<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_King_Arthur_and_His_Knights"title="The Story of King Arthur and His Knights">
## "The Book of King Arthur".The first section in Pyle's "The Story of King Arthur and His Knights", "The Book of King Arthur", contains three separate stories: "The Winning of Kinghood", "The Winning of a Sword", and "The Winning of a Queen".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Can_Be_Happy_and_Free_in_Russia?"title="Who Can Be Happy and Free in Russia?">
Seven peasants embark upon the eventful journey across the Russian land united by an idea of finding just one happy person. Witnessing nothing but suffering and injustice all around, they are surprised to find that even those supposed to be the masters of the land find life here totally unsatisfactory.The peasants decide not to return home until they find the right answer. In the prologue, they also find a self-assembled tablecloth that will feed them, and hit the road.Chapter I. PopThe peasants continued on their way. They met many people, but no one was interested in life. All the wanderers were close to them: the bast shoe, the artisan, the beggar, the coachman. The soldier could not be happy. He shaves with an awl, warms himself with smoke. Toward nightfall, they met a pop. The peasants stood in a row and bowed to the holy man. Luka began to ask the priest if he was free to live. The priest thought about it and began to talk. He simply kept silent about the years of study. The priest has no rest. He is called to a sick, dying person. My heart aches and aches for orphans and people leaving for another world. The hand does not rise to take copper dimes - a reward for demand. And you have to live on something. The priest has no honor. They call him insulting words, stay away on the way, compose fairy tales. They do not like either a priest's daughter, or a priest, or seminarians. Pop is not held in high esteem among all classes. Where does the priest get wealth? There used to be many nobles in Russia. Children were born in the estates, weddings were played. Even if one of the landowners lived in cities, then he came to die in the village and bequeathed to be buried in the parish. Everyone went to the priests, the wealth grew and multiplied, and the laity also received something. Now everything has changed in Russia. The landowners scattered across the foreign land, leaving only ruined possessions in their homeland. Pop complains about the emerging schismatics who live among the Orthodox. However, he was lucky here, he avoided the need to cash in on schismatics, since in his parish there are Orthodox Christians in the majority - two-thirds. But the life of the priests is becoming more and more difficult, only poor peasants give income. And what can they give? Only a dime and a pie for the holiday, and eggs for Easter. The priest finished his melancholy story and moved on. The men pounced on Luka, who argued that the priests live at ease.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_American_Plague"title="An American Plague">
The book takes place during the 1793 Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic. At this point Philadelphia is considered to be the largest city located in North America. The city is hit with an incurable and unknown disease which kills about 50% of the people affected. The author Jim Murphy describes a disease called the yellow fever and how it affected the residents of Philadelphia. In the novel he highlights the heroic roles and actions that the Philadelphia free blacks took in order to fight this deadly disease, and how it causes a constitutional crisis that leads president George Washington to leave the city of Philadelphia. The cure for the disease was not found until centuries later.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrus_County_(novel)"title="Citrus County (novel)">
The book follows Toby, a young man that wants to set himself apart from the other criminals and hoodlums in his area. He's decided to accomplish this by kidnapping the young sister of a schoolmate, Shelby. Toby finds himself drawn to Shelby and the two bond over their mutual dissatisfaction with their lives and community, but Shelby has no way of knowing that he has kidnapped her sister. During all of this their high school geography teacher has been made to coach the school's all-girl basketball team while making plans with Shelby's aunt to murder one of his co-workers.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Million_Heavens"title="A Million Heavens">
The novel follows several different characters as they congregate in the parking lot of a clinic where a child prodigy has fallen into a coma. They each have their own issues, the foster child, the divorcee, and the gas station owner, and all of whom have decided to gather to hold a vigil for the coma patient.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_Online"title="Girl Online">
Penny Porter is a 15-year-old girl living in Brighton, with her best friend Elliot and a picture-perfect family. She has an outgrown friend Megan, her long-lasting crush Ollie and a secret-she suffers from anxiety. She leads a mundane life and is not happy with herself. When an incident at school triggers her badly, her family whisks her away to New York, where her mom is planning a wedding. There she meets Noah, the wedding caterer's grandson. The two hit it off instantly and fall in love in the days that follow. After the wedding Penny leaves New York. She returns to Brighton a confident bright girl who realizes her worth and a cute American boyfriend. The next that follows is a twist and that forms the ending.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_(Suzuki_novel)"title="S (Suzuki novel)">
25 years after the events of "Spiral", Takanori Ando, graphic designer at Studio Oz, a CG production company, is dating high school teacher Akane Maruyama, who is pregnant with his child, planning to marry her soon to avoid exposing the fact that he impregnated her out of wedlock. Company president Yoneda gives Takanori a USB drive containing a suicide video that went viral a month ago, asking him to reconfigure it for a possible future project. Upon copying the video into his laptop, he realizes that the video changes slightly; the suicidal man's body is positioned in a lower position than the original, revealing his neck. When he asks Yoneda about the video's origin, Yoneda tells him that it was given to him by Kiyomi Sakata, producer of the latest film that Studio Oz is working on. Meanwhile, Akane feels stalked by a figure. During an encounter at the high school where she works, she faints and is taken to a hospital, where she briefly hallucinates meeting her deceased mother.One day, Akane unwittingly spots the copy of the suicide video. Consoling her, Takanori discovers that the video has changed further; the body is lowered to the extent that the man's face and the noose are now visible. The man is revealed to be Seiji Kashiwada, a serial killer who was apprehended a decade ago for murdering four girls and executed a month ago. Akane admits that she was his potential fifth victim. Fearing that he is still hunting her, Takanori promises to keep track of her using a GPS. Analyzing the video, Takanori deduces the location where it was shot and heads there, finding out that the room is currently occupied by a man named Hiroyuki Niimura.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aim_High_(TV_series)"title="Aim High (TV series)">
Four friends at the end of their junior year of college dreams of success and landing that perfect job. Each one has a detailed perception of what they want to be, however once they graduate from college reality sets in when they enter the work force. All four are struggling by in dead end jobs. Only Xu Yi Fen is still holding on and chasing her dream of being an app developer and creating her own app. Soon hotshot app developer Yu Qi Feng sees potential in her and gets her hired at his company.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Shadows"title="Silver Shadows">
The novel starts with Sydney Sage in re-education, still in her dark cell, called reflection time by the Alchemists. She is still resisting their mind games, holding onto Adrian's love for her, until they start talking about letting her see her family if she admits she has been corrupted, making her think that if she's out of reflection, she might be able to see Adrian in a dream.Meanwhile, Adrian is still searching for her in his dreams, but sporadically, and is losing heart because he never connects, so he turns to drinking again. Jill tells his mother where he is. Since she's out of prison, she comes and takes him to the Moroi Court, where he meets Nina Sinclair again. He takes her under his wing, oblivious to the fact that she's in love with him. While at Court, Adrian discovers that his parents don't love each other, and that his mother is staying with his father for the money and status, which disgusts him.Back in the secret Alchemist facility, Sydney tells the Alchemists that she is ready to 'purge the darkness' so she can get out of the dark cell, and then she is taken to re-education, where she meets other Alchemists who have all been there for varying amounts of time. They are all told about her relationship with a Moroi, and as a result, nobody speaks to her. They even go so far as to move as far away from her as possible. She thinks that she will be able to have a normal sleep, meaning that Adrian will be able to reach her, but when she wakes up in the morning, she realises that the Alchemists are still drugging them somehow. She quickly makes a friend who has been there over a year, and he provides her with snippets of information, while being careful not to get noticed.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eighth_Day_(novel)"title="The Eighth Day (novel)">
During a weekend gathering of the Ashley and Lansing families, Breckenridge Lansing is shot while the men are practicing shooting. Townsfolk suspect that Eustacia Lansing, Breckenridge's wife, and John Ashley were having an affair. Ashley is tried, convicted, and sentenced to execution. Miraculously, days before the scheduled execution, he is rescued by mysterious masked men. He then escapes to Chile, where he assumes the identity of a Canadian named James Tolland and finds work in the copper mining industry.While Ashley escapes to Chile, his family—left destitute without his income—turns to running a boarding house to make ends meet. His son, Roger, assumes a fake name and moves to Chicago. After working a series of odd jobs, Roger makes a name for himself as a writer for a newspaper. Ashley's daughter, Lily, also assumes a fake name and becomes a famous singer in Chicago, later moving to New York.At the end of the book, it is revealed that a group of Native Americans, one of whom was friends with Roger, is responsible for helping Ashley escape his execution. The group did this because, after a flood wiped out their local church, Ashley loaned them money to rebuild it. It is also revealed that Ashely did not kill Lansing; Lansing's son George did, because Lansing was becoming violent towards his wife, George's mother. George feared for his mother's safety, and consequently killed his father and then ran away to San Francisco, and later Russia, to work as an actor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armada_of_Antares"title="Armada of Antares">
The book continues on from Avenger of Antares with Prescot being at home in his fortress in Valka with his wife and children. Attacked by four assassins in his own garden he defeats them and captures one but the latter is himself assassinated before he can talk.Employing the help of Evold Scavander, a wise man of Valka Prescot persuades the research into the contents of the two boxes in the flying boats which cause them to fly and makes some progress. When a merchant ship from Pandahem is captured Prescot learns that Vitridia, the female pirate he once served with in Swordships of Scorpio is still alive and active but that the fight against Hamal is becoming ever more desperate. Prescot and the Emperor raise an army of 15,000 as an assistance force to help the nations of Pandahem. He parts from Delia, now pregnant with their second set of twins and heads for Tomboram to assist Kov Pando.At the Battle of Tomor Peak Prescot's army defeats a 20,000-strong Hamalian force. He encounters Pando and his mother Tilda after the battle but is not recognised by them. During the night he accidentally walks into Rees who was captured during the battle and is now escaping. In his identity of Hamun Prescot joins Rees and they reach the Hamalian lines. From there Prescot, Rees and Chido return to Ruathytu.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ice_Dragon"title="The Ice Dragon">
The novella follows the story of a young girl, Adara, who befriends an ice dragon after the death of her mother.Martin has stated on his LiveJournal blog that "The Ice Dragon" is not set in the same world as Westeros of "A Song of Ice and Fire" fame, commenting: "The world of Ice &amp; Fire did not exist when I wrote "The Ice Dragon"". Despite this, several press releases, book covers and commentaries have claimed that it is set in the same world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_You_Tomorrow_(novel)"title="See You Tomorrow (novel)">
"See You Tomorrow" is set in Stavanger, the author's hometown and surroundings which he uses for his literary exploration of the human condition. The novel is told through 11 narrators, characters belonging to highly different worlds within the same city – a group of adolescents at a high school and the bewildered and desperate father of two of them, and a gang of petty criminals trying to cope with the changing times. All of them are in search of something, trying to fill the holes in their lives. "Pål", divorced father of two, has a shameful secret that has dragged him into a huge debt, a lot more than he can ever hope to pay with his modest civil servant salary. He is desperate to make sure that no one finds out – especially not his teenage daughters or his ex-wife. Sixteen-year-old "Sandra" also has a secret. She is in love with the irresistible delinquent "Daniel William", a love so strong and pure that nothing can come in its way. "Cecilie" carries the greatest secret of them all, a baby growing inside her. She can only hope that her boyfriend "Rudi" is the child's father. But although she loves him, she feels trapped in their small-time criminal existence and dreams of escaping from it all. Over three fateful September days, these lives cross in a whirlwind of brutality, laughter, tragedy and love that will change them forever.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_We_Say_Goodbye"title="Before We Say Goodbye">
The book follows Ayat al-Akhras, a seventeen-year-old female suicide bomber that has been sent to a supermarket in Kiryat HaYovel on the even of Passover to kill as many people as possible. It also follows Haim Smadar, a security guard that notices her actions and tries to stop her, losing his life in the process but saving the lives of multiple people. The story begins at seven o'clock in the morning on the day of the attack and ends with the explosion. Despite the very short time span – seven hours – seen from the points of view of the different characters, the book tries to portray the complex reality between Israel and Palestine. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_in_White_Van"title="Wolf in White Van">
Sean Phillips lives with a caretaker after shooting himself in the head at age 17, causing facial disfigurement. The circumstances of the shooting are initially left ambiguous. Sean's relationship with his parents is strained as they struggle to understand why he chose to shoot himself. The novel alternates between different moments in Sean's life. He describes the reactions people have to his appearance, and the experience he has meeting people before and after the shooting. One of his friends, Kimmy, visits him in the hospital, but she is discouraged by Sean's parents who believe she convinced Sean to shoot himself.While recuperating in the hospital, Sean develops the play-by-mail role-playing game "Trace Italian", from which he earns a small income. The objective of "Trace Italian" is to traverse a post-apocalyptic United States and locate a fortress after which the game is named—a fortress that Sean claims no player will ever penetrate. Sean describes the correspondence he has with players, in particular two teenage players who attempt to carry out the game's actions in real life. One dies and the other is injured, and Sean is charged in court by the players' parents but is not found guilty.The novel ends with Sean recalling a time before the shooting when he sneaked out with Kimmy and they kissed behind a store. That same night, Sean takes out a rifle and considers whether to shoot himself as well as his parents. He decides not to shoot his parents, then enters his room, rests the rifle against under his chin and lies on his stomach. The sentence ends with an excerpt from a fantasy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictures_of_Hollis_Woods"title="Pictures of Hollis Woods">
The adventures of a 12 year-old foster girl with a talent for drawing, who moves from family to family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_a_Samurai"title="Heart of a Samurai">
"Heart of a Samurai" is based on the real story of a Japanese boy, who is believed to have been one of the first Japanese people to land in America. In 1841, Manjiro Nakahama, a young fisherman at the age of fourteen, lived in a remote, poor fishing village in Japan. He dreamed of being a Samurai, a royal title bequeathed solely by inheritance. The fishing ship he worked on encountered a storm and ended up drifting out to the sea until it landed on an island which he and the crew named "Bird Island".After months staying on the island, Manjiro and his crew were rescued by Captain Whitfield, aboard the "John Howland", an America whaleship. Manjiro caught whales and quickly gained Captain Whitfield's admiration. By the time they reached Hawaii, the duo had developed a special relationship. Captain Whitfield wanted to adopt Manjiro and go back to America with him. In spite of the Japanese empire having portrayed foreigners as evil and barbarians, Manjiro was determined to see a new world through his adventure by stepping out of his comfort zone and leaving his crew members behind. Upon landing in America, Manjiro found the majority of Americans he encountered had shown kindness toward him, however, some others discriminated against him as a foreigner. He worked hard at school and took care of his new family while Captain Whitfield was at sea.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Abraham_Lincoln_Pocket_Watch_Conspiracy"title="The Great Abraham Lincoln Pocket Watch Conspiracy">
In 1910, Robert Todd Lincoln, an esteemed scientist, the only living son of former US President Abraham Lincoln, and a close friend of incumbent President William Howard Taft, reveals to the President that he has found an old pocket watch that belonged to his father. Lincoln explains that he can find no records of his father ever acquiring or owning the watch (though the watch fob was found on Abraham's person the night of his assassination), and although the watch has been running for a very long time, there is no inbuilt way to open or adjust it, and it has no discernible power source, save for a small cylinder of an unknown material. Furthermore, the watch bears a Russian inscription that translates to "Made in America", suggesting that the watch came from Russian America. Lincoln believes that the watch is so technologically advanced that it could not possibly have been built by humans, leading him to theorize that extraterrestrial beings are beginning to populate Alaska. Lincoln requests to use Taft's secret government zeppelin, Airship One, to travel to Alaska and test his hypothesis, which Taft gladly allows.Meanwhile, while conversing with Nikola Tesla over a wireless telegraph, Airship One intercepts a mysterious exchange between five anonymous "gentlemen". The men are mining an unknown substance, which they will begin shipping around the world in approximately one year, and imply that they have just carried out a mass murder and that they are maintaining unknown operations in Belfast. After the transmission, Tesla is almost assassinated as part of the mass murder, but he kills the assassin with one of his inventions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Familjen_Anderssons_sjuka_jul"title="Familjen Anderssons sjuka jul">
In the Andersson family, mother Karin suddenly turns ill. She has to rest, and is sent to the hospital. Rudolf, the father, has to take care of the family himself.The series received positive reception for, among other things, tackling that Christmas is celebrated in remembrance of the birth of Jesus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tides_of_Kregen"title="The Tides of Kregen">
The book takes place a number of years after the events of Armada of Antares and the short story Wizard of Scorpio. It begins with an argument between Khe-Hi-Bjanching, a young Wizard of Loh and Evold Scavander about a visitation by Phu-si-Yantong. Prescot is than visited by the Gdoinye, the messenger bird of the Star Lords, to tell him his service will be required soon. He is astonished to hear that his soon Drak was able to see the bird, too, when he thought it invisible to all himself. He shortly after informs Delia that he might be leaving soon.When a messenger informs Prescot that the Shanks, a mysterious race of raiders have attacked an island of Valka and he rushes out with a small force to beat them back. The small force, including Delia and Drak, are trapped in an island village and under attack when Prescot is teleported away by the Star Lords. He resists and refuses to take up battle in his new location, instead returning to Delia. The Gdoinye warns him of his foolishness to resist and once more he is teleported, arriving for the first time fully armed and clothed. Again he defies the Star Lords and for this he is banished to Earth, seemingly for good.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renegade_of_Kregen"title="Renegade of Kregen">
The book continues on shortly after the events from The Tides of Kregen with Prescot and Duhrra arriving in Magdag to look for a ship to take them to Vallia and the two take passage on an argenter from Menaham. Attacked by pirates and rescued by a galley from Magdag, Prescot and the captain are taken before the ship's master, Gafard, a renegade from the south. He persuades Prescot, still traveling under the name of Dak, to join him.Prescot joins Gafard, who is an admirer of Pur Dray but unawares that the former has been declared an Apushniad and that he is in his presence. Prescot is accepted in the ranks of the Grodnim as a renegade by King Genod, receiving the new name of Gadak. The latter also encounters Princess Susheeng in the process who does not recognise him. During the ceremony Prescot is visited by Zena Iztar again who questions his motives and once more tells him that, to be allowed to leave the Eye of the World he must become a Krozair of Zy again.Prescot and Duhrra than ride north with Gafard and an army to fight a barbarian invasion. On the way Prescot saves Gafard's life and the life of his Lady when attacked by a predator. By saving the girl, revered to as the Lady of the Stars by Gafard, he sees her face, normally hidden, and for the first time in his life feels he has met a woman equal to Delia in beauty. Gafard keeps her a secret to protect her from King Genod's in saturable desire for women and Prescot is instructed never to mention the girls beauty.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Illegal_Self"title="His Illegal Self">
The novel is set in 1972, and the main character Che Selkirk is being brought up in New York by his grandmother. On a rare excursion to the city from his isolated home on Kenoza Lake in upstate New York, Che meets a woman who he believes is his mother. The woman, Dial, attempts to arrange a meeting between Che and his mother but this is cancelled after Che's mother is killed while attempting to plant a bomb. Dial then takes the boy away from New York, first to Seattle where they briefly meet Che's father, and then on to Queensland in Australia. Dial and Che eventually settle into a hippie commune while still attempting to evade the authorities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morte_d'Urban"title="Morte d'Urban">
Based out of Chicago, Father Urban Roche is a member of the fictitious religious order, the Clementines. The Clementines, by Father Urban's estimation, are stagnating. They care little about innovation and are instead content to remain as they are. Father Urban's charismatic, energetic personality contrasts the rest of the Order. Through his charisma, he befriends a wealthy benefactor named Billy Cosgrove, who helps Fr. Urban secure new quarters for the Order. Despite Fr. Urban's charismatic spirit, he is sent to The Order of St. Clement, a failing retreat house in rural Minnesota.At Minnesota, Fr. Urban is joined by Fr. Jack, an aging priest who was also transferred from Chicago to Minnesota. Fr. Wilfrid presides over The Order of St. Clement and is primarily concerned with completing the necessary repairs to the facility. To Fr. Urban's dismay, the property is in sorry shape, and the Order hardly has the means to repair it. True to his spirit, Fr. Urban dreams of making the retreat a better place and it is renamed St. Clement's Hill.Fr. Urban becomes involved with the surrounding communities in the area, slowly growing a following thanks to his public speaking skills. He plays a large role in revitalizing a local parish and makes connections throughout the community, particularly with the Thwaites family. Mrs. Thwaites, an aging widow, was the previous owner of St. Clement's hill before donating the property to the Order.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krozair_of_Kregen"title="Krozair of Kregen">
The book directly follows "Renegade of Kregen" with Prescot being made an oar slave on a Magdagian galley and still trying to come to terms with the death of his daughter Velia. After some time Prescot, still using the name of Dak, is reunited with Duhrra, who had been captured when his ship was taken, and a young man, Vax. Prescot learns that Zena Iztar had helped Duhrra to a new hand, a prosthetic quite beyond the skills of local doctors.Prescot and his companions break their chains and free all the slaves on their ship, liberating two more vessels in the process. Prescot takes command of one of the three ships. When Vax gets drunk celebrating their new freedom he reveals that he is Jaidur of Valka, youngest son of Pur Dray, who he hates for abandoning his mother and ruining his chances becoming a Krozair. Prescot is surprised that he has another son and daughter, Jaidur and Dayra, they having been born after he was exiled to Earth. Eventually, to prevent Vax from going to Magdag, Prescot breaks the news to him that his sister Velia has been killed, without disclosing the fact that he is his father and knows of his true identity. Prescot is spied on by the Gdoinye once more and discovers that Vax, like Drak before, can see the bird, though nobody else can.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foal's_Bread"title="Foal's Bread">
The main subject of the novel is the golden era of Australian show-jumping between the wars. Roley Nancarrow is the 1926 high jump record holder for New South Wales, and, while competing one day at a country show, is captivated by Noah Childs, a 14-year-old drover's daughter, who can coax tired old horses into extraordinary feats. Riding out in a storm one day, Nancarrow is struck by lightning. The novel examines his steady decline into paralysis from the lightning-strike and the effect this has on his horse-riding passion and relationship with Noah.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_Mr._Lemoncello's_Library"title="Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library">
Twelve-year-old Kyle Keeley loves games of all kinds, especially the board games and video games created by beloved game maker, Luigi Lemoncello. The morning after getting grounded for breaking a window while playing one of Lemoncello's games, Kyle's friend Akimi Hughes tells him of an essay for a school contest; the winners will be the first to visit the new, grand library in Kyle's town of Alexandriaville, Ohio. Initially, Kyle wasn't interested in books, but when he realizes the new library will offer games and computers, he quickly makes a very brief attempt.At school, Kyle discovers that Mr. Lemoncello designed and funded the new library, and that he plans to judge the essay contest. Mr. Lemoncello credits much of his success to the help of Alexandriaville's old public library in his childhood. Regretful that he missed out on a great opportunity, Kyle tries to hand in a much stronger essay late, but his teacher refuses to accept it. Undeterred, Kyle finds an email address for Mr. Lemoncello and sends the essay directly to him. When Mr. Lemoncello arrives at Kyle's school to announce the essay contest winners, Dr. Yanina Zinchenko, world-famous librarian, explains that they will experience the grand new library in an overnight visit. Then Mr. Lemoncello walks onto the stage and announces the winners: Kyle, Akimi, helpful Miguel Fernandez, nerd Andrew Peckleman, Bridgette Wadge, bookworm Sierra Russell, Yasmeen Smith-Snyder, Sean Keegan, popular girl Haley Daley, Rose Vermette, over-eager Kayla Corson and bully Charles Chiltington. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette_&amp;_Espionage"title="Etiquette &amp; Espionage">
Like the "Parasol Protectorate" books, "Etiquette &amp; Espionage" is set in an alternate history version of Victorian era Britain where supernatural creatures such as vampires and werewolves are part of society. The protagonist is 14-year-old Sophronia, who enrolls in Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality. But Sophronia finds out that this is not an ordinary finishing school; in addition to dance, dress, and etiquette, she and her classmates are also trained in the fine arts of espionage and assassination.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Underground_Girls_of_Kabul"title="The Underground Girls of Kabul">
The book follows the stories of many women who are or who have been bacha posh. It also offers the insight of mothers considering bacha posh for her newborn daughters. Some families who have only a daughter or multiple daughters will designate their children as sons instead. The communities in which they live are often tolerant of this for the span of their childhood.The experiences of these individuals give personal accounts of how some women handle the treatment of girls in modern day Afghanistan. There is tremendous importance placed on being male or having male children. To grow up as a boy instead of as a girl in Afghanistan offers the child freedom and autonomy that young girls do not have access to. Oftentimes the mother is judged as well for not bearing a son.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentlemen_(novel)"title="Gentlemen (novel)">
The novel is set in the late 1970s Stockholm. The narrator, Klas Östergren, is a young writer who shares the name with the author of the novel. He picks up a commission to write a pastiche of Strindberg's "The Red Room", updating its political satire to mark the centenary of its publication.Soon after, Klas finds out that he has been burgled on nearly all of his belongings. In a local boxing club he meets the elegant and charismatic Henry Morgan, a boxer, pianist and an ebullient if unreliable raconteur. Henry persuades Klas to move into his apartment, where he lives with his mentally unstable brother Leo.The second part of the novel tells the story of the Morgan brother's previous life. A picaresque story of Henry as, among other things, a smuggler of false passports to East Berlin, and Leo who finds out about a political scandal concerning Swedish sales of weapons to nazi-Germany during World War II.In the third part of the novel, Henry and Leo both mysteriously disappear, and Klas finds himself living alone in the apartment. He burns up his unsuccessful attempt to write a pastiche of "The Red Room" and begin to write a new story, the story about the Morgan brothers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Railway_(poem)"title="The Railway (poem)">
The narrator contemplates the beautiful moonlit autumnal landscapes from his wagon window. The boy travelling in the same compartment with his father asks the latter who the builders of this railway were, and the latter says, Count Kleinmikhel was.The narrator imagines how he tells the boy about the real people who'd built this railway. Suddenly the boy is struck by the horrible vision: thousands of ghosts of emaciated, mangled men rise up by the sides of the rails, each trying to tell his story, asking the people of the future if they remember at all those on whose bones they are now travelling.The boy tells his father about the vision and of their vis-à-vis maintaining those were the real builders of the railway. The General, outraged, suggests his own line of argument: he's been in Rome, Vienna and Athens and seen there the beautiful creations of man. But have those masterpieces been created by "the common man"? No, common people are but vandals, able only of destroying beauty. He demands that their neighbor should give his son the brighter side of the story.The narrator imagines a rather tongue-in-cheek happy end. The work is over, the dead are buried, and the workers, expecting to be paid, gather at the accountant's office. Here they learn that they actually are indebted to the authorities for having used baths, hospital treatment, et cetera. The contractor arrives and, as a gesture of generosity cancels the workers' debts, rolling out a barrel of wine for everybody to drink and celebrate. The General's reaction to this is not revealed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilful_Disregard"title="Wilful Disregard">
The book tells the story about a writer called Ester Nilsson. She meets an artist called Hugo Rask in an unusual way – because he is listening in the audience when she delivers a talk about him. Despite being in a steady relationship, the story tells the story of Nilsson's relationship with Rask, and betrayal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_Storm"title="Havana Storm">
The novel was Cussler's 23rd novel in his Dirk Pitt Adventure Series, and follows the adventures of Dirk Pitt, who appears in Cuba to investigate a toxic outbreak that could threaten the United States, but winds up becoming involved in a post-Castro battle for political control of Cuba.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_I_Never_Told_You"title="Everything I Never Told You">
On May 3, 1977, Lydia Lee, the middle child of the Lee family, is missing. After several days, her body is dredged out of the town lake. Lydia's parents, James and Marilyn, are horrified by their daughter's death. As the police investigate, her parents discover that, contrary to their belief that Lydia was popular and doing well in school, she was actually very lonely with almost no friends and that her grades had severely slipped.The death of Lydia leads James and Marilyn to reflect on their lives. James, the academically gifted child of Chinese immigrants, spent his life yearning to belong. He met Marilyn in 1957 when he was a doctoral candidate at Harvard teaching a class on American culture in which she was a student. After graduation, James failed to secure a faculty position at Harvard, so he accepted an offer from the fictional Middlewood College in Ohio. Marilyn grew up disgusted by her homemaker mother (who taught home economics at her high school) and longed to become a doctor. When she met James and recognized the racist treatment he had been enduring, Marilyn felt a kinship with him and the two began a relationship. Discovering she was pregnant, Marilyn arranged for a quick marriage to James and was angry when her mother tried to stop the wedding after seeing that James was of Asian descent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Witch"title="April Witch">
The book is about Desirée, who is severely disabled, and her three foster sisters, who are all named after the "hagasessas". Because she was taken away to an institution as a child because of her disability, the sisters do not know her, but she can follow their lives as she is an "April Witch" and can see through the eye of any other creature. She feels that one of the sisters has stolen the life that was meant for her. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Brief_Stop_on_the_Road_from_Auschwitz"title="A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz">
The book starts with a chapter called "The Place" in which, on 2 August 1947, a 24-year-old man arrives via train at the industrial town of Södertälje. He starts working at a lorry factory. Soon after a woman which the author refers to as my future mother joins the man. Originally from Łódź, Poland, the man and woman had started a relationship in the Łódź Ghetto, then been separated in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1944 and reunited in Alingsås before moving to Södertälje. They get an apartment and their first child is born; the latter is the author, who refers to himself as "the child". They name him Göran, the most common name in Sweden, and not after his Jewish grandfather, Gershon, and they start speaking to each other in Swedish perhaps to make him fit into the place. The chapter further focuses on "The Child"s experience in Södermanland, which mostly is positive. He learns to downplay his foreign background, and at one point, he writes with regard to one of his teachers, "I never let Mr. Winqvist find out that I knew a few words of Yiddish".The next chapters, called "The Wall", "The Carousel" and "The Road", recount the experience the man had in Auschwitz, as imagined by the author, informed by the historical record, in addition to the man's prior life in Poland, and general stories from Poland and Sweden during World War II. It ends with the man, now named as David Rosenberg, arriving in Malmö on 18 July 1945. The chapter "The Stop" describes David Rosenberg's early years in Sweden, as well the story of his wife, Hala Staw, during the war and afterwards in Poland. She arrives in Sweden in August 1946.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dear_Blue_Sky"title="Dear Blue Sky">
The story begins the Saturday before Cassie's brother, Sef, leaves for Iraq.After a party, Sef leaves the following day. The family falls apart: Cassie is lost in memories, their mother is severely frightened, Cassie's sister Van is drinking alcohol, and Cassie's little brother, Jack, misses Sef greatly.During a school project, Cassie coincidentally sees the blog of a 13-year-old Iraq girl nicknamed Blue Sky. Blue Sky describes life in Iraq during the war from her perspective. She explains the environment and the casualties and expresses her feelings and opinions. Cassie begins to question her own thoughts about the war. Cassie and Blue Sky become pen pals and write to each other via email, gradually learning more about life in another part of the world.One day, Jack gets beaten up by the neighbors' son, Ben. Ben threatens that if Jack says anything, Sef will not come home. Jack stops speaking to everyone.Cassie learns to be the courageous "Supergirl" Blue Sky is. Unfortunately, Blue Sky has to leave home and move to another country: because her father works for the U.S as a translator, Blue Sky's whole family is in danger.Soon, the next time Sef calls, Jack starts talking again. However, Sef explains to Cassie that he has to extend his term in Iraq in the next email.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Kind_of_Anger"title="A Kind of Anger">
A car comes hurtling down the drive of a remote villa near Zurich, crashes into a lorry, but carries on without stopping. When the police investigate, they find the body of an exiled Iraqi general inside the villa. He has been tortured and shot three times, and the house has been ransacked. Witnesses say the fleeing car was driven by a beautiful young woman.Dutch journalist Piet Maas is tasked by his editor at the (fictional) news magazine "World Reporter" with tracking down the mystery woman - who has been identified as the general's mistress, Lucia Bernardi - and getting the full story. After lengthy detective-work he succeeds and discovers that the general was at the heart of a planned uprising of Kurdish nationalists inside Iraq. He had made detailed notes about the uprising and it was these that his murderers were seeking. Lucia had managed to hide from the intruders, then escape from the villa with the notes.It turns out that there is disagreement among the Kurdish activists, some wanting the uprising to go ahead, others fearing it is too dangerous and so trying to prevent it. Naturally, the Iraqi government wants to find out everything it can about the conspiracy. And so does an Italian oil company which has offered a new Kurdish administration a more favourable percentage of revenue if it is allowed to replace the British and American oil companies currently working in Kurdistan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irma_Voth"title="Irma Voth">
In a remote Mennonite colony in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, nineteen-year-old Irma Voth has been banished to a neighbouring farm by her strict, religious father after secretly marrying a non-Mennonite Mexican. After her new husband soon disappears into the drug trade, Irma tends to the farm alone. Her world is transformed when a bohemian film crew from Mexico City arrives to make a film about Mennonites. Irma, who speaks Plautdietsch (Low German), Spanish and English, is hired by Diego, the film's director, to act as interpreter and to cook for the crew.As Irma is drawn into the exotic world of the hip, urban filmmakers, she begins to better understand her place in the world, and to envision the possibility of some form of self-determination. She wonders, "How do I behave in this world without following the directions of my father, my husband, or God?" Her thirteen-year-old sister, Aggie, is also emboldened by the presence of the outsiders, and like Irma, comes into dangerous conflict with the local community and her father, who believes that "Art is a lie." When their father's violence escalates, and the secret tragedy that has haunted her family begins to surface, Irma flees with Aggie and her infant sister, Ximena, to Chihuahua City and Acapulco. They eventually go to Mexico City, where the Voth sisters must embrace the ways of the city in order to survive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Gate_(novel)"title="Star Gate (novel)">
Long ago people came from beyond the sky and landed on Gorth. There they raised the human natives out of the wild state and led them to develop a civilization analogous to that of medieval Europe. Then they went away, leaving behind a few of their number, memories, and a small population of cross-breeds. Kincar s’Rud is one of those cross-breeds. Part native and part Star Lord, he has assumed that he will inherit the throne of a small fief when his grandfather dies. Instead, his grandfather bestows upon him the livery of a Star Lord and warns him to leave Styr Holding immediately, because his uncle intends to kill him in order to take the throne for himself.Riding his larng Cim, the four-eyed analogue of a horse, and accompanied by his pterodactyl-like hunting mord, Vorken, he leaves the only world he has known, following a map that his grandfather gave him. Falling in with a party of cross-breeds and a Star Lord, he helps them fight off outlaws and follows them through a pair of luminous webs to another Gorth. As they pass through the Star Gate Kincar is burned by an amulet, a Tie, that he wears.Joined by others, the group takes refuge in an abandoned keep that they find on their new world. Kincar meets a healer, Lady Asgar, who treats his burn while Lord Dillan tells him about many worlds and travel between them. They have come to a Gorth that they had not intended to occupy, so they will have to build another Star Gate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Striker"title="The Striker">
This novel is set in both 1902 and 1912 and in various locations in the United States. Isaac Bell leads a team of Van Dorn detectives in a search to find who is causing violent mayhem in various mining operations and metal refinement operations. While union activists are being blamed, Bell doubts this. Most of the action takes place in 1902, but Bell is unable to get to the bottom of the trouble. After a while, he reaches a dead end. In 1912 several new leads develop, enabling Bell to pursue who he believes is responsible.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirage_38"title="Mirage 38">
The story takes place over eight months in 1938 in Helsinki. The main character is lawyer Claes Thune and the book is set in a Finnish-Swedish bourgeois environment. He has been left by his wife Gabi, who has gotten together with his friend Lindemark. Banan and Lindemark meet in the discussion group Wednesday Club (), which they have founded with old friends Arelius and Joachim Jary, to discuss politics and culture, but mostly to socialize and drink themselves senseless. The group gradually splits into a liberal section, to which Thune belongs, and a right-wing one. Adolf Hitler's expansionist policies arouse both anger and admiration. Joachim Jary suffers from insanity and is admitted to a mental hospital.Thune becomes involved as a foreign policy writer in the daily press and is published in "". In Thune's office, Matilda Wiik works as a newly hired secretary. She has tragic memories of the Finnish Civil War and the abuses committed against her in prison camps. One day, when the Wednesday Club meets in Thune's office, Matilda hears her tormented voice from the prison camp. The tormentor, "the Captain," who does not realize who Matilda is, begins to court her. Only at the end of the book does the reader learn who the "Captain" really is.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winger_(novel)"title="Winger (novel)">
The narrator, Ryan Dean West is a fourteen-year-old junior at a boarding school for rich kids. He reveals that "Ryan Dean" is, in fact, his first name and that his intelligence has led him to skip ahead two grades. He lives at Opportunity Hall, the dorm for troublemakers. He is assigned a room in O-Hall with Chas Becker, a senior whom Ryan Dean despises. After being invited to play a poker game by Chas, Ryan Dean's former roommates JP, and Seanie warn him about the "consequence," a typically humiliating dare given to the losing player.When playing poker that midnight, Ryan Dean is forced by Chas to drink beer, his first ever alcoholic beverage. Finding out about him getting drunk in school, Annie becomes upset with Ryan Dean. He apologizes to Annie and she accepts it saying that it's typical for boys to act stupid temporarily and plan to talk at Stonehenge, a circle of stones in a clearing of the forest with which Annie believes you can make a wish whenever going in. When walking back out of the path of Stonehenge, Ryan reveals his wish through a Venn diagram to have her realize that although he is fourteen, he is just as good for her as any other one of the boys at PM and she regretfully reveals her wish was for his wish to come true. He feels as though this may have ruined their friendship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weedflower"title="Weedflower">
The story takes place in 1941. A classmate invites the main character Sumiko to a birthday party. Sumiko goes with a gift her uncle bought. However, she is not invited into the house because she is Japanese. When she returns home, she lies to her family so as not to disappoint them. Afterward, she tells the truth to her cousin Bull and her little brother Tak-Tak.To Sumiko's surprise, Japan bombs Hawaii's Pearl Harbor. The United States declares war on Japan. Sumiko and her family are forced to burn everything that may seem "disloyal" or suspicious, including Sumiko's dead parents' photo. Sumiko is kept home from school. Her grandfather is arrested for being first-generation Japanese ("issei") and former principal of a Japanese school, and her uncle is arrested for being former president of a Japanese flower growing association.By the end of February, more than 2,000 people of Japanese ancestry, including American citizens, have been wrongfully arrested and relocated to prison camps. Gradually, all Japanese people, including Sumiko's family, have to leave their homes and belongings and go to camps. Sumiko has to leave her flower farm and move twice: from the San Carlos racetrack camp to Poston War Relocation Center in Poston, Arizona.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intercom_Conspiracy"title="The Intercom Conspiracy">
Two senior military officers from unnamed minor north Europeans countries are sent as liaison officers to the NATO Headquarters. Both have a distinguished record in the WWII Anti-Nazi Resistance and are highly regarded in their own countries, but they discover that at NATO they are complete non-entities and the Americans never bother to listen to anything they say. Increasingly fed up and angry, the two hatch a scheme whereby they would be avenged on the arrogant Americans and at the same time gain a tidy sum for their approaching retirement. When the owner of an extreme right-wing weekly magazine, "Intercom", dies, they buy the company which publishes it. Acting through a fictional intermediary, they start sending the surprised editor "articles", which consist of highly sensitive information about the weapons systems of the USA, USSR, Britain and NATO. Before the fourth "article" has even been published the magazine's lawyer is contacted by a potential buyer. The two intelligence heads have correctly calculated that the security services of the nations they're mentioning in their "articles" will pay handsomely to close the magazine down. To the magazine's lawyer's amazement, the buyer is prepared to pay $500,000. The sale is quickly carried through, the magazine closed down, and all its assets mysteriously removed. The intelligence heads divide their takings and start planning for a comfortable retirement.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncommon_Danger"title="Uncommon Danger">
Bessarabia has been a contested area between Russia and Romania since the Great War. It contains important oil fields. A Russian double-agent (Borovansky) has stolen Russian plans for a possible attack on Bessarabia. If these are made public it will whip up anti-Russian feeling in Romania and help the Fascist Iron Guard to power, and help them make an alliance with Nazi Germany. The spy is taking them by train south into Austria.Russian spies Andreas Zaleshoff and his sister Tamara are tipped off and commission a Spaniard, Ortega, to pursue Borovansky on the train, follow him to his hotel in Austria, and get the plans back.Mr Balterghen of the British-based Pan-Eurasian Petroleum Company (PEPC) wants the question of the Romanian Concessions, i.e. which external oil companies can exploit Romania's oil, to be re-opened so that PEPC can bribe its way to new concessions. He commissions one 'Colonel Robinson' to do this. Zaleshoff realises that 'Robinson' is the assassin and propagandist-for-hire Stefan Saridza, accompanied by his henchman Captain Mailler.So, as the story begins, two separate sets of men are on the track of Borovansky and his photos.The protagonist of the novel is Kenton, a down-at-heel freelance journalist who loses money gambling and takes the train to Vienna to borrow money from a man he knows there, Rosen, a Jew he helped escape Germany after the Nazis came to power. He is befriended on the train by a shifty foreigner, Sachs, who asks him to carry a package through customs on the Austrian border and who seems to be being followed on the train. When they arrive at Linz, Sachs asks Kenton to carry the envelope off the train and bring it to him at a particular hotel later that night. Kenton agrees for a price of 600 Marks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_School_(novel)"title="Home School (novel)">
In "Home School", Benjamin "Ben" Braddock and Elaine, now married and living in Westchester County, New York, are fighting with their school district to allow for their sons Jason and Matt to be homeschooled. They turn to Mrs. Robinson to help them, who decides to seduce and blackmail the principal. The novel is set in the 1970s. Webb stated that Ben chose to do homeschooling because he felt disenchanted with education, a message that was in the previous novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughter_of_the_Moon_Goddess"title="Daughter of the Moon Goddess">
Xingyin is an immortal and has lived in Isolation with her mother. Her existence has been kept secret for years from the other's in the Celestial Kingdom unaware of her mother's history.Her mother Chang'e became the moon goddess when she drank her husband's elixir and she lost her husband and was granted immortality but the Celestials — 'gods' became angry and imprisoned her in the Palace where she hides her secret daughter, Xingyin. Soon when her existence is discovered by the Celestial Emperor, she flees from her only home to the Celestial Kingdom and swears to free her mother from imprisonment.Xingyin discovers she has magic and her skills for archery which she inherited from her father and works hard to get enough status to bargain her mother's freedom. She befriends the Crown Prince Liwei, the Captain of the Celestial Army and she learns more about magic while disguising herself as an archer.Xingyin works undercover to free her mother, while others plot against the Kingdom but the Emperors are also staging a malicious plan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ivory_Key"title="The Ivory Key">
Set in the Indian inspired world of Ashoka, magic is an essential physical resource mined in quarry sites and the biggest export and it is the only thing that can save them from a war with the neighboring kingdoms as long as the kingdoms are unaware of the depletion of magic.After the Maharani is assassinated, her four children; Vira, Ronak, Kaleb and Riya will have to work together to find the ivory key to unlock a new source of magic although each of them has their own personal goals.Vira wishes to use the key to continue the legacy of her mother, the Maharani, Ronak plans to sell the key to the highest bidder, Kaleb wants to use it to prove his innocence after being accused of killing the Maharani and Riya needs it to show her loyalty to the Ravens, a group of rebels. The four siblings will have to work together or else they would lose everything they worked hard for.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinka,_Where_Is_Your_Huzband?"title="Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband?">
The novel revolves around Yinka; a British-Nigerian Oxford graduate who is being pressured into getting married.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_of_Wraiths_and_Ruin"title="A Song of Wraiths and Ruin">
Seventeen year old Karina Alahari is the princess of Ziran, who lost her father and sister in a mysterious fire outbreak. When her mother, the Sultana is assassinated, Karina does not want to carry the burden of rulings and looks for a way to resurrect her mother for which will involve dark magic and a human sacrifice.Malik and his sisters are poor refugees from the Eshra Mountains who are heading to Ziran to find a job. When his younger sister is taken away from them by an evil spirit, Malik makes a deal to kill the princess, in order to save his sister.The evil spirit says that he has to kill the princess by Solstasia's end or they will kill Malik's sister. So Malik becomes a champion to get closer to the princess. Solstasia is a festival celebrating a comet that passes once in every 50 years.Karina and Malik meets during the Solstasia and they fall in love with each other but each of them struggles with their individual intentions. Karina plans on using Malik and a couple of other people for the human sacrifice while Malik plans to kill her to save his sister.Karina finds out that there is a traitor in the castle, and tries to figure out who it is.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Runenberg"title="Der Runenberg">
A melancholic hunter named Christian meets a stranger in the mountains. The stranger accompanies Christian for a while, and Christians tells him about his background - Christian's father, a gardener in a castle, is disappointed with him, because his son does not share the same interests as him, but rather is guided by his longing for the mountains and nature. Christian eventually leaves home and learns how to hunt from an old forester.After a while Christian and the stranger part ways. On the advice of the stranger, Christian climbs the "Runenberg", doubtful and afraid but inquisitive. After a while he finds a window and peers through it; he sees a singing woman undressing. The naked woman hangs him a strange tablet with signs drawn on it, set with precious stones. Christian falls asleep.When he wakes up, he can only vaguely remember what has happened and convinces himself it was a dream. A short time later he arrives in a small village and is relieved to finally be amongst people again. At the village church he meets his future wife, the beautiful Elisabeth. In order to be near to Elisabeth he takes a job as a gardener with her father.Christian is a hard worker, and 6 months later he marries Elisabeth. The couple are very happy together and soon start a family. After a long time, Christian decides to visit his hometown. On the way, he meets his father at the foot of the fateful Runenberg. He tells Christian that after his mother died, he became very lonely and thus decided to try to find his son. The two return to Christian's house and the father becomes part of the family. They live happily oncemore. One day a stranger comes to the village and stays at Christian's house. After three months the stranger leaves, leaving behind a large sum of money. Christian is told to take care of it; if the stranger does not return within a year, it is his to keep.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Ends_with_Us"title="It Ends with Us">
"It Ends with Us" focuses on Lily Bloom, a young college graduate who moves to Boston and opens her own floral business. She develops feelings for surgeon Ryle Kincaid, who is initially reluctant towards having a serious relationship with her. As their relationship blossoms, Lily has a sudden encounter with her first love, Atlas Corrigan. This reintroduction of Atlas threatens her relationship with Ryle, and forces her to come to terms with the trauma of her past and present. Lily is forced to make a difficult decision when she is faced with an assault and finds out she is already pregnant with Ryle's child. Atlas initially helps her but both decide they cannot be around each other casually. Ultimately, Lily decides to leave Ryle for the sake of her newborn baby. She finds it in her heart to co-parent with him. At the novel's conclusion, Lily runs into Atlas and they restart their relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redemptor"title="Redemptor">
Set after the events of the first book, Empress Tarisai must form her own council of eleven connected by the Ray and work as the High Lady Judge alongside Emperor Ekundayo while also trying to fulfill her promise of sacrificing herself to the Abiku by going to the Underworld to stop the death of 200 Redemptor as the Ojiji, spirits of dead Redemptor children begins to haunt her. Meanwhile, An activist called the Crocodile is turning the mind of peasants and miners away from the throne and he is trying to overthrown the rulers of Aristar. Tarisai must fight to defend the empire or else lose everything.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witches_Steeped_in_Gold"title="Witches Steeped in Gold">
Iraya has spent her life in a cell, but every day brings her closer to freedom - and vengeance.Jazmyne is the Queen’s daughter, but unlike her sister before her, she has no intention of dying to strengthen her mother’s power.Sworn enemies, these two witches enter a precarious alliance to take down a mutual threat. But power is intoxicating, revenge is a bloody pursuit, and nothing is certain - except the lengths they will go to win this game.This Jamaican-inspired fantasy debut about two enemy witches who must enter into a deadly alliance to take down a common enemy has the twisted cat-and-mouse of Killing Eve with the richly imagined fantasy world of Furyborn and Ember in the Ashes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Like_Magic"title="Blood Like Magic">
Set in the year 2049 in Toronto, Voya Thomas is called by her ancestors and given a challenge in order to receive her magic. Afraid of being banished and humiliated because she refused her calling, her ancestor Mama Jova force her to witness her execution as a slave and she commands her to kill her first love or else magic will be taken away from her family. Voya is given 30 days to finish the plan and as she forms a bond with a boy named Luc, whom she plans to kill but soon she learns more secrets about her family and she begins to question the original intention of the act.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Civil_Wars_Start"title="How Civil Wars Start">
Walter argues that the United States is in danger of becoming an autocracy, although she does not expect a conflict in the United States like the American Civil War in terms of scale. In comparison, she analyzes the circumstances that led to the conflicts in Yugoslavia, the Philippines, and Iraq. Walter also analyzes the democracy of the United States through a "polity index"; this is a scale from -10 to +10, where -10 is an autocracy and +10 is a democracy. According to Walter, the U.S. has gone from +10 a few years before the book was written to +5 when it was published, making the current United States an anocracy—a partial democracy. She pictures a scene that would occur in 2028, in which wildfires burn in California and bombs are set off nationwide.Walter writes about the impact of social media on tensions in the United States, arguing that it unites extremists and creates division. She also talks about "ethnic entrepreneurs", who gain following by exploiting cultural and ethnic tensions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violeta_(novel)"title="Violeta (novel)">
Violeta tells the story of the author Violeta Del Valle. Violeta was born in 1920 amid the Spanish flu epidemic in an unnamed South American country. She was the youngest daughter of her family and had five older brothers. The book depicts the scene during the 2020 pandemic, where Violeta is breathing her last as a ripe old woman of 100 years. She writes a letter to her grown up grandson telling him about her multiple difficulties. The story starts with Violeta being born in an influential family on a stormy night. Soon though her father loses everything in the Great Depression and the family had to relocate from the comforts of their mansion in the capital to the modest rural countryside. In a way "Violeta" reminds of Isabel's earlier work, "The House of Spirits", which dealt with personal and political upheaval spanned over decades. Violeta also tells about the coups and military uprisings and similar horror of 1970s which seemed to encapsulate the whole of South America. Violeta has a long passionate but troubled relationship with her former husband and the father of her son. Her son is a journalist who has come into the government's Black books because of his career. Thus to escape he first seeks asylum in Argentina and then in Norway. After this tumultuous period in her life, Violeta finally find a partner and solace in a retired diplomat who is also a naturalist. The book deals with a vivid 100-year-story that contains surviving a pandemic, the great depression, loss of familial wealth, political upheavals, marriage problems, estrangement and eventual peace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_of_Forgotten_Ancestors_(novel)"title="Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (novel)">
Two children, Ivan and Marichka, live in a village near the Cheremosh river. Because of his solitude and curiosity about witchcraft and evil spirits, Ivan's mother believed him to be a changeling, a fairy left in place of a stolen human child. On his seventh birthday, Ivan hears a strange sound, despite being all alone. He later learns about the long-standing rivalry between the Paliychuk and Gutenyuk families, and witnesses an assassination attempt on his father, who succumbs to his wounds a few days later. In retaliation, Ivan attacks Marichka, who is the daughter of the killer, and throws her hair ribbons into the river. However, over time, the two forget about the incident.Ivan and Marichka begin taking care of their families' grazing sheep together and eventually fall in love by the age of thirteen. However, since the death of Ivan's father, the economy has been in steep decline. The young man now goes to work in the meadow in the summer, shepherding sheep, milking them, and making bundz and bryndza.One night, while he is guarding the bonfire, Marichka sees him again. But once he returned home from the meadow, he learned that Marichka was killed in a flood. He finds the body of his beloved and, overwhelmed by grief, wanders the mountains and living off the land. He is considered to be dead in the village.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Lived_Twice"title="The Girl Who Lived Twice">
Mikael Blomkvist is trying to reach Lisbeth Salander — the fierce, unstoppable girl with the dragon tattoo — to no avail. He worries that she is getting herself into danger, but is pre-occupied with a decline in his career. He needs her help unraveling the identity of a man who died with Blomkvist’s phone number in his pocket — a man who does not exist in any official records and whose garbled last words hinted at knowledge that would be dangerous to important people. He is persuaded by a medical examiner to look into the death of the homeless man, but Lisbeth has disappeared when Blomkvist reaches out seeking her assistance. She’s sold her apartment in Stockholm, and without telling him, has left Sweden. She’s told no one where she is and no one is aware that at long last she’s got her primal enemy, her twin sister, Camilla, squarely in her sights. In the end, it will be Blomkvist in a moment of unimaginable self-sacrifice–who will make it possible for Lisbeth to face the most important battle of her life, and, finally, to put her past to rest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_and_Chocolate_Cake"title="Prison and Chocolate Cake">
Sahgal begins the story in 1943, mid-World War II when she was in her teens, and en-route to the United States to complete her education. At the time, her parents and several others of her family were in prison for opposing British rule. She questions her parents' courage to send her and her sister abroad at such a time. On the ship, she hears experiences from Polish refugees from Russia, and US soldiers returning from the Pacific War, one of who was surprised that she could be Indian, as she spoke English like he did. She describes several encounters on the ship and then later in the US, with people intrigued to know about India from her. Sahgal says herself that she writes in the order that she remembers events rather than chronologically. An account then follows of political life at Swaraj Bhavan, their family mansion in Allahabad, and daily routines at the newer Anand Bhawan in the 1930s, and how the non-cooperation movement changed life for the Nehru family. Politicians in her memoirs include Sir Stafford Cripps, Maulana Azad and Sarojini Naidu. Included is her first encounter with Gandhi, dropping her elder sister to boarding school, parties at home, life at Woodstock School and her uncle Nehru, who she calls Mamu. Her parents and Nehru are central to her story and were jailed several times. She explains it was voluntary, occasions to be congratulated upon and family and friends patted them on their backs on their way. Sahgal, as a young child, wanting to be old enough to go to prison too, was expected to be proud, not show sorrow, but hold a stiff upper lip; crying was in secret, she writes. Recollections of increasing time spent with servants include one of Hari, who is given an encouraging send-off when he too is arrested and sent to prison. Later visits to prison to see her parents are unpleasant and after the announcement of the Quit India Movement, contact by letter and in person becomes almost none. Sahgal is 12 when war breaks out in 1939. In a series of letters she discusses with her father, then in prison, several political topics including whether India should help Britain, non-violent disobedience and communism. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_fille_de_Carilès"title="La fille de Carilès">
In the tale of "La Fille de Carilès", Carilès is an old man who lives in a wretched garret, and gains his living by selling whirligigs of coloured paper well known that time to little children in France and England. He is alone in the world, very poor, slovenly and lazy, thoroughly contented with his lot until he finds himself responsible for a little girl who has escaped from the cruel hands of some mountebanks. The gradual interest which he feels in the orphan, the self-denying tenderness which underlies the crust of selfishness and idleness that has grown over the solitary old man, and the sunshine which his adopted daughter brings into his life is charming, recalling in a degree, "Silas Marner". Not the least well-imagined part of the story is the way in which a family of the middle class, far from rich, lend a hand to bring up and educate "La fille de Carilès", who, does not turn out to be some stolen princess, and remains to make a home for the good old man when age comes upon him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom!_(poetry_book)"title="Zoom! (poetry book)">
"Zoom!" is a collection of 61 poems, 49 of them less than a page in length. They are grouped in a single list. There is no introduction, and there are no illustrations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxious_People"title="Anxious People">
Ten years ago, a man lost all his savings due to a financial crash. He visited a financial banker named Zara and asked for advice, but she flatly said it was his fault for giving the bank his money. The man wrote a letter to her before taking his own life by jumping off the bridge.In the present day, a woman tries to rob a bank to get enough money to pay for rent, so her ex-husband won't take her children away. Unfortunately, it is a cashless bank, so she panics and runs to a nearby apartment building to avoid being caught by the police. The bank robber enters an apartment viewing, and the people inside see her pistol and assume that it is a robbery. The bank robber hesitantly accepts that she is taking the people hostage as she tried to maintain order.The hostages are apartment renovators Anna-Lena and Roger, expecting mothers Julia and Ro, an elderly Estelle, and bank owner Zara. They find a man named Lennart wearing a bunny suit inside the bathroom. Anna-Lena admits that she hired Lennart to cause a commotion to lower the bidding price of other prospective buyers, in order to make Roger believe that he negotiated the price himself. They split up in silence, as Roger had taken pride in his negotiation skills.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futon_(novel)"title="Futon (novel)">
"Futon" recounts the memories of Tokio Takenaka, a 34 year old novelist in a loveless marriage, who hates his day job and finds nothing in life interesting besides fantasizing about younger women. One day, he receives a letter from Yoshiko Yokoyama, a young female student and admirer, asking to become Tokio's disciple. Hesitant at first, after exchanging multiple letters with the girl, he agrees to take her as his student, and Yoshiko moves to Tokyo. Tokio begins to fall in love with Yoshiko, but does not confess his feelings towards her due to his fear of societal consequences.Yoshiko starts dating a man, and Tokio decides to have her stay on the second floor to keep an eye on her. Tokio contacts Yoshiko's parents to inform them of the relationship. Upon learning the couple had sex, Tokio contacts her father in anger and jealousy, who calls her home. Tokio returns to his old life, and out of loneliness, buries his face in Yoshiko's futon and cries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noor_(novel)"title="Noor (novel)">
A young disabled Igbo woman named Anwuli Okwudili, who goes by the codename AO (Autobionic Organism), lives in a futuristic Nigeria, where advanced technology has enabled her to upgrade unformed or weakened body parts with cybernetic prosthetics created by the megacorporation Ultimate Corp. AO lives as a mechanic in the capital city of Abuja. To the north, a great sandstorm called the "Red Eye" blows perpetually. After being attacked in a marketplace, AO fights back and ends up killing several men. Wanted for murder, she flees and encounters a Fulani herdsman named Dangote Nuhu Adamu, who goes by the name "DNA". Because he is also wanted for murder, DNA and AO flee together further north.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Bedknob"title="The Magic Bedknob">
While spending the summer in Bedfordshire, England, Carey, Charles, and Paul, meet Miss Price, the old spinster next door. When Paul sees Miss Price riding a broomstick, the children realize she is a witch. In return for their silence, Miss Price casts a spell on a knob from the bed so that when the knob is turned, the bed will fly wherever they wish to go. The children take the bed on various magical adventures.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Dependence"title="In Dependence">
The story starts in the early 1960s, a young Tayo sails from Nigeria to England to pursue a scholarship at Oxford University. He sees himself as one of a generation filled with ideas of a new and better future in this city of dreaming spires. The globe seemed to be on fire with change: domestic independence, the Civil Rights movement, and the first tremors of cultural and sexual upheavals.The love story begins when Tayo meets Vanessa Richardson, the lovely daughter of a retired officer, at this point. The heroic but bittersweet love story of Tayo and Vanessa. It is the narrative of two individuals trying to figure out who they are and who they want to be; it is a journey of romance and idealism, strength and deceit, and the universal yearning to fall madly and completely in love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Water_Thief"title="The Water Thief">
Charles Thatcher is a typical citizen in a future hyper-capitalist society. He is the property of Ackerman Brothers Securities Corporation and in this society, every commodity, even air, is sold on the market. The population is kept under control with horrific punishments delivered by a corrupt, profit-driven police service.Given that turning in thieves of resources is inventivized with the profit motive, when Charles sees a woman steal rainwater (which is corporation property), his first thought is to call the police. Hoping to secure a larger reward, he tells authorities that she is not only a water thief; he claims she is a revolution-minded militant who is agitating for the return of the ancient system known as “government.”She disappears, and he realizes that his creative editorializing in his report may have in fact been true. As he connects with the underground resistance, he learns more about the hyper-capitalist nature of the ruling corporations. At the same time, he even starts to wonder if the lure of profit is tempting the revolutionaries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Witch,_Spider_King"title="Moon Witch, Spider King">
The novel is told in a more straightforward linear style than "Black Leopard, Red Wolf".Part 1 No Name Woman The plot follows Sogolon, who starts as a nameless young girl enslaved and abused by her brothers. Sogolon escapes and flees to the city of Kongor in the Northern Kingdom, where she is taken in by Miss Azora, the owner of a "house of pleasurable goods and services." Miss Azora gives Sogolon shelter and eventually forces her into prostitution. Sogolon survives by drugging the men that come to have sex with her and stealing from them, plotting to leave the pleasure house. Sogolon unknowingly steals a talisman from one of the johns linked to an Ukundunka, a monster that protects the owner, and the owner's wife, the willful Mistress Komwono, comes to collect it, killing most of the prostitutes and Miss Azora. Mistress Komwono recognizes the craftiness and grit in Sogolon and extends an offer for Sogolon to be her ward, which Sogolon accepts. Sogolon's time in the Komwono household is spent sleeping in the slave quarters, being ignored by Master Komwono (who recognized her from the pleasure house), and learning proper behavior from Mistress Komwono. Sogolon is forbidden from entering the library of the house and witnesses Master Komwono's mistreatment of the enslaved people and staff, which Mistress Komwono ignores and enables. Eventually, Sogolon's curiosity leads her to enter the library and discover what Master Komwono calls the "boli," a sort of vessel for seemingly mystical power. Master Komwono berates Sogolon and attempts to force himself on her. An unknown force (later named by Sogolon as her wind (no wind), a magical manifestation- prevents this and impales Master Komwono on the ceiling. An investigation follows, and Mistress Komwono leads the household back to the capital city of Fasisi, attempting to rejoin the royal court after an exile.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwendy's_Final_Task"title="Gwendy's Final Task">
Gwendy's Final Task is the third installment of the Gwendy’s Button Box trilogy. Written by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar, the horror novel describes Gwendy Peterson’s last encounter with the button box. Gwendy is tasked by Richard Farris to dispose of the box in outer space, the only place he believes the box can go to keep the world safe from it. Since Gwendy last had the box in her possession, it has increased in its power to do evil. Farris blames the COVID pandemic on one proprietor’s misuse of the box.Once the box is in Gwendy’s possession, she encounters evil forces that seem determined to keep her from achieving her goal. First, her husband, Ryan, is killed in a freak hit and run accident when Gwendy is campaigning for the Senate. Soon afterward, Gwendy begins suffering the debilitating symptoms of early-onset Alzheimer’s. During her trip into space, Gwendy is informed that her house caught fire. She believes the people who want to save the box and use it to harm others intentionally set the fire when they discovered the box was not there.The novel begins in the present tense with the crew of the Eagle-19 Heavy launching into space. Gwendy is onboard as the first United States senator to ride to the MF-1 space station. The chapters that are set in the present are interspersed with chapters set in the past to give the reader background. Even though Gwendy was ready to step aside from politics, she was persuaded to run for a Senate seat in Maine against a man who supported lies and ideas that would harm the country.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyes_That_Kiss_in_the_Corners"title="Eyes That Kiss in the Corners">
A Chinese American girl thinks of how her eyes are not the same as those around her. She thinks about her family's eyes such as her mother's sparkling like sunlight and her grandmother's eyes having the ability to look far into her heart despite her eyes not working as well as they used to. Chinese culture and its landscapes are included within the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Master_of_Djinn"title="A Master of Djinn">
In 1912 Cairo, Fatma el-Sha'arawi is an agent of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, recently noted for having saved the world from a nefarious plot (see the events of the novelette, “A Dead Djinn in Cairo”, which take place prior to the novel). When the members of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Al-Jahiz, a group of primarily English men with enthusiasm for al-Jahiz, a Soudanese mystic who returned magic to the world about forty years prior, are brutally murdered by a man in a golden mask at one of their meetings, it is up to Fatma to track down the killer and solve the case. Assisted by her new partner at the Ministry, Hadia Abdel Hafez, and her lover, Siti, a devotee of Sekhmet and source of information from the underground worshipers of the Egyptian pantheon, Fatma tracks clues and leads across Cairo and the surrounding area in the wake of the gold-masked perpetrator, who claims to be al-Jahiz himself, returned to the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sea_and_Poison"title="The Sea and Poison">
The story is set in Fukuoka hospital during the late stages of World War II, when Japan is demoralized by constant air raids. The intern Dr. Suguro participated in a series of medical experiments designed by an ambitious senior surgeon, Toda, involving vivisection of captured American airmen. Formally, the purpose of the experiments are to determine how much lung tissue can be removed before the patient dies, and how much saline and air can be injected into the blood before death occurs, both are crucial knowledge in the treatment of tuberculosis, a disease currently ravaging the country. However, the real motivation of these chilling experiments arises from military brutality, competition among hospital department heads, and an atmosphere of nihilism in the face of closing defeat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_Vanity"title="Sex and Vanity">
Set in Capri, New York, and The Hamptons, the novel details the escapades of Lucie Tang Churchill, a nineteen-year-old biracial New Yorker and descendent of Winston Churchill who is engaged to Baron Cecil Pike while being wooed by Chinese Australian surfer George Zao.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_in_Sokcho"title="Winter in Sokcho">
"Winter in Sokcho" begins at a guesthouse located in Sokcho, South Korea, a fishing town which dies during the colder months due to less traffic from tourists. The story is told through the eyes of the narrator, an unnamed woman of French-Korean decent, who introduces the reader to Yan Kerrand, a French graphic novelist looking for inspiration for his latest story. Kerrand checking into the guesthouse is the start of their tense, uncomfortable, borderline romantic/sexual acquaintanceship.The narrator agrees to help this foreigner find the inspiration he needs for his next comic within Sokcho, even though she believes there is nothing to find. She takes him through the city, to the North Korean border, and along the beaches, trying to show him her home through her eyes, yet Kerrand constantly denies trying the local cuisine or doing things as the locals do. Through all this, the narrator cannot pull herself away from this strange man and becomes obsessed with the drawings he makes when he thinks nobody is watching. She does several questionable things like rummaging through his bag and trash, using his toothpaste, and spying on him secretly.Simultaneously, the narrator is also struggling in her relationships with her mother and her boyfriend Jun-oh. Her mother cannot seem to see her daughter as a grown adult, while the narrator tries to separate herself from her mother without abandoning her entirely. Her boyfriend only seems to be attracted to the narrator sexually, which is distressing because of the narrator's extreme body dysmorphia. She eventually ends the relationship between them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jailing_of_Cecelia_Capture"title="The Jailing of Cecelia Capture">
Cecelia Capture is an American Indian of mixed heritage who has been jailed on her 30th birthday. Having been arrested on drunk driving charges and being held for welfare fraud charges she hadn't known about, Cecelia goes on a journey of retrospection. Cecelia reflects on her life as a poverty stricken child growing up in an increasingly emotionally abusive home, first on an Idaho reservation, then moving to Tacoma, Washington when she was 12 years old. She convinces her mother to leave her alcoholic father to go live with her sister when she is 13 years old. Her parents eventually reconcile, but Cecelia reaches her breaking point leaving home at 16 and moving to San Francisco.Cecilia meets the love of her life who after only three days together, ships off to Da Nang where he is killed shortly after. Cecilia finds out she is pregnant a few weeks after he has left. She considers her life as a "welfare mother" and the struggles she had with people expecting her to fail. She goes on to a Community College, then on to Berkeley where she meets her husband, Nathan. They end up moving to Spokane, which Cecilia hates because it reminds her of her childhood. She eventually leaves to go back to Boalt Hall Law School and lives in San Francisco on her own until we meet up with her back in jail. She is so unhappy with her life, she becomes suicidal. After everything Cecelia has gone through, she finds new resolve and puts the gun away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_Never_Sleeps"title="The Devil Never Sleeps">
The author discusses emergency management and disaster preparedness, and how people do not always serve the publics best interest in a crisis. The work is divided into three major areas: "preparing for and reacting to catastrophic events, minimizing harm, and applying information gleaned from present-day disasters to those of the future."The book emphasizes the importance of "situational awareness," and asserts that major events like Hurricane Katrina, and the January 6 Capitol attack could have been handled better if better preparation had been made. Minimizing cascading failure is a concept that is delved into, where preparation is made this in turns prevents further loss (fewer deaths from IEDs with better medical response). An example of tragedy from lack of preparation is seen from the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami which in turn caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.Learning from disasters is important, like how people reacted to the 2004 tsunami and how changing peoples behaviors can save lives. Another topic discussed in the book is the "preparedness paradox", where something like the Year 2000 problem doesn't happen because of preparedness, leaving everyone to wonder whether the preparation was really necessary.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatty_Legs"title="Fatty Legs">
When Pokiak-Fenton was eight years old, a residential school opened nearby, and with the dream of learning to read, she begged her parents to go. However, upon arrival, she learned that the school was not as she imagined. "Fatty Legs" documents the vicious treatment she received at the school, particularly from one nun, having her hair cut, being locked in a dark basement, and the humiliation of being given red socks as a punishment. The story also speaks to the power of literature and of resiliency and fortitude.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Stranger_at_Home"title="A Stranger at Home">
At age eight, fascinated by the possibility of reading, Margaret Pokiak-Fenton asked her parents if she could attend the nearby religious school instead of her Arctic school, not knowing the dangers of the residential school system. While at the school, she was unable to speak her language or connect to her culture in any way.Two years later, Margaret returned home a stranger with short cropped hair and the outsiders' perspective of the world, and she has lost many of the skills and enjoyments of life with her family. Although she is thrilled to return home, her mother doesn't recognize the person she has become and angrily yells, "Not my girl!"Over time, Margaret readjusted to life at home with her family and community.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Fallen_Feathers"title="Seven Fallen Feathers">
"Seven Fallen Feathers" discusses the experiences of Indigenous children at schools in Thunder Bay, Ontario. For various reasons, Indigenous children in Ontario often leave their homes around age 13 or 14 to attend school in a larger city, such as Thunder Bay, where they are likely to " face a myriad of hardships—rampant racism, extreme underage alcohol and substance abuse, along with physical and sexual violence." Talaga's book investigates "seven untimely and largely unsolved deaths that have taken place among Native Thunder Bay students" between 2000 and 2011, all of which were "immediately deemed accidental, some noted as such by the local police even before a coroner had a chance to conduct an autopsy."Throughout the investigation into these deaths, Talaga also provides necessary history about Canadian residential schools. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Scion"title="Blood Scion">
Set in a Nigerian inspired world, Sloane Folashadé is a Yoruba girl and a Scion — people with magic who are descendants of the ancient Orisha gods and are hunted by the Lucis who colonized the fictional country of Nagea and stripped them off their culture and heritage. On her 15th birthday, she is drafted alongside her age mates to become one of the child soldier of the Lucis. Sloane refuses to run away with her village boyfriend and is taken to the island of Avalon where she will be trained to fight against other Scion and also partake in the genocide of theYoruba people. Sloane will have to hide her identity, find out what happened to her dead mother who she believes was killed by the Lucis and destroy the Lucis from within the Army.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_of_the_Animals_versus_Man"title="The Case of the Animals versus Man">
Seventy men are shipwrecked on the island , which is inhabited by talking animals who had fled from the descendants of Adam to avoid abuse and exploitation. Believing them to be their slaves, the men attempt to subjugate the animals. The animals demand justice, thus a trial is convened by the island's Muslim governor and the King of the Jinn, Bīwarāsp the Wise. The humans are represented by seven spokespeople, including an Iraqi; a Sri Lankan; a Syrian Jew; a Syrian Christian; a Qurayshi; a Byzantine Greek; and a Shiite Muslim. They unconvincingly argue that mankind is superior to animals. On the other hand, the animals are led by the bee (, king of insects); the griffin or anqa (, king of predatory birds); the lion (, king of predatory land animals); the simurgh (, king of birds); the sea serpent (, king of aquatic animals); the snake (, king of animals that crawl on the ground); and the unspecified king of the cattle (probably the horse, ). They each appoint one animal to represent their respective species: the bee; the nightingale (); the jackal (); the parrot (); the frog (); the cricket (); and an unspecified cattle ambassador (perhaps the mule, ). 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bir_Charitra"title="Bir Charitra">
The novel is a satirical work on the Rana regime and is set in the western region of Nepal. The novel starts from the Baglung district of Nepal. It is an adventure of three princes in search of Agni Dutta, the son of a Brahmin named Ganesh Dutta. When Agni Dutta is kidnapped by a couple, Ganesh Dutta pleads the princes for their help. The novel contains various mythological creatures such as "Rakshasa", demons, "Nagas", etc. and fantasy elements alongside science fictions elements.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupamati"title="Rupamati">
When Pandit Chhabilal's son Habilal was nine years old, he married six-year-old Rupamati, the only daughter of Mohan Prasad Luitel. He is benevolent. Her mother-in-law Ugra Chand Chotha is miserable and temperamental and tortures Rupamati. Having learned patience and endurance from her mother, Rupamati quietly endures her mother-in-law's circus behavior in tears. The novel presented a portrait of an ideal Nepali woman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hearts_of_Darkness"title="The Hearts of Darkness">
The short book documents racism in the writing of authors, explorers, and aristocrats Samuel Baker, Joseph Conrad, Frederick Lugard, Charles Gordon, Keith Richburg, and Henry Morton Stanley. The author reports on his conversations with retired editors of The New York Times, National Geographic, and Time magazine.It documents racial stereotypes in both print and online media. Specifically, it documents and critiques the widespread depictions, most by white writers, but also by Black writers, of barbarism, physical, moral and intellectual inferiority, denial of the positive contributions that Black people have made to culture, arts, science, and descriptions of Africa as inhospitable and uncivilized.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Hate"title="Manufacturing Hate">
The book documents how writing that dehumanizes Africans and African countries is not accidental but a deliberate effort to justify the theft of resources and violence colonization of Black people.It covers over 2,000 years of writing, starting with Herodotus's writing circa 450 BC noting the constant fascination of Europeans with black skin colour. The majority of the book focusses on European and US colonial activities in the 19th and 20th centuries. It documents the self-promotional motivations of European travelers to Africa and their efforts to justify colonization. It notes the European surprise at Ethiopian forces winning the Battle of Adwa. The book focuses on narratives from "The New York Times" and its role in perpetuating racist coverage."The Albert N’Yanza Great Basin of the Nile" by Samuel Baker and "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad are singled out for their negative characterization of Africans as "savages" which in turn were used to justify colonization.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kaiju_Preservation_Society"title="The Kaiju Preservation Society">
Jamie Gray goes to a six-month performance review as an employee for food delivery startup füdmüd expecting to impress boss Rob Sanders with plans to grow the company, only to be terminated and offered a delivery contract instead. At first rejecting the offer, Jamie is eventually forced to take it after all to make rent, as jobs are scarce in COVID-19-afflicted New York City. One delivery client turns out to be Tom Stevens, an old acquaintance, and over the next few weeks of deliveries they renew their friendship. Tom has a lucrative position with KPS, a secretive animal rights NGO, and is slated to head out into the field right about the same time Jamie loses the delivery job (füdmüd having been bought out). Tom offers Jamie a job with his own employer, and Jamie, again out of options, goes in for the interview, is accepted, and is soon on a plane to Thule Air Base in Greenland.Thule Air Base turns out to hide the gateway to a parallel Earth, in which evolution took a different turn after the early Mesozoic era, resulting in a planet dominated by impossibly immense creatures whose growth is fueled by internal bio-nuclear reactors. Mankind first became aware of this world in the wake of World War II, when the use of atomic bombs opened temporary portals between the worlds, to which and through which the creatures were attracted by the radiation fallout, on which they feed. After Japanese filmmakers were inspired by rumors of the initial breakthrough to make "Kaiju" movies such as "Godzilla" and its successors, the creatures were dubbed Kaiju. Aside from such rumors, their real-life existence has been kept secret by governments around the world, who formed KPS (the Kaiju Preservation Society) to study the Kaiju Earth, prevent additional breakthroughs, and protect the denizens of each world from those of the other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercinema"title="Supercinema">
"Supercinema" combines philosophy of film, film theory, and psychology of film with scientific principles to fundamentally attempt to explain a deeper reality. The book delves into cognitive aspects of a hidden, potentially profound meaning behind the fabric of the film medium. And that analogue cinema is Clark Kent hiding Supercinema. And that Supercinema will take us into a new realm of cinema and what it can do.Supercinema discusses convergent digital cinema. And that total cinema would involve no editing and little meaningful narrative. And would include single-take films and long-take films, and that single shots allow us to rethink perspective, and reconceptualize the frame.Brown implies that there is an imminent new age of cinema coming, "Supercinema".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Viscount_Who_Loved_Me"title="The Viscount Who Loved Me">
In 1814, after years as one of the most notorious rakes of the ton, Anthony, Viscount Bridgerton, decides to settle down and carry on the family line. Haunted by his father's death at a young age from a bee sting, Anthony now believes, albeit irrationally, that he will die young too, and does not want the complication of falling in love.Meanwhile, Kate Sheffield arrives in London's ton with her younger half-sister Edwina and her stepmother Mary. She is determined to find a suitable husband for Edwina, who is intelligent and renowned for her beauty, and is less hopeful about her own prospects as a near spinster. When Anthony begins to court Edwina, Kate is determined to interfere, doubting that he is reformed from his roguish ways. Despite the animosity between the two, a mutual attraction begins to develop they attempt to deny.While visiting Aubrey Hall, the Bridgertons' country estate, Kate is stung by a bee while with Anthony. He is overcome with fear and attempts to tend the wound; they are caught in a compromising position by their mothers, leading Anthony to declare he will marry Kate to protect their reputations. Society gossip accepts that the viscount was actually courting Kate when he seemed to be visiting Edwina, and Edwina is happy for them, having suspected Kate's affection. However, Kate struggles with her growing feelings for Anthony as he insists that while he will marry her, he will never love her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_a_Tide_of_Evil"title="Against a Tide of Evil">
"Against a Tide of Evil" documents the experiences of the author as he is deployed to Sudan as the most senior representative of the United Nations. Kapila is based in Khartoum as violence flares in Darfur during the genocide between 2003 and 2004. Kapila quickly becomes a whistleblower, reporting his analysis of the Sudanese government's role in the ethically-targeted violence, including sexual violence. Kapila is shocked when the United Nations' enquiry concludes that actions of the Sudanese government do not amount to genocide.The author is critical of the United Nations and argues that the world ignored the genocide in Darfur, despite the warnings that he and others made at the time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night._Sleep._Death._The_Stars."title="Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.">
John Earle McClaren, nicknamed "Whitey", is a well-respected 67-year-old man who served as the mayor of Hammond, New York, and is the father of five children. Whitey, who is white, intervenes in a police stop of an Indian American man. He is tased by the police, suffers a stroke, and dies. The rest of the novel concerns the fall-out of Whitey's death for the McClaren family—Whitey's widow, Jessalyn, and his children, Beverly, Lorene, Thom, Virgil, and Sophia—including Jessalyn's relationship with a Cuban artist and Thom's pursuit of charges against the officers responsible for Whitey's death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorrowland"title="Sorrowland">
Vern Riley grows up in the Blessed Gardens of Cain, a Black separatist cult. At the Blessed Gardens, or Cainland, she is forced to marry the cult’s leader, Reverend Sherman. Members of Cainland frequently experience “hauntings”; Vern believes that Sherman is drugging the congregation.Vern escapes and gives birth to twins in the woods. During this time, she develops increased strength and healing abilities, as well as a bony tumor on her back. Despite being away from Cainland, she experiences continued hauntings. She is stalked by a figure called “the fiend”. Vern meets a biker named Ollie and begins a relationship with her. Vern learns that Ollie is the fiend, attacks her, and leaves her for dead. Vern decides to leave the woods and track down Lucy, a childhood friend who was also able to escape Cainland.Vern and her children meet Bridget, Lucy’s aunt, as well as Gogo, an EMT. Vern realizes that the hauntings are actually fragments of other people’s memories rather than drug-induced hallucinations. Gogo discovers that Vern’s symptoms are caused by a newly discovered fungal infection. They theorize that the Cainland cult is a psyop designed to research the fungus and its effects on humans. Vern begins a relationship with Gogo. Vern sees a haunting of Reverend Sherman, who states he has been dead for three months. He tells Vern that the fungus absorbs the memories of the infected dead, creating the hauntings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Beasts_of_China"title="Strange Beasts of China">
Yan Ge's "Strange Beasts of China" features an unnamed narrator in the city of Yong'an, a large industrial city. One feature that sets Yong'an apart from other large cities in China is the presence of different sorts of beasts. The unnamed narrator is a self-identified cryptozoologist. She was a zoology student who eventually dropped out of school and now makes a living as a journalist writing beast stories. The story is told chronologically, with each chapter focusing on a different species of beast. When she is not tracking down stories of beasts, the narrator is chain-smoking and drinking, alone or with company, at the Dolphin bar.Throughout the novel, the narrator meets and, inevitably, becomes emotionally involved with each type of beast. Along with the narrator, other significant characters are her cousin, cousin's daughter (her "niece") Lucia, past professor, and professor's assistant Zhong Liang. As the story progresses, there is a tense love-hate relationship fostered between the narrator and her professor. She grows closer to Zhong Liang, the professor's new assistant. As the plot line progresses and new types of beasts are introduced, layers of connection and involvement between the narrator's friends and certain beasts are unveiled and explored. The exposure of how beasts can be involved in so many aspects of the narrator's life starts to break down the artificial separation between humans and beasts as the narrator questions her identity and the identity of the human race itself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dangers_of_Smoking_in_Bed"title="The Dangers of Smoking in Bed">
"Angelita Unearthed"A girl discovers small bones in her backyard, and her grandmother claims they are the bones of Angelita, the grandmother’s sister who passed away as a baby. Years later, a decomposing baby appears at the girl's bedside, and the girl realizes that the baby is Angelita. Angelita follows the girl everywhere but never talks. One day, the girl takes Angelita to the house where her bones were displaced in order to make peace with her."Our Lady of the Quarry"A group of friends hangs out at a quarry pool every weekend. One day, Diego suggests that they all go to the quarry's altar, but once the girls reach the altar, Diego and Silvia ditch them. Natalia prays at the altar, and savage dogs appear and surround Diego and Silvia. Natalia leads the other girls to the bus stop as Silvia’s and Diego’s screams are heard in the distance."The Cart"One afternoon, a very drunk man stumbles into a neighborhood with a cart full of stuff. He terrorizes the neighborhood, and irate neighbors chase the man off. His rotting cart is left behind, and two weeks later, the neighborhood begins to deteriorate. Some blame the cart’s presence for the neighborhood’s extreme decline. One girl’s family isn’t struggling nearly as much as the other neighbors, and her family hides this fact until their only option is to escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannery_Women,_Cannery_Lives"title="Cannery Women, Cannery Lives">
Cannery Women, Cannery Lives tells the history of Mexican and Mexican-American women working in the California canning and food processing industry and their involvement in labor organization and unionization during 19301950. Ruiz combines a variety of sources, government records, newspaper articles, union documents, and oral histories to tell the story of how Mexican American women shaped the canning and food processing industry and unionization in California and how the industry in turn impacted their lives, families and communities.The book is divided into six chapters. The first two chapters discuss the details of the work, family, and community lives of the women working in the industry; the role of family and kinship connections form an important theme in the work. Chapters 35 focus on the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), a loosely organized labor union created in 1937, and how it developed and influenced the California food packing industry and the roles Mexican women in the cannery industry played in its organization, development, and leadership. The final chapter discusses the competition between the UCAPAWA and the more centrally organized Teamsters and its eventual decline and absorption into the Distributive and Processing Workers of America.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_Mom"title="Missing Mom">
Nikki Eaton, a 31-year-old journalist in a small town in New York state, deals with the murder of her widowed mother, Gwen, by a meth addict, while having an affair with a married man and clashing with her more conventional older sister.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tattooed_Girl"title="The Tattooed Girl">
Alma Busch, a 27-year-old woman from Akron, Pennsylvania with mysterious tattoos of unknown origin on her body, arrives in the affluent town of Mount Carmel in upstate New York. She is spotted by a man named Dmitri Meatte, a waiter at "The Café" who become her pimp and boyfriend. Alma meets a novelist named Joshua Seigl, who takes her on as an assistant for his next novel even though she steals and destroys his work and hates him for being Jewish.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Cooking_with_Cannabis"title="The Art of Cooking with Cannabis">
The book is arranged by geographical region, and includes profiles of the featured brands and chefs. One section is devoted to hemp as food, another to the compound CBD found in cannabis, and another to THC also found in the plant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dyer"title="Rachel Dyer">
The novel opens with an overview from the narrator of the historical context preceding the Salem witch trials. The narrator describes belief in witchcraft as a universal human trait that was well established amongst educated authorities in the 1690s in both the United Kingdom and British North America. When Puritans fled persecution in England and colonized New England, they quickly turned to violence to control Quaker colonists and Indigenous Wampanoag. Mary Dyer was executed for her religious convictions and fellow Quaker Elizabeth Hutchinson (based on Anne Hutchinson) cursed their persecutors. A series of events impacting the Massachusetts Bay Colony fulfilled that curse: King Phillip's War, King William's War, epidemics, an earthquake, fires, storms, conflict within the church, and finally, the witch trials. The narrator then introduces the peculiarities of colonial court proceedings and early Puritan leaders, Governor William Phips and Reverend Matthew Paris (based on Samuel Parris).Paris is grieving for his recently deceased wife. Psychologically vulnerable and superstitious, he centers his life on his ten-year-old daughter, Abigail Paris (based on Betty Parris). She and her twelve-year-old cousin, Bridget Pope (based on Abigail Williams), begin to exhibit what he perceives as demonic behavior. Indigenous neighbors who used to visit the household begin avoiding it and Matthew Paris searches for an explanation. He interrogates Tituba, an Indigenous household servant whom he has enslaved and who lives in the household with her husband, John Indian. Paris accuses Tituba of witchcraft, and she is arrested, tortured, convicted, and executed. While undergoing torture, she implicates Sarah Good of the same crime in her confession.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Employees"title="The Employees">
## Summary.Sometime in the future, a mixed group of humans and human-like androids are sent to research a succession of alien objects that they obtain from the planet “New Discovery”, which is located very far from Earth. Their ship (The Six Thousand Ship) orbits above the planet's surface. The corporation in charge of the ship sends a group of impartial mediators to conduct an 18 month long interview of the ship's workers to see the impact these objects have on the crew. Tensions rise between the crew's two factions as the objects begin to inspire profound emotional reactions. The objects are all rich sensory articles, which sharply contrast to the insipid, antiseptic lifestyle aboard the ship. The crew members begin to question the meanings of their lives beyond work. Following the final collection of the crew members' statements, the authoritative committee which employs them disintegrates the biological material aboard the ship, including both the humans and the humanoids, citing the effects the strange objects had on the crew.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobody's_Victim"title="Nobody's Victim">
"Nobody's Victim" has an introduction, nine chapters and a conclusion. It is written by Carrie Goldberg, who runs an American law firm specializing in sexual violence. She has a typology for people involved in such activity, who are mostly male. "Assholes" mistreat vulnerable people for financial gain or through indifference; "psychos" stalk and intimidate their targets; "pervs" enjoy non-consensual sex acts; and "trolls" enjoy causing suffering with the protection of anonymity. Throughout the book, she mentions her "psycho ex", who spent a year sending her harassing messages, threats of violence and posting sexual images and videos of her (taken without her knowledge) online. He harassed her family, colleagues and judges, and filed a frivolous lawsuit that cost her $30,000 in legal fees.In "Sleeping with the Enemy", Goldberg documents the intimate partner violence faced by social worker Francesca Rossi at the hands of the "psycho" Juan Thompson, who was fired as a journalist for falsifying reports. During their relationship, Thompson was impersonating Rossi's ex-partners with harassing messages, a fake lawsuit, and revenge porn. For nine months after their breakup, Thompson's harassment included contacting around 50 family members, creating fake accounts for Rossi, doxing her, and swatting under her name. Police declined to take action until a bomb threat that led to a sentence of five years in prison.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Does_Not_Win_Elections"title="Love Does Not Win Elections">
Osori wrote mostly about the gender biased system in the Nigerian electoral system. The book provides insight into the role that money plays in Nigerian elections.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_of_Sand"title="Tomb of Sand">
The book traces the transformative journey of 80-year-old Ma, who becomes depressed after the death of her husband. She then decides to travel to Pakistan, confronting trauma that had remained unresolved since she was a teenager who survived the Partition riots. The story is fictional.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_From_Uncommon_Stars"title="Light From Uncommon Stars">
Shizuka Satomi is the world's best violin teacher, known for coaching virtuosos who meet tragic ends. Years ago, she struck a deal with a demon that she would deliver seven souls to hell. To do this, she coaches ambitious violin students, then offers them fame and renown in exchange for their souls. Satomi has delivered six souls already, and with a year left on her contract, she needs one more student. She finds that student in Katrina Nguyen, a young transgender prodigy with little formal training.As Satomi teaches Nguyen, she also meets Lan Tran, a starship captain and refugee disguised as a doughnut shop owner, who has brought her family to Earth to escape war and a deadly plague. The two strike up a tenuous flirtation, but their budding romance is imperiled by Satomi's deal with the demon and Tran's tumultuous galactic past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Atheism"title="The Evolution of Atheism">
The book focuses on four major New Atheist figures, collectively known as the "Four Horsemen": Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. LeDrew argues that a right-wing branch of atheism—New Atheism—deviates from its traditional associations with classical liberalism, social justice and multiculturalism. The modern atheist movement has three bodies of thought, according to LeDrew: scientific atheism, the view that religion is opposed to scientific truth; secular humanism; and libertarianism combined with rationalism. New Atheism fits in the first category. LeDrew compares this to historical conflicts since the beginning of secularism, such as George Holyoake's arguments with Charles Bradlaugh or the division between libertarian views inspired by Herbert Spencer and egalitarian views based on Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud or Karl Marx.LeDrew believes that, in parallel to religious movements, New Atheism has a fundamentalist and dogmatic adoption of scientism—the view that science is the only method of determining information or values. This leads it towards defense of Western hegemony, Islamophobia, and opposition to progressive views on class, gender and race. LeDrew also says that its focus on rationalism and utopianism creates a tendency towards authoritarianism and individualism. He argues that the rise of New Atheism in the mid-2000s could be attributed to the war on terror, an increasing American Christian right, child sex abuse revelations in the Catholic Church, and declining religiosity across America. He discusses other New Atheist figures such as Steven Pinker, A. C. Grayling, Victor J. Stenger, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Lawrence Krauss as well as laypeople in the mass movement.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_the_Turtle_Drum"title="Beat the Turtle Drum">
Written in a diary format, the story follows Kate, a thirteen-year-old aspiring poet, whose best friend is her little sister, eleven-year-old Joselyn (nicknamed "Joss"). Joss, obsessed with horses, wants to save the money to rent a horse of her own, which Kate joins in on happily. Joss saves up money from her birthday, and manages to get enough money. The horses name is Prince and Joss will be renting him from a man named Mr. Essig. Renting a horse comes with some difficulties, including a nosy spinster neighbour and a latent crush on a local boy. Unspoken rivalries and an age gap threaten to make the sisters more distant, especially since Kate is becoming a teenager while Joss is still interested in childish things. Moreover, Joss is often treated as the "perfect" sister, while Kate is often criticized by their parents.When Kate and Joss finally have the money to rent their horse for Joss's upcoming birthday, they try to build the horse a shed with the help of their younger best friend, Tootie. Eventually realizing that the construction project isn't feasible after a storm blows the shed over, the three girls decide to keep the horse in the garage. Joss is given the horse, named Prince, for a week-long rental from eccentric neighbours Mr. and Mrs. Essig. Mrs. Pemberthy, the sisters' nosy alcoholic neighbour, does not approve of the horse, but this does not deter the girls, who are determined to spend Joss's birthday happily. They plan a picnic, climbing into a tall old tree to eat at the top of it. When Joss attempts to look out to the distance and watch for Prince, she slips from the treetop and falls, dying instantly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Small_Thing"title="No Small Thing">
Nathaniel, a twelve-year-old boy in 1970s Ontario, lives with his older sister Cid, his younger sister Queenie, and his single mother, who is the main breadwinner of the household. The children's father left them when they were younger, something that Nathaniel still secretly resents. He and Cid decide to take Queenie to adopt a free pony on the outskirts of town, and they hitchhike to the farm where the pony is being offered. Riding the pony back, Queenie falls and breaks her arm. A rude local curmudgeon agrees to let the children keep the pony at his own barn, on the grounds that the children make up for the cost by looking after his other horses. Nathaniel and Cid take Queenie home, and their mother, furious, fights with Nathaniel, causing him to flee the house and call his mother a "witch". The two later reconcile, an event that causes Nathaniel to reflect on his own maturity. The children name the pony Smoky (after its gray coat colouring), and spend much of their time after school at the local barn.Nathaniel recalls seeing the release of "Star Wars" at the movie theatre, and also the rejection he faces from an older girl, Cheryl, whom he has a crush on. Cheryl is upper-class, and sees no viability of a long-term relationship with a working-class boy. When in the house one day, Nathaniel accidentally knocks over and crushes all of Cid's beloved ceramic animal figurine collection, causing her to cry, and feeling terrible, he seeks out a new animal figurine within his budget to give his sister for Christmas. He buys a tiny fawn in a basket, but the basket is squished. Cid adores it anyway, and the two siblings make up. Nathaniel realizes that the extra cost of the ceramic fawn would not be such an expense to him if his father had remained with the family, and angrily breaks down outside one day, believing that he's seen a man who looks just like his father living with another family, with a new wife and children. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_Christ_of_Bomba"title="Poor Christ of Bomba">
Set in the 1930s, the story is narrated by Dennis who is Father Drumont's house-boy. The story revolves around Father Drumont who established a parish in Bomba, a small village in southern Cameroon. It tells about how he strives to convert the natives to Christianity and encourage monogamy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_Bardel"title="Olga Bardel">
The novel opens with a prologue recounting a chance meeting after a space of many years between the narrator, a writer, and John Braille, a successful painter famed for his technically accomplished but showy portraits of rich patrons. Braille has recently exhibited a new portrait demonstrating a complete change of artistic direction. "The Mother" is a superbly sensitive and nuanced portrayal of a woman in a grey dress leaning on a grand piano and looking at her khaki-clad son as he stands before her ready to answer the call of war. The narrator, deeply moved by the painting, asks if he could set down the story of the woman depicted, whom he recognises as Olga Bardel.Born into extreme poverty in Canning Town, a slum area of London, Olga Bardel's early years as an orphan were spent trying to escape punishment at the hands of her much older drunken and sometimes violent siblings, and in attempting to avoid the notice of her terrifying and controlling Uncle Grubhofer, a wire spring dealer who owns their lodgings. Her early interest in music develops when she secretly creeps into Uncle Grubhofer's room to play with the metal springs he keeps as part of his stock in trade.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uplift_Storm_trilogy"title="Uplift Storm trilogy">
## Brightness Reef.Brightness Reef introduces the reader to the planet "Jijo", a world that had been declared fallow, but one area, known as The Slope, is illegally inhabited by eight different galactic races, most supposedly seeking the "Path of Redemption", the goal of which is to devolve into a non-sapient life form, to be re-uplifted by a new patron race in the future. The peaceful, primitive society of Jijo is severely disrupted by the arrival of offworlders, first a mysterious mute human, followed by a starship belonging to the Rothen, a race of galactic criminals, and their human devotees, the Daniks. The Commons of Jijo establishes an uneasy, distrustful relationship with the Daniks for a short time, but events accelerate rapidly and it becomes clear that the Rothen are amoral, attempting to cause friction between the races of the Commons, and possibly genocidal. Jijoan religious fanatics also cause friction and in some cases commit acts of destruction and violence, further complicating matters.At the same time, elsewhere on Jijo, a young member of Hoon race named Alvin and his friends from several races receive unexpected help in their quest to make a bathysphere for underwater exploring. They are assisted by Uriel, a sage of the urrish race, who asks their help in locating a hidden underwater cache of galactic technology. The bathysphere fails while deep underwater, and the young crew is rescued by mysterious metal-clad beings. On the other end of "the Slope" a small group of humans attempts to quietly form a new settlement that may escape the murderous intent of the Rothen, but they find their Danik servants already there. A fight ensues and the group is scattered.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agatha_of_Little_Neon"title="Agatha of Little Neon">
"Agatha of Little Neon" features Agatha, a sister of the Catholic Church, in 2005. Agatha entered the convent seven years earlier, after the death of her mother. She has become inseparable from three other young sisters—Frances, Mary Lucille, and Therese—who took their vows at the same time, and they are all devoted to their Mother Roberta.At the beginning of the novel, Agatha and her three sisters are all 29 years old. They have spent much of their 20s working at their church in Lackawanna, New York, and running a daycare center. When the parish goes broke, the four sisters are transferred to Woonsocket, Rhode Island, where they are in charge of a halfway house. The house is "the color of Mountain Dew" which prompts the nickname "Little Neon".At the halfway house, they care for a small group of broken, lost, and healing adults, including Tim Gary and Lawnmower Jill. During the day, Agatha is sent to teach geometry at a local Catholic girls' high school. For her entire adult life, her three sisters have been her family, and the church her home. But as Agatha forges new relationships in the halfway house and at the school, and as the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal grows, she begins to question her religion and her identity. By the end of "Agatha of Little Neon", Agatha comes of age and forges a new path for herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invisible_Wall_(memoir)"title="The Invisible Wall (memoir)">
The book takes place in the mill town of Stockport, England (now part of Greater Manchester). Harry Bernstein and his family live on a narrow street that is divided by an "invisible wall", with Jewish families (including Harry's) on one side, and Christian families on the other. Harry's father is an alcoholic who frequently abuses his wife and children, and gambles away much of his meager income.Harry's older sister, Lily, falls in love with a Christian neighbor, Arthur. The two hide their relationship until Harry finds out and informs his parents, who disavow Lily by sitting shiva. Lily and Arthur eventually elope and get married.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembered_Prisoners_of_a_Forgotten_War"title="Remembered Prisoners of a Forgotten War">
Carlson explains that in the early 1950s, the Cold War and McCarthyism left the American public paranoid about the Red Menace and were quick to accuse returning POWs of collaborating with their communist captors. But the reality of the situation was that the primary goal of the prisoners was simply to survive under extreme and unbearable conditions. Carlson states that "their conduct, rather than manifesting personal or societal weaknesses, as their critics charged, was far more likely to reflect the changing conditions of their captivity.""Remembered Prisoners of a Forgotten War" contains first-hand testimonies of over 40 repatriated prisoners of war detailing their experiences in captivity. These include accounts of starvation, disease, solitary confinement, abuse and torture. Several prominent events are covered in detail, including the Tiger Death March, which happened in October 1950 when over 800 prisoners were forced to march 100 miles in nine days, resulting in the death of almost two-thirds of them, and the mass killings of American POWs: the Hill 303 massacre, where 41 were executed on a hill above Waegwan in South Korea in August 1950, and the Sunch'ŏn Tunnel Massacre where almost 70 American prisoners were murdered outside a tunnel near Sunch'on in North Korea in October 1950.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hills_Were_Joyful_Together"title="The Hills Were Joyful Together">
In Jamaica during the Second World War, Surjue is persuaded to take part in a robbery and is imprisoned.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Bones_and_My_Flute"title="My Bones and My Flute">
British Guiana, 1933. A jumbee (ghost) of a Dutch slaveowner, who died by suicide after his family was killed in the 1763 slave revolt, haunts whoever comes in contact with his will until his bones and flute are buried according to Christian rites. The document's owner, lumber magnate Ralph Nevinson, journeys deep into the jungles of Guiana with painter Milton Woodsley in order to find the Dutchman's bones and flute and end the curse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crow_Eaters"title="The Crow Eaters">
The book is about a Parsi family, the Junglewallas, in pre-partition India and their move from central India to the city of Lahore. The book opens with the death of the family patriarch, businessman Fareedon Junglewalla. Fareedon's conflicts with his mother-in-law provide many of the novel's comic scenes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajmohan's_Wife"title="Rajmohan's Wife">
## Summary.The novella opens one late afternoon in a remote village named Radhaganj in the Bengal Presidency. A 30-year-old unnamed woman awakens from an afternoon nap, dresses up and heads out of her house and goes to a nearby house, where she meets with a young 18-year-old married woman. The two women strike up a conversation, through which the 30-year-old woman's name is revealed to be Kanakmayee, shortened to Kanak. After some persuasion, Kanak convinces the 18-year-old woman to accompany her to fetch water from the nearby river. Albeit being afraid of her husband's reaction, the 18-year-old woman takes a pitcher and goes out with Kanak.Meanwhile in another place, two men—who are cousins—are seen conversing with each other. The elder one is Mathur Ghose and the younger one is Madhav Ghose. Mathur was talking to Madhav about his recent arrival in Radhaganj after leaving Calcutta, when they both look out of their window and see Kanak and the 18-year-old married woman returning home. A sudden gust of wind removes the veil of the 18-year-old woman, revealing her face. Madhav recognises her as Matangini, the wife of Rajmohan, who is also in Radhaganj. Kanak and Matangini return to their respective homes, with Matangini being fearful of her husband's reaction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Rain_Clouds_Gather"title="When Rain Clouds Gather">
Makehaya escapes Apartheid South Africa into Botswana. In the village of Golema Mmidi he meets Gilbert, an Englishman who is trying to modernise farming. They join forces to create a utopia but are opposed by the village chief.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Rachel"title="Book of Rachel">
The main protagonist of the book is an old Jewish widow named Rachel from Bene Israel community who tries to preserve Jewish culinary art and simultaneously tries to protect a local synagogue from local land mafia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(Lovelace_novel)"title="Salt (Lovelace novel)">
Alford George, son of a poor farm labourer on Trinidad, does not speak until the age of six, and grows up as an outsider; later he becomes a teacher and then a politician, and dreams of leaving his homeland for Great Britain. His ancestor, Guinea John, led an 1805 slave rebellion and then apparently flew back to Africa; the other slaves had eaten too much salt and could not fly with him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_Bellingcat"title="We Are Bellingcat">
The book covers Higgins' life as a college drop out, his blogging, and his hobby of using Google Earth to ascertain the precise location of violent events. It documents his online activity analysing the First Libyan Civil War while working his "dead end job".It describes the creation of Bellingcat in 2014, and Higgins' work investigating the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which used images gathered from social media to demonstrate that the plane was shot down using a Russian Buk missile system. It also documents investigations into Bashar al-Assad's use of chemical weapons in Syria, neo-Nazi activity in Charlottesville, and Russia's involvement in the poisonings of Sergei and Yulia Skripal and of Alexei Navalny.The book documents Higgins' role on the Technology Advisory Board of the International Criminal Court. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Apricots_Bloom"title="When the Apricots Bloom">
On the precipice of the United States' invasion of Iraq in 2002, the Iraqi secret police ramp up inspection. In this patriarchal society, they force Huda, a young woman working in the Australian embassy, to befriend and spy on Ally, the young American wife of the Australian ambassador, threatening her son if she disobeys. Ally's late mother worked in Iraq in the 1980s, and she wants to find out more about that time. Huda is conflicted about reporting on Ally to the secret police, and wants to protect her son even from threats, so she calls on her best friend, artist Rania, to help her procure a passport for him to leave. Rania also plans to send her children away, but is stuck being forced to paint a portrait of leader Saddam Hussein.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mask_of_Mirrors"title="The Mask of Mirrors">
Decades ago, the city of Nadežra is captured from the Vraszenians clans by the Liganti. A dictator named Kaius Rex rules the city. Rex paves over the Wellspring of Ažerais, a sacred Vraszenian religious site, and replaces it with an amphitheater. After his death, peace is brokered between the Vraszenian clan elders and a five-person committee called the Cinquerat. Although peace is restored, the city remains unstable, with the native Vraszenians under the control of the Liganti nobility.After the death of her mother, a Vraszenian street urchin named Ren joins the Fingers, a gang. She and her sworn siblings Tess and Sedge survive cruelties from the gang’s leader, Ondrakja. After Ondrakja beats Sedge, Ren poisons her. Ren and Tess flee the city, believing that Sedge and Ondrakja are dead. They eventually become servants in the house of Letilia, a woman estranged from her noble Nadežran family. After years as Letilia’s servant, Ren and Tess steal her jewelry and return to Nadežra.Ren disguises herself as Renata Viraudax, the fictional daughter of Letilia; Tess poses as Renata’s maid. They hope to con their way into the Traementis family and become wealthy. The Traementis family has declined in numbers and wealth since Letilia left: the only remaining members are Donaia Traementis and her two children, Leato and Giuna. Ren begins to feel genuine affection for the Traementis and feels guilty about her lies. Ren and Tess reunite with Sedge, who now works for a crime boss name Derossi Vargo. Ren also interacts with the Rook, a Vraszenian folk hero who fights against Liganti corruption.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I'm_Glad_My_Mom_Died"title="I'm Glad My Mom Died">
In the memoir, McCurdy discusses her childhood as a successful child actress (including a strained relationship with a producer described only as "The Creator"), her brief foray into a country music career and the troubled and controlling relationship she had with her mother Debra, who died from cancer in 2013. The book is divided into two sections, "Before" and "After", which describe the events of her life before and after the death of her mother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_All_That_Falls"title="The Light of All That Falls">
## Prior to the novel.Thousands of years ago, Aarkein Devaed destroyed the Shining Lands, inhabited by the Darecians. This was done so that the surviving Darecians would one day create the city of Deilannis, and with it a time-traveling device. Shammaeloth, a demon, hopes to use the device to bring the Darklands into Andarra. The Venerate believe that Shammaeloth is their god, El. They believe that when “El” reaches Deilannis, they will be able to change the past and undo all of the crimes that they have committed in El’s name. Realizing that this was a lie, Devaed switched sides and created the Boundary to keep Shammaeloth away from Deilannis. Deilannis is destroyed, and the last survivors become the Lyth. Caeden plans to close the Rift to the Darklands and ensure that the two realms remain separate forever. To do so, he must kill all Augurs and all of the Venerate, including himself. The Venerate can only be killed by Licanius, which is currently being held north of the Boundary.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_Era"title="Supernova Era">
On a seemingly ordinary summer night, a catastrophe brewing for hundreds of millions of years reaches the Earth from deep space. The radiation from the supernova explosion irreversibly irradiates everyone over the age of 13, leaving them with only a few months to live. Children under 13 years old can recover. That means that all humans over thirteen in the world will die, and the Earth will become a world with only children.It is a society the world has never seen before; adults are supposed to teach their children life skills in the shortest possible time, such as running a country, commanding an army, etc. The adults also leave their children the best gift, the Chinese Quantum, a super quantum computer, which will help the children go through a dark age that follows. In the early days of the supernova era, the world of children becomes the last continuation of the world of adults. After several months of seemingly smooth operation, it finally gets out of control.When children are tired of the rules and regulations of the adult world, playing seems to be the only theme of the child world. First, they want to build a candy world, where the building shell is edible chocolate; They have created the maximal online games. Because all children are participants, online community organizations are even equipped to compete with the state power; In the end, they found that the most exciting game is war. Out-of-control children in the Antarctic continent started a world war; After that, China and the United States even exchanged their territory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Craft_Sequence"title="The Craft Sequence">
## Three Parts Dead.Forty years before the start of the novel, Craftspeople and gods fight in the God Wars. Seril, the moonlight goddess of the city of Alt Coulumb, is killed. The Guardians of Seril, gargoyles, are exiled from Alt Coulumb. Alexander Denovo, a powerful Craftsman, is hired to resurrect Seril. He uses Seril's corpse to create a replacement goddess named Justice.As the novel begins, Tara Abernathy is a student of the Craft. The Craft is a system of magic based on contracts and laws. She discovers that Professor Denovo has been stealing his students’ powers and controlling their minds. She burns Denovo's laboratory and is exiled from the school as punishment. Tara is hired by Elayne Kavarian, a Craftswoman and rival of Denovo's.Kos, the fire god of Alt Coulumb and former lover of Seril, dies under mysterious circumstances. Kavarian is hired by the clergy to investigate, and she brings Tara to the city with her. Their companions include Abelard, a priest of Kos, as well as Catherine, a servant of Justice. They are opposed by Denovo, who is representing the creditors to whom Kos had pledged his power. A local judge is murdered, and Justice suspects that the exiled gargoyles are the perpetrators. Tara, believing that the cases are linked, investigates further.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bone_Readers"title="The Bone Readers">
The novel is set on the island of Camaho, based on Ross's native Grenada (Kalinago: "Camerhogne"). Michael "Digger" Digson testifies in a murder case and is recruited into a plainclothes homicide squad led by the mysterious Chilman, who is obsessed with the disappearance of a young man several years ago. Digger is also researching a cold case: his mother's, who was murdered by police when he was a child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daring_Greatly"title="Daring Greatly">
The title of the book is taken from the 1910 speech Citizenship in a Republic by Theodore Roosevelt, in which he stated, "who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly." In the book, Brown equates vulnerability with being something hard to do and that we need to "dare greatly" in order to overcome that vulnerability. The book describes feelings of shame and unworthiness and how people have a hard time admitting they are doing certain things. It also talks about owning and engaging in vulnerability and shame resilience.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starmer_Project"title="The Starmer Project">
"The Starmer Project" is hostile to Starmer and portrays him as a ruthless individual who sabotaged Corbyn's Labour leadership to become the new party leader. He promised to continue Corbyn's policies if elected leader but purged the left from the party leadership upon gaining power. His libertarianism slowly turns into paternalism, and he pledges to give Britain's voters security. Starmer focuses on non-partisan issues, such as incompetence, and is described as an authoritarian centrist who wants technocratic reform. He is also alleged to be contradictory throughout his career.The book criticises Labour's election victories during the centrist New Labour period but praises its defeat in the 2017 general election under Corbyn because, according to Eagleton, New Labour "lost millions of votes after its landslide victory" in the 1997 general election, while the loss in 2017 had "the biggest swing to Labour since 1945".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preventable_(book)"title="Preventable (book)">
"Preventable" covers the first eighteen months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The first chapter focusses on the origin of the virus and notes the Chinese government's reluctance to allow an investigation of the origins of the virus, documenting Sridhar's open-mindedness around the COVID-19 lab leak theory.The book compares COVID-19 variants and their relative transmissibility. It compares pandemic responses internationally, contrasting governmental responses in China, South Korea, Vietnam, Senegal, Sweden, New Zealand, and Australia. It notes "over-confidence" from high income country government responses and critiques the tendency for high income countries to over-procure stocks of vaccines.In "Preventable," Sridhar notes how Nicola Sturgeon was more willing to take her advice than Boris Johnson, whose activities are compared to Jair Bolsonaro's and Donald Trump's. Critique of Johnson continues, noting his absence at COBRA meetings and his decision visit COVID-19-positive patients in a hospital. The book is also critical of the UK's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies for their groupthink, their adoption of a herd immunity strategy, and their incorrect pessimism around the speed at which an effective vaccine could be produced.In the book, Sridhar discusses the online harassment she has received and Twitter doxing attempts. She also writes about catching COVID-19.The book suggests what could be done better in the next pandemic, which is described as inevitable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policing_the_Womb"title="Policing the Womb">
"Policing the Womb" centers the criminalization of birth and other aspects of reproduction in the United States, such as contraception and abortion. Goodwin contextualizes the contemporary policing of reproduction within the history of American slavery and contends that women's bodies are treated as property by the American state. She describes fetal personhood legislation, the treatment of those who are incarcerated and pregnant, and many of other examples of criminal punishment for pregnant women throughout the book. She contends that this criminalization predominantly targets low-income women, Black, and Latina women by design, as these populations were never included in the vision of pro-choice movements, which center white middle-class women. Goodwin argues in favor of widening current "choice" movements to reproductive justice, an expansive framework inclusive of domains like abortion access, healthcare, and mass incarceration. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_Island"title="Domino Island">
Bill Kemp, an ex-serviceman working in London as an insurance investigator, is sent to the Caribbean to determine the legitimacy of an expensive life insurance claim following the inexplicable death of businessman David Salton. His rapidly inflated premiums immediately before his death stand to make his young widow Jill Salton very wealthy. Once there, Kemp discovers that Salton's political ambitions had made him a lot of enemies, and local tensions around a forthcoming election are already spilling over into protest and violence on the streets. Kemp eventually realises that Salton's death and the local unrest are a deliberate smokescreen for an altogether more ambitious plot by an enemy in their midst.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Tiger"title="The Night Tiger">
In 1931, in British Malaya, Ji Lin works as an apprentice dressmaker and dancehall girl. One of her dance partners leaves her with a human finger.Houseboy Ren is trying to fulfil his former master’s dying wish: to find his lost finger within 49 days.Meanwhile, unexplained deaths take place across the area, and there are rumours of the "harimau jadian", a tiger that can transform into a human.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Binder_series"title="Adam Binder series">
## "White Trash Warlock".Adam Binder, a young gay boy living in Guthrie, Oklahoma, lives in poverty with his parents and older brother Robert. His father disappears when Adam is young. As a teenager, Adam begins to hear voices and visit the spirit world. Unwilling to accept the existence of magic, his mother and brother have him institutionalized. In the institution, Liberty House, Adam spirit walks and meets an elf named Perak, who teaches him to control his power. Adam falls in love with Perak, who eventually abandons him. Adam leaves Liberty House on his 18th birthday. He moves in with his grandaunt Sue, also a witch.Adam investigates dark artifacts made from the bones of magical creatures. These artifacts were created by a warlock, or a witch who has turned to dark magic. He suspects that the warlock is his missing father and learns that one artifact was first found in Denver. Adam receives a call from his estranged brother, now a physician living in Denver, Colorado. Robert's wife Annie has been possessed by an evil spirit, and he begs Adam for help. Adam visits Denver, finding that all of the local witches have been killed by the same spirit that is possessing Annie. While investigating, the spirit takes control of a police officer and tries to kill Adam. An officer named Vic is shot, and Adam saves Vic's life through magic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_We_Disappeared"title="How We Disappeared">
Singapore, the year 2000: a twelve-year-old boy hears a mumbled confession from his grandmother, which leads him to her history of sexual slavery during the Japanese occupation of Singapore. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_White_Spaces"title="All the White Spaces">
Jonathan Morgan is a trans man from Portsmouth, England. He was previously called Jo and was the sister of two older brothers who were killed in France in 1918 during World War I. Her brothers planned on enlisting with polar explorer James Randall after the War in a 1920 British expedition to the South Pole. Jo decides to honour them by taking their place on the voyage. The eighteen-year-old changes her name to Jonathan, dresses like a man, and stows away aboard Randall's ship, the "Fortitude", bound for Antarctica.Jonathan hides in a storage closet aboard the "Fortitude", but is discovered after five days. Randall is not happy with a stowaway on board, but agrees to let him stay on as a "spare". It takes several days before Jonathan earns the respect of the crew when he saves the navigator from certain death.Disaster strikes the "Fortitude" in the frozen Weddell Sea off Coats Land on Antarctica's west coast. A fire on board forces the crew to abandon ship. They manage to make it ashore but have to survive on the frozen land with minimal provisions. Randall is determined to locate a German expedition led by Karlmann that landed in the same area two years previously, but had never returned. Randall eventually finds Karlmann's huts, but they have been abandoned and there is no sign of the Germans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unbroken"title="The Unbroken">
The Empire of Balladaire rules over the colony of Qazāl, formerly part of the fallen Shālan Empire. Balladaire has banned all religion as “uncivilized”, but pockets of resistance still practice religion and its associated magic. Balladaire kidnaps Qazāli children to be conscripted into the Balladairan army; Touraine is one such child.As an adult, Touraine and her company of conscripts (called Sands) are ordered to return to El-Wast, the Qazāli capital. They accompany Princess Luca, heir to the throne. Luca's uncle Nicholas currently holds power. She hopes that performing well in managing Qazāl will allow her to claim the throne in her own right.As the princess arrives in the city, Touraine saves her from an assassination attempt. Touraine is falsely accused of murdering a Balladairan guard, but Luca rescues her. Dismissed from the military, Touraine becomes Luca's servant. On Luca's orders, Touraine secretly negotiates for peace with the Qazāli rebels, while developing romantic feelings for Luca. Luca grows interested in Shālan religion and magic, knowing that openly supporting these concepts would not be accepted in Balladaire. Touraine discovers that her birth mother, Jaghotai, is a leader of the rebellion. Other rebellion leaders include Djasha, an apostate priest who has lost her magic, and her wife Aranen, a healer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmaster_of_Demonic_Cultivation"title="Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation">
"Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation" is the story of the rise, death, and rebirth of Wei Wuxian (魏无羡), a man who made a name for himself as a cultivator with unconventional and forbidden methods to control the undead. Renowned as the founder of the ‘"Demonic Path",’ he is eventually killed during an attack by the Four Great Clans.Thirteen years later, Wei Wuxian's spirit is forcefully summoned during a self-sacrificial ritual and he incarnates into the body of a man named Mo Xuanyu (莫玄羽). Wei Wuxian soon becomes embroiled in an investigation of a series of attacks by a feral dismembered corpse. With a new and unrecognizable face, he attempts to hide his return from the familiar faces he reunites with along his journey. But the stoic Lan Wangji (蓝忘机) of the Gusu Lan Clan may suspect more than he lets on, and Wei Wuxian may have to face the truth of his resurrection in a world changed by his thirteen-year absence, along with his true feelings for Lan Wangji."(The novel has a non-linear narrative structure with several intertwining plots. Below is a per storyline summary of events.)"The principal storyline begins thirteen years after the death of Wei Wuxian, the Yiling Patriarch (夷陵老祖; "Yílíng Lǎozǔ"), as he is summoned back to life by Mo Xuanyu through a self-sacrificial ritual. Wei Wuxian is reborn and awakens in the body of a homosexual lunatic, while fully cognizant of his own identity. He finds himself in Mo Village, where he is to fulfill the ritual's condition—to take revenge on Mo Xuanyu's behalf and exterminate the Mo family for abusing him—or else Wei Wuxian's own soul will be forever annihilated. He is freed from this condition when a vicious entity appears and goes on a murder spree that kills every one of Mo Xuanyu's abusers. While exploring the new world he finds himself in, he stumbles into people from his past and ends up accompanying Lan Wangji, his former classmate and a highly esteemed cultivator. The two become embroiled in the mystery of the evil entity, which left in its path a series of clues all seemingly leading back to Wei Wuxian's past. As they travel to unravel the case, Wei Wuxian re-lives previously encountered struggles and trials, and attempts to deal with the hatred of the cultivation world once more, along with the changes in his relationship with Lan Wangji.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Mystics_and_Magicians_in_Tibet"title="With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet">
"With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet" is neither a travel journal nor an autobiography but a collection of studies of religious and mystical practices, occult traditions, and psychic trainings in Tibet and the surrounding areas. David-Néel described the events that brought her in contact with Lamaism (a term used to describe Tibetan Buddhism) and all sorts of magicians that surrounded that religion. Then she groups multiple mystical theories and beliefs that she learned during her stages in the Gompas, in the presence of religious authorities and yogi hermits in the remote caves of the Himalayas. She illustrated the monastic system of Lamaism, the great teachers and the training of their disciples. David-Néel described in detail what in her words are the 'Psychic Sports', namely a set of practices done by Tibetan monks and mystics to achieve supernatural results, such as surviving naked in the snow with the self-heating technique 'Tumo'. A feature of the book is that David-Néel herself claimed to have experienced many of these phenomena and still described them in a precise and a matter-of-fact manner, to leave the reader a personal interpretation of their validity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Past_Is_Red"title="The Past Is Red">
## The Future Is Blue.Nineteen-year old Tetley Abednego describes herself as the “most hated girl in Garbagetown”. She suffers physical and verbal abuse from all inhabitants of Garbagetown.Decades before the start of the story, all dry land disappeared due to climate change. Most remaining humans live atop the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Humans survive off the trash left by the previous civilization, whom they call the Fuckwits.Tetley was born with a nuchal cord; her parents did not believe she would survive and neglected her in favor of her twin brother. She recounts leaving home at the age of ten to receive her name, which is a ritual common to all children of Garbagetown. After finding a tea bag stuck to her, she receives the name Tetley; her twin brother becomes Maruchan. She falls in love with a boy named Goodnight Moon, who lives in Electric City, the richest neighborhood in Garbagetown.When Tetley is seventeen, Garbagetown is visited by Brighton Pier, which survives as a floating city. The Emperor of Brighton Pier claims to have seen dry land, but one of his subjects admits that this is a lie. Goodnight Moon tells Tetley that Electric City has been building an engine in preparation for the news that dry land still exists. It will turn Garbagetown into a massive boat, but this will use up all the fuel which would otherwise last decades. Tetley destroys the engine and thus becomes the most hated girl in Garbagetown.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspects_(novel)"title="Aspects (novel)">
In the city of Lystourel, capital of the land of Lescouray, Varic is a Coron representing his people in Parliament who falls in love with Longlight, a fellow Coron. Legal reforms regarding magic and monarchy are pursued, and Varic and Longlight vacation together at Strange House.The novel has seven chapters, and eight paragraphs of the eighth; it also includes six sonnets by Ford, each of which was intended to be the epigraph of a separate novel in a series, of which "Aspects" would have been the first.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Dumb_for_Democracy?"title="Too Dumb for Democracy?">
The book focuses on why people make political decisions against their own self-interest, documenting the extent to which people are manipulated by bad-faith actors.In the book, Moscrop argues that democracy is under threat but can be saved, emphasising the need for good process to resolve disagreements.The book documents the neuroscience of human decision making, and breaks decisions into two types that Moscrop calls "autopilot" and "long-form", stating that people too frequently rely on the former when the later would serve them better. He writes of the importance of wanting to make better decisions and learning how to do so.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_of_Tranquility_(novel)"title="Sea of Tranquility (novel)">
## Edwin (1912).The novel begins in 1912, following Edwin St. John St. Andrew, a remittance man. The character is loosely based on one of Mandel's great-grandfathers. Edwin is sent to Canada for making statements about colonialism to his British parents which they considered improper. In Canada, Edwin – who is "capable of action but prone to inertia" – eventually lands in British Columbia, where he ponders that the "trouble with Victoria is that it’s too much like England without actually being England. It’s a far-distant simulation of England, a watercolor superimposed unconvincingly on the landscape." Edwin reaches Caiette, a fictional place on Vancouver Island, which also appeared in Mandel's previous novel "The Glass Hotel". In Caiette, Edwin is confronted with "the unfathomable wilderness, dark towering trees crowding around the periphery." When Edwin walks into a forest near Caiette, he experiences a mysterious darkness and a mix of sounds − a violin, a hum as if he is at a train station, and an unfamiliar whooshing noise. When he leaves the forest, he meets a stranger named "Roberts", who claims to be a clergyman, but abruptly leaves when Edwin is unconvinced by this assertion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_Tale_(novel)"title="Fairy Tale (novel)">
Charlie Reade is a seventeen-year-old boy living in Rural America with his widowed father, George. When Charlie was seven years old, his mother was struck and killed by a van, and the resulting grief led his father to alcoholism, from which he eventually recovered.One day, Charlie discovers his elderly neighbor Mr. Howard Bowditch injured in his yard and calls an ambulance. Feeling indebted from his father's recovery, Charlie agrees to watch Mr. Bowditch's German Shepherd dog, named Radar, while Mr. Bowditch stays in the hospital and cares for him when he returns home. Mr. Bowditch shares with Charlie his .45 caliber handgun and a stash of gold pellets that he uses to pay the hospital bills. Several months later, Radar's health has significantly declined, and Mr. Bowditch suffers a heart attack and dies. He leaves Charlie a recorded message, revealing that he was actually 120 years old, and that the locked shed in his backyard contains a portal to another world. In this world exists a magical sundial that was the secret to his longevity. He also reveals the world as the source of his gold and urges Charlie to keep it secret to prevent its exploitation. Determined to prolong Radar's life, Charlie decides to seek out the sundial and revitalize her. Charlie gets attacked by a homeless person with a gun but overpowers and brutalizes him. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridin'_the_Rainbow"title="Ridin' the Rainbow">
Mose Drachman is a young man in the Arizona Territory, trying to make his way. He starts working in his Uncle Sam's cigar store, before beginning to sell Arbuckle coffee, which proved highly successful. Over the years he gets involved in oil wells, gold mines, steam laundries, and real estate development. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_Clean,_My_Love"title="Come Clean, My Love">
When Wyatt Bruce's father suddenly cuts off his alimony payments, Wyatt is forced to look for work. His mother owns a half-interest in a local steam laundry, however the laundry is not doing well. Wyatt goes to work at the laundry in order to turn it into a success. With the help of his wealthy fiancé, Cordelia, he turns the business around, but also creates a love triangle between himself, Cordelia, and the daughter of the owner of the other half of the laundry, Janey.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leave_the_Gun,_Take_the_Cannoli"title="Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli">
"Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli" begins as Mario Puzo's novel is adapted into a screenplay for Paramount pictures. Exploring the casting, filming, and location scouting, this book explores filmmaking. The Italian Mafia, trying to control their depiction in the film, put pressure on the filmmakers. Some members of the Mafia took offense at the way they were portrayed in the novel and wanted to change their character in the movie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Market_Concierge"title="The Black Market Concierge">
The Black Market Concierge takes readers inside the counter intelligence world, showing the daily life of zealous men set on greed, extortion and power.Since his sanction-breaking activities made headlines in 2012, the South African government has attempted to politically prosecute Oberholzer on multiple fronts, all while international smuggling cartels were on the hunt for him. The book provides a tantalizing look at his dangerous life as an undercover confidential informant, as Oberholzer traveled the world for missions targeting its most dangerous cartels, smugglers and corrupts politicians and gives insight into the world's most powerful intelligence agencies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Zahra"title="The Story of Zahra">
The novel is split into two sections; the first takes place before the start of the Lebanese Civil War, and the second part whilst it is ongoing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schooling_and_the_Struggle_for_Public_Life"title="Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life">
"Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life" contains Henry Giroux's critical analysis of various political conceptions of pedagogy. Giroux criticizes positions across the political spectrum including the conservative and New Right perspectives on education along with various liberal and leftist views. He adopts the concept of citizenship education from conservative pedagogy, rejecting what he describes as the tendency of leftist theorists to "downplay citizenship as an emancipatory category", but also rejects uncritical patriotism and its association with citizenship. Instead, he defines citizenship as the ongoing pursuit of empowerment. In connection with this definition, he states that the goal of education is "elimination of those ideological and material conditions that promote various forms of subjugation, segregation, brutality, and marginalization."While distinguishing his argument from cultural relativism, which he describes as not sufficiently critical, Giroux argues that schools should be sites of struggle into which identity, social change, and empowerment are incorporated. He criticizes the existing structure of education in the United States as subservient to the broader structure of power, stating that "notions of struggle, debate, community, and democracy have become subversive categories" as a result of their subservience to the "status quo" structure of society. He additionally argues that education should be liberatory and schools should maintain active solidarity with oppressed groups.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_Very_Important_and_Other_Stories"title="Nothing Very Important and Other Stories">
The stories are centered around LDS missionaries in the Southern California mission in the late 1970s, with Mihaly Agyar being a central character.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Name_Is_George_Floyd"title="His Name Is George Floyd">
The book uses the life of George Floyd and his murder by police officer Derek Chauvin as a lens through which to examine racism in the United States. It draws from interviews with Floyd's friends and family and members of his local community. Floyd's ancestors are discussed—they worked as tenant farmers during the Reconstruction era. Aspects of Floyd's life such as his parenting, drug addiction and convictions are covered. Race-related commentary about education housing segregation, incarceration, police brutality and terrorism in the United States is connected to the life of Floyd.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaudavaho"title="Gaudavaho">
## Prelude.Vakpati invokes several gods in the first 61 verses. He starts with Brahma, and then refers to Vishnu and his incarnations including Narasimha, Varaha, Vamana, Kurma, Mohini, and Krishna. Next, the poet invokes Shiva and his aspects such as Ardhanarishvara. He then refers to Shiva's son Kartikeya, and Shiva's consort Parvati, naming her various aspects including Mahishasura Mardini, Kali, and Chamunda. He further invokes Saraswati, Surya, Shesha, Ganapati, Lakshmi, and Kama, and Ganga.In the next 36 verses, Vakpati talks about poets, their impact, their challenges, the language used by them (Sanskri or Prakrit), their aspirations, and their disappointments.Vakpati then glorifies his patron Yashovarman, calling him the Lord of the Earth, deifying him as an incarnation of Vishnu. He states that the king of gods - Indra - invites Yashovarman to share his throne. The poet then describes a mythological episode of how Indra cut the wings of the flying mountains. Next, Vakpati talks about Yashovarman's courtesans playing water-sports in the bathing tanks of defeated enemies. He then describes pralaya, the periodic dissolution of the world, stating that its sole survivor - Vishnu - had incarnated as Yashovarman. The next 10 verses describe the pitiful condition of the widows of the enemy kings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parent_Agency"title="The Parent Agency">
James Bond and FC Barcelona fan Barry Bennett gets transported to 'United Kid-dom' in an alternate universe where kids choose their parents, after Barry wished he had better parents. He encounters his friends Jake, Lucas and Taj (with different names) working at 'The Parent Agency' in 'Youngdon', where he discovers that everyone has to find parents before their tenth birthday. With his in 5 days time, Barry is assigned to 5 different sets of parents (one on each day), before deciding he prefers his original parents, being transported back to them on his tenth birthday.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rich_Man's_House"title="The Rich Man's House">
McGahan constructs a world very similar to our own, varying only in the critical elements necessary for the setting of the novel. The world's tallest mountain is not Mount Everest, but an island peak known as 'The Wheel', of some twenty-five vertical kilometres, located hundreds of kilometres southwest of Tasmania. One man has reached the summit, the 'rich man' of the title, Walter Richman. Others, including George Mallory and Edmund Hillary have died in their attempts. In McGahan's world, Everest itself had been conquered by Tenzing Norgay and Tom Bourdillon. Following his achievement in 1975, Richman inherits the bulk of an immense fortune, and sometime around 2010, constructs his own house on, and within, an adjacent high peak, Observatory Mount, with views across to the Wheel. Rita Gausse is the daughter of the house's architect, who himself has died, apparently of natural causes, at the house. She is invited by Richman to see her father's work. As the days of her visit proceed, however, it becomes clear to Rita that there are many unsettling mysteries concerning Richman, his ascent of the Wheel, and indeed the house itself.In her younger years, when she was estranged from her architect father and often under the influence of artificial stimulants, Rita had penned a book, "The Spawn of Disparity", in which she postulated the existence of what is behind the indefinable sense that humans often feel in the presence of natural wonders. Indeed, she used the term 'presence' to label this quality which accompanies natural (but inorganic) phenomena, from mountains to surf breaks. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Either/Or_(Batuman_novel)"title="Either/Or (Batuman novel)">
Selin Karadağ is a sophomore studying linguistics at Harvard University in 1996. Through the novel, Selin retrospects on her previous summer relationships, her work in Hungary, and her new travels abroad.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Dan_the_Bandage_Man"title="Doctor Dan the Bandage Man">
The book follows a child named Dan who, while playing, gets a scratch on his finger, to which his mother applies a Band-Aid. Dan then provides Band-Aids to his injured sister, her doll, their dog, and his father, leading the latter to nickname him "Doctor Dan".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furia_(novel)"title="Furia (novel)">
The book begins with Camila Hassan leaving her home to secretly play in a soccer match (referred to as "fútbol"). Camila's secret becomes increasingly difficult to keep as her fame grows, her lover arrives back in town, and she struggles with injuries, sexism and family dynamics.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeroes_(novel)"title="Zeroes (novel)">
The book follows six teenagers, all born in the year 2000, who have superpowers with huge drawbacks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Young_Dudes_(fan_fiction)"title="All the Young Dudes (fan fiction)">
The story is told from the perspective of "Harry Potter" character, Remus Lupin. Nearing his 5th birthday, Lupin was bitten by a werewolf, Fenrir Greyback, and became one himself. Soon after, his father committed suicide due to the knowledge of pain and agony his son will endure. His mother placed Lupin in St. Edmund's, a children's home for boys. At St. Edmund's, Lupin is looked after by Matron, who locks him up during the full moon to keep him from hurting any of the other boys, while simultaneously preserving his secret.As Lupin comes of age, Albus Dumbledore visits the home to give Lupin his acceptance letter to Hogwarts and explain his special situation. Since he is a werewolf, he will go into a secret tunnel under the Whomping Willow on full moons which leads to the Shrieking Shack, where he can undergo his transformation in privacy and safety. While attending school, he befriends James Potter, Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew; the four became known as the Marauders.In the summer of 1975, Lupin realises that he is gay after having intimate relations with Grant Chapman, his new roommate at St. Edmunds. Upon returning to Hogwarts, he finds he has a crush on his friend and classmate, Sirius Black. On Lupin's birthday, he kisses Black. In sixth year, the two become an unofficial couple and Lupin helps Black discover his own sexuality. Lupin comes out to the rest of his friends on a camping trip, and later Black tells them that he and Lupin are a couple.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy-Go-Lucky_(book)"title="Happy-Go-Lucky (book)">
In "Happy-Go-Lucky", Sedaris continues where he left off in "Calypso", writing about his transition into late midlife during the final years of the Trump administration and into the COVID-19 pandemic. He writes about his life and the lives of his family—including his siblings, his longtime partner Hugh, and the decline of his 98-year-old father, with whom he had a fractured relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/22_Murders"title="22 Murders">
The book documents the police response to Gabriel Wortman killing 22 people on the 18th and 19th April 2020, in Portapique. Palango presents the actions of authorities in a critical light, highlighting his perceptions of their failures. He is critical of both the immediate response to the killings and the subsequent investigation, which he describes as a "cover up". Criticism is levied at the RCMP for using Twitter rather than the phone-based Alert Ready system to warn nearby communities. Palango is also critical of the RCMP for not setting up roadblocks, and for their choice to seek assistance from a neighbouring provincial police force some hours away rather than the most proximate municipal police forces.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_Monsters"title="Ordinary Monsters">
The plot is set in the Victorian era and is about children with special abilities. The employees of a special academy called the Cairndale Institute are determined to find them, and a monster is hunting the children as well. In this alternate timeline, some people are known as Talents, those who have specific abilities that enable them to do seemingly supernatural feats like control dust, become invisible, heal themselves, or be able to harden their skin, among others.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nona_the_Ninth"title="Nona the Ninth">
Nona, an unknown being housed in the body of Harrowhark, awakens on an unknown planet. Harrow, along with the cavalier Pyrrha in the Lyctor Gideon's body, was rescued by Camilla and Palamedes (who are now sharing a body) from the River at the end of "Harrow the Ninth". Despite carrying out a number of tests, Camilla and Palamedes are unable to determine Nona's true identity, though they believe she is either Gideon or Harrow. Nona displays several magical abilities: she heals faster than a Lyctor, and she understands any language (including body language). Nona works as a teacher's assistant at a school where she befriends local kids. She, Camilla, Palamedes, Pyrrha, and Coronabeth (now called "Crown") are together working as "Troia cell," an operation run by the Blood of Eden (BoE) rebel group. Troia reports to We Suffer, who controls a BoE faction seeking to negotiate with the Nine Houses, with the secret objective of gathering the necessary materials to open the Locked Tomb. We Suffer hopes that Nona will prove to be a Lyctor who can aid them in the execution of this objective. We Suffer's faction is in conflict with the militant, anti-negotiation "Merv Wing," commanded by Unjust Hope, which publicly burns to death all "zombies" (anyone suspected of being necromantic).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Bad_Are_Bananas?"title="How Bad Are Bananas?">
The book gives an approximate carbon footprint of just under 100 activities starting small, with carbon used in sending a text message, ending with the massive example of a World Cup. Commentary in the book helps the reader separate important decisions from trivial ones, for example highlighting that fresh food transported by air is more environmentally harmful than comparable produce transported by ship or truck.The book compares methods of transport, including walking and cycling and details the differences in carbon footprint for human-powered transport based on the diet of the walkers and cyclists.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zachary_Ying_and_the_Dragon_Emperor"title="Zachary Ying and the Dragon Emperor">
Zachary Ying is a 12-year-old boy whose mother fled China after the death of his father to escape a dangerous political situation. His now single mother was absolutely devoted to Zach, and did everything she could to provide for him, though this often meant working multiple jobs to keep their small family afloat. As a result of her busy schedule, and a desire to help Zach assimilate into western culture, Zach was raised without much knowledge of China's history, culture, or language. Despite that absence, he is often singled out for being the one Asian kid in school, and so does his best to distance himself from anything that might make him seem more "other" than he already feels. So when a strange boy of Asian descent approaches Zach in school and wants to tell Zach all about Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, Zach is standoffish and suspicious. Later during an unexpectedly hostile confrontation between the new boy, Simon, and Zach's so-called friends, Zach abruptly becomes aware that he is being possessed by the spirit of Qin Shi Huang, the legendary first emperor of China. Qin Shi Huang explains that this is possible because Zach is Qin Shi Huang's direct descendant, and that he needs Zach's help to help prevent a catastrophe that could destroy China and possibly the world. Without meaning to, Zach forcibly exorcises the spirit of Qin Shi Huang, and flees. Without a mortal host, Qin Shi Huang's spirit is almost forced to return to the spirit world, but realizes in time that Zach's AR Headset, his "XY Technologies Portal-lens", is sophisticated enough to act as a host, allowing Qin Shi Huang's spirit to remain on the mortal plane.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Ice_Garden"title="The Lord of the Ice Garden">
The protagonist, Vuko Drakkainen, a special-forces soldier, equipped with the latest technology from Earth, making him almost a superhuman (effectively, a supersoldier), is dispatched to a planet called Midgaard, to look for human scientists from a covert research facility with whom all contact was lost two years earlier. The task, however, is extremely difficult, because the planet is inhabited by anthropoid civilization, moreover magic is present there. To become more like the local people, Vuko undergoes eye surgery and adopts the local name Ulf Nitj’sefni. A parasitic fungus – Cyfral was implanted in his brain.In parallel, the fate of Filar, the young Prince of the Tiger Throne, is presented. At the same time, the ancient faith in the Underground Mother is returning in the empire, and temples are being built in the cities – Red Towers. Social unrest caused by the drought is increasing. The emperor decides to destroy the Red Towers. As a result of the coup d'état, the imperial family dies, and the young son of the emperor as the last descendant of the family must escape. He is accompanied by Brus, a trusted man familiar with martial arts and survival. Both of them travel sidelong and observe the fall of the empire and the takeover of power by the fanatical followers of the Underground Mother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadriana_in_All_My_Dreams"title="Hadriana in All My Dreams">
## Part 1.Jacmel, Haïti, January 1938. The story begins with the death of Germaine Muzac Villaret-Joyeuse, the godmother of the narrator Patrick Altamonte. Germaine requests a butterfly mask to be put on her face at her death. According to local legend, this butterfly mask is actually a man, Balthazar Granchiré, cursed by a witch doctor. Granchiré promised Germaine that they would go to heaven together. Granchiré instead turns his interests to Hadriana Siloé, a young French woman to be married soon to a young Haitian man.On her wedding day, Hadriana drinks a mysterious drink. At the moment of her vows "I do", she drops dead. Her grief-stricken parents desire to cancel the carnival, but a friend of Hadriana's declares that Hadriana had told her that she wanted her funeral to be a carnival. After many strange and supernatural happenings at the carnival, Hadriana is buried.A few days afterward, it is discovered that Hadriana's grave is empty, leading everyone to the realization that Hadriana did not die, but was zombified. There are legends floating around that Hadriana went around to the homes of Jacmel, knocking on people's doors for help, but out of fear noone would help her. Patrick continues to think of Hadriana as the years go by.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tea_Dragon_Society"title="The Tea Dragon Society">
The webcomic begins with Greta's mother showing her how to forge a sword in their blacksmith's shop, a skill slowly being abandoned, as those kinds of weapons are no longer needed. While returning from some errands, Greta finds a small creature cornered by hungry animals. She feeds them and rescues the creature, which her father explains is called a tea dragon, and says he knows its owner, Hesekiel. Greta then goes to the tea shop where Hesekiel thanks her for returning the dragon and explains what they are.A month later, Greta accepts Hesekiel's invitation to help tend to tea dragons and begins visiting the shop, where she becomes acquainted with Minette, a girl with memory loss issues who has been living there for a couple of months, and Erik, Hesekiel's significant other. Greta and Minette become fast friends, with the latter talking about her past as a prophetess. After some time helping around the shop, Hesekiel and Erik talk about the origin of the Tea Dragon Society, with the two as their last remaining members. They also explain that drinking the tea made from the leaves of these creatures allows one to see their memories, and Greta learns about the couple's past as adventurers before an injury forces Erik to retire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_and_John_Wayne"title="Jesus and John Wayne">
The book begins by addressing a speech that Trump gave at Dordt University in Sioux Center, Iowa, on January 23, 2016. In the speech, Trump said that he could "stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone" without losing his constituents' loyalties. Du Mez reflects on how she had attended Dordt and participated in worship teams on the same stage that Trump gave the speech.The book examines white evangelical affinity for Donald Trump. Du Mez explains that white evangelical support for Donald Trump during the 2016 United States presidential election was a continuing trend rather than an exception. The book focuses on the militant masculinity that white evangelicals idealize and how it has manifested in a pattern of abuse among evangelical leaders. Du Mez criticizes mainstream evangelicals such as John Eldredge, John Piper, and James Dobson for advancing the evangelical ideal of militant masculinity.The book includes a chapter called "Evangelical Mulligans" which discusses the sexual scandals in evangelical circles. It also discusses figures such as Billy Graham and Mark Driscoll.The book suggests that white evangelical views on masculinity have always been in tension with the figure of a loving Jesus and that of a militant John Wayne.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Elephant_(novel)"title="The Blue Elephant (novel)">
After 5 years of optional isolation, Dr. Yehia Rashed resumes his practice in Abbasia Mental Health Hospital where he finds a surprise awaiting him..In "8 west"the wing which decides the fate of those who committed crimes, he meets an old friend with a long past. Now this man's fate is between Yehia's hands.More surprises flow over him and his life flips upside down, for what started as a try to understand the truth behind his friend's past, is now a thrilling adventure to discover himself and what is left of him.Ahmed Mourad takes us in his third novel to behind the scenes of a strange world which he spent two years studying its details. It's a strange trip where we find the deepest and strangest mysteries of the human soul.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Astronauts_(novel)"title="Dead Astronauts (novel)">
The first half of the novel follow three part human shapeshifters - Grayson, Moss, and Chen - as they travel through worlds to fight "The Company". Grayson, the leader, is a former astronaut that can see iterations of the future and information about others through a blinded eye. After exploring space and finding no habitable planets and no signs of life, she returns to "The City" and finds it transformed by the company. She flees the city and travels west where she encounters and falls in love with Moss. Moss is a sentient moss that takes the form of a person around her companions, but can shapeshift with ease and split into multiple selves. Together Moss and Grayson decide to return to The City and attempt to save it from "The Company". On the way they run into Chen, a creation of The Company who became disillusioned and horrified at the work he was doing and fled. Chen sees the world in equations and formulas, but is always on the verge of collapsing into a mass of salamanders. The three then set out across multiple timelines and versions of the world to try and stop the company.The second half of the novel follows a homeless woman, Sarah, as she seeks to understand the journal of Charlie X, a scientist of "The Company".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boychick_(novel)"title="Boychick (novel)">
Leo Tsalis is a 28 year-old Jewish American graduate student studying Old English at New York University. In the showers of Hotel St. George's pool in New York City, he meets a naked 16 year-old boy named Leroy—though he looks "about fourteen or fifteen"—and the two leave together. They take the subway to Leo's friend's house in order to have a brief sexual encounter; instead, his friend's roommate asks them to leave. After walking together for a short while, Leo leaves his phone number with Leroy, who he calls Boychick, but does not gather any of his contact information. Boychick arrives at Leo's house the next day, and they attempt to have sex; Leo cannot maintain an erection, so he instead gives a handjob to the boy. Boychick is almost late for work, so Leo gives him money for the subway with a request to be called later. Although he never receives a call, Leo becomes infatuated with Boychick, and tells his friends of their encounter, and of his apprehension because Boychick is under the age of consent in New York. Leo decides he is in love and goes out to search for him, scouring every place that Boychick mentioned. As he looks, he becomes more infatuated with the boy and imagines the two of them together and holding conversation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cottingley_Cuckoo"title="The Cottingley Cuckoo">
In the 2020s, Rose starts working as a caregiver at the Sunnyside Care Home. She is tasked with looking after an elderly lady, Charlotte Favell, but soon discovers that Mrs. Favell is unlike any of the other residents at the home. She is formidable and mysterious, and Rose is intimidated by her. One day, Mrs. Favell shows Rose an old letter written in 1921 by Lawrence Fenton to Arthur Conan Doyle. At the time, Conan Doyle had recently published photographs that cousins Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright had allegedly taken of fairies in Cottingley. In the letter Fenton says that he, his daughter-in-law, Charlotte, and his seven-year-old granddaughter, Harriet have also seen and photographed fairies. He further states that they found a dead fairy and took it home as proof of their existence. Even though, many years later, Griffiths and Wright's photographs were revealed to be fakes, Rose is captivated by the letter and its implications.Over a period of weeks, Mrs. Favell teases Rose with more letters. Having not received a response from Conan Doyle, Fenton wrote a series of letters to Edward Gardner, an associate of Conan Doyle. In these letters, Fenton reveals the true nature of fairies, that they are not pretty little winged people, but are the dangerous and vindictive creatures from folklore. He tells Gardner that he believes Charlotte is being held captive by fairies, and that the woman in his house is not his daughter-in-law, but a changeling. In another letter, Fenton tells Gardner that Harriet has gone to the fairies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_from_the_Empire"title="News from the Empire">
The novel is written in two sequences, the first is a monologue by Empress Carlota while she was locked up in the Bouchout Castle in Belgium, sixty years after the death of Maximilian, shot at Cerro de las Campanas, Querétaro, on June 19, 1867, as she fell into madness after his death. In this monologue, Carlota explains the story of her love for Maximilian, as well as the times of the Second Mexican Empire and European royalty.At the same time, del Paso resorts to various genres and techniques to give voice to the different parties involved in the conflict, among them epistles between members of the royalty, historical chronicles, which have as settings the Miramare Castle, Mexico, France, Germany, Vienna, among other places, and characters such as Charles de Lorencez, François Achille Bazaine, Élie-Frédéric Forey, Miguel Miramón, Tomás Mejía, Benito Juárez, Porfirio Díaz, Mariano Escobedo, Gaspar Sánchez Ochoa, Franz Joseph I of Austria, Napoleon III, among other historical participants in the conflict.Both sequences take turns, changing the name of the chapter of the narrative sequence while all of Carlota's monologues are always titled "Bouchout Castle 1927".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotta_on_Troublemaker_Street"title="Lotta on Troublemaker Street">
Lotta is a little girl who is three years old at the beginning of the book series. She lives with her siblings Jonas and Mia Maria and her parents on Troublemaker Street. Lotta's next-door neighbor is an elderly woman who Lotta simply calls Aunt Berg. Lotta often visits her. One day, when Lotta has an argument with her mother because she does not want to wear her scratchy sweater, she even moves into Aunt Berg's attic. But she feels lonely in the attic, so she decides to come back home with her father, when he visits her. Lotta often plays with her siblings Mia Maria and Jonas, but does not always want to follow their rules, so the games often end abruptly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Now_That_Night_Is_Near"title="Now That Night Is Near">
On a Swedish summer evening, the reader follows a cat on a magical walk along some beautiful landscapes. The cat sees lambs and other small animals who would rather play than sleep. Only when twilight turns to night all animals seem to fall asleep. The cat also returns home and goes to sleep.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Pictures_in_Education"title="Motion Pictures in Education">
The book opens with an introduction by Philander Claxton, former U.S. Commissioner of Education, on using films to teach. It shows how teachers can instruct students by using a film projector, combined with typical methods, while detailing how to choose the needed films and equipment. The book contains the history of moving pictures up to the early 1920s, starting with horse pictures by Eadweard Muybridge that were moved quickly to imitate movement. It mentions how films were initially meant for education, but that they quickly became produced for profit. 125 film distributors are listed, including the government and state universities, to obtain films for classroom use. It is noted that film distribution to institutions with a low profit margin typically did not happen, including schools. The authors thought some films should only be created for such institutions, but they did not want Hollywood or the government to produce such films. 17 objections to films being used for teaching are listed which includes dulling imagination, causing eye strain, being a fire hazard (due to the use of nitrocellulose in non-amateur film gauges before 1951), and replacing traditional instruction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mango_Bride"title="The Mango Bride">
The novel follows two Filipino women who move to the United States. Socialite Amparo Guerrero is banished from Manila after disgracing her wealthy family. Meanwhile, impoverished Beverly Obejas travels as a mail-order bride in hopes of a better life. They both settle in Oakland, California, where their lives soon intersect.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Tender_Land"title="This Tender Land">
In 1932, 12-year-old Odysseus "Odie" O'Bannion and his older brother Albert are the only two white children raised in the brutality of Lincoln Indian Training School in central Minnesota. The O'Bannions' best friend is Mose, a mute Sioux boy with a talent for baseball. After a tornado kills the only kind teacher, Cora, and Cora's husband, their orphaned daughter, Emmy, is adopted by Clyde and Thelma Brickman, the cruel principals of the Lincoln School. When Odie accidentally kills one of the school's brutal teachers, the three escape downriver in a canoe with Emmy, with the goal of arriving in St. Louis to stay with Albert and Odie's Aunt Julia.The group is soon captured by Jack, a WWI veteran with a missing eye and scarred face which leads Odie to call him The Pig-scarer. Over several days, the children and Jack grow closer, and they help him build a still. But when Emmy accidentally drops Jack's liquor bottle and he threatens her, Odie shoots him in the chest with Clyde's gun.Fleeing further down-river, the boys learn from news articles they are being accused of kidnapping Emmy and may be executed. Drawn by beautiful music and food, the children join a revival meeting of the Gideon Crusade, a snake-handling church led by Sister Eve, who performs faith healings. After Odie catches camp manager Sid paying off the recipients of "miraculous" healings, he confronts Sister Eve about her frauds. This startles Emmy, who accidentally releases rattlesnake Lucifer, who poisons Albert. As they wait for antivenom to arrive, Sister Eve explains that she had cured the actors once and let Sid convince her to hire them to "prime the pump" in new towns. The antivenom arrives just in time, but the story's publicity forces the children to flee again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Ashes_(memoir)"title="From the Ashes (memoir)">
The book documents Thistle's difficult upbringing in Saskatchewan, his father's addiction issues, and being taken into state custody before being cared for by his grandparents in Brampton, Ontario. "From the Ashes" details Thistle's struggle with his own Indigenous identity, his relationship with his brothers, his use of drugs, being kicked out of his grandparents home and his time living on the streets in Vancouver, Brampton, Ottawa and TorontoThistle's story is told over short chapters, and makes use of prose and poetry. As a young adult Thistle struggles with suicidal ideation, and he is jailed, before finding redemption through university education.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Term_at_Malory_Towers"title="Last Term at Malory Towers">
In her final year, Darrell returns to Malory Towers for her final term. She is now Head Girl at the school.After taking the new girls to Miss Grayling's study, the two agree that the only real failure in Darrell's year is Gwendoline. Darrell undertakes to do what she can to set her on a more positive path. The girls discuss their futures: Mary-Lou wants to train as a children's nurse, Clarissa and Bill plan to open a riding school close to Malory Towers, Belinda will train to be an artist and Irene will study music. Darrell, Sally, Alicia and Betty hope to go to university. Gwen boasts that she will be going to a finishing school in Switzerland. To the other girls' disgust, she boasts about the cruel and unkind exchanges she had with her father to emotionally blackmail him into agreeing to her plans. New girl include Amanda Chartelow and Suzanne, Mam'zelle Rougier's niece.Amanda is tall and physically strong, and plans to compete in the Olympic Games. She is dismissive of the games culture at Malory Towers, saying that there is a second former at the school with outstanding potential whom nobody has noticed. When Moira, now Games Captain, challenges her, she names June. Amanda undertakes to coach June in tennis and swimming, predicting that she will be in the school second teams by the end of the term. June realises that Amanda's motive is to be proved right, rather than any personal interest in her, but accepts Amanda's offer. However Amanda's tough training regime soon leads to friction between them, and June gives up.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterland"title="Afterland">
In 2020, a human culgoa virus, a highly infectious strain of flu, spreads rapidly across the globe. The virus mutates into an aggressive prostate cancer and kills 99% of the world's male population. The pandemic is dubbed "Manfall", and most countries outlaw pregnancies and close their borders to safeguard future generations until a cure for the virus can be found."Afterland" begins in 2023 in the United States. Cole and her twelve-year-old son, Miles are trying to reach Florida and return to their home in South Africa. Miles is one of the few surviving males, and was quarantined with his mother at a Department for the Protection of Men facility in California. There he was probed and tested by researchers looking for a cure. Billie, Cole's sister, broke them out of the compound, but Billie had ulterior motive. She wants to keep her nephew to harvest his sperm and sell it on the black market. Now Cole and Miles are not only on the run from the US authorities, but also from Billie.Cole disguises Miles as a girl and names him Mila. After days on the road, they encounter a bus full of "nuns" who have formed a cult they call the Sisters of the Church of All Sorrows. They believe that if women repent their sins, men will return. Cole and Mila join the travelling nuns in the hope of reaching the border safely.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timekeeper_trilogy"title="Timekeeper trilogy">
## Timekeeper.Aetas, an ancient god, once granted humans the power to control time. As retribution for this, he was supposedly killed by Chronos. Since the death of Aetas, humans have used clock towers to regulate the flow of time. Clock mechanics are valuable members of society, because a broken clock tower can cause time to flow abnormally or even stop.In England in 1875, 17-year-old Danny Hart works as a mechanic. Danny suffers from panic attacks after being injured by a bomb planted in a clock tower. Additionally, his father Christopher has been trapped in time since a clock tower broke down in Maldon three years ago. Matthias, Danny’s mentor, was previously fired from the Maldon assignment and banished from the town after falling in love with Maldon's clock spirit.Danny is summoned to repair the Colton Clock Tower in Enfield, where he meets clock’s spirit, also named Colton. Because Colton is unable to travel far from his tower, he repeatedly sabotages his own mechanisms in order to get Danny to come and repair them. They fall in love, although relationships between spirits and humans are forbidden.A series of bombing attacks target clock towers around England. The lead mechanic pulls Danny from the Enfield post, citing concerns about Danny’s mental health. Several mechanics are injured or killed by bombs. Danny secretly trades assignments with Daphne, another mechanic, so he can continue visiting Colton in Enfield. Daphne is injured in an explosion, casting suspicion Danny. As a result, they are both fired.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_Princess"title="Spy Princess">
After a prologue describing Khan's final journey to Dachau, early chapters cover her ancestry and early life in Moscow, London and Paris. The book dispels some previously held accounts of Khan, including dismissing that she was recruited during a tiger-hunt in India, that her father was associated with Rasputin and recruited by him, and that she was born in the Kremlin, and states that many former romanticised accounts were nothing less than "pure fantasy".In 1940, just before Paris was occupied, she escaped with her family to the UK and volunteered for the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). A fluent French speaker and a trained radio operator, she was soon recruited by the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret British organisation. In June 1943, code-named Nora Baker, she became the first woman radio operator to be infiltrated into occupied France. Her brief was to assist the Prosper circuit and the French Resistance. Within a week, she was the only radio operator left in Paris, as members of her network fell to the Gestapo, mostly due to betrayal by double agents. Determined to maintain communications between the Resistance and the SOE, she declined the opportunity to return to London, and continued to transmit messages, avoiding being captured while repeatedly changing her looks and locations. Her work allowed safe passage of several SOE members, in addition to supplies of money and ammunition to the French Resistance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Luck_Bank_Robbers"title="Bad Luck Bank Robbers">
The book documents the Havelock Bank Robbery of the Toronto Dominion Bank in 1961 and the police chase of the robbers. The book describes the two years of planning that went into the robbery, learning the patterns of the staff and the timing of the managers vacation. It details the limited capacity of the local police force. It also talks about the errors made by the robbers, how the local butcher spotted their vehicle and the series of unlucky events that slowed their escape, including a bulldozer blocking road an the breakdown of another vehicle on a single lane road. The book describes how the delays allowed the police to catch up with the robbers, the subsequent gun fight and then the robbers escape into the Ontario wilderness. It details the police-led search, the capture and then the trail of four of the robbers, and the death in custody of the fifth. The book ends by discussing the mystery of the missing $230,000.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angéline_de_Montbrun"title="Angéline de Montbrun">
The plot concerns a woman named Angéline, who is raised by her father in an isolated village named Valriant. In the first part of the novel, Maurice negotiates a marriage contract with Charles, Angéline's father. In the second part of the novel, Charles dies in an accidental shooting accident and a fall disfigures Angéline's face. The engagement ends when Maurice's affection for Angéline decreases and Angéline renounces the world and enters a period of self-isolation. The third part of the novel concerns diary entries and letters in which Angéline recalls moments of her life with her father and Maurice. She expresses regret and agony over her decisions, processing her thoughts through writing. This contrasts with her friend, Mina, who is a worldly woman and becomes an Ursuline nun. Angéline visits her father's grave and burns her father's letters. She then writes a letter to Maurice, explaining that she will not be sad for the rest of her life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worldwide_Machine"title="The Worldwide Machine">
After World War II, living in San Savino, a hamlet of Frontone in the province of Pesaro and Urbino, is Anteo Crocioni, a curious but unschooled young man who asks many questions about the origin of the world and living things, arriving at a conception that is both mechanistic and idealistic of what exists, which presupposes its creation by what he calls authorial automata. According to Anteo, if his theories were known in the world, steps would be taken toward friendship among peoples and universal peace. Instead, they leave his father, a small farmer who sees in his son a layabout and a dangerous protester (because of his inclinations toward communism) of the economic and social order represented by landowners, Christian Democracy and the Catholic Church, perplexed. However, it is with a young seminarian named Liborio that Anteo establishes a friendly relationship, finding in the boy a mind willing to listen and understand his worldview, though not to share it. Later Anteo meets Massimina, a girl from a neighboring village, and marries her.To improve his economic condition he buys, in the wake of his fascination with mechanical means, several agricultural machines with which he starts a business as a contractor, despite the contrary opinion of his father and wife, who are reluctant to any idea of innovation. His work keeps him away from home for long periods, and when he returns he no longer finds Massimina there. He discovers that his wife, no longer determined to put up with his sudden outbursts, has moved to Rome to look for work as a housekeeper, counting on the support of the sizeable Marche community that has emigrated there. Anteo sells the cars and also travels to the capital, to bring his wife home while seizing the opportunity to show professors and students at the Sapienza University of Rome his theories and the treatise he is writing, which, however, do not meet with the slightest success with them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Falls_On_Us"title="Love Falls On Us">
In December 2011 on Human Rights Day, Hillary Clinton said in a United Nations speech in Geneva that "gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights." According to the book by journalist Robbie Corey-Boulet, the speech might have resulted in consequences within Africa for those identifying as LGBTQ. According to the author, the United States has made it difficult for LGBTQ activists and their largely unnoticed life. The book focuses on Cameroon, Ivory Coast, and Liberia to show glimpses of those countries both political and cultural in the context of LGBTQ living. Corey-Boulet argued that well-meaning Westerner activists have not allowed Africans themselves "to discuss the issue on their own terms, but instead to respond to what Westerners were doing and saying." It includes interviews and information from Africa and abroad to show how Africans who are LGBTQ live socially and politically. Subjects include a 2005 police raid in Yaoundé, a man's experience in Ivory Coast, LQBTQ organizations in Ivory Coast, the life of a Cameroon activist, and an H.I.V.-positive LQBTQ man.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabin_Porn_(book)"title="Cabin Porn (book)">
The book includes over 200 images of cabins, accompanied by guides on how to build varies types of simple shelters including cabins and yurts. It includes a wide range of designs, traditional and modern, wood and concrete.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survive_the_Night_(novel)"title="Survive the Night (novel)">
The book follows Charlie, a young woman who drops out of film college due to the trauma of witnessing the murder of her best friend Maddy by a serial killer. Dubbed "The Campus Killer", the murderer had been picking off women on their campus. At the time Charlie had assumed that the murder was one of her visual hallucinations, something she is prone to experiencing, especially in emotional situations. These hallucinations typically appear as film scenes. As she did not stop the murder and cannot provide many helpful details, Charlie is extremely guilt stricken. She arranges for a ride home via a ride share, as she doesn't drive due to her parents dying in a car crash, and through this meets Josh. Their ride is initially pleasant and the two hit it off, however Charlie becomes convinced that he is the murderer when he mentions that the murderer took one of Maddy's teeth, something that the police did not reveal to the general public. Josh also admits that he came to campus specifically to find Charlie. The two stop at a diner, where Charlie meets a waitress named Marge. She is briefly offered a chance to escape with Marge's help and even manages to call her boyfriend Robbie, but Charlie decides to keep traveling with Josh in order to get revenge and stop him from killing anyone else. This surprises Josh, who assumed that she would have chosen to escape. The two talk some more and Charlie admits that she tried killing herself. She then stabs Josh and flees back to the diner, where she is captured by Marge. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Girls"title="Final Girls">
Ten years ago Quincy was a carefree college student who decided to join her friends in a camping vacation at Pinewood Cottage. The trip ended with a gruesome massacre, of which Quincy was the sole survivor. She was saved by a police officer responding to the scene, Coop, and an escaped mental patient who arrived at their camp, Joe, is blamed for the murders. The press dubs Quincy a "final girl", comparing her to two other "final girls: Lisa, who survived a sorority house massacre and Sam, who was targeted by a serial killer known as the "Sack Man" while working at a hotel. The media tried desperately to get the three women together for a television special, only for Quincy to refuse. She is contacted by Lisa and the two begin communicating with each other, albeit very infrequently, but does not have a similar relationship with Sam. Years later Quincy is barely holding herself together, as she finds it hard to trust anyone other than Coop and her boyfriend Jeff. She is able to make a living of sorts via a cooking vlog, but is unable to remember anything from the night of the massacre. Her fragile living situation is thrown into an upheaval when she learns that Lisa has killed herself and Sam arrives at her home. Sam is determined to make Quincy remember what happened, as well as come out of her shell, which puts Quincy on edge. She begins to question what actually happened that night, especially after Lisa's death is discovered to be murder. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Trips"title="Bad Trips">
The book documents Pastuk's life, that started with his birth in Ukraine, and emigration with his mother to Canada. He lived in Barrie, before moving to Toronto at the age of 19 for a marketing job, that he then quits to work for Noisey Canada, part of Vice Media. At Vice, he reports being encouraged to use cocaine and doing so. He started DJing as a side job and selling marijuana to people he met on Grindr. In 2015, his drug dealing escalates and he earns $20,000 from helping a drug cartel smuggle cocaine from Australia to Canada. After boasting about his smuggling at work, he recruits five colleugues: Jordan Gardner, Robert Wang, Porscha Wade, Nathaniel Carty, and Ketiba Senusi into the smuggling efforts, but they fail and get arrested. Each of the five were sentenced to between three and four years in prison.Pastuk was fired from Vice after news of his activities reached Vice management and the front page of the National Post newspaper. In 2018, Pastuk was arrested and in 2019 jailed for nine years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Time_I_Lied"title="The Last Time I Lied">
Fifteen years ago three campers at a prestigious camp for the wealthy, Camp Nightingale, snuck out of their cabin after lights out, never to be seen again. Their fellow camper, Emma, was the last to see them alive. A young man, Theo, was blamed for their disappearances but never received punishment. This reality has stuck with Emma throughout her life and now as an artist, she includes pieces of that past in all of her artwork. This detail catches the eye of the current owner of Camp Nightingale, Francesca, who hires her to work as an art counselor. Once back at the camp Emma begins to remember more of that fateful summer and also discovers hints that the camp is not all it seems to be, as the lake next to the camp holds the ruins of an asylum. This earns her Francesca's mistrust, increasing the sense of unease and danger that Emma feels. Compounding her confusion, footage surfaces that shows Emma leaving the cabin immediately after the other three girls, implying that she was responsible for their deaths.Ultimately it is revealed that Chet, Francesca's adopted son, doctored footage to make it seem as if Emma was responsible. He is also Theo's brother and was resentful that Emma accused Theo of the disappearances. He manages to overcome her and takes her to the underwater asylum with the intention of leaving her there. While down there they discover the bodies of the missing girls. Emma is rescued by Theo. The following police investigation initially believes that the three girls dove down to find the asylum but drowned in the process. This is proven false, as only two of the bodies are present and the remains clearly show that they were murdered.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Women_Have_Better_Sex_Under_Socialism"title="Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism">
In the book, Ghodsee argues that socialist societies are better for women. She presents the reader with a view of motherhood from an economic and political perspective. She is critical of the sexualised images that frequently appear in western magazines and television, which she describes as capitalism commodifying women. She presents a series of case studies from Eastern Europe and illustrates that compared to capitalist societies, women are more liberated and have more control of their lives in socialist societies. She points out how women tend to earn less than men in capitalist societies, thus making women more dependant on men, and receiving more pressure to get married.Two chapters of the book are about sexual economics, and are critical of puritanical tendencies in western societies while praising the normalisation of sex in socialist societies. The book quotes studies showing greater sexual satisfaction among women in East Germany compared to those in West Germany.Ghodsee advocates for a Universal Basic Income which she argues would balance inequity resulting from unpaid labour that women undertake.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ms._Teeny-Wonderful_(book_series)"title="Ms. Teeny-Wonderful (book series)">
The Ms. Teeny-Wonderful series follows Carol Weatherspoon, an Alberta teenager in the 1980s, as well as her best friend Wally Stutzgummer (a Slavic-Canadian boy) and Carol's ever-critical mother, who does not understand Carol's unconventional behaviour. Carol is a huge fan of BMX biking, and often practices stunts with her own bike at home. In the first book, which is also the best-known book in the series, Carol's mother enters her in a child beauty pageant for girls called the "Ms. Teeny-Wonderful" pageant. Much to her mother's horror, Carol's talent presented for the pageant is to jump her bike over six garbage cans lined up on the street. With Wally's help, Carol practices the stunt, often with comedic outcomes until she gets it right. Throughout the series, Carol's adventures become more outlandish, involving things such as foiling a kidnapping plot, dealing with a marriage proposal from a Middle Eastern prince, and coping with bothersome behaviour from younger children.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Train_(novel)"title="Bullet Train (novel)">
At Tokyo Station, Yuichi Kimura, a former hitman, boards the "Hayate" train on the Tōhoku Shinkansen bound for Morioka to take revenge against the teenage Satoshi Oji, who is referred to as "the Prince" by his friends. Kimura's six-year-old son, Wataru, is in a coma after the Prince pushed him off the roof of an apartment building for fun. However, the Prince knows exactly who Kimura is and actually lured him onto the train. When Kimura approaches, the Prince knocks him out with an improvised taser and ties him up. The confident Prince is a sociopath who likes to manipulate people, and when Kimura awakes, the Prince takes control of him, threatening Wataru's life; an acquaintance is watching over him in the hospital and will kill him if the Prince is harmed and unable to answer his phone.Tangerine and Lemon are an odd couple of skillful hitmen; Tangerine is composed and well-read, while Lemon is frantic and obsessed with "Thomas &amp; Friends". The pair just rescued the kidnapped son of mob boss Yoshio Minegishi, and they are returning the boy and suitcase of ransom money to Minegishi in Morioka. Lemon misplaces the suitcase, and Minegishi's son mysteriously ends up dead while they leave him unattended. At each station on the way, Minegishi's subordinates are also assigned to check on their progress, so Tangerine tries to think of a way out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_Two_Fires_(novel)"title="Between Two Fires (novel)">
Lucifer and the other fallen angels spark another war against Heaven by starting the Black Plague. Demons roam the Earth and God appears to leave His angels and humanity to fend for themselves.Thomas, a French knight turned brigand, saves a young girl named Delphine from being raped. After the Battle of Crécy, Thomas's lands were stolen by the Comte d'Évreux, and he was excommunicated. Delphine claims she can see angels and instructs Thomas to bring her to Paris and then Avignon. Along the way, they meet Father Matthieu, a gay alcoholic priest. Matthieu reminisces about how he was caught with another man, losing the trust of his congregation just before the plague struck; although this makes Thomas uncomfortable, Delphine reassures him that she does not care.Delphine receives the Holy Spear from a man selling relics in Paris. As the group leaves the city, they are attacked by possessed statues of the Virgin Mary and various saints. The group have several more confrontations with fallen angels as they move toward Avignon. Matthieu is killed by a demon in the River Rhône. Thomas meets D'Évreux on the road and challenges him to a duel in which D'Évreux is eventually killed.Disguised as D'Évreux and his page, Thomas and Delphine reach Avignon. They meet Matthieu's brother Robert, a servant and lover to an older cardinal. She asks Robert to arrange a meeting with Pope Clement VI. Separately, she tells Thomas that the pope has been replaced by a demon and that they must kill him. Robert informs the pope. Delphine resurrects the true Clement, who confronts the false pope along with Delphine and Thomas. Thomas and Robert are killed. Delphine is killed by the Holy Spear, but Michael and the heavenly host emerge from her body to defeat the false pope and his army of demons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Things_I_Left_Behind"title="Things I Left Behind">
"Things I Left Behind" is about two Palestinian sisters with divorced parents. One sister falls in love with a man in Sweden. The book it set in 2000, and includes themes of Israeli occupation, women's rights, sexuality and family values.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Upon_a_Time_in…_Donnybrook"title="Once Upon a Time in… Donnybrook">
The country, and Taoiseach Charles O'Carroll-Kelly, attempt to deal with the burning of Leinster House by a Russian-funded mob.Sorcha is still angry over Ross's adultery with Honor's Irish teacher. Ross becomes manager of the Ireland women's rugby team.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pin_(novel)"title="Pin (novel)">
Leon and Ursula are siblings, growing up in a wealthy mansion with their parents. Their father is a stern, analytical and curious medical doctor, who often means well but can be eccentric, creepy and even at times frightening, which influences the children as they grow up. Their mother, neurotic, abusive and obsessed with cleaning and hygiene, is constantly scrubbing floors and keeping the house spotless. As a result, Leon and Ursula have very few friends and spend most of their childhood isolated, coming to rely on each other for companionship. One day, Ursula's best friend, a sexually-experienced schoolgirl, gives Ursula a copy of a pornographic magazine, which Ursula sneaks into one of the bedrooms at home. Leon discovers her with it, and the two children giggle at the magazine and explore it, only to be caught by their mother. Despite the children not having actually done anything sexual, the mere existence of the offending magazine causes their father to take an interest in the children's proper sexual education. To explain sex and gender to the children, he uses ventriloquism to get his medical anatomy mannequin, named "Pin" (short for "Pinocchio") to "speak" to the Leon and Ursula about "The Need" (a euphemism for sexual desire). Their father often uses Pin to entertain his other child patients during medical appointments so that they won't be frightened of doctors, a benign parlour trick, but while Ursula learns to recognize this as a trick, Leon does not. He fully believes that Pin is alive and speaking to him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lifeguard_(novel)"title="The Lifeguard (novel)">
Kelsey Tanner, a young girl who recently grieved the death of her biological father, is given a summer vacation trip to Beverly Island (fictional location) with her mother and her mother's boyfriend, Eric, who has several children roughly Kelsey's age. Upon arriving on the island, Kelsey and her mother are informed by a horrified Eric that his only daughter, Beth, is missing. A search party has been called in to look for the girl after her belongings are found on the beach; meanwhile Kelsey befriends the other teenagers on the island, including Donna, a preppy girl, and Skip, a wealthy and vain boy who works as a lifeguard. Kelsey is put off by Neale, Eric's son and Beth's brother; Neale is cold, aloof and bitter, and Kelsey doesn't trust him.It is decided by the search party later on that Beth must have drowned while swimming on the beach, although no corpse is ever recovered. Kelsey finds a note hidden in Beth's bedroom that says "I think someone is going to kill me". Kelsey begins to suspect that Beth was murdered, but is hesitant to tell her peers. She fears for her own life after she hears someone in her bedroom while she's alone in Eric's house, and later when she's about to leave the shower; she hears bizarre noises and notices wet footprints on the floor of the shower room, along with seaweed from the beach. Kelsey discovers a deceased body, but when she alerts her peers to it, the body has disappeared, leading the other teens to doubt Kelsey's sincerity. A creepy old man with an eyepatch, Isaac (a resident of Beverly Island off-season), keeps yelling warnings at Kelsey, terrifying her into thinking that he's some kind of a pervert who may have attacked and killed Beth. Kelsey develops romantic feelings for Justin, Eric's shy younger son and the brother of Neale and Beth, although she is also drawn to Neale despite his cold nature. Kelsey breaks into Isaac's houseboat and discovers items belonging to Beth, but before she can gather any of this evidence, a rat startles her and she flees the houseboat. She discovers that Justin left the note in Beth's room and that he has been listening to her telephone conversations. She also finds Isaac’s dead body in the road; as she comes to learn that a series of drownings have occurred on Beverly Island within the same period, Kelsey suspects that Justin is the culprit, along with Donna agreeing to this, though nobody believes the two girls. When it is verified that Justin is the killer, he attempts to attack Kelsey, but she is saved by Neale; she kisses Neale passionately, and the two teens begin a romantic relationship together although Kelsey is aware that Neale will probably soon be her stepbrother if her mother marries Eric, making them an incestuous couple, though not by blood. Kelsey discovers while in the hospital that Beth and Donna are both alive and safe, but that Justin is responsible for the other murders that have occurred around the island. She wonders what will happen in the future now that the truth has come out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Haifa"title="Return to Haifa">
The story starts with Saeed S. arriving in the city of Haifa after the Manpeldaum Gate opened. It brought an abundant amount of memories and feelings mixed together taking him and his wife, Safiyah, 20 years back, on the 21st of April 1948. It was the day they lost their son, Khuldoon, because of war that made situations difficult and horrible for them, causing them to leave forcefully by a British ship that took them to the city of Acre.The novel narrates that on this date, there was an explosion in Haifa coming from Mount Carmel. Saeed S felt overwhelmed as he saw everything getting worse, from armies showing up, to more explosions happening, making it hard for him to navigate through. Safiya and he were on two opposite sides; as she rushed through the crowds of people to see him, she realised Khuldoon was still sleeping inside their house at Hallisa.Calling out Khuldoon's name numerous times, there was no response. And after she saw Saeed S. from far, they both were on the verge of despair and tears, realising they lost their son. Since then, they tried all means of searching for him, from getting in touch with the Red Crescent, and sending friends to the area to help them look.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_Freedom_Died"title="The Day Freedom Died">
The book describes events leading up to and during the Colfax massacre in Grant Parish, Louisiana, on Easter Sunday, 1873, in which dozens of African Americans were killed at the hands of white supremacists, as well as the subsequent manhunt, trial, and appeal to the United States Supreme Court, in which the Court in a unanimous decision in "United States v. Cruikshank" (1876) overturned the convictions that had been obtained against three of the original ninety-eight defendants who had been indicted, nine of whom had been brought to trial.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umm_Saad"title="Umm Saad">
Umm Saad revolves around the character with the same name, who is described as strong, patient, and revolutionary, representing not only herself as a Palestinian woman but Palestinian women overall, and a narrator tells the story from a first point of view perspective. The novella revolved around war, patience, and resistance, along with how Umm Saad felt, throughout their conversations together. The loss at war, being away from her son, and still managing to remain active and standing tall, helping and taking risks in critical areas, Umm Saad was narrating and not just having a regular conversation with Kanafani; her feelings of despair towards the constant bad news heard through the radio, or following up on her son, Saad, who went with the Fedayeen, but got arrested and tortured, expressing how Palestinian women experience the pain of loss, distance, and deprivation in camps. Broken down in tears at some point through the storyline, Umm Saad wishes she lives somewhere safe and clean and not suffer through the coldness of camps. It was later told in the story that Saad gave his mother a car gift, hinting, according to Umm Saad, that he wanted to destroy an Israeli car, news which made Umm Saad feel delighted. Saad then appears again with his friends in the camp, after a bullet attacked him, where his mother takes full care of them. The story ends when Saad informs the family that his friend, Laith, got arrested, making them deal with a betrayer who works with Israelis in order to set him free. Laith insists on the other family not to deal with the betrayer so they don't die, which symbolised the Palestinians' insistence on not wanting to deal with the Israelis.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadhouse_Landing"title="Deadhouse Landing">
The novel picks up where "Dancer's Lament" left off, with Dancer and Kellanved fleeing Itko Kan to the city of Malaz. It continues the story of their founding of the Malazan Empire and eventual ascension.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_is_Not_Willing"title="The God is Not Willing">
The novel is set 10 years after the events in the "Book of the Fallen" and explores aftermath and legacy of Karsa Orlong.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kellanved's_Reach"title="Kellanved's Reach">
The novel chronologically takes place between Deadhouse Landing and Night of Knives. It continues the story of Dancer and Kellanved, their founding of the Malazan Empire, and eventual ascension.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creekfinding"title="Creekfinding">
The book introduces the excavator as a "creekfinding machine" that can help uncover lost creeks. It shows a vibrant creek being diverted as a farmer uses a bulldozer to fill it with dirt for growing corn. Decades later, Mike learns about the former creek and decides to restore it despite the skepticism of others. He marks the creek's former path and an excavator is used to dig into the ground to locate it. Mike waits until the winter to have trucks deliver rocks to line the creek, so that the ground is frozen by then and the trucks do not damage the soil. Plants, insects, and sculpins return to the creek, and the trout are delivered in another truck. Two years later, the trout lay eggs that hatch during the winter. The book concludes with the flourishing ecosystem and a thanks "to Mike and the big machines that found the creek".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_Beautiful_(novel)"title="The City Beautiful (novel)">
The novel follows Alter Rosen, a 17-year-old Romanian Jewish immigrant in Chicago in 1893. He avoided death as an infant but believes he curses the people around him to die, including his father who died travelling to America. Alter now works to bring his family over from Europe. He is in love with his roommate, Yakov Kogan, but knows little about Yakov's past, except that his family died in a fire. When Yakov is found dead in the water at the Chicago World's Fair with bruises on his neck, Alter becomes suspicious that Yakov was murdered, and is only the latest in a string of disappearances of Jewish boys, although the police are uninterested.Alter helps to prepare Yakov's body for burial but falls into the ritual bath and has a vision that his and Yakov's bodies fuse together. After this, Alter begins to have experiences that parallel Yakov's, such as dreaming about fire, and feeling pain on his body where Yakov was injured. He has visions and hallucinations, and sometimes cannot control his actions.Alter is joined in his investigation of the disappearances by his neighbour Raizel Ackermann and his old friend Frankie Portnoy, who both also know missing or dead boys. Frankie is a Torah-scholar-turned-thief and Alter used to be in his gang, although he left after witnessing Frankie violently beat a man. Frankie now also fights illegal boxing matches for a wealthy audience, but faces antisemitism from his patrons. Although disliking how Frankie makes money, the two become close again, and Alter is attracted to him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stealth_(novel)"title="The Stealth (novel)">
Sonallah Ibrahim portrayed us in this novel, Egypt in 1948 AD, the events of this novel revolve around the story of the young son who tells everything around him and his father who takes care of him. When he was five years old, and he explains to us in the smallest details of what he saw and heard, his eyes are observing, and piercing the smallest things, he lurks and kidnaps scenes and minute details to store in his subconscious mind, the child monitors everything that was going on around him, the movements of people and their privacy, the classes of his school and the habits of the street, market and squares The public and mosques in his time, with an attractive and detailed description that makes you travel in his time and live his moments.The habit of voyeurism is the habit of the child, and it is something that the father does not realize in the novel due to the young age of his “voyeur” son, especially when the father takes the son with him wherever he goes. The child witnesses all the father's conversations with some people about politics, art, literature, women and the social situation in Egypt during wartime.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coffeehouse"title="The Coffeehouse">
The coffeehouse was the group of friends’ regular, “special” spot where they spoke about life, touching upon all topics from their daily lives and routine spent with their family, such as going to the cinema and planting, to their moments at school and what each of them pursued after graduating, Sadeq founded a copper factory, Tariq became a poet, Hamada pursuing law, and their love life, marriages, and the questions of love and death.The coffeehouse was considered “haram” to the friends’ parents because of topics discussed, trying out new stuff to them such as smoking hookah and drinking, and telling each other the adventures of how love from the first sight felt like from dopamine rushes, nervousness, and failures.Political arguments would arise throughout the times of British conquest, wars, and political issues overall, causing protests. Teaching civics was a huge risk at that time despite that it was still done due to the fact that it revealed so much, causing attachment to the homeland. Religious differences would appear, “It is not just Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, we have here. It is also AlWafd”, as one of the friends would say.Cultural conflicts would separate between Tahir and his family, as he’d say that “parents need a new way to raise children”. He fought with his parents because they wanted him to be a doctor, but he failed with that. He only succeeded with writing poems in a magazine. His parents considered him as a failure, to the point of refusing him to marry a nurse, who they thought was going to be of a bad reputation that he, with a "bad reputation", is married to a lady with a "good reputation". so he cut contact with them, and managed to marry her in their 20s.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting.com"title="Forgetting.com">
The novel starts when the heroine Ahlam - the writer herself - meets her friend Camelia, whose man abandoned her. She lives with her, and agrees to call her every day at the same time as the man who abandoned her.Ahlam calls her friend every day at the same time for two months, and one day they went together to a poetry evening and met by chance the man who had abandoned her friend.The next day, when Ahlam tried to call her friend, she found the line busy. This made her sure that she had returned to a relationship with that man, so she felt angry and stopped calling.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_a_Whimsical_Lover"title="Diary of a Whimsical Lover">
"Diary of a Whimsical Lover" is a story about Gaurav and Maya, two young professionals in Vancouver who must overcome many challenges to be together. Both develop an immediate connection when they meet for the first time at a party. Gaurav is mesmerized by Maya's beauty and charm, while she appreciates Gaurav's distinct sense of humour and compassionate temperament. The protagonist is an introverted Indian author who moved to Canada. Maya, on the other hand, is charming, endearing, and very well liked. The story uses first person narration.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_German_Myth_of_the_East"title="The German Myth of the East">
In this book the geographic East refers to eastern parts of Germany as well as lands that are east of Germany's borders. According to Liulevicius, this German view of the East was mixed. Influential people from high culture to popular culture saw the East as wild, dangerous, disorganized, and dirty, while others conversely saw it as captivating, intoxicating, as a transformational experience or as a desirable place of endless promise and opportunity. Each of these beliefs provided a rationale for a possible future civilizing mission. So, the book analyzes this phenomenon from around 1800 to 2009, the year the book was published. However, these popular psychological projections stretched from the Middle Ages until the second World War's end in 1945. Hence, focusing on the East was occurring well before Germany unified as a nation state. Also, this focus on the East has its counterpart in America's own romanticized view of the Wild West. For example, the mythologized East as a destination served as the German's equivalent of America's Manifest destiny. Likewise, according to the book, the German people were impacted by the mythologized East in the same way that Americans have been affected by their own formative stories based on the mythical West.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_My_Rage"title="All My Rage">
"All My Rage" takes place in the Mojave Desert of California and is told from three points of view: Misbah in the past and Noor and Sal in the present. Sal is Misbah's son. Sal and Noor are former friends growing up in a small desert town. Noor wants to go to college but her guardian will not let her. Sal wants to save his parents' business, a motel, but it is deep in debt. Their friendship rekindles after a tragedy, but Sal's choices and Noor's secrets threaten to tear them apart. Meanwhile, we learn about Misbah, Sal's mother, and what brought her to America.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_a_Brave_Man"title="The End of a Brave Man">
Mufid is a young man from a rural village near the coastal town of Baniyas in Syria. He lives there during the French occupation in the first half of the 20th century with his father, a farmer who is overbearing and violent with him. At the age of 12, Mufid cuts off the tail of a donkey, angering the people from the village and earning him the nickname "Mufid al-Wahsh" ("Mufid the Beast"). His father punishes him by tying him to the trunk of a tree and beating him in view of the villagers. Like his father, Mufid is physically strong, courageous, and has a tendency towards violence.Mufid drops out of school and runs away from the village, making his way to Baniyas. Following an altercation with a French colonial officer, he is imprisoned for two years. He is held in Latakia at first and then later is transferred to a prison in Aleppo. In prison he receives advice on how to live from fellow prisoner Abd al-Jalil, a friend of one of his relatives.After Mufid leaves prison, he moves to Latakia. He marries a woman named Labiba and struggles to find consistent employment, working as a porter, a sailor and as an assistant to a baker. He tries to remain a virtuous person, but succumbs to economic pressures and is drawn into the criminal underworld of the port city. He learns about city life and maturity from Abdush, a gang leader who is from the same village as him. Mufid finds self-worth in standing up to rival gangs and fighting against the French occupation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rama_and_the_Dragon"title="Rama and the Dragon">
The novel is told as a dialogue between a man and a woman and has mythological, Pharaonic, Greek and Islamic elements mixed together. The novel is a great example of Edwar al-Kharrat's literature in talking about the experimental novel with its own investigations and in-depth research into the aesthetics of the languages, in addition to the writer's reliance on the torrent of awareness technique that permeates the text's fabric through the character of "Rama", which in turn is also deeply rooted with the stream of conciseness technique "Mikhail" and his own thoughts and inner monologues that uncovers many memories.The novel is multi-layered, deep conversations around the human experience and the struggle one faces with polarities wrapped in the story of an unrequited love that Rama and Mikhael live. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worthy_of_Love"title="Worthy of Love">
Adrian is morbidly obese, weighing 280 pounds. He tries to minimize his bulky appearance by wearing black clothing, which does little to boost his self-esteem, particularly in school. A resident of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Adrian attends a local school where he is embarrassed during a weigh-in in gym class; compared to his peers, Adrian is extremely overweight, and his coach, who calls Adrian's bullying "petty crap", does not prevent any of the fatphobic comments that come Adrian's way. Tied of the harassment, Adrian sets a goal to lose as much weight as possible, which leads him to experiment with self-induced vomiting until he develops a habit of full-blown bulimia. He secretly binge-eats at home, and dreads the idea that a girl he is attracted to, Melody Woods (affectionately nicknamed "Mel") will never love him because he is fat and ugly. These internalized feelings only heighten his emerging eating disorder. Adrian is, however, able to find solace in a local kickboxing class in Halifax, and this is where he is able to exercise in a healthy way. Mel confronts Adrian about his weight loss and apparent eating problems, leading Adrian to question his own negative self-perception and how it all started.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_for_Life"title="Hunger for Life">
James has graduated from college and, rather than moving forward and securing long-term employment, he moves back into his childhood home with his parents; the family all struggle to help Emma, James's sister, who suffers from an eating disorder that is slowly consuming her life and her physical health. James feels powerless to help her, and unsure of where his future will go. He finds solace in Hannah, an eccentric free spirit and international student from Austria, but James's father begins retreating from life, concerning James about the possibility of something darker happening to his family. Emma is urged by doctors to gain weight, but she feels incessantly fat and refuses to do as they say. James finds himself torn between his family and his new adult life with Hannah, and has to decide where he stands as an individual.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_Down_Home_with_Daddy"title="Going Down Home with Daddy">
Alan, a young boy, is excited to travel to his great-grandmother's house for an annual family reunion. He worries, however, that he will not have anything to share at the family's celebration – while his sister and cousins plan to sing a song, read a poem, or present a scrapbook, he has not prepared anything yet. During a tractor ride, Alan's father talks about the fields of cotton that their ancestors planted as slaves, and tells him to think with his heart. The next day, after reflecting on his family's history, Alan has an idea for the celebration. He collects some cotton, a pecan from the pecan trees, and some dirt, and presents a tribute to his family's land and the work of his great-grandparents. The presentation is well-received and when they leave the next morning, Alan is already excited for next year's reunion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spider's_House_(novel)"title="The Spider's House (novel)">
The story is set during the 1950s in the city of Fez, Morocco during the nationalist uprising against French colonial rule. The holy month of Ramadan is underway. A middle-aged American writer and expatriate, Stenham, resides in the then Medieval-like city. A former Communist, Stenhm is disillusioned with the party, and equally hostile to the French colonialist occupiers. He lives an existence of alienation. Another denizen of the city, the poor 15-year-old Arab boy, Amar, supports the rebellion. Through the actions of a well-to-do English painter and an American divorcee, the lives of Stenham and Amar become enmeshed in the social upheavals that engulf the city. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Englishman_who_Went_up_a_Hill_but_Came_down_a_Mountain_(novel)"title="The Englishman who Went up a Hill but Came down a Mountain (novel)">
On a Sunday in 1917, during World War I, two English cartographers from the Ordnance Survey, the pompous George Garrad and his junior, Reginald Anson, arrive at the fictional Welsh village of Ffynnon Garw. Their job is to re-measure certain Welsh mountains, and their first task is to measure Ffynnon Garw. Garrard is the senior, many years retired from the army. He claims to have surveyed many locations around the British Empire, although he is fundamentally lazy and a drunk. Anson is a younger and much-decorated army officer, invalided out with severe shellshock from fighting in France, and is just starting to enjoy life again. Most of the men of the village are fighting in France, and those who are not work in the coalmine. The two men put up at the pub ‘Y Ffynnon’ owned by Morgan Morgan, known as Morgan the Goat, the only villager who doesn’t attend chapel. Within a short time, every villager is aware of the arrival of the map makers. They are extremely proud of ‘their’ mountain, which they claim to be the ‘The first mountain in Wales’. Garrard tells them that only if the mountain is 1000feet high or higher, will it appear on official maps. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bleeding_of_the_Stone"title="The Bleeding of the Stone">
The novel tells the story of Asouf, a lone bedouin who loves and respects the desert and identifies with its creatures. Asouf knows exactly where he can find moufflon, wild sheep known for their meat, who survive in the remote mountainous desert of southern Libya. But Asouf and the moufflon are both threatened by hunters who have already slaughtered the once numerous desert gazelles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_on_the_Beach"title="The Boy on the Beach">
"The Boy on the Beach" documents the Kurdi family's efforts to escape the Syrian civil war and the circumstances that led to the deaths of Alan, Ghalib Kurdi, and Rehanna (their mother), in 2015. The book starts by describing the family's comfortable life in Damascus prior to the Syrian civil war. As war starts, the family move to Kobanî, before fleeing Syria and attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea. When their boat capsizes, their father, Abdullah Kurdi, survives, but his two children Alan and Ghalib both drown along with his wife Rehanna. A photograph of Alan caught the attention of the international media and public attention.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Maris_(novel)"title="Stella Maris (novel)">
The novel follows Alicia Western, a math prodigy conflicted by her father's contributions to the American development of the atomic bomb.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turnout"title="The Turnout">
"The Turning Point" follows twin sisters Dara and Marie Durant, who grew up in a Victorian home with their father, an electrician, and their mother, a former ballet dancer. Their mother opens The Durant School of Dance and teaches her daughters ballet at home, making ballet central to the girls' identities.One year, Charlie, one of Mrs. Durant's students, comes to live with them, and Mrs. Durant begins forcing the children into sexual games while she and her husband drink and argue. On their twentieth wedding anniversary, Mr. and Mrs. Durant are involved in a fatal car crash, leaving Dara and Marie to inherit the dance school.A decade later, Dara, Marie, and Charlie run the dance school and live together in Marie's home. Dara and Charlie have married. Marie moves out of the home, then accidentally sets a fire to one of the dance studios. To fix the studio, the family hires a contractor, Derek, whose presence at the school quickly becomes uncomfortable, especially once Dara learns that he and Marie are having an affair.Derek becomes overly interested in the Durant home and eventually makes it clear he wants to take it from the Durants. Dara and Charlie confront Derek, which ultimately leads Charlie to push Derek down the stairs to his death, which the Durants report as an accident.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(King_novel)"title="The Game (King novel)">
Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes are visited by Sherlock's gravely ill brother, Mycroft, who has an intriguing case for them. Mycroft, who has connections in the highest levels of the government, has just received a strange package: An oilskin-wrapped packet containing the papers of a missing English spy named Kimball O'Hara.Mary quickly realises that this is the same Kimball who served as the inspiration for the famous Rudyard Kipling novel, an orphaned English boy turned loose in India, whose cunning he used to spy for the Crown. But now, he has inexplicably gone missing. Mycroft fears that he may have been taken hostage or even killed. When Russell learns of that Holmes knew Kim thirty years before, she knows the die is cast: she will accompany her husband to India to search for the missing operative. En route, they encounter the insufferable Tom Goodheart—a wealthy young American who has embraced Communism—traveling with his mother and sister to visit his maharaja friend, Jumalpandra ("Jimmy"), an impossibly rich and charming ruler of the (fictional) Indian state of Khanpur. Even before they arrive, danger shows its face in everything from a suspicious passenger on board their steamer to an "accident" that very nearly claims their lives. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juma_and_the_Magic_Jinn"title="Juma and the Magic Jinn">
On the seafaring Lamu Island, families traditionally keep a jinn jar at home. The jinn jar is a container that holds a supernatural being in Islam and Arabian mythology called a jinn (in English, a genie). The jinn jar is kept sealed because the owners do not know if their magic jinn is good or evil, which makes people of Lamu Island generally afraid of the jinns.The story opens with a young student named Juma daydreaming in a school instead of doing his mathematics. Since the young Juma concentrates more on his own directions of thought rather than the lessons being taught, the teacher sends Juma home. On the way home, he comes across his mother buying fish at the shore. His mother admonishes his daydreaming in school and suggests that Juma may be better off working with his father to cut mangrove poles. She instruction Juma to go home, but instructs Juma to not touch the jinn jar.At home, Juma disobeys his mother's prior instructions and removes the cork sealing the jinn jar and calls the jinn. Juma is sceptical about his efforts and does not believe in magic. However, the magic jinn appears, in this instance as a "young woman with black and smiling catlike eyes," whose dark hair is tied with amber beads. The jinn offers to grant Juma wishes. Desiring to be some place where he won't have to study or behave, Juma formulates his wishes to overcome his need for schooling, particularly math and writing ("sums and script"). The magic jinn grants some of Juma's wishes and is sent away from his home on what turns out to be misadventures. Eventually, Juma is able to get home again but arrives with new appreciation of his home and family and realisation that learning can be exciting and fun.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Christopher_Killer"title="The Christopher Killer">
When Cameryn Mahoney convinces her dad to give her the job of being his assistant, she is thrilled to finally get some hands-on experience in forensics. But Cammie is in for more than she bargained for when the second case that she attends turns out to be her friend and the latest victim of a serial killer, known as the Christopher Killer. And if dealing with that isn't enough, Cammie soon realizes that if she is not careful, she might wind up as the next victim.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portobello_(novel)"title="Portobello (novel)">
The central character of the novel is Eugene Wren, a wealthy, middle-aged art dealer whose secretive personality jeopardizes both his sanity and his relationship with, and eventual engagement to, Ella Cotswold, an attractive general practitioner ten years his junior. Having in the past overcome various slight addictions to alcohol, nicotine, and food, Wren gets hooked on a special brand of sugar-free sweet, which he wants to conceal from his fiancée. When the couple decide that Ella should sell her flat and she moves in with him, he starts inventing excuses and lies so as to be alone just for the time it takes to suck a sweet and to get rid of the sweet smell on his breath afterwards. Extremely ashamed of his habit, he buys, hoards, and consumes the sweets secretly, and he establishes several caches in his antique-studded home. When Ella happens to find one of them, out of curiosity goes on to search the rest of the house, and finally confronts Wren with her find, he is so ashamed of himself that he sees no other way than to break off their engagement and move into a hotel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birthday_Present_(novel)"title="The Birthday Present (novel)">
Robert, a city accountant narrates the story, with excerpts from one Jane Atherton's diary. He is married to Iris Tesham. Iris' brother Ivor is an up-and-coming Tory MP, who is having an affair with Hebe Furnal. Hebe uses Jane Atherton as her alibi for her trysts. Ivor Tesham arranges a mock abduction of Hebe as a birthday present for her, but it goes horribly wrong.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Played_with_Fire"title="The Girl Who Played with Fire">
After a yearlong sojourn to Grenada, Lisbeth Salander uses three million laundered kronor to purchase a new apartment in Stockholm. She re-establishes contact with Dragan Armansky, her former boss at Milton Securities, and her former legal guardian Holger Palmgren. Nils Bjurman, who had previously raped Salander, focuses his attention on capturing her and destroying the film she made of his crime. Reviewing her medical records, he identifies a person from her past as his strongest ally. Mikael Blomkvist, the publisher of "Millennium" magazine, who had lost contact with Salander since her absence, sees her being attacked by a member of the Svavelsjö outlaw motorcycle club. He attempts to help, to Salander's astonishment, and their joint efforts enable her to elude her attacker. "Millennium" is approached by Dag Svensson and Mia Johansson, who have put together a report concerning sex trafficking in Sweden and the abuse of underage girls by high-ranking figures. Everyone is intrigued by recurring mentions of "Zala", a mysterious figure heavily involved in the sex-trafficking industry. Salander, hacking Blomkvist's computer, is taken aback by the mention of Zala, and visits Svensson and Johansson to ask questions. Later that same night, Blomkvist finds the couple shot dead in their apartment. With Salander's fingerprints on the murder weapon, and her formal record establishing a history of violent instability, she is implicated in the double murder. Bjurman is also found dead, shot by the same weapon; Salander is the prime suspect.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_of_the_Mutant_Underwear"title="Attack of the Mutant Underwear">
Fifth-grader Cody Carson keeps a journal of his hopes for a fresh start in a town where nobody knows about his humiliating mistakes of the past, but before school even begins so does his embarrassment. As he goes through many things at his new life, he encounters many challenges, crushes, adventures and embarrassing moments. Will he be able to become a "New Me", without shattering into pieces?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_False_Note"title="One False Note">
Amy, Dan, and Nellie arrive in Vienna, where they discover Mozart had a sister, Nannerl. They discover she had a diary, but it has been stolen from the museum. They conclude Jonah stole the diary, and break into his hotel room. They manage to escape with it, and after reuniting with Nellie, discover she knows enough German to translate it. However, three pages are missing.Amy finds the complete sheet music from Paris online and plays it in the hotel lobby. A woman informs them it's a song titled "The Place Where I Was Born", and Amy realizes they need to be in Salzburg. There, they see Alistair Oh and follow him into the catacombs. They lose Alistair but notice The Man in Black. They flee further into the catacombs, eventually getting lost. They manage to find an exit, appearing in a room in St Peter's Abbey. Dan finds a list and assuming it's the complete 39 clues, takes it. This gets the attention of the monks, who chase them out of the abbey. Amy and Dan show the list of Nellie, who informs them that the list is just a recipe for Bénédictine.Nellie discovers a homing device in Saladin's collar. They stumble onto a sleeping Alistair and plant it on him. Amy then takes what Alistair found in the catacombs--a poster for a Mozart concert in Venice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Minds_of_Marginalized_Black_Men"title="The Minds of Marginalized Black Men">
Introduction - Making New Sense of Poor Black Men in CrisisThe introduction gives insight on what is to come later in the book. It also describes the setting and how Young did his research.Young conducted his research in several public housing developments in the Near West Side of Chicago. Young describes the area as "geographically and socially isolated from downtown Chicago and the opulent western suburbs, and resembles a holding pen for the economically immobile."The first development that Young went to was the Governor Henry Horner Homes. The development had "19 buildings with 1,774 units, almost all of which are occupied by African Americans." In these households over 85% received public assistance, and only 8% were able to be supported by the employment of a member of the household.The second development was the ABLA homes located one and a half miles away from the Henry Horner Homes. This development contains 160 buildings with 3,505 units and, like the Henry Horner homes, is almost all African-American. ABLA occupants do a little better financially, with 75% needing public assistance and just over 8% able to support themselves.The second half of the introduction talks about what made Young want to research and write this book and what the main themes of the book are. Young says that the main goal of this book is to "uncover these men's worldviews on issues such as mobility, opportunity, and future life chances." The book is not about what was going through these men's heads when they were dealing drugs or carrying a firearm but instead about how they view their place in American society and what they think about their futures.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Call_Me_Stupid"title="Just Call Me Stupid">
Patrick is traumatized since his father would keep on calling him stupid and locking him in a closet. This led him to have troubles reading by fifth grade, leading his teachers and school bullies to also call him stupid. This is about to change thanks to a kind teacher, and the encounter of Celina, a neighbor and a classmate, whom he met once he was playing chess by himself in the park. Celine starts reading to Patrick and asks him to tell her a story that she secretly records, submits to a contest behind his back, and wins a trophy. Patrick gets furious, but this opens the path for Patrick to face his fear of being dumb and unlocks his pleasure for reading.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Side_of_the_Rainbow"title="The Other Side of the Rainbow">
Brennan describes the experiences of growing up in an Irish speaking household and early interests in music through to her success recording with Clannad, Bono and finding her faith with help from her husband.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_Grip_(novel)"title="Monkey Grip (novel)">
The novel is set in the inner city suburbs of Melbourne in the mid-1970s. The characters inhabit a lively social circle, frequenting cafés, restaurants, cinemas, theatres, pubs and clubs in the city. Nora, a single mother in her thirties, and her young daughter Grace, live in a succession of share houses. Nora is in love with the notoriously unreliable Javo, a twentysomething heroin addict, who repeatedly drifts in and out of Nora's life. Other characters, including Rita, a single mother and Nora's housemate, Gerald, Francis, Joss, Bill, Willy, Claire, and Martin (a former flame of Nora's), also drift in and out of the story. Most of the characters are artists, actors and creative types; many of them frequent the Fitzroy baths in summer. Nora, a freelance journalist, takes small acting gigs in independent films and edits a women's newspaper between jobs to make ends meet.Nora's relationship with the flaky Javo is first put under strain when he is arrested in Bangkok for drug possession. As he returns, their relationship seems to ebb and flow: while, at a high point, the tentative couple, along with Nora's daughter Grace, go on trips across the country – first to Hobart, then a road trip to Sydney – at its lowest point, Javo steals from the share house to support his heroin habit and disappears for days on end, leaving Nora to wonder about his whereabouts and contemplate his return.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamsin_(novel)"title="Tamsin (novel)">
Jenny Gluckstein, a moody Jewish-American teenager, lives in New York City with her divorced mother Sally. Jenny's closest confidante is her cat, Mister Cat. When Sally marries Evan, an Englishman with two sons, the family relocates to Dorset, where Evan has been hired to renovate 300-year-old Stourhead Farm. Due to the extent of the restoration, the family must live in the farm's dilapidated manor house plagued with unexplained annoyances: erratic electricity and plumbing, strange cold spots and odors, terrifying howling overhead on stormy nights, and a darkened third-story window that does not correspond to any room in the house. For Jenny, already upset with her mother's remarriage, the move, and the state of the house, the final straw comes when Mister Cat must be quarantined for six months. Jenny resolves never to accept her step-family or her new home.After returning from quarantine, Mister Cat's presence attracts a ghostly Persian cat only he and Jenny can see. Following the cats one night, Jenny locates the mysterious third-story room, where she discovers the ghost of 19-year-old Tamsin Willoughby, daughter of the farm's original owner. Ghosts endure as long as they remember being alive, but Tamsin has blocked out the circumstances surrounding her death, including what became of her sweetheart Edric Davies. Jenny comes to believe something sinister happened the night Tamsin died.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Call_Me_Carpenter"title="They Call Me Carpenter">
The story takes place in the fictional locale Western City. It begins with a man named Billy who is attacked by a mob outside a theater after watching a German film. Billy then stumbles into a church and is visited by Carpenter, that is Jesus, who walks out of a stained glass window. Carpenter is shocked and appalled by upper-class culture. The story then roughly follows the biblical account of the Ministry of Jesus. In the end, Carpenter decides to escape the corroded culture by jumping back into the stained glass window whence he came.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Froudacity"title="Froudacity">
"Froudacity" is split into four books, each addressing specific topics that Froude brings. Thomas begins the preface by attacking the overarching claims that Froude uses to argue against self-governance. Thomas ridicules Froude's assertion that if blacks in West Indian countries were given the right to vote, they would elect a candidate that would strip away the rights of whites due to racial animosity. He also attacks the notion that West Indian blacks harbor animosity against whites by pointing out that as many blacks owned slaves as whites, and that most people who were alive during slavery have since died.In Book I Thomas addresses Froude's claims in the early portions of "The English in the West Indies". Froude's tendency to state incorrect assumptions as fact is roundly assaulted. Thomas criticizes Froude for making sweeping generalizations about the condition of blacks on multiple islands without ever talking or interacting with the people he was writing about. Thomas points out that Froude comments extensively on the lifestyles of the natives of Grenada when his only experience among the natives was peering into their houses as he rode past in a carriage. Thomas attacks many other different factual inaccuracies in Froude's work.In Book II Thomas begins to directly address Froude's criticism of giving colonies self-rule. When Froude claims that leaders of the reform movements "did not complain that their affairs had been ill-managed" Thomas spends over two dozen pages detailing the gross abuses of power and corruption that many of the appointed governors of Trinidad have participated in. Thomas also debunks Froude's claim that the reformers pushed for reform in the hope that they would be elected and allowed to draw a handsome government salary. Thomas also points out that contrary to Froude's claims the reform movement has been active for decades. Thomas finishes the second book by refuting Froude's assertion that West Indian blacks were incredibly well taken care off by "the beneficent despotism of the English Government"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Had_Seen_Castles"title="I Had Seen Castles">
It is a story about a young American named John Dante who enthusiastically enlists in 1942 but soon comes to understand the horrors of war.It can be deemed as an anti-war novel due to Rylants way of describing the War and its consequences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronicle_of_a_Blood_Merchant"title="Chronicle of a Blood Merchant">
Xu Sanguan works in a silk factory, distributing silk-worm cocoons to the spinners. To make extra income, Xu Sanguan decides to sell blood at a hospital. He befriends Genlong and Ah Fang, who are blood-sellers themselves and with whom Xu travels to the hospital. The two tell Xu that every time after they sold their blood, they have a plate of fried pork livers and two shots of yellow rice wine at the Victory Restaurant, believing that the pork livers replenish blood while the rice wine maintains the blood quality.Xu Sanguan marries Xu Yulan and gives birth to three boys soon after: Yile, Erle and Sanle. After nine years, questions about Yile’s legitimacy arises, and it is revealed that Xu Yulan had slept with her ex-lover, He Xiaoyong. Xu Sanguan’s relationship with Yile becomes tumultuous as a result. One day, the sons get into a fight and Yile critically injures Blacksmith Fang’s son. At first, both Xu and He deny responsibility for Yile’s actions and refuse to pay for Blacksmith Fang’s son’s hospital bill. But Xu sells his blood and pays his debt to Fang. Ashamed of being a cuckold, Xu sleeps with a former love interest of his, Lin Fenfang.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_the_Barrens"title="Lost in the Barrens">
"Two Against the North" is an adventure story that takes place in northern Manitoba and southwestern North West Territories in 1935. It tells a coming of age tale of two boys in their late teens, one a white boy who has recently lost his parents, the other a Cree boy from a tribe living nearby. The boys embark on a mission to relieve the starvation of a neighbouring village, occupied by the Chipewyans, but due to a series of unfortunate events become trapped above the tree line in Canada's northern Barren Lands during winter. The characters emerge again in Mowat's "The Curse of the Viking Grave".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lodger_(novel)"title="The Lodger (novel)">
The story is told from the point of view of Ellen Bunting, a former maid, and her husband and former butler, Mr. Bunting, who together are trying to manage a lodging. Struck by bad luck at their first attempt, as an epidemy develops near where their first lodging is, they decide to try one more time, with their remaining savings. When they are close to giving up on this endeavour, Mr. Sleuth appears and decides to stay there. He pays a month upfront and asks not to be disturbed while conducting his experiments.Mrs. Bunting becomes increasingly suspicious of Mr. Sleuth, as he arrived at the same day a gruesome murder happened, and, while staying there, several more women are killed by a mysterious man. She notices that the man only leaves after it is dark and his experiments consists of burning his clothes. Despite her growing fear, she lets Mr. Sleuth stay, as they need the money.Mr. Bunting, having received some extra money after working as a waiter for a party, invites his daughter from a previous marriage, Daisy, to come visit them for a few days during her 18th birthday. That night, while going home, he finds Mr. Sleuth on his way to the lodging. After a brief conversation, he passes Mr. Sleuth to open the lodging's front door, and accidentally touches Mr. Sleuth's pocket. The butler becomes suspicious after realizing it was drenched in blood, and even more so when two more bodies are found nearby on the next morning.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Day_of_Life"title="One Day of Life">
Guadalupe "Lupe" Guardado is a middle-aged Salvadoran woman who lives near Chalatenango, El Salvador. During the day she is required to do what she can to support her family, while her husband works for a wealthy landowner. Her husband José has become involved in rebellion against the economic conditions and became a leader in the Christian farmers organization. Fearing persecution for his opposition, José regularly stays "in the hills" after work and sees his family little. The Guardado's son Justino was killed by the "authorities" prior to the events in the novel, and their son-in-law Helio has "disappeared." Guadalupe's granddaughter Adolfina relays the protest at a cathedral, as well as a massacre of students on a bus. At the end of the novel, the authorities bring a beaten man to Guadalupe and Adolfina who had said the name "Adolfina" after being severely beaten. Adolfina does not recognize the man, but Guadalupe recognizes her husband José. On his previous advice, she denies knowing him, and he is taken away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Deadlock"title="Holy Deadlock">
The novel's plot is very similar to that of "Not a Crime", expanded and presented with a tragic ending rather than the earlier deus ex machina. The protagonists are a faultless and honest young couple, with the everyman names of John Adam and Mary Eve, who married impetuously, are now amicably separated, and wish to divorce so that they can remarry; neither has committed adultery nor desired to. Because of the lack of legal provision, they are compelled to collude to present a fictional cause for divorce; Mary asks Adam to "act like a gentleman" and provide the pretext, as her fiancé, Martin Seal, cannot be named as a co-respondent without risking his job (he works as an announcer for the BBC). After his first attempt to obtain the necessary evidence, the maid refuses to identify him in court and the case collapses; at the second attempt, his "partner" develops measles and has to be supported in the hotel for several weeks at great expense. A "decree nisi" is granted but, during the waiting period, Mary spends the night with Seal and is reported by an acquaintance to the King's Proctor, who reports that the divorce should not be granted. She fights the case, but the judge refuses to exercise any discretion in her favour, and declines to grant a divorce. By the end of the book, Mary and Adam are separated but remain legally married. Seal has lost his position after being named in the final court case, but can choose to live with Mary without excessive social stigma. However, John is a broken man, legally unable to marry his lover—and, as she is a school headmistress, socially unable to continue associating with her. On the last page, he departs in the company of a prostitute, announcing that he intends to "behave like a gentleman—at last!"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_and_the_Mind"title="Infinity and the Mind">
The book contains accessible popular expositions on the mathematical theory of infinity, and a number of related topics. These include Gödel's incompleteness theorems and their relationship to concepts of artificial intelligence and the human mind, as well as the conceivability of some unconventional cosmological models. The material is approached from a variety of viewpoints, some more conventionally mathematical and others being nearly mystical. There is a brief account of the author's personal contact with Kurt Gödel.An appendix contains one of the few popular expositions on set theory research on what are known as "strong axioms of infinity."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alamat_ng_Gubat"title="Alamat ng Gubat">
Tong and his friends help find the banana heart in the forest. When Langgam won as the new leader of the forest, he got squashed by an animal. And also, they are being threatened by a gang of evil animals. So Tong, Pagong, Aso and Kuneho fight for the forest and are planning to save Tong's father. But when Tong's friends were eaten by Buwaya. Tong eventually got the banana heart with the help of an annoying but wise monkey. He has also not harmed the forest but saved it and made it a better place to live in. But of course, no one still knows what has happened to Leon and his gang.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildwood_Dancing"title="Wildwood Dancing">
One winter, Jena's father sets out to the coast of Constanța to recover from a serious illness that would kill him if he remained home for the winter. In his absence, he leaves his house, his younger daughters, and his half of the merchant business he and his cousin run in the hands of Jena, and her elder sister Tatiana (called "Tati"). It is when Jena's father's cousin (called Uncle) Nicolae dies, that things begin to go wrong for Jena and her sisters: Cezar, Nicolae's youngest son, uses his newfound power of being master of his father's estate to take a firm control over the castle in which Jena and her sisters live.Every full moon, the sisters go to the Other Kingdom, where they meet and dance with various magical creatures. With each visit they begin to notice the deterioration of their lives at home: Aunt Bogdana, Nicolae's widow, is falling into depression, the money that was to last them the winter is rapidly dwindling, and Cezar is trying to seize all power over his cousin's estate in an attempt to prove himself after an incident that occurred in his childhood. Eventually, Cezar becomes so bent on revenge for the death of his older brother Costi (who drowned ten years prior to the book) that he suggests felling the forest around both his and his cousins' estates. In distress, Jena attempts to dissuade him from doing so. She also attempts to prevent Tati from seeing Sorrow, her sweetheart, who Jena believes to be one of the Night People.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_More_Dead_Dogs"title="No More Dead Dogs">
Ever since Wallace Wallace was young, he has insisted on telling the truth. Since scoring the winning touchdown for the Bedford Middle School football team in the championship, Wallace Wallace has been very popular.When Wallace is assigned to write a report on the book "Old Shep, My Pal", he won't lie about his feelings. He dislikes the book and writes a negative review, which results in a detention handed down by his English teacher, Mr. Fogelman, until he writes a quality review. His detention is spent with the drama club. The drama club is led by Mr. Fogelman, and they are working on a production of a dramatic adaptation of "Old Shep, My Pal" written by Mr. Fogelman. Wallace is initially bored, much to the irritation of Mr. Fogelman and Rachel Turner, the president of the drama club.Soon after Wallace joins the club, an unknown person vandalizes the play set and rehearsals. Rachel believes Wallace is the culprit. Everyone else initially regards him as a hero and refuses to believe her, but when one of Wallace's scrimmage jerseys appears during a sabotage attempt, they turn against him.Wallace is eventually banned from the play entirely. Despite his ban, the drama club decides to use Wallace's ideas for the play, including having Shep live at the end. This decision results in disaster when the saboteur blows up the prop Shep with a cherry bomb during the performance—just as the actors praise his miraculous recovery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planine"title="Planine">
The hero is the shepherd Zoran (i.e. Zoranić himself), who for seven years has been suffering from unrequited love towards a maiden Jaga. One morning, wandering around, he arrives to a well called Vodica, having gotten bored with his life. Suddenly from a well a fairy Zorica (Napeja) appears, advising him to go for the mountains to find a particular plant which will cure his love pain. Then on a golden apple he makes a notice of a beautiful fairy Grace (Milošća) which transfers him across the seas to Podgorje, where he continues the journey by himself. But, soon he runs into a beast, from which Grace saves him and leads him by safer pathways. Afterwards, he arrives to the Gates of hell (Paklenica), where the fairy tells him a tale on a young maiden Bura.The next day Zoran meets a company of shepherds with whom he spends the next three days. On the fifth day, Zoran hears from shepherds a story on the origin of Velebit and heads further to the east. There he discovers a small group of shepherds that complains of being attacked by the wolves from eastern sides (i.e. Turks), which has caused many of the shepherds to flee those areas. The next day Zoran is contacted by a fairy Consciousness (Svist) who directs him to the fairy Dinara. Dinara frees him by her magic powers from his love sufferings. Then Zoran dreams a vision of four fairies in a "gardens of Glory" ("perivoj od Slave"). These are the fairies Latinness (Latinka), Helleness (Grkinja) and Croatess (Hrvatica). While the first three hold in their arms a handful of golden apples (the symbol of a literary piece), the fairy Croatess is poor and makes a complaint on the small number of literary pieces written in folk language. The sixth day Zoran heads for home, but on his way he meets Dinara's daughter, fairy Krka, which drives him across Knin, Skradin and Šibenik down to the mouth of Krka (where she makes her disappearance). Thence, fairy Grace returns him back to Zaton, the place of his departure. There he finds a grave of Juraj Divnić, the bishop of Nin, and swears to follow the path of Lord's love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Thirty_and_The_Man-Eater"title="Beyond Thirty and The Man-Eater">
## "Beyond Thirty".The story was heavily influenced by the events of World War I, and reflects U.S. sentiments at the time of writing. When the war broke out, Americans were predominantly isolationist and wary of being drawn into a European war. Burroughs imagines a future two centuries onward in which that view prevailed and the western hemisphere severed contact with the rest of the world. Consequently, the eastern hemisphere has exhausted itself in war and Europe descended into barbarism while the Americas, sheltered from the destruction, have continued to advance and joined peacefully into the union of Pan-America. By the twenty-second century the entire world east of the 30th meridian west and west of the 175th meridian east has become "terra incognita" to Pan-America.In 2137, Pan-American Navy Lieutenant Jefferson Turck is commander of the aero-submarine "Coldwater", tasked with patrolling the 30th meridian from Iceland to the Azores. Disaster strikes when the vessel's anti-gravitation screens fail, dooming it to wallow upon the surface of the ocean, and the engines fail, leaving it adrift. As its wireless radio has failed as well, Turck cannot even summon help. It is implied that the perfidy of the "Coldwater"’s second officer is behind its misfortunes, as well as the abandonment at sea of Turck and three crewmen in a small boat while attempting repairs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You'll_Never_Eat_Lunch_in_This_Town_Again"title="You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again">
The book begins by briefly introducing the reader to Phillips in 1989, before quickly travelling back to her childhood in 1940s Brooklyn. It then covers her early life and first successes in the film industry: she and Michael earned $100,000 from their debut feature, "Steelyard Blues", moved to Malibu, California, and had a daughter, Kate. The most notorious chapters follow as Phillips enjoys her greatest career successes, perhaps most infamously when she recalls the amalgam of drugs she was under the influence of on the night she won her Oscar ("a diet pill, a small amount of coke, two joints, six halves of Valium, and a glass and a half of wine"). She also reveals the personal peccadillos and vices of the biggest Hollywood A-listers of the day, including Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Richard Dreyfuss, Goldie Hawn, and David Geffen. Many of these people were pivotal figures in the emergence of New Hollywood in the 1960s and '70s, but Phillips disparagingly refers to them as "a rogues' gallery of nerds". Later episodes in her life, including freebasing, and her abusive relationship with a violent drug addict which caused her to miss her own mother's funeral, are also discussed candidly.Most significant, from Phillips' own point of view, is her exposé of the "Boys' Club" in the higher echelons of Hollywood, where she claimed it was her gender that led to her ultimate ostracism. "If I had been a man, they would have closed ranks around me", she said, referring to her drug addiction. "They hated the woman thing. And I wasn't even regarded as a woman, I was a girl." Writing about her in "The Independent" in 2002, film critic David Thomson expressed Phillips' attitude as: "you [Hollywood] guys don't take women seriously; you like us around... [but] we aren't allowed to be players". Those same few men, like "Valley viper" Mike Ovitz who headed the Creative Artists Agency were, in her eyes, responsible for a qualitative decline in standards and the increasing banality of movies since the 1970s.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bulwark_(novel)"title="The Bulwark (novel)">
Hannah and Rufus Barnes, both Quakers, move out of Maine to Trenton, New Jersey, where Hannah's widowed sister lives. Their son Solon, the protagonist, meets Benecia Wallin; although she is affluent and he is not, they get married. Solon works in a bank in Philadelphia, where his Quaker values are contrary to financial ethos. He summons a bank examiner from Washington DC to stop the corrupt practices of some chief executives. Eventually, he resigns.Meanwhile, two of his offspring, Etta and Stewart, repudiate their Quaker upbringing. While Orville gets married and Isobel works in a college, Etta moves to Wisconsin and then Greenwich Village under the influence of one of her friends, Volida La Porte. She has an affair with a painter, until he decides to go West to further his career. Moreover, Stewart accidentally kills one of his dates and commits suicide shortly after. Eventually, Benecia dies upon Etta's return; Solon dies of cancer as Etta watches over him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Lies_(Meltzer_novel)"title="The Book of Lies (Meltzer novel)">
The book of Genesis tells the story of the slaying of Abel by his brother Cain; the world's first recorded murder. Despite wide assumption that Cain used a rock or tree branch, the Bible does not state what weapon was used. That detail is lost to history. In 1932, Mitchell Siegel was killed by three gunshots to the chest. As a result, his son dreamed of a bulletproof man and co-created one of the world's greatest superheroes: Superman. Like Cain's murder weapon, the gun used in this unsolved murder has never been found, until now. In Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Cal Harper comes face-to-face with his family's greatest secret: his long-lost father, who has been shot with a gun that traces back to Mitchell Siegel's 1932 murder. When Cal and his father are attacked by a ruthless killer tattooed with the ancient markings of Cain, he learns that the two murders, committed thousands of years apart, have something in common, setting off the hunt for the world's first murder weapon. The novel goes on to follow Cal Harper and others in their search for answers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Informer_(novel)"title="The Informer (novel)">
Set in 1920s Dublin in the aftermath of the Irish Civil War, the novel centers on "Gypo" Nolan. Having disclosed the whereabouts of his friend Frankie McPhillip to the police for a reward, Gypo finds himself hunted by his revolutionary comrades for this betrayal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chop_Shop_(novel)"title="Chop Shop (novel)">
This thriller features Nick “Bug Man” Polchak, a forensic entomologist who deduces clues to murders based on evidence left by insects on the victims. The heterochromiac Dr. Riley McKay of the Allegheny County coroner's office becomes suspicious while analyzing several corpses. She asks Polchak for help, who discovers that a Pittsburgh-based black market in transplant organs seems to be fronted by PharmaGen, a genetics company with interests other than DNA.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_13th_Reality"title="The 13th Reality">
Atticus "Tick" Higginbottom is an average 13-year-old until he receives a mysterious letter from Alaska, signed "M.G." That marks the beginning of a deadly and crazy adventure, and Tick is reintroduced to the world as he never knew it. Accompanied by new friends while he tries to evade frightful enemies, he sets off on a life-threatening journey through the Realities, alternate worlds created every time a choice is made, to discover secrets and to solve missions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Promise_(novel)"title="Blood Promise (novel)">
In "Blood Promise", Rose leaves St. Vladimir's Academy to go after Dimitri, who has become Strigoi, and kill him. The only clue she has is that he might be somewhere in Siberia. After meeting an Alchemist named Sydney, they travel to Siberia, where she eventually finds Dimitri’s family in the small town of Baia. While in Baia, she meets another "Shadow-Kissed" bonded pair, Oksana and Mark, and a mysterious Moroi man named Abe, who tries to force her to go back to St. Vladimir's. He eventually coerces her into leaving, and Rose agrees after a falling out with Dimitri's sister Viktoria. She then travels to Novosibirsk with other unpromised guardians to stake out Strigoi in the hopes of finding Dimitri. When she does meet him, she is too stunned by his Strigoi appearance to attempt to kill him, and ends up being held hostage by him. He refuses to kill her, and instead, says he will keep her until she decides to turn Strigoi by her own will to be with him.All the while, Rose keeps checking up with Lissa back at St. Vladimir's through the bond. Avery Lazar, a secret Spirit user, has been using compulsion to control Lissa. During a visit to Lissa's head, Rose gets pushed out by Avery. While held hostage by Dimitri, who has been feeding off her and thus weakening her, Rose eventually manages to escape, grabbing a stake on the way out. Dimitri catches up with her, and they eventually battle on a bridge, where Rose manages to plunge her stake into his chest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nether_World"title="The Nether World">
The old Michael Snowdon returns from Australia to London after inheriting a substantial sum of money from his deceased son. Despite being able to live a comfortable, if not luxurious life, he spends only on necessities and lives like a poor man, keeping his fortune secret. In London he finds his granddaughter, Jane, a weak child whom he rescues from the tyranny of the Peckovers (mother and daughter), in whose house she is employed as a household drudge. Jane's father, Joseph, is another son of Michael's who disappeared a few years ago in search of work, leaving Jane with the Peckovers. Michael nurtures a plan to bestow his fortune on Jane after his death, but he wants Jane to spend this money on charity and social work rather than on her own needs. He engages Jane in charitable activities and everyday work even before he reveals the secret of his wealth to her, trying to inculcate to her the principles of benevolence.Joseph Snowdon returns suddenly to London. Formerly he argued with his father and is not on amiable terms with him. Joseph is preyed upon by the young Clem Peckover who marries him after she and her mother begin suspecting that Joseph's father is rich. Michael receives Joseph reservedly, without revealing intent of sharing the fortune with him. Joseph, pestered by his disappointed wife, also believes that Michael is rich, and tries to win his father's respect by improving relations with Jane. He also befriends Jane's older friend, Sidney Kirkwood. Sidney, an honest and sympathetic character, apparently intends to marry Jane in the future, unaware of Michael's fortune. Joseph, fearing that if Sidney, Michael's favorite, marries Jane, then Michael will leave most of the fortune to the young couple. Therefore, he develops a plan to make Clara Hewett, Sidney's former love, more fond of Sidney, and catalyze their marriage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamburlaine_Must_Die"title="Tamburlaine Must Die">
This novella is set in a plague-ridden London in 1593. Someone calling himself "Tamburlaine", the name of the hero in one of Marlowe's most famous plays, has written a libelous and heretical pamphlet in a style of writing similar to Marlowe's. Marlowe is called before the Privy Council which accuses him of writing the pamphlet; however, he protests his innocence. Marlowe is sentenced to death for this blasphemous writing and only has three days to figure out who really wrote the pamphlet and track that individual down. Marlowe becomes entangled in a web of intrigue, plots and counterplots before his eventual murder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Dawn"title="Breaking Dawn">
"Breaking Dawn" is divided into three parts. The first part details Bella's marriage and honeymoon with Edward, which they spend on Isle Esme, a private island off the coast of Brazil that Carlisle owns. Two weeks into their honeymoon, Bella realizes that she is pregnant. Because the fetus is part-vampire, her condition progresses at an unnaturally accelerated rate. Bella and Edward immediately return home to Forks, Washington, where the fetus continues to develop at an abnormal speed, causing Bella severe physical and emotional distress.The second part of the book is written from the perspective of Jacob Black, a Quileute Native American who, like other members of his tribe, can shapeshift into a wolf. Knowing of Bella's wish to become a vampire, he is immediately suspicious when she returns from her honeymoon and the Cullens keep her father, Charlie, from seeing her. Believing the Cullens have broken their treaty not to bite another human, he advances on their home intending to kill Edward. He arrives and discovers that Bella is undergoing a difficult pregnancy in which the fetus is draining her life away. Jacob begs Bella to abort the fetus to save her life, as neither Carlisle, a doctor, nor Alice who can see the future, are optimistic about Bella's prognosis.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bridge_to_Nowhere_(novel)"title="The Bridge to Nowhere (novel)">
After losing his job as a bridge-builder, Hallie's father begins suffering from depression and fits of anger, which lead Hallie into bouts of isolation. At the onset of the novel, she accompanies her mother to follow her father in order to see where he is going. as he doesn't have a job. They see him standing on top of the "Bridge to Nowhere," a bridge project that he was never able to finish. They return, and a tense evening follows. Hallie tries to communicate with her mother and father, but they are too much blinded by their own fears, doubts, and regrets, that she simply retreats to her room instead. She talks with her friend Jude from school, who is more receptive to Hallie's family issues, but isn't what Hallie needs. Hallie then develops a friendship with Crane Henderson, a high school freshman. She is intimidated at first by his age and popularity, but, after Crane and her go for a walk through the woods, he becomes more comforting and easy to talk to around her. As their relationship grows, Hallie's family life becomes more dreary. Her sister Shelley returns from college, but her jaded attitude towards her family does little to easy Hallie's troubles. In addition, Shelley doesn't want to spend time with Hallie, furthering her younger sister's alienation at home. Crane continues to act as an outlet for Hallie, as someone to talk to. They both go to the bridge one day, where Hallie spots her father standing dangerously high up. As Crane attempts to get his attention, Hallie runs from the scene, afraid he'll find out the man on the bridge is her father. Having alienated Crane, Hallie has no one left to talk to, and finally yells at her father for never talking to her anymore. The next day, she finds that he has driven his car over the edge of the bridge, and was taken to the hospital. She rushes to see him, against her mother's will, and finds that he suffers from amnesia as a result of the accident. Her father returns home after a short stay in the hospital, and is seemingly cured of his bitterness, to the family's relief.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wild_Girls"title="The Wild Girls">
The novel centers around a twelve-year-old girl by the name of Joan who has just moved from Connecticut to a town in California. She figures her time will be miserable until she meets a girl named Sarah, who prefers to be called "Fox" and who lives with her writer father in a rundown house in the middle of the woods.Joan and Sarah—Newt and Fox—spend all their spare time outside, talking and fooling around, and soon start writing stories together. When they win first place in a student fiction writing contest, they are recruited for a prestigious summer writing class taught by a free spirit named Verla Volante.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Murder_Stella"title="We Murder Stella">
Set in the late 1950s, the novella takes the form of a written confession committed to paper in the course of a weekend shortly after Stella's death during which the narrator is alone at home, as her husband Richard and their two children have left the city to visit Richard's mother. Anna realizes that on the surface level everything is back to normal again now that Stella is no longer around: an intruder imposed on the family who was threatening to upset the equilibrium carefully, and tacitly, maintained by each family member has left again. However, Anna cannot but delve deeper into the matter: guilt-ridden, and unable to find any peace of mind, let alone happiness, she remembers many details of Stella's stay in the house, and starts relating the events that have led to the catastrophe of her death in chronological order.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People_of_Kau"title="The People of Kau">
This is a photographic monograph on the life of the people of Kau in the southern part of Sudan. Riefenstahl spent 16 weeks with the Nuba of Kau in 1975. These people, known as the "South East Nuba", live only 100 miles away from the Mesakin Nuba. Yet, they speak another language, follow different customs, and are said to be very different in character and temperament. Their knife-fights, dances of love and elaborately painted faces and bodies are represented in the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Chercheur_d'or"title="Le Chercheur d'or">
Alexis L'Estang becomes obsessed with finding the treasure of the legendary Unknown Corsair on the island of Rodrigues.The child recalls the sea around the island of Rodrigues in the Indian Ocean. The author situated the plot of this book in the village of Anse aux Anglais.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandering_Star_(novel)"title="Wandering Star (novel)">
In the year 1944 in a mountainous area on the French-Italian border Esther and her mother and all the Jews in the village of Saint-Martin must cross from France to Italy to avoid the SS. After the war, she and her mother, Elizabeth, begin their long journey to France, to the sailing ship "Sette Fratelli" which will take them to Palestine. When Esther finally arrives in Jerusalem, she briefly meets and exchanges names with Nejma, a Palestinian, another wanderer, one who ends up, in the summer of 1948, in the Nour Chams Refugee Camp.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ourania_(novel)"title="Ourania (novel)">
Le Clézio lived for fifteen years in a small village in Mexico called Valle de Bravo. Children invented an imaginary country and ideal, Ourania, and this book describes a near-Utopian society in Mexico. Two types of Utopias are compared to each other: a modest Utopia from the Jesuits and the other an ideal city called Santa Fe de la Laguna. The book mentions the transhumant movement Rainbows (1970–1980) and the Salvadoran revolution and its leader, Monsignor Romero. Failure was inevitable. Dreams are necessessary, even if reality isn't.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritournelle_de_la_faim"title="Ritournelle de la faim">
Set in Paris in the 1930s, it tells the story of Ethel, a young woman who must save herself and her parents, torn by the age's politics and their hatred for each other. The story seems so simple. A narrator who is and is not the author tells the story of a young girl – Ethel Brown – who is and is not the mother of JMG Le Clézio.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Near_to_Baby"title="Getting Near to Baby">
In the novel, the characters Willa Jo and Little Sister are dealing with their grief after the passing of their baby sister who drank contaminated water. Their mother is unable to handle her own feelings of dejection while caring for the two girls and her sister takes them to stay with her, Patty. Aunt Patty has no children, and her household is full of rules. Aside from moving into a home with their aunt, things become even more difficult for the girls due to the fact that Aunt Patty does not fully understand them.When Willa Jo and Little Sister climb up on Aunt Patty's roof to watch the sunrise, then decide not to come down for a while, Patty realizes she has not been fulfilling the girls' emotional needs. Willa Jo reflects on her time at her Aunt Patty's house, like meeting Liz, the Piggly-Wiggly pickle, and much more.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Pound_Bank_Note"title="The Million Pound Bank Note">
Henry Adams, a clerk in a San Francisco stockbroker's office, is swept out to sea while sailing one weekend. He is rescued by a ship bound for London and must work during the voyage to earn his passage, and he arrives in the city with his clothing in rags and only one dollar in his pocket. Two very rich and eccentric brothers spot him and give him an envelope with no information. Seeing money inside the envelope, Henry immediately heads for a cheap dining house and eats a meal; afterward, he discovers that the money is a single bank note for one million pounds sterling, the equivalent of $5 million in United States currency. Without knowing it at the time, Henry has become the subject of a £20,000 bet between the brothers. One believes that the mere possession of the bank note can enable a person to survive even with no other means of support, while the other feels that the holder will be unable to use it without drawing the authorities' suspicions.Harris, the proprietor of the dining house, tells Henry not to worry about payment when Henry tries to obtain change. Henry then finds a note from one of the brothers, telling him of the bet and instructing him to return to them in 30 days with the bank note intact and unspent. If Henry fulfills these conditions and thus wins the bet for the writer, he can have any situation that he is qualified to fill. Henry realizes that he would not be easily able to exchange the bank note in the bank without being questioned about how he had come to have it, charged with theft and arrested. He would also not be able to spend it since no ordinary person would be able to change it. Finally, in desperation, Henry decides to see if he can use the note to get a cheap suit to replace his rags, similar to the way he got his meal; when he pulls out the million-pound note to pay, the store manager gives him an entire wardrobe on credit. Ultimately, he becomes a celebrity in London as the "vest pocket million-pounder" or the "vest-pocket monster", and Harris' dining house becomes so famous that Harris actually lends Henry money. Henry tries to keep his borrowings under control so that he will be able to pay everyone back over time when he gets his situation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Along_for_the_Ride_(novel)"title="Along for the Ride (novel)">
Auden West is an academically accomplished girl who didn't get the chance to enjoy the activities young children often got to do (such as riding a bike) when she was a child. After being accepted into Defriese University upon graduating high school, Auden is not sure on how to spend her summer. After receiving a package from her brother Hollis who is touring Europe, she decides to take up her father's offer to spend her summer before college in the beach town Colby. When she arrives, she hopes she can have some bonding time with her father. However, she is disappointed to find that that will not be the case since her father spends all his time working on his novel. One night Auden heads down to the Tip, a stretch of beach where all the teens hang out. At the Tip she runs into a guy named Jake, with whom she "almost" ends up having a one-night stand with. Feeling guilty and wrong about what she was doing, Auden leaves for home. Early in the morning, she helps out her young stepmother Heidi by supervising her newborn half-sister, Thisbe, while Heidi rests. Auden also helps Heidi run an errand for Heidi's boutique named Clementine's.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_to_the_Wild_Heart"title="Near to the Wild Heart">
"Near to the Wild Heart" does not have a conventional narrative plot. It instead recounts flashes from the life of Joana, between her present, as a young woman, and her early childhood. These focus, like most of Lispector's works, on interior, emotional states.The book opens with a scene of the child Joana playing in the garden, making up poems for her father. Joana's wildness and barely suppressed violence, along with her linguistic creativity, are her most notable features. She is frequently compared to animals: over the course of the book Lispector compares her to a bird, a snake, a wildcat, a horse, and a dog. She commits transgressive acts—as a child she throws a book at an old man's head, for example, and as a married woman she leaves her husband, Otávio, and greets the news of his adultery—he has made another woman, his old friend Lídia, pregnant—with utter indifference. She is not so much immoral as she is amoral: “Evil is not living, and that’s it. Dying is already something else. Dying is different from good and evil.” In the book, she cites long passages from Spinoza, the longest quotes that appear anywhere in her novels; it seems that she felt an affinity with the Dutch philosopher's amoral conception of the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill,_Hitler_and_the_Unnecessary_War"title="Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War">
Buchanan argues that it was a great mistake for Britain to fight Germany in both world wars, which he argues was a disaster for the whole world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saving_the_Appearances"title="Saving the Appearances">
## An evolution of phenomena correlative to an evolution of consciousness.Barfield argues that if, as physics suggests, ordinary appearances—including for example colors, sounds, and smells—are a kind of subjective response of the human organism to an unknown underlying base of reality, and if what underlies our phenomena and is real "independently" of us is only what is suggested by science's experimental hypotheses of a subatomic world; if, that is, we must conclude that there is no such thing as unseen color, unheard sound, or unfelt solidity, because physics tells us the only thing existing independently of us is a subsensible or supersensible base symbolized in some detail by particle theory—then in that case other sciences besides physics, in particular those sciences that deal with the pre-human past, must be profoundly reconceived.For example, the evolutionary biologist and the archaeologist talk about the pre-human, and even pre-life distant past as if color, sound, solidity, and a phenomenal world rather like that of modern Western humanity were all present even before the advent of life and consciousness, though physics tells us that all that is present in the absence of human beings or life is what can be described quantitatively by the particle theories of physics. Barfield emphasizes that contradiction between physics on the one hand, and on the other, sciences that offer an account of the earth before life and consciousness evolved. Barfield draws out the implications and argues we must learn to conceive of an "evolution of phenomena" that first begins at the point where life and consciousness manifest. The evolution of phenomena is correlative to the evolution of consciousness. Prior to the point where consciousness, and in particular "human" consciousness, comes into existence, we should not naively speak as if phenomena similar to our own existed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Freedom"title="Pirate Freedom">
The hero is named Christopher (Chris, Crisóforo, Christophe). He recounts his childhood and career as a pirate, interspersed with digressions about events in his later life, including the time when he is writing the book (as in "The Book of the Short Sun"). The following summarizes his story in the order in which he experiences it.Chris is a Sicilian-American. When he is ten, Communism ends in Cuba, and his father (apparently a "wiseguy") moves there with him to run a casino. Chris goes to school at a monastery, where he becomes a novice and helps a Brother Ignacio with the farm work. At one point, he notices that many of the people he knew are gone, Mass is in Latin, and no one wears a watch. Somewhat later, he walks away from the monastery.A farmer in a horse-drawn wagon picks him up and takes him to Havana—but the roads are unpaved and Havana is much smaller than he remembers. Chris lives by theft until he signs on to a Spanish brig bound for Veracruz, Mexico. He is raped twice by shipmates, but thereafter manages to avoid them, and he enjoys learning military seamanship.In Veracruz he meets an English captain, Abraham Burt. Then Chris's ship sails to Spain, where he becomes infatuated with Estrellita, the maid of a wealthy young married woman. Her master puts a stop to the relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_in_the_Dress_(novel)"title="The Boy in the Dress (novel)">
The story follows a 12-year-old boy named Dennis and his 14-year-old brother John, whose parents divorced when Dennis was only 7. The boys remain with their father, who resorts to comfort eating after his wife leaves. Dennis is talented in football and is one of the best on his team. However, he deeply misses his mother, who left their family about five years ago, and finds comfort remembering his mother's yellow dress in an old picture. Dennis sees the same dress on the cover of a "Vogue" magazine and buys a copy from Raj, the local shop owner. But when Dad finds the magazine, he is furious and forces Dennis to throw it away, while John teases him by calling him "Denise". At school that day, Dennis is given detention for kicking a football through an office window. While in detention, he talks to a girl named Lisa James, the prettiest and most fashionable girl in the school. Lisa invites him over to her house, showing Dennis her collection of Vogue magazines and dressing him up in girls' clothing. The two decide to go out in public, with Dennis in an electric blue dress, under the alter ego of "Denise", a French exchange student who speaks very little English. They go to Raj's corner shop. Raj does not recognise Dennis, believing he is "Denise". Later on, they meet a friend of Lisa's named Mac, and he was so impressed by "Denise" that he asks "Denise" on a date, not knowing that it was actually Dennis. Following their success in fooling Raj and Mac, Dennis goes to school with Lisa as "Denise".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quofum"title="Quofum">
Sent by the Humanx Commonwealth Science Council, a team of explorers manage to find the planet Quofum—which only occasionally appears on long range scans. Since the planet is outside of the Commonwealth territory their mission is deemed minor and unimportant. The team's four scientists—two human males, one human female and one male thranx—initially discover four separate, unique sentient species. Combined with Quofum's nine percent alcohol oceans, its unstable appearance is seemingly part of the nature of Quofum: every species on Quofum is seemingly unrelated—casting well-established scientific notions of evolution into doubt.When the team's mechanic, Salvador Araza murders the ship's captain—revealing himself to be a member of the assassin clan, the Qwarm—the scientific exploration nearly ends. Before stranding the scientists on Quofum, Araza kills one member of the team who tries to stop him from stealing the ship's shuttle. Upon returning to the ship Araza leaves Quofum but quickly discovers he is not in any part of the known universe. Unknowingly he left the planet while it was in an alternate universe where it periodically hides. Upon realizing his mistake, Araza tries to re-locate Quofum, but fails—stranding himself in the alternate universe.The three remaining scientists fall into a survivor's depression realizing their small expedition won't be missed while also lacking a means to return home on their own. They continue to explore and document Quofum's flora and fauna, documenting upwards of ten different sentient species of various degrees of technological development. Eventually they happen upon an entrance to the inner workings of the planet. The ancient race (unnamed, but obviously the Xunca) that once inhabited Quofum altered their planet when they realized the inter-galactic Great Evil was eventually coming to their corner of the universe. The main alternation was to give Quofum the ability to shift to a different universe to protect itself. They also started multiple experiments to create different diverse races in an attempt to find a species that could trigger the "Great Attractor device" they set up in the Norma cluster to fight the Great Evil.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curious_George_(book)"title="Curious George (book)">
The story opens with George, a little orphaned monkey, in the jungle of Africa. A Man with a Yellow Hat observes him through his binoculars and decides to bring the monkey home with him. He puts his hat on the ground and hides behind a tree. George, ever curious, comes down from the tree. He puts the hat on but it is so large that he cannot see and this gives The Man In The Yellow Hat the chance to capture him and put him in a bag. The man takes George in a rowboat to his cruise ship where he tells George that he is taking him to a zoo in a big city and that he will like it there. He then gives George the run of the ship and tells him not to get into trouble. On deck, George sees some birds, tries to fly, and falls overboard. The crew notices that George is missing, and spot him in the Atlantic Ocean. They throw him a lifesaver and pull him aboard.When they arrive in America, George says goodbye to the sailors, and is then taken to the man's house, where he has a meal, smokes a pipe, and then goes to bed. The next day, after seeing the man make a telephone call to the zoo before leaving, George decides to try the telephone himself, until he inadvertently calls the fire station and sets off a false fire alarm. The firefighters (who hear the call and the alarm) are unaware that it is George. Then they look at a signal screen (revealing a map) and the location highlights where the telephone call had come from. Thinking there is a real fire, the firefighters get into their trucks quickly. But when they rush to the house, all they find is no fire but a monkey (which is George). A thin firefighter caught one arm and the fat one caught the other. They arrest him for the false alarm. They tell George that since he fooled the fire department, they will have to shut him up in a prison where he cannot do anymore harm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curious_George_Takes_a_Job"title="Curious George Takes a Job">
The book picks up where the first book ends. George is living in the zoo, until he gets a key from a zookeeper and escapes his cage. In the city, George sneaks into a restaurant where he is caught in the kitchen eating a pot of spaghetti and forced by the cook to wash the dishes, but he does a splendid job. As a reward, the cook takes him to meet an elevator man, who gives him a job as a window washer for a tall apartment building. As George works, he observes many people in the different windows, such as a child refusing to eat spinach and a man sleeping. Once he reaches the final window, he notices a room behind the window being painted. George lets curiosity get to him again, he enters the apartment just as the painters leave for lunch and decides to paint it for them.An hour later, the painters return and see that George has given the room a jungle theme, including painting the furniture coverings as animals. Furious, the painters, the elevator man, and the lady owning the apartment chase him out of the room and down a fire escape, followed by the other tenants. George then jumps from the end of the stairway thinking he will be home free, but forgetting how hard the pavement is, the jump causes him to break his leg and an ambulance soon arrives to take George to the hospital. As the others look on, the lady of the apartment remarks that the injury serves him right for ruining her room and the elevator man adds that he knew that George would get into trouble because he was too curious.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curious_George_Rides_a_Bike"title="Curious George Rides a Bike">
To celebrate the three years since he brought George home from the jungle, The Man With The Yellow Hat plans to take George to the animal show, and he has also bought George a blue bicycle. George is shown doing many tricks with it, including riding backwards, and riding on the back wheel. As he's riding, he meets Bill, the local paperboy, whom he helps deliver his papers. After tossing the papers to one side of the street, he sees the road continue off somewhere he is curious about. So he rides on and doesn't deliver to the other side. He rides past a stream and sees two boys playing with boats, and decides he wants to play with boats as well, so he gets off the bike and starts folding all the newspapers into boats (with helpful diagrams to help the reader do the same) and set them off in the water to watch them float around. As he watches his boats float down the stream, he's still riding the bike, but without watching where he was going, he crashes into a rock, emerging unhurt but severely damaging his front wheel. Not knowing what to do now (after trying to ride normally, and trying to carry the bike) he breaks down into tears, but then brightens up when he realized he can still ride the bike on the back wheel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syren_(novel)"title="Syren (novel)">
This story picks up where "Queste" ended. Jenna, Nicko, Snorri, Ullr and Beetle are in the small harbor known as the Trading Post, where Jenna encounters her father, Milo Banda, who persuades them to spend the night on his ship. Back in The Castle, Septimus gets a promotion to Senior Apprentice by Marcia Overstrand, for being the only apprentice wizard to complete the Queste. This enables him to head off on an adventure of his own. His escapade begins as he plans a simple flight on board his dragon, Spit Fyre, to retrieve his friends from the Trading Post. Around this time, Aunt Zelda sends Wolf Boy from the Marram Marshes. She is giving him a challenging test for becoming the first male Keeper. As soon as Wolf Boy leaves, Zelda retrieves a SafeCharm, which appears to be a tiny, pear-shaped gold bottle. She needs to deliver it to Septimus, however, by the time she arrives he has already left. Due to an unfortunate mix-up, the SafeCharm falls into the hands of Merrin Meredith who stole it believing it to be a rare perfume. When he takes the top off to sniff it, a jinnie comes out of it. "Jim Knee" as he is called by Merrin, sets off on his own adventure. Meanwhile, Wolf Boy bumps into Simon Heap in the Port; he was looking for his fiancée Lucy Gringe who had been missing. Wolf Boy approaches the House of the Port Witch Coven. There he reads Zelda's letter which tells him to feed a creature called Grim and cut-off its tentacle tip. The Port Witch takes him inside her kitchen and wakes the Grim, which is a giant octopus. The witches bring forth a captive Lucy to feed to the Grim. Under the pretense of feeding Lucy to the Grim, Wolf Boy and Lucy escape from the coven. They are chased by a senior witch, Linda, but they escape by riding straight into a leaving ship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam's_Letters_to_Jennifer"title="Sam's Letters to Jennifer">
Jennifer, who is still mourning the death of her husband, is rushed to her grandmother's side when she goes into a coma. Jennifer makes the shocking discovery while there of a packet of letters addressed to her, to read from grandmother, Sam. As Jennifer reads the letters, she follows the sad story of Sam, who married young to a Stanford man, only to find true love soon after with a man nicknamed "Doc". Jennifer is also beginning to find love with a friend from her childhood, Brendan, whom she later finds out is fighting for his life with a brain tumor. As the summer progresses, Sam comes out of her coma and Brendan leaves Jennifer to have a dangerous and possibly life-ending surgery to remove the tumor. Jennifer tracks him down and is there for him when he has, and lives through, the surgery. Brendan gains his health back and "Doc" is revealed to be the family friend Reverend John. At the end of the book, Sam dies, and at her service Jennifer announces that she is pregnant with Brendan's child, who they hope to name Sam. It is later revealed that the child is a daughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare_Bones_(novel)"title="Bare Bones (novel)">
In the Charlotte summer heat, Brennan is hoping to get away for a few days at the beach with her would-be lover, Detective Andrew Ryan. First she has to identify the skeleton of a newborn baby found in a wood stove; the baby was probably born to the missing daughter of a former colleague. Then a small plane flies into a rock face; the occupants may have been drug running. A picnic at Cowans Ford with Brennan's daughter Katy turns sour when her estranged husband's dog Boyd discovers mixed animal and human bones in a derelict outhouse. Is the headless body found in South Carolina linked, and who is sending Brennan e-mails telling her to back-off ? More puzzling, the drug runners and the animal (bear and rare bird) bones seem to be connected in a blatant CITES violation - the market for CITES animals and parts thereof being as hot as the drug market. Brennan, helped by Ryan and Detective "Skinny" Slidell, must try and piece together these seemingly random events and discover who is behind the racket.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poverty_of_Historicism"title="The Poverty of Historicism">
The book is a treatise on scientific method in the social sciences. Popper defines historicism as: "“an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim…”". He also remarks that "“[t]he belief … that it is the task of the social sciences to lay bare the law of evolution of society in order to foretell its future… might be described as the central historicist doctrine.”"Popper distinguishes two main strands of historicism, a “"pro-naturalistic"” approach which "“favours the application of the methods of physics”" and the "“anti-naturalistic”" approach which opposes these methods. The first two parts of the book contain Popper's exposition of historicist views (both pro- and anti-naturalistic), and the second two parts contain his criticism of them. Popper concludes by contrasting the antiquity of historicism (which, for example, Plato is said to have espoused) with the claims of modernity made by its twentieth-century adherents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curious_George_Goes_to_the_Hospital"title="Curious George Goes to the Hospital">
George wakes up to find a box labeled "surprise" on the desk, it contains a jigsaw puzzle. George opens the box, takes a puzzle piece out and, thinking it is a piece of candy, he swallows it. The Man with the Yellow Hat comes home and tells George that the puzzle is a present for him. They both assemble the puzzle, but notice that the last piece is missing. Unable to find the missing piece, they go to bed. The next morning, George has a stomachache and is unable to eat his breakfast. Worried, the Man calls the doctor. The doctor is unable to determine the problem and recommends that George should go to the hospital.The Man reassures George at the hospital, reminding him of being here before when he broke his leg (referencing a previous story). George is given a barium drink from a nurse and then taken to the x-ray room. The taken x-ray reveals the puzzle piece lodged in George's stomach, the Man with the Yellow Hat realizes that the last piece was missing because George had swallowed it. The doctor then tells George that a small operation is needed to remove it, and he has to stay for a few days. He reveals that a tube is needed to take the puzzle piece out of George's stomach.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise_(novel)"title="Sunrise (novel)">
"Sunrise" begins with Leafpool repeating a long-used ritual to send Ashfur to StarClan. During the process, she discovers a tuft of fur in Ashfur's claws, and she knows whose it is, although she does not say.ThunderClan discusses Ashfur's murder, and many think that a WindClan cat killed him since he was found on the WindClan border. To find out, Firestar sends a patrol to WindClan, but Onestar denies the possibility. As the patrol leaves, Ashfoot tells ThunderClan that she sighted Sol near the site of Ashfur's dead body, and this leads many cats to believe that Sol killed Ashfur.Firestar sends Birchfall, Brambleclaw, Brackenfur, Hazeltail, Hollyleaf, and Lionblaze to the sun-drown-place to find Sol. The patrol finds Sol in the Twolegplace where Purdy, a friend of ThunderClan lives. Brambleclaw persuades Purdy to live in the Clan as an elder. Both Sol and Purdy agree to go to ThunderClan. When the patrol returns to the Clan, Sol denies killing Ashfur and is kept under guard in the camp.Being the most curious of the Three, Jayfeather tries to find out who his true parents are. When asking around about his birth, Mousefur reveals that Leafpool accidentally put a strange herb in Mousefur's tansy soon after Jayfeather's birth. After looking through herbs in the medicine cat's den and with herbs sticking to his pelt, he goes to Mousefur to deliver some fresh-kill. Mousefur says that a certain herb sticking to his fur is the mystery herb, but Jayfeather does not know what it is. To find out, he asks Littlecloud when the medicine cats meet at the Moonpool. The ShadowClan medicine cat recognizes it as parsley, a herb that stops the milk of a cat whose kits die. Jayfeather also remembers that, on his journey to ThunderClan from his birthplace, there was another cat with him besides Squirrelflight: Leafpool, the true mother of the Three.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_of_Adventure"title="The Island of Adventure">
During school holidays, Jack, his sister Lucy-Ann, and their parrot Kiki go to stay with their new friends, Philip and Dinah, in their isolated old house, "Craggy-Tops", set on a steep cliff on the coast. The house is owned by Phillip and Dinah's uncle Jocelyn (a focused historian) and overworked aunt Polly, who are helped by a handyman named Joe.Joe warns the boys that, from their tower room in Craggy-Tops, they can occasionally see the dangerous Isle of Gloom, though it is usually shrouded in fog and mist. Soon the children meet Bill Smugs who shares Jack's fascination with birds. The children sail out to the Isle of Gloom and eventually learn that Joe is working with men who are counterfeiting money in the old mines on the island.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_Apartheid"title="Medical Apartheid">
"Medical Apartheid" traces the complex history of medical experimentation on Black Americans in the United States since the middle of the eighteenth century. Harriet Washington argues that "diverse forms of racial discrimination have shaped both the relationship between white physicians and black patients and the attitude of the latter towards modern medicine in general".The book is divided into three parts: the first is about the cultural memory of medical experimentation; the second examines recent cases of medical abuse and research; while the last addresses the complex relationship between racism and medicine. Some topics discussed are well-known, such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiment (193272), in which African Americans with the disease were intentionally denied treatment (without being told) in order to allow the progression of the disease so it could be observed in all stages, but other episodes are less well known to the general public. The book also mentions cases of medical experimentation in Africa and their links to African-American cases.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.I.V.E._(series)"title="H.I.V.E. (series)">
H.I.V.E., the Higher Institute of Villainous Education, is a top-secret school hidden inside a still active volcano. The school is a part of G.L.O.V.E., the Global League of Villainous Enterprises, and was built for the purpose of training children to become criminal masterminds. Only children who have already been seen to have some villainous skill are accepted to the school. The school has four streams; the Alpha stream, Henchmen stream, Technical stream, and the Political/Financial stream. Each stream is associated with a color, and their uniforms reflect this. Alphas have black, Henchman has blue, Technical is white, and Political/Financial is grey. Otto Malpense is a thirteen-year-old criminal genius, who has been handpicked along with others-the most intelligent, most athletic, technologically advanced children in the world to be part of H.I.V.E. In the first book, Otto has entered the school; he discovers that it is not all that it seems, and sets out to unfold the mystery behind the school and its organization. Otto and his friends, Wing, Shelby, and Laura try to defy the headmaster, Dr. Maximilian Nero, and try to accomplish something no one has ever succeeded in: escaping H.I.V.E. alive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_of_the_Flood"title="The Year of the Flood">
The Year of the Flood details the events of "Oryx and Crake" from the perspective of the lower classes in the pleeblands, specifically the God's Gardeners who live in a commune at the Edencliff Rooftop Garden. God's Gardeners are a religious sect that combines some Biblical practices and beliefs with some scientific practices and beliefs. They are vegetarians devoted to honoring and preserving all plant and animal life, and they predict a human species-ending disaster, which they call "The Waterless Flood". This prediction becomes true in a sense, as Crake's viral pandemic destroys human civilization. God's Gardeners have their own set of saints, all honoured for their environmental activism, such as Saint Dian Fossey and Saint Rachel Carson.The plot follows two characters, Toby and Ren, whose stories intertwine with each other and, at points, with major characters from "Oryx and Crake". Much of the story is told through flashbacks with the two main characters separately surviving the apocalypse described in the previous novel, each reminiscing about their time in the God's Gardeners religious movement and the events that led to their current situations. Atwood uses third-person narration for Toby's accounts and first-person narration for Ren's.Toby is a young woman who loses her parents under tragic circumstances that may or may not be due to the corporations, and is forced to live off of the grid in a shady meat burger joint working as a meat barista at SecretBurgers. She soon encounters the unwelcome attentions of Blanco the psychopathic manager of the chain who has a reputation for sexually assaulting and murdering the women in his employ. Toby is able to escape when a group of God's Gardeners arrive at the restaurant. She follows them to the rooftop garden where she finds her former colleague Rebecca. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinflicks"title="Kinflicks">
The novel starts with a first-person reflection on her life so far by the protagonist, Virginia "Ginny" Hull Babcock Bliss, as she catches a plane to look after her gravely ill mother. From then on, dated chapters in third person alternate with Ginny's non-linear first-person reminiscences of her childhood, her teenage years, her college years, her marriage, and beyond.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guarding_Hanna"title="Guarding Hanna">
He was born a freak. With above-average intelligence, which soon realises that a body bent on destruction cannot live among others. The only person who can help him is a Mafia don, who has enough money to isolate the monster. But nothing comes free. And now, the moment when the freak has to repay the favour has arrived. He has to come out of isolation and become a bodyguard of a woman named Hanna for a week.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crossroads_(novel)"title="The Crossroads (novel)">
Zack Jennings, his dad, and his new stepmother Judy have just moved back to his father’s hometown, in Connecticut, not knowing that their new house has a dark history. Fifty years ago, a crazed killer caused an accident at the nearby crossroads that took 40 innocent lives. He died when his car hit a tree, which is in Zack's backyard. Since then, his malevolent spirit has inhabited the tree. During a huge storm, a lightning hits the tree, releasing the spirit, and the spirit began looking for the descendants of those who cost him his life, starting with Zack, whose grandfather started it all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_the_Rattling_Spirits"title="King of the Rattling Spirits">
The novel is first person narrative of a twelve year old Egon who tries to become a normal teenager with normal teenage problems of growing up in a milieu of little industrial town in then Tito's Yugoslavia with open borders to the West that allowed free visits to the other side of the iron curtain that was not so iron at the borders between modern day Slovenia and Italy, in times of record players and popular and less popular alternative music records. However for Egon, having normal teenage problems is a hard task for him.At home he is exposed to his grandmothers PTSD, which she got from World War One because of which she keeps having hallucinations of dead souls and she makes sure that Egon keeps watching dreadful illustrations of martyrs from her little book of Catholic saints and apologize to dead souls for stepping on them accidentally, which only she can see.As well at home he is exposed to neglect and scapegoating by his single mother, who is in conflict with his nona.As if that isn't enough (and too much) for a child, he gets sexually abused by teacher at school who keeps molesting him at school. Also a beautiful girl is also sexually abused by her own father at home and because of that - as the narrator tells at the end of the novel - finds escape from her nightmarish life in her death (suicide) at the end. Egon can only dream of having the kind of problems his teenage peers have, that would be "sweet dreams" for him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Place_Called_Freedom"title="A Place Called Freedom">
Malachi (Mack) and Esther McAsh are 22-year-old twins living in the community of Heugh, a coal mining settlement above the pits owned by their Laird, Sir George Jamisson, a wealthy coal and shipping magnate with two sons, Robert (by his first, deceased wife) and Jay (by his second wife). As coal miners, Mack and Esther live a slightly better existence than the tenant farmers below Heugh, but they live a near-slave-like legal existence, since by legal tradition, any man working more than a year in coal mines becomes the property of the mine owner.On the opposite side of the mountains from Heugh is High Glen, the estate of the widowed Lady Hallim, mother to the independent Lizzie. The estate of High Glen is highly indebted, since it has not exploited its coal reserves, and Lady Hallim has managed her estate poorly. As such, she has high hopes that Lizzie will marry well and rid her estate of its debts. Lizzie is something of a tomboy, enjoying the great outdoors and hunting with a rifle over balls and dresses. In the past, Lizzie played with Mack and Esther, without her mother's knowledge.Mack and Esther's parents are dead, but their mother was a maidservant to Lady Hallim before her marriage, and as such taught them to read and write. This encouraged an egalitarian and rebellious streak in Mack, who wants nothing better than to escape Heugh. Mack writes to Caspar Gordonson, a London lawyer and reformist, asking him if the practice of enslaving coal miners is legal. Gordonson writes back that any parent may accept "arles," (money given to pledge their child to work in the mines) but on their coming of age (at 21), they are free, unless as an adult they work a year and a day, at which point, they are the property of the mine owner.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_Babies"title="Babylon Babies">
Set in 2013, the main character, Hugo Cornelius Toorop (hero of "The Red Siren"), is a mercenary whose mission is to escort a young woman with schizophrenia, Marie Zorn, from Siberia to Quebec on behalf of a sect. It appears that the young woman is the surrogate mother of twins, representing the next stage of human evolution.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ancient_Ship"title="The Ancient Ship">
Set in the fictional Shandong town of Wali, the novel explores the enduring culture and psychology of the Chinese people.The plot is non-linear and events move into and out of and around certain events in the first forty years of the People's Republic of China. Although these events, as a background to the ancient patterns of the struggle for survival in Wali are almost inconsequential, they also have profound repercussions.Although the reader might identify the struggle for land reform, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Sino-Vietnamese war and the “reform and opening up”, these milestones in the history of contemporary China are unmarked, their anonymity serving to deny, for the author, that linear time has any meaning or relevance for the ebb and flow of Chinese life.Liberation in 1949 and the period of the Five Year Plans are referred to in passing as “By then an earthshaking change had occurred in our land, characterized mainly by pervasive turmoil. The people were confident that it would take only a few years to overtake England and catch up to America” (p. 9).The masking of such familiar milestones and the moving backwards and forwards between them simultaneously upsets the Western mind's reliance on a linear time structure and brings to the fore a concentration on what the author sees as innate Chinese characteristics that are as much a part of the Chinese mind as ancient walls and ancient ships are part of its landscape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno's_Dream"title="Bruno's Dream">
Set in London, the novel tells the story of a dying man called Bruno and his family. Narrated in the third person that allows for multiple character perspectives it follows Bruno, Bruno's son Miles, Miles' wife Diana and her sister Lisa, Bruno's son-in-law Danby, Bruno's nurse Adelaide, Nigel (the messianic figure consistently found in Murdoch's novels) and Nigel's twin brother, Will. The novel ends with all the different people, other than Nigel, coupling up.Couples:Miles and Parvati (1st wife), Miles and Diana (2nd wife), Miles and Lisa (Diana's sister) they love each other but never get together.Danby and Gwen (1st wife and Bruno's daughter), Danby and Adelaide (his maid/mistress), Danby and Diana- they go dancing once and he proposes an affair, but it doesn't come to fruition. Danby and Lisa (they end up together at the end of the novel.Bruno and Janie (his wife), Bruno and Maureen (his mistress).Will and Adelaide (cousins)In the end the couples are Miles and Diana, Danby and Lisa, Bruno and Diana, and Will and Adelaide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_Soup"title="Broken Soup">
Rowan copes with the death of her older brother and takes on a lot responsibilities. After her father leaves, abandoning the family, and her mother slips into a depression, Rowan must take care of her little sister, Stroma, as well as the house. Through the pain of losing her older brother and through the stress of inheriting these new responsibilities, Rowan becomes closer to a classmate of hers and discovers just how little she knew about her older brother (Contemporary Authors Online, 2009). This new relationship with Harper, begins when he hands Rowan a negative of a photograph that he claimed she had dropped. Although Rowan knows that the photo negative is not hers, she is too preoccupied with her troubled home life and takes it anyway without thinking it would lead her to a different life. Rowan also develops a relationship with a girl, Bee, who saw Harper hand Rowan the negative and questioned her about it (Jones, 2008). Bee's relationship with Rowan is more complicated than the reader would originally guess. A plot twist reveals a few secrets about Bee involving Rowan's dead brother, Jack, as they two work together to develop the negative and solve the mystery. Rowan finds out that Bee's 2-year-old brother is actually a child Bee had with Jack (Patti). Rowan begins to rely heavily on Bee and Harper when dealing with her rough home life, especially when her mom tries to commit suicide (Kirkus, 2009). The novel's theme, set by Jenny Valentine, is "developing". The book follows Rowan as she develops new relationships and a new family (Kraus, 2009)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Price_of_Murder"title="The Price of Murder">
Sir John and Jeremy are drawn deep into the notorious Seven Dials area of London, where they must contend with the most sordid inclinations of both the working class and the aristocracy. When the body of a young girl is pulled from the Thames, the search for the girl's mother takes Jeremy to the races.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_Engagement_(Alexander_novel)"title="Rules of Engagement (Alexander novel)">
Sir John and Jeremy are confronted with a series of bizarre deaths (including an unmotivated suicide) on the streets of Georgian London in a mystery that tests even Sir John's legendary skills of deduction. This book ends the series.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Person_of_Interest_(novel)"title="A Person of Interest (novel)">
The novel begins with a deadly explosion in the office of Rick Hendley, a successful mathematics and computer science professor at a mid-tier midwestern university. Lee, a tenured Asian-born professor who is near retirement, is in his own office, which is next door to Hendley's, when the bomb goes off. The explosion sends Hendley to the hospital, where he eventually dies. Tired and solitary after two divorces, Lee suddenly finds himself in the public eye after the bombing. This draws Lee to the attention of the bomber, who reveals in a letter to Lee that he was once a colleague. Although not supplying his identity, Lee immediately assumes the letter is from Lewis Gaither, his old graduate school colleague. In a series of flashbacks, the author reveals that Lewis Gaither and Lee used to be friends. Lee began an affair with Gaither's wife Aileen. Aileen eventually left Gaither and married Lee, leading to an end of Gaither and Lee's friendship. Gaither gained sole custody of his and Aileen's infant son and then soon after left the country to be an evangelical Christian missionary in a series of different locations. Because of Lee's indifference toward helping Aileen get her son back and general lack of empathy toward Aileen, Aileen eventually divorces him later. She dies a few years later. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Woman_With_No_Clothes_On"title="A Woman With No Clothes On">
The aristocratic Manet and the working-class Victorine Meurent narrate "A Woman With No Clothes On". A chance meeting between the two leads to an intense relationship of painting and sexual tension. Manet creates a scandal when he exhibits "Le déjeuner sur l'herbe" and "Olympia" in which the naked model is a young Victorine. While critics and the general public dismiss the works, and label Victorine a common prostitute, she is determined to make her mark in the art world as a painter in her own right. Her bitter struggle to succeed is punctuated by the exchanges between Manet and his friend Baudelaire on the matter of modernism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_Treasure_of_Glaston"title="The Hidden Treasure of Glaston">
"The Hidden Treasure of Glaston" is an exciting mystery thriller about a boy's journey in becoming a man and his struggle to obtain the Holy Grail that Jesus used at the Last Supper. "The Hidden Treasure of Glaston" takes place in Britain in 1171, and the story is seen through the eyes of the main character Hugh, a sickly boy whose father abandons him at Glastonbury Abbey when he is 12 years old. He seeks occupation at the monastery's scriptorium, where it is the monks' responsibility to copy the scriptures as the printing press was not yet invented. Hugh does not show much promise upon his arrival at the monastery at first but makes immense changes as he transforms into a responsible, persevering, and religious young man. It is nearing the end of his journey that he shows the qualities and personal growth that make him seem more refined in all aspects of his personality. He shows little regard towards his well-being as he begins to travel knowing the dangers he would face. The journey unravels with him escaping from a mob that chases after him, finding his way through deserts and caves and making it to Glaston before he gets caught. Despite all the difficulties he faces throughout the story, he shows perseverance. He becomes a new person through his adventures, having developed more strength, faith and courage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Softwire"title="The Softwire">
## "Virus on Orbis 1"."Virus on Orbis 1" introduces Johnny Turnbull, his sister Ketheria, and a group of orphaned children who are forced into slavery on the rings of Orbis. It opens on board "Renaissance", a human seed ship where JT lives with 200 other children, orphaned in space. After their parents have died in "sleepers", apparently due to a malfunction, the children are raised by a ship's computer known as Mother. JT's biggest problem is in dealing with Switzer, the ship's bully; otherwise, he lives a quiet and unassuming life watching over his mute sister, Ketheria...except, JT has one oddity: he communicates telephatically with Mother and claims to receive answers in return. JT always wonders what kind of fantastic world his parents once desired for a new home. Now, as "Renaissance" arrives at Orbis 1, he is going to find out.Orbis 1 seems wondrous. Yet the children are immediately shocked to learn that they will be expected to fulfill their parents' contract for their passage. Their freedom which they once enjoyed on the "Renaissance" is quickly reduced to slavery. Now their new "Guarantor", Boohral is a heartless Citizen. Intrigue builds. JT and the Orbisians soon learn that JT can enter computers with his mind, then later with his essence—that is, JT is a "softwire" (the very "first" human softwire) and it is this use (or abuse) of telepathic computer-interaction which propels "The Softwire" series forward. Since the Orbisian Universe is run by an enormous, self-correcting, central computer, JT's gift is great cause for concern. Many Citizens aspire to possess him so that he can be used for their own gain. JT just wishes to be normal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_Interflux"title="Son of Interflux">
Simon Irving has just moved to the town of Greenbush, New York with his parents. His father is the Senior Vice President of Interflux, a large corporation that makes only parts of things. He enters into Nassau County High School for Visual, Literary and Performing Arts, an arts school, in an attempt to become a painter and therefore avoid the business job that his father has planned for him.When he finds out that a major expansion is in the works and that the school's greenspace (a small wood and stream) will have to be cut down to make way, Simon finds a way to get back at Interflux.He uses Student Council funds to purchase a crazily shaped strip of land that Interflux is not aware of and therefore does not own. Inventing the rival group "Antiflux", he convinces most of the school's 1500 students to go along with him. By blockading the land, Antiflux causes the expansion to grind to a halt.On top of this, Simon has to keep his grades up and keep the student body from finding out that he is the "Son of Interflux".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kine_Saga"title="The Kine Saga">
## Marshworld.The young least weasel Kine lives alone at the place of his birth, beneath the roots of an old fallen willow dubbed the Life Tree. A very proud, boastful creature, he has few acquaintances: Watchman, the cynical old rook; Scrat, the shrew who is more nuisance than friend; and Kia, the bright young female weasel who seeks Kine's companionship.Adamant that weasels are meant to lead solitary lives, Kine spurns her affections, but soon comes to respect her when she rescues him from an owl, at risk to her own life. The two weasels become inseparable, creating a den beneath the Life Tree and parenting five kits. Content with this idyllic lifestyle, Kine is unaware of the brutal mink Gru and her followers intent on invading the forest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Monkeys"title="Bad Monkeys">
The beginning of the book takes place in the mental disabilities wing of the Las Vegas Clark County Detention Center. A psychiatrist named Dr. Vale interviews Jane Charlotte, who is there for the murder of a man called Dixon. Jane claims that she works for a secret organization devoted to fighting evil and that she is the operative for the Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons, which is also known as Bad Monkeys. She also claims that her job is to eliminate individuals who are guilty of heinous crimes, but might elude normal channels of justice. Jane tells her story to Dr. Vale about her life working with Bad Monkeys.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanesville_(novel)"title="Zanesville (novel)">
The story is set forty years into the future, in an America in which distinctions between government, religion, and corporations have vanished. The main character, Elijah Clearfather, is found by a resistance cell outside their camouflaged borders in Central Park, New York City. After the cell witnesses the Clearfather's powers, they learn a little about his true identity but decide, in the interests of everyone, to send him away, with the only safe clues to his identity they can provide: a bus pass marked with three important locations and a note written in disappearing ink. Clearfather is set on a journey of self-discovery pursued by murderous Vitessa Cultporation agents, and accompanied by Aretha Nightengale, once a lawyer, now a cross-dressing resistance leader; Dooley Duck and Ubba Dubba, hologram cartoon characters leading a sexual revolution; and the mysterious Kokomo.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomy_(novel)"title="Autonomy (novel)">
Hyperville is 2013's top hi-tech, 24-hour entertainment complex - a sprawling palace of fun under one massive roof. A place to go shopping, or experience the excitement of Doomcastle, Winterland, or Wild West World. But things are about to get a lot more exciting - and dangerous. But what exactly "is" lurking on Level Zero of Hyperville? And what will happen when the entire complex goes over to Central Computer Control?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Coins,_Please"title="No Coins, Please">
Juniortours is an outfit that drives children across America during the summer months. When Group Ambulance's Artie Geller, a precocious 11-year-old con artist from Montreal signs on, counselors Rob and Dennis find they have more than the usual summer job on their hands. From the streets of New York City to the casinos of Las Vegas, Artie proves as slippery as ever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_Fire_(novel)"title="Frozen Fire (novel)">
The story begins with Dusty, the main character, receiving a mysterious phone call from an anonymous boy who claims to be dying. He soon reveals to her over the phone that he has taken an overdose with the intention of killing himself and that he rang her phone so he would have someone to talk to as he slipped away. At first he gives himself the false name Josh, which is the name of Dusty's brother who went missing a few years previously, leading Dusty to believe that he knows something about his disappearance.Dusty leaves the house to find the dying boy and attempts to save him. She searches around the local park but cannot find him anywhere. Instead she is chased down by three men with two dogs that eventually corner her and assault her.Dusty receives frequent phone calls from the strange boy. He constantly talks about how he is suffering and how he is unable to kill himself. People start to talk about seeing this odd boy around the town. He is described as having snow-white skin and wearing a duffel coat.Stories start to spread about the boy raping a girl in another town and keeping her prisoner and when Dusty asks the boy if this is true he replies by saying he does not know or remember.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor_Unrat"title="Professor Unrat">
The protagonist is Raat, a 57-year-old reclusive, widowed school teacher who is estranged from his son because of the son's academic laxity and scandalous trysts with women. Even though everyone around is either a former student of his or a descendant thereof, Raat is not held in high regard by his students. He takes the nickname "Unrat" (literally meaning "garbage") to be a personal affront, and treats every school-day as a battle against his foes, the students, and uses impossible assignments as his means of achieving victory.One of Raat's most formidable adversaries is the 17-year-old Lohmann, whose quick-thinking allows him to escape punishment and enrage his teacher. Raat discovers a poem in the student's notebook addressed to "Fräulein Rosa Fröhlich", whom he proceeds to track down. At the "Blue Angel", he finds a placard promoting the "barefoot dancer" Rosa Fröhlich. Trying to avoid his students, Raat finds himself in the dressing room of the dancer, where he commands her to stop corrupting his students and leave town immediately. In response, she offers the professor wine, and attempts to charm him.The next morning sees a cease-fire between the students and the professor; he is afraid of being made a fool of in the classroom and they are afraid of being written up by the principal. That night, he returns to Fröhlich and calmly explains how unacceptable it is for her to accept wine, champagne, and flowers from students. She explains that she sends such things from students back, and undresses, beginning a relationship with Raat that sees him catering to her every wish: expensive restaurants, new clothing, a furnished flat, even sorting her laundry. Eventually he is fired from his position, marries her, and discovers she has a daughter. After two years, Raat is financially ruined. A friend of his wife suggests that he give "lectures", which serve as a cover for his wife to discreetly entertain men in the professor's formerly respectable home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remember_Me?_(novel)"title="Remember Me? (novel)">
It is about Lexi Smart, a woman who has insecurities about herself until she experiences amnesia after a car accident. When she wakes up in the hospital she finds that she is a completely different person: she thinks it's 2004 and she's a twenty-five-year-old with crooked teeth, a disastrous love life and a dead-end job. The most recent events of her life she can remember are three years in the past. She learns it's actually 2007 – she's twenty-eight, she's the director of her department. She's fit, groomed, has a fabulous apartment, a closet full of designer clothes, and a handsome husband she has never seen before in her life, who also happens to be a multimillionaire. She finds herself without the loyal group of girlfriends she counted on to stand by her during this difficult time due to her changed attitude. As the story unfolds, she realises that she doesn't particularly like the person she's supposed to be, all the same trying to find her footing. As she learns more about her new self, she realizes her life is not all that she thought it would be. This is complicated further when she finds out that her perfect marriage may be an illusion as well, when a man turns up in her life, claiming to be someone she's been having an affair with. How on earth did all this happen? Will she ever remember? And what will happen when she does?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Krillitane_Storm"title="The Krillitane Storm">
The Doctor arrives in Worcester in 1139. There have been disappearances in last few months and people live in terror, afraid to leave their dwellings once the dark falls. When the Doctor meets with a Krillitane, he knows they have every reason to be afraid.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtain_Up_(novel)"title="Curtain Up (novel)">
"Curtain Up" recounts the story of three siblings: Sorrel, Mark, and Holly Forbes. After their widowed father is reported missing during the war, and his father (their grandfather) dies, the children go to live in London with their grandmother on their mother's side, a retired actress. She sends them to the Children's Academy for Dancing and Stage Training, much against their will.However, it is clear that the stage is in their blood, as they discover talents they never knew they had: Sorrel shines at acting, Mark at singing, and Holly at dancing and impressions.The book also involves the Fossil sisters from Streatfeild's "Ballet Shoes", as each Fossil girl provides each of the Forbes children with a scholarship to cover school expenses. Pauline sponsors Sorrel, Petrova, Mark, and Posy, Holly. The Fossil girls also exchange letters with the Forbes children, although when Miriam, the Forbes' cousin and another student at the school, shows herself to be an exceptionally talented dancer, Posy decides to sponsor her, as well, and to communicate with Miriam instead of with Holly. From these letters we learn that Pauline and Posy have made careers for themselves in Hollywood, after Posy and her teacher had to leave Czechoslovakia due to the war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siege_of_Trencher's_Farm"title="The Siege of Trencher's Farm">
George Magruder, an American professor of English from Philadelphia, moves with his British wife Louise and their eight-year-old daughter Karen to Trencher's Farm in the town of Dando, Cornwall, England, so that George can finish a book he is writing about the (fictitious) 18th-century diarist Branksheer, "a complete man". George and Louise are having marital troubles, causing Louise to become frustrated and, though he wants to, George has difficulty in relating to the locals at the local pub, The Inn. The locals tell Louise the story of Soldier's Field, in which locals who killed a rapist escaped justice as none of them would talk.In the climax of the book, child killer Henry Niles is being transported back to prison when his ambulance hits ice and crashes. Niles sees blood and flees, worried that he will be blamed, and George accidentally hits him in a snow drift with his car and takes him back to the farm, not knowing who he is. At the same time, a mentally disabled child, Janice Heddon, runs away from a Christmas party. George realises who Niles is and phones for the doctor and police, but the town is cut off to the police by the weather. The doctor was already attending to Janice's mother, and when the locals find out Janice is missing and that the child killer Niles is at Trencher's Farm, Janice's father Tom and his friends knock out the doctor and form an armed vigilante mob to break in. A community leader Bill arrives, but is accidentally killed by the mob. Tom reminds the locals of Soldier's Field, leading them to believe that if they attack as a group none will be blamed. George has to fight them off and protect his family, changing from ordered and civilised into enraged and animalistic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easy_Money_(novel)"title="Easy Money (novel)">
JW is a young man originally from the countryside who now lives in Stockholm. JW feigns the appearance of a "stekare" (in Swedish parlance, a lifestyle based on flaunting one's apparent wealth; a jetsetter), actually leading a double life driving taxi illegally to finance his expensive life on Stureplan. Abdulkarim, who runs the taxi business, offers JW a job selling cocaine instead. JW accepts the offer and enters the criminal underground of Stockholm. Jorge Salinas Barrio is a Latino who has gone to prison after taking the blame for drug business in which the Yugoslav mafia was involved. He escapes from Österåker Prison with plans to flee the country. Mrado Slovovic is a Serbian henchman who runs errands for the Yugoslav mafia, but secretly he dreams of a normal life with his daughter Lovisa.The three characters unite in the book through their dreams about quick earnings. Once JW and Abdulkarim have the cocaine sales going they want to expand. Abdulkarim has heard of Jorge, the recent escapee. The word on the street is that Jorge got very knowledgeable about the cocaine trade while he was in prison and thus JW gets an assignment to hire him. Simultaneously Jorge has tried to blackmail the Yugoslav mafia boss. The hitman Mrado has been contracted to dissuade him. When JW finally finds Jorge he is laying beaten-up in a forest, courtesy of Mrado.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_and_the_Crab"title="Colossus and the Crab">
The novel begins where its predecessor, "The Fall of Colossus" leaves off, with the supercomputer Colossus immobilized and the Martians arriving on Earth. They appear before Charles Forbin and his friend Edward Blake in the form of two black spheres, and quickly demonstrate vast intellect and powers of transformation and telepathy. After immobilizing Blake, they explain to Forbin their purpose in immobilizing Colossus — their desire to take half of the Earth's oxygen, a process that will kill nearly a quarter of the human population. In order to proceed with construction of the "Collector" designed to harvest the oxygen, the Martians reactivate the parts of Colossus necessary to manage human society.Though having no other option but to agree to the Martians' plan, Forbin continues to search for an alternative. He discovers in conversation with the Martians that their need for the oxygen is driven by the threat of radiation emanating from the Crab Nebula, which will kill the Martians without the protection of an oxygenated atmosphere. As construction of the Collector proceeds, a humbled Blake proposes to Forbin that the old Colossus — the "parent" of the crippled system, be reactivated. With little other alternative, Forbin agrees.Construction equipment controlled by Colossus soon completes work on the Collector. An initial five-minute test of the device proves enormously destructive. With a second, final test imminent, Blake travels to Colorado with Angela, Forbin's private secretary. Racing against time, Blake and a small team of workers succeeds in penetrating the mountain where the old Colossus is located and re-activating the computer, only to discover that, once supplied with the facts of the situation, Colossus argues that the collection program is in the best interests of humans' long-term future and should move forward.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Couldn't_Leave_Dinah"title="We Couldn't Leave Dinah">
The novel is set during the summer holidays early in the Second World War. The Templetons are English residents on the fictional island of Clerinel in the English Channel. The children are all members of the local Pony Club. Caroline rides the spirited Dinah, Mick the more placid Punch, and their little brother the chubby Bellman.Meanwhile, there are rumours that the Germans who have occupied the nearby Channel Islands may be planning to take over Clerinel too. The location and topography of the island are ideally suited as a platform for launching an invasion of the South Coast. Mr. Templeton discusses leaving with the children, prompting Caroline's horrified response: "We couldn't leave Dinah".The Pony Club's chairman, Peter Beaumarchais, has surprisingly opted for a fancy-dress carnival as their Anniversary Day celebration in mid-September. Caroline decides to go as Elaine the Lily Maid of Astolat; Mick chooses to dress simply as a local fisherboy and borrows some clothes from Petit-Jean. During the celebration Caroline spots some unfamiliar riders in fancy dress. These riders turn out to be a party of German invaders taking advantage of the fancy dress to gain easy access to the Martello tower.The English residents hurriedly evacuate, but in the confusion Caroline and Mick are left behind. Their home having been requisitioned by the German general, they camp in some caves that have been fitted out as stables. With the help of Peter they manage to survive and stay hidden while planning their escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_City"title="Chronic City">
The novel begins with Chase Insteadman, a former child actor whose career seems to be over, accidentally meeting Perkus Tooth, a once-promising critic now barely surviving by writing liner notes for CDs and DVDs at the office space of The Criterion Collection, and Perkus is eager to expose Chase to a self-contained universe of pop culture esoterica. Perkus has unconventional opinions on almost everything, especially Marlon Brando, and is glad to express them; Chase contents himself with listening to his new friend. Much of the first part of the novel is pivoted upon Perkus' speeches and Chase's thoughts about them. In this part of the novel readers also meet Perkus' friends: Oona Laszlo, a ghost-writer of autobiographies, and presently that of high-profile sculptor Laird Noteless, whose "dystopian" public art exhibits are hinted to actually be disaster sites; Richard Abneg, a former squatter, now working for the powerful NYC mayor, Jules Arnheim (who seems to be a fictional portrait of Michael Bloomberg); Biller, a black hobo who unexpectedly turns Internet wizard; and Georgina Hawkmanaji, often referred to as the ostrich-woman, a Turk heiress to "twenty million or so of inherited Armenian plunder."Strange things happen in the NYC depicted in the novel; a mysterious tiger randomly destroys buildings and underground stations; a grey fog envelops Manhattan's Downtown; people are fascinated by mysterious chaldrons, gorgeous vases that are only seen in pictures, because nobody seems to have ever seen the originals; people keep asking Chase about his fiancée, Janice Trumbull, stranded on the orbital space station, even though he cannot remember anything of the woman but her letters. On the other hand, nothing really important seems to happen in the plot, with the characters living their ordinary lives, unconventional as they may be. But then the tiger strikes Perkus' favorite hamburger joint, and damages the building he lives in; this suddenly turns him into a hobo, and sets in motion a chain of events which will bring the novel to its conclusion—and to several final revelations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickshaw_Boy"title="Rickshaw Boy">
Set in the 1920s, the novel's protagonist is an orphan peasant who leaves for Beijing to earn a living. Xiangzi is a young, hardworking, well-built rickshaw puller who dreams of owning his own rickshaw. Just when he has earned enough to buy one, it is confiscated by warlord soldiers. As he leaves, he spots some camels captured by the soldiers. He takes the camels and escapes and later sells them, earning the nickname Camel. However, the cash Xiangzi obtains from this is not enough for him to buy another new rickshaw – providence decrees that he must toil once more. A police secret agent later extorts him into paying him his savings, leaving Xiangzi impoverished again. Left with no choice, Xiangzi returns to work for Old Master Liu, the boss of a thriving rickshaw rental company.Although he tries to be honest and down to earth, Xiangzi finds himself entangled between Old Master Liu and his stout, manipulative daughter Tiger Girl, ten years his senior. Tiger Girl, who is carrying a torch for him, insists on marrying Xiangzi after pretending to be made pregnant by him. Her father disowns her and the couple live together, progressively made poor by her spendthrift ways. Later, Tiger Girl becomes pregnant by Xiangzi and grows even fatter as she awaits her delivery due her laziness and greediness for food.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Corpse_Too_Many"title="One Corpse Too Many">
In August 1138, King Stephen is besieging rebels now loyal to Empress Matilda in Shrewsbury Castle. Brother Cadfael welcomes the assistance of young Godric, brought to the Abbey by his aunt. Cadfael recognises that Godric is a girl. She is Godith Adeney, daughter of Fulke Adeney, a rebel leader inside the castle. Cadfael agrees to keep her secret, thus beginning 10 adventurous days.Aline Siward and Hugh Beringar enter King Stephen's camp to pledge their loyalty. The King welcomes Aline Siward even though her absent brother Giles has declared for the Empress. He treats Hugh Beringar with more reserve, as he was betrothed as a child to Godith. To prove his loyalty, he is asked to find Godith and deliver her to the King. Beringar and Adam Courcelle, designated Deputy Sheriff once the castle falls, both fall for Aline on first sight. The castle falls the next morning, but FitzAlan and Adeney escape. Infuriated, King Stephen orders the ninety-four survivors of the turncoat garrison executed that very afternoon. Abbot Heribert of Shrewsbury Abbey offers to give Christian burial to the victims; King Stephen assents.Counting the bodies, Cadfael finds not ninety-four, but ninety-five – one corpse too many. The extra corpse did not die by hanging, but by strangulation. Aline finds the body of her brother Giles among the ninety-four. Very upset, Courcelle gives Aline her brother's cloak. Later, Godric/Godith identifies the murdered man as Nicholas Faintree, a squire of FitzAlan. Cadfael visits Godith's old nurse, Petronilla Flesher for news. FitzAlan ordered squires Faintree and Torold Blund to slip out of the castle to take his treasury to safety in Wales, then to Normandy. She tells Cadfael that Beringar asked after Godith the day of the hangings, which means Beringar knows of the treasure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_(novel)"title="Homunculus (novel)">
A dirigible with a dead pilot has been passing over Victorian London in a decaying orbit for some years, arousing the interest of the Royal Society, as well as scientist-explorer Langdon St. Ives and the evangelist/counterfeiter Shiloh. Shiloh is convinced that the dirigible carries his father, a tiny space alien, but withholds this knowledge from vivisectionist Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, who he is paying to reanimate Shiloh's dead mother, none other than Joanna Southcott. Narbondo and the evil millionaire Kelso Drake have their own interest in the alien; Drake possesses its spacecraft, which he uses for perverse purposes in one of his chain of stop-and-go brothels.St. Ives and his friends of the Trismegistus Club are more concerned with the inheritance of Jack Owlesby, a fine young fellow affianced to Dorothy, the beautiful daughter of toymaker/inventor William Keeble, who builds jolly boxes for space aliens, oxygenators, and gigantic emeralds. Jack's late father bequeathed him just such a gem, but also left behind dark knowledge developed in association with the evil Narbondo. St. Ives and the heroic tobacconist suspect that Narbondo and his assistant, the pimply Willis Pule, are using this knowledge to raise the dead, possibly for nefarious purposes. When poor Bill Kraken steals what everyone assumes to be Owlesby's emerald in a fit of alien-induced delirium tremens, the ambitions of Shiloh, Narbondo, Drake, and Pule collide with the heroism of St Ives and Godal and the scientific greed of Parsons of the Royal Academy as Hampstead Heath turns into a carnival of flying skulls, crumbling ghouls, crashing spaceships, and the sparking perversity of the dreadful Marseilles Pinkle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_I_Became_a_Nun"title="How I Became a Nun">
"How I Became A Nun" chronicles a year in the fantastic internal and external life of an introverted six-year-old called César, who sees herself as a girl but is referred to by the rest of the world as a boy. In the beginning of the novel, her family moves to a bigger town Rosario, where her father takes her for a promised Ice-cream. The child is horrified at the taste of the Strawberry ice-cream, which disappoints the father. He insists that she finish her ice-cream and stop being difficult. After tasting the ice-cream himself, he realizes it is contaminated and in an altercation ends up killing the ice-cream vendor. The child gets cyanide poisoning and spends her time in the hospital, often suffering from delusions.Once out of the hospital, she learns that her father has been sent to eight years of prison. She joins school, three months late into the class and finds herself disconnected from a class which has learned to read. Thus she gets drawn into her own world of make-believe and imagination. Her only friends are her mother and a boy named Arturo Carrera.In the end, she is kidnapped by the wife of the ice-cream vendor who was killed by her father. The wife, in an act of vengeance, throws Cesar into a drum of Strawberry ice-cream, which seems to have become the girl's biggest horror.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(Rogers_novel)"title="Island (Rogers novel)">
Nikki Black, a disturbed and hate-filled young woman intent on punishing the mother who abandoned her at birth goes to the island with only one aim in mind: revenge. Her plans are confounded by the discovery that she has a brother, Calum: a brother strangely possessed by their mother; a brother with a terrifyingly violent streak; a brother whose dangerous love and strange way of seeing the world transform Nikki's life. The characters Calum and Phyllis are loosely based upon Caliban and Prospero.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Boy"title="River Boy">
Fifteen-year-old Jess, a dedicated swimmer, dotes on her grandfather, a fiercely independent and cantankerous artist. When he falls ill, he insists on returning to the isolated valley where he lived as a child to finish his last painting, a haunting landscape called 'River Boy'. Jess is desperately trying to cope with the knowledge that her grandfather is dying, but she does her best to help him finish the painting that is so important to him.While exploring the valley, Jess feels a strange presence and sees a mysterious boy in the river, now there, now gone. When she eventually meets the boy, he gives her some surprising advice that leads to the painting being finished against everyone's expectations. In return, he challenges her to join him in swimming down the river from the source to the sea, over forty miles. Jess refuses, saying she must stay with her grandfather, and watches him dive from the waterfall into the river. Soon after, hearing about her grandfather as a boy, she has a sudden revelation, and she swims after the boy to the mouth of the river, where he is waiting for her before finally disappearing. Jess then learns that her grandfather has died peacefully, leaving her his painting of the 'River Boy', which she now realizes is both a landscape and a portrait of the boy she met – a self-portrait.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_Power_(novel)"title="Separation of Power (novel)">
About a month after the events in the previous book, CIA Director Thomas Stansfield has succumbed to cancer and has chosen Dr. Irene Kennedy, The director of the CIA's counterterrorism center, to take his place as director. Meanwhile, Henry "Hank" Clark, a corrupt Republican senator and chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is making plans to prevent Kennedy from becoming the director of the CIA. His plan involves embarrassing her before she can be confirmed for the position, and handpick a new director and have them open up "ECHELON", a global surveillance program, and give its secrets to his investors in Silicon Valley, who will then help him get elected to become president. His original plan to kill Rapp and embarrass the CIA failed, so he begins the process of his new plan.Mitch Rapp is called in to visit Kennedy to talk about Peter Cameron, the CIA officer who attempted to have him killed in Germany, but was killed by an assassin before Rapp could capture him. He and Kennedy watch surveillance footage that captured the face of the assassin. Rapp realizes that the assassin is Donatella Rahn, an Israeli assassin and Rapp's ex-girlfriend. Kennedy instructs him to take his girlfriend, Anna Rielley, to Milan and propose to her, and then go visit Donatella to learn who hired her to kill Peter Cameron. Meanwhile, Clark visits his accomplice, Mossad director Ben Freidman at the Israeli Embassy, who has been helping him become president in exchange for more aid to Israel. At the meeting, Clark orders Ben to assassinate Donatella, who he hired to kill Peter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parable_of_the_Blind_(novel)"title="The Parable of the Blind (novel)">
The action of the story is concerned with the six blind men who are hired to be painted by an unnamed painter (whom the reader will come to realize is Bruegel) and their confused journey to the painter's house. After becoming lost, nearly drowned, and attacked by a dog, the men finally arrive at the painter's house where they are fed and warmed (and nearly burned by the fire). The blind men are then led to a bridge and are told to repeatedly walk across it in a line as they hold on to each other and fall into the stream, while the painter paints them from inside his open window.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wheel"title="The Great Wheel">
The story's protagonist is Irish-born Conn Kilroy, who leaves Ireland for the United States in the 1890s at the urging of his Uncle Michael. Before he leaves, his aunt predicts that he will ride the biggest wheel in the world. He travels to the United States by steamship. While on board, he meets an attractive German girl named Trudy, who is traveling to Wisconsin.Upon his arrival, he begins working for his uncle in New York City, but he is soon hired to work for the company commissioned to create the huge Ferris Wheel for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. He works hard with his newfound friend Martin Brennan to build it. After the giant wheel is installed at the exposition, Conn fulfills his aunt's prophecy by riding on it. His uncle would like him to help build a bridge, but Conn refuses and stays. He takes a job as a guard at the fair, hoping that someday Trudy will visit the fair. She does visit, and the two reunite, eventually marrying and moving to Wisconsin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_One_Thinks_of_Greenland"title="No One Thinks of Greenland">
The book is set after the Korean War. The novel follows the misadventures of the character Rudy Spruance who has been mistaken for another soldier and inadvertently assigned to Greenland.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcatraz_Versus_the_Scrivener's_Bones"title="Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener's Bones">
Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener's Bones is the second novel in the Alcatraz series. Sanderson continues the series as Alcatraz goes to the Library of Alexandria and tries to rescue his Dad and Grandpa from the soul stealing library curators. Once he arrives he is immediately separated from the rest of the group consisting of Bastille and her mother Draulin, Alcatraz's uncle Kazan, and Alcatraz's cousin Australia. Alcatraz is travelling through the library alone and he is often pestered by the curators who ask him to take a book at the cost of his soul. The curators speak long forgotten languages which he can understand because of his Translator's Lenses. At one point Alcatraz finds Bastille caught in a net, and he breaks the ropes that bind her. After Bastille and Alcatraz continue to venture Kazan finds them by utilizing his talent of getting lost. He finds them because they are both abstractly lost. Soon after the three travel the library with Kazan's talent they activate another trip wire which encloses them in a hardened goo. Alcatraz escapes by biting through it, and his friends follow suit. Along the way he finds the tomb of Alcatraz the first, who was the first wielder of the breaking talent. His tomb does not age because he broke time. At the tomb he also finds a note which informs him that his talent is more of a curse than a blessing. After activating yet a third trip wire Bastille and Alcatraz fall into a pit. After a lengthy (and awkward) discussion about responsibility, they escape using Windstormer's Lenses and proceed to fight the Scrivener's Bones—a sect of Dark Oculators. They defeat him by tricking him into checking out a book, then the curators take his soul. Later, they find Grandpa Smedry crying over a note. It is revealed that indeed, Attica Smedry (Alcatraz's father) has sold his soul for all the knowledge in the world. But, in claiming a note written before he was turned into a curator, Alcatraz learns of a way to turn him back.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T2_(novel_series)"title="T2 (novel series)">
## "T2: Infiltrator" (2001)."T2: Infiltrator" explores Sarah and John's life while living off the grid. Set six years after the events of "", Sarah and 16-year-old John live a relatively normal life under the assumed names John and Suzanne Krieger near a small town in Paraguay, believing they have destroyed Cyberdyne Systems for good and prevented the creation of Skynet. They own a successful trucking company known as Krieger Trucking, while also being proficient smugglers. Sarah works at the company, while John attends military school, quickly becoming one of their best students, gaining military skills, weaponry and hacking knowledge. They gain a new neighbor in Dieter von Rossbach, a former Austrian counterterrorism operative and future model for the T-800 series. He is drawn to the Connors, and after Sarah tells him about the future war, they are attacked by a new T-800, created in the present by a new Terminator model, the i-950 Infiltrator Serena Burns. Realizing that Judgment Day was not permanently averted, they attempt once again to stop Skynet's creation with the help of Dieter. They eventually run into FBI agent Jordan Dyson, Miles Dyson's brother who is looking to capture the Connors for his brother's death and Cyberdyne's destruction, but witnesses the Terminators himself and comes to believe them and decides to help them destroy Cyberdyne's most recent facility and the remaining Terminators. Sarah is seriously wounded by Serena as she destroys her, while Dyson looks after her and makes sure she makes a full recovery. John and Dieter flee to Paraguay once again. Dyson, however, finds out that Cyberdyne has a back-up facility located in Montana and immediately informs them of this information.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Hard_Things"title="Do Hard Things">
In "Do Hard Things", the Harris brothers attempt to "explode the myth of adolescence," and show that prior to the 20th century, a person was an adult or a child. The book challenges teenagers to go beyond their comfort zone, and, in essence, "do hard things." The foreword was contributed by Chuck Norris.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_World_(Crichton_novel)"title="The Lost World (Crichton novel)">
In August 1993, four years after the disaster at Jurassic Park, chaos theorist and mathematician Ian Malcolm - who is revealed to have survived the events of the previous novel - encounters and reluctantly agrees to team up with wealthy paleontologist Richard Levine. The two men attempt to search for a "lost world" of dinosaurs following rumors of strange animal corpses washing up on the shores of Costa Rica. They learn of Site B on Isla Sorna, the "production facility" where the now-defunct company InGen hatched and grew the dinosaurs for their Jurassic Park theme park on nearby Isla Nublar.Eighteen months later, afraid that the Costa Rican government will find Isla Sorna and destroy the dinosaurs, Levine hastily embarks on an expedition to the island without Malcolm. He arrives with a Costa Rican guide named Diego, but shortly after arriving, the two are attacked by mysterious creatures later identified as a pair of "Carnotaurus" who kill Diego. Eventually, Malcolm learns that Levine has gone missing there. Malcolm then goes to the island with a rescue team consisting of Jack "Doc" Thorne, an engineer and retired university professor; Eddie Carr, Thorne's assistant; and two stowaway children, R. B. "Arby" Benton and Kelly Curtis, who were working as Levine's research assistants. Dr. Sarah Harding, an ethologist and close friend of Malcolm, is also approached to join the expedition. Though she is initially unsure, she ultimately decides to meet them there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_to_Zero"title="Code to Zero">
In America, 1958 a man wakes up in a railway station public toilet with no recollection of his past. His clothing, associates and surroundings suggest to him that he is an alcoholic derelict, however his behaviour, intelligence, morals and instinct lead him to investigate and research his past. He establishes (by the simple method of going into a library and pulling books off shelves until he finds one that he understands,) that he is in fact Dr Lucas - a rocket scientist, and well known in his field. He further establishes that he is directly responsible for the design of a rocket due to be launched by America in an attempt to match the Soviet Sputnik, and bolster America's entry into what would become the Space Race.Several people from his past both help and hinder his progress, and the implication is made that he himself was a Soviet spy, and had his memory erased instead of being killed - although this theory is made suspect when his old college friend reveals that he himself was once a Soviet spy and subsequently turned (but not entirely forgiven) by Lucas.The actual spies (and saboteur) are revealed to be both his wife and another close friend, who plan on using the rocket's self-destruct mechanism to destroy the rocket as it is launched, either removing America from the Space Race, or putting their progress back so far that the Soviets will be hard to catch.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taking_of_Chelsea_426"title="The Taking of Chelsea 426">
The Doctor arrives for a flower show on Chelsea 426, a human colony of Saturn. However, he notices many of the local shopkeepers acting oddly. Then the Sontarans show up. They are not fans of flowers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Joan_(novel)"title="Pope Joan (novel)">
Joan, the daughter of a priest and his Saxon wife, is born in 814 as the last of three children. When he discovers that Joan has learned to read, her father calls her “child of the devil” and blames the illness and death of his oldest son, Matthew, on her as a punishment. When the middle child, John, is sent away to school, Joan goes with him and is reluctantly accepted as well due to her brilliance. As she cannot live with the other male students, she is sent to live with a knight, Gerold, and his family while she attends the school.Joan and Gerold soon fall in love. Although he remains faithful to his wife, sheresents Joan and seizes an opportunity to force her into marriage at age 14. However, the ceremony is interrupted by Viking invaders. Joan narrowly escapes the attack, but her brother John is killed. She then decides to dress as a young man and joins the monastery at Fulda in her brother's place.There she becomes a skilled physician and is ordained as a priest. Her father visits her in Fulda, believing her to be John. When he discovers who she is, he dies of a stroke before he can expose her. When the plague comes to Fulda, Joan sickens. Afraid that they will discover that she is a woman, she flees and finds refuge with a family she once helped.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_a_Girl_in_My_Hammerlock"title="There's a Girl in My Hammerlock">
Maisie Potter tries out for the wrestling team in her junior high to get close to a boy she likes, but she soon finds out that what she really loves is the sport of wrestling.Maisie initially wants to be on the cheerleading squad, but she did not make the cut during tryouts. She is infatuated with a boy at her school, Eric Delong, and will do anything to be near him. Because he tries out for the wrestling team, Maisie decides to try out too. She makes the team but discovers that wrestling is a lot harder than she initially thought. She wins some of her matches but most of her opponents forfeit because they don't think it's right for a girl to wrestle a boy. She has to decide if she should do things that other people want her to do or things that she truly wants to do and is good at.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Man's_Ransom"title="Dead Man's Ransom">
England is in the grip of the Anarchy, as King Stephen and the Empress Maud contend for the throne. Ranulf of Chester sought the aid of the Empress's forces when he and his brother broke their agreement with King Stephen, and were joined by Madog ap Maredudd, Lord of Powys in Mid Wales, and Cadwaldr, the brother of Owain Gwynedd, ruler of Gwynedd in North Wales. A contingent from Shrewsbury and the county of Shropshire has gone to fight for King Stephen at Lincoln.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-of-a-Kind_Family"title="All-of-a-Kind Family">
Ella, Henny, Sarah, Charlotte, and Gertrude are five sisters growing up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1912. The book follows them through a year of their childhood, as they deal with mundane chores, find joy in eating candy in bed and collecting used books from their father's junk shop, recover from scarlet fever, and celebrate Jewish holidays such as Purim and Sukkot as well as the Fourth of July. They also inadvertently help their father's friend Charlie solve a mystery from his past and, in the end, welcome a new family member.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Accidental_Time_Machine"title="The Accidental Time Machine">
The protagonist, Matthew Fuller, is a research assistant for physics professor Jonathan Marsh at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 2057, when he builds a calibrator to supply one photon per unit of time. When he presses the reset button, the box unexpectedly disappears for one second. When he presses the button a second time, he finds it disappears for about 10 seconds. The third time, it disappears for a bit less than three minutes. Fuller deduces it is traveling forward in time at intervals approximately 11.8 times the previous interval and he further deduces how to bring other objects, such as himself, along. On the seventh press of the button, Fuller and the box are taken 39 days into the future and unexpectedly land on a busy road. He is arrested on suspicion of murder but is bailed out of jail by an anonymous person he comes to believe is himself from the future. He continues forward, 465 days, then 15 years, when he is greeted by Professor Marsh who tracked Fuller and calculated the theoretical physics behind time travel.Unsatisfied, Matt travels to 2252 where he learns that the Second Coming of Jesus has occurred and resulted in the One Year War. Society is now governed by a theocracy led by Jesus and shuns technology. Jesus had anticipated Fuller's appearance at the Massachusetts Institute of Theosophy, where he is appointed to be professor with a female student named Martha assigned to be his assistant. As Fuller tries to scientifically rationalize Jesus's seeming omnipotence, Jesus orders Fuller to destroy the time machine but he instead flees, along with Martha, and lands in the year 4346 outside of California. There they find a society where all of humanity is wealthy and satisfied to a point of apathy. It is here that they encounter an artificial intelligence, named La, that controls Los Angeles. La is curious about her own mortality, and having learned about Matt's time machine from historical records, wishes to join him on a journey to the end of time (heat death of the universe) to discover if she can die.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Dragon_Chronicles"title="The Last Dragon Chronicles">
In "The Fire Within", David Rain is a tenant of Elizabeth (Liz) Pennykettle (a potter who makes clay dragons) and her daughter, Lucy. However, there is something mysterious about Liz, the house, and the dragons. As for what it is, David can't figure out. Meanwhile, David is trying to help Lucy find a missing squirrel named Conker. Conker, unlike the other squirrels, does not leave after the tree he lived in was cut down, his eye is badly injured and the doctors try to rescue him, but unfortunately he dies. While he tries to unravel the dragon mysteries and save the squirrel, David writes a story for Lucy about Snigger (another squirrel), Conker and Lucy's other squirrel friends. However, the story begins to mirror real life. Whatever is going on, it has something to do with his special writing dragon Gadzooks, whom Liz made as a housewarming gift. But when Conker's life is threatened and Gadzooks appears to be in trouble, David is forced to believe the impossible if he is going to save them. Meanwhile, he finds himself drawn to an attractive wildlife rescuer.In "Icefire", Lucy creates a new dragon named G'reth. He is a wishing dragon that can grant wishes that would benefit dragon kind. David becomes the owner of this dragon because he was the one who named him (with Gadzook's help). But fate seems to be dictating an unusual course for David when his college tutor, Dr. Bergstrom, sets him an essay on the existence – or not – of dragons. The tantalising prize is a fully funded research trip to the Arctic, which seems just within his grasp. David starts to research the subject and soon discovers a connection between dragons and the Arctic. Then, evidence begins to mount that somewhere in the neighbourhood is a polar bear. Beginning to wonder whether it is only a coincidence or could deeper forces be at work, David begins to uncover more about the dragons. He finds himself drawn to a time when dragons really did exist, and their secrets were guarded by the polar bears of the Arctic. David must open his mind to the legend of dragons if he is going to have any chance of winning the research trip. Meanwhile, the evil sibyl, Gwilanna, appears with an evil plot, and the secret of the dragons is revealed. If she is to be defeated, David must discover the link between an ancient legend about the fire tear of the last dragon, Gawain, and the frozen north. The keys to solving the puzzle are his new girlfriend, Zanna, and Dr. Bergstrom, who proves to have more mysteries than meets the eye.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Fire_(The_Last_Dragon_Chronicles)"title="Dark Fire (The Last Dragon Chronicles)">
Three young adults named Arthur, Lucy and Elizabeth were traveling to meet Rupert Steiner, who had received a note from Gadzooks. The word "Scuffenbury" was written in Dragontonge, which is the name of one of the barrows which are said to contain a dragons.Back in their home town, Wayward Crescent, David asks Zanna, David's girlfriend, for more information about Gwilanna. This is where Gwillanna is threatening to hand over the Dark Fire Tear to IX. She had the choice to sacrifice her husband while being threatened, but Zanna was used for David's place. The summoning of the dragon Ghislaine, Gwilanna summoned a darkling.David and Zanna get home one night and discover their neighbor, Henry Bacon, is in the hospital due to a stroke. Liz and Lucy are at the hospital and David gets a letter. He learns about the Scuffenbury.David goes with Liz to visit Henry in hospital, and Henry dies during their visit. After Henry dies, Gwilanna, attends the funeral and gives a warning to David that she will do anything to get her hands on the obsidian and the Dark Fire. The group meet Henry's sister Agatha, a powerful sibyl. They also discover that Henry has left Liz and Lucy $50,000, and left David his collection of Arctic memorabilia and Zanna his house. The will also says that the Arctic would be left in place. After this, Agatha(a Sybil) teaches Zanna healing magicks and suggests that she make her peace with David.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalice_(novel)"title="Chalice (novel)">
Chalice is welcoming a new Master. The Chalice must be the first to greet the new Master.The reason for a new Master is that the old one, and the former Chalice, died in a fire, which was caused by some of their own actions, a few months earlier. The now-dead Master was concerned only with his own pleasure and power, and neglected his duties to his demesne. Seven years before the story begins, the Master sent his brother away, to join the priests of Fire. The brother had been concerned about the demesne, and opposed the Master's ways. When the older brother died, the Grand Seneschal sent for the younger brother, asking that he become the new Master. The brother is welcomed by the Circle, and the people of the demesne, but has changed, physically and mentally, so that he can hardly interact with the people of the demesne at all.Mirasol, the Chalice, was a peasant, living by herself in a cottage within walking distance of the House of the demesne, but having nothing to do with its inhabitants, until, to everyone's surprise, she was chosen as Chalice. She raises bees, left to her by her dead parents. The bees are special. For a period of time, they produced so much honey that Mirasol couldn't take care of it. They are larger than normal bees, they seem to understand the Chalice, and protect her, and they produce special types of honey. The Chalice has had no training for the job. She has read every manuscript she can find that tells her what a Chalice must do, and how, but there is a lot she doesn't know. She thinks that the rest of the Circle, especially the Grand Seneschal, believes that she was a bad choice. She performs her job as best she can, operating from what she has read, and from her intuition, in deciding what vessel to use, and what to put in it, for each occasion. She mixes honey with the various drinks she offers to people involved in ceremonies of the Circle, or to pour out. This use of honey is new. It has never been used this way before.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostalgia_(novel)"title="Nostalgia (novel)">
The first section, which is itself the prologue describes the world of a pre-war Bucharest, as narrated by an aging, potentially dying, author while focusing on the improbable and explicitly impossible story of a homeless young man who serves as the stubborn center of progressively more absurd games of Russian Roulette which become progressively more peopled by the wealthy upper-crust of the capital.The second section brings alive a universe of children through a magical realist writing style that focuses upon a prepubescent messiah who has begun to lose his magical powers while working wonders for his young followers. Which has a famous scene that makes the reader feel voyeur into the world of Proust when the main character falls into "unbearable nostalgia" by virtue of a bright pink lighter.The third section is an exploration of the pinnacle of romantic love between two adolescents, culminating with them swapping souls after their first night together.The final part of the main portion of this book is centered around Nana, a middle aged woman engaged in an affair with a college student, as well as her memories of being 12 years old, when she was visited by a mother and son pair of gigantic skeletons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_Miss_Finch"title="Poor Miss Finch">
Twenty-one-year-old Lucilla Finch, the independently wealthy daughter of the rector of Dimchurch, Sussex, has been blind since infancy. Shortly after the narrator, Madame Pratolungo, arrives to serve as her paid companion, Lucilla falls in love with Oscar Dubourg, her shy and reclusive neighbour, also wealthy, who devotes himself to craftsmanship in precious metals.After being attacked and knocked unconscious by robbers, Oscar is nursed by Lucilla and falls in love with her, and the couple become engaged. Their plans are jeopardized by Oscar's epilepsy, a result of the blow to his head. The only effective treatment, a silver compound, has the side-effect of turning his skin a permanent, dark blue-grey. Despite her blindness, Lucilla suffers a violent phobia of dark colours, including dark-complexioned people, and family and friends conceal Oscar's condition from her.Meanwhile, Oscar's twin brother, Nugent, returns from America, where he has dissipated his fortune pursuing a career as a painter. Oscar is devoted to his brother, who is as outgoing, confident and charming as Oscar is diffident and awkward. Knowing of Lucilla's blindness, Nugent has arranged for her to be examined by a famous German oculist, Herr Grosse. Herr Grosse and an English oculist each examine Lucilla but disagree on her prognosis. Lucilla elects to be operated on by Herr Grosse, who believes he can cure her. After the operation, but before the bandages are taken off, Madame Pratolungo pressures Oscar into telling Lucilla of his disfigurement, but his nerve fails and, instead, he tells her it is Nugent who has been disfigured.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skagboys"title="Skagboys">
The novel begins in Yorkshire in 1984, where Mark Renton and his father Davie have travelled to join a picket of the coke plant. Mark is shaken after getting caught in the violence, and he travels to Manchester, where at a party he is offered heroin, which he refuses. In the Banana flats, Sick Boy decides to seduce his neighbours' daughter, Maria. He goes to the pub with her father, Coke, but they are ejected by the violent, ex-cop landlord DicksonRenton, Begbie, Spud, Tommy and Keezbo are watching football in a pub when teenage Samantha Frenchard arrives and confronts Begbie over her pregnancy. Renton and Sick Boy visit Swanney, a drug dealer, and Renton takes heroin for the first time. Samantha's family begin planning revenge on Begbie for his dismissive response to the pregnancy.Sick Boy and Coke visit Dickson's pub again, but Dickson beats Coke unconscious, and he later dies in hospital. Renton moves in with Sick Boy. At a drug den in Muirhouse, Alison tells Renton that her mother is dying; her friend Sylvia takes Renton home to Lochend for sex. Renton later gives Spud his first hit of heroin. Alison learns that her boss's brother is involved in drug smuggling, and seduces her boss.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_Odyssey"title="Galactic Odyssey">
Down-on-his-luck college dropout Billy Danger shelters from a sleet storm in what he thinks is a corn silo, but which turns out to be a space yacht containing three upper-class hunters from a planet located halfway across the Milky Way. They take him on as a gun-bearer, but after landing on a desert world known as Gar 28, both of the male hunters are killed by their prey. Billy is left alone with the beautiful Lady Raire, the unwilling companion of the dead men. Since neither Billy nor Lady Raire knows the password to re-enter the space yacht, they are effectively marooned. Eventually they find the wreck of an ancient starship and use its components to signal for help. Unfortunately, their signal attracts a ship full of hostile aliens who severely wound Billy. The aliens kidnap Lady Raire, leave Billy for dead, and depart in their ship. Billy is nursed back to health by a giant tabby cat descended from pets that survived the starship crash. A friendlier bunch of aliens arrive on Gar 28 and give Billy a ride to another planet, where he begins his quest to find and rescue Lady Raire. After mastering the technical skills needed to crew a starship, he works his way across the galaxy, seeking the lady's homeworld. His adventures include being captured on an espionage mission, which forces him to give up his right eye to ransom the lives of his fellow spies. He endures betrayal and slavery before he finally escapes, takes revenge on his enemies, and flies off with Lady Raire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Decathlon"title="The Last Decathlon">
Chad Norris becomes the track and field star for the United States and appears at the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, U.S.S.R.. Every time Norris gets interviewed by the popular press, he becomes suspicious and tells tall tales.When the opening ceremonies come about, he disappears and blends with the locals. This young athlete turns out to be Dale Richardson; who had his father wrongfully accused of working for an American spy network and serving time at Lubyanka Prison. The athlete/spy and the young Russian peasant try to elude the authorities and eventually arrive at their destination.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Spencer_(novel)"title="Paula Spencer (novel)">
The novel is a sequel to Doyle's 1996 book "The Woman Who Walked Into Doors", describing the life of alcoholic and battered wife Paula Spencer. The second book picks up her life ten years after the death of her husband.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foe_(Coetzee_novel)"title="Foe (Coetzee novel)">
Susan Barton is on a quest to find her kidnapped daughter who she knows has been taken to the New World. She is set adrift during a mutiny on a ship to Lisbon. When she comes ashore, she finds Friday and Cruso who has grown complacent, content to forget his past and live his life on the island with Friday—tongueless by what Cruso claims to have been the act of former slave owners—in attendance. Arriving near the end of their residence, Barton is on the island for only a year before the trio is rescued, but the homesick Cruso does not survive the voyage to England. In England with Friday, Barton attempts to set her adventures on the island to paper, but she feels her efforts lack popular appeal. She tries to convince novelist Daniel Foe to help with her manuscript, but he does not agree on which of her adventures is interesting. Foe would prefer to set her story of the island as one episode of a more formulaic story of a mother looking for her lost daughter, and when he does write the story she wishes, fabulates about Cruso's adventures rather than relating her facts. Frustrating Barton's efforts further, Foe, who becomes her lover, is preoccupied with debt and has little time or energy to write about anything. Barton's story takes a twist with the return of someone claiming to be her missing daughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuvalu_(novel)"title="Tuvalu (novel)">
The novel is set mostly in Tokyo and tells the story of a young Australian teacher of English, and his relationship with two women, Tilly, another Australian English teacher, and Mami, a Japanese hotel heiress. It is told in first-person.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deeper_(Gordon_and_Williams_novel)"title="Deeper (Gordon and Williams novel)">
Part 1: Breaking CoverWill and Chester are overjoyed to be reunited once again as the Miners' Train travels down through the Earth on its way to the Deeps. Will's younger brother, Cal, is also with them. The train passes through a series of storm gates (gates designed to block powerful winds from inside the earth) and, on the final approach to the Miners' Station, the three boys jump from it. Having escaped detection at the station, they travel further into the Deeps, where they are attacked by carnivorous bats and are forced to take shelter in an old, deserted house. Inside the house they find evidence that Will's stepfather, Dr. Burrows, has already been there.Sarah adopts a disguise, allowing her to become a woman who has the authority to interview a deranged Mrs. Burrows, who currently is residing at Humphrey House. However, when her fear that Will actually killed Tam clouds her judgment, Mrs. Burrows quickly realizes the fake, forcing Sarah to flee. Soon, she is acquainted with a much skinnier, much weaker Bartleby, who takes her to a hiding place. There, a few days later, Rebecca and the Styx show up and make her believe for sure that Will killed Tam. Rebecca tells her that she knows where Will is, and that he is forcing Cal to come with him, and, if she doesn't act soon, Will might also kill him. Finally, they explain that Cal and Bartleby shared a strong bond, and, because of his love for Cal, Bartleby would be able to track him down anywhere...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Miss_You,_I_Miss_You!"title="I Miss You, I Miss You!">
Cilla and Tina are thirteen years old and identical twin sisters. As they hurry to catch the bus to school one day, Cilla is run over by a car and killed. Left behind is Tina, who now has to find her balance in life without her sister. The book follows the sisters during the months leading up to Cilla's death, and Tina's first year without her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Dead_in_Dallas"title="Living Dead in Dallas">
This book opens with Sookie Stackhouse finding the dead body of Lafayette in the backseat of Andy Bellefleur's car, which had been left at Merlotte's the night before. Sookie learns that her friend had recently attended a local sex party. She thinks the members of that group might know something about her friend's murder so she starts "listening" to people's thoughts by using her special mind reading talent while working at the local bar.In the meantime, Bill Compton, Sookie's vampire boyfriend, informs her that they have been summoned by Eric Northman. As a way to get Eric's attention, a maenad known as Callisto attacks Sookie on their way to Fangtasia, Eric's vampire bar. Sookie's wounds are poisoned, and she is healed by a combination of Dr. Ludwig's special treatment, and blood drainings by Eric, Pam, Chow, and Bill. Sookie is later given a fresh transfusion of human blood. Eric informs Bill and Sookie that they need to go to Dallas to help the local vampire leader, Stan Davis, to find his missing "brother," Farrell, who has not returned to Davis' nest for five days.The Dallas vampires, Sookie, and Bill learn that The Fellowship of the Sun (FotS) as well as a "renouncer" vampire named Godfrey might be behind the disappearance. Sookie decides to go to the FotS church with Hugo, Stan's human dish washer (although he is a lawyer in his regular human life) and the lover of Stan's "sister," Isabel, in an undercover mission. Sookie discovers that Hugo is a traitor, but her cover is quickly exposed when they meet Steve and Sarah Newlin, and she is badly hurt while trying to escape from the church. She does escape with the help of Luna, a shapeshifter, and Godfrey (who turns out to be a remorseful child molester and killer). After a run-in with more Supes, including an undercover doctor at a local hospital and some werewolves, Sookie ends up back at the FotS to be with Godfrey as he "meets the sun." That night at the welcome home party for Farrell, Stan's house is attacked by the FotS and many humans die. Sookie, unable to locate Bill, helps Eric remove a bullet that he took protecting her from the gunfire; he insists the only safe way to remove it is to suck the bullet out. In doing so, she ingests a few drops of his blood inadvertently. Bill returns soon after; he had chased down members of the FotS. He reveals to Sookie that Eric's insistence on sucking out the bullets was just a ruse to get her to ingest some of his blood—now he will have a connection with her. Sookie is furious at Eric. She is also angry at Bill because he killed someone and did not check on her before beginning his pursuit of the FotS. Sookie leaves the house and immediately flies back to Bon Temps.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_Dead"title="Club Dead">
The novel takes place in December. Sookie discovers Bill working secretively on his computer. Bill closes a file but not before Sookie sees the screen. Bill informs Sookie he has to leave to complete a task ordered by the Queen of Louisiana Vampires. Days later, a werewolf targeting Sookie comes into her workplace, Merlotte's, but he is eliminated by Bubba, sent on Eric's orders, before he can harm Sookie. As night falls, Eric and his employees tell Sookie that Bill had actually been in Mississippi, where his former lover and maker Lorena had summoned him. They continue to tell Sookie that Bill has since then gone missing, and Eric speaks of his suspicions on Lorena's involvement. He also states that the vampire queen of Louisiana will need to receive Bill's secret project on its due date, if Eric wishes not to compromise his life.Since Eric is unable to interrogate humans or vampires in the territory of Mississippi vampire king Russell Edgington without provoking a war, he invites Sookie to come along to Mississippi and utilize her telepathy to locate Bill. Sookie agrees, but is shocked at Bill's possible betrayal of her.The next day, Sookie is introduced to Alcide Herveaux, a werewolf sent by Eric to help Sookie circulate in the supernatural community of Jackson, Mississippi. Sookie takes a liking to Alcide's physique and personality. In Jackson, Alcide escorts her to a local vampire bar, Josephine's, generally known as Club Dead. In this club, Sookie learns by telepathy that Bill is being held captive and that Russell Edgington is possibly involved. She meets Edgington when he aids her after a confrontation with a were patron angered at Sookie rebuffing his sexual advances. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Dared"title="The Boy Who Dared">
The majority of the story is told through flashbacks, as Helmuth Hübener, charged with treason, waits in a Berlin prison for his execution. Starting with his memories as a young boy, Helmuth recounts his childhood growing up in Nazi Germany with his mother Mutti (German for "Mom"), grandparents, two brothers, his best friends Rudi and Karl, and his future stepfather Hugo, a Nazi soldier.As a young boy, Helmuth plans to become a soldier and fight for Germany, but that changes when he grows up, and Helmuth stands out as a very knowable young man. He becomes very opinionated about the Nazi government when he sees his Jewish classmate's father mercilessly murdered by the SA. Helmuth's brothers like Gerhard are separated as Gerhard goes to serve the country in marine work. He begins to secretly listen to forbidden enemy radio broadcasts and enlists the help of two of his closest friends in distributing anti-Nazi material. Helmuth uses pamphlets, to tell the truth about Hitler and the Nazis but ends up getting caught, because of his mistake, and he is executed by guillotine in Berlin, Germany.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Scripture"title="The Secret Scripture">
The main character is an old woman, Roseanne McNulty, who now resides in the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital. Having been a patient for some fifty years or more, Roseanne decides to write an autobiography. She calls it "Roseanne's testimony of herself" and charts her life and that of her parents, living in Sligo at the turn of the 20th century. She keeps her story hidden under the loose floorboard in her room, unsure as yet if she wants it to be found. The second narrative is the "commonplace book" of the current chief Psychiatrist of the hospital, Dr Grene. The hospital now faces imminent demolition. He must decide who of his patients are to be transferred, and who must be released into the community. He is particularly concerned about Roseanne, and begins tentatively to attempt to discover her history. It soon becomes apparent that both Roseanne and Dr Grene have differing stories as to her incarceration and her early life, but what is consistent in both narratives is that Roseanne fell victim to the religious and political upheavals in Ireland in the 1920s – 1930s.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Love_&amp;_Money"title="For Love &amp; Money">
I - IIRaban describes his development as a writer from his early youthful love for books to a university career lecturing on Literature to his final decision to become a full-time writer in London, starting out as a professional book reviewer for the "London Magazine" and the "New Statesman".The first part is mainly composed of book reviews he wrote for various literary journals and his subjects include: living in London, the Romantic poet Byron, Thackeray, Henry Mayhew, a well-researched piece on Anthony Trollope (although it is a pity there is so little of the writer's thoughts on his great masterpiece "The Way We Live Now"), who still remains a highly under-rated Victorian novelist, and three penetrative pieces on Evelyn Waugh, of whom Raban is a great admirer. As he says of Waugh's diaries, there is no clear division from the youthful into the adult Waugh and this element of youthfulness always maintained a strong influence on his writing:'This disconcerting, sometimes vengeful, sometimes pathetic, childishness gives all Waugh's writing an odd innocence, a kind of brazen incorruptibility. His cult of the noble (which was much more a dream of living in a Burne-Jonesish world of sunlit castles and pure chivalry than it was of toadying after titles), his fiercely traditionalist Catholicism, his horror of the urban proletariat, were too wide-eyed to be either dangerous or mean. His sensibility had the extravagance of a brilliant child's: adult moderation never got in the say of clarity. When he admired he worshipped; when he disapproved, he was appalled. The bourgeois virtues of common sense and good manners (the besetting vices of so many modern English novelists) were totally foreign to him - not because he was a snob but because he never forgot what it was like to be a child.'
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princess_and_Curdie"title="The Princess and Curdie">
Two years have passed since the last book, and Princess Irene and her father go to Gwyntystorm, while Curdie (a miner boy who is the friend of the Princess) stays at home with his mother and father.As the years go by, Curdie begins to hunt for pleasure. He also slowly begins to doubt Irene's story of her great-great grandmother. One day, he shoots down a white pigeon. Curdie then remembers Irene's tale of her grandmother's pigeons, assumes the one he has shot down was one of them, and becomes aware of his folly. A light appears at the roof of the castle, and Curdie follows it. There, Curdie meets the old Princess, who appears small and withered, contrary to Irene's descriptions.The old Princess gently tells Curdie of his wrong thinking, and he confesses. Because he now believes, the pigeon heals. He is then told to keep his bow and arrows but use them for good instead of bad things. The old Princess then tells Curdie he must go on a special quest. Before she sends him, she burns his hands in her special fire of roses. His cleansed hands now possess the ability to be able to feel the hands of his fellow men and detect what kind of person (or beast) they are on the inside. She also gives Curdie's father a special emerald to keep while Curdie is away on the quest. If Curdie is in danger, the emerald will change colour, to alert his father to go after him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freefall_(novel)"title="Freefall (novel)">
Closer, Further (Part 1)The opening chapter describes how Chester Rawls is the first to regain consciousness on a fungal shelf deep down in the Pore where he, Will Burrows, Elliott and Bartleby have crash landed. After Will has located his brother’s dead body and given him a burial of sorts, he and Chester carry the injured Elliott with them as they set about exploring this alien and frightening world. The task of moving through the passages with the burden of Elliott and their equipment is made easier thanks to the reduced gravity at this depth in the Earth.With the help of Bartleby’s tracking ability, they discover that there is someone else down there with them, but are attacked by giant carnivorous creatures called spider-monkeys. They are saved by the intervention of a new character called Martha. She takes them to where she lives, a shack evidently built by the survivors of a galleon which was sucked down another of the giant holes like the Pore, so she can tend to Elliott and protect the two boys.Meanwhile, the Rebecca twins, who were pushed into the Pore by Sarah Jerome in her last dying act, are aware that Will is alive, and begin to plot against him with two Styx Special Forces soldiers, called Limiters. One of the Rebeccas and a Limiter approach Will's father, Dr. Burrows, and attempt to bully him into finding them a way out of the Pore. Dr. Burrows seems to have very little comprehension that the Styx are dangerous and capable of great cruelty and murder.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoner_(novel)"title="Stoner (novel)">
William Stoner is born on a small farm in 1891. One day his father suggests he should attend the University of Missouri to study agriculture. Stoner agrees but, while studying a compulsory literature course, he quickly falls in love with literary studies. Without telling his parents, Stoner quits the agriculture program and studies only the humanities. He completes his MA in English and begins teaching. In graduate school, he is friendly with fellow students Gordon Finch and Dave Masters. World War I begins, and Gordon and Dave enlist. Despite pressure from Gordon, Stoner decides to remain in school during the war. Masters is killed in France, while Finch sees action and becomes an officer. At a faculty party, Stoner meets and becomes infatuated with a young woman named Edith, who is staying with an aunt for a few weeks. Stoner woos Edith, and she agrees to marry him.Stoner’s marriage to Edith is bad from the start. It gradually becomes clear that Edith has profound emotional problems. Significantly, she is bitter about having cancelled a trip to Europe with her aunt to marry Stoner. After three years of marriage, Edith suddenly informs Stoner that she wants a baby. She suddenly becomes passionate sexually, but this period is brief. When their daughter Grace is born, Edith remains bedridden for nearly a year, and Stoner largely cares for their child alone. He grows close with his young daughter, who spends most of her time with him in his study. Stoner gradually realizes that Edith is waging a campaign to separate him from his daughter emotionally. For the most part, Stoner accepts Edith's mistreatment. He begins to teach with more enthusiasm, but still, year in and year out, his marriage with Edith remains perpetually unsatisfactory and fraught. Grace becomes an unhappy, secretive child who smiles and laughs often but is emotionally hollow.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_City"title="Thirteenth City">
An astronaut from Earth named Dima (short for Dmitry) crash-lands on the fourth planet of the star LK 43. The indigenous people, whose physical appearance is almost indistinguishable from human, live in the so-called Cities, enclosed and self-sufficient habitats, providing their tenants with all life's necessities. The Cities are ruled by the ruthless and authoritarian Watchers. The official ideology of the Cities promotes absolute equality and replaceability. The official honorific is "Equal". All individual qualities are considered to be atavistic and must be mercilessly eliminated to the point that most redheads are forced to dye their hair. The most dangerous atavisms are crying, hate, love, and friendship. These are eradicated in early childhood. The inhabitants of the Cities live in dormitories, while children live and study in boarding schools and know nothing about their parents. Each person's place of residency is chosen by the Watchers and are often relocated to another City. The Watchers also choose each person's job. Reproductive couples are chosen by the computer. The same computer also chooses a person's menu (exchanging food is forbidden). At the age of 60, all citizens are killed. Those who are declared as incurable "atavists" or publicly promote ideologically incorrect views are publicly censured and are subjected to a mind-wipe procedure..
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_of_Shadows"title="The Way of Shadows">
Azoth is an orphan who lives in the Warrens of Cenaria City. He and his two friends, Jarl and 'Doll Girl', are members of the Black Dragon Guild. They make their living stealing money to buy food and pay their guild dues to Rat, the Guild Fist, an enforcer who beats or rapes anyone who doesn't pay. One night, Azoth overhears a confrontation between Durzo Blint, the best wetboy (magically endowed and highly trained assassins) in the city, and several unknown assailants. After Durzo slaughters the assassins, he catches the escaping Azoth and tells him to not say a word about what he has seen to anyone.Jarl gives Azoth money that he'd saved so that he can be Durzo Blint's apprentice. Azoth follows Durzo after an ambush during a contract at the Black Dragon's guild to present his offer for apprenticeship. Durzo declines his offer and disappears. Rat beats and rapes Jarl which prompts Azoth to rally other members of the guild to stand up to him. Azoth encounters Durzo again and threatens to kill him unless he apprentices him. Durzo agrees on the condition that Azoth kill Rat by the end of the week.Before Azoth can kill Rat, Rat kidnaps and beats Doll Girl, leaving her with ugly scars all over her face. Durzo finds Doll Girl, and Azoth pleads with him to save her. Durzo agrees and Azoth sets out to kill Rat. Azoth kills Rat and cuts off his ear as proof to take back to Durzo, who has followed through and saved Doll Girl's life.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winds_of_Dune"title="The Winds of Dune">
The novel opens with the Lady Jessica back on Arrakis following the disappearance of her son Emperor Paul-Muad'Dib, who according to Fremen custom has walked into the desert to die after he is blinded. The story of the friendship between Paul and Bronso Vernius is also told.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headlong_(Ings_novel)"title="Headlong (Ings novel)">
"Headlong" is set England in the mid-21st century. There has been a civil war and reconstruction after a period of corporate excess. Advances in nanoelectronics and robotics have led to the hybridization of human and artificial intelligence (AI). These expensive interfaces have only been installed on a few architects to facilitate their direction of nanobots that are constructing beautiful cities on the Moon. However, a few years before the novel begins, the AIs take over the Moon and precipitate an economic collapse on Earth by subtle market manipulations.The novel's posthuman protagonist Christopher Yale and his wife Joanne have enhanced senses and are telepathically linked. Christopher has lived on the Moon for years. When his interfaces are removed following the economic collapse, he struggles with Epistemic Appetite Imbalance (EAI), a disorder precipitated by the loss of his enhanced senses. Christopher and his wife divorce, and she is killed a few months later. Christopher is pursued by both his wife's murderers and the police.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_(novel)"title="Horizon (novel)">
With Fawn's prompting, Dag seeks out a teacher. A powerful groundsetter at local New Moon Cutoff Camp could be the answer to his prayers, but conflicts arise between the insular Lakewalker traditions and Dag's determination to be a healer for farmers. Dag, Fawn, Arkady the groundsetter and others embark on a long journey by wagon. They are joined by several other characters, some Lakewalker, some farmer, including Fawn's brother, Whit, and his wife, Berry. On their way up the Trace, a long wagon road, they encounter a malice, an evil being with great power. A Lakewalker kills the malice with a sharing knife. Fawn guesses that this malice was fleeing something even more powerful. That turns out to be a second malice. That malice is killed by Whit, aided by Fawn and Berry, which is unprecedented—no farmer has ever killed a malice without Lakewalker aid before.At the end of the book, Dag and Fawn's vision of closer cooperation and understanding between Lakewalkers and farmers, as partners, is beginning to be achieved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_Upcountry"title="March Upcountry">
Prince Roger is ordered by his mother and older half-brother to attend a ceremony in Leviathan. Roger travels on the spaceship "Charles DeGlopper" with Eleanora O'Casey, Kostas Matsugae, and Captain Vil Krasnitsky. During the trip, a sentry is discovered shot dead on the ship, and Sergeant-Major Eva Kosutic then discovers charges in the main plasma conduits. Kosutic catches the ship's logistics officer, Ensign Guha, and shoots her just before the charges are detonated. As a result, the ship is forced to land in the nearest star system, Marduk.Prince Roger and his body guards escape in shuttles hoping to land on the planet and capture the space port. The shuttles eventually land further from the port than planned and Bravo Company sets out on their long journey. The company reach a jungle and D'Nall Cord, a shaman of the X'Intai people, suddenly appears from the jungle. He decides to introduce them to his tribe. While in the village, Cord and Delkra (the tribal chief) consult with Roger, Pahner and O'Casey on a serious problem facing the tribe from the city-state of Q'Nkok. The city and the X'Intai have a treaty whereby the city dwellers are permitted to cut only certain trees in a specific area of the tribe's territory. In recent months the woodcutters have been cutting deeper into the jungle than permitted. To attack the woodcutters would create war. The tribe could launch a surprise attack on Q'Nkok and feast on their food stores, but Pahner requests that they delay attacking Q'Nkok until after the company has gone there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_Meets_Boy"title="Girl Meets Boy">
A modern-day reinterpretation of Ovid's myth of Iphis, it concerns two sisters, Anthea and Imogen (Midge) living in Inverness. Imogen works in the marketing department of a large company producing bottled water, Anthea is on work experience in the same department but then falls in love with Robin, a genderqueer environmental activist. It also vividly portrays her sister Imogen and her joyful emergence from low self-esteem.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_from_the_Midnight_Driver"title="Notes from the Midnight Driver">
Alex Gregory is a 16-year-old boy. One night, while his mom was on a date because his dad ran off with his third-grade teacher, he decided to get wasted and he took his mom's car to pay his father a visit. The next thing he knows is that he hit a lawn gnome and puked on a police officer. To pay back the $500 Alex has to do 100 hours of community service at a nursing home. He is assigned to a man named Solomon. Alex is frustrated by Sol, but the judge will not change his assignment.Alex's best friend, Laurie, is a beautiful martial arts master. After meeting her, Sol constantly teases Alex by calling Laurie his wife throughout the book. Sol's comments about Laurie make Alex realize his feelings for her. Alex gets made fun of in Yiddish and has trouble in his life.One day, Alex practices his guitar while waiting for Sol and learns that the man used to be a Jazz guitar player. They start to bond and Sol begins to teach Alex teach some valuable lessons, in music and in life. Alex begins playing benefit concerts with Steven and Annette (from Sonnenblick's first book "Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie") to give the residents something to look forward to in their boring lives. At one such concert Sol plays a rendition of Sunrise, Sunset causing the judge to have a very emotional reaction leading to the revelation that she is Sol's daughter Judy, from whom he has been estranged for many years. Sol then dies the next day and they have his funeral soon after.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadly,_Unna?"title="Deadly, Unna?">
The novel is set in a small town in South Australia, where the whites, or "Goonyas" live in "The Port", and the Nungas, the nigarooes/Aboriginal community, live in "The Point".It is told very early in the text that the separate towns in which the whites and the Aboriginal peoples lived "didn't have too much to do with one another", which establishes the conflict that challenges Blacky and his sense of justice and loyalty throughout the text.Blacky tells, in a colloquial manner, of the various personalities of the town and of his large family of three sisters and three brothers; heavy drinking, hard-hitting father, 'He only sat down to eat with us when the pub was closed'; and gentle, patient but exhausted mother. Blacky has a friend from the Point, Dumby, and a friend from the town, Pickles. Dumby is the best player in the team but this is not recognised, as is obvious on the grand final day.As the novel opens, Blacky is worried about the imminent grand final and the responsibility he carries as the team’s new first ruck. His opponent will be the unstoppable "Thumper". To protect himself, Blacky has devised the ‘Thumper tackle’ which is the ultimate defence of the coward: it looks like he is trying to tackle his opponent but is really an elaborate dodge. For the majority of the game, Blacky keeps himself out of harm's way but near the death, he inadvertently steps into the path of the Thumper leaving him concussed yet causing sufficient impedance to the Thumper such that time expires before a scoring shot at goal could be registered resulting in a win to Blacky's Port side.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birthday_Party_(novel)"title="The Birthday Party (novel)">
Set on a single day in late summer of 1975, it is about the rise to wealth and fame of Marco Timoleon, a 72-year-old Greek shipping magnate who for that end of August day has arranged a grand party on his private island in the Aegean to celebrate his daughter's 25th birthday. In a series of flashbacks, the omniscient narrator of the novel chronicles the businessman's life from his childhood days in İzmir to his present cosmopolitan existence and status as one of the richest men in the world. However, being a master at deception, the billionaire has rewritten his own history so often that there are patches of his past his family know next to nothing about and of which even his official biographer cannot make head or tail. Sensing now that his life is gradually drawing to a close, Timoleon plans to use the birthday party as his final attempt to take influence on his daughter's extravagant life and, by doing so, to ensure that his accumulated wealth stays in the family.Practically all reviewers have pointed out the numerous parallels between the fictional protagonist and Aristotle Onassis.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_of_Dreams"title="Alphabet of Dreams">
Young Babak has a magnificent gift: He can dream the future. Mitra, his brave older sister, is sworn to protect him. For them to survive living on the streets, she must do whatever is necessary—including using her brother's talent for profit.When Babak is asked to dream for a powerful Magus, he receives a mysterious vision of two stars dancing in the night. Determined to solve this prophetic riddle, the Magus takes the boy and his sister on an arduous journey across the desert. What they discover will change the world in a way that no dream could ever predict...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granny_Was_a_Buffer_Girl"title="Granny Was a Buffer Girl">
In the first chapter the narrator is Jess, an 18-year-old girl who is about to leave home to study in France. Her extended family (her father Mike and mother Josie, her grandfathers Jack and Albert, her grandmother Dorothy, her elder brother John and his girlfriend) gathers for a celebration, partly to say goodbye, partly because it is the 27th birthday of Jess and John's eldest brother Danny, who died 10 years earlier, when she was 8. Jess is troubled by a secret she has been harbouring. As the characters talk, they promise to reveal their own stories and secrets.The second chapter is set in the 1930s and concerns Jess's maternal grandparents, Bridie and Jack. Bridie comes from a large Catholic family and Jack's parents are deeply religious Protestants. They fall in love and marry secretly, knowing their prejudiced families will oppose their marriage.The third chapter centres on Dorothy, Jess's father's mother, the "buffer girl" of the title. It introduces Jess's great aunt Louie, Dorothy's elder sister, who gets Dorothy a job at a local buffing shop. At the Cutlers' Ball, 1931, Dorothy dances with the boss's handsome son, but when the next day he fails to recognize her in her grimy work clothes, she gives up her dream of escaping the narrow streets and grudgingly accepts the matter-of-fact proposal of her boy-next-door sweetheart, Albert, a young steelworker.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_of_Wrath"title="Wings of Wrath">
The story opens with Kamala returning to Ethanus, despite the usual unwillingness of Magisters to show weakness around others of their kind. He willingly protects her while she heals, but tells her that he will turn her over to the Magisters to face justice for her violation of their Law (although he tells her this only so that she will flee to safety).Meanwhile, Salvator returns to the High Kingdom after his mother offers him the throne. A great deal of the political intrigue of the novel centers around the fact that Salvator is a monk of a monotheistic religion at odds with that of his mother, and that he will have to give up his monastic vows to take the throne, with many believing he will cling to pacifism, and others believing he will turn from his religion - if he turns either way, his political enemies can celebrate victory.Rhys returns to Kierdwyn with evidence of an attack by a souleater, including some pieces of its armored hide and a tale of how quickly the beast disintegrated after its death. Fearing that a souleater south of the Wrath means that there must be a weak point along it, the Lord Protector sends Rhys and another guardian to look for the point where the Wrath may have become so damaged. On their way, Kamala watches them from high above as a bird, and seeks to find a way to join their company. Seeing a trap laid for them, she tries to return to human form, but the power of the Wrath is too great and she nearly dies, passing out until after they have fallen into the trap. Rhys is captured and his companion apparently killed. Kamala sets aside her power and manages to rescue him via subterfuge and a lot of luck, and they finally ride north together to investigate the Wrath.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_the_Iguana"title="Day of the Iguana">
Hank and his two best friends, Frankie and Ashley, perform magic tricks at Hank's 3-year-old cousin's birthday party. Performing at the party means that Frankie will have to miss "The Mutant Moth That Ate Toledo," a movie he has been looking forward to, but Hank promises to record the movie for him. However, since Hank has dyslexia, he accidentally records the wrong channel, making Frankie very upset.Hank takes apart a cable box to see how it works for his school science project, but then his sister's pet iguana, Katherine, lays eggs in it. Afraid that his father will discover the cable box taken apart, Hank orders a new one. Tom, the new cable box installer, happens to be knowledgeable about iguanas. That night they witness 23 baby iguanas hatching. Tom agrees to give Hank a tape of "The Mutant Moth That Ate Toledo" in exchange for a baby iguana, and Hank and Frankie watch the movie together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chindi_(novel)"title="Chindi (novel)">
Alien stealth satellites have been discovered orbiting various habitable planets (eventually including Earth) across space. The Contact Society, a group of rich alien enthusiasts, set out in a brand new superluminal, with Hutch as captain, in search of the source of the strange satellites. As they travel they find a species of sentient spider-like beings who destroyed themselves in a nuclear war, a species of avian beings who look beautiful but are really savages, and a technically advanced alien retreat on an artificial moon. Then Chindi is discovered. A giant asteroid ship, almost 16 km (9.9 miles) long, it seems to have no reasonable use; but when they enter it, they begin to discover its true purpose.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifted_Hands"title="Gifted Hands">
The book is based on the real events during the life of Dr. Carson. It is written in the first person and describes how Ben, an African-American boy from the Detroit ghettos achieves success and fame as a world-class pediatric neurosurgeon. It begins when, at age 8, Ben's father leaves the family, forcing Carson’s mother, Sonya, to raise her two sons, Ben and Curtis, alone. The Carson family faces struggles in the next years. These include both financial struggles and his mother’s mental health issues. Carson then turns to his personal struggles in school and dealing with anger. He achieves excellent grades and enters Yale as a freshman in the premed program and continues to face challenges, including ongoing struggles for financial security and unexpected academic challenges. In his college years, Ben meets his future wife, Lacena (Candy) Rustin, with whom he shares a love of music and, eventually, commitment to the Seventh-day Adventist Church.Carson then focuses on his medical career. He tells how he returns to Michigan for medical school, marries Candy, and then heads to Johns Hopkins for his neurosurgery residency and eventually becomes their youngest ever director of pediatric neurosurgery, in which position he continues beyond the period covered in the book. Turning his attention to his career as director of pediatric neurosurgery, Carson thinks back on key surgical advances that he made, using his “gifted hands” while relying on God’s guidance, most notably, the separation of two craniopagus German twins, the first such twins joined at the back of the cranium to both survive a separation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Appleton"title="Elizabeth Appleton">
The title character is a woman from a wealthy New York family who, at a young age, marries a scholar of modest means. They move to his hometown in Pennsylvania, where he becomes a history professor and later a college dean. Several years into the marriage, after having two children, she embarks on a passionate but extremely secret love affair with a wealthy and affable local man.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Calder_Game"title="The Calder Game">
Calder Pillay travels with his father to a Woodstock, Oxfordshire and becomes interested in an unexpected Alexander Calder sculpture (who coincidentally is his namesake) in the town square. On the same night, both Calder and the sculpture disappear. His friends Petra and Tommy fly to England to aid his father in finding him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeletons_at_the_Feast"title="Skeletons at the Feast">
The plot of the story centers around a young Prussian girl, Anna Emmerich, and the broken remnants of her family as they flee westward from the advancing Russian army. Along with them they are joined by the Scottish POW, Callum Finella, with whom Anna has embarked on a secret love affair. As Anna, her mother, her younger brother Theo, and Callum trek across the Third Reich, other stories run parallel to theirs, including the story of Uri Singer, a Jew that leapt off the train to Auschwitz and survives by assuming identities belonging to various German soldiers; and Cecile, a French Jew taken prisoner in a concentration camp and, along with her fellow prisoners, forced to march westward to outdistance the Russian advance. Eventually all three stories come together when Anna's party, joined by Uri, crosses paths with the sad march of Cecile and the other prisoners. Throughout the novel, Anna struggles with understanding the atrocities the Nazis have committed and how she can possibly bear the burden of blame by the rest of the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bandit_of_Hell's_Bend"title="The Bandit of Hell's Bend">
Elias Henders is the prosperous owner of a ranch and a gold mine. Competing for his daughter Diana, ranch hand Colby sabotages recovering alcoholic foreman Bull, and takes his job. The local stage is repeatedly robbed of gold bullion from the owner's mine, and Bull is suspected. The cowardly sheriff does not take action on the robberies. Rich Easterner Wainwright tries to buy the mine and ranch for a low price, but Henders refuses the offer and discusses the property's true value with Diana. She is intrigued by Wainwright's Eastern-educated son Jefferson, who proposes marriage. However, when they are attacked by Indians during the roundup, he runs rather than defend her. Henders is mortally wounded in the battle.Henders will bequeaths his property to his brother John back East so that he can take care of Diana, but John dies too. The Wainwrights pretend that Henders had agreed to a sale, but Diana knows better. Diana's Eastern cousin Lillian brings Corson, a lawyer, to try to seize the ranch and gold mine. They insist that the ranch and mine are nearly played out, and that they should sell the property, offering her a small amount. They show their ignorance about western ways. Bull encourages Diana that the property is worth more than they say, and advises her that the Wainwrights are often at the mine. The Eastern lawyer finally announces that Diana has no property rights due to the wills.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordy_Bank_(novel)"title="Nordy Bank (novel)">
Six children plan a camping trip during the Easter holidays, deciding on Brown Clee Hill as it is out of the way of summer visitors. They set up camp on the top of the hill, which turns out to be the site of an Iron Age hill fort, Nordy Bank. Bronwen is particularly susceptible to the atmosphere of the place, and shows unexpected knowledge about its construction. Her personality begins to change, as from a quiet good-natured girl she becomes argumentative, then increasingly withdrawn and sullen. Bron is aware of the change and frightened by it. Her friend Margery believes she is possessed by the spirit of an Iron Age woman.Meanwhile an Alsatian dog of the Royal Army Veterinary Corps escapes while on his way to retraining by the National Canine Defence League after being retired due to partial deafness. Being muzzled, he is unable to hunt and becomes increasingly hungry. When the dog appears lurking round the camp, the dog-loving Bron reacts with fear and hostility, calling him a wolf. However, his forlorn state eventually rouses her true self and she befriends him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minister_Jade"title="Minister Jade">
In Yuan dynasty China a down-on-his-luck former government official named Zhen Wenxiu tries to commit suicide by jumping into the stormy sea, but is instead carried off to the mysterious Island of Living Jade. There he is met by two green-skinned dwarves who question him as to the state of their former home, China. When Wenxiu informs them that it has been conquered by the Mongols and transformed into a land of oppression and injustice, the dwarves give him a magical belt of Living Jade and encourage him to use its power to free China from the Mongol yoke. But the prestige-hungry Wenxiu chooses to serve rather than destroy the occupying regime. He insinuates himself into the retinue of Mongol emperor Khubilai Khan and basks in the wealth and status of his new position. Meanwhile, a mad cult leader named Wanyao Wang is on a mission to destroy all of China with a dread mist that turns people into solid gold. Wenxiu eventually uncovers this plot and wants to act, but Khubilai Khan urges him to focus his attention instead on the impending invasion of Japan. Realizing that Khubilai cares more about his imperial ambitions than the people of China, Wenxiu finally breaks away from him and sets out to stop Wanyayo Wang. In the end he gives up the life of a high-ranking minister for that of a poor but honorable hero.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_of_Clay"title="Bridge of Clay">
The Dunbar boys live in a suburb of Sydney, in a house of mayhem and madness that only five young boys can cause. Left to their own devices after their mother, Penny Dunbar, died of cancer, and their father, Michael Dunbar, ran out on them, the boys do their best to get along through life. The novel starts with their father, referred to as 'the murderer', coming back into their lives requesting their help to build a bridge. All of the brothers refuse, except Clay – who betrays his family in this act. Clay leaves school to go help his father, but before leaving Sydney meets up with their neighbour Carey Novac at the Surrounds, an old abandoned horse stables, as they do every Saturday night. The two talk about the previous horseraces of the week and obsess over "The Quarryman", a book about Michelangelo. Clay leaves Carey with the book, and she says he has to come back for it.Meanwhile, several years and decades prior, a young Penny sits at the piano with her father Waldek, who hits her hands with a twig every time she gets a note wrong. Growing up in the Eastern Bloc, Waldek wants a bigger life for his daughter – he mentors her at the piano and reads her "The Illiad" and "The Odyssey". Proficient at the piano, Penny plays many concerts all over the Eastern Bloc, and Waldek decides that at the age of 18, she will play a concert in Vienna and never return. She is in a camp for nine months before Australia accepts her for entry. Once in Sydney, Penny works as a cleaner and an English as a Second Language teacher, but still misses her father and the piano. Eventually, she decides to gather up her savings and buy a piano, which instead of being delivered to her address, is delivered to Michael Dunbar, who lives further down on the same street. Michael, broken after the divorce from his wife Abbey, finds beauty in the world again through Penny. They get married and live happily in their house with their five sons until Penny gets cancer. Death creeps in, and at the end of her life Clay, not Michael, is the one to spend her final moments with her, outside in the garden underneath the clothesline.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gods_Behaving_Badly"title="Gods Behaving Badly">
A young woman named Alice finds a job as a cleaning lady in a London flat. She's unaware that the tenants are Greek gods, fallen into disgrace because nobody believes in them anymore. Apollo falls in love with Alice, but when he discovers that she's already in love with a boy named Neil, he tricks Zeus into killing her with lightning.Feeling guilty, he tries to apologize to Neil, but winds up blocking out the sun in a fit of anger. At that moment, Apollo loses his energy and dies, leaving the world without a sun. Neil descends into Hades in search of Alice's and Apollo's souls, intent on resurrecting his beloved and saving the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betrayal_(Tilton_novel)"title="Betrayal (Tilton novel)">
Ambassadors from all over the Federation have assembled on "Deep Space Nine" for a conference that will determine the future of the planet Bajor. Keeping dozens of alien ambassadors happy is hard enough, but when hidden terrorists start blowing up the station, Commander Benjamin Sisko must track a hidden enemy who strikes at will. Then things get even worse: a new Cardassian commander arrives, demanding the return of "Deep Space Nine" to the Cardassian Empire. With "Deep Space Nine" now a dangerous minefield, Sisko must defuse a situation that threatens the very existence of the planet Bajor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_(Marsden_novel)"title="Winter (Marsden novel)">
Winter is a headstrong 16-year-old girl whose parents died when she was 4. Since then she has lived with her mother's half sister and her husband, the Robinsons. At the start of the book, she returns to her parents’ home, drawn by a desire to know what happened to them. She was also motivated by a mysterious desire to return to the place she grew up in, surrounded by memories, notably of her parents.Upon arriving, Winter is welcomed by the caretakers of the property, Ralph and Sylvia, but she insists on staying in her parents’ house, not theirs. She finds that her house is very run-down and negotiates with Mr. Carruthers, the manager of the estate and of the trust left to her by her parents, to renovate it. Later on, she discovers that Ralph and Sylvia have been carrying out illegal business on her property. They have been using the money from Winter's family trust for their own profit, rather than to maintain the estate, which was what they were employed to do. Upon discovering this, Winter insists that Mr Carruthers fire Ralph and Sylvia, much to the delight of many of her neighbours.Winter also makes the effort to meet several people in the town who knew her parents. She meets Matthew Kennedy, a young man from a neighbouring farm. Their first encounter is fiesty. Winter yells at him for trespassing on her property, only to find out that she had crossed over onto his property during her walk. Throughout the novel, Winter becomes friends with Matthew.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Normal_(book)"title="The Trouble with Normal (book)">
Chapter One criticizes the idea that there is some morally compelling aspect to "normality", arguing that the normal range is simply a statistical category to which there is no ethical obligation to correspond: "If normal just means within a common statistical range, there is no reason to be normal or not". Warner uses the example of former US president Bill Clinton's impeachment after a sexual scandal to argue that public and political discourse uses shame disingenuously, to portray certain kinds of sexual behaviour as intolerable, when private morality generally recognises the compatibility of sex with dignity.The second chapter argues that as well as being a limited goal, less urgent than the elimination of violence and discrimination against queer people, same-sex marriage actively causes negative consequences both for queer and straight people, because in validating a single, prescribed type of relationship it devalues and makes more difficult other kinds of interpersonal relationship. Warner argues that the campaign for gay marriage threatens to turn the gay rights movement, previously a powerful force against the stigmatization of sex, into a tool for the normalization of queer life.In Chapter Three Warner proposes that by restricting its campaigning to demands for same-sex marriage, the gay rights movement has marginalized and ignored queer counterpublics that it would have served better by presenting a broad range of sexual lives as moral.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prophet_Murders"title="The Prophet Murders">
The narrator sets out to investigate the mysterious death of two of the employees at the transvestite nightclub she runs, only two discover that they are part of a larger sequence of murders of transvestites named after the prophets.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_River_Why"title="The River Why">
A coming-of-age story narrated by Gus Orviston, a high school graduate and the oldest son in a fishing-crazed family. Frustrated with life in Portland, Oregon, and the constant bickering of his bait fishing mother (Ma) and tweed-wearing, fly-fishing father () over the proper way to fish, Gus moves to a small cabin in the foothills of the Oregon Coast Range. Once there he begins to follow an "ideal schedule" that has him doing nothing but eating, sleeping, and fishing. In the course of doing nothing but what he loves to do, he begins to notice the scars that humanity has inflicted on the river and forests he loves. Gus also goes through the traumatic event when he is fishing and finds and must transport a dead fisherman to shore, and through this experience he is able to realize how wrong his "ideal schedule" really is. As he wrestles with what to do, he begins to relate with the people in his neighborhood. He starts to regain his passion for life through his intense passion of the outdoors and fishing, but also through human contact. He also meets his new friend, though while rather eccentric, is also a brilliant thinker, helping Gus see the meaning in his life. Gus continues to grow and mature, mirroring the path to adulthood many experience, until he meets a young fisherwoman, Eddy. Although their relationship is unique, it is also a very true form of love that not only helps Gus to continue to grow into a man, but also teaches him to truly appreciate every aspect of his life. Gus is put to the test when Eddy hooks him a salmon, making him fight it all night up the river. Gus ultimately chooses her and the new life he has started to create for himself by releasing the fish when he finally catches it, mirroring man's quest for success, to only discover that true success is the happiness experienced by the abandonment of preconceived notions of success that are not applicable anymore to a growing life, entering into adulthood. The book ends with Gus completely growing up by confronting his parents with Eddy and forgiving them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_the_Unknown_Island"title="The Tale of the Unknown Island">
A man requests the king of his country to give him a boat so he can go in search for "the unknown island". The king questions him about the existence of such an island and tries to convince the man that all islands already appear on maps. The man states that only the known islands do. This debate concludes with the king granting him a boat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelology_(novel)"title="Angelology (novel)">
The story follows a nun in New York who unwittingly reignites an ancient war between Angelologists, a group who study angels, and a race of descendants of angels and humans called the Nephilim. The story blends ancient biblical pericopes, the myth of Orpheus, and the fall of rebel angels.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_(novel)"title="Julia (novel)">
Julia Lofting has just purchased a large house in London as a means of escaping her overbearing husband, Magnus, and to start her life over following the death of her nine-year-old daughter, Kate. But she begins to suspect that she is not alone, and after a seance is held at her home she comes to fear that a malevolent supernatural presence is stalking her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someone_Named_Eva"title="Someone Named Eva">
Milada, a young Czechoslovakian girl, lives in the village of Lidice. The book starts with her and her friends hanging out on her 11th birthday when Milada receives a telescope. The next days, Nazis break into their home. She doesn't understand at first when Nazi soldiers come to her house, ordering them to pack belongings for three days and leave the house. Her father and her older brother, Jaroslav, are separated from the rest of the family to be taken elsewhere; Milada, her mother, baby sister Anechka, and grandmother, are subsequently held together with the rest of the female inhabitants of Lidice, in a building.Milada is taken to a health examination where her facial features are measured and checked by doctors. With her "perfect" features, blue eyes, and blonde hair, Milada fits the "Aryan ideal" and is separated from her family, and is sent to a center outside of Puschkau, Poland. At the center, Milada is renamed Eva, a more "German" name, and the other girls are renamed too. The center employs harsh disciplinary methods and the girls are schooled in the German language, Nazi philosophies, and home economics so they can eventually join the German society. As hard as she works to remember, she forgets a little about herself in the process like her language Czech.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majya_Jalmachi_Chittarkatha"title="Majya Jalmachi Chittarkatha">
The autobiography "Majya Jalmachi Chittarkatha" by Dalit woman writer Shantabai Kamble, the protagonist of the story, Naja, bears the brunt of class, caste and gender. Naja is from the Mahar caste, one of the biggest Dalit communities in Maharashtra.Najabai Sakharam Babar (renamed Shantabai Krishnaji Kamble after her marriage), was the first Dalit woman teacher in Solapur district. she began teaching at the Solapur District Board School in 1942. Ten year, in 1952, she completed two years of teacher training and served as an education extension officer in the Jat taluka of Sangli district.She wrote "Mazhya Jalmachi Chittarkatha" ("The Kaleidoscopic Story of My Life") after she retired from teaching in 1981. It was first serialised in "Purva" magazine in 1983 and was teleserialised as "Najuka" on Mumbai Doordarshan in 1990. It has also been translated into French. The word "chittarkatha" literally means a picture story but also indicates a sense of pieces of pictures being put together like a jigsaw puzzle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_Fair_(novel)"title="Science Fair (novel)">
5 years or so before the book's main plot, a Krpshtskani singer named Gmygmy is disgraced by the American public because his vocals sound like a dying horse. This enrages the Krpshtskanis, who live in a fictional impoverished country about the size of Luxembourg. Grdankl the Strong, president of Krpshtskan and Gmygmy's father, decides to exact revenge by sending his other son, Prmkt, to the US to disrupt their electrical grid.Prmkt applies for a job as a janitor at Hubble Middle School, a prestigious public school in southern Maryland that hosts an annual science fair with a cash prize for the winner. Prmkt secretly sends notes to the Manor Estates (ME) kids, children of rich government officials who win the science fair every year by going to a store in the local mall called the Science Nook, where the owner, Neil Sternabite, secretly builds their projects for a fee. Prmkt's note says that for a fee, he will give the ME kids blueprints to build technical items for the science fair.Meanwhile, Toby Harbinger, a kid attending Hubble Middle School, decides to investigate the cheating at his school to catch the ME kids, who routinely bully him. He learns about their yearly scheme and confronts the principal of his school (nicknamed the Hornet because the students find her scary). However, he is unable to prove anything, and suspended because Prmkt frames him for cheating to get him out of the way. Sternabite reveals to Toby that he is having second thoughts about this year's projects for the ME kids because of a suspicion he has about the combination of the projects. Toby and his two friends Micah and Tamara get sent to jail after Prmkt blackmails them, as well as two men Grdankl the Strong sent to "help", Drmtsi and Vrsk. Toby and his friends escape in a Weinermobile to Hubble where they arrive just in time stop Prmkt's plan. Fester the frog plays a key role in taking down Prmkt. Prmkt later is forced to work for the FBI.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Faithful_Spy"title="The Faithful Spy">
The book begins a few months after the September 11th terrorist attacks on the United States, with John Wells, an undercover CIA agent, in the middle of a battle in Afghanistan. Wells has been undercover with Al Qaeda for many years, fighting in Chechnya, Afghanistan and Pakistan. During the battle he and his crew of Al-Qaeda members are on a hillside where a group of United States Marines are stationed. The small Al-Qaeda band is planning to attack the Marines to help with a bigger battle that is raging below, and Wells decides to take out the terrorists himself so he can send a message to his CIA contact via the Marines: "No prior knowledge of 9/11. Say hi to Heather for me."Meanwhile, back in the United States, Jennifer Exley, his CIA handler, visits a prisoner of war being held on a Navy ship to try to get information on Wells, who has been incommunicado for two years.Al Qaeda detonates two truck bombs in LA, killing hundreds of people. John Wells is returned to the USA on a mission from Al Qaeda where he reconnects with the CIA. However, due to the length of his absence he is accused of being “un-faithful” because he did not warn the US about Al Qaeda attacks. The accuser, Vinny Duto, forces John to take a polygraph test. He proves himself to be innocent. Wells is put in a CIA safe house in Washington, DC but escapes in order to continue his Al Qaeda mission.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Girl"title="Harvard Girl">
Liu Weihua (Liu's mother) and Zhang Xinwu (Liu's stepfather) published "Harvard Girl" in 2000, after Liu had matriculated at Harvard. According to Liu, her parents had plans early on to write about their parenting methods, but they waited until 2000 to publish the book, relying on Liu's perceived success to establish themselves as "experts". The book primarily consists of research-like notes and diary entries, which Liu and her parents began recording and saving before Liu was in first grade. Liu herself helped edit the book, and wrote several of the later chapters.One major element of the child-rearing strategy described in the book was treating Liu as an adult and "encourag[ing] her to develop a mature style of thinking". Liu's parents never used baby talk when Liu was a child, and they allowed her to argue with them but required her to present reasoned arguments like an adult. According to education scholar Ben Mardell, the book's focus on independent thinking and intellectual development was a "break with the past" in China, where both early and higher education often emphasize rote learning.In addition, the book details the rigorous "character-building exercises" Liu's parents had her perform. In addition to having her do physical exercises, Liu's parents controlled her diet. They also frequently took her traveling, both on short trips to nearby rural areas and on longer trips to historical sites such as Xi'an. Throughout the book, high value is placed on "full development", and the writers encourage parents to cultivate more than just academic ability in their children.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Dragons_(novel)"title="Nine Dragons (novel)">
Harry Bosch is still back in homicide (no closer duty for him) and during a slow night he is asked to investigate a shooting in a "rougher" section of L.A. Harry and his partner (Detective Ignacio Ferras) grudgingly take the assignment that would normally be handled by a gang-related crimes unit, and learn that a Chinese-American convenience store owner was murdered behind his own counter. The case draws Harry's interest because he remembers the store and that the owner had been kind to him several years earlier. He assures the owner's son, Robert Li, that he will catch the culprit.Harry starts to realize that this might not have been a routine robbery but a possible execution by a Triad hitman. With the help of Detective David Chu of the Asian Gangs Unit, Harry starts to zero in on a suspect and then receives a threatening call telling him to back off. Harry shrugs it off and continues but his investigation stalls when he receives a video showing his daughter (Maddie) being kidnapped in Hong Kong, which he believes to be related to the Triad and his murder investigation. He rushes off to save her, realizing that if he is not back within 48 hours, a suspect in the shooting will be set free. Because of the length of the flights, Harry will have less than 24 hours in Hong Kong to find Maddie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_People_(novel)"title="Other People (novel)">
Mary, an amnesiac young woman, wakes in a hospital and cannot remember who she is, what has happened to her, or even simple things such as how to blow her nose or what clouds are. She leaves the hospital and takes the name "Mary Lamb" after overhearing a nursery rhyme. Mary befriends a woman named Sharon, an alcoholic who seems well-meaning to the naïve Mary until she prostitutes her for money. After enduring painful sex, Mary smashes the man's mouth in once he passes out. She flees, coming into contact with a policeman named Prince, who knows about Mary's past.Mary lives for a while with Sharon's parents, also alcoholics, but eventually she moves into a shelter for "fallen women." She receives a letter from Prince that includes a newspaper clipping concerning her before she lost her memory. Mary learns that her real name is Amy Hide and that her past was quite dark, a fact which causes Mary a great deal of distress. During her stay at the shelter, she gets a job as a waitress in a seedy café. With one exception, all of the male employees sexually harass her, but she does not understand the significance of their actions. The exception is Alan, a meek and highly insecure man who is deeply infatuated with Mary but does nothing to ward off the attentions of others. Mary meets Prince again, and she learns that Amy had asked someone to kill her. According to Prince, the failed killing was what had caused her amnesia. The man who did it is behind bars but due to be released.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Monk_Goes_to_the_Firehouse"title="Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse">
Adrian Monk, an obsessive-compulsive private detective, moves in with his assistant Natalie Teeger while his apartment is being fumigated. Julie tells Natalie that Sparky, a firehouse dalmatian who visited her school during Fire Safety Week, was found murdered the previous night. Monk volunteers to identify the killer.Monk and Natalie head to Sparky's firehouse in North Beach. Captain Mantooth, the commander of the engine company, says that Sparky belonged to Joe Cochran, and always slept in the firehouse while Joe was on duty. The crew was called to a house fire around 10:00pm. An old woman named Esther Stoval died, having fallen asleep while smoking a cigarette. In the four hours they were gone, someone sneaked into the firehouse and killed Sparky with a pickaxe. The only thing missing were two towels, seemingly eliminating the possibility that the killer was there to rob the firehouse.At the scene of the previous night's fire, Monk and Natalie run into Captain Stottlemeyer, who is treating the house as a crime scene until the arson investigator makes a decision. The arson investigator concludes the death was an accident. However, Monk observes that from Stoval's position on the couch, her view of the TV was blocked by an empty chair, indicating she had a visitor. He believes Stoval was murdered.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_to_the_World_(novel)"title="Dead to the World (novel)">
This novel opens on New Year's Eve, three weeks after the events of "Club Dead". Sookie Stackhouse finds Eric running down the road close to her home, but he seems to have lost his memory. Sookie, initially reluctant to get involved in vampire matters once again, takes Eric in. Eric's second in command, Pam, is relieved at Sookie finding Eric, and explains a coven of villainous witches, some of them also werewolves, has arrived in Shreveport, set on extorting money from Eric and taking over the local power he has. Hence, Pam believes the witches to be responsible for Eric's erased memory. After Sookie's brother Jason bargains on a financial settlement, Sookie agrees to keep Eric in her house and care for him, as the witches are on the lookout for Eric and might harm him.The next day, Jason is missing. Sookie oversees the slowly progressing police investigation of her brother's disappearance, but personally fears the witch coven might've gotten hold of him.Later on, Sookie informs werewolf Alcide Herveaux of the witch coven being in town. Alcide and his pack master fear that one of their pack members might have defected to the witches' side, but Sookie and Alcide then discover this particular woman's murdered body. Back in Bon Temps, Sookie's workplace is paid a visit to by the leaders of the witch coven, Marnie "Hallow" and Mark Stonebrook. Meanwhile, Sookie and Eric give in to their intense desire for each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_and_the_Gone"title="The Dead and the Gone">
Alex Morales is a seventeen-year-old Puerto Rican-American boy living in New York City with his parents and younger sisters, Briana and Julie. He also has an older brother, Carlos, who is serving in the Marines. While their father is in Puerto Rico for their grandmother’s funeral, a large asteroid crashes into the moon and knocks it closer to the Earth (as seen in "Life As We Knew It"). Alex’s mother, a nurse, is summoned to the hospital to help, leaving Alex to watch over Bri and Julie. The next morning, Alex’s Uncle Jimmy visits and helps them stock food in each other’s apartments, and when they get home Bri says she received a static-filled call from someone she believes was their father. Alex also receives a call from Carlos reassuring him that he is alright and will soon be deployed. Later that day, a massive storm strikes the city and floods the subways, causing Alex to worry since he knows his mother takes the subway to and from work in addition to his father being in Puerto Rico when a hurricane strikes. On Sunday, telephone service resumes and Alex calls the hospital his mother works out but is unable to receive word about her wellbeing. That Tuesday, Alex’s all-boys Catholic high school resumes and he meets Father Francis Mulrooney, a stoic retired priest asked to act as temporary headmaster for the school. Later that week, Alex visits Yankee Stadium where the bodies of the dead are laid out for identification, but does not find anyone he recognizes. Tensions rise in the Morales household as Bri and Julie grow frustrated with the lack of information and Alex admits that they shouldn’t expect to see their parents ever again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_Hospital"title="Gothic Hospital">
The book focuses on a teenager named Johnny Doolan who discovers many old gothic books in his attic after his younger sister dies of tuberculosis, which results in his parents breaking up. The books' chapters are replaced by "sessions" as the book is partly set at a psychiatrist's office.In the book, Johnny claims to his psychiatrist that when he reads the books in his attic, the book "fills itself in" with colour, and Johnny becomes part of the story. One book Johnny particularly becomes engrossed in, is a book about an old Gothic hospital, and Johnny eventually believes that his father is trapped in the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clown_(novel)"title="The Clown (novel)">
Hans Schnier is the "Clown" of the novel's title. He is twenty-seven years old from a very wealthy family. At the beginning of the story he arrives in Bonn, Germany. As a clown, he had to travel across the country from city to city to perform as an artist. He always sees himself as an artist. His home is in Bonn, so he has to stay in hotels when he is not in Bonn. The woman he has been living with, Marie, has left him to marry another man, Zupfner. Therefore Hans has become depressed. He wants to get Marie back from Zupfner, and also has serious financial problems.He describes himself as a clown with no church affiliation. His parents, devout Protestants, sent him to a Catholic school. He met Marie in school and fell in love with her. Although Marie was a Catholic, she agreed to live with him. They never got legally married, largely because Hans would not agree to sign a paper agreeing to raise his children as Catholics. He did not even want to get a marriage license, because he thought that they were for people who did not go to church. While living together, they never had any children. Marie always stated that even though she was living in sin, she was still a Catholic. Once in high school, Hans saw her holding hands with Zupfner, but she told him that Zupfner was only a friend. Hans brought her along on every trip and took her everywhere he went. After five years, there was a Catholic conference near their hotel in a German city. Marie wanted to breathe some Catholic air and ask Hans to go there. Hans had a performance at the same time. When they arrived late at night, he fell asleep. The next morning, he discovered Marie was gone, but had left a note. He never saw her again. The note read: “I must take the path that I must take.”
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luckypenny"title="Luckypenny">
Luckypenny, the title character, is married with two young adult children. Like the author himself, Luckypenny has lost a leg in World War I. He works as an accountant with an English arms firm. Discovering some financial irregularities he blackmails his way to promotion.He is sent to negotiate an arms sale to fascist Italy and becomes embroiled in a scheme to smuggle cash out of the country, arranged by his boss to get rid of him. He is caught, but escapes with the aid of a young woman, who, unbeknownst to Luckypenny, is an Italian espionage agent.The agent falls in love with Luckypenny and helps him to land a large contract for his company.Additional adventures involve Luckypenny's children. His son, Tom, and the boss's daughter fall in love, but Tom is shattered when he discovers that she is not a virgin. Luckypenny's daughter and his boss also begin a love affair.The novel ends in Francoist Spain, where Luckypenny's fate depends upon the intervention of his Italian lover.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vespers_in_Vienna"title="Vespers in Vienna">
Shortly after the end of World War II, British Colonel Michael 'Hooky' Nicobar is assigned to the Displaced Persons Division in the British Zone of Vienna, Austria. Like the author himself, Nicobar has had a limb amputated. Marshall also served in the Displaced Persons Division in Austria.Nicobar's duty is to aid Soviet authorities repatriate citizens of the Soviet Union. Billeted in the convent run by Mother Auxilia, Nicobar, and his military aides Major John 'Twingo' McPhimister and Audrey Quail, become involved in the plight of Maria, a young ballerina, who is trying to avoid being returned to Moscow, as she, like many others, fears imprisonment or execution on returning to her home country. Nicobar's sense of duty is tested as he sees first hand the plight of the people he is forcing to return to the Soviet Union; his lack of religious faith is also shaken by his contact with the Mother Superior.The novel was the basis of the 1949 film "The Red Danube" starring Walter Pidgeon, Ethel Barrymore, Peter Lawford, Angela Lansbury and Janet Leigh. George Sidney directed.After the movie was released the novel was re-issued as "The Red Danube".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fair_Bride"title="The Fair Bride">
A young priest decides to leave the church because disillusioned by the worldliness and minor cruelty of the clergy. This decision coincides with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The rebels accuse priests of indoctrinating their followers against them, and many get beaten up and tortured. The priest discovers that the clergy he had despised are capable of heroism under terrible torture. He interprets this as holiness, and this prompts him to rejoin the church, in a state of great fear and personal confusion. This means that he, himself, has to go on the run. He goes into a cabaret to hide and meets a young girl, an entertainer in the club and an illiterate prostitute. She and her mother shelter him. They become lovers while he thinks of himself as an atheist. Later, when he reconverts to Christianity, he preaches purity to her. Both of them wind up being arrested, and she gets shot protecting him. As she dies in his arms, he suddenly recognises that this little prostitute has shown him a depth of pure love and acceptance that puts him, the intellectual, professional clergyman, to deep shame.Meanwhile, both sides are searching for a sacred relic that is believed to have miraculous powers - it is said to have helped defeat Napoleon. Because the ordinary people believe that the side that has the relic is going to win, both sides obviously want to have it. The relic ends up in the priest's possession, and he recognises its power as a morale-booster so doesn't want it to fall into the wrong hands.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Friend_(Marshall_novel)"title="The Little Friend (Marshall novel)">
James Garrett is the “Little Friend” of several young women. Whether or not this is a good thing for these ladies is the issue studied in this tragicomic novel.Garrett meets Effie, the lovely daughter of a local pastor, while studying for the ministry at St. Andrews, a university in Scotland. He falls in love with Effie only moments after meeting her. They are inseparable, until, just days before his graduation–ordination, and the day after their first sexual encounter, she is killed in a traffic accident.Despondent and disillusioned, he abandons his intended pastoral career and takes a job as an ad writer with Paloma, the American manufacturer of a very successful line of toothpaste.The company sends him to Paris where he meets Marjorie, a worldly, promiscuous and beautiful British expatriate. He quickly abandons her when his company assigns him to Barcelona.On the train to his new job, he meets an English family, the Nicholsons, also traveling to Barcelona. The daughter, Molly, becomes infatuated with Garrett. His feelings towards her are more ambiguous.The next player in this drama is Pepita. A fiery and lovely poor woman, Pepita works in a brothel since “I can’t keep body and soul together on what is paid by shoe stores.”
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stooping_Venus"title="The Stooping Venus">
Lady Louise Eleanor Stromworth-Jenkins is "very much of the nineteen twenties." The daughter of an English Baron and a French mother, Louise is young, wealthy, intelligent, well-educated and beautiful. An object of pursuit by many eligible young men in her London, England area, Louise feels herself not really capable of love.She meets Lord James Strathcrombie, a decorated war veteran and owner of Benhyter Motors, Limited, a successful automobile company. Eventually, despite her lack of deep love for James, they marry.While Strathcrombie is in Paris on a business trip, Louise travels to Roscoff, France to visit her good friend Veronica Ashley, who is staying there with her family and several friends.One of the friends is Robert Hewitt, a Scottish medical student and the author of one relatively unsuccessful novel. Although she believes in loyalty and is devoted to her husband, Louise feels an attraction to Robert which lasts through the visit. Soon all return to their respective endeavors.A few months later Louise travels to St. Andrews, Scotland to visit friends. There she encounters Robert again, this time just after he has published his second novel, "The Silver Fleece", which has become a great success.Louise and Robert spend considerable time together and the encounters grow increasingly romantic. But again, nothing happens between them and soon they part.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_World"title="Terminal World">
The plot begins when an "angel", a posthuman from the Celestial levels at Spearpoint's peak, falls to Neon Heights, further down the spire. The clean-up crew that finds it delivers it to Quillon, one of the zone's pathologists. It is revealed that Quillon was part of a secret angel project to see if angels could be altered to survive in Spearpoint's lower levels. The dying angel tells Quillon that certain factions amongst the angels are searching for him to obtain further information about the results of this project.Quillon seeks advice from his old ally, Fray, who tells him that he needs to leave Spearpoint if he is to survive in the foreseeable future. He summons Meroka, one of his extraction specialists, to help Quillon out of the city. Quillon and Meroka escape the city, pursued by "Ghouls"- angels with similar, but less sophisticated, inter-zonal modifications that allow them to survive in lower state zones for short periods of time.They find out that the zones had rearranged themselves totally overnight in what is called a "zone storm". They look to Spearpoint and see that all the lights have gone out, indicating the entire city has been affected by the storm. They venture on and run into an overturned carriage with several bodies having been consumed by the , carnivorous cyborgs, that harvest brain tissue to feed on. Soon Quillon and Meroka run into a Skullboy caravan and find two prisoners who they release. The Skullboys take them all hostage, then the turn up and demand fresh meat in return for making drugs for the Skullboys. Meroka offers herself up to the but before she is harvested the vorg behind her is killed by members from Swarm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Malachy's_Miracle"title="Father Malachy's Miracle">
The book sits in a small collection of Anglo-Catholic &amp; Roman Catholic novels alongside, "The Chalice and the Sword" by Ernest Raymond and "Twenty years at St Hilary" by Bernard Walke. All the authors knew each other through their discovery of Catholicism via Anglo-Catholicism. The names of people and places in the book are only slightly changed. The Church of St Margaret is in fact the RC Cathedral Church of St Mary in Broughton Street/61 York Place at the top of Leith Walk, Edinburgh. St Gabriel's Church is St Michaels, Hill Square, Edinburgh. The Reverend Denis Meaty being Father Beattie. The "Garden of Eden", a dance hall of dubious reputation was the Kosmo Club in Little King Street in the shadow of the Cathedral. The "Garden of Eden" is a thorn in the side of the innocent and unworldly Catholic priest Father Malachy, who is praying to God that He will close the dance hall.During an argument with a Protestant minister, in real life the Rector of St Pauls, York Place. Father Malachy claims that God could miraculously remove the "Garden of Eden". The skeptical Protestant scoffs and Father Malachy inadvertently predicts that God will indeed remove the "Garden of Eden" on a specific date.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Polished_Hoe"title="The Polished Hoe">
The novel is a narrative by Mary-Mathilda (Miss Mary Gertrude Matilda Paul) of her confession of a crime. The events takes place in about twenty-four hours of span starting on a night in the 1950s post World War II era. She is a respected woman of the island of Bimshire, now popularly called as Barbados. She comes to the police and confronts her old friend Percy who is a Sergeant. Percy and Mary-Mathilda have feeling for each other but can never unite. She confesses of murdering Mr. Belfeels, the owner of a sugar plantation, a rich man known for his arrogance towards the workers under him. Mary-Mathilda had been working as a field labourer, kitchen help and then as a maid and since many years has been Belfeels' mistress. She has a son Wilberforce from him who becomes a doctor after being funded by Belfeels. Her son returns to the island after his studies abroad. Belfeels lives with his wife and two daughters and keeps Mary-Mathilda in a house on the outskirts of plantation away from the town. Belfeels objectifies her and treats her ruthlessly on various occasions. On their first encounter, while she was quite young, he undresses her using the riding crop while her mother turns a blind eye. Due to this she develops a nausea of leather's smell. She also discovers a dark secret kept by her mother that she herself is Belfeels' daughter which shatters her and provokes her eventually to murder Belfeels.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Foot_in_the_Grave"title="A Foot in the Grave">
When John Smith's garrulous South American wife was found dead in Buenos Aires, he is accused by the Argentine police not only of her murder, but also of tax evasion, links with the British Intelligence Service and of conspiring to overthrow the Argentine dictatorship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_the_Ninth"title="Urban the Ninth">
A Catholic comic thriller – In 1990, Urban the Ninth takes over the papacy after Pope Marx I (successor of Leo XIV and Pius XIII) dies in an air crash. Urban IX has to face the Third Secret of Fatima (which had not yet been revealed in 1973, when the book was written) and a mysterious woman: perhaps, Pope Marx's secret lover.A major subplot concerns the efforts of a mother superior of a religious order to get the order's founder canonised.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Hilary's_Holiday"title="Father Hilary's Holiday">
After thirty years in the priesthood, Father Hilary seizes the opportunity to attend a religious congress in South America. Father Hilary's well earned holiday is to be spent at a sort of ecumenical conference convened by "el Libertator" the Generalissimo of Tomasia. The result is a witty, pointed tale of humble but outspoken Franciscan friar and his wondrous escapades in the boiling maelstrom of a mythical Latin American dictatorship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Divided_Lady"title="The Divided Lady">
The style of this book is unusual for a Marshall work. The first half of the book alternates present time with flashbacks from the central character's earlier life.James Childers, an accountant with a large London firm is sent to Rome to investigate a business deal. The Sisters of Ramoth-Gilead have invested a considerable sum with Morobito, a famous film producer, to make a movie about St. Joseph Benedict Cottolengo of Turin. The Sisters suspect they have been swindled.Childers, who served in Rome in the post-World War II era, quickly revisits old haunts. The chapters switch back and forth between events during his original tour in Rome and the current one.Post-World War II Childers worked for the British Army dealing with Displaced Persons, specifically their financial situations. In his spare time he pursued Phoebe &amp; Sarah, beautiful, identical twins who are aides of the General Childers also works for.In the present time, while investigating the Sisters' case, Childers renews his acquaintanceship with Bice, the daughter of a wealthy Duke who was a teenager when he was last in Rome. Bice hopes to use this relationship to get a part in Morobito's film.But Childers also meets Mila, who is what the Italians call a "Divided Lady," meaning that she is separated from her husband and hoping to obtain an annulment from the Catholic Church.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_in_May"title="Girl in May">
A romance set among a motley crowd of eccentrics of all ages who constitute the population of St. Andrews.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_of_My_Cats"title="Thoughts of My Cats">
It is the story of the cats who adopted the Marshalls' villa at Cap d'Antibes when their less loving owners departed at the end of the season minus their pets.The book has engaging photographs of the author and his feline family, and is a delightful and witty treatise on how to win --- and influence --- cats.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Every_Man_a_Penny"title="To Every Man a Penny">
The story of a young French priest, Gaston, who goes off to World War I. In the trenches he is mutilated, modestly administers the sacraments, hears the confessions of dying men, aids the wounded, and becomes a good friend of a Communist, Louis Philippe Bessier.Both he and Bessier are wounded in the leg, which is amputated, and both limp through the rest of the book. When they return to Paris, no one is expecting them – neither the canons of Father Gaston’s parish nor Bessier’s employers.Gaston, who had always sustained himself with the idea that the great evil of the war could lead to good, is forced to change his mind. The world is moving away from the Church and the Church from the world.The little girl Armelle, his pupil in catechism class, of whom he is very fond and who had always written to him in the trenches, wants to become a model, and he gives her his permission, even if many of his fellow canons disapprove.Marshall masterfully recounts the Catholic Church in France between the two world wars. The more formal people are in approaching her, the more the ecclesiastical hierarchies appear closed in their moralisms, their formalisms, their solipsistic way of thinking.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Judas_Goat"title="The Judas Goat">
A reclusive millionaire, Hugh Dixon, hires Spenser to find the nine members of a terrorist group that bombed a London restaurant where he and his family were dining, resulting in the deaths of his two daughters, his wife and leaving him a paraplegic. Spenser is promised USD$2,500 a head for the apprehension of each of the nine terrorists responsible, dead or alive. Spenser heads to London, England to start his investigation. Running an ad for information in "The Times" results in two assassination attempts on Spenser. Spenser foils the attempts resulting in the deaths of two gunmen and the capture of another.Spenser enlists the help of his friend Hawk, a powerful ally. Spenser tracks one of the members of the terrorist group, Liberty, and uses her as a Judas goat to lead him to other members."Katherine," the name she is operating under, flees to Copenhagen with Hawk and Spenser in pursuit. Spenser allows himself to be captured by Katherine's allies just to be rescued by Hawk before they can kill him. The rescue leads to the deaths of three more members of the group, but Katherine (also called Kathie) and the leader of the group, Paul, escape.The group turns out to be an anti-communist/white-supremacist group trying to keep control of African countries away from the native Africans and in the hands of white countries and leaders. The bombing of the restaurant Dixon and his wife were in was more or less a random act of violence against the United Kingdom because of its backing of black majority rule in Africa.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_Contempt"title="Time of Contempt">
Following their secret conclave in "Blood of Elves", the monarchs of the Northern Kingdoms are secretly preparing to create a pretext for war with Nilfgaard. Unbeknownst to them, the Emperor of Nilfgaard is aware of their plans and preparing his own.Geralt consults with a lawyer, Codhringer, to discover the identity of the unknown mage trying to capture Ciri. At the same time, Yennefer takes Ciri from the Temple in Ellander to Gors Velen. Yennefer plans to enroll Ciri at the Aretuza school of magic on Thanedd Island, while attending a conference of mages there. While Yennefer is talking business with a dwarven banker in Gors Velen, she allows Ciri to see the city, escorted by one of the banker's young employees. While viewing an exotic menagerie, Ciri inadvertently provokes a disturbance, and escapes using a magic amulet Yennefer gave her in case of emergency. This draws the attention of the mages Tissaia de Vries and Margarita Laux-Antille, the former and current headmistresses of Aretuza, out hunting for truant students.After reuniting, Yennefer, Tissaia and Margarita discuss Ciri's upcoming education at Aretuza. Ciri, unwilling to be "imprisoned" at school, steals a horse and rides to a nearby town where she heard Geralt is staying. Yennefer pursues her, leading to a reunion and reconciliation with Geralt. The three return to Thanedd island together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_About_Lulu"title="All About Lulu">
In the wake of his mother's death, as his bodybuilding brethren pump themselves to Hulkish proportions, weak-eyed vegetarian Will Miller stops growing altogether—until the day his father remarries a relentlessly kind grief counselor, delivering Will a troubled stepsister who soon becomes his confessor, companion, and heart's only desire. But when Lulu returns from cheerleading camp the summer of her fourteenth year, she inexplicably begins to push Will away, forcing him to look elsewhere for meaning.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sport_of_the_Gods"title="The Sport of the Gods">
Berry Hamilton, an emancipated black man, works as a butler for a wealthy white man Maurice Oakley. Berry lives in a small cottage a short distance away from the Oakley's place of residence. Berry lives with his wife, Fannie, and two children, Joe and Kitty. During a farewell dinner for Maurice's younger brother, Francis Oakley, it becomes known that a large sum of money has disappeared from Oakley residence due to Francis apparently being careless and leaving the key in the safe. Maurice soon convinces himself that Berry must have stolen the money. A court finds Berry guilty of the theft and sentences him to ten years of hard labor.Maurice and his wife expel Fannie, Joe, and Kitty from the cottage. Unable to find work, Fannie and her children decide to move to New York. Once in New York, Joe begins work and starts regularly visiting the Banner Club. He begins dating an entertainer from the club named Hattie Sterling. To Fannie's disapproval, Hattie helps Kitty to find employment as a singer and actress. Joe's situation quickly declines and he becomes an alcoholic. Hattie breaks the relationship. Completely degraded, Joe strangles Hattie. Later, he confesses to the murder and finds himself in prison. With her husband and son in prison, Fannie is distraught. Kitty convinces Fannie to marry a man named Mr. Gibson.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Land_(novel)"title="Foreign Land (novel)">
The novel opens with Sheila Grey, George's daughter and her partner, Tom, discussing the imminent return of her father from Bom Porto. In a letter, he tells her of his plans to retire to his parents’ house in St Cadix, Cornwall. The action then moves to Bom Porto, the capital of Montedor – an independent Marxist Republic - where we first meet George, who is the manager of a bunkering station. He plays a game of squash with Eduordo (Teddy) Duarte, the Minister of Communications, who informs him about the President's plans to use Cubans to subjugate the mountainous Wolofs, a tribe who have historically been hostile towards the coastal Creole population. George later settles his affairs and is given a surprise official send-off and eventually arrives in Britain, booking himself into a Post House Hotel at Heathrow rather than choosing to stay with Sheila.The scene then shifts to St Cadix and an annual Christmas drinks party held by George's neighbours, the Walpoles. Most of the people there, like George, are retirees and spend their time talking about their past lives. It is here that George meets Diana Pym, who gives him a lift back to his house, Thalassa, where he discovers that she was the former singer, Julie Midnight. When down by the harbour, George is approached by a St Cadix resident and informed about a boat, the "Calliope", that is for sale – it belongs to a Wing Commander and his wife who are in financially strained circumstances and they need to sell it. He reflects back on a time in Bom Porto when he was given some money by the President for previously attending a Pan-African shipping convention whilst a Portuguese patrol vessel was sabotaged during the PAIM revolution against its colonial masters. George refused the money but it was automatically transferred to a Geneva bank account, and it is this money that he uses to purchase "Calliope". George travels to London to visit Sheila who, as S.V. Grey, is the author of a popular feminist book. During his visit he is presented with an old sextant that Tom had been planning to sell. George had learnt how to use one whilst studying at Pwllheli, under Commonader Prynne, an elderly navigation instructor and he is pleased to find out he has still retained his skills. As Tom gives him a lift down to Heathrow, from which George is flying to collect his money in Geneva, George tells him of his plans to sail round England.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Train_Was_on_Time"title="The Train Was on Time">
"Why don't you get on?" a chaplain asked him when the train arrived. "Get on?" asked the soldier, amazed. "Why, I might want to hurl myself under the wheels, I might want to desert ... eh? What's the hurry? I might go crazy, I've a perfect right to, I've a perfect right to go crazy. I don't want to die, that's what's so horrible—that I don't want to die."On his way to the war front, he meets two other Germans with whom he starts a dialogue and a short-term friendship; he also meets Olina, a Polish prostitute, who has been working for the anti-fascist partisans but who has become disillusioned with such activity, seeing it as begetting yet further cycles of violence and aggression rather than leading to a proper way out of the bellicosity of the situation. During their trip we learn much about horrors soldiers endure in the war, and the effect it leaves on a person. Andreas has a particularly passive (some might say stoic) attitude to his involvement in the conflict, and the inevitability of death (and the question of fate) hangs over the narrative in a tragic fashion. It is arguable that the only real choices in the novel, presented in its opening gambits, involve the place and manner of Andreas's death in the war, rather than the possibility of its evasion. This tragic fate seems to be circumvented to some extent when Andreas meets Olina and they plan an escape to the Carpathian mountains, but the eventual fate cannot (it appears) be overlooked. In this sense, connections can be made between the work and the structure of ancient Greek tragedies such as the story of Oedipus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World,_the_Flesh,_and_Father_Smith"title="The World, the Flesh, and Father Smith">
This is the fictional life story of a parish priest, a man of God "conscious of the indwelling of the Trinity," living the life of grace in a drab industrial town, bringing the grace of God to weak human beings seduced by the devil’s ancient lures of the world and the flesh.It covers the activities of Father Thomas Edmund Smith in his urban Scottish parish from 1908 until his death in 1942. On this framework, the author hangs the glowing tapestry of Father Smith's spiritual life, a life of sanctity, humility, and burning love of God. He interacts with a wide range of people, children, adults and other clerics. It also tracks the lives of two particular youths from their innocent childhood affections to their respectives lives as a priest and an actress.From the dust jacket: "This is the story of Father Smith, priest in a Scottish city – of his friends, the exiled French nuns, of the Bishop, of Monsignor O'Duffy who wages simple, violent war against simple sins, of Father Bonnyboat, the liturgical scholar, of all the people who come into the gentle orbit of Father Smith – from Lady Ippecacuanha, that tweedy convert, to the slut Annie who drives her husband to murder."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Fink_and_the_Meaning_of_Life"title="Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life">
One month before his thirteenth birthday, Jeremy Fink and his best friend Lizzy Muldoun were out in his New York City apartment when the mailman delivers a package addressed to Jeremy's mom. Lizzy convinces him to open the package. Inside the package, they discover a wooden box with four keyholes and the words, "THE MEANING OF LIFE: FOR JEREMY FINK TO OPEN ON HIS 13TH BIRTHDAY." Jeremy immediately recognizes the box as the work of his father, who died five years earlier in a car crash. An accompanying note explains that the friend taking care of the box lost all of the keys. Determined to open the box, Jeremy and Lizzy contact a locksmith who explains that he is unable to pick the locks or break the box open without destroying the box and possibly its contents. The two friends set a goal to find the keys by the end of the summer so Jeremy can still open the box on his thirteenth birthday.Lizzy's impulsiveness gets the duo into trouble for destroying property and they must spend the summer performing community service. Jeremy and Lizzy are assigned to work for Mr. Oswald, an antique dealer preparing to retire to Florida, who sends them to deliver some special antiques. Once the first house is reached, the children realize they are returning items to the original owners, people who pawned these items when only teenagers. Each item is being returned with the original letter stating why the owner chose to pawn the items.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humbling"title="The Humbling">
## Part one.Simon Axler is a famed sexagenarian stage actor who suddenly and inexplicably loses his gift. His weak attempts at portraying Prospero and Macbeth on stage at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., lead to poor reviews, sending Axler into a profound depression and causing him to give up acting and contemplate suicide with a shotgun he keeps in his attic. His wife, Victoria, a former ballerina, is unable to deal with Axler's depression and moves to California, where their son lives. Axler checks himself into a psychiatric hospital on the advice of his physician and stays there for 26 days.In the hospital, Axler meets another patient, Sybil Van Buren, who tells him about catching her second husband sexually abusing her young daughter. She expresses shame at not immediately reporting her husband or removing him from the home and admits to attempting suicide. Sybil asks Axler whether he would be willing to kill her husband and he tells her he fears he would "botch the job".Months after his stint in the hospital, Axler's agent, Jerry Oppenheim, visits him at his upstate New York home to tell him about an offer to play James Tyrone in "Long Day's Journey into Night". Axler refuses, fearing another failure. In the fan mail Oppenheim brings, Axler finds a letter from Sybil, thanking him for listening to her problems in the hospital. She says she did not recognize him at the time but decided to write him after catching one of his old movies on TV.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Running_Man_(Bauer_novel)"title="The Running Man (Bauer novel)">
Joseph Davidson was a quiet, self-conscious fourteen-year-old boy and a talented artist. His world changes, however, when he is asked to draw a portrait of his mysterious neighbour Tom Leyton who was a Vietnam veteran who for thirty years has lived alone with his sister Caroline, raising his silkworms and hiding from prying eyes. Because of this he is the subject of ugly gossip and rumour, much of it led by neighbour Mrs. Mossop, who views Leyton’s brief teaching career with suspicion.When Joseph finally meets his reclusive neighbour he discovers a cold, brooding man lost deep within his own cocoon of silence. He soon realises that in order to truly draw Tom Leyton, he must find the courage to unlock the man’s dark and perhaps dangerous secrets.But Joseph has his own secrets, including the pain of his damaged relationship with his absent father and his childhood fear of the Running Man – a local character whose wild appearance and strange manner of moving everywhere at a frantic pace terrified him when he was a small boy. These dreams suddenly return when Joseph is forced to face his fears and doubts regarding Tom Leyton.As Joseph moves deeper and deeper into his neighbour’s world he confronts not only Tom Leyton’s private hell, but also his own relationship with his father, and ultimately the dishevelled, lurching figure of the Running Man.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singhasan_Battisi"title="Singhasan Battisi">
King Bhoja walks past a field of a Brahmin with the royal entourage who from a seat on a high mound overlooking his whole field invites the King to have a taste of the fresh produce of his field. On the King's approach to the Brahmin's field, he leaves his seat to shoo off the birds, following which he miserly opposes King's entry on his field and charges him with grave intrusion and violation of civilian rights which prompts the King to leave the field immediately. After shooing off the birds, the Brahmin returns to sit on the mound. He then again beseeches King Bhoja to return to the field and taste the produce. Again the same process is repeated which intrigues Bhoja as to how the behavior of the Brahmin changes whilst on the mound and on the plain.He learns that by just stepping on it, one's heart has all the magnanimous traits boosted and filled with love and justice. Bhoja's soldiers dig the mound to find a throne. The throne is identified as that of the ancient Emperor Vikramaditya, who was well-known and respected for being just. Bhoja's advisers tell him that he will also be able to pass the best judgements, once he sits on the throne.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(Roth_novel)"title="Nemesis (Roth novel)">
"Nemesis" explores the effect of a 1944 polio epidemic on a closely knit, family-oriented Newark Jewish community of Weequahic neighborhood. The children are threatened with maiming, paralysis, lifelong disability, and death. At the center of "Nemesis" is a vigorous, dutiful, 23-year-old teacher and playground director Bucky Cantor, a javelin thrower and weightlifter, who is devoted to his charges. Bucky feels guilty because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his close friends and contemporaries. Focusing on Cantor's dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his playground, Roth examines some of the central themes of pestilence: fear, panic, anger, guilt, bewilderment, suffering, and pain. Cantor also faces a spiritual crisis, asking himself why God would allow innocent children to die of polio. Finally, Cantor faces a romantic crisis, becoming engaged to his beloved girlfriend (a fellow teacher who is working as a counselor at a Jewish summer camp). Fearing that Cantor will get polio if he remains in Newark during the summer, she implores him to quit his job in Newark and to join her at her polio-free summer camp. He wants to be with his fiancee, but leaving the children of Newark adds to his feelings of guilt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_and_the_Oaks"title="Simon and the Oaks">
The book follows the Swedish man Simon Larsson throughout his childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. He grew up in Gothenburg with his adoptive parents, Karin and Erik, who are both of the working class. He befriends a wealthy classmate, Isaak Lentov. Isaak and his family formerly lived in Germany but were forced to flee due to the Nazi party's persecution of Jewish people and the mentally ill, as Isaak's mother has a mental illness. After his mother's illness requires that she stay in a mental institution, Isaak begins to spend more time with Simon's mother Karin, who becomes a mother figure for him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riders_(novel)"title="Riders (novel)">
Set against the backdrop of the English Cotswolds countryside, "Riders" follows the fortunes of a group of fame and money hungry show jumping stars.Jake Lovell, the gypsy-born hero of the novel, is a brilliant horseman desperately seeking revenge for years of bullying at the hands of the glamorous but brutish aristocrat Rupert Campbell-Black. With the help of his rich debutante wife, Tory Maxwell, he is able to set himself up his own yard and begins building a reputation on the show-jumping circuit. Meanwhile, Rupert is content living the jet-set lifestyle with best friend Billy Lloyd-Foxe, plus a string of beautiful women, horses and dogs. Meeting his beautiful wife, Helen Macaulay, does little to curb his promiscuity and he eventually falls back into a life of parties, alcohol, and casual sex.When Jake and Rupert meet again for the first time since school, old rivalries are reawakened as they fight it out to prove who is the greater horseman and, perhaps more importantly, the greater lover. Along the way, Cooper gives us a peek into the lives of this close-knit community of tops riders, their horses, grooms and families. We see the highs and lows of life in the equestrian world, but who will eventually come out on top in the final showdown at the Los Angeles Olympics.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Spirits_(book)"title="Animal Spirits (book)">
The Preface recalls Keynes' use of the phrase "animal spirits," which he used to describe the psychological forces that partly explain why the economy does not behave in the manner predicted by classical economics — a system of thought that expects economic actors to behave as unemotional rational beings. The authors assert that the Keynesian Revolution was emasculated as Keynesians progressively relegated the importance of animal spirits to accommodate the views of economists who preferred the simpler classical or neo-classical system.The preface goes on to describe how Keynes' ideas suggest the economy will function best with a moderately high level of government intervention, which they compare to a happy home where children thrive with parents that are neither too authoritarian (as in a Marxist economy) nor too permissive (as in a neoliberal economy). The authors state that recent research now supports the concept of animal spirits much more robustly than Keynes was able to, and they express the hope that fellow economists can be convinced of this, thus reducing the internecine disputes that prevent their discipline from providing the clear support that politicians need for the aggressive action required to fix the 2008–2009 economic crises.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotionally_Weird"title="Emotionally Weird">
The novel begins with chapter one of a murder mystery set in a seaside resort. This tale is later revealed as being written by Euphemia (Effie) Stuart-Murray as part of a creative writing class at the University of Dundee in 1972. This main narrative is in fact being told by Effie to her presumed mother Nora on a remote Scottish Island in return for which Effie hopes to entice from Nora the truth about her family history and parentage...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offending_the_Audience"title="Offending the Audience">
In "Offending the Audience" there is no plot. No story is being told at all. Instead, the audience is made aware that what they see is not a representation of anything else, but is in fact quite literal. The actors continuously repeat the point that this is not a play, and that nothing theatrical will happen.The first lines of the performance are "You are welcome. This piece is a prologue." A prologue, that is, to all future theatrical performances.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bud_Brothers_Series"title="The Bud Brothers Series">
The books tells the story of eight different men (Vince Banaag, Wayne Alban, Pete Labrador, Carlo Domingo, Dr. Ed Lacson, Rei Arambulo, Monty Geronimo &amp; Pio Andong Jr.) who decided to start a flower farm, called The Bud Brothers Flower Farm, in Lian, Batangas and their adventures in love.The story revolves around 8 men, who eventually each have their own love story. In each book tells the story of how they met their 'the one'.Stupid cupid- Georgie being the new student in their college is being attracted to many boys, including Vince. However, she has her eyes on the playboy Pio who is Vince's best friend, after a little fight with someone who tried to harass Georgie she instantly falls for Pio and his good looks. Pio asks Georgie on a date, she instantly accepts not knowing the date is actually with Vince at first the idea of her being Vince's girlfriend was the answer to her problems, but when Vince listens to a voice recording of her telling her 'diary' she is only using Vince to get to Pio. They break up but Vince does not know she has actually fallen for him, Georgie's reputation would go down hill if everyone found out he broke up with her so she spreads a rumour to say that he does not know how to kiss, after a slight misunderstanding Georgie moves to Singapore and they don't see each other for at least 5 years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waking_the_Dead_(novel)"title="Waking the Dead (novel)">
The book is a love story about two passionate liberals with vastly different approaches to their ideologies: Fielding Pierce is a lawyer and aspiring politician, and Sarah Williams is a social activist who despises the political system. During a mission to assist Chilean refugees, Williams is killed by a terrorist car-bomb. Years later, Pierce is offered the Democratic candidacy for an Illinois congressional seat, but during the campaign Pierce becomes convinced he has seen and heard Williams on several occasions. As Pierce becomes obsessed with finding out if his lost lover is alive, he is pushed to the brink of insanity and begins to fear he has become fully absorbed and changed by the political system Williams so hated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dip"title="The Dip">
Godin introduces the book with a quote from Vince Lombardi: "Quitters never win and winners never quit." He follows this with "Bad advice. Winners quit all the time. "They just quit the right stuff at the right time.""Godin first makes the assertion that "being the best in the world is seriously underrated," although he defines the term 'best' as "best for them based on what they believe and what they know," and 'world' as "the world they have access to." He supports this by illustrating that vanilla ice cream is almost four times as popular as the next-most popular ice cream, further stating that this is seen in Zipf's Law. Godin's central thesis is that in order to be the best in the world, one must quit the wrong stuff and stick with the right stuff. In illustrating this, Godin introduces several curves: 'the dip,' 'the cul-de-sac,' and 'the cliff.' Godin gives examples of the dip, ways to recognize when an apparent dip is really a cul-de-sac, and presents strategies of when to quit, amongst other things.The book is also accompanied with cartoons from Hugh MacLeod, who publishes his cartoons on his blog "gapingvoid" and is the author of "How To Be Creative."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_(novel)"title="Glass (novel)">
Kristina thinks that now she has a baby to care for and love, she can quit her addiction. But she finds herself searching for Robyn, her old contact for the "street crank". While at Robyn's house she meets a boy named Trey and starts to crave for people to look like they want or need her. Once she gets home, she begins to work at a 7-Eleven to get the money to buy more crank. The manager there is a porn dealer and offers her a job as a prostitute, but she declines.After learning that her father is coming to her mother's home to be at the christening of her new baby, Hunter Seth, she begs her mother to let him come and she agrees, on the condition that Kristina has to be the one to tell her older sister Leigh. Once her father comes, he takes her to casinos for her eighteenth birthday party and they snort some lines while there. This causes Kristina to be almost late for Hunter's christening, but she manages to make it on time. Meanwhile, Kristina has started dating Trey and began smoking "glass", which is much more harmful than smoking crank because it is pure meth in rock size quantities. Kristina begins to smoke it every day, becoming skinnier and crashing more often. After crashing one day, her mother kicks her out of the house because she didn't even try to help Hunter, who had rolled himself under a chair and couldn't get out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Your_Heart_Belongs_to_Me_(novel)"title="Your Heart Belongs to Me (novel)">
At thirty-four, Internet entrepreneur Ryan Perry seemed to have the world in his pocket—until the first troubling symptoms appeared out of nowhere. Within days, he’s diagnosed with incurable cardiomyopathy and finds himself on the waiting list for a heart transplant; it’s his only hope, and it’s dwindling fast. Ryan is about to lose it all…his health, his girlfriend Samantha, and his life.One year later, Ryan has never felt better. Business is good and he hopes to renew his relationship with Samantha. Then the unmarked gifts begin to appear—a box of Valentine candy hearts, a heart pendant. Most disturbing of all, a graphic heart surgery video and the chilling message: Your heart belongs to me.In a heartbeat, the medical miracle that gave Ryan a second chance at life is about to become a curse worse than death. For Ryan is being stalked by a mysterious woman who feels entitled to everything he has. She’s the spitting image of the twenty-six-year-old donor of the heart beating steadily in Ryan’s own chest.And she’s come to take it back.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Fur_Family"title="Little Fur Family">
A little fur family (mother, father, and a child) live in a cozy house in a tree trunk. Secure in his cozy home, the fur child goes out to explore his world. He finds some creatures that are like him and others that are very different, including fish, a flying bug, and in one of the book's most memorable sequences, a tiny version of himself (which he kisses and sends it on its way). Even in the fur child's comfortable, familiar surroundings, there are just enough unfamiliar things to make his day interesting. At the end of the day, the child's parents and his dinner are waiting for him at home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Borrowed_(novel)"title="Something Borrowed (novel)">
The novel centers around the protagonist and narrator, Rachel White, a thirty-year-old single woman who is a consummate good-girl. She and Darcy Rhone have been best friends since childhood, and hard-working Rachel is often in the shadow of flashy, sometimes selfish Darcy. Then, after a night of drinking on Rachel's thirtieth birthday, she sleeps with Darcy's fiancé, Dex. After this turns into an affair, Rachel explores the meaning of friendship, true love, and ethics.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_(novel)"title="Flight (novel)">
"Flight" begins with Zits waking up in a new foster home. Not liking his new family, he shoves his foster mom against the wall and runs out the door. Eventually, Officer Dave catches up with him and takes him to jail. While in jail Zits meets Justice, a young white boy who takes Zits under his wing. When Zits is released from jail he finds Justice and they begin their training on how to shoot people. Once Justice believes Zits is ready to commit a real crime, he sends him off to a bank. After opening fire in the lobby, Zits perceives he has been shot in the head, ultimately sending him back in time.During his flashback, Zits transforms into many different historical characters. The first character he transforms into is FBI Agent Hank Storm. While in Hank's body Zits witnesses a meeting with two Indians involved with IRON. He watches his partner kill an innocent Indian and is forced to shoot the corpse in the chest.The next character he becomes is a mute Indian boy. He is thrown back into the time of General Custer's last stand. He gets to witness this historical battle and at the end is told by his father to slash a fallen soldier's throat as revenge for his own muteness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Lust_of_Knowing"title="For Lust of Knowing">
While "For Lust of Knowing" is a riposte to Said's "Orientalism", much of the book is taken up with a general history of Orientalism as an academic discipline. Unlike Said's work, it does not examine fiction, painting or other art forms. It focuses mainly in the work of British, French and German Orientalists and contrasts their different approaches and occasional idiosyncrasies. When Irwin does mention Said, it is usually to point out an error or inconsistency in Said's analysis. For example, one of the few Orientalists Said professes to admire is Louis Massignon. Irwin points out that Said "fail[ed] to note Massignon's anti-Semitism" and "his decidedly patronising attitude to Arabs", as well as Massignon's debt to Ernest Renan, one of the villains of "Orientalism".In the chapter that specifically focuses on Said's "Orientalism", Irwin highlights Said's inconsistent melding of the work of Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_(novel)"title="Crime (novel)">
Ray Lennox is a Detective Inspector with the Lothian and Borders Police who attempts to recover from a mental breakdown induced by stress, cocaine and alcohol abuse and a child murder case in Edinburgh in which he was the lead investigating officer by taking a holiday in Florida with his fiancée, Trudi. The pair meet up with Eddie 'Ginger' Rodgers, one of Lennox's retired former colleagues, and his wife Delores, and they all drink into the early hours of the morning.The next morning Lennox finds himself craving more alcohol and goes to a bar with Trudi where they have an argument which causes Trudi to angrily leave the bar. Lennox continues drinking heavily. Soon afterwards he meets two women, Starry and Robyn, in a different bar and they all go back Robyn's apartment where they drink more alcohol and take cocaine. They are soon joined by two men, Lance Dearing and Johnnie, and a fight breaks out a short time later when Lennox sees Johnnie is sexually assaulting Tianna, Robyn's ten-year-old daughter. Lennox incapacitates Johnnie and struggles with Dearing, who ultimately leaves the apartment with everyone except Lennox and Tianna, who have locked themselves in a bathroom.The next morning, Lennox wakes in the bathroom and receives a telephone call from Robyn, who urges him to take Tianna to a man called Chet Lewis in Bologna before the call is interrupted by Dearing, who tries unsuccessfully to pacify Lennox. Lennox instead leaves the apartment with Tianna and travels to a local police station where he is shocked to find Dearing is in police uniform and is working at the reception desk. Lennox flees with Tianna and hires a car to take her to Chet as Robyn instructed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Ashes"title="City of Ashes">
Clary returns to the Institute after receiving a text message from Isabelle "Izzy" Lightwood, saying that Jace angered the Inquisitor, Imogen Herondale. He has been imprisoned in the Silent City and is awaiting trial by the Sword to determine if he is telling the truth about being in league with Valentine. The Sword is one of the Mortal Instruments indicated in the first book. Alongside the Sword is the Cup and the Mirror. While chained inside his cell, Jace hears something attacking the Silent Brothers. Valentine has killed the Silent Brothers to obtain the second Mortal Instrument - the Soul Sword. While the Cup is capable of creating new Shadowhunters, the Sword forces Shadowhunters to tell the truth. Clary, Izzy, and Alec respond to a distress call from the Silent City, only to discover that the current Silent Brothers inside have all been slain. Clary frees Jace using an amplified version of the opening rune that appeared to her amidst her panic. This is surprising because no new Runes have been created since the runes handed down by the Angel Raziel. The Inquisitor appears, along with a large group of armed Shadowhunters, and accuses Jace of helping Valentine, since he was supposed to go on trial by the Sword which is now gone. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magician's_Apprentice"title="The Magician's Apprentice">
In the remote village of Mandryn in Kyralia, Tessia serves as assistant to her father, the village Healer – much to the frustration of her mother, who would rather she found a husband. Despite knowing that women aren't readily accepted by the Guild of Healers, Tessia is determined to follow in her father's footsteps.Kyralia and the neighbouring country Sachaka have been at a certain "peace" for centuries, though the countries dislike each other, for Kyralia was once part of the Sachakan Empire. Lord Dakon is housing a visiting Sachakan Lord and Magician (Takado), much to his dislike. Dakon is a kind man with noble intentions. He is wary of Takado and dislikes the Sachakans for not abolishing slavery, especially when Takado beats his slave (Hanara) to near death. Tessia and her father are called to heal him.One day when Tessia comes by herself to Lord Dakon's mansion to re-apply bandages to Hanara, Takado tries to force himself upon her, holding her body still with magic. Tessia removes the magical influence on her mind with magic of her own, which she had no idea she had (blowing apart the corner of the room in the process), discovering she is a natural. She becomes the second apprentice of Lord Dakon, and Takado leaves the premises.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cave_Boy_of_the_Age_of_Stone"title="The Cave Boy of the Age of Stone">
The story line focuses on two young brothers and their family group while attempting to educate the young reader in a picture of what life was likely like for Cavemen. In the earliest part of the narrative, the author introduces the idea of domestication of animals, because a tethered kid (goat offspring) had become gentled and docile—so much so they put their toddler sister on its back for a ride. Moving forward, the novel describes all the major milestones featured during the stone age such as the discovery of fire, the creation of weapons, hunting/ foraging for food, cooking that food, as well as how and why man learnt how to swim.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Train_of_Thought"title="The Lost Train of Thought">
The third and final book on The Seems begins with Becker Drane on trial against his breaking the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule forbids any employee that has had access a person's Case File to communicate with them. At the end of The Split Second, Becker Drane came in contact with Jenifer Kaley who he got her Case File in The Glitch in Sleep. When tried, he was found guilty on all counts. He was suspended from duty for one year, unremembered of Jenifer Kaley and has his Seems Credit Card revoked. Jenifer Kaley and Benjamin Drane will also be unremembered of all they know about The Seems.When about to tell Jenifer about his punishment, Simly, Becker's favorite Briefer calls Becker in for a Mission. He along with the Octogenarian, Shahzad Hassan and Jelani Blaque are called in as a second team to find a missing train of Thought that was supposed to supply The World with enough Thought for the next six weeks. When Thought was first discovered, it was debated on how it should be used. Some felt the Raw Thought should be given directly to the people of the World while others felt it should be processed first. It was decided for Raw Thought to be given to people in The World so they can think for themselves. However, without Thought to keep emotions such as Jealousy and Anger in, the Unthinkable could occur causing mass destruction to The World. The first team consisted of Li Po, Casey Lake, Lisa Simms and Greg the Journeyman, but they went missing when a sudden bright light appeared.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Universe_Maker"title="The Universe Maker">
Morton Cargill, Korean War soldier, accidentally kills a girl named Marie while driving drunk. He runs from the scene. A year later, he gets a letter from the girl asking to meet him. But this is not Marie, but a remote descendant from the future, who is suffering an inherited form of neurosis which time travelers, called 'The Shadows', have traced back to his negligent crime. The only therapy to cure her is if she witnesses him being murdered. He then wakes 400 years into the future, to the Shadow City to be executed.He escapes, with help from Ann Reece, who represents a group called 'Tweeners', who are organized by a Shadow named Grannis. Grannis is apparently a traitor to the Shadows and wishes the Tweeners to attack and destroy the Shadow City. Cargill is overcome by suspicions against the Tweeners, so during his rescue he escapes into the woods where he is immediately captured. His captors this time are futuristic nomads or 'trailer trash' called 'Planiacs' who live in floating airships.The Planiacs have rejected civilization and its intolerable psychological pressures. Their airships are stocked and repaired by the Shadows, and they live utterly purposeless lives floating from place to place, occasionally stopping to fish.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_Bones_(novel)"title="Cross Bones (novel)">
The story begins in Montreal, Canada, with the body of Avram Faris, who is an antiques dealer and an orthodox Jew. Brennan continues the investigation in Israel, where she and sometime lover Detective Andrew Ryan, and her friend, archeologist Jake Drum, are threatened by radical orthodox sects and other, unknown, parties.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smaller_and_Smaller_Circles"title="Smaller and Smaller Circles">
Its main protagonists are Gus Saenz and Jerome Lucero, Jesuit priests who also perform forensic work. The mystery revolves around the murders of young boys in a poor region of Payatas, Philippines. While dealing with the systematic corruption of the government, church and the elite, the two priests delve into criminal profiling, crime scene investigation and forensic analysis to solve the killings, and eventually, find the murderer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Temple_of_Elemental_Evil_(novel)"title="The Temple of Elemental Evil (novel)">
The heroes entering the Temple seek to find a way to save the world from a demon struggling to escape captivity and an evil demigod working to gain control over the demon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_in_Wartime"title="Winter in Wartime">
Michiel van Beusekom is an average but enterprising teenager. He lives in a village in the northern part of the Veluwe region on the banks of the IJssel river and is the son of the village's burgemeester. Michiel has one sister, nurse-to-be Erica, and one brother, Jochem, who is still in primary school. Each day a vast number of city dwellers arrive in the village and several stay in the Van Beusekom house. Michiel spends his days with tracking down food for them by helping local farmers with small chores. He is, after all, unable to go to school due to ongoing bombardments and railway strikes. Michiel secretly dreams of becoming a Resistance fighter, and sometimes loathes his father Jan, who, in Michiel's eyes, is too soft. As a result, Uncle Ben, who claims to be part of the Resistance, becomes Michiel's idol. On a day in late 1944, 21-year-old Dirk Knopper, who lives opposite to the Van Beusekom house, tells Michiel a secret. Together with two others, Dirk is planning an attack on the local ration card office to steal ration cards as part of the Resistance. Michiel gets the task, in case the attack fails, to deliver a letter to Bertus van Gelder as soon as possible. That same evening, Nazi vehicles arrive at the Knopper home. The attack has failed. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loved_Ones_(book)"title="Loved Ones (book)">
The book includes pen portraits of leading figures that featured prominently in Mosley's life. These include Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, former neighbours and friends of hers. Violet Hammersley, an author, close friend of her mother's and prominent figure in childhood. The writer, Evelyn Waugh a close personal friend. Professor Derek Jackson, a leading physicist and her former brother-in-law. Lord Berners, a close personal friend she stayed with often at Faringdon House. Prince and Princess Clary, close friends of hers after the Second World War. The final portrait is of her second husband, Sir Oswald Mosley.The book also features several photographs of the selected subjects.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_(Pike_novel)"title="Wings (Pike novel)">
Laurel Sewell is a 15-year-old girl who has lived her whole life on her family's land near Orick, California. Her adoptive parents buy a bookstore in Crescent City, California and move the family there, deciding to enroll Laurel in Del Norte High School—up to this point, she has been Homeschooling/homeschooled. At high school, Laurel finds she struggles to concentrate with the harsh lighting and confining classrooms but quickly befriends David, a handsome boy in her year, and Chelsea, a friendly girl with a crush on David who is fascinated by Laurel's strictly-vegan diet. As Laurel and David grow closer, she tells him that she wasn't adopted by normal means; she was left in a basket on her parents' doorstep when she was 3, with no memories except her name.A few months into the year, Laurel gets a large pimple on her back, which is unusual as she never gets pimples. She attempts to use an herbal salve of her mother's to treat it, but the zit only grows larger, until one day she wakes up with an enormous blue flower growing out of the small of her back. Hesitant to tell her parents, Laurel confides in David, who is surprised but also remarks that the blossom resembles a pair of wings. Using David's microscope, they confirm that the blossom is a plant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Time_for_the_Traditionally_Built"title="Tea Time for the Traditionally Built">
Mma Ramotswe and her assistant Mma Makutsi agree that there are things that men know and ladies do not, and vice versa. The glamorous Violet Sephotho sets her sights on Mma Makutsi's unsuspecting fiancé and it becomes clear that some men do not know how to recognise a ruthless Jezebel even when she is bouncing up and down on the best bed in the Double Comfort Furniture Shop.In her attempt to foster understanding between the sexes and find the traitor on Mr Football's team, Mma Ramotswe ventures into new territory, with the help of an observant small boy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_Just_a_Plant"title="It's Just a Plant">
The main character is a little girl named Jackie. She is awakened one night in her bedroom by an unusual smell in the air, and she sets out to find its source. She goes to her parents' room and discovers her parents smoking marijuana. When she asks what they're doing, they tell her they are smoking marijuana. Her parents decide to teach her the facts about marijuana.They travel to the farm where the family buys vegetables. The farmer shows her the variety of crops he grows, including some marijuana plants. He tells her about the history of marijuana, and remarks that many people use the drug, including doctors, teachers, and politicians.Following the trip to the farm, they visit their family doctor. The doctor tells Jackie that marijuana has many medicinal uses, and that it can ease pain and help people relax. She emphasizes that only adults should use it, and that it is not for children.Shortly afterward, Jackie sees a group of people smoking marijuana on the street. Two police officers appear and promptly arrest them, to Jackie's bewilderment. The police officers explain that smoking marijuana is against the law, and that's why they are arresting the marijuana smokers. One of the officers tells her that “a small but powerful group decided to make a law against marijuana.” She comes to the conclusion that she wants to vote for the legalization of marijuana when she is older.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifanaticism"title="Antifanaticism">
The story takes place somewhere in Virginia, and depicts a group of white plantation owners who put charity towards their black slaves before the harvesting and selling of the cotton on their own plantations, as well as successfully converting several troublesome abolitionists into friendly socialites through a process referred to throughout the novel as "Southern hospitality".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slab_Boys_Trilogy"title="The Slab Boys Trilogy">
"The Slab Boys" is set in the Slab Room of A. F. Stobo &amp; Co. Carpet Manufacturers. This story focuses on a handful of young people who have to grow up fast in the tough working-class culture of 1950s industrial Scotland. It is a semi-autobiographical work. The play is set in 1957, the year Byrne worked in Stoddard's carpet factory as a slab boy, and the year he applied to Glasgow Art School. In 1958 he was accepted to the Art School, unlike the character Phil McCann, whose application is refused. He described the factory as a ‘technicolour hell hole’. Byrne was raised in Ferguslie Park, Paisley not far from the carpet factory.The opening scene introduces the three incumbent slab boys bantering away on a Friday morning. Phil and Spanky are the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid of the slab room and Hector is the target and source of most of their humour. Enter, Mr. Curry, the boss, who is always trying to shame Phil and Spanky into doing some actual work. Unfortunately, Phil and Spanky are far too clever to fall for that old ruse. In comes Jack Hogg. He used to be a slab boy, but has come up in the world and is now a designer. This is not as grand as it sounds – he is only one step further up the ladder and Phil and Spanky never let him forget it. Jack brings with him Alan Downie – an obviously better-off youngster whose father knows the boss, and who is going to work in the company for a while before going off to University. This does not endear him to Phil or Spanky.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Burn_the_Thistles"title="They Burn the Thistles">
The plot of "They Burn the Thistles" is much the same as in the first novel "Memed, My Hawk", where Memed, a young boy from a village in Anatolia is abused and beaten by the villainous Abdi Agha, the local landowner. Having endured great cruelty towards himself and his mother, he finally escapes with his beloved, a girl named Hatche. Abdi Agha catches up with the young couple, but only manages to capture Hatche, while Memed is able to avoid his pursuers and runs into the mountains whereupon he joins a band of brigands and exacts revenge against his old adversary.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire"title="Catching Fire">
Six months after winning the 74th Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark have returned home to District 12, the poorest sector of Panem. Prior to Katniss and Peeta's "Victory Tour" of the country, President Snow visits Katniss and tells her that her televised acts of defiance in the previous Games have inspired rebellion among the districts. Snow demands that Katniss convince the country that she was acting out of love for Peeta, not against the Capitol, or her entire family and best friend Gale Hawthorne will be executed. Katniss reveals this threat to her mentor, Haymitch Abernathy, but not to Peeta.The tour’s first stop is District 11, home of Katniss's Hunger Games ally Rue. Peeta announces that he will give part of his winnings to the families of Rue and fellow tribute Thresh, and Katniss delivers an impromptu, heartfelt speech expressing her gratitude to the fallen tributes. An old man salutes Katniss, joined by the crowd; to her horror, the old man is immediately executed. Katniss tells Peeta of Snow’s threat, and they continue the tour as normal. Hoping to placate Snow, Peeta proposes to Katniss during a televised interview in the Capitol. Katniss accepts, but Snow is dissatisfied with her performance, leaving her afraid for her loved ones.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Civil_Action"title="A Civil Action">
After finding that her child is diagnosed with leukemia, Anne Anderson notices a high prevalence of leukemia, a relatively rare disease, in her city. Eventually she gathers other families and seeks a lawyer, Jan Schlichtmann, to consider their options.Schlichtmann originally decides not to take the case due to both the lack of evidence and a clear defendant. Later picking up the case, Schlichtmann finds evidence suggesting trichloroethylene (TCE) contamination of the town's water supply by Riley Tannery, a subsidiary of Beatrice Foods; a chemical company, W. R. Grace; and another company named Unifirst.In the course of the lawsuit Schlichtmann gets other attorneys to assist him. He spends lavishly as he had in his prior lawsuits, but the length of the discovery process and trial stretch all of their assets to their limit.Though Unifirst settles for a little over $1 million, the money immediately is invested in the case against Grace and Beatrice. The plaintiffs' case against Grace is far stronger for two reasons: (1) Schlichtmann has personal testimony of a former employee of Grace who had witnessed dumping, and (2) a river between Beatrice's tannery and the contaminated wells makes Beatrice's contribution to the contamination less likely. The jury finds Beatrice not liable. Though Schlichtmann's firm anticipates a much higher settlement, the dire state of its finances forces it to accept settlement from W.R. Grace for $8 million.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canyons_(novel)"title="Canyons (novel)">
Canyons is a book about two boys. One boy is named Coyote Runs (age 14) and the other boy is Brennan Cole (age 15).The story starts with Brennan making a short narrative about his life and switches back and forth from Brennan and Coyote Runs. Later in the story, the switching ends when Coyote Runs gets shot in the head during his first raid that would, if successful, make him a man among his Apache tribe. However, he is shot by American soldiers and dies instantly. Nearly two hundred years later, Brennan finds his skull with a bullet hole in its forehead and becomes obsessed with it. From that point on in the novel, a mystical link connects Brennan's mind with Coyote Runs' spirit. After talking to his old biology teacher, he runs sixty miles in a day and a night to return the skull to the top of a canyon - a place Coyote Runs calls his “medicine place." After a grueling run and a chase by Brennan's search party, he gets Coyote Runs' skull back to the medicine place, ending the bond and the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Thoroughbred"title="Irish Thoroughbred">
The novel follows the relationship between Irishwoman Adelia "Dee" Cunnane and American Travis Grant. As the story begins, the young and penniless Dee emigrates to the United States to live with her uncle, Paddy, who works on a large horse farm. Dee's love for animals is evident, and she is given a job working alongside her uncle. Dee has a fiery temper and often argues with Travis, the wealthy farm owner; many of their arguments lead to passionate embraces. Travis later rescues Dee from an attempted rape.When Paddy suffers a heart attack, he becomes very concerned about his mortality and Dee's future. He becomes overwrought and insists that Travis take care of Dee. After privately agreeing to a temporary marriage of convenience, Travis and Dee exchange vows in Paddy's hospital room. As the story progresses, the protagonists become increasingly unhappy, with neither willing to admit their love for the other.Although still unwilling to vocalize their feelings, Dee and Travis appear more confident in their relationship after they finally consummate their marriage. Soon, however, Dee's insecurities are exploited by Travis's sophisticated former girlfriend, Margot, who has returned to the area to win him back. Dee runs away. Travis follows, and the two confess their love and resolve to make their marriage work.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carazamba"title="Carazamba">
The narrative begins with a tales of Carazamba's relationships with various men. The plot describes how the narrator kills Carazamba's English lover, who has connections within the Guatemalan government. This forces the narrator and Carazamba to flee into the jungle with Pedro, the narrator's loyal friend, in order to escape from the authorities and find a way to Mexico. Along the way, Pedro is forced to amputate his foot after he is bitten by a venomous snake. When they finally cross into Mexico, they are involved in a firefight with a group of soldiers; the narrator falls injured and Carazamba is shot dead. The narrator and Pedro are thrown into prison.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GingerSnaps_(novel)"title="GingerSnaps (novel)">
The story starts with Ginger, an overweight child with no friends and red hair. Then the book forwards to when she's 12, popular and confident, having lost weight, found makeup, and hair-straighteners, and with a best friend, Shannon. Ginger is happy, until she and Shannon befriend a lonely girl from Ginger's old school, Emily Croft. Ginger finds that Shannon likes Emily more than her, making her upset, and breaking their friendship.Meanwhile, Ginger meets Sam, a boy at her school that doesn't wear uniform and ditches class often. Shannon doesn't like him and thinks he's weird (Ginger later says that Shannon doesn't like him because he's the only boy that doesn't fall to her feet) but Ginger starts to, and they are secretly together. Mr. Hunter, their English teacher (who everyone likes but Sam, and Shannon has a crush on) announces that they will make a school magazine (S'cool). Shannon is the Editor. After the magazine is completed, the students throw a release party which falls on Shannon's 13th birthday. Shannon's parents aren't home at the party, so some of her friends bring in beer, and soon everyone starts to get drunk except Emily and Ginger. Mr. Hunter arrives and tries to calm things down, but it doesn't work. Sam also comes and Shannon tells him to get lost and says that Ginger thinks he's weird and is too nice to tell him. Ginger is shocked and Sam gets hurt and leaves. Ginger ends up crying. Shannon gets rejected by Mr. Hunter and then becomes upset.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_Like_a_Lady,_Think_Like_a_Man"title="Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man">
In the book, Harvey instructs women on how to be a "keeper" rather than a "sports fish". He asserts that men are "simple", and that women should understand that they can never be first in a man's life without understanding and accepting that men are driven by who they are, what they do, and how much they make.He says it's "just plain dumb" to let a man lock you into a monogamous premarital relationship, where you share a bed, bills, and even kids. The only way to convert your "committed relationship" into a marriage is to insist on setting a date for the wedding.He writes:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M_or_F?"title="M or F?">
Frannie Falconer has a crush on Jeffrey Osbourne, but is shy around him, so her gay best friend Marcus Beaureg suggests that she chat with him online, as it takes away some of the nausea of face-to-face conversation. That does not work, so Marcus decides to write conversations for her. At first, this works because Frannie is hovering over his shoulder, however Marcus continues the conversations when Frannie is not around and it is unclear exactly who Jeffrey likes. Frannie worries that Marcus may be jealous of her spending time with Jeffrey and his group. Frannie finds out that Marcus has been posing as her online and they get into a fight. She calls Jenn, another friend, and they realize that Jeffrey was not falling for Frannie, but for 'Marcus posing as Frannie. Frannie seduces Jeffrey by wearing a negligee and serving him ginseng-laced hot cacao, but when he throws up, she decides he must be gay. Marcus and Frannie reconcile, and she tells him of her suspicions of Jeffrey's sexuality. They decide to take Jeffrey to a meeting of the school's Gay-Straight Alliance, but this does not give them any information, so Marcus decides hook up with Jeffrey. While waiting for Marcus to see a movie, Glenn, Jeffrey's best friend, shows up, telling her that Marcus told him to go there. Marcus calls, telling Frannie he cannot make it and she realizes that Marcus is setting her up with Glenn. She tells Glenn about it, and he reveals that he is gay and denies that Jeffrey is. Frannie and Glenn rush to Buckingham Fountain, where Marcus is just about to kiss Jeffrey. Everything gets sorted out, and Jeffrey confesses that he needed help with the online conversations as well, so Glenn helped him, and eventually the same thing that happened with Marcus and Frannie happened with them. Jeffrey and Frannie leave, while Glenn talks to Marcus and kisses him. Frannie tells Jeffrey that they would be better off as friends. In the end, Glenn ends up with Marcus, the German girl Astrid is hitting on Jeffrey, and Frannie ends up with a freaky quasi-cowboy she met at a line-dancing place Marcus's grandmother made them go.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_David"title="Just David">
David is a ten-year-old boy who plays the violin and does not know his last name. He leads an idyllic life in the mountains with his father, until his father becomes gravely ill, forcing them to go down into the valley. With his father's health worsening, they spend the night in a barn. Just before he dies, the father gives David a large number of gold coins, telling him to hide them until they are needed. David plays the violin to soothe his "sleeping father" and is found by Simeon Holly and his wife. Realizing the man is dead, they try to figure out who David is, but all he can tell them is that he is "just David."David is unable to tell them his last name, his father's name, or if he has any relatives. They find some letters on the dead man, but the signature on it is illegible. The couple reluctantly let him stay with them as he reminds them of their own son, John, whom they no longer speak with. David learns to adjust to live in the village, taking one of his two violins with him wherever he goes and "playing" the world around him, such as playing "the sunset" and "the flowers," and using his music to express his feelings. His innocence and musical skills charm the villagers and change several of their lives, uniting in marriage two childhood sweethearts who had grown apart. He also changes the Hollys, healing Simeon's heart enough that he reconnects with his son and allows him to come visit with his new wife and child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Colour"title="The Colour">
Joseph and Harriet Blackstone, and Joseph's mother Lilian, are immigrants from England on the "SS Albert" into the South Island of New Zealand in 1860s. After settling the two women into accommodation in Christchurch, Joseph travels to the foothills near the Okuku river to build their Cob House. Joseph returns to Christchurch once the house has been built and the three of them set off to start their new lives on their farm. The harsh first winter brings with it problems which threaten the viability of their farm, but Joseph's chance finding of gold in the nearby creek changes the situation. Not telling Harriet about the find, Joseph abandons the farm and travels by boat to Hokitika on the West Coast of the South Island where major gold strikes have occurred.After Lilian's death, Harriet also travels to Hokitika and delivers that news to Joseph. The search for gold, the 'colour', goes on in difficult conditions. Joseph's encounters with Will Sefton, a young man whom he met on the boat bringing them to the West Coast, and Pao Yi, a Chinese gardener befriended by Harriet, add flavour to the dynamics of the searching couple's relationship which has become distant and strained. Joseph's guilt surrounding events in England prior to their emigration impact on this separation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fringe_of_Leaves"title="A Fringe of Leaves">
A young Cornish woman, Ellen Roxburgh, travels to the Australian colony of Van Diemen's Land (now "Tasmania") in the early 1830s with her older husband, Austin, to visit his brother Garnet Roxburgh. After witnessing the brutalities of Van Diemen's Land, the Roxburghs embark on their return trip to England on the "Bristol Maid". But the ship runs aground on the coral reef off the coast of what is now Queensland. Ellen is the only survivor from the leaky vessel in which the passengers and crew travel to the shore. She is rescued by the Aboriginal people of the island, and she later meets Jack Chance, a convict who has escaped from Moreton Bay (now Brisbane), the brutal penal settlement to the south. It is Chance who escorts her through the dangerous coastal territory south to the outskirts of the settlement, but who refuses to accompany her further and returns to his exile. She returns to "civilisation" transformed and tormented by her experience with Garnet in Van Diemen's Land, with the Aboriginal people, and with Chance.The novel sets in sharp relief the distinctions between men and women, whites and blacks, the convicts and the free, and English colonists and Australian settlers. The contrast between Ellen's rural Cornish background and the English middle class she has married into is also highlighted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Girl_from_Lübeck"title="A Girl from Lübeck">
Versory is a literary lecturer engaged in spreading English culture ("from Beowulf to Dylan Thomas") throughout Germany. He needs a ride after delivering a talk to a group of matrons. Versory is surprised that his driver is a young woman, Hannelore. He sees her as a blonde beauty with a charming personality, and becomes infatuated with her. They arrange to meet again in Paris, to attend a meeting of literary lecturers from other countries.Once in Paris, Versory becomes suspicious to how Hannelore can afford her expensive clothes and habits. After their meeting, Hannelore states that there is no way to contact her and that she will get in touch with him. She contacts him regularly and indicates her affection for him. Versory continues to be suspicious of Hannelore and wonders what she is hiding. Versory himself is not what he appears to be. His career as a lecturer serves as a cover for other activities. Versory has a connection with a gentleman from South America. Hannelore is found in the establishment of Mme.Putiphar. Vesory's chief takes Hannelore in his sports car and drives off somewhere. There is ambiguity to whether Hennelore loves Versory or whether she is using him. The ending reveals the truth surrounding Hannelore.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slap_(novel)"title="The Slap (novel)">
At a barbecue in suburban Melbourne, a man slaps a 3-year-old boy across the face. The child, Hugo, has been misbehaving without any intervention by his parents, "the steely-eyed Rosie and the wimpish Gary". The slapper is Harry, cousin of the barbecue host and adulterous businessman whose slightly older son, Rocco, is being threatened by Hugo. This event sends the other characters "into a spiral, agonising and arguing over the notion that striking a child can ever be justified. Some believe a naughty boy should be taught some discipline, others maintain the police ought to be brought in to investigate a common assault" with a range of positions in between.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter_in_the_Sky"title="Typewriter in the Sky">
The story begins in Greenwich Village, New York. The main character, Mike de Wolf, is a struggling pianist. His friend, Horace Hackett, is an author and popular pulp fiction writer. Hackett is portrayed in the book as a skilled writer able to quickly produce voluminous amounts of material for pulp magazines. Hackett writes under stress, as he is facing a deadline. Hackett attempts to persuade his book publisher that he has almost finished writing his latest novel, while in actuality he has already depleted his advance payment prior to coming up with an idea for a story. Hackett's publisher pressures him and he rapidly decides to place his friend Mike as the central character in his story.Hackett writes about Mike as the villain in his book, a swashbuckling adventure story. Mike enters the bathroom of Hackett's basement-level apartment, and hears the sound of someone typing on a typewriter. After electrocuting himself, Mike loses consciousness. He subsequently awakens to find himself on a beach in the year 1640, as a character within his friend's novel. He inspects himself to find he has a saber attached to his person, and is wearing strange attire.Mike learns he is regarded in this world as the villain, Spanish Admiral Miguel de Lobo, a "pirate potboiler". He knows that the villains in stories written by Hackett often do not come to a favorable end, and is therefore anxious to exit the situation safely. Mike recognizes the specific work into which he has been transported: a tale by his friend called "Blood and Loot". Assuming the role of the villain, Mike realizes he must face off against a formidable opponent in the story, its protagonist named Tom Bristol.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_Ghote_Hunts_the_Peacock"title="Inspector Ghote Hunts the Peacock">
An injury to Inspector Ghote's commanding officer prevents him from attending an international police conference on drug smuggling that is to be held in London. Inspector Ghote is ordered to go to England, attend the conference, take notes and produce a presentation on behalf of his superior.On arrival Inspector Ghote is met by his cousin who, with his wife, runs an Indian restaurant in London. He stays with them for the duration of the conference but quickly learns that they expect him to find their missing 17-year-old niece, Ranee, who is nicknamed "The Peacock" for her bright attitude and dress.In between attending the conference Ghote investigates the girl's disappearance, has his high expectations of Great Britain dashed by a grey and grimy London and tries to acquire a gift to take home to his wife.Inspector Ghote is tasked by his Superintendent to attend the London police conference and present a prepared speech. On arrival at the airport, Ghote is met by his cousin, Vidur Datta, who runs with his wife a London restaurant. Their niece, 17-year-old Ranee – known as the "Peacock" for her brightness – has disappeared. The family suspects her boyfriend, 35-year-old pop music star Johnny Bull. Ghote interviews the Peacock's friends, who believe she has been murdered but don't know who did it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_from_Grace_(novel)"title="Falling from Grace (novel)">
Young sisters Annie and Grace squeeze in one last game of "Tracking" with their dad at the seashore, the beach by Point Nepean. There is a storm coming and it is getting dark. Annie, younger by eleven months and more agile than Grace, scrambles up the side of a steep hill. Grace struggles to follow when suddenly the ground falls away. The search for her begins, but is hampered by bad weather. The police become convinced that the young man, Kip, who found Grace's backpack on the beach, and Ted, who was too inebriated to remember much of what he did that night on the beach, may have had something to do with her disappearance. The police initially are unable to successfully interrogate Ted, but as the story is gradually assembled, it looks worse and worse for Kip and Ted, the longer Grace cannot be found.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glubbslyme"title="Glubbslyme">
A girl called Rebecca has just had a row with her best friend, Sarah, because of Mandy, who is pretty, girly type, who can sometimes be quite nasty and rude to Rebecca. Both Rebecca and Mandy thinks that Sarah is their best friend. One day, the girls discover a pond. Rebecca spins a tale, saying that it is a witch's pond in which a witch drowned. Sarah seems to be impressed. Then Mandy, trying to get Sarah's attention, says that the pond wasn't deep enough. Sarah seems to think the same thing. Rebecca goes in the pond to prove it, but Sarah leaves, saying that Rebecca is a baby. While she is in the pond a toad grips at her foot. Rebecca finds out that the toad is Glubbslyme, who is the witch's familiar and has magical powers. Together they seek revenge on Mr. Baker, a man who is fed up of Rebecca because she always ruins her flower beds. They also seek revenge on Mandy. In the end Rebecca and Sarah become friends again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Broken_Anchor"title="The Broken Anchor">
Nancy receives a mysterious letter claiming she has won a week-long holiday for two at the Sweet Springs Resort on Anchor Island in the Bahamas. Nancy is puzzled because she never entered any contest. The enclosed plane tickets are for the next day, so she sends her friends Bess and George to go to the resort, and she and her dad will follow later. After Bess and George have left for Anchor Island, she and her dad, Carson Drew, go down to Miami to investigate a mysterious ship. It has been linked to them as it contains newspaper clippings on some of Nancy's recent adventures. The boat is owned by Jeff and Lena DeFoe, who Nancy finds out are the owners of the Sweet Springs resort. While searching the boat for any evidence, Nancy loses her earring and while trying to find it uncovers an old medallion. Her father takes it to Avery Yates, an antique jewelry restorer. Meanwhile, Nancy is worried because her attempts to contact Bess and George have failed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Voice_in_the_Wind"title="A Voice in the Wind">
It is the story of a young Christian-Jewish slave named Hadassah living under the Roman Empire. When Hadassah is captured by Roman soldiers, her entire family is killed. She serves as a slave to a teenaged Roman woman named Julia, whose parents marry her off to a much older man. Although Julia initially dislikes Hadassah because of her plain appearance, she comes to trust her. Hadassah is faithful and kind but afraid of many things. As the story progresses, she gains the courage to tell others about her faith and the God that she serves. Meanwhile, she struggles with her love for Julia's older brother, Marcus, thinking it's a trick from Satan to lead her away from God. All he wants is for her to love him the same as he loves her, but she struggles with a choice, remain close to God or fall for a man who will lead her on a dark road away from him. As she struggles to remain close to God, her hard life and difficult challenges are just beginning to the extent she is thrown to the lions.The story goes into many different side characters, such as the young gladiator Atretes, who—as well as the main characters—are all searching for peace and purpose but unable to find it in the world of pleasures Rome has to offer. Throughout the entire novel, Hadassah's Christian faith (kept a secret for fear of death) is continually challenged and evolved, helping her overcome the harsher aspects as life as a slave in the Roman Empire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Echo_in_the_Darkness"title="An Echo in the Darkness">
The book begins where "A Voice in the Wind" left off, in the arena where Hadassah is thrown to the lions because her mistress was jealous of her purity. A young physician, Alexander, must choose one of the mauled bodies in the arena, so that he can examine it and further his knowledge as a physician. He chooses Hadassah's, only to discover that she is alive and that the lion has struck no vital organs. On a sudden impulse, Alexander saves Hadassah and nurses her back to health. Although she remains crippled, she regains the ability to walk and talk.Meanwhile, Marcus Lucianus Valerian, believing that Hadassah is dead, tries to deal with his grief by traveling to Israel (Hadassah's homeland) and learning about Hadassah's God.Throughout the book Hadassah's mistress, Julia Valerian contracts a fatal illness due to her sexual immoral and promiscuous behavior in her younger years, and slowly dies of a wasting disease. Hadassah, who had become Alexander's assistant, learns of her old mistress' bereavement and decides to move in with Julia and care for her until she dies. Hadassah covers her scars (and identity) with veils and heavy clothing.As she leaves Alexander, he admits his feelings for her, but she knows that he is not who she was meant to be with, and admits that she really only loves him as a brother and dear friend. As Hadassah tries to bring spiritual salvation to Julia, she finds herself feeling sorry for her and ultimately forgives Julia completely for attempting to kill her. However, she is still scared that Julia may find out her true identity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Car_(novel)"title="The Car (novel)">
Terry Anders is a fourteen-year-old boy living in Cleveland, Ohio whose parents didn't pay much attention to him. When both of his parents abandon him after an argument, he assembles his father's old Blakely Bearcat kit car. He decides to go on a cross-country adventure to find an uncle that he vaguely remembers. Along the way, he befriends two Vietnam veterans, Waylon Jackson and Wayne, with whom he enjoys life on the open road. This book is about their adventure together as they travel across the country. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timoleon_Vieta_Come_Home"title="Timoleon Vieta Come Home">
The novel centres around Timoleon Vieta, a little mongrel dog with black and white patches of fur and eyes that are describes as being as pretty as a girl's. Timoleon lives with Cockcroft, a retired, gay composer, who lives in a run-down farmhouse in Umbria financed by the occasional royalties he receives from the theme tunes he wrote. He reminisces about his failed career and former lovers, but is surprised when a man claiming to be a Bosnian shows up at his door with a business card he says Cockcroft gave him in a bar in Florence; Cockcroft often has such drunken weekends when he attempts to pick up men.In return for the occasional odd job and weekly fellatio, Cockcroft provides him with accommodation, but Timoleon Vieta, who is a good judge of character, takes against the Bosnian, and the dislike is reciprocated. Cockcroft is forced to choose between them and agrees to abandon the dog in Rome. The remainder of the novel is about Timoleon Vieta's journey back home, and the people he briefly comes into contact with, as he tries to make his way back to his beloved Cockcroft.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brave_Adventures_of_Lapitch"title="The Brave Adventures of Lapitch">
In the story, a poor young orphan called Lapitch works as the apprentice for the Scowlers - a mean-mannered shoemaker, and his kind-hearted wife. After Master Scowler blames him for the wrong size of a customer's shoes, Lapitch leaves a note and runs away from home. Later joined by Bundaš, the Scowlers' dog, he sets off on a seven-day adventure, during which he meets Gita, a circus performer, and encounters a local thief known as the Black Man.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victim_of_Prejudice"title="The Victim of Prejudice">
The main character, Mary, is brought up by her guardian Mr. Raymond in a loving environment, separate from the prejudiced and patriarchal society of Britain. This unsullied childhood begins to shift, when at the age of 11, two brothers, William and Edmund Pelham, come to live with and be educated by Mr. Raymond. Mary soon develops a close friendship with William, and on two separate occasions their games make Mary run into Sir Peter Osborne, who lies in the neighboring house. On the first occasion, William convinces Mary to steal grapes from the neighbor's garden, but is caught by several young men, one of which being Sir Peter Osborne. Sir Peter Osborne threatens to kiss Mary but she is able to escape before he is able to. On the second occasion, Mary attempts to save a hare from a hunting party during her games with William, and Sir Peter Osborne whips her several times with his horse whip before forcefully kissing her. As William and Mary grow older, Mr. Raymond sees that he must separate them in order to maintain his promise to the boys' father; that he should keep them from any acquaintance that might negatively affect their future as men of fashion and wealth. He sends Mary to live with a friend, Mr. Neville, and his family. During this time, Mary is saved from being swept away to sea by a boat of seamen, one of which is Sir Peter Osborne. After returning her to the Nevilles, Sir Peter Osborne makes several offers to pay a visit to Mary and shows up at the house on several occasions, all of which are denied by the Nevilles. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amnesia_(Cooper_novel)"title="Amnesia (Cooper novel)">
The book is dictated by an unknown narrator and follows Izzy Darlow, a mental hospital employee who volunteers his time in order to make amends for a robbery committed during his youth. It is there that he falls for the mute Katie, a patient at the hospital who had been subjected to extreme sexual abuse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lizzie_Zipmouth"title="Lizzie Zipmouth">
"Lizzie Zipmouth" is about a young girl named Lizzie who moves into a new home with her mother after her once-single mother finds a new boyfriend, Sam. Disgruntled and unhappy about the way these proceedings are going, she doesn't try to make friends with Sam's two sons, Rory and Jake, and keeps to herself by not saying a word. Soon, Jake nicknames her 'Lizzie Zipmouth' because of her obvious silence to everyone. It is only when she meets her scary step-great-grandmother that she begins to find a connection with her new family, bonding with Great-Gran over their love of dolls. However, Great-Gran has a bad stroke, and the family is unsure of the outcome. Lizzie, using Great-Gran's phrases and back-chats, manages to snap Great-Gran out of her ill trance. Soon, Great-Gran is making a full recovery and Lizzie is not so zipmouthed anymore.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_of_Senet"title="Lion of Senet">
The novel is set in the fantasy world of Ranadon, where there is no night time. Two suns orbit the earth and bathe it in light constantly. A religious sect known as the Shadowdancers claim this is the work of the Goddess, a deity both benign and merciless, whom most in the world believe in. The back story is that many years ago the second sun mysteriously vanished and left Ranadon in the Age of Shadows. At the insistence of the self-appointed High Priestess of the Shadow dancers, Belegren, the lion of Senet, a powerful and devout man named Antonov, sacrificed his baby son Gunta, after which the second sun returned and so it has been ever since. Dirk Provin, the second son of the Duke Wallin Provin of Elcast, saves a wounded sailor from a shipwreck, brought about by a volcanic eruption and consequent earthquake. Through the course of the man's recovery it is revealed that he is in fact, Johan Thorn, the exiled King of Dhevyn who was utterly defeated by Antonov during the Age of Shadows, and is now the most wanted man in Ranadon. News of this reaches the Lion of Senet himself, who arrives with Belegren the High Priestess, on Elcast, and the secret web of lies which had been built up around Dirk and everything he ever knew begins to slowly unravel, as the apprentice physician comes to realise that others are slowly drawing their own plans around him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_the_Labyrinth"title="Eye of the Labyrinth">
This novel picks up two years after the events of the previous one, with Dirk fleeing Avacas a wanted man and seeking sanctuary in the Baenlands. Obsessed with Dirk's capture Antonov arrests Morna Provin at her husband's funeral and announces that he will have her burned at the stake come Landfall. Despite the best efforts of Tia and Reithan Dirk still finds out and demands that they attempt to save her. The other major plot follows the domestic quarrels of Alenor and Kirsh, who is still besotted with the acrobat Marquel. At Dirk's suggestion, Alenor invites Marquel to Kalarada willingly in the hope that keeping Kirsh distracted will give her some measure of control over her kingdom. Arriving on Elcast too late, Dirk has only time to beg Tia to end his mother's suffering. She refuses at first, but forced to listen to Morna's screams, Tia relents and shoots the former duchess through the eye, ending her pain. The two escape with Master Helgrin and row back to the Wanderer, watching as Reithan Seranov's diversion burns Antonov's flagship to the waterline in retribution. Tired of running, Dirk announces that night that he is going to Omaxin in an attempt to break through the labyrinth and discover the truth that sent Neris Veran into madness. The strain of her husband openly flaunting a mistress takes its toll on Alenor and her relationship with Kirsh grows fractious. She eventually begins an affair with the captain of her guard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_Thief"title="The Sword Thief">
In Venice, Amy and Dan are separated from Nellie when Ian and Natalie steal their tickets and board the plane with the au pair already on board. The siblings run into Alistair, who offers them a ride to Tokyo on his private jet. Once there, they learn about the life of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the son of Thomas Cahill. They discover a collection of strange symbols, but are taken captive by the Holts who steal their lead. The Holts bring their three captives to an underground train station, but a train scares the Holts off. Amy, Dan, and Alistair barely escape the train, and find themselves in an unused storage room. There, they find strange artifacts, but are chased back to the surface by the Yakuza. They're rescued by Ian, Natalie, and Nellie, who have stuck a deal and are working together. Amy and Dan are hesitant, but Ian gives Amy a small coin, stolen from Vikram Kabra, that should help them find the next clue. The six go back for the artifacts, discovering a message telling them to head to Seoul.In Seoul, the six go to Alistair's house. They discover his hidden library, and after earning entrance, Amy and Dan discover a book informing them more about the 39 Clues. Alistair notes how much Ian and Natalie seem to already know, and how they're playing dumb to appeal to Amy and Dan. They then discover to head to Bukhansan, where Ian and Amy's flirting leads them to a secret entrance. The coin is the key, and after gaining entrance, Amy returns the coin to Ian. Nellie stays behind. In the cave, the five discover Hideyoshi's treasure, and the third clue--gold. Dan and Natalie discover mirror writing, and Dan solves the anagram, telling everyone Lake Tash is the next destination. Ian and Natalie take the information, betraying the others and sealing them in the cave. Angry, Dan reveals that he lied, and that Al Sakhet and Alkahest are the words. The siblings manage to escape the cave, but Alistair is killed in the collapse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fiery_Angel_(novel)"title="The Fiery Angel (novel)">
Set in sixteenth-century Germany, it depicts a love triangle between Renata, a passionate young woman, Ruprecht, a knight and Madiel, the fiery Angel. The novel tells the story of Ruprecht's attempts to win the love of Renata whose spiritual integrity is seriously undermined by her participation in occult practices. This love triangle is now recognised to be that which existed between the author, Bryusov, the symbolist novelist Andrei Bely and their shared lover, the nineteen-year-old Nina Petrovskaya.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Steps_to_Death"title="Four Steps to Death">
In this novel by John Wilson set during the Battle of Stalingrad, three participants — two soldiers and a boy — are caught in its horrors. Their story is told over seven days of fierce and deadly street-by-street fighting. Vasily is a patriotic Russian soldier determined to rid his country of the hated Nazi invaders — if he can stay alive long enough. Conrad is a German tank officer, part of the seemingly unstoppable force sweeping eastward over the steppe, expecting a quick victory over Stalin's ill-trained and badly equipped Red Army.Between them is eight-year-old Sergei, whose home is the maze of rubble that used to be the city of Stalingrad. None of them can know that their fates will be intertwined as the cataclysm engulfs them.In the middle of the conflict is eight-year-old Sergei who lives in the cellar of his former apartment, scavenging among the ruins of his hometown while the Germans and Russians wage war on one another. Thousands of bodies litter the streets, and yet, Sergei is not bothered by any of this, being hardened by the horrors that he faces every day. He dreams of being a famous sniper one day and ridding his homeland of the "Fascists".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_Ghote's_First_Case"title="Inspector Ghote's First Case">
Inspector Ghote has just been promoted to inspector and is on leave before taking up his post in Bombay Criminal Investigation Department. This he hopes will allow him to spend time with his heavily pregnant wife, Protima. Sir Rustom Engineer, the retired Police Commissioner of Bombay, asks Inspector Ghote to investigate the motiveless apparent suicide of Mrs Iris Dawkins, whose husband was an old friend of Sir Rustom's before Indian independence.The case has already been investigated by Inspector Darrani, an old rival of Ghote's from police training college, but Inspector Ghote soon learns that the tragedy is not what it first seems to be.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicka_Chicka_1,_2,_3"title="Chicka Chicka 1, 2, 3">
The number 0 wants to climb up an apple tree but ends up watching the numbers from 1 to 20 (including the number 5 wearing a top hat) in counting order, then 30 to 90 by tens (including the number 70 with long hair), and finally 99, climb it. As the numbers were climbing, 0 wondered if there would be a place for him. But as they all come before him, there is no room for him, until a group of bumblebees claim the tree by angrily ordering the numbers to get out of their tree. While counting backwards, the bumblebees fly around them, causing all the numbers (except 10 who was hiding, but including 99 who immediately falls out before the rest and continued right after the bumblebees told the numbers to get out of the tree), to fall out of the tree. Also, while falling down, 11 gets bent up, 8 gets a crack (broken bone), and 6 gets twisted. The number 0 now knows where he would be in the apple tree. He goes to the top of the tree and joins with 10 to make the number 100, which scares all the bees away, and all the other numbers convene in the tree to cheer for 10 and 0's bravery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Tree"title="The Iron Tree">
The story begins in a small desert town of R'shael in the kingdom of Asqualeth. Jarred and his friends set off on an adventure to explore the world of The Four Kingdoms of Tir. On the way they are ambushed by Marauders, mountain folk that are deformed and spend their lives pillaging villages and unwary travelers. Jarred is found out by his friends to be invulnerable however one of their part is injured and they are forced to take refuge in Marsh Town in the kingdom of Slievmordhu. There Jarred falls in love at first sight with a Marsh daughter Lilith. When the party are to depart Jarred decides to stay and start a family with Lilith; it is soon learned however a terrible curse runs in the family of Lilith and Jarred must try to find the cure before it devours Lilith. Little do they know, they will find Jarred's gift and Lilith's curse stem from a past that intertwines them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boxer_and_the_Spy"title="The Boxer and the Spy">
In a quiet New England town, the body of shy teenager Jason Green washes up on the shore, and the police soon claim that the death was a suicide induced by steroid addiction. However, Terry Novak, a fifteen-year-old aspiring boxer, is not so sure, especially considering that Jason was an artistic person who had no interest in sports, and thus was not the type to be taking such drugs. Assisted by his friend Abby, he begins an investigation of his own, and soon learns that asking too many questions can lead him into serious danger.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Hand"title="The Fourth Hand">
While reporting a story from India, Patrick Wallingford, a New York television journalist, has his left hand eaten by a lion. Millions of TV viewers witness the accident, and Patrick achieves instant notoriety as "the lion guy".In Boston, a renowned hand surgeon, Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac, awaits the opportunity to perform the nation's first hand transplant. After watching video of Patrick, Dr. Zajac contacts the journalist and pledges to find a suitable hand donor for him.Doris Clausen, a married woman in Wisconsin, wants to give Patrick Wallingford her husband's left hand—that is, after her husband dies. When her husband later dies from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Doris immediately rushes the hand to Boston. In the waiting room before the procedure, Doris has sex with Patrick, explaining that she had always wanted to have a child but was unable to with her late husband. The hand is then successfully attached by Dr. Zajac, with unorthodox visitation rights for the hand granted to Doris.Patrick quickly falls in love with Doris, who has his baby, Otto Clausen Junior. Doris, however, will not return Patrick's love, and only allows him to touch her intimately with her late husband's hand, now Patrick's.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_and_Hemlock"title="Fire and Hemlock">
As she clears out her old bedroom, Polly discovers that below her memories, in which she led an entirely normal and unremarkable life, there is a second set of memories, which are rather unusual.As Polly thinks back to this "second set" of memories, the point where they seem to diverge is when she stumbled into a funeral in an old mansion, Hunsdon House, when she was ten and playing with her best friend, Nina. There, she was approached by a man named Thomas Lynn who took her back outside and kept her company. He takes her back inside to help him select six pictures from a large pile, his share of the estate of the deceased; one of them is a photograph called "Fire and Hemlock" (hence the name of the novel), which he gave to her. He then takes her back to her grandmother's house, where she is living.Over the following years Tom and Polly continue a friendship largely through correspondence, with occasional visits. Tom sends her books and letters with stories in them, many of which tie into the general theme of his predicament. Together, the two come up with stories about a hero named Tan Coul and his assistant Hero, who are Mr. Lynn's and Polly's alter egos, respectively. These stories all eventually come true, after a fashion. For instance, after discussing Tan Coul's horse, they encounter an identical horse disrupting traffic in the streets of London, having escaped from a nearby circus. An invented town and hardware store later turn out to be real, the proprietor being the spitting image of Tom, and "his" nephew Leslie falling into the story much later as a possible victim of Laurel's. Tom and Polly's story features three other heroes; later on, Tom gives Polly a photograph of all the members of his orchestra, and asks her to identify them. She immediately finds the other three heroes. These three are exactly the ones with whom Tom was considering setting up an independent string quartet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_(novel)"title="Bliss (novel)">
Written as a dark, comic fable, the story concerns an advertising executive, Harry Joy, who briefly 'dies' of a heart attack. On being resuscitated, he realizes that the life he has previously drifted amiably through is in fact Hell – literally so to Harry. His wife is unfaithful, while his son is selling drugs, and his daughter is a communist selling herself to buy them. In one of the novel's more shocking scenes, glimpsed through a window, incest occurs.Redemption comes in the form of Honey Barbara – a pantheist, healer and prostitute. In the words of the book's blurb "Honey is to Harry as Isis is to Osiris. Together they conquer Hell and retire to the forest where their children inherit the legend of paradise regained." But Harry must die for a second time to be truly saved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Beyond_Zebra!"title="On Beyond Zebra!">
The young narrator, not content with the confines of the ordinary alphabet, reports on additional letters beyond Z, with a fantastic creature corresponding to each new letter. For example, the letter "FLOOB" is the first letter in Floob-Boober-Bab-Boober-Bubs, which have large buoyant heads and float serenely in the water.In order, the letters, followed by the creatures for which the letters are the first letter when spelling their names, are YUZZ (Yuzz-a-ma-Tuzz), WUM (Wumbus), UM (Umbus), HUMPF (Humpf-Humpf-a-Dumpfer), FUDDLE (Miss Fuddle-dee-Duddle), GLIKK (Glikker), NUH (Nutches), SNEE (Sneedle), QUAN (Quandary), THNAD (Thnadners), SPAZZ (Spazzim), FLOOB (Floob-Boober-Bab-Boober-Bubs), ZATZ (Zatz-it), JOGG (Jogg-oons), FLUNN (Flunnel), ITCH (Itch-a-pods), YEKK (Yekko), VROO (Vrooms), and HI! (High Gargel-orum).The book ends with an unnamed letter that is substantially more complicated than those with names. A list of all the additional letters is shown at the end.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Office_(novel)"title="Post Office (novel)">
In Los Angeles, California, down-and-out barfly Henry Chinaski becomes a substitute mail carrier; he quits for a while and lives on his winnings at the race track, then becomes a mail clerk. Chinaski drifts from place to place, surviving through booze and women, with his biting sense of humor and a cynical view of the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_(novel)"title="Mexico (novel)">
The main action of "Mexico" takes place in Mexico over a three-day period in the fictional city of Toledo in 1961. The occasion is the annual bullfighting festival, at which two matadors — one an acclaimed hero of the sport, the other a scrapping contender — are prepared to fight to the death for fame and glory.Through the memories of the book's narrator, Norman Clay, an American journalist of Spanish and Indian descent, Michener provides plenty of historical background, including a depiction of the fictitious Indian civilization that once flourished on the city's periphery. The story focuses on bullfighting, but also provides insight into Mexican culture. The reader follows the bulls from their breeding to their "sorting" to the pageantry and spectacle of the bullring, where picadors and banderilleros prepare the bull for the entrance of the matador with his red cape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searching_for_David's_Heart"title="Searching for David's Heart">
Darcy Deeton is a twelve-year-old girl who loves her older brother, David. After becoming jealous when he falls in love with Jayne Evans, Darcy inadvertently leads David to his death in a car accident. The Deetons decide to donate David's most important organ, his heart. Darcy is so guilt-ridden about his death that she is determined to find the person who has his heart so she can find some closure. Darcy embarks on a wild adventure with her best friend, Sam. She goes on a journey with Sam and finds the recipient of David's heart, Winston Pawling.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong_Yiji"title="Kong Yiji">
The narrator reminisces about the time twenty years ago when he worked in a tavern in Luzhen (Chinese: 鲁镇), a fictional town where many of Lu Xun's stories are set.Kong Yiji was a self-styled scholar who filled his speech with literary jargon. He was the only customer who wore a scholar's long gown and drank his wine while standing. He had often been laughed at contemptuously by other customers, who gave him the nickname "Kong Yiji". Kong Yiji was poor and sometimes stole books, but he never defaulted on payment of the tavern. He was willing to teach the narrator about writing and shared fennel peas with children. Later, Kong Yiji had been caught stealing and was beaten until his legs broke. He dragged himself to the tavern and ordered some wine. After that, he was not seen again and presumably died as a result of his injuries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Beach"title="Cadillac Beach">
 The year is 1996. At long last, Serge A. Storms has been captured. He is committed to the psychiatric hospital at Chattahoochee, where he patiently tries to explain his views. Serge grows tired of this diversion, however, and escapes once more. His newest obsession involves investigating the circumstances surrounding his grandfather's death forty years earlier, when he allegedly committed suicide by wandering into the ocean at a Miami beach. Serge's grandfather, who passed on many of his habits and interests (as well as his mental instability) to his grandson, may have been involved with a lucrative jewel theft shortly before his disappearance, however, so his friends are understandably reluctant to talk.The novel then skips forward eight years and over the previous novels in the series to 2004, where Serge is living with his friend Lenny and Lenny's mother while planning a phantasmagoric array of projects, the biggest of which is still to solve the matter of his grandfather's supposed suicide. To finance his quest, Serge and Lenny start up a unique tour service highlighting the "lesser known" side of Florida's tourism industry. During one of his tours, a group of drunken convention attendees accidentally kidnap and kill a mob boss. The mobster in question just happens to be one that Serge personally insulted a few days earlier, incurring the wrath of both the mob and the FBI. Serge decides to keep close tabs on the salesmen for their own protection, not letting them leave his sight. Somehow, he also finds the time to publicly embarrass the Castro regime of Cuba and the United States government at the same time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torpedo_Juice_(novel)"title="Torpedo Juice (novel)">
The book takes place mainly in the Florida Keys, where Serge heads to "reinvent himself". After flirting with becoming the next Jimmy Buffett (undaunted by a total lack of musical talent), he finally decides to marry. All he has to do is find the right woman. Given Serge's personality (a mixture of bizarre topic-hopping as his attention drifts and his penchant for brutal honesty), this proves quite a challenge. And somehow, he's picked up a legion of devoted followers continually begging him for pearls of wisdom.After briefly courting a few unwilling prospects, he falls in love at first sight with Molly, a new hire at the local library. She initially seems to be stereotypically meek and prim, but is won over when she inadvertently watches Serge beat a man to death for insulting her. She agrees to his hastily scheduled wedding (held during an underwater concert) and quickly proves to be more than a match for Serge's formidable libido. He is quickly baffled by the intricacies of a "normal" relationship, however, and his bride resents all the time he spends with his dim-bulb pal Coleman. Arguments and cold silences follow. With all of this frustration, Serge barely notices the brown Duster following him or the repeated attempts on his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Plus"title="Man Plus">
In the not-too-distant future, the Cold War threatens to turn into a fighting war. Colonization of Mars seems to be mankind's only hope of surviving certain Armageddon. To facilitate this, the US government begins a cyborg program to create a being capable of surviving the harsh Martian environment: Man Plus. After the death of the first candidate, due to the project supervisors forgetting to enhance his brain's ability to process sensory input to cope with the new stimuli he is receiving, Roger Torraway becomes the heart of the program.To survive in the thin Martian atmosphere, Roger Torraway's body must be replaced with an artificial one. At every step he becomes more and more disconnected from humanity, unable to feel things in his new body. It is only after arriving on Mars that his new body begins to make sense to him. It is perfectly adapted to this new world and he becomes perfectly separated from his old world and from humanity.The success of the Martian mission spurs similar cyborg programs in other spacefaring nations. It is revealed that the computer networks of Earth have become sentient and that ensuring humanity's survival will guarantee theirs as well. In the end, the network is puzzled; something has distorted their extrapolations, the same way they influenced humanity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shout_at_the_Devil_(film)"title="Shout at the Devil (film)">
Colonel Flynn O'Flynn, a hard-drinking American, manipulates British aristocrat Sebastian Oldsmith into helping poach ivory in Tanganyika, which is part of the German-controlled pre-World War I territory of German East Africa. On hearing news that the American has returned to poaching, Herman Fleischer, the local German Commander of the Southern Provinces, relentlessly hunts O'Flynn with his "Schutztruppe".Fleischer has his warship ram and sink O'Flynn's Arab dhow loaded with poached ivory. Sebastian and O'Flynn recuperate at O'Flynn's house where Sebastian meets and falls in love with O'Flynn's daughter, Rosa. They are married and have a daughter together. Sebastian and O'Flynn continue to make trouble for Fleischer by stealing taxes. Fleischer fights back by having his "Schutztruppe" attack and raze to the ground O'Flynn's home killing his granddaughter in the process.O'Flynn, Sebastian and Rosa decide to find and kill Fleischer as revenge for the death of the baby. But when it is discovered that Britain is at war with Germany, Royal Navy officers convince O'Flynn to locate and destroy the German warship, "SMS Blücher" which is hiding awaiting repair.O'Flynn, Sebastian, and Rosa pursue Fleischer, who happens to be on the warship. Eventually they find her in an inlet and plant a bomb on board. O'Flynn sacrifices himself so that Sebastian and Rosa can escape while Fleischer's crew search for the bomb. Fleischer jumps overboard just in time to get away also, but as he comes ashore, Sebastian kills him with a rifle. Sebastian and Rosa then watch the ship as it is ripped apart by more explosions and burns.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deep_Blue_Good-by"title="The Deep Blue Good-by">
"The Deep Blue Good-by" introduces readers to McGee, his place of residence, the "Busted Flush" (a houseboat he won in a poker game), and its mooring place, slip F-18 at the Bahia Mar Marina in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In the early chapters we learn that McGee is a bachelor, a man who can be friends with ladies as well as have a passion for them, and a man of principle (although they are somewhat at the mercy of his uncertain emotional condition and his circumstances at the moment; in McGee's own words, "Some of them I'll bend way, way, over, but not break.").Another feature of the McGee series is the seemingly unending parade of colorful and invariably evil villains whom McGee must contend with in order to make a recovery for his clients. In this first story the antagonist is Junior Allen, a smiling, seemingly friendly man, large, "cat quick", powerful, and pathologically evil. The story begins with a fortune smuggled home after World War II by a soldier who was a native of the Florida Keys. This soldier killed another soldier just prior to his discharge, went on the run back to the Keys, and buried his treasure there. He was later captured by the U.S. Army and sent to a military prison, where he met Junior Allen. Allen discovered vague details about the fortune hidden in the Keys and after his release from prison went there to find it. The story depicts the psychotic behavior of Allen as he evolves from thief to serial rapist to murderer. We see McGee's savvy, guile, and physical prowess as he works methodically to locate Allen and eventually make the recovery. As is thematic in many of the McGee books, however, he pays a heavy price for the successful recovery. Throughout the series, in fact, it is debatable as to whether McGee ever makes a recovery in which the gain outweighs the costs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_and_Phoenix"title="Dragon and Phoenix">
Dragonlord Linden Rathan and his wife, Maurynna Kyrissean are trying to enjoy the life of newlyweds when a traveller brings a shocking tale to Dragonskeep: the empire of Jehanglan, far to the south, is sustained through the power of a phoenix, bound by the magical power of a truedragon, also trapped and exploited. Learning they must act before the phoenix is due to die and be reborn, Linden, Maurynna, and their mortal and immortal friends launch a daring rescue operation to the reclusive Phoenix Empire.Meanwhile, in the halls of Jehanglan's imperial palace, a power struggle erupts between Shei-Luin, the emperor's favorite concubine, and Jhanun, the most conservative of the Jehangli nobles. The emperor himself meanwhile, finds himself increasingly swayed into believing the heresies of Shei-Luin's estranged and exiled father: the history of Jehanglan is a lie, and phoenix must be freed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_in_the_Air"title="The War in the Air">
The first three chapters of "The War in the Air" expound on details of the life of the novel's hero Bert Smallways and his extended family. They reside in a location called Bun Hill, a fictional, former Kentish village that had become a London suburb. The chapters introduce Bert's brother Tom, a stolid greengrocer, who views technological progress with apprehension. Also introduced is their aged father, who recalls, with longing, the time when Bun Hill was a quiet village and he had been able to drive the local squire's carriage. The story soon shifts focus to Bert; an unimpressive, unsuccessful, not particularly gifted young man with few ideas about larger things. Bert is far from unintelligent, however and we come to know that Bert has a strong attachment to a young woman named Edna. When bankruptcy threatens his business one summer, he and his partner abandon their shop and devise a singing act, calling themselves "the Desert Dervishes". They attempt to resolve their misfortunes by staging performances at English sea resorts. As chance would have, their initial performance is interrupted by a certain balloon that lands on the beach before them. The balloon contains a new character: Mr. Butteridge. Butteridge is famous for his successful invention of an easily maneuverable fixed-wing aircraft, whose secret he has not revealed. We come to know that he intends to sell his secrets to the British government or, if not possible, instead to Germany. We also come to know that prior to Mr. Butteridge's invention, nobody had succeeded in producing a practical, "heavier-than-air" machine—only a few awkward devices of limited utility had been made since (such as the German "Drachenflieger" which had to be towed aloft and released from an airship). Butteridge's invention is considered a major breakthrough. The invention is highly maneuverable, capable of both very fast and very slow flight, and requires only a small area to take off and land—reminiscent of the later autogyro.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Jones_and_the_Philosopher's_Stone"title="Indiana Jones and the Philosopher's Stone">
Indiana Jones hunts down an English alchemist, a Renaissance scholar and a stolen manuscript containing the great alchemical secrets of immortality and transmuting base metals to gold.The book was published only in paperback by Bantam Books of New York City in April 1995.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perks_of_Being_a_Wallflower"title="The Perks of Being a Wallflower">
Throughout the 1991–1992 academic year, Charlie, the fifteen-year-old protagonist, begins writing letters about his own life to an unknown recipient addressed, "dear friend". In these letters, he discusses his freshman year of high school and his struggles with two traumatic experiences: the suicide of his only middle-school friend, Michael Dobson, and the death of his favorite aunt, Helen.His caring English teacher, who encourages Charlie to call him Bill, notices Charlie's passion for reading and writing, and acts as a mentor by assigning him extracurricular books and reports. Although he is a wallflower, Charlie is befriended by two seniors: Patrick and Sam. Patrick is secretly dating Brad, a football player, and Sam is Patrick's stepsister. Charlie quickly develops a consuming crush on Sam and subsequently admits this to her. It is revealed that Sam was sexually abused as a child, and she kisses Charlie to ensure that his first kiss is from someone who truly loves him.Similar to his own experience, Charlie witnesses his sister's boyfriend hit her across the face, but she forbids him from telling their parents. He eventually mentions the occurrence to Bill, who tells Charlie's parents about it. Charlie's relationship with his sister rapidly deteriorates and she continues to see her boyfriend against her parents' wishes. Eventually, he discovers that his sister is pregnant and agrees to bring her to an abortion clinic without telling anyone. His sister breaks up with her boyfriend, after which her relationship with Charlie begins to improve significantly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Flame_of_Queen_Loana"title="The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana">
The plot of the book concerns Yambo (full name: Giambattista Bodoni, just like the typographer Giambattista Bodoni), a 59-year-old Milanese antiquarian book dealer who loses his episodic memory due to a stroke. At the beginning of the novel, he can remember everything he has ever read but does not remember his family, his past, or even his own name. Yambo decides to go to Solara, his childhood home, parts of which he has abandoned following a family tragedy, to see if he can rediscover his lost past. After days of searching through old newspapers, vinyl records, books, magazines and childhood comic books, he is unsuccessful in regaining memories, though he relives the story of his generation and the society in which his dead parents and grandfather lived. Ready to abandon his quest, he discovers a copy of the original First Folio of 1623 among his grandfather's books, the shock of which causes another incident, during which he relives his lost memories of childhood. The final section of the book is, therefore, a literary exploration of the traditional phenomenon whereby a person's life flashes before him or her, as Yambo struggles to regain the one memory he seeks above all others: the face of the girl he loved ever since he was a student.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_on_the_Mountain_(Abbey_novel)"title="Fire on the Mountain (Abbey novel)">
Abbey includes the following paragraph to introduce this book:The hero of the story is John Vogelin, a New Mexico rancher whose land is about to be condemned by the United States Air Force, who want to use his land to expand a bombing range. He is the last holdout among the several people whose land the Air Force wants, and he refuses to move. The story of his resistance to being thrown off his land and his death is told through the eyes of his grandson, who is visiting the ranch for the summer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Troy"title="Jonathan Troy">
Many of the other characters in the book refer to Jonathan Troy as the golden boy. He's a senior at the local high school and they call him that because he has everything: Looks, intelligence and talent. But he is not an easy character for the reader to like. We're given an insight into the mind of a teen-age boy, where he holds nearly everyone he meets in contempt—especially his father, Nathaniel, and his favorite teacher, Feathersmith.The book is written as a series of different events, almost none of them related. Jonathan has had an ongoing relationship with one girl, Etheline. But once he finally succeeds in seducing her, he begins to lose interest, especially when she starts talking about marriage. A chance meeting with a new girl in town, Leafy, gives him new inspiration and he begins pursuit of her.Abbey also introduces the only major gay character in any of his eight novels, Phillip Feathersmith. Abbey doesn't come right out and say he's gay, but he describes his "fairy-flower" hands, talks about what a pink little fellow he is, and Jonathan calls him "Fairysmith" in his own mind. Feathersmith shows an attraction to Jonathan that is not very subtle.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brave_Cowboy"title="The Brave Cowboy">
This book is the story of a cowboy, Jack Burns, who lives as a transient worker and roaming ranch hand much as the cowboys of old did, and refuses to join modern society. He rejects much of modern technology, prefers to cut down any fence he comes across, will not carry any kind of modern identification such as a driver's license or Social Security card, and refuses to register for the draft. When his friend Paul Bondi, who is a philosophical anarchist, is jailed in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for refusing to register for the draft, Burns deliberately gets himself arrested in an attempt to break his friend out of jail, but winds up on the run from the law himself.Bondi has been tried and is awaiting transport from county jail to federal prison but refuses to escape with Burns. As police have discovered that Burns has also never registered for the draft, authorities are intent on sending Burns to trial and eventually federal prison for violation of the Selective Service Act of 1948. Burns eventually escapes reluctantly leaving his friend behind. After a brief stop to say goodbye to Paul's wife, Jerry, and son, Seth, Jack heads into the Sandia Mountains, just east of Albuquerque, on horseback.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Over_Easy"title="The Big Over Easy">
The book begins a short time after Easter, and no one can remember the last sunny day. Mary Mary, a detective sergeant from Basingstoke, is being transferred to Reading, Berkshire. She hopes to be paired up with Detective Chief Inspector Friedland Chymes, a member of the Detective's Guild with multiple appearances in the fictional magazine "Amazing Crime Stories", but instead is paired up with Jack Spratt at the Nursery Crime Department, who is most famous for giant killing and for arresting the serial wife killer Bluebeard. Jack himself is living with his second wife, Madeleine, who moonlights as a photographer for certain prestigious events, and their five children: Pandora, Ben, Stevie, Jerome, and Megan. Madeleine is trying to rent the spare room in the house, but without much success. Jack's first wife could only eat fat and soon died.The day after Mary is transferred, Humpty Dumpty is discovered dead outside of his residence at Grimm's Road, apparently having fallen off the wall. Jack's Superintendent, Briggs, introduces him to Mary Mary at the crime scene. Jack interviews some possible witnesses, including Wee Willie Winkie, the insomniac neighbor; Ms. Hubbard, the owner of the boarding house where Humpty stayed; and Prometheus, the titan from Greek mythology, the latter of which Jack offers to rent the spare room in his house to. They all describe Humpty as a nice egg, who generally kept to himself. Upon inspection of Humpty's room, Jack and Mary find some odd clues: several shares in Spongg Footcare, Reading's Footcare empire, a picture of Humpty with a girlfriend in Vienna, and a 28-foot-long strand of hair. They later interview Laura, Humpty Dumpty's ex-wife. When Jack returns home, he tells his mother that the painting of the cow his mother wanted to sell was fake and he only received some beans in return. Mrs. Spratt retorts that she had the painting valued years ago and that the auctioneer probably knows how incredibly valuable it is. She is so upset that she throws the beans out of the window, and Jack sees them bury into the ground by themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zahir_(novel)"title="The Zahir (novel)">
"The Zahir" means 'the obvious' or 'conspicuous' in Arabic. The story revolves around the life of the narrator, a bestselling novelist, and in particular his search for his missing wife, Esther. He enjoys all the privileges that money and celebrity bring. He is suspected of foul play by both the police and the press, who suspect that he may have had a role in the inexplicable disappearance of his wife from their Paris home.As a result of this disappearance, the protagonist is forced to re-examine his own life as well as his marriage. The narrator is unable to figure out what led to Esther's disappearance. Was she abducted or had she abandoned the marriage? He encounters Mikhail, one of Esther's friends, during a book launch. He learns from Mikhail that Esther, who had been a war correspondent against the wishes of her husband (the protagonist), had left in a search for peace, as she had trouble living with her husband. The author eventually realizes that in order to find Esther he must first find his own self. Mikhail introduces him to his own beliefs and customs, his mission of spreading love by holding sessions in restaurants and meeting homeless people living in the streets. He tells the narrator about the voices he hears, and his beliefs related to them. The narrator, who only too frequently falls in love with women, 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Woods"title="In the Woods">
Twenty-two years prior to the novel's events, twelve year-old Adam and his two best friends failed to come home after playing in the familiar woods bordering their Irish housing estate. The Gardaí find Adam shivering, clawing the bark of a nearby tree, with blood in his shoes and slash marks on his back. His friends are never found. He is unable to say what happened to them. Now using his middle name, Rob, he is a detective with the Murder Squad. His amnesia holds to the present day.The plot of the novel circles around the murder of a twelve-year-old girl, Katy Devlin, whose case Rob and his partner Cassie Maddox are assigned to investigate. The body is found in the same woods where Rob's friends disappeared, at an archaeological dig site; and the coincidence is enough to make Rob nervous, though he insists to his partner that he is fine.Cassie and Rob have been partners for a few years and get along famously, teasing one another and completing one another's thoughts. Cassie is one of the few people who knows the truth about Rob's past. There are many rumours that they are romantically involved, though both of them scoff at the idea, despite the fact that they live almost like a married couple, spending a lot of time at Cassie's cooking dinner for one another, drinking wine, and having Rob crash on Cassie's couch across the room.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_in_Lisbon"title="The Night in Lisbon">
The story takes place in the opening months of World War II. Josef Schwarz is a refugee who offers his visa and tickets for America to another refugee desperate to leave Lisbon. He does this in exchange for keeping him company throughout one night, a night in which he relates the story of his and his wife's frantic flight from Nazi Germany to Lisbon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Still_Life_with_Woodpecker"title="Still Life with Woodpecker">
Princess Leigh-Cheri Furstenberg-Barcalona lives with her exiled royal parents King Max and Queen Tilli and their last loyal servant Gulietta in a converted farmhouse in Seattle. While a modern American high school student in most respects, Leigh-Cheri has an existentialist view of the cultural symbolism of her title of "princess" and wishes to use it for the good of mankind. To this end, she involves herself in many liberal and ecopolitical causes, including a liberal symposium called CareFest in Hawaii, where many progressive minds gather to present their ideas for improving the world. However, there is so much unnecessary infighting that Leigh-Cheri quickly becomes disenchanted. Leigh-Cheri is further demoralized by a beautiful blonde woman claiming to be an alien from the planet Argon, who denounces Leigh-Cheri for her red hair, stating red hair is a sign that Leigh-Cheri is descended from mutant, renegade Argonians.In the middle of all this, Leigh-Cheri encounters outlaw bomber and fellow redhead Bernard Mickey Wrangle, known as the Woodpecker, who plans to blow up the CareFest. Leigh-Cheri places Bernard under citizens arrest, only to be drawn in by his outlaw philosophy, which teaches freedom is more important than happiness. Bernard is likewise charmed by Leigh-Cheri's romantic idealism, and the two fall in love. While drunk on tequila, Bernard accidentally blows up a UFO conference taking place opposite the CareFest, after which all the attendees witness a flying saucer escaping, leading Leigh-Cheri to believe the Argonian woman was really an alien.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinds'_Feet_on_High_Places"title="Hinds' Feet on High Places">
It is the story of a young woman named Much Afraid, and her journey away from her Fearing family and into the High Places of the Shepherd, guided by her two companions Sorrow and Suffering. It is an allegory of a Christian devotional life from salvation through maturity. It aims to show how a Christian is transformed from unbeliever to immature believer to mature believer, who walks daily with God as easily on the High Places of Joy in the spirit as in the daily life of mundane and often humiliating tasks that may cause Christians to lose perspective.The book takes its title from Habakkuk 3:19, "The Lord God is my strength, and he will make my feet like hinds' feet, and he will make me to walk upon mine high places."The story begins at the Valley of Humiliation with Much Afraid, being beset by the unwanted advances of her cousin, Craven Fear, who wishes to marry her. Much Afraid is ugly from all outward appearances, walking on club feet, sporting gnarled, deformed hands, and speaking from a crooked mouth that seems to have been made so by a stroke or the like.The Good Shepherd is tender and gentle with Much Afraid, especially in the beginning. However, His many sudden departures may strike the reader as bizarre, given the human penchant to expect kindly souls to never do anything that may be interpreted as rude or as hurtful in any way. Yet, though the Shepherd leaves in a moment, He returns the same way at the first furtive cry of the forlorn little protagonist. "Come, Shepherd, for I am much afraid!"
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sittaford_Mystery"title="The Sittaford Mystery">
Sittaford is a tiny village on the fringe of Dartmoor. Mrs Willett and her daughter Violet are the newly installed tenants of Sittaford House, a residence owned by Trevelyan, a retired Navy captain. They invite four people to tea on Friday afternoon: Captain Trevelyan's long-standing friend, Major Burnaby, Mr Rycroft, Mr Ronnie Garfield, and Mr Duke. At the suggestion of Mr Garfield, the six of them decide to play a game of table-turning. During this séance, at 5.25 pm, a spirit announces that Captain Trevelyan has just been murdered. Concerned for the Captain's safety in Exhampton, Major Burnaby says that he intends to walk the six miles there. There is a thick layer of snow on the ground and further heavy snowfall is forecast for later that evening. There is no telephone in Sittaford, and cars cannot manoeuvre in these conditions.Two and a half hours later, just before 8 pm, in the middle of a blizzard, Major Burnaby is trudging up the path to the front door of Hazelmoor, the house in Exhampton where Captain Trevelyan now lives. When nobody answers the door, he fetches the local police and a doctor. They enter the house through the open study window at the back, and find Captain Trevelyan's dead body on the floor. Dr Warren estimates the time of death at between 5 and 6 pm. A fracture of the base of the skull is the cause of death. The weapon was a green baize tube full of sand.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chancellor_Manuscript"title="The Chancellor Manuscript">
In the prologue the protagonist meets an ambassador of the United States who on the subject of his thesis which is rejected. The ambassador convinces him to display his thesis in front of the public in the form of a novel. Chancellor complies, reluctantly, and soon becomes a famous novelist. The ambassador is revealed to be part of an organization known as Inver Brass. The organization is actually a group of intellectuals who intervene in political as well as economic matters when they think they are going off track. These intellectuals decide to assassinate J.Edgar Hoover, head of the Federal Bureau Of Investigation, on the grounds that they believe his private files contain damaging information on various political, military and other very important figures, and that Hoover uses this information to control them. When Hoover is assassinated by the work of the ingenious NSC official Stefan Varak, half of the files are not found. To get the remaining files Inver Brass recruit Peter Chancellor to get to the files, using him, by giving him a new subject for his novel, telling him that Hoover has been assassinated so that he will investigate further. From thereon Chancellor is trapped in a violent spiral, not knowing who his enemies are, desperately trying to finish his novel somehow.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayworld_(novel_series)"title="Dayworld (novel series)">
Jeff Caird is a citizen of Tuesday-World N.E. (New Era) 1330. The book starts on D5-W1 (Day-Five, Week-One) in the Second Month of N.E. 1330. (Each day of the week is the same day number, i.e. Sun-Sat will still be D5-W1). The book takes place over a full week, from Tuesday-World D5-W1 to Tuesday-World D6-W1. Jeff Caird is an 'organic' (police officer) by profession. Each day of the week organics have a different outfit. Also, each day of the week has a different fashion trend, TV shows, news, and so on, most people only knowing about each in his or her own day. However, Jeff Caird is a daybreaker, and not only that, he's an immer. The immers are a group of individuals living and acting beneath the radar of the government. The goal of the immers is to slowly and subtly change the government for the better. There are immers in just about every aspect of society in each day of the week. Jeff Caird is special in that he is a daybreaker as sanctioned by the immers, used to pass messages from day to day. As a daybreaker, Caird has mentally created a different identity for himself for each day of the week, different jobs, different friends, and different wives all included.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Countess_of_Pembroke's_Arcadia"title="The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia">
Although "Old Arcadia" has never been greatly popular, it has entertained a small set of readers for over 400 years with its sensational treatment of sex, politics, violence, soporifics, mobs, and cross-dressing. Narrated in sprawling Renaissance prose, the romance comprises five "books or acts," organized according to the five-part structure of classical dramaturgy: exposition, action, complication, reversal, catastrophe. This hybrid structure—part prose romance and part classical drama—allows Sidney to contain the diverseness of romance within the cohesiveness of the dramatic arc. The work is often called "tragicomic" for its combination of a "serious" high plot centering on the princes and Duke Basilius's household and a "comic" low plot that centers on the steward Dametas's family. The standard modern edition of "Old Arcadia", on which this synopsis is based, is edited by Jean Robertson (Clarendon: Oxford, 1973).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eater_(novel)"title="Eater (novel)">
In the early 21st century, astronomers detect what appears to be a distant gamma-ray burster, a black hole engulfing another star many light years away. The data are bizarre and troubling, because only 13 hours later, a second burster appears, which, given the great distance between stars, would be impossible. Eventually, the astronomers realize that the black hole, rather than being incredibly far from us, is actually heading towards the Solar System, and moving our way at considerable speed. Stranger still, it seems to be moving under its own will; it is an intelligent being itself. This age-old cosmic being reveals that it had been born seven billion years ago and had become a wandering entity, feeding on asteroids, planets and various space debris, projecting itself forward in space through the process. Through the billions of years of its existence across the expanse of time and space, this intelligent entity has learned of many ancient civilizations in the universe. The black hole eventually sends a message to the people of Earth; it "desires converse". The black hole is willing to share the knowledge it had gained throughout the ages in return for the chance to "chat" with the humans. But eventually, something about the nature of the life-form is revealed. It prefers to learn about people by having their minds uploaded to it and demands that the best and brightest of Earth be sent to it in this way.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gammage_Cup"title="The Gammage Cup">
Slipper-on-the-Water is home to a clan known as the Periods, who are descendants of Fooley the Magnificent or the Great Fooley, who 440 years before the book opens constructed a balloon, flew to the land beyond the mountains and returned with a case of curiosities. They hold high offices in Slipper-on-the-Water, have very high opinions of themselves and have a "Council of Periods" that rules the village. Also living in the village are a group of Minnipins referred to as "Them" by the other villagers. These include Gummy, Walter the Earl and Curley Green. "Them" shun the tradition-based existence of the other Minnipins. One night, a Minnipin named Muggles wakes up and sees fires in the Sunset Mountains in the West. While digging for treasure, Walter the Earl discovers a vault under his house and finds iron chests that contain ancient scrolls, swords, armor and military trumpets. The scrolls reveal that Fooley the Magnificent's story and contain ominous warnings from Walter the Earl's forebear Walter the Obtuse saying that the vault will be found when it is needed for the protection of the Minnipins.The mayor returns from the annual meeting of village mayors with news that there will be a contest to find the finest village in the Land Between the Mountains. The winning village will win the legendary and sacred Gammage Cup. The villagers are excited but the Periods convince the villagers that "Them" will ruin their chances of winning the cup. During a town meeting, the Periods outlaw "Them". Mingy, the curmudgeonly money-keeper who resists spending money for "fancying up the village" is also outlawed. Along with Muggles who has become involved with "Them" because of her seeing the fires on the Sunset Mountains.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_and_June"title="Henry and June">
At the end of 1931, Nin finds herself dissatisfied with being a timid, faithful wife to her banker husband, Hugh Parker Guiler. Nin and her husband contemplate the possibility of opening their relationship, and determine that it would threaten their marriage. However, when Anais meets June Miller, she is magnetically drawn to her and perceives June to be the most beautiful and charismatic woman she has ever met. Nin pursues an extremely intense, ambiguous, sexually charged friendship with her. When June leaves, Nin becomes involved with Henry, and begins an uninhibited sexual and emotional affair with him, which prompts an intellectual and sensual awakening. A friendship is formed between the two that was maintained throughout both artist's lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson's_Sorcery!"title="Steve Jackson's Sorcery!">
The story is set on the fictional "Fighting Fantasy" world of Titan, on the continent known as The Old World. A powerful artifact known as the Crown of Kings, which bestows magical powers of leadership upon its owner, has been stolen from the land of Analand by the cruel Archmage of Mampang Fortress. With the Crown, the Archmage will be able to gain leadership of the lawless and brutal region of Kakhabad and begin an invasion of surrounding kingdoms. The player takes on the role of the lone hero, referred to only as the Analander, who has been dispatched to retrieve the Crown, thereby averting the invasion and saving Analand from terrible disgrace. The quest itself is divided between the four titles in the series:"The Shamutanti Hills""Kharé – Cityport of Traps""The Seven Serpents""The Crown of Kings"
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliquary_(novel)"title="Reliquary (novel)">
The story picks up where the epilogue of "Relic" left off. Two headless skeletons are found in the Humboldt Kill. When further decapitated bodies follow, there is suspicion of a second Mbwun monster. Major characters from the original book team up with new ones to solve the puzzle. The mystery soon leads underground to the Mole people, and even deeper towards enigmatic beings called the Wrinklers. In the end, it is revealed that the Wrinklers are led by Frock, who has refined a modified version of the Mbwun plant, created by Kawakita to regain the use of his legs. Kawakita also gave the drug to the people who were to become the Wrinklers, later made into his tribe by Frock. After going underground, the group kills them with an explosion, vitamin D infused water and a flood.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Riddle-Master_of_Hed"title="The Riddle-Master of Hed">
The titular Riddle-Master is Morgon, the Prince of Hed, a small, simple island populated by farmers and swineherds. The prince, inexplicably, has three stars on his forehead.Morgon's sister Tristan discovers that he keeps a crown hidden under his bed. He explain that he won it in a riddle-game with the ghost of the cursed king Peven of Aum. When Deth, the High One's harpist, discovers this, he explains that another king, Mathom of An, has pledged to marry his daughter Raederle to the man who wins that crown from the ghost.Accompanied by Deth, Morgon sets forth to claim his bride. En route, the ship is sunk by mysterious shapechangers. Shipwrecked, Morgon loses his memory and the power of speech. When Deth finds Morgon again, after he has regained both, Morgon resolves to travel to question the High One about the shapechangers. The High One's home, located in the far north on Erlenstar Mountain, is seldom visited. As Morgon and Deth travel the length of the realm, they are repeatedly attacked by the shapechangers, and Morgon learns more and more perilous knowledge concerning the three stars and the great powers which come with them. He also comes to know personally the land rulers of Ymris, Herun, Osterland, and Isig.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dain_Curse"title="The Dain Curse">
The story is told in the first person, and the nameless detective known only as The Continental Op investigates a theft of diamonds from the Leggett family of San Francisco. The plot involves a supposed curse on the Dain family, said to inflict sudden and violent deaths upon those in their vicinity. Edgar Leggett's wife is a Dain, as is his daughter Gabrielle. The detective untangles a web of robberies, lies and murder. It is discovered that Gabrielle Leggett is under the influence of a mysterious religious cult and is also addicted to morphine.Gabrielle escapes from the cult and marries her fiancé Eric Collinson, but bloodshed continues to follow her. The Continental Op, on behalf of four successive clients, investigates the reason behind all the mysterious, violent events surrounding Gabrielle Leggett, which he eventually uncovers. The concluding chapters of the novel contain a detailed description of how the Op weans her from her drug habit, and the novel ends on a hopeful note.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Prophet"title="Red Prophet">
Lolla-Wossiky, a troubled, one-eyed, whiskey drinking "Red", leaves General Harrison's fort and heads north in order to find his "dream beast", the spirit that can save him from the pain of his memories. On his journey, he meets Alvin Miller Jr. and assists him in making an ethical decision that will shape his life forever. In appreciation, Alvin heals Lolla-Wossiky's painful memories, allowing him to give up alcohol and become in touch with the land once again. Lolla-Wossiky grows into "the Prophet" although he prefers to be known as Tenskwa-Tawa. Lolla-Wossiky preaches both pacifism and separatism, believing that "Reds" should live west of the Mississippi and "Whites" should live east of it.Meanwhile, Lolla-Wossiky's brother, Ta-Kumsaw, tries to rally "Reds" behind his belief that their land should be defended violently. When Alvin Miller Jr. and his older brother Measure travel to the place of his birth (where Alvin is expected to become apprenticed to the Hatrack River blacksmith) the two brothers are captured by 'Reds' (Native Americans) sent by William Henry Harrison to intentionally create conflict. Ta-Kumsaw, sent by Lolla-Wossiky, rescues the brothers from torture and death. Measure leaves the "Reds" only to be captured by William Henry Harrison's men and subsequently beaten to the brink of death. Ta-Kumsaw accompanies Alvin to the holy site of Eight-Face Mound where they meet up with Taleswapper, an old friend of Alvin. Using the spiritual powers of the Eight-Face Mound, Alvin is able to heal Measure from afar. Measure is then able to stop some of the slaughter of Lolla-Wossiky's followers by villagers and William Henry Harrison's men over the alleged kidnapping and murder of Alvin and Measure Miller.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Pye"title="Mr Pye">
Mr. Pye travels to the Channel Island of Sark to awaken a love of God in all the islanders. His landlady on the island, Miss Dredger, quickly becomes a devout follower of his teachings, and even agrees to allow the person she hates the most, Miss George, to stay in her house. As Pye does good works he gradually feels a stinging feeling on his back. On further investigation he discovers that he has started to grow angel's wings, and after consulting with a Harley Street doctor, he concludes the best thing to do is to stop doing good deeds, and instead does bad deeds.He engages in some deliberately malicious acts, and after a time this results in him growing horns on his forehead. He is unable to decide what to do, but eventually decides to reveal his horned condition to the islanders, who chase him to the edge of a cliff, from which he flies, using his wings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fierce_Invalids_Home_from_Hot_Climates"title="Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates">
"Invalids" follow its wheelchair-using protagonist, Switters, across four continents as he experiences love and danger. Robbins "explores, challenges, mocks, and celebrates virtually every major aspect of our mercurial era."(Quote from the hardcover book jacket.)Robbins has stated in numerous interviews that in this book he was trying to deal with contradiction, but rather than avoiding his contradictory nature, his character embraces it. He's a CIA agent but despises the government. He's a pacifist but carries a gun. He's as much in love with his 17-year-old stepsister as he is with a 46-year-old nun.Switters feels that the core of the universe and the basis of human existence is the paradox of light and dark coexisting together. One is not separate from the other; they just co-exist. This is the main idea of "Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates", along with an interest in the Lady of Fatima and a squawking parrot. The title of the novel comes from Arthur Rimbaud's "A Season in Hell", in which he daydreams about becoming one of "ces féroces infirmes retour des pays chauds."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appointment_with_Death"title="Appointment with Death">
Holidaying in Jerusalem, Poirot overhears Raymond Boynton telling his sister, "You do see, don't you, that she's got to be killed?" Their stepmother, Mrs Boynton, is a sadistic tyrant who dominates her family. When she is found dead on a trip to Petra, Poirot proposes to solve the case in twenty-four hours, even though he has no way of knowing whether it was murder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dance_with_Dragons"title="A Dance with Dragons">
## The Wall and beyond.Stannis Baratheon, a claimant to the Iron Throne of Westeros, occupies the Wall at the realm's northern border, having helped to repel an invasion of wildlings from the northern wilderness. Stannis executes Mance Rayder, the leader of the wildlings, for refusing to submit to him, and marches his army south to seek support in his bid for the throne.Jon Snow, the newly elected Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, the order that defends the Wall, prepares the defense against the Others, hostile inhuman creatures from the far north. Jon negotiates with wildling leader Tormund Giantsbane to let the wildlings past the Wall in exchange for their assistance in defending it. This results in a fragile peace but creates unrest among the Night's Watch, who have considered the wildlings their enemies for centuries.Stannis's advisor, the sorceress Melisandre, warns Jon that his half-sister, Arya Stark, is in trouble. Mance is revealed to be alive, thanks to Melisandre's magical trickery. He is sent to the Starks' ancestral castle Winterfell, now occupied by the enemy Boltons, to rescue Arya. However, the girl in Melisandre's visions turns out to be Alys Karstark, a young noblewoman fleeing to the Wall to escape her treacherous uncle. To protect Alys and aid the wildlings' integration into Westerosi society, Jon arranges for Alys to marry Sigorn of Thenn, a wildling leader.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_Town"title="Canal Town">
The novel is set in the 1820s in the town of Palmyra, New York, near Rochester, located on the Erie Canal. The novel opens in 1820, when the construction of the Erie Canal had just begun, but has not reached Palmyra, and most of the town is looking forward to the economic boom the Canal is expected to bring.During the course of the book, Adams depicts the changes in the daily life brought about by the construction of the canal. By the close of the book, citizens in Palmyra are regularly and casually travelling to Rochester via packet boat on the canal, or to New York by canal packet to Albany and thence by steam packet down the Hudson.On publication, a "New York Times" review by Catharine Brody noted that the book recalls the Erie Canal novels of Walter D. Edmonds, whom Adams acknowledges in his introduction. In fact, Edmonds allowed Adams to use his notebooks as background for the novel.The book is constructed around a single plot device, a case that a Dr. David Little reported to the Albany County Medical Society in the early 19th century. Brody called the incident "a truthful old-wives' tale."The chief protagonist is a young doctor, Horace Amlie. He is intelligent and dedicated, willing to treat both wealthy and indigent, and willing to accept barter in lieu of cash when necessary. He knows of the latest advances in medical science, such as vaccination against smallpox, and comes into conflict with an established doctor who prefers older treatments such as bleeding. Brody called him "an Arrowsmith in a high beaver hat."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_and_Alone"title="Under and Alone">
William Queen was a nearly 20-year ATF veteran as well as a motorcycle enthusiast when, in 1998, a "confidential informant" contacted Queen's superiors, offering to help place an agent inside the San Fernando Valley chapter of the Mongols. Queen's work was soon to become the most extensive undercover operation into a motorcycle gang in the history of American law enforcement.Queen, using the alias Billy St. John, successfully infiltrated the gang by posing as a heavily bearded and long-haired motorcyclist who liked to drink beer and ride his Harley-Davidson motorcycle. After becoming a full member ("patched"), Queen eventually rose to the office of Treasurer in the organization. As Treasurer, he had access to evidence of the gang's criminal activity and was able to build a case against dozens of Mongol club members. Initially, Queen was subjected by members to tests of his fealty by taking part in and witnessing the trafficking of drugs and firearms and the theft of motorcycles, as well as driving getaway cars.In the book Queen details how, after 28 months, he began to lose his own identity to his new persona. He explained how he learned to battle the conflicts both within the gang and within himself in order to keep his identity a secret. Despite the activities of the group, Queen also came to appreciate their camaraderie and sense of family. When the work began to have the effect of isolating Queen, he explains in the book, the Mongols began to feel like his own family, causing emotional difficulty for him when the investigation closed more than two years after it had begun.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindstar_Rising"title="Mindstar Rising">
The focus of the novel is the growth of the company Event Horizon, founded by Julia's grandfather Philip Evans. Beset by industrial saboteurs, the company seeks help in the form of ex–Mindstar Brigade soldier turned private detective Greg Mandel. The company is leading the way in rebuilding a twenty-first-century England after the People's Socialist Party (PSP), a tyrannical communist government, had first crushed the country and then collapsed, leaving it in shambles. Initially hired to solve a mystery involving missing stocks from a zero-g satellite production facility, he is then re-hired to find the source of attacks on a stored personality of Philip Evans after the industrialist's death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Fever"title="Blood Fever">
"Blood Fever" begins with a prologue during which a young girl named Amy Goodenough is aboard her father's yacht in the middle of the Mediterranean sea when it is boarded by a band of pirates under the command of Zoltan the Magyar. Zoltan's men ransack the vessel and murder Amy's father, who was unwilling to part with his priceless possessions. When Amy fails to get revenge by throwing a knife at Zoltan and hitting him in the shoulder, she is taken prisoner but swears she will one day succeed in achieving vengeance.Following the events of "SilverFin", James Bond is back at Eton where he is now a member of a secret risk-taking club known as the Danger Society. As summer holidays approach, James is given the opportunity to go to Sardinia on a field trip with one of his professors, Peter Haight and a colleague, Cooper-ffrench. While in Sardinia Bond plans to visit his cousin Victor Delacroix (a relation of Monique Delacroix, James deceased mother).Prior to leaving, Bond learns of the tragedy that took place on the Goodenoughs' yacht from Amy's brother Mark, who attends Eton and is a friend of Bond's. Bond also witnesses a mysterious group whose followers are marked on both of their hands with an "M" (double M), which James eventually learns is the mark of the Millenaria, a defunct secret Italian society that has had plans throughout history to restore the Roman Empire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Riddle_of_the_Sands"title="The Riddle of the Sands">
Carruthers, a minor official in the Foreign Office, is contacted by an acquaintance, Davies, asking him to join in a yachting holiday in the Baltic Sea. Carruthers agrees, as his other plans for a holiday have fallen through, and because of a heartbreak due to a woman he courted becoming engaged to another man.He arrives to find that Davies has a small sailing boat (the vessel is named "Dulcibella", a reference to Childers's own sister of that name), not the comfortable crewed yacht that he expected. However, Carruthers agrees to go on the trip and joins Davies in Flensburg on the Baltic, whence they head for the Frisian Islands, off the coast of Germany. Carruthers has to learn quickly how to sail the small boat.Davies gradually reveals that he suspects that the Germans are undertaking something sinister in the German Frisian islands. This is based on his belief that he was nearly wrecked by a German yacht luring him into a shoal in rough weather during a previous trip. The yacht was owned and captained by a mysterious German entrepreneur called Dollmann, whom Davies suspects of being in fact an expatriate Englishman posing as a German. The situation was further complicated by Davies having fallen deeply in love with Dollmann's daughter, Clara – who, Davies is sure, is not involved in whatever nefarious scheme her father is engaged upon. In any case, Davies is suspicious about what would motivate Dollmann to try to kill him, and believed that it is some scheme involving the German Imperial government. Having failed to interest anyone in the British government in the incident, Davies feels it is his patriotic duty to investigate further on his own – hence the invitation to Carruthers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Italian_Girl"title="The Italian Girl">
Edmund has escaped from his family into a lonely life. Returning for his mother's funeral he finds himself involved in the same awful problems, together with some new ones. He also rediscovers the eternal family servant, the ever-changing "Italian girl".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titus_Groan"title="Titus Groan">
The book is set in the huge castle of Gormenghast, a vast landscape of crumbling towers and ivy-filled quadrangles that has for centuries been the hereditary residence of the Groan family and with them a legion of servants. The Groan family is headed by Lord Sepulchrave, the seventy-sixth Earl of Groan. He is a melancholy man who feels shackled by his duties as Earl, although he never questions them. His only escape is reading in his library. His wife is the Countess Gertrude. Large and imposing, with dark red hair, she pays no attention to her family or to the rest of Gormenghast. Instead, she spends her time either in her bedroom or in walking selected areas, in the company of a legion of birds and her white cats that alone command her affections. Their daughter is 15-year-old Fuchsia Groan, attended to by the easily upset Nannie Slagg. Self-absorbed, childish and thoughtless, she is also impulsive, imaginative and at times fiercely affectionate. Sequestered in the south wing of the castle are Sepulchrave's identical twin sisters Cora and Clarice Groan, notable for always being dressed in purple. Both suffered from epileptic fits in their youth, as a result of which their left arms and legs are "rather starved". They have the same vague and vacant personalities, lacking intelligence to the point of mental impairment. Both crave political power and bitterly resent Gertrude, believing that she robbed them of their rightful place in the hierarchy of Gormenghast and of any involvement in its affairs. This desire for power, along with their general ignorance, allows for them to be easily manipulated by Steerpike in his quest for authority. Also important to the life of the castle is Lord Sepulchrave's personal servant, Mr. Flay, who believes in strictly adhering to the rules of Gormenghast.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiac_(true_crime_book)"title="Zodiac (true crime book)">
This book chronicles the history of the self-named "Zodiac" killer who was active in the 1960s and 70s in California from first hand details covered by Robert Graysmith's investigative efforts to unmask the "Zodiac" killer. The book describes the investigations of the many law enforcement branches such as the LAPD, the FBI, the CIA , etc., that worked on the case and other murders that the "Zodiac" had proclaimed he committed, including the 1966 Cheri Jo Bates stabbing. Later chapters deal with Graysmith's many theories on the case, and the book eventually cites two possible suspects (who are given pseudonyms), Bob Starr and Donald Andrews, and details some of the circumstantial evidence against them. Graysmith received assistance from police departments that fell within the jurisdictions of the murders, and especially from Inspector Dave Toschi from the San Francisco Police Department, who had worked the Zodiac case. Although the case was never solved, there were instances where solid evidence was held among a number of suspects, even after the Zodiac murders had stopped.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier_Son_Trilogy"title="Soldier Son Trilogy">
The career of a person living in Gernia is heavily influenced by their parentage. Those sons born to common parentage follow their father's career. However, for the sons of a noble, things are different. The eldest son inherits his father's title, the second son serves as an officer in the army, the third son enters priesthood, while the fourth becomes an artist. This allocation continues for further sons. Daughters are relegated to submissive roles, being primarily used to forge social links with arranged marriages.The first book, "Shaman's Crossing", concerns Nevare's education. As a young boy on the vast plains, his position as the second son, the Soldier Son, is cemented from birth. From an early age, Nevare is drilled in mounted cavalla (Cavalry) techniques, riding, survival, tactics, and all aspects of life as an officer in the King's Cavalla. As a teenager, he has a first encounter with the Specks' magic (see below), which will influence the rest of his life. Later, as a young man, Nevare's education at the King's Cavalla Academy begins. Nevare suffers the consequences of being the son of a New Noble, when the struggle between Old Nobles and New Nobles in the court of Gernia affects the supposedly independent Academy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_Is_in_the_Heart"title="America Is in the Heart">
Born in 1913, Bulosan recounts his boyhood in the Philippines. The early chapters describe his life as a Filipino farmer "plowing with a carabao". Bulosan was the fourth oldest son of the family. As a young Filipino, he once lived on the farm tended by his father, while his mother was separately living in a barrio in Binalonan, Pangasinan, together with Bulosan's brother and sister. Their hardships included pawning their land and having to sell items in order to finish the schooling of his brother Macario. He had another brother named Leon, a soldier who came back after fighting in Europe.Bulosan's narration about his life in the Philippines was followed by his journey to the United States. He recounted how he immigrated to America in 1930. He retells the struggles, prejudice, and injustice he and other Filipinos had endured in the United States, first while in the Northwestern fisheries then later in California. These included his experiences as a migrant and laborer in the rural West.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Star_Called_Henry"title="A Star Called Henry">
The novel is set in Ireland in the era of political upheaval between the 1916 Easter Rising and the eventual truce signed with the United Kingdom in 1921, seen through the eyes of young Henry Smart, from his childhood to early twenties. Henry, as a member of the Irish Citizen Army, becomes personally acquainted with several historical characters, including Patrick Pearse, James Connolly and Michael Collins. Energized by Sinn Féin's victory in the General Election of 1918 and the party's establishment of the independent Irish Republic, Henry trained the men in the Soloheadbeg Ambush, the first engagement of the Irish War of Independence.Later, he becomes a gunman in the ensuing guerilla war against the British, setting barracks on fire, shooting G-men and training others to do the same. At the end of the novel, Henry comes to think that the endless violence and killing of innocent people has little to do with the concept of a free Ireland, or the prospect of a better life in Ireland and more about personal gain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Life_of_Bees_(novel)"title="The Secret Life of Bees (novel)">
Set in 1964 in the fictitious town of Sylvan, South Carolina, "The Secret Life of Bees" tells the story of a 14-year-old white girl, Lily Melissa Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. Lily lives in a house with her abusive father, whom she refers to as T. Ray. They have a no-nonsense maid, Rosaleen, who is a mother figure for Lily. The book opens with Lily's discovery of bees in her bedroom. Then, after Rosaleen is arrested for pouring her bottle of "snuff juice" on three white men, Lily breaks her out of the hospital and they decide to leave town. The two begin hitch-hiking toward Tiburon, South Carolina, a place written on the back of an image of the Virgin Mary as a black woman, which Deborah, Lily's mother, had owned. They spend a night in the woods with little food and little hope before reaching Tiburon. There, they buy lunch at a general store, and Lily recognizes a picture of the same "Black Mary" but on the side of a jar of honey. Rosaleen and Lily receive directions to the origin of the honey, the Boatwright residence. They are introduced to the Boatwright sisters, the makers of the honey: August, May, and June, who are all black. When Lily meets the sisters she makes up a story about being an orphan. Believing Lily's Story, August, June, and May invite Lily and Rosaleen to stay with them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macunaíma_(novel)"title="Macunaíma (novel)">
In the tale, Macunaíma travels from his home tribe in the jungle to São Paulo and back again, with chase scenes that go all over the country of in between, in order to retrieve an amulet which he lost. The amulet had been given to him by his lover, Ci before she ascended into the sky to become a star. He encounters all sorts of folk legends and orixas along the way. The interactions which Macunaíma had with most of these characters was imagined by Andrade, though the essence of the folk lore remains true.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Temple_of_the_Golden_Pavilion"title="The Temple of the Golden Pavilion">
The protagonist, Mizoguchi, is the son of a consumptive Buddhist priest who lives and works on Cape Nariu on the north coast of Honshū. As a child, the narrator lives with his uncle near Maizuru. Throughout his childhood he is assured by his father that the Golden Pavilion is the most beautiful building in the world, and the idea of the temple becomes a fixture in his imagination. His stammering and poverty cause him to be friendless. A neighbour's girl, Uiko, becomes the target of his hatred. After she is killed by her deserter boyfriend, Mizoguchi becomes convinced that his curse on her has worked.His ill father takes him to the Kinkaku-ji in the spring of 1944, and introduces him to the Superior, Tayama Dosen. After his father's death, Mizoguchi becomes an acolyte at the temple. He meets his first real friend, Tsurukawa there. During the 1944–5 school year, he works at a factory, where he comes to hope that the Golden Pavilion will be destroyed by the firebombing. However, Kyoto is never firebombed. In May 1945, he and Tsurukawa visit Nanzen-ji and witness a woman giving her lover a cup of tea with her own breast milk.The Temple is visited by a drunk American soldier who orders Mizoguchi to trample his pregnant Japanese girlfriend's stomach, giving him two cartons of cigarettes. Mizoguchi gives them to the Superior. Father Dosen thanks him, and tells him he will attend Ōtani University. A week later the girl visits the temple and demands compensation. The Superior gives her money, but rumours of her claims spread.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where's_My_Cow?"title="Where's My Cow?">
The book is written as a children's picture book and tells the story of Sam Vimes reading the picture book "Where's My Cow?" to Young Sam. The book describes the search for a cow, in which various animals that are not cows are identified by the noise they make.Sam eventually decides that this is a daft way to look for a cow, and that Young Sam should, in any case, be getting taught about Ankh-Morpork rather than animals he will only see on a plate. He therefore attempts to rework the story into what he calls the 'Vimes street version', about a search for "daddy" through the city, encountering such characters as Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, Foul Ole Ron, and the Patrician.In "Thud!" we learn that the next day Young Sam said "Buglit!" (an attempt at Ron's distinctive "Buggrit!") and Sybil pointedly never raised the subject. Sam then stuck rigidly to the authorized version. In the framing story of "Where's My Cow?", Young Sam also says "Buglit!" when Sybil comes upstairs to see what all the excitement is.There are three art styles in the book, all drawn by Melvyn Grant. The first art style is a fairly realistic style, with a slight cartoony feel. This is used for Vimes relating the story to Young Sam. The second style is that of the book within the book, which is simple, with thick lines and pastel colours. The pictures of Vimes and Young Sam are in front of these pictures, and do not interact with them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lāčplēsis"title="Lāčplēsis">
The poem opens at the council of the Baltic gods at the palace of Pērkons in the sky where the Father of Destiny declares that Latvians are under threat because Christian crusaders are going to come and conquer the Baltic lands and enslave the Latvian nation. The Gods promise to protect the Latvians. When the meeting comes to an end suddenly Staburadze arrives and ask for advice in her matter: she has found a young man drowning in the river Daugava where he has to turn into stone. Pērkons says that he has chosen this man for an important matter and that he will save the man. The council ends with the question, will the Baltic gods ever come back together?The story continues a few days in the past where the Lord of Lielvārde is having a walk with his 18-year-old son. Suddenly a bear jumps out to attack them. The son takes the bear by the jaws and rips it apart like a small goat, earning the name Lāčplēsis - the bear slayer. After this he is sent of to the castle of Burtnieks for studies. On the way, at the castle of Lord Aizkrauklis, he spies on the activities of the witch Spīdala, who is under the control of the Devil, and the holy man Kangars, who is in reality a traitor plotting with crusaders to replace the old gods with Christianity. Spīdala tries to drown Lāčplēsis by throwing him into the whirlpool of Staburags in the Daugava, but he is rescued by the goddess Staburadze and taken to her underwater crystal castle. There Lāčplēsis meets and falls in love with the maiden Laimdota. Shortly afterwards, Lāčplēsis becomes friends with another hero, Koknesis ("Wood-bearer"), and they study together at the castle of Burtnieks, Laimdota's father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando"title="Accelerando">
The book is a collection of nine short stories telling the tale of three generations of a family before, during, and after a technological singularity. It was originally written as a series of novelettes and novellas, all published in "Asimov's Science Fiction" magazine in the period 2001 to 2004. According to Stross, the initial inspiration for the stories was his experience working as a programmer for a high-growth company during the dot-com boom of the 1990s.The first three stories follow the character of agalmic "venture altruist" Manfred Macx, starting in the early 21st century; the second three stories follow his daughter Amber; and the final three focus largely on Amber's son Sirhan in the completely transformed world at the end of the century.In the following table, the chapter number (#), chapter name and original magazine date of publication, and a brief synopsis are given. The nine stories are grouped into three parts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Eye_(book)"title="The Third Eye (book)">
The story of "The Third Eye" begins in Tibet during the reign of the 13th Dalai Lama. Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, the son of a Lhasa aristocrat, takes up theological studies and is soon recognised for his prodigious abilities. As he enters adolescence, the young Rampa undertakes increasingly challenging feats until he is recognised as a crucial asset to the future of an independent Tibet. Tibet's Lamas had foretold a future in which China would attempt to reassert its authority, and Rampa is operated upon to help him preserve his country. A third eye is drilled into his forehead, allowing him to see human auras and to determine people's hidden motivations.With his third eye, Rampa can serve as an aide in the Dalai Lama's court and spy on visitors to the court as they are being received. The visitors upon whom Rampa spies include the scholar Sir Charles Alfred Bell, deemed by Rampa as naive but benevolent. In contrast, Rampa and others are certain that Chinese visitors are nefarious and are soon to attempt to bring conquest and destruction to Tibet. Tibet must then prepare for an invasion. During the story, Rampa meets yetis, and at the end of the book he encounters a mummified body that was him in an earlier incarnation. He also takes part in an initiation ceremony in which he learns that during its early history the planet Earth was struck by another planet, causing Tibet to become the mountain kingdom that it is today. The popularity of the book led to two sequels, "The Doctor from Lhasa" and "The Rampa Story", and Lobsang Rampa wrote twenty books in all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon_Angel"title="Nylon Angel">
The story is set in post-apocalyptic Australia, around a city called the Tert. There, a bounty hunter/bodyguard named Parrish Plessis has ended up working for a ganglord called Jamon Mondo. She wants out, and her answer arrives in the form of two men wanted in connection with the killing of a journalist called Razz Retribution (In this world, the army, churches and the government have given up on the world, so it is now ruled by the media).The story is divided between the Tert, a rundown slum reminiscent of Mega-City One, and Viva City (a pun on the word vivacity), a walled suburb some forty kilometres up the coast.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_(Burgess_novel)"title="1985 (Burgess novel)">
"1985" is in two parts. The first part, called "1984", is a series of essays and interviews (Burgess is the voice of the interviewer and the interviewee) discussing aspects of Orwell's book. The basic idea of dystopia is explicated, and term "kakotopia" is also brought up and explored etymologically. The etymology of the word "utopia" is also deconstructed. Burgess treats Orwell as being somewhat bound by his times. Orwell is seen somewhat as a war-exhausted Brit fearing the Soviet threat along with the spectre of atomic war. Orwell is treated as handling these ideas to the exclusion of other phenomena will come to alter British society. Burgess fairly well explicates the distinction between Orwell's "Ingsoc" and the more mundane "English socialism", as Burgess sees this actuality, in the Britain of his time.The second part is a novella set in 1985, seven years in the future at the time of the novel's being written.Rather than a sequel to Orwell's novel, Burgess uses the same concept. Based on his observation of British society and the world around him in 1978, he suggests how a possible 1985 might be if certain trends continue.The main trend to which he is referring is the expanding power of trade unions. In the hypothetical 1985 envisioned in the book, the trade unions have become so powerful that they exert full control over society; unions exist for every imaginable occupation. Unions start strikes with little reason, and a strike by one union usually turns into a general strike.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butcher_Boy_(novel)"title="The Butcher Boy (novel)">
## Francie's family.In the early part of the book it becomes apparent that Francie's mother is frequently abused both verbally and physically by her husband, Benny, a bitter alcoholic. Francie's mother often considers suicide and is committed for a time to a mental hospital.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_School"title="The Dead School">
Set in small-town Ireland, 'The Dead School' tells the intriguing story about two interacting characters: Raphael Bell, an old schoolmaster, and Malachy Dudgeon, a young teacher.Like other novels by Patrick McCabe, both of the two main characters had troubled childhoods. The intertwining of the two results in the destruction of Raphael and the dramatic change of Malachy.Malachy Dudgeon comes from a small suburban Irish town, from a dysfunctional family, existing under the guise of happiness, using the facade of happy Sunday mornings, whilst the adulteress mother and suicidal father continue to make devastating blows to their son, from which he never truly recovers, and chooses to escape into his world of imaginations, dreams and Americanisms.On the other hand, Raphael Bell comes from a small rural Irish town, and is the apparent picture of perfection. Raphael constantly seeks attention, from singing: "Wee Hughie" at any available moment to succeeding at school. However Raphael's world is gravely affected when Black and Tan soldiers shoot his father in the chest before his eyes. From this moment on Raphael strives to uphold the virtues and traditions of old Ireland, and it is inevitably this inability to transgress and adjust into modern living that leads, unsurprisingly to his suicide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakfast_on_Pluto"title="Breakfast on Pluto">
Set in 1960s to 1970s, the novel tells of Patrick "Pussy" Braden's escape from the fictional Irish town of Tyreelin and a drunk foster mother, to find herself and the biological mother who gave her away. Bad luck surrounds her until she finds temporary contentment with a married politician who acts as a sugar daddy. The latter is killed by either the IRA or the Ulster Defence Volunteers, leaving Braden alone once again. She moves to London, becomes a prostitute in Piccadilly Circus, and later is arrested on suspicion of an IRA bombing, only to be released a few days later. She later embarks on a search to find her mother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Act_Tragedy"title="Three Act Tragedy">
Renowned stage actor Sir Charles Cartwright hosts a dinner party at his home in Cornwall. His guests include: Hercule Poirot; psychiatrist Sir Bartholomew Strange; Hermione "Egg" Lytton Gore and her mother; Captain Dacres and his wife Cynthia; the playwright Muriel Wills; Egg's friend Oliver Manders; Mr Satterthwaite; and Reverend Babbington and his wife. When the Reverend Babbington suddenly dies after sipping one of the cocktails being served, Cartwright believes it was murder, though Strange finds no poison in his glass. Some time later, Poirot is in Monte Carlo and hears news from Satterthwaite and Cartwright that Strange died from nicotine poisoning after drinking a glass of port wine, despite there being no trace in the glass. With the exception of the three men, Strange's guests are the same ones who attended Cartwright's party. Both Satterthwaite and Cartwright return to England to investigate the murders. They learn that prior to the party, Strange had sent his usual butler away for two months, and that he exhibited strange behaviour as if expecting something. A temporary replacement he hired named Ellis has since disappeared, with Satterthwaite and Cartwright finding drafted blackmail letters from Ellis in his room. Babbington's body is soon exhumed, showing he too died from nicotine poisoning.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Didn't_They_Ask_Evans?"title="Why Didn't They Ask Evans?">
Bobby Jones is playing golf with Dr Thomas in the Welsh seaside town of Marchbolt. Seeking the golf ball he hit over the cliff edge, he sees a man lying on the rocks below. The doctor says the man is fatally injured and seeks help. Bobby stays with the man, who briefly regains consciousness, says "Why didn't they ask Evans?", and then dies. Bobby finds a photograph of a beautiful woman in the man's coat pocket, but no identification. Roger , a stranger wearing plus fours, offers to stay with the body so Bobby can play the organ at his father's church.The dead man is identified as Alex Pritchard by his sister, Amelia Cayman, at the inquest. She is said to be the woman in the photograph; Bobby wonders how such a beautiful girl could become such a coarse older woman. After the inquest, Mrs Cayman and her husband want to know if Pritchard had any last words. Bobby says that he did not. Later, when talking with his friend Lady Frances "Frankie" Derwent, Bobby remembers that Pritchard did have last words and writes to the Caymans to tell them.Bobby receives and rejects an unexpected job offer from a firm in Buenos Aires. Soon afterwards Bobby nearly dies after drinking from a poisoned bottle of beer. The local police do not pursue this. Frankie thinks Bobby is targeted for murder. Bobby agrees when he sees the issue of the local paper with the photograph used to find Pritchard's sister. Bobby sees that it is not the one he found in the dead man's pocket. He and Frankie realise that swapped the photographs and that Mrs Cayman is not related to the dead man at all. Bobby and Frankie search for . They trace him to Merroway Court in Hampshire, owned by Roger's brother and sister-in-law, Henry and Sylvia. They stage a car accident outside the house with the help of a doctor friend so that Frankie, feigning injury, will be invited to stay to recover. Frankie produces a newspaper cutting about the mysterious dead man; Sylvia remarks that he looks like Alan Carstairs, a traveller and big-game hunter who was a friend of John Savage, a millionaire who had killed himself after learning he had terminal cancer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_Mesopotamia"title="Murder in Mesopotamia">
Nurse Amy Leatheran arrives at an archaeological dig near Hassanieh, Iraq, to assist the Swedish-American archaeologist, Dr Eric Leidner, in caring for his seemingly-neurotic wife, Louise. During her initial days, Amy learns that Louise was married before to a German named Frederick Bosner. Fifteen years ago, during the Great War, Bosner was arrested for being a spy within the US State Department, and sentenced to death; he escaped custody, but died later in a train crash. Louise reveals that she received death threats claiming to be from Frederick, whenever she was attracted to another man; these stopped when she married Leidner three years ago, until recently. A week later, after receiving another threatening letter, Louise is found dead in her bedroom in the archaeologists' compound near the dig site. Dr Giles Reilly determines she was struck by a very heavy, blunt object.An initial investigation, led by Captain Maitland, cannot find the murder weapon, but confirms someone on the dig must have committed the murder. Reilly learns that his friend Hercule Poirot is travelling in Iraq, and so contacts him for help. When Poirot arrives, he notes that the bedroom has only one point of entry, that the only window in the room was shut and barred, and that a rug near a washstand has blood on it. Anne Johnson, a colleague of Leidner, claims she heard a cry, yet is unsure about it. Reilly's daughter Sheila remarks that the victim had the attention of every man, especially one of Leidner's old friends Richard Carey. Poirot takes an interest in the story Louise told Nurse Leatheran about her first husband; he wonders if Bosner, or possibly his much-younger brother William (presumably still living but whereabouts unknown) is somehow among the team. Two men - epigraphist Father Lavigny and drug-addicted historian Joseph Mercado - are the right age to be Frederick. Furthermore, three younger men - dig assistants Bill Coleman and David Emmott, and photographer Carl Reiter - are the right age to be William. Reiter in particular is of German-American ancestry, and was tormented by Louise for his shyness and clumsiness. However, he seems to have an alibi. Poirot is also intrigued to find that the letters Louise received were apparently in her own handwriting.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercule_Poirot's_Christmas"title="Hercule Poirot's Christmas">
Multi-millionaire Simeon Lee, frail in his old age, unexpectedly invites his family to gather at his home for Christmas. The gesture is met with suspicion by the guests. Simeon is not given to warm family sentiment, and the family are not on good terms, in particular, with the black sheep of the family, Harry. Simeon also searched out his orphaned, Spanish-born granddaughter, Pilar Estravados, to live in his house. None have met their late sister Jennifer's daughter before; she proves to be delightful. Simeon is intent on playing a cruel game with his family's emotions. Stephen Farr, a surprise guest, arrives on Christmas Eve. He is the son of Simeon's former partner in the diamond mines, welcomed warmly by Simeon. Simeon calls his family together that afternoon, to hear him on the telephone with his attorney, saying he wants to update his will after Christmas. This incomplete information stirs up negative feelings among his sons and their wives.After dinner on Christmas Eve, the sounds of crashing of furniture and a hideous scream are heard by several, who rush to Simeon's room. When they get to his door, they find it locked and have to break it down. The sight revealed includes heavy furniture overturned, crockery smashed, and Simeon dead, his throat slit, in a great pool of blood, a grisly and shocking sight. The local police superintendent is already at the front door, before anyone could call the police. Superintendent Sugden notices Pilar pick up something from the floor. He insists that she give the small bit of rubber and a small object made of wood to him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabumpo_in_Oz"title="Kabumpo in Oz">
During Prince Pompadore of Pumperdink's eighteenth birthday celebration, his birthday cake explodes, revealing a magic scroll, a magic mirror, and a doorknob. The scroll warns the prince that if he doesn't wed a "proper princess" within seven days, his entire kingdom will disappear. The prince, along with the kingdom's wise elephant Kabumpo, set off on an adventure to the Emerald City so Pompa can marry Princess Ozma, the only "proper princess" the Elegant Elephant can think of as worthy of his prince.Meanwhile, Ruggedo the Gnome King (Thompson "corrected" Baum's spelling of "Nome") finds Glegg's Box of Mixed Magic while tunnelling under the Emerald City. After he brings a wooden doll, Peg Amy, to life, and makes Wag the rabbit the size of a man, Ruggedo turns himself into a giant. This means that Ozma's palace gets stuck on his head, and in a panic he runs off to Ev with it.After many adventures in the strange lands of Rith Metic, the Illumi Nation, and the Soup Sea, Pompadore and Kabumpo arrive in the Emerald City to find Ozma missing. They set off to find her and eventually meet up with Wag and Peg Amy. The group reaches the edge of the Deadly Desert and is hijacked by the Runaway Country, a conscious, talking, mobile piece of land. It carries them over the desert to Ev.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camelot_30K"title="Camelot 30K">
In 2009, humans make contact with their first extraterrestrials. The signal comes from beyond Neptune and even Pluto, on 1999 ZX, a celestial body between comet and planet in size, out in the Kuiper belt at 35 AU from the Sun. Twenty years later they send a scientific team to this small, ice-bound planetoid in the farthest reaches of the Solar System in the Oort cloud.This cold, dark planetoid ends up being a strange world indeed. There is only a thin hydrogen atmosphere, almost vacuum, and the average temperature is some 30 K (-243 °C, -406 °F), where only hydrogen, helium, and neon are gaseous in state and nearly everything else is a solid. Yet on this icy, frozen world, life manages to thrive: the keracks, which are no bigger than a few centimeters in length resemble "large one-eyed prawns dressed in elaborate clothing". The keracks, despite their small size, have built rather small cities and developed a complex society on their planetoid which they dubbed "Ice". They have a collectivistic hive-like society with a rich culture suggesting that of England in the time of King Arthur.The human visitors' first contact is the female kerack Merlene, wizard of the kerack city of Camalor. The humans themselves, being too hot and large, are unsuited for direct contact with the natives on this chilly world. So, instead, they have built "telebots" through which they can communicate with Merlene and the other keracks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_Who_Walked_into_Doors"title="The Woman Who Walked into Doors">
The novel tells the struggle and survival of an abused wife named Paula Spencer. It is narrated by the victim. The title comes from an incident narrated in the book, where Paula's husband asks her how she received a bruise he was responsible for, and she replies that she "walked into a door." A sequel, "Paula Spencer", was published in 2006. The narrative blends her recounting of the circumstances of her childhood, courtship and wedding day, with reflections on those events. The gathering drama is linked to the increasing awareness of moving towards a climax, which is on the one hand the outbreak of violence in her marriage, and on the other hand the violent death of her husband.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_with_Scissors_(memoir)"title="Running with Scissors (memoir)">
"Running with Scissors" covers the period of Burroughs' adolescent years, beginning at age 12 after a brief overview of his life as a child. Burroughs spends his early childhood in a clean and orderly home, obsessing over his clothes, hair, accessories, and having great potential, with his parents constantly fighting in the background.When his parents separate and his mother begins to second-guess her sexuality, Burroughs is sent to live with his mother's psychiatrist, Dr. Finch, who lives in a rundown Victorian house in Northampton, Massachusetts. Finch lives with his "legal" wife, Agnes, as well as his two biological and one adopted children and some of his own patients. Rules are practically nonexistent and children of all ages do whatever they please, such as having sex, smoking cigarettes and cannabis, and rebelling against authority figures. Finch feels that, at age 13, children should be in charge of their own lives. However, the dysfunctional issues that occur in the Finch family are outdone by the psychotic episodes frequently experienced by Burroughs' mother.The Finch house is a parallel universe to the home Burroughs came from. It is filthy, with cockroaches roaming around the uncleaned dishes, Christmas trees left up year-round, stairs up which Burroughs is afraid to walk because he thinks that they will collapse under him, and nothing off limits. Eventually, Finch comes to believe that God is communicating with him through his feces and develops a form of divination to try and decipher these messages. When Hope, Finch's second oldest daughter, believes her cat is dying, she keeps it in a laundry basket for four days until it dies: "Hope said Freud died of kitty leukemia and old age, I thought it was because Freud was stuck under a laundry basket with no food or water for 4 days."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_on_My_Mind"title="Annie on My Mind">
Liza Winthrop first meets Annie Kenyon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a rainy day. The two become fast friends, although they come from different backgrounds and have differing levels of confidence.Liza is the student body president at her private school, Foster Academy, where she is studying hard to get into MIT and become an architect. She lives with her parents and younger brother in the upscale neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights, where most residents are professionals. While at school, Liza fails to stop a friend and classmate, Sally Jarrell, from running her amateur ear-piercing business in the school basement, causing Liza and Sally to be reprimanded by the headmistress, Mrs. Poindexter.Annie goes to a public school and lives with her parents—a bookkeeper and a cabdriver—and grandmother in a lower-income part of Manhattan. Although Annie is not sure if she will be accepted, she hopes to attend the University of California, Berkeley to develop her talent as a singer.While they have different histories and goals in life, the two girls do share a close friendship that quickly grows into love. Liza's school is struggling to remain open and she finds herself having to defend a student, her friend Sally, in a school trial in front of the student body. This results in a three-day school suspension for Liza and helps to bring Liza and Annie closer together as they both deal with the struggles encountered by many high school students.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_(novel)"title="Self (novel)">
The narrator, at first male, explains various events from his early childhood, living with a traveling family who finally settle in Ottawa, Ontario. He goes on to explain events from his years in private school (including his parents' death), until he graduates and travels to Portugal, where he, on his eighteenth birthday, wakes up as a female.Surprisingly unfazed by her transformation, the narrator concludes her trip and begins university back in the fictional Roetown. She begins writing, and keeps travel in her life, eventually visiting such places as Spain and Thailand, to name a few. She shares romances with a select few — males and females alike. Eventually she gets published, and after graduating, moves to Montreal, where she gets a job as a waitress while continuing to write. At her job she meets Tito, her final love. But as the novel is nearing a conclusion, she is suddenly raped by a vicious neighbour in her secluded apartment and her body reverts to being a male again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_(novel)"title="The Master (novel)">
"The Master" depicts the American-born writer Henry James in the final years of the 19th century. The eleven chapters of the novel are labelled from January 1895 to October 1899 and follow the writer from his failure in the London theatre, with the play "Guy Domville", to his seclusion in the town of Rye, East Sussex, where in the following years he rapidly produced several masterpieces.The novel starts with a portrait of Henry as a public figure who feels humiliated in an unexpected way, not just in the public side of his writing career but also in a more personal way, in which all the precautions he had taken to carry on with his life as he wished it to be, come to a crisis. Henry resolves to reduce his public life by buying a house in Rye and there he nurses his loneliness and is haunted by all the consequences his need to maintain a protected space in which to live and write has generated all through his life. He's in his fifties and he's very much aware of how he had to refuse the company of his ill sister, whom he adored, at some point, how he chose to stay away from his country and his family, how he felt to turn cold with a writer friend he had been very close to previously and becomes a bachelor with an unresolved sexuality, certainly close to homosexuality, living in a house with servants in the South of England and a daily visit of the stenographer to whom he dictates. The portrait of Henry, a man appalled by the Oscar Wilde case while repressing his self and his sexuality, shows a complex and ambiguous man. He copes with life by exerting control over how much he would reveal, even to himself, and choosing to be a writer in order to achieve precisely that.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Domville"title="Guy Domville">
The play is set in 1780s England. Frank Humber proposes marriage to the widow Mrs. Peverel, whose son is tutored by Guy Domville. The tutor Domville is planning to become a Catholic priest but learns that he is the last of his family. He starts to believe that it is his duty to marry and carry on the family line. When Mrs. Peverel rejects Humber's proposal, Frank suspects she may be in love with Domville.Guy is later about to wed Mary Brasier, but she really loves Lieutenant George Round. Once he understands the situation, Guy refuses to go through with the marriage and instead helps Mary and George elope. Domville also realizes that Frank Humber and Mrs. Peverel are in love, and commends them to each other. He will enter the priesthood, as he previously planned.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Long_Way_Down"title="A Long Way Down">
Disgraced TV presenter Martin Sharp, the lonely single mother Maureen (51 years old), the unsuccessful musician JJ and the rude teenager Jess (18 years old) meet at Toppers' House in London on New Year's Eve. They all want to commit suicide by jumping from the roof. Their plans for death in solitude, however, are ruined when they meet. After telling their individual stories to the others, they decide to hold off on jumping and to help each other. Thus a group of four unfortunate and very individual people forms. Jess's condition not to jump is that they help her to find her ex-boyfriend Chas. So they take a taxi and drive to the party they suppose Chas to be at. After finding and talking to Chas they decide to go to Martin's place where they find Penny, who has obviously been crying. She accuses Martin of cheating on her because he had left the party they'd both attended that evening without any explanation.The next morning Jess's dad learns that the newspapers are publishing a story about Jess and Martin. Jess tells him that she slept with Martin, to avoid him finding out the truth of her attempted suicide. He takes her to task because the whole thing is very awkward for him. He is the Junior Secretary of Education and has a reputation to lose. He goes out to get an early edition of the paper and sees the story about her 'suicide pact' with Martin, so Jess's "whole sex confession bit had been a complete and utter fucking waste of time."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_South_(novel)"title="The South (novel)">
Katherine, a Protestant woman from Ireland, arrives in Barcelona in the 1950s having left her husband and son. Very slowly she starts discovering the city and gets to meet local painters. The Francoist State and the still recent civil war are present in the characters' past. She meets the artist Miguel and they both move to a remote village in the Pyrenees.The endings of the hardback and paperback editions differ. Tóibín altered two sentences of the book's ending because he thought it was too soft. He said in 2021: "There was one moment where it looked like they were going to be happy forever. What I had was slightly too sugary".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_(1974_film)"title="Gold (1974 film)">
The film begins with a tunnel collapse at the world-famous (but fictitious) Sonderditch gold mine outside Johannesburg, establishing the courage of Slater and his chief miner, John Nkulu (known as "Big King"), and the bond of trust between them. This is contrasted with the contempt with which some other managers treat the native miners. Big King is awarded a gold helmet for his heroic efforts to save others. It is soon revealed that the collapse was no accident, but a failed part of a plan by a London-based criminal syndicate, which includes the mine-owner's son-in-law and director-manager Manfred Steyner, to destroy the mine so that the syndicate members can profit from share-dealing and raising the price of gold on world markets. This will be done by drilling through a deep underground greenstone wall or dike which is all that prevents an adjacent reservoir of water from flooding the mine.The mine's general manager, an accomplice in the plot, was killed in the tunnel collapse. Steyner then interviews Slater, the underground manager, for the now vacant post of general manager, although the mine owner/chairman of the board Hurry Hirschfeld (Ray Milland) has the next regular man in seniority in mind as a candidate. During his interview, Slater first meets Steyner's wife Terry at their luxurious mansion and is attracted to her, but she does not at first return his interest. However, Steyner arranges for them to meet again, in the hope that Terry will influence her grandfather, Hurry Hirschfeld, an old curmudgeon whom she lovingly calls "Poppsie", in Slater's favour. The plan works, with two consequences: Slater becomes general manager, and he and Terry start a love affair. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_Is_Easy"title="Murder Is Easy">
Upon his return to England after his overseas job in the police, Luke Fitzwilliam shares a London-bound train carriage with Lavinia Pinkerton. She talks with him about her reason to travel to Scotland Yard, hoping for agreement. She plans to report a serial killer in her village and tells him who was killed and who will next be killed— Amy Gibbs, Tommy Pierce, and Harry Carter have been killed; Dr John Humbleby will be the next victim. This woman reminds him of a favourite aunt, so he replies politely and recalls what she said.He reads of Miss Pinkerton's death the next day, and then of the death of Dr Humbleby, who has died of septicaemia. Luke will not let this rest, and he travels to the village, Wychwood under Ashe. He poses as one finding material for a book on beliefs in witchcraft and superstition, as he investigates. He stays at the home of Gordon Ragg aka Lord Whitfield (Easterfield in the U.S. edition), claiming to be a cousin of Bridget Conway, Whitfield's fiancée, and the cousin of his own good friend. He and Conway receive the assistance of Honoria Waynflete, a woman whom they believe may know the person behind the deaths. He talks with villagers to learn the stories of the recent murders, including Mr Abbot, the solicitor who fired Tommy Pierce from his service; the Reverend Mr Wake, local preacher; Mr Ellsworthy, an antique shop owner who appears to be mentally unstable, and Dr Thomas, Humbleby's younger partner. People in the village view the deaths as accidents. Amy Gibbs died after confusing her cough remedy with hat paint in the dark, Tommy Pierce died from falling from an upper-floor window at the library while cleaning the windows, Harry Carter fell from a bridge while drunk and drowned in the mud, and Humbleby died from a cut that became infected. Luke learns that Mrs Lydia Horton was another victim of these accidents—she was recovering from acute gastritis and was getting better before she had a sudden relapse and died.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_in_the_Library"title="The Body in the Library">
The maid at Gossington Hall wakes Mrs Bantry by saying, “There is a body in the library!” Dolly Bantry then wakes her husband, Colonel Arthur Bantry to go downstairs. He finds the dead body of a young woman on the hearth rug in the library, with heavy makeup, platinum-blonde hair, and a silver-spangled dress. The colonel calls the police, and Mrs Bantry calls her old friend, Miss Marple. The police investigators include Colonel Melchett and Inspector Slack.Trying to identify this dead young woman, Melchett heads to the nearby cottage of Basil Blake, but Blake's girlfriend Dinah Lee, a platinum blonde, is very much alive and arrives at the house while Melchett is interviewing Blake. Dr Haydock’s autopsy reveals that the young woman, healthy but not fully mature, died between 10 pm and 12 midnight the previous evening, had been drugged and then strangled, and was not sexually molested. Miss Marple notices that the appearance of this girl is not right, from her bitten fingernails to her old dress. She shares these observations with Dolly.Hotel guest Conway Jefferson reports Ruby Keene, an 18-year-old dancer at the Majestic Hotel in Danemouth, as missing. Josie Turner, employee at the hotel, identifies the body as that of her cousin Ruby. Guests saw Ruby as late as 11 pm dancing with George Bartlett, but Ruby did not appear for her dance demonstration at midnight. Conway tells police he has revised his will to favour Ruby, until the legal adoption is completed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Michael"title="My Michael">
Hannah Greenbaum, a first-year literature student, meets Michael Gonen, a doctoral student in geology, by chance in her Hebrew University building. They date briefly and then marry, though their backgrounds and personalities could not be more dissimilar. They rent a small apartment in the Mekor Barukh neighborhood populated by religious Jews unlike themselves. Michael's aunts and other elderly acquaintances pop in and out of their lives, but Hannah is largely on her own as Michael pursues his degree. While Michael runs his life in a calm, methodical, unemotional manner, Hannah feels increasingly hemmed in by sameness and routine. She begins to escape into private fantasies – some featuring the heroes of her favorite childhood books, like Jules Verne's Michael Strogoff and Captain Nemo – and others based on her own dreams of being an exciting Sephardi woman named Yvonne Azulai, of being raped by strangers, of being a cold princess who commands others to go into battle for her. Two recurrent figures in her fantasies are Arab twin boys with whom she used to play as a child. Michael finally realizes how deeply she has sunken when she has a nervous breakdown one winter day before he is called up to serve in the 1956 Sinai campaign, and orders her to stay in bed until the doctor comes. But he cannot satisfy Hannah's unfulfilled sexual needs and her daydreams and nightmares continue, forcing her downward into a vortex of lust and fantasy. Hannah also finds it difficult to love their child, Yair, who is as pragmatic and non-relationship-oriented as his father. When Hannah finally conceives another child, Michael is no longer hers, having been seduced by an old college friend who constantly asks him to help her write her papers. The novel ends with Hannah still married, but for all intents and purposes estranged from Michael.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towards_Zero"title="Towards Zero">
Lady Tressilian is now confined to her bed, but still invites guests to her seaside home at Gull's Point during the summer. Tennis star Nevile Strange, former ward of Lady Tressilian's deceased husband, incurs her displeasure when he proposes to bring both his new wife, Kay, and his former wife, Audrey, to visit at the same time – a change from past years. Lady Tressilian grudgingly agrees to this set of incompatible guests. A long time family friend, Thomas Royde, home after a long stretch working overseas and still faithfully waiting on the sidelines for Audrey, is also a guest. Staying in hotels nearby are Kay’s friend, Ted Latimer, and Mr Treves, an elderly former solicitor and long time friend of the Tressilians.The house party feels uncomfortable, as Lady Tressilian had predicted. Invited to a dinner party, Mr Treves relates a story of an old case, where a child killed another with an arrow, which was ruled an accident, although a local man reported seeing the child practising with a bow and arrow. The child was given a new name and a fresh start. Mr Treves remembers the case and the child because of a distinctive physical feature which he does not reveal. The next morning, Treves is found dead in his hotel room and his death is attributed to heart failure from climbing up the stairs to his room the previous night, greatly upsetting Lady Tressilian. Thomas and Ted are mystified, as they saw a note stating that the lift was out of order when they walked Treves back. They learn from hotel staff that the lift was in working order that night. His death is ruled to be from natural causes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkling_Cyanide"title="Sparkling Cyanide">
One year earlier on 2 November, seven people sat down to dinner at the Luxembourg restaurant. One, Rosemary Barton, never got up; instead she collapsed and died. The coroner ruled her death suicide by poisoning, due to post-flu depression. Six months later, her husband George receives anonymous letters saying that Rosemary was murdered. George investigates and decides to repeat the dinner at the same restaurant, with the same guests, plus an actress who looks like his late wife, and who is meant to arrive late and startle the murderer into making a confession. The actress does not arrive and George dies at the table – poisoned, like his wife, by cyanide in his champagne. His death might have been judged as suicide, but George shared his concerns and some of his plan with his friend Colonel Race.As per their uncle's will, if Rosemary died childless her inherited fortune passed to her younger sister Iris, now a wealthy girl. If Iris dies unmarried, the money would pass to her only relative, her aunt Lucilla Drake. Mrs Drake is a decent person but her son, Victor, is decidedly not. During the investigation it becomes clear that the intended victim was Iris. Colonel Race and Iris's suitor, Anthony Browne, realise that Ruth Lessing, George's trusted secretary, had fallen for Victor a year earlier.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heather_Blazing"title="The Heather Blazing">
The novel tells the story of Eamon Redmond, a judge in the Irish High Court of the late twentieth century Ireland. It reconstructs his relationships with his wife and children through his life and the memories of a childhood marked by the death of his father. The County Wexford landscape and the death of the father are the narrative material, which Colm Tóibín would revisit again in "The Blackwater Lightship".The novel takes its title from a line from the song "Boolavogue", specifically "a rebel hand set the heather blazing".The novel also plots the development of Fianna Fáil from the austere republicanism and style of Éamon de Valera to the corruption of the Charles Haughey era.It has been said that this novel made Tóibín the heir of John McGahern. "Amongst Women", a book by McGahern, has similar atmosphere to this book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rising_(Keene_novel)"title="The Rising (Keene novel)">
The story starts off in the aftermath of a particle accelerator experiment. Somehow the experiment has opened some sort of interdimensional rift allowing demons to possess the dead. As the dead come back to life, a zombie plague results.The story's protagonist is Jim Thurmond, a construction worker living in West Virginia. Hiding away in a bomb shelter, which was previously constructed because of a fear of the aftermath of Y2K, Thurmond holds off packs of roving zombies, many of which were his neighbors and one of which is his recently deceased second wife who was pregnant. A distraught Jim laments his situation and worries about his son, Danny, who is living with Jim's first wife in upstate New Jersey. Jim considers suicide when unexpectedly Jim's cellphone rings with a message from his son, Danny. Danny whispers into the phone that he is hiding from the zombies in his mother's attic. Jim's suicidal thoughts turn around into a new purpose - to rescue Danny. Jim packs some supplies from the shelter and heads out into an apocalyptic United States overrun with gruesome sights. Jim fights his way out of the shelter by killing his undead neighbors and even his undead second wife, who taunts him with his unborn daughter. The moment he leaves the shelter, Jim is on the run discovering that the undead possess the ability to think, drive cars, use weapons, and set traps for the living.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hour_of_the_Dragon"title="The Hour of the Dragon">
The plot is a loosely based on a melange of motifs from previous Conan short stories, most notably "The Scarlet Citadel", with which its early chapters share an almost identical storyline: Conan, captured and placed in a monster-infested dungeon, finds an unexpected ally and escapes. Meanwhile, the population of the Aquilonian capital, believing him dead, riots and is ready to accept an alternative King. From here the two diverge: "The Scarlet Citadel", a short story, ends with Conan coming back when the rioting just started and making short work of his foes; in the book-length "Hour of the Dragon" it's much more complicated, Aquilonia has to live under a long and harrowing foreign occupation while Conan goes through a long hazardous quest, before he could finally come back and dispose of his foes.The book begins when Conan is about forty-two, during his reign as the King of Aquilonia, and deals with a plot by a group of conspirators to depose him in favor of Valerius, heir to Conan's predecessor Numedides, whom he had slain to gain the throne. To accomplish this they resort to necromancy, resurrecting Xaltotun, an ancient sorcerer from the forgotten empire of Acheron. With his aid, the Aquilonian army is defeated by the rival kingdom of Nemedia and occupied. Conan, captured, is slated for execution until a sympathetic slave girl, Zenobia, risks her life to free him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saga_of_Seven_Suns"title="The Saga of Seven Suns">
Having colonized many worlds in the Spiral Arm, humanity is divided into three branches: the Earth-based Terran Hanseatic League (Hansa) and its subordinate planets, the independent world Theroc with its telepathic green priests, and the Roamers, interplanetary traders who prefer starships and hidden bases to a conventional planet-based civilization. The only other known intelligent species in the galaxy are the Ildirans, an ancient civilization at its peak, and the long-extinct Klikiss, whose planets remain empty but for their unusual ruins.As the novel begins, the Hansa's test of a recently discovered ancient Klikiss technology that can convert gas giant planets into suns is a success. The ignition of the planet Oncier will eventually make its satellite moons into habitable worlds perfect for human colonization, but it has also murdered millions of hydrogues, a previously-unknown race of gas elementals living in the high-pressure core of the planet. Confined in crystalline globe ships, the hydrogues retaliate by systematically destroying several Roamer skymines, floating factories which harvest the hydrogen used to produce the vital stardrive fuel ekti from the atmosphere of gas giants. The powerful warglobes also destroy the moons of Oncier and the scientific space station there before warning the human race to stay away from all gas giants or be destroyed. This ultimatum is punctuated by the murder of the Hansa's puppet king Frederick and everyone in his vicinity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Half-Blood_Prince"title="Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince">
Severus Snape, a member of the Order of the Phoenix, meets with Narcissa Malfoy, Draco's mother, and her sister Bellatrix Lestrange, Lord Voldemort's supporter. Narcissa expresses concern that her son may not survive a mission that Voldemort has given him. Snape makes an Unbreakable Vow with Narcissa, swearing to assist Draco.Dumbledore collects Harry Potter to escort him to the Burrow, home of Harry's best friend Ron Weasley. They detour to the home of Horace Slughorn, former Potions teacher at Hogwarts; Harry unwittingly helps persuade Slughorn to return to teaching.While traveling to Hogwarts on the Hogwarts Express, Harry says he suspects Draco is a Death Eater. Harry eavesdrops on Draco, who brags to friends about a mission Voldemort has assigned him. Draco catches Harry, petrifying him and breaking his nose. Nymphadora Tonks finds Harry, repairs his nose and escorts him to Hogwarts. Dumbledore announces that Snape is the new Defence Against the Dark Arts instructor, while Slughorn will teach Potions. Harry finds an old potions textbook, once belonging to "The Half-Blood Prince", an individual who wrote numerous spells and tips in the book. Harry, using the tips in the book, excels in Potions class, winning a bottle of Felix Felicis, or "Liquid Luck". Hermione, however, distrusts the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xingshi_Yinyuan_Zhuan"title="Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan">
The plot is split between the two incarnations of a married couple. The victim of earlier wickedness will seek retribution by being a tormenting wife in the later reincarnation. In the first, set in the Han dynasty, the lascivious actions of Chao Yuan dissipate his family fortune in reckless living and tortures his father and wife until he is murdered. Retribution for his actions is visited upon his reincarnation, Di Xichen, in the early Ming dynasty, who after failing as a scholar becomes a prosperous merchant and is tormented by two shrewish wives, Sujie and Jijie. Xichen suffers for Chao Yuan's crimes. In the final chapters, Xichen is saved from certain death by a monk. He then vows to abstain from killing, chants the Diamond Sutra, and leads a virtuous life with one of his wives until he dies at the age of 85.The author paints this serious family drama against a satirical panorama not only of officials, scholars, and teachers, for whom he has little respect, but cooks, midwives, and doctors. All provide examples of lechery, drunkenness, and love of money, yet each of the characters is given individual personality and particular language. The author makes precise use of proverbs, xiehouyu, and curses in the Shandong style, but also literary poetry, fiction, and writings. One of the author’s techniques is to pair one character against another of the same profession or type. Xichen is made to seem all the more inept, for instance, in contrast to his capable assistant, and his wives all the more ill-tempered in contrast with better women.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_of_the_Bones"title="Servant of the Bones">
"Servant of the Bones" is an account of the creation and subsequent existence of a genie, Azriel. It is a story told as a fireside chat and includes historical accounts of Azriel's life as a displaced Jewish merchant's son in Babylon at the time of its conquest by Cyrus the Persian. There are also glimpses of life in ancient Miletus, in Strasbourg during a pogrom, and New York City of the 1990s.Azriel is telling the story of his transformation into and subsequent existence as an immortal genii who is forced to obey the Master who calls him. Over centuries, Azriel becomes less obedient to the Masters and a warning is placed on the casket of his bones that he is not to be summoned lest his evil be loosed upon the undeserving world.After many centuries of rest, Azriel finds himself awake and in New York City, a dazed witness to the murder of a young woman, Esther Belkin. He becomes inexplicably obsessed with the desire to avenge her death and to find out who called him into the physical world in time to see Esther die but not in time to save her. This quest leads him to the girl's stepfather, Gregory Belkin, who would pay any price to fulfill his messianic dream via his immense worldwide religious organization, the Temple of the Mind of God.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_Hilton"title="Chip Hilton">
Chip Hilton books are always about football, basketball, or baseball. The most notable book in the series is "Hoop Crazy," which examines the difficulties facing a black player wanting to join the basketball team. This is the only Chip Hilton book addressing social issues, and it does so in a compelling manner, although some of the early works did mention a great "negro" athlete, Miner, who played for one of the Big Reds' major rivals, Steeltown. Miner was presented as a gifted athlete without controversy over his participation; portraying an African-American athlete as accepted by teammate and foe alike. The reference is all the more interesting considering that the first books were written in the late 40s and early 50s when many pro teams, and even leagues, were yet to feature a black athlete. "Tournament Crisis" dealt with a team member who was Chinese and struggled to be included as a part of the team. He is initially depicted as angry and hard to like, and Chip works to help him and bring him around.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kushiel's_Chosen"title="Kushiel's Chosen">
In the novel, the journey of famed "anguissette", Phèdre nó Delaunay, brings her all the way to Caerdicca Unitas, chasing after the path of the infamous traitor of Terre d'Ange, Melisande Shahrizai. Even still, the curse of her one true friend, Hyacinthe, haunts her. She has a long way to go if she will ever have the chance to free him from the curse that should have been hers. It is all she can do to keep madness at bay and try to stay one step ahead of Melisande.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kushiel's_Avatar"title="Kushiel's Avatar">
In the ten years of peace following the events of "Kushiel's Chosen", Phèdre nó Delaunay has prospered. As the foremost courtesan of Terre D'Ange and the confidante of the Queen, she has a place at the peak of D'Angeline society. But the fate of her oldest friend Hyacinthe, living out the terms of an angel's curse, is never far from her heart. The search for the key to his freedom intertwines in unexpected ways with the quest for the missing son of her onetime lover and sometime enemy, Melisande Shahrizai. Phèdre and her consort Joscelin Verreuil travel through many lands, finding the boy in the darkest place on earth and fighting through hell to thwart his captors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vittorio_the_Vampire"title="Vittorio the Vampire">
In the twentieth century, from his castle in the northern part of Tuscany, Vittorio writes the tragic tale of his life.In 1450, Vittorio di Raniari is a sixteen-year-old Italian nobleman, when his family is murdered by a powerful and ancient coven of vampires. The image of his siblings' severed heads with eyes staring fixedly at him strikes him permanently. Vittorio, however, escapes such a dreadful ending because of a vampire's intervention.After taking care of his family's burial, Vittorio gathers what riches he can and prepares himself for adventure as he flees towards Florence, away from the perilous crowd of vampires, under the sun's protecting wing.By nightfall, Vittorio arrives at the most strange of villages, for there are no beggars at the street, no elderly, no sick or dying. Yet his mournful spirit prevents him from taking notice of it. He soon realizes that someone is stalking him, and, worried enough, he seeks shelter at an inn.Ursula, the vampire who prevented the other members of her coven from killing Vittorio, lurks behind his room's window. She continues to seduce him, all while draining blood from him, and giving him some of her own.Vittorio is led by Ursula to the coven's lair, as she attempts to make him part of their gatherings. It is an ancient castle, where he discovers its many gardens filled with old people and sick children; he suddenly realizes that some of these people he had met at the village. Vittorio then witnesses an important feast that is carried on as a ritual by the leader of the vampires' group. In it, some people who were selected from the gardens are sacrificed to satisfy their thirst for blood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_for_Alaska"title="Looking for Alaska">
Miles Halter, a teenage boy obsessed with the last words of famous people, leaves his normal high school in Florida to attend Culver Creek Preparatory High School in Alabama for his junior year. Miles' reasoning for such a change is quoted by François Rabelais's last words: "I go to seek a Great Perhaps." Miles' new roommate, Chip "The Colonel" Martin, nicknames Miles "Pudge" and introduces Pudge to his friends: hip-hop MC Takumi Hikohito and Alaska Young, an intelligent, beautiful, and emotionally unstable girl. Learning of Pudge's obsession with famous last words, Alaska informs him of Simón Bolívar's: "Damn it. How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!" The two make a deal that if Pudge figures out what the labyrinth is and how to escape it, Alaska will find him a girlfriend. Later, Alaska sets Pudge up with a Romanian classmate, Lara.Unfortunately, Pudge and Lara have a disastrous date, ending with a concussed Pudge throwing up on Lara's pants. Alaska and Pudge grow closer and he begins to fall in love with her, although she insists on keeping their relationship platonic because she has a boyfriend at Vanderbilt University named Jake, whom she insists that she loves.On his first night at Culver Creek, Pudge is kidnapped and thrown into a lake by the "Weekday Warriors," a group of rich schoolmates who blame the Colonel and his friends for the expulsion of their friend, Paul. Takumi claims that they are innocent because their friend Marya was also expelled during the incident. However, Alaska later admits to Miles that she told on both Marya and Paul to the dean, Mr. Starnes, nicknamed as "The Eagle", to save herself from being expelled.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trustee_from_the_Toolroom"title="Trustee from the Toolroom">
The plot of the novel hinges on the actions of a modest technical journalist, Keith Stewart, whose life has been focused on the design and engineering of small and scale-model precision machinery. Stewart writes serial articles about how to build miniature machines in a magazine called the "Miniature Mechanic", which are extremely well regarded in the modelling community — as is he.Keith's sister had married a wealthy naval officer, recently retired from service at the opening of the story. The couple plan a long pleasure cruise in their small yacht before settling in British Columbia, meanwhile leaving their 10-year-old daughter with Keith and his wife. Before leaving, they ask Keith for assistance in hiding a jewelry box in the yacht's concrete ballast. When the couple are killed in a shipwreck in French Polynesia, Keith becomes the permanent guardian and trustee of his niece (hence the title). But, the solicitor handling the estate finds that the money has disappeared; the evidence suggests that Keith's brother-in-law converted his wealth into diamonds to take with him abroad in order to evade export and currency restrictions intended to prevent capital leaving Britain.Keith infers that the metal box he secreted contained the diamonds, and he starts to investigate how he may retrieve them from the wreck. It is a difficult problem. Keith, while not poor, has chosen to do work he loves in place of better-paying work, and cannot afford to travel to Polynesia. He is able to call on connections in the model engineering world to deadhead his way on a flight as far as Hawaii. Finding no conventional way to get further which is within his means, he takes passage on the hand-built sailing ship of an illiterate half-Polynesian from Oregon, Jack Donelly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Castle"title="The Blue Castle">
Valancy Stirling is twenty-nine, unmarried (and thus considered an "old maid"), and has lived her entire life with her nagging mother and gossip-minded extended family who actively discourage happiness and treat Valancy like a child. She retreats from her unhappy circumstances with flights of imaginative fantasy, centring on daydreams of her imaginary "Blue Castle," and finding refuge in the books of her favourite author, John Foster, who writes about the great beauty of nature. When Valancy is diagnosed with a terminal heart ailment, she hides it from her family and, at the same time, realizes she has never been happy in her life, so she rebels against the colourless life that her family has always imposed on her. She begins by judging them objectively and, even worse, telling them exactly what she thinks, causing the Stirling clan to conclude that Valancy has suddenly lost her mind.Valancy decides to move out of her mother's house and take a position as a housekeeper for a friend of hers, Cissy Gay, who is now gravely ill. Cissy and Valancy had known each other as children, but Cissy became ostracized from society for having a child out of wedlock, as well as on account of her father, Roaring Abel, and his reckless, usually-drunken behaviour. Cissy and Valancy share a room and rebuild their friendship. Valancy enjoys being paid a salary and spending her money in ways her family would not approve, such as purchasing a brightly-coloured, low-necked dress. She also begins spending time with Barney Snaith, who visits often as a friend to Roaring Abel and Cissy, but who the townspeople are convinced is a criminal and/or the father of Cissy's illegitimate, now-deceased child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_Cat"title="Eye of Cat">
When the galaxy's most skilled hunter is asked to use his skill to protect an important political mission, he realizes that he needs specialized aid. Thus Billy Singer must seek the shape-shifting telepathic creature only known as "Cat", whom he had caught and trapped for a museum. Cat agrees to help on the condition that, once the mission is over, he be given the chance to hunt his former captor. Billy accepts Cat's offer. However, Billy has been growing increasingly fatalistic in the time leading up to the story, and originally offers to let Cat kill him with no struggle. Cat, a hunter, refuses, encouraging Billy to flee. Billy does so, but remains fatalistic, with Cat reading in his mind a wish to die and his foreknowledge of a final location. Billy must reconcile his personal chindi to evade Cat. Billy turns increasingly primitive, away from the technology of the day, and eventually returns to his Navajo roots. Traveling across the world using teleportation technology, he eventually comes to Canyon de Chelly where he regresses to a state where he can, or believes he can, walk in the spirit world. At the same time, a collection of psychics try to pool their powers to help him and to attack Cat. Cat is able to kill one by destroying his mind, but even so the dead man seems to linger as a part of their group consciousness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorways_in_the_Sand"title="Doorways in the Sand">
A galactic confederation of alien civilizations exchanges the star-stone and the Rhennius machine, mysterious alien artifacts, for the Mona Lisa and the British Crown Jewels as part of the process of admitting Earth to its organization. The star-stone is missing, and Fred Cassidy, a perpetual student and acrophile, is the last known person to have seen it. Various criminals, Anglophile zealots, government agents and aliens torture, shoot, beat, trick, chase, terrorize, assault telepathically, stalk, and importune Fred in attempts to get him to tell them the location of the stone. He denies any knowledge of its whereabouts, and decides to conduct his own investigation. Through the examination of an alien telepath, Fred finds out that the star-stone entered his body through a wound while he was asleep. An alien agent, a representative of the Whillowhim culture, attempts to steal the stone when it is removed from Fred's body. The Whillowhim seek to limit the power of an alliance of newer, less-developed members of the galactic coalition, and its theft would temporarily stop the entry of Earth into the organization. In a struggle atop the building housing the Rhennius machine, the Whillowhim agent falls to its death. Fred accepts a position as alien cultural expert for the legation of the U.S. to the United Nations. The star-stone, now identified with the name Speicus, is a sentient, telepathic sociological life-form that can gather and analyze information and make reports using Fred as its host.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_Fall"title="Arrow's Fall">
Having completed her year and a half interning in the field, Talia returns to Haven as Queen's Own Herald in right. In her absence, the Council of Valdemar has been considering an offer of an alliance marriage between Princess Elspeth and the Prince of Hardorn, a young man named Ancar. While the Council is generally in favor, Queen Selenay has her suspicions about the idea, and she and Talia overrule the Council. Meanwhile, the budding lifebond between Talia and Herald Dirk is frustrated due to a misunderstanding - Dirk thinks Talia is in love with his best friend, the handsome Herald Kris. The problems of the kingdom occupy Talia's time so completely that she cannot speak to him, nor spend as much time with the young Princess as she used to. As a result, Dirk falls into depression (worsened by the death of a young Herald who was his special pupil) and begins drinking heavily. Elspeth, through the work of a trusted Councilor, Lord Orthallen, begins spending time with unsavory young men.Dirk is falsely accused by Orthallen, and when Kris (Orthallen's nephew) does not immediately believe his innocence, the two have a falling-out. Dirk's slide into depression continues, and he neglects his health until he collapses from pneumonia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becoming_Madame_Mao"title="Becoming Madame Mao">
Madame Mao is born to a very poor family around 1910 (early enough to have had her feet bound although due to a severe infection the bindings were taken off). She has an abusive father who kicks her and her concubine mother out of the house at an early age. Her mother ends up as a concubine and servant and the young 'Madame Mao' runs away to her grandparents. Anchee Min, the author, seems to attribute a lot of Madame Mao's later actions to her childhood—and that a lot of her incessant claims to power actually come from a need to be desired and to feel close to Mao rather than a deep need for power herself. Madame Mao's dream is to become an actress but she only achieves mediocre success. Using the stage name Lan Ping, she spends a few years in Shandong province (where she becomes a Communist due to a lover of hers) and then Shanghai. In Shanghai she had some success in playing Nora in Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House", and the author clearly parallels Nora's strength and inability to be controlled with Lan Ping's strong personality and need to be in control and the center of attention. The play is closed down since it is perceived to be too subversive by the authorities. She even ends up in prison for a short time but is released after signing a document denouncing Communism. After what seems like a string of rejections as well as a few serious lovers and two husbands, she travels to Yan'an, Mao's revolutionary base, to become part of his movement. The book does not offer much explanation for the switch from actress to countryside revolutionary except that she certainly had been involved in revolutionary elements (anti-Japanese plays, etc.) and that with the absence of work as an actress she did not have many options. Also, joining the Communist revolution seemed to be a common choice for young discontented students and others in their 20s.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gruffalo"title="The Gruffalo">
A mouse walks through a wood and encounters three predators—first a fox, then an owl, and finally a snake. Each of these animals invites the mouse into their home for a meal, the implication being that they intend to eat the mouse. The mouse declines each offer, telling the predators that it plans to dine with a "gruffalo". The mouse then describes the gruffalo's frightening features, such as "terrible tusks, terrible claws, and terrible teeth in his terrible jaws". The mouse tells each predator that they are the gruffalo's favourite food. Frightened that the gruffalo might eat them, each animal flees. Convinced the Gruffalo is fictional, the mouse says:After getting rid of the last animal, the mouse is shocked to encounter a real Gruffalo, which has all the features the mouse thought that it was inventing. The Gruffalo threatens to eat the mouse. Instead, the mouse insists that they themselves are the scariest animal in the wood. Laughing, the Gruffalo agrees to follow the mouse. The two walk through the wood, encountering each of the three predators again. Each predator is terrified by the sight of the Gruffalo and escapes to their home. The Gruffalo believes that they are actually scared of the mouse. Exploiting this, the mouse threatens to eat the Gruffalo. The Gruffalo flees, leaving the mouse to eat a nut in peace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saga_of_Darren_Shan"title="The Saga of Darren Shan">
"The Saga of Darren Shan" follows the story of Darren Shan, a normal human boy who is coerced by the vampire Larten Crepsley into becoming his assistant and a half-vampire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Road"title="Revolutionary Road">
Set in 1955, the novel focuses on the hopes and aspirations of Frank and April Wheeler, self-assured Connecticut suburbanites who see themselves as very different from their neighbors in the Revolutionary Hill Estates. In the opening scene, April stars in an embarrassingly bad amateur dramatic production of "The Petrified Forest". After the performance, Frank and April have a fight on the side of the highway, and Frank later begins an affair with his office colleague Maureen Grube.Seeking to break out of their suburban rut (and consequently blaming herself for all of Frank's "problems"), April convinces Frank they should move to Paris, where she will work and support him while he realizes his vague ambition to be something other than an office worker. The promise of France brings the two together in love and excitement again, and Frank seemingly ends his relationship with Maureen. While April sees the emigration as an opportunity to escape their bland environment, Frank's plans are more driven by vanity of his own intelligence, which April panders to. When the dull and prim neighbor Mrs. Givings begins bringing her "insane" son John around to the Wheelers' house for regular lunches, John's honest and erratic condemnation of his mother's suburban lifestyle strikes a chord with the Wheelers, particularly Frank.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_(Suzuki_novel)"title="Ring (Suzuki novel)">
After 4 teenagers mysteriously die simultaneously in Tokyo, Kazuyuki Asakawa, a reporter and uncle to one of the deceased, decides to launch his own personal investigation. His search leads him to "Hakone Pacific Land", a holiday resort where the youths were last seen together exactly one week before their deaths. Once there, he happens upon a mysterious unmarked videotape. Watching the tape, he witnesses a strange sequence of both abstract and realistic footage, including an image of an injured man, which ends with a warning revealing that the viewer has one week to live. Giving a single means of avoiding death, the tape's explanation ends suddenly, having been overwritten by an advertisement. The tape has a horrible mental effect on Asakawa, and he does not doubt for a second that its warning is true.Returning to Tokyo with no idea how to avert his fate, Asakawa enlists the help of his curious friend Ryūji Takayama, an apparent psychopath who openly jests that he engages in rape. As soon as Asakawa explains the story, Ryūji believes him and insists on seeing the tape. Asakawa shows it to him, and he agrees that there is a powerful aura around it, and asks Asakawa to make him a copy to study at home, which Asakawa does.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killshot_(novel)"title="Killshot (novel)">
Carmen and Wayne Colson live a quiet, suburban life. Carmen is a realtor while Wayne is an ironworker. Suddenly everything is violently changed when they stumble upon an extortion plot hatched by two crooks, Armand "Blackbird" Degas and his partner Richie Nix. While Richie is unstable and impatient, the Blackbird is calm and collected. After Wayne forces the two away with a Sleever Bar, the criminals decide to exact vengeance on the Colsons, leading to a tense climax.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Comes_as_the_End"title="Death Comes as the End">
The quiet lives of an Egyptian family are disturbed when the father, Imhotep, returns from the north with his new concubine, Nofret, who begins to sow discontent amongst them. Once the deaths begin, fears are aroused of a curse upon the house, but is the killer closer to home?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Murder_Is_Announced"title="A Murder Is Announced">
A notice appears in the local newspaper for Chipping Cleghorn: "A murder is announced and will take place on Friday, 29 October, at Little Paddocks, at 6.30 pm. Friends accept this, the only intimation." This surprises Letitia Blacklock, owner of Little Paddocks. She prepares for guests that evening. Some villagers appear at the house, showing definite interest. As the clock strikes 6.30, the lights go out, and a door swings open, revealing a man with a blinding torch who demands the guests "Stick 'em up!" The game ends when shots are fired into the room. When the lights turn on, Miss Blacklock is bleeding, and the masked man is dead on the ground. Miss Blacklock's companion, Dora "Bunny" Bunner, recognises the man as Rudi Scherz, a Swiss man who worked for a local hotel and had recently asked Letitia for money.The crime scene plus interviews with all who witnessed it lead police to drop the case, but Inspector Craddock is not satisfied. He learns that Scherz had a criminal background of petty theft and forgery. Then Craddock meets Miss Jane Marple at lunch with his boss and Sir Henry Clithering, at the hotel where Scherz worked. Craddock brings Miss Marple in to help with the case after her suggestions prove correct. Scherz's girlfriend Myrna Harris tells Craddock that Scherz had been paid to appear as the holdup man — a fall guy, as Miss Marple had said. He had not said who paid him. The police feel the real target is Letitia Blacklock, and that Scherz was killed by his unknown employer to prevent him talking.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Came_to_Baghdad"title="They Came to Baghdad">
A secret summit of superpowers is to be held in Baghdad, but it is no longer secret. A shadowy group (which is both anti-Communist and anti-Capitalist) is plotting to sabotage the event. Things get complicated when enthusiastic young "adventurer" Victoria Jones discovers a dying secret British agent – Henry "Fakir" Carmichael – in her hotel room. His last words – "Lucifer...Basrah...Lefarge" – propel her into investigation. "Lucifer" refers to the mastermind, Victoria's crush, Edward, who is behind the plot. "Basrah" is the city where Carmichael saw Edward and recognised him as an enemy. "Lefarge" turns out to actually be "Defarge" and is a reference to a Charles Dickens character; it is an allusion to the fact that the name of a vital witness has been stitched into a scarf. While Victoria is the central character, the real heroine is Anna Scheele, secretary/executive assistant to an American banker, who has discovered a great deal about finances of the shadowy group. She appears rather sparingly, with a few brief appearances in the early part of the story, then seems to vanish, to the chagrin of the evil organization who fear her financial knowledge and who want to liquidate her, and of her allies who wish to protect her. She reappears unexpectedly at the last moment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs_McGinty's_Dead"title="Mrs McGinty's Dead">
Superintendent Spence visits Poirot to ask him to find evidence that would forestall the execution of James Bentley, who has recently been convicted of killing his elderly landlady, Mrs McGinty, for a meager £30. All evidence points to his guilt, but something about Bentley's surly acceptance of his fate just doesn't sit right with the experienced Spence. Poirot agrees to go to the village of Broadhinny and investigate the matter. Taking a room in the Summerhayes' guest house, Poirot finds that Mrs McGinty often worked as a charwoman at various village houses. No one wants to talk to Poirot, most being satisfied that Bentley is guilty. During the course of his investigations, Poirot discovers that, three days before the murder, Mrs McGinty took a clipping from a notorious Sunday newspaper, containing an article showing photos of females who had disappeared after being involved in decades-old criminal cases. She then wrote to the paper, claiming to have found a photo like one of the women, proving a villager was one of the missing women in disguise. However, her terrible spelling had caused the paper to dismiss her as a simple fame-seeker. Poirot and Spence, using the ages of people in the town, conclude that someone is either Lily Gamboll, who committed murder with a meat cleaver at only 12 years old, or Eva Kane, a governess who had had an affair with her employer, Mr Craig. Craig was later convicted and executed for killing his wife. After being acquitted as an accessory, a pregnant Eva had changed her surname to "Hope" and left the country. Some sources claim she had a daughter named Evelyn, and several women in the town are the right age to be Evelyn, as well. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Do_It_with_Mirrors"title="They Do It with Mirrors">
While visiting her American school friend Ruth Van Rydock in London, Miss Marple learns that Ruth is seriously concerned for her sister Carrie Louise. She asks Miss Marple to visit Carrie Louise at Stonygates, her home in England. Miss Marple agrees to the visit. She is impressed by the size of the Victorian mansion, which now has a separate building for delinquent boys, the cause which engages Carrie Louise and her third husband, Lewis Serrocold. Carrie Louise has her family living with her, as her granddaughter Gina has brought her American husband Walter to England to meet her family. Daughter Mildred Strete moved back home after she was widowed. Stepsons Stephen and Alexis Restarick, now grown, are frequent visitors and are present during Miss Marple's visit. One of the first people Miss Marple encounters is Edgar Lawson, a young man acting as a secretary to Serrocold; Lawson shows clear signs of paranoid schizophrenia, but these are largely ignored.Miss Marple learns that Carrie Louise has experienced health problems incidental to old age. Nevertheless, Miss Marple is pleased to see that Carrie Louise is still the sweet, idealistic, and loving person she has known.An unexpected visitor arrives at Stonygates—Christian Gulbrandsen, Carrie Louise's stepson from her first marriage and a trustee of the charitable foundation that his father set up with the wealth he generated in his life. Lewis Serrocold walks from the train station and meets Christian on the terrace. Miss Marple watches them through her bird-watcher's binoculars and tries to learn the reason for Christian's unexpected visit. She hears a few phrases concerning the importance of keeping a problem from Carrie Louise, and that the two men agree to call for outside help. Both men enter for dinner, and afterwards, Christian retires to his room to write letters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pocket_Full_of_Rye"title="A Pocket Full of Rye">
When London businessman Rex Fortescue dies after drinking his morning tea, Scotland Yard Detective Inspector Neele spearheads the investigation. An autopsy reveals the cause of death was poisoning by taxine, a toxic alkaloid obtained from the yew tree, and that Fortescue ingested it with his breakfast, while a search of his clothing reveals a quantity of rye in his jacket pocket.Rex's wife Adele is the main suspect in the murder. Son Lancelot and his wife Pat are travelling from Kenya to London, at the invitation of his father, according to Lance; at Paris, he wires that he will be home next day, and police meet him at the airport. The day Lance arrives at Yewtree Lodge, leaving his wife in London, Adele dies of cyanide in her tea, and a few hours later the maid Gladys Martin is found strangled in the yard, with a clothes peg put on her nose.Inspector Neele is working full-time with the aid of Sergeant Hay on these murders, interviewing all at the office and in the home. The older son, Percival, tells the Inspector that his father was erratic and ruining the business. After the story of the three murders is in the newspapers, Miss Marple arrives at Yewtree Lodge to shed light on Gladys Martin, who learned serving and cleaning at Miss Marple's home. Miss Ramsbottom, Rex's sister-in-law, invites her to stay. Inspector Neele agrees to work with Miss Marple, seeing what she can add. Neele learns that the taxine was ingested in marmalade, with a new jar put out at breakfast used by Rex alone; that jar had been tossed in the yard and found by police. When Miss Marple and Inspector Neele discuss the case, she asks him if he has asked about blackbirds, having seen the pattern of the old children's rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpence." When he does ask, he learns of dead blackbirds on Rex's desk at home, a pie whose contents were removed and replaced with dead blackbirds, and from Lance, of the Blackbird Mine in east Africa.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destination_Unknown_(novel)"title="Destination Unknown (novel)">
Hilary Craven, a deserted wife and bereaved mother, is planning suicide in a Moroccan hotel. British secret agent Jessop knocks on her door to propose that she undertake a dangerous mission as an alternative to taking an overdose of sleeping pills. The task, which she accepts, is to impersonate the wife of Thomas Betterton, a nuclear scientist who has disappeared and may have defected to the Soviet Union. Soon she finds herself in a group of oddly-assorted travellers being transported to the unknown destination of the title.The destination is a secret scientific research facility disguised as a modern leper colony and medical research center at a remote location in the Atlas Mountains. The scientists are well-treated and supplied with all equipment needed for their research, but they are not allowed to leave the facility for any reason. They are locked in secret areas deep inside the Mountains whenever government officials and other outsiders visit. Hilary Craven successfully passes herself as Betterton's wife Olive, because he is miserable and wants desperately to escape. He says he cannot do his best work without freedom.Hilary discovers that the facility was built by the fabulously wealthy and somewhat villainous Mr Aristides, for financial rather than political ends. He has lured many of the world's best young scientists to it with various deceptions so that he can later sell their services back to the world's governments and corporations for a huge profit. She falls in love with Andrew Peters, a handsome young American and a research chemist who travels in the group with her to the facility. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4.50_from_Paddington"title="4.50 from Paddington">
Mrs Elspeth McGillicuddy is on her way from a shopping expedition to visit her old friend Jane Marple for Christmas. Her train passes another train running parallel and in the same direction as her train. A blind in a compartment on the other train flies up, and she sees a man with his back to her strangling a woman. She reports it to a sceptical ticket collector who passes the report for investigation. When arriving at Miss Marple's cottage, she tells her everything. Mrs McGillicuddy describes the dying woman as having blonde hair and wearing a fur coat and the man as tall and dark, though she saw only his back. Miss Marple believes her story, knowing her friend to be trustworthy in description. With no report of a body found in the next day's news, Miss Marple sets out to determine where the body is. With a good map and several rides by train to feel the effect of a sharp curve on standing passengers, she determines that the body is probably in the grounds of Rutherford Hall. Miss Marple sends Lucy Eyelesbarrow, a young professional cook and housekeeper of her acquaintance, to work at Rutherford Hall and find the body.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_(novel)"title="Platform (novel)">
The story is the first-person narrative of a fictional character named Michel Renault, a Parisian civil servant who, after the death of his father and thanks to a hefty inheritance, engages in sex tourism in Thailand, where he meets a travel agent named Valérie. Valerie and Renault begin an affair, and, after moving back to France, hatch a plan with Valerie's boss (who works in the travel industry in the "Aurore" group, an allusion to the real-life Accor group) to launch a new variety of package holiday called "friendly tourism", implicitly aimed at Europeans looking for a sexual experience whilst on vacation. Single men and women—and even couples—are to be targeted, and would vacation in specially designed "Aphrodite Clubs".Initially, the name "Venus clubs"—an allusion to the Villa Venus clubs dreamed of by Eric Veen in Vladimir Nabokov's classic "Ada or Ardor"—is suggested, but is rejected as being too explicit. It is decided that Thailand is the best location for the new clubs, with the advertising making it clear that Thai women would also be easily available. The tours are to be marketed predominantly to German consumers, as it is perceived that there will be less moral outrage in Germany than in France.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Awkward_Age"title="The Awkward Age">
Mr. and Mrs. Edward Brookenham host an effete, rather corrupt social circle. They are the parents of worthless Harold and sweet but knowledgeable Nanda (age eighteen). Mr. Longdon attends one of their social functions and is amazed at how much Nanda resembles her grandmother, his long-ago love who married another man. Vanderbank, a young civil servant with little money, admires both Mrs. Brookenham (nicknamed "Mrs. Brook") and Nanda. Mrs. Brook seems to want an affair with "Van" but he appears more interested in Nanda. Mr. Longdon promises him a dowry if he marries Nanda.Mrs. Brook is instead trying to get her daughter married to Mitchy, a very rich but rather naive member of her social circle. But Nanda urges Mitchy to marry Aggie, the supposedly sheltered step-niece of one of Mrs. Brook's friends (the Duchess). Mitchy follows the advice, then watches helplessly as Aggie kicks over the traces and starts playing around on him. Van constantly hesitates about proposing to Nanda. She finally tells him and Mitchy to be kind to her mother, then prepares to stay at Mr. Longdon's country home as a kind of surrogate daughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_in_the_Attic"title="Flowers in the Attic">
In 1957, the Dollanganger family—father Christopher, mother Corinne, 14-year-old Chris, 12-year-old Cathy, and 5-year-old twins Carrie and Cory—live an idyllic life in Gladstone, Pennsylvania, until Christopher Sr. is killed in a car accident, leaving Corinne deep in debt with no means to support her children.On the verge of their home being foreclosed, Corinne reveals to the children that as a young woman, her marriage to Christopher so offended her multimillionaire father Malcolm Foxworth that he disinherited her. Now the elderly Malcolm is dying of heart disease, and Corinne intends to return to her childhood home of Foxworth Hall in Virginia to win back her father's affection in time to be reinstated into his will. Because Malcolm is unaware that Corinne had children by her marriage to Christopher, the children must hide in a secluded upstairs room of the enormous Foxworth Hall until Corinne can break the news to her father. She assures the children that they will only be in the room for a few days.At Foxworth Hall, Corinne's mother (called only "the grandmother") locks the children in a bedroom connected to the house's large attic. The grandmother forces Corinne to reveal to her children that the reason for her disinheritance was that Christopher was Malcolm's younger half-brother, and thus Corinne's half-uncle, and that the children are the products of incest. The grandmother believes the children are "the Devil's spawn" and is obsessed with the idea of incest, forbidding all contact between opposite sexes, while prohibiting the children from making noise or opening the room's windows. Only in the attic are they free to play.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Happiness"title="Family Happiness">
The story concerns the love and marriage of a young girl, Mashechka (17 years old), and the much older Sergey Mikhaylych (36), an old family friend. The story is narrated by Masha. After a courtship that has the trappings of a mere family friendship, Masha's love grows and expands until she can no longer contain it. She reveals it to Sergey Mikhaylych and discovers that he also is deeply in love. If he has resisted her it was because of his fear that the age difference between them would lead the very young Masha to tire of him. He likes to be still and quiet, he tells her, while she will want to explore and discover more and more about life. Ecstatically and passionately happy, the pair immediately engages to be married. Once married they move to Mikhaylych's home. They are both members of the landed Russian upper class. Masha soon feels impatient with the quiet order of life on the estate, notwithstanding the powerful understanding and love that remains between the two. To assuage her anxiety, they decide to spend a few weeks in St. Petersburg. Sergey Mikhaylych agrees to take Masha to an aristocratic ball. He hates "society" but she is enchanted with it. They go again, and then again. She becomes a regular, the darling of the countesses and princes, with her rural charm and her beauty. Sergey Mikhaylych, at first very pleased with Petersburg society's enthusiasm for his wife, frowns on her passion for "society"; but he does not try to influence Masha. Out of respect for her, Sergey Mikhaylych will scrupulously allow his young wife to discover the truth about the emptiness and ugliness of "society" on her own. But his trust in her is damaged as he watches how dazzled she is by this world. Finally they confront each other about their differences. They argue but do not treat their conflict as something that can be resolved through negotiation. Both are shocked and mortified that their intense love has suddenly been called into question. Something has changed. Because of pride, they both refuse to talk about it. The trust and the closeness are gone. Only courteous friendship remains. Masha yearns to return to the passionate closeness they had known before Petersburg. They go back to the country. Though she gives birth to children and the couple has a good life, she despairs. They can barely be together by themselves. Finally she asks him to explain why he did not try to guide and direct her away from the balls and the parties in Petersburg. Why did they lose their intense love? Why don't they try to bring it back? His answer is not the answer she wants to hear, but it settles her down and prepares her for a long life of comfortable "Family Happiness".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matchlock_Gun"title="The Matchlock Gun">
The book is set in the year 1756 during the French and Indian War in Guilderland, New York. Ten-year-old Edward Van Alstyne (throughout the book, he is called "Ateoord", which is his name in Dutch) and his mother Gertrude are determined to protect their home and family with an ancient (and much too heavy) Spanish matchlock gun that Edward's great-grandfather had brought from Bergen Op Zoom in the Netherlands while his father Teunis is away from home with the local militia fighting the enemy (using, to Edward's disappointment, a musket instead of the matchlock).Gertrude, Edward, and his younger sister Trudy go about their everyday chores, but news arrives that the French-Indian forces have been attacking and burning nearby settlements and that Teunis and his militia company have been sent to intercept them. Later that day, while she and the children are out herding the cows, Gertrude spots a column of smoke in the distance and realizes that raiders are getting closer. Rather than take herself and the children over to her mother-in-law's brick house as Teunis had previously suggested, since raiders would be more likely to attack it rather than their house, she devises a plan for a possible Indian attack. Returning home, she loads the matchlock gun, fixes it in position to fire and instructs Edward how and when to fire it. She then goes outside to keep a watch for any approaching raiders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_35th_of_May,_or_Conrad's_Ride_to_the_South_Seas"title="The 35th of May, or Conrad's Ride to the South Seas">
The novel is about Conrad, a young boy, who spends each Thursday afternoon with his uncle, Mr. Ringelhuth. One Thursday — it happens to be the 35th of May — they meet Negro Caballo, a black horse that can speak, is well-versed in German literature, and at the same time, is the best roller skater in the world. Together they enter Mr. Ringelhuth's huge wardrobe, which stands in the hallway, and end up in a series of magical lands, starting with the land of Cockaigne ("free entry — children half price"), followed by a medieval castle complete with jousting, an upside-down world in which children send bad parents to reform school, a science fiction nightmare city with mobile phones and moving walkways, and a South Sea island. On his return to the real world, Conrad writes a school essay about his experiences.The plot device of a magic wardrobe through which the characters enter magical lands anticipates the similar device used by C. S. Lewis in "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe", and, earlier, in the 1912 short story by E. Nesbit, "The Aunt and Amabel" — in which a girl enters a magic world through a wardrobe. (Critics accept that this was Lewis's inspiration.)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Female_American"title="The Female American">
## Volume I.The poem opens with a declaration of the author's intention to relate the events of her life, which introduces the first major theme of female adventure outside of the domestic sphere. She describes her grandfather's plantation in Virginia, and the of settlers by the native Indians, which leaves her grandfather dead and her father, Mr. William Winkfield, captured. As her father is about to be put to death by the Indians, a young Indian princess, named Unca, saves his life and secures his liberty by taking a liking to him and putting him in favor with the king. Unfortunately, his troubles mount when the sister of the young princess grows equally fond of him, and solicits him for marriage. He responds unfavorably, claiming love only for Unca, so she poisons him and leaves him for dead. Unca comes upon him and saves his life yet again, and they remove themselves from the village to live with the settlers. They are not there long before their daughter, Unca Eliza, is born, and they are visited by two Indian men sent from Alluca, the jealous sister of princess Unca. The two men reveal daggers and a skirmish leaves Unca and one of the assassins dead, while Mr. Winkfield escapes death and takes the remaining assassin prisoner. Under the council of the other settlers, he decides to set him free, sending him back to the village with a promise of revenge on Alluca from Mr. Winkfield. She dies of grief before revenge can be had, and sends her heart and a request for forgiveness to Mr. Winkfield.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_Child"title="The Martian Child">
A single man who writes science fiction books and screenplays for a living, adopts a son who claims he is from Mars. The adoptive father comes to be intrigued by the possibility his son might really be a Martian. Ultimately, the father realizes that he loves his son whether or not he is a Martian. The son uses a magical "Martian wish" to be a human so he can remain with his father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Mountain_Zhang"title="China Mountain Zhang">
The main story involves a man's maturation in a future dominated by China, where the United States has undergone a Second Great Depression, a Communist revolution and then a "Cleansing Winds Campaign" that resembled the Chinese Cultural Revolution. His personal evolution is paralleled in four interwoven side stories following characters progressing from outsiderdom to finding places in society.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyteen"title="Cyteen">
Ariane Emory is one of fourteen "Specials", Union-certified geniuses. In addition to her research on azi, she runs Reseune (founded by her parents) with the assistance of Giraud and Denys Nye.Emory is also a member of the Council of Nine, the elected, top-level executive body of Union. Two political factions vie for power in Union: the Centrists and the Expansionists. The latter, led by Emory, seek to enlarge Union through exploration, building new stations and continued cloning. Her political enemies, headed by Mikhail Corain, prefer to focus on the existing stations and planets. The Expansionists have held power since the foundation of Union, a situation fostered by "rejuv", which extends lifespans and staves off the effects of old age. Emory herself is 120 years old at the start of the novel – and only just beginning to show signs of aging – and has been the Councillor for Science for five decades.Emory's former co-worker and now bitter longtime rival, Jordan Warrick, is also a Special. Jordan has created and raised a clone of himself named Justin. Justin has grown up with and is very close to Grant, an experimental azi created by Emory from the slightly modified geneset of another Special. When Justin goes to work for Emory, she threatens to use Grant, who is Reseune property, for research. Using drugs and tape to overcome Justin's remaining resistance, she rapes the inexperienced seventeen-year-old. This trauma causes him to experience periodic debilitating "tape-flashes", similar to the flashbacks that PTSD sufferers experience. Justin does his best to hide the sordid matter from his "father", but Jordan eventually learns of it. He is furious and confronts Emory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpreter_of_Maladies"title="Interpreter of Maladies">
## A Temporary Matter.A married couple, Shukumar and Shoba, live as strangers in their house until an electrical outage brings them together when all of sudden "they [are] able to talk to each other again" in the four nights of darkness. From the point of view of Shukumar, we are given bits and pieces of memory which slowly gives insight into what has caused the distance in the marriage. For a brief moment, it seems the distance is nothing but perhaps a result of a disagreement. However, descriptions of Shukumar and Shoba's changed physical appearances begin to hint at something much more than a lovers’ quarrel. We soon find out that both characters’ worn outward appearance results from their internal, emotional strife that has caused such deeply woven alienation from each other.The husband and wife mourn for their stillborn baby. This traumatic loss casts a tone of melancholia for the rest of the story. However, there is some hope for the couple to reconnect as during each night of blackness, they confess more and more to each other—the things that were never uttered as man and woman. A late night drink with a friend, a ripped out photo from a magazine, and anguish over a sweater vest are all confessions made in the nightly blackouts. Shukumar and Shoba become closer as the secrets combine into a knowledge that seems like the remedy to mend the enormous loss they share together. On the fourth night, we are given the most hope at their reconnection when they "make love with a desperation they had forgotten."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Persian_Boy"title="The Persian Boy">
Like much of Renault's fiction, the book, published in 1972, provides a sympathetic portrait of homosexual love. "The Persian Boy" is notable for its depiction of the tradition of pederasty in ancient Greece, where relationships between adult men and adolescent boys were celebrated. In the novel, Bagoas is 16 years old when he begins his relationship with Alexander (then about 25). Renault depicts the attachment as lasting until Alexander's death, when Bagoas would have been about 23. She explores the tensions in the triangular relationship between Alexander and his two lovers, Hephaistion and Bagoas, and suggests that Alexander went mad with grief over Hephaistion's untimely death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komm,_süßer_Tod_(novel)"title="Komm, süßer Tod (novel)">
Disillusioned paramedic and ex-cop Simon Brenner finds himself trapped between the front lines of two competing Emergency Medical Services in Vienna's relentless summer heat. Things turn really hot when Brenner starts looking into the unusually high death rate of elderly patients.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordeal_by_Innocence"title="Ordeal by Innocence">
Geologist Arthur Calgary appears at the Argyle home Sunny Point two years after Rachel Argyle, wife and mother of five adopted children, was bludgeoned to death. Her son Jacko was tried and imprisoned, and he died after 6 months in prison. Calgary explains that Jacko is innocent of murder, because his alibi was true. Calgary is the man who gave Jacko a ride to town and talked with him, when the murder was known to happen. Calgary is confused by the family’s reaction to his news. It had been difficult to face them with his failure to appear by the time of the trial, yet no one is pleased at his effort for justice. Brother Mickey Argyle realises immediately that there is a murderer among them still, and visits Calgary in his hotel room to tell him. As the new police investigations proceed, they suspect in turn his father Leo, his brother Mickey, his sisters Mary, Tina and Hester, his father’s secretary Gwenda, and the long-time housekeeper Kirsten. Calgary visits the defense lawyer, who gives him more details of the event and some insights into the family, and the position in which the news puts them. Calgary feels he must now assist the family in the new situation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pale_Horse"title="The Pale Horse">
A dying woman, Mrs Davis, gives her last confession to Father Gorman, a Roman Catholic priest, but along with her confession she gives him a list of names and a terrible secret. Before he can take action, however, he is struck dead in the fog. As the police begin to investigate, a young hero begins to piece together evidence that sets him upon a converging path.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Caribbean_Mystery"title="A Caribbean Mystery">
This story takes place at the Golden Palm resort on the Caribbean island of St Honoré. Miss Marple's nephew has paid for her to holiday there after a bout of ill health. She speaks with Major Palgrave, a well-travelled man with many stories to share. She sits, half listening, until Palgrave tells a story about a man who got away with murder more than once. When Palgrave asks her if she wants to see a picture of a murderer, she listens intently – but after he finds the snapshot in his wallet, he suddenly changes the subject. Miss Marple looks up to see why and spots several people nearby.The next day, when the maid Victoria finds Major Palgrave dead in his room, Miss Marple is convinced he was murdered. She asks Dr Graham to find the photo he mentioned, pretending it is of her nephew, but it is not found. Meanwhile, she interviews the others: Tim and Molly Kendal, owners of the hotel; the Prescotts, a clergyman and his sister; Mr Jason Rafiel, a tycoon confined to a wheelchair; Jackson, his nurse/masseur/attendant/valet; Esther Walters, his secretary; the American Lucky Dyson and her husband, Greg; and Edward and Evelyn Hillingdon. On the beach, Miss Marple sees Señora de Caspearo, a woman on holiday who says she remembers Major Palgrave because he had an evil eye. Miss Marple corrects her that he had a glass eye, but she still says that it was evil.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Girl"title="Third Girl">
Norma Restarick seeks help from Poirot, believing she may have committed murder. When she sees him in person, she flees, saying he is too old. He pursues the case finding that Ariadne Oliver sent Norma to him. He believes there is a murder that prompted Norma's fears. Poirot and Mrs Oliver gather information, visiting her parents’ home and her apartment building. Norma does not return home after a weekend visit to her father and stepmother. Mrs Oliver finds her in a café by chance with her boyfriend David. Poirot meets Norma at the café, where she mentions the death again. After describing the odd times where she cannot recall what has happened she leaves in fear again. Mrs Oliver trails David, ending up in the hospital after being coshed on the head upon leaving his art studio. Poirot arranges for Dr Stillingfleet to follow Norma; he pulls her to safety from a close call with speeding traffic and brings her to his place for treatment and for safety.Norma's father Andrew abandoned her and her mother Grace when Norma was about 5 years old. Andrew had run off with a woman in a relationship that ended soon after. He travelled in Africa in financially successful ventures. Norma lived with her mother until Grace's death two and a half years before. Andrew returned to England after his brother Simon died a year earlier, to work in the family firm, arriving with a new young wife, Mary. Norma can recognize nothing familiar in this man, but accepts him. Norma is the third girl in her flat in the fashion of young women advertising for a third girl to share the rent. The main tenant, Claudia, is secretary to her newfound father; the other girl, Frances, travels often for the art gallery that employs her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_to_Frankfurt"title="Passenger to Frankfurt">
Sir Stafford Nye's flight home from Malaya takes an unexpected twist, when a woman approaches him in the Frankfurt Airport. The woman claims that her life is in danger, and that she needs his help. Nye agrees to lend her his travelling cloak, passport, and boarding ticket. A colleague in London, Horsham of Security, tells Nye that his action in Frankfurt saved Mary Ann's life; Sir Stafford heard another name announced for her at the airport, Daphne Theodofanous. Nye has dinner with his friend Eric, worried for his professional reputation. Mary Ann returns his passport, taped into a magazine in his post. Nye advertises in the personals section of the newspaper for his mystery woman, signing himself as Passenger to Frankfurt. She replies with tickets to an opera, given at a discreet meeting on a bridge. His great-aunt Matilda hints to him of a terrible world-wide conspiracy, which uses a phrase of music from Richard Wagner, related to the opera "Siegfried" (1876). Matilda detects that he has a woman in his life now.The opera is "Siegfried", part of "The Ring of the Nibelung" by Wagner. The mystery woman attends only the second half, leaving Nye the tune for young Siegfried marked on a copy of the program, a motif for what she is doing. He attends an embassy party, given by the American ambassador and his wife, Sam and Mildred Cortman. Mary Ann is there, under her real name, Countess Renata Zerkowski. She offers Nye a ride home, but takes him instead to the home of Mr Robinson the financier, where they meet Colonel Pikeaway, Lord Altamount, James Kleek and Horsham. Nye is not seen for a while, as he has been accepted by the close-knit group of British intelligence to aid in accomplishing the tasks Mary Ann has taken on. They travel extensively. Mary Ann warns Nye that one among their own group is probably a traitor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(Christie_novel)"title="Nemesis (Christie novel)">
Miss Marple receives a letter from the solicitors of the recently deceased Jason Rafiel, a millionaire whom she had met during a holiday on which she had encountered a murder, which asks her to look into an unspecified crime; if she succeeds in solving the crime, she will inherit £20,000. Rafiel has left her few clues. She begins by joining a tour of famous British houses and gardens with fifteen other people, arranged by Mr Rafiel prior to his death. Elizabeth Temple is the retired school headmistress who relates the story of Verity, who was engaged to Rafiel's ne'er-do-well son, Michael, but the marriage did not happen. Another member of the tour group, Miss Cooke, is a woman she had met briefly in St Mary Mead.Her next clue comes from Lavinia Glynne; Rafiel had written to Mrs Glynne and her two sisters before his death, suggesting Miss Marple spend the most physically challenging few days of the tour with them at the Old Manor House. Miss Marple accepts Lavinia's invitation. She then meets Lavinia's spinster sisters, Clotilde and Anthea Bradbury-Scott. Touring the grounds, Miss Marple notices a creeping plant about to bloom, polygonum baldschuanicum covering the wreck of the greenhouse. On talking with the servant, Miss Marple learns Verity joined the family after both her parents died, becoming quite attached to Clotilde. Verity is dead now, brutally murdered. Michael Rafiel is in prison.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postern_of_Fate"title="Postern of Fate">
Tommy and Tuppence have decided to retire. They have purchased a new residence for themselves, called the Laurels. The residence is located in Hollowquay, a resort town. The couple have inherited the library of the Laurels' previous owners, and Tuppence decides to sort through its collection of children's books. She examines a copy of "" (1888), as she recalls reading this novel in her youth. Inside the book, Tuppence finds a hidden message: "Mary Jordan did not die naturally. It was one of us. I think I know which one. Tuppence searches for the grave of Mary Jordan, but is unable to locate it. She instead finds the grave of Alexander Parkinson, who was the book's original owner and the message's writer. Alexander had died at age 14. Investigating the past of the Parkinson household, Tuppence finds out that Mary Jordan was an au pair who worked for the Parkinsons. Mary reportedly died accidentally, poisoned by eating lethal foxglove leaves. The leaves had been mixed into a salad that she ate. The death supposedly occurred 60 years before the present.Tommy and Tuppence gather information about Mary from aging villagers. They learn that she was involved in "secret government affairs", involving the plans for the development of a new submarine. Tommy contacts his former associates in British intelligence, who confirm this information. The Beresfords learn that Mary was herself a British secret agent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exultant_(novel)"title="Exultant (novel)">
"Exultant" is set in Baxter's "Xeelee Sequence" twenty thousand years into the Third Expansion of Mankind, "a titanic project undertaken by a mankind united by the Doctrines forged by Hama Druz after mankind's near extinction." The human-supremacist Interim Coalition of Governance has conquered almost the whole Milky Way — all but the alien Xeelee concentrated at the galactic core around a supermassive black hole called Chandra. The mysterious Xeelee are far more advanced but less numerous than the humans, and the war has been at a stalemate for three millennia even though the entire Coalition has been directed toward the war effort and ten billion humans die at the front every year. In a war fought with faster-than-light technology (equivalent to time travel), each side has foreknowledge of the other's actions and can develop counter-measures to plans before they are made.Pirius is a fighter pilot stationed at the front. When a battle turns to disaster for the Coalition forces, he disobeys suicide orders to stand and fight, choosing instead to risk survival. In a desperate gamble to outrun a pursuing Xeelee, Pirius captures a Xeelee fighter for the first time in history. Returning to base via FTL travel, he arrives two years previous to the battle, when his younger self is still a cadet. Rather than being lauded as a hero, both instances of Pirius are court-martialed for disobeying orders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boat_of_a_Million_Years"title="The Boat of a Million Years">
The novel follows a group of eleven immortals from the ancient past to the distant future. Most of the novel follows the various immortals throughout their lives as they try to find others like themselves, avoid being killed, and remain quiet about their gift. Gradually, the immortals begin to meet across the world and form a family of sorts. After they share their secret of immortality with the rest of humanity, the ensuing years result in a human culture they no longer relate to or in which they fit. Consequently, they create and crew a starship to explore new civilizations within the galaxy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zadig"title="Zadig">
Zadig, a good-hearted, handsome young man from Babylonia, is in love with Sémire and they are to marry. Sémire, however, has another suitor: Orcan, who wants her for himself. Zadig tries to defend his love from Orcan's threat, but his eye is injured in the process. Sémire abhors this injury, causing her to depart with his enemy. Shortly after, Zadig makes a full recovery and falls into the arms of another woman, Azora, whom he marries, but who promptly betrays him.Disillusioned with women, Zadig turns to science, but his knowledge lands him in prison, the first of several injustices to befall him. Indeed, the "conte" derives its pace and rhythm from the protagonist's ever-changing fortunes which see him rise to great heights and fall to great lows. Upon his release from prison, Zadig rises in favour with the king and queen of Babylonia and is eventually appointed prime minister; in this role, he proves himself to be a very honest man, looked upon favourably by the king, as he passes fair judgements on his citizens unlike the other ministers who base their judgements on the people's wealth. He is forced to flee the kingdom, though, when his relationship with King Moabdar is compromised: Zadig's reciprocated love for queen Astarté is discovered and he worries that the king's desire for revenge might drive him to kill the queen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cookie_Monster_(novella)"title="The Cookie Monster (novella)">
The story begins following the first day of Dixie Mae Leigh's job as a customer support employee at a fictional company called Lotsatech. She receives an insulting and mysterious email and, in a fit of rage, decides to find out who sent it. She and a fellow employee Victor search the Lotsatech campus looking for the author of the email, following clues in the email header. They meet up with Ellen, a grad student in computer science, who decides to try to help Dixie Mae.While they talk, several mysteries arise and convince them that the email may be a kind of warning about something going on at Lotsatech involving a professor named Gerry Reich, who seems to be involved in all the projects on the campus. Ellen finds another clue in the email leading the three to another building where, to their utter astonishment, a second Ellen appears. The only explanation of this is that they are being simulated by a computer. Further clues from another person in the building lead them to an underground lab where they find two researchers working on improving methods of producing and preserving Bose–Einstein condensates.When Dixie Mae and the Ellens reveal that they are all actually simulations, the researchers explore the email and find a clue that leads them to a 'cookie', a file that is passed from each iteration to the next with messages from the centuries of time they have been simulated over and over. They also find out that it was actually Dixie Mae herself who wrote the email in order to make it as offensive as possible to herself, allowing each iteration of the researchers to access the cookie. The story ends with a sad Dixie Mae realizing she can't do anything herself to stop the endless cycle they are all in, but through the passing of information and ideas from one iteration to the next someday they will have the ability to stop the simulations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Want_a_Dog"title="I Want a Dog">
May wants a dog more than anything else in the world, and, at school, often imagines that everyone in her class are dogs too. But no matter how much she wants one, her parents often say no to the offer.One day, May tries to show them her such determination by luring, with salami, a pack of ten dogs to her home. But her mother wants them returned, and some time later, May buys a puppy for her mother's birthday using all of her allowance. It does not work to plan, and that same evening, May's parents discuss the trials and tribulations of raising dogs as pets.Still, as to May having a dog of her own, both of them object, and this leads to their daughter throwing her toys all over her room in outrage. It is not long before May sees one of her white rollerskates roll down the nearby staircase like a dog, which gives her an idea: along with a self-built training course, she can train that skate just like she would a real dog! Her school friends, hearing of her idea and amused at first, want to try walking it.Another day, May arrives at the neighbourhood luncheonette to check out the newest comic books, leaving her skate outside. Little does she know that her "dog" is being interrogated by a real one! The latter runs away with it, and afterwards, May panics about its whereabouts. With her "try, try again" attitude, she is reunited with the skate by finding it nearby.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Garden_of_Iden"title="In the Garden of Iden">
This novel is the first in a series about "The Company" and its servants, human and otherwise. The series continues with "Sky Coyote", "Mendoza in Hollywood", "The Graveyard Game", and "The Life of the World to Come". The collection "Black Projects, White Knights" consists of Company stories, and there are allusions in the collection "Mother Ægypt and Other Stories".The story is told by Mendoza, a cyborg botanist. In the introduction, she describes a 24th-century organization called Dr. Zeus Inc., or simply "The Company". The Company has the secrets of immortality and time travel. Unfortunately the immortality treatment can only be used on young children; and time travel is difficult, expensive, and only possible when going into the past and returning to your own time. History cannot be changed.Dr. Zeus uses the technology simply to get rich. By travelling far into prehistory, the company creates its own immortal cyborg agents, who then have the mission of preserving cultural artifacts and other valuable items for sale in the 24th century. Usually these items are hidden in safe places, but in the case of extinct species, for instance, they are kept in secret Company caches run by the cyborgs. In the 24th century the Company then 'finds' the long-lost objects and sells them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Takes_a_Village"title="It Takes a Village">
The book emphasizes the shared responsibility that society has for successfully raising children, by looking at a number of angles as indicated in the chapter titles noted above. Clinton describes herself in the book as a Moderate, which is evidenced by a combination of advocating for government-driven social reforms while also espousing conservative values.Clinton notes in the book many institutions responsible in some way for raising children, including: direct family, grandparents, neighbors, teachers, ministers, doctors, employers, politicians, nonprofits, faith communities, businesses, and international governmental groups.Some of the goals and institutions that Clinton advocates for in the book include: the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, Community Policing, the Brady Bill, Amber Alerts, immunizations, State Children's Health Insurance Program, financial regulation, expanded Child Tax Credits, Minimum Wage increases, Universal health care, personal responsibility, uniforms in schools, Goals 2000 academic framework, music warning labels, sexual abstinence, Plan B contraception, family planning, and marriage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Nocturne"title="Manhattan Nocturne">
Porter Wren is a columnist and crime reporter for a New York City newspaper. He is a popular journalist and his stories are widely read. Wren knows how to listen to people and there are people who just need to talk, especially to him. He attends an after-work party hosted by the publishing magnate, where he meets Caroline Crowley.Mrs. Crowley was recently widowed by the mysterious murder of her husband Simon Crowley. Crowley was a brilliant movie director who would often just disappear at night to videotape stuff. Crowley's body was discovered in a sealed-off building that was about to be demolished. No one could figure out how the body got there.Caroline invites him to her apartment where she shows him confidential police reports related to the death of her husband. She wants Porter to investigate the murder and as an incentive seduces him even though he is married with children. What follows is a twisted tale of sex, murder and blackmail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_School_(novel)"title="Old School (novel)">
The book is narrated by a school senior ("sixth former" in prep-school vernacular) at an unnamed elite boarding school in the northeastern United States in 1960–61. The unnamed protagonist is a scholarship student who comes from a middle-class family.He aspires to be a writer, and the school he attends is an embodiment of a certain kind of academic fantasy, where non-English masters (teachers are "masters" here) "floated at the fringe of [the English masters'] circle, as if warming themselves at a fire," and literature is still believed to hold the key to the soul. Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Ernest Hemingway, with each of whom the narrator crosses paths, appear in the story, dispensing wisdom, pseudo-wisdom, vitriol. These literary appearances amount to creative satires of these authors, especially Ayn Rand. The novel revolves around themes of adolescence, class, and the role of literature.The Penguin Random House publisher's blurb describes the book thus:In his review for the "New York Times", critic A.O. Scott writes that "Old School" is "about nothing if not the making of a writer — though it is also, just as plainly, about a writer's failure."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Icarus_Agenda"title="The Icarus Agenda">
Evan Kendrick is a U.S. Congressman from a remote Western Colorado district. As a former building contractor in the Middle East, he is close friends with the Sultan of Oman. He returns to Oman under deep cover when the U.S. Embassy in Masqat is taken by terrorists. During his time undercover he unmasks a far-reaching terror network aimed at controlling the economies and governments of the Middle East.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felidae_(novel)"title="Felidae (novel)">
Francis, a European Shorthair, moves to a German neighbourhood with his bumbling owner, Gustav, into a poorly-maintained apartment with bad smells and rotting parquet flooring. Francis soon finds the corpse of another local cat, Sascha. Bluebeard (Blaubart in the original print), a deformed local cat, is convinced that humans (cat slang: "can-openers") are responsible for the death and other recent murders. Francis disagrees with this assessment, convinced that the slash on Sascha's neck was caused by teeth. The discovery of the body marks the start of terrible nightmares that afflict Francis and intertwine him with the murders. Another tomcat, "Deep Purple", is the next victim; while visiting the body, Francis notices Deep Purple's sexually-aroused state, suggesting a murderous femme fatale.That night, Francis hears loud yowls that are coming from the uninhabited upper floors of his house. He finds a strange religious meeting taking place, in which a cat named Joker preaches about a cat known as Claudandus, a Jesus Christ-like figure, who allegedly sacrificed himself and ascended to Heaven. Meanwhile, cats jump into frayed wires and electrocute themselves. Francis accidentally alerts Joker to his presence, and is chased by the cult members. He escapes and falls through a skylight. He then meets Felicity (Felicitas in the original print), a blind Russian Blue who has heard the murderer and his victims shortly before their death. Additionally, Felicity says that she sees images in her mind alongside feelings of fear and pain. Francis believes that the images are actually memories retained from childhood. After leaving Felicity's home, Bluebeard takes Francis to Pascal, an intelligent Havana Brown who has learned to use his owner's computer. With it, he has compiled a list of the local cats. Francis learns from Pascal that Felicity has just been reportedly murdered; her decapitated head is found while her beloved owner sobs over his pet's death. Francis experiences another nightmare that night, in which a large portrait of Gregor Mendel comes to life and plays with dead cats. Unnerved, Francis hunts for rats to distract himself and finds the journal of a "Professor Julius Preterius", a scientist who used the house as a laboratory years prior. Francis learns that Preterius was attempting to create a flesh-binding glue with assistants Ziebold and Gray, using living cats to test it. The glue is unsuccessful, and, desperate, Preterius uses the glue on a stray cat. Due to a genetic abnormality, the glue seals the wounds on the cat instantly. Preterius names the cat Claudandus ("one who must or should be sealed"). Preterius descends into madness, but continues with his project long after funding ceases and his assistants have left. The journal's last entry reveals that Preterius had heard Claudandus speak to him, and was planning to free the cats.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lords_of_the_Starship"title="Lords of the Starship">
In the far future, on an Earth devastated by millennia of war, the Caroline Republic is hostile towards its neighbors despite sharing their dire economic straits. Outside the declining remains of civilization lie ruins and wastelands populated by mutants and monsters. It is generally felt that humanity lost its vitality long ago.To a leading politician of the Caroline the aged veteran General Toriman proposes a centuries-long scheme to build the nation by taking control of an ancient shipyard hundreds of miles away which was apparently designed to build spacecraft. Ostensibly, the purpose of the project will be the construction of a spaceship seven miles long called the "Victory" to carry the population of the despairing world to a paradise planet called "Home". In fact, the ship will never be completed, but the effort will revitalize the nation's economy and perhaps restore mankind's missing quality.General Toriman dies and the cynical politicians of the Republic rouse the population to begin the project. The River Road from the Caroline homeland to the Yards is forced with a bloody battle between a Caroline military force and mutants, during which the ghost of the ancient hero Miolnor IV appears to save the day.Work begins on constructing the ship. Despite their antiquity, the Yards' machinery and buildings seem to have been perfectly preserved and materials for the construction of the ship are discovered. Legends say that the fortifications still standing nearby defended human civilization against Dark Powers over the mountains to the west.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_in_Revolt"title="Youth in Revolt">
The book's main protagonist is Nicholas "Nick" Twisp, a 14-year-old boy of above-average intelligence from Oakland, California. Nick's life continues like a normal teenager's with his best friend Leroy, a.k.a. Lefty, and his divorced parents George and Estelle. His mother is dating a truck driver named Jerry, who sells a group of sailors a Chevy Nova that dies soon after the sailors get it. In response, the sailors go for revenge. After outsmarting them, Jerry strategically decides to take a vacation, so they all go to a religious mobile home camp in the resort town of Clearlake.It is there that Nick meets Sheridan "Sheeni" Saunders and his life is turned completely upside down. Through plots to get Sheeni closer to him he ends up with several crimes on his hands (including arson, grand theft auto, and foul play) and is forced to run from the police. Nick tricks everyone into thinking he went to India, thereby escaping the police. Nick hides out with his sister Joanie and returns with help from his friend in Ukiah, Frank "Fuzzy" DeFalco. He dresses in Fuzzy's late grandmother's clothes, adopting the name Carlotta and a conservative disposition. As Nick does so, he befriends Sheeni and several other people who Nick knew before. While spending the night with Sheeni on Christmas Eve, she reveals to him that she knew from the beginning it was him, not Carlotta. Nick then gets "the best Christmas present a youth could receive," starting a secret relationship with Sheeni.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse_and_the_Motorcycle"title="The Mouse and the Motorcycle">
Ralph is a mouse who lives in the run-down Mountain View Inn, a battered resort hotel in the Sierra Nevada mountain range of California. Ralph longs for a life of danger and speed, wishing to get away from his relatives, who worry about the mice colony being discovered. One day a boy named Keith Gridley and his family visit the hotel on their way through California. Keith leaves a toy motorcycle on his bedside table. While Keith is away, Ralph attempts to ride it, but cannot figure out how to start it. Startled by a telephone ring, both Ralph and the motorcycle fall into a metal wastebasket.Keith discovers his missing motorcycle in the wastebasket. Although Ralph's mother worries that he is in contact with humans, Keith shows Ralph how to start the motorcycle—make an engine-like noise—and lets Ralph ride it at night. While Keith and his family explore California, Ralph recklessly rides the motorcycle through the depths of the hotel. One night he is spotted by Keith's mother, who initially thinks she is imagining things, but later is sure that she saw a mouse riding a motorcycle. Ralph and the motorcycle are almost sucked up by a maid's vacuum cleaner, but Ralph escapes, riding into a pile of linen and dirty bedsheets. He escapes by chewing holes in the sheets, forced to leave the precious vehicle behind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaroo_Notebook"title="Kangaroo Notebook">
One morning, while pondering the stress of his latest assignment at his uninspiring job, the narrator of "Kangaroo Notebook" feels an itching on his leg that seems to indicate an unusual hair loss. The next morning he wakes to discover that he has daikon radish sprouts emerging from his shins. After battling to be seen in his local medical clinic, he enters a hospital, where a physician prescribes hot-spring therapy in Hell Valley.Hooked to a penile catheter and an IV bottle, the narrator begins a harrowing journey on his hospital bed through the underworld that seems to lie beneath the city streets. Here he seeks, not so much health, as simple explanations for what is happening to him and the strange people he meets: abusive ferrymen, waif-like demons, vampire nurses, and a chiropractor who runs a karate school and has a side job carrying out euthanasia procedures.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Face_of_Another"title="The Face of Another">
An industrial accident has severely burned the face of Mr. Okuyama, a plastics scientist. His wife is repulsed by his disfigurement and refuses to have sexual contact with him. In an effort to regain the affection of his wife, he attempts to create a prosthetic mask in a rented apartment. With this new "face," the protagonist sees the world in a new way and begins a clandestine affair with his estranged wife. Although the mask gives Okuyama newfound freedom, at the end of the story, it becomes difficult to determine if the mask has taken ownership of the man or the man has taken ownership of the face.There is also a subplot following a "hibakusha" woman who has suffered burns to the right side of her face. In the novel, the protagonist sees this character in a film; in the film version, this is deliberately obscured.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter_Ice_Age_4"title="Inter Ice Age 4">
Plot elements include submersion of the world caused by melting polar ice, genetic creation of gilled children for the coming underwater age, and a fortune-telling computer predicting the future and advising humans how to deal with it. Because a similar computer in Moscow is being used to make political forecasts, the institute of a Tokyo professor decides to avoid politics and try to foresee the future of an individual. A man is picked, apparently at random, only to be murdered before he can be programmed, but the computer can still read his mind. The resulting involvements are complicated by a climatic shift – Inter Ice Age 4 – that puts Earth underwater.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Barracks_Thief"title="The Barracks Thief">
In Fort Bragg, North Carolina, three recent paratrooper training graduates are temporarily attached to an airborne infantry company as they await orders to report to Vietnam. Because most of the men in the company fought together in Vietnam, the three newcomers are treated as outsiders and ignored. When money and personal property are discovered missing from the barracks, suspicion falls on the three newcomers. The narrative structure of the book contains several shifts of tone and point of view as the story unfolds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_James_Bond_Junior_003½"title="The Adventures of James Bond Junior 003½">
The plot follows James Bond Junior while he tries to uncover what is going on at Hazeley Hall. He and Sheelagh Smith, his "girlfriend," follow the clues of this mystery, but the information is given to the commander of the police, Sir Cuthbert Conningtower, when James is injured. Conningtower ultimately gets the credit for solving the case and threatens James if he says anything.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalki_(novel)"title="Kalki (novel)">
James J. Kelly, a former soldier in the American military, finds out that the American and Soviet governments are about to conduct tests of a new kind of neutron bomb called the "model b" or the nC, which will kill every living thing on the planet, leaving it uninhabitable for centuries. The American generals know the cataclysmic effects of conducting these tests but they acquiesce to the tests anyway, ignoring a report provided to the National Security Council which predicts the end of the world if six or more nCs are simultaneously exploded. Mistakenly assured that the Soviets would not explode reciprocating nCs, the generals are unwittingly about to destroy the whole world.Kelly decides to save the human race through an elaborate religious hoax, declaring himself to be Kalki and announcing the end of the world. His secret plan is to kill off everyone in the world except for himself and his wife Lakshmi. They would become the Adam and Eve to a new human race by giving birth to three sons and six daughters over the next twelve years, who would then intermarry; in approximately two centuries the world would be fairly well populated again.In addition to himself and his wife, Kalki decides to bring along three more people to his new world, teachers called Perfect Masters, chosen for their knowledge and the fact that they are all sterile. These three people will teach various fields of science to the new race. Teddy Ottinger will teach engineering, Geraldine O'Connor biology and genetics, and Dr. Giles Lowell medicine. Kalki's wife Lakshmi is herself a physicist, and Kalki is a chemical engineer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilse_Witch"title="Ilse Witch">
Set 130 years after the events of the Heritage of Shannara series, the Free-born and the Federation are still at war. The story follows a quest organized by Walker Boh, the last surviving Shannara Druid. Thirty years before the story begins, the Elven prince Kael Elessedil led an expedition in search of a legendary magic which was said to be the most ancient and powerful in the world.At the beginning of the narrative, Kael is found floating in the sea of the Blue Divide; a map is found with him, covered with mysterious symbols. Walker is the only man who can read them.But there is another: the Ilse Witch, a beautiful but twisted young woman who is as practiced in magic as Walker himself. She will stop at nothing to possess the map and the magic it leads to. To stop her, Walker must find the magic first.Thus begins the voyage of the sleek, swift airship, the "Jerle Shannara". The company chosen by Walker must fly into the face of unknown terrors while the Ilse Witch and her dark allies pursue.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bear_That_Wasn't"title="The Bear That Wasn't">
A bear settles down for his hibernation and while he sleeps, the progress of man continues. He wakes up to find himself in the middle of an industrial complex, where he gets mistaken by the foreman for a worker and thus is ordered to get to work. When the bear responds that he doesn't work there, and that he's is a bear and not a human, the foreman takes the bear to each of his successive bosses (general manager and a trio of vice-presidents, all of whom tell him their own version of him merely being a "silly man who needs a shave and wears a fur coat"), reaching all the way up to the elderly president of the factory, who concludes he cannot be a bear because "bears are only in a zoo or a circus; they're never inside a factory." Eventually, he concludes that he is indeed a "silly man" and promptly buckles down to work hard at the factory – much to the satisfaction of the foreman and the other bosses, all of whom shake hands happily as the bear works.Months later, the factory closes for the winter and the bear finds himself turned out of doors in the cold snow, wishing that he were a bear. Finally, he realizes that he is indeed a bear after all and – whilst discarding the trappings of his human existence – seeks out a cave to hibernate, which he enters feeling comfortable and bear-like once more.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antrax"title="Antrax">
The voyage to find the lost magic takes the companions to the continent of Parkasia. Here, they are split up, and Walker, despite all his plans and his enormous power, finds himself caught and trapped by an unseen force, a supercomputer built by the ancient humans. Antrax was created to store data and information from its time and it is given a duty, an order to protect the information that it holds. However, when the Great War broke out, the last of its creators returned, and gave Antrax its final task: protect the information at all costs, no matter what the price. Antrax then began to build its own arsenal of defence mechanisms: lasers and Creepers.Above Castledown, the crew of the "Jerle Shannara" find themselves besieged by evil forces, and the Ilse Witch confronts the Druid's protégé, Bek Ohmsford, who claims that she is actually Grianne Ohmsford, and that he is the brother she last saw as an infant - now a young man who carries the Sword of Shannara and wields the magic of the wishsong. Truls Rohk keeps protecting Bek buying him time till the Ilse Witch finally takes up the Sword of Shannara to realize the truth of her life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgawr_(novel)"title="Morgawr (novel)">
The Morgawr is a centuries-old sorcerer of unimaginable might, who feeds upon the souls of his enemies. With a fleet of airships and a crew of walking dead men at his command, he is in relentless pursuit of the Jerle Shannara. His goal is twofold: to find and control the fabled 'magic' of Parkasia, and to destroy the Ilse Witch (his disciple) to keep her from using the magic to destroy him. He gets more annoyed when Ahren Elessedil escapes his imprisonment and the seer, Ryer Ord Star is able to lead him astray as directed by Walker even at his death.When Walker Boh persuades the witch to use the Sword of Shannara, she is exposed to its awesome power and forced to confront the truth of her horrifying deeds as the Ilse Witch, causing her to flee deep into her own mind. She has only one protector: her brother Bek, who is determined to redeem her. In the last stand taken by crew of Jerle Shannara, Redden Alt Mer alone destroys all of Morgawr's fleet after stealing the lead ship and using it against them. Bek and Rue kills the company of mwellret led by Cree Bega, while Cree Bega is killed by Ahren Elessedil. Bek finally reaches the confrontation of Grianne and Morgawr to find his sister already in trouble and triggers a feeble magic of his wish-song just enough to raise the spirit of castle, hence destroys the Morgawr.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarrasine"title="Sarrasine">
Around midnight during a ball the narrator is sitting at a window, out of sight, admiring the garden. He overhears the conversations of passers-by regarding the origins of the wealth of the mansion's owner, Monsieur de Lanty. There is also the presence of an unknown old man around the house, to whom the family was oddly devoted, and who frightened and intrigued the partygoers. When the man sits next to the narrator's guest, Beatrix de Rochefide, she touches him, and the narrator rushes her out of the room. The narrator says he knows who the man is and says he will tell her his story the next evening.The next evening, the narrator tells Mme de Rochefide about Ernest-Jean Sarrasine, a passionate, artistic boy, who after having trouble in school became a protégé of the sculptor Bouchardon. After one of Sarrasine's sculptures wins a competition, he heads to Rome where he sees a theatre performance featuring Zambinella. He falls in love with her, going to all of her performances and creating a clay mold of her. After spending time together at a party, Sarrasine attempts to seduce Zambinella. She is reticent, suggesting some hidden secret or danger of their partnership. Sarrasine becomes increasingly convinced that Zambinella is the ideal woman. Sarrasine develops a plan to abduct her from a party at the French embassy. When Sarrasine arrives, Zambinella is dressed as a man. Sarrasine speaks to a cardinal, who is Zambinella's patron, and is told that Zambinella is a castrato. Sarrasine refuses to believe it and leaves the party, seizing Zambinella. Once they are at his studio, Zambinella confirms that she is a castrato. Sarrasine is about to kill him as a group of the cardinal's men barge in and stab Sarrasine. The narrator then reveals that the old man around the household is Zambinella, Marianina's maternal great uncle. The story ends with Mme de Rochefide's expressing her distress about the story she has just been told.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_David"title="I Am David">
12-year-old David has lived in a concentration camp for as long as he can remember.David was a strong, brave, and intelligent boy who had been ripped away from his mother and put into a dreadful camp. His only friend in the camp, Johannes, died sometime before from a heart attack, as is revealed in a flashback in Chapter 1. One of the commandants has been keeping an eye on David, making sure he is fed properly and taking his vitamins. This guard sets up the escape, gives him some soap, and leaves a sack outside the camp fence with bread, a bottle of water, and a compass in it. David must go south to Salonika, find a boat to Italy, then travel north to a free country that has a king.David finds a truck headed for Salonika, and without realizing it, climbs on board. He eats some of the food inside and when the truck stops, he jumps out. He finds a boat labelled "Italy" and sneaks in. After hiding for a few days and getting quite drunk from drinking wine, he is found. Thankfully, the Italian sailor decides to help David escape by lowering him down the side of the ship with a lifebelt on. He floats to land and, after climbing for a little way, promptly falls asleep.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cry_to_Heaven"title="Cry to Heaven">
Set in eighteenth-century Italy, "Cry to Heaven" focuses on two characters, peasant-born Guido Maffeo, who is castrated at the age of six to preserve his soprano voice, and fifteen-year-old Tonio Treschi, the last son of a noble family from the Republic of Venice, whose father, Andrea, is a member of the Council of Three of "La Serenissima". Although Guido becomes a star of the opera as a teenager, he loses his voice at eighteen, as many castrati did. After a suicide attempt, he becomes a music teacher in the Naples conservatorio. Tonio, on the other hand, learns that his older brother Carlo was exiled for embarrassing the family. Although Andrea attempts to cut Carlo out of the family, Carlo returns after Andrea's death, and plots to regain his original position. Revealing that Tonio is actually his illegitimate son, he has Tonio castrated, and sends him off with Guido to study in Naples.Although everyone in Venice is inclined to believe that Carlo was behind his castration, Tonio cannot accuse him of the crime because doing so would result in the extinction of the Treschi family. After some soul-searching, he decides to remain in Naples and study under Guido, holding off on revenge until after Carlo and his mother (also Carlo's lover and later wife) have children to ensure the family line.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Today_We_Choose_Faces"title="Today We Choose Faces">
The story is set, like many Zelazny pure science fiction novels, a few centuries in the future. The narrator, a Mafia assassin named Angelo di Negri, has been revived from suspended animation by the mostly legitimate successors of the criminal organization, and given a mission to assassinate a scientist on a fortified facility on an otherwise uninhabited planet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellwether_(novel)"title="Bellwether (novel)">
The main character, Dr. Sandra Foster, studies fads in Boulder, Colorado. Her employer, Hi-Tek, wants to know how to predict fads, in order to take advantage of this knowledge and thus to possibly create one. While Dr. Foster is extensively researching and analysing fads, Hi-Tek itself is swept by management fads. In addition, the Management wants one of its employees to win the mysterious Niebnitz Research Grant (the fictitious award is very similar to the MacArthur Fellowship's Genius Grant). Meanwhile, the employees struggle with chaos created by a self-centered administrative assistant. Willis uses humor to come to an unsettling conclusion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribulations_of_a_Chinaman_in_China"title="Tribulations of a Chinaman in China">
Kin-Fo is an extremely wealthy man who certainly does not lack material possessions. However, he is terribly bored and when news reaches him about his major investment abroad, a bank in the United States, going bankrupt, Kin-Fo decides to die. He signs up for a $200,000 life insurance covering all kinds of accidents, death in war, and even suicide; the philosopher Wang (Kin-Fo's old mentor) and Kin-Fo's fiancée are to be the beneficiaries. He rejects seppuku and hanging as means of dying, and is about to take opium laced with poison when he decides that he doesn't want to die without having ever felt a thrill in his life. Kin-Fo hires Wang (actually a former warrior of the Taiping Rebellion) to murder him before the life insurance expires.After a while news reaches Kin-Fo that the American bank he had invested in was not bankrupt, but instead had pulled off a stock market trick and is now wealthier than ever. Unfortunately, Wang has already disappeared. Together with two bodyguards assigned by the insurance company, and his loyal but lazy and incompetent servant Soun, Kin-Fo travels around the country in an effort to run away from Wang and the humiliation from the affair.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_End_(Sinclair_novel)"title="World's End (Sinclair novel)">
Thirteen-year-old Lanny Budd, spending the summer of 1913 at a Dalcroze Eurhythmics school near Dresden, vows lifelong friendship and dedication to art with fellow students Kurt Meissner, scion of a German ruling family in Silesia in Prussia; and Rick Pomeroy-Nielson, an English Viscount's son from Oxford. Author Upton Sinclair weaves Lanny and these two friends, and many other characters in this book, into the saga of the turbulent decades to follow in the eleven-volume Lanny Budd series.Lanny was raised on the French Riviera by his mother, called Beauty. His father, Robbie, visits regularly from Connecticut while selling arms manufactured by the family-owned Budd Gunmakers. Robbie never married Beauty, but he set up a perpetual trust for Beauty and Lanny to live in a seafront villa at Juan-les-Pins, near Cannes. Lanny, without formal schooling, has grown up with languages, music, and the society of Beauty's wealthy, connected friends. Robbie teaches Lanny history and diplomacy needed for a Budd to sell arms to European powers. Basil Zaharoff, a brilliant and dangerous competitor, runs arms giant Vickers and plots to absorb Budd.Perplexing incidents intrude on young Lanny's idyllic life. Robbie erupts when he learns Beauty's "Red" brother Jesse introduced Lanny to followers of syndicalism. On the train home from a picture-postcard Christmas at Kurt's family schloss, a Social Democrat says commoners in Silesia are basically slaves; and Lanny should avoid being alone with certain Prussian aristocrats, including Kurt's father. Also on the train, Lanny meets the charming Johannes Robin, a Jewish jobber from Rotterdam; Lanny wonders why Jews have been absent from his life. Back in France, a Russian baron whom Lanny trusted lures and assaults the handsome boy. Beauty, faced with Lanny's new questions about life, hires a psychiatrist and a tutor for him. Lanny absorbs the new knowledge and realizes that a painter friend, Marcel Detaze, is Beauty's lover.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderful_Fool"title="Wonderful Fool">
One day Takamori, a young man living with his mother and dominant younger sister Tomoe, receives a letter from Singapore. After a while they manage to decipher the unusually poor Japanese, and figure out that Gaston Bonaparte, a man who used to be a pen friend of Takamori during his school days, will soon arrive in Japan. On the expected day, they find the poorly dressed Gaston (a striking contrast to his more famous relative, in the eyes of his Japanese hosts) in the cheapest class, deep down in the ship.Gaston immediately befriends a stray dog (who he initially calls 犬さん - "Mr. Dog", but later renames "Napoleon"), who is to follow him for most of the story but he is eventually captured by the dog catcher and killed. After staying a few days at Takamori and Tomoe's home, Gaston decides to carry on his mysterious mission in Japan. He ends up checking into a Love hotel in Shibuya with his dog, attracting some strange looks from the owner. During the night Gaston manages to help a thieving prostitute escape (although mostly due to misunderstanding the situation), which gets him kicked out of the hotel in the middle of the night, but she gets him food and puts him in contact with an old fortune teller, who makes Gaston his assistant. Soon Gaston is kidnapped by a gangster planning to murder two old army officers for revenge. Gaston tries to talk the man, Endo, out of his violent plans. When this doesn't work, he simply steals the bullets from Endo's gun, thus making the victim able to run away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poirot_Investigates"title="Poirot Investigates">
## The Adventure of the Western Star.Poirot receives a visit from Miss Mary Marvell, the famous American film star on her visit to London. She has received three letters, handed to her by a Chinese man, which warn her to return her fabulous diamond jewel, the "Western Star", to where it came from – the left eye of an idol – before the next full moon. Her husband, Gregory Rolf, who bought it from a Chinese man in San Francisco, gave Mary the jewel three years ago. The pair are going to stay at Yardly Chase, the home of Lord and Lady Yardly when the moon is next full to discuss the making of a film there and Mary is determined to go with her diamond. Both Poirot and Hastings remember society gossip from three years back that linked Rolf and Lady Yardly. The Yardlys also own an identical diamond that came from the right eye of the idol – the Star of the East. After Mary has gone Poirot goes out and Hastings receives a visit from Lady Yardly, who was advised to visit Poirot by her friend Mary Cavendish. Hastings deduces that she too has received warning letters. Her husband plans to sell their jewel as he is in debt. When Poirot learns this he arranges to visit Yardly Chase and is there when the lights go out and Lady Yardly is attacked by a Chinese man and her jewel stolen. The next day, Mary's jewel is stolen from her London hotel. Poirot makes his investigations and returns the Yardlys' jewel to them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_Attempt"title="Escape Attempt">
The novel tells a story of two young men from Earth, "Anton" and "Vadim", who decide to go for a trip to Pandora, but are persuaded rather to travel to an uncharted planet by a mysterious man whom they know as Saul Repnin. Their choice is an unnamed planet in EN-7031 system, because that's where Gorbovsky and Bader predicted that Wanderers' traces could be found.After landing successfully on the planet (which they named Saula after Repnin), the explorers soon discover a local human civilization, as well as the predicted Wanderers' traces. The latter appear as a phenomenon later called "everlasting machines" and largely influence the entire local population. Despite the fact that it is strictly forbidden for them to initiate a contact with any human or alien civilization without an authorization from COMCON, they try to do just this - and fail, having misinterpreted the situation. What Anton and Vadim (who lived in Anarcho-communism) see as catastrophic is just a routine life in an early feudalistic society of Saula.Saul Repnin, who, as it was later uncovered, was from 20th-century Earth (a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, but originally in drafts he was a Soviet political prisoner) but shifted into the future (s.c. "time guest"), is so shocked to see a local civilization (even though it is not the Earth's one) commit just the same cruelties he saw in his time, that it causes a severe psychological crisis in him. Anton and Vadim decide that it's the best to leave the planet immediately. On arriving back to Earth, they discover that Saul has disappeared, leaving a short note, which partly explains who he was and that he wants to go back to continue his fight against the Nazis (he is armed with a guard's machine-gun).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornblower_in_the_West_Indies"title="Hornblower in the West Indies">
## St. Elizabeth of Hungary.Hornblower raises his flag in the schooner HMS "Crab" and pays a courtesy call at New Orleans. There, he learns of a plot by Napoleon's most loyal followers to liberate him from his exile on the isolated island of St Helena. Hornblower intercepts their ship, the "Daring", but is powerless to stop them by force; with no other choice, he is prepared to sacrifice his honour for the sake of peace in Europe. He lies to their leader, Count Cambronne, telling him that Napoleon has died. When he returns to port, he learns to his astonishment and relief that his lie was the truth, recalling Saint Elizabeth's miracle of the roses.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_Coyote"title="Sky Coyote">
The preceding novel, "In The Garden of Iden", introduced the Botanist Mendoza, from her time of recruitment in the dungeons of the Spanish Inquisition to her love affair with a mortal in Tudor England, followed by her being sent to base New World One in the Americas. Her recruiter and also her superior on the England mission was a much older operative, Joseph, who is the narrator of this novel. The story begins almost 150 years after Mendoza's arrival at New World One, when Joseph arrives there in the dying days of 1699 with a new mission in California. This episode focuses on operatives Lewis, Latif and Imarte, all of whom have roles in future stories.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Rainbow"title="Far Rainbow">
The novel tells the story of the Rainbow catastrophe of 2156. It starts very simple, as a Wave observer "Robert Sklyarov" notices an unusually persistent Wave and reports it to the "Capital" (the only city on the scientists' planet, whose primarily mission is conducting zero-transportation experiments, of which the Waves, destroying everything from the planet poles onward, are a sidekick). Simultaneously, "Camill" (the last remaining of "the Baker's Dozen") appears at his observation tower and tells him to leave it and fly south immediately. Sklyarov refuses to leave precious "ulmotrons" behind and urges Camill for help but when the wind front preceding the Wave strikes, the falling machinery seemingly kills Camill. Terrified Sklyarov flees south.Back in the Capital, everything is still quiet. Leonid Gorbovsky, whose "Tariel II" has delivered scientific equipment to Rainbow, pays a visit to "Matvei Vyazanitsyn", the general director of the planet, then returns to his ship, when the ominous news come. Camill contacts (via videophone) the nearest scientist village and issues a warning that the Wave Sklyarov saw is closely followed by another one of a new type. According to him, it cannot be stopped like the ones before and therefore the Rainbow world council must begin the evacuation of the planet immediately. At this moment the Wave reaches Camill's observation tower and he dies once again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_Transparent_Blue"title="Almost Transparent Blue">
Narrated by the main character Ryū, the novel focuses on his small group of young friends in the mid-1970s. Living in a Japanese town with an American air force base, their lives revolve around sex, drugs and rock 'n roll.The near-plotless story weaves a vividly raw, image-intensive journey through the daily monotony of drug-induced hallucinations, vicious acts of violence, overdoses, suicide, and group sex.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendoza_in_Hollywood"title="Mendoza in Hollywood">
The narrator is the botanist Mendoza. What we are reading is apparently her confession of why she deserted her post and ran away with a mortal, and then violently killed the six others responsible for his death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_Violets"title="March Violets">
Bernhard Gunther, a 38-year-old Berlin ex-cop turned private investigator, is hired in the summer of 1936 by rich industrialist Hermann Six to recover a diamond necklace stolen from his daughter Grete's house. As part of the robbery, it appears both his daughter and her husband, Paul Pfarr, were murdered and the house was torched.Through various informants, Gunther discovers that Paul Pfarr was an SS officer and at odds with his father-in-law Six, and was working to eradicate corruption in the government administration under orders from SS and Gestapo leader Heinrich Himmler. He also uncovers a link between Six's private secretary Hjalmar Haupthändler and Kurt Jeschonneck, a shady diamond dealer.The investigation then centers around a certain Von Greis, an aristocrat collecting blackmail material on important personalities for Hermann Göring, which Goering uses for political means. During the investigation Gunther meets Inge Lorenz, who becomes his assistant and, eventually, romantic interest. With Inge, Gunther follows various clues to try to find Kurt Mutschmann, the criminal who allegedly cracked the safe of the Pfarr house. This leads them to a dilapidated "pension" where they find Von Greis's decaying body. Eventually they learn that Mutschmann did the robbery for "Red" Dieter, head of the German Strength crime syndicate. Gunther then meets Paul's assistant, Marlene Sahm, at the Reich Sports Field during races that are part of the 1936 Olympic games. From Sahm, Gunther learns that Paul had discovered Six was corrupt and was about to indict him. To do that, he tried to convince Von Greis to release what he had on Six, but Von Greis refused, so Paul got the Gestapo to obtain the documents for him. Von Greis later was killed by Dieter's men.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mount_(novel)"title="The Mount (novel)">
The first-person narrator, Charley, is a young man who, like all humans, is used as a riding mount (e.g. horses) for an alien race known as Hoots. Humans in Charley's world, a pastoral Earth, have existed in a master-slave relationship with the Hoots for centuries. The Hoots, who have no way to return to their home planet, maintain the natural systems that keep the world running. Escaped mounts like Charley's father, formerly the Guards' Mount known as Heron, lead assaults on the stables where humans are kept and seek to unify their own people against the Hoots.When Charley (mount name Smiley) meets his father for the first time (Heron and Merry Mary were mated and separated by the Hoots soon after Charley was born), he resists betraying either his Master, the Hoot heir apparent, or anything that might help the resisting humans because his life as a mount is the only one he's ever known.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_Finds_Work"title="The Devil Finds Work">
The book opens with a discussion of a Joan Crawford film, which was the first movie Baldwin could remember seeing, and ends with a discussion of "The Exorcist", which came out in 1973. Among the other movies discussed are "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (1967), "In the Heat of the Night" (1967) and "The Defiant Ones" (1958).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors_(novel)"title="Doctors (novel)">
Star basketball player Barney Livingston and the beautiful and brilliant Laura Castellano are neighbors in Brooklyn who are as close as siblings. After graduating from Midwood High School in 1954 Livingston attends Columbia University and Castellano Radcliffe College, and both enter Harvard Medical School in 1958; he wants to become a psychiatrist, and she is drawn to pediatrics. Others include Rhodes Scholar Bennett Landsmann, the wealthy black adoptee of Jewish parents; former Jesuit Hank Dwyer; former Miss Oregon Grete Anderson; and top students Peter Wyman and Seth Lazarus.They survive the immense stress that drives some to suicide, and after graduation leave for internships and residencies. Livingston becomes an author and finds at the New York State Psychiatric Institute that psychiatrists can be as disturbed as their patients; Castellano's unhappy marriage to an Army officer causes both to have affairs; Wyman aggressively seeks fame as a researcher at Harvard; Landsmann at Yale–New Haven Hospital finds that some during the Civil Rights Movement dislike his two heritages; Anderson's beauty attracts men that she has difficulty forming relationships with; and Lazarus in Chicago begins to commit mercy killings of patients in great pain who want to die.By their late 30s Livingston and Castellano, after many other relationships for both, marry and become first-time parents in New York City; Wyman is at a Silicon Valley biotechnology company; Anderson is a transplant surgeon in Houston; Dwyer opens a successful IVF clinic in Hawaii; and Landsmann, a lawyer after a spinal injury ends his surgical career, defends Lazarus in a trial for murder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_of_the_Intern"title="Year of the Intern">
It is an insider's perspective of the medical world. As Dr. Peters becomes a doctor he is destroying himself as a person due to extensive work and concerns.Dr. Cook began writing the book while serving on a submarine, basing it on his experiences as a medical resident. When it did not do particularly well, he began an extensive study of other books in the genre to see what made a bestseller. He decided to concentrate on medical suspense thrillers, mixing intricately plotted murder and intrigue with medical technology. He also brought controversial ethical and social issues affecting the medical profession to the attention of the general public.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Graveyard_Game"title="The Graveyard Game">
The protagonists of the series are mostly immortal cyborgs, specifically the botanist Mendoza, and the Facilitator Joseph. They were recruited as children to serve the Company in its ostensible mission to preserve artifacts from the past for a better future.Like the second novel, "Sky Coyote", this is a volume which fills in background that is not apparent to Mendoza, the narrator of the first and third books. The principal characters are Joseph and his friend, the Literature Specialist Lewis. Action starts in 1996 and continues through the next 250 years. Over this period the world changes profoundly. Japan suffers violent earthquakes and sinks into the sea. Japanese society relocates to Mexico. The USA fragments into independent republics. Animal rights movements and other activists pass laws eliminating the consumption of meat, dairy products, coffee, chocolate, alcohol, tobacco and many other stimulants and foods. Los Angeles becomes an anarchic war-zone walled off from the rest of California. Terrorists use a nuclear weapon to destroy Belfast, Northern Ireland. Anti-gravity is "re-discovered", having been known to the ancient Egyptians.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_and_the_Mighty_(novel)"title="The High and the Mighty (novel)">
In Honolulu, a DC-4 airliner operated as TOPAC Flight 420 prepares to takeoff for San Francisco with 16 passengers and a crew of five. Former captain Dan Roman, the flight's veteran first officer known for his habit of whistling, is haunted by a takeoff crash in South America that killed his wife and son and left him with a permanent limp. 420's captain, Sullivan, suffers from a secret fear of responsibility after logging thousands of hours looking after the lives of passengers and crew. Young second officer Hobie Wheeler and veteran navigator Lenny Wilby are contrasts in age and experience. Stewardess Spalding attends her passengers, each with varying personal problems, and befriends the terminally ill Frank Briscoe after being charmed by his pocket watch. A last minute arrival, businessman Humphrey Agnew, soon causes her misgivings by his strange behavior.After a routine departure, 420 experiences sporadic sudden vibrations. Although the crew senses that something may be wrong with the propellers, they cannot locate a problem. When a vibration causes Spalding to burn her hand, Dan inspects the tail compartment but still finds nothing amiss. After nightfall, as the plane passes the point of no return, Agnew confronts fellow passenger Ken Childs, accusing him of having an affair with Agnew's wife. The men struggle and Agnew pulls out a gun, intending to shoot Childs, but before he can do so, the plane swerves violently when it loses a propeller and the engine catches fire. The crew quickly extinguishes the fire, but the engine has twisted off its mounting. In mid-ocean, the crew radios for help, assisted by an amateur radio operator aboard the steamer "S.S. Cristobal Trader", and sets in motion a rescue operation. Dan discovers that the airliner is losing fuel from damage to a wing tank and that as a result, along with adverse winds and the drag of the damaged engine, the plane will eventually run out of fuel and be forced to ditch.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Eat_Fried_Worms"title="How to Eat Fried Worms">
Alan challenges Billy to eat a worm a day for 15 days. The winner gets $50. Tom prepares the worms in a variety of ways to make them more appetizing, using condiments such as ketchup, mustard, horseradish, and maple syrup. His parents eventually find out about the bet, but he is allowed to finish and eventually wins. Billy drives his newly-won mini-bike over to his usual lunch-spot and we hear that he's gotten so used to eating worms, he now can't stop.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_of_the_World_to_Come"title="The Life of the World to Come">
This novel is another chapter in the disastrous life of the cyborg botanist Mendoza, recruited by the Company in 16th century Spain, and exiled to the far past. Twice in her life the same man, in different identities, has visited her, become her lover, and been killed. Neither seemed to know her at first.Alec Checkerfield is a 24th-century data pirate and smuggler who steals a time machine. He encounters Mendoza. She encounters him. It's "deja vu" all over again for her. He is mystified. This meeting catalyzes the most horrific event in human history. All involved are left wondering what they have done, and why. Meanwhile, Dr. Zeus seems to go from strength to strength.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Namesake_(novel)"title="The Namesake (novel)">
The story begins as Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, a young Bengali couple, leave Calcutta, India, and settle in Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ashoke is an engineering student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Ashima struggles through language and cultural barriers as well as her own fears as she delivers her first child alone. Had the delivery taken place in Calcutta, she would have had the baby at home, surrounded by family. The delivery is successful, but the new parents learn they cannot leave the hospital before giving their son a legal name.The traditional naming process in their families is to have an elder who will give the new baby a name, and the parents wait for the letter from Ashima's grandmother. The letter never arrives, and soon after, the grandmother dies. Bengali culture calls for a child to have two names, a pet name to be called by family, and a good name to be used in public. Ashoke suggests the name of Gogol, in honor of the famous Russian author Nikolai Gogol, to be the baby's pet name, and they use this name on the birth certificate. As a young man, Ashoke survived a train derailment with many fatalities. He had been reading a short story collection by Gogol just before the accident, and lying in the rubble of the accident he clutched a single page of the story "The Overcoat" in his hand. With many broken bones and no strength to move or call out, dropping the crumpled page is the only thing Ashoke can do to get the attention of medics looking for survivors. This motivated him to move far away from home and start anew. Though the pet name has deep significance for the baby's parents, it is never intended to be used by anyone other than family. They decide on Nikhil to be his good name.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant's_Bread"title="Giant's Bread">
The opening of London's National Opera House is celebrated by the performance of a new composition, "The Giant". The audience was either puzzled or ecstatic about this modernist piece. One man who does not personally like the composition, but can see the genius that scored it, is Carl Bowerman, an elderly and distinguished music critic, who joins the owner of the Opera House, Sebastian Levinne, for a private drink. Despite the foreign nature of the music, Bowerman recognises that the composer, known as Boris Groen, must be English because "Nationality in music is unmistakable." He states that Groen is the natural successor to a man called Vernon Deyre who was killed in the war. Sebastian politely refuses to tell more about the absent Groen, saying "There are reasons..."In the late years of the Victorian era, Vernon Deyre was a small boy growing up in the old country house of the Deyre family, Abbots Puisannts. He was the only child of Walter, a soldier by profession, and Myra Deyre who was something of an emotional and clinging person. Walter is a sad figure who is not in love with his wife and is subject to various dalliances. Vernon's nurse – an important figure in his childhood – raises him, but he has no friends. In their place he has four imaginary friends, the most important of whom is called Mr. Green, a florid man who loves playing games and who lives in a wood that borders on the grounds of Abbots Puisannts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Many_Magicians"title="Too Many Magicians">
The novel takes place in 1966. However, it occurs in a world with an alternative history. The Plantagenet kings survived and rule a large Anglo-French Empire. In addition, around A.D. 1300 the laws of magic were discovered and magical science developed. The physical sciences were never pursued. The society looks early Victorian, though medical magic is superior to our medicine.The book uses the conventions of a detective story. The protagonist is Lord Darcy, Chief Investigator for the Duke of Normandy. This Sherlock Holmes-like figure is assisted by Master Sean O’Lochlainn, a forensic sorcerer.The novel is a locked room mystery, which takes place at a wizards’ convention. Garrett delights in puns. Analogues of Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin, James Bond and Gandalf the Grey appear.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Samuel_Whiskers_or_The_Roly-Poly_Pudding"title="The Tale of Samuel Whiskers or The Roly-Poly Pudding">
Tom Kitten is a young cat who lives with his mother, Mrs. Tabitha Twitchit, and sisters, Moppet and Mittens, in a house overrun with rats. Her children being an unruly bunch, Mrs. Tabitha puts Moppet and Mittens in a cupboard in order to keep them under control, but Tom Kitten escapes up the chimney.As he makes his way to the top of the house, he comes across a crack in the wall and, squeezing through it, finds himself under the attic's floorboards. There he meets the rats, Mr. Samuel Whiskers and his wife Anna Maria. They catch him and proceed to cover him with butter and dough in order to eat him as a pudding. However, when they proceed to settle the dough with a rolling-pin, the noise gets through the floorboards and attracts the attention of Tabitha Twitchit and her friend Mrs. Ribby who has been helping search for Tom Kitten. They quickly call for John Joiner, a terrier, who saws open the floor and rescues Tom Kitten.Samuel Whiskers and Anna Maria escape to the barn of Farmer Potatoes, spreading their chaos to another location, though leaving the cat family residence in peace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABBA_ABBA"title="ABBA ABBA">
In Part One, Keats has various adventures, meeting Belli in the Sistine Chapel and Pauline Bonaparte, sister of Napoleon, in the Pincio, and a Roman man of letters named Giovanni Gulielmi.Part Two consists of about seventy (from a total of 2,279) amusingly blasphemous sonnets by Belli, purportedly translated by one Joseph Joachim Wilson, a descendant of Gulielmi. An elaborate passage describes how the Italian Gulielmis were transformed into English Wilsons "during a wave of anti-Italian feeling occasioned by alleged ice-cream poisoning in the 1890s in the Lancashire coastal resorts of Blackpool, Cleveleys, Bispham and Fleetwood".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jagged_Orbit"title="The Jagged Orbit">
The novel is set in the United States in 2014, when interracial tensions have passed the breaking point. A Mafia-like cartel, the Gottschalks, are exploiting this situation to sell weapons to anyone able to buy them. A split develops within the cartel, between the conservative old men and ambitious underlings prepared to use new computer technology to pull off some spectacular coups.There are several separate strands of narrative following particular characters. James Reedeth is a young psychologist at New York's major mental health institution who is disenchanted with his job and his employer, the revered Elias Mogshack. Lyla Clay is a "pythoness," a young woman capable of metabolising certain psychedelic drugs to enter a trance in which she makes unconscious predictions. Matthew Flamen, a "spoolpigeon" (a variety of investigative journalist), is struggling to hold onto his job, and by his obsessive behaviour has driven his wife into Mogshack's asylum.The plot is contrived to bring the strands together and resolve matters by a lengthy discussion between Flamen, Reedeth, Lyla Clay, Pedro Diablo (Flamen's African-American counterpart), Xavier Conroy (a long-time critic of Mogshack), and Harry Madison (a former patient at Mogshack's asylum).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Rumphius"title="Miss Rumphius">
The book opens with the narrator telling readers about a little old woman nicknamed "The Lupine Lady" who "lives in a small house overlooking the sea." The story of her Great Aunt, Miss Rumphius, begins to unfold, starting when her aunt was just a little girl named Alice.In illustrations depicting the late 1800s, a young Alice lives with her grandparents near a waterfront shipping town. Her grandfather, an immigrant who arrived by boat to America himself, now carves the figureheads for sailing ships in his old age. At night, he regales his granddaughter with stories of exotic places across the sea. Inspired, Alice tells her grandfather that, when she grows up, she will travel to faraway places and settle down by the sea when she grows old, just as he did. He agrees that her plans are "all very well," but goes on to tell her that she must do one more thing: "You must do something to make the world more beautiful." Alice resolves to follow her grandfather's advice, though she is not sure how.For a time, life goes on normally and, eventually, Alice grows up. She goes to work in a library where people call her Miss Rumphius and she helps them find books they're looking for. It is in the library where she learns about more faraway places. Time continues to pass and streaks of gray appear in her hair. In her spare time, she likes to visit the local conservatory where she can linger among the exotic plants and dream of the places from which they originally came. She decides she finally needs to go see those places for herself. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_That_Failed"title="The Light That Failed">
The story begins with Dick and Maisie as orphan children in a seaside boarding house under the care of Mrs. Jennet (a sadist drawn from Kipling's own childhood experience with a Mrs. Holloway). Dick confesses his infatuation with Maisie but she informs him that she will soon be leaving to complete her education.Years later, Dick is working as a painter and artist among the British armed forces in Sudan. He meets a war correspondent named Torpenhow who, witnessing his skill, arranges for Dick to be hired by the syndicate that he works for. The two men quickly strike up a friendship and help each other in their respective trades. Dick is later injured by a sword-cut to the head and spends a night in delirium, moaning about Maisie. Once the campaign is over, Dick returns to London where he eventually reunites with Torpenhow. His war sketches have drawn attention in England and when his former employers try to withhold his submitted works, Dick bullies their representative into returning them. He shares a rented apartment with Torpenhow in London where the two, along with a few other friends, spend their time working and discussing "Art". Dick runs into Maisie again who is also working as a painter and a student under Dick's former teacher, Kami. He asks her about their relationship and, though she rebuffs his advances, she asks him to visit her every Sunday as she values his advice about her work. He relents, assuming that she would grow to love him as he loves her. He also meets Maisie's roommate, a red-haired girl, who immediately despises him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partners_in_Crime_(short_story_collection)"title="Partners in Crime (short story collection)">
The Beresfords' old friend Mr Carter, from a government intelligence agency, arrives bearing a proposition for the adventurous duo. They are to take over 'the International Detective Agency', a recently cleaned-out spy stronghold, and pose as the owners so as to intercept any enemy messages coming through. In the meantime Tommy and Tuppence can take on cases as this detective agency, an opportunity that delights the young couple. They employ Albert, a young man also introduced in "The Secret Adversary", as their assistant at the agency.The two tackle a series of cases – mimicking in each the style of a famous fictional detective of the period, including Sherlock Holmes and Christie's own Hercule Poirot. At the end of the book, Tuppence reveals that she is pregnant, and will play a diminished role in the spy business.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Labours_of_Hercules"title="The Labours of Hercules">
## Foreword.Hercule Poirot is enjoying a social visit by Dr. Burton, a fellow of All Souls, who recites sonorously some lines from Homer's "Iliad" (XXIII, 316 f) and turns the conversation round to the subject of Poirot's unusual Christian name and how some of the pagan names parents give to their children do not suit their recipients. He thinks about Poirot's and Sherlock Holmes's mothers sitting together and discussing names for their children. Poirot claims ignorance of the legend of Hercules. The talk turns to Poirot's intention to retire after completing a few cases of interest and personal appeal and Burton laughingly refers to the twelve labours of Hercules. This comment gives Poirot pause for thought and after his visitor has gone, Poirot gets acquainted with the exploits of his legendary namesake, deciding his final cases will mimic Hercules' Twelve Labours.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poirot's_Early_Cases"title="Poirot's Early Cases">
## "The Affair at the Victory Ball".Chief Inspector Japp asks Poirot to assist Scotland Yard in the strange events which took place at a recent costumed Victory Ball. A group of six people, headed by the young Viscount Cronshaw, attended dressed in the costume of the "Commedia dell'arte". Lord Cronshaw was Harlequin, his uncle, the honourable Eustace Beltane, was Punchinello and Mrs Mallaby, an American widow, was Punchinella. In the roles of Pierrot and Pierrette were Mr and Mrs Christopher Davidson (he being a stage actor) and finally, Miss "Coco" Courtenay, an actress rumoured to be engaged to Lord Cronshaw, was Columbine. The night went badly from the start when it was obvious to the party that Cronshaw and Miss Courtenay were not on speaking terms. The latter was crying and asked Chris Davidson to take her home to her flat in Chelsea. When they had gone, a friend of Cronshaw's spotted Harlequin in a box looking down on the ball and called up to him to join them on the main floor. Cronshaw left the box to join them but then disappeared. He was found ten minutes later on the floor of the supper room, stabbed through the heart with a table knife, his body strangely stiff. Coco Courtenay is found dead in her bed from an overdose of cocaine; at the inquest that followed, it was found that she was addicted to the drug. Poirot starts to investigate, finding out to everyone's puzzlement that Cronshaw was emphatically opposed to drugs, that Beltane's costume had a hump and a ruffle and that a curtained recess exists in the supper room. He arranges a get-together of the people involved at his flat where he puts on a shadowed presentation across a back-lit screen of the six costumes but then reveals that there were actually five. Underneath Pierrot's loose garb is that of the slimmer-fitting Harlequin. Davidson leaps forward and curses Poirot but is quickly arrested by Japp.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Island"title="Hell Island">
Hell Island is a remote Pacific Island that no one knows about. It does not feature on any map. It was used by the Japanese during World War II as a remote airfield, but it was soon taken over by American forces in 1943. During the time the book is set, the location is used by the U.S. government for scientific experiments on apes. The U.S. government is using the island for Project Stormtrooper, wherein apes are being engineered in such a way that they become super-soldiers.The book opens with Schofield's ten-man Marine Recon team parachuting onto the deck of the soon-to-be-decommissioned aircraft carrier, the USS "George Washington", along with three other special forces teams – a Delta Force team, a squad of SEALs and a team from the 82nd Airborne Division. The Delta team make landfall on the island while the other three teams investigate the aircraft carrier.Shane Schofield realises that the carrier is being used for the specific project after the Airborne and SEAL teams are quickly slaughtered. A DARPA scientist, whom Schofield's team stumble across, explain that the enemy is a group of genetically and electronically enhanced gorillas, armed with modified M-4 Colt Commandos and extremely deadly in melee combat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_(Baxter_novel)"title="Ring (Baxter novel)">
The AI Lieserl is abandoned for five million years, leaving her to observe the sun's interior. She discovers dark matter-based life, which she names "photino birds". These birds gradually drain the energy from the core of a star, ending fusion and causing premature aging into a stable red giant—the birds' preferred habitat, as it has no risk of going supernova and destroying them.A generation ship is sent with one end of a wormhole to explore the future and investigate the whereabouts of Michael Poole. It will be a round-trip journey, returning to the solar system after five million years, though only a thousand years will elapse on board, due to relativistic time dilation effects. The crew is broken into three factions—the primitives, the virtuals, and a survivalist faction, Superet. Among the factions, the primitives are a eugenics project for Garry Uvarov who hopes to lengthen the lives of humanity without the use of Anti-Senescence (anagathic or life-extension) technology. The Superet faction relies heavily on failing technology and maintains a totalitarian government which refuses to acknowledge the existence of other decks on the ship; the virtuals remain aloof.Upon their arrival, their end of the wormhole is destroyed leaving them trapped in the future. They observe that the entire universe is full of red stars, so the stars have aged far faster than expected. The "Great Northern" makes contact with Lieserl, who explains her observations of the photino birds. The birds do not just exist in our sun but every sun, helioforming them to an amenable habitat. The Xeelee, masters of baryonic matter, have known about the photino birds and have been striving to thwart them. The baryonic universe is doomed, but the Xeelee create a 'Ring', an escape hatch. A cosmic string is made into a loop and creates the phenomenon of the Great Attractor. The function of the Ring is to create a Kerr metric at its centre, which creates a portal to other universes. Whenever humans have met up with the Xeelee and pursued war, this was merely an annoyance since the Xeelee were thinking on a larger scale about more potent enemies. The crew of the "Great Northern" and Lieserl discover the folly of their species.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_(Shatner_novel)"title="The Return (Shatner novel)">
The novel begins on the planet Veridian III and takes place shortly after the events seen in the motion picture "Star Trek Generations". The body of James T. Kirk is stolen by the Romulans after his burial by fellow Starfleet captain Jean-Luc Picard. The Borg have formed an alliance with the Romulan Star Empire in order to destroy the Federation. Using alien technology, the Borg bring Kirk back to life and his "katra" is restored, but false memories are implanted to turn him against the Federation. The goal of this secret alliance is to destroy Picard and therefore Starfleet's only defense against the Borg but, despite his conditioning, Kirk is able to resist commands to kill Worf, Data, and Geordi La Forge, all of whom are attacked by him during his search for Picard.Simultaneously, Picard and Dr. Beverly Crusher are participating in a strike team in a Federation expedition to an assimilated colony, where they are forced to sneak on board the fleeing Borg vessel. While on board, they are able to move freely around the vessel and they learn of the Borg/Romulan Alliance. Spock also learns of this alliance when he is captured dealing with Romulans, but the Borg do not assimilate him as, for some reason, they believe Spock is "already" Borg.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zahrah_the_Windseeker"title="Zahrah the Windseeker">
The novel takes place in the fictional northern kingdom of Ooni located in the planet Ginen where technology are made using plants, children who are born with Dada (dreadlocks) are despised because of an old rumor about them possessing magical abilities. the kingdom is enclaved by the forbidden greeny jungle.Zahrah Tsami is a thirteen years old who lives with her parents, she was born dada, which means vines grow among her hair and is a subject of ridicule among her peers, except for her best friend, Dari. Zharah discovers her ability to fly as a windseeker but she is afraid of heights, so it makes her feel a bit anxious about it.During one of their secret trips to the greeny jungle to practice and explore the jungle with the aid of a digibook written by explorers, Dari is bitten by a snake and falls into a deep coma. The doctor prescribed a serum made from an unfertilized Elgort (huge dinosaur like creature) egg as the only cure of his Dari’s ailment.Zahrah escape from home with the digibook and her compass to the forbidden greeny jungle in order to get an Elgort egg meeting the annoying shinning pink frog and others who advised her to go back home. While in the jungle Zahrah discovers that the chapter in the digibook containing information about the Elgort is broken and she cannot access it. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Spider_Queen"title="War of the Spider Queen">
## "Dissolution".The background of the series takes place in the matriarchal Drow society of Menzoberranzan, the ancestral underground city of the Drow, in the year 1372 DR (Dale Reckoning). Lolth, goddess of the Drow, has gone silent and is no longer affording spells to her priestesses. The females attempt to keep this a secret, but soon they are found out, and males begin disappearing from the city for unknown reasons. Pharaun Mizzrym, a magic user, and Ryld Argith, a warrior, are sent by the Archmage of Menzoberranzan, Gromph Baenre, to discover the cause of these missing drow. The two are attacked several times by Pharaun's sister Greyanna, who is in a power struggle for her household, and trying to kill Pharaun for aligning with their other sibling. Pharaun and Ryld press on, and discover a group of renegade males who are planning a hostile takeover of the city using the thousands of kobold, goblin, and bugbear slaves of the city as their army. When the duo attempt to infiltrate the renegades' base they are captured by its leader, the Illithid Lich Syrzan. Using his magic and trickery Pharaun escapes and leaves behind Ryld, who manages to fight his way out of the hideout. In a sub-plot, an emissary from the Drow city of Ched Nasad, Faeryl Zauvirr, is attempting to leave Menzoberranzan. Matron Mother Triel Baenre forbids this, and has Faeryl captured and tortured by her Draegloth son, Jeggred Baenre. The insurrection of the males is crushed by the physical and arcane strengths of Menzoberranzan, and the city remains under female control. Concerned that others may gather the courage to attempt another take over, Triel sends a group to discover the cause of Lolth's silence and bring an end to it, first by traveling to Ched Nasad. The group is made up of Triel's sister Quenthel, her son Jeggred, Master of Sorcere Pharaun Mizzrym, Master of Melee-Magthere Ryld Argith, a mercenary named Valas Hune, and the emissary Faeryl Zauvirr, in order to secure ties within Ched Nasad.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Thorne"title="Doctor Thorne">
When their father dies, Doctor Thomas Thorne and his younger brother Henry are left to fend for themselves. Thomas begins to establish a medical practice, while Henry seduces Mary Scatcherd, the sister of stonemason Roger Scatcherd. When Roger finds out that Mary has become pregnant, he kills Henry in a fight.While her brother is in prison for the death, Mary gives birth to a girl. A former suitor offers to marry Mary and emigrate to America to start a new life, but not if she keeps the baby. Doctor Thorne persuades Mary to accept the offer, promising to raise his niece. He names her Mary Thorne, but, wishing neither to have her illegitimacy made public nor to have her associate with the uncouth Roger Scatcherd, he keeps her parentage secret. Mary Scatcherd tells her brother that the baby has died.After his release from prison, Scatcherd rises quickly in the world, becoming extremely rich. When he completes a seemingly impossible important project on time, he is made a baronet. Throughout his career, he entrusts his financial affairs to Doctor Thorne. When Thorne becomes the family doctor to the Greshams, he persuades Scatcherd to lend increasing sums to the head of the family, the local squire. Eventually, much of the Gresham estate is put up as collateral.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sheep_Look_Up"title="The Sheep Look Up">
"The Sheep Look Up" takes place over the course of a single year, with each chapter depicting one month. The story is a multi-strand one, involving a variety of characters whose paths only cross as the world's ecological disaster brings them together.DecemberThe novel starts with a man running across the Santa Monica Freeway in a bizarre incident before getting killed when he is hit by a car. The accident and the ensuing traffic jam results in Philip Mason, a Denver-based executive at the Angel City insurance company, being late for a meeting. The head of the insurance company says that it has to increase life insurance premiums because of the declining life expectancy in the United States. Peg Mankiewicz, a journalist, identifies the body of the man in the freeway accident as her friend Decimus Jones. Later, Peg meets with her friend and influential ecologist, Austin Train, from whom the Trainites take their name. He has gone underground and is working as a mall Santa. Peg is one of the few people able to contact him. In Honduras, a group of UN investigators is looking into a famine nation ridden by civil war. They examine a ruined coffee farm and discover mysterious wormlike insects filling the roots of the plants with holes. They are known as Jigras and are immune to every known insecticide. Jacob Bamberley, heir to an oil fortune and head of Bamberley Trust, a charitable institution that manufactures Nutripon, a hydroponically-grown food product that is meant to provide relief in places afflicted by famine, gives his adopted son Hugh Pettingill a tour of the factory in Denver. Hugh is not impressed by his adoptive father's work. In Africa, in a village called Noshri, a nurse named Lucy Ramage is on hand to receive shipment of Nutripon when suddenly, the villagers seem to go insane and start murdering each other. She is saved by UN soldiers, who put down the riots.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Worlds_Collide"title="After Worlds Collide">
Bronson Alpha, the larger of two rogue planets, collided with and destroyed the Earth, before leaving the solar system. However, its companion, the roughly Earth-sized Bronson Beta remained behind and settled into a stable, but eccentric, orbit around the sun.In a desperate attempt to save a portion of humanity, the United States and several other countries feverishly constructed space arks to transport a select few to Bronson Beta. The Americans, under the leadership of Cole Hendron, managed to launch two space Arks, carrying hundreds of people, as well as the animals, plants and knowledge they will need to hopefully survive on the alien planet. Both American ships reach this new world, as do at least two others, though all four become separated and each is unaware of the fates of the others.The survivors of Hendron's own, smaller Ark set out to establish a colony, aware (from a road they find) that an alien civilization once existed on Bronson Beta. Tony Drake and another associate scout out for suitable farmland, but during their return journey following the alien road, the two men come across a vehicle. After a mysterious disease strikes the camp, killing three colonists, Hendron forbids exploration, but some of the colonists defy him and strike out, bringing back wood from a distant forest. That night, an aircraft passes near the camp, beating a hasty retreat when the campfire is spotted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_to_Be_a_God"title="Hard to Be a God">
The prologue shows a scene from Anton's childhood (but real names of Arkanar people and locations pronounced allow to speculate that it is not childhood, but just a vacation in preparation to departure to the planet), in which he goes on an adventure with his friends Pashka (Paul) and Anka (Anna) and plays a game based on melodramatic recreations of events on the unnamed medieval planet. The children live in a futuristic utopia, and the teenagers feel drawn to adventure. While the children play they find an abandoned road with a road sign reading "Wrong way". Anton decides to go further and discovers remnants from World War II – a skeleton of a German gunner chained to his machine gun (or so he says to his friends).Later, Anton and Pashka grow up to be observers on the aforementioned planet, Anton in the Arkanar Kingdom and Pashka in the Irukan Duchy. Anton has taken the role of Don Rumata. He visits the "Drunken Den", a meeting place for observers working in the Lands Beyond the Strait (Запроливье). He has the current task of investigating the disappearance of a famed scientist, Doctor Budach, who may have been kidnapped by Don Reba, the Prime Minister of Arkanar. Don Reba leads a campaign against all educated people in the kingdom, blaming them for all the calamities and misfortunes of the kingdom. Rumata feels alarmed, as the kingdom is changing into a fascist police state which would never have developed in equivalent medieval societies on Earth. Rumata has attempted to save the most talented poets, writers, doctors and scientists, smuggling them abroad into neighboring countries. However, Reba's régime murders or breaks most of his native friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Constant_Gardener"title="The Constant Gardener">
Justin Quayle, a British diplomat in Nairobi, Kenya, is told that his activist wife, Tessa, was killed while travelling with a doctor friend in a desolate region of Africa. Investigating on his own, Quayle discovers that her murder, reportedly committed by her friend, may have had more sinister roots.Justin learns that Tessa had uncovered a corporate scandal involving medical experimentation in Africa. KVH (Karel Vita Hudson), a large pharmaceutical company working under the cover of AIDS tests and treatments, is testing a tuberculosis drug that has severe side effects. Rather than help the trial subjects and begin again with a new drug, KVH covered up the side effects and improved the drug only in anticipation of a massive multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis outbreak.Justin travels the world, often under assumed identities, to reconstruct the circumstances leading to Tessa's murder. As he begins to piece together Tessa's final report on the fraudulent drug tests, he learns that the roots of the conspiracy stretch further than he could have imagined; to a German pharmawatch NGO, an African aid station, and, most disturbingly to him, corrupt civil servants in the British Foreign Office.John le Carré writes in the book's afterword: "by comparison with the reality, my story [is] as tame as a holiday postcard". The book is dedicated to Yvette Pierpaoli, a French activist who died during the course of her aid work.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter"title="Harry Potter">
## Early years.The series follows the life of a boy named Harry Potter. In the first book, "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone", Harry lives in a cupboard under the stairs in the house of the Dursleys, his aunt, uncle and cousin. The Dursleys consider themselves perfectly normal, but at the age of eleven, Harry discovers that he is a wizard. He meets a half-giant named Hagrid who invites him to attend the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry learns that as a baby, his parents were murdered by the dark wizard Lord Voldemort. When Voldemort attempted to kill Harry, his curse rebounded and Harry survived with a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead.Harry becomes a student at Hogwarts and is sorted into Gryffindor House. He gains the friendship of Ron Weasley, a member of a large but poor wizarding family, and Hermione Granger, a witch of non-magical, or Muggle, parentage. Harry encounters the school's potions master, Severus Snape, who displays a dislike for him; the rich pure-blood Draco Malfoy whom he develops an enmity with; and the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, Quirinus Quirrell, who turns out to be allied with Lord Voldemort. The first book concludes with Harry's confrontation with Voldemort, who, in his quest to regain a body, yearns to gain the power of the Philosopher's Stone, a substance that bestows everlasting life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_of_Swords"title="Sea of Swords">
Drizzt and his friends try and track down Wulfgar's magical hammer Aegis Fang. They stop Wulfgar's new wife Delly Curtie from being murdered in Waterdeep and are eventually reunited with Wulfgar himself with help from their old crewmate Robillard of the "Sea Sprite". They track down the pirate Sheila Kree, the one who bought the hammer back in Luskan and who has now turned it into a symbol of her power. They discover her cohabiting in a cave complex with an ogre clan which she has bent to her will. There, Drizzt is faced by Ellifain, the elf child he saved when he was a part of a drow surface raid. She blames him for killing her mother; they fight and he unintentionally kills her, and with a little help from Morik the Rogue they succeed in taking back Wulfgar's weapon. Wulfgar then takes his family to Mithral Hall to live with his old friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kid_from_Hell"title="The Kid from Hell">
The novel tells the story of Gack, a teenage boy from Giganda. Gack is a cadet commando in "Fighting Cats": an elite army unit of "the Alai Duchy". In the first chapter of the novel, Gack is mortally wounded in a dogfight with an attacking tank unit of the army of "the Empire". Kornei Yashmaa, a progressor, finds him and takes him to Earth, where the doctors practically resurrect Gack. Yashmaa tries to help Gack adjust to life on Earth.However, Gack does not want to cooperate, nor does he believe that Earth is real. At first, he thinks that everything Yashmaa and other Earthlings tell him is a part of his psychological training as an officer of the Alai Army. Even after Yashmaa proves to him that he is indeed on a different planet, Gack still thinks that he was sent to Earth with an unknown secret mission by the Alai military.His next idea is that the Earth wants to conquer Giganda and wants to use him as a test subject or a future propaganda agent. As he learns more about the technology and lifestyle on Earth (he is even given an android servant), he becomes more and more confused. Accidentally, Gack discovers that other Gigandians have been taken to Earth as well, but they have integrated into the society and do not want to deal with him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Heidenhoff's_Process"title="Dr. Heidenhoff's Process">
The novel concerns a doctor who develops a mechanical method of eradicating painful memories from people's brains so that they can feel good about life again. The protagonist persuades his lover to try the process after she has been seduced by a rival. She is transformed until the protagonist awakes and realizes that he has dreamt of the doctor and his process and that his lover has committed suicide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_(novel)"title="The Wave (novel)">
The setting of the book is Gordon High School in Spring 1969. The plot revolves around a history teacher Mr. Ben Ross, his high school students, and an experiment he conducts in an attempt to teach them what it may have been like living in Third Reich Germany. Unsatisfied with his own inability to answer his students' earnest questions of how and why, Mr. Ross initiates the experiment (The Wave) in hopes that it answers the question of why the Germans allowed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party to rise to power, acting in a manner inconsistent with their own lies and sins.Ross considers this and plans an experiment: the next day, he starts to indoctrinate the class using the slogan STRENGTH THROUGH DISCIPLINE, ordering them around in ways such as sitting in a specific way, and telling how to answer questions. The class reacts well to this, embracing the sense of empowerment it gives them, and they continue their newly disciplined behavior into a second day of class, surprising Ross. He decides to take the experiment further and create a group, The Wave, adding two more slogans—STRENGTH THROUGH COMMUNITY and STRENGTH THROUGH ACTION—which leads to further rules of conduct, a symbol, a salute, and an organizational structure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiff_Upper_Lip,_Jeeves"title="Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves">
Jeeves comes home after serving as a substitute butler at Brinkley Court, the country house of Bertie's Aunt Dahlia. She tells Bertie that Sir Watkyn Bassett was there and was impressed with Jeeves. Additionally, Sir Watkyn bragged about obtaining a black amber statuette to Aunt Dahlia's husband, Tom Travers, who is a rival collector.Jeeves dislikes Bertie's new blue Alpine hat with a pink feather. Bertie continues to wear the hat, and has lunch with Emerald Stoker, the sister of his friend Pauline Stoker who is on her way to the Bassett household, Totleigh Towers. He then sees Reverend Harold "Stinker" Pinker, who is upset that Sir Watkyn has not given him the vicarage, which Stinker needs to be able to marry Stephanie "Stiffy" Byng, Watkyn Bassett's niece. Stinker tells Bertie that Stiffy wants Bertie to come to Totleigh Towers to do something for her, but knowing that Stiffy often starts trouble, Bertie refuses.Gussie Fink-Nottle is upset with his fiancée Madeline Bassett, Sir Watkyn's daughter. Jeeves suggests that Bertie go to Totleigh Towers there to heal the rift between Gussie and Madeline, or else Madeline will decide to marry Bertie instead. Though Bertie does not want to marry Madeline, his personal code will not let him turn a girl down. Bertie reluctantly decides to go to Totleigh, saying, “Stiff upper lip, Jeeves, what?”. Jeeves commends his spirit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Certain_Smile"title="A Certain Smile">
Dominique is a sophisticated twenty-year-old law student at the Sorbonne in mid-1950s Paris who is introduced by her lover Bertrand to his uncle and aunt, the worldly businessman Luc and his wife Françoise. Both Luc and Dominique are aware of their mutual attraction from the beginning, but Dominique holds off for fear of hurting both Bertrand and Françoise. The latter has become close to Dominique, relating to her almost as a mother, buying her presents and using the familiar form tu with her. Tiring of Bertrand, Dominique eventually decides on the experiment of accepting Luc's desire to make love to her and spends two weeks with him in a luxurious hotel in Cannes. Though she had promised herself not to fall in love with Luc, after their sexual separation and return to Paris, Dominique becomes obsessed with the memory of their past happiness and appeals to Luc not to end the affair. But for Luc their relationship had simply been a pleasant adventure and he can only pity Dominique's inexperience. Meanwhile Catherine, a fellow student, has told Bertrand of Dominique's affair and he informs Dominique that he is not prepared to share her affections. Then Pierre, a family friend who had caught sight of Luc and Dominique together in Cannes, tells Françoise about it out of jealousy, breaking up their friendship. But after some months of misery, while Luc is away in the US on business, Dominique is reconciled with Françoise and accepts the transience of her sexual relationship. "But what of it?" she concludes, "I was a woman, I had loved a man. It was a simple story; there was nothing to make a fuss about." For the future she has the accepting friendship of Alain, another student she has met recently, who is more her intellectual equal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaspar_(play)"title="Kaspar (play)">
"Kaspar" is loosely based on the story of Kaspar Hauser. "Raised in a dark hole, at 17 he wandered into a 1824 German town knowing only a single sentence and became a scientific curiosity: a nearly-adult human without language and external influences, a tabula rasa upon which society and its scientific teachers could write with impunity."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_You_(novel)"title="Lucky You (novel)">
Newspaper reporter Tom Krome is sent to the small Florida town of Grange to interview JoLayne Lucks, an African-American veterinary assistant who holds one of two winning tickets to the state lottery. She agrees to an interview, but politely declines to have a news story written about her. The other winning lottery ticket is held by Bode Gazzer and his best friend "Chub," two unemployed white supremacists. Bode is the founder and self-proclaimed "leader" of a fledgling militia, which consists solely of himself and Chub. Unwilling to accept only half of the $28 million jackpot, Bode insists that they track down the owner of the other winning ticket. Discovering that this other winner is black seems to vindicate Bode's conspiracy theory that the government is keeping "Christian white men" from winning the lottery, and makes his and Chub's next decision easy.After Bode and Chub savagely beat JoLayne and steal her ticket, she appears in Tom's hotel room pleading for help. Tom urges her to contact the police, but she says she can't: she plans to use the lottery proceeds to buy Simmons Wood, a pristine forest plot near her home, to prevent it being redeveloped; she can't afford to wait for the police, since a labor union in Chicago has already made an offer for the property. Before leaving Grange, Bode and Chub approach "Shiner," the clerk at the convenience store where JoLayne bought her winning ticket, and convince him to hand over the store's security video showing the purchase by playing on his small-town boredom and offering him a place within the new "brotherhood."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein's_Dreams"title="Einstein's Dreams">
The novel fictionalizes Albert Einstein as a young scientist who is troubled by dreams as he works on his theory of relativity in 1905. The book consists of 30 chapters, each exploring one dream about time that Einstein had during this period. The framework of the book consists of a prelude, three interludes, and an epilogue. Einstein's friend, Michele Besso, appears in these sections. Each dream involves a conception of time. Some scenarios may involve exaggerations of true phenomena related to relativity, and some may be entirely fantastical. The book demonstrates the relationship each human being has to time, and thus spiritually affirms Einstein's theory of relativity.The novel is sometimes cited as the source of the urban legend apocryphal "universal force" letter from Einstein to his daughter, Lieserl, but the novel does not contain the letter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beast_in_the_Jungle"title="The Beast in the Jungle">
John Marcher, the protagonist, is reacquainted with May Bartram, a woman he knew ten years earlier while living in southern Italy, who remembers his odd secret: Marcher is seized with the belief that his life is to be defined by some catastrophic or spectacular event, lying in wait for him like a "beast in the jungle". May decides to buy a house in London with the money she inherited from a great aunt, and to spend her days with Marcher, curiously awaiting what fate has in store for him. Marcher is a hopeless fatalist, who believes that he is precluded from marrying so that he does not subject his wife to his "spectacular fate".He takes May to the theater and invites her to an occasional dinner, but does not allow her to get close to him. As he sits idly by and allows the best years of his life to pass, he takes May down as well, until the denouement where he learns that the great misfortune of his life was to throw it away, and to ignore the love of a good woman, based upon his preposterous sense of foreboding.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Pudding"title="The Magic Pudding">
Wanting to see the world and unable to live with his uncle anymore, Bunyip Bluegum the koala sets out on his travels, taking only a walking stick. At about lunchtime, feeling more than slightly peckish, he meets Bill Barnacle the sailor and Sam Sawnoff the penguin who are eating a magic pudding which, no matter how much one eats it, always reforms into a whole pudding again. The pudding is called Albert, has thin arms and legs, and is bad-tempered and ill-mannered. His only pleasure is being eaten and on his insistence, Bill and Sam invite Bunyip to join them for lunch. They then set off on the road together, Bill explaining to Bunyip how he and Sam were once shipwrecked with a ship's cook on an iceberg where the cook created the pudding which they now own.Later on they encounter the Pudding Thieves, a possum named Patrick and a wombat named Watkin. Bill and Sam bravely defend their pudding while Bunyip sits on Albert so that he cannot escape while they are not looking. Later that night sitting round the fire, Bill and Sam, grateful for his contributions of the day, invite Bunyip to join them and become a member of the Noble Society of Pudding Owners.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real_Eve"title="The Real Eve">
In the book, Oppenheimer supports the theory that modern humans first emerged in Africa and that modern human behavior emerged in Africa prior to the out of Africa migration.Oppenheimer writes that there was only one migration out of Africa that contributed to the peopling of the rest of the world. Oppenheimer believes that anatomically modern humans crossed the Red Sea from the Horn of Africa and followed the "southern coastal route" once in Asia. Thus Oppenheimer is opposed to the theory that there was another out of Africa migration using a northern route along the Nile and into the Levant as suggested by Lahr and Foley 1994. The book also supports the theory that modern humans were in South Asia during the Toba catastrophe.Oppenheimer uses familiar names to describe genetic lineages. The biblical analogies of Adam and Eve are used to describe the most recent common ancestors via mitochondrial DNA and the y-chromosome. Other male lineages are described as Cain, Abel and Seth. Mitochondrial DNA haplogroups are frequently described using female names from regions where the haplogroups are common. For example, the haplogroup M is named "Manju" as it is frequent in India, and the haplogroup N is named "Nasreen" as it is predominant in Arabia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lotus_and_the_Wind"title="The Lotus and the Wind">
The story is told through the viewpoints of Lieutenant Robin Savage and the innocent but determined Anne Hildreth, although Savage's viewpoint predominates later in the novel. It begins in 1879, when Britain and Afghanistan are engaged in the Second Anglo-Afghan War.Anne Hildreth and Robin Savage have met and become attracted to each other before the narrative starts. Anne is the daughter of a Commissariat officer and is travelling with her parents to the military post at Peshawar in the North-West Frontier Province of India. En route, she witnesses the murder of an Afghan stranger. In his last moments, the murdered man writes the word "atlar" (horses) in his own blood.Meanwhile, Robin is part of a military column in Afghanistan. He is the son of a distinguished soldier and has almost been forced to follow in his father's footsteps, but has no particular thirst for action. As the result of an accident, and a superior officer's bungling, he is accused of cowardice, and is also sent to Peshawar to await a military court of inquiry.Life threatens to be awkward, but an acquaintance, Major Hayling, connects the murder witnessed by Anne with a souvenir collected by Robin in Afghanistan, a jezail with the words "atlar shimal" (horses, north) engraved on it. Realising that Robin's true passion is for solitude and empty spaces, Hayling recruits him into the Secret Service and sends him in disguise into Central Asia. Accompanied by a faithful Gurkha orderly, Robin sets out to discover the motive behind the murder and determine whether it is connected with the ambitions of Tsarist Russia. Before departing he marries Anne.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightrunners_of_Bengal"title="Nightrunners of Bengal">
It introduced the fictional Savage family, whose history of service in British India rather resembled that of Masters' ancestors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Samurai_(novel)"title="The Last Samurai (novel)">
"The Last Samurai" is about the relationship between a single mother, Sibylla, and her son, Ludo, who live together in a small flat in London where Sibylla, an American expatriate, works as a freelance typist. From a young age Ludo proves to be gifted: he starts reading at two, reading Homer in the original Greek at three, and goes on to Hebrew, Japanese, Old Norse, Inuit, and advanced mathematics. As a substitute for a male influence in his upbringing, Sibylla plays him Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai", which he comes to know by heart.The next portion of the novel describes Ludo at age eleven, with no formal schooling and the only social interaction he has coming from his participation in a judo class in which his mother has enrolled him. After meeting his biological father, whom he deems undeserving due to his lack of genuine intellect, he devotes his time to the pursuit of various potential fathers. Ludo interacts with several adult male geniuses, testing each to see if they would make a good candidate to be his father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Country_Girls"title="The Country Girls">
Caithleen "Cait/Kate" Brady and Bridget "Baba" Brennan are two young Irish country girls who have spent their childhood together. As they leave the safety of their convent school in search of life and love in the big city, they struggle to maintain their somewhat tumultuous relationship. Cait, dreamy and romantic, yearns for true love, while Baba just wants to experience the life of a single girl. Although they set out to conquer the world together, as their lives take unexpected turns, Cait and Baba must ultimately learn to find their own way.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity's_Child"title="Trinity's Child">
The US president is informed by the head of SAC that a Soviet first strike is underway. The Soviet premier offers the United States three choices via a HOTLINE message:As the order to respond in kind is passed on, the first wave of Soviet ICBMs and SLBMs strike and cripple most of America's ICBM missile silos and bomber bases. As a Soviet missile strikes near Chevy Chase, Maryland, and the President is informed of a second Soviets strike. The president reluctantly gives a second order to respond in kind just before SAC and Omaha, Nebraska, are destroyed. As he is evacuated from the White House, the president is briefed that the second launch was directed at the Chinese, therefore a second response was unnecessary. During the flight a nearby detonation causes Marine One to crash and kills the president.Believing the president to be dead, a US Navy admiral code-named "Harpoon" is given the assignment of locating a successor, who turns out to be the US Secretary of the Interior. He is sworn in and given the code-name "Condor." Harpoon's Boeing E-4B becomes the American military's new command center. It is revealed that Baton Rouge, Seattle, Los Angeles, Colorado Springs, New Orleans, Phoenix, Raleigh, Honolulu and Washington, DC, have also been destroyed, and massive unrest and riots have broken out in the remaining cities across the country. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Jones_Street_(novel)"title="Great Jones Street (novel)">
Dissatisfied with the life that his fame, fortune, and revolutionary image has bought, Bucky Wunderlick retreats to an unfurnished apartment on Great Jones Street in Manhattan and tries to pare things down. A spokesperson for Happy Valley Farm Commune, named Skippy, delivers to Bucky for safekeeping a package containing a drug that debilitates the language centers of the brain. Wunderlick's iconic status in the counterculture, and his privateness, had attracted the attention of Happy Valley, a domestic terrorist organization. A skinhead-like offshoot known as the Dog Boys also rampages through his apartment building.Bob Dylan is reputed to be one of the models for the character of Bucky Wunderlick. A key subplot involves the theft of Wunderlick's unreleased "Mountain Tapes". These are clearly inspired by Dylan's "The Basement Tapes", which would not be released until the summer of 1975 and were still shrouded in mystery. Ambitious but neurotic guitarist Azarian reflects less-than-complimentary stories about The Band's Robbie Robertson. Wunderlick's characterization by withdrawal and contrariness fits the public image of Dylan.In the novel, Wunderlick's girlfriend Opel passes away from neglect of her health. She had arranged for the "Mountain Tapes" to arrive at Wunderlick's apartment for his birthday. The novel also covers his relationship with the other tenants in the building; upstairs lives a struggling author, and downstairs a mother who is ashamed of her disfigured son and keeps him locked in his room after she was unable to sell him to the circus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zorro_(novel)"title="Zorro (novel)">
Captain Alejandro de la Vega, a Spanish soldier, marries a Native American woman named Regina. He retires from the military and becomes a hacienda owner, and later an alcalde. The two have a son, Diego. While Regina is pregnant with Diego, she befriends Ana, also Native American and a young Christian convert assigned to care for her during her pregnancy. She has her own son, Bernardo, who grows up with Diego and the two become friends. As youths, Diego and Bernardo undergo an indigenous rite of passage to prove their maturity and to find their spirit guides. Bernardo's spirit guide is a horse and Diego's is a fox ("zorro" in his native Spanish).Alejandro receives a letter from an old friend, Tomas de Romeu, who resides in what was then French-occupied Spain. Tomas urges Alejandro to send Diego to Barcelona, where he can receive more formal schooling, and learn fencing under the maestro Manuel Escalante. Alejandro reluctantly allows Diego to go, accompanied by Bernardo. In Barcelone, the young men live with de Romeu and his two young daughters, Juliana and Isabel. Diego is immediately struck by Juliana and decides to pursue her romantically. The main competitor for her affections is Rafael Moncada, whom Diego humiliates in a fencing duel. At Escalante's invitation, Diego joins La Justicia, a secret organization devoted to justice for people who are marginalized in society. He takes the name "Zorro".
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Aurora"title="Killing Aurora">
The novel contains two central characters, both fourteen years of age: the first, Aurora Thorpe (rabbit queen), has been forced by her overprotective mother and stepfather to attend the prestigious St Dymphna's Non-Denominational Ladies' College. The second, also attending St Dymphna's, is Web Richardson (rabbit king), an outcast from a single parent family. Aurora and Web share a prickly connection, despite Aurora's reluctance to be associated with the terribly unpopular Web.In an abruptly unfamiliar environment, and under the pressure of family and social expectations, Aurora becomes increasingly concerned with losing weight as a means of achieving the acceptance of her peers and living up to her own rigorous standards. Meanwhile, Web endures life without a mother, having only the scant guidance of her timid father, overbearing aunt, bitter grandfather and volatile older sister to rely on. Web desperately tries to stop Aurora from "disappearing", at the same time struggling with her mother's absence and the need for a friend.There are many references throughout the book to suggest that the school "St Dymphna's" is in fact the selective Mac.Robertson Girls' High School in Melbourne. This is the school that the author attended.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodnight_Opus"title="Goodnight Opus">
"Goodnight Opus" is a take-off of the popular "Goodnight Moon" children's book; this book actually begins with Opus being read "Goodnight Moon" by a maternal nanny figure while he sits in bed in his pink pajamas. After the nanny falls asleep while reading, Opus goes on his own journey to say goodnight to all sorts of fanciful beings and animals. The entire journey is an ode to imagination and to going beyond the last pages of a book ("departed the text"). Because the book encourages readers to think radically, it has "been banned in seventeen countries with early bedtimes", according to Breathed's website.The book ultimately served as a foreshadowing of Opus's fate; in the character's final story-arc in the "Opus" comic strip, he is encouraged by the ghost of Elvis and Breathed himself to choose someplace where he can spend eternity in peace. The final strip finds that Opus has chosen to spend eternity sleeping in the bed on the final page of "Goodnight Moon".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(Baxter_novel)"title="Time (Baxter novel)">
"Time" is set on Earth, the inner part of the Solar System and various other universes onwards from the 21st century. The novel covers a wide range of topics, including the Doomsday argument, Fermi paradox, genetic engineering, and humanity's extinction.The book begins at the end of space and time, when the last descendants of humanity face an infinite but pointless existence. Due to proton decay, the physical universe has collapsed, but some form of intelligence has survived by embedding itself into a lossless computing substrate where it can theoretically survive indefinitely. However, because there will never be new input, eventually all possible thoughts will be exhausted. Some portion of this intelligence decides that this should not have been the ultimate fate of the universe, and takes action to change the past, centering on the early 21st century. The changes come in several forms, including a message to Reid Malenfant, the appearance of super-intelligent children around the world, and the discovery of a mysterious gateway on asteroid 3753 Cruithne.Baxter's short story "Sheena 5" explores an alternate ending to the story of Sheena, the intelligent squid.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatelessness"title="Fatelessness">
The novel is about a young Hungarian boy, György "Gyuri" Köves, living in Budapest. The book opens as György's father is being sent to a labor camp. Soon afterwards, György receives working papers and travels to work outside of the Jewish quarter. One day all of the Jews are pulled off of the buses leaving the Jewish quarter, and are sent to Auschwitz on a train without water. Arriving there, György lies about his age, unknowingly saving his own life, and tells us of camp life and the conditions he faces.Eventually he is sent to Buchenwald, and continues on describing his life in a concentration camp, before being finally sent to another camp in Zeitz. György falls ill and nears death, but remains alive and is eventually sent to a hospital facility in a concentration camp until the war ends. Returning to Budapest, he is confronted with those who were not sent to camps and had just recently begun to hear of the terrible injustice and suffering.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hours_(novel)"title="The Hours (novel)">
The book concerns three generations of women affected by the classic novel "Mrs Dalloway".In 1923 Richmond, outside London, author Virginia Woolf is writing "Mrs Dalloway" and struggling with her own mental illness. In 1949 Los Angeles, Laura Brown is reading "Mrs Dalloway" while planning a birthday party for her husband, a World War II veteran. In 1999 New York City, Clarissa Vaughan plans a party to celebrate a major literary award received by her good friend and former lover, the poet Richard, who is dying of an AIDS-related illness.The situations of all three characters mirror situations experienced by Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway in "Mrs Dalloway", with Clarissa Vaughan being a very literal modern-day version of Woolf's character. Like Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa Vaughan goes on a journey to buy flowers while reflecting on the minutiae of the day around her and later prepares to throw a party. Clarissa Dalloway and Clarissa Vaughan also both reflect on their histories and past loves in relation to their current lives, which they both perceive as trivial. A number of other characters in Clarissa Vaughan's story also parallel characters in Woolf's "Mrs Dalloway".Cunningham's novel also mirrors "Mrs Dalloway's" stream-of-consciousness narrative style (a style pioneered by Woolf and James Joyce) in which the flowing thoughts and perceptions of protagonists are depicted as they would occur in real life, unfiltered, flitting from one thing to another, and often rather unpredictable. In terms of time, this means characters interact not only with the present, but also memories; this contextualizes personal history and backstory, which otherwise might appear quite trivial—buying flowers, baking a cake and such things.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_and_the_Crown"title="The Hero and the Crown">
## Part One.Aerin is the only child of Arlbeth, king of Damar, and his second wife. Aerin inherits her mother's pale skin and fiery red hair, setting her apart from all other Damarians and causing her to be feared and ostracized. Her particular nemesis at court is Galanna, a beautiful but vain young woman, who spread rumors that Aerin's mother was a witch and that Aerin is illegitimate. Galanna taunts Aerin for having failed to develop the Gift, known as "kelar", an ability to use magic that all members of the royal family inherit to some degree. During one of their regular fights, Galanna convinces Aerin to eat the leaves of the surka plant, which is poisonous to all those not of royal blood. While eating the surka plant does not kill Aerin, it makes her extremely ill.During her recovery, Aerin stumbles upon a book about the history of Damar and the enormous dragons of old that used to terrorize it, of which only much smaller relatives still exist. Seeking privacy in the pasture of her father's now-injured war horse, Talat, Aerin reads through the book while forging a friendship with the stubborn and proud horse. At the back of the book she finds a recipe for kenet, an ointment meant to protect the wearer from the effects of fire. While experimenting with the ointment, she also trains herself on mounted combat with Talat. Eventually, she sneaks off to slay a small dragon that has been terrorizing a village. Her success earns her some minor notoriety and requests for assistance from other villages. In the meantime, trouble comes from the north, in the form of one of the western barons, Nyrlol, who threatens civil war.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Europeans"title="The Europeans">
The tale opens in Boston and New England in the middle of the 19th century, and describes the experiences of two European siblings shifting from the old to the new world. The two protagonists are Eugenia Münster and Felix Young, who since their early childhood have lived in Europe, moving from France to Italy and from Spain to Germany. In this last place, Eugenia entered into a Morganatic marriage with Prince Adolf of Silberstadt-Schreckenstein, the younger brother of the reigning prince who is now being urged by his family to dissolve the marriage for political reasons. Because of this, Eugenia and Felix decide to travel to America to meet their distant cousins, so that Eugenia may "seek her fortune" in the form of a wealthy American husband.All the cousins live in the countryside around Boston and spend a lot of time together. The first encounter with them corresponds to the first visit of Felix to his family. Mr Wentworth's family is a puritanical one, far from the Europeans' habits. Felix is fascinated by the patriarchal Mr Wentworth, his son, Clifford, age 20, and two daughters, Gertrude and Charlotte. They spend a lot of time together with Mr. Robert Acton and his sister Lizzie, their neighbours and cousins.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_in_a_Blue_Dress"title="Devil in a Blue Dress">
Set in 1948, the story begins in the Watts area of Los Angeles, with Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins, a Houstonian — from that city's Fifth Ward — who lost his job at an aviation defense plant in Los Angeles and is unable to pay the mortgage on his LA home. Easy is sitting in a bar run by Joppy, a friend who is also from Houston, when a man named DeWitt Albright walks into the bar and offers him a job finding a young White woman named Daphne Monet, who is rumored to be hanging out in bars frequented mostly by African Americans, but where White women are allowed inside.At the bar, Easy meets two old friends, Coretta and Dupree, among many other people that he knew from his former life in Houston. Coretta says that she knows Daphne, but gives an incorrect address to Easy. He goes home with them and has sex with Coretta while Dupree is asleep in the next room. Easy then leaves her early the next morning, only to be arrested by the LAPD. Shortly thereafter, following police interrogation, Easy is told that Coretta is dead, and that he is a suspect in her murder.When Easy finally does find Monet, he figures out that she has stolen a large amount of money from a man named Todd Carter, who is a local wealthy businessman. Albright wanted this money for himself. Eventually, Albright finds Monet through Easy, who is trying to shield the thieving woman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Untertan"title="Der Untertan">
The socio-critical novel portrays the life of Diederich Hessling, a slavish and fanatical admirer of Kaiser Wilhelm II, as an archetype of Wilhelmine Germany. The name "Hessling" alludes to the German word for ugly, "". Hessling is unthinkingly obedient to authority and maintains a rigid dedication to the nationalist goals of the newly created Second Reich.As a self-conscious and snivelling child, he acts as an informer. He later gains self-confidence by joining a duelling student fraternity, practising as a drunkard and "Stammtisch" agitator, and by narrowly obtaining a doctorate of chemistry. He becomes a paper manufacturer, family patriarch, and eventually the most influential man in his small town.Throughout the novel, Hessling's inflexible ideals are often contradicted by his actions: he preaches bravery but is a coward; he is the strongest militarist but seeks to be excused from conscription; his greatest political opponents are the Marxist Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), yet he uses his influence to help get his hometown's SPD candidate to the Reichstag parliament, in order to defeat his liberal business competitors; he starts vicious rumors against the latter and then dissociates himself from them; he both preaches and enforces Christian morality against others but lies, cheats, and regularly commits adultery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Liar_(novel)"title="The Liar (novel)">
The book opens as the protagonist, Adrian Healey, and his mentor, Professor Donald Trefusis, are at Mozart's birthplace in Salzburg, where Adrian witnesses the (staged) murder of their contact.The narrative then shifts to Adrian's time at public school, where he has carefully groomed himself to convey the image of a witty, highly extroverted young gay man; however, despite his image, and, despite regarding sex as his "public pride", he finds himself unable to express his love for the beautiful Hugo Cartwright. Another student, Paul Trotter (known as "Pigs Trotter" ["sic"]) hangs himself due to his unrequited love for Adrian. Adrian is shown later in the novel to be touchy on the subject of suicide as a result. Prior to Trotter's funeral, Adrian has a sexual encounter with Hugo while pretending to be asleep.Adrian is later expelled from school for writing an article discussing the tradition of hidden behaviours that could be considered homosexual at public schools; consequently, he takes his A-level examinations in a Gloucestershire state school. Adrian claims to have run away from home due to unhappiness, subsequently becoming a rent boy, but it is later revealed, in an overheard conversation, that this probably never occurred.Eventually, Adrian takes on the role of schoolmaster and has his first sexual encounter with a woman, a fellow member of staff at the school. The school years finish with Adrian's cricket team defeating the team of Hugo Cartwright, to whom Adrian no longer feels attracted. Just as Adrian and his team are about to leave the school at which Hugo is a master he admits to Hugo that he was awake during the incident before Trotter's funeral.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_of_New_Moon"title="Emily of New Moon">
Similar to her earlier and more famous "Anne of Green Gables" series, the "Emily" novels depicted life through the eyes of a young orphan girl, Emily Byrd Starr, who is raised by her relatives after her father dies of tuberculosis. Montgomery considered Emily to be a character much closer to her own personality than Anne, and some of the events which occur in the "Emily" series happened to Montgomery herself. Emily is described as having black hair, purply violet eyes, elfin ears, pale skin, and a unique and enchanting "slow" smile.Emily Starr is sent to live at New Moon Farm on Prince Edward Island with her aunts Elizabeth and Laura Murray and her Cousin Jimmy. She makes friends with Ilse Burnley, Teddy Kent, and Perry Miller, the hired boy, whom Aunt Elizabeth looks down upon because he was born in 'Stovepipe Town', a poorer district.Each of the children has a special gift. Emily was born to be a writer, Teddy is a gifted artist, Ilse is a talented elocutionist, and Perry has the makings of a great politician. They also each have a few problems with their families. Emily has a hard time getting along with Aunt Elizabeth, who does not understand her need to write. Ilse's father, Dr. Burnley, ignores Ilse most of the time because of a dreadful secret concerning Ilse's mother. Teddy's mother is jealous of her son's talents and friends, fearing that his love for them will eclipse his love for her; as a result, she hates Emily, Teddy's drawings, and even his pets. Perry is not as well off as the other three, so his Aunt Tom once tries to make Emily promise to marry Perry when they grow up, threatening that unless Emily does so, she will not pay for Perry's schooling.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Without_Qualities"title="The Man Without Qualities">
Part I, titled "A Sort of Introduction", is an introduction to the protagonist, a 32-year-old mathematician named Ulrich who is in search of a sense of life and reality but fails to find it. His ambivalence towards morals and indifference to life has brought him to the state of being "a man without qualities", depending on the outer world to form his character. A kind of keenly analytical passivity is his most typical attitude.Musil once said that it is not particularly difficult to describe Ulrich in his main features. Ulrich himself only knows he is strangely indifferent to all his qualities. Lack of any profound essence and ambiguity as a general attitude to life are his principal characteristics.Meanwhile, we meet a murderer and rapist, Moosbrugger, who is condemned for his murder of a prostitute. Other protagonists are Ulrich's mistress, Bonadea, and Clarisse, his friend Walter's neurotic wife, whose refusal to go along with commonplace existence leads to Walter's insanity.In Part II, "Pseudoreality Prevails", Ulrich joins the so-called "Collateral Campaign" or "Parallel Campaign", preparations for a celebration in honor of 70 years of the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph's reign. That same year, 1918, the German Emperor Wilhelm II would have been ruler of his country for 30 years. This coincidence prompts Count Leinsdorf to suggest the creation of a committee to explore a suitable way to demonstrate Austria's political, cultural, and philosophical supremacy via a festival which will capture the minds of the Austrian Emperor's subjects and people of the world forever. On that account, many bright and vague ideas and visions are discussed (e.g., The Year of Austria, The World Year, The Austrian Peace Year or The Austrian World Peace Year).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Mowgli"title="Space Mowgli">
The novel describes the "Ark Project" of 2160 and the first (and last) contact with Ark Megaforms. The story is told by "Stanislav Popov", a technician of the ER-2 team, one of the twelve ecologist teams that were working on Ark to prepare the planet for the arrival of the colonists from Pant. The ER-2 consists of Popov, Gennady Komov, Maya Glumova and Yakov Vanderhuze.The story begins as the members of ER-2 go on a routine exploration mission while Popov is left behind to oversee the construction of a permanent base for the arriving colonists. Suddenly, the construction robots get out of control and leave the construction site. It takes a few hours for Popov to locate the robots, fix them and set them back to work.After that, Popov hears a human baby crying. Popov tries to locate the source of the sound but the crying stops as suddenly as it started. Since infants are not allowed to leave Earth, Popov assumes he had an auditory hallucination. Popov carries on his work with the robots. Now, he hears a female voice pleading for help from somebody named "Shura". Popov cannot locate the source of the voice either.Meanwhile, the ER-2 exploration party discovers the wreckage of an Earth spaceship and the remains of its two pilots. They log a report describing their discovery with the 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_That_Corrupted_Hadleyburg"title="The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg">
Chapter IHadleyburg enjoys the reputation of being an "incorruptible" town known for its responsible, honest people that are trained to avoid temptation. However, at some point the people of Hadleyburg manage to offend a passing stranger, and he vows to get his revenge by corrupting the town.The stranger drops off a sack in Hadleyburg, at the house of Edward and Mary Richards. It contains slightly over 160 pounds of gold coins and is to be given to a man in the town who purportedly gave the stranger $20 and some life-changing advice in his time of need years earlier. To identify the man, a letter with the sack suggests that anyone who claims to know what the advice was should write the remark down and submit it to Reverend Burgess, who will open the sack at a public meeting and find the actual remark inside. News of the mysterious sack of gold, whose value is estimated at $40,000, spreads throughout the town and even gains attention across the country.Chapter IIThe residents beam with pride as stories of the sack and Hadleyburg's honesty spread throughout the nation, but the mood soon changes. Initially reluctant to give into the temptation of the gold, soon even the most upstanding citizens are trying to guess the remark.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironside_(Black_novel)"title="Ironside (Black novel)">
In the realm of Faery, the time has come for Roiben's coronation. Uneasy in the midst of the malevolent Unseelie Court, pixie Kaye is sure of one thing only, her love for Roiben. But when Kaye, drunk on faerie wine, declares herself to him, he sends her on a seemingly impossible quest. Now Kaye cannot see or speak with Roiben unless she can find the one thing she knows does not exist: a faerie who can tell a lie.Corny and Kaye decide to watch Ellen, her mother, perform in a bar. A male character is watching Kaye. Realising that this character is a faery, Corny attempts to get information from him in the bathroom. Kaye finds them and the faery curses Corny so that anything he touches withers.Miserable and convinced she belongs nowhere, Kaye decides to tell her mother the truth that she is a changeling, long ago left in place of a human daughter. Her mother's shock and horror sends Kaye to the Seelie Court to find her human counterpart and bring her back to Ironside. Silarial offers Kaye protection to and from the court in order to offer her a deal, and a boy who can see through faerie enchantments, Luis (introduced in "Valiant", the preceding book in the series), is arranged to lead them there.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bringing_Down_the_House_(book)"title="Bringing Down the House (book)">
The book's main character is Kevin Lewis, an MIT graduate who was invited to join the MIT Blackjack Team in 1993. Lewis was recruited by two of the team's top players, Jason Fisher and Andre Martinez. The team was financed by a colorful character named Micky Rosa, who had organized at least one other team to play the Vegas strip. This new team was the most profitable yet. Personality conflicts and card counting deterrent efforts at the casinos eventually ended this incarnation of the MIT Blackjack Team.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Education_of_Robert_Nifkin"title="The Education of Robert Nifkin">
Robert attended Riverview High School, which was only notable for its anti-semitic attitudes, homophobia, boredom, and anti-communist paranoia. Robert has no interest in any of his classes except for ROTC, a class he is taking instead of PE. His boredom and hatred for school grows and he eventually stops attending for large periods of time, preferring to hang out with Kenny Papescu and his girlfriend Linda in a very beatnik part of town. On a day that he actually attends, he found out that his ROTC sergeant had been fired, on the grounds of being a Communist. Robert's truancy increased even more, except on the occasions that he sought shelter in Riverview from the Chicago winter.Finally, the school ordered him to be transferred to a correctional school but upon the recommendation of Kenny Papescu, Robert convinced his parents to let him attend Wheaton, a private school. At Wheaton, truancy, when it is even noticed, goes unpunished. This is how, Robert learns, Kenny Papescu has not been to school in over two years. Robert ends up getting straight A's, some in courses he didn't know he was enrolled in. Robert matures greatly while attending the Wheaton school and learns to appreciate art, chess, and the city's architecture; the freedom that it provides allows him to explore his interests with the guidance of the teachers. Robert concluded his high school reflection with the hope that he be admitted to college.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Apology_for_the_Life_of_Mrs._Shamela_Andrews"title="An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews">
"Shamela" is written as a shocking revelation of the true events which took place in the life of Pamela Andrews, the main heroine of "Pamela". "Shamela" starts with a letter from a Parson Thomas Tickletext to his friend, Parson J. Oliver, in which Tickletext is completely smitten by " Pamela", and insists Oliver gives the book a read. In response, however, Oliver reveals her true nature is not so virtuous, and he has letters to prove her real character. The rest of the story is told in letters between the major characters, such as Shamela, her mother, Henrietta Maria Honora Andrews—who is unwed in this version—Master Booby, Mrs. Jeweks, Mrs. Jervis, and Rev. Arthur Williams, much like in " Pamela". In this version, however, her father is not present at all. In "Shamela" we also learn that, instead of being a kind, humble and chaste servant-girl, Pamela (whose true name turns out to be Shamela) is in fact a wicked and lascivious creature—daughter to a London prostitute—who schemes to entrap her master, Squire Booby, into marriage. Later, however, it was discovered Shamela was having an affair with the Reverend. The verbal and physical violence of Richardson's "Mr. B" (whose name is revealed to Booby) to his servant maid are hyperbolized, rendering their supposed love-match contemptible and absurd.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obernewtyn_Chronicles"title="Obernewtyn Chronicles">
Elspeth Gordie and her brother Jes grow up in an orphanage after their parents are burned as Seditioners. Elspeth has enhanced mental abilities and must conceal them in order to avoid being discovered as a Misfit. At the beginning of the first book in the series, "Obernewtyn", Elspeth is named a Misfit and is sent to Obernewtyn, a place run by people who claim to investigate the Misfits and look for a cure to their abilities.At Obernewtyn, Elspeth discovers what is really happening to all the Misfits that Madam Vega, the co-owner of Obernewtyn, claims she is curing. Together the Misfits form an uprising and take over Obernewtyn, turning it into a secret refuge for both Misfits and animals.Elspeth is not just a Misfit; she is what the animals call the "Innle", or "Seeker" in English, and she must find and destroy the "weaponmachines" around the world. The weaponmachines are what caused the Great White, and Elspeth has to seek them out to destroy them before the world is plunged into another Great White.However, the Misfits can't hide forever and must find a place in "The Land" as it enters a period of turmoil, as rebels begin to revolt against the Council and the Herder Faction. The elusive "Twentyfamilies' Gypsies", and half-blooded gypsies, also play an important role in the political and social struggles of The Land.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Raj_Quartet"title="The Raj Quartet">
The story of "The Raj Quartet" begins in 1942. World War II is at its zenith, and in South East Asia, the Allied forces have suffered great losses. Burma has fallen, and the Japanese invasion of the Indian subcontinent from the east appears imminent. The year 1942 is also marked by Indian nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi's call for the Quit India movement to the British rulers of India. "The Raj Quartet" is set in this tumultuous background for the British soldiers and civilians stationed in India who have a duty to manage this part of the British Empire, known as the "jewel in the crown" of the British monarch. One recurrent theme is the moral certainty of the older generation as contrasted with the anomie of the younger. Another theme is the treatment of Indians by Britons living in India. As a reflection of these themes. the British characters let themselves be "trapped by codes and principles, which were in part to keep their own fears and doubts at bay." Most of the major characters suffer difficulties, and some die, either because they try to follow codes which have become outmoded (Ahmed Kasim, Merrick, Teddie Bingham) or because they reject the codes and become outsiders (Kumar, Lady and Daphne Manners, Sarah Layton).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Roderick_Random"title="The Adventures of Roderick Random">
The novel is set in the 1730s and 1740s and tells the life story (in the first person) of Roderick "Rory" Random, who was born to a Scottish gentleman and a lower-class woman and is thus shunned by his father's family. His mother dies soon after giving birth and his father is driven mad with grief. Random's paternal grandfather coerces a local school master into providing free education for the boy, who becomes popular with his classmates (some of whom he encounters again in subsequent adventures) and learns Latin, French, Italian and ancient Greek. The language accomplishments are despite, rather than because of, the abusive tutor who oppresses Random at every opportunity. Finally Random is cast out after the tutor exacts revenge for one of Random's escapades and denounces him to his grandfather. With none of his paternal family willing to assist him in any way, Random relies on his wits and the occasional support of his maternal uncle, Tom Bowling.The naive Random then embarks on a series of adventures and misadventures, visiting inter alia: London, Bath, France, the West Indies, West Africa and South America. With little money to support himself, he encounters malice, discrimination and sharpers at every turn. His honest and trustworthy character and medical skills do however win him a few staunch friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_True_Story"title="A True Story">
The novel begins with an explanation that the story is not at all "true", and that everything in it is a complete and utter lie. The narrative begins with Lucian and his fellow travelers journeying out past the Pillars of . Blown off course by a storm, they come to an island with a river of wine filled with fish and bears, a marker indicating that and Dionysus have traveled to this point, and trees that look like women. Shortly after leaving the island, they are caught up by a whirlwind and taken to the Moon, where they find themselves embroiled in a full-scale war between Endymion the king of the Moon and Phaethon the king of the Sun over colonization of the Morning Star. Both armies include bizarre hybrid lifeforms. The armies of the Sun win the war by clouding over the Moon and blocking out the Sun's light. Both parties come to a peace agreement. Lucian describes life on the Moon and how it is different from life on Earth.After returning to Earth, the adventurers are swallowed by a whale, in whose belly they discover a variety of fish people, against whom they wage war and triumph. They kill the whale by starting a bonfire and escape by propping its mouth open. Next, they encounter a sea of milk, an island of cheese, and the Island of the Blessed. There, Lucian meets the heroes of the Trojan War, other mythical men and animals, as well as Homer and Pythagoras. They find sinners being punished, the worst of them being the ones who had written books with lies and fantasies, including Herodotus and Ctesias. After leaving the Island of the Blessed, they deliver a letter to Calypso given to them by Odysseus explaining that he wishes he had stayed with her so he could have lived eternally. They discover a chasm in the ocean, but eventually sail around it, discover a far-off continent and decide to explore it. The book ends abruptly with Lucian stating that their future adventures will be described in the upcoming sequels, a promise which a disappointed scholiast described as "the biggest lie of all".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_(novel)"title="Neanderthal (novel)">
The plot of "Neanderthal" revolves around two rival scientists, Matt Mattison and Susan Arnot, who are sent by the United States government to search for missing Harvard anthropologist James Kellicut. Their only clue is the skull of a Neanderthal. Carbon dating shows that the skull, which should be 40,000 years old, is suspiciously only 25 years old.The Russian and American governments are competing to study the surviving Neanderthals in Tajikistan in order to learn more about their "remote viewing" capabilities. The Neanderthals are split into two tribes, a peaceful valley tribe and a cannibalistic and violent mountain tribe. Soon, the protagonists are captured by Neanderthals and must try to escape from the cannibals. They hope to do so without jeopardizing the safety of the peaceful tribe. It eventually, however, becomes necessary to train the peaceful tribe for war. The novel explains that a completely peaceful society like that was doomed in any case, and would have been destroyed soon by the mountain tribe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilt_(novel)"title="Wilt (novel)">
Henry Wilt is a demoralized and professionally under-rated assistant lecturer who teaches literature to uninterested construction apprentices at a community college in East Anglia. Years of henpecking and harassment by his physically powerful but emotionally immature wife Eva leave him with dreams of killing her in various gruesome ways. But a string of unfortunate events (including one involving an inflatable plastic female doll) start Henry on a farcical journey. Along the way he finds humiliation and chaos, which ultimately lead him to discover his own strengths and some level of dignity. All the while he is pursued by the tenacious police inspector Flint, whose plodding skills of detection and deduction interpret Wilt's often bizarre actions as heinous crimes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_You_Forgive_Her?"title="Can You Forgive Her?">
Alice Vavasor, a young woman of twenty-four, is engaged to the wealthy, respectable, dependable if unambitious and bland, John Grey. She had previously been engaged to her cousin George, but she broke it off after he went through a wild period. John, trusting in his love, makes only the slightest protest of Alice’s planned tour of Switzerland with her cousin Kate, George's sister, even when he learns George is to go with them as their male protector. Influenced by the romance of Switzerland, by Kate's contriving to restore George to Alice's favour, and by her own misgivings with John's shortcomings, Alice jilts her second fiancé.Alice's noble but despised relations are shocked, but their protests only strengthen Alice's resolve, and she eventually renews her engagement to George, who seems charismatic, ambitious and alluring, in contrast to John. She respects his honesty in acknowledging in his letter proposing their marriage that her money would support his parliamentary ambitions, and she tells him that he can draw on her funds even before they marry. Ever attentive to Alice's welfare, John secretly pays the money instead.George wins his first election, but loses his second. Now desperate, his darker side becomes increasingly visible. He has fantasies about murdering his grandfather, and breaks Kate's arm when the old man dies of natural causes having denied George his inheritance. In despair, and after learning of John's interference in his campaign and engagement, he almost murders John before escaping to America.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Italian_(Radcliffe_novel)"title="The Italian (Radcliffe novel)">
The plot starts in Naples, Italy in the 18th century, in the church of Santa Maria del Pianto, where an English traveller is speaking with an Italian friar. The Englishman notices a man of extraordinary appearance in a shadowy area of the church, who is an assassin, according to the friar. When the Englishman asks why this assassin is protected in the church, an Italian friend travelling with him directs his attention to a famous confessional in the church, which was the scene of a particularly startling confession. He offers to send him a narrative relating this former assassin's confession, and the problems that attended it, to his hotel, and the two retire from the church and go their separate ways. The Englishman reads the story in his hotel room as follows:It is 1758 in the church of San Lorenzo in Naples where Vincentio di Vivaldi sees the beautiful Ellena di Rosalba with her aunt, Signora Bianchi. Vivaldi is struck with her beauty, and intends to court her, with the hopes that they will end up married. When Vivaldi’s mother, the proud Marchesa, hears about his love for a poor orphan, she appeals to her ambitious and cunning confessor, Father Schedoni, to prevent the marriage, with a promise that she will help him obtain promotion in his order. As Vivaldi continues to visit Signora Bianchi at Villa Altieri, he is approached by a monk, who seems to be an apparition, threatening him to keep away from the villa and Ellena. After each encounter, Vivaldi tries in vain to capture the strange monk, with the help of his friend Bonarmo and his faithful servant Paulo. Vivaldi suspects that the monk is Father Schedoni, and is determined to know why his courtship of Ellena is discouraged. After being promised the hand of Ellena and appointed her guardian by Signora Bianchi before her sudden mysterious death, Vivaldi finds that Ellena has been kidnapped from the villa, and immediately deduces it is by the hand of the Marchesa and Schedoni. Leaving Naples secretly in pursuit of her abductors, Vivaldi and Paulo eventually find Ellena held at the remote convent of San Stefano, at the mercy of a cruel Lady Abbess, and Vivaldi infiltrates the convent disguised as a religious pilgrim to rescue her. In the convent, Ellena befriends a lovely but melancholy nun, Sister Olivia, who helps her escape from the convent into the care of Vivaldi.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit,_Run"title="Rabbit, Run">
Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, formerly a high school basketball star, is now 26, and has a job selling a kitchen gadget named MagiPeeler. He is married to Janice, who was a salesgirl at the store where he once worked, and who is now pregnant. They live in Mount Judge, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Brewer, and have a two-year-old son named Nelson. Harry finds middle-class family life unsatisfying, and on the spur of the moment, leaves his family and drives south in an attempt to "escape". After getting lost, he returns to his home town, but not wanting to return to his family, he instead visits his old basketball coach, Marty Tothero.That night, Harry has dinner with Tothero and two girls, one of whom, Ruth Leonard, is a part-time prostitute. Harry and Ruth begin a two-month affair and he moves into her apartment. Meanwhile, Janice moves back in with her parents. The local Episcopal priest, Jack Eccles, tries to persuade Harry to reconcile with his wife. But Harry stays with Ruth until he learns she had a fling with his high school nemesis, Ronnie Harrison. Enraged, Harry coaxes Ruth into performing fellatio on him. The same night, Harry learns that Janice is in labor, and he leaves Ruth to visit his wife at the hospital.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headlong_(Williams_novel)"title="Headlong (Williams novel)">
The story takes place in the United Kingdom in the mid-1930s. During the Silver Jubilee of King George V and Queen Mary in May 1935, the entire British Royal Family is killed in a freak accident after the explosion of a large dirigible (similar to the "Hindenburg" disaster), and the search is on to find a surviving heir of British blood. After an extensive search, the choice falls on Jack Green, a 24-year-old stage actor who, unbeknownst to him, is the grandson of the philandering Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, George V's elder brother, and the nearest living heir. He is virtually kidnapped and brought to Buckingham Palace, where he is placed in the care of William Millingham (known as Willie) who is to be his Private Secretary. Millingham assists the new king during a period of adjustment to his new status. He is duly installed as King John II.After the new king refuses to marry any of several potential queens offered to him, and also makes a speech drawing attention to the problem of unemployment, which is considered highly radical by "The Powers That Be," a plot is discovered to discredit him. At the same time, the King begins to chafe at the rigid, ceremonial routine of royal life and the limitations inevitably placed upon his freedom. He also misses his girlfriend Kathy, who is deeply uncomfortable with him in his new role.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_(novel)"title="The End (novel)">
The book begins with the Baudelaire orphans and Count Olaf on a boat heading away from the burning Hotel Denouement. After a storm, the Baudelaires arrive and are welcomed on an island by a young girl named Friday. Count Olaf, however, is not welcomed due to his snobby attitude and death threat to Friday.Later, the pregnant Kit Snicket (who first appeared in "The Grim Grotto") and a friendly snake known as the "incredibly deadly viper (a misnomer)" (which first appeared in "The Reptile Room") are shipwrecked on the island. Count Olaf disguises himself as Kit, but for the first time in the series, it fails to everyone else, and the Islanders, led by a man called Ishmael (who, multiple times, says that 'he won't force them' to do what he wants), capture him and shun the Baudelaires for possessing forbidden items.That night, two of the islanders sneak out to feed the children, asking them to join a mutiny. Agreeing, the Baudelaires go to the arboretum to collect weapons, where they discover a hidden room with a book that chronicles the history of the island. Ishmael arrives, explaining to the children that their parents were once the island's leaders and were responsible for many improvements in island life, but were eventually overthrown by Ishmael, who brought the island back to a simple and austere way of life while hoarding comforts for himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casino_Royale_(novel)"title="Casino Royale (novel)">
Le Chiffre, the paymaster for a French Communist Party trade union in Alsace, loses 50 million francs in Soviet subsidies by investing in a chain of brothels three months before the French Fourth Republic ratifies the Loi Marthe Richard. He desperately absconds to the Royale-les-Eaux casino in Somme with the remaining 25 million francs in union funds in a last-ditch attempt to recoup his losses by winning a high-stakes baccarat game before his handlers realize anything is amiss. Unbeknownst to him SMERSH has already discovered his perfidy and sent an agent from the Polish People's Republic to assassinate him, while his mistress passes word of his financial troubles to the Head of Station S (Soviet Union) at the British Secret Service. As NATO has determined the union could serve as a fifth column in a war with the Eastern Bloc, the agency's director M approves S's proposal to send a 00 Agent to play against Le Chiffre and bankrupt both him and the union. M chooses the agent James Bond, 007, for the mission because of Bond's expertise in gambling.As part of Bond's cover as a wealthy Jamaican planter, M also assigns as his companion Vesper Lynd, personal assistant to the Head of Section S (Soviet Union). Although Bond and Vesper attempt to maintain a dispassionate working relationship, they nevertheless grow closer. The CIA and the French Deuxième Bureau also send agents Rene Mathis and Felix Leiter as observers. Mathis quickly warns Bond that his cover has somehow been blown and that he is under surveillance from the couple staying in the hotel room above him. That night he narrowly survives a bombing by two of Le Chiffre's Bulgarian henchmen, who are themselves killed after being falsely assured that one of the explosives was merely a smokescreen to help them escape. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_World_Out_of_Time"title="A World Out of Time">
Jerome Branch Corbell has incurable cancer and is cryogenically frozen in the year 1970 in the faint hope of a future cure. His body is revived in 2190 by an oppressive, totalitarian global government called "The State". His personality and memories are extracted (destroying his body in the process) and transferred into the body of a mindwiped criminal. After awakening, he is continually evaluated by Peerssa, a "checker", who has to decide whether he is worth keeping. With the threat of his own mindwiping looming, Corbell works hard to pass the various tests.Peerssa decides that Corbell is a loner and born tourist, making him an ideal candidate to pilot a one-man Bussard ramjet, finding and seeding suitable planets as the first step to terraforming them. Discovering it is a one-way trip and disgusted with the State's treatment of him as an expendable commodity, Corbell hijacks the ship and takes it to the center of the galaxy. (It was at this point that the original short story ended.)Peerssa fails to talk him out of it. Peerssa and The State resort to subterfuge; an artificial intelligence program based on Peerssa's personality is secretly transferred into the ship's computer using the link with Earth. Though the Peerssa AI opposes the detour, it cannot disobey Corbell's direct orders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Tomorrow's_Parties_(novel)"title="All Tomorrow's Parties (novel)">
The book has three separate but overlapping stories, with the repeated appearance of shared characters. The San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge, the overarching setting of the trilogy, functions as a shared location of their convergence and resolution.The first story features former cop Berry Rydell, the protagonist of "Virtual Light". Rydell quits a temporary job as a security guard at the Lucky Dragon convenience store to run errands for atrophied computer hacker Colin Laney (the protagonist of "Idoru"), who lives in a cardboard box in a subway in Shinjuku, Tokyo. As a child, Laney was the subject of pharmaceutical trials which damaged his nervous system. As a result, he has a form of attention deficit disorder but gains the ability to discern nodal points in the undifferentiated flow of information, and from that he acquires a certain predictive faculty. This makes him ideal for the role of "netrunner" or data analyst. A side effect of 5-SB, the drug administered to Laney, causes the user to become attached to strong personalities. As a result, Laney has become obsessed with media baron Cody Harwood of Harwood/Levine, a powerful public relations firm. He spends his life surfing the net from his enclave in the subway, searching for traces of Harwood in the media. From this, Laney foresees a crucial historical shift which may precede the end of the world "as we know it". He predicts that Harwood, who had also taken 5-SB before (albeit voluntarily, with the knowledge of the consequences), knows this and will try to shape this historical shift to his liking. To stop Harwood, Laney hires Rydell under the guise of a courier to travel to San Francisco where he believes the next nodal point will congeal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Scroll"title="The Star Scroll">
While on the island of Dorval, the Sunrunner Meath uncovers ancient scrolls in the ruins of an ancient Sunrunner keep. Concerned about the content and odd star symbols, Meath decides to these "Star Scrolls" to the leader of the Sunrunners, Andrade. Lady Andrade appoints Andry, nephew of High Prince Rohan, to translate the scrolls with the help of Hollis, his brother Maarken's unofficial betrothed. As Andry and Hollis work through the translation and the embedded code, they learn that the scrolls deal with ancient sorcerers and sorcery. They are unaware that the scrolls' existence and rediscovery is known to sorcerers in hiding. Mireva, a sorceress, forms a plan to retrieve the scrolls. One of her charges, Segev, Ianthe's youngest son, travels to Goddess Keep to pose as a young "faradhi" in order to steal the scrolls. He addicts Hollis to "dranath" as a cohort, but Andry disrupts Segev's plan.Meanwhile, an arrogant upstart called Masul attempts to proclaim himself Roelstra's son and heir. The whispers of this heir lead to an assassination attempt on Pol's life. To proclaim Pol's position as Prince of Princemarch, Rohan and Pol travel through Princemarch. Pol meets the local Lords and earns his people's favor by participating in their traditions. Unfortunately, another assassination attempt is made, this time ending in the death of Maeta, one of Rohan's most favored guards.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_of_the_Border,_West_of_the_Sun"title="South of the Border, West of the Sun">
The novel tells the story of Hajime, from his childhood in a small town in Japan to his adult years in Tokyo. He meets Shimamoto, a girl with polio and a fellow only child. They spend their time together talking about their interests in life and listening to records on Shimamoto's stereo. They are separated in their high school years, and grow apart.They are reunited in their thirty-sixth year. Hajime is now the father of two children and owner of two successful jazz bars. Shimamoto gives no details of her own life and appears only at random intervals, haunting him as a constant "what-if". Meeting Shimamoto again sets off a chain of events that forces Hajime to choose between his young family and the magic of the past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron's_Rod_(novel)"title="Aaron's Rod (novel)">
Aaron Sisson, a union official in the coal mines of the English Midlands, is trapped in a stale marriage. He is also an amateur, but talented, flautist. At the start of the story he walks out on his wife and two children and decides on impulse to visit Italy. His dream is to become recognised as a professional musician. During his travels he encounters and befriends Rawdon Lilly, a Lawrence-like writer who nurses Aaron back to health when he is taken ill in post-war London. Having recovered his health, Aaron arrives in Florence. Here he moves in intellectual and artistic circles, argues about politics, leadership and submission, and has an affair with an aristocratic lady. The novel ends with an anarchist or fascist explosion that destroys Aaron’s instrument.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_America"title="Hello America">
"Hello America" is set in 2114 AD, after an ecological collapse has rendered North America virtually uninhabitable. Most of the population evacuated to Europe and Asia. The bulk of the novel takes place when a European steamship, the SS "Apollo", sails to America to try to discover the cause of increased radioactive fallout in England.Each of the crew members has a secret agenda, and is subject to their own psychological yearnings. Most of the "Apollo"'s crew are descended from expatriate Americans who have become assimilated into European society, while still feeling some draw to their homeland.In the novel, the Soviet Union dammed the Bering Strait in the 1990s, thus changing global weather patterns by reversing the normally clockwise currents in the Pacific Ocean. Although the Russians were able to grow grain as far north as the Arctic Circle, a massive drought began east of the Rocky Mountains. West of the Rockies, the opposite problem was true. Further, much of coastal Asia froze over. The expedition eventually encounters survivors from a previous expedition. One of these survivors calls himself "President Charles Manson," but none of the Apollo's crew understood the historical reference.In the end, it was implied that Europe needs America, if only as a place where the darker elements of the Western mindset can emerge without inconveniencing decent people. A kind of rebirth re-establishes something akin to the old order, allowing insanity to appear in small doses to everyone, rather than bottled up in one person where it proves to be really dangerous. Possibly for the first time ever, nuclear weapons are used for a constructive purpose, and the 'New World Order' that arises from the events of the book contains both the promise of a better future and the understated promise/threat of phantasmagoric horrors to come, though presumably in smaller doses.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strip_Tease_(novel)"title="Strip Tease (novel)">
During a late-night bachelor party at the Eager Beaver, a strip club in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, drunken groom-to-be Paul Guber climbs on stage and grabs Erin Grant, one of the dancers. Before the club's bouncer can act, Paul is attacked with a champagne bottle by another customer. The attacker turns out to be Congressman David Lane Dilbeck, an incorrigible (yet secret) patron of adult establishments. Political fixer Malcolm Moldowsky, representing Dilbeck's legislative patrons in Florida's sugar cane industry, is furious at Dilbeck's stupidity since he is in the middle of a re-election campaign.Erin, a single mother engaged in a custody legal fight with her ex-husband Darrell, was fired from her job as a secretary for the FBI after he was arrested for grand larceny. The legal costs of her divorce impelled Erin to take up erotic dancing as a career. Ironically, her occupation has given the judge a prejudiced view of her, while Darrell's criminal record has been expunged after he has agreed to become an informant for the police. As a result, Darrell has been given custody of their daughter Angela, and Erin desperately needs even more money to reverse the court decision.One of Erin's lovestruck fans, a bookish man named Jerry Killian, recognizes Dilbeck from the club and tries to blackmail him into influencing the judge in Erin's favor. But when the judge proves resistant to Dilbeck's probing, Moldowsky decides the only way to safeguard Dilbeck is to have Jerry murdered. His body is found floating in the Clark Fork River in Montana – by Miami homicide detective Al Garcia, on vacation with his family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerlitz_(novel)"title="Austerlitz (novel)">
Jacques Austerlitz, the main character in the book, is an architectural historian who encounters and befriends the solitary narrator in Antwerp during the 1960s. Gradually we come to understand his life history. He arrived in Britain during the summer of 1939 as an infant refugee on a kindertransport from a Czechoslovakia threatened by Hitler's Nazis. He was adopted by an elderly Welsh Nonconformist preacher and his sickly wife, and spent his childhood near Bala, Gwynedd, before attending a minor public school. His foster parents died, and Austerlitz learned something of his background. After school he attended Oriel College, Oxford and became an academic who is drawn to, and began his research in, the study of European architecture. After a nervous breakdown, Austerlitz visited Prague, where he met a close friend of his lost parents, Vera, who often took care of "Jacquot" when his parents were away. As he speaks with her, memories return, including French and Czech expressions she taught him. The elderly lady tells him the fate of his mother, an actress and opera singer who was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp. From Prague, Austerlitz travels to Theriesenstadt, and after returning to England via train, with an emotionally difficult journey through Germany, manages to obtain a 14-minute video compilation of highlights from "Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet", the 1944 Nazi propaganda film, in which he believes he recognizes his mother. Vera, however, dismisses the woman from the documentary. Instead, she confirms the identity of Austerlitz's mother in a photograph of an anonymous actress which Austerlitz found in the Prague theatrical archives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ware_Tetralogy"title="Ware Tetralogy">
The events in the series are set in motion by Cobb Anderson, a computer scientist born in 1950 as part of the baby boomer generation. In the late part of the 20th century, the population bulge of the Baby Boomers causes massive unemployment. By 1995, Anderson's self-replicating robots, known as "boppers", colonize the Moon. By 2010, the United States Social Security system collapses. In response to riots, the federal government turns over the state of Florida to the elderly. This leads directly into the events of "Software", in 2020.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Super_Barbarians"title="The Super Barbarians">
For two generations humanity has been enslaved by the Vorra, a race of technologically advanced barbarians who had conquered space. On Qallavarra, the home planet of the Vorra, Gareth Shaw is an indentured servant of the House of Pwill, one of the giant city-states into which the planet is divided. As the only Terran on the estate, he is drawn into a seraglio intrigue by Under-lady Shavarri, the ninth wife of Pwill Himself, the overlord who rules the estate like a medieval duke. Shavarri's demand obliges Shaw to visit the "Acre of Earth", a ghetto-like enclave in the middle of a nearby city.In the Acre humans lived in relative freedom because they provided services that the Vorra could not provide for themselves. Chief among those services was the maintenance and repair of machines brought from Earth for the Vorra to use. But the Terrans also provided certain chemical services and Shaw had been sent to obtain one of those.Chased into the Acre by a Vorrish mob instigated by a squad of soldier-trainees, Shaw meets an almost equally hostile reception from three Terrans—Marijane Lee, her brother Ken, and their friend Gustav—who have rescued him from the mob. Seeing that he's wearing the livery of a Vorrish estate, they take him to Judge Olafsson, the voice of Terran law in the Acre. After being interrogated about his time on Qallavarra, Shaw leaves Judge Olafsson's court and completes his mission. He obtains from Hans Kramer, an apothecary, the love potion that Shavarri has ordered him to bring to her. Containing credulin, a drug that enhances suggestibility, the potion will enable Shavarri to manipulate Pwill Himself in her favor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_I_Ran_the_Zoo"title="If I Ran the Zoo">
When young Gerald McGrew visits the zoo, he discovers that the exotic animals are "not good enough." He says that if he ran the zoo, he would set all of the current animals free and find new, more bizarre and exotic ones. Throughout the book he lists these creatures, starting with a lion with ten feet and escalating to more imaginative (and imaginary) creatures, such as the Fizza-ma-Wizza-ma-Dill, "the world's biggest bird from the island of Gwark, who eats only pine trees, and spits out the bark." The illustrations also grow wilder as McGrew imagines going to increasingly remote and exotic habitats, capturing each fanciful creature, and bringing them all back to a zoo now filled with his new wild animals. He also imagines the praise he receives from others, who are amazed at his "new Zoo, McGrew Zoo".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie's_War"title="Carrie's War">
A frame story has Carrie visiting the town as a widow with three children. She tells the children what happened thirty years before.Carrie Willow and her younger brother Nick are evacuated to a rundown mining town in Wales during the Second World War. After a traumatic difficulty in finding a family to foster them, they stay with a shopkeeper, Mr Evans, who dominates his gentle but weak younger sister, whom they call "Auntie Lou". Another evacuee whom Carrie has befriended, Albert Sandwich, is staying at a dilapidated country house called Druid's Bottom with Mr Evans's older sister, the dying Mrs Dilys Gotobed, and her disabled cousin, Mr Johnny Gotobed. Their English housekeeper, Hepzibah Green, is reputed to be a wise woman. Carrie and Nick become friends with Albert and Johnny and spend a lot of time there. The housekeeper tells the children many tales, including one about a curse on Druid's Bottom, which will be activated if a mysterious skull is removed from the house.It is revealed that Mr Evans has been estranged from his older sister, Mrs Gotobed, after she married a wealthy Englishman whose family owned the mines where their father was killed in an accident. Carrie is caught in the rift between the brother and sister. Despite almost universal contempt for Mr Evans, Carrie gives him a chance and sees that, beneath his rough exterior, he genuinely is a well-meaning man, who became embittered with the world due to his hard life and the feud with his older sister, to whom he was once very close.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illywhacker"title="Illywhacker">
The novel is related in broad chronological order by the main protagonist, Herbert Badgery, but with frequent digressions that relate the circumstances and life history of Badgery himself, and of many of the characters he meets.The story begins in 1919 when the thirty-three-year-old Herbert lands his aeroplane in a field close to the wealthy former bullock-herder Jack McGrath. Herbert befriends Jack and persuades him to invest in the construction of an aeroplane factory. Herbert also becomes the lover of Jack's teenage daughter Phoebe, who had previously been involved in a lesbian relationship with a teacher, Annette Davidson. Jack commits suicide following a violent argument between Herbert and some other potential investors. Herbert marries Phoebe and they bear two children, Charles and Sonia. After learning to fly Herbert's aeroplane, Phoebe steals it, abandoning her husband and children to live with Annette. Herbert briefly becomes the lover of Jack's widow, Molly, but goes out on the road to scrape a living, often as a confidence trickster, accompanied by his two children. He meets Leah Goldstein, a former medical student turned dancer who is married to the Communist agitator Izzie Kaletsky. She and Herbert become lovers and develop a variety act, but Leah returns to care for Izzie after he has both legs amputated following an accident.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_King_of_Oz"title="The Lost King of Oz">
Old Mombi, formerly the Wicked Witch of the North, is now a cook in the land of Kimbaloo. One day she comes across Pajuka, the former prime minister of Oz, transformed by Mombi into a goose years before. She sets out to find Pastoria, the king of Oz, whom she also enchanted in the past. However, she has forgotten what shape she transformed Pastoria into. She kidnaps a local boy called Snip as her unwilling assistant and bearer of burdens. Eventually deciding, however, that he knows too much, Mombi throws Snip down a well; he ends up in Blankenburg, populated by the invisible Blanks. Snip meets and soon rescues Tora, an amnesiac old tailor. Tora has been held prisoner for many years by the Blanks, to do their tailoring; he has compensated by sending his detachable ears flying about the countryside to hear the news.Meanwhile, Dorothy is accidentally transported to Hollywood, where she meets Humpy, a live stunt dummy, whom she brings back to Oz. They escape the Back Talkers in Eht Kcab Sdoow (by running backwards), and meet the Scooters who help scoot them on their way. Kabumpo the Elegant Elephant shows up to provide transport (of the mundane sort). Dorothy's party encounters Snip and Tora, and Mombi and Pajuka too. They come to the conclusion that Humpy the dummy is the enchanted Pastoria.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Pumpkinhead_of_Oz"title="Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz">
A rainy day in Philadelphia means no baseball; Peter Brown, the child protagonist introduced by Thompson in "The Gnome King of Oz", mopes in his attic. He finds the sacks that were full of gold when he brought them back from his previous Oz adventure; and one of those sacks contains an odd gold coin. Toying with the coin and thinking of Oz, he wishes himself back in the magic land — and suddenly finds himself there, in the front yard of Jack Pumpkinhead.The sensible thing for Peter to do is to head for the Emerald City; and Jack is ready to act as his guide. They lose their way in the Quadling Country, where they blunder into Chimneyville and Scare City. By chance, Peter finds that his empty sack will fly from his hand and consume objects and creatures that are scooped into its open mouth, protecting him from danger. The two also find the magic dinner bell of Jinnicky the Red Jinn, which supplies Peter with needed provisions.The travelers adopt a third member for their party when they meet the doggerel-spouting Snif the Iffin (he's a griffin who has lost his "gr-" and is no longer able to growl). The three then encounter the unfortunate Baron Belfaygor of Bourne. He has been accidentally cursed with a rapidly growing beard that he must constantly cut away. Even worse, his fiancée, the princess Shirley Sunshine, has been kidnapped by the local villain, Mogodore the Mighty, the Baron of Baffleburg. Belfaygor had wanted a beard to have for his wedding to Shirley.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yellow_Knight_of_Oz"title="The Yellow Knight of Oz">
Sir Hokus of Pokes grows tired of the Emerald City, and he and the Comfortable Camel set out for some adventure. Sir Hokes wants to rescue a damsel in distress, or at least find a monster to fight. Sir Hokus visits Marshland and befriends Ploppa, a giant mud turtle. Ploppa would like to accompany Sir Hokus on his adventures, but cannot leave the swamp. Sir Hokus is joined by the Comfortable Camel.Meanwhile, a boy named Speedy blasts his way to Oz in a homemade rocket ship, where he finds himself in the underground kingdom of Subterranea. At his touch, a golden statue of a beautiful girl comes to life. She is called Marygolden, and she accompanies Speedy on his further adventures. Sir Hokes and Speedy join forces and, using the power of a bag of magic dates, they counter the magic of the evil Sultan of Samandra and restore the Corumbian Kingdom, which the Sultan had conquered and enchanted. Sir Hokus learns his true identity: he is actually the young and handsome Yellow Knight of Corumbia, transformed into old, absent-minded Sir Hokus by the Sultan's magic. Using the power of the magic dates, Sir Hokus regains his youthful form and vacates the Emerald City to rule as Prince of Corumbia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handy_Mandy_in_Oz"title="Handy Mandy in Oz">
The book's heroine is an "honest and industrious" goat-girl named Mandy, who grazes her flock on the slopes of Mt. Mern (a location otherwise unidentified).The story opens with a bang and a splash: an underground spring erupts in a geyser that blasts Mandy into the sky. The force propels her across the Deadly Desert to Oz; she lands in the little principality of Keretaria in the Munchkin Country, her impact cushioned by the power of a magic blue daisy. Mandy finds a silver hammer, and meets a white ox with golden horns; she blunders into the court of King Kerr of Keretaria and his courtiers. They are outraged by the intrusion of such an outlandish figure — for Mandy has seven arms and hands. As Mandy explains,Mandy, for her part, is amazed to meet so many two-handed people; on Mt. Mern, everyone has seven hands.Mandy is reprieved from the dungeons by Nox the Royal Ox, who takes her as his personal slave. Mandy and Nox quickly become friends. (It is Nox who gives the girl her nickname, Handy Mandy.) Nox is preoccupied by the political situation of Keretaria: the rightful king, a boy named Kerry, has disappeared, and his throne has been usurped by his uncle Kerr. Mandy discovers that the Royal Ox's horns have magic powers: they can be unscrewed from his head, and when they are, the right horn grants wishes, and his left horn offers clues. When a clue indicates that King Kerry can be found at a place called the Silver Mountain, the enterprising Mandy leads Nox on a search for the missing monarch.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozoplaning_with_the_Wizard_of_Oz"title="Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz">
The story opens with a dinner party, attended by seven of the characters from Baum's inaugural book, including the castle-housemaid Jellia Jam. After the dinner, the Wizard takes his guests to a glass-domed building that contains two gleaming silver aircraft, the newly created ozoplanes. The Wizard has named them the "Ozpril" and the "Oztober". The guests enthusiastically pile into the craft to inspect them.The Soldier with the Green Whiskers is suddenly overcome by a violent stomach cramp from eating too many pickles. He slams into the control panel of the "Oztober", causing it to take off. The Wizard, startled and appalled, takes the "Ozpril" in pursuit and in search of the "Oztober", accompanied by Dorothy, Lion, and Scarecrow.Enduring a chaotic flight, the resourceful Tin Man eventually gets the "Oztober" under control; he lands in a previously unexplored sky-country called Stratovania. He enthusiastically but undiplomatically claims the place for Ozma as a colony of the Land of Oz. The ruler, Strutoovious the Seventh, also called "Strut of the Strat" for short, is outraged, and decides to turn the tables and conquer the land of Oz. He forces the Tin Woodman to fly him and his army to Oz, leaving Jellia and the Soldier behind in Stratovania.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Mimics_in_Oz"title="The Magical Mimics in Oz">
At the start of Snow's story, Princess Ozma and Glinda the Good are planning to leave Oz, to attend the Grand Council of the fairy queen Lurline, held in the Forest of Burzee every 200 years. Dorothy Gale is surprised when Ozma appoints her to rule Oz during their absence; but Ozma reminds Dorothy that she is a princess of Oz. (Ozma's choice is not well-motivated; but it is in keeping with Snow's "Baum-centric" approach, in that it places Baum's primary heroine Dorothy at the center of the coming action.)Chapter 3 shifts attention to the evil Mimics in their lair in Mount Illuso. The Mimics habitually shift "from one loathsome shape to another" — an ape body with a head of an alligator, and a serpent with black butterfly wings, and a toad with a hyena's head are a few of their choices. Their rulers, King Umb and Queen Ra (a play on "umbra"), reveal their plan to counter Lurline's controlling magic and attack Oz. The shape-shifting royals and their minions fly to Oz as big black birds, and waylay Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz. By stepping into their shadows, Ra and Umb take the shapes of Dorothy and the Wizard; the originals are paralyzed by the magic, and are carried off to Mount Illuso by Mimics. Ra and Umb, in their stolen forms, search Ozma's library for the antidote to Lurline's magic spell.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ark_Angel"title="Ark Angel">
Maximilian Webber, a former SAS , gives a speech denouncing an extreme eco-terrorist organisation known as Force Three. After the speech, he is contacted by an unknown man who declares him an enemy of Force Three. The phone explodes, killing him.Meanwhile, Alex Rider is recuperating in a hospital after being shot at the end of his previous mission. He meets Paul Drevin, the son of a Russian billionaire Nikolei Drevin. One night, four men break into the hospital and attempt to kidnap Paul, but Alex manages to overpower them. However, he is captured by Kaspar, the leader, and imprisoned in an abandoned building where the men reveal themselves as members of Force Three. The men set fire to the building after realising that Alex deliberately foiled their plan. Alex escapes from the fire by tightrope walking to an adjacent building, and returns to the hospital, where he is debriefed by John Crawley, MI6 Chief of Staff, and later discharged. Back home, Nikolei Drevin invites Alex to stay with him for two weeks as thanks for preventing his son's kidnapping. As Alex's doctor has recommended that he take a holiday, he accepts.Alex meets Drevin and his jobsworth assistant, Tamara Knight, at a hotel where Drevin is holding a press conference about his space project, Ark Angel; it is set to be the first-ever space hotel. Alex is treated well by Drevin, but starts suspecting him after realizing that Paul had been given no protection before the Force Three attack, despite claims of always being "a target". Stumbling into Drevin's private study, Alex discovers that Drevin owns the building where Alex was interrogated and nearly killed by Force Three. The following day, Alex participates in a race on Drevin’s private go-kart track; Alex beats Drevin when the man attempts to cheat, revealing his hatred of losing. Later, Alex watches a football match at Stamford Bridge with the home team, Chelsea, up against a team owned by Drevin, Stratford East, which loses. Alex encounters Force Three members giving a medal to the team captain who missed the final penalty, and is briefly taken by one of the Force Three men, but manages to get away. Alex tells Tamara Knight about Force Three, but the footballer is killed when the medal, made of caesium, catches fire in the shower.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Peacock"title="The White Peacock">
The novel is set in Nethermere (fictional name for real-life Eastwood) and is narrated by Cyril Beardsall, whose sister Laetitia (Lettie) is involved in a love triangle with two young men, George and Leslie Temple. She eventually marries Leslie, even though she feels sexually drawn to George. Spurned by Lettie, George marries the conventional Meg. Both his and Lettie's marriages end in unhappiness, as George slides into alcoholism at the novel's close.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Lucifer_(O'Donnell_novel)"title="I, Lucifer (O'Donnell novel)">
Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin are in Paris. Modesty is being wined and dined by René Vaubois, head of the Deuxième Bureau (the French Intelligence Service), on a floating restaurant on the Seine. René asks Modesty for advice regarding a new protection racket. High-level people worldwide are receiving death threats, and those who don't pay end up dead. The really crazy thing is that most of the deaths are apparently natural deaths.Willie, waiting on the river bank for Modesty's return, encounters Chuli, a criminal whose speciality is planting bombs. René Vaubois' car has been wired with explosives. And when Modesty, Willie, René and Stephen Collier (making his first appearance) leave the scene they are followed by a car full of underworld killers, all bent on putting René down.This is the start of a rather strange story about Lucifer, a "young man with a godlike body, dark hair and a ruined mind" who had been studying to go into the church when he was seduced by a woman and suffered a nervous breakdown, becoming convinced that he was the source of all sin, and therefore the devil himself. A pair of ageing puppeteers, Seff and Regina, unable to get work when the music halls closed down, turned to crime. After discovering Lucifer's uncanny ability to predict forthcoming natural deaths Seff has created an incredible worldwide protection racket.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Toyshop"title="The Magic Toyshop">
The novel starts with Melanie stealing her mother's wedding dress and venturing out in the night into her family's property. However, on her way home, she realises she forgot the door key and is forced to climb up a tree to get back into her room, destroying the dress in the process. The next morning, Melanie learns of the unexpected deaths of her parents in a plane crash over the Grand Canyon, and she and her two siblings – Victoria and Jonathon – are moved to South London, to the care of her tyrannical uncle Philip, a bullish and eccentric maker of life-sized puppets and fantastical old fashioned toys. There, she meets her mute aunt Margaret, who is mistreated by and terrified of her husband and only converses through notes. She also meets Margaret's younger brothers Francie, a fiddler, and the rakish Finn. At first, Uncle Philip ignores Melanie and her siblings as they are introduced to his bizarre puppet shows and she is made to work selling toys in the toyshop. Meanwhile, Finn and Melanie grow closer until he takes her to a park which is the ruins of the National Exhibition of 1852. There, after seeing a worn, fallen statue of Queen Victoria and walking across a chess board (only on the white squares), Finn kisses Melanie. She feels intruded on by the gesture, imagining it to be romantic only as an observer from far away. The kiss begins Melanie's conflicted feelings of attraction toward Finn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Escaped_Cock"title="The Escaped Cock">
The story is a recasting of the resurrection of Christ narrated in the New Testament. The man who survives his crucifixion comes to celebrate his bodily existence and sensuality. Lawrence himself summarized "The Escaped Cock" in a letter to Brewster (May 3, 1927):
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Girl"title="The Lost Girl">
Alvina Houghton, the daughter of a widowed Midlands draper, comes of age just as her father’s business is failing. In a desperate attempt to regain his fortune and secure his daughter’s proper upbringing, James Houghton buys a theater. Among the traveling performers he employs is Ciccio, a sensual Italian who immediately captures Alvina’s attention. Fleeing with him to Naples, she leaves her safe world behind and enters one of sexual awakening, desire, and fleeting freedom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Fuzzy"title="Little Fuzzy">
Protagonist Jack Holloway lives a solitary life mining valuable "sunstones" in the wilderness of the planet Zarathustra, managed by Victor Grego's Chartered Zarathustra Company, which built colonial outposts there and now reaps the benefits of the planet's resources. One day, Holloway meets a small golden-furred humanoid whom he names "Little Fuzzy", who soon introduces Holloway to his family. Holloway cares for the Fuzzies and spreads word of their apparently intelligent behavior. When the Company discovers that the Fuzzies' intelligence may qualify them as a sapient species, the Company moves against them, as the discovery of sapient native Zarathustrans would turn the planet into a protected aboriginal zone, install a proper government there, and deprive the Company of its complete control of the planet's resources.Leonard Kellogg, one of Grego's staff, manages a team of scientists working to legally disprove the Fuzzies' sapience at all costs. Holloway suspects Kellogg's intentions and resists him. When Kellogg kills a Fuzzy in anger, Holloway has him charged with murder, leaving the Fuzzies' sapience to be determined in court. In the midst of the proceedings, it is proven that Fuzzies have at least the mental capacity of a ten-year-old human child and speak to each other ultrasonically. Kellogg kills himself in his cell, but the prosecution continues, and the court officially rules that the Fuzzies are sapient beings, invalidating the Company's charter. Holloway and his allies are given Fuzzy-related positions in the new government.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plumed_Serpent"title="The Plumed Serpent">
"Note: this description of the plot is based on the version of the book published as The Plumed Serpent, not the version published as Quetzalcoatl."Shortly after Easter, a group of tourists visiting Mexico, including Kate Leslie, an Irishwoman, and her cousin, Owen Rhys, an American, attend a bullfight in Mexico City. Leslie is thrilled at the prospect of witnessing the fight, but later leaves in disgust, after witnessing the violence suffered by a horse and a bull. As she leaves, she encounters Don Cipriano, a Mexican general, and invites him to meet her. Later, at a party in Tlacolula which she attends with Rhys, Leslie listens to discussions of changes brought about by the Mexican Revolution, and encounters a Major Law, who states that there is a rumour that the recently elected Mexican President, Socrates Tomás Montes of the Labour Party, will be prevented from taking office by the military. She also meets Cipriano's friend Don Ramón Carrasco. Soon afterwards, she reads a newspaper report, "The Gods of Antiquity Return to Mexico", describing an incident in the village of Sayula, in which a man arose from a lake, then announced to a group of women that the Aztec gods Quetzalcoatl and Tlaloc are ready to return to Mexico. Rhys returns to the United States, but Leslie decides to stay in Mexico. Wanting to leave Mexico City because of rising social tensions, she travels to Sayula, with the encouragement of Cipriano. She learns of a religious movement, the Men of Quetzalcoatl, and, upon making inquiries about it, is told that it was founded by Ramón, who is suspected of having political ambitions. Leslie begins to sympathise with Ramón, believing him to be a "great man". Receiving an invitation from Ramón, she meets him and his wife Doña Carlota, who tells her that he wants to be worshipped as a god and to destroy the belief of Mexicans in both Jesus and the Virgin Mary, objectives she deplores.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slipback"title="Slipback">
The Sixth Doctor and Peri arrive on a mysterious space liner, where intergalactic policemen are investigating art thefts, a computer is suffering from a split personality and the Captain's disease threatens every living thing on the ship…
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Album_(novel)"title="Family Album (novel)">
"Family Album" tells the story of Faye Price (later Thayer), since World War II to her death in present day. It relates her professional life as an actress in Hollywood's golden era to finally becoming one of the first female directors in Hollywood. But more important to her is her family life, from her marriage, the birth of her children, separations and reconciliations with her husband, the struggles to raise her children, and the problems they go through once grown up until, in the end, they come through stronger from the ordeal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heir_of_Sea_and_Fire"title="Heir of Sea and Fire">
The focus shifts from the previous protagonist of Morgon of Hed to Raederle of An. Raederle, the titular heir of sea and fire, was promised by her father to the man who won a riddle game with a ghost. In the previous book, this was revealed to be Morgon. As the book opens, Morgon has been missing for a year; with Morgon presumed dead, his power over the land of Hed has passed on to his heir.Raederle sets out for Erlenstar Mountain, which Morgon was trying to reach when he disappeared. Along the way, she is assisted by Lyra, the Morgul of Herun's heir, and by Morgon's sister. The first half of the book describes their journey north. Along the way, Raederle grows to understand her own significant powers as a descendant of both shapechangers and witches. Her hidden ancestry makes her related to Morgon's enemies. Midway through the story, Reaerle discovers that Morgon is alive, while shapechangers and Ghisteslwchlohm, an ancient and traitorous wizard, pursue him.Sensing a powerful force pursuing her, Raederle uses her abilities to confound it, thinking she is protecting Morgon; but discovers that the force she thought was Ghisteslwchlohm is Morgon himself, who had stolen much of Ghisteslwchlohm's power during his long captivity, while the helpless man he pursued was Deth, who had betrayed him. Confronted with this, and realizing how he appears, Morgon forsakes his revenge and allows Deth to escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Than_Human"title="More Than Human">
The novel concerns the coming together of six extraordinary people with strange powers who are able to "blesh" (a portmanteau of "blend" and "mesh") their abilities together. In this way, they are able to act as one organism. They progress toward a mature gestalt consciousness, called the "homo gestalt", the next step in the human evolution.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapture_(Sosnowski_novel)"title="Rapture (Sosnowski novel)">
The book starts somewhere in the middle. Zander is attempting suicide by trying to jump off the smokestack of an industrial plant. Cassie is at the same plant intending to do a little night flying. Zander succeeds in knocking himself unconscious and breaking a wing. Cassie drags him to shore and calls paramedics, eventually having to instruct them on how to set the broken bones.Roughly half of the book is involved with Zander and Cassie's backgrounds. Zander grew up in the shadows of industrial plants. His father died under mysterious circumstances and his stepfather locked Zander out when he turned 18. Zander quickly fell under the influence of a class-mate of his, a small-time drug dealer who soon taught Zander about running from the police and how to tell a good stash from a bad one. Zander eventually became a drug runner in his own right until he started undergoing some of the preliminary changes of 'angelism'. As the condition was completely unknown at the time, he thought he was simply dying and holed up in a rent-a-cottage facility, ordering in pizza and beer. Eventually, when he began growing the hard green casing that is the first visible sign, he realized he had something new and became an all-out hermit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neanderthal_Parallax"title="The Neanderthal Parallax">
In Sudbury, Ontario, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory is conducting a physics experiment. This is interrupted by the mysterious arrival of a strange man, who is believed by the people who meet him to be a Neanderthal. Geneticist Mary Vaughn, a professor at Toronto's York University is called in to determine that the man really is a Neanderthal.Mary is reeling from being recently raped by a masked man on the University campus, and finds this a welcome distraction along with the scientific opportunity of a lifetime along with her friend physicist Louise Benoit, who'd initially encountered the man. The two, plus physician Ruben Montego, learn that he is a Neanderthal from a parallel world. His name is Ponter Boddit, having been a quantum physicist who passed somehow into our world as the result of an experiment gone wrong. They are fascinated by the fact of his existence, while exploring all the many differences that distinguish his people from theirs. Meanwhile, Ponter's spouse and scientific partner Adikor Huld is distraught at his sudden disappearance, then doubly so after he's been accused of murdering Ponter due to his vanishing.Long-term contact is eventually created between the two worlds, along with formal diplomatic relations. However, issues of distrust and misunderstanding plague the characters. Ponter and Mary forge a relationship however as they strive for both their people's mutual benefit even as they struggle to work through profoundly different beliefs as a potential crisis looms for our Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysterious_Stranger"title="Mysterious Stranger">
The book has been divided into 12 chapters — "For Those Who Believe", "Discovery of Magic", "The Three Magi", "Secrets of Cards", "Confidence", "Playing the Part of a Magician", "The Man Ain't Right", "Primitive Mysteries", "Ehrich Weiss", "The Premature Burial", "Frozen in Time2", "Vertigo".In the chapter "Discovery of Magic", Blaine tells stories about his childhood, of how he became interested in magic, and of his devotion to his late mother.In "The Three Magi", he acknowledges Robert-Houdin, Max Malini and Alexander Herrmann as major influences; in "Confidence", he cites Orson Welles and Titanic Thompson as inspiration for his street magic persona; and in "Ehrich Weiss", he celebrates the man we know as Houdini.In "The Man Ain't Right", Blaine describes the evolution of his street magic act and how a masterfully timed card trick cinched his television deal with ABC.In "Premature Burial", "Frozen in Time", and "Vertigo", Blaine details his grueling regime in preparation for each of his stunts of endurance, respectively, being buried in a glass coffin for seven days, standing inside a block of ice for sixty-one hours, and standing atop a 100-foot pole in high winds for thirty-five hours.In addition, scattered throughout the book are clues to Blaine's $100,000 Challenge, an armchair treasure hunt of visual ciphers and logic deduction devised by game designer Cliff Johnson, creator of "The Fool's Errand". The Challenge was solved by Sherri Skanes on March 20, 2004, 16 months after the book's publication.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful"title="Small Is Beautiful">
"Small Is Beautiful" is divided into four parts: "The Modern World", "Resources", "The Third World", and "Organization and Ownership"."Socialists should insist on using the nationalised industries not simply to out-capitalise the capitalists – an attempt in which they may or may not succeed – but to evolve a more democratic and dignified system of industrial administration, a more humane employment of machinery, and a more intelligent utilization of the fruits of human ingenuity and effort. If they can do this, they have the future in their hands. If they cannot, they have nothing to offer that is worthy of the sweat of free-born men." (Part IV, Chapter 3 'Socialism')
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Club_Dumas"title="The Club Dumas">
Lucas Corso is a middle-aged book dealer with a reputation of doing anything—regardless of legality—for his privileged clientele. While in Madrid attempting to authenticate a previously unknown partial draft of "The Three Musketeers", he is summoned to Toledo by Varo Borja, a notoriously eccentric and wealthy collector.Borja has obtained a copy of a legendary book, "Of the Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows", whose author was burned at the stake by the Inquisition. The book purportedly contains instructions for summoning the Devil. Only one copy of the book is supposed to have survived, but Borja claims three exist, two of which are elaborate forgeries. He hires Corso to compare the three copies and obtain the legitimate one by any means necessary. He promises to pay handsomely and cover all expenses.Corso agrees, but continues to research the partial Dumas draft. The widow of the draft's previous owner, Liana Taillefer, insists the draft is a fake, but offers to buy it from Corso. After several encounters, she attempts to seduce Corso to obtain the draft; when he succumbs to her charms but refuses to surrender the manuscript, she becomes his enemy. She imagines herself as Milady de Winter, and uses a male associate (whom Corso nicknames "Rochefort") to follow Corso and attempt to retrieve the manuscript by force.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Expectancy_(novel)"title="Life Expectancy (novel)">
James Tock was born in Snow County Hospital in Colorado and at the exact moment his grandfather, Josef Tock, a pastry chef, dies of a stroke. Though crippled by a stroke earlier in the week, moments before his death, Josef recovers miraculously to impart on his son Rudy ten cryptic predictions: among them that his grandchild will be named James—but that everyone will call him Jimmy. Josef also predicts five terrible days to come in his grandson's life. Coherent though his bizarre speech may be, Josef Tock does not recover from this event, but expires just as the baby is born.Earlier in the evening, Rudy Tock made the acquaintance of a strange man, Konrad Beezo. Beezo is a clown for the very circus Tock's pass is for, and is a fitful, spiteful, creepy, chain-smoking individual half in his clown costume. His wife Natalie, a trapeze artist of some renown and born of a good family, is lying in childbirth, says he, and her relatives have virtually disowned her for marrying him. He speaks glowingly of his soon-to-be-born son, who is to be named "Punchinello", and will carry on the fine tradition of clowning. He speaks venomously of his father-in-law, using many colorful epithets.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mummy,_or_Ramses_the_Damned"title="The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned">
During the Edwardian period in 1914, a wealthy shipping-magnate-turned-archaeologist, Lawrence Stratford, discovers an unusual tomb. The mummy inside, in its left-behind notes, claims to be the famed pharaoh Ramses II, despite the tomb's dating only to the first century B.C. (the historical Ramses II died in 1224 B.C.). Before he can fully investigate this claim, Lawrence unexpectedly falls dead, and those around him fear he was the victim of a curse placed on the tomb. Nonetheless, the mummy and other belongings are shipped off to London, and placed on temporary display in Lawrence's house before they are taken by the British Museum.Lawrence's daughter Julie Stratford is the designated heir to her father's shipping company, as well as the dysfunctional family that surrounds it. Her cousin Henry is an alcoholic and gambling addict who has been draining the family fortune with the aid of his father. Julie is engaged to marry Alex Savarell, a viscount and son of Elliott, the current Earl of Rutherford. Although the marriage is a standard alliance between the wealthy Stratfords and an impoverished family of nobles, Alex truly loves Julie, though she is unable to return these feelings.Into this unstable situation comes the mummy Ramses, who awakes shortly after his sarcophagus is placed in Julie's house.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Pony"title="The Red Pony">
## Chapter 1 – The Gift.The book's action begins when Carl Tiflin gives his son Jody a red pony colt. Overjoyed, Jody quickly agrees to all of the conditions his father places on the gift (to feed the pony, to clean his stall, etc.). Jody is so awed at the pony's magnificence that he decides to name him Gabilan, after the grassy and oak-dotted Gabilan Mountains that border the Salinas Valley ranch. Afterseveral weeks of training and getting to know Gabilan, Jody is told by his father that he will be allowed to ride the horse by Thanksgiving. Though the ranch hand Billy Buck assures him there would be no rain, the pony is caught in a downpour and catches what appears to be a cold after being left out to corral. Billy tries to cure the horse of its illness to no avail and finally diagnoses the illness as strangles, placing a steaming wet bag over the pony's muzzle and entrusting Jody to watch the pony. In the night, Jody becomes sleepy in spite of his constant worry and drifts off to sleep, forgetting about the open barn door. By the time he awakens, the pony has wandered out of the barn. When Billy arrives, he deems it necessary to cut a hole in the horse's windpipe so he can breathe. Jody stays by his side, constantly swabbing out the mucus that clogged the windpipe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladysmith_(novel)"title="Ladysmith (novel)">
The time is November 1899 through February 1900; the place is Ladysmith, a small railway town in the British Colony of Natal near the border with the Boer Republics. The Boers have surprised the world with initial victories over the British Army and have now laid siege to Ladysmith. As they shell the town from surrounding hills, people die, disease is rampant, structures collapse, starvation looms, there is panic about enemy agents and yet the British muddle through.The setting of Giles Foden’s novel is historically accurate, and a number of historical figures appear as characters; for example, the Boers arrest a young reporter named Winston Churchill as he struggles to reach the besieged town, and an Indian lawyer-turned-medical volunteer named Mohandas K. Gandhi becomes more committed to his philosophy of active non-violence.The core of "Ladysmith" is a fictionalised version of a love story that Giles Foden found in the letters of his great-grandfather, who was a British soldier at Ladysmith. Bella, the Irish hotelkeeper's daughter, falls in love, first, with a British soldier; and later with a Portuguese barber, thus defying convention and rebelling against her father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_King_of_Scotland"title="The Last King of Scotland">
The protagonist is a fictional character named Nicholas Garrigan, a young Scottish doctor who goes to work in Uganda out of a sense of idealism and adventure, arriving on the day of the 1971 Ugandan coup d'état. He relates how he came to be the personal physician and confidant of Amin, the president of Uganda during the Second Republic of Uganda. The novel focuses on Garrigan's relationship and fascination with the president, who soon grows into a brutal and ruthless dictator. Garrigan consciously and repeatedly acts against his better judgment, remaining in Amin's employment until he is far past the point of easy escape physically and morally. Mesmerized by Amin's charm and charisma, he is gradually drawn complicitly into the corruption and brutality of Amin's rule (including his personal participation in the severance of British relations with Uganda, the murder of Kay Amin, the events of Operation Entebbe and the murder of Dora Bloch, and the Uganda-Tanzania War) with fatal results for his friends and colleagues, which Garrigan treats with a mixture of physical disgust; nonchalant, fatalistic acceptance of living under a totalitarian regime; and self-serving denial of culpability.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Away_(play)"title="Away (play)">
To conclude the year, a high school stages a production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ by William Shakespeare. The play is directed by Miss Latrobe, whose work is praised by the headmaster Roy. Among the performers are Tom and Meg, who form a polite friendship and show a mutual attraction to each other. Backstage after the production, Tom's parents, Harry and Vic, give the show an enthusiastic reception, whereas Meg's parents, Gwen and Jim, react with indifference. The two families discuss their plans on going away for the holidays, although after his parents depart Tom is hurt when he overhears Gwen slandering his family's lack of wealth. Gwen also shows disdain towards Coral, Roy's aloof wife. Following the death of their son in the Vietnamese War, Coral suffers from severe bouts of depression and dementia which is revealed to be causing a great strain on her marriage to Roy.Although staying in different accommodation, the three families eventually converge on the same location at the Gold Coast for their holiday. Jim, Gwen and Meg are staying at a caravan park, and on Christmas Day, Jim is upset that the box of Christmas presents for the family has been left at home. Although he tries to hastily change the subject, Meg deduces that Gwen left the box of presents at home on purpose and angrily confronts Gwen. Gwen retaliates, offended and hurt as she explains her logic, immediately departing to lie down. Privately, Jim shares a memory to Meg of when he saw Gwen recite Scarlett O'Hara’s famous monologue from Gone with the Wind, and places emphasis on Gwen finding solace in the film and aligning her life with the quote.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rising_Force"title="The Rising Force">
The protagonist, Obi-Wan Kenobi is trying hard to become an apprentice within four weeks. At the end of those four weeks is his thirteenth birthday, and by then he would have passed the cut-off age for apprenticeship, and be forced to leave the Jedi Temple. Master Yoda informs Obi-Wan that Qui-Gon Jinn is going to be visiting the Jedi Temple in search of an apprentice. As there are no other Jedi looking for an apprentice at the time, Qui-Gon is Obi-Wan's only hope.Obi-Wan fails to become Qui-Gon's apprentice and is subsequently assigned to the Jedi Agricultural Corps on the planet Bandomeer. He finds out Qui-Gon is on a mission on Bandomeer, also. The two must dodge Whiphids and Hutts on a mining ship, which is eventually hijacked by Offworld Corporation, a rival faction to the group Obi-Wan is joining. Offworld holds the ship's stash of dactyl, a mineral required for most of the creatures on the ship.The mining ship is soon attacked by pirates, which causes them to launch an emergency landing on a moon close to Bandomeer. The Jedi, Offworld, and Offworld's rival faction must work together to fight against predators and other threats. Offworld's uprising is also stopped during this truce, and once the ship is repaired, the factions travel together to Bandomeer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_(novel)"title="Amanda (novel)">
The plot of "Amanda" centers around the main character's journey from Boston to Oregon on the Oregon Trail in 1846. Amanda Bentley travels with her father Thaddeus Bentley, who is escaping creditors in their former hometown of Boston. Her beau Joseph White lives in Boston as well.On the Oregon Trail, she meets and befriends several characters, including Helen Jorgenson, a girl of her own age, and Ben Compton, who becomes a romantic interest as well later in the book.Amanda's character changes throughout the book, from spoiled society girl to hardworking pioneer woman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_in_a_Bottle_(novel)"title="Message in a Bottle (novel)">
Divorced and disillusioned about romantic relationships, Theresa Osborne is jogging when she finds a bottle on the beach. Inside is a letter of love and belonging to "Catherine," signed simply "Garrett." Challenged by the mystery and pulled by emotions she doesn't fully understand, Theresa begins a search for this man that will change her life. What happens to her is unexpected, perhaps miraculous-an encounter that embraces all our hopes for finding someone special, for having a true and strong love that is timeless and everlasting.Touched by the warmth of the words in the letter Theresa embarked on a mission that would change her life forever. She discovers two other letters written by the same author and for the same recipient and goes to Wilmington to find this mysterious writer at the urging of Deanna, a close friend. It doesn't take long for her to find Garrett, the mysterious writer. Chemistry gradually grows between the two as they start dating. However, with the passage of time, the two are confronted with the reality of one of them having to change his/her life in order for them to be together. One night, the two have a confrontation about this issue that doesn't end well. Even worse, Garrett discovers his letters in Theresa's drawer. Angry at what he deemed as deception and an affair founded on lies, Garrett storms out of Theresa's apartment, taking with him his letters. Back at Wilmington, he tries to get over the issue by sharing with his father Jeb, who instead thinks Garrett mishandled the whole situation. Jeb receives a visitor that same day, a young woman whom he believes to be Theresa. Garret and Theresa argue, with Theresa giving up the relationship citing that she could never compete with Catherine. A grieving Theresa heads back to Boston to move on with life. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Flew_Over_the_Cuckoo's_Nest_(novel)"title="One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (novel)">
The book is narrated by "Chief" Bromden, a gigantic yet docile half-Native American patient at a psychiatric hospital, who presents himself as deaf and mute. Bromden's tale focuses mainly on the antics of the rebellious Randle Patrick McMurphy, who faked insanity to serve his sentence for battery and gambling in the hospital rather than at a prison work farm. The head administrative nurse, Nurse Ratched, rules the ward with absolute authority and little medical oversight. She is assisted by her three day-shift orderlies and her assistant doctors and nurses.McMurphy constantly antagonizes Nurse Ratched and upsets the routines of the ward, leading to endless power struggles between the inmate and the nurse. He runs a card table, captains the ward's basketball team, comments on Nurse Ratched's figure, incites the other patients to conduct a vote about watching the World Series on television, and organizes a deep-sea fishing trip wherein the patients were going to be "supervised" by prostitutes. After claiming to be able, and subsequently failing, to lift a heavy control panel in the defunct hydrotherapy room (referred to as the "tub room"), his response—"But at least I tried"—gives the men incentive to try to stand up for themselves, instead of allowing Nurse Ratched to take control of every aspect of their lives. The Chief opens up to McMurphy, revealing late one night that he can speak and hear. A violent disturbance after the fishing trip results in McMurphy and the Chief being sent for electroshock therapy sessions, but such punishment does nothing to curb McMurphy's rambunctious behavior.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cause_for_Alarm_(novel)"title="Cause for Alarm (novel)">
Nicholas Marlow, an English engineer engaged to a young doctor, loses his well-paid job. Increasingly desperate, he responds to an advert from an English engineering company, the Spartacus Machine Tool Company of Wolverhampton. The firm manufactures the "Spartacus Type S2 automatic" boring machine, which is used for shell production. Able to speak some Italian, he is offered the post of the firm's representative in Italy. Marlow gladly accepts, secretly deciding that he will quit the job as soon as possible to go back to England and get married.On arrival in Milan, Marlow discovers there is a huge backlog at his office, and that his personal assistant Bellinetti is highly inefficient. A lot of his time is diverted by the Italian authorities, to whom he has to report on a regular basis and who eventually claim that they have misplaced his passport so he is unable to leave the country. There is growing uneasiness on Marlow's part when he notices his private correspondence with his fiancée has been steamed open. He makes friends with Andreas Zaleshoff, a Russian spy whose office is in the same building. Marlow learns that his predecessor was murdered, and that Bellinetti is an agent for the OVRA.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trigger"title="The Trigger">
"The Trigger" starts in the early to mid-21st century. A group of scientists invent, by accident, a device that detonates all nitrate-based explosive in its vicinity, thus providing good protection against most known modern conventional weapons. The first half of the book explores the reactions of society, government and the scientists themselves as the latter attempt to ensure that their invention will only be used for peaceful ends. Although at first beneficial, other uses for the device are found, such as a faultless at-range detonator. The novel also traces the scientists' slow progress in understanding the science behind their invention. The second half of the book begins when the science is sufficiently well understood that a second device can be built - one that does not detonate explosives, but merely renders them permanently harmless. The story ends with the scientists discovering that the hyperdimensional impulse wave can be set to scramble extremely specific DNA – making the device a killer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_Reckoning_(novel)"title="The Day of Reckoning (novel)">
Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi go to the planet of Telos on an unofficial mission to apprehend Xanatos, the Dark Jedi who had tried to destroy the Jedi Temple. Upon their arrival, they are surprised to find that Xanatos wields significant financial and political power on Telos. They soon discover that Xanatos and the government of Telos have been distracting the populace with a new form of gambling called Katharsis. In the meantime, the company UniFy, a subsidiary of the massive Offworld Corporation headed by Xanatos, has been mining the planet's resources despite the importance the native Telosians place on their environment.Pursued by Xanatos' men, Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon are forced to trust Denetrus ("Den"), a con man associated with POWER, an outlawed political party dedicated to preserving the Telosian environment. The three infiltrate the UniFy headquarters, looking for evidence to prove that Offworld is mishandling the planet's resources. However, the two Jedi are arrested, and Xanatos personally informs them they have been sentenced to death. The Jedi manage to escape the public execution with the help of Andra, a member of the POWER party.Obi-Wan and Andra infiltrate the Sacred Pools of Telos and discover that the site is indeed being used for mining operations. The two are detected by surveillance droids, but are able to escape and record evidence that Offworld is connected with UniFy. Meanwhile, Den and Qui-Gon have rigged the Katharsis lottery so that Den will win. When Den does win and Xanatos presents the prize to him, the recorded images are played for all the Telosians to see. However, Xanatos deceives the crowd and the Jedi are captured once more. But Den, addressing the crowd, tells the people how the lottery was rigged and how the Telosians were robbed of their money. Xanatos then makes his get-away, but Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan chase him back to the Sacred Pools site. After a lightsaber battle amid the black acid pools, the two Jedi finally corner the Dark Jedi. But Xanatos, not willing to be defeated, commits suicide by throwing himself into the acid pools.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fight_for_Truth"title="The Fight for Truth">
Qui-Gon Jinn and Adi Gallia are sent with their young padawans to the planet of Kegan. They must pick up O-Lana - a Force-sensitive baby - and take her to the Jedi Temple on Coruscant without interfering with the customs and isolationist-centered ideology of the planet.However, the nature of this culture ends up compromising the original mission when Siri Tachi and Obi-Wan Kenobi are mistaken for orphaned children, captured, and put in a school known as the Learning Circle. This school is a brainwashing camp, where Keganite children are preached the ideals of V-Tan and O-Vieve, the Benevolent Guides who are the cause of Kegan's isolationism. While at the school, Siri and Obi-Wan meet several Keganite children and discuss the reality of the situation. Meanwhile, the apprentices try to talk sense into O-Bin, their "teacher". This attempt fails, and the duo is sent to the "Relearning Circle", where drastic actions are taken to try and brainwash them.O-Lana is also located within this Relearning Circle, and Qui-Gon and Adi are able to rescue their padawans and the baby at the same time. After this incident, the truth behind the Learning Circle is revealed, which creates an uproar against the Benevolent Guides. Kegan is eventually introduced to the ways of the Galactic Republic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deadly_Hunter"title="The Deadly Hunter">
When a murderer tries to kill Didi, a friend of Qui-Gon Jinn, he and his fourteen-year-old apprentice Obi-Wan Kenobi must stop the murderer. But they fail and the murderer, a bounty hunter by the name of Ona Nobis, starts going after them.After several days of investigations, Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon learn that Ona Nobis will stop at nothing, and Didi must be sent away from Coruscant. Unfortunately, Didi is attacked at his sanctuary, and Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon are forced to fight Ona Nobis. Qui-Gon is captured by the bounty hunter, and it quickly becomes clear that it was all a plot to capture "him", not Didi.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evil_Experiment"title="The Evil Experiment">
Jenna Zan Arbor is a mad woman. She kidnaps Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn, using him to investigate the Force . Meanwhile, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Astri Oddo look for a cure, while also searching for Qui-Gon. Along the way, they meet other characters, such as Cholly, Weez and Tup, and a bounty hunter named Ona Nobis. Obi-Wan uses clues from Uta S'orn's son to track them from Nobis' home planet of Sorrus to Simpla-12, where he finds Cholly, Weez and Tup. He also finds the bounty hunter Ona Nobis, who easily matches the young apprentice's strength.At Simpla-12, Obi-Wan teams up with Adi Gallia and Siri Tachi before preparing to break into Zan Arbor's hideout and rescue Qui-Gon. However, it will not be an easy task, for Zan Arbor's laboratory is nearly impregnable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feather_Boy"title="Feather Boy">
Robert Nobel is a 12-year-old shy boy who despairs of his newly divorced parents. Living in the dog-leg, he has to face many difficulties. He is the victim of classroom jokes and a victim of Niker, the classroom bully. He is hated and forced to do disgusting things. His life changes when a storyteller, Catherine, invites some of his class to Mayfield Rest Home. In there, he has to do a project with an elder called Edith Sorrel.Edith Sorrel asks him to go to Chance House, a lonely abandoned house standing out of nowhere at st Alybuns. He goes into finding the grave of David Sorrel: a 12 year old boy who took his life on the very top level of the abandoned house ( The Chance House ). and tells this to the one he loves: Kate. However, Niker hears him and challenges him to spend a night together at the top. Having done this, Edith Sorrel gives him a new task: to create a coat of feathers just for her. He sews night and day to create it and finally, it is nearly ready. However, there is another problem: Niker. Niker destroys his coat of feathers and he has to sew it back! Finally, he gives it back to Edith and when she has it: she flies and then she dies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dersu_Uzala_(book)"title="Dersu Uzala (book)">
Arsenyev tells of his travels in the Ussuri basin in the Russian Far East. Dersu Uzala (c. 1849–1908) was a Goldi hunter who acted as a guide for Arsenyev's surveying crew mapping the taiga from 1902 to 1907 and saved them from starvation and cold. Arsenyev portrays him as a simple yet great man, an animist who sees animals and plants as equal to man. From 1907, Arsenyev invited Dersu to live in his house in Khabarovsk as Dersu's failing sight hampered his ability to live as a hunter. In the spring of 1908, Dersu bade farewell to Arsenyev and walked back toward his home in the woods of the Primorsky Krai; he was killed before he could reach them, near the town of Korfovskiy, evidently for the highly valuable latest model Russian military rifle given to him by Arsenyev as a parting gift to replace his old, worn, Berdianka. He was buried in a hastily dug grave, unmarked but for Dersu's walking stick, stuck in the earth beside it by a heartsick Arsenyev.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddle-to-the-Sea"title="Paddle-to-the-Sea">
At Lake Nipigon, Ontario, a First Nation boy carves a wooden model of an “Indian” in a canoe. On its side he roughly carves the words "Please put me back in the water. I am Paddle-to-the-Sea" and sets it free to travel the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. The story follows the progress of the little wooden canoe and paddler on their journey. It travels the Nipigon River wedged in a log of wood, and is rescued by a French-Canadian lumberjack just as it is going under the saw. He puts it back in the water. It is picked up several more times, but the inscription is always obeyed. At one point, a man finds the inscription very worn and adds a metal plate bearing similar words. As the canoe travels, those who send it on its way scratch their locations on the metal plate. It traverses all five Great Lakes (including going over Niagara Falls) and the St. Lawrence River. Finally after four years it arrives off Newfoundland at the Atlantic Ocean. There it is retrieved for the last time in the nets of a French trawler on the Grand Banks, and is taken to France. Its long journey is written up in a French newspaper. A copy arrives at the sawmill on the Nipigon River, sent from France by the cousin of the lumberjack. By chance, the original maker, now a grown man, is working there as a local guide and he also sees the newspaper. He recognizes his handiwork, but does not draw attention to it, and the book ends with his words of pride, spoken only to himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Rigby_(novel)"title="Eleanor Rigby (novel)">
Two distinct plot movements are separated by a break in the narrative flow. The first part of the novel involves two retellings: the story of Liz Dunn’s trip to Europe and her pregnancy, and the story of the re-emergence into her life of her child, Jeremy, who is dying of multiple sclerosis.As a teenager, Liz goes on a trip to Europe, her one big expressive moment. On this trip, while drunk, she loses her virginity in Italy to a man she cannot remember. From this experience, she becomes pregnant with Jeremy, who is put up for adoption, and goes in and out of foster families for much of his young life.Jeremy arrives back into Liz’s life when she is at a low point of loneliness. His illness is terminal, and because of drug abuse, he has only a short time to live. Jeremy’s introduction into Liz’s life rattles the lonely world she has constructed, opening up her and her world.The first part of the novel, narrated by Liz, jumps between these two moments, constantly reminding the reader that these are moments in the past. There is a symbolic page break between the first section, which takes place in the past, and the second section, which takes place in the novel’s present.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dangerous_Rescue"title="The Dangerous Rescue">
Obi-Wan Kenobi is joined by Jedi Master Adi Gallia and her Padawan Siri Tachi at Jenna Zan Arbor's secret laboratory on Simpla-12. Zan Arbor, who has been conducting experiments in an attempt to break the Force into its constituent parts, is holding captive Qui-Gon Jinn and the elderly Jedi Master Noor R'aya. The three rescuers attempt to smuggle themselves into the laboratory; however, despite the fact that Qui-Gon has managed to free himself, Zan Arbor escapes with the unconscious Noor.Later, Obi-Wan receives a message informing him that his companion Astri Oddo, who went to pursue the bounty hunter Ona Nobis, is injured on the planet of Sorrus. Qui-Gon and Adi send their Padawans to Sorrus to bring Astri home, but Obi-Wan learns that this was merely a trap set by Ona Nobis, and wisely chooses to run away from a fight. He and Siri are ordered to return to the Jedi Temple, but he convinces Siri that they should look for Astri since she's on Sorrus. They are transported to the far desert and investigate a cave where they find Astri and her three companions tied up. However, the cave collapses — another trap set by Ona Nobis. The party are eventually rescued by a member of a tribe that Astri once helped. The two Padawans learn that Ona Nobis is headed to Belasco, the homeworld of Senator Uta S'orn, Jenna Zan Arbor's only friend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Hope"title="The Death of Hope">
Everything is a confusion in the New Apsolon mission. The Jedi Knight Tahl, partner of Qui-Gon Jinn, has been trapped. The Jedi Master soon forgets his apprentice Obi-Wan Kenobi and goes after his beloved Tahl. No one can be trusted and Tahl is dying.When Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon discover Tahl, she is severely maimed. After returning to the capital, Tahl perishes, which sends Qui-Gon over the edge. Qui-Gon now begins his call to vengeance, which is targeted at the leader of the rogue faction that caused the entire catastrophe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Call_to_Vengeance"title="The Call to Vengeance">
Qui-Gon Jinn is nearing the dark side of the Force . He's looking for vengeance and he has left alone his Padawan, forgetting everything except vengeance. Now Obi-Wan Kenobi is afraid about his master and he asks for help from Jedi Master Mace Windu and his close friend, Bant.However, Qui-Gon's leads are solid, and the Jedi have a difficult time keeping him at bay. Eventually, Qui-Gon pins down the leader of the rogue faction. Although his revenge is almost complete, Qui-Gon backs down when he sees his apprentice, Obi-Wan, staring at him passively. Qui-Gon lays down his grief and accepts the fact that the rebels on New Apsolon must be tried and brought to justice, not slaughtered.Peace is temporarily restored to New Apsolon, but Qui-Gon is still bitter over the death of his loved one, Tahl.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Only_Witness"title="The Only Witness">
A witness asks for escort and protection from the Jedi Order. She wants to testify against her family - the Cobral group - who control the planet of Frego much like the Syndicat controlled Phindar. An older Obi-Wan Kenobi and his master, Qui-Gon Jinn, have been sent to protect her, but they suspect that she is hiding something.The Cobral family stop at nothing to ensure that the witness does not testify, but they eventually fail. She is escorted to Coruscant, where she successfully testifies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prestige"title="The Prestige">
The events of the past are told through the diaries of 19th century magicians Rupert Angier and Alfred Borden. The diaries are read by their great-grandchildren, Kate Angier and Andrew Westley (born Nicholas Borden) who meet in the present day, with the two diary accounts being interspersed with events of Kate's and Andrew's framing story throughout the novel. Andrew's story is related to his childhood, being adopted and his current job as a journalist. Kate's story is related to a traumatic event that happened when she was five years old where she witnessed a small boy murdered by her father. This leads her to search for Andrew who she believes is a key to the mystery. Kate believes that Andrew was the twin of the boy she witnessed die. As the diaries are read, the truth of the what happened to Andrew's twin is explained by the history of Angier and Borden. The central plot focuses on a feud between the magicians, begun in the fledgling years of their careers when Borden disrupts a fake seance being conducted by Angier and his wife after having conducted a previous one for one of Borden's relatives (Borden was upset that they were presenting it as real when he realized it was in truth an illusion). During a scuffle, Angier's pregnant wife Julia is thrown to the ground, resulting in a miscarriage. The two men are mutually antagonistic for many years afterwards as they rise to become world-renowned stage magicians, with the feud affecting the later generations of their families to come, specifically Kate and Andrew.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prime_Minister_(novel)"title="The Prime Minister (novel)">
When neither the Whigs nor the Tories are able to form a government on their own, a fragile compromise coalition government is formed, with Plantagenet Palliser, the wealthy and hard-working Duke of Omnium, installed as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The Duchess, formerly Lady Glencora Palliser, attempts to support her husband by hosting lavish parties at Gatherum Castle in Barsetshire, the family's largest country house, barely used until now. Palliser, initially unsure that he is fit to lead, grows to enjoy his high office, but becomes increasingly distressed when his government proves to be too weak and divided to accomplish anything. His own inflexible nature does not help.A significant sub-plot centres on Ferdinand Lopez, a financially overextended City adventurer of undisclosed parentage and doubtful ethnicity (possibly Jewish), who wins the favour of Emily Wharton. She marries him despite her father's objections in preference to Arthur Fletcher, who has always been in love with her. As in Trollope's earlier Palliser novel "Can You Forgive Her?", in which the heroine also has to choose between two suitors, the enticing and charismatic suitor is revealed to have many unpleasant traits, and Emily soon has cause to regret her choice. Lopez meets the Duchess at one of her parties, and Glencora unwisely encourages him to stand for Parliament. He campaigns against Arthur Fletcher, but withdraws from the contest when he sees he has no chance of winning. Lopez writes to the Duke, insisting on being reimbursed for his election expenses since the Duchess had led him to believe that he would have the Duke's endorsement (despite having his expenses already paid in full by his father-in-law).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time's_Arrow_(novel)"title="Time's Arrow (novel)">
The novel recounts the life of a German Holocaust doctor in reverse chronology. The narrator, together with the reader, experiences time passing in reverse. The narrator is not exactly the protagonist himself but a secondary consciousness apparently living within him, feeling his feelings but with no access to his thoughts and no control over events. Some passages may be interpreted as hinting that this narrator may in some way be the conscience, but this is not clear. The narrator may alternatively be considered merely a necessary device to narrate a reverse chronology.Amis engages in several forms of reverse discourse including reverse dialogue, reverse narrative, and reverse explanation. Amis's use of these techniques is aimed to create an unsettling and irrational aura for the reader; indeed, one of the recurrent themes in the novel is the narrator's persistent misinterpretation of events. For example, he simply accepts that people wait for an hour in a physician's waiting room after being examined, although at some points he has doubts about this tradition. Relationships are portrayed with stormy beginnings that slowly fade into pleasant romances. Although the narrator accepts all this, he is puzzled and feels that the world does not really make sense.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet_of_Destinies_(book)"title="Tablet of Destinies (book)">
The second book in The Celestial Triad takes Tory and Maelgwyn into the realms of the Devachan, the Fourth Dimension. They and their clan have had many peaceful years on the planet of Kila until Tory's new twin babies, only a few days after their birth, are switched with changelings ... the babies now exhibit all the characteristics of fairy folk and, as with all deva infants, are neither male nor female.Tory seeks the counsel of the Tablet of Destinies and is told that the changelings are the first of the Devachan to venture into human existence, and that her twins are the first humans to choose to experience the world of the Devachan ... and all the babies are psychically linked. To reclaim their children, Tory and Maelgwyn must journey into the fourth dimension.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_(novel)"title="Flux (novel)">
Dura and her fellow human beings live inside a neutron star, as they have for generations. As long as they can remember, "glitches" (instabilities of the magnetic field inside the star caused by changes in the star's rotation) have happened from time to time. As the novel starts, the worst glitch that anyone can remember threatens to destroy her home. To survive, Dura must travel to a far-off city, and eventually outside of the star itself.As the novel begins, a glitch — an instability of the magnetic field inside the star caused by changes in the star's rotation — is about to destroy a net made of ropes, where a group of 50 humans live. During this several of the older humans are killed, and importantly the humans lose their main food source, a herd of "air pigs", animals indigenous to the star.To find more food, Dura, together with her young brother Farr, Adda (the eldest of the humans and one of the novel's main characters), Philas (wife of a man killed during the glitch; this man was also seeing Dura), and six other adults travel high into the top of the mantle of the star to find food in the forest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_of_the_Yellow-Breasted_Luddites"title="Dance of the Yellow-Breasted Luddites">
The story takes place in a wildlife reserve on a mostly barren planet named Sutter's Mill. Rescue Star operative Hannah Specter is overseeing the introduction of a new alien animal species into the reserve and must unravel the mystery of the species' seemingly suicidal behavior.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Halloween_Tree"title="The Halloween Tree">
A group of eight boys set out to go trick-or-treating on Halloween, only to discover that a ninth friend, Pipkin, has been whisked away on a journey that could determine whether he lives or dies. Through the help of a mysterious character named Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud, they pursue their friend across time and space through Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek, and Ancient Roman cultures, Celtic Druidism, the Notre Dame Cathedral in Medieval Paris, and The Day of the Dead in Mexico. Along the way, they learn the origins of the holiday that they celebrate, and the role that the fear of death, ghosts, and the haunts has played in shaping civilization. The Halloween Tree itself, with its many branches laden with jack-o'-lanterns, serves as a metaphor for the historical confluence of these traditions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_of_the_Wolves"title="Julie of the Wolves">
Julie/Miyax (My-yax) is an Inuk girl torn between modern Alaska and the old Inuit tradition. After her mother's death, she is raised by her father Kapugen (Kah-Pue-Jen). In his care, Miyax becomes an intelligent and observant girl at one with the Arctic tundra. Miyax goes to live with her great aunt Martha, a distant and cold woman, after her father goes out on a seal hunt and does not return. Search parties find four pieces of his boat washed ashore, but there is no sign of him. He is presumed dead.As an orphan, Miyax is never more than an unwanted guest in Martha's house. So at the age of 13, she accepts a marriage to a boy named Daniel as it will allow her to leave her aunt’s house. However, she soon realizes that life with Daniel is no better if not worse than her life with Martha. Daniel has an unspecified type of intellectual disability. After being mercilessly teased by other young people about it, he becomes abusive towards Miyax and sexually assaults her. Caught in an unbearable situation, she runs away in the hope of being able to stay with her pen-pal in San Francisco, California.Miyax realizes she has no way of reaching her friend and finds herself lost in the Arctic wild with only her own strength and knowledge between her and death. She happens upon a wolf pack and is able to coexist with them. She learns to communicate with the wolves to receive food and water and over time, they become like family. When she finds a way to return to her old Inuit way of life, she is torn between the choice of staying with the wolves or going back to her home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartburn_(novel)"title="Heartburn (novel)">
The narrator of the novel is Rachel Samstat (based on Nora Ephron), a food writer who is married to Mark Feldman (based on Carl Bernstein), a political journalist. Rachel is a Jewish New Yorker who has moved to Washington, D.C., to support her husband's career. They have one son, Sam, and Rachel is pregnant with their second child as the book begins. The book wittily describes the life of an upper middle class intellectual couple replete with neuroses—Rachel is in group therapy, Mark agonizes over the mystifying disappearance of his socks. Threaded through the whole are recipes and anecdotes which drive the story along and humanize Samstat.Rachel's self-esteem takes a huge battering as Mark has an affair with Thelma Rice (based on Margaret Jay) and she takes her revenge by telling the Washington grapevine that Thelma has a venereal disease.Rachel's diamond ring, given to her by Mark after the birth of their first son and stolen from her while at group therapy, is pivotal to the plot. Remarkably she gets it back when the police catch the robber. The stone is loose in its setting and she takes it back to the family jeweler for repair. Here she discovers that while she had been in the hospital giving birth, Mark had bought an expensive necklace for his lover Thelma. She sells the ring and the money enables her to go back to New York and start afresh.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball,_1973"title="Pinball, 1973">
Despite being an early work, "Pinball" shares many elements with Murakami's later novels. It describes itself in the text as "a novel about pinball," but also explores themes of loneliness and companionship, purposelessness, and destiny. As with the other books in the "Trilogy of the Rat" series, three of the characters include the protagonist, a nameless first-person narrator, his friend The Rat, and J, the owner of the bar where they often spend time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pothunters"title="The Pothunters">
Tony Graham, of the Sixth form at St Austin's, narrowly defeats his cousin Allen Thomson, of Rugby, in boxing at the inter-school sports at Aldershot. Tony returns to St Austin's with Welch, another athlete. Tony's fag Robinson excitedly tells them that a window pane was removed from the Pavilion, where the school sports trophies are temporarily being kept. Robinson thinks the trophies have been stolen. Tony later sees Jim Thomson, Allen's brother who attends St Austin's. Jim bet two pounds on Allen at Aldershot, with Allen betting against himself to hedge another bet. Jim now needs two pounds to pay Allen. Jim's father will pay Jim a pound for every race he wins at St Austin's. He has already won the half-mile and hopes to win the mile. Thanks to Robinson, news quickly spreads about the burglary. Only two trophies (for the quarter-mile and hundred-yard races) and a valueless flask were taken. Jim tells Tony that on the night of the burglary, he broke into the Pavilion because he had left notes there which he needed to study for an examination. At the time, he heard someone jump out through a different window. Jim now realizes he interrupted a burglary. He worries about what will happen if it is discovered that he was in the Pavilion at the time of the burglary.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Red_Caboose"title="The Little Red Caboose">
It tells the story of a caboose who longs to be as popular as the steam engine at the front of the train, and gains the respect and admiration of all when it saves the train from rolling down a steep hill.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rainbow_Fish"title="The Rainbow Fish">
The story is about a small rainbowfish with shiny, multi-coloured scales. He has blue, green, purple, and pink scales. Interspersed with these colorful scales are shiny, holographic scales which are his favorites. The other fish from his shoal also have scales, but only scales matching to their real colors. However, they wish that they had shiny silver scales just like Rainbow Fish. One day, a small blue fish (named Blue in the TV series) who envied the shiny silver scales asks the Rainbow Fish if he could have one of his. The Rainbow Fish refuses in a rude manner. The small blue fish tells all the other fish that The Rainbow Fish was being rude, and as a result, the other fish do not want to play with him any more.His only remaining friend, the starfish, tells him to go visit the wise octopus (named Wanda in the TV series) for advice. When he goes to the cave where she lives, he sees Wanda the octopus. Wanda (in a deep voice) says that she has been waiting for him. Then she explains that the waves have told her his story. Then, she gives The Rainbow Fish her advice: He must share his scales with the other fish. She continues that he might no longer be the most beautiful fish after that, but he will discover how to be happy. The Rainbow Fish tries to say that he cannot share his favorite scales, but Wanda disappears in a cloud of ink.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathilda_(novella)"title="Mathilda (novella)">
Narrating from her deathbed, Mathilda, a young woman barely in her twenties, writes her story as a way of explaining her actions to her friend, Woodville. Her narration follows her lonely upbringing and climaxes at a point when her unnamed father confesses his incestuous love for her. This is then followed by his suicide by drowning and her ultimate demise; her relationship with the gifted young poet, Woodville, fails to reverse Matilda's emotional withdrawal or prevent her lonely death.The novella begins with readers becoming aware that this story is being narrated in the first person, by Mathilda, and that this narration is meant for a specific audience in answer to a question asked prior to the novella's beginning: "You have often asked me the cause of my solitary life; my tears; and above all of my impenetrable and unkind silence." Readers quickly learn that Mathilda is on her deathbed and this is the only reason she is exposing what seems to be a dark secret. Mathilda's narrative first explores the relationship between her mother and father, and how they knew each other growing up. Mathilda's mother, Diana, and her father were childhood friends; Mathilda's father found solace in Diana after the death of his own mother and the two married not long after. Mathilda, as narrator, notes that Diana changed Mathilda's father making him more tender and less fickle. However, Mathilda was born a little more than a year after their marriage and Diana died a few days after her birth, causing her father to sink into a deep depression. His sister, Mathilda's aunt, came to England to stay with them and help care for Mathilda, but Mathilda's father, unable to even look at his daughter, left about a month after his wife's death and Mathilda was raised by her aunt. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Stranger_in_the_Mirror"title="A Stranger in the Mirror">
A retired captain recalls the cruise where he decided to retire, which involves the famous celebrity, Jill Castle. The book then goes back to the beginning of the lives of the two main characters: Jill and Toby Temple.Toby's main influence growing up is his mother, who pushes him to always do better and leads him to believe he is destined for fame and greatness. After running away to Hollywood to avoid a shotgun marriage, his delusion of being naturally funny and charming is shattered when he struggles to start his career as a comedian. Eventually, after years of hardship, he becomes a successful star through the help of Clifton Lawrence, a celebrity producer, though he has become an egomaniac who destroys the careers of anyone with the slightest fault against him, and has to have everyone around him dependent on him, including Lawrence, whom he forces to drop all of his other celebrity clients.Jill, born Josephine Czinski, leaves her hometown of Odessa, Texas for Hollywood after she learns that her boyfriend, the wealthy David Kenyon, is engaged to another woman, Cissy, the morning after he nearly proposed to Jill himself. In reality, David's mother and Cissy trick David into thinking it would be a temporary marriage just to please his mother, but he fails to tell Jill about this. She discovers the difficulty of being an actress with no connections and, after being drugged into participating in a pornographic film, decides to start earning better roles in exchange for sexual favors. After a failed attempt at reuniting with David, who misses their rendezvous after Cissy attempts to kill herself, Jill returns to Hollywood and ends up working for the "Toby Temple Show".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abominable_Man"title="The Abominable Man">
A senior policeman known for brutality is violently knifed while in his hospital bed (in Sabbatsberg Hospital). Within a 24-hour period, Martin Beck investigates the policeman's many enemies in an attempt to identify the killer, for whom the murder was only a precursor to a Charles Whitman-style attack on Stockholm.Since they cannot find a starting clue, the police go in the archives of the police ombudsman where they find many old complaints about Nyman. They encounter the entry of their former colleague Åke Eriksson; Eriksson's wife was in diabetic coma but she was considered drunk by Nyman and locked in the drunk cell, where she died. Finally, on the roof of a skyscraper in downtown Stockholm, it comes to a showdown with Eriksson, who has lost everything, at which point the novel ends with Martin Beck seriously injured by a gunshot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Shadows,_White_Whale"title="Green Shadows, White Whale">
The narrator, an unnamed writer, is sent to Dublin, Ireland to coproduce a film adaptation of "Moby Dick" with a director whose first name is given as "John". The narrator checks in at the Royal Hibernian Hotel in Dublin before leaving for Heeber Finn's Pub in Kilcock, where he converses with several local characters. The narrator meets with his director, John, and John's wife, Ricki. At dinner, John tells a story about his and his wife's trip to Spain, which ends with the couple arguing. The narrator flashes back to when he was buying his travel copy of "Moby Dick" and a woman warned him not to go to Ireland because the director was a monster.The remainder of the novel consists of a series of unrelated short stories, most containing surreal and fantastic elements, inspired by Irish customs and culture. Meanwhile, the narrator works for weeks on what he refers to as "the Whale" through the rain in Ireland. In the last chapter, the narrator shows John the finished script. John is impressed and says that he should take the ferry to England. The narrator tells the people in Finn's pub what he's found out about Ireland and says goodbye to them. As he leaves, he sees the hills as green.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Prefect's_Uncle"title="A Prefect's Uncle">
Gethryn is the Head-prefect of Leicester's House in Beckford and is friends with Marriott, another prefect. Marriott's aunt has asked him to look after the son of a friend, though the new boy, Wilson, proves to be capable of defending himself. Wilson becomes Marriott's fag (a junior student who performs errands for a senior student). Gethryn's aunt asked him to meet his uncle at the train station. Gethryn is surprised that his uncle, Farnie, is four years younger than him. Farnie is entering the school, having transferred between several schools, in each case because he was expelled or his father was dissatisfied with the school. The students in the Upper Fifth form are required to enter a poetry contest, and this year, the subject is the death of Dido. Lorimer, who is in the Upper Fifth, cannot write poetry, so his friend Pringle offers to write the poem for him. Against school rules, Farnie goes to a village to play billiards, and loses money. He borrows two pounds from Monk, a notorious troublemaker, who tells Farnie to pay him back four pounds later.Monk is disappointed when Farnie does not become one of his cronies, and demands his loan get repaid or he will reveal that Farnie broke bounds to play billiards. While Gethryn is playing for Beckford against the Marylebone Cricket Club, Farnie takes four pounds out of Gethryn's charity collection box and leaves the money in Monk's study. Since Wilson sees Farnie in Gethryn's study and will probably realize later who took the money, Farnie decides to run away. He leaves a note for Gethryn and thinks he might as well take the other six pounds in the box too. The match against the M.C.C. starts well for Beckford, who bat first. During the lunch break, Gethryn sees Farnie's note. Gethryn believes he can catch up to Farnie on his bicycle and bring him back before the next innings. However, the match takes a bad turn for Beckford and the first innings soon ends. Since Gethryn cannot be found, Lorimer is brought in as a substitute fielder, but is not allowed to bowl. The team loses without Gethryn. Gethryn meanwhile encounters obstacles but finally brings back Farnie, who can only return six pounds. To protect his uncle, Gethryn refuses to explain why he left. Norris, the cricket captain, bars Gethryn from playing for the school team.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Password_to_Larkspur_Lane"title="The Password to Larkspur Lane">
## 1933 edition.The story opens with Nancy tending her prize delphiniums when a mysterious carrier pigeon lands in her yard. Nancy contacts the registry for the carrier pigeon.Meanwhile, housekeeper Hannah Gruen takes a fall and must be treated at the local orthopedist's office. Her attending physician, Dr. Spires, confides to Carson Drew and Nancy that he was forced to tend an elderly woman for her shoulder under peculiar circumstances: the driver of a car blindfolded him when they drove him there, so he would not be able to guess her location, but the doctor believes their destination might have been someplace called Larkspur Lane. Events led him to believe the patient was being held prisoner.The only clue to the woman's identity is a bracelet with a family crest. Nancy, of course, sets out to track the crest, discovering it belongs to the Eldridge family of St. Louis.In the meantime, the pigeon registry contacts Nancy about the bird, suspecting criminality is involved. Effie Schneider, a foolish girl who serves as Hannah's substitute, gets in on the action when Nancy attempts to track the carrier pigeon's flight into the country. A ferocious woman attacks Nancy and steals the bracelet from her. Due to threats of intruders and increasing danger, the Drews temporarily retreat and accept Helen Corning's invitation to visit Sylvan Lake.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_of_Falling_Angels"title="The City of Falling Angels">
The book explores local reactions to the fire, from the American "Save Venice" Foundation to Venice's bureaucratic government. The opera house burned again while the second renovation was ongoing.Among those interviewed is Archimede Seguso, a renowned Venetian glassblower of the twentieth century. Seguso lived directly behind La Fenice and witnessed the fire. Soon afterwards he created glassworks dedicated to the memory of the fire, in his own rendition of how the opera house burned.The book also tells the story of many American and English expatriates who went to live in Venice, from Daniel Curtis, who owned Palazzo Barbaro where Henry James and John Singer Sargent were guests, to the poet Ezra Pound, who lived the last part of his life in Venice with his long-time mistress Olga Rudge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Agony_and_the_Ecstasy_(novel)"title="The Agony and the Ecstasy (novel)">
## Sections.The book is divided into eleven sections, each detailing a distinct period of Michelangelo's life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Weeks_in_a_Balloon"title="Five Weeks in a Balloon">
A scholar and explorer, Dr. Samuel Fergusson, accompanied by his manservant Joe and his friend professional hunter Richard "Dick" Kennedy, sets out to travel across the African continent — still not fully explored — with the help of a balloon filled with hydrogen. He has invented a mechanism that, by eliminating the need to release gas or throw ballast overboard to control his altitude, allows very long trips to be taken. This voyage is meant to link together the voyages of Sir Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke in East Africa with those of Heinrich Barth in the regions of the Sahara and Chad. The trip begins in Zanzibar on the east coast, and passes across Lake Victoria, Lake Chad, Agadez, Timbuktu, Djenné and Ségou to St Louis in modern-day Senegal on the west coast. The book describes the unknown interior of Africa near modern-day Central African Republic as a desert, when it is actually savanna.A good deal of the initial exploration is focused on finding the source of the Nile, an event that occurs in chapter 18 (out of 43). The second leg is to link up the other explorers. There are numerous scenes of adventure, composed of either a conflict with a native or a conflict with the environment. Some examples include:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Widow's_Broom"title="The Widow's Broom">
The story involves a widow named Minna Shaw. One evening, a witch falls from her broom when it suddenly loses the ability to fly, causing the witch to crash-land in the garden near Minna Shaw's house. Minna Shaw takes her in until she recovers, and when she does, the witch calls a friend to "drive" her home, leaving her own broom behind. Minna Shaw discovers the broom is still in her house and leaves it alone but is startled, and more than a little afraid, when it comes to life later that evening. She discovers that the broom is harmless, as all it does is sweep, but she teaches it how to feed the chickens, chop wood, and play the piano. While most of the neighbor women and children are comfortable with the broom, the men are concerned that it had been a witch's broom. Shortly afterwards, two boys begin to harass it. The broom, apparently angered, beats them and flings their dog over the forest. The boys' parents demand that the broom be burned at the stake. Minna Shaw surprisingly agrees, and the broom is burned. Things appear normal until the broom's phantom-white ghost begins stalking the Spiveys' house. The Spiveys are so terrified that they pack up and leave the house. Minna Shaw can now be alone and listen to the broom play the piano; she'd given the Spiveys her own ordinary household broom to burn and cooked up the plan for the magical broom (which was just painted white), to scare her neighbors away. She painted it white to make it look like the "ghost" broom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hungry_Tide"title="The Hungry Tide">
Off the easternmost coast of India, in the Bay of Bengal, lies the immense labyrinth of tiny islands known as the Sundarbans. For settlers here, life is precarious: attacks by deadly tigers are common, and the threat of eviction and consequent social unrest is ever present. Without warning, at any time, tidal floods rise and surge over the land, leaving devastation in their wake. In this place of vengeful beauty, the lives of three people from different worlds collide. The main character, Piyali Roy, is a young marine biologist of Bengali-Indian descent but identifying as stubbornly American. Raised in Seattle, she studies at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla. She travels to the Sundarbans in search of a rare endangered river dolphin, "Orcaella brevirostris". She meets Kanai Dutt, a translator and businessman, on the Kolkata Suburban Railway heading towards Port Canning, on her way to the Sundarbans. Upon her arrival, she hires a boat to look for the dolphins, but her journey begins with a disaster, when she is thrown from a boat into crocodile-infested waters. Rescue comes in the form of an illiterate young fisherman, Fokir. Although they have no language between them, Piya and Fokir are powerfully drawn to each other, sharing an uncanny instinct for the ways of the sea. Piya engages Fokir to help with her research and finds a translator in Kanai, whose idealistic aunt and uncle are longtime settlers in the Sundarbans. As the three of them explore the tidal backwaters, they are drawn unaware into the hidden undercurrents of this isolated world, where political turmoil exacts a personal toll that is every bit as powerful as the ravaging tide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Historian"title="The Historian">
"The Historian" interweaves the history and folklore of Vlad Țepeș, a 15th-century prince of Wallachia known as "Vlad the Impaler", and his fictional equivalent Count Dracula together with the story of Paul, a professor; his 16-year-old daughter; and their quest for Vlad's tomb. The novel ties together three separate narratives using letters and oral accounts: that of Paul's mentor in the 1930s, that of Paul in the 1950s, and that of the narrator herself in the 1970s. The tale is told primarily from the perspective of Paul's daughter, who is never named.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Claw_of_the_Conciliator"title="The Claw of the Conciliator">
The book continues the story of Severian, a journeyman in the Seekers for Truth and Penitence (the guild of torturers), describing his travels north to the city of Thrax.An independent tale in the book, "The Tale of the Student and his Son", was later published separately in "The Magazine of Fantasy &amp; Science Fiction", October 1981.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Citadel_of_the_Autarch"title="The Citadel of the Autarch">
Unlike the first books in the series, "The Citadel of the Autarch" picks up right after the end of the previous one, "The Sword of the Lictor". It tells of the travels of Severian, weak and defenseless after his encounter with Baldanders and Dr. Talos. Severian continues his travels, which lead him into war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_of_the_Lictor"title="The Sword of the Lictor">
The book continues the story of Severian, a lictor in the Seekers for Truth and Penitence, describing his time as a torturer in the city Thrax and then his travels after soon leaving Thrax.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Short-Timers"title="The Short-Timers">
The book is divided into three sections, written in completely different styles of prose, and follows James T. "Joker" Davis through his enlistment in the United States Marine Corps and deployment to Vietnam.Joker and his fellow Marines refer to military personnel in various ways. A "short" service-member, or "short-timer", is one who is approaching the end of his tour of duty in Vietnam, described in the novel as 385 days for Marines and 365 days for members of other armed services. "Lifers" are distinguished not necessarily by their length of time served, but rather by their attitude toward the lower ranks. (Joker describes the distinction as follows: "A lifer is anybody who abuses authority he doesn't deserve to have. There are plenty of civilian lifers.") Finally, the term "poges" (an alternative spelling for the slang term "pogues") is short for "Persons Other than Grunts"—Marines who fill non-combat roles such as cooks, clerks, and mechanics. Poges are a favorite target of the front-line troops' derision, and vice versa.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maestro_(novel)"title="Maestro (novel)">
The protagonist, a boy called Paul Crabbe, is taught piano by his teacher (or maestro), Eduard Keller. Paul dislikes his teacher at first, but by the end of the book has grown to appreciate him dearly. Paul learns the limits of his own musical ability through Keller, but he also grows to understand himself and Keller enough to write the novel. He also has a loving relationship with his sweetheart, Rosie.This book has an ongoing theme of contrasts, including the difference's between Paul's mother and father; Vienna and Darwin; high culture vs. low culture; and the contrast of Paul as an adolescent and Paul as an adult. Throughout the narration, Paul slowly comes to realisation that he is now learning from the maestro, and his talent starts growing day by day.The maestro, Eduard Keller, lost his family during The Holocaust, despite performing private concerts for Adolf Hitler in the belief that he would spare Keller's Jewish family.For Keller, the grand piano is his sanctity and security, helping him deal with the horrors of the world "safe beneath that grand piano", and likewise offering him a way of deconstructing life. As Paul matures, Keller's phrasings, which seemed absurd in adolescence, ossify into a "musical bible whose texts I knew by heart"..
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritage_(novel)"title="Heritage (novel)">
The Seventh Doctor and Ace arrive on Heritage in the year 6048 to visit the Heyworths, who are old friends of the Doctor's. Nobody seems to want them on the planet, and certainly not poking their noses in. But they are stuck there until the next day. The Doctor doesn't want to get involved, but Ace can't help herself: by talking to Lee Marks she finds out that the Heyworths were murdered by the townsfolk, because they threatened to disrupt Professor Wakeling's experiments into cloning. Without the cloning technology, Heritage would have nothing going for it at all.The Doctor suspects all this, and also that the Heyworth's surviving daughter Sweetness is a clone of her mother created by Professor Wakeling. What he doesn't tell Ace is that Sweetness's mother is his old companion Melanie Bush.The Doctor confronts Wakeling and ruins his chances of announcing his discoveries to the universe. As Wakeling tries to take revenge on the Doctor, he is caught in a landslide and probably killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_&quot;R&quot;"title="The Fourth &quot;R&quot;">
At the beginning of the story, Jimmy's mother and father are murdered by their best friend, who is also the youngster's godfather and appointed guardian as well as the inventors' trustee. It leaves the protagonist—who has had the plans of his parents' invention eidetically and indelibly imprinted in his mind—to destroy the physical copies of these plans before his "uncle" can finish "him" off as well.Jimmy must survive his guardian's efforts to squeeze the secret of the invention out of him (whereupon his death will most certainly be arranged, just as his parents' were), and then escape into hiding until he can grow into a physical stature commensurate with his mental age.In the process, the character must make for himself a living and a safe place of residence, and Smith uses his protagonist's situation and capabilities to examine the nature of childhood and the "protections" (including incapacitations) imposed upon legal infants in American civil society at the time of writing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rum_Punch"title="Rum Punch">
Set in the South Florida cities of West Palm Beach and Miami, "Rum Punch" follows Jackie Burke, a forty-four-year-old stewardess for a bottom-rung airline, who has been smuggling illegal cash into the U.S. from Jamaica for small-time gunrunner and aspiring crime boss Ordell Robbie. When U.S. agents arrest Jackie after catching her smuggling this "dirty money", they use the threat of prison and job loss to pressure her into acting as bait in their plan to catch Ordell. Upon learning of this, Ordell pressures Jackie into intentionally misleading and stalling the police long enough for her to smuggle the remainder of his "retirement score" money into the U.S. Hopelessly caught between two no-win scenarios, both dooming her to lifelong poverty (since she's too old to start over again), a desperate Jackie devises a secret, risky plan of her own to double-cross Ordell and the police, save herself, and secure her future. To execute this plan, Jackie must enlist the help of Max Cherry—the same bail bondsman Ordell hired to get Jackie out of jail. Louis Gara, Ordell's longtime criminal associate works for Cherry and becomes involved in the gun running.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Cave"title="The Crystal Cave">
The protagonist of this story is a boy named Myrddin Emrys, also known as Merlin, which is the Welsh form of the word "falcon". (Welsh "dd" is pronounced "th" as in "thus", so "Myrddin" is roughly pronounced "Murthin".) This story is told in first-person narrative and includes his journey to find a home as he travels through Wales, Brittany, England and Ireland. Emrys is also known as Ambrosius, or Prince of Light.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pilgrimage"title="The Pilgrimage">
The story begins in 1986 when Coelho undertakes his initiation into the order Regnus Agnus Mundi (RAM), which he subsequently fails. He is then told that he must embark on a pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago to find the sword that is the symbol of his acceptance into the ranks of RAM. He must do this to gain insight into the simplicity of life. The journey transforms him as he learns to understand the nature of truth through the simplicity of life.He begins his journey with a guide, also a member of RAM, who goes by the alias Petrus. During the journey Petrus shows him meditation exercises and introduces him to some of the more down-to-earth elements of Western mystical thought and philosophy, and teaches him about love and its forms: agape, philia and eros.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredible_Tide"title="The Incredible Tide">
The story alternates between the experiences of Conan and Lanna. A New Order ship discovers the island where Conan has been surviving for five years since the helicopter crash and captures him, taking him back to the city of Industria as a worker. Meanwhile, Lanna and her parents at High Harbor have to deal with Dyce, who wants her people to supply lumber faster than they can with the tools they have and is desperate for knowledge of the whereabouts of Briac Roa.The New Order seems to be resurrecting only the worst of the fallen civilization's qualities, putting together a military-industrial complex without a culture or conscience. Without telling him what it will mean, they mark his forehead with a tattoo that designates him as an "apprentice citizen," meaning that he will have to work to pay off the "debt" that he owes in gratitude for having "rescued" him. Enraged, he seizes the tattooing device and marks several self-important officials before he is subdued, and they assign him to work for a crazy old man named Patch, who turns out to be Teacher. Teacher has been hiding in Industria since the cataclysm, since it's the last place where the New Order would ever look for him, hiding his identity by acting like an insane, crippled old man.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_(fairy_tale)"title="The Shadow (fairy tale)">
A learned man's shadow becomes self-aware and takes on a life of its own. The shadow gains insight into the dark side of human behaviour, then returns to the man and enslaves him. Fearful of being discovered, the shadow has the man killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_Warning_(Lackey_novel)"title="Storm Warning (Lackey novel)">
When "Storm Warning" begins, Emperor Charliss, the Eastern Emperor (first mentioned in "Winds of Fury") knows he is dying and must name a successor. Grand Duke Tremane, a Commander in the Army, is currently his favorite choice. Tremane is sent to Hardorn, a country the Imperial Army recently invaded after the Hardornen King, Ancar, was killed by a group of assassins from Valdemar. Tremane understands that he must succeed in this mission or he will be killed.Meanwhile, in Haven, the capital city of Valdemar, An'desha shena Jor'ethan, a young Shin'a'in Adept, is feeling lonely. While Adept Firesong k'Treva, his lover, is perfectly at home in Haven, An'desha feels left out and alien. He spends almost all of his time in Firesong's "ekele", an environment something like a cross between a sukkah and a treehouse and something like the "flets" of the elves in Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings", where he meditates and tends the plants in the garden. However, he has been having premonitions of approaching doom. Neither he nor Firesong can explain these premonitions. Also, An'desha has an Adept-class (the highest level of ability of magic) potential, but refuses to be trained, believing his powers to be tainted by Falconsbane, by whom An'desha was earlier possessed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarka_Ruus"title="Jarka Ruus">
In the 20 years since the events chronicled in "The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara", Grianne Ohmsford has become High Druid, or Ard Rhys, of the new Druid Council, but not without misgivings by many over her former life as the evil Ilse Witch. In a bid for power, a group of Druids led by Shadea a'Ru use unorthodox magic called "liquid night" to send Grianne out of the Four Lands and into the Demon-infested world of the Forbidding. Tagwen, Grianne's loyal Dwarf aid, sets out to restore her, seeking the aid of her brother Bek Ohmsford. Finding Bek and his wife Rue Meridian otherwise disposed, Tagwen joins forces with their son Pen, who has a supernatural ability to commune with nature. Advised by the King of the Silver River, they set out in search of the legendary Tanequil tree, which they are told can provide a means to reach Grianne in the Forbidding. They are joined by the elf Ahren Elessedil, now a Druid, and his niece Khyber (heir to the magic Elfstones), as well as the mysteriously empathic Rover girl Cinnaminson, for whom Pen develops strong feelings. Along the way, they are stalked by traitorous Druid minions and their spider-like assassin accomplice, Aphasia Wye. They manage to defeat one of the pursuing Druid airships, but at the cost of Ahren's life and Cinamminson's capture.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanequil"title="Tanequil">
Pen, Khyber, and company rescue Cinnaminson and continue their journey north, pursued continuously by traitorous Druids and the assassin Aphasia Wye. Meanwhile, the traitourous Druids find Pen's parents, Bek and Rue, and they agree to go back to Paranor to help to try to find their son Pen. The senior Ohmsfords recognize the deception and lies that the Druids have been telling them, so Bek attempts to locate Pen by using the magical scrye waters in the depths of Paranor. However, Bek and Rue are captured and unwillingly give Pen's position away.Pen and his friends find allies among the Troll people, led by Kermadec and his semi-estranged brother Atalan, who aid them in locating the mystical Tanequil tree on a ravine-surrounded island. From the Tanequil, Pen receives the enchanted wooden "darkwand," a talisman that can aid him in saving his aunt. However, two of his fingers, as well as Cinnaminson, are taken in exchange. Pen and Aphasia meet in one last confrontation in which the assassin is killed by the Tanequil, but as Pen leaves the island, he finds the rest of his party taken hostage by the enemy Druid traitors.Meanwhile, the corrupt Federation army has unleashed a devastating new airship-mounted weapon in their war against the Elven and Free-born armies. A shape-shifting Demon called the Moric, has crossed over into the Four Lands from the Forbidding in exchange for Grianne's banishment. This creature, who has taken the form of a Druid advisor to the Federation leader, is intent on using the weapon to destroy the Ellcrys tree in Arborlon, which would allow the Demon hordes from the Forbidding to flood into the Four Lands.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straken"title="Straken">
After receiving the darkwand from the Tanequil tree, Pen Ohmsford finds his companions—the Dwarf Tagwen and a small troll force led by Kermadec and his brother Atalan—captured by Druid forces under the command of the illegitimate High Druid Shadea a'Ru. Pen agrees to be taken prisoner in exchange for their release. The elf-girl Khyber Elessedil, however, manages to stow away on the Druid airship before it leaves for Paranor.Meanwhile, Trefen Morys and Bellizen, Druids still loyal to the banished Ard Rhys, help spring Bek and Rue from Paranor's dungeons. After barely escaping with their lives, Bek is directed in a dream by the King of the Silver River to seek Pen's abandoned friends in Taupo Rough. He is told that Pen has made it into the Forbidding in order to save Grianne Ohmsford (the banished High Druid) and Bek will have to work together with each of Pen's companions to ensure their safe return. In a daring airship rescue, Bek and company save the Trolls and Tagwen from a marauding flood of wraithlike Urdas and return to Paranor, picking up a new army of Kermadec's Trolls along the way.Pen is imprisoned in Paranor and the darkwand is confiscated. Khyber soon springs him free, and together they make their way up to the High Druid's sleeping quarters, where the darkwand is secured. Pen grabs the darkwand and is transported to the realm of the Forbidding, while Khyber is taken prisoner and sentenced to death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Purple_Cloud"title="The Purple Cloud">
The story, a recording of a medium's meditation over the future writing of the text, details the narrator, Adam Jeffson, on an expedition to the North Pole during the 20th century on board the "Boreal". Jeffson's fiancée, the Countess Clodagh, poisons her own cousin to secure a place on the ship for Jeffson, because the expedition was known to be one of the best ever planned. A millionaire, who died some years previously, had provided in his will for the payment of millions of dollars to the first person to reach the Pole.Before Jeffson leaves, he hears a priest speaking against polar research, calling the failure of all previous expeditions the will of God, and prophesying a terrible fate for those who attempt to go against God's will. Jeffson remembers meeting with a man who claimed that the universe is a place of strife between vague "powers", "The White" and "The Black", which vie for dominance.Throughout the polar journey, Jeffson discovers that his course has been guided by these mysterious forces. He finds a huge lake of spinning water, with a rocky island inlaid with inscriptions. Upon seeing this, Jeffson faints. When he returns to his camp he feels nauseated after having smelled a peculiar peach-like odour. He also notices a moving purple cloud, spreading in the heavens. During the journey, he discovers dead animals, all without injury, and he learns of the death of his crew.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_of_Sunnybrook_Farm"title="Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm">
The novel opens with Rebecca's journey from her family's farm to live with her two aunts, her mother's older sisters Miranda and Jane Sawyer, in their brick house in Riverboro. Rebecca is the second-oldest of seven children. Most of the children have fanciful names, such as Marquis and Jenny Lind, influenced by their father's artistic background; Rebecca is named after both the heroines in "Ivanhoe". The family is quite poor, due to the number of children, Mr. Lorenzo DeMedici Randall's inability to stick to a job, and the farm being mortgaged. As the novel begins, the family is barely scraping by three years after the father's death. Rebecca's stay with her aunts is a chance to improve her opportunities in life and to ease the strain on her family's budget. Despite her impoverished background, Rebecca is imaginative and charming. She often composes little poems and songs to express her feelings or to amuse her siblings. It is she who named their farm "Sunnybrook".Miranda and Jane had wanted Hannah, the eldest sister, because of her household skills and pragmatic nature, but her mother needs her at home for the same reasons and sends Rebecca instead. Miranda is unimpressed by Rebecca's imagination, chatter, and dark complexion, calls her the image of her shiftless father, and determines to train Rebecca to be a proper young lady who won't shame the Sawyer name. Jane becomes Rebecca's protector and acts as a buffer between her and Miranda. Jane teaches Rebecca to sew, cook, and manage a household. Rebecca's liveliness and curiosity brighten Jane's life and refresh her spirit. Although Rebecca strives to win Miranda's approval, she struggles to live up to Miranda's rigid standards, as Miranda views her as "all Randall and no Sawyer." 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Popper's_Penguins"title="Mr. Popper's Penguins">
Mr. Popper is a house painter of modest means, living with his wife and two children (Bill and Janie) in the small town of Stillwater, Minnesota. He has a happy life, however, he is also a restless dreamer, spending his time reading of famous explorers in faraway places.One day, the Popper family tunes in to a radio broadcast by an Admiral exploring polar regions. Mr. Popper had previously sent the Admiral fan mail, and the Admiral promises Mr. Popper a surprise. The surprise turns out to be a penguin, which comes in a large box. Mr. Popper names the penguin "Captain Cook" after the famous James Cook. Mr. Popper cleans out the icebox so that the penguin can sleep inside. As time goes by, the Poppers find that Captain Cook is growing larger, but his health is failing. Mr. Popper writes to the curator of a large aquarium, asking for help. The curator replies that the aquarium has a female penguin who unfortunately, is also experiencing the same symptoms, and he suggests that perhaps the penguins are simply lonely. Soon after, the Poppers receive their second penguin in the mail.Mr. Popper names the second penguin Greta and the pair of penguins are revitalized by each other's presence. As both birds cannot fit into the icebox together, Mr. Popper opens the window to let in the cold winter air, creating a snow-covered habitat. As this solution will not work in springtime, Mr. Popper has the main things moved upstairs and a freezing plant installed in the basement for the birds. This makes for happy penguins, but strains the family budget.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_of_the_Ghost"title="The Time of the Ghost">
The book begins with the words "There's been an accident! Something's wrong!" – and something is. There is a ghost. She does not know who she is, or how she died, or quite where she is. All she knows is that there has been a terrible accident.The as-yet unnamed heroine finds herself attracted to a large building, a boys' boarding school, which she finds to be strangely familiar. After a little detective work, the disembodied spirit concludes that she is Sally Melford, one of a quartet of eccentric sisters (Imogen, Cart, Fenella and Sally) who live at the school and are neglected by their overworked parents, both of whom teach at the school. Their father, only known as Himself, is the headmaster, and his wife, Phyllis, is the school nurse. Both of them are constantly busy with school business, and leave their daughters to fend for themselves.As the plot continues, evidence of time-travel begins to emerge. In the present day, the adult, university-age Sally is in a hospital, badly injured after her abusive boyfriend threw her from a speeding car. Some part of her has journeyed back seven years into the past, where, with the help of her sisters and their schoolboy friends, she must undo a rash bargain with the powerful and ancient goddess, Monigan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Time_City"title="A Tale of Time City">
It is September 1939, the start of World War Two, and Vivian Smith is being evacuated. On arriving at the station, she is kidnapped by two boys, Jonathan and Sam, and taken to Time City, which exists outside of what we know as History. Most of the plot takes place in Time City, the purpose of which is to oversee the course of history and ensure that it stays on its "correct" path. To stop it straying from this path, the Time Police have Observers out in history, tweaking events to make sure that they go the right way.Jonathan and Sam have kidnapped Vivian because they (incorrectly) believe that she is the "Time Lady," a legendary figure in Time City. The Time Lady is the consort of Faber John, another legendary figure. The legend states that at the end of history, Faber John and the Time Lady will return to Time City. Sam and Jonathan overheard the Chronologue, powerful authorities in Time City, talking about history going wrong and it being the fault of the Time Lady. They reasoned that, since she is Faber John's (in translation, John Smith's) wife, she must be calling herself Smith, and disguised as a young girl. Since Vivian fits these criteria, they had reasoned that she must be the Time Lady.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Single_Shard"title="A Single Shard">
Tree-ear is an orphan who lives under a bridge with Crane-man, a physically disabled man who took him in when Tree-ear was only a small child, about 2 years old. The potters of Ch'ulp'o, the local village, suddenly become famous for their celadon glaze, but Tree-ear has observed richer pickings in their rubbish dumps. He becomes very interested in watching the potters at work, especially an old potter called Min, famous for the beauty of his wares. Tree-ear enjoys watching Min at work more than any other potter because only Min possesses enough confidence to work openly. Tree-ear learns Min's daily habits and always sneaks up to the same paulownia tree to watch Min at work. One day, Tree-ear goes into Min's yard, but since neither the old potter nor his throwing wheel are in sight, he decides to investigate the work left drying in the sun. He sees a duck-shaped water dropper, a jug and a box that Tree-ear picks up. When Min comes out and startles Tree-ear, he drops and breaks the box by accident. As Tree-ear leaves, he hears Min muttering that the box he had dropped was made in three days. To pay for his mistake, Tree-ear offers to work for Min thrice the number of days to pay for the box. Min agrees. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bud,_Not_Buddy"title="Bud, Not Buddy">
The story opens with Bud being placed with a new foster family, the Amoses. Bud soon meets Todd Amos, their 12-year-old son, who teases him mercilessly and calls him Buddy. After a fight with Todd, Bud is forced to spend the night in the garden shed, where he mistakes a hornet nest for a vampire bat. He hits the nest with a rake, upsetting the hornets and getting himself stung. During his adrenaline rush, he breaks through the window of the shed.After escaping, Bud takes revenge on Todd by making him wet his bed by pouring warm water on Todd, as the Amoses can’t stand bedwetting. He also hides the Amoses’ shotgun and takes leave. He then sleeps under a Christmas tree for the night. The next day, he wakes up to find that he had missed the breakfast line at the mission, but is saved by a couple who pretended he was their son. The next morning, his friend Bugs wakes him up so they can go to the West.Bud runs away with Bugs to Hooverville where they eat and plan to get on the train leaving West the next day. The train, however, leaves early, and Bud, unlike Bugs, fails to hop on and is left behind. Bud starts walking to Grand Rapids, Michigan. On the way, he meets Lefty Lewis —- whom he thought was a Vampire as he had a box of blood in his car —- who gives Bud a ride in his car to Grand Rapids to find his father. He stays with Lefty for a short while and meets his daughter's family. He then leaves to find his father, whom he believes is Herman E. Calloway.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merchant_of_Death"title="The Merchant of Death">
The story takes place in a "territory" (Universe separate from the "Second Earth" universe of the story, there are ten territories in all) called Denduron. Denduron has three suns, one to the east, the north, and the south, but besides that, it has most of the same characteristics as Earth. The story is based around two tribes: the Milago and the Bedoowan. The Milago are treated very poorly by the Bedoowan, who live in luxury; they live in little huts without running water or even outhouses, and have to mine for a valuable stone called glaze every hour of the day in order to meet the demands of Kagan, the queen of the Bedoowan. If the Milago do not meet the required supply of glaze which changes for each day, then one of them is killed by being pushed into an abandoned mine shaft. This process is used by a weight system that weighs the person in glaze. The Bedoowan have more advanced tools and technologies such as running water, stoves, and artificial light.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Have_I_Loved"title="Jacob Have I Loved">
Imaginative, emotionally sensitive, and hard working, Sara Louise Bradshaw, a young girl growing up on an isolated fishing island off the coast of Maryland during WWII, is made to feel second-best from the moment of her birth. Her impoverished family consists of her rough but gentle father, always absent due to his working-class job on his oyster boat; her ladylike and intelligent mother, who had arrived on the island as a school teacher and stayed after falling in love; her grandmother, a bitter and nasty woman with a religious bent; and Caroline, Sara Louise's younger twin sister who is the main impediment of Sara Louise's struggle to distinguish herself and obtain the affection she craves. Caroline is fragile, beautiful, and admired—everything Sara Louise is not.Caroline is offered a scholarship to a mainland school for voice lessons, due to her rare singing skills, and the rest of the family, mainly Sara Louise, must sacrifice to make this happen. To raise money, Sara Louise catches crabs with her only friend, McCall "Call" Purnell, a dumpy, short-sighted boy.One day, Hiram Wallace, the only islander to leave to go to college in fifty years, returns to the island. Hiram, whom they call "the Captain", bonds with Call over their shared sense of humor, becoming a father figure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtime_(Doctor_Who)"title="Downtime (Doctor Who)">
Sometime after Victoria had parted company with the Doctor on 20th century Earth ("Fury from the Deep"), she is lured back to the Detsen Monastery in Tibet ("The Abominable Snowmen") by a dream telling her she'll find her late father there. Instead, she finds the Great Intelligence, which still possessed the mind of Professor Travers ("The Web of Fear").15 years later, Victoria is the vice chancellor of New World University. New World is an institution that claims to offer spiritual guidance to distraught youth. In reality, New World is the headquarters for the Intelligence's new plan to conquer the world by infecting all of the computers. Both the administration and students await the coming of a "new world" that will be heralded by the chancellor, the Intelligence-possessed Travers.Victoria's motives are well-meaning but misguided, having been manipulated with a promised "light of truth". The students themselves have been brainwashed through their computer courses and are slaves of the Intelligence. Outsiders refer to them as "chillys".The Intelligence needs a final missing Locus to attain its goal. It believes the Brigadier has it, but the locus (a small wooden carving of a yeti) is actually with his daughter Kate and grandson Gordon on their narrowboat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coming_of_the_Quantum_Cats"title="The Coming of the Quantum Cats">
The novel proposes invasions from alternate Earths in alternate universes. None of these universes are quite like our universe; however, they all have some element or other in common, many of which Pohl develops to satiric effect.The book presents multiple versions of three characters—Dominic DeSota, Nyla Christophe, and Larry Douglas—and their interactions as different versions of the characters travel from one Earth to another. Dominic DeSota is the main character, with most of the book told from the divergent viewpoints of three of his avatars (see following), with brief glimpses of numerous additional Dominic DeSotas scattered throughout the novel as varying between a nuclear scientist and a hunter scrabbling for bare existence in the ruins left after a nuclear holocaust.The book seems to argue in favor of the idea that social conditions rather than heredity shape a person's character and behavior (the nature versus nurture debate). As depicted again and again in the course of the book, people born with precisely the same genetic heritage can - given different social conditions - develop completely different character traits (timid or assertive, benevolent or predatory, etc.)The novel begins with Nicky DeSota as a timid mortgage broker in a fascist America, who draws the unwelcome attention of Nyla Christophe, an agent of the FBI (a brutal, full-fledged secret police in his world), who is investigating a break-in at a government lab by someone who proves to be a Dominic DeSota from an alternate universe. Used as a pawn by Christophe's con-man boyfriend Larry Douglas to entrap an left-wing activist and former actor (who turns out to be Ronald Reagan), he is later detained and brought to New Mexico to unravel a mystery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Globe"title="The Golden Globe">
"The Golden Globe" takes place in Varley’s "Eight Worlds" universe. The Solar System has been colonized by human refugees fleeing aliens (known as "the Invaders"). Earth and Jupiter are off-limits to humanity, but Earth's Moon and the other planets and moons of the Solar System have all become populated. There are also minor colonies set in the Oort cloud beyond the Solar System. "The Golden Globe" story is told initially from a first person perspective, but a substantial portion of the book comes in the form of extended flashbacks.The Golden Globe in question is Luna, Earth's Moon and the most heavily inhabited world in the Solar System since the Invaders obliterated human civilization on Earth.The novel begins as a first person account of Valentine's adventures in the outer worlds of the Solar System as he attempts to make his way to Luna to play King Lear in an upcoming production. Valentine is a consummate actor and a skilled con man. It is by exercising the latter skill that he runs afoul of the Charonese Mafia, personified by the cold-blooded and unkillable assassin Isambard Comfort.The story is punctuated by several extended flashback sequences in which we learn that Valentine's father, a supremely egotistical and domineering stage actor, has groomed his son almost from birth to follow in his footsteps. It is Valentine, Sr.'s egotism and obsession with the stage that sets the tone for much of the flashback material.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Kiss_Before_Dying_(novel)"title="A Kiss Before Dying (novel)">
Burton “Bud” Corliss is a young man with a ruthless drive to rise above his working-class origins to a life of wealth and importance. He serves in the Pacific in World War II, and upon his honorable discharge in 1947 he learns that his father was killed in an automobile accident while he was overseas.The most pivotal moment in his life occurs during the war, when he first wounds, then kills, a Japanese sniper, who is so terrified that he wets his pants and begs for mercy. Corliss is elated by the total power he holds over the soldier; at the same time, he is disgusted by the man's display of abject terror.Upon returning to the U.S., he enrolls in college and meets Dorothy Kingship, the daughter of a wealthy copper tycoon. Seeing an opportunity to attain the riches he has always craved, he becomes Dorothy's lover. When she tells him she is pregnant, however, he panics; he is sure that her stern, conservative father will disinherit her. Resolving to get rid of Dorothy, he tricks her into writing a letter that, to an unknowing observer, would look like a suicide note, and then throws her from the roof of a tall building. He runs no risk of getting caught, having urged Dorothy to keep their relationship a secret from her family and friends. He continues to live with his mother, who dotes on him and has no clue as to what he has done.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Despair_(novel)"title="Despair (novel)">
The narrator and protagonist of the story, Hermann Karlovich, a Russian of German descent and owner of a chocolate factory, meets a homeless man in the city of Prague, who he believes is his doppelgänger. Even though Felix, the supposed doppelgänger, is seemingly unaware of their resemblance, Hermann insists that their likeness is most striking. Hermann is married to Lydia, a sometimes silly and forgetful wife (according to Hermann) who has a cousin named Ardalion. It is heavily hinted that Lydia and Ardalion are, in fact, lovers, although Hermann continually stresses how much Lydia loves him. On one occasion Hermann actually walks in on the pair, naked, but Hermann appears to be completely oblivious of the situation, perhaps deliberately so. After some time, Hermann shares with Felix a plan for both of them to profit off their shared likeness by having Felix briefly pretend to be Hermann. But after Felix is disguised as Hermann, Hermann kills Felix in order to collect the insurance money on Hermann on March 9. Hermann considers the presumably perfect murder plot to be a work of art rather than a scheme to gain money. But as it turns out, there is no resemblance whatsoever between the two men, the murder is not 'perfect', and the murderer is about to be captured by the police in a small hotel in France, where he is hiding. Hermann, the narrator, switches to a diary mode at the very end just before his capture; the last entry is on April 1.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beetle_in_the_Anthill"title="Beetle in the Anthill">
"Beetle in the Anthill" is the sequel to "Prisoners of Power", but its plot is almost independent.The novel is set in 2178 AD (approximately 20 years after the events of "Prisoners of Power") and follows the story of the main character of the first novel, Maxim Kammerer. Kammerer, now an experienced investigator of COMCON-2, receives an order to track down a man named Lev Abalkin, who was not supposed to return to Earth but has returned nevertheless. The order was issued in secret by Rudolf Sikorski (called "Excellency" throughout the book), the chief of COMCON-2.Studying the materials on Abalkin that Sikorski provided him with, Kammerer discovers that prior to his arrival on Earth, Abalkin was a progressor on Saraksh, working as an undercover agent in the power structures of the Island Empire. Among other materials, he finds a sheet of paper with a strange symbol resembling the Cyrillic letter Ж or Japanese character 卅 ("san juu") which only adds to his confusion.Kammerer's search leads him to several of Abalkin's friends and associates, including Maya Glumova who is a historian working in the "Museum of Extraterrestrial Cultures" (MEC) and Shokn the Golovan who worked closely with Abalkin in projects on Saraksh and Hope. Each of these has had recent contact with Abalkin, and report that he had been behaving strangely.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Case_of_Need"title="A Case of Need">
Dr. John Berry, the protagonist, is a pathologist working in Boston during the 1960s, a time when abortion was illegal in the United States. The story opens with an introduction of the various requirements and challenges of the medical profession during the era. Subsequently, Dr. Berry is notified that his friend, an obstetrician named Arthur Lee, has been arrested and accused of performing an illegal abortion that led to the death of Karen Randall, a member of a prominent Boston medical dynasty. Berry does not believe the allegations, but the situation is further complicated by the fact that Lee is already well-known within the medical community as an abortion provider and that Berry has in the past helped Lee disguise medical samples to hide the fact that Lee's dilation and curettage patients were pregnant.After visiting his friend in jail, Berry sets out to prove Lee's innocence. He investigates the personal life of the dead woman, creating an accurate portrait of her past, psychology, and character. During his search, which lasts several days, vandals attack Lee's home. The protagonist's knowledge of medicine and law are helpful in overcoming various barriers in his search, including a hostile police captain and bribes from the scion of the Randall family itself: Karen's father, a well-established (though mediocre) doctor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Frigate"title="The Dark Frigate">
The book opens in 17th century London. Philip Marsham, a nineteen-year-old sailor, has just been orphaned when his father's ship was lost at sea. An accident with a gun causes him to flee London, leaving behind the small inheritance left by his father. He decides to journey across England on foot, heading towards Bideford. During his travels, he encounters Sir John Bristol, a local Lord who greatly impresses the young man. He also encounters two men, Tom Jordan and Martin Barwick, who claim to be fellow sailors. Tom, who is more commonly known as the Old One, soon parts company with them; however, Martin becomes Phil's traveling companion. When they reach Bideford, Martin leads the way to the house of Mother Taylor, an old woman who works as the go-between for numerous illegal activities. She informs them that the Old One has already gone ahead on a ship without them, but arranges positions for Martin and Phil on a frigate, known as the "Rose of Devon".Once aboard the frigate, Phil quickly impresses the captain with his skills. When the boatswain is killed in an accident, Phil is promoted to replace him. After a violent storm, the crew of the "Rose of Devon" encounters a wrecked ship. While rescuing the survivors, Phil is surprised to see that they are coincidentally led by the Old One. Although the Old One and his followers initially put on a mask of friendliness, they soon reveal their true nature as pirates, killing the Rose's captain and seizing control of the ship. Tempted by the promise of vast riches, the majority of the Rose's former crew willingly join the Old One. Only Phil and Will Canty, a fellow sailor of the same age, show reluctance to become pirates. Having taken an immediate liking to Phil, the Old One allows him to keep his position as boatswain, hoping to convince him to join them willingly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitty,_Her_First_Hundred_Years"title="Hitty, Her First Hundred Years">
The narrative unfolds through the eyes of a tiny wooden doll named Mehitabel (Hittie), who was carved early in the nineteenth century from the magical wood of the Mountain Ash tree by a peddler for a little girl, Phoebe Preble, who lives on Great Cranberry Island in Maine, during a winter when her father was away at sea. As the doll narrates her beginning:The book details Hitty's adventures as she becomes separated from Phoebe and travels from owner to owner over the course of a century. She ends up living in locations as far-flung as Boston, New Orleans, India, and the South Pacific. At various times, she is lost at sea, hidden in a horsehair sofa, abandoned in a hayloft, part of a snake-charmer's act, and picked up by the famous writer Charles Dickens, before arriving at her new owner's summer home in Maine, which turns out to be the original Preble residence where she first lived. From there she is purchased at auction for a New York antique shop, where she sits among larger and grander dolls of porcelain and wax, and writes her memoirs.The story was inspired by a doll purchased by Field. The doll currently resides at the Stockbridge Library Association in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I'm_Not_Who_You_Think_I_Am"title="I'm Not Who You Think I Am">
Thirteen-year-old Ginger becomes the target of a disturbed lady who believes that Ginger is her daughter. Ginger becomes distressed when the woman, named Joyce, starts stalking her insisting that Ginger is her daughter. Joyce uses the help of her brother-in-law while Ginger's parents are out of town to speak to Ginger and convince Ginger to go with Joyce.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterless_Mountain"title="Waterless Mountain">
Younger Brother, a Navajo Indian living in Arizona in the 1920s, wishes to follow in the footsteps of his uncle and become a medicine man. To accomplish this task, he must undergo several arduous years of training, to learn all of the ancient songs and customs of his ancestors. This includes a journey to the Pacific Ocean in the far west, participating in traditional ceremonies, and climbing the nearby Waterless Mountain. Throughout his training, his Uncle relates to him numerous legends of their culture.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beirut_Blues"title="Beirut Blues">
Asmahan, the protagonist, is presented as a well-to-do independent woman who is able to sensualize the beauty of the land, the concept of home, and the country in itself, even in times of war. In 10 letters addressed to the people, places, and events that have shaped her life, Asmahan tries to decide whether to stay in her war-ravaged country or to emigrate to the U.S., where her mother lives, or possibly to France, new home of her friends Jawad and Hayat. She writes long, rambling, eloquent letters to loved ones, to Beirut, and to the war itself and the daring fragmented structure of this epistolary novel mirrors the chaos surrounding the heroine. But Asmahan loves her city and its people, and she cannot imagine life anywhere else. She is contemptuous of those who have left, whether they are fleeing religious or political persecution or are simply trying to find work. But the constant danger and the daily frustrations of dealing with the various militias, of not having enough food, of rationed electricity, coupled with her love for Jawad, weaken her resolution. In the final letter, she sits in the departure lounge of Beirut International Airport and weighs her decision. In this sparkling translation, Hanan al-Shaykh vividly portrays the tragedy of contemporary Lebanon in resonant human terms.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cock_and_Bull_(book)"title="Cock and Bull (book)">
## Cock.A woman grows a penis and then uses it to rape her tedious, alcoholic husband and his patronising, evangelical mentor from Alcoholics Anonymous. In the story's final twist, the woman comes into non-consensual contact with her violating member, and makes allusions to "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zucchini_(novel)"title="Zucchini (novel)">
The story concerns a young New York boy, Billy, and his pet ferret, Zucchini. The book contains a number of incorrect basic facts about ferrets, such as claiming that they are herbivorous rodents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Passage_(novel)"title="Northwest Passage (novel)">
## Book 1.Langdon Towne is a young Congregationalist resident of Kittery, Maine, in love with Elizabeth Browne, the youngest daughter of Anglican minister Rev. Arthur Browne of nearby Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Towne wants to become an artist, a goal which he has kept secret from even Elizabeth. He is admitted to Harvard College, but an ill-timed visit from his friends Saved from Captivity ('Cap') Huff and Hunking ('Hunk') Marriner results in his expulsion in 1759, although it does allow him to meet the young artist John Singleton Copley. Upon his return to Portsmouth, he incautiously insults Benning Wentworth, the governor of the Province of New Hampshire, and he and Hunk flee arrest and head to Crown Point to join the volunteers fighting the French and Indian War.On their way, they meet a sergeant named McNott, who is a member of Rogers' Rangers. Both Towne and Hunk decide to join Rogers' Rangers themselves. After arriving at Crown Point, Towne impresses Major Robert Rogers with a discussion about the Northwest Passage and is chosen as one of Rogers' aides. Setting out with a force of Rangers, Stockbridge Indians and Mohawk Indians, the troops are not told their destination. The Mohawks, who are closely allied with Sir William Johnson, are jealous of Rogers' preference for the Stockbridge Indians and decide to leave. Hunk and McNott, among others, are critically injured when the Mohawks detonate gunpowder after failing to steal it and have to be left behind. The rest of the Rangers are then informed that their destination is the Abenaki town of Saint Francis, a center for hostile native raiding parties into New England. In a predawn attack, the Rangers annihilate the town and kill about a quarter of the population. However, to prevent capture, the Rangers choose to return across Quebec and northern Vermont, through the forests along the eastern shore of Lake Memphremagog. The harrowing journey creates dissension, and some Rangers who choose to separate from the main body are massacred by pursuing French and Indian troops.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaper_(novel)"title="Reaper (novel)">
A group of lawyers are meeting to take down Telecon corporations when suddenly they are all hit with a rhinovirus that the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) classifies as "CaV". At the same time, our protagonist Nick Barnes is in the back of an ambulance trying to save a woman who suffered a car accident. After a high-speed operation, the woman is saved by having the blood drained from a bruise on her chest.After barely saving her life, Nick and his fellow EMT Charles both make it to the hospital. Nick faces suspension from the dangerous tactic taken to save the woman's life. After leaving the hospital, they come across an office building with a janitor with a battered face. He was the only survivor of the outbreak in the office building. After treating him, Nick and a few police officers at the scene move up to the lawyers office to see nine horribly calcified bodies.Minutes later, the USAMRIID turns the area into a quarantine zone and lets Nick and the other officers off easily because they know that the virus could not affect them. Samantha Craig, the leader of the operation, dismisses Nick after he tries to discover what is going on. After time passes, Nick tries to break into the quarantine area only to be held up by a group of armed soldiers. He is taken back to Boston General Hospital and is suspended for breaking protocol.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shrinking_of_Treehorn"title="The Shrinking of Treehorn">
Treehorn is a young boy who begins shrinking one day. The book opens with the line "Something very strange was happening to Treehorn," and the boy soon discovers that he is getting smaller when he cannot reach the candy bars and bumble gum he has hidden on a previously accessible shelf. (No reason for his shrinking is ever given in the text.) When his parents comment on it, they say, "Maybe he's doing it on purpose, just to be different." In the end, Treehorn returns to his normal size.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rainmaker_(novel)"title="The Rainmaker (novel)">
Rudy Baylor is about to graduate from Memphis State Law School. He secures a position with a Memphis law firm but loses the job when the firm is bought out by the large Memphis law firm Tinley Britt. As one of the few members of his class without a job lined up, a desperate Rudy is introduced to J. Lyman "Bruiser" Stone, a ruthless but successful ambulance chaser, who makes him an associate. To earn his fee, Rudy is required to hunt for potential clients at the local hospital and sign them up to personal injury lawsuits. He is introduced to Deck Shifflet, a less-than-ethical former insurance assessor who received a law degree but doesn't practice law, having failed to pass the bar exam six times.Rudy signs two clients. One is his new elderly landlady, who needs a revised will drawn. The other is a poor family, Dot and Buddy Black, whose insurance bad faith case could be worth several million dollars in damages. With Stone's firm about to be raided by the police and the FBI, Rudy and Deck set up their own practice and file suit on behalf of the Blacks, whose leukemia-stricken son, Donny Ray, could have been saved by a bone marrow transplant for which his identical twin brother is a perfect match. The procedure should have been covered and paid for by their insurance carrier, Great Benefit Life Insurance, but the claim was instead denied.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Maze_of_Death"title="A Maze of Death">
The plot revolves around fourteen colonists of the planet Delmak-O. They are: Betty Jo Berm, a linguist; elderly Bert Kostler, settlement custodian; Maggie Walsh, a theologian; Ignatz Thugg, who oversees thermoplastics; Milton Babble, a physician; Wade Frazer, a psychologist; Tony Dunkelwelt, a geologist; Glen Belsnor, who specialises in telecommunications; Susie Smart, a typist; Roberta Rockingham, a sociologist; Ben Tallchief, a naturalist; Seth and Mary Morley, a marine biologist couple; and Ned Russell, an economist.The colonists travel in one-way rockets consecutively to Delmak-O to take part in an unknown colonization project. After all landed, their assignment should be communicated via satellite. However, the communication system fails, leaving the colonists without contact to the outside world. Thus, the colonists try to identify their task and explore Delmak-O.Delmak-O seems to be inhabited by both real and artificial beings and enormous cube-shaped, gelatinous objects ("tenches") that duplicate items presented to them and give out advice, in anagrams reminiscent of the I Ching. In addition, various members of the group report sightings of a large "Building." As various calamities continue to befall each character, part of the group ventures out to find the mysterious structure. Each member of the group perceives the Building's entrance motto, and thus its purpose, differently.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dead_Man_in_Deptford"title="A Dead Man in Deptford">
Reckless but brilliant Cambridge scholar Christopher "Kit" Marlowe is conscripted by Francis Walsingham to be a spy for Queen Elizabeth. Kit and Walsingham's young cousin Thomas experience love at first sight. Kit is soon sent to the English college at Rheims to ferret out recusants conspiring against the Queen and her Church of England. Walsingham and his agents discover a conspiracy, later known as the Babington Plot, to assassinate Elizabeth I. They use this discovery as a means to effect the execution of Elizabeth's rival, Mary, Queen of Scots. Kit is instrumental in the arrest of the conspirators, but horrified by their execution.Marlowe is portrayed as a secretive, solitary and eventually isolated person. Burgess explores his sexual addiction and passion for the theatre.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradise_of_Death"title="The Paradise of Death">
Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart of UNIT asks the Doctor to investigate a particularly gruesome murder at a new theme park on London's Hampstead Heath, called "Space World". Together with journalist Sarah Jane Smith and her photographer Jeremy Fitzoliver, they take in the incongruous exhibits, including virtual reality machines, and even seemingly living alien monstrosities – which the Brigadier immediately suspects of the killing.The owners of the theme park are a "gang of alien carpetbaggers from outer space", who are ostensibly trying to persuade the Government to begin talks on allowing interplanetary trade. Although their real motives are unclear, they have a sophisticated form of mind-control which they employ to kill anyone who threatens their plans.When Sarah is kidnapped by the sinister Mr Tragan, and transported to the aliens' home planet, Parakon, the Doctor and the Brigadier must race to her rescue in the Tardis. On Parakon, they learn the truth about the proposed trade deal, which will mean the destruction of all life on Earth. The rapine plant is a parasite which will turn the planet into a wasteland.Freeth and Tragan are secretly conspiring to overthrow the President and democratic government on Parakon, and fear what the visitors from Earth may accidentally disclose which might reveal their plans to Captain Rudley, the commander of the Presidential Guard. The Doctor hopes to persuade the President that rapine will harm the Earth, but Freeth and Tragan hope to have the Doctor executed before he can do so.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Door_in_the_Wall_(novel)"title="The Door in the Wall (novel)">
The story, illustrated by the author, is set in England during the Middle Ages, as the Black Death (bubonic plague) is sweeping across the country. Young Robin is to be sent away to become a knight like his father, but his dreams are endangered when he loses the use of his legs. A doctor reassures Robin that the weakness in his legs is not caused by the plague. His parents are away, serving the king and queen during war, and the servants abandon the house, fearing the plague. Robin is saved by Brother Luke, a friar, who finds him and takes him to St. Mark's, the monastery where Brother Luke lives, and cares for him.Brother Luke teaches Robin how to read using the Bible, how to swim as exercise, whittling and wood carving and how to use crutches he assists in crafting, to be independent and build self-confidence, but Robin also learns patience and strength from the friar. The friar tells him that before overcoming a challenge you must first find "the door in the wall".Robin's parents had planned for him to stay with Sir Peter de Lindsay to be a page, as the first step in becoming a knight. John Go-in-the-Wynd, a minstrel, gives him a letter from Robin's father telling him and John Go-in-the-Wynd and Brother Luke to go to Lindsay. They get there after traveling for long hours for several days, almost being robbed, and going on the wrong road for a time. Arriving safely, he is welcomed warmly by de Lindsay and his family. During his stay, he fulfills his page duties as far as he is capable, continues his literary lessons, and swimming in the autumn-chilled river. Inspired by Go-in-the-Wynd's playing, he also learns to play the harp, and utilizes his growing woodworking skills to start crafting his own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Short_History_of_Progress"title="A Short History of Progress">
The first chapter, "Gauguin's Questions", poses the questions that provide a framework for the book. Referring to Paul Gauguin's painting of the same name the questions are: "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" Wright defines progress using the Victorian terms "the assumption that a pattern of change exists in the history of mankind...that it consists of irreversible changes in one direction only, and that this direction is towards improvement". Despite the extended time span of the Stone Age, Wright places the first sign of progress as being the ability to create fire. The competition between Cro-Magnon and Neanderthals is examined with respect to the conditions that allowed one to out-compete the other.The second chapter, "The Great Experiment", continues the examination of Stone Age progress by looking at the advancements in hunting. Wright uses the term "progress trap" to refer to innovations that create new problems for which the society is unable or unwilling to solve, or inadvertently create conditions that are worse than what existed before the innovation. For example, innovations in hunting during the Stone Age allowed for more successful hunts and consequently more free time during which culture and art were created (e.g., cave paintings, bone carvings, etc.), but also led to extinctions, most notably of megafauna. As smaller and smaller game were hunted to replace larger extinct animals, the hunts became less successful and culture declined. Agriculture, and subsequently civilisations, independently arising in multiple regions at about the same time, about 10,000 years ago, indicates to Wright that "given certain broad conditions, human societies everywhere will move towards greater size, complexity and environmental demand". The chapter title refers to the human experience which Wright sees as a large experiment testing what conditions are required for a human civilisation to succeed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychomech"title="Psychomech">
Richard Garrison is a corporal in the Royal Military Police who is disturbed by repeated nightmares involving a silver car, black dog, two men, a beautiful unseen girl, a Machine and a man-God and ending in an explosion. Thomas Schroeder, a German industrialist, along with his trusted companion and employee Willy Koenig, are brought to Ireland on business. Members of the IRA try to prevent Schroeder from developing in Ireland by kidnapping his wife. While Schroeder and Koenig are able to beat the IRA at their own game of intimidation, they underestimate them and are left frantically trying to return to their hotel rooms as they learn that a bomb has been planted in the building, again threatening the lives of Schroeder's wife and son. Garrison's and Schroeder's lives cross paths as Garrison is ordered to escort Schroeder to his hotel room in search of his wife and son. Garrison manages to save the lives of Schroeder, his wife and his son just as the bomb explodes in the room, as predicted in his dream. The explosion leaves Garrison blind and cripples Schroeder, reducing his life expectancy to a mere two years.Schroeder brings Garrison to his home in Germany in an attempt to repay his debt. While there Garrison meets Vicki Maler, the daughter of a friend of Schroeder who is also blind, and the two quickly become involved. Schroeder meanwhile tries to help Garrison in his blindness with gadgets and a highly trained guide dog. Schroeder also reveals to Garrison his belief in extra-sensory perception (ESP) and that he has had both his, Garrison's and even Vicki's fortunes read. Schroeder is to die within two years, Vicki is to die within only one year, and Garrison is to meet a "T", a "Machine" and eventually be merged with "TS" – partially agreeing with the events of his former nightmares. Schroeder explains that he believes that after his death he will return and his consciousness will merge with that of Garrisons. Garrison is sceptical at first, but after Schroeder shows how he is able to test for ESP ability, revealing Garrison's strong natural ability in the process, Garrison changes his opinion and makes a pact with Schroeder. Schroeder will give Garrison money and power now in exchange for the rebirth in Garrison that is to come.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Adventure"title="South Sea Adventure">
Much of South Sea Adventure involves the Hunt brothers becoming stranded on an island in the manner of Robinson Crusoe. However, Hal and Roger's island is a pitiless environment scarce in such necessities as fresh water and adequate food. The brothers use their knowledge of science and zoology to survive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hallowed_Hunt"title="The Hallowed Hunt">
The principal characters are Ingrey, a disgraced and landless aristocrat, who received a wolf spirit in childhood and spends most of the story discovering how, why and to what effect; Ijada, the heiress of a desolate woods in which the Darthacans finally conquered the warriors of the Weald 400 years earlier; and Wencel, who has extended his life for centuries by taking over the bodies of others, mainly his own descendants, for a purpose that is finally revealed.At a time when the Hallow King is dying, Ingrey is sent by his lord to take custody of Ijada, who has killed one of the king's sons, and bring her to the capital. Ingrey immediately learns that the victim was attempting to accumulate the spirits of animals, including a leopard which now dwells in Ijada. As they travel together, Ingrey realizes on the one hand that he is in love with Ijada and on the other that he feels compelled to try to kill her. With the help of a sorceress and Ijada, he gets rid of this geas, but in the process he frees the wolf spirit he acquired as a boy. They meet Wencel, who seems to have many answers to the questions they have, but also an obsession with the long-ago loss of the independent culture of the region, when the Darthacans conquered the old Hallow King and replaced the old religion with Quintarianism. Wencel's cruel purpose involves the fusing of the old and new kingship in a vengeful act, and Ingrey, with the help of Ijada and others, must prevail to save the souls bound by magic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_the_Mahatma"title="Waiting for the Mahatma">
Sriram is a high school graduate who lives with his grandmother in Malgudi, the fictional Southern Indian town in which much of Narayan's fiction takes place. Sriram is attracted to Bharati, a girl of his age who is active in Mahatma Gandhi's Quit India movement, and he becomes an activist himself. He then gets involved with anti-British extremists, causing much grief to his grandmother. Sriram's underground activity takes place in the countryside, an area alien to him, and the misunderstandings with the locals provide the book's best comic moments. After spending some time in jail, Sriram is reunited with Bharati, and the story ends with their engagement amidst the tragedy of India's partition in 1947 and Gandhi's death in 1948."Waiting for the Mahatma" is written in Narayan's gentle comic style. An unusual feature of this novel is the participation of Gandhi as a character. His revolutionary ideas and practices are contrasted with the views of traditionalists such as the town's notables and Sriram's grandmother. This note of ambivalence towards the freedom movement may be due to Narayan's needing to reassure his mainly British audience. The political struggle serves as a background to Sriram and Bharati's unconventional romance which is concluded outside either's family circle. This is one of Narayan's most successful novels, where much happens behind the facade of the low key storytelling.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Westing_Game"title="The Westing Game">
Sunset Towers is a new apartment building on Lake Michigan, north of Milwaukee and just down the shore from the mansion owned by reclusive self-made millionaire Samuel W. Westing. (Despite its name, Sunset Towers faces east – into the sunrise.) Sam Westing was a wealthy businessman who made his fortune in paper products. He was very patriotic and never smoked, drank, or gambled.As the story opens, Barney Northrup is selling apartments to a carefully selected group of tenants. After Sam Westing dies, at the beginning of the book, it emerges that most of the tenants are named as heirs in Westing's will. The will is structured like a puzzle, with the 16 heirs challenged to find the solution. In the will it states that one of his heirs has taken his life. Each of the eight pairs, assigned seemingly at random, is given $10,000 cash and a different set of baffling clues. The pair that solves the mystery of his death will inherit Westing's entire $200 million fortune and control of his company.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_of_a_Bull"title="Shadow of a Bull">
Twelve-year-old Manolo Olivar is the son of Juan Olivar, a renowned bullfighter who was killed in the ring when Manolo was only three. The people in the town of Archangel, Spain, expect that Manolo will follow in his father's footsteps. His best friend, Jaime, has a brother, Juan, who yearns to fight bulls like his father before him, but Manolo has been trying to conquer his own fears. Many of the townspeople have paid much attention to Manolo, mainly by comparing him to his famous father or taking him to bullfights to see how to perform the sport. Through all this commotion, Manolo is trying to learn more about his father. Everyone in the town always speaks of how great Juan Olivar, Manolo's father, was, but Manolo wants to know the truth. Manolo has heard that his father first killed a bull when he was twelve years old. Manolo wants to know, did Juan Olivar have fear? After seeing the result of a bull goring, Manolo becomes more discouraged in becoming a bullfighter. He notices the old doctor cleaning the wound and, hearing that he was the only doctor who would touch a goring injury, decides that he could be the next doctor. Manolo still suffers from the problem that everyone wants him to be a bullfighter, not a doctor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witch_of_Blackbird_Pond"title="The Witch of Blackbird Pond">
In April 1687, 16-year-old Katherine Tyler (known as Kit) leaves her home in Barbados after her grandfather dies and a 50-year-old man tries to marry her. She relocates to Wethersfield, Connecticut to live with her Aunt Rachel, Uncle Matthew, and her two cousins, Judith and Mercy, in their Puritan community.A brief stop is made in Old Saybrook, Connecticut to pick up four new passengers. As the small rowboat returns to the ship, a young girl named Prudence accidentally drops her doll in the water and begs her harsh mother, Goodwife Cruff, to get it back for her. Impulsively, Kit jumps into the water and retrieves the doll. She is then met with astonished suspicion, as few white people in Connecticut could swim so well. Cruff is the most skeptical of them all, believing Kit is a witch, commenting, "No respectable woman could stay afloat like that." On the slow trip upriver, Kit befriends John Holbrook, another passenger coming to Wethersfield to study with Reverend Gershom Bulkeley. Kit finds Wethersfield very different from Barbados. Unlike at her previous home, where Kit's family owned servants and slaves, she is expected to work here along with the rest of the family. Her cousin Mercy has a lame leg and is on crutches. Kit is required to attend the Sabbath church meetings twice each Sunday, which she finds dull. Kit meets a rich young man, William Ashby. He begins courting her, though she does not care for him. Originally, her cousin Judith had hoped to marry William, but she focuses on John Holbrook, a divinity student studying with Reverend Bulkeley.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_of_the_Andes"title="Secret of the Andes">
Cusi, a modern Inca boy, leaves his home high in the Andes mountains to learn the mysterious secret of his ancient ancestors. Accompanied by his pet llama, Misti, he slowly discovers the truth about his birth and his people's ancient glory. Now he must prove himself worthy to be entrusted with the fabulous secret from the past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_and_Vietnam"title="Nuremberg and Vietnam">
The book begins with a lengthy history of war crimes beginning with the "knightly chivalry" of the medieval period. These rules were put into place in order to minimize unnecessary cruelties during the course of warfare. The rules protected civilian populations from massacre and the needless spread of disease. Thus, the blanket of immunity that protects soldiers from being held criminally responsible for murder committed during the course of warfare had to be carefully balanced so as to discourage wartime atrocities.The laws of war remained largely unwritten until U.S. President Abraham Lincoln approved the "Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field", in 1863. Concerning spies, prisoners of war, and the punishment of war crimes, this document comprising 159 articles facilitated the formation of military tribunals and later led to a demand for the formalization of international laws of warfare. Thus, international laws of warfare were codified by means of a series of treaties known as the Hague and Geneva conventions. The most important consequence of these treaties is that all nations, whether signatory or otherwise, were bound by international laws of war.The Nuremberg Trials, for which Taylor served as a leading figure, gave rise to several developments in regard to international law as applied to warfare. First, it gave international jurisdiction to the prosecution of war crimes; and second, it obligated individuals engaged in warfare to adhere to international laws of conduct over and above those of their respective armies. Of greatest importance with respect to this book, however, is that the United States as a result of its participation emerged as legally, morally, and politically bound to the principles that resulted from the Nuremberg trials. Thus, Taylor is concerned by how the principles of the Nuremberg trials would apply to the United States' conduct of the Vietnam War.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Bête_humaine"title="La Bête humaine">
Lantier, the "human beast" of the title, has a hereditary madness and has several times in his life wanted to murder women. At the beginning of the story he is an engine driver, in control of his engine, "La Lison." His relationship with "La Lison" is almost sexual and provides some degree of control over his mania.As a result of a chance remark, Roubaud suspects that Séverine has had an affair some years earlier, with Grandmorin, one of the directors of the railway company, who had acted as her patron and who had helped Roubaud get his job. He forces a confession out of her and makes her write a letter to Grandmorin, telling him to take a particular train that evening, the same train Roubaud and Séverine are taking back to Le Havre.Meanwhile, Lantier, who is not working while his engine is being repaired, goes to visit his Aunt Phasie who lives in an isolated house by the railway. On leaving he meets his cousin, Flore, with whom he has had a longstanding mutual attraction. After a brief conversation with her his passions become inflamed and he is on the verge of raping her but this in turn brings on his homicidal mania. He has a desire to stab her but just about controls himself and rushes away. Finding himself beside the railway track as the train from Paris passes, he sees, in a split second, a figure on the train holding a knife, bent over another person. Shortly after, he finds the body of Grandmorin beside the track with his throat cut. It is also discovered that he has been robbed of his watch and some money.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin_Locker_Babies"title="Coin Locker Babies">
It is the surreal story of two boys, Hashi and Kiku, who were both abandoned by their mothers during infancy and locked in coin lockers at a Tokyo train station in the summer of 1972. Both boys become wards of the Cherryfield Orphanage in Yokohama, where the tough and athletic Kiku comes to the defense of the slight, and often picked on, Hashi. They both experience difficulties, and are given mental treatment involving playing the sound of an in utero heartbeat to them, a sound they will later search for after having forgotten it.They are adopted by foster parents, the Kuwayamas (the wife is Zainichi Korean) who live on an island off Kyushu. At the age of 16 both find themselves in a diseased urban wasteland in Tokyo named Toxitown. Hashi, whose voice has a profound effect on those who hear it, becomes a bisexual rock star, employed by an eccentric producer named D. Hashi falls in love with his (female) manager Neva and they marry. Kiku becomes a pole vaulter and with his girlfriend Anemone, a model who has converted her condo into a swamp for her crocodile, searches for a substance named DATURA in order to take his revenge upon the city of Tokyo and destroy it. Along the way, however, in a search for Hashi's real mother, D finds a woman and arranges a meeting with Hashi on live television. Kiku watches and sees Hashi break down, and goes to help, but ends up shooting the woman, who is actually his own mother. He is sentenced to five years in prison.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Rose_(novel)"title="Audrey Rose (novel)">
Bill and Janice Templeton's peaceful lives are cast into chaos when a strange man begins fixating on their eleven-year-old daughter Ivy. This stalking seems to coincide with Ivy's horrible night terrors in which she beats at the windows and screams. One night while Ivy is in the middle of one of these episodes, the stranger contacts them directly and introduces himself as Elliot Hoover.Hoover explains to the Templetons that he lost his wife and their three-year-old daughter, Audrey Rose, in a fiery car crash. To heal his mental anguish, he visited a clairvoyant who revealed that his daughter had been immediately reincarnated as another young girl born at the moment of Audrey Rose's death. Because of this immediate reincarnation, Audrey Rose's soul was not allowed the necessary time to reflect in the spirit world, causing her to be trapped forever at the moment of her horrific death. In an effort to rescue his daughter's soul, Hoover began to research births that coincided with his daughter's death, gradually determining that his daughter's soul now resides in Ivy Templeton.The Templetons refuse to believe Hoover and order him to stay away from their daughter. However, Ivy's night terrors grow steadily worse. The Templetons are astonished when Hoover is able to calm Ivy by calling her Audrey Rose.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_March_(novel)"title="The March (novel)">
Published in 2005 by E.L. Doctorow, "The March" is a historical fiction novel set in late 1864 and early 1865 near the conclusion of the American Civil War. Central to the novel is the character of General William Tecumseh Sherman as he marches his 60,000 troops through the heart of the South, from Atlanta to Savannah, carving a 96 km (60-mile)-wide scar of destruction in their wake. As a result of Sherman's order to live off the land, his soldiers sow chaos as they pillage homes, steal cattle, burn crops, and attract a nearly unmanageable population of freed slaves and refugees who have nowhere else to go. While the novel revolves around the decisions of General Sherman, the story has no specific main character. Instead, Doctorow retells Civil War history according to the individual lives of a large and diverse cast of characters—white and black, rich and poor, Union and Confederate—whose lives are caught up in the violence and trauma of the war.The character of General Sherman is an unstable strategic genius who longs for a sense of romance in the war he wages and chafes under the implications of a post-war bureaucracy. Charismatic, yet often detached, Sherman is idolized by his men and the freed slaves who follow behind in hope of a better future. Pearl is the young and attractive daughter of a black enslaved woman, Nancy Wilkins, and her white master who is unsure about her future and the attention she is now receiving from the handsome Union soldiers. She must decide whether to follow the advice of other emancipated slaves or choose to seek the possibilities she hopes the conclusion of the war will bring. Colonel Wrede Sartorius is a cold yet brilliant field surgeon who is seemingly numb to the horrors of war due to his close and frequent proximity to the surgical hacksaw which he carries with him everywhere. Trained in Germany, Sartorius experiments with new techniques on his patients and is consumed with his work, leaving little time for regret, romance, or pain. Arly and Will are two Confederate soldiers who serve the roles of the Shakespearean fool, alternately offering comic relief and poignant wisdom. Their antics are wild and chaotic and include defecting to the Union, impersonation, and robbing a church in order to be able to pay for a trip to a brothel. Emily Thompson, a judge's daughter, is a displaced southern aristocrat from Milledgeville, Georgia, which was then the state capital. She becomes the surgical assistant and lover to the cold, passionless Colonel Sartorius.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_in_the_Forest"title="The Light in the Forest">
"The Light in the Forest" is about the struggles of a white boy, John Butler, who was taken captive as a boy in Pennsylvania by the Lenni Lenape Indians and became assimilated.The story opens in the autumn of 1764. John Butler, approximately fifteen years of age, has lived with the Lenni Lenape in Ohio since being taken captive eleven years earlier. His adoptive Lenape father, Cuyloga, renamed him True Son. He is assimilated and accepted as a full-blooded Lenape by that community. Along with other Native groups, the Lenape enter into a peace treaty with the British forces. The treaty required that the Indians had to return any white captives. True Son did not want to leave as he was fully assimilated and considered himself Lenape; he disdained white society. He tries to commit suicide in order to be free of the whites, but is unsuccessful. Accompanied by a young soldier, Del Hardy, True Son is taken to Fort Pitt, where he is met by Harry Butler, his blood father. Hardy accompanies the Butlers to their home in Paxton Township, near present-day Harrisburg.After returning to his father's home, True Son refuses to recognize his blood father, continues to wear his Indian clothes, and pretends that he no longer understands English. His younger brother Gordie is intrigued by his Indian ways and True Son becomes fond of him. Later, True Son gets into a heated argument with his Uncle Wilse. Wilse accuses the Indians of scalping children, which True Son denies. Wilse is so angered by what he perceives as the young man's lack of respect that he slaps True Son.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loveday_Fortunes"title="The Loveday Fortunes">
When the Lovedays' banker is found dead in the river Thames, his legacy of debts and foolish investments plunges the family into financial chaos and leaves them facing ruin. As Adam struggles to face this new challenge, he falls in love with the mysterious gypsy woman Senara despite his father's censure. Meanwhile, St John, encouraged by his wife Meriel, throws in his lot with a gang of smugglers in order to win the riches both of them have always dreamed of. The growing Revolution in France also has repercussions for the family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loveday_Trials"title="The Loveday Trials">
Adam, now married to the half-gypsy Senara, returns to his home to find his father threatening to disown him for his wife's heritage. To support his wife and new child, he becomes an undercover agent helping nobility to escape from a France now in the turmoil of revolution.Meanwhile, his brother St John is making a fortune as a smuggler and his wife Meriel is pregnant with his second child, ensuring his future as heir to their father's estate. But his success has made him an enemy of Thadeous Lanyon, a rival smuggler. When Lanyon attacks Meriel and causes her to lose her child, he is soon found murdered. With all the evidence pointing to him, St John faces execution unless the family can find some way of proving his innocence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_(Peretti_novel)"title="Monster (Peretti novel)">
An unidentified man discovers a dead logger's body killed gruesomely by a deadly carnivore, he proceeds to cover it up by making it look like an accident.Reed Shelton, policeman and his introverted wife Rebecca Shelton are about to begin their vacation (something which Rebecca opposes). More and more sightings of a hairy, upright monster occur and Rebecca hears a shrieking in the night. Suddenly she is kidnapped by a large beast, Reed seeing her taken away. Rebecca's captor proves to be a gentle giant however, a red colored female Bigfoot that lives in a small troop with her mate, an adult male, the male's other mate, and the other mate's offspring. Rebecca comes to call the male Jacob, the other female Leah, and the female who took her and seems especially maternal of her, Rachel. The bigfoot are powerful, but relatively peaceful animals skittish around humans and Rebecca comes to realize that rather than the source of the attacks or shrieks, they're actually running away from the true monster; a genetically engineered hybrid of a human and chimpanzee that had been driven insane by its condition. The reason Rachel abducted Rebecca was because the hybrid killed her offspring and the grieving mother mistook Rebecca for her baby based on their shared red color.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Such_a_Long_Journey_(novel)"title="Such a Long Journey (novel)">
"Such a Long Journey" takes place in Bombay (present-day Mumbai) in the year 1971. The novel's protagonist is a hard-working bank clerk called Gustad Noble, a member of the Parsi community and devoted family man struggling to keep his wife Dilnavaz, and three children out of poverty. His family begins to fall apart as his eldest son Sohrab refuses to attend the Indian Institute of Technology to which he has gained admittance and his youngest daughter, Roshan, falls ill. Other conflicts involve Gustad's ongoing interactions with his eccentric neighbours and his relationship with close friend and co-worker, Dinshawji. Tehmul, a seemingly unimportant and mentally disabled character, is essential in Gustad's life, as he brings out his tender side and represents the innocence of life. A letter that Gustad receives one day from an old friend, Major Bilimoria, slowly draws him into a government deception involving threats, secrecy and large amounts of money. The novel not only follows Gustad's life, but also India's political turmoil under the leadership of Indira Gandhi.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sky_Is_Falling_(Sheldon_novel)"title="The Sky Is Falling (Sheldon novel)">
The main character of this book is Dana Evans, an anchorwoman for the press, who was also featured, though not as a main character, in another Sidney Sheldon book, The Best Laid Plans.The book begins with Dana Evans returning from Sarajevo with an armless adoptee, Kemal after filming war coverage for three months. Soon after, the last member of one of the most respected families in the world, Gary Winthrop dies after being shot by robbers. Dana decides to set out to find why anybody would want to kill the family well known for its kindness and contributions to charity (all of Gary's relatives had died in suspicious circumstances one at a time before him). Dana starts by visiting Roger Hudson, one of Taylor Winthrop, Gary's father's friends to start looking for answers.Meanwhile, Kemal is facing difficulties at his current school from Ricky Underwood, who teases him about having only one arm. After being repeatedly warned by the school principal for getting into fights and swearing, things finally reach a breaking point where the principal expels Kemal. Dana's boss's secretary, Elliot Cromwell helps Dana enroll Kemal in another school and refers her to an organization who help buy Kemal a prosthetic arm. As Jeff Connors, Dana's fiancé takes care of Kemal, Dana thinks about a motive for murdering the Winthrops. She rules out money, as when the Winthrop family dies, the fortune goes to charity. She settles on revenge as a motive, and starts hunting for clues by visiting the places where the Winthrops died.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodline_(Sheldon_novel)"title="Bloodline (Sheldon novel)">
Roffe and Sons is a family firm, an international empire filled with desperate, cash-hungry family members. The family consists ofIt is clear that everyone in the family is in need of money. The firm Roffe and Sons is managed by Sam Roffe and his assistant Rhys Williams. Sam Roffe was expecting a son, but instead got a daughter, Elizabeth. Elizabeth was declined love from her father during childhood, but escaped the reality by reading about her great-great grandfather, Samuel Roffe.Samuel Roffe was born in a Jewish ghetto, which was systematically and strictly controlled by officials. The ghetto gate was opened after sunrise and locked before sunset. Anyone caught outside the gate after sunset was captured and sent to prison camps. In midst of this chaos, along with the trauma of his mother's death, Samuel Roffe aspires to become a doctor. He wanders around the Wal house, the house of a rich Jewish doctor, and falls for his daughter. Wal accepts to teach him about medicine, and Samuel learns a lot. But later, Wal's daughter's marriage is fixed, which she rejects as she believes she is in love with Samuel. The Wals give Samuel six months to prove himself worthy of his daughter's hand, and he manages to do that by making a vaccine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Tomorrow_Comes_(novel)"title="If Tomorrow Comes (novel)">
Tracy is a successful bank-worker in Philadelphia, engaged to a wealthy heir, whose child she is carrying. Then her mother commits suicide, after being scammed by the New Orleans Mafia and left in debt. Tracy gets a gun to frighten the scammer, Joe Romano, into admitting her mother’s innocence, but he tries to rape her and is wounded in the struggle. Her attorney convinces her that she will get a much shorter sentence if she pleads guilty, but the judge sentences her to fifteen years to Southern Louisiana Penitentiary for Women, and she realises that the judge and the attorney are both working for Romano’s boss, mafia Don Anthony Orsatti. As she goes to jail, her employer and her fiancé abandon her and the unborn child, which she miscarries under the horrendous abuse she suffers from her prison mates. Tracy now decides to avenge herself on all the men who have ruined her life. Granted an official pardon for saving the life of the warden's daughter, she uses her banking knowledge to divert large sums into Romano’s account, making it look as though he was planning to skip the country, and Orsatti imprisons him for his apparent betrayal. Then she gets the boyfriend of one of her jail-mates to plant evidence in the attorney’s home, making it look as though he was cheating Orsatti at cards, and Orsatti teaches him a lesson too. While the judge is in Russia, she sends him coded letters that implicate him as a spy, and he is sentenced to fourteen years of hard labor in Siberia. She stalks her ex-fiancé and his new wife, but decides that they look so bored and unhappy with each other that no further punishment is needed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morning,_Noon_and_Night_(novel)"title="Morning, Noon and Night (novel)">
The Stanford family is one of the most respected in America - but behind the facade of fame and glamour lies a hidden web of blackmail, drugs and murder. When Harry Stanford, one of the wealthiest men in the world, mysteriously drowns while cruising on his yacht off the rugged coast of Corsica, it sets off a chain of events that reverberates around the globe. At the family gathering following the funeral in Boston, a strikingly beautiful young woman appears. She claims to be Stanford's daughter and entitled to a share of the tycoon's estate. Is she genuine, or is she an impostor? Sweeping from the splendors of the Italian Riviera, to the fashion salons of Paris and New York, and the opulence of Boston and Florida, Morning, Noon &amp; Night twists and turns its way through intrigue, smoke and mirrors to a surpriseending you'll never forget.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga"title="Commonwealth Saga">
## "Pandora's Star".The book opens with a short section providing backstory. As part of the first mission to Mars, a team of astronauts exits their spacecraft for the first time, only to see another man standing there, connected to an air hose that leads through a wormhole to a laboratory in California. The wormhole generator's inventors, Nigel Sheldon and Ozzie Isaacs, chose to test it by beating the crew, by moments, to become the first humans to reach Mars. The saga then moves into the Commonwealth era in 2380, when humanity has used the wormhole technology to colonise several hundred planets across hundreds of light years.On a distant planet, astronomer Dudley Bose performs the first detailed observations of a mysterious astronomical event known as the Dyson Pair Enclosure. Two stars, located roughly 1,000 light years from Earth (750 light years from the edge of Commonwealth space), disappeared some time in the past. The theory is that they have been enclosed inside Dyson spheres.Bose's investigations reveal that the enclosing of Dyson Alpha and Dyson Beta (as the stars become known) occurred quickly and simultaneously. This implies that the technology of the Dyson aliens, or possibly of other unknown aliens, surpasses that of the Commonwealth; furthermore, did the Dyson Aliens enclose themselves, or did some other force enclose them? Was it for protection or to protect those outside the spheres?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_the_Game_(novel)"title="Master of the Game (novel)">
Kate Blackwell, matriarch of the Blackwell family and head of multinational business empire Kruger-Brent Int., celebrates her 90th birthday. She sees the ghosts of her past but refuses to join them until a member of the family is ready to take over. The novel revolves around four generations of the empire's rise and Kate's dedication to the conglomerate.Kate's father, Jamie McGregor, leaves Scotland for Klipdrift, South Africa to find his fortune in the growing diamond trade of the 1860s. He is swindled and left for dead by merchant Salomon van der Merwe but is saved by Banda, van der Merwe's servant, and they steal millions' worth of diamonds in a dangerous heist. An unrecognizable Jamie returns to Klipdrift under a new name and impregnates Margaret, van der Merwe's daughter, for revenge, revealing his true identity to everyone after announcing Margaret's impregnation to the supposedly moral and religious town, shaming the very religious van der Merwe. Jamie's wealth and business helps the town thrive. Jamie secretly takes control of the local bank and ruins van der Merwe financially, driving the latter to kill himself. Margaret gives birth to a son, and after leaving the baby on Jamie's doorstep after trying to reconnect with him, Jamie grows to love Jamie Jr. and agrees to marry Margaret to keep Jamie Jr. close to him. One night Jamie drunkenly mistakes his wife for his mistress, which results in Kate's birth. During the Bantu rebellion, Banda kidnaps Kate before rebels can take her, but Jamie Jr. is kidnapped and left to die in the desert. News of this causes Jamie to have a stroke, leaving him helpless in the care of Margaret, who runs Kruger-Brent with Jamie's right-hand man, David Blackwell. While captured during the Boer War, Kate realizes the need for power so she will never feel helpless again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passage_(Willis_novel)"title="Passage (Willis novel)">
Joanna Lander, a clinical psychologist, interviews patients who have had near-death experiences; she aspires to understand what occurs between the times when a person dies and then is revived. She becomes frustrated when many of her patients cannot or will not give accurate information about their experiences. She realizes that the scientific evidence is contaminated by the influence of Dr. Maurice Mandrake, a persistent and almost omnipresent charlatan "researcher" who publishes best-selling books about near-death experiences and convinces patients that their experiences happened exactly the way his books describe NDEs, such as learning cosmic secrets from angels:Dr. Richard Wright, who has discovered a way to induce artificial NDEs in patients and monitor their brain activity throughout, contacts Joanna and asks if she will join his research study and interview his patients after he induces NDEs. She agrees. They are intellectually compatible and have a budding, mutual romantic interest.Mandrake considers the pair his competitors, and he sabotages their efforts by approaching revived patients before they can. Mandrake's method is to ask mellifluous leading questions of the patients and thereby taint their self-reported NDEs; this causes Joanna and Richard hardship in finding un-interviewed volunteers for their own study. The reader later learns that two of their volunteers are liars, which also corrupts their conjectures.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gold_Bat"title="The Gold Bat">
After the local mayor Sir Eustace Briggs makes negative remarks about Ireland, two Irish students at Wrykyn, O'Hara and Moriarty, sneak out at night to tar and feather a statue of Briggs, though they use leaves instead of feathers. They are not caught, but O'Hara realizes that during the escapade, he lost a tiny gold cricket bat he borrowed from his friend Trevor. Trevor won the bat, which is about an inch long, as a trophy since he was the captain of the winning cricket team in the latest house cricket cup. He is supposed to return it to the school by the next house cricket cup. Trevor is concerned about being blamed for the statue incident if the gold bat is found near the statue. Meanwhile, there is a vacant spot in the school rugby football team, and Trevor, as captain, considers Rand-Brown for the position, but favours Barry, who is smaller than Rand-Brown but more skilled.A study belonging to a prefect named Mill is found wrecked, and a calling card left behind indicates that it was done by a group called the League, which was the name used by a society of students several years prior who bullied others to get what they wanted until they were expelled. The society has apparently been revived. Trevor receives a letter warning him that the League does not wish Barry to play for the school rugby team. Trevor knows the team will do better with Barry than Rand-Brown and ignores the letter. As a result, Trevor's study is also wrecked by the League. Rand-Brown has the clearest motive for trying to get Barry out of the team, and dislikes Mill, but he could not have damaged Trevor's study since he was playing rugby at the time the incident occurred. O'Hara tries to find where the League meets and believes he has succeeded when he sees two figures in a basement used to store extra chairs, but it turns out that they are only the two younger students Renford and Harvey, who are secretly keeping two ferrets in the basement.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_(novel)"title="Wife (novel)">
This is the story of Dimple Dasgupta who has an arranged marriage to Amit Basu, an engineer, instead of marrying a neurosurgeon as she had dreamed about. They move to the United States and experience culture shock and loneliness. At one point, she jumps rope to escape her pregnancy. As frustration becomes expressed as abuse, the tale turns to tragedy with the murder of her husband, Amit at the end.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loveday_Scandals"title="The Loveday Scandals">
St John Loveday has been cleared of murder, but forced to leave England for America until the scandal of his trial dies down. His wife Meriel has left him to seek her fortunes elsewhere, and Adam Loveday is still at sea on his ship Pegasus.Meanwhile, Japhet Loveday, spurned by the love of Gwendolyn Druce, leaves the peace of Cornwall for London. There he begins an affair with the treacherous actress Celestine Yorke. As bad fortune continues to dog him, he turns to highway robbery to settle his debts. When Gwendolyn arrives in London, Japhet realises how much he still loves her. But Celestine Yorke is not a woman to be trifled with and she is determined that if she can't have Japhet, then no one will.Edward Loveday is also shocked by the arrival of his illegitimate daughter Tamasine, who puts his relationship with his wife under immense strain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tiger's_Daughter"title="The Tiger's Daughter">
The story revolves around Tara who was raised in Calcutta, educated at Vassar College in New York and is married to an American man. The novel explores her sense of culture shock when she travels back to India intertwined with the political situation in Calcutta and West Bengal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loveday_Honour"title="The Loveday Honour">
Japhet Loveday has been convicted of highway robbery and sent to prison, where he faces deportation to the penal colony of Botany Bay. His wife Gwendolyn races to prove his innocence, but powerful men are working to ensure she will be too late.Meanwhile, Edward Loveday's marriage is stretched to breaking point as he struggles to hold together the shipyard and family estate despite his deteriorating health. He is fighting a losing battle however, and finally dies from the effects of a gunshot wound that never fully healed.St John returns from America on hearing of his father's death. But there are further shocks for him - Meriel, his estranged wife, has returned from London after being discarded by her wealthy lover. Bankrupt and desperately ill from tuberculosis, she seeks to reinstate herself into the Loveday family and become mistress of Trevowan, the family estate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Warrior"title="Ghost Warrior">
The Chiricahua Apache chief, Victorio, called his sister Lozen his wise counselor and his right hand. He said she had the strength of a man and was a shield to her people. Even in a society possessing extraordinary courage, endurance and skill, she was unique. The Apaches believe that when she was young, the spirits blessed her with horse magic, the gift of healing and the power to see enemies at a distance. In the Apaches' 30-year struggle to defend their homeland, they came to rely on her strength, wisdom, and supernatural abilities.Because of her gift of far-sight, she was the only unmarried woman allowed to ride with the warriors and fight alongside them. After her beloved brother Victorio's death, she joined Geronimo's band of insurgents. With Geronimo and fifteen other warriors, she resisted the combined forces of the United States and Mexican armies, and the heavily armed civilian populations of New Mexico and Arizona Territories. She and the sixteen warriors, and seventeen women and children held out against a total of about nine thousand men.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithe_(novel)"title="Tithe (novel)">
"Tithe" follows the story of sixteen-year-old American, Kaye Fierch, a young nomad who tours the country with her mother's rock band. The book begins in Philadelphia, at a gig her mother's band Stepping Razor is playing in a seedy bar in Philadelphia. After her mother's boyfriend and guitarist, Lloyd, attempts to stab her mother under the enchantment of Nephamael (a knight of the Unseelie Court) her mother takes her back to Kaye's grandmother's house in New Jersey to stay.Once at her grandmother's house, Kaye begins to look for her old "imaginary" friends she had during her childhood, faeries named Lutie-Loo, Spike, and Gristle. However, she fails to find them and, begins to suspect that they were simply figments of her imagination. Her suspicions dissolve when she finds and saves the life of Roiben, a faerie knight, by pulling an iron-tipped arrow from his chest. In return, he grants her three truthfully answered questions about anything she chooses, which she does not immediately use. Soon after this, Spike and Lutie-Loo contact her and warn her that Roiben is a murderer who has killed Gristle. As revenge, Kaye tricks Roiben into telling her his full name (she later learns that faeries can be controlled by their true names).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Hills"title="The Hollow Hills">
The protagonist and narrator is Merlin, who supervises the birth and raising of King Arthur. (In this version, Merlin's father is Aurelius Ambrosius, so he is Arthur's cousin.) The Duchess Ygraine is said to have conspired with him to herself bear Arthur to Uther Pendragon; whereafter Merlin goes into hiding, to evade accusations, and learns that Uther wishes the child to be hidden, until another (legitimate) son is born. In later chapters, Merlin gives the child to his own nurse Moravik, who later sends him to Count Ector of Galava to be trained in courtesy and warfare. Thereafter, Merlin visits Constantinople, where he learns from his relative Adhjan that Magnus Maximus (alias 'Macsen Wledig') possessed an especially beautiful and well-made sword, which was taken back to Britain after his death.Inspired by a dream which he believes prophetic, Merlin finds the sword in a deserted temple of Mithras. There, Merlin becomes a hermit in an obscure shrine, providing healing to the injured and advice to the insecure. Later, Merlin becomes Arthur's tutor and that of two other boys: Arthur's foster-brother Cei and his friend Bedwyr. One day, Arthur discovers the sword of Maximus — his ancestor and Merlin's — hidden in a cave on an island in the centre of a lake, and names it Caliburn. Later he wins his first battle in a decisive victory against invading Saxons; whereupon his parentage is revealed and he is proclaimed the heir to Uther Pendragon. Shortly before he learns his identity, he unknowingly commits incest with his half-sister Morgause, and thus sires Mordred. When challenged to prove his birthright, he reveals Caliburn to the assembled kings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_(Baxter_novel)"title="Origin (Baxter novel)">
In 2015, the Earth's Moon vanishes to be replaced by a red moon. The new moon is more massive, causing devastating effects on Earth. It is also crawling with life. Meanwhile, a mysterious glowing construct appears in the skies over the African continent. NASA Astronaut, Reid Malenfant, flying over Africa in a T-38 training jet with his wife, Emma, decides to investigate. They collide with what appears to be a large floating wheel out of which people are falling. Ejected from the plane, Emma falls through the wheel.Emma wakes up on a strange Earth-like world that is populated by many species of Hominidae, most of which are long extinct on Earth. Unable to think of a better plan for survival, Emma and a small group of survivors who fell through the wheel join a group of "Runners" (Homo erectus), who, after an initial confrontation resulting in the death of one of the survivors, allow them to tag along. Back on Earth, Malenfant campaigns to get a mission launched to the red moon, feeling in his heart that Emma is up there. He is ultimately successful, and, along with a Japanese scientist named Nemoto, takes off in a hastily put-together rescue mission.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_(Baxter_novel)"title="Space (Baxter novel)">
Alien activity is discovered in a Kirkwood gap; the aliens are identified as self-replicating machines (von Neumann probes). Their activity is potentially an immense threat, as Malenfant notes in an earlier speech: "A target system, we assume, is uninhabited. We can therefore program for massive and destructive exploitation of the system's resources, without restraint, by the probe. Such resources are useless for any other purpose, and are therefore economically free to us. And so we colonize, and build."The self-replicating spacecraft are named "Gaijin" (Japanese for "foreigner"), after their discovery by a Japanese observer on the Moon. Malenfant travels in a prototype fusion engine to the Kirkwood Gap and discovers an interstellar teleportation device. He travels around the galaxy to uncover information about the Fermi paradox (see below). At the same time, the story also follows the efforts of Humans on Earth and the eventual draining of the Earth's resources, making a move off-world necessary. At the same time small group of humans use anti-aging techniques and an alien form of interstellar teleportation to "parachute" in on the changing solar system over many centuries.Eventually, it is revealed that in this version of the Fermi paradox, sentient life is endemic throughout the universe; Humanity simply hadn't noticed it earlier because the universe destroys any race before it becomes advanced enough to develop a Type IV civilisation. The story ends with Malenfant helping the Gaijin build a shield to prevent a pulsar from sterilising a large part of the galaxy. Although this project will not be completed before another predicted pulsar event wipes out all extant species, it is hoped to give the sentient aliens who develop from the aftermath of the coming extinction a better chance at long-term survival.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fearless,_A_Novel_of_Sarah_Bowman"title="Fearless, A Novel of Sarah Bowman">
In 1845, Mexico would not relinquish its claim to Texas, and the U.S. prepared for war. Under the command of General Zachary "Old Rough and Ready" Taylor, Sarah signed on as a laundress and cook and bivouacked with Taylor's army in Corpus Christi, preparing for an attack by Mexico. Before the war even began, though, her husband was killed. But going home was out of the question. She considered the army her home and its soldiers her family. Nowhere else would her courage and compassion be so much needed and appreciated.While the battle raged around her, Sarah became a familiar figure through the haze of sulfurous blue smoke and the stench of exploding gunpowder, riding among the flames to retrieve the wounded. Through the long years of bitter battle, she would find love in the arms of a sergeant with eyes as golden as a flame, and friendship in the company of Cruz, a mexican woman whose personal history encompassed the war in all its passions and horrors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walk_in_My_Soul"title="Walk in My Soul">
Walk in My Soul is the story of Tiana Rogers of the Cherokee, the young Sam Houston, and the Trail of Tears.Tiana grew up learning the magic, spells, and nature religion of the Cherokee. In a tribe that revered the life force that was female, she became a beloved woman—priestess, healer, and teacher.Known as the "father of Texas", the young Sam Houston ran away on a lark from his family's general store in Maryville, Tennessee, to live among the Cherokee. He hunted and played ritual games with the men and was adopted as a headman's son and was known as "Raven".Houston falls in love with Tiana, but due to their differing racial and cultural backgrounds, conflict ensues.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loveday_Pride"title="The Loveday Pride">
With the death of his father, St John Loveday is finally master of Trevowan. But his success is blighted by the presence of his treacherous wife Meriel who, despite being riddled with pox and consumption, manages to cling on to lifelong enough to thwart his plans to marry a rich widow from America. Embittered by his failure, St John soon turns to drink and gambling while his hatred towards his brother continues to fester.Adam meanwhile has been putting all his energy into rebuilding the ruined estate of Boscabel, which he intends to create as a rival to Trevowan itself.And on the far side of the world, Gwendolyn races to reach her estranged lover Japhet and give him his pardon. But Japhet has sworn to live an Honorable life, and to return to England with pride. He has made a promise, and pride will not allow him to abandon his obligations.The girl on the front cover is performance artist, Abi Lake.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Mountain"title="The Fifth Mountain">
The story is based on the account of Biblical prophet Elijah from the Hebrew Bible (1 Kings chapters 17-19). The focus is on Elijah's time in Zarephath (in this book named Akbar). In ninth century B.C.,wife to Israel's ruler Jezebel threatens to execute all prophets who refused to worship the pagan deity Baal. Elijah, a young prophet is commanded by an angel of God to flee Israel and he eventually seeks safety in the land of Zarephath. He unexpectedly falls in love with the widow to whom God sent him. But this new-found rapture is cut short and Elijah gets lost in his emotional turmoil. Much has been added to the simple Bible story by Coelho, including Elijah witnessing the sacking of Akbar by the Assyrians, Elijah's journey up the Fifth Mountain itself (said to be the dwelling place of Baal).For a considerable portion of the story Elijah is very compliant, obeying everything God's angels say. Eventually he realizes that his destiny is not being chosen by him but by God and ultimately he decides to abide by his own desires and will.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Valkyries"title="The Valkyries">
The book is written as a third-person narrative describing how Paulo and his wife embark on a 40 day journey through the Mojave Desert. There they meet the valkyries, a group of warrior women who travel on Pegasus At the beginning of the story, "J", Coelho's master in RAM, shows him a copy of the poem by Wilde that says "we destroy what we love" and this theme is central to the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Winter_Haunting"title="A Winter Haunting">
Dale Stewart, a character from "Summer of Night", has ruined his life. A fifty-one-year-old college professor and writer, he left his spouse for a young co-ed and the co-ed has left him.He returns to Elm Haven, Illinois, where the events of "Summer of Night" took place. Dale is remembering these events as more pleasant than what actually happened. He will soon recall the truth and also must deal with current-day Neo-Nazis.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_Engines_Quartet"title="Mortal Engines Quartet">
## Mortal Engines.The book starts with the traction city of London chasing and catching a small mining town called Salthook. Tom Natsworthy, a teenage Apprentice Historian, is sent to the "Gut" of London, where towns are stripped for resources after he skips a chore. Tom incidentally meets the Head of the Guild of Historians, Thaddeus Valentine, along with his daughter, Katherine. One of Salthook's residents, teenager Hester Shaw, attempts to assassinate Valentine, but Tom interferes and chases her. She reveals a disfiguring scar on her face and claims Valentine caused it, before escaping the London police through a chute. When Tom informs Valentine of her name, Valentine pushes him down into the chute. Tom and Hester recover outside of London within the Hunting Ground, and after an argument start following the city's tracks to reboard it.The pair eventually boards a small town called Speedwell, where the owner Orme Wreyland drugs them and plans to sell the pair as slaves for profit at a trading cluster. Tom and Hester escape from Wreyland, meeting a friendly airship pilot called Anna Fang, who takes them in her airship the Jenny Haniver to the neutral flying city of Airhaven where they can find a passage to London. At Airhaven, they are then attacked by a cyborg "Stalker" called Shrike, who was sent after them by the London Mayor Magnus Crome to kill them and bring their bodies to him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoky_the_Cowhorse"title="Smoky the Cowhorse">
The story details the life of a horse in the western United States from his birth to his eventual decline. It takes place after the 1910, during which the West dies away and automobiles are introduced. Smoky is born in the wild but is captured and trained by a cowboy named Clint. Clint is taken by Smoky's intelligence and spirit, and he uses him as his personal steed. Under his guidance, Smoky soon becomes known as the best cow horse around. However, Smoky is among a number of horses stolen by a horse thief. When Smoky refuses to allow the thief to ride him, being loyal only to Clint, he is beaten repeatedly in punishment. Developing an intense hatred for humans from this treatment, Smoky eventually attacks and kills the thief.When Smoky is eventually captured by local authorities, his now violent and aggressive demeanor prompts his use as a bucking bronco at a rodeo. Under the moniker of "The Cougar", he becomes the most famous rodeo attraction in the South West, and people come from miles away to attempt to ride him. Years of performing at the rodeo eventually take their toll on his body and spirit, and he is left a shell of his former self.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dobry"title="Dobry">
Dobry is a young boy who lives in a small farming village in Bulgaria with his widowed mother and grandfather. Both of them are dedicated farmers, and Dobry spends much of his early life helping them in the fields. The majority of his free time is spent with his best friend, Neda, the daughter of the village shoemaker.While still young, Dobry discovers a found love for art, in which he displays an unusually high amount of natural talent. In order to pay for the art supplies he needs to practice, he takes on the job as the village cow herder, and spends the next several years honing his artistic skills. While Neda and Dobry's grandfather are impressed and supportive of his dedication to his craft, his mother becomes increasingly worried and agitated. She had always assumed that Dobry would take over the family farm as an adult, and sees the time that Dobry spends with his art as wasted time that he could be using to help with the work. However, Dobry's grandfather is slowly able to convince her that talent like his should be allowed to develop. When Dobry creates a beautiful snow sculpture of the nativity that the whole town praises, his mother finally realizes how skilled her son truly is.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shepherd"title="The Shepherd">
"The Shepherd" relates the story of a De Havilland Vampire pilot, going home on Christmas Eve 1957, whose aircraft suffers a complete electrical failure en route from RAF Celle in northern Germany to RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk. Lost in fog over the North Sea and low on fuel, he encounters a De Havilland Mosquito fighter-bomber, which has apparently been sent up to "shepherd" (i.e. guide) him in.The circumstances of how he is guided to a safe landing, and his subsequent efforts to identify the pilot who saved him, are the central themes of the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gump_and_Co."title="Gump and Co.">
On the first page, Forrest Gump tells readers "Don't ever let nobody make a movie of your life's story," and "Whether they get it right or wrong, it don't matter."However, the character is not an idiot savant, as in the first book, but more similar to Tom Hanks' "warmhearted dope." The text intentionally contains grammar and spelling mistakes in order to indicate the character's deficient education and cognitive difficulties, albeit less frequently than its predecessor, reflecting that Forrest is a more mature and somewhat more astute man.The story suggests that the real-life events surrounding the film have affected Forrest's life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candy_(Southern_and_Hoffenberg_novel)"title="Candy (Southern and Hoffenberg novel)">
Candy Christian, aged eighteen, is an extremely pretty and desirable but naïve young woman, who finds herself in a variety of farcical sexual situations as a result of her desire to help others. The men in her life, regardless of age or relationship, wish only to possess her.Having eluded the pursuits of her philosophy instructor Prof. Mephesto, she returns to her father's house, where she plans to allow the family gardener to sexually initiate her. However, her father steps in, and angrily denouncing the gardener as a Communist, attacks him and in the ensuing scuffle ends up with a fractured skull. Candy visits him in the hospital. Mr. Christian's twin brother Jack and his lascivious wife Olivia (Livia) are also present. Aunt Livia leaves, and Uncle Jack attempts to have sex with Candy; a nurse enters and wrestles him away from the girl, who escapes, only to find herself in the lair of young Dr. Krankeit, who is studying the salutary effects of masturbation. (Aunt Livia also has an adventure with Krankeit, which she later describes to Candy in a cheery letter.) Back in the hospital room, the patient (in identical head-bandages after the scuffle with the nurse) turns out to be Jack; Candy's father has gotten up quietly and left.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_K"title="The Fourth K">
President Francis Xavier Kennedy is elected to office, in large part, thanks to the legacy of his forebears–good looks, privilege, wealth–and is the very embodiment of youthful optimism. Too soon, however, he is beaten down by the political process and, disabused of his ideals, becomes a leader totally unlike what he has been before.When his daughter becomes a pawn in a brutal terrorist plot, Kennedy, who has obsessively kept alive the memory of his uncles’ assassinations, activates all his power to retaliate in a series of violent measures. As the explosive events unfold, the world and those closest to him look on with both awe and horror. Mario Puzo has stated: ""The Fourth K" was a [commercial] failure—but it was my most ambitious book."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brothers_Lionheart"title="The Brothers Lionheart">
In an unnamed Swedish city, ten year-old Karl Lejon has found out that he is going to die from an unspecified pulmonary disease (most likely tuberculosis). His adored big brother, 13-year-old Jonatan, calms him down and tells him that in the afterlife, all men will go to a land known as Nangijala.One day, a fire breaks out in the Lejon home. Jonatan takes Karl on his back and jumps out of the house's window to save him, but dies himself in the fall. Karl is crestfallen over his brother's death, until, just before his own demise, he receives a sign which allays his fears of death, and when he wakes again, he finds himself in the Cherry Valley of Nangijala, where he is happily reunited with Jonatan. Karl is introduced to the denizens of the valley, particularly Sofia the dove-keeper, Hubert the hunter, and Jossi, a landlord, and assumes the surname Lionheart along with his brother.However, despite first appearances, not all is truly at peace in Nangijala. The adjacent valley, the Thorn Rose Valley, is suppressed by a tyrant named Tengil, his army and a female dragon named Katla, who is controlled by Tengil through a trumpet. The people of the Cherry Valley, led by Sofia, are aiding the resistance movement in the Thorn Rose Valley, but they know someone from the Cherry Valley is helping Tengil, as Sofia's white doves, which transport secret messages between the valleys, are being shot. Soon after Karl's arrival, Jonatan leaves to assist the Thorn Rose people. Prompted by a nightmare in which he sees Jonatan in danger, Karl follows him in the middle of the night; but while hiding in a cave, he witnesses a clandestine exchange between two of Tengil's soldiers and Jossi, who has turned traitor to his people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Blas"title="Gil Blas">
Gil Blas is born in misery to a stablehand and a chambermaid of Santillana in Cantabria, and is educated by his uncle. He leaves Oviedo at the age of seventeen to attend the University of Salamanca. His bright future is suddenly interrupted when he is forced to help robbers along the route and is faced with jail.He becomes a valet and, over the course of several years, is able to observe many different classes of society, both lay and clerical. Because of his occupation, he meets many disreputable people and is able to adjust to many situations, thanks to his adaptability and quick wit.He finally finds himself at the royal court as a favorite of the king and secretary to the prime minister. Working his way up through hard work and intelligence, Gil is able to retire to a castle to enjoy a fortune and a hard-earned honest life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alongside_Night"title="Alongside Night">
The story begins with the United States collapsing economically and the government's agents struggling to keep their power after central bankers over-inflated the money supply. Trading in foreign currency is illegal. Businesses are subject to rationing. As a result, there is a growing black market for everything. It's the world as Samuel Edward Konkin III conceived it prior to a successful agorist revolution.Elliot Vreeland, son of Nobel Laureate Austrian School economist Dr. Martin Vreeland, learns of his father's apparent death, and is rushed home from school. But the death is fake, a plot concocted by his father to escape arrest by the government agents who are detaining "radicals" accused of worsening the economic crisis. Elliot is sent by his father to collect some gold coins stored in case the family has to escape.Upon his return home, Elliot finds his family missing. Government agents enter the house searching for Elliot, who manages to escape.Elliot becomes acquainted with the Revolutionary Agorist Cadre, an organization plotting the end of the government agents by means of counter-economics. The cadre is strong and organized, and has its militia. Elliot enlists their help, and meets Lorimer, a girl hiding from the government agents; they develop a relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coffin_Dancer"title="The Coffin Dancer">
Detective Lincoln Rhyme, the foremost criminal inspector in the Capitol as a Peacekeeper, is put on the trail of the Coffin Dancer, a cunning professional killer who has continually big-brained the police. Rhyme, a quadriplegic since a line-of-duty accident, uses his wits to track this brilliant killer who's been hired to eliminate three witnesses in the last hours before their grand jury testimony. Rhyme works with his arms and legs, New York City cop Amelia Sachs, to gather information from trace evidence at the crime scene to nail him, or at least to predict his next move and head him off.So far, they have only one clue: the assassin has a tattoo on his arm of the Grim Reaper waltzing with a woman in front of a coffin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Gunners"title="The Machine Gunners">
Set during the Second World War the story follows six children living in the fictional town of Garmouth which regularly suffers bombing raids by the German Luftwaffe. When Chas McGill finds a crashed German Heinkel 111 bomber he removes a fully operational machine gun and over 2000 rounds of ammunition. With the help of his friends, Cem, Clogger, Carrot Juice, Audrey and Nicky they set up their own den called "Fortress Caporetto", named after a World War I battle in which Chas's grandfather fought.Later a bomb lands on Nicky's house and he is presumed dead but actually survives and hides in the fortress, where he is found by the gang. After this, only his friends know he is alive and Clogger leaves his home and joins him.During an attack by a Bf 110 fighter, the children fire their gun at the plane. They miss but the plane is shot down. The pilot is killed but the rear gunner, Rudi Gerlath, bails out. He discovers the children's hidden fortress and is promptly detained by the children, who take his pistol, even though their machine gun is damaged and inoperable.The children do not hand the German over to the authorities, but keep him prisoner at their fort. The children bribe the German with the offer of a boat if he will repair their machine gun. He agrees and mends it before being taken to the dock where he rows off. The same night the church bells ring signalling a German invasion. The children hurry to the fortress but do not see anything; it was a false alarm. Out at sea, Rudi finds he does not have the strength to row to German-occupied Norway and is forced back to England and rejoins the children at the fortress.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Robbers_Came_to_Cardamom_Town"title="When the Robbers Came to Cardamom Town">
The book is about the peaceful town of Kardemomme and the people there, as well as the only characters which stir up serious trouble. They are the three robbers, Casper, Jasper and Jonathan who live outside the town and regularly enter to steal the things they need. The robbers get arrested and are treated well in jail. In the end they are reformed, and in the final chapter, they become the heroes of the day when they extinguish a fire in the tower of the town. Finally, Casper becomes the town's fireman, Jasper becomes the town's circus manager and Jonathan becomes a baker.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cestus_Deception"title="The Cestus Deception">
Set during the Clone Wars, the story follows Jedi Knights Obi-Wan Kenobi and Kit Fisto and their adventures as ambassadors on the planet of Ord Cestus, which has started producing so-called "Jedi Killer" droids. While, Obi-Wan Kenobi takes the diplomatic approach with the leadership, Kit Fisto and a clone trooper squad start recruiting and training fighters from the working class of the planet to incite a rebellion, should Obi-Wan fail. While they deal with the intrigue and politicking of the locals, as well as intervention by the Sith minion Asajj Ventress, a love affair forms between one of their clone trooper bodyguards Nate and a female pilot who is attracted to the clone template Jango Fett.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memories_of_Midnight"title="Memories of Midnight">
The novel begins at the end of "The Other Side of Midnight", with Catherine Douglas recovering in a convent, knowing only her name. Everyone except Constantin Demiris, known as Costa, thinks she was killed by her husband, Larry Douglas, and his mistress, Noelle Page. Catherine requests to leave the convent to uncover her past, which Costa permits.In Greece Catherine remembers Larry and Noelle trying to drown her, and tells Costa, her apparent benefactor. Worried that she will realise they were wrongfully convicted, he sends her to London to work in one of his offices.Frederick Stavros begins to feel guilty for sending Larry and Noelle to their death, as he was their lawyer and they were all tricked into pleading guilty by Napoleon Chotas. He dies shortly after confiding in a priest, who then tells an employee of Spyros Lambrou, the brother of Costa's wife Melina. Spyros Lambrou uses this news to destroy Costa, who has been mistreating his sister.Fearing for his life, Chotas leaves a package with attorney Peter Demonides, and sends a tape to tell Costa this. When Chotas apparently dies in a house-fire the next day, Peter delivers the package to Costa, rather than the authorities, and starts working for him. Meanwhile, Catherine befriends Kirk Reynolds, who falls in love with her. She tells him that her husband and his mistress were executed for her attempted murder. Kirk is doubtful that Greek law would sentence anyone to death for attempted murder, but checks with his acquaintance, Peter Demonides, and dies the next day.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behold_the_Man_(novel)"title="Behold the Man (novel)">
The story begins with Karl's violent arrival in the Holy Land of AD 28, where his time machine, a womb-like, fluid-filled sphere, cracks open and becomes useless. By interpolating numerous memories and flashbacks, Moorcock tells the parallel story of Karl's troubled past in 20th century London, and tries to explain why he's willing to risk everything to meet Jesus. In the story, Karl has chronic problems with women, homosexual tendencies, an interest in the ideas of Jung, and many neuroses, including a messiah complex.Karl, badly injured during his journey, crawls halfway out of the time machine, then faints. John the Baptist and a group of Essenes find him there, and take him back to their community, where they care for him for some time. Since the Essenes witnessed his miraculous arrival in the time machine, John decides Karl must be a magus, and asks him to help lead a revolt against the occupying Romans. When he asks Karl to baptise him, however, the latter panics and flees into the desert, where he wanders alone, hallucinating from heat and thirst.He then makes his way to Nazareth in search of Jesus. When he finds Mary and Joseph, Mary turns out to be little more than a whore, and Joseph, a bitter old man, sneers openly at her claim to have been impregnated by an angel. Worse, their child Jesus is a profoundly intellectually disabled hunchback who incessantly repeats the only word he knows: "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus". Karl, however, is so deeply committed to the idea of a real, historical Jesus that, at this point, he himself begins to step into the role, gathering followers - carefully choosing ones whose names are identical with those attested in the Gospels, repeating what parables he can recall, and using psychological tricks to simulate miracles. When there's no food, he shows the people how to pretend to eat to take their minds off their hunger; when he encounters illness caused by hysteria, he cures it. Gradually, it becomes known that his name is Jesus of Nazareth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_Dark"title="Speed of Dark">
Lou Arrendale is a bioinformatics specialist who has high-functioning autism, and has made a good life for himself working doing pattern recognition. A new manager at the firm where he works puts pressure on his department, where many autistic people work. Lou is pressured to undergo an experimental treatment that might "cure" his autism. Lou does not think he needs curing, but he risks losing his job and other accommodations the company has put in place for its employees with autism if he does not undergo it.Lou struggles with the idea of going through this "treatment" for his autism while he pursues fencing with his "normal" friends and continues to go to work. His autistic friends, as well as himself, meet together after work and discuss what or what not to do.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Enemy_But_Time"title="No Enemy But Time">
The novel follows the story of a modern black American man who is able to mentally project himself back to pre-human Africa, where he meets (and eventually mates) with humanity's prehistoric ancestors.At less than 1-year old, John Monegal is abandoned by his mother and adopted by USAF officer Hugo Monegal and his wife Jeanette. Since the very beginning of his life, John dreams of an ancient world and becomes an expert of the Pleistocene epoch, the era of the "Homo habilis" in Africa. When he is 18, John gets in touch with a paleonthologist, Alistair Patrick Blair, who serves as prime minister in the fictional country of Zarakal (approximately representing Kenya according to the author's preface) and works closely with a US physical scientist, Woodrow Kaprow, who has developed a time machine which brings John back to the era he dreams of. Just before leaving to the past, John discovers his mother wants to publish a book based on voice records of his dreams, and angry and deluded, he leaves her house and changes his name into Joshua Kampa.Almost lost in the remote past of a world which is the frontier between non-human and human life, John/Joshua feels he has reached the reality he always belonged to, and is accepted by a group of individuals who live in the African savanna. He gives a name to all his new friends, and learns to eat and live like them. Joshua starts thinking he will never get back to the 20th century. After a while he falls in love with a pre-historic woman, Helen, who gets pregnant and dies at the daughter's birth. To save his child and let her survive in a better world, Joshua goes back to the area of the time machine, where he is mysteriously saved by two African astronauts apparently coming from the future. Back to his actual life, Joshua finds he lost his dreaming power and learns that only a month in modern world's time has passed since he left; this is why he struggles in being believed about his daughter. As years pass, Joshua learns his daughter has the same dreaming power he used to have, but she is projected towards the future.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declare"title="Declare">
The non-linear plot, shifting back and forth in time from the 1940s to the 1960s, mainly concerns Andrew Hale, a scholar and occasional operative for a secret British spy organization. Early in World War II, Hale is recruited as part of Operation Declare, an investigation of the true nature of several mysterious beings living on Mount Ararat, and how the Soviet Union has attempted to harness their vast supernatural powers. In this effort he is opposed by real-life communist traitor Kim Philby, a supporting character in the novel, who did travel extensively in the region. The novel proposes that the Great Game, the prolonged geopolitical conflict between the British and Russian empires in the 19th century over domination of Central Asia, was actually part of Operation Declare. The Okhrana, or Tsarist secret police, are cast as the Russian counterpart to Operation Declare.A sub-plot concerns Hale's on-off romance with Spaniard Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga. A devoted Comintern agent and lapsed Catholic when she first meets Hale, Ceniza-Bendiga eventually rejects communism. While imprisoned in Moscow's notorious Lubyanka prison, she returns to her faith upon discovering the horrible motivation behind the deliberate mass starvation and violent political purges of Stalinist Russia: the placation of an entity called Zat al-Dawahi ("Mistress of Misfortunes") or Machikha Nash ("our stepmother"), a demonic being who demanded human sacrifice in exchange for protecting the nation from foreign invasion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Never_War"title="The Never War">
Bobby Pendragon and Vo Spader, the Traveler from Cloral, arrive on Veelox a few weeks after the death of Bobby's uncle, Press Tilton, only to figure out from Aja Killian, the Traveler from Veelox, that Saint Dane went to First Earth. They flume there (New York City, 1937) to be greeted by bullets from gangsters that Saint Dane has hired. They then met the First Earth Traveler, who saved them from the gangsters. He is a bell captain at the Manhattan Tower Hotel named Vincent Van Dyke, nicknamed "Gunny". Bobby and Spader become employed as bellhops there, and investigate the ties between First Earth's Turning Point, rival crime godfathers Max Rose and Winn Farrow, and the Nazi party.The critical connection is revealed to be the "Hindenburg" zeppelin. To understand its significance, Bobby and Gunny visit Third Earth, in the 51st Century. The Traveler of Third Earth, Patrick, accesses a computer that predicts the future in which they save the "Hindenburg": industrial spies working for Max would lead to the Nazis developing an atomic bomb and disastrously winning World War Two.Bobby and Gunny return to First Earth, only to find that Spader and Rose have gone ahead, seeking to stop Winn Farrow from shooting a firework rocket into "Hindenburg". Bobby was flown to the LZ-129's launch site by a female aeroplane pilot called Nancy Olsen (Jinx), who has been his friend and client at the hotel. Once parachuting from the aeroplane, Bobby tracks down Max and Spader, who are seconds from departing to meet Max's airship arrival. Bobby accompanies them, and with Third Earth foresight, manages to save the entire entourage's lives. While on Third Earth, the young Traveler learns that Max Rose was destined to die on the same highway, on the same day, after crashing into a motorcycle cop. With Max unconscious and Spader, convinced stopping the "Hindenburg" will save First Earth, heading for the airfield, Bobby uses Max's car to follow them. Spader, misunderstanding, tries to stop the rocket from launching; Gunny holds him back, but fails. Spader tries to save the "Hindenburg" on his own, but is stopped by Winn Farrow. Spader begs Bobby to save the "Hindenburg". Looking up, Bobby sees the faces of those who will die in the explosion and is reluctant to let them die. Gunny again intervenes, holding him until the rocket launches and the zeppelin burns.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infernal_Devices_(Reeve_novel)"title="Infernal Devices (Reeve novel)">
Sixteen years after the events of "Predator's Gold", the former ice city of Anchorage has settled on an island in North America unaffected by the fallout from the Sixty Minute War and has become a static city named Anchorage-in-Vineland. Most of the inhabitants are happy with their new life, but Wren Natsworthy, the teenage daughter of Tom Natsworthy and Hester Shaw, is bored with her life and seeks adventure.When she sneaks out one night Wren encounters three Lost Boys, Remora, Fishcake and their older leader Gargle; who have come to Anchorage in search of a mysterious Rasmussen family artifact named the Tin Book. The Book, bearing the insignia of the President of the United States of America, contains the activation codes for the final remaining orbital weapons left over from the Sixty Minute War; potentially with firepower far greater than that of MEDUSA, which destroyed the Traction City of London in "Mortal Engines". After meeting former Lost Boy now Anchorage resident Caul, who refuses to help him, Gargle persuades Wren to retrieve the Tin Book for him and to join them on their journeys around the world.Wren begins her mission by asking the now-adult margravine Freya Rasmussen, knowing that the Book is in the palace's library. Freya tells Wren of the Book's origins but explains that no one knows its purpose or meaning. When Wren reports to Gargle he tells her that Nimrod Pennyroyal's book about the time he spent in Anchorage has revealed the Lost Boys' existence to the raft cities that they previously robbed. As a result, the Lost Boys have been forced to loot cities further afield, but most of the Lost Boys' limpets never return. Gargle explains that raft cities have also begun searching for Grimsby and claims the Tin Book contains information that could get the sunken city moving again; but in actuality he intends to sell it to Stalker Fang for protection.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_Choice"title="Weapons of Choice">
In 2021 off East Timor, a US-led multinational task force commanded by Admiral Phillip Kolhammer prepares to liberate the Indonesian islands from an Islamic government calling itself the Caliphate, which is slaughtering the Chinese nationals living there. In the book's backstory, the Chinese government was planning to send a task force but was warned by the US government not to do so. The flagship of the task force is the aircraft carrier USS "Hillary Clinton", named after "the most uncompromising wartime president in the history of the United States". The task force is made up mainly of US and British units alongside French, Australian, Japanese, and "Free Indonesians", along with a few other units like Spetsnaz from Russia and Kommando Spezialkräfte from Germany. Alongside the navy task force is JRV "Nagoya", a scientific ship that is experimenting with wormholes; the navy ship protecting it is ordered to join the task force. A new ship from the Royal New Zealand Navy is sent as escort, but prior to its arrival, "Nagoya"s project director, Manning Pope, decides to make a trial run. The task force is constantly watched by a Caliphate spy on the mainland.In 1942, Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance and Lt. Commander Daniel Black are on the bridge of , on their way to face the Japanese sent to invade Midway. A growing commotion outside the bridge prompts them to investigate, only to find a large group of what are, to them, unknown and strangely designed ships. They spot a ship with the Japanese ensign and assume it is the Japanese fleet sent against Midway and they order their own ships to open fire. The multinational task force Combat Intelligence, referred to as CI, takes defensive action; the 21st-century fleet nearly wipes out the US fleet, including and . During the battle, Kolhammer and the rest of the multinational task force commanders learn that not all ships of the task force came through and those that did, did not all end up in the same place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Loss"title="Lord Loss">
Grubitsch "Grubbs" Grady, the younger child of chess-obsessed parents, grows increasingly uneasy with the recent strange, nervous behavior of his parents and sister. One night, he finds the mutilated bodies of his family and encounters Lord Loss, a gruesome human-like demon who sets his two familiars, Vein and Artery, on Grubbs.Although Grubbs manages to escape, he is deeply traumatized and is placed in a mental institute. He refuses to respond to treatment until he is visited by his father's younger brother, Dervish Grady, who tells Grubbs that he knows demons exist and convinces Grubbs to finally accept help.After Grubbs recovers, he lives with the rather eccentric Dervish in his mansion near the village of Carcery Vale. Dervish explains to Grubbs that using magic is possible as Grubbs himself used magic to flee from Lord Loss and his minions. As Grubbs begins to settle down, he meets and befriends Bill-E Spleen, another orphan who visits Dervish often to learn magic. Bill-E tells Grubbs of his belief that Dervish may actually be his father, given how close they were before then, but tells Grubbs to keep it a secret from him, which he agrees. Later, when exploring the cellar, Grubbs comes across a book on demonology, and opens to a page containing an illustration of Lord Loss, which seemingly comes to life and calls to him. Grubbs immediately closes the book and runs out of the cellar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_in_the_Cloister"title="Venus in the Cloister">
"Venus in the Cloister" is made up of five dialogues, all of them carried out between Sister Agnes and Sister Angelica. The entire story can be considered as a “whore dialogue” in which the elder nun trains the younger one in matters of sex. Sister Angelica is the older and more experienced nun who had come to the convent at the age of thirteen. She has been a part of the House for almost seven years now while Sister Agnes is younger and new to the place.The dialogue begins when Sister Agnes is caught in the act of masturbating by the older and wiser nun Sister Angelica. She is embarrassed and taken aback while Sister Angelica appears to be quite unaffected by what she has just witnessed.What follows is an attempt by Sister Angelica to seduce the younger nun. Sister Agnes is discomfited to have been caught by the older nun and so she meekly protests against Sister Angelica's sexual attempts.However, Angelica knows that her seduction will remain incomplete if the younger nun's philosophical thought process remains unchanged. So she promises Agnes teachings of a new kind of religion in which there is little room for self-denial and more scope for “informed Judgment”. Angelica then proceeds to mention Reverend Father Jesuit, who helped open her mind to such new types of religious speculations and debate. The father talks of religion in terms of two distinct bodies—"one of which is purely celestial and supernatural, the other terrestrial and corruptible, which is only the invention of Men". The second body is termed as Policy which tends to destroy inner peace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Equal_Music"title="An Equal Music">
The plot concerns Michael, a professional violinist, who never forgot his love for Julia, a pianist he met as a student in Vienna. They meet again after a decade, and conduct a secret affair, though she is married and has one child. Their musical careers are affected by this affair and the knowledge that Julia is going deaf.A recurring element throughout the plot is the pair's performance of Beethoven's Piano Trio Opus 1 No.3, which they first perform in their college days.Seth together with Philippe Honoré marketed a double CD of the music mentioned in "An Equal Music", performed by Honoré.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predator_(Cornwell_novel)"title="Predator (Cornwell novel)">
"Predator" is the fourteenth book of the Dr. Kay Scarpetta series by author Patricia Cornwell.Dr. Kay Scarpetta, now freelancing with the National Forensic Academy in Florida, takes charge of a case that stretches from steamy Florida to snowbound Massachusetts, one as unnerving as any she has ever faced. The teasing psychological clues lead Scarpetta and her team—Pete Marino, Benton Wesley, and Lucy Farinelli—to suspect that they are hunting someone with a cunning and malevolent mind whose secrets have kept them in the shadows, until now.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pushcart_War"title="The Pushcart War">
## The big Three.The opening sentence of the first edition is "The Pushcart War started on the afternoon of March 15, 1976 when a truck ran down a pushcart belonging to a flower peddler." The prefatory material includes introductions by (the fictional) Professor Lyman Cumberly and the author, Jean Merrill, dated ten years after the opening sentence; later editions have changed the years so the dates would continue to be set in the future at the time of publication.Traffic in New York City has become intolerable. Leaders of the three biggest trucking companies, collectively known as The Three, hold a secret meeting where they plan to take over the streets for themselves by eliminating other traffic, starting with the pushcarts. The Three are Moe Mammoth of Mammoth Moving, Walter Sweet of Tiger Trucking, and Louie Livergreen of LEMA (Lower Eastside Moving Association). Professor Cumberly says, "The truck drivers had gotten together and figured out that in crowded traffic conditions, the only way to get where you wanted was to be so big that you didn't have to get out of the way of anybody." This is known as the Large Object Theory of History.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal's_Children"title="Hannibal's Children">
The novel opens at the alternate close of the Second Punic War. Hannibal offers terms to the Romans: abandon their city and move north of the Alps, or be destroyed. The Romans, under the dictator Quintus Fabius Maximus, accept the offer and withdraw into Germania, vowing to return. The Carthaginians declare victory and go home.One chapter and several generations later, the Romans have long since reestablished their republic. These Romans, largely out of need, have adopted a practice of Cultural Romanization more pronounced than the historical Romans did: large numbers of Germans have been adopted into the Roman society, forming a large proportion of both the legions and the Senate. A series of auspicious omens prompt the Senate to send a delegation south into Latium. The expedition leaders are subtly but immediately at cross purposes: the commander, Marcus Scipio, a scion of the ancient patrician Cornelii Scipiones family, is wholly motivated by a desire to reestablish the Republic in the Mediterranean basin. His deputy, Titus Norbanus, one of the newer, Germanic Romans, seeks personal glory, at least in part to ensure that the Germans (particularly his own family) remain as powerful within the expanded Republic as they do under the current scheme.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wheel_on_the_School"title="The Wheel on the School">
Lina is one of six school children in the small fishing village of Shora. When she writes an essay for school that asks why there are no storks in their village, she sets all the others to wondering. Their teacher encourages the class to find out for themselves. The children set out to bring the storks back. They have to overcome many obstacles. They discovered that the roofs on the village's homes are pitched so steeply that the storks cannot find space to nest on the sharp ridges, and placing a wagon wheel on each roof ridge would give storks a place to nest. The task of finding a wagon wheel in the tiny village proves difficult, and the children meet several interesting personalities during their search. This simple, yet compelling plot teaches that if people think and wonder why, things will begin to happen and dreams will come true.The schoolchildren are: Lina, the only girl in the small school; Jella, the biggest of all the children; Auka, an average boy; Eelka, who is fat and awkward; and Pier and Dirk, the inseparable twins. These six kids are aided by their teacher, Grandmother Sibble III, legless Janus, old Douwa, and the "tin man". Other characters include the fathers of the children, who are all fishermen; Lina's aunt, who lives in Nes; Evert, the man living across from Lina's aunt; Lina and Auka's younger siblings, Linda and Jan; Jana, Janus's wife; and the mothers of the children.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Sur_(novel)"title="Big Sur (novel)">
The novel depicts Jack Duluoz's mental and physical deterioration in the late 1950s. Despite having found mainstream success with his work, Duluoz is unable to cope with a suddenly demanding public, and is battling advanced alcoholism. He seeks respite first in solitude in the cabin at Big Sur, on the California coast, and later in a relationship with Billie, the mistress of his long-time friend Cody Pomeray (Neal Cassady). Duluoz finds respite in the Big Sur wilderness, but is driven by loneliness to return to the city, and resumes drinking heavily.Across Duluoz's subsequent trips to Big Sur and interleaved lifestyle in San Francisco, he drunkenly embarrasses Cody by introducing Billie to Cody's wife, and finds himself unable to emotionally provide for the increasingly demanding Billie (who proves to be mentally unstable herself) and to integrate into suburban life. On Duluoz’s third and final trip to Big Sur, he brings friends Dave Wane and Româno Schwartz (Lew Welch and Lenore Kandel), along with Billie her son Elliot. The peaceful trip soon goes afoul when Duluoz’s inner turmoil culminates in him having several panic attacks. The group leaves the following day.An addendum to the book contains a free verse poem by Kerouac, "Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur", written from the perspective of the Pacific Ocean.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Sax"title="Doctor Sax">
The novel begins with Jackie Duluoz, based on Kerouac himself, relating a dream in which he finds himself in Lowell, Massachusetts, his childhood home town. Prompted by this dream, he recollects the story of his childhood of warm browns and sepia tones, along with his shrouded childhood fantasies, which have become inextricable from the memories.The fantasies pertain to a castle in Lowell atop a muted green hill that Jackie calls Snake Hill. Underneath the misty grey castle, the Great World Snake sleeps. Various vampires, monsters, gnomes, werewolves, and dark magicians from all over the world gather to the mansion with the intention of awakening the Snake so that it will devour the entire world (although a small minority of them, derisively called "Dovists," believe that the Snake is merely "a husk of doves," and when it awakens it will burst open, releasing thousands of lace white doves. This myth is also present in a story told by Kerouac's character, Sal Paradise, in "On the Road").The eponymous Doctor Sax, also part of Jackie's fantasy world, is a dark but ultimately friendly figure with a shrouded black cape, an inky black slouch hat, a haunting laugh, and a "disease of the night" called "Visagus Nightsoil" that causes his skin to turn mossy green at night. Sax, who also came to Lowell because of the Great World Snake, lives in the forest in the neighboring town of Dracut, where he conducts various alchemical experiments, attempting to concoct a potion to destroy the Snake when it awakens.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Pearl"title="City of Pearl">
The novel opens in the year 2198 and shows several preliminary scenes both on Earth and on alien planets; however, most of the action takes place much later, in the year 2374, on planet Cavanagh's Star. The planet is far from Earth, but very similar to it in atmosphere; it is claimed already by three alien races when a group of "gethes" (alien term for humans, literally "carrion eater") arrives to explore, led by former police woman, Shan Frankland. The Bezeri (squid-like water dwellers) are the planet's natural inhabitants, the Isenj are invaders here to take advantage of unused land, and the Wess'har are the mediators, here to defend the Bezeri from Isenj pollution. Also coexisting on the planet is Constantine - a Christian colony of humans (led by Josh Garrod) who landed on the planet several generations ago in an attempt to escape the corruption of Earth. Constantine is guided by the Wess'har, Aras, who is plagued with a strange disease which outcasts him from Wess'har society. The political balance is tenuous, and Shan must play the mediator between her anxious, disobedient crew and the powerful military force of these alien beings. At the same time, she is troubled by her own past and the strange relationship that seems to be forming between her and Aras, as she struggles to lead a mission whose goal she doesn't yet consciously know.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonio_Kröger"title="Tonio Kröger">
The narrative follows the course of a man's life from his schoolboy days to his adulthood. The son of a north German merchant and a "Southern" mother (Consuelo) with artistic talents, Tonio inherited qualities from both sides of his family. As a child, he experiences conflicting feelings for the bourgeois people around him. He feels both superior to them in his insights and envious of their innocent vitality. This conflict continues into Tonio's adulthood, when he becomes a famous writer living in southern Germany. "To be an artist," he comes to believe, "one has to die to everyday life." These issues are only partially resolved when Tonio travels north to visit his hometown. While there, Tonio is mistaken for an escaped criminal, thereby reinforcing his inner suspicion that the artist must be an outsider relative to "respectable" society. As Erich Heller—who knew Thomas Mann personally—observed, "Tonio Kröger"s theme is that of the "artist as an exile from reality" (with Goethe's "Torquato Tasso" [1790] and Grillparzer's "Sappho" [1818] for company). Yet it was also Erich Heller who, earlier, in his own youth, had diagnosed the main theme of "Tonio Kröger" to be the infatuation and entanglements of a passionate heart, destined to give shape to, intellectualize, its feelings in artistic terms.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Nest_trilogy"title="The Dark Nest trilogy">
## "The Joiner King".An insectoid species called the Killik have been expanding beyond their borders, encroaching on Chiss territory. All of the Jedi survivors of the mission to Myrkr in "Star by Star", most notably those who were students at the Jedi Academy on Yavin 4 in the "Young Jedi Knights" series, are called through the Force to help, and they depart into the Unknown Regions of the Galaxy. The Chiss lodge a formal complaint, accusing the Jedi of interfering in their border dispute with the Killik. The Jedi find that their old friend Raynar Thul, who had been presumed dead after the events of "Star by Star", had come upon the Killik and been absorbed into their hive mind as a "Joiner". Thul, now known as UnuThul, has been influencing the hive mind from the top, and is the reason the Jedi have been drawn into the conflict so early. The Jedi find that they, too, are at risk of being absorbed by the collective consciousness of the nest since the collective accepts even non-insectoid species. Meanwhile, Tenel Ka, the Queen Mother of the Hapes Consortium, has become pregnant by Jacen Solo, and delays her pregnancy through use of the Force to reduce the chance of their daughter's paternity being discovered. When the child is born, she is named Allana.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinner_at_the_Homesick_Restaurant"title="Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant">
Pearl Tull is a rigid perfectionist. She has three children with her husband, traveling salesman Beck, who abandons the family. After Beck leaves, Pearl struggles to maintain a front as if nothing is wrong at all. Cody, the oldest, is wild and adventurous, but is envious of his brother Ezra, who he believes is Pearl's favorite. As they grow up, this plays out in endless pranks. Ezra is passive, and never tries to get back at Cody. He is nurturing and sweet, traits that often interest Cody's girlfriends, furthering Cody's resentment. Ezra goes to work at a restaurant, which he later manages and ultimately inherits, while Cody becomes a wealthy and successful efficiency expert. When Ezra becomes engaged to Ruth, his star cook, Cody becomes obsessed with luring her away, and ultimately succeeds, but his marriage to Ruth is not easy. Ezra never recovers, and remains at home with Pearl; he is a caregiver, both for Pearl and his customers, but this is underlain by sadness.Jenny is the third child and the most scholarly of the Tulls, but in college, she marries on an impulse with unhappy results. Only in her third marriage to a man with six children whose wife has abandoned him does she find stability in family life and in her successful, if harried, career as a pediatrician.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fortunate_Pilgrim"title="The Fortunate Pilgrim">
The novel tells the story of the Angeluzzi-Corbos family, a family of immigrants living an adopted life in New York City. The head of the family is Lucia Santa, a wife, widow and mother of two families. It is her formidable will that steers them through the Great Depression and the early years of World War II. But she cannot prevent the conflict between Italian and American values.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sicilian"title="The Sicilian">
In 1950, Michael Corleone, the son of Sicilian-American Mafia Don Vito Corleone, is preparing to return home to America after his exile in Sicily. He meets with Don Croce Malo, the most powerful Sicilian Mafia boss. Don Croce and Michael's father have allied to help the famous bandit Salvatore "Turi" Guiliano escape Sicily and go with Michael to America. Michael learns of a set of documents Guiliano has that would cause the downfall of the current Italian government, to be released upon Guiliano's death or capture, called the Testament. Michael also meets Guiliano's parents and Gaspare "Aspanu" Pisciotta, Guiliano's best friend and second in command.In 1943, Turi Guiliano and Aspanu Pisciotta are stopped by the "Carabinieri", the corrupt Italian police, while smuggling food, but they refuse to give up the food or the name of who they were trading with. Guiliano is shot, but he manages to kill his attacker, a police Sergeant. Turi is carried by Aspanu to a local monastery, where he recovers from his wounds and learns more about the criminal side of Sicily under the care of the Abbot Manfredi. After he recovers, he and Aspanu make their way back to Guiliano's home in Montelepre, where he is still being sought for the murder. While discussing his future with family and friends, the local police attempt to arrest Turi. Turi and Aspanu open fire on the trucks pursuing them and kill some policemen. They flee to the mountains. Innocent citizens of Montelepre are arrested in retaliation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Italian_Secretary"title="The Italian Secretary">
Architect Sir Alistair Sinclair and his foreman, Dennis McKay, have been slain in the midst of rehabilitating the medieval west tower of the Royal Palace of Holyrood—the very wing where Mary, Queen of Scots, had lived, and where David Rizzio had met his brutal, politically motivated end. Mycroft Holmes fears these murders portend new threats against Britain's present monarch—the elderly Queen Victoria, who occasionally lodges at the palace—by a known assassin, perhaps in nefarious league with the German Kaiser. En route north, Holmes and Watson are menaced aboard their train by a red-bearded bomb thrower (supposedly a rabid Scots nationalist), only to discover that still greater dangers await them, and others, at Holyroodhouse. The plaintive drone of a weeping woman, cruelly punctured and shattered corpses, a pool of blood "that never dries", and a disembodied Italian voice with unexpected musical tastes all imply the wrath of wraiths behind recent atrocities. But Holmes and Watson deduce that greed, rather than ghosts, may be to blame.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilead_(novel)"title="Gilead (novel)">
The book is an account of the memories and legacy of John Ames as he remembers his experiences of his father and grandfather to share with his son. All three men share a vocational lifestyle and profession as Congregationalist ministers in Gilead, Iowa. John Ames describes his vocation as "giving you a good basic sense of what is being asked of you and also what you might as well ignore", explaining that your vocation is something both hard to fulfill and hard to obtain. He writes that this is one of the most important pieces of wisdom he can bestow upon his son. Ames's father was a Christian pacifist, but his grandfather was a radical abolitionist who carried out guerrilla actions with John Brown before the American Civil War, served as a chaplain with the Union forces in that war, and incited his congregation to join up and serve in it; as Ames remarks, his grandfather "preached his people into the war." The grandfather returned from the war maimed with the loss of his right eye. Thereafter he was given the distinction that his right side was holy or sacred in some way, that it was his link to commune with God, and he was notorious for a piercing stare with the one eye he had left.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Wild_Sheep_Chase"title="A Wild Sheep Chase">
This quasi-detective tale follows an unnamed, chain-smoking narrator and his adventures in Tokyo and Hokkaido in 1978. The story begins when the recently divorced protagonist, an advertisement executive, publishes a photo of a pastoral scene sent to him in a confessional letter by his long-lost friend, 'Rat.' He is contacted by a mysterious man representing 'The Boss,' a central force behind Japan's political and economic elite, who is now slowly dying. The Boss' secretary tells him that his agency must immediately cease publication of the photo. He also explains that a strange sheep with a star-shaped birthmark, pictured in the advertisement, was in some way the secret source of the Boss' power and that he has one month to find that sheep or his career and life will be ruined. The narrator and his girlfriend, who possesses magically seductive and supernaturally perceptive ears, travel to the north of Japan to find the sheep and his vagabond friend. The biggest clue seems to be the photo of the sheep that the mysterious man wished to cease publishing. Which brings the two to the Hokkaido region, in a cold and mountainous city called Sapporo. There the narrator's girlfriend digs through various texts in the library and they explore the city. The girlfriend's ears help to guide them to the Dolphin Hotel which is a shadow of its former self. It is run by a man who was once a sailor, but, due to an accident at sea, has only the use of one arm. The hotel owner points the pair to his father, the 'Sheep Professor', who is a bitter, eccentric man living upstairs in the hotel, still remembering the sheep from when he encountered them in Manchuria, decades before. The hotel owner and his father have a horrible relationship, and the Sheep Professor is reluctant, at first, to talk to anyone that his son brought, until the narrator mentions the sheep to the Sheep Professor. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ringworld_Engineers"title="The Ringworld Engineers">
The Hindmost, recently deposed leader of the Puppeteers, abducts the human Louis Wu (who has become a wirehead) and Kzin Chmeee (previously known as "Speaker-to-Animals"). Both had been part of the original Ringworld expedition. The Hindmost hopes to acquire Ringworld technology, specifically matter transmutation, to help him regain his position.Once they reach the Ringworld, Louis and Chmeee are sent out to explore, while the Hindmost remains safely behind on their starship. Louis and Chmeee secretly plot to try to overthrow the Hindmost so they can go home. In their travels, they meet a number of the hominid species that have evolved on the Ringworld. They also learn more about the full-scale "maps" of various known space worlds, including Earth, Mars and Kzin.They discover that the Ringworld has become unstable and will collide with its star soon. The Ringworld's builders, revealed to be Pak Protectors, have long since died out, and the attitude jets they installed all around the rim to maintain the Ringworld's position were dismounted to use as starship engines. Chmeee goes to the Kzin map for his own goals, while Louis tries to find some way to save the trillions of inhabitants.It is on the Map of Mars that the reunited party (and two natives) finds the Ringworld control room Louis is seeking, located in a vast maze of rooms in the hollow space under the map. To create the rarefied atmosphere on Mars, the Map of Mars was built above the main surface, creating a cavity. The control room contains living space and, among other things, the meteor defense system. The defense system uses the superconductor grid embedded in the Ringworld's "scrith" floor to manipulate the magnetic field of the Ringworld's sun to trigger stellar flares that power a titanic gas laser. (The first expedition to the Ringworld crashed after being hit by this laser.)
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ringworld_Throne"title="The Ringworld Throne">
This book consists of two main plot threads, which only come together towards the end of the book.A variety of Ringworld hominid species, led by the Machine woman Valavirgillin (from "The Ringworld Engineers"), join together to kill a large nest of vampires (the shadow nest) which has been feeding on all of them. With the help of two Ghouls, who know that the nest is located under an abandoned floating factory, they manage to cast out the vampires. The Ghouls find one of the Hindmost's spying devices in the factory and transport it all the way to the rim, to ask for help against the Protectors who rule the rim.Meanwhile, Louis Wu decides to die of old age instead of asking the Hindmost for rejuvenation, as self-punishment for his helping the Hindmost to restabilize the Ringworld at the end of "The Ringworld Engineers", killing (as he thinks) a trillion hominids to save the rest. After ten years of wandering around the Ringworld and aging, the Hindmost convinces him that he killed far fewer people than expected. Since there are signs of several Protectors on the Ringworld, Louis returns to the Hindmost to be restored to health in exchange for service, only for the pair of them (along with a Kzin named Acolyte, son of Chmeee) to be enslaved by a vampire Protector ("Bram"). Bram shoots down ARM and Patriarchy ships attacking the Ringworld, and then tries to overthrow the other vampire Protectors who control the rim wall. He manages to kill them all, but returns wounded to the control center, where he fights and is killed by a Ghoul protector Louis has created.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Great_Mischief"title="No Great Mischief">
The novel opens in the present day, with successful orthodontist Alexander MacDonald visiting his elderly older brother Calum in Toronto, Ontario. The novel explores the emotional bonds of family through flashbacks to their childhood in Cape Breton Island and young adulthood spent in the mines of Northern Ontario, clan history dating back to 1779, and present-day interactions between the two brothers and a sister. Though written primarily in English, Scottish Gaelic and French are used in dialogue and songs.The novel also mirrors Canadian history as a whole, taking its title from James Wolfe's assertion in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham that Scottish soldiers should be sent into battle because "they are hardy, intrepid, accustomed to a rough country, and no great mischief if they fall." The enduring linguistic and cultural tensions that have defined Canadian society are also reflected in the novel; during their time working in the uranium mines of Elliot Lake, the brothers are frequently in conflict with their francophone co-workers.The novel explores the themes of brotherhood and the conflict between the rise of individualism and family in the post-modern world. Alex loves his alcoholic brother, Calum, despite his problems because Alex sees the potential in Calum. Alex lets his brother die in peace and with dignity even though he is a convicted murderer and alcoholic. The author uses Alex as an example for all human beings. MacLeod wants the reader to realize that "all of us are better when we're loved" and that forgiveness and love for humanity are the only weapons humans have against the destructive forces of evil.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balyakalasakhi"title="Balyakalasakhi">
The childhood romance between neighbours blossoms into passionate love during adolescence. Majeed's father was rich once, so could send him to a school in the distant town, although he was not very good at studies. Suhra's father on the other hand had trouble making both ends meet. Even then he wanted to send his daughter, who was good at studies to the school. But after her father's death, all her hopes of further studies was ruined. Majeed begs his father to sponsor Suhra's education, but he refuses.Majeed leaves home after a skirmish with his father, and wanders over distant lands for a long time before returning home. On his return, he finds that his family's former affluence is all gone, and that his beloved Suhra has married someone else. He is grief struck at the loss of love, and this is when Suhra turns up at his home. She is a shadow of her former self. The beautiful, sunshiny, vibrant Suhra of old is now a woman worn out by life, battered hard by a loveless marriage to an abusive husband. Majeed commands her, "Suhra, don't go back!" and she stays.Majeed leaves home once again, but this time with plans on his mind. He needs to find a job, to ward off poverty, and thus he reaches a North Indian city. He finds work as a salesman but one day he meets with a bicycle accident in which he loses a leg. The day after he is discharged from hospital, he is informed that he's fired from his job. He again sets off on a job quest knocking at every door, wearing off his soles. He finds work as a dish-washer in a hotel. As he scrubs dirty dishes each day, he dreams of Suhra back home waiting for him to return. He must make enough money to return home and repay debts, before he can finally marry the woman of his life. His mother writes to him that Suhra is sick and subsequently of Suhra's death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_of_the_Wicked"title="The Kingdom of the Wicked">
The story of the birth of Christianity and its interaction with the Roman Empire is told largely chronologically by a narrator slowly succumbing to disease during the reign of Domitian.The story starts where "Man of Nazareth" ended, immediately after the crucifixion of Jesus, and covers the work of the apostles, in particular Paul (who himself was not one of the original twelve apostles), the development of Christianity as an Abrahamic religion separate from Judaism, the Great Fire of Rome, the persecution of Christians, the destruction of the Second Temple, and the destruction of Pompeii.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_City_of_Faar"title="The Lost City of Faar">
Loor flumes to her home in Zadaa while Press and Bobby flume to Cloral. Most of the book takes place on the territory known as Cloral, a planet that is entirely covered by water. The inhabitants of Cloral live on giant floating barges, called habitats. The main habitat in the book is called "Grallion". Grallion is responsible for growing food for Cloral. A territory called Zadaa is also visited. Pendragon goes searching for a mythical city called Faar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poky_Little_Puppy"title="The Poky Little Puppy">
Instead of following his siblings when they all sneak out to play (although their mother has warned them that they can go out and play; but never dig holes under the fences so they can go to other yards), the titular character lags behind to observe other things. In the beginning, his independence is rewarded. The puppies had all dug a hole underneath the fence to escape from their yard (instead of playing in their own backyard), but only the Poky Little Puppy's siblings are caught. The Poky Little Puppy avoids punishment because he is away exploring as his mother scolds his siblings, and he comes home alone after everyone is asleep. The Poky Little Puppy then eats the rice pudding that the mother was planning to give all the puppies but withheld because of the fence-digging incident. Not knowing that he is going to be punished, he secretly eats up the rice pudding and crawls into bed happy as a lark.This pattern then repeats itself, only with chocolate custard for dessert instead of rice pudding. Once again, the Poky Little Puppy avoids punishment while everyone else is asleep. He eats up the chocolate custard withheld because of the fence digging incident. Again, not knowing he is going to be punished, he secretly eats the chocolate custard too, and again crawls into bed happy as a lark.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_of_Rin_(novel)"title="Rowan of Rin (novel)">
One morning the people of Rin wake up to find that the stream that flows down from the mountain has slowed to a trickle. By nightfall, it dries up completely; the villagers are alarmed and distressed by this unprecedented crisis. The stream is essential for the survival of the "bukshah", the herd of animals that plow the land and are rich sources of wool and milk, and hence also for the survival of the people of Rin. Because of the severity of the situation, six of the strongest, bravest villagers decide to climb the mountain - considered forbidden territory, with tales telling of a dragon living at its peak - in order to see what is wrong at the source of the stream. Strong Jonn of the Orchard, Brandon the furniture-maker, Marlie the weaver, Allun the baker, and Val and Ellis, the twin millers, volunteer to make the perilous journey. When it turns out that Rowan, the village weakling, has been given a map of the mountain that only reveals the path when he is holding it, the group reluctantly agree that Rowan must join them. During the journey, the group must unravel riddles and persevere despite frightening situations to progress. One by one, each of the villagers breaks down and returns to the village when forced to confront their own greatest fears. Rowan, the most fearful of them all, proves to be the bravest after facing and overcoming each threat despite his fear. Having reached the dragon's lair at the top of the mountain, Rowan is able to get the dragon to breathe fire and melt the ice in and around its lair. The melted ice rushes down a channel inside the mountain and becomes the stream that runs down to the village of Rin, carrying the remaining villagers back home with it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudine_at_School"title="Claudine at School">
Claudine, a fifteen-year-old girl, lives in Montigny, with her father, who is more interested in mollusks than in his daughter. Claudine attends the small village school, which is the primary location of her many adventures, presented as an intimate journal. The journal begins with the new school year, marked by the arrival of the new headmistress, Miss Sergent, and her assistant, Miss Aimée Lanthenay, as well as the boys' instructors, Mr. Duplessis and Mr. Rabastens. Although Claudine begins an affair early on with Miss Lanthenay, Miss Sergent soon discovers the liaison and discourages Miss Lanthenay, ultimately taking her on as her own lover. Claudine feels betrayed and causes trouble for the two women with the help of her friends, cynical Anaïs and childlike Marie Belhomme. Miss Lanthenay's sister Luce arrives at school, and Claudine mistreats her, but Luce idolizes Claudine nonetheless. Some major events of the school year documented in the novel are the final exams, the opening of the new school, and a ball to mark the visit of an important political minister to the town.At the end of the book, everyone is at the ball when Miss Sergent's mother suddenly throws a man's shoe downstairs into the parlor from the living quarters upstairs. Everyone is silent downstairs as the elder Sergent yells at her daughter for disgracing the family by sleeping with the superintendent of the school district. Miss Sergent's attraction to the man had been mentioned earlier by Claudine, who dismissed it when Sergent stole Aimée away from her. Publicly humiliated, Miss Lanthenay runs off crying while Luce and Claudine laugh.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Men_in_the_Moon"title="The First Men in the Moon">
The narrator is a London businessman named Bedford who withdraws to the countryside to write a play, by which he hopes to alleviate his financial problems. Bedford rents a small countryside house in Lympne, in Kent, where he wants to work in peace. He is bothered every afternoon, however, at precisely the same time, by a passer-by making odd noises. After two weeks Bedford accosts the man, who proves to be a reclusive physicist named Mr. Cavor. Bedford befriends Cavor when he learns he is developing a new material, "cavorite", which can negate the force of gravity. When a sheet of cavorite is prematurely processed, it makes the air above it weightless and shoots off into space. Bedford sees in the commercial production of cavorite a possible source of "wealth enough to work any sort of social revolution we fancied; we might own and order the whole world". Cavor hits upon the idea of a spherical spaceship made of "steel, lined with glass", and with sliding "windows or blinds" made of cavorite by which it can be steered, and persuades a reluctant Bedford to undertake a voyage to the Moon; Cavor is certain there is no life there. On the way to the Moon, they experience weightlessness, which Bedford finds "exceedingly restful". On the surface of the Moon the two men discover a desolate landscape, but as the Sun rises, the thin, frozen atmosphere vaporises and strange plants begin to grow with extraordinary rapidity. Bedford and Cavor leave the capsule, but in romping about get lost in the rapidly growing jungle. They hear for the first time a mysterious booming coming from beneath their feet. They encounter "great beasts", "monsters of mere fatness", that they dub "mooncalves", and five-foot-high "Selenites" tending them. At first they hide and crawl about, but growing hungry partake of some "monstrous coralline growths" of fungus that inebriate them. They wander drunkenly until they encounter a party of six extraterrestrials, who capture them. The insectoid lunar natives (referred to as "Selenites", after Selene, the Greek moon goddess) are part of a complex and technologically sophisticated society that lives underground, but this is revealed only in radio communications received from Cavor after Bedford's return to Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy_Blue_(novel)"title="Little Boy Blue (novel)">
Alex Hammond is an 11-year-old boy living in Los Angeles, California. His father Clem Hammond is a carpenter who has been struggling to find a job ever since the Great Depression hit the US. Alex's parents are separated and he is very close with his father. However, Clem does not have the resources to support Alex. As a result, he attempts to have outside intervention in supporting Alex such as enrolling him into military school and placing him into foster homes. Alex has run away from all of these places and exhibits temper tantrums because he does not want to be away from his father. His bursts of rage cause authorities and fellow inmates in various institutions to believe that he is crazy, specifically displaying the early traits of psychopathy, such as what is deemed to be "criminal versatility".The story starts out in 1943, with Alex, Clem, and a social worker going from LA to the Valley Home For Boys in San Fernando Valley where Alex will live. However, he meets up with trouble there because one of his roommates Sammy decides to shoplift from a store. Even though Alex does not steal anything, the housemother Thelma Cavendish decides to punish him. This unfair act in the eyes of Alex causes him to attack her and he rips her dress. He decides to run away with Sammy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demonata"title="The Demonata">
The series centers around three protagonists: Grubitsch "Grubbs" Grady, Cornelius "Kernel" Fleck and Bec MacConn. Although they meet each other at various points, they are from separate times; Grubbs lives in the present day, Kernel in the 1970s and Bec in around 450AD. The books detail their fight against the demon master Lord Loss, his many demon familiars and the mysterious Shadow, who promises to destroy the human universe and to even stop death. Together with The Disciples, the main characters attempt to thwart the Demonata from destroying the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Dragon"title="Mount Dragon">
Dr. Guy Carson is a young scientist and cowboy-at-heart, raised on a southwestern ranch and bored with city life. That is, until the prestigious genetic engineering corporation GeneDyne offers Carson a six-month position as a lab researcher at its Mount Dragon Remote Desert Testing Facility in Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico. Carson accepts and soon finds that the Mount Dragon laboratory is testing far more promising and dangerous things than Carson ever expected. Scientists at the facility spend months isolated from the outside world, essentially locked in the guarded facility within a Level 5 containment lab, as they research a vaccine for the influenza virus. With the help of his feisty lab assistant, Susanna Cabeza de Vaca, Carson begins to unlock the mysteries of the spontaneously mutating influenza virus, dubbed “X-FLU”.Over time, Carson and DeVaca discover that their predecessor Dr. Franklin Burt, was literally driven mad by his time at Mount Dragon and was institutionalized. Burt’s death is not the only one caused by the facility; an emergency quarantine prompted by the contamination of the Level 5 lab by a chimp infected with the deadly X-FLU results in the death of researcher Rosalind Brandon-Smith. Soon, more human harm follows as Carson’s friend and messmate Dr. Andrew Vanderwagon spontaneously punctures his own eye with a fork and attempts to commit suicide and kill others. Through researching Burt’s descent to madness, Carson and DeVaca realize that what occurred with Vanderwagon closely resembled the behavior of Burt toward the end. In fact, everyone at the facility except for Carson and DeVaca begin to display abnormal and erratic behavior that Carson at first presumes is the result of tight quarters or contamination by X-FLU.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathummayude_Aadu"title="Pathummayude Aadu">
Ever since Basheer first left home to participate in the salt satyagraha at Kozhikode, he had led a wanderer's life; "Ottaanthadi, muchaanvayaru". Only occasionally did he return to his home at Thalayolapparambu, with the intention of penning down his thoughts in interludes of tranquility. Next to the house where he grew up, in the same compound, he had a walled-in plot with a small house. He built this retreat himself, and around the house he planted a garden. This gate was always closed, and he required silence and peace of mind. He would sit and write or walk around his garden tending to his beloved plants.On returning from one of his travels, he was forced to live in the house where his large family lived, instead of in his private home. This household was always filled with noise and chaos; no place for a writer. The inhabitants were Basheer's mother, his younger siblings and their families. Add to this, there were myriads of domestic animals who treated the house as their own.Basheer's sister Pathumma, who lived in a dilapidated shack a little distance away, would visit the house every day with her daughter Khadeeja and with them would come Pathumma's goat. This goat had absolute freedom in the house. It would eat up anything it could, from fallen leaves before someone came to sweep them, Chaambaykka fruits (Water Apple) from the lower branches of the tree basheer planted, trousers worn by Basheer's nephew Abi, grass specially gathered for it, food set away for it, even food meant for human inhabitants of the house, to the author's copy of newest editions of Basheer's "Baalyakaalasakhi", "Shabdangal" and "Vishwavikhyaadamaaya Mookku", fresh out of press.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_2042"title="Moscow 2042">
The Russian author Kartsev, living in Munich in 1982 (just like Voinovich himself), time travels to the Moscow of 2042. After the "Great August Revolution", the new leader referred to as "Genialissimus" has changed the Soviet Union... up to a certain point. After Vladimir Lenin's dream of the world revolution narrowed down to Joseph Stalin's theory of "Socialism in one country", Genialissimus has decided to start from building "Communism in one city", namely in Moscow.The ideology has changed somewhat, into a hodgepodge of Marxism–Leninism and Russian Orthodoxy (the Genialissimus is also Patriarch). The country is ruled by the CPGB – The Communist Party of State Security, a merger of the Communist Party and the KGB. The decay from which the Soviet Union suffered has worsened. The rest of the Soviet Union, where people barely survive, has been separated by a Berlin type of wall from the "paradise" of Moscow, where communism has been realized. Within the wall everyone gets everything by the communist principle, "according to his needs", though their needs are not decided by themselves, but by the Genialissimus. Most people have "ordinary needs", but a chosen few have "extraordinary needs". For the first-mentioned group, life is dismal even within the privileged "Moscorep" (Moscow Communist Republic). 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Fischer_of_Geneva"title="Doctor Fischer of Geneva">
The story is narrated by Alfred Jones, a translator for a large chocolate company in Switzerland. Jones, in his 50s, lost his left hand while working as a fireman during The Blitz. Jones is a widower when he meets the young Anna-Luise Fischer in a local restaurant. Jones is surprised to learn that Anna-Luise is the daughter of Dr Fischer, who has become rich after inventing a perfumed toothpaste and whose dinner parties are famous (or infamous) around Geneva. After a brief courtship, the two are married.Anna-Luise is estranged from her father, the Fischer of the book's title. Jones goes to see Fischer to inform him that he and Anna-Luise are married, but Fischer is indifferent to the information. Later, however, he invites Jones to one of his dinner parties; Anna-Luise warns Jones not to go, saying that these parties are nothing more than an opportunity for her father to humiliate the rich sycophants (whom she calls “the Toads,” her malapropism for “toadies”) in his coterie. Jones goes anyway when Anna-Luise relents, saying that one dinner party can’t corrupt him.At the party, Fischer and his guests explain some of the rules: If a guest follows all the rules, he or she receives a present (or prize) at the end of the meal. The presents are usually tailored to each guest and are worth a substantial amount of money. However, the rules include complete submission to the humiliations of Fischer, which always include barbed verbal taunts that focus on each guest’s failings or insecurities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_R"title="J R">
"J R" tells the story of the eponymous J R Vansant, an 11-year-old schoolboy who obscures his identity through payphone calls and postal money orders in order to parlay penny stock holdings into a fortune on paper. The novel broadly satirizes what Gaddis called "the American dream turned inside out". One critic called it "the greatest satirical novel in American literature." Novelist Louis Auchincloss thought it "worthy of Swift."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Star_(novel)"title="Polar Star (novel)">
Arkady Renko, former Chief Investigator of the Moscow Town Prosecutor's Office, is serving a self-imposed exile in Siberia to avoid being detained for his actions in "Gorky Park" several years earlier, despite the Soviet Union's ostensibly increasing liberalization. He procures menial employment as a fish gutter on the "slime line" of a large Arctic Sea factory ship called the "Polar Star", part of a joint Soviet-American fishing exercise within detente.He is brought to the attention of Viktor Marchuk, the ship's captain, after a young woman named Zina Patiashvili is found dead in a net full of freshly-caught fish. Due to his past as a homicide investigator, he is given the task of finding out what happened to her—to the dislike of political officer Volovoi. Hess, the ship's chief electrical engineer—an elaborate blind for his espionage activities—welcomes Arkady more warmly. Researching the girl's background, he discovers an open and somewhat radical Georgian personality, known for her many lovers (including the Captain, before she became a crew member) and fondness for underground music. Looking into her death also attracts the attention of the ship's main gang, led by Karp Korobetz—the ship's leading fisher and Arkady's former prisoner. The American corporate representative on board, Susan Hightower, takes an interest in the case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Square_(novel)"title="Red Square (novel)">
Now back in Moscow, Arkady Renko struggles to keep the peace in a town overrun by organized crime and the economic recession caused by the death-throes of the Soviet Union. The lawlessness of the new Moscow is brought home to him when one of this informants, a Russian Jewish black marketer named Rudy Rosen, is killed by a fire bomb. Suspicion for the act is divided among each of the leading gangs, such as one led by a new Soviet "entrepreneur" or the ever troublesome Chechens.Whilst looking over Rosen's apartment, Arkady is confused by an incoming fax asking "where is Red Square?", as well as several connections to Germany, specifically Munich. He also is amazed to hear the voice of Irina Asanova, his long lost love from "Gorky Park", announcing for the recently unblocked American propaganda station Radio Liberty, operating out of Munich. Uncovering more and more connections to Germany, and once again facing suppression at home - including the killing of his partner - Arkady manages to coerce the prosecutor to allow him to go to the recently reunified Germany, in an unofficial capacity.He looks up leads in the Rosen case, as well as trying to re-connect with Irina, but finds she wants nothing to do with him. He soon enters a strained but beneficial relationship with a German police officer called Peter Schiller, who describes his grandfather's escapades as one of Heinrich Himmler's art collectors, particularly of revolutionary avant garde Russian art, presently persecuted by the Soviet regime. Arkady finds himself a rival in Max Albov, Irina's colleague at Radio Liberty, whom he had previously encountered in Moscow and starts to suspect of involvement with Rosen. Irina repents of her dislike for Arkady, after learning that he had not been living as the spoiled apparatchik he had been portrayed, and awkwardly all three of them head for Berlin. At an art exhibition, the avant garde piece by Malevich called "Red Square" is proudly shown to audiences. Increasingly finding his present company intertwined with the case, Arkady realizes that he has stumbled across a vast, and deadly, art smuggling operation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercy_among_the_Children"title="Mercy among the Children">
Set in the rural Miramichi Valley of New Brunswick, the novel depicts the family of Sydney Henderson, a man who vowed in childhood never to express himself in anger or violence after accidentally pushing a playmate off the roof of a building. As a result of his vow, residents of the community exploit Henderson, framing him for a crime and tormenting his children. The novel closely explores the effect of this dynamic on one particular son, Lyle, who is drawn into violence as he attempts to defend his family. The characters are limited by many constraints such as class, poverty, lack of education, family background and reputation and the biases that come along with these factors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Presence_of_Mine_Enemies"title="In the Presence of Mine Enemies">
Wehrmacht officer Heinrich Gimpel astonishes his 10-year-old daughter, Alicia, with a secret that has been hidden from her all her life: the family is Jewish. He explains that the Gimpels, their friends Walther and Esther Stutzman, and their extended families all belong to the remnants of Jews who now survive by hiding in plain sight within the very society that wants them dead. Now old enough, by family tradition, to be trusted with this life-or-death deception, Alicia is obliged to hide the truth from her friends, her classmates, and even her younger sisters, even as she is forced to regard her school's racist curriculum from a new perspective that leaves her sick and angry over all the anti-Semitic propaganda that she had always learned and parroted without question.Meanwhile, Heinrich finds himself caught in the marital strife between his co-worker, Willi Dorsch, and Willi's wife, Erika. Willi, doubting Erika's fidelity due to her constant flirting with Heinrich, begins an extra-marital affair with his secretary. Embittered by her husband's infidelity, Erika seeks to have a retaliatory affair with Heinrich. He resists, which leads to Erika accusing him of being a Jew and Heinrich being arrested by the Sicherheitspolizei. It is only after Erika realizes that her accusation caused Heinrich's children to be taken as well that she confesses her lie and attempts to commit suicide, unaware the entire time that Heinrich and his family actually are Jewish.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Thursday"title="Sweet Thursday">
Doc returns to a failed Western Biological Laboratories and a changed Cannery Row after serving in the army during World War II. Mack and the Boys are still living in the Palace Flophouse, but Lee Chong has sold his general store to Joseph and Mary Rivas. Since the death of its original owner Dora, the local brothel, The Bear Flag Restaurant, is now being run by Dora's older sister Fauna, a former mission worker previously known as Flora. Under Fauna, the girls of the Bear Flag study etiquette and posture with the goal of joining Fauna's list of "gold stars," former employees of the Bear Flag who have married and left their employ there.As Doc tries to rebuild his neglected business, the latest Bear Flag resident Suzy is causing trouble. Fauna knows Suzy isn't cut out to be a working girl, but her soft heart always causes her to fall for a hard luck story. Deciding to make Suzy one of her gold star girls, Fauna plots to throw Suzy into the arms of an unwitting Doc and enlists the aid of Mack and the Boys.After a disastrous party hosted by Mack and the Boys, Suzy leaves the Bear Flag, but not to marry Doc. Choosing to live alone, Suzy moves into an empty boiler in a vacant lot and takes a job at the local diner, the Golden Poppy. While Cannery Row is stunned over Suzy's actions and Doc wrestles with a critical project, Hazel, one of the Boys living in the Palace Flophouse, struggles with his own demons. Having been told by Fauna in an astrological reading he will become President of the United States, Hazel fights destiny. To practice for high office, Hazel understands that he must learn to make difficult decisions — one of which is breaking Doc's arm, for he’s realized that this, arousing Suzy's sympathy, is the only way to bring the couple together. Realizing Doc's broken arm will keep him from a much-needed collecting expedition, Mack and the Boys teach Suzy to drive a car. Suzy and the injured Doc head off to the coast for the collecting expedition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_City_(novel)"title="Paradise City (novel)">
Giancarlo Lo Manto, an East Bronx-raised Italian American, returns with his widowed mother to Naples at the age of fifteen. Giancarlo grows up to become an educated yet street-wise cop within the poverty and crime-ridden southern Italian city. His ongoing battle with the city's organized crime families has him in constant contact with his native New York City. Then one day, his young niece, who is on an exchange trip to the city that never sleeps, goes missing resulting in Giancarlo's canceling his holiday to Italy's Isle of Capri in exchange for America's Island of Manhattan to search for her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Grass"title="The Death of Grass">
A new virus strain has infected rice crops in East Asia causing massive famine; the virus is also revealed to be found in the UK but because of its selectivity does not affect the country's agriculture. After the introduction of a new pesticide, developed in preference to breeding resistant crops, a mutated virus appears and infects the staple crops of West Asia and Europe such as wheat and barley—all of the grasses (thus the novel's title). It threatens a famine engulfing the whole of the Old World, while Australasia and the Americas attempt to impose rigorous quarantine to keep the virus out.The novel follows the struggles of engineer John Custance and his friend, civil servant Roger Buckley, as, along with their families, they make their way across an England which is rapidly descending into anarchy, hoping to reach the safety of John's brother's potato farm in an isolated Westmorland valley. Buckley, having advance warning of the government's plot to hydrogen bomb major cities, alerts Custance to evacuate. Picking up a travelling companion in a gun shop owner named Pirrie after an attempt to procure arms, they find they must sacrifice many of their morals in order to stay alive. At one point, when their food supply runs out, they kill a family to take their bread. The protagonist justifies this with the belief that "it was them or us."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegiance_(novel)"title="Allegiance (novel)">
The story was told in three parallel threads which eventually intertwined in the later part of the book.Five members of the Imperial Stormtroopers attached to the Imperial Star Destroyer "Reprisal" began to have doubt about their work after being made to participate in massacre of innocents on planet Teardrop. The planet had a rebel base, but evacuated just moments before the "Reprisal" arrived. The Imperial Security Bureau (ISB) officers in charge of the operations had the innocent people killed anyway. Back on board the Star Destroyer, the ISB Major Dreflin made a mistake of pushing the stormtrooper too far and ended up killed by his own weapon. The five stormtroopers aboard realized official channels would get them nowhere, and managed to escape on board the ship "Suwantek". While on the run, their sense of honor and duty led them to seemingly unrelated incidents where they rescued local populace, and subsequently pursued a link to a pirate group named the Bloodscars operating in the Shelsha Sector.Leia was dispatched to the Shelsha Sector to meet three local representatives of the Rebellion. Luke, Han and Chewbacca went along as her escorts. They separated to pursue different leads, the men to investigate pirate attacks on the Rebel supply line, and Leia to a negotiation that the governor of Shelsha sector was going to declare independence and join the Rebellion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Pioneers!"title="O Pioneers!">
"O Pioneers!" tells the story of the Bergsons, a family of Swedish-American immigrants in the farm country near the fictional town of Hanover, Nebraska, at the turn of the 20th century. The main character, Alexandra Bergson, inherits the family farmland when her father dies, and she devotes her life to making the farm a viable enterprise at a time when many other immigrant families are giving up and leaving the prairie. The novel is also concerned with two romantic relationships, one between Alexandra and family friend Carl Linstrum and the other between Alexandra's brother Emil and the married Marie Shabata.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hammer_of_God_(Clarke_novel)"title="The Hammer of God (Clarke novel)">
A new contact binary asteroid is discovered by an amateur astronomer, Dr. Angus Millar, having been missed by the SPACEGUARD due to a combination of factors. It is named Kali and is determined to be on course to hit Earth in about a year's time. "Goliath", having been at Jupiter L4, leaves for Deimos to receive the ATLAS propulsion module - designed for attaching with the asteroid and slowly deflecting it to a safe course using nuclear fusion-powered thrusters. Then, having loaded hydrogen fuel at Europa, "Goliath" reaches Kali and starts the ATLAS.Extremists from The Reborn, believing collision with Kali is meant to be, had planted bombs in the ATLAS and they explode just moments after the activation of ATLAS. However, most of the fuel tanks of ATLAS remain functional and the plan is changed to use "Goliath" itself to propel the asteroid. Meanwhile, a contingency plan is discussed by Earth's government to use nuclear weapons to break up the peanut shaped asteroid with enough energy that the fragments miss Earth.With Kali getting closer to Sun, it starts ejecting material from vents and is also adjudged to be a probable extinct comet. The resulting venting cancels off a bit of the deflection, taking it too close to the margin of error. Meanwhile Earth's government affirms the usage of nuclear weapons as the success of "Goliath"s mission isn't deemed certain enough.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor's_Quest"title="Survivor's Quest">
"Survivor's Quest" opens with a meeting between Talon Karrde and Luke and Mara Jade Skywalker. Karrde's people had earlier picked up an urgent transmission, addressed to Luke, coming from Admiral Voss Parck on the planet Nirauan. Before the message could be passed on, however, it had been stolen by a member of Karrde's own organisation, one Dean Jinzler. Fearing that the message might be somehow connected with the unknown menace Parck and Baron Fel had warned them about two years previous, Luke and Mara decide to head out to Nirauan.There, they learn that the message had in fact come from Chiss Aristocra Chaf'orm'bintrano (or "Formbi"). The Chiss have found the remains of the pioneering Jedi expedition, Outbound Flight Project, which had been mercilessly destroyed by Grand Admiral Thrawn many years previous. Now, the Chiss wish to hand over their find to the New Republic, and Luke and Mara join the odd group—which includes a squad of stormtroopers from the 501st, a remnant of an alien people, the Geroons, who owe a strange debt to the people of Outbound Flight, and a false New Republic Ambassador—which will visit the site of the tragedy.As they voyage on the "Chaf Envoy" deeper into Chiss space, into a treacherous cluster of stars known as the Redoubt, Luke and Mara grow more uneasy. Occurrences of sabotage and theft only serve to deepen their suspicions. On top of that, Mara begins to feel torn between her duty to the New Republic and her troubled respect for the Empire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Year_Down_Yonder"title="A Year Down Yonder">
The year is 1938, and the Great Depression has hit the Dowdel family hard. 15-year-old Mary Alice is sent downstate to live with Grandma Dowdel while her mother and father remain in Chicago. Her brother, Joey Dowdel, joins the army while Mary Alice is less than thrilled with the arrangement. Grandma's Hickory farming community could not be more different from Chicago if it tried, and the grandmother Mary Alice remembers from childhood is a no-nonsense country gal.Having no choice in the matter, Mary Alice arrives by train in September with her beloved cat Bootsie and prized Philco radio. Day one in the new high school finds Mary Alice getting on the wrong side of the local bully, Mildred Burdick. Mildred brazenly follows Mary Alice home, demanding a dollar---but Grandma Dowdel turns the tables on the tyrant, slyly untying Mildred's stolen horse. Faced with a barefoot 5-mile-hike home, Mildred loses interest in making trouble for Mary Alice. October brings plenty of other trouble, however, when another teen hooligan - August Fluke Jr. - gets in the habit of knocking down privies for pre-Halloween amusement. With the help of a strategically strung wire and a pan of glue, Grandma Dowdel trips up Augie's trickery, with a hot coat of glue that sticks "till kingdom come." Luckily, Grandma's treats prove far sweeter than her tricks: at the party, Mrs. Dowdel dishes up home-baked pies made with "borrowed" pecans and pumpkins. Moonlit winter nights find Grandma and Mary Alice trapping foxes; with the extra money, Grandma buys Joey a train ticket and he arrives just in time for the Christmas pageant. But when Mildred Burdick's illegitimate baby turns up in the manger, Christmas is anything but a silent night.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lime_Twig"title="The Lime Twig">
In England after World War II, a sedate, bored lower-class couple—Michael and Margaret Banks—are lured into fronting a racehorse scheme. Michael is befriended by William Hencher, a well-meaning but lost soul who fell into association with a ruthless gang during the war. After his mother's death, Hencher wants to repay the Bankses for their allowing him to rent a room in their home, where he had lived with his mother for twenty years. Knowing Michael likes horses, Hencher invites him to the heist of the racehorse Rock Castle—which goes awry, leading to Hencher's death. The gang members then keep Michael under wraps. Realizing that Margaret is becoming suspicious of Michael's absence, they force Michael to call and tell her to meet him at a party. In order to ensure that Michael will front as the owner of the stolen stallion, they kidnap Margaret while distracting Michael with two women, both sexual predators. The heavy of the gang, Thick, beats Margaret mercilessly with a truncheon after she attempts to escape; Larry, the kingpin of the gang, slashes and rapes her. Meanwhile, Michael finds pleasure in a femme fatale, Sybilline, the mistress of Larry—as well as two other women. Badly beaten in a street fight with a constable, Michael attempts to redeem himself from both criminal activity and infidelity by thwarting the race, which has been set up in order to allow Larry to retire to America in comfort.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nervous_Conditions"title="Nervous Conditions">
Tambu is the main character of the novel. The novel opens with the news that Tambu’s older brother, Nhamo, had just died. Tambu is not upset about this because Nhamo studied at a missionary school away from home with his uncle Babamukuru and his family. The only thing Tambu desires is to attend school, but her family is very poor and does not have enough money to pay her school fees. Tambu’s uncle, Babamukuru, and his family came to visit the homestead. Because of Babamakuru’s success, he is worshiped whenever he comes to visit. During the visit, Babamukuru suggests that Tambu should take Nhamo's place and attend the missionary school by his house. Upon arriving, she soon becomes close to her cousin Nyasha and completely focuses on her studies. During term break, everyone returns to visit the family back in the homestead. Tambu does not want to go back as she is much more comfortable living with Babamukuru.Towards the end of the term, there is an exam administered at Tambu’s school. This exam is to test the students and offer them an opportunity to study at a well known missionary school. Tambu excels on the exam and is offered a scholarship to attend this well known school. In the new school Tambu is introduced to many cultural changes; however, she remains resistant to the changes. As always she is fully focused on her studies. Consequently, she remains cautious of her daily situations and nervous of the conditions that surround her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Big_Heat"title="Night of the Big Heat">
The main characters are a former novelist named Richard Callum and his wife Frankie, who own a pub called the White Lion. Richard has hired a secretary to help out on his new book, Patricia Wells, who turns out to have an obsession for Callum. A visiting scientist named Harsen reveals, ultimately, that the reason for the extreme heat is that an alien race of spiders are "beaming in" scouts from their home planet via a radio wave ray, which generates intense amounts of heat as a side effect.The spiders themselves are carnivorous and eat humans, and give off bodily heat intense enough to burn alive any person who gets too close to them. Together with Harsen, Patricia, and science fiction author Vernon Stone, the Callums try to make it to the island's radio station to call for help so that they can thwart the invasion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathstalker_(novel)"title="Deathstalker (novel)">
Set in a far-future fictional universe, "Deathstalker" follows the life of Owen Deathstalker, a minor aristocrat and historian, as he is catapulted from a life of quiet luxury and academic pursuit into a galaxy-wide rebellion against the empire in which he lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionboy"title="Lionboy">
## Lionboy.Charlie is a young child who is able to speak to cats (and all felines) due to an incident involving a leopard cub's blood when he was a baby.He lives in London with his parents, Dr. Aneba Ashanti and Professor Magdalen Start, both of whom are scientists working on a cure for asthma and other allergies caused by contact with the family Felidae, or referred in the books as allergies.His parents, as a result of their scientific discoveries, are kidnapped by a pharmaceutical company known mysteriously as the Corporacy. Charlie, closely avoiding being kidnapped himself, sets out to find them and ends up on board Circe, a circus ship making its way to Paris. On board he befriends most of the circus performers as well as (using the ability) a pride of beautiful performing lions who seek the boy's help to escape their cruel trainer, Maccomo. Meanwhile, the vicious criminal Rafi Sadler, who is employed by the Corporacy, is hot on his heels, going to any lengths to get his hands on Charlie. The circus ship arrives in Paris and Charlie escapes with the lions. They make their way to Gare d'Austerlitz where they hide on the Orient Express which is destined for Venice, the place Charlie's parents are rumored to have been taken.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_(novel)"title="Junk (novel)">
"Junk" is told in the first person, with each chapter having a different character narrating. At the beginning of the story, fourteen-year old Gemma Brogan is spending time with David 'Tar' Lawson, a boy of the same age. Tar is a victim of physical abuse at the hands of his father, and — as he later realises — emotional abuse from his mother. Both of his parents are alcoholics. After a particularly violent incident, he decides to run away to Bristol, even though he knows no-one there and has no money. Gemma, despite having loving (albeit strict) parents, also decides to leave home and join Tar in Bristol shortly afterwards.In Bristol, Tar sleeps rough, interacting regularly only with Skolly, a local newsagent who likes his naive, trusting attitude. Skolly eventually introduces Tar to Richard, an absent-minded, vegan anarchist, who opens up abandoned houses for use as squats. Tar joins Richard and his friends Vonny, an eighteen-year old 'motherly' woman; and her boyfriend Jerry, who is described as a bit useless. Between them, the young adults support Tar financially in order to keep him safe and away from his father, even though it is illegal. Gemma comes 'to visit', intending to stay. Vonny is frustrated by this, as she does not see it as the same situation; they are protecting Tar, but Gemma is unafraid and merely wants a more 'interesting' life. Vonny reluctantly allows Gemma to remain with them, but she insists that both teenagers notify their families from a telephone box that they are safe. Tar is happy with their situation, but Gemma gradually grows more restless, wanting to find some people their own age.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Vernon_of_Haddon_Hall"title="Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall">
The story is narrated by Sir George Vernon's 35-year-old cousin, Malcolm François de Lorraine Vernon. Raised in France, he became enamored of Mary, Queen of Scots, when she was a youth there, and followed her to Scotland. Historically speaking, Mary was captured, imprisoned, and forced to abdicate the Scottish throne in July 1567, but in the novel, Malcolm receives word of Mary's capture in the Fall. He immediately flees to England, and heads to Haddon Hall to take refuge with Sir George. On the way, he meets and becomes friends with John Manners, son of Sir George's hated enemy Thomas Manners (Lord Rutland).Years earlier, Sir George had suggested that Malcolm marry George's daughter Dorothy as a way to keep the Vernon properties held by Vernons. Dorothy at the time had been an awkward adolescent; she now is a mature, strong-willed, red-headed beauty. On his way to Haddon Hall, Malcolm (still in the company of John Manners) encounters Dorothy, her aunt, and her friend Madge, all of whom live at Haddon Hall. Catching glimpses of each other, John Manners and Dorothy instantly begin to be attracted to each other. Malcolm, by contrast, sees his cousin as too beautiful and strong-willed to make a good wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_(Suzuki_novel)"title="Spiral (Suzuki novel)">
The events in the story occur one day after the events of the 1st book. It introduces Ando Mitsuo, a coroner still struggling with his son's death, being assigned to do the autopsy of his old classmate, Ryūji Takayama. He and his colleague, Miyashita, find a tumor in Ryūji's heart, which is believed to be his cause of death. Puzzled as the tumor appears similar to smallpox (which was eradicated in 1979), Ando completes the autopsy and, upon finding a newspaper poking through a suture, is reminded of Ryūji's cryptography hobby. Finding the newspaper numbers interesting, he decodes them and discovers that they spell "RING", perplexing Ando.In the search for the message's meaning, Ando soon meets Ryūji's assistant and lover, Mai Takano. Mentioning a videotape that Ryūji watched before dying, Mai believes that it is connected to his death through a curse. Learning of Kazuyuki Asakawa, Ryūji's friend and the protagonist of "Ring", Ando considers speaking to him, only to learn that Asakawa and his family were involved in a car accident. Finding that Asakawa is the sole survivor and catatonic, Ando investigates relevant evidence and learns that his wife and child were dead well before the car crashed and that a tape recorder and word processor were in the vehicle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cast_of_Shadows"title="Cast of Shadows">
The book's plot is set in the near future at a time when cloning has been legalised in the U.S. It is based around a Chicago-based cloning doctor, Davis Moore, whose daughter is brutally raped and killed. The doctor uses the murderer's DNA to clone him. The resulting clone is a boy called Justin Finn, whom Moore follows throughout his life, hoping the boy will offer a glimpse into the killer's psyche and perhaps enable Moore to find the identity of his daughter's murderer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_Mirror_Bay"title="The Secret of Mirror Bay">
Aunt Eloise invites Nancy and her friends to a cabin at Mirror Bay, in Cooperstown, New York, to solve a case of a mysterious woman seen gliding across the water. Nancy is then involved in a vacation hoax because she resembles a woman involved in the hoax. A strange green sorcerer who appears in the woods and a lost treasure involving the gliding woman lead Nancy and her friends to uncover a concealed operation in the woods.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_the_Fire_Dragon"title="The Mystery of the Fire Dragon">
Nancy Drew is called to New York City by her Aunt Eloise to solve a missing-person case. The granddaughter of her elderly Chinese author neighbor, Mr. Soong, has been kidnapped. The search is on, first by disguising Nancy's friend George Fayne as the missing Chi Che, and then pursuing a lead at Chi Che's place of employment, a book store, where Nancy encounters its suspicious owner, Mr Stromberg.Nancy decides to visit the store again but as she goes along the sidewalk, Nancy is knocked-out by a falling vase which hits her on the head. While Nancy is unconscious, Bess and George take up the mystery and a red-haired man is quickly arrested.A series of clues leads the girls to Hong Kong, where Nancy's boyfriend, Ned Nickerson, joins the action. Nancy foolishly follows "Chi Che" on board a plane, and is herself kidnapped. Ingenious Nancy uses her lipstick to signal for help on the plane windows. After her rescue, she follows more clues to an international smuggling ring, and, utilizing a disguised George once again, forces the thieves out of hiding and has the chance to finally locate the missing girl.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spock's_World"title="Spock's World">
Certain Vulcan organizations, many with anti-human biases, have begun a movement calling for the secession of Vulcan from the United Federation of Planets, citing the emotionality and unpredictability of humans as dangerous factors for the further development of the planet Vulcan. The dispute is to be resolved by a planetwide vote, with televised debates by important figures for a certain time period beforehand. James T. Kirk and the rest of the crew of the "Enterprise" are called away from shore leave on Earth in order to serve as diplomats for Vulcan, arguing against the secession, as the odds that Vulcan will leave the Federation are considered very high. Spock, being half-human and half-Vulcan as well as a prominent Starfleet officer, is seen as one of the most important figures in the debate.While on Vulcan, the crew discovers (mostly through detective work by Dr. Leonard McCoy, using the aid of a sentient computer named "Moira" resident on the Enterprise) that the secession movement was sparked at least partially by T'Pring, Spock's childhood bride-mate, who has nursed a grudge against Kirk and Spock for years for the deception involved in their participation in the koon-ut-kalifee ceremony (described in the original series episode "Amok Time"). Using the financial resources and connections available to her after the death of Stonn, T'Pring funded many of the organizations seeking to spark anti-human prejudice in the larger Vulcan population, as well as arranging favorable contracts for them regarding Federation property that would revert to the care of the Vulcan government should the secession take place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Ulysses_(novel)"title="HMS Ulysses (novel)">
The novel features HMS "Ulysses", a light cruiser that is well armed and among the fastest ships in the world. Her crew is pushed well beyond the limits of endurance and the book starts in the aftermath of a mutiny. "Ulysses" puts to sea again to escort FR-77, a vital convoy heading for Murmansk. They are beset by numerous challenges: an unusually fierce Arctic storm, German ships and U-boats, as well as air attacks. All slowly reduce the convoy from 32 ships to only five. "Ulysses" is sunk in a failed attempt to ram a German cruiser after all her other weapons had been destroyed. This echoes events in which British G-class destroyer and , an armed merchant cruiser, sacrificed themselves by engaging larger opponents.The book uses a set of events to paint moving portrayals of the crew and the human aspects of the war. Maclean's heroes are not especially motivated by ideals, they rarely excel at more than one task and they are overcome by a respectable enemy. It is their resilience that pushes these seamen to acts of heroism. The realism of the descriptions, the believable motivations of the characters and the simplicity of the line of events make the story all the more credible, though the number of coincidental accidents that plague the crew is startling.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_Through_the_Deeps"title="Tunnel Through the Deeps">
In an alternative history, the United States lost the American Revolutionary War and George Washington was executed for treason. Thus, America in 1973 is still under the control of the British Empire. The divergence point between this world and our own occurred far earlier, however, when the Moors won the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa on the Iberian peninsula, on July 16, 1212. Thus it was that Spain was unable to become unified, owing to the survival of an Islamic presence in its territory, and therefore could not finance the expedition of Christopher Columbus in 1492. Instead, it was John Cabot who discovered America, just a few years later.The protagonist, Captain Augustine Washington, is a direct descendant of George Washington, and labors in his 'traitorous' shadow. Captain Washington and Sir Isambard Brassey-Brunel (descendant of Isambard Kingdom Brunel) get together to link the heart of the British Empire with its far-flung Atlantic colony in North America, although they fall out over Augustine's wooing of Isambard's young daughter, Iris, and as a result of disputes over engineering techniques. However, after a number of adventures the two are reconciled on Sir Isambard's deathbed, and the lovers later marry. After the completion of the tunnel, the American colonies are granted their independence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herr_Lehmann"title="Herr Lehmann">
Frank Lehmann works as a barkeeper in Kreuzberg, West Berlin, complacent and drinking frequently, with few other ambitions. His 30th birthday is fast approaching, and as a result, he is teasingly called "Herr Lehmann" ("Mr Lehmann") by his friends. The book follows Frank Lehmann's daily life in Kreuzberg and showcases the attitude of a generation of young adults in West Berlin in autumn 1989 in the months leading up to the Fall of the Berlin Wall.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Having_Writ..."title="And Having Writ...">
According to the novel, the Siberian explosion was originally caused by the crash landing of the spacecraft named "The Wanderer". In this alternate reality, however, the alien astronauts are able to commandeer their failing vessel so that it lands in the Pacific Ocean, just outside San Francisco.Shortly after landing, the quartet of spacemen are rescued from the sea by an American ship and taken to California. "The Wanderer" sinks into the ocean, and the team reasons that they must find a way to accelerate Earth's technological advances so that they can get back home. The eventual conclusion at which they arrive is that they must provoke the planet into what Ari claims is an inevitable global conflict, one that will (through weaponry innovations) result in a boom of new science and industry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Always_Outnumbered,_Always_Outgunned"title="Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned">
Ex-convict Socrates Fortlow lives in Watts, a tough Los Angeles neighborhood, and struggles to stay on the path of righteousness. He befriends a young boy named Darryl, who initially dislikes Socrates but grows to appreciate his mentorship. He counsels Corrina, a pretty 23-year old who works and wants to keep her husband who has no job. He counsels the husband, Howard, to step up lest he lose Corrina. After a few trials and tribulations, Socrates lands a job at a supermarket further on the west side of Los Angeles. He helps Darryl again as he stands up against gang members, and tries to make up for his past misdeeds by reaching out to an old flame.Socrates finds himself in jail, having hit a man who struck a dog with his car and wanted to finish off the dog. Socrates carries the dog to a local vet, who later posts his bail. Through his savvy public defender, Socrates gets a suspended sentence. At the end of the novel Socrates does his final good deed, helping his friend, suffering from terminal cancer, find enough pain medication to end his own life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno's_Conscience"title="Zeno's Conscience">
The novel is presented as a diary written by Zeno, published by his doctor (who claims that it is full of lies). The doctor has left a little note in the beginning, saying he had Zeno write an autobiography to help him in his psychoanalysis. The doctor has published the work as revenge for Zeno discontinuing his visits.The diary, however, does not follow chronological order; instead, it is structured in large chapters, each developing a particular theme (tobacco addiction, his father's death, the story of his marriage, and so on). Only the last chapter is a real diary, with pages referring to specific dates at the time of the First World War.Zeno first writes about his cigarette addiction and cites the first times he smoked. In his first few paragraphs, he remembers his life as a child. One of his friends bought cigarettes for his brother and him. Soon, he steals money from his father to buy tobacco, but finally decides not to do this out of shame. Eventually, he starts to smoke his father's half-smoked cigars instead.The problem with his "last cigarette" starts when he is twenty. He contracts a fever and his doctor tells him that to heal he must abstain from smoking. He decides smoking is bad for him and smokes his "last cigarette" so he can quit. However, this is not his last and he soon becomes plagued with "last cigarettes." He attempts to quit on days of important events in his life and soon obsessively attempts to quit on the basis of the harmony in the numbers of dates. Each time, the cigarette fails to truly be the last. He goes to doctors and asks friends to help him give up the habit, but to no avail. He even commits himself into a clinic, but escapes. The whole theme, while objectively serious, is often treated in a humorous way.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowmancer"title="Shadowmancer">
The fantasy story takes place in Whitby and concerns the evil sorcerer Reverend Obadiah Demurral who is seeking two powerful amulets, called the Keruvim, which he plans to use to control the elements and dominate the world.At the start of the book he purchases the first Keruvim (which takes the form of a golden statuette of a cherub) from an Ethiopian mercenary named Gebra Nubera.He then uses the Keruvim to destroy a ship upon which the next Keruvim is prophesied to arrive, but when he surveys the wreckage he finds nothing.The next day an Ethiopian boy named Raphah arrives searching for the Keruvim. He befriends the main character, an urchin named Thomas and reveals that he is a messenger from God (referred to as Riathamus here), and that Demurral is a Shadowmancer, a sorcerer who can control the dead. Despite not believing in God, Thomas agrees to assist Raphah in regaining the Keruvim because he wants revenge on Demurral for evicting him and his dying mother from their home.They pursue Demurral and the Keruvim with the assistance of Thomas's tomboy friend Kate and the mysterious smuggler, Jacob Crane. During the story, Raphah, Kate and Jacob Crane, who all for their own individual reasons did not believe in God, do come to believe in him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Homeward_Bounders"title="The Homeward Bounders">
Twelve-year-old Jamie discovers a strange place in his hometown in which mysterious and demonic entities, known only as "Them", are playing a board game with the entire world. Upon his discovering "Them", "They" are forced to make Jamie a Homeward Bounder; this means he must constantly travel from world to world until he finds his home again. Homeward Bounders cannot die, and must not interfere with Play. If he can reach his home he may stay, and re-enter play. No-one is allowed to interfere directly with the Homeward Bounders; for example, if someone were to attempt to hurt or steal from Jamie, that person would die mysteriously.In his travels through the many worlds, Jamie meets the Flying Dutchman, with his ship and crew, and Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew. In addition, he meets a strange entity chained to a rock by "Them". Every day, a Vulture comes to peck at him. While he is never named, the entity is Prometheus (he states that his name means "foresight" and that, according to legend, he was punished for bringing fire to humanity). Jamie becomes skilled at travelling, learning to read the signs left by other Homeward Bounders, growing fluent in many languages and proficient in many unusual skills.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Darkling_Plain"title="A Darkling Plain">
## Part One.Six months after the events of Infernal Devices, General Naga, the now-leader of the Green Storm after the supposed demise of the Stalker Fang, has formed a truce with the "Traktionstadtsgesellschaft", blossoming a new era of trade and peace.Theo Ngoni, returning to his home of Zagwa and reuniting with his family, foils an assassination attempt on Oenone Zero, who is married to General Naga and has taken the title of Lady Naga. Zero was in Zagwa to facilitate peace terms with Zagwa and the Green Storm; and suspects that the attempt was made by Green Storm soldiers still loyal to the Stalker Fang. Due to the possibility of another attempt, Zero has an incognito merchant airship prepared that will take her an alternate route to Naga. As Theo saved her life, Zero wants him to accompany her; Theo agrees, hopeful that he might meet Wren. En route, Zero's servant Rohini is revealed to be Cynthia Twite, a Green Storm spy who survived the events of "Infernal Devices", and attempts to kill her, but Theo intervenes. Cynthia escapes and downs the airship. The pair survive the crash, but Zero is captured by air-trader Napster Varley who plans to sell her to the "Traktionstadtsgesellschaft"; whilst Theo is saved from slavers by Hester Shaw and the Stalker Shrike, who is unable to kill due to Zero's tampering. After Theo informs them of Zero's capture, Hester and Shrike decide to find her, as Zero will be able to reverse Shrike's "barrier" she implemented.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soddit"title="The Soddit">
The story starts with a peaceful Soddit called Bingo who is visited by a wizard, Gandef, and a party of dwarfs led by Thorri and Mori who ask Bingo to come with them on a quest to 'The Only Mountain' where 'Smug the Dragon' lives. After a few drinks, Bingo accepts, not knowing what they were actually searching for. "Gold, boyo gold, la, look you."On the way, they have many adventures and close shaves, including their ponies drowning in the river and losing all luggage but one helmet. Roberts says he wanted the company fighting through the Piccadilly flea circus and fighting the Daleks from Doctor Who, but he says it was cut for time. They have a nasty run in with some trollops, who plan to eat them, successfully squash four dwarfs but they annoy the wizard Gandef, who temporarily turns them to mounds of sand as opposed to real stone. While at the tree village of Riverdale, Ellesquare and the other "Tree Elves" of the high council ridicule the dwarfs for their loss of their four comrades and call it "carelessness." The company entered the mountains after Gandef struggled to open the door until he coughed, which was apparently the password. In the mountains, they encounter Gobblins, which are evil turkeys, who take them to their town, but the dwarves all fight out, Gandef repeatedly decapitates countless Gobblins while in combat, a fifth dwarf dies in friendly fire from Gandef and Bingo gets lost by falling down the abyss. He falls into a cavern where he meets a morose philosopher named Sollum. He challenges him to a game of riddles; with the cannibalistic philosopher seeing Bingo's presence as the only delightful moment in his life. Bingo wins the riddles, and asks what he wins, but then remembers he found a Thing® that was created by evil dark lord Sharon and is Sollum's. So the philosopher tries to eat him but he escapes due to the Thing®'s super-speed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stone_Angel"title="The Stone Angel">
In a series of vignettes, "The Stone Angel" tells the story of Hagar Shipley, a 90-year-old woman struggling to come to grips with a life of intransigence and loss. The themes of pride and the prejudice that comes from social class recur in the novel. As a young girl she refuses to rock her dying brother in the garments of their mother. As a young woman she marries Brampton Shipley against her father's wishes, severing the family ties. She shows favouritism towards her younger son, John. After Hagar separates from her husband, Hagar takes John with her. However, he ultimately returns to his father. When John dies, Hagar does not cry, and at that point, she turns into a "Stone Angel". Later in life, her elder son Marvin is shown to have been the good and loyal son all along, despite the lack of his mother's favour. It is he at the age of 64 along with his wife Doris who takes care of her. As a 90-year-old woman, Hagar goes on an unexpected adventure into the woods alone. Given her age, there is an overtone that this event will be the last chapter of her life. In the woods, she meets another wanderer. The two have a bonding conversation, where Hagar finally opens up. A lifetime of buried emotion comes out, and she finally cries. The next day the police and Marvin come to rescue Hagar from the woods. In an act of love and repentance, she confesses to Marvin that he was the better son. It is unclear whether she dies at the end of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parsifal_Mosaic"title="The Parsifal Mosaic">
Michael Havelock (an anglicized version of Mikhail Havlíček) is an intelligence officer working for the US State Departments black operation division "Consular Ops". At the beginning of the novel he believes he has just witnessed the execution of his partner and the love of his life, Jenna Karas (anglicized version of Jana Karasova), along an isolated stretch of the Costa Brava. Jenna had been marked for execution because she was proved to be a KGB double agent.He immediately leaves the intelligence world, something he had been considering doing for some time and goes sightseeing in areas he had previously visited. In Athens, Pyotr Rostov, a senior director of the KGB forces a meeting with Havelock. Rostov denies that Karas is an agent of theirs. Later, in Rome, Havelock sees Jenna alive at a train station. She flees him, frightened, and he pursues her.He makes contact with a former source at the US Consulate called Colonel Baylor, and begins his search for Jenna throughout several countries. Meanwhile, strategists for Consular Operations in the US government decide that he is a paranoid schizophrenic and must be terminated, lest he compromise entire networks across Europe. All the evidence available to them indicates that Karas was a double agent, and was successfully terminated on the Costa Brava. So one of them, "Red" Ogivile sets up an ambush on the Palatine Hill in Rome with the intention of taking Michael in. However, the two mercenaries he hired are taken out by Michael, the gas grenade he uses only affects him when Michael lashes out, and after being convinced of Havelock's innocence, he ends up taking an accidental bullet from Colonel Baylor who was sent to kill Havelock.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mother's_Gift"title="A Mother's Gift">
The story is about a 14-year-old girl named Holly Faye Lovell from a tiny, rural town called Biscay in the U.S. state of Mississippi. She gets accepted as a scholarship student into the exclusive Haverty School of Performing Arts, and the story revolves around Holly's life in Haverty, where she is the poorest student, and her relationship with her mother, Wanda.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nor_Crystal_Tears"title="Nor Crystal Tears">
The story follows a Thranx, Ryozenzuzex (i.e. Ryo, of Family Zen, clan Zu, Hive Zex) who came from an odd-numbered hatching (thranx offspring almost always come in multiples of two) immediately making him somewhat different from his brethren. Setting himself aside as different Ryo decides that he has to know what is the secret of the new space-faring race that supposedly wear "their skeletons inside". To accomplish this un-thranxlike task, Ryo travels from his home planet, Willow-Wane, to the ice caps of the Thranx home world, Hivehom with the aid of the wealthy Wuuzelansem, a poet in search of inspiration. Once on Hivehom he is confronted with the "monsters" and comes to the conclusion that they must set them free, believing that an alliance between Thranx and these so-called "humans" is the only way to stop the aggressive advances of the AAnn Empire.Thranx military and scientists, by studying the contained humans tendency to fight amongst each other came to the conclusion that the entire species could be insane and would destroy Thranx society if they were to attempt any further contact. Ryo, after spending a good amount of time with the humans, decides to aid in their escape from Hivehom. Once they escape, they return to a human research station where the reaction to Ryo is worse than anticipated. When the scientists there decide to kill and dissect Ryo the crew he rescued from Hivehom returns the favor and helps him escape his death sentence. It is at this point Ryo and the crew come to the conclusion that they must start a long-term program in order to properly integrate human and thranx society.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forest_of_Doom"title="The Forest of Doom">
"The Forest of Doom" is a fantasy adventure scenario in which the hero character travels through a hazardous forest in search of the missing pieces of a magic warhammer needed to assist the dwarves in their war against the trolls.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Thieves_(gamebook)"title="City of Thieves (gamebook)">
"City of Thieves" is a fantasy scenario in which the hero is retained by the village of Silverton to save them from Zanbar Bone, lord of the undead; to do this, the hero must first travel to Port Blacksand to enlist the aid of the magician Nicodemus.The player takes the role of an adventurer on a quest to find and stop the powerful Night Prince Zanbar Bone, a being whose minions are terrorizing a local town. Hired by a desperate mayor, the player must as the adventurer journey to the dangerous city-state of Port Blacksand (the titular "City of Thieves"), and find the wizard Nicodemus, who apparently knows of Bone's one weakness. What follows is a series of challenges as the player must locate certain key items, escape Port Blacksand and eventually confront Bone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eight_Doctors"title="The Eight Doctors">
Immediately after the events of the TV film, the Eighth Doctor finishes reading "The Time Machine" (a book written by his old friend H.G. Wells). After checking the Eye of Harmony in his TARDIS, he falls prey to a final trap set by his old enemy, the Master; which erases all of his memory. The only fact he knows for certain is that his name is "the Doctor" – but Doctor who? His instincts tell him to "trust the TARDIS", which immediately lands.He lands at a scrapyard at 76 Totters Lane, London in 1997. There, he encounters Sam Jones, a young lady that is being accused by local drug dealers, led by Baz Bailey, of "grassing" them over to the police. The dealers intend to force Sam into taking drugs to get her addicted, but the Doctor saves her and falls foul of the local police who promptly charge him with possession and selling the cocaine he has confiscated from the thugs. Sam tells her two teachers, who have noticed her lateness, and takes them back to the junkyard to verify the story. In the confusion of Bailey's desperate attack on the local police station, the Doctor escapes and runs back into the TARDIS and it dematerialises – taking the cocaine with him to dispose of it safely. This leaves Sam alone, defenceless against the knife-wielding druggies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Fudge"title="Double Fudge">
In this latest installment of the Fudge series, Fudge is still five years old and takes up an obsessive and greedy love for money, driving his twelve-year-old brother, Peter, insane, and after some talking with his family, they decide to take him to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington, D.C. for a long weekend to show how it is made, hoping that his obsession would stop there. That plan doesn't work, and instead, they meet up with their long-lost cousins, the Howie Hatchers. There is Howie, a park ranger who resides in Hawaii and is traveling the country, his pregnant wife, Eudora, their perfect, slightly overindulged twelve-year-old identical twin daughters, Flora and Fauna, who are sometimes nicknamed the "Natural Beauties" and the "Heavenly Hatchers", and last but not least, three-year-old Farley Drexel Hatcher, which is also Fudge's real name. Peter dubs him "Mini", and the nickname sticks. The Hatchers are forced when the Howie Hatchers invite themselves to move in with them for weeks in their Upper West Side apartment.Peter is also having a rough time throughout the story because his best friend, Jimmy Fargo, has left the Upper West Side and moved "far off" to SoHo on the other side of Manhattan, although they still get to go to the same school, where they're both in the seventh grade, while Fudge is in *Mixed* group, along with his new friend, Melissa Beth Miller.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-in-Law"title="Q-in-Law">
The "Enterprise" (NCC-1701-D) is assigned to diplomatic duty to host the wedding between two houses of the Tizarin, a race that lives only in space and engages in commerce. One of the guests is Lwaxana Troi, to represent Betazed. The time setting places it after the events of "Deja Q" (third season) and before "Q-Pid" (fourth season). Kerin, heir to the house of Nistral, will marry Sehra, the daughter of the house of Graziunas.Q puts in an appearance. Although he toys with Picard while asking to be allowed to attend the wedding festivities, he promises to behave himself. Q attracts Lwaxana's notice, and she is fascinated by Q. To Picard's horror, Q fans the flames of love. Later, Q also begins to fan the animosity between the two Tizarin houses, mainly by feeding on the occasional blowups between the bride and groom, who are themselves irritated: Sehra by her future father-in-law Nistral's comments and Kerin by his future mother-in-law Mrs. Graziunas' comments.The two families come to battle, and a despairing Lwaxana wishes she could do something. Q gives her power, and Lwaxana stops the battle, and Kerin and Serah determine they will marry, no matter what. Meanwhile, Q has revealed his true colors: another way of annoying lower life forms. He scorns Lwaxana, who gives Q a serious thrashing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foley_Is_Good"title="Foley Is Good">
The book covers the last years of Mick Foley's in-ring wrestling career up until the birth of his second son, Michael Francis Foley, Jr., which he mentions in the book's epilogue. It has a more celebratory tone than his first book, as he is writing about the time of his career where he has already achieved success. The book alternated between in-ring wrestling activities and Foley's life away from the ring. In the book, he also describes his obsessions, such as theme parks and Christmas.He also writes about his experience writing his first book without the aid of a ghostwriter. He defends himself against being misquoted by news program "20/20", and explains the events surrounding his "I Quit" match with The Rock at the Royal Rumble in January 1999, which can also be seen in the documentary "Beyond the Mat".The book also heavily defends the World Wrestling Federation against accusations of being violent. Foley made an effort to pointedly refute claims made by detractors, citing statistical data and other evidence he compiled himself. He criticizes the actions of the Parents Television Council.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Morning"title="April Morning">
The novel begins in the afternoon of April 18, 1775, when Adam's father, Moses, sends him out to draw water from the well for his mother, Sarah. After completing this task, he heads upstairs to talk with Granny. During it, they engage in a debate on religion. Afterwards, they head downstairs for dinner. Then they pray and the meal, consisting of bread pudding and donkers, begins. In the middle of it, Moses confronts Adam about a "spell" to be said while drawing water. As a result, the confrontation starts an argument, which is interrupted by Cousin Simmons arriving. He, chosen to draft a letter on the rights of man, comes to Moses with his draft seeking criticism. Another debate arises over his description of rights as "god-given." Moses asserts that rights come from the people backing them, not God.After dinner is over and Adam finishes some evening chores, he heads over to the Simmons' house to meet with Ruth, his love interest, and go on a walk. Before he is able to see her, however, Aunt Simmons makes conversation with him and feeds him pie. Then Ruth comes downstairs, and she and Adam leave on a walk. During it, they talk about various things, including their futures and what they want to be in the world. After a kiss he walks her home and then he himself heads home. Upon arrival, he spots his brother, Levi, cleaning his gun. He does not like this but Sarah insists that he let him do it. Then he heads upstairs and goes to bed. Before falling asleep he overhears his parents talking about the committee meeting. Finally he falls asleep.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyte"title="Flyte">
The book begins with a "fair haired" boy rowing a canoe to the place where Necromancer DomDaniel drowned, along with his ship. His skeleton climbs into the canoe, while the fair haired boy thinks about exacting his revenge on all the people who underestimated him. He thinks that they'll be sorry, especially when he becomes the ExtraOrdinary Wizard. Septimus Heap has become the apprentice to Marcia Overstrand, the ExtraOrdinary Wizard, and a year has gone by. Septimus's older brother, Simon, had run away after an argument between him and Sarah and Silas Heap about Septimus, who Simon dislikes. He comes back and kidnaps Jenna on his horse, Thunder. Septimus goes to search for her and he is assisted in his search by his brother Nicko, who helps build boats at Jannit Maarten's boatyard. Along the way, Septimus meets his old friend Boy 409 from the young army, who went missing before the events of Book 1. He is now called Wolf Boy. Jenna runs away from Simon's observatory in The Badlands and makes her way towards The Port. Eventually Septimus is able to rescue Jenna with his elder brother Nicko's help from the Port but they are tracked by Sleuth, Simon's tracking ball.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mio,_My_Son"title="Mio, My Son">
"Mio, My Son" starts by introducing Bo Vilhelm Olsson (nicknamed Bosse), a nine-year-old boy who has been taken in by an elderly couple who dislike boys. They harass him and tell him to stay out of their way. Bosse's mother had died during childbirth and he has never known his father. His only friend is a boy his age, Benke. One day he receives an apple from the kindly shopkeeper, Mrs. Lundin, who asks him to mail a postcard for her. Before doing so, he takes a look at the postcard and sees it is addressed to a king, saying that his son will soon be coming home, recognised by his possession of a golden apple. Bosse looks at his apple and suddenly it turns into gold.Soon after, Bosse finds a bottle with a spirit trapped inside. Upon freeing it, the spirit recognises the apple and takes Bosse to another world, far, far away.Upon arriving, Bosse is told that his real name is Mio, and that he is the son of the king and thus a prince of the land. He finds a new best friend, Jum-Jum, and receives the horse Miramis from his father. As he explores his father's kingdom, he meets and befriends other children. However, he also learns that not everything in this world is as wonderful as it first seemed. In the lands beyond that of the king lives an evil knight named Kato, whose hatred is so strong that the land around his castle is barren and singed. He has kidnapped several children from the nearby villages, and he poses a constant threat to the people living there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Would_Never_Hurt_a_Fly"title="They Would Never Hurt a Fly">
"They Would Never Hurt a Fly" begins with an introductory section explaining Drakulić's purpose in the book as well as her choice in characters. She explains that she wants to learn more about their personalities in order to justify how the Yugoslavian war arose. Drakulić describes the war as an unexpected tragedy that embarked on innocent civilians within the boundaries of Yugoslavia - specifically Bosnia. As the book begins to unravel descriptive profiles of different war criminals, Drakulić elucidates that these criminals were not completely monsters, but ordinary people who committed crimes due to the circumstances they were in. She takes this stance not to sympathize with them, but because "the war itself turned ordinary men [...] into criminals because of opportunism, fear and, not least, conviction." By treating such people as criminals without understanding their background, she argues, put them in a different class of people that they could never be a part of. As a result, they refuse to believe that themselves, their neighbours or their co-workers could commit such acts. Many of the perpetrators actually regard themselves as heroes rather than criminals and only regret "that they have been stupid enough to get caught or being tricked into surrendering." This argument is mirrored with political theorist Hannah Arendt's thesis on the "Banality of Evil".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trials_of_Nikki_Hill"title="The Trials of Nikki Hill">
The protagonist of this legal thriller is 33-year-old, Nikki Hill. Nikki is a lead prosecutor at the District Attorney's office, and he has trusted her to help find the killer of Madeleine Gray, Hollywood's most popular TV host of a blackmail show.At first there is a hands down suspect, Jamal Deschamps, who was found at the scene of the crime. He possessed her ring and his skin was also under Maddie's thumb. After a lie detector test, it was proven that Deschamps was not the killer. It turned out, he merely found the cadaver and whilst stealing its ring, cut himself on her thumb.Nikki, another smart aleck prosecutor, and two quirky homicide detectives have a few loose strings, and bewilderment of who the real killer is. At Maddie's mansion, there was a missing rug, and a glass a ball that had Maddie's blood on it. And upstairs, where her "blackmail" files are, there is a busted drawer with missing contents. Nikki and the team discover that R&amp;B singer, Diana Cooper, had a fight with Maddie the day of the murder. She quickly becomes a major suspect when Maddie's blood is also found in her trunk. The detectives come up with a scenario: Maddie threatened to give Diana's blackmail information, so she stole it and killed Maddie. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_(Nabokov_novel)"title="Mary (Nabokov novel)">
"Mary" is the story of Lev Glebovich Ganin, a Russian émigré and former White Guard Officer displaced by the Russian Revolution. Ganin is now living in a boarding house in Berlin, along with a young Russian girl, Klara, an old Russian poet, Podtyagin, his landlady, Lydia Nikolaevna Dorn and his neighbour, Aleksey Ivanovich Alfyorov, whom he meets in a dark, broken-down elevator at the beginning of the novel. Through a series of conversations with Alfyorov and a photograph, Ganin discovers that his long-lost first love, Mary, is now the wife of his rather unappealing neighbour, and that she will be joining him soon. As Ganin realizes this, he ends his relationship with his current girlfriend, Lyudmila, and begins to be consumed by his memories of his time in Russia with Mary, which Ganin notes were "perhaps the happiest days of his life". Enthralled by his vision of Mary and unable to let Alfyorov have her, Ganin contrives to reunite with Mary, who he believes still loves him. Eventually, Ganin claims that he will leave Berlin the night before Mary is to arrive and his fellow residents throw a party for him the night before. Ganin steadily plies Alfyorov with alcohol, heavily intoxicating him. Just before Alfyorov falls into his drunken sleep, he asks Ganin to set his alarm clock for half past seven, as Alfyorov intends to pick up Mary at the train station the next morning. The infatuated Ganin instead sets the clock for eleven and plans to meet Mary at the train station himself. However, as he leaves the house, he has a moment of clarity. "The world of memories in which Ganin had dwelt became what it was in reality: the distant past... Other than that image no Mary existed, nor could exist." Instead of meeting Mary, Ganin decides to board a train to France.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sunday_(novel)"title="Black Sunday (novel)">
Michael Lander is a pilot who flies the Aldrich Blimp over NFL football games to film them for network television. He is also, secretly, deranged by years of torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, a bitter court martial on his return and a failed marriage. He longs to commit suicide and to take with him as many as possible of the cheerful, carefree American civilians he sees from his blimp each weekend.Lander conspires with Dahlia Iyad, an operative from the Palestinian terrorist group Black September, to launch a suicide attack using a bomb composed of plastique and a quarter million flechettes, housed on the underside of the gondola of the blimp, which they will detonate over Tulane Stadium during a Super Bowl between the Miami Dolphins and the Washington Redskins. Dahlia and Black September, in turn, intend the attack as a wake-up call for the American people, to turn their attention and the world's to the plight of the Palestinians.American and Israeli intelligence, led by Mossad agent David Kabakov and FBI agent Sam Corley, race to prevent the catastrophe. They piece together the path of the explosives into the country, and Dahlia's own movements.In a spectacular conclusion, the bomb-carrying blimp is chased by helicopters as it approaches the packed stadium. The blimp manages to crash into the stadium, causing mass panic and destruction, but Kabakov's helicopter manages to pull the blimp out of the packed stadium just seconds before the weapon detonates. The explosion kills hundreds, including Kabakov, but thanks to their efforts they manage to prevent the death of tens of thousands more people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sea_(novel)"title="The Sea (novel)">
The story is told by Max Morden, a self-aware, retired art historian attempting to reconcile himself to the deaths of those he loved as a child and as an adult.The novel is written as a reflective journal; the setting always in flux, wholly dependent upon the topic or theme Max feels inclined to write about. Despite the constant fluctuations, Max returns to three settings: his childhood memories of the Graces—a wealthy middle-class family living in a rented cottage home, the "Cedars"—during the summer holidays; the months leading up to the death of his wife, Anna; and his present stay at the Cedars cottage home in Ballyless—where he has retreated since Anna's death. These three settings are heavily diced and jumbled together for the novel's entire duration.Max's final days with Anna were awkward; Max does not know how to act with his soon-to-be-dead wife. Scenes of Anna's dying days are more full of commentary than with actual details, as are most of the novel's settings. It's through these commentaries that we learn of Max's choice to return to the cottage of his childhood memories (after Anna's death), confirming that a room would be available for residence during a visit with his adult daughter, Claire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ysabel"title="Ysabel">
Ned Marriner is in France with his father, Edward, a celebrated photographer who is working on a book about Provence. While his father shoots outside the deserted Saint-Sauveur Cathedral, Ned wanders in to look around. There he meets Kate Wenger, an American exchange student with a passion for ancient history and an extensive knowledge of the cathedral's past. The pair is startled by the appearance of a then-nameless man, who warns them to leave immediately, stating that they "have blundered into the corner of a very old story." Ned finds that he is able to sense the man's presence, a power of which he was previously unaware. Ned and Kate also notice an ancient carving of a woman on one of the church pillars, which the nameless man claims he created.Frightened by the incident, Ned and Kate make plans to meet a few days later. Ned goes on a photo-scouting mission with his father's assistants, Greg, Steve, and Melanie, a young woman who is hyper-organized, witty, and well liked by everyone, including Ned. They head towards Mont Sainte-Victoire, a much-photographed location made famous by Paul Cézanne. But along the way, Ned falls suddenly and inexplicably ill. Arriving at the mountain, he is overcome by images of the slaughter that took place there centuries prior, when a Roman general killed thousands of Celts. He is rushed back to the team's villa, but once he has travelled only a short distance from the mountain, he recovers completely. Ned and Kate meet later that day in a coffee shop to discuss their situation. Ned is unnerved by the discovery of his strange abilities, while both are curious to find out more about the nameless man and his "story." Unaware that they are being watched by the nameless man, they make plans to meet again in Entremont, an ancient Celtic site, on the Eve of Beltaine. Kate leaves, but Ned becomes aware of the nameless man's presence and confronts him. The man tells him little, and soon leaves the cafe. Outside, however, he is attacked by unnaturally vicious dogs, and Ned steps in to defend him, saving his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkspell"title="Inkspell">
A year has passed, and Meggie now lives with Elinor, Darius and her parents, Mo and Resa. Life is peaceful, but not a day goes by without Meggie thinking of "Inkheart" and the characters that came to life. For the fire-eater Dustfinger, the need to return to his home world has become urgent. When he finds a crooked storyteller named Orpheus who has the ability to read and write stories to life like Mo, he asks to be read back. Orpheus obliges but doesn't send Dustfinger's apprentice, Farid, back into the book as they arranged. Instead, Orpheus steals the book from the boy and hands it over to Basta, who wants revenge for the death of his master Capricorn. Distraught, Farid goes in search of Meggie, and before long, both are caught inside the book, too.Soon after Meggie and Farid are in the book, Mortola, Basta, Orpheus, and a "man built like a wardrobe" barge into Elinor's house, taking Mo, Resa, Elinor, and Darius prisoner. As per Mortola's orders, Orpheus reads Basta, Mortola, and Mo into "Inkheart", bringing Resa along by accident. Upon entry, Mortola shoots Mo with a shotgun that he brought from our world. Resa discovers that her voice has come back to her as she prays for Mo to survive the wound. As he recovers, Resa and Mo hide in a secret cave with the strolling players, or the Motley Folk. Soon the Motley Folk assume that the injured Mo is the mysterious gentleman-robber, the "Bluejay", a fictitious hero from a song created by Fenoglio's words. Fenoglio has been living within his own story since the events of "Inkheart", working as a court scribe in Lombrica's capital city of Ombra. Once reunited with Meggie, Fenoglio asks her to read Cosimo the Fair back into the story, since he died a death the author never planned for him. Meggie doesn't feel comfortable interfering with the story but is soon convinced by Fenoglio that it will be 'a double' of Cosimo - not Cosimo himself. Reluctantly, Meggie reads Cosmio in and quickly regrets it when the Adderhead's soldiers barge into the fair, injuring and killing many people. Cosimo has none of his doubles memories and doesn't seem to love his wife and child anymore. Cosimo's return upsets the Adderhead, ruler of the neighboring region of Argenta, who planned to take over Lombrica once the Laughing Prince died. With the rightful heir to the throne of Ombra mysteriously brought back to life, but with no memories of 'his own' life, war is imminent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_Science"title="Vampire Science">
An ancient Time Lord enemy, 'vampires', have been spotted on earth. Some of these creatures want to co-exist with humanity, but others want to cause destruction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memories_of_the_Ford_Administration"title="Memories of the Ford Administration">
Alf Clayton, a struggling history professor at Wayward Junior College in New Hampshire, receives a request from the Northern New England Association of American Historians (NNEAAH) to provide his memories and impressions of the Presidential administration of Gerald Ford. Clayton has spent several years unsuccessfully attempting to write a new biography of President James Buchanan and the two projects intertwine as Clayton's mind shifts between them. Simultaneously, Clayton's guilt over his extramarital affair with another professor at the college both influences and is influenced by the Buchanan book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clue_of_the_Broken_Locket"title="The Clue of the Broken Locket">
The book starts with Nancy Drew witnessing a couple named Kitty and Johnny Blair who adopt two baby twins, Jay and Janet, from the Selkirk Foundling’s Home. The babies were mysteriously found in a boat along the river by a nurse at the Home. The Blairs, who are famous actors, decide to adopt the babies as a publicity stunt, as they hope to raise the children as actors, which will help their own careers. The Blairs are cruel to the children, and Nancy sets off to find their real mother and take them away from the Blairs, although the adoption papers have already been signed.Nancy and Bess are invited to a party at Blair’s estate, Jolly Folly, where Mrs. Blair decides to burn a package of clothes and an old broken locket that came with the children. Nancy, with the help of Hannah Gruen, substitutes the original clothing and locket with some of her old doll clothes and an old locket. She takes Janet and Jay’s original clothing and locket with her for investigation.Nancy is suspicious of Blair’s maid, Colleen, and their chauffeur, Rodney. Colleen, who was put in charge of the twins, is unfit to care for them. She spends most of her time with her boyfriend, Francis Clancy, and trying on Mrs. Blair’s fancy gowns. Nancy, Bess, and George are disgusted at the girl's actions, although they help her out of many problems. Meanwhile, Edwin McNeely, a theatre producer, tries to get the Blairs to sign a contract requiring them to give up the babies and attend more rehearsals in exchange for parts in his upcoming play. He tells Nancy about his wife, who left him because he wanted her to keep acting when she wanted to start a family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_(novel)"title="Core (novel)">
After several disasters around the world connected with the electromagnetic field, a group of scientists travel into the Earth's core to start it again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemies,_A_Love_Story"title="Enemies, A Love Story">
It's New York City, a few years after World War II. Herman Broder, a Jewish man who has lost his faith but still enjoys Talmudic scholarship, is married to a Polish woman named Yadwiga Pracz, not of Jewish origin, who had worked as a servant in his father's family in Poland and had kept Herman alive, during the Holocaust, by hiding him in a hayloft in her native village. Almost all Herman's family perished in the Holocaust, including, he believes, his first wife, Tamara, whom an eyewitness told him was shot, along with the couple's two children. Broder married Yadwiga after he received a visa for America, perhaps partly out of a sense of obligation. He brought her to Brooklyn, and in their apartment in Coney Island, she works diligently as a homemaker, learning how to cook such Jewish foods as matzo balls with borscht, carp's head, and challah, but although there are moments of tenderness between them, it isn't a happy union. He calls her a "peasant" to her face and mocks her wish to convert to Judaism. He has told her that he works as a book salesman and that he has to travel for his job up and down the Eastern seaboard, but in fact he works as a ghost-writer for a rabbi in Manhattan named Milton Lampert, who's a showboat and a schemer, and the nights that Yadwiga thinks he's on the road, he is in fact spending in the Bronx, where he pays rent on a second apartment for his mistress, Masha, who is a concentration camp survivor, and her mother, a pious woman named Shifrah Puah. Herman isolates himself from the larger Jewish community, in part because he is haunted by the Holocaust—he often daydreams about what it would be like to have to live for years in whatever room he happens to be in—in part because he is ashamed of his somewhat disreputable line of work, and in part because he wants to hide his double life with Yadwiga and Masha. That romantic arrangement becomes even more complicated when Herman reads his name in a classified ad in a Yiddish newspaper, answers it, and learns that Tamara is alive and in New York City. The comedy of the novel consists in Herman's doomed attempts to keep his three wives from knowing about one another; the tragedy is in the inability of Herman and other characters to make the accommodations and compromises that would reconcile them to their survival. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_Solus"title="Locus Solus">
John Ashbery summarizes "Locus Solus" thus in his introduction to Michel Foucault's "Death and the Labyrinth":"A prominent scientist and inventor, Martial Canterel, has invited a group of colleagues to visit the park of his country estate, Locus Solus. As the group tours the estate, Canterel shows them inventions of ever-increasing complexity and strangeness. Again, exposition is invariably followed by explanation, the cold hysteria of the former giving way to the innumerable ramifications of the latter. After an aerial pile driver which is constructing a mosaic of teeth and a huge glass diamond filled with water in which float a dancing girl, a hairless cat named Khóng-dek-lèn, and the preserved head of Danton, we come to the central and longest passage: a description of eight curious tableaux vivants taking place inside an enormous glass cage. We learn that the actors are actually dead people whom Canterel has revived with 'resurrectine', a fluid of his invention which if injected into a fresh corpse causes it continually to act out the most important incident of its life."As well as Czech, Dutch, Italian, Polish, Turkish, Russian, Spanish, and other translations, there have been three English translations of the work in question, all based on Rupert Copeland Cunningham's scholarship and transcription.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galatea_2.2"title="Galatea 2.2">
The main narrative tells the story of Powers' return to his "alma mater" – referred to in the novel as simply "U.", but clearly based on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the school Powers attended and teaches at as a professor – after he has ended a long and torrid relationship with a loving but volatile woman, referred to as "C." Powers is an in-house author for the university, and lives for free for one year. He finds himself unable to write any more books, and spends the first portion of the novel attempting to write, but never getting past the first line.Powers then meets a computer scientist named Philip Lentz. Intrigued by Lentz's overbearing personality and unorthodox theories, Powers eventually agrees to participate in an experiment involving artificial intelligence. Lentz bets his fellow scientists that he can build a computer that can produce an analysis of a literary text that is indistinguishable from one produced by a human. It is Powers' task to "teach" the machine. After going through several unsuccessful versions, Powers and Lentz produce a computer model (dubbed "Helen") that is able to communicate like a human. It is not clear to the reader or to Powers whether she is simulating human thought, or whether she is actually experiencing it. Powers tutors the computer, first by reading it canonical works of literature, then current events, and eventually telling it the story of his own life, in the process developing a complicated relationship with the machine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Duck"title="Peter Duck">
The Swallows and Amazons are in Lowestoft, preparing for a cruise aboard a schooner, the "Wild Cat", with Captain Flint, the Blacketts' uncle Jim Turner. Unfortunately the other adult (Sam Bideford) cannot come and so the cruise is threatened until Peter Duck, an elderly seaman, offers to come along to help.In the harbour a larger black schooner, the "Viper", is fitting out for a voyage and Peter Duck's presence aboard the "Wild Cat" interests Black Jake, the "Viper"’s captain. Peter Duck spins a yarn about a treasure that he saw being buried long ago, when marooned on a desert island in the Caribbean Sea, and which Black Jake wants to find. When the "Wild Cat" sails, the "Viper" is quick to follow and trails her down the English Channel, at one point threatening to board her in the night.In a fog off Land's End, the crew of the "Wild Cat" give the "Viper" the slip but pick up the "Viper"’s cabin boy, Bill, who has been set adrift to try and fool the "Wild Cat"’s crew with false signals. They continue across the Atlantic Ocean to Crab Island where they spend several days searching in vain for Peter Duck's treasure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rats_Saw_God"title="Rats Saw God">
It follows the main character Steve York, the son of an astronaut. Steve is a high school student who has had issues with marijuana and has found himself in the counselor's office. The counselor tells him that he is flunking and if he wants to graduate he must write a 100-page paper about anything. Steve is reluctant to do so, at first, but eventually relents and begins the tale about the divorce of his parents, his prickly relationship with his father, and his first real relationship with a girl nicknamed Dub. Told in parallel timelines and bouncing back and forth from his senior year to his sophomore year, through writing the book Steve eventually comes to see his father as he'd never seen him before and understands that many of the things that he thought were true were completely wrong.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Code_of_the_Woosters"title="The Code of the Woosters">
Jeeves is trying to persuade Bertie to go on a world cruise. Instead Bertie's Aunt Dahlia sends him to visit a particular antique shop and sneer at a silver eighteenth-century cow creamer, so as to drive down its price for his aunt's collector husband, Tom. In the shop, Bertie encounters the magistrate Sir Watkyn Bassett, who is also a collector. Sir Watkyn is accompanied by his future nephew-in-law Roderick Spode, the leader of a Fascist organization. Later, Bertie learns that, by playing an underhanded trick on Tom, Sir Watkyn has obtained the creamer. Aunt Dahlia sends Bertie to Totleigh Towers to steal it back, but there he comes under suspicion as someone Sir Watkyn had once sentenced for a drunken offence. Bertie's other reason for visiting is to heal a rift between Gussie Fink-Nottle and Madeline, Sir Watkyn's daughter. Madeline incorrectly believes Bertie is in love with her, and she has promised to marry him if her engagement should ever fail. In order to avoid this at all costs, Bertie persuades Madeline to invite him down, but he learns upon arriving that Gussie and Madeline have reconciled.To give himself confidence for an upcoming speaking engagement, Gussie has been keeping a notebook in which he writes insults about Sir Watkyn and Spode. When the notebook is lost, Bertie fears that if it should fall into Sir Watkyn's hands, Madeline would be forbidden to marry Gussie. The notebook is found instead by 'Stiffy' Byng, Sir Watkyn's niece, who wants approval from her uncle to marry the local curate, Harold Pinker. Sir Watkyn considers Harold unsuitable, however, so Stiffy uses the notebook to blackmail Bertie into going along with her plan. Bertie must pretend to steal the cow-creamer but allow Harold to catch him in the act. She hopes this will motivate Sir Watkyn to approve Harold's marriage to her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_(novel)"title="Nicolae (novel)">
The members of the Tribulation Force have discovered that their pastor, Bruce Barnes, has been killed during the bombing of a hospital in World War III. Rayford Steele is quickly called to meet Global Community Supreme Potentate and Antichrist Nicolae Carpathia in Dallas, Texas to fly him to New Babylon, Iraq. Meanwhile, Cameron "Buck" Williams and Chloe Steele go to New Hope Village Church to inform Loretta about Bruce. Chloe is in downtown Chicago, Illinois when it is bombed by the Global Community. Buck is eventually able to rescue her after she crashed her Range Rover into a tree. Rayford hears about this and sends Amanda White back to Chicago to help them and to keep her safe because Nicolae was dropping bombs on major cities and he says to her, "If your flight doesn't leave before mine, board my flight", because Ray is piloting the flight that Nicolae is on. On the flight back to New Babylon, Rayford learns much about Nicolae's secret plans through a secret intercom device installed by his former boss at Pan-Continental Airlines, Earl Halliday. Rayford eventually arrives back in New Babylon.Having heard from his friend Chaim Rosenzweig about Tsion Ben-Judah's loss of his wife and children to murder, Buck goes to Israel with charter pilot Ken Ritz. He is led by the two witnesses, Eli and Moishe in Jerusalem, to a boat near the Sea of Galilee. After proving that he is who he says he is, Buck is taken to the shelter where Tsion is hiding for his protection. Tsion has been accused of murdering his family, although he did not do so. Buck and Tsion are given a worn-out bus to drive to Egypt to meet Ritz for the escape to the United States. They meet many obstacles along the way, but are supernaturally protected and arrive in Chicago safely. During this time, Rayford meets with his friend Hattie Durham, and tries to discourage her from having an abortion of her baby that she conceived with Carpathia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hippopotamus"title="The Hippopotamus">
The "hippo" of the title (occasionally referred to as "the happy hippo" and given to wallowing in long baths) is Edward (Ted/Tedward) Lennox Wallace, an aging, lecherous, one-time hell-raising poet, reduced by diminishing poetic talent to working as a theatre critic. The story opens with the aftermath of Ted being fired from his job on a newspaper.At the suggestion of a sick god-daughter, Jane (suffering from leukaemia), he goes to stay at the Norfolk country house of old schoolfriend and Army colleague from National Service, Lord Michael Logan and his wife Lady Anne, to investigate unspecified mysterious goings-on.Ted reports back to Jane regularly, in the form of long, rambling letters, apprising her of events at Swafford Hall whilst also offering his views on numerous other issues (women, art, poetry, sex, morality and modern life being favourite topics), all the time attempting to uncover the nature of the unusual events that Jane has instructed him to look out for.Over the course of his stay it gradually becomes apparent that other house guests are ascribing healing powers to one of Logan's children, David (Ted's other godchild), and indeed it is in the hope that he might bestow his 'talent' upon them that they have descended upon Swafford Hall. Among the assembled guests are a witty and hugely camp but rebarbative defrocked minister and TV producer, a businessman and his wife and rather gawky teenage daughter, a friend of Jane's, and Jane's mother, a woman Ted crossed paths with disastrously many years earlier.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_the_Red_King"title="Children of the Red King">
## "The Time Twister".In 1916, Charlie's great-great-uncle, Henry Yewbeam, is tricked into looking into the Time Twister while staying with his jealous cousin, Ezekiel Bloor. The Time Twister takes Henry from 1916 to the present day without ageing him. Charlie, at Bloor's Academy, witnesses his appearance and takes him to Mr. Pilgrim's room. However, the dog Blessed also sees this, and tells Billy Raven, an orphan who can communicate with animals and is acting as a spy for Ezekiel in return for the chance to be adopted. Ezekiel orders Billy to bring Henry to him. At midnight, Charlie goes down to the kitchens to find Cook, but comes across Henry directly. Henry says that he had met a "small lady in black", who had given him tea and sweets. It turns out the lady in black is Manfred Bloor's mother, who is cursed and can never leave the castle. Together they devise a plan: Henry will go in one of the canteen's freezers until the temperature is the same as winter in 1916, then look at the Time Twister and be transported back; Charlie will keep checking that he's still breathing. However, when they put their plan into action, the freezer door freezes shut. Hearing Charlie shout out, Cook comes running, and manages to heave the door open, revealing Henry who has turned blue and fainted of hypothermia. They take him back to Cook's top-secret quarters, where the Flames help revive him. Charlie then returns to his dormitory, with the help of a magical torch that Cook gives him which shows up details that aren't usually visible. Cook threatens Blessed not to tell Billy about her secret home or Henry. On his return to his dormitory, Charlie finds Billy, who has apparently just been bribed with cocoa. Charlie and his friends devise a plan to help Manfred's mother. She escapes through the Time Twister, while Charlie and Uncle Paton take Henry to live with his younger brother (and Paton's father), James, by the sea.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Man"title="Slow Man">
Paul Rayment, a man of late middle-age, loses part of a leg after his bicycle is hit by a car driven by a reckless young man. He becomes reclusive and retreats to his flat where he is cared for by a succession of nurses. None suit him until Marijana, with whom he shares a European childhood (hers in Croatia, his in France), comes along. Paul's feelings for Marijana, and for her teenage son Drago, become more complex. When Paul offers to finance Drago's education, Marijana's husband becomes suspicious of Paul's relationship with Marijana, which causes trouble in their family and culminates in Drago fighting with his father and moving in with Paul.It is not until the famed author Elizabeth Costello shows up unexpectedly and uninvited at Paul's doorstep that he confronts his feelings for Marijana and his resentment at the state of his life following his bicycle accident. Costello's sudden presence in his life confounds Paul, who believes she is merely using him as a character in her next novel.The book can be read as a metafictional discourse on the inter-relationship between the literary author and the characters, and with reality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misty_of_Chincoteague"title="Misty of Chincoteague">
"Misty of Chincoteague" begins with an account of the wreck of a Spanish galleon off the coast of Virginia. The ponies in the hold of the galleon swim to Assateague Island and become feral as the years and eventually the centuries pass.The book then tells the story of two children, Paul and Maureen Beebe, who live with their grandparents on Chincoteague Island. Paul and Maureen work to earn money to buy a Chincoteague Pony mare named the Phantom, who has escaped the roundup men on Pony Penning Day for the past two years. Paul and Maureen save enough to buy Phantom, and Paul is able to capture her on the roundup because she is slowed down by her new foal, Misty. However, a man from the mainland buys the pair of ponies for his son before Paul and Maureen can give their money to the fire chief. Paul and Maureen are distressed, but they end up being able to buy Phantom and Misty because the original buyer's son won a colt in the yearly raffle and then decided he didn't need another pony, and chose the colt from the raffle.Paul and Maureen eventually break Phantom to ride, and the next year Paul races her on Pony Penning Day. Phantom wins, but the next day becomes distressed when she sees the herd she once belonged to, led by a stallion called Pied Piper, being released to swim back to Assateague. Paul releases Phantom, and she gallops to join Pied Piper and the herd as they return to freedom on their ancestral island. Misty remains behind with Paul and Maureen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Estate_(novel)"title="The Fourth Estate (novel)">
Lubji Hoch, the son of an illiterate Czech Jewish peasant, escapes the Nazis, changes his name to Richard Armstrong, and becomes a decorated British Army officer. After the war he is posted to Berlin as head of press relations in the British sector. He appropriates a floundering newspaper, his entrée to the business of publishing. On his return to the UK, he builds a publishing empire.On the other side of the world, in Australia, Keith Townsend, son of a millionaire newspaper owner, is groomed to follow in his father's footsteps. Private schools, an Oxford degree, and a position at a London newspaper prepare him to take over the family business. He quickly becomes the leading newspaper publisher in Australia.As Armstrong and Townsend battle to seize control of existing publishers on the world stage, they become fierce competitors. Hubris and overreach finally lead to financial disaster and tragic consequences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Penultimate_Peril"title="The Penultimate Peril">
The Baudelaire orphans, Violet, Klaus and Sunny are travelling with pregnant V.F.D. member Kit Snicket to Hotel Denouement, the last safe place for volunteers to gather. She tells them that, prior to V.F.D.’s gathering in two days, they will be disguised as concierges to observe the mysterious 'J.S.,’ in order to identify him as a volunteer or a villain of V.F.D. The hotel's managers are identical triplets Frank, Dewey and Ernest - Frank is a volunteer, while Ernest is on the opposing side as a villain, and Dewey is someone of legend who many do not believe exists. He has created a book cataloging all information of the V.F.D.During their first day of disguised employment, the Baudelaires split up to assist the hotel's guests - Violet assists Esmé Squalor and Carmelita Spats by bringing them a harpoon gun, Klaus assists Charles and Sir (the owners of the Lucky Smells Lumbermill) by escorting them to the sauna while also hanging flypaper outside a window for one of the managers, and Sunny assists Hal (an employee at Heimlich Hospital), Vice-Principal Nero, Ms. Bass and Mr. Remora (teachers at Prufrock Preparatory School) while locking a V.F.D device onto a door of the laundry room, converting it into a Vernacularly Fastened Door - all the guests discuss the mysterious J.S. and together the siblings discuss who asked for what, as each of them run into a separate manager.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silver_Mistress"title="The Silver Mistress">
Sir Gerald Tarrant, head of a secret service department in the British Government, and good friend of Modesty Blaise, is being driven by his chauffeur along a narrow road on the edge of the gorge of the Tarn River in S. France. His chauffeur stops to help two nuns change a tire on their car, and Sir Gerald is taken prisoner – by the nuns, no less.On the other side of the gorge lies Quinn, only semi-conscious after having stumbled and fallen while hiking. But he is sufficiently aware that he sees the two cars stopped on the road, and he tries to summon help by waving his handkerchief. Unknown to him, he is spotted by Mr. Sexton, who is the leader of the kidnapping operation.This starts a long chain of events. Modesty rescues Quinn the next morning, and then later Quinn provides the missing information that convinces Modesty that Sir Gerald has been kidnapped. (Until now everyone had believed that Sir Gerald had died together with his chauffeur when his car went tumbling down into the Tarn River.) Modesty and Willie Garvin have by chance already determined the probable location of Sir Gerald's captivity: Chateau Lancieux in the foothills of the Pyrenees in S. France.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_the_Rivers"title="Between the Rivers">
In the novel, the cities and regions are each ruled by their own gods. In the city of Gibil, however; the god Engibil has gotten lazy and does not monitor his city. As such the inhabitants have developed technology such as writing and smelting, and have started to lose respect for Engibil and his power. The other gods have gotten angry at Gibil for reasons they keep to themselves, and have started to refuse to trade with Gibil. It becomes the task of the main character, Sharur, a merchant, to travel the land and find out why the gods are angry and try to solve the problem.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pickup"title="The Pickup">
The events in part one of the novel all take place in South Africa. In a busy South African street, Julie Summers' car breaks down. She goes asking for the nearest garage, where she meets Abdu. He accompanies her to where she left the car. The events in part two of the novel all take place in Abdu's homeland. In the airport of an unnamed Arab country Julie and Abdu pass through the usual paper work.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bull's_Hour"title="The Bull's Hour">
The plot is of the "story within a story" format. The actual story is told as an answer to a question asked in school at a lesson about the patterns of the development of societies. The story goes as follows.After the story of Tormance has been told in the classroom it was clarified by the teacher that the contact with the Earth people had eventually indeed helped the people of Tormance to achieve Freedom. Now, some 130 years after the events, the Earth had just received a message from the Tormancians, and a starship from one of Earth colonies was being prepared to be sent to Tormance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor's_Edge_(novel)"title="Razor's Edge (novel)">
The plot contains some storylines which are intertwined. We can name these storylines according to their setting places. The first one is the Soviet Storyline and is about the medical doctor and psychophysiologist Ivan Girin, who studies the hidden possibilities of human brain and is interested in human beauty. The second storyline is about a group of Italians who go to Africa to find diamonds, but find Alexander The Great's Crown with mysterious crystals in it. The third storyline is about Dayaram Ramamoorty, the sculptor from India, and Amrita Tillottama, the dancer. The characters meet each other in the end of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormy_Weather_(novel)"title="Stormy Weather (novel)">
Young newlyweds Max and Bonnie Lamb, on their honeymoon at Walt Disney World in Orlando, are taken aback by news of a hurricane making landfall in South Florida. To Bonnie's surprise, Max is possessed by a fervent desire to visit the disaster scene after it has passed through. Once they arrive, Bonnie is appalled to see Max hopping through hurricane debris and gutted houses with his video camera, treating the devastation as a tourist attraction. She stalks away from him to regain her temper, and is not present when Max is snatched up by "Skink," an ex-governor of Florida now living wild on Key Largo, who attempts to teach him some manners and respect for nature.At the same time, con artist Edie Marsh and her sometime partner, an ex-convict nicknamed "Snapper," travel to the hurricane zone to work a personal injury scam. However, the house they pick belongs to mobile home salesman Tony Torres. A bit sharper than the average hurricane victim, Tony quickly sees through them and takes them hostage with a shotgun. Instead of killing them, he invites them in on his own scam: he's expecting a large settlement from his insurance company, but needs his estranged wife Neria's signature to collect. If Edie poses as the wife, Tony can cut out his real wife, and Edie gets a slice of the take. Meanwhile, after searching fruitlessly for Max, Bonnie is befriended by Augustine Herrera, an independent young man who is searching for exotic animals loosed from his deceased uncle's wildlife farm by the hurricane.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_of_Ballantrae"title="The Master of Ballantrae">
## The Rising.The novel is presented as the memoir of one Ephraim Mackellar, steward of the Durrisdeer estate in Scotland. The novel opens in 1745, the year of the Jacobite rising. When Bonnie Prince Charlie raises the banner of the Stuarts, the Durie family—the Laird of Durrisdeer, his older son James Durie (the Master of Ballantrae) and his younger son Henry Durie—decide on a common strategy: one son will join the uprising while the other will join the loyalists. That way, whichever side wins, the family's noble status and estate will be preserved. Logically, the younger son should join the rebels, but the Master insists on being the rebel (a more exciting choice) and contemptuously accuses Henry of trying to usurp his place, comparing him to Jacob. The two sons agree to toss a coin to determine who goes. The Master wins and departs to join the Rising, while Henry remains in support of King George II.The Rising fails and the Master is reported dead. Henry becomes the heir to the estate, though he does not assume his brother's title of Master. At the insistence of the Laird (their father) the Master's heartbroken fiancée marries Henry to repair the Durie fortunes. Some years pass, during which Henry is unfairly vilified by the townspeople for betraying the rising. He is treated with complete indifference by his family, since his wife and his father both spend their time mourning the fallen favourite. The mild-tempered Henry bears the injustice quietly, even sending money to support his brother's abandoned mistress, who abuses him foully, and her child, who she claims is his brother's bastard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Ugly_Stepsister"title="Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister">
"Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister" tells the story of Iris, the plain younger daughter of Margarethe Fisher, as she takes care of her mentally challenged older sister Ruth and her beautiful stepsister Clara. Having fled from the Fens of Cambridgeshire, England to Haarlem, the Netherlands, upon her father's death, Iris is slightly at odds with the world and often contemplates the value of beauty and ugliness. While caring for her sisters and keeping the peace between Clara and Margarethe, Iris develops a painter's eye and spends time studying under a local painter known as The Master, and his apprentice, Caspar.Margrethe makes Iris and Ruth go to the ball in the hopes of making the prince fall in love with Iris. Iris secretly helps Clara get to the ball and the prince immediately falls in love with her. While at the ball, Ruth does the unthinkable out of jealousy and love of Clara and Master, burning down the Master's magnum opus, a painting of Clara. That night, the fairy tale of Cinderella and her pumpkin carriage is spun, and the next morning her prince comes to collect her.At the end of the tale, the characters' eventual fates are revealed: Iris marries Caspar and paints at his side, sometimes under his name; Caspar "dutifully" cares for Ruth; and Clara eventually dies in New Amsterdam from a complaint of the heart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shack_(Young_novel)"title="The Shack (Young novel)">
The novel is set in the American Northwest. The main character is Mackenzie Allen Phillips, a father of five called "Mack" by his family and friends. Four years prior to the main events of the story, Mack takes three of his children on a camping trip to Wallowa Lake near Joseph, Oregon, stopping at Multnomah Falls on the way. Two of his children are playing in a canoe when it flips and almost drowns Mack's son. Mack is able to save his son by rushing into the water and freeing him from the canoe's webbing but unintentionally leaves his youngest daughter Missy alone at their campsite. After Mack returns, he sees that Missy is missing. The police are called, and the family discovers that Missy has been abducted and murdered by a serial killer known as the "Little Ladykiller". The police find an abandoned shack in the woods where Missy was taken: Her bloodied clothing is found, but her body is not located. Mack's life sinks into what he calls, "The Great Sadness".As the novel begins, Mack receives a note in his mailbox from "Papa", saying that he would like to meet with Mack that coming weekend at the shack. Mack is puzzled by the note—he has had no relationship with his abusive father since he left home at age 13. He suspects that the note may be from God, whom his wife Nan lovingly refers to as "Papa".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrows_of_an_American"title="The Sorrows of an American">
On the death of their father Lars, a retired Professor of History, Erik Davidsen and his sister Inga, a philosopher, clean out his home office in rural Minnesota and, while going through his copious papers, find a cryptic note written and signed by someone they do not know called Lisa which suggests to them that as a boy back in the 1930s their father was involved in some illicit act and that he has kept his promise never to tell anyone about it. The siblings decide to investigate the matter further, if only half-heartedly at first. For the time being, Erik Davidsen is preoccupied reading his father's journals, which the latter completed only shortly before his demise. For Erik, all this will mean that in the months to come he will not only be haunted by the ghosts of the present but also of the past.It has been pointed out that none of the characters in "The Sorrows of an American" leads a carefree, untroubled existence. The narrator himself suffers from a slight form of depression triggered by his recent divorce, childless state, and subsequent feeling of loneliness but still finds satisfaction in attempting to cure his patients of the complaints he occasionally recognizes in himself. His sister Inga has had absence seizures from childhood and migraines all her adult life. What is more, when the novel opens she is being harassed by a female journalist who states her intention to publicize hitherto unknown facts about Inga's deceased husband, a cult author and filmmaker, and who demands that she be co-operative without telling her what exactly she is aiming at or planning to do. Inga's 18-year-old daughter Sonia suffers from posttraumatic stress disorder, having witnessed, from the windows of her Manhattan school, the September 11, 2001 attacks and the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Lars Davidsen, the long-term patriarch of the family, was a fugueur.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Mike"title="Mrs. Mike">
The novel is based on the stories of Katherine Mary O'Fallon Flannigan (1899-1954). According to her fictionalized account, in 1907 at age 16 O'Fallon travels to Calgary to visit her uncle and recover from pleurisy. There she meets and marries Mike Flannigan, a sergeant with the Royal North-West Mounted Police, moving with him to isolated posts in the mountain and lake regions of British Columbia and northern Alberta (Lesser Slave Lake). In the novel the Flannigans' two children die of diphtheria, and they adopt three orphaned children.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goddess_of_Ganymede"title="The Goddess of Ganymede">
The novel concerns Adam Thane, a soldier of fortune who fights for the woman he loves against the immortals of Ganymede.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanar_of_Pellucidar"title="Tanar of Pellucidar">
The author's friend Jason Gridley is experimenting with a new radio frequency he dubs the Gridley Wave, via which he picks up a transmission sent by scientist Abner Perry, from the interior world of Pellucidar at the Earth's core, a realm discovered by the latter and his friend David Innes many years before inhabited by prehistoric creatures. There Innes and Perry have established an Empire of Pellucidar, actually a confederation of tribes, and attempted with mixed success to modernize the stone-age natives. Lately things have not gone well, and Innes is currently held captive in an enemy realm. Perry transmits a lengthy account of how this has come about, as reported by Innes's native comrade in arms Tanar, and appeals for aid from the outer world.Tanar's narrative comprises the bulk of the novel. Innes had led an army to the relief of the member tribe of Thuria and the remnants of the Empire's former foes, the reptilian Mahars. Both had been attacked by a previously unknown people, the Korsars (corsairs), the scourge of the internal seas. These, it is eventually learned, are the descendants of outer world Moorish pirates who had penetrated Pellucidar centuries before through a natural polar opening connecting the outer and inner worlds. The empire's forces succeed in repulsing the Korsars, but the raiders retain as hostage Tanar, son of Innes’ ally Ghak of Sari. They hope to trade him for the secret of the empire's superior weaponry. Leaving his forces to construct ships to counter the enemy fleet, Innes and his comrade Ja of Anoroc set out alone to rescue Tanar, guided by their own prisoner, the Korsar Fitt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Boss"title="Lady Boss">
"Lady Boss" tells the story of Lucky Santangelo taking over a movie studio in Hollywood called "Panther Studios."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_Dead_Beautiful"title="Drop Dead Beautiful">
The story focuses on the character Anthony Bonar (Enzio Bonatti's grandson), who is seeking revenge against the Santangelo family as Lucky Santangelo is responsible for the deaths of his grandfather and father. Lucky's daughter - the rebellious teenager Maria, also known as "Max" - is arranging to meet up with a mysterious boy on the internet, in the hopes of making an ex-boyfriend jealous. However, the mystery boy turns out to be a middle-aged man named Henry, who has a hatred for Max's mother Lucky as she did not cast him for a movie which she developed a few years ago. On the day of meeting Henry in Big Bear, many miles away from her Bel Air home, Max meets the nineteen-year-old Ace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gate_House"title="The Gate House">
After John Sutter's aristocratic wife killed her Mafia don lover, John left America and set out in his sailboat on a three-year journey around the world, eventually settling in London. Now, ten years later, he has come home to the Gold Coast, that stretch of land on the North Shore of Long Island that once held the greatest concentration of wealth and power in America, to attend the imminent funeral of an old family servant. Taking up temporary residence in the gatehouse of Stanhope Hall, John finds himself living only a quarter of a mile from Susan, his aristocratic ex-wife, who has also returned to Long Island. But Susan isn't the only person from John's past who has reemerged: Though Frank Bellarosa, infamous Mafia don and Susan's ex-lover, is long dead, his son, Anthony, is alive and well, and intent on two missions: Drawing John back into the violent world of the Bellarosa family, and exacting revenge on his father's murderer—Susan Sutter. At the same time, John and Susan's mutual attraction resurfaces and old passions begin to reignite, and John finds himself pulled deeper into a familiar web of seduction and betrayal. In The Gate House, acclaimed author Nelson DeMille brings us back to that fabled spot on the North Shore—a place where past, present, and future collides with often unexpected results.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_and_His_Big_Tunnel"title="Tom Swift and His Big Tunnel">
The Titus Brothers Contractors company have won a government contract in Peru to blast a tunnel through a mountain and connect two isolated railroad lines. The deadline is approaching, and the contractors have hit a literal wall: excessively hard rock which defies conventional blasting techniques. The company is under pressure to finish, or else the contract will default to their rivals, Blakeson &amp; Grinder. Mr. Job Titus has heard of Tom Swift and Tom's giant cannon, which is used in protecting the Panama Canal, and wants to hire Tom to develop a special blasting powder to help them finish the excavation.Mr. Damon, Tom's very good friend, arrives in the middle of this conversation, and is unaware of the situation. By coincidence, Mr. Damon is invested in a business which procures cinchona bark from Peru, but production has all but ceased, prompting Mr. Damon to invite Tom to accompany him to Peru and discover the source of the problem.Tom, Mr. Damon and Mr. Titus (along with Koku, Tom's giant) embark for Peru. On the way, they encounter Professor Swyington Bumper, who is on a lifelong quest to locate the lost city of Pelone. Professor Bumper returns to Peru each season, and has thus far been unsuccessful. When Professor Bumper discovers that Tom is headed to the same general area, Rimac, Professor Bumper decides to join the company.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Hitchcock_and_the_Making_of_Psycho"title="Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho">
The book details Hitchcock's acquisition of the original novel by Robert Bloch to his work with two different screenwriters, casting, filming, editing, scoring, and promotion. "Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho" shows the daily lives of the filmmakers, who believed they were making a modestly budgeted, black-and-white shocker, representing a radical departure from the elegant, suspenseful films that had made director Hitchcock's reputation, including "Rope", "Rear Window", "To Catch a Thief", "The Man Who Knew Too Much", and "North by Northwest".The project, which Hitchcock tackled in part to compete with financially successful, low-budget, youth-oriented horror movies, went on to astound many by becoming a cultural watershed, an international box-office success, a film classic, and a forerunner of the violent, disorienting films and real-events of the turbulent 1960s and '70s.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lone_Star_Ranger"title="The Lone Star Ranger">
Buck Duane is the son of a famous outlaw. Though an outlaw is not always a criminal, if the Rangers say he is an outlaw, it's just as bad – he's a hunted man. After killing a man in self-defense, Duane is forced to 'go on the dodge'. Duane turns up at an outlaw's hideout, still revolting at the idea of outlawry. Worse still, all the men he kills haunt him, for years. At the outlaw hideout, he meets a kidnapped, beautiful young woman and desires to see her free.In the second part of the book, Duane joins the Rangers, who want him to help to clear the frontier of major cattle rustlers and bank robbers, in return for the governor's pardon of his illegal deeds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hundred_Secret_Senses"title="The Hundred Secret Senses">
The story focuses on the relationship between Chinese-born Kwan and her younger, Chinese-American sister Olivia, who serves as the book's primary narrator. Olivia and Kwan's relationship begins when their father dies and Kwan is sent to live with the family. Olivia is embarrassed by Kwan because she is unfamiliar with American customs and does not speak English well. She constantly makes a fool of herself, and Olivia is teased by peers for having a "retarded" sister.Kwan relates to Olivia through the telling of Chinese tales and superstitions. She believes she has ""Yin" eyes", which means that she can see ghosts. She converses with them at night, frightening Olivia. She speaks Chinese in private, and Olivia picks up the language. Kwan believes that her stories are not just stories; they are based on her belief that she is part of the Yin world, the world of the ghosts. She believes that she is recounting tales from her past lives. In the melding of Olivia's modern Western world and Kwan's yin world, Olivia and Kwan create Asian-American identities for themselves, individually and together.Kwan plans a trip to China which is actually a scheme to get Olivia and her estranged husband, Simon, back together. Now Kwan serves as the translator for the writer (Simon) and photographer (Olivia). The real purpose of the trip is to discover Olivia and Kwan's connection to the Yin world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_the_Retreat"title="Sound the Retreat">
The story takes place between November 1945 and June 1946 in British India. Peter Morrison and his cadet comrades arrive in Bangalore for military service and are informed that they will have an Indian commander. The cadet Alister Mortleman disapproves strongly. During a visit with Captain Detterling to Ley Wong's restaurant, the Earl of Muscateer, the son of Detterling’s cousin Lord Canteloupe, gets food poisoning and later dies of Jaundice.The cadets meet their Indian commander, Gilzai Khan, and (except for Mortleman) take a liking to him. Khan starts a sexual relationship with the cadet Barry Strange. Khan shows strong feelings during Muscateer's funeral, and later during some heavy drinking at Ley Wong’s is rebuked by Mortleman. Khan arranges an unusual duel in which Mortleman will have the advantage of youth and Khan that of experience: the men will demonstrate their sexual endurance with Ley Wong's waitresses, and the one who displays the highest number of ejaculations will win. Mortleman beats Khan by 3 – 2. Shortly after, Peter Morrison starts a relation with a prostitute, Margaret Rose Engineer.Riots and unrest are breaking out all over India and Khan, a non-religious Muslim, predicts bloodbaths between the Hindus and Muslims when the British leave. Morrison is blackmailed by Margaret Rose who says that he promised her marriage and would have to resign his commission. Khan saves him by planting false evidence that she’s been forging ID cards at her home, and the charge against Morrison is dropped. Shortly after that Khan is removed from his command because of his positive attitude to British rule. An emotional farewell dinner for Khan is held at Ley Wong’s.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasquatch_(novel)"title="Sasquatch (novel)">
Fourteen-year-old Dylan Hickock's father, Bill, had quite often been strange. Bill would often go from one favorite subject to another, borrowing books to suit his interest. Dylan's mother goes on a four-month expedition to Egypt as an Egyptologist. Dylan's father had been on a hunting trip to Mount St. Helens, which is in danger of an eruption. Later, he takes Dylan to a cryptozoology convention called Bigfoot International, where Dr. Theodore Flagg is late for the meeting, and one member shows a snapshot of Bigfoot.Later, when Dr. Flagg, who supports bringing in evidence of Bigfoot in the form of an actual specimen, dead or alive, arrives, someone in the audience named Buckley Johnson objects to his views. Dylan's father objects to the idea as well, but is quiet about it. Dylan and his father later go to his house, because he owns real estate and Mr. Johnson is one of his buyers. There is a giant statue of Bigfoot in his yard, and he is being watched by a neighbor, Peter Nunn, who also owns a house from Bill Hickock's real estate and has set up video cameras and tape recorders.Bill invites Mr. Johnson to dinner with him and Dylan. Mr. Johnson tells them to call him Buck, and denies ever seeing the Sasquatch. Later, while Dylan's father joins Dr. Flagg on the expedition to Mount St. Helens, and everyone comes to Dylan's house for the night, taking away all communications so that the word isn't spread. Dylan's father wants him to quietly get Buck involved in this, but when Dr. Flagg is woken up he points a gun at Dylan, and Bill thinks Dr. Flagg is crazy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Éramos_Seis"title="Éramos Seis">
"Éramos Seis" chronicles the struggles of a middle-class family in São Paulo through the eyes of its matriarch Dona Lola.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miriam_(short_story)"title="Miriam (short story)">
"Miriam" is about a 61-year-old widow named Mrs. H. T. Miller who wants to spend the remaining years of her life alone in her apartment near the East River after the death of her husband, H. T. Miller. She is very lonely, has no friends to speak of and does not keep in touch with any of her relatives.One day, going into a movie theater, she meets a young, intelligent girl named Miriam. Mrs. Miller is intrigued that the girl's first name is also Miriam. Miriam asks Mrs. Miller to buy her a movie ticket because the usher will not let her in. She gives Mrs. Miller 25 cents (two dimes and a nickel) to buy her a ticket. They part as Mrs. Miller goes in search of a seat. When the movie ends, Mrs. Miller returns home. The following week, there is a knock on Mrs. Miller's door. When she answers it, she finds out it is Miriam, the girl she met at the movie theater. Mrs. Miller asks Miriam to go home, but Miriam refuses and asks Mrs. Miller to make her a jelly sandwich. After Miriam agrees to leave if given the sandwich, she goes into Mrs. Miller's bedroom and finds a cameo brooch that was given to Mrs. Miller by her deceased husband. She asks Mrs. Miller if she can keep it, and Mrs. Miller, despite her desire to stop her from taking it, relents in helplessness. Miriam then goes back to the couch and finishes her sandwich.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oreo_(novel)"title="Oreo (novel)">
Born into a taboo relationship that neither of her grandparents supported, having a Jewish father and black mother who divorce before she is two, Oreo grows up in Philadelphia with her maternal grandparents while her mother tours with a theatrical troupe. Soon after puberty, Oreo heads for New York with a duffel bag to search for her father; but in the big city she discovers that there are dozens of Sam Schwartzes (her father's name) in the phone book, and Oreo's mission turns into a humorous picaresque quest. The ambitious and playful narrative challenges accepted notions of race, ethnicity, culture, and even the novelistic form itself; its quest theme is inspired by that of the Greek tale of Theseus. In the end, Oreo witnesses her own father's death as he falls from a window.Ross uses the structure of the Theseus myth to both trap Oreo and allow her to reinvent it. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wyrmling_Horde"title="The Wyrmling Horde">
"The Wyrmling Horde" is an epic fantasy novel set in a land where men can bestow to each other a number of endowments, granting the recipient of the endowment attributes such as increased strength, a more acute sense of hearing, or better eyesight. The novel combines traditional sword and sorcery elements of fantasy with its own unique magic system of endowments.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(book)"title="Revolution (book)">
"Revolution" draws on Brand's own experiences and observations both as someone who has experienced considerable social mobility in his life—from a working class upbringing with a single mother in Grays, Essex, to Hollywood fame and fortune—and as a former drug addict who has found solace in twelve-step movements and in spirituality. "Change is something I'm good at," Brand claims. It also draws on a range of counter-cultural authors such as Noam Chomsky, David Graeber, and Helena Norberg-Hodge, as well as on historical events from the Spanish Revolution of 1936 to Che Guevara's reflections on the Cuban Revolution of 1959, and contemporary practices such as participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre or direct democracy in Switzerland.The book argues that contemporary capitalism is manifestly unequal and unfair, to the detriment of society's winners as much as to its many victims. It also claims that contemporary democracy is a sham, and so conventional politics will never bring about real change: "That is why I do not vote; that is why I will never vote." Instead, Brand advocates a social revolution based on two principles: "1) nonviolence, and 2) the radical improvement of the quality of life for ordinary people." It proposes a society of "self-governing, fully autonomous, ecologically responsible, egalitarian communities."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Writing_on_the_Hearth"title="The Writing on the Hearth">
Stephen, whose father was bodyguard to his Lord of Suffolk, is under taken into the Lord's household when his stepfather remarries and his sister enters a convent. Stephen is keen to learn and to enter the University at Oxford under the patronage of his Lordship's chaplain, but he becomes embroiled in some mild political intrigue when he believes he has let a copy of an indiscreet letter fall into the hands of his Lordship's enemies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lords_of_the_Bow"title="Lords of the Bow">
Under the name Genghis, the protagonist unites the Mongol tribes, finally defeating the last alliance against his rule. After the killing of the Khan of the alliance, the defeated shaman decides to tie his fate to that of the new Mongol nation.Genghis orders all of the tribes to assemble the following summer in the pastures around the Black Mountain.The following summer sees the tribes gathered, waiting for Genghis to lead them where he will. They are anxious to be off, but he is determined to wait for the Khan of the Uighur to show up with the five thousand soldiers he wishes to have. While stuck in one place, the new Nation becomes impatient and tempers flare. In one incident, Genghis' brother Khasar is forced to defend his honour against the sons of a lesser Khan. He is helped by the young Tsubodai, who is rewarded later in the book. When his brother, Temuge, tries to intervene, he is forced to his knees. Genghis shows up on the scene, and tries to sort out the situation. Almost everyone has their honour satisfied, except for Temuge, who complains that he was made to kneel. Genghis uses his sword to cut the Khan's thighs, so he cannot stand in return.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldbinder"title="Worldbinder">
In this novel, the main character Fallion returns to Castle Coorm in Mystarria, following his defeat of Shadoath. There he finds The One True Tree reborn, but it is surrounded by a twisted Seal of the Inferno. Fallion tries to heal the rune, only to discover that it was a trap left by the Queen of the Loci, in the form of Shadoath. The only thing he can do to save himself is to combine his world with the other linked to the Seal of the Inferno. The two worlds crash together with some unexpected results. For example, some people who happen to be standing in the wrong place recover from the melding of the two worlds to discover that they have a vine growing through their hand. Others combine with the version of themselves from the other world to produce a hybrid, but those whose other self has died or was never born are weakened.In this new world, a race of men who are several feet taller than the men from Fallion's world are locked in a mortal struggle with a race called wyrmlings. The wyrmlings are light-sensitive, and are approximate to the Inkharrans from Fallion's world and they carry parasitic wyrms inside them (like the loci of Fallion's world). They are led by Death Lords and Knights Eternal, undead creatures that perform the will of the Queen of the Loci. The battle between wyrmlings and men is at an uneasy truce because each holds a captive of the other race—the wyrmlings hold the prince Areth (the equivalent of Fallion's father, Gaborn, the Earth King) and the men hold the princess of the wyrmlings, Kan-hazur.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peony_in_Love"title="Peony in Love">
Peony's father, a wealthy, cultured man with important political contacts, is planning a performance of "The Peony Pavilion" on his estate. This is seen by many as controversial because the opera may influence young women into imitating Liniang, starving themselves to death in hopes of finding love.Unfortunately, this is just what happens to Peony. She is deeply moved by the text and performance of "The Peony Pavilion", having extensively written about her feelings and reactions to love in her copy of the text. On the evening of the opera performance, Peony accidentally meets a handsome young man. After three nighttime meetings, Peony falls in love, but she also falls into deep despair, feeling doomed because of being trapped in an arranged marriage. Following the example of Du Liniang, she starves herself to death, only to learn right before her death that the man her father has picked for her is Wu Ren, the man she loves.Most of "Peony in Love" takes place after Peony's death. Because her funeral rituals are not concluded properly, she becomes a "hungry ghost", who wanders far beyond the inner world of women that constrained her in her youth. In the process, she encounters a number of women writers who lament the difficulty of getting their voices heard in a male-dominated world. From her dead grandmother, she learns many painful details about her family's past as the Qing Dynasty violently replaced the Ming Dynasty, details later amplified by Peony's mother. Peony comes to learn about the courage and extreme suffering both older women experienced during the fighting and that the sternness her mother treated her with as a girl was only her attempt to protect her daughter from the evils of the outside world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daz_4_Zoe"title="Daz 4 Zoe">
The 'Subbies' live in the suburbs of Silverdale, a large fictional city, whereas the 'Chippies' live in the run-down city. The subbie children like to go out 'chippying' (visiting nightclubs in Rawhampton). This prompts adverts on TV about the dangers of chippying.Zoe is friends with Tabitha, the daughter of a very wealthy real estate developer. She encourages Zoe to go chippying with her in the company of Ned and Larry. Ned drives them to the Blue Moon nightclub, where Daz is as well. In order to leave the suburb, they tell the guard on duty that they are visiting Zoe's cousin in the next suburb and are made to show their ID cards to the bouncers who guard Silverdale.Zoe and Daz fall in love when they first set eyes on each other, although, at first, Zoe thinks it may be the 'lobotomizer' (coke, rum and 'a couple of other ingredients') that she has been drinking.Larry spots an attractive chippy girl and subtly tries to call her over to him. She smiles out of embarrassment, but he thinks she fancies him. Eventually, he shouts out to her loudly, his outburst coinciding with a pause in the music. Her boyfriend picks up a chair and goes over to Larry. A policeman steps between them. The chippy throws the chair, which Larry deflects with his arm. Daz comes over to rescue Zoe, taking Larry by the arm and telling the group to run and save themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_Days_(novel)"title="School Days (novel)">
Following a high school shooting in which seven people were killed by two masked students, one of the perpetrators, Wendell Grant, gives himself up, and police believe that shady peer Jared Clarke was his accomplice. However, his grandmother Lily Ellsworth, the grand dame of Dowling, Massachusetts, believes otherwise and hires P.I Spenser to prove the young man's innocence. As he investigates, the detective finds himself drawn into an increasingly tangled web of deception, blackmail and insanity, which isn't at all helped by Jared's curious apathy regarding his fate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adeline's_Dream"title="Adeline's Dream">
The narrative follows the story of twelve-year-old Adeline Mueller as she moves with her mom and five-year-old brother to Canada from their German home to move in with her father to start a new life. Adeline has not seen her father since she was eight and she is expecting a great and wonderful life in Canada from the description in the letters she has received from her father. But Adeline's relationship with her father has been strained ever since he left her and the rest of the family to move to Saskatchewan. Her father worked in a bank in Germany and then, after being fired, decided to find a better life for the rest of the family in Saskatchewan. Finally Adeline's father had reported that he has started a splendid new life for the family. The book begins with Adeline, her mother, and her brother Konrad traveling by steamship and then by train from Germany to Saskatchewan. The family then arrives at Qu'Appelle. When Adeline arrives, the truth is revealed.Adeline's father now works on a farm bagging flour and doing the accounts which does not make enough money to provide a home. So the family lives in a soddle made of grass and earth. All her life Adeline had dreamed that one day she would be a singer but she feels that because her father has brought her into these horrible conditions, that her dream will be ruined making their relationship even more strained. Adeline soon learns that the richer townspeople do not take kindly to the immigrants that move to the area. But through all the prejudice, Adeline makes two friends, Kat and Henery, who are also immigrants. Kat helped Adeline fight off prejudiced bullies at their school.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Morning_Gift"title="The Morning Gift">
"The Morning Gift" tells the story of Ruth Berger, whose family is part of the Jewish Intelligentsia in Vienna. When the Nazis take over, the Bergers organize a student visa for Ruth to be sent ahead to England, not realizing that she will not be allowed to leave Austria because of her political leanings as a Social Democrat. When her father is suddenly arrested by the Gestapo, he is told to leave Austria within a week and while his family is able to escape to London, Ruth on a separate transport is stopped on the border by the SS and sent back to Vienna. Quinton Somerville, an English professor and scientist who worked with Professor Berger in the past, arrives in Vienna for an award ceremony and learns that Professor Berger has been dismissed. Trying to contact the family, he visits Bergers' home and discovers Ruth, who is desperate to find a way to escape to England. Several attempts to get a valid visa for Ruth fail and Quin realizes that the only way to get her out of the country quickly is through a marriage of convenience. The marriage has to stay a secret until Ruth receives British citizenship, but once safe in London, the annulment of the marriage takes much longer than expected.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_You're_Reading_This,_It's_Too_Late_(novel)"title="If You're Reading This, It's Too Late (novel)">
For 500 years, the secret society of the Midnight Sun has been waiting for the homunculus, the man-made man, to rise, and now the evil Dr. L and Ms. Mauvais are going to throw Cass and Max-Ernest to the sharks unless they tell them where he resides. After going on an excursion with their science teacher, the two are tricked by Dr. L after receiving a note from Pietro saying he will meet them on a ship, from which they barely escaped. After finding out their teacher is really Owen, the accent changing member of the Terces Society, they are introduced to the great magician himself, Pietro, who gives them a mission. The mission is to find the homunculus before the Midnight Sun does. Max-Ernest also finds out that 'Terces' is "secret" backwards, and Cass gets grounded when she returns home, because she was missing for too long. While on the Midnight Sun ship, Cass and Max-Ernest discovers a strange ball (also called the sound prism), which enables her to hear all types of sounds by putting it to her ear and makes wonderful music when thrown in the air carefully. Cass also discovers a birth certificate. The name is unrecognizable, thus making Cass wonder if she was the wrong girl that the Terces Society wanted. She ignores it, even though it pains her, and continues her mission. Later Cass finds out she is really adopted and was delivered in a box on her grandfathers' doorstep.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_General's_Daughter"title="The Martian General's Daughter">
As with his previous work "Fitzpatrick's War", "The Martian General's Daughter" borrows heavily from classical history; in this case, the setting is reminiscent of the Roman Empire during the reign of Marcus Aurelius and his son, Commodus. Unlike "Fitzpatrick's War", Judson provides little background to explain how the world evolved into the shape set forth in the novel. The story takes place in the late twenty-third century, in which much of the Northern Hemisphere, as well as extraplanetary colonies on Mars and Jupiter, are dominated by the Pan-Polarian Empire, which is implicitly descended from the United States of America (though this is never expressly stated, references are made to the "old capital" near Maryland.)Pan-Polarian society is based on that of Imperial Rome, including an imperial cult and a variety of polytheistic and monolatric religions that have largely replaced the major religions of our time, including the cults of "El Bis" and the goddess Marilyn.The Empire's primary rivals are Persia and China, but which also fights against a number of enemies in Africa and South America. A nano-engineered plague has been released by one of the warring parties which causes metal to corrode and become useless; as a result, advanced technology is beginning to fail and the world is quickly degenerating to pre-industrial technology.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboys_for_Christ"title="Cowboys for Christ">
Beth is a successful pop music singer and a devout Protestant Christian from Texas, United States. She and her boyfriend Steve both belong to a group known as the "Cowboys for Christ", who travel to "heathen areas" of the world to preach Christianity. They travel to Glasgow, Scotland, hoping to save some souls once there. However, they are shocked when they receive a very negative reception, Beth even being set upon by a large dog.After performing a concert at a local cathedral, the duo are approached by Lord Lachlan and his wife Delia, aristocrats from the small village of Tressock in the Scottish lowlands. They invite Beth and Steve to come back with them to Tressock in order to preach.Meanwhile, Detective Orlando is sent to Tressock, posing as the local police officer, in order to secretly investigate reports of a pagan cult.Beth and Steve decide that they shall begin their preaching at the May Day celebrations in the village. Meanwhile, Orlando discovers that the people of the village worship the ancient Celtic goddess Sulis.In an attempt to impress the locals, Steve and Beth agree to becoming the local Queen of the May and the Laddie for the festival. In this role, they must split up for the day, and it is during this that the Laddie is devoured by the locals on an island in the middle of the river Sulis. Beth discovers this, and tries to escape, but is captured and embalmed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equality_(novel)"title="Equality (novel)">
The story takes up immediately after the events of "Looking Backward" with the main characters from the first novel, Julian West, Doctor Leete, and his daughter Edith.West tells his nightmare of return to the 19th century to Edith, who is sympathetic. West's citizenship in the new America is recognized, and he goes to the bank to obtain his own account, or "credit card," from which he can draw his equal share of the national product. He learns that Edith and her mother do not normally wear the long skirts he has seen them in (they had been wearing them so as not to offend his 19th century sensibilities): when Julian tells Edith that he would not be shocked to see them dressed in the modern fashion, Edith immediately runs into the house and comes out dressed in a pants suit. Clothing has revolutionised and is now made of strengthened paper, recycled when dirty, and replaced at very little cost (shoes and dishes are made of variations on the same substance).Julian learns that women are free to compete in many of the same trades as men; the manager of the paper factory he visits with Edith is a woman. Edith herself is in the second year of the three year general labor period required of everyone before choosing a trade, but has taken leave to spend time with Julian. The two tour a tenement house, in which no one now lives, kept as a reminder of the evils of private capitalism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Mars"title="Return to Mars">
Navajo geologist Jamie Waterman returned to Earth as a hero, travelling the globe, giving speeches on Mars, and supporting a return voyage. Now six years later, Waterman gets to return to his beloved red planet, and to the mysterious dwelling in the Valles Marineris region. However, the second voyage has sponsorship not from governments, but from corporations, most notably from millionaire Daryl Trumball, whose son is sent on the mission to make his father proud... and money. Now, Jamie finds himself locked in a war between Trumball's wishes of exploiting the planet, his job as mission director, and his own desires to explore the cliff dwelling that could hold the key to discovering the planet's past inhabitants.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Palladins"title="The Three Palladins">
The novel is an adventure story about the rise of Genghis Khan and the fabled kingdom of Prester John.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Owl"title="Downtown Owl">
The story describes the fictional town of Owl, North Dakota, in which three characters are intangibly connected. Horace is an old man who spends his afternoons in the local coffee shop with other old men, shaking dice to see who pays for coffee, and talking about politics, religion, and memorable Owl football teams of the past. Mitch is a stoic high school backup quarterback who is depressed for no apparent reason. Julia is the newest resident of Owl. She moved to the small town to teach history and spends much of her free time at the local bars (where she meets local celebrity Vance Druid). The town has about 850 residents and is semi-isolated from 1980s music and culture. As a climax, the three main characters are caught in a sudden blizzard — Horace and Julia stuck in their cars and Mitch outdoors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius_Squad"title="Genius Squad">
The book begins roughly 5 months after the events of Evil Genius. Cadel is now living with foster parents in a state of legal limbo, not knowing where he was born or his true father. His life is made even worse due to his foster brother "Mace" (real name: Thomas) is constantly bullying him. With no school to attend due to his questionable legal status, Cadel spends his time either on the computer, idling or visiting Sonja. The police and the FBI also occasionally turn up to question him on what he knows about Dr. Darkkon, Prosper English and the Axis Institute. During these questionings Cadel meets Saul Greeniaus, a detective who is now in charge of his case. His style puts him in conflict with Cadel's social worker, Fiona Currey. On his second visit to Sonja he is confronted by Trader Lynch and Judith Bashford. Trader and Judith attempt to convince Sonja and Cadel to join Genius Squad, An organisation formed to take down GENOME [a corporation founded by Darkkon] which is funded by Rex Austin, an American billionaire who suspects the company murdered his son, Jimmy. The book ends with Cadel being told that a man named Chester Cramp is his father. He is offered a spot in Fiona and Saul's family
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagan_Babies"title="Pagan Babies">
The novel begins in Rwanda. The protagonist is a priest named Terry Dunn. It is a few years after the genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus.Father Terry lives in Rwanda with his girlfriend Chantelle. He doesn't have qualms about substituting punishment for penance. If that means killing four Hutu murderers who slaughtered his Tutsi congregation, so be it. After being an instrument of divine wrath, Dunn breaks camp and heads for Detroit. He wants to raise money for 'Pagan Babies' — the children orphaned during the genocide.Dunn's brother Fran specializes in lawsuits for personal injuries. He is helping Debbie, a woman who spent three years in jail for deliberately hitting her ex-husband Randy with a Ford Escort. Debbie is trying to have a career as a comedian.In the meantime we learn more about Terry's past and his problems with the IRS, which was the reason for his fleeing to Rwanda to help his uncle.Debbie's ex-husband Randy now owns a restaurant and is involved with some of the same gangsters that Terry once knew. Debbie and Terry begin a relationship. Randy stole sixty-seven thousand dollars from Debbie and now it's only a matter of time before Debbie's desire for cold, hard cash and Terry's fundraising for Rwandan orphans join forces in a carefully plotted financial assault on Randy. They want to receive a donation of 250,000 dollars from Tony Amilia, the local wise guy, for the 'Pagan Babies'. In Randy's restaurant all of the local wise guys, hit men, and scam artists twist and twirl around each other for the money and for their lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cause_Celeb"title="Cause Celeb">
Rosie Richardson works in marketing at a publisher, when she starts dating Oliver Merchant, and falls in love with him. Oliver is the host of the TV show called "SoftFocus" where they tackle mostly cultural and political topics. Their relationship is formed by his erratic behaviour, like one day telling her he loves her and then not calling for days.When Rosie has to go to Nambula on a business trip, the poverty and general environment shock her into the realisation that she wants to spend her life doing something meaningful. So she breaks up with Oliver and leaves to go to Nambula and work at a refugee camp, organised by "Sustain".Four years later, she is running the camp and feels attracted to a new doctor, Robert O'Rourke. Unfortunately, rumours about a locust invasion spread and about the shipping of food that will be late.So Rosie decides that she has to take matters into her own hands. She flies back to England and gets in touch with Oliver and his circle of famous friends to raise funds. After some convincing, the stars and Rosie fly to Nambula for a one-hour fundraising show.In the meantime, Oliver attempts reuniting with Rosie, who refuses him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revenge_of_Dracula"title="The Revenge of Dracula">
The novel concerns the story of Count Dracula in England and is set before the events in Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Perfect_Strangers"title="Nine Perfect Strangers">
Nine people from different walks of life attend a pricey 10-day "Mind and Body Total Transformation Retreat" at a place called the Tranquillum House run by a mysterious Russian woman named Masha. Throughout the course of their retreat they realize that each of them are battling their own demons and all of them are subjects of an experiment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Une_passion_dans_le_désert"title="Une passion dans le désert">
The story is told in the first person by an unnamed narrator. In the frame story, the narrator tells his companion, after attending a show in a menagerie, a story he heard from a former French soldier. The soldier had been captured during Napoleon's campaign in Egypt. He escaped from his captors with a horse, food and weapons. After the horse dies he finds refuge in a cave and manages to tame a panther with which he is somehow in love. He calls her "Mignonne", in memory of his former lover, and projects a number of feminine qualities on the beast. He sets off walking through the desert towards the Nile to be rescued, and is followed by the panther. He stabs the animal to death when he mistakenly thinks she is attacking him. He is rescued by soldiers who find him in tears. The story finishes with the soldier telling the narrator of his regrets and of his experience of the desert.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Were_Her_Property"title="They Were Her Property">
"They Were Her Property" disputes the idea that white women did not play a significant role in slaveholding in the American south. Jones-Rogers uses primary source documents to illustrate the scope and conduct of white women slaveholders, including testimonials of formerly enslaved people archived by the Federal Writers' Project, and bills of sales for enslaved people bought and sold by white women. The author stated that around 40% of bills of sales from South Carolina in the 18th century included either a female buyer or seller.Jones-Rogers argues that white women were socialized to become plantation mistresses from girlhood through various social norms and often exacted cruelty and sexual violence onto enslaved people. The book addresses the widely-held belief that white women were gentler to enslaved people than white men, and dispels the notion of the "Jealous Mistress" who is angry that her husband has sex with enslaved women.Jones-Rogers contends that slaveholding was a key mechanism for white women to build wealth and maintain financial independence from their future husbands, and they skirted losing enslaved people to their husbands through various legal tools.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Still_Dream_About_You"title="I Still Dream About You">
Margaret Anne "Maggie" Fortenberry has reached the age of 60 and feels she has nothing left to live for. A former Miss Alabama, Maggie never made anything of her life or married. She enjoys her work in a real estate agency and also her friendships with Hazel Whisenknott, a positive-thinking midget who founded the agency; her real estate partner Brenda Peoples, an overweight black woman who aspires to be the city's first black woman mayor; and Ethel Clipp, the 88-year-old purple-haired office manager who is disgruntled with the deterioration of modern society. The only thing Maggie thinks she will miss are spring and fall in her native city of Birmingham, and the view of the graceful historic home called Crestview perched atop Red Mountain. Maggie determines to kill herself in the most unobtrusive way possible so the news won't be splashed all over the headlines. But every time she sets off to do the deed she is interrupted, until she realizes that she really wants to continue living after all.Subplots involve the rivalry between Red Mountain Realty and Babs "The Beast" Bingington, a non-native of Birmingham with a fake name and a fake Southern accent who will do anything, legal or not, to get a listing; and the mystery surrounding the last owner of Crestview, Edward Crocker, whose skeleton Maggie and Brenda find in a steamer trunk in the home's locked attic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tattooist_of_Auschwitz"title="The Tattooist of Auschwitz">
Told from the perspective of Lale Sokolov, the story follows his journey as a prisoner of Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. After being forcibly transported on a long journey on a livestock train with other Jewish prisoners, Lale arrives at Auschwitz II-Birkenau work camp where, within his first night, he witnesses two men killed by the SS.Lale adjusts to his new life as a Jewish prisoner, which involves witnessing gassings of fellow prisoners and becoming ill with typhus. While Lale is ill, the current tattooist of the camp, Pepan, takes interest in him and arranges for him to become his apprentice. Lale endures the labour of tattooing new prisoners to enable his further survival.Lale briefly meets a beautiful, young woman while tattooing her arm upon her entry to the camp, and he experiences love at first sight. Lale becomes the main tattooist after Pepan disappears. Lale asks the SS officer in charge of him, Baretksi, for an assistant, just as Pepan had asked that he be his assistant. Baretski picks out a young prisoner named Leon. Lale uses his relationship with Baretski to gain increased privileges within the camp, including the ability to communicate with the beautiful woman he met earlier, Gita. Gita works in one of the camp warehouses that houses the confiscated belongings of prisoners and often sneaks valuable items to Lale. Lale then risks his own life to exchange jewels and money with a sympathetic German worker for who comes to the camp each day for medicine and items of clothing to help prisoners who are suffering or gain favours with the SS. For example, while Gita is ill with typhus, Lale brings her medicine and promises to one day start a family with her once she is well again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Alice_Forgot"title="What Alice Forgot">
Alice wakes up believing she is a 29-year-old happily-married newlywed expecting her first child. She soon discovers that she is a 39-year-old soon to be divorced mother of three, estranged from her husband, best friend, and sister. She must deal with the amnesia that caused her to forget the last ten years of her life and discover what she has forgotten.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_from_an_Apocalypse"title="Notes from an Apocalypse">
"Notes from an Apocalypse" is an investigative book about the anxieties of a potential ecological and social collapse and the movements of survivalism that have followed. Mark O'Connell describes his experiences at the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, survival bunkers in South Dakota, an apocalyptic retreat in New Zealand, and with the environmentalist group Dark Mountain Project in the Scottish Highlands. He details his communications with doomsday preppers, aspiring space colonists and right-wing conspiracists.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'illustre_Gaudissart"title="L'illustre Gaudissart">
Felix Gaudissart is a successful and ambitious travelling salesman, based in Paris. He is nicknamed "The Illustrious Gaudissart". He has previously sold clothing and hats, but at the start of the story he has also taken up selling life insurance and subscriptions to newspapers. The latter include newspapers advocating Saint-Simonianism and republicanism, and he learns the Saint-Simonian doctrine without having any belief in it. He sets off to the Touraine area on a sales trip, and during this trip stays in the town of Vouvray. He tries to sell his items to a local man named Vernier, without realising that Vernier is strongly opposed to Saint-Simonianism. As a practical joke, Vernier recommends that he sells his items to his insane neighbour Margaritis. After a long discussion with Margaritis filled with comic misunderstandings, Gaudissart sells some children's newspaper subscriptions to him, and also agrees to buy two barrels of wine from Margaritis. Vernier eavesdrops on this conversation and brags about it to his friends.When he gets back to his hotel, the landlord tells Gaudissart that he has been fooled, and that the wine barrels he bought from Margaritis do not exist. Gaudissart is angry about this, and then confronts Vernier and challenges him to a duel. The next morning Gaudissart and Vernier meet for their duel and both deliberately miss their shots. They then reconcile, and a relieved Vernier agrees to buy some children's newspaper subscriptions from him. Gaudissart then threatens to take legal action over the nonexistent barrels of wine that Margaritis owes him, so Madame Margaritis agrees to pay him compensation for these instead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Chamber_(novel)"title="Black Chamber (novel)">
## Preliminaries.When William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt's opponent in the 1912 presidential election dies of a heart attack, Roosevelt's election is assured. After Roosevelt takes office, the United States conquers Mexico "for its own good" and begins a rigorous progress agenda.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Liberalism_Failed"title="Why Liberalism Failed">
"Why Liberalism Failed" is a critique of political, social, and economic liberalism as practiced by both American Democrats and Republicans. According to Deneen, "we should rightly wonder whether America is not in the early days of its eternal life but rather approaching the end of the natural cycle of corruption and decay that limits the lifespan of all human creations." The book argues that liberalism has exhausted itself, leading to income inequality, cultural decline, the erosion of freedoms, and the growth of powerful, centralized bureaucracies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaudissart_II"title="Gaudissart II">
In this very short story, the owner of a Parisian shop sells a cheap shawl at an inflated price to a wealthy Englishwoman by pretending that it used to be owned by the Empress Joséphine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollhouse_(book)"title="Dollhouse (book)">
Sisters Kamille, Kassidy, and Kyle Romero live in California where their mother, Kat, owns a restaurant. Their father, David, made some bad business decisions that left the family broke upon his death. Kat is remarried to former professional baseball player Beau, who has two children of his own from a previous marriage. Despite the sisters helping their mother out at the restaurant, the entire family is struggling to survive financially.The family's luck changes when Kamille is discovered by a modelling agent and becomes famous overnight. At a red carpet event she meets and later becomes engaged to a professional baseball player. The couple decide to have their wedding ceremony filmed for a television show. The wedding is called off after Kassidy has a drunken one-night stand with Kamille's fiance which results in her becoming pregnant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_Looks_Better_Naked"title="Strong Looks Better Naked">
The book is divided into three sections: Body, Mind, and Soul. The Body section primarily describers Kardashian's workout routine, diet plan, and fitness advice. The book also contains many photos of Kardashian.Kardashian also discusses her personal life and relationships in the book, including dealing with the death of father Robert Kardashian, her marriage to Lamar Odom, and her relationship with Caitlyn Jenner.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kris_Jenner..._and_All_Things_Kardashian"title="Kris Jenner... and All Things Kardashian">
The book is a memoir of Kris Jenner's life. She details her friendship with the late Nicole Brown Simpson, and the OJ Simpson trial which her ex-husband Robert Kardashian participated in. Jenner also shares personal memories of her children's lives, including daughter Kim's first relationship, first marriage at age 19, Khloe's difficulty in grieving the death of her father, and a 1996 incident in which daughter Kourtney grounded a commercial flight by shouting that there was a bomb on board.Jenner also revealed an affair she had while married to first husband Robert Kardashian.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secrets_of_My_Life"title="The Secrets of My Life">
Jenner details her three marriages and the role that her gender identity played in them. She writes that she told her first wife Chrystie about her gender dysphoria in 1973 after she noticed a rubber band Jenner had placed on her bra after wearing it. Her second marriage to Linda ended after Linda discovered Jenner wearing women's clothes. Jenner writes that she told third wife Kris about her gender identity early in the relationship, before they ever had sexual relations. Jenner writes that she began hormone therapy as part of her transition in the 1980s, becoming more feminine and growing breasts. She ultimately decided not to go through with it, stating that it would have been too hard on her family and herself. She had her breasts removed, telling the doctor that they had grown as a result of steroid use. After her divorce from Kris, she decides to go through with her transition, having her final surgery in January 2017.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_a_Recovering_Environmentalist"title="Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist">
Much of the book recounts Kingsnorth's personal history with the environmental movement and with nature. He starts the book with a description of his upbringing, his engagement with the Dongas road protest group, and with his engagement with environmentalism and journalism through his twenties. Kingsnorth then describes how he pivoted into a cynicism with mainstream environmentalism, a cynicism centered on what Kingsnorth feels is a "single-minded obsession with climate change" that "has trumped all other issues," resulting in "a curious, plastic world." He highlights some of the ways that this has occurred in England. Kingsnorth finished his book with a chapter titled The Eight Principles of Uncivilisation, which he presents as his manifesto in how to re-evaluate myths of progress and human centrality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unspoken_Name"title="The Unspoken Name">
Thirteen-year-old Csorwe is an Oshaaru living in a temple called the House of Silence, where she is pledged to be the Chosen Bride of the Unspoken God. On her fourteenth birthday, she is destined to be sacrificed to the god. On the day of the ritual, a traveling Tlaanthothe wizard named Belthandros Sethennai convinces her to abandon her vows and become his apprentice. Oranna, a necromancer from the House of Silence, becomes jealous that Sethennai did not rescue her from the temple and vows revenge.Csorwe trains under Sethennai, gaining skills as a spy and assassin. She helps him to regain his position as the Chancellor of the city of Tlaanthothe. Sethennai takes the nephew of the previous Chancellor, Tal Charossa, as another pupil. Tal and Csorwe despise one another, and their mutual hatred drives many of their actions. They both pledge to help Sethennai recover the Reliquary of Pentravasse.In their search for the Reliquary, Csorwe meets young mage Adept Shuthmili. Shuthmili has been exploring the ruined monument that holds the Reliquary. Oranna arrives and seizes the Reliquary; Csorwe chooses to save Shuthmili rather than pursue Oranna. Shuthmili is destined to become part of a hive mind of mages designed to protect the Qarzashi Empire; Csorwe convinces her to abandon this duty and escape with her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_We_Became"title="The City We Became">
"The City We Became" takes place in New York City, in a version of the world in which major cities become sentient through human avatars. After the avatar of New York falls into a supernatural coma and vanishes, a group of five new avatars representing the five boroughs come together to fight their common Enemy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Elixir_de_longue_vie"title="L'Elixir de longue vie">
The story starts in 16th century Ferrara in Italy. Don Juan Belvidero, the spoiled young son of wealthy nobleman, Bartolommeo Belvidero is having dinner with friends in the family palace, when he is told by a servant that his father is dying. He goes to his father's room. There his father tells him to fetch a phial of liquid from one of the drawers. His father orders Juan to rub this liquid over his body after he is dead, saying that it will restore him to life, and make him young again. Bartolommeo then dies. Juan does not immediately obey his father. After informing his guests of his father's death and seeing them off, he returns to his dead father's room, and puts one drop of the liquid from the phial on his father's eye. The eye comes back to life. After his initial shock, Don Juan kills his father's eye. Having inherited his father's wealth, Juan continues his life of debauchery. He also secretly becomes an atheist. In his 60s, he settles down in Andalusia in Spain, and marries Dona Elvira, and they have a son, Felipe. He also chooses the Abbot of San-Lucar to be the confessor of his wife and son, and Felipe is raised to be religiously devout. On Juan's death bed, he tells his son Felipe about the phial of liquid, claiming that it is holy water. He orders his son to pour it over his body after he is dead. Felipe follows these orders, first pouring the liquid on his father's head, then on one of his arms. Juan's now living arm then grasps Felipe by the throat. A shocked Felipe faints, and the phial drops to the floor and breaks and all the rest of the liquid is lost. People rush into the room when they hear the noise, and see Don Juan's body with the head and one arm bought back to life and youth, and the rest still dead. They proclaim it to be a miracle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eat_the_Document_(novel)"title="Eat the Document (novel)">
After a domestic bombing campaign against corporations involved in the Vietnam War goes awry in 1972, a leftist cell led by lovers Bobby Desoto and Mary Whittaker goes underground. Mary and Bobby split up and invent new lives for themselves. Mary changes her name, dyes her hair, and moves to Oregon to join a feminist collective. When her identity is discovered, she flees across the country, first to a lesbian commune in upstate New York, and then to Southern California. She ends up as Louise, a placid housewife in a suburb of Seattle raising a son, Jason, by herself after her husband dies in an accident. Jason grows to become an insular, intelligent teenager and aficionado of retro music.In a parallel plot, Bobby has become Nash Davis, an indifferent owner of an alternative bookstore in Seattle in the late 1990s who convenes ironic leftist discussion groups that never actually undertake the actions they plan. Nash is friends with a chronically ill man named Henry, who has all the symptoms of Agent Orange exposure despite never having served in Vietnam. Nash becomes romantically involved with a fiery young activist named Miranda, but loses her to Josh, an unassuming, calculating young man who, despite his apparent suburban normalcy, has a penchant for computer hacking to aid leftist causes. Josh executes a hack against a mega-corporation that ends up landing him a job there, which he takes for the sake of infiltrating them from the inside (or so he tells Miranda). Eventually, as Josh rises in the corporate ladder, his intentions are no longer clear, and Miranda leaves him. Meanwhile, Jason discovers his mom's secret, as well as Bobby's new identity, and confronts her. The reader learns at this point that a bomb planted by Mary in the home of an executive of a munitions company accidentally killed a maid instead. Jason gives her Bobby's information, and she meets with him for the first time since they went underground. She tells him that she has resolved to turn herself in, but Bobby urges her to turn him in to the authorities to reduce her sentence. She leaves without explicitly accepting his offer, but a few days later Bobby is arrested.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ickabog"title="The Ickabog">
On the eve of a visit from the king of a neighboring country, Dora Dovetail dies of overwork with King Fred's final button in her hand, trying to finish King Fred's latest costume. Fred, despite feeling embarrassed and guilty, declines to visit her family, leading them to become disillusioned with him, especially Dora's daughter, Daisy. This leads to a fight between Daisy and her friend Bert Beamish, Major Beamish's son when Daisy Dovetail insults Fred. A shepherd from the Marshlands begs Fred to rid the country of the Ickabog, and Fred, wishing to prove himself, agrees and rides North. An accident in the marshes results in Major Beamish getting shot and killed by Flapoon, one of Fred's advisors. Seeking to take control of the kingdom and become richer, Spittleworth, Flapoon's ally, pretends that Beamish was killed by the Ickabog, fooling Fred and the rest of the army.On their return, three soldiers and Herringbone, the Chief Advisor, object to the story. Herringbone is murdered and the three soldiers are imprisoned. A heavy tax is imposed to pay for an "Ickabog Defence Brigade", causing widespread poverty, which Fred is oblivious to, as he is scared into staying within the capital. Spittleworth, now Chief Advisor, has the Dovetails kidnapped, with Dan Dovetail sent to prison, and forced to carve Ickabog feet. Daisy ends up in the brutal Ma Grunter's orphanage, where she befriends Martha, a Marshlander.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madame_Firmiani"title="Madame Firmiani">
Madame Firmiani is a beautiful young woman who is the subject of gossip in Paris. However, her husband's whereabouts are unknown. One day she receives a visit from Monsieur de Bourbonne, who is concerned about a rumour that his nephew Octave de Camps is having an affair with her, and has ruined himself financially because of her. Monsieur de Bourbonne is charmed by Madame Firmiani, but when he mentions that Octave is his nephew, the conversation is brought to an abrupt end. The next day he visits his nephew Octave, who is making a living by teaching mathematics, and living in poverty. Octave explains to his uncle that he and Madame Firmiani are in fact married, and that her first husband died in Greece in 1823. They are waiting for evidence of his death so that they will be able to inherit his money. Octave also says that he has renounced his late father's money, after Madame Firmiani learned that he had come by the money dishonestly. Octave also says that he has given most of his money to the Bourgneuf family whom his father had wronged. Madame Firmiani then comes in, and announces that she has finally received confirmation of her first husband's death. They are then all reconciled.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wicked_Deep"title="The Wicked Deep">
Set in the small town of Sparrow, Oregon, the novel follows seventeen-year-old Penny Tabolt, who knows all about the curse that torments the town: about the Swan sisters who were accused of witchcraft and drown nearly two centuries ago. She knows why the sisters return each summer, why they seek revenge upon the men of the town, and how to stop them. But this summer, a boy, Bo Carter, comes to town, and he has as many secrets as Penny, and soon she must decide who to save: Bo, or herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxfire_(novel)"title="Foxfire (novel)">
New York socialite Amanda Lawrence falls in love with mining engineer Jonathan Dartland, but is ill-prepared for the harsh realities of life in the Arizona desert.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Isle_of_Youth"title="The Isle of Youth">
## "I Looked For You, I Called Your Name".A woman goes on her honeymoon but faces a series of disasters on the trip, including a plane crash, a broken nose and a hotel fire. She soon realizes these events are reflective of the looming end to her marriage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incest_Diary"title="The Incest Diary">
The author discusses how her father raped and abused her from ages three to 21 in graphic detail. The author told her mother, grandmother and a family friend about her abuse but was ignored. She eventually confronts her father, who apologizes and cries and goes on to tell the family about it. The author's grandfather tries to force her into a mental institution and her brother has a breakdown for which she feels responsible.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_Water"title="Devil Water">
Charles Radcliffe escapes from Newgate Prison after his brother's execution during the Jacobite rising of 1715. Charles' daughter Jenny travels across the Atlantic Ocean to Williamsburg, Virginia and William Byrd's plantation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maître_Cornélius"title="Maître Cornélius">
The story is set in Tours in 1479. It starts with Marie de Saint-Vallier, an illegitimate daughter of Louis XI attending mass at Tours Cathedral with her much older husband, the Comte de Saint-Vallier. He falls asleep, and Marie's lover Georges d’Estouteville comes over to speak to her. He tells her that he will meet her that night in her home, by breaking in from the home of Cornelius Hoogworst who lives next door. Cornelius Hoogworst is a wealthy silversmith and merchant who does business with the King and wealthy courtiers. He is an elderly miser who lives with his sister in a big house and is originally from Ghent. During his time in Tours, his home has been robbed three times, and each time his apprentices were blamed, and executed. This has made him feared and hated in Tours. Georges then presents himself to Cornelius, and asks to become his apprentice. He is accepted with the help of a forged letter from another merchant in Ghent. He is given a room in Cornelius' home, and during the night escapes next door for a rendezvous with Marie. Whilst this happens Cornelius' home is again robbed of valuable jewelry. So the next morning, Georges is arrested, because Cornelius has noticed that he was absent from his room. When Marie learns of the arrest of her lover, she immediately arranges to see her father, the King.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mistletoe_and_Sword"title="The Mistletoe and Sword">
Quintus Tullius is a standard bearer for the Ninth Roman legion who wishes to find and bury the bones of his long-dead grandfather. While in Britain, he meets and falls in love with Regan, the foster daughter of the warrior queen of the Iceanians who leads the British tribes in the uprising against Rome.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champa_(novel)"title="Champa (novel)">
The story describes the life of a 12-year-old girl, Champa, who is married to Ramakanta but being self-reliant, she could not stay her home and she runs away. Due to some disease, the husband cannot have physical contact with the girl. One day he decides to leave home because he fears that if he goes close to his "tempting" wife his life may be at risk. Due to this Champa is blamed by her in-laws. This novel has however no distinct ending.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Beast"title="The Final Beast">
The untimely death of Franny Nicolet leaves behind her grieving husband, Theodore, and their two children. A minister, living in Myron, New England, Nicolet struggles on with the overwhelming tasks of raising his children and caring for his parishioners. When Clem Vail reports the distressed abscondment of his wife, Rooney, Nicolet drives off in search of her, and in hopes of ascertaining why she has fled her husband. His pursuit of her, however, opens up an opportunity for a local journalist, Will Poteat, to spread the malicious rumour that the parishioner and her pastor are engaged in a secret affair.Nicolet's journey will take him down several avenues of self-discovery. The minister meets with his distant and disinterested father, Roy, with whom he haltingly attempts to ignite some form of familial relationship. The attempt proves to be a failure, though not a personal one, as ultimately the son will forgive the father, although the relationship remains dormant. Nicolet eventually finds Rooney, who has cloistered herself away in a retreat house in Muscadine, owned and operated by Lillian Flagg, a faith-healer and Christian mystic. Flagg's overtures to Nicolet on the topics of prayer and forgiveness prove to be a catalyst for change in the young minister's outlook, prompting a greater understanding about the inherent joy that lies beneath grief and suffering.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Should_See_Me_in_a_Crown_(novel)"title="You Should See Me in a Crown (novel)">
Liz Lighty longs to leave her hometown of Campbell, Indiana and makes plans to start a new life at the elite Pennington College, where she aims to join their world-renowned orchestra and study to become a doctor. Liz hopes to enroll at Pennington with the help of financial aid but when the aid suddenly becomes unavailable, she reluctantly decides to join a contest at her high school which awards scholarships to the prom king and queen.Even though Liz is afraid of being the center of attention, fears the possibility of being trolled on social media and dislikes public events, she is fueled by the desire to follow her dream of attending Pennington College. When Liz finds herself falling for her prom queen competition, the bright and witty Mack, she is caught between the excitement of a new crush and the risk of losing a scholarship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Honor_(novel)"title="Code of Honor (novel)">
In Indonesia, software engineer Jeff Noonan secretly sells the computer program Calliope to Superhuman Games, an Indonesian gaming company. Soon after, he is lured into a honey trap by Wu Chad, an agent working for the cyber warfare division of the Chinese PLA. Along with his assassin Kans, Zhao blackmails him into giving them a copy of Calliope, intending to exploit its next-generation AI capabilities to hack into American military computer systems.The next day, Noonan turns to Jesuit priest Pat West for help; however, Chao and Kang catch up to them. They murder the former and have the priest arrested by the Indonesian police for made-up charges of blasphemy against Islam. However, Father West, a former CIA officer, manages to send a private text message about his encounter with Noonan to his friend, U.S. President Jack Ryan.Upon receiving the text message from Father West, President Ryan discreetly orders the Campus to investigate the priest’s text message. After pleading for the release of Father West to the Indonesian president to no avail, he decides to make a state visit to Indonesia. Meanwhile, the priest is speedily convicted of smuggling heroin and sentenced to death in the country’s Execution Island.The Campus tracks down Noonan’s colleague Todd Ackerman, who is in hiding in New Zealand. However, they find him dead, murdered by PLA agents. After finding out about the sale, they proceed to Indonesia to break into the headquarters of Suparman Games and retrieve the purchased copy of Calliope. However, Suparman’s henchmen abduct Campus operative Domingo “Ding” Chavez.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartment_(novel)"title="Apartment (novel)">
## 1996.The novel opens in August 1996 in New York City, where the narrator is enrolled in the Columbia University's prestigious Master of Fine Arts Writing program, and lives in a two-bedroom in Stuyvesant Town on the east side in Manhattan. The apartment is especially desirable because it's rent-stabilized, whereas most rents in Manhattan are exceedingly high. The narrator is however subletting illegally in the apartment, since the lease is under his great aunt's name, who has since moved to New Jersey. During a writing workshop, the professor and other students criticize the narrator's writing, but one student, Billy Campbell, defends him. The narrator later meets Billy at a bar, and learns he is from a poor family, working as a bartender to make ends meet, and living in a storage room basement. The narrator offers his spare room at the apartment to Billy in exchange for Billy cooking a few nights a week. In addition, Billy agrees to clean the apartment once a week. With minor disagreements, the narrator and Billy's relationship is warm at first. The narrator greatly admires Billy's writing talent, charisma, handsomeness, and success with women. In December, the narrator and Billy take ecstasy with 2 women. The narrator accidentally touches Billy in a sexual manner, and Billy abruptly leaves. After this experience, Billy becomes cold and distant toward the narrator.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_and_White_Supremacy"title="Me and White Supremacy">
The book opens with a foreword by American academic and author Robin DiAngelo. Structured as a 28-day guide divided into four weeks and targeted at white readers, the book aims to aid readers in identifying the impact of white privilege and white supremacy over their lives. It contains quotations, terminology definitions and writing prompts. The first week, "The Basics", discusses concepts such as white fragility and tone policing. The second, "Anti-Blackness, Racial Stereotypes and Cultural Appropriation", covers the titular subjects in addition to color blindness. The third, "Allyship", is about individual action and attitudes that white people can adopt. The last, "Power, Relationships and Commitments", continues this subject and poses questions about structural change.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Message"title="Le Message">
The story is told in the first person by an unnamed male narrator. He recalls that in 1819, he was on a stagecoach from Paris to Moulins where he met another young man, and they discussed their love affairs with older married women. The stagecoach rolls over, and the other young man is fatally injured. Before he dies, he asks the narrator to go to his home, fetch the love letters from his lover and return them to her. The narrator does as he is told, and goes to the château of Count and Countess de Montpersan outside Moulins to return the letters. There he informs the couple of the young man's death. The narrator is asked to stay for dinner by the count. However, the countess does not attend the dinner, and the narrator joins a search for her. He finds her in an outbuilding crying for her young lover.Later that night, the countess visits the narrator's room to learn more of her lover's death, and he also returns the letters. When he leaves the next day, the count gives him some money which he asks him to return to a friend in Paris. On his return, the narrator learns that the money is actually for him, and that the countess has given him the money to pay for the expenses of his journey.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sister"title="Red Sister">
The planet Abeth was originally settled by four tribes with various abilities. The hunska have superhuman speed; the gerant have superhuman strength, the marjal can work elemental magic; the quantal can work larger magics. Children born on Abeth may have access to one (or rarely, multiple) bloodline powers. Abeth’s dying red giant sun cannot generate sufficient heat to prevent a global ice age. Abeth’s man-made moon refracts sunlight onto a narrow strip of land circling the globe. This Corridor, only fifty miles wide, is the only unfrozen land on the planet. It comprises several kingdoms fighting for control of the planet’s resources.Nona Grey is a peasant girl living in a remote village in the Corridor. She is purchased by a slave trader who recognizes that she has hunska blood. She is brought to the capital of the Empire, where she attacks a noble named Raymel Tacsis. She is saved from execution by Abbess Glass of the Sweet Mercy Convent.Nona trains in the arts of combat and subterfuge at Sweet Mercy. Along the way, she meets fellow novice Arabella (Ara). Various nobles believe that Ara is the Argatha, a savior destined to save Abeth. Abbess Glass convinces the nobility that Nona is the Shield, destined to protect the Argatha. With her training, Nona recognizes that she also has quantal and marjal talents. Nona also meets a mysterious student named Zole and her bodyguard Yisht. Nona realizes that Yisht is attempting to steal a valuable artifact from Sweet Mercy: the shipheart, which was left by the original settlers of Abeth. With four shiphearts, one can control the moon which is protecting Abeth from a permanent ice age. Nona and the other students defeat Yisht and save the shipheart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Much_and_Never_Enough"title="Too Much and Never Enough">
The book takes the form of a chronological biography; while Donald Trump is the stated focal point, Mary Trump devotes significant attention to other members of the Trump family as a way to shed light on their mutual dynamics and financial dealings. Drawing on her skills as a clinical psychologist, the author attempts to provide the inner familial workings as a background from which to analyze Donald, but has avoided outright diagnosis.In "Part One: The Cruelty Is the Point", the author describes the character of the family's patriarch, Fred Trump Sr., and attempts to elucidate how his treatment of his children has had a lasting impact on them. Based on recollections from family members, Mary diagnoses Fred Sr. as a "high-functioning sociopath" who sought to use and abuse all those around him for his own benefit. Donald, while observing his brother Fred Jr. being constantly criticized over perceived shortcomings, would adapt their father's attitude and nature to avoid displays of sadness, weakness or kindness. Mary states Fred's cruel influence ensured that Donald would have limited access to his range of emotions. Their mother, Mary, is described as a "physically and mentally challenged" subservient wife during the children's formative years as a result of osteoporosis and due to Fred's frequent verbal abuse of her and their children. Later in life, she would reveal to Mary that she was relieved when Donald was sent away to a military school at age 13, as at that point he had started to become belligerent and disobedient towards her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Best_Man"title="The Worst Best Man">
Wedding coordinator Carolina Santos is left at the altar. Three years later, she has an opportunity to win a dream job. She is assigned a marketing specialist - Max Hartwell, her former fiancé's brother. While working together, the two eventually fall in love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Burning"title="A Burning">
Set in Kolkata, India, the novel tells the story of its central character Jivan, a woman who witnesses a terrorist attack on an Indian train while it is stopped in a station. Jivan posts to Facebook the next day, drawing the attention of police who arrest her on suspicion of committing the terrorist attack. Following the accusation, her fate hinges upon her former gym teacher, PT Sir, who has become a politician in an Indian right-wing party, and on a hijra actress named Lovely.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Grenadière"title="La Grenadière">
La Grenadière is the name of a farm house overlooking the Loire at Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire near Tours. A woman named Madame Willemsens comes to rent the house, and stays there with her two young sons Louis Gaston and Marie Gaston, and her elderly servant Annette. Her past life is not explained. She reveals to her older son, 13 year old Louis that she is terminally ill. The family then spend the last few months of her life trying to enjoy their life and their idyllic surroundings. Louis also dedicates himself to study, particularly mathematics, as he plans to join the navy in order to support himself and his brother.On her death bed, she asks Louis to write a letter to her husband Lord Brandon in England announcing her death. She also charges Louis to act as a father to Marie and gives him her entire life savings of 10,000 francs. Louis explains that he has already decided give the funds to Annette who will care for Marie while he attends a technical college in Tours. Louis, meanwhile will join the French Navy in order to secure his fortune. Madame Willemsens is greatly consoled by Louis' maturity in the moments prior to her passing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Theatre_for_Dreamers"title="A Theatre for Dreamers">
Set in the early 1960s, "A Theatre for Dreamers" tells the story of 18-year-old Erica, who escapes from her controlling father in London to live among the colony of writers, painters and musicians on the small Greek island of Hydra. Erica befriends and then observes Hydra's circle of talented but troubled bohemians, including fictionalised versions of famed real-life characters Charmian Clift, George Johnston, Axel Jensen, Marianne Ihlen, Gregory Corso, Gordon Merrick and a young, as yet undiscovered, Leonard Cohen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cefalonia_(poem)"title="Cefalonia (poem)">
The dialogue takes place between two characters, Ettore B., an Italian soldier who officially died in combat on September 17 (but was perhaps executed), and Hans D., a German businessman. The relationships tying the two characters to the events that occurred on the island are very different: those of Ettore B. are real and final and those of Hans D., conceivably surreptitious. Their presence acquires meaning only on a symbolic level. Ettore B. is a direct victim of the war; Hans D. is an indirect executioner who cannot escape from the suspicion that executioners—direct or indirect—cannot be absolved by invoking a duty to obey or, least of all, a state of ignorance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firing_Point"title="Firing Point">
Jack Ryan, Jr. takes a vacation in Barcelona, Spain after taking part in a mission with the Campus in South Korea. He runs into his former college classmate Renée Moore in a restaurant, and they briefly catch up. The two agree to meet up later that night, and Jack leaves the restaurant moments before a suicide bomber blows up the place, killing everyone inside. Ryan manages to catch up to his dying friend, who utters the word “Sammler” before succumbing to her wounds. Jack meets Spanish intelligence (CNI) agent Laia Brossa, who probes him for information on the suicide attack. Brigada Catalan, an activist organization demanding Catalan independence from Spain, had taken responsibility. However, Jack is not convinced, but agrees to help Brossa with the investigation.Meanwhile, U.S. President Jack Ryan receives reports of commercial vessels disappearing under mysterious circumstances across the Pacific Ocean. They are leased by civilian defense contractor Buck Logan, one of Ryan’s biggest supporters. The incidents are accompanied by a threat from an unknown party demanding ransom. President Ryan suspects Russian involvement, especially in light of the country gearing up for a military exercise with China called Snow Dragon in the Bering Sea.With the help of Campus IT director Gavin Biery, Jack investigates the circumstances behind Moore’s death, often passing information to Brossa. He finds out about Moore’s involvement with the CIA as well as data scientist Dylan Runtso, whom he had encountered moments before the suicide attack. Runtso had been working on a top secret government program codenamed RAPTURE out of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Jack’s investigation attracts the attention of Guatemalan contract killer Hector Guzman, who has been involved with the bombing at the restaurant. He places him under surveillance through his Russian colleague named Bykov. However, Jack discovers and unsuccessfully tries to capture the Russian for information.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_He_Can_Creep"title="For He Can Creep">
While Christopher Smart is confined for insanity in St. Luke's Asylum, he is repeatedly visited by Satan, who wants him to write a poem that will end the world — and only his cat Jeoffry (with the help of several other cats) can stop him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Life_(novel)"title="Real Life (novel)">
Wallace is a gay, Black student from a small town in Alabama who is enrolled in a PhD program in biochemistry at a predominantly White university in a Midwestern town. He is the first Black student admitted to the program in decades and is considering dropping out. The narrative starts shortly after one of Wallace's experiments (involving the culturing of nematodes) has gone wrong, and he suspects one of his fellow students of having sabotaged it. The novel takes place over the course of a weekend, which alternates between gatherings with his (White) friends, moments of solitude, a session in his lab, and a number of steamy encounters with his friend Miller. Further events from his past are narrated through flashbacks, and they include the death of Wallace's father a few weeks before the start of the novel, his absence at the funeral, his difficult relationship with his mother, the sexual abuse suffered at the hands of a family friend. Part of the recent trauma for Wallace is an experiment most likely ruined for him by a fellow White student, and when early in the novel Wallace is confronted with the likely sabotage of his nematodes experiment, he does not even try to make the case for foul play to his supervisor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanishing_Acts"title="Vanishing Acts">
Delia Hopkins is a missing persons' investigator, who lives in New Hampshire with her widowed father Andrew and her young daughter Sophie. Delia works with her own search-and-rescue bloodhound to find missing people. Delia is on the verge of marrying Eric, a friend since childhood. Suddenly, she learns that her father has been arrested for her kidnapping as a young child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M_Aisubeki_Hito_ga_Ite"title="M Aisubeki Hito ga Ite">
Set in the 1990s, Ayu is a high school student aiming to pursue a career in the entertainment business. Living her childhood with her mother and grandmother in Fukuoka, while still being a teenager she decides to move to the capital Tokyo to live with her aunt. Ayu begins her modelling and acting career in a small talent agency and drops out of high school. However, her career does not seem to advance, as she only gets minor roles in B rate productions. One day, Ayu meets Masa, who is the executive director of record label A Victory. He decides take Ayu as his protégé, taking full responsibility of every aspect of her career in order to turn her into a successful singer. Ayu begins taking singing lessons, first in New York, and then in the A Victory academy, where she encounters difficulties and jealously by her classmates. On the other hand, Masa is continuously trying to prove himself against Director Ohama, renowned producer Tenmei Kira, and label associate Shō Rukawa. However, before Ayu's official debut with A Victory, her grandmother is taken back to be hospitalized in Fukuoka and later dies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Don't_Want_to_Kill_You"title="I Don't Want to Kill You">
After encountering and killing two demons, sociopathic teenager John Wayne Cleaver has decided that if anyone in Clayton County, North Dakota is ever going to be completely safe, he has to be the slayer of these supernatural serial killers. The first one strikes by shooting a priest, cutting off his hands and tongue, and displaying the body outside. This is the signature of "the Handyman," a known serial killer from Georgia. John surmises that he or she is a demon, nicknamed "Nobody," and that they've come to Clayton to find him. Meanwhile, John goes on a date with Marci Jensen who, to his surprise, is very interested in him. A news report the next morning reveals Clayton's mayor as the next victim. John knows he is the only one who can stop Nobody, but his mom pleads with him to stay out of it.On the first day of school, John learns that one of his classmates took her own life by slitting her wrists - the same exact way another girl had killed herself a few months prior. He and Marci skip class, and John opens up to her and teaches her how criminal profiling works. She proves to be very good at it, but the two are unable to identify the next victim before it is slain. The body of a teacher is found with the eyeballs removed. After Father Erikson, a priest at the local Catholic church, shares and with John, he realizes that the demon's pattern is killing sinners in authority positions. But before John can act, the culprit kills the sheriff.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_cristo_feo"title="El cristo feo">
Ordalisa is a domestic worker who lives in a small and modest room without windows. One morning she starts to hear a voice calling her by her name. After searching all over the room for the source of the voice, she discovers that it is coming from an old and ugly crucifix made of wood. Ordalisa finds herself puzzled by the incident, without knowing if the voice is real or a product of the loneliness she feels from living alone and not counting on family.Ordalisa's employers ask her to move with them to one of the empty rooms in the house and she gladly accepts. In the following days the ugly crucifix starts to motivate Ordalisa to be more assertive and to not be ashamed of expressing her desires and to get ready better. One day on which she goes to her boss arranging his collection of stamps, she asks him if she gets bored of doing the same things every day. He remains pondering the question and notices that until them he had never thought of Ordalisa as a person, but only as an extra part of the house. Little by little the two become friends, which awakens jealousy in her other employer, his wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women,_Race_and_Class"title="Women, Race and Class">
"Women, Race and Class" is a collection of 13 essays about the American women's liberation movement from the 1960s up to the point at which the book was published, and also about slavery in the United States. She applies Marxist analysis to the relation of class and race to capitalism in America. Davis criticizes that the women's liberation movement has been run by and for white middle class women, to the exclusion of black women, other women of color and other social classes. She makes similar comments about women's suffrage. Davis comments on the participation of white women in the abolitionism movement. The book also describes the woman's club movement.Davis explores the economic role of black women slaves. She writes that black women under slavery had similar struggles to black men, both groups sharing the task of manual labor and participating in abolitionist activism. However, women were also expected to perform the household labor, similar to women of other races. Engaging in Marxist analysis, Davis argues that women's liberation should consist of women participating in wage labor and domestic labor becoming socialized. She believes that rape is a crime of power, giving the example of white men raping their black slaves. Davis describes the role of race in rape and the archetype of the black male rapist. She also comments on race and birth control, linking abortion-rights movements to the Eugenics Society and commenting on the sterilization of black and Puerto Rican women.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_the_Sixteenth"title="Beatrice the Sixteenth">
The protagonist Mary Hatherley, M.B., an explorer and geographer, travels through the desert somewhere in Asia Minor. A kick from a camel sends her into another plane of existence, which seems to exist in a time before Christ.Mary is rescued by a group of fair, clean-shaven people wearing robes and escorted back to their kingdom, known as Armeria. It is a slave-owning monarchy ruled over by Queen Beatrice the Sixteenth. The Armerians live in luxurious palaces and fight with darts, javelins and swords; despite their fighting abilities, the natives are familiar with both agriculture and government.There are two classes of people, free and slave; slaves can apply to change households if they wish. They follow a strict vegetarian diet, having ceased to slaughter animals for over a thousand years. Life partnerships are known as a "conjux" and divorce is unknown; relationships appear to be based on love and companionship, rather than sex. The Armerians are unable to reproduce, so infants are purchased from a neighbouring tribe.The Armerian language is a combination of Latin and Greek, which Mary is familiar with and contains no gendered nouns. Mary is soon able to understand and communicate with them and is drawn to Ilex, one of the leading figures in the kingdom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Instruction_of_Imagination"title="The Instruction of Imagination">
The first three chapters of the book are dedicated to a definitional exposition of the theory. In chapter 1, Dor presents the basic premises of the theory and positions it within the wider context of post-Chomskian linguistics, discussing also the history of the social conception of language. In chapter 2, Dor defines the specific functional strategy of language as a communication technology for the instruction of imagination, and shows how it is different from the experiential strategies employed by all other communication systems. In chapter 3, Dor presents a technical description of language – its constitutive parts, their social construction, the way they fit, and how they function together.Chapters 4 and 5 deal with issues of meaning. Chapter 4 discusses lexical semantics: from the rise and fall of the definitional-componential approach, through the emergence of prototype theory, to the current investigation of polysemy. In chapter 5, Dor presents a re-interpretation of the question of linguistic relativity as a question about the dialectic influence of a technology on its users.Chapter 6 contains a more detailed discussion of the processes involved in the production and comprehension of linguistic utterances. In chapter 7, Dor discusses how his theory handles syntactic complexity, claiming that syntactic complexity is socially-constructed and specifically suited for the instruction of imagination.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jésus-Christ_en_Flandre"title="Jésus-Christ en Flandre">
The story is told in the first person by an unnamed narrator. In the first half he tells the story of a miracle that occurred in Flanders at some unspecified time in the past. A small boat is about to make a voyage from the island of Cadzand to Ostend. The wealthy passengers sit in the stern, and the poorer ones at the front. The crew are rowing in the middle. At the last minute a stranger boards the boat. The rich passengers will not make room for him so he has to sit with the poorer passengers. It then sets off to Ostend. During the journey, there is a storm, and the boat is soon in danger. The stranger gives a message of reassurance to the poorer passengers, whilst the wealthier passengers view him with disdain or skepticism. The boat capsizes a short distance from Ostend. The stranger walks on the water to the shore, and poorer passengers walk with him to safety at a house on shore. The wealthy passengers drown. The stranger then goes back to the water to rescue the boat's captain and takes him back to the house. It is realised afterwards that the stranger was Jesus Christ.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolting_Prostitutes"title="Revolting Prostitutes">
The book discusses the effects of different sex work policies on the lives of sex workers, including analysis of: decriminalisation in countries like New Zealand; legalisation in places such as the Netherlands; the Nordic model; partial criminalisation in the UK; and full criminalisation in locales including the U.S. Mac and Smith argue for full decriminalisation of all sex work and suggest legal policies which would provide sex workers with additional labour rights. Using a Marxist feminist and materialist framework, they argue that issues with sex work are not unique to the industry, but are instead issues of labour exploitation under capitalism. The authors hold the perspective that almost all sex work is done out of material necessity. They discuss survival sex as well as groups including disabled people, undocumented migrants or the LGBTQ community who may have no job options other than sex work.Mac and Smith criticise anti-prostitution feminism and carceral feminism, a movement advocating lengthier prison sentences and more stringent law enforcement to solve social issues relating to sex. They provide evidence that legal restrictions in some countries have not improved the lives of sex workers and discuss statistics relating to the Nordic model, in which purchase of sex but not sale of sex is criminalised. The authors argue that the Nordic model causes clients of sex workers to become more volatile and unsafe, as reliable clients are more discouraged by the threat of arrest. In general, they believe criminalisation causes sex workers to work in more dangerous locations, to hire procurers who may put them at risk or to be at a higher chance of being extorted by police. They comment that engaging in sex work, or receiving a criminal record for such work, can lead to housing instability or losing custody of one's children.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twins_(1930_novel)"title="The Twins (1930 novel)">
"The Twins" tells the story of Saleem, the father of newborn twins named Rasheed and Fareed. On reaching school age, the twins were sent to a preparatory school. After their graduation, Rasheed joined a national school while Fareed joined a foreign one. As time passed, Rasheed advanced in his career and improved his social status, thus becoming a well-respected individual. Fareed, on the other hand, ended up in a tragic situation, where he became morally decayed and died afterwards in exile in a foreign country.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Player_Two"title="Ready Player Two">
After the events of the first novel, the High Five have scattered across the globe: Aech is on vacation in Senegal with her fiance, Bollywood singer Endira. Shoto has taken over operations at GSS's Hokkaido division, and Samantha has flown back to Vancouver to pack up her belongings and say goodbye to her grandmother. To keep himself busy, Wade Watts decides to test out his new superuser abilities, a result of winning the competition that gives him control of the OASIS.Wade finds an inscription on Halliday's Easter egg and after following directions, he finds the first operational ONI (OASIS Neural Interface) headset. This headset takes control of the user's mind and gives real world sensations inside of the OASIS. However, it can only be used for twelve hours a day to prevent death by Synaptic Overload Syndrome. After testing it out, he contacts Aech and Shoto of his findings and they both try it out. Samantha is furious and argues with Wade about the headset's capabilities, saying that being even more dependent on the OASIS is the last thing the world needs while Wade argues that the ONI can help those with physical limitations. She breaks up with him after realizing that their argument is being recorded. The High Five all start their own charity businesses. Three years pass. Aech, Shoto, and Wade build a spaceship christened Vonnegut and upload a standalone copy of the OASIS which they call ARC@DIA.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_They_Come_in_the_Morning"title="If They Come in the Morning">
The book is a collection of 27 writings, edited by Angela Davis in collaboration with Bettina Aptheker. It contains letters from each of the three Soledad Brothers, as well as contributions from prominent Black Panther Party (BPP) members and Davis' co-counsels Margaret Burnham and Howard Moore. Julian Bond provided a foreword.The writings cover the U.S. legal system, particularly trials and prisons. Davis gives an account of her experiences in prison, while Aptheker writes about their social functions. BPP co-founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale and activist Ericka Huggins analyze contemporary trials of BPP members. Jessica Mitford argues that California's approach to prisons, which she calls "psychological rehabilitation", cannot be fixed by reform until prisoners are allowed legal representation. A group of Folsom State Prison inmates contribute a manifesto of demands.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Policing"title="The End of Policing">
The book is about police in the contemporary United States and the nature of policing. Vitale argues that the purpose of police is not to deal with instances of social ills, but to uphold inequalities in society on the axes of class, gender, race and sexuality. Historically, Vitale writes, the police have facilitated slavery and colonialism and suppressed workers' rights movements. He believes that the conditions for crime arise due to the implementation of conservative policies such as support for a trickle-down economics model, austerity, redlining and reduction of trade unions. Topics covered by the book include the criminalization of the mentally ill, homeless people and sex workers; policing of schools; the war on drugs; and border policing by the police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the military and the National Guard.Vitale believes that policing should be disbanded in full, with decriminalization of some crimes such as sex work and drug usage, and public infrastructure or non-law enforcement approaches for other crimes. For instance, government agencies and private companies could provide homeless people with permanent housing. He recommends drug rehabilitation centers for addicts, improved education and a different employment system, as well as more mental health care availability and open borders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Constant_Rabbit"title="The Constant Rabbit">
In 1965, an "Anthropomorphising Event" transformed 18 ordinary rabbits into 18 intelligent, talking, human-sized rabbits. By 2020, there are over a million of them in Britain, and the United Kingdom Anti-Rabbit Party has taken power. Peter Knox is a small-town "rabbit spotter" whose life is changed when a family of rabbits — one of whom, Constance, was his friend in university — moves in next door.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Southern_Book_Club's_Guide_to_Slaying_Vampires"title="The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires">
Bored and neglected, 90's Southern suburban housewife Patricia Campbell has little in her life that truly brings her joy. Her days are filled with caring for a senile mother-in-law named Miss Mary, a doctor husband, Carter, who spends much of his time working, and two teenage children, Korey and Carter Jr. aka "Blue," who are growing up and distracted by their own interests. Patricia's sole escape is her book club, which has recently splintered into a new group that focuses on true crime. The group includes Grace Cavanaugh, Kitty Scruggs, Slick Paley, and Maryellen. The book club is a chance for these women to escape their domesticity and talk about things other than their husbands and children. However, everything changes when Patricia is attacked by an elderly neighbor named Ann Savage. Following the attack, Patricia meets Ann's nephew, James Harris. James seems dashing and is good at investments, but he harbors a little secret. He's a vampire. Patricia's suspicions about James are confirmed by Ursula Greene, a woman who had previously worked for the Campbell family. Mrs. Greene tells Patricia that James's white van was seen in her neighborhood, and ever since, black children in the area have gone missing, or are killing themselves in horrific ways. It starts with 8-year-old Orville Reed and his cousin, Sam, and Mrs. Greene is fearful that the disappearances will continue. So when 9-year-old Destiny Taylor starts showing odd behavior, Patricia wants to get involved and try to stop James before it's too late.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malorie_(novel)"title="Malorie (novel)">
Two years after arriving at a school for the blind, Malorie and her two young children, Olympia and Tom, are forced to venture out of the place again when mass chaos ensues after creatures manage to break in. She sees a blind woman named Annette, who was driven to madness by the creatures and comes to the conclusion that the creatures have evolved and can now spread madness through touch. Twelve years after this, the novel finds Malorie, Olympia, and Tom living in an abandoned Jewish summer camp. Tom and Olympia are now teenagers who find themselves chafing under the multiple restrictions and expectations placed upon them. Things take a major turn once Malorie learns of another community of survivors in another area far off and that her own parents may be among the shelter's occupants. Along the way she also learns that there are people who claim to have experimented on the creatures that have decimated humanity and that they may pose an all-new threat to those who have survived.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Queue_(Abdel_Aziz_novel)"title="The Queue (Abdel Aziz novel)">
In an unnamed Middle Eastern city, a building known as the Gate controls the populace by making decrees and requiring inordinate amounts of paperwork which must be directly processed by the Gate itself. Dr. Tarek examines a patient named Yehya, who was shot by government forces in a riot known as the Disgraceful Events. The Gate begins a propaganda campaign to rewrite the history of the Events, denying that anyone was shot at all. The Gate decrees that is illegal to remove a bullet without a permit. It also confiscates all X-Rays within the city, removing all evidence of government-sponsored violence. After the Events, the Gate remains closed. Thousands of people stand outside in the titular queue, awaiting the Gate's opening so that their paperwork can be correctly processed. Over the course of 140 days, Yehya's condition worsens and various other members of the queue struggle to survive as the Gate remains closed. Eventually, Tarek decides to break the law and remove the bullet without a permit, only to learn that Yehya has died of his injuries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middlegame"title="Middlegame">
Alchemist James Reed attempts to create a human embodiment of the Doctrine of Ethos, a fundamental force of the universe. He creates twins Roger and Dodger, child prodigies with mastery over language and mathematics, respectively. The twins forge an intermittent psychic connection as children. The pair reunite in person at Berkeley for grad school. Erin, another construct created by Reed, is Dodger’s roommate. Erin is secretly following Reed’s orders, but resents him for killing her twin brother Darren.When Roger visits home for Thanksgiving, he finds a childhood drawing of him and Dodger which should not exist. Erin instructs him to reset the timeline. Dodger uses her powers to bring them back in time, erasing all memories of the event. It is revealed that Roger and Dodger have used their powers to reset the timeline thousands of times before, preventing Reed from destroying them. The twins explore their powers, accidentally triggering a massive earthquake which destroys much of Berkeley. Horrified, Roger abandons his sister.Years later, Roger is a professor who is dating Erin. Reed orders Erin to kill Roger. Erin goes rogue and helps Roger escape. Timelines begin to merge as Roger and Dodger speak to each other from their alternate pasts and futures. Roger and Dodger reunite once again at the Sutro Baths, exploring their reality-warping powers. Dodger is shot and almost dies. Erin and Reed are both killed in a final confrontation. Roger and Dodger decide to learn more about their powers, and agree that they will eventually try once more to find a timeline with a happier ending.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_in_Milan"title="Miranda in Milan">
After the events of "The Tempest", Miranda does not marry Ferdinand as planned. Instead, she returns to Milan with Prospero, who has regained his position as duke. She is shunned by the castle staff; her only friend is the servant Dorothea, a Moorish witch, with whom she soon begins a romantic relationship. Miranda learns that Prospero has not given up his magic as he previously promised.Desperate to learn why she is being shunned and about the circumstances of Prospero's fall from grace, Dorothea and Miranda use magic to invade the memories of a castle staff member. Miranda learns that after the death of her mother Beatrice, Prospero used his magic to resurrect her. This led a horrified Antonio to stage a coup against his brother.When Miranda learns that Antonio is being held prisoner in the castle, she and Dorothea attempt to rescue him and stage another coup. Prospero catches them, but is confronted by the reanimated corpse of his wife, who has been living beneath the castle. Prospero is then killed by his brother. Miranda chooses to reject her arranged marriage with Ferdinand. She, Dorothea, and Beatrice return to the magical island where she was raised.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_Avenue"title="Utopia Avenue">
The novel follows the fictional rock band Utopia Avenue, formed in Soho, London, in 1967. They were assembled by their Canadian manager Levon Frankland as a "psychedelic-folk-rock" supergroup. Each chapter name is the title of a song and focuses on one of the members of the band. It features cameos from David Bowie, Jerry Garcia, Leonard Cohen, Syd Barrett, Jackson Browne, John Lennon, Allen Ginsberg, Francis Bacon, Joni Mitchell, Steve Winwood, Keith Moon, Frank Zappa, Rick Wakeman, Cass Elliot, Sandy Denny and Marc Bolan. As well as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, Jim Morrison, and Brian Jones; the latter five, coincidentally, all members of the 27 Club.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_Beach_(novel)"title="Muscle Beach (novel)">
Carlo Cofield, a restless WWII vet in New York City, alternates between work at the Atlantic Novelty Company and hanging out at the Treble Bar listening to the Quo Vadis Quartet. Impulsively entering an office of Seaspray Swimming Pools, he pitches a sale to a client on Long Island. A condition of his making this sale is his being transferred to the Seaspray office in LA. During his flight to the Coast he places his neck-tie in an air-sickness bag for disposal, never to be worn again. In LA, he meets Vic Salter and his chimp Simeon in a bar up on Sunset. Vic introduces Carlo to hit songwriter Prescott Tom, whose sister Toby takes him to the beach to see the body builders. Carlo joins them to get close to the beautiful Jocelyn, but eventually he finds happiness and fulfillment with Toby.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Temples_and_Temple_Mountains"title="Mountain Temples and Temple Mountains">
Between the third century BCE and 13th century CE, the region that is modern-day Uttarakhand acquired immense religious significance and became home to many pilgrimage sites, most notably the Char Dham, considered to be among the holiest pilgrimage sites for Hindus. Chanchani's book studies the many stone edifices and steles that were erected across the region, many in remote areas, during that period. The book charts the architectural history of the structures and temples, the sociopolitical context in which they arose, and their effects on the surrounding landscape, including the natural environment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attupokatha_Ormakal"title="Attupokatha Ormakal">
Attupokatha Ormakal is based on Joseph's biography and interpretation about his controversial 2010 assault.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interference_(novel)"title="Interference (novel)">
About a hundred years after the events in "Semiosis", a new expedition to Pax from Earth is launched. Contact with the Pax colonists had been lost soon after they landed on the planet. On Pax the new arrivals find descendants of the original colonists living side-by-side in a glass city with alien arthropod-like Glassmakers, and Stevland, a sentient rainbow bamboo. Stevland oversees a fragile peace between the Pax humans and the Glassmakers. The Earthlings, as the new arrivals are called, interfere with this delicate balance, causing divisions in the colony and amongst themselves.The Earthlings partake in an expedition with the Pax humans and Glassmakers to explore the plains surrounding the city. There they discover colonies of sentient corals who begin infiltrating the city's territory. The Earthlings, the Pax humans and the Glassmakers put aside their differences and unite with Stevland to fight the corals. Stevland takes remote control of one of the Earthling's heli-planes using their radio network and destroys the corals.Once calm is restored to the city, most of the Earthlings return home with specimens of Pax's fauna and flora, including some of Stevland's seeds. The seeds are planted on Earth and grow into a young rainbow bamboo named Levanter, who becomes aware of his sentience and soon learns how to exploit it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therapy_(Fitzek_novel)"title="Therapy (Fitzek novel)">
Josy, the twelve-year-old daughter of the renowned psychiatrist Viktor Larenz, seems to have disappeared without trace after one of her numerous visits to the doctor. At this point, she has been suffering from an illness for months, the cause of which no doctor has been able to determine. Larenz notices Josy's disappearance and in his rage suffers a nervous breakdown. The investigations remain unsuccessful, Larenz and his wife Isabell live for years without any sign of life from their daughter.Four years later, Larenz, who is no longer practicing, agrees to an interview in order to come to terms with the past and retreats to the island of Parkum. There he is tracked down by a beautiful stranger who pretends to be Anna Spiegel and asks him to treat her. At first reluctantly, Larenz begins therapy when Anna tells him about her illness: She is a writer and suffers from schizophrenia; all her novel characters manifest themselves in her life. Lately, among them is also a little girl named Charlotte, who, like Josy, is terminally ill. She is also the character from an unfinished fairy tale manuscript.Larenz scents a new trail, as Anna's tales coincide with events from the time around Josy's disappearance. He's pressuring her to finish Charlotte's story: Anna makes clear to him that Charlotte's been poisoned. During one of her schizophrenic phases, Charlotte appeared to her and begged her to run away with her from her mother Isabell. She had poisoned Charlotte to satisfy her maternal instinct and to prevent her daughter from growing up. To hide her from her mother, Anna tried to stifle the girl's cries, but killed her in the process.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_Deep_History"title="Earth's Deep History">
From a geologist's perspective where everything has a history, "Earth's Deep History" explains how the discovery of the Earth's old age progressively moved humans from the center. It focuses on details of the difficult and slow path to knowledge, the difference between law-like and physical history and the interplay of science and religion. It expains how scholars gradually discovered and came to understand the mechanisms that shaped the Earth, rather than remaining limited by event reconstructions. "Earth's Deep History" is considered to be a more condensed and approachable overview than Rudwick's previous works like "Worlds Before Adam".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisters_of_the_Vast_Black"title="Sisters of the Vast Black">
Decades prior to the start of the novella, a civil war between Earth Central Governance and its colony planets lead to the loss of Earth's authority. Millions of people died as a result of warfare and biological terrorism.The Order of St. Rita is a group of Roman Catholic nuns who live on the spaceship "Our Lady of Impossible Constellations". The ship is a living organism resembling a slug. They travel to rural colony planets to perform charity work; as part of their mission, they visit a colony on the moon Phoyongosa III, where they bless marriages and perform baptisms.The Mother Superior is suffering from the early stages of dementia, leading to a crisis among the sisters. At the same time, the Earth Central Governance sends a priest to join the ship's crew, reasserting control over the previously independent sisters. Sister Gemma decides to leave the order when she falls in love with an engineer named Vauca.The ship received a distress signal from Phoyongosa III; the colonists are suffering from ringeye, a deadly plague. The nuns and Vauca's crew respond, only to find that Earth Central Governance has unleashed the plague in order to trigger another war and regain their power. The Mother Superior reveals that she was previously a member of Earth Central Governance before becoming a nun, and that her husband designed ringeye as a biological warfare agent. As penance, she takes the "Our Lady" on a suicide attack against Earth's ships. This allows the other nuns to join Vauca's ship, land safely, and save some of the colonists. After this, remaining nuns declare independence from the Catholic Church and vow to continue their mission of servitude and charity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begin_Again_(book)"title="Begin Again (book)">
The book spans genres including biography, memoir, history and literary analysis. Glaude says that Americans have had two failed opportunities to "begin again", a phrase taken from Baldwin's final novel "Just Above My Head". The first was the "second founding" of America after the American Civil War and Reconstruction era. The second was the civil rights movement. He argues that a third opportunity is needed.Glaude outlines Baldwin's early literary works. He argues that Baldwin's focus later changed from "white America" to the "well-being and future of black people". In 1963, a bombing took place at 16th Street Baptist Church, which Glaude believes led to Baldwin becoming disillusioned and his writing changing. Glaude mostly analyzes Baldwin's non-fiction, including his later books "The Fire Next Time" (1963) and "No Name in the Street" (1972), and the 1982 documentary "I Heard It Through the Grapevine".Glaude sees Baldwin as addressing "the lie", the idea that America has an underlying goodness, by calling for people to "bear witness". In "No Name in the Street", Baldwin found that white liberals viewed racism as a matter of "hearts and minds" rather than systematic discrimination and rejected evidence of police brutality. Additionally, according to Glaude, the book is a work of experimentation and a piece of art; Glaude found it to be Baldwin's most significant work of social criticism. He says that though Baldwin's later works continued to be popular, he lost support from literary critics. He also discusses Baldwin's time in Istanbul after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and writes that Baldwin's queerness made him "misfitted" amongst civil rights activists including King and Eldridge Cleaver.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meaning_of_Mariah_Carey"title="The Meaning of Mariah Carey">
Carey witnessed violence in her family at a young age; fights occurred between her older brother Morgan and parents Alfred and Patricia. She used music as an escape from such situations and sang herself lullabies. Patricia and a childhood friend recognized Carey's vocal talent; their validation was her raison d'être. Immersed in music as a profession before she was a teenager, Carey was "learning the craft, sitting in on jam sessions with accomplished jazz musicians with [Patricia] and developing the skills of scatting and improvisation". Their mother-daughter relationship deteriorated, however, after Patricia warned Carey "you should only hope that one day you become half the singer I am". Carey was neglected as a child and her safety was disregarded by Patricia. She felt inferior because of her unkempt matted hair and experiences with racism, including being called a "nigger" by a group of white girls. Her relationship with older sister Alison "was manipulation masquerading as love". She brought twelve-year-old Carey to a whorehouse and her pimp boyfriend kissed Carey at a drive-in theater. Alison also drugged Carey and gave her third-degree burns.After graduating from high school, Carey moved to New York City and began working with other musicians, including Brenda K. Starr, who introduced her to Tommy Mottola. Carey signed with his record label, and they entered a working relationship. Mottola began advancing romantic gestures, and she was attracted to him for the "sense of home" he provided. Mottola was determined to marry her, and Carey agreed in hoping he would loosen his grasp on her life. The marriage was strained as soon as their honeymoon, however, and "the control and imbalance of power ... accelerated." Mottola stifled her voice, removed blackness from her music and appearance, and prevented her from realizing she was appreciated by others. As she was monitored with security cameras and an intercom system inside of the house and secretly followed by Mottola's security when leaving it, Carey likens herself to a captive and their mansion a prison. While he "tried to destroy" her, she began a covert relationship with Derek Jeter, and their encounters deepened her music on "Butterfly". Coupled with Jeter, Carey separated from Mottola after he dragged a butter knife down her face. She later divorced him and left Sony Music for Virgin Records.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_vulgaire_geschiedenis_van_Charelke_Dop"title="De vulgaire geschiedenis van Charelke Dop">
It is World War I. Charelke Dop lives in the Belgian municipality Diest. He pretends to be poor but is rather rich. After his wife Angelina dies he moves to Brussels. Charelke is a manipulative, lying, stingy, immoral but charming widower. He earns a lot of money by declaring people to the German soldiers although he is a smuggler, traitor and blackmailer. He convinces highly placed Belgians that he performed acts of valour (whilst it were only misdeeds) and thus receives medals of honour and an accompanying ceremony.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaturanga_(Neelakantan_novel)"title="Chaturanga (Neelakantan novel)">
The prologue of the novel starts with how Sivagami's parents were killed a day before her fifth birthday, 13 years ago. In the present day, after a failed coup by the Vaithalikas (immediately after the incidents of the first book). Sivagami was unintentionally elevated to the position of bhoomipathi () is given the orders to execute her foster father Thimma, who was suspected to be a Vaitlikas warrior. Sivagami stages a duel with her foster father and planned on assassinating Maharaja Somadeva. During the dual, Thimma, the ex-commander in chief who can read people's body language, attempts to kill the king but fails due to Kattapa's save. Sivagami is forced to kill Thimma and she is praised by the Kingdom.Kattapa alongside his father Malayappa digs up Shivappa's grave and finds him alive, Shivappa accidentally fatally hits his father with a shovel and Shivappa runs away. Brinhalla helps Kattapa make it look like Malayappa committed suicide due to Shivappa's fake death. Kattapa is now looking for Shivappa. Shivappa is made the new leader of the Vaitlikas and alongside Brinhalla and Neelappa (who was Devaraya's former slave) plan to kill Kattapa. Bjjaladeva is given the mission to find where Pattaraya had gone, he goes alongside Keki who instructs him to start being nice to the public so Bjjaladeva could win the throne. Bjjaladeva finds Pattaraya with his daughter Mekhala, Mekhala can seduce Bjjaladeva and Pattaraya promises Bjjaladeva that he will be the future king. They kill an innocent slave which is brought back to Bjjaladeva to Mahishmati who falsely says this was Pattaraya's corpse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deep_(Katsu_novel)"title="The Deep (Katsu novel)">
The novel's plot switches between various time periods. The following synopsis is told in chronological order. The novel also features elements that question whether or not supernatural elements in the novel actually occurred or if they were due to mental illness, superstition, or susceptibility towards supernatural beliefs of the characters. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheinsberg_(story)"title="Rheinsberg (story)">
The short (story, literally: narrative) describes a trip of three days over a weekend of two young people who recently met, Claire and Wolfgang. They escape the city of Berlin where they live and work, for the rural Rheinsberg. They have to pretend to be married to get a room, and call themselves the Gambetta couple ("Ehepaar Gambetta"). They arrive by train, visit Schloss Rheinsberg, take a boat tour on the surrounding lakes, admire the unspoiled nature which is unusual for them, and stroll at night, seeing parts of a stage play through a window. The following day, they enjoy a late breakfast and explore the town and its shops, and visit a cinema. The last day is devoted to another boat tour, this time with Lissy Aachner, a medical student. After a final stroll through the park, they return home, to "the big city, ... grey days and longing telephone conversations, secretive afternoons, work and all the happiness of their great love" ("in die große Stadt, in der es wieder Mühen für sie gab, graue Tage und sehnsüchtige Telefongespräche, verschwiegene Nachmittage, Arbeit und das ganze Glück ihrer großen Liebe.")
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer_of_the_Wildeeps"title="The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps">
A merchant caravan hires Captain Isa, Sorcerer Demane, and their men to guard them on a journey through the dangerous Wildeeps. The Wildeeps are a forest in which multiple dimensions overlap; only by staying on the Road can travelers be assured of safety. Isa and Demane are both descended from gods, granting them supernatural strength and other powers. They hide both their powers and their romantic relationship from the rest of the convoy. During the journey, the caravan is stalked by a jukiere, a type of magical tiger. Isa and Demane leave the Road to hunt the tiger. Demane kills one tiger while Isa fights another. In an ambiguous ending, it is implied that Demane's missed spear throw kills Isa.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luster_(novel)"title="Luster (novel)">
"Luster" follows Edie, a Black woman in her twenties who lives in New York City and works as an editorial assistant. She meets Eric, a white man in his forties who is in an open marriage. Eric and his wife have a 12-year-old adoptive daughter, Akila, who is also Black. Edie begins a sexual relationship with Eric and moves to New Jersey to live with his family after she gets fired.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baron_of_Magister_Valley"title="The Baron of Magister Valley">
A young Dragaeran, Eremit, is sent by his parents to investigate a plot against the family for control of their lucrative mines. He is kidnapped and imprisoned on a volcanic island for more than 600 years, where he dreams of taking his revenge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_Talks_(The_Dresden_Files)"title="Peace Talks (The Dresden Files)">
Harry Dresden, now torn between his White Council wizard duties, his obligatory Winter Knight duties, and being a father to his daughter, is contacted by the Winter Queen Mab to serve as emissary for Winter at upcoming peace negotiations between the Fomor and the various other signatories of the Accords. Even as he does, he discovers that forces in the mortal world are moving against him and Karrin Murphy, the White Council may be meeting to expel him, something in collusion with Outsiders is trying to kill him, and his grandfather, Ebenezar McCoy, wants to take his daughter away from him to someplace safe until she can grow into her magic.His brother, Thomas Raith, attacks the King of the Svartalfar at the cusp of the negotiations, fails, and is imprisoned. Lara Raith uses favors from Mab to force Harry into springing him, and they do so right during the middle of the peace talks for the Fomor to join the Accords.Arriving just as Harry and Lara are escaping, the King of the Fomor declares open war on the surface and humanity, and introduces the last Titan, in possession of the Eye of Balor, who effortlessly humiliates Mab and intimidates almost all other present parties. He declares that in a few hours, the Fomor will rise from Lake Michigan and sack Chicago. The Accordites realize this would almost certainly mean a genocidal war against the supernatural, and would likely result in their extinction... possibly while the Fomor are safe in their underwater cities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golgotha_Falls"title="Golgotha Falls">
Two paranormal researchers from Harvard University, Mario and Anita, have traveled to Golgotha Falls, Massachusetts to investigate an abandoned cathedral that is purportedly the site of strong supernatural events. They are surprised to discover that a Jesuit priest, Malcolm, is there to exorcise and reconsecrate the church by holding a mass. Despite being ordered to keep the exorcism secret, Malcolm agrees to let them record the proceedings as he recognizes that Mario will leave the church voluntarily. The exorcism is very difficult and Malcolm experiences strong temptations and terrifying visions, but manages to succeed through what he interprets as divine intervention. Mario and Anita are stunned when they manage to record what appears to be a vision of the Crucifixion. Malcolm travels back to the bishop at the Boston archdiocese, where his claims are dismissed as misinterpretations and fantasy. Returning to the cathedral, Malcolm is horrified to discover that Mario has moved parts of the altar around to set up more cameras and cords, as this would run the risk of undoing the exorcism. He grows more afraid when Mario states his intent to hold a conference back at Harvard. The two men argue and Mario returns to Boston; Anita remains behind with Malcolm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlem_Shuffle_(novel)"title="Harlem Shuffle (novel)">
In 1959, Ray Carney lives in Harlem with his wife Elizabeth, with whom he is expecting a second child. Although descending from a criminal family, Ray makes his living working as an upstanding furniture salesman on 125th Street. However, he occasionally fences stolen goods through his furniture store, including those from his cousin Freddie. Whereas Ray has steered his way toward an honest living, Freddie is descending into Harlem's criminal underworld. Freddie orchestrates a robbery of the Hotel Theresa with his associates and volunteers Ray to fence what is stolen. The heist goes wrong and a cast of criminal figures enter Ray's life, forcing him into a personal struggle between aspects of his fractured self. The novel is divided in three parts and covers three separate capers, set in 1959, 1961 and 1964. It culminates with the Harlem riot of 1964.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolls!_Dolls!_Dolls!"title="Dolls! Dolls! Dolls!">
Rebello details the writing, publication, promotion, controversy and international success of the original novel written by Jacqueline Susann as well the discovery of the novel by fledgling film producer Robert Evans and its preemptive sale to 20th Century Fox. From there, the book documents the development of the screenplay by three successive writers Harlan Ellison, Helen Deutsch and Dorothy Kingsley; the intense competition among young actresses wanting to play Susann's young heroines "Anne Welles", "Neely O'Hara" and "Jennifer North"; the hiring of costume designer Travilla and legendary cinematographer William H. Daniels and songwriters Dory Previn and Andre Previn; the details of the hiring and firing of Judy Garland, the hiring of her replacement Susan Hayward and the sometimes-contentious processes of filming, editing, scoring by John Williams; postproduction, promotion and major success at the box-office despite negative reviews by the critics. "Dolls! Dolls! Dolls!" sheds light on the daily lives of the filmmakers, some of whom believed they were making a frank and honest look at women struggling with prescription pill addiction, betrayal, loneliness and terminal illness as they climb the ladder of show business success.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adieu_(short_story)"title="Adieu (short story)">
In 1819, two men, Baron Philippe de Sucy and Marquis d'Albon get lost while out hunting near L'Isle-Adam. They come across an old manor house and stop to look at it. They see a young woman, who calls out "Adieu" to them and runs away. De Sucy faints, and d'Albon helps him to get away in a carriage which happens to be passing by. They are told that the young woman is Comtesse Stephanie de Vandieres and that she is insane. Afterwards, d'Albon revisits the old house and meets its owner, who tells him about Stephanie, who is his niece.In 1812, the Comtesse, and her much older husband were in Russia taking part in Napoleon's invasion. The Comte was a general, and Philippe was also in the army with them. On November 28th, 1812, Philippe had escorted them to the eastern bank of the Beresina river, where they stopped for the night along with much of the rest of Napoleon's retreating army. A temporary bridge had been built to allow the army to cross.Philippe briefly goes away to feed his hungry horse. When he comes back he finds that the Comte and Comtesse are sitting at a campfire with a number of hungry and cold French soldiers. They have made the fire from some of the contents of the carriage. When the soldiers see Philippe, one of them shoots his horse, and the horse is cooked and everyone shares the meat. The next morning, the Russian army is seen gathering on the hills overlooking the Beresina. The French army is in a panic to cross the river, but the bridge is set alight by the French soldiers on the other side to stop the Russian advance. Philippe and a grenadier then attack some Russian soldiers in order to steal their horses. They hitch the horses to the Comte's carriage, and get the Comte and Comtesse on board, and hurry towards the river. By the time they get there, the bridge has been totally destroyed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_the_Gold_Coast_and_Asante"title="The History of the Gold Coast and Asante">
The book has 29 chapters arranged chronologically.The book covers the period BC600-750 and AD1400-1700 with short description of " Gold Coast; the Kingdom of Guinea; expeditions sent by Pharaoh Necho and the Carthiginians; F. Romber’s reference to the Kingdom of Benin; traditional accounts of emigration to the coast; tribes assumed to have been the aboriginal races on the coast, and their conquest".The final chapter covers the period 1851-1856 : "administration of justice according to English law &amp; its effects; imposition &amp; collection methods of a poll tax, and conspiracy to refuse payment; bombardment of Christiansborg, Labadi and Teshi; peace and the rebuilding of Christiansborg."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Black_(1986_book)"title="Deep Black (1986 book)">
"Deep Black" recounts the United States' clandestine Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) program from its inception at the start of the Cold War up to the mid-1980s. Burrows concentrates on aspects of the program which use technical means of collecting intelligence by employing strategic aircraft, satellites and other electronic techniques instead of more traditional espionage activities. Additionally, the work details how the program adapts from, or is directly related to seminal events of the era such as early Soviet successes in their space program, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster while framing the intragovernmental competition among organizations of the US Intelligence Community (IC) for tax dollars, equipment and influence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanica"title="Germanica">
Deep in the Alps, the Nazi German propaganda master Joseph Goebbels leads a battalion of zealots called Germanica to hold out against the frantic final Allies push to end World War II in Europe.With British Prime Minister Winston Churchill losing the 1945 election, Charles De Gaulle consolidating his rule over a newly-liberated France and Joseph Stalin asserting Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, only the United States, led by its untried new president, Harry S. Truman, remains to face the toughest Nazi warriors, who hunker down for a bitter fight to the last man.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Nude"title="The Last Nude">
Set primarily in 1920s Paris, "The Last Nude" is told through two perspectives: a young Italian-American named Rafaela Fano, and the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka.Rafaela, a 17-year-old runaway, by chance meets the wealthy aspiring painter de Lempicka and agrees to model for her. Rafaela becomes both de Lempicka's muse and lover, inspiring the painter's most esteemed work "La Bella Rafaela". As Rafaela's attraction and relations to Tamara grow, she learns the high price of ambition and reality. All but the last 60 pages of the novel are told from Rafaela's point of view, and work as a fictionalised biography of de Lempicka.The last chapters, told from de Lempicka's perspective, are set in Mexico in 1980. The artist once again takes up her brush and works on her last painting, a copy of the portrait of her long-ago muse.Avery described why she changed character viewpoints in the latter part of the novel: "I wrote the entire novel from Rafaela's point of view, and then I was completely taken by surprise by this voice in my head that was louder, stranger, more demanding, more ruthless than Rafaela's voice — it was Tamara's voice. And I had to try writing in it, and it just came out like a roar. Like an aria. And I was excited and scared, and I just let her speak, and ... having done so, realized that something Rafaela took 120 pages to say, Tamara could say in two lines. And that meant that I wound up cutting the book by a full quarter." 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_You_Finish_Saving_the_World"title="When You Finish Saving the World">
"When You Finish Saving the World" tells the story of three individuals working to understand each other and themselves: Nathan, a father learning to connect with his newborn son; Rachel, a young college student seeking to find her place in a relationship and in life, before marriage to Nathan; and Ziggy, their son, a teenager hoping to figure out where he came from, and where he’s headed. The shifts between time frames in these characters’ lives span more than a decade and depicts the complexities of growing up, having children, and fitting in. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bear_Went_Over_the_Mountain_(1996_book)"title="The Bear Went Over the Mountain (1996 book)">
"The Bear Went Over the Mountain" is a compilation of selected anecdotes written by Soviet field grade officers while serving as higher staff students at the Frunze Military Academy. The stories are based on their operational experiences during the Soviet–Afghan War where they served as company grade officers. Many of the vignettes conclude with "Frunze Commentary" emphasizing the proper employment of Soviet tactics or how commanders developed innovative solutions rooted in Soviet strategy. Grau adds "Editor's Commentary" highlighting either the effectiveness of Soviet doctrine or potential hazards in Soviet military thinking.The book consists of 47 separate vignettes accompanied by maps and operational graphics, compiled into six chapters: A seventh chapter is titled "And in Conclusion.." in which the Frunze author declares Soviet combat experience in Afghanistan "...confirms the correctness of the basic tenets of our directive documents." Grau includes an "Editor's Conclusion" which ends with: "The tactical lessons that the Soviets learned are not uniquely Soviet, but equally apply to other nations' forces caught in the middle of a civil war on inhospitable terrain."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Side_of_the_Mountain_(1998_book)"title="The Other Side of the Mountain (1998 book)">
"The Other Side of the Mountain" is a compilation of selected anecdotes from Afghan Mujahideen recollecting their various combat actions against Soviet forces during the Soviet-Afghan War. The 92 vignettes along with accompanying maps including operational graphics are arranged chronologically and assembled topically, based on type of action, into 14 chapters. Each chapter opens with a brief summary and a simple map depicting the general locations of the vignettes inside Afghanistan. Soviet operational graphics were used in the detailed vignette maps, since the Afghan Army used them and many Mujahideen were familiar with them. The 15th chapter concludes the book by assessing the technology, command challenges, effects of decentralized command, professionalism, logistics, and tactics used by the Mujahideen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damiano_(novel)"title="Damiano (novel)">
"Damiano" is a novel in which the lute-playing alchemist Damiano goes on a quest to bring peace to his war-torn home town.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himmler's_War"title="Himmler's War">
About a month and a half after the start of the Normandy landings, an American bomber drops its ordnance on a random target, which just happens to contain Adolf Hitler, who is killed. With Hitler dead, "Reichsführer-SS" Heinrich Himmler assumes control of Nazi Germany. For the Allies, there is confusion on whether attempts should be made to negotiate with the new government, or Germany should be forced into an unconditional surrender.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submergence_(novel)"title="Submergence (novel)">
"Submergence" tells the story of an Australian-French professor of biomathematics at Imperial College, Danielle Flinders, and a British MI6 spy, James More. They meet and fall in love at a hotel on a wild stretch of the Atlantic coast of France. The novel alternates between the hotel and Danielle's scientific expedition to the sea floor and James's captivity in Somalia. "Running separately and together, their stories become dramatic explorations of conditions far larger than their individual destinies—a meditation on our species and our planet at a time heavily shadowed by the prospect of extinction," said Philip Gourevitch in "The New Yorker". Ledgard has said he wanted to show that "there is another world in our world - the 99% of the living space in our planet that is in the sea."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After_Gettysburg"title="The Day After Gettysburg">
After being defeated at the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, Confederate General Robert E. Lee does not retreat across the Potomac River and his eventual surrender at Appomattox. He instead turns the tables on Union General George Meade with a vicious counterattack that sets the Union Army on its heels.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_with_Demons"title="Dancing with Demons">
Sometimes it takes a single moment to destroy it all. For twenty four year old boxer Karan Pratap Singh, who is on the brink of winning the Heavy weight Boxing Championship, that moment arrives during the last round of the Boxing finals, when he nearly bludgeons his opponent to death in an uncontrolled fit of rage. In that fateful moment, he loses everything he's worked for and is banned from boxing for four years. The four best years of his sporting career, along with his coach and mentor Jerry Fernandez, are lost forever to a rage that he cannot explain. His fall from glory seems fueled by ruthless arrogance and an anger management problem. That, however, is simply symptomatic of a deeper issue. Buried under layers of his fractured subconscious lies a childhood secret, a demon he needs to vanquish, but cannot come to terms with. Karan must vanquish these demons to become the boxer he was meant to be. He must atone and do what it takes to get back into the ring.Parallelly we meet Sonia Kapoor, a beautiful and volatile young woman with a dark secret that torments her at night but a secret that she seemingly feels no guilt for. Sonia comes to Mumbai on a stormy night with the hope that she, along with her secret, will disappear in the bustling megalopolis. She hopes that Mumbai will hide her and never judge her. But just as a leopard cannot change its spots, nor can the volatile Sonia. And soon, her past catches up with her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Benedict_Society_and_the_Riddle_of_Ages"title="The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Riddle of Ages">
In "The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Riddle of Ages", the Ten Men have escaped prison and are loose in the city of Stonetown. While the families of Sticky, Reynie, and Constance prepare to leave by ship for their own safety, the three sneak back ashore to await the villains' next move.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpentine_(book)"title="Serpentine (book)">
In this story, a teenage Lyra and her dæmon Pantalaimon revisit Trollesund, the Arctic town prominently featured in "Northern Lights" as the place of her first meeting with the aeronaut Lee Scoresby and the armoured bear Iorek Byrnison. They seek the witch-consul Dr. Lanselius in the hope of finding answers to their ability to separate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Is_for_Witching"title="White Is for Witching">
## Prologue.The novel begins with several cryptic pages in which questions are asked of three entities: a woman named Ore, a man named Eliot, and the Silver House at 29 Barton Road. Each answers the question, "Where is Miranda Silver?" Ore answers that Miranda is in the ground below the Silver House, her throat blocked by a chunk of apple. Eliot answers that Miranda has been missing for six months. The Silver House answers that Miranda is at home, "homesick, home "sick"."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over_Your_Dead_Body_(novel)"title="Over Your Dead Body (novel)">
John and Brooke are now on their own: hungry, dirty, and hunting down the "Withered" (demons in human form) using Brooke's memories from when she was possessed. They rely on stashes of supplies and money that Agent Potash, one of John's FBI team members, had stored before his death. Wanted by the FBI, the pair have been hitchhiking to different cities and towns for a year. They find a commune where the demon Yashodh is the leader, and John kills him quickly with a gun. They then move on to their next destination – the small town of Dillon, Oklahoma – and when they arrive, a new personality manifests itself through Brooke: Marci, John's former girlfriend who was killed by the demon Nobody. This proves to be extremely difficult for him; he is able to talk to the dead girl he loves, but she is trapped in Brooke's body and often gets replaced by the other personalities. Meanwhile, John struggles with the temptation to kill anyone who gets in their way.They move on to Dallas, where John notices they are being followed by a black SUV, which they assume is the FBI. A news report then reveals that a gruesome murder just occurred in Dillon, the town John and Brooke just left. They go back and make friends with a teenage boy named Corey (who they suspect is the demon Attina) and two sisters: Brielle and Jessica. The next day, both Jessica and Corey are found dead. John suspects that Attina is reading his mind. Then, Brooke has a suicidal episode, and the police seize her and John; they are sent to a hospital, where FBI Agent Mills shows up. He takes them back to Dillon to try to stop Attina, and when they arrive, they find two more people dead. One was the pedophile police officer who was found with Jessica the night of her murder, and Brielle is presented as the primary suspect; John had even heard her vow to kill the predator if he ever did anything to her sister.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Warning_(Connelly_novel)"title="Fair Warning (Connelly novel)">
A drunk woman drives home with an unknown man. They go up to her apartment and have sex, before he puts her in a headlock and squeezes her neck. As she begins to lose consciousness, he tells her people call him "The Shrike".Upon arriving at his apartment in the following days, reporter Jack McEvoy, now writing for the consumer watchdog news service FairWarning out of Los Angeles, is stopped by two L.A.P.D. detectives. They inform him that a woman he had a one-night stand with several months ago, Tina Portrero, was found dead in her shower, and that she had suffered atlanto-occipital-dislocation in what they believe was staged to look like an accident. The detectives leave after interrogating Jack and taking a DNA sample.Reflecting on his history with Tina, Jack decides to investigate further. He leaves a post in a forum for coroners asking for any examples of recent AOD deaths. He looks into the few examples he finds and discovers that all of them submitted samples of their DNA to an ancestry website called GT23. Unsure of where to look next, Jack reconnects with former FBI agent Rachel Walling. She suggests the possibility of sex addiction being a common trait in the victims and joins Jack on the investigation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vanishing_Half"title="The Vanishing Half">
The novel is a multi-generational family saga set between the 1940s to the 1990s and centers on identical twin sisters Desiree and Estelle "Stella" Vignes and their daughters Jude and Kennedy. Desiree and Stella are light-skinned black sisters who were raised in the fictional town of Mallard, Louisiana and witnessed the lynching of their father in the 1940s. In 1954, at the age of 16, the twins run away to New Orleans. However, Stella disappears shortly thereafter only to be living her life in secret as a white woman. Stella meets a successful, wealthy man named Blake while working as his secretary at a marketing firm called Maison Blanche. They get married and have a daughter named Kennedy who eventually drops out of college to pursue a career in acting. The family lives in an affluent white neighborhood in Los Angeles, California, and Stella hides the fact that she's black in order to fit into this new life. Meanwhile, Desiree leaves an abusive marriage and moves away from Washington, D.C. to return to Mallard with her eight-year-old dark-skinned daughter, Jude. Jude grows older and moves to Los Angeles through a track scholarship at the University of California, Los Angeles. She falls in love with Reese while in college and eventually gets a job to help him save for surgery. While working part time as a caterer in Beverly Hills, Jude sees a woman who appears to be her mother's doppelgänger. The woman is actually Stella. Jude meets Kennedy at a local theater and tells her the secret of her mother's identity. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Minute_Out"title="One Minute Out">
Freelance mercenary Court Gentry is tasked with assassinating former Serbian general Ratko Babic at his compound in Bosnia and Herzegovina. While infiltrating his house, Gentry discovers that it is also a way station for young girls waiting to be transported east and sold into sex slavery. After killing Babic, Gentry manages to escape with one of the girls named Liliana while taking heavy fire from the general's men, leaving the other girls behind.Liliana informs Gentry about Captain Niko Vukovic, a police chief stationed in the nearby city of Mostar who is Babic's associate. After sending the girl home safely, Gentry goes to Mostar and surveils the police officer, later apprehending Hungarian mobsters sent to kill him. While there, he encounters Talyssa Corbu, a Romanian financial analyst working for Europol. She had embarked on a personal mission to find her sister Roxana, who is missing and presumed dead or sold into sex slavery. They agree to work together to save the trafficked girls as well as Roxana.Gentry snatches Vukovic and tortures him for information. The police officer reveals that the next way station or "pipeline" for the trafficked girls is in Dubrovnik, Croatia, and that he works for a global enterprise called the Consortium, which deals in money laundering and sex trafficking. Gentry and Corbu then proceed to Croatia, where he uses her as bait to attract Consortium men by asking around about the organization. Eventually, Albanian mobsters working for the Consortium kidnap Corbu. Gentry then chases them through the streets of Dubrovnik, eventually saving the analyst and killing her captors. While captive, Corbu overhears of a Consortium hideout near the Croatian coast. They venture there, where Gentry finds a yacht where the young girls are being transported and decides to follow it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Adler_Swims_Forever"title="Florence Adler Swims Forever">
Esther and Joseph Adler own a bakery, above which is an apartment they lived in while they raised their two daughters. While they now have a house, they still return to the apartment each summer so they can make extra money by renting out their home to vacationers eager to visit Atlantic City. The apartment grows cramped after their daughters, college girl Florence and expectant mother Fannie, return home. Florence is preparing to swim the English Channel, a dangerous venture that requires that she spend the summer training, and Fannie must remain on bed rest lest she run the risk of miscarriage. Joseph has also brought home a young Jewish woman that he helped emigrate from Nazi Germany, which makes the apartment even more crowded. After Florence dies during a swimming accident Esther convinces the family to hide the truth from Fannie out of fear that she would lose the baby. This proves to be a difficult venture and one that brings out much family tension and many secrets. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damiano's_Lute"title="Damiano's Lute">
"Damiano's Lute" is a novel in which former mage Damiano tries to survive as he wanders through plague-ridden Renaissance Italy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Flames"title="Ghost Flames">
The present-tense narrative unfolds chronologically in interwoven episodes describing the experiences of featured individuals, beginning with that of a North Korean refugee girl in Seoul, South Korea, on June 25, 1950, the morning the war began with an invasion of the South by the northern army.The other protagonists are a North Korean communist party functionary; a mother of two in Seoul; Major General Yu Song-chol, the North Korean army operations chief; Lieutenant General Matthew B. Ridgway, the U.S. army’s operations chief; a North Korean Naval Academy cadet; a black American infantryman; a Maryknoll nun; a northern medical student; a U.S. 1st Cavalry Division soldier; a Korean journalist in Seoul; a British communist journalist; a Seoul high school student; a high school student from Kochang, South Korea; a female Seoul university student; a Chinese interpreter at the truce talks; a U.S. Marine officer; a U.S. 7th Infantry Division soldier; overall Chinese commander General Peng Teh-huai; and a Chinese army medic.These individuals observe or participate in the war’s major events: the U.S.-South Korean retreat into the defensive Pusan Perimeter; the Inchon Landing; the breakout from the perimeter; the U.S.-South Korean drive deep into North Korea; the intervention of the Chinese army on North Korea’s side; the seesawing battles over the peninsula’s midsection; the trench warfare of 1951–1953; the truce talks; the signing of an armistice on July 27, 1953.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Happy_Than_Not"title="More Happy Than Not">
Aaron Soto is a 16-year-old living in the Bronx with his mother and brother. His father died by suicide in the house three months ago. Aaron's ensuing depression caused him to attempt suicide as well, leaving him with a scar on his wrist in the shape of a smile. He maintains his happiness with his girlfriend Genevieve and his other friends in his project, promising himself to not make the same mistake again.Aaron meets Thomas, a kid from a different project, and becomes friends with him due to his idealist and carefree personality. When Genevieve leaves for three weeks on an artist's retreat, their friendship deepens. Aaron suspects that Thomas is gay, and realizes that he had developed feelings for him as well. Aaron breaks up with Genevieve, and his old friends attack Thomas out of jealousy of Aaron's new friendship. Later that night he admits his feelings for Thomas, but he rejects him, telling him he's straight.Distraught over losing his best friend, girlfriend, and old friends, Aaron turns to the Leteo Institute — an organization that uses neurosurgery to erase traumatic memories in their patients — to solve his problems. He figures that if he forgets that he is gay by erasing all his memories of Thomas, he'll have his old relationships back and be happy again. Before he does so, Thomas comes back and apologizes for reacting so harshly, though he states that he is straight and a romantic relationship between them isn't possible. Aaron's old friends overhear their conversation and physically assault Aaron for being gay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_Song"title="Survivor Song">
The state of Massachusetts is under quarantine and curfew by the government due to a new virus that resembles rabies and is extremely infectious. These measures are only a stopgap, as hospitals are ill-equipped to deal with both virus victims and their regular capacity. People are terrified and it is only a matter of time before the emergency protocols become inadequate. The novel follows Natalie, a pregnant woman, and her friend Ramola "Rams" Sherman, a pediatrician, as they try to fight their way to the hospital to obtain the rabies vaccine. Natalie has been bitten by an infected neighbor while unsuccessfully trying to defend her husband, who was suddenly attacked.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_People's_Movements"title="Poor People's Movements">
The book argues that organizing the poor to form long-term political pressure groups is futile and distracts from winning larger gains in moments of opportunity opened by mass protest: "...that by endeavoring to do what they cannot do, organizers fail to do what they can do...all too often, when workers erupted in strikes, organizers collected dues cards; when tenants refused to pay rent and stood off marshals, organizers formed building committees; when people were burning and looting, organizers used that 'moment of madness' to draft constitutions."People generally acquiesce to material inequality. Only in moments of crisis do people question the arrangement of society. Massive, rapid economic change creates these crises. Piven and Cloward identify three signals indicating the possibility of mass protest: first, that the harm and indignity falling upon people is a fault of the system and not due to individual failing; second, when ordinarily fatalistic people begin to demand rights or other forms of change; and third, when people who ordinarily consider themselves helpless begin to see themselves as capable of changing their conditions.Protest by the poor faces greater constraints than other groups. Welfare recipients cannot easily go to Congress or state legislatures en masse, and when they do, they are easily ignored, whereas at the welfare offices they are difficult to ignore and can meaningfully disrupt the office. Context also constrains the possible targets of protests, "[t]enants experience the leaking ceilings and cold radiators, and they recognize the landlord. They do not recognize the banking, real estate, and construction systems...when the poor rebel they so often rebel against the overseer of the poor, or the slumlord, or the middling merchant, and not against the banks or the governing elites to whom the overseer, the slumlord, and the merchant also defer." The authors argue that "people cannot defy institutions to which they no access, and to which they make no contribution."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_Scars"title="King of Scars">
King of Ravka Nikolai Lantsov attempts to rebuild his country after the Ravkan Civil War and get it in order to fend off threats from neighboring nations Shu Han and Fjerda while dealing with the demons the Darkling infested him with. Zoya Nazyalensky, his friend, a powerful Squaller, and general of Ravka's Second Army, is desperate to help him.They also run into the Cult of the Starless Saint, who worship and claim loyalty to the Darkling. Yuri, the leader of this cult, travels with Zoya and Nikolai while they are searching for a way to control the monster inside of Nikolai. They are trapped in a remnant of the Shadow Fold that holds some of Ravka's Saints, including Sankta Elisaveta, Sankt Juris, and Sankt Grigori. Sankta Elisaveta helps Nikolai prepare for a dangerous ritual to rid himself of the monster, while Sankt Juris works with Zoya to hone her Grisha powers. Elisaveta ends up betraying Zoya and Nikolai with Yuri's help. Juris is murdered by Elisaveta and is joined with Zoya as an amplifier. By the end of the ritual, the Darkling's spirit has entered Yuri's body.Meanwhile, Nina Zenik is disguised as a woman named Mila Jandersdat as she, Leoni, and Adrik help Grisha flee Fjerda, where Grisha are oppressed and even hunted. Shortly after burying her lover, Matthias, Nina meets Hanne, a Grisha living in secret in Fjerda. Hanne is revealed to be the daughter of Jarl Brum and Ylva, a Hedjut woman. Together, Nina and her allies manage to rescue young Grisha women and children who are being drugged with "parem" and forced to conceive children born already addicted to the drug.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Leader_(story)"title="The Leader (story)">
In the beginning of the story, we see a group of people from an impoverished region discussing to leave the barren area they live, but they are unable to reach a consensus nor do they trust each other enough to elect a leader among themselves.In the end, they decide upon a silent stranger who came to the village the day before. The old man agrees to lead them but remains entirely impassive, and they come to believe that he is so silent because he is pensive and extremely wise, and everybody finds in his silence and demeanour some proof of his excellent wisdom.Two hundred families set off the next day, and immediately encounter difficulties. The leader leads them directly into the fence, and then stops dead in his track and starts hitting it with his cane, without saying a word. Despite the children pointing out the door in the fence nearby, men follow the leader blindly, and break the fence down so that they could continue the journey on the leader's path. Similar obstacles follow, but they push on. Days pass, some children and old people die on the road, and all are exhausted and wounded but still hopeful that this difficult road will lead them into a better land.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artful_(novel)"title="Artful (novel)">
This book is based on four lectures given by Ali Smith at Oxford University, the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature. The four headings are: "On Time", "On Form", "On Edge", and "On Offer and On Reflection".It has two fictional characters. One is a woman mourning her dead lover and the other is her dead lover who still seems to be present. She speaks to the mourning woman in Greek, steals belongings, and causes a nuisance. The dead woman was working on some lectures when she died, and the living one works with trees.The English author and critic Julie Myerson wrote in the Guardian that "if this book has a central subject, it's the relationship between thought and art". Smith explores different artists throughout the book including the surrealists, William Shakespeare, and Jackie Kay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apeirogon_(novel)"title="Apeirogon (novel)">
The story follows two real life figures: Rami Elhanan, an Israeli graphic designer, and Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian scholar and previous political prisoner. Consisting of 1001 short sections, the two central figures bond over the untimely deaths of their respective daughters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knife_(novel)"title="Knife (novel)">
Harry Hole started drinking again and was kicked out of his home by his wife Rakel. Recently, only minor cases have been entrusted to him, despite the fact that his investigative skills are well known at the anti-crime in Oslo. Everything changes when one morning he wakes up covered in blood without remembering what happened the previous evening and, a short time later, he discovers that a murder had taken place that night.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grey_Seas_of_Jutland"title="The Grey Seas of Jutland">
Two cousins, one British and one German, join their country's Naval forces and fall in love with the same girl. Their ongoing rivalry comes to a head in the thick of the Great War, when their ships close for action in the Battle of Jutland.The Author points out that no destroyer named "Nilotic" took part in the Jutland action, and that no capital ship named "Sachsen" was involved.He acknowledges a debt of gratitude to Captain Geoffrey Bennett, Royal Navy.The book is divided into two major sections; "Time Growing" and "Time Fighting".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spark_(Matayoshi_novel)"title="Spark (Matayoshi novel)">
Tokunaga is a young comedian struggling to make a name for himself when he is taken under the wing of Kamiya, who is either a crazy genius or perhaps just crazy. Kamiya's indestructible confidence inspires Tokunaga, but it also makes him doubt the limits of his own talent, and dedication to manzai comedy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin's_Peasants"title="Stalin's Peasants">
"Stalin's Peasants" is a history from below of the conflict between peasants and Stalinist leaders and apparatchiks during the period of collectivization in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. It attempts to understand the different ways Soviet peasants attempted to resist Joseph Stalin's policy of collectivization and their efforts to adapt and control their lives within the newly collectivized village. It also explores the impact collectivization had on relationships within and between villages, the conflicts it gave rise to, and the changes to the structure of local authority it engendered. The work shatters the myth of the "happy peasants" and the image of a "Potemkin village" of plenty, allegiance, and solidarity created by Soviet propagandists to justify collectivization and demonstrates how peasants understood this period as a "second serfdom". Based on evidence from the Soviet archives, it refutes the claim that the peasants saw Stalin as the "good Tsar" and shows that they understood he was responsible for the misery and famine they were experiencing.Writing in "Slavic Review", Robert E. Johnson states that "Sheila Fitzpatrick's book is not a general history of Soviet agriculture, or the Soviet peasantry or collectivization. (It will, indeed, be a challenging read for anyone who is not already familiar with these subjects.) Rather, she offers a thoughtful and provocative reappraisal of the collision between peasants and the Soviet state in the 1930s. Using a wide array of grass-roots sources, she examines the strategies of everyday survival, the limits of Soviet power, and the strains and divisions of life in the countryside."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Before_Dark_(novel)"title="Home Before Dark (novel)">
The novel is told via a split narrative. Maggie Holt narrates events as they happen during current day, while her father Ewan's narrative occurs via passages of his book "House of Horrors," which details the family's time at Baneberry Hall during the 1990s. The below synopsis is split into sections, one containing Ewan's narrative and the other containing Maggie's.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_(book)"title="Nothing (book)">
Danish 8th grader Pierre Anthon tells his classmates about his existential dread. Upon doing so, he leaves school, returning to his home, where he lives with his dad. He takes residence in a plum tree.Agnes, the narrator, decides to work with her classmates in an attempt to convince Pierre that life has a purpose, and to convince him to give up living in the plum tree in favor of returning to school. The classmates decide to create a "heap of meaning," which is a collection of one personal sacrifice from each participant. The participants choose items based on personal meaning. A classmate named Dennis begins the heap by giving up his Dungeons and Dragons books, and then challenges another classmate Sebastian to give up his fishing rod. Sebastian complies, and asks Laura to sacrifice her earrings, which she does.The classmates begin to see the heap as a game, asking "Who can sacrifice the most meaningful item for the heap?" Agnes is forced to sacrifice her new sandals, and as a result she forces Gerda to sacrifice her pet hamster. The children begin to sacrifice darker and darker things, including their virginity, their fingers, and additional animals. Law Enforcement and the media get involved, and the heap begins to receive national coverage. The classmates sell the heap to a museum for $3.6 million.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_Every_Door"title="Lock Every Door">
This synopsis is in chronological order as opposed to book order.Jules Larsen is at the end of her rope. She lost both her job and her boyfriend, Andrew, and is now living with her best friend, Chloe, in New York City. With no job prospects, Jules answers a job posting for an apartment sitter for an upscale apartment in The Bartholomew after the death of its occupant. Leslie Evelyn is the woman in charge of hiring new tenants. She explains that they cannot let an apartment sit empty for more than a month's time, so as to deter burglars, and that Jules will live in the apartment until the family determines what they want to do with the unit. Jules has always dreamed of living in The Bartholomew since her favorite book is "The Heart of a Dreamer" written by Greta Manville. Jules's sister, Jane, also loved the book, but went missing years ago. Jules's parents committed suicide by setting their home on fire shortly after Jane's disappearance. For Jules, this job is an opportunity to start over and live out a childhood fantasy. While staying in the building, however, Jules learns that other people, predominantly apartment sitters, have gone missing in The Bartholomew. She soon discovers that a woman named Erica Mitchell, who had previously stayed in apartment 12A before her, was very likely abducted for unknown reasons. Jules finds evidence to support this and grows even more suspicious after a sitter for another apartment, Ingrid, goes missing. This leads her to believe that the building owners are part of a satanic group called the Golden Chalice and that the missing people were used as sacrifices to lengthen their lifespans. Terrified, Jules flees The Bartholomew, upon which point she is hit by a car and hospitalized. She initially tries to explain what has happened to the hospital staff, only to discover that she is once again in the clutches of the group.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lying_Life_of_Adults"title="The Lying Life of Adults">
In Naples in the early 1990s, twelve-year-old Giovanna Trada overhears her father Andrea disparagingly liken her appearance to that of his estranged sister Vittoria. This sends Giovanna into a search for Vittoria on another side of Naples to discover the nature of the family's fallout.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Gothic"title="Mexican Gothic">
In 1950s Mexico City, beautiful young socialite Noemí Taboada receives a letter from her cousin Catalina, begging for help. She firmly believes that her English husband, Virgil Doyle, intends to poison her. Suspecting that Virgil may be after Catalina's money, Noemí's father, Leocadio, sends her to the Doyle home, High Place, which is located in the mountains outside of a small town named El Triunfo. Once there, Noemí is struck by the strange and unwelcoming atmosphere of the Doyles' house and the controlling and patronising attitude of its inhabitants. Catalina is proclaimed to be suffering from consumption and Noemí is mostly kept away from her cousin. During an infrequent visit Catalina begs her to seek out a healer living in the small village near the mansion named Marta Duval and pick up medicine that could save her. Noemí does so, but the medicine instead causes a seizure that keeps her from freely visiting Catalina as frequently.As a result of the drastically decreased visits Noemí spends her time learning about the Doyle family, which also includes Florence Doyle and the frail family patriarch, Howard. The family has a history of incestuous marriages and deep intergenerational traumas, such as one of Howard's daughters, Ruth, killing several family members before shooting herself. Despite being mistreated by Florence and receiving unwanted attention from both Virgil and Howard, Noemi grows closer to one of the Doyles, Francis, who confirms her growing suspicion that the family cannot be trusted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_Monarchs"title="Absolute Monarchs">
As indicated by its title, this is a history of the popes, from Saint Peter to Pope Benedict XVI. Although primarily factual, Norwich enlivens the historical record by sharing commentary and indicating motivations for the parties' decisions and actions. For example, in treating Charles Martel, Norwich asks if he would stop the advance of the Lombards and answers, "Perhaps, but he would not be hurried." Accordingly, the reader is presented with the grand strategy and moral dilemmas of the times, providing a sense of the drama present in every age.Norwich comments that Pope Gregory I (term 590 – 604) "was an administrator of genius, an organizer and a missionary; he was not and never could be, an abstract thinker or theologian, or even a politician." Further he was, "[p]ious but practical, he intended the Patrimony of Peter to be a huge charitable fund, at the immediate disposal of the Church for the benefit of the poor — every day twelve paupers shared his table."Norwich also details the low points of the institution. In the mid-10th century, the "de facto" ruler of Rome, and therefore the papacy, was the "ravishingly beautiful but sinister figure of Marozia, senatrix of Rome." Pope John X, who showed signs of acting independently was, "struck down in the Lateran, before his brother's eyes" and later "deposed and imprisoned in the Castle Sant'Angelo, where he was soon afterward smothered to death with pillows." Apparently Marozia hated him, which may "partly have been due to the fact that he had been her mother's lover." Marozia used her power to have her grandson installed as Pope John XII. Far from conforming to our modern image of the pope as a frail, elderly man, this twenty-something gave female pilgrims to Rome quite a different sort of papal audience, by raping them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Children_(book)"title="Stolen Children (book)">
Amy is a 14-year-old that has just lost her father and, after finishing her babysitting course, is hired to take care of a 3-year-old baby girl from a wealthy family. After beginning her new job, the girls are kidnapped and offered for ransom by two criminals. While recording the tapes they plan to deliver to the baby's parents, Amy sends coded messages through the recordings to help the parents figure out where they are being held.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escapist_Dream"title="Escapist Dream">
The story takes place in a virtual reality world known as the Escapist Dream, where all kinds of geeks can live a life of superpowered adventures based on their favorite film, comic, anime, novel or video game characters.Two individuals – a shy teenage geek named Charlie, and a serious programmer named Jim – came to the Escapist Dream for different reasons. One came to this virtual reality to have fun while the other was sent to fix bugs that have been plaguing the Escapist Dream. Charlie and Jim would soon find out how the bugs have caused madness in this place, and must now work together to protect themselves and save the Escapist Dream.The world of the Escapist Dream is divided into different areas: Stan City is a place where American comic book and superhero fans reside, Otaku Academy is the place for Japanese otaku and anime fans, Gamer's Den is video game-like area for gamers, The Library is the area for bookworms and fans of classic literature, and Zone of the Macabre is a dark place for fans of controversial medium. Both Charlie and Jim have to journey through each areas to find and remove the viruses affecting the virtual reality world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Heights_of_Despair"title="On the Heights of Despair">
The text consists of 66 brief titled sections, usually ranging in length from one to three pages. In each section, Cioran considers certain emotions or psychological states, contrasting them with each other. He focuses on negative emotions, such as sadness, melancholy, and agony. For Cioran, while sadness itself is an acute emotion which may follow moments of happiness, melancholy is a more diffuse form of sadness, associated with regret and ambiguity. Cioran praises lyricism and heightened emotional states for their ability to force humans to reconsider the truly important categories of the human condition, such as love and death. Humans may ignore such categories for several years by focusing on the routines of everyday life, or by participating in rational or intellectual endeavors. Cioran scorns the latter categories:Throughout the text, Cioran also expresses anti-rationalist and anti-Christian views:Although Cioran focuses on negative emotions and gives contrarian opinions, he also considers certain positive emotions and expresses more conventional views rejecting certain negative states, although these rejections have an anti-Christian content. Innocence and grace are described as positive states, although Cioran's grace is more secular and aesthetic, as opposed to the religious sense of the English word. Although he praises the heightened emotions which suffering can induce, Cioran explicitly rejects poverty and suffering themselves as purely destructive states which have none of the nobility or catharsis which Christianity confers upon them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Craft_of_Science_Writing"title="The Craft of Science Writing">
"The Craft of Science Writing" presents more than 30 articles, some new, others previously published on "The Open Notebook" website, organized to answer five questions: "Who is a science journalist and how do you become one? What makes a science story and how do you find one? How do you report a science story? How do you tell your story? How do you build expertise in science writing?" In ALA's "CHOICE", Melody Herr wrote that the articles are organized "into an introductory course that covers becoming a science journalist, identifying a story idea, conducting research, writing the story, and building proficiency in core skills". She also said the articles demonstrate effective idea presentation, "through personal anecdotes, interviews with award-winning journalists, expert panel discussions, and visuals, including a marked-up science article, a flowchart, and helpful checklists".Jonathan Wai wrote in "Psychology Today", that it "...seeks to illuminate the craft of science writing by collecting numerous perspectives from science writers themselves about how to improve their own craft of science writing." Carolyn Crist wrote the pieces "offer advice about how to pitch stories, evaluate scientific and statistical claims, report on controversial topics, and engage readers with a scientific story."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ceremonies_(novel)"title="The Ceremonies (novel)">
The novel opens with the arrival of an evil entity countless years before the dawn of humanity and life as it is known on earth. It eventually manages to meet and coerce a human boy to serve it, with the goal of eventually returning to its true strength. Decades later, graduate student and adjunct professor Jeremy Freirs decides to rent a renovated chicken coop located in the New Jersey countryside. The property sits on the farm of Sarr Poroth, who along with his wife Deborah, belong to a restrictive and conservative religious sect that prides itself on eschewing modern conveniences and the modern world as a whole. Prior to traveling to the farm Jeremy meets Carol, a library assistant and failed novitiate to whom he is drawn. While they believe their meetings to be random coincidence, in truth they were orchestrated by the elderly Mr. Rosebottom, the human boy from so long ago. Rosebottom's goal is to guide Carol through a series of rituals preparing her for a final one to be held on Lammas, using her naiveté to ensure that she is unaware of her participation. This final ritual will use Carol's body to birth the evil entity. Jeremy is to be killed and reanimated by the entity so it can serve as its own "father". While Rosebottom is busy in the city with Carol, a remnant of the entity manages to possess one of the Poroth's cats and eventually Deborah herself, in the process killing its hosts. As the rituals continue the arcane magic results in dramatic environmental changes in New Jersey and New York, as well as disturbances in the Poroth's religious community and the formation of a suspected volcano in an area close to the Poroth farm. This causes the community to believe that Jeremy's presence is the cause. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alice_Network"title="The Alice Network">
The narrative starts in 1947. American college student Charlotte (Charlie) St. Clair is on her way to Switzerland with her mother, who has arranged for her to get an abortion. However, Charlie is more interested in finding her French cousin Rose Fournier, who disappeared during World War II. During a stopover in England, she slips away from her mother and tracks down World War I British spy Eve Gardiner, whose name appeared on a report Charlie’s father had received when he was trying to locate Rose.The story of Evelyn (Eve) Gardiner starts in London in 1915. She is recruited by "Uncle Edward" (Captain Cameron) to join the Alice Network, a group of mostly female spies working against the Germans in northeastern France. The ring is headed by “Lili” (Louise de Bettignies). Using the code name Marguerite Le François, Eve takes a waitress job in Lille at a restaurant named Le Lethe, which caters to German officers and is operated by René Bourdelon, a French collaborator and profiteer.Eve conceals her fluency in German so she can eavesdrop on conversations at the restaurant and pass on valuable intelligence to Lili and her lieutenant “Violette” (Léonie van Houtte).Over time, Bourdelon becomes attracted to Marguerite and seduces her. She accepts his advances so she can get even more information to pass on to Lili. Eventually, he discovers that she is a British spy. In attempting to get information from her, he breaks all of the joints of her fingers. When she refuses to tell him anything, he gives her opium and tells her afterwards that, while under the influence of the drug, she betrayed Lili and her network.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Blood"title="Troubled Blood">
"Troubled Blood" begins in August 2013 and ends on Robin's 30th birthday on 9 October 2014. While visiting his terminally ill aunt Joan in Cornwall, Strike is approached by a woman who wants to hire Strike's firm to investigate the disappearance of her mother, Margot Bamborough, a general practitioner in London, almost 40 years previously, on 11 October 1974. As a result of their previous successes, Strike and Robin (still a salaried partner) now employ three contract investigators and an office manager. Both are dealing with their own problems: Strike over his aunt's illness, suicide threats from his ex-fiancée Charlotte (now a married mother of two), and the attempts of his half-siblings to get him to attend a party honouring his rock star biological father Johnny Rokeby; Robin over Matthew's intransigence in their divorce, her continuing PTSD, and her unsettled personal life, brought into clearer focus by her brother and his wife having their first child.The police's principal suspect in Margot's disappearance was a currently incarcerated serial killer named Dennis Creed. The daughter (Anna) and her wife give the firm a one-year contract to try to trace information, although, because the small firm has three other ongoing cases, it takes several months to run down the surviving witnesses and investigators (or their children). During the year, Strike's aunt dies from cancer, Matthew grants Robin the divorce because his mistress/girlfriend becomes pregnant, Charlotte attempts suicide and calls Strike to tell him goodbye—although Strike's quick reaction gets help to her in time, and the heavy work schedule combined with a lack of communication about all of the issues contributes to many personal misunderstandings within the firm, including arguments between Strike and Robin and the termination of one of the contract investigators for instances of inappropriate behaviour toward Robin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piranesi_(novel)"title="Piranesi (novel)">
Piranesi lives in a place called the House, a world composed of infinite halls and vestibules lined with statues, no two of which are alike. The upper level of the House is filled with clouds, and the lower level with an ocean, which occasionally surges into the middle level following tidal patterns that Piranesi meticulously tracks. He believes he has always lived in the House, and that there are only fifteen people in the world, most of whom are long-dead skeletons. Piranesi records every day in his journals, the text of which makes up the novel.Twice a week, Piranesi meets with the Other, a well-dressed man who enlists his help to search for a "Great and Secret Knowledge" hidden somewhere in the House. The Other occasionally brings Piranesi supplies that seem to originate from outside the House, such as shoes, electric torches, and multivitamins. When Piranesi suggests that they abandon the quest for the Great and Secret Knowledge, the Other says they have had this conversation before, and warns Piranesi that the House slowly erodes one's memories and personality.The Other warns Piranesi that a sixteenth person, whom both call "16," may enter the House to do him harm, and that he must not approach 16 under any circumstances or he will lose his sanity. Piranesi meets an elderly stranger he calls the Prophet, who identifies the Other as Ketterley, a rival who stole his ideas about the Knowledge. The Prophet claims that the House is a "distributary world", formed by ideas flowing out of another world. He declares he will lead 16 to the House in order to hurt Ketterley.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoax_(book)"title="Hoax (book)">
Stelter draws on over 250 sources, including 140 current staffers at Fox, to detail Trump's ties to Fox News and its evolution from a news network to what he describes as "state-supported TV". He charts the network's origins from its inception in 1996 under Roger Ailes to today, noting Trump's close relationship with the channel emerging back in 2012 when he was given a regular call-in spot on the show "Fox &amp; Friends", giving Trump a platform for the birtherism conspiracy and his eventual presidential run.The book also details Trump's entwinement with Sean Hannity, with claims they speak almost daily, while building and sharing each other's rhetoric on such topics as rigged elections, immigration issues, the evils of the Democrats and the "fake news media". Stelter provides incidents in which Trump's campaign speeches and tweets use terminology taken from Hannity's program, and notes that Trump has used Hannity's program to test the ratings he might receive from his voter base on certain political stands or theories. Stelter also calls out Trump and the network's downplaying of the COVID-19 pandemic, with Fox News medical contributor Marc Siegel telling Hannity on March 6, 2020, that "at worst, at worst, worst case scenario, it could be the flu." Sean Hannity had at one time discouraged the use of social distancing to combat the spread of COVID-19. Stelter also credits Hannity with both pressuring FBI Director James Comey to investigate Hillary Clinton's laptop emails only days before the election as well as shifting public opinion against Hillary Clinton as a result of Comey's public statement that he was investigating the emails.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legendborn"title="Legendborn">
The book centers on 16-year-old Bree Matthews, who attempts to infiltrate a historically white magical society at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill pre-college program she is attending when she finds out that some members may have been involved in her mother's recent death.Three months after her mother's death, Bree attends the University of North Carolina with her friend Alice. On the first night, they sneak out of campus with a group of people. They end up getting caught and are given peer mentors to watch over them due to breaking the law. While Bree is walking with her peer mentor Nick, a 'shadowborn' monster appears, Nick slaying it with a sword. Bree is then taken to an unknown building where a strange man attempts to erase her mind, but fails without knowing so. Through Nick, she discovers a secret organization that is full of Legendborn nobles, descendants from fifteen of King Arthur's knights. She gradually recovers her memory of her mother's death, and is able to uncover the mage's organization enough to decide to infiltrate it as a page; a person training to defend the Legendborn nobles. Over time she slowly uncovers more about the society: the fifteen knights reincarnate in a sense in a descendant called a Scion, each knight sometimes Calls their Scion giving them power at the cost of a shortened life, and there is a set order in which they are Called. The descendants of Merlin are mages called Merlins, like the mage who attempted to wipe Bree's memory earlier in the book, Sel. As Nick and Bree's relationship grows, Sel begins to suspect that Bree is an undercover shadow monster, complicating her chances of becoming a Page.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_Automated_Luxury_Communism"title="Fully Automated Luxury Communism">
The book argues that human history can be divided into three broad periods, each characterized by substantial changes in technology: prehistory to the dawn of agriculture; agriculture to the Industrial Revolution; and the present period, characterised by the explosive spread of information technology. Bastani suggests that the prosperity ushered in by technology is inconsistent with contemporary models of capitalism. While capitalism is organised around a logic of scarcity, the technologically-mediated prosperity he predicts is characterised by the absence of scarcity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_in_White_Cotton"title="Girl in White Cotton">
In Pune, Antara must care for her ageing mother Tara who is experiencing memory loss from what is suspected to be the early onset of Alzheimer's disease. Tara lived a rebellious and careless life, abandoning her marriage to join an ashram and pursure a romance with a guru. Antara was neglected and abused by her mother as a child. Antara reckons with the contempt she holds for her mother as she is forced to care for her."I would be lying if I said my mother's misery has never given me pleasure" is the opening sentence of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Midnight_Clear_(novel)"title="A Midnight Clear (novel)">
The novel is set during the last days of WWII in the Ardennes Forest, and follows a group of six American soldiers, led by sergeant William Knot, called Won't by his comrades. Weary of this futile war, they are ordered to establish an observation post in an old chateau in order to have an eye on a German outpost. A few days after their arrival, they begin hearing strange noises and noticing Germans leaving strange signs of their presence. After some difficult communication with the Germans, they realize that the "Krauts" wish to surrender to avoid being sent to Russia. Everything seems perfectly ready for a fake surrender scene to finish the deal. But war is never so simple.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Queen_of_Tuesday"title="The Queen of Tuesday">
In 1949, at a party on Coney Island thrown by Fred Trump Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz have to convince a skeptical CBS to greenlight a television show starring a red-headed caucasian woman and a man from Cuba. As Lucille becomes disillusioned with Desi—he's flirting with another woman—she meets Isidore Strauss, the author's grandfather, and allows him to kiss her. This sets off a series of events that will echo through both their lives for decades.The book examines both the birth of the television industry and of the American suburb, and is a meditation on fame. It has also been called – in "The Washington Post" – "a charming love story".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Will_Go_with_You_(novel)"title="I Will Go with You (novel)">
The story centres around the passengers of a flight from Mumbai to Sydney whose lives are endangered after the pilot decides to commit suicide on board.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Crucible"title="Pacific Crucible">
"Pacific Crucible" covers the period from December 1941 to June 1942, a time frame that starts with the successful Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor and ends with the dramatic Japanese defeat at the Battle of Midway. In between the author weaves into the story chapter length biographies of key well known individuals such as Admirals Chester W. Nimitz and Ernest King, along with lesser known individuals such as Joseph Rochefort and Thomas Dyer while telling the story of Station Hypo, the code breaking team they led. Toll recounts the stunning Japanese blitzkrieg in the South Pacific that followed Pearl Harbor, the tentative small-scale clashes between the United States and Japan that followed, and the Battle of the Coral Sea, which set the stage for the Japanese defeat at Midway.The book primarily tells the story from the American point of view, but the author does not leave out details about the Japanese leadership, goals, strategy, and tactics or those of the American allies such as Britain and Australia. Chapters 3 and 4 provide the reader with a background of recent Japanese history, the circumstances and American interest surrounding the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the military culture and ArmyNavy rivalry that helped lead Japan into conflict with its neighbors. Toll provides another mini-biography of Isoroku Yamamoto, the admiral that planned and led the attacks on Pearl Harbor and Midway.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conquering_Tide"title="The Conquering Tide">
Continuing the story of the Pacific war, "The Conquering Tide" covers the period from June 1942 to June 1944, a time frame that starts with the fighting during the Solomon Islands, Guadalcanal, and New Guinea campaigns, continues into the Gilbert and Marshall Islands campaign and ends with the dramatic Japanese defeats during the Mariana and Palau Islands campaign and the Battle of the Philippine Sea, which sets the stage for the final phase of the war in the approach to and on the Japanese home islands. In writing about the scope of the subject covered in "The Conquering Tide", the Dallas Morning News review states,The Pacific War was the largest, bloodiest, most costly, most technically innovative, and most logistically complex amphibious war in history. To roll back the tide of Japanese conquests, the Allies would be required to seize one island after another, advancing across thousands of miles of ocean in two huge parallel offensives on either side of the equator. The army, navy, and marines were compelled to work together in sustained and intricate cooperation.Both a history from below, showing the perspectives of the average soldiers, sailors, and airmen that fought the war and a history from above, showing how American military leaders, especially Admiral Ernest King, planned and executed the strategy that set the stage for the final phase of the Pacific war. Toll uses both official histories and personal recollections to tell the story of this phase of the war. He weaves personal stories from the fighter pilots that fought the Japanese in the air, the sailors on board ship that encountered them at sea, and the soldiers and marines that fought them on countless islands, together with thoughts, plans, and reactions of the leaders that guided the progress of the war, to provide the reader with a compelling narrative of how the war unfolded.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrow_the_Ninth"title="Harrow the Ninth">
After ascending to Lyctorhood in "Gideon the Ninth", Harrowhark "Harrow" Nonagesimus discovers that her process of ascension is somehow imperfect and she lacks many of a Lyctor's standard powers. Despite this, the Emperor fulfills his promise and renews the Ninth House by waking several hundred people from cryogenic sleep and delivering them as new citizens to the Ninth. He apologizes that she does not have a real choice in returning to her House, because the Lyctors are perpetually being chased by Resurrection Beasts, the "ghosts" of the dead planets of the Nine Houses.In addition, large portions of Harrow’s memory are missing; Ianthe Tridentarius gives her a series of letters written by Harrow herself, giving her detailed instructions for what to do or avoid doing in various scenarios. Ianthe appears to know the reason behind these letters, but has been hexed by this past Harrow to prevent her from any talk of it.The book alternates between two perspectives; second-person chapters documenting Harrow's experiences in the present as a Lyctor, and third-person chapters that take place in the past, documenting Harrow's memories of the events in Canaan House in "Gideon the Ninth." However, her memories of Canaan House directly contradict the events of "Gideon," including replacing Gideon herself with Ortus, who is extremely occupied with his telling of an epic poem called "The Noniad", as her cavalier. In this version, Harrow reveals to Ortus that she is insane; she frequently reads text that appears differently to other characters, and hallucinates a beautiful woman she refers to as ”the Body.” This hallucination is described to have occurred prior to Canaan House as well as to still be occurring in the Mithraeum. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clown_in_a_Cornfield"title="Clown in a Cornfield">
The novel centers upon Quinn Maybrook, a teenage girl who is a senior in high school, has recently moved to the small factory town of Kettle Springs, Missouri from Philadelphia after the tragic death of her mother, Samantha. Her father, Glenn, has been hired as the new town physician in the hopes that this will allow the two of them to heal. Kettle Springs has suffered financially since the closing of the Baypen Corn Syrup Factory and its subsequent burning due to arson by a local boy named Cole Hill. As a result, the town is at odds with itself and strict lines are drawn between the largely conservative adults and the teens, who are more interested in having fun and getting views on their YouTube channel. Quinn manages to befriend Cole and his group of friends, including Queen Bee Janet, the ponytail-wearing Ronnie, and her boyfriend Matt, after an incident during her first day in class. Their science teacher, Mr. Vern, sends them all to study hall, and they get to talking about their group and the town's eerie history. During the study hall, Quinn is invited to attend the town's annual Founder's Day celebration, despite Mr. Vern banning them from the event. She is also invited to the subsequent party planned by Janet that's taking place in the nearby cornfield. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julián_Is_a_Mermaid"title="Julián Is a Mermaid">
One day, while on the subway with his grandma, Julián sees some of the participants of the Coney Island Mermaid Parade. Julián becomes fascinated by them and starts dreaming of becoming a mermaid swimming in the sea.Back home, while his grandmother is showering, Julián fashions himself a mermaid outfit with a variety of materials he finds at home, including a potted plant and window curtains. After leaving the bath, his grandmother gives what seems a disapproving look and leaves for a while, just to return with a smile on her face and a pearl necklace for Julián.His grandmother then takes him to the parade, where he gets to walk with all the other mermaids.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_of_the_Scorpion"title="The Night of the Scorpion">
After the events of the previous novel, "The Night of the Scorpion" follows Martin Hopkins and journalist Richard Cole as they travel together to Peru, only to immediately get separated and chased by a sinister Mr Todd. As Martin befriends a mysterious stranger called Pedro, they end up getting caught up with precognitions, chases, ancient secrets, artificial satellites, and the mysterious Nazca Lines in the Nazca Desert.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Losing_Uncle_Tim"title="Losing Uncle Tim">
Tim is Daniel's uncle and favorite person to spend time with and play games. As time goes on, though, Tim starts going out of his home less and less, eventually stopping completely. Daniel learns that his uncle has AIDS, and that's the reason he feels sick all the time. Daniel and his parents take care of uncle Tim, but he eventually dies from his condition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Long_Petal_of_the_Sea"title="A Long Petal of the Sea">
The story opens during the Spanish Civil War in Barcelona where the protagonist, Victor Dalmau, has left his medical studies to help the Republicans against the Fascist forces of General Franco. His brother, Guillem, is also a Republican soldier, but he dies in the Battle of Ebro. Victor has to seek the help of his Basque friend, Aitor Ibarra, to send his mother and Guillem's wife, Roser, to France, as the victory of Franco's forces is becoming more and more certain. After many trials, he reunites with Roser in France, and they hear that Winnipeg, a ship chartered by the poet Pablo Neruda, is going to take a certain number of Spanish refugees to Chile. Desperate to grab the chance, Victor and Roser get married reluctantly to qualify for the journey.They embark on this journey, but migration to the new country is not the end of their problem, and there again they are forced to witness the fight between freedom and repression, which seems to be a neverending war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_of_Gold"title="Chain of Gold">
The book takes place during the 1900's. However, several flashbacks (known as "Days Past") are scattered between the official chapters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everyday_Stalinism"title="Everyday Stalinism">
Everyday Stalinism looks at the effects of urbanization and industrialization in the Soviet Union in the 1930s under Joseph Stalin. Focused on a "history from below", Fitzpatrick records a history of impoverishment, overcrowding, and social destruction visited upon the average person. It records how ordinary citizens attempted to adapt when possible and circumvent when necessary the new way of life forced upon them by an omnipresent state bureaucracy backed up by a ruthless and brutal state secret police and the waves of terror and turmoil it imposed on Soviet society. Fitzpatrick's 1994 work "Stalin's Peasants" looked at rural life in the Soviet Union in the 1930s during the period of Stalinist collectivization and the impact it had on the daily life of peasants. "Everyday Stalinism" completes the story by providing a look at urban life in the Soviet Union during the 1930s and the impact industrialization had on workers and their families and the shockwaves in urban centers created by the massive disruption collectivization caused in Soviet agriculture. Together the works form the story of the two sides of the devastating consequences of Stalinism had on the Soviet Union.In "Slavic Review", Lewis H. Siegelbaum (Michigan State University) writes:Her range of sources is enormous. It includes, inter alia, advertisements, standard personnel questionnaires, movie scenes, and song lyrics. From these as well as diaries, memoirs, letters, newspaper articles, and travelers' accounts, she extracts telling details about the symbolic significance of uniforms and domestically produced champagne, markers of privilege such as chauffeur driven cars, dachas, and travel allowances, and the crucial role that patronage played in acquiring them. The types of individuals we meet along the way include not only the party elite, pampered Stakhanovites and intellectuals, but also conmen and domestic servants.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Child"title="Hurricane Child">
Caroline Murphy, a girl that lives on an island near Saint Thomas, believes herself to be cursed. She was born during a hurricane, a sign of bad luck, and is haunted by the spirit of an unknown woman. Murphy goes to a Catholic school, where she is bullied by students and faculty alike, due to the color of her skin. Her mother also abandoned the family without apparent reason and disappeared.One day, a girl called Kalinda, from Barbados, is transferred to Murphy's school. Kalinda eventually develops a friendship with Caroline after Caroline asks Kalinda to sit with her. Murphy slowly realizes she has a crush on Kalinda.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Ground_(The_Dresden_Files)"title="Battle Ground (The Dresden Files)">
In the aftermath of the Titan Ethniu's declaration of war against humanity, Harry Dresden returns from Demonreach with his lover Karrin Murphy and temporary allies, Lara Raith and Freydis, when their ship gets attacked by a kraken, which they manage to kill with the help of Molly Carpenter before reaching Chicago. Harry and Murphy rush to warn their local friends in the Paranet about the upcoming war, and Harry charges Murphy with keeping the group out of trouble while he meets with the rest of the Accorded Nations, including John Marcone, who are ready to defend the city from the Titan and her Fomor army.When the Fomor scouts attack, Harry goes out to fight them off with the support of the sasquatch River Shoulders. Joined by several Wardens and Listens-to-Wind, Harry reaches Graceland Cemetery, where they find Drakul and several Black Court vampires, Mavra among them, trying to carry out a necromantic ritual, and they engage in a fight. While the vampires leave, they do so on their own accord after killing Wardens Yoshino and Wild Bill and sending Chandler somewhere unknown. Harry is attacked by the Fomor, but is saved by the appearance of the Knights of the Cross and Murphy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_the_Night_on_Fire"title="Set the Night on Fire">
The book covers a period of more than ten years beginning at the start of the decade with a description of the Los Angeles of the 1950s and ending with the defeat of Sam Yorty, the powerful Los Angeles mayor by African American city councilman Tom Bradley. During the 1950s, Los Angeles became associated with images of laid-back surf culture, the beatniks, and the celebrity lifestyle; images of Hollywood and Venice Beach filled the minds of individuals when the city of Angeles was mentioned. But behind the scenes, the city was rife with corruption, police violence, and poverty, all while being under the tight control of police chief William H. Parker and Mayor Sam Yorty, who used their unchecked power to rule over the city. By the advent of the 1960s, the mythical image Los Angeles had carefully cultivated was beginning to crack, and the void which was created was filled by the counter-culture movements which would eventually define the decade."Set the Night on Fire" covers a range of movements—the desegregation struggle, the gay rights movement, and the birth of the Black Power movement. The emergence of alternative media, and the stories of draft resisters, activist nuns and priests, and the high school "blowouts" during 1968 in Chicano East Los Angeles are some of the subjects explored. The authors make it clear their intention is not to retell another version of myths of the 1960s. They feel the story of Los Angeles is normally written from the perspective of the elite and wealthy individuals, usually white and male, and those they surrounded themselves with, and the history of Los Angeles has become the myth they projected onto it. Lost in this myth is the vast majority of Los Angeles: the normal working-class citizens and students, the black and brown faces, those marginalized by gender or sexual orientation. These are the individuals who make up the history of Los Angeles in "Set the Night on Fire" and their parallel and sometimes intersecting movements form its narrative.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Paxwax"title="Master of Paxwax">
The story of Master of Paxwax, Mann's second book, centers around the life of Pawl Paxwax. Pawl – and his name is significant – is the second son of the Fifth Family in a galaxy-wide empire ruled by Eleven Great Families. These Families have for centuries enslaved non-human life forms by a policy of alien genocide. Now things are changing. Beneath the surface of the seemingly dead world of Sanctum, surviving intelligent aliens are gathering, united in their desire to strike back at the barbarous society that had laid waste their civilisations.When Pawl's father and brother die in quick succession, Pawl finds himself thrust into a position of supreme power, unaware that the alien races have decided to revolt and intend to use him and his lover, Laurel Beltane, as pawns to defeat the other ruling families. Pawl is a poet, and non-political in nature, but his enmity, once roused, is to be feared. "Wonderfully imaginative" said Locus. "High-class space opera with a welter of convincing aliens," sang White Dwarf.The sequel, "The Fall of the Families", brings this saga to its conclusion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_You_Could_Be_Mine"title="If You Could Be Mine">
The book is narrated by Sahar, a teenager that lives in Tehran, the capital city of Iran. She grew up in a humble house with her single father and is in a love affair with her childhood friend, Nasrin. Her girlfriend comes from a wealthy family and, although she also loves Sahar, she is afraid to have an open relationship with her, due to the persecution of LGBT people in their country.Nasrin was arranged to be married to a man, and she is unwilling to call it off so as not to disappoint her family. While Nasrin is content to have her as a lover, Sahar becomes desperate. Through her gay cousin, Ali, she meets Parveen, a transgender woman, and decides she will go through sex reassignment surgery so Nasrin will accept marrying her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritus_(novel)"title="Spiritus (novel)">
A group of foreigners touring Eastern Europe after the fall of communism hears exciting rumours during its stay in Albania about the capture of the spirit from the dead. As it turns out, the spirit is in fact a listening device known to the notorious secret service as a "hornet".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girlfriend_in_a_Coma_(novel)"title="Girlfriend in a Coma (novel)">
The first part of the book covers the 17 years in the lives of a group of friends, after one of the friends, Karen, lapses into a coma. Richard has to cope with losing Karen but gaining a daughter, Megan, as fatherhood is thrust upon him: the outcome of their mutual loss of virginity just hours before Karen fell into her coma. Wendy throws herself into work and Linus loses himself, looking for that which is lost. Pamela becomes a supermodel and Hamilton a demolition expert, but none of the friends' lives turn out how they imagined. Broken and lacking, they return to the suburbs of their youth to try to pull themselves together until one day, almost two decades after she fell asleep, Karen regains consciousness.The book is divided into three parts. The first chapter of the book is narrated by Jared, the ghost of a friend of the characters who died of leukemia at a young age. The rest of Part 1 is narrated by Richard, in the first person, as he tells the story of what happened in the 17 years.The second part of the book, with no narrator, deals with Karen's return to the world. It also begins to explain where she had been all those years and the reality she had hoped to escape. Then, suddenly, the world ends. This section is narrated in the third person, with insight into all the characters' minds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schindler's_Ark"title="Schindler's Ark">
This novel tells the story of Oskar Schindler, self-made entrepreneur and "bon viveur" who finds himself saving Polish Jews from the Nazi death machine. Based on numerous eyewitness accounts, Keneally's story takes place within Hitler's attempts to make Europe "judenfrei" (free of Jews). Schindler is presented as a flawed hero – a drinker, a womaniser and, at first, a profiteer. After the war, he was commemorated as Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, but was never seen as a conventionally virtuous character. The story is not only Schindler's, it is the story of Kraków's Ghetto and the forced labour camp outside town, Płaszów, and of Amon Göth, Płaszów's commandant.His wife Emilie Schindler later remarked in a German TV interview that Schindler did nothing remarkable before the war and nothing after it. "He was fortunate therefore that in the short fierce era between 1939 and 1945 he had met people who had summoned forth his deeper talents." After the war, his business ventures failed and he separated from his wife. He ended up living a sparse life in a small flat in Frankfurt. Eventually he arranged to live part of the year in Israel, supported by his Jewish friends, and part of the year in Frankfurt, where he was often hissed at in the streets as a traitor to his "race". After 29 unexceptional postwar years, he died in 1974. He was buried in Jerusalem, as he wished, with the help of his old friend Pfefferberg.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sparrow_(novel)"title="The Sparrow (novel)">
In the year 2019, the SETI program at Arecibo Observatory discovers radio broadcasts of music from the vicinity of Alpha Centauri. The first expedition to Rakhat, the world that is sending the music, is organized by the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), known for its missionary, linguistic and scientific activities since the time of its founder, Ignatius of Loyola. In the year 2060, only one of the crew, the Jesuit priest Emilio Sandoz, survives to return to Earth, and he is damaged physically and psychologically. The story is told with parallel plot lines, interspersing the journey of Sandoz and his friends to Rakhat with Sandoz's experiences upon his return to Earth.Father Sandoz is a talented Puerto Rican linguist. He is described as of mixed Taíno and Conquistador heritage and character. Sandoz grew up in La Perla, a poor neighborhood in San Juan. He joined the Jesuits as a teenager. After several stints at Jesuit missionaries around the world, he returns to Puerto Rico. Several of his close friends and co-workers, people with a variety of unique skills and talents, have seemingly coincidental connections to Arecibo. One of them, a gifted young technician, was the first to hear the transmissions; another, Sofia Mendes, a Turkish Jewish artificial intelligence specialist, has the connections and aptitude to obtain a spacecraft and help pilot the mission. Sandoz, who has often struggled with his faith, becomes convinced that only God's will could bring this group of people with the perfect combination of knowledge and experience together at the moment when the alien signal was detected. Sandoz and his friends, along with three other Jesuit priests, are chosen by the Society of Jesus to travel in secret to the planet, using an interstellar vessel made with a small asteroid.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Rabbit"title="Red Rabbit">
In 1982, Pope John Paul II privately issues a letter to the communist Polish government, stating that he will resign from the papacy and return to his hometown unless they cease their repression of counterrevolutionary movements in Poland, particularly the Solidarity trade union. Called the Warsaw Letter, it was later forwarded to Moscow, enraging Committee for State Security (KGB) director Yuri Andropov. He decides to plan for the pope’s assassination, which he believes would reinvigorate Communism in Eastern Europe, perceived by many to be in a state of decline. Known only by its designated number 15-8-82-666 for security reasons, the assassin is then selected as a Turk Muslim (understood to be Mehmet Ali Ağca), who would then be eliminated by Bulgarian KDS officer Boris Strokov afterwards for deniability. The operation was later unanimously approved by the Politburo.Meanwhile, Oleg Zaitzev, a communications officer in the KGB tasked with sending and receiving encrypted dispatches to and from KGB stations across Europe, pieces together the plot to kill the pope, and becomes deeply troubled with the prospect of murdering an innocent person for political purposes. He later decides to make contact with the local CIA station chief Edward Foley as well as his wife and agent Mary Pat, intending to defect and then be extracted out of the Soviet Union with his family, in exchange for providing information on the assassination plot as well as the names of KGB deep-penetration agents in the American and British governments.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions"title="The Structure of Scientific Revolutions">
## Basic approach.Kuhn's approach to the history and philosophy of science focuses on conceptual issues like the practice of normal science, influence of historical events, emergence of scientific discoveries, nature of scientific revolutions and progress through scientific revolutions. What sorts of intellectual options and strategies were available to people during a given period? What types of lexicons and terminology were known and employed during certain epochs? Stressing the importance of not attributing traditional thought to earlier investigators, Kuhn's book argues that the evolution of scientific theory does not emerge from the straightforward accumulation of facts, but rather from a set of changing intellectual circumstances and possibilities. Such an approach is largely commensurate with the general historical school of non-linear history.Kuhn did not see scientific theory as proceeding linearly from an objective, unbiased accumulation of all available data, but rather as paradigm-driven. “The operations and measurements that a scientist undertakes in the laboratory are not ‘the given’ of experience but rather ‘the collected with difficulty.’ They are not what the scientist sees—at least not before his research is well advanced and his attention focused. Rather, they are concrete indices to the content of more elementary perceptions, and as such they are selected for the close scrutiny of normal research only because they promise opportunity for the fruitful elaboration of an accepted paradigm. Far more clearly than the immediate experience from which they in part derive, operations and measurements are paradigm-determined. Science does not deal in all possible laboratory manipulations. Instead, it selects those relevant to the juxtaposition of a paradigm with the immediate experience that that paradigm has partially determined. As a result, scientists with different paradigms engage in different concrete laboratory manipulations.” 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sartoris"title="Sartoris">
The novel deals with the decay of an aristocratic southern family just after the end of World War I. The wealthy Sartoris family of Jefferson, Mississippi, lives under the shadow of its dead patriarch, Colonel John Sartoris. Colonel John was a Confederate cavalry officer during the Civil War, built the local railroad, and is a folk hero. The surviving Sartorises are his younger sister, Virginia Du Pre ("Aunt Jenny" or "Miss Jenny"), his son Bayard Sartoris ("Old Bayard"), and his great-grandson Bayard Sartoris ("Young Bayard").The novel begins with the return of young Bayard Sartoris to Jefferson from the First World War. Bayard and his twin brother John, who was killed in action, were fighter pilots.Young Bayard is haunted by the death of his brother. That and the family disposition for foolhardy acts push him into a pattern of self-destructive behavior, especially reckless driving in a recently purchased automobile.Eventually young Bayard crashes the car off a bridge. During the convalescence which follows, he establishes a relationship with Narcissa Benbow, whom he marries. Despite promises to Narcissa to stop driving recklessly, he gets into a near wreck with old Bayard in the car, causing old Bayard to die of a heart attack. Young Bayard disappears from Jefferson, leaving his now pregnant wife with Aunt Jenny. He dies test-flying an experimental airplane on the day of his son’s birth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babbitt_(novel)"title="Babbitt (novel)">
"The Smart Set"s review of the novel stated, "There is no plot whatever... Babbitt simply grows two years older as the tale unfolds."The first seven chapters follow Babbitt's life over the course of a single day. Over breakfast, Babbitt dotes on his ten-year-old daughter Tinka, tries to dissuade his 22-year-old daughter Verona from her newfound socialist leanings, and encourages his 17-year-old son Ted to try harder in school. At the office he dictates letters and discusses real estate advertising with his employees. Gradually, Babbitt realizes his dissatisfaction with "The American Dream", and attempts to quell these feelings by going camping in Maine with his close friend and old college roommate Paul Riesling. Although the trip has its ups and downs, the two men consider it an overall success and leave feeling optimistic about the year ahead.On the day Babbitt gets elected vice-president of the Booster's club, he finds out that Paul shot his wife Zilla. Babbitt immediately drives to the jail where Paul is being held, trying to think of ways to help Paul out. Shortly after Paul's arrest, Babbitt's wife and daughter go to visit relatives, leaving Babbitt more or less on his own. Babbitt begins to ask himself what it was he really wanted in life. In time, Babbitt begins to rebel against all of the standards he formerly held: he jumps into liberal politics with famous socialist/"single tax" litigator Seneca Doane, conducts an extramarital affair, goes on various vacations, and cavorts around Zenith with bohemians and flappers. He slowly becomes aware that his forays into nonconformity are not only futile but also destructive of the life and the friends he once loved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerika_(novel)"title="Amerika (novel)">
The story describes the bizarre wanderings of sixteen-year-old European immigrant Karl Roßmann, who was forced to go to New York City to escape the scandal of his seduction by a housemaid. As the ship arrives in the United States, he becomes friends with a stoker who is about to be dismissed from his job. Karl identifies with the stoker and decides to help him; together they go to see the captain of the ship. In a surreal turn of events, Karl's uncle, Senator Jacob, is in a meeting with the captain. Karl does not know that Senator Jacob is his uncle, but Mr. Jacob recognizes him and takes him away from the stoker.Karl stays with his uncle for some time but is later abandoned by him after making a visit to his uncle's friend without his uncle's full approval. Wandering aimlessly, he becomes friends with two drifters named Robinson and Delamarche. They promise to find him a job, but they sell his suit without permission, eat his food in front of him without offering him any, and ransack his belongings. Finally, Karl departs from them on bad terms after he's offered a job by a manager at Hotel Occidental. He works there as a lift-boy. One day Robinson shows up drunk at his work asking him for money. Afraid of losing his job if seen talking with a friend, which is forbidden for lift-boys, Karl agrees to lend him money, then commits the far worse offence of bunking a drunk-sick Robinson in the lift-boy dorm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quiet_American"title="The Quiet American">
Thomas Fowler is a British journalist in his fifties who has covered the French war in Vietnam for more than two years. He meets a young American idealist named Alden Pyle, a CIA agent working undercover. Pyle lives his life and forms his opinions based on foreign policy books written by York Harding with no real experience in Southeast Asia matters. Harding's theory is that neither communism nor colonialism are proper in foreign lands like Vietnam, but rather a "Third Force"—usually a combination of traditions—works best. When they first meet, the earnest Pyle asks Fowler to help him understand more about the country, but the older man's cynical realism does not sink in. Pyle is certain that American power can put the Third Force in charge, but he knows little about Indochina and is recasting it into theoretical categories.Fowler has a live-in lover, Phuong, who is only 20 years old and was previously a dancer at The Arc-en-Ciel (Rainbow) on Jaccareo Road, in Cholon. Her sister's intent is to arrange a marriage for Phuong that will benefit herself and her family. The sister disapproves of their relationship, as Fowler is already married and an atheist. So, at a dinner with Fowler and Phuong, Pyle meets her sister, who immediately starts questioning Pyle about his viability for marriage with Phuong. Towards the end of the dinner, Pyle dances with Phuong, and Fowler notes how poorly the upstart dances.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noli_Me_Tángere_(novel)"title="Noli Me Tángere (novel)">
Crisóstomo Ibarra, the "mestizo" son of the recently deceased Don Rafael Ibarra, is returning to San Diego town in Laguna after seven years of study in Europe. Kapitán Tiago, a family friend, invites him to a reunion party in Manila. At the party Crisóstomo meets Padre Dámaso, who was San Diego's parish priest when Crisóstomo left for Europe. Dámaso treats Crisóstomo with hostility, surprising the young man who regarded the priest as a friend of his father. Later as Crisóstomo was walking back to his hotel, Lieutenant Guevara, another friend of his father, informs him that Don Rafael may have been killed for political reasons and Dámaso may have been involved. Guevara warns him to be careful.The following day, Crisóstomo returns to Tiago's home to meet with his childhood sweetheart, Tiago's daughter María Clara. As the two flirt and reminisce, María reads back to him his farewell letter where he quoted a discussion he had with his father regarding the state of the country. Deeply moved, Ibarra excuses himself saying that he had to prepare for his trip to San Diego. Arriving at the town, Crisóstomo goes to the cemetery to visit his father's grave. He meets the gravedigger, who tells him that the parish priest had ordered Don Rafael's remains transferred to the Chinese cemetery, but that he threw the corpse into the lake instead out of fear and pity. At the same time, as Padre Bernardo Salví, the new parish priest, walks by, an enraged Crisóstomo pushes him to the ground, demanding an explanation. A fearful Salví states that he was only newly assigned to the town but reveals that Padre Dámaso ordered the transfer. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Robots_of_Death"title="The Robots of Death">
The Fourth Doctor and Leela arrive in the TARDIS inside "Storm Mine 4", a large sand-crawling mining vehicle used to gather valuable minerals that are brought to the surface of a desert planet by powerful sandstorms. They find the vehicle has a minimal human crew that oversee the menial work done by numerous robots, which are divided into three classes: dark-green-coloured "Dum" robots that cannot speak, gold-green-coloured "Voc" robots that can interact with the human crew, and a silver-coloured "Super Voc" robot, SV7, who manages the other robots.The Doctor and Leela arrived shortly after the discovery of the corpse of one of the human crew, meteorologist Chub, recently murdered. The Doctor offers to help to find the murderer and prove their innocence. During the search, Leela comes across D84, a Dum who is secretly a Super Voc who is able to speak. The investigation is cut short when two more of the crew, Kerrill and Cass, are found killed, and the Doctor and Leela are secured in the robot repair section. However, crew member Poul is doubtful of the Doctor's or Leela's involvement, and when Poul finds Commander Uvanov standing over the corpse of yet another victim, he allows them to go free, convinced that Uvanov was guilty.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feet_of_Clay_(novel)"title="Feet of Clay (novel)">
Twelve of the city golems, clay creatures forced to obey the written instructions placed inside their heads, decide to create a "king" golem. They fashion a golem from their own clay and place in his head instructions that would fulfill their hopes: "Bring peace to the world", "Treat everyone fairly" and so on. They enroll the help of a priest and dwarf bread baker to write the sacred instructions and bake the clay, respectively; Meshugah, the "king" golem, is initially sent to work in a candle factory.Around the same time, a cabal of Ankh-Morpork's nobles and guild leaders seeks to gradually depose the Patrician, replace him with Nobby Nobbs, revealed as the heir to the Earldom of Ankh, as the new king and rule the city through him.To implement this, the cabal orders the golems' newly made king, Meshugah, to make poisoned candles and have them delivered to the palace. Vetinari is successfully poisoned, making him severely ill. Meshugah, however, is "overloaded" by all the different instructions his creators gave him, and goes "mad": he starts overworking and, when he exhausts raw materials, he rampages through the city, and goes on to murder the priest and baker who took part in his creation. The golems that made him are horrified as murder violates their most base instructions and Meshugah was baked from some of their parts and is therefore “clay of their clay.”
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thursbitch"title="Thursbitch">
Set both in the 18th century and the present day, the novel centres on the mystery of an inscription on an extant engraved wayside stone tablet about a death from exposure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_American_Tragedy"title="An American Tragedy">
Clyde Griffiths is raised by poor and devoutly religious parents to help in their street missionary work. As a young man, Clyde must, to help support his family, take menial jobs as a soda jerk, then a bellhop at a prestigious Kansas City hotel. There, his more sophisticated colleagues introduce him to bouts of social drinking and sex with prostitutes.Enjoying his new lifestyle, Clyde becomes infatuated with manipulative Hortense Briggs, who manipulates him into buying her expensive gifts. When Clyde learns Hortense goes out with other men, he becomes jealous. Nevertheless, he would rather spend money on her than to help his sister, who had eloped, only to end up pregnant and abandoned by her lover. Clyde's life changes dramatically when his friend Sparser, driving Clyde, Hortense, and other friends back from a secluded rendezvous in the country in his boss's car, used without permission, hits a little girl and kills her. Fleeing from the police at high speed, Sparser crashes the car. Everyone but Sparser and his partner flee the scene of the crime. Clyde leaves Kansas City, fearing prosecution as an accessory to Sparser's crimes.While working as a bellboy at an exclusive club in Chicago, he meets his wealthy uncle Samuel Griffiths, the owner of a shirt-collar factory in the fictional city of Lycurgus, New York. Samuel, feeling guilt for neglecting his poor relations, offers Clyde a menial job at the factory. After that, he promotes Clyde to a minor supervisory role.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Happened"title="Something Happened">
While there is an ongoing plot about Slocum preparing for a promotion at work, most of the book focuses on detailing various events from his life, ranging from early childhood to his predictions for the future, often in non-chronological order and with little if anything to connect one anecdote to the next. Near the end of the book, Slocum starts worrying about the state of his own sanity as he finds himself hallucinating or remembering events incorrectly, suggesting that some or all of the novel might be the product of his imagination, making him an unreliable narrator."Something Happened" has failed to achieve the renown of "Catch-22" but has a cult following, with some considering it one of Heller's finest works.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_(novel)"title="Christine (novel)">
In 1978, nerdy high-school student Arnie and his friend Dennis notice a dilapidated 1958 Plymouth Fury being sold by an elderly man with a back brace, Roland D. LeBay, who named the car "Christine". Despite Dennis' reservations, Arnie buys Christine for $250. While Arnie finishes the paperwork, Dennis sits inside Christine and has a vision of the car and the surroundings as they existed when the car was new, 20 years earlier. Frightened, Dennis decides he dislikes Christine. Arnie brings Christine to a do-it-yourself garage run by Will Darnell, who is suspected of using the garage as a front for illicit operations. As Arnie restores the car, he stops wearing his glasses and his acne clears up, but he also becomes withdrawn, humorless and cynical. When LeBay dies, Dennis meets his younger brother, George, who reveals LeBay's history of anger and violent behavior. George reveals that LeBay's young daughter choked to death on a hamburger in the back seat of the car and that LeBay's wife subsequently committed suicide in its front seat by carbon monoxide poisoning.Dennis observes that Arnie is taking on many of LeBay's personality traits and has begun dressing like a 1950s greaser. Dennis also sees that Arnie has become close to Darnell, even acting as a courier in Darnell's smuggling operations. When Arnie is almost finished restoring Christine, he begins dating an attractive student named Leigh. Arnie's parents force him to keep Christine in an airport parking lot. Soon afterward, Clarence "Buddy" Repperton, a bully who blames Arnie for his expulsion from school, learns where Christine is being kept and vandalizes the car with help from his gang. Arnie, aware of Christine's ability to repair herself, pushes her through Darnell's garage until enough of the damage is undone for her to run, and then drives her through the junkyard until she is fully restored. Arnie strains his back in the process and begins wearing a back brace, as LeBay did. During a date with Arnie, Leigh nearly chokes to death on a hamburger and is saved only by the intervention of a hitchhiker. Leigh notices that Christine's dashboard lights seemed to become glaring green eyes, watching her during the incident, and that Arnie only half-heartedly tried to save her. Believing she and Christine are competing for Arnie's affection, Leigh vows to never get into the car again. Several inexplicable car-related deaths occur around town. The victims include Darnell, Buddy and all but one of his accomplices in the vandalism. The police link Christine to each of the murders, but no evidence is found on the car. Detective Rudy Junkins becomes suspicious of Arnie despite his airtight alibis. Christine, possessed by LeBay's vengeful spirit, is committing these murders independently and then repairing herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Portrait_of_the_Artist_as_a_Young_Man"title="A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man">
The childhood of Stephen Dedalus is recounted using vocabulary that changes as he grows, in a voice not his own but sensitive to his feelings. The reader experiences Stephen's fears and bewilderment as he comes to terms with the world in a series of disjointed episodes. Stephen attends the Jesuit-run Clongowes Wood College, where the apprehensive, intellectually gifted boy suffers the ridicule of his classmates while he learns the schoolboy codes of behaviour. While he cannot grasp their significance, at a Christmas dinner he is witness to the social, political and religious tensions in Ireland involving Charles Stewart Parnell, which drive wedges between members of his family, leaving Stephen with doubts over which social institutions he can place his faith in. Back at Clongowes, word spreads that a number of older boys have been caught “smugging” (the term refers to the secret homosexual horseplay that five students were caught at); discipline is tightened, and the Jesuits increase use of corporal punishment. Stephen is strapped when one of his instructors believes he has broken his glasses to avoid studying, but, prodded by his classmates, Stephen works up the courage to complain to the rector, Father Conmee, who assures him there will be no such recurrence, leaving Stephen with a sense of triumph.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiasco_(novel)"title="Fiasco (novel)">
At a base on Saturn's moon Titan, a young spaceship pilot Parvis sets out in a strider (a mecha-like machine) to find several missing people, among them Pirx (the spaceman appearing in Lem's "Tales of Pirx the Pilot"). Parvis ventures to the dangerous geyser region, where the others were lost. Unfortunately, he suffers an accident. Seeing no way to get out of the machine and return to safety, he triggers a built-in cryogenic device.An expedition is sent to a distant star in order to make first contact with a civilization that may have been detected. It is set more than a century after the prologue, when a starship is built in Titan's orbit. This future society is described as globally unified and peaceful with high regard for success. During starship preparations, the geyser region is cleared, and the frozen bodies are discovered. They are exhumed and taken aboard, to be awakened, if possible, during the voyage. However, only one of them can be revived (or more precisely, pieced together from the organs of several of them) with a high likelihood of success. The identity of the man is unclear; it has been narrowed to two men (whose last names begin with 'P'). It is never revealed whether he is in fact Pirx or Parvis (and he seems to have amnesia). In his new life, he adopts the name Tempe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_I_Lay_Dying"title="As I Lay Dying">
The book is narrated by 15 different characters over 59 chapters. It is the story of the death of Addie Bundren and her poor, rural family's quest and motivations—noble or selfish—to honor her wish to be buried in her hometown of Jefferson, Mississippi.In the novel's first chapters, Addie is alive but in ill health. She expects to die soon and sits at a window watching as her firstborn child, Cash, builds her coffin. Anse, Addie's husband, waits on the porch, while their daughter, Dewey Dell, fans her mother in the July heat. The night after Addie dies a heavy rainstorm sets in; rivers rise and wash out bridges that the family will need to cross to get to Jefferson.The family's trek by wagon begins, with Addie's non-embalmed body in the coffin. Along the way, Anse and the five children encounter various difficulties. Stubborn Anse frequently rejects any offers of assistance, including meals or lodging, so at times the family goes hungry and sleeps in barns. At other times he refuses to accept loans from people, claiming he wishes to "be beholden to no man," thus manipulating the would-be lender into giving him charity as a gift not to be repaid.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_of_Small_Things"title="The God of Small Things">
The story is set in Aymanam, part of Kottayam district in Kerala, India. The novel has a disjointed narrative; the temporal setting shifts back and forth between 1969, when fraternal twins Rahel, a girl, and Esthappen, a boy, are seven years old, and 1993, when the twins are reunited.Ammu Ipe is desperate to escape her ill-tempered father, known as Pappachi, and her bitter, long-suffering mother, known as Mammachi. She leaves Ayemenem, and to avoid returning, she marries a man only known by the name of Baba in Calcutta. She later discovers that he is an alcoholic, and he physically abuses her and tries to pimp her to his boss. Ammu gives birth to Estha and Rahel, leaves her husband, and returns to Ayemenem to live with her parents and brother, Chacko. Chacko has returned to India from England following his divorce from an English woman, Margaret, and the subsequent death of Pappachi.The multi-generational, Syrian Christian family home in Ayemenem also includes Pappachi's sister, Navomi Ipe, known as Baby Kochamma. As a young girl, Baby Kochamma fell in love with Father Mulligan, a young Irish priest who had come to Ayemenem. To get closer to him, Baby Kochamma converted to Roman Catholicism and joined a convent against her father's wishes. After a few months in the convent, she realized that her vows brought her no closer to the man she loved. Her father eventually rescued her from the convent and sent her to America for education. Because of her unrequited love for Father Mulligan, Baby Kochamma remained unmarried for the rest of her life, becoming deeply bitter over time. Throughout the book, she delights in the misfortune of others and constantly manipulates events to bring calamity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_the_Dinosaurs"title="Invasion of the Dinosaurs">
The Third Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith arrive in a deserted London, where they discover that dinosaurs are inexplicably appearing all over the city, causing havoc, but no one can account for their sudden appearances and disappearances.The Doctor suspects that someone is deliberately tampering with time and with the help of his colleagues at UNIT, he starts to formulate a plan. They are introduced to Sir Charles Grover MP, and General Finch. In a hidden laboratory, Professor Whitaker is operating secret Timescoop technology. The dinosaurs are being used to compel the authorities to evacuate the city. It turns out that Whitaker is being aided by a disillusioned Captain Yates.Sarah conducts her own investigations, but is captured by Grover, who is in league with Whitaker. She awakens and is astounded to find herself on a vast spaceship. The crew explain that they are en route to a distant Earth-like planet, explaining that Mankind can begin again on "New Earth", closer to nature and without the overpopulation and pollution of Earth. When Sarah tries to explain that they're still on Earth, they condemn Sarah to be re-educated into thinking the way they do.Operation Golden Age is revealed to be a broad conspiracy including Mike Yates of UNIT, with Whitaker, Grover and Finch as its coordinators. They have emptied London, so that the chosen people on the "spacecraft" (a dummy ship hidden in a bunker under London) will be the only people within range of the Timescoop when it's activated. Whitaker has discovered how to reverse time, so that only the chosen elite will ever have existed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Decay_(Doctor_Who)"title="State of Decay (Doctor Who)">
After the events of "Full Circle", the Fourth Doctor, Romana, K9, and TARDIS stowaway Adric arrive on a planet with a feudal society whose inhabitants live under the thrall of three lords—Zargo, Camilla, and Aukon—who dwell in a shadowy Tower. The Doctor and Romana discover evidence of advanced technology and wonder what happened to cause the planet to devolve to its current "state of decay". After being taken prisoner by the three lords, The Doctor and Romana discover that the great Tower in which the Lords dwell is a spaceship called "Hydrax", originally from Earth. The three lords are members of the original crew, mutated into vampires, while the subjects beneath them are the descendants of the other colonists, made dull and primitive by generations of breeding and oppression. A rebel called Tarak infiltrates the Tower, freeing the Doctor and Romana. The Doctor returns to the TARDIS, while Romana stays with Tarak to search for Adric. They find Adric in a state of trance. Zargo and Camilla attack them, but Aukon compels them to stop. He wants Adric as a Chosen One and Romana, a Time Lord, for sacrifice at the Arising, the first taste of revenge for their master, the "Great One."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mark_of_the_Rani"title="The Mark of the Rani">
When the Sixth Doctor and Peri arrive in the 19th Century mining town of Killingworth, they encounter a group of rampaging miners attacking people and destroying machinery. The attacks are the work of two rogue Time Lords, The Master and the Rani. The Rani's experiments on her home planet of Miasimia Goria have left its inhabitants unable to sleep. In an attempt to fix the problem, she has begun harvesting brain fluid from the Killingworth miners and synthesising it back on Miasimia Goria. The Master wants to use the finest brains of the Industrial Revolution to help speed up Earth's development and use the planet as a powerbase.The Doctor sneaks into the Rani's TARDIS, whose control room contains jars of preserved dinosaur embryos, and overhears Rani confessing to have laid landmines in nearby Redfern Dell. Simultaneously, Peri is using her botanical knowledge to make a sleeping draught for the afflicted miners, but her quest for herbs leads her to Redfern Dell. The Doctor then surprises the Master and the Rani, who are lurking at the edge of the Dell, and takes them prisoner with the Master's own Tissue Compression Eliminator. They attempt to flee in The Rani's TARDIS, but the Doctor has sabotaged the navigational system and velocity regulator, and the ship starts heading out of control. In the destabilised condition, one of the jars containing an embryo "Tyrannosaurus Rex" falls to the floor and the creature begins to grow. The Master and the Rani are "stuck" against one of the walls of the Rani's TARDIS due to the speed at which they are travelling and are helplessly at the mercy of the rapidly aging immature Tyrannosaurus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_the_Rani"title="Time and the Rani">
Whilst in flight, the TARDIS is attacked by the Rani, an amoral scientist and renegade Time Lord. The TARDIS crash-lands on the planet Lakertya. On the floor of the console room, the Sixth Doctor regenerates into the Seventh Doctor. In his post-regenerative confusion the Doctor is separated from Mel and tricked into assisting the Rani in her megalomaniac scheme to construct a giant time manipulator.Lost on the barren surface of the planet, Mel has to avoid the Rani's ingenious traps and her monstrous, bat-like servants, the Tetraps. She joins forces with a rebel faction among the Lakertyans, desperate to end the Rani's control of their planet. The Doctor must recover his wits in time to avoid becoming a permanent part of the Rani's plan to collect the genius of the greatest scientific minds in the universe, of which she has captured many including Albert Einstein, in order that she can create a time manipulator, which would allow the Rani to control time anywhere in the universe, at the expense of all life on Lakertya.The Doctor manages to foil her plan and free the Lakertyans of her evil control. The Rani escapes in her TARDIS, but it has been commandeered by the Tetraps, who take her prisoner. The Doctor takes all the captured geniuses on board his TARDIS so that he can return them home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyrd_Sisters"title="Wyrd Sisters">
"Wyrd Sisters" features three witches: Granny Weatherwax; Nanny Ogg, matriarch of a large tribe of Oggs and owner of the most evil cat in the world; and Magrat Garlick, the junior witch, who firmly believes in occult jewelry, covens, and bubbling cauldrons, much to the annoyance of the other two.King Verence I of Lancre is murdered by his cousin, Duke Felmet, after his ambitious wife persuades him to do so. The King's crown and child are given by an escaping servant to the three witches. The witches hand the child to a troupe of travelling actors, and hide the crown in the props-box. They acknowledge that destiny will eventually take its course and that the child, Tomjon, will grow up to defeat Duke Felmet and take his rightful place as king.However, the kingdom is angry about the way the new King is mistreating the land and his subjects. The witches realise that it will be at least 15 years until Tomjon is able to return and save the kingdom, but by then irreparable damage will have been done. Granny Weatherwax, with help from the other two witches, manages to cast a spell over the entire kingdom to send it forward in time by 15 years. Meanwhile, the duke has decided to have a play written and performed that portrays him in a favourable light and the witches in a negative light. He thinks this will cause the witches to lose their power, and the people will like him. He sends the court Fool to Ankh-Morpork to recruit the same acting company that Tomjon was given to, which now resides in the Dysk Theatre on the river Ankh.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nigger_of_the_&quot;Narcissus&quot;"title="The Nigger of the &quot;Narcissus&quot;">
The title character, James Wait, is a dying West Indian black sailor on board the merchant ship "Narcissus", on which he finds passage from Bombay to London. Suffering from tuberculosis, Wait becomes seriously ill almost from the outset, eliciting suspicion from much of the crew, though his ostensible plight arouses the humanitarian sympathies of many. The ship's white master, Captain Allistoun, and an old white sailor named Singleton remain concerned primarily with their duties and appear indifferent to Wait's condition. Rounding the Cape of Good Hope, the ship capsizes onto her beam-ends during a sudden gale and half her hull is submerged, with many of the crew's rations and personal belongings lost; the men cling onto the deck for an entire night and day, waiting in silence for the ship to turn over the rest of the way and sink. Allistoun refuses to allow the masts to be severed, which might allow the hull to right itself but would prevent the ship from making use of her sails. Five of the men, realizing that Wait is unaccounted for, climb down to his cabin and rescue him at their own peril. When the storm passes and a wind returns, Allistoun directs the weary men to catch the wind, which succeeds in righting the ship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksilver_(novel)"title="Quicksilver (novel)">
## "Quicksilver".The first book is a series of flashbacks from 1713 to the earlier life of Daniel Waterhouse. It begins as Enoch Root arrives in Boston in October 1713 to deliver a letter to Daniel containing a summons from Princess Caroline. She wants Daniel to return to England and attempt to repair the feud between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. While following Daniel's decision to return to England and board a Dutch ship (the "Minerva") to cross the Atlantic, the book flashes back to when Enoch and Daniel each first met Newton. During the flashbacks, the book refocuses on Daniel's life between 1661 and 1673.While attending school at Trinity College, Cambridge, Daniel becomes Newton's companion, ensuring that Newton does not harm his health and assisting in his experiments. However, the plague of 1665 forces them apart: Newton returns to his family manor and Daniel to the outskirts of London. Daniel quickly tires of the radical Puritan rhetoric of his father, Drake Waterhouse, and decides to join Reverend John Wilkins and Robert Hooke at John Comstock's Epsom estate.There Daniel takes part in a number of experiments, including the exploration of the diminishing effects of gravity with changes in elevation, the transfusion of blood between dogs and Wilkins' attempts to create a philosophical language. Daniel soon becomes disgusted with some of the practices of the older natural philosophers (which include vivisection of animals) and visits Newton during his experiments with color and white light. They attempt to return to Cambridge, but again plague expels the students. Daniel returns to his father; however, his arrival on the outskirts of London coincides with the second day of the Fire of London. Drake, taken by religious fervour, dies atop his house as the King blows it up to create a fire break to prevent further spread of the fire. Soon after Drake's death, Newton and Daniel return to Cambridge and begin lecturing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_and_the_Bannermen"title="Delta and the Bannermen">
On an alien planet the genocide of the Chimeron by the merciless Bannermen led by Gavrok is almost complete. The last survivor, Chimeron Queen Delta, escapes clutching her egg. She reaches a space tollport where the Navarinos, a race of shape-changing tourist aliens, are planning a visit to the planet Earth in 1959 in a spaceship disguised as an old holiday bus. She stows aboard, meeting Mel, while the Seventh Doctor follows in the TARDIS. The holiday vehicle collides with an Earth satellite and is diverted off track, landing at a holiday camp in South Wales, led by camp director Burton. Delta's egg hatches into a bright green baby that starts to grow at a startling rate. The Chimeron Queen supports this development with the equivalent of royal jelly given to bees.Delta captures the heart of Billy, the camp's mechanic, to the chagrin of Ray, who loves Billy herself. Ray confides her situation to the Doctor, and they stumble across a bounty hunter making contact with the Bannermen to tell them of the Chimeron's whereabouts. Gavrok and his troops soon arrive. Delta and Billy head off for a picnic while the Doctor busies himself coordinating things back at the camp. Meanwhile, the Bannermen have destroyed the Navarino bus with all its passengers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Wind"title="The Other Wind">
Alder, a minor village sorcerer who is adept at mending, has been tormented by dreams since the death of his beloved wife Lily. Every time he falls asleep, he is brought to the wall of stones, the border between the world of the living and the Dry Land of the dead. The dead, including Lily, beseech him to be set free. He sought guidance from the masters of the school of wizardry on Roke. The Master Patterner advises him to seek out Ged on the island of Gont. Ged, the ex-Archmage, is powerless as a wizard, but knows more of the world of the dead than anyone living. Alder finds Ged, who is alone at the time, as his Kargish wife Tenar and adopted daughter Tehanu have been summoned to Havnor to counsel King Lebannen. Ged listens to Alder's tale and recommends he go to Havnor to speak to both the king and his family.Alder sails to Havnor and tells his story. Lebannen is concerned, but has other worries. The king of the Kargs, a warlike people from the East who despise sorcery, has sent his daughter to marry Lebannen as the price for peace between them, a demand that angers Lebannen. Furthermore, dragons have been menacing the islands in the West. Soon after Alder arrives, dragons encroach further east than ever before, finally to Havnor itself. The king and his people ride to deal with them. Tehanu goes with him because she appears to have some kinship with dragons, having as a young girl summoned the great dragon Kalessin, who called her ‘daughter’. She speaks to one of the raiding dragons who delivers a cryptic message, to the effect that the dragons are angry that men have stolen part of their land in the furthest west. The dragons do, however, agree to a truce, and to send an emissary.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Colour_of_Magic"title="The Colour of Magic">
## Setting.The story takes place on the Discworld, a planet-sized flat disc carried through space on the backs of four gargantuan elephants – Berilia, Tubul, Great T'Phon and Jerakeen – who themselves stand on the shell of Great A'Tuin, a gigantic star turtle. The surface of the disc contains oceans and continents, and with them, civilizations, cities, forests and mountains.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_Fantastic"title="The Light Fantastic">
The book begins shortly after the ending of "The Colour of Magic", with wizard Rincewind, Twoflower and the Luggage falling from the Discworld. They are saved when the Octavo, the most powerful book of magic on the Discworld, readjusts reality to prevent the loss of one of its eight spells, which has resided in Rincewind's head since his expulsion from Unseen University: Rincewind, Twoflower and the Luggage end up in the Forest of Skund. Meanwhile, the wizards of Ankh-Morpork use the Rite of Ashk-Ente to summon Death to find an explanation for the Octavo's actions. Death warns them that the Discworld will soon be destroyed by a huge red star unless the eight spells of the Octavo are read.Several orders of wizards travel to the forest of Skund to try and capture Rincewind, who is currently staying with Twoflower and the Luggage in a gingerbread house in the forest. In the subsequent chaos, Rincewind and Twoflower escape on an old witch's broom, while the Archchancellor of Unseen University is killed when his attempt to obtain the spell accidentally summons the Luggage on top of him, crushing him to death. His apprentice, Ymper Trymon, uses the opportunity to advance his own power, intending to obtain the eight spells for himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_the_Atom"title="Children of the Atom">
In the novel, much of which was originally published as a series of stories in "Astounding Science Fiction" magazine, hidden throughout a future America of 1972 are a group of incredibly gifted children — all approximately the same age, all preternaturally intelligent, and all hiding their incredible abilities from a world they know will not understand them.These children were born to workers caught in an explosion at an atomic weapons facility, and orphaned just a few months after birth when their parents succumbed to delayed effects from the blast.The children in the novel are mutants, brought together to explore their unique abilities and study in secret at an exclusive school for gifted children, lest they be hated and feared by a world that would not understand them. The "Oakland Tribune" described it in 1953 as "the inevitable adjustments and maladjustments of minority genius to majority mediocrity".In Shiras' book, none of the children are given paranormal super powers such as telekinesis or precognition—their primary difference is simply that of incredible intellect, combined with an energy and inquisitiveness that causes them to figuratively devour every book in their local libraries, to speed through university extension courses, and to publish countless articles and stories all over the world, but all done carefully through pen-names and mail-order, to disguise their youth, and protect them from the prejudicial stereotypes that less intelligent adults continue to try and enforce on children.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names"title="True Names">
The story follows the progress of a group (called a "coven" in the story) of computer hackers (called "warlocks") who are early adopters of a new full-immersion virtual reality technology, called the "Other Plane". Warlocks penetrate computers around the world for personal profit or curiosity. Penetrating computers, often referred to as hacking, is called "vandalism" and "pranks" in the book. Forming a cabal, they must keep their true identities—their "True Names"—secret even to each other and to the "Great Adversary", the United States government, as those who know a warlock's True Name can force him to work on their behalf, or even cause a "True Death" by killing the warlock in real life.The protagonist is a warlock known as "Mr. Slippery" in the Other Plane. The government (referred to as "The Great Enemy") learns Mr. Slippery's True Name—Roger Pollack, a holonovelist in Arcata, California—and forces him to investigate the Mailman, a mysterious new warlock which it suspects of conducting a large-scale subversion of databases and networks. The Mailman has been recruiting others, such as the warlock DON.MAC, by promising great power in the real world, and claims to be responsible for a recent revolution in Venezuela. Because he never appears in the Other Plane, and reacts to events only after a significant delay, Mr. Slippery and fellow warlock Erythrina begin to suspect that the Mailman may be an extraterrestrial invader, subverting global databases to gradually conquer the Earth while causing True Deaths of the warlocks he recruits.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postman_Always_Rings_Twice_(novel)"title="The Postman Always Rings Twice (novel)">
The story is narrated in the first person by Frank Chambers, a young drifter who stops at a rural California diner for a meal and ends up working there. The diner is operated by a beautiful young woman, Cora, and her much older husband, Nick Papadakis, sometimes called "the Greek".Frank and Cora feel an immediate attraction to each other and begin a passionate affair with sadomasochistic qualities. Cora is tired of her situation, married to a man she does not love and working at a diner that she wants to own and improve. Frank and Cora scheme to murder the Greek in order to start a new life together without Cora losing the diner.They plan on striking Nick's head and making it seem he fell and drowned in the bathtub. Cora fells Nick with a solid blow, but a sudden power outage and the appearance of a policeman make the scheme fail. Nick recovers and because of retrograde amnesia does not suspect that he narrowly avoided being killed.Determined to kill Nick, Frank and Cora fake a car accident. They ply Nick with wine, strike him on the head, and crash the car. Frank is also gravely injured in the crash, while Cora simulates minor injuries and bruises. The local prosecutor suspects what has actually occurred but does not have enough evidence to prove it. As a tactic intended to get Cora and Frank to turn on each other, he charges only Cora with the crime of Nick's murder, coercing Frank to sign a complaint against her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siddhartha_(novel)"title="Siddhartha (novel)">
The story takes place in the ancient Nepalese kingdom of Kapilavastu. Siddhartha decides to leave his home in the hope of gaining spiritual illumination by becoming an ascetic wandering beggar of the Śamaṇa. Joined by his best friend Govinda, Siddhartha fasts, becomes homeless, renounces all personal possessions, and intensely meditates, eventually seeking and personally speaking with Gautama, the famous Buddha, or Enlightened One. Afterward, both Siddhartha and Govinda acknowledge the elegance of the Buddha's teachings. Although Govinda hastily joins the Buddha's order, Siddhartha does not follow, claiming that the Buddha's philosophy, though supremely wise, does not account for the necessarily distinct experiences of each person. He argues that the individual seeks an absolutely unique, personal meaning that cannot be presented to him by a teacher. He thus resolves to carry on his quest alone.Siddhartha crosses a river and the generous ferryman, whom Siddhartha is unable to pay, merrily predicts that Siddhartha will return to the river later to compensate him in some way. Venturing onward toward city life, Siddhartha discovers Kamala, the most beautiful woman he has yet seen. Kamala, a courtesan, notes Siddhartha's handsome appearance and fast wit, telling him that he must become wealthy to win her affections so that she may teach him the art of love. Although Siddhartha despised materialistic pursuits as a Śamaṇa, he agrees now to Kamala's suggestions. She directs him to the employ of Kamaswami, a local businessman, and insists that he have Kamaswami treat him as an equal rather than an underling. Siddhartha easily succeeds, providing a voice of patience and tranquility, which Siddhartha learned from his days as an ascetic, against Kamaswami's fits of passion. Thus Siddhartha becomes a rich man and Kamala's lover, though in his middle years he realizes that the luxurious lifestyle he has chosen is merely a game that lacks spiritual fulfillment. Leaving the fast-paced bustle of the city, Siddhartha returns to the river fed up with life and disillusioned, contemplating suicide before falling into a meditative sleep, and is saved only by an internal experience of the holy word, Om. The very next morning, Siddhartha briefly reconnects with Govinda, who is passing through the area as a wandering Buddhist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Rites"title="Equal Rites">
The wizard Drum Billet knows that he will soon die and travels to a place where an eighth son of an eighth son is about to be born. This signifies that the child is destined to become a wizard; on the Discworld, the number eight has many of the magical properties that are sometimes ascribed to seven in other mythologies. Billet wants to pass his wizard's staff on to his successor.However, the newborn child is actually a girl, Esk (full name Eskarina Smith). Since Billet notices his mistake too late, the staff passes on to her. As Esk grows up, it becomes apparent that she has uncontrollable powers, and the local witch Granny Weatherwax decides to travel with her to Unseen University in Ankh-Morpork to help her gain the knowledge required to properly manage her powers.But a female wizard is something completely unheard of on the Discworld. Esk is unsuccessful in her first, direct, attempt to gain entry to the University, but Granny Weatherwax finds another way in; as a servant. While there, Esk witnesses the progress of an apprentice wizard named Simon, whom she had met earlier, on her way to Ankh-Morpork. Simon is a natural talent who invents a whole new way of looking at the universe that reduces it to component numbers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guards!_Guards!"title="Guards! Guards!">
The story follows a plot by a secret brotherhood, the Unique and Supreme Lodge of the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night, to overthrow the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork and install a puppet king, under the control of the Supreme Grand Master. Using a stolen magic book, they summon a dragon to strike fear into the people of Ankh-Morpork.Once a suitable state of terror and panic has been created, the Supreme Grand Master proposes to put forth an "heir" to the throne, who will slay the dragon and rid the city of tyranny. It is the task of the Night Watch – Captain Vimes, Sergeant Colon, Corporal Nobbs, and new volunteer Carrot Ironfoundersson – to stop them, with some help from the Librarian of the Unseen University, an orangutan trying to get the stolen book back.The Watch is generally regarded as a bunch of incompetents who walk around ringing their bells without accomplishing anything. Carrot's arrival changes this; Whereas the existing officers are either cynical, incompetent, mildly crooked or all three, Carrot is honest, straightforward and idealistic. Additionally, he is 6'6" (1.9812 meters) tall and enormously strong. Having memorized the Laws and Ordinances of the Cities of Ankh and Morpork, on his first day he tries to arrest the head of the Thieves' Guild for theft (the Thieves' Guild is permitted a quota of legally licensed thieving, a concept that the book of ancient Laws does not take into account). Brought up as a dwarf – dwarves are a literal, dutiful people – Carrot has an absolute dedication and conscientiousness that unnerve his colleagues who view them as bordering on the suicidal in the face of the reality of Ankh-Morpork life. Carrot's policing style is reminiscent of traditional idealized portrayals of British police, but astoundingly, it actually seems to work.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramids_(novel)"title="Pyramids (novel)">
The main character of "Pyramids" is Teppic (short for Pteppicymon XXVIII), the crown prince of the tiny kingdom of Djelibeybi (a pun on the candy Jelly Baby, meaning "Child of the Djel"), the Discworld counterpart to Ancient Egypt. The kingdom, founded seven-thousand years ago and formerly a great empire which dominated the continent of Klatch, has been in debt and recession for generations due to the construction of pyramids for the burial of its pharaohs and now occupies an area two miles wide along the 150-mile-long River Djel.Young Teppic has been in training at the Assassins Guild in Ankh-Morpork for the past seven years, having been sent to bring in revenue for the kingdom. The day after passing his final exam by chance he mystically senses that his father has died and that he must return home. Being the first Djelibeybian king raised outside the kingdom leads to some interesting problems, as Dios, the high priest, is a stickler for tradition, and does not actually allow the pharaohs to rule the country.After numerous adventures and misunderstandings, Teppic (now Pteppicymon XXVIII) is forced to escape from the palace with a handmaiden named Ptraci, who was condemned to death for not wishing to die and serve the last king in the afterlife (despite Teppic wishing to pardon her). However, during the attempt, Dios discovers them and decrees that Teppic has killed the King (as the King is only recognised whilst wearing the Mask of the Sun and Dios reasons that Teppic's actions to save Ptraci would not be those of the King) and should be put to death. Meanwhile, the massive pyramid being built for Teppic's father (or, rather, in reaction to Dios's rejection of the old pharaoh's wish not to be buried in a pyramid) warps space-time so much that it "rotates" Djelibeybi out of alignment with the space/time of the rest of the Disc by ninety degrees.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sea_Hawk"title="The Sea Hawk">
Sir Oliver Tressilian lives at the estate of Penarrow with his brother, Lionel. Oliver is betrothed to Rosamund Godolphin, whose hot-headed brother, Peter, detests the Tressilians due to an old feud between their fathers. Peter and Rosamund's guardian, Sir John Killigrew, also has little love for the Tressilians.Peter's manipulations drive Oliver into a duel with Sir John. The scheme backfires: Sir John is seriously wounded, further stoking Peter's hatred. Peter attempts to bait Oliver into a violent confrontation, but Oliver is mindful of Rosamund's warning never to meet her brother in an affair of honor. One evening, Lionel returns home, bloodied and exhausted. He has killed Peter in a duel, but there were no witnesses. Oliver is widely believed to be Peter's killer, and Lionel does nothing to disprove the accusations. To avoid repercussions for Peter's death, Lionel has Oliver kidnapped and sold into slavery to ensure that he never reveals the truth. En route to the New World, the slave ship is boarded by the Spanish, and her crew are added to the slaves.For six months Oliver toils at the oars of a Spanish galley. He befriends a Moorish slave, Yusuf-ben-Moktar. Oliver, Yusuf and the other slaves are freed when the galley is boarded by Muslim corsairs. They offer to fight for the Muslims. Oliver's fighting skills and the testimony of Yusuf, the nephew of the Basha of Algiers, grants Oliver special privileges in Muslim society. He becomes a corsair known as "Sakr-el-Bahr", "the Hawk of the Sea". In this new role, Oliver rescues English slaves by purchasing them himself and releasing them in Italy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita"title="The Master and Margarita">
The novel has two settings. The first is Moscow during the 1930s, where Satan appears at Patriarch's Ponds as Professor Woland. He is accompanied by Koroviev, a grotesquely dressed valet; Behemoth, a black cat; Azazello, a hitman; and Hella, a female vampire. They target the literary elite and Massolit, their trade union, whose headquarters is Griboyedov House. Massolit consists of corrupt social climbers: women, bureaucrats, profiteers, and cynics. The second setting is the Jerusalem of Pontius Pilate: Pilate's trial of Yeshua Ha-Notsri (Jesus of Nazareth), his recognition of an affinity with (and spiritual need for) Yeshua, and his reluctant acquiescence to Yeshua's execution.Part one opens with a confrontation between Berlioz (the head of Massolit) and Woland, who prophesies that Berlioz will die later that evening. Although Berlioz dismisses the prophecy as insane raving, he dies as the professor predicted. His death prophecy is witnessed by Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev, a young, enthusiastic, modern poet who uses the pen name "Bezdomny" ("homeless"). His "nom de plume" alludes to Maxim Gorky (Maxim the Bitter), Demyan Bedny (Demyan the Poor), and (Michail the Hungry). His futile attempts to capture the "gang" (Woland and his entourage) and his warnings about their evil nature land Ivan in a lunatic asylum, where he is introduced to the Master, an embittered author. The rejection of his novel about Pontius Pilate and Christ led the Master to burn his manuscript in despair and turn his back on Margarita, his devoted lover.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disgrace"title="Disgrace">
David Lurie is a white South African professor of English who loses everything: his reputation, his job, his peace of mind, his dreams of artistic success, and finally even his ability to protect his own daughter. He is twice-divorced and dissatisfied with his job as a 'communications' lecturer, teaching a class in romantic literature at a technical university in Cape Town in post-apartheid South Africa. Lurie's sexual activities are all inherently risky. Before the sexual affair that will ruin him, he becomes attached to a sex worker and attempts to have a romantic relationship with her (despite her having a family), which she rebuffs. He then seduces a secretary at his university, only to completely ignore her afterwards. His "disgrace" comes when he seduces one of his more vulnerable students, a girl named Melanie Isaacs, plying her with alcohol and other actions that arguably amount to rape. Later, when she stops attending his class as a result, he falsifies her grades. Lurie refuses to stop the affair, even after being threatened by Melanie's erstwhile boyfriend, who knocks the papers off Lurie's desk, and her father, who confronts him but whom David runs from. This affair is thereafter revealed to the school, amidst a climate of condemnation for his allegedly predatory acts, and a committee is convened to pass judgement on his actions. David refuses to read Melanie's statement, defend himself, or apologize in any sincere form and so is forced to resign from his post. Lurie is working on an opera concerning Lord Byron's final phase of life in Italy which mirrors his own life in that Byron is living a life of hedonism and excess and is having an affair with a married woman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lords_of_Discipline"title="The Lords of Discipline">
Will McLean, returning to the Carolina Military Institute in Charleston, South Carolina, an unknown number of years after his graduation, tells the story of his life at the Institute. In 1966, Will was an English major on a basketball scholarship, in his fourth and final year at the Institute. Will is not interested in a military career, and had only attended on account of his father, also an alumnus, to whom he made a deathbed promise years ago to attend and eventually wear the Institute's graduate ring. He is generally well-liked and his professors and peers recognize him for his integrity and fairness, although he is also sarcastic and independent. Will struggles to fit into the strict military environment, but finds solace in his three roommates, who have become his closest friends: Tradd St. Croix, the son of an upper-class Charlestonian family, and two brawny Italian-American boys from the North, Dante "Pig" Pignetti and Mark Santoro. They all look forward to graduation, although Will's friends will head off to fight in the Vietnam War, which Will is personally against. However, Will does have some pride in the Institute, representing it in basketball. Though anti-war, he also despises the discrimination the Institute faces from civilian students of other colleges due to its military association, which he sees at away games. For example, when Will plays a game against the Virginia Military Institute, which is considered their biggest rival game, he notes that VMI was the only team all season that did not harass him and his teammates. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engines_of_Creation"title="Engines of Creation">
The book features nanotechnology, which Richard Feynman had discussed in his 1959 speech "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." Drexler imagines a world where the entire Library of Congress can fit on a chip the size of a sugar cube and where universal assemblers, tiny machines that can build objects atom by atom, will be used for everything from medicinal robots that help clear capillaries to environmental scrubbers that clear pollutants from the air. In the book, Drexler proposes the gray goo scenario—one prediction of what might happen if molecular nanotechnology were used to build uncontrollable self-replicating machines.Topics also include hypertext as developed by Project Xanadu and life extension. Drexler takes a Malthusian view of exponential growth within limits to growth. He also promotes space advocacy, arguing that, because the universe is essentially infinite, life can escape the limits to growth defined by Earth. Drexler supports a form of the Fermi paradox, arguing that as there is no evidence of alien civilizations, "Thus for now, and perhaps forever, we can make plans for our future without concern for limits imposed by other civilizations."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_(novel)"title="Eric (novel)">
The story is a parody of the tale of Faust, and follows the events of "Sourcery" in which the Wizard Rincewind was trapped in the Dungeon Dimensions. The Discworld version of Hell or Pandemonium exists simply because some people believe that it exists for them. In other Discworld stories, such as "Small Gods", the afterlife is different or non-existent according to personal belief rather than divine judgement.After magical disturbances occur throughout Ankh-Morpork, the wizards of Unseen University perform the Rite of AshkEnte to ask Death what is behind them; before being asked the question, Death informs them that it is Rincewind. Rincewind wakes in a strange place, having been summoned to a house in Pseudopolis by the thirteen-year-old demonologist, Eric Thursley, who wants the mastery of all kingdoms, to meet the most beautiful woman who ever existed, to live forever, and to be given a chest of gold "to be getting on with". He is disappointed when Rincewind tells him he is unable to deliver any of these things, and embarrassed when Rincewind sees through his disguise. Rincewind is disheartened to learn that the spells to confine the demon summoned are working on him; Eric's parrot tells him that because he was summoned as a demon, he is subject to the same terms.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sirens_of_Titan"title="The Sirens of Titan">
This novel begins with an omniscient comment: "Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn't always so lucky."Malachi Constant is the richest man in a future North America. He possesses extraordinary luck that he attributes to divine favor which he has used to build upon his father's fortune. He becomes the centerpoint of a journey that takes him from Earth to Mars in preparation for an interplanetary war, to Mercury with another Martian survivor of that war, back to Earth to be pilloried as a sign of Man's displeasure with his arrogance, and finally to Titan where he again meets the man ostensibly responsible for the turn of events that have befallen him, Winston Niles Rumfoord.Rumfoord comes from a wealthy New England background. His private fortune was large enough to fund the construction of a personal spacecraft, and he became a space explorer. Traveling between Earth and Mars, his ship—carrying Rumfoord and his dog, Kazak—entered a phenomenon known as a "chrono-synclastic infundibulum", which is defined in the novel as "those places ... where all the different kinds of truths fit together". When they enter the infundibulum, Rumfoord and Kazak become "wave phenomena", somewhat akin to the probability waves encountered in quantum mechanics. They exist along a spiral stretching from the Sun to the star Betelgeuse. When a planet, such as the Earth, intersects their spiral, Rumfoord and Kazak materialize, temporarily, on that planet.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freaky_Friday"title="Freaky Friday">
A willful, disorganized teenage girl, Annabel Andrews, awakens one Friday morning to find herself in the body of her mother, with whom she had argued the previous night.Suddenly in charge of taking care of the New York family's affairs and her younger brother Ben (whom Annabel has not-so-affectionately nicknamed "Ape Face" and described as "so neat, it's revolting!"), and growing increasingly worried about the disappearance of "Annabel", who appeared to be herself in the morning but has gone missing after leaving the Andrews' home, she enlists the help of her neighbor and childhood friend, Boris, though without telling him about her identity crisis.As the day wears on and Annabel has a series of increasingly bizarre and frustrating adventures, she becomes gradually more appreciative of how difficult her mother's life is, and learns, to her surprise, that Ben idolizes her, and Boris is actually named Morris, but has a problem with chronic congestion (at least around Annabel) leading him to nasally pronounce "m"s and "n"s as "b"s and "d"s. The novel races towards its climax and Ben also disappears, apparently having gone off with a pretty girl whom Boris did not recognize, but Ben appeared to trust without hesitation.In the climax and dénouement, Annabel becomes overwhelmed by the difficulties of her situation, apparent disappearance of her mother, loss of the children, and the question of how her odd situation came about and when/whether it will be resolved. Finally, it is revealed that Annabel's mother herself caused them to switch bodies through some unspecified means, and the mysterious teen beauty who took Ben was Mrs. Andrews in Annabel's body (to which she is restored) made much more attractive by a makeover Mrs. Andrews gave the body while using it, including the removal of Annabel's braces, an appointment Annabel had forgotten about (and would have missed, had she been the one in her body that day).
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Set_Free"title="The World Set Free">
A frequent theme of Wells's work, as in his 1901 nonfiction book "Anticipations", was the history of humans' mastery of power and energy through technological advance, seen as a determinant of human progress. The novel begins: "The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal. ... Always down a lengthening record, save for a set-back ever and again, he is doing more." (Many of the ideas Wells develops here found a fuller development when he wrote "The Outline of History" in 1918–1919.) The novel is dedicated "To Frederick Soddy's "Interpretation of Radium"," a volume published in 1909.Scientists of the time were well aware that the slow natural radioactive decay of elements like radium continues for thousands of years, and that while the "rate" of energy release is negligible, the "total amount" released is huge. Wells used this as the basis for his story.In his fiction,Wells's knowledge of atomic physics came from reading books by William Ramsay, Ernest Rutherford, and Frederick Soddy; the last discovered the disintegration of uranium. Soddy's book "Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt" praises "The World Set Free". Wells's novel may even have influenced the development of nuclear weapons, as the physicist Leó Szilárd read the book in 1932, the same year the neutron was discovered. In 1933 Szilárd conceived the idea of neutron chain reaction, and filed for patents on it in 1934.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Few_Remain"title="How Few Remain">
The point of divergence occurs on September 10, 1862, during the American Civil War. In actual history, a C.S. Army messenger lost a copy of General Robert E. Lee's Special Order 191, which detailed Lee's plans for an invasion of the North. The order was soon found by U.S. Army soldiers, and using them, George McClellan fought the Army of Northern Virginia to a draw at the Battle of Antietam and made it return to Virginia.In "How Few Remain", the orders are instead recovered by a trailing C.S. soldier. McClellan is caught by surprise, and Lee thus leads the Army of Northern Virginia towards Philadelphia. Lee forces McClellan into battle on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania and destroys the Army of the Potomac in the Battle of Camp Hill on October 1. Lee goes on to capture Philadelphia, earning the Confederate States of America diplomatic recognition from both the United Kingdom and France, thus winning the war, which is known as the War of Secession in the alternate timeline, and independence from the United States on November 4, 1862.Kentucky, having been conquered by C.S. forces shortly after the Battle of Camp Hill as a result of Lincoln diverting key troops there to Pennsylvania, who did not arrive in time to fight at Camp Hill, joins the eleven original C.S. states after the war's conclusion, and the Confederacy is also given the Indian Territory (our timeline's state of Oklahoma, later the State of Sequoyah in the SV timeline). However, as a compromise, the United States retains Missouri (despite proposals to divide it) and West Virginia. The Spanish island of Cuba is purchased by the C.S. in the late 1870s for $3,000,000, thus also becoming a C.S. state.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perelandra"title="Perelandra">
Philologist Elwin Ransom, some years after his return from Mars at the end of "Out of the Silent Planet", receives a new mission from the Oyarsa (the angelic ruler) of Mars. Ransom summons narrator-Lewis to his country home. Ransom explains to Lewis that he (Ransom) is to travel to Perelandra (Venus), where he is to counter some kind of attack - details not yet specified - to be launched by Earth's Black Archon (Satan). Ransom is transported in a casket-like vessel which is seemingly made of ice and contains only himself, unclothed, as Oyarsa tells him clothes are unnecessary on Venus. He returns to Earth over a year later and is met by Lewis and another friend, then recounts his experiences. The remainder of the story is told from Ransom's point of view, with Lewis acting as interlocutor and occasional commentator.Ransom arrives in Venus after a quick journey through inter-planetary space. He finds that the surface of the planet is covered in a sweet-water ocean which is dotted with floating rafts of vegetation. These rafts resemble islands, to the extent of having plant and animal life upon them, including edible plants and plants large enough to provide shelter. As the rafts have no geologic foundations, they are in a constant state of motion. The planet's sole observable geological feature is a stony mountain called the Fixed Land. The planet's thick atmosphere hides the sun and stars, although like Earth, the planet rotates and has days and nights.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teranesia"title="Teranesia">
9-year-old Prabir Suresh lives on a small tropical island among the South Moluccas where strange mutations generate unique plants, birds and creatures. His life revolves around the jungle, which he calls Teranesia; school; and friendships he makes on the internet. Prabir lives on the island with his baby sister, Madhusree and parents who are both research biologists, currently studying the evolution of a species of butterflies that strays from conventional evolution.Civil war breaks out in Indonesia, with heated attacks against the Javanese empire. One day planes fly by and drop mines, some falling in Prabir's family garden. While tending to the garden the next day, Prabir's father is gravely injured by a mine. Prabir and his mother attempt to help pull his father out of the garden, but his mother loses her balance and Prabir witnesses them both die after falling on another mine. Shocked from the explosion and sudden death of his parents, Prabir escapes the island with his fifteen-month-old sister. As the civil war expands across the area, they scramble on a boat to the nearest inhabited island, where they are taken to Australia, and seek asylum with their aunt in Canada, far way away from Teranesia and their family's homeland of India.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_Fetish"title="Growth Fetish">
Hamilton's catchphrase "People buy things they don't need, with money they don't have, to impress people they don't like"—an axiom "borrowed" from actor Walter Slezak—sums up his philosophy on consumerism.Hamilton proposes that where a society has developed to the point at which the majority of people live reasonably comfortably, the pursuit of growth is pointless and should be curtailed. The surplus wealth could then be diverted into the essential infrastructure and to other nations that have not reached this level of wealth. Hamilton adapted the term "Eudemonism" to denote a political and economic model that does not depend on ever increasing and ultimately unsustainable levels of growth, but instead (page 212) "promotes the full realisation of human potential through ... proper appreciation of the sources of wellbeing", among which he identifies social relationships, job satisfaction, religious belief for some, and above all a sense of meaning and purpose.Hamilton relates the fetish for growth to a "development mentality", and to a neoliberal "instrumental value theory [which] maintains that, while humans are valuable in and of themselves, the non-human world is valuable only insofar as it contributes to the well-being of humans" (page 191). To this he contrasts the stance of the "transpersonal ecology" described by Warwick Fox: this is "centred on the notion that only the ego-involved, contracted self can imagine itself to be distinct from the natural world and that expansion of the self beyond the boundaries of the personal necessarily means that one's awareness, and ground of concern, extends to the natural world" (page 194).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Road"title="On the Road">
The two main characters of the book are the narrator, Sal Paradise, and his friend Dean Moriarty, much admired for his carefree attitude and sense of adventure, a free-spirited maverick eager to explore all kicks and an inspiration and catalyst for Sal's travels. The novel contains five parts, three of them describing road trips with Moriarty. The narrative takes place in the years 1947 to 1950, is full of Americana, and marks a specific era in jazz history, "somewhere between its Charlie Parker "Ornithology" period and another period that began with Miles Davis." (Pt. 1, Ch. 3) The novel is largely autobiographical, Sal being the alter ego of the author and Dean standing for Neal Cassady. Like Kerouac, Sal Paradise is a writer who published two books over the course of the plot, even though the names are not known.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon_God_Little"title="Vernon God Little">
The life of Vernon Little, a normal teenager who lives in Martirio, Texas, falls apart when his best friend, Jesus Navarro, murders their classmates in the schoolyard before killing himself, and Vernon is taken in for questioning. He cooperates with Deputy Vaine Gurie, because he had been running an errand for a teacher, Mr Nuckles, and is not involved in the massacre. The perception of Vernon's innocence weakens when his Mom's best friend, the food-obsessed Palmyra (Pam) arrives and, against Vernon's better judgment, whisks him off to Bar-B-Chew Barn, allowing the police to claim he is a flight risk. Eulalio ("Lally") Ledesma, supposedly a CNN reporter, ingratiates himself to Vernon's mother, Doris, and promises to help Vernon "shift the paradigm" of his story. Instead, Lally betrays Vernon, who is returned to jail pending a psychiatric analysis.When the court-appointed shrink, Dr Goosens, touches him inappropriately, Vernon leaves, knowing it can wreck hopes for bail. Vernon's bail hearing suggests a possible alibi and no grounds for holding him, so Vernon is released as Goosens' outpatient, subject to regular sessions. Vernon, however, is intent on living out the movie "Against All Odds", repelled by Lally not only betraying him again with a video interview with Nuckles, but also by insinuating himself into Vernon's family life - including sharing Mom's bedroom. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Hero"title="The Last Hero">
A message, carried by pointless albatross, arrives for Lord Vetinari from the Agatean Empire. The message explains that the Silver Horde (a group of aged barbarians introduced in "Interesting Times", wherein they conquered the Empire, and led by Cohen the Barbarian, now the Emperor) have set out on a quest. The first hero of the Discworld, "Fingers" Mazda, stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind (analogous to Prometheus), and was chained to a rock to be torn open daily by a giant eagle as punishment. As the last heroes remaining on the Disc, the Silver Horde seek to return fire to the gods with interest, in the form of a large sled packed with explosive Agatean Thunder Clay. They plan to blow up the gods at their mountain home, Cori Celesti. With them is a whiny, terrified bard, whom they have kidnapped so that he can write the saga of their quest. Along the way, they are joined by Evil Harry Dread (the last Dark Lord) and Vena the Raven-haired (an elderly heroine who has now gone grey).The heroes are disillusioned with the way their lives have turned out—having conquered the Empire, they have nothing left to do but die in comfort—and are angry for having been allowed to grow old, rather than dying in battle as most of their friends did. They decided to go out on the quest after one of the Horde members choked to death on a cucumber. Evil Harry is just as angry; despite his efforts to give his opponents the sporting chance that an Evil Overlord should, they will not follow the Code by allowing him to escape in return.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vile_Bodies"title="Vile Bodies">
Adam Symes has a novel to finish and, with the proceeds, plans to marry Nina Blount. Returning from France, his manuscript is impounded as obscene by customs officers, while in the next room his friend Agatha Runcible is strip searched as a suspected jewel thief. She rings the newspapers about her fate. Adam rings Nina to say he cannot now marry her, and has to negotiate a penal new contract with his publisher. Winning 1,000 pounds on a bet, Adam gives it to a drunk major to place on a horse, but the major disappears. After a fancy dress party, where he meets up with Nina and Agatha, the young people go back to the home of a quiet girl who turns out to be the Prime Minister's daughter. Agatha, who is in Hawaiian costume, is kicked out, to the delight of press photographers. The implication of orgies at 10 Downing Street causes the collapse of the government.Nina suggests that Adam asks her widowed father in the country for money to marry on. The eccentric old man comes up with a cheque for 1,000 pounds and, in celebration, Adam takes Nina to a country hotel to claim her virginity. She claims not to have enjoyed it, pointing out also to Adam that the signature on the cheque says Charlie Chaplin.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh_the_King"title="Gilgamesh the King">
The novel is told from the point of view of Gilgamesh, and is primarily ambivalent about the supernatural elements of the epic. But the events are portrayed in a fairly realistic manner.Gilgamesh is a giant among men and an amazing warrior, even since he was very young. When the king of Uruk (his father) dies, Gilgamesh is exiled by the recently crowned Dumuzi, jealous of his skills and power. When in time Dumuzi dies, Gilgamesh comes back to the kingdom to be proclaimed.Silverberg afterwards wrote a number of stories for the fantasy anthology series "Heroes in Hell" describing Gilgamesh's posthumous adventures in the underworld, including the award-winning novella "Gilgamesh in the Outback".
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roma_Eterna"title="Roma Eterna">
The point of divergence is the failure of the Israelite Exodus from Egypt. Moses and many of the Israelites drowned, and the remnant, led by Aaron, were fetched back to slavery in Egypt, a traumatic event recorded for posterity in the "Book of Aaron", an alternate version of the Bible. Later, the Hebrews were freed from bondage and remained a distinct religious-ethnic minority in Egypt, practicing a monotheistic religion, up to the equivalent of our 20th century (the 27th century of the Roman calendar).Still, affairs of the larger world and the rise and fall of empires and cultures remained roughly the same as in our history until the division of the Roman Empire, which was never Christianised in this history. Mutual assistance between the Western and the Eastern Roman Empire against barbarian invasions preserved both from falling and kept Roman rule intact throughout the imperial dominions.Despite the absence of Christianity, which, in our history, considerably influenced early Islam, Muhammad still started his prophetic career but was assassinated by a perceptive Roman agent, nipping Islam in the bud and thus precluding the spread of any monotheistic religion through the Roman Empire. Monotheism remained limited to the specific Hebrew sect in Egypt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Towers"title="Paradise Towers">
The Seventh Doctor and Mel, looking for a swimming pool, land in Paradise Towers, a luxurious 22nd-century high-rise apartment building now fallen into disrepair and chaos. It is divided between the Caretakers who maintain the building and roaming gangs of young girls called Kangs, grouped in colour theme; the Doctor and Mel encounter the Red Kangs.The Chief sends a squad of Caretakers to arrest the Red Kangs and in the ensuing confusion the Doctor is split from Mel and captured by the Caretakers. Mel meanwhile heads off to an apartment in which two elderly residents ("") live. Tilda and Tabby explain that all the able-bodied residents left the Towers to fight a war, leaving behind only children and the elderly. The only other man still loose in the Towers is Pex, a would-be hero, who appoints himself Mel's guardian.At the Caretaker control centre, the Doctor meets the Chief Caretaker, who greets him as the Great Architect Kroagnon, designer of Paradise Towers, and orders him killed. The Doctor cites an imaginary rule from the Caretakers' manual, confusing them enough to make his escape. Mel and Pex meanwhile are captured by a party of Blue Kangs who reveal to Mel that Pex is a coward and only survived by fleeing and hiding.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminus_(Doctor_Who)"title="Terminus (Doctor Who)">
Under the Black Guardian's instructions, Turlough sabotages the TARDIS, causing parts of it to dissolve. As the field of instability threatens to engulf Nyssa's room, a door appears behind her and the Fifth Doctor tells her to go through it. The TARDIS, to save itself, has materialised aboard a spaceship heading for an unknown destination. The Doctor and Nyssa, while exploring the ship, encounter two raiders, Kari and Olvir, who are intent on plundering the ship's cargo.When the raiders' ship abandons Kari and Olvir, it becomes apparent that the spaceship is actually a transport carrying Lazars, sufferers of a leprosy-like disease, to a space station named Terminus. The station is owned by Terminus, Inc., which claims that a cure exists there, but no-one has returned from it. Nyssa, separated from the Doctor, is infected by the disease and ushered away with the rest of the Lazars. Terminus is manned by the Vanir, guards clad in ornate radiation armor. They are slave labour, kept alive only by regular doses of a drug called "hydromel", which is supplied by the corporation.The Doctor discovers that Terminus is at the centre of the known universe and finds this information unsettling. Nyssa, meanwhile, is given over to the Garm, a giant dog-like biped, who takes her to a chamber and exposes her to radiation. The Doctor and Kari find the control room of Terminus and he realises that Terminus is also a time ship. In some unspecified past, the fuel that powered it became unstable and the now dead pilot had tried to jettison it while still in the time vortex. The tank exploded, and the outrush of energy started "Event One" – the Big Bang – and hurled Terminus billions of years into the future. There is still one tank of unstable fuel left, and the computer has begun a countdown to jettison that too. However, where the first explosion created the universe, the second will undoubtedly destroy it.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emerald_City_of_Oz"title="The Emerald City of Oz">
At the beginning of this story, it is made quite clear that Dorothy Gale (the primary protagonist of many of the previous Oz books), is in the habit of freely speaking of her many adventures in the Land of Oz to her only living relatives, her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry. Neither of them believes a word of her stories, but consider her a dreamer, as her dead mother had been. She is undeterred.Later, it is revealed that the destruction of their farmhouse by the tornado back in "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" has left Uncle Henry in terrible debt. In order to pay it, he has taken out a mortgage on his farm. If he cannot repay his creditors, they will seize the farm, thus leaving Henry and his family homeless. He is not too afraid for himself, but both he and his wife, Aunt Em, fear very much for their niece's future. Upon learning this, Dorothy quickly arranges with Princess Ozma to let her bring her guardians to Oz where they will be happier and forever safe. Using the Magic Belt (a tool captured from the jealous Nome King Roquat), Ozma transports them to her throne room. They are given rooms to live in and luxuries to enjoy, including a vast and complex wardrobe, and meet with many of Dorothy's old friends, including the Cowardly Lion and Billina the Yellow Hen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Door_into_Ocean"title="A Door into Ocean">
At the beginning of the novel, the Sharers are all female. But as they encounter a non-Sharer community from another planet, which threatens them, the Sharer Merwen realizes that they must find out whether other kinds of "people" can share their life or not. Merwen goes to the other planet, Valedon, to recruit a young man, Spinel, to return to Shora and attempt to learn their ways. This venture leads to disagreement within the Sharer community (they have plenty of disagreements, though addressed without violence). With many false starts, Spinel gradually learns the Sharer way, as a man; and ultimately he works with the Sharers to help them defend their planet from a military invasion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Robber_Bride"title="The Robber Bride">
Set in present-day Toronto, Ontario, the novel is about three women and their history with old friend and nemesis, Zenia. Roz, Charis, and Tony meet once a month in a restaurant to share a meal decades after Zenia betrayed them and interfered with their romantic relationships. During one outing they spot Zenia, who they thought to be long-dead since their university days. The plot then travels back in time to explain how Zenia stole, one by one, their respective partners. The novel alternates between the present and the past through flashbacks, in the third person perspective of Tony, Charis and Roz. Zenia gives each woman a different version of her biography, tailor-made to insinuate herself into their lives. No one version of Zenia is the truth, and the reader knows no more than the characters.Their betrayals by Zenia are what initially bring the three together as friends and bind their lives together irrevocably - their monthly luncheons begin after her funeral. In the present-day, Roz, Charis and Tony each individually confront Zenia in a Toronto hotel room, where she tells each of them that the men they'd been with got what they deserved. She explains various versions of her earlier staged death, each as implausible as the accounts of her life.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Locust"title="The Day of the Locust">
Tod Hackett is the novel's protagonist. He moves from the East coast to Hollywood, California in search of inspiration for his next painting. The novel is set in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Most of the characters exist at the fringes of the Hollywood film industry, but Hollywood is merely the backdrop for Tod Hackett's revelation. Tod is employed by a Hollywood studio "to learn set and costume designing." During his spare time, Tod sketches scenes he observes on large production sets and studio back lots. The novel details Tod's observation of the filming of the Battle of Waterloo. His goal is to find inspiration for the painting he is getting ready to begin, a work titled "The Burning of Los Angeles."Tod falls in love with Faye Greener, an aspiring starlet who lives nearby but Faye only loves men that are good looking or wealthy. She is beautiful but lacks the acting talent to progress beyond roles as an extra. Tod is simply a "good-hearted man," the kind Faye likes. He imagines that loving her would compare to jumping from a skyscraper and screaming to the ground. Tod wants to "throw himself [at her], no matter what the cost." Throughout the novel, Tod fantasizes about having a sexual encounter with Faye as an act of rape. Every time he imagines raping her, reality interrupts his fantasy before he can complete the act. Scenes are interrupted prior to their climax frequently throughout the novel. A patron jokes that it is "the old teaser routine," when a pornographic film viewing at Mrs. Jenning's parlor ends unexpectedly due to technical difficulties.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Her_Majesty's_Secret_Service_(novel)"title="On Her Majesty's Secret Service (novel)">
For more than a year, James Bond, British Secret Service operative 007, has been involved in "Operation Bedlam": trailing the private criminal organisation SPECTRE and its leader, Ernst Stavro Blofeld. The organisation had hijacked two nuclear devices in an attempt to blackmail the western world, as described in "Thunderball". Convinced SPECTRE no longer exists, Bond is frustrated by MI6's insistence that he continue the search and his inability to find Blofeld. He composes a letter of resignation for his superior, M.While composing his letter, Bond encounters a beautiful, suicidal young woman named Contessa Teresa "Tracy" di Vicenzo first on the road and subsequently at the gambling table, where he saves her from a "coup de deshonneur" by paying the gambling debt she is unable to cover. The following day Bond follows her and interrupts her attempted suicide, but they are captured by professional henchmen. They are taken to the offices of Marc-Ange Draco, head of the Unione Corse, the biggest European crime syndicate. Tracy is the daughter and only child of Draco who believes the only way to save his daughter from further suicide attempts is for Bond to marry her. To facilitate this, he offers Bond a dowry of £1 million (£ million in pounds); Bond refuses the offer, but agrees to continue romancing Tracy while her mental health improves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boxcar_Children"title="The Boxcar Children">
The original "Boxcar Children" novel tells a story of four orphaned Alden children, Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny. Not wishing to live with their hard-hearted grandfather, whom they have never met because of his disapproval of their parents' marriage, the children strike out on their own following their parents' death. On a cold night, the children stop at a bakery to ask for food, where they are invited to stay for the night. However, when they overhear the baker and his wife are planning to keep the three older children as labor and send Benny to an orphanage, the children decide to escape and flee to the woods instead.There they sleep on some pine needles. But Jessie then sees it is about to rain, and frantically searches for some shelter. At that point, she finds an abandoned boxcar and takes her siblings to it. They all renovate it into their new home. They find useful items such as kitchenware at the junkyard, use a stream for water, and collect blueberries for their meals. They also adopt a stray dog that they name Watch. Realizing they cannot live on water and blueberries, Henry walks to a nearby town called Silver City for work. There he meets a young doctor, Dr. Moore, who hires Henry for odd jobs, often paying him in spare food and clothing as well as money. Suspecting that Henry is not telling the full truth about himself, Dr. Moore follows Henry home in secret and sees the children's living conditions. He decides that they are safe for now and that he should allow Henry to tell the truth when he feels comfortable. Mr. Moore gifts Henry a hammer and Henry also takes a few nails from the doctor. With the tools, he and his siblings create a swimming pool and a dam in the stream. Henry also makes a cart for Benny.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God's_Eye"title="The Mote in God's Eye">
In the year AD 3017, humanity is slowly recovering from an interstellar civil war that tore apart the first Empire of Man. The Second Empire is busy establishing control over the remnants of its predecessor, by force if necessary. After a rebellion on the planet New Chicago is quashed, Captain Bruno Cziller of the Imperial battlecruiser INSS "MacArthur" remains behind as Chief of Staff to the new governor, while Commander Roderick Blaine is given temporary command of the ship, along with secret orders to take Horace Hussein Bury, a powerful interstellar merchant suspected of instigating the revolt, to the Imperial capital, Sparta. Another passenger is Lady Sandra Bright "Sally" Fowler, the niece of an Imperial senator and a traumatized former prisoner of the rebels.New Caledonia is the capital of the Trans-Coalsack sector, on the opposite side of the Coalsack Nebula from Earth. Also in the sector is a red supergiant star known as Murcheson's Eye. Associated with it is a yellow Sun-like star, which from New Caledonia appears in front of the Eye. Since some see the Eye and the Coalsack as the face of God, the yellow star is known as the Mote in God's Eye.Human ships use the Alderson Drive, which allows them to travel instantaneously between "Alderson points" in specific star systems. Approaching New Caledonia, "MacArthur" is ordered to investigate when an alien spacecraft, propelled by a solar sail, is detected. After the spacecraft fires upon "MacArthur", Blaine has its main capsule detached from the sail and taken aboard at great risk to his ship and crew. Its sole occupant, a brown and white furred creature, is found dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Egg_and_I"title="The Egg and I">
MacDonald begins her book with a summary description of her childhood and family. Her father was a mining engineer, and moved frequently with his family throughout the West. Her mother's theory that a wife must support her husband in his career comes into play when the author marries a friend of her brother (Bob), who soon admits that his dream is to leave his current office job and start a chicken ranch [sic]. Knowing nothing about farming, but eager to support her husband, the author encourages the dream, but is unprepared for the primitive conditions that exist on the farm he purchases.From this "set-up", the book turns to anecdotal stories that rely upon the proverbial "fish out of water" tales that pit MacDonald against her situation and her surroundings, such as the struggle to keep up with the need for water, which needs to be hand carried from a pond to the house until a tank is installed, or keeping a fire going in "Stove", or the constant care that chicks need. At one point, a guest expresses envy of MacDonald and her husband, as she thinks they live a life full of fresh air and beautiful scenery, which is then followed by MacDonald pointing out that while the guest had lounged in bed that morning, her husband and she had been up before sunrise working for several hours, and then again the couple had stayed up long into the night after the guest had gone to bed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasion_(novel)"title="Persuasion (novel)">
The story begins seven years after the broken engagement of Anne Elliot to Frederick Wentworth: Having just turned nineteen years old, Anne fell in love and had accepted a proposal of marriage from Wentworth, then a young and undistinguished naval officer. Wentworth was considered clever, confident and ambitious, but his low social status made Anne's friends and family view him as an unsuitable partner. Anne's father, Sir Walter Elliot, and her older sister, Elizabeth, maintained that Wentworth was no match for a woman of Kellynch Hall, the family estate. Furthermore, Lady Russell, a distant relative whom Anne considers to be a second mother to her after her own died, also saw the relationship as imprudent for one so young and persuaded Anne to break off the engagement. Sir Walter, Elizabeth, and Lady Russell are the only family members who knew about the short engagement, as Anne's younger sister Mary was away at school.Several years later, the Elliot family are in financial trouble on account of their lavish spending, so they lease out Kellynch Hall and decide to settle in a cheaper home in Bath until their finances improve. Sir Walter, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth's new companion, Mrs Clay, look forward to the move. Anne is less sure she will enjoy Bath, but cannot go against her family. Mary is now married to Charles Musgrove of Uppercross Hall, the heir to a respected local squire. Anne visits Mary and her family, where she is well-loved. As the war against France is over, the new tenants of Kellynch Hall, Admiral Croft and his wife Sophia, (Frederick's sister), have returned home. Captain Wentworth, now wealthy and famous for his service in the war, visits his sister and meets the Uppercross family, where he crosses paths with Anne.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Dragon"title="Fallen Dragon">
"Fallen Dragon" takes place during the 25th century. In the preceding centuries, a means of Faster-than-light (FTL) space travel was discovered, allowing a speed of one-half of a light-year per day. This led to a series of colonization efforts in a radius of about 70 light years around Sol, but these ended as their costs proved prohibitive. The only major ongoing starflight efforts are carried out by the Zantiu-Braun megacorporation, who use their fleet of starships to periodically plunder their colonies in technically legal "asset realization" raids, typically involving military occupation of the planet in question. As it is cheaper to copy technology than ship it, these efforts normally collect single samples of interesting goods, or raw materials that are expensive on Earth. Zantiu-Braun is controlled by clones of Simon Roderick, who is motivated by the idea of uplifting the entire human race to his ideal.The story follows the life of Lawrence Newton from the colony planet Amethi, both in the current timeframe and in a series of flashbacks. In the current time, Newton is a mercenary in the Zantiu-Braun strategic security forces, who leads a squad of troopers wearing organic armour suits called "Skin" that render them practically invulnerable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sea-Wolf"title="The Sea-Wolf">
"The Sea-Wolf" tells the story of a soft, domesticated protagonist — an intellectual man named Humphrey Van Weyden — forced to become tough and self-reliant by exposure to cruelty and brutality. The story starts with him aboard a San Francisco ferry, called "Martinez", which collides with another ship in the fog and sinks. He is set adrift in the Bay, eventually being picked up by Wolf Larsen. Larsen is the captain of a seal-hunting schooner, the "Ghost". Brutal and cynical, yet also highly intelligent and intellectual, he rules over his ship and terrorizes the crew with the aid of his exceptionally great physical strength. Van Weyden describes him as individualist, hedonist, and materialist. Larsen does not believe in the immortality of the soul; he finds no meaning in his life save for survival and pleasure, and he has come to despise all human life and deny its value. Being interested in someone capable of intellectual disputes, he somewhat takes care of Van Weyden, whom he calls "Hump", while forcing him to become a cabin boy, do menial work, and learn to fight to protect himself from a brutal crew.A key event in the story is an attempted mutiny against Wolf Larsen by several members of the crew. The organizers of the mutiny are Leach and Johnson. The two were motivated by previous slights by Wolf Larsen: Johnson had previously been beaten severely by Larsen, and Leach had been punched earlier while being forced to become a boat-puller. The first attempt at mutiny involved sending Larsen overboard; however, he manages to climb back onto the ship. Searching for his assailant, he ventures into the sleeping quarters, located beneath the main deck, the only exit being a ladder. Several, at least seven men, take part in the mutiny and attack Larsen. Larsen however, demonstrating his inhuman endurance and strength, manages to fight his way through the crew, climb the ladder with several men hanging off him, and escape relatively unharmed. Van Weyden is promoted as mate, for the original mate had been murdered. Larsen later gets his vengeance by torturing his crew, and constantly claiming that he is going to murder Leach and Johnson at his earliest convenience. He later allows them to be lost to the sea when they attempt to flee on a hunting boat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa_Overdrive"title="Mona Lisa Overdrive">
Taking place eight years after the events of "Count Zero" and fifteen years after "Neuromancer", the story is formed from several interconnecting plot threads, and also features characters from Gibson's previous works (such as Molly Millions, the razor-fingered mercenary from "Neuromancer").Thread one: concerns Mona, a teen prostitute who has a more-than-passing resemblance to famed Simstim superstar Angie Mitchell. Mona is hired by shady individuals for a "gig" which later turns out to be part of a plot to abduct Angie.Thread two: focuses on a young Japanese girl named Kumiko, daughter of a Yakuza boss sent to London to keep her safe while her father engages in a gang war with other top Yakuza leaders. In London, she is cared for by one of her father's retainers, who is also a powerful member of the London Mob. She meets Molly Millions (having altered her appearance and now calling herself "Sally Shears", in order to conceal her identity from hostile parties who are implied to be pursuing her), who takes the girl under her wing.Thread three: follows a reclusive artist named Slick Henry, who lives in a place named Factory in the Dog Solitude; a large, poisoned expanse of deserted factories and dumps, probably in southern New Jersey. Slick Henry is a convicted car thief whose punishment consisted of having his short-term memory erased every five minutes, leading to continuous confusion and dissociation. Following the end of his sentence, he spends his days creating large robotic sculptures and periodically suffers episodes of time loss, returning to consciousness afterward with no memory of what he did during the blackout. He is hired by an acquaintance to look after the comatose "Count" (Bobby Newmark from the second novel, "Count Zero", who has hooked himself into a super-capacity cyber-harddrive called an Aleph).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tehanu"title="Tehanu">
"Tehanu" begins slightly before the conclusion of the previous book in the series, "The Farthest Shore", and provides some information about the life of Tenar after the end of "The Tombs of Atuan". She had rejected the option of life in aristocratic Havnor, and instead arrived on Gont. For some time she lived with Ged's old master, the mage Ogion – but though fond of him, rejected Ogion's offer to teach her magic. Instead, she married a farmer called Flint with whom she had two children, called Apple and Spark, and became known to the locals as Goha. It is mentioned that Ged was a bit disappointed in – and did not understand – Tenar's choice of a life.At the book's outset her husband is now dead and her children grown up. Tenar lives on her own at Flint's property – Oak Farm – and is lonely and uncertain of her identity. She is brought a severely injured child, born of wandering vagabonds; the child's natural father had pushed her into a campfire and left her for dead. Tenar helps to save the child's life, but the child is left with one side of her face permanently scarred and the fingers of one hand fused into a claw. Tenar adopts her and gives the child the use name Therru, which means "flame" in Tenar's native Kargish language.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plague_Dogs"title="The Plague Dogs">
This book tells of the escape of two dogs, Rowf and Snitter, from a government research station in the Lake District in England, where they had been horribly mistreated. They live on their own with help from a red fox, or "tod", who speaks to them in a Geordie dialect. After the starving dogs attack some sheep on the fells, they are reported as ferocious man-eating monsters by an opportunistic journalist. A great dog hunt follows, which is later intensified with the fear that the dogs could be carriers of a dangerous bioweapon, such as the bubonic plague.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moll_Flanders"title="Moll Flanders">
Moll's mother is a convict in Newgate Prison in London who is given a reprieve by "pleading her belly," a reference to the custom of postponing the executions of pregnant criminals. Her mother is eventually transported to Colonial United States, and Moll Flanders (not her birth name, she emphasises, taking care not to reveal it) is raised from the age of three until adolescence by a kindly foster mother. Thereafter she gets attached to a household as a servant where she is loved by both sons, the elder of whom convinces her to "act like they were married" in bed. Unwilling to marry her, he persuades her to marry his younger brother. After five years of marriage, she then is widowed, leaves her children in the care of in-laws, and begins honing the skill of passing herself off as a fortuned widow to attract a man who will marry her and provide her with security.The first time she does this, her "gentleman-tradesman" spendthrift husband goes bankrupt and flees to mainland Europe, leaving her on her own with his blessing to do the best she can to forget him. (They had one child together, but "it was buried.") The second time, she makes a match that leads her to Virginia Colony with a kindly man who introduces her to his mother. After three children (one dies), Moll learns that her mother-in-law is actually her biological mother, which makes her husband her half-brother. She dissolves their marriage and after continuing to live with her brother for three years, travels back to England, leaving her two children behind, and goes to live in Bath to seek a new husband.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skellig"title="Skellig">
10-year-old Michael and his family have recently moved into a house. He and his parents are nervous, as his new baby sister was born earlier than expected and may not live because of a heart condition. When Michael goes into the garage, he finds a strange emaciated creature hidden amid all the boxes, debris and dead insects. Michael assumes that he is a homeless person, but decides to look after him and gives him food. The man is crotchety and arthritic, demanding aspirin, Chinese food menu order numbers 27 and 53 and brown ale. Michael hears a story that human shoulder blades are a vestige of angel wings.Meanwhile, his friends from school become more and more distant as Michael stops attending school and spends less time with them. He meets a girl named Mina from across the road and over the course of the story they become close. Mina is home-schooled and enjoys nature, birds, drawing and the poems of William Blake. Often drawing or sculpting at home, she invites Michael to join in. She takes care of some baby birds who live in her garden and teaches Michael to hear their tiny sounds. Michael decides to introduce her to the strange creature. Michael's friends, Leakey and Coot, become skeptical about Michael and try to find out what he is hiding from them. Michael and Mina try to keep it a secret from them, and have to move "Skellig" to a safer space.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokoro"title="Kokoro">
## "Part I – “Sensei and I".The narrator has been left on his own in Kamakura after his friend, who invited him to vacation there, is called home by his family. One day, after finishing his usual swim in the sea, he takes notice of a man in the changing house who's there with a foreign guest, preparing to head for the water. He sees the same man each day thereafter, though no longer with his foreign companion. After some days, he finds occasion to make the man's acquaintance. As they grow closer, he comes to refer to the man as “Sensei.”On parting in Kamakura, as Sensei prepares to return home to Tokyo, the narrator asks if he can call on Sensei at his home sometime. He receives an affirmative, though less enthusiastic than hoped for, response. Several weeks after his own return to Tokyo, he makes an initial visit, only to find Sensei away. On his next visit, when he again finds Sensei away, he learns from Sensei's wife that Sensei makes monthly visits to the gravesite of a friend.Over subsequent months and years, through periodic visits, the narrator comes to know Sensei and his wife quite well. At the same time, Sensei insists on maintaining a certain distance. He refuses to talk of his deceased friend and is reluctant to explain his own reclusion and lack of occupation. He also cautions the narrator that intimacy and admiration will only lead to future disillusionment and disdain. However, he does promise that one day, when the time is right, he will divulge in full the story of his past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_an_Ordinary_Woman"title="Diary of an Ordinary Woman">
From the age of thirteen, on the eve of the Great War, Millicent King keeps her journals in a series of exercise books. The diary records the dramas of everyday life in an ordinary English family touched by war, tragedy, and money troubles in the early decades of the century. She struggles to become a teacher, but wants more out of life. From bohemian literary London to Rome in the twenties, her story moves on to social work and the build-up to another war, in which she drives ambulances through the bombed streets of London. She has proposals of marriage and secret lovers, ambition and optimism, but then her life is turned upside down once more by wartime deaths.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Oz"title="The Road to Oz">
While Dorothy Gale is at home in Kansas one day, she and her pet dog Toto meet the Shaggy Man who comes walking past the Gale farm. He is a friendly, yet slightly senile hobo with an optimistic, care free mentality. He politely asks Dorothy for directions to Butterfield, which is the nearest town on the prairie. The girl agrees to show him the way, bringing her dog with her. Further on, the road splits into seven paths. They take the seventh one and soon find themselves lost in what appears to be another dimension. The trio meets Button-Bright, a cute and wealthy little boy in a sailor's outfit who is always getting lost. Later, the companions encounter Polychrome, the beautiful and ethereal Daughter of the Rainbow who is stranded on earth. Polychrome explains that she accidentally fell off her father's bow while dancing on it. The bow ascended into the atmosphere and back into the clouds before she was able to climb her way back on it, thus being left behind.Dorothy, Toto, the Shaggy Man, Button-Bright, and Polychrome eventually come to the peculiar town of Foxville, where anthropomorphic foxes live. With prompting from King Dox of Foxville, Dorothy deduces that she and Toto are obviously on another "fairy adventure" that will ultimately lead them to the magical Land of Oz, just in time for Princess Ozma's royal birthday party (which is now acknowledged as August 21 by Oz fans, even though the book only refers to the 21st of the month, Dorothy having mentioned that the current month is August in another passage). The king takes a particular liking to Button Bright, whom he considers astute and clever due to his tabula rasa-like mind. Believing that the human face does not suit one so clever, Dox gives him a fox's head which he is unable to remove. A similar event subsequently happens to the Shaggy Man, when King Kik-a-Bray of Dunkiton confers a donkey's head upon him — also in reward for cleverness, even though it is implied that Foxville and Dunkiton exist at odds with one another. Though both of them ask Dorothy to procure them invitations to Princess Ozma's birthday party.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Battle"title="The Last Battle">
In the western regions of Narnia, the clever and greedy ape Shift persuades the naive donkey Puzzle to wear a lion's skin (an echo from Aesop's story of The Ass in the Lion's Skin) and introduces him to the other Narnians as the Great Lion Aslan. Shift, posing as Aslan's spokesman, uses Aslan's name to persuade the Narnians to cut down the trees for lumber. Shift pockets the profits and garners support from the Calormenes – led by Rishda Tarkaan – by claiming that Aslan is another name for Tash, a bloodthirsty deity worshipped by the Calormenes. Those who question Shift's words are invited into a large stable where "Tashlan" is said to reside, only to be stealthily murdered by one of Rishda's men. King Tirian, a descendant of King Caspian X, is warned by Roonwit the Centaur that strange and evil things are happening to Narnia and that the stars portend ominous developments. Tirian and his friend Jewel the Unicorn hear word of the death of the Dryads and rashly set out to confront the danger, instructing Roonwit to gather a small army to join them. Finding two Calormenes abusing a Narnian Talking Horse, Tirian and Jewel kill them both in a blind rage. Ashamed, they give themselves up to "Aslan".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_the_Funeral"title="After the Funeral">
Following the funeral of Richard Abernethie, his family assemble at Enderby Hall for the reading of the will by his lawyer, Mr Entwhistle. His wealth is to be divided up between his surviving family: his brother Timothy Abernethie and his wife Maud; his sister Cora Lansquenet; his nephew George Crossfield; his first niece Rosamund Shane, and her husband Michael; his second niece Susan Banks, and her husband Gregory; and Helen Abernethie, the wife of his brother Leo before his death during the war. Although Richard died of natural causes and his death was expected, Cora makes a chance remark that he was murdered. The day after the funeral, she is found dead, having been violently murdered in her sleep. No motive is obvious in Inspector Morton's investigations - while Cora's life income reverts to the Abernethie estate, her property goes to Susan, while her companion Miss Gilchrist receives a number of her paintings she made. However, doubts soon arise about Richard's death in the wake of her murder. Seeking help, Entwhistle contacts his friend, Hercule Poirot, to resolve the matter. Poirot contacts his old friend Mr Goby to investigate the family.Each family member had their own reason for wanting Richard's wealth, and thus become a suspect in the murder. On the day of the inquest, Susan visits Cora's home to clean up her possessions for auction. She learns from Gilchrist that her aunt always painted from life, and that she collected paintings from local sales in the hopes of finding a valuable piece. The day after Cora's funeral, art critic Alexander Guthrie arrives to look through Cora's recent purchases as previously scheduled, but finds nothing of value there. That evening, Gilchrist is poisoned with a slice of arsenic-laced wedding cake sent in the post; she survives, mainly from eating a small portion. Gathering to select items from Richard's estate before its sale, the family are joined by Poirot and Gilchrist. During discussions, Helen comments about believing there was something odd on the day of the funeral, Gilchrist makes a remark about one of the decorations in Enderby, while Susan recalls finding a painting in Cora's possession, which she believed had been copied from a picture postcard and not painted from life, Cora's usual style.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burmese_Days"title="Burmese Days">
"Burmese Days" is set in 1920s British Burma, in the fictional district of Kyauktada, based on Kathar (formerly spelled Katha), a town where Orwell served. Like the fictional town, it is the head of a branch railway line above Mandalay on the Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) River. As the story opens, U Po Kyin, a corrupt Burmese magistrate, is planning to destroy the reputation of the Indian, Dr Veraswami. The doctor hopes for help from his friend John Flory who, as a "pukka sahib" (European white man), has higher prestige. Dr Veraswami also desires election to the town's European Club, of which Flory is a member, expecting that good standing among the Europeans will protect him from U Po Kyin's intrigues. U Po Kyin begins a campaign to persuade the Europeans that the doctor holds anti-British opinions in the belief that anonymous letters with false stories about the doctor "will work wonders". He even sends a threatening letter to Flory.John Flory, a jaded 35-year-old teak merchant with a birthmark on his face in the shape of a ragged crescent, spends three weeks of every month acquiring jungle timber. Friendless among his fellow Europeans and unmarried, but with a Burmese mistress, he has become disillusioned with life in an expatriate community centred round the local European Club in a remote provincial town. At the same time, he has become so embedded in Burma that it is impossible for him to leave and return to England. Flory has one good friend, the Indian, Dr Veraswami, whom he often visits for what the Doctor delightedly calls "cultured conversation". But when Flory dismisses the British as mere moneymakers, living a lie, "the lie that we're here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them," he provokes consternation in the doctor, who defends the British as the efficient administrators of an unrivalled empire. Toward his mistress, Flory is emotionally ambivalent: "On the one hand, Flory loves Burma and craves a partner who will share his passion, which the other local Europeans find incomprehensible; on the other hand, for essentially racist reasons, Flory feels that only a European woman is acceptable as a partner".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Maker"title="Star Maker">
A human narrator from England is transported out of his body via unexplained means. He realizes he is able to explore space and other planets. After exploring a civilization on another planet in our galaxy at a level of development similar to our own that existed millions of years ago thousands of light years from Earth (the "Other Earth") in some detail, his mind merges with that of one of its inhabitants, and as they travel together, they are joined by still more minds or group-minds. This snowballing process is paralleled by the expansion of the book's scale, describing more and more planets in less and less detail.The disembodied travelers encounter many ideas that are interesting from both science-fictional and philosophical points of view. These include many imaginative descriptions of species, civilizations and methods of warfare, descriptions of the multiverse, and the idea that the stars and pre-galactic nebulae are intelligent beings, operating on vast time scales. A key idea is the formation of collective minds from many telepathically linked individuals, on the level of planets, galaxies, and eventually the cosmos itself.A symbiotic species, each individual composed of two species, both non-humanoid, is discussed in detail. Normally detached from the galaxy's turmoil, they intervene in a deus ex machina to end the threat of a civilization dedicated to forcing its mentality onto one stellar civilization after another.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loved_One"title="The Loved One">
Sir Ambrose Abercrombie visits housemates Dennis Barlow and Sir Francis Hinsley to express his concern about Barlow's new job and how it reflects on the British enclave in Hollywood, which is also taken as an announcement of Barlow's impending exclusion from British society. Barlow reports to his job at the Happier Hunting Ground, a pet cemetery and funeral service, and picks up a couple's dead Sealyham Terrier.Because of the difficulty he is having rebranding actress Juanita del Pablo as an Irish starlet (having previously rebranded Baby Aaronson as del Pablo), Hinsley is sent to work from home. After his secretary stops showing up, he ventures to Megalopolitan Studios and finds a man named Lorenzo Medici in his office. After working his way through the bureaucracy he finds he has been unceremoniously fired. In the next scene, Abercrombie and other British expatriates are discussing Hinsley's suicide and the funeral arrangements.Barlow, given the task of making Hinsley's funeral arrangements, visits Whispering Glades. There he is transfixed by the cosmetician Aimée Thanatogenos, though he has yet to learn her name.Barlow continues with the funeral arrangements while Hinsley's body arrives at Whispering Glades and is tended to by Thanatogenos and the senior mortician Mr. Joyboy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Town_Like_Alice"title="A Town Like Alice">
The story falls broadly into three parts.In post-World War II London, Jean Paget, a secretary in a leather goods factory, is informed by solicitor Noel Strachan that she has inherited a considerable sum of money from an uncle she never knew. But the solicitor is now her trustee and she only has the use of the income until she inherits absolutely, at the age of thirty-five, several years in the future. In the firm's interest, but increasingly with personal interest, Strachan acts as her guide and advisor. Jean decides that her priority is to build a well in a Malayan village.The second part of the story flashes back to Jean's experiences during the war, when she was working in Malaya at the time the Japanese invaded and was taken prisoner together with a group of women and children. As she speaks Malay fluently, Jean takes a leading role in the group of prisoners. The Japanese refuse all responsibility for the group and march them from one village to another. Many of them, not used to physical hardship, die. Jean meets an Australian soldier, Sergeant Joe Harman, also a prisoner, who is driving a lorry for the Japanese and they strike up a friendship. He steals food and medicines to help them. Jean is carrying a toddler, whose mother has died, and this leads Harman to believe that she is married; to avoid complications, Jean does not correct this assumption. On one occasion, Harman steals five chickens from the local Japanese commander. The thefts are investigated and Harman takes the blame to save Jean and the rest of the group. He is beaten, crucified, and left to die by the Japanese soldiers. The women are marched away, believing that he is dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_the_Living"title="We the Living">
The story takes place from 1922 to 1925, in post-revolutionary Russia. Kira Argounova, the protagonist of the story, is the younger daughter of a bourgeois family. An independent spirit with a will to match, she rejects any attempt by her family or the nascent Soviet state to cast her into a mold. At the beginning of the story, Kira returns to Petrograd with her family, after a prolonged exile due to the assault of the Bolshevik revolutionaries. Kira's father had been the owner of a textile factory, which was seized and nationalized. Having given up all hopes of regaining their past possessions after the victories of the Red Army, the family returns to the city in search of livelihood. They find that their home has also been seized and converted to living quarters for several families.Kira's family eventually manages to find living quarters, and Kira's father gets a license to open a textile shop, an establishment that is but a shadow of his old firm. Life is excruciatingly difficult in these times; living standards are poor, and weary citizens wait in long queues for meager rations of food and fuel. With some effort, Kira manages to obtain her Labor Book, which permits her to study and work. Kira also manages to enroll in the Technological Institute, where she aspires to fulfill her dream of becoming an engineer. At the Institute, Kira meets fellow student Andrei Taganov, an idealistic Communist and an officer in the GPU (the Soviet secret police). The two share a mutual respect and admiration for each other in spite of their differing political beliefs, and become friends.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Call_of_the_Wild"title="The Call of the Wild">
The story opens in 1897 with Buck, a powerful 140-pound St. Bernard–Scotch Shepherd mix, happily living in California's Santa Clara Valley as the pampered pet of Judge Miller and his family. One night, assistant gardener Manuel, needing money to pay off gambling debts, steals Buck and sells him to a stranger. Buck is shipped to Seattle, where he is confined in a crate, starved, and ill-treated. When released, Buck attacks his handler, the "man in the red sweater" who teaches Buck the "law of club and fang", sufficiently cowing him. The man shows some kindness after Buck demonstrates obedience.Shortly after, Buck is sold to two French-Canadian dispatchers from the Canadian government, François and Perrault, who take him to Alaska. Buck is trained as a sled dog for the Klondike region of Canada. In addition to Buck, François and Perrault add ten dogs to their team (Spitz, Dolly, Pike, Jo, Billie, Teek, Koona, Dub, Dave, and Sol-leks). Buck's teammates teach him how to survive cold winter nights and about pack society. Over the next several weeks on the trail, a bitter rivalry develops between Buck and the lead dog, Spitz, a vicious and quarrelsome white husky. Buck eventually kills Spitz in a fight and becomes the new lead dog.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soft_Machine"title="The Soft Machine">
The main plot appears in linear prose in chapter VII, "The Mayan Caper". This chapter portrays a secret agent who has the ability to change bodies or metamorphose his own body using "U.T." (undifferentiated tissue). As such an agent he makes a time travel machine and takes on a gang of Mayan priests who use the Mayan calendar to control the minds of slave laborers used for planting maize. The calendar images are written in books and placed on a magnetic tape and transmitted as sounds to control the slaves. The agent manages to infiltrate the slaves and replace the magnetic tape with a totally different message: "burn the books, kill the priests", which causes the downfall of their regime.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddie_Woodlawn"title="Caddie Woodlawn">
Set in the 1860s, the novel is about a lively eleven-year-old tomboy named Caroline Augusta Woodlawn, nicknamed "Caddie", living in the area of Dunnville, Wisconsin. As a young girl, she made the journey there from Boston with her family, one that nearly cost her life. Sickly and weak, she is allowed to run wild with her brothers, Tom and Warren, to regain her health. They spend much of their time exploring the woods and rivers that surround their farm. The book opens with Caddie being late for dinner after an excursion to visit the local Indian tribe, embarrassing her mother with her antics. She, undaunted, spends the next year having a string of adventures and scares. From a midnight ride through the forest to warn her friend, "Indian John", that the settlers are planning an attack, to a prairie fire that brings out the best in Obediah, the school bully, to a life-threatening fall through a lake while ice skating, her life is far from boring. Things come to a head when "perfect" Cousin Annabelle from Boston arrives for a visit, and Caddie is forced to confront her future. Tom and Warren, always a part of her adventures, come along for the journey. This story is full of practical jokes and touching moments, like the long journey home of Nero, a beloved pet dog that was taken by Caddie's uncle to be "educated". It tells the story of a family's existence on the frontier during the and offers insights into how life was lived in a small Wisconsin village where fear of local Indians was a reality, and life and death situations arose with frightening regularity. The sequel, "Magical Melons" (1939), continues the story of Caddie Woodlawn
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_the_Daleks"title="Remembrance of the Daleks">
The Seventh Doctor and Ace arrive in Shoreditch in 1963. They meet a military unit led by Group Captain Gilmore and Sergeant Smith, tracking abnormal local magnetic fluctuations, originating mainly from Coal Hill School where a transmat device in its basement is tied to a Dalek ship in geostationary orbit. A second, weaker fluctuation is emitted by a nearby Dalek. There are two Dalek factions: Imperial Daleks on the orbiting mothership, controlling the school, and Renegade Daleks, who reject the Emperor's authority, controlling the junkyard. Both sides seek the Hand of Omega, a Time Lord device the Doctor left on Earth during his first visit to 1963.Smith is a secret associate of Ratcliffe, leader of a group of fascists, reporting to a Renegade battle computer, which uses a schoolgirl as its eyes and ears. The Doctor has the Hand buried in a local cemetery, but Ratcliffe finds it, tipped off by Smith. Imperial Daleks arrive to seize it from the Renegades, but the Doctor and Ace defeat them and destroy their transmat. Anticipating a siege, the Doctor has Gilmore fortify the school while he disables the Renegade "time controller", fleeing with Daleks in pursuit, returning to the school just as the Imperial Daleks land. The Imperials eventually defeat the Renegades after deploying a Special Weapons Dalek, wiping out all but a Supreme Dalek, allowing Ratcliffe and Smith to escape with the controller, pursued by the schoolgirl, who kills Ratcliffe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germinal_(novel)"title="Germinal (novel)">
The novel's central character is Étienne Lantier, previously seen in "L'Assommoir" (1877), and originally to have been the central character in Zola's "murder on the trains" thriller "La Bête humaine" (1890) before the overwhelmingly positive reaction to "Germinal" persuaded him otherwise. The young migrant worker arrives at the forbidding coal mining town of Montsou in the bleak area of the far north of France to earn a living as a miner. Sacked from his previous job on the railways for assaulting a superior, Étienne befriends the veteran miner Maheu, who finds him somewhere to stay and gets him a job pushing the carts down the pit.Étienne is portrayed as a hard-working idealist but also a naïve youth; Zola's genetic theories come into play as Étienne is presumed to have inherited his Macquart ancestors' traits of hotheaded impulsiveness and an addictive personality capable of exploding into rage under the influence of drink or strong passions. Zola keeps his theorizing in the background and Étienne's motivations are much more natural as a result. He embraces socialist principles, reading large amounts of working class movement literature and fraternizing with Souvarine, a Russian anarchist and political émigré who has also come to Montsou to seek a living in the pits, and Rasseneur, a pub owner. Étienne's simplistic understanding of socialist politics and their rousing effect on him are very reminiscent of the rebel Silvère in the first novel in the cycle, "La Fortune des Rougon" (1871).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Liaisons_dangereuses"title="Les Liaisons dangereuses">
The Marquise de Merteuil is determined to corrupt the young Cécile de Volanges, whose mother has only recently brought her out of a convent to be married—to Merteuil's previous lover, who has rudely discarded her. At the same time the notorious Vicomte de Valmont is determined to seduce the virtuous, married, and therefore inaccessible Madame de Tourvel, who is staying with his aunt while her husband is away on a court case. Cécile falls in love with the Chevalier Danceny (her young music tutor), and Merteuil and Valmont pretend to help the secret lovers in order to gain their trust and manipulate them later to benefit their own schemes.Merteuil first suggests that the Vicomte should seduce Cécile in order to enact her revenge on Cécile's future husband but Valmont refuses, finding the challenge too easy and preferring to devote himself to seducing Madame de Tourvel. He is however interested in resuming their affair. Merteuil promises Valmont that if he seduces Madame de Tourvel and provides her with written proof of seduction, she will spend the night with him. At first Valmont is able to convince Tourvel that he has turned over a new leaf, but he does not find it as easy as his many other conquests. During the course of his pursuit, Valmont discovers that Cécile's mother has written to Madame de Tourvel warning her about him. He avenges himself by seducing Cécile as Merteuil had suggested. Meanwhile, Merteuil takes Danceny as her lover.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_First_Circle"title="In the First Circle">
Innokentii Volodin, a diplomat, makes a telephone call to an old family doctor (Dobrumov) he feels obliged by conscience to make, even though he knows he could be arrested. His call is taped and the NKVD seek to identify who has made the call.The "sharashka" prisoners, or zeks, work on technical projects to assist state security agencies and generally pander to Stalin's increasing paranoia. While most are aware of how much better off they are than "regular" gulag prisoners (some of them having come from gulags themselves), some are also conscious of the overwhelming moral dilemma of working to aid a system that is the cause of so much suffering. As Lev Rubin is given the task of identifying the voice in the recorded phone call, he examines printed spectrographs of the voice and compares them with recordings of Volodin and four other suspects. He narrows it down to Volodin and one other suspect, both of whom are arrested.By the end of the book, several zeks, including Gleb Nerzhin, the autobiographical hero, choose to stop co-operating, even though their choice means being sent to much harsher camps.Volodin, initially crushed by the ordeal of his arrest, begins to find encouragement at the end of his first night in prison.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Be_Not_Proud_(book)"title="Death Be Not Proud (book)">
The book is an account of Johnny Gunther's experience with a brain tumor, and ends with his death at age 17.The book consists of two parts. Part 1 contains the primary narrative of the book, while Part 2 contains additional letters written by Johnny, excerpts from his diary, and a short essay by his mother, Frances Gunther.The primary narrative consists of five chapters, and an Aftermath section.Chapter 1 begins with Johnny's diagnosis with a brain tumor in the spring of 1946. It describes the first operation that Johnny underwent, at the Neurological Institute of New York. The surgery confirmed the existence of the tumor. One of his doctors, Tracy Putnam, said, "It was about the size of an orange. I got half of it." Johnny recovered from the surgery, while the nature of the tumor was assessed: it was described as an "astroblastoma undergoing transformation".Chapter 2 begins in June 1946 when Johnny underwent daily X-ray treatment of his tumor until June 20. Johnny's vision was impaired to varying degrees because of papilledema (pressure on the nerves to the eyes) caused by the tumor. Johnny's parents, John and Frances, sought help from many sources. Between August 1 and 5, 1946, Johnny was treated with chlormethine, described by the author as mustard. Dr. Max Gerson was consulted, and Johnny began a special, highly regimented program of diet and enemas on September 7, 1946, visiting Dr. Gerson's nursing home for the first time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Oecumene"title="The Golden Oecumene">
The author's first novel, it revolves around the protagonist Phaethon (full name Phaethon Prime Rhadamanth Humodified (augment) Uncomposed, Indepconsciousness, Base Neuroformed, Silver-Gray Manorial Schola, Era 7043). The novel concerns Phaethon's discovery that parts of his past have been edited out of his mind—apparently by himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Soldier_Švejk"title="The Good Soldier Švejk">
The story begins in Prague with news of the assassination in Sarajevo that precipitates World War I.Švejk displays such enthusiasm about faithfully serving the Austrian Emperor in battle that no one can decide whether he is merely an imbecile or is craftily undermining the war effort. He is arrested by a member of the state police, Bretschneider, after making some politically insensitive remarks, and is sent to prison. After being certified insane he is transferred to a madhouse, before being ejected.Švejk gets his charwoman to wheel him (he claims to be suffering from rheumatism) to the recruitment offices in Prague, where his apparent zeal causes a minor sensation. He is transferred to a hospital for malingerers because of his rheumatism. He finally joins the army as batman to army chaplain Otto Katz. Katz was well able to avoid being sent to the front, managing to have a soft military job in Prague. However, Katz loses Švejk at cards to Senior Lieutenant Lukáš, whose batman he then becomes - which would eventually lead him to the front.Lukáš is posted with his march battalion to barracks in České Budějovice, in Southern Bohemia, preparatory to being sent to the front. After missing all the trains to Budějovice, Švejk embarks on a long anabasis on foot around Southern Bohemia in a vain attempt to find Budějovice, before being arrested as a possible spy and deserter (a charge he strenuously denies) and escorted to his regiment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_the_Black_Girl_in_Her_Search_for_God"title="The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God">
After she becomes dissatisfied with the inconsistencies of the answers the missionary who has converted her gives to her questions, the girl leaves to wander in the forest, searching for God. One by one, she actually meets several versions of "God"—from the vengeful deity of the early books of the Bible, to the philosophical version of the Book of Job. She also meets two versions of Jesus—a kindly but ineffective young man, and another who makes a living by posing for an artist depicting him on a cross. Muhammad, and the Muslim view of God, fare no better.She then meets an atheist behaviourist (with a strong resemblance to Ivan Pavlov) and a coterie of intellectuals who explain that speculations about God are passé, and that a better quest lies in abstract mathematics. She disposes of them all, first and last, by trenchant logic and the occasional skilled use of her knobkerry (wooden club).Eventually she meets an old gentleman who (like Voltaire) persuades her to seek God by working in a garden. He eventually persuades her to abandon her quest, settle down with a "coarse" red-headed Irishman and rear a "charmingly coffee-coloured" family. Only after the children are grown and gone does she resume her searching, and by then her "strengthened mental powers take her far beyond the stage at which there is fun in smashing idols".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_Sky"title="Singularity Sky">
The Festival, a civilisation of uploaded minds, arrives at Rochard's World, an outlying colony of the New Republic. It begins breaking down objects in the system to make technology for its stay. Then it begins making contact with the inhabitants of the planet by dropping cell phones, forbidden to most citizens of the planet, from low orbit.Those who pick them up hear the Festival, "Entertain us," it asks, "and we will give you what you want." Interlocutors who successfully entertain the Festival by telling it something it has not heard are rewarded with anything they wish for. At first they request food or other modest needs, but then Burya Rubenstein, exiled to the colony for his role in leading an uprising, asks for a cornucopia machine in return for a political tract on the disruptive effect a sudden singularity would have on repressive regimes. Within days the theory becomes reality, as a post-scarcity economy develops and the government is threatened by Rubenstein's uprising and its advanced weaponry. A naval detachment challenges the Festival but is destroyed.In the New Republic's capital city of New Prague, 40 light-years away, deep-cover UN agent Rachel Mansour keeps a close eye as the New Republic prepares a military response. Not only does the New Republic misunderstand the Festival, it seriously underestimates its military capabilities. Of greater concern to Rachel is that it may be planning to approach Rochard's World via a closed timelike loop, arriving there shortly after the Festival did, but earlier than the Navy left the capital. If the Eschaton responds to this apparent violation of causality as the UN fears it might, many settled worlds could have to be evacuated. She recruits Martin Springfield, an Earth-based engineer who has been hired by the New Republic's Admiralty to upgrade its drive systems, to keep an eye out for any signs of such a plan. Unbeknownst to her, Martin is an agent of the Eschaton and has been assigned to sabotage the Admiralty's plan just slightly enough to make it seem unworkable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marvelous_Land_of_Oz"title="The Marvelous Land of Oz">
The events are set shortly after the events in "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" and after Dorothy Gale's departure back to Kansas. The protagonist of the novel is an orphan boy called Tip. For as long as he can remember, Tip has been under the guardianship of a cruel Wicked Witch named Mombi and lives in the northern quadrant of Oz called Gillikin Country. Mombi has always been extremely mean and abusive to Tip. As Mombi is returning home one day, Tip plans to get revenge and frighten her with a wooden man he has made, with a large Jack-o'-lantern he carves for a head, thus naming him Jack Pumpkinhead. To Tip's dismay, Mombi is not fooled by this trick, and she takes this opportunity to demonstrate the new magical "Powder of Life" that she had just obtained from another sorcerer. Mombi tells Tip that she intends to transform him into a marble statue to punish him for his mischievous ways.To avoid being turned into a marble statue, Tip runs away with Jack that very same night and steals the Powder of Life. He uses it to animate the wooden Sawhorse for Jack to ride. The Sawhorse runs so quickly that Tip is left behind. Walking alone, he meets General Jinjur's all-girl Army of Revolt, which is planning to overthrow the Scarecrow (who has ruled the Emerald City since the end of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz"). Meanwhile, Jack and the Sawhorse arrive at the Emerald City and make the acquaintance of His Majesty the Scarecrow. Jinjur and her crew invade the Emerald City, terrorize the citizens, and loot the city, causing great havoc and chaos. Tip joins Jack and the Scarecrow in the palace, and they escape on the Sawhorse's back.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozma_of_Oz"title="Ozma of Oz">
On an ocean voyage with her uncle Henry to Australia, Dorothy is blown into the sea by a storm. She takes refuge on a floating chicken-coop, which washes ashore, along with the coop and a hen in it. The hen is able to speak; Dorothy gives it the name "Billina". Exploring the land, Dorothy and Billina are menaced by a tribe of brightly dressed "Wheelers", who have wheels instead of hands and feet. They also find a clockwork man named Tik-Tok (one of the first intelligent humanoid automatons in literature), who joins them.Tik-Tok informs Dorothy and Billina that they are in the Land of Ev, which currently has no competent ruler, its king having committed suicide after selling his family to the Nome King. The three visit the castle of Princess Langwidere, who has many exchangeable, detachable heads. When Dorothy refuses to let Langwidere take her head and add it to her collection, Langwidere has a tantrum and locks Dorothy in a high tower within the palace.Luckily, Princess Ozma and her Royal Court of Oz (many of whom appeared in the two previous "Oz" books) just happen to cross over the Deadly Desert on a mission to free the royal family from the Nome King. Upon arriving, Ozma takes charge and has Dorothy, Billina and Tik-Tok released from Langwidere's custody. The three join Ozma's expedition to the Kingdom of the Nomes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Doctors_(Doctor_Who)"title="The Three Doctors (Doctor Who)">
A superluminal signal is sent to Earth, carrying with it an energy blob that seems intent on capturing the Doctor. The homeworld of the Time Lords is also under siege, their power being drained through a black hole. Trapped themselves, and desperate to send help, the Time Lords do the unthinkable, breaking the First Law of Time by recruiting a previous incarnation of the Doctor from his own past. As the Second Doctor cannot get along with the present Third Doctor, they attempt to retrieve the First Doctor to "keep them in order", but he is trapped in a "time eddy", unable to fully materialise, communicating through a viewscreen. The Doctors investigate, while UNIT headquarters faces an attack by shapeless blob-like creatures. The First Doctor realises that the black hole is a bridge between universes, so they allow the TARDIS to be swallowed up by the energy creature, finding themselves in an antimatter universe created by the legendary Time Lord Omega, a solar engineer who created the supernova that powers Time Lord civilisation, but which also supposedly killed him. In fact, he remains trapped in his antimatter universe, whose reality is maintained by his will alone (or as described by Omega himself, the "...Atlas of [his] world..."). 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(novel)"title="Prey (novel)">
The novel is narrated by protagonist Jack Forman, an unemployed software programmer taking the role of a house husband. His wife, Julia, serves as a high ranking executive for a Nanorobotics company called Xymos. Julia claims to be working on revolutionary imaging technology, which takes up most of her time. Her intense focus on work creates distance between herself and her family, but Jack believes Julia may be having an affair.One night, Julia shows Jack a video of Xymos nanobots being injected into a human test subject. Jack is impressed, but grows more suspicious as he notices the video was not filmed on the day she claimed it to be. Later in the night their baby Amanda woke in agony, her body bright red. Jack took her to the hospital, but the doctors could not identify the cause of her pain. She was given an MRI when suddenly her pain stopped and her skin returned to a normal shade. A bewildered Jack returns home to a strangely indifferent Julia, who leaves in a hurry claiming to be off to an urgent business trip.A series of strange events lead Jack to suspect something bigger is occurring than what he can see. First, their son Eric claimed to have seen "silver men" cleaning the house in the middle of the night. Next, Jack finds a strange device located underneath Amanda's bed. Soon after, memory chips on Eric's MP3 player turned directly to dust. Julia began to display abusive behavior toward her family, and was seen driving with an unidentifiable passenger. In an unexpected twist, Julia is injured in a car crash leaving Jack to consult for Xymos, as project manager Ricky is struggling with the nanobots.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tin_Woodman_of_Oz"title="The Tin Woodman of Oz">
The Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow are regaling each other with tales at the Woodman's palace in the Winkie Country when a Gillikin boy named Woot wanders in. After he is fed and rested, Woot asks the Woodman how he came to be made of tin.He relates how the Wicked Witch of the East enchanted his axe and caused him to chop his body parts off limb by limb, because he was in love with her ward, Nimmie Amee. Each chopped limb was replaced by the tinsmith Ku-Klip with a counterpart made of tin. (Since Oz is a fairyland, no one can die, even when the parts of their body are separated from each other, unless those people are witches and someone drops a house onto them.) Without a heart, the Tin Woodman felt he could no longer love Nimmie Amee and he left her. Dorothy and the Scarecrow found him after he had rusted in the forest (an event related in "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz") and went with him to the Emerald City where the Wizard gave him a heart. Woot suggests that the heart may have made him kind, but it did not make him loving, or he would have returned to Nimmie Amee. This shames the Tin Woodman and inspires him to journey to the Munchkin Country and find her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocannon's_World"title="Rocannon's World">
## Semley's story.The novel begins with a prologue called "Semley's Necklace", which was first published as a stand-alone story titled "The Dowry of Angyar" in "Amazing Stories" (September 1964). A young woman named Semley takes a space voyage from her unnamed, technologically primitive planet to a museum to reclaim a family heirloom.An interstellar society of the League of All Worlds has placed an automated spaceship at the disposal of the more advanced underground dwellers of the planet. Semley descends into their tunnels, uses the spaceship for the flight and returns after sixteen years. Due to relativistic time dilation while the trip will be of short duration for her, many years will elapse on her planet. She returns to find her daughter grown up and her husband dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-9_and_Company"title="K-9 and Company">
Sarah Jane Smith visits her Aunt Lavinia, who was occasionally mentioned but never seen in "Doctor Who". When she arrives at her aunt's house, though, she finds that her learned relative has left early for a lecture tour in America, Christmas notwithstanding. Sarah is thus left disappointed by the prospect of another holiday without family. Lavinia's ward, Brendan Richards, breaks her moment of reflection on her aunt's sudden disappearance. After picking him up from the railway station, they return to the house and discover a large crate that has been waiting for Sarah for a number of years. When they open it, they discover a mechanical dog named K9. Upon activation, it tells Sarah that it is a gift from the Doctor.Brendan's curiosity about K9 is matched only by Sarah's renewed concern over Lavinia's absence. They thus split up and follow their new-found obsessions. Sarah goes into town to question the locals, and Brendan stays behind to test the capabilities of Sarah's new "pet". In town, Sarah discovers that Lavinia has become disliked by some because of her blunt letters to the local newspaper editors about a growing practice of witchcraft in the area. Brendan, meanwhile, is attacked while using K9 to analyse soil samples in Lavinia's garden. His attackers, George Tracey and his son, Peter, are tied into the local coven. George Tracey flees before Brendan can get a good look at him, however K9 uses his laser gun to stun Peter before setting off in pursuit of George. Peter is pinioned and interrogated by Brendan, but makes his escape when Brendan goes outside to investigate a crashing sound which turns out to be the accidental destruction of a greenhouse by K9 in his pursuit of the elder Tracey.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_of_the_Mohicans"title="The Last of the Mohicans">
Cora and Alice Munro, daughters of Lieutenant Colonel Munro, are traveling with Major Duncan Heyward from Fort Edward to Fort William Henry, where Munro is in command, and acquire another companion in David Gamut, a singing teacher. They are guided through the forest by a native named Magua, who leads them through a shortcut unaccompanied by the British militia. Heyward is dissatisfied with Magua's shortcut, and the party roams unguided and finally join Natty Bumppo (known as Hawk-eye), a scout for the British, and his two Mohican friends, Chingachgook and his son Uncas. Heyward becomes suspicious of Magua, and Hawk-eye and the Mohicans agree with his suspicion, that Magua is a Huron scout secretly allied with the French. Upon discovery as such, Magua escapes, and in the (correct) belief that Magua will return with Huron reinforcements, Hawk-eye and the Mohicans lead their new companions to a hidden cave on an island in a river. They are attacked there by the Hurons, and their ammunition is soon exhausted. Knowing they will be killed instantly but that the English party will make valuable captives, Hawk-eye and the Mohicans escape, with a promise to return for their companions.Magua and the Hurons capture Heyward, Gamut, and the Munro sisters. Magua admits that he is seeking revenge against Cora's father, Colonel Munro, for turning him into an alcoholic with whiskey (causing him to be temporarily cast out of the Hurons) and then whipping him at a post for drunken behavior. He offers to spare the party if Cora becomes his wife, but she refuses. Upon a second refusal, he sentences the prisoners to death. Hawk-eye and the Mohicans rescue all four and lead them to a dilapidated building that was involved in a battle between the Huron and the British some years ago. They are nearly attacked again, but the Hurons leave the area, rather than disturb the graves of their tribesmen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_and_the_Wizard_in_Oz"title="Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz">
Dorothy Gale is gladly joining her Uncle Henry in California to visit relatives who live at Hugson's Ranch, after their vacation from Australia in "Ozma of Oz". Dorothy meets Hugson's nephew who is her second cousin, Zeb of Hugson's Ranch. Dorothy, Eureka (her cat) and Zeb are riding a buggy being pulled by a cab-horse named Jim when a violent earthquake strikes. A crevice opens in the ground beneath them and they fall deep into the Earth.Dorothy, Eureka, Jim, Zeb, and the buggy land in the underground Land of the Mangaboos, a race of vegetable people who grow on vines. The Mangaboos accuse them of causing the earthquake, which has damaged many of their glass buildings. Just as they are about to be sentenced to death by the Mangaboos, a hot air balloon descends, and in the basket is the former Wizard of Oz, whom Dorothy last saw as he floated away into the sky from the Emerald City at the end of the earlier book "The Wizard of Oz".The Wizard demonstrates his (humbug) magic powers in a contest with the Mangaboo Sorcerer, first, by "conjuring" nine tiny, mouse-sized piglets (actually taking them from his pocket by sleight-of-hand), and then, by lighting a fire, which is a phenomenon unknown to the Mangaboos. The Sorcerer threatens the Wizard, who responds by cutting him in two, revealing his vegetable nature. The Mangaboo prince gives the Wizard a temporary job as court wizard, but the death sentence is only postponed until a new, native Mangaboo Sorcerer grows ripe enough to serve. Eureka asks for permission to eat one of the piglets, but the Wizard angrily refuses to allow this. The Mangaboo people eventually drive the travelers out of their country into a dark tunnel, which leads to another kingdom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_the_Foundation"title="Forward the Foundation">
"Forward the Foundation" continues the chronicles of the life of Hari Seldon, first begun in "Prelude to Foundation". The story takes place on Trantor, and begins eight years after the events of "Prelude to Foundation". It depicts how Seldon develops his theory of psychohistory from hypothetical concept to practical application, and its application in the Seldon plan.In the latter years of the reign of Emperor Cleon I, Seldon is dragged into the world of galactic politics by Yugo Amaryl's concern over Seldon's friend Eto Demerzel, known only to Seldon and Dors Venabili as R. Daneel Olivaw. A new political faction threatens Demerzel, and consequently the fate of the Galactic Empire. In the aftermath Demerzel steps down as First Minister, vanishing to attend to other matters in the galaxy. Cleon appoints Seldon, somewhat unwilling, as the new First Minister. After a ten-year period of relative silence on Trantor, the remains of the political faction exploit Trantor's faults in an attempted coup. As a result, the emperor is assassinated, and a military junta takes over for a disastrous decade. Seldon steps down from his government position and resumes leadership of the psychohistory project.Seldon and others, most notably Yugo Amaryl, finally develop psychohistory to the point that he can initiate what will come to be known as the Seldon Plan, the road map for drastically shortening the interregnum between the First and Second Empires.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Confederacy_of_Dunces"title="A Confederacy of Dunces">
Ignatius Jacques Reilly is an overweight and unemployed thirty-year-old with a degree in Medieval History who lives with his mother, Irene Reilly. He utterly loathes the world around him, which he feels has lost the values of geometry and theology. One afternoon, Reilly's mother drives him 'downtown in the old Plymouth, and while she was at the doctor's seeing about her arthritis, Ignatius had bought some sheet music at Werlein's for his trumpet and a new string for his lute.' While Reilly waits for his mother, Officer Angelo Mancuso approaches Reilly and demands that the latter produce identification. Affronted and outraged by Mancuso's unwarranted zeal and officious manner, Reilly protests his innocence to the crowd while denouncing the city's vices and the graft of the local police. An elderly man, Claude Robichaux, takes Reilly's side, denouncing Officer Mancuso and the police as "communists". In the resulting uproar, Reilly and his embarrassed mother escape, taking refuge in a bar in case Officer Mancuso is still in hot pursuit.In the bar, Mrs. Reilly then drinks too much. As a result, she crashes her car. The fallout for the accident totals $1020, a sizable amount of money in early 1960s New Orleans. Ignatius is forced to work for the first time in many years in order to help his mother pay for the accident.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tik-Tok_of_Oz"title="Tik-Tok of Oz">
Queen Ann Soforth of Oogaboo, a small monarchy separated from the rest of Oz's Winkie Country, sets out to raise an army to conquer Oz. Seventeen men eventually make up the Army of Oogaboo (sixteen officers and one private); they march out of their valley. Glinda the Good, protector of Oz, magically rearranges the path through the mountains and Queen Ann and her army march out of Oz into a low-lying, befogged country.Betsy Bobbin, a girl who is a year older than Dorothy Gale, and her loyal mule Hank have washed ashore during a storm. They arrive at a large greenhouse that is the domain of the Rose Kingdom, where the roses tell them that no strangers are allowed. Just as the Royal Gardener (apparently the only human allowed in this flowery kingdom) is about to pass sentence on Betsy and Hank, the Shaggy Man falls through the greenhouse's roof, and charms the Gardener into sparing all of their lives with his Love Magnet. The flowers, not having hearts, are unaffected by the Magnet, and force the travelers to leave, taking with them the newly plucked Rose Princess Ozga, a cousin of Ozma, the ruler of Oz.The Shaggy Man relates how Ozma sent him here via the Magic Belt because he wanted to find his brother, who went digging underground in Colorado and disappeared. He surmised that the Nome King, ruler of the underground Nome Kingdom, captured him. They meet up with Polychrome the Rainbow's Daughter, and they rescue Tik-Tok from the well where the Nome King had tossed him. Once Tik-Tok is wound up, he accompanies Betsy, Hank, the Shaggy Man, Ozga, and Polychrome to their chance encounter with Queen Ann and her army. In a rage, Queen Ann orders them to be seized and bound, but Private Files — the only private in this army of generals, colonels, and majors — refuses to bind innocent girls. He resigns his commission on the spot. When Queen Ann learns of the riches to be found in the Nome King's underground kingdom, she calms down and accepts the services of Tik-Tok as her new private.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truce_at_Bakura"title="The Truce at Bakura">
While recovering from their victory against the Empire at Endor, the Rebel Alliance intercepts an Imperial probe containing a distress call for the Emperor. The message details a lizardlike race of aliens invading the Outer Rim planet Bakura. With Palpatine dead and the Imperial Navy scattered, Luke Skywalker volunteers to lead a force to intercept the alien invasion and save Bakura.Upon arrival, the Rebel Alliance's force has no choice but to ally with the remnants of the Imperial garrison to repel an invasion by the reptilian Ssi-Ruuk race under the Ssi-ruuvi Imperium, which seeks to establish a beachhead in the larger galaxy. The Ssi-Ruuk seek to harvest a supply of life forms, whose life energies power their advanced technology through a process known as entechment. Luke especially intrigues the Ssi-Ruuk, because they believe his Force powers could allow the Ssi-ruuk to entech beings from a distance. Obi-Wan Kenobi appears to Luke and alerts him to the danger of the Ssi-Ruuk if they get into the greater galaxy with this technology. The Ssi-ruuk themselves cannot sense the Force, but they know of it through a captured human, Dev Sibwarra, who is Force-sensitive but untrained (his mother was killed by the Ssi-ruuk) and has been brainwashed into furthering the Ssi-ruuvi agenda.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scarecrow_of_Oz"title="The Scarecrow of Oz">
Cap'n Bill, a sailor with a wooden peg-leg, and his friend, a little girl named Trot, set out from California on a calm day for a short ride in their row-boat. A freak whirlpool capsizes their boat and pulls them under water, where they are carried by mermaids (referred to but not seen) to a cave. They are soon joined by a flying creature called an Ork. Passing through a dark tunnel out of the cave, the three arrive at an island inhabited by a grim man calling himself Pessim the Observer. Cap'n Bill and Trot reduce their size by eating magic shrinking-berries, and the Ork carries them away from the island to the land of Mo, where they eat another type of magic berries and resume their normal size.They meet the Bumpy Man, who specializes in serving sugar and molasses and has some of their appearance too. After dining on Mo rain (lemonade) and Mo snow (popcorn), they run into Button Bright, the boy from "The Road to Oz" who has gotten lost again. Cap'n Bill calls down some of the native birds (who, like all birds in fairy countries, can talk back) and offers them the "growing" berries to make them large enough to carry himself, Trot, and Button-Bright to the land of Oz. When they make it across the desert, Button-Bright, Cap'n Bill, and Trot are set down in a field and the Ork leaves them to find his own country, which he got lost from on a routine flight.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Capital"title="The Old Capital">
Chieko Sada is the daughter of Takichiro and Shige, who operate a wholesale dry goods shop in the NakagyoWard of Kyoto. Now twenty, Chieko has known since she was in middle school that she was a foundling adopted by Takichiro and Shige. However, as told by Shige, they snatched Chieko when she was a baby "Under the cherry blossoms at night at Gion Shrine". The discrepancy on whether Chieko was a foundling or stolen is part of the plot and is revealed later in the story.Soon after a chance encounter at Yasaka Shrine, Chieko learns of a twin sister Naeko, who had remained in her home village in Kitayama working in the mountain forests of cryptomeria north of the city. The identical looks of Chieko and Naeko confuse Hideo, a traditional weaver, who is one potential suitor of Chieko. The novel, one of the last that Kawabata completed before his death, examines themes common to much of his literature: aging and decline; old culture in the commercial new Japan; the muted expression of strong yet repressed emotion; the role of accident and misunderstanding in shaping lives.The story is set in Kyoto, and incorporates various festivals celebrated there. One of these is the Gion festival which occurs in the book during July. As part of the Gion festival, there is a parade of floats constructed by various neighborhoods in Kyoto and one of Chieko's fond memories is of Shin'ichi, who is also interested in Chieko, participating as a festival boy. The Festival of the Ages is another important festival and this is where Hideo takes Chieko's twin, Naeko, to view the parade.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little,_Big"title="Little, Big">
Turn-of-the-century American architect John Drinkwater begins to suspect that within this world there lies another (and within that, another and another ad infinitum, each larger than the world that contains it). Towards the center is the realm of the fairies, which his wife, the Englishwoman Violet Bramble, can see and talk with but he can′t. Drinkwater gathers his thoughts into an ever-evolving book entitled "The Architecture of Country Houses", which goes through at least six ever longer and more mystical editions.Somewhere around the start of the 20th century, Drinkwater designs and builds a house called Edgewood north of New York City. It is a composite of many styles, each built over and across the others, supposedly as a ″sampler″ for customers thinking about employing Drinkwater's firm. It has the effect of disorienting visitors and somehow protecting the family, and it proves to be a door leading to the outer realm of Faerie.At the beginning of the story, well after the deaths of Drinkwater and his wife, their great-granddaughter Daily Alice falls in love with and marries a stranger, ″Smoky″ Barnable. Alice has only briefly met Smoky at the home of her City cousin George Mouse. Smoky gradually realizes that Alice and her sister Sophie claimed to see fairies when they were younger and that they and their family see their history as ″the Tale″.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timequake"title="Timequake">
Vonnegut uses the premise of a timequake (or repetition of actions) in which there is no free will. The idea of determinism is explored—as it is in many of his previous works—to assert that people really have no free will. Kilgore Trout serves again as the main character, who the author declares as having died in 2001, at the fictitious Xanadu retreat in Rhode Island. Vonnegut explains in the beginning of the book that he was not satisfied with the original version of "Timequake" he wrote (or "Timequake One"). Taking parts of "Timequake One" and combining it with personal thoughts and anecdotes produced the finished product, so-called "Timequake Two". Many of the anecdotes deal with Vonnegut's family, the death of loved ones, and people's last words.The plot, while centered on Trout, is also a sort of ramble in which Vonnegut relays tangents to the plot and comes back dozens of pages later: the timequake has thrust citizens of the year 2001 back in time to 1991 to repeat every action they undertook during that time.Most of the small stories in the book expound on the depression and sadness wrought by watching oneself make bad choices: people watch their parents die again, drive drunk or cause accidents that severely injure others. At the end of the timequake, when people resume control, they are depressed and gripped by ennui. Kilgore Trout is the only one not affected by the apathy, and thus helps revive others by telling them, "You were sick, but now you're well, and there's work to do."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neverending_Story"title="The Neverending Story">
The book centres on a boy, Bastian Balthazar Bux, an overweight and strange child who is neglected by his father after the death of Bastian's mother. While escaping from some bullies, Bastian bursts into the antiquarian book store of Carl Conrad Coreander, where he finds his interest held by a book called "The Neverending Story". Unable to resist, he steals the book and hides in his school's attic, where he begins to read.The story Bastian reads is set in the magical land of Fantastica, a place of wonder ruled by the benevolent and mysterious Childlike Empress. A great delegation has come to the Empress to seek her help against a formless entity called "The Nothing". The delegates are shocked when the Empress's physician, a centaur named Cairon, informs them that the Empress is ill, and has chosen a boy warrior named Atreyu to find a cure. Upon finding Atreyu, Cairon gives him AURYN: a powerful medallion that protects him from all harm. At the advice of the giant turtle Morla the Aged One, Atreyu sets off in search of an invisible oracle known as Uyulala, who may know the Empress's cure. In reaching her, he is aided by a luckdragon named Falkor, whom he rescues from the shapeshifting creature Ygramul the Many. By Uyulala, he is told the only thing that can save the Empress is a new name given to her by a human, who can only be found beyond Fantastica's borders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinkitink_in_Oz"title="Rinkitink in Oz">
Prince Inga is the son of King Kitticut and Queen Garee, who rule the island kingdom of Pingaree. Kitticut tells Inga that years earlier, when armies from the neighboring islands of Regos and Coregos attempted to invade and conquer Pingaree, they were repelled by Kitticut himself with the aid of three magic pearls. The blue pearl gives its bearer superhuman strength, the pink pearl protects him from any harm, and the white pearl speaks words of wisdom.The jovial fat King Rinkitink of Gilgad arrives in Pingaree on royal holiday, and remains as Kitticut's guest for several weeks. Rinkitink usually rides Bilbil, a surly talking goat. One day invaders from Regos and Coregos arrive again, and seize King Kitticut before he can reach his magic pearls. All the people are carried into slavery, except Inga and Rinkitink who escape along with Bilbil. Inga resolves to free his people with the aid of the magic pearls. Keeping the pearls secret from Rinkitink, he hides them in his shoes, and the three sail to Regos.The wicked King Gos of Regos and his army are easily defeated by the strength and invulnerability of Inga, and they flee to the neighboring island of Coregos, ruled by the equally wicked Queen Cor. Inga and Rinkitink sleep in the palace, but the next morning both shoes along with the pink and blue pearls they contain are accidentally lost. The shoes are found by a poor charcoal burner, who takes them home to give to his daughter Zella. Queen Cor arrives on Regos and captures the now powerless Inga and Rinkitink, and brings them back to Coregos.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godric_(novel)"title="Godric (novel)">
Godric of Finchale is joined at his hermitage on the banks of the River Wear by Reginald, a monk sent by the abbot of Rievaulx Abbey with instructions to record the aging saint’s biography. The arrival of the enthusiastic young monk plunges Godric back into his past, and he unflinchingly narrates the ribald tale of his own history, which is carefully edited by Reginald and set down in restrained and laudatory prose more befitting of the life of a saint. Having survived a near drowning in the sea at a young age, Godric leaves home for a life of petty crime – selling counterfeit relics and the ostensibly holy hair of nuns. Following a dreamlike encounter on the Island of Farne with an apparition who identifies himself as Saint Cuthbert, Godric appears set to spend his life seeking God. His meeting with the roguish Roger Mouse, however, puts paid to any notion of quests for personal holiness. The two embark upon a life of crime and villainy aboard their boat, the "Saint Espirit", where they hatch a series of schemes to defraud pilgrims journeying to the Holy Land and commit acts of piracy, all the while hoarding their growing stockpile of treasure. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrowsmith_(novel)"title="Arrowsmith (novel)">
"Arrowsmith" tells the story of bright and scientifically minded Martin Arrowsmith of Elk Mills, Winnemac (the same fictional state in which several of Lewis's other novels are set), as he makes his way from a small town in the Midwest to the upper echelons of the scientific community at a prestigious foundation in New York City. Along the way he begins medical school. He becomes engaged to one woman, cheats on her with another woman, becomes engaged to the second woman and then finally invites both women to a lunch to settle the issue. He eventually insults his mentor, Max Gottlieb, and is suspended from school. He takes up life as an ordinary worker, then marries Leora with her family supporting him based on the promise that he will take up private practice as the only doctor in tiny Wheatsylvania, North Dakota. Frustrated with the work, he moves on to a job at the state Department of Public Health branch in Nautilus, Iowa, then becomes romantically involved with the young daughter of its local director. After a series of political disputes, he resigns and joins the staff of an exclusive private hospital in Chicago. Finally, Arrowsmith is recognized by his former mentor, Gottlieb, for a scientific paper he has written, and is invited to take a post with a wealthy and elite research institute in New York City. The book's climax deals with Arrowsmith's discovery of a phage that destroys bacteria and his experiences as he faces an outbreak of bubonic plague on a fictional Caribbean island.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Princess_of_Oz"title="The Lost Princess of Oz">
Dorothy has risen from bed for the day and is seeing to her friends in the Emerald City and notices that Ozma has not awakened yet. Dorothy goes into Ozma's chambers only to find she is not there.Glinda awakens in her palace in the Quadling Country and finds her Great Book of Records is missing. She goes to prepare a magic spell to find it- only to see her magic tools are gone as well. She dispatches a messenger to the Emerald City to relay news of the theft. Receiving the news, the Wizard hastily offers his magic tools to assist Glinda, however, these are missing as well. Glinda, Dorothy, and the Wizard organize search parties to find Ozma and the missing magic. Accompanying them are Button-Bright, Trot, and Betsy Bobbin. Dorothy and the Wizard's party begins to search the Winkie Country to the west of the Emerald City.Meanwhile, in the southwestern corner of the Winkie Country on a plateau belonging to the Yips, and Cayke the cookie cook has had her diamond-studded gold dishpan stolen. The self-proclaimed adviser to the Yips, a human-sized dandy of a frog called the Frogman, hears Cayke's story and offers to help her find the dishpan. When they have gotten down the mountain, Cayke reveals to the Frogman that the dishpan has magic powers, for her cookies come out perfect every time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Ships"title="The Time Ships">
After the events related in "The Time Machine", the Time Traveler (his first name, Moses, is given in the novel but applied to the Time Traveler's younger self) prepares, in 1891, to return to the year 802,701 and save Weena, the Eloi who died in the fire with the Morlocks. He reveals that the quartz construction of the time machine is suffused with a radioactive substance he calls Plattnerite for the mysterious benefactor who gave him the sample to study twenty years earlier, in 1871.The Time Traveler departs into the future and stops in AD 657,208 when he notes the daytime sky has gone permanently dark. He arrives and is abducted by a branch of Morlocks more culturally advanced than the ones he met before. One of their number, Nebogipfel (the name of a character from Wells' "The Chronic Argonauts"), explains after hearing the Time Traveler's own story that the conflict between Eloi and Morlocks never occurred due to the Writer's publication of the story that became "The Time Machine". The timeline he sought to go to is inaccessible to him now. The Morlocks of this timeline have constructed a Dyson sphere around the inner Solar System and use the Sun's energy to power it. Humans as the Time Traveler knows them live on the sunlit inner surface of the Sphere while the Morlocks live on the outer shell. The Time Traveler convinces Nebogipfel that he will help him understand the time travelling mechanism of the time machine if the Morlock takes him back to it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Beauty"title="Black Beauty">
The story is narrated in the first person as an autobiographical memoir told by the titular horse named Black Beauty—beginning with his carefree days as a foal on an English farm with his mother, to his difficult life pulling cabs in London, to his happy retirement in the country. Along the way, he meets with many hardships and recounts many tales of cruelty and kindness. Each short chapter recounts an incident in Black Beauty's life containing a lesson or moral typically related to the kindness, sympathy, and understanding treatment of horses, with Sewell's detailed observations and extensive descriptions of horse behavior lending the novel a good deal of verisimilitude.The book describes conditions among London horse-drawn cab drivers, including the financial hardship caused to them by high license fees and low, legally fixed fares. A page footnote in some editions says that soon after the book was published, the difference between 6-day cab licenses (not allowed to trade on Sundays) and 7-day cab licenses (allowed to trade on Sundays) was abolished and the cab license fee was much reduced.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Adversary"title="The Secret Adversary">
In 1919 London, demobilised soldier Tommy Beresford reunites with his childhood friend and war volunteer Prudence "Tuppence" Cowley. Out of work and money, they form "The Young Adventurers, Ltd". Their first client, a Mr Whittington, makes Tuppence a suspiciously generous offer. Remembering a seemingly unrelated anecdote of Tommy’s, when Whittington asks Tuppence her name, she gives him the alias "Jane Finn." A shocked Whittington offers her £50 hush money and disappears. Carter, an old friend of Tommy's from British intelligence, tells them that Jane Finn was a British agent who disappeared while attempting to deliver a secret treaty to the American embassy in London. Tommy and Tuppence agree to find her, but Carter warns them about an enemy agent known only as "Mr Brown." Also searching for Jane Finn is her cousin Julius Hersheimmer, an American multimillionaire.Tommy and Tuppence's investigation leads them to the home of Mrs Marguerite "Rita" Vandemeyer, a woman with several powerful friends, including Whittington and Sir James Peel Edgerton, K C. Tuppence obtains a job as Mrs Vandemeyer's maid and enlists the help of a young boy working there named Albert. Tuppence hears Mrs Vandemeyer mention Mr Brown and forces her to admit she knows his real identity. Mrs Vandemeyer screams, collapses, and murmurs "Mr Brown" to Tuppence just before dying. Tuppence receives a telegram signed by Tommy and rushes after him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thorn_Birds"title="The Thorn Birds">
The story begins in New Zealand on 8 December 1915, the fourth birthday of Meghann "Meggie" Cleary, who is the only daughter of Padraic ("Paddy"), an Irish farm labourer, and Fiona ("Fee"), his wife. Meggie is a beautiful child with curly red-gold hair, but receives little coddling and must struggle to hold her own in the family, which includes five older brothers at the time. Her favourite brother is the eldest, Frank, a rebellious young man who is unwillingly preparing himself for the blacksmith's trade. He is much shorter than his other brothers, but very strong. Unlike the other Clearys, he has black hair and eyes, believed to be inherited from his Maori great-great-grandmother.Paddy has a wealthy sister, Mary Carson, a widow who lives in New South Wales, Australia, on Drogheda, an enormous sheep station. One day, Paddy receives an offer from Mary of a job on her estate, so in 1921, the whole Cleary family moves from New Zealand to Australia.In Drogheda, the family meets Ralph de Bricassart, a young, capable, and ambitious priest. As punishment for insulting a bishop, he has been relegated to a remote parish in the town of Gillanbone, near Drogheda. Ralph has befriended Mary Carson, hoping a hefty bequest from her to the Catholic Church might liberate him from his exile. Ralph is "a beautiful man", and Mary goes to great lengths to tempt him to break his vows. Ralph shrugs off her attentions and ploys, and continues his visits. He cares for all of the Clearys and particularly cherishes forlorn little Meggie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_of_Oz"title="The Magic of Oz">
At the top of Mount Munch lives a group of people known as the Hyups. One of their numbers, a Munchkin named Bini Aru, discovered a method of transforming people and objects by merely saying the word "Pyrzqxgl". After Princess Ozma decreed that no one could practice magic in Oz except for Glinda the Good Witch and the Wizard of Oz, Bini wrote down the directions for pronouncing "Pyrzqxgl" and hid them in his magical laboratory.When Bini and his wife are at a fair one day, their son Kiki Aru, who thirsts for adventure, finds the directions and afterward transforms himself into a hawk and visits various countries outside the land of Oz. When he alights in the land of Ev, Kiki Aru learns that he needs money to pay for a night's lodging (versus Oz, where the money is not used at all) and changes himself into a magpie to steal a gold piece from an old man. A sparrow confronts the then-human Kiki Aru with knowledge of the theft, and Kiki says that he did not know what it was like to be wicked before, he is glad that he is now. This conversation is overheard by Ruggedo, the Nome who was exiled to the Earth's surface in "Tik-Tok of Oz", and he sees through Kiki Aru's power a chance to get revenge on the people of Oz.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_and_the_Great_Glass_Elevator"title="Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator">
The story picks up where the previous book left off, with Charlie and family aboard the flying Great Glass Elevator after Willy Wonka has rewarded him with the ownership of his chocolate factory. The Elevator accidentally goes into orbit, and Mr. Wonka docks them at the "Space Hotel USA". Their interception of the hotel is mistaken by approaching astronauts and hotel staff in a Commuter Capsule and listeners on Earth (including U.S. President Lancelot R. Gilligrass) as an act of space piracy and they are variously accused of being enemy agents, spies and aliens. Shortly after their arrival, they discover that the hotel has been overrun by dangerous, shape-changing alien monsters known as The Vermicious Knids. The Knids cannot resist showing off and reveal themselves by using the five hotel elevators (with one Knid in each of them) and spell out the word "SCRAM", giving the group time to evacuate. As the group leaves, a Knid follows the Great Glass Elevator and tries to break it open, but to no avail, which results in the Knid receiving a bruise on its backside and hungering for payback.Meanwhile, with the Great Glass Elevator's passengers gone, the President allows the Commuter Capsule to dock with the Space Hotel. Upon entry by the astronauts and the Space Hotel staff, the Knids attack by eating fourteen of the staff, prompting an immediate evacuation by the rest of the group. The Great Glass Elevator comes back just in time to see the entire Knid infestation coming in on the attack, bashing the Commuter Capsule to the point where the retrorockets cannot be fired to initiate immediate reentry and the communication antenna cannot keep the astronauts in communication with the President. Charlie suggests towing the Commuter Capsule back to Earth, and, despite a last attempt by the Knids to tow the two craft away to their home planet Vermes, in the process the Knids are incinerated in Earth's atmosphere. Mr. Wonka releases the Commuter Capsule, while the Elevator crashes down through the roof of the chocolate factory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Pictures_(novel)"title="Moving Pictures (novel)">
The alchemists of the Discworld have invented moving pictures. Many hopefuls are drawn by the siren call of Holy Wood, home of the fledgling "clicks" industry – among them Victor Tugelbend, a dropout from Ankh-Morpork's Unseen University and Theda "Ginger" Withel, a girl "from a little town you never ever heard of", and the Discworld's most infamous salesman, Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, who introduces commerce to the equation and becomes a successful producer. The business of making movies grows rapidly, and eventually Victor and Ginger become real stars, thanks to the help of Gaspode the sentient dog (who also develops a manager-client relationship with Laddie, who everybody considers to be the real Wonder Dog, although in fact is very simple-minded). Holy Wood for a while becomes an effervescent place full of humans, dwarfs, alchemists, demons (which essentially constitute the main technological device to make movies), and trolls (among whom is Detritus) all living in harmony.Meanwhile, it gradually becomes clear that the production of movies is having a deleterious effect on the structure of reality. Ginger is possessed by an unspecified entity and she and Victor find an ancient, hidden cinema, complete with portal to the Dungeon Dimensions. Back in Ankh-Morpork, during the first screening of "Blown Away" (a parody of "Gone with the Wind") which the senior wizards of the Unseen University are also attending, a creature from the Dungeon Dimensions breaks through. Victor fights it (in what eventually becomes a parody of the movie "King Kong" also featuring the Librarian of the Unseen University), having discovered that he could exploit Holy Wood magic and the narrative conventions of the clicks if he had a camera pointing at him. However, after the creature is defeated, Victor and the Librarian realise that the creatures will still try to get through from the Dungeon Dimensions and that Ginger in her possessed state was not trying to summon them but trying to keep them from coming through (possibly as a result of being descended from the High Priestess of Holy Wood). Returning to the ancient cinema at Holy Wood, Victor and Ginger witness a golden statue of a warrior (reminiscent of an Oscar) come to life and travel through the screen to defeat the creatures.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glinda_of_Oz"title="Glinda of Oz">
Princess Ozma and Dorothy travel to an obscure corner of the Land of Oz, in order to prevent a war between two local powers, the Skeezers and the Flatheads. The leaders of the two tribes prove obstinate, and are determined to fight in spite of Ozma and Dorothy. Unable to prevent the war, Dorothy and Ozma find themselves imprisoned on the Skeezers' glass-covered island, which has been magically submerged to the bottom of its lake. Their situation worsens when the warlike queen Coo-ee-oh, who is holding them captive and who alone knows how to raise the island back to the surface of the lake, loses her battle and gets transformed into a swan, forgetting all her magic in the process, and leaving the inhabitants of the island, with Ozma and Dorothy, trapped at the bottom of the lake. Ozma and Dorothy summon Glinda, who, with help from several magicians and magical assistants, must find a way to raise the island to the surface of the lake again, and liberate its inhabitants.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walk_Two_Moons"title="Walk Two Moons">
The novel is narrated by a 13-year-old girl named Salamanca (Sal). Sal's mother has recently left Sal's father, and Sal's grandparents are taking her on a cross-country road trip to Lewiston, Idaho to see her mother. Sal loves nature and was very close to her mother before she left. On the trip, Sal entertains her grandparents by telling a story about her friend in Euclid, Ohio, Phoebe Winterbottom, whose mother suddenly disappeared and left their family too, and about Ben Finney, with whom Sal wants to begin a romantic relationship. Throughout the book, as Sal's story unfolds and their car travels west, she reveals more details about Phoebe, and why her story reminds Salamanca of her own. The more she tells her grandparents of Phoebe's story, the more she feels like her story is less connected to Phoebe's story. When Sal reaches the Missouri River, her grandmother, or referred to as Gram, is bitten by a Cottonmouth snake. Sal reaches Coeur D'Alene while Gram suffers a stroke and has to stay in a hospital. Gramps wanted to stay with Gram, but he wanted Salamanca to reach her mother in Lewiston so he gives her his car to drive. Sal reaches Lewiston but then the readers find out that Salamanca's mother had died in a bus crash while coming here and Salamanca knew that.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Bless_You,_Mr._Rosewater"title="God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater">
The Rosewater Foundation was founded by United States Senator Lister Ames Rosewater of Indiana to help Rosewater descendants avoid paying taxes on the family estate in Rosewater County. It is operated by a large legal firm in New York and provides an annual pension of $3.5 million to Eliot, the senator's son.Eliot, a World War II veteran and volunteer firefighter, has developed a social conscience and sets out across America to visit various small towns before he lands in Rosewater County. Eliot does his best to help the people there, having an office in the county seat where he gets phone calls from any of the ineffectual townsfolk needing his help or reassurance, much to the displeasure of his father. Meanwhile, the only other branch of the Rosewater family is a distant cousin named Fred Rosewater living in Rhode Island, a depressed life insurance salesman who contemplates suicide every day. Fred is visited by Norman Mushari, defecting from the Rosewater Corporation's legal team. Mushari persuades Fred that, if he can prove Eliot is insane, he can give him control of the family fortune by causing the money to pass to Fred, Eliot's closest oldest male relative. After his father advises him of the scheme, Eliot suffers a nervous breakdown and is confined to a mental institution for a year. He suffers a bout of amnesia, recovers and is informed of the present situation, including the fact that he is set to appear the following day in court to defend himself at a proceeding intended to prove his insanity. He learns that the people of Rosewater now hate him and many of them falsely claim that Eliot fathered their children and are asking for money. Eliot's brainwave is to devise a way out of his predicament: he writes Fred a $100,000 check, and then orders his lawyer to draw up legal papers acknowledging that he is the father of all of his alleged children in Rosewater, thereby creating a county full of heirs with a greater claim on the fortune than Fred. This will foil Mushari's plot and ensure that the Rosewater family fortune will be distributed among the people of the county.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unknown_Soldier_(novel)"title="The Unknown Soldier (novel)">
The novel starts with the company transferring in June 1941 from their barracks to the Finnish-Soviet border in preparation for the invasion of the Soviet Union. Soon after, the soldiers receive their baptism by fire in an attack over a swamp on Soviet positions. Captain Kaarna is killed during the battle and the stern Lieutenant Lammio takes his place as company commander. Amidst a series of battles, the company assaults a Soviet bunker line on a ridge and stops an armoured attack, the ambushed and abandoned Lehto commits suicide during a regimental flanking maneuver, and the soldiers advance into East Karelia. The company eventually crosses the old border lost during the Winter War and the soldiers ponder the justification for the continued invasion. In October 1941, the company is stationed in the captured and pillaged Petrozavodsk, where the novel follows the soldiers interacting with the locals.Two men are executed after refusing to follow orders to fend off a Soviet winter attack along the Svir river—during which Lahtinen is killed while trying to carry off his Maxim M/32-33 machine gun and Rokka distinguishes himself by ambushing a 50-strong enemy unit with a Suomi KP/-31 submachine gun. The story moves on to the trench warfare period of the war. The period includes the soldiers drinking kilju (a home-made sugar wine) during Commander-in-Chief Field Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim's birthday celebrations and getting drunk, a new recruit being killed by a sniper for failing to listen to advice from experienced veterans and raising his head above the trench, and Rokka capturing an enemy captain during a nightly Soviet probe into the Finnish trenches.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Street_(novel)"title="Main Street (novel)">
Carol Milford, the daughter of a judge, grew up in Mankato, Minnesota, and became an orphan in her teens. In college, she reads a book on village improvement in a sociology class and begins to dream of redesigning villages and towns. After college, she attends a library school in Chicago and is exposed to many radical ideas and lifestyles. She becomes a librarian in Saint Paul, Minnesota, the state capital, but finds the work unrewarding. She marries Will Kennicott, a doctor, who is a small-town boy at heart.When they marry, Will convinces her to live in his home-town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, a town modeled on Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the author's birthplace. Carol immediately sets about her plans to remake Gopher Prairie, but she is filled with disdain for the town's physical ugliness and smug conservatism.She speaks with its members about progressive changes, joins women's clubs such as the Thanatopsis, distributes literature, and holds a party to liven up Gopher Prairie's inhabitants. Despite her efforts, she is ineffective and constantly derided by the leading cliques.She finds some comfort and companionship with a variety of social outsiders in the town, but these companions all fail to live up to her expectations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misery_(novel)"title="Misery (novel)">
Paul Sheldon is the author of the best-selling series of Victorian era romance novels featuring the character Misery Chastain, which he privately disdains. He has thus written the final installment, "Misery's Child", in which Misery is killed off. After completing the manuscript for his new crime novel, "Fast Cars", which he hopes will receive serious literary acclaim and kickstart his post-"Misery" career, Paul gets drunk and drives to Los Angeles instead of flying back home to New York City. He is caught in a snowstorm and crashes his car in the small, remote town of Sidewinder, Colorado.He awakens to find that he has been rescued by Annie Wilkes, a local former nurse who is a devoted fan of the "Misery" series. She keeps Paul in her guest bedroom, refuses to take him to the hospital despite his broken legs, and nurses him herself using her illicit stash of codeine-based painkillers. Paul quickly becomes addicted to a medication named Novril, which Annie withholds in order to threaten and manipulate him. She begins reading the recently published "Misery's Child" and coerces permission to read the "Fast Cars" manuscript, but disapproves of the darker subject matter and profanity. Paul assesses that Annie is mentally unstable: she is prone to trailing off into catatonic episodes and has sudden, unpredictable bouts of rage. When she learns of Misery's death, she leaves Paul alone in her house for over two days, depriving him of food, water, and painkillers. During this time, Paul examines his legs and sees that they have been pulverized and deformed in the car crash. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monk"title="The Monk">
"The Monk" has two main plotlines. The first concerns the corruption and downfall of the monk Ambrosio, and his interactions with the demon-in-disguise Matilda and the virtuous maiden Antonia. The subplot follows the romance of Raymond and the nun Agnes. The novel switches between the stories at moments of high suspense. At various points, the novel also includes several extended anecdotes of characters with Gothic backstories who tell their tales.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Tabloid"title="American Tabloid">
## Part I, Shakedowns, November – December 1958."Shakedowns" covers just 26 days, introducing the three principal characters, and establishing their relationships, history, and career trajectories. Pete Bondurant is a former LASD deputy; he presently works for billionaire Howard Hughes and runs small-time shakedowns. (Bondurant is also an associate of Jimmy Hoffa.) Kemper Boyd is a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, a southerner, and a man who covets wealth and power. Ward Littell is also an FBI agent and Boyd's friend and former partner. Although assigned to monitor Communist Party activities, his abiding hatred of organized crime leads him to vie for a spot on the Bureau's Top Hoodlum Squad.Each of the three protagonists plot to entrap John F. Kennedy with a call girl; Boyd and Littell for J. Edgar Hoover, Bondurant for Hughes. The set-up is successful, but the Kennedy family discovers that Hughes's "Hush-Hush" tabloid will print the transcripts before the issue went to press, and prevents their publication. At Hoover's direction, Boyd leaves the FBI and begins working with Hoover's personal nemeses - Kennedy and his younger brother Robert—on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management's investigation of organized crime and union corruption. Boyd strikes a rapport with John Kennedy but dislikes Bobby. The Kennedys, with their wealth and privilege, embody everything that Boyd hopes to gain. Littell, who meets the Kennedys through Boyd, is enraptured by Bobby, both men sharing a hatred for organized crime.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wonderful_Adventures_of_Nils"title="The Wonderful Adventures of Nils">
The book is about a young lad, Nils Holgersson, whose "chief delight was to eat and sleep, and after that he liked best to make mischief". He takes great delight in hurting the animals in his family farm. Nils captures a "tomte" in a net while his family are at church and have left him home to memorize chapters from the Bible. The tomte proposes to Nils that if Nils frees him, the tomte will give him a huge gold coin. Nils rejects the offer and the tomte turns Nils into a tomte, which leaves him shrunken and able to talk with animals, who are thrilled to see the boy reduced to their size and are angry and hungry for revenge. While this is happening, wild geese are flying over the farm on one of their migrations, and Martin, the farm's white goose attempts to join the wild ones. In an attempt to salvage something before his family returns, Nils holds on to Martin's neck as he successfully takes off and joins the wild birds.The wild geese, who are not pleased at all to be joined by a boy and a domestic goose, eventually take them on an adventurous trip across all the historical provinces of Sweden observing in passing their natural characteristics and economic resources. At the same time the characters and situations he encounters make him a man: the domestic goose needs to prove his ability to fly like the experienced wild geese, and Nils needs to prove to the geese that he would be a useful companion, despite their initial misgivings. During the trip, Nils learns that if he proves he has changed for the better, the tomte might be disposed to change him back to his normal size.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cold_Six_Thousand"title="The Cold Six Thousand">
The story begins on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, minutes after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and continues for roughly five years. Ward Littell, former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent turned high-powered Mafia lawyer, arrives in Dallas with J. Edgar Hoover's blessing to "manage" the investigation and ensure a consensus: Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Pete Bondurant, whom Littell once arrested, but now is an uneasy friend and partner, is a veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency's war against Fidel Castro and now the point-man for the Mafia's Las Vegas operations. Wayne Tedrow Jr., a US Army veteran and Las Vegas Police Department officer, is paid six thousand dollars to fly to Dallas and murder Wendell Durfee, a black pimp who has offended the casinos, and is thus thrust into the assassination's aftermath. As the tension over race relations and the Vietnam War builds and explodes throughout the decade, all three become involved in plots to kill Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_These_Mean_Streets"title="Down These Mean Streets">
The story begins in Harlem, 1941, where Piri is living with his family. Piri's father has a job with the Works Progress Administration, while his mother stays at home with the children. After the death of Piri’s baby brother Ricardo, the family moves to the Italian section on 114th Street. Piri has various encounters with the local kids in the street, and despite various fights, Piri earns the Italians' respect by not ratting on them. When the family moves back to Spanish Harlem, Piri joins a Puerto Rican gang called the TNT’s.Piri and his family move to the Long Island suburbs. Piri plays baseball with classmates and attends a school dance where he flirts with a girl named Marcia; however, Piri is shocked to hear a group of girls talking about his skin color. This, along with Poppa seeing another woman, makes Piri very upset.Three months later, Piri returns to Harlem and finds himself homeless. Desperate for cash, Piri searches for work and goes after a position as a sales representative. He begins a relationship with Trina Diaz and makes a new friend named Brew, who forces Piri to further question his own identity. Piri and Brew discuss heading South so that Piri can discover what it means to be a black man.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Business"title="Fifth Business">
Dunstan Ramsay, an aging history teacher at Colborne College, becomes enraged by the patronizing tone of a newspaper article announcing his recent retirement, which appears to portray him as an unremarkable old man with no notable accomplishments to his name. Hoping to prove that he has lived a worthwhile and fulfilling life, Ramsay pens an indignant letter to the school's headmaster relating the story of his life, beginning with a childhood memory of an incident that occurred in his hometown of Deptford, Ontario in December 1908.During a quarrel with a ten-year-old Ramsay (then known as "Dunstable Ramsay"), Ramsay’s wealthy friend Percy Boyd Staunton angrily hurls a snowball at him, but accidentally hits his heavily pregnant neighbor Mary Dempster, causing her to prematurely give birth to a sickly child called "Paul". Apparently afflicted with severe mental trauma by the incident, Mrs. Dempster's behavior grows progressively more erratic until she is ostracized from polite society after being found having sex with a homeless tramp in a gravel pit, leading Paul Dempster to become an outcast in the village. While Ramsay takes pity on Paul and often keeps him company, Staunton refuses to take responsibility for throwing the snowball. The rift between the two deepens after Staunton begins a romantic relationship with Ramsay's crush Leola Cruikshank.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Boy"title="Black Boy">
"Black Boy (American Hunger)" is an autobiography following Richard Wright's childhood and young adulthood. It is split into two sections, "Southern Night" (concerning his childhood in the south) and "The Horror and the Glory" (concerning his early adult years in Chicago).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_and_the_Pillar"title="The City and the Pillar">
The plot centers on Jim Willard, a handsome youth in Virginia in the late 1930s, who is also a very good tennis player. When his best friend Bob Ford, one year his senior, is about to leave high school, the two take a camping trip into the woods. Both are elated to be in each other's company and, after some moaning from Bob about how difficult it is to get the local girls to have sex with him, the two have sex, even though Bob thinks this is not a "normal" thing for two men to do.Jim, who does not find girls so appealing, hopes Bob can stay and is crushed when Bob is insistent on joining the United States Merchant Marine. The next seven years of Jim's life will be an odyssey, at the end of which he hopes to be happily reunited with Bob.Jim decides he wants to go to sea too and becomes a cabin boy on a cruise ship after going to New York City to look for work. Another seaman on his ship, Collins, goes out with him in Seattle, but is more interested in a double date with two girls than in sex with Jim. The date is a disaster for Jim, who must realize that he is unable to drink enough to overcome being repelled by the female body. When he finally storms out, Collins calls him a queer, which causes him to think about this possibility.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai-Pan_(novel)"title="Tai-Pan (novel)">
The novel begins following the British victory of the first Opium War and the seizure of Hong Kong. Although the island is largely uninhabited and the terrain unfriendly, it has a large natural harbour that both the British government and various trading companies believe will be useful for the import of merchandise to be traded in mainland China, a highly lucrative market.Although the novel features many characters, it is Dirk Struan and Tyler Brock, former shipmates and the owners of two massive (fictional) trading companies who are the main focal points of the story. Their rocky and often abusive relationship as seamen initiated an intense amount of competitive tension. Throughout the novel, both men seek to destroy each other in matters of business and personal affairs. Struan is referred to throughout the novel as the Tai-pan, indicating his position as head of Struan &amp; Company, the greatest private trading company in nineteenth-century Asia. Clavell translates tai-pan as "Supreme Leader" although "Big Shot" might be more accurate.In 1805, at the age of seven, Dirk Struan began his nautical adventures as a powder monkey on a King's ship at the Battle of Trafalgar and he remains bound to the sea for life. By the end of this year, he found service on the East India Company merchant ship "Vagrant Star" to China. Under the command of Tyler Brock, third mate and future nemesis, Dirk Struan was whipped mercilessly. Dirk Struan vowed to someday destroy Brock. Later, Dirk Struan and Tyler Brock would go on to dominate the opium trade.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Time_Immemorial"title="From Time Immemorial">
According to Peters, most people who call themselves Palestinians are not actually Palestinians, but instead descendants of recent immigrants from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria, who came to the land in waves of immigration starting in the 19th century and continuing through the period of the British Mandate. She argues that what is referred to as the 1948 Palestinian exodus was not ethnic cleansing, but actually a population exchange that resulted from the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horton_Hears_a_Who!"title="Horton Hears a Who!">
The book tells the story of Horton the Elephant, who, while splashing in a pool, hears a speck of dust talking to him. Horton surmises that a small person lives on the speck and places it on a clover, vowing to protect it. He later discovers that the speck is actually a tiny planet, home to a community called Whoville, where microscopic creatures called Whos live. The Mayor of Whoville asks Horton to protect them from harm, which Horton happily agrees to, proclaiming throughout the book that "a person’s a person, no matter how small."Throughout the book, Horton is trying to convince the Jungle of Nool that "A person is a person no matter how small" and that everyone should be treated equally. In his mission to protect the speck, Horton is ridiculed and harassed by the other animals in the jungle for it, as they believe that anything which can't be seen or heard is nonexistent. He is first criticized by the sour kangaroo and her joey. The splash they make as they jump into the pool almost reaches the speck, so Horton decides to find somewhere safer for it. But the news of his odd new behavior spreads quickly, and he is soon harassed by the Wickersham Brothers, a group of monkeys. They steal the clover from him and give it to Vlad Vladikoff, a black-bottomed eagle. Vlad flies the clover a long distance, with Horton in pursuit, until Vlad drops it into the middle of a field of clovers that stretches for hundreds of miles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'Salem's_Lot"title="'Salem's Lot">
Ben Mears, a writer, has returned to Jerusalem's Lot, Maine after 25 years to try to write his next novel. He quickly becomes friends with high school teacher Matt Burke and strikes up a romantic relationship with Susan Norton, a young college graduate with ambitions of leaving town. Ben has returned to "the Lot" to write a book about the long-abandoned Marsten House, where he had a bad experience as a child when he saw a hanging ghost. He learns that the house—the former home of Depression-era hitman Hubert "Hubie" Marsten—has been purchased by Kurt Barlow, ostensibly an Austrian immigrant who has arrived in the Lot to open an antique furniture store. Barlow is supposedly on an extended buying trip; only his business partner, Richard Straker, is seen in public. The truth, however, is that Barlow is an ancient vampire and Straker is his human familiar.The duo's arrival coincides with the disappearance of a young boy, Ralphie Glick, and the death of his 12-year-old brother, Danny, who becomes the town's first vampire turned by Barlow. Barlow also turns town dump custodian Dud Rogers and telephone repairman Corey Bryant. Danny turns other locals into vampires, including the graveyard digger, Mike Ryerson; a newborn baby, Randy McDougall; a man named Jack Griffen; and Danny's mother, Marjorie. Danny fails to turn his classmate Mark Petrie, who resists him by holding a plastic cross in Danny's face. To fight the spread of the new vampires, Ben and Susan are joined by Matt and his doctor, Jimmy Cody, along with Mark and the local priest, Father Callahan. Susan is captured by Barlow, who turns her. She is eventually staked through the heart by Ben.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Dahlia_(novel)"title="The Black Dahlia (novel)">
## Prologue.When World War II breaks out, light heavyweight boxer Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert joins the LAPD in order to avoid being conscripted into the military so that he can stay in Los Angeles to look after his elderly, dementia-addled father. However, soon his father's membership in the German American Bund is discovered, putting Bucky's career in jeopardy, and to keep his job he is forced to inform on two Japanese-American friends. Both are sent to an internment camp as "enemy aliens", causing Bucky immense guilt. During the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots, Bucky meets Lee Blanchard, another boxer-turned-cop who made his name by proving that the violent pimp Bobby De Witt was the mastermind behind a notorious bank robbery. However, Lee has squandered much of the political kudos from this success by subsequently cohabiting with Kay Lake, De Witt's girlfriend, in violation of LAPD policy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Man"title="Invisible Man">
The narrator, an unnamed black man, begins by describing his living conditions: an underground room wired with hundreds of electric lights, operated by power stolen from the city's electric grid. He reflects on the various ways in which he has experienced social invisibility during his life and begins to tell his story, returning to his teenage years.The narrator lives in a small Southern town and, upon graduating from high school, wins a scholarship to an all-black college. However, to receive it, he must first take part in a brutal, humiliating battle royal for the entertainment of the town's rich white dignitaries.One afternoon during his junior year at the college, the narrator chauffeurs Mr. Norton, a visiting rich white trustee, out among the old slave-quarters beyond the campus. By chance, he stops at the cabin of Jim Trueblood, who has caused a scandal by impregnating both his wife and his daughter in his sleep. Trueblood's account horrifies Mr. Norton so badly that he asks the narrator to find him a drink. The narrator drives him to a bar filled with prostitutes and patients from a nearby mental hospital. The mental patients rail against both of them and eventually overwhelm the orderly assigned to keep the patients under control, injuring Mr. Norton in the process. The narrator hurries Mr. Norton away from the chaotic scene and back to campus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bourne_Identity_(novel)"title="The Bourne Identity (novel)">
The preface of the novel consists of two real-life newspaper articles from 1975 about terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, known as "Carlos the Jackal."The story opens with gunfire on a boat in the Mediterranean Sea. One man is cast into the waves before the boat explodes, and is later picked up by fishermen, who find him clinging to debris. They also find he has amnesia, apparently as a result of a traumatic head injury, with occasional erratic intrusions or flashbacks to the past, but is unable to make sense of them. The only definite evidence of his former life is a small film negative found embedded in his hip containing the information required to access a bank account in Zurich.After being nursed back to health by a local doctor, he goes to Zurich to gain access to the bank, where a clerk recognizes him. The man determines that his name is "Jason Charles Bourne", that he has relations with a firm called Treadstone Seventy-One Corporation, and that his account holds 7.5 million Swiss francs (equivalent to $5 million in the novel). Circumstantial evidence leads Bourne to suspect that he should go to Paris, so he wires most of the money there. At the bank and his hotel, men try to kill Bourne, so he quickly takes another hotel guest, Canadian government economist Marie St. Jacques, as a hostage in order to escape. After escaping from Bourne, St. Jacques reports his whereabouts to men she thinks are police, but they turn out to be Bourne's pursuers and professional killers who try to rape and kill her. When Bourne rescues her at the risk of his own life, St. Jacques decides to help him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_(memoir)"title="Night (memoir)">
## Moshe the Beadle."Night" opens in Sighet in 1941. The book's narrator is Eliezer, an Orthodox Jewish teenager who studies the Talmud by day, and by night "weep[s] over the destruction of the Temple". To the disapproval of his father, Eliezer spends time discussing the Kabbalah with Moshe the Beadle, caretaker of the Hasidic shtiebel (house of prayer).In June 1941 the Hungarian government expelled Jews unable to prove their citizenship. Moshe is crammed onto a cattle train and taken to Poland. He manages to escape, saved by God, he believes, so that he might save the Jews of Sighet. He returns to the village to tell what he calls the "story of his own death", running from one house to the next: "Jews, listen to me! It's all I ask of you. No money. No pity. Just listen to me!"When the train crossed into Poland, he tells them, it was taken over by the Gestapo, the German secret police. The Jews were transferred to trucks, then driven to a forest in Galicia, near Kolomay, where they were forced to dig pits. When they had finished, each prisoner had to approach the hole, present his neck, and was shot. Babies were thrown into the air and used as targets by machine gunners. He tells them about Malka, the young girl who took three days to die, and Tobias, the tailor who begged to be killed before his sons; and how he, Moshe, was shot in the leg and taken for dead. But the Jews of Sighet would not listen, making Moshe "Night's" first unheeded witness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redwall_(novel)"title="Redwall (novel)">
A young anthropomorphic mouse named Matthias is a novice monk at Redwall Abbey, where he was adopted as a young orphan, though he dreams of a life of adventure, inspired by the legends of Martin the Warrior, the founder of Redwall. One summer, Redwall Abbey is surrounded by the army of Cluny the Scourge, an infamously evil one-eyed rat. Matthias is guided by visions of Martin the Warrior, while the abbey inhabitants prepare the defense of their home against Cluny's impending attack. Matthias seeks Martin's famous sword, supposedly hidden somewhere within the abbey, helped particularly by Methuselah, an ancient and grizzled mouse who serves as Redwall's historian. Cluny, meanwhile, attempts to gain entrance to the abbey and murders a defector from his horde, Sela the fox. Sela's son, Chickenhound, seeks refuge at Redwall but ends up accidentally killing Methuselah after being caught stealing. Driven from the abbey, Chickenhound is maimed in the wilderness by the venomous adder Asmodeus Poisonteeth, a local terror in Mossflower Wood, the forest that surrounds the abbey.Clues to the location of Martin's sword and shield have been built into the abbey, allowing Matthias to recover the shield, though he discovers the sword has been stolen by a wild sparrow tribe, the Sparras, that dwell on Redwall's roof. He learns from the violent sparrows that the sword was stolen from them in turn by Asmodeus. The king of the sparrows attacks Matthias but dies when the two plummet together off the abbey roof. Matthias recovers and ventures to Asmodeus's lair with his new allies Log-a-Log, a shrew, and Warbeak Sparra, the new and just queen of the aforementioned Sparras. Matthias, Log-a-Log, and two other Shrews succeed in retrieving the sword from Asmodeus's cave, Asmodeus kills the latter two, and Matthias subsequently kills Asmodeus. Alerted to the fall of the abbey by the Sparra tribe, Matthias rushes back to Redwall to save his friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forever_Peace"title="Forever Peace">
Though its title is similar to "The Forever War" and both novels deal with soldiers in the future, "Forever Peace" is not a direct sequel, and takes place on a different future of Earth in the year 2048.Using remotely controlled robots called "soldierboys" (which are nearly invincible), the Alliance military fights third world guerrillas in an endless series of economy-driven wars. As only first world nations possess the nanoforge technology that can produce anything from basic materials, conflict is largely asymmetric.The novel is told partly in first-person narration by the main character, Julian Class, and partly by an anonymous third-person narrator, who is able to comment on aspects of Julian's personality and background.The main protagonist, Julian Class, is a physicist and a mechanic who operates a soldierboy. Thanks to electronic "jacks" implanted in their skulls, mechanics are remotely linked to the machinery as well as to each other, being able to experience battle through the machines and read the thoughts of other mechanics who are simultaneously jacked in.After attempting suicide, Julian and his lover, Amelia "Blaze" Harding, are made aware of a problem with an automated particle physics project that could potentially trigger a new Big Bang that destroys the Earth and the rest of the universe. Because it's so easy to do, it is speculated that universes could potentially have only the lifespan of the first civilization that attempts such a project. When Julian, Blaze, and another physicist submit their paper to a journal's review board, they find themselves the target of "The Hammer of God", a Christian cult bent on hastening an anticipated end of the universe. As the Hammer of God has a secret presence throughout the government, Julian and Blaze narrowly miss being assassinated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mill_on_the_Floss"title="The Mill on the Floss">
Spanning a period of 10 to 15 years, the novel details the lives of Tom and Maggie Tulliver, siblings who grow up at Dorlcote Mill on the River Floss. The mill is at the junction of the River Floss and the more minor River Ripple, near the village of St Ogg's in Lincolnshire, England. Both the rivers and the village are fictional.The novel begins in the late 1820s or early 1830s – several historical references place the events in the book after the Napoleonic Wars but before the Reform Act of 1832. (In chapter 3, the character Mr Riley is described as an "auctioneer and appraiser thirty years ago", placing the opening events of the novel in approximately 1829, thirty years before the novel's composition in 1859. In chapter 8, Mr Tulliver and Mr Deane discuss the Duke of Wellington and his "conduct in the Catholic Question", a conversation that could only take place after 1828, when Wellington became Prime Minister and supported a bill for Catholic Emancipation). The novel includes many autobiographical elements and reflects the disgrace that George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) experienced while in a lengthy relationship with a married man, George Henry Lewes.Maggie Tulliver is the protagonist and the story begins when she is 9 years old, 13 years into her parents' marriage. Her relationship with her older brother Tom, and her romantic relationships with Philip Wakem (a hunchbacked, sensitive and intellectual friend) and with Stephen Guest (a vivacious young socialite in St Ogg's and assumed fiancé of Maggie's cousin Lucy Deane) constitute the most significant narrative threads.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Père_Goriot"title="Père Goriot">
The novel opens with an extended description of the Maison Vauquer, a boarding house in Paris' "rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève" covered with vines, owned by the widow Madame Vauquer. The residents include the law student Eugène de Rastignac, a mysterious agitator named Vautrin, and an elderly retired vermicelli-maker named Jean-Joachim Goriot. The old man is ridiculed frequently by the other boarders, who soon learn that he has bankrupted himself to support his two well-married daughters.Rastignac, who moved to Paris from the south of France, becomes attracted to the upper class. He has difficulty fitting in, but is tutored by his cousin, Madame de Beauséant, in the ways of high society. Rastignac endears himself to one of Goriot's daughters, Delphine, after extracting money from his own already-poor family. Vautrin, meanwhile, tries to convince Rastignac to pursue an unmarried woman named Victorine, whose family fortune is blocked only by her brother. He offers to clear the way for Rastignac by having the brother killed in a duel.Rastignac refuses to go along with the plot, balking at the idea of having someone killed to acquire his wealth, but he takes note of Vautrin's machinations. This is a lesson in the harsh realities of high society. Before long, the boarders learn that police are seeking Vautrin, revealed to be a master criminal nicknamed "Trompe-la-Mort" ("Daredevil", literally "Cheat-the-Death" or "Death-Dodger"). Vautrin arranges for a friend to kill Victorine's brother, in the meantime, and is captured by the police.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_Jim"title="Lucky Jim">
Jim Dixon is a lecturer in medieval history at a red brick university in the English Midlands. He has made an unsure start and, towards the end of the academic year, is concerned about losing his probationary position in the department. In his attempt to be awarded a permanent post he tries to maintain a good relationship with his absent-minded head of department, Professor Welch. To establish his credentials he must also ensure the publication of his first scholarly article, but he eventually discovers that the editor to whom he submitted it has translated it into Italian and passed it off as his own.Dixon struggles with an on-again off-again "girlfriend", Margaret Peel, a fellow lecturer who is recovering from a suicide attempt in the wake of a broken relationship with another man. Margaret employs emotional blackmail to appeal to Dixon's sense of duty and pity while keeping him in an ambiguous and sexless limbo. While she is staying with Professor Welch, he holds a musical weekend that seems to offer an opportunity for Dixon to advance his standing among his colleagues. The attempt goes wrong, however, and the drunken Dixon drops a lighted cigarette on the bed, burning a hole in the sheets.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They'd_Rather_Be_Right"title="They'd Rather Be Right">
Two professors create an advanced cybernetic brain, which they call "Bossy." Bossy can "optimise your mind...and give you eternal youth into the bargain, but only if you're ready to abandon all your favourite prejudices." However, when given the choice of admitting they were wrong and therefore being able to benefit from Bossy's abilities, most people would rather be right, and Bossy's ability to confer immortality is almost made ineffective by humanity's fear of "her."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Us,_the_Living"title="For Us, the Living">
Perry Nelson, a normal 1939 engineer and Navy pilot, is driving his automobile when he has a blowout, skids over a cliff, and wakes up in the year 2086. Though he was apparently killed in the summer, he re-appears in extremely cold snow, nearly dies again by freezing, and is saved by a fur-clad woman named Diana. The exact circumstances of his being killed and reborn after a century and a half are never explained.The later 21st century people seem strangely incurious, showing little interest in how he had come to be among them and rather take his appearance for granted and proceed to explain to him the details of the social and political set-up of their world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Connecticut_Yankee_in_King_Arthur's_Court"title="A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court">
The novel is a comedy set in 6th-century England and its medieval culture through Hank Morgan's view; he is a 19th-century resident of Hartford, Connecticut, who, after a blow to the head, awakens to find himself inexplicably transported back in time to early medieval England, where he meets King Arthur himself. Hank, who had an image of that time that had been colored over the years by romantic myths, takes on the task of analyzing the problems and sharing his knowledge from 1300 years in the future to try to modernize, Americanize, and improve the lives of the people.Many passages are quoted directly from Sir Thomas Malory's "Le Morte d'Arthur", a late medieval collection of Arthurian legends that constitutes one of the main sources on the myth of King Arthur and Camelot. The frame narrator is a 19th-century man (ostensibly Mark Twain himself) who meets Hank Morgan in modern times and begins reading Hank's book in the museum in which they both meet. Later, characters in the story retell parts of it in Malory's original language. A chapter on medieval hermits also draws from the work of William Edward Hartpole Lecky.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolution_Gap"title="Absolution Gap">
The plot of the novel takes place in four separate time periods. The bulk of the novel is contained in the 2675 and 2727 sections.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_Angels_(novel)"title="Broken Angels (novel)">
Approximately 30 years after "Altered Carbon", Takeshi Kovacs is now serving in Carrera's Wedge, a mercenary organization that joins a war on a distant planet, Sanction IV, fighting against an anti-corporate-government rebel group. Pilot Jan Schneider recruits Kovacs to help him lay claim to a buried Martian artifact. The artifact is a gate that opens a portal to a Martian starship. Kovacs and Schneider rescue Tanya Wardani, the archaeologue who coordinated the gate's discovery, from a prison camp. Unable to reach the heavily contested location alone, Kovacs enlists the support of the Mandrake Corporation, one of the corporate entities profiteering off of the war. Mandrake is represented by an executive named Matthias Hand.Kovacs and Hand select an elite squad of resurrected soldiers to accompany them. Hand secretly leaks information that prompts the rebels to destroy the city of Sauberville with a nuclear weapon. This clears the gate site of opposing forces, and the recovery expedition begins. However, the radiation severely damages the team's bodies, and they must work against the clock to find the ship before dying of radiation poisoning. While Wardani works to open the gate, someone sabotages the beacons necessary to claim the starship. Two expedition members are killed by nanodes deployed by Hand's rivals within the Mandrake firm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coronation_(novel)"title="The Coronation (novel)">
The story is told from the perspective of Afanasi Ziukin, the majordomo of Grand Duke George Alexandrovich. Erast Fandorin investigates the abduction of Grand Duke Mikhail, the four-year-old youngest son of George Alexandrovitch, by criminal mastermind "Doctor Lind" whom Fandorin has been pursuing for several years. Their initial confrontation is briefly described in the novella "Dream Valley" from the "Jade Rosary Beads" collection. This time, Lind demands the Orlov diamond, a prerequisite for the upcoming coronation, as a ransom. Nicholas II is portrayed as dependent on his uncles Cyril and Simeon, the Governor-General of Moscow.Akunin distorts the Romanov family relations somewhat. The three uncles of Nicolas II (sons of Alexander II) are semi-fictitious:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Earth"title="The Good Earth">
The story begins on Wang Lung's wedding day and follows the rise and fall of his fortunes. The House of Hwang, a family of wealthy landowners, lives in the nearby town, where Wang Lung's future wife, O-Lan, lives as a slave. However, the House of Hwang slowly declines due to opium use, frequent spending, uncontrolled borrowing and a general unwillingness to work.Following the marriage of Wang Lung and O-Lan, both work hard on their farm and slowly save enough money to buy one plot of land at a time from the Hwang family. O-Lan delivers three sons and three daughters; the first daughter becomes mentally handicapped as a result of severe malnutrition brought on by famine. Her father greatly pities her and calls her "Poor Fool", a name by which she is addressed throughout her life. O-Lan kills her second daughter at birth to spare her the misery of growing up in such hard times, and to give the remaining family a better chance to survive. During the devastating famine and drought, the family must flee to a large city in the south to find work. Wang Lung's malevolent uncle offers to buy his possessions and land, but for significantly less than their value. The family sells everything except the land and the house. Wang Lung then faces the long journey south, contemplating how the family will survive walking, when he discovers that the "firewagon" (the Chinese word for the newly built train) takes people south for a fee.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Garden"title="The Secret Garden">
At the turn of the 20th century, Mary Lennox is a neglected and unloved 10-year-old girl, born in British India to wealthy British parents who never wanted her and made an effort to ignore her. She is cared for primarily by native servants, who allow her to become spoilt, demanding and self-centred. After a cholera epidemic kills Mary's parents, the few surviving servants flee the house without Mary.She is discovered by British soldiers who place her in the temporary care of an English clergyman, whose children taunt her by calling her "Mistress Mary, quite contrary." She is soon sent to England to live with her uncle, Archibald Craven, whom her father's sister Lilias married. He lives on the Yorkshire Moors in a large English country house, Misselthwaite Manor. When escorted to Misselthwaite by the housekeeper Mrs Medlock, she discovers Lilias Craven is dead and that Mr Craven is a hunchback.At first, Mary is as sour and rude as ever. She dislikes her new home, the people living in it and, most of all, the bleak moor on which it sits. Over time, she becomes less temperamental and befriends her maid, Martha Sowerby, who tells Mary about Lilias, who would spend hours in a private walled garden growing roses. Lilias Craven died after an accident in the garden ten years prior, and the devastated Archibald locked the garden and buried the key.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sea,_the_Sea"title="The Sea, the Sea">
"The Sea, the Sea" is a tale of the strange obsessions that haunt a self-satisfied playwright and director as he begins to write his memoirs. Murdoch's novel exposes the motivations that drive her characters – the vanity, jealousy, and lack of compassion behind the disguises they present to the world. Charles Arrowby, its central figure, decides to withdraw from the world and live in seclusion in a house by the sea. While there, he encounters his first love, Mary Hartley Fitch, whom he has not seen since his love affair with her as an adolescent. Although she is almost unrecognisable in old age, and outside his theatrical world, he becomes obsessed by her, idealising his former relationship with her and attempting to persuade her to elope with him. His inability to recognise the egotism and selfishness of his own romantic ideals is at the heart of the novel. After the farcical and abortive kidnapping of Mrs. Fitch by Arrowby, he is left to mull over her rejection in a self-obsessional and self-aggrandising manner over the space of several chapters. "How much, I see as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at the reality... Yes of course I was in love with my own youth... Who is one's first love?"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discovery_of_Heaven"title="The Discovery of Heaven">
An angel-like being is ordered to return to Heaven the stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments. The divine being, however, cannot himself travel to Earth, and on several occasions in the book resorts to influencing events. He affects the personal lives of three people (two men and one woman) in order that a child will be conceived. This child would then have an innate desire to seek out and return the Tablets.The book consists of four parts (dubbed "The Beginning of the Beginning", "The End of the Beginning", "The Beginning of the End", and "The End of the End"). In between these four parts, the angel-like being discusses "The Plan" with his superior, who is supposedly an archangel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_Begotten_Daughter"title="Only Begotten Daughter">
The story is about Julie Katz, the new Messiah, who is the daughter of God, and who is spontaneously conceived from a sperm bank donation by her father, Murray Katz, through "inverse parthenogenesis". Julie struggles with her messianic powers, the mind games of Satan, being hunted by fundamentalists, and the silence of her mother, God.This novel is a counter-theodicy similar to Morrow's "Godhead Trilogy". In addition, "Only Begotten Daughter" refers to God as a female throughout the book.Inverse parthenogenesis is a baffled scientist's explanation for the existence of an entirely unexpected ovum in Murray Katz's latest sperm bank donation: unexpected because, as Murray himself admits, he does not know many women. (The ovum, though, apparently, has been provided the necessary Immaculate Conception.) Murray is a Jewish hermit pushing fifty, living alone in a lighthouse in Atlantic City, writing a book about human nature based on evidence gleaned from a job at the local Photomat. His closest friend is lesbian Georgina Sparks, foster-mother to Julie.The result of these gathered abnormalities is Julie Katz, half-sister to Jesus. Well-schooled in the appropriate use of her messianic powers (she can breathe underwater, restore life to dead animals, and converse with a talking sponge named Amanda) by her only visible parent (at least as well as Murray can manage), Julie reaches adulthood and explores life, death, Hell and the universe on the East Coast of the modern United States.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Prayer_for_Owen_Meany"title="A Prayer for Owen Meany">
The story is narrated by John Wheelwright, a former citizen of New Hampshire who has become a voluntary expatriate from the United States, having settled in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and taken on Canadian citizenship.The story is narrated in two interwoven time frames. The first time frame is the perspective of John in the present day (1987). The second time frame is John's memories of the past: growing up in New Hampshire in the 1950s and 1960s alongside his best friend, Owen Meany.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Present_Darkness"title="This Present Darkness">
"This Present Darkness" takes place in the small college town of Ashton. Bernice Kreuger, a reporter for the "Clarion", Ashton's town newspaper, is falsely arrested on prostitution charges after taking a photograph at the annual Ashton Summer Festival. When she is released the next day, she discovers that the film in her camera was destroyed.Marshall Hogan, owner/editor-in-chief of the "Clarion" decides to go to the town police station/courthouse and confront Alf Brummel, the police chief, about the incident. Brummel denies any wrongdoing on behalf of the police department and insists it was all a mistake. Brummel then advises Marshall to drop the matter. Marshall does not fall for Brummel's story and, ignoring Brummel's advice, begins an investigation.As the investigation continues, Marshall and Bernice begin to realize that they are onto something much bigger than they thought. They slowly uncover a plot to take over the town via buying the college, that is being carried out by The Universal Consciousness Society, a powerful New Age group. When the Society decides Marshall has found out too much they take the "Clarion", and his house. They also falsely accuse him of murder, adultery and molesting his daughter, who attends the college and who unwittingly has been pulled into the Society. When he and Bernice are caught in a desperate attempt to keep the society from winning out, he is arrested and thrown in jail, and she escapes, running off to find help.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobiography_of_a_Brown_Buffalo"title="Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo">
This character survives on drugs, alcohol, and counseling sessions until he transforms into a Chicano activist. At the end of the work, the protagonist adds the middle name of "Zeta," a symbol that represents his Chicano and Mexican culture and roots. By traveling to his birthplace, the lost character discovers himself and learns lessons on the road as he reflects on his life.On the back of some copies of the book, it says "Oscar Zeta Acosta was famous as a Robin Hood Chicano lawyer and notorious as the real-life model for Hunter S. Thompson's "Dr. Gonzo"", a character in the book and movie "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revolt_of_the_Cockroach_People"title="The Revolt of the Cockroach People">
Brown becomes involved with the Chicano movement when he moved to Los Angeles in 1968 looking to write a book. He spent three years with the Chicano Militants, defending them in various court cases and helping to organize protests and marches. The novel depicts the radical Chicano movement in the fictional barrio of "Tooner Flats" in East Los Angeles. The leaders are eventually indicted on charges of conspiracy to disrupt the schools. Brown defends them and wins.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Sun"title="The Naked Sun">
The story arises from the murder of Rikaine Delmarre, a prominent "fetologist" (fetal scientist), responsible for the operation of the planetary birthing center of Solaria, a planet politically hostile to Earth, whose death Elijah Baley is called to investigate, at the request of the Solarian government. He is again partnered with the humanoid robot R. Daneel Olivaw, and asked by Earth's government to assess the Solarian society for weaknesses.The book focuses on the unusual traditions, customs, and culture of Solarian society. The planet has a rigidly controlled population of 20,000, and all work is done by robots, which outnumber humans ten thousand to one.Normally the prime suspect in a murder would have been Delmarre's wife Gladia, who was present in the house when he was killed by being beaten over the head. She claims to have no memory of what happened, nor is there any sign of the object used to beat Rikaine Delmarre to death. The only witness is a malfunctioning house robot that has suffered damage to its positronic brain because it allowed harm to be done to a human, in violation of the First Law.Baley's first encounter with Gladia is through "viewing" (holography), at which point he discovers that Solarians have no taboo about nudity when viewing, though Baley is shocked. Thereafter he develops a relationship with Gladia in face-to-face contact. She reveals to Baley that she does not like all the customs of Solaria, where face-to-face interaction, and especially sex, are considered repugnant, and was on bad terms with Rikaine, partly from sexual frustration.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Was_Thursday"title="The Man Who Was Thursday">
In Victorian-era London, Gabriel Syme is recruited at Scotland Yard to a secret anti-anarchist police corps. Lucian Gregory, an anarchistic poet, lives in the suburb of Saffron Park. Syme meets him at a party and they debate the meaning of poetry. Gregory argues that revolt is the basis of poetry. Syme demurs, insisting the essence of poetry is not revolution but law. He antagonises Gregory by asserting that the most poetical of human creations is the timetable for the London Underground. He suggests Gregory isn't really serious about anarchism, which so irritates Gregory that he takes Syme to an underground anarchist meeting place, under oath not to disclose its existence to anyone, revealing his public endorsement of anarchy is a ruse to make him seem harmless, when in fact he is an influential member of the local chapter of the European anarchist council.The central council consists of seven men, each using the name of a day of the week as a cover; the position of Thursday is about to be elected by Gregory's local chapter. Gregory expects to win the election but just before, Syme reveals to Gregory after an oath of secrecy that he is a secret policeman. In order to make Syme think that the anarchists are harmless after all, Gregory speaks very unconvincingly to the local chapter, so that they feel that he is not zealous enough for the job. Syme makes a rousing anarchist speech in which he denounces everything that Gregory has said and wins the vote. He is sent immediately as the chapter's delegate to the central council.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sign_of_the_Four"title="The Sign of the Four">
On a foggy day in 1888, Dr. Watson remonstrates with Holmes about his cocaine addiction. Holmes claims he needs a problem to solve and is bored; shortly thereafter, Miss Mary Morstan arrives with a case. Miss Morstan explains that, in December 1878, her father Captain Morstan had arrived in London, on leave from his post as a convict guard in the Andaman Islands. He requested her to meet him at the Langham Hotel, but he was not there when she arrived. Mary contacted Major John Sholto, a former convict guard who had known her father and was now living in England; however, he denied having seen Morstan, and Morstan was never heard from again. Four years later, Miss Morstan answered an anonymous newspaper advertisement, asking for her whereabouts. She then received a large and valuable pearl in the post, a gift repeated once a year for six years. With the sixth pearl, she received a letter asking for a meeting, claiming she has been "wronged". Holmes takes the case, and soon discovers that Major Sholto had died in 1882; within a week of his death, Mary received the first pearl. The only further clue Mary can give Holmes is a map of a fortress found in her father's desk, appended with the words " "The Sign of the Four: Jonathan Small, Mahomet Singh, Abdullah Khan, and Dost Akbar" ".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farewell,_My_Lovely"title="Farewell, My Lovely">
Private detective Philip Marlowe is investigating a dead-end missing person case when he sees a felon, Moose Malloy, barging into a nightclub called Florian's, looking for his ex-girlfriend Velma Valento. The club has changed owners, so no one there now knows her. Malloy ends up killing the black owner of the club and escaping. The murder case is assigned to Lt. Nulty, a Bay City police detective who has no interest in the murder of a black man. Marlowe advises Nulty to look for Malloy's girlfriend, but Nulty prefers to let Marlowe do the routine legwork and rely on finding Malloy based on his huge size and loud clothes. Marlowe decides to follow up and look for the girl.He tracks down Mrs Jessie Florian, the widow of the nightclub's former owner, and plies her with bourbon. Mrs Florian claims Malloy's girlfriend is dead. Before making further progress, Marlowe receives a call from a man named Lindsay Marriott, who claims his friend has been robbed and requests Marlowe's presence in delivering a ransom payment for stolen jewellery. Later that evening, in a deserted canyon, Marlowe waits in the dark and is hit on the head from behind. When he awakes, Marriott is dead. A passerby, Anne Riordan, finds him and takes him home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Goodbye_(novel)"title="The Long Goodbye (novel)">
The novel opens outside a club in Los Angeles called the Dancers. It is late October or early November: no year is given but internal evidence and the publication date of the novel places it between 1950 and 1952. Philip Marlowe meets a drunk named Terry Lennox, a man with scars on one side of his face. They forge an uneasy friendship over the next few months, having drinks together at bars, especially gimlets. In June, Lennox shows up late one night at Marlowe's home in "a great deal of trouble" and needing a ride to the airport across the border in Tijuana, Mexico. Marlowe agrees as long as Lennox does not tell him any details of why he is running. He later finds $500 left to him by Terry.On his return to Los Angeles, Marlowe learns that Lennox's wife Sylvia was found dead and that she had died before Lennox fled. Marlowe is arrested for aiding a suspected murderer after refusing to co-operate with investigators, who want him to confess that he helped Lennox flee. After three days of antagonizing his interrogators, Marlowe is released, the police explaining that Lennox has been reported to have committed suicide in a little town in Mexico with a written confession by his side. Marlowe gets home to find a cryptic letter from Lennox containing a "portrait of Madison" (a $5,000 bill).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relic_(novel)"title="Relic (novel)">
In September 1987, Dr. Julian Whittlesey is leading an expedition through the Amazon Basin, in the Brazilian rainforest, in search of the lost Kothoga tribe. He hopes to prove that they still do exist and in the process learn more about their culture, including their lizard god Mbwun ("He Who Walks On All Fours"), supposedly the son of Satan. However, Whittlesey disappears after finding the mutilated body of his partner, Crocker, and realizes that a creature in the bush is stalking him. A year later, in Belem, a dock worker named Ven is suddenly and brutally killed when a freighter arrives with a shipment of crates from Whittlesey's expedition.Seven years later, in a fictionalized version of New York City's American Museum of Natural History, two young boys are found dead in a museum stairwell, having gotten lost in the late hours of the museum. NYPD Lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta leads the subsequent investigation. He has the museum under tight lockdown and its staff placed under curfew for fear the murderer is still hiding somewhere in the museum or the many catacombs that run underneath it. The three prominent leadership figures of the facility—curator Winston Wright, deputy head Ian Cuthbert, and public relations director Lavinia Rickman—all try to keep the murders under wraps, as the grand gala opening of the new "Superstition" exhibition, led by George Moriarty, draws nearer, an event that will feature many wealthy benefactors as well as Mayor Harper. Rickman even hires "The New York Times" reporter Bill Smithback, Jr. to cover the murder investigation but repeatedly edits his reports so they will appear more palatable towards the museum and its leadership. Assistant Curator Gregory Kawakita jokingly begins spreading the rumor of the "Museum Beast", a legendary monster that has allegedly been roaming the tunnels under the museum for years and is responsible for the murders. Although the rumors are initially dismissed as myth, D'Agosta is shocked during the autopsy when he discovers a claw buried in one of the boy's brains.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mayor_of_Casterbridge"title="The Mayor of Casterbridge">
At a country fair near Casterbridge in Wessex, Michael Henchard, a 21-year-old hay-trusser, argues with his wife Susan. Drunk on rum-laced furmity he auctions her off, along with their baby daughter Elizabeth-Jane, to Richard Newson, a passing sailor, for five guineas. Sober and remorseful the next day, he is too late to locate his family. He vows not to touch liquor again for 21 years.Believing the auction to be legally binding, Susan lives as Newson's wife for 18 years. After Newson is lost at sea Susan, lacking any means of support, decides to seek out Henchard again, taking her daughter with her. Susan has told Elizabeth-Jane little about Henchard, and the young woman knows only that he is a relation by marriage. Susan discovers that Henchard has become a very successful hay and grain merchant and Mayor of Casterbridge, known for his staunch sobriety. He has avoided explaining how he lost his wife, allowing people to assume he is a widower.When the couple are reunited, Henchard proposes remarrying Susan after a sham courtship, this in his view being the simplest and most discreet way to remedy matters and to prevent Elizabeth-Jane learning of their disgrace. To do this, however, he is forced to break off an engagement with a woman named Lucetta Templeman, who had nursed him when he was ill.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_of_Pi"title="Life of Pi">
The book begins with a note from the author, which is an integral part of the novel. Unusually, the note describes "mostly" fictional events. It serves to establish and enforce one of the book's main themes: the relativity of truth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Morte_d'Arthur"title="Le Morte d'Arthur">
## Book I (Caxton I–IV).Arthur is born to the High King of Britain (Malory's "England") Uther Pendragon and his new wife Igraine, and then taken by the wizard Merlin to be secretly fostered by Sir Ector in the country in turmoil after the death of Uther. Years later, the now teenage Arthur suddenly becomes the ruler of the leaderless Britain when he removes the fated sword from the stone in the contest set up by Merlin, which proves his birthright that he himself had not been aware of. The newly crowned King Arthur and his followers including King Ban and King Bors go on to fight against rivals and rebels, ultimately winning the war in the great Battle of Bedegraine. Arthur prevails due to his military prowess and the prophetic and magical counsel of Merlin (later replaced by the sorceress Nimue), further helped by the sword Excalibur that Arthur received from a Lady of the Lake. With the help of reconciled rebels, Arthur also crushes a foreign invasion in the Battle of Clarence. With his throne secure, Arthur marries the also young Princess Guinevere and inherits the Round Table from her father, King Leodegrance. He then gathers his chief knights, including some of his former enemies who now joined him, at his capital Camelot and establishes the Round Table fellowship as all swear to the Pentecostal Oath as a guide for knightly conduct.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_State_and_Revolution"title="The State and Revolution">
"The State and Revolution" is considered to be Lenin's most important work on the state and has been called by Lucio Colletti "Lenin's greatest contribution to political theory". According to the Marxologist David McLellan, "the book had its origin in Lenin's argument with Bukharin in the summer of 1916 over the existence of the state after a proletarian revolution. Bukharin had emphasised the 'withering' aspect, whereas Lenin insisted on the necessity of the state machinery to expropriate the expropriators. In fact, it was Lenin who changed his mind, and many of the ideas of State and Revolution, composed in the summer of 1917 – particularly the anti-statist theme – were those of Bukharin".Lenin's direct and simple definition of the State is that "the State is a special organisation of force: it is an organisation of violence for the suppression of some class." Hence his denigration even of parliamentary democracy, which was influenced by what Lenin saw as the recent increase of bureaucratic and military influences: "To decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament – this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary-constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peril_at_End_House"title="Peril at End House">
Poirot and Hastings are staying at a Cornish resort. Conversing with Magdala "Nick" Buckley, Poirot believes that someone is out to kill her, confirmed when he finds a bullet that Nick had thought to be a wasp shooting past her head. Poirot explains his concern to Nick. Poirot suspects someone in Nick's inner circle. Nick's nearest living relative is a lawyer cousin, Charles Vyse, who arranged the re-mortgaging on End House for her to supply desperately needed funds. Her housekeeper is Ellen, and the lodge near End House is leased by Australians Mr and Mrs Croft. George Challenger has a soft spot for Nick. Nick's two closest friends are Freddie Rice, an abused wife, and Jim Lazarus, an art dealer in love with Freddie. When Nick had surgery six months earlier, the Crofts suggested she make a will.It is not clear who wants Nick dead. Charles would inherit End House and Freddie would get the rest of the estate – none of which is worth killing for. At Poirot's advice, Nick calls her cousin Maggie to stay with her for a few weeks. When Maggie arrives, Nick hosts a party with everyone present but George. A renowned pilot named Michael Seton has gone missing, sparking debate about his fate. Nick receives a call while the guests are enjoying the party. Maggie is found dead, wearing Nick's shawl. Nick and Maggie had gone to freshen up, after which Maggie wore Nick's shawl. George is relieved to see Nick alive. Realizing that Maggie was killed by mistake under his nose, Poirot becomes furious, launching an investigation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Subtle_Knife"title="The Subtle Knife">
Twelve-year-old Will Parry lives in Oxford, where he cares for his mother who has mental health problems. After accidentally killing an intruder, Will escapes via a portal into another world and finds himself in the city of Cittàgazze where he meets Lyra and her dæmon Pantalaimon, who have arrived from her world via the opening in the sky created by her father, Lord Asriel (in "Northern Lights").Mrs Coulter, Lyra's mother, tortures a witch for a prophecy said to concern her daughter. Before the victim can reveal the details she is killed by the witch Serafina Pekkala. Realising Lyra's importance, Serafina Pekkala sets off in search of her. Meanwhile the aeronaut Lee Scoresby searches for Stanislaus Grumman, previously believed dead, who is rumoured to have knowledge of a powerful object that could protect Lyra.Will returns to his world to seek information about his father, who went missing years earlier on an expedition. Lyra, who has come with him, wants to learn about Dust—mysterious particles connected to consciousness. On the advice of her alethiometer Lyra visits the physicist Dr Mary Malone, who has a computer that can communicate with dark matter. Lyra realises that dark matter seems to correspond with what she knows as Dust.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horse_and_His_Boy"title="The Horse and His Boy">
Shasta is a boy who lives in southern Calormen with Arsheesh, a fisherman, whom Shasta believes to be his father. A powerful nobleman demands hospitality one evening, and haggles with Arsheesh to buy Shasta as his slave. It emerges that Arsheesh is not Shasta's father, having found him in a washed-up boat as a baby. In the stable, Bree, the nobleman's stallion, astounds the boy by speaking. He tells Shasta that the nobleman is very cruel to his slaves, and suggests they both flee to his homeland of Narnia, from where he was captured as a foal. Shasta agrees, and they sneak away at night.After weeks of northwards travel, during which the two companions bond, a brief chase to escape lions leads to their meeting another pair of refugees: another Narnian Talking Horse, the mare Hwin, who like Bree desires to return home, and Aravis, a young noblewoman who wants to escape a political marriage to Ahoshta, the ugly Grand Vizier. Although Shasta and Aravis immediately dislike each other, the four decide to travel together. In Tashbaan, the capital of Calormen, a party of Narnians mistake Shasta for Corin, the prince of Archenland, a Narnian ally, who has gone missing. Taken from the others, Shasta overhears the Narnians planning to escape Calormen to prevent a forced marriage between Queen Susan and Rabadash, son of the Tisroc, the Calormen ruler. Shasta escapes when Corin returns, but not before learning of a hidden route through the desert.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_the_Stone_(Hughart_novel)"title="The Story of the Stone (Hughart novel)">
The abbot of a humble monastery in the Valley of Sorrows calls upon Master Li and Number Ten Ox to investigate the killing of a monk and the theft of a seemingly inconsequential manuscript from its library. Suspicion soon lands on the infamous Laughing Prince Liu Sheng—who has been dead for about 750 years. To solve this mystery and others, the incongruous duo will have to travel across China, outwit a half-barbarian king, and saunter into (and out of) Hell itself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mists_of_Avalon"title="The Mists of Avalon">
"The Mists of Avalon" is a generations-spanning retelling of the Arthurian legend that brings it back to its Brythonic Celtic roots . The plot tells the story of the women who influence King Arthur, High King of Britain, and those around him.The book's protagonist is Morgaine, priestess of Avalon, who is King Arthur's half-sister. Their mother Igraine is married to Uther Pendragon after Morgaine's biological father, Gorlois, is killed in battle. Rumors spread in Avalon that before Igraine knew her husband Gorlois was killed, Uther consulted with the Merlin, who used his magic to transform the king into the likeness of Gorlois and thus gain access to Igraine at Tintagel. He spent the night with her and they conceived a son, Arthur. Morgaine witnesses Uther Pendragon's accession to the throne of Caerleon after his predecessor, Ambrosius, dies of old age. Uther becomes her step-father, and he and Igraine have a son, Arthur, Morgaine's half-brother.When Morgaine is eleven years old and Arthur six, an attempt of murder is made on Arthur's life. Their maternal aunt, the high priestess Viviane, arrives in Caerleon and advises Uther to have Arthur fostered far away from the court for his own safety. Uther agrees, and also allows Viviane to take Morgaine to Avalon, where she is trained as a priestess of the Mother Goddess. During this period, Morgaine becomes aware of the rising tension between the old Pagan and the new Christian religions. After seven years of training, Morgaine is initiated as a priestess of the Mother, and Viviane begins grooming her as the next Lady of Avalon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Merlyn"title="The Book of Merlyn">
The book opens as King Arthur prepares himself for his final battle. Merlyn reappears to complete Arthur's education and discover the cause of wars. As he did in "The Sword in the Stone", Merlyn again demonstrates ethics and politics to Arthur by transforming him into various animals.The last chapter of the book takes place only hours before the final battle between King Arthur and his son and nephew Mordred. Arthur does not want to fight after everything that he has learned from Merlyn. He makes a deal with Mordred to split England in half. Mordred accepts. During the making of this deal, a snake comes upon one of Mordred's soldiers. The soldier draws his sword. The opposing side, unaware of the snake, takes this as an act of betrayal. Arthur's troops attack Mordred's, and both Arthur and Mordred die in the battle that follows.Guenever joins a convent, and remains there till death. Lancelot becomes a hermit and dies a hermit. His last miracle was making the room that he died in smell like heaven.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Eden"title="Martin Eden">
Living in Oakland at the beginning of the 20th century, Martin Eden struggles to rise above his destitute, proletarian circumstances through an intense and passionate pursuit of self-education, hoping to achieve a place among the literary elite. His principal motivation is his love for Ruth Morse. Because Eden is a rough, uneducated sailor from a working-class background and the Morses are a bourgeois family, a union between them would be impossible unless and until he reached their level of wealth and refinement.Over a period of two years, Eden promises Ruth that success will come, but just before it does, Ruth loses her patience and rejects him in a letter, saying, "if only you had settled down ... and attempted to make something of yourself". By the time Eden attains the favor of the publishers and the bourgeoisie who had shunned him, he has already developed a grudge against them and become jaded by toil and unrequited love. Instead of enjoying his success, he retreats into a quiet indifference, interrupted only to rail mentally against the gentility of bourgeois society or to donate his new wealth to working-class friends and family. He feels that people do not value him for himself or for his work but only for his fame.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Valley_of_the_Moon_(novel)"title="The Valley of the Moon (novel)">
The novel "The Valley of the Moon" is a story of a working-class couple, Billy and Saxon Roberts, struggling laborers in Oakland at the Turn-of-the-Century, who leave city life behind and search Central and Northern California for suitable farmland to own. The book is notable for its scenes in which the proletarian heroes enjoy fellowship with the artists' colony in Carmel, and their settling in the "Valley of the Moon".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Lady_of_the_Big_House"title="The Little Lady of the Big House">
The story concerns a love triangle. The protagonist, Dick Forrest, is a rancher with a poetic streak (his "acorn song" recalls London's play, "The Acorn Planters"). His wife, Paula, is a vivacious, athletic, and sexually self-aware woman, who falls in love with Evan Graham, an old friend of her husband. Unable to choose between the two men, she wounds herself mortally with a rifle in what her husband is certain is a suicide. .
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Rover"title="The Star Rover">
A framing story is told in the first person by Darrell Standing, a university professor serving life imprisonment in San Quentin State Prison for murder. Prison officials try to break his spirit by means of a torture device called "the jacket," a canvas jacket which can be tightly laced so as to compress the whole body, inducing angina. Standing discovers how to withstand the torture by entering a kind of trance state, in which he walks among the stars and experiences portions of past lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Swim-Two-Birds"title="At Swim-Two-Birds">
"At Swim-Two-Birds" presents itself as a first-person story by an unnamed Irish student of literature. The student believes that "one beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with", and he accordingly sets three apparently quite separate stories in motion. The first concerns the Pooka MacPhellimey, "a member of the devil class". The second is about a young man named John Furriskey, who turns out to be a fictional character created by another of the student's creations, Dermot Trellis, a cynical writer of Westerns. The third consists of the student's adaptations of Irish legends, mostly concerning Finn Mac Cool and Mad King Sweeney. But even this is a jest — the first of many in the novel — as there's also a fourth beginning here: That introducing the Irish student's own discourse on the benefits of three beginnings, setting his own story in motion.In the autobiographical frame story, the student recounts details of his life. He lives with his uncle, who works as a clerk in the Guinness Brewery in Dublin. The uncle is a complacent and self-consciously respectable bachelor who suspects that the student does very little studying. This seems to be the case, as by his own account the student spends more time drinking stout with his college friends, lying in bed, and working on his book than he does going to class.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rilla_of_Ingleside"title="Rilla of Ingleside">
Set almost a decade after "Rainbow Valley", Europe is on the brink of the First World War, and Anne's youngest daughter Rilla is an irrepressible almost-15-year-old, excited about her first adult party and blissfully unaware of the chaos that the Western world is about to enter. Her parents worry because Rilla seems not to have any ambition, is not interested in attending college, and is more concerned with having fun.Once the Continent descends into war, Jem Blythe and Jerry Meredith promptly enlist, upsetting Anne, Nan, and Faith Meredith (whom Rilla suspects is engaged to Jem). Rilla's brother Walter, who is of age, does not enlist, ostensibly due to a recent bout with typhoid but truly because he fears the ugliness of war and death. He confides in Rilla that he feels he is a coward. Rilla was a bit happy because she was closer to Walter than to her brother Jem.The enlisted boys report to Kingsport for training. Jem's dog, Dog Monday, takes up a vigil at the Glen train station waiting for Jem to come back. Rilla's siblings Nan, Di, and Walter return to Redmond College, and Shirley returns to Queen's Academy, leaving Rilla anxiously alone at home with her parents, their spinster housekeeper Susan Baker, and Gertrude Oliver, a teacher who is boarding with the Blythes while her fiancé reports to the front.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_(Egan_novel)"title="Quarantine (Egan novel)">
The novel is set in the near future (2034–2080), after the Solar System has been surrounded by an impenetrable shield known as the Bubble, presumably by an extraterrestrial civilization for unknown reasons. The Bubble permits no light to enter the Solar System, and as a consequence the stars can no longer be seen, causing widespread societal panic, 'claustrophobia', and terrorist action. Neural mods are common place, designed pathways in the brain that are created with engineered, programmable microorganisms to produce a variety of effects, such as implanting skillsets, emotions, altered states of awareness or, illegally, forcing and controlling thoughts.The narrator, Nick, contains a suite of tactical mods that allow him to suppress emotions and enhance tactical and analytical thought. Nick is a private eye forced to quit the police force after the death of his wife, the trauma of which caused him to activate his emotional suppression mod, which further prompted him to purchase a mod that simulates the feeling of love and wellbeing of his wife still being alive, logically solving the problem of grief.Nick accepts a case to investigate Laura, a woman who has vanished from a psychiatric institute, after several instances of her escaping. The institute staff insist that short of walking through a wall, it should not have been possible to escape the previous times, though it comes to light that she was kidnapped in this instance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfume_(novel)"title="Perfume (novel)">
## Part One.A boy is born in Paris, France in the year 1738. His mother is tried almost immediately for previous infanticide and subsequently executed, leaving him an orphan. He is named "Jean-Baptiste Grenouille" (French for "frog") and is fostered but is a difficult, solitary child and is eventually apprenticed to a local tanner. Unknown to other people, Grenouille has a remarkable sense of smell, giving him an extraordinary ability to discern subtlest odors from complex mixtures of scent and across great distances; as a result, he can perform apparently magical feats such as identifying bad vegetables, discerning approaching visitors, or navigating in total darkness.One day, long after having memorized nearly all the smells of the city, Grenouille is surprised by a unique smell. He finds the source of the scent: a young virgin girl just passing puberty. Entranced by her scent and believing that he alone must possess it, he strangles her and stays with her body until the scent has left it. In his quest to learn more about the art of perfume-making, he becomes apprenticed to one of the city's finest perfumers, Giuseppe Baldini, an aging, once-great master of the trade who finds himself increasingly outperformed by rival perfumers. Grenouille proves himself a prodigy by copying and improving a rival's perfume in Baldini's laboratory, after which Baldini offers him an apprenticeship. Baldini teaches Grenouille the basic techniques of perfumery while selling Grenouille's masterful new formulas as his own, restoring his flagging reputation. Baldini eventually reveals to Grenouille that there are techniques other than distillation that can be used to preserve a wider range of odours, which can only be learned in the heartland of the perfumer's craft, in the region of Grasse in the French Riviera. Shortly after, Grenouille elects to leave Paris, and Baldini dies when his shop collapses into the river Seine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rama_II_(novel)"title="Rama II (novel)">
Seventy years after the events of "Rendezvous with Rama", a second Raman vessel enters the Solar System. Its arrival is expected, and on Earth the chosen crew of twelve readies for the voyage to unlock more of Rama's mysteries. Interpersonal conflicts among crew members begin prior to the launch date.After arriving, an accident kills the leader of the group while still outside Rama, and there is debate over who the replacement should be. The tools and vehicles the crew bring to Rama, based on knowledge from the first expedition, make exploring Rama easier.The novel ends with three of the twelve astronauts abandoned inside Rama as it travels out of the Solar System.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prelude_to_Space"title="Prelude to Space">
"Prelude to Space" recounts the fictional events leading up the launch of "Prometheus", the world's first spacecraft capable of reaching the Moon. "Prometheus" consists of two components, named Alpha and Beta. Alpha is designed for travel from Earth orbit to the Moon and back. It is not capable of independent atmospheric flight. Beta is a nuclear-powered flying wing which carries Alpha into orbit. Beta uses a nuclear reactor to superheat either air (when flying in the lower, denser, part of the atmosphere) or its own internal supply of methane (in the higher reaches of the atmosphere and in space) to achieve thrust. Beta functions as a ramjet in the lower atmosphere and must be launched using an electric launch track. The return journey to the Moon proceeds as follows: Beta carries Alpha into orbit; Alpha separates from Beta and refuels from tanks previously carried into orbit by Beta; Alpha flies to and lands on the Moon while Beta remains in Earth orbit; Alpha returns to Earth orbit and the crew returns to Earth aboard Beta; Alpha remains in orbit to await the next flight."Prelude" was written before the Apollo program landed men on the Moon and follows the ideal that space travel is realistic and within the grasp of the population. Clarke wrote a new preface in 1976 in which he admits that he had some propagandist goals in writing "Prelude to Space" — he was an influential member of the astronautics community when the idea of rockets leaving Earth's atmosphere was scoffed at by many scientists.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_Exile"title="Planet of Exile">
The story is set on Werel, the third planet of the Gamma Draconis system. The planet has an orbital period of 60 Earth years, and is approaching its correspondingly long winter. The main characters belong to one of two major groups: Wold and his daughter Rolery are members of the Tevarans, a tribe of humanoids indigenous to the planet. Jakob Agat is a young man from a dwindling colony of Earth humans that have been effectively marooned on the planet. Although both populations share a common genetic heritage in the Hainish people, the difference is significant enough to prevent interbreeding.The relationship between the two groups has long been tense and characterized by limited interaction. However, with the approaching dangers of winter and marauders, the visit of curious young Rolery to the colony becomes a sign of coming changes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_Besieged"title="Fortress Besieged">
Set in the 1930s, the novel follows the misadventures of Fang Hung-chien ( "Fāng Hóngjiàn"). The book begins with Fang returning home to China after running out of money while studying abroad. It is revealed that his studies were financed by a family friend but Fang Hongjiang wasted his time aimlessly bouncing between European schools. Fang bought a fake degree to have something to show for his studies. Onboard the "Vicomte de Bragelonne", Fang meets Su Wenwan (蘇文紈 "Sū Wénwán"), a young woman in her late 20s. She is quite pretty, if thin and pallid, but her pickiness means she is unmarried. He also meets the tanned and voluptuous Miss Pao (鮑小姐 "Bào xiǎojiě"), whom Fang pursues with some success during the voyage. When the boat reaches Hong Kong Miss Pao disembarks into the embrace of her fiancé, a middle-aged balding doctor, and Fang realizes he has been used.Fang returns to Shanghai and joins his family who are fleeing Japanese occupation. He encounters Su Wenwan, her cousin Tang Xiaofu (唐曉芙), and Su Wenwan's suitor Zhao Xinmei (赵辛楣). Fang Hongjian wants to pursue Tang Xiaofu, but Su Wenwan expects him to propose to her instead. Zhao Xinmei also misinterprets Fang Hongjian's intentions and sees him as a romantic rival. Their romantic ambitions are all foiled: Tang Xiaofu moves away and Su Wenwan marries another man. Eventually Fang Hongjian and Zhao Xinmei both receive job offers to teach at San Lü University in the countryside. Zhao Xinmei gathers other teachers hired by San Lü in order to make the journey from Shanghai as a group. The story the follows the group's journey through the Chinese countryside to reach their new employer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voyage_of_the_Dawn_Treader"title="The Voyage of the Dawn Treader">
The two youngest Pevensie children, Lucy and Edmund, are staying with their odious cousin Eustace Scrubb while their older brother, Peter, is studying for an exam with Professor Kirke, and their older sister, Susan, is travelling through America with their parents. Edmund, Lucy, and Eustace are drawn into the Narnian world through a picture of a ship at sea. (The painting, hanging neglected in the guest bedroom in which Lucy was staying, had been an unwanted present to Eustace's parents.) The three children land in the ocean near the pictured vessel, the titular "Dawn Treader", and are taken aboard.The "Dawn Treader" is the ship of Caspian X, King of Narnia, whom Edmund and Lucy (along with Peter and Susan) helped gain the throne of Narnia in "Prince Caspian". Also present on board are the Lord Drinian (the captain of the "Dawn Treader") and the first mate Rhince.Peace has been established in the three years since then, and Caspian has undertaken a quest in fulfilment of his coronation oath to sail east for a year and a day to find the seven lost Lords of Narnia: Argoz, Bern, Mavramorn, Octesian, Restimar, Revilian, and Rhoop. He mentions that Trumpkin the dwarf has been left in charge of Narnia as Lord Regent in his absence. Lucy and Edmund are delighted to be back in the Narnian world, but Eustace is less enthusiastic, as he has never been there before and had taunted his cousins with his belief that this alternate universe had never existed. The Talking Mouse Reepicheep is also on board, as he hopes to find Aslan's Country beyond the seas of the "utter East". When Eustace teases Reepicheep, much is revealed about the mouse's pugnacious character.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silver_Chair"title="The Silver Chair">
Eustace Scrubb, now a reformed character following the events of "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader", encounters his classmate and new friend Jill Pole at their school, Experiment House, where they are miserable. Jill has been tormented by bullies and is hiding from them. Eustace tells Jill about his Narnian adventures, and how his experiences there led to the changes in his behaviour – which Jill warns is likely to see him targeted by the bullies as well. Eustace suggests asking for Aslan's help, and as the bullies converge on them, the two blunder through a gate that leads them to Aslan's Country.They encounter a cliff, where Jill shows off by approaching the edge, and Eustace, trying to pull her back, falls over the edge. Aslan appears and saves Eustace by blowing him on a magical wind stream to Narnia. He charges Jill with helping Eustace find King Caspian X's son, Prince Rilian of Narnia, who disappeared some years earlier. He gives Jill four Signs to guide them on their quest and then blows Jill into Narnia, where Eustace is already waiting by a great castle. They watch as an elderly and frail man takes ship and sails from the harbour. To Eustace's dismay, they then learn that the elderly man is actually King Caspian; by failing to greet him they have missed the first Sign. 50 years have passed since Eustace was last in Narnia, even though less than a year has passed in his world. They also learn that Caspian has sailed off to visit again the lands they had sailed to when he and Eustace were young, although many Narnians believe that he has set off to seek Aslan in order to ask who can be the next King of Narnia when he dies. Caspian is obviously deteriorating with old age, and his people fear that he will not live for much longer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Love"title="Geek Love">
The novel takes place in two interwoven time periods: the first deals with the Binewski children's constant struggle against each other through life. They especially have to deal with the Machiavellian Arty as he develops his own cult: Arturism. In this cult, Arty persuades people to have their limbs amputated (so that they can be like him) in their search for the principle he calls PIP ("Peace, Isolation, Purity"). Each member moves up in stages, losing increasingly significant chunks of their body, starting with their toes and fingers. As Arty battles his siblings to maintain control over his followers, competition between their respective freak shows slowly begins to take over their lives.The second story is set in the present and is centered on Oly's daughter, Miranda. Nineteen-year-old Miranda does not know Oly is her mother. She lives on a trust fund created by Oly before she gave up her daughter to be raised by nuns. This had been urged by her brother Arty, who was also Miranda's father (not through sexual intercourse, but by the telekinetic powers of Chick, who carried Arty's sperm directly to Oly's ovum). Oly lives in the same rooming house as Miranda so she can "spy" on her. (The rooming house is run by "Crystal" Lil, who is so addled that she doesn't know Oly is her daughter.) Miranda has a special defect of her own, a small tail, which she flaunts at a local fetish strip club. There she meets Mary Lick, who tries to convince her to have the tail cut off. Lick is a wealthy woman who pays attractive women to get disfiguring operations, ostensibly so they may live up to their potential instead of becoming sex objects; it is implied, however, that Lick's real motivation is to punish them for being more attractive than she is. Oly plans to stop Lick in order to protect her daughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malafrena"title="Malafrena">
The story takes place from 1825 to 1830, when Orsinia is ruled by the Austrian Empire. The hero is Itale Sorde, the son of the owner of an estate on a lake called Malafrena in a valley of the same name. Itale leaves the estate, against his father's will, to engage in nationalistic and revolutionary politics in the capital.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chanur_novels"title="The Chanur novels">
## Overview.The Chanur novels are written as unusually realistic space opera, with much less ship-to-ship shooting than coercion, manipulation, politics, pride contests, and clashing economic interests interspersed with species-to-species miscommunication and misunderstanding.The realistic handling of linguistic and psychological barriers is one of the stronger aspects of the books (especially compared to the genre as a whole). The character development is another, which is also closely connected to the inter-species relations. As the (usually involuntary) exposure of the characters to different cultures goes on, they are pushed to probe other ways of thinking—and together with constant pressure of both economical and immediate hazard that drives them to opening new levels of themselves. Even the "enemy" side is quickly brought from the level of incomprehensible faceless danger into viewing them as a formidable yet admirable opponent. The books are a metaphor of breaking mental barriers, finding oneself in adversity, and growing above petty interests towards global strategies and greatness.There are several references to the events of the Chanur series in Cherryh's 1988 novel "Cyteen," both in statements by its characters and in the pseudo-historical documents making up the chapter interstitials. From them we learn that the Earth authorities, badly rattled by contact with the Compact and thus deprived of expansion opportunities into nearby volumes of space, stepped up their rapprochement with Alliance and Union. In particular, they increased their overtures toward Union to avoid having all of their interstellar commerce dominated by the closer Alliance. This led to Earth's transferring genetic information about Earth species to Union for preservation against their possible extinction, and Union transferring information gained in the terraforming of Cyteen to Earth to be used in terraforming Mars and repairing ecological damage on Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passage_of_Arms"title="Passage of Arms">
The novel is about the discovery of a cache of arms, abandoned by Communist insurgents in the Malayan jungle, and the later transfer of the arms via Singapore to Indonesia. It is structured as three connected stories. The outer, framing story is that of Girija Krishnan, the Tamil plantation clerk who finds the arms cache and sells it to raise money so that he can create a local bus service company. Krishnan's story of business ambition leads to the story of an entrepreneurial Chinese trading family who arrange the transferring of the arms from seller to buyer. The central, third story features an American couple, Greg and Dorothy Nilsen, who are tourists of the Far East used to legitimize the transaction, and so find themselves in great danger. The Nilsens are on a cruise holiday when they are asked by Mr Tan to go to Singapore to participate in an arms deal in exchange for a handsome fee.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Boys"title="Crystal Boys">
The story takes place in Taipei in 1971 (or, in the most recent film adaptation, in 1973), and follows a short period in the life of a young man called Li-Qing (李青, nicknamed "A-Qing").When A-Qing is expelled from his school because of "scandalous relations" with classmate Zhao Ying (趙英), his father kicks him out of the family home. A-Qing begins to hang out at a park called New Park, a gay cruising area and hangout for gay men, where he meets the novel's other primary characters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Hound_and_the_World's_Pain"title="The War Hound and the World's Pain">
The book is set in Europe ravaged by the Thirty Years' War. Its hero Ulrich von Bek is a mercenary and freethinker, who finds himself a damned soul in a castle owned by Lucifer. Much to his surprise, von Bek is charged by Lucifer with doing God's work, by finding the Holy Grail, the "cure for the world's pain", that will also cure Lucifer's pain by reconciling him with God. Only through doing this can von Bek save his soul.After many adventures, von Bek eventually finds the Holy Grail, and discovers that it will set mankind on the path to self-redemption through rationality, without the help of God or the hindrance of Lucifer.The story is continued in "The City in the Autumn Stars" (1986).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Things_Fall_Apart"title="Things Fall Apart">
## Part 1.The novel's protagonist, Okonkwo, is famous in the villages of Umuofia for being a wrestling champion, defeating a wrestler nicknamed "Amalinze The Cat" (because he never lands on his back). Okonkwo is strong, hard-working, and strives to show no weakness. He wants to dispel his father Unoka's tainted legacy of unpaid debts, a neglected wife and children, and cowardice at the sight of blood. Okonkwo works to build his wealth entirely on his own, as Unoka died a shameful death and left many unpaid debts. He is also obsessed with his masculinity, and any slight compromise to this is swiftly destroyed. As a result, he often beats his wives and children, and is unkind to his neighbours. However, his drive to escape the legacy of his father leads him to be wealthy, courageous, and powerful among the people of his village. He is a leader of his village, having attained a position in his society for which he has striven all his life.Okonkwo is selected by the elders to be the guardian of Ikemefuna, a boy taken by the clan as a peace settlement between Umuofia and another clan after Ikemefuna's father killed an Umuofian woman. The boy lives with Okonkwo's family and Okonkwo grows fond of him, although Okonkwo does not show his fondness so as not to appear weak. The boy looks up to Okonkwo and considers him a second father. The Oracle of Umuofia eventually pronounces that the boy must be killed. Ezeudu, the oldest man in the village, warns Okonkwo that he should have nothing to do with the murder because it would be like killing his own child – but to avoid seeming weak and feminine to the other men of the village, Okonkwo disregards the warning from the old man, striking the killing blow himself even as Ikemefuna begs his "father" for protection. For many days after killing Ikemefuna, Okonkwo feels guilty and saddened.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball"title="Moneyball">
The central premise of "Moneyball" is that the collective wisdom of baseball insiders (including players, managers, coaches, scouts, and the front office) over the past century is outdated, subjective, and often flawed. Statistics such as stolen bases, runs batted in, and batting average, typically used to gauge players, are relics of a 19th-century view of the game and the statistics available at that time. Before sabermetrics was introduced to baseball, teams were dependent on the skills of their scouts to find and evaluate players. Scouts are experienced in the sport, usually having been players or coaches. The book argues that the Oakland A's' front office took advantage of more analytical gauges of player performance to field a team that could outsmart and better compete against richer competitors in Major League Baseball (MLB).Rigorous statistical analysis had demonstrated that on-base percentage and slugging percentage are better indicators of offensive success, and the A's became convinced that these qualities were cheaper to obtain on the open market than more historically valued qualities such as running speed and defense. These observations often flew in the face of conventional baseball wisdom and the beliefs of many baseball scouts and executives.By re-evaluating their strategy in this way, the 2002 Athletics, with approximately $44 million in salary, were competitive with larger market teams such as the New York Yankees, who spent over $125 million in payroll that season. Because of its smaller budget, Oakland had to find players undervalued by the market, and their system has proven itself thus far. The approach brought the A's to the playoffs in 2002 and 2003.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Done_Gone"title="The Wind Done Gone">
"Gone with the Wind" revolves around Scarlett O'Hara, a pampered Southern white woman, who lives through the American Civil War and Reconstruction. "The Wind Done Gone" is the same story, but told from the viewpoint of Cynara, a mulatto slave on Scarlett's plantation and the daughter of Scarlett's father and Mammy.Sold from the O'Haras, Cynara eventually makes her way back to Atlanta and becomes the mistress of a white businessman. She later leaves him for a black aspiring politician, eventually moving with him to Reconstruction Washington, D.C.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Budd"title="Billy Budd">
Billy Budd is a seaman impressed into service aboard HMS "Bellipotent" in the year 1797, when the Royal Navy was reeling from two major mutinies and was threatened by the 's military ambitions. He is impressed to this large warship from another, smaller, merchant ship, "The Rights of Man" (named after the book by Thomas Paine). As his former ship moves off, Budd shouts, "And good-bye to you too, old "Rights-of-Man"."Billy, a foundling from Bristol, has an innocence, good looks and a natural charisma that make him popular with the crew. He has a stutter, which becomes more noticeable when under intense emotion. He arouses the antagonism of the ship's master-at-arms, John Claggart. Claggart, while not unattractive, seems somehow "defective or abnormal in the constitution", possessing a "natural depravity." Envy is Claggart's explicitly stated emotion toward Budd, foremost because of his "significant personal beauty," and also for his innocence and general popularity. (Melville further opines that envy is "universally felt to be more shameful than even felonious crime.") This leads Claggart to falsely charge Billy with conspiracy to mutiny. When the captain, Edward Fairfax "Starry" Vere, is presented with Claggart's charges, he summons Claggart and Billy to his cabin for a private meeting. Claggart makes his case and Billy, astounded, is unable to respond, due to his stutter. In his extreme frustration he strikes out at Claggart, killing him instantly.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_to_Terabithia_(novel)"title="Bridge to Terabithia (novel)">
Ten-year-old Jesse "Jess" Aarons has trained all summer to be the fastest runner in his rural school. Secretly, he wants to be an artist, but his father disapproves. He has a crush on the school music teacher, Miss Edmunds, the only person who encourages him to draw.Jess's new neighbor, Leslie Burke, is a wealthy tomboy from Arlington, Virginia. At recess on the first day of school, Leslie outruns everyone. The other students mock her for being a teacher's pet and for not owning a television. When Jess defends Leslie from Janice Avery, a seventh grade bully, they become friends. They play by a dry creek behind Leslie's house. They pretend they are the king and queen of a hidden magical kingdom, Terabithia, that can be entered only by swinging over the creek bed on an old rope. When Jess's six-year-old sister May Belle brings Twinkies to school for lunch, Janice Avery steals them. At Terabithia, Jess and Leslie forge a love letter to Janice from a boy she likes. The letter asks for a date, and Janice is humiliated when he does not show up. Months later, Leslie hears Janice crying in the bathroom. Jess convinces Leslie to help Janice. Janice tells Leslie that she is abusively beaten by her father, and her so-called friends have just gossipped about it to the entire seventh grade. Leslie comforts Janice by telling her that everyone will forget about it in a week. That night, May Belle tells Jess that she followed him and Leslie to the creek. He makes her swear never to follow them again nor to tell their mother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Painted_Bird"title="The Painted Bird">
In 1939 at the beginning of World War II, a six-year-old boy living in the largest city of an Eastern European country invaded by Nazi Germany is sent by his parents to hide in the countryside because of their past anti-Nazi activities. However, they lose contact with him because of the chaos of the war and he is left stranded. As a result of his black hair and olive skin he is constantly accused of being either a Jew or a Gypsy, although Kosiński's narrator denies this. He also has trouble understanding the local languages and dialects of the peasants he encounters. His first caretaker is a superstitious and unhygienic old woman named Marta, who refuses to allow him to look into her eyes because she is worried his "Gypsy eye" will curse her. Marta eventually becomes ill and dies, and the boy accidentally burns down her hut after spilling kerosene on it. Left to fend for himself, he wanders alone from village to village seeking shelter and food from adults in exchange for work. The boy endures various kinds of violence and cruelty, sometimes hounded and tortured, only rarely sheltered and cared for. He is saved from an angry mob of villagers by Olga, an elderly folk healer, who takes him under her wing. Although she openly distrusts the boy because of his appearance, she gains his admiration for her cures. After he becomes infected with a local epidemic, she buries him up to his head in dirt and he is attacked by birds but recovers. However, he is caught by the villagers again and thrown onto a large catfish's air bladder, which floats him down the river away from the village. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourist_Season_(novel)"title="Tourist Season (novel)">
"Las Noches de Diciembre" (Spanish, "The Nights of December") is a small terrorist cell led by rogue newspaper columnist Skip Wiley, calling himself "El Fuego". Skip believes that the only way to save Florida's natural beauty from destruction is to violently dissuade tourists from visiting and/or settling in the state. Recruiting three comrades with similar vendettas against the Florida establishment, they begin a spree of flashy kidnappings, murders, and bombings to frighten off new arrivals into the Sunshine State. Their first victim is B.D. "Sparky" Harper, the head of Miami's Chamber of Commerce. Sparky's body is found stuffed into an oversized suitcase, dressed in a garish tourist outfit, smeared with sunscreen, and with his legs amputated. Next, the group starts kidnapping and killing random tourists and Florida residents, many of whom are fed to a giant crocodile nicknamed "Pavlov".Brian Keyes, a private investigator and former reporter for the Miami "Sun", is hired to help defend petty burglar Ernesto Cabal, who was caught driving Sparky's stolen car. Brian does not believe that Ernesto killed Sparky, but the Miami police dismiss him. Ernesto commits suicide when told by his own lawyer that the case is a lost cause. Brian is then hired by Nell Bellamy to find her missing husband (the first tourist victim), and by "Sun" editor Cab Mulcahy to locate the missing Wiley. After an encounter with his ex-girlfriend Jenna (who is now dating Skip), Brian tracks Skip to the Everglades and is captured by "Las Noches". Revealing himself, Skip tells Brian to return to Miami and spread the word of the group's demands. He then has Brian watch as their latest victim is fed to Pavlov. Brian tries to stop the murder and is stabbed in the back by one of Skip's followers, a Cuban named Jesús Bernal. He is returned to Miami and treated in the hospital.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigana"title="Tigana">
The plot focuses on a group of rebels attempting to overthrow both tyrants and win back their homeland. Many of the rebels are natives of the province of Tigana, which was the province that most ably resisted Brandin: In a crucial battle, Brandin's son was killed. In retaliation for this, Brandin attacked Tigana and crushed it more savagely than any other part of the Palm; then, following this victory, he used his magic to remove the name and history of Tigana from the minds of the population. Brandin named it Lower Corte, making Corte, their traditional enemies to their north, seem superior to a land that was all but forgotten.Only those born in Tigana before the invasion can hear or speak its name, or remember it as it was; as far as everyone else is concerned, that area of the country has always been an insignificant part of a neighbouring province, hence the rebels are battling for the very soul of their country.In the end the rebels engineer a battle between their two enemies hoping they will defeat each other. After victory, the magic preventing others from remembering the province of Tigana is removed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_to_Witch_Mountain"title="Escape to Witch Mountain">
Tony and Tia are orphaned teenagers who have paranormal abilities. Tony possesses the ability of telekinesis, which he can access most readily through playing music, particularly his harmonica. Tia's strengths include the ability to unlock any door by touch and communicate with animals. Both siblings can communicate via ultrasonic speech audible only to each other; but Tia cannot speak normally and is regarded as strange because of this. It is later revealed that Tia is not unusual in this respect, but Tony is; few of their kind have the ability to speak out loud. After their foster guardian, Mrs. Malone, dies, they are placed by social services in a juvenile detention home under grim, unwholesome conditions, where Tia befriends a black cat, Winkie.Both have suppressed memories of their past, but discover a clue in an old road map hidden along with a cache of money in Tia's "star box", a leather purse-like box with a double-star design on it. In a chance encounter with a nun who is an art teacher, the nun reveals that she once received a letter on stationery with an identical design. The writer, a Blue Ridge Mountains resident with "a name like Caroway, or Garroway, or Hideaway" sought information on students who had "unusual aptitudes." When a man named Lucas Deranian, claiming to be the brother of their deceased father, shows up at the detention center to take custody of them, they instinctively know he is not their uncle and has ulterior motives. Unfortunately, when they attempt to reach the nun, they find that she has died.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pincher_Martin"title="Pincher Martin">
The plot of "Pincher Martin" surrounds the survival and psychophysical, spiritual and existential plight of one Christopher Hadley "Pincher" Martin, a temporary naval lieutenant who believes himself to be the sole survivor of a military torpedo destroyer which sinks in the North Atlantic Ocean. At the start of the novel Martin is in the water and desperately fighting for his life. He is apparently saved after being providentially washed ashore a rocky mid-Atlantic islet. He deduces that his naval crew is dead and begins his grim struggle for survival but, as time goes by, a series of strange and increasingly terrifying events, which he at first dismisses as hallucinations, slowly provokes in him an existential crisis.Throughout the novel Golding juxtaposes themes of sanity and insanity, and reality and unreality. At first Martin is portrayed as a thinking individual, who uses his intelligence, education and training to source food, collect fresh water and alert any potential rescuers. It is in fact during this rational phase that Martin is at his most delusional. It is only when insanity takes hold that he begins to comprehend the reality of his predicament: 'There is a pattern emerging. I do not know what the pattern is but even my dim guess at it makes my reason falter'.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocky"title="Chocky">
David Gore becomes concerned that his twelve-year-old son, Matthew, is too old to have an imaginary friend. His concerns deepen as Matthew becomes increasingly distressed and blames it on arguments with this unseen companion, whom he calls "Chocky". As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the friend is far from imaginary, but is an alien consciousness communicating with Matthew's mind; which is of interest to shadowy government forces."Chocky" reveals that it is a scout sent from its home planet (where there is only one sex) in search of new planets to colonise, or to provide subtle guidance to newly-emerging intelligent life. "Chocky", talking through Matthew, explains to David that in becoming overly attached to Matthew and saving him and his sister from a recent accident, it has violated the rules of its scout mission (interfering with events on Earth) and must end its link with him completely. Its further work on Earth will be conducted in a much more covert manner.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_and_Its_Discontents"title="Civilization and Its Discontents">
Freud begins this work by taking up a possible source of religious feeling that his previous book, "The Future of an Illusion", overlooked: the "oceanic feeling" of wholeness, limitlessness, and eternity. Freud himself cannot experience this feeling of dissolution, but notes there exist different pathological and healthy states (e.g. love) where the boundary between ego and object is lost, blurred, or distorted. Freud categorizes the oceanic feeling as being a regression into an earlier state of consciousness — before the ego had differentiated itself from the world of objects. The need for this religious feeling, he writes, arises out of "the infant's helplessness and the longing for the father," as there is no greater infantile need than a father's protection. Freud "imagine[s] that the oceanic feeling became connected with religion later on" in cultural practices.The second chapter delves into how religion is one coping strategy that arises out of a need for the individual to distance himself from all of the suffering in the world. The ego of the child forms over the oceanic feeling when it grasps that there are negative aspects of reality from which it would prefer to distance itself. But at the same time as the ego is hoping to avoid displeasure, it is also building itself so that it may be better able to act towards securing happiness, and these are the twin aims of the pleasure principle when the ego realizes that it must also deal with 'reality'. Freud claims that the 'purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle' and the rest of the chapter is an exploration of various styles of adaptation that humans use to secure happiness from the world while also trying to limit their exposure to suffering or avoid it altogether. Freud points out three main sources of displeasure that we attempt to master: our own painful and mortal existence, the cruel and destructive aspects of the natural world, and the suffering endemic to the reality that we must live with other human beings in a society. Freud regards this last source of displeasure as "perhaps more painful to us than any other", and the remainder of this book will extrapolate on the conflict between the individual's instinct for seeking gratification and the reality of societal life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodbye,_Mickey_Mouse"title="Goodbye, Mickey Mouse">
Each chapter is titled by the name of the main character it deals with. The central storyline revolves around a love affair between a new pilot, Captain James Farebrother, and an English girl, Victoria Cooper. Another major plot line follows Lieutenant Mickey Morse, nicknamed "Mickey Mouse", who is racing to be the first American pilot to break Eddie Rickenbacker's record of 26 kills from World War I.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stepford_Wives"title="The Stepford Wives">
The premise involves the married men of the fictional Fairfield County town of Stepford, Connecticut and their fawning, submissive, impossibly beautiful wives. The protagonist is Joanna Eberhart, a talented photographer newly arrived from New York City with her husband and children, eager to start a new life. As time goes on, she becomes increasingly disturbed by the submissive wives of Stepford who seem to lack free will, especially when she sees her once independent-minded friends, fellow new arrivals to Stepford, turn into mindless, docile housewives following a romantic weekend. Her husband, who seems to be spending more and more time at meetings of the local men's association, mocks her fears.As the story progresses, Joanna becomes convinced that the wives of Stepford are being poisoned or brainwashed into submission by the men's club. She visits the library and researches the pasts of Stepford's wives, discovering that some of the women were once feminist activists and very successful professionals and that the leader of the men's club is a former Disney engineer and others are artists and scientists, capable of creating lifelike robots. Her friend Bobbie helps her investigate, going so far as to write to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to inquire about possible toxins in Stepford. However, eventually, Bobbie is also transformed into a docile housewife and has no interest in her previous activities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_of_the_Giant"title="Shadow of the Giant">
A belief is spreading in conquered China that the government has lost the Mandate of Heaven. Han Tzu meets up with Mazer Rackham, who passes him a blow dart pen, calling it the "Mandate of Heaven". Han Tzu confronts the emperor, Snow Tiger, who is shot and killed by a guard, allowing Han Tzu to overthrow the Chinese government and install himself as the new emperor. Meanwhile, Peter Wiggin, Hegemon of Earth, along with Petra Arkanian, goes to visit Alai, Caliph of the Muslim League. The two help Alai realize that he is little more than a glorified prisoner, and that others have been ruling Islam in his stead. After uncovering a conspiracy against him, Alai resolves to take firmer control of his nation and guarantee the human rights of his subjugated peoples.The rest of the book deals with Peter Wiggin working to create a world government free of war through his Free People of Earth (FPE) alliance. Caliph Alai of the Muslim League and Virlomi, now the virtual goddess of India, oppose his efforts. Against this backdrop of world political machinations by the former Battle School children is the extremely personal story of Julian (Bean) Delphiki. Anton's Key is making him grow at an astounding rate and he has only a short time before his body will become too large for his heart to support. He searches frantically for his and Petra's missing children. Graff assists them in locating the surrogate mothers of their children. While Bean and Petra wait for news, Graff extends invitations to the other members of Ender's Jeesh to leave Earth and rule colonies, where they can conquer to their heart's content without causing needless wars between themselves, and instructs Bean to support Peter in forming the FPE.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Personal_Matter"title="A Personal Matter">
The plot follows the story of Bird, a 27 year old Japanese man. The book starts with him wondering about a hypothetical trip to Africa, which is a recurrent theme in his mind throughout the story. Soon after day-dreaming about his trip and a brawl with a few local delinquents from the region, Bird receives a call from the doctor of the hospital regarding his newborn child, urging him to talk in person. After meeting with the doctor, he discovers that his son has been born with a brain hernia, although the fact is still obscure to his wife.Bird is troubled by the revelation, and regrets having to inform the relatives of his wife about the facts concerning the state of the child, who is not expected to survive for long. Not long after, Bird meets an ex-girlfriend of his, called Himiko, who has, after her husband's suicide, become a sexual deviant and eccentric. After a short philosophical discussion, both become drunk and Bird sleeps at Himiko's, only to wake up on the morning after in a deep state of hangover from all the whisky he had drunk the day before. He vomits violently. After freshening up and readying himself for work, Bird goes to his teaching job at a cram school to teach English Literature. Whilst teaching, Bird suddenly becomes wildly nauseated and vomits in his classroom. The classmates disapprove of Bird's behaviour, claiming that he's a drunk and should be fired from his job. Bird worries that he might lose his job.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encounter_with_Tiber"title="Encounter with Tiber">
Evidence is found of an intelligent alien species who visited the Earth long ago and left an encyclopedia with the collected knowledge of their culture. The story is told from the point of view of a human historian on a star ship on the way to Alpha Centauri (the aliens' home star) who is using the time in transit to translate two alien books and to write a history of how humans gained access to the aliens' knowledge.9000 years ago the alien society in the Alpha Centauri system was under threat of cosmic bombardment. Their only hope to survive was to explore and colonize nearby space. On 21st century Earth, astronauts find artifacts left by this civilization and wonder who they were.The narrator is a historian who is part of a mission to the Alpha Centauri system, the home system of the aliens. As all crew members were required to bring several projects to work on, due to the decades long nature of the mission, she spends her time writing biographies of several family members who were closely involved in the acquisition of a repository of the aliens' knowledge. As another project, she translates two autobiographies by the aliens who had visited the Solar System over 9000 years earlier.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Aurochs"title="Night of the Aurochs">
"Aurochs" is an attempt by Trumbo to tell the tale of World War II through the eyes of a Nazi by the name of Grieban, commandant of the concentration camp at Auschwitz.The book is compiled and edited by Robert Kirsch. The story starts out narrated in the first person through a series of letters written by Grieban, but later is written in the third person.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stars,_Like_Dust"title="The Stars, Like Dust">
Biron Farrill, about to complete studies at the University of Earth, is told by Sander Jonti that his father, a rich planetary leader who is known as Lord Rancher of Widemos, has been arrested and killed by the Tyranni and that his own life may be in danger. On Jonti's advice, he travels to Rhodia, the strongest of the conquered planets. There, from the Director of Rhodia's brother Gillbret, he hears rumours of a world on which rebellion against the Tyranni is secretly being plotted.Escaping with Artemisia oth Hinriad, the daughter of the Director of Rhodia, and her uncle Gillbret in a Tyranni spaceship, they travel to the planet Lingane. It is not part of the Tyranni conquests but maintains "peaceful" relations with them.There, they meet the Autarch of Lingane, who is revealed to be Sander Jonti, the man who sent Farrill to Rhodia from Earth, who seems to possess knowledge of a rebellion world. With him and his followers, the group travel to the heart of the Horsehead Nebula as they believe that for any rebellion world to exist and not be known to the Tyranni, it must be located in a place like the Horsehead Nebula.The Tyranni spaceship that was stolen by Farrill is being tracked by a fleet of Tyranni vessels led by Simok Aratap, the Tyrannian Commissioner. With him is the Director, who is shown to be nervous about the well-being of his daughter and his brother. They keep themselves at a distance for fear of discovery until Farrill lands on one planet in the heart of the nebula.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swiss_Family_Robinson"title="The Swiss Family Robinson">
The novel opens with the titular family in the hold of a sailing ship, weathering a great storm. The ship's crew evacuates without them, so William, Elizabeth, and their four sons (Fritz, Ernest, Jack, and Franz) are left to survive alone. As the ship tosses about, William prays that God will spare them.The ship survives the night, and the family finds themselves within sight of a tropical desert island. The following day, they decide to get to the island they can see beyond the reef. With much effort, they construct a vessel out of tubs. After they fill the tubs with food, ammunition, and other items of value they can safely carry, they row toward the island. Two dogs from the ship, Turk and Juno, swim beside them. The ship's cargo of livestock (including a cow, a donkey, two goats, six sheep, a ram, a pig, chickens, ducks, geese, and pigeons), guns and powder, carpentry tools, books, a disassembled pinnace and provisions have survived.Upon reaching the island, the family set up a makeshift camp. William knows that they must prepare for a long time on the island and his thoughts are as much on provisions for the future as on their immediate wants. William and his oldest son Fritz spend the next day exploring the island.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Learner"title="Slow Learner">
## "The Small Rain".This was Pynchon's first published story. It centers around Nathan Levine, a lazy Specialist 3/C in the Army stationed at New Orleans who, along with several of his companions in the battalion are assigned to help with the cleanup at a small island named Creole, which has just been hit by a hurricane. He picks up dead bodies back at the island and after the horrific day of work, he heads back thinking about how to go forward with his life, if at all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sky_So_Big_and_Black"title="The Sky So Big and Black">
This story alternates between the point of view of Terpsichore Melpomene Murray ("Teri"), an ecoprospector who's approaching adulthood on Mars and seeks to follow in her father's footsteps, and the unnamed psychiatrist who is listening to her story. Several decades earlier, refugees from Earth fled to join a pre-existing human colony on Mars to escape the domination of "One True", a massively parallel/cellular automata program that runs on the interconnected brains of most of the human beings on Earth; the program in the individual human brain is called Resuna, probably a contraction from the Latin for One Thing. If a human mind has a copy of Resuna, it may remain dormant until a human speaks the trigger phrase "let overwrite, let override."The first half of the novel is mostly backstory in Teri's voice, leading up to the day when she passed her test for "full adulthood", a legal status that can apparently be reached at any age by passing an educational and psychiatric exam, which gives her the right to marry, hold property, vote, and so forth. Teri hopes to be an ecospector (eco-prospector) like her father Telemachus, living on the surface in a pressure suit most of the time; but because in the last generation the colonists decided to forgo terraforming Mars to suit human life and instead adapt humans to suit the Martian environment, the future of ecospecting doesn't look good to Telemachus; he thinks the future of Mars is with the "Nations" of Mars-formed humans. It's estimated that modifying people can be done in just two to three generations, whereas terraforming Mars might take thousands of years. Thus he wants her to get an advanced degree and go into some always-needed occupation like science or medicine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_of_Go"title="The Master of Go">
The story itself is a semi-fictionalized account of a lengthy 1938 Go game between the respected master Honinbo Shūsai and the up-and-coming player Minoru Kitani (known as Otaké in the book). The match took almost six months to complete, and was the last of Shūsai's career. In the novel, the game, as actually played in real life, lasts 237 moves, and is documented in the book by means of diagrams. Otaké (as his historical counterpart Kitani) wins by 5 points with the Black stones. Kawabata had reported on the match for the Mainichi newspaper chain, and some sections of the book are reworked versions of his original newspaper columns.The novel follows the progress of the game as it moves from location to location, placing particular emphasis on the time between each player's moves (often a matter of days). As Meijin, Shūsai is entitled to certain deference which he does not always receive. Thus the players regularly come into conflict with one another about the ritual and ceremonial aspect of the game. Finally, Shūsai dies from an illness, mirroring the death of the historical Shūsai just over a year after the end of his match.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Dead_(novel)"title="The House of the Dead (novel)">
The narrator, Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov, has been sentenced to deportation to Siberia and ten years of hard labour for murdering his wife. Life in prison is particularly hard for Aleksandr Petrovich, since he is a "gentleman" and suffers the malice of the other prisoners, nearly all of whom belong to the peasantry. Gradually Goryanchikov overcomes his revulsion at his situation and his fellow convicts, undergoing a spiritual awakening that culminates with his release from the camp. Dostoevsky portrays the inmates of the prison with sympathy for their plight, and also expresses admiration for their courage, energy, ingenuity and talent. He concludes that the existence of the prison, with its absurd practices and savage corporal punishments, is a tragic fact, both for the prisoners and for Russia.Though the novel has no readily identifiable plot in the conventional sense, events and descriptions are carefully organized around the narrator's gradual insight into the true nature of the prison-camp and the other prisoners. It is primarily in this sense that the novel is autobiographical: Dostoevsky wrote later, in "A Writer's Diary" and elsewhere, about the transformation he underwent during his imprisonment, as he slowly overcame his preconceptions and his repulsion, attaining a new understanding of the intense humanity and moral qualities of those around him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Luke"title="The Legend of Luke">
The book begins during the construction of Redwall Abbey, when a roving female hedgehog named Trimp visits the abbey and sings a song to help the workers lifting a beam. Martin the Warrior recognises his father, Luke the Warrior, mentioned in the lyrics and asks Trimp more about him. He decides to go on a quest to learn more about his father. Martin, Gonff the Mousethief, Dinny, and Trimp befriend an orphaned woodlander squirrel named Chugger, the bird Krar Woodwatcher, as well as two brother otters, Folgrim (who is very close to becoming feral, having filed his teeth to points, and even eating vermin after he kills them) and his older brother Tungro. When they reach the northlands, Martin meets his father's friends: the old mouse, Vurg, and Beauclair Fethringsol Cosfortingham, an exuberant old hare. They show him a book titled "In the Wake of the Red Ship", an account of Luke's life.The plot then flashes back to Martin's birth to Luke and Sayna. Luke was the leader of a tribe of mice who lived an idyllic life for many seasons until Vilu Daskar, the murderous captain of the pirate ship "Goreleech", attacked the settlement and killed Sayna, as well as many others with his Sea Rogues. Luke vowed revenge upon Daskar and soon had an opportunity when Reynard Chopsnout, master of the "Greenhawk", sailed in, hoping to fix his broken vessel. Luke and his tribe slew Chopsnout and his crew and captured the ship. Together with Vurg, Beau, and others, they sailed off. Martin, now older, wished to accompany his father, but Luke declined, giving Martin his sword, and the chance to name the ship, which he dubbed "Sayna".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monkey_Wrench_Gang"title="The Monkey Wrench Gang">
The book's four main characters are ecologically minded misfits—"Seldom Seen" Smith, a Jack Mormon river guide; Doc Sarvis, an odd but wealthy and wise surgeon; Bonnie Abbzug, his young Jewish feminist assistant; and a rather eccentric Green Beret Vietnam veteran, George Hayduke. Together, although not always working as a tightly knit team, they form the titular group dedicated to the destruction of what they see as the system that pollutes and destroys their environment, the American West. As the gang's attacks on deserted bulldozers and trains continue, the law closes in.For the gang, the enemy is those who would develop the American Southwest—despoiling the land, befouling the air, and destroying nature and the sacred purity of Abbey's desert world. Their greatest hatred is focused on the Glen Canyon Dam, a monolithic edifice of concrete that the monkey-wrenchers seek to destroy because it dams a beautiful wild river.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jin_Ping_Mei"title="Jin Ping Mei">
"Jin Ping Mei" is framed as a spin-off from "Water Margin". The beginning chapter is based on an episode in which "Tiger Slayer" Wu Song avenges the murder of his older brother by brutally killing his brother's former wife and murderer, Pan Jinlian. The story, ostensibly set during the years 1111–1127 (during the Northern Song dynasty), centers on Ximen Qing (), a corrupt social climber and lustful merchant who is wealthy enough to marry six wives and concubines.After Pan Jinlian secretly murders her husband, Ximen Qing takes her as one of his wives. The story follows the domestic sexual struggles of the women within his household as they clamor for prestige and influence amidst the gradual decline of the Ximen clan. In "Water Margin", Ximen Qing is brutally killed in broad daylight by Wu Song; in "Jin Ping Mei", Ximen Qing in the end dies from an overdose of aphrodisiacs administered by Jinlian to keep him aroused. The intervening sections, however, differ in almost every way from "Water Margin". In the course of the novel, Ximen has 19 sexual partners, including his six wives and mistresses, and a male servant. There are 72 detailed sexual episodes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_from_a_Top_Hat"title="Death from a Top Hat">
"As the story opens, free-lance writer Ross Harte is writing a magazine article on the modern detective story, and most of this article-to-be is included in the first chapter."When a magician is found dead inside his locked and (thoroughly) sealed apartment, the police call in Merlini to help explain the impossible, "perhaps on the theory that it takes a magician to catch one."All the suspects, however, are accustomed to producing the impossible. They include a professional medium, an escape artist, a couple of magicians, a ventriloquist, and two people who claim to exhibit mental telepathy in their nightclub act.The first murder victim is found spread-eagled inside a pentagram, surrounded by the trappings of black magic. The second victim, also spread-eagled, seems to have been in two places at once during the first murder. After a number of breakneck chases from one scene to the next, Merlini and his assistant are a couple of steps ahead of the police and provide a far-fetched but logical solution to the impossible crimes.In between, Merlini and other characters deliver great chunks of informative conversation mixed with paragraphs of information about entirely unrelated but fascinating topics, like yogic bilocation, making the keys of a typewriter move without touching them, and even posing a tricky problem in geometry. The action also stops for a while when Merlini quotes a well-known passage from John Dickson Carr's "The Three Coffins" about the nature of locked-room mystery novels, and adds some flourishes of his own in relation to the problems at hand.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autumn_of_the_Patriarch"title="The Autumn of the Patriarch">
The book is written in long paragraphs with extended sentences. The general's thoughts are relayed to the reader through winding sentences which convey his desperation and loneliness alongside the atrocities and ruthless behavior that keep him in power. The first three chapters begin with an omniscient and anonymous narrator finding the corpse of the General; the beginning of the third chapter reveals that the body belonged to Patricio Aragonés, whom, due to their uncanny resemblance, the general uses to fake his own death. One of the book's most striking aspects is its focus on the God-like status held by the protagonist and the unfathomable awe and respect with which his people regard him. Dictators and strongmen such as Franco, Somoza, and Trujillo managed to hold sway over the populations of their nations despite internal political division. García Márquez symbolizes this with the discovery of the dictator's corpse in the presidential palace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eyre_Affair"title="The Eyre Affair">
In a parallel universe, England and Imperial Russia have fought the Crimean War for more than a century; although now a republic (with entertainer George Formby as its president), England still also has a parliamentary government, although heavily influenced by the Goliath Corporation (a powerful weapon-producing company with questionable morals); and Wales is a separate, socialist nation. The book's fictional version of "Jane Eyre" ends with Jane accompanying her cousin, St. John Rivers, to India in order to help him with his missionary work. Society publicly debates literary questions (especially the question of Shakespearean authorship), sometimes inspiring gang wars and murder. Regular law enforcement agencies still exist, alongside new specialized agencies under the single organization SpecOps (Special Operations). The more than 20 branches include SpecOps 12, the Chronoguard, who police all events related to time travel, and SpecOps 27, the Literary Detectives, or "LiteraTecs", who deal with all literature-related crimes.The Crimean War is a cold conflict with both sides at a stalemate but too stubborn to call for peace. A peace movement in Britain is gaining popularity. Meanwhile, Goliath has been contracted to create a plasma rifle codenamed "STONK" to overpower the Russians. The weapon should be capable of destroying a tank with a single blast. Goliath promises that STONK will soon be standard issue to the British military.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Cat"title="I Am a Cat">
In "I Am a Cat", a supercilious, feline narrator describes the lives of an assortment of middle-class Japanese people: Mr. ("sneeze" is misspelled on purpose, but literally translated from , in the original Japanese) and family (the cat's owners), Sneaze's garrulous and irritating friend , and the young scholar with his will-he-won't-he courtship of the businessman's spoiled daughter, .
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swag_(novel)"title="Swag (novel)">
Frank Ryan is an almost honest used car salesman, who after deliberately not testifying against car thief Ernest "Stick" Stickley, Jr., thinks of a foolproof plan for them to perform armed robberies.The plan is about simple everyday armed robbery. Supermarkets, bars, liquor stores, gas stations, etc. Because the statistics prove that this armed robbery pays the most for the least amount of risk, they start their business and earn three to five thousand dollars a week.To prevent getting caught Frank introduces 10 golden rules for successful armed robbery:For a while, Frank and Stick are able to follow the rules and the plan and they are extremely successful. They even rob the robber who just robbed the bar they were in. But, inevitably, the rules start falling by the wayside and when they see a chance for a big score, the rules go out the window, with predictably disastrous results.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_and_Sixpence"title="The Moon and Sixpence">
The book is written largely from the point of view of the narrator, a young, aspiring writer and playwright in London. Certain chapters entirely comprise accounts of events by other characters, which the narrator recalls from memory, selectively editing or elaborating on certain aspects of dialogue, particularly Strickland's, because Strickland is said by the narrator to have a very poor ability to express himself in words. The narrator first develops an acquaintance with Strickland's wife at literary parties and later meets Strickland himself, who appears to be an unremarkable businessman with no interest in his wife's literary or artistic tastes.Strickland is a well-off, middle-class stockbroker in London, sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century. Early in the novel, he leaves his wife and children and goes to Paris. The narrator enters directly into the story at that point, when he is asked by Mrs Strickland to go to Paris and talk with her husband. He lives a destitute but defiantly content life there as a painter, lodging in run-down hotels and falling prey to both illness and hunger. Strickland, in his drive to express through his art what appears to continually possess and compel him on the inside, cares nothing for physical discomfort and is indifferent to his surroundings. He is helped and supported by a commercially successful but hackneyed Dutch painter, Dirk Stroeve, coincidentally, also an old friend of the narrator, who recognises Strickland's genius as a painter. After helping Strickland recover from a life-threatening illness, Stroeve is repaid by having his wife, Blanche, abandon him for Strickland. Strickland later discards the wife, because all he really wanted from Blanche was to be a model to paint, not serious companionship. It is hinted in the novel that he indicated that to her, but she took the risk anyway. Blanche then dies by suicide. She is another human casualty in Strickland's single-minded pursuit of art and beauty, the first casualties being his own established life, and those of his wife and children.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illness_as_Metaphor"title="Illness as Metaphor">
"Illness as Metaphor" served as a way for Susan Sontag to express her opinions on the use of metaphors in order to refer to illnesses, with her main focuses being tuberculosis and cancer. The book contrasts the viewpoints and metaphors associated with each disease. At one point, tuberculosis was seen as a creative disease, leading to healthy people wanting to look as if they were ill with the disease. However, lack of improvement from tuberculosis was usually seen as lack of passion in the individual. Tuberculosis was even seen as a sign of punishment by some religions, such as Christianity, leading the afflicted to believe that they deserved their ailment.Sontag then made the comparison between the metaphors used to describe tuberculosis and cancer, with cancer being seen in the 1970s as a disease that afflicted people who lacked passion and sensuality, and those who repressed their feelings. Sontag wrote that multiple studies found a link between depression and cancer, which she argued was just a sign of the times and not a reason for the disease, since in previous times physicians found that cancer patients suffered from hyperactivity and hypersensitivity, which were signs of their times.In the last chapter, Sontag argued that society's disease metaphors cause patients to feel as if society were against them. Her final argument was that metaphors are not useful for patients, since metaphors make patients feel as if their illness was due to their feelings, rather than lack of effective treatment. The most effective way of thinking about illness would be to avoid metaphorical thinking, and to focus on only the physical components and treatment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverlock"title="Silverlock">
While on a sea voyage, a ship named "Naglfar" founders. One anhedonic passenger, A. Clarence Shandon (M.B.A., Wisconsin), is washed ashore in a fictional land known as "The Commonwealth of Letters". He is befriended by Golias, who nicknames him "Silverlock" and who becomes his guide. Silverlock and Golias encounter figures from history, literature and mythology.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_(film)"title="Doctor Who (film)">
Following the Master's trial and execution at the hands of the Daleks, the Doctor, currently in his seventh incarnation, is transporting the Master's remains to Gallifrey via his TARDIS. En route, the box with the remains breaks open and an ooze leaks out, infecting the TARDIS. The Doctor is forced to make an emergency materialisation in San Francisco's Chinatown on 30 December 1999.As he exits and locks the TARDIS, the Doctor is shot by a gang chasing down Chang Lee, a young Chinese-American man. Lee calls for an ambulance and escorts the unconscious Doctor to a hospital, unaware the ooze from the TARDIS has gotten aboard the ambulance. At the hospital, after the bullets are removed, cardiologist Dr Grace Holloway attempts surgery to stabilise his unusual heartbeat, but is confused by his strange double-heart anatomy, and accidentally lodges a cardiac probe in the Doctor's body, apparently killing him. The Doctor's body is taken to the morgue, while Lee steals the Doctor's possessions, including the TARDIS key. Meanwhile, the ooze takes over the body of the ambulance driver, Bruce, transforming him into a new body for the Master.Later, the Doctor's body regenerates, and the new Doctor, suffering amnesia, gathers clothes from an upcoming fancy dress party. He recognises Holloway, who has resigned from the hospital after the failed operation, and follows her to her car, proving to her he is the same man by pulling out the cardiac probe. Grace takes him home to recover. Lee returns to the TARDIS where the Master arrives and puts him under his mind control by claiming the Doctor had stolen his body. The Master convinces Lee to open the TARDIS and then to open the Eye of Harmony within it, which requires a human retinal scan. When the Eye opens, the Doctor is flooded with memories and realises the Master is searching for him, and tries to block the scan. He warns Grace that while the Eye is opened, the fabric of reality will weaken, and potentially destroy the Earth by midnight on New Year's Eve if they cannot close it. However, he needs an atomic clock to do so, and Grace finds one on display at the San Francisco Institute of Technological Advancement and Research.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilda_(novel)"title="Matilda (novel)">
In a small Buckinghamshire village forty minutes by bus away from Reading and 8 miles from Aylesbury, Matilda Wormwood is born to Mr and Mrs Wormwood. She immediately shows amazing precocity, learning to speak at age one and to read at age three and a half, perusing all the children's books in the library by the age of four and three months and moving on to longer classics such as "Great Expectations" and "Jane Eyre". However, her parents emotionally abuse her and completely refuse to acknowledge her abilities; to keep from getting frustrated, Matilda finds herself forced to pull pranks on them, such as gluing her father's hat to his head, sticking a parrot in the chimney to simulate a burglar or ghost, and bleaching her father's hair with peroxide.At the age of five and a half, Matilda enters school and befriends her teacher Jennifer Honey, who is astonished by her intellectual abilities. Miss Honey tries to move Matilda into a higher class, but the tyrannical headmistress, Miss Agatha Trunchbull, refuses. Miss Honey also tries to talk to Mr and Mrs Wormwood about their daughter's intelligence, but they ignore her, with the mother contending "brainy-ness" is an undesirable trait in a little girl.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Positronic_Man"title="The Positronic Man">
In the twenty-first century the creation of the positronic brain leads to the development of robot laborers and revolutionizes life on Earth. Yet to the Martin family, their household robot NDR-113 is more than a mechanical servant. "Andrew" has become a trusted friend, a confidant, and a member of the Martin family.The story is told from the perspective of Andrew (later known as Andrew Martin), an NDR-series robot owned by the Martin family, a departure from the usual practice by U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men of leasing robots.Andrew's initial experiences with the Martin family are replete with awkward moments which demonstrate his lack of socialization. However, he is much better with inanimate objects and animals and begins to display sentient characteristics (such as creativity; emotion; self-awareness) traditionally the province of humans. He is taken off his mundane household duties, for which he was intended, and allowed to pursue his creativity, making a fortune by selling his creations.Andrew seeks legal protection stemming from his initial creative output and eventual full recognition as a human, by gradually replacing his robotic components with synthetic organs, and citing the process as a transformation from robot to human. Succeeding generations of the Martin family assist him in his quest for humanity, but each is limited to what degree they are prepared to acknowledge Andrew's humanity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_Red"title="Brazil Red">
The plot of this veritable epic is set in 1555, on a small island in the Guanabara Bay of Rio de Janeiro, where an odd French expeditionary force, made up of sailors, craftsmen, priests, ex-convicts and a Quixotic knight, has just landed. Their objective is twofold: on the one hand, to set up a French colony on this far-off rich continent to compete with the Portuguese, on the other hand, to convert the Indians to Christianity. Ill-prepared for the realities of the New World and, above all, torn apart by theological controversy which sets the Catholics and Calvinists among them against one another, these French pioneers see their dreams of coloniasation gradually dissipate. Both satirical and colourful, Rouge Brésil is above all a passionate and exciting exploration of the origins of imperialist thinking.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Highway"title="No Highway">
The narrator is Mr Scott, brought in to downsize his department, and the plot concerns his consideration of Theodore Honey, who initially comes across as an unlikely hero. Mr Honey, a widower, does not live a conventional British life, and is bringing up his young daughter, Elspeth, alone. He is engaged in research on the fatigue of aluminium airframes. He is currently investigating possible failure in the high aspect ratio tailplane of a new airliner, the fictional "Rutland Reindeer".Honey is nervous and distrusting of the 'new broom', is unimpressive in appearance and is so intensely focused on his work that his relations with the outside world – never that good to begin with – suffer badly. Throughout the story, people judge him by that appearance, or by his varied and unconventional outside interests, such as pyramidology, the study of possible esoteric interpretations of the Pyramids.Honey has predicted, by a (fictional) theory supposedly related to quantum mechanics, that it is possible for an aluminium alloy structure to fail long before the design lifetime predicted by the usual design standards. He is using a spare tailplane from a Reindeer aircraft in a fatigue test. Honey's theory predicts that the metal at the root of the tailplane will suffer from metal fatigue and fail with a crystalline fracture.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_No_More"title="Black No More">
The novel begins at a speakeasy in Harlem on New Year's Eve, where protagonist Max Disher's romantic advances are rejected by a white woman solely because he is Black. The following morning, he reads about a new scientific procedure for turning Black skin white called "Black-No-More," and he decides to go through with the procedure, being the first to do so. As Max sees his face broadcast on the news for undergoing the procedure, he expresses concern, until remembering that he is now unrecognizable due to now being white.As the Black-No-More procedure grows increasingly popular, it wreaks havoc on the social and economic institutions of Harlem, drawing resistance from leaders in the African American community. It also draws fierce resistance from Southern segregationist organizations, as the Southern economy rooted in Black labor collapses. Meanwhile, Max — who has now changed his name to Matthew Fisher — discovers that life as a white man is not as great as he imagined, with economic struggles remaining a constant in his life. In order to earn some money, he travels to Atlanta, Georgia, and joins Reverend Harry Givens's white supremacist organization, The Knights of Nordica, claiming that he has the expertise necessary to help them end Black-No-More.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation's_Fear"title="Foundation's Fear">
Emperor Cleon I wants to appoint Hari Seldon as the First Minister of the Galactic Empire. Powerful Trantor High Council member Betan Lamurk opposes the independent Seldon's appointment. Seldon himself is reluctant to accept the position because of its time constraints pulling him away from the psychohistory project. The project is led by Seldon, Yugo Amaryl, and Seldon's advanced humaniform robot-spouse Dors Venabili. Seldon needs to carry favor with the emperor, however, and advises Cleon I informally. For example, Seldon suggests a decree that erases terrorists' names from records, denying them immortality, discouraging chaotic actions.Besides the psychohistorians, much of the novel's action revolves around advanced sentient simulations (sims) of Joan of Arc and Voltaire. The sims have been recreated by Artifice Associates, a research company located in Trantor’s Dahl Sector. Artifice Associates programmers Marq and Sybil plan to use the Joan/ Voltaire sims for two money-making projects. First, Hari Seldon’s psychohistory project. Second, Trantor’s Junin-Sector “Preservers vs Skeptics Society” debate whether mechanical beings endowed with artificial intelligence should be built. And if so, whether they should receive full citizenship. The Preservers’ champion will be Joan, the Skeptics’ champion Voltaire.Hari Seldon and Dors Venabili flee Trantor, escaping High Council member Betan Lamurk's forces. During their galactic odyssey, Hari and Dors experience virtual reality as chimpanzees on planet Panucopia. They also visit helter-skelter New Renaissance world Sark.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_and_Chaos"title="Foundation and Chaos">
The novel is the second part of the Second Foundation Trilogy and takes place almost entirely in the same time frame as "The Psychohistorians", which is the first part of the novel "Foundation". In addition to telling a more expanded version of Hari Seldon's confrontation with the Commission of Public Safety it also interweaves R. Daneel Olivaw's struggle against a sect of robots who oppose his plans for humanity.While covering the same period as in Asimov’s "The Psychohistorians", "Foundation and Chaos" focuses more on paternal superrobot R Daneel Olivaw than on Hari Seldon. Olivaw’s 20 millennia of machinations and contrivances are questioned by “Calvinian” robots who do not observe Olivaw’s Zeroth Law (“No robot may harm humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm”) developed in Asimov’s "Robots and Empire." Olivaw’s actions dampen human intellectual growth and variation until the human species matures. The novel’s primary issue is whether Olivaw’s ends justify his means. Does the ancient Auroran robot really serve humanity’s greater good? Should Olivaw decide this for himself?Seldon seems unaware of Olivaw’s role in perpetuating brain fever and other dampeners. But Seldon would probably approve, considering his quarantining of the New Renaissance worlds when Seldon served as Imperial 1st Minister.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation's_Triumph"title="Foundation's Triumph">
"Foundation’s Triumph" starts with Hari Seldon who reviews his life and has to accept the fact that his “purpose” is completed. One day he meets a bureaucrat, Horis Antic, who explains his theory about the correlation of certain soils on planets and psychohistory. Seldon agrees to take a trip to some of the planets which fit Antic's theory. Hari and Horis travel to Demarchia, where they rent a yacht.Parallel to Seldon's story, Dors Venabili starts out on the planet Panucopia to meet Lodovik Trema, a robot whose Three Laws of Robotics have been erased. Lodovic gives her the head of R. Giskard Reventlov, an important robot who founded the Zeroth Law with R. Daneel Olivaw. She finds out that Giskard and Daneel never consulted a human while founding the Zeroth Law.Later Trema meets a faction of cyborgs and joins them. After Dors has become a rebel, she fights for the cyborgs as well.The third plot of the novel takes place on the planet Eos. Daneel talks to his possible successor Zun Lurrin. All chapters with Olivaw as the main character are printed in a different typeface.In Seldon's story, during the flight to the first planet the yacht is taken over by rebels, who are from the renaissance or chaos planet Ktlina. They show Seldon ancient spaceships with many data capsules from the human past.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov's_Utopia"title="Isaac Asimov's Utopia">
Utopia takes place five years into the reign of Alvar Kresh as the governor of Inferno, who is now married to roboticist Fredda Leving. The re-terraforming effort is doing fairly well, but many believe it is still doomed to failure. The plot centers around a plan created by an Infernal named Davlo Lentrall to use a comet, named comet Grieg after the old governor, to dig a channel creating a northern sea.Norlan Fiyle, who has been working as an intelligence broker, found out about this plan early and informed the Settlers, the Ironheads, and the New Law robots of the plan. The issue is complicated by the fact that the plan calls for the comet to land essentially on top of the new law robot city of Valhalla.Tonya Welton, the leader of the settlers on Inferno, is upset by this plan having seen similar plans fail in the past. She orders her security people to grab Davlo and destroy his work. Although they were successful in destroying his data, the attempt to capture Davlo himself failed due to quick thinking on the part of Commander Justen Devray, now the head of the Combined Inferno Police, and the help of Davlo's robot Kaelor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_a_Good_Book"title="Lost in a Good Book">
"Lost in a Good Book" is the second book by Jasper Fforde and the sequel to the first adventure of literary detective Thursday Next, "The Eyre Affair". "Lost in a Good Book" uses a variety of literary allusions as it follows Thursday through a vast government conspiracy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_(novel)"title="Pan (novel)">
Lieutenant Thomas Glahn, a hunter and ex-military man, lives alone in a hut in the forest with his faithful dog Aesop. Upon meeting Edvarda, the daughter of a merchant in a nearby town, they are both strongly attracted to each other, but neither understands the other's love. Overwhelmed by the society of people where Edvarda lives, Glahn has a series of tragedies befall him before he leaves forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eye_of_Argon"title="The Eye of Argon">
Traditional photocopied and Internet versions end at this point, incomplete since page 49 of the fanzine had been lost. The ending was rediscovered in 2004 and published in "The New York Review of Science Fiction" #198, February 2005.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Meetings"title="First Meetings">
## The Polish Boy.Polish: Jan Paweł Wieczorek (John Paul Wiggin) is a very smart child who is being homeschooled because his family refused to comply with the population's control laws. One day, Captain Helena Rudolf from the International Fleet shows up to test three of John Paul's brothers for possible admission into Battle School. She notices John Paul reading a book and decides to test him early. He passes the test and gets a very high score for leadership. The IF tries to get him to go to Battle School, but John Paul is only interested in trying to get his family out of Poland so that they can have a better life and he can get a good education. Captain Graff realizes this, but agrees to send the Wieczorek family to America because he hopes that one of John Paul's children will go to Battle School.This story contains younger versions of important characters in the Enderverse, such as Ender's father John Paul Wieczorek (later Wiggin), Hyrum Graff, and Admiral Chamrajnagar. Other characters associated with the IF appear, including Captain Helena Rudolf and Colonel Sillian.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vampire_Chronicles"title="The Vampire Chronicles">
## "Interview with the Vampire" (1976).Louis de Pointe du Lac tells a young reporter the story of how he had been made a vampire in 18th-century New Orleans by Lestat de Lioncourt. In creating and sheltering the child vampire Claudia, Lestat and Louis had unknowingly set tragedy in motion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bead_Game"title="The Glass Bead Game">
The novel's beginning introduces the Music Master, the resident of Castalia who recruits Knecht as a young student and who is to have the longest-lasting and profoundest effect on Knecht throughout his life. At one point, as the Music Master nears death in his home at Monteport, Knecht obliquely refers to the Master's "sainthood". Knecht also develops another meaningful friendship with Plinio Designori, a student from a politically influential family, who is studying in Castalia as a guest, and holds vigorous debates with Designori, who views Castalia as an "ivory tower" with little to no impact on the outside world.Although educated in Castalia, Knecht's path to "Magister Ludi" is atypical for the order, as he spends much of his time after graduation outside the province's boundaries. His first such venture, to the Bamboo Grove, results in his learning Chinese and becoming something of a disciple to Elder Brother, a recluse who had given up living in Castalia. Next, as part of an assignment to foster goodwill between the order and the Catholic Church, Knecht is sent on several "missions" to the Benedictine monastery of Mariafels, where he befriends the historian Father Jacobus—a relationship that also profoundly affects Knecht.As the novel progresses, Knecht begins to question his loyalty to the order, gradually coming to doubt that the intellectually gifted have a right to withdraw from life's big problems. Knecht, too, comes to see Castalia as a kind of ivory tower, an ethereal and protected community, devoted to pure intellectual pursuits but oblivious to the problems of life outside its borders. This conclusion precipitates a personal crisis, and, according to his personal views regarding spiritual awakening, Knecht does the unthinkable: he resigns as Magister Ludi and asks to leave the order, ostensibly to become of value and service to the larger culture. The heads of the order deny his request, but Knecht departs Castalia anyway, initially taking a job as a tutor to his childhood friend Designori's energetic and strong-willed son, Tito. Only a few days later, the story ends abruptly with Knecht drowning in a mountain lake while attempting to follow Tito on a swim for which Knecht was unfit.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy_(novel)"title="The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (novel)">
The novel opens with an introduction describing the human race as a primitive and deeply unhappy species as well as the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which provides information on every planet in the galaxy. Earthman Arthur Dent awakes in his home in West Country, England, to discover that the local planning council is trying to demolish his house to build a bypass and lies down in front of the bulldozer to stop it. His friend Ford Prefect—an alien researcher for "Guide" from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse who has been posing as an out-of-work actor from Guildford for 15 years—convinces the lead bureaucrat Mr. Prosser to lie down in front of the bulldozer for Arthur so that he can buy him six pints of beer at the pub. The construction crew begins demolishing the house anyway, but stop when a fleet of alien spaceships arrives on Earth undetected by human space agencies. The Vogons, a callous race of civil servants running the fleet, announce that they have come to demolish Earth to make way for a hyperspace expressway. Ford and Arthur hitch a ride from the Dentrassis, who serve as the cooks on the fleet, and are allowed onto a spaceship traveling to Barnard's Star. They are quickly discovered by the Vogons, who torture them by forcing them to listen to their poetry and then toss them out of an airlock.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Satanic_Verses"title="The Satanic Verses">
"The Satanic Verses" consists of a frame narrative, using elements of magical realism, interlaced with a series of sub-plots that are narrated as dream visions experienced by one of the protagonists. The frame narrative, like many other stories by Rushdie, involves Indian expatriates in contemporary England. The two protagonists, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, are both actors of Indian Muslim background. Farishta is a Bollywood superstar who specialises in playing Hindu deities (the character is partly based on Indian film stars Amitabh Bachchan and N. T. Rama Rao). Chamcha is an emigrant who has broken with his Indian identity and works as a voiceover artist in England.At the beginning of the novel, both are trapped in a hijacked plane flying from India to Britain. The plane explodes over the English Channel, but the two are magically saved. In a miraculous transformation, Farishta takes on the personality of the archangel Gabriel and Chamcha that of a devil. Chamcha is arrested and passes through an ordeal of police abuse as a suspected illegal immigrant.Both characters struggle to piece their lives back together. Farishta seeks and finds his lost love, the English mountaineer Allie Cone, but their relationship is overshadowed by his mental illness. Chamcha, having miraculously regained his human shape, wants to take revenge on Farishta for having forsaken him after their common fall from the hijacked plane. He does so by fostering Farishta's pathological jealousy and thus destroying his relationship with Allie. In another moment of crisis, Farishta realises what Chamcha has done, but forgives him and even saves his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government"title="Jennifer Government">
John Nike, Vice President of Guerrilla Marketing, contracts Hack Nike, a clumsy and naïve low-level-employee, to execute an ambitious and unethical secret marketing scheme. John plans to increase interest in the upcoming Nike Mercury shoes by having Hack kill people who try to buy them, intending to make the shoes appear so desirable that customers are killing each other to acquire them. Hack signs the contract without reading it. When he finds out that it requires him to commit murder, he subcontracts the scheme to the Police, now a mercenary organisation, in an attempt to keep his job (which requires fulfilling the contract) without having to take responsibility for murder.After several children are murdered at various Nike stores on opening day, Jennifer Government takes it upon herself to track down the perpetrators, even if she cannot get the funding for her investigation. One of the murdered children bought the shoes with money given to her by Buy Mitsui, a French stockbroker flush with money after recent professional success. Feeling personally responsible for the girl's death, Buy joins forces with Jennifer.At the same time, Violet (Hack's girlfriend) creates a dangerous computer virus, intending to sell it to the highest bidder. She succeeds in selling it to ExxonMobil. Her handlers take her all over the world to exploit the virus's power, but never pay her for it. Angered, Violet turns to John Nike, who promises to help her revenge herself on ExxonMobil. In exchange, John demands that Violet kidnap Kate, Jennifer Government's daughter, intending to use her as leverage to deter Jennifer's investigation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Pastoral"title="American Pastoral">
Seymour Irving Levov is born and raised in the Weequahic section of Newark, New Jersey, in 1927 as the elder son of a successful Jewish American glove manufacturer, Lou Levov, and his wife Sylvia. Called "the Swede" because of his anomalous blond hair, blue eyes and Nordic good looks, Seymour is a star athlete in high school, a two-year veteran of the Marine Corps, and the narrator Nathan Zuckerman's idol and hero. Zuckerman and Seymour's younger brother, Jerry—who grows into a curmudgeonly, irascible heart surgeon with little empathy for the Swede—are schoolmates and close friends. The Swede eventually takes over his father's glove factory and marries Dawn Dwyer, a former beauty queen from nearby Elizabeth, whom he met in college. Following the death of the Swede from prostate cancer, Zuckerman writes an account of what he imagines the Swede's experiences would have been based on the little background information he receives from Jerry.Seymour establishes what he believes to be a perfect American life with a beloved wife and daughter, a satisfying business career, and a magnificent house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. Yet, as the Vietnam War and racial unrest wrack the country and destroy inner-city Newark, his precocious teenage daughter Meredith ("Merry"), beset by an emotionally debilitating stutter and outraged by the war, becomes increasingly radical in her beliefs. In February 1968, Merry plants a bomb in the Old Rimrock post office, which kills a bystander; she goes into permanent hiding. Seymour finds Merry five years later, living in deplorable conditions in inner-city Newark. During this reunion, Merry reveals that she was responsible for several more bombings, killing three more people. Although Merry informs him that her actions were deliberate, Seymour decides to keep their meeting a secret, believing Merry has been manipulated by an unknown political group and a mysterious woman named Rita Cohen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_to_a_Sunless_Sea_(Graham_novel)"title="Down to a Sunless Sea (Graham novel)">
The story is told in the first person by Jonah Scott, a British pilot for the fictional airline Air Britain who has arrived in New York City on his regular flight from London. The United States has collapsed after using up nearly all of its oil reserves and the collapse of the dollar.During the night, Jonah and the apartment superintendent and guard, John Capel, must fight off armed burglars disguised as military police looking for food that Jonah and Senior Flight Attendant Kate Monahan brought with them. Capel is wounded but Kate demonstrates her basic medical skills in cleaning and dressing the wound. Jonah offers to help Capel and a newly orphaned girlfriend, Nikki, of one of his crew travel illegally to London aboard his aircraft, in order to escape the anarchy that has befallen America.Shortly after takeoff from New York, Jonah is informed that Israel has attacked Beirut, Damascus, and Cairo with nuclear weapons in retaliation for their radioactive poisoning of Tel Aviv's water supply.Israel's strike triggers a worldwide nuclear holocaust while the plane is "en route" to London, the Soviet Union and China attacking America and its allies. Four Soviet diplomats on board try to hijack the plane, only to be killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undine_(novella)"title="Undine (novella)">
A knight named Huldbrand comes across a fisherman's hut in the forest, and is welcomed in by the fisherman and his wife. He also meets their capricious eighteen-year-old foster daughter, Undine. The fisherman explains that years ago, their young daughter was lost in the lake and apparently drowned, but that same day, Undine appeared on their doorstep. Since then, they have raised her as their own.Undine asks Huldbrand what he’s doing in the forest. He explains that he was participating in a tournament when he met Bertalda, a duke's foster daughter. As they flirted, she promised to give him her glove if he would explore the haunted forest. He did so, encountering strange and threatening spirits until he reached the fisherman’s home.A storm arrives and a flood surrounds the house, stranding the group. During their time together, Huldbrand and Undine fall in love, although she continues to behave erratically and can seemingly control the weather. An elderly priest, Father Heilmann, arrives after being washed overboard from a ferry. Huldbrand suggests that the priest marry him and Undine, and they hold the ceremony immediately.The morning after the wedding, Undine suddenly acts like a completely different person, kind and gentle. She explains to Huldbrand that elemental beings exist and she is a water-spirit. Her kind does not have immortal souls or any sense of morals, but can gain them by marrying humans. She was sent to live among humans by her parents, who hoped she would earn a soul in this way, and with her marriage to Huldbrand she’s accomplished this. She fears that Huldbrand will leave now that he knows what she is, but he swears never to abandon her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_Darkness"title="Piercing the Darkness">
It follows the journey of Sally Beth Roe as she tries to escape her past and slowly overcomes her constant struggle to discern the Truth. Also told is the story of another small town, similar to that of "This Present Darkness" and called Bacon's Corner, and a resident named Tom Harris. His kids are ripped from his home by Child Services. Seeming to have no connection with other events at first, a young police officer, Ben Cole, is convinced what is being brushed off as a suicide is actually a murder, and ends up losing his job over the issue, which brings him to the side of the embattled Christian school. Caught in the crossfire is a little girl who's been forced into a curriculum of "meditation techniques" and "inner spiritual guides" that control her moods, attitudes, and actions, the little Amber, and her mother Lucy who realizes this lawsuit and the people who are "helping" her may be much, much more than she bargained for. Before the paths that Sally Roe and Tom Harris [and the others] are on collide, the "Ashton Clarion" editor and his wife, Marshall and Kate Hogan (from "This Present Darkness"), make a return appearance as veteran fighters in this war against the powers of darkness that threaten freedom of religion everywhere. As the story unfolds, the lawsuit and its participants are soon locked in a struggle of ethics versus non-ethics, absolutes versus relativism, right versus wrong, and those with interest in this battle are shown to be even in the highest places of government.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemony_or_Survival"title="Hegemony or Survival">
Chomsky's first chapter, "Priorities and Prospects", provides an introduction to U.S. global dominance at the start of 2003. He looks at the role of propaganda – employed by government and mass media – in shaping public opinion in both the U.S. and United Kingdom, arguing that it allows a wealthy elite to thrive at the expense of the majority. As evidence for the manner in which the media shapes public opinion on foreign policy, he discusses the role of the U.S. government in protecting its economic interests in Nicaragua, first by supporting the military junta of General Somoza and then by supporting the Contra militias, in both instances leading to mass human rights abuses which were ignored by the mainstream U.S. media.Chapter two, "Imperial Grand Strategy", looks at the U.S. government's belief that it should take part in "preventative war" against states who threaten its global hegemony, despite the illegality of these actions under international law. Chomsky argues that the targets of U.S. preventative war must be weak, yet important and easy to depict as a threat to the U.S. populace. Using the 2003 invasion of Iraq as an example, he discusses how the U.S. government and media portrayed the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein as a threat to the U.S. and other Middle Eastern states, something which Chomsky argues it was not.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_the_Yellow_Room"title="The Mystery of the Yellow Room">
Reporter and amateur sleuth Joseph Rouletabille is sent to investigate a criminal case at the Château du Glandier and takes along his friend the lawyer Sainclair, who narrates. Mathilde Stangerson, the 30-something daughter of the castle's owner, Professor Joseph Stangerson, was found near-critically battered in a room adjacent to his laboratory on the castle grounds, with the door still locked from the inside. She recovers slowly but can give no useful testimony. Rouletabille meets and interrogates several characters: the castle's concierges Mr &amp; Mrs Bernier, the old servant Jacques, an unfriendly inn landlord and a womanising gamekeeper, and begins a friendly rivalry with France's top police detective Frédéric Larsan, who has been assigned the case. Larsan suspects Ms Stangerson's fiancé, another scientist called Robert Darzac, to Rouletabille's dismay.More attempts are made on Ms Stangerson's life despite Rouletabille and Larsan's protection, and the perpetrator appears to vanish on two occasions when they are closing in on him, echoing Professor Stangerson's research into "matter dissociation". The gamekeeper is murdered during the second attempt. Ultimately, Larsan arrests Darzac who is charged with murder attempts. Rouletabille suspects that Darzac has secret reasons not to defend himself and he disappears to make further investigations.Two-and-a-half months later, as Darzac's trial opens, Rouletabille reappears sensationally and tells the court that the culprit is Frédéric Larsan himself, whom he accuses of being an alter-ego of a master criminal called Ballmeyer. Larsan appeared to vanish on the two occasions he was nearly collared as he was one of the pursuers. Darzac is released when it emerges that Larsan has vanished after Rouletabille warned him he would accuse him in court. The mystery of the locked Yellow Room is explained thus: Larsan assaulted Ms Stangerson earlier in the day than originally thought, but she hid the traces of the attack and locked herself away. During the night, traumatised by the event, she fell off her bed and inflicted the gravest of the wounds by hitting her temple on the corner of her bed-side table.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_of_the_Constant_Suicides"title="The Case of the Constant Suicides">
Members of a large and widespread Scottish family are brought together at a highland castle in order to resolve various pieces of family business following a death. Suspicious events soon begin to occur, the body count rises, and a verdict of suicide is not necessarily to be trusted. Enter the gargantuan Doctor Gideon Fell, who applies his substantial powers of deduction to the problem of how men can be indirectly murdered while they're inside locked, sealed and inaccessible rooms.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galilee_(novel)"title="Galilee (novel)">
The novel begins with an introduction to the manor of L'Enfant where Cesaria lives along with three of her children, Marietta, Zabrina and Luman. Also living there is Edmund Maddox, the son of Nicodemus and a human woman. Maddox had been crippled in an accident many years before which also resulted in the death of Nicodemus and Maddox's wife, Chiyojo. Maddox decides to write a book telling of the conflict between the Gearys and the Barbarossas and when brought to a dome at the top of L'Enfant is provided back the usage of his legs along with new knowledge that enables him to tell the story. Throughout the novel we are told various stories involving Maddox and his half-siblings.The story initially begins with the baptism of Galilee and how a witness named Zelim became a prophet and eventually a spirit bound to Cesaria. In the present day, Maddox tells the story of how Rachel Pallenberg met Mitchell Geary and married him. The Geary family is led by Mitchell's grandfather Cadmus, who while aged came back into power over the family after the mysterious murder of Mitchell's father George. Things are initially happy for Rachel, and she befriends much of the fellow women in the Geary family including Margie, wife to Mitchell's older brother Garrison. However, after a couple of years of marriage being married to Michell loses its luster. Things appear to be improving when Rachel becomes pregnant, but she suffers from a miscarriage and is told she can't have any more children. She decides that she wants to leave Mitchell and tells him so after a visit to her hometown in Ohio. The two of them decide to wait a few weeks before making a final decision.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spy_Who_Loved_Me_(novel)"title="The Spy Who Loved Me (novel)">
Fleming structured the novel in three sections—"Me", "Them" and "Him" to describe the phases of the story.Vivienne "Viv" Michel, a young Canadian woman narrates her own story, detailing her past love affairs, the first being with Derek Mallaby, who took her virginity in a field after being thrown out of a cinema in Windsor for indecent exposure. Their physical relationship ended that night, and Viv was subsequently rejected when Mallaby sent her a letter from Oxford University saying he was forcibly engaged to someone else by his parents. Viv's second love affair was with her German boss, Kurt Rainer, by whom she would eventually become pregnant. She informed Rainer and he paid for her to go to Switzerland to have an abortion, telling her that their affair was over. After the procedure, Viv returned to her native Canada and started her journey through North America, stopping to work at "The Dreamy Pines Motor Court" in the Adirondack Mountains for managers Jed and Mildred Phancey.At the end of the vacation season, the Phanceys entrust Viv with looking after the motel for the night before the owner, Mr. Sanguinetti, can arrive to take inventory and close it up for the winter. Two mobsters, "Sluggsy" Morant and Sol "Horror" Horowitz, both of whom work for Sanguinetti, arrive and say they are there to look over the motel for insurance purposes. The two have been hired by Sanguinetti to burn down the motel so that Sanguinetti can make a profit on the insurance, and then frame Viv, who is to die in the fire. The mobsters immediately start harassing Viv, making crude passes and aggressively asking her to dance. When she says she does not want to dance with them, they attack her, holding her down and starting to remove her top. They are about to rape her when the door buzzer interrupts them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_(novel)"title="Metropolitan (novel)">
The novel's protagonist, Aiah, is a minor functionary for the Plasm Authority in the metropolis of Jaspeer; the Authority is the public utility company that taps plasm wells and sells the plasm (at very high rates) to those who would use it. Aiah is one of the Barkazi, an ethnic group whose metropolis, Barkazil, was engulfed by civil war several generations ago, its territory partitioned and occupied by the adjacent metropolises and its population dispersed as refugees. Barkazi religion centers around a trickster god, Karlo, who is constantly running scams on others, and the tradition of the scam, or "chonah," is central to their culture. Aiah briefly studied plasm use at university, but ended her studies because of the high cost of the plasm required to continue them.Working for an emergency response team investigating a huge flaming apparition of a woman that damages several city blocks, she discovers a previously unknown plasm well of tremendous power (the apparition being caused by a woman who blundered into the well and tapped the plasm directly, killing herself in the process). Instead of disclosing its location, she leads the Authority on a wild goose chase while trying to decide on how best to use it to her advantage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hellbound_Heart"title="The Hellbound Heart">
Frank Cotton is a hedonistic criminal selfishly devoted to sensual experience even if it harms others. Believing he has indulged in every pleasure the world can offer, Frank pursues rumours of the Lemarchand Configuration, a puzzle box said to open a "schism" or portal to an extradimensional realm of unfathomable pleasure ruled by beings called the Cenobites. In Düsseldorf, Frank obtains the box and returns with it to his deceased grandmother's home in England. Solving the box, he is confused and horrified when the Cenobites – horribly scarified creatures whose bodies have been modified to the point that they appear sexless and in constant pain – arrive. The Cenobites warn he cannot renege on their agreement once it is made, but Frank still eagerly accepts the offer of experiences he has never known before. With Frank as their newest "experiment", the Cenobites subject him to total sensory overload and he realises their devotion to sadomasochism is so extreme and their personalities so removed from humanity that they no longer differentiate between pain and pleasure and have no care to ever stop even if their subject no longer wishes the experience. Frank is taken to the Cenobite realm, a hellish dimension where he will be subjected to an eternity of torture.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-PAX"title="K-PAX">
In 1990, a man is picked up by the New York Police after being found bending over the victim of a mugging at Grand Central Terminal in midtown Manhattan. After responding to the police questions with somewhat strange answers, he is transferred to Bellevue Hospital for evaluation. Although not physically ill, he is found to harbor the strange delusion that he is from a planet called K-PAX in the Lyra constellation. The patient calls himself "prot" (pronounced to rhyme with "goat", and intentionally written in lower-case to reflect the insignificance of an individual life form in the universe). He is eventually transferred to the Manhattan Psychiatric Institute (MPI), where he becomes the patient of Dr. Gene Brewer.Prot is extremely fond of fruit, including banana skins and apple cores, which he eats during each session. He tells Brewer that he is 337 Earth years old, that he has visited Earth often, and that on this visit he has traveled to most of the world's countries for the past four years and nine months. He exhibits a sense of humor, reassuring Brewer on the first session that, despite being one, an alien will not burst out of his chest. Brewer discovers that prot is also a savant who possesses arcane information about astronomy that excites a group of astronomers who meet him. Prot states that he possesses at least rudimentary conversational knowledge of most human languages as well as the languages of animals, including whale song and the apparent gibberish of some schizophrenic patients.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Them_(novel)"title="Them (novel)">
"Them" explores the complex struggles of American life through three down-on-their-luck characters—Loretta, Maureen, and Jules—who are attempting to reach normality and the American dream through marriage and money.The story begins with Loretta Botsford and her brother Brock as teenagers, living in the 1930s in a "fair-sized city on a midwestern canal". Loretta falls in love with Bernie Malin, and sleeps with him. Later in the night, Brock fatally shoots Bernie in the head. Loretta runs away, and meets Howard Wendall, an older cop to whom she confesses the death of Bernie Malin. They later marry, and she bears son Jules (who is hinted to be Bernie Malin's son). Loretta and Howard live close to Mama and Papa Wendall's house, on the south side of town. Soon after the birth of Jules, Howard is busted for taking money from prostitutes. The Wendalls move into the country house with Howard's family, where Loretta bore her daughters Maureen and Betty.When World War II breaks out, Howard leaves his family to fight in Europe. Meanwhile, Jules grows up to be a fast, energetic child who hangs around older children, and is never still. Maureen is a quiet, shy, delicate girl, while Betty is a smart aleck. Jules as a child displays a fascination with fire when he burns down a deserted barn, and when a plane crashes in Detroit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rama_Revealed"title="Rama Revealed">
The book picks up the story immediately after the end of "The Garden of Rama". The book follows the story of Nicole Wakefield and her escape from imprisonment left at the cliffhanger of the previous book.At this point, the humans had already come into contact with two alien species known as "octospiders" and "myrmicats". The octospiders were a simple species until a space-faring species made contact with them and forever changed their society. By undergoing genetic enhancements, the octospiders became biological wizards and were eventually able to form a utopia of sorts. The myrmicats (named by Richard Wakefield, a combination of the Greek word for ant, myrmex, due to their ant-like appearance, and the English word "cat" due to their feline size and running gait) were a naturally heteromorphic species whose final form was a large, interconnected sentient mesh which was able to directly interface with the human brain through a network of fibers connected to the body. Through this medium, it was able to communicate to Richard the threat posed to the species by the violent colonists, and at the request of the myrmicats he leaves their habitat carrying some of their eggs for preservation.As the human colony continues to degenerate with respect to living conditions and human rights, the members of Nicole's family escape to the region nicknamed "New York", where they used to live in "Rama II," and are eventually reunited with Richard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Mountains_of_Madness"title="At the Mountains of Madness">
The story is narrated in a first-person perspective by the geologist William Dyer, a professor at Arkham's Miskatonic University, in the hope to prevent an important and much publicized scientific expedition to Antarctica. Throughout the course of his explanation, Dyer relates how he led a group of scholars from Miskatonic University on a previous expedition to Antarctica, during which they discovered ancient ruins and a dangerous secret beyond a range of mountains higher than the Himalayas.A small advance group, led by Professor Lake, discovers the remains of fourteen prehistoric life-forms previously unknown to science, and also unidentifiable as either plants or animals. Six of the specimens have been badly damaged, while another eight have been preserved in pristine condition. The specimens' stratum places them far too early on the geologic time scale for the features of the specimens to have evolved. Some fossils of Cambrian age show signs of the use of tools to carve a specimen for food.When the main expedition loses contact with Lake's party, Dyer and his colleagues investigate. Lake's camp is devastated, with the majority of men and dogs slaughtered, while a man named Gedney and one of the dogs are absent. Near the expedition's campsite, they find six star-shaped snow mounds with one specimen under each. They also discover that the better preserved life-forms have vanished, and that some form of dissection experiment has been done on both an unnamed man and a dog. The missing man Gedney is suspected of having gone utterly insane and having killed and mutilated all the others.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maskerade"title="Maskerade">
The story begins with Agnes Nitt leaving Lancre to seek a career at the Opera House in Ankh-Morpork, recently purchased by Seldom Bucket, formerly a cheesemonger. When Granny Weatherwax realizes Nanny Ogg has written an immensely popular "cookbook" but has not been paid by the publisher (and that the nom de plume of 'A Lancre Witch' may lead people to believe that she rather than Nanny wrote it), the witches leave for Ankh-Morpork to collect the money. They also hope to recruit Agnes into their coven, to replace Magrat Garlick who left the coven when she became Queen of Lancre (in "Lords and Ladies"). This has the side benefit of distracting Granny from becoming obsessive and self-centered, or so Nanny believes to her great relief. En route, they meet Henry Slugg, an Ankh-Morporkian opera singer who adopted a Brindisian persona of Enrico Basilica to further his career but yearns for Ankh-Morporkian cuisine after years of Brindisian pasta, squid and tomato sauce; and Granny makes a deal with Death for him not to claim the fatally-ill son of an innkeeper.Agnes Nitt is chosen as a member of the chorus, where she meets Christine, a more popular but less talented girl whose father lent Bucket large sums of money to purchase the Opera House. The Opera Ghost, who has long haunted the opera house without much incident, begins to commit seemingly random murders staged as "accidents", and also requests that Christine be given lead roles in several upcoming productions. Due to her incredibly powerful, versatile and possibly magical voice, Agnes is asked to sing the parts from the background, unbeknownst to Christine or the audience. After swapping rooms with Christine, Agnes begins receiving late-night training from the Opera Ghost originally intended for Christine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footfall"title="Footfall">
The alien Fithp resemble baby elephants with multiple prehensile trunks. They possess more advanced technology than humans, but did not develop any of it on their own. In the distant past on their planet, another species was dominant. The predecessor species badly damaged the environment, rendering itself and many other species extinct, but left behind their knowledge inscribed on large stone cubes from which the Fithp gained their technology. An arms race between two rival herds threatened to render the species extinct, so they wagered to see who would depart in a starship and seek a new home elsewhere. The leadership of the loser formed the "Chtaptisk Fithp" ('Traveling Herd'). The herd was divided into "Sleepers" and the "Spaceborn", as the starship is both a generation ship and a sleeper ship. The original leaders are subordinate to the Spaceborn, who are prepared to start a space-based civilization, but are still dedicated to the generations-old goal of conquest.The Fithp are herd creatures and fight wars differently from humans. When two herds meet, they fight until it is evident which is dominant. Fighting then ceased, and the losers are incorporated into the winning herd. The Fithp are confused by human attempts at peaceful contact. Upon arrival, they attack the Soviet space station, the country still being a world superpower, where Soviets and Americans wait to greet them. They proceed to destroy military sites and important infrastructure on Earth. US Congressman Wes Dawson and Soviet cosmonauts are captured from the ruins of the space station.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shade's_Children"title="Shade's Children">
A boy nicknamed Gold-Eye, a fifteen-year-old, was born near the time of the Change. He was physically affected by the Change radiation and his eyes, including his pupils, are a bright golden color. He has a very special talent known as being able to see in the "soon to be now." He is also unusual in that he managed to escape and elude the Trackers and Myrmidons for a time. Yet as the story begins, he is finally trapped by the Myrmidons, and prepares to kill himself to prevent his organs from being harvested. This turns out to be unnecessary as he is saved by a team of strangers who stun the Myrmidons with a flashbang grenade and lift him to safety. These strangers are a team of Shade's Children, and after the group eludes some Ferrets by hiding in a tall building, he accompanies them back to the Submarine, Shade's Children's hideout.Gold-Eye joins Shade's Children, and is soon sent off on his first mission with the team that saved him: Ella, Ninde, and Drum. Each team member is unique, and has Change abilities that correspond somewhat to their personality.This mission is a critical one: to retrieve the equipment and data from Shade's abandoned laboratory on the University campus in the Department of Abstract Computing, including a device that measures Change radiation. It is also one of the most dangerous missions: All of the teams who have previously attempted this retrieval have been killed or captured in the process. Ella's team is successful, even when the Overlord Black Banner surrounds and invades the building, alerted by Leamington, a pre-Change artificial intelligence who calls the police on detection of the intruders. Leamington is notably different from Shade in that he is an artificial intelligence as opposed to an uploaded consciousness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bonfire_of_the_Vanities"title="The Bonfire of the Vanities">
The story centers on Sherman McCoy, a successful New York City bond trader. His $3 million Park Avenue co-op apartment, combined with his wife's extravagances and other expenses required to keep up appearances are depleting his great income, or as McCoy calls it, a "hemorrhaging of money." McCoy's secure life as a self-regarded "Master of The Universe" on Wall Street is gradually destroyed when he and his mistress, Maria Ruskin, accidentally enter the Bronx at night while they are driving back to Manhattan from Kennedy Airport. Finding the ramp back to the highway blocked by trash cans and a tire, McCoy exits the car to clear the way. Approached by two black men whom they perceive—uncertainly, in McCoy's case—as predators, McCoy and Ruskin flee. After Ruskin takes the wheel of the car to race away, it fishtails, apparently striking one of the two would-be assailants—a "skinny boy."Peter Fallow, a has-been, alcoholic journalist for the tabloid "City Light", is soon given the opportunity of a lifetime when he is persuaded to write a series of articles about Henry Lamb, a black youth who has said he been the victim of a hit and run by a wealthy white driver. Fallow cynically tolerates the manipulations of Reverend Bacon, a Harlem religious and political leader who sees the hospitalized youth as a projects success story gone wrong. Fallow's articles on the matter ignite a series of protests and media coverage of the Lamb case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Station_Zebra_(novel)"title="Ice Station Zebra (novel)">
Drift ice Station Zebra, a British meteorological station built on an ice floe in the Arctic Sea, suffers a catastrophic oil fire; several of its men die, and their shelter and supplies are destroyed. The survivors take refuge in one hut with little food and heat.The (fictional) American nuclear-powered submarine USS "Dolphin" is dispatched on a rescue mission. Just before she departs, Dr. Carpenter, the narrator, is sent to accompany her. Carpenter's background is unknown, but he claims that he is an expert in dealing with frostbite and other deep-cold medical conditions, and he carries orders from the Chief of Naval Operations of the United States Navy. Commander Swanson, the "Dolphin" submarine captain, is suspicious of Carpenter, and calls in his superior Admiral Garvie. Garvie refuses to allow Carpenter on board without knowing his mission. Under duress, Carpenter finally reveals that the ice station is actually a highly equipped listening post, keeping watch for nuclear missile launches from the Soviet Union, a statement which convinces the commander and the admiral."Dolphin" reaches the Arctic ice-pack, and dives under it. She surfaces in a break in the ice and succeeds in making tenuous radio contact with Ice Station Zebra. Carpenter confides to the Captain that the commander of the station is his brother. Having obtained a bearing on the station, "Dolphin" dives again, and succeeds in finding a lead from the station and breaks through a crack in the ice above. Carpenter, Executive Officer Hansen, and two crewmen are put above on the icepack and make the journey to the station through an Arctic storm on foot, taking with them as many supplies as they can. They reach Zebra after a near-impossible trek, and find that eight of the men on the station are dead, while the 11 others are barely alive. Investigating the corpses, Carpenter finds that one of them has been shot. They find that their radio has been damaged, and so Carpenter and Hansen return to "Dolphin". The US submarine moves close to the station, and finding no open water, blows a hole in the ice using a torpedo.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discovery_of_India"title="The Discovery of India">
The journey in "The Discovery of India" begins from ancient history, leading up to the last years of the British Raj. Nehru uses his knowledge of the Upanishads, Vedas, and textbooks on ancient history to introduce to the reader the development of India from the Indus Valley civilization, through the changes in socio-political scenario every foreign invader brought, to the present day conditions.Nehru was jailed for his participation in the Quit India Movement along with other Indian leaders, and he used this time to write down his thoughts and knowledge about India's history. The book provides a broad view of Indian history, philosophy and culture, as viewed from the eyes of an Indian fighting for the independence of his country. He wrote the book during his imprisonment.In "The Discovery of India", Nehru argued that India was a historic nation with a right to sovereignty. This book also analyses in depth the philosophy of Indian life. It has 10 chapters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_and_Sunday_Morning"title="Saturday Night and Sunday Morning">
The novel "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" is split into two unequal parts: the bulk of the book, Saturday Night, and the much smaller second part, Sunday Morning.Saturday NightSaturday Night begins in a working man's club in Nottingham. Arthur Seaton is 22 years old, and enjoying a night out with Brenda, the wife of a colleague at work. Challenged to a drinking contest, Arthur defeats "Loudmouth" before falling down the stairs drunk. Brenda takes him home with her and they spend the night together. Arthur enjoys breakfast with Brenda before her husband Jack gets home from a weekend at the races.Arthur works at a lathe at a bicycle factory with his friend Jack. Arthur keeps his mind occupied during the mundane and repetitive work through a mental collage of imagined fantasies, and memories of the past. He earns a good wage of 14 pounds a week, and Robboe, his superior, fears he may get in trouble for letting Arthur earn so much. Soon Arthur hears the news that Jack has been switched to nights, which pleases Arthur as he can now spend more time with Jack's wife. At the same time, Arthur carries on with Brenda's sister Winnie.During another night out at the pub, Arthur meets Doreen, a young unmarried girl with whom he begins a relatively innocent courtship — all the while keeping Brenda and Winnie a secret. However, although Jack is oblivious to his wife's infidelity, Winnie's husband Bill catches on — and Arthur's actions catch up with him when Bill and an accomplice jump Arthur one night, leaving him beaten and bed-ridden for days.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children_Act_(novel)"title="The Children Act (novel)">
Fiona Maye is a respected High Court Judge specialising in Family Law and living in Gray's Inn Square. While reviewing a case, she is approached by her husband, Jack, who tells her that because of their lack of physical intimacy he would like to embark on a sexual affair, with her permission, with a 28 year old statistician. Fiona is horrified and refuses to agree to Jack's terms. Fiona had developed a horror of the body after presiding over a case in which she ruled that conjoined twins should be separated despite the fact that one twin would immediately die due to her verdict. Though her peers lauded her elegant solution to the case, Fiona is privately troubled by it and nevertheless refuses to share this detail with Jack. In the middle of their fight, Fiona receives a call about an emergency case of a young teenager with leukemia who refuses a blood transfusion as a member of Jehovah's Witnesses. Jack leaves the apartment.Going to work Fiona finds herself pondering her marriage, her childlessness (in part due to her dedication to her career). Impulsively she decides to change the locks to her home despite knowing that this is illegal. Returning home she realizes that Jack has not returned or tried to contact her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Niven_and_Pournelle_novel)"title="Inferno (Niven and Pournelle novel)">
"Inferno" is based upon the hell described in Dante's "Inferno". However, it adds a modern twist to the story. The story is told in the first person by Allen Carpenter (who spelled his name "Carpentier" on his novels), an agnostic science fiction writer who died in a failed attempt to entertain his fans at a science fiction convention party. He is only released, after many decades, from a Djinn-bottle in the Vestibule on the outer edge to Hell when he finally calls upon God for mercy. Upon release he is met by Benito, or Benny, a Virgil-like figure whose full identity is not immediately apparent. Benito offers to take him out of Hell by bringing him to the center.At first, as Allen and Benito travel through Hell, Allen tries to scientifically rationalize everything he sees, renaming his surroundings as 'Infernoland', a high-tech amusement park some thousand years in the future. It isn't until he sees a man recover from incineration and his own leg heal from a compound fracture that he starts to actually believe that he is in Hell. From this point on, as Allen travels through the inner circles of Hell, he sees how he is guilty of each of the sins in some fashion, commenting to himself that he is in no danger from ditch 3 of circle 8 (simony) only because he has never had any holy offices to sell. At first Allen views the punishments for these sins as far surpassing the crime, repeatedly thinking, "We're in the hands of infinite power and infinite sadism", although he comes more and more to accept the justice of the situation as he realizes that it is their continuing denial of their sins that keeps many of the condemned in hell. Eventually Allen takes over Benito's role in helping reformed souls proceed on to Paradise via Purgatory, allowing Benito to move on towards Purgatory himself. It is revealed that Benito is actually Benito Mussolini, the former dictator of Italy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Owl_Service"title="The Owl Service">
Roger and Alison are stepbrother and sister. Alison's father died and her mother Margaret has married Clive, a businessman and former RAF officer. Clive's former wife was notoriously unfaithful, bringing shame to the family and a particular kind of pain to his son, Roger. To bond the new family together they are spending a few weeks of the summer in an isolated valley in Wales, a few hours' drive from Aberystwyth. They occupy a fine house formerly owned by Alison's father, subsequently transferred to her to avoid death duty. He in turn inherited it from a cousin, Bertram, who died there in mysterious circumstances around the time Alison was born.With the house comes Huw Halfbacon, also known as Huw the Flitch, a handyman and gardener. He is the last of the original domestic staff to remain at the house. The former cook, Nancy, had left to live in Aberystwyth but is offered a substantial amount to come and resume her duties. With her comes her son Gwyn. He has never seen the valley before but knows everything about it, courtesy of his mother's stories. Someone else who knows a lot about the place is Huw, but he is very mysterious about it. Oddly, Nancy has told Gwyn nothing about Huw.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudolino"title="Baudolino">
In the year of 1204, Baudolino of Alessandria enters Constantinople, unaware of the Fourth Crusade that has thrown the city into chaos. In the confusion, he meets Niketas Choniates and saves his life. Niketas is amazed by his language genius, speaking many languages he has never heard, and Baudolino begins to recount his life story to Niketas.His story begins in 1155, when Baudolino – a highly talented Italian peasant boy – is sold to and adopted by the emperor Frederick I. At court and on the battlefield, he is educated in reading and writing Latin and learns about the power struggles and battles of northern Italy at the time. He is sent to Paris to become a scholar.In Paris, he gains friends (such as the Archpoet, Abdul, Robert de Boron and Kyot, the purported source of Wolfram von Eschenbach's "Parzival") and learns about the legendary kingdom of Prester John. From this event onward, Baudolino dreams of reaching this fabled land.The earlier parts of the story follow the general historical and geographical outlines of 12th-century Europe, with special emphasis on the Emperor Frederick's futile efforts to subdue the increasingly independent and assertive city states of Northern Italy. Baudolino, both a beloved adopted son to the Emperor and a loyal native of the newly founded and highly rebellious town of Alessandria, plays a key role in reconciliation between the Emperor and the Alessandria townspeople, who are led by Baudolino's biological father; a way is found for the Emperor to recognize Alessandria's independence without losing face. (It is no accident that Alessandria is Umberto Eco's own hometown.) During the siege, Baudolino works on the side of Frederick Barbarossa, but concocts a plan to help win the Alessandrian townspeople independence. He attempts to convince the emperor's forces that Alessandria is more prepared for a siege than them through stuffing a cow with the last of Alessandria's wheat and sends the cow out to the Emperor's forces. When the cow is cut open, it reveals a full belly of wheat. The emperor's forces are convinced that Alessandria is not worth besieging, and thus leave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_Little_Boy"title="The Ugly Little Boy">
A Neanderthal child is brought to the present day as a result of time travel experiments by Stasis Inc, a research organization. He cannot be removed from his immediate area because of the vast energy loss and time paradoxes that would result, and is kept in the present by way of a Stasis module. In order to care for the boy the organization hires Edith Fellowes, a children's nurse.Initially repelled by the boy's appearance, Edith soon begins to regard him as her own child, learning to love him and realizing that he is far more intelligent than she first imagined. She dubs him 'Timmie' and attempts to ensure that he has the best possible childhood despite his circumstance. She is enraged when the newspapers refer to him as an "ape-boy." Edith's love for Timmie brings her into conflict with her employer, for whom he is more of an experimental animal than a human being.Eventually, her employer comes to the conclusion that his organization has exacted all the knowledge and publicity it can from Timmie and that the time has come to move on to the next project. This involves bringing a Medieval peasant into the present, which necessitates the return of Timmie to his own time. Edith fights the decision, knowing the boy cannot survive if returned to his own time due to his acquisition of modern dependencies and speech. She attempts to smuggle the boy out of the facility, but when that plan fails she disrupts the integrity of the Stasis module and returns to the ancient past with Timmie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Walk_in_the_Woods_(book)"title="A Walk in the Woods (book)">
The book starts with Bryson explaining his curiosity about the Appalachian Trail near his house. He and his old friend Stephen Katz start hiking the trail from Georgia in the South, and stumble in the beginning with the difficulties of getting used to their equipment; Bryson also soon realizes how difficult it is to travel with his friend, who is a crude, overweight recovering alcoholic, and even less prepared for the ordeal than he is. Overburdened, they soon discard much extra food and equipment to lighten their loads.After hiking for what seemed to him a large distance, they realize they have still barely begun while in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and that the whole endeavor is simply too much for them. They skip a huge section of the trail, beginning again in Roanoke, Virginia. The book recounts Bryson's desire to seek easier terrain as well as "a powerful urge not to be this far south any longer". This section of the hike finally ends (after nearly 800 miles (1,300 km) of hiking) with Bryson going on a book tour and Katz returning to Des Moines, Iowa, to work.In the following months Bryson continues to hike several smaller parts of the trail, including a visit to Centralia, Pennsylvania, the site of a coal seam fire, and eventually reunites with Katz to hike the Hundred-Mile Wilderness in Maine, which again proves too daunting. Ultimately Bryson hiked about 40% of the trail. In the 21st Century, about 25% of thru-hike attempts are successful. Bryson quotes the older figure of 10%.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Path_to_the_Nest_of_Spiders"title="The Path to the Nest of Spiders">
Pin, an orphaned cobbler's apprentice in a town on the Ligurian coast, lives with his sister, a prostitute and spends as much time as he can at a seedy bar where he amuses the adult patrons. After stealing a pistol from a Nazi sailor, Pin searches for an identity with an Italian partisan group. All the while, the people he meets mock him without his knowing. The title refers to Pin's secret hiding place, directions to which he touts as a prize to any adults who win his trust.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shikasta"title="Shikasta">
Canopus, a benevolent galactic empire centred at Canopus in the constellation Argo Navis, colonises a young and promising planet they name Rohanda (the fruitful). They nurture its bourgeoning humanoids and accelerate their evolution. When the Natives are ready, Canopus imposes a "Lock" on Rohanda that links it via "astral currents" to the harmony and strength of the Canopean Empire. In addition to Canopus, two other empires also establish a presence on the planet: their ally, Sirius from the star of the same name, and their mutual enemy, Puttiora. The Sirians confine their activities largely to genetic experiments on the southern continents during Rohanda's prehistory (described in Lessing's third book in the "Canopus" series, "The Sirian Experiments"), while the Shammat of Puttiora remain dormant, waiting for opportunities to strike.For many millennia the Natives of Rohanda prosper in a Canopean induced climate of peaceful coexistence and accelerated development. Then an unforeseen "cosmic re-alignment" puts Rohanda out of phase with Canopus which causes the Lock to break. Deprived of Canopus's resources and a steady stream of a substance called SOWF (substance-of-we-feeling), the Natives develop a "Degenerative Disease" that puts the goals of the individual ahead of those of the community. The Shammat exploit this disturbance and begin undermining Canopus's influence by infecting the Natives with their evil ways. As Rohanda degenerates into greed and conflict, the Canopeans reluctantly change its name to Shikasta (the stricken). Later in the book, Shikasta is identified as Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spitting_Image"title="The Spitting Image">
At the time he wrote "The Spitting Image", Lembcke had not found a single substantiated media report to support the now common claims of spitting. He theorizes that the reported "spitting on soldiers" scenario was a mythical projection by those who felt "spat upon" by an American society tired of the war; an image which was then used to discredit future anti-war activism and serve political interests. He suggests that the manufactured images of pro-war antipathy against anti-war protesters also helped contribute to the myth. Lembcke asserts that memories of being verbally and physically assaulted by anti-war protesters were largely conjured, noting that not even one case could be reliably documented. He further suggests the "baby-killer" and "murderer" components of the myth may have been reinforced, in part, by the common chants by protesters aimed at President Lyndon Baines Johnson, like "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?""The Spitting Image" asserts that the image of abuse of soldiers by anti-war demonstrators only really became ingrained in the American consciousness years after the war had come to a close. Lembcke attributes part of the legend's growth to films relating to Vietnam, notably "First Blood", in which a "spat-upon veteran" image is popularized. He writes that the myth of the spat-upon veteran was later revived by President George H. W. Bush as a way to help suppress dissent when selling the Gulf War to the American people. Lembcke believes that resurrection of the myth was useful in promoting the yellow ribbon "Support our Troops" campaign, as it implies that for one to support the troops, one must also support the war. It conflates the ideas of anti-war sentiment and anti-troop sentiment, despite a common anti-war chant being "Support the Troops: Bring them Home!"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom"title="Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom">
This future history book takes place in the 22nd century, mostly in Walt Disney World. Disney World is run by rival adhocracies, each dedicated to providing the best experience to the park's visitors and competing for the Whuffie the guests offer.The story is told in first person by Julius, whose old college buddy Dan used to be one of the most popular people in the country (as measured by Whuffie). Julius and girlfriend Lil are working with the committee (called an "ad hoc") that oversees the Magic Kingdom's Liberty Square. Dan, who has hit rock bottom and lost all his Whuffie, doesn't believe in rejuvenation and wishes to die, but not while he's at rock bottom. He moves in with Julius and Lil in order to rebuild his life. At the park, Julius is murdered and soon refreshed. By the time he wakes up, Debra's "ad hoc" group has taken control of the Hall of Presidents, and is planning to replace its old-fashioned animatronic robots with the synthetic memory imprinting of the experience of being the president for a moment. Julius believes that this rival committee had him killed as a distraction so that they could seize the Hall in the interim.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Like_Pumpkins"title="I Like Pumpkins">
The main character of the book is a little girl who loves pumpkins. She describes the many uses of pumpkins that she appreciates, including plastic pumpkins, pumpkins used to hold candy, jack-o-lanterns, pumpkin seeds, and her favorite, pumpkin pie. The illustrations show her and her mother traveling by car to a pumpkin patch, picking out a pumpkin, and then returning home. Along the way, they see a number of strange sights, including Frankenstein and his pet purple alligator who are returning home with their own respective pumpkins. One image shows a fantasy version of the girl's bedroom which is decorated with a pumpkin theme, including a pumpkin-themed headboard for her bed and an alarm clock in the shape of a pumpkin. The book ends with a series of pumpkin-themed puzzles that ask readers to identify a pumpkin that is different from the others, count which of a set of farmers has the most pumpkins, locate hidden pumpkins in a parade scene, and identify a pumpkin that looks like the little obese monkey in the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Velvet"title="National Velvet">
"National Velvet" is the story of a 14-year-old girl named Velvet Brown, who trains and rides her horse, named The Piebald, to victory in the Grand National steeplechase.The novel focuses on the ability of ordinary people, particularly women, to accomplish great things. Velvet is a teenager in the late 1920s, living in a small English coastal village in Sussex, dreaming of one day owning many horses. She is a high-strung, shy, nervous child with a delicate stomach. Her mother is a wise, taciturn woman who was once famous for swimming the English Channel; her father is a butcher.Velvet's best friend is her father's assistant, Mi (Michael) Taylor, whose father – as Mrs. Brown's swimming coach – helped her cross the channel. Mi formerly worked in stables and is familiar with the horse racing world. One day they both watch The Piebald jump over a five-foot-high cobbled fence to escape a field. Mi remarks that "a horse like that'd win the National". Velvet becomes obsessed with winning the horse in an upcoming raffle and riding him to greatness.In addition to inheriting several horses from one of her father's customers, Velvet also wins The Pie, her dream horse. After riding him in a local gymkhana, she and Mi seriously consider entering the Grand National steeplechase at Aintree racecourse and train the Piebald accordingly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bury_My_Heart_at_Wounded_Knee"title="Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee">
In the first chapter, Brown presents a brief history of the discovery and settlement of America, from 1492 to the Indian turmoil that began in 1860. He stresses the initially gentle and peaceable behavior of Indians toward Europeans, especially their lack of resistance to early colonial efforts at Europeanization. It was not until the further influx of European settlers, gradual encroachment, and eventual seizure of native lands by the "white man" that the Native peoples resisted.Brown completes his initial overview by briefly describing incidents up to 1860 that involved American encroachment and Indian removal, beginning with the defeat of the Wampanoags and Narragansetts, Iroquois, and Cherokee Nations, as well as the establishment of the West as the "permanent Indian frontier" and the ultimate breaches of the frontier as a means to achieve Manifest Destiny.In each of the following chapters, Brown provides an in-depth description of a significant post-1860 event in American Western expansion or Native American eradication, focusing in turn on the specific tribe or tribes involved in the event. In his narrative, Brown primarily discusses such tribes as the Navajo Nation, Santee Dakota, Hunkpapa Lakota, Oglala Lakota, Cheyenne, and Apache people. He touches more lightly upon the subjects of the Arapaho, Modoc, Kiowa, Comanche, Nez Perce, Ponca, Ute, and Minneconjou Lakota tribes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sum_of_All_Fears"title="The Sum of All Fears">
During the first day of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the Israeli Defense Force (I.D.F.) prepares to conduct a tactical nuclear strike to stave off defeat. The necessity for the strike is averted, but an Israeli Mark 12 nuclear bomb is accidentally left on an A-4 Skyhawk attack aircraft flown by Captain Mutti Zadin; which is subsequently shot down over Syria, near Kafr Shams. The nuclear weapon is lost, buried in the field of a Druze farmer. Eighteen years later, an Israeli police captain (coincidentally the brother of the downed pilot) converts to a fundamentalist sect of Hasidic Judaism after discovering his wife had an extramarital affair and attempts to instigate a violent demonstration of Palestinians at the Temple Mount. When the demonstrators unexpectedly conduct a peaceful protest, Zadin orders the police to fire tear gas and Rubber bullets at the protesters anyway. Captain Zadin then kills the leader of the demonstration by shooting him point-blank. The United States finds it hard to diplomatically defend Israel, yet knows it cannot withdraw its support without risk of destabilizing the Middle East.Following the advice of Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (DDCI) Jack Ryan, National Security Advisor Dr. Charles Alden enacts a plan to accelerate the peace process by converting Jerusalem into a Vatican-like independent city-state to be administered by a tribunal of Jewish, Muslim, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox religious leaders, and secured by an independent contingent of the Swiss Guards. As a nod to Israel, the U.S. Army supplies the I.D.F. with more sophisticated equipment and agrees to construct a training base in the Negev Desert run by the U.S. Army's tank warfare specialists and the revived 10th Cavalry Regiment. To everyone's surprise, Ryan's plan seems to work, in large part due to Ryan's meetings with officials in Israel and Saudi Arabia and the acquiescence of the reformist President Andrey Narmonov in the democratized Soviet Union. With their religious contentions appeased, the factions in the Middle East find it much easier to negotiate their disputes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(Huxley_novel)"title="Island (Huxley novel)">
Englishman William Asquith "Will" Farnaby deliberately wrecks his boat on the shores of the Kingdom of Pala, an island halfway between Sumatra and the Andaman Islands, thus forcing his entry to this otherwise "forbidden island". Farnaby, a journalist, political huckster, and lackey for the oil baron Lord Joseph "Joe" Aldehyde, is tasked with persuading the island's current queen—the Rani—to sell Aldehyde rights to Pala's untapped oil assets. Farnaby awakens on the island with a leg injury, hearing a myna bird screaming "Attention", when a local boy and girl notice him and take him for medical treatment to their grandfather, Dr. Robert MacPhail. Dr. Robert and a young man named Murugan Mailendra carry Farnaby to Robert's house for a surprisingly successful hypnotherapy session led by Susila, Robert's daughter-in-law and the mother of the two children. Susila's husband (Robert's son) recently died in a climbing accident, and Susila is still grappling with the grief.Farnaby and Murugan recognise each other from a recent meeting with Colonel Dipa, the military dictator of a threatening country called Rendang-Lobo that neighbours Pala—another force coveting Pala's oil. In private, Murugan reveals to Farnaby that he is in fact the Rani's son and will be assuming control over Pala in a few days as its new Raja. Both the Rani and Murugan were raised outside of Palanese culture, however, and so both are largely westernised, with Murugan especially influenced by materialism and consumerist greed. Contrary to these philosophies, most Palanese islanders engage in peaceful living, intellectual pursuits, and deep spiritualism that avoids superstition. The kingdom has no military and its inhabitants have cultivated a nearly utopian society by blending the most applicable elements from western science and eastern Mahayana Buddhism, also adopting a multiple-parents child-rearing strategy of mutual adoption clubs (MACs), as well as a bilingual culture of English and Palanese. Palanese citizens strive to live always in the moment, to directly confront suffering and death, to meditate often, to engage shamelessly in coitus reservatus called "maithuna", and to use "moksha"-medicine—a local psychedelic drug or entheogen—to help achieve these other goals. The Rani, however, who comes to visit Farnaby and is theatrical, larger-than-life, and more traditionally religious, is disgusted by these mainstream Palanese values and wishes to reform the country. Farnaby convinces her that Joe Aldehyde's oil money will help her in her quest to "save" the nation from blasphemy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Fresh"title="Something Fresh">
Ashe Marson and his fellow lodger Joan Valentine discover that they both work as writers for the Mammoth Publishing Company. Joan urges Ashe to overcome his discontentment and take a fresh direction in life.Meanwhile, Freddie Threepwood, younger son of the Earl of Emsworth, is engaged to marry Aline Peters, the daughter of American millionaire J. Preston Peters. Freddie pays a visit to a shady fixer, R. Jones, hoping to recover letters he once sent to a certain chorus girl, feeling they might be used to make a breach of promise case against him. His father later calls on Aline's father to view his collection of scarabs and absent-mindedly puts Mr Peters’ prize exhibit in his pocket. Though Peters suspects the Earl, he cannot confront him for fear of endangering his daughter's marriage. Aline is being pursued by George Emerson, a Hong Kong police officer, who wishes to marry her. Having befriended Freddie Threepwood, George has been invited to Blandings Castle, the family home, at the same time that Aline and her father are paying a visit. R. Jones finds the address of Freddie's ex-sweetheart, Joan Valentine, who tells him she has long since destroyed any letters she may have had from Freddie. As Jones is leaving, Aline, a former school friend of Joan, arrives on a visit, and the suspicious Jones listens at the door. Hearing that Aline's father is offering £1,000 to anybody who can retrieve his scarab, Joan decides that she will go herself to Blandings, posing as Aline's maid, so as to recover the scarab and scoop the reward. Acting separately, Ashe answers a newspaper advert and is engaged as his valet by Mr. Peters, who is looking for somebody to steal back the scarab during his visit to Blandings. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days"title="The Light of Other Days">
Wormhole technology has advanced to the point where information can be passed instantaneously between points in the spacetime continuum. The wormhole technology is first used to send digital information via gamma rays, then developed further to transmit light waves. The media corporation that develops this advance can spy on anyone, anywhere it chooses. A logical development from the laws of space-time allows light waves to be detected from the past. This enhances the wormhole technology into a "time viewer" where anyone opening a wormhole can view people and events from any point throughout time and space.When the technology is released to the general public, it effectively destroys all secrecy and privacy. The novel examines the philosophical issues that arise from the world's population (increasingly suffering from ecological and political disturbances) being aware that they could be under constant observation by anyone, or that they could observe anyone without their knowledge. Anyone is able to observe the true past events of their families and their heroes. An underground forms which attempts to escape this observation; corruption and crime are drastically reduced; states discover the true causes and outcomes of international conflicts; and religions worldwide are forced to re-evaluate their divine histories. As the underground movement grows, it utilises a direct neural interface coupled with the unlimited communication provided by the wormhole technology to develop a group mind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Parties"title="Political Parties">
Michels put forward a thesis about incompatibility of democracy and large-scale social organizations. He observed that contrary to democratic and egalitarian principles, both society in general, and specific organizations in particular are dominated by the leadership – the oligarchy. This, according to Michels, was not because of any particular weakness of a particular society or organization in question, but a characteristic of any and all complex social systems. Such social systems have to be organized along bureaucratic lines, managed by departments staffed with non-elected officials, and bureaucracies inevitably develop oligarchies. Michels concluded that in any complex organization, and such dominate the modern world, it is impossible to escape domination of oligarchy - a conclusion which became known as the iron law of oligarchy.The iron law of oligarchy is based on the following logic. First, any large scale organization will necessitate the development of bureaucracy for efficient administration. Such leaders will amass resources (superior knowledge control over the formal means of communication with the membership, and the skill in the art of politics) giving them power at the expense of rank and file members.Second, Michels expressed doubts about whether the rank and file possess the skills necessary to compete with the leaders, a concept he phrased as the "incompetence of the masses". In order to prevent the development of an oligarchy, the regular members must be involved in various activities of the organizations; however, reality of time constraints due to work, family and leisure will reduce the amount of time that most such members are willing to dedicate to active involvement in organizational activities and politics. This is compounded by the rank and file lack of education, and corresponding sophistication of the leadership.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Integral_Trees"title="The Integral Trees">
Twenty astronauts aboard an interstellar "ramship" colonized the Smoke Ring five hundred years before the story begins. Their descendants have adapted their cultures to the free-fall environment. Without gravity, even those who live in integral tree tufts are much taller than Earth-average humans, having grown up in much weaker tides. Many people are able to use their longer, prehensile toes as another set of fingers. The small number of devices left from the original crew are coveted items in Smoke Ring societies.Quinn Tribe inhabits the "in tuft" of Dalton-Quinn tree. They normally subsist on the tree's cottony foliage, augmented by hunting and a flock of domesticated turkeys. But since the tree passed near Gold six earth years ago it has been falling toward Voy, nearly dropping out of the Smoke Ring. As a result, the tribe suffers a severe drought. The tribe's leader, the Chairman, decides to send a party of nine up the tree, ostensibly to hunt and re-cut tribal markings into the trunk. The group consists mostly of people with disability and people the Chairman dislikes, including the Chairman's son-in-law (and rival) Clave, and Jeffer, the Scientist's apprentice.When they approach the midpoint they notice that the tribal markings are different; upon reaching it, they are attacked by members of the Dalton-Quinn tribe who live at the other end of the tree. During the battle a massive tremor splits the tree in half, causing the in tuft to fall farther toward Voy (killing its inhabitants) and allowing the out tuft to find a new equilibrium that is closer to the Smoke Ring's median. The seven surviving members of the Quinn Tribe and one of the attackers jump clear of the shattered tree and are left adrift in the sky with only a few "jet pods" (high pressure seed cases that provide a temporary thrust when opened) as their only method of propulsion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Innocence"title="The Age of Innocence">
Newland Archer, gentleman lawyer and heir of one of New York City's most illustrious families, happily anticipates his highly desirable marriage to the sheltered and beautiful May Welland. Yet he finds reason to doubt his choice of bride after the appearance of Countess Ellen Olenska, May's exotic and beautiful cousin. Olenska strikes Archer as the opposite of the innocent and ignorant May Welland. Ellen has returned to New York from Europe after scandalously separating herself (per rumor) from a disastrous marriage to a Polish count. At first, Ellen's arrival and its potential taint on the reputation of his bride-to-be's family disturbs Newland, but he becomes intrigued by the worldly Ellen, who brazenly flouts New York society's fastidious rules. As Newland's admiration for the countess grows, so do his doubts about marrying May, a perfect product of Old New York society; his match with May no longer seems the ideal fate he had imagined.Ellen's decision to divorce Count Olenski causes a social crisis for the other members of her family, who are terrified of scandal and disgrace. Living apart can be tolerated, but divorce is unacceptable. To save the Welland family's reputation, a law partner of Newland asks him to dissuade Countess Olenska from going through with the divorce. He succeeds, but in the process comes to care for her. Afraid of falling in love with Ellen, Newland begs May to elope and accelerate their wedding date, but she refuses.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Fire_and_Sword"title="With Fire and Sword">
Despite some deviations, the book's historical framework is genuine and the fictional story is woven into real events. Many characters are historical figures, including Jeremi Wiśniowiecki and Bohdan Khmelnytsky (Polish: Bohdan Chmielnicki). Sienkiewicz researched memoirs and chronicles of the Polish nobility, or szlachta, for details on life in 17th-century Poland. The book was written, according to the author, "to lift up the heart" of the Polish nation in the unhappy period following the failed January Uprising during the era of the partitions of Poland. Thus it often favors epic plots and heroic scenes over historical accuracy. Nonetheless, Sienkiewicz's vivid language made it one of the most popular books about that particular place and era.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabriel"title="Sabriel">
The novel is set in two neighbouring fictional countries: To the South lies Ancelstierre, which has a technology level and society similar to that of early-20th century Australia, and to the North lies the Old Kingdom, where both Free magic and Charter Magic exist—a fact officially denied by the government of Ancelstierre and disbelieved by most of Ancelstierre's inhabitants. A wall separates the two countries. Near the border some magic crosses the Wall, especially on days when the wind is blowing out of the Old Kingdom. Since the fall of the Royal Family, dangerous entities roam, ranging from the undead to powerful sorcerers and Free Magic elementals.These living Dead are raised by Necromancers, diviners of the dead who roam the Old Kingdom or live in Death, using Hands to do their bidding. To remedy the problem of dangerous living dead, a necromancer under the title of Abhorsen uses a bandolier of Bells and a sword to put the dead to rest. At the time of Sabriel, it is her father Terciel who has the job of putting the dead to rest in the Old Kingdom, especially difficult since a new evil is rising.When the current Abhorsen is overcome by one such evil and beyond the Seventh Gate, he sends his bells (the primary tools of a necromancer and used in various ways to control the Dead) and sword to his daughter Sabriel via an undead messenger bound and under his control. Sabriel is at an Ancelstierre school for girls to remain out of reach of those who might try to strike at her father through her and end the Abhorsen bloodline. The bound undead is also attempting to speak, but she must enter death in order to make out the words. She is instructed by her father (speaking through the undead messenger in Death) to return to the Old Kingdom to take on the role of Abhorsen and stop Kerrigor's return to Life. While in Death obtaining her father's guidance, she narrowly avoids a fatal altercation with a Lesser Dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amber_Spyglass"title="The Amber Spyglass">
Having learned of the witches' prophecy that Lyra Belacqua is the second Eve, the Magisterium decides she must be killed to prevent a new fall. Lyra's ambitious and hardhearted mother, Mrs Coulter, hides her in a remote cave. In her drugged sleep, Lyra dreams of meeting her friend Roger in the land of the dead, and promises to help.In the world of Cittàgazze the angels Balthamos and Baruch try to persuade Lyra's friend Will to take the subtle knife to Lord Asriel, whose army is preparing to fight the Magisterium, but Will insists on finding Lyra first. They are attacked by the archangel Metatron but escape to another world just in time with the help of the subtle knife. The angels explain that the very first angel to condense out of Dust had falsely claimed to be the creator, and had acquired great power as the Authority. Now aged, he dwells in an isolated citadel and has delegated most of his powers to his regent Metatron.The physicist Mary Malone finds herself in a world of sapient creatures called mulefa. The trees they rely on have been dying, and she uses lacquer from their sap to construct a spyglass that allows her to see Dust. She discovers that it is streaming rapidly away, no longer able to provide the trees with nourishment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tao_of_Pooh"title="The Tao of Pooh">
The book starts with a description of the vinegar tasters, which is a painting portraying the three great eastern thinkers, Confucius, the Buddha, and Laozi over a vat of vinegar. Each tasting the vinegar of "life," Confucius finds it sour, the Buddha finds it bitter, but Laozi, the traditional founder of Taoism, finds it satisfying. Then the story unfolds backing up this analogy.Hoff presents Winnie-the-Pooh and related others from A. A. Milne's stories as characters that interact with him while he writes "The Tao of Pooh", but also quotes excerpts of their tales from Milne's actual books "Winnie-the-Pooh" and "The House at Pooh Corner," in order to exemplify his points to the reader and the characters. Hoff uses many of Milne's characters to symbolize ideas that differ from or accentuate Taoist tenets. Winnie-the-Pooh himself, for example, personifies the principles of "wu wei", the Taoist concept of "effortless doing," and "pu," the concept of being open to, but unburdened by, experience, and it is also a metaphor for natural human nature. In contrast, characters like Owl and Rabbit over-complicate problems, often over-thinking to the point of confusion, and Eeyore pessimistically complains and frets about existence, unable to just "be". Hoff regards Pooh's simpleminded nature, unsophisticated worldview and instinctive problem-solving methods as conveniently representative of the Taoist philosophical foundation. The book also incorporates translated excerpts from various prominent Taoist texts, from authors such as Laozi and Zhuang Zhou.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Astonishing_Hypothesis"title="The Astonishing Hypothesis">
"The Astonishing Hypothesis" posits that "a person's mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make them up and influence them." Crick claims that scientific study of the brain during the 20th century led to acceptance of consciousness, free will, and the human soul as subjects for scientific investigation.Rather than attempting to cover all the aspects of consciousness (self-awareness, thought, imagination, perception, etc.), Crick focuses on the primate visual system and breaks down the prerequisites for conscious experience into several broad subconditions, including some sort of short-term memory and attention mechanism. The book then delves into a brief overview of many neuroscientific topics, ranging from a survey of how neurons function to a description of basic neural circuits and their artificial equivalents. Throughout, Crick cites various experiments which illustrate the narrow points he is making about visual awareness, such as studies investigating the phenomenon of blindsight in macaques.The later chapters of the book try to synthesize many of the points made earlier about the visual system into a unified framework, although Crick frequently notes the many exceptions to his assumptions and the clumsiness of many of his attempts at synthesis. Also, here he takes the opportunity to make suggestions for further experiments that could provide empirical basis for further understanding about human consciousness and includes a brief addendum on several topics he purposefully glossed over, like free will. Overall, the message Crick repeats as the main purpose of writing the "Astonishing Hypothesis" is to break the scientific community's reluctance to give consciousness a thorough and scientifically-grounded investigation, and to encourage others such as philosophers to address the issues of consciousness in a way that takes account of neuroscientific discoveries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Lightning"title="Summer Lightning">
Gally is down at Blandings and writing his memoirs, to the horror of all who knew him in their wild youths, particularly Lord Emsworth's neighbour and pig-fancying rival Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe. While sinister forces, including the efficient Baxter and the unpleasant Percy Pilbeam, scheme to put a stop to the book, Ronnie Fish and his old pal Hugo Carmody are entangled in difficult relationships, which require much subterfuge, some pig-theft and a little imposter-ing to resolve.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riddley_Walker"title="Riddley Walker">
Roughly two thousand years after a nuclear war has devastated civilization, Riddley, the young narrator, stumbles upon efforts to recreate a weapon of the ancient world.The novel's characters live a harsh life in a small area which is presently the English county of Kent, and know little of the world outside of "Inland" (England). Their level of civilization is similar to England's prehistoric Iron Age, although they do not produce their own iron but salvage it from ancient machinery. Church and state have combined into one secretive institution, whose mythology, based on misinterpreted stories of the war and an old Catholic saint (Eustace), is enacted in puppet shows.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_or_M?"title="N or M?">
After the outbreak of the Second World War and many years after they worked for British intelligence, middle-aged Tommy and Tuppence Beresford feel useless and sidelined. Then, Tommy is approached by a secret agent named Grant to go undercover once more. Grant tries to find German spies and fifth columnists but is hampered by traitors within British intelligence who follow and sabotage his work. Since Tommy has not been in the field for many years, nobody knows him, and he can investigate unofficially.Grant explains that another British agent was recently murdered but left a cryptic message on his deathbed: "N or M. Song Susie". Grant suspects that "Song Susie" stands for "Sans Souci", a hotel in (fictional) seaside Leahampton (based on Bournemouth), and "N" and "M" are known to be two top German spies, one male and one female. Tommy is to go to "Sans Souci" to investigate whether N, M or both are at the hotel and to figure out their identities.Tommy is sent alone, but Tuppence decides to join him on his mission whether invited or not. Through good sleuthing, she learns where he is to be sent and actually arrives there before he does. Working together, they begin a search for the master spies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pal_Joey_(novel)"title="Pal Joey (novel)">
Taking the form of letters from "pal Joey" to "dear Pal Ted," a second-rate nightclub singer recounts his life in 1930s Chicago, with a focus on money and women. Although he does not seem aware of it, Joey's letters reveal him to be an amoral, calculating heel whose venality is cloaked by an amiable persona. He also does not seem aware of his frequent spelling and grammatical errors (really choices by O'Hara to convey Joey's voice):Dear Friend TedThat is if I can call you friend after the last two weeks for it is a hard thing to do considering. I do not know if you realize what has happen to me oweing to your lack of consideraton . Maybe it is not lack of consideraton . Maybe it is on purpose. Well if it is on purpose all I have to say is maybe you are the one that will be the loser and not me as I was going to do certan things for you but now it does not look like I will be able to do them...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mist_(novella)"title="The Mist (novella)">
The morning after a severe thunderstorm left the area without electrical power, an unnaturally thick and straight-edged cloud of mist spreads across the small town of Bridgton, Maine, bringing with it a whole ecosystem of deadly creatures. The source of this mist is never determined, but there are indications that it was caused by the storm disrupting experiments being conducted at a nearby U.S. military installation under the rumored name "Project Arrowhead". Commercial artist David Drayton, along with his young son Billy and neighbor Brent Norton (whose car has been smashed by a fallen tree), go to the local supermarket for groceries, leaving David's wife behind at their home. The mist-edge soon arrives at the supermarket, blotting out the sun, followed by an earthquake-like jolt. When a young bagger, Norm, goes outside to fix a clogged vent in the store's generator, he is dragged into the mist by a mass of giant tentacles. David and assistant manager Ollie Weeks witness Norm's death and try to convince the remaining survivors of what has happened, imploring that no one leave the store. Norton and a small group of people accuse David of lying and go outside for help, only to be killed by one of the creatures. Ollie is given a revolver by the young Amanda Dumfries; she and David also have passionless stress-induced sex. Large "insects" begin crawling over the outside of the store, attracting pterosaur-like creatures, one of which squirms inside through a broken window and is killed with an improvised torch. David leads a group of people to an adjacent pharmacy as a test of possibly escaping the situation, where they encounter huge spiders, which kill several members of the expedition and force the rest to retreat to the supermarket. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronia,_the_Robber's_Daughter"title="Ronia, the Robber's Daughter">
Ronia is a girl growing up among a clan of robbers living in a castle in the woodlands of early-Medieval Scandinavia. As the only child of Matt, the chief, she is expected to become the leader of the clan someday. Their castle, Matt's Fort, is split into two parts by a lightning bolt on the day of Ronia's birth. Ronia grows up with Matt's clan of robbers as her only company, until a rival robber group led by Borka moves into the other half of the castle, exacerbating the longstanding rivalry between the two bands.One day, Ronia sees Birk Borkason, the only son of Borka, idling by the chasm. He is the only other child she has ever met, and so she is sorry that he is a Borka. He engages her in a game of jumping across, which does not end until Birk almost falls down. Ronia saves him, and they eventually become friends.The following winter is long and cold and although Matt's robbers are well fed, their counterparts are suffering on the other side of the chasm. Ronia brings food to Birk through a secret passageway. They get very close but both know that they cannot tell their families. Later that year, Birk is captured by Ronia's father. Ronia gives herself to the Borkas so she must be exchanged, but as a result, her father disowns her and refuses to acknowledge her as his daughter. Birk and Ronia run away to the woods, where they live in a cave and experience several harrowing adventures with the wood's indigenous wildlife, including trolls, forest gnomes, and harpies. Ultimately their families repent of their feuding, and everyone is reunited, but the story concludes with both Ronia and Birk deciding that the robber's life is not for them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Sematary"title="Pet Sematary">
Louis Creed, a doctor from Chicago, is appointed director of the University of Maine's campus health service. He moves to a large house near the small town of Ludlow with his wife Rachel, their two young children, Ellie and Gage, and Ellie's cat, Winston Churchill ("Church"). From the moment they arrive, the family runs into trouble: Ellie hurts her knee, and Gage is stung by a bee. Their new neighbor, an elderly man named Jud Crandall, comes to help. He warns Louis and Rachel about the highway that runs past their house, which is frequented by speeding trucks.Jud and Louis quickly become close friends. Since Louis's father died when he was three, he sees Jud as a surrogate father. A few weeks after the Creeds move in, Jud takes the family on a walk in the woods behind their home. A well-tended path leads to a pet cemetery (misspelled "sematary" on the sign) where the children of the town bury their deceased animals. The outing provokes a heated argument between Louis and Rachel the next day. Rachel disapproves of discussing death, and she worries about how Ellie may be affected by what she saw at the "sematary." It is explained later that Rachel was traumatized by the early death of her sister, Zelda, from spinal meningitis—an issue that is brought up several times in flashbacks. Louis empathizes with his wife and blames her parents for her trauma, who left Rachel at home alone with her sister when she died.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestarter_(novel)"title="Firestarter (novel)">
Andy and Charlene "Charlie" McGee are a father/daughter pair on the run from a government agency known as The Shop. During his college years, Andy had participated in a Shop experiment dealing with "Lot 6", a drug with hallucinogenic effects similar to LSD. The drug gave his future wife, Victoria Tomlinson, minor telekinetic abilities and him a telepathic form of mind control he refers to as "the push". They both also developed telepathic abilities. Andy's and Vicky's powers were physiologically limited; in his case, overuse of the push gives him crippling migraine headaches and minute brain hemorrhages, but their daughter Charlie developed frighteningly strong pyrokinetic ability.The novel begins "in medias res" with Charlie and Andy on the run from Shop agents in New York City, the latest in a series of attempts by The Shop to capture Andy and Charlie following a disastrous raid on the McGee family in suburban Ohio. After years of Shop surveillance, a botched operation to take Charlie leaves her mother dead; Andy, receiving a psychic flash while having lunch with colleagues, rushes home to discover his wife murdered and his daughter kidnapped. He then uses his push ability to track the trail of Charlie and The Shop agents, catching up to them at a rest stop on the Interstate. He uses the push to incapacitate The Shop agents, leaving one blind and the other comatose. Charlie and Andy flee, and begin a life of running and hiding, using assumed identities. They move several times to avoid discovery before The Shop catches up to them in New York.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_(King_novel)"title="Rage (King novel)">
Charlie Decker, a Maine high school senior, is called to a meeting with his principal about a previous incident in which he struck his chemistry teacher with a pipe wrench, leading to the teacher's hospitalization and Charlie's suspension. Charlie then subjects the principal to a series of insulting remarks, resulting in his expulsion. Charlie storms out of the office and retrieves a pistol from his locker, then sets the contents of his locker on fire. He then returns to his classroom and fatally shoots his algebra teacher, Miss Jean Underwood. The fire triggers an alarm, but Charlie forces his classmates to stay in the room, killing a history teacher, Mr. Peter Vance, when he attempts to enter. As the other students and teachers evacuate the school, the police and media arrive at the scene.Over the following four hours, Charlie toys with various authority figures who attempt to negotiate with him, including the principal, the school psychologist, and the local police chief. Charlie gives them certain commands, threatening to kill students if they do not comply. Charlie also admits to his hostages that he does not know what has compelled him to commit his deeds, believing he will regret them when the situation is over. As his fellow students start identifying with Charlie, he unwittingly turns his class into a sort of psychotherapy group, causing his schoolmates to semi-voluntarily tell embarrassing secrets regarding themselves and each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Regulators_(novel)"title="The Regulators (novel)">
Along a residential street in the suburban town of Wentworth, Ohio, a paperboy is suddenly shot by a mysterious stranger in a red van. The neighborhood’s panicked civilians run for shelter while author Johnny Marinville attempts to contact the police. However, an otherworldly force prevents the call from going through. Two other colorful vans, each driven by mysterious and odd strangers, later appear and kill three more residents. Former police officer Collie Entragian directs the affected residents and corrals them into the homes of victim David Carver and veterinarian Tom Billingsley. Only two residents remain indoors the entire time, seemingly unfazed: Audrey Wyler and her autistic nephew Seth, whom she has been caring for since the death of his family two years ago, remain silent among the chaos.During a trip to a mining town in Desperation, Nevada, an evil, otherworldly being named Tak took possession of Seth's body after it was released from a mine. Implementing strong mental influence, it later killed Seth’s parents and siblings. Tak then forced Audrey's husband to commit suicide. To survive, Audrey took refuge in a mental construct of her creation, modeling her safe place after a favorite retreat. Seth, meanwhile, is sent into the deep recesses of his mind while Tak is in control and suffers poor hygiene and nutrition as a result of the creature’s neglect. Because of his autism, Seth displays a gifted mental strength that is likely the reason Tak was drawn to him in the first place. It also helps keep his mind intact while Tak is in control.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Georges"title="The Two Georges">
"The Two Georges", being displayed in New Liverpool, is stolen while a crowd is distracted by the murder of 'Honest' Dick (a.k.a. 'Tricky' Dick), the Steamer King, a nationally-known used car salesman. In its place is left a gramophone with a recording of the "Yankee Doodle," a notorious subversive song serving as the anthem of the Sons of Liberty. Colonel Thomas Bushell of the Royal American Mounted Police leads the search for the painting, accompanied by its former curator (and his eventual love interest) Dr. Kathleen Flannery and Captain Samuel Stanley. Some days later, a ransom note is received from the Sons of Liberty. The Governor-General of the North American Union, Sir Martin Luther King, informs Bushell in confidence that the painting must be recovered before King-Emperor Charles III's state visit, or the government will have to pay the Sons' ransom demand of fifty million pounds.The search takes Bushell, Flannery, and Stanley across the country via airship (an advanced form of dirigible), train, and steamer. They also meet many members of the Sons of Liberty, including "Common Sense" editor John F. Kennedy.After chasing many false leads and the wrong suspects, Bushell and his associates arrive at Victoria (the nation's capital, on the south side of the Potomac River across from Georgestown, Maryland); during a reception at the Russian Embassy, Bushell encounters his ex-wife Irene, who had an affair with and subsequently married Sir David Clarke, Governor-General King's chief of staff. "The Two Georges" is found undamaged in a self-storage facility an hour before the King arrives. They also uncover the true culprits: the Holy Alliance and Bushell's superior officer and covert Sons of Liberty operative, Lieutenant General Sir Horace Bragg, who believed that emancipation was an injustice to his formerly slavocratic family. Bushell then thwarts Bragg's attempts to assassinate the King, first by gunfire then by a bomb concealed in the frame of "The Two Georges". When Bragg is arrested and awaiting trial, he and Bushell argue over the outcomes of a potential war against the Holy Alliance and a resultant American separatist uprising caused by the theft of the painting. Later, Bushell and Stanley are both knighted by King Charles for their accomplishments.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oryx_and_Crake"title="Oryx and Crake">
The novel focuses on a character called "Snowman", living in a post-apocalyptic world near a small group of primitive and innocent human-like creatures whom he calls "Crakers". Flashbacks reveal that Snowman was once a boy named Jimmy who grew up in a world dominated by multinational corporations that built privileged walled compounds to isolate and protect their employees and the employees' families from a degenerating outside society. The companies had operated by developing and marketing advanced technology products such as medical treatments and genetically engineered hybrid animals, but now no other humans are evident, and the compounds have become decaying ruins.Near starvation, Snowman decides to return to the ruins of a compound named RejoovenEsense to search for supplies, even though his excursion risks encountering dangers including feral populations of the hybridized animals. He concocts an explanation for the Crakers, who regard him as a teacher, and begins his foraging expedition.In Snowman's recollection of past events, Jimmy's family moves to the HelthWyzer compound, where his father works as a genetic engineer. Jimmy meets and befriends a brilliant science student named Glenn. Jimmy begins to refer to him as Crake when he uses that name in an online trivia game called "Extinctathon". Jimmy and Crake spend much of their leisure time playing online games, smoking "skunkweed", and watching underground videos such as live executions, graphic surgery, Noodie News, frog squashing, and child pornography. During one of their child pornography viewings, Jimmy is very much lovestruck by the gazing eyes of a young girl seen in the porn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_(novel)"title="Temple (novel)">
## William Race's adventure.Professor William Race is a young linguist, working for NYU is approached by a retired Col. Frank Nash, a physicist from the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, to translate a manuscript written in ancient Latin, to find an ancient Incan idol in the South American jungles. Race is told that his brother, Martin Race, was the one who suggested his name, and that his ex college sweetheart, Lauren O'Connor is also accompanying them. Race reluctantly agrees.En route to Peru, Nash provides Race with photocopied pages of a copy of the Santiago Manuscript, which describes the adventures of Alberto Santiago, a Spanish missionary in ancient Peru, whilst also holding the key to the final resting place of a legendary Incan idol, allegedly made of thyrium-261, an element that, when combined with the mass destruction weapon called Supernova, would destroy a third of the Earth's mass throwing it off from its orbit and effectively killing the planet. The team travels to Cuzco, Peru with physicists Troy Copeland and Lauren O'Connor, archaeologist Gaby Lopez, anthropologist Walter Chambers and a team of six Green Berets, including Race's personal bodyguard Leo Van Lewen.Race, translating the copy of the manuscript that Frank Nash's team had acquired prior to the flight to Peru, discovers that Santiago and his expedition ended up in Vilcafor, an Incan town deep in the Amazon. However, this was only a partially completed copy, so they didn't know what occurred after Santiago's arrival in Vilcafor. The team decide to use the information in the manuscript to make their way to Vilcafor and find out if the idol resides there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troll"title="The Troll">
The troll in this story is based on the troll from the "Three Billy Goats Gruff" fairy tale. However, in this story, no goats ever cross the troll's bridge and he is forced to survive on fish that he catches from the river. He does encounter, in turn, a spider, a mouse and a rabbit, each of which convinces the troll not to eat them by telling him that he should try a bridge further down the river that is more suitable for capturing goats as he is "sick of fish". Meanwhile, the pirate captain Hank Chief and his crew (Peg Polkadot, Ben Buckle, and Percy Patch) are searching for the treasure that is marked on their map, but are unable to locate the correct island. The pirates also display very poor culinary skills. Eventually, the troll reaches the sea and realises that he has been tricked by the other animals; he sees what he thinks are goat tracks in the sand and sets about laying a trap for the goat in a spot not too far from the location on the pirate's treasure map. He duly discovers an old chest when digging a large hole to ensnare his prey and throws away the "round shiny objects" he finds therein. He decides to lie in wait in the chest for the goat and falls asleep. Predictably, the pirates then arrive and make off with their "treasure"; upon opening the chest the pirates decide to make the troll walk the plank, until Peg discovers the troll's frying pan and cookbook. On discovering the troll's culinary talents, they agree to spare the troll and make him their cook. The troll is delighted and proceeds to tell the pirates that he will make them his favourite goat stew only to be advised, to his horror, that all the pirates desire is fish.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Feathers"title="The Four Feathers">
The novel tells the story of a British officer, Harry Feversham, who resigns from his commission in the Royal North Surrey Regiment just before Lord Wolseley's 1882 expedition to Egypt to suppress the rising of Colonel Ahmed Orabi. He is censured for cowardice by three of his comradesCaptain Trench and Lieutenants Castleton and Willoughbysignified by their delivery of three white feathers to him. His fiancée, Ethne Eustace, breaks off their engagement and also gives him a white feather. His best friend in the regiment, Captain Durrance, becomes a rival for Ethne.Harry talks with Lieutenant Sutch, a friend of his late father who is an imposing retired general. He questions his own motives, but says he will redeem himself by acts that will convince his critics to take back the feathers. He travels on his own to Egypt and Sudan, where in 1882 Muhammad Ahmed proclaimed himself the Mahdi (Guided One) and raised a Holy War. On 26 January 1885, his Dervish forces captured Khartoum and killed its British governor, General Charles George Gordon. Most of the action over the next six years takes place in the eastern Sudan, where the British and Egyptians held Suakin. Durrance is blinded by sunstroke and invalided. Castleton is killed at Tamai, where a British square is briefly broken by a Mahdi attack.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Station"title="Ice Station">
After a diving team at Wilkes Ice Station is killed, the station sends out a distress signal. A team of United States Force Recon Marines led by Shane Schofield, code named Scarecrow, arrives at the station. At the station he finds several French scientists have arrived, and several more come after the Marines' arrival. The French reveal themselves as soldiers and a fight ensues in the station, claiming the lives of Scarecrow's men Hollywood, Legs and Ratman, along with several scientists and most of the French soldiers, while Mother loses her leg, Samurai is badly injured, and two French scientists are captured.Schofield decides to send a team down to find an object below the ice where the diving team was going. Later, Samurai is found strangled, leaving the only people he trusts to be one of the scientists, Sarah Hensleigh and another soldier named Montana as he was with them at the time of Samurai's death. Hensleigh, Montana and two other Marines, Gant and Santa Cruz, are sent down to where the diving team vanished. While alone, Schofield is shot and killed. He later wakes up, found to have been accidentally resurrected by his attacker, and is in the care of scientist James Renshaw, the believed killer of one of the other scientists at Wilkes. Watching a video of Schofield's death, they see the attacker and discover it to be one of Schofield's men, Snake. The two capture Snake before he is able to kill the wounded Mother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Mountain"title="The Magic Mountain">
The narrative opens in the decade before World War I. It introduces the protagonist, Hans Castorp, the only child of a Hamburg merchant family. Following the early death of his parents, Castorp has been brought up by his grandfather and, later, by a maternal uncle named James Tienappel. Castorp is in his early 20s, about to take up a shipbuilding career in Hamburg, his hometown. Before beginning work, he undertakes a journey to visit his tubercular cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, who is seeking a cure in a sanatorium in Davos, high up in the Swiss Alps. In the opening chapter, Castorp leaves his familiar life and obligations, in what he later learns to call "the flatlands", to visit the rarefied mountain air and introspective small world of the sanatorium.Castorp's departure from the sanatorium is repeatedly delayed by his failing health. What at first appears to be a minor bronchial infection with slight fever is diagnosed by the sanatorium's chief doctor and director, Hofrat Behrens, as symptoms of tuberculosis. Castorp is persuaded by Behrens to stay until his health improves.During his extended stay, Castorp meets a variety of characters, who represent a microcosm of pre-war Europe. These include Lodovico Settembrini (an Italian humanist and encyclopedist, a student of Giosuè Carducci); Leo Naphta, a Jewish Jesuit who favors communistic totalitarianism; Mynheer Peeperkorn, a dionysian Dutchman; and his romantic interest, Madame Clawdia Chauchat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Monsters"title="Invisible Monsters">
The narrator of the story, Shannon McFarland, is a disfigured former model who goes by multiple pseudonyms, notably Daisy St. Patience and Bubba Joan—identities given to her by Brandy Alexander. The novel opens "in medias res" on the wedding day of Evie Cottrell, whose house is burning to the ground. Brandy, who has been shot by Evie, asks the narrator to tell her life story. Her memories of her life and her relationship with Brandy are told in a non-linear sequence.The narrator is the daughter of a farmer. Her older brother, Shane, was kicked out of the house for being gay after contracting gonorrhea. After their parents receive a phone call from a stranger that Shane is dead from AIDS, they become obsessive supporters of gay rights, so that even in death, Shane gets more parental attention than the narrator. This attention is a large source of resentment for the narrator towards her brother, and she sought a career in modeling in attempt to get attention for herself.The narrator's best friend in modeling school is Evelyn "Evie" Cottrell, who begins a secret relationship with the narrator's boyfriend, Manus Kelley, a police officer. While driving down the highway, the narrator is mysteriously shot in the face and her jaw is torn off. She immediately drives to the hospital and recovers, but her lower jaw is lost; she keeps her disfigured face veiled and her modeling career has been destroyed. In group speech therapy she meets Brandy Alexander, a trans woman. During sessions, Brandy instructs the narrator in how to give herself a new life and a new identity, and gives her a new name, Daisy St. Patience, the first among many new identities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speak_(Anderson_novel)"title="Speak (Anderson novel)">
The summer before her freshman year of high school, Melinda Sordino meets senior Andy Evans at a high school party. During the party, Andy rapes a drunken Melinda. In shock, Melinda calls 9-1-1, but does not know what to say and runs home. The police come and break up the party, and some people are arrested. Due to Melinda calling police to the party, she becomes ostracized by her peers and abandoned by her friends.Melinda does not tell anyone what happened to her, and nobody asks. Melinda is befriended by Heather, a girl from Ohio who is new to the community. However, once Heather realizes that Melinda is depressed and an outcast, she ditches Melinda to sit with the "Marthas," a group of girls who seem charitable and outgoing, but are actually selfish and cruel. As Melinda's depression deepens, she begins to skip school, withdrawing from her already distant parents and other authority figures, who see her silence as means of getting "attention". She slowly befriends her lab partner, David Petrakis, who encourages her to speak up for herself.Near the end of the book, Melinda's ex-best friend Rachel, who has been dating Andy, breaks up with him on prom night after Melinda tells her Andy had raped her at the party. Realizing only one other person could've told Rachel, Andy attacks Melinda in an abandoned janitor's closet, where Melinda spends most of her time to avoid her peers. Melinda fights back against Andy, and her screaming attracts the attention of students, who open the closet door and witness Andy attacking Melinda. When word spreads about Andy's attack in the closet and the truth about what happened at the party is revealed, the students no longer treat Melinda as an outcast but as a hero instead. Melinda tells her story to her art teacher, Mr. Freeman, and she regains her voice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Your_Eyes_Only_(short_story_collection)"title="For Your Eyes Only (short story collection)">
## "From a View to a Kill".Bond investigates the murder of a motorcycle dispatch-rider and the theft of his top-secret documents by a motorcycle-riding assassin. The rider was "en route" from SHAPE, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, then located in Versailles, to his base, Station F, in Saint-Germain in France. Since Bond is already in Paris, his superior, M, sends him to assist in the investigation in any way he can. Bond disguises himself as a dispatch-rider and follows the same journey to Station F as the previous rider. As expected, the assassin attempts to kill Bond. Bond, however, is ready and kills the assassin. He then uncovers the assassin's hidden base of operations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripley_Under_Water"title="Ripley Under Water">
Tom Ripley spends his days tending his garden and playing the harpsichord at his home near Fontainebleau. An obnoxious American named David Pritchard, motivated by malice rather than any financial interest, threatens to expose Tom's role in the disappearance of Thomas Murchison, an art collector whom Ripley murdered in "Ripley Under Ground" when Murchison threatened to expose Ripley's art forgery scheme.Pritchard initially harasses Ripley by talking about his knowledge of the suspicious death of Dickie Greenleaf, whom Ripley murdered in "The Talented Mr. Ripley". He photographs Tom's house and follows him on a trip to Tangier. While there, Ripley gets into a fight with Pritchard in a bar. Upon returning to France, Pritchard starts dredging local canals for Murchison's corpse. He locates it, dumps the skeleton on Ripley's doorstep, and calls the police. Ripley hides the body from the police and then dumps it in the pond outside the Pritchards' temporary home. The Pritchards hear the splash, come out to investigate, and fall in while trying to hook the body with a garden tool. Unable to swim, they drown in two meters of water. Police investigate but come up empty-handed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_Chimneys"title="The Secret of Chimneys">
When they meet up in Bulawayo, Anthony Cade agrees to take on two jobs for his friend James McGrath. Anthony heads for London to deliver the draft of a memoir to a publisher, and to return letters to the woman who wrote them. In England, politician George Lomax persuades Lord Caterham to host a house party at Chimneys. George's cousin Virginia Revel is invited, as is Hiram Fish, a collector of first edition books, along with the principals in a political scheme to restore the monarchy in Herzoslovakia – while assuring that newly discovered oil there will be handled by a British syndicate.On Cade's first night in London, the letters are stolen from his hotel room by his waiter. The publisher sends Mr Holmes to pick up the memoirs. These were written by the late Count Stylptitch of Herzoslovakia; now that oil has been discovered, the nation is in turmoil between republicans and royalists. On advice, Cade puts a dummy package in the hotel safe. The thief brings one letter to Virginia Revel at her home, as it is her name in the signature of each letter. Unaware she did not write the letters, he wants to blackmail her. On a whim, she pays, and promises more money the next day. When she arrives home the next day, she finds him murdered in her house, and Anthony Cade on her door step. Cade arranges to have the body discovered elsewhere by the police, to avoid a scandal and allow Virginia to proceed to Chimneys.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pelican_Brief"title="The Pelican Brief">
The story begins with the assassinations of two ideologically divergent Supreme Court Justices. Both murders are committed by Khamel, the most wanted hitman in the world. Justice Rosenberg, a liberal, is killed at his home while Justice Jensen, a Republican-appointed swing voter, is killed inside a gay movie theater in Washington, D.C. The circumstances surrounding their deaths, as well as the deaths themselves, shock and confuse a politically divided nation.Darby Shaw, a Tulane University law student, conducts research on Rosenberg and Jensen's records and writes a legal brief speculating they were not killed for political reasons. She shows the brief to Thomas Callahan, her law professor and lover, who in turn shows it to his friend, an FBI lawyer, Gavin Verheek. Soon afterwards, Callahan is killed by a car bomb, while Shaw, who witnesses his death, is contacted at the scene by suspicious people. Afraid that she is the next target, Darby goes on the run. She contacts and agrees to meet Verheek, but Khamel murders Verheek and impersonates him when they meet. He is just about to kill Shaw when he is shot by an unknown person, so she manages to escape again.Gray Grantham, a reporter for "The Washington Post", is contacted by an informant calling himself "Garcia", who believes he has seen something in his law office that is related to the assassinations. However, Garcia is reluctant to come forward. Shaw shows her findings to Grantham, believing that the assassinations were committed on behalf of Victor Mattiece, an oil tycoon who seeks to drill on Louisiana marshland which is home to an endangered species of pelican. A case that would decide whether Mattiece can gain access to the land is expected to be heard before the Supreme Court. Despite their status as ideological opposites, the two slain justices had a single characteristic in common: a history of environmentalism, causing Darby to surmise that Mattiece orchestrated their murders to make sure their replacements would be appointed by the current President, a hardline reactionary. Grantham agrees to help Shaw prove her suspicion is correct.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_of_Null-A"title="The World of Null-A">
Gilbert Gosseyn (pronounced "go sane"), a man living in an apparent utopia where those with superior understanding and mental control rule the rest of humanity, wants to be tested by the giant Machine that determines such superiority. However, he finds that his memories are false. In his search for his real identity, he discovers that he has extra bodies that are activated when he dies (so that, in a sense, he cannot be killed), that a galactic society of humans exists outside the Solar system, a large interstellar empire wishes to conquer both the Earth and Venus (inhabited by masters of non-Aristotelian logic), and he has extra brain matter that, when properly trained, can allow him to move matter with his mind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_Times"title="Interesting Times">
Two gods, Fate and the Lady, oppose each other in a game over the outcome of the struggle for the throne of the Agatean Empire on the Counterweight Continent.The Patrician of Ankh-Morpork receives a demand that the "Great Wizzard" be sent to the distant Agatean Empire, and he orders Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully of Unseen University to comply. As the spelling, "Wizzard," matches that on Rincewind's hat, the faculty decide to send him. Using the machine Hex, which has seemingly been augmenting its own infrastructure, they teleport him to the University from a desert island where he has been living since the events of "Eric". They offer him the right to call himself a Wizard, which he never actually earned, if he will let them send him to Agatea; he agrees. Teleportation requires an exchange of mass, and they end up exchanging him with a very heavy live cannon (which they extinguish upon its arrival); this results in Rincewind arriving in Agatea at a very high speed, but he lands safely in a snowbank.As is typical for Rincewind, his dedicated efforts to run from any kind of danger quickly embroil him in momentous events, and coincidence makes it appear on several occasions that Rincewind is responsible for significant feats of magic. He encounters his friend Cohen the Barbarian, now accompanied by a "Silver Horde" of elderly warriors, who is planning to infiltrate the Empire and live a luxurious retirement by taking over as Emperor. Rincewind eventually learns that the first Agatean Emperor supposedly conquered the land with the assistance of a "Great Wizard" and a "Red Army." Now, a new "Red Army" movement of young people, dedicated mainly to the promulgation of mildly worded slogans, has been inspired by a supposed revolutionary tract, which turns out to be a travelogue of Ankh-Morpork written by Rincewind's erstwhile traveling companion, Twoflower, whom Rincewind ends up freeing from a dungeon and whose two daughters are leaders of the Red Army. It turns out that the villainous Grand Vizier, Lord Hong, has made the harmless Red Army appear to be a threat to the Empire and had Rincewind brought to Agatea so that he could blame the problems on foreigners, then put the "revolution" down violently and turn to the conquest of Ankh-Morpork, whose culture he secretly seeks to emulate. But when Hong murders the Emperor with the intention of framing the Red Army, it inadvertently creates the opportunity needed by the Silver Horde, who have infiltrated the palace. Cohen and Ronald Saveloy, a member of the Horde who is a retired schoolteacher, had hoped to conquer the Empire by simply installing Cohen as Emperor, since almost nobody has ever seen the Emperor's face. But Lord Hong leads four other lords who had been vying against him for the throne to rally their armies against the Horde, to the chagrin of Saveloy who had been trying to civilize the barbarians.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Lives_with_Eric_and_Martin"title="Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin">
The story describes a few days in the life of a five-year-old named Jenny, her father, Martin, and his boyfriend Eric who lives with them. Jenny's mother Karen lives nearby and often visits the household.The book covers such small adventures as
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragon_Reborn"title="The Dragon Reborn">
## From the Mountains of Mist to Tear.Rand al'Thor, having been declared the Dragon Reborn by Moiraine Damodred, secretly goes to Tear to prove himself. Along the way he is hunted by Darkhounds and Darkfriends. After leaving in secret, Moiraine, Lan Mandragoran, the Ogier Loial, and Perrin Aybara follow always one step behind. Rand leaves in his trail a pattern of weddings and strange events. Perrin comes across an Aiel warrior that was captured and in a cage. He frees him, earning a friendship with Gaul, a Stone Dog, who will accompany Perrin on his travels. This event is witnessed by a hunter of the horn, Zarine Bashere (alias Faile), who joins the party as well.Min reports to the Amyrlin Seat, while Moiraine, Lan, Loial, Zarine and Perrin follow Rand. En route they battle Darkhounds, and discover that the Forsaken Sammael rules in Illian.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fires_of_Heaven"title="The Fires of Heaven">
In Rhuidean, worried by news that Aiel from other clans join the cause of his enemy Couladin, Rand al’Thor confers with the Clan Chiefs who have recognised him as the Car’a’carn – Chief of Chiefs – on how to win over the four remaining Clans. Darkhounds attack and he kills them with balefire, a powerful weave that burns a person's thread backwards through the Pattern, undoing his past actions for a short time prior to being consumed by balefire. Egwene al'Vere continues to chafe under the instruction of Aiel Wise Ones, eager to learn faster than they think is wise, and Moiraine Damodred grows increasingly desperate to find her way into Rand’s circle of trust.In Tanchico, Nynaeve and Elayne set out for the White Tower -- only to receive news that it has suffered a schism. Elaida, a Red sister and former advisor to Queen Morgase Trakand, has deposed and replaced the Former Amyrlin Seat and ally Siuan Sanche.Unwilling to accept an outsider as their prophesied hero, the Shaido and their allies follow Couladin across the Dragonwall to conquer the “treekillers” and wetlanders. Rand leads the seven Aiel Clans who have recognised him in pursuit and is followed in turn by the four of the undecided Aiel Clans. Along the way they are ambushed by Darkfriends and Shadowspawn but arrive in time to save the city of Cairhien and defeat the Shaido, in part thanks to the memories of long dead generals the Eelfinn have placed in Matrim Cauthon’s mind. Couladin is killed in single combat by Mat, while Rand is attacked from afar by either Rahvin or Sammael during the course of the battle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_Rising"title="The Shadow Rising">
Rand al'Thor has just claimed the crystal sword "Callandor" to prove himself the Dragon Reborn. He is approached by Lanfear, who tells him of the Forsaken's plans. However, the fortress known as the Stone of Tear is stormed by Trollocs and Fades, sent by another Forsaken (Sammael), while a third, Semirhage, sends her followers into the Stone, to oppose Sammael's forces. In defense, Rand uses "Callandor" to create a lightning storm killing all the Trollocs and Fades.Rand then decides that he must travel to the Aiel Waste, to be acknowledged as the Aiel's prophesied leader. Before leaving, Rand, Mat Cauthon, and Moiraine Damodred visit a "ter'angreal" that lets them talk to a mysterious snakelike race called the Aelfinn, who seemingly know the answer to any question. Mat learns from them that he must go to Rhuidean or die and also that he is destined to marry someone called "the Daughter of the Nine Moons". Egwene al'Vere and the Aiel Aviendha are also summoned to the Aiel Waste, Egwene to learn Dreamwalking and Aviendha to become a Wise One. Thus, Rand, Mat, Moiraine, Egwene, and Aviendha all travel to the Aiel Waste.Other characters in the Stone of Tear also learn that they must travel elsewhere. Perrin Aybara hears of trouble in The Two Rivers, his native region, and returns thereto, accompanied by Faile Bashere and Loial. Elayne Trakand, Nynaeve al'Meara, and Thom Merrilin depart to Tarabon to hunt the Black Ajah. Finally, Min Farshaw arrives in Tar Valon to report to the Amyrlin Siuan Sanche. Thus, "The Shadow Rising" follows four groups of characters in four plotlines.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1876_(novel)"title="1876 (novel)">
The novel follows Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler who has recently returned to the United States after more than 30 years in Europe, where he married into minor Napoleonic nobility; he is accompanied by his beautiful, young, widowed daughter Emma, the Princesse d'Agrigente. She immediately becomes the darling of New York high society. Despite his fame and affluent image, Schuyler finds work as a journalist because his wealth has been destroyed by the Panic of 1873 and his daughter's late husband has left her penniless. Schuyler also supports the Democratic candidate, Samuel J. Tilden, Governor of New York, because he hopes to secure himself a diplomatic position with the incoming administration, enabling him to return to Europe.The early chapters detail the Schuylers' introduction into New York society and the engagement between Emma and John Day Apgar, a wealthy but rather dull young lawyer and scion of a leading New York family. The later chapters chronicle Schuyler's sojourn in Washington, D.C., and Emma's growing friendship with the wealthy Denise Sanford and her boorish husband William. Emma and Denise become close friends, but after Denise dies in childbirth, Emma breaks off her engagement to Apgar and marries Sanford instead.The political backdrop to the story is the 1876 presidential election, a close contest between Tilden and the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. Tilden won the popular vote, but there was a dispute over the results in Louisiana, Oregon, South Carolina, and Florida. In Florida, the Republican leaders of the State and the Electoral Commission initially reported a victory for Tilden, before deciding that in fact Hayes had won. Vidal builds up to this historic crisis through the activities of a mixed cast of historical and fictional characters, some of the latter having appeared in "Burr" or having descended from characters in that novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seeds_of_Death"title="The Seeds of Death">
At the end of the twenty-first century, a teleportation technology called "T-Mat" has replaced all traditional forms of transport, allowing people and objects to travel instantly anywhere on Earth. Manned space exploration has ceased. The Doctor, Jamie McCrimmon and Zoe Herriot arrive in a museum on Earth run by Professor Daniel Eldred dedicated to the obsolete technology of rockets. However, something goes amiss at the T-Mat vital relay station on the Moon and the system breaks down. With communications out, and no way to reach the Moon without T-Mat, those responsible for the system, Commander Radnor and his assistant Gia Kelly, turn to Professor Eldred to help. He has been privately building a rocket in hopes of re-igniting interest in space travel. The Doctor and his companions volunteer to crew the rocket. The Doctor also comments that the TARDIS is not suitable for short range use after Zoe informs Jamie that the TARDIS would most likely overshoot by a couple of million years.The relay station on the Moon has been invaded by Ice Warriors, a militant Martian race, who plan to use it as a staging point for an invasion of Earth. The technicians attempt to fight the invaders but several are killed, while Phipps goes into hiding and Fewsham is pressed into assisting the invaders. Fewsham repairs the T-Mat link on receive mode and Miss Kelly beams through to start repairing the T-Mat system.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaper_Man"title="Reaper Man">
The Auditors of Reality watch the Discworld to ensure everything obeys The Rules. As Death starts developing a personality the Auditors feel that he does not perform his Duty in the right way. They send him to live like everyone else. Travelling to the Octarine Grass Country, he assumes the name "Bill Door" and he works as a farm hand for the elderly Miss Flitworth. She is a spinster whose fiancé, Rufus, died on a last smuggling expedition many years ago. There are rumours that he had had second thoughts about their marriage but she does not believe them.While every other species creates a new Death for themselves, humans need more time for their Death to be completed. As a result, the life force of dead humans starts to build up; this results in poltergeist activity, ghosts, and other paranormal phenomena. Most notable is the return of the recently deceased wizard Windle Poons, who was really looking forward to reincarnation. After several misadventures, including being accosted by his oldest friends, he finds himself attending the Fresh Start club, an undead-rights group led by Reg Shoe. The Fresh Start club and the wizards of Unseen University discover that the city of Ankh-Morpork is being invaded by a parasitic lifeform that feeds on cities and hatches from eggs that resemble snow globes. Tracking its middle form, shopping trolleys, the Fresh Start club and the wizards invade and destroy the third form, a shopping mall.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_at_Arms"title="Men at Arms">
Edward d'Eath, an Assassin and son of a down-and-out noble family, becomes convinced that the restoration of the Ankh-Morpork monarchy will solve the social change in the city which he blames for his family's humbling. He researches the history of the royal family and determines that Carrot Ironfoundersson is in fact the rightful heir to the throne.Meanwhile, Captain Samuel Vimes, captain of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, prepares for his imminent wedding to Sybil Ramkin, the richest woman in Ankh-Morpork. He also must deal with a new group of recruits that he has been required to take on for the sake of diversity: Cuddy (a dwarf), Detritus (a troll), and Angua (a werewolf—but Carrot is unaware of this, and believes she is included because she is female). When a string of seemingly random murders occur among the Guilds of the city, Lord Vetinari forbids Vimes to investigate in a successful ploy to ensure Vimes does investigate. Cuddy and Detritus are forced to work together, resulting in them becoming friends as they overcome their deep-seated racial enmity. Angua works with the talking dog Gaspode, and also forms a romantic connection with Carrot, who loses his virginity to her but handles the discovery that she is a werewolf poorly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogfather"title="Hogfather">
The Auditors of Reality, a group of "celestial bureaucrats" attempt to eliminate the Hogfather, a jolly god-like creature who brings children presents on December 32nd, similar to the figures of Santa Claus and Father Christmas in the US and UK. Forbidden to interfere directly by "The Rules", they pay the Assassin's Guild to kill the Hogfather instead. The task is given to Mr. Teatime who has a reputation for ruthlessness and creative solutions. Mr. Teatime enlists the help of some gangsters to find a delivery person working for the Tooth Fairy, using his magic to break into her kingdom and stealing all the collected teeth. With these teeth, he is able to control all the children on the Discworld, commanding them to no longer believe in the Hogfather.Knowing that the Hogfather is also responsible for the sun rising, Death attempts to maintain belief by dressing up as the Hogfather and fulfilling his role, aided by his servant Albert. Due to Death's simplistic understanding of the meaning of Hogswatch, he commits several acts supposedly to aid restoring belief in the Hogfather but which Albert believes are unacceptable, including granting more life to a deceased matchgirl and stealing food from a luxury restaurant to give to the Canting Crew (whilst replacing said restaurant's stock with mud and old boots). Since he is unable himself to defeat Mr. Teatime, who is in a realm created by children's belief where death (and thus Death) does not exist, he appears at his granddaughter's place of work dressed as the Hogfather. As he had planned, Susan Sto Helit is unable to resist her curiosity and tries to find the Hogfather. She visits the Hogfather's Castle of Bones, only to find the hung-over Bilious, the "Oh God" of Hangovers. In an attempt to cure Bilious from his hangovers, Susan visits the Unseen University, where it is discovered that several small gods and beings (including Bilious, a Verruca Gnome, a Hair Loss Fairy, an Eater of Pencils, and Eater of Socks, Towel Wasps, and a Cheerful Fairy) are being created due to an abundance of excess belief in the world caused by the Hogfather's disappearance.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thief_of_Time"title="Thief of Time">
The Auditors hire young clockmaker Jeremy Clockson to build a perfect glass clock, without telling him that this will stop time and thereby eliminate human unpredictability from the universe. Death discovers their plans, but cannot act against them directly, so he instead sends his granddaughter Susan Sto Helit. Meanwhile, Lu-Tze of the History Monks leads gifted young apprentice Lobsang Ludd in a desperate mission.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Mr._Griffin"title="Killing Mr. Griffin">
Brian Griffin is a strict high-school English teacher at Del Norte High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who never accepts late homework and is demanding of his students. When Mark Kinney, one of the students in his class, plagiarizes a paper, Mr. Griffin makes him beg to be allowed back into the class. Instead of allowing him back in, though, Mr. Griffin decides to make him repeat the class next semester. Fellow students in the class he is repeating include David Ruggles, Jeff Garrett, and Betsy Cline. Susan McConell is an A+ student on average, but is constantly receiving below-average B's in his class. Mark suggests kidnapping Mr. Griffin, and convinces David, Jeff, and Betsy to join in on the plan as a way of scaring him and getting revenge because they feel he has treated them poorly.The group decides to use Susan, who is least willing to participate in the plot, to distract Mr. Griffin by requesting a conference with him after school. Since Susan is one of his better-performing students with a serious approach to her studies, Mr. Griffin willingly does so, allowing her to walk him to his car afterwards. Jeff, David, and Mark forcibly place a bag over Mr. Griffin's head and tie him up, replacing the bag with a blindfold as they take him to a remote spot in the mountains. Betsy, due to a speeding ticket, arrives in the parking lot after the boys have left with Mr. Griffin. Susan was supposed to ride with Betsy, but does not want any further part in the scheme, and Betsy leaves without her. Mark tells Mr. Griffin to beg, but he refuses, so the students decide to leave him alone there until midnight.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Witch_(novel)"title="Water Witch (novel)">
On the desert planet of Mahali, political power is held by a hereditary line of water witches who can sense and control water. A young con artist girl named Deza tries to impersonate a water witch, helped by the spirit of her recently dead conman father, who now resides in a small animal called a mbuzi.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Tide_of_Years"title="Against the Tide of Years">
In the "Island in the Sea of Time", the island of Nantucket in Massachusetts is transported by an unknown phenomenon (called "The Event" in the series) on March 17, 1998 at 9:15 P.M. EST back in time to the Bronze Age circa 1250s BC (corresponding to the late Heroic Age of the Trojan War). "Against the Tide of Years" is set from 8 to 10 years afterward.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Oceans_of_Eternity"title="On the Oceans of Eternity">
In the first novel "Island in the Sea of Time", the island of Nantucket in Massachusetts is transported by an unknown phenomenon (called "The Event" in the series) back in time on March 17, 1998 at 9:15 pm EST to the Bronze Age "circa" 1250s BC (corresponding to the late Heroic Age of the Trojan War).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Luxe"title="The Luxe">
Elizabeth Holland and her best friend Penelope Hayes rule Manhattan's social scene. But when Elizabeth learns her family's status is far from secure, suddenly everyone is a threat to a golden future. Elizabeth is forced into an engagement to Henry Shoonmaker, a man she barely knows, with a terrible reputation as a ladies man, who happens to be the person Penelope is in love with.To complicate matters Elizabeth's headstrong little sister Diana also falls head over heels in love with Henry, who develops feelings for her as well. Meanwhile Elizabeth is secretly in love with her childhood friend Will, her family's coachman... but so is Elizabeth's maid Lina who will do anything to win Will's love. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Place_(novel)"title="The Other Place (novel)">
16-year-old Alison Fairweather and her family are living in a not-so-distant future when they are taken from their homes and forced to stay in a penal colony, Habitat W, for five years because of a crime against WOGPO, the World Government. Within a month, Gordie Fairweather, Alison's 8-year-old brother, starts having dreams about "Xanadu", a paradise he believes existed behind the walls of their prison. Gordie succeeds in finding Xanadu, and Alison follows him.In Xanadu, Gordie and Alison meet Jay, the supposed leader of Xanadu. Alison finds that all of Xanadu's inhabitants, besides Jay, are young children. At first, the children do not approve of Alison because of her age, but they become familiar with Alison, and accept her.One day, when Alison and the children are eating dinner, Alison catches sight of a wild-looking young woman her age. She discovers that the woman is Kristin, her long-lost friend, who was among the inhabitants of the Habitats. Kristin was not accepted as part of the "Xanadu Family", and has been living in Xanadu, but as an outcast. Kristin does not like Jay, so she and Alison try to follow Jay into his underground home, which he stays in at night.Kristin and Alison find that Jay was the one calling the children to go to Xanadu, and for each child he named the paradise differently. They also find out that Jay was the one who had the idea of Xanadu, which was originally the "Botany Bay Project". Jay catches Kristin and Alison, but still lets them stay in Xanadu, both as regular inhabitants.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoul_(novel)"title="Ghoul (novel)">
The novel follows Timmy, Barry, and Doug, three friends looking forward to summer vacation. They initially spend their time playing in the cemetery where Barry's father Clark works as a caretaker, unaware that it houses a ghoul. Clark has been hiding the ghoul's murders and even kidnaps a woman to serve as its sexual partner. As the murders and disappearances continue the town grows suspicious, particularly after some local boys go missing. The boys investigate the events and grow suspicious of Clark. Barry and Doug also bond over revelations that each is being abused by a parent; Doug experiencing sexual abuse from his mother while Barry is physically abused by Clark. While trying to escape his mother's abuse by going to a friend's house, Doug discovers Clark with the ghoul. He is then kidnapped and taken to the ghoul's underground lair. Barry and Timmy stage a rescue attempt that ends with the gruesome discovery that the ghoul has killed Doug. They also find the kidnapped woman, who they free. In the ensuing struggle Clark is crushed by dirt falling from a backhoe and the ghoul melts in the sunlight due to it pursuing the fleeing woman and Barry. In the epilogue, occurring twenty years later, Timmy's father is being buried in the cemetery and Barry is the caretaker. Barry's son has bruises consistent with abuse, and Timmy realizes the ghoul was not the only monster in the cemetery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Rabbit_Belongs_to_Emily_Brown"title="That Rabbit Belongs to Emily Brown">
Emily Brown has a floppy gray stuffed rabbit, Stanley, that she loves very much. They go on adventures every day, such as scuba diving, going to outer space, and other things like that. They have much fun together, until one day, they hear a "Rat-a-tat-tat at the kitchen door". It is the Queen's Footman, who wants to have Stanley (whom he calls Bunnywunny) for the Queen in exchange for a brand-new golden bear. Emily says no, but the Queen keeps sending more of her officers to offer her more and more toys, but since Emily keeps refusing, they steal Stanley from her in her sleep. The next morning, Emily marches up to the castle, where she finds out the Queen put him in the laundry and turned him pink, and also he has been filled with stuffing and had his mouth sewn up so he looks miserable. Emily takes the rabbit and goes home, but before that she gives the golden teddy bear to the sad Queen and tells her to do everything with that bear, to go on adventures and sleep with him at night, until he becomes real. A while later, Emily gets a letter from the Queen that says "Thank you" and has a picture of the Queen holding her smiling bear. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Pepper"title="Hugo Pepper">
This story is set in the same world as "Fergus Crane" and "Corby Flood". It stars Hugo Pepper, a young boy who was raised by reindeer herders after his parents were eaten by polar bears. When Hugo discovers that his parents' sled has a very special compass which can be set to 'Home', he sets off to find where his true home is. As he does this, he unravels the mystery of "The Firefly Quarterly"'s Institute disaster and the treasure of his great-great-grandmother, Brimstone Kate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corby_Flood"title="Corby Flood">
Corby Flood is an average girl in an average family. They are on board the SS "Euphonia", a giant cruise ship that used to be "the Empress of the Seas" but has since been reduced to a cargo ship with some passengers. The people aboard include her family, the captain, Lieutenant Letchworth-Crisp, a third engineer, Mr. and Mrs. Hattenswiller, The Man from Cabin 21, and the mysterious Brotherhood of Clowns. The Floods are traveling to Harbor Heights to start a new school for the children and, for Mr. Flood, a job designing umbrellas, as he was an engineer but had a "great disappointment" when a bridge he built collapsed. Corby must handle the annoying, smarmy Lieutenant who is overly interested in her older sister, cope with the antics of her four older brothers, and figure out the connection between the Brotherhood of Clowns and a sad, mournful tune – and she must make it back to the ship after getting shipped to a strange and foreign place wearing a bumblebee costume.Also some (if not all) the characters names are taken from names of fonts such as Garamond, Franklin Gothic, Times Roman and Palatino. Most font names were notably among the Brotherhood of clowns.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fergus_Crane"title="Fergus Crane">
Fergus Crane is a young boy, who lives in the Archduke Ferdinand Apartments with his Mother Lucia. A mysterious little flying box arrives at his house three different times which has letters in it from his 'long lost uncle Theo', warning him that he is great danger and is sending help. After this, a flying horse arrives at his window and takes him to a magnificent mountain chalet, where his adventures begin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Coriander"title="I, Coriander">
The novel tells the story of a seventeenth-century girl named Coriander. Coriander Hobie is born the daughter of a wealthy merchant living on the Thames a few years before the English Civil War. The Novel is told in her voice of what she remembers of her early childhood. She pays little attention to the political intrigue around her, only to her mother's special medicines she gives to the neighbours, and to the fairy stories her mother tells her in her room full of murals of golden creatures. She is happy until she receives a present of silver shoes which her mother forbids her to wear and stores above a wardrobe with a stuffed alligator which scares Coriander into leaving it alone for sometime. True to any mischievous child's antics, Coriander slips on the pair of silver shoes. The first time she wears them she experiences hallucinations and disappears on a bridge with the family servant only to reappear shaken minutes later. Her mother insists that the shoes be put out of her reach, though Coriander begs for them back. On Coriander's ninth birthday her mother gives in and lets Coriander have the shoes. Shortly after, an evil raven flies into their house and though Coriander does not understand why, shortly thereafter her mother dies. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spilled_Water"title="Spilled Water">
The story is told in three parts : early childhood, life as a domestic servant and life working in a factory. It is told through the eyes of Lu Si-Yan, an eleven-year-old girl.Her early childhood is described as a rural idyll. She has a doting father who makes a living growing vegetables on a very small strip of land. A baby brother is born, whom Si-yan loves. But then her father is killed in a road accident and Si-yan's mother, overwhelmed by grief, cannot keep the family going when faced with one disaster after another. Disapproving Uncle Ba takes Lu Si-yan to market to sell her, calling her "Spilled Water" : a waste because she is not a boy.She joins the Chen household as an unpaid domestic servant. She is well fed and well clothed but worked very hard and is constantly criticised by Mrs Chen. The only positive things are, Xiong Fei, a student employed as a cook, who is a fun loving young man; and Mr Chen's wheelchair bound mother Mrs Hong. Lu Si-Yan is frightened by the Chen's son Yi-mou, whom she is told she must marry. He acts strangely because he is brain damaged. Mrs Hong finds out what the Chen's are up to, gives Lu Si-Yan money and helps her to escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Busting"title="Cloud Busting">
Mr Mackie, the teacher, assigns the homework to the class: to write a poem. Sam wants to write his poem about Davey. Alex, his ex-best friend, mocks him for doing so. Sam quotes:"I want to write my poem about Davey.Because now he's goneAnd I can't get him out of my head!"Davey, or 'Fizzy Feet', is a new boy. Everyone hates him. He has holes in his jumper, and strange ideas fill his mind. Sam, the school bully, makes fun of him. He dislikes Davey at least as much as everyone else until Davey saves his life by pulling him from in front of a speeding vehicle. The two soon become friends.Davey's way of looking at life begins to seem fun. Sam learns that Davey has an allergy to dairy, and Davey tells him to keep it a secret to avoid a fuss. In front of the bully, Alex, he accidentally lets it slip. Alex, as a joke, offers Davey a part of his sandwich, with a cheese slipped inside. Davey immediately has an allergic reaction, and Mr Mackie is forced to use the epipen. Davey regains consciousness and is whisked to hospital. Davey begins to avoid Sam after letting his secret slip. He loses his eccentric imagination. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fire-Eaters"title="The Fire-Eaters">
The novel is set in 1962, before and during the Cuban Missile Crisis.Bobby Burns, who lives in the quiet coal-mining village of Keely Bay in Northumberland, has had a wonderful summer. But in autumn his father falls mysteriously ill, and he loathes his new school which is pervaded by bullying. Perhaps worst of all, Bobby is worried there will be a nuclear war.Bobby's wonder-working friend Ailsa Spink and McNulty the crazy fire-eater open Bobby's eyes to the possibility of miracles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Pointe"title="On Pointe">
This story is told in free verse. The novel centers on 16-year-old Clare, who has dreamed of becoming a dancer all her life and has worked hard to achieve her dreams. She hopes to be selected for City Ballet, a program for very skilled dancers, although there are only sixteen positions available. After a growth spurt, she is judged too tall for professional ballet and advised to take a dance class for adult amateurs. It seems her dream is crushed, but when her grandfather has a stroke, losing the ability to talk and move his right side, her perspective alters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Castaways"title="The Last Castaways">
Grandfather and his dog Roo accidentally win their old ship, the "Unsinkable", in an auction and go on a fishing trip. However, the ship sinks and they are cast away on a desert isle. They find some treasure and rescue their ship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Various"title="The Various">
Eleven-year old Margaret Walters, better known as Midge, is sent to stay with her Uncle Brian at Mill Farm in Somerset, England while her mother is on tour with the orchestra. She stumbles across secrets and things that have been kept from her about her childhood, which makes her wonder about where she came from. While exploring, she comes across a small winged horse named Pegs, which is trapped and injured in a barn, which is her first introduction to the hidden world of the "Royal Forest", an impenetrable thicket on a hill within the farm boundaries. Midge manages to rescue Pegs and nurses him back to health. Meanwhile, all the tribes who live in the forest, the Ickri, Naiad, Wisp, Troggles and Tinklers, unite to send a group to search for the missing horse, Pegs. The adventures of the group demonstrate the dangers posed to the Various by the Gorji world, as humans are called by the tribes, and one of them, Lumst, is killed by a ferocious tomcat named Tojo.While Midge is accepted by the ickri Queen Ba-betts and her advisers as the savior of Pegs, despite the news she brings of her uncle's plan to sell the forest land. Meanwhile, an archer captain, Scurl, believes that she is herself a danger to the tribes and intends to kill her. Scurl and his archers, Snerk, Dregg, and Fitch, attack Mill Farm when Midge and her cousins, Katie and George, are home alone. Maglin, an ickri steward serving under Ba-Betts, finds out of Scurl's scheme and banishes him and the other archers from the royal forest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fangland"title="Fangland">
The story begins with Evangeline Harker, an associate producer of the television news program, "The Hour", and the daughter of a rich Texan magnate. Harker is tasked with investigating the notorious Eastern European crime lord Ion Torgu in Romania, to see if there is a story for "The Hour" there. She reluctantly accepts and travels to Transylvania where she meets Clementine Spence, a fellow American who tries to warn her about things beyond natural comprehension.After meeting with Torgu, Evangeline is convinced to accompany him to a remote hotel. While Evangeline encounters horrors at the hotel, she goes missing in the eyes of the world. Meanwhile, mysterious tapes are delivered to the offices of "The Hours", infecting the entire audio system with a strange noise.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_in_the_Land_of_Wonders"title="Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders">
Professor Bumper, introduced in the previous volume, is on the trail of another lost city, this time the lost city of Kurzon, somewhere deep in Honduras. The Professor has come into some documents which he thinks will help him locate the city, and the documents make mention of a huge idol made of solid gold. Professor Bumper would very much like Tom Swift to accompany the expedition.As circumstances would have it, Professor Bumpers rival, in the form of Professor Fenimore Beecher, is also on the trail of Kurzon. Unfortunately for Tom Swift, Professor Beecher is also trying to win the heart of Mary Nestor, Tom Swift's sweetheart! Envy, rather than fame or fortune, drive Tom to finally accompany the expedition to Honduras, as Tom hopes to prevent Professor Beecher from discovering the idol and presenting some of the gold to Mary Nestor as a betrothal gift.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ombria_in_Shadow"title="Ombria in Shadow">
In the beginning of "Ombria in Shadow", Royce Greve, ruler of Ombria, has just died and his mistress Lydea is being thrown out of the castle by the ancient, evil, and powerful Domina Pearl who wishes to gain control over the court by acting as regent for Royce's young son Kyel. Lydea flees through the dangerous night-time streets and eventually, with some aid from a mysterious source, reaches the tavern of her father. Meanwhile, beneath Ombria, Faey, a sorceress who can wear any face she likes, and her assistant Mag, who helped Lydea survive her flight from the castle, work on magical potions and charms for the wealthy of the city, including Domina Pearl.In the castle Ducon Greve, Royce's bastard nephew, tries to support Kyel against the machinations of Domina Pearl in an increasingly paranoid climate. Various nobles, unhappy with Domina's ruthless rule, attempt to convince him to work against her and set himself up as the new prince of Ombria. Unwilling to go down such a dangerous route and concerned that it could have dire consequences for Kyel, Ducon manages to foist them off, escaping through the vast network of secret passageways and rooms that permeate the castle.Faey is hired by one of Ducon's enemies to kill him; she makes a magical piece of charcoal that is imbued with poison. Mag, who has been observing Ducon, does not want him to die and searches for a way to undo the spell. However, she becomes trapped in the castle, eventually freed by the historian Camas Erl on the promise that she will bring him to meet Faey, who has been alive for ages, and whose history is entwined with the city's.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempted_(von_Ziegesar_novel)"title="Tempted (von Ziegesar novel)">
After two weeks of being back at Waverly for almost being expelled, Jenny Humphrey has now become the new it girl (first it was Tinsley Carmichael). At the upcoming Halloween masquerade Jenny decides to dress up as Cleopatra and beats Tinsley for the best costume award. Meanwhile, Callie attempts to win back Easy in a Cinderella costume with a secret proving that she's a good person. But it backfires when Callie's costume reminds Easy of the snobby princess she is. After Easy tells her off, Callie runs away to a "health spa" set up by her mom. During the masquerade, Brett and Jeremiah reunite after Brett lies to him about Kara, her very "friendly" friend. After the masquerade, Easy climbs and accidentally collapses an oak tree, leaving first floor Dumbarton residents (like Kara) homeless. Tinsley, being the "angel" that she is, gives Kara a home, creating a very awkward rift with Brett in the room.Meanwhile, Callie finds out that the supposed health spa her mother set up for her is actually some kind of rehab-work camp. Luckily, through group confessions, she learned to get over, and let go of Easy. Easy, in an attempt to get over Callie and be able to stay in Waverly, searches for an extracurricular activity, but instead finds himself in Heath's club, Men of Waverly. While Callie's away, Jenny will play, with Drew that is, her supposed savior who paid for her re-admittance by paying off the owner of the burned barn. While going through Callie's things, Jenny finds out that it was "Callie" who paid for the burned barn fiasco. Once Jenny realizes it was Callie who saved her, she sees that Callie is a good friend after all. She leaves Drew and hides trying to stay away from her room. Meanwhile, Tinsley has just gotten an email from Callie telling Tinsley where she is and that she needs help. Tinsley, feeling lonely and desperate now that she's a nobody, decides she needs to go rescue Callie but she can't do it alone. On her way out she bumps into Jenny and they formulate a plan putting their differences aside to help Callie. By getting Sebastian's car, Drew's roommate and also the guy Brett is supposed to tutor, Tinsley and Jenny head off to Maine. Heath and Kara have broken up when he told everyone about Brandon's baby blanket because Kara feels that he is insensitive and said it reminded her that he used to tease her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Precipice_(Bova_novel)"title="The Precipice (Bova novel)">
The greenhouse effect is threatening the earth. Two rival industrialists, Dan Randolph and Martin Humphries believe that the key to earth's survival is to mine the asteroid belt and move earth's heavy industry to space.Millionaire Dan Randolf is going bankrupt, since his aerospace company, Astro Corp, is out of work due to the "greenhouse cliff" putting Earth at a higher priority than space. Cold-hearted multi-billionaire Martin Humphries shows Randolph a fully laid-out plan to reach the Asteroid Belt and mine it for its abundant metals. Randolph immediately takes up the idea, putting his entire life savings into the plan. Humphries donates much of the funds from his own pocket, planning to use that leverage later, after Randolph has put in all of his own work, to destroy Randolph, take over Astro Corp, and have a monopoly on all metals arriving from the Asteroids Belt.While Dan Randolph wants to distribute the Asteroids' resources fairly at a very modest price to aid in the restoration of Earth's climate system, Martin Humphries intends to take over the company and use the monopoly to his own financial gain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_of_Sleep"title="Fields of Sleep">
The novel concerns English adventurer Victor Marshall who is hired to find a fellow Englishman who is lost in Asiatic Sapelung. Marshall discovers a hidden valley and is imprisoned by its inhabitants who are descended from ancient Chaldean colonists. The inhabitants are dependent on a narcotic flower whose fragrance produces ecstasy. Marshall finds his countryman living among the inhabitants. After a flood, the flowers are destroyed and without it, the inhabitants including Marshall's countryman perish. Not dependent on the flower, Marshall survives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lotus_Caves"title="The Lotus Caves">
Two teenage boys, Marty and Steve, live in a colony on the Moon, "The Bubble", in the year 2068. Exploring outside the dome of "The Bubble" is strictly controlled. The boys grow bored and decide to borrow a lunar vehicle. They discover someone has forgot to remove their key, which makes it possible for them to explore beyond proscribed boundaries without restriction. They go on a journey to an old and abandoned base, where they find the diary of Andrew Thurgood, a missing early lunar settler. The diary contains coordinates to a place Thurgood claimed he saw something that looked like a huge flower, and the boys decide to go there and do some investigating themselves. They crash through the Moon's surface into a series of caverns containing fluorescent plants, many of them able to move, which is a part of and controlled by a single intelligent alien life form. They also meet a man, the missing settler from 70 years earlier, who has become enthralled by the alien. He does not seem to have aged during all those years. The boys are torn between staying in the caves, within which the alien provides an idyllic life fulfilling all their needs, and escaping. The longer they stay, the more their minds are affected. They eventually escape, but the man decides to stay, having lost any desires beyond worshipping the alien.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Pesky_Rat"title="That Pesky Rat">
The story is narrated by a rat who wishes he could live the life of a proper pet. He visits several friends who are proper pets, including a chinchilla and a cat. However, he doesn't like the way any of them live. In the end, he puts up signs, asking if there is any one who wants a rat as a pet, and goes to a pet store. He is finally taken home from the store by an old man with poor eyesight who sees him in the display window and mistakes him for a cat. In the end, the rat says that he doesn't mind pretending to be a cat and that he likes his life as a pet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Wolf"title="The Last Wolf">
Miya helps her grandfather, Michael McLeod, become interested in computers. Michael comes up with the idea to trace their ancestors back to the 18th century; while working to do that, they discover a story written by their great-great-great-great-great grandfather.In the story, their great-great-great-great-great grandfather, Robbie McLeod, talks about his childhood. After being orphaned, his cruel uncle had looked after him; to escape the abuse, Robbie ran away into the woods. He found a male wolf pup who, similarly, had also been orphaned, and looked after him, naming it Charlie. A few days later, Robbie and Charlie made their way to America in hopes of a better life, but they were disillusioned; in America, there had been a war between the redcoats and the rebels. They encountered life-threatening situations.As the years passed, Charlie's temperament naturally became wilder and more animalistic. Robbie noticed the change in Charlie and, reluctantly, let him go. He built a farm next to a lake where he occasionally saw Charlie. A couple years later, Robbie got married and had a son named Alan. The last time Robbie saw Charlie, Charlie had also started a family of his own.After reading the story, Miya and her grandfather decide to travel to America to see where Robbie and Charlie lived.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operación_Masacre"title="Operación Masacre">
The book details the José León Suárez massacre, which involved the June 9, 1956 unlawful capture and shooting by the Buenos Aires Province Police of a group of civilians suspected of being involved with a Peronist uprising that same night, including the rebel leader, General Juan José Valle. Walsh claims that the men were arrested before the establishment in that very same night of the martial law and that they also were never properly charged, therefore they were unlawfully shot. These events followed a 1955 military coup, known as Revolución Libertadora ("the Liberating Revolution"), which deposed Argentine president Juan Domingo Perón and eventually brought the right-wing dictatorship to power, led first by Lieutenant General Eduardo Lonardi – who was considered too "lenient" (with Peronism) by the leaders of the coup and quickly deposed – and later by the hard-line General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_of_the_Humpback_Whale_(novel)"title="Songs of the Humpback Whale (novel)">
Jane Jones, a speech pathologist, has been married to Oliver Jones for almost twenty years. Together, they have a teenage daughter named Rebecca. Oliver is a world-renowned marine biologist. However, Oliver has a history of behaving emotionally abusive and emotionally unavailable. After a heated argument that culminated in Jane slapping Oliver, Jane calls her brother Joley, who is living and working on an apple orchard in Massachusetts. Through a series of letters awaiting the mother-daughter duo at designated post offices, Joley guides Jane and Rebecca across the country until they are reunited, while Oliver begins to obsessively track them down.The orchard is owned by Sam, who employs and lodges his friend, Hadley, as well as Jane's brother, Joley. Soon into her stay at the orchard, Jane and Sam begin an affair, and a relationship develops between Rebecca and Hadley. This is controversial, as Hadley is 25 and Rebecca is 15, while Jane is 35 and Sam is 25. Jane is worried about her daughter, and is able to persuade Sam to chase Hadley away. Sam agrees to do so reluctantly.Eventually, Oliver is able to track Jane and Rebecca to the apple orchard. Oliver arrives with the intention of bringing the women back to San Diego. However, Rebecca, afraid of being separated from Hadley, runs away to his mother's house, where he resides. The pair are discovered one morning atop a mountain by Oliver, along with Sam, and a park ranger. Hadley, startled and attempting to run falls from the mountain to his death. Sick with pneumonia from spending the night outside, Rebecca has no choice but to return to the orchard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potshot_(novel)"title="Potshot (novel)">
Spenser is approached by a beautiful blonde widow who wants him to find the identity of the murderer of her late husband. He agrees, but this case will take him away from Boston to Arizona and the resort town of Potshot. Questioning all of the victim's acquaintances yields little information. However, the couple had just recently moved from Los Angeles, so Spenser heads there to talk to their old neighbors. His visit there is very fruitful, but raises as many questions as it answers.Returning to Potshot, Spenser follows-up on what he found out from old neighbors in LA. Meanwhile, he is investigating a band of thugs that live on the outskirts of town in an area called "The Dell". Everyone is convinced that they killed the victim, and had publicly threatened him."The Dell" gang is led by a man who calls himself The Preacher. He organized the gang from a ragtag group of drunks and junkies. Now, with leadership, they are bullying the townspeople and extorting protection money from local businesses. After a public confrontation with the gang, the town's leaders ask Spenser if he can rid the town of the menace.They agree to pay a healthy sum for the service, so Spenser forms a small private band of mercenaries composed of several associates, most of them criminals or people with criminal backgrounds. But he hires them for their shooting skills, which will be needed for the coming battle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durandal_(novel)"title="Durandal (novel)">
The tale of two Crusaders, betrayed by the scheming Christian Emperor Theodore and pursued by Muslim swordsmen, who discover the sword of Roland.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Tarzan"title="The Adventures of Tarzan">
Tarzan rescues Jane from Arab slave-traders after they have been marooned in Africa. They return to the cabin where his parents lived before their death. Jane is captured by Queen La of Opar, taken to that hidden city, and is to be made a sacrifice. Tarzan rescues her and they escape. Nikolas Rokoff and William Cecil Clayton, the usurper to Tarzan's title of Lord Greystoke, learn that Jane has a map to the city (which contains fabulous riches in exotic jewels), tattooed onto her back. They kidnap her and attempt to loot the city. Tarzan braves many perils, finally rescues Jane, defeats the villains and escapes La's amorous clutches.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loving_Spirit"title="The Loving Spirit">
The novel tells the story of the Coombe family over four generations starting with Janet Coombe, Joseph Coombe, Christopher Coombe and Jennifer Coombe.The book is based on real events and places, but names are changed and Plyn is an amalgam of Fowey and Polruan and the Slade family name becomes Coombe.The novel introduces Janet as a young woman who marries Thomas Coombe a ship builder in Plyn. They have several children and the boys follow their father into the family business with the exception of Philip who becomes a clerk at the local shipping office and Joseph, who like Janet, longs to go to sea. Philip features in all chapters of the book and is portrayed as a dark force, withdrawn and distant from the rest of the family.Fowey was a busy port at this time and Joseph serves his time on board a sea trading vessel. In time Joseph earns his master certificate and the family agree to build their own ship and name it the “Janet Coombe” which Joseph then captains. Tragedy strikes when Janet, who has a weak heart, passes away on the day of the ship launch.The book transitions to Joseph, who spends most of his time at sea, and later, marries Susan Collins. His ambition for his youngest son, Christopher, is for him to follow in his footsteps. These plans are thwarted when Christopher declares his hatred of the sea and a rift between father and son ensues. Christopher later abandons the Janet Coombe while it was offloading in London and Joseph, distraught by this news, refuses to have anything more to do with Christopher. A rivalry with his brother Philip is fuelled by their courting of the same girl following the death of Joseph’s wife Susan. Joseph wins the girl's hand, but gradually, as failing sight prevents him from going to sea, he broods, becomes mentally unstable and his young wife dies in childbirth. He hears his dead mother Janet calling him and they meet at the castle ruin on the cliff, when he returns his brother Philip has him committed to an asylum.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-Six_(novel)"title="Twenty-Six (novel)">
Set in the fictional town of Albion Mines, Nova Scotia, the novel takes place against the backdrop of a coal mine explosion that kills twenty-six miners, loosely based on the real-life Westray Mine explosion of 1992. Like the real-life incident, the novel's "Eastyard" mine disaster has themes of government corruption and the greed of the mine operator.The story primarily revolves around the family of Ennis Burrows, a former union organizer, and his sons, Ziv - a college drop-out now working at the local Zellers - and Arvel, a miner who has followed in his father's footsteps. Their stories and those of other supporting characters unfold from the novel's beginning with the mine explosion, and working backward to show how the tragedy has fundamentally changed each of their lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarzan_and_the_Valley_of_Gold"title="Tarzan and the Valley of Gold">
Augustus Vinero (David Opatoshu) is a wealthy international criminal known for his habit of sending explosive wristwatches or necklaces to those not in his favor. When he hears of Ramel (Manuel Padilla Jr.), a small boy who may know the location of the fabled Valley of Gold in Mexico, he sends a death squad of plainclothes mercenaries which destroys the farmhouse (and its inhabitants) where Ramel is being sheltered.Prior to his murder, the head of the farmhouse summoned his old friend Tarzan to track the kidnappers and rescue the boy. Aware of Tarzan's arrival, Vinero uses one of his assassins to impersonate a taxi driver to meet Tarzan at the airport. Tarzan is driven to an ambush in an empty stadium. After the driver is killed, Tarzan kills the sniper by crushing him with a giant Coca-Cola bottle used in the stadium for advertising.The local authorities take Tarzan to the boy's wrecked compound and offer Tarzan troops, technology and weapons for his mission. Tarzan turns them down in favor of his own equipment: a chimpanzee scout called Dinky, a lion named Major, Ramel's pet leopard, his hunting knife and his uniform of a loincloth.Meanwhile, Vinero and his private army are heading for the lost city in two separate parties, one led by Vinero and the other party has Ramel. Vinero's uniformed private army is well equipped with American World War II small arms, an M5A1 Stuart light tank, an M3 Half-track and a Bell 47 helicopter. Tarzan catches up with Ramel's party, the leopard is killed and Tarzan kills Vinero's thugs. Tarzan calls Vinero on a walkie-talkie and tells him what has happened and warns Vinero not to continue, Vinero sends a helicopter which Tarzan, using a captured M1919 Browning machine gun (that he fires from the hip but misses) and then a bolus of Mk 2 grenades, brings down.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Spaces"title="Real Spaces">
## Introduction.Summers divides the world into "Real Space", the space we share with other people and objects, and "Virtual Space", the space that exists within two dimensions which people "seem to see." He explains, “Real space is the space we find ourselves sharing with other people and things; virtual space is space represented on a surface, space we ‘”seem to see.’ In fact, space can only be represented visually as virtual, but at the same time we always encounter a virtual space in a real space.” 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kill-Off_(novel)"title="The Kill-Off (novel)">
"The Kill-Off" relates the events leading up to the inevitable murder of Luane Devore, a hypochondriac hated in the seaside town of Manduwoc for her malicious gossip. Each chapter provides a partial first person account from a different character, all of whom are unreliable, to an unidentified audience. The result is a sprawling network of possibilities and suspicions with no ultimately trustworthy account.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_8th_Confession"title="The 8th Confession">
Stacey Glenn, a dropout girl from the high society is convicted of multiple counts of murder by Yuki Castellano - the lawyer of the Murder Club. Glenn is killed and beheaded once she arrives in prison.The major plot develops around two cases: a homeless man who goes by the name of Bagman Jesus is beaten to death and then targeted with multiple shots; Linsday and her friends investigate the case but they initially find a wall of silence defending him; many people living in the slums where he lived seem to consider him a sort of a saint.Boxer's team finally gives Bagman Jesus an identity; he is Rodney Brooker, a meth dealer who provoked a terrible explosion with a school bus he used as a drug laboratory; he was not loved by the people who knew him but on the contrary he was feared and hated; he had been actually killed by his mates; who also planned to put the blame one on the other in order to make all confessions void and impossible to be used in a courtroom.Then there's a girl, whom the reader comes to meet as "Pet Girl", who kills rich people without leaving any trace behind; the corpses seem immaculate and intact. She kills multiple couples until Boxer and her partner Rich Conklin manage to trace her while she's trying another murder; her victims were killed with poison from lethal snakes; one of them bites Rich; but he manages to survive and Pet Girl is arrested.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Road_Home_(novel)"title="The Long Road Home (novel)">
Gabriella Harrison, a child of the fifties, suffers abuse from the hands of her mother, Eloise, who explains her abuse as disciplining Gabriella for being so bad. Frequent beatings mar her life. Her father scared of annoying her mother plays a spectator to all the evil happenings. Before Gabbie turns thirteen her father, tired of his wife's constant abuse towards their daughter, leaves. Her mother as always accuses Gabbie's badness for her father's departure. She says it's only because of her badness that her parents hate her, and that is exactly why her father has left them. Gabbie is then gotten rid of at a nunnery to finish out her education by her mother so she can abandon the biggest disappointment in her life.While there, Gabriella decides she wants to become a nun. In the course of being a postulant, she falls in love with a priest, Father Joe Connors. They want to move into the real world to live their life loving each other, but the priest is not confident about making it in the real world for Gabbie and the symbol of their love growing in Gabbie's womb. Incidentally the priest commits suicide with a turmoil for he cannot break the promise made to the brotherhood of serving the needed, and for he cannot live without Gabriella. Gabriella thus loses her love, and then their child in a miscarriage. Ultimately she is compelled to leave the convent for the sin committed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_of_the_Northern_Spring"title="Child of the Northern Spring">
The novel begins on the night before Guinevere's departure from her home, the kingdom of Rheged to Logres, in order to marry King Arthur. Along the journey, Guinevere recalls scenes from her childhood. Later, Bedivere retells the story of Arthur's ascension as High King, focusing on the events that surround Arthur meeting his father Uther, his investiture of Excalibur by Vivien the Lady of the Lake (and her subsequent death at the hands of Sir Balin) and the subsequent war with King Lot of Lothian. Afterwards, Guinevere retells how the war with Lot affected Guinevere's people directly. The book continues to show episodes of her youth and several proposed offers of marriage, including those of Gawain, Uwain, her cousin Maelgwn (who was willing to put aside his own wife in order to marry her), Gildas, and King Mark of Cornwall (made on his behalf by his nephew Tristan).Arthur and Guinevere's marriage is a hasty affair, due to an invasion that was timed to coincide with the wedding celebrations, an act attempt at catching Arthur unaware. During this time Guinevere is left with Igraine and Morgan le Fey; the latter leaves when Guinevere discovers her and her paramour Accolon. Following Arthur's return there is the first meeting of the Round Table, which is a suggestion of Guinevere's.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behind_the_Attic_Wall"title="Behind the Attic Wall">
At twelve, Maggie has already been thrown out of numerous foster homes and boarding schools for lying, stealing, and disobedience. At last she comes to Adelphi Hills—a former boarding school that ceased functioning after the death of its founders—to live with her only living relatives: Great-Aunts Lillian and Harriet and her eccentric but kind uncle Morris.Upon arriving, Maggie is unsurprised to learn that her great-aunts are strict, stern, and do not really care about her; they plan to use their rigid rules regarding nutrition and exercise to rehabilitate Maggie as an example of healthful living. By the end of her first day, Maggie is already in disgrace for refusing to eat her meals and rummaging through the aunts' rooms, which they mistake for stealing. Maggie spends much of her time alone in Adelphi Hills, playing imaginary games and exploring the many empty rooms. The only person who makes an effort to connect with her is Uncle Morris, who, while funny and playful, often frustrates Maggie with his cryptic answers. Maggie attends the New Adelphi Hills school, where she alienates her classmates with her sullenness and strangeness. One day while exploring the house, Maggie hears voices having a conversation but cannot locate the speakers. This begins to happen frequently, and soon she is convinced that the voices are speaking about her. Finally she hears them calling her by name and eventually traces them to a secret room behind the attic wall, where two large dolls--Timothy John and Miss Christabel--live in a makeshift home with their small china dog. The dolls, who can move as well as speak, greet Maggie as their new caretaker. Confused, frightened, and angry, Maggie rejects the dolls, overturning their kitchen table and scattering them. Later that night, Maggie feels guilty for injuring the dolls and returns the next day to repair them, beginning a relationship. Maggie is expected to join the dolls for tea, then accompany them to the portion of flowered wallpaper they call their rose garden. As she learns to accept the dolls' love, she improves both physically and emotionally, eventually even befriending girls at her school.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_(Lupica_novel)"title="Heat (Lupica novel)">
The book is set in the Bronx, New York. The main character is a young boy named Michael Arroyo, a gifted baseball player/pitcher. Coaches from other teams say that he is too good to be just 12 years old (He can pitch a ball at 80mph). With no parents, and a birth certificate back at his native home Cuba, Michael will have to somehow prove with the help of his best friend, Manny, and his brother Carlos that he really is the age that he says. Later on in the book, Michael also meets a girl named Ellie who is beautiful and mysterious. Also, he has to lie to everyone else that his father is still alive otherwise he will be possibly separated from his brother. His brother is a couple months from reaching 18 years old, making him almost able to legally take care of his brother. His father died a few months before the plot of the story. He was a great man and encouraged Michael to do his best in everything and helped him a lot in baseball. He died from a heart attack after defending a woman who he drove to her home in his taxi cab who was attacked by her boyfriend. He was hit several times in the chest. He made it to a friend's house and died. His last words were, "Keep my boys together." At the middle of the book, he is removed from his baseball team due to the fact that he has no birth certificate of file. He watches a Yankee Baseball game on TV and is shocked to find out that Ellie is the daughter of the Yankee's star pitcher. He is sitting on the sidelines on a game when Ellie and her father show up with his birth certificate and he is allowed to finish the game.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_Freeze"title="Terminal Freeze">
The events take place in Alaska, north of the Arctic Circle. A decommissioned military base located near the fictional Mount Fear, the Mount Fear Remote Sensing Installation, is being used by a research team from Northern Massachusetts University to study the effects of global warming on a receding glacier. The team consists of five scientists from the University - Evan Marshall, a paleoecologist; Gerard Sully, a climatologist and the team leader; Wright Faraday, an evolutionary biologist; Ang Chen, a graduate student; and Penny Barbour, a computer scientist - along with the skeleton crew of four soldiers - Corporal Marcelin, Privates First Class Tad Phillips and Donovan Fluke, and the leader, Sergeant Paul Gonzalez.The expedition discovers a monstrous ancient animal, presumed to be a preserved example of "Smilodon populator", frozen in solid ice inside a lava tube made into an ice cave. The expedition's corporate sponsors, Terra Prime and its parent corporation Blackpool Entertainment, sense huge publicity and decide to have the beast cut from the ice, thawed, and revealed live on television. A massive entourage is sent to the base to begin production of the documentary, and the new crew includes Kari Ekberg, the field producer; Emilio Conti, the eccentric director (along with his assistant Hulce); Allan Fortnum, the director of photography; Ken Toussaint, the assistant director of photography; Wolff, the network liaison and channel representative; George Creel, the production foreman; and Ashleigh Davis, the spoiled host and star of the show (along with her assistant Brianna). The group is later joined by the truck driver Carradine, who brings Davis' luxurious trailer to the site, and a man who hitched a ride with Carradine, named Dr. Jeremy Logan, a private investigator and Yale professor of medieval history.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Ghost_in_the_Machine"title="A Ghost in the Machine">
Village resident Dennis Brinkley, an enthusiastic collector of old war machines and torture weapons, suffers a gruesome death after being crushed by one of his own devices. Although his demise is initially regarded as an accident, his best friend Benny believes otherwise, and her suspicions are only confirmed by local psychic Ava Garrett, who tells her that she will ask Dennis to identify his killer at her next seance.However, the elusive murderer silences her before the event can go ahead, leaving Chief Inspector Barnaby, accompanied by his Sergeant Gavin Troy, with two gruesome slayings and a complex mystery to unravel. Several of Dennis's friends and associates come under suspicion, and much of the book is devoted to detailing their tangled lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coffin_Quilt"title="The Coffin Quilt">
Rinaldi tells the story of the Hatfield-McCoy feud in the late 19th century through the eyes of Fanny, a young female member of the McCoy clan. Set against the backdrop of the Civil War, Rinaldi illustrates the fervent code of honor in the mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia as her protagonist struggles to understand the superstition and loyalty fueling the cycle of violence in Tug Valley. In the end, Fanny must choose between her family and her future to escape the feud.When Fanny’s sister, Roseanna, the “purtiest girl in the county,” has an affair with Johnse Hatfield, the slow brewing hatred between the Hatfield and the McCoys erupts. As the families take the law into their own hands through dubious pacts and midnight raids, Fanny follows her sister Roseanna into a nest of secrets. Pregnant and estranged from her lover, Roseanna sews a coffin quilt to preserve the family members so quickly disappearing from Tug Valley. Fanny disapproves of the quilt despite her loyalty to her sister and evolves from an innocent bystander to a judicious dissenter as the violence escalates. With the help of her mysterious “Yeller Thing,” Fanny learns to overcome the petty hatred plaguing both families.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmy_(novel)"title="Pygmy (novel)">
The plot revolves around a 13-year-old boy named Agent Number 67 from an unnamed, totalitarian state described as a "mash-up of North Korea, Cuba, Communist-era China, and Nazi-era Germany", as an exchange student to live with an American family from an unnamed Midwestern location as a sleeper agent to execute a terrorist attack on the United States codenamed "Operation Havoc". Nicknamed "Pygmy" by his American family for his diminutive size, he is introduced into the rituals of modern American life such as enrolling in public school and going to church.He sodomizes a bully, who had been victimizing his host brother, in the bathroom of a Wal-Mart. The scene is described in graphic detail. This is only the first of many acts committed by the operative in order to adjust to American life while preparing with his fellow operatives, who are also masquerading as exchange students, to execute "Operation Havoc".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_(novel)"title="Jupiter (novel)">
Grant Archer, a young astrophysicist and recently married man dreams of exploring collapsing stars, in hope that one day he would be able to find a way in creating wormholes, to create instantaneous transportation. However, upon graduating he finds out that he must go to Jupiter on a four-year public service, enforced by the ultraconservative religious organization the "New Morality". His orders are to spy on the scientists of the space station "Gold"; where it is believed, and feared that they have found new living species living in a liquid ocean, deep below Jupiter's clouds.As Archer's anger and frustration wears off, he soon finds himself befriending the crew, and drawn to the station's super-secret project; a select few wearing bioimplants in their legs, and a mysterious spacecraft attached to the space station.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve_(Francis_novel)"title="Nerve (Francis novel)">
Robert Finn watches a fellow steeplechase jockey blow his brains out in the parade ring at Dunstable races, just before a race. As Finn and the other jockeys cope, some better than others, with the stress of their jobs, other incidents lead him to conclude that someone is trying to destroy the lives of jockeys all over England.Finn is not the average jockey. The only child of famous virtuoso musicians, and the single family member to not be gifted musically, he has followed a different path than that of his family's vocation. He has inherited other skills that will help him as he unravels a sad and warped trail. And he has been a remarkably successful jockey for a man with only 2 years' experience.Soon, Finn is the next target. A losing streak that lasts weeks threatens his job until he takes it upon himself to do a little sleuthing and uncovers the identity of the culprit. Now, Finn wants his revenge, and he takes his time setting it up.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Sister_Jodie"title="My Sister Jodie">
Pearl and Jodie Wells are sisters. Jodie, 14, is boisterous, mischievous and very protective of her younger sister. She dyes her hair, pierces her ears and dresses in an outlandish way, constantly irritating her mother. Pearl, 10, is a shy bookworm, who thinks the world of Jodie. Their mother and father, Sharon and Joe, decide to move to Melchester College, a boarding school in the countryside, where they have both been offered new jobs as a cook and caretaker, respectively. They would like to give the girls an opportunity to receive a quality education. Jodie does not want to move, because she is settled at her current school, where she is friends with the popular girls. She is even more horrified when her mother says that she will have to retake Year 8. Pearl, however, is glad because she is constantly bullied at her school. She sees the move as an opportunity to have a fresh start, in a different place with a different life. Even though she refuses, at first, Jodie finally says that she will move, when Pearl asks her to.When the family arrive at Melchester they meet Miss French, the school secretary. On their first night at the school, they are invited to dinner at the residence of Mr. Wilberforce, the Headmaster, and his wheelchair-bound wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Order_of_the_Gumm_Street_Girls"title="The Secret Order of the Gumm Street Girls">
Former beauty queen Pearl Diamond and her daughter, Ivy, move into #5 Gumm Street in the town of Sherbet. While moving in, Ivy befriends her neighbor, Franny Muggs, and meets two other girls, Pru Gumm and Cat Lemonjello, who harbor ongoing animosity towards each other.Their neighbor, Mr. Staccato, offers to give Ivy piano lessons. When Ivy goes to his house for her first lesson, she sees the glamorous ruby slippers from the film "The Wizard of Oz", which Mr. Staccato claims to have worked on. He tells her that she is the true owner of the slippers, warning her never to give them up.Sherbet experiences its first hurricane and Ivy speeds off home, promising to return the next day. Later, at #3 Gumm, Franny has a vision of Mr. Staccato, who has died in the storm.The next day, the hurricane dissipates, and Ivy and Franny return to Mr. Staccato's house. Ivy takes one of the Ruby Red Slippers; the other is missing. ChaCha, a glamorous woman claiming to be Mr. Staccato's relative, appears and demands to be given the shoe. Ivy and Franny manage to escape to Ivy's house, where they all conclude that Ivy, whose mother's middle name is Gale, is a descendant of Dorothy, and that Mr. Staccato's dogs Fred and Ginger are related to Toto, while ChaCha is the Wicked Witch of the West. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_to_Last_Man_Peak"title="Escape to Last Man Peak">
At the beginning of the novel, the narrator, 11-year-old Nellie Atkins, as well as nine other children at the Sunrise Home Orphanage (Jimmy; Pauline; Sylvia; Wuss Wuss; Gerald; Frankie; Myrna; Pet and Precious) are shocked to discover that the matron of their orphanage has died in the hospital from the pneumonia epidemic (referred to as "the sickness") that is raging through the country. Afraid that they will be made to work in a labour camp, the children are at first desolate; however they later learn that eleven-year-old Wuss Wuss, a shy albino boy, is the secret owner of a house and a very large plot of land on the other side of the island called Last Man Peak, where he once lived with his grandfather.Gathering the remains of food, clothing and other resources that they have left, the children skulk from the orphanage before dawn the following day. They first visit their neighbor Mr. Henry, who lives about half a mile away, and he explains that his wife has died, and that he has also caught the virus. He entrusts his large Alsatian dog Bess to Jimmy with commands for her to "guard" and follow Jimmy. After a tearful goodbye, the children set off to their other remaining friend, the old Teacher Mack. Teacher Mack gives the children useful advise on how to travel, and the route they are to take, and repeatedly cautions them to avoid being seen by others.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understood_Betsy"title="Understood Betsy">
The story tells of Elizabeth Ann, a 9-year-old orphan girl who goes from a sheltered existence with her father's aunt Harriet and cousin Frances in the city, to living on a Vermont farm with her mother's family, the Putneys, whose child-rearing practices had always seemed suspect to Harriet and her daughter. In her new rural life, Elizabeth Ann comes to be nicknamed "Betsy," and to find that many activities that Frances had always thought too demanding for a little girl are considered, by the Putney family, routine activities for a child: walking to school alone, cooking, and having household duties to perform.The child thrives in her new environment, learning to make butter, boil maple syrup, and tend the animals. She also loves to read to herself and to her family. When Frances announces she is to be married and has come to "save" Elizabeth Ann from the dreaded Putney cousins, she is amazed to discover that the little girl is quite content to stay. The story ends after Frances has returned home, with Betsy, her aunt Abigail, uncle Henry, and cousin Ann sitting quietly and happily around the fireplace enjoying the knowledge they will now be a family for good.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrets_(novel)"title="Secrets (novel)">
Treasure lives with her mother and her abusive stepfather, Terry, who she hates very much. When Terry whips Treasure with his belt, scarring her forehead, her grandmother Rita puts her foot down and takes Treasure in herself, although she still has nightmares that Terry is coming to get her.India lives in the upper middle-class, expensive Parkfield Estate, with her parents and her au pair, miserable Australian-born Wanda. Her father is a businessman with a terrible drinking problem, and her mother, Moya Upton is a controlling fashion designer who finds India's weight problem particularly embarrassing. India is unpopular at school and her only friend now goes to boarding school. Her only source of comfort is rereading The Diary of Anne Frank, whom she considers her heroine.One day, after Wanda fails to collect her from school, India decides to walk home. While passing through the Latimer Estate she meets Treasure, and the two hit it off instantly. India is very taken with Treasure's charismatic family, and Treasure is impressed by India's posh lifestyle. Their friendship proves to be the bright spot in both of their lives, as India begins to suspect that her dad is having an affair with Wanda and Treasure receives a phone call from her mum and Terry, telling her that they are coming to take her home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius_Wars"title="Genius Wars">
After abandoning a life full of deception and mistrust, fifteen-year-old Cadel has finally found his niche. He has a proper home, good friends, and loving parents. He's even been studying at a real university. But he's still not safe from Prosper English, who's now a fugitive from justice and determined to smash everything that Cadel has struggled to build. When Cadel's nearest and dearest are threatened, he must launch an all-out attack on the man he once viewed as his father. Can Cadel track down Prosper before it's too late? And what rules will he have to break in the process?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceship_Medic"title="Spaceship Medic">
On a routine trip to Mars, the passenger liner "Johannes Kepler" is hit by a meteoroid, killing the captain and almost all the senior members of the crew and resulting in the loss of much of the ship's breathable air. Lieutenant Donald Chase, a junior medical officer, finds himself the highest-ranked surviving crew member and has to take over the running of the ship. He is helped by Chief Petty Officer Kurikka, who is familiar with the technical aspects; the Mexican scientist Dr Ugalde, a passenger whose mathematical genius enables the new crew to navigate the ship; and various others. Chase solves the air shortage by using the oxygen content of some of the ship's water. Once the situation has stabilised, a passenger, General Mathew Briggs, who had criticised Chase's methods, overthrows him by force with the apparent help of Ugalde. However, it turns out that Ugalde had only pretended to shift his loyalties and Briggs is faced down by Kurikka, defeated and imprisoned. The ship's occupants are also struck by a deadly plague carried by the meteorite, but Chase and his medical colleagues eventually find a cure, although Chase collapses from disease and exhaustion. Recovering in hospital after the ship has docked safely, he is presented with a captain's cap by his crew.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bees"title="The Glass Bees">
Out-of-work former cavalryman and tank inspector Captain Richard is offered a job interview with a "catch" by a former comrade, Twinnings: namely, he suggests a morally questionable position with Giacomo Zapparoni, whose firm builds advanced robots; occasionally one of his engineers deserts, and he needs a man to "take care of" the problem to protect company secrets. At this point a reluctant Richard offers the first of many essayistic narrative asides, as he outlines the social magnitude of Zapparoni's creations, and the first of many autobiographical flashbacks, recounting his days in Military Academy under the guidance of his strict yet caring instructor, Monteron.Two days later, while nervously awaiting Zapparoni, Richard notices how Zapparoni's modest house appears strangely old-fashioned for a man who made his vast fortune in robotics. This tension between new and old prompts Richard to nostalgically reflect upon the historic demise of cavalry, supplanted by mechanized modern warfare. The suicide of his comrade Lorenz, who refused to adapt to the vertiginous pace of technological, social change, figures prominently in his reflection; for Richard, Lorenz's death exemplifies the fate of those who cannot "find firm ground under [their] feet in the present". Richard's ruminations then turn inward, as he narrates his own lack of worldly success and his negative evaluations by superiors as an "outsider with defeatist inclinations."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starclimber"title="Starclimber">
Matt Cruse is piloting an aerocrane for France's Celestial Tower where he narrowly survives a terrorist attack by the Babelites, a group of people who are opposed to humans reaching the heavens. After the incident, he meets with Kate de Vries, and is saddened to hear that Kate will soon return to Lionsgate City.Canada's Minister of Air wants Canadians to be the first in space, and invites Kate to join the expedition as an expert in aerial zoology, while Matt is offered a chance to become one of the world's first astronauts on board the "Starclimber". Matt decides to visit his mother and sisters. While he is there, he accepts a party invitation sent by Mr. and Mrs. de Vries. During the party, Matt is informed that Kate's parents will probably marry Kate to James Sanderson. Upon hearing this, Matt seeks out Mr. Sanderson during the party.Matt is enrolled in the astronaut program and becomes friends with fellow astronaut trainee Tobias Blanchard. Three people are chosen to be the first astronauts, but Matt is not amongst them. When he leaves the room, Kate follows him to try and cheer him up. When she takes his hands, Matt finds an engagement ring on her finger. Matt leaves, heartbroken, and goes to a bar with the rest of the rejected astronauts-in-training. The other astronauts tell him that he deserved to be chosen. The next morning, Captain Walken tells him that one of the men they chose broke his leg, and offers Matt a spot on the space trip as a replacement. Matt accepts, even though the thought of seeing Kate again is painful.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_About_Jane_Spring"title="The Thing About Jane Spring">
The plot of the novel revolves around the title character Jane Spring, an attractive and intelligent 31-year-old Manhattan assistant district attorneyand West Point general's daughter who grew up without a female role modeland struggles to understand why she fails to 'keep' men in a relationship.Spring is described as "militaristic","no-nonsense","aggressive","abrasive", "caustic" and "tomboyish",and a "domineering hellion ... who makes old ladies cry on the stand and men run for the hills". A review in "The Age" characterizes Spring as the antithesis of Helen Fielding's fictional character Bridget Jones. A military brat, she prioritizes discipline and motivation and disdains 'civilians' who lack these qualities. A series of events, including overhearing her colleagues' thoughts about her and seeing a Doris Day marathon, ultimately give way to an epiphany and prompt her to reevaluate her approach and undergo a transformationto "get in touch with her feminine side".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Screen"title="Hell Screen">
"Hell Screen" is narrated by an uninvolved servant who witnesses or hears of the events. The plot of "Hell Screen" centers on the artist Yoshihide. Yoshihide is considered “the greatest painter in the land”, and is often commissioned to create works for the Lord of Horikawa, who also employs Yoshihide’s daughter in his mansion. When Yoshihide is instructed to create a folding screen depicting the Buddhist hell, he proceeds to inflict tortures upon his apprentices, so he can see what he is trying to paint. Supernatural forces seem to be present; one time, Yoshihide speaks in a devilish voice. The story climaxes when Yoshihide asks the lord to burn a beautiful lady in a carriage so he can finish the screen. The lord concedes, but, in a macabre twist, Yoshihide must watch as his daughter Yūzuki and her monkey are the ones who burn. The story ends with the magnificently horrible screen completed, and Yoshihide’s suicide by hanging.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Drew_on_Campus"title="Nancy Drew on Campus">
The series followed Nancy and her friends George and Bess as they attend the fictional Wilder University. Nancy is attending in order to receive a degree in journalism, much to the chagrin of her longtime boyfriend Ned Nickerson, who wants her to attend Emerson College with him instead. Despite initial attempts to make their relationship work, the two break up in the second book "On Her Own" after Nancy decides that Ned is too controlling.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_and_His_War_Tank"title="Tom Swift and His War Tank">
When the United States joins in The Great War, it seems that everyone has war fever. A military base close to Shopton is training soldiers in the art of trench warfare, while pilots are learning aerial combat. Ned Newton has quit his job to sell liberty bonds full-time. Many of the young men have enlisted, or even hoping for the draft. Everyone seems to be "doing their bit", except for Tom Swift, which raises many concerns that Tom is a "slacker".Tom does not let his country down; the reason he appears to be idle is that he has secretly been developing a new tank for use in combat. The project is so secret that Tom does not even let his close friends know, which causes the concerns being raised about Tom's patriotism. Even though the development is in secret, that does not stop German nationals from trying to steal his tank.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bourne_Sanction"title="The Bourne Sanction">
In the prologue, four prisoners at High Security Prison Colony 13, in Nizhny Tagil, Russia, attack Borya Maks and try to kill him. Leonid Danilovich Arkadin, member of the Kazanskaya who appears on scene disguised as a guard, neutralizes the attackers prior to leading Borya into a corridor where, quite ironically, Maks meets his demise. Leonid Danilovich is an assassin sanctioned to kill Borya Maks by Pyotr Zilber. As Arkadin returns to Campione d'Italia, where Zilber pays him for a job well done. Pyotr then discusses another prospective target by the name of Semion Icoupov. Zilber, unaware that Icoupov is Arkadin's real boss, is subsequently kidnapped by Leonid. He awakens in a room with Semion Icoupov and Leonid Arkadin standing by. The two men begin to extract information out of him but are brought up short when he kills himself with a hidden tab of cyanide. Arkadin's next mission is to Sevastopol to get possession of a document that is vitally important to the successful execution of a terrorist act on United States soil.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Fields"title="The Dark Fields">
Edward "Eddie" Spinola is a copywriter at a small publishing house in New York City. He starts using MDT-48, an experimental drug granting heightened intellectual, creative, and learning powers, and enabling its user to see meaningful patterns in large amounts of disparate data. Using his newly acquired intellect, Edward amasses a small fortune short selling technology stocks. His trading escapades don't go unnoticed, and he is offered a job by billionaire tycoon Carl Van Loon, mediating the merger between entertainment giant MCL Parnasis and Abraxis, the country's second largest Internet service provider – a deal he sees to completion.However, his indiscriminate use of the drug leads to panic attacks and blackouts. Edward is suspected of bludgeoning to death Donatella Alvarez, the wife of a prominent Mexican artist, during an MDT induced fugue state. He further learns the full scope of the side-effects from his ex-wife Melissa, who had dabbled in the substance and suffered permanent neurocognitive damage, prompting him to gradually discontinue use of the drug.Edward initially reduces his intake to half a pill a day, but this quickly proves insufficient to maintain the level of mental acuity required to work out the details of the merger, and he is forced to increase the dosage. Realizing he is on a treadmill of addiction, Edward tracks down another user, from whom he learns of the existence of a drug, readily available over the counter, capable of negating some of the harmful side-effects. Armed with this knowledge, Edward resumes taking MDT and is filled with a renewed surge of energy and motivation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TimeTripper"title="TimeTripper">
## TimeTripper 1: Yestermorrow.Siara Warner, a high school junior, becomes attracted to a fellow student, Harry Keller, after witnessing him prevent a shooting, seemingly by accident. Harry, in fact, has been given the ability to see time beyond its linear form, and used this ability to change the future. He is still getting a handle on the ability, which, as he is well-aware, could also be the manifestation of schizophrenia or another mental illness. After he reaches a plane of existence he calls A-Time, he nevertheless decides to take his ability as truth. However, while navigating this new universe, where every moment co-exists simultaneously, Harry detects a temporal anomaly involving a school outcast. Meanwhile, he semi-successfully explains his condition to Siara, who believes him insane until he successfully brings her into A-Time, where both struggle to prevent predestined events from occurring. "Yestermorrow" was published in 2006.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Henri_Tod"title="The Story of Henri Tod">
CIA agent Blackford Oakes is sent to West Berlin East Germany in 1961, during the time leading up to the building of the Berlin Wall.Henri Tod is a German Jew who during World War II is sent to England to prevent his conscription into the army. After the war he returns to Germany and becomes Germany's leading Freedom fighter. Henri Tod carries a burden of guilt because while in England he told someone of his sister who was still hiding on a farm in Germany. This information gets back to the Death Squads who kill the foster parents and send his sister, Clementa, to the death camps. His sister is rescued from Auschwitz at the last minute by the Soviet armies, but after the war becomes a pawn in an East Block effort to secure Tod's capture. Thrown into this mix of lively characters is a curious East German couple that play crucial roles in the tableau. Of historical interest is their secret meeting place, a relic German railcar, that once belonged to Adolf Hitler. And, of course there's Blackford Oakes. Oakes's mission is to infiltrate the Bruderschaft (Tod's organization) in an effort to learn of its intentions. All this occurs, of course, during the days leading up to the building of the Berlin Wall.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_You_Later,_Alligator_(novel)"title="See You Later, Alligator (novel)">
CIA agent Blackford Oakes is sent to Cuba in 1961 to meet with Che Guevara, attempting to ease tension following the events surrounding the Bay of Pigs Invasion in the 1960s.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Jinx"title="High Jinx">
CIA agent Blackford Oakes is sent inside the Soviet Union to monitor an internal power struggle within the Kremlin in 1954.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongoose_R.I.P."title="Mongoose R.I.P.">
CIA agent Blackford Oakes is sent to Cuba to determine the feasibility of overthrowing Fidel Castro, following the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker's_Last_Stand"title="Tucker's Last Stand">
CIA agent Blackford Oakes is sent to Vietnam in 1964 to assist in cutting off supply lines to the Viet Cong.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Private_Plot"title="A Very Private Plot">
In early 1995, CIA agent Blackford Oakes is called to testify before the United States Congress regarding a suspected plot to assassinate Mikhail Gorbachev, president of the Soviet Union.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Call_for_Blackford_Oakes"title="Last Call for Blackford Oakes">
CIA agent Blackford Oakes confronts Kim Philby, a British double agent who defected to the Soviet Union, in 1987.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_(novel)"title="The Bell (novel)">
The setting is Imber Court, a country house in Gloucestershire that is the home of a small Anglican lay religious community. It is situated next to Imber Abbey, a convent belonging to an enclosed community of Benedictine nuns. The owner of Imber Court and the community's de facto leader is Michael Meade, a former schoolmaster in his late 30s. The community supports itself by a market garden.The novel begins with the journey of Dora Greenfield from London to Imber by train. Dora is a young former art student who is married to the difficult and demanding Paul Greenfield, an art historian who is staying at Imber Court as a guest while studying 14th-century manuscripts belonging to the Abbey. Dora left her husband six months earlier, but he has persuaded her to return to him. On the same train are Toby Gashe, an 18-year-old boy who has just finished school and is going to spend a few weeks as a guest at Imber Court before starting university, and James Tayper Pace, a community member who formerly ran a settlement house and led youth groups in the East End of London.Among the community members is Catherine Fawley, a young woman who is preparing to enter the convent as a nun. Her twin brother, Nick, is living at Imber Court's lodge. Nick is a troubled and troublesome character, often drunk, who has been invited to Imber Court at the request of his sister in the hope that the spiritual surroundings will be of benefit to him. Fourteen years earlier Michael, then a schoolmaster with aspirations to the priesthood, had been in love with his teenaged pupil Nick. The relationship was unconsummated and apparently mutual, but Nick informed the school's headmaster. As a result, Michael lost his job and did not see Nick again until he came to stay at Imber Court, where the two do not acknowledge having known each other in the past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Listeners_(novel)"title="The Listeners (novel)">
The following is synopsis is presented in chronological order, although it is not presented that way in the novel.It is the year 2025, and many world problems (such as overpopulation, economic depression, resource depletion, racism, and crime) are on the verge of being solved. Robert MacDonald is a 47-year-old linguist and electrical engineer who is director of The Project, an attempt to listen for attempts at interstellar communication. For 20 years, he has been married to Maria, a Hispanic woman from Puerto Rico. MacDonald is obsessed with his job, which places strains on his marriage. His wife, who has previously attempted suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills, slashes her wrists in a second attempt. Although MacDonald almost resigns to care for his wife, he does not.Two years later, MacDonald and his wife have had a child, Robert MacDonald, Jr. (known as "Bobby"). MacDonald is interviewed by a journalist, George Thomas. Thomas is skeptical of The Project's cost. He also confronts MacDonald with the views of a new Christian sect, the Solitarians, led by the elderly preacher Jeremiah Jones. Jeremiah (he prefers to use only his first name) believes that humanity is alone in the universe, and that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence borders on heresy. That night, as Thomas visits the MacDonald household, The Project receives a message from the region of the star Capella in the constellation Auriga. The message is badly degraded by static, but appears to be early radio and audio-only television signals beamed back at the Earth from an alien race. MacDonald releases the news to the entire world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Cert_(novel)"title="Dead Cert (novel)">
Admiral should have won his race at Maidenhead, but an unexpected fall and the death of top jockey Bill Davidson gave jockey Alan York and his mount the win instead. But Alan recognized sabotage when he saw it and was not about to let a murderous act go unpunished, even if it meant risking his own life to bring his friend's killers to justice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_Coat"title="Turn Coat">
Nearly a year and a half after the events in "Small Favor", a wounded Warden Morgan shows up at Dresden's apartment, asking for protection from the other Wardens. Morgan reveals that he was drugged and framed for the murder of Senior Council member LaFortier. While obtaining medical supplies, Dresden spots a naagloshi, a shape-shifting creature from Native American lore. Over the course of investigating Morgan's apparent crime, he legally entangles his apprentice Molly, as well as Captain Luccio, after they stumble over Morgan in Dresden's home. Dresden also confronts Madeline Raith of the White Court, whom Dresden comes to suspect is behind framing Morgan, and Binder, a practitioner who uses beings of the Nevernever as a mercenary.Dresden invites Captain Luccio to accompany him on a visit to Lara Raith and accuses her of complicity, but is interrupted by the naagloshi who ransoms Thomas Raith for Morgan. Realizing he needs far more strength to combat the naagloshi, Dresden performs a Sanctum Invocation and bonds with the spirit of Demonreach, the island in the finale of "Small Favor". Despite this, Dresden—aware that he can't fight both the naagloshi and Morgan's betrayer alone—calls the Council, House Raith, and the naagloshii, convincing each that Morgan is on the island or that the island is where they will meet to discuss further strategy. Dresden manages to take down Madeline and Binder, but it takes the intervention of Listens-to-Wind to defeat the naagloshi. Thomas is rescued but is insane with hunger, and is collected by Lara. Morgan surrenders after the true murderer manages to slip away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_(novel)"title="Dead Sea (novel)">
The streets of the city are no longer safe. They are filled with zombies - the living dead, rotting predators driven only by a need to kill and eat. For Lamar Reed and a handful of others, their safe haven is an old ship out at sea. But it will soon become a deathtrap, and they'll learn that isolation can also mean no escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithful_unto_Death"title="Faithful unto Death">
When local housewife Simone Hollingsworth doesn't show up for bell-ringing practice, nobody even raises an eyebrow, let alone suspect anything sinister. However, after her suspicious neighbours, the elderly Brockleys, notice her husband digging holes in his garden late one night, they call in Chief Inspector Barnaby for help unearthing his dark secrets.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_a_Hollow_Man"title="Death of a Hollow Man">
While attending an amateur production of "Amadeus" to watch his wife, Joyce's performance, Chief Inspector Barnaby witnesses the gruesome, all-too realistic murder of an actor on stage, after the tape applied to blunt the razor blade used to slit his character's throat is removed, revealing the lethal blade.As he investigates the shocking crime, Barnaby unearths a whole host of dark passions and resentments nestling beneath the surviving cast's genial facade.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_in_Disguise"title="Death in Disguise">
In a country manor house currently owned by a New Age cult of mystics, the mysterious death of member William Carter stirs all the local gossips into a frenzy of speculation. However, the rumours of sinister events are confirmed when the so-called Master of the Lodge Is killed with a carving knife during a psychic regression.Meanwhile, untrustworthy financier Guy Gamelin tries reconciling with his estranged, cultist daughter Sylvia, now called Suhami, as does her alcoholic mother. Chief Inspector Barnaby finds himself lost amidst a labyrinthine puzzle of deception, evil and pseudo-supernatural forces.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Place_of_Safety"title="A Place of Safety">
Ferne Basset vicar's wife Ann Lawrence accuses Carlotta, a young homeless girl her husband has taken in, of stealing her precious heirloom earrings. Their argument escalates and the pair end up fighting on the area's picturesque bridge, when Carlotta falls off into the river below.After her body doesn't re-surface, witness Charlie Leathers begins blackmailing Ann for money, until he's found garrotted and his pet dog, Candy, left savagely beaten. However, still another blackmail demand arrives and this time Ann won't pay. Meanwhile, Chief Inspector Barnaby peels away at the wholesome veneer of Ferne Basset in his hunt for a dangerous and sadistic killer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time's_Champion"title="Time's Champion">
2008: John Benton is celebrating his birthday by having a few friends round to his house at Hilsley Halt. But the monsters are lurking.1908: Writer George Mackenzie-Trench is suffering from writer’s block unable to foresee the ending of his novel, "Time’s Champion", nor the consequences of its completion.9908: The planet Caliban is under attack from Cyber-forces, and governor George Mackenzie-Trench intends to save their world by unleashing Abaddon, a powerful computer virus. But Abaddon has other instructions.Meanwhile, Gallifrey is under attack and the Keeper is seeking answers within the Matrix. President Romana is helpless: no-one is who they seem and the conspiracy goes even deeper than she can imagine. She needs the Doctor...But the Doctor is on Earth in 2008, fighting to save the life of a child who must survive at all costs.As Gallifrey is attacked by ghosts from the past, the Doctor, Mel and Benton find themselves in the middle of an epic and final battle as the ancient gods choose their Champions and allow chaos to reign across all of time and space.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeen_Against_the_Dealer"title="Seventeen Against the Dealer">
"Seventeen Against the Dealer" is the final novel in the seven-part Tillerman Cycle. The novel takes up the story of Dicey Tillerman, now 21, who has dropped out of college despite a scholarship in order to start her own business building wooden sailboats. Dicey is the oldest of four Tillerman children, whose journey to Crisfield, Maryland and subsequent life there with their grandmother, Abigail Tillerman, or Gram as the children call her, is described in the preceding novels "Homecoming", "Dicey's Song", and "Sons from Afar".As a continuation of the preceding Tillerman novels, this novel contains characters developed in the previous Tillerman books, notably Dicey's siblings James (now 18), Maybeth (16), and Sammy (15); her boyfriend Jeff Greene (23); her friend Mina Smiths (21), and Gram, the Tillerman's maternal grandmother with whom they have lived for 8 years.The book is set in around 1986, and the events of the novel take place over a short time-span, between New Year's Eve and Valentine's Day. At the start of the novel, Dicey is just beginning her new boatbuilding business, which she has dropped out of college to start. To learn the trade, she has worked hard in a series of low-paid jobs in Annapolis and Crisfield and now she has built up a small amount of savings that she hopes will enable her to start realizing her dream. Dicey becomes increasingly absorbed in and even obsessed by her work, to the detriment of her relationship with Jeff, who asks Dicey to marry him at the start of the book, explaining that he does not want to have a casual relationship with her. Dicey makes some crucial mistakes in her new business, including failing to take out insurance on the tools and equipment in her workshop. When the workshop is broken into, she loses all she has and cannot make it up, despite help from Jeff. Increasingly desperate, Dicey takes help from a smooth-talking drifter who turns out to be a con artist. Eventually Dicey stacks the odds against herself and has to close up shop. As Dicey's preoccupation with her work increases, her family and friends fade from the pages of the novel, reflecting her neglect of them. Eventually, after a series of crises culminating in Gram's serious illness, Dicey realizes that her relationships are as important, if not more so, as her work..
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Noir"title="Blood Noir">
## Summary."Blood Noir" appears to take place a short time after "The Harlequin"; however it is not noted exactly how much time has elapsed. There are a few main themes in the novel, which are mostly resolved by the end.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_Story_(novel)"title="Spy Story (novel)">
The story opens with Armstrong and his colleague Ferdy Foxwell returning from a six-week mission aboard a nuclear submarine, gathering data on Soviet communications and electronic warfare techniques in the Arctic Ocean. He and Foxwell visit "The Bonnet", a rural Scottish public house. On returning to London, Armstrong's car breaks down on his way home and he decides to use the phone in his old flat, for which he still has the key. He is surprised and disturbed to discover that the flat has been refurnished, including photographs which he owns but with someone else replacing him in the images, wearing identical clothes. He discovers a door hidden in the back of the wardrobe leading into the adjoining flat, which has been fitted out as some kind of sick bay. When he leaves the flat thinking that a taxi he ordered has arrived, he is confronted by Special Branch officers who have a former member of the Studies Centre verify who he is before releasing him.While they were away, the Studies Centre acquired a new boss, the abrasive American, Charles Schlegel, a former Marine Corps Colonel. Foxwell and Schlegel do not get on at all well and even less so when Schlegel makes Armstrong his Personal Assistant. Shortly after his return, Armstrong is about to leave his flat when it is ransacked by KGB Colonel Oleg Stok and two assistants, who even blow open a safe left by the previous occupant. They offer no explanation for this, leaving Armstrong yet more puzzled. At a party at Ferdy Foxwell's palatial London house, Armstrong learns that Foxwell is close to MP Ben Toliver and has even been passing him classified information. Also at the party is Dawlish, the head of the intelligence organisation WOOC (P) of earlier books. We learn that Armstrong worked for Dawlish before deciding to quit intelligence work. Dawlish tries to recruit him but Armstrong turns him down.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conscience_of_a_Liberal"title="The Conscience of a Liberal">
The book is a history of wealth and income gaps in the US in the 20th century. The book documents that the gap between rich and poor diminished greatly in mid-century—he refers to this as the "Great Compression"—then widened again, starting in the 1980s, to levels higher than those in the 1920s. Most economists—including Krugman himself—have regarded the late 20th century divergence as resulting largely from changes in technology and trade, but now Krugman writes—particularly in Chapters 1, 3, and 4—that "government policies"—particularly the establishment of, and subsequent attacks on, the social safety net or "welfare state"—has played a much greater role both in reducing the gap in the 1930s through 1970s, and in widening it in the 1980s through the present.He talks about the history of American conservatism, both, in Chapter 2, pre–New Deal conservatism—dominating the period between the American Civil War and the Great Depression (which he calls the "Long Gilded Age")—and, in Chapter 6, modern-day "movement conservatism". He argues—particularly in Chapters 5, 6, and 9—that the subtle exploitation by movement conservatives of racial and cultural resentments through small-government rhetoric (see "dog-whistle politics") and of national-security fears were key in the movement's ability to win national elections—even though its policies concentrating wealth at the top should be deeply unpopular. He talks extensively, in Chapter 6, about William F. Buckley, Jr.'s, Irving Kristol's and Ronald Reagan's role in building the movement—and, in Chapters 7 and 8, about the role of "institutions [particularly labor unions] and norms [particularly corporate policy]"—vis-à-vis government policy—in increasing or decreasing economic inequality. He rebukes the George W. Bush administration for policies that were currently widening the gap between the rich and poor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dear_Mr._Henshaw"title="Dear Mr. Henshaw">
Every school year, Leigh Botts writes a letter to his favorite author, Boyd Henshaw. In the 6th grade, Leigh's class has an assignment to write letters to their favorite authors. Leigh includes all the questions he was given as a numbered list. Mr. Henshaw writes back, teases Leigh for not doing research, and includes more questions for the boy to answer. Leigh is angry and at first refuses to answer. When Leigh's mother finds out, she demands he show Mr. Henshaw the courtesy of a reply.Through his answers to Mr. Henshaw, Leigh's concerns and conflicts are revealed. He struggles with his parents' divorce, being the new kid in school, his relationship with a neglectful father, and a school lunch thief. In a later letter, Mr. Henshaw encourages him to keep a diary of his thoughts and feelings. Leigh is reconciled to the writer, and his new diary is at first written to a Mr. Pretend Henshaw.Through writing this diary, Leigh learns to accept the parts of his life he cannot change. He must deal with problems that many other children also have to cope with, such as feeling lonely because he is new in town and completing school assignments. His parents will never remarry, he can never fully depend on his father, and he must find adult ways to deal with "bad things", such as not finding the person who still steals his lunch.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Can't_Be_Happening_at_Macdonald_Hall"title="This Can't Be Happening at Macdonald Hall">
The two main characters, Bruno Walton and Melvin “Boots” O'Neal, are small-time troublemakers who share a room at the Macdonald Hall boarding school some miles north of Toronto, circa 1980. Across the road is a girls' boarding school, Miss Scrimmage's Finishing School For Young Ladies. Best friends, they play mischievous pranks on the school, faculty and other students. They are constantly under the watch of Headmaster William Sturgeon, nicknamed “The Fish” due to his surname but also due to the trademark stern, fishy-like stare he uses on his students whenever he disapproves of them.Following the abduction of an overweight cat mascot of a rival hockey team (in an attempt to demoralize them), Sturgeon forbids them from seeing each other and separates them. Bruno moves in with the school genius, Elmer Drimsdale, while Boots is placed with wealthy hypochondriac George Wexford-Smith III. The two can't stand their new roommates and decide to meet at a cannon at night to discuss ways of getting back into their old room together.The two prominent ideas they have, including having both Elmer and George complain to the headmaster to get them to move elsewhere, and then framing their roommates to have themselves moved away from them, get them into more trouble.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_and_Grant_at_Appomattox"title="Lee and Grant at Appomattox">
"Lee and Grant at Appomattox" depicts the surrender of the Confederate States of America to Union soldiers. In specific, it portrays the surrender of General Robert E. Lee to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, helping to bring about the end of the American Civil War. Kantor mainly discusses the feelings of each army, both victorious and shellacked, and pays special attention to the history and interaction between Grant and Lee.The story also addresses the lasting bitterness between the North and South for years following the Civil War.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_47th_Samurai"title="The 47th Samurai">
The story begins with Bob Lee now living in Idaho. There along with his wife, former wife of his spotter Donny Fenn, he is cultivating his land by using a scythe. The story starts while Bob Lee is cutting away at his land with the scythe while an expensive car pulls up. Bob Lee is aggravated by this, since his previous encounters with such cars and men in them have led him into troublesome situations.Having this predisposition to the men within the car, Bob Lee confronts them to make them leave him and his family alone. Instead he finds a man roughly the same age as himself, looking for Bob Lee, since he is the son of the man that was killed by Bob's father during the battle of Iwo Jima.Here the book changes to the situations that led to the awarding of the Medal of Honor, to Earl Swagger during a battle on Iwo Jima.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_Club"title="The Shadow Club">
Cheryl Gannett and Jared Mercer are second bests at their school, so they decide to form a club consisting of their school's other second bests; Jason, Karin, Abbie, Darren, and Randall. Their club is called the Shadow Club, consisting of other students who also consider themselves to be "in the shadows" of people who are better than them at the things they are good at. They start out by pulling pranks to humiliate their enemies, the "unbeatable". However, their pranks quickly escalate, to the point of becoming dangerous. In addition, the most recent pranks were not carried out by the Shadow Club at all and the club members believe that they are being framed by Tyson, their school's biggest underachiever and pyromaniac. The pranks climax when Jared's biggest enemy, Austin Pace (nicknamed L'Austin sPace), a student training to be an Olympic racer, is permanently injured. After this even, the members of the Shadow Club gather to discuss their problem and decide that their only solution is to force a confession out of Tyson in the worst way possible; by punching, kicking, and pushing him, and even by trying to drown him. After he almost dies, they let him run off, and return to their meeting place, which they called "Stonehenge." Meanwhile, Jared, who has taken part in half of Tyson's interrogation, discovers that it was not Tyson who pulled the pranks, it was the members of the Shadow Club, each acting independently, so that none of the others knew of their actions, and each of them truly believed that they pulled one prank, but that Tyson did the rest. Realizing their mistake, Jared rushes back to find the members of the club in Stonehenge, all with horrified looks on their faces. They share their mistakes, and here the ones from the Shadow Club that had been tormenting Tyson share what they learned about him; that he is a pyromaniac, and all the school fires had been cause by him. Jared goes over to the lighthouse where Tyson lives to apologize for their mistake. But what he sees is a burning building, and Tyson was no doubt in it. Refusing to turn his back on Tyson, Jared runs into the lighthouse, and manages talk him out of burning to death, with difficulty. The two escape by jumping from a window, into the ocean below, and Jared carries Tyson to shore as he is unable to swim. In the end, he had to admit to the Shadow Club to his parents. After the talk with Mr. Greene, the school's vice principal, Tyson, Jared, and Cheryl join at Stonehenge for a final meeting (the others refused to show). Cheryl gives the charter to Tyson, who tosses it into the flames, and it burns, ending the Shadow Club, but leaving all the members, mostly Jared, with a bad reputation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Benedict_Society_and_the_Perilous_Journey"title="The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey">
After the events of the previous book, Mr. Benedict, and the children's parents, plan to bring the children back together for another adventure using their teamwork, skills, and intelligence. When the children arrive at his house, they find out that Mr. Benedict was kidnapped by his evil twin, Mr. Curtain. In a letter, Mr. Curtain explains that he needs a certain rare plant and that a person extremely close to Mr. Benedict knows where to find it. He also says that Mr. Benedict and his assistant, Number Two, will be in danger if he doesn’t get this info. Constance, Mr. Benedict’s adopted 3-year-old genius, soon reveals that Mr. Benedict gave her a letter to open when the others came. A series of riddles lead them to take the MV Shortcut, the fastest ship in the world, bound for Lisbon.They sneak off to the ship, which is captained by Phil Noland, a friend and former navy colleague of Mr. Benedict, who has been expecting them. Noland tells them more about Mr. Benedict, including his recent communications. Noland gives them a two-way radio for communication, but Reynie mistrusts him and later disposes of it. They find new info, which leads them to a castle in Portugal. There, they find evidence that leads them to a science museum in a city in Holland called Thernbaakagen. At the museum, they learn that the rare plant is called duskwort, capable of inducing a spellbinding sleep, and might be extinct. It has the power to put an entire city to sleep and also has the power to cure narcolepsy, the disease that Mr. Benedict and his brother have.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busting_Vegas"title="Busting Vegas">
The book's protagonist, Semyon Dukach, is recruited by team leader Victor Cassius while attending MIT to play on a highly specialised blackjack team. They employ advanced advantage play strategies like card steering and Ace sequencing. The team deals with the crises of success, and one of the players develops a substance abuse problem that will ultimately prove their downfall. An aggressive investigation by casinos into the teams' various false identities forces them to travel outside of America to continue play, culminating in a high tension climax in Monte Carlo after being caught steering cards.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Queen"title="The Other Queen">
Mary Stuart, cousin to Queen Elizabeth, has fled to England after she has lost the support of the Scots after marrying Bothwell, whom the people believe murdered her second husband, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. She has left her son in Scotland in the hands of the Protestants and expects her cousin to restore her to her throne. Secretly, however, Mary recognizes herself as Queen of Scotland (since she was born to it), France (since she married to it), and England (since Elizabeth's paternity and her mother's marriage to her father is questionable). As Mary plots to overthrow Elizabeth, Elizabeth puts her in the custody of George Talbot and his wife, Bess of Hardwicke, in response to Mary's repeated attempts to claim the English throne. Mary is indignant at the captivity, repeatedly stating her royal status, and is upset when she is given some of the reigning queen's gowns to wear, saying that they are "hand-me-downs." She is unafraid of punishment for any reckless or insulting behavior she makes to her cousin, believing that one would never execute a fellow monarch. Most of the novel centers around the first few years of Mary's Stuart's imprisonment, during which time she makes several failed escape attempts and almost immediately begins to seduce the earl. George slowly begins to feel his loyalty to Elizabeth fade, replaced by a strong attachment to the captive queen. This results in marital problems with Bess, who ultimately separates from him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistress_of_the_Empire"title="Mistress of the Empire">
After rising to power, Mara of the Acoma must now face the power of the brotherhood of assassins, the spies of rival houses, and the might of the Assembly, who see her as a threat to their power.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_of_the_Empire"title="Servant of the Empire">
In the world of Kelewan, Mara of the Acoma has now become an expert player in the Game of the Council through bloody political maneuvering. After buying a group of Midkemian prisoners-of-war, she finds one of them—Kevin of Zūn—to be a great asset in her ongoing struggle for survival and power.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughter_of_the_Empire"title="Daughter of the Empire">
In the world of Kelewan, Mara of the Acoma must lead her followers through terror and peril while surviving the ruthless Game of the Council. Mara must plot, bend tradition, avoid assassination attempts and trade her heart for power in order to save the Acoma from destruction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_the_Galactic_Bus"title="Waiting for the Galactic Bus">
The tale begins with two college-age brothers, Barion and Coyul, members of an advanced alien world. Their race is endowed with the power to manipulate physical matter with their minds, a power which is exploited incessantly by the young adults. An accident strands the brothers on Earth, which at the time has no human race. The brothers hope for rescue, but eventually grow despondent. In their free time, they cause a series of evolutionary changes in the indigenous primates of Earth, which eventually lead to the blossoming of human civilization.The brothers grow fond of their project, which they ardently monitor, intervening when necessary. With all the progress they are able to endow humans with, they are never able to rid them of the dim memory of primal darkness, causing a permanent schism between intellect and emotion, which is termed "spiritual schizophrenia". Humans have an insatiable need to decipher the meaning of life, a thirst which leads to stubborn belief systems and immense amounts of violence.Eons later, the brothers' creation is in danger due to an unlikely courtship. Charity Stovall is a passionately religious young woman from a small American town. She is poised to marry Roy Stride, a violent young fascist. The young couple is oblivious to the fact that if they were to bear a child, it could possibly be more destructive than Hitler to human culture and possibly humanity itself. Subsequently, the two brothers literally put the duo through hell to keep them apart, subjecting them to outrageous scenarios beyond their control.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Picture_of_Freedom"title="A Picture of Freedom">
The book is written in the form of a diary kept by Clotee, a young slave girl on a Virginia plantation in 1859. Clotee secretly teaches herself to read and write while fanning William, her owner's young son, during his lessons with his mother Miz Lilly. Clotee is discovered by Mr Harms, the tutor, who is actually an abolitionist working to help slaves escape via the Underground Railroad. When Clotee is given the opportunity to escape, she must decide whether to run away to freedom or stay behind to help other slaves escape.Clotee's best friend on the plantation is a very strong girl named Spicy. Spicy desperately wants to change her name to Rose (the name her mother picked out for her), but is forced to accept the name given by her owners. Clotee later writes in Spicy's Bible, the only keepsake that Spicy has from her mother, that Spicy's name is actually Rose. Spicy is also in love with Hince, the person who Clotee calls her "brother-friend".Clotee and Spicy are the property of "Mas' Henley," a cruel man. While Master Henley never whips or beats Clotee in the book, he does strike Spicy across the face in the final chapter. Mistress Lilly Henley is a weak, foolish woman and a disinterested mother. Clotee's mother was Lilly Henley's personal maid, but Master Henley forced his wife to sell her maid; Clotee's mother later died far from her daughter. Clotee's father is not present in the story as he drowned in the river before she was born. Mistress Lilly often tries to make Clotee her little pet, claiming that Clotee's mother was a very good friend of hers. Clotee always finds a way to decline and Lilly soon gives up, taking another housemaid under her wing and trying to turn the household servants against each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_and_His_Air_Scout"title="Tom Swift and His Air Scout">
World War I still rages on in Europe, and Tom Swift is still inventing wartime technology, but inspiration comes in the form of infatuation: while taking Mary Nestor for a brief flight, he is unable to communicate due to the noise of the engine, which sets Tom onto the track of developing a totally silent airship. While Mary Nestor was the spark, Tom intends to offer this to the United States government for use on the western front.While this is still a germ of an idea, Tom is approached by Mr. Gale and Mr. Ware, representatives of the Universal Flying Machine Company, a competing airship manufacturer. Tom is offered a lucrative salary to join the firm, but Tom is uninterested in the money. Tom's refusal infuriates the men, and events are set in motion, which include the (accidental) kidnapping of Mr. Nestor, Mary's father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gomorrah_(book)"title="Gomorrah (book)">
The book describes the clandestine particulars of the business of the Camorra, a powerful Neapolitan mafia-like organization. In this book Saviano employs prose and news-reporting style to narrate the story of the Camorra, exposing its territory and business connections.In an article in 2020, Saviano said "[w]e forget what Gomorrah really is: Gomorrah is not a mere synonym with Camorra, Gomorrah is an economic system wherein everything is missing, where there are no investments, no opportunities, no education, no jobs, no resources, no businesses."Since 2006, following the publication of the book, Saviano has been threatened by several Neapolitan “godfathers”. The Italian Minister of the Interior has granted him a permanent police escort, but he's been often attacked by politicians of Berlusconi's cabinet. Also, his escort has been questioned.As of December 2008, the book has sold almost 4 million copies worldwide.The title of the book comes from a text by Giuseppe Diana, a parish priest in Casal di Principe who was killed by the Camorra in March 1994: "time has come to stop being a Gomorrah."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gypsy_Morph"title="The Gypsy Morph">
Angel Perez is found by Kirisin and Simralin, and brought to the blind elven tracker Larkin Quill for healing. Leaving Angel, Kirisin and Simralin use a hot-air balloon to travel to the elven city of Arborlon where they discover a demon army hiding outside the city, waiting for the order to attack. The two manage to evade the demon army and enter the city where they gain an audience with the elven High Council. The King is still skeptical about the danger awaiting Arborlon until it is violently revealed in the Council that the elven tracker Tragen is a demon in disguise. Tragen is killed and the elven King is finally convinced that the Arborlon and its guardian tree, the Ellcrys, must be transported within the Loden Elfstone to a safe location.Meanwhile, the Ghost tribe is reunited with Hawk, Tessa, and Cheney. Hawk uses his magic to heal the comatose Logan Tom who has a vision in which he is instructed to help the elves bring the Loden to safety. Logan leaves the ghosts and, with the help of an Owl named Trim, finds Arborlon. There, he meets, and falls in love with, Simralin. Kirisin then uses the magic of the Loden to encase the entire city and most of its inhabitants within the small stone. Simralin, the King, and a small contingent of elves hold off the demon attackers so that Logan can help Kirisin escape with the stone. Simralin and her companions are separated from Logan and Kirisin, but not before Kirisin gives Simralin the blue Seeking Elfstones for protection. Kirisin is later captured by flying demons called Skrails, but manages to drop the Loden before he is taken to the demon camp. After a frightening interrogation by the demon commander, Findo Gask, Kirisin is rescued by Logan. They then make their way to the camp of refugees led by Helen Rice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Romance_of_Two_Worlds"title="A Romance of Two Worlds">
A young improvisational musician in London experiences a debilitating depression. Her doctor is unable to help her and sends her off on a holiday where she meets a mystical character by the name of Raffello Cellini, an Italian painter who has rediscovered the secret of vivid, lightfast pigments. Cellini offers her a strange potion which immediately puts her into a tranquil slumber, in which she experiences divine visions, which causes her symptoms of neurasthenia to somewhat abate. Cellini directs her to take up residence in Paris under the tutelage of Heliobas, a Chaldean Christian and "electric physician" who performs miraculous feats including prophecy, telepathy and animal magnetism. He introduces her to his sister Zara, a sculptress, with whom she enjoys a close friendship, and to Prince Ivan, a rakish figure who pursues an unrequited attraction to Zara. She witnesses Ivan attempt to assault Zara, who repels him with electric power similar to that of an electric eel. From this, the protagonist gleans that the arts practiced by Heliobas enable the strengthening of a human organ similar to a voltaic pile, granting health and longevity as well as other powers. Heliobas prescribes plant remedies to the heroine, which cause her health to steadily improve and enable her to cultivate these supernatural powers. Under the influence of a psychedelic draught, she meets her unnamed guardian angel, who whisks her through infinite solar systems faster than a shooting star while human spirits fly by like gossamer silk. The spirits share with her the secrets of the universe and the nature of Christ, as well as a premonition that Heliobas's own salvation is in danger. When she awakes, Heliobas bestows upon her his treatise on the "Electric Principle of Christianity," which is reprinted in the book, as well as a document on the stewardship of her newfound electric powers. She witnesses Zara's death by lightning, which prompts Ivan to challenge Heliobas to a duel, and persuades Heliobas not to kill Ivan. Heliobas leaves Paris, assuring the heroine that they will meet again. In the conclusion, the heroine reflects on what she has learned from Heliobas since the events of the story, asserting a historical basis for crystal healing and other miracles. She states that she expects her story to be received as a fiction, but reaffirms her belief that the universe is electric in nature.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_(Douglass_novel)"title="Threshold (Douglass novel)">
Set in the Egypt-like kingdom of Ashdod and primarily narrated by the glass-working slave Tirzah, the novel takes place during the final stages of the construction of the titular Threshold, an enormous glass-clad pyramid. Designed by the Magi, an order of mathematically obsessed sorcerers, it is meant to open a gateway into Infinity, allowing the Magi to pass through and unite themselves with the One, an abstract proto-Platonic ideal of perfection. When the pyramid is activated, however, it instead allows the demonic entity Nzame to cross from Infinity into Ashdod, taking control of its people and turning most of the land into stone and black glass. Among those who escape are Tirzah, who is secretly an "elemental cantomancer," able to communicate with the spirits of objects, principally those of glass, and her former master, the conflicted Magus Boaz, who may hold the key to the destruction of both Nzame and Threshold.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar_(novel)"title="Jaguar (novel)">
Fourteen-year-old Jake is forced to be left to live at a retirement home in Poughkeepsie, New York while his father, Dr. Robert Lansa, travels to help his friend Bill set up a jaguar preserve. Doc, as everyone calls him, takes longer than expected in Brazil and sets up a plane ride for Jake to visit during his Spring Break. When he arrived in Manaus, Jake met Buzz, the expedition's pilot who is supposed to track jaguars at the preserve. Jake meets Doc but is angry with him for not arriving home, not keeping in touch, and not meeting him at the airport. A couple mornings later, Bill is working on the boat they received, and Buzz, Doc, and Jake are heading outside when the boat explodes. This explosion kills Bill, injured Buzz's leg, and injured Doc's arm. At first, the expedition is called off, but Silver, a skipper who lives in his boat nearby, offers his boat. At first, the expedition declines, but they decide that Jake could be the pilot and they could take the boat up the Amazon. Flanna, the expedition's botanist, goes with Doc to Brasilia to get the exploration permit changed. Meanwhile, Buzz teaches Jake how to fly the Morpho, a small ultralight plane. One night, Jake goes into Silver's boat and while looking at some of Silver's books, he is attacked by a man with a scar on his face and knocked out. Jake keeps this a secret between himself and Silver. When Doc and Flanna return, Doc, Flanna, Silver, and Jake get ready for the trip up the Amazon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Snow_Empress"title="The Snow Empress">
The prologue begins in autumn of 1699, with the murder of an unidentified woman in Hokkaido, followed by the kidnapping of Sano Masahiro, son of the Shogun's Lord Chamberlain, Sano Ichiro, at the autumn festivities at the Zōjō Temple in Edo city.Several months later, Sano is summoned by the shogun to undertake a mission. Lord , who administers the country's northernmost domain, has failed to report to the capital as scheduled, and messengers despatched to Hokkaido have not returned. With tensions rising between Sano and his rival, Lord Matsudaira, the last thing Sano wants is to leave Edo, but Matsudaira produces the piece of a toy sword belonging to Masahiro: it seems Matsudaira's agents have sent Sano's son north, leaving him no choice but to go to Ezogashima.Left with little choice, Sano departs, accompanied by a small retinue, including his wife Reiko, his chief retainer , and "The Rat", an Ezo migrant to Edo. Hirata had been training with an ancient martial arts mystic when he sensed Sano was in trouble. He also sensed that the attainment of the next level of mastery which had eluded him would be found in the mission.The mission was almost over before it began when their ship was wrecked off the coast of Hokkaido. The survivors were found and sheltered by local natives who refer to themselves as the Ainu instead of the derisive term Ezo used by the Japanese. The Ainu were much spiritually closer to their natural world than the Japanese, and in there Hirata sensed the key to his breakthrough.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maigret_Has_Scruples"title="Maigret Has Scruples">
On one of those rare days when all is quiet at the Quai des Orfèvres Maigret receives a visit from the mild-mannered toy salesman (at the Magasins du Louvre) Xavier Marton. Marton thinks that either his wife is trying to poison him or he is just crazy. Then Mme. Marton also shows up leaving Maigret rather bemused. Worried about his own wife's health and musing over his marriage, Maigret decides to investigate despite an order from the public prosecutor not to. When a body finally shows up, the reality is a surprise to everyone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_Stars_(novel)"title="To the Stars (novel)">
Protagonist Alan Corday is a young engineer, and is kidnapped from a spaceport called "New Chicago" and taken aboard the interstellar trading starship "Hound of Heaven". The ship is commanded by a charismatic leader named Captain Jocelyn, who tells Corday to use his skills to help the "Hound of Heaven" in its travels between Earth and space colonies in other star systems. On the first page of the book's prologue Hubbard cites "the basic equation of mass and time... AS MASS APPROACHES INFINITY, TIME APPROACHES ZERO", meaning that interstellar travelers at near light speed experience time relative to their environment, and when they return to their home star will find that decades or centuries may have passed. Six weeks of time aboard the ship amounts to roughly nine years experienced by those on Earth. Corday resists mingling with the culture aboard the starship, but when he returns home after travels with the "Hound of Heaven" he finds that his fiancee has aged and has trouble with her memory. Corday realizes his only home has become that of the starship. Captain Jocelyn is killed in an ambush on a dystopian Earth, and Corday takes command of the ship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Claimant"title="The American Claimant">
"The American Claimant" is a comedy of mistaken identities and multiple role switches. Its cast of characters include an American enamored of British hereditary aristocracy and a British earl entranced by American democracy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Herr_Friedemann"title="Little Herr Friedemann">
The story begins abruptly, as the family's alcoholic nurse drops one-month-old Johannes Friedemann from the changing table while the mother and three daughters are away. The main character is thus a marked man, a hunchback, not a writer or artist as in some other works by Thomas Mann. He grows up deformed and hunchbacked. He falls in love as a young boy with a girl, only to find her kissing another behind a hedge. He then swears off love dedicating himself to self-improvement. The result is a person of calm resignation, taking pleasure in music and literature. Friedemann grows into a man with taste, interested in music, clothes and literature. He is successful in his career and seemingly content. Soon, a military commander with a personable wife is stationed in Herr Friedemann's town. Frau Commandant von Rinnlingen destroys Herr Friedemann's seeming contentment. He falls in love with her on first sight, despite her lack of, what Mann describes as, classic beauty.Herr Friedemannn and Frau von Rinnglingen make a deep connection, despite the brevity of their encounters and the constraints of society. Herr Friedemann confesses to Frau von Rinnglingen that, after meeting her, he has realized his life thus far has been a lie; he was only imagining happiness, but was not happy. Frau von Rinnglingen tells him this was brave and admits to knowing similar sadness. He confesses his love to her; she pauses, then breaks away from him laughing. Friedemann drowns himself in a river.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eyeless"title="The Eyeless">
The Doctor, now on his own, is drawn to the ruins an ancient weapon at the heart of a destroyed civilisation. There he discovers survivors from the world before, people who were children when the weapon fell out of the sky and destroyed the great city, now adults heading a small tribe with offspring of their own. The tribe rests far beyond the city, away from the dangers of the decayed buildings and the ghosts of those who once lived in them. But there are new dangers arising. A race of glass conquerors calling themselves 'The Eyeless' have also been drawn to the ruins by the ancient power of the weapon, and the Doctor must venture deep into the centre of it to uncover why it suddenly appeared, and why it destroyed everything...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Martha"title="The Story of Martha">
As Martha travels, she meets survivors of the Master's domination of Earth. Martha relates stories conveying a message of hope that she and the Doctor can defeat the Master, foreshadowing the events of "Last of the Time Lords". The story ends at the point at which that episode begins.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Winston's_Daughter"title="General Winston's Daughter">
Averie is thrilled to visit Chiarrin, a colonized land her father oversees as general of the Aebrian military. As the foreign rhythms of her new life sweep her along, the general's daughter begins to question the ethics and wisdom of colonial governance, depicted as a rough parallel to British rule during empire days. She delves into the culture, strains against the fussy restraints of her era and social class, and finds herself drawn to an officer of non-Aerbrian descent. But it is an interesting young woman from the marketplace, Jalessa, who truly opens a window into Chiarrizi culture. As political resistance begins to threaten colonial rule, security becomes tighter and tensions rise.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myst_Reader"title="The Myst Reader">
## Book of Atrus."The Book of Atrus" serves as a prequel to the events of the eponymous first game in the "Myst" series, and introduces both new characters and old characters seen in the games. The book's protagonist is Atrus. He is raised by his grandmother Anna after his mother dies and his father abandons him. Eventually, Atrus' father Gehn returns from his explorations of the ruins of the D'ni empire and enlists Atrus to come follow him back to the fallen city. Gehn teaches Atrus the Art, a skill the D'ni used to create special books which allow transport between worlds known as Ages. Atrus is awed by the Art at first, but he is horrified when he witnesses Gehn's manipulation and dismissive attitude to the inhabitants of the Ages. He also comes to understand Gehn's selfish, cold cruelty and his own power-hungry nature; Gehn believes that he creates the Ages he writes, instead of creating links to preexisting universes. Gehn destroys Atrus' first Age, Inception, because it does not follow Gehn's style of writing. After attempting to escape his father, Gehn traps Atrus in a locked chamber in D'ni, with the only escape to Gehn's own Age of Riven. On Riven Atrus falls in love with a villager named Catherine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scourge_of_God_(novel)"title="The Scourge of God (novel)">
Rudi Mackenzie and company stage a rescue of Mathilda Arminger, Odard Liu, and Ingolf Vogeler from High Seeker Kuttner. They come upon a group of Mormon rebels, who join up with Rudi and reach the town of Picabo, now occupied by Church Universal and Triumphant (CUT). They attempt to infiltrate the town, but are discovered and chased out by Graber.After recovering in the woods, the whole company is discovered by a group of Buddhist monks and they winter in their monastery. While at the monastery, Ignatius receives a vision from Mary telling him to look after Mathilda.As the group enters Sioux territory, they are greeted by Sioux chief Red Leaf and his soldiers. Red Leaf gives the group sanctuary, but Major Graber catches up with them. The ranchers and the CUT are driven away after the two forces accidentally upset some lions. Rudi and his group stay with Red Leaf's tribe, but leave just before Graber returns with reinforcements. With the help of Red Leaf's son, they manage to get on the other side of a huge stream of migrating buffalo, thus losing Graber.Rudi and company make it to Iowa and, thanks to Ingolf's connections with a local influential farmer, are able to make it to Des Moines, where they hope to finance a trip into the eastern deathlands. The group is ambushed and captured by the State Police. It appears that the Bossman of Iowa is angry with Ingolf for not completing a salvaging expedition he had paid for into the eastern Death zones. Rudi volunteers to retrieve the goods that were abandoned in Illinois. The Bossman agrees on the condition that Rudi must do it alone in one month.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starting_with_Alice"title="Starting with Alice">
The book begins with Alice McKinley moving from Chicago to Takoma Park, Maryland with her single father, Ben, and older brother, Lester. As the new girl in school, she doesn't know a single person except for her next-door neighbor Donald Sheavers, who is not only a boy, but also seems to be a little bit peculiar. She gets off to a rough start when she meets three snooty girls, Jody, Dawn and Megan, whom Alice nicknames "The Terrible Triplets" after they make it clear they don't want to get to know her. Along the way, she makes some new friends, gets a kitten, attends a wedding, attends a funeral, confronts bullies and continues to learn about the world around her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grail_Prince"title="Grail Prince">
Before his death, King Arthur sends young Galahad, the oldest son of Lancelot and Elaine, on a quest to find the lost treasures of an ancient king — a Grail, a Spear, a Sword — which will safeguard Britain's future.For Galahad, the search becomes a transformative journey into manhood. His quest challenges his famed gallantry and purity, the traits that set him apart in Arthurian legend as the only knight fit for and worthy of the quest for the Holy Grail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Courts_of_the_Crimson_Kings"title="In the Courts of the Crimson Kings">
The story takes place on the planet Mars in an alternate universe solar system in which probes from both the United States and the Soviet Union find intelligent life and civilizations on both Venus and Mars. The book is heavily influenced by the works of writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, and Leigh Brackett.It is a sequel to "The Sky People", which is set on Venus. Stirling later wrote a short story prequel, "Sword of Zar-Tu-Kan", which was published in the 2013 anthology "Old Mars", edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princes_of_the_Golden_Cage_(novel)"title="The Princes of the Golden Cage (novel)">
Prince Amir lives in a lavish and beautiful cage. He lives in a palace with hundreds of his brothers, all barred by law from ever leaving the palace until he, or one of his brothers, becomes the next Sultan. Living under constant threat of death at the hands of his scheming brothers, Amir has chosen a life of solitude and study. His scholarly and alchemical pursuits bring him under suspicion when his brothers begin to die from seemingly supernatural means. Amir finds himself thrown together with his brother Erik, the son of a barbarian princess. Together they must discover the dark secret that is stalking the halls of their golden cage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marianne_and_Mark"title="Marianne and Mark">
Now aged fifteen Marianne returns to Brighton, where she recuperated from her illness at the end of "Marianne Dreams", when she was ten. Much to her disappointment she finds Brighton a lonely and boring place, and she tags along with local girls Alice and Josie despite having little in common with them.One evening Josie's friend Billie tells the girls of a visit to a local fortune teller who apparently gives remarkably accurate readings. Reluctantly, Marianne joins the girls on a trip to the fortune teller and there she is astonished at how much the woman guesses about her life, including details of her illness five years ago. The fortune teller assures Marianne that she will not be lonely for much longer and that soon she will experience romance.Spurred on by this Marianne accepts a date with a boy called Alan, whom she doesn't realise is Billie's former boyfriend. This inadvertent betrayal alienates Marianne from the few friends she had, and after Alan also deserts her she is left on her own. It is then that she meets Mark, a boy from London who, it transpires, is the same boy with whom she shared a tutor but never met in "Marianne Dreams". The two enjoy the last few days of the holiday together and promise to meet again in London.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shesher_Kabita"title="Shesher Kabita">
The novel recounts the love story of Amit Ray living in Kolkata in the 1920s. Though he is a barrister educated at Oxford his main interest lies in literature. Never afraid to speak his mind, he is always ready to challenge society's pre-established knowledge and rules regarding literature, equal rights and so on. While vacationing in Shillong, he comes upon a governess named Labanya in a minor car accident. Amit's iconoclasm meets Labannya's sincere simplicity through a series of dialogues and poems that they write for each other.The novel also contains a self-reference of significance in Bengali literature. By the late 1920s, more than a decade after his Nobel Prize, Tagore had become a towering presence in Bengal, and was facing criticism:Shortly after this meeting, while writing this novel, Tagore has Amit railing against a much revered poet, whose name turns out to be Rabi Thakur - Rabi is a common short form of Rabindranath, and Thakur is the original Bengali for Tagore. Amit remarks: "Poets must live for at most five years. ... Our severest complaint against Rabi Thakur is that like Wordsworth, he is illicitly staying alive." These remarks aroused much mirth among the reading public, but the novel is also a serious attempt at demonstrating his versatility, at age 67.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusader_(Bloor_novel)"title="Crusader (Bloor novel)">
The central character in "Crusader" is 15-year-old Roberta Ritter, who lives in south Florida with her widowed father. Roberta is an aspiring journalist, but works after school and on the weekends at Arcane, the virtual-reality arcade run by her father and uncle.Roberta is apathetic towards many facets of her life. Her father acknowledges her presence, instead spending much of his free time with his girlfriend, Suzie. Roberta doesn't approve of the games offered in Arcane, which are all filled with over-the-top violence and covert racism, nor does she like having to deal with the arcade's often unsavory clientele. Roberta deals with coming of age problems, criticized by her cousin's popular friend Nina for her disinterest in make-up and never having menstruated. She also is forced to come to terms with finding many of the people around her to be motivated by self-interest and the deaths of both an elderly friend, Winston Peters, and her mother.Roberta takes it upon herself, with the occasional help of some friends and her high school journalism teacher, to investigate a series of incidents at the mall where Arcane is located. These incidents range from hate crimes perpetrated against vendors, to rumors that the mall developers are planning to have the mall burned down in an insurance scam. She also begins to dig into the facts surrounding her mother's murder. Roberta likes the idea of muckraking as a way of unveiling hidden injustice, but also becomes disillusioned with both her teacher and the local news station after witnessing the inability to pursue real journalism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kushiel's_Mercy"title="Kushiel's Mercy">
Sidonie and Imriel confess their love, causing a national uproar. To mitigate the turmoil and quell the uprising, Queen Ysandre decrees that she won't acknowledge the lovers. To appease the Queen, Imriel embarks on a quest to find his mother and return her to the kingdom where she faces treason charges and execution.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_of_the_Crimson_Guard"title="Return of the Crimson Guard">
The novel is set shortly after the events of "The Bonehunters". The Malazan Empire is in turmoil following the catastrophic war in Seven Cities and the plague which has devastated the subcontinent and severely disrupted food supplies to Quon Tali, the Empire's home continent. In an attempt to divert the populace's anger elsewhere, the Empress Laseen has pinned the blame for the disaster on the Wickan contingents of the armies in Seven Cities, and a pogrom has been launched into the Wickan homelands. However, this bluff has not succeeded and civil war threatens to tear the Empire apart. Whilst the Malazan Empire teeters on the brink of disaster, the mercenary group known as the Crimson Guard has been summoned back to Quon Tali to take advantage of the chaos and fulfil their century-old vow to liberate their homeland from the occupiers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_and_His_Undersea_Search"title="Tom Swift and His Undersea Search">
A Mr. Dixwell Hardley approaches Tom with a proposition to help recover sunken treasure. Mr. Hardley was on board a ship which was carrying gold to help finance an illegal revolution. When the ship sank, Mr. Hardley overheard the captain recording the coordinates. Now he wants Tom's help to recover the gold, under the guise of both financing the expedition as well as rewarding Tom with a portion of the recovered treasure.Unfortunately for Tom, after agreeing to the expedition, he learns that Mr. Hardley is a con-artist, who recently scammed someone out of the oil well rights. Making matters worse, the victim is Barton Keith, a relative of Mary Nestor. Rather than cancel the expedition, Tom decides to carry on in the hopes of restoring Mr. Keith's claims to the oil wells.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_Reckoning"title="Winter Reckoning">
The novel concerns the adventures of Molly Kerbridge, a member of the Planetary Federation, on a world called Tringe. There she encounters the Fnick, a reptilian race intent on conquest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swindle_(novel)"title="Swindle (novel)">
A smart, young boy named Griffin Bing decides to invite his entire class grade over for a sleepover in an old, abandoned house that is slated to be demolished after the town's plan for using as a new space in their town to make a skate park was thrown out because of their youth. However, on the night of the sleepover, only Griffin and his best friend Ben Slovak show up. Griffin finds a vintage baseball card. The card was a 1920 Babe Ruth trading card worth $974,000. S. Wendell Palomino, or Swindle as the boys call him, stiffed them and gave Griffin only 120 dollars for the card. Griffin gave half to Ben. The boys attempt to steal the card from a safe in Palomino's shop, but it has been moved. After discovering that it is in his house, they group up with a few other people and decide to steal the card back in an elaborate heist. The team consists of Griffin, Ben, Melissa, Savannah, and Pitch, but Darren blackmails them into letting him also join the team. They steal the card, but leave a little evidence to their identity, and they are caught. However, news of Swindle's swindling comes out in the newspaper, and he does not press charges-instead, he gets a dose of karma and his shop does not see much visitors anymore. The card goes on auction, selling for 974,000 dollars, with the money eventually going to a town museum and the skate park.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Skin_(adventure_book)"title="Second Skin (adventure book)">
When you find yourself on a 23rd-century space station, you soon realise a dangerous alien parasite has taken over most of the people on board. Can you and the Doctor destroy it before it reaches Earth?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragon_King_(adventure_book)"title="The Dragon King (adventure book)">
Your journey takes you to the planet Elandeffn, where people live side by side with dragons. But hunters from a neighbouring planet are attacking... Can you restore peace to these two clashing worlds?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_Terrain"title="Fatal Terrain">
Taiwanese politicians vote to declare independence from China in early June 1997 and the US immediately recognizes Taiwan as a sovereign state. However, Beijing does not take the declaration lightly and plans offensive operations to reimpose the one-China policy, with the initial swing led by the PLAN's deployment of the aircraft carrier "Mao Zedong".Meanwhile, the US government authorizes a covert deployment of two EB-52 Megafortresses to patrol over the Taiwan Strait and keep watch on the situation. Lt. General Bradley Elliott successfully reorganizes the survivors of the original Old Dog crew for the operation as part of a plan to pitch the Megafortress as new aircraft for the US Air Force. A stand-off between a Taiwanese Navy frigate and the "Mao Zedong" task force escalates as the Old Dog crew is forced to intervene.The battle opens an opportunity for the Chinese to wage an international public-relations campaign to paint the US and Taiwan as the aggressors. Chinese Admiral Sun Ji Guoming uses Sun Tzu's lessons on deception to give the campaign added leverage. His schemes include launching torpedoes against the "Mao Zedong" and frame the attack on the Taiwanese submarine "Hai Hu" shadowing it in Hong Kong harbor, disguising a ferry as a cruiser to provoke an attack by the Megafortress, and detonating a suitcase nuke on the USS "Independence" as it steams out of Japan for deployment to the Taiwan Strait. Sun uses the success of his deception operation to launch a massive air campaign against Taiwan, starting off with nuclear-tipped SAMs fired on Taiwanese F-16s attacking a naval base in Fujian province. The Chinese attacks on Taiwan - with nuclear weapons used on several of them - prompts the US to prepare its own strategic nuclear forces.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unfortunates"title="The Unfortunates">
A sportswriter is sent to a city (identifiable through landmarks as Nottingham) on an assignment, only to find himself confronted by ghosts from his past. As he attempts to report an association football match, memories of his friend, a tragic victim of cancer, haunt his mind.The city visited remains unnamed, however the novel contains an accurate description of Nottingham landmarks, its streetscape, and its environment in 1969, with additional recallings of 1959.The football ground in the novel is obviously Nottingham Forest's City Ground, whence the fictional football club 'City' comes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senselessness"title="Senselessness">
A sex-obsessed lush of a writer is employed by the Catholic Church to edit and tidy up a 1,100-page report on the army's massacre and torture of the indigenous villagers a decade earlier. The writer becomes mesmerized by the poetic phrases written by the indigenous people and becomes increasingly paranoid and frightened, not only by the spellbinding words he must read, but also by the murders and generals that run the country. The country, never named, is identifiable as Guatemala through the mention of two presidents, Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo and Efrain Rios Montt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_in_Case"title="Just in Case">
The book is set in Luton, Bedfordshire where fifteen-year-old David Case saves his younger brother from falling out of an open window. Scared by the experience, he starts to see danger everywhere, believes that Fate is stalking him, and decides to change his identity in order to escape his destiny. He changes his name to Justin, adopts a new wardrobe, seeks out new friends, acquires an imaginary dog, all in the hope of avoiding Fate. His new, moody, self-absorbed persona attracts attention, not all of it good, and Fate is not fooled at all.The title and David's adopted name Justin Case refer to his preparation phobia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_Among_the_Fire_Fighters"title="Tom Swift Among the Fire Fighters">
While Tom and Ned Newton are reviewing financial records, a fire breaks out at the fireworks factory in town. Assisting the firemen, they rescue Josephus Baxter, Mr. Baxter is developing a new dye formula and has hired out laboratory space at the factory. During the mayhem created by the fire and the rescue, Mr. Baxter loses the formula, but he is positive that the owners of the factory have stolen it. Tom feels pity for the man and allows him the use the labs at the Swift Construction Company.While observing the blaze, Tom wonders if there is not a more efficient way to fight the fire, especially having troubles with multi-storied buildings or skyscrapers. These thoughts lead him to develop a new fire suppressant chemical, and an air-borne system to deliver the new chemicals to the upper stories of skyscrapers.Tom also rescues a small boat in distress, with the aid of a naphtha launch.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_and_His_Electric_Locomotive"title="Tom Swift and His Electric Locomotive">
Richard Bartholomew, president of the Hendrickton and Pas Alos Railroad Company (H&amp;PA) is under pressure to save his company from bankruptcy. If Mr. Bartholomew cannot come up with a means to compete with the Hendrickton &amp; Western railroad, the H&amp;PA will be doomed to failure. Mr. Bartholomew has contracted The Swift Construction Company to build a new electric locomotive which can travel at 2 miles per minute ( ).The catch is that the owner of the competing H&amp;W railway, Montagne Lewis, is dishonest and will stop at nothing to prevent Mr. Bartholomew from succeeding. Hired thugs are under orders to destroy Tom's developments. Tom, and his friends Ned Newton and Mr. Damon, have several life-threatening encounters with these hired gunmen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eagle_and_the_Wolves"title="The Eagle and the Wolves">
The book begins with the aftermath of the last book as Cato and Macro recover from their injuries in the Atrebatan capital city of Calleva. The Durotrigans are still at large raiding the Roman supply lines in Atrebatan territory. The Legate Vespasian with a small bodyguard come to investigate the stop of the supply lines, but is caught up in a skirmish to save a caravan of supplies. The raiders are only just fended off with most of the guards killed. The Atrebatan king, Verica, demands that Vespasian leave troops to protect the kingdom. Vespasian is unable to leave troops, but instead has Centurions Macro and Cato to train local troops. The two make good progress training two cohorts of locals as Roman troops. The two cohorts are named the Wolves and the Boars, and in their first combat action, ambush a Durotrigan raiding party of some 500 men, resulting in a much-needed victory. In light of such success General Plautius is worried that arming disloyal locals would endanger his rear flank against Caracutus and sends a Tribune Quintillus with procurator powers to assess the situation.The situation at Calleva is dangerous as the locals are questioning whether they should be aiding the British resistance instead of Rome. Internal politics run rife and an assassination attempt is made on the King, who is grievously injured in the attempt. The Boars and Wolves are called to attack a raiding party, but it is revealed to be a trap. The army routs and most of the troops are massacred before they make it back to Calleva. Only around 200-odd of the 960 men escape back into the city. Tincommius, the king's "loyal" nephew is revealed to be the would-be assassin and has set siege to the city in a power play with the Durotrigans. Cato and Macro's men are forced to abandon the walls and fall back to the royal enclosure as the enemy numbers overwhelm the loyalist army. The Legate Vespasian's relief forces soon arrive to drive the enemy from the city, only to abandon it after hearing news of Caracutus' superior flanking force. Forced into battle Vespasian's forces attempt a last stand against the British onslaught, only to be saved by the pursuing forces of General Plautius. Victory is snatched from the jaws of defeat. The novel finishes with the Atrebatan Kingdom annexed regardless and the remaining Boars and Wolves disbanded. Centurion's Macro and Cato are left with another set of medals and reinstatement to the 3rd Cohort, with Cato commanding the 6th Century.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passage_(Bujold_novel)"title="Passage (Bujold novel)">
"Passage "is the immediate sequel to "Legacy" in The Sharing Knife series. It takes farmer's daughter Fawn and Lakewalker maverick Dag back to her home farm as a first step on their 'honeymoon trip' to the Southern Sea, which is analogous to the Gulf of Mexico in The Sharing Knife series' alternate-world setting. At the farm they add the first of a considerable list of fellow-travelers: Fawn's older brother Whit.Once on their way again another odd companion is added by accident, quite literally, as Hod the charity-case helper of the teamster taking them to find flatboat passage on the Grace River (the Ohio River) gets his kneecap shattered by Dag's ill-tempered horse. This begins a series of events in each of which Dag's ground-working abilities are stretched past old limits, ground being the series setting's term for what might well be read as chi. Hod happens to owe much of his sloth and sly theft of edibles to a well-grown tapeworm, not suspected by his employer and only noticed in passing by Dag. But by his good curing works Dag has, as he feared, left himself open to an avalanche of farmer folk with ailments. He has, also, unwittingly beguiled Hod—Hod follows him, and wants more of Dag's ministrations. So there are dangers to the farmers he tries to cure, too. Much of the novel follows out his attempts to present what Lakewalkers do, how, and with what limitations, in ways that farmers should understand. This action violates long-standing Lakewalker secrecy about just these matters. Dag, in his effort to reduce a culture gap that has already led to violent misunderstandings, sees no choice but to risk apostasy. After he, with help from two other Lakewalkers, and many of the so-called farmers (in this book, the non-Lakewalkers mostly work with boats, not farms) defeats a renegade Lakewalker, who has been leading a group of murderers and robbers, Dag even demonstrates, for a group of farmers, the ceremony that turns a knife made from a bone from a deceased Lakewalker into a sharing knife. He also discovers how to remove a beguilement.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Sacred_Ginmill_Closes"title="When the Sacred Ginmill Closes">
This Matthew Scudder noir crime novel starts out much like the previous books in the series. Matt is still drinking heavily and solving crimes as an "unofficial" private detective in gritty New York. There are three separate mysteries that are intertwined, involving multiple dead bodies, stolen money and other complications. But the real story is Matt's drinking and how it affects his work.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Savarus"title="Albert Savarus">
Rosalie is the only daughter of the Wattevilles, a distinguished family of Besançon. Her father is very timid and spends his time working on a lathe, while her mother is quite proud and domineering. Her mother is trying to encourage Rosalie to take an interest in M. de Soulas, who is a young fop. At a dinner party, the Abbe reports the spectacular success of a lawyer Savaron, who has settled quietly in the town. Rosalie takes an interest in the lawyer, who is good-looking, and gets her father to build a gazebo in the garden with the secret intent of being able to watch Savaron. Savaron is successful in several cases, and it becomes known that he has started a local literary journal. Rosalie persuades her father to subscribe, and reads a story obviously penned by Savaron.In Savaron's story, two young men are touring in Switzerland. From a boat on a lake, Rudolfe, one of the young men, becomes captivated by a girl he sees leaning out of a window in a house on the lakeside. He instantly decides to stop in the village, and makes enquiries. He is told that the girl is a young English girl staying with her grandfather who has come there for his health with a dumb girl as a servant. Rudolfe tries to obtain invitations and eventually creeps into the garden and overhears the two girls talking Italian. It emerges that they are Italian émigrés who are hiding in Switzerland. Furthermore, it turns out that the girl, Francesca, is married to the old man. Rudolfe befriends them and enters into a chaste love affair with the girl. They are in love and agree to wait until the old man dies to get married. News comes that their exile has been lifted and the Italians depart to Geneva, where Rudolfe is to meet them later. When he gets there, it turns out that Francesca is a princess and her husband is a Duke. Rudolfe is invited to the house, and they swear undying love, before Rudolfe departs to make his name in the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_of_Chéri"title="The Last of Chéri">
"The Last of Chéri" picks up the lives of Cheri and Lea after a six-year break during which World War I has been fought and Cheri returns an uninjured hero. During this time, Edmee and Madame Peloux have become more assertive in home and business as do many women in the burgeoning suffragist movement. Cheri finds himself wandering aimlessly with no focus now that he does not have his former lover Lea nor the war to occupy his time.Cheri is also perplexed by the assertive behaviors of Edmee and his mother; he cannot adapt to the new role of women in the post-War era. Eventually, Cheri and Edmee grow further apart and live separate lives, Edmee taking lovers without any jealousy from her husband. Attempting to recapture his past, Cheri visits old friends but finds that they, too, have moved on to new ventures and do not want to dwell in stories of the past. Cheri grows increasingly impatient with his life surrounded by Edmee and Madame Peloux and finds any route he can to escape even for a little while; including buying a car and taking friends on long day trips into the French countryside.Because he can find no purpose to his life, Cheri obsesses about Lea. He makes the mistake of visiting her one day to find that she has aged and is overweight with short gray hair. Cheri is repulsed by Lea's appearance and plunges into an even deeper despair. Just when Cheri has reached the point where he can think of nothing that interests him or motivates him to think beyond the present, he runs into an old acquaintance, the Pal, who offers up her flat to Cheri's need for time alone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancelot_and_the_Lord_of_the_Distant_Isles,_or_the_&quot;Book_of_Galehaut&quot;_Retold"title="Lancelot and the Lord of the Distant Isles, or the &quot;Book of Galehaut&quot; Retold">
The author of the 13th-century Prose "Lancelot"—the massive section of the Old French Vulgate Cycle devoted to Lancelot—expanded the Arthur-Guenevere-Lancelot love triangle into a rectangle, adding a figure named Galehaut, Lord of the Distant Isles, a powerful political and military foe to Arthur and a rival to Guenevere for the love of Lancelot. The Old French account is an extraordinary tale, related with an understanding of human desires and aspirations unprecedented in its depth and richness. For love of Lancelot, Galehaut surrenders his political ambitions, voluntarily submitting to the rule of Arthur; the same reason leads him to facilitate the rapprochement of Lancelot and the Queen. The invincible Lord of the Distant Isles, who had seemed destined to conquer the world, becomes a paragon of love-inspired self-sacrifice.In this retelling of the episodes concerning the connection between Galehaut and Lancelot, two motifs are emphasized: magic and a new understanding of love. The first is embodied in the Lady of the Lake; the second in Galehaut, the Lord of the Distant Isles. Unlike other retellings or translations of the Old French sources, this novel seeks to retell the central love-drama in such a way as to restore its complexity and emotional depth for the modern reader.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowland_(Straub_novel)"title="Shadowland (Straub novel)">
The story concerns two teenage boys, Tom Flanagan, and Del Nightingale, who attend a prestigious all boys private school called Carson's. The freshmen students are at the whims of the seniors, most notably, Steve “Skeleton” Ridpath, son of Coach Ridpath, one of many mean and troublesome teachers at Carson. Tom befriends several of the freshmen and bonds with them over the school year. Tom and Skeleton are haunted by ghostly visions of vultures and of a nightmarish figure that Del seems to know. Skeleton becomes insane and sociopathic over the course of the novel and behaves strangely during school because of these occurrences. Del and Tom bond over their shared love of magic, which Del is an expert at and demonstrates to Tom during their school year.During an away football game at another private school, the boys see Skeleton nonchalantly steal an artifact from the other school. This causes disarray from both schools and Carson students are subjected to extensive interrogation from the teachers, and they can't figure out who stole the item. It is revealed that Skeleton kept the item, a bejeweled owl, alongside papers he cheated off of inside the piano, which explained as to why he got so angry at the students when they were near it, exampled when Skeleton whipped Del with his belt. Del breaks the owl thereafter, and the situation is mostly forgotten.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ledfeather"title="Ledfeather">
A young Blackfoot man discovers the 1883 letters of an Indian Agent, whose decisions have "impacted the lives of generations of Blackfeet Indians." As the novel progresses, it is shown that this young man, Doby Saxon, and the Indian Agent may be the same soul inhabiting two separate bodies, and the Indian Agent has been forced to live in the future on the same reservation still plagued by the consequences of his decision.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_the_Stone_Age"title="Back to the Stone Age">
The story reveals the fate of Wilhelm von Horst, the lost member of the previous book's outer world expedition to Pellucidar, which had been led by Jason Gridley and Tarzan to rescue Pellucidarian emperor David Innes from the Korsars. The action begins by recapping the incident in which Gridley, von Horst, and Tarzan's Waziri warriors, led by Muviro, are caught up in and separated by a horde of saber-toothed tigers’ cooperative hunt. Now on his own, von Horst quickly becomes lost, links up again with the Waziri by accident, and gets lost again when he foolishly goes out hunting on his own.In the most powerful sequence in the book, von Horst becomes prey himself when a Trodon, or a pterodactyl-like Dragon, carries him off to its nest in the crater of a dead volcano. The explorer is left poisoned and paralyzed together with other victims, all of them intended as a living larder to feed the creature's young as its eggs hatch. Von Horst passes the time by getting to know a fellow paralytic, the native warrior Dangar of Sari, a member-tribe of Innes' empire. From him, the outer worlder gradually learns the Pellucidarian language. Von Horst's clothing prevented him from receiving a full dose of venom, and he recovers from his paralysis in time to save Dangar from the next hatchling. Shooting the immature trodon, he makes a long strap from its hide, lassos the parent on its next return, and after allowing it to fly off just past the lip of the crater, shoots it in turn. After securing the free end of the strap to the still paralyzed Dangar, he uses it to climb out of the trap, pulling his companion up after him. In the forest at the foot of the mountain he constructs a treehouse to serve them as a secure base while Dangar recovers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Face_in_the_Abyss"title="The Face in the Abyss">
The novel concerns American mining engineer Nicholas Graydon. While searching for lost Inca treasure in South America, he encounters Suarra, handmaiden to the Snake Mother of Yu-Atlanchi. She leads Graydon to an abyss where Nimir, the Lord of Evil is imprisoned in a face of gold. While Graydon's companions are transformed by the face into globules of gold on account of their greed, he is saved by Suarra and the Snake Mother whom he joins in their struggle against Nimir.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorine_(novel)"title="Honorine (novel)">
Maurice is a Consul at Gênes/Genoa, a Mediterranean town where he has married Onorina the daughter of the only wealthy man into the town, although it seems he was originally extremely reluctant to get married. They are having a dinner party with guests from Paris, and Maurice recounts some of his history.When Maurice was young, he became secretary to Count Octave. The count was very good to him but seemed very sad and mysterious as if hiding some past misfortune. Eventually Maurice discovers that he had been married, but his wife had left him. She, Honorine, had been brought up with him from a very early age, having been adopted by his parents, and they were devoted to each other. They had become married almost as a matter of course. However, after a few months she just disappeared. Octave then discovered she had gone off with an adventurer who had abandoned her, pregnant. She had the child but lived full of remorse, and resisted all attempts of Octave to get in touch with her. Octave is still devoted to her and secretly helps her in her business of flower arranging. However she still refuses to have anything to do with him. The Count therefore gets Maurice to act as a go between, arranging for him to occupy the house next to her, and pose as a misogynistic flower breeder. Eventually Maurice makes contact and indirectly puts the Count’s case. Honorine is still too overcome with remorse and shame. Eventually however she agrees to see the count, and then goes back to live with him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Fausse_Maîtresse"title="La Fausse Maîtresse">
Clementine is a descendant of rich and noble families whose wealth has been dissipated. She married Count Laginski a Polish immigrant who is quite prosperous. They are a happy couple well set up in an attractive house. Clementine discovers that Adam has a friend who is acting as steward and general manager, a handsome young man who has kept in the background. Adam and Thaddee had served together in the army and were close friends, although Thaddee was poor, but very capable. He was devoted to Adam, and had volunteered to look after Adam’s affairs since he was worried that Adam and his wife would dissipate their fortune. Clementine insists that Thaddee join in their various social activities and finds him attractive. Thaddee falls in love with Clementine, but his devotion to his friends puts him in complete anguish. When Clementine tries to find out more about him, he invents a secret mistress who is a girl in the circus called Malaga. Having done this, he has to make the story true, and tracks down Malaga and sets her up as if he were his mistress. However he does no more apart from paying for her keep, but upsets Clementine by carrying on with her and occasionally having to borrow money. In time, Thaddee believes Clementine is capable of looking after the finances, and claims that to get Malaga out of his mind he is leaving Paris and going into the army again. Nothing more is heard of him, until one night, when an infamous rake tries to seduce Clementine, taking her away in his carriage. A figure grabs Clementine and sets her on the right track in her own carriage. It is Paz, who has never left Paris but has kept in the background looking after his friends. It is revealed that the invention of Malaga as his imaginary mistress was a ploy to discourage Clementine from taking an interest in him, thereby preserving his friendship with Adam. It is not quite clear whether Adam had had an affair with Malaga which Paz had to keep quiet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Change_(Parker_novel)"title="Sea Change (Parker novel)">
In his grittiest investigation to date, Jesse Stone hunts for the killer of a woman whose body washes up on shore. The woman turns out to be Florence “Flo” Horvath, of Miami, Florida. She was pushed off a boat, then run over; knocking her unconscious and causing her to drown. The investigation comes to a halt shortly after she is identified, until Jesse acquires a tape of Flo having sex with two men at the same time. He also discovers that Flo rented a boat before she was murdered, but that it was returned to the wrong place. During the investigation he is led to the yacht “The Lady Jane.” He questions the yacht owner Harrison Darnell, and the other occupants, who of course all deny knowing Flo. In an attempt to get more information, Jesse sneaks onto the yacht and finds a stack of sex tapes. He takes one and reviews it, and although it is sexual in nature, he does not find anything criminal.Later seventeen-year-old Cathleen Holten comes to Chief Stone with accusations of rape. She claims that a man took her onto his yacht, The Lady Jane, forces her to strip for his friends and then rapes her in his cabin. Although, Jesse does not believe her, and the rape later proves to be consensual sex, he uses this opportunity to get a warrant and search the yacht. Having been there before he goes right for the video tapes and confiscates them. While reviewing them with Molly, she recognizes her daughter's fifteen-year-old friend as one of the sex partners. Although Jesse now has the yacht owner for statutory rape, he continues to investigate, determined to get the murderer. However, in the end he does have him and another man arrested for statutory rape. He next finds one of the men in Flo's sex tape and discovers that the men in the tape were brothers. He reveals that it was Flo's sisters that made the tape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maigret_in_Exile"title="Maigret in Exile">
The mysterious moves of bureaucrats have exiled Maigret to a small town in the coast of Normandy where it rains all the time and there is nothing to do except for playing billiards in the local pub and sniff the gel that the local inspector lathers into his hair. Then an old woman shows up with a story about a body in the house of a judge in the fishing village of l'Aiguillon and things get interesting. A young woman with a mysterious ailment (something to do with being over-sexed but Simenon never explains what exactly is wrong with her), a young man with a temper, a hotel waitress with a secret, and an ex-judge with taste and style.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nico_the_Unicorn"title="Nico the Unicorn">
After the accident which resulted in his leg being injured. Billy visits the Starlight Circus. There he meets and buys a pony who gives birth to a unicorn who he names Nico. Later the pony gets killed by a mountain lion and Billy has to do what he can with his secret to protect his new friend.Billy and his mother moved from Boston to rural Vermont after a car accident which left Billy fatherless and with a gimpy leg. Billy has a hard time adjusting to life in Vermont and has trouble making friends. While shopping at the mall after school one day, Billy stumbles upon a ramshackle petting zoo, where the animals are kept in poor conditions. After seeing a small pony with a horn taped to its head and finding out that it is about to be sold for slaughter, Billy instead makes a deal with the zoo keeper and buys the pony. Once Billy takes the pony home, he cleans her up and cares for her. The pony appears to be pregnant and eventually foals, under the watchful eye of Billy and his friend Carolyn. The pony's foal grows a horn and turns out to be a unicorn, who grows at a tremendous rate. Billy names the colt Nico from the letters found in the word "unicorn".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khasakkinte_Itihasam"title="Khasakkinte Itihasam">
The protagonist, Ravi, a Malayali final year under-graduate student in Madras, is haunted by the guilt of an affair he had with his stepmother. He thus abandons the prospects of a bright academic career, deserts his girlfriend Padma and leaves on a long journey, which finally brings him to the remote (fictional) village of Khasak near Palakkad (central Kerala). At Khasak, he works in a single-teacher government primary school as part of the Malabar District Board’s education initiative. The story commences with Ravi’s arrival at Khasak and the beginning of his encounters with its people and legends. He immerses himself in the 'bewitching sensuousness of the rustic, amoral world', only to emerge as an 'involved outsider'. He finds rational inquiry meaningless and begins a metaphorical journey inwards. The narrative strategy of the novel is characterized by the matter-of-fact inclusion of fantastic or mythical elements into seemingly realistic fiction. The narration also makes sense of multiple separate realities (see magic realism). At the end of a series of events, including the threat of suspension from the authorities, Ravi keeps his word to his ex-girlfriend Padma to leave Khasak. The novel ends with Ravi in the monsoon rain, waiting for his bus to leave the village, watching a snake that had struck him withdrawing into its hole. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_and_the_Genii"title="The Twelve and the Genii">
Max is an eight-year-old boy whose family has just moved into an old farmhouse in Yorkshire. He discovers some old toy soldiers in the attic and is surprised and delighted to find that they come to life. The soldiers, known as the Twelves, or the Young Men, have different personalities; they are brave, intelligent and very independent, not to mention argumentative. They adopt Max as one of their Genii, or protective spirits, and he begins to spend most of his time watching and thinking about them. He learns from the local parson that they once belonged to the Brontës, who wrote stories about their adventures. When his older sister Jane discovers the secret, she becomes as keen on the soldiers as Max is.The local newspaper publishes a letter about the Brontë wooden soldiers, from an American professor offering £5,000 (at the time a small fortune) to anyone who finds them. Max and Jane's older brother Philip believes the Morley soldiers may be the Brontë ones, and impulsively writes to the professor about them – only to deeply regret his act when he too discovers the truth.The soldiers learn that they are in danger of being taken to America and disappear in the night. The children have some anxious moments before they discover that the soldiers have determined to return to their original home in Haworth, now a museum dedicated to the Brontës. Their march across the countryside is fraught with peril, but they finally reach safe haven with the protection of the Genii.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Falcon_(novel)"title="Millennium Falcon (novel)">
Much of the novel delves into the fictional history of the "Millennium Falcon", from the time it came off the assembly line to when it was owned by Han Solo.In 19 BBY, during the Battle of Coruscant in the clone wars, the "Falcon" is known as the "Stellar Envoy" and captained by Tobb Jadak and his copilot Reeze Duurmun. Jadak and Duurmun are conspirators in a plot to overthrow Supreme Chancellor Palpatine as leader of the Old Republic. Their mission fails when an erratic hyperspace jump lands the "Envoy" in an accident, killing Duurmun and placing Jadak in a coma that lasts for more than sixty years. By 43 ABY, two years after the end of the Second Galactic Civil War, Jadak awakes, having barely aged since his time in the coma. With the help of Flitcher Poste, they attempt to find out what happened to the "Stellar Envoy".Meanwhile, the Solos discover a mysterious object aboard the "Falcon", and decide to ascertain the "Falcon" origins. They work their way back in time from when Lando Calrissian first owned the ship until they eventually cross paths with Jadak and Poste. Jadak reveals that the mysterious object in the Solos hands will lead them to a treasure on the world of Tandun III, which was meant to overthrow Palpatine. On their heels is Lestra Oxic, a mysterious businessman who wants the treasure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Storms_of_Chai"title="The Storms of Chai">
The Claw of Naar is the evil wand of power used by Agarash the Damned during his ancient conquest of Magnamund. After retrieving it in "Vampirium", the reader handed it over to the Elder Magi who tried to destroy it. That was 18 years ago, but Elder Magi are still trying to figure out how to annihilate it.The reader is now living in the new Kai Monastery on the Isle of Lorn and receives grim news: several hordes of Agarashi have been spotted all over Magnamund. Lone Wolf, the Supreme Grand Master of the Kai Order, dispatches his six Grand Masters to missions across the world to investigate and stop the menaces.One of those hordes of Agarashi is marching towards the country of Chai, ruled by the young Khea-khan Lao Tin. The reason: one of the gems that embellish the Khea-khan's throne is the Eye of Agarash, a stone that can be coupled with the Claw of Naar to increase its destructive power. The reader's mission is to retrieve the Eye of Agarash before their enemies. But that is the easy part: bringing back the gem to the Elder Magi, with Agarashi roaming the land of Chai, is where the real challenge resides for the reader.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Business_(novel)"title="Bad Business (novel)">
Spenser is hired by a wealthy woman, Marlene Rowley, to gather evidence on her husband's infidelity. While following the husband, Trent, one evening and finding him meeting his mistress, Spenser discovers that she too is being followed by another private detective. Things get even stranger when Spenser discovers that Marlene Rowley is also being followed by a third P.I.Eventually, Trent winds up dead as Spenser is waiting to follow him outside his place of business, Kinergy, where he is CFO. The investigation picks up steam as Spenser tries to solve the murder. More people end up dead and the other two P.I.s Spenser ran into disappear. The story involves corporate corruption and an accounting scandal that only a detective as determined as Spenser can unravel.Several Spenser-verse reappearing characters are featured in this book including Hawk, Vinnie Morris, Susan Silverman and Pearl, their dog.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Dome_(novel)"title="Under the Dome (novel)">
At 11:45 a.m. on October 21, 2017, the small Maine town of Chester's Mill is abruptly and gruesomely separated from the outside world by an invisible, semipermeable barrier of unknown origin. The immediate appearance of the barrier causes a number of injuries and fatalities and traps former Army Captain Dale "Barbie" Barbara—who is trying to leave Chester's Mill because of a local dispute—inside the town.Police Chief Howard "Duke" Perkins is killed instantly when his pacemaker explodes when he gets too close to the Dome. This removes the last significant opposition to James "Big Jim" Rennie, used car salesman and the town's Second Selectman. Big Jim exerts a significant influence on Chester's Mill and seizes the opportunity to use the barrier as part of a power play to take over the town.Big Jim appoints one of his cronies, the incompetent Peter Randolph, as the new police chief. He also begins expanding the ranks of the Chester's Mill Police with questionable candidates, including his son, Junior Rennie, and his friends. Junior has frequent migraines caused by an as-yet-undiscovered brain tumor which has also begun affecting his mental state; unknown to Big Jim, Junior was in the process of beating and strangling a girl (Angie McCain) to death when the barrier appeared and has killed another girl (Dodee Sanders) by the time Big Jim places him on the police force.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Noir"title="Budapest Noir">
Budapest, October 1936. Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös is dead. The body of a young Jewish girl is found in a Terézváros doorway. Zsigmond Gordon, a criminal journalist for The Est newspaper, arrives on the scene soon afterwards and starts asking questions, but everywhere seems to run into a brick wall. The clues lead him upwards to the highest echelons of society and downwards to the lowest depths of misery and poverty. Gordon refuses to give up, keeps asking his questions, and the more they want to frighten him off, the more determined he becomes. He does not know whom to trust, and does not know and does not care how many people's interests he is harming. He just wants to find the girl's killer, because, by the look of things, he is the only one who cares.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omensetter's_Luck"title="Omensetter's Luck">
"Omensetter's Luck" takes place in the 1890s in the fictitious town of Gilean, Ohio. The story is bookended by the story of Brackett Omensetter who arrives with his family to settle down. The middle (and the bulk) of the novel is devoted to the spiritual and mental degradation of the town's priest, Jethro Furber, who is jealous of Omensetter's magnetic personality and the luck that seems to underpin Omensetter's existence.After a meeting to receive his monthly rent, Omensetter's landlord, Henry Pimber, disappears and is found much later, dead. Omensetter's luck changes soon after, forcing him to abandon Gilean, leaving the locals to question the role of Omensetter in Pimber's death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_Fellow_My_Country"title="Poor Fellow My Country">
The novel takes place between 1936 and 1942, with a brief epilogue set in 1974, and is set primarily in Australia's Northern Territory. Three social outcasts - Prindy, a half-Indigenous boy; Jeremy, his white grandfather, well-known for his outspoken rants against bigotry and conservatism; and Rifkah, a female Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany - find themselves facing oppression as Australia faces a war and ongoing questions about its place in the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavinia_(novel)"title="Lavinia (novel)">
Lavinia, daughter of the king of the Latins of Laurentum, is sought after by neighbouring kings, but knows she is destined to marry a stranger. This is Aeneas from the Trojan War, who arrives with a large body of Trojans.An agreement is made but then breaks down and there is war, which is won by the outnumbered Trojans. They found a new city called Lavinium, but Aeneas is killed after three years. Aeneas's elder son Ascanius founds Alba Longa and marries but fails to produce an heir. Lavinia removes her son Silvius from his control and he eventually becomes king of the Latins.Rome already exists, but as a small settlement that plays no part in events.Lavinia herself retreats from the world and at the end seems to have turned into an owl. She has all along regarded the world she lives in as unreal, a product of Virgil's imagination.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cats_of_the_Clans"title="Cats of the Clans">
In the introductory chapter, "Three Lost Travelers", the kits Mosskit, Adderkit and Blossomkit have somehow walked from their home StarClan, the place where Clan cats go when they die, to Rock's home, in the far unknown. Rock tells the three that they did not live long enough to learn about their Clanmates, so he will answer their questions about the cats they left behind. Rock describes himself as "the keeper of the world beneath the one your former Clanmates walk."The remainder of the book consists of Rock's stories about each Clan, and descriptions of various cats within the Clans. Rock describes major events in the cats' lives, and often comments on why the cat is special or acted as they did. There are also stories about a few cats from the Tribe of Rushing Water, SkyClan, and BloodClan in addition to some loners and kittypets.Although Rock, as the narrator, claims neutrality, the book does not treat each Clan equally, devoting more space to ThunderClan cats. This is to be expected, as during the time when the book was published, ThunderClan was the only Clan to have been written as a main Clan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_Star_the_Wizard"title="Grey Star the Wizard">
The series plays for the most part at the tip of south-eastern Magnamund, in the land then known as the Shadakine Empire. A tyrant called Shasarak the Wytch-King has subjugated the people and with the help of seven Shadaki Wytches is ruling with an iron fist. The Shianti, members of a mystical race, wish to help, but because of their exile on the Isle of Lorn they are forced to remain neutral in the conflict. However, one night the situation changes when a storm wrecks a vessel near the island, with a human infant being the only survivor. In this child the Shianti see a chance to help the people of Magnamund without breaking their vow to Ishir, and they raise the boy in the arts of magic, giving him the name Grey Star: the star as the symbol of hope, and grey for the white-grey streak the boy has in his dark hair. Once his training is complete, Grey Star is sent out to retrieve the Moonstone, an ancient Shianti artefact, from the Daziarn, for only with its power can Shasarak be defeated. The first book of the series details Grey Stars travel to the Shadakine Empire and his desperate attempt to find a guide to lead him to the Shadow Gate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windfall_(novel)"title="Windfall (novel)">
This is a novel about the source of a mysterious 40 million pound legacy. The main benefactor of Jan Willem Hendryk's legacy was 34 million to a small agricultural college in the remote Rift Valley in Kenya, with the remaining six million to be split between his only known descendants. One descendant is the South African Dirk Hendricks, the new husband of security consultant Max Stafford's friend Alix. The other is the recently discovered Henry Hendrix, a young California beach bum, who is tracked down by down-on-his-luck private detective Ben Hardin. However, a strange series of events involving the attempted murder of Henry Hendrix, and a stranger masquerading as Henry in England lead Hardin to seek help from Stafford. Stafford, for his own reasons, is interested in this mysterious windfall, and the strange clause in the will stating that the heirs must spend one month of every year in Kenya. Suspicious that the man claiming to be Henry Hendrix is an imposter and that the college is not what it seems leads Max Stafford to visit Kenya. The violent reaction to his arrival in Kenya points to a sinister and far-reaching conspiracy far beyond mere greed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moor_of_Peter_the_Great"title="The Moor of Peter the Great">
The novel opens with a picture of morals and manners of the French society of the first quarter of 18th century; with the Moor's life in Paris, his success in French society, and his love affair with a French countess. But "summoned both by Peter and by his own vague sense of duty" Ibrahim returns to Russia. The following chapters, full of historical color and antiquarianism, sketch the different strata of the Russian society: ball at the Winter Palace and boyars' dinner at the boyar Gavrila Rzhevsky's place. The latter is interrupted by the arrival of the Tsar, who wants to marry Ibrahim to the Gavrila's daughter, Natalia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Plus_Twelve"title="Doomsday Plus Twelve">
The story is set in 2000, twelve years after the world nuclear war known as "Doomsday." A group of Oregon teenagers seek to use peaceful protest to stop militarists in San Diego from using the nuclear missiles on a captured nuclear submarine against Japan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drakon_(novel)"title="Drakon (novel)">
Set centuries since the last war between the Domination and the Alliance, the Domination has conquered the Earth and the solar system, while the Alliance survivors have fled to the Alpha Centauri star system where they have started a new civilization called the United States of Samothrace.The two societies have traded technology and skirmished some, focusing most of their efforts on colonizing all new habitable worlds they discover. Space combat has been rare since faster-than-light (FTL) travel formerly has been impossible. Combat only occurred when colonists from both sides reached the same world, an incident that happened only once. (Stirling later said the Samothracians won due to their superior ship.) The Draka continued their enslaving any new intelligent species they discover, using genetic engineering to produce a meek and submissive version of it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Odd_We_Trust"title="In Odd We Trust">
In Odd We Trust serves as a prequel to the first Odd Thomas novel. The ghost of a young boy appears to Odd, and he embarks on a quest to bring justice to the boy's killer so that his ghost can move on. Odd's friend, the Chief of Police Wyatt Porter, shares some details of the case, and informs him that the boy's babysitter is the one that discovered the body. The babysitter turns out to be Sherry Sheldon, a childhood friend of Odd's girlfriend and soulmate, Stormy Llewellyn. Sherry relates that a stalker has been leaving her disturbing notes for several months, and believes this stalker may be the murderer. Odd and Stormy resolve to catch the stalker before he kills again.Odd asks the ghost of the little boy to help him find his killer, and Joey leads him to a street corner, where he sees a suspicious man. The man flees when Odd tries to address him. Odd gives chase, but loses his quarry when he trips over a lawn gnome.Four neighborhood children are believed to be targets, as they have each received a note from the killer. Chief Porter assigns police escorts to each of the houses, and Odd and Stormy decide to spend the night with Sherry at the house where she is babysitting a girl named Angelica. The policeman on stakeout at the house finds an empty car containing a mutilated mannequin, and from this Odd deduces that the killer is nearby, taunting them. He throws open the doors of a nearby van, and discovers the man he chased earlier. He and Odd trade veiled threats, but when Stormy shows up with a gun, the man drives off.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inventors_(novel)"title="The Inventors (novel)">
Nate is at home, about to test his latest invention - a machine that can dress humans, like in cartoons. However, the invention goes wrong and ruins his room, upsetting his parents. Nate goes to his best friend Cat's house, to test their latest invention, the Bully Blow - also known as Pergophosphaticus III - a goo-like substance that causes whoever eats it to turn blue. They test it on the school bully by putting some in her chocolate brownie, but it is confiscated by the Headmaster, who turns blue when he eats it. Rather than getting Nate and Cat into trouble, he asks them to take part in Ebenezer Saint's competition. They have under a week to invent something so good that Saint's company, Saint Solutions, will take it on. The winners will be given a year-long scholarship at Saint Solutions, working with Ebenezer himself. After many failed attempts at making Facial-Recognition Glasses, they decide to use the Bully Blow, now in the form of a helmet for the army, allowing the wearer to blend in with the surroundings by turning the appropriate color. Saint loves their invention, and they, along with the other winners, are taken to Saint Solutions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becoming_Naomi_León"title="Becoming Naomi León">
Naomi Soledad León Outlaw is a Hispanic girl who lives a relatively peaceful life with her great-grandmother, Mary Outlaw, and deformed younger brother, Owen, in the fictional town of Lemon Tree, California. One day, Naomi and Owen's mother, Skyla, suddenly reappears after seven years of being gone. Although initially happy to have her mother back in her life, Naomi questions the reason for Skyla's return, whilst Skyla showers Naomi with gifts, but neglects and expresses disgust towards Owen.Mary later tells Naomi and Owen the truth, but they don't really know the truth, until the day of the Parent-Teacher Conferences which Skyla promised to attend, but didn't. That day, Naomi learns that Skyla is actually an alcoholic and that her father wanted custody of her and Owen but Skyla wouldn't allow it. As things become more severe, Naomi gradually begins to grow fearful of Skyla, but is ultimately hesitant to warn Mary of her increasingly erratic behavior.However, after a seemingly regular doctor's appointment for Owen, Skyla suddenly becomes infuriated and threatens Naomi, Owen, and Mary's well-being while revealing her plans of taking Naomi with her and her boyfriend, Clive, to Las Vegas so she would take care of Clive's daughter while leaving Owen behind. However, refusing to let that happen, Mary takes the kids on a whirlwind journey accompanied by their neighbors Fabiola and Bernardo Morales to the city of Oaxaca, Mexico. There they go on a quest in which Naomi is determined to find her father, Santiago. The group participate in Mexico's Los Posadas and Night of the Radishes, where Santiago arrives and reunites with his children, but he is unable to come back with Naomi and Owen to Lemon Tree.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Mécanique_du_cœur_(novel)"title="La Mécanique du cœur (novel)">
The book opens in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1874. Little Jack is born on the coldest day ever, which causes his heart to be frozen solid, requiring a replacement. The makeshift Doctor, Madeleine, who provides midwifery and medical services to the poor and the desperate of Edinburgh, grafts a cuckoo clock to his heart of flesh and blood in order to save it. Due to Madeleine's "clientele" the children that she delivers are sometimes unwanted, and so she puts them up for adoption to good parents. Unfortunately, nobody wants Jack because of his strange clock heart, and so he ends up living with Madeleine as his adoptive mother.She tells Jack that his clock heart is weak and so to avoid premature death, he must obey three golden rules: Never touch the hands of the clock, control his anger, and never fall in love. Life is relatively happy and carefree for a while as Jack lives with Madeleine in her surgery/workshop and is befriended by two 'working girls' named Anna and Luna. However, one day, he does fall in love; With a street singer named Miss Acacia, who takes a liking to him. Against Madeleine's initial wishes Jack demands that he be enrolled in the local school in order to receive an education, but his real motive is to look for, and hopefully be reunited with, Miss Acacia. At the school Jack doesn't find her but he does come across Joe, who becomes Jack's tormentor. Joe bullies him relentlessly until one day Jack accidentally strikes Joe in the eye with his clock, blinding him. Jack escapes the authorities and decides to travel all the way to Andalusia, where he's heard that Miss Acacia was now living. Whilst on this journey he encounters 'Jack the ripper' on a train and is nearly killed by him, only just escaping. Eventually he arrives in Paris and looks for someone who can properly readjust his clock heart. He meets a mechanically minded filmmaker named Georges Méliès, who performs the repairs and decides to travel to Andalusia with Jack for the attempt to reunite Jack with Miss Acacia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_in_the_Mist"title="Fire in the Mist">
Fire in the Mist is the story of Faia Rissedote, who as the story begins is a shepherd from a small village. Faia returns from tending her sheep to find everyone in her village dead from the plague. In her anguish, she loses control of her magic and destroys the entire village.This act is felt even in the far away town of Ariss, where staff of the university that exists there to train mages travel to the village to see what happened. They find Faia and bring her back to their university. Faia does not fit in there, as she is a much stronger mage but has little control; the other mage students either don't believe in her power or dislike her for being from a humble background. She does meet and sleep with a young mage, which is expressly forbidden as sex is supposed to be harmful to magical talent.A series of murders occur; primarily targeting young mages with potential. The women at the university believe it to be the work of the men, as the murders resemble a much earlier legend which implicated the men. Faia's body is taken over by the spirit of the murderer, who it turns out was actually a woman (and is the same person from the legend) and proceeds to start killing the mages of the university. Faia defeats the murderer by surprising her with the fact that she (the murderer, in Faia's body) is pregnant, and regains her body. She escapes the university, the staff of which still bear a grudge against her, in spite of explanations, and begins to travel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorns_(novel)"title="Thorns (novel)">
Humanity has colonized the solar system and moved outward to begin exploring the far reaches of the galaxy. An interplanetary audience follows real-life stories of triumph and tragedy presented to them by Duncan Chalk, a media mogul with apparently limitless resources. Chalk, unknown to all around him, is a kind of psychic vampire who draws sustenance from the emotions of others, particularly those of pain and trauma. Though he enjoys playing his inner circle of assistants against each other as a sort of daily snack, Chalk's true nourishment comes from the dramas he orchestrates for his audience.Chalk's latest drama involves the pairing of Minner Burris, a space explorer who was captured and surgically altered by aliens on the planet Manipool, and Lona Kelvin, a 17-year-old girl who donated eggs for a fertility experiment that produced a hundred babies. Burris, whose freakish appearance draws attention whenever he ventures out in public, has withdrawn into seclusion and bitterness. Kelvin, whose brief fame as the virgin mother of an army of children has begun to fade, has twice attempted suicide because she has not been allowed to adopt or even see any of her offspring. Chalk promises Burris a full round of surgery and treatment to restore his human appearance, and offers Kelvin a chance to adopt one of her babies, if the two agree to come together for an all-expenses paid tour of the solar system.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madam,_Will_You_Talk?"title="Madam, Will You Talk?">
Charity Selborne is on holiday in Provence with her friend and former colleague Louise. Before Charity’s marriage to Johnny Selborne, they both taught at the same school in the West Midlands. Charity is now a widow; her husband's plane was shot down in France during the war. She is staying at the same hotel as David Shelley and his stepmother, Loraine Bristol. Mrs. Bristol has taken David to France from England. David's father, Richard Byron, an antique dealer, who has been accused of murder, is pursuing his son across France.Also staying at the hotel are John Marsden, who is English and reads T. S. Eliot at breakfast, and Paul Véry, who is French. Both have parts to play in subsequent events.Charity befriends 13-year-old David Shelley, who seems mature and literary for his age. Making a joke about confusing “David Shelley” with another of the Romantic poets, “David Byron”, Charity is surprised by David’s alarmed reaction. She senses that David is carrying a burden too heavy for his years.Mrs. Palmer, a guest at the Hotel Tistet-Vedene, gossips to Charity about the other guests. She recognizes Loraine Bristol as Loraine Byron from newspaper accounts of the sensational trial of her husband, Richard Byron. Byron was acquitted on insufficient evidence for the murder of his best friend, who had been having an affair with Loraine. On scene during the murder, David Byron had been hit over the head by the attacker but had professed that he had not seen the assailant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_Club"title="Geography Club">
Russel Middlebrook is keeping a secret from his two best friends, Min, a bright Chinese American girl, and Gunnar, a bright and socially awkward boy. Neither of them knows he is gay and that he has been visiting an internet chat room to chat with other gay teens. When he discovers another Alliance group for support. The group meets and decides on the Geography Club name to keep it private.At school Gunnar, who is unaware of Russel's sexuality, persuades Russel to go on a double date with him and two popular girls from their school. Russel is reluctant to go on the date but agrees to do it for Gunnar, as this would be the only way for him to go on a date. When Gunnar and Russel go on their double date, Gunnar is happy but Russel only puts up with it for his friend's sake. Russel's date tries to have sex with him and he puts her off by saying he's a virgin and he wants his first time to be special.Russel joins the school baseball team so he can be part of Kevin's crowd. Russel plays well and wins a game for his team. Russel persuades Kevin to come to the Geography Club meeting. At school, Kevin and his jock friends make fun of the school outcast Brian Bund and Russel joins in. Min sees this and is disgusted. Brian wants to join the Geography Club but Kevin and Russel vote against this. Min wanted to let him join and is angry with Russel for voting with Kevin. Min suggests they make the club public, making Kevin and Terese nervous. Terese breaks up with Min.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Long_Way_Gone"title="A Long Way Gone">
## Before the RUF attack.The book starts with Ishmael Beah, his older brother Junior, and their friend Talloi traveling from their village of Mogbwemo to Mattru Jong in order to perform in a talent show. Ishmael, Junior, and their friend dance and sing rap music. Thinking they would return the following day, they tell no one of their leaving.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bolshevik_Myth"title="The Bolshevik Myth">
The narrative of "The Bolshevik Myth" starts in December 1919, when Berkman and Emma Goldman were deported to Soviet Russia along with over two hundred other anarchists, socialists, and other leftists. Berkman describes conditions on board the transport ship, the "Buford".Berkman begins with great enthusiasm for the revolution. Unlike some of his fellow anarchists, he is willing to ignore the very different philosophy of the Bolsheviks. "From now on, we are all one—one in the sacred work of the Revolution", he tells a welcoming committee. "Socialists or anarchists—our theoretical differences are left behind. We are all revolutionists now.""The Bolshevik Myth" describes the situation in Petrograd and Moscow. Food is scarce and rations are being cut. At the Moscow rooming house in which Berkman stays, meals are served at a common dining room. Berkman notes that the other residents watch an empty seat at the table. "In their eyes I read the frank hope that the missing one may not come: there will be a little more soup left for the others".In March 1920 Berkman and Goldman meet Lenin, whom Berkman describes as speaking with "a peculiar, almost Jewish, accent". Lenin tells them that freedom of the press is a luxury that cannot be permitted during the early stages of the revolution. Lenin assures them that anarchists will not be persecuted for their beliefs, but "we will not tolerate armed resistance or agitation of that character".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Else_(book)"title="Something Else (book)">
Something Else (the name of the protagonist and Something's best friend) is excluded from everything because he looks different. He does not play the same games, eat the same food or draw the same pictures.Then one day Something turns up and wants to be friends. However, Something Else does not want to be friends with this creature as he believes that they are "not" the same and he refuses to eat sandwiches with 'Urgy stuff' in them. He sends Something away and then suddenly realizes that he acts like all the other people who always sent him away.Eventually Something Else and Something become best friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Summer_(book)"title="Freedom Summer (book)">
The novel is set in Mississippi during the summer of 1964, a summer of desegregation in the South. The story revolves around two best friends, John Henry, who is black and Joe, who is white. They do everything together, including swimming in a local creek. However, they cannot do the same in the town pool because blacks are not allowed to use the public swimming pool.Joe is then told that a law has been passed that blacks can do everything that whites can do. He is really excited because this means that he can go to the town pool tomorrow with John Henry. The boys are more excited than ever but when they arrive at the town pool the following day, they are shocked to find that the town pool has been closed. The pool has been filled with black sticky tar as the white people in their community chose to close down the entire pool instead of facing the prospect of sharing it with their black neighbors. While the laws of the nation of changed, it becomes clear to the boys that attitudes and ideas about race will take longer to evolve.The boys are disappointed but the book ends with a glimmer of hope as the two friends are able to enter a grocery store together that was previously for whites only.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Skin_(novel)"title="Cold Skin (novel)">
The novel chronicles the story of a former fighter for the independence of Ireland who, unmotivated by the events of the Western World, decides to escape from the society in which he lives. He accepts a job offer as a weather official on a remote island in the south Atlantic close to the Antarctic Circle.On this island there is only one inhabitant, the signals official Batis Caffo, who does not help the Irishman, and hides all the information which he has on the island. So the hero has to spend a night alone, where he suffers the attack of strange monsters that are similar to frogs.Through his cunning he manages to stay in the lighthouse with Caffo, and thus he can withstand attacks from the big frogs. After some days, he finds out that Caffo has sex with a domesticated monster, the female Aneris. Although the Irishman first thinks that the monsters are evil and murderous, after meeting Aneris, he changes his mind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zookeeper's_Wife"title="The Zookeeper's Wife">
In the 1930s, Jan Żabiński is the director of a thriving zoo in Warsaw, Poland. His wife, Antonina, has a remarkable empathy with animals, and their villa in the zoo acts as a nursery and residence for numerous animals, as well as for their son. This part of their life abruptly ends with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, subsequently starting World War II (1939–1945). Most of the zoo's animals and structures are destroyed in the bombings and siege of the city. The zoo is closed under German occupation, but the Żabińskis continue to occupy the villa, and the zoo itself is converted first as a pig farm and subsequently as a fur farm.Jan and Antonina Żabiński become active with the Polish underground resistance. At the villa and in the zoo's structures, they secretly shelter Jews, most escaping from the doomed Warsaw ghetto. As many as 300 such "guests" pass through the zoo, and many survive the war with the Żabińskis' and the underground's assistance. Although the German occupiers execute those aiding Jews, Antonina Żabińska maintains a semblance of prewar life at the villa, harboring a menagerie of animals – such as otters, a badger, hyena pups, lynxes, and a rabbit – as well as the secret guests.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Broken_Window"title="The Broken Window">
In the book, a killer has access to the world's greatest data miner called Strategic Systems Datacorp. He is using detailed information to commit crimes and blame them on innocents. Lincoln Rhyme, Amelia Sachs, and characters from the previous books, team up to stop the criminal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_She_Spot"title="The She Spot">
"The She Spot" looks at the impact of women on social change, and focuses on the influence women have had on the world, as well as on volunteering. The book incorporates several case studies, polls, and the potential for women to be underrepresented in these polls and studies. It also covers the potential misrepresentation in marketing towards women.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Gap"title="Beyond the Gap">
When a gap opens in the glacier, Count Hamnet Thyssen and Ulric Skakki are dispatched by Emperor Sighvat II of Raumsdalia to explore the other side. Together with Earl Eyvind Torfin and a wizard, Audun Gilli, they team up with Trasamund, a chieftain of the nomadic, mammoth-herding Bizogot nation. Crossing through the gap, the explorers discover that a powerful tribal confederation, who call themselves "the Rulers," are preparing to burst through the gap and seize the lands to the south for their own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumper_Cable"title="Jumper Cable">
Jumper Spider, the descendant of the spider who accompanied Magician Dor on his adventure to the past, has been caught by a narrative hook and dropped into the human realm of Xanth. Wishing to return home, he teams up with seven lovely maidens to help restore the link between Xanth and Mundania which had been damaged by the Demon Pluto, who is angry for being demoted to a Dwarf Demon and does all he can to stop the group of adventurers from succeeding.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knot_Gneiss"title="Knot Gneiss">
This is about Jumper's friend Wenda Woodwife, who has a nymphly front but no back, being hollow from behind, who speaks with the forest dialect: "I wood knot dew that to yew." She has to transport a boulder made of petrified reverse wood that naturally terrifies (petrifies) everyone else. She has to put together a group of six or more and starts out her journey asking help from her best friend Jumper, King of the Spiders, and enlists the aid of a winged mermaid, the Princess Ida, a fallen angel, and a handsome prince in search of his princess
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortality_(novel)"title="Immortality (novel)">
Divided into seven parts, the novel centers on Agnes, her husband Paul, and her sister Laura. Several of the storylines involve real historical figures.The novel is at times narrated by a self-insertion of Kundera. At the start, this narrator sees a woman wave and creates the character of Agnes: "I was strangely moved. And then the word Agnes entered my mind. Agnes. I had never known a woman by that name."Later, the Kundera character says: "A novel shouldn't be like a bicycle race but a feast of many courses. I am really looking to Part 6. A completely new character will enter the novel. And at the end of that part he will disappear without a trace. He causes nothing and leaves no effects. That is precisely what I like about him. Part 6 will be a novel within a novel, as well as the saddest erotic story I have ever written."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawkins_vs._Gould"title="Dawkins vs. Gould">
## Part I—Battle Joined.In the introductory chapter the author points out that there have been many conflicts in biology. Still, few have been as public or as polemical as the one between Dawkins and Gould. Dawkins sees evolution as a competition between gene lineages, where organisms are vehicles for those genes. Gould, a palaeontologist in the tradition of George Gaylord Simpson, has a different perspective. For example, he sees chance as very important, and views organisms as being more important than genes. Their broader world views also differ, for instance they have very different beliefs about the relationship between religion and science.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Who_Were_Hanged"title="The Seven Who Were Hanged">
A minister learns of a foiled assassination plot on him by five leftist revolutionaries, and the trauma this inflicts on his peace of mind. The novella then switches to the courts and jails to follow the fates of seven people who have received death sentences: the five failed assassins, an Estonian farm hand who murdered his employer, and a violent thief. These condemned people are awaiting their executions by hanging. In prison, each of the prisoners deals with their fate in his or her own way.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fools_in_Town_Are_on_Our_Side"title="The Fools in Town Are on Our Side">
The novel is set around the time of its publication and follows Lucifer Clarence Dye, freshly exposed as a US intelligence agent following a bungled operation in Singapore (where a Chinese operative Dye had been trying to recruit instead died of a freak heart attack during a routine polygraph test.) Having just been released from a three-month term in a Singaporean jail in exchange for an official US apology (and a large bribe), Dye is cashiered by the small, independent agency Section 2 and is immediately offered a job by an eccentric young man, Victor Orcutt. A self-proclaimed genius, Orcutt has decided to address the then-topical challenge of urban decay; however, his immodestly named "Orcutt's First Law" states that "Before things get better, they must get much worse." Dye's assignment is, therefore, to "corrupt me a city."The city in question is Swankerton, a fictional settlement on the Texas Gulf Coast where Victor Orcutt Associates has been hired to aid the election of a "Reform" slate to city offices. Swankerton hardly needs corrupting, being practically afloat on a cesspool of vice and depravity already; the "Reform" poobahs are if anything worse than the current leadership, which is knee-deep in drugs, gambling, whores, and worse, and is backed by a New Orleans mob boss, Giuseppe "Joe Lucky" Lucarelli. Nevertheless, Dye and Orcutt's other operative, semi-disgraced ex-police chief Homer Necessary, dive right in.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_in_Bloom"title="Rose in Bloom">
The story begins when Rose returns home from a long trip to Europe. Everyone has changed. As a joke, Rose lines up her seven cousins to take a long look at them, just as they did with her when they first met. The youngest, Jamie, accidentally mentions that the aunts want Rose to marry one of her cousins to keep her fortune in the family. Rose is very indignant, for she has decided ideas about what her future holds. From the beginning, she declares that she can manage her property well on her own and that she will focus on philanthropic work. Charlie has already decided she is marked out for him, with the approval of his mother.Phebe also comes home no longer the servant that Rose "adopted" but as a young lady with a cultured singing ability. Rose challenges anyone who would look down on "her Phebe", and she is readily accepted as part of the Campbell clan until Archie falls in love with her: the family feel that Archie would be marrying beneath himself. Phebe's pride and debt to the family make her wish to prove herself before she will accept Archie; so she leaves the Campbells' home and sets off to make a name for herself as a singer, to try to earn the respect of her adopted family.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ah,_but_Your_Land_Is_Beautiful"title="Ah, but Your Land Is Beautiful">
The novel has multiple storylines that alternate one another, all reminiscent of the true-life experiences faced by Alan Paton and his political colleagues in resisting National Party rule in South Africa during the 1950s.The book is divided into six parts:Part One: The Defiance CampaignPart Two: The Cleft StickPart Three: Come Back, AfricaPart Four: Death of a TraitorPart Five: The Holy Church of ZionPart Six: Into the Golden AgeIt was originally conceived as the first part of a trilogy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvesting_the_Heart"title="Harvesting the Heart">
Paige O'Toole only has a few memories of her mother, who left her when she was five. One of the most vivid memories is of her mother painting winged horses on the ceiling of her childhood home. After Paige grows up, she marries Nicholas and becomes pregnant. She then starts to doubt her own maternal love and ability, because of her history and lack of maternal care and love as a child. After their son Max slips off the couch and gets a nosebleed, she flees and goes on a journey of self-discovery.Paige revisits her childhood home in Chicago and tracks down her mother, now giving children horseback riding lessons. On this journey, Paige is able to understand more about her childhood and her mother, prompting her to eventually return home to her husband and child.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telling_Right_from_Wrong"title="Telling Right from Wrong">
The book's synopsis describes the work as an "analysis and discussion of moral language and the assumptions underlying its use. This book contends that much of our prescriptive language pertaining to issues such as gambling, abortion, capitol punishment, homosexuality, prostitution, divorce, freedom of speech and expression, pornography, and others, is devoid of moral content."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbé_Jules"title="Abbé Jules">
After reading Dostoïevsky, Mirbeau plumbs the depths of psychology to describe a Catholic priest, Jules Dervelle, whose body and mind are rebelling against social oppression and the corruption of the Catholic Church.An indictment of the dreary materialism of provincial French society, where life is governed by cupidity and closed-mindedness, Octave Mirbeau's 1888 novel, "L'Abbé Jules" also offers an indictment of the repressive institutions of family and religion. Object of his neighbors’ fearful curiosity, the novel's eponymous hero, Jules Dervelle, constitutes, for the author, a vehicle for exploring the mysteries of the human psyche, the abuses of religion, and the human longing for the transcendental and the sacred.Returning to his native village of Viantais after a six-year absence in Paris, Jules revolutionizes his countrymen with his scandalous behavior and unorthodox religious views. Consenting to tutor his young nephew, Albert Dervelle – whom Mirbeau uses as an uncorrupted and innocent narrator – Jules exposes his ideas on sexuality, education, and man's "quest for an ideal". Retrospective narrative allows Mirbeau to recount Jules's past, his introduction into the priesthood, and the scandalous behavior resulting in his subsequent exile to a remote parish. After his repatriation in Viantais, Jules installs himself in an overgrown country estate, where he delights in the unspoiled simplicity of nature. Wishing to instill in Albert the artlessness of animals, Jules instructs his young charge to throw away his books. He advises Albert that it is easier to "fabricate a Jesus or Mohammed" than it is to dismantle the adulterated social being that each individual has become so that can return to the original purity of his status as a "Nothing."
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wonderful_Country"title="The Wonderful Country">
Martin Brady, at age 14, flees to Mexico from Texas after he kills the man who murdered his father. Now, 14 years later, in 1880s Mexico, he is called Martin Bredi. He is a hired gun for a rich Mexican rancher and Chihuahuan warlord, Cipriano Castro. Brady starts to feel like he would like to return to Texas. Castro send him north to Puerto, Texas, to guard a load of silver ore, with the intention of smuggling arms.When he gets to Texas he breaks his leg and has to stay put in the town while he heals. He is approached by the head of the Texas Rangers division in Puerto about joining after the Captain confirms his identity and lets Brady know that he will not be prosecuted for killing his father's murderer. He also is enamored by the ranger captain's daughter, Louisa Rucker.After killing a man who injured a friend, he returns to Mexico and is sent on an impossible errand to deliver a load of gunpowder by General Marco Castro, the brother of Cipriano. The wagon blows up before it is delivered. After returning to Chihuahua, Cipriano Castro sends Brady to assassinate a rival Salcido; however, the Castros are suspicious of him and have him followed. During his sojourn in Chihuahua, he meets an acquaintance from Puerto and learns that the man he killed was a criminal with a reward for his death.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome_(novel)"title="Genome (novel)">
Alex Romanov is a pilot-spec, born on Earth, gets out of the hospital on the planet Mercury Bottom, where he spent six months after an accident. Alex meets Kim Ohara, a runaway fourteen-year-old girl, who is an unformed fighter-spec, escaped from her home on Eden. He invites the hungry girl to dine, but, during dinner, her metamorphosis kick in. Unfortunately, the process must take place in a hospital under the watchful eyes of qualified doctors, but Alex is out of money and does not know anyone on this planet. As a pilot-spec, Alex is psychologically incapable of not helping someone in his charge. He takes her to a cheap hotel (the Hilton) and tries to help her through the transformation. For this he needs medicine, but he has spent everything he had left on the hotel room. He uses the network terminal in the hotel to search for work. He surprisingly quickly locates a perfect and extremely attractive offer — the post of captain on a small but new ship "Mirror" with the right to choose his own crew. While Alex is skeptical that this is just too good to be true, he has no choice but to sign the contract. He gets his advance and uses the money to help Kim.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_Hell_(novel)"title="Escape from Hell (novel)">
Following events in the first novel, in which Carpenter learned that it is possible to leave Hell, Carpenter wants to help others in the way his benefactor helped him. Carpenter meets and travels through all the circles of the Hell described by Dante. He is accompanied in his travels by Sylvia Plath (whom he rescues from the Wood of the Suicides by burning her tree, causing her physical body to reform itself), attempting to understand the purpose of Hell and free many of the damned. Carpenter discovers that, apparently because he returned to Hell of his own free will to help others, he now possesses powers and abilities such as his mentor, Benito, also displayed.In his travels, Carpenter meets many well-known individuals deceased as of 2009. In addition to Plath, some of the notables encountered by Carpenter include:In the end, and partly as the consequence of some unusual changes to Hell itself, Carpenter not so much escapes as that he is shown the door for being a troublemaker.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beware_the_Fish"title="Beware the Fish">
Macdonald Hall is having a severe budget problem. The Headmaster, William R. Sturgeon or by his nickname, The Fish, is taking budgetary measures like lowering dormitory temperatures and removing junk food from the menus in the cafeteria. When Bruno and Boots figure this out after being forced into Dormitory 2 with Elmer Drimsdale when he closes the third dorm building, they decide to try to gain Macdonald Hall some publicity in order to enroll more students and solve their money problems. Elmer Drimsdale comes up with a new machine that mimics a broadcasting system, with a lens and microphone pointed at a labeled diagram of a Pacific king salmon, but he informs the hopeful two that it won't broadcast further than the room. Still, Bruno uses it to channel his frustrations by pretending to be a conspirator of an evil fish organization (never appearing on camera but narrating the plans of the conspiracy). Unknown to Elmer and Bruno, the device can actually broadcast a radius of 43 kilometres around the school and overpower all commercial television broadcasts on its frequency within that range.Meanwhile, everyone is trying to think of ideas of coming up with publicity. This leads to the idea of breaking the world record of the largest tin can pyramid. During the nights of the weekend almost the entire student body leaves the property to go and collect soda cans from nearby townships and villages. Bruno and Boots go all the way to Toronto, hitching a ride in the morning on a school bus field trip back to Ms. Scrimmage's Finishing School For Young Ladies, the girls' school across from Macdonald Hall.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Terror"title="Land of Terror">
The novel relates the adventures of David Innes on his return from Lo-Har to Sari in the wake of the events of "Back to the Stone Age".&lt;br&gt;It is divided into five adventures: 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Remorseful_Day"title="The Remorseful Day">
Morse tries to solve the unsolved murder of Yvonne Harrison, as his health deteriorates.Harrison, a nurse, has inspired romantic attachment in Morse during an earlier (and separate) illness, and he has written to her about it. She is a sharer of her favours; recipients, including her daughter's lover, are serially suspect.His superintendent has found Morse's letter among crime-scene evidence but has sequestered it.Morse dies of acute myocardial infarction; his last words are "Thank Lewis for me."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan's_World"title="Logan's World">
Logan and Jessica have lived on Argos (the fabled "Sanctuary"), a space station in orbit around Mars, for four years, along with 3,000 other "Runners". They have a two-year-old son named Jaq.On Earth, Ballard's escape line for Runners at Cape Steinbeck is discovered and destroyed by Deep Sleep operatives. Ballard escapes to Crazy Horse Mountain, and sabotages the Thinker complex buried in the catacombs below the statue. While he is killed in the explosion, he succeeds in destroying the computer network and making the world free.With Ballard's death, supply ships to Argos cease. For six more years the Runners there hang on, until there are less than a few dozen of them. They have no more food, and plague is running rampant. They draw straws — a handful will return to Earth. Logan, Jessica and Jaq are among those chosen.Logan and family settle with a group called the Wilderness People along the Potomac River in Washington D.C. Life is tough — learning to farm is not easy — but good until Jaq falls deathly ill. Logan sneaks back into the Angeles Complex to get medicine for his son. While he is gone, an insane pack of devilstick-riding Borgia gypsies murders Jaq and kidnaps Jessica. Logan finds himself on the run again, this time to save his wife and avenge his murdered son.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llana_of_Gathol"title="Llana of Gathol">
The stories in this collection revolve around John Carter's granddaughter Llana of Gathol, who plays the "damsel in distress" role played by Dejah Thoris and Thuvia in earlier entries of the "Barsoom" series.In search of solitude, John Carter flies to the deserted city of Horz. By one of those coincidences which are common in Burroughs's books, he discovers his own granddaughter, Llana of Gathol, who is being held captive. The subsequent attempts to get Llana safely back home bring Carter, Llana and Pan Dan Chee, a young man they pick up along the way, through a series of adventures. They meet an ancient, mad hypnotist who has preserved people for nearly a million years by the power of hypnotism. They find a valley occupied by Black Men who imprison them. They travel to the land of Pankor where soldiers are frozen and kept in reserve until needed for a war. Finally they reach the land of Invak where the inhabitants have mastered the art of invisibility.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_at_Midnight"title="Bella at Midnight">
Maud's sister Catherine has just married Sir Edward of Burning Wood when he forbids her to see her family again. Three years later, Maud receives an urgent summons from her brother-in-law to aid her sister in childbirth. The child is delivered safely, but Catherine falls ill and dies. Edward flies into a fury and orders Maud to get rid of the child.Maud christens the child Isabel, after her late grandmother, and gives her to the family of a blacksmith named Martin. His wife, Beatrice, recently served as a wet nurse to the fourth son of the king, Prince Julian. The prince frequently returns to visit over the course of his childhood, and he and Isabel, or "Bella", become fast friends.One day, when Julian is older, he is approached by Bella in front of his peers. But instead of acknowledging her as a friend, he pretends not to know her. Later, he is on his way to apologize to her when a messenger stops him to inform him that he is to be a hostage in a neighboring kingdom, Brutanna, with which they had been at war. The captivity is to enforce a peace treaty between the two kingdoms.Some time later, Maud returns to Bella's village with a summons from her father, who has recently remarried. Bella sorrowfully leaves her family and journeys with her aunt to meet her father. Once there she finds him still cold and cruel, and her stepmother Matilda and stepsister Marianne unkind as well. Her other stepsister Alice has been silent ever since the death of her father.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forbidden_City_(Grey_Star)"title="The Forbidden City (Grey Star)">
The series plays for the most part at the tip of south-eastern Magnamund, in the land then known as the Shadakine Empire. A tyrant called Shasarak the Wytch-King has subjugated the people and with the help of seven Shadaki Wytches is ruling with an iron fist. The Second installment of the World of Lone Wolf series takes place after Grey Star has found the Lost Tribe of Azanam. Grey Star begins his journey with the aid of a Kundi mystic named Urik, and journeys through Desolation Valley, beyond the Mountains of Morn. There, he makes new allies, faces new dangers, and helps to stoke the flames of a fledgling rebellion against the Shadakine Empire, all in a desperate attempt to find the Shadow Gate and travel through it to the Daziarn plane and retrieve the Moonstone of the Shianti.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_with_Mr._Wizzle"title="The War with Mr. Wizzle">
Macdonald Hall starts off the year in a fix due to a new dress code, and Bruno, Boots, and the rest of the ensemble soon find out that a new assistant has arrived, Walter C. Wizzle - a strange man intent on instituting a new set of rules at the school. He institutes a dress code that is hated by the students, a demerit system for bad behavior, and schedules psychological tests for the students. Worst of all, he calls the institute in danger of becoming 'a dinosaur' for not keeping up with technological advancements, so he starts installing a new software program called WizzleWare (that he wrote himself) to handle all school and teaching functions. The school atmosphere becomes strict and restricted for everyone, including the teaching staff and Headmaster Sturgeon. The only person not standing for it is Bruno Walton, who starts up a committee against Wizzle and his new system, and with the gradual help of other students comes up with ways to remove Wizzle from the school. They write a free press newspaper, exchange his printer paper with toilet paper and napkins, and at night in the gym building they make a large comic Wizzle balloon. With the help of genius Elmer Drimsdale and a device he created (along with a convincing presentation supporting the fact that Wizzle's guest cottage is along a fault line), they give Wizzle earthquakes at night.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Hard_Choices"title="Very Hard Choices">
In this novel, Nika and Russell discover that protecting the secret of Smelly's telepathic abilities has brought them into conflict with the Central Intelligence Agency, who have been pursuing him since his escape from the MKUltra Project in the 1960s.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigands_M.C."title="Brigands M.C.">
The book begins in 2003 with the death of Dante Scott's parents, older sister and brother at the hands of the Brigands M.C. South Devon President, Ralph "Führer" Donnington, after Dante's father refuses to go through with the plans to redevelop the Brigands' clubhouse, turning it into shops and flats.After saving his eighteen-month-old sister Holly from the burning house (the Führer attempted to burn the evidence), nine-year-old Dante escapes, is put under the wing of child psychologist Ross Johnson, and is questioned by police in an attempt to convict the Führer.On the night of the brutal killing, he was forced into a boxing match with Martin, the Führer's eldest son, and got blood on his shirt; he lies to the police, claiming that it was a nosebleed. Johnson realises that the defence solicitors could use the unreliability of his statement to clear the Führer. Much to Dante's fury, the courts decide that there is insufficient evidence to convict the Führer; and he is subsequently released.After moving in with a foster family, a Dutch member of another Brigands chapter known as "Doods" attempts to murder Dante with a bomb inside the controller of a remote-controlled toy car on his birthday. Shaken, Dante moves in under the care of Ross again. Dante is drugged by Jennifer Mitchum (the same person that drugged James Adams in "The Recruit") and is sent to CHERUB campus where he befriends Lauren Onions (soon to become Lauren Adams).
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_String_of_Pearls"title="The String of Pearls">
The story is set in London during the year 1785. The plot concerns the strange disappearance of a sailor named Lieutenant Thornhill, last seen entering Sweeney Todd's establishment on Fleet Street. Thornhill was bearing a gift of a string of pearls to a girl named Johanna Oakley on behalf of her missing lover, Mark Ingestrie, who is presumed lost at sea. One of Thornhill's seafaring friends, Colonel Jeffrey, is alerted to the disappearance of Thornhill by his faithful dog, Hector, and investigates his whereabouts. He is joined by Johanna, who wants to know what happened to Mark.Johanna's suspicions of Sweeney Todd's involvement cause her to dress as a boy and becoming Todd's employee after his last assistant, a young boy named Tobias Ragg, has been incarcerated in a madhouse for accusing Todd of being a murderer. Soon, after Todd has dismembered the corpses of his victims, Mrs. Lovett creates her meat pies from leftover flesh. While the bodies are burning in the oven, a ghastly and intolerable smell reeks from the pie shop chimney. Eventually, the extent of Todd's activities is uncovered when the dismembered remains of hundreds of his victims are discovered in the crypt underneath St. Dunstan's church. Meanwhile, Mark, who has been imprisoned in the cellar beneath the pie shop and made to work as the cook, escapes via the lift used to bring the pies up from the cellar into the pie shop. Here he makes the following startling announcement to the customers of that establishment:
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Nightmare_Gate"title="Beyond the Nightmare Gate">
The series plays for the most part at the tip of south-eastern Magnamund, in the land then known as the Shadakine Empire. A tyrant called Shasarak the Wytch-King has subjugated the people and with the help of seven Shadaki Wytches is ruling with an iron fist. In an attempt to find the lost Moonstone of the Shianti and destroy the Shadakine empire, Grey Star made his way to the location of the Shadow Gate and beyond into the realm of the Daziarn itself. The Daziarn is a shadow realm with many strange beings and fearsome creatures inhabiting it. Grey Star is forced to travel across the gray plains of the Neverness to find the Moonstone but comes upon an unexpected ally; one he thought he would never see again. With her help, he must retrieve the moonstone and find a way to return to Magnamund if the Wytch-King is to be defeated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mucker"title="The Mucker">
Billy Byrne is a low class American born in Chicago's ghetto. He grows up a thief and a mugger. "Billy was a mucker, a hoodlum, a gangster, a thug, a tough." He is not chivalrous nor kind, and has only meager ethics - never giving evidence against a friend or leaving someone behind. He chooses a life of robbery and violence, disrespecting those who work for a living. He has a deep hatred for wealthy society.He trains as a prizefighter but cannot stop drinking. When falsely accused of murder, he flees to San Francisco and is shanghaied aboard a ship. Enforced sobriety, brutal ship's discipline and productive work improves him. The ship's secret mission is soon enacted - the hijacking of a specific yacht to take a millionaire's daughter, Barbara Harding, for ransom. Billy Byrne brutally beats her suitor, Billy Mallory, leaving him for dead."He knew that she looked down upon him as an inferior being. She was of the class that addressed those in his walk of life as 'my man.'" After Barbara confronts him and calls him a coward, a change begins in Billy Byrne. He saves the life of one kidnapper, Theriere, rather than letting him be washed overboard, though he cannot fathom his own reasons. After a terrible storm, the ship is damaged and only makes it to land with Billy's help at the wheel. He rescues Barbara from the wreck and brings her ashore. Barbara is kidnapped by headhunters descended from medieval Japanese. Byrne and Theriere race to rescue her from the daimyo's hut in the middle of the village, but Theriere is fatally wounded in the escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gentleman's_Guide_to_Graceful_Living"title="A Gentleman's Guide to Graceful Living">
The book is about a man, named Arthur Camden, who is the great-grandson of the owner of a club which is named Maidenhead Grange. The club is a beloved Catskills fly-fishing lounge. The lounge is home to the Hanover Street Fly Casters, a group that was founded in 1878 by 12 Manhattan financiers. Arther burns Maidenhead Grange to the ground. He didn't burn down the club on purpose, he did it by accident. Arthur has also destroyed his marriage and an import-export business that is owned by his family.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Earth"title="The White Earth">
The book follows a dual narrative between the perspectives of William and John, where William's takes place over the time period of late 1992 to 1993 and John's takes place from his childhood up to the present of 1993.William's narrative follows his father dying in an explosion and William and his mother being invited by John to Kuran Station. At the station, William learns from John some stories of the land and is introduced to the water hole. John then organises an anti-Native Title rally, which ends in disaster as it gets out of control. At the rally, William sees a burning man in nausea and John is injured in the chaos. After the rally, John's daughter, Ruth, arrives in awareness of John's injury, and the daughter and father are shown to have a bad relationship. After an argument between John and Ruth, William experiences a moment of realisation and leaves for the water hole. At the water hole, he finds it to be empty, despite it being described as always flowing. After William is driven back to Kuran House by Ruth, he realises that there were bones inside the empty water hole. John drives William to retrieve the bones and proceeds to burn them, resulting in the entire house catching fire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoe's_Tale"title="Zoe's Tale">
"Zoe's Tale" is a parallel retelling of Scalzi's third Old Man's War novel, "The Last Colony", written as a first-person narrative from the viewpoint of Zoë Boutin Perry. It follows up on several plot points that were underrepresented in the original novel.Zoë is the 17-year-old adopted daughter of John Perry and Jane Sagan, two former-soldiers-turned-colonists who were the subjects of Scalzi's first book, "Old Man's War". Her biological father, Charles Boutin, created a device capable of giving consciousness to a race of creatures, called the Obin, who are otherwise intelligent but not conscious. The Obin worshipped him, but he was killed for being a traitor to humankind and wanting to overthrow the Colonial Union. Since Boutin gave consciousness to the Obin, his daughter Zoë became a demigod to them. As such, she is accompanied at all times by a pair of Obin bodyguards, Hickory and Dickory, who also relay all their experiences and feelings back to the rest of the Obin.After John and Jane are assigned to manage the colony of Roanoke—the first human colony to be settled by colonists from other colonies rather than directly from Earth—Zoë befriends Gretchen en route, and the two soon build romantic relationships with Enzo and Magdy, respectively. On Roanoke, foolhardy Magdy leads the four into peril against what later come to be known as Roanoke's indigenous werewolves. Hickory and Dickory train Zoë to defend herself against these and other alien threats. Later, after a colonist is killed by the werewolves, Magdy and Enzo are among those who head into the woods for revenge. Zoë, Gretchen, Hickory, and Dickory manage to find Enzo and Magdy, who are cornered by the werewolves, without alerting them, but Zoë reveals herself to defuse the situation and the werewolf threat by asserting dominance over Magdy and punishing him, then allowing an injured werewolf to injure Magdy in turn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Bones_(Clare_novel)"title="City of Bones (Clare novel)">
Clary goes to the Pandemonium club with her best friend, Simon Lewis, where she sees a blue-haired boy and a girl sneak into a storeroom, pursued by two other boys, one armed with what appears to be a knife. She sends Simon for help and follows the group into the storeroom, where she witnesses the boy being killed, before vanishing. Simon enters the storeroom with a bouncer and questions why Clary is there alone; Clary realizes no one else can see the others.The next day, Jocelyn announces that they are moving from New York to the country for the summer, where Jocelyn's friend, Luke, has a house. Clary, upset by the decision, confides in Simon that she knows almost nothing about her mother or her family. Simon mentions seeing thin, white scars on Jocelyn's back and shoulders, but Clary dismisses this. They go to a poetry reading where Clary sees Jace, one of the boys from the previous night, who privately tells Clary about demon-hunters, called Shadowhunters or Nephilim. Jace claims Clary is not a 'mundane', a term for ordinary humans, as she has the Sight, allowing her to see beings from the Shadow World. Clary answers a call from Jocelyn, who frantically warns her not to come home, and to tell Luke that "he" has found her. It ends abruptly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Oil"title="The End of Oil">
Though "The End of Oil" is not a chronological history of humanity's use of fossil fuels, Roberts begins by recounting how Thomas Newcomen, in 1712, presented the first large steam engine, and thus helped spark the Industrial Revolution. He then goes on to explain the problems that have since developed, or may develop in the future, from humanity's reliance on oil and its "geological siblings", coal and natural gas. While there is a chapter on hydrogen as a possible alternative to oil (not as an energy source, but as an energy carrier), the book is not focused on any one solution to the problems it lays out.According to Roberts, oil faces three major dilemmas. Most importantly, all fossil fuels are by their very nature limited in supply; as far as oil is concerned, the resulting dilemma is best known as the question of peak oil. Further, much of the oil consumed by affluent countries such as the United States is extracted in countries that are rather unstable politically, such as some of the members of the OPEC. The oil trade is therefore prone to become intertwined with international relations, although the nature of this interplay is highly controversial, with some citing oil as a reason for conflicts such as the Iraq War and others denying such claims. Finally, since the burning of fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide that was previously locked in the ground, humanity's reliance on oil may contribute to global warming.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanks_for_the_Memories_(novel)"title="Thanks for the Memories (novel)">
A blood transfusion saves Joyce Conway’s life. After she wakes up, she finds that she has memories and knowledge that she did not possess before her accident. As she deals with her impending divorce and a miscarriage, Joyce encounters a handsome American, Justin. Joyce and Justin are drawn to each other. What is this magical connection?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Shadows_(novel)"title="Mad Shadows (novel)">
"La Belle Bête" starts off as the three main characters return home on a train. Immediately, their relationships with one another, as well as their physical beauty as a status, are established. As they return home, their daily activities reveal even more of their living situation with one another, as Isabelle-Marie is the Cinderella of the family, works hard, and is neglected. Louise fawns over her beloved beautiful Patrice, who is so incompetent from his constant dependence on his mother that he can do nothing but accept her attention. Eventually, Louise announces that she needs to travel to pick up farm equipment for their vast land and leaves Patrice and Isabelle-Marie. Isabelle-Marie continues her distaste for her brother, and as her mother is no longer there to support Patrice, she takes the opportunity to let him starve to release her anger and jealously towards him. As she grows to pity his incompetence and dependency on Louise, Isabelle-Marie begins to care for him ever so slightly.When Louise returns, she brings with her Lanz, who becomes the new controlling figure over the family. Patrice rejoices and cleaves to his mother, who, however, can no longer respond with her attention as she is consumed by her own relationship with Lanz. As Lanz brings Louise further and further from her children, Patrice spirals into deterioration, and Isabelle-Marie relishes her new freedom. As Isabelle-Marie becomes more upbeat, she learns to care for Patrice and meets her lover, Michael, whom she convinces to love her by lying about her beauty.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swords_and_Deviltry"title="Swords and Deviltry">
The Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories concern the lives of two larcenous but likable rogues as they adventure across the fantasy world of Nehwon. The stories in "Swords and Deviltry" introduce the duo and their relationship ("Induction"), present incidents from their early lives in which they meet their first lady-loves (Fafhrd in "The Snow Women", the Gray Mouser in "The Unholy Grail"), and relate how afterwards in the city of Lankhmar the two met and allied themselves with each other, and lost their first loves through their defiance of the local Thieves' Guild ("Ill Met in Lankhmar").
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Lion_Feeds"title="When the Lion Feeds">
The novel begins in Natal in the 1870s, with the introduction of twin brothers Sean and Garrick, the sons of ranch owner Waite Courtney. After one of Sean's hunting accidents results in Garrick losing his leg, a guilt-ridden Sean becomes Garrick's protector, with Garrick later manipulating Sean's guilt for his own benefit. Sean and Garrick are both expelled from school after Sean assaults a teacher who attacked Garrick in order to antagonize Sean, after which Waite hires the two to work for him.Sean, Garrick and Waite all participate in the Anglo-Zulu War. Waite is killed in battle, and Sean is later presumed dead after getting caught in an ambush. Garrick meanwhile becomes a war hero after inadvertently preventing the Zulus from forcing their way into a makeshift hospital ward, earning the Victoria Cross for his efforts.Upon learning that Sean's girlfriend Anna is pregnant, Garrick marries her to prevent her giving birth out of wedlock. The two fail to consummate their marriage due to Garrick proving to be impotent, and when they return, Sean is revealed to have survived after escaping the ambush and subsequent pursuit with the help of Mbejane, a Zulu who turned against his people after his father was murdered by supporters of Cetewayo. Anna tries to return to Sean, but he refuses her due to her marriage to Garrick, even after learning that she bears his child. A bitter Anna fakes being raped by Sean, turning Garrick against his brother, though Sean assumes that she told Garrick the truth of her pregnancy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rose_Rent"title="The Rose Rent">
Shrewsbury Abbey anticipates two events coming on 22 June in 1142: honouring the day five years earlier when Saint Winifred's reliquary was placed on its altar, and paying the rent due to the widow Judith Perle. Three years earlier, she lost both her husband and her unborn child within three weeks. She gave their home in the Foregate to the Abbey, half her patrimony, in a charter. The Abbey pays a single white rose from the garden, delivered to her in person, as rent. Brother Eluric delivers the rose. Eight days before the feast, he asks Abbot Radulfus to be released from this duty, as he is tormented by his desire for the widow Perle. The Abbot asks Niall the bronzesmith, who rents the property, to deliver the rose rent.Judith asks Niall to make a new buckle for a girdle. She has several active suitors but is not interested in remarrying, still grieving her losses. She considers taking the veil at Godric's Ford with Sister Magdalen. Sister Magdalen advises her to wait, saying their door is always open as a place of retreat.Niall, a widower, keeps his young daughter with his sister in Pulley, three miles away. He returns from an overnight visit to find that the white rose bush has been hacked at its bole. At its base lies young Eluric, dead with a knife by his side. While investigating the murder scene with the Abbot and Brother Anselm, Brother Cadfael finds a distinctive footprint and makes a wax impression. Judith arrives to pick up the repaired girdle; Cadfael tells Judith about Eluric's desire for her. That night, Judith tells her servant Branwen that in the morning she will make the gift unconditional, which news Branwen shares in the kitchen. The next day, Judith fails to arrive at the abbey. The Sheriff, called back to town, Cadfael, and Abbot Radulfus believe that Judith was kidnapped, either to be forced into marriage or to void the charter by her absence on rent day. The search begins. Cadfael finds the once firmly-attached bronze tag from the end of Judith's girdle, suggesting a struggle. It is found under the bridge where a boat had been hauled up for convenient use, stolen by the kidnapper. Cadfael searches the River Severn with Madog, finding the stolen boat discarded downstream.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_Towns"title="Paper Towns">
"Paper Towns" mostly takes place in and around Jefferson Park, a fictional subdivision located in suburban Orlando, Florida and focuses on narrator and protagonist Quentin "Q" Jacobsen and his neighbor Margo Roth Spiegelman, with whom Quentin has always had a romantic fascination. As preadolescents, Quentin and Margo together discovered the corpse of a local man who committed suicide in their neighborhood park. Nine years later, Quentin is an outcast whose best friends are Ben and Radar, while Margo is a popular student—both now seniors at Winter Park High School. A month before their graduation, Margo suddenly reappears in Quentin's life, climbing through his bedroom window as she did during their first meeting. She has devised an eleven-part plan of vengeance on a group of people she feels have hurt her during her time at high school; these people include her cheating boyfriend Jase and peers Lacey and Becca. Margo needs an accomplice and a car to help her, and Quentin accepts. Margo and Quentin successfully complete the tasks, share a romantically ambiguous dance, and return to their homes around dawn.The next day, Quentin wonders hopefully if Margo will start hanging out with him, but Margo is reported missing by her parents after three days. Quentin, Ben, and Radar soon discover a series of items that Margo has left hidden for Quentin: a picture of Woody Guthrie on Margo's bedroom window shade, Margo's highlighted copy of Walt Whitman's poem "Song of Myself", and a written address in Quentin's bedroom doorjamb. Quentin and his friends follow these clues to find an abandoned mini-mall in Christmas, Florida, that contains evidence of Margo's recent presence. Quentin struggles to analyze all of Margo's clues and leftover materials in the mini-mall. He suspects the clues are meant to lead him to her current whereabouts, though he worries she may have committed suicide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Wizards_(gamebook)"title="War of the Wizards (gamebook)">
In this, the final installment of the World of Lone Wolf, Grey Star and Tanith have just completed a harrowing quest in the Shadow realm of the Daziarn. Upon retrieving the Moonstone, the two return to Magnamund to find the forces of good and evil poised on the brink of final conflict. Shasarak has enlisted the aid of the dreaded demon lord Agarash the Damned in order to eradicate the resistance movement once and for all. Battling their way through hordes of demons and undead minion, Grey Star and Tanith must struggle to rejoin the Freedom Guild, defeat the forces of the Wytch-King, and fulfill his destiny and promise to the Shianti.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_the_Pygmies"title="King of the Pygmies">
Penn is an average American high school boy living in the small town of Havre de Grace, Maryland. He has a crush on the new girl at school, Daisy. He looks out for his older brother, Matt, who has had brain damage from birth. Penn is on his way to a successful life.All of this changes when he starts hearing voices.He learns of the worries that his brother does not voice out loud, the depression that his neighbor is fighting, and the quiet struggles that his parents face each day.After Penn shares the details of being able to hear people's thoughts, his mother forces him to see a psychiatrist as she suspects that he suffers from schizophrenia. He desperately tries to show his father that he is not insane and takes him to see his Uncle Hewitt, who had convinced Penn that he too could read people's minds. Unfortunately, his uncle could not correctly guess the thoughts of Penn's father, and both Penn and Hewitt are left looking as if they are not mentally stable.Penn is let down by his uncle again after he promised that a man would come and see him and explain the Pygmy disease, which causes the ability to hear the thoughts of other people. The man does not show up, leaving Penn unsure whether his Uncle can truly hear the thoughts of other people, and even creates doubts concerning Penn's mental state and whether he is magic or mentally unstable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Dinosaur_Robbery"title="The Great Dinosaur Robbery">
The book is set in New York City in the 1970s, and follows attempts by a group of five British nannies who discover that a microdot containing Chinese military secrets believed to be vital to the survival of the British Empire has been hidden in a dinosaur skeleton in the American Museum of Natural History. However, since they cannot find the message, they contrive to steal the entire skeleton and mail it to the Queen. Furthermore, in the story, the Chinese agents who hope to retrieve the message, and also the Americans searching for the missing dinosaur skeleton, play important roles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ox-Bow_Incident_(novel)"title="The Ox-Bow Incident (novel)">
"The Ox-Bow Incident" takes place in 1885, and begins with two cowboys, Art Croft and Gil Carter, riding into the town of Bridger's Wells. They go into Canby's Saloon and find the atmosphere is tense, partly due to recent incidents of cattle rustling. News is brought that a local named Kinkaid has been murdered and a large number of cattle have been stolen from Drew, the largest cattle rancher in Bridger's Wells. The townspeople begin to form a posse. Local men Osgood and Davies send for Judge Tyler to try to defuse the situation, but the rancher Tetley arrives and incites them to further action. As the posse sets out, the judge warns that the men must be brought back alive to stand trial.The posse finds cattle bearing Drew's brand and three men sleeping on the ground around a campfire: an old, raving man named Alva Hardwick; a Mexican named Juan Martinez, who claims to be unable to understand English; and the young Donald Martin. Tetley interrogates them. Martin says that he purchased the cattle and that Drew was to send the bill of sale at a later date. No one believes him, and the mob decides the men should be hung.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath_(Alten_novel)"title="Goliath (Alten novel)">
The story chronicles ex-Army Ranger Gunnar Wolfe escaping from being falsely imprisoned after attempting to wipe data from a computer on efforts to construct a new futuristic type of military submarine called "Goliath". The Chinese government, however, has been building a version of the submarine using stolen plans. The Chinese craft is stolen by Simon Covah, the antagonist who wants to use it as leverage over the world's governments and the CIA. Goliath is also equipped with an artificial intelligence program known as SORCERESS.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Light_(Wellum_book)"title="First Light (Wellum book)">
The book opens with Wellum's interview for the Royal Air Force and his training. It then shifts to his participation in the Battle of Britain and to his participation in Operation Pedestal, flying planes to Malta off an aircraft carrier. It then closes with him being grounded, recovering from sinusitis and then returning to duty as a test pilot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unwilling_Warlord"title="The Unwilling Warlord">
The Kingdom of Semma is on the verge of war but the VIII Hereditary Warlord has died. The King sent out a search party to the Hegemony of Ethshar where with the aid of magic they track down the heir to the title, the Unwilling IX Warlord Sterren.The story evolves as Sterren, along with assorted others hired to help in the war, is hauled off from his career as a low stakes gambler to Semma. One of his companions is Vond, a master Warlock who is feeling the Calling and who is seeking to get as far away from Aldagmor as he can because once a Warlock gives in to the Calling they are drawn to Aldagmor and are never seen again. Vond takes a liking to Sterren who was actually apprenticed as a Warlock for three days before being dismissed as unable to perform. Of course it is against the Guild law for any magician to practice in more than one field so Sterren was disqualified to take up any of the other studies. Not long after arriving in Semma, Vond discovers a second source of power for Warlockry and quickly becomes the most powerful magician in the Small Kingdoms.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nip_the_Buds,_Shoot_the_Kids"title="Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids">
The novel deals with fifteen adolescent boys from a reformatory in World War II Japan. The boys (including the unnamed narrator and his brother) are sent to a rural village (strongly echoing the regions of Shikoku in which Ōe was raised) to live and work. Upon arrival, the boys find the village afflicted by plague, with piles of rotting animal corpses dominating the atmosphere. Soon after the boys' arrival, the villagers flee from the plague to a neighboring village, barricading the boys in and abandoning them to their fate.The group is joined (in stages) by a Korean boy named Li, a deserter from the army, and a young girl who has been abandoned in a warehouse. The boys attempt to make the most of their situation; Li teaches them to hunt birds, resulting in a jubilant festival, and the narrator finds love with the young girl. Their situation turns after a few days, however; the girl dies of plague after being bitten by a village dog, the narrator's brother runs away into the wild forest (and presumed dead), and the villagers eventually return and are furious with the state in which they find the village. Fearful of the repercussions should it become known that they abandoned the boys to die, they stab the deserter and alternately threaten the boys with violence and ply them with food. All members of the reformatory boys eventually agree to keep silent about the actions of the villagers, with the exception of the narrator. At the close of the novel, he is chased into the forest by the villagers to an unknown fate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Thirty"title="Beyond Thirty">
The story was heavily influenced by the events of World War I, and reflects U.S. sentiments at the time of writing. When the war broke out, Americans were predominantly isolationist and wary of being drawn into a European war. Burroughs imagines a future two centuries onward in which that view prevailed and the western hemisphere severed contact with the rest of the world. Consequently, the eastern hemisphere has exhausted itself in war and Europe has descended into barbarism while the Americas, sheltered from the destruction, have continued to advance and joined peacefully into the union of Pan-America. By the twenty-second century the entire world east of the 30th meridian west and west of the 175th meridian west has become "terra incognita" to Pan-America.In 2137, Pan-American Navy Lieutenant Jefferson Turck is commander of the aero-submarine "Coldwater", tasked with patrolling the 30th meridian from Iceland to the Azores. Disaster strikes when the vessel's anti-gravitation screens fail, dooming it to wallow upon the surface of the ocean, and the engines fail, leaving it adrift. As its wireless radio has failed as well, Turck cannot even summon help. While the crew attempts repairs Turck and three subordinates, Snider, Taylor and Delcarte, go fishing in a small boat to reprovision the vessel. While they are out the "Coldwater" is successfully repaired and flies off, leaving the fishermen to their fate. It is implied that Turck's second officer Johnson, who has clashed with his superior, is behind both the original sabotage and subsequent abandonment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Yoke_(Stirling_novel)"title="Under the Yoke (Stirling novel)">
Tanya von Shrakenberg, a Draka, establishes a plantation in the formerly-French Touraine after the Drakan subjugation of Continental Europe. Her slaves include Marya Sokolowska and Chantal Lefarge, formerly a Polish nun and a French Communist respectively. Fred Kustaa, an agent for the Alliance secret service (the OSS), is involved in the effort to keep a resistance movement alive in Europe. He smuggles weapons to guerillas in Finland, and later attempts to smuggle out the German professor Ernst Oerbach, who has vital knowledge on nuclear fusion. Marya Sokolowska is Fred's contact in this second mission. Meanwhile, Chantal is raped by Tanya's husband, and impregnated with twins. Fred attempts to flee, but fails, leading to the deaths of Fred, Marya, and Ernst. Chantal manages to escape to the United States on a submarine. In New York City, she gives birth to Fred and Marya Lefarge (named after her rescuers), who would be the protagonists of the next book in the series, "The Stone Dogs", and who - though biologically the children of a Draka father - would be staunch enemies of the Draka.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_(novel)"title="Century (novel)">
## Introduction.Seven-year-old Princess Syliva Maria Pia Angelica Toscanelli is called to the Mother Superior's office. She is told that her father, Prince Filiberto was killed in battle, making the princess an orphan.Private Augustus Dexter is on his way back from Savannah, Georgia, after delivering confidential papers from General Sherman when he decides to spend the night at a burned plantation house, in order to rest and loot the house. An old slave, offers him his mistress's jewels for fifty dollars. Augustus gives him thirty dollars and his father's gold watch. He plans to sell the jewellery and use them to fund his plans of building a bank in New York.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Are_You_There,_Vodka?_It's_Me,_Chelsea"title="Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea">
## Blacklisted.In order to impress a fifth grade boy and to gain the respect of the girls at her school, Chelsea concocts a tall tale in which she is co-starring in a movie with Goldie Hawn. The lie quickly gets blown out of proportion, and things get even more complicated when Chelsea's father forces her to reveal the truth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports,_Sin_and_Subversion"title="Sports, Sin and Subversion">
Hyde takes as his point of departure his childhood in the downtown area of Belize City, discussing in effect the history of Belizean sports and sports personalities as he saw it from the late 1950s through to the present day.Hyde makes many references to famous sportspeople in Belize, as well as famous internationals who interacted with Belize and Belizeans: Willie Mays, Roberto Clemente, Muhammad Ali, as well as popular sports teams: San Francisco Giants, New York Yankees, Philadelphia 76ers and Chicago Cubs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_Country_(novel)"title="Cross Country (novel)">
An African warlord known as the Tiger, aided by his crew of angry young men, horrifically murders author Eleanor 'Ellie' Cox and her entire family. Alex Cross and girlfriend Bree Stone go investigate, when Alex recalls Ellie had been his one time girlfriend, whom he had loved at one point. He is instantly terrified by this so much he gets no sleep, does no work for the case, and stays up late at night, sitting in his bed. He then figures out the Tiger's next murder, and arrives on time to stop the Tiger and his gang of kids, where most of the villains escape including the Tiger and most of his gang. After gaining access from the CIA he plans on going to Nigeria, where he hopes to find and stop the Tiger, using the knowledge based on the Tiger's whereabouts. After convincing a bitter Nanna and nervous Bree, he goes on a plane trip to Nigeria, where he is annoyed by their customs. He is then kidnapped by 'cops' and put in jail, where his nose is broken, he is horribly injured, and starves as well as having to deal with no water. After nearly three days or more, he is bailed out by American Ian Flaherty who gives Cross advice to flee while he still can. He is then called by Bree who says there has been another murder by the Tiger.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stranger_Beside_Me"title="The Stranger Beside Me">
The first few chapters following the brief introduction about Bundy's birth and family describe Rule's friendship with Bundy, her first impressions of him, and her reluctance to consider the evidence that he might be responsible for the crimes of which he was accused. She met Bundy in 1971 when he was a psychology student at the University of Washington and contemplating a career in law and politics. They worked together at a crisis center taking telephone calls from those at risk of suicide or facing other difficulties. Rule considered Bundy "kind, solicitous, and empathetic". Rule and Bundy developed a close friendship, sharing meals and conversations. Over a decade older than Bundy, Rule later stated that she would have trusted Bundy to care for her young children. They fell out of contact in late 1973 after he stopped working at the crisis center. Starting in early 1974, a series of brutal murders of young women in the Seattle area shocked the city and gained major attention. Women were killed at a rate of roughly once every 30 days. Bundy was considered a possible suspect from the summer of 1974, when the unidentified killer was observed by several witnesses talking with two young women who later disappeared at Lake Sammamish State Park. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_(novel)"title="Eva (novel)">
When 13-year-old Eva is badly injured in a car accident, her consciousness is transplanted into the body of a chimpanzee. The novel concerns her efforts to adjust to her unique situation. The setting is a future when urban civilization has spread across the globe, with disastrous effects on other species.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relic_of_Empire"title="Relic of Empire">
Set in a future where an advanced humanity has forgotten their origins on Earth, the novel describes the political equations and power struggle between the emperor, a quasi-religious group, a pre-sentient computer named the Mag Comm and the Lord Commander.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Bad_Ants"title="Two Bad Ants">
The title characters, while journeying through a human home, decide to exploit a sugar bowl on their own rather than delivering the sugar cubes to the colony's queen (so each of the ants get one sugar cube and so does the queen ant). They experience misadventures: they land in a cup of coffee (after a giant spoon shovels up the sugar cubes into the coffee and gets the ants out), almost get toasted on an English muffin (after mistaking it for a giant disc with holes), fall into a sink, get threatened by its garbage disposal unit, and are nearly electrocuted when they enter an electric outlet. Chastened, they rejoin a line of ants carrying sugar cubes back to the colony.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marihuana_(novel)"title="Marihuana (novel)">
King Turner is in a deep funk after his wife, Eleanor, left him. He's fallen in with a pair of reprobates, Bill Evans and Wash Gordon, who are more interested in him as the butt of their jokes than as a friend. One night they drag King and a girl named Vinnie to a "ranch"—a sort of speakeasy where people smoke "grass".After getting high, King hallucinates that Vinnie is his ex-wife and begins chasing her around the room. Bill hands him a knife as a lark and tells him to "pin her down." King does exactly that and then flees the room. He finds a sleeping bouncer and steals the man's gun. Before he can leave the ranch, a couple police officers arrive, but King manages to sneak past them.King evades pursuit and hides out in the phone booth of a candy store. While there, a police officer enters and walks towards the store's proprietor to buy a numbers ticket, but King, paranoid from the marijuana, thinks the officer is there to arrest him, and responds by gunning the man down. King flees the store and heads to the hotel where his ex-wife is living.Eleanor agrees to talk with King in her room. After hearing his story, she tries to calm him down but with little effect. She convinces him to let her order some sandwiches and coffee from room service. On the phone, she tells the clerk that she wants her order fixed "just like the other night," referring to the fact that she'd had sleeping powder added to her coffee to help with insomnia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Swan_(short_story)"title="The Black Swan (short story)">
Rosalie, a 50-year-old widow, finds her youthful manner diminished by the "organic phenomena of her time of life," or menopause. She lives with her adult unmarried daughter and an adolescent son, both of whom juxtapose youth to her "superannuated" purpose in life.The family hires a young, American-born man to tutor for her son. Rosalie is strongly attracted to him and is soon infatuated. Her daughter disapproves more strongly now of her still socializing mother. Then, seemingly miraculously, Rosalie's menopause reverses. Where her vitality, and sexual awareness would be in decline, she is in a heightened state of sexual awareness including the return of menstrual bleeding.Rosalie plans a family trip and declares her intentions and availability to the young man. They plan a liaison in the Rhine castle "Schloss Benrath", but it never takes place. She is later found in her bed unconscious due to a hemorrhage caused by what would soon prove to be a fatal metastatic tumor in her uterus.The surgeons' commentary include a discussion on the possible causes of Rosalie's newfound youth. Cancer was an obvious cause of her tumor, but one doctor insinuates that it could have been the yearning for love and her altered or re-awakened erotic personality that stimulated her ovaries thereby causing the cancerous growth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geisha_in_Rivalry"title="Geisha in Rivalry">
"Rivalry" begins with the return of the story's protagonist, Komayo, to the geisha world. Having left the pleasure quarters to live in the countryside, she returns several years later because her husband has died, leaving her to fend for herself. She decides that she would rather relive her days as a geisha than to live as a peasant.Upon her return, she is reunited with a lover from her past, Yoshioka. The two had spent time together before Yoshioka left the country to study abroad. Yoshioka feels a rekindled desire for Komayo and calls for her often to spend much of her time with him attending events. Soon he suggests that he should become her . Although Komayo would be glad to have the financial support, she shies away from his proposal. Komayo and Yoshioka go on a weeklong vacation to hot spring resorts, but Yoshioka has to unexpectedly leave early. Komayo stays and runs into Segawa, a man whom she desires instantly. After a brief, unforgettable affair, Komayo returns to Tokyo.At the kabuki theater, Yoshioka overhears a conversation about the love affair between Komayo and Segawa. He seeks revenge by becoming involved with Kikuchiyo, a promiscuous geisha from Komayo's . Komayo discovers that Yoshioka has betrayed her; though hurt, she pursues her relationship with Segawa with renewed determination, though Segawa does not reciprocate the same devotion. After a performance, Yoshioka's first mistress, Rikiji, seeks her revenge on Komayo by introducing Segawa to a wealthy former geisha, Kimiryu. This new geisha's financial situation pleases Segawa's mother, who never approved of Komayo.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Jones_and_the_Dance_of_the_Giants"title="Indiana Jones and the Dance of the Giants">
The year is 1925 A.D. Dr. Henry Jones Jr., better known as Indiana Jones, has secured his first teaching job as a professor in London University's archaeology department. It is here that Indy first meets a very attractive 20 year old Scottish girl by the name of Deirdre Campbell. She is the brightest student in his class but Indy quickly learns that her knowledge goes far past the contents of his lectures. In her thesis for the class, she quite seriously claims to have uncovered a golden scroll that proves of the true existence of Merlin the sorcerer. Intrigued by the thesis and by Deirdre herself, Indy once again takes up the bullwhip and fedora for an action-packed chase across Britain filled with magic, mystery, murder, a lesson in love and the threat of world domination.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-da-Fé_(novel)"title="Auto-da-Fé (novel)">
The novel is a dark and disorienting tale of the self-destructive character of totalitarian thinking. A writer for the Spectator described it as: "Appalling, magnificent ... [It] screams and bellows of evil, out of which a supremely mad, unfaceable book is orchestrated ... of which we dare not deny the genius."The protagonist is Herr Doktor Peter Kien, a famed and famously reclusive forty-year-old philologist and Sinologist who is uninterested in human interaction or sex, content with his monkish, highly disciplined life in his book-lined apartment in Vienna. He uses the least amount of furniture possible, to make room for his pacing through his lofty rooms, sleeping on a small divan. He holds books at a higher value than human life, and becomes obsessed with the protection of his library, which he fancies the largest private library in the city:"He himself was the owner of the most important private library in the whole of this great city. He carried a minute portion of it with him wherever he went. His passion for it, the only one which he had permitted himself during a life of austere and exacting study, moved him to take special precautions. Books, even bad ones, tempted him easily into making a purchase. Fortunately, the great number of the book shops did not open until after eight o'clock."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_of_a_Yellow_Sun"title="Half of a Yellow Sun">
The novel takes place in Nigeria prior to and during the Nigerian Civil War (1967–70). The effect of the war is shown through the relationships of five people's lives including the twin daughters of an influential businessman, a professor, a British expat, and a Nigerian houseboy. After Biafra's declaration of secession, the lives of the main characters drastically change and are torn apart by the brutality of the civil war and decisions in their personal lives.The book jumps between events that took place during the early and late 1960s, when the war took place, and extends until the end of the war. In the early 1960s, the main characters are introduced: Ugwu, a 13-year-old village boy who moves in with Odenigbo, to work as his houseboy. Odenigbo frequently entertains intellectuals to discuss the political turmoil in Nigeria. Life changes for Ugwu when Odenigbo's girlfriend, Olanna, moves in with them. Ugwu forms a strong bond with both of them, and is a very loyal houseboy. Olanna has a twin sister, Kainene, a woman with a dry sense of humor, tired by the pompous company she runs for her father. Her lover Richard is an English writer who goes to Nigeria to explore Igbo-Ukwu art.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_with_Darkness"title="Date with Darkness">
Navy Lieutenant Philip Branch is on leave in New York City when he becomes snared in a glamour girl's schemes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_with_Mermaids"title="Dancing with Mermaids">
The novel is set in the secluded fishing village of Rams Horn, once a fashionable Regency spa, at the mouth of the River Sheep, somewhere on the Dorset coast. Rams Horn is described by the author as ‘a memory, a lost cause, a carnival of ghosts, an ark of half-forgotten dreams’. The Financial Times described the setting as a secretive place ‘full of leery, venal, outsize, hideous and beautiful people’ .
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Steel_Mirror"title="The Steel Mirror">
The plot is set in the post-World War II years, with a background of heroism and treachery in Nazi-controlled Europe and paranoia over communism. John Emmett managed to avoid fighting in the war because he was a chemist in a safe but useful state-side post. However, both of his older brothers fought and died in the war, and he has questions about his untested courage.The novel starts with Emmett stalled out in a small town outside Chicago, his car having died. He is on a cross-country journey to California to a new job. He spots a young woman at the service station and makes a pitch to hitch-hike with her. To his surprise, she agrees. She is Ann Nicholson, and over the course of the novel it is revealed that she is the daughter of a rich industrialist from Chicago, that she was married to a French man before the war, and that during the war, she fought in the French resistance until she was captured and tortured by the Gestapo.As the car journey continues, Emmett is approached in a diner by a man and woman, who reveal that they are Ann's psychiatrist and his nurse. They were keeping an eye on her in Chicago, but Ann suddenly bolted in the car and started driving cross-country. It is revealed that there was a murder in Chicago, an Army Air Force pilot who knew Ann and her husband in Nazi-controlled France, who had accused her of betraying her resistance group and her husband.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoky_Valley"title="Smoky Valley">
John Parrish doesn't run, even when the local land baron tries to burn him out of his home. The former soldier has to stay alive long enough to outwit his enemies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Klingon_Gambit"title="The Klingon Gambit">
The Klingon ship "Terror" has recently murdered the innocent crew of a Vulcan science ship. The "Enterprise" is sent to meet this new threat, only to fall apart from within. Crew members throw immature temper tantrums. Orders are ignored. One by one, the crew are losing their minds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Covenant_of_the_Crown"title="The Covenant of the Crown">
Spock, McCoy and Kailyn, the beautiful heir to the Shaddan throne are the only survivors of an "Enterprise" shuttle crash on the barren planet of Sigma 1212. The three must survive Klingon scouts and literally reclaim the Shaddan crown, or else risk a Klingon territorial takeover.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prometheus_Design"title="The Prometheus Design">
The U.S.S. "Enterprise" arrives to assist the Helvans, who are being plagued with outbreaks of many types of violence. Soon Captain Kirk becomes mentally ill. He is removed from command and Commander Spock takes over, but it is not exactly an improvement. Spock's orders seem to be just as irrational and cruel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abode_of_Life"title="The Abode of Life">
The citizens of the isolated planet Mercan cannot conceive of the existence of much past their home planet and their dangerous, flaring sun.The USS "Enterprise", severely damaged, must somehow find a way to repair itself without exposing the Mercanians to societal concepts for which they are not yet ready, as the Federation's 'Prime Directive' forbids interference in less advanced cultures.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Fire_(novel)"title="Black Fire (novel)">
An explosion destroys the bridge of the "Enterprise", killing trainee crewmembers and severely injuring the main crew. Spock ignores a chunk of metal in his spine to take command and figure out exactly what happened.His investigation soon leads him and the "Enterprise"s Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott to the discovery of the Tomarii, an alien race who reveres war and conflict. Despite being urged by Scott and others to take the time to have his injuries treated, Spock refuses to do so. Scott and Spock meet with a small grouping of Romulans and Klingons, all three races having been attacked. The grouping is captured by the Tomarii, who use them in other conflicts.Meanwhile, Spock has been framed for the explosion and Captain Kirk, recovering from his own wounds, must clear his friend's name.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_(novel)"title="Triangle (novel)">
Both Captain Kirk and Commander Spock have fallen in love with the same woman, Federation Free Agent Sola Than. This situation ties into the galaxy-threatening danger of the immense intelligence known as the 'Totality'.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_the_Romulans"title="Web of the Romulans">
A deadly virus causes desperate Romulans to invade Canara and incite a battle with the USS "Enterprise". Captain James T. Kirk, fully willing to get the antidote to the Romulans, has to deal with the ship's central computer which has developed romantic feelings for Kirk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_Through_a_Small_Planet"title="Journey Through a Small Planet">
In "Journey Through a Small Planet" (1972), the writer Emanuel Litvinoff recalls his working-class Jewish childhood in the East End of London: a small cluster of streets right next to the city, but worlds apart in culture and spirit. With vivid intensity Litvinoff describes the overcrowded tenements of Brick Lane and Whitechapel, the smell of pickled herring and onion bread, the rattle of sewing machines and chatter in Yiddish. He also relates stories of his parents, who fled from Russia in 1914, his experiences at school and a brief flirtation with Communism. Unsentimental, vital and almost dream like, this is a masterly evocation of a long-vanished world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunder_and_Lightnings"title="Thunder and Lightnings">
Andrew Mitchell moves to Tiler's Cottage in East Anglia. He goes to his new school and meets Victor Skelton in General Studies class. The two slowly become friends and do things together, including going to RAF Coltishall to see the aeroplanes, which are English Electric Lightnings. Victor is devastated when he discovers that his beloved Lightnings are to be replaced with Jaguars.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Her_Shoes_(novel)"title="In Her Shoes (novel)">
Rose and Maggie Feller are two young sisters who share little in common except their shoe size. Rose is the eldest and has been watching after Maggie since they were young children and their mother Caroline died in a car accident. They were raised by their father Michael (perpetually in mourning for Caroline) and stepmother Sydelle (who resents them both).Rose is a thirty-year-old single, successful lawyer who struggles with her weight, and who resents her younger sister's beauty and sexual attractiveness and lack of stability. Rose feels responsible for her sister and is frustrated with how each attempt to help Maggie backfires on her. Maggie, a twenty-eight-year-old who uses her beauty and charming nature to hide the obstacles she faces due to dyslexia and related learning difficulties, resents Rose's academic success and consequent wealth. Maggie is resentful of only ever holding a series of minimum wage jobs that leave her dependent on the charity of others especially her father and Rose. After middle school, standardized testing sets them on different paths in high school: Rose's success on the exams leads to Princeton University and University of Pennsylvania Law School; Maggie is unable to take the exams and is consequently sidelined in high school and due to her inability to cope with school work, she drops out of high school. She is unable to hold on to any job for long and struggles to manage her money so much so that she is evicted from her flat. Rose offers to support Maggie until her life gets sorted out by giving her a place to stay. Both are nearing the age of their mother when she died, Rose and Maggie each feel as if there is a vacuum in their lives which they are unable to fill.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutiny_on_the_Enterprise"title="Mutiny on the Enterprise">
A much needed peace mission to the Orion Arm is delayed when the "Enterprise" becomes damaged while in orbit around a living planet. Further problems arise when a mysterious female guest causes much of the crew to become hardline pacifists - ruining the real mission. Kirk must now lead the rebellion against his own crew.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trellisane_Confrontation"title="The Trellisane Confrontation">
The planet Trellisane is the breeding ground for a three-way war. Captain Kirk ends up as a passenger on a Klingon warship. Dr. McCoy is stuck with cannibals. The USS "Enterprise" is surrounded by Romulans and the Neutral Zone is filled with more danger than ever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_(novel)"title="Corona (novel)">
A sentient force of protostars, called 'Corona', endangers a team of Vulcan scientists. Captain Kirk and the USS "Enterprise" arrive, their onboard situation complicated by a female reporter and a new computer system that can override Kirk's commands. The situation further degrades when it is learned the protostars might restart the entire universe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Enemy,_My_Ally"title="My Enemy, My Ally">
The USS "Enterprise" is contacted by Ael i-Mhiessan t'Rllaillieu, a Romulan commander with whom Captain Kirk has tangled several times before. Ael has become disillusioned with the Romulan Empire's politics, and is especially concerned with a secret project she has discovered which seeks to use captured Vulcans for medical research with the goal of allowing Romulans to develop extensive mental powers. She convinces her crew to cross the Neutral Zone into Federation space, where the "Enterprise" is patrolling with the Starships "Constellation", "Intrepid" and the Denebian "Defender"-class battleship "Inaieu". Ael hopes to convince Kirk to launch a strike against the medical facility.The Captain declines, but when the USS "Intrepid" mysteriously vanishes during an ion storm, Ael convinces him that the ship has been captured by Romulans and its Vulcan crew will become part of the project. This convinces Kirk to take the "Enterprise" with Ael's ship, "Bloodwing", into Romulan space in a rescue mission. The plan involves Ael's ship pretending to capture the "Enterprise", taking it back home through the Romulan defences on a course which will pass close to the research station.The plan proceeds smoothly until a double cross by Ael's son, Tafv, threatens to leave the "Enterprise" genuinely captured. This attempt is overturned, the "Intrepid" and her crew rescued, the base destroyed, and the "Enterprise" duly heads back to Federation space. Ael and Kirk go their separate ways, he back to duty and she to a life of exile as a traitor. Before leaving she tells Kirk all of her names and their meaning, a highly symbolic act for a Romulan which is only done to "one closer than kin". She tells him her names will be purged from the records back home, rendering her essentially a non-person in Romulan eyes. On returning to Earth Kirk hangs a pennant with Ael's names on it in a remote valley, symbolically counteracting this status.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tears_of_the_Singers"title="The Tears of the Singers">
Captain Kirk and the USS "Enterprise" joins with the Klingons to investigate a spatial anomaly that has already swallowed one starship. Kirk suspects the problem has something to do with the nearby life forms on Taygeta V, beings which are preyed upon for the jewels they secrete at the moment of their death. Unfortunately a Klingon officer has mutiny on his mind and the anomaly threatens to destroy all of known space.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vulcan_Academy_Murders"title="The Vulcan Academy Murders">
Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy travel to a hospital facility on Vulcan to acquire treatment for a badly wounded "Enterprise" crew member. Kirk encounters Spock's mother, Amanda Grayson, and Spock's father, Sarek, and soon becomes heavily involved in Spock's personal life.Then people begin to die. Kirk, trying to solve the case, is hampered by some Vulcans' belief that it would be illogical for murder to be happening on their home world, and that the deaths are therefore accidents. But he knows criminal behavior when he sees it, and presses on.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uhura's_Song"title="Uhura's Song">
Lt. Uhura's friendship with a cat-like diplomat from Eeiauo becomes vital when a plague threatens the population. The songs they shared are key to the cure. When the plague begins to infect humans starting with Dr. McCoy, the crew of the "Enterprise" must work to decipher the songs and cure the plague.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Lord_(novel)"title="Shadow Lord (novel)">
Prince Vikram of the planet Angira has spent some time studying on Earth. He plans to return home with new ways of changing his homeland. Accompanying him are Spock and Hikaru Sulu. Resistance comes from Angirans who hate new technology. The two Starfleet officers are swept up in the fighting and must use primitive weapons themselves to survive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Time_(Star_Trek_novel)"title="Killing Time (Star Trek novel)">
The USS "Enterprise" is on patrol near the Romulan neutral zone and the crew is experiencing unusual dreams. Captain James T. Kirk and Science Officer Spock both confess that they are having dreams that Spock is Captain of the ship and Kirk is an Ensign. Kirk informs Spock that Starfleet intelligence has discovered that the Romulans are attempting to use time travel and are sending more ships to investigate. Captain Kirk goes to sleep, and awakes as Ensign Kirk on the VSS "ShiKahr", which appears to otherwise be the "Enterprise". The Ensign is a drug addled ex-convict who has been on board for only a day.The Romulans had attempted to travel back in time and destroy the Federation, but they instead created a Federation dominated by Vulcans. They shielded a ship from the changes and compare the differences, realising that it needs to be reversed. Meanwhile, Captain Spock begins to act protectively of Ensign Kirk, but the Captain is injured on an away mission. After Doctor McCoy conducts a series of mental scans, the crew of the "ShiKahr" realise that history has been altered. The Romulans plot to use Kirk to force Spock to impersonate their leader. Spock mindmelds with Kirk, each realising their personas from the main timeline.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwellers_in_the_Crucible"title="Dwellers in the Crucible">
On the planet Vulcan, several representatives of each Federation world are kept as "Warrantors of the Peace". As close relatives of the leaders of their worlds, they serve as hostages against the actions of their planetary governments, and are immediately killed if their world attacks another Federation planet.Six of these Warrantors - an Andorian, a human, a Vulcan and three Deltans - are kidnapped and held by the Romulan Empire. The Andorian is killed during the kidnap, and the three Deltans are tortured to death by their Klingon captors, acting for the Romulans. The plot focuses on the cultural differences and eventual friendship between the two surviving captives, T'Shael and Cleante.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pawns_and_Symbols"title="Pawns and Symbols">
Jean Czerny, a Federation survivor of an earthquake, is suffering from amnesia. She becomes involved in a Klingon crisis, caused by an empire-wide famine. Captain Kirk and the Klingon Captain Kang clash over the potential war brewing and the fate of Jean.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner_of_the_Daleks"title="Prisoner of the Daleks">
The TARDIS arrives on the planet Hurala. Whilst investigating the deserted site the Doctor makes his way to the base's computer data core room, where he is locked inside by the computer along with the corpse of another person previously trapped inside.Five days later, the bounty hunter ship "Wayfarer" lands on the planet, its crew hoping to use the fuel stores to refuel the ship. They soon come across the TARDIS, and then hear a repeating tapping noise. One of them, called Scrum, realises that it's a Morse code SOS message. They quickly trace it to the computer data core room where they find and free the Doctor, who has been sending it out with a spoon. On the insistence of the Doctor and another of the bounty hunters, Stella, the group investigate the computer's systems. They discover an override which, when activated, took control of the base and trapped the Doctor. Someone had used the computer to set a trap. Who did is soon answered when the group are attacked by a Dalek patrol.The Doctor and the bounty hunters, who now reveal that they kill Daleks for a living, race back to the "Wayfarer", escape to the TARDIS being blocked by Daleks. They manage to take off but the Daleks blow up a refuelling pump, sending debris flying into the ship through the open landing ramp, badly wounding Stella. As the crew attempt to put her into cryo-freeze a Dalek manages to get into the ship through an air-lock, and exterminates Stella. Before it can kill anyone else the Doctor freezes it using the emergency cryo-charge intended for Stella. With the Dalek immobilised Stella's body is also frozen and the crew make a course for Auros, Stella's home world. On the way, the Dalek's eye stalk is removed so that the crew can claim the prize-money for killing it, and it is placed in the cargo hold. Whilst talking with the crew the Doctor realises that he's travelled back along the time line to before the Time War. At this point in history the Daleks are locked in a huge galactic war with Earth's first empire, at a moment when victory can go either way. The Doctor also learns more about the crew. Commanding the ship is Bowman, a former Earth trooper who has been fighting the Daleks for years and is a veteran of the Draconian Wars. Scrum is the crew's technician, Cuttin' Edge is a former Space Marine who was dishonorably discharged and Stella was the ship's Medic. The other crew member, Koral, is a humanoid alien whose planet and people of Red Sky Lost were destroyed by the Daleks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindshadow_(novel)"title="Mindshadow (novel)">
The peaceful planet of Aritani becomes the center of a Romulan plot to gain power. A Romulan double agent and a severely injured Spock further complicate the situation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_on_Centaurus"title="Crisis on Centaurus">
On the planet Centaurus, the planetary capital of New Athens has been annihilated by a terrorist antimatter bomb. Millions are dead; because of a computer malfunction, the planetary defense system is preventing any rescue ships from approaching the planet. No subspace communication is possible, and traditional speed-of-light radio is blanketed with heavy static. Despite an emergency do-not-approach warning (known as Code 7-10, which went unheard), the first three relief ships, carrying hundreds of medical personnel, are destroyed by ground-to-air missiles as they assumed standard orbit. The USS "Enterprise" has been sent to assess the situation and offer what relief they can, but they are in need of help themselves as the ship is falling apart around them due to an unexplainable massive computer malfunction of their own; the transporter is made inoperable by the antimatter's residual tachyon radiation.The tragedy has a personal touch as well-- Dr. McCoy's daughter Joanna is among the missing, as well as friends and relatives of other crewmembers. While Spock attempts to disable the planetary defense computers, Captain Kirk, Mr. Sulu and attorney Samuel T. Cogley become involved with the terrorists when the terrorist leader contacts Cogley and ask him to represent them in Federation court. Despite his personal feelings, Kirk is determined that the terrorists will get a fair trial under Federation jurisdiction, but certain individuals in the patchwork government are equally determined that the terrorists will not leave Centaurus alive. While the surviving Centauran government engages in an all-out search for Kirk and party, Kirk learns that three more antimatter bombs are somewhere on the planet, and is forced to take refuge in the one place he cherishes most - the little cabin he had built in Garrovick Valley, on the river Farragut.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreadnought!"title="Dreadnought!">
The novel begins with Lt. Piper (no last name), a native of Proxima Beta, taking the "Kobayashi Maru" simulation at Starfleet Academy. After her "ship" takes several hits and sustains heavy damage, Lt. Piper uses an unusual method to issue commands to the ship's computer via handheld communicator. The technique results in the computer controlling the simulation crashing. The simulator's commander comments during the debriefing that she has come closer to checkmating the no-win scenario than any other command-line candidate, then tells her that she has been reassigned to the starship "Enterprise" by special request.Lt. Piper meets briefly with Brian Silayna, an academy cadet in the engineering program and her friend and lover. Piper and Silayna had originally been assigned to the same ship, but with Piper's reassignment (which Silayna reveals was from Captain Kirk, who had been observing the "Kobayashi Maru" simulation) they wind up saying their goodbyes instead.Lt. Piper takes a shuttle to the "Enterprise" and reports to her assigned cabin. Here she meets her cabin-mates: a Gorn named Telosirizharcrede, a human from Earth named Judd "Scanner" Sandage, a humanoid from Altair Four named Merete AndrusTaurus, and a Vulcan named Sarda. It is revealed that Piper and Sarda have a history together which has generated animosity between them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demons_(Dillard_novel)"title="Demons (Dillard novel)">
A strange device found by a scientific expedition is taken to the planet Vulcan. It begins taking people over one by one, replacing them with malevolent power-hungry entities. The crew of the "Enterprise", those not yet replaced, must contain this threat to Vulcan and defeat it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopaholic_Abroad"title="Shopaholic Abroad">
Life looks good for Becky Bloomwood. She has a great relationship with boyfriend Luke as well as a steady job giving financial advice on television. Furthermore, she is on good terms with her bank manager, Derek Smeath. Life becomes problematic for Becky when Mr. Smeath retires from Endwich Bank and Luke announces he wants to make it big in New York, big changes are in store for Becky. She takes to New York like an angel to heaven. Becky has never been happier and the reader is treated to Becky seeing the Guggenheim in a unique way, winning the attention of employees at Barney's and discovering sample sales. Becky spends a substantial amount of money, but is sure she's financially secure, with the job offers on T.V. piling up. She also justifies her expenses by convincing herself that the items are an investment in the future.An article in the "Daily World" reveals her high debts, calls her a fraud for telling people how to manage their money when she is herself feckless. This causes a fight between her and Luke, as there are current rumours about that his PR company, Brandon Communications, will lose Bank of London as their client, and her being revealed as in debt (and Luke not even knowing about it) doesn't help situations. More and more opportunities are ruled out, when more and more people read the article. She even loses her current job on Morning Coffee, and is replaced by her former co-worker Clare Edwards, who Becky never liked, being boring and smug. She returns home to her roommate and best friend Suze, while Luke remains in New York, and their relationship comes to an apparent end.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestations!"title="Battlestations!">
Lt. Commander Piper is taking a vacation from Starfleet following the events of the novel "Dreadnought!", in which she prevented a military coup from taking over the Federation. However she is swept up into intrigue when Captain Kirk is arrested for the theft of transwarp drive, a new technology which could radically shift the balance of power across the galaxy. Piper, Commander Spock, and Dr. McCoy attempt to solve the mystery as the major powers of the galaxy scramble for the new technology.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_of_Attack"title="Chain of Attack">
While mapping gravitational anomalies, the USS "Enterprise" is hurled millions of light-years off course. They find themselves in a galaxy devastated by war and soon they are under attack by both warring fleets. Captain Kirk risks his ship and crew in order to stop the war and get home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Domain"title="Deep Domain">
Admiral Kirk and the Enterprise visit the ocean-world of Akkalla for diplomatic reasons. Soon Spock and Chekov become lost. A civil war and secrets under the water threaten the entire planet and the "Enterprise".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams_of_the_Raven"title="Dreams of the Raven">
A mysterious distress call leads to the USS "Enterprise" being attacked by the same forces assaulting the other ship. Dozens of "Enterprise" crew members die in the attack and Chief Medical Officer Leonard McCoy is critically injured. Although the Doctor recovers from his injuries physically, mentally he has lost all sense of his former identity. Kirk discovers it is much more difficult tracking down their new enemies without McCoy's always valued advice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Romulan_Way"title="The Romulan Way">
Deep-cover Federation spy Agent Terise LoBrutto has her carefully maintained life disrupted by an unpleasant discovery. The chief medical officer of the USS "Enterprise", Dr. McCoy, has been captured. It's up to LoBrutto to rescue McCoy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_IDIC_Epidemic"title="The IDIC Epidemic">
I.D.I.C. – Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination. This is a philosophical cornerstone of the Vulcan society. Currently, a mysterious plague has hit the planet, a plague somehow tied into I.D.I.C and the fact hundreds of races also currently make their home on Vulcan as well. Unfortunately Vulcan is also a central part of Starfleet and the Federation as well, so if it falls, war might follow.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Given_Day"title="The Given Day">
"The Given Day" is a historical novel set in Boston, Massachusetts and Tulsa, Oklahoma. The story has two main characters: Aiden "Danny" Coughlin, an ethnic Irish Boston Police patrolman, whose father is a prominent detective and captain in the department; and Luther Laurence, a talented black amateur baseball player from Columbus, Ohio.The novel starts at the end of the First World War, when union organizing activities are high across the country. The year is 1918 and the BPD patrolmen have not been given a raise since 1905; they are working for below-poverty level wages. The Boston Social Club (BSC) is the fraternal organization of the BPD patrolmen and its members begin to discuss their grievances and possible actions. Due to his family's high status and reputation in the police department, Danny is reluctant to attend BSC meetings. His partner, Steve Coyle, is able to get him to attend some meetings where the BSC hopes to join the American Federation of Labor, a national union. BPD Captain Thomas Coughlin (Danny's father), FBI agent Rayme Finch, and a Department of Justice lawyer, the young J. Edgar Hoover, assign Danny to infiltrate the Roxbury Lettish Workingman's Society in promise of his detective's stripes. Danny is told that they may be collaborating with other radical cells to plan a national revolt on May Day. As Danny is undercover attending meetings with the Letts, he begins to identify with some of the principles they preach. He soon is elected as the vice-president of the BSC.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Minute_Universe"title="The Three-Minute Universe">
The Sackers, a race of physically repellent beings, murder almost an entire race to steal a powerful device. This device rips a hole in the fabric of space, bringing in a brand-new universe that threatens the old one.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Prime"title="Memory Prime">
'Memory Prime' is the name of a planet home to artificial intelligences called 'Pathfinders'. These beings help Federation personnel, including Commander Montgomery Scott's old flame, Lt. Mira Romaine, sort the information coming from all over Federation territory. This is intended for the project, Memory Prime, an attempt to undo and avoid a repeat of the fate of the previous archive, Memory Alpha, which was profoundly damaged by malevolent incorporeal beings (in the episode, "The Lights of Zetar"). The planet is also the host to a current series of scientific award ceremonies. Unfortunately the visitors are being stalked by a killer and Spock is being accused of being part of a Vulcan terrorist cell, the Adepts of T'Pel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Nexus"title="The Final Nexus">
In this sequel to "Chain of Attack", the "Enterprise" must deal with an ancient series of warp-gates, now malfunctioning, that threatens to tear apart the galaxy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double,_Double_(Star_Trek_novel)"title="Double, Double (Star Trek novel)">
One android has survived the destruction of Roger Korby and his scientific facilities. The robot creates another Captain Kirk and fools the "U.S.S. Hood" with a distress signal. The "Hood"s command crew is soon overtaken by murderous androids and Kirk himself is framed for murder.Kirk's android double takes over his command position on the "Enterprise". The real Kirk rallies the survivors of the "Hood" and his own crew into destroying the android's threat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cry_of_the_Onlies"title="The Cry of the Onlies">
Boaco Six is caught up in revolution and Captain Kirk is sent in to re-establish diplomatic ties. His efforts are going well until an experimental Federation ship destroys a Boacan vessel. In order to stop a war, Kirk attempts to track down and uncover the secrets of the Federation ship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_Engagement_(Star_Trek_novel)"title="Rules of Engagement (Star Trek novel)">
James T. Kirk is sent to assist in the evacuation of Federation personnel from the crisis-wracked planet of Dekkanar. He is ordered to only participate in the evacuation, not to even raise shields or fire weapons. The situation becomes complicated when Captain Kasak takes an experimental Klingon warship to the planet as well.The novel also offers an alternate explanation, via Kasak's viewpoint, of why Klingons' facial features have changed over the years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pandora_Principle"title="The Pandora Principle">
A Romulan Bird of Prey drifts over the Neutral Zone and into Federation territory. Admiral James T. Kirk and the "Enterprise" take the ship back to Earth, unaware of the deadly force hiding inside. It is soon learned one way to battle the threat is via the traumatic childhood knowledge of Saavik and her birth planet Hellguard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor's_Orders_(novel)"title="Doctor's Orders (novel)">
In response to good-natured complaints about his command style, Captain Kirk leaves Doctor McCoy in command of the "Enterprise". Kirk beams down to the planet 'Flyspeck' in order to facilitate its acceptance into the Federation. Kirk soon vanishes, leaving McCoy stuck with the ship against his will; regulations forbid him from passing on command to Commander Spock.Kirk is nowhere to be found and to complicate matters, the Klingons show up, claiming to have a stake in 'Flyspeck' as well. It is later found that Kirk had been lost in the time stream, as one of Flyspeck's races do not fully live in linear time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_Unseen"title="Enemy Unseen">
The "Enterprise" is assigned to carry a diplomatic mission, which is nothing new. Things start to go really wrong for this one. The Federation ambassador is an old 'flame' of Kirk's, who aggressively tries to rekindle their old romance. Another diplomat presents Kirk with three of his wives, a situation with which he is not comfortable. Things take a turn for the worse when another diplomat is found killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murder_Book"title="The Murder Book">
During a surprise trip to Paris, Alex Delaware's girlfriend Robin announces that she will be working as part of the road crew for a rock music tour, while Alex remains at home. The split is hard on Alex, who uses the time to question his relationship with Robin as well as to start drinking heavily.An enigmatic package arrives at Alex's house containing a photo album of violent photographs depicting victims of various cases. Labeled the Murder Book, Alex's friend, homicide detective Milo Sturgis, inspects the book and is disturbed by the image of the body of a young woman, who had been tortured, strangled and dumped. The murder was one of Milo's first cases as a rookie homicide cop.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cold_Moon"title="The Cold Moon">
It is the night of the full Cold Moon—the month of December according to the lunar calendar. A young man is found dead in lower Manhattan, the first in a series of victims of a man calling himself the Watchmaker. This killer's obsession with time drives him to plan the murders with the precision of fine timepieces, and the victims die prolonged deaths while an eerie clock ticks away their last minutes on earth. Lincoln Rhyme, Amelia Sachs, and the rest of the crew are tapped to handle the case and stop the Watchmaker and his partner, Vincent Reynolds, a repulsive character with a special interest in the female victims of the killer. Amelia is not only Lincoln's eyes and ears at crime scenes on the Watchmaker case, but she is now running her own homicide investigation—her first case as lead detective. The policewoman's unwavering efforts in pursuing the killers of a businessman, who left behind a wife and son, sets into motion clockwork gears of its own, with consequences reaching to people and events that will endanger not only many lives but Lincoln's and Amelia's future together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Jasons"title="The Two Jasons">
A few years ago, Jason Kane created three clones of himself, to help him in a scam. Afterwards, the replicants went their separate ways, but now somebody is trying to kill them. Plagued by flashbacks of the original Jason's life, the surviving clones must join forces or die. Or possibly both.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Is_the_Hunter"title="Home Is the Hunter">
Captain Kirk, commanding the USS "Enterprise", gets into a fight with a Klingon ship concerning arguments over a primitive planet and its inhabitants. A mysterious, powerful entity named 'Weyland' stops the fight and decides to punish three of the "Enterprise" crew with their own history.Hikaru Sulu is sent to feudal Japan during a bloody power struggle. Scotty is sent to Scotland in the eighteenth century on the eve of revolt. Chekov is sent to his beloved homeland of Russia during World War 2.All three eventually make it back home to their right time and place, Sulu even managing to leave a literal mark on history with a carved message on a durable rock.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Walker"title="Night Walker">
Navy Lt. David Young hitches a ride with a friendly stranger and wakes up in a hospital bed with a new name and a pretty young wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_Fire_(novel)"title="Line of Fire (novel)">
An assassination attempt carried out for a local crime boss by gun shop owner Paul Nyquist, is interrupted by a young woman.Among Hamilton's early works, it is easily as believable as Death of a Citizen, the origin of Hamilton's Helm series. Hamilton achieves here the difficult job of offering an Action-Adventure that requires no suspension of disbelief by the reader.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_River_(novel)"title="Mad River (novel)">
Boyd Cohoon comes back from prison for the girl; her brother, who'd done the crime; the mine owner who'd gotten rich; and the sheriff, his boyhood friend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Country_(Hamilton_novel)"title="The Big Country (Hamilton novel)">
Maryland sea captain James McKay goes west to Texas, to claim his bride, and steps into a violent feud over water. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_Santa_Clara"title="The Man from Santa Clara">
Photographer Alexander Burdick drives his old mule-drawn army ambulance and a smooth-bore shotgun to the New Mexico Territory and into a range war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsewhere_(Blatty_novel)"title="Elsewhere (Blatty novel)">
Joan Freeboard, a realtor, has been assigned to sell Elsewhere, a house notorious for being haunted. She brings along her friend Terrence Dare, a writer, and psychic Anna Trawley to help investigate. When they arrive at the house, they met up with paranormal investigator Gabriel Case. It is suggested that something is wrong with Gabriel Case; he acts as if he has met the group before, saying, "here you all are again", even though this is supposedly his first time meeting the group.Gabriel Case then tells them that a doctor who once lived at Elsewhere killed his young wife and himself, both becoming the ghosts of the house. Gabriel also introduces his servant. It is evident that something is going on between the two because, after an argument between Terrence and Joan, Gabriel Case tells the servant, "See she forgives him."As the group stays at Elsewhere, things get even stranger. Terrence opens a door to find a family and two priests who throw holy water at him, burning him. When Anna and Joan go for a walk, they notice they can no longer see any lights coming from the city even though it is just across from the island. The group then holds a seance where strange paranormal events occur.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Valley-Westside_War"title="The Valley-Westside War">
The Mendoza family, funded by a Crosstime Traffic grant and disguised as traders, return to postwar Earth to learn who initiated the hostilities. Liz Mendoza frequently visits the UCLA library to analyze the period books and magazines, searching for insight and reasons for the conflict. It is on her regular trips to the library that she meets Dan, a Valley soldier whom she initially considers dull and dumb. Dan, however, is not as unschooled and ignorant as Liz thinks, and, although he is attracted to her, he has his misgivings about the Mendozas. His suspicions are confirmed, and he blows their cover and causes them to return to their own time alternate, but not before he asks why someone from a different time, who has the knowledge and expertise to help Earth recover from its postwar havoc, does nothing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Fever_(novel)"title="Texas Fever (novel)">
Three years after the Civil War, the McAuliffe family drives a herd of cattle north from Texas to Kansas and into another kind of war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Demon"title="Personal Demon">
Half-demon tabloid reporter Hope Adams has a secret. Like full demons, she loves chaos. She thrives on it. She needs it. Most of the time, Hope feeds the hunger by helping the interracial council. But it's never enough. So when Benicio Cortez offers her a job infiltrating a gang of young supernaturals, she thinks she's found the perfect solution. Instead, she finds a tinderbox of greed, desire and ambition. And when it ignites, a world is going to explode
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Place_(book)"title="My Place (book)">
Sally Morgan's "My Place" is a story of a young Aboriginal girl growing up to false heritage and not knowing where she is from. Recounts of several of Morgan's family members are told. The story setting revolves around Morgan's own hometown, Perth, Western Australia, and also Corunna Downs Station, managed by Alfred Howden Drake-Brockman. Morgan has four siblings, two brothers and two sisters. She faces many challenges, such as fitting in at school, getting good marks for acceptance in University, and living life without her father.My Place is the autobiographical account of Sally Morgan’s discovery of her family’s Indigenous roots. In 1982, Sally Morgan travelled back to her grandmother’s birthplace. What started as a tentative search for information about her family, turned into an overwhelming emotional and spiritual pilgrimage. My Place is an account of a search for truth into which a whole family is gradually drawn, finally freeing the tongues of the author’s mother and grandmother, allowing them to tell their own stories.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopaholic_Ties_the_Knot"title="Shopaholic Ties the Knot">
The book opens with Becky living with her boyfriend Luke in Manhattan's West Village. She has finally found her career calling as a personal shopper at Barney’s and is happily helping her best friend, Suze plan her wedding. Becky's best friend, Danny, helps her make a bridesmaid's dress. That night, Luke, Danny and Becky discuss when Becky will get married. She replies that she will get married in ten years, much to Luke's disbelief and amusement. A few days before the wedding, Becky learns that Suze is pregnant. Becky is shocked when she catches Suze’s bouquet and finds a marriage proposal from Luke in it.Suddenly, she finds herself caught in the middle between her mother and Luke’s mother Elinor, both of whom want to throw her a lavish wedding, one at her childhood home in England and one at the Plaza Hotel in New York on the same day. On one hand, Becky wanted to get married at home. On the other, she wanted to have a gorgeous wedding at the Plaza, and being the 'special, glossy' person for the day. As she sees more and more preparations done on both sides, it's even more difficult for her to say no to either one. If Becky gives up the Plaza, she'll have to pay a penalty of a hundred thousand. Becky has no way of paying - and she can't possibly ask Luke or else he will get suspicious. During that time, she confronts Elinor for her own behavior in the way she treated him all his life. This in turn made her despise Becky for calling her out about that and reveals that she thinks Becky isn't good enough for Luke. Refusing to back down, Becky decides to bargain with Elinor about having her wedding at the Plaza in exchange that she writes down her confession in everything that she did including abandoning Luke and take responsibility for herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopaholic_and_Sister"title="Shopaholic and Sister">
The novel commences with the protagonist, Becky Bloomwood, coming to the conclusion of her extravagant ten-month-long honeymoon around the World with her husband, Luke. Although the newlyweds have been enjoying themselves, Luke and Becky decide it is time to return home to England. Before returning home, the couple embarks upon a brief trip to Milan, where Luke is scheduled to meet with a potential client. After agreeing with Luke that she will not buy anything in Milan, Becky explores the city. She heads to a leather store and manages to buy Luke a new leather belt as a present to him, wanting to replace the one she ruined with the hot wax when she was waxing her legs.Becky's resolve not to purchase anything for herself is weakened when she sees the opportunity to own an Angel handbag, a popular and expensive purchase. Unfortunately, the clerk tells her that there is a waiting list for the bag. A wealthy businessman, Nathan Temple, overhears the encounter between Becky and the sales assistant. He persuades the sales assistant to sell the handbag to Becky because he and the owner are friends. Becky shows her gratitude by promising to pay him back somehow. When Becky gives Luke the new belt, he is pleased and believes that she has made a sincere commitment to changing her irresponsible shopping habits.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgement_of_the_Judoon"title="Judgement of the Judoon">
The Doctor arrives on New Memphis, specifically, a spaceport known as "Elvis the King Spaceport" which has grown into a vast city-state. It is set to open Terminal 13, but problems develop, and the Doctor faces a lockdown situation. A notorious criminal, the Invisible Assassin, is at large, and Judoon troopers are sent to apprehend him. The Doctor partners with a Judoon Commander and a teenage private detective named Nikki Jupiter. This last character is an homage to the TV series "Veronica Mars", where a young girl works in her father's detective agency.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ice_Queen"title="The Ice Queen">
"The Ice Queen "is a nameless woman who makes a wish as an eight-year-old child that ruins her life. She grows up cold and unfriendly until, as she stands by her kitchen window, she is struck by a bolt of lightning. She survives but is changed: now it's as if she is made of ice. Also, she can no longer see the color red. She hears of a man called Lazarus Jones, who also survived being struck by lightning, and who is reputed to have a heart and soul made of fire. He came back to life after being dead for 40 minutes. They embark on a turbulent love affair whilst trying to hide their secrets: how one became full of fire and the other became made of ice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practical_Magic_(novel)"title="Practical Magic (novel)">
For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in their Massachusetts town. Gillian and Sally have also endured that fate: As children, the sisters were forever outsiders, taunted, talked about, pointed at. Their elderly aunts almost seemed to encourage the whispers of witchery, with their darkened house, their love concoctions and their crowd of black cats. All Gillian and Sally wanted to do was escape. One would do so by marrying, the other by running away. But the bonds they shared brought them back to each other, and to the magic they could not escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Samurai's_Garden"title="The Samurai's Garden">
Twenty one year-old Stephen leaves his home in Hong Kong just as the Japanese are poised to further invade China, towards Hong Kong. He is sent to Tarumi, a small beach-side village in Japan, to recuperate from tuberculosis. There, he meets and develops friendships with three adults, Matsu, Kenzo, and Sachi, and a young girl, Keiko, who is his own age.Keiko becomes his first love, but it can't be because she is Japanese and he is Chinese. The Japanese and Chinese were fighting a war at that time, and Keiko's family had prejudiced opinions about Chinese people (especially Keiko's father). Yet Keiko still sees Stephen. Then Keiko's brother eventually dies fighting for Japan, and that causes Keiko's father to develop extreme hatred for Stephen, as he is Chinese. Thus, Keiko cannot see Stephen anymore.In addition, there is a bitter love triangle between Sachi, Kenzo, and Matsu. Sachi is now an old woman with leprosy. Lepers are forced into exile and are said to dishonor their family because of their disfigured bodies. Sachi says that society thinks of her as a monster, and these thoughts have obviously rubbed off on her self-concept. She always makes sure that no one can see the left side of her scarred face (the right side is unblemished and Stephen considers it the most beautiful face he has ever seen). Such beauty existing next to the scars shows that beauty is in everything. When Sachi was younger and "one of the most beautiful girls in Tarumi", she was engaged to Kenzo, a handsome boy who had promise for a great, successful future. But when Sachi got leprosy, Kenzo was too afraid to visit her in Yamaguchi because he didn't want to see what happened to her. He never realized it, but he had fallen in love with her beauty, and not her soul.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panther_in_the_Basement"title="Panther in the Basement">
Oz's reminiscent novel describes the doings of a twelve-year-old boy in 1947, the last year of the British Mandate of Palestine, during the British–Zionist conflict. Young Proffy has organized a pro-Israel underground cell that proposes to blow up Buckingham Palace or perhaps 10 Downing Street. These heroic dreams are no danger to anybody, but Proffy's friendship with a kindly British soldier causes his two fellow panthers to accuse him of treason.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetlands_(novel)"title="Wetlands (novel)">
Set in an anonymous German city, "Wetlands" is told by 18-year-old Helen Memel, a schoolgirl who spends some days in the proctological ward of a hospital to be treated for an anal fissure caused by the careless shaving of her anal hair. Deep at heart Helen is lonely and bored, and has been so since the breakup of her parents' marriage. Her secret plan is to reunite her father and mother by having them visit her at the same time. However, her parents seem to have little interest in their daughter's well-being and show up only occasionally, only for short periods of time, and at different hours. When she learns that her surgery, which included the removal of haemorrhoids, has been successful and she is going to be released soon, she desperately looks for means to prolong her hospital stay.She secretly rams the pedal of her hospital bed into her anus and immediate emergency surgery has to be carried out to prevent extreme blood loss. Thus having successfully extended her stay, she waits in vain for her miracle to happen: her parents have stopped visiting altogether, and when she tries to contact them by phone all she gets is their respective answering machines. During this time she falls in love with her favourite male nurse called Robin and tries to draw the young man into her world. At the end of the novel the doctor tells Helen she can go home and she asks Robin if she can go live with him. It becomes apparent that Helen is traumatized, following a childhood experience when her mother tried to commit suicide, although her narration may be unreliable. As the novel ends, Robin is escorting her through a door in the hospital.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gospel_According_to_the_Son"title="The Gospel According to the Son">
The novel employs first person story-telling from the perspective of Jesus. It stays nearly entirely true to the text of the four canonical gospels. Jesus tells his own story, from his birth to a teen-aged virgin named Mary to his execution by crucifixion at the hands of the Romans. Just as in the gospels, he is resurrected from the dead, and ascends to heaven.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Man_Dies_Alone"title="Every Man Dies Alone">
The story takes place during World War II in 1940 in Berlin. The book conveys the omnipresent fear and suspicion engulfing Germany at the time caused by the constant threat of arrest, imprisonment, torture and death. Even those not at risk of any of those punishments could be ostracized and unable to find work.Escherich, a Gestapo inspector, must find the source of hundreds of postcards encouraging Germans to resist Adolf Hitler and the Nazis with personal messages such as “Mother! The Führer has murdered my son. Mother! The Führer will murder your sons too, he will not stop till he has brought sorrow to every home in the world.” Escherich is under pressure from Obergruppenführer Prall to arrest the source or find himself in dire straits.Nearly all those who find the cards turn them in to the Gestapo immediately, terrified they themselves will be discovered having them. Eventually, Escherich finds the postcard writer and his wife, who turn out to be a quiet, working class couple, Otto and Anna Quangel. The Quangels' acts of civil disobedience were prompted by the loss of their only son, who has been killed in action. They are arrested and brought to trial at the Volksgerichtshof, the Nazi "People's Court", where Judge Freisler presides. The Quangels are sentenced to death; Otto is soon executed, but Anna dies during an Allied bombing raid, while still on death row.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Day_at_HorrorLand"title="One Day at HorrorLand">
The Morris family and their friend Clay become lost, accidentally finding the HorrorLand theme park. Shortly after parking, their car explodes, but the ticket-taker reassures them that it will be taken care of. The children, Lizzy, Luke and Clay, explore the theme park and get on the rides. After a ride in which Lizzy is locked in a casket traveling down a river, the three of them attempt to convince the Morris parents, Carl and Peggy, that they all should leave. The two reveal that they experienced similar problems, so they all decide to confront the Horrors.After the Morris family and Clay discover that the gates have been locked to prevent their escape, the monsters surround them. In anger, Lizzy tries to remove a mask from one of the monsters, which she discovers is actually the Horror's face. The Horrors explain that they are monsters, but that the visitors' experiences were part of a television show. As an apology, the monsters say that they will lead them towards a new car, but they are led to carnivorous animals.After the family survives the animals' attack, the monsters attempt to murder them. Lizzy then remembers signs within the park that said "No pinching". The visitors proceed to pinch all of the monsters, resulting in them deflating like balloons. The Morris family and Clay escape HorrorLand in a different car, but in a twist ending, find out that a Horror held onto the back of the vehicle until they reached their home. The monster offers them free passes for their next visit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Hills"title="The Seven Hills">
Rome has reconquered weakly-defended Italy from the Carthaginians and is resettling it to be as it was before the Carthaginians came. The legions stand poised to march down the length of the peninsula to Carthage itself. Meanwhile, the four legions cut off in Egypt and led by Titus Norbanus, decide not to trust Marcus Scipio and head east into the desert, marching the long way home along the Eastern edge of the Mediterranean to get back to Rome. Encountering the doddering remnants of the Seleucid Empire, the divided kingdoms of the Jews, the rapidly ascendant Parthians, and annihilating the pirates of Cilicia, Titus Norbanus makes a strong impression on the Eastern Mediterranean of the power of Rome. Accumulating vast amounts of wealth and prestige, the men under the command of Norbanus find their loyalties shifting from the Senate of Rome to the man who made them rich beyond measure. Arriving in Rome with untold riches, Norbanus shocks the Senate and shifts the greedy desires of the Patricians south, rather than north.Keeping a wary eye on the luck-filled fortunes of his rival Titus Norbanus, Marcus and his lover Selene prepare the Egyptian military to counterattack Carthage with heavy investments in new inventions made at the Library of Alexandria, including light clipper ships, razor-backed bronze submarines, heavy water-borne rams, trebuchets, telescopes, and wide wings allowing for a degree of human flight.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Königsprojekt"title="Das Königsprojekt">
The Vatican gains possession of a time machine from Leonardo da Vinci after the inventor's death. Selected members of the Pope's Swiss Guard are sent back in time to alter history in favour of the Catholic Church. All this is supervised by a very small group of church officials and without the specific knowledge of the current Pope.The Vatican learns that major historical events can't be prevented, only their details can be altered. For example, the Reformation can not be undone, but the details surrounding it can be changed: Martin Luther can't be killed before publishing "The Ninety-Five Theses", but the failed attempt on his life by a time-traveling agent is interpreted by Luther as a visitation by the devil.In 1688, the "Progetto Reale" (English: "Royal Project") is undertaken by the men in charge of the department. The project's aim is to reestablish Catholicism in England through restoration of the House of Stuart. The Catholic Church perceives the Stuarts as too weak for their purposes and instead selects the Bavarian House of Wittelsbach as an alternative. For the purpose of legalising the claim to the British throne, a member of the Swiss Guard, Arnold Füßli, is sent out to exchange the Stone of Scone for a fake. While this mission succeeds, the stone is deposited at what later becomes a reservoir and is lost for the cause.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keziah_Dane"title="Keziah Dane">
Keziah Dane is a widow who lives "on the brink of poverty" with her children in a small Kentucky town. She lost her husband in a flood that also devastated their town. A vagrant named Web gains Keziah's trust then attempts to rape her eldest daughter. The daughter fends off the attack but kills Web in the process. The body is dumped in the flooded town and unexpected complications ensue for the Dane family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Dead"title="Generation Dead">
The protagonist of the story is goth teenager Phoebe Kendall who, along with her best friends Margi and Adam, attends the fictional Oakvale High School. The world in which the story takes place is a strange one, with a supernatural phenomenon that causes dead teenagers to wake from their graves and move about like regular people—except they don't breathe.With help from the school's principal, Tommy joins Oakvale High's football team. The coach is openly hostile towards him and instructs the other players (in particular Pete, his lackeys Stavis and Harris, and Adam) to do their utmost to injure him so severely that he can no longer play. Adam refuses, and Pete and the others fail. Adam and another living boy, Thornton Harrowood, come to accept Tommy, but when the team plays their first match, they are harassed by anti-zombie protestors. Tommy bargains with the coach, promising to quit as long as he can play, however briefly, in the second half of the game.The school is also visited by the Hunter Foundation, which aims to promote tolerance and understanding of the living impaired. Founders Alish and Angela Hunter announce a work and study program open to all students, intended to improve relations between traditionally and differently biotic people. Phoebe, Margi, Adam and Thornton are the only living students to sign up for the class (affectionately referred to as 'Undead Studies'), along with their differently biotic classmates Tommy, Karen, Evan, Colette, Kevin, Sylvia and Tayshawn. When the class list is posted publicly in the school, Pete steals it, planning to go after each of the class members in turn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dances_on_the_Snow"title="Dances on the Snow">
Tikkirey "Tiki" Frost lives on the planet Quarry, poorly adapted for human life and stricken with poverty. Due to the planet's high radioactivity, the inhabitants of Quarry are forced to live in a protective dome and pay for food and air, or "social support". Unemployment is a major problem on Quarry. In fact, one's ability to obtain a job depends on the quality of his or her neuroshunt implant, allowing direct mind-to-machine connection. Tikkirey's parents' neuroshunts have become obsolete and they have no money for an upgrade. His father has been unemployed for years, and his mother makes a pittance. Incapable of paying for their social support, Tikkirey's parents are forced to invoke their "constitutional right to commit suicide." For that, Tikkirey's social support is extended by 7 years, during which he can get education and find a job, as his neuroshunt is above the local standard. If his parents forgo their "constitutional right", the entire family will be evicted from the Dome. The life expectancy outside the Dome is 1–2 years.After losing his parents, Tikkirey decides to leave Quarry by any means necessary. As such, he signs up on an interstellar ore transport as a "calculation module" — a wetware computer used for complex calculations at faster-than-light speeds, as normal computers fail to work. A calculation module remains in suspended animation, most of the time, while a stream of data is shunted through his brain. While this is a highly paid position, continuous misuse of the brain atrophies the frontal lobe, causing the person to lose his free will. After the expiration of the standard five-year contract, 97% of calculation modules are incapable of making their own decisions and continue flying for the rest of their lives. The other 3% manage to muster enough willpower to leave the ship (2%) or cancel the contract before time is up (1%); however, even they have to spend years relearning to make even the simplest decisions (e.g. a simple choice of soft drink is an extremely difficult process for them).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistance_(Star_Trek)"title="Resistance (Star Trek)">
Picard must rebuild his crew after the death of Data and departure of Capt. William Riker and Counselor Troi. Picard selects newly promoted, and acting first officer, Commander Worf as permanent first officer. A Vulcan, T'Lana, is granted commission as the "Enterprise's" new counselor. The captain is looking forward to putting the devastation of war behind him, shaping his new crew, building his relationship with Dr. Beverly Crusher and returning at last to being an explorer. Worf refuses the promotion and Picard senses his new counselor does not approve of Worf.Quickly after being assigned a simple shakedown mission for the restored "U.S.S. Enterprise-E", Picard once again begins hearing the voice of the Borg Collective. After reporting this to Starfleet, Admiral Janeway feels the Borg are decimated and are no longer a threat. Picard knows she is wrong and believes they are regrouping in the Alpha Quadrant for an annihilation-style attack on the Federation and all of the Alpha Quadrant's inhabitants.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_(Goebel_novel)"title="Commonwealth (Goebel novel)">
Somewhere in the middle of America dwells Blue Gene Mapother, a trashy, mullet-headed Wal-Mart stockboy-turned-flea marketer who staunchly supports any American war effort without question. Besides patriotism, little enlivens him besides pro wrestling, cigarette breaks, and any instance in which he thinks his masculinity is at stake. Curiously, he is also a member of one of the wealthiest families in the country.His mother, the fanatical Christian socialite Elizabeth Mapother, has a prophetic dream in which she sees Blue Gene’s older brother, the handsome but nervous John Hurstbourne Mapother, becoming an apocalyptic world savior. In order to fulfill his mother’s prophecy—not to mention his father Henry’s lifelong desire for his bloodline to ascend to Washington—John is running for Congress.John soon finds that as a corporate executive he is not popular with his largely working-class constituents, many of whom work for him and his father. Now, after years of estrangement, the Mapothers need Blue Gene’s common man touch in order to cast their family name in a more favorable light with the voters. The Mapothers no longer shun Blue Gene for his embarrassing, low-class ways; they embrace him as political gold.Will Blue Gene allow himself to be used? His family has ignored him the last four years and has only invited him back into the fold as campaign time looms near. But then again, even though the superrich John Hurstbourne Mapother clearly represents the interests of big business, man, he sure does have all the right values.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Mirror_(Star_Trek_novel)"title="Dark Mirror (Star Trek novel)">
In "Dark Mirror", the Mirror-Spock left the Enterprise and rose through the ranks and spearheaded an effort to reform the Empire. However, the Mirror-Kirk framed him for treason, which resulted in Spock's execution. Soon afterwards Mirror-Sarek was assassinated by another Vulcan seeking his job. As a result, Spock's attempted reforms died with him and the Empire is still alive and powerful. The Klingons are a conquered race who were forced into slavery by the Empire after their defeat. The Romulans have also been defeated by the Empire, but committed suicide en masse rather than submit to Terran rule."Dark Mirror" tells how Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the Enterprise-D are forced to deal with their counterparts. Like the Original Series episode "Mirror, Mirror", their counterparts are brutal and savage. For example, the Mirror-Captain Picard had murdered the Mirror-Jack Crusher so as to claim his wife, Beverly Crusher, for himself. Crusher is further forced to build biologically based weaponry. The Mirror-Deanna Troi is a security officer who freely uses torture. The missions of the crew of the Mirror-Enterprise-D's are filled with brutality and even genocidal activities. Personal communicators are intentionally not used in the mirror Starfleet; due to the prevalence of assassinations, they make crewmembers too easy to track down and kill.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Show_Boat_(novel)"title="Show Boat (novel)">
The time is the late nineteenth century. Captain Andy Hawks is a former riverboat owner with a shrewish wife, Parthy Ann, and a 10-year-old daughter, Magnolia.He buys the new show boat "Cotton Blossom". Among its acting cast are Julie Dozier and her husband Steve Baker, and Ellie Chipley and her husband, affectionately known as "Schultzy". Other members of the crew are Pete, the engineer of the towboat "Mollie Able", which propels the show boat; Frank the utility man; and Windy McClain, the pilot.Steve and Julie are close, and Julie becomes Magnolia's best friend, showing motherly affection toward her. For a time, all is well, but soon Pete begins making unwanted advances toward Julie. He gets into a fist fight with Steve, is soundly beaten, and swears revenge.He implies knowing some dark secret concerning Julie. When the troupe arrives in fictional Lemoyne, Mississippi, Pete steals Julie's picture from the box office and takes it to the local sheriff. Julie claims she does not feel well enough to perform, and Parthy observes that Julie fell sick the year before in the same town. When they hear what Pete has done, Steve takes out a pocket knife, makes a cut on Julie's hand, and sucks blood from it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkest_Hour_(Cabot_novel)"title="Darkest Hour (Cabot novel)">
Suze Simon is forced to work a summer job by her stepfather, Andy. She becomes a babysitter at the Pebble Beach Hotel and Golf Resort, where her usual charge is moody eight-year-old Jack Slater. Suze soon realizes that Jack is miserable because he is a mediator like her, and teaches him that ghosts do not mean to do any harm, but just want help to go to the afterlife. This cheers him up greatly and begins to bring him out of his shell. His older brother, Paul, is impressed by the change in his brother's behaviour and asks Suze to join them for dinner, but she refuses and avoids talking to him.Suze's routine is interrupted when Andy and her stepbrother Brad, while renovating the backyard, dig up letters from a person named Maria de Silva to her fiance, Hector de Silva. Suze realizes that these letters belonged to Jesse, but she is threatened by Maria's ghost, who does not want anyone to find the letters and starts harassing Suze's family. Suze begins to fear that if they find Jesse's remains in the backyard, he will move on to the next world and leave her. She attempts to bring the letters to the Carmel Historical Center, where the conservator, Dr. Clive Clemmings, expresses his belief that Jesse was not murdered but ran away from his wedding. Suze notices Maria's picture and a portrait of Jesse in the museum.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horus_Heresy"title="The Horus Heresy">
## Story setting.Early in the 31st millennium, the Galaxy is in the throes of the Great Crusade. Originating from Terra (Earth), it is an interstellar crusade that claims the galaxy as the rightful domain of Humankind, and aims to reunite the multitude of scattered human colonies remaining from earlier space exploration under the domain of an "Imperium of Man". Organised in numerous expeditions, the Crusade fields huge fleets and vast armies; at its forefront, led by the Primarchs, are Legions of Space Marines genetically enhanced supersoldiers numbering in the millions. Over the course of two Terran centuries, the Crusade has reached star systems more than 50,000 light years away from its original staging point in the Sol (Solar) System, has assimilated millions of worlds into the Imperium, and has given Humankind a dominant position among the galaxy's species. Its grand mastermind is the "Emperor of Mankind", a mysterious superhuman of unknown origin.The Emperor, founder and head of the Imperium, is a being of towering charisma, prowess, conviction, and ability. He has declared an agnostic worldview, the "Imperial Truth", which promotes science, rationalism, and human primacy. Unknown to the common citizenry, he is also the most powerful human (or humanlike) psychic, referred to as psykers, and is overall one of the most formidable psychics in the galaxy. Officially, the Imperium denies the existence of psychic phenomena, including its manifestations as witchcraft and sorcery, and punishes its belief as ignorant and superstitious; yet the Imperium is also dependent on psychic activity in order to achieve faster-than-light travel between its scattered dominions. The Emperor knows that psychic phenomena originate in The Warp, a parallel dimension reflecting the events of the material world at its most emotional. Within the Warp exist Daemons, sentient vortices of concentrated feeling that are chiefly malignant. The Daemons are themselves in service to the Chaos Gods, also known as the Ruinous Powers, titanic collectives of dark will whose rulership over the parallel dimension is supreme. These malign immaterial entities forever seek to breach the material universe and subject all life within it to foul and debased whims. Awareness and perception of the Chaos Gods and their Daemons serves as the basis of numerous faiths and religions in the setting, both human and alien in origin. Knowing followers of the Chaos Gods, though rare, refer to their faith as the Primordial Truth, or the Primordial Annihilator.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madame_Doubtfire"title="Madame Doubtfire">
Daniel and Miranda Hillard are separated and Miranda, a successful businesswoman, severely limits the amount of time Daniel, an impractical, out-of-work actor, is allowed to spend with their three children Lydia, Christopher and Natalie.When Miranda decides to hire a nanny, however, Daniel disguises himself as a woman and gets the job. Lydia and Christopher immediately know who "Madame Doubtfire" is, but Natalie and Miranda are fooled. Daniel uses his disguise to spend time with his children. Miranda comments that the house has never been run better.After Miranda discovers Daniel's secret—and after one more terrible fight—both parents admit to mistakes and make arrangements for Daniel to see his children more often.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Justice_Raffles"title="Mr. Justice Raffles">
After an absence of three weeks, Raffles tells Bunny he has been taking the cure at Carlsbad as an excuse to try to steal jewelry from the wife of moneylender Dan Levy (whom Bunny calls Mr. Shylock), but returned early to watch his young cricket protégé, Teddy Garland, play at Lord's. At the Albany, however, they catch Teddy writing himself a check from Raffles's checkbook. Raffles easily forgives the distraught Teddy, who is seriously in debt to Levy, due to Levy's unfairly high interest. Raffles sends Teddy to sleep, then discusses Levy with Bunny.Next morning, Raffles and Bunny trick Levy into accepting money that Levy had loaned to Raffles as payment for Teddy's debts. Back at the Albany, however, Teddy has disappeared. Teddy's father, Mr. Garland, arrives, looking for him. Raffles suggests they check Mr. Garland's home for Teddy, but Teddy isn't there, either. While Raffles goes to search at Lord's, Bunny distracts Teddy's fiancée, Camilla Belsize, who seems jealous of Raffles's friendship with Teddy. Raffles returns without Teddy, and lies about him to Belsize. Abruptly, Levy and Mr. Garland enter the room. Levy and Raffles do verbal battle with veiled threats. Teddy finally returns, and dismisses Levy from the house. Levy retorts that he owns the house: Mr. Garland has lost it through debt to him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badjelly_the_Witch"title="Badjelly the Witch">
In the story, two children Tim and Rose, looking for their lost cow Lucy, meet magical enchanted forest characters. They are captured by Badjelly the witch, then rescued by an eagle. God intervenes as they escape, and the witch is destroyed when she attempts to "scratch God's eye out". The characters enchanted by Badjelly are rescued.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn's_Children_(novel)"title="Saturn's Children (novel)">
The novel chronicles the travels and perils of Freya Nakamichi-47, a gynoid in a distant future in which humanity is extinct and a near-feudal android society has spread throughout the galaxy. Wealthy and self-indulgent "aristos" own and have enslaved most of the populace; the remaining "free" androids struggle to keep themselves independent and can rarely afford the exorbitant costs of interplanetary travel. Freya, a robotic courtesan originally designed to please humans but activated a century after their mysterious extinction, is considered obsolete and works menial jobs to survive. When she offends an aristo and needs to escape off-world, she accepts a job as a courier for the mysterious Jeeves Corporation and becomes embroiled in a complex and dangerous war among factions conspiring against each other for control of society.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_Gap"title="Missile Gap">
On 2 October 1962, the universe underwent a change – instantly, the continents of the Earth were no longer wrapped onto a spherical planet but were on the surface of an Alderson disk. Measurements on Cepheid variable stars indicate that the Alderson disk is located in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, and that the epoch is roughly 800,000 years later than the calendar date (give or take 100,000 to 200,000 years). In the sky, the stars of the Milky Way are reddened and metal-depleted, evidence that it is now controlled by a Type-III civilisation capable of controlling the resources of an entire galaxy. Three theories for the change are suggested within the novella:The first hypothesis would indicate that the characters of the book are the original humans of the 20th century Earth. The latter two hypotheses would indicate that the characters of the book are "duplicates" of humans that lived and died thousands of years previously. The creatures that moved or copied humanity are unknown, as is the technology they used and the purpose for their action.Because of the projection of a spherical surface onto a flat surface, some changes occur: North America is now much farther from Asia, as there is no polar route. Furthermore, launching an artificial satellite into orbit becomes impossible, and chemical-fuelled ICBMs are no longer capable of reaching other continents. The gravitational attraction in the near field of an Alderson disk does not drop away according to the inverse-square law but is approximately constant and perpendicular to the disk, so missile trajectories become parabolic rather than segments of elliptical orbits. Thus, both the strategic bomber and ICBM "legs" of the nuclear triad are no longer feasible so nuclear deterrence breaks down, and the Soviet Union takes advantage of this to conquer much of Western Europe. The deterrent role is then taken over by long-range nuclear-powered cruise missiles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Walls"title="The Little Walls">
The novel tells the story of Phillip Turner who refuses to believe that his brother's death was suicide. He sets out to find out how his brother Grevil, an eminent archaeologist, came to be found dead in an Amsterdam canal. The official investigation is led by Inspector J.J. Tholen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Masks_of_Time"title="The Masks of Time">
Vornan-19 arrives on Christmas Day, 1998 in Rome. He floats down from the sky naked, landing on the Spanish Steps. The police try to arrest him but he knocks them over with a touch. He is helped and given clothes by Horst Klein who believes that the apocalypse will come in 389 days. Vornan-19 tells him that he is from the year 2999. Jack Bryant, a graduate student under Leo Garfield at the University of California is working toward a process to extract huge amounts of energy from ordinary matter. He leaves the physics department, marries pretty blonde named Shirley and they move to the deserts of Arizona. Leo Garfield spends several months with Jack and Shirley to get a break from his physics work. During Vornan-19's first public press conference he mentions the fact that in the future society is very different because they have tapped the energy within all matter so that no one has to work to obtain energy. Leo Garfield tells Jack that he left the University because he had actually finished his thesis showing how to extract the enormous amounts of energy within all particles of matter. He could not bear to release this theory since it would dramatically change human society. He asks Jack to use his influence to question Vornan-19 on the subject to see if it was his theory that was used in the future. When Jack returns to the University, he has a call from the White House and is forced to join a group of scientists working for the US government on how to best deal with Vornan-19. Vornan-19 comes to New York City where he meets with the group of scientists, attends an outrageous house party and tours the New York Stock Exchange. He reveals during the tour that in 2999 there is no capitalism and even no money. All citizens have all that they need. After visiting the stock market Vornan requests a visit to an automated brothel in Chicago. During an interview in California, Vornan-19 says that in the future they have determined how life began on the earth. An alien spacecraft visited the earth long ago on a scouting mission and discovered no life forms and so departed; but before they left they jettisoned a load of their garbage that landed on earth and eventually started life. Vornan then goes to the moon, and when he returns he takes a break from his tour of the earth by staying with Leo's friends Jack and Shirley in Arizona. Shirley subtly offers herself to Vornan but he shows no interest, Vornan instead seduces Jack. Shirley then sleeps with Leo who has been wanting her for years. Vornan has been made into a messiah by the people of earth. He visits Buenos Aires using a personal shield technology that should allow him to interact with the crowds. The shield fails and Vornan is grabbed by the crowd and his body is never recovered. Leo remains in Buenos Aires until the turn of the century.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_on_a_Branch_Line_(novel)"title="Love on a Branch Line (novel)">
## Tuesday.The action of the novel begins on Tuesday, 4 June 1957. Jasper Pye, a civil servant for nine years in an unnamed ministry, takes the Piccadilly line from Barons Court to Green Park. Whilst on the train, he recounts a party in Chelsea he attended the previous evening, where he overheard the woman he had been pursuing, Dierdre, say "yes I know; Jasper "is" a bore." Pye explains that the remark has provoked him to resign his position in the Civil Service and move to Paris to paint. After exiting the tube, Pye walks to his office to meet his boss, Mark Fairweather, and announces his intention to resign. Fairweather ignores Pye's wishes and asks if Pye would like a special job to visit and report on a remote division, and to recommend to close it. The unit, called the "Department of Output Statistics," is located on the border of Norfolk and Suffolk in a country house, Arcady Hall, owned by the Earl of Flamborough. The unit had been established in 1940 during the Battle of Britain when the ministry requisitioned the Earl's house, and has largely been ignored since the War. Reluctantly, Pye agrees to take on the job and to leave the next day.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier_Boys"title="Soldier Boys">
Dieter Hedrick, once a small and timid person, over time becomes a member of an anti-aircraft gun battery that scores at least one kill during Allied bombing raids. Moving steadily higher in rank in the Hitler Youth (in German Hitlerjugend, abbreviated HJ), Dieter is promoted to lead a group of 180 boys, who are part of the enormous project to build the Westwall (Siegfried Line) before the Allies arrive. Two fellow HJ's are less fortunate: Ernst Gessel is killed when a British Spitfire fighter strafes the site, and Willi Hoffmann is shot for attempting to desert. Dieter proves himself to be a capable leader, and he, along with a few other HJ leaders meet Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer and are decorated for their contributions to the German war effort. Dieter is anxious to fight and, following other senior HJ's, goes into the Wehrmacht. Assigned to a unit that is demoralized and badly understrength, Dieter meets Schaefer, a weary soldier whose cynical attitude contrasts sharply with Dieter's blind, fiery patriotism. Schaefer had a son, an HJ, who was killed while manning an AA gun in an Allied bombing raid and has seen far more of the war than Dieter, being a veteran of Stalingrad. He constantly criticizes Dieter's blind devotion to Hitler, truthfully saying that the war is lost for Germany and that simply living to see the end of it is the best thing any German soldier can hope for. Despite their constant arguing, Dieter gradually begins to form a father-son relationship with Schaefer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost-Walker"title="Ghost-Walker">
Elcidar Beta III, inhabited by the Midgwins, is a planet strategically located between the Federation and the Klingon empire. The Midgwins' refusal to embrace technological advances have left their planet devastated and their people endangered. The "U.S.S. Enterprise" tries to help but is hampered by a murderous force that roams its corridors seemingly at will.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother-Daughter_Book_Club"title="The Mother-Daughter Book Club">
## Middle school.In the first book in the series, "The Mother-Daughter Book Club," the book club is formed by the mothers while all of the girls are in sixth grade. They become friends over the course of it and help Jess get her parents back together while reading "Little Women" by Louisa May Alcott.In "Much Ado About Anne", they read "Anne of Green Gables" by Lucy Maud Montgomery, and struggle with their mothers' decision to let Becca Chadwick into the book club. Meanwhile, Cassidy and her older sister Courtney discover that their mother has begun dating again, and Jess tries to keep her parents from selling Half Moon Farm.In the third book "Dear Pen Pal", the mothers set the girls up to be pen pals with another mother-daughter book club in Wyoming, whom they visit at the end of the book, and read Daddy Long Legs by Jean Webster. Jess transfers to a prestigious boarding school, Colonial Academy, after being offered an anonymous scholarship and clashes with her Southern roommate Savannah Sinclair, but also joins the school's a cappella group. Megan's grandmother Gigi moves in with the Wongs and Cassidy learns her mother is pregnant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passionate_Minds"title="Passionate Minds">
The book starts with a "flash forward" in which Émilie du Châtelet is briefly introduced. It is June in the year 1749, and Émilie is in the final stages of her pregnancy. She is struggling to complete a book of her theories and calculations, and fears that she will not have enough time to finish the thesis. The book then jumps back in time to the year 1706, and to a youngerÉmilie. She has not yet met Voltaire, and is but ten years old. She lives with her parents, and is considered an unusual child because of her love of books and reading.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Courtship"title="Supreme Courtship">
After several failed attempts to seek Senate approval for his Supreme Court nominations, perpetually unpopular President Donald P. Vanderdamp (nicknamed "Don Veto" by Congress) decides to get even by nominating Judge Pepper Cartwright, star of "Courtroom Six" and America's most popular TV judge, to the Supreme Court. Soon, Cartwright finds herself in the middle of a constitutional crisis, a Presidential campaign, and entanglements both political and romantic in nature.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_(novel)"title="Sacred (novel)">
Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are hired by a dying billionaire to find his daughter, Desiree, after the previous detective working the case, Jay Becker, disappeared.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_False_Inspector_Dew"title="The False Inspector Dew">
It is 1921, and Alma Webster, a reader of romances, is passionately in love with her dentist, Walter Baranov. There is only one foreseeable outcome: the murder of his wife. Inspired by the real-life Dr Crippen case, they plot the perfect murder while aboard the ocean liner "Mauretania". The dentist takes on the identity of Inspector Walter Dew, Crippen’s nemesis, but when a murder occurs aboard the ship the captain invites "Inspector Dew" to investigate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_Victory"title="Gray Victory">
The first point of divergence occurs during the American Civil War in May 1864, when General J. E. B. Stuart survives the wound which historically killed him at the Battle of Yellow Tavern. Then, in July, a second point of divergence occurs when Confederate President Jefferson Davis does not replace the "plodding" General Joseph E. Johnston, in command at Atlanta, with the "dashing" General John Bell Hood, as he actually did. Johnston, rather than leave the fortifications of Atlanta and get his army destroyed by William T. Sherman's Union forces, as Hood did in our time line, keeps his soldiers inside, fighting a long-drawn siege war of attrition until the Northern elections of November 1864. Abraham Lincoln loses the support of the war-weary voters and Democratic candidate and Major general George B. McClellan is elected president. McClellan orders a cease-fire, followed by a peace in which the independence of the South is recognized.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Eagles"title="Clash of Eagles">
December, 1941. Nazi Germany has vanquished the United Kingdom and launches a major invasion across the Atlantic. German forces under Erwin Rommel land in Quebec and sweep down on Canada, New England, and the Ohio Valley to New York City and declared the eastern United States an occupied territory. The rest of the United States remains unoccupied but perilously exposed to further attacks. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the government administration evacuate the endangered Washington, D.C. and flee westward to California. Life in the major cities has become a grim nightmare as the new Nazi regime takes over. But slowly, quietly, a resistance movement has begun to grow. Determined to rout the invaders, brave and angry men and women from longshoremen, laborers, gangsters, actresses, street hoods, socialites, and vagrants will rise up against history's greatest evil. They will fight to the death, some at the cost of their lives to take their country back.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Divine_Worshipper"title="The Divine Worshipper">
Accused of murders he did not commit, a young scribe named Kel is continuously evading the forces of justice in a desperate attempt to prove his innocence. Aided by Nitis (a beautiful priestess and his wife) and Bebon (an actor and his closest friend), Kel manages to flee south and eventually take refuge in Thebes, safely out of the reach of the pharaoh Ahmose and his main pursuers, Judge Gem and Henat, head of the spies.Protected by the spiritual leader of Thebes, a venerable lady known as The Divine Worshipper, Kel manages to finally clear his name, but not in time to save Egypt, as the Persian forces swarm across the border and overrun the country.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Jolly_Good_Fellow_(novel)"title="A Jolly Good Fellow (novel)">
A fake charity Santa Claus plots to kidnap the eleven-year-old son of a State Representative, but the plot goes topsy-turvy when the boy decides to run away from home by hitchhiking.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Helmet"title="The Green Helmet">
The novel starts at France's 24-hour Le Mans race when British champion racing driver Greg Rafferty crashes his car. The plot then follows Rafferty as he continues to race while also concealing his fears.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wench_Is_Dead"title="The Wench Is Dead">
In 1859, the body of a young woman was found floating in the Oxford Canal; her death led to a sensational murder trial, and two men were eventually hanged for the murder.In 1989, Inspector Morse is recovering from a bleeding ulcer in Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital. Morse is given a book by the wife of a recently deceased patient at the hospital. The little book called "Murder on the Oxford Canal" tells the story of the murder of Joanna Franks aboard the canal boat "Barbara Bray". Morse is soon convinced that the two men hanged for the crime were innocent and sets out to prove it from the confines of his bed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams_of_Speaking"title="Dreams of Speaking">
Protagonist, Alice Black, is a young Australian academic. The novel follows several months in the life of Alice, as she conducts research for a project that she titled "The Poetics of Modernity." Intending to further her research into the unremarked beauty of modern things, Alice leaves Perth for Paris. Alice leaves behind her sister, Norah, who, unbeknown to her, is suffering from cancer.When in Paris, Black coincidentally meets her estranged lover, Stephen. Stephen, too, had travelled to Paris to conduct, presumably, philosophical research. Stephen attempts to rekindle their relationship. But, Alice almost immediately grows distant from Stephen, instead concentrating on her research. In her mind, Alice resolves that she is not there to be with him but rather to study the concept of modernity. Through her project, Alice aims to consider the complex relationship between the human mind and "these plastic and metal extrusions," ultimately questioning how the aesthetics of technology meld with the human psyche.Yet, upon moving to Paris, Alice becomes almost obsessively consumed by her own loneliness. She feels a sense of isolation and disorientation as she mourns her ever-growing physical and emotional distance from her working-class family and her failed relationship with Stephen. By chance, Alice meets Mr Sakamoto, an elderly Japanese gentleman, on a train. Mr Sakamoto and Alice commence a friendship, despite initial tentativeness. To her surprise, Alice discovers Mr Sakamoto spoke impeccable, literary English and was also fascinated by modern technology, working on a biography of Alexander Bell, the inventor of the telephone. Yet, Mr Sakamoto also embodied a darker side to modernity, being a survivor of the Nagasaki bomb. The pair forge an intense friendship, predicated on their shared curiosity for the modern world and their search for some way of explaining the elusive poetry which resides within a machine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_the_Kingdom"title="The Secret of the Kingdom">
Marcus, an Ancient Roman citizen, arrives in Jerusalem. As he rides into the city he passes by a hill on which three men are being crucified. When he pays the customary courtesy call on the governor, Pontius Pilate, he learns that one of the three men, Jesus of Nazareth, is the leader of a religious sect suspected of sedition. Pilate confides to Marcus that there are rumors that the disciples of Jesus will steal his body and then claim he is risen from the dead. To prevent this, Pilate has posted a guard of Roman soldiers at the tomb of Jesus. A couple of days later, Marcus is summoned before Pilate. He is told that the soldiers at the tomb claim to have been blinded by a great light, and that when they regained their sight, the body of Jesus was gone. Pilate suspects that the guards were drunk or sleeping on guard. He asks Marcus, as a newly arrived and presumably impartial observer, to go to the tomb and investigate. Marcus becomes convinced that Jesus did rise from the dead, and over the next weeks and months he tries to learn all he can about the man Jesus, who he was and what he stood for. He talks to anyone he can find who knew Jesus or who had any contact with him, including Mary Magdalene, a number of the disciples, Lazarus of Bethany, whom Jesus reportedly raised from the dead, and even Simon of Cyrene, the man dragged out of the crowd and forced to carry the cross of Jesus. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four-Story_Mistake"title="The Four-Story Mistake">
The four Melendy children live with their father, a widowed professor of economics, and Cuffy, their beloved housekeeper. During the height of World War II, the Melendy family moves out of New York City and into the countryside. Miranda "Randy", the third child, dislikes change and is saddened by the move. But the house they move into turns out to be an adventure. Called by locals "The Four-Story Mistake", it is an odd-looking house with a rich architectural history, surrounded by the country.The four Melendy children soon find adventure discovering the many hidden attractions of the house. Oliver discovers buried history, Rush is stranded in a tree during a storm, Randy finds a diamond in the most unlikely of places, and Mona learns what it truly means to be an actress. None of them could have guessed at the secret hidden in their very own play space, the office—a secret that had been shut away for over 60 years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Then_There_Were_Five"title="Then There Were Five">
The four Melendy children live with their father, a widowed professor of economics, and Cuffy, their beloved housekeeper, in an old house in the countryside of New York. Their Father has been hired by the government for a secret, World War II-related job, and the children venture into their new neighborhood with the intention of helping their country. They end up making new friends collecting scrap metal, and also brush up against some local scoundrels. The most notable of their new friends is Mark, a boy about Rush's age, who is under the care of his abusive adult cousin Oren Meeker. The Melendy children want to help Mark, but don't know how.Meanwhile, there are adventures to be had: Rush composes his Opus 3, Miranda "Randy" and Mona try their hand at canning, and Oliver is entranced by the possibilities presented by fish and caterpillars. But when Cuffy, their housekeeper, goes away to visit a sick cousin in Ithaca, the unexpected occurs. A fire brings Mark to live at The Four-Story Mistake, where he becomes a permanent member of their family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Gone-Away"title="Return to Gone-Away">
When Portia learns of her parents buying Villa Caprice, a tumbledown Victorian house close to Gone-Away Lake, she is excited. She, her brother Foster and her cousin Julian enjoy learning about the "new" old house, with the help of elderly neighbors Mr. Payton and Mrs. Cheever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barsoom"title="Barsoom">
Like most of Burroughs' fiction, the novels in the series are mostly travelogues, feature copious violence, and often depict civilized heroes captured by uncivilized cultures and mimicking their captors to survive.Most Barsoom novels follow a familiar plot structure wherein a hero is forced to a far-off location in search of a woman kidnapped by an odious but powerful villain.Female characters are likely to be virtuous and fight off amorous advances and other dangers until able to connect with the hero; who himself fights a variety of enemies and deposes petty rulers of severely repressed populations, usually with the assistance of a native.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Drift"title="Arctic Drift">
The plot begins in the year 1847, when the Franklin Expedition becomes stranded trying to find the Northwest Passage. They experience a harsh winter. The men are seemingly going mad. Their stranded ships ("Erebus" and "Terror") are loaded with a mysterious, unidentified silvery metal. The story switches to the present day. There is an ongoing quest to save the earth from Global Warming. All of the world's scientists are looking for a solution. Some people are trying to thwart these efforts. The NUMA team, headed by Dirk Pitt, Al Giordino and Dirk Pitt's children, Dirk Junior and Summer, are trying to find a way to stop Global Warming. Their quest leads them to investigate a series of mysterious asphyxiations. They soon realize that the solution they are looking for is hidden in the heart of the Arctic; in an old forgotten ship. They will need to solve a centuries-old mystery to save the earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Life_(novel)"title="The New Life (novel)">
The protagonist, Osman, first notices the book in the university canteen when a female student, Janan, sets a copy down for a moment on his table. He later buys his own copy at a bookstall and is so thrilled by this novel that he sets off in search of the new life it promises. Janan introduces Osman to her lover Mehmet who had also read the book and been to the world it describes. Osman, who at this point is enchanted by Janan, witnesses Mehmet gunned down at a bus stop, but the injured man mysteriously disappears and can't be traced at any hospital. The two embark on surreal bus journeys in search of Mehmet. One of the buses has a road accident which results in fatalities, however, they emerge alive, expropriating wallets and identities of two dead passengers. They continue the journey and encounter Dr. Fine, Mehmet's father. It turns out that he had sent spies to keep watch on his rebellious son and to murder other readers of the book. Janan herself vanishes and Osman goes on more surreal and violent bus journeys. It later appears that a deceased friend of Osman's father, Uncle Rifki, may actually be the author of the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Then_There_Were_None"title="And Then There Were None">
"These details correspond to the text of the 1939 first edition."Eight people arrive on a small, isolated island off the Devon coast, each having received an unexpected personal invitation. They are met by the butler and cook-housekeeper, Thomas and Ethel Rogers, who explain that their hosts, Ulick Norman Owen and Una Nancy Owen, have not yet arrived, though they have left instructions.A framed copy of an old rhyme hangs in every guest's room, and on the dining room table sit ten figurines. After supper, a phonograph record is played; the recording accuses each visitor and Mr and Mrs Rogers of having committed murder, then asks if any of the "prisoners at the bar" wishes to offer a defence.The guests discover that none of them know the Owenses, and Mr Justice Wargrave suggests that the name "U N Owen" is a play on "Unknown". Marston finishes his drink and promptly dies of cyanide poisoning. Dr Armstrong confirms that there was no cyanide in the other drinks and suggests that Marston must have dosed himself.The next morning, Mrs Rogers is found dead in her bed, and by lunchtime, General MacArthur has also died from a heavy blow to the head. The guests realise that the nature of the deaths corresponds with the respective lines of the rhyme, and three of the figurines are found to be missing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Alice"title="Automated Alice">
The story of "Automated Alice" tells of the character of Alice from Lewis Carroll's books in a future version of Manchester, England. After following her Great Aunt Ermintrude's parrot Whippoorwill through a grandfather clock, Alice and Alice's doll Celia get lost in a world inhabited by "Newmonians", entities made from two objects combined, for example a zebra and a human.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged"title="Atlas Shrugged">
## Setting."Atlas Shrugged" is set in a dystopian United States at an unspecified time, in which the country has a "National Legislature" instead of Congress and a "Head of State" instead of a President. The US appears to be approaching an economic collapse, with widespread shortages, business failures, and decreased productivity. Writer Edward Younkins said, "The story may be simultaneously described as anachronistic and timeless. The pattern of industrial organization appears to be that of the late 1800s—the mood seems to be close to that of the depression-era 1930s. Both the social customs and the level of technology remind one of the 1950s". Many early 20th-century technologies are available, but later technologies such as jet planes and computers are largely absent. There is very little mention of historical people or events, not even major events such as World War II. Aside from the United States, most countries are referred to as "People's States" that are implied to be either socialist or communist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_and_Wendy"title="Peter and Wendy">
Although the character appeared previously in Barrie's book "The Little White Bird", the play and its novelisation contain the story of Peter Pan mythos that is best known. The two versions differ in some details of the story, but have much in common. In both versions Peter makes night-time calls on the Darlings' house in Bloomsbury, listening in on Mrs. Mary Darling's bedtime stories by the open window. One night Peter is spotted and, while trying to escape, he loses his shadow. On returning to claim it, Peter wakes Mary's daughter, Wendy Darling. Wendy succeeds in re-attaching his shadow to him, and Peter learns that she knows many bedtime stories. He invites her to Neverland to be a mother to his gang, the Lost Boys, children who were lost in Kensington Gardens. Wendy agrees, and her brothers John and Michael go along.Their magical flight to Neverland is followed by many adventures. The children are blown out of the air by a cannon and Wendy is nearly killed by the Lost Boy Tootles. Peter and the Lost Boys build a little house for Wendy to live in while she recuperates (a type of structure that to this day is called a Wendy house). Soon John and Michael adopt the ways of the Lost Boys.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_Royal_Command"title="By Royal Command">
In Lisbon, OGPU Colonel Irina Sedova, also known as 'Babushka' (Russian for 'grandmother'), visits the leader of the Communist Cell in Portugal. However, she soon realizes that he isn't the cell leader. He vainly tries to kill her but Sedova's bulletproof vest protects her and she manages to kill the imposter. She then finds a sheet of paper with a name from the past on it: James Bond.During this time, Bond is on his way for a school skiing trip in Austria when he runs afoul of a group of Hitler Youth members who call him a cheater for having won a game of poker. He beats them, gives them back their money, and tells them to play with good grace. Some time later, he arrives in Austria where he realizes that he is being followed. When he arrives at his hotel, he is still being followed. There, he meets with his friend Andrew Carlton and his teacher Mr. Merriot. During a skiing outing, Bond goes after one of his classmates who is drunk and they get caught in an avalanche. After saving himself and his classmate, Bond is hospitalised and hears a man crying out about his cousin named Jürgen who is going to be killed. He later finds out this man was the Graf Von Schlick.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_from_Heaven"title="Fire from Heaven">
## Main locations.Pella – the opening scene of the novel, capital city of Macedon. Pella is presented as a place of constant political struggles. It is where Alexander's childhood is spent and where most of the central relationships are formed.Aigi – the closing scene of the novel, the old capital of Macedon, located higher in the mountains. It features a fortress near a waterfall, and is presented as the site of many important character shifts, such as loss of virginity, murder, and transformative religious experiences.Mieza – site of a school for Alexander and the other sons of important Macedonian military leaders. Mieza is presented as a sort of Arcadian place of refuge from the wider politics of Macedon, a place of comradeship, learning, and love.Thrace – Macedon's neighbor to the northeast. Thrace is presented as a wild, remote region which Philip's soldiers have occupied. Even more so than Macedon, Thrace remains a rough land of feuding warlords. It is noted for the blue tattoos of its inhabitants. Thrace is where Alexander first exhibits his military bravery and leadership, and where he and Hephaestion are hardened to the gruesome realities of war.Athens – Macedon's antagonistic neighbor to the south. Athens is represented in the novel as past its glory days and ruled by petty, squabbling demagogues. It still, however, retains an aura of great respect for both Alexander and Philip as the birthplace of Greece's high culture.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qadiani_Problem"title="Qadiani Problem">
The book deals with some of the interpretations of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad who claimed to be a prophet. It discusses the finality of prophethood, the claimed prophethood of Ahmad, and its consequences in Muslim society. It also mentions the status of the Ahmadiyya Community and the political plans which Maududi associated with them.In one of the appendices of the book, a discussion has been given which is claimed to have occurred between Allama Iqbal and Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru. In this discussion Allama Iqbal is said to have expressed his views regarding followers of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad and have rationalised his view that followers of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad be given a status of a different religious community in India.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sound_of_the_Mountain"title="The Sound of the Mountain">
Shingo Ogata, a 62-year-old businessman living in Kamakura and working in Tokyo, is close to retirement. He is experiencing temporary lapses of memory, recalling strange and disturbing dreams upon waking, and hearing sounds, including the titular noise which awakens him from his sleep, "like wind, far away, but with a depth like a rumbling of the earth." Shingo takes the sound to be an omen of his impending death. At the same time, he is repeatedly confronted with the passing away of friends and former fellow students.Shingo observes and questions his relations with the other family members. He married his wife Yasuko after the untimely death of her older sister, whose beauty Shingo adored, considering both Yasuko and their daughter Fusako to be rather unattractive. Shingo has both fatherly and subtle erotic feelings for his daughter-in-law Kikuko, who calmly endures his son Shūichi's affair with another woman. When Fusako leaves her husband and returns to the family home with her two little children, Shingo starts to perceive the marital difficulties of his son and daughter as the result of not fulfilling his role as a father. In addition, Fusako blames him for marrying her to a man she did not want, and for preferring Kikuko over her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whortle's_Hope"title="Whortle's Hope">
In the story, which takes place in the summer before the events of "The Crystal Prison", it is almost the time of the Fennywolde games, when the young field mice compete to see who will have the honour of being the head sentry of the cornfield for the entire summer. Young Whortle longs to win the competition, but not if it means his friends are going to sabotage the other competitor's chances. He wants to win on his own merits, but soon realises winning isn't the most important thing as another mouse needs the prize more than he does.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Haunted_Bookshop"title="The Haunted Bookshop">
This is a suspenseful novel set in Brooklyn around the time of the end of World War I. It continues the story of Roger Mifflin, the book seller in "Parnassus on Wheels". It also details an adventure of Miss Titania Chapman and a young advertising man named Aubrey Gilbert."The Haunted Bookshop" is not a novel of the supernatural. Rather, the name refers to the ghosts of the past that haunt all libraries and bookstores: "the ghosts of all great literature." Throughout the novel Morley, through the character of Roger Mifflin, makes reference to the knowledge and wisdom that one can gain from literature.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daddy-Long-Legs_(novel)"title="Daddy-Long-Legs (novel)">
Jerusha Abbott was brought up at the John Grier Home, an old-fashioned orphanage. The children were completely dependent on charity and had to wear other people's cast-off clothes. Jerusha's unusual first name was selected by the matron from a gravestone (she hates it and uses "Judy" instead), while her surname was selected out of the phone book.One day, after the asylum's trustees have made their monthly visit, Judy is informed by the asylum's dour matron that one of the trustees has offered to pay her way through college. He has spoken to her former teachers and thinks she has potential to become an excellent writer. He will pay her tuition and give her a generous monthly allowance. Judy must write him a monthly letter because he believes that letter-writing is important to the development of a writer. However, she will never know his identity; she must address the letters to Mr. John Smith, and he never will reply.Judy catches a glimpse of the shadow of her benefactor from the back, and knows he is a tall long-legged man. Because of this, she jokingly calls him Daddy-Long-Legs. She attends a "girls college" on the East Coast. She illustrates her letters with childlike line drawings, also created by Jean Webster.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty_and_Sadness_(novel)"title="Beauty and Sadness (novel)">
Opening on the train to Kyoto, the narrative, in characteristic Kawabata fashion, subtly brings up issues of tradition and modernity as it explores writer Oki Toshio's reunion with a young lover from his past, Otoko Ueno, who is now a famous artist and recluse. Ueno is now living with her protégée and a jealous lesbian lover, Keiko Sakami, and the unfolding relationships between Oki, Otoko, and Keiko form the plot of the novel. Keiko states several times that she will avenge Otoko for Oki's abandonment, and the story coalesces into a climactic ending.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barmy_in_Wonderland"title="Barmy in Wonderland">
J. G. Anderson, owner of the Hotel Washington in Bessemer, Ohio and the Lakeside Inn near Skeewassett, Maine, is staying at the Lakeside Inn. He is angered after a hotel guest, the famous but obnoxious actor Mervyn Potter, and Anderson's desk clerk, amiable and impressionable Cyril "Barmy" Fotheringay-Phipps, wake him at 3 a.m. to give him a frog. Anderson intends to fire Barmy, but instead decides to sell the Hotel Washington to Barmy after Potter mentions that Barmy has inherited a fortune. It is also mentioned that, before leaving London two years prior, Barmy saw a fortune teller in Wimbledon named Gypsy Sybil who predicted that Barmy would take a long journey, meet a fair girl, have some trouble with a dark man, and acquire a lot of money. Barmy, who has taken the long journey and got the money, now looks forward to meeting the fair girl, and is not worried about the dark man.Potter tells Barmy that he should not buy the hotel but instead invest in an upcoming Lehmac Productions play that Potter is starring in. Anderson offers to sell Barmy the hotel for a hundred thousand dollars, but Barmy only has about twenty thousand. Anderson fires Barmy and Barmy goes to New York to invest in the play. There, Barmy sees a fair girl, Eileen "Dinty" Moore, looking longingly through a shop window at a fancy hat, and instantly falls in love with her. He tosses his cigar away, only for it to burn the old hat she is currently wearing. He buys the fancy hat for her to replace it. Dinty thanks Barmy before leaving. Barmy fears he will never see her again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Palace_of_Heavenly_Pleasure"title="The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure">
The book's story is told in three parts.Part One sets the scene, with the various character's arrivals and meetings. Helen Frances meets Henry Manners and begins to grow affectionate. The brothel is introduced. The Boxers watch as spirits appear within the sky.Part Two develops the political aspects of the story and begins to demonstrate the influence of different powers within China. Later, the attacks against foreigners increase and the Airtons are forced to flee the town. Execution of foreigners, watched by the Airtons, as they hide in the brothel. Escape from the town, by means of train. Helen Frances is told that Manners is dead.Part Three introduces Orkhon Baatar, who helps the Airtons to survive. Lament of the previous tragedies. Finally, new character (Arthur Topps) enters Shishan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigs_Have_Wings"title="Pigs Have Wings">
The absent minded Lord Emsworth finds himself once again embroiled in fierce rivalry in the pig-rearing arena with his neighbour, the obese baronet Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe. With Emsworth's champion Empress of Blandings in line for a third straight victory in the local show and Parsloe bringing in a ringer, suspicions run high. Meanwhile, Blandings has its full complement of romantic entanglements. The ever-resourceful Gally is on hand to help out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_(Kuzmin_novel)"title="Wings (Kuzmin novel)">
The novel deals with teenager Vanya Smurov's attachment to his older, urbane mentor, Larion Stroop, a pederast who initiates him into the world of early Renaissance, Classical and Romantic art. At the close of the first part, Vanya is shocked to learn that the object of his admiration frequents a gay bathhouse. In order to sort out his feelings, Vanya withdraws into the Volga countryside, but his sickening experience with rural women, whose call on him to enjoy his youth turns out to be an awkward attempt at seduction, induces Vanya to accept his Classics teacher's proposal and accompany him in a journey to Italy. In the last part of the novel, Vanya and Stroop, who is also in Italy, are seen enjoying the smiling climate and stunning artworks of Florence and Rome, while Prince Orsini mentors the delicate youth in the art of hedonism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smell_of_Apples"title="The Smell of Apples">
Marnus Erasmus is an eleven-year-old boy who, with his family, lives in Cape Town, South Africa in the early seventies. The Erasmus family, as white Afrikaners, lives in a country where blacks and coloured people form the majority, but where the white Apartheid regime rules and Marnus' father is an important general in the army.Marnus grows up believing that black people are second-class people because he has been indoctrinated by the Apartheid system and his parents' views. On the other hand we, the readers, see that all Marnus' encounters with black people have actually been positive. Marnus' father hates black people because his father, Marnus' grandfather, and his family were driven away and their land was expropriated by the black majority from Tanganyika, today's Tanzania. They fled to South Africa and, together with the descendants of other white settlers, turned it into an ostensibly modern state. Now Marnus' father thinks that the black people are going to destroy everything that they built up and that the white population has to prevent this by keeping the native Africans under control. Marnus' older sister Ilse, an intelligent and talented girl, under the influence of a stay in the Netherlands, but also of an aunt living in London, gradually begins to become more and more sceptic of her father's beliefs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_Post"title="Pigeon Post">
The Swallows, Amazons and Ds are camping in the Blackett family's garden at Beckfoot. The "Swallow" is not available for sailing. James Turner (Captain Flint) has sent word that he is returning from an expedition to South America prospecting for gold, and has sent "Timothy" ahead. As he can be let loose in the study, the Amazons and D's have already deduced that Timothy is an armadillo, and Titty, Dick and Peggy make a box for him, but he does not arrive. Slater Bob, an old slate miner, tells them a story about a lost gold vein in the fells. As Captain Flint has been unsuccessful in his prospecting trip, the children plan to prospect for gold on "High Topps" instead, as a surprise for Flint.When Mrs. Blackett shows doubts, the children prove they can stay in touch with Beckfoot using the homing pigeons that give the book its name, and earn permission to move camp to Tyson's Farm, up near the fells, to be closer to the prospecting grounds. They are disappointed in that Mrs Tyson does not permit them to cook over a campfire, owing to drought conditions and her fear of fires, meaning that they have to keep in time with her meal-schedules. Titty eventually finds a spring by dowsing, and they move closer to the Topps. They send daily messages home by pigeon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allies_of_the_Night"title="Allies of the Night">
Darren, Harkat, and Mr. Crepsley [Vancha going back to Vampire Mountain to inform the other Princes and Generals of their encounter with the Vampaneze Lord] go to Mr. Crepsley's hometown once again to investigate if the Vampaneze had set up territories there. But soon after their arrival Darren is discovered by the police and forced to attend school. He has trouble with most of his subjects as he only has a middle school education, but luckily his English teacher is Debbie, his old girlfriend from his first visit to this city.Mr. Crepsley has to go back to Vampire Mountain again for Paris Skyle's funeral, leaving Darren and Harkat to continue the investigations alone. One night on his way back to the hotel room the three are staying in, Darren encounters a Vampaneze with hooks for hands and a mask wrapped around his face. The Vampaneze attacks, but Darren is saved by his old friend Steve. Steve joins Darren for the hunt of the Vampaneze, claiming he's changed his ways and now understands who the real enemy is and dropped his desire for vengeance against Darren and Mr. Crepsley long ago.Darren later reveals himself as a vampire to Debbie, and after a long explanation and a day's contemplating she joins Darren and Steve for the fight. Mr. Crepsley comes back and helps Darren pursue the Vampaneze, but understandably doesn't trust Steve. Darren does convince him, however, that Steve will be a big help for them and lets him come with them. Vancha also joins them again a few days later.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Courtship_of_Princess_Leia"title="The Courtship of Princess Leia">
## Background.Though the Battle of Endor resulted in the destruction of the Emperor and Darth Vader, along with the best of the Imperial Starfleet, the remnants of the Empire are still a danger. One of the recently formed New Republic's most dire foes is a splinter faction of the former Empire, led by Warlord Zsinj. Zsinj is a cunning strategist whose skills have earned him the allegiance of almost a full third of the entire galaxy. Both the Imperial Remnant and the New Republic have dedicated considerable forces to ending his reign. But Zsinj has possession of one of the few Super Star Destroyers left, and whenever nearly cornered, slips away to a secret stronghold where the SSD "Iron Fist" is repaired.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Leave_(novel)"title="French Leave (novel)">
The Trent sisters, Teresa ("Terry"), Josephine ("Jo"), and Kate, run a farm with hens and bees in the village of Bensonburg in Long island. Henry Weems, who wants to marry Jo, works for a legal firm that has managed the sale of a play written by the sisters' late father for television, and each girl receives a large payment. Jo wants to go to St. Rocque for the Festival and to marry a millionaire, whereas Teresa, the youngest sister, wants to have fun in Roville and then return to farming. Jo and Teresa agree to pool their money and buy one set of nice clothes, with one girl acting as the rich Miss Trent and the other as Fellowes, Miss Trent's personal maid, for a month, and then vice versa. Kate, the oldest sister, disapproves of them squandering their money but accompanies them as an austere chaperone.Nicolas Jules St Xavier Auguste, Marquis de Maufringneuse et Valerie-Moberanne ("Old Nick") has a minor civil service job in Paris. Nick is a widower by his first wife and divorced his second wife, both American. He is well-mannered but lazy and fired by his employer, Monsieur de La Hourmerie, though he inadvertently takes away a dossier with him. Nick had a son with his first wife named Jefferson "Jeff" Auguste, Comte d'Escrignon, a writer who was in the Maquis. Old Nick gets money from his son and goes to St. Rocque. Jeff follows when Nick needs more money after being tricked by his friend Prince Blamont-Chevry. Jo, who will be the rich Miss Trent first, hopes to court a rich American there, Chester Todd. Chester's wealthy friend Frederick "Freddie" Carpenter hides after his trousers are stolen. Terry gets Old Nick to assist him, and Nick is rewarded with a cruise on Carpenter's yacht to Roville. On the yacht will also be Chester's aunt, Hermione Pegler (Old Nick's ex-wife), and Chester's sister, Mavis Todd. Jo learns that Chester is married and goes home to marry Henry, while Terry and Kate head to Rovillle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Cranes"title="Thousand Cranes">
The novel consists of five chapters, titled "Thousand Cranes", "The Grove in the Evening Sun", "Figured Shino", "Her Mother's Lipstick" and "Double Star".28-year-old Tokyo office worker Kikuji attends the tea ceremony lesson of Miss Chikako Kurimoto, with whom his deceased father once had a short-lived affair. He still vividly remembers a large naevus on her chest, which he once saw as a child. Kikuji is impressed by the beauty of one of Miss Kurimoto's pupils, Yukiko Inamura, who carries a furoshiki which bears a pattern of the thousand cranes of the novel's title. The tea ceremony lesson is also attended by Mrs. Ota, a 45-year-old widow and long-time mistress of his father, and her daughter Fumiko. Miss Kurimoto speaks disparagingly of Mrs. Ota, while at the same trying to awaken Kikuji's interest in Miss Inamura.Kikuji and Mrs. Ota spend a passionate night together, and Kikuji wonders if Mrs. Ota sees his father in him. When she visits him again after a long pause, he learns that her daughter Fumiko tried to keep her from meeting him. Despite her deep sense of shame, she sleeps with Kikuji again. Late that night, Fumiko rings him to tell him that her mother committed suicide. He agrees to help Fumiko with covering up her mother's suicide to maintain her reputation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_in_the_Bedroom"title="Ice in the Bedroom">
Freddie Widgeon is renting a villa called Peacehaven in the idyllic South London suburb of Valley Fields, and working, unhappily, in the office of Shoesmith, Shoesmith, Shoesmith and Shoesmith, solicitors. Soapy Molloy has just moved out of the house next door (Castlewood), to be replaced by the novelist Leila Yorke. Leila is published by Popgood and Grooly (a publishing firm also mentioned in other novels including "Uncle Dynamite" and "Galahad at Blandings"), which is largely owned by Oofy Prosser. It turns out that Soapy has left some diamonds or "ice" (stolen from Oofy's wife Myrtle) in the bedroom of Castlewood. His wife Dolly, just released from jail, is determined to get it back. After several failed attempts, she comes up with the idea of trying to drive Leila out of her house by arranging for many people to knock on her door bearing cats, and later dogs.Meanwhile, Freddie is keen to escape from his office job and go to Kenya to run a coffee plantation. He thinks he can finance this using oil stocks sold to him by Soapy. As usual he is in love, with Sally Foster, Leila's secretary. Sally is aware of Freddie's reputation with women and is unamused when he is repeatedly found in compromising situations with the glamorous Dolly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_with_a_Smile"title="Service with a Smile">
Myra Schoonmaker is staying at Blandings Castle, her London season having been cut short by Connie. Connie is not happy that Myra wants to marry the impoverished East End curate Bill Bailey. Lord Emsworth is not happy with his sister, with his latest secretary Lavender Briggs and with the houseguest Duke of Dunstable. Adding to the unpleasantness, Lady Constance invites a party of Church Lads to camp out at the lake, young boys who enjoy taunting Emsworth.When Connie says she will be away for a day having her hair done in Shrewsbury, Myra contacts Bailey, arranging to meet in a registry office and get married. Bailey, with his friend Pongo Twistleton and Pongo's Uncle Fred, waits at the selected spot, but Myra does not appear. Uncle Fred is an old friend of Myra and her father, and he likes Bailey. Fred then meets Emsworth, who is in London to attend the Opening of Parliament), and invites himself to Blandings to help Emsworth, the unhappy earl. He brings Bailey under the name of "Cuthbert Meriweather", an old friend returned from Brazil.At the castle, Bailey and Myra are reunited, after learning each was waiting at a different registry office. The Church Lads trick Emsworth into diving into the lake to rescue one of their number, which turns out to be a log. This leads the Duke of Dunstable to again question Emsworth's sanity, always manifest in Emsworth’s affection for his pig. Emsworth, at Fred's suggestion, takes his revenge on the Church Lads by cutting the ropes of their tent in the small hours.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_Assets_(novel)"title="Frozen Assets (novel)">
On the last day of his Paris holiday, Gerald "Jerry" Shoesmith, editor of "Society Spice", loses his wallet, which contains his keys. It is brought to an overly bureaucratic police sergeant, who will not return it for three days. American journalist Katherine "Kay" Christopher suggests he sleep at Henry Blake-Somerset's apartment, though Henry is cold and aloof. It is revealed that Henry is Kay's fiancé. Jerry tells Kay that he wants to marry her, but she remains with Henry. Kay's brother and Jerry's friend, Edmund Biffen "Biff" Christopher, is prone to drinking and getting into fights while drunk. He has fled Paris for London after punching a policeman. At Barribault's Hotel, Biff is served by waiter William "Willie" Pilbeam, whose son Percy runs a private detective agency, and whose niece Gwendoline Gibbs is secretary to Jerry's formidable employer Lord Tilbury. Biff discovers he has inherited millions from his godfather, Edmund Biffen Pyke, but on conditions that will be explained in a coming letter. In the meantime, Biff is low on funds and moves into Jerry's modest flat in Halsey Court. Once engaged to Tilbury's niece Linda Rome, Biff hopes to win her back. Tilbury was the late Pyke's brother and wants Biff's inheritance. Tilbury also loves Gwendoline.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Thursday"title="Sir Thursday">
## Background.Arthur Penhaligon is a young boy who has gotten involved with the 'House', a magical world. This world comprises seven parts, each containing a 'Key' (powerful magical objects) and a part of the 'Will' (a being that holds the wish of the absent 'Architect'), under control of a villainous 'Trustee'. Arthur is on a quest to defeat the 'Trustees' and fulfill the 'Will'.In the preceding three books, Arthur has captured three parts of the House.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Across_the_Zodiac"title="Across the Zodiac">
The book details the creation and use of apergy, a form of anti-gravitational energy, and details a flight to Mars in 1830. The planet is inhabited by diminutive beings; they are convinced that life does not exist elsewhere than on their world, and refuse to believe that the unnamed narrator is actually from Earth. (They think he is an unusually tall Martian from some remote place on their planet.)The book's narrator names his spacecraft the "Astronaut".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sign_of_the_Beaver"title="The Sign of the Beaver">
"The Sign of the Beaver" tells the story of 13-year-old Matthew James "Matt" Hallowell, an 18th-century American settler. He and his father build a log cabin in the wilderness of Maine, then Matt is left alone to guard the cabin and his family's claim to the land while his father heads back to Quincy, Massachusetts to pick up his mother, his sister, and the new baby and bring them back to the cabin. Matt learns how to survive and deal with difficult situations, getting help from Attean, a Native American boy, and his family. When Matt fears his father will not return, Attean asks him to join the Beaver tribe and move north.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walking_Drum"title="The Walking Drum">
Forced to flee his birthplace on the windswept coast of Brittany to escape the Baron de Tournemine, who killed his mother, and to seek his lost father, Mathurin Kerbouchard looks for passage on a ship and, although forced to serve as a galley slave initially, travels the coast and attains the position of pilot, frees a captured Moorish girl, Aziza, and her companion, then frees his fellow slaves and with their help sells his captors into slavery and escapes to Cádiz in Moorish Spain, where he looks for news of his father.Hearing that his father is dead, Mathurin goes inland and poses as a scholar in Córdoba, but his scholarship is interrupted when he becomes involved in political intrigue surrounding Aziza and is imprisoned by Prince Ahmed. Scheduled to be executed, Mathurin escapes eastward to the hills outside the city, but before he leaves soldiers arrive and ransack and burn the place where he is staying, leaving him for dead. Mathurin returns to Córdoba and, aided by a woman he chances upon named Safia, he takes a job as a translator. However, the intrigue in which she is involved threatens their lives, and they must flee the city. Safia, through connections of her own, has gathered news of Mathurin's father, and tells him that his father may be alive but was sold as a slave in the east.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pelican_at_Blandings"title="A Pelican at Blandings">
Blandings Castle lacks its usual balm for the Earl of Emsworth, as his stern sister Lady Constance Keeble is once more in residence. The Duke of Dunstable is also infesting the place again, along with the standard quota of American millionaires, romantic youths, con artists, imposters and so on. With a painting of a reclining nude at the centre of numerous intrigues, Gally's genius is once again required to sort things out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_in_Blue"title="The Girl in Blue">
In New York, Duane Stottlemeyer of Guildenstern's Stores tells corporation lawyer Homer Pyle that Homer's sister, Bernadette "Barney" Claybourne, has been arrested for shoplifting, despite being rich. The company will not press charges if she leaves the city. Duane proposes that Homer keep his sister away from department stores by sending her to an English country house that takes paying guests, and suggests Mellingham Hall, near the village Mellingham-in-the-Vale. Homer agrees, as he knows the brother of the man who runs it. Homer brings his sister to London to make the arrangements.In London, comic cartoonist Gerald "Jerry" West attends jury duty, and falls in love with a fellow juror. An intelligent girl, she leads the jury deliberation to a unanimous vote. Jerry speaks with her afterwards. She enjoys his cartoons and is an air hostess on leave. They make plans for dinner later that week at Barribault's, though Jerry forgets to ask for her name. He soon remembers that he is already engaged, to the beautiful yet critical Vera Upshaw, a writer. Vera wants Jerry to demand his inheritance, which is supposed to be held in trust for three more years, from his trustee, his uncle Willoughby "Bill" Scrope. Bill's older brother, Crispin Scrope, struggles financially to maintain the manor he inherited, Mellingham Hall, and to pay off a broker's man from a repair company, obtains a loan of approximately two hundred pounds from Bill, who is a wealthy lawyer. Bill is a miniature portrait collector, and has acquired a Gainsborough miniature of a direct ancestor, titled "The Girl in Blue".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelors_Anonymous"title="Bachelors Anonymous">
Ephraim Trout of Trout, Wapshott and Edelstein, a legal firm employed by Ivor Llewellyn, head of the Superba-Llewellyn studio of Hollywood, has handled Llewellyn's five divorces. Llewellyn is on his way to London on business, and Trout sees Llewellyn off at the Los Angeles airport. Trout warns him against any more impulsive proposals. Trout has managed to stay single since he belongs to a California group called Bachelors Anonymous, inspired by Alcoholics Anonymous. When one member feels the impulse to take a woman out to dinner, he seeks out the other members and they reason with him. He advises Llewellyn to consult the legal firm of Nichols, Erridge and Trubshaw in London, as they can find someone to act as a similar advisor for Llewellyn. Other members of Bachelors Anonymous convince Trout to follow Llewellyn to London to help. In London, Llewellyn meets Vera Dalrymple, the star of the Regal Theatre's stage comedy "Cousin Angela", written by Joseph "Joe" Pickering (who makes his living working for the solicitors Shoesmith, Shoesmith, Shoesmith, and Shoesmith, mentioned in other stories such as "Ice in the Bedroom"). Joe is interviewed by Sally Fitch (from Much Middlefold) for a women's paper, and they get along well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_at_Blandings"title="Sunset at Blandings">
The story is another tale set at Blandings Castle, filled as ever with romance and imposters. Galahad Threepwood uses his charm and wit to ensure his brother Clarence continues to lead a quiet and peaceful life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_My_Bum_Went_Psycho"title="The Day My Bum Went Psycho">
Zack Freeman's bum is constantly detaching itself from his body and running off. One night, when he follows his bum, he learns that there is a plot by bums to take over the world. Specifically, the bums plan to create a huge, worldwide fart by building up a massive quantity of methane gas in the "Bumcano". When the "Bumcano" blows, all humans will be rendered unconscious. While they are unconscious, the bums will seize their chance and switch places with their heads.Fortunately, Zack meets the "Bum-hunter" Silas Sterne and his daughter, Eleanor, and is introduced to the realities of life in a world where bums are constantly a threat. To prevent the Bumcano eruption, the friends enlist the help of "the Kisser", "the Kicker", "the Smacker" and "Ned Smelly". The characters encounter a variety of bum-related places and things, including the "Great Windy Desert", "flying bum squadrons", "Stenchgantor The Great Unwiped Bum" and "the Great White Bum".Naturally, every possible opportunity for "toilet humour" is milked in this book for children, which won a number of Children's Choice awards in Australia.It is followed by "Zombie Bums from Uranus" (2003) and "" (2005).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Day_No_Pigs_Would_Die"title="A Day No Pigs Would Die">
While skipping school one day, twelve-year-old Rob Peck finds himself assisting a neighbor's cow through the delivery of a pair of calves (and saving her life from her goiter). He is injured in the process, but eventually recovers and the farmer whose animals he helped gives Rob a piglet. He names the piglet Pinky. Pinky quickly becomes Rob's best friend and closest companion save for his father, Haven, a butcher working to save money to pay off the Peck family's farm. Unfortunately, Pinky is barren and they eventually decide that they have to kill the piglet if it cannot bring the family any more piglets or profit. Robert hates his father when he kills Pinky, but understands that his father is heartbroken as well. Rob's father, Haven, dies in his sleep a few months later and Rob discovers while doing random chores that his father had been trying to teach himself to write. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_Baby_(novel)"title="Tar Baby (novel)">
This novel portrays a love affair between Jadine and Son, two Black Americans from very different worlds. Jadine is a beautiful Sorbonne graduate and fashion model who has been sponsored into wealth and privilege by the Streets, a wealthy white family who employ Jadine's aunt and uncle as domestic servants. Son is an impoverished, strong-minded man who washes up at the Streets' estate on a Caribbean island. As Jadine and Son come together, their affair ruptures the illusions and self-deceptions that held together the world and relationships at the estate. They travel back to the United States to search for somewhere they can both be at home, and find that their homes hold poison for each other. The struggle of Jadine and Son reveals the pain, struggle, and compromises confronting Black Americans seeking to live and love with integrity in the United States.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Egoist_(novel)"title="The Egoist (novel)">
The novel recounts the story of self-absorbed Sir Willoughby Patterne and his attempts at marriage; jilted by his first bride-to-be, he vacillates between the sentimental Laetitia Dale and the strong-willed Clara Middleton. More importantly, the novel follows Clara's attempts to escape from her engagement to Sir Willoughby, who desires women to serve as a mirror for him and consequently cannot understand why she would not want to marry him. Thus, "The Egoist" dramatises the difficulty contingent upon being a woman in Victorian society, when women's bodies and minds are trafficked between fathers and husbands to cement male bonds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sleeper_Awakes"title="The Sleeper Awakes">
Graham, an Englishman living in London in 1897, takes drugs to cure insomnia and falls into a coma. He wakes up in 2100. He later learns that he has inherited huge wealth and that his money has been put into a trust. Over the years, the trustees, the "White Council", have used his wealth to establish a vast political and economic world order.When Graham wakes, he is disoriented. The people around him had not expected him to wake up, and are alarmed. Word spreads that the "Sleeper" has awakened. A mob gathers around the building and demands to see the fabled Sleeper. The people around Graham will not answer his questions. They place Graham under house arrest. Graham learns that he is the legal owner and master of most of the world.Rebels led by Ostrog help Graham to escape. They say that the people need Graham's leadership to rise against the White Council. Unconvinced, but unwilling to remain a prisoner, Graham goes with them. Graham arrives at a massive hall where the workers have gathered to prepare for the revolution. They march against the White Council but are soon attacked by the state police. In the confusion, Graham is separated from the revolutionaries. He meets an old man who tells him the story of the Sleeper - the White Council invested his wealth to buy the industries and political entities of half the world, establishing a plutocracy and sweeping away parliament and the monarchy. The Sleeper is just a figurehead. The old man thinks that the Sleeper is a made-up figure used to brainwash the population.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayers_for_the_Assassin"title="Prayers for the Assassin">
The book starts off during the second American Civil War with a Muslim soldier dying in 2017, at the battle of Newark. Flash forward to the Super Bowl in 2042 in Seattle, the capital of the new Islamic Republic, the majority of whose inhabitants have converted to Islam. The nation's culture is a fusion of traditional American and Islamic: the Super Bowl is still played, but the cheerleaders are sword-wielding men and the participants break at half-time for afternoon prayers.As the story opens, the country is facing a crisis, with competing political and religious factions threatening to destroy the fragile peace that exists within the Islamic States of America. At the same time, behind the scenes, a messianic figure known as the Wise Old One contrives to seize power for himself, and fulfill the ancient prophecy of the restoration of the Caliphate.The story's protagonist is Rakkim Epps, a Muslim and ex-Fedayeen shadow warrior. Epps must risk everything to save the life of Sarah Dougan, the young historian he loves.It becomes known that it was in fact Muslim extremists who launched the attacks, including the dirty bomb in Mecca. A fourth, more powerful bomb (later found in China) was scheduled for detonation but the small group of Muslim extremists assigned the task succumbed to radiation poisoning before it could be put into play.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stinky_Cheese_Man_and_Other_Fairly_Stupid_Tales"title="The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales">
The book is narrated by the character of Jack from Jack and the Beanstalk, who tells the stories and deals with the rest of the cast. There is a very loud and annoying Little Red Hen that comes in to complain about no one helping her make her bread (or do anything). Chicken Licken believes that the sky is falling and demands that someone call the President until the table of contents crushes her and the others. Jack introduces Little Red Running Shorts, a counterpart of Little Red Riding Hood, by blurting out the entire story — including the ending — so she and the wolf refuse to be in it. The Stinky Cheese Man, a counterpart of The Gingerbread Man, is afraid to be near anyone because he thinks that they will eat him...but they are really trying to get away from his horrid smell.Also in the book are "The Princess and the Bowling Ball", "The Other Frog Prince", "The Really Ugly Duckling", "Cinderumplestiltskin" and "The Tortoise and the Hair". In the first, a retelling of "The Princess and the Pea", the Prince finally finds a girl he really loves. Sick of his parents rejecting potential wives when they do not feel a pea under 100 mattresses, he slips his bowling ball under her mattresses when his parents have her over. In "The Other Frog Prince", the frog tells the princess that he will turn into a prince if she kisses him and so she does; he then says "I was just kidding" and hops back into the lake. "The Really Ugly Duckling" (a parody of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Ugly Duckling"), grows up to be a Really Ugly Duck rather than a swan. "Cinderumplestiltskin" combines "Cinderella" and "Rumplestiltskin". In "The Tortoise and the Hair", a re-telling of "The Tortoise and the Hare", the Hare says he can grow his hair (one on the top of his head) faster than the Tortoise can run. So they race, and race, and race, and race; this story has no ending, the last words of it being "not the end".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deed_of_Paksenarrion"title="The Deed of Paksenarrion">
The "Deed of Paksenarrion" was written as one long story, but published as three separate books."The Deed of Paksenarrion" revolves around the adult life of Paksenarrion Dorthansdotter, known as Paks, of Three Firs. It takes place in a fictional medieval world of kingdoms of humans, dwarves, gnomes and elves.The story begins by introducing Paks as a headstrong girl of 18, who leaves her home in Three Firs (fleeing a marriage arranged by her father) to join a mercenary company and through her journeys and hardships comes to realize that she has been gifted as a paladin, if in a rather non-traditional way. Paksenarrion works, fights, and sacrifices herself until she can see the rightful king of Lyonya established over the opposition of evil forces, or gods, and evil humans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Kin"title="Dragon's Kin">
The story tells how the people of the planet Pern discover the special abilities of the watch-whers or whers, a distant relative of the dragons. Subsequently, these beasts are used in mines to warn miners of gas pockets and also to locate stranded miners, should there be a cave-in.The story begins some years before the 3rd Pass in Camp Natalon, a mining camp. There, the reader is introduced to a young boy Kindan, whose father owns a watch-wher called Dask. During a mining cave-in, Kindan loses his entire family as well as Dask, and is adopted by the Master Harper Zist, who begins to train him to be both an entertainer and a spy, something that Harpers do. This is how Kindan learns that the camp is divided into two parties, Natalon's and his uncle Tarik's.Meanwhile, the camp is without a watch-wher and minor accidents keep delaying the work. Despite the protests from Tarik and his group, Natalon decides to trade an entire winter's worth of coal for a chance for Kindan to ask a queen watch-wher for an egg. He succeeds and begins the difficult task of raising a nocturnal animal. As no records exist on how to raise or train the watch-wher, Kindan has no clue but is luckily aided by the mysterious Nuella. Together, they train Kisk and, in the process, learn a great deal about this species. This proves to be vital as, towards the end of the novel, Kisk's abilities will save many lives, including that of the camp leader, Natalon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Spell_for_Chameleon"title="A Spell for Chameleon">
In this adventure, Bink is exiled to Mundania because he has (inadvertently) broken Xanth law by not having a magical talent. He returns to Xanth with Chameleon, a woman whose intelligence and beauty vary inversely depending on the time of the month, and the evil magician Trent who was exiled 20 years earlier for attempting to usurp the throne of Xanth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaur_Aisle"title="Centaur Aisle">
Xanth's King Trent has left for dreary Mundania, leaving Dor to practice governing the magical kingdom. Dor's magical talent is communication with the inanimate which for information gathering is very helpful, but for dealing with citizens needing discipline it leaves room for improvement. But when Trent goes to establish trade routes with Mundania, Dor and his friends (a golem named Grundy, the centaur Chet, Smash the ogre, and Dor's love interest, King Trent's daughter Princess Irene) must keep the land in line.However, the former King Trent does not return when he had planned. After waiting two weeks, Dor gathers his gang and goes on a quest to help rescue Trent.This mission leads them to Centaur Isle, to find an unknown Centaur Magician. Centaurs are very negative about magical talents, so when they find Arnolde the Centaur and discover his talent, he is exiled and willing to help them rescue Trent. Arnolde's talent is a magical aisle, creating a field of magic around him that allows anyone to use magic in Mundania.The gang (minus Chet) travel north by rainbow to Mundania. While in Mundania, they find a scholar named Ichabod. From him, they learn that they are in the wrong time strand and must go back to Xanth and re-cross the border. Eventually Dor and his friends find the correct strand and go to the castle where they think Trent and his wife Iris were last. After a nice dinner and a little betrayal, they are locked in a dungeon. After escaping, they smash down walls to find Trent and his new friend King Omen, the proper king of this area.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogre,_Ogre"title="Ogre, Ogre">
Smash the half-ogre (offspring of Crunch the ogre and a human Curse Fiend acting like an ogre) goes to see the Good Magician Humfrey to get his question answered, although he doesn't know what his question is. The magician's answer: Travel to the Ancestral Ogres to find what you seek. His payment is to guard Tandy, a half-nymph, for one year.They travel about the magical land of Xanth, and Smash acquires other young women who travel with him and whom he protects. Along the way, he is infected with the Eye Queue vine, which makes him intelligent (although actually invoking his human half) making him distressed as ogres are not supposed to be smart in any way. As he tries to find an antidote to his intelligence, he undergoes several adventures; saving Tandy from the dream realm in a plant called a hypnogourd and smashing the Gap Dragon. Soon he finds matches and finds solutions to all of the women, who leave one by one.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_on_a_Pedestal"title="Dragon on a Pedestal">
When the book begins, the Good Magician Humfrey, and his son Hugo, run into the Gap dragon while filling a vial with water from the Fountain of Youth. Humpfrey tells Hugo to douse the dragon with the water, and Hugo does so but accidentally sprays Humpfrey as well. Humpfrey regresses to the age of a baby, as does the dragon. Queen Irene realizes Princess Ivy has wandered off, and begins a quest to find her daughter. Luckily, Ivy comes across Humfrey's 8-year-old son Hugo, and – due to her unknown talent of enhancement – Hugo temporarily becomes smarter, braver, and stronger when she tells him he is. Ivy also manages to enhance the positive qualities of the Gap Dragon, and names him Stanley Steamer.In "Castle Roogna", Dor accidentally put a forget spell on the Gap Chasm (the huge rift that splits Xanth in two), while trying to escape a horde of harpies and goblins, with the result being that everyone forgot the Gap Chasm existed, with the exception of the people who live near it. In this book, the forget spell is beginning to disintegrate into "forget whorls" spinning off into the nearby forest (due to the Time Of No Magic caused when Bink released the Demon X(A/N)th), causing confusion and memory loss. Ivy ends up walking through a forget whirl and it causes her to forget how to get home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_in_the_Gears"title="Golem in the Gears">
Grundy, a man only a few inches high, is desperate to prove himself and gain respect. He volunteers to ride the Monster Under The Bed to find his friend Ivy's long lost dragon, Stanley Steamer.After many adventures, he rescues Rapunzel from the villainous Sea Hag. It seems too good to be true that she could become any size she wanted! A perfect match, seemingly. But that would have to wait until they shook off the pursuing Sea Hag...and Stanley still needed to be found!
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vale_of_the_Vole"title="Vale of the Vole">
On his way to the Good Magician's castle, Esk meets Chex, the winged centaur daughter of Xap Hippogryph and Chem Centaur. Despite having wings, Chex is unable to fly due to her solid equine weight; she is going to ask Humfrey how she can fly. Later, the two of them meet up with Volney Vole, who always replaces S's with V's during speech. Volney has a demon problem of his own, as his home by the Kiss-Me River has become unbearably infested with bugs ever since the demons decided to straighten out the river's undulating curves.When they discover the Good Magician is missing, they decide to look for him. On the way, they go through a Hypnogourd, where bad dreams are manufactured. Esk meets Bria Brassie, a heavy brass woman, and they fall in love. The team discovers that Chex can make items temporarily light when she flicks them with her tail, which provides a solution to her problem of how to fly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven_Cent"title="Heaven Cent">
The protagonist of "Heaven Cent" is Prince Dolph, shapeshifting son of King Dor and Queen Irene and younger brother of Princess Ivy. The story begins with Dolph, a pre-teen, setting out on a Quest with his designated Adult Companion Marrow Bones to locate the magician Humfrey, who had been missing since "Vale of the Vole".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_from_Mundania"title="Man from Mundania">
The protagonist of "Man from Mundania" is seventeen-year-old Princess Ivy, daughter of King Dor and Queen Irene, older sister to Prince Dolph. Due to her ancestor Bink's deal in the second Xanth novel, "The Source of Magic", Ivy has a magician-caliber magical talent of being able to selectively enhance the world around her to match her expectations. The story begins when Ivy decides to use the Heaven Cent, located by Dolph in the previous book "Heaven Cent", to find the Good Magician Humfrey, who had been missing since "Vale of the Vole".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_View"title="Isle of View">
Che, Chex Centaur’s winged foal, has been kidnapped by a group of goblins. It is up to Jenny, a girl from the world of Two Moons, to save him. Dolph finally has to decide whom to marry: Electra or Naga Nada.The book begins in mid-crisis: Che Centaur has been foalnapped. Jenny Elf, wandering in a myopic haze through the World of Two Moons with her cat Sammy, accidentally stumbles through a giant hole between dimensions and ends up in Xanth. Jenny eventually discovers Che being held hostage by a group of goblins, and her attempt to rescue him results in them both being captured by another band of goblins.Nada Naga, Electra, and the original goblin gang work together and succeed in retrieving Che, Jenny, and Sammy from the new goblin kidnappers. Nada and Electra play a game of chance with the goblins to determine to whom Che goes; the goblins win. The four goblins, Che, Jenny, and Sammy go back to Goblin Mountain where Che is to live. There, Che and Jenny learn why the goblins had kidnapped Che in the first place: they wanted him to be the tutor and companion to Gwendolyn, a young goblin princess who was lame and mostly blind. Because the goblins only respect strength and power, Gwendolyn needed to be able to conceal her physical disabilities by riding on Che's back - otherwise she would be overthrown and killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demons_Don't_Dream"title="Demons Don't Dream">
Dug, a Mundane, is transported in to the magic land of Xanth when he plays a computer game introduced to him by his friend for a bet. The game consists of the player having a companion, who is usually a well known Xanth character, and being led through the magical world of Xanth, defeating challenges along the way and eventually winning the ultimate prize of a magic talent. The catch with the companions is that there is a chance that your companion is false, meaning that at the point where you might finally win, the companion will cause your ultimate downfall. The game also has a way of becoming 3D to the player, and, if the player believes in magic, eventually real.Dug, being a mundane boy of sixteen, picks Nada Naga as his partner, because of her beauty. Nada Naga begins to lead Dug in the world of Xanth, at first trying to convince him that the magical world is real, but giving up after realizing that Dug stubbornly refuses to believe in magic. Dug travels to the Isthmus village, where he learns the town is being controlled under a horrible censorship. He sets out to destroy the ship. After defeating the censorship, he is kicked out of the game twice, once only temporarily from trying to look at Nada's panties, the second time for good after being defeated by Com Pewter. He comes back to the game and picks Nada to be his partner again but fails to remember that there is a chance that Nada will be a False Companion, which she is. He again has to go through the first part of his adventure, but this time his starting point has changed to the Black Village, home to the new Black Wave. Sherlock, one of the members of the Black Wave, joins Nada and Dug on their journey.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harpy_Thyme"title="Harpy Thyme">
Gloha Goblin-Harpy is searching for love, and decides to ask the Magician Humfrey where she can find it. He tells her to ask his second son Crombie the Soldier. Gloha goes on a quest for love, accompanied by Magician Trent and Cynthia, a winged centaur filly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geis_of_the_Gargoyle"title="Geis of the Gargoyle">
Seeking a spell that will restore the polluted river Swan Knee to a state of purity, guardian Gary Gargoyle finds himself face-to-face with the Magician Humfrey. Humfrey tells Gary to go and find the philter. Instead of serving the usual one year, Gary has to become a man with the help of Trent, who has gone into the brain coral's pool along with his wife Iris, and civilize a 5 year old child named Surprise. Iris comes along for the quest after having a rejuvenation potion. Surprise is a kid with as many talents as there are thinkable, but only one at a time. When Gary gets some direction, they go off to search for the philter in the middle of the madness, which is spreading farther out, in the ruins of stone hinge. Once there, in an attempt to search for where the philter could be Iris recreates the past that Gary revealed to them from "reading the stones" After the illusions are being recreated, some illusions that aren't Iris's come and start communicating with the group. Eventually, they find that the illusions are trying to steal Gary's soul. Then they find that there is a demon creating the illusions, and that that demon is the philter, and in order to stop the madness from spreading, and to clean the rivers coming in to Xanth, they have to put the philter back into 'The Interface'. An old spell that the ancients who created stone hinge used to tame the madness, and separate Xanth from Mundania. They had apparently thought that the philter had also gone into 'the interface', but it had managed to hide itself instead of going in. After much confusion, they manage to get the philter into the interface. In finding the philter, they also find out that Surprise can only use each talent once, and then can no longer do the same thing. Surprise became way more mature after learning that she can't perform the same talent more than once, and Gary no longer has to purify the river of Swan Knee.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roc_and_a_Hard_Place"title="Roc and a Hard Place">
One year after the events of Geis of the Gargoyle, Demoness Metria, whilst making her husband Veleno deliriously happy, finds that the stork will not acknowledge her summons. Seeking to summon the stork, Metria (and her worse half, D. Mentia) are sent on a quest by the Good Magician Humphrey. Metria is then tasked by the Simurgh to deliver a bag's worth of summons to their respective citizens of Xanth in order to hold a trial for Roxanne Roc. All that remains is to find out why Roxanne Roc is on trial as Metria meets with many old Xanth characters, including Grundy Golem, Sorceress Iris, Magician Trent, Gray Murphy, Jordan the Barbarian and Desiree Dryad.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faun_&amp;_Games"title="Faun &amp; Games">
A young faun discovers his friend has gone missing into the Void and thus, the tree that nymph is bound to will wither and die. The hero wishes to save his friend's tree but in doing so, he risks his own tree. After visiting the Good Magician, Forrest Faun is sent with Mare Imbri to Ptero to find a faun for the tree. His journey later takes him from Ptero to smaller moons that orbit that specific world's Ida.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xone_of_Contention"title="Xone of Contention">
Dug, the Mundane who had had an adventure in Xanth through the Companions of Xanth computer game, is now happily married to Kim. His friend Edsel on the other hand is on the rock with his marriage to Pia, Dug's old girlfriend, who wants a divorce. Edsel, not wanting to lose her strikes a deal with her, they take a two-week vacation in Xanth, switching with Nimby and Chlorine who want to learn about Mundania, and if she doesn't change her mind, he won't fight it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dastard"title="The Dastard">
Becka was a crossbreed - the daughter of Draco Dragon and a lovely human woman who met, by chance, at a Love Spring. Now fourteen, Becka was beginning to wonder where in Xanth she belonged, on the ground with her mother's people or flying the skies with her father's kind. So she journeyed to the Good Magician Humfrey to discover her true purpose in life. Much to her astonishment and surprise, the Magician told her that a great Destiny awaited her, one that would affect the future of all of Xanth.To unravel the mystery of her Fate, Becka did as Humfrey bade her: traveling on foot to the statue of the dreaded Sea Hag to meet the man who would be waiting for her there, and offering him her assistance. But to her dismay, Becka discovered that the one who awaited her there was a dangerous, despicable libertine who called himself the Dastard.Once a common country boy, the Dastard had sold his soul to a detestable demon in exchange for the power to erase events and rewrite history to suit his own devious ends. Lacking a conscience and filled with craven self-loathing, he roamed the width and breadth of Xanth in search of anyone happier than he was. Once he found them, he used his malevolent talent to "unhappen" their happiness so that others could share in his misery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swell_Foop"title="Swell Foop">
Cynthia Centaur and her companions must find the Six Rings of Xanth (Air, Earth, Fire, Water, Void, and the Idea) in order to find the Swell Foop and use it to rescue the Demon E(A/R)th from the thrall of the Demoness Fornax.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currant_Events"title="Currant Events">
The plot follows Clio, the Muse of History, as she finally leaves the mountain where she and her sisters live, to find the currant that can clarify her volume of Xanth's history.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stork_Naked"title="Stork Naked">
Surprise summons the stork with Umlaut, only to discover with dismay that the stork refuses to deliver her baby due to a clerical error. Off on an adventure to find her child, she seeks the aid of Pyra, who wields a tool that can find, and enter, alternate realities. As Surprise and her entourage search for the correct world, the sinister mechanism behind the whole adventure is revealed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Apparent"title="Air Apparent">
Piers Anthony has stated that the book is set as a murder mystery. It has, typical for Xanth books, many puns. Readers also get a better understanding of the nature of Ida's moons. Air Apparent includes a character known as a Debra who is a 13-year-old girl who is constantly pressured to take off her bra. To De-Bra so to speak. She is based on a real girl. Debra Kawaguchi was a huge fan of the Xanth series and after her death in 2004, her father wrote Piers and asked him to include Debra in his cast of characters. After Piers explained to Debra's father that the only way he could think to include Debra in the book was through the De-Bra-ing pun, Mr. Kawaguchi agreed that Debra would have been delighted to be a character in Xanth and would have loved the pun. Piers mentions Mr. Kawaguchi in the author notes as the inspiration for Debra. Debra is depicted on the front cover of the hardback book as a flying centaur.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_of_Things_to_Come"title="The Shape of Things to Come">
A long economic slump causes a major war that leaves Europe devastated and threatened by plague. In decades of chaos with much of the world reverting to medieval conditions, pilots and technicians formerly serving in various nations' air-forces maintain a network of functioning air fields. Around this nucleus, technological civilization is rebuilt, with the pilots and other skilled technicians eventually seizing worldwide power and sweeping away the remnants of the old nation states. A benevolent dictatorship is set up, paving the way for world peace by abolishing national divisions, enforcing the English language, promoting scientific learning and outlawing religion. The enlightened world-citizens are able to depose the dictators peacefully, and go on to breed a new race of super-talents, able to maintain a permanent utopia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_and_the_Sword"title="The Book and the Sword">
The Red Flower Society is a secret society aiming to overthrow the Manchu-led Qing Empire and restore Han Chinese rule in China. It is led by 15 heroes, with Chen Jialuo as their chief. At the beginning of the novel, the Qianlong Emperor sends his men to ambush and arrest Wen Tailai, the society's fourth leader, because he wants to silence Wen Tailai, who knows a secret about him.The main plot follows the heroes' repeated attempts to rescue Wen Tailai, and is intertwined with two or more extensive subplots. The heroes encounter some Islamic tribesmen who are pursuing a convoy of mercenaries who have robbed them of their holy artefact, a Quran. Chen Jialuo aids the tribesmen in defeating the mercenaries and recovers the holy book. He earns the respect and admiration of Huoqingtong, the daughter of the tribe's leader. Throughout the novel, some of the heroes eventually find their future spouses after braving danger together: Xu Tianhong and Yu Yutong marry Zhou Qi and Li Yuanzhi respectively.Chen Jialuo and the heroes follow the trail of the convoy escorting Wen Tailai and arrive in Hangzhou, where Chen Jialuo coincidentally meets the Qianlong Emperor, who is disguised as a rich man, and befriends him. However, after they discover each other's true identities, they become suspicious and wary of each other. When the emperor's best warriors are defeated by the heroes in a martial arts contest, the emperor feels humiliated and wants to summon the military forces stationed in Hangzhou to destroy the Red Flower Society. However, he eventually refrains from doing so when he learns of the society's vast network of underground connections in Hangzhou.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otis_Spofford"title="Otis Spofford">
Otis Spofford is a young boy with a propensity for causing trouble. He is an only child and he lives with his mother. One of the reasons why Otis likes to cause trouble is because he yearns to make life more exciting. Unfortunately, his behavior means that he does not have any close friends and his classmates are reluctant to form close bonds with him. The book is also about how Otis torments his classmate, Ellen Tebbits. He annoys her because she performs well in school and exhibits excellent behavior. Thus, Ellen is often the victim of Otis's bad behavior.Each chapter revolves around a prank from Otis, which often backfires. In one instance, he sabotages the class's science project, which consists of feeding cafeteria food to one rat and bread and soda to another, and monitoring their growth. Otis feeds the underfed rat himself, hoping that it will get soda pop served in the cafeteria. His teacher, Mrs. Gitler, becomes wise to this and tries to get the culprit to confess. Otis opens his mouth and is stunned when Ellen steps forward. Ellen was secretly feeding the rat as well. Subsequently, Ellen is allowed to take the rat home at the experiment's end, much to Otis's displeasure (although she gives it to him when her mother will not allow her to keep it).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_Shadows"title="King of Shadows">
Nathan 'Nat' Field is a young boy from Greenville, North Carolina. He was recruited by Arby, a diligent play producer (who can come off rude), to join the Company of boys. They intend on reenacting A Midsummer's Night's Dream and Julius Caesar in London, at the re-built Globe theatre, just as they had done in Shakespeare's time. He is chosen to be Puck in a Midsummer Night's Dream and Pindarus in Julius Caesar. As he was going to their first rehearsal he feels odd and can smell some foul stench. He returns to the house in which he was staying with a family and he feels ill and goes to bed early. He wakes up in a different room with a boy he doesn't recognise talking to him in a heavy Elizabethan accent. He says he thought he had the plague and is relieved to see him better. He realises he travelled back 400 years in time, to the year 1599, when the Globe Theatre was first built. He meets William Shakespeare and acts with him in the play he had rehearsed for in his own time, and experiences theater as it was originally intended. Before he knows it, he is back in the hospital bed, awake and unsure whether what he experienced was real. Later, Rachel Levin and Gil Warmun, his co-actors from the present time, try to find out who he was 400 years ago.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firelord_(novel)"title="Firelord (novel)">
The novel begins with a mortally wounded Arthur dictating his memoir to a friar at a monastery after the Battle of Camlann. In flashback the reader is led through his formative years, his first meeting with Merlin, his rise to fame in the service of the British High King Ambrosius Aurelianus, his military campaigns against the Saxons, and his eventual downfall.Despite some fantasy elements, Godwin aims to tell the story of King Arthur from a historically accurate perspective, based on his own research, including archeological trips to various parts of England. He returns the Arthurian characters to the time period and place in which they might actually have lived - 5th-century post-Roman Wales and Cornwall. He uses historically appropriate Latin and Brythonic names for the characters, such as "Artos" and "Artorius" for Arthur, "Gwenhwyfar" for Guinevere, and (the conjectural) "Ancellius" for Lancelot.Morgan le Fay, called Morgana, is a sympathetic character in "Firelord." She is presented as a fiery leader of the wild Prydn people who live north of Hadrian's Wall. However, Guinevere is the principal female character. At the center of the novel, Godwin's Arthur is torn between his desire for the simple joy of love and family (represented by Morgana le Fay) and his ambition to fulfill his destiny to become Emperor of Britain (represented by Guinevere).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Line_(novel)"title="Crossing the Line (novel)">
The book concerns the struggle of Shan Frankland, a police officer in the year 2376, to cope with biological changes that have been made to her body by an alien species.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Before"title="The World Before">
The Bezeri are no more. The effects of the cobalt-salted nuclear weapons have had devastating effects on their population and has wiped them out completely. Aras and the rest of the Wess'Har have a strong desire to see those responsible punished. They have already destroyed the "Actaeon" and its crew that refused to abandon ship. Those who did are now the occupants of the habitat called Umeh Station on the planet Umeh, as it is called by the Isenj who live there. Aras is battling his conflicting loyalties and genetics. Part of him wants to blame Bennett for Shan's death as he was involved and another part recognizes that Bennett now shares genes with himself and Shan. Aras and Bennett take a trip to the transplanted colony from Constantine, now called Mar'an'cas. Aras feels the need to see the Garrod family and see to the colony's well-being. He finds, unsurprisingly, that he is no longer welcome. They admit him as they do not have the force to stop him but they make their feelings clear.Eddie Michallat is increasingly becoming more involved in the politics of the different worlds interacting. He is friends with the Isenj Minister Ual; who is finding that as he fights to preserve his world from the potential wrath of Eqbas Vorhi, so Umeh seems intent on its own destruction. He is inescapably bound to Wess'ej as tries to honor the memory of Shan Frankland and her sacrifices for everyone involved and his growing friendship with Aras, Bennett and the Wess'Har community. He still is a reporter at heart but that seems to be changing as his conscience affects his decisions for stories more and more. The information he provides now has the power to create war on Earth and the realization is sobering. Eddie decides to tell the real reasons for the destruction of Christopher, the death of Shan Frankland and also of the coming of the World Before and its possible ramifications, to the people of Earth. The Wess'Har have demanded the delivery of Mohan Rayat and Lindsay Neville. Minister Ual has been told by his government that they will only do so only if the Destroyer of Mjat (name given to Aras for the destruction of the Isenj city on Bezer'ej) is turned over to them. Ual, knowing that the Wess'Har do not negotiate, has decided to oppose his government by secretly allying with Eddie and the Royal Marines at Umeh Station to capture Neville and Rayat and turn them over to the Wess'Har. He knows this will be the end of his career and possibly his life but for the sake of Umeh, he feels he must do this.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoeless_Joe_(novel)"title="Shoeless Joe (novel)">
Ray Kinsella lives and farms in Iowa where he grows corn with his wife Annie and their five-year-old daughter Karin. Kinsella is obsessed with the beauty and history of American baseball, specifically the plight of his hero, Shoeless Joe Jackson, and the Black Sox Scandal of the 1919 World Series. When he hears a voice telling him to build a baseball field in the midst of his corn crop in order to give his hero a chance at redemption, he blindly follows instructions. The field becomes a conduit to the spirits of baseball legends. Soon, Kinsella is off on a cross-country trip to ease the pain of another hero, the reclusive writer J.D. Salinger, as part of a journey the "Philadelphia Inquirer" called "not so much about baseball as it's about dreams, magic, life, and what is quintessentially American."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deltora_Quest_(book_series)"title="Deltora Quest (book series)">
## "Deltora Quest".The first series of "Deltora Quest" follows the journeys of Lief, the son of a humble blacksmith [in disguise], who, on his sixteenth birthday, sets out to fulfil his father's quest to restore the Belt of Deltora. Joining Lief is an ex-palace guard named Barda. Along the way they meet with Jasmine: a wild girl from the Forests of Silence, who has long, brown hair and green eyes. She can speak to trees and has two pets: a raven named Kree and a small, grey, furry creature called Filli. Their quest is to find the seven gems of the fabled Belt of Deltora: the topaz, the ruby, the opal, the lapis lazuli, the emerald, the amethyst, and the diamond. The gems each have a special power and are hidden in dangerous locations around Deltora. The three friends must face numerous perils to reach them. Once the Belt is complete and the proper descendant of the first King of Deltora, Adin, wears the belt, the evil tyranny of the Shadow Lord will be forced back to the Shadowlands. The books in this series are "The Forests of Silence", "The Lake of Tears", "City of the Rats", "The Shifting Sands", "Dread Mountain", "The Maze of the Beast", "The Valley of the Lost", and "Return to Del".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_Watch_(novel)"title="Day Watch (novel)">
Walking the streets of Moscow, indistinguishable from the rest of its population, are The Others. These beings possess supernatural powers and can enter the Twilight, a shadowy world that exists in parallel to our own. Each Other owes allegiance to either the Dark or the Light forces. Each side has a patrol to ensure the opposing side follows the rules of an agreement put in place millennia ago. The Light's patrol is called Night Watch and the Dark's patrol is called Day Watch, in accordance with the times when each is active.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorna's_Quest"title="Acorna's Quest">
Found as an infant drifting in space, Acorna, the Unicorn Girl, has become a young woman. She still has her tiny, translucent horn and her "funny" feet and hands. And she still has her miraculous ability to make plants grow and heal human sickness.But Acorna has strange dreams of a gentle folk who mind-speak by touching horns. With her "Uncle" Calum, one of the three grizzled asteroid prospectors who rescued, protected, and raised her, she sets off to find her people. No sooner does she leave than a mysterious craft appears, piloted by the Linyaari, a gentle race with telepathic powers.The Linyaari are roaming the galaxy, spreading the alarm about the deadly Khleev- and searching for a beloved little girl they had given up for lost, long ago...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleny,_or_The_Reverse_of_the_Medal"title="Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal">
The story begins with Des Grieux attending a concert with his mother; he experiences strange and suggestive visions during one piano performance – by the beautiful Hungarian Teleny. Des Grieux becomes fascinated by the man and by the sporadically and frequently sexual telepathic connection he feels with Teleny, and this feeling becomes a mixture of curiosity, admiration, and desire, which quickly leads to jealousy. Des Grieux knows that Teleny attracts many men and women before their relationship begins. Eventually they meet and share their experiences of their unexplained bond which quickly leads to a passionate affair. Des Grieux feels very torn about loving and desiring a man and attempts to genuinely sexually interest himself in a household servant, but in so doing indirectly leads to her death. Thus shaken, he vows not to fight his feelings and allows Teleny to introduce him to an underground sexual society of males desiring men. Their love continues through a blackmailing attempt and their emotional struggles, until Teleny declares a need to leave for a time, ostensibly for a concert performance. During this time Des Grieux goes to Teleny's apartments only to find Teleny in bed with Des Grieux's mother, who had offered to pay Teleny's debts in return for sexual favours. The two part badly; Des Grieux nearly commits suicide and remains isolated in the hospital for many days. When he leaves he goes to Teleny only to find that his lover has stabbed himself in remorse, and is bleeding to death. Des Grieux forgives Teleny; they re-declare their love, and Teleny dies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Color_Kittens"title="The Color Kittens">
The story revolves around two kittens, "Hush" and "Brush," who attempt to create green paint through mixing their other paints. Their attempts lead to a variety of different hues—none of them green. The book's famous catch phrase is "Blue is blue, and red is red! They still need green!"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_a_Road_Slowly"title="Up a Road Slowly">
When seven-year-old Julie's mother dies, she is sent to live with her Aunt Cordelia, an unmarried schoolteacher who lives in a large house several miles outside town. Her uncle Haskell lives in a converted carriage house behind the main house. Haskell is an alcoholic who, like his niece, aspires to be a writer (although he never produces a manuscript). Julie's brother Chris goes to boarding school, leaving her alone with Aunt Cordelia. At first, grief-stricken Julie finds Aunt Cordelia stern and strict, but as she grows to young adulthood she comes to love her and to see her house as home. She becomes so attached to her that even when she has the chance to move back with her father, who remarries, she declines.The story follows Julie from the age of seven to seventeen, from elementary school through her high-school graduation, and documents the ordinary events in a child's life: the cruelty of children, jealousy, schoolwork trouble, and first love. Julie also encounters problems in the lives of the adults around her, including alcoholism and mental illness (dementia).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Without_Laughter"title="Not Without Laughter">
"Not Without Laughter" portrays African-American life in Kansas in the 1910s, focusing on the effects of class and religion on the community.The main storyline focuses on Sandy's "awakening to the sad and the beautiful realities of black life in a small Kansas town."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legs_(novel)"title="Legs (novel)">
The book chronicles the life of the gangster Jack 'Legs' Diamond. It is told from the perspective of Jack's lawyer, Marcus Gorman. Marcus becomes involved with "Legs" Diamond to add excitement to his otherwise boring life, and the best way to do this was by immortalizing a highly popular gangster. Through Gorman's eyes, Kennedy is able to elicit sympathy for the criminal, transposing this sympathy into the context of America during the 1920s and 30s: excess, collapse, destitution, and analysis of right and wrong, good and evil.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texar's_Revenge,_or,_North_Against_South"title="Texar's Revenge, or, North Against South">
Texar and Burbank are bitter enemies, Burbank's northern view of slavery as an evil being an unpopular stance with Texar and the rest of the community, deep in the Confederate States of America. On top of this disagreement, though, Texar is angry at Burbank for past legal troubles Burbank has brought upon Texar, and, despite Texar inventing a perfect alibi that allows him to escape conviction, Texar feels the need for vengeance and eventually becomes a prominent and powerful member of the Jacksonville community. Using this newfound power, Texar turns the townsfolk against Burbank and leads a mob that destroys the Burbank plantation, known as Camdless Bay. Burbank's daughter Dy and caretaker Zermah are both kidnapped by a man claiming to be Texar and are purportedly taken to a place in the Everglades called Carneral Island. En route, and after enlisting the help of the United States Navy, they find a separate group searching for Texar in response to crimes that apparently happened in the same time as the ones at Camdless Bay but in a distant location. This opens up the realization that there is one real Texar and one who is not, and the search continues now, not only for Dy and Zermah, but for the answer to this mystery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Nobody_Speaks_of_Remarkable_Things"title="If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things">
"If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things" eschews a traditional narrative structure, instead moving from one resident of an unnamed English street to another, describing their actions and inner world over the course of a single day, the last day of Summer in 1997. These characters are not named, and are described by an omniscient third person narrator. These sections are intercut with another character, a young woman who has recently discovered that she is pregnant, who narrates in the first person and whose story covers several days. She regularly refers ambiguously to a day in the past when something terrible happened, and it gradually becomes clear that the rest of the novel is set during this day.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Frolic_of_His_Own"title="A Frolic of His Own">
Oscar Crease is hospitalized after a car injury. He had short-circuited the ignition of his car while standing in front of it, and the driverless car then drove over him. His stepsister Christina and her lawyer husband Harry Lutz visit him and bring him the legal opinion prepared by his father, a circuit judge, concerning the case of "Szyrk v. the Village of Tatamount et al." This case concerns a situation where a dog got entrapped by a steel sculpture created by Mr. Szyrk. To free the dog a destructive procedure has to be performed on the sculpture, but the sculptor tries to prevent this and is granted a preliminary injunction by the judge.Back at home in the Hamptons, Oscar is recovering. He is trying to build a legal case against the movie producer Constantine Kiester and his associates who he asserts have infringed upon his copyright of his unpublished play. Both the play and the movie describe an event during the Civil War, where Oscar's grandfather, later to be a judge on the Holmes court, hired two substitutes to fight for him, one for the South, the other for the North. At the battle of Antietam they meet, fight and kill each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holy"title="The Holy">
Aaron, a wealthy amateur scholar, hires sexagenarian private investigator Howard, whom he meets at a chess club in Chicago to which they both belong, to investigate the gods Baal, Ashtoroth and Moloch, that were worshipped for centuries in Israel during a period of antiquity when the God of Abraham had fallen into disfavor. As Aaron says to Howard while proposing the task, referring to story of Exodus of the Old Testament:Although Howard initially turns down the case, thinking Aaron is either crazy or a fool, Aaron is dogged, and increases his offer of reward until Howard eventually relents. However, Howard only agrees to work on the problem for one month to test whether any inroads can be made into the peculiar case.It is indeed a problem — how to even begin investigating a trail that is "centuries cold". Howard turns to a psychic for help, who using a Tarot card reading, sets Howard on a path which leads him to a young boy named Tim from Indiana, in whom the gods have taken an interest. Tim's father, who was in the midst of a mid-life crisis, has recently disappeared. Howard helps Tim in his quest to locate and determine what has become of his father. In their quest they are dogged by supernatural events that are eventually revealed as the workings of the gods who may be "false," but who are, nevertheless, real.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everyday_Use"title="Everyday Use">
## Themes.One of the primary themes that the story revolves around is the idea of a person's relationship with their heritage. In the story, Dee's mother remained close to family traditions, while Dee herself chose to search more deeply into her African roots. Dee has a different mindset; she does not have the same ideals as Mama and Maggie, particularly in regard to cultural preservation and the best way to go about it. Dee (Wangero) only wants the family heirlooms to display in her home for their "artistic value", whereas Maggie and her mother cherish these items because they "remind them of their loved ones." In Mama’s mind, Maggie learning to make her own quilt and putting it to everyday use is preserving the culture, which is how Mama believes the quilt should be used. Even if the quilts "end up in rags," more quilts can simply be made because Maggie was taught how to make them. On the other hand, Dee believes the proper way to preserve her culture is to display the quilt in her home and preserve the quilt itself rather than continuing to live out their culture as Mama and Maggie do. Another theme in this short story is the divisive power of education throughout the story. In the story education is not really talked about and is completely separated from the entire family (Sparknotes).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swallows_and_Amazons"title="Swallows and Amazons">
The book relates the outdoor adventures and play of two families of children. These involve sailing, camping, fishing, exploration and piracy. The Walker children (John, Susan, Titty and Roger) are staying at a farm near a lake in the Lake District of England, during the school holidays. They sail a borrowed dinghy named "Swallow" and meet the Blackett children (Nancy and Peggy), who sail a dinghy named "Amazon". The Walkers camp on an island (which they name "Wildcat Island") in the lake, while the Blacketts live in their mainland house nearby. When the children meet, they agree to join forces against a common enemy – the Blacketts' uncle Jim Turner whom they call "Captain Flint" (after the parrot in "Treasure Island"). Turner, normally an ally of his nieces, has withdrawn from their company to write his memoirs, and has become decidedly unfriendly. Furthermore, when the Blacketts let off a firework on his houseboat roof, it is the Walkers who get the blame. He refuses even to listen when they try to pass on a warning to him about actual real-life burglars in the area.To determine who should be the overall leader in their campaign against Captain Flint, the Blacketts and the Walkers have a contest to see which can capture the others' boat. As part of their strategy, the Walkers make a dangerous crossing of the lake by night, and John is later cautioned by his mother for this reckless act. The Walkers nevertheless win the contest – thanks to Titty who seizes the "Amazon" when the Blacketts secretly come to Wild Cat Island in hopes of capturing the Swallow. During the same night Titty hears suspicious voices coming from a different island – Cormorant Island – and in the morning it transpires that Turner's houseboat has been burgled, and his locked sea-chest stolen. Turner again blames the Walkers, but is finally convinced that he was mistaken and penitently reconciles with all the children, also feeling that he was wrong to distance himself from his nieces' adventures all summer. The Swallows, Amazons, and Turner join forces to investigate Cormorant Island, but they cannot find Turner's missing trunk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_(novel)"title="Murphy (novel)">
The plot of "Murphy" follows an eponymous "seedy solipsist" who lives in a soon-to-be-condemned apartment in West Brompton. The novel opens with the protagonist having tied himself naked to a rocking chair in his apartment, rocking back and forth in the dark. This seems to be a habit for Murphy, who in carrying out the ritual attempts to enter a near-if-not-totally-nonexistent state of being (possibly something akin to sensory deprivation), which he finds pleasurable.Murphy's "meditation" is juxtaposed with conversations he has with his friend and mentor Neary, an eccentric from Cork who has the ability to stop his heart—an ability or condition which Neary calls the "Apmonia" (a play on the Greek word for "harmony"), sometimes referred to as "Isonomy" or the "Attunement". The book states that this is a "mediation between... extremes" of heart attack and heart failure, allowing Neary to enter a state of survivable cardiac arrest at will. An early conversation between Neary and Murphy is spurred by some type of revelation Neary receives during one of these routine heart-stopping sessions, and the two are prompted to discuss their respective romantic lives. Murphy admits that "there is a Miss Counihan," though their relationship is unclear.Murphy's "meditation" is further interrupted by a call from his current lover, Celia Kelly, who became a prostitute following the deaths of her parents at a young age. Murphy had proposed to Celia shortly after meeting her, but they have so far been unable to wed due to both their lack of money: "Celia spent every penny she earned and Murphy earned no pennies" and Murphy's conflicted feelings: "The part of him that he hated craved for Celia, the part that he loved shrivelled up at the thought of her." Celia finds Murphy in his flat still tied naked to the rocking chair, which he has somehow overturned. She rushes to assist him, noticing a large pink birthmark on his right buttock for the first time. She urges him to find a job, finally telling him that if he doesn't, she will leave him. Murphy reluctantly agrees to try.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Water_(Highsmith_novel)"title="Deep Water (Highsmith novel)">
Vic and Melinda Van Allen are a couple in the small town of Little Wesley. Their loveless marriage is held together only by a precarious arrangement whereby, in order to avoid the messiness of divorce, Melinda is allowed to take any number of lovers as long as she does not desert her family. Vic becomes fascinated with the unsolved murder of one of Melinda's former lovers, Malcolm McRae, and, in order to successfully drive away her current fling, takes credit for the killing. When the real murderer is apprehended, Vic's claims are interpreted by the community as dark jokes.Melinda begins a new relationship with a local pianist, Charley De Lisle. One night, at a party given at the home of one of their neighbours, the Cowans, Vic and Charley find themselves alone in the Cowans' backyard swimming pool. Impulsively, Vic drowns Charley, exits the pool, and feigns surprise when his body is discovered. His death is attributed to a cramp, though Melinda is immediately suspicious of her husband.Vic and many of his neighbours begin to move on from the event, though some particularly Don Wilson, a local pulp writer begin to idly suspect him of foul play. Melinda demands Vic admit his guilt and accuses him in front of their friends, though Vic is undaunted, finding superiority in his successful crime. A new neighbour, Harold Carpenter, appears in town, claiming to be researching psychiatry at a local asylum. Vic deduces that he is really a private detective hired by Don and Melinda. Carpenter leaves town, unable to nail down anything solid against Vic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawksong"title="Hawksong">
The book centers on two different kinds of shapeshifters: the avians and the serpiente. The avians have birds for second forms and their royal line consists of golden hawks. Their leader is the Tuuli Thea, or queen. The queen's pair bond is called her Alistair. Avian culture is uptight and strict, and it centers on, "avian reserve," the ability to keep complete control of one's emotions at all times. Avians do not lose their temper and they do not cry, no matter what the situation. The serpiente have the second form of a snake. Their royal line is the Cobriana, cobra shapeshifters descended from Kiesha, and their king is called the Diente. Their queen is the Naga. Serpiente wear sensual outfits and are free with their emotions, even in situations where some control might be appropriate. They are passionate and sometimes violent, the complete opposite of the avians. The two groups have been at war beyond living memory, so that nobody even remembers how the fighting started. The reason behind the war starting is given in "Falcondance". All they know is that they hate each other and they will keep fighting until one of them is destroyed.The book takes place in roughly 705 BCE and is the romantic story of Danica Shardae, the heir to the Tuuli Thea. The novel opens with Danica walking the latest bloody battlefield and her discovery of the fallen Gregory Cobriana, who is the younger brother of the current Arami (Prince, soon to be Diente/King), Zane Cobriana. Despite her guards' warnings, Danica stays by Gregory's side, holding him, and singing the Hawksong, a lullaby, until the young prince passes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragon_Masters"title="The Dragon Masters">
Aerlith is a planet of rocks and wilderness orbiting a distant bright star known as Skene which appears as "an actinic point" in the daytime. The sky is described as being black rather than blue. The planet's rotation is slow, taking several days. It is so slow that dawn and dusk are accompanied by storms that follow the boundary between day and night around the planet. The night has an effect on the "Dragons" of the title, making them more vicious and unmanageable. This means that all movement of the armies must take place during daylight.Humans live in valleys where the soil is good. Occasionally they make war on each other across the hills, passes and fells between their valley homes. Their technology is limited to steel and gunpowder. They also use semi-precious stones for decoration.From time to time, often after many years, a spaceship appears and abducts as many humans as can be caught. The settlements are also bombarded, ensuring that humanity will not rise above its present technological level. During one such raid, a charismatic leader named Kergan Banbeck captures a group of the alien raiders, who are accompanied by their human servants. Without their masters, the humans go mad and destroy the ship. The aliens, many-limbed lizard-like creatures known as "grephs", become prisoners of the humans they came to kidnap.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downbelow_Station"title="Downbelow Station">
Space is explored not by short-sighted governments but by the Earth Company, a private corporation which becomes enormously wealthy and powerful as a result. Nine star systems are found to lack planets suitable for colonization, so space stations are built in orbit instead, stepping stones for further exploration. Then, Pell's World is found to be not only habitable, but already populated by the gentle, sentient (if technologically backward) Hisa. Pell Station is built. The planet is nicknamed "Downbelow" by the stationers, who also start to call their home "Downbelow Station".When Earth's out-of-touch policies cause it to begin losing control of its more distant stations and worlds, it builds a fleet of fifty military carriers, the Earth Company Fleet, to enforce its will. This leads to the prolonged Company War with the breakaway Union, based at Cyteen, another habitable world. Caught in between are the stationers and the merchanters who crew the freighters that maintain interstellar trade.Set in the final days of the war, "Downbelow Station" opens with Earth Company Captain Signy Mallory and her warship, "Norway", escorting a ragtag fleet fleeing from Russell's and Mariner Stations to Pell. Similar convoys arrive from other stations destroyed or lost to Union, leading to an enormous crisis. The flood of unexpected refugees strains station resources. Angelo Konstantin, Stationmaster of Pell, and his two sons, Damon and Emilio, struggle to cope with the situation. Fearing Union infiltrators and saboteurs, Pell dumps all the refugees in a Quarantine Zone, causing massive dislocations of Pell's own citizens.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Human"title="Last Human">
## Cyberia.Dave Lister – the last surviving human in the universe – wakes in a transport ship taking him to prison colony Cyberia, the worst place in the universe, having been found guilty of serious crimes against the GELF state and sentenced to the worst imprisonment imaginable, having been hindered by his inability to comprehend the over-complicated legal system of the GELF – and his choice of clothing, including a tie depicting a naked woman in birthing stirrups. After his welcome by the foul and grotesque Snugiraffe, the prison commandant, he is implanted and introduced into the cyber network of Cyberia where he will be forced to live out his life in a hellish dream world of his own creation. Naturally he spends a great deal of time considering where it all went wrong...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Ebenezer_Le_Page"title="The Book of Ebenezer Le Page">
Ebenezer was born in the late nineteenth century and dies in the early 1960s. He lived his whole life in the Vale. He is never married, despite a few flings with local girls, and a tempestuous relationship with Liza Queripel of Pleinmont. He only left the island once, to travel to Jersey to watch the Muratti. For most of his life he was a grower and fisherman, although he also served in the North regiment of the Royal Guernsey Militia (though not outside the island) and did some jobbing work for the States of Guernsey in the latter part of his life. Guernsey is a microcosm of the world as Dublin is to James Joyce and Wessex is to Hardy. After a life fraught with difficulties and full of moving episodes, Ebenezer is ready to die happy, bequeathing his pot of gold and autobiography ("The Book of Ebenezer Le Page") to the young artist he befriends, after an incident in which the latter smashed his greenhouse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sign_of_the_Seahorse"title="The Sign of the Seahorse">
The book's story is composed of two acts and is set in the underwater town of Reeftown, where its fishy inhabitants live peacefully with each other. However one of them, Gropmund Grouper, is intent on fulfilling his own greedy needs at the expense of everyone else - even if this requires polluting the entire area. This pollution has far reaching effects and forces Corporal Bert of the Soldiercrabs to leave behind his sweetheart Pearl Trout while he tries to find the source of the pollution - unaware that his departure will also cause Pearl to do her own investigating.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Things_Betray_Thee"title="All Things Betray Thee">
Set in the new town of Moonlea, a fictionalised version of Merthyr Tydfil, it is told from the viewpoint of a travelling harpist, Alan Hugh Leigh, who is looking for his friend, the singer John Simon Adams. But his friend has become a populist leader among the ironworkers, who are involved in a bitter industrial conflict.Rachel Trezise describes it as "an emblematic account of the 1831 Merthyr Rising".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Blade_(novel)"title="Black Blade (novel)">
In New York City, a series of murders begin. In Washington, a plot conceived at the highest levels of American government is at work to bring the nation of Japan to its knees. In Tokyo, a power struggle is nearing its final stages for control of the Black Blade Society, an ostensibly political cabal whose motives may encompass far more than politics.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Huma"title="The Legend of Huma">
The book narrates the adventures of Huma Dragonbane, a Knight of the Crown, his meeting with Kaz the Minotaur, the discovering of the dragonlances, and the defeat of Takhisis during the Third Dragon Wars.Huma and the rest of his unit patrol through a desolate village. Huma's commander, Rennard, orders the investigation of the nearby woods due to a rumor of goblin activity. During the ensuing confrontation Huma is separated from his unit. While searching for his comrades he comes across goblins tormenting a captive, the minotaur Kaz. After saving Kaz, Huma strikes up an unlikely friendship with the minotaur and later with a silver dragon before being reunited with the Knights.Once back at headquarters, they encounter a battle between the forces of Paladine and the forces of Takhisis. Huma is struck in the battle and loses consciousness. He awakens in an infirmary being tended by a woman who introduces herself as Gwyneth. Huma is appointed captain of the watch, and encounters his old friend, Magius, a powerful magic user.Magius tells Huma to trust him, but has to leave while Huma returns to the knights' encampment. The knights are engulfed in a battle with the forces of Takhisis and Huma and Kaz are thrown into a magical darkness. Magius leads Huma and Kaz through the battle to his Citadel, but later prevents them from leaving. Magius tells Huma that he is a renegade mage that took the test in the Tower of High Sorcery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_Money"title="Making Money">
Moist von Lipwig is bored with his job as the Postmaster General of the Ankh-Morpork Post Office, which is running smoothly without any challenges, so the Patrician tries to persuade him to take over the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork and the Royal Mint. Moist, though bored, is content with his new lifestyle, and refuses. However, when the current chairwoman, Topsy Lavish, dies, she leaves 50% of the shares in the bank to her dog, Mr Fusspot (who already owns one share of the bank, giving him a majority and making him chairman), and she leaves the dog to Moist. She also made sure that the Assassins' Guild would fulfill a contract on Moist if anything unnatural happens to the dog or he does not do as her last will commands.With no alternatives, Moist takes over the bank and finds out that people do not trust banks much, that the production of money runs slowly and at a loss, and that people now use stamps as currency rather than coins. His various ambitious changes include making money that is not backed by gold but by the city itself. Unfortunately, neither the chief cashier (Mr. Bent, who is rumoured to be a vampire but is actually something much worse, a clown) nor the Lavish family are too happy with him and try to dispose of him. Cosmo Lavish tries to go one step further — he attempts to replace Vetinari by taking on his identity — with little success; to this end, he tasks his secretary Heretofore (who he frequents calls 'Drumknot', Vetinari's secretary) with acquiring Vetinari's personal effects (many of them, in fact, being fakes, with Heretofore having pocketed most of the expenses he 'required' to obtain them).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowmarch"title="Shadowmarch">
The series takes place principally in the castle and province of Southmarch. Prominent sub-plots cover connected events to the south and north of Southmarch, respectively in the land of Xis and the Qar (faerie) lands beyond the impassable Shadowline. The action centers on the troubled Eddon family, the rulers of Southmarch, which is the nearest human province to the Shadowline and was formerly held by the Qar prior to their expulsion by the advancing humans.The novel begins with the king, Olin Eddon, imprisoned in a foreign land. His eldest son Kendrick is struggling to rule in his place, while his younger twins, Barrick and Briony, struggle with their adolescent emotions. The male twin, Barrick, is particularly troubled by depression and nightmares, incited by his private knowledge of a mysterious family curse. When Kendrick is assassinated, Briony shoulders the burden of ruling in her father's absence, while Barrick slips further into maudlin self-obsession.An army of Qar cross the Shadowline to invade Southmarch, and in the climactic battle of the first book Barrick is lost in the land of the Qar. Briony narrowly escapes death when the throne is usurped by her cousin. While Barrick travels in the Shadowlands, Briony travels around her own lands incognito, seeking allies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Latin_Course"title="Cambridge Latin Course">
## Book I (published 1970).The book tells the adventures of Caecilius, a banker, and Metella, his wife, in Pompeii from the reign of Tiberius to that of Vespasian. Sometimes the book deviates to talk about Caecilius' two slaves, their cook Grumio, and Clemens, and their frequent humorous mishaps. The book also discusses Metella (Caecilius' wife) and her slave, Melissa. The book ends when Mount Vesuvius erupts, and Caecilius, Cerberus, Melissa, and Metella are killed in Pompeii. However, the book leaves the reader wondering whether Caecilius' son, Quintus, survives, as he indeed does, along with the slave, Clemens. Grumio's fate is left ambiguous. The beginning of the book is very simple, but each stage develops more complicated grammar and vocabulary. This book introduces the nominative, dative, and accusative cases and different verb tenses including the present, perfect and imperfect.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kindness_of_Women"title="The Kindness of Women">
"The Kindness of Women" is semi-autobiographical, and discusses Jim's departure from China, where he had been born and had been interned, to visit England, other parts of Europe and the United States.Jim is obsessed with two themes throughout the book: sex and death. The numerous sexual encounters are described in clinical and cold terms. The act of sex becomes a dispassionate observation of the male and female genitalia. Too often Jim is unaroused, and has to be "worked on" by his female partner.When Jim leaves the Japanese camp at the end of the war, he is 15 years old and alone. He witnesses a murder of a Chinese clerk at a railway station, a slow, casual murder, committed by a Japanese soldier in the immediate aftermath of the Atomic bomb. Jim cannot intervene; he knows he, too, could be killed in just as casual a manner. As he walks away towards Shanghai, Jim's life has changed forever.Jim tries and fails to find a niche in post-war England. Failing to complete his studies as a medical student, he decides to be a pilot. But his motives are strange: convinced that World War III is around the corner, he wants to be one of the bombers, carrying his own "pieces of the sun" to annihilate and, more importantly, to recapture the light he saw at the railway station, where the Chinese clerk died.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spies_(novel)"title="Spies (novel)">
Narrating in the form of a bildungsroman, an elderly man, Stefan Weitzler, reminisces about his life during the Second World War as he wanders down the now modernised London cul-de-sac that he once called home.Now a young boy, Stephen, regularly bullied at school and bored with his home life, is informed by his best friend Keith Hayward, a snobbish and domineering neighbour, that Keith's mother is an undercover operative working for the Germans. As the two boys spy on Mrs. Hayward from a hiding place in the hedges, they notice her unusual daily routine: leaving Keith's house with a picnic basket full of food, tapping on the window of Auntie Dee (Mrs. Hayward's sister, next-door-neighbour and best friend, whose husband, Uncle Peter, is away in the RAF), and walking through to the end of the cul-de-sac where she disappears into the nearby town. When the boys follow her, they cannot find her in any of the shops; and when they get back to their hiding place, Mrs. Hayward is already ahead of them, walking back into Keith's house.When snooping in Keith's mother's room, they find her diary which contains a small 'x' marked on a day of every month (in reference to her menstrual cycle). The boys' naïveté leads them to believe that 'x' is another secret agent that Mrs. Hayward has meetings with each month. One day, the boys realise that Keith's mother does not turn left into the town every day, but instead turns right into a grimy tunnel that leads to a disused field. Later that night, Stephen goes through the tunnel and finds a box in the field that contains a pack of cigarettes. When Keith opens the packet, a slip of paper pops out with a single letter written on it: X. Another night, Stephen sneaks out to the tunnel and goes to the box once again; this time some clean clothes are inside. As he is looking through them, somebody appears behind him. Stephen is too scared to turn around and holds his breath hoping that he isn't noticed. Still holding a sock, Stephen runs away as soon as he cannot hear the sound of breathing behind him. His family are outside looking for him and are furious.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_(novel)"title="Shock (novel)">
The novel is about two friends "Deborah Cochrane" and "Joanna Meissner", both of whom are shown equally as protagonists. Joanna dumps her boyfriend Carlton Williams and finds herself in need of money to complete her studies. Her friend Deborah shows her a newspaper article about "Wingate Clinic" that is offering $45,000 for people willing to donate their eggs for infertile patients. The two friends decide to take the offer and donate the eggs. Everything goes on peacefully till they complete their doctorate studies and come back to USA. Here their curiosity gets the better of them and they decide to find out what happened to their eggs. With the Wingate Clinic maintaining a strict silence about their working, the two of them decide to use some unfair means to get this information.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Punk"title="Human Punk">
Set against a soundtrack of Clash, Sex Pistols, Ruts, and Ramones records, sixteen-year-old Joe sets about enjoying his newfound freedom, which in the summer of 1977 means hard-drinking pubs and working-men's clubs, local Teds, soulboys, disco girls, and a job picking cherries with gypsies. A joyride to Camden Town in North London takes him to see his first band, but a late-night incident back on the streets of Slough changes his life forever.The second part of the book takes place in 1988 and finds Joe in China, receiving bad news in a letter from home. He buys a black-market ticket and takes the Trans-Siberian Express back to England. During this journey, he reflects on the events that have filled the intervening years, eventually returning to that night in 1977. Siberia passes in a series of recollections and romance with a Russian woman, Joe arriving in Moscow during the days of Mikhail Gorbachev, continuing to Berlin, where he crosses the Wall in the early hours. More trains take him on to Slough.The third section of "Human Punk" captures the main characters as they reach middle age. They are older but little wiser. Slough has changed, but not too much, the spirit that drove Joe and his friends as boys stronger than ever. He makes his living in a range of ways, one of which involves buying and selling secondhand records. His punk beliefs remain solid. Life bounces along, until a face from the past emerges from the haze of a misty morning and forces him to stop and confront his memories once more.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Those_Who_Trespass"title="Those Who Trespass">
The antagonist is a tall, "no-nonsense" television journalist named Shannon Michaels, described as the product of two Celtic parents, who is pushed out by Global News Network, and systematically murders the people who ruined his career.Meanwhile, the protagonist, a "straight-talking" Irish-American New York City homicide detective named Tommy O’Malley, is charged with solving the murders that Michaels has committed, while competing with Michaels for the heart of Ashley Van Buren, a blond, sexy aristocrat turned crime columnist. Some reviewers have said that Michaels and O'Malley are "thinly veiled versions" of O'Reilly.Michaels' first victim is a news correspondent who stole his story in Argentina, and got him into trouble with the network. He then stalks the woman who forced his resignation from the network and throws her off a balcony. After that he murders a television research consultant who had advised the local station to dismiss him by burying him in beach sand up to his neck and letting him slowly drown. Finally, during a break in the Radio and Television News Directors Association convention, he slits the throat of the station manager. After this, he is pursued by O'Malley and Van Buren, where he attempts to lose them by crossing a runway in front of a speeding jet. Although he makes it, his car's right back tire is cut by the jet's wing, causing the car to spin, flip over, and be subsequently melted by the exhaust from the jet, which explodes. Michaels dies in extreme agony, as his contacts (used to hide his identity) burn into his eyes and a chunk of the car crushes his head in.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_Friends_(Wilson_novel)"title="Best Friends (Wilson novel)">
Eleven-year-olds Gemma Jackson and Alice Barlow are best friends, ever since they were born on the same day and were in the same hospital. Gemma is a tomboy who likes playing wild and exciting sporty games. Alice is very girly girl who loves the color pink and enjoys ballet. Despite their differences and opinions, the two girls spend almost every single day together, and on their birthdays they always wish to stay friends forever.One day though, Gemma notices a change in Alice when she becomes miserable. Alice tells Gemma that she and her parents are moving to Scotland which is hundreds of miles away. Gemma and Alice are both devastated at the thought of being separated, but Alice's snobbish mother "Auntie Karen" claims that Alice will make new friends when they move. Not wanting this, Alice suggests that she and Gemma run away - and do so during the leaving party on the day before the move. Gemma suggests they catch a train to London. On the way they are recognized by Billy "Biscuits" McVitie whose baby sister was christened the same day (Biscuits' family were seen in the churchyard after the ceremony which Alice and Gemma passed en route to the train station); he tells his mother and she informs Alice's and Gemma's parents who catch the girls before they can board the train.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_Last_Man_(Grey_novel)"title="To the Last Man (Grey novel)">
It is a story of a family feud healed by young love. The story is based on a factual event involving the notorious Hashknife gang of Northern Arizona.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coot_Club"title="Coot Club">
The Callum children spend their Easter holidays on The Broads with family friend, Mrs Barrable, who is staying on the small yacht "Teasel", moored near the village of Horning. There they encounter the Coot Club, a gang of local children comprising Tom Dudgeon, twin girls 'Port' and 'Starboard' (Nell and Bess Farland), and three younger boys — Joe, Bill and Pete (the "Death and Glories"). The Coot Club was formed to protect local birds and their nests from egg collectors and other disturbances. Protecting wild birds was a relatively new concept at the time.A noisy and inconsiderate party of city-dwellers (dubbed the 'Hullabaloos' by the children) hire the motor cruiser "Margoletta" and threaten an important nesting site of a coot with a white feather (one of many monitored by the Coots) by mooring in front of it, and refuse to move when politely requested to do so. Despite warnings "not to mix with foreigners", Tom stealthily casts off the "Margoletta"'s moorings to save the nest and then hides behind the "Teasel". He hides for fear of disgracing his father, who is the local doctor. Casting off boats is considered unthinkable on The Broads, where the local economy is so dependent on boating. Mrs Barrable does not give Tom away to the Hullabaloos and instead asks him to teach the Callums to sail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_in_Moominland"title="Comet in Moominland">
The story begins a few weeks after the events of "The Moomins and the Great Flood", as the Moomin family are settling into their new life in Moominvalley. Sniff, who is now living with the Moomins, discovers a mysterious path in a nearby forest. As he and Moomintroll explore it, they meet the mischievous Silk Monkey and arrive at a beach, where Moomintroll goes pearl-fishing. Meanwhile, Sniff and the Silk Monkey find a cave, and the three decide to hide Moomintroll's pearls there.The next day, as they go back to the cave, they find the pearls arranged in the shape of a star with a tail. Back at Moominhouse, the Muskrat, a philosopher whose home was ruined by Moominpappa's bridge-building and who is now staying with them, explains that the pearls depict a comet. He directs Moomintroll to the Observatory on the Lonely Mountains, where the Professors would be able to tell him whether the comet will hit the Earth.Moomintroll and Sniff set sail towards the Lonely Mountains, and on the way they meet Snufkin, who joins them. The river takes them into a cave under the mountains where they almost fall into a hole, but at the last moment a Hemulen inadvertently rescues them when he mistakes Snufkin's harmonica-playing for a rare caterpillar and reaches his butterfly net into the cave to catch it. They find themselves in the Lonely Mountains and set off towards the Observatory. On the way they are attacked by an eagle and Moomintroll finds a gold ring, which Snufkin tells him belongs to the Snork Maiden he had met a few months earlier.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finn_Family_Moomintroll"title="Finn Family Moomintroll">
Moomintroll, Sniff and Snufkin discover the Hobgoblin's top hat on a mountain-top, unaware of its strange powers. An egg shell discarded into the hat becomes five clouds the children ride and play with. Next day the clouds have disappeared and nobody knows where they came from. Moomintroll hides inside the hat during a game of hide-and-seek and is temporarily transformed beyond recognition.Once they discover the magic powers of the hat and use it for a few transformations, the family resolves to get rid of it and throw it into the river. But Moomintroll and Snufkin recover it at night and hide it in the cave by the sea, where the Muskrat is spooked when his dentures transform into something mysterious and terrifying.The Moomin Family travel to the Island of the Hattifatteners on a boat they have found, and the Moominhouse is transformed into a jungle when Moominmamma absent-mindedly drops a ball of poisonous pink perennials into the hat. At night the jungle withers, and it is used as firewood to cook the huge Mameluke that the children previously caught while fishing.Thingumy and Bob arrive clutching a large suitcase containing the King's Ruby, which they stole from the Groke. After a court case (presided over by the Snork) the Groke agrees to exchange the ruby for the Hobgoblin's Hat.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moominsummer_Madness"title="Moominsummer Madness">
A nearby volcano causes a massive wave to flood Moominvalley. While escaping the flood the Moomin family and their friends find a building floating past, and take up residence there. They believe it is a deserted house until they realise someone else lives there, Emma, who explains that it is not a house but a theatre. The moomins start to understand about the scenery, props, and costumes they have found. The theatre drifts aground and Moomintroll and the Snorkmaiden decide to go and sleep in a tree. When they wake next morning the theatre has floated away again and they are alone. Meanwhile, Little My accidentally falls overboard, and by some strange coincidence is rescued by Moomintroll's adventurous friend Snufkin who is setting off to seek revenge on a grumpy Park Keeper. He tears down all the "Do not walk on the grass" notices, fills the lawns with electric Hattifatteners and sets free twenty-four small woodies who immediately adopt him as their father. The coincidences continue as Moonmintroll and the Snorkmaiden meet Emma's deceased husband's niece, the Fillyjonk, and all three get arrested burning the signs that Snufkin tore up. Meanwhile, in the theatre, Emma helps Moominpappa write a play and the family decide to stage it. The woodies find a playbill for the play and cajole Snufkin into taking them to the theatre. The Hemulen who has arrested Fillyjonk, Moomintroll, and the Snork Maiden also finds a playbill and leaves his cousin to guard the prisoners while he heads off to see the play. The cousin is persuaded of their innocence and lets them out to go to the play too, where everyone is reunited and ends up on stage, the play itself collapsing into a big reunion party. When the floods recede everyone gets to go home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twins_at_St._Clare's"title="The Twins at St. Clare's">
The two girl twins, Pat and Isabel O'Sullivan, having just finished school at the elite school Redroofs, are expected to move on to senior school. While most of their friends at their old school (including Mary and Frances Waters) are moving to the equally elite Ringmere, the twins' parents are reluctant to send them to an expensive school as they are afraid the twins might become spoilt and snobbish. Furious at their parents' refusal to send them to the school of their choice, the twins are determined to be as difficult as possible at St. Clare's.The twins miss their favourite sports of field hockey and tennis because only lacrosse is played at St Clare's. However, Pat turns out to be quite good at lacrosse. She is selected by sports captain Belinda Towers despite having defied her earlier.The twins soon make good friends with the other girls and play pranks on others in the school. Most pranks are directed at Miss Kennedy, their new history teacher, who is a very timid and insecure though highly qualified. One of the pranks for Miss Kennedy is discovered by Miss Roberts, and she punishes the whole form as a result. The class stops playing tricks on Miss Kennedy when the twins overhear her talking to a friend about giving up her job, despite needing the money to help her sick mother, because she cannot control the class.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_O'Sullivan_Twins"title="The O'Sullivan Twins">
The newly sensible Pat and Isabel O'Sullivan depart for their second term at St Clare's, with their Cousin Alison joining them. Alison's character is airheaded and ditzy, but also a decent and kind-hearted person.Other new characters include Lucy Oriell and Margery Fenworthy. Lucy is the archetypal school story girl — bright, kind and popular — although she is portrayed well, without the one-dimensional flatness this type of character can often have. Her father is a painter and Lucy herself is a talented artist. Margery is sulky, sullen, rude, antisocial and the other girls suspect she is older than them, nearer to sixteen years old.Events include a midnight tea party for second former Tessie, which is discovered by Mamzelle through the machinations of another second former, Erica. Erica causes trouble for the first and second formers throughout the year, and is finally trapped in a fire which results in a thrilling rescue by Margery, who becomes a heroine. Lucy's father is involved in an accident rendering him unable to paint, and therefore unable to pay St Clare's school fees, but she is helped by the twins and her new friend, Margery. There is also excitement when Janet puts beetles into Mamzelle's spectacle case and then the girls pretend they can't see them, leaving Mamzelle to believe she is going mad.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wishing_Game"title="The Wishing Game">
Jonathan Palmer is a shy teenager at a traditional British boys' boarding school in the 1950s. He has three friends: bookworm Nicholas and twins, Stephen and Michael. Unfortunately, his friends live in a separate dormitory, leaving Jonathan exposed to regular bullying at the hands of sadistic James Wheatley and his cronies Stuart and George. There is only one boy who is not bullied with James Wheatley – Richard Rokeby. Richard is a loner but has confidence and scathing wit. Jonathan gradually befriends dark and dangerous Richard, who in turn encourages Jonathan to be brave and stand up to the bullies (both students and faculty members). Richard begins to turn Jonathan against his three friends.One night, Richard suggests that the boys play a game with a ouija board that he has brought to the school from his aunt's house. The twins refuse and leave. Nicholas refuses to let Richard scare him, so he remains. Following that evening, bad things begin to happen that Jonathan believes he has caused. Both James Wheatley's cronies leave the school – Stuart's family leaves for the United States and George spends a considerable time in hospital after a brutal injury on the rugby field. This leaves James Wheatley vulnerable. James Wheatley becomes paranoid and becomes too afraid to go to sleep. Driven mad, he ends up running out of the school in his pyjamas and is killed in a hit and run. Jonathan believes that it was his fault and begins to fear Richard Rokeby.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Fille_aux_yeux_d'or"title="La Fille aux yeux d'or">
The story follows the decadent heir Henri de Marsay, who becomes enamored of the eponymous beauty, Paquita Valdes, and plots to seduce her. He succeeds but becomes disillusioned when he discovers she is also involved with another lover and so plots to murder her. When he arrives to kill her, he discovers that she is already dead by the hand of her lover, his half-sister. She declares that Paquita came from a land where women are no more than chattels, able to be bought and used in any way. In the last lines of the story, de Marsay tells a friend that the girl has died of "something to do with the chest,” by which he means tuberculosis.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_(Kostick_novel)"title="Epic (Kostick novel)">
"Epic" takes place on a world named New Earth and follows the life of a boy named Erik Haraldson and his involvement in a game called Epic. Epic is a virtual game which echoes "World of Warcraft" and "EverQuest", although interaction with this game directly affects income, social standing, and the careers of the people who play. Because of this relationship a growing separation of power occurs that mimics the real world, where those with money and power tend to keep it, and those without tend to stay impoverished (both in-game and in real life). In order to build up acclaim in the game, and thus in real life, poor players must work in-game for their entire lives in hopes of becoming powerful enough to take part in challenges set forth by the elite for prizes. With these prizes the citizens may live more comfortably in real life.If a community wishes to redress a perceived injustice, they may challenge "Central Allocations" or C. A., which is a powerful, select group of nine individuals that controls all of the world's resources and funds the most powerful characters in the game world. All of the members of C. A. are wealthy and possess nearly unbeatable characters in the game. These are the individuals who set challenges which are held in special arenas where various players may attack each other - the last player alive is proclaimed the winner. If you win against the Central Allocations team, then you get what you want, be it a new law, a medical procedure, or a material object. However, if you lose then everything your character owns (including items and money) is forfeited and that person must create a new in-game character. Since death in the game results in death of the character, challenges are a risky method of gaining prosperity, as the characters involved are usually trained for months to years of real life time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Kitten_and_Tucker_Mouse"title="Harry Kitten and Tucker Mouse">
The book tells the story of the young mouse who becomes Tucker, and the kitten who becomes Harry, the two friends of Chester Cricket in "The Cricket in Times Square".Tucker, we learn, was born in a box of Kleenexes and other odds and ends on Tenth Avenue, and fled his nest at a young age to avoid sanitation workers. He takes his name from "Merry Tucker's Home-Baked Goods", a bakery on Tenth Avenue. He meets Harry Kitten, who took his name from two children he heard talking. One said "Harry-you're a "character"!" and the kitten decided he too wanted to be a character.The two become friends and search New York City for a home of their own. Their wanderings take them to the basement of the Empire State Building and to Gramercy Park, among other places. Eventually, they settle down in a disused drain pipe in the Times Square subway station.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moominland_Midwinter"title="Moominland Midwinter">
While the rest of the Moomin family are in the deep slumber of their winter hibernation, Moomintroll finds himself awake and unable to get back to sleep.He discovers a world hitherto unknown to him, where the sun does not rise and the ground is covered with cold, white, wet powder.Moomintroll is lonely at first but soon meets Too-ticky, a wise spirit who sings mysterious songs, and his old friend Little My (who takes delight in sledging down the snowy hills on Moominmamma's silver tea tray).The friends build a snow horse for the Lady Of The Cold and mourn the passing of an absent-minded squirrel who gazed into the Lady's eyes and froze to death. However, a squirrel is spotted alive by Moomintroll at the end of the book, and it seems that it may have come back to life.As the haunting winter progresses, many characters (notably the Groke, Sorry-oo the small dog, and a boisterous skiing Hemulen) come to Moominvalley in search of warmth, shelter and Moominmamma's stores of jam.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Jazz"title="White Jazz">
Dave Klein is a lieutenant in the LAPD's vice unit. He has a sister named Meg, with whom he shares an incestuous attraction, and performs contract killings for the mob to cover the costs for law school. Klein has committed several murders, including the unsolved killings of Tony Brancato and Tony Trombino, who were killed in revenge for hurting Meg. He seeks to get out of mob work and begs the dying Jack Dragna to let him go. When he refuses, Klein suffocates him.After setting up a raid on a bookmaking operation, Klein and his partner, George "Junior" Stemmons, are ordered to protect a witness in a probe into organized crime in boxing. Having been told by gangster Mickey Cohen that another crime figure, Sam Giancana, wants the witness dead, Klein throws the witness out of a high window and makes it look like an accident. Later that night, Captain Wilhite, of the corrupt Narcotics Squad, summons Klein to investigate a burglary at the home of J. C. Kafesjian, a drug dealer sanctioned by the LAPD.Klein gets a side job from Howard Hughes to obtain information on an actress named Glenda Bledsoe, that would violate the morality clause of her full-service contract. Klein learns through Cohen that Glenda has a "publicity date" with actor Rock Rockwell which violates the clause. During surveillance of Glenda, Klein finds out she, Rockwell, Touch Vecchio, and George Ainge are planning a fake kidnapping. Klein falls for Glenda and decides not to aid Hughes in getting her blacklisted by the film industry. He begins to aid Glenda as he continues investigating the Kafesjian burglary.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Term_at_St._Clare's"title="Summer Term at St. Clare's">
The children's story starts with the twins Pat and Isabel O'Sullivan looking forward to enjoying their first summer term at St. Clare's. Their mother is happy to see them looking forward to school. One day, they go to play tennis with a friend, and meet a girl who has mumps. The twins, to their dismay, are put in quarantine, and are not allowed to go back to school at the beginning of the term.When they arrive back the following week, they are heartily welcomed by their friends. Five new girls have joined their form. There is an American girl called Sadie, who is obviously quite rich and elegant. The twins discover that their cousin Alison has already made friends with her. There is a wild-looking girl called Carlotta, who is half Spanish. There is a naughty but very likeable girl Bobby (Roberta), who quickly becomes friends with Janet. There is another girl called Prudence, who is quite pretty but has no sense of humour. The last new girl is Pam, who is very hard working but also very shy.The girls soon discover that Miss Roberts is on the war path. She is the first form head and is determined that her girls should do well and be promoted in next form. The twins also get to know the new girls. Prudence turns out to be nasty, spiteful, and dishonest. She takes a strong dislike to Carlotta, and discovers that Carlotta once belonged to a circus. She reveals Carlotta's secret to the other girls, hoping it will make them despise her, but it only serves to make Carlotta even more popular. Prudence also manipulates the shy Pam under the false disguise of a friendship. As a result, Pam is initially disliked by all of the girls except Carlotta and Isabel, who take pity on her when they realise that she is afraid to tackle Prudence as she does not want to be on her own. Encouraged by the two older girls, Pam eventually stands up to Prudence and ends their forced friendship, becoming friends with Carlotta instead. Bobby initially doesn't seem to care for anything or anyone until Miss Theobald tells her that she is cheating her parents badly. After learning this, Bobby starts working hard, too, though she occasionally plays tricks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Housekeeper_and_the_Professor"title="The Housekeeper and the Professor">
The narrator's housekeeping agency dispatches her to the house of the Professor, a former mathematician who can remember new memories for only 80 minutes. She is more than a little frustrated to find that he loves only mathematics and shows no interest whatsoever in anything or anyone else. One day, upon learning that she has a 10-year-old son waiting home alone until late at night every day, the Professor flies into a rage and tells the narrator to have her son come to his home directly from school from that day on. The next day, her son comes and the Professor nicknames him "Root". From then on, their days begin to be filled with warmth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lighthouse_at_the_End_of_the_World"title="The Lighthouse at the End of the World">
Verne sets the plot by stating, "The Argentine Republic had displayed a happy initiative in constructing this lighthouse at the end of the world," within Elgor Bay and the harbor of Saint-Jean "forms a kind of pendant to Elgor Bay." The despatch boat "Santa-Fé" arrived on Oct. 1858 to construct the lighthouse, which was inaugurated on 9 Dec. 1859, standing 103 feet in height on top of a mound 120 feet high, and illuminated by oil. The lighthouse guided ships into the Le Maire Strait or south of the island, and was to be staffed by 3 keepers over the next 3 months, until the return of the "Santa-Fé".Unbeknownst to Vasquez, Moriz, and Felipe, the chief lighthouse keeper and his helpers, the island was the domain of a dozen marooned pirates, who bide their time in wrecking.Two of them are murdered by a band of newly arrived pirates led by one Kongre. Vasquez, the only survivor, spends several months until the dispatch boat "Santa-Fé" is due to return, surviving off the pirates' hidden stores of food in a cave. After the "Century", an American ship from Mobile, Alabama, crashes on the island due to the light's having been put out by the pirates, Vasquez bands with the sole survivor of the wreck – First Officer John Davis – to stop the pirates from escaping into the South Pacific.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_of_the_Sky_Pirates"title="The Last of the Sky Pirates">
Rook Barkwater lives in the network of sewer-chambers beneath Undertown, in which a society of librarians has established itself, secretly opposing the cruel Guardians of Night. Rook, a lowly under-librarian, dreams of becoming a librarian knight—one of the select few to travel into the Deepwoods and gather information which may lead to the discovery of the cure to stone-sickness (an affliction which has destroyed the buoyant rocks, making skysailing impossible). Rook does not expect his dreams ever to come true—his best friend, Felix Lodd, seems a much more likely candidate—but, to everyone's surprise, Rook is chosen to be a knight, along with Stob Lummus and Magda Burlix.Rook, Magda and Stob make their way along the Great Mire Road, a shryke-controlled bridge that has been built to traverse the marshy Mire in place of sky ships. While on the way, Rook helps an imprisoned sky pirate, Deadbolt Vulpoon, to escape. Finally, the librarian knights arrive in the Eastern Roost, a large shryke-city. Employing the help of a male shryke, Hekkle, who is friendly to the librarians, the three make their way across the Deepwoods, eventually arriving at the Free Glades.After arriving there, Rook, Stob and Magda are joined by Xanth Filatine, a disguised Guardian of Night who is secretly channelling information to the Guardians so that they may ambush the librarian knights as they travel. During Rook's studies, he learns to create a skycraft, which is a small, flying one-person vehicle. Xanth breaks his leg in a skycraft accident, and cannot embark upon his treatise-voyage, the journey for which the knights have been studying. Rook also makes a raid on the Foundry Glade, along with Felix Lodd's sister Varis Lodd (who saved Rook from slavers when he was very young) and the slaughterer Knuckle. The purpose of this raid is to free the banderbear slaves that are kept there. During this raid, Rook takes a poisoned arrow to the chest to save a banderbear's life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_World"title="Empty World">
15-year-old Neil Miller's world explodes when he and his family are involved in a car accident that kills his parents. Sent to live with his grandparents in a small village named Winchelsea, England, Neil suffers from post traumatic stress. Soon, a devastating illness, called the Calcutta Plague, makes headlines, killing thousands of people in India in a matter of months. The virus begins spreading across the world, making its way to the small village where Neil lives. It is a strange illness as it only affects the adults and none of the children, and once again Neil finds himself an orphan after his grandparents succumb to the disease.Neil attempts to care for two younger children also orphaned by the plague, but they also contract the virus and die as he tries to care for them. During this time Neil notes that he has contracted the plague, but after a brief fever it leaves him unaffected. Now the sole survivor in Winchelsea and deciding that the village is becoming dangerous -- packs of feral dogs roaming everywhere -- he leaves for London, taking first a manual Mini which he has difficulty driving, followed by an automatic Jaguar.Arriving in London he meets his first fellow survivor - the mentally unbalanced Clive, who although friendly towards Neil, during the night vandalizes his car to the point of destroying it, steals his mother's ring that Neil had kept, which was the only memory of his mother he had, and then abandons him in central London.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox_(Stewart_and_Riddell_novel)"title="Vox (Stewart and Riddell novel)">
The novel begins by showing the state of play in Undertown. The usurper Vox Verlix is now trapped in the Palace of Statues having lost control over all his grand projects. The Guardians of Night took over the Tower of Night when they drove him out, the Shrykes seized the Great Mire Road, and the goblins Vox hired to enslave Undertowners and build the Sanctaphrax Forest cut the Most High Academe out of the loop. Vox was left as nothing more than a puppet used by General Tytugg of Undertown to keep the Shrykes at bay. The situation also appears to be coming to a head. The Shrykes are massing for war. The goblins in Undertown seem much more aggressive, with numerous assassins sent to kill Vox, who is now too obese to leave his Palace of Statues. To cap all this, strange sightings are being reported by Librarian Knights on patrol; demonic creatures are seen emerging from a former Undertown district named Screetown, a rubble wasteland. This is revealed to be down to the work of the Most High Guardian of Night, Orbix Xaxis, who is having his executioner Mollus Leddix feed captured librarians to rock demons.Rook Barkwater is on patrol duty, noting the sweltering weather, when he is struck by a fireball and sent hurtling to earth. He awakens, battered and bruised, to find his skycraft the "Stormhornet" broken beyond repair. Rook hopelessly traverses Screetown, pursued by predators, one of which, a Rubble-ghoul, almost kills him, until he is rescued by his old friend Felix Lodd, Varis' brother, whom Rook and all the other librarians believed to be dead in Screetown, as rumour had it nobody could survive there. Felix takes Rook back to his hideout for the night, having formed a gang called "the Ghosts of Screetown", who trap and hunt whilst attempting to free as many as Sanctaphrax Forest slaves as they can.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Roses_(novel)"title="The War of the Roses (novel)">
"The War of the Roses" tells the story of Jonathan and Barbara Rose, and their descent from a picturesque family life into a world of macabre self-destruction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_Irae"title="Deus Irae">
After 1982, the world experienced a devastating nuclear war. Fallout and radiation has caused widespread mutations to human and animal populations alike. There is a new messianic religion, akin to gnosticism. The members of this religion, known as the Servants of Wrath or SOWs, worship the creator and detonator of the war's ultimate weapon, Carleton Lufteufel (from the German words "Luft," meaning "air," and "Teufel," meaning "Devil"), ex-chairman of the Energy Research and Development Agency of the United States of America - ERDA/USA.In Charlottesville, Utah, there are ample debates between the Servants of Wrath and the diminishing congregations of Christians left in existence.The Servants of Wrath's faith is based on an "anger-driven" traditional perception of godhood, compared to that of the Christian survivors, and it is from this that the book derives its name- "deus irae", Latin for "God of Wrath". Tibor McMasters is an armless, legless cyborg phocomelus artist who has been commissioned to paint a mural of Lufteufel, though nobody knows where Lufteufel lives, or what he looks like.The Servants of Wrath leadership ask McMasters to find Lufteufel and paint his mural. En route, we learn about the absence of national communications systems after the widespread destruction caused by nuclear warfare. McMasters and other seekers encounter mutant lizards, birds and insects who have evolved sentience, as well as the "Big C", a decaying artificial intelligence that also survived the war; it survives by consuming humans for their trace elements.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magicians'_Guild"title="The Magicians' Guild">
Each winter in Imardin, the capital city of Kyralia, the streets are purged of the "dwells", the city's poor under-class, by magicians who drive away the inhabitants of the city's slums. Although young gang members gather to throw rocks at them, the magicians are protected by a magical shield—until Sonea, a young dwell, hurls a rock through their barrier and injures the magician Lord Fergun.Fearing a rogue magician, the Guild begins searching for Sonea. Lords Dannyl and Rothen lead the search into the slums, worried that Sonea's increasingly uncontrolled magic will harm her and those around her. But Sonea both distrusts the Guild for their apparent lack of compassion for the poor dwells and fears their reprisal for her accidental injury of Lord Fergun. She flees with her friend Cery, eventually seeking the aid of the shady Thieves, who see the value of having their own magician and take her under their care. With Cery, she sneaks into the Magician's Guild in an attempt to gain knowledge of how to control her magic, and observes a black-robed magician covered in blood performing a strange rite on a servant. However, her attempt to learn more is unsuccessful, and Sonea continues to lose control of her powers, setting fire to her surroundings repeatedly, before Lord Rothen at last locates her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Days_of_Louisiana_Red"title="The Last Days of Louisiana Red">
"The Last Days of Louisiana Red", which has been described as a "HooDoo detective story and a comprehensive satire on the explosive politics of the '60s", set amidst the racial violence of Berkeley, California. The story follows investigator Papa LaBas as he tries to figure out who murdered Ed Yellings, the proprietor of the Solid Gumbo Works. In the story, Labas finds himself fighting the rising tide of violence propagated by Louisiana Red and the militant opportunists, the Moochers. Eventually, Labas learns that the murder has been a conspiracy to dethrone the Gumbo business because Ed was trying to create medicine that would stop heroin addiction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_Me_When_I_Fall"title="Catch Me When I Fall">
Holly Krauss, a successful married woman who runs her own business with best friend Meg, finds her perfect life deteriorating as a result of foolish actions made almost subconsciously, including an alcohol fuelled one night stand and arguments with potentially dangerous men. After a mysterious stranger from one such incident begins imposing himself on her life, first through stalking and then physical intimidation, she wonders if she really is going insane, before inadvertently causing even more trouble by losing £11,000 in a poker game.While good-natured and thoroughly empathetic, her artist husband Charlie is a procrastinator and therefore incapable of providing her with the support she needs. Only when Holly finally attempts suicide does she realise that all of her problems may not be simply a result of her own foolhardiness, but the work of a devious and determined psychopath intent on tearing her life apart...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cool_Million"title="A Cool Million">
"A Cool Million", as its subtitle suggests, presents “the dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin,” piece by piece. As a satire of the Horatio Alger myth of success, the novel is evocative of Voltaire’s "Candide", which satirized the philosophical optimism of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Alexander Pope. Pitkin is a typical ‘Schlemiel’, stumbling from one situation to the next; he gets robbed, cheated, unjustly arrested, frequently beaten and exploited. In a parallel plot Betty Prail, Pitkin's love interest, is raped, abused, and sold into prostitution. Over the course of the novel Pitkin manages to lose an eye, his teeth, his thumb, his scalp and his leg, but nevertheless retains his optimism and gullibility to the inevitably bitter end.Pitkin's troubles, however, don't end with his death. Even after his death he is exploited as a martyr by the ‘National Revolutionary Party’, a political organization led by Shagpoke Whipple, a manipulative former American president. Pitkin's birthday becomes a national holiday and American youths march down the streets singing songs in his honor. Whipple speaks out against aliens and calls for a rejection of “sophistication, Marxism and International Capitalism.” The novel ends with a series of roaring "hails" from the crowd.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindred_(novel)"title="Kindred (novel)">
"Kindred" scholars have noted that the novel's chapter headings suggest something "elemental, apocalyptic, archetypal about the events in the narrative," thus giving the impression that the main characters are participating in matters greater than their personal experiences.PrologueDana wakes up in the hospital with her arm amputated. Police deputies question her about the circumstances surrounding the loss of her arm and ask her whether her husband Kevin, a white man, beats her. Dana tells them that it was an accident and that Kevin is not to blame. When Kevin visits her, they are both afraid of telling the truth because they know nobody would believe them.The RiverTheir predicament began on June 9, 1976, the day of her twenty-sixth birthday. The day before, she and Kevin had moved into a house a few miles away from their old apartment in Los Angeles. While unpacking, Dana suddenly becomes dizzy, and her surroundings begin to fade away. When she comes to her senses, she finds herself at the edge of a wood, near a river where a small, red-haired boy is drowning. Dana wades in after him, drags him to the shore, and tries to resuscitate him. The boy's mother, who had been unable to save him, begins screaming and hitting Dana, accusing her of killing her son, whom she identifies as Rufus. A man arrives and points a gun at Dana, terrifying her. She becomes dizzy again and arrives back at her new house with Kevin beside her. Kevin, shocked at her disappearance and reappearance, tries to understand if the whole episode was real or a hallucination.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_a_Dark_Realm"title="Into a Dark Realm">
Leso Varen has moved to wreak havoc on the world of Kelewan and Pug and the Conclave of the Shadows are determined to find him, only to find out he has stolen a body of a Tsurani magician. Meanwhile, Pug, Magnus, Nakor and Ralan Bek lead a desperate expedition into the Dasati realm hoping to find the key to defeating the enemy who threatens their homeworld.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Mr_Enderby"title="Inside Mr Enderby">
The story opens on a note of pure fantasy, showing school children from the future taking a field trip through time to see the dyspeptic poet Francis Xavier Enderby while he is asleep. Enderby, a lapsed Catholic in his mid-40s, lives alone in Brighton as a 'professional' poet - his income being interest from investments left to him by his stepmother.Enderby composes his poetry whilst seated on the toilet. His bathtub, which serves as a filing cabinet, is almost full of the mingled paper and food scraps that represent his efforts. Although he is recognised as a minor poet with several published works (and is even awarded a small prize, the 'Goodby Gold Medal', which he refuses), he has yet to be anthologised.He is persuaded to leave his lonely but poetically fruitful bachelor life by the editor of a woman's magazine, Vesta Bainbridge, after he accidentally sends her a love poem instead of a complaint about a recipe in her magazine. The marriage, which soon ends, costs Enderby dearly, alienating him from his muse and depriving him of his financial independence.Months pass, and Enderby is able to write only one more poem. After spending what remains of his capital, he attempts suicide with an overdose of aspirin, experiencing disgusting (and rather funny) visions of his stepmother as he nears death. His cries of horror bring help, and he regains consciousness in a mental institution, where the doctors persuade him to renounce his old, "immature" poetry-writing self. Rechristened "Piggy Hogg", he looks forward contentedly to a new career as a bartender.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enderby_Outside"title="Enderby Outside">
After a suicide attempt at the very end of "Inside Mr. Enderby", the second novel opens with the protagonist under psychiatric care and working as a bartender at a large London hotel. Under the name of 'Hogg' (his stepmother's maiden name, we learn), he is persuaded to renounce the creation of poetry as an adolescent preoccupation and to pursue useful work.Hogg-Enderby, bereft of his stock of capital and now divorced, is forced to earn his keep and finds that the poetic muse has left him. He also finds that his work has been plagiarised, again, by a certain rock singer named Yod Crewsey - whose band, the Crewsey Fixers, are managed and groomed by his former wife.After being implicated in the public murder of Crewsey during a banquet at the hotel, Enderby-Hogg goes on the run to Morocco - to the bar of a rival poet named Rawcliffe. Assuming control and ownership of Rawcliffe's property upon his death, and the death of his 'Hogg' persona, Enderby realises that his muse is returning.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clockwork_Testament,_or_Enderby's_End"title="The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End">
Enderby is a dyspeptic British poet, 56 years old, and "The Clockwork Testament" is an account of his last day alive. The day in question is a cold one in February. He spends it in New York City, where for the past several months he's been working as a visiting professor of English literature and composing a long poem about St Augustine and Pelagius.Enderby's present situation arose from a chance encounter with an American film producer in Tangiers, where he owns a bar. Publican Enderby served the man a Scotch and pitched him an idea for a new film—an adaptation of Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetic masterpiece "The Wreck of the "Deutschland"". The producer, intrigued, asked for a script, which Enderby duly composed. The eventual film bears little resemblance to this script or to Hopkins's poem; however, his name is prominently credited, and the film, and Enderby, are now famous.This unwanted public recognition has led to an invitation to teach English at the University of Manhattan for a year. Also, since the film has controversial elements—including, for some reason, a lurid rape scene with Nazis and nuns—the reclusive, little-read poet has been receiving a barrage of ranting phone calls from angry citizens who are eager to denounce "his" film. Invariably, these callers (and other critics) have never read the original poem; indeed, they don't even know it exists.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartfire"title="Heartfire">
Alvin marries Peggy, and they conceive a daughter (not born by the end of the book).Alvin, Verily Cooper, Arthur Stuart, and Mike Fink are joined by John James Audubon, a French-speaking painter of birds. This group go to a Puritan-dominated place near Boston and end up confronting the witch laws.Meanwhile, Peggy has gone to the Crown Colonies - slave states that ruled by the Stuart dynasty in exile - in an attempt to free the slaves.Purity is introduced, a Puritan girl whose parents were hanged for their knacks, which are considered witchcraft by the Puritans. Purity meets Alvin's band and Arthur Stuart tells her the whole story of their travels. Purity goes away convinced they are witches and tells a local witcher, Quill, who is evil and twists her words against her and the boys. Quill intends to hang them as well as Purity.Alvin whisks away Arthur Stuart, Mike Fink, and Audubon by leading them into the greensong that lets them run hundreds of miles without tiring, but turning back without the others en route. Alvin gives himself up to the men sent to bring in the "witches" while Verily hides for the moment.Quill has both Purity and Alvin running in tight circles to wear them down - a semi-legal form of torture, intended to make them confess to witchery. Verily comes by and loudly scolds Quill in front of the crowd, saying it's inhumane.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Journeyman"title="Alvin Journeyman">
Alvin is a Maker, and what he can make is a new future for America. But to do that he must defeat his ancient enemy, the Unmaker, whose cruel whispers and deadly plots have threatened Alvin's life at every turn.Now a grown man and a journeyman smith, Alvin has returned to his family and friends in the town of Vigor Church, to share in their isolation, to work as a blacksmith, and to try to teach anyone who will learn the knack of being a Maker. For Alvin has had a vision of the city he will build, and he knows that he cannot build it alone.But the Unmaker is not through with Alvin. If that spirit of destruction cannot stop him by magic, or war and devastation, then it will try to crush the young Maker by simpler means - more human means. By lies and innuendo, and by false accusations, Alvin is driven from his home back to Hatrack River, only to find that the Unmaker has been there before him, and that he must now stand trial for his life. Against him in this trial stands Daniel Webster.Meanwhile, his brother Calvin has started to grow into his own knacks, which he views to be equal to Alvin's. When Alvin returned to Vigor Church he found that Calvin had been doing all the jobs that Alvin had done prior to his apprenticeship. When Alvin started to teach how to be a maker, Calvin resented the way he felt he was being treated and decided to learn how to be a Maker on his own, but by any means he deems necessary. He finds passage to the United Kingdom, and then to the courtship of Emperor Napoleon himself in Paris, to treat him for his gout. By healing the pain each day, he spends a few hours a day learning from Napoleon on how to rule. Calvin makes a friend in Paris, with whom he then leaves Napoleon (healed from ever feeling pain again) and heads to America.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mephisto_(novel)"title="Mephisto (novel)">
The novel portrays actor Hendrik Höfgen's rise from the Hamburger Künstlertheater (Hamburg Artists' Theater) in 1926 to nationwide fame in 1936. Initially, Höfgen flees to Paris on receiving news of the Nazis' rise to power because of his communist past (learning from a friend that he is on a blacklist). A former co-actress from Hamburg, Angelika Siebert, travels to Berlin to convince Lotte von Lindenthal, the girlfriend (and later wife) of a Luftwaffe general, to have him pardoned. On returning to Berlin he quickly manages to win over Lotte and her general, and with his support has a wonderful career.On obtaining the role of Mephisto in "Faust Part One" he realizes that he actually made a pact with evil (i.e. Nazism) and lost his humane values (even denouncing his mistress as "Black Venus"). There are situations where Höfgen tries to help his friends or tell the prime minister about concentration camp hardships, but he is always concerned not to lose his Nazi patrons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Rebellion"title="The New Rebellion">
"Somewhere in the galaxy, millions suddenly perish—a disruption of the Force so shocking it is felt by Luke at his Jedi academy and by Leia on Coruscant. While Leia must deal with an assassination attempt, a rumored plot against the New Republic, and allegations that Han Solo is involved, Luke seeks out a former Jedi student who may hold the key to the mass destruction. But Brakiss is only the bait in a deadly trap set by a master of the dark side who is determined to rule as emperor. He's targeted Luke, Leia, and Leia's children to die. Then billions will follow, in a holocaust unequaled in galactic history."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thief_Lord"title="The Thief Lord">
Two brothers, Prosper and Boniface Hartleib, run away to Venice and are taken in by a group of street children who are led by a proud orphan named Scipio, AKA "The Thief Lord." The runaway boys' aunt and uncle figure out where they are and hire a detective, Victor Getz, to find them. While investigating the thief gang, Getz discovers that Scipio is actually the son of a successful doctor, Dr. Massimo, but the doctor is abusive and Scipio has run away from home.A man calling himself the Conte asks the "Thief Lord" to steal a wooden lion's wing for him. The wing belongs to a woman named Ida Spavento. At her house, Ida tells them the wing is from a magical merry-go-round, which has the ability to change a person's age. She agrees to let them have the wing if they let her accompany them to the exchange. The gang, along with Ida, goes to make the exchange the next night, leaving Boniface and Caterina "Hornet" Grimani, the gang's only girl, to guard the hideout. When they return, they find Boniface and Hornet gone and discover the money they received for the wing is counterfeit. With Getz's help, they find Hornet and Boniface. While the others stay with Ida Spavento, Prosper and Scipio return to the Conte's island home to get the money they are owed. On the island, the Conte's sister, Morosina, catches them climbing the wall and locks them inside the stables.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooray_for_Diffendoofer_Day!"title="Hooray for Diffendoofer Day!">
The story surrounds the Diffendoofer School in the town of Dinkerville, which is well liked by its students, particularly the unnamed narrator, notably because of its many eccentric faculty members, especially Miss Bonkers, the narrator's teacher. However, the students must make a good grade on a standardized test (which turns out in the end to be a revising test on multiple subjects they regularly learn) lest Diffendoofer be demolished and they be sent to an adjacent school in Flobbertown, which requires uniforms to be worn and is incredibly dull.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Star"title="The Crystal Star">
## Background.Jacen and Jaina Solo are now five years old, and their brother Anakin is three, all at an age where they are easily manipulated.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_(Pamuk_novel)"title="The Black Book (Pamuk novel)">
The protagonist, an Istanbul lawyer named Galip, finds one day that his wife Rüya (the name means "dream" in Turkish) has mysteriously left him with very little explanation. He wanders around the city looking for his clues to her whereabouts. He suspects that his wife has taken up with her half-brother, a columnist for "Milliyet" named Celal, and it happens that he is also missing. The story of Galip's search is interspersed with reprints of Celal's columns, which are lengthy, highly literate meditations on the city and its history. Galip thinks that by living as Celal he can figure out how Celal thinks and locate both him and his wife, so he takes up residence in Celal's apartment, wearing his clothes and eventually writing his column.Galip starts getting mysterious phone calls from one of Celal's obsessed fans, who displays an astonishing familiarity with the columnist's writings. After Galip's columns under Celal's name start to take the form of impassioned pleas to Rüya, a woman from Celal's past misinterprets the articles and calls Galip, thinking they are actually Celal's attempts to win her back. It turns out that Celal and the woman had an affair, and the fan who is calling Galip is the woman's jealous husband. In an eerie twist, it turns out that the husband has been following Galip around Istanbul in an attempt to find Celal through him, accounting for Galip's frequent apprehension that he is being watched. Galip finally agrees to meet both of them at a public location, a store called Aladdin's that figures in much of the narrative. Soon after, Celal is shot to death in the street. Rüya is found also shot in Aladdin's store. The identity of the killer is never discovered for certain.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trail_of_the_Lonesome_Pine_(novel)"title="The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (novel)">
Set in the Appalachian Mountains at the turn of the twentieth century, a feud has been boiling for over thirty years between two influential mountain families, the Tollivers and the Falins. The character of Devil Judd Tolliver in the novel was based on the real life of "Devil John" Wesley Wright, a United States Marshal for the region in and around Wise County, Virginia, and Letcher County, Kentucky. The outside world and industrialization, however, are beginning to enter the area. Coal mining begins to exert its influence on the area, despite the two families' feuds. Entering the area, enterprising "furriner" (foreigner) John Hale captures the attention of the beautiful June Tolliver, and inadvertently becomes entangled in the region's politics.Geologist Hale has a vision for the potential wealth of the natural raw materials, especially coal, that he intends to use as a means of creating a legacy for himself and the Gap. But he also has an eye for the young natural beauty of a mountain girl, June Tolliver, whom he feels compelled to free from the confines of mountain life and introduce to higher education.The coming boom time for the region requires Hale to establish authoritative law and order that the two feuding clans refuse to recognize. It is this conflict between clans, who are used to settling their differences established by a century of tradition, and the principled Hale that threatens to destroy the budding romance between him and June, who then must choose between clan loyalties and the man she loves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hideaway_(novel)"title="Hideaway (novel)">
Following a traffic accident that left him clinically dead for more than 80 minutes, a Southern California antique dealer named Hatch Harrison begins experiencing strange dreams and visions that connect him to a psychopathic killer who calls himself "Vassago". The killer believes that he is the human incarnation of one of the demon princes of Hell, and that if he murders enough innocent human beings and offers them up in sacrifice to his Master, he will be allowed to return to the afterlife and rule at Satan's right hand. He also has a strange condition that enables him to see in the dark, but also causes his eyes to be extremely sensitive to light.Meanwhile, the accident gives Hatch and his wife Lindsey, an artist, a new lease on life as they struggle to rebuild their marriage in the wake of their son's death from cancer five years before. As the couple set about trying to adopt a young girl named Regina, Hatch continues to be tormented by visions, in some cases even seeing through Vassago's eyes. Making matters worse, Vassago slowly gains information about Hatch and his family in the same fashion, putting both Lindsay and Regina in danger.It is eventually revealed that Vassago's real name is Jeremy Nyebern; as a teenager, he brutally murdered his mother and sister, then attempted to kill himself. His life was saved by the same doctor who miraculously resuscitated Hatch, Dr. Jonas Nyebern, Jeremy's father (thus facilitating the seemingly supernatural bond between the two men). Like Hatch, Jeremy was clinically dead for more than 30 minutes, and during that time, believes that he went to Hell and was later returned to do Satan's bidding. At the book's climax, Vassago's visions lead him to kidnap Regina and take her to his "hideaway" (an abandoned amusement park, where, as a boy, Jeremy committed his first murder). There, Hatch and Vassago get into a struggle that ends with Hatch beating Vassago to death with a crucifix attached to a flashlight, thus saving Regina and Lindsay. During the closing moments of this confrontation, Hatch inexplicably begins speaking in another voice and calls himself "Uriel" (whom Hatch later learns is an archangel mentioned in the Bible), thus implying that Vassago's beliefs about his demonic heritage and short-lived journey to the afterlife may not have been entirely delusional after all. Uriel/Hatch tells Vassago/Jeremy that instead of returning to Hell as a prince, he will be returned as a slave.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeland_(Forgotten_Realms_novel)"title="Homeland (Forgotten Realms novel)">
Drizzt was born to the tenth noble House of Menzoberranzan, Daermon Na'shezbaernon (more commonly known as House Do'Urden). He was the son of Malice, the Do'Urden Matron Mother and her consort, Do'Urden weaponmaster (and sometime Patron) Zaknafein. As the third son, drow culture demanded that Drizzt be sacrificed to their goddess Lolth. However, the death of his older brother, and the first son, Nalfein, (incidentally, at the treacherous hand of the second son, Dinin) in the battle against House DeVir which raised Daermon Na'shezbaernon to the 9th ranked in the city during his birth, made him the second son and spared him.Being a male in the matriarchal drow society, Drizzt Do'Urden suffered considerable abuse at the hands of his family, particularly his eldest sister Briza, in the first sixteen years of his life. His first ten years were spent as a page prince in the care of his sister Vierna; though she was far from kind, in his later years Drizzt would recall some affection for her, stemming from the fact they shared paternity through Zaknafein.As a child, Drizzt displayed amazing reflexes and coordination. Consequently, Zaknafein was able to persuade Malice that Drizzt should become a warrior, instead of replacing Nalfein as the house wizard. Thus, at the age of sixteen, Drizzt began his weapons training. He began learning the skills that would lead him to become one of the most formidable swordsmen in both the Underdark, and Faerûn.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sojourn_(novel)"title="Sojourn (novel)">
Having lived in the Underdark for over forty years, Drizzt realized that neither he nor anyone around him would be safe, so he decided to travel to the surface. There he met with much adversity because of his race, but also found his true calling in life as a ranger, during his time with a blind ranger named Montolio. He eventually moved to Icewind Dale, where he joined with Catti-Brie, Bruenor Battlehammer, Regis the Halfling, and Wulfgar the barbarian.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Mr_Polly"title="The History of Mr Polly">
The protagonist of "The History of Mr. Polly" is an antihero inspired by H. G. Wells's early experiences in the drapery trade: Alfred Polly, born circa 1870, a timid and directionless young man living in Edwardian England, who despite his own bumbling achieves contented serenity with little help from those around him. Mr. Polly's most striking characteristic is his "innate sense of epithet", which leads him to coin hilarious expressions like "the Shoveacious Cult" for "sunny young men of an abounding and elbowing energy" and "dejected angelosity" for the ornaments of Canterbury Cathedral.Alfred Polly lives in the imaginary town of Fishbourne in Kent (not to be confused with Fishbourne, West Sussex or Fishbourne, Isle of Wight – the town in the story is thought to be based on Sandgate, Kent where Wells lived for several years). The novel begins "in medias res" by presenting a miserable Mr. Polly: "He hated Foxbourne, he hated Foxbourne High Street, he hated his shop and his wife and his neighbours – every blessed neighbour – and with indescribable bitterness he hated himself". Thereafter, "The History of Mr. Polly" is divided in three parts. Chapters 1–6 depict his life up to age 20, when he marries his cousin Miriam Larkins and sets up an outfitter's shop in Fishbourne. Chapters 7–8 show Mr. Polly's spectacular suicide attempt, which ironically makes him a local hero, wins him insurance money that saves him from bankruptcy, and yields the insight that ""Fishbourne wasn't the world", which leads him to abandon his shop and his wife. Chapters 9–10, at the Potwell Inn (apparently located in West Sussex), culminates in Mr. Polly's courageous victory over "Uncle Jim", a malicious relative of the innkeeper's granddaughter. An epilogue then depicts Mr. Polly at ease as assistant-innkeeper, after a brief visit to ascertain Miriam's prosperity.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Darkness"title="Siege of Darkness">
"Siege of Darkness" tells the story of how the Time of Troubles, in which all magic is temporarily disrupted and many gods and goddesses are forced to take the forms of their avatars and walk the material plane, affects the drow and Drizzt and company. The Spider Queen, Lolth, plots to keep Matron Baenre in power and to ultimately take Mithral Hall. In-house fighting results in the destruction of the 3rd house, House Oblodra, with the exception of their kobold/ goblin army, and the 4th house, House Faen Tlabbar, being left leaderless. Matron Baenre, along with the favor of Lolth, forms a loose house alliance to attack Mithral Hall. Realizing that they cannot possibly stop a drow army, the svirfnebli, the deep gnomes, are forced to abandon Blingdenstone. The battle for Mithral Hall takes place on the surface as well as in the Underdark. The drow were defeated with a little help from an unlikely source, the balor, Errtu. Through trickery, all Baenre wizardry and spells are temporarily interrupted and the heroes take advantage of the opening, killing Matron Baenre and defeating the drow offensive. Lolth's plan all along was to bring about chaos and to rid herself of Matron Baenre.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Swords"title="The Two Swords">
In "The Two Swords", Obould's horde has pressed the Companions to the very gates of Mithral Hall, where Bruenor and his clan launch a desperate, last-ditch effort to push the orcs back. A desperate rescue attempt succeeds, with Drizzt and Innovindil rescuing the latter's pegasus, which Obould had captured and chained as a trophy, and Drizzt is unexpectedly reunited with the Companions that he long thought dead. The only major plot line to be tied up in this novel is the question of what Drizzt will do about his relationship with Catti-brie.Other than that, "The Two Swords" resolves a few minor plot threads. Drizzt and the surface elf Innovindil bring their quest for the captured pegasus to a conclusion. A few more characters meet their demise in this novel. Ultimately, the novel keeps the major plot lines active for future novels, and introduces several more.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spine_of_the_World"title="The Spine of the World">
Wulfgar and his new friend, Morik the Rogue, are convicted of the attempted murder of Wulfgar's old companion Captain Deudermont, a crime they did not commit. Morik the Rogue is an unscrupulous human who comes along as a traveling and drinking companion to barbarian hero Wulfgar, and is a close, but not necessarily trusted, friend. Wulfgar's mighty warhammer "Aegis Fang" is stolen and sold to a notorious pirate. They narrowly avoid the horrors of Luskan's prisoner's carnival, but through the intervention of the victim himself, they are spared. As the book progresses, Wulfgar slowly climbs out of his despair, finally setting out to find the life he thought lost to the darkness. After their eviction from the city, they set out to become bandits on the roads outside the city. They prove to not be very proficient at it, though, and soon become involved in the politics of a backwater town in which the peasant fiancée of the local lord bears an illegitimate child. Wulfgar is blamed, but is helped to escape, and adopts the baby girl as his own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_of_the_Shard"title="Servant of the Shard">
After regaining his confidence and will to live (lost in Paths of Darkness, when Drizzt Do'Urden seemed to have died without being defeated fairly by Artemis, thus apparently taking from him the ability to prove to himself that he was a better fighter), Artemis Entreri finds himself allied with the mercenary Jarlaxle as the drow's tie to the surface world. Caught in the plans of Jarlaxle's band, Bregan D'aerthe, Artemis finds himself back in Calimport, the city in which he became known as one of the greatest assassins in Faerûn. Without many ties to the city after spending his time in captivity to the drow, Entreri must once again make his name known while trying to survive against the guilds of Calimport and Jarlaxle's lieutenants, Berg'inyon Baenre, Raiguy Bondalek, and Kimmuriel Oblodra. At the same time Jarlaxle succumbs to the mental intrusions of the crystal shard, Crenshinibon, as it pushes Jarlaxle to fulfill his unending ambitions. This is also the third novel in the "Paths of Darkness" series.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Water"title="Secret Water">
The Swallows intend to sail in the "Goblin" (as featured in "We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea") to Hamford Water and camp with their father, but he is called away on naval business. To compensate, he maroons them with a small dinghy on an island. Before he leaves, Father gives them an outline map of the area they decide to call Secret Water, and suggests they survey and chart the area before he returns to pick them up. For the first time, their small sister Bridget accompanies them on this adventure.Titty and Bridget then find some mysterious footprints, which they think look as though they were made by a Mastodon; when nobody else seems to have any interest, they return to their camp, where they find a totem pole of an eel. They spot somebody escaping in a dinghy, and they track the person to his lair; it turns out that the footprints had been left by a local boy named Donald, whom they nickname the "Mastodon", wearing "splatchers" (mud-shoes), and he left the totem pole because he mistook them for the Eels, another family who camp in the area regularly. For a surprise, Father has arranged for the Amazons to come down from the Lake District and join them with another dinghy, named the "Firefly".
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picts_and_the_Martyrs"title="The Picts and the Martyrs">
The Ds have been invited to stay at Beckfoot at the start of the summer holidays while Mrs Blackett has gone with her brother, James Turner (whom they call Captain Flint), on a cruise for her health. However, when Great Aunt Maria finds out that the Blackett girls have been left at home, she decides to come and take care of them. She is unaware of the Ds' visit.Nancy Blackett insists that the Ds' holiday will not be spoiled and that they will learn to sail the "Scarab", a dinghy their father has bought for them. So they move out to the Dog's Home, a small hut in the woods, and become secretive Picts while the Blacketts are martyrs to the Great Aunt. They are schooled in woodcraft by Jacky a local boy who brings them a rabbit to skin, gut and cook, and teaches them how to tickle trout. In the woods, Dick's ornithology comes to the fore. True to her character, Dorothea constantly romanticises their situation.The Great Aunt attempts to civilize the Amazon pirates, for example by making them read aloud, recite poetry and perform their party-pieces on the piano. Despite these ordeals, they manage to accomplish a number of adventures. They succeed in escaping for a day to accompany Captain Flint's partner Timothy to the copper-mine previously discovered in "Pigeon Post". The Ds succeed in burgling Captain Flint's study at Beckfoot to commandeer some chemical equipment that Timothy needs. They are also introduced to sailing the "Scarab". The Great Aunt in fact suspects that the Amazons are meeting the Swallows. Near the end of her visit, the Great Aunt goes missing and there is a hue and cry and search for her. She has gone to make her own enquiries after the suspected Swallows, but is forced to admit that she has been quite wrong. The Ds find her on Captain Flint's houseboat where Timothy has been living in somewhat squalid circumstances. Despite being the very people who must not meet her, they deliver her back to Beckfoot in their boat in time to catch her train, and manage to avoid revealing their identities. They slip away before they can be questioned, and Nancy manages to save the Great Aunt some embarrassment for which she gets praised in a letter to her mother.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someone_Comes_to_Town,_Someone_Leaves_Town"title="Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town">
The story mainly takes place in two Ontario locales. In flashbacks, the main character, usually but not always called Alan (he appears to have been alphabetized rather than named, and will answer to and identify himself as any masculine name beginning with A), and his brothers (also alphabetized) grow up outside of the remote town of Kapuskasing. The novel opens with Alan's purchase of a home in the Kensington Market neighborhood of modern-day Toronto.There are two main plotlines. Alan befriends Kurt, a thirty-something punk who operates a dumpster-diving operation. Kurt uses computer components that he retrieves from the trash and turns them into Wi-Fi network access points. Kurt's goal is to blanket the entire neighborhood with free and secure Internet access by attaching his access points to buildings in a wireless mesh network with the permission of their owners. Kurt's plan doesn't really get off the ground until he forms a partnership with Alan, who puts a more professional face on the operation and sweet-talks many local owners into allowing the access points to use their space and a small amount of their electricity.The second plotline features fantasy elements. Unbeknownst to most of the other characters, Alan and his brothers are not quite human. Their father is a mountain and their mother is a washing machine. Alan's eldest brother can see the future, his second-eldest is an island, his younger brother is undead, and his three youngest brothers are a set of Russian nesting dolls. Alan is the most normal-seeming of his family. Outwardly, he looks human, but he heals at an incredible rate, and if part of him is cut off, it will grow back, and the cut off part can be made to form a new copy of him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Faith"title="The End of Faith">
"The End of Faith" opens with a literary account of a day in the life of a suicide bomber – his last day. In an introductory chapter, Harris calls for an end to respect and tolerance for the competing belief systems of religion, which he describes as being "all equally uncontaminated by evidence". While focusing on the dangers posed by religious extremist groups now armed with weapons of mass destruction, Harris is equally critical of religious moderation, which he describes as "the context in which religious violence can never be adequately opposed."Harris continues by examining the nature of belief itself, challenging the notion that we can in any sense enjoy "freedom" of belief, and arguing that "belief is a fount of action "in potentia"." Instead he posits that in order to be useful, beliefs must be both logically coherent, and truly representative of the real world. Insofar as "religious" belief fails to ground itself in empirical evidence, Harris likens religion to a form of mental illness which, he says, "allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them "holy"." He argues that there may be "sanity in numbers", but that it is "merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your prayers, while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window."
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trench_(novel)"title="The Trench (novel)">
4 years after the events of the previous novel, a deep sea submersible, Proteus, is attacked by unknown creatures and destroyed while on a geological survey of the Mariana Trench's sea floor.In Monterey, California, paleobiologist and former deep sea pilot Jonas Taylor is now working for his father-in-law Masao Tanaka at the Tanaka Oceanographic Institute studying the lone surviving Megalodon offspring alongside his friend Mac. The shark, named Angel, has grown into a 72 foot, 31 ton monster who draws crowds from all over the world to get a glimpse of its incredible size. In the 4 years since the opening of the institute, lawsuits filed by the survivors of the people Angel's mother killed has crippled the institute financially, forcing Masao to sell controlling interest to energy mogul Benedict Singer. Jonas and his wife, Terry Tanaka, are struggling with their marriage as Jonas is obsessed with trying to make sure Angel doesn't escape her tank as well as the strain of their first child being stillborn.After the Proteus implodes in the trench, Singer insists on Jonas joining him aboard the Goliath, Singer's research ship, and help with the investigation of the accident. Jonas, plagued by nightmares where he and Terry die in the Trench, refuses the request, insisting that he remain at the institute to determine what damage Angel is doing to the steel doors keeping her in the lagoon. Masao is forced to go in Jonas' place and Terry joins him, finally confronting Jonas about her unhappiness with their marriage. Aboard the Goliath, Masao and Terry meet Singer and his protege Celeste, agreeing to stay until Singer's deep water laboratory, The Benthos, is able to send the sonar records of the accident. Back at the institute, 3 teen boys break into the underwater viewing gallery and pound on the glass, enraging Angel and causing her to ram the glass, flooding the gallery and devouring the boys. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroes_Die"title="Heroes Die">
The novels are set in a future dystopia Earth where a parallel world called Overworld reminiscent of the worlds featured in post-Tolkien secondary world fantasy has been discovered. The corporations that run Earth send actors into Overworld in order to provide the masses of an overcrowded world with virtual-reality entertainment.Hari Michaelson is a famous Actor and son of a now-mentally ill libertarian professor. On Overworld, he is the assassin Caine, while his estranged wife Shanna is another Actor, playing the mage Pallas Ril. Actors who travel to Overworld through advanced technology and assume an alternate persona which they then use to carry out 'adventures'. Pallas is captured by Ma'elKoth, the Emperor of Overworld's human kingdom of Ankhana, on one of her adventures. Ma'elKoth's plan to rule Ankhana by wiping out a final resistance group is blocked by a spell that causes others to forget the existence of the resistance group's members. The remainder of the book plays out the conflict between Ma'elKoth, Caine and the resistance. Hari finds himself manipulated by both the powers on Overworld and the Studio on Earth, and must defeat them both in order to save himself and Pallas Ril from death.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Fleet_Crisis"title="The Black Fleet Crisis">
The Black Fleet Crisis begins in a time of peace for the New Republic, and the first time a chance occurs for the Rebel Alliance to turn their attention to more personal concerns.The outbreak of the Black Fleet Crisis ends a period of relative peace in the galaxy. Yevethan forces (former Imperial slaves who overthrew their masters) using captured Imperial ships begin a genocidal campaign to conquer the Koornacht Cluster by killing all non-Yevethans. The New Republic is forced to fight in its own defense, as well as to rescue hostages held by the Yevethans (including Han Solo). After obtaining an image of Han as a battered hostage, Chewbacca goes on a desperate rescue mission.Luke Skywalker travels with Akanah Norand Goss Pell to seek out what he's told are mother's people, the Fallanassi, to learn about them. Luke finds that the Fallanassi are a mysterious and secretive sect of Force users who are total pacifists. Luke learns new Force techniques and philosophies from them, and gains their help to aid the New Republic in one battle.Leia is the only person who doesn't have a chance to rest, who because of her fame, what others expect of her, and her sense of duty and obligation, she has become a prisoner of the Presidency. But she is far too tired, stressed beyond her limits, and emotionally fragile, and she is only two steps away from a serious personal crisis of her confidence. Nil Spaar, the Machiavellian Viceroy of the Yevethan Protectorate, sees that as an opportunity he can exploit and an opportunity to destroy the New Republic from within.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonely_Road_(novel)"title="Lonely Road (novel)">
The book begins with a note from the solicitor for Commander Malcolm Stevenson, who has died recently (in about 1930). The note was written by him in the months before his death.Stevenson's narration begins with a series of seemingly unrelated vignettes, of which the only one that is readily sensible occurred during World War I, leading the last survivors of a sinking decoy ship, Stevenson managed to sink a German submarine, and with the British survivors wounded and with no way of taking prisoners, killed the Germans as they attempted to surrender. That incident still haunts him. Quite wealthy, he runs a flotilla of coastal steamers in a desultory but increasingly profitable way. He awakens, after having been taken, injured, from a damaged car, on a night on which he has been drinking heavily.Still bearing the mental and physical scars of the naval encounter, he meets a dancer, Mary (Mollie) Gordon (whom he nicknames Sixpence), at a dance hall in Leeds, where she entertains lonely gentlemen by dancing with them or sitting out a dance and talking, at sixpence a dance. He has the best evening he has had in years with Mollie.The police call in Stevenson to consult on guns they have found being smuggled into the United Kingdom, found near a burned-out lorry. Stevenson cannot identify the guns, but puts together something Mollie said, and something said by his cousin by marriage, pioneer aviator Sir Phillip Stenning, and realises Mollie's brother may well have been the driver of the lorry. He approaches the police. Rather than risk publicity from a police interrogation, they ask Stevenson to do the initial questioning himself. They tell Stevenson they are convinced the guns are being smuggled in for an armed uprising in connection with the upcoming General Election, although they have no idea who is responsible.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legacy_(Forgotten_Realms_novel)"title="The Legacy (Forgotten Realms novel)">
"The Legacy" continues the plot-line of The Icewind Dale Trilogy, with Wulfgar and Catti-brie preparing for their marriage and Drizzt returning from the first of many visits to Lady Alustriel of Silverymoon. Drizzt returns to a disturbed Catti-brie and eccentric Regis, who has returned to Mithral Hall after a stint as master of Pasha Pook's thieves' guild. While Bruenor plans the wedding, Wulfgar's tribe settles the appropriately named Settlestone and begins to prosper. Wulfgar, on the other hand, is straining his relationship with Catti-brie, who feels his possessiveness is excessive and unwise. When Wulfgar unexpectedly attacks Drizzt and appears to have lethal motives, the tension builds, despite the drow defusing the situation.Newly introduced is the dwarf battlerager, Thibbledorf Pwent. The dwarf, knocked unconscious during the invasion of Mithral Hall, pledges fealty to Bruenor. Among his personality quirks are a disgusting smell, and ungreased, ridged armor, which also serves as Pwent's primary weapon. Meanwhile, in Menzoberranzan, Drizzt's sister Vierna (Taken in by Matron Baenre after the fall of House Do'Urden) is preparing to recapture her brother. Vierna believes that this quest, if successful, will gain her the full favor of Lolth, the chief drow goddess. Vierna enlists the help of Bregan D'aerthe, the most prominent mercenary band in Menzoberranzan. Jarlaxle, Bregan D'aerthe's leader, briefly doubts Vierna's sanity and designs, but is convinced when Vierna turns her brother Dinin into a drider.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Highwayman_(novel)"title="The Highwayman (novel)">
Pryd Holding, where much of the story is set, is troubled by the threat of powrie dwarves, domination by other kingdoms and religious conflicts between the brutal Samhaists, led by the cruel and evil Bernivvigar and the seemingly more benevolent brothers of Blessed Abelle, to which Brother Bran Dynard belongs. Also complicating matters is that Prince Prydae, the last of his line, suffers an injury in battle that leaves him impotent. Brother Dynard has recently returned from the south, where he was sent to enlighten the people, but instead became fascinated and enlightened by the people, and took a wife, the beautiful Jhesta Tu mystic Sen Wi. Sen Wi has come to Pryd holding with Dynard to help explain the ways of her people to the brothers of Blessed Abelle.One night, a beautiful young woman, Callen Duwornay, is sentenced to death for adultery. Forced to endure sexual humiliation as part of her punishment, she is stripped completely naked in front of the community, is bitten by a poison snake and then left for dead, hung over the road that is being constructed to connect Pryd Holding with the other kingdoms as a warning to others. Sen Wi and Dynard find her hanging naked and rescue her from the dwarves that are beating her. Sen Wi uses her training to heal Callen and they take her to Dynard's friend, Garibond, to heal. After recovering, an apparently still naked Callen leaves Garibonds home and disappears. Some time later, after changing her name, Callen gives birth to a daughter, whom she names Cadayale.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon_Apostle"title="The Demon Apostle">
The final novel in the first trilogy begins with the mopping up of Bestesbulzibar's army and the battle against the demon's spirit, which has possessed the highest levels of power within the Abellican Church. Again, it is up to Elbryan and Pony, along with their friends, to combat the corruption and attempt to end its terrible hold forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortalis"title="Mortalis">
Mortalis tells of Pony's life after the war: her fight against the crushing grief of her husband Elbryan's death and her fight to stop a plague infecting the people of the kingdom. At the same time, the characters of Aydrian Wyndon, Elbryan's and Pony's child, and Brynn Dharielle, a To-Gai girl turned ranger, are introduced to the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascendance_(novel)"title="Ascendance (novel)">
The novel "Ascendance" begins the tale of Aydrian Wyndon, a tortured and lonely young man raised by the Touel'alfar to be a ranger even greater than his father and to, hopefully, be the salvation of the elves. The plans of the Touel'alfar go awry due to Aydrian's own arrogance, cultivated by a dark force. When he leaves the home of the elves, events occur which bring about great sorrow for himself, his mother and the kingdom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witch's_Daughter"title="The Witch's Daughter">
On the small remote Scottish isle of Skua, Perdita has been branded "the witch's daughter" by islanders. They believe her mother died cursing the sea on which they depend for their livelihood (most of the men are fishermen). She lives in a tumbledown house by the loch, alone apart from the housekeeper Annie, never goes to school and has no friends. The house's owner, Mr Smith, is usually absent and expects Perdita to keep out of his way when he is there. The village children avoid or bully her, saying she's a witch like her mother.One summer Janey, who is blind, and her elder brother Tim visit the island with their naturalist father who wants to find a rare orchid that might grow there. Another English tourist, Mr Jones, arrives at the same time and also stays in the hotel (a village inn with a few rooms). The children befriend the lonely girl Perdita, though she is at first very shy as she has only experienced cruelty from other children before. Mr Smith arrives to stay in his old house with Annie and Perdita. One evening Perdita overhears Mr Jones in the kitchen talking with Mr Smith.Together they search for fossils (mostly Tim, who's very interested in fossils), explore the island's caves, investigate an old unsolved crime as well as a current one after Tim's father is assaulted, and find treasure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_and_Iron"title="Amber and Iron">
The novel begins with where "Amber and Ashes" leaves off. Former Majere monk Rhys Mason is trying to escape the clutches of the death knight Auseric Krell after Rhys has the kender Nightshade, in the guise of a Khas piece, recover the imprisoned soul of Ariakan for his mother, the god Zeboim.Mina, as enigmatic as ever, escapes imprisonment to set off on a quest that will test even her considerable will. All the while, evil spreads across the land, gaining ground with each new day. With so much at stake, with the very soul of Krynn on the line, champions must be found even in the darkest places.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dirty_Job"title="A Dirty Job">
The story centers on Charlie Asher, a "beta-male" (as opposed to "alpha-male") who leads a satisfying life as the owner and proprietor of a second-hand store in San Francisco. At the moment when his wife Rachel unexpectedly dies in the hospital shortly after the birth of their first child (Sophie), Charlie is chosen to be a "death merchant," retrieving souls of the dying and protecting them from the forces of the underworld, while he manages his store and raises his daughter. He only gradually realizes the ramifications of this business as clues and complications unfold, and the forces of darkness threaten to rise.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrek!"title="Shrek!">
Shrek is a repugnant, green-skinned, fire-breathing, seemingly indestructible monster who enjoys causing misery with his repulsiveness. After his parents decide that he must be sent out into the world to "[do] his share of damage", they (literally) kick him out of their swamp. Shrek soon encounters a witch, who, in exchange for his rare lice, reads his fortune: by uttering the magic words "Apple Strudel", he will be taken by donkey to a castle, where he will battle a knight and marry a princess who is even uglier than him.Excitedly on his way, Shrek encounters a scything peasant from whom he steals and eats his pheasant, counters an attack from thunder, lightning and rain by eating lightning's fiercest bolt, and knocks out a dragon with his fiery breath. While resting, he is disturbed by a nightmare in which he is helpless to being hugged and kissed by a multitude of children. Awakening, he meets the donkey, who takes him to the castle.Shrek confronts the knight guarding the castle; outraged by Shrek's demands to see the princess, the knight attacks him, to which Shrek responds with a fire blast that sends him into the surrounding moat. Inside the castle, Shrek is terrified when he appears to be surrounded by an army of similarly hideous creatures, but regains his resolve and self-esteem upon discovering that he is in the hall of mirrors. He finally meets the princess; mutually smitten by their shared ugliness, they marry and live "horribly ever after, scaring the socks off all who fell afoul of them".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sea_of_Trolls"title="The Sea of Trolls">
"The Sea of Trolls" is set in Anglo-Saxon England, Scandinavia, and the mythical realm of Jotunheim.Jack Crookleg, the main character of the book, is being trained by a famous skald (bard) named Dragon Tongue, when he and his younger sister, Lucy, are captured by Viking raiders ten chapters into the book. The pair are to be sold as slaves to "Picts" as soon as they reach land. On board the Viking ship Jack meets and ultimately befriends Thorgil, a young would-be berserker, and Olaf, the leader of the raiders, along with Boldheart, the crow. The two captives are spared because Jack is a bard and because Lucy is to be given to the queen, a half-troll named Frith.When they arrive at the court nothing goes as planned. Jack is sentenced to menial labor and made to clean the barn. There Jack encounters the deadly troll-pig, Golden Bristles, who is to be sacrificed to the goddess, Freya, by being placed in a wooden cart and left to sink in a bog. After singing Olaf One-Brow's praise-song for the Northman's homecoming, Jack inadvertently makes Queen Frith lose her hair. Queen Frith threatens to sacrifice Lucy (instead of the troll-pig) to the goddess Freya, because Jack set Golden Bristles free. However, Frith allows Jack a chance to save Lucy and their freedom if he can make her hair grow back, which is much more difficult than she makes it sound. Jack goes with Olaf and Thorgil to Jotunheim, land of the Trolls, to seek the mythic Mimir's Well, a well with magical water (song mead) which gives the drinker knowledge, at the roots of the world tree Yggdrasil. Olaf One-Brow is killed by a "trollbear," a gigantic bear native to Jotunheim. Jack and Thorgil are captured by a dragon, but Bold Heart tricks the dragon and enables Jack and Thorgil to escape. Thorgil slays the baby male dragon but gets some blood on her tongue, allowing her to speak with birds. On the way Jack also visits the queen of the Jotuns (Trolls), as he needs her consent to continue seeking Mimir's Well. He finds the tree Yggdrasil and Mimir's Well. Both he and Thorgil drink from the well, and Jack saves some for Rune, a skald (bard) who teaches Jack poetry. With the knowledge Jack gains from drinking from Mimir's Well, he returns to the land of the Northmen to restore Frith's hair.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Flower"title="The Blue Flower">
In 1794 the 22 year old von Hardenberg becomes mystically attracted to the 12-year-old Sophie von Kühn, an unlikely choice for an intellectual of noble birth given Sophie's age and lack of education and culture, as well as her physical plainness and negligible material prospects. The couple become engaged a year later but never marry as Sophie dies of consumption a few days after her 15th birthday. The blue flower of the novel's title is the subject of the first chapter of a story that von Hardenberg is writing. In it, a young man longs to see the blue flower that "lies incessantly at his heart, so that he can imagine and think about nothing else". Von Hardenberg reads his draft chapter to Sophie and others, and asks "what is the meaning of this blue flower?" No definitive answer is given within the novel, leaving the reader to provide his or her own interpretation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaro"title="Imaro">
Growing up among the Ilyassai, a fierce tribe of warrior-herdsmen who despise his origin, a young Imaro struggles for acceptance after the breaking of a taboo forces his mother to leave him behind.The boy becomes a man unlike any other the Ilyassai has ever seen. His quest for acceptance and identity continues. Yet, Imaro learns he has powerful enemies, both human and inhuman. Prevailing over foes who desire nothing more than to see him dead, Imaro finds that in victory, there can be loss.Departing from the Ilyassai, Imaro roams afar, wandering across the vast continent of Nyumbani, pitting his prodigious strength or courage against men, beasts, and demons. Hunted by relentless foes, Imaro becomes the hunter. Eventually, he finds friendship and love among people who are like him, exiles or outlaws.Still, forces beyond Imaro's comprehension are aligned against him. As he rises to prominence, events preordained before Imaro's birth begin to unfold.Powers are stirring in Nyumbani, the Africa of a world that is beyond the one we know. Soon, Imaro learns that some of these powers are aligned against him. As he struggles to hold on to his hard won acceptance, this warrior seeks the answer to the question which has haunted him all his life: "Who am I?"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Kestrel_for_a_Knave"title="A Kestrel for a Knave">
South Yorkshire, the 1960s. In the opening pages of the book, we see Billy and his half-brother Jud sleeping in the same bed in a troubled household. Billy tries to encourage Jud to get up to go to work, but Jud only responds by punching him. Soon afterwards Billy attempts to leave for his paper round, only to discover that Jud has stolen his bicycle. As a result, Billy is late and has to deliver the newspapers on foot.There is a flashback to several months before when Billy returns home to find a man whom he does not recognize leaving his house. He asks his mother and finds out he is a man she had come home with the night before. It becomes obvious that Billy's father is absent. His mother then tells him to go to the shop to get some cigarettes, but he instead steals a book from the local bookshop and returns home to read it. Jud comes back drunk from a night out. Still in flashback, the next scene takes place at a farm. Billy sees a kestrel's nest and approaches it. Billy is then approached by the farmer and his daughter. At first, the farmer tells Billy to "bugger off" but when he realizes that Billy was looking for a kestrel, he soon takes an interest. The flashback ends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Ab"title="The Story of Ab">
Ab is a Stone Age boy who grows to young manhood amid the many dangers of his times. With his friend, Oak, he digs a pit and catches a baby rhinoceros, participates in a mammoth hunt with the tribe to prove himself a man, and courts the young women from a neighboring tribe. One girl in particular, Lightfoot, holds the attention of both men, and Ab is forced to kill his friend in a savage fight. He wins Lightfoot for his mate, but is haunted by guilt for his murdered companion. As Ab grows older, he helps the tribe kill a marauding sabre-tooth tiger, leads his people in a great battle against an invading tribe, and eventually becomes the leader of the cave men, and the patriarch of a large personal family. Ab is used by the author to support his contention that there was no sharp division between the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods, that man learned to make fine, polished tools and weapons gradually and naturally, as Ab does. During his life Ab invents and perfects the bow and arrow, and is the first of the primitives to domesticate wolves as pets.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_the_Flopsy_Bunnies"title="The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies">
In "The Flopsy Bunnies", Benjamin Bunny (son of Old Mr. Bunny) and Peter Rabbit are adults, and Benjamin has married his cousin Flopsy (one of Peter's sisters). As for Peter, Mopsy, and Cotton-Tail, they haven't been married yet and still live with their mother (Mrs. Josephine Rabbit). (However, Peter becomes an uncle and his sisters --Mopsy and Cotton-Tail-- are aunts.) The couple (as Benjamin had become a father) are the parents of six young rabbits generally called The Flopsy Bunnies. Benjamin and Flopsy are "very improvident and cheerful" and have some difficulty feeding their brood. At times, they turn to Peter Rabbit (who has gone into business as a florist and keeps a nursery garden), but there are days when Peter cannot spare cabbages. It is then that the Flopsy Bunnies cross the field to Mr. McGregor's rubbish heap of rotten vegetables.One day they find and feast on lettuces that have shot into flower, and, under their "soporific" influence, fall asleep in the rubbish heap, though Benjamin puts a sack over his head. Mr. McGregor discovers them by accident when tipping grass-clippings down and places them in a sack and ties it shut then sets the sack aside while attending to another matter. Benjamin and Flopsy are unable to help their children, but a "resourceful" wood mouse called Thomasina Tittlemouse, gnaws a hole in the sack and the bunnies escape. The rabbit family (Benjamin, Flopsy, and the Flopsy bunnies) fill the sack with rotten vegetables (two decayed turnips and three rotten vegetable marrows) to trick Mr. McGregor into thinking the Flopsy Bunnies are still in the sack. Then the animals mend the hole which Thomasina Tittlemouse made. Afterwards, they hide under a bush to observe Mr. McGregor's reaction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quest_for_Cush"title="The Quest for Cush">
Defeated and demoralised by treachery within the bandit tribes that he led, Imaro searches for vengeance, and his kidnapped lover Tanisha. In the City of Madness, he discovers both, along with a new ally, Pomphis, who seemingly possesses information about the dark forces which have hounded Imaro all his life.Pomphis doesn't have all the answers, but he suggests they might be found in the legendary city of Cush. As they embark on their quest for Cush, the forces arrayed against Imaro grow bolder, manifesting themselves as assassins, monsters, and deadly creatures from the sea; all in a desperate attempt to prevent Imaro from reaching his destination. As the forces grow deadlier, the true nature of the coming continent-wide conflict becomes increasingly more apparent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trail_of_Bohu"title="The Trail of Bohu">
Imaro, warrior of the Ilyassai, has settled into his new life as a husband and father in the fabled kingdom of Cush. Amid his growing restlessness, unspeakable tragedy strikes, sending Imaro on a grim mission of vengeance. His adversary has no face, but he does have a name: Bohu, the Bringer of Sorrow – a sorcerer of immense power and cruelty.As Imaro seeks a confrontation with his most formidable foe yet, turmoil spreads across the continent of Nyumbani. The balance between the forces of good, represented by Cush, and evil, represented by the pariah land of Naama, has been disrupted. The gods themselves may have to declare war with one another, before this balance is finally restored.In the midst of a coming cataclysm, Imaro travels the length of Nyumbani in search of Bohu. During his journey, Imaro finally discovers his own identity – but will this knowledge help him as he battles a formidable array of enemies bent not only on his destruction, but that of Nyumbani itself?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taking"title="The Taking">
In the midst of an oddly sudden rain storm, author Molly Sloan awakens in the middle of the night. Unable to return to sleep, she leaves her husband Neil slumbering in bed and goes downstairs to work on a manuscript in progress.Dark shapes huddle on her porch – coyotes from the nearby forest. She wonders what could have frightened such animals into leaving the sanctuary of the deep woods to brave the proximity of human beings. Disturbed, she steps outside, to stand among the wild beasts, and is frightened herself – not by the animals, but by the strange, oddly luminescent rain. On an instinctual level, she realizes that there is something unclean about the rain.Once she comes back to the house, Molly and Neil search for information in the news. They are only able to gather that the same phenomenon is taking place all over the world, before all communications are lost. They decide to flee their isolated home, gathering with the residents of the nearby small mountain town, in order to prepare a resistance, though they are not even sure against what they will be fighting. After 10 hours of downpour, the rain stops. In its place, a thick, ominous fog obscures everything, reducing trees and buildings to looming shadows. By then, Molly and Neil are in the town's tavern, where around 60 people have gathered with pets and children. It is implied that the phenomenon is the product of an alien invasion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Child_in_Time"title="The Child in Time">
Stephen Lewis is, by his own admission, an accidental author of children's books. One Saturday, on a routine visit to the supermarket, during a momentary distraction, he loses his only daughter, Kate, aged three. The only purpose in his life becomes sitting as a member of a government committee on childcare, an activity he does with little to no interest. Otherwise he spends his days lying on the sofa drinking scotch and watching mindless TV programmes and the Olympic games. His wife, Julie, frustrated by her husband’s seemingly futile quest to find Kate, has moved away to the countryside and become a recluse.Stephen occasionally visits his close friend, Charles Darke, who was in charge of publishing Stephen's first novel and is now a junior Minister in the Cabinet, and a rumoured future candidate for Prime Minister. Darke's wife, Thelma, is a quantum physicist who engages Stephen with her outlandish theories on time and space.At the behest of Thelma, who believes Stephen's marriage with Julie is salvageable, he makes an effort to reconnect with Julie by visiting her. Although he has never visited the town, he feels strangely familiar with the place - especially a pub. There Stephen experiences a strange event that he cannot explain: he sees his parents as a young couple in a pub, before they were married, an event that is later confirmed to have happened by his parents. Though Julie and Stephen temporarily reconnect during his visit and sleep together, Kate's absence has become too great a divider between the two and they part believing it impossible to overcome her loss.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked_in_Time"title="Locked in Time">
Seventeen-year-old Nore Robbins is staying with her father Chuck, stepmother Lisette Bergé, stepbrother Gabe, and stepsister Josie at their Louisiana plantation during the summer. Nore's father recently remarried after her mother died less than a year ago, and this was her first time meeting her stepmother, stepbrother, and stepsister. During her time there, she notices unusual behavior from her new family. During dinner her first evening, Josie mentions she was in Hartford when the Ringling Circus tent caught fire. Nore finds this odd considering Josie is a teenager and the event occurred in the 1940s. A woman at the supermarket, Elaine Shannon, thought she recognized Lisette from twenty years ago, but Lisette says that she must be thinking of her mother, who Lisette stated had the same name. Nore is puzzled by this statement because Bergé is not her maiden name, but a name she obtained from a previous marriage.One day, Lisette tells Nore that Gabe invited her to go on one of his fishing trips. While out in the river, Gabe crashes the boat into a floating log and Nore falls into the water. Nore, who cannot swim, manages to grab onto a floating log and make her way back to land. Nore tries to tell her father that Gabe drove the boat into the log on purpose and left her there, but her father attributes it to an accident. While Nore is looking for evidence that might convince her father something is not right about the new family, she finds a very old picture of Lisette, Josie, and Gabe who look the same as they do now apart from their clothing and hairstyle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Assault"title="The Assault">
The novel consists of a brief prologue and five "episodes" dated 1945, 1952, 1956, 1966, and 1981.Twelve-year-old Anton Steenwijk is living with his parents and older brother on the outskirts of Haarlem in January 1945 under Nazi Occupation. One evening they hear shots and discover that Fake Ploeg, a prominent Dutch collaborator, has been shot. They watch as their neighbors, the Kortewegs, a father and his teen-age daughter, move the body from where it fell in front of their house to a position in front of the Steenwijks' house. In the chaotic hours that follow, Anton's family is killed and their house torched, while he spends a night in a dark police station cell in Heemstede being comforted by an unseen young woman prisoner. As Nazi authorities transport him to Amsterdam a German soldier dies trying to protect him when the convoy is attacked from the air. They place him in the care of an aunt and uncle there.The author writes: "All the rest is postscript–the cloud of ash that rises from the volcano, circles around the earth, and continues to rain down on all its continents for years." In the decades that follow, Anton becomes an anesthesiologist, marries twice, and has a child by each of his wives. He lives with his repressed memories and limited understanding of the events that destroyed his family, uncertain of others' motivations that night and suppressing any instinct to discover more about the way events unfolded, though what he knows is incomplete and presents riddles more than resolution. He learns more details through a series of chance encounters, not by seeking out witnesses and survivors. Only occasionally do his emotions overwhelm him. He weighs motivations and unintended consequences, the moral judgments made and risks taken, the interplay of intention and accident, the actions he and his brother and parents took or failed to take. Anton's discoveries take place against the background of the emergence of Dutch society from the war, the development of new political alignments associated with the Cold War, the anti-establishment Provo movement, and a huge anti-nuclear demonstration.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Fell_in_Love_with_the_Moon"title="The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon">
Duivichi-un-Dua, also known as Out-in-the-Shed or just "Shed", is a biracial bisexual who lives in the fictional town of Excellent, Idaho, in the middle part of the 20th century.In flashback, Shed reveals that in the 1880s he lived with his mother, a Shoshone Indian, and that his mother worked as a maid, laundress, and prostitute for no-nonsense but tender-hearted madam Ida Richilieu at Richilieu's hotel and brothel. The two live in a shed in the rear of Ida's place. Although Shed's mother will not speak about his father, Shed believes his father was a mentally ill cowboy named Billy Blizzard (who had been sexually involved with Shed's mother since Blizzard was 13 years old). Blizzard goes insane, raping the teenaged Shed. Shed's mother tries to hunt down her son's rapist, but Blizzard kills her. Ida Richilieu takes Shed on, so long as Shed acts as a prostitute for Richilieu's customers. Shed agrees.After a few years, Shed decides to discover more about his father and heritage. He leaves Excellent and tries to find his mother's tribe. On the way there, he meets Dellwood Barker, a Montana cowboy who introduces Shed to a variety of spiritual and mystical traditions. The two begin a relationship. After finding a photograph of his mother among Barker's possessions, Shed comes to believe that Barker is his father. Barker soon sends Shed on his way to the Shoshone tribe, not wishing to hinder Shed in his quest. Shed finds his mother's tribe living on a reservation, and meets the Shoshone medicine man, Owlfeather. Shed learns the true meaning of his name, but shortly thereafter is shot by Owlfeather's son, Charles Smith. Smith commits suicide moments later, and Owlfeather breathes life back into Shed (dying in the process).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Ask_Malice"title="Go Ask Malice">
Faith has always been a loner. Growing up in a broken home in South Boston, shuffled from relative to relative, her only companion was an imaginary friend named Alex, who helped her escape into a fantasy world of monsters and the supernatural, far from the real-life horrors of the waking world.Now, taken away from her mother by Social Services and shipped off to a foster home, Faith learns that some nightmares are all too real, that the inventions of her childhood really do haunt the night, hungry for blood. Enter Diana Dormer, a Harvard professor and representative of the Watchers' Council who has come to tell Faith of her destiny, to train her, to prepare her for what is to come: Faith is the Chosen One. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness.But she's not alone. When Alex, her childhood companion, returns in her dreams, she warns Faith that someone else is coming for her, a force so deadly and unforgiving that it has inspired fear in the underworld for a thousand generations. Its name is Malice.As memory and fantasy begin to merge, Faith's two worlds collide, with cataclysmic results. A violent battle for the soul of the Slayer is staged, winner take all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welcome_to_Dead_House"title="Welcome to Dead House">
The Benson family takes their first trip to Dark Falls to meet with the local real estate agent Compton Dawes, and see their new home. Mr. Benson inherited a house that belonged to his late great-uncle that he didn't even know existed. Amanda Benson, her little brother Josh, and their dog Petey immediately sense that something is not quite right. Despite the fact that it is the middle of July, the entire neighborhood seems covered in an artificial darkness created by the shadows of massive, overhanging tree limbs. Dead brown leaves, shade, and shadows are everywhere. Then there is the creepy old house, that appears to have been built many years ago. It is an enormous, dark, antique home with two large bay windows on the second floor that look eerily like a pair of dark eyes staring down at the street below. While Josh proceeds to impatiently whine in protest over the family move and how tragic it is for him, Mr. Dawes welcomes the family into the home. Whilst exploring her new room, Amanda watches with amazement as she catches a glimpse of a boy standing in the doorway, before quickly disappearing down the hall.Amanda feels much better after seeing her bedroom. She goes outside to tell Josh about it, but both he and Petey are gone. Mr. Dawes offers to provide directions while the family drive around town to find the missing pair. On the way Amanda finds it odd that there aren't any people in the houses or yards, or even on the street. Eventually, the group find Josh trying to catch Petey amongst the gravestones of the Dark Falls cemetery. The kids' father Jack ends up catching Petey and putting him on a leash despite how frantic his behavior is. The family then drops off Mr. Dawes at his real estate office in Dark Falls, where he mentions to the Bensons that they can come back the following week to finalize the contracts for the house. After an eventful first visit, the Benson family leave Dark Falls and head back home to their old neighborhood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_(novel)"title="Velocity (novel)">
Not so long ago a promising young short story writer, Billy Wiles has not even turned on his PC since his fiancée Barbara fell into a coma several years ago. Leading the life of a recluse who spends his spare time alone at home doing woodwork, he leaves his secluded house only when he goes to work as a bartender. An orphan, he associates with only a few people, and he considers them acquaintances rather than friends.Wiles' life takes a dramatic turn when he finds a piece of paper stuck to his windshield which contains an ultimatum (see book cover, below). He decides not to go to the police and to consult someone he knows who happens to be in the police force instead. Together, although not thoroughly convinced, the two men decide that the note must have been some sick joke.The following day, however, a cruel murder is reported which exactly fits the description given in advance by the alleged joker. Two more notes follow in quick succession, and only when they become increasingly personal does Wiles realize that he has not been chosen at random by the person he comes to think of as "the freak". For example, shortly after receiving a cryptic message saying "Are you prepared for your first wound?" he is physically assaulted by the mask-wearing killer. When Wiles recovers from the shock and the pain he realizes that the psychopath has driven three large fish hooks under the skin of his forehead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hōjōki"title="Hōjōki">
Chōmei introduces the essay with analogies emphasizing the impermanence of nature, setting a pessimistic view for the rest of this work. He recalls the devastating fire of the Fourth Month of Angen 3 where homes and governmental buildings "turned to ash and dust." Winds picked up the fire and spread the flames throughout the city. Those who were caught near it choked and collapsed. Others instantly died.Chōmei goes on to recount a great whirlwind that raged on from Nakanomikado and Kyōgoku to Rokujō during the Fourth Month of Jishō 4. The wind blew on for several blocks. No homes were spared; homes were reduced to posts and beams, and others were flattened. The wind blew items, boards, and shingles from the homes into the sky along with dust that obscured it.The Sixth Month of Jishō 4 brought on a change of the relocation of Japan's capital from Kyoto to Fukuhara. Although people objected, the emperor, ministers and high officials still moved. Those who depended on the capital left with them while others were left behind. Houses went in to ruin, and plots of land became barren fields. Chōmei takes a chance to visit Fukuhara, in which he sees that the city was too crowded for proper streets and nature always beat Fukuhara with violent winds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Forest_Apart"title="A Forest Apart">
While there, Lumpawarrump finds a burglar at Han and Leia Solo's apartment and pursues him into Coruscant's dangerous under-levels. Chewbacca and his wife, Mallatobuck, follow their son to find him fighting the burglar in the company of a band of thieves. The burglar and the thieves flee when they arrive. Chewbacca notices that Leia's datapad was stolen by the group. Before they can stop him, Lumpawarrump runs off to recover the datapad. When Chewbacca and Mallatobuck find him again, the burglars are carrying him into one of the secret detention centers Palpatine kept in the undercity. Chewbacca saves Lumpawarrump, but Mallatobuck is taken in his stead and dragged away. Chewbacca and Lumpawarrump learn that the burglars were attempting to assassinate the New Republic's leaders so Chewbacca comms Han to inform him of the plot. Chewbacca and Lumpawarrump invade the enemies' base to find an advanced IT-3 interrogation droid attempting to brainwash Malla into believing that the Solos are a danger to her child. Chewbacca attacks and frees Mallatobuck. Han then arrives with a New Republic security company, chases off the last of the pursuers, and takes Chewbacca to the nearest medical center. Security learns that this was a plot by the presumed deceased Ysanne Isard to seek the destruction of the New Republic's government after the Krytos Virus failed to destroy Coruscant. Han tries to free Chewbacca from his life debt again but the Wookiees refused once again. In the end Lumpawarrump heads back to Kashyyyk after learning a lesson about listening to his parents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythago_Wood"title="Mythago Wood">
The events of "Mythago Wood" occur between 1946 and 1948. Stephen Huxley returns from service (after recuperating from his war wounds) to see his elder brother Christian, who now lives alone in their childhood home, Oak Lodge, just on the edge of Ryhope Wood. Their father, George, has died recently (their mother, Jennifer, died some years earlier). Christian is disturbed but intrigued by his encounters with one of the mythagos, while Stephen is confused and disbelieving when Christian explains the enigma of the wood. Both had seen mythagos as children, but their father explained them away as travelling Gypsies. Christian returns to the wood for longer and longer periods, eventually assuming a mythical role himself. In the meantime Stephen reads about his father's and Edward Wynne-Jones's studies of the wood. Part of his research on the wood causes him to contact Wynne-Jones's daughter, Anne Hayden. Stephen also meets a local man named Harry Keeton, a burn-scarred ex-RAF pilot, who encountered a similar wood when he was shot down over France and has since been trying to find a city that he saw there. Stephen and Harry try to survey and photograph Ryhope Wood from the air, but their small plane is buffeted back by inexplicable winds each time they try to fly over the trees. Stephen soon has his own encounters with the woodland mythagos (and an older Christian) and eventually, to save both his brother and a mythago girl named Guiwenneth (also referred to as Gwyneth or Gwyn), he ventures deep into the wood, accompanied by Harry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Didn't_Mean_to_Go_to_Sea"title="We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea">
The Walkers help Jim Brading, who was given the sailing cutter "Goblin" by his uncle, moor her when he misses the buoy. In return he invites them to sail aboard "Goblin". Mother agrees provided that they stay within the estuary of the rivers Orwell and Stour, do not pass the Beach End buoy at the mouth of the rivers, and do not "go out to sea". These conditions are imposed because of the imminent arrival of their father.The children promised to abide by these conditions. However, on the second morning during a calm, the engine runs out of petrol; Jim had used it for some time the night before last. So, leaving the children aboard the anchored "Goblin" Jim rows ashore in his dinghy, the "Imp", to catch a bus to a garage in order to fill a petrol can - however he does not return, leaving the "Goblin" without her captain. An unexpected bank of fog then drifts over the river, and reduces visibility to zero. Some hours later, after hearing the anchor drag in the fog, the Walkers realise that the tide has risen, the anchor chain is now too short, and they are drifting down river. While attempting to put out more chain, John loses the main anchor, tries to lower the spare (kedge) anchor but it fails, leaving the yacht drifting out beyond Beach End into the North Sea. Aboard the drifting boat, John decides that it is safer to hoist the sails and go farther out to sea rather than stay near the shore among the sandbanks and shoals of the estuary, with the risk of being wrecked in the fog. A strengthening wind blows away the fog after a couple of hours, only for blinding rain to replace it. Susan is meanwhile wracked with guilt over the breaking of their promises and is also very seasick - Titty has a bad headache and has to lie down. As darkness closes in, they attempt to put about to return to the river, but find that sailing against the now storm-force wind is impossible, so run eastward with the wind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Watcher_in_the_Woods"title="A Watcher in the Woods">
Fifteen year old Jan Carstairs is the narrator. Her family moved from Ohio to a small town in Massachusetts, where her father has accepted a teaching position at a local college. They live in a big old brick and stucco house in the country, which borders on a forest.The previous owner, Mrs. Aylwood lives nearby. Fifty years earlier, her fifteen year old daughter, Karen, disappeared in the woods. They bought the house. Jan had known they would. It was her mother's kind of house. Yet it was Jan who had made the purchase possible. Mrs. Aylwood, who was selling the house only because she had to, had talked to Jan and said, "I'll have to take a chance on you." What chance was that?Moving in, Jan felt the watcher still, but the only concrete evidence was a rash of broken mirrors-all with a large X across the middle. Not until the family went on a picnic near the old pond on the property did more clues come, and then they came as puzzles to be solved, as mysteries to be understood, as incredible facts to be absorbed, and as desperate need begging for prompt action.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Because_the_Night_(novel)"title="Because the Night (novel)">
"Because the Night" features Hopkins investigating a triple murder at a liquor store. Nothing was stolen, leading Hopkins to suspect that the crime was a thrill killing. His investigation crosses paths with psychiatrist John Havilland, who uses drugs and professional expertise to manipulate a small group of followers into crime and debauchery. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavondyss"title="Lavondyss">
Tallis Keeton, the younger sister of Harry Keeton (from "Mythago Wood"), is the protagonist of the story. "Lavondyss" starts with Tallis's grandfather and his efforts to write down some of his encounters with the mythagos from the nearby Ryhope Wood; Tallis is still a baby at this point. The story soon jumps forward a few years to where Tallis and her development are concentrated upon – it is at this point that the story shows her developing relationship with the land around her house and the mythagos emerging from Ryhope wood. This development continues throughout the book as periods in her life from baby to child to teenager to young woman are shown to the reader. As Tallis' shamanistic powers grow, she undertakes a quest in Ryhope wood to find her lost brother and undergoes a metamorphosis of her own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wise_Men_(Nadler_novel)"title="Wise Men (Nadler novel)">
Hillard (Hilly) Wise gives the novel first-person narration. "Wise Men" is broken into three sections: 1947–52, during Hilly's adolescence; 1972; and the present. Hilly grows up in New Haven, Connecticut, where the Wises are Jewish in a non-Gentile community. Arthur Wise, Hilly's father, is an ambulance chaser who becomes very wealthy from class-action lawsuits involving airplane crashes. From Arthur's wealth, the family decides to move to the WASP community of Bluepoint, Cape Cod. Included in the deal is a black caretaker, Lem Dawson. The family hires Lem for $8 per week.Lem and Hilly form a friendship despite Arthur's dis-allowance; as a result, Hilly must keep the relationship secret. Lem introduces him to his niece, Savannah, and Hilly falls in love with her. Hilly meets Savannah's father Charles Ewing, a baseball player cut from the Milwaukee Braves due to race. Savannah wants to run away with Lem. Hilly originally wants to join them, but he changes his mind and disrupts their attempt. Later, Arthur proffers Hilly $70 million, which he rejects on moral grounds. Now working as a "race relations" reporter for a Boston newspaper, Hilly travels to Iowa for a story about Ewing, which he thinks may have to do with Savannah.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Hour"title="The Secret Hour">
15-year-old Jessica Day moves with her family to Bixby, Oklahoma after her mother is employed at a high-tech aerospace company. Soon after the move, Jessica awakens to find time frozen and rain stopped in mid air. Although she thinks it is a dream, she is suspicious when she wakes to find her clothes wet. The next night, it happens again. Leaving her room, she finds that her family is frozen and the only other living thing is a cat, which leads her out of her house. Once outside, the cat transforms into a snake, revealing that it is actually a slither. It, along with other slithers and a darkling in the form of a large cat, attacks her. Jessica is rescued by the "Midnighters": Dess, Rex and Melissa, who chase away the animals using thirteen letter words and steel.The next day, they explain that in Bixby time freezes for an hour every midnight and that only Midnighters - people born at the moment of midnight - can enter it. Creatures known as darklings live in this secret hour where they can hide from advances in human technology. Darklings hate people and fear new inventions, complex concepts and the number 13. It was the darklings who took one hour of each 25-hour-day and hid inside it so that people couldn't get to them. They also explain that each Midnighter has a special power - Dess is a polymath, Rex is a Seer (someone who can read the lore - the ancient history of the midnighters) and Melissa is a mindcaster (meaning she has a variety of telepathic abilities). They don't know what Jessica's power is, except that it isn't the same as any of theirs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_War_II"title="God of War II">
## Setting.As with its predecessor, "God of War II" is set in an alternate version of ancient Greece, populated by the Olympian gods, Titans, heroes, and other beings of Greek mythology. With the exception of flashbacks, the events are set between those of the games "" (2007) and "God of War III" (2010). Several locations are explored, including a real-world setting in the ancient city of Rhodes, and several fictional locations, including a brief scene in the Underworld, the Lair of Typhon, the Island of Creation and its locales, Tartarus, and a brief scene on Mount Olympus.Rhodes, its skyline dominated by the massive statue, the Colossus of Rhodes, is a war-torn city under assault by Kratos, the God of War, and his Spartan army. The Lair of Typhon, hidden in an unknown location, is a snow-topped mountain and prison of the Titans Typhon and Prometheus. The Island of Creation is a vast island located at the edge of the world and home to the Sisters of Fate. The island is host to deadly traps, puzzles, and monsters. On the outskirts of the island are the Steeds of Time, and on the island itself are the Temples of Lakhesis and Atropos, and the Bog of the Forgotten, which hides the Gorgon Euryale and is the site of Jason of the Argonauts' last battle. Beyond the Bog are the Lowlands and the Great Chasm: a huge divide that blocks the way to the Palace of the Fates. At the base of the Chasm is the realm of Tartarus—prison of the Titan Atlas, condemned to hold the world on his shoulders. The Temple of the Fates is also filled with traps and monsters, while the final battle occurs on Mount Olympus, home to the gods.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Might_as_Well_Be_Dead"title="Might as Well Be Dead">
Nero Wolfe is hired to find a missing person, who soon turns up — under a new name — as a newly convicted murderer in a sensational crime.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_and_the_Witch"title="Simon and the Witch">
In the first chapter, "The Backwards Spell" the witch teaches Simon how to turn the school gardener into a frog, but forgets how to turn him back. She eventually remembers the spell, and turns the gardener into a man again, claiming privately she never forgot the spell at all.In chapter two, "The Lost Magic Wand", the witch loses her wand so Simon takes her to the police station where the witch becomes fascinated with Constable Scruff's uniform, and so becomes a policewoman. The three eventually find the witch's wand, which has been stolen by two thieves who used it as a poker for their fire.In chapter three, "The Witch at the Seaside", Simon takes the witch on holiday to the beach for a day, where she makes the English Channel disappear, not believing Simon's assurances that it is not flooding. She agrees to put it back on the condition she is featured on the evening news, which she is. In "The Witch has Measles", chapter four, the witch catches double German measles, so goes to hospital.She sees the trolleys patients are moved round on, and organises races on them, and everyone has so much fun they all feel better and go home again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Looking_Glass_Wars"title="The Looking Glass Wars">
The premise of the book is that Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel "Alice in Wonderland" was fiction, but that the character Alice and the world of Wonderland is real. Carroll's novel is said to have been inspired by the images, ideas, and names related by Alice to the author, whom she had requested to make a book of her personal history.The book's prologue tells of Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson showing Alice Liddell (who claims her name to be spelled "Alyss") his manuscript for "Alice's Adventures Under Ground". Alyss is shocked by the book's contents and refuses to speak to Dodgson ever again.The story then begins many years earlier, on Alyss' seventh birthday in Wonderland, which is ruled by imagination and is the source of all imagination for all other worlds. Wonderland features a class system similar to that seen in England during the 17th century. The government is a queendom with an advising Parliament dominated by a playing card based hierarchy, with the Heart family at the top. The Wonderland queen is a member of the Heart family, and the parliament is composed of reigning members of the Spades, Clubs, and Diamonds.Wonderland, ruled by Queen Genevieve Heart, is still recovering from a civil war between White Imagination and Black Imagination which ended twelve years prior to the beginning of the story. Alyss' companions include tutor Bibwit Harte (whose name is an anagram of "White Rabbit"), the queen's bodyguard Hatter Madigan, Alyss' best friend Dodge Anders, childhood troublemaker Jack of Diamonds, and military commander General Doppelganger. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_No_It_Isn't!"title="Oh No It Isn't!">
Bernice Summerfield's investigation into the lost civilisation of Perfection takes a turn for the strange when her cat Wolsey turns into Puss in Boots…
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorcing_Jack_(novel)"title="Divorcing Jack (novel)">
Set in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the novel's events follow a turbulent period in the life of married, cynical and usually drunk journalist Dan Starkey. Dan's wife Patricia leaves him after a drunken party in which he kisses a student called Margaret. What follows is a darkly comical tale of murder and mystery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Egg"title="Dragon's Egg">
## The neutron star.Half a million years ago and 50 light-years from Earth, a star in the constellation Draco turns supernova, and the star's remnant becomes a neutron star. The radiation from the explosion causes mutations in many Earth organisms, including a group of hominina that become the ancestors of "Homo sapiens". The star's short-lived plasma jets are lop-sided because of anomalies in its magnetic field, and set it on a course passing within 250 astronomical units of the Sun. In 2020 AD, human astronomers detect the neutron star, call it "Dragon's Egg", and in 2050 they send an expedition to explore it.The star contains about half of a solar mass of matter, compressed into a diameter of about , making its surface gravity 67 billion times that of Earth. Its outer crust, compressed to about 7,000 kg per cubic centimeter, is mainly iron nuclei with a high concentration of neutrons, overlaid with about of white dwarf star material. The atmosphere, mostly iron vapor, is about thick. The star shrinks slightly as it cools, causes the crust to crack and produce mountains high. Large volcanoes, formed by liquid material oozing from deep cracks, can be many centimeters high and hundred meters in diameter, and will eventually collapse, causing starquakes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_to_Babylon"title="Walking to Babylon">
Bernice Summerfield travels back in time to ancient Babylon to try to prevent the powerful race known only as the People from destroying the city with a singularity bomb.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthright_(Robinson_novel)"title="Birthright (Robinson novel)">
After the TARDIS malfunctions and then explodes, the Doctor's companions find themselves in two different time zones. Bernice is stranded in the East End of London of 1909, where a series of grisly murders is occurring blamed on Spring Heeled Jack, while Ace is trapped on the planet Ant'ykhon fighting alongside guerrilla fighters against alien oppressors.Ace discovers that Ant'ykhon is actually the planet Earth, 22,000 years in the future and devastated by rising temperatures. The Charrl, an insect-like race, now inhabit Earth. They have been using an unstable trans-dimensional link called the "Great Divide" to travel to Earth's past in order to escape from the dying planet. Once there they implant humans with their eggs, but inadvertently kill them, causing the murders blamed on Spring-Heeled Jack. Since the Great Divide is unstable, any Charrl that travels to the past eventually crumbles into dust.Back in 1909, Benny is scratched by one of the time-travelling Charrls and is implanted with an egg. This has the effect of placing her under the control of the Charrl, causing her to replace the missing Time Vector Generator in the TARDIS and reunite it with its other half in the future. This also stabilizes the Great Divide and allows Jared Khan, a Charrel agent, to attempt to use the Great Divide to give him immortality. The TARDIS time rams its other half and sends it and Khan back to Siberia 1908, where it explodes, causing the Tunguska event.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_War_(novel)"title="Just War (novel)">
The Doctor and his companions land in German-occupied Guernsey in 1941 where the Nazis are pursuing a top-secret weapon which could change the course of the war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverwing_(novel)"title="Silverwing (novel)">
## Part I.Shade is a young Silverwing bat whose father disappeared before he was born. He lives with his mother, Ariel, and is bullied by other newborns, especially Chinook and his friends, for being the runt of his colony. Shade challenges Chinook to look at the sun, an act forbidden by the owls. When Chinook backs down from the challenge, Shade looks at the sun, attracting the attention of an owl. Four elders, Bathsheba, Aurora, Lucretia and Frieda, try to discipline Shade at Tree Haven, the Silverwings' roost. Instead, Frieda takes Shade to an Echo Chamber storing the history of the bats and their rivalry with the owls. She shows him a metal band on her wrist and says that the bat goddess, Nocturna, gave it to her as part of a promise that bats would one day return to the sun.The group of owls, led by General Brutus, come to Tree Haven to get payback on Shade. When the bats refuse to hand over Shade, the owls set the tree on fire. Despite Bathsheba's complaints, Frieda orders the colony to join the males at Stone Hold and, from there, they migrate to their winter retreat of Hibernaculum. Before the journey, Ariel teaches Shade a sound map, which uses landmarks, such as a cathedral, a valley shaped like a wolf's head and a waterfall. While Shade's colony is migrating, a strong storm breaks out and separates Shade from his colony. Shade lands on a human fishing boat and meets Marina, a Brightwing bat who, like Frieda, is banded. A passing Graywing colony offers to help Shade relocate the Silverwings. However, he decides to go with Marina instead upon hearing that banded bats are not welcome in their group.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Enchantment"title="The Last Enchantment">
The protagonist of this story is the clairvoyant and wise Merlin, the wizard of legend, who is recounting his story of the reign of Arthur Pendragon as he oversees Arthur's destiny to become the great king Merlin has predicted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shane_(novel)"title="Shane (novel)">
The story is set in 1889 Wyoming, whenthe Wyoming Territory was still open to the Homestead Act of 1862. It is narrated by a homesteader's son, Bob Starrett. The original unclaimed land surrounding the Starretts' homestead had been used by a cattle driver named Luke Fletcher before being claimed by Bob's father, Joe Starrett, along with 12 other homesteaders. Fletcher had settled there first, although he could only claim as a homestead. He wants to expand his herd; homesteads in the area would hinder its growth.The title character, Shane, is a mysterious stranger who rides into and then out of the lives of the Starrett family, "a man who seemed to come from nowhere and appeared equally determined to pass on to nowhere." He is typically quiet, always silent about his past. He does not wear his gun, and yet everyone seems to understand that he is a dangerous man. Joe Starrett hires Shane as a hand on his farm, and Shane puts aside his handsome Western clothes and buys dungarees. He then helps the homesteaders to avoid intimidation by Fletcher and his men, who try to get them to abandon their farms. With Joe Starrett's leadership and Shane's help, the farmers resist Fletcher. Shane is forced into a gun battle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Spiders"title="The Golden Spiders">
A youngster comes to Wolfe's office and tells Wolfe that he saw a woman driving a car, apparently being menaced by her passenger. The next day, the boy is murdered while washing car windows at a nearby intersection.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Many_Cooks_(novel)"title="Too Many Cooks (novel)">
Wolfe, a knowledgeable gourmet as well as a detective, attends a meeting of great chefs, "Les Quinze Maîtres", at a resort in West Virginia, and jealousies among them soon lead to strife; then, one of the chefs is murdered. Wolfe sustains his own injury in the course of finding the culprit but also obtains the secret recipe for "saucisse minuit".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Room_(Narayan_novel)"title="The Dark Room (Narayan novel)">
Savitri is a submissive wife who listens to all the harsh abuses sent out to her by her husband Ramani. Ramani works for the elite Engladia Insurance Company and will do anything to satisfy his bosses.Savitri has three children Kamala, Babu and Sumati. Savitri would flee to her dark room when she could not tolerate the pangs of intolerance and maltreatment meted out to her unfairly. She discovers sadly that her husband is having an affair with another woman. Her husband even takes her favorite bench so that he can use it to decorate the other woman's house. Her husband seems more interested in flattering and pleasing the other woman. A simpleton like Savitri has nowhere to go. She tries to drown herself but unfortunately she gets saved. She works as a temple custodian. She can fend for herself but she has her past life also. She cannot forget the bleak look on her children's faces when she abandoned them, much to their shock.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shell_Seekers"title="The Shell Seekers">
Shifting in time, the novel tells the story of Penelope Keeling, the daughter of unconventional parents (an artist father and his much-younger French wife), examining her past and her relationships with her adult children. When the novel opens, Penelope is in her 60s and has just been discharged from the hospital after what was seemingly a heart attack. Penelope's life from young womanhood to the present is revealed in pieces, from her own point of view and those of her children. Much of the forward impetus of the novel involves the work of her father, including a painting called "The Shell Seekers", given to Penelope as a wedding present.Pilcher's novel "September" includes the character of Noel Keeling, son of Penelope.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Petros_and_Goldbach's_Conjecture"title="Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture">
Petros Papachristos, a child prodigy, is brought by his father, a Greek businessman, to the University of Munich to verify his genius with Constantin Caratheodory, a Greek-German mathematician. The boy immediately shows an excellent aptitude for mathematics and graduates soon at the University of Berlin. Later he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, where he collaborates with the mathematicians Godfrey Harold Hardy, John Edensor Littlewood and Srinivasa Ramanujan. He is then offered a professorship in Munich, which he accepts because it was far from the great mathematical centres of the time, and it was therefore the ideal place to live in isolation while tackling the Goldbach conjecture.After years of fruitless work, Petros arrives at an important intermediate result, which he prefers not to disclose in order not to reveal the object of his research and involuntary helping someone else working on the same problem. Later he comes to an even more important result and decides finally to publish it. He sends it to Hardy, whose answer, however, is disappointing: the same discovery had already been published by a young Austrian mathematician. Petros then falls into the deepest depression, taunted by mental exhaustion and the fear that his genius might vanish. Mathematics also begins to enter his dreams, which often turn into nightmares. During a research visit at Trinity College, however, he learns from a young mathematician named Alan Turing of the existence of the incompleteness' theorem by Kurt Gödel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_to_Dust_(novel)"title="Dust to Dust (novel)">
Andy Fallon, Internal Affairs cop and son of police legend, "Iron" Mike Fallon, is found hanging nude in his bedroom, facing a mirror with the word "sorry" printed on it. Was it a suicide, an erotic accident, or murder? Sam Kovac and Nikki Liska, two of Minneapolis' toughest detectives are told to exploit the case, call it an accident and move on. But Kovac isn't convinced and when Iron Mike is found dead a few days later, another apparent suicide, Kovac and Liska stop listening to the brass, put their careers on the line and start their own investigation. As they begin to dig, they uncover cover ups, a connection to a twenty-year-old case and a killer who wants to keep the secrets of the past dead and buried.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Child_of_the_Cavern"title="The Child of the Cavern">
Covering a time span of over ten years, this novel follows the fortunes of the mining community of Aberfoyle near Stirling, Scotland. Receiving a letter from an old colleague, mining engineer James Starr sets off for the old Aberfoyle mine, thought to have been mined out ten years earlier. Starr finds mine overman Simon Ford and his family living in a cottage deep inside the mine; he is astonished to find that Ford has made a discovery of the presence of a large vein of coal. Accompanying Simon Ford are his wife, Madge, and adult son, Harry.From the outset, mysterious and unexplained happenings start to occur around the main characters, attributed initially to goblins and firemaidens.Soon after the discovery of the new vein of coal, the community is revitalised with a whole town growing up around the underground lake called Loch Malcolm.Suspicious of a malevolent force at work, Harry continues his explorations of the cavern system, where down a deep shaft, he discovers a young orphan girl named Nell. Over the course of the next few years Nell is adopted by Simon and Madge but reveals nothing of where she came from, only that she had never been out of the mine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doorbell_Rang"title="The Doorbell Rang">
Nero Wolfe is hired to force the FBI to stop wiretapping, tailing and otherwise harassing a woman who gave away 10,000 copies of a book that is critical of the Bureau and its director, J. Edgar Hoover."The Doorbell Rang" generated controversy when it was published, due largely to its unflattering portrayal of the FBI, its director and agents. It was published at a time when the public's attitude toward the FBI was turning critical, not long after Robert F. Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover clashed and the Bureau was coming under fire for its investigations of Martin Luther King Jr. Some dismissed the book: "National Observer" described it as "little more than an anti-FBI diatribe", and Nero Wolfe fan John Wayne wrote Rex Stout a terse note of goodbye after reading the condensed magazine version. But Clifton Fadiman, quoted in a Viking Press advertisement for "The Doorbell Rang", thought it was "the best of all Nero Wolfe stories".Rachel Bruner, a wealthy Manhattan widow, has recently incurred the wrath of the FBI. After reading a book called "The FBI Nobody Knows", a prominent critique of the many unethical practices of the Bureau, she has mailed 10,000 copies of it to prominent figures across the country. Having endured several incidents of harassment and prying, she offers to hire Wolfe to persuade the FBI to leave her alone. Although initially hesitant of making a powerful enemy, Wolfe is persuaded over Archie’s objections when Bruner offers a $50,000 retainer and then doubles it to $100,000, as well as a fee and any expenses he may incur. He is also sympathetic to both Bruner’s plight and the arguments made in the book, and decides not to withdraw in the face of what he sees as heavy-handed and bullying opposition tactics.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_a_Thief"title="Take a Thief">
Skif's parents are dead, and he lives with his horrible uncle, who does not make much of an attempt to take care of him. Because of this, Skif turns to thievery so that he can obtain food. One day, after dressing up like a page and stealing food from Lord Orthallen's table, he hides in the laundry room. There he inadvertently meets with a fellow and more experienced thief, and begs to be trained in the art. The boy gives in, and Skif finds himself living permanently with him, other boys and Bazie (their teacher).Eventually Skif becomes a master at the trade, and is glad for good food and clothes. One night after a successful theft, Skif comes home to find his house in flames and his comrades dead.In need of money and a home, Skif steals a beautiful white horse, only to find out she is a Companion and he is her Chosen. This means that the two are linked for life, and must work together to aid Valdemar. Skif figures that being a Herald is better than nothing, and travels with his new Companion, Cymry, to the Herald's Collegium. There the circumstances of his life improve, and Skif finds friends, books, a comfortable bed, and good education. However, he still feels that one thing is missing from his life: revenge for the lives of his friends and beloved mentor Bazie. In the end Skif helps Herald Alberich, the weaponsmaster, take the criminal down, and earns his name as a hero of Valdemar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_President_Vanishes"title="The President Vanishes">
The book concerns the mysterious disappearance of the President of the United States, who was facing a serious political crisis, perhaps even impeachment, over his handling of the foreign situation, namely an impending war in Europe. The disappearance of the president seems like a kidnapping, but no ransom is demanded.Although not revealed in detail until near the end, it is fairly apparent from an early stage that the president has staged his own disappearance to counter an impending military coup staged by an upstart army of fascist "Grey Shirts" allied with a small coterie of industrialists (similar to the Business Plot). The aim of all this is to involve the United States in a European war when none of the combatants has attacked American territory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_for_Business"title="Bad for Business">
Amy Duncan is a private investigator for the firm of Bonner and Raffray (see "The Hand in the Glove" for more complete information about Dol Bonner and this company) and the youngest of four women on what is called the "siren squad". Her detective work is based on the theory that most men get careless eventually around pretty women, especially those with chartreuse eyes like hers, and she's been trying to encourage a handsome young man named Leonard Cliff to get careless when she gets knocked down (harmlessly) by a car driven by private investigator Tecumseh Fox. He learns of her assignment, which is to investigate the possibility the company of which Cliff is a vice-president, a large food conglomerate, has been putting quinine into jars of food sold by her uncle's company, Tingley's Tidbits; someone certainly has, and it's bad for business.After a further series of coincidences involving her boss, Cliff and Fox, she is fired and goes to visit her uncle after working hours—she finds him murdered in his office and is promptly knocked unconscious without seeing her assailant. Fox and the police both investigate the company, including its sales manager Sol Fry and production manager G. (for Gwendolyn) Yates, but reserve their suspicions for Tingley's son Phil, who has crackpot ideas about reforming the economic system, and Guthrie Judd, who owns the food conglomerate. Since the quinine problems began, Mr. Tingley has been taking samples from the production line, and the latest sample jar is missing, but so are some documents that relate to the personal lives of Phil Tingley and Guthrie Judd. Fox tracks down the documents and learns Judd's secret, but it brings him no closer to the identity of the murderer. The only thing that does so is remembering a chance remark made by one of the suspects that leads directly to the missing sample jar and the guilty party.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swan_Song_(McCammon_novel)"title="Swan Song (McCammon novel)">
Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union peak, and the two superpowers engage in nuclear war. In hours, the United States is reduced to a barren wasteland covered by the snows of nuclear winter. The President, blaming himself for what happened, prepares some kind of system known only as "Talons", but his plane crashes before he can activate it. A number of individuals are caught up in the onset of nuclear war: Josh Hutchins and a young girl named Sue "Swan" Wanda take cover in the basement of a Kansas gas station; a homeless woman named Sister Creep miraculously escapes an explosion in the subway tunnels of New York City; Colonel Macklin and teenager Roland Croninger are trapped in a collapsed fallout shelter in Idaho.Amid the ruins of a jewelry store, Sister discovers an unusual glass ring with precious stones melted into it and soon discovers that the ring has supernatural properties, showing the holder visions of a better world. Sister and new companion Artie Wisco find themselves pursued by a demonic shapeshifter known as "The Man with the Scarlet Eye", who seeks to destroy the ring.Josh and Swan, wandering through post-apocalyptic America, meet Leona Skelton, who predicts via tarot cards that Swan will have to face the Devil. Sister and Artie meet mountain man Paul Thorsen, the leader of a small group of survivors, and continue their journey in his truck. Macklin and Roland reach the Great Salt Lake and discover a relatively well-maintained and guarded camp led by the narcissistic Kempka. Macklin and Roland capture drug addict Shiela and use her supply to bargain with Kempka and move into the camp. After Roland kills Kempka when the latter tries to rape him, Macklin assumes command and introduces military discipline to the camp, establishing the "Army of Excellence" (AoE). Meanwhile, Josh, Swan, and Leona find themselves trapped in a former K-Mart taken over by escaped psychiatric hospital patients; Leona sacrifices herself to allow Josh and Swan to escape from the group's leader Alvin Magrim. The pair then meet Rusty, the last survivor of a traveling circus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Setting_Sun"title="The Setting Sun">
Twenty-nine year old Kazuko, her brother Naoji, and their widowed mother are members of an impoverished aristocratic family living in post-war Tokyo. Kazuko had been married, but divorced and returned to the family household after claiming that she had had an extramarital affair with a painter she admired. The child she had been expecting was stillborn. Naoji, who served with the military in the South Pacific, is declared missing. Kazuko recalls a time when she burned snake eggs, thinking that they were viper eggs. It is revealed that at the time of Kazuko's father's death, there were many snakes present in and around the house, which therefore have become ominous in her and her mother's eyes.Kazuko and her mother move to the Izu peninsula countryside with the help of a relative, and she begins working in the fields to support them, claiming to be growing into a "coarse woman". One day, Naoji eventually returns. He is addicted to opium as he had been before the war. He treats his mother and sister cruelly, and spends most of the time among Tokyo's literary circles which he had been associated with before he was drafted. Kazuko finds Naoji's "Moonflower Journal," in which he rants about people's bigotry and insincerity, and writes about his addiction and his struggles as a writer and individual.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budding_Prospects"title="Budding Prospects">
Felix Nasmyth, the first-person narrator, is a young man who, as he tells readers right at the beginning of the book, has "always been a quitter". Without any hopes for the future, he is persuaded by one of his few friends to take part in a "summer camp"—a secluded rural area in Mendocino County, California-and grow marijuana on a large scale.The illegal business venture seems doomed from the start, but for once Nasmyth decides to prove something to himself and follow through. In the end, after many misadventures, the venture is a failure.At the same time Nasmyth has made the acquaintance of a lovely girl and has fallen in love with her. He ends his narrative on an optimistic note, returning to the girl with plans to "plant a little seed".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Mystery"title="Mr. Mystery">
The story is about 6 (briefly 5) friends who run a detective company, named Soh &amp; Co, in an old storeroom behind Alvin Soh's mother's jewelry shop. A large sign hangs outside proudly proclaiming: SOH &amp; CO INVESTIGATORS We investigate anything No case too big or too smallThey are frequently roped into solving crimes that baffle the police by their suspicious clients, frowned upon by their friend in the police, Sergeant Soo, as well as Alvin's mother, Gracie Soh (They are both worried about safety since Alvin’s father was murdered). 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_Silas_Lapham"title="The Rise of Silas Lapham">
The novel begins with Silas Lapham, a middle-aged native of rural New England, being interviewed for a newspaper story about his rise to wealth in the mineral paint business. Despite his limited education, Lapham is a shrewd and hardworking man, an American success story. But he, his wife and two daughters feel socially awkward compared to other wealthy Bostonians. They decide to build a new home in the fashionable Back Bay neighborhood, and Lapham spares no expense in making it impressive.Tom Corey, a young man from an "old money" Boston family, shows an interest in the Lapham girls, and Mr. and Mrs. Lapham assume he is attracted to Irene, their beautiful younger daughter. Corey joins the Lapham paint business in an attempt to find his place in the world, rather than rely on his wealthy father. Tom introduces Lapham to the cream of Boston society at a dinner party, and they remain on good terms even though the occasion turns out to be embarrassingly awkward.As Tom continues calling on the Laphams regularly, it's assumed that he wants to marry Irene, and she hopes for just such a result. Tom, however, later shocks both families by revealing that he loves Penelope, the older, less glamorous but more intelligent and thoughtful Lapham sister. Though Penelope has feelings for Tom, she is held back by the romantic conventions of the era, not wanting to act on her love for fear of betraying her sister.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sun_Rising"title="Black Sun Rising">
"Black Sun Rising" takes place on the fictional planet of Erna, following the perspective of Damien Vryce, a priest of the Church of Human Unification on Erna. The tale begins with him entering the great city of Jaggonath, a mimicry of modern-day Jerusalem, as the pagan religions that advocate the worship of personal gods and the church of the One God share the city. He has come to assist the Patriarch of his Church with a new, somewhat controversial mission: teaching initiates of his Order the rudiments of sorcery with the energy force known as the Fae (detailed further in Coldfire Trilogy section). As the Church primarily resists human reliance on the Fae, the classes are opposed by the Patriarch, though held with high regard by the Matriarch whom Damien serves.While in the city, Damien Vryce enters the shop of an Adept (individuals with the ability to sense the Fae on a level akin to a sixth sense) named Ciani, with whom he begins a light-hearted courtship. Their fledgling love is abruptly put on hold, however, when Ciani's shop explodes in a Fae-related accident. Damien presumes she is dead, but her assistant, Senzei "Zen" Reese, informs him otherwise. Ciani was alive, but mortally wounded, not physically but mentally and spiritually. She had been assaulted by a gang of unknown creatures that stole from her memories, and her skills as an Adept. This has left her bereft of a will to live; an Adept sees the Fae every waking moment, giving their vision a "life" to it that regular humans could not comprehend. Without her skill however, all she can see is a dead world. Senzei had set off the store as a Sacrifice, so as to hide the fact that Ciani was still alive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_True_Night_Falls"title="When True Night Falls">
In "When True Night Falls", Damien, Hesseth, and Tarrant land on the shores of the Eastern Continent where the order of the Church have managed to subdue the unconscious working of the Fae. Consequently, the technology of the civilization is far more advanced than the Western Continent as is seen by the casual use of explosive weapons and fireworks. While conversing with various leaders, the group learns that only women are allowed to rise to the highest ranks in the Eastern Church. Many rarely see the Matria or holy women of the Church except for odd snippets of time and it is discovered by the group that the Matria and holy women are in fact rakh disguised with tidal fae.After learning of the corruption starting on the Eastern Continent the group manage to trace it south, to the crystal palace of the Immortal Prince, and his Iezu servant, Calesta. Along the way, they rescue a young girl, Jenseny, whose father was killed and impersonated by the Prince's rakh servants. Jenseny is driven near to madness by events she has seen and her rare ability to see and control tidal fae. While scared and untrustful she manages to form a bond with Hesseth who is unable to bear children as was ritual to the rakh who journey away from their homes to mingle with humans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragons'_Wrath"title="Dragons' Wrath">
Bernice meets the Time Lord Irving Braxiatel and soon becomes involved in the hunt for a jewel thief who is after a rare artefact.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Northern_Light"title="A Northern Light">
The novel is written in alternating chapters from the past and present. The novel begins in the present day, with teenaged Mattie Cokey working at The Glenmore, a hotel on Big Moose Lake, to earn money during the summer. One of the hotel guests, Grace Brown, asks Mattie to burn a pack of letters. Later that day, Grace is found dead in the lake near the hotel. Mattie remembers the letters, which she did not have time to burn. She is drawn in by the mystery of what they might say, and she begins to read them. They reveal some shocking information about Grace's lover, Chester Gillette, who checked into the hotel as Carl Grahm. Grace was pregnant with Chester's child at the time, so he killed her.In the past, Mattie Cokey remembers her life on her family's farm in the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York. In 1906, when she was 16, Mattie dreamed of going to Barnard College. Her best friend, Weaver Smith, shows Mattie's writings to their teacher, Miss Wilcox, who sends an application for Mattie to Barnard. Mattie gets a "full scholarship" but cannot afford to buy the books and a train ticket, or to leave her family's farm. In an attempt to raise the money, Mattie cleans her rich Aunt Josie's house every week, but Aunt Josie refuses to pay her and tells Mattie she is selfish to leave the farm and the family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Western_Eyes_(novel)"title="Under Western Eyes (novel)">
## Part First.The narrator, an English teacher of languages living in Geneva, is narrating the personal record of Kyrilo Sidorovitch Razumov. Razumov is a student in the University of St. Petersburg in the early 1910s. Razumov never knew his parents and has no family ties. He is trusted by his fellow students, many of whom hold revolutionary views, but Razumov takes no clear position on any of the great questions of his time because he considers all of Russia his family. (A better view, perhaps, would be to say that Razumov has no family to fall back on, feels isolated from his contemporaries, takes no interest in the "great issues" of the day, and merely seeks a middle-class secure position within the Czarist system – thus, very ironically, he sees "all Russia" as his "family.")One night, Mr. de P—, the brutal Minister of State, is assassinated by a team of two, but the bombs used also claim the lives of his footman, the first assassin and a number of bystanders. Razumov enters his rooms to find Victor Haldin, a fellow student. Haldin tells Razumov that he was the one who murdered Mr. de P—, but that he and his accomplice did not make a proper escape plan. He requests Razumov's help because he trusts him, even though he realises that they do not quite belong in the same camp. Razumov agrees to help, if only to get Haldin out of his flat. Haldin tasks him with finding Ziemianitch, who was supposed to help Haldin escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorna's_People"title="Acorna's People">
In the book, Acorna has finally been reunited with her people - the Linyaari -and has travelled to the new homeworld of her people Narhii - Vhiliinyar to learn about her lost culture. However, she is distinctly different from her people due to her unusual upbringing, and most are not accepting of her. The only people who really befriend her are her aunt, Neeva and her shipmates, and the oldest Linyaari Grandam Naadiina, as well as the young girl named Maati. All of her friends on the ship "Balakiire" are called away on Acorna's first day on her planet, to investigate the loss of communication with certain off-world Linyaari colonies. This loss of communication soon spreads, and more ships are launched, but all join the missing and soon the fate of her spacefaring friends is placed in Acorna's hands.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_13_Clocks"title="The 13 Clocks">
The evil Duke of Coffin Castle lives with his good and beautiful niece, the princess Saralinda, in a castle so cold that all the clocks have frozen at ten minutes to five. Several suitors have tried to court the Princess, but the Duke's policy is to test their eligibility by assigning them impossible tasks. A few days before Saralinda's twenty-first birthday, Prince Zorn of Zorna arrives in the town disguised as a minstrel. He falls in with an enigmatic guide known as the Golux. Soon after, he is arrested for singing mocking songs about the Duke in public.The Duke learns "Xingu"'s true identity, and decides to allow him to court Saralinda. The Duke assigns Zorn the task of finding a thousand jewels, and sets a deadline 99 hours hence, which is too little time for Zorn to obtain the jewels from the kingdom of Zorna. In addition, the Duke demands that Zorn must also find a way to restart the thirteen frozen clocks.Zorn and the Golux travel to the home of Hagga, a woman who had been given the magical ability to weep jewels rather than tears. She tells them that she has wept so much, in order to provide jewels for others, that she can no longer weep from sadness; the only time she weeps is when she weeps from laughing. She adds that such jewels, produced by weeping with laughter, will turn back into tears a fortnight (fourteen days) later. Undeterred by this, the Golux and Zorn obtain a thousand of these short-lived jewels of laughter from her. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bones_of_the_Moon"title="Bones of the Moon">
In New York City, Cullen James' greatest wishes are being fulfilled: She marries her best friend; she travels in Europe; she has a baby daughter.But by night, bizarre dreams begin to intrude. In her dreams, Cullen visits a strange land called Rondua, where the sea is full of fish with mysterious names. She and a huge dog named Mr. Tracy escort a young boy named Pepsi across places such as the Northern Stroke, the Mountains of Coin and Brick, and the Plain of Forgotten Machines. Together they search for the Bones of the Moon, five bones that grant power over Rondua.As Cullen's days become more disjointed and episodic, her dreams grow in intensity. While searching for the last of the bones, she learns more about the adversary she and her dream friends race against. Bit by bit, the events in Rondua start affecting her life on earth, intersecting in unpleasant, then frightening ways.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tau_Zero"title="Tau Zero">
"Tau Zero" follows the crew of the starship "Leonora Christine", a colonization vessel crewed by 25 men and 25 women aiming to reach the nearby star Beta Virginis. The ship is powered by a Bussard ramjet, which was proposed 10 years before Anderson wrote the book. This mode of propulsion is not capable of faster-than-light travel, and so the voyage is subject to relativity and time dilation: the crew will spend 5 years on board, whereas 33 years will pass on the Earth before they arrive at their destination. The ship accelerates at a modest constant rate for most of the first half of the journey, eventually achieving an appreciable percentage of the speed of light, and the goal is to decelerate at the same rate during the second half of the journey by reversing the ram scoop fields. However, the "Leonora Christine" passes through a small nebula before the half-way point, damaging the deceleration field generators. Since the Bussard engines must be kept running to provide particle/radiation shielding, and because of the hard radiation produced by the engines, the crew can neither repair the damage nor turn off their ramjet.The text consists of narrative prose interspersed with paragraphs in which Anderson explains the scientific basis of relativity, time dilation, the ship's mechanics and details of the cosmos outside.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Planet"title="Big Planet">
Big Planet had been colonized hundreds of years prior to the start of the novel by misfits, faddists, cultists and anti-government advocates from Earth. The environment is Earth-like, including the surface gravity; even though the planet is much larger than Earth (hence the name), it is much less dense, resulting from a scarcity of metal. As a result, a large number of technologically backward societies have developed, many of them ruled by petty tyrants and prey to lawlessness, murder, and mayhem.Commissions from Earth have visited Big Planet at irregular intervals for 500 years to little effect; the majority of them are never heard from again. The latest, headed by Claude Glystra, arrives to try to stop the illegal importation of arms from Earth and halt Big Planet's slave trade, especially targeting Charley Lysidder, the ruthless, expansion-minded Bajarnum of Beaujolais. However, their starship is sabotaged by Lysidder's agents and crashes near a quaint village called Jubilith, near Beaujolais. The survivors attempt to reach Earth Enclave, 40,000 miles away, armed with little more than their wits and a few modern hand weapons. A Jubilith resident, Natilien-Thilssa, whom they call "Nancy," insists on tagging along, despite Glystra's opposition. The team begins to dwindle as Lysidder's efforts and the dangers of Big Planet take their toll. Nevertheless, by sheer tenacity, resourcefulness, and some luck, Glystra manages to triumph over Lysidder, despite the presence of Lysidder's agents within his own small group.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_of_the_Griffin"title="Year of the Griffin">
"The Year" is set in a fantasy world several years after the end of its domination by commercial tourism from our world. The University formerly produced large numbers of competent wizards who served as tour guides; current staff aims to produce competent wizards who gradually repair the damage caused by tours. It suffers financially because tuition demand is down, which greatly concerns the faculty, and educationally from its long practical focus, which barely concerns the few who have noticed. The head, wizard Corkoran, is obsessed with becoming the first man to visit the moon and devotes much time to that, but there is little research or innovation generally. The senior wizards have all retired; the middle-age and young know of no other way.Wizard Corkoran has selected children from wealthy families to fill his own first-year tutorial, hoping that a current appeal for donations will be fruitful. His class turns out to be unusual in other respects too. All six are talented, some in ways they do not yet understand, some encumbered by jinxes. Not one of the families is likely to donate because they have status rather than money, or their fortunes have recently slumped, or their children are here with grudging permission or none. Prince Lukin's father has not permitted him to be at the University, and his kingdom is also very poor; Ruskin is an escaped artisan dwarf, which is the third lowest and here to receive an education so the unjust ranking system can be overthrown; Felim ben Felim is a member of the royal family of Ampersand, whose Emir has vowed to send assassins if he is to attend; and Claudia, the half-sister of Emperor Titus, is here partially hiding from the Senate, who despise her for being half Marsh. Evidently, only one is personally wealthy, the beautiful Olga who does not divulge her name or even her region. Elda is the youngest daughter of Derk, the final Dark Lord before the revolution and head of a most important family now. But she is a griffin, appearing at first glance to be frightening and inscrutable, and her father does not approve of university education.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expendable"title="Expendable">
The year is 2452. Festina Ramos is an Explorer, assigned to the Technocracy Fleet ship Jacaranda. Her specific physical "qualification" for her job is a large port-wine birthmark on her right cheek. She and her fellow Explorer and partner Yarrun Derigha (who is missing half his jaw) are the two Explorers assigned to the ship; they lead the isolated existence typical of Explorers, isolated from the healthy and attractive members of the fleet as from the "beautiful people" of the larger society.Then Festina and Yarrun are plunged into a crisis: they are assigned to escort a Fleet admiral named Chee to planet Melaquin. Melaquin is the great question mark in the Technocracy's domain: for forty years Explorers have landed there, only to lose contact and disappear, cause unknown. The High Council has now acquired the habit of sending its troublesome admirals to Melaquin in the company of a team of Explorers, to rid itself of embarrassments without scandal or controversy. The fact that Explorers are lost in the process is accepted—since Explorers are expendable.Admiral Chee is precisely the kind of embarrassment the high council wants to dispose of, quickly and quietly. Well beyond the century mark in age, when doses of Youthboost are no longer effective in prolonging his life and health, he is "clearly unstable, possibly senile"—or else "suffering from Don't-give-a-shit-itis". Though they try to avoid the duty, and then concoct a plan of escape from their apparent sentence to oblivion, Festina and Yarrun must accompany Chee to the surface of Melaqiuin. There, things go quickly and badly wrong: Festina accidentally kills Yarrun while attempting an emergency tracheotomy, Chee dies of a stroke, and Festina is cut off from her ship, alone on Melaquin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Squirrel_Nutkin"title="The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin">
Squirrel Nutkin, his brother Twinkleberry, and their many cousins sail to Owl Island on little rafts they have constructed of twigs. They offer tawny owl Old Brown a gift and ask his permission to collect nuts on his island. Nutkin, however, dances about impertinently singing a silly riddle. Old Brown pays no attention to Nutkin, but permits the squirrels to go about their work. Every day for six days, the squirrels offer gifts to Old Brown, and every day as well, Nutkin taunts the owl with another sing-song riddle. Eventually, Nutkin annoys Old Brown once too often. The owl seizes Nutkin and tries to skin him alive. Nutkin escapes, losing most of his tail. After this, he becomes furious when he is asked riddles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_(Meyer_novel)"title="Twilight (Meyer novel)">
Bella Swan is a seventeen-year-old introvert girl who moved from Phoenix, Arizona to Forks, Washington on the Olympic Peninsula to live with her father, Charlie Swan, the town's police chief. Her mother, Renée Dwyer, is traveling with her new husband, Phil Dwyer, a minor-league baseball player. Bella is admitted to Forks High School, where she easily settles in with a group of friends. A somewhat inexperienced and shy girl, Bella is dismayed by several boys competing for her attention.On the first day of her school, Bella sits next to Edward in biology class, but he seems to be utterly repulsed by her, much to her bewilderment. He disappears for a few days but when he returns, he is unexpectedly friendly to Bella. Their newfound relationship is interrupted after Bella is nearly struck by a van in the school parking lot. Edward saves Bella, narrowly stopping the van with his bare hands. Bella questions Edward about how he saved her life but he refuses to tell her anything.During a campout, Bella meets Jacob Black, a local boy from the Quileute tribe. She learns from stories told at a bonfire with his tribe that Edward and his family are "the cold ones" (vampires) who consume only animal blood. Disturbed and riddled by recurring nightmares, Bella researches vampires. She compares the characteristics of the vampires in mythology to the Cullens and becomes convinced that Edward is a vampire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manalive"title="Manalive">
This is a book in two parts. The first, "The Enigma of Innocent Smith", concerns the arrival of a new tenant at Beacon House, a London boarding establishment. Like Mary Poppins, this man (who is tentatively identified by lodger Arthur Inglewood as an ex-schoolmate named Innocent Smith) is accompanied by a great wind, and he breathes new life into the household with his games and antics. During his first day in residence the eccentric Smith creates the High Court of Beacon; arranges to elope with Mary Gray, paid companion to heiress Rosamund Hunt; inspires Inglewood to declare his love for Diana Duke, the landlady's niece; and prompts a reconciliation between jaded journalist Michael Moon and Rosamund.However, when the household is at its happiest two doctors appear with awful news: Smith is wanted on charges of burglary, desertion of a spouse, polygamy, and attempted murder. The fact that Smith almost immediately fires several shots from a revolver at Inglewood's friend Dr. Herbert Warner seems to confirm the worst. Before Smith can be taken to a jail or an asylum, Michael Moon declares that the case falls under the purview of the High Court of Beacon and suggests that the household investigate the matter before involving the authorities or the press.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_Behind_(novel)"title="Left Behind (novel)">
The story begins with Cameron "Buck" Williams, a renowned journalist having recently survived an attempted invasion of Israel, on board a plane piloted by Rayford Steele en route to London. Suddenly, several passengers instantly vanish, leaving behind their clothes and other personal items. Upon being notified by flight attendant Hattie Durham, Steele contacts another pilot, only to learn that millions of people around the world have also disappeared in the same way.Steele lands the plane in Chicago, which has descended into anarchy and chaos. He returns home and discovers that his wife Irene and son Raymie have vanished. He soon realizes that the Rapture, the taking of all Christians, has occurred. He later reunites with his distraught daughter Chloe.Williams arrives in New York City where he meets with his father. However, he soon receives a call from his British contact Dirk, who informs him of a rising European politician. He later learns that the politician is Romanian President Nicolae Carpathia, who gives a rousing speech at the United Nations.Steele meets with Bruce Barnes, the pastor of the church he and Irene attended. Barnes reveals he was left behind for not truly believing in God and Christ. He then explains that the Tribulation, a period of chaos and suffering, will soon begin. Chloe, after some debating, ultimately accepts the truth and becomes a Christian with her father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_and_Ashes"title="Amber and Ashes">
"Amber and Ashes" is set in Krynn shortly after the death of Takhisis at the end of the War of Souls. Magic is back, and so are the gods. But the gods are vying for supremacy, and the war has caused widespread misery, uprooting entire nations and changing the balance of power on Ansalon.The mysterious warrior-woman Mina, brooding on her failure and the loss of her goddess, makes a pact with evil in a seductive guise. As a strange vampiric cult spreads throughout the fragile world, unlikely heroes—a wayward monk and a kender who can communicate with the dead—join forces to try to uproot the cause of the growing evil.It begins with Chemosh talking to himself in an abandoned temple about his plans to rule the pantheon and obtaining living servants as opposed to the dead. Shortly after, Mina and Galdar are seen. Mina is grieving the death of Takhisis and is about to kill herself when Chemosh intervenes and makes her his lover. It is then that the plot to create the Beloved of Chemosh begins.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Whole_Family"title="The Whole Family">
In the opening chapter Howells introduces the Talbert family, middle-class New England proprietors of a silverplate works that turns out ice-pitchers and other mundane household items. Daughter Peggy Talbert has just returned from her coeducational college engaged to a harmless but rather weak young man named Harry Goward.Eventually, after many twists and turns introduced by the subsequent contributors, Harry Goward is dismissed as a suitor, Aunt Elizabeth is sent off to New York City, and a more suitable mate for Peggy is found in a college professor named Stillman Dane. Peggy marries Dane and the couple sails off to Europe with Peggy's brother Charles and his wife Lorraine for a honeymoon tour.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unconsoled"title="The Unconsoled">
The novel takes place over a period of three days. It is about Ryder, a famous pianist who arrives in a central European city to perform a concert. He is entangled in a web of appointments and promises which he cannot seem to remember, struggling to fulfill his commitments before Thursday night's performance and frustrated with his inability to take control.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Face_of_the_Waters"title="The Face of the Waters">
"The Face of the Waters" takes place deep in the future, on a penal colony, inhabited by convicts and their progeny. The planet is "Hydros", an ocean planet whose inhabitants live on artificial floating islands.After a human offense against the natives of Hydros, the human population of the island of Sorve are ordered to leave. Forbidden on all other islands, in a flotilla of ships they seek the semi-mythical island of the Face of the Waters. During their journey they are forced to learn more about themselves, leading to questions about both religion and the purpose of Man. At the end of the novel Robert Silverberg addresses what it means to be human.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Werewolf_of_Paris"title="The Werewolf of Paris">
Like much Gothic fiction, "The Werewolf of Paris" opens with a frame story in which the author explains his struggle with the fantastic elements of his tale. Here the narrator, an anonymous American working on his doctoral research in Paris, discovers a manuscript in the hands of some trash-pickers. He describes it as "the Galliez report: thirty four sheets of closely written French, an unsolicited defense of Sergeant Bertrand Caillet at the latter's court-martial in 1871."A descendant of the cursed Pitamont clan, which destroyed itself in a long feud with the neighboring Pitavals, Bertrand is born one Christmas Eve to an adolescent girl who had been raped by a priest, Father Pitamont. Bertrand grows up with strange sadistic and sexual desires which are usually expressed as dreams. Sometimes the dreams are memories of actual experiences in which he had transformed into a wolf.His step-uncle, Aymar Galliez, who raises the boy (along with his mother Josephine and a servant Françoise), soon learns of Bertrand's affliction. Bertrand flees to Paris after his assault on a prostitute, his incestuous union with his mother, and his murder of a friend in their home village. Aymar tries to find Bertrand by studying the details of local crimes, such as the mutilation of corpses and various murders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Night_with_Moon"title="The Book of Night with Moon">
To her owners, apartment-dwellers on the upper East Side of New York's Manhattan Island, Rhiow looks like nothing more than their little black pet cat: a sweet-tempered, good-natured little creature who shakes them down for food at every opportunity, is always ready for a cuddle, and never ventures any further away than the apartment's terrace.But a lot more could be said about Rhiow...for when her humans aren't looking, she has a life of her own that they don't dream of. Rhiow is a wizard, and heads an elite team of other feline wizards whose job is to keep the Grand Central worldgates running. With her teammates Urruah (a dumpster-living, foodie tomcat with a yen for opera) and Saash (the "Scotty" of their team, cerebral and witty, but always scratching at fleas that aren't there), they help keep the city's wizardly public transport system purring along....Until one morning matters get suddenly complicated with the arrival of Arhu, an abrasive feral tom-kitten in the middle of his Ordeal—the potentially deadly initiation through which every wizard must pass to come into his or her power. The chain of events triggered by Arhu's adoption into their team leads Rhiow and her companions out of their own New York and into another, more ancient, and far deadlier one—to a confrontation with the Lone Power that's intent on the destruction of cats and humans alike.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thank_You_for_Smoking_(novel)"title="Thank You for Smoking (novel)">
Nick Naylor is the chief spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, a tobacco industry lobbying firm that promotes the benefits of cigarettes. He utilizes high-profile media events and intentionally provocative rhetoric in order to highlight what his clients view as an unfair crusade against tobacco and nicotine products.The political satire is heightened by Naylor's informal association with lobbyists from other industries that are subjected to routine vilification in the media, e.g. Polly Bailey, a lobbyist for the alcohol/spirits industry, and Bobby Jay Bliss, who represents the firearms industry. Collectively, they form what is known as the M.O.D. Squad, a reference to the title of a police drama, although in this case, "M.O.D." stands for "Merchants Of Death".A pivotal point in the plot occurs when Naylor is kidnapped by a clandestine group who attempt to kill him by covering him with nicotine patches. The search for the perpetrators of the crime leads to surprising results.In this respect, the plot mirrors one of Buckley's other satirical novels, "Little Green Men".
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_(Pamuk_novel)"title="Snow (Pamuk novel)">
Though most of the early part of the story is told in the third person from Ka's point of view, an omniscient narrator sometimes makes his presence known, posing as a friend of Ka's who is telling the story based on Ka's journals and correspondence. This narrator sometimes provides the reader with information before Ka knows it or foreshadows later events in the story. At times, the action seems somewhat dream-like. The story is set in the city of Kars which creates a sense of alienation for Ka as the city is unlike anywhere else in Turkey, due to its history as a Russian garrison town.Ka is a poet, who returns to Turkey after 12 years of political exile in Germany. He has several motives, first, as a journalist, to investigate a spate of suicides but also in the hope of meeting a woman he used to know. Heavy snow cuts off the town for about three days during which time Ka is in conversation with a former communist, a secularist, a fascist nationalist, a possible Islamic extremist, Islamic moderates, young Kurds, the military, the Secret Service, the police and in particular, an actor-revolutionary. In the midst of this, love and passion are to be found. Temporarily closed off from the world, a farcical coup is staged and linked melodramatically to a stage play. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Mr._Jeremy_Fisher"title="The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher">
Jeremy Fisher is a frog that lives in a damp little house amongst the buttercups at the edge of a pond. His larder and back passage are "slippy-sloppy" with water, but he likes getting his feet wet; no one ever scolds and he never catches cold. One day, Jeremy finds it raining and decides to go fishing. Should he catch more than five minnows, he would invite his friends to dinner. He puts on a mackintosh and shiny galoshes, takes his rod and basket, and sets off with "enormous hops" to the place where he keeps his lily-pad boat. He poles to a place he knows is good for minnows.Once there, the frog sits cross-legged on his lily-pad and arranges his tackle. He has "the dearest little red float". His rod is a stalk of grass and his line a horsehair. An hour passes without a nibble. He takes a break and lunches on a butterfly sandwich. A water beetle tweaks his toe, causing him to withdraw his legs, and rats rustling about in the rushes force him to seek a safer location. He drops his line into the water and immediately has a bite. It is not a minnow but little Jack Sharp, a stickleback. Jeremy pricks his fingers on Jack's spines and Jack escapes. A shoal of little fishes come to the surface to laugh at Jeremy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Mrs._Tittlemouse"title="The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse">
"Mrs. Tittlemouse" is a tale in which no humans play a part and one in which events are treated as though they have occurred since time immemorial and far from human observance. It is a simple story, and one likely to appeal to young children.Mrs. Tittlemouse is a "most terribly tidy little mouse always sweeping and dusting the soft sandy floors" in the "yards and yards" of passages and storerooms, nut-cellars, and seed-cellars in her "funny house" amongst the roots of a hedge. She has a kitchen, a parlour, a pantry, a larder, and a bedroom where she keeps her dust-pan and brush next to her little box bed. She tries to keep her house tidy, but insect intruders leave dirty footprints on the floors and all sorts of messes about the place.A beetle is shooed away, a ladybird is exorcised with "Fly away home! Your house is on fire!", and a spider inquiring after Miss Muffet is turned away with little ceremony. In a distant passage, Mrs. Tittlemouse meets Babbitty Bumble, a bumblebee who has taken up residence with three or four other bees in one of the empty storerooms. Mrs. Tittlemouse tries to pull out their nest but they buzz fiercely at her, and she retreats to deal with the matter after dinner.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Ginger_and_Pickles"title="The Tale of Ginger and Pickles">
Shopkeepers Ginger, a tomcat, and Pickles, a terrier allow their customers to purchase on credit, and, as a result, are unable to collect enough to pay the bills. They subsequently go out of business. Their competitor, Tabitha Twitchit, raises her prices once customers are forced to shop at her store and Mr. Dormouse tries to sell peppermints and candles with limited success. Eventually, Sally Henny-penny, a hen, successfully reopens the shop and offers an assortment of bargains.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Mrs._Tiggy-Winkle"title="The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle">
A little girl named Lucie lives on a farm called Little-town. She is a good little girl, but has lost three pocket handkerchiefs and a pinafore. She questions Tabby Kitten and Sally Henny-penny about them, but they know nothing (especially since Tabby Kitten licks her paw, and Sally Henny-penny flaps back into the barn clucking, "I go barefoot, barefoot, barefoot!" neither of which is very helpful). Lucie mounts a stile and spies some white cloths lying in the grass high on a hill behind the farm. She scrambles up the hill along a steep path-way which ends under a big rock. She finds a little door in the hillside, and hears someone singing behind it:She knocks. A frightened voice cries out, "Who's that?" Lucie opens the door, and discovers a low-ceilinged kitchen. Everything is tiny, even the pots and pans. At the table stands a short, stout person wearing a tucked-up print gown, an apron, and a striped petticoat. She is ironing. Her little black nose goes sniffle, sniffle, snuffle, and her eyes go twinkle, twinkle, and beneath her little white cap are prickles! She is Mrs. Tiggy-winkle, the animals' laundress and "an excellent clear-starcher". She keeps busy with her work. She has found Lucie's lost things, and launders them for her. She also shows Lucie items belonging to Mrs. Tiggy-winkle's animal customers. They have tea together, though Lucie keeps away from Mrs. Tiggy-winkle due to the prickles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Lame_Prince_and_his_Travelling_Cloak"title="The Little Lame Prince and his Travelling Cloak">
On the day of Prince Dolor's baptism, there was a great procession. His well-to-do nurse was fiddling with her dress while holding the Prince and she dropped him, causing damage to his spine (probably). But she told no one. A fairy godmother appears to the Nurse and reveals she knows what happened. The Prince's Mother (the Queen) dies. The Prince's legs never grow strong. He cannot walk; he can only crawl with his arms. The King dies, too. The Regent family moves into the castle (with many kids) and the Prince's Uncle rules the kingdom. Things are good throughout the land, but Prince Dolor is ignored. The new King sends Dolor away and tells everyone that Dolor died.Dolor is sent away to live in the lonely tower in the middle of a wasteland. There are no doors in the tower. It is 100 ft tall. But he has many books, toys and maps. His only companion is his nurse. And a deaf mute Black Knight brings them food and things. The Nurse is a 'prisoner', too. They use a ladder to get up into the tower. The Black Knight visits once a month. The Prince likes to be quiet and look out the window at the lonely plains. He does his lessons and schoolwork. He loves books. He learns of the kingdom of Nomansland. But he feels that to read of things and never see them is sad. If only he could fly he wished. And he wishes he had someone who would be nice to him. He was lonely.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Jemima_Puddle-Duck"title="The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck">
The tale begins in a farmyard which is home to a duck called Jemima Puddle-duck. She wants to hatch her own eggs, but the farmer's wife believes ducks make poor sitters and routinely confiscates their eggs to allow the hens to incubate them. Jemima tries to hide her eggs, but they are always found and carried away. She sets off along the road in her poke bonnet and shawl to find a safe place away from the farm to lay her eggs.At the top of a hill, she spies a distant wood, flies to it, and waddles about until she discovers an appropriate nesting place among the foxgloves. However, a charming fox gentleman with "black prick ears and sandy-coloured whiskers" persuades her to nest in a shed at his home. Jemima is led to his "tumble-down shed" (which is curiously filled with feathers), and makes herself a nest with little ado.Jemima lays her eggs, and the fox suggests a dinner party to mark the event. He asks her to collect the traditional herbs used in stuffing a duck, telling her the seasonings will be used for an omelet. Jemima sets about her errand, but the farm collie, Kep, meets her as she carries onions from the farm kitchen and asks her what she is doing and where she keeps going. She reveals her errand, Kep sees through the fox's plan at once, and finds out from Jemima where the fox lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sleeping_Father"title="The Sleeping Father">
The Schwartzes live their ordinary lives in the aptly named (and fictional) small town of Bellwether, Connecticut. When she thinks her two children do not need her any longer, Lila Schwartz, a sexually active woman, leaves behind her family, calls herself Lila Munroe and moves to California, where she trains, and later works, as a lawyer. Faced with the dual challenge of having to raise two teenage kids while remaining successful in his demanding job as a publicist and speech writer, Bernard Schwartz more and more relies on medication to cope with everyday life. The real trouble begins when he accidentally swallows two incompatible antidepressants and falls into a coma shortly thereafter.While he is unconscious Bernard Schwartz has a stroke. When he wakes up again he is seriously handicapped—his speech is slurred, his walk is unsteady and his memory is permanently impaired. Similar to a child, he has to learn the meanings of many words. Instead of going to school, Chris teaches his father as best as he can.In spite of his enforced preoccupation with his "sleeping" father, Chris Schwartz notices that his own life goes on without any major change. Still a virgin, he fantasizes about having sex with Lisa Danmeyer, Bernard's neurologist and actually has his first sexual encounter ever at his father's rehab centre with a sexy speech pathologist who performs fellatio on him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Tom_Kitten"title="The Tale of Tom Kitten">
This book tells the story of three little kittens, Mittens, Tom Kitten and Moppet, who get into mischief. Their mother, Mrs. Tabitha Twitchit, grooms and dresses them up for company she is expecting, then sends them out with the admonishment that they not get dirty. They not only get dirty but lose their clothes to some passing puddle-ducks. When they return, she hides them upstairs and tells her company that they have the measles. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Mr._Tod"title="The Tale of Mr. Tod">
The tale begins with Tommy Brock, a Eurasian badger, being entertained by old Mr. Bouncer, the father of Benjamin Bunny. Mr. Bouncer has been left to tend his grandchildren while his son and daughter-in-law Flopsy are away, but, after smoking a pipe of rabbit-tobacco, he falls asleep in Tommy's company. Tommy puts the bunnies in his sack and slips out. When the parents return, Benjamin sets out in pursuit of the thief.Benjamin finds and brings his cousin Peter Rabbit into the rescue venture, and the two discover Tommy has invaded one of Mr. Tod's homes. Mr. Tod, a fox, has multiple homes but keeps moving. Often Tommy lodges in his homes. Peeping through the bedroom window, the rabbits see Tommy asleep in Mr. Tod's bed, and, peeping through the kitchen window, they see the table set for a meal. They realise the bunnies are alive, but shut in the oven. They try to dig a tunnel into the house but hide when Mr. Tod suddenly arrives in a very bad temper, which has caused him to move house.The fox discovers the badger asleep in his bed, and originally plans to hit him, but decides against this due to the Badger's teeth. He decides to play a trick upon him involving a pail of water balanced on the overhead tester of the bed. Brock however is awake, escapes the trick, and makes tea for himself in the kitchen. Mr. Tod thinks the bucket has killed Tommy and decides to bury him in the tunnel the rabbits have dug, thinking Tommy dug it. When Mr. Tod discovers Tommy in the Kitchen and has tea thrown over him, a violent fight erupts that continues outdoors. The two roll away down the hill still fighting. Benjamin and Peter quickly gather the bunnies, and return home in triumph.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernesto_(novel)"title="Ernesto (novel)">
The events in the novel take place in the course of a month in 1898 in Trieste. Ernesto, a 16-year-old apprentice clerk to a flour merchant named Wilder, lives with his mother and aunt. He and his mother rely on the charity of relatives, whose control Ernesto resents. When he was thirteen, he spent a perfect summer reading the "Arabian Nights". He adopts leftist political views, partly out of conviction and partly to needle Wilder. He has his first sexual experiences on several occasions with a 28-year-old laborer identified as "the man". Their roles reflect classical models, with the older man insisting that since he has a beard he must be the active partner in intercourse. Ernesto also has one experience with a female prostitute. He imagines a different life for himself, perhaps as an adored concert violinist, though he lacks talent. His tentative approach to manhood is reflected in a visit to the barber where he has his first shave, though he hardly seems to need it. He becomes resentful about being overworked, though he refuses to share tasks with a younger assistant. He resents his employer and resigns his post with an insulting letter. Ending his employment will also end his casual encounters with "the man" at work. His mother succeeds in arranging for his employer to rehire Ernesto, who then reveals his sexual history to his mother to avoid taking up his clerk's post again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_in_Amber"title="Gypsy in Amber">
The story's protagonist is Romano Grey, a gypsy antique expert who is pulled into a murder investigation when one of his friends dies in an automobile accident and is posthumously accused of the murder of a girl whose body, neatly sliced into six pieces, is found at the scene of the accident. Grey reappears in "Canto for a Gypsy", published in 1972.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mermaid_Chair"title="The Mermaid Chair">
"The Mermaid Chair" is the tale of Jessie Sullivan, a middle-aged woman whose stifled dreams and desires take shape during an extended stay on Egret Island, where she is caring for her troubled mother, Nelle. Once she returns to her childhood home, Jessie is forced to confront not only her relationship with her estranged mother, but her other emotional ties as well. After decades of marriage to Hugh, her practical yet conventional husband, Jessie starts to question whether she is craving an independence she never had the chance to experience. After she meets Brother Thomas, a handsome monk who has yet to take his final vows, Jessie is forced to decide whether passion can coexist with comfort, or if the two are mutually exclusive. As her soul begins to reawaken, Jessie must also confront the circumstances of her father's death, a tragedy that continues to haunt Jessie and Nelle thirty years later.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_You_Could_See_Me_Now_(Ahern_novel)"title="If You Could See Me Now (Ahern novel)">
Trapped in the stifling, small Irish town Baile na gCroíth, Elizabeth Egan had always been known as a serious woman, never laughing at jokes or taking joys from the simplest pleasure of life. This is due to having been abandoned by her free-spirited mother when she was young and was forced to grow up quickly to take care of her sister, Saoirse.Taking advantage of Elizabeth's sense of responsibility, Saoirse has led life with abandonment, and when she gives birth to a son, Luke, she leaves Elizabeth to take care of him.At the age of six, Luke claims to have a friend named Ivan whom Elizabeth cannot see. Though at first she is exasperated with this imaginary friend, she starts playing along with Luke when she learns that imaginary friends will only last about 3 months.Though invisible to most, Ivan is real. Only Luke can see him, though he comes to realise that Elizabeth can feel his presence. Knowing that only people who are in real need of a friend are able to see him, he follows Elizabeth around. When, suddenly, she is able to see him, Ivan is delighted, but disappointed just as quickly when she thinks him to be the father of one of Luke's friends. A friendship which soon turns into romance blossoms between them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Heart_of_the_Country"title="In the Heart of the Country">
The novel is narrated from the point of view of Magda, the white daughter of a widowed farmer in the Karoo semi-desert of the Western Cape. Much of the novel is narrated from within the claustrophobic confines of Magda's bedroom and throughout the narrative the unreliability of Magda's narration means the reader cannot be certain what is actually taking place and what is occurring within Magda's imagination. At the beginning of the novel Magda fantasizes about her father unexpectedly bringing home a young bride and the violent way that she would kill them both. A short while later the black farm worker Hendrik really does bring a young bride named Anna to the farm. Magda's father seduces Anna and when Magda hears her father and Anna fornicating in the farmhouse bedroom, she takes her father's rifle and shoots him in the stomach. He slowly dies of his injuries and Magda buries him in a makeshift crypt on the farmland. Gradually, without her father to manage the land, the food begins to run out and Hendrik, who is owed wages, demands to be paid. Magda pays him in kind by offering him certain items from her father's former possessions. Hendrik and Anna move into the farmhouse and the power balance begins to tip in their favour. After a series of altercations, Hendrik rapes Magda and begins to visit her room every night for sexual intercourse. When white men from nearby farms turn up looking for Magda's father, Hendrik and Anna flee fearing that they will blamed for his death. The novel ends with Magda isolated on the farm, slowly starving and seemingly going mad, as she tries to communicate with the planes that are beginning to fly over the desert every day.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curse_of_Lono"title="The Curse of Lono">
Hunter S. Thompson receives a letter from the editor of "Running" magazine, asking him to cover the 1980 Honolulu Marathon, which the editor says should be "a good chance for a vacation". Thompson asks the illustrator Ralph Steadman to accompany him. On the flight over, he meets a man named Ackerman, who seems to have connections to the drug trade in Hawaii. Thompson covers the marathon with his characteristic gonzo style, weaving his own experiences into the coverage of the story. After the marathon, Thompson along with Steadman and his family move to a rented beach side compound on Hawaii's Kona coast. The weather is miserable and they are trapped indoors, besieged by huge waves. Steadman and his family, upset about the terrible conditions of their vacation, return to England. Later, Thompson reunites with Ackerman to go fishing. Thompson eventually catches a huge Marlin, which he beats to death with a Samoan war club. The fishing boat returns to the dock, with Thompson screaming triumphantly, "I am Lono!", referring to the ancient Hawaiian god which upsets the locals, and he goes into hiding in the City of Refuge. The story frequently breaks away to excerpts from "The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook" by Richard Hough, which tells the story of the man the native Hawaiians thought was the reincarnation of Lono and was eventually killed by them when he overstayed his welcome on the island of Hawaii.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zap_Gun"title="The Zap Gun">
This novel is set in a then-future 2004. There is still a (theoretical) Cold War between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies. At the elite governmental level, however, both "sides" have secretly come to an agreement. They have decided that, instead of continuing the ecologically and economically crippling nuclear and conventional arms race, they will pretend to be constantly developing new weapons, which are then "plowshared". This means that these items are transformed into novel but baroque consumer products. Most of these weapon designers are mediums, who create their new designs in trance states. Design of weapons are extracted telepathically from a motion comic book, "The Blue Cephalopod Man from Titan", created by mad Italian artist Oral Giacomini.One Wes-Bloc weapons designer, Lars Powderdry (Mr. Lars of Mr. Lars Incorporated) is the central character. He is depressed that his industry is little more than a fraud, as none of his "weapons" are functional, having become fashion items instead. The plowshared guidance system of Item 202, a telepathic featureless brazen head named Ol' Orville, explains that this depression is merely a projection of his own fears of professional and physical impotence. His female Peep-East counterpart is Lilo Topchev, whom he knows nothing about, but whom Ol' Orville advises him to seduce. He also has a mistress, Maren Faine, head of his company's Parisian branch.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginger_Pye"title="Ginger Pye">
This book is about a puppy named Ginger. Jerry Pye, a resident in Cranbury, Connecticut in 1919, bought a puppy he wanted from Ms. Speedy for a hard-earned dollar he made while dusting the pews in the church for Sam Doody. Jerry was pleased with the puppy and headed home. On the way home, Jerry and his sister Rachel heard footsteps behind them. When they turned back, they did not see anything. Jerry decided that if anyone was following them, then that follower was after his dog. After a few days, Jerry remembered that he hadn't given his puppy a name! He asked his mother and his mother said Ginger because he is the color of ginger and has a gingery temperament. So they called him Ginger or Ginger Pye. Ginger was a smart dog. He even located the school that Jerry goes to. Almost all his neighbors and friends knew Ginger.Ginger Pye went missing on Thanksgiving Day. Jerry and his sister Rachel searched for the puppy all around Cranbury but could not find him. They discover Ginger tied up in a shed, and uncover the identity of the thief: Wally Bullwinkle. The book closes with Ginger home safe to a happy family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_the_Bomb_(novel)"title="After the Bomb (novel)">
The story follows a teen, Philip, who attempts to survive in the aftermath of a nuclear missile accidentally launched at Los Angeles by the Soviet Union, with his mother (the father is presumed dead as he worked in downtown Los Angeles, ground zero for the bomb), older brother, and friends. During the story Philip develops an attitude of "Me and mine first", with him being portrayed as switching the tag of an evacuee with his mother's so that his mother would be evacuated to another state for treatment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Cafe"title="The Glass Cafe">
Tony is fascinated with art, and goes to the club that his mom works at to draw pictures of some of the ladies. When his art teacher looks at the drawings, she wants to put them up in a museum for a contest.When people look at the pictures of the ladies Tony's mom gets in trouble and is sent to court for letting her son draw pornographic pictures. Tony's mom explains that it was just art, and tells them the story of the Glass Cafe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belles_on_Their_Toes"title="Belles on Their Toes">
"Belles on Their Toes" was written about the Gilbreth family after Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr.'s death, and how they survived as their mother, Lillian Moller Gilbreth, continued the pioneering work in industrial engineering, time and motion studies, and industrial and organizational psychology she had shared with her husband. This book is also the first place where the absence of the second oldest child, Mary Gilbreth, is explained; she died of diphtheria in 1912, at age five.Ernestine and Frank decided to share the royalties from the books and movies evenly among their mother and siblings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1633_(novel)"title="1633 (novel)">
"1633" continues where "1632" left off. Most of the novel details various political machinations of the new "United States" and the attempts of Cardinal Richelieu to nullify the threat posed by the technological advantage the up-timers have given to Gustavus Adolphus and his "Confederated Principalities of Europe". Richelieu completely changes France's foreign policy and forms an alliance aimed squarely at the NUS and Gustavus called the League of Ostend. Mike Stearns sends emissaries looking for allies, some of whom end up behind enemy lines as they already belong to the secret League of Ostend, which announces its presence in the Battle of Four Fleets. The Dutch Republic nearly falls and Stearns' emissary voluntarily stays behind, becoming trapped in the Siege of Amsterdam.At this point, the newly created timeline start to diverge greatly from the actual history of the 17th Century, in no small part because the news of a town from the future brought spies and emissaries, and a fair number of encyclopedias and history textbooks found their way into European courts. One theme of the series is of down-timer leaders trying to change, hasten or head off their histories while the acts of ordinary citizens going about their day-to-day affairs and of the leaders of Grantville effect more fundamental societal and political changes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seola"title="Seola">
The greatest discovery of the nineteenth century is found by accident. A team of archaeologists uncover one of the most ancient burial tombs of all time. Inside the tomb they find something far greater than gold or gems, they find a diary of a person who lived more than four thousand years ago. The team pool all their knowledge together in order to translate the scroll diary before it disintegrates in the foreign air.The diary of Seola is about a girl's struggle to resist a wicked world. Her resolve to remain loyal to God is so strong she influences a fallen angel to repentance. The diary is unique because it gives a detailed account on how the Great Deluge started. One of the planets in the solar system becomes unstable and its destruction causes the waters above the expanse to fall.The beginning entry of the journal gave no doubt as to the era the individual claims to come from. The entry reads, “West Bank of the Euphrates, first moon-evening, after Adam, four cycles”. The author of the journal identifies herself as Seola, daughter of Aleemon and Lebuda. Her father was the son of Lamech and his father was Methuselah. Aleemon had a passion for study and the preservation of historical records. This desire kept him near a grand city which contained a wealth of knowledge on the history of the world written down on scrolls. The city’s name was Sippara and it was also known as the city of the Sun. This desire also endangered the lives of his family. It so happened that the city was the royal seat of the one who ruled the planet. This ruler was known as Lucifer the Light Bearer, King of the Sun. He and his kind were ruling the earth for over 1100 years, since the days of Jared. These beings were known as the Devas. The Devas were angelic spirit beings that materialized into human form. Their superior powers enabled them to dominate and instill fear into the human race. They sought after the most beautiful women of mankind and took them as wives. Through the union of the mortal female and the angelic being came male children of large stature. These offspring were known as the Darvands. The Darvands were ruthless bullies with strength that none could match.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Super_Diaper_Baby"title="The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby">
## Introduction.Fourth graders George Beard and Harold Hutchins skate over ketchup packets in the school gym until their rude-spirited principal, Mr. Krupp, forces them to clean up the mess and meet him at his office. Since writing a sentence over and over wouldn't teach the boys anything, Mr. Krupp assigns them to write a 100-page essay on good citizenship, which they can't turn it into a Captain Underpants story. The boys promptly make a story with a new superhero called "Super Diaper Baby", which angers Krupp to the point of making them write sentences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Calcutta_Chromosome"title="The Calcutta Chromosome">
The novel begins with the story of Antar, a resident of the future New York doing data processing for the International Water Council. A chance bit of data causes Antar to recall a bizarre encounter he had with L. Murugan, an employee of the LifeWatch organization (Antar's former employer), who disappeared in Calcutta in 1995. Murugan had asked to be transferred to Calcutta because of his fascination with the life of Sir Ronald Ross. While Antar tries to track Murugan’s movements in Calcutta through the digitized archives, another narrative thread follows Murugan directly as his path brings him into contact with a variety of other characters, some more savory than others. The plot is quite complex and its timelines are deliberately mixed up, switching from Antar's time to Murugan's to Ross' and back over the course of as many chapters.Through his research into old and lost documents and phone messages, Antar determines that Murugan had systematically unearthed a deep secret lurking behind Ross' malaria research — an underground scientific and mystical movement that could grant eternal life. Loosely described, the process of securing this form of immortality is as follows: the disciples of this movement can transfer their chromosomes into another's body, and gradually become that person or take over that person. In the novel, Ronald Ross did not discover the mysteries of the malaria parasite; it was a group of underground practitioners of a different, mystical "science," natives of India, who helped to guide Ross to the conclusions for which he is famous. These native Indians provided Ross with clues in the belief that in the moment Ross made his discovery, the parasite would change its nature. At this point, a new variant of malaria would emerge and the group's research using the chromosome-transfer technique would advance even further.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormbreaker"title="Stormbreaker">
The protagonist, Alex Rider, secretly becomes a teenage spy for MI6, working undercover in Port Tallen, Cornwall. There he discovers the Stormbreaker computer factory where millions of computers were being filled with biological weapons which would give smallpox to the user. The aim of the attack was to kill hundreds of thousands of British schoolchildren and their teachers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ezekiel_Option"title="The Ezekiel Option">
A hijacked Aeroflot flight from Moscow to New York is flying on a kamikaze mission to Washington. Once it crosses the D.C air exclusion zone and is within several miles of the White House, US President MacPherson regretfully orders the plane to be shot down. The resulting shootdown of the plane by F-16's kills all of the hundreds of passengers on board. Jon Bennett, the senior advisor to the president, proposes to his girlfriend Erin McCoy while in Moscow to finalize the Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty that he helped create. When Erin says yes, the story of the jetliner shootdown breaks out and causes a political crisis between the Russian Federation and the United States.When they attempt to explain to Russian president Vadim what happened, Dr. Mordechai, the former head of Mossad, calls Jon to tell him he believes that the hijacking was orchestrated by elements of the Russian government, Iran, and the terrorist group Al-Nakbah to foment a crisis as a pretext for a potential coup in Moscow. Before Jon and Erin can relay this to President Vadim, Moscow, the Red Square, and the Kremlin are attacked by rebellious units of the Russian military. Jon and Erin are both injured in the ensuing gun battle in the Kremlin, where they both witness the Russian and Iranian cofounders of Al-Nakbah, Yuri Gogolov and Mohammed Jibril, execute President Vadim and his staff. After the "Second Russian Revolution" ends, Gogolov appoints himself as the new Russian czar and suspends all diplomatic relations with the United States.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knight_of_the_Sacred_Lake"title="The Knight of the Sacred Lake">
The Knight of the Sacred Lake is a variant of an Arthurian legend. It follows the lives of Queen Guinevere, or Guenevere, and her strife with Agravain and Gawain, as well as that of her lover's, Lancelot, as they both enter different paths in their lives, away from each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princess_of_Dhagabad"title="The Princess of Dhagabad">
"The Princess of Dhagabad" follows the princess as she grows up, in fictional Dhagabad, into a young woman of seventeen, when she proves that she more than capable of taking her destiny—and the destiny of Dhagabad—into her hands.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_Moon_Investigations"title="Half Moon Investigations">
Fletcher Moon (often called "Half-Moon" due to his short stature) is a natural born investigator. Knowing this, April, a girl from his school comes to him for help in finding a lock of hair that she believes to have been stolen. Fletcher agrees to help her and starts off by investigating all suspects which eventually gets him threatened by a thirteen-year-old named Red Sharkey. Fletcher is a graduate from the Bernsteins Academy, so he is a "certified" detective.While Fletcher is investigating the stolen lock of hair he has a hurling stick thrown at him and is seriously injured. Fletcher holds Red as a prime suspect as the hurling stick had 'Red' embossed on it and comes to the conclusion that it was Red who attacked him. Fletcher then goes to visit April’s cousin May to photograph this newfound evidence but ends up at the wrong house where he catches sight of somebody setting fire to May’s lucky dancing costume.He passes out in the yard due to the anesthetic from the hospital and later awakens to find a torch in his hand and all evidence for the arson pointing to him. Following an interrogation by the police, Fletcher is rescued by Red Sharkey. Red claims he was framed for the hurl assault.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela;_or,_Virtue_Rewarded"title="Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded">
## Volume 1.Pamela Andrews is a pious, virtuous fifteen-year-old, the daughter of impoverished labourers, who works for Lady B as a maid in her Bedfordshire estate. Following Lady B's death, her son, Mr. B, inherits the estate, and begins to pay Pamela romantic attention: first gifting her his mother's fine clothes, and then attempting to seduce her. Pamela rejects Mr. B's advances multiple times, by fleeing and locking herself in her bedroom. In one instance, she faints, and finds the laces of her stays have been cut. When Mr. B attempts to pay her to keep his failed seduction secret, she confides in her best friend and housekeeper of the estate, Mrs. Jervis. Later, Mr. B hides in Pamela's closet and tries to kiss her when she undresses for bed, causing Pamela to consider leaving her position and returning to her parents to preserve her innocence. She is insistent on remaining at the estate to finish embroidering a waistcoat for Mr. B, hoping that by doing so he will let her leave on good terms.Angry at Pamela for telling Mrs. Jervis of his attempted seductions, Mr. B informs Pamela that he intends to marry her off to Mr. Williams, his chaplain in Lincolnshire, and gives money to her parents to persuade them to give consent. Pamela refuses the engagement and decides to leave the estate, but Mr. B intercepts her letters to her parents and tells them she is having an affair with a poor clergyman, and that he will send her to a safe place to preserve her chastity. Pamela is forcibly taken to Mr. B's Lincolnshire Estate by Mr. B's servant Monsieur Colbrand, where she begins a journal with the intention of sending it to her parents. The Lincolnshire housekeeper, Mrs. Jewkes, is "odious" and "unwomanly", devoted to Mr. B, and keeps Pamela as her bedfellow. Mr. B promises he won't approach Pamela without her leave, and stays away from the estate for some time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Torture_Garden"title="The Torture Garden">
Published at the height of the Dreyfus affair, Mirbeau's novel is a loosely assembled reworking of texts composed at different eras, featuring different styles, and showcasing different characters. Beginning with material stemming from articles on the 'Law of Murder' discussed in the "Frontispiece" ("The Manuscript"), the novel continues with a farcical critique of French politics with "En Mission" ("The Mission"): a French politician's aide is sent on a pseudo-scientific expedition to China when his presence at home would be compromising. It then moves on to an account of a visit to a Cantonese prison by a narrator accompanied by the sadist and hysteric Clara, who delights in witnessing flayings, crucifixions and numerous tortures, all done in beautifully laid out and groomed gardens, and explaining the beauty of torture to her companion. Finally she attains hysterical orgasm and passes out in exhaustion, only to begin again a few days later.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gate_of_Time"title="The Gate of Time">
Roger Two Hawks, an Iroquois serving as a combat pilot in World War II, is shot down during a raid on Ploieşti, Romania. While parachuting he feels a strange dizziness. Being hidden by locals, he realises that they neither look nor speak like Romanians, but rather resemble Native Americans and speak a language distantly resembling that of his own tribe.The mystery is resolved when he sees a globe and finds that he is in a world where the continent of America does not exist, having been drowned for the whole of humanity's tenure on Earth. As a result, the ancestors of the various Native American tribes did not cross the non-existent Bering Strait but wandered westward into Europe, taking the general place of the Slavs in our history. "Hatti" (Greece) was colonised by the Hittites of our timeline, while Akhaivia (Italy) was colonised by the Greeks instead of the Sabines, Latins, Voluscans and Samnites. The Iroquois live in Romania and Ukraine, which is known as Hotinohsonih in this timeline, while the Algonquin occupy Kinukkinuk, roughly co-terminous with our Czech Republic and the Aztecs dominate an equivalent of Russia. "Blodland" is analogous to England, while "Norland" is roughly parallel to Scotland. "Rasna" is cognate with France and Belgium (apart from Normandy, which is "Grettirsland"). "New Crete" is comparable to the Iberian peninsula, "Doria" matches the Balkan region on our world, and "Saariset" (Japan) is dominated by Finnish speakers. "Dravidia" is India's equivalent in this universe and is a major military power.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_in_Space"title="Rogue in Space">
In the book a sentient and powerful asteroid arrives in the solar system's asteroid belt after countless aeons of wandering interstellar space. Passing by another asteroid, the living asteroid makes its first ever encounter with other living beings - a likeable criminal involved in a life-and-death struggle with a corrupt and power-mad judge.The judge is eventually killed, but so too is his beautiful wife who had allied herself with the criminal, the couple falling in love. Whilst the god-like living asteroid builds a new world around itself, and blocks all mankind's efforts to investigate it, eventually the criminal returns to the planet with a small group. The sentient asteroid allows them to make planetfall, but only the criminal can accept living in the new Eden created for him, and they eventually depart. The alien then resurrects the late judge's wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_Saturday"title="Superior Saturday">
## Background.Arthur Penhaligon is a young boy who has gotten involved with the 'House', a magical world. This world comprises seven parts, each containing a 'Key' (powerful magical objects) and a part of the 'Will' (a being that holds the wish of the absent 'Architect'), under control of a villainous 'Trustee'. Arthur is on a quest to defeat the 'Trustees' and fulfill the 'Will'.In the preceding five books, Arthur has captured five parts of the House. Superior Saturday, the Trustee that Arthur fights in this book, has appeared earlier in the series, trying to hinder Arthur.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Sunday"title="Lord Sunday">
## Background.Arthur Penhaligon is a young boy who has gotten involved with the 'House', a magical world. This world comprises seven parts, each containing a 'Key' (powerful magical objects) and a part of the 'Will' (a being that holds the wish of the absent 'Architect'), under control of a villainous 'Trustee'. Arthur is on a quest to defeat the 'Trustees' and fulfill the 'Will'.At the end of the preceding book, Trustee Saturday was invading the 'Incomparable Gardens', the domain of the seventh and last Trustee Sunday. Arthur was thrown off the edge of the Gardens, and meanwhile back on Earth a nuclear strike was occurring on his hometown.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Midnight_(novel)"title="Before Midnight (novel)">
Nero Wolfe is approached by corporate attorney Rudolf Hansen and his clients Oliver Buff, Vernon Assa and Patrick O'Garro, the chief executives of Manhattan advertising agency Lippert Buff Assa (LBA). The group want Wolfe to save them from embarrassment and ruin following the murder of Louis Dahlmann, an up-and-coming advertising executive with the firm. Dahlmann's wallet was also stolen, and inside were the final answers for a series of cryptic poetic riddles run as part of a promotional competition for Pour Amour, a brand of perfume designed by one of LBA's clients. The first prize of the competition is $500,000, and in a meeting with the final five contestants the night before his death Dahlmann had revealed that he kept the answers in his wallet, both of which lead the police to suspect one of the contestants. The executives, however, do not want Wolfe to investigate the murder but to find out who stole the wallet before the contest deadline—midnight of the nineteenth of April, exactly one week later—in order to ensure the integrity of proceedings and restore their reputation. Despite tension between the advertising agency and Talbott Heery, owner of the company that produces Pour Amour, Wolfe agrees to their terms.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morning_Star_(Raven_novel)"title="Morning Star (Raven novel)">
## Part 1: The Order of Baptism.1977. Lord and Lady Canteloupe celebrate the christening of their first son, Sarum, at Lancaster College. Wealthy scholar Ptolemaeos Tunne intends to research the link between the physical brain, and the immaterial mind and soul. He attends the christening party to scout a list of youths to be test subjects in his experiments, obtaining permission from the children's parents via coercion and blackmail. At the same party, twelve-year-old Marius Stern insults his ten-year-old sister Rosie’s school friend Tessa Malcolm, and Rosie retaliates by wishing bad luck on Marius at cricket in the coming year.Old friends Fielding Gray and Maisie Malcolm own and operate Buttock's Hotel, where they live with Maisie’s daughter Tessa. The hotel has recently done poor business. Maisie believes that Tessa is producing a strange “aura”, associated with adolescence, which is driving away regulars. Publisher Gregory Stern has misgivings about allowing his children (Rosie and Marius) to participate in Tunne's experiments, but Tunne secures his consent by threatening to reveal sensitive information about Stern's ancestry. Stern's wife Isobel as well as Lord Canteloupe, both assure him that Tunne's work is reputable, and that he is to be trusted.Undergraduates Carmilla Salinger and Jeremy Morrison discuss their invitations to participate in Tunne's experiments. The couple engage in foreplay, but not sex. Carmilla's twin sister Thea is also revealed to be in love with Jeremy. Donald Salinger, adoptive father to the twins, mulls over the recent accidental death of his wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_(Nix_novel)"title="The Fall (Nix novel)">
Thirteen-year-old Tal has lived his entire life in the enormous, labyrinthine Castle of the Chosen, which is in a state of perpetual darkness due to the Veil that hangs above its seven towers. Inside the Castle, society is organized into stratified society organized by the colors of the rainbow and light.Tal is preparing for his Day of Ascension, in which he will enter the spirit world of Aenir to bind a Spiritshadow and cement his place in the castle, when he receives news that his father, who had left the castle on a secret mission, has been declared missing and is presumed dead, which threatens Tal's plans for the Day of Ascension. Tal's father possessed the family's Primary Sunstone, which is needed to enter Aenir, and the Primary Sunstone belonging to Tal's mother has faded in power due to her grave illness. Tal knows he must secure his family's standing lest they be demoted to Underfolk and any hope for curing his mother's illness will be gone.Tal reluctantly visits his cruel aunts, who dislike Tal's family, to ask to borrow one of their Sunstones for his visit to Aenir but they refuse. At his aunts' quarters, he meets Shadowmaster Sushin, who appears to greatly dislike Tal, much to Tal's confusion. Tal attempts to win a Sunstone by entering the Achievements of Luminosity competition. He enters the Achievement of Body category, but discovers he was mysteriously re-registered to the Achievement of Music roster. With help from his great-uncle Ebbitt, Tal finds a piece of music to play for the competition at the last minute. Upon entering the contest, he finds, much to his horror, that Sushin is one of the three judges. Tal performs the piece well, but is given the Yellow Ray of Failed Ambition by Sushin, and the other judges agree that Tal did not perform well enough to win a Sunstone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmortem_(novel)"title="Postmortem (novel)">
The novel opens as Dr. Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia, receives an early-morning call from Sergeant Pete Marino, a homicide detective at the Richmond Police Department with whom Scarpetta has a tense working relationship. She meets him at the scene of a woman's gruesome strangling, the latest in a string of unsolved murders in Richmond.The killer leaves behind a few clues; among them are a mysterious substance which fluoresces under laser light, which was later on proved to be from a liquid soap which the killer used to wash his hands, traces of semen, and in the vicinity of the last murder, an unusual smell. Scarpetta and Marino work with FBI profiler Benton Wesley to attempt to piece together a profile of the killer. Initial evidence appears to point to the fourth victim's husband, but Scarpetta suspects otherwise despite Marino's insistence. The book references DNA profiling as a relatively new technique, and characters briefly bemoan the lack of a criminal DNA database which could provide better leads to suspects, given available evidence.Meanwhile, in her personal life, Scarpetta must deal with the presence of her extremely precocious ten-year-old niece, Lucy, as well as an uncertain romantic relationship with the local Commonwealth's attorney.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everyone_in_Silico"title="Everyone in Silico">
The story is set in Vancouver, 2036.San Francisco was struck by an earthquake and a company called Self, which is somehow related to Microsoft, set up an AI system to replace the city, with a virtual environment called "Frisco".The story follows several people, both in Vancouver as well as in Frisco.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_the_Pie_and_the_Patty-Pan"title="The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan">
Potter declared the tale her next favourite to "The Tailor of Gloucester". The pictures are some of the most beautiful Potter ever created, especially the profusions of flowers in the doorways and garden plots. The colours in the illustrations are not the muted browns and greens the reader expects in a Potter illustration, nor are they the contrasting colours such as the muted reds and blues Potter uses occasionally to give her illustrations a splash of colour. Instead, the colours are bright oranges, violets, and yellows seldom seen in her other books. Even Ribby's lilac dress and Duchess's black mane illustrate Potter's concern for colour in this book.Potter's own three-door oven, her hearthrug, her indoor plants, her coronation teapot, and her water pump are minutely detailed with more color than in other productions. The large format of the original edition, the captions accompanying the full page color illustrations, and the occasional lack of coordination between picture and text all display Potter's delight in the pictures, sometimes at the expense of the text."Once upon a time", Ribby, a "Pussy-cat" invites a little dog called Duchess to tea with plans to serve her "something so very very nice" baked in a pie dish with a pink rim. Ribby promises Duchess she shall have the entrée entirely to herself. Duchess accepts the invitation but hopes she will not be served mouse. "I really couldn't, "couldn't" eat mouse pie. And I shall have to eat it, because it is a party."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firethorn_(novel)"title="Firethorn (novel)">
Firethorn, narrated by the protagonist of the same name, starts out as Luck, a 'mudfolk' orphan with unusually red hair serving an ageing noblewoman, the Dame, in a land where the division between high and lowborn is literally attributed to the gods. Too restless to live her fate as a drudge and too proud to accept the inevitable abuse that accompanies it after the Dame's death, Luck runs. A year in the mountains spent starving to death makes her desperate enough to eat the poisonous berries of the firethorn tree but instead of dying, she has a revelation that may well include a god-granted gift.Emerging from the forest, calling herself Firethorn, she tries to return to civilisation, knowing she can never quite fit. In the Upside-Down Days (ten days when the high and lowborn trade places) she meets Sire Galan, a visiting lord who takes her as his lover. When he marches off to war and suggests she tag along as his 'sheath' (a woman that follows a soldier to war and shares his bed), she jumps at the chance just to get away. But life as a camp follower waiting for war may well be something that not even Firethorn can survive...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_(novel)"title="Offshore (novel)">
Set in 1961, the novel follows an eccentric community of houseboat owners whose permanently moored craft cluster together along the unsalubrious bank of the River Thames at Battersea Reach, London. Nenna, living aboard "Grace" with her two children Martha and Tilda, is obsessed with thoughts of her estranged husband Edward returning to her, while her children run wild on the muddy foreshore. Maurice, who lives next to her on a barge he has named "Maurice", provides a sympathetic ear for her worries. He ekes out a precarious living as a male prostitute, bringing back men most evenings from the nearby pub, and allowing his boat to be used for the storage of stolen goods by his shadowy acquaintance, Harry. Willis, an elderly marine painter, lives aboard "Dreadnought" which he hopes to sell in spite of its serious leak. Woodie is a retired businessman living aboard "Rochester" during the summer and with his wife Janet in Purley during the winter. Richard, aboard his converted minesweeper "Lord Jim", is looked up to as the unofficial leader of the community, both by temperament and by virtue of his past role with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. His wife Laura hankers to move to a permanent house ashore.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_the_Fire"title="Voice of the Fire">
The story follows the lives of twelve people who lived in the same area of England over a period of 6000 years, and how their lives link to one another’s. Each chapter carries the reader forward in time, but circles around the centre of Northampton, drawing in historical events and touchstones, before finally segueing into metafictional narrative in the closing chapter, as the author himself comments directly upon the previous chapter’s ambiguous closing line, before relating a personal (possibly fictional) anecdote about Northampton which relates a personal experience of local myth, and features an appearance by his daughter and son-in-law, the writers Leah Moore and John Reppion. Throughout, the image of the fire sparks resonates between the tales, while Moore finds a different voice for each character – though most are inherently duplicitous in some manner, leading to a further commentary on the disparity between myth and reality, and which is more likely to endure over time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_to_Pay_(novel)"title="Hell to Pay (novel)">
The novel's central plotline concerns the murder by drug dealers of a no-account deadbeat over an unpaid debt and the incidental killing of the intended victim's nephew, starting with the killers’ efforts to locate the victim and continuing through Strange's investigation of the murders and the killings’ repercussions in the world of the DC drug trade. Secondary plotlines involve efforts by Strange's white associate, Terry Quinn, to locate a young girl who has disappeared into prostitution, as well as Strange's background investigation of a potentially shady young man who is engaged to marry the beautiful daughter of Strange's wealthy friend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Above_the_Veil"title="Above the Veil">
While Shadowmaster Sushin maintains control over higher ranked chosen, Tal and Milla travel through the Castle's depths where they encounter the Freefolk, a group of the servant class Underfolk who possess a great hatred for all the Chosen. They also meet Lector Jarnil, a famous teacher. Tal and Milla learn more about the intricacies of Castle politics, including that Sushin, a Shadowmaster of the Orange, is the Dark Vizier of the Empress. He deals in unsavory matters and commands others under the authority of the Empress. They also learn that the Veil is maintained by the seven Keystones which lie at the top of each of the seven towers.Most of the Chosen leave the Castle due to the Day of Ascension. To prevent the Veil from failing, Tal, accompanied by the Freefolk leader Crow, climb the Red Tower and defeat the deadly Keeper. They also solve a puzzle of tiles to prevent any alarms from ringing out. Eventually they reach the Red Keystone and discover Lector Jarnil's cousin Lokar trapped inside. As Tal and Crow prepare to depart, they are assaulted by numerous unbound Spiritshadows. Tal is able to construct a miniature Veil in time to hide them, but accidentally binds Adras, his Spiritshadow, into it. As they near the Freefolk base, Crow injures Tal and flees with the Keystone. Tal recovers the keystone and Lokar convinces Tal to go to Aenir and consult the Empress to free Lokar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aenir"title="Aenir">
After arriving in Aenir they offer up blood on the hill they are standing on. This summons up two storm shepherds, Aenirian creatures with a heart of thunder and cloud, who then demand a life in exchange for a great gift. Soon the two characters discover that the two shepherds do not like taking lives, but only do it because they were bound thousands of years ago to do that exact task ever more. When they do not take a life and hesitate when Tal offers to make them his and Milla's spiritshadows to release their bind on the hill, the spirit in the hill awakes to sort out the problem. Afraid, the two creatures accept Tal's offer and quickly grab their new chosen and escape the hill, exhilarated to finally be free. Tal's spirit shadow is Adras, a big but dim witted male. While Milla ends up with Odris, a more sharp witted slender female. Neither is very good at reading human emotions and find themselves confused quite often.When Milla realizes that Tal's offer has removed her true shadow, she flies into a rage. Tal gets angry at her because he does not fully understand that when he gave away her true shadow, he destroyed her hopes of being a shield maiden, as they are sworn to destroy all Spiritshadows, and cannot possibly have one themselves. Going berserk, Milla first threatens him with her Merwin horn sword before putting it away and knocking him out. She then storms off by herself. Adras and Odris then have a small talk about the over reactions of humans before deciding that Odris should probably go with Milla to make sure she doesn't get hurt. Adras then turns into a thunder cloud and surrounds Tal, protecting him while he is asleep.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_on_Target_(The_Hardy_Boys)"title="Dead on Target (The Hardy Boys)">
Joe Hardy's girlfriend, Iola Morton, is caught in a car bomb and dies. Joe is unable to believe it. The brothers begin their investigation. They meet a person who calls himself the "Gray Man," from a government agency called "The Network." Frank and Joe take his help to get to the person who planted the bomb. Soon they learn that it is not a person, but a group of terrorists who call themselves "Assassins."Joe vows to kill them. As the story progresses, some Assassins are killed in encounters while others escape. They come to know that the person who killed Iola is a member of The Assassins named Al-Rousasa.When the book is about to end, Frank, Joe, Chet (who is Iola's brother) and their other friends begin searching a shopping mall when they learn that the Assassins plan to kill a presidential candidate giving a speech in Bayport. Soon, Joe and Frank have a fight with Al-Rousasa at the top floor. The fight ends with Al-Rousasa falling to his death, and Joe remembers what he had been told - "Nobody takes an Assassin alive."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil,_Inc._(novel)"title="Evil, Inc. (novel)">
The Hardy Boys come to New York for a vacation. When the brothers spot The Gray Man in Manhattan, they learn about an investigation he is working on regarding a terrorist organization in France. While the Gray Man does not want the brothers involved because they are too young and the case is too dangerous, the Hardys secretly work to get themselves in the center of the investigation and soon they find themselves undercover in France as a couple of gun dealers who are into the punk rock scene, complete with dyed hair and grungy clothes. They get caught up in a company called Renyard and Company, which secretly sells guns and other illegal things to people. They are almost killed in a machine when a lady known as Denise helps them escape. The book has an interesting storyline in which almost everybody is betraying each other - Renyard and Company, Denise and many other people. The Hardy Boys are also captured by the French special police known as the Sûreté. They eventually escape by beating everybody up.Soon when the book is about to end, they are chased by the Chairman of Renyard &amp; Company and his other partners. The people try to kill them but Denise saves them at the right moment. The case is then solved by the Hardy Boys and they return to the United States.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_Crime"title="Cult of Crime">
The Hardy boys hear their father and a person named Emmet Strand talking about his daughter Holly, who has joined the group of Rajah. Holly was a close friend of Frank, so Frank decides to join the group of teenagers who serve the Rajah in order to save Holly. The Rajah claims that he shall give everybody peace, so every teenager who is fed up with life, or is very frustrated joins the group in hope of finding peace. The Rajah is a very powerful man - even police officials are linked to him and do as he says. On a mission to rescue their good friend Holly from the cult of the lunatic Rajah, the boys unwittingly become the main event in one of the madman's deadly rituals--human sacrifice. The Hardy Boys try to escape the ritual, during which, Joe is framed that he kills a person very close to the Rajah, known as Vivasvat. Holly pleads with them to take her along; actually, she is linked with Rajah and wants to kill them.The Hardy Boys escape with Holly. They are chased by a police officer who is linked with the Rajah. When they are travelling on a train, Frank is shot by a bullet and falls of the train. Holly attempts to kill Joe but fails.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Country_(novel)"title="Border Country (novel)">
Matthew Price, a university lecturer in economic history, returns from London to visit his sick father in South Wales. The novel is set in the fictional village of Glynmawr in the Black Mountains, a rural area but closely connected to the nearby coal mining valleys of the South Wales coalfield. His father had been a railway signalman, and the story includes lengthy flashbacks to the 1920s and 1930s, including the General Strike and its impact on a small group of railway workers living in a community made up mostly of farmers. It also describes Matthew Price's decision to leave his own community, studying at Cambridge before becoming a lecturer in London.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Losing_You_(novel)"title="Losing You (novel)">
The story tells about Nina, a mother of two, planning to go on holidays with her new boyfriend. However, the road away from the isolated winter bleakness of Sandling Island seems to be littered with obstacles, frustrating her plans at every turn. Most pressingly of all, her fifteen-year-old daughter, Charlie, has yet to return from a night out.Minute by minute, as Nina's unease builds to worry and then panic, every mother's worst nightmare begins to occur. Has Charlie run away? Or has something more sinister happened to her? And why will nobody take her disappearance seriously? As day turns to night on the island and a series of half-buried secrets lead Nina Landry from sickening suspicion to deadly certainty, the question becomes less whether she and her daughter will leave the island for Christmas and more whether they will ever leave it again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangman's_Curse"title="Hangman's Curse">
The story centers around an apparently supernatural case taken by a family of investigators who make up the Veritas Project. About seventy years after the suicidal hanging of Abel Frye, a student at a high school who hanged himself after being unable to cope with the pressures of bullying, Jocks from the school's football team begin to lose their sanity after seeing what they believe to be Abel's ghost, which is rumored to be under the control of a group of witches out for revenge. Abel's ghost makes them go into a coma like feeling.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prose_Tristan"title="Prose Tristan">
The first part of the work stays closer to the traditional story as told by verse writers like Béroul and Thomas of Britain, but many episodes are reworked or altered entirely. Tristan's parents are given new names and backstories, and the overall tone has been called "more realistic" than the verse material though there are moments where characters sing. Tristan's guardian Governal takes him to France, where he grows up at the court of King Pharamond. He later arrives at the court of his uncle Mark, King of Cornwall, and defends his country against the Irish warrior Morholt. Wounded in the fight, he travels to Ireland where he is healed by Iseult, a renowned doctor and Morholt's niece, but he must flee when the Irish discover he has killed their champion. He later returns, in disguise, to seek Iseult as a bride for his uncle. When they accidentally drink the love potion prepared for Iseult and Mark, they engage in a tragic affair that ends with Tristan being banished to the court of Hoel of Brittany. He eventually marries Hoel's daughter, also named Iseult.Especially after this point, however, the traditional narrative is continually interrupted for side adventures by the various characters and episodes serving to "Arthurianize" the story. Notably, Tristan's rivalry with the Saracen knight Palamedes is given substantial attention. Additionally, in the long version, Tristan leaves Brittany and returns to his first love, and never sees his wife again, though her brother Kahedin remains his close companion. Tristan is compared frequently to his friend Lancelot in both arms and love, and at times even unknowingly engages him in battles. He becomes a Knight of the Round Table (taking Morholt's old seat) and embarks on the Quest for the Holy Grail before abandoning the idea to stay with Iseult at Lancelot's castle. Manuscripts which do not include the Grail material preserve the earlier version of the lovers' deaths, while the longer versions have Mark kill Tristan while he plays the harp for Iseult, only to see her die immediately afterwards.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savrola"title="Savrola">
Events take place in a fictional country called Laurania, located somewhere on the Mediterranean sea, which is similar to Italy or Spain, but with an overlay of Victorian England. Laurania has an African colony which can be reached via the Suez Canal. It has been a republic for many years, and has a well established constitution. Five years previously (stated to be in 1883) the country was split by a civil war, as a result of which General Antonio Molara became president and Dictator. Unrest has arisen because of Molara's refusal to restore parliamentary rule, and the final events of his dictatorship are described in the book.The story opens with a description of the capital and fast-moving political events there. Molara has bowed to popular pressure for elections, but intends to do so on the basis of a grossly amended electoral register. Savrola is seen as the leader of the revolutionaries, deciding what they are to do, and presiding over conflicting factions with differing aims. Despite the unrest, society still proceeds on the surface in a genteel course, with state balls and society events. Molara decides to ask his young and beautiful wife, Lucile, to attempt to seduce Savrola and discover anything she can about his plans. Unfortunately for him, Lucile finds herself attracted to Savrola and her loyalties become confused.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Boy's_Own_Story"title="A Boy's Own Story">
The story starts when the narrator, aged 15, experiences the physical side of young love with his twelve-year-old friend Kevin O'Brien. Although he is the younger boy, Kevin takes the lead in the sexual activity. Kevin's remoteness keeps the relationship one-sided; he forgets all about it once each session is over, whereas the narrator gets more and more worried about his deep feelings. As the book progresses, he starts to have cravings for anal penetration. The encounters between the two adolescents become infrequent and are pushed to the background as the narrator's soul-searching about his homosexuality continues.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Game_(novel)"title="World Game (novel)">
Under threat of execution after his conviction by the Time Lords at the end of "The War Games", the Doctor is granted a reprieve if he agrees to undertake missions for the Celestial Intervention Agency. Accompanied and supervised by the ambitious Lady Serena, their first mission is to halt attacks upon three key figures in Earth's past: Napoleon Bonaparte, The Duke of Wellington, and Charles Maurice de Talleyrand.The Doctor re-encounters the Player known as the Countess and struggles to end her Grand Plan to allow Napoleon to win his various European campaigns. Her plan to set the City States of Europe against each other is stopped by the Doctor, despite her setting a Raston Warrior Robot and a vampire on him and Serena. In preventing the Countess's assassination scheme on Wellington, Serena is killed. The Countess has many back up plans, and at the Battle of Waterloo, her plan to prevent the Prussians coming to the English army's relief is thwarted when the Doctor imitates Napoleon himself to get through the French lines and deliver new orders to the Prussian commander Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher.After returning to Gallifrey and discovering a traitor in the CIA who had been using the time scoop to assist the Countess, the Doctor is sent on a mission to investigate the time travel experiments of Kartz and Reimer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiamante"title="Adiamante">
After gaining amazing power over genetics and technology, three sects of humanity have developed and split after a civil war on earth forced them apart. Now, far into the future, the deported sect has returned to force their rule on the remaining citizens of earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Land_of_Foam"title="The Land of Foam">
The novel is divided in two parts, separated by more than 1000 years.The first part takes place during the rule of the pharaoh Djedefra (26th century BC), who decides to send an expedition to the South, in order to seek the famous and fabled Land of Punt and to seek the limits of the land and the start of the "Great Arc", the circular ocean encompassing the entire world in Egyptian cosmology.The second part starts in Ancient Greece during its (no precise dates are provided, but one can assume a date c. 1000–900 BC). A young sculptor named Pandion sets off on a journey to Crete, but he ends up on Phoenician Trading Ship ( while trying to escape captivity from some local wild Crete people), and after 4 days, he jumps the ship in the middle of the storm ( while escaping sacrifice from frightened sailors), and a storm finally lands him in Egypt, where he is enslaved. He manages to win his freedom and after a long and perilous journey comes back home. On the way, he carves a cameo which portrays his friends and some details of their adventures.In a short framing narrative, modern researchers examine the cameo and contemplate its possible origins.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruins_of_Ambrai"title="The Ruins of Ambrai">
In Lenfell's far past, its population is decimated by the Waste Wars, and the ruling class has emerged based on the ability to have healthy children. This leads to a very matriarchal society in which many of the traditional gender roles are reversed, with women holding nominal power with men used as marriage tools with little autonomy (much like women prior to the early 20th century and the onset of modern feminism)The plot centers around a war between two rival magical and political factions, the Mage Guardians and the Lords of Malerris, one who seeks to guide and guard, and one that seeks to rule. In the midst of this war are the four primary characters, Glenin, Sarra, and Cailet Ambrai, sisters who were torn apart after the destruction of Ambrai, their home, and Collan Rosvenir, a Minstrel with no memory of his past.The book starts with Collan, a young man with no memory of his life prior to being enslaved by Scraller Pelaris. Due to his beautiful singing voice, Col is set to be castrated in order to preserve it, an act from which he is rescued by Gorynel Desse, who then takes him to a cabin in the forest of Sheve Dark, where he serves as nurse and student to Bard Falundir, the worlds most famous Bard, who was crippled by the First Councillor Avira Anniyas when he wrote the Long Sun, a satire that would have exposed her as a Malerissi. Once he comes of age is and deemed sufficiently trained, Gorynel Desse appears to wipe his memory and send him out into the world as an itinerant Minstrel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mageborn_Traitor"title="The Mageborn Traitor">
The "Mageborn Traitor" continues the story of Glenin, Sarra, and Cailet. Divided into two parts, the first part is separated into three sections: 'Wraiths', 'Twins', 'Prentices'; as is the second part: 'The Hunt', 'The Chase', 'The Kill'.Continuing from the end of 'The Ruins of Ambrai', the beginning sees little change in the characters' circumstance. However, this is quickly amended. After the first section, 'Wraiths', time lapses at a much faster pace. From Cailet's dreams of building the Mage Hall, this is quickly seen to be her reality. Similarly, Sarra's children become the focus of the story and the respective sections 'Twins', 'Prentices' sees their rapid maturation from children to young adults.As characteristic of her works, Melanie Rawn deftly handles the multiple story lines. Whereas 'The Ruins of Ambrai' established her world-building, 'The Mageborn Traitor' extends it. It is difficult to pin down the exact main storyline of the story - there are many - or the true meaning of the title 'The Mageborn Traitor', though the obvious idea is that it is one of Cailets Mages who happens to betray them all near the end of the novel, unravelling all that Cailet has worked for.However, the overriding plotline to the story is the battle between the Mage Guardians and the Malerrisi. The former is represented by Cailet and Sarra and the latter by the eldest sister, Glenin Feiran.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_on_the_Mountain_(Bisson_novel)"title="Fire on the Mountain (Bisson novel)">
The difference from actual history starts with the participation of Harriet Tubman in Brown's uprising in 1859; her sound tactical and strategic advice helps Brown avoid mistakes which in real history led to his downfall. As a result, instead of the American Civil War, the U.S. faces a full-scale slave revolt throughout the South helped by a handful of white sympathizers and various European revolutionaries such as Giuseppe Garibaldi, and an invasion by Mexico, which seeks to regain the territory it lost in 1848.After a great deal of bloody fighting and an increasing dissatisfaction in the North which is required to send troops to fight the rebellious slaves, the blacks succeed in emancipating themselves and create a republic in the Deep South, led by Tubman and Frederick Douglass. (Brown himself did not survive to see the victory of what he started.) Abraham Lincoln – a Whig politician who never got to be President – tries to start a war to bring back the secessionist black states into the Union, but he fails and is himself killed in that war. Blacks remember him as their archenemy.Later, the black state (named "Nova Africa") becomes Socialist, touching off a whole string of revolutions and civil wars in Europe. The Paris Commune wins out in 1871 instead of being crushed by the French Third Republic, Ireland breaks away from British rule in the 1880s, and the Russian Revolution is just one of many similar revolutions in different countries. Finally Socialism also wins out in the rump U.S., following a revolutionary outbreak in Chicago. Socialism works out as predicted by the German philosopher Karl Marx, bringing happiness and prosperity to all of humanity. (Marx himself is mentioned in the book as an enthusiastic supporter of the rebellious slaves, though he does not personally come to America to help them.)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many_Moons"title="Many Moons">
Princess Lenore suffers from "a surfeit of raspberry tarts" — eating too many sweets. She insists she is gravely ill, but if her father brings her the moon she'll be well again. Her father, the king, asks the wisest men in his court how he can give his daughter the moon, and becomes outraged when they all claim that it is too large, too far away, and composed of unstable or dangerous substances. Despairing, the king confides in his court jester. The jester then asks the princess what "she" thinks the moon is made of, how big it is, and how far away. According to the princess, the moon is as big as her thumbnail and made of gold. She says it's so close that he could climb a tree and pluck it from the sky. He promises to do just that, that very night.Instead, the jester takes the princess's specifications to the royal goldsmith, who creates a necklace with a moon-like pendant. It is presented to the princess and she becomes well again. The next day, the King fears she'll see the moon in the sky and realize that the necklace is a forgery. He consults the wisest men in his court, who propose outrageous schemes to prevent her from seeing it in the sky. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teckla"title="Teckla">
While deciding what to do with the fortune he made after the events of "Jhereg", Vlad is alarmed to discover that his wife has joined a group of revolutionaries consisting of Easterners and Teckla from the ghetto of South Adrilankha. One of their members, Franz, has been murdered. Fearing for Cawti's safety, Vlad resolves to investigate the matter. After some aggressive investigation, Vlad learns that the Jhereg boss of South Adrilankha, Herth, ordered the assassination after the revolutionaries attacked his businesses. By getting involved, Vlad becomes a target in the ongoing feud.Vlad takes the information back to Kelly, the leader of the revolutionaries, but he is unafraid. He plans to not only revolt but to break the Cycle itself. Several of his followers tell Vlad their stories, including a Teckla sorcerer named Paresh, but Vlad is unmoved. He accuses them of parroting Kelly's slogans, which put impossible ideals ahead of individuals. Vlad's relationship becomes strained as Cawti's changing values pull her away from his lifestyle.Distraught over his failing marriage, Vlad lets his guard down and gets captured by Herth's men. They torture him for information about Cawti and the revolutionaries until Vlad's men rescue him. Jarred by his brush with total helplessness, Vlad becomes temporarily suicidal, but Cawti drugs him before he can harm himself. After awakening, Vlad remains troubled by the incident, but reaffirms his desire to save Cawti and destroy Herth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_Goblins_from_Neptune"title="The Devil Goblins from Neptune">
The Brigadier is pursued across the world from seeming traitors within UNIT, his own organization. The Doctor and Liz deal with an alien invasion that started with an extraterrestrial mass exploding in the atmosphere.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tigers_of_Mompracem"title="The Tigers of Mompracem">
Would you be the greatest pirate in the South China Sea or would you hang up your sword to be with the woman you love? Malaysia, 1849. The Tigers of Mompracem are a band of rebel pirates fighting against the colonial power of the Dutch and British empires. They are led by Sandokan, the indomitable Tiger of Malaysia, and his loyal friend Yanez De Gomera, a Portuguese wanderer and adventurer. After twelve years of spilling blood and spreading terror throughout Malaysia, Sandokan has reached the height of his power, but when the pirate learns of the extraordinary "Pearl of Labuan", his fortunes begin to change.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates_of_Malaysia"title="The Pirates of Malaysia">
Sandokan and Yanez De Gomera, the protagonists of "The Tigers of Mompracem", are back, righting injustices and fighting old foes. Tremal-Naik's misfortunes have continued. Wrongfully imprisoned, the great hunter has been banished from India and sentenced to life in a penal colony. Knowing his master is innocent, Kammamuri dashes off to the rescue, planning to free the good hunter at the first opportunity. When the good servant is captured by the Tigers of Mompracem, he manages to enlist their services. But in order to succeed, Sandokan and Yanez must lead their men against the forces of James Brooke, "The Exterminator", the dreaded White Rajah of Sarawak.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_Lines"title="The Shadow Lines">
Split into two parts ('Going Away' and 'Coming Home'), the novel follows the life of a young boy growing up in Calcutta, who is educated in Delhi and then follows with the experiences he has in London.His family – the Datta Chaudhuris - and the Price family in London are linked by the friendship between their respective patriarchs – Justice Datta Chaudhuri and Lionel Tresawsen. The narrator adores Tridib, his uncle, because of his tremendous knowledge and his perspective of the incidents and places. Tha'mma thinks that Tridib is the type of person who seems 'determined to waste his life in idle self-indulgence', one who refuses to use his family connections to establish a career. Unlike his grandmother, the narrator loves listening to Tridib.For the narrator, Tridib's lore is very different from the collection of facts and figures. The narrator is sexually attracted to Ila but his feelings are passive. He never expresses his feelings to her afraid to lose the relationship that exists between them. However, one day he involuntarily shows his feelings when she, unaware of his feelings for her, undresses in front of him. She feels sorry for him but immediately abandons him to visit Nick's (the Price family's son, and the man who she later marries) bedroom. Tha'mma does not like Ila; she continually asks the narrator "Why do you always speak for that whore?" Tha'mma has a dreadful past and wants to reunite her family and goes to Dhaka to bring back her uncle. Tridib is in love with May and sacrificed his life to rescue her from mobs in the communal riots of 1963–64 in Dhaka.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_the_Beasts"title="City of the Beasts">
## Beginning."City of the Beasts" begins with the story of Alexander Cold, who is 15 years old and going through a family crisis. While his parents leave for Texas to try to treat his mother's cancer, Alex and his sisters are sent to live with their grandmothers. Despite his desperate pleading, Alex is sent off to New York City to stay with his eccentric grandmother Kate Cold, a reporter for "International Geographic Magazine". His sisters, however are sent to live with their other grandmother. Meanwhile, Kate announces that she will be taking Alex with her to the Amazon rainforest during his visit. Once Alex arrives in New York City, and finds out that his grandmother had no intentions of collecting him at the airport he is forced to find his own way to her apartment. In the process he meets a girl named Morgana, a homeless girl in her mid-20s. She offers him pot and steals his backpack that contained his clothes, his money and his flute. He is greatly saddened by the loss of his precious flute, but Kate gives him the flute belonging to his grandfather, musician Joseph Cold. Soon, they pack off to go to the Amazon with a professor and some photographers. The reason Kate goes is to write an article about the Beast.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abduction!"title="Abduction!">
Matt, a six-year old boy, is kidnapped by his father, Denny, whom he had never met. Though he has always dreamed of meeting him, nothing is the way he thought it would be, given his father is only using Matt to impress his sister who often brags about her two well-raised sons. Denny has also taken Matt's dog, Pookie, and then dropped him off in a park. With few clues to follow, Matt's mother, sister, and the police, are doing everything they can to find him. Some old folks found Pookie and later gave him back to Matt's mom and sister. Matt's sister, Bonnie, sees Matt at a Mariner's baseball game, but is caught by Denny. Now both captive, the siblings attempt to escape. On the ferry, Bonnie signals to Matt to throw his hardest pitch. The baseball hits Denny, which allows the two to escape. Denny is arrested, and the children return home safely.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasite_Eve_(novel)"title="Parasite Eve (novel)">
Mitochondria are the "power house" of biological cells. It is thought that they were originally separate organisms, and a symbiotic relationship between them and early cellular life has evolved into their present position as cell organelles with no independent existence (see endosymbiotic theory).The novel's plot supposes that mitochondria, which are inherited through the female line of descent, form the dispersed body of an intelligent conscious life-form, dubbed Eve, which has been waiting throughout history and evolution for the right conditions when mitochondrial life can achieve its true potential and take over from eukaryotic life-forms (i.e. humans and similar life) by causing a child to be born that can control its own genetic code.Eve is able to control people's minds and bodies by signaling to the mitochondria in their bodies. She can cause certain thoughts to occur to them and also make them undergo spontaneous combustion.The conditions Eve has waited for have arrived; she has found the perfect host in the body of Kiyomi Nagishima. At the start of the book, Eve is the mitochondria in Kiyomi's body. She causes Kiyomi to crash her car; Kiyomi survives but is brain dead. Kiyomi's husband is Toshiaki, a research assistant teaching and researching biological science. Eve influences Toshiaki and a doctor to ensure that one of Kiyomi's kidneys is transplanted into the teenage girl Mariko Anzai as an organ donation. As part of Kiyomi's body, the kidney is also a part of Eve; this prepares Mariko to be a suitable host for giving birth to mitochondrial life, as her immune system would otherwise rebel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excalibur_(novel)"title="Excalibur (novel)">
The novel is set in modern times against the background of the legendary Medieval Welsh colonization of Mobile, Alabama under the prince Madoc in the 12th century. The modern Pendragon, King Arthur's secret successor, must recover Arthur's famed sword Excalibur.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festival_of_Death_(novel)"title="Festival of Death (novel)">
'The Beautiful Death' is a theme park ride that allows people to experience the afterlife. At least, that is the intention. Riders are now turning into brain-damaged shells of their former selves. The Doctor arrives at the end of this disaster and is praised for saving everyone, something he did not actually do yet. With the help of all-new characters, he investigates through time and discovers he did save all in danger. All it took was the sacrifice of his own life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Son_Called_Gabriel"title="A Son Called Gabriel">
As he grows up, Gabriel starts to suspect that he is not like other boys, and engages in a series of sexually oriented games with Noel, a young male friend. He is later caught in the act by his childhood friend Fergal. During adolescence, Gabriel is convinced by his cousin Connor to sexually experiment with him, learns he is attracted to his own sex, and tries to fight it by trying to make himself attracted to girls. At sixteen, he is also abused at school by a priest Father Cornelius.The story ends with Brendan's revelation and Gabriel about to leave Ireland to go to University in England, and the reader has to draw his or her own conclusions about whether Gabriel will continue his relationship with Fiona – with whom he is in love but can't have a sexual relationship – or reconcile with his homosexual leanings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_of_Normal_Boys"title="The World of Normal Boys">
The book is written in the present tense. It's 1978, New Jersey: "Saturday Night Fever" and "Grease" are big. 13-year-old Robin MacKenzie is caught in a triangular relationship with next-door neighbor Todd Spicer and classmate Scott Schatz.Robin develops a fascination for 17-year-old neighbor Todd who, despite often teasing him, initiates a sexual relationship with the younger boy, whom Todd invites to a party after which they go swimming on a golf course. Robin further forms a close bond with fellow freshman Scott Schatz, whose father is physically abusive. Robin learns that, two years earlier, Todd and Scott were involved in a sexual relationship. Robin is troubled by this, but his relationship with Scott is ultimately unaffected.During the novel, Robin's younger brother Jackson dies some time after falling from a slide and breaking his neck, an incident Robin blames himself for although it isn't anyone's fault. As a result, Robin's family begins to break down: his father becomes violent towards Robin, and Robin's longstanding bond with his mother begins to be affected. His younger sister Ruby becomes religious and also closer to Robin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekaterina_(novel)"title="Ekaterina (novel)">
Ekaterina is an exiled Svanetian princess who arrives at an unnamed city at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela, Pittsburgh. There, she gets a job teaching an introductory mycology class at a university. Meanwhile, she rents a room from a woman, Loretta, who lives there with her twelve-year-old son, Kenny, who immediately takes a precocious liking to her. She befriends the 12-year-old boy called Kenny who reminds her of two young pubertal boys she had relationships with in Russia, Islamber and Dzhordzha. Harington describes the attractive boy as a faunlet, a male counterpart to Vladimir Nabokov's nymphet in "Lolita".After two months, the 27-year-old Ekaterina seduces Kenny and they have sex. During the course of their sexual relationship, Kenny, already a juvenile delinquent, steals contraceptives to avoid pregnancy. When Kenny confesses his sexual relationship with Ekaterina after being caught stealing car parts, his mother forces Ekaterina to leave. She settles in town called Stick Around where she befriends a woman named Sharon, who indirectly introduces her to a boy named Jason. Later, she engages Jason on his twelfth birthday by giving him an all-over massage in the bath while baby-sitting him.With the help of a novelist and improbable creative writing teacher named Ingraham, Ekaterina matures as a writer, eventually publishing not only a successful autobiography, "Louder, Engram!" (invoking Nabokov's revised autobiography, "Speak, Memory"), but also several works of fiction, one of which, a novel called "Georgie Boy", becomes a bestseller, allowing her to move from "Stick Around," this novel's disguise for Stay More, the primal setting for all of Harington's novels except his first, "The Cherry Pit," to a hotel in Arcaty, the novel's counterpart to the real Arkansas Ozarks town of Eureka Springs. In Arcaty, she meets young Travis Coe, another twelve-year-old boy, who moves into her luxurious penthouse apartment as her houseboy. After getting the lice out of his hair, Ekaterina invites Travis into her bed – just twelve days after they meet. Travis turns out to be a considerably more complex presence than his new employer has anticipated, and the relationship does not last. Ekaterina discovers that Travis was not a virgin and kicks him out, becoming obsessed with how he lost his virginity. Travis does go on to star in Hollywood's screen adaptation of "Georgie Boy". Ekaterina also benefits by turning her investigation of the girl to whom Travis lost his virginity into a series of short stories that propel her fame further by being published in Playboy magazine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anachrophobia"title="Anachrophobia">
Whilst travelling in time, the TARDIS suddenly shakes violently. The Eighth Doctor shuts it down, concluding that it is tearing itself apart attempting to escape a force that is forcing it to land. As the Doctor, Anji and Fitz emerge onto a wasteland, they are captured by soldiers. They learn that they have landed on a planet that is host to a war between two factions of humans: the Plutocratic empire and rebels known as Defaulters. Both sides have weapons that can slow the flow of time, or speed it up in small areas, but because of this, both sides have reached a stalemate.The soldiers take the Doctor to an officer called Lane. She assumes that the Doctor is the time expert the Plutocrats were sending, and the Doctor decides to agree. Lane takes them to a military outpost called Station 40. When they arrive, one of the soldiers, a man called Bishop, who had his arm aged by a time storm, is placed in a decelerated time capsule until his fate is decided.The commander of the base, Commander Bragg, reveals that one of his scientists, Dr Patterson, has developed a time capsule, which they plan to use to stop the war from ever happening. Two men, Ash and Norton, get inside the machine and go back in time, but the machine spins out of control. The Doctor brings the machine back to the present, and Ash and Norton are placed in quarantine and develop disorientation, anachrophobia, memory loss and physical trauma.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Dismiss_Us"title="Lord Dismiss Us">
The novel is set in a public school in England in the 1960s. It deals with the love affair between two boys, together with the internal politics of the school itself. Carleton, a sixth former loves Allen, a boy two years his junior. At the same time, the headmaster is trying to enforce a policy against such liaisons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Empire_of_Glass"title="The Empire of Glass">
The Doctor, Steven, and Vicki land in what seems to be Venice in 1609, where they meet a host of major historical figures including Galileo Galilei and William Shakespeare. However, with the arrival of old acquaintance Irving Braxiatel, Vicki's abduction and the framing of Steven for murder, the Doctor soon finds himself embroiled in the sinister machinations of an alien invasion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jhereg"title="Jhereg">
Vlad Taltos, a mobster and assassin in the magical metropolis of Adrilankha, is given the largest contract of his career, but the job is even more complicated than he expects.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Q"title="I, Q">
The novel opens with a mysterious Lady, who, having grown bored with contemplating the Universe, has decided to bring it to an end. She walks to the beach of the island where she lives alone, and summons a storm. As the storm builds up, a bottle washes up to the shore. The Lady picks up the bottle, takes out a manuscript it contains, and begins to read as the storm stands by and waits for her.Q is deep-sea fishing (literally standing at the bottom of an ocean) with his wife Q and son q, when the ocean begins draining into a giant whirlpool. Q powerlessly watches as his wife and son are taken in, and is only barely able to escape. He arrives in the Holodeck of the Enterprise, where Picard and Data's fishing simulation had been disturbed by the same disaster.In order to investigate what happened, Q takes Picard and Data to the Q Continuum, which they perceive as the fictional world of Dixon Hill. There, they learn that the Universe is ending, and that not only is the Q Continuum powerless to stop it, the Continuum actually welcomes the opportunity. Having explored all there is to explore and experienced all there is to experience, the Continuum is old and bored, and the end of the Universe is seen as a welcomed liberation. Q is unwilling to accept this decision, so the Continuum freeze him as a statue. With the help of Q2, Q escapes this punishment and the Continuum.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Earth_of_Mankind"title="This Earth of Mankind">
"This Earth of Mankind" tells the story of Minke, a Javanese minor royal who studies at a "Hogere Burger School" (HBS) in an era when only the descendants of the European colonizers can expect to attain this level of education. Minke is a talented young writer whose works are published in several Dutch-language journals and are widely admired. But as a "native", Minke is disliked by many of his fellow-students, who all claim some European descent. He is portrayed as being bold in opposing the injustices imposed upon his fellow Javanese as well as challenging aspects of his own culture.Minke is introduced to an extremely unusual Indonesian woman, Nyai Ontosoroh, who is the concubine of a Dutch man called Herman Mellema. Though she is a concubine, Nyai Ontosoroh is the actual head of family and company as Herman Mellema lost his sanity in the past. Minke falls in love with their daughter, Annelies, whom he eventually marries in an Islamic wedding in accordance with "native" customs, but which, according to Dutch law, has no legal validity because it was conducted without the consent of the under-aged Annelies' legal, Dutch, guardians.In that period, it was common for women to become the concubines of Dutch men living in the East Indies. They were considered to have low morals because of their status as concubines, even if, as in Nyai Ontosoro's case, they had no choice in the matter. Their children had uncertain legal status - either considered illegitimate "natives" with a corresponding lack of legal rights, unless legally acknowledged by their father, in which case they were considered "Indos", and their mother lost all rights over them in favor of the father. As a concubine, Nyai Ontosoro suffers because of her low status and lack of rights, but, significantly, is aware of the injustice of her suffering and believes education is the route by which her basic humanity can be acknowledged. She believes that learning is the key to opposing indignity, stupidity, and poverty. However, the decision to have the children of their relationship legally acknowledged as Herman Mellema's children has catastrophic consequences by the end of the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roundheads"title="The Roundheads">
Landing in December 1648 after the end of Second English Civil War, the TARDIS crew gets involved with intrigue involving both the victorious Oliver Cromwell and the doomed Charles I.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terre_Haute_(novel)"title="Terre Haute (novel)">
Jared McCaverty has a sexual encounter with a friend, Paul Herzog, but his father finds out and beats him. He buys a gay magazine, but his father finds it and cannot accept his son's sexual inclinations. He then has another homosexual episode with Randy Sparks, a school friend, but his father discovers them having sex in Jared's bedroom.Jared meets Julian Clay, the new curator of the local museum, and a sexually abusive relationship ensues. Jared faces rejection by Julian and threatens him.Julian Clay then commits suicide. It is likely that he did so because Jared threatened to expose him as a pedophile and a rapist, and Jared blames himself for Julian's death. In the closing pages, Jared meets Alexandre, a sympathetic twenty-year-old Frenchman, and the reader is led to believe that Jared will have found true love.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatta's_War"title="Vatta's War">
## "Trading in Danger".Kylara Vatta, the daughter of the CFO of Vatta Transport Ltd., a space shipping firm based out of the wealthy world of Slotter Key, is forced to resign in disgrace from the Slotter Key spaceforce academy after she is tricked by another cadet. Hoping to get her out of the limelight and make the best of her skills, her family give her the command the old, decrepit freighter "Glennys Jones" on its final journey to the scrapyards of Lastway. At the young Belinta colony she is told that a sorely needed shipment of agricultural machinery never arrived and a sizable payment is available to anyone who can bring the goods from the Sabine system. Determined to save the "Glennys Jones" from being scrapped, Ky deviates from the mission in an attempt to gain enough credit to refit the ship.An engine malfunction strands her at Sabine until she can raise funds to replace critical parts, but the two planets in the system are sliding towards open conflict. Just as she prepares to call home to request funds, the ansibles that link Sabine to outside systems are attacked and mercenary warships from the Mackensee Military Assistance Corporation appear in the system. They board the "Glennys Jones" and Ky is injured when a young man who had joined her ship at Belinta tries to attack them. After recovering she agrees to host the hostages the mercenaries have taken from the other merchant vessels in the system.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spook's"title="Spook's">
"Spook's" follow Thomas "Tom" Ward, the seventh son of a seventh son who is apprenticed to Gregory to become a Spook - a master fighter of supernatural evil. John Gregory is the Spook for "the County" and gives Tom practical instruction on tackling ghosts, ghasts, witches, boggarts, and all manner of other things that serve "The Dark". Tom soon discovers that most of John Gregory's apprentices have failed for various reasons, including being killed in the process of learning how to be a Spook. As the Chronicles progress the focus expands to other characters such as the assassin Grimalkin and the young witch Alice Deane; overall the series develops the plotline of Tom being destined to save the world or be tortured by the Fiend, the father of all evil, for all eternity."The County" referenced in the Chronicles is based on Lancashire in the North of England. Various County fictional towns are thinly-veiled modern day cities; for example, the town of Priestown is based on Preston (where author Delaney was born); Caster is Lancaster; Black Pool is Blackpool; Chipenden is Chipping.The first series, titled "The Wardstone Chronicles", concluded in 2014, and was followed by "The Starblade Chronicles" in 2015, a trilogy following the continued adventures of Tom Ward, who has finished his apprenticeship and is now a Spook in his own right dedicated to fighting an unparalleled evil threatening the County, and the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Lady_Molly's"title="At Lady Molly's">
It is 1934 and Nick is working, without great success, as a script writer at a film company. He gets invited by a colleague, Chips Lovell, to a party at the home of Lady Molly Jeavons. There he learns that Widmerpool is to marry the twice widowed, somewhat notorious (somewhat insane according to Nick) Mrs. Mildred Haycock. Nick subsequently has to endure having to lunch with Widmerpool and fending-off questions from Widmerpool's prospective in-laws becomes, for Nick, a motif throughout the novel. Also re-encountered at Lady Molly's gathering is old Alfred Tolland.A chance meeting by Nick with Quiggin (at a cinema where "Man of Aran" is showing) leads to a surprising and rather mysterious invitation of a weekend visit to the country. Quiggin and Mona Templer are staying in a cottage loaned to them by Erridge (Lord Warminster, eccentric head of the Tolland family). While there, they all visit the Tolland ancestral home, Thrubworth Park, for a frugal but eventful dinner.Just as the meal is finishing two Tolland sisters, Susan and Isobel, arrive. A while later Nick meets Lady Molly's husband, Ted Jeavons, in a Soho pub and they visit Umfraville's nightclub. They encounter Widmerpool (suffering another bout with jaundice), Mrs Haycock and Templer.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilsa_(novel)"title="Ilsa (novel)">
The title character, Ilsa Brandes, initially lives with her naturalist father, Dr. John Brandes, in a house on a beach, outside a fictional town in the American Deep South. 13-year-old Ilsa is a vibrant, outgoing, seemingly carefree person. She immediately captivates the book's narrator, Henry Randolph Porcher, who is ten years old as the book opens. Henry's mother hates Ilsa and Dr. Brandes, even to the point of refusing their help when her home is on fire. After the fire, Henry and his family go to stay with relatives in Charleston, where Henry gets his first hints about the family scandals that explain his mother's attitude. The circumstances of Ilsa's birth are the subject of controversy, both locally and in Charleston.After the death of her father, Ilsa goes to live with Henry's cousin, Anna Silverton. Henry's mother dies soon after this. Henry finally sees Ilsa again, and renews his friendship with her. Unfortunately for Henry, Ilsa later marries Monty Woolf, another cousin of Henry's. Despite his continuing love for Ilsa, Henry does little to further a romance with her, even after Monty's death. Nevertheless, he keeps returning to her side over the years. Ilsa and Henry experience numerous personal setbacks - including Ilsa's blindness and Henry's failure as a musician - and few if any triumphs.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_into_Fox"title="Lady into Fox">
Silvia Tebrick, the 24-year-old wife of Richard Tebrick, suddenly becomes a fox while they are out walking in the woods. Mr. Tebrick sends away all the servants in an attempt to keep Silvia's new nature a secret, although Silvia's childhood nurse returns. While Silvia initially acts human, insisting on wearing clothing and playing piquet, her behaviour increasingly becomes that characteristic of a vixen, causing the husband a great deal of anguish. Eventually, Mr. Tebrick releases Silvia into the wild, where she gives birth to five kits, whom Tebrick names and plays with every day. Despite Tebrick's efforts to protect Silvia and her cubs, she is ultimately killed by dogs during a fox hunt; Tebrick, who tried to save Silvia from the dogs, is badly wounded, but eventually recovers.McSweeney's Collins Library imprint republished "Lady into Fox" in 2004.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Zhivago_(novel)"title="Doctor Zhivago (novel)">
The plot of "Doctor Zhivago" is long and intricate. It can be difficult to follow for two reasons. Firstly, Pasternak employs many characters, who interact with each other throughout the book in unpredictable ways. Secondly, he frequently introduces a character by one of his/her three names, then subsequently refers to that character by another of the three names or a nickname, without expressly stating that he is referring to the same character. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silence_of_the_Lambs_(novel)"title="The Silence of the Lambs (novel)">
Clarice Starling, a young FBI trainee, is asked to carry out an errand by Jack Crawford, the head of the FBI division that draws up psychological profiles of serial killers. Starling is to present a questionnaire to the brilliant forensic psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer, Hannibal Lecter. Lecter is serving nine consecutive life sentences in a Maryland mental institution for a series of murders.Crawford's real intention, however, is to try to solicit Lecter's assistance in the hunt for a serial killer dubbed "Buffalo Bill", whose M.O. involves kidnapping large women, starving them for up to two weeks, killing and skinning them, and dumping the remains in nearby rivers. The nickname was started by Kansas City Homicide as a sick joke that "he likes to skin his humps." Throughout the investigation, Starling periodically returns to Lecter in search of information, and the two form a strange relationship in which he offers her cryptic clues in return for information about her troubled and bleak childhood as an orphan.When Bill's sixth victim is found in West Virginia, Starling helps Crawford perform the autopsy. Starling finds a pupa in the throat of the victim, and just as Lecter predicted, she has been scalped. Triangular patches of skin have also been taken from her shoulders. Furthermore, autopsy reports indicate that Bill had killed her within four days of her capture, much faster than his earlier victims. Starling takes the pupa to the Smithsonian, where it is initially identified by entomologist Noble Pilcher as the black witch moth, a species that does not naturally occur where the victim was found, though later it is identified as the Death's-head Moth, an even more exotic species that would have to be reared in captivity from imported eggs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forged_in_the_Fire"title="Forged in the Fire">
"Forged in the Fire" is an epic love story in which love prevails over all. When Will is sent to prison during the plague, Susanna has no way of knowing whether her beloved is alive or not. Will gets sent to jail with two of his friends for starting a fight in the streets. Whilst in jail both his friends are infested with the plague and Will becomes deathly ill. Both of his companions die but Will is bailed out by a man called Edmund who is extremely wealthy and a friend of Nat, who during the story is always at Will's side.When Susanna finally finds out where Will is located she travels at once to London. There she finds Will happy and healthy in Edmund's home with his eldest daughter. This is the one and only blow to their love but is soon overcome. The two get married in the sight of God at a Quaker meeting.The London fire is the next huge thing to happen. The city is destroyed bit by bit, and now that Susanna is with a child she and Will must leave. But Will refuses to leave until he has finished his work, so he sends Susanna, with friends, to make it out of the city and into a farm where she is to camp for many nights. Finally Will with Nat manage to get out of the city and they are reunited at last. Will also makes up with his father who has never much cared for Will and Susanna's love. He gives them some money and they live happily ever after. A few years later they have a son and life happily goes on.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witch_Hunters_(novel)"title="The Witch Hunters (novel)">
With the Doctor wanting to repair the TARDIS in peace and quiet, Barbara, Ian and Susan decide to get some experience of living in the nearby village of Salem. But the Doctor knows about the horrors destined to engulf the village and determines that they should leave.His friends are not impressed. His granddaughter Susan has her own ideas, and is desperate to return, whatever the cost. But perhaps the Doctor was right. Perhaps Susan's actions will lead them all into terrible danger and cause the tragedy that is already unfolding to escalate out of control.An adventure set during the Salem witch trials (1692-1693), featuring the First Doctor as played by William Hartnell and his companions Susan, Ian and Barbara.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_of_the_Gaderene"title="Last of the Gaderene">
RAF Culverton, East Anglia, during the Second World War. Alec Whistler, a Spitfire pilot discovers a green crystal in the wreckage left by a bomb which destroyed the RAF base's Mess, killing his fiance...As a reward for his actions in "The Three Doctors" the Third Doctor has had his knowledge of the TARDIS's dematerialisation codes returned to him by the Time Lords. The Doctor has left Earth and is helping the rebels on the planet Xanthos.Meanwhile, back on Earth, the Brigadier has received a call from his old friend Wing Commander Alec Whistler. Culverton Aerodrome has closed and been purchased by the mysterious Legion International, led by the sinister Bliss. Black-shirted troops guard the base and have begun to terrorise the local residents, and people have begun to disappear. Investigating the base with the young Noah Bishop, Whistler is captured by Legion. Noah escapes, but is injured by a huge worm-like creature living in the marsh behind the aerodrome.Escaping from Xanthos, the Doctor returns to UNIT HQ, realising this is the closest thing he has to home at the moment, though clearly unwilling to acknowledge this either to himself, Jo or the Brigadier. The Brigadier sends the Doctor and Jo to Culverton to investigate.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Chain_(novel)"title="Critical Chain (novel)">
Like Goldratt's book "The Goal", "Critical Chain" is written as a novel, not like a project manager's how-to guide. This book is a story about a professor trying to attain his tenure at a university's business school. The plot is used to maintain interest in the subject and provide a real life feel to the book. It provides plenty of real-world examples. The plot of the novel is fourfold:The goal of the book is the last point, but Goldratt makes it clear that educational systems must change to better accommodate the quickly changing world of business.The book walks the reader through a series of steps to establish the principles for the discussion. It is written for someone with a modicum of project management background.The book starts by pointing out the problems with how time estimates are normally done on projects. It then provides a primer on the Theory of Constraints and an example of its implementation in a steel mill. With the foundation set, it proceeds to show how the Theory of Constraints can be applied to schedule generation, resources constraints and multiple projects.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Runes_of_the_Earth"title="The Runes of the Earth">
Donaldson returns to the Land for the third series of novels based there. We are re-introduced to Linden Avery years after she first encountered Thomas Covenant and was forever changed by the experience. We journey once more to the familiar fantasy world where everything is again under threat.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marrow_(novel)"title="Marrow (novel)">
When a jovian-sized, artificially-created structure enters the galaxy, a society of technologically advanced humans (capable of interstellar flight and functionally immortal) are the first to intercept and investigate it. Finding it to be an intergalactic ship, they decide to convert it into a cruise ship, inviting alien races to join them in its massive, uncharted interior as it makes a slow circumnavigation of the Milky Way .After thousands of years, with over 200 billion creatures living in its upper levels, a group of explorers discover a planet hidden in the core of the Great Ship. As they explore it, however, an ionic blast cuts them off from the rest of the ship and destroys much of their technology. Because this planet, Marrow, is slowly expanding, the explorers reason that a new bridge can be built in another 5,000 years. They thus begin a civilization on the surface of Marrow.The descendants of these original explorers come to believe that the large superstructure has been built to contain the Bleak, a race of nearly unstoppable insect-like creatures. Calling themselves the Wayward, they take over the ship when the bridge is completed and attempt to steer it towards a black hole to destroy the Bleak.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragons_of_Autumn_Twilight"title="Dragons of Autumn Twilight">
The book begins with the return of a group of friends, consisting of Tanis, Sturm, Caramon, Raistlin, Flint, and Tasslehoff, who had separated to pursue their own quests and pledged to return in five years. Kitiara Uth Matar, the half sister of the twins Caramon and Raistlin, was supposed to be there as well, but only sent a mysterious note.On the eve of their reunion, the Companions discover that the village where they are meeting has been taken over by a religious order called the Seekers. They are collaborating with the Dragon Highlords, who are preparing for the conquest of the continent of Ansalon.The Companions soon discover that the Seekers are searching for a Blue Crystal Staff. When Goldmoon, a plainswoman in the same inn as the companions, heals a Seeker with her staff, the Companions are confronted by Highlord forces and are forced to flee the village.The next day, the group is attacked by Draconians, reptilian creatures that serve as foot soldiers in the Highlords' army. The Companions are driven into the woods, where they are attacked by undead and rescued by a centaur. The group is charged to go to the ruined city of Xak Tsaroth to retrieve the Disks of Mishakal, an object containing the teaching of the True Gods that will be instrumental for the restoration of the faith in the True Gods.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragons_of_Winter_Night"title="Dragons of Winter Night">
The novel begins with the Companions assembled in the major dwarven city of Thorbardin, where the refugees of Pax Tharkas are presenting the dwarves with the Hammer of Kharas, a legendary warhammer wielded by the dwarven hero Kharas, in return for refuge in the city.The refugees of Pax Tharkas, freed from the Dragon Highlord Verminaard, are on an intermittent stay before finding a new home in Thorbardin, ruled by the dwarves, who have agreed to house them temporarily. The Companions are sent to Tarsis, a supposed city by the sea, in order to find a permanent home for the refugees. Upon arriving, they discover that the city, which became landlocked after the Cataclysm, has turned from a thriving port into a ramshackle town. Whilst in Tarsis, the heroes meet the Silvanesti princess, Alhana Starbreeze and a small group of Knights of Solamnia led by Derek Crownguard. The heroes also learn of the existence of Dragon Orbs, ancient magical artifact capable of controlling dragons. The city is then attacked by dragons and completely destroyed. During the attack, the party is split: Tanis Half-Elven, Riverwind, Goldmoon, Caramon, Raistlin and Tika are rescued by Alhana Starbreeze while Sturm Brightblade, Flint Fireforge, Tasslehoff Burrfoot, Gilthanas, Laurana Kanan and Elistan escape with Derek Crownguard and his knights.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragons_of_Spring_Dawning"title="Dragons of Spring Dawning">
## Into the Blood Sea.The book begins with Tanis Half-Elven in Flotsam. Kitiara has recently left for Solamnia to lead the Dragonarmies in their failed attack against the High Clerist's Tower, which was depicted in the previous novel and resulted in the death of Sturm Brightblade. Tanis returns to the other companions, being watched by the draconian Gakhan, Kitiara's personal assassin. Returning to his friends (Goldmoon, Riverwind, Tika Waylan, Caramon and Raistlin Majere), Tanis tells them the half-truth that he was mistaken for an officer by an unspecified Dragon Highlord and forced to continue the impersonation for his own safety.Later on, the companions depart to Kalaman via Blood Sea of Istar by the ship Perechon, where the mysterious Berem (also called "the Everman" and "the Green Gemstone Man") works as a helmsman. Kitiara leads her forces and her dragon Skie to follow The Perechon. Evading pursuit, Berem steers the ship straight towards the whirlpool at the center of the sea, which was formed over the ruins of Istar city during the Cataclysm. Eventually Kitiara is unable to follow them, but The Perechon is caught in the whirlpool and the heroes realize they're doomed. Raistlin uses his Dragon Orb to teleport away, leaving the rest of his companions behind. Soon afterward, the Perechon tips over the edge of the whirlpool and the rest of the companions vanish beneath the waves.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-No_Boy"title="No-No Boy">
After World War II, Ichiro Yamada, a Japanese American male and former student at the University of Washington, returns home in 1946 to a Japanese enclave in Seattle, Washington. He has spent two years in an American internment camp for Japanese Americans and two years in federal prison for refusing to fight for the U.S. in World War II. Now home, Ichiro struggles with his parents for embracing American customs and values, and he struggles to maintain a relationship with his brother, Taro. Also, Ichiro faces ostracism from the Japanese American community for refusing to join the U.S. military and fight Japan when many in his community did. Despite his struggles with his family and some members of the community, Ichiro maintains a friendship with Kenji, a Japanese American who fought for the U.S. and badly injured one of his legs. Kenji introduces Ichiro to Emi whose husband re-enlisted and remained in Germany after the war. Ichiro even manages to meet Mr. Carrick who interviews him for a draftsman position.Perceived as disloyal to the U.S. but not fully Japanese, Ichiro struggles to find his path. Through Ichiro's story, Okada examines what it means to be American in a post-war society whose non-white communities are struggling to find their places.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Theocracy"title="American Theocracy">
Phillips describes three central, unifying planks in the Republican coalition. The first is oil. The second is radical religion. The third is unprecedented levels of national and consumer debt.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plainsong_(novel)"title="Plainsong (novel)">
The book follows several stories of families in a small town in eastern Colorado. Maggie is the link between many of the other characters and strands of the novel. She introduces Victoria to the McPheron brothers, and has a romantic relationship with Tom.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immoralist"title="The Immoralist">
"The Immoralist" is a recollection of events that Michel narrates to his three visiting friends. One of those friends solicits job search assistance for Michel by including in a letter to Monsieur D. R., Président du Conseil, a transcript of Michel's first-person account. Important points of Michel's story are his recovery from tuberculosis; his attraction to a series of Algerian boys and to his estate caretaker's son; and the evolution of a new perspective on life and society. Through his journey, Michel finds a kindred spirit in the rebellious Ménalque.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_(Peters_novel)"title="Luna (Peters novel)">
"Luna" follows the life of sixteen-year-old Regan as she keeps the secret of her older sister Luna's transgender identity. During the day, Luna pretends to be an average senior boy named Liam. But at night, Luna is allowed to be her true self: Lia Marie, a girl. Later, she changes her female name to Luna, which means "moon", to reflect that her true identity could only be seen at night. After years of ‘transforming’ only at night, Luna confides in her sister that she wants to transition into a full-time female. Luna asks Regan to help her with her transitioning and, although she agrees, she finds herself worried about Luna and her safety. The novel follows Regan as she makes sense of her sister’s decision.Other problems arise for Regan as she is attending high school. She spends most of her life avoiding other students, in fear of letting the secret slip. But a new boy at school, Chris, becomes interested in her. Although Regan enjoys attention from Chris, she draws away from him, choosing to stay focused on Luna.As Luna is coming out more, her father starts to notice differences in his child and tries to push a more masculine role onto Luna. Regan’s father confides in her that he believes Luna is gay. Meanwhile, their mother remains oblivious to the rising tension in the household. Consumed by the workload of her wedding planning business, the mother is constantly out of the house and distant from her family.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_to_Magnus"title="Mission to Magnus">
The Doctor is tricked by his old Gallifreyan school bully Anzor and becomes involved with a conflict on the planet Magnus. There, a virus in the planet's atmosphere has made the surface lethal to men, and the predominantly female society is led by Madamme Rana Zandusia. She believes that their neighboring planet Salvak has found a cure to the virus and will use it to invade and take over their planet. At the urging of Sil, who seeks commercial opportunity from any outcome of this conflict, Rana called for a Time Lord envoy, Anzor, to allow them to use time travel, prevent Salvak from developing the antidote, and save their planet. Recognising that the women of Magnus have powerful telepathic abilities that could allow them to discover the secrets of time travel, the Doctor tricks Anzor to depart in his TARDIS, allowing himself and Peri to handle the situation. Separately, the Doctor and Peri learn from a group of boys, part of Magnus' breeding program and led by Vion, that there is a prophecy of a revelation that will change Magnus' society for the better, heralded by the Doctor's arrival.The Doctor is forced to show Rana and Sil how to use his TARDIS when they hold Peri hostage, but limits their travel to only a few hours ahead. Left behind, the Doctor, Peri, and Vion discover that a large number of Ice Warriors have been hiding under Magnus' ice caps, and have planted nuclear explosives around the planet aimed to push it out of orbit and farther away from its sun as to make its overall climate hospitable to the Ice Warriors, despite the loss of life on the surface. They encounter the survivors of an exploration team from Salvak that had come to offer the cure to the virus out of compassion with no plans to invade, but instead were caught by the Ice Warriors. With their help, the Doctor and his allies attempt to stall the explosions, but are unable to do so, and the planet shifts out of orbit.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Temple_of_Dawn"title="The Temple of Dawn">
The lawyer Honda visits Thailand on a business trip and encounters a young girl whom he believes to be his schoolfriend's second reincarnation. Eleven years later she travels to Japan to study and he befriends her in the hope of learning more. The main narrative takes place between 1941 and 1952. The last chapter is set in 1967.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Sanction_(novel)"title="The Final Sanction (novel)">
It is the second and so far final encounter between the Doctor and the Selachians, first introduced by Lyons in his previous Second Doctor novel, "The Murder Game". The year is 2204. The Doctor is caught in human history. When the TARDIS is stolen and Zoe is kidnapped by a Selachian he is forced to intervene in a war. The Doctor most make a painful choice which is more important the flow of a time stream or the lives of his companions.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_in_the_Sun"title="Dying in the Sun">
Los Angeles, 1947. LAPD detective Robert Chate is convinced that the man who calls himself 'The Doctor' has something to do with the murder of multi-millionaire movie producer Harold Reitman.The Doctor aids the police in their investigation, while looking into 'Star Light Pictures'. The Doctor is convinced there is a powerful threat hidden somewhere in the soon to be released film 'Dying In the Sun'. He decides to stop the release any way he can and faces opposition from the Hollywood power structure.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Mountain_(novel)"title="Cold Mountain (novel)">
The novel opens in a Confederate military hospital near Raleigh, North Carolina, where Inman is recovering from battle wounds during the American Civil War. The soldier is tired of fighting for a cause he never believed in. After considering the advice of a blind man, and moved by the death of the man in the bed next to him, he decides one night to slip out of the hospital and return home to Cold Mountain, North Carolina.At Cold Mountain, Ada's father dies. The farm, named Black Cove, that the genteel, city-bred Ada lives on is soon reduced to a state of disrepair. But she is saved from destitution by a resourceful but homeless young woman named Ruby, who moves in with her. Together, they clean the place up and return it to productivity. Ruby also teaches Ada how to survive in those difficult times, while Ada shares her knowledge of literature with Ruby.Inman soon becomes aware of the Confederate Home Guard, who hunt down military deserters from the Confederacy. He meets a preacher called Veasey, whom he catches in the act of attempting to murder a woman he has impregnated. After Inman dissuades him, they travel together. They butcher a dead bull that had fallen into a creek and the bull's owner, Junior, gives them away to the Home Guard. They are put into a group of other captured prisoners and march for days before the Home Guard decides to simply shoot them because they are "too much trouble." Veasey steps forward to try to stop them and is killed. Inman is grazed by a bullet that passed through Veasey and is thought to be dead. The Guardsmen dig a shoddy mass grave and Inman pulls himself out, helped in part by some passing wild pigs. He cannot bury Veasey, so he turns him face down and continues on.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaroids_from_the_Dead"title="Polaroids from the Dead">
The book is split into three parts. The first part is Polaroids from the Dead, which is a collection of short stories inspired by a series of Grateful Dead concerts. The second is Portraits of People and Places, which is a collection of essays about people and places, including a letter to Kurt Cobain and a discussion of the Lions Gate Bridge. The last part is called “Brentwood Notebook” and is a discussion of Brentwood, California, a suburb of Los Angelus. It is also where Marilyn Monroe died, and where Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_Lawino"title="Song of Lawino">
"Song of Lawino", which is a narrative poem, describes how Lawino's husband, Ocol, the son of the tribal leader of their Acholi tribe, has taken another wife, Clementine, who is educated and acts European. Although Ocol's polygamy is accepted by society, and by Lawino herself, her description of his actions shows that he is shunning Lawino in favour of Clementine. Ocol is also said to be fascinated with the culture of the European colonialists. As an example of this, Lawino says Ocol no longer engages, or has any interest in, the ritualistic African dance but prefers the ballroom-style dances introduced by the colonising Europeans. This loss of culture on the part of Ocol is what disturbs Lawino the most. The poem is an extended appeal from Lawino to Ocol to stay true to his own customs, and to abandon his desire to be white. The book also advocates for the African culture that has been lost by the educated elite. Lawino bemoans her husband's lack of African pride and she romanticizes all that is black. Lawino says "all that is black is beautiful."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Colony_of_Lies"title="The Colony of Lies">
The independent Earth Colony Axista Four was supposedly founded in the 2439 by Stewart Ransom, a noted humanitarian. Arriving on the colony one hundred years later, the Doctor, Zoe and Jamie find a near-civil war.'Realists' have abandoned Ransome's 'back to basics' ideals and are raiding the remains of the colony ship to further their technological advancements. The 'Loyalists' are in danger of extinction. In a little-known underground bunker, aliens who claim to be the planet's first colonists are stirring.Hopeful colonists hope Random's daughter, Kirann, can be revived from cryogenic suspension and reunited the colony. This does not work out as expected.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Five"title="The Power of Five">
The series focuses on five children: Matthew Freeman, Pedro, Scott Tyler, Jamie Tyler, and Scarlett Adams, a group of five modern day teenagers with some sort of power who are expected to defeat the Old Ones and save humanity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven's_Gate"title="Raven's Gate">
After being arrested for breaking and entering an Ipswich warehouse, 14-year-old delinquent Matthew 'Matt' Freeman is enrolled in a teenage rehabilitation program and sent to a farm in the village of Lesser Malling, Yorkshire. The farm is run by the stern spinster, Jayne Deverill, whose sister, Claire, is also a spinster and the local primary school's headmistress. While there, Matt experiences various unexplained phenomena and discovers a confidential file suggesting he possesses psychic abilities. A farmer called Tom Burgess tells Matt to come to his farmhouse the next day and he will help him leave. Visiting the farm the next day, Matt finds Burgess dead and the place wrecked. The words "Raven's Gate" have been painted on one wall of the bedroom. All of Matt’s attempts to inform the authorities are mysteriously thwarted, in part thanks to the villagers of Lesser Malling.Several days later, Matt follows Jayne and Claire Deverill into the woods and watches them perform a dark magic ritual. He tries to eavesdrop, but triggers a security alarm. Jayne Deverill summons two black demon dogs, which chase him through the woods and trap him in a bog. Matt is rescued by Richard Cole, a journalist who he had previously contacted about the Burgess murder. At Richard's flat in York, he hears Matt's full story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Tickle"title="Mr. Tickle">
Mr. Tickle's story begins while he is in bed, getting himself a biscuit without getting up, because of his "extraordinarily long arms." He then decides that it is a tickling sort of day, thus he journeys town to tickle people: a teacher, a policeman, a greengrocer, a station guard, a doctor, a butcher, and a postman. The book ends with a warning that Mr. Tickle could be seen at your door, wanting to tickle you.It is a relatively unusual Mr. Men book where the main character is naughty, tickling everyone, yet there is no corrective action taken to mend his ways—Mr. Tickle is left free to tickle the next day, learning nothing from this.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Riders"title="The Riders">
"The Riders" tells the story of an Australian man, Fred Scully, and his 7-year-old daughter Billie. Scully, as he is known, and his wife, Jennifer, have planned to move from Australia to a cottage they have purchased in Ireland. His wife and daughter are due to arrive in Ireland, but at the airport only Billie arrives, traumatised and unable to tell her father what has happened or why her mother put her on the plane alone. The story follows Scully and Billie as they travel around Europe retracing the steps of their previous travel, trying to find Jennifer and work out why she left them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_of_Wenceslas"title="The Night of Wenceslas">
Nicolas is a 24-year-old Londoner, a witty wastrel and the novel's archetypal anti-hero. He hates his job in his late father's glass-making business, where he works under the odious Nimek in anticipation of making full partner one day. He dreams of inheriting untold riches from his Uncle Bela in Vancouver, which will put an end to his current servitude. His bossy Irish girlfriend Maura continually presses him to make something of himself. His one true love is his car, an MG, which he bought on an impulse, and its maintenance keeps him in permanent hock to the garage owner "Ratface" Ricketts.A note arrives from a lawyer called Stephen Cunliffe, stating that his Uncle Bela has died in Canada and left him a fortune. He goes to see Cunliffe, who forwards him a sum of £200 to tide him over until such time as he can begin to enjoy the fruits of his new estate. However, Nicolas manages to spend this allowance in a matter of days, and returns to Cunliffe's office to request a further advance.However, Cunliffe now declares that Uncle Bela is very much alive; that he, Cunliffe, is in fact a moneylender, and that Nicolas owes him £200, with the MG as security. The distraught Nicolas is told that he can discharge his debt if he is willing to carry out a simple assignment in Prague. He is to bring back a formula for a glass-making process from a glass factory that used to belong to Pavelka, an associate of Cunliffe's who also happens to have been a wrestler in the past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbinger_(Star_Trek_novel)"title="Harbinger (Star Trek novel)">
The U.S.S. "Enterprise" is damaged after traveling to the edge of the galaxy. They are passing through the Taurus Reach and are surprised to find a new Federation facility, Starbase 47 a.k.a. Vanguard. Captain James T. Kirk is puzzled at this place for many reasons, including it being so near the xenophobic Tholian Assembly. Kirk has his ship dock for repairs.The Tholian Assembly, the Orion Syndicate, and the Klingon Empire all believe there is much more to the establishment of this odd new starbase and there is.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_(novel)"title="Georges (novel)">
The novel concerns the life of Georges, the son of a wealthy mulatto planter named Pierre Munier, on the French colony of Mauritius. While also being a mulatto, Georges is very light-skinned to the point where he can pass for being white. As a child, he witnesses the British invasion of Isle de France. Because Pierre is a mulatto, the other planters on the island (who are all white) refuse to let him fight alongside them. Instead, Pierre leads a group of Black militiamen and successfully rout a British column, saving the lives of many of the planters. Refusing to acknowledge that a person of colour saved them, the other planters ignore Pierre's accomplishment.Henri Malmédie, the son of a wealthy planter, begins to mock George for the treatment meted to his father, resulting in a fight breaking out between the two. Afterward, concerned about possible retaliation from Henri's father, Pierre father sends Georges and his older brother Jacques to France to be educated. In France, the brothers are separated when the older brother gets a job on a merchant ship. Georges becomes cultured, deeply educated, and popular in Parisian high society. Through numerous tests of will, Georges overcomes his weaknesses and becomes skilled in a variety of fields, ranging from hunting to the art of seducing women.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_St._Petersburg"title="The Man from St. Petersburg">
The book is set just before the outbreak of World War I. It is an account of how the lives of the main characters were interwoven with the success or failure of secret naval talks between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the Russian Empire. In these, Britain had to win the support of Russia in order to make any headway with its navy. As a result, Tsar Nicholas’s nephew Prince Alexei was sent to London for high-level bilateral talks.Lord Stephen Walden is married to Lydia, a Russian aristocrat. The young visiting Prince is her nephew and Walden was one of the people taking part in the talks. When Prince Alexei arrived in London, his presence aroused the interest of not only the establishment, but tragically that of Feliks, an anarchist.Feliks, also a Russian, decided to assassinate Prince Alexei so that the Anglo-Russian negotiations would collapse. Having failed once to shoot the Russian prince, Feliks looked for alternative methods. Eventually, he learned that Lydia, his ex-lover, was married to Walden. He visited the Waldens’ home and was able to get details of the Prince’s whereabouts. But his plot was foiled when Lydia, guided by her intuition, realized that Feliks had evil designs and told her husband about Feliks’s visit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fade_(novel)"title="Fade (novel)">
In the summer of 1938, the young Paul Moreaux, who lives in a town outside of Boston called Monument, discovers he can "fade", becoming invisible. His family has had this ability generation after generation; it is somehow passed down from uncle to nephew.Bewildered and then thrilled with the possibilities of invisibility, Paul experiments with his "gift". He sees things that he should not witness. His power soon overloads him, shows him shocking secrets, pushes him over the edge, and drives him toward some chilling and horrible acts for which there is no forgiveness, no forgetting, and no turning back. Paul discovers how cruel, evil, and disgusting the world can be, and how the ability to fade becomes a nightmare.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diary_of_a_Drug_Fiend"title="The Diary of a Drug Fiend">
The story is widely thought to be based upon Crowley's own drug experiences, despite being written as a fiction. This seems almost conclusively confirmed by Crowley's statement in the novel's preface: "This is a true story. It has been rewritten only so far as was necessary to conceal personalities." Crowley's own recreational drug use and also his personal struggle with drug addiction, particularly heroin, is well documented. Crowley made a study of drugs and their effects upon the body and mind, experimenting widely on himself. Many of his conclusions are present within this novel. "Diary of a Drug Fiend" encapsulates much of Crowley's core philosophy concerning Thelema and his conception of True Will.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Boy"title="Dream Boy">
Nathan is an intelligent but shy teenage boy who wants to escape from his abusive and violent father, and fantasizes about a relationship with Roy, the boy who lives next door. Roy is a senior at the same high school as Nathan, and he drives the school bus. Gradually their relationship deepens and becomes sexual.Drunk one evening, Nathan's father tries to molest him. This is clearly not the first time it has happened and helps explain Nathan's desire to escape from his family. His mother avoids the issue, although she knows what is going on.Nathan is accepted into Roy's social circle and is invited to go on a camping trip with Roy and his friends Randy and Burke. During the trip, they discover an abandoned and possibly haunted plantation house and Nathan and Roy are discovered in a compromising situation. Burke later on rapes and hits Nathan with a chair handle. The blow is clearly fatal and Nathan "dies" yet is still inside his body and aware of his surroundings. The book ends with Nathan leaving the abandoned house and finding Roy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decay_of_the_Angel"title="The Decay of the Angel">
In "The Decay of the Angel", the last book of "Sea of Fertility tetralogy", Shikeguni Honda, a retired judge, adopts a teenage orphan, Tōru Yasunaga, whom he believes to be a dead schoolfriend's third successive reincarnation. In this book, which is also accepted as the testament of Yukio Mishima, Shigekuni Honda observes the evolution of Japan in the 20th century. Japan's progressive losing traditional values and westernization in both individual and social levels, which started in "Spring Snow", appears as a new, universalized Japan in the last book. In "Spring Snow", Kiyoaki's faithful friend and a young lawyer candidate, a judge in the "Runaway Horses", and a philosopher in "The Temple of the Dawn", Shigekuni Honda is presented as an old man, a retired judge in the book of "The Decay of the Angel". Throughout the previous three books, Honda, who tried to protect Kiyoaki himself and his reincarnations from death, fails each time, and this book deals with the last reincarnation Toru, who later turns out to be a fake. We see that Honda, who thinks Toru is a reincarnation of Kiyoaki, tries to educate and protect him throughout the novel, but we witness that Toru's response turns out negatively to this behavior and tries to deceive him in some way and to be superior. As a matter of fact, when Toru does not die at the age of 20, as in every reincarnation, it is revealed that he is fake. At the end of the book, Honda visits Gesshū Temple to see Satoko, who is Kiyoaki's love in the first book. Honda depicts Satoko, who is now an Abbess, has not lost anything of its purity and beauty. The novel ends with a question mark. When Honda finds out that Satoko doesn't remember anything about their past, he questions his existence in the world and thinks maybe he never existed. After writing the last lines of The Decay of the Angel, writer Yukio Mishima died in 1970 by killing himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_(novel)"title="America (novel)">
Born to a crack addict, America was given to a rich white family. They decided they didn't want him anymore after his skin started to darken at the age of five years old. The family's nanny, Sylvia Harper, adopts/fosters America. She had a "man-friend" named Clark Poignant, and a half-brother named Browning. Clark Poignant befriended America. After a year, America gets sent back to his biological mother by the state. Browning tells America to be as bad as he possibly can, so he will get sent back to them. America's mother lived in a shoddy house in New York City with America's two older brothers, named Brooklyn and Lyle.America's mother is never around, so five-year-old America has to live with his brothers – aged 7 and 8 – for two years. America, Brooklyn, and Lyle become hooligans, vandalizing and stealing all over the place. However, their luck runs out when an elevator worker finds them scribbling America's numbers all over the elevator. America is sent to a hospital, and Brooklyn and Lyle are sent to a foster home. Soon, he is sent back to Mrs. Harper.Mrs. Harper has grown old and arthritic, and Browning has moved into America's old bedroom, which they share. Clark Poignant had since died, after he left. However, America has difficulty erasing the cussing and bad behaviors he'd learnt. He soon starts Grade 2, even though he is mostly illiterate. Browning sees that America enjoys being bad and secretly encourages him. When America begins school, he meets Liza, who shares some of his bad behavior, and they develop crushes on each other. Browning's relationship with America continues to develop. He gives America a lighter with a naked lady on it, and gives him alcohol. He also gives America reading lessons with pornographic magazines. Eventually, Browning begins to molest America and has sex with him on occasion. America likes the feeling of Browning touching him so begins to promote his sexual relations. Then Browning introduces America to masturbation and both masturbate together in the room unnoticed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punk_Farm"title="Punk Farm">
"Punk Farm" tells the story of five farm animals—Sheep (lead vocals), Pig (electric guitar and backing vocals), Goat (electric bass guitar and backing vocals), Chicken (electronic musical keyboards and backing vocals) and Cow (drum kit and backing vocals)—who are an underground punk rock band called "Punk Farm". They perform a punk rock cover of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" while Farmer Joe is asleep.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Blanc"title="Point Blanc">
The book opens with the death of American electronics billionaire Michael J. Roscoe, in an elevator shaft in his New York City office, arranged by a reputable contract killer. Elsewhere, Alex Rider is at school and witnesses a man known as "Skoda" selling drugs to some of his classmates. Alex follows him to his home, situated on a barge in Putney River, but is caught by the police after using a crane to lift the barge out of the water. He accidentally drops it in a police conference centre rather than a nearby car park, as he originally intended, thanks to the builders shutting down the crane's power. The police arrest Skoda and his accomplice, Mike Beckett.Miraculously, no one is killed, although some people end up with major injuries, but Alex's real identity is revealed when he is arrested. After arranging for his release, MI6 chief Alan Blunt blackmails Alex into investigating the deaths of Roscoe and General Viktor Ivanov, head of the Foreign Intelligence Service, who died in a bizarre motorboat explosion, in exchange for all potential charges being dropped. The only thing linking these deaths are that both men had rebellious sons attending the Point Blanc Academy in the French Alps.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Possibility_of_an_Island"title="The Possibility of an Island">
There are three main characters - Daniel and two of his clones.Daniel is a successful comedian who can't seem to enjoy life despite his wealth. He gets bored with his hedonist lifestyle, but can't escape from it either. In the meanwhile he is disgruntled with the state of current society, and philosophizes about the nature of sex and love.His two clones live an uneventful life as hermits, in a post-apocalyptic future. They live in a time where the human species is on its last legs (or, alternatively, on its first legs, as they have returned to societies of hunter-gatherer tribes), destroyed by climate change and nuclear war. The two clones are confronted with the life of the first Daniel and have different views about their predecessor. Scattered around are the remnants of tourist resorts, cities and consumer items and some natural humans living in small tribes without any knowledge of the past or of civilization.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matarese_Countdown"title="The Matarese Countdown">
Like the legendary phoenix, the Materese are rising from the ashes and are regaining their former power.The new leader of the Matarese is an enigmatic figure named Jan van der Meer Matareisen, according to himself the only legitimate grandchild of Baron Guillaume de Matarese, the founder of the Matarese group.With the help of another shadowy figure known as Julian Guiderone a.k.a. "son of the shepherd boy," who seems to have survived the events recounted in "The Matarese Circle" nearly twenty years ago, they are hatching a new and diabolical plot to plunge the civilised world into total chaos.Only one man, a consular operations operative known as Brandon Scofield a.k.a. Beowulf Agate, can stop them, but he has been retired for nearly twenty years. Brandon Scofield is once again sent into the field together with a CIA case officer, Cameron Pryce, but this time the enemy is more dangerous.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon_Awakens"title="The Demon Awakens">
Elbryan Wyndon and his childhood friend Jilseponie Ault (nicknamed Pony), whose lives are irrevocably changed by the destruction of their home town Dundalis, and Avelyn Desbris who is a very pious man that enters a group of monks that go to a monastery by the name of St. Mere Abelle to study and serve under God. So while Elbryan and Pony try to sort out their lives, Avelyn comes to terms with the all-too human brothers of the church and the myriad of injustices he watches them cause. After the destruction of Elbryan’s home town he is taken in by the Touel’alfar and to their home Andur’Blough Inninnes (The Forest of Cloud) and teaches him to not just train his body, but also his mind in the ways of philosophy to become a formidable ranger. While Elbryan is training his childhood friend Pony can’t even remember her past and is trying to ease the pain of her forgotten past. While all this is happening Avelyn has problems of his own and soon has to leave the church in a most unexpected way. It is not till years later when they all meet each other and fight an evil like no other by the name of Bestesbulzibar who is a mighty demon that was reawakened by the humans weakness to rule all the realm with an army of goblins, "powries" (dwarfs), and Fomorian Giants and not only that the church is after Avelyn, too. So now this ragtag group of friends, with the help of some unlikely allies, must stop the demon and save the entire realm from its impending doom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon_Spirit"title="The Demon Spirit">
Even with the destruction of the dactyl, all is not well in the kingdom of Honce-the-Bear. The servants of Bestesbulzibar still roam the land, creating havoc while, at St.-Mere-Abelle, the centaur Bradwarden is held captive. It is up to Elbryan and Pony, with help from friends, to attempt a rescue while fighting the enemy. It is during this time that Elbryan teaches Pony "Bi'nelle dasada", the sword-dance of the "Touel'alfar", the short winged elves of Corona. It is also at this time that Father Abbot Markwart, head of the Church of St. Abelle, begins his spiral downward. In this novel the reader meets Andacanavar, a northern ranger from Alpinador. Also, the character of Marcalo De'Unnero becomes more fully developed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caramelo"title="Caramelo">
Each summer, Celaya (Lala) and her family return to her grandmother's home in Mexico City. At the house, Lala meets Candelaria, the maid's daughter, who she secretly admires for her beauty and her "caramelo skin" that is almost too pretty to look at. The Awful Grandmother, having chased out the renters to make room for her family, controls everything from the family's activities to what will be served for dinner, as the Little Grandfather looks on. As the narrative unfolds, Lala starts to understand how her dysfunctional family members became the way they are. One by one, the members of the family reveal pieces of their life that helped shape their personalities: Narciso lived in Chicago for a time, where he fell in love, but was injured in the war and had to come home; after Soledad's mother died, she has cherished a silken rebozo but has never truly been loved, other than by her son; Aunty Light-Skin had an affair with an unnamed movie star. One by one, secrets are exposed, the cruel ones that usually wreck a family. Through it all, Cisneros illustrates how the ties between families are similar to those that bind the ancient silken rebozo. The rebozo (shawl) is central to the story, as it is a "caramelo", not especially the most valued or sought after color of scarf, but the rebozo is the only thing that Soledad has that belonged to her mother. The symbolic shawl parallels familial relationships, perhaps not the first choice or the most beautiful, but even in dysfunctional relationships, families can maintain a culture of interconnected relationships.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Academy"title="Nightmare Academy">
Twin siblings and Veritas Project members Elijah and Elisha Springfield are sent to investigate the Knight-Moore Academy when a missing boy mysteriously reappears with his mind wiped clean of almost all of his memories. The only two things he can say are "I don't know" and "Nightmare Academy". When the young man dies mysteriously, the Springfield family is tasked with the investigation of what happened to the boy and what exactly the Nightmare Academy is. Elijah and Elisha are sent to Knight-Moore and discover that sinister happenings abound on the campus, such as campus raids and frequent fights. During the course of the investigation the teens lose contact with their parents and Elijah is taken to a mysterious mansion after someone starts a fight with him. Elijah's sister has to find a way to save her brother without help from her parents before he is murdered or loses all of his memories...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divided_City"title="Divided City">
A dark stain, spreading. A young man lies bleeding in the street. It's Glasgow. And it's May - the marching season. The Orange Walks have begun. Graham doesn't want to be involved. He just wants to play football with his new mate, Joe. But then he witnesses a shocking moment of violence. A gripping tale about two boys who must find their own answers - and their own way forward - in a world divided by differences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Seen_Wearing_..._(Hillary_Waugh_novel)"title="Last Seen Wearing ... (Hillary Waugh novel)">
"The police examine her past for any motive that might make her wish to disappear, or any reason why someone might want to kill her. They find her body after a long and frustrating search. As they sift all the evidence again and again, the identity of her killer slowly begins to emerge, like a photograph taking on recognizable features in the developing fluid" (Ian Ousby).The novel, which minutely chronicles the work of the police, is told in chronological order. No piece of information is ever held back. At any given point in time, the reader knows just as much as the police. The time narrated is 5½ weeks, from 3 March 1950 to 11 April 1950.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curse_of_the_Pharaohs_(novel)"title="The Curse of the Pharaohs (novel)">
The Emersons are at home in England, aching to return to Egypt, but finding no excuse to return until Lady Baskerville asks them to finish the excavation started by her husband, who died mysteriously just before opening a tomb in Luxor. No one else will continue as rumors of a curse on those who desecrate the tomb fly through the region.Leaving their son Ramses at home, the Emersons arrive at the Baskerville compound near the Valley of the Kings to find sick employees, over-eager reporters, and an assortment of other characters trying to either get into the tomb, or keep the Emersons out.Three recurring characters are introduced; Cyrus Vandergelt, Karl von Bork and Kevin O'Connell. Vandergelt is a wealthy amateur American Egyptologist, and over the years becomes Professor Emerson's closest friend. Bork is an expert in hieroglyphs who appears in a number of stories, usually assisting other Egyptologists. O'Connell is a reporter who eventually becomes a valuable outlet for the Emersons and their adventures.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Monkey_(novel)"title="Love Monkey (novel)">
Tom Farrell is a man in his thirties who resides in New York City in 2001 (before, during and after the September 11 attacks). The novel is a slice of life story, briefly visiting several months of his life as he works as an editor of the weekend edition of the New York City newspaper, "Tabloid". Although his friends and relatives advance in life (marriage, kids, etc.), Tom believes he is not. He makes around $86,000 a year, but the most expensive item he owns is a several thousand dollar couch (doesn't own a high priced item like a home or car, for example). The novel tracks Tom as he moves through his life, with each chapter being a day in his life during the year 2001 (not all days covered, and not all chapters start new days).Throughout the book, Tom dates several women, including the woman he really fancies, Julia. Unfortunately for him, Julia is living with another man, and is ten years his junior in age. Julia also works at "Tabloid", but while Tom is an editor, Julia is just starting out.Tom's days are filled with drinking, watching TV (many cartoons), working at "Tabloid", and trying to deal with his deep desire to be in a relationship with Julia, who seems somewhat determined to not have said relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Men_and_Monsters"title="Of Men and Monsters">
The storyline introduces giant, technologically superior aliens who have conquered Earth. People live like vermin in holes in the insulation material of the walls of the homes the monsters have built, sneaking out to steal food and other items from the aliens. A complex social and religious order has evolved, with women preserving knowledge and working as healers, while men serve as warriors and thieves. For the aliens, human beings are just a nuisance, neither civilized nor intelligent, and are generally regarded as vermin to be exterminated.The novel opens with the story of Eric, a boy who is a member of a tribe that calls itself "Mankind". In order for Eric to become an adult, he must undergo a ceremonial rite of passage in which he must venture out on his own into monster territory and steal some item from them which the tribe can then use for themselves. As he is about to embark on his adventure, Eric learns that his uncle has been a secret supporter of a very different philosophy – the idea that "Ancestor-Science" failed to repel the aliens when they first came and therefore to seek the old "science" would be futile. It would be wiser to try to gain knowledge of "Alien-Science" and then to turn it against the monsters. Eric goes out into alien territory to prove himself and ends up meeting some more people who also believe that alien science is the answer to escaping from their predicament. However, on his return to the burrows, Eric finds an insurrection led by his uncle has failed and he is now an outcast. What follows is Eric's journey from boy to man, from follower to leader and ultimately from captivity to deliverance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scales_of_Injustice"title="The Scales of Injustice">
The Doctor suspects Silurians are afoot when a child goes missing in a seaside community, a policewoman begins drawing cave paintings, and the employees at the mysterious "Glasshouse" project are desperate to hide something. Meanwhile, his assistant Liz Shaw teams up with a journalist to search for people who don't exist, and Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart copes with personal and UNIT crises. And how does all this link back to the very heart of the British Government?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_Lasts_More_Than_a_Hundred_Years"title="The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years">
The novel begins with Yedigei learning about the death of his longtime friend, Kazangap. All of Kazangap's crucial relatives have been forewarned of his impending death, and it is decided to set off to bury him the next day. To the consternation of his son, Sabitzhan, who is indifferent toward his father's burial, it is decided to travel across the Sarozek to the Ana-Beiit cemetery in order to bury Kazangap. The procession promptly leaves the next morning, and experiences that took place throughout Yedigei's lifetime, as well as various Sarozek legends, are recollected.Initially, Yedigei recalls how he had fought in World War II but had been dismissed from duty due to shell shock. As a result, he was sent to work on the railway. Through his work, he met Kazangap, who convinced him to move to what would become his permanent home, the remote Boranly-Burannyi junction, from which he gained his namesake. Kazangap and Yedigei become dear friends, and Kazangap eventually gives Yedigei the gift of a camel, named Karanar, which becomes legendary across the Sarozek because of its strength and vitality.At the end of 1951, Abutalip and Zaripa Kuttybaev move to Boranly-Burranyi junction with their two young sons. They initially have a hard time adjusting to living on the Sarozek because of the harsh environment; however, they eventually become adjusted. Before relocating, both had been school teachers. Abutalip also fought in the war and had been taken prisoner by the Germans, but he escaped and fought with the Yugoslav partisan army. Nevertheless, upon his return to the Soviet Union he still retained the stigma of having been a prisoner of war and was often relocated because of political reasons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tricky_Part"title="The Tricky Part">
"The Tricky Part" tells the story of the relationship and its effect on Moran, who grew up as a homosexual. It describes Moran's sexual awakening, and how he and a chubby friend of his called George, go with Bob to get the camp ready. Bob pulls Moran into his sleeping bag the first night they are alone (with George asleep beside them) and abuses him.A year later, Moran discovers that a friend of his, Kip, another 13-year-old, is also being abused by Bob. The abuse continues through puberty and adolescence and Moran tries to tell Bob that he wants it all to stop. Bob's response is to invite the boy into bed with him and his cowgirl-friend Karen. Bob is finally arrested and jailed for his sex crimes.Moran's desperate coming-of-age is described with candor and humor and sets out the paradox that what is, in nearly everyone's eyes, a seriously damaging experience, can be the very thing that gives "rise to transformation, even grace".The book condemns adult–child sex. Moran is ambivalent about the touching and other sexual acts. He tries to commit suicide twice, but eventually finds his feet in Off Broadway and Broadway theater.Moran has also developed and performed "The Tricky Part" as a one-man play.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petey_(novel)"title="Petey (novel)">
In the 1920s, at a hospital in Bozeman, Montana, a boy named Petey Corbin is born with cerebral palsy to Sarah Corbin. The doctor diagnoses him as physically and mentally disabled, unable to walk or talk and has no capacity for thought. Devastated, Sarah and her husband spend two years and enormous sums of money going to doctors, but each tells them to send Petey to an institution. The Corbins decide to send him to a psychiatric hospital, although called an insane asylum (in 1922), in Warm Springs, Montana.The story's point of view then shifts to Petey, following his life in the hospital. The nurses in the crowded and unsanitary institution care for him lazily and improperly, some even abusing him. A new male nurse named Esteban quickly befriends Petey. Whenever he can, Esteban talks to Petey and brings him chocolate, as Petey is "his favorite". Esteban understands (unlike most people) that Petey is not retarded, but that it is only his body that is deformed. Esteban is discharged for informing civic leaders from Butte that Petey isn't, in fact, retarded.At the age of eleven, Petey is transferred to the Men's Ward. He is put in a large room with several bigger men. Soon after, he notices a family of mice living in his room. They are his only joy until a new person, named Calvin, moves into Petey's room. Mildly retarded and club-footed, Calvin quickly becomes Petey's best friend, and the two spend all their time together. Petey and Calvin meet many people in the Warm Springs Insane Asylum including Joe, Cassie, and Owen, however they all leave them at different points in time. Eventually, many patients are moved to different facilities. Petey and Calvin are separated when Calvin is taken to a nursing home. Months later, Peter is also transferred to a nursing home. The story then proceeds to travel several years later. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Endless_Storybook"title="The Little Endless Storybook">
The story involves Barnabas, Destruction's dog on strict orders to watch over Delirium, looking for Delirium after she disappears. He visits each of the Endless in turn to see if they've seen Delirium, but none of them have any clue where she is. At the end, Barnabas finally finds her by collecting all of the sigils of each of the Endless and conjuring her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Fall_Down_(Herlihy_novel)"title="All Fall Down (Herlihy novel)">
The wealthy Williams family is torn apart from within once they invite Echo in.When the hedonistic Berry-Berry Williams deserts his pregnant lover, Echo O'Brien, his younger brother Clinton's blind faith in him shows signs of waning, while his parents are disgusted by Berry-Berry's actions.The book goes back and forth from third person to first person (Clinton's diaries).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Happy_Hypocrite"title="The Happy Hypocrite">
The protagonist is named Lord George Hell. A worldly man, he is a dandy, fond of gambling, drinking, womanising, and the like. He is enjoying lavish outdoor entertainment in London with his lover, La Gambogi, when a young and innocent dancer named Jenny Mere performs on the stage. A dwarf sitting with Lord George, revealed to be Cupid, shoots his arrow into Lord George's breast.Lord George boldly proposes marriage to Jenny, but she says that she will only marry a man with the face of a saint. Confused, Lord George spends the night wandering the streets, heartbroken. In the morning, he stumbles upon a mask maker shop of a man named Mr. Aeneas. He purchases a saint's face mask, custom altered to bear the mark of true love. La Gambogi, who sees him leave the shop with his new false face, confronts him, but he pretends not to know her and retreats to Kensington, intending to return to London that evening to see Jenny perform again. However, while viewing his new look in the reflection of a brook, he sees Jenny, leaps across the brook and proposes marriage. Jenny accepts.Starting with signing the marriage register as "George Heaven", Lord George makes a total moral conversion by returning ill-gotten wealth to gamblers he had cheated to the rightful owners, donating excess money to charities. He then buys a woodman's cottage to live a quiet, modest existence. The newlyweds lead a simple but unrealistic life subsisting "bread and honey and little strawberries (...) seed-cake and dewberry wine".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._'Arris_Goes_to_Paris"title="Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris">
The plot revolves around Ada Harris, who is so enchanted by her employer's couture wardrobe that she becomes determined to go to the House of Dior in Paris to purchase an evening gown of her own. She achieves her goal with the assistance of a French marquis, whom she first meets at the house of Dior during an afternoon showing and who becomes a long-term friend as do a series of other characters revealed to have hidden hearts. The comic tale takes on a final poignant overtone when the dress is loaned to an up-and-coming actress, with disastrous consequences. Initially devastated, Mrs. Harris reflects that the experiences she had in pursuit of the dress were worth its loss.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gathering_of_Old_Men"title="A Gathering of Old Men">
One afternoon, Candy Marshall, a white plantation owner, discovers that a white Cajun farmer, Beau Boutan, has been shot in the yard of a black man named Mathu. She enlists the help of seventeen other old black men by having them come to Mathu's yard, each with a shotgun and one empty number 5 shell. She and the men all claim to be responsible for the murder in an effort to protect the guilty party. Meanwhile, Sheriff Mapes arrives to the scene to arrest the real murderer, most likely Mathu (as he was the only black man who stood up against racism and the Boutans, and is capable of shooting a shotgun). The sheriff also wishes to keep Beau's father, Fix Boutan, from coming to lynch Mathu, who he presumes killed Beau. Meanwhile, Fix's son Gil, who happens to be a standout football player at LSU, arrives at his house to try to convince Fix not to go to Marshall to seek revenge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Is_the_Sun"title="Dark Is the Sun">
By the year 15 billion AD, Earth's species have evolved to the point of being super-selected to a purpose. Every form has a sentient representative: animal, plant, and mineral. Pairing of sentient beings, including humans, is controlled by the use of "Soul Eggs" which are given shortly after birth, worn from the neck and when held up to another belonging to a potential mate will sync in pattern and color to approve marriage. Many times through Earth's existence it faced its end, but each time this event occurred, humanity was at a high point in intelligence and was able to rescue Earth from annihilation. When the sun died, they ignited the moon, and later when the moon died, the Earth was moved to safety. But now Earth's death is approaching during a time when humanity's technological levels are at a low point.The story opens with Deyv, a human, being forced to leave his tribe, the Turtle Tribe, because he cannot find a mate. After leaving his tribe to find a possible mate from a distant tribe, Deyv runs into trouble and ends up meeting the plant-man Sloosh and a feisty woman named Vana. It is revealed that all three have had their Soul Eggs stolen by the fox-like Yawtl, and they begin a mission to track their Soul Eggs down and recover them. Their search brings them to the Jewelled Wasteland, home of the Shemibob, an ancient female being from another star who knows Earth's demise is near and holds the only key to escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_(novel)"title="The Dream (novel)">
In circa 4,000 A.D., a biologist named Sarnac is taking a holiday among mountains and lakes with his lover, Sunray. With four other holiday travellers, they visit some 2,000-year-old "ancient remains [of war dead] that had recently been excavated" in a nearby valley. A little later, after a brief afternoon nap, Sarnac awakens from "a very vivid dream." The rest of the novel consists of Sarnac's recounting of the dream, with occasional discussion of its particulars with his companions. Sarnac's dream brings with it total recall of the complete life of Harry Mortimer Smith. Smith's life and the institutions that structure it are the subject throughout the novel of a running commentary from the point of view of the achieved Utopia of 2,000 years later.Harry Mortimer Smith was born in 1891 or 1892 in the fictional town of Cherry Gardens, in an area bordering the South Downs on the southern English coast. His father is a greengrocer who has trouble supporting his family because of the ignorance of birth control. He profits from the sale of produce from the nearby estate of Lord Bramble, where Harry Mortimer Smith's mother's brother, Uncle John Julip, works as head gardener.Harry unwittingly exposes this theft when he is sent to work at Lord Bramble's estate, and as a result his uncle loses his job and comes to depend on the Smith household. Uncle John debauches Harry's weak-willed father, leading him to yield to the temptation to drink and bet on horses. The only person in the household that Harry esteems is his older sister Fanny, whom he helps run away to rejoin a lover in London. Harry's parents are scandalised by Fanny's sudden departure; shortly afterwards Smith "père" dies after being struck by an automobile.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fire_Engine_That_Disappeared"title="The Fire Engine That Disappeared">
Just as Gunvald Larsson arrives to replace a colleague, the apartment of a drug dealer in Stockholm, the house he is observing suddenly explodes into flames. Larsson tries to break into the house to rescue the residents, while an anonymous person calls the fire brigade from a payphone. The fire brigade arrives too late and some residents are killed.The investigation finds that the drug dealer under surveillance has committed suicide by gas poisoning and blocked all the openings of his room. Beck still has doubts about this happening: where did the spark for the explosion come from and why did the fire department take so long to arrive? The doubts are justified, as it turns out according to the findings of the Crime Lab: the gas was lit by a hidden incendiary bomb in the mattress of the deceased.The suspect, who had placed the incendiary, was, as it turns out, a Lebanese professional killer entering the country specifically to kill the drug dealer. He had himself called the firefighters as he wanted to avoid harming bystanders but accidentally due to lack of local knowledge he said the name of the wrong location.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Quarters_of_the_Orange"title="Five Quarters of the Orange">
Framboise Dartigen, the youngest child of Mirabelle Dartigena woman still remembered and hated for an incident that happened in the village, "Les Laveuses", when Framboise was nine, during the Second World War.Framboise was profoundly marked by this incident and the events leading up to it. Now a widow of twenty years, she returns to the village on the Loire to restore the family's burnt out farm. She uses her married name, Francoise Simon, as she does not want the villagers to know her real identity. She opens a small restaurant and business is successful. A notable food critic brings it to prominence in a national magazine. This results in a visit from her nephew, Yannick, and his wife, Laure. They are eager to profit from Framboise's sudden popularity. The arrival of Luc threatens the new life she has built for herself.Framboise, her brother Cassis and her sister Reine-Claude lost their father early. Their mother, Mirabelle Dartigen, was a difficult woman, prone to crippling migraines and more tender with her fruit trees than with her own children. Faced with having to bring up three children and run a farm alone, Mirabelle had to be very tough; sadly, this toughness translated into a lack of outward affection towards her children. When the war came and the Germans occupied Les Laveuses, Mirabelle had to be tougher than ever; the children, with no-one to supervise them, ran wild, eventually falling under the spell of a young German soldier, Tomas, who first bribed them with black-market goods like oranges or chocolate, then manipulated them into secretly giving him information about their friends and neighbours. Framboise, the youngest child, who was nine at the time, and whose relationship with her mother was especially tortuous, became closest to Tomas, and now blames herself for the series of events that resulted in Tomas' death, the retribution killing of ten villagers by the Gestapo and Mirabelle's flight from the family home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mummy_Case"title="The Mummy Case">
Amelia and her husband, Professor Radcliffe Emerson, return to Egypt for the 1894–95 season to excavate the ruined pyramids of Mazghunah, which pale in comparison to the nearby dig at Dahshoor – but that is all Emerson could get after annoying the Department of Antiquities. On this trip, the Emersons bring along their young son Walter (aka Ramses) and his cat Bastet, along with a sturdy footman to keep Ramses out of trouble. This is Ramses' first trip to Egypt, after studying and hearing about it for all his young life.While in Cairo, Amelia hears rumors of a scrap of papyrus which no one will confess to owning, but which has the local antiquities dealers living in fear of the man who is after it.No sooner does the family settle in near their dig than they are paid a visit by a group of American missionaries who have set up shop nearby, then the rival archaeologist who "did" get permission to dig at Dahshoor, then a German noblewoman with more money than taste...and then a thief who steals one of the objects the Emersons find at Mazghunah, a mummy case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Katy_Did"title="What Katy Did">
12-year-old Katy Carr lives with her widowed father and her two brothers and three sisters in Burnet, a small Midwestern American town. Her father is a very busy doctor who works long hours; the children are mostly in the care of his sister Aunt Izzie, who is very particular and something of a scold. Bright, headstrong Katy can hardly avoid getting into mischief almost daily under these circumstances, but she is unfailingly remorseful afterward. She behaves somewhat kindly to the children and dreams of some day doing something "grand" with her life: painting famous pictures, saving the lives of drowning people, or leading a crusade on a white horse. She also wants to be "beautiful, of course, and good if I can." When her mother died four years earlier, she hoped Katy would be a little mother to her siblings: in practice, she is the kind of big sister who is sometimes impatient and cross with them but leads them into all sorts of exciting adventures.When Cousin Helen, an invalid, comes to visit, Katy is so enchanted by her beauty and kindness that on the day of Helen's departure she resolves to model herself on Helen ever afterward. The very next day, however, Katy wakes in an ill humor, quarrels with her aunt and pushes her little sister so hard that she falls down half a dozen steps. Afterward, sulky and miserable, Katy decides to try out the new swing in the woodshed although Aunt Izzie has forbidden it. Had Aunt Izzie actually explained that the swing was unsafe because one of the staples supporting it had cracked, "all would have been right," but she believes that children should unquestioningly obey their elders. Katy swings as high as she can and then, as she tries to touch the roof with her toes, the staple gives way. She falls hard, bruising her spine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Piece_of_Blue_Sky"title="A Piece of Blue Sky">
The book is arranged into nine parts, plus introductory material. In part 1, Atack describes his personal experience in the Scientology organisation. Parts 2 – 8 provide a chronological history of L. Ron Hubbard, Dianetics and Scientology, researched from paper sources and interviews. The final part draws conclusions about the belief system of Scientology and its founder. The book also contains a preface by Russell Miller, author of "Bare-faced Messiah".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tattooed_Potato_and_Other_Clues"title="The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues">
Seventeen-year-old Dickory Dock, an art-school student in Greenwich Village, answers an ad for a job as a painter's assistant at Number 12 Cobble Lane. The painter, Garson, evaluates and hires her; in her duties of cleaning paintbrushes and answering the door, she becomes involved in Garson's mysterious affairs, as well of those of his downstairs neighbors, Manny Mallomar and Shrimps Marinara. She befriends Garson's companion, a deaf, mentally handicapped man with the pseudonym of Isaac Bickerstaffe; her fellow student, George Washington III; and the Chief of Detectives of the NYPD, Joseph P. Quinn.When the latter begins asking for Garson's assistance as a sketch artist, Garson assumes the character of Inspector Noserag (whose name is an imperfect reversal of "Garson"), and dubs Dickory his assistant, Sergeant Kod (likewise). The two work together to solve several cases, which divide the book into six sections of four chapters each: "The Mystery in Number 12 Cobble Lane," "The Case of the Horrible Hairdresser," "The Case of the Face on the Five-Dollar Bill," "The Case of the Full-Sized Midget," "The Case of the Disguised Disguise," and "The Case of the Confusing Corpus." Meanwhile, Dickory learns more about the histories, motives and identities of all the people in and around Number 12 Cobble Lane.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poe_Shadow"title="The Poe Shadow">
Baltimore lawyer Quentin Hobson Clark witnesses the somber, simple funeral of Edgar Allan Poe on October 8, 1849. He had previously corresponded with Poe about providing legal support for a new publication, "The Stylus". Clark feels obliged to look into the mysterious circumstances surrounding Poe's death, despite protests from his fiancée Hattie Blum and his friend Peter Stuart.Clark's journey takes him to Paris to seek out the real-life inspiration for Poe's character C. Auguste Dupin, a man of intellect who could help unravel the mystery. After eliminating several possibilities, he meets Baron C.A. Dupin, a famous lawyer, and a detective with a similar name, Auguste Duponte. After a confrontation with the Baron Dupin and his female aide, Bonjour, Clark realizes that the Baron is not the character described in Poe's stories. He determines that Auguste Duponte, with his approach to problem-solving through ratiocination, was the real inspiration for the character.Clark and Duponte return to Baltimore to investigate Poe's final days, only to find that the Baron and Bonjour are already doing the same. Both parties interview the funeral attendants and witnesses, and try to obtain Poe's final letter, discovered by funeral attendant Henry Reynolds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Broken_Vase"title="The Broken Vase">
The novel begins with backstage performance jitters just before a musical performance at Carnegie Hall in New York to be given by a striking young violinist, Jan Tusar and his on-again-off-again girlfriend and piano accompanist, whose father has died a few months earlier in a fall from his office window. Private investigator Tecumseh Fox is by no means a follower of classical music, but has been convinced by his friend Diego Zorilla, a former violinist whose fingers were mangled in an accident, to charitably contribute to buying a valuable violin for the young performer.Fox and his friend take their seats in the audience, but the concert does not go well, and it seems not to be the fault of either the violinist or the pianist but the magnificent violin itself. The concert limps to intermission, and the audience is so disgusted that many go home. Fox and his friend rush backstage, only to find that the young violinist has just shot himself to death in front of witnesses and the violin has vanished in the furore.Fox is then invited to the home of Mrs. Irene Dunham Pomfret, wealthy socialite, who also contributed to the purchase of the violin. Her husband Henry is unenthiastic on the topic of music, but collects rare coins and Chinese porcelain (a rare piece of which, he mentions, has been stolen). Fox and other contributors to the violin's purchase (including gorgeous movie star Hebe Heath) have been assembled for two reasons: one is to hear Jan Tusar's suicide note and the other is to arrange the sale of the violin and the return of the money to the contributors, since the violin arrived at Mrs. Pomfret's home by parcel post that morning. Hebe Heath's publicist confesses privately to Fox that he has returned the violin and, when asked to explain why, tells him that the movie star is not only spectacularly stupid but subject to bizarre impulses—she stole the violin in an uncalculated moment for no reason at all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Nature_(novel)"title="Human Nature (novel)">
Bernice Summerfield is grieving since the death of Guy de Carnac (as seen in the previous novel, "Sanctuary"). The Doctor takes her to a market on a planet called Crex in the Augon system. He quickly sets off, telling her he'll be back in an hour, and Benny finds a pub where she orders a beer and finds a group of female human drinking partners. After Benny's had several drinks with them, the Doctor arrives and places a patch on her cheek — a pad that disperses the alcohol in her system. He tells her that they need to leave immediately, and leads her back to the TARDIS. He hands her a scroll, tells her he'll see her in three months, and collapses.Meanwhile, the genesmith Laylock meets with his associates. They plan to follow the Doctor. In a long, dark room, a teenager named Tim awakens from a dream, having had a premonition that everyone will die.Unable to understand Benny's grief on a human level, the Doctor has purchased a device which alters his biodata, transforming him into a human named Dr John Smith. Smith lives as a history teacher at a public school in 1914 England, and falls in love with a fellow teacher named Joan. However, when alien Aubertides, hoping to acquire Time Lord abilities, attack the school, Smith sacrifices himself and becomes the Doctor once more; as the Time Lord, he is unable to love Joan in the way the human John Smith did.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Infinity_Doctors"title="The Infinity Doctors">
During the Dark Time, the Gallifreyan scientist Omega leaves his wife to travel to the star that will give his people the power to become Lords of Time when he causes it to go supernova. But things do not go as planned and Omega is lost inside a black hole.Millions of years later, an unknown version of the Doctor, his friend the Magistrate and star pupil Larna, together with the rest of the Time Lords are preparing to host a peace conference between the Sontarans and the Rutans to end their thousand-year war. But behind the scenes a masked figure arranges a kidnapping and robbery in the Doctor's rooms and a strange anomaly appears across the universe, which seemingly has the power to alter the past and future. The epicentre of the effect is a black hole at the end of the universe to which the Doctor and his friends must travel to prevent disaster.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayesha_(novel)"title="Ayesha (novel)">
In the book's prologue, the book's anonymous "Editor" receives a parcel. Opening it, he finds a letter from Horace Holly, with an enclosed manuscript containing a second memoir about She. There is also a second letter, from Holly's doctor, to whom Holly has entrusted his letter and manuscript, along with a wooden box, which contains an ancient sistrum. The doctor recounts how, when attending Holly in his last hours, he arrived at the house to find that Holly had risen from his deathbed and made his way to a local ring of ancient standing stones. Following him, the doctor glimpsed a manifestation that appears to Holly, but as the vision vanished, Holly had let out a happy cry and died.When the narrative of Holly's manuscript begins, nearly twenty years have passed since their first adventure in Africa, but he and his ward Leo Vincey are convinced that Ayesha did not die. Following their dreams, they wander for years through Asia, eventually coming to "Thibet" (as it is spelled in the book). Taking refuge over winter in a remote lamasery, they meet the old Abbot Kou-En, who claims to recall a past-life encounter with a witch queen from the time of Alexander the Great. The Abbot tries to dissuade them from going on and warns them that, however beautiful, nothing is immortal, even if the Queen was born centuries ago in Ancient Egypt or remembers it from a past life. He believes the Queen is holding on to the distractions of life, which will lead them away from Enlightenment and peace, whether she is a demon, a fallen angel, or only a dream.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tree_of_Hands"title="The Tree of Hands">
"The Tree of Hands" tells the story of an affluent young woman, Benet, who has a two-year-old son named James. She is estranged from James' father. They live in North London. Benet's mother comes to visit them. She and Benet's father now live in Spain. Benet's mother has a history of mental illness, possibly schizophrenia, and Benet is rather fearful of her mother and what she may be capable of doing.Unfortunately James becomes extremely ill and dies, Benet is distraught and spends a lot of time in a state of prostrated grief. Her mother tries to look after her.A sub-plot involves a young man on a council estate who is deeply in love with a woman, Carol, who has several children from previous partners. It becomes apparent to the reader that she is unfaithful to this young man, and she is abusing her children, in particular her little boy, Jason. A turn in events leads to Benet's mother kidnapping little Jason and "replacing" the dead James. Benet, at first horrified at what her mother has done, begins to realise that little Jason has been abused (she finds cigarette burns on his body) and grows to love him. As he refers to himself as Jay, this is what she calls him. However, she realises that she cannot continue to see the Doctor from the hospital because he knows that James has died, and he has been very kind to her. He may start to question Jason's appearance. Also Benet's ex begins to realise what may have happened and puts pressure on her. She realises that she and Jay must leave the country in order to start their new life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Friends_from_Frolix_8"title="Our Friends from Frolix 8">
In the 22nd century, the Earth is ruled by the "New Men", who have superhuman mental abilities, and the "Unusuals", who possess psionic abilities such as telepathy, telekinesis and precognition. (In its use of psychic abilities as a major plot element, this work is similar to Dick's novel "Ubik".) Thors Provoni, who has gone deep into space to find help for his resistance to the ruling groups, is returning with a sentient protoplasmic alien being, a "Friend from Frolix 8" known as Morgo Rahn Wilc, to fight for the "Old Men", human beings who have none of the rulers' powers. Nick Appleton is a tire regroover - a lowly, if skilled, job; his son Bobby fails a Civil Service examination that is deliberately geared toward failing "Old Man" applicants. At the same time, Terran authorities are holding the "Under Man" activist Cordon in prison and preparing for his execution. Appleton becomes politicised, and falls for Charlotte ("Charley") Boyer, a sixteen-year-old subversive. She is involved with alcoholic Denny (in this future, alcohol prohibition has returned as a social policy). After the authorities discover that Appleton has become "subversive", they attempt to apprehend him and Charley, whom Willis Gram is also obsessed with.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollowing"title="The Hollowing">
"The Hollowing" shares the third person narrative viewpoint as does its predecessor, "Lavondyss." The narrative begins in the 1950s, merely one year after the events that take place in "Lavondyss," but the majority of the story takes place in 1968. Inside Ryhope wood, Tallis Keeton's young friend, Alex Bradley, remains an adolescent when he would otherwise be twenty years old. This is possible because the rate of time inside the wood is not synchronized with the rate of time outside the wood. The story's protagonist is Alex's father, Richard Bradley. Richard is on a quest to locate his lost son in the wood, a very dangerous task because Alex’s overactive imagination generates mythagos dangerous to both himself and others.The day Tallis Keeton disappears into Ryhope wood in "Lavondyss," her father, James Keeton, disappears into the wood to locate her. While he spends only four days in Ryhope wood, over one year of time passes in the outside world. When he turns up, he is clutching Moondream, one of Tallis’ masks, and is placed in a mental hospital. He is kept close company by Alex Bradley, a young playmate of Tallis’, who alone can calm James. James Keeton has a number of episodes in which he appears to communicate with Tallis through the mask. In a dramatic scene, Richard Bradley sees James Keeton collapse and die. At the same time, his son Alex is physically traumatized by a mythic force. This compromises Alex’s mental faculties and he is confined to the same mental hospital. Alex escapes the mental hospital and his highly decayed remains are subsequently found, so he is presumed dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masquerades_(novel)"title="Masquerades (novel)">
The novel features the continued adventure of the heroine Alias and her companion Dragonbait from the novel "Azure Bonds" and takes place after the events in the "Finder's Stone" trilogy. The novel takes place in the city of Westgate and follows the struggle against the Night Masks and their mysterious leader known only as The Faceless.The story of the newly ascended god Finder continues in "Finder's Bane" and "Tymora's Luck".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haunted_Mesa"title="Haunted Mesa">
Mike Raglan, a middle-aged man who specializes in paranormal investigations (and normally debunking the phenomena) has received urgent phone calls and mail from an old friend of his, Erik Hokart. Hokart was an independently wealthy scientist, inventor, and businessman who made his fortune in electronics. He was investigating a mysterious mountainous area in the Southwest, intending to build a secluded home on top of one particular mesa around which rumors had long swirled. His messages to Mike intimated that he was in deep trouble and desperately needed someone of his talents.Hokart doesn't show up at the designated meeting spot, but the next day Mike receives a package from him, delivered by an exotic female beauty. A man breaks into his room to try to steal the package, and is chased off with an Eric Ambler book and a threat from a .357 Magnum.The package contains Erik Hokart's journal of his quasi-archaeological expedition. The first night on the chosen mesa, glowing lines appear on the blueprint of a kiva (a room used for religious rituals) attached to the ruins of the house Hokart was using as a makeshift shelter. Hokart is a little perturbed when the glowing lines turn out to be correct, and he begins to excavate the underground kiva even though it looks to have been deliberately buried. It creeps out both him and his large guard dog, "Chief".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paul_Street_Boys"title="The Paul Street Boys">
The novel is about schoolboys in Józsefváros neighbourhood of Budapest and set in 1889. The Paul Street Boys spend their free time at the "grund", an empty lot that they regard as their "Fatherland". The story has two main protagonists, János Boka (the honourable leader of the Paul Street Boys) and Ernő Nemecsek (the smallest member of the group).When the "Redshirts"—another gang of boys, led by Feri Áts, who gather at the nearby botanical gardens—attempt to take over the "grund", the Paul Street Boys are forced to defend themselves in military fashion.Although the Paul Street Boys win the war, and little Nemecsek repeatedly demonstrates that his bravery and loyalty surpasses his size, the book ends in tragedy: Nemecsek dies of the pneumonia that he caught in the conflict.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Werewolf_of_Fever_Swamp"title="The Werewolf of Fever Swamp">
Grady and his family, the Tuckers, have moved to Florida into a house next to Fever Swamp because his father Mr. Tucker, a scientist, wants to determine if swamp deer from South America can survive in Florida. Grady’s father keeps the deer in a pen but plans on releasing them in the swamp. Grady and his sister Emily get lost while exploring the swamp and meet a swamp hermit who lives in a shack. As the hermit chases after them, they run away ultimately making their way back home. A few days later, as Grady is going outside to meet Will Blake, one of his new friends, a big stray dog jumps onto Grady. Grady thinks the dog resembles more a wolf than a dog and decides to call the dog Wolf. One morning, Will tells him that a neighbor, Ed Warner, went missing after hunting in the swamp. Cassie O'Rourke, a girl who lives in the neighborhood, suggests that a werewolf is the reason for Mr. Warner's disappearance.After going out to investigate some howling, Grady finds a hole that had been ripped from the deer pen and a slain deer laying on one side. Mr. Tucker sees paw prints around the pen and blames Wolf for the killing. He plans on taking Wolf to the pound, but Grady is convinced that a werewolf killed the deer and other animals in town, and he helps the dog flee before Mr. Tucker can capture Wolf. That night, Grady hears howling and observes Wolf slowly moving towards the swamp shortly afterward. As Grady follows the dog he runs into Will, who says he heard the howls and decided to investigate them. While they are following Wolf, Grady gets separated from both Will and the Wolf.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Steep_Approach_to_Garbadale"title="The Steep Approach to Garbadale">
The book describes the Wopuld family, who made a fortune on a board game called "Empire!", now a successful computer game. A US firm, the Spraint Corporation, wants to buy them out.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Among_the_Impostors"title="Among the Impostors">
Twelve-year-old Luke Garner is brought to Hendricks School for Boys by Mr. Talbot, the father of his dead best friend Jen. Luke is his parents’ third child and so is illegal under the country's Population Law; if he were to be caught, both he and his parents would be executed by the Population Police. After Jen is killed leading a rally to protest the Population Law at the end of the first book in the series it is no longer safe for Luke to remain in hiding on his parents’ farm. Mr. Talbot arranges for Luke to take the name and identity of Lee Grant – a boy who died just before the novel opens – and arranges for him to attend Hendricks, an exclusive boarding school. Mr. Talbot shakes Luke's hand as he leaves and slips him a note, which Luke hides in his pocket.Having only ever met six other people – his parents and brothers, Jen, and Mr. Talbot – in his entire life, Luke is overwhelmed by the size of Hendricks, and the hundreds of boys who are always around him. He ducks into one class after another simply to avoid the teachers and monitors who patrol the hallways, and finds that no one will tell him what classes he belongs in, or what he should be doing. He is never alone and so can't read Mr. Talbot's note, and the first night in his dorm room one of his roommates (who he thinks of as ‘jackal boy’) bullies him until well after lights-out. For the next week Luke is miserable; he is frightened that he will give away the fact that he is an illegal child and be caught, he goes to classes he doesn't belong in to just to avoid drawing attention to himself, and he is bullied by jackal boy every night.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Thoughts_(Butor_novel)"title="Second Thoughts (Butor novel)">
The plot is quite straightforward: a middle-aged man takes the train in Paris to visit his lover, Cécile, whom he has not informed of his arrival, in Rome. They have met in secret once a month for the past two years: each time that his business trips have taken him to the Italian capital. He now intends to tell her that he has finally decided to leave his wife, found a job for her (Cécile) in Paris and is ready to take her back there and live with her. The novel describes his gradual change of mind. His initial enthusiasm and hopes of a rejuvenating new start slowly give way to doubt, fear and cowardice. He eventually decides to spend the week-end in Rome alone, go back to Paris the following Monday without telling anything to Cécile and leave the situation as it was until their relationship eventually ends. He will write about this failure in a book which happens to be "La Modification" itself.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_Through_Time"title="Portal Through Time">
An artifact has been forged which enables time-travelling spells while it remains in Sunnydale. A group of vampire-assassins are travelling into the past in an attempt to kill previous Slayers, and disrupt the Slayer lineage. They are led by the spellcaster Lucien, whose aim is to ensure that Buffy does not interfere with the ascension of the Master. When they discover that killing Buffy in the past merely changes the way in which the Master is killed, they become frustrated and decide to go further back.When Buffy becomes aware of their plans, the vampires have already left and she is forced to follow them into the past. With Giles, Willow and Xander, she travels to first-century Anglesey in where a Druidic stronghold is being invaded by Romans. Next they travel to Uruk in ancient Sumer where they encounter Gilgamesh. Xander inadvertently arouses a plague god, and Willow accidentally summons a snake-demon while trying to banish the god.Then they return to the American Civil War period, where they find themselves in the middle of the Battle of Shiloh. They destroy many vampires feeding on the soldiers. Finally they head for Paris during the French Revolution where they witness executions on the guillotine and meet Angelus and Darla.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_the_Spell_(Dennett_book)"title="Breaking the Spell (Dennett book)">
The book is divided into three parts. Dennett's working definition of religions is: "social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought". He notes that this definition is "a place to start, not something carved in stone".
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Frost"title="Night Frost">
A serial killer is terrorizing the senior citizens of Denton, and the local police are succumbing to a flu epidemic. Tired and demoralized, the force has to contend with a seemingly perfect young couple suffering arson attacks and death threats, a suspicious suicide, burglaries, pornographic videos, poison-pen letters...In uncertain charge of the investigations is Detective Inspector Jack Frost, crumpled, slapdash and foul-mouthed as ever. He tries to cope despite inadequate back-up, but there is never enough time; the unsolved crimes pile up and the vicious killings go on. So Frost has to cut corners and take risks, knowing that his divisional commander will throw him to the wolves if anything goes wrong. And for Frost, things always go wrong...
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Houses_of_Iszm"title="The Houses of Iszm">
The inhabitants of a planet called Iszm, a species known as the Iszic, have evolved the native giant trees into living homes, with all needs and various luxuries supplied by the trees' own natural growth. The Iszic maintain a jealously guarded monopoly, exporting only enough trees to keep prices high and make a great profit. Ailie Farr is a human botanist who goes to Iszm (like many others before him, of many species) to try to steal a female tree, which might allow the propagation of the species off world and break the monopoly.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_(Applegate_novel)"title="The Other (Applegate novel)">
The Animorphs meet survivors of Elfangor's Dome Ship, the "GalaxyTree". One Andalite called Gafinilan-Estrif-Valad suffers from a genetic disease called Soola's Disease while Mertil-Iscar-Elmand, is crippled, or a "vecol", as Ax puts it, missing half of his tail.Gafinilan attacks Marco when he gets too close to the human home he owns, while Ax comes to his defense. Both enter his home and Gafinilan asks to meet Ax's prince, not realizing his "prince" is human, as Visser Three had captured Mertil and had offered his release only if Gafinilan brought him a healthy adult Andalite (as Mertil was a vecol, and Visser Three discovered through Mertil that Gafinilan had a fatal disease, rendering them both as useless, in the Visser's perspective). The Animorphs assume that since "Soola's" Disease is genetic, and the only 'cure' is for Gafinilan to acquire and morph another Andalite, this is the reason why Gafinilan wanted to meet Ax's "prince", not wanting to acquire Ax himself because he would prefer to morph the adult Andalite he believes Jake is, as Ax's body would take too long to reach physical maturity.Jake agrees to meet with him, with the intention of laying a trap for Gafinilan, and they overpower him by force of numbers. When they tell Gafinilan what they assumed his plan was, he is shocked at the mere thought, as Andalites consider using morphing to escape an illness as an act of cowardice. He confesses his real intentions, justifying his attempt at betraying one of his own kind by saying he cares deeply about his partner Mertil, and he did what he was told to do by the Visser in order to ensure Mertil's safety. Although still skeptical of Gafinilan's motives, they join forces with him and help rescue Mertil from Visser Three.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stone_Carvers"title="The Stone Carvers">
Beginning with the woodcarver Joseph Becker, the novel's timeline shifts back and forth between his life in 19th century Ontario, and the pre- and post-war lives of the grandchildren Klara and Tilman. Told in three parts, "The Stone Carvers" starts within Canada, moving to France as the characters negotiate their grief, and explore the human need to live, remember and memorialize.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bishop's_Mantle"title="The Bishop's Mantle">
In around 1939, Hilary Laurens, a young Episcopal priest, has recently returned to his hometown, somewhere in the American heartland, upon receiving sudden word that his grandfather, the Bishop of that diocese and the only father he's known, has suddenly taken ill and is dying, and Hilary arrives just in time to talk briefly with his grandfather just before the Bishop's death, to tell him that he has just been appointed vicar of St. Matthews, a large church in a "great eastern city", and thus can perpetuate the Bishop's calling.In course of the book, Hilary needs to cope with the multiple challenges of becoming a vicar of a major church just at the moment his grandfather dies, inheriting the Bishop's Mantle, dealing with the twin callings of a priest to keep his church financially viable, up to date, and yet in keeping of his duty to serve the poor, falling in love with Lex, the daughter of a wealthy church patron, and providing pastoral service to women in his flock, not all of whom want a priest so much as male company, and then finally deal with the odious consequences of the events of December 1941. Hilary struggles to be a worthy replacement to his predecessor, and copes persistent attempts by various people to involve him in scandal. While Hilary deals with his pastoral issues at home, events on the world stage are escalating. His brother Dick, even though the American involvement in the war has not started, volunteers for ambulance service in Europe. Later in the novel Dick dies in the war zone, while Hilary is reconciling with the now-pregnant Lex after a period of conflict, and the attack on Pearl Harbor takes place, causing the gradual departure of young men from Hilary's parish into the Army.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornblower_and_the_Crisis"title="Hornblower and the Crisis">
Hornblower has just finished his tour blockading Brest in command of the Royal Navy sloop "Hotspur". As he travels back to England for his next assignment (and his promised elevation to post rank), he is asked to participate in the court martial of "Hotspur's" new captain. "Hotspur" ran aground and was lost the day after Hornblower turned over command.Following the court martial, the "Hotspur's" officers, now without a ship, travel back to England with Hornblower in a supply ship. On the way, they are pursued by a French brig, which they board and disable. During the battle, Hornblower finds important papers in the French captain's cabin. Back in England, he travels to the Admiralty with the documents. He arrives at the same time as the disappointing news that the French fleet under Admiral Pierre-Charles Villeneuve has escaped into Ferrol, Spain after an indecisive engagement.Hornblower presents a daring plan to the first and second secretaries to the Admiralty - William Marsden and John Barrow. He proposes sending agents to Spain, posing as messengers, to deliver false orders from Napoleon Bonaparte to Villeneuve. These will command Villeneuve to take his fleet out of their safe harbour of Ferrol and so bring about a decisive engagement with Admiral Nelson. This plan has been made possible because the papers captured by Hornblower include a routine letter from Napoleon, whose form can be copied.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Daughter"title="Rose Daughter">
A merchant loses all his money when his ships are lost at sea, and is forced to move his three daughters to a lonely countryside house called Rose Cottage which was left to his youngest, Beauty, in a will, and thus is not subject to his creditors. The garden of the house is full of strange thorny bushes and vines, which neither of the merchant nor his three daughters can identify. Beauty asks in the town and discovers that they are the roses the cottage are called after and begins to tend them, because she loves gardening and she remembers the smell of her mother's rose perfume. Roses are very rare because only great magic or great love can grow them. The roses bloom under Beauty's care, and the sisters sells wreaths of them in the town. After some time, the merchant hears word that one of his ships might have made it back and journeys to find out if it's true. He asks his daughters what presents they would like him to bring back, and Beauty requests a rose, as her bush has not blossomed that year because it has been so cold and rainy and miserable.The ship had come in, but the creditors had remembered the merchant's old debts and seized upon the goods before he could reach them. A man who had once worked as his clerk and was now employed by a rival had let the merchant stay with him, but his employer found out and demanded that he be turned out. Finding that he was nothing but bad luck in that city, the merchant refused another offer of aid and set out to make his way home on a stout pony allowed to be lent to him, in spite of the fierce winter weather. On the way he gets lost in a snow storm, and ends up at a magnificent castle where he is given food and shelter. As he is leaving he notices a beautiful rose on a table and decides to take it back for Beauty. This enrages the castle's owner - a terrifying beast. When the merchant explains his actions, the Beast agrees to let him go on the condition that Beauty comes to live with him in the castle.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spindle's_End"title="Spindle's End">
In McKinley's version of the classic fairy tale, "Sleeping Beauty", a wicked fairy named Pernicia appears on the princess' name-day and places a curse on the baby, claiming that the child will, on her 21st birthday, prick her finger on a spindle and fall into deathly sleep. The cursed princess is rescued on her name-day and secretly taken away by a young fairy, Katriona, to her village, a town called Foggy Bottom, located in the damp and swampy section of the country known as The Gig. There Katriona and her aunt (affectionately known as Aunt) raise the princess as an ordinary village maiden, naming her Rosie after the last of the princess' twenty-one names.Throughout the book, Rosie grows from a headstrong, stubborn child into an intelligent and courageous young woman. With the help of a rare talent—beast-speech, a small bit of magic unknowingly passed on from Katriona—and the silent encouragement of the town's taciturn blacksmith, Narl, Rosie becomes a talented and well-known horse leech, more inclined to wear breeches and whittle spindle ends than wear dresses and practice embroidery, as her more ladylike friend Peony does. However, when Rosie is 20 years old, Ikor, a mysterious powerful fairy, appears and reveals to Rosie that she is actually the country's hidden princess, and announces a plan to defeat Pernicia: a spell will be cast over Peony and Rosie which switches their identities, but only until Rosie turns 21 and Pernicia's spell is broken.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pact_(novel)"title="The Pact (novel)">
In the fall of 1979, the Golds, consisting of a recently pregnant Melanie Gold and her husband Michael Gold, moved into the small town of Bainbridge, New Hampshire. They moved in next door to the Hartes, another coincidentally pregnant couple, and through their shared interests, the women, Gus Harte and Melanie Gold, began to forge a lasting friendship. Their husbands, James Harte and Michael Gold would follow suit and the families would soon raise their firstborns together. From the moment they were delivered from the womb it seemed that Emily Gold and Chris Harte were destined to be together, and their parents certainly hoped that to be the case. By the time Chris and Emily were teenagers it was easy for them to develop feelings for each other and before they knew it they were dating. Everything seemed perfect, until a 3 a.m. telephone call to both family homes sent them running to the hospital. Chris and Emily had been found at the carousel where Chris worked, he was unconscious with an open head wound, and she had a gun shot to the head from a gun Chris' father owned. Emily was later pronounced dead in the emergency roomWhen a detective comes looking for Chris to answer questions about Emily's death, he learns that he is the main suspect in her death, which is being investigated as a homicide. However, Chris claims that he and Emily made a suicide pact, and he had fallen unconscious before he had the chance to end his own life as well. When a grieving Melanie caught wind of this, she is relieved to have the finger turned away from herself after struggling to believe she had not seen Emily's suicidal tendencies. Melanie focused all her anger at her daughter's premature death on making sure that her murderer (i.e. Chris) paid for his crime. Meanwhile, her husband, Michael, did not believe that Chris could have done such a thing after seeing the way he treated her with such care while they were friends and subsequently in a relationship together. Michael considers the possibility that his daughter may have kept more from him than he had thought. With mounting evidence against him, and an autopsy report that revealed that Emily had been several weeks pregnant at the time of her death, the state of New Hampshire had enough evidence to arrest Chris. He was soon after charged with first-degree murder. During this time, Chris met his lawyer, Jordan McAfee, who would deny him of revealing the truth about the night of Emily's death because to McAfee the only truth that mattered was the one that was most likely to help his client. Due to the severity of the charge, Chris is remanded to jail without bail until the trial, which would be several months away. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_(novel)"title="March (novel)">
In 1862, Mr. March, an abolitionist and chaplain in the Union Army, is driven by his conscience to leave his home and family in Concord, Massachusetts, to participate in the war. During this time, March writes letters to his family, but he withholds the true extent of the brutality and injustices he witnesses on and off the battlefields. He suffers from a prolonged illness stemming from poor conditions on a cotton farm in Virginia. While in hospital, he has an unexpected meeting with Grace, an intelligent and literate black nurse whom he first met as a young woman staying in a large house where she was enslaved. The recovering March, despite his guilt and grief over his survival when others have perished, returns home to his wife and Little Women, but he has been scarred by the events he has gone through.The novel accurately reflects Bronson Alcott's principles, notably his belief that boys and girls of all races had a right to education and his wish to follow a vegetarian diet. It presents the young Mrs March as a fiery character with strong verbal and physical expressions of anger.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_All_Fall_Down_(Walters_novel)"title="We All Fall Down (Walters novel)">
Ninth-grader Will Fuller shadows his father, the vice president of an international trading company based in the World Trade Center. He is not looking forward to the visit, as his father has always been very focused on his work and Will worries that his father will not bother to make time for him.Will's visit takes place on the morning of the September 11, 2001 attacks, and is told in rapid first-person narration as Will, his father, and other staff in the tower offices attempt to escape during the building's collapse. Will's best friend James's father works as a New York firefighter, adding another element of danger to the narrative."We All Fall Down" received predominantly very positive reviews, but received some criticism for lengthy exposition designed to explain the background of the terrorist attacks to readers.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gift_from_Earth"title="A Gift from Earth">
Plateau, a colony in the Tau Ceti system, was settled by humans some 300 years before the plot begins. The colony world itself is a Venusian-type planet with a dense, hot, poisonous atmosphere. It would be otherwise uninhabitable, except for a tall monolithic mesa that rises up into a breathable layer in the upper atmosphere. This gives the planet a habitable area about half the size of California. The Captain of the first colony vessel named the feature Mount Lookitthat (from his interjection at first sight of it), and the colony became known as Plateau.After landing the slower-than-light ships, the Crew sign an agreement, called the Covenant of Planetfall, with their former passengers (who had just emerged from suspended animation and were in a weak bargaining position). This agreement gives the Crew (and their descendants in perpetuity) all control over the new colony. A system of medical care evolves, in which organ transplantation is the only method of treatment, even for cosmetic defects (such as baldness); a justice system evolves, based on the Hospitals in the two immense "slowboat" spacecraft which had brought their ancestors to the planet; all crimes are punishable by death, followed by involuntary donation of the perpetrator's transplantable organs (including skin, scalp, and teeth). Not surprisingly, only Colonists are ever arrested for crimes; and only Crew are eligible to receive transplants, except as a rarely granted privilege in return for service to the Crew. Some Colonists become dissatisfied with the system and form a dissident group called the "Sons of Earth".
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fireclown"title="The Fireclown">
The novel is based in a future where the majority of the human population live underground. Alan Powys works at the transport department. His grandfather, Simon Powys, is the minister for space transport and is the presumptive nominee for his party to succeed the current president. Alan's cousin Helen Curtis is leader of the Radical Liberal Movement, the government's opposition.The arrival of the Fireclown in the lower levels of the underground city and his performances featuring fire captivate those who see it. He is thought by Simon Powys to be a dangerous rebel, his niece thinks conversely that the Fireclown is there to reignite people's passion for democracy.A fire breaks out in the lower levels forcing the Government to shut them off, people revolt and the Fireclown flees. Unconvinced by his grandfather's, and the Government's, assertion that the Fireclown is a terrorist, Alan sets off to find the Fireclown for an explanation. Helen accompanies him providing a ship and desperate to believe the Fireclown is a great healer.After arriving at an orbiting monastery they do, eventually, find the Fireclown. He takes them out in his specially designed starship "The Pi-Meson" and shows them at incredibly close quarters, the sun's corona. It transpires that the Fireclown is neither a terrorist nor a saviour. After a private conversation with Alan, the Fireclown allows both him and Helen to return to Earth.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine,_Called_Birdy"title="Catherine, Called Birdy">
The story begins in September 1290, when Catherine describes her world: her father's manor, her father and mother themselves (her father is bawdy, loud and disagreeable; her mother, kind and sweet), and the people she encounters daily. The novel is marked by the Catholic Saints' Days. Catherine is called "Birdy" because she keeps many birds as pets. She has three older brothers. The eldest, Robert, is a knight. He weds his betrothed though she is only 12, and she dies from complications while giving birth to their child. Catherine's second brother, Thomas, is in the king's service. Edward, with whom she corresponds and is closest, is a monk who lives in an abbey nearby.Catherine's relationship with her parents is a pervasive element in the plot. Her mother wishes her to be an accomplished and docile lady, while her father wishes to make advantageous social connections through her marriage. Several suitors approach Stonebridge Manor with the intention of wooing Lady Catherine, but all fall short of her expectations and devices. Eventually, Catherine's father demands that she marry an old, repulsive man she calls "Shaggy Beard" in her diary. She spends the year described in her diary fighting the marriage, devising various escapes and alternate versions of her life where she will run away and be a monk, or escape overseas and go on the Crusades.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Captain_(novel)"title="The Captain (novel)">
The frame story has Martinus Harinxma, a senior tugboat captain home after a long voyage, catching up on correspondence. He opens a letter from a young man who is the son of a Canadian naval officer killed aboard Harinxma's ship during escort duty during Second World War. In the letter, the son asks the Captain, "How was my father killed, and what was he really like?" As he begins to write the boy, Harinxma is forced to remember, and re-live the events surrounding the Canadian officer's time aboard his ship, and his eventual death.In 1940 Harinxma, then a young tugboat officer, escapes to Britain. The Kwel company has managed to get away much of its fleet and personnel, one jump ahead of the advancing Germans, and sets up to continue operations from London. Harinxma gets his first command, at an earlier age and under much more difficult conditions than he would otherwise have had.A central element of the book are the complex relationships between the crew members, in whose depiction de Hartog's personal nautical experience is manifest. Among other things the young and inexperienced captain must face the dilemma of whether to cover up for a severe mishap by the ship's engineer, who is his personal friend, or report him for the sake of the ship's safety and risk his getting fired.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Stein"title="Allan Stein">
In the novel's first section, the protagonist loses his teaching job due to a false accusation of seducing a 10th-grade student. He then seduces the student, and having done so, departs on a trip to France. In France he assumes the name of a friend, 'Herbert', and pretends to be a curator looking for lost drawings of Allan Stein.The protagonist uses his new identity to become close to the son of his hosts, a moody 15-year-old named Stéphane. The narrator projects onto Stéphane an idealized memory of his own childhood, when he visited France with his mother at age 16. Enchanted by Stéphane's mother as well as her son.After two weeks, the narrator succeeds in making Stéphane his lover, and the two run off together to the South of France. But Stéphane returns to his parents when he discovers that the narrator has lied about his name. It is only at this point that the reader discovers the real name of the narrator: Matthew.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_of_the_Dragons"title="Dawn of the Dragons">
Lone Wolf, Kai Grand Master of Sommerlund, has just completed a successful quest when he learns that the Dark God Naar is about to send a large group of fire-breathing dragons against the Kai Monastery. Lone Wolf has to deal with assassins sent to intercept him before he can reach the monastery and lead the new Kai Lords into battle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Buccaneers_of_Shadaki"title="The Buccaneers of Shadaki">
This is the second half of Lone Wolf's apprentice’s voyage to the Isle of Lorn to return the Moonstone to its proper place among the Shianti.The book is notable for retracing, in a sense, the steps of the protagonist Grey Star in The World of Lone Wolf series. Major characters and events from that series, such as Grey Star, Agarash the Damned, Shasarak the Wytch-King and Mother Magri, are referenced in passing, and a number of important locations such as the city of Shadaki and the Inn of the Laughing Moon in Suhn make cameo appearances.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Need_to_Talk_About_Kevin"title="We Need to Talk About Kevin">
Ever since her son Kevin was a baby, Eva has struggled with parenthood. She gave up her career to concentrate on giving her son a good upbringing, but something has gone wrong, because as a teenager her son is developing sinister psychopathic traits. As the situation turns catastrophic, she tries to figure out where she and Kevin's father Franklin went wrong.In the wake of a school massacre committed by Kevin Khatchadourian, the 15-year-old son of Franklin Plaskett and Eva Khatchadourian, Eva begins writing letters to Franklin in November 2000. She reflects candidly on the history of her relationship with her husband and the events of Kevin's life up to the killings. She also relates her current life: she was involved in both her son's criminal trial and a civil lawsuit against her for parental negligence by the mother of one of her son's victims. Eva sold the family home to pay for legal expenses, but in order to be near Claverack Juvenile Correctional Facility where Kevin is incarcerated, she lives in the same town and is shunned by the community. She regularly visits Kevin in prison, where they have a cold relationship.Eva unwillingly stepped back from a successful career as a travel writer to raise Kevin, and has struggled with him from his difficult infancy. Kevin seemingly regards everyone with contempt and hatred, especially his mother, yet is manageable when Franklin is around. Eva perceives him as deliberately antagonistic, with his behavior ranging from seemingly petty sabotage of Eva's belongings to possibly encouraging a girl to gouge her eczema-affected skin. Kevin resisted toilet training, which Eva reveals led her to lash out and break Kevin's arm; Kevin told Franklin this was an accident and used the secret to manipulate Eva.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everyman_(novel)"title="Everyman (novel)">
The book begins at the funeral of its protagonist. The remainder of the book, which ends with his death, looks mournfully back on episodes from his life, including his childhood, where he and his older brother, Howie, worked in his father's shop, Everyman's Jewelry Store. He has been married three times, with two sons from his first marriage who resent him for leaving their mother, and one daughter from his second marriage who treats him with kindness and compassion, though he divorced her mother after beginning an affair with a 24-year-old Danish model, who subsequently became his third wife. Having divorced her as well, he has moved in his old age to a retirement community at the New Jersey shore, where he lives alone and attempts to paint, having passed up a career as an artist early in his life to work in advertising in order to support himself and his family. The book traces the protagonist's feelings as he gets increasingly old and sick, and his reflections of his own past, which has included his share of misdeeds and mistakes, as he ponders his impending death.The unnamed everyman, while an ordinary man and not a famous novelist, has much in common with Philip Roth; he is born, like Roth, in 1933; he grows up in Elizabeth, six miles away from Roth's native Newark; and he recounts a series of medical problems and a history of frequent hospitalization similar to that of the author's.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Whipping_Boy"title="The Whipping Boy">
Prince Horace also known as prince brat, frequently misbehaves. Since he is a prince, no one may raise a hand against him. Therefore, his family provides him with a whipping boy, Jemmy, an orphaned boy who will be punished instead of the prince. Though he has learned to read, write and do mathematics while living in the castle, Jemmy is beaten several times a day and longs for the freedom he had on the streets. When the prince decides to run away on a whim, he demands that Jemmy act as his servant during his journey. While on the run, the boys are picked up by two notorious highwaymen, Hold-Your-Nose Billy and Cutwater, who hatch a scheme to ransom the prince. Jemmy talks them into believing that he is the prince, and sets into motion a plan of escape. The prince misunderstands Jemmy's intentions and betrays him. Nonetheless, the boys escape. They come across a girl named Betsy searching for her lost dancing bear, Petunia, and she directs them to the river where they find a kind man with a wagon full of potatoes. The boys help the man - whose name is Captain Nips - get his wagon out from the mud, and in return, the potato man gives the boys, the girl, and the bear a lift to the fair, but they are soon intercepted by the highwaymen. Still believing Jemmy is the prince, and believing it to be a crime worse than murder to beat the prince, they beat Horace instead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legacy_of_Vashna"title="The Legacy of Vashna">
Long ago, Vashna, the greatest of all Darklords, was defeated in battle by King Ulnar of Sommerlund. But the victory was not complete, for while his body was destroyed, his spirit, as well as the spirits of his troops, remain trapped deep within the Maakengorge. Now, Lone Wolf learns of strange sightings in the area near the Maakengorge, suggesting that there may be a plot afoot to resurrect Vashna. Lone Wolf and the reader set out to uncover the nature of the threat, and to see if, indeed, Vashna will return.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Surgeon"title="Star Surgeon">
Dr Conway must deal with an unconscious patient, classification ELPH, who may be a cannibal or a demigod, or both. It came from the "other galaxy", and the species is well known, almost infamous, to the Ians, who are also from another galaxy. It is extremely long-lived, and regularly takes complete rejuvenation treatments, including the brain and memory, to keep itself young. By doing this, it is practically immortal. It, although unconscious, appeared to have the ability to negate the most powerful drugs and resist surgery to cure its skin condition. This later turned out to be the work of the entity's "doctor", who is an intelligent, organised collection of microscopic, virus-type cells. Once Doctor Conway realises this, he uses a wooden stake to make the ELPH's doctor focus itself in one small location, at which time it is removed from the ELPH, informed regarding the physiology-problems of its patient, and put back in. The patient, whose name is Lonvellin, quickly makes a full recovery, and it leaves to do what it does best: "bona fide" missions that involve taking backwards planetary cultures and pulling them up "by their bootstraps". His particular mission, this time, is to cure a diseased planet called Etla, and he recruits Dr Conway and the "Monitor Corps" to help him. When the empire that controls the planet of Etla misinterprets Lonvellin's efforts as an act of war, the empire declares war on the Sector General space hospital.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_on_the_Water"title="Fire on the Water">
Having informed the King of Sommerlund about the fate of the Kai Order, Lone Wolf is instructed to make a journey to their ally, the neighbouring country of Durenor, to retrieve the legendary Sommerswerd, which is Sommerlund’s only hope at repelling Darklord Zagarna’s massive invasion. Lone Wolf is given the Seal of Hammerdal and sets off on a ship bound for Durenor, but when a traitor on board sabotages the ship, he is forced to make his way on foot to Durenor despite the enemies that await him around every corner.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Caverns_of_Kalte"title="The Caverns of Kalte">
After defeating Darklord Zagarna’s invasion, Sommerlund has begun rebuilding and little scars of war remain after one year. Work on rebuilding the Kai Monastery was about to commence when disturbing news from the north came. The merchants returning from summer trading to Kalte told of Brumalmarc, leader of the Ice Barbarian, has fallen to a hunch-backed magician. The description fit Vonotar, the former wizard from the Brotherhood of the Crystal Star, who betrayed Sommerlund and helped the Darklord Zagarna in the invasion and massacre of the Kai Order.Apparently after his defeat, Vonotar made his way to the frozen wastes of Kalte and to the ice fortress of Ikaya and through deception, managed to trick the Cruel Brumalmarc to adopt him as his magician and thus cost him his life and fortress. News of his survival spread in Sommerlund like wildfire with people demanding he pay for his treachery. The king is obliged to promise that the traitor be brought back and stand trial for his crimes and thus has asked you to go capture and bring him back.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betsy-Tacy_(novel)"title="Betsy-Tacy (novel)">
The adventures between the two friends range from the real life (such as going to school for the first time, making a playhouse out of a piano box, and dressing up to go calling) to the extraordinarily fanciful (such as being taken for a ride in the milkman's magic wagon by his talking horse, and flying away on a cloud while enjoying a picnic). The fanciful adventures are provided by Betsy's active imagination and her love of telling stories. The book deals with the themes of shyness, with the birth of new siblings, with the joys of an active imaginations, and even touches on death within the family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betsy's_Wedding_(novel)"title="Betsy's Wedding (novel)">
Betsy returns to New York from her European trip, where Joe Willard is waiting for her. He wants to take her to Tiffany's and buy an engagement ring, but the more practical Betsy suggests he buys a wedding band instead. They spend the day in New York City enjoying many of Joe's favorite places, but more importantly renewing their love.Betsy takes a train to Minneapolis, where her parents and younger sister are now living. She breaks the news of her engagement to her family, who are surprised that Joe wants to marry Betsy without first asking her father and without having a job in Minnesota. Her father is very upset. He thinks that Joe should have a job. When Joe arrives at the train station, Betsy tells him that her father is uncomfortable about him not having a job. He immediately drives from newspaper office to newspaper office before finding a job on a publicity campaign to help the people of Belgium (who were the victims of atrocities during World War I). Betsy's father respects Joe's go-getter attitude and allows the wedding to proceed.Joe and Betsy live with her parents while looking for an apartment to rent. With younger sister Margaret's help they find the perfect newlywed's home. Betsy struggles with her first forays into cooking, but eventually becomes a very good cook - and even has fun making some of Joe's favorite foods! Several happy months later, Joe's widowed aunt asks to live with them &amp; Joe tells her yes, although Betsy resents her coming. Joe is aware of her feelings (she had been hoping to bring a baby into their happy home; not Joe's aunt) &amp; this is the first serious difference of opinion in their marriage. Betsy wants to agree with Joe but cannot help feeling bitter until she has an epiphany &amp; realizes that Joe's generosity is one of the things she loves about him. In the end she enjoys Joe's aunt's company and her wonderful stories, especially when Joe begins working the night shift writing headlines for the newspaper. Meanwhile, Betsy and Tacy unite to try to find a husband for Tib. They introduce her to Mr. Bagshaw (a colleague of Harry's), who quickly falls in love with Tib. He proposes &amp; Tib turns him down. Betsy and Tacy are relieved, having realized that if she had married him, Tib would have moved to NYC. Betsy then introduces Tib to Rocky, a "Tramp" journalist they meet at "The Violent Study Club" (a group of friends &amp; fellow writers with whom Betsy &amp; Joe hone their writing skills).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_at_Skeleton_Rock"title="The Ghost at Skeleton Rock">
Frank, Joe, Chet and Tony travel to Puerto Rico to investigate the mystery behind a coded letter they received from the Hardy father. They later go in a race against time to stop a criminal mastermind from using an atomic bomb to take over the government of the fictional country of Tropicale.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flying_Sorcerers"title="The Flying Sorcerers">
The plot concerns the efforts of an astronaut and geologist/anthropologist, known to the natives as "Purple", to escape from a primitive world on which he is stranded and return to his people. The events are seen from the perspective of Lant, one of the natives, who becomes, in the course of the novel, Speaker (chieftain) of his people.The natives, a fur covered people, believe in magic and the book shows how sufficiently advanced technology would be perceived by a primitive society.Purple lands in an egg-shaped vehicle. He casually disrupts the lives of Lant's people, and thoughtlessly demeans Shoogar, the village magician. Shoogar gets revenge by destroying Purple's vehicle, which results in an atomic explosion. Many of the villagers are dead or injured: the rest, including Lant and Shoogar, are forced to flee. Purple is presumed dead.The villagers eventually wind up on a fertile peninsula, which, as the summer approaches, is rapidly becoming an island (thanks to the influence of the two suns, the shorelines on this world are somewhat variable). To the annoyance of the existing inhabitants of the area, the villagers contrive to be trapped in the verdant area by the rising seas. The villagers are less happy when they learn that Purple is here, serving ineffectively as local magician, having succeeded the incumbent, Dorthi, by killing him by landing on him in a fall from the sky in an impact suit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chrysanthemums"title="The Chrysanthemums">
The story opens with a panoramic view of the Salinas Valley in winter. The focus narrows and finally settles on Elisa Allen, cutting down the spent stalks of chrysanthemums, in the garden on her husband's ranch. Elisa is thirty-five, lean and strong, and she approaches her gardening with great energy. Her husband, Henry, comes from across the yard, where he had been arranging the sale of the thirty steers. Then he offers to take Elisa to town so they can celebrate the sale. He praises her skill with flowers, and she congratulates him on doing well in the negotiations for the steer. They seem to be a well-matched couple, though their way of talking together is formal and serious. While talking about their plan to go out, Henry jokingly asks Elisa if she would like to see a fight. Showing no interest, Elisa refuses and says she wouldn't like it. They agree on dinner and a movie instead. Elisa decides to finish her transplanting before they get ready to leave for town.Elisa hears “a squeak of wheels and a plod of hoofs,” and a man drives up in an old spring wagon (He is never named; the narrator simply calls him “the man”). Earning a meagre living, he fixes pots and sharpens scissors and knives. He travels from San Diego to Seattle and back every year. The man chats and jokes with Elisa, but she admits that she has no work for him to do. When he presses for a small job, she becomes annoyed and tries to send him away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_from_Boneville"title="Out from Boneville">
## The Map.The three Bone cousins, Fone, Phoney and Smiley, are lost in the desert after being run out of their hometown of Boneville. Eventually they find a hand-drawn map and are attacked by a swarm of locusts. Fone Bone escapes, but falls off a cliff; climbs the other side; and finds a trail of Smiley's cigars that lead into a nearby mountain range. When he sleeps that night, two rat creatures attempt to eat him, and he is rescued by the Great Red Dragon. Soon after, he crosses over the mountains and into a valley and meets Ted (a treehopper-like insect), who suggests that Fone seek counsel from Thorn, before winter arrives; but Fone is soon isolated by the snow.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knights_of_the_Cross"title="The Knights of the Cross">
"Krzyżacy" tells the story of a young nobleman, Zbyszko of Bogdaniec, who together with his uncle Maćko of Bogdaniec returns from the war against the Order (Knights of the Cross) in nearby Lithuania. In a tavern inn Zbyszko falls in love with the lovely Danusia, who is traveling with the court of the Duchess Anna. He swears to her his knight's oath and promises to bring her "three trophies" from the Teutonic Knights.On his way to the royal city of Kraków, Zbyszko attacks Kuno von Liechtenstein, who is an official diplomatic delegate of the Teutonic Knights. The penalty is death. Yet, on the scaffold, Danusia saves him from execution when she jumps onto the platform in full view of the crowd, and promises to marry him, covering his head with her handkerchief (an old Polish tradition that carries with it a stay of execution if the couple wed). Zbyszko and Maćko return home to their estate, where they rebuild their mansion. After some time Zbyszko returns to Danuśka and marries her. However, she is soon treacherously kidnapped by four Teutonic Knights who want revenge – her father Jurand fought against the Germans. Jurand himself is soon captured by them, imprisoned and cruelly tortured and maimed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youngblood_Hawke"title="Youngblood Hawke">
"Youngblood Hawke" is the story of Arthur Youngblood Hawke, an ex-Navy man from rural Kentucky who comes to New York to publish his first novel "Alms for Oblivion". Arthur's late father had literary ambitions, but his mother has a more worldly temperament and spends years trying to pry a fortune from family relations in the coal mining business. Hawke's parentage helps explain the conflict between his mastery of the written word and his sometimes obsessive hunt for wealth.After publishing his first novel, he falls in with an older married woman, Frieda Winter, with whom he maintains an emotionally tumultuous affair for too long. He also carries a torch for Jeanne Green, his editor who has helped make his work commercially viable. His second novel is an unqualified success, and he becomes a literary sensation.His fame carries with it some wealth, but Arthur has a weakness for building even more wealth fast. He gets involved with Scott Hoag, a builder from his own town, who gives him the opportunity to participate in real estate developments, such as suburban shopping centers. In a few years, Arthur overextends himself and gets seriously in debt.In the end, he works himself to death between the money he owes; jealousy over Jeanne, the love of his life (who married a man she didn't love to spite him) and the tragedy of the suicide of Frieda Winter's son, for which Hawke feels responsible. A head trauma from his days of coal trucking also comes into play, and (like Thomas Wolfe) he eventually dies of an infection at a young age. In his legacy after death, he achieves the status that he had sought while alive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornblower_and_the_Atropos"title="Hornblower and the Atropos">
On a December day in 1805, Hornblower travels with his very pregnant wife and their son to London on a canal boat via the Thames and Severn Canal and the Thames. He is excited about getting his new orders and obtaining his first command as a post-captain. On the canal, the assistant boatman becomes incapacitated through drink, thus allowing Hornblower the opportunity to learn much of canal boat operation when he volunteers to take the man's place at the boat's helm.Upon their arrival in London, Hornblower assumes command of the "Atropos". His first assignment is a unique one: to organise Admiral Horatio Nelson's funeral. The Battle of Trafalgar had just taken place, in which Nelson was shot and killed by a musket. The whole nation is in deep mourning and all eyes are on the funeral. The funeral consists of a procession on the Thames between Greenwich Pier and Whitehall Steps, during which the ceremonial barge conveying Nelson's coffin springs a leak. The crew, after frantic bailing, barely manage to unload the coffin without disrupting the proceedings noticeably.Once Hornblower finishes with the funeral, he is presented to the King at Court. He is informed that the King's nephew, a German prince driven out of his principality by Napoleon, is to be one of his midshipmen on the "Atropos". Hornblower's treatment of the prince is a continuing subplot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Solitudes_(novel)"title="Two Solitudes (novel)">
The novel's plot revolves around the life and times of the fictional character Paul Tallard and this character's struggles in reconciling the differences between his English and French Canadian identities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Hands_in_the_Fountain"title="Three Hands in the Fountain">
Falco arrives home in Rome with Helena Justina and Julia Junilla Laeitana, his new baby daughter, and barely have time to settle in before being subjected to a welcome-home party. Falco and Petronius sneak out for a drink in a nearby street next to a fountain, which is not working. When a worker turns up to clean it, it is revealed that a severed hand had blocked the aqueduct. Falco and Petro start to investigate, but their case is stolen by Anacrites. Petro puts up a sign proclaiming that awards are to be given on the discovery of any body parts. Falco talks to his brother-in-law and is told that severed body parts have been discovered in the rivers and aqueducts for several years, usually after festivals. When he's told that Petro put up the sign he runs back to his old apartment (where Petro now lives after being kicked out by his wife) as a slave hands over a new hand to Petro. Petro takes down the sign.Anacrites, who is rather annoyed at being muscled out of his stolen case, sends four men to beat up Falco and Petro. They defeat the bruisers easily and trail them back to Anacrites. Soon afterwards, Julius Frontinus finds and gives over a new hand. It looks the same as the other hands but this one has a wedding ring with two names inscribed (Asinia and Caius). They track down Caius Cicurrus, the widower of Asinia. He is innocent and is greatly grieving for his lost wife. Petro's wife dumped him after he took up with Balbina Milvia from "Time to Depart". Milvia's husband Florius sends men to beat up Falco and Petro. Falco, with the help of his trainer Glaucus and Glaucus's trainees, beats off his attackers but Petro has no such help and is heavily injured. Milvia comes to Falco asking him to help her, as she fears that her mother, who has vanished, has been taken by the killer. Falco finds Cornella Flaccida at a new apartment. He goes out to the country but finds no suspects. After continuous reconnaissance he has two problems: First, Claudia Rufina, the heiress from "A Dying Light In Corduba" and the new fiancee to Helena's brother Aelianus, has vanished, and second, a slave called Thurius has been identified as the murderer. Falco goes out to rescue Claudia and apprehend Thurius. He captures Thurius and finds his lair and his victim. He finds that it's not Claudia, it's Milvia's mother, who vanished again. Unlike Claudia, however, no one liked her enough to send out a search party. Claudia is later found to have eloped with Helena's other brother Justinus, an act that has disastrous consequences. The book ends with Falco telling Petro his wife went out with another man, and later receiving a visit from Anacrites.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Graduate_(novel)"title="The Graduate (novel)">
Benjamin Braddock has recently graduated from a small Eastern college and has returned home to a suburb of Los Angeles. Benjamin, visibly uncomfortable as his parents deliver accolades and neighborhood friends ask him about his future plans, evades those who try to congratulate him. Mrs. Robinson enters his room, asking him strange questions and probing into his life. After he drives her home, Mrs. Robinson attempts to seduce him. Benjamin rebuffs her and quickly goes downstairs as he hears Mr. Robinson arriving home. A week after his 21st birthday, Benjamin begins his affair with Mrs. Robinson and meets her at the Taft Hotel. In mid-September, Benjamin spends the time drifting around in the pool by day, purposefully neglecting to select a graduate school, and seeing Mrs. Robinson at the hotel by night. One evening, Mrs. Robinson reveals that she is in a loveless marriage, because in the 1940s, she became pregnant with her daughter, Elaine, dropped out of college, and married to avoid scandal.After being increasingly pressured by his parents and Mr. Robinson to go on a date with Elaine, he takes her out but deliberately sabotages the date by driving recklessly and taking her to two clubs and a strip show. Benjamin discovers that he likes Elaine and decides to tell her everything. Elaine is furious and returns to Berkeley where she is a university student. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Step_by_Wicked_Step"title="Step by Wicked Step">
Five children on a school trip stay overnight in Old Harwick Hall, a reputedly haunted house. They find the dusty diary of a boy called Richard Clayton Harwick and read that after Richard ran away to sea to escape his stepfather, he returned to an empty house. His mother had died of grief while his sister had also died in childbirth. This sparks a discussion of Richard's actions between the children. The discussion leads to each of them divulging their own family problems.Claudia reveals that her parents had divorced after several fights. The 'scarlet woman', a pleasant woman named Stella, tries but fails to win Claudia's approval. However, after a dinner party with her father's friends who also ignore Stella, Claudia realises her mistake and attempts to get them into attention by wearing beautiful green pyjamas bought by Stella in front of the guests, shocking them into politeness.Colin reveals that his 'Dad' (who was his mother's partner but not his biological father) was left behind by his mother after they had absconded one day. While his mother was frustrated with Jack (Dad)'s unemployed state, Colin, who loved him very much, attempted to keep in contact with Jack. Failing to do so, he plans to find him in the future.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Without_End"title="Night Without End">
A BOAC airplane crash-lands on the Greenland ice cap far from its usual route after flying in a seemingly erratic fashion. An International Geophysical Year scientific research team based near the crash site rescues the surviving passengers and takes them to their station. Most of the flight crew are dead. The station's only means of contact with the outside world, a radio set, is destroyed in a seemingly accidental manner.With not enough food for everyone and no hope of rescue, the leader of the scientific research team, Dr Mason, decides that they must set out for the nearest settlement, some 300 kilometers away at the coast. Meanwhile, the crew member who was found with massive brain injuries an who since fell in a coma is found to have been suffocated with a pillow. Inspecting the plane, Dr Mason discovers that one of the pilots had been shot in the back. The dead passenger is determined to be a military courier. An attempt is also made on Mason's life by stranding him in the arctic night, soon after that the wreck goes up in flames. The scientist's suspicion falls on the stewardess but she is soon cleared. Mason orders another scientist, Joss, to stay behind and try to repair the radio so that a field expedition can be contacted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_the_Overlander"title="Gregor the Overlander">
Eleven-year-old Gregor is left home alone in his family's New York City apartment to watch his sister and grandmother. When Gregor's baby sister Boots falls through an old air duct grate in the building's basement, he dives in after her. The two fall miles below into the Underland: a subterranean world home to humans with near-translucent skin, violet eyes, and silver hair; giant sentient bats, rodents, and insects; and an escalating conflict between the human kingdom of Regalia and the rats' King Gorger. They meet several "Underlanders", among them the human Regalians' crown princess Luxa, who is Gregor's age, her cousin Henry, aged 14, and the bats who are "bonded" to them as warrior allies. At first, Gregor wants only to return home, but when he is attacked by two rats during an escape attempt and saved by the Underlanders, he inadvertently brings the conflict between the two groups to a head.It is then that he learns the real reason for the rats' hatred of Overlanders: a mysterious prophecy written by the human colony's founder Bartholomew of Sandwich hints that an Overland "warrior" will stop an attempt by the rats to take over the underground realm once and for all. The Regalian council believes Gregor to be this warrior, and tries to convince him to undertake the quest mentioned in the "Prophecy of Gray". Though he sympathizes, Gregor is reluctant to help until he learns a surprising fact: his father, who disappeared unexpectedly over two years before, had actually fallen down into Regalia just like Gregor and Boots and been taken prisoner by the rats. Gregor, his sister, and a group of Regalians go on a journey to rescue Gregor's father and recruit allies for a war against the rats.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Alliance_(book)"title="Dark Alliance (book)">
According to Webb, in the 1980s when the CIA exerted a certain amount of control over Contra groups such as the FDN, the agency as well as the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) granted amnesty to and put on the agency’s bankroll important Contra supporters and fundraisers who were known to the US Government to be cocaine smugglers. Later, at the behest of Oliver North, the Reagan Administration began to use Contra drug money to support the anti-communist Nicaraguan rebels' efforts against the Sandinista government. The Sandinistas were hated by successive Democratic and Republican U.S. administrations for the 1978-79 Sandinista Revolution (the overthrowing of the U.S.-sponsored brutal dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua) and for their support of worker and peasant revolutions developing throughout Central and South America.Blandon, a cocaine smuggler who founded an FDN chapter in Los Angeles, was a major supplier for Freeway Ricky Ross. With access to cheap, pure cocaine and the idea to cook the cocaine into crack, Ross established a major drug network and fueled the popularity of crack. By 1983, Ross was purchasing 10 to 15 kilos of cocaine a week from CIA-backed Contra supporter Blandon - according to Blandon. All the while, Webb alleges, the CIA was supporting the Contras supplying him with the cocaine. Meanwhile, the US Justice Department and its agencies - who were aware of the Contra-linked drug trafficking operations of the FDN supporters - derailed local police investigations and blocked the prosecution of the Contra-linked cocaine traffickers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Night_in_Terror_Tower"title="A Night in Terror Tower">
Sue and her younger brother Eddie are American tourists in London. After Eddie wants to visit Terror Tower, they join a tour of the castle. As the tour progresses, Sue notices that a man wearing black is following them as they move throughout the castle. The man in black, who also wears a cape, chases them and the children manage to escape. After going back to their hotel room, they find out that the suite is empty and that their parents are not in the hotel. They have trouble remembering their last name as well. After they leave the hotel's restaurant, the man in black blocks their path, and sends them to Medieval times with magical stones.Confused, alone, and frightened, Eddie and Sue are once again stalked by the man in black and eventually find refuge in the home of a peasant woman who promises to keep them safe. However, this turns out to be a ruse, as the woman quickly betrays them and turns them over to the man in black, who is revealed to be the Lord High Executioner of the reigning British Monarch. Sue and Eddie are then taken back to Terror Tower to await execution. In the dungeon, the children meet Morgred, a sorcerer, who informs them that they are Edward and Susannah, Prince and Princess of York, heir to the throne, and niece and nephew to the current King. It is revealed that the King murdered their parents—the rightful King and Queen—to claim the throne for himself, and was attempting to murder the children in order to forestall any challenge to his rule. However, before he could succeed, Morgred sent the children into a distant future with new memories in hopes of saving them from their uncle. However, he was unable to complete their new memories, resulting in them forgetting their parents and their own surnames.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ship_(novel)"title="The Ship (novel)">
A vital convoy is heading to Malta, escorted by five Royal Navy light cruisers, including HMS "Artemis". It is afternoon, and "Artemis", commanded by Captain Troughton-Harrington-Yorke, has just beaten off a number of air attacks. An Italian surface fleet, with the battleships "San Martino" and "Legnano" and several light cruisers, will intercept it soon. The convoy must get through, so the British ships must fight. The crew, from the command level officers on the bridge down to the ordinary seamen in the lower decks, prepares for the coming confrontation, while part of them is also occupied with their own, very colorful lives.Upon receiving reports from the lookouts at the masthead of enemy ships ahead, the cruisers lay a smoke screen, then attack. The ship sustains two hits, the first of which kills the ship's surgeon and several other crewmembers, while the second one does more damage to the ship and requires the flooding of "X" gun turret aft. The other two turrets continue to fire upon the Italian fleet, while destroyers lay a torpedo attack. A single shell, whose history from the mining of the ores to the firing of the gun is described in detail, hits the Italian flagship and strikes the final blow to the morale of the enemy commanders. With the "San Martino" being hit by a torpedo, the Italian fleet retires as night falls, and the convoy continues for Malta.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stronghold_(novel)"title="Stronghold (novel)">
After the trials and tribulations faced with the High Prince and others, Rohan, Sioned, Pol and Andry along with the rest of their families and friends, must defend their land against a large army of barbarians. No one knows where this army comes from or why they are attacking the Continent - or focusing on the Desert, High Prince Rohan's beloved homeland.Rohan and Pol are forced to flee across the Desert as they are pursued by the invaders. The Dorvali are forced to flee their island, but Ludhill, Prince Chadric's heir, and his wife stay on the island and form a resistance. Prince Kostas of Syr revels in leading his army and manages to secure his princedom. Rohannon defends Kierst after the death of Prince Volog, and manages to fend off the invaders by having the army pad their armor to look like women. Andry protects Goddess Keep by using a "ros'alath", a sorcerous wall, which terrorizes and kills those who touch it.As Rohan and Pol retreat across the Desert, they discover the enemy's fear of dragons. For a while the Desert forces are able to outsmart the enemy, but at the Battle of Stronghold the High Warlord arrives with his elite forces. The defenders of the Desert lose the battle, and High Prince Rohan dies as his beloved Stronghold burns.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_Dead_(novel)"title="The Book of the Dead (novel)">
An FBI agent, rotting away in a high-security prison for a murder he did not commit...His brilliant, psychotic brother, about to perpetrate a horrific crime...A young woman with an extraordinary past, on the edge of a violent breakdown...An ancient Egyptian tomb with an enigmatic curse, about to be unveiled at a celebrity-studded New York gala...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovelock_(novel)"title="Lovelock (novel)">
"Lovelock" is set in a near-future in which humanity is preparing to send out its first interstellar colonization ship, called the "Ark". In the speculative future described by the novel, a new field of science, Gaiaology, has come into existence, based on the Gaia Hypothesis. Lovelock, a genetically- and cybernetically-enhanced capuchin monkey relates the story in the first person. Lovelock serves as the "Witness" for Carol Jeanne Cocciolone, meaning that his job is to record every waking moment of the life of a prominent member of society. As the chief Gaiaologist of the "Ark", Carol Jeanne is responsible for managing the extensive terraforming their new planet will require, integrating the terrestrial species needed for the colonists' survival with the planet's existing ecology. Like every Witness, Lovelock has been indoctrinated to love and obey his owner unconditionally.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruising_(novel)"title="Cruising (novel)">
The novel focuses on three main characters, the killer Stuart Richards, the undercover policeman John Lynch, and the policeman Captain Edelson, who assigns the undercover role to Lynch. Each chapter (20 in total) focuses on one of the character's thoughts. Focus is placed on Lynch's feelings about various minority groups, including gay men and his feelings related to working undercover and how his life is changing as the job progresses. Additional focus is Richard's various heterosexual exploits, his rocky relationship with his father and many more memories of his life, both past and current, and Edelson's thoughts on the case and how he hopes it will garner him a promotion if he solves it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fripp_(novel)"title="Fripp (novel)">
Retired Rear Admiral Peter Legg has a delicate problem. He is suffering from satyriasis (the male equivalent of nymphomania) and his constant craving for sexual excitement with the local Madam, Miss Forde, and her working girls, "Forde's Escorts", have left him broke and despondent. Furthermore, his long-suffering wife Margot has deserted him. In desperation he attends a newly opened sexual addiction clinic run by the handsome, breakfast TV doctor Ryan Hooper. When this fails to solve his problems he decides to employ a young private detective, Twyford Fripp, to track down his wife and hopefully bring her back. Unfortunately, it's Twyford Fripp's very first case...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heechee_Rendezvous"title="Heechee Rendezvous">
Robinette Broadhead, a married millionaire with health problems, returns in this novel. Even with his need for medical care, Broadhead does not feel that he deserves transplants to keep him alive, as he is still feeling guilty about his horrible journey to a black hole many years ago. He still attempts to research more about the advanced alien Heechees and their star-travelling technology. At the same time, a madman named Wan attempts to search for his father within black holes, using stolen equipment and a Heechee ship. Wan's probing is noticed by a sentient race of slow-moving creatures who inform a Heechee patrol that is sent out of their black hole to observe the galaxy. Fearing that humans may alert a malevolent race of beings known as the Assassins, the Heechee patrol tries to find out more about human achievements in space flight and whether or not the damage done by them can be undone. Wan's probing also releases Gelle-Klara Moynlin from her two decade-long entrapment. Moynlin was a companion of Robinette on his journey to the black hole, which Moynlin experienced as only several elapsed days. The journeys of these past and future friends of Robinette begin to converge, and in the end, humans finally meet the Heechee race.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amnesia_Moon"title="Amnesia Moon">
The protagonist is a survivalist named Chaos, who lives in an abandoned megaplex in Wyoming after an apparent nuclear strike. The residents of his town of Hatfork are reliant on a sinister messianic figure named Kellogg for food. Kellogg also has powerful dreams, which he transfers into the minds of others. Chaos's mind is especially receptive, making him reluctant to sleep.Both Lethem and Chaos abandon this premise early on, and Chaos also goes by the name of "Everett Moon", depending on where he is. The novel plays with several other dystopian and post-apocalyptic setups. One area is covered in a thick green fog, save for an exclusive private school. Vacaville, California, has converted to a luck-based social system, taken to totalitarian extremes."Amnesia Moon" bears homage to Philip K. Dick. During a party scene, one guest describes a battle of wills in West Marin, and another cites a West Marin inhabitant named "Hoppington", both references to Dick's "Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb". Vacaville is reminiscent of Dick's "Solar Lottery", where society is also based on chance. When Moon and Melinda reach San Francisco, hallucinogenic drugs play a role in altered perceptions that provide access to other characters in this world, as in "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch". Elsewhere, it is argued that the depicted realities splintered away from each other to provide resistance to a hive-like alien invasion of Earth. Such solipsistic worlds are reminiscent of Dick's early novel "Eye in the Sky".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Hand_of_Mars"title="The Iron Hand of Mars">
Following the events of "Venus in Copper", the Imperial authorities are seeking Falco out for an assignment in Germany (which given the events of his last mission abroad, Falco is slow to accept). Meanwhile, Falco is not pleased with Titus Caesar attempting to seduce Helena. When Helena gets an invitation to a private dinner with Titus, she pleads that Falco stay by her side on the same day, but he instead decides to see a client in Veii — who unfortunately turns out to be a widow more intent on pleasure than business. Disgusted, Falco returns to Rome, but Helena has disappeared, apparently leaving Falco for good. Romantically depressed, Falco goes over to the Palatine to be personally briefed by the emperor Vespasian on his latest assignment — broker peace between Rome and the Celtic tribes of Germany (whose leaders are thought to be Veleda, a priestess and Julius Civilis, a local strongman), locate a missing military officer named Munius Lupercus, and deliver a new standard in the form of a two-foot long human hand, cast in iron, to the 14th Gemina at Moguntiacum — the last actually being a pretext for Falco to investigate them, given that the 14th's loyalty is held in doubt. Much to Falco's annoyance, he is also to escort an ex-slave named Xanthus into Germany as well, whose specialty is hairdressing.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyes_of_the_Storm"title="Eyes of the Storm">
## Moby Bone.The Great Red Dragon interrupts Fone Bone's nightmare. The following day, Fone Bone asks him about the dream, and the Dragon hints that he entered the dream on purpose. Later, the Bone cousins are absorbed in rebuilding Grandma Ben's farm.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragonslayer"title="The Dragonslayer">
## Business.Following the message that a Rat Creature army is crossing the Eastern border, Fone Bone, Thorn, and Gran'ma Ben travel off-road to Barrelhaven. "En route", Gran'ma Ben suffers an attack of her "gitchy feeling" - a dizziness and her omen of impending trouble. At the Barrelhaven tavern itself, Phoney Bone's tales of dangerous dragons make his end of the bar the most popular. Lucius attempts to call off the bet, but Phoney declines.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man's_Cave"title="Old Man's Cave">
## Cranky Groundhog.Fone Bone is trying to climb a tree so he can see the whole valley while Smiley Bone is at the bottom to catch Fone Bone. A groundhog starts to complain that Smiley is in his hole. then Fone Bone falls into the groundhog's hole. Ted finds them and the groundhog gets scared about rumors going around that Fone Bone had killed Kingdok. Fone Bone is outraged by this, so he, Smiley, and Ted go to warn Thorn.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Circles"title="Ghost Circles">
## End Times.At the besieged fortress of "Old Man's Cave", the Headmaster of the Veni Yan summons Wendell, the village tinsmith, and explains that the current unrest is not the fault of the Bones. Thorn, he explains, may be sought by the Hooded One. The mountain erupts as the Lord of the Locusts stirs beneath it, and the armies massed outside the fortress begin their attack. The Lord of the Locust resurrects his servant Briar, and sends her to "seek out our missing powers and return them to us". The Bones, Thorn, and Gran'ma Ben flee the collapsing mountain, pursued by Kingdok. As they descend through the tunnel discovered in a previous volume, Fone warns everyone of possible hallucinations; and indeed, Fone and Phoney become costumed as Ishmael and Captain Ahab. Upon leaving the tunnel, they find the valley covered in ash and every tree flattened.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_of_Horns_(comic)"title="Crown of Horns (comic)">
## The Dungeon and the Parapet.The chapter starts with Thorn's dream of Briar, Queen Lunaria, and Lunaria's husband the king at Dragon's Stair, where Thorn is given to her grandmother, Rose Harvestar/Gran'ma Ben, who delivers her to the Great Red Dragon; almost at the same moment, Thorn's parents are killed. Thorn rides the dragon underground into the cavern containing a bright light. The Great Red Dragon asks Thorn to look into the light, whereupon she mentions a frozen waterfall. After trying to see past this, she sees her mother, who asks her to seek the Crown of Horns. Thorn then wakes, and readers learn that Tarsil's soldiers had beaten and imprisoned Thorn and Fone Bone; each losing a tooth in the process. Meanwhile, Gran'ma Ben, on the city walls, throws an interfering Vedu off the wall and two Veni-Yan monks immediately recognize her and re-enter her service. Briar's army arrives at the main gate and Tarsil defies them. In their conversation, Tarsil reveals his facial injures, received from fighting dragons, to Briar, who responds by making her face an image of his former appearance and cuts him into two halves (possibly a reference to the manner of her own death), and declares the attack. Gran'ma Ben immediately takes charge of the city's army and orders the defense. In the dungeon, Fone Bone hears the fight and shouts for the guard; but learns that Smiley and Phoney are in the next cell, while all the guards have all gone to fight. At the wall, Gran'ma Ben oppose the invading hordes of Pawa soldiers and Rat Creatures when the Venu warn her of an attack on the weaker left flank, whereupon she orders them there as reinforcements. She is then pinned down by Pawan soldiers. Thorn tries to break the iron bars imprisoning herself and her friends, but fails. Fone mentions that in using the Crown of Horns, Thorn might destroy both the Locust and herself; whereupon she promises not to use the Crown of Horns. Taneal, a prophetess-like child featured in the previous collection, brings them a hammer by which to break their shackles while she tries to break the bars of their cell. Her brother then frees Phoney and Smiley. Tarsil's soldiers gather, causing Taneal to hide. When they have gone, Taneal, her brother, Phoney, and Smiley find Thorn comatose as a result of overwhelming visions. As Smiley tries to break the bars, Taneal tells the others that Tarsil was killed and Gran'ma Ben is getting overwhelmed by the Pawa soldiers. Hearing this, Thorn awakes and manages to break out of the cell with her bare hands. On the wall, the dream masters use illusions to scare off the Rat Creatures and the Pawas from climbing over the wall. Thorn, Fone Bone, Phoney, and Smiley rejoin Gran'ma Ben. They watch as the attacking army retreats, and Thorn reveals that ghost circles are surrounding the city.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dealing_with_Dragons"title="Dealing with Dragons">
Princess Cimorene is frustrated by her life and persuades the castle staff to teach her fencing, magic, cooking, Latin, and other interesting subjects that are considered very "improper" for princesses to learn.The King and Queen take Cimorene on a state visit to a neighboring kingdom. Cimorene learns that they plan to arrange her marriage to an annoying prince named Therandil. Faced with the prospect, Cimorene runs away. She meets a group of dragons and volunteers to become the "captive" princess of the dragon Kazul. Kazul assigns Cimorene to cook for her and organize her library and treasure hoard.Cimorene likes her position and becomes friends with Kazul, but finds she must constantly deal with knights and princes who want to rescue her. She hopes that a sign on the road to the cave will keep would-be rescuers at bay.While posting the sign, Cimorene encounters a wizard. After being annoyed, the wizard leaves using complicated magic, and Cimorene guesses that he is a powerful wizard. Later, Kazul explains that the dragons and the wizards disagree about the wizards' access to the Caves of Fire and Night. The wizards' staves absorb magic from any magical sources nearby – including dragons.Cimorene and Alianora, princess to the dragon Woraug, find another wizard gathering herbs near the dragon caves. Cimorene brings a sample of the herb back to Kazul. Panicking, the dragon burns it up immediately, but the inhalation of the smoke causes Kazul to fall ill. The plant is dragonsbane, poisonous to dragons. Kazul sends Cimorene to warn another dragon that the wizards are gathering dragonsbane. This news comes too late as the King of the Dragons has already been fatally poisoned.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clock_Winder"title="The Clock Winder">
The protagonist of the story is Elizabeth, a young woman who is taking time away from college to earn a bit of money and discover a sense of direction. By happenstance, she ends up landing in Baltimore near the home of Mrs. Pamela Emerson, a recent widow and the mother of seven grown children. Seeing Mrs. Emerson struggling to store her porch furniture in the garage for the winter, she stops to offer help and ends up becoming Mrs. Emerson's handyman and companion.The story, which spans 14 years, discusses the relationship between first Elizabeth and Mrs. Emerson and then the relationship between Elizabeth and several of Mrs. Emerson's children, particularly Timothy and Matthew. Elizabeth and the Emersons end up changing each other's lives in fundamental ways.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_Area_Goražde"title="Safe Area Goražde">
Joe Sacco visits Goražde, a mainly Bosniak enclave in eastern Bosnia surrounded by hostile Serb-dominated regions. Sacco visits the locals and gets a first-hand view of the war's brutal effect on the town.The story of Goražde develops through the narrations of Edin, a graduate student who was studying engineering in Sarajevo before the war, and other residents of Goražde.Yugoslavia had been a multi-ethnic country and its cultural pluralism was proudly propagandized throughout the world. Edin and many others recall having fun with their Serb and Croat friends during the Josip Broz Tito era. However, after the death of the charismatic former Partisan leader, the newly elected president of Serbia Slobodan Milošević begins to incite extreme Serb nationalism among the Serb population. By bringing back the painful memories before the Tito era in which bloody conflicts raged between Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks, he succeeds in inciting chauvinistic sentiment among the Serbs. The republics of Slovenia and Croatia, intimidated by the development of the situation, declare independence from Yugoslavia.The political situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina is rapidly deteriorating. The Serbian Democratic Party led by Radovan Karadžić represents the ethnic Serbs and is against disintegration; the Party of Democratic Action and the Croatian Democratic Union, respectively representing Bosniaks and Croats, are in favor of breaking apart from the Yugoslav federation. Bosnian Serbs, fearing that once Bosnia gains independence they would be persecuted by the numerically superior Bosniaks and Croats, organize their armed forces and prepare for the upcoming war. The tension among nations is now visible; Serbs and Bosniaks now go to separate cafés. Vigilantes raised from both sides patrol the streets and night for fear of Serb/Bosniak attack. Amid this atmosphere, Edin returns home from Sarajevo to protect his family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother_Fish"title="Brother Fish">
Brother Fish is a story spanning four continents and eighty years, though the bulk of the narrative takes place in Australia and Korea. The book deals with the friendship of Jacko McKenzie, a native of the (fictional) Queen's Island in the Bass Strait, and James ‘Jimmy’ Pentecost Oldcorn, an orphaned American ex-soldier. The two have been meeting at the Gallipoli Bar of the ANZAC Hotel, Launceston, Tasmania for 33 years, ever since their release from a prisoner of war camp in Korea.In the bar, Jacko reminisces about his youth on Queen's Island, ruminates on the poverty he experienced as the son of a fisherman and a washerwoman, and recalls the inhabitants of his hometown. One of the defining points of Jacko's life was his first encounter with Miss Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan, the town librarian and indomitable justice of the peace. The librarian substantially influenced Jacko's life, first as a teacher giving additional English lessons during his formative years, later as a friend, and ultimately as a business partner.A key feature of the novel is Jacko's recounting of his army days, first as an infantryman who enlisted too late to see any service in World War II and then as an infantryman in Korea. It was during this time that Jacko met Jimmy, an American soldier, and care is taken to delve into the background of the latter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_River_(novel)"title="The River (novel)">
Brian Robeson, a 13-year-old boy who spent 54 days surviving alone in the Canadian wilderness the previous summer, is hired by the government to again live in the woods and surviving only by his wits, so the military can learn his survival techniques. Though reluctant at first, Brian eventually agrees. This time, Brian sets out for a remote Canadian location accompanied by Derek Holtzer, a government psychologist.Though the government stipulated the duo take emergency supplies, Brian insists they abandon everything but a knife and an emergency radio, saying that it would be impossible to eat bugs and sleep in the rain when a tent and prepared food is within reach. During their stay, things take a grim turn when their camp is struck by lightning, which knocks Derek into a coma and destroys the radio. Knowing that Derek will die of dehydration long before anyone finds them, Brian builds a raft in a desperate bid to navigate down the unknown river to Brannock's Trading Post, the nearest inhabited point, for emergency aid. The biggest problem is the trading post is 100 miles downriver. Despite rapids, the craft's unwieldiness, exhaustion, and a lack of geographical knowledge, they finally reach the trading post and Derek survives. After the two get back home, Derek buys Brian a canoe named "The Raft" as a thank you present.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faust,_Part_One"title="Faust, Part One">
The first part of "Faust" is not divided into acts, but is structured as a sequence of scenes in a variety of settings. After a dedicatory poem and a prelude in the theater, the actual plot begins with a prologue in Heaven, where the Lord bets Mephistopheles, an agent of the Devil, that Mephistopheles cannot lead astray the Lord's favorite striving scholar, Dr. Faust. We then see Faust in his study, who, disappointed by the knowledge and results obtainable by science's natural means, attempts and fails to gain knowledge of nature and the universe by magical means. Dejected in this failure, Faust contemplates suicide, but is held back by the sounds of the beginning Easter celebrations. He joins his assistant Wagner for an Easter walk in the countryside, among the celebrating people, and is followed home by a poodle. Back in the study, the poodle transforms itself into Mephistopheles, who offers Faust a contract: he will do Faust's bidding on earth, and Faust will do the same for him in Hell (if, as Faust adds in an important side clause, Mephistopheles can get him to be satisfied and to want a moment to last forever). Faust signs in blood, and Mephistopheles first takes him to Auerbach's tavern in Leipzig, where the devil plays tricks on some drunken revelers. Having then been transformed into a young man by a witch, Faust encounters Margaret (Gretchen) and she excites his desires. Through a scheme involving jewellery and Gretchen's neighbour Marthe, Mephistopheles brings about Faust's and Gretchen's liaison. After a period of separation, Faust seduces Gretchen, who accidentally kills her mother with a sleeping potion given to her by Faust. Gretchen discovers that she is pregnant, and her torment is further increased when Faust and Mephistopheles kill her enraged brother in a sword fight. Mephistopheles seeks to distract Faust by taking him to a witches' sabbath on Walpurgis Night, but Faust insists on rescuing Gretchen from the execution to which she was sentenced after drowning her newborn child while in a state of madness. In the dungeon, Faust vainly tries to persuade Gretchen to follow him to freedom. At the end of the drama, as Faust and Mephistopheles flee the dungeon, a voice from heaven announces Gretchen's salvation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unlimited_Dream_Company"title="The Unlimited Dream Company">
In "The Unlimited Dream Company", a man named Blake crashes a stolen aircraft into the River Thames outside the Surrey suburb of Shepperton. Whether he survives the crash, to become a sort of supernatural messiah for the small town, or if he actually drowns, and dying, imagines the whole thing, is never truly revealed. Contradictory hints are scattered throughout the novel which may support both interpretations.Since the story is told by Blake in the first person, we know what he wants us to know, and we are only told what he chooses to tell us. In the first chapter of the novel, where Blake outlines his life before the air accident, there are elements that may make us suspect that he is insane, so that he is an absolutely unreliable narrator.Blake has extraordinary powers: he can fly, heal sick people, phagocytize other people whenever he likes; but he cannot leave the suburbs, though he repeatedly tries to get away. Moreover, Blake is obsessed by the relic of the small Cessna aircraft that he crash-landed on, which has been left submerged in the Thames. This might support the hypothesis that he is dead and is only imagining the strange events of the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Minutes"title="The Seven Minutes">
A novel titled "The Seven Minutes," purporting to be the thoughts in a woman's mind during seven minutes of sexual intercourse, is reputed to be the most obscene piece of pornography ever written, with massive public debate as to whether or not the book should be banned. A bookseller named Ben Fremont sells "The Seven Minutes" to Jeffrey Griffith, a college student with no history of violence. The book is found in Jeffrey's possession after his arrest for committing a brutal rape and murder.District Attorney Elmo Duncan takes advantage of the public interest in the case and conspires to publicly link "The Seven Minutes" with the Jeffrey Griffith trial. His plan is to not only ban the book, but to make possessing it illegal on the grounds of public morality and safety. Ultimately he wishes to use this platform of moral decency to unseat the current senator in an upcoming election. Luther Yerkes, a wealthy businessman who has clashed with the incumbent senator, secretly funds Duncan's censorship campaign. This leads to the arrest of Ben Fremont for providing the book to Griffith, as well as legal action leveled at the book's publisher Phillip Sanford as he refuses to cooperate in an attempt to locate the pseudonymous author of the book J.J. Jadway. Sanford claims that Jadway committed suicide in Europe years before due to despondency over the book's reception.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_Planet"title="Rebel Planet">
"Rebel Planet" is a science fiction adventure set in the year 2453. In this fictional representation of the future, human colonisation of the galaxy began in 2070 with the settlement of Tropos a few light-years from Earth. Earth and her colonies were conquered by an alien race known as the Arcadians in a twelve-year war around 2300. Humans have become slaves, and are kept alive only to serve their alien masters.However, a human organization known as SAROS ("Search And Research Of Space") has discovered that the Arcadians rely on a powerful super-computer to keep themselves networked together. Without this computer, they are merely zombies, incapable of acting on their own. SAROS has limited resources, but a secret plot is hatched to infiltrate Arcadion and destroy the queen computer. The reader plays the role of the last hope of humanity, an undercover agent posing as a space merchant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lords_of_the_North"title="The Lords of the North">
878 – 881: Uhtred of Bebbanburg makes his way back to his native Northumbria seeking revenge against his uncle Ælfric and childhood enemies Sven the One-Eyed and Kjartan the Cruel. He travels by ship with his lover and former nun, Hild. They make landfall near Eoferwic (York) to find the region in chaos. Ivarr Ivarsson, the most powerful Danish lord in Northumbria, has led his army against the Scots in the north. The formerly Danish-held Eoferwic has been conquered by Saxons, who, under the fanatical Father Hrothweard, have begun a massacre of Danes. The central lands of Dunholm are ravaged by Kjartan and Sven, and Bebbanburg remains under the control of Ælfric.Uhtred is hired to escort a Danish merchant's family north, through Dunholm. Their path leads to a slave trading station belonging to Sven. In order to avoid being recognised, Uhtred hides his face and calls himself Thorkild the Leper, Dark Swordsman of Niflheim. When the situation spirals out of control, he convinces Sven he was returned from the dead to haunt him and his father. He frees the Dane Guthred of Cumbraland from the slave pens; the amiable Guthred claims to be the king of Northumbria.In Cumbraland, Guthred converts to Christianity and is hailed as king of Northumbria by the Saxon Abbot Eadred, who believes Guthred has been anointed by Saint Cuthbert and claims to have dreamed of Guthred, though he initially mistakes Uhtred for him. Uhtred becomes the commander of Guthred's household troops, as well as his closest advisor. He trains a band of thirty new warriors and foils an attempt by Kjartan's infiltrators to capture him and Guthred. Uhtred is smitten with Guthred's sister, Gisela. He marches east with Guthred. With Ivarr Ivarsson away fighting the Scots, they capture Eoferwic easily. There Father Hrothweard joins them. As they march north to Dunholm, Guthred betrays Uhtred. He makes a deal with Uhtred's treacherous uncle, Ælfric, for his support against Kjartan. In return, Ælfric wants Uhtred dead, but Guthred gets him to accept something less. He pays Danish trader Sverri to take the unsuspecting Uhtred as a slave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chasm_of_Doom"title="The Chasm of Doom">
In this book, Lone Wolf is charged by the King of Sommerlund to investigate the disappearance of a troop of cavalry. The cavalry, led by a man named Captain D'Val, themselves disappeared under mysterious circumstances while investigating a disruption in the flow of mined resources from the province of Ruanon. Lone Wolf, along with the fifty Sommlending soldiers who accompany him, must uncover the truth surrounding the missing men and stop the resurrection of an ancient and terrible evil.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_on_the_Sand"title="Shadow on the Sand">
Once more, the reader (Lone Wolf) must set out on a mission bestowed upon him by the king. This time, the mission is a diplomatic one, in which a crucial peace treaty must be signed in the far away desert empire of Vassagonia.But as always, things are more complex than they seem, and peace is elusive. Lone Wolf walks into a trap from which he barely escapes, and he must fight the prime Darklord (Haakon) to regain a secret Kai artefact which will determine the fate of the Kai Order. This artifact is called the 'Book of the Magnakai'.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdoms_of_Terror"title="The Kingdoms of Terror">
In order to fulfill his pledge to restore the Kai, Lone Wolf must first himself become a Kai Grand Master. To accomplish this monumental task, he must retrieve the Lore Stones led only by the wisdom of Sun Eagle, the First Kai Grandmaster. As the last of the Kai, there is little to guide Lone Wolf in his studies, except for a faded inscription in the Book of the Magnakai directing him to seek the Lorestone of Varetta. And so, Lone Wolf sets off for Varetta in the Stornlands, far to the south of Sommerlund, to find this ancient relic and revive the glory of the Kai.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Death"title="Castle Death">
In his quest to attain Kai Grand Master status, Lone Wolf must seek out and find 7 Lorestones. After obtaining the Lorestone of Varetta in the previous book and absorbing its wisdom and power, the location of the next Lorestone is revealed as the remote township of Herdos. Here, Lone Wolf is directed by friendly Elder Magi to search within the accursed fortress of Kazan-Oud, otherwise known as "Castle Death".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle_of_Horrors"title="The Jungle of Horrors">
After surviving the perils of Castle Death and being tutored by the Elder Magi, Lone Wolf and the reader now seek out the third Lorestone. The location of this Lorestone is thought to be hidden in a temple deep within a jungle-swamp known as the Danarg. Over the years, this fetid swamp has become the home for any number of evil creatures who seek to protect the jungle and its treasures. To make matters worse, news is delivered that the Darklords have united behind a new leader, and may soon again bring war to Magnamund, increasing Lone Wolf's sense of urgency.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cauldron_of_Fear"title="The Cauldron of Fear">
As Lone Wolf races against time to recover the remaining Lorestones, he learns that the next one resides deep underground, beneath the streets of the city of Tahou. Unfortunately, the war against the Darklords has not been going at all well for the freeland nations, and Tahou is now in danger of falling before Lone Wolf even reaches it. If it falls to the Darklords and their Vassagonian allies before the Lorestone is recovered, the hopes of Lone Wolf completing the Magnakai quest will be thwarted forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dungeons_of_Torgar"title="The Dungeons of Torgar">
After discovering that the three remaining Lorestones have fallen into the hands of the Darklords, Lone Wolf and his allies must formulate a daring plan to recover them. It is rumored that the stones are being kept in the grim Drakkarim fortress-city of Torgar, where the darklords' evil sorcerers (the Nadziranim) are searching for the means to destroy them. Once more, Lone Wolf must make haste in an attempt to recover the Lorestones before the Nadziranim can bring about their destruction. The adventure ends with an exciting twist, which threatens to banish Lone Wolf from Magnamund for all time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoners_of_Time"title="The Prisoners of Time">
Although Lone Wolf is successful in rescuing one of the captive Lorestones from Torgar, both he and the remaining two Lorestones are blasted through a dimensional portal (Shadow Gate) by Darklord Gnaag. After plummeting through the Shadow Gate, Lone Wolf finds himself trapped on the Daziarn Plane and must join strange allies and face old enemies if he hopes to make his way back from the Daziarn in time to save his homeland from destruction at the hands of the Darklords and their powerful new armies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Masters_of_Darkness"title="The Masters of Darkness">
After his struggles in the plane of Daziarn, Lone Wolf finally recovers the last of the Lorestones and finds a Shadow Gate back to his home. Unfortunately, upon his return, he finds that considerable time has passed and that, in his absence, the Darklords have conquered much of Magnamund. Now with all of the Lorestones' wisdom absorbed within him, and the hopes of Sommerlund and all the free peoples of Magnamund on his shoulders, Lone Wolf must travel to the very heart of the Darklords' foul realm, to the infernal city of Helgedad, and confront Archlord Gnaag himself. The adventure culminates with a spectacular battle in Helgedad and the destruction of the Darklords' principal city.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plague_Lords_of_Ruel"title="The Plague Lords of Ruel">
After the events of the previous series of books, Lone Wolf has taken up training new Kai recruits, and under his tutelage, the Kai have been re-founded. Even though peace reigns for the moment, chaos is once again poised to unfold, as a group of Cenerese druids plot to unleash a massive plague upon all of Magnamund. Lone Wolf and the reader must find the source of this plague and destroy it before it can be released.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Captives_of_Kaag"title="The Captives of Kaag">
Three months after the events of "The Plague Lords of Ruel", Lone Wolf learns that his friend, Guildmaster Banedon, has been abducted by a band of Giaks under the command of Nadziranim sorcerers. It is theorized that they are planning to torture him to extract magical techniques which can be united with their own dark sorcery. Lone Wolf and the reader must venture to Kaag, where Banedon is held, and attempt a rescue before he meets his demise, or worse, yields the coveted magical secrets of left-handed magic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Darke_Crusade"title="The Darke Crusade">
Once more, Lone Wolf's help is sought by a monarch, this time King Sarnac of Lencia. While battling the Drakkarim under control of Magnaarn, the High Warlord of Darke, the Lencians have discovered that Magnaarn seeks an ancient artifact, the Doomstone of Darke. It is feared that he is close to discovering this artifact, and with it, the power to rally the Nadziranim sorcerers and other Darklord allies against Lencia. Lone Wolf and the reader take up the cause of Lencia to thwart Magnaarn's aims.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icebound_(novel)"title="Icebound (novel)">
The plot concerns a group of international scientists working for the project of towing an iceberg to be used as relief for droughts. It is headed up by the husband and wife team of Rita and Harold (Harry) Carpenter. Rita secretly suffers from the fear of cold, ice and snow. Due to an unexpected storm, the scientists become stranded on the iceberg with bombs ticking under them. If they do not find a way out, they will perish. A Russian submarine is trying to rescue them, but the rescue is complicated by the ice. Meanwhile, another problem arises. One of the crew members is secretly an assassin with an agenda of his own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curse_of_Naar"title="The Curse of Naar">
In this book you (in the guise of the heroic Lone Wolf) again travel to the Plane of Darkness. Your quest involves rescuing an artifact crafted by the Lords of Light - the Moonstone - from the Dark God's clutches. The Plane of Darkness is a predictably nasty place, and even a being as powerful as a Kai Grand Master may shrink from the challenge. Dare you face up to the Dark God Naar himself?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Codex_(novel)"title="The Codex (novel)">
Maxwell Broadbent, an eccentric rich man with terminal cancer, has spent his entire life collecting valuable art and treasures from around the world. One day, he writes a letter to his three sons telling them to go to his New Mexico house. Upon their arrival, they find Maxwell and all of the valuables missing, with only a cryptic message left behind hinting at his location. The message explains that his final test for them is to find his tomb, promising that the son that finds his tomb will receive all his treasures—worth approximately $300 million. The three sons—Philip the eldest, Vernon the middle son, and Tom the youngest—each go their separate ways after figuring out that their father is somewhere in Central America. Philip recruits Marcus Hauser, a private investigator who briefly served as his father's partner in their earliest treasure hunting endeavors, and Hauser subsequently hires a group of Central American mercenaries to aid and protect them. Vernon approaches the greedy leader of his San Francisco-based cult, and the two of them find three Central American guides.Tom is the only one who is not interested in the treasure at all, until he is approached by a beautiful ethnopharmacologist named Sally Colorado, who informs Tom that his father tried to present an ancient Mayan Codex to a museum for translation years back, only to be rejected since no one knew ancient Mayan at the time. Years later, after ancient Mayan has been deciphered, Sally and her fiancé, Yale professor Julian Clyve, have deduced from a single surviving photograph that the Codex may contain many ancient Mayan herbal remedies that, if studied and reproduced in present times, could revolutionize medicine and cure many diseases. Tom reluctantly agrees to help her, and they eventually recruit a witty tribal elder named Don Alfonso, accompanied by the brother trackers Pingo and Chori.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Chills"title="Night Chills">
Widower Paul Annendale has taken his two children, Rya and Mark, on their annual camping vacation to the small New England town of Black Water. What no one there knows is that the town has become a testing ground for a new experiment involving techniques related to subliminal advertising. Developed by amoral scientist Ogden Salsbury and funded by multi-millionaire Leonard Dawson, this newly discovered technique was introduced into the town, with the aid of a chemical in the water supply and allows anyone with a special code phrase to gain total mind control of an exposed subject. Together with local store owner Sam Edison, Paul intends to put a stop to this illegal conspiracy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vision_(novel)"title="The Vision (novel)">
After being raped and mutilated as a child by her family's gardener, Berton Mitchell, Mary Bergen exhibits clairvoyant abilities. With the help of her older brother Alan and husband Max, she aids the police in their murder investigations. Unfortunately, she can only sense pieces of a crime as they happen in real time.A few days before Christmas, Mary thwarts a serial killer from claiming another victim. After the ordeal, Alan, who has always been jealous of Max for coming into his sister's life and taking over his role as her helper, tries to persuade her once again to divorce him. She refuses. He accepts her decision and leaves for a vacation.Mary and Max travel home to spend the holidays at their mansion. However, she suddenly has a strong vision of four women being murdered sometime in the future. This has never happened before, as previously she could only have visions as they happen in real time. Max tries to tell her it was just a dream, but is unsure. The next morning, a news report comes on detailing the murder of four women who lived together by a single assailant. Mary thinks she recognizes one of the victims.Mary attends her weekly meeting with her psychiatrist, who tries to help her get over the traumatic childhood attack by reliving it. She remembers beating wings and an awful voice whispering to her. However, before she can remember Mitchell's face, several glass figurines in the office fly off the shelves and begin pelting the two. After a few minutes, the commotion stops. That night, Mary has another vision of the same killer murdering three people at a hair salon. Just as she attempts to picture the killer's face, Max's gun animates and begins shooting at them. The couple become convinced they are being haunted by a poltergeist trying to hinder Mary's visions. The next morning, another news report comes out confirming the triple homicide took place. She calls Alan in a panic, who manages to calm her down.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Face_of_Fear"title="The Face of Fear">
Graham Harris was once one of the world's foremost mountain climbers, until a fall five years earlier left him with a lame leg, a fear of heights...and a frightening psychic ability in which he can see murders as they are happening. Harris lives in New York City, where a murderous madman known as the Butcher has been mutilating young women. While he is giving an interview on live television one night, Graham senses the Butcher claiming another victim. When the madman realizes that Graham poses a threat to him he formulates a plan to kill the clairvoyant. While working late one night in his office building, Graham senses that the Butcher is coming to his floor aboard an elevator. With his girlfriend Connie at his side, Graham begins a long night of playing hide and seek to try to avoid the psychopath's grip, during which, Connie and Graham gradually run out of places to hide, and are eventually faced with a horrific ultimatum: either stay and take their chances with the Butcher, or scale the face of the building in the midst of a blizzard. Graham is eventually talked into facing his fear with the latter, with the Butcher shooting at them all the while. Eventually, the Butcher is violently killed in an incident involving a piece of machinery. Graham and Connie escape, but they soon meet up with Anthony Prine, who is the other half of the Butcher. (It is revealed that he and Bollinger had a quasi-Leopold and Loeb relationship.) Prine confronts them, but he is wounded by detective Ira Preduski. In the epilogue, it is revealed that Connie and Graham are engaged.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Key_to_Midnight"title="The Key to Midnight">
Lisa Chelgrin is a US Senator's daughter. Her life has been erased and true past blocked. Her imposed, fake new identity is Joanna Rand. A detective, Alex Hunter, is hired to track Lisa down, but he finds nothing. Years later, during a vacation in Kyoto, Japan, he views a lounge act in which Lisa Chelgrin performs. Her name is different than it was before, and she is older, now working as the nightclub owner and singer. Nevertheless, the detective knows it is she. He sends for his dead-case file, and his privately employed messenger is almost killed delivering it. Someone is watching him and Lisa.At the same time, a person known as The Doctor (Inamura) is trying to find a way around Lisa's memory block, and he assumes that, by removing a "password" or "pass-phrase," he can access Lisa's true memories. Under hypnosis, however, Lisa can only repeat the phrase "tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun," instead of answering the questions The Doctor asks her about her true past. After the first series of events, Lisa and Alex try to deal with their respective pasts so they can survive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whispers_(Koontz_novel)"title="Whispers (Koontz novel)">
Hilary Thomas, a screenwriter living in Los Angeles, is attacked in her home by Bruno Frye, a mentally disturbed man whose vineyard in Napa Valley she recently visited. Frye tries to rape her, but she forces him to leave at gunpoint and calls the police. Detective Tony Clemenza tells her that Frye has an airtight alibi, as the police called his home and he answered, proving that he could not have been anywhere near Los Angeles that night.The next day, Frye returns and attacks Hilary again, this time receiving several stab wounds before escaping. She calls the police and once again meets with Clemenza, who tells her that Frye's body has been found and takes her to the morgue to identify it. Afterward, Clemenza asks Hilary out, and the two begin a romantic relationship.Hilary is once again attacked by a man who appears to be Frye. "Frye" escapes just before Clemenza arrives and Hilary tells him what happened. After some investigations, Frye's psychologist lets them listen to a tape recording of one of Frye's sessions. Frye talks about identical twins being born with cauls on their faces, and says he read somewhere that this was a mark of a demon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voice_of_the_Night"title="The Voice of the Night">
In the summer of 1980, introverted bookworm Colin Jacobs moves to Santa Leona, California, with his mother, and soon meets and becomes friends with another boy his age. Roy Borden is everything Colin has never been, but he secretly wishes he could be- brave, outgoing, muscular, athletically talented, and a consummate ladies' man. He is an instinctive fighter, ready to stand up to anyone or anything—a stark contrast to Colin, who "learned long ago that resistance causes pain" and avoids trouble and confrontations. Despite their differences, Roy appears glad to be friends with Colin, even remarking that the boys and girls who think they are his friends are really just acquaintances. Colin and Roy become close friends in a short period of time, and Roy declares them to be blood brothers after a brief ceremony. Roy displays some odd behavior, such as asking if Colin has ever killed anything and calling anything fun a "popper", but Colin does not think anything of it.Colin meets a beautiful girl called Heather Lipschitz in a store one day, and he is overwhelmed but thrilled as he realizes the two are developing a romantic interest in each other. He does not tell Roy, but assumes that his association with Roy has indeed helped his own image and made girls more interested in him. Roy begins to confide more in Colin, revealing an extremely cynical worldview, and an obsession with sex, violence, and death. Colin treats it as a joke, even as Roy claims to have killed two other boys who refused his offer to be blood brothers. He leads Colin to an abandoned house by a railroad line, where he has set up an old pickup truck and prepared it to be pushed downhill to cause an approaching passenger train to wreck. He asks for Colin's help, but Colin, realizing it was never a joke, tries to stop him. Roy throws Colin aside and tries to push the truck down to the tracks on his own, but it needed two people to keep it on course, and Roy screams in rage as the train goes by unharmed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Funhouse_(novel)"title="The Funhouse (novel)">
In 1955, Ellen, a young woman tired of being oppressed by her meek father and psychotically religious mother, falls in love with a barker from a traveling carnival named Conrad. Despite her mother's pleas, she runs away with the carnival and marries him. However, it quickly becomes clear that Conrad is using Ellen to spawn the Antichrist, as she later finds out he is a Satan worshiper. Stuck at the fair as she cannot go back to her parents, she eventually gives birth to a hideously deformed infant.One stormy night, the demonic baby attacks Ellen. She crushes it to death just as Conrad comes home. Enraged, he beats but does not kill her, stating that he will hunt her down one day and murder her own children. Ellen runs off into the night.In 1980, a girl named Amy gets pregnant by her boyfriend. He refuses to raise the child or pay for an abortion. She tearfully runs home to her religious, alcoholic mother who is later revealed to be Ellen. Amy eventually tells her mother that she is pregnant, causing her to strike her. However, she agrees to pay for an abortion and takes her to the doctor, but only to stop Amy from "giving birth to the Antichrist".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mask_(novel)"title="The Mask (novel)">
An amnesic blonde girl appears in the middle of traffic on a busy day. Carol and Paul, a married couple, are drawn to her, seeing her as the child they never had, they take her in. Then Carol begins to have nightmares about ghastly noises in the dead of night, a bloody face in a mirror, and a razor-sharp ax. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eyes_of_Darkness"title="The Eyes of Darkness">
A year after her son Danny dies in an alleged accident on a camping trip, stage producer Tina Evans starts receiving paranormal signals insinuating that the boy is still alive. Having never seen Danny's deceased body, she plans to exhume his corpse to put her mind to rest. Assisting Tina is a newly acquainted lawyer Elliot Stryker, formerly working for Army Intelligence, with whom she is having an affair. They are soon targeted by assassins hired by Project Pandora and barely escape alive. Tina, strongly convinced that Danny is still alive, sets out to discover what really happened to her son and rescue him. Elliot accompanies her and the pair are chased by other agents instructed to kill them. Tina is telepathically guided by Danny to an underground lab in Sierra Nevada where her son has been subjected to horrific experiments by a top secret governmental organisation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Dog_(Gary_novel)"title="White Dog (Gary novel)">
A fictionalized memoir set in both the United States and France during the 1960s American civil rights movement, "White Dog" focuses on the events that occur after Gary and his then-wife Jean Seberg, an actress and an activist, adopt a handsome and clearly well-trained German Shepherd dog who comes back to their home with one of their other dogs. At first, the dog, which they name Batka, is an ideal new member of the family: intelligent, devoted, and quickly befriending the couple's assortment of other animals. To their dismay, they discover that the dog, a former Alabama police dog, was trained to attack black people on sight. Although they are told the dog is too old to be retrained, they take him to a black dog trainer to try. Instead, the man trains the dog to attack white people, including Gary himself. Gary states that he changed the ending of the American version to be more optimistic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkfall_(Koontz_novel)"title="Darkfall (Koontz novel)">
Jack Dawson, a New York City detective, is dealing with a variety of situations in his life. His wife Linda has recently died, leaving him the sole caretaker for his two children, Penny and Davey. He is also forced to confront an especially brutal string of murders of Mafia criminals, which have been seemingly done by animals even though no living creature would simply tear a victim to pieces without actually eating anything. Finally, his partner Rebecca dismisses his eventual belief that there may be supernatural or magical factors in the killings. In truth, these creatures have been called forth from hell by a bocor named Baba Lavelle. Because of their small size, Lavelle assumed were just minor demons and the portal to Hell is not yet big enough to accommodate greater entities. At the end of the novel, Dawson is surprised to see that the portal has grown so big it has engulfed the shed where it is concealed. Numerous tentacles have sprouted from the pit and dragged Lavelle to hell. When Jack sees this, he comes to the conclusion that this was just a mere finger of a greater evil that was about to come. When holy water doesn't stop the pit from growing, Jack uses his blood from a wound inflicted by a tentacle to stop the pit. He fears that if he fails, he will be forced to sacrifice himself into the pit. The novel ends with all the denizens turning to mud and Jack hearing Rebecca say "I love you Jack" in thin air.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_Eyes"title="Twilight Eyes">
The book begins with Slim sneaking up on, and killing, a "goblin or beast" on the fair grounds of a local carnival. Goblins are monsters which can shape shift between human and bestial forms, genetically engineered super-predators which desire bloodshed and human misery. Created in an ancient, technologically superior era of human civilization, they exist to torment and ultimately murder humans. They can only be seen by a few people, including Slim himself, Rya Raines (his wife), and Joel Tuck (Slim's friend and fellow carnie). These goblins are superhuman and extremely dangerous and genocidal, at least as intelligent as us, and can mimic human behavior. While they appear and act as a normal person would, they experience only negative emotions like fear and hate. Their only pleasure is in torturing and murdering humans.Slim's claim to fame is his "Twilight Eyes", which give him the ability to receive psychic, or prophetic, premonitions of the future. They also allow him to see through the human seeming disguise of the goblins. These eyes are named what they are because they are colored purple like the skyline at dusk.After this encounter, Slim proceeds to join the carnival (one of many he has drifted from) as a way to support himself while killing goblins and hiding from his murderous past (in which he killed an uncle by marriage that was a goblin responsible for the deaths of several family members). One of the prominent members of the "carnies" is a young woman named Rya Raines, who quickly becomes his lover and confidant. As their relationship matures, Slim has several more run-ins with the goblins which leads to the revelation that his friend Joel, and even Rya herself, can see the goblins too, and that each of them in their own way has suffered terribly from the goblins' actions in their past. It is soon revealed that Rya had long before made a pact with the goblins to report to them whenever she found someone who could see through their disguise in exchange for safety from their predations. She wants him to make the same pact with them, but he refuses. This reality creates a gulf between her and Slim that comes to bloodshed between them. She regrets this later and after reconciling with Slim she becomes his wife. They decide to go on a mission to destroy any and all of the creatures they possibly can.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Door_to_December"title="The Door to December">
When a pair of renowned psychologists are brutally murdered from unexpected causes, Laura McCaffrey is called to assist in the case. Meeting with Dan Haldane, a police lieutenant, she is told that one of the victims was her divorced spouse, Dylan, who kidnapped their only daughter six years ago. While inside the crime scene, police notify Lieutenant Haldane of a naked young girl wandering the streets of Los Angeles in a daze. It turns out that the girl was Melanie McCaffrey, Laura's daughter. She was found in a catatonic, autistic state, and is sent to the hospital. It soon becomes apparent that Dylan was using his only child in a series of experiments that combined science and the occult. Unfortunately, it has resulted in unintended and deadly consequences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangers_(Koontz_novel)"title="Strangers (Koontz novel)">
A group of people are brought together by their different and equally strange maladies. There is Dominick who suffers from somnambulism, Ginger has unexplained lapses into a fugue state, Father Brendan loses his faith and later gains a miraculous 'gift', and Ernie who suffers from nyctophobia.Dominick receives Polaroids that lead him to the Tranquility Motel, situated in the middle of the Nevada 'high-desert', thirty miles west of Elko. Together with Ned and Sandy, who run the restaurant next door to the motel, they discover that their true memories from the summer of the previous year may have been suppressed.Later Ginger, Jorja, and the other people who stayed at the Tranquility Motel are contacted and invited to join the group. Ginger shares that their memories are suppressed by Azrael Blocks - a means of brainwashing induced through drugs and hypnosis. She received hypnosis as a treatment to uncover a cause of her malady.The Tranquility 'community' are unaware that those behind the suppression are watching them. They are joined by Jack Twist (who was led to the Tranquility Motel by a series of postcards placed there by an insider). The group finally comes up with a strategy to uncover the government secret that has been hidden at the Thunder Hill Depository in the hills.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchers_(novel)"title="Watchers (novel)">
Travis Cornell, a former Delta Force operator, feels that his life has become pointless, and is exploring a canyon near his home when he encounters two genetically engineered creatures that have escaped from a top-secret government laboratory. One, a Golden Retriever with enhanced intelligence, befriends Travis; the other, a creature known as the Outsider, appears to be trying to kill the dog. After eluding the Outsider, Travis takes the dog home. On discovering the dog's exceptional intelligence, he names him Einstein.Later, he and Einstein find and rescue Nora Devon in a park, who was being pestered by a dangerous man, Arthur Streck. Together they form a trio.Travis, Nora, and Einstein are soon on the run not only from the Outsider, but from federal agents, determined to track down the laboratory escapees, and Vince Nasco, a ruthless professional assassin, hired by Soviets to kill several human targets who carried knowledge of how to stop the Outsider, in order to further the destruction of the Outsider. He wants the dog to trade for a great sum of cash, alone, without any knowledge from the Soviets or others.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Fires"title="Shadow Fires">
The protagonist of the story is a woman who is in the process of divorcing her abusive husband Eric, an intense scientist at a bio-research company, when he is killed in a traffic accident.As it turns out, the husband was doing research into immortality, due to an obsession with cheating death stemming from sexual abuse he suffered as a child and the fear that his abuser is waiting for him in Hell. In fact, he experimented on himself using an untested serum designed to grant incredible regenerative abilities.The husband wakes up in the morgue, but his "immortality" turns out to be flawed; it cannot properly repair brain damage, as the "mind" is made of electrical signals and not just flesh and protein. The trauma from the traffic accident has resulted in him suffering constant pain and a lack of mental clarity. The husband, now an unstoppable killing machine, proceeds to stalk his wife across the country while slowly descending into madness as the return from death causes him to mutate at a rapid pace.Rachael and her boyfriend Ben Shadway track the reanimated Eric to his secret country hideaway in the hope of killing him before he can regenerate to a level where he would be able to find and kill Rachael. However, Eric outwits them and manages to hide in the trunk of Rachael's car after overhearing her and Ben in conversation discussing their plan to split up and meet in Las Vegas.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Servants_of_Twilight"title="The Servants of Twilight">
Single parent Christine Scavello and her young son Joey are confronted in a mall parking lot by a madwoman who claims that Joey is the Antichrist. After a distressing attack on the family home results in her dog being decapitated, Christine enlists the help of private detective Charlie Harrison. Harrison traces a van that is following Christine back to one Grace Spivey—a charismatic elderly woman who is the leader of a fanatical religious cult called The Servants Of Twilight.Christine is provided with bodyguards for her protection; however, it is not long before one of them is killed in an attack by cult members. Christine, Charlie, Joey, and the new dog Chewbacca begin a tiresome cross country journey to escape the deluded members of "The Twilight". It seems that no matter how far they travel or where they go, Spivey's people find them. It is revealed that this is due to Spivey being a psychic who can see into the future, a gift that also plagues her with many sleepless nights.After several more attacks (including a car bomb and an arson attack) the group tries to escape the growing threat of The Twilight by retreating to Charlie's lodge in the mountains. Here, Charlie finds himself falling in love with Christine, and the two end up sleeping together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_(Koontz_novel)"title="Midnight (Koontz novel)">
Janice Capshaw, a nighttime jogger, is pursued and killed by a pack of mysterious, nightmarish beasts while she is jogging along the beach of her northern California home town, Moonlight Cove. Sam Booker, an undercover FBI agent, arrives in Moonlight Cove to investigate the recent rash of suspicious deaths, including that of Janice Capshaw. Tessa Jane Lockland, sister of Janice Capshaw, also arrives in Moonlight Cove, to investigate her sister's unexplained death.Chrissie Foster, an eleven-year-old girl who lives on a farm north of town, accidentally witnesses her parents in a physically altered state - part human and part beast - and is forced to flee for her life. She heads towards town to seek help.Sam, Tessa, and Chrissie are all hunted, albeit separately, by the mysterious beasts. Sam and Tessa meet by chance in a laundromat where they have both retreated after being stalked by the beasts. Mistrustful of one another at first, they realize that in order to survive they must work together. Sam discovers that Thomas Shaddack, a brilliant computer scientist, is "converting" the citizens of Moonlight Cove into something unexplained. Sam also learns that the local police are aiding Shaddack in the conversions and that their state-of-the-art computer system, given to them by Shaddack’s company, is unnecessarily sophisticated for the needs of a small town police force.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bad_Place"title="The Bad Place">
Frank Pollard wakes up in an alley at night, filled with confusion and fear. He knows nothing but his name, and that he must escape fast, or else he will be killed. Pursued by a mysterious assailant, Frank barely escapes with his life.Every time he goes to sleep, he wakes up to find evidence of bizarre nighttime travels which he cannot remember. Afraid of his own actions, Frank enlists the help of husband-wife security team, Bobby and Julie Dakota. At first, the case merely seems absurd, but as they track deeper into the life and past of the mysterious Frank Pollard, the Dakotas uncover an increasingly bizarre and dangerous world threatened by a madman who thirsts for blood.It is ultimately revealed that Frank Pollard is the brother to the mysterious madman as well as twin sisters. They were born from a mother who was the product of an incestuous relationship. Her father was a hallucinogenic drug-abuser and her mother was his sister. She is a hermaphrodite and impregnated herself with her own seed. As a result of this compounded inbreeding, Frank and his siblings developed unusual psychic abilities. Frank, wanting a normal life, tries to escape from his family while being pursued by his brother who seeks to either bring him back or kill him, and nothing will stand in his way. After a message from Julie's younger brother, who has Down Syndrome and possesses minor psychic ability himself, Bobby, Julie, Frank and his family begin speeding into a final confrontation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Fire_(Koontz_novel)"title="Cold Fire (Koontz novel)">
Recently retired teacher Jim Ironheart (aptly named) risks his life to save lives. In Portland he saves a young boy from an oblivious drunk driver in a van. In Boston he rescues a child from an underground explosion. In Houston he disarms a man who was trying to shoot his own wife – and he is not just lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. He gets “inspirations” and knows he must hurry to wherever prompted. He rushes off to hail a cab or catch a plane, dropping whatever he's doing at the moment, much to the surprise of those around him. He has no idea where these visions come from or why, but he believes that he must be some sort of God-sent guardian angel with a heavenly gift.Reporter Holly Thorne was in Portland to write a less than exciting piece on a school teacher who has recently published a book of poetry full of poems which Holly finds are pure transcendental garbage – but such is Holly's lot in life. She is a fine writer but is failing at her job because she is filled with too much integrity and compassion to be a good reporter. As she is leaving she witnesses Jim rescuing the child from the drunk driver and felt there was something fishy in Jim's explanations of how he started running for the child before seeing or hearing the van coming. She discovers there have been 12 last-minute rescues reported over the last three months in other newspapers by a mysterious Good Samaritan named Jim with blue eyes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Murder_(novel)"title="Mr. Murder (novel)">
Bestselling mystery writer Marty Stillwater was recording himself one day when he realized that he was saying "I need..." repeatedly. When he rewound the recording he found that he had been unconsciously repeating "I need" for over 7 minutes. Marty was tense that whole day, when he put the kids to bed though he calmed down considerably and was finally consoled.Meanwhile, the Killer is roaming the streets before his job. He goes into a bar and leaves with a prostitute to go to a motel. He has sex with her and then murders her because she cannot assuage his frustration. He proceeds to kill his targets and returns to his hotel. That night, still restless, he is drawn for some reason towardsTopeka. Suddenly, he starts saying:The Killer is attracted like a magnet by some force he doesn't understand to the Stillwater residence. On his way he kills several people; an old couple for a set of clothes and a gas station clerk to steal food and money. When he breaks into the Stillwater house he sees a picture of Marty and believes it to be himself. He observes books authored by Marty and decides they are his. He sees the pictures of the daughters Emily and Charlotte and Marty's wife Paige, he then decides he wants to be the father and husband. He attempts to write a book but cannot and in his frustration he destroys the computer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Tears"title="Dragon Tears">
Harry Lyon is a cop who embraces tradition and order. His partner, Connie Gulliver, is Harry's exact opposite. Harry does not like the messiness of her desk, her lack of social polish or her sometimes casual attitude towards the law. Connie often urges him to surrender to the chaos of life that is the 1990s. "Look, Harry, it's the Age of Chaos," she tells him. "Get with the times." And when Harry and Connie have to take out a hopped-up gunman in a restaurant, the chase and shootout swiftly degenerate into a surreal nightmare that seems to justify Connie's view of the modern world. Shortly after, Harry encounters a filthy, rag-clad denizen of the streets, who says ominously, "Ticktock, ticktock. You'll be dead in sixteen hours." Struggling to regain the orderly life he cherishes, Harry is trapped in an undertow of terror and violence. For reasons he does not understand, someone is after him, Connie Gulliver and the people he loves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_(Koontz_novel)"title="Invasion (Koontz novel)">
The story begins with a thirty-two-year-old Los Angeles police officer named Jack McGarvey. Jack is caught in a shootout at a gas station. He kills the gunman but is badly injured and spends months recovering in a hospital. When Jack returns home, the McGarveys receive a letter stating that Jack has inherited the Quartermass Ranch in Eagles Roost, Montana from his late partner's father, Eduardo Fernandez.While Jack was recovering from his injuries, Eduardo was experiencing strange events in Montana. He sees glowing lights in the trees and hears strange sounds. One night he discovers a massive black circle and suspects it is a portal opened by an alien. Soon after, he notices wild raccoons watching him and intruding in his house. The raccoons all perish strangely, and Eduardo contacts the local veterinarian, Travis Potter. The veterinarian performs an autopsy which does not reveal anything conclusive as to the cause of death. Squirrels and birds now spy on him. Although frightened, Eduardo eventually challenges the traveler to come to him in its true form instead of using animals. One night he hears a shambling on his porch. With shotgun in hand, he opens the door and sees the traveler piggybacking on his late wife's corpse, taken from the family plot on the ranch. Travis Potter discovers Eduardo's body and an autopsy determines he suffered a heart attack.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Rivers_of_the_Heart"title="Dark Rivers of the Heart">
Spencer Grant is a man with a tainted, yet shadowy past with a lovable dog, Rocky, who together embark on a quest to find a life in a woman named Valerie Keene, whom he meets in a nightclub. Grant and his dog come back to the club later to find out that the woman is late for work.When Grant attempts to find her at her home, a SWAT-like team bombards the place, sending Grant into confusion. Grant is now determined to find Valerie.He searches for her in Las Vegas and is pursued by a secret government agency who are also looking for Valerie. He gets caught in a storm in the Nevada desert and is injured. He is rescued by Valerie and she helps Spencer's injuries.Meanwhile, Roy Miro, a high-ranking official in the agency, is the main antagonist who has been looking for Valerie for months. He and the agency use a satellite to find Spencer and Valerie's location in the desert. Roy and some agents get into a helicopter and corner them into a shopping center.Spencer and Valerie take hostage a helicopter and fly out of Nevada to Colorado to visit the house Spencer had his childhood in. When Spencer was 14 years old he heard a noise in the night and went out to the barn in the backyard to investigate. Inside the barn he found his father torturing a woman and Spencer found a gun but only wounds his father. His father was later sent to a mental hospital. Roy takes Spencer's father out of the hospital and flies to the Colorado house to confront Spencer and Valerie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intensity_(novel)"title="Intensity (novel)">
Chyna Shepherd is a college student visiting the family of her friend, Laura Templeton, for a long weekend. Chyna, who was abused and neglected by her mother as a child, finds that the Templeton house provides something she has yearned for: acceptance. This comes to a violent end when serial killer Edgler Vess breaks into the house in the night and methodically kills all of the occupants except Laura and Chyna. After discovering that Laura has been tied up and raped, Chyna leaves, promising to return. Chyna hears Laura screaming and runs upstairs, intending to attack Vess with a knife. Before she can intervene, Vess kills Laura and takes her to his motor home. Unaware Laura is dead, Chyna sneaks aboard the motor home and finds her friend's corpse. Before she can escape, Vess drives away. Chyna hides in a back room, planning to escape at the earliest opportunity. When Vess stops at a gas station, she sneaks out of the motor home and looks for a payphone. Chyna secretly watches Vess boast to the gas station clerks that he is holding a young girl, Ariel, prisoner in his basement, before he kills them and drives away. She feels compelled to follow Vess and help free Ariel, taking a clerk's car. Chyna passes Vess while traveling through a state park and intentionally crashes her car into a redwood tree. While Vess gets out to investigate, Chyna sneaks on board the motor home. However, unbeknownst to Chyna, Vess glimpses her. Fascinated, he decides not to kill her immediately, wanting to see what she will do. Eventually, they arrive at Vess's remote house. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Cousin_Pons"title="Le Cousin Pons">
The novella was based on a short story by an acquaintance of Balzac, Albéric Second, as Tim Farrant has demonstrated. Its original title was to have been "Le Parasite". Sylvain Pons, a musician in a Parisian boulevard orchestra, has a close friend in another musician from the orchestra, the German pianist Wilhelm Schmucke. They lodge with Mme Cibot but Pons – unlike Schmucke – has two failings: his passion (which is almost a mania) for collecting works of art and his passion for good food. Schmucke, on the other hand, has only one passion, his affection for Pons. Pons, being a gourmet, much enjoys dining regularly with his wealthy lawyer cousins M. and Mme Camusot de Marville, for their food is more interesting than Mme Cibot's and full of gastronomic surprises. To remain on good terms with the Camusots and to repay their favour, he tries to find a bridegroom for their unappealing only child Cécile. When this ill-considered marriage project falls through, Pons is banished from the house.The novella becomes a novel as Mme Camusot learns of the value of Pons's art collection and strives to obtain possession of it as the basis of a dowry for her daughter. In this new development of the plot a bitter struggle ensues between various vulture-like figures, all of whom are keen to lay their hands on the collection: Rémonencq, Élie Magus, Mme Camusot – and Mme Cibot. Betraying his client Mme Cibot's interests, the unsavoury barrister Fraisier acts for the Camusots. Mme Cibot sells Rémonencq eight of Pons's choicest paintings, deceitfully stating in the receipt that they are works of lesser value. She also steals one for herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruling_Class_(novel)"title="The Ruling Class (novel)">
When a new girl moves to Highland Park High School, she encounters a difficult clique and dramatic situations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrannosaur_Canyon"title="Tyrannosaur Canyon">
The novel opens with a lunar find by the Apollo 17 astronauts, which is suppressed.Tom Broadbent (who first appeared in Preston's novel "The Codex") is riding in the New Mexico desert when he hears gunshots coming from Tyrannosaur Canyon (a fictional canyon east of the Rio Chama Gorge, on Mesa Viejo, and north of the Monastery of Christ in the Desert). Following the sound, he comes upon an old prospector who has been shot by a sniper. He gives Tom a notebook just before he dies, and Tom rides off on his horse to find help. The murderer, Jimson Maddox, is furious that the notebook is gone by the time he reaches the body; he has been hired to retrieve it at any cost. He does, however, find an interesting rock sample. When Tom returns to Tyrannosaur Canyon with the police, the prospector's body has disappeared without a trace.The notebook is filled with numbers, a code Tom is unable to decipher. He brings the book to Wyman Ford, a monk in training at a nearby monastery. Ford is a retired CIA analyst and he takes the notebook to try to decipher it. Ford discovers that the numbers are not a code but a sequence of ground-penetrating radar readings. When processed, they form the image of a fully intact "Tyrannosaurus".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_of_Death_(novel)"title="Dance of Death (novel)">
The book follows FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast and his sidekick, Lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta. Pendergast was last seen at the end of the previous novel, "Brimstone", where he was buried alive behind a brick wall in Castel Fosco. His estranged brother, Diogenes, rescues him and nurses him back to health. However this is not a true act of kindness; Diogenes has a dark agenda and needs his brother alive in order to carry out his nefarious plans.Pendergast's ward Constance Greene requests Vincent D'Agosta's presence for a very important meeting. D'Agosta is shown a letter written many months previously by Pendergast about his brother Diogenes. In the letter, Pendergast writes that he does not know of Diogenes's whereabouts, but does in fact know one thing—a date, January 28. D'Agosta presumes that this will be the date of Diogenes's greatest crime. Having been hated by and hating his family, Diogenes obviously cannot be trusted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Schlemihl"title="Peter Schlemihl">
In the story, Schlemihl sells his shadow to the Devil for a bottomless wallet (the gold sack of Fortunatus), only to find that a man without a shadow is shunned by human societies. The woman he loves rejects him, and he himself becomes consumed with guilt. Yet when the devil wants to return his shadow to him in exchange for his soul, Schlemihl, as the friend of God, rejects the proposal and throws away the bottomless wallet besides. He seeks refuge in nature and travels around the world in scientific exploration, with the aid of seven-league boots. When overtaken with sickness, he is reconciled with his fellow men, who take care of him, and in regard for his sickness do not look for his shadow. Finally, however, he returns to his studies of nature and finds his deepest satisfaction in communion with nature and his own better self.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Colours_(novel)"title="Flying Colours (novel)">
At the end of the previous novel, "A Ship of the Line", after attacking and severely damaging a superior French squadron with HMS "Sutherland", Hornblower had to surrender his ship to the French. He and his surviving crew are imprisoned in the French-occupied Spanish fortress of Rosas on the Mediterranean Sea. From the walls of Rosas, Hornblower witnesses an English raid leading to the final destruction of the French ships he immobilised.Soon afterwards, Hornblower is told that he is to be sent to Paris to be tried as a pirate for his previous actions, including the capture of a battery and some coastal vessels using a ruse of war. Hornblower, his first lieutenant, Bush, who is still recovering from the loss of a foot in the fighting, and his coxswain, Brown, are taken away in a carriage by an Imperial aide-de-camp.The carriage becomes stuck in a snowstorm on a minor road close to the river Loire, and part of the escort leaves to get help from Nevers, the next town. Hornblower and Brown overpower the remaining guards and steal a small boat on the river. Taking Bush with them, they set out downstream, but the river is in spate, and the boat eventually capsizes in some rapids. Hornblower and Brown carry Bush towards the nearest building, which happens to be the Chateau de Graçay. The Comte de Graçay, a member of the old French nobility who has lost three sons in Napoleon's wars, and his widowed daughter-in-law Marie, welcome them and protect them from the authorities, who eventually abandon the search thinking them drowned.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf's_Bane"title="Wolf's Bane">
Lone Wolf learns that the evil god Naar has created an evil doppelganger of himself, the champion of the forces of good on Magnamund. A cat and mouse game between the two warriors ensues, which leads both across a world claimed by Naar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sole_Survivor_(novel)"title="Sole Survivor (novel)">
The novel centers around Joe Carpenter, a man who lost his wife and two daughters in a plane crash the year prior. Joe has never been able to fully cope with their deaths, and on the one year anniversary, meets a strange woman named Rose, claiming to be a survivor of the crash even when none were reported. Rose promises to tell Joe the truth, but just not yet. Finally acknowledging that the story of the crash never fully made sense to him, Joe begins seeking answers as to what really happened on that night, discovering that some may be interested in stopping him even if it means taking his life.There are a large number of suicides of family of the crash victims, which for a while convinces Joe that Rose is somehow getting them to kill themselves with a picture of a gravestone. This leads him to a development involving his dead daughter and a laboratory developed girl, CCY 21–21, with healing powers who looks like his daughter and who wants to live the life she was never able to. This girl can heal, and give hope to anyone she touches. The only weakness is that she cannot heal herself if she is hurt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_Nothing"title="Fear Nothing">
"Fear Nothing", told in the first person, follows 24 hours of Christopher Snow's life, as he discovers and attempts to unravel a mysterious and seemingly endless conspiracy centered on a military compound called Fort Wyvern. The book opens with Christopher Snow going to visit his dying father at the hospital. As Snow crosses the hospital to his father's room the lights are thoughtfully dimmed to protect him in his condition. His father's dying words of advice were, "Fear nothing, Chris. Fear nothing".As he leaves the hospital Snow accidentally and serendipitously watches as his father’s body is switched with that of a drifter. Following the people taking the body to the funeral home, Christopher is nearly caught and a manhunt begins. Christopher is chased to the outskirts of town and only his knowledge of the landscape of night keeps him ahead of his pursuers.Later, upon returning home, Christopher finds his father's gun on his bed, and an urgent message on his answering machine to call Angela Ferryman, a nurse and lifelong family friend. Orson, the family dog, is uncharacteristically digging holes in the garden. Christopher stops the pet and brings Orson along with him to see Angela, who reveals a strange story about a night several years ago when she encountered a strange rhesus monkey in her house, a terrifying creature which is recovered by mysterious military personnel. Before more is revealed, Angela is killed while in another room, and Chris barely escapes when unknown assailants set the house on fire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_Memory_(novel)"title="False Memory (novel)">
Martie Rhodes helps her friend Susan Jagger, who suffers from agoraphobia, attend visits to psychologist Dr. Ahriman. Martie's husband, Dusty, tries to help his brother Skeet by providing employment in his painting business. Skeet, who had been in drug rehabilitation previously, gets high again and attempts suicide by jumping off a roof. Dusty falls off the roof while saving Skeet and decides to take his brother back to rehab.Martie suddenly develops a mysterious case of autophobia and returns home to find herself frightened by her own reflection. Later, her condition worsens, and soon she becomes afraid of pointed objects, although she is actually afraid of the harm she might cause with them. When Dusty leaves Skeet at the rehab center, he notices a shadow lurking in the window of his brother's room. Strange things start to happen to both Dusty and Martie, involving Skeet, Martie's autophobia, and hypnotism.The couple eventually discovers that they have both been progressively brainwashed and programmed to obey Dr. Ahriman, a sexual psychopath who drugs and indoctrinates his patients, then repeatedly rapes them or orders them to commit murders or suicide for his amusement. Dr. Ahriman orders Susan to commit suicide by slitting her wrists after discovering that she videotaped him having sex with her. The doctor has also programmed Skeet, causing his inability to fully recover from drug use and distorted thinking. Dr. Ahriman establishes control, sending patients almost instantly into a detached state of consciousness by stating a name and then reading them a haiku. He tries to justify this by stating that, by ordering certain patients to commit horrific crimes—mass murders, bombings, and random shootings—he can force legislation in order to make the world a "better place".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Door_Away_from_Heaven"title="One Door Away from Heaven">
A shapechanging alien has come to Earth with others of his kind to save us from ourselves. After witnessing the slaughter of his entire family by evil aliens bent on stopping him, he takes off on a cross-country race to save himself. He stops at a farmhouse in the middle of the night to "borrow" some money and clothes, and comes across a sleeping boy about his age. Using a drop of blood from an old bandage, he is able to "become" Curtis Hammond, the exact duplicate of the boy. Seconds after leaving the house, the evil aliens arrive and murder the family, leaving only the dog alive. Curtis and the dog escape, and eventually end up at the location of an alien sighting. UFO buffs Castoria and Polluxia Spelkenfelter, twins, recognize Curtis from the news reports of his murder and decide to help him. Eventually he reveals to them his true nature, and they pledge to assist him in the mission he has come to Earth to complete. Together, twins, boy, and dog set off for Nun's Lake, Idaho, the next stop on the twins' itinerary while they decide what to do next.Michelina (Mickey) Bellsong just got out of prison. She has moved in with her Aunt Geneva in order to make a new start, but things aren't going her way. She feels adrift and without direction, just wanting to get through the day. While sunning in the backyard, she is approached by a precocious but disabled little girl. Leilani Klonk has a deformed hand and a deformed leg, which requires a brace. She is more intelligent and articulate than the average nine-year-old, and disarms Mickey with her wit. Mickey and Geneva get to know the girl, and find out that her mother is an insane drug addict, and her step-father is a murderer. He killed her older brother Lukipela, and Leilani is next. Leilani believes that no one can help her, as Preston Maddoc is highly thought of by the academic community. Preston and Sinsemilla, Leilani's mother, bounce across the country looking for UFOs and Leilani knows it's only a matter of time before they bounce back to Montana, which is where Preston murdered her brother Lukipela. Mickey and Geneva vow to find a way to help Leilani, but Preston finds out and takes off with the family in the dead of night. Mickey discovers them gone and sets out after them, determined to save Leilani. Leilani has mentioned that they are headed to Nun's Lake, Idaho to the site of a supposed close encounter and Mickey races to reach the town and find the girl. Mickey arrives and goes to speak to the man who was "healed" by aliens, and finds out that Leilani's step-father hasn't been there yet. She stakes out the house, wanting to find Preston and follow him to Leilani. Preston is alerted to her presence by the man who was healed, who he then murders. He sneaks out of the house and creeps up on Mickey, knocking her unconscious. He carries her into the dead man's house and ties her up, leaving her there and racing back to the campground.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Corner_of_His_Eye"title="From the Corner of His Eye">
Dean Koontz writes a tale of good and evil, and how the concepts influence people's lives. The book begins with three separate stories that eventually intertwine: a loving relationship between a mother and her genius son, a ruthless killer, and a young woman who takes it upon herself to raise her late sister's baby.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_the_Light_of_the_Moon_(novel)"title="By the Light of the Moon (novel)">
An amoral doctor forever changes the lives of Dylan O'Conner, his autistic brother Shepherd, and a comedian named Jillian Jackson, and instigates a new force for good from his evil acts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigal_Son_(novel)"title="Prodigal Son (novel)">
The basic plot follows New Orleans detective Carson and her partner Michael on the hunt for a serial killer dubbed "The Surgeon". Reports of this killer catch the attention of Deucalion, formerly known as The Monster, who believes his former master and maker, Dr. Victor Frankenstein, has returned. As the body count grows, the case takes a darker turn when Carson encounters Deucalion, pushing Carson and Michael on to the path of a 200-year-old mystery and evil that threatens more than just New Orleans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Husband"title="The Husband">
Mitch Rafferty, owner of a small landscaping business, receives a phone call from someone claiming to have kidnapped his wife Holly. The caller demands that Mitch pay two million dollars or Holly will be killed, and if he informs the police, Holly will be tortured and left to die. When Mitch protests that he doesn't have the money, the caller tells him that if he loves his wife enough, he will find a way. He is told to look across the street and witnesses a man walking his dog get shot in the head. The murder is meant to make Mitch believe that the kidnappers are serious and not individuals Mitch could disobey. Mitch also becomes aware that he is being watched and therefore cannot inform the police of Holly's kidnapping.When the police arrive to tend to the murder, Mitch is questioned by a detective named Sandy Taggart. Mitch does not tell Taggart of the kidnapping, and can sense that the detective believes he may be holding something back. However, Mitch is not arrested and leaves after Taggart officially dismisses him.On arriving home, Mitch finds his house staged to look like he had killed his wife. He finds blood smeared over his clothes in the closet and splattered on the kitchen walls. The phone rings, and the kidnapper verifies Mitch's ideas about the staging. He informs Mitch they have also planted additional evidence that would be difficult for Mitch to locate and remove, but easy for police dogs. The kidnapper then plays a recording of Mitch's session with Taggart, which confirms his earlier belief that the kidnappers have him under surveillance. Mitch is then told to have his cell phone on and remain available for further instructions later in the evening.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother_Odd"title="Brother Odd">
The novel begins seven months after "Forever Odd". During that time, Odd Thomas has been a guest at St. Bartholomew's Abbey, where he hopes to seek peace and understanding. During his time there, he befriends a white-furred dog who assists him in his further adventures.Odd sees a shade-like bodach. This portends great disaster for the abbey. One of the monks disappears and Odd is attacked by a mysterious killer. As he searches for the missing monk, Odd hears an odd noise in a great snowstorm, and later sees an intricate, shifting pattern of bones against a window.Rodion Romanovich, the abbey's other guest, meets Odd in the garage to pick up the monks. Odd, suspicious of Romanovich, intends to leave him in the abbey but he takes one sport utility vehicle (SUV) full of monks before Odd can stop him. On the way there, Romanovich's SUV is turned over by a bone-creature. Brother Knuckles, Odd's confidant, damages the creature with the other plow, saving everyone. Back at the school, Odd and Romanovich are able to determine that Jacob's father, the Neverwas, is John Heineman, a monk at the abbey known as Brother John and a former physicist who experimented with reality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Night_(Koontz_and_Gorman_novel)"title="City of Night (Koontz and Gorman novel)">
They are stronger, heal better, and think faster than any humans ever created—and they must be destroyed. But not even Victor Helios—once Frankenstein—can stop the engineered killers he’s set loose on a reign of terror through modern-day New Orleans. Now the only hope rests in a one-time “monster” and his all-too-human partners, Detectives Carson O’Connor and Michael Maddison. Deucalion’s centuries-old history began as Victor’s first and failed attempt to build the perfect human–and it is fated to end in the ultimate confrontation between a damned creature and his mad creator. But first Deucalion must destroy a monstrosity not even Victor’s malignant mind could have imagined—an indestructible entity that steps out of humankind’s collective nightmare with one purpose: to replace us.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forever_Odd"title="Forever Odd">
After Odd Thomas discovers that his childhood friend Danny has been kidnapped and his step-father brutally murdered, he assumes that Danny's birth father, who was recently released from prison, has kidnapped him. Because of this belief, Odd starts to investigate, and is led through a water tunnel and into an abandoned hotel by his "psychic magnetism," an ability of Odd's to track down who, or what he is visualizing.Inside, Odd finds his friend tied up and strapped to a bomb. Danny informs Odd that his dad did not kidnap him. Instead, Danny recounts that, because of his loneliness from a debilitating bone disease, he called a phone sex line and spoke with a woman named Datura. Danny, having been seduced by this woman, had eventually given up the information of Odd's "gift." Once this registered in her mind, she kidnapped Danny in order to have Odd reveal himself to her.Odd leaves Danny and finds Datura in her room with two thugs, Cheval Robert and Cheval Andre. She orders Odd to show her ghosts. Reluctantly, Odd takes her to the casino in the hotel where he previously saw many ghosts and one poltergeist. Datura insults a ghost, and the enraged poltergeist flings objects at them. At this point, Odd escapes from Datura, returns to Danny, and disarms the bomb. Odd returns to Datura's room and finds a shotgun, which he uses to kill Cheval Robert. Datura finds him by "reverse psychic magnetism"; as they are talking, a mountain lion attacks her from behind. An angry Cheval Andre chases Odd through the hotel, before Odd kills Cheval Andre in a sewer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_&amp;_King"title="King &amp; King">
"On the tallest mountain above town," the young Prince Bertie still has not married, as is the custom in his kingdom. His mother, a grouchy Queen who is tired of ruling and wishes to pass on the responsibility to her son, insists he must find a princess to marry. The prince tells his mom "Very well, Mother... I must say, though, I've never cared much for princesses." His mother marches princess after princess through the castle, from places ranging from Greenland to Mumbai, but in spite of their various talents — Princess Aria of Austria sings opera, Princess Dolly from Texas juggles and does magic tricks — they fail to interest the prince (though the prince's page falls in love with the princess from Greenland). After a while, along comes Princess Madeleine escorted by her brother Prince Lee. At the same time, both Bertie and Lee exclaim, "What a wonderful prince!" The princes immediately fall in love, and they begin marriage preparations at once. The wedding is attended by all the rejected princesses and their families; the two princes are declared King and King, and the Queen can finally relax, sunning herself in a lounge chair near the page and the princess from Greenland. The story ends with a kiss between the two kings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep_(novel)"title="Sheep (novel)">
A young family moves to rural Wales to renovate a farmhouse and recover from the drowning death of their daughter, Ruthie. While there, the family witnesses a series of terrible mutilations of sheep by an unknown perpetrator.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Calm_(novel)"title="Dead Calm (novel)">
Honeymooners John and Rae Ingram take their yacht for a cruise through the Indian Ocean, where they rescue a young man, Hughie Warriner, from a dinghy. Hughie claims to have escaped from another vessel after three crew members succumbed to food poisoning. John, a former naval officer, is suspicious of inconsistencies in Hughie's story and goes to inspect the sinking ship while Hughie sleeps. He discovers passengers Russ Bellows and Mrs. Warriner, alive and begging for help. Meanwhile, upon discovering that John has left, Hughie panics, takes Rae hostage, and begins motoring her boat away from the sinking ship.On board the sinking ship, John learns that Hughie, Mrs. Warriner, Russ, and Russ' wife, Mrs. Bellows, were vacationing when Hughie suffered an agoraphobic reaction while diving with Mrs. Bellows and accidentally killed her by trying to climb onto her shoulders. The realization of what he'd done resulted in Hughie's suffering a psychotic break. Mrs. Warriner further tells John that Hughie, though a gifted artist, has the mind of a child, his emotional growth having been stunted by his overbearing father and a codependent relationship with an inappropriately affectionate mother. On board the Ingrams' boat, Rae is able to surmise this herself from Hughie's behavior and assumes the role of a caring mother figure in order to lull him into a false sense of security, while preparing to kill him with a shotgun John has stashed in their stateroom. She is unable to do this, and in a fit of rage he destroys the gun. She then tricks him into taking codeine laced drink, ties him up and heads back to rescue her husband. She overcomes a disabled engine, destroyed instruments and coming darkness to locate the sinking boat. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eiger_Sanction"title="The Eiger Sanction">
Dr. Jonathan Hemlock is an art professor and mountaineer. He is also a collector of paintings, most of them obtained from the black market. To finance his collection, Hemlock, who served in a Special Forces team of the Army Intelligence Branch and fought in the Korean War, works as a so-called "counter-assassin" for a secret US government agency, the CII.In order to acquire a Pissarro, Hemlock agrees to carry out a couple of "sanctions" (contract assassinations targeted specifically against killers of American agents). The first one is easily dealt with in Montreal. For the second, he will need to join a group of climbers who are about to attempt the north face of the Eiger, a particularly difficult challenge. Hemlock goes back into training and eventually climbs the mountain with the team that he believes includes his would-be victim — whose identity he will have to deduce on the mountain itself. Poor climbing conditions disrupt the climb and lead Hemlock to the discovery that his target is someone other than he had expected.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Made_Straight"title="The World Made Straight">
In 1970s western North Carolina, a young man stumbles across a grove of marijuana, sees an opportunity to make some easy money, and steps into the jaws of a bear trap. He is discovered by the ruthless farmer who set the trap to protect his plants, and begins his struggle with the evils of his community's present as well as those of its history. Before long, he has moved out of his parents' home to live with a onetime schoolteacher who now lives in a trailer outside town, deals a few drugs, and studies journals from the American Civil War. Their fates become entwined as the community's terrible past and corrupt present lead to a violent reckoning with the marijuana farmer and with a Civil War massacre that continues to divide an Appalachian community.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian's_Winter"title="Brian's Winter">
The story deals with Brian, still stranded at the L-shaped lake during the fall and winter, constructing a winter shelter, building snow shoes, being confronted by a bear, befriending and naming a skunk and learning how to make a bow more powerful. Eventually, Brian meets a family of Cree trappers, the Smallhorns, who help him return home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicka_Chicka_Boom_Boom"title="Chicka Chicka Boom Boom">
The lowercase alphabet tries climbing up a coconut tree in order, until their weight causes the tree to lean over, and everyone falls out of the tree. After that, the uppercase alphabet (the older relatives of the lowercase alphabet) comes to rescue them. Again alphabetically, while being rescued, most of the letters receive injuries, including D having a skinned-knee, E having a stubbed toe, F being patched up, G being all out of breath, H and I being tangled up, J and K about to cry, L being knotted like a tie, M being looped, N being stooped, O being twisted "alley-oop," P having a black eye, and T having a loose tooth. However, the rest of the letters have no injuries. The sun goes down afterwards. Later at night, the letter A starts to get out of bed and climbs up the tree again, daring all the other letters to catch him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rather_English_Marriage"title="A Rather English Marriage">
The book's plot concerns two retired men who are thrown together following the deaths of their wives in the same hospital. Both have served in the armed forces, one, Reggie Conyngham-Jervis, being a former officer, the other, Roy Southgate, an ex-NCO. The perceived class differences lead to Roy moving in with Reggie and being treated as an unpaid servant. The reader's sympathies are with Roy as he remains humble and faithful to his purpose until Reggie becomes too domineering. Roy remarries, and Reggie, whose attempt to seduce a younger widow, Liz Franks, has ended in failure, is left alone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_(novel)"title="Enigma (novel)">
In February 1943, Tom Jericho, a gifted cryptanalyst at Bletchley Park, is recuperating in Cambridge from a nervous breakdown brought on by the pressures of work and the breakup of his relationship with Claire Romilly, a cipher clerk. After a few weeks, he is told Bletchley needs him back since it has become locked out of the Naval Enigma. Back at Bletchley, Jericho is still infatuated with Claire and makes his way to her lodgings, only to be told by her flatmate Hester Wallace that Claire is not there.Jericho waits for Hester to leave and lets himself in to rifle through Claire's possessions. He discovers that her bedroom floorboards have been recently replaced. Beneath them he finds a sheaf of unsolved cryptograms, which he takes. He goes to leave but notices a male figure arrive at the cottage and flee at the sight of him.Jericho discusses the Enigma lockout with Jozef "Puck" Pukowski, an Anglo-Polish cryptanalyst who fled Poland after the invasion by Germany and so left his family behind. Jericho realises that the way back into the Naval Enigma can be made through collecting 'contact codes', abbreviated reports made by a U-boat when it discovers a convoy. In the meantime, Claire has gone missing. Jericho's attempt to phone her father, Edward Romilly, is rebuffed. He approaches her flatmate Hester and the two learn that the cryptograms that Jericho found had originated from Smolensk, in the German-occupied Soviet Union. Hester discovers that the cryptograms were part of a series sent to German Army High Command but that interception and decryption of the signals at Bletchley were abruptly terminated by a high authority for unknown reasons. Hester and Jericho bluff their way into a signals-receiving station and purloin copies of the full set of undeciphered signals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eternal_Champion_(novel)"title="The Eternal Champion (novel)">
"The Eternal Champion" is narrated by John Daker, an inhabitant of 20th century Earth. Daker has a wife and child whom he loves but no further information is given. He has an occupation that does not interest him and feels unfulfilled in life. One night, while thinking of morality and "the futility of human existence", Daker hears a voice calling him to action in order to protect humanity. The voice calls him Erekosë. Daker hears the voice on several other occasions and makes an effort to hear it better and answer its call, though also seems uncertain he has a choice to ignore it. Finally, his spirit moves through time and space and he realizes he is the Eternal, a being who is reborn time and again throughout the multiverse. Throughout their lives, the Eternal Champion is called to maintain or restore the balance between the cosmic forces of Chaos and Law when needed. While many Eternal Champions only remember their current life and existence, Daker's trip through time and space reveals scattered memories from many other incarnations, such as Erekosë and Michael Moorcock's other characters such as Elric, Prince Corum, Dorian Hawkmoon, Jerry Cornelius, the Rose, and members of the family von Beck.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Empire_Strikes_Back_(novel)"title="The Empire Strikes Back (novel)">
Despite the destruction of the Death Star in the 1976 novel "", the Galactic Empire stills retains an iron grip on the galaxy. Upon discovering the Rebel Alliance's secret base, the Empire strikes with massive force, sending the rebels scrambling across the galaxy. Han Solo, Princess Leia, Chewbacca ("Chewie") and C-3PO are slowed down from escaping with the rest of the group by collapsing ice on Hoth. Throughout the story, they remain within the Empire's reach.Luke Skywalker and R2-D2 flee to Dagobah, but not to regroup with the others. Instead, Luke seeks Yoda in order to be trained as a Jedi Knight. His development of Force sensitivity during his training gives him a sensation of the danger shadowing his friends. Subsequently, Luke's friends are captured in Cloud City. Han is frozen in carbonite and taken to Jabba the Hutt. Luke leaves Dagobah to save his friends. But it is a trap, as the unprepared Luke is drawn into an unsuccessful confrontation with the Imperial Sith Lord Darth Vader. He is left with a missing hand, near-death and reeling from the shocking revelation that Vader is his father. However, he is rescued by the "Millennium Falcon".As in the film, the ending sees Luke, Leia, Chewie, 3PO and R2-D2 reunited, with Luke and Lando finalizing their plan to rescue Han Solo from Jabba's captivity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Johnny_Town-Mouse"title="The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse">
The country mouse, Timmy Willie, falls asleep in a hamper, and is carried with the vegetables to the city, where the mice, including Johnny Town-Mouse, make him welcome, but finding the cat frightening and the food strange, he returns by the hamper. Sometime later, Johnny Town-Mouse pays him a visit, but finding such things as cows and lawnmowers frightening, returns to the city himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Stop_the_Carnival_(novel)"title="Don't Stop the Carnival (novel)">
"Don't Stop the Carnival" revolves around the lead character of Norman Paperman. He is the middle-aged New York City press agent who leaves the noise and safety of the big city and runs away to a (fictional) Caribbean island to redeem and reinvent himself as a hotel keeper. The result is a satirical tale of tropical disaster.The novel takes place on the fictional island of Amerigo. According to the opening of the musical (a paraphrased excerpt from the novel):
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Jack_(novel)"title="Bloody Jack (novel)">
After losing her entire family to disease, eight-year-old Mary Faber joins a gang of orphans led by Rooster Charlie, whom she looks up to as a brother. One day, after stealing some bread, Mary stumbles across Charlie's corpse and realizes that he's been murdered. Donning his clothes, she assumes the identity of "Jack" and joins the crew of HMS "Dolphin" as a ship's boy.While serving aboard the "Dolphin", she kills a pirate during an attack on an enemy ship. As a mark of honor, her shipmates give her the nickname "Bloody Jack".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistress_of_Spices"title="Mistress of Spices">
Tilo, the titular character, is a shopkeeper born in India and trained in magic, who helps customers satisfy their needs and desires with the mystical properties of spices. Her life changes when she falls for an American man named Raven, whom the book strongly implies is Native American. Unfortunately, she chooses to disregard the rules of her training in her pursuit of romance and her decision to seek out customers outside her shop, which results in the spices inflicting punishment on her and those she cares about. To save Raven from being another victim of the spices' powerful magic, she decides to leave him after one last night where they make love. Afterwards, she accepts the punishment for disregarding the rules of her training, which results in the store being destroyed in an earthquake. She survives, and she and Raven reconcile and decide to help rebuild the shop.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Language_of_Cranes"title="The Lost Language of Cranes">
"The Lost Language of Cranes" was the second novel by David Leavitt, and deals primarily with the difficulties a young gay man, Philip Benjamin, has in coming out to his parents, Rose and Owen, and with their subsequent reactions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Day_Road"title="Three Day Road">
Set in 1919, following the end of World War I, the novel takes place in the wilderness of Northern Ontario and on the battlefields of France and Belgium. Niska, an Oji-Cree medicine woman, is the remnant of her native relatives who refused to assimilate in the 19th century. She rejected European beliefs and culture and continues to thrive in the bush in a manner befitting her and her traditions. Niska’s voice is one of two narratives that complete the novel. After getting word that her closest thing to living family, Elijah, is coming back from the war, she paddles the three-day journey to meet him in town. She finds, however, that it is not Elijah but her nephew Xavier who has returned from battle. In an attempt to heal her only relative, who has clearly been sucked dry of his soul and has hardened with nightmares from the war and turned hollow by morphine, she begins to recount the stories of her past. She believes that perhaps this will revive Xavier and the Three Day Road will not be one to his demise. Similarly, Xavier attempts to stumble over his story for his aunt and unearths ghosts of his bullet-riddled past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfbane_(novel)"title="Wolfbane (novel)">
This science fiction novel takes place in the year 2203, if we take literally the age of 250 years given for a Korean War identity bracelet that is dated 1953. A rogue planet, populated by strange machines known as Pyramids, has stolen the Earth from the Solar System, taking it off into interstellar space. The moon has been 'ignited' by alien technology to serve as a miniature sun around which both planets orbit. This new sun is rekindled every 5 years, though as the book opens, the rekindling is nearly overdue and there is fear among the populace that it may never happen again.The global population has crashed to a hundred million, due largely to the radical climate changes that followed the arrival of the alien planet. Most of the surviving humans are 'Citizens,' passive people living lives bound up with elaborate social rituals, various styles of meditation, and carefully prescribed selflessness. This constraining lifestyle frequently causes Citizens to succumb to mental breakdowns and run 'amok,' attacking anyone within reach. Persons who commit this or any other crime face ritual execution.A small minority of the population who retain their aggressive natures are referred to as 'Wolves.' They are considered to be a direct threat to the rest of society. These Wolves, however, generally see themselves as superior humans and refer to the Citizens as 'Sheep.' This labeling system is somewhat ironic, because the Wolves generally try to trick the Sheep into avoiding their settlements, while any Wolf who is caught by the Sheep is murdered.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants"title="The Space Merchants">
In a vastly overpopulated world, businesses have taken the place of governments and now hold political power. States exist merely to ensure the survival of huge trans-national corporations. Advertising has become hugely aggressive and by far the best-paid profession. Through advertising, the public is constantly deluded into thinking that the quality of life is improved by all the products placed on the market. Some of the products contain addictive substances designed to make consumers dependent on them. However, the most basic elements of life are incredibly scarce, including water and fuel. Personal transport may be pedal powered, with rickshaw rides being considered a luxury. The planet Venus has just been visited and judged fit for human settlement, despite its inhospitable surface and climate; the colonists would have to endure a harsh climate for many generations until the planet could be terraformed.The protagonist, Mitch Courtenay, is a star-class copywriter in the Fowler Schocken advertising agency who has been assigned the ad campaign which would attract colonists to Venus. But a lot more is happening than he knows about. It soon becomes a tale of mystery and intrigue, in which many of the characters are not what they seem, and Mitch's loyalties and opinions change drastically over the course of the narrative. One of the hazards he faces is a psychopathic agent of his former company, found using the same psychological techniques used to identify targets for advertising.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon's_Stone"title="Solomon's Stone">
When Montague Allen Stark, with the assistance of friends, attempts to summon a devil, he quite unexpectedly succeeds: Bechard possesses Prosper Nash's body and sends his soul to the astral plane. Nash awakes in a cavalier's body, with no memory, but with the old reflexes. This gets him shortly involved in a fight, and he meets up with Arizona Bill Averoff, who does not remember him, but is the image of his friend Bill Averoff, an avid Western reader. He also learns that the society is in the throes of a war with the Wotanists—or Voties, as they are commonly called (in the original 1940s magazine version, these characters are referred to as "Arries" or "Aryans", and appear to be the astral products of daydreaming German émigrés in the New York of the time).Spending the night reveals his name, as he signs it from habit, and more importantly, the existence of the Shamir. After a failed attempt to steal it, a fellow cavalier drags him back a club, which contains letters that reveal more of his past to him. In particular, he knows Alicia Dido Woodson, the double of Alice Woodson, present when the demon was summoned, but tracking her down reveals that she was kidnapped.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracles_on_Maple_Hill"title="Miracles on Maple Hill">
Marly's father just returned from the war; he is suffering from mood swings and depression, and seems to be tired all the time. Lee, Marly's mother, moves the family to Maple Hill, a town where the children's grandmother once lived, so that her husband, Marly's father, will not suffer as much as he would in the city. In Maple Hill, neighbors help one another when help is needed; they do not keep secrets from one another. The family is supported by a neighbor couple, Mr. and Mrs. Chris, who make their living with maple syrup. Marly and her brother adapt to living in the country very well, and eventually become happier there. Their father's condition also improves tremendously.When Mr. Chris has a heart attack during sugaring time, Marly's family steps forward to return the kindness that the Chrises have shown them. They collect the entire crop of sap and boil it down, but they are certain that they lack Mr. Chris's deft touch with making syrup. When Mr. Chris is allowed to return home, it is the moment of truth: is their syrup as good as Mr. Chris's? Mr. Chris himself is unable to detect any difference. Marly reflects that the recovery of her father and Mr. Chris, the growing strength of bonds within her family, and the second chances for life and love are the true miracles of Maple Hill.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail-Safe_(novel)"title="Fail-Safe (novel)">
A U.S. Air Force command center receives information that an unknown aircraft is approaching from Europe. The alert status of the Strategic Air Command's (SAC) bomber forces is raised, a standard precaution against a sneak attack. The unknown aircraft then disappears from radar, causing the alert status to continue to increase, eventually leading to the bombers being sent into the air to the fail-safe points. From there, they can proceed to their targets only if they receive a special attack code from the on-board "fail-safe box". After a short time, the unknown target is reacquired and identified as an off-course commercial airliner. The SAC threat level is immediately reduced, and the bomber fleet is sent a recall order.A technical failure at the height of the alert allows the attack code to be accidentally transmitted to Group Six, which consists of six Vindicator supersonic bombers. Colonel Grady, the head of the group, tries to contact SAC Headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska to verify the fail-safe order (called Positive Check), but Soviet radio jamming prevents Grady from hearing them. Concluding that the fail-safe order and the radio jamming could mean only nuclear war, Grady orders Group Six to fly towards Moscow.At meetings in Omaha, at the Pentagon, and in the fallout shelter of the White House, American politicians and scholars debate the implications of the attack. Professor Groteschele, a civilian advisor, suggests that the United States follow this accidental attack with a full-scale attack to force the Soviets to surrender. The President of the United States (unnamed but apparently modeled on John F. Kennedy) refuses to consider such a course of action.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well-Mannered_War"title="The Well-Mannered War">
Two factions have laid claim to the planet Barclow: humans from Metralubit, and the Chelonians. But instead of fighting, for nearly two hundred years, the two sides are the best of friends.The Doctor, Romana and K-9 arrive to find an important election looming. K-9 begins a career in politics, Romana reunites with an old friend, and the Doctor discovers a plot to alter the war's friendly nature. And what has Galatea, leader of the beautiful Femdroids, got to do with this?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_Rites"title="Vampire Rites">
Eight years have passed since Darren Shan was "blooded" by his colleague in blood, Mr. Larten Crepsley. The Vampire Council will be gathering again soon, as it does after every 12 years, and Darren has to accompany Mr. Crepsley to the Vampire Mountain, a mountain where all the vampires share a safe haven in the mountain's caves, to be presented to the ruling committee of the Vampires - the Vampire Princes.Six years have passed since the events in "Tunnels of Blood" and eight years in total in Darren's vampire life. Darren is whisked away by Mr. Crepsley to a perilous and torturous journey to the Vampire Mountain. Whilst Evra Von the Snake-Boy has grown up, and will not be accompanying Darren in his journey, Darren and Crepsley are accompanied by Mr. Desmond Tiny's two of the many workers – the Little People. One of them is Lefty, a Little Person named after his limp by Darren and Evra.On their journey they encounter a cave which is splattered with a dead vampire's blood, Gavner Purl - a friend of Crepsley's, the blood of a dead vampaneze, and a mad bear who had been infected with vampaneze blood (hence the madness) and thus attacked Darren, who with a little help from the Little People and a pack of wolves whom he had befriended, killed the bear. After the fight, it is then revealed that Lefty, a Little Person, is actually named Harkat Mulds and can speak. He has been given the ability by Mr. Tiny to give the Vampire Princes a message about a person who will lead the vampaneze in a war against the vampires.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sands_of_Time_(Richards_novel)"title="The Sands of Time (Richards novel)">
Visiting the British Museum, Nyssa is soon kidnapped leaving the Doctor and Tegan to face the consequences of an ancient Egyptian prophecy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changeling_(novel)"title="Changeling (novel)">
The people had long suffered under Det Morson's power. When at last, the wizard Mor joined the fight, Det and his infamous Rondoval castle were destroyed. But the victory was not complete, for the conquerors found a baby amidst the rubble: Det's son, Pol. Unwilling to kill the child, Mor took him to a parallel world where technology ruled and the ways of magic were considered mere legends. He substituted Pol for a baby of the same age, using a spell to persuade the parents to recognize him as their own. In order to retain the balance between the worlds, Mor took the baby from the other world and brought it back to his own, leaving it with a local artisan, Marak.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madwand"title="Madwand">
Pol Detson, son of Lord Det, has come home, now a powerful sorcerer of unsurpassed natural ability. But Pol is still an untrained talent, a "madwand". To take control of his powers, to rule in his father's place, he must survive arduous training and a fantastic initiation into the rites of society.During this process, Pol discovers that he is being monitored by a powerful magician. He has recurrent dreams of opening a portal into another world where a dark bestial erotic magic reigns supreme. Eventually he is drawn to a castle occupied by two magicians who are working to make the dream real, and want him to take his father's place in the scheme, so they can all reinvent themselves as gods in the new world.Pol's loyalty to the world that he lives in, which will be destroyed by the dark world, causes him to resist and, with the help of a dragon, he stops the portal being opened. One of his enemies is killed and the other flees by flying away. He leaves behind a garment containing a label that says "Made in Hong Kong".The story implied that a sequel was necessary to complete the story, but no sequel was ever written.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_with_a_Clock_in_Its_Walls"title="The House with a Clock in Its Walls">
Lewis Barnavelt, recently an orphan, moves to the town of New Zebedee, Michigan, to live with his mysterious uncle Jonathan Barnavelt. Lewis' uncle turns out to be a mediocre, though well-intentioned, warlock. His next-door neighbor and good friend, Florence Zimmermann, is a far more powerful good witch. Jonathan's house was previously owned by Isaac and Selenna Izard, a sinister couple who had dedicated their lives to black magic, and plotted to bring about the end of the world. Before dying, Isaac constructed the eponymous clock that he hid somewhere inside the walls of the house, where it eternally ticks as it attempts to pull the world into a magical alignment, which would destroy the world.Lewis befriends a local boy named Tarby Corrigan, who is everything he is not—popular, athletic, thin—but the two soon begin to drift apart. Lewis tries to win Tarby back by demonstrating how to raise the dead in the local cemetery on Halloween but in doing so unwittingly releases Selena Izard from her tomb. An escalating series of encounters with the sorceress' ghost builds to a final confrontation in the basement of Jonathan's house, where Lewis must summon up his courage and prevent the couple from finishing their work and bringing about the end time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behind_the_Scenes_at_the_Museum"title="Behind the Scenes at the Museum">
Common themes in the book include the untimely death of children, the effect of the two World Wars on the family, the ultimate fate of characters who "disappeared" from their family's lives never to be heard of again, and how the women of the family feel compelled to enter into unhappy marriages.The fate of Ruby's family is revealed gradually. A number of revelations, such as the fact that Ruby's sister Gillian dies in a road accident aged 11, are revealed to the reader long before they occur. However, other revelations relating to the fate of various characters are withheld and revealed gradually throughout the novel, including:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian's_Hunt"title="Brian's Hunt">
Brian, who is now sixteen years old, is canoeing through the Canadian wilderness. He realizes that the woods are now his home and he will never be happy in modern society with its noise, pollution, and inauthentic people. He now spends his time in the wild hunting, fishing, and home schooling himself. While Brian does not miss human contact, he finds his thoughts frequently turning to Kay-gwa-daush (also known as Susan), the eldest daughter of the Cree family who rescued him at the end of "Brian's Winter". Though he has only seen her photograph, her family has described her as an adventurous, self-reliant young woman, and Brian wonders if she might be a kindred spirit.While canoeing, Brian finds a seriously wounded Malamute dog, which he nurses back to health. The dog is clearly domesticated, and Brian begins to worry that whatever maimed the dog may have done the same to her owners. He remembers his Cree friends, the Smallhorns, and decides to go check on them.When Brian reaches their cabin, he finds that a bear had killed the parents and apparently chased Susan into hiding. Brian returns her to her home and buries the family while she radios for help. The authorities arrive to take Susan to relatives in Winnipeg. Brian, along with the dog, stays behind in order to hunt down and kill the bear, knowing very well that the hunt could cost him his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashman_(novel)"title="Flashman (novel)">
Presented within the frame of the discovery of the supposedly historical Flashman Papers, this book chronicles the subsequent career of the bully Flashman from "Tom Brown's School Days". The book begins with a fictional note explaining that the Flashman Papers were discovered in 1965 during a sale of household furniture in Ashby, Leicestershire.The papers are attributed to Harry Paget Flashman, the bully featured in Thomas Hughes's novel, who becomes a well-known Victorian military hero (in Fraser's fictional England). The papers were supposedly written between 1900 and 1905. The subsequent publishing of these papers, of which "Flashman" is the first instalment, contrasts the public image of a (fictional) hero with his own more scandalous account of his life as an amoral and cowardly bully."Flashman" begins with the eponymous hero's own account of his expulsion from Rugby and ends with his fame as "the Hector of Afghanistan". It details his life from 1839 to 1842 and his travels to Scotland, India, and Afghanistan.It also contains a number of notes by the author, in the guise of a mere editor of the papers, providing additional historical glosses on the events described. The history in these books is largely accurate; most of the prominent figures Flashman meets were real people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_(Pierce_novel)"title="Hunter (Pierce novel)">
The story is set in the United States, presumably during the late 1980s or early 1990s. It begins with Yeager driving around Washington D.C with a rifle. In his personal campaign of assassination, he initially shoots racially mixed couples in parking lots. Over 22 days, his campaign leads to 12 victims in 6 shootings. In the narrative, Yeager is depicted as the hero. His campaign escalates to more sophisticated methods against higher-profile targets, including prominent journalists and politicians whom Yeager sees as promoting racial mixing. At the same time, Yeager and his girlfriend are developing connections with a white nationalist group.After several successful and increasingly ambitious attacks, Yeager is found and confronted by a senior agent of the FBI who himself is disgusted with Jewish control of the FBI and the American social situation. This agent blackmails Yeager into assisting him with his career by assassinating several Jewish FBI agents and targeting Mossad agents in the United States so that the agent can be appointed as the head of a newly formed antiterrorist secret police agency, assume increasing control of the United States and use his power to challenge and remove Jewish control of the government and media.At the same time, Yeager's white nationalist group achieves growing prominence through the insertion of one of their members into a Christian evangelist television broadcasting ministry, from which he is broadcasting increasingly racist and antisemitic messages. Yeager's campaign of assassination and terrorism, the actions of copycats and imitators, the white nationalist broadcasting effort, the efforts of the antiterrorist official, and a rapid decline of the US economy all work to push the United States towards increasing racial and social violence and fragmentation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betsy-Tacy_and_Tib"title="Betsy-Tacy and Tib">
Betsy, Tacy, and Tib are three eight-year-old girls who live in Deep Valley, Minnesota. At a carnival, they are mesmerized by the Flying Lady. When they learn that her act used a see-saw, they put on a show for their neighbors, recreating the act with a see-saw they assemble themselves. The three girls and Tib's brother Freddie build a playhouse in Tib's basement, using her family's store of firewood. Tib's father convinces them to demolish the playhouse by reenacting the fable of The Three Little Pigs with the little girls as the pigs and Freddie as the wolf.When Betsy's mother allows Betsy, Tacy, and Tib to stay at the house by themselves, they amuse themselves by cooking a dish Betsy calls Everything. They put a little of every ingredient in the kitchen into the pot. After tasting the results, they toss it out, but that night, all three have stomach-aches. Betsy, Tacy, and Tib explore Tib's house by looking into mirrors, calling the rooms that they see in the mirrors part of the Mirror Palace.After Tacy recovers from a bout of diphtheria, the girls decide to cut off locks of their hair so they each have a keepsake of the others. They cut off one of Betsy's braids, half of Tacy's long red ringlets, and half of Tib's yellow curls, and divide the hair into pillboxes that they can each wear as lockets. Their parents are furious until they hear the girls' reasoning which makes them laugh. Tib's mother cuts of the rest of the girls' hair to even it up.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betsy_and_Tacy_Go_Over_the_Big_Hill"title="Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill">
While the first two volumes are something like collections of vignettes about Betsy, Tacy, and Tib, this one has a story through the whole volume.The girls are competing with Betsy's and Tacy's older sisters about having a Queen of Summer. When they go out to collect votes, they find themselves making friends with a surprising little girl their own age in the Little Syria section of Deep Valley, Minnesota.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betsy_and_Tacy_Go_Downtown"title="Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown">
In this volume in the series, horseless carriages arrive in Deep Valley for the first time when Mr. Poppy, the owner of the Opera House, buys an automobile. Betsy's friend Tib is his first passenger — along with his wife — due simply to her having the boldness to ask for a ride. Although the girls' classmate Winona Root is initially jealous of Tib over this experience, she soon gets over it and invites Betsy, Tacy, and Tib to their first real theatrical experience, a dramatized version of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" at the Opera House. Betsy befriends the lonely Mrs. Poppy, who welcomes the chance to share the little girls' affection after having lost her only daughter in the years before moving to town. Through this friendship, the girls not only enjoy parties at the Poppy Hotel, but also participate in a theatrical production of "Rip Van Winkle" that lets Mrs. Poppy reunite Betsy's mother, Mrs. Ray, with her long-lost brother.Betsy and her friends also discover the temptations of dime novels, prompting Betsy to try her hand at writing her own. Eventually, Betsy shares her secret writings with her mother, who successfully encourages her to write fiction of more elevated character. Betsy's parents decide that in order to foster a love of classic literature and make Betsy a better writer, she will be allowed to go alone to the new Carnegie library every two weeks, with spending money for a special mid-day treat to let her stay all day.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betsy_Was_a_Junior"title="Betsy Was a Junior">
The novel begins with the return of Betsy's childhood friend Thelma (Tib) Muller, who had been living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin since her parents were independent and they wanted to return to their old life, and the departure of Betsy's older sister, Julia, for college at the University of Minnesota. Julia's desire to bypass college and begin a musical career cause her to be relatively uninterested in classes and to focus instead on her desire to join a sorority. Excited by her sister's stories of college life, Betsy and her friends Tacy and Tib join with five other girls in establishing a local sorority at the high school level.Over time, Betsy finds that the social whirl of the sorority distracts her from her studies and also eventually causes a backlash of resentment among the rest of the student body, which leads to her group's being excluded from their usual leading role in school activities. Moreover, the exclusiveness of the sorority concept pushes away others she would like to welcome into her social circle. Julia likewise becomes less interested in sororities after she is temporarily blackballed for having attracted the romantic attentions of a man who had dated other sorority members. By April, both girls have decided against sorority membership — Betsy in order to have a wider circle of friends and Julia to have the long-awaited chance to travel abroad and begin her musical training in earnest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betsy_and_Joe"title="Betsy and Joe">
"Betsy and Joe" details the events of Betsy Ray's senior year (1909-1910) at Deep Valley High School in Deep Valley, Minnesota. Betsy had first met Joe Willard in the fifth book of the series, "Heaven to Betsy", at Willard's Emporium, a store in the country owned by Joe's uncle. The two of them did not become close friends initially, as they competed in school for top marks in English class and in the annual high school essay competition. Joe's parents had died earlier, causing him to have to spend his time working to support himself and making him, in Betsy's opinion, proud.At the end of the previous book, "Betsy Was a Junior", Betsy's classmate, Joe Willard, sent her a postcard requesting to correspond over the summer while he was away working in the harvest fields. Joe soon moved to North Dakota to help run a newspaper, and over the summer while Betsy is away on vacation at Murmuring Lake, Betsy and Joe corresponded, Betsy on her "scented, greensealed" stationery replying to Joe's "typewritten letters." While at Murmuring Lake, Betsy is often visited by her good friend, Tony Markham. Tony tends to run with a wild crowd, so Betsy encourages his visits to keep him with the Crowd. In September, school begins, and Joe makes his first visit to Betsy's home and soon he comes every Sunday night for "Sunday Night Lunch." The first dance of the school year is announced, and to Betsy's dismay Tony asks her first. After Betsy explains the situation to Joe, he makes a blanket invitation for her to go to all the rest of the dances with him. Betsy declines because she feels it would be unfair to Tony to shut him out of her life like that, even though she only likes him as a friend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Flash"title="Royal Flash">
"Royal Flash" is set during the Revolutions of 1848. The story features Lola Montez and Otto von Bismarck as major characters, and fictionalises elements of the Schleswig-Holstein Question, 1843, 1847 and 1848. It is set in the fictional Duchy of Strackenz, making it the only Flashman novel to be set in a fictitious location.Other characters include: The book is loosely based on the plot of "The Prisoner of Zenda". Flashman explains that this is because the story was plagiarised from him by its author, Anthony Hope. In a letter, Fraser wrote that during his researches into an earlier Flashman book he had discovered that in real life Bismarck and Lola Montez had been in London at the same time. He added that it had been too good an opportunity to miss.The book's plot is anachronistic in depicting Bismarck already in 1848 striving for the unification of Germany. In fact, during the revolutions of 1848 Bismarck was completely opposed to German Unification, which in 1848 was a cause promoted by radical revolutionaries that the conservative Bismarck detested. Unlike his depiction in the book, Bismarck only took up German Unification much later in his career, when he could use it to enhance the power of the Prussian Monarchy and of himself. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashman_in_the_Great_Game"title="Flashman in the Great Game">
Presented within the frame of the supposedly discovered historical Flashman Papers, this book describes the bully Flashman from "Tom Brown's School Days". The papers are attributed to Flashman, who is not only the bully featured in Thomas Hughes' novel, but also a well-known Victorian military hero. The book begins with an explanatory note detailing the discovery of these papers. Fraser also states he has received communications from people either claiming to be a descendant of Flashman or of someone to whom Flashman owed money."Flashman in the Great Game" begins with Flashman at Balmoral as a guest of Queen Victoria. Here he meets with Lord Palmerston, who recruits him to go to Jhansi in India and investigate rumours of an upcoming rebellion among the Sepoys. Flashman skulks through India in various disguises, narrowly avoiding death several times and witnessing first-hand the carnage of the Sepoy Mutiny. "Flashman in the Great Game" covers the years 1856 to 1858. It also contains a number of notes by Fraser, in the guise of editor, giving additional historical information on the events described.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashman's_Lady"title="Flashman's Lady">
Presented within the frame of the supposedly discovered historical Flashman Papers, this book describes the bully Flashman from "Tom Brown's School Days". The papers are attributed to Harry Paget Flashman, who is not only the bully featured in Thomas Hughes' novel, but also a well-known Victorian military hero. The book begins with an explanatory note that while this is the sixth packet of the papers to be published, the story contained within actually takes place chronologically after "Flashman", the first packet to be published, and between the two timeframes featured in "Royal Flash", the second story to be published."Flashman's Lady" begins with Flashman's encounter with Tom Brown, a former acquaintance from Rugby School, and progresses through cricket, battling pirates with James Brooke in Borneo, and enslavement in Madagascar under Queen Ranavalona I, detailing his life from 1842 to 1845. This book is unique among the Flashman series for containing extracts from the diary of his wife, Elspeth. It also contains a number of notes by Fraser, in the guise of editor, giving additional historical information on the events described.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashman_and_the_Dragon"title="Flashman and the Dragon">
Presented within the frame of the supposedly discovered historical Flashman Papers, this book describes the bully Flashman from "Tom Brown's School Days". The papers are attributed to Flashman, who is not only the bully featured in Thomas Hughes' novel, but also a well-known Victorian military hero. The book begins with an explanatory note detailing the discovery of these papers.The present novel takes place shortly after Flashman's service with John Brown in the United States (detailed in "Flashman and the Angel of the Lord"). There is no explanation as to how he ends up in Hong Kong, but it is from here that he begins his adventures in China. Flashman meets both the leaders of the Taiping Rebellion and members of the Qing Dynasty who participated in the Second Opium War.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashman_and_the_Mountain_of_Light"title="Flashman and the Mountain of Light">
Presented within the frame of the supposedly discovered historical Flashman Papers, this book describes the bully Flashman from "Tom Brown's School Days". The papers are attributed to Flashman, who is not only the bully featured in Thomas Hughes' novel, but also a well-known Victorian military hero. The book begins with an explanatory note detailing the discovery of these papers.The book begins with Flashman being questioned about Koh-i-Noor by Queen Victoria. As Flashman cannot tell the truth to the Queen without offending her, he reminisces about the First Sikh War, 1845 and 1846, and how he acquired Koh-i-Noor (The Mountain of Light).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashman_and_the_Angel_of_the_Lord"title="Flashman and the Angel of the Lord">
Presented within the frame of the supposedly discovered historical Flashman Papers, this book describes the bully Flashman from "Tom Brown's School Days". The papers are attributed to Flashman, who is not only the bully featured in Thomas Hughes' novel, but also a well-known Victorian military hero. The book begins with an explanatory note detailing the discovery of these papers.The present novel takes place immediately after "Flashman in the Great Game" and before "Flashman and the Dragon". It details Flashman's involvement with John Brown and his raid on Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, from 1858 to 1859.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashman_and_the_Tiger"title="Flashman and the Tiger">
Presented within the frame of the supposedly discovered historical Flashman Papers, this book describes the bully Flashman from "Tom Brown's School Days". The papers are attributed to Flashman, who is not only the bully featured in Thomas Hughes' novel, but also a well-known Victorian military hero. The book begins with an explanatory note detailing the discovery of these papers. It also states that smaller narratives have been discovered mixed in with the larger packets which comprise the previous books. "Flashman and the Tiger" is a collection of three of these narratives."The Road to Charing Cross" is the longest, detailing Flashman's involvement in preventing an assassination attempt on Emperor Franz Josef. It takes place in 1878 and from 1883 to 1884. "The Subtleties of Baccarat" describes the Tranby Croft affair in 1890 to 1891. "Flashman and the Tiger", covering 1879 and 1894, borrows some characters from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for a tale about blackmail and revenge. It is also the only Flashman story to give any detail about his adventures with the Zulus. The title story had been originally serialised in the "Daily Express", between 29 September 1975 and 3 October 1975, with illustrations by Andrew Robb.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashman_on_the_March"title="Flashman on the March">
As in all of Fraser's Flashman novels, the story is presented as part of the Flashman Papers, supposedly written by Sir Harry Flashman, the villain of "Tom Brown's School Days". It begins with the usual explanatory note detailing the discovery of the papers.The adventure is set in 1867-8 and starts in Trieste, shortly after Flashman's service with Emperor Maximilian I in Mexico. Flashman then travels to Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and takes part in General Robert Napier's 1868 expedition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_American"title="Mr American">
Mark Franklin arrives on the "Mauretania" at Liverpool in 1909 with a copy of Shakespeare's works, an old Mexican charro saddle and two Remington pistols in his battered luggage. A tall and softly-spoken American prospector, who made his fortune in a silver strike in Nevada, he is visiting the 'old country' to see his roots.He goes to London where he meets and has a one-night stand with 'Pip' Delys, a music hall performer. She gives him the name which forms the title of the book. He then buys a house in Castle Lancing, the Norfolk village his ancestors came from in the 17th century. A chance event during a fox hunt, when the fox hides in Franklin's picnic basket, leads to an acquaintance with King Edward VII, and the beginning of an enmity with a neighbour (Frank, Lord Lacy) which lasts throughout the book.Through playing bridge with Edward and his mistress Alice Keppel, Franklin elevates himself greatly in the king's estimation through his easy manners.When the king invites him to Sandringham, Franklin meets Winston Churchill, Jackie Fisher, and Ernest Cassel. This allows Fraser to depict some of the historical background of the build-up to the First World War. He also meets General Flashman, from Fraser's well-known historical fiction series. Flashman is in his late 80s at the start of the book (as he says, "I'm eighty-eight next May, and I attribute my longevity to an almost total abstinence from tea"), and an important sub-plot involves his grand-niece, Lady Helen Cessford, a suffragette.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_in_Spinner"title="Come in Spinner">
The book tells the story of three women, Claire, Guinea and Deb, who are co-workers in the beauty salon of an exclusive Sydney hotel. The story weaves together these characters with their familial and romantic relationships, as they struggle to manage the realities of working for the privileged upper classes, to whom no rules apply, while their own families cope with wartime deaths and losses, rationing, government manpower recruitment and stiflingly conservative attitudes surrounding the role and perception of the "acceptable" behaviour of women.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goth_Opera"title="Goth Opera">
As the Fifth Doctor and his companions vacation in Tasmania they become caught up in a scheme by the Time Lord Ruath to resurrect the vampire Yarven (from "Blood Harvest"). Ruath sends a vampire baby to attack the Doctor and turn him into a vampire, but the child instead attacks and converts Nyssa. Unable to provide Yarven with the Doctor's Time Lord blood, Ruath gives her own blood to Yarven, causing her to die and regenerate into a vampire Time Lord.Nyssa, while trying fight her new vampire nature, is drawn to Yarven's castle, where she learns more about Ruath's plan. Ruath has created a genetically enhanced mist that can turn normal humans into vampires, and kill those who use traditional methods (garlic, crosses, etc.) to protect themselves. Ruath has also invented a Time Freeze, a small Time Loop that can hold the Earth in a perpetual night, leaving the vampires free to roam and feed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donnerjack"title="Donnerjack">
Donnerjack is set in a world that has developed a shared, fully immersive virtual reality. This virtual reality, referred to as Virtu, has come to dominate all aspects of society. People work, play, and can lead entire lives in Virtu.The eponymous John Donnerjack is one of the creators of Virtu, and a peerless engineer, capable of building just about anything in his virtual reality. The story follows John's final adventure, where he saves his lover from Death itself, and continues on through the perspective of his son, Jack. Many aspects of Donnerjack directly parallel famous myths and legends, particularly those conforming to Joseph Campbell's theory of the monomyth.It is heavily implied throughout the novel that, though humanity experiences it as a virtual reality simulation, Virtu may actually be an unintentional bridge to the magical realms described in mythology.It is not connected with "Jack of Shadows" written by Zelazny years before.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_on_the_Borderland"title="The House on the Borderland">
Two men on a two-week fishing vacation in remote western Ireland are surprised to discover a strange abyss. On a rock spur above this pit they find ruins and buried in them a journal, which they read.The author of the journal introduces himself as an old man who has lived for years in an ancient house accompanied only by his sister, who serves as housekeeper, and his dog, Pepper. He has no contact with the local inhabitants, who say he is mad. The house is circular in form and its weird appearance includes peculiar decorations that suggest leaping flames. It has had an evil reputation for centuries and had been empty for many years when he purchased it. The diary will record his strange experiences and thoughts.Late one night, as he was reading in his study, the light suddenly turned green and then red. Pepper hid under his chair and he sat still, frightened. The red light went low, and he was no longer afraid. The far side of the room became a vision of a vast empty plain. He floated like a bubble into space, leaving the earth and sun behind as he traveled into utter darkness and despair. He reached the world of the vast plain, whose sun is a wreath of red flame. He was brought to an arena: an immense green jade copy of his own house, at the center of a circle miles across, circled by mountains containing hundreds of huge idols of Beast-gods and Horrors. As he nears the huge building, a humanoid creature with the repellent head and face of a huge swine is trying to get into the House. The Swine-creature suddenly and horribly moves toward him, but he is borne upward, then reverses his travel through space to return to his study.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hundred_Dresses"title="The Hundred Dresses">
The book centers on Wanda, a poor and friendless Polish-American girl. Although her grades are very good, she sits in the worst seat in the classroom and does not say anything when her schoolmates tease her. One day, after Wanda's classmates laugh at her funny last name and the faded blue dress she wears to school every day, Wanda claims to own one hundred dresses, all lined up in her closet in her worn-down house. This outrageous and obvious lie becomes a game, and the group of girls in her class, headed by Maddie and Peggy, mock and corner her every day before school demanding that she describe all of her dresses for them. Her father, Jan Petronski, reveals that due to the constant discrimination directed at his family they must leave town.The teacher holds a drawing contest in which the girls are to draw dresses of their own design. Wanda enters and submits one hundred beautiful designs. Her classmates are in awe of her talent and realize that these were her hundred dresses. The students who teased her feel remorse and want her to know this, but they are not sure how. They decide to write her a kind letter and send it to her old address, hoping the post office can forward it. Unfortunately, she has already moved away and does not realize she won the contest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dying_Light_in_Corduba"title="A Dying Light in Corduba">
The Society of Olive Oil Producers of Baetica is throwing a big dinner party in Rome, trying to drum up business for their product. Falco is invited at the request of Claudius Laeta, Vespasian’s top clerk. The food, the garum and the dancing girl make a big impression on Falco. When two guests at a dinner are assaulted, one fatally, Falco realizes that being at the dinner was just the start of another job.The surviving victim, Anacrites, is Falco's rival and Vespasian's Chief Spy, a significant position in Vespasian's empire, challenged as it was by constant conspiracies. Falco is asked to investigate the attack on Anacrites and its possible connection to an attempt to corner the market on Spanish olive oil. Trying to keep Anacrites safe, he moves him to the one place where no one will look, and if they do, they will regret it; his mother’s house.Soon, Falco is on his way to Hispania to track down some of the guests and that memorable dancer. Laeta hints that someone is looking to corner the market on Hispania’s olive oil production. Suspicion immediately falls on Quinctius Attractus, the host of the festivities that fatal evening.This is an assignment Falco does not take solo; he is bringing his very pregnant companion, Helena Justina. Helena's father Camillus Verus happens to own a small estate in Baetica, and her brother Aelianus has just returned for serving there, so he and Helena have a perfect excuse to show up. And Helena has made it very clear that Falco "will" be there for the birth of his child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_of_Sejanoz"title="The Hunger of Sejanoz">
The reader plays as one of Lone Wolf's Grand Masters. On a visit to the court of Xo-lin, news of an invasion force by the Autarch Sejanoz of Bhanar brought to the palace in Pensei. Xo-lin must be rescued and brought to sanctuary in the distant city of Tazhan across the Lissanian Plain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Rainbows_End"title="Where Rainbows End">
"Where Rainbows End" is a story told through letters, emails and instant messaging about the ever-changing relationship between the two main characters Rosie Dunne and Alex Stewart. Rosie and Alex are close friends from childhood but one day they are suddenly separated when Alex and his family move from Dublin to Boston. The book guides us through their relationship as it continues to change due to distance, new relationships and circumstances which seem determined to keep them apart. One question remains throughout the book, were they always meant to be more than friends and will they risk everything including their friendship on love?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archer's_Goon"title="Archer's Goon">
Thirteen-year-old Howard Sykes lives in an English town with his parents, Quentin, an author and professor, and Catriona, a music teacher; his sister Anthea, always called "Awful" because of her constant screaming; and Fifi, the family's au pair. Their life is interrupted one afternoon when an unnamed huge person, "somebody's Goon" as Fifi describes him, comes into their home and announces that he has come to collect the two thousand words that Quentin owes somebody called Archer.It transpires that thirteen years ago, Quentin was suffering dreadfully from writer's block and hadn't been able to write anything for nearly a year after his last book was published, and so Mountjoy, a town official, came up with the idea that Quentin should undertake to write two thousand words of nonsense quarterly and deliver them to him at the town hall. In return, Quentin was promised an exemption from city taxes. The Goon says that the latest two thousand didn't get to Archer. Quentin irritably writes a replacement set and gives them to the Goon, who goes away – but the next afternoon, he is back, as the words were a repeat of what had been done previously, and the agreement specified that they must not be a copy or paraphrase of anything Quentin had done before.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_in_the_Valley"title="Lion in the Valley">
The Emersons return to Egypt in 1895–96 to excavate at Dahshoor - finally, some real pyramids for Amelia!In looking for a keeper for Ramses, they find a demoralized Englishman named Donald Fraser. Donald has troubled family relationships and a hashish habit, both of which Amelia means to reform. Enid Debenham, a young lady whose behavior scandalizes Cairo society, also takes a hand when Amelia takes her under her wing.Meanwhile, the Master Criminal reappears personally, taking an interest not only in illegally obtained antiquities but in the person of Amelia herself.The story is key in the series because it is the first time the reader learns the pseudonym of the Master Criminal: Sethos. It is the name of a number of Pharaohs, and is tied to Set or Seth, the Egyptian god of the desert. Sethos interacts in a number of ways, including offering gifts and returning the communion set stolen from Mazghuna the previous year. Sethos also appears in a number of guises, only one of which Amelia sees through. She does, however, assume a number of others are either Sethos or in his gang, almost always incorrectly.Donald and Enid return in a later novel, "Seeing a Large Cat".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Whammy_(novel)"title="Double Whammy (novel)">
One early August morning in Harney County, Florida (the most backward-thinking and racist county in the state), the body of professional bass fisherman Robert Clinch is found floating in Lake Jesup shortly after taking his boat out to go bass fishing. Private investigator R.J. Decker is hired by sugar cane tycoon Dennis Gault, another bass fisherman, to prove that celebrity fisherman Richard "Dickie" Lockhart, his main rival on the fishing tournament circuit, is a cheat. Decker is a former newspaper photographer who was fired and briefly sent to prison after assaulting a teenager who tried to steal his camera equipment. In Lockhart's hometown of Harney, Decker looks up an old newspaper friend, a laconic reporter named Ott Pickney. Finding the local bass fishing guides too expensive, Decker takes Ott's advice and meets a reclusive hermit who lives in the woods, calling himself "Skink". While teaching Decker about fishing, he mentions seeing Clinch on the lake, but not fishing, on the morning he died. Attending Clinch's funeral, Decker meets Gault's sister Elaine, or "Lanie," who confides to Decker that she and Clinch were lovers. She tells Decker that Gault hired Clinch to catch Lockhart first, only she believes Lockhart had Clinch killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_for_the_Dead"title="Call for the Dead">
Following a wartime excursion undercover, first in Germany and then in Switzerland, George Smiley returns to England and marries Lady Ann Sercombe. Although Smiley is a devout husband, Ann is serially unfaithful, and begins an affair with a Cuban racing driver before absconding the country with him. Smiley, infinitely self-controlled and self-deprecating, does nothing, and instead lets Ann continue to utilise their finances whilst he continues to live at their home in Bywater Street in the London borough of Chelsea, distracting himself with a love of German poetry and his work as a member of the Circus, the headquarters of the SIS named after its location on Cambridge Circus.Smiley is abruptly summoned in the early hours of the morning by the Circus' advisor, Maston. Unsure about the meeting’s purpose, he travels in via taxi to learn that Foreign Office civil servant Samuel Fennan has killed himself following a routine security check. Smiley, the interviewer, had cleared Fennan, despite only a few days earlier receiving an anonymous letter regarding Fennan's past membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Because Fennan did not have a private office, Smiley had suggested the interview take place in an informal manner on a lunchtime walk through London. Maston informs him that an inquiry will be convened, and begins to set Smiley up for the blame for the suicide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Murder_of_Quality"title="A Murder of Quality">
Long retired since the war, Ailsa Brimley is now the editor of a small Christian magazine called "Christian Voice". The magazine's membership is small but loyal, and many of its readers have been supporters of the magazine since its inception. Unexpectedly, Brimley receives a letter from a reader, Stella Rode, who claims that her husband, a public school junior master in the town of Carne, is plotting to kill her. Fearing for Stella's life, Brimley hunts down her former wartime colleague, the retired Circus spy George Smiley, and asks him to help. Smiley, who knows the brother of school teacher Terence Fielding, agrees to do what he can, but before he is able to intervene, learns that Rode has been murdered. Brimley, feeling a duty of care to Rode on account of her family's long history as magazine subscribers, asks Smiley to go down and see what he can do to help. Smiley agrees and goes down to Carne to find out what he can about Rode's situation.Upon arrival, Smiley becomes a victim of village gossip, on account of his wife, Ann, and her childhood connection to Carne. Now that they are living apart, Smiley is privately ridiculed by many of the town's occupants. Smiley is introduced to the town's police chief, who shares details about the case with Smiley. Rode was found alone in her house by her husband Stanley, and had been killed in a period of time where he claimed to be out of the house, returning to Fielding's house to collect his bag which he had forgotten, and contained many of the students' exams which he needed to mark. Any footprints were lost in the subsequent increased police presence at the house after the body was discovered. The chief's superior believes that the murder was perpetrated by a homeless madwoman who Rode knew, but Smiley remains unconvinced. He also witnesses invidious class division between "town and gown" which is superimposed upon a religious division between adherents of the Church of England and Nonconformists. As the wife of the only public school teacher who was himself not public school-educated (Stanley graduated from a grammar school), and as a nonconformist, Stella Rode occupied a low rank in the local social hierarchy, especially in the estimation of Carne's upper crust.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iggie's_House"title="Iggie's House">
Winnie Barringer is heartbroken over her close friend Iggie's move to Tokyo, Japan. However, she immediately takes an interest in the black family that has relocated in Iggie's old house, the Garbers, who have moved to her neighborhood (in an unspecified location) from Detroit, and prioritizes befriending the family's three children, Glenn, Herbie, and Tina, over all else. Her first meeting with the Garber children is awkward and nearly disastrous as she brings up racist subjects inadvertently, but she tries to overcome this by continuing to bond with them, despite several major bumps in the road along the way — most notably her snobby, prejudiced neighbor Mrs. Landon's callous attempts at running the Garbers out of town because of their race.After Mrs. Landon and her daughter Clarice leave a sign on the Garbers' lawn telling them they are unwanted and to leave town, Winnie fears that the Garbers will move again, and becomes extremely disappointed in her parents (especially her mother, who appears to demonstrate racism equal to Mrs. Landon's, albeit in more subtle ways) for not standing up for the Garbers. Eventually Mrs. Landon decides to sell her house and move away herself for no reason other than her prejudice, and attempts to pressure her neighbors into doing the same. This proves to be the last straw for Winnie's father, who thoroughly excoriates Mrs. Landon for her intolerance and tells her there will be no blockbusting in their neighborhood. Although she is proud of her father for telling Mrs. Landon off, Winnie fears that her parents will follow Mrs. Landon's lead, and decides to stow away on a ship to Japan to live with Iggie's family as she would be ashamed of having racist parents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otherwise_Known_as_Sheila_the_Great"title="Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great">
The book centers on Sheila Tubman, a 10-year-old girl who masks her insecurities with a much more self-assured, confident persona. In truth, she suffers from fears ranging from arachnophobia (fear of spiders and other arachnids), cynophobia (fear of dogs), and aquaphobia (fear of water).Her family decides to spend summer in Tarrytown, New York, where she is enrolled at a day camp and meets Merle "Mouse" Ellis, an easygoing, courageous, and slightly tomboyish girl skilled with deep knowledge of yo-yo tricks. To Sheila's dismay, the family who owns the house they are staying in owns a dog named Jennifer, who Sheila fears and avoids. Her anxiety escalates when she learns of Jennifer's pregnancy and the desire of her sister, Libby, to adopt one of the puppies. Meanwhile, Sheila is enlisted in swimming lessons to her chagrin — though she manages to take the final exam and earn a beginner's certificate. At camp, she single-handedly starts a camp newspaper, which proves difficult. Ultimately, she hands over editorship to two teenage boys names Allen and Paul after they complete a crossword puzzle she wrote, for which she promised a prize but forgot to name it. She even succeeds in painting the backdrop set for the camp's theatrical production of "Peter Pan." 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forever..._(novel)"title="Forever... (novel)">
Katherine, in the middle of her senior year in high school, finds herself strongly attracted to Michael, a boy she meets at a New Year's party. As their relationship unfolds, the issue of sex comes up more as an emotional and health issue than as a moral one. Both of them are aware that physical intimacy is both common and complicated.Their relationship progresses slowly as they begin to go on dates and trips together; they are accompanied on various meetings by Katherine's friend, Erica, who has known Katherine since the 9th grade and believes that sex is a physical act and not very romantic, and believes Katherine should "just get it out of the way." Erica and Katherine are also joined by Michael's friend Artie, who got together with Erica. Katherine and Michael go on a skiing trip, where they plan to have sex, but Katherine has her period, and they are disappointed. Michael teaches Katherine how to hold his penis (nicknamed "Ralph") and how to rub it correctly. When Katherine and Michael do have sex on Michael's sister's living room floor in her apartment, they are sure it seals a love that will be "forever". Michael buys Katherine a necklace for her birthday that says "Katherine" on one side and "Forever...Michael" on the other. That summer, both sets of parents make plans that will take Katherine and Michael to two different states. Katherine finds herself aware of the limitations of the relationship and is ultimately attracted to a tennis instructor, Theo, who is older than Michael. Theo calls her Kat, even though she is at first highly irritated with the nickname. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unvanquished"title="The Unvanquished">
Although "The Unvanquished" was first published as a whole in 1938, it consists of seven short stories which were originally published separately in "The Saturday Evening Post", except where noted:"The Unvanquished" is told in seven episodes—sometimes immediately following one another, other times separated by months or years—spanning the years 1862 to 1873. The book begins with Bayard Sartoris and his slave friend Ringo playing in the dirt on the Sartoris plantation. A slave named Loosh smugly interrupts their game, hinting that Union armies have entered northeastern Mississippi, near their town of Jefferson. The boys do not fully understand, but when Bayard's father, Colonel John Sartoris, returns home from the front that day, they overhear him telling Granny Millard that Vicksburg has fallen. Loosh obviously knows about the defeat, and Bayard decides he and Ringo will keep watch over Loosh. Several days into the watch, the boys spot a Yankee soldier on horseback riding up the road. The boys grab a musket off the wall and shoot at the soldier, then run into the house as a fist pounds on the front door. Granny hides them under her billowing skirts and insists to the angry Union sergeant that there are no children present. Colonel Dick, a Yankee officer, calls off the search but makes it clear that he does so out of pity, not because he believes Granny. Afterward, the boys learn they only hit the horse, not the rider.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Die_of_Heartbreak"title="More Die of Heartbreak">
The book opens with an introduction of characters, and with Trachtenberg, the narrator, describing his complex relationship with his maternal uncle, Benn Crader, a world-renowned botanist. He then discusses the distinctions between himself, and his father, a man who, as he describes him, “[puts] on the kind of sex display you see in nature films, the courting behavior of turkey cocks or any of the leggier birds… Dad was a hit with women.”This theme continues throughout the book, with Kenneth accepting his difficulties with women. He also introduces his mother, a woman who allowed her husband to step out, and only left after realizing that he did not understand what made her happy. She wanted intellectual stimulation of a literary style, whereas he bought her materialistic goods to make up for his infidelities. To atone for receiving the goods she did not need, Kenneth's mother is now living among refugees in Africa.Kenneth then embarks on an overview of Benn's recent sexual history. He presents a man who, while appreciative of beauty and women, is not quite rooted enough in human society to understand the sexual pretexts he encounters. One incident is discussed many times during the novel: a middle aged neighbor of Benn's, an attractive professional who has a slight drinking problem, asks Benn to help her change a light bulb, a not too subtle hint which Benn ignores until she makes a move. The next day, when he shows no interest, and expresses regret for the act, she exclaims, “What am I supposed to do with my sexuality?” 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_You_Please_Be_Quiet,_Please?"title="Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?">
## “Fat”.A waitress recounts a story to her friend, about "the fattest person I have ever seen," who comes into the diner where she works and orders a procession of dishes in a polite and self-deprecatory manner. The waitress notices his strange manner of speaking, commenting positively on every aspect of the massive meal. She describes the physical struggle of the fat man, his "puffing" and overheating. After recounting the events at the dinner, the waitress tells her friend how she tried to explain to her partner, Rudy, that "he is fat... but that is not the whole story". When they had sex that night, the waitress felt that she was "terrifically fat", and Rudy was "hardly there at all". The story ends on a note of anticipation, with the waitress thinking to herself: "It is August./ My life is going to change. I feel it."
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Good_Scent_from_a_Strange_Mountain"title="A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain">
## Open Arms.The opening story is set during the Vietnam War. The narrator, a translator for the Australian forces, recounts the story of a North Vietnamese communist named Thập who joins the Australian forces as a spy after the communists massacre his family. When the Australian soldiers bring him to a screening of pornographic films, Thập seems overwhelmed and disgusted. The narrator speculates that, as a former Communist, he considers pornography immoral, and that it simultaneously reminds him of his longing for his dead wife. Thập later kills an Australian soldier and himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitely_Maybe_(novel)"title="Definitely Maybe (novel)">
The story takes place in Leningrad, USSR, apparently in the 1970s.The protagonist, Dmitry Alekseyevich Malyanov (Дмитрий Алексеевич Малянов) is an astrophysicist who, while officially on vacation, continues to work on his thesis, "The Interaction of Stars with Diffused Galactic Matter". Just as he begins to realize that he is on the verge of a revolutionary discovery worthy of a Nobel Prize, his life becomes plagued by strange events.First, Malyanov is visited unexpectedly by an attractive woman claiming to be his wife's classmate and food and wine arrive for them mysteriously and already paid for. Then his neighbor dies of an apparent suicide and Malyanov becomes the murder suspect.Approaching the problem with a scientific mindset, Malyanov suspects that his discovery is in the way of someone (or something) intent on preventing the completion of his work. The same idea occurs to his friends and acquaintances, who find themselves in a similar impasse—some powerful, mysterious, and very selective force impedes their work in fields ranging from biology to mathematical linguistics.An explanation is proposed by Malyanov's friend and neighbor, the mathematician Vecherovsky (Вечеровский). He posits that the mysterious force is the Universe's reaction to mankind's scientific pursuit, which threatens to destroy the very fabric of the universe in some distant future. His hypothesis is that of a Homeostatic Universe, meaning that the Universe tends to conserve both its total entropy (a measure of disorder) and the capacity of regeneration of reasoning performed into it. The equilibrium between the two measures determines the structure of the Universe at a given time. Thus, the Universe naturally resists attempts of rational beings of constructing supercivilizations. Vecherovsky proposes to treat this universal resistance to scientific progress as a natural phenomenon which can and should be investigated and even harnessed by Science.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exiles_to_Glory"title="Exiles to Glory">
An intelligent young misfit, Kevin Senecal, leaves Earth to escape various troubles, including a teen gang vendetta which the authorities will not act to stop, and bureaucratic interference in his studies for an engineering degree, in a culture where environmentalists and zero-growth advocates hold sway.He enlists with the Hansen Corporation, a huge conglomerate which has re-located to the Moon, and is now involved in asteroid mining. He is to go to the asteroid Ceres. The journey involves laser launch from Earth to orbit, and a long voyage on a ship using the NERVA nuclear rocket technology. During the journey, all the passengers have to be involved in maintaining the shipboard environment, which includes algae to generate oxygen from photosynthesis.Kevin falls in love with a mystery woman called Ellen MacMillan. Between them they deal with the consequences of sabotage of the ship by persons unknown, and find a way to effect the rendezvous at Ceres after the ship's computer is sabotaged. They use the expertise of Jacob Norsedal, a prototypical computer hacker who is also a top-notch mathematician and physicist.At Ceres Ellen reveals herself to be an agent for Hansen investigating the mining work, which is plagued with irregularities. In particular, a new element called "Arthurium" is being mined on Ceres. This is a stable transuranic element of the kind predicted during the 1970s based on the theory of an Island of stability for elements of atomic number 114, 120 and 126. Being super-heavy, these elements sink into the cores of planets and are not accessible, but may be found in asteroids.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratman's_Notebooks"title="Ratman's Notebooks">
The book is set as a series of journal entries, where the unnamed narrator goes back and forth between his life with the rats and his work, in a low-level job at a company that his father used to own. In these entries, the young man dwells on the hatred he feels for his boss, the stresses of caring for his aging mother, a nameless girl he becomes fond of and above all the families of rats which he has befriended and which he uses for company and companionship.Eventually, the young man trains the rats to do things for him. His favorite is an Agouti Berkshire rat (normal wild rat color, only with white markings on the belly, who in the film adaptations was portrayed as a white rat) which he calls "Socrates". A rival to Socrates is "Ben", a large rat that the narrator grows to despise when it refuses to listen to him. The young man uses the rats to wreak revenge upon his boss and havoc among the local shop owners and home owners, whom he has robbed with the aid of his rats. His "ratman" robberies become a newspaper sensation in the area and the man makes quite a stash of money for himself and for the girl he is courting at work. After his mother dies, the young man inherits the house.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Da_Vinci_Code"title="The Da Vinci Code">
Louvre curator and Priory of Sion grand master Jacques Saunière is fatally shot one night at the museum by an albino Catholic monk named Silas, who is working on behalf of someone he knows only as the Teacher, who wishes to discover the location of the "keystone," an item crucial in the search for the Holy Grail.After Saunière's body is discovered in the pose of the "Vitruvian Man" by Leonardo da Vinci, the police summon Harvard professor Robert Langdon, who is in town on business. Police captain Bezu Fache tells him that he was summoned to help the police decode the cryptic message Saunière left during the final minutes of his life. The message includes a Fibonacci sequence out of order and an anagram 'O, draconian devil Oh, lame saint'.Langdon explains to Fache that the pentacle Saunière drew on his chest in his own blood represents an allusion to the goddess and not devil worship, as Fache believes.Sophie Neveu, a police cryptographer, secretly explains to Langdon that she is Saunière's estranged granddaughter and that Fache thinks Langdon is the murderer because the last line in her grandfather's message, which was meant for Neveu, said "P.S. Find Robert Langdon," which Fache had erased prior to Langdon's arrival. However, "P.S." does not refer to "postscript", but rather to Sophie "—" the nickname given to her by her grandfather was "Princess Sophie". She understands that her grandfather intended Langdon to decipher the code, which leads to Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa", which in turn leads to his painting "Madonna of the Rocks". They find a pendant that holds the address of the Paris branch of the Depository Bank of Zurich.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rotters'_Club_(novel)"title="The Rotters' Club (novel)">
Three teenage friends grow up in 1970s Britain watching their lives change as their world gets involved with IRA bombs, progressive and punk rock, girls and political strikes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passion_According_to_G.H."title="The Passion According to G.H.">
When the book opens, G.H., a well-to-do resident of a Rio de Janeiro penthouse, reminisces on what happened to her the previous day, when she decided to clean out the room occupied by the maid, who had just quit."Before I entered the room, what was I?" G.H. asks. "I was what others had always seen me be, and that was the way I knew myself."In the maid's room, G.H. expects chaos. Instead, to her shock, she finds a desert; "an entirely clean and vibrating room as in an insane asylum from which dangerous objects have been removed".Only one thing disturbs the room's perfect order: black carbon scratches on the dry white wall, outlining a man, a woman, and a dog. Pondering the inscrutable drawing, she realizes that the black maid, whose name she initially forgets, and whose face she has trouble calling to mind, had hated her. Overwhelmed by anger, she opens the door to the wardrobe. Terrified by the cockroach she sees emerging, she slams the door shut, severing the cockroach in its centre, and sees the still-living animal's entrails beginning to ooze out.G.H. is appalled by the sight, but she is trapped in the room by the irresistible fascination for the dying insect. She wants to scream, but she knows it is already too late: "If I raised the alarm at being alive, voiceless and hard they would drag me away since they drag away those who depart the possible world, the exceptional being is dragged away, the screaming being [sic]."
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cry_in_the_Night_(novel)"title="A Cry in the Night (novel)">
Jenny MacPartland, a divorced single mother, falls in love with artist Erich Kreuger while working for a New York gallery. They marry within a month and set up home on Erich's vast Minnesota ranch. For several months they are happily married, but Jenny begins to feel uneasy around her increasingly unstable husband. Within a year, their marriage is ripped apart by scandal and Jenny plans to return to New York City until she realizes that she is pregnant and completely dependent financially on Erich. Unsure of what to do, Jenny lives in fear and hides her growing baby from her husband as long as she physically can.As Jenny's pregnancy progresses, she discovers Erich's obsession with his dead mother, Caroline—the exact image of Jenny. Jenny begins to realize who she is married to and worrying about his child which she is carrying. Soon after he finds out she is planning to leave him, he starts to stalk her. He leaves without her on a trip and takes her two children. In an attempt to find out the truth about his plans, Jenny explores his past...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honus_&amp;_Me"title="Honus &amp; Me">
Joe Stoshack is infatuated with baseball. He knows everything there is to know about the game: except how to play well. When he takes a job cleaning a bunch of junk out of the attic of his neighbor, Miss Young, he finds a 1909 T-206 Honus Wagner card (the most valuable baseball card in the world). He tries to verify that it is authentic by going to a collectible shop. The owner, an ex "bad guy" professional wrestler named Birdie Farrell, tries to trick Joe into selling it for ten dollars by saying it's Heinie Wagner. When he goes to sleep that night, he's holding the baseball card, wishing he could meet Honus.The next day, after one of his team's games, Joe finds himself face-to-face with baseball legend Honus Wagner. He plays catch with him, and Joe and Honus share their dreams with each other. Joe's is to play in the big leagues, while Honus's is to win the World Series. Together they travel back in time to the seventh game of the World Series, where Honus helps Joe boost his self-esteem and gain confidence in his ability to play baseball. Finally, Joe returns home more encouraged about his baseball future.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rainbird_Pattern"title="The Rainbird Pattern">
Elderly spinster Julia Rainbird, under sessions by medium Blanche Tyler, or "Madame Blanche", promises her a large sum of money to locate her illegitimate nephew, Edward Shoebridge. Blanche and her boyfriend, George Lumley, begin making inquiries around their area about the Shoebridges, despite no one knowing where Edward is, or if he is alive.Meanwhile, Edward Shoebridge, alive and under the pseudonym of "the Trader", has been organising small kidnappings around the area, but is planning a larger score, the Archbishop of Canterbury, whom he will hold for a large ransom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashes_and_Diamonds"title="Ashes and Diamonds">
The story takes place in Ostrowiec (probably Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski), Poland, and begins on 5 May 1945, one of the last days of World War II. The characters are all aware that the war will end soon. The Soviet Army had driven the German Army out of Ostrowiec in January, and the Communists are poised to take control of post-war Poland. In the story, Stefan Szczuka is the Secretary of the Province Committee of the Polish Workers' Party (PPR, a party of Communist orientation formed in the Soviet Union), and is expected to play an important role in the new government of Stalinist Poland. A jeep is transporting him to speak at a cement factory in Biała, a nearby town. The jeep is being driven by Frank Podgórski, who is the Secretary of the District Committee of the PPR. Podgórski recognizes a friend (Alicja Kossecka) walking alongside the road, and stops to greet her. Podgórski learns from her that her husband Antoni Kossecki, who was a local judge before the war, had returned from the German prison camp Groß-Rosen two days ago. He asks to visit them, and she agrees. Podgórski gets out of the car to talk with his friend which causes a delay. Szczuka impatiently honks the horn to get Podgórski to return to the jeep and resume the trip. Later, as they are driving, Podgórski explains to Szczuka who his friend Alicja Kossecka was and that her husband had just returned from the Nazi captivity. Szczuka mentions that he had also spent time in that prison camp, but cannot remember knowing anyone from Gross-Rosen named Kossecki. Podgórski suddenly remembers that Kossecki had been arrested under an assumed name, so that Szczuka would not have known him as Kossecki, but Podgórski cannot recall what his assumed name was.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lab_(novel)"title="The Lab (novel)">
"The Lab" is an action book, whose protagonist is a 16-year-old superhuman named Agent "Six of Hearts". Six was created to be the ultimate soldier by a group called The Lab which is a ruthless division of the company ChaoSonic.In this futuristic setting there is only one known city left in the world, and it is run by ChaoSonic. ChaoSonic took over the city and has obliterated all their competitors and enemies. Six is an agent of a vigilante organization called "The Deck" which survives by attacking ChaoSonic subsidiaries that are acting unethically, arresting the people involved and then selling off their assets.Only the King of Hearts, who saved Six from the Lab as a child, and is now his boss, is aware of the fact that Six is a superhuman developed by ChaoSonic. Six and King keep this a secret, as the Spades, another division of the Deck, would imprison Six if they knew he was a ChaoSonic creation, in case he was a threat. Six is the best agent in the Deck, having a 100% mission success rate.The Deck then begins to investigate "The Lab" and King gives Six the assignment to stop anyone from discovering his true identity. On his mission he meets Kyntak. Kyntak is genetically identical to Six, and was designed in the Lab's 'Project Falcon' alongside him. In a twisted way, they are brothers. This discovery prompts Six to reexamine his life and reevaluate his own identity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_(novel)"title="Edinburgh (novel)">
In the novel, Aphias "Fee" Zhe, a twelve-year-old Korean American boy growing up in Maine, is selected for membership in a boys' choir along with Peter, who becomes his best friend and first love. Fee and other boys are molested by the choir director Big Eric Gorendt. Fee is afraid to tell, and doesn't want anyone else to tell, for reasons that are deeper than pure embarrassment or fear. When one boy comes out with the secret, all the boys are revealed as victims as well. This novel explores the horrific mental and emotional damage these boys go through and how they cope with this trauma.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coming_Storm"title="The Coming Storm">
The story is told from the alternating perspective of four characters:  Louis Tremper, the headmaster of a boy's prep school in upstate New York; his wife, Claire Tremper; Tracy Parker, the school's new 25-year-old English teacher; and Noah Lathrop III, a 15-year-old student struggling with his own sexuality.Headmaster Louis Tremper is a repressed homosexual with a love of German opera. He hires Tracy as an English teacher at the school, Middle Forge, and is instantly attracted. He and his wife, Claire become close friends with Tracy, often inviting him over to dinner, with Louis educating and imparting his love of classic music on the young English teacher. Louis, as headmaster, has a history of having favorite boys within the school, but the relationships always closely resembled that of his new friendship with Tracy Parker – a relationship similar to the one he himself had with Jack Emmerich, the school's previous headmaster.Claire has also developed a friendship with Tracy. Knowing full well of Louis' repressed desires, Claire accepts them knowing that even so, he has remained a faithful husband. She also admits to a lesbian crush when she was younger, with her best friend Libby, who is married to Reid. Louis and Reid have been friends for years, and it was through Reid that Claire had met Louis. It is implied that Louis had an unrequited love for Reid – who instead became a womanizer and an adulterer, eventually leaving his wife by the end of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Short_History_of_Tractors_in_Ukrainian"title="A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian">
The novel describes the reactions of two daughters when their widowed, 84-year-old father Nikolai marries a highly sexual and much younger Ukrainian immigrant, Valentina. Concerned about Valentina's motives, Nadezhda and Vera are drawn back into contact with each other after a long period of estrangement. They find themselves united against a common enemy in Valentina, whose grasping, manipulative behavior escalates until the daughters finally succeed in obtaining a divorce for their father.Nikolai, a former engineer who emigrated to Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War, is writing a history of tractors in Ukrainian, translated extracts from which appear throughout the novel. In the process of sorting out Nikolai's marital entanglements, Nadezhda also uncovers secrets from her family's history and learns about their experiences during the Ukrainian famine and Stalin's purges.The action takes place in Peterborough, England, and is narrated by the youngest daughter, Nadezhda, a university lecturer in Sociology.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragazzi_di_vita"title="Ragazzi di vita">
The novel tells the story of Riccetto, a street urchin to whom the audience is first introduced during his Confirmation and First Communion. Not too long afterwards, Riccetto is stealing from a blind beggar and a convent. Over the next few years, the reader follows along with Riccetto as he goes from robbery to scam to prostituting himself and back again while drifting around. During this time, many of his companions are killed or die off and there is constant immorality at hand. He is finally arrested and put in jail after trying to steal some iron in order to buy his fiancée an engagement ring. He is released afterwards and goes back to his same street life. Pasolini makes it clear to the reader that Riccetto and his peers are wanderers by nature, they have no life plans or goals and don't care to; Riccetto is a more deviant Dean Moriarty of sorts. This is the way in which Pasolini finds this subclass of people to be free from modernity and rooted in a way of life that has since been lost. He also admired "what he considered their pre-political rebelliousness"; they were separated from the partisan politics that plagued post-war modern Italy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starring_Sally_J._Freedman_as_Herself"title="Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself">
Sally J. Freedman moves from New Jersey to Miami, Florida with her brother and their mother and grandmother at the end of World War II. This is because of her brother Douglas's health, for he caught nephritis from staying in wet clothes in the cold. The novel first touches on racism when, on the train to Florida, Sally meets a black woman traveling with her young sons about Sally's age and her infant daughter whom Sally gets to hold. The next day, Sally goes back to visit the black family and discovers that laws requiring racial segregation in the 1940s in the Southern United States force the family to move to another car on the train. Sally is infuriated and does not understand why her mother is not upset as well. Before Sally can be admitted to her new school, she must undergo a physical examination in which the school nurse discovers nits (head louse eggs) in Sally's hair. The school nurse tries to calm Sally's mother, who is insulted and taking the news personally, by saying, "Look Mrs. Freedman, don't take this personally. You've been traveling, she could have picked them up anywhere."In her new school, she meets new friends, the first being Barbara, who teaches Sally all about the new school. Later, she meets Andrea, a sixth grader, and Shelby, a girl in a different class than Sally. She has a difficult first day at school, but after a while, she begins to make more friends. There, she meets Peter Hornstein, a so-called 'Latin Lover', who seems to like Sally, but Peter ignores Sally when Jackie, a new girl, arrives at the school. It troubles Sally that Peter is going after a different girl, and she begins to like Peter back. She also meets Harriet Goodman, who takes an instant disliking of her simply because she's a "snowbird".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wifey_(novel)"title="Wifey (novel)">
The story follows the life of bored 1970s New Jersey housewife, Sandy Pressman, who decides to reinvigorate her life by having an extramarital affair with an old high school boyfriend. This decision is complicated when she accidentally discovers evidence her husband might be having a long-term affair. Somewhat emblematic of the time period of open marriages and different mores, this was the first novel by Blume to directly address adult lives and sexuality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Women"title="Smart Women">
The story follows Margo and B.B., two divorcees who are trying to restart their lives in Boulder,Colorado, to the annoyance and amusement of their teenage daughters. Matters get much more complex and relationships strained when B.B.'s ex-husband moves next door to Margo and starts a relationship with her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Clock"title="The Big Clock">
The novel's innovative structure is presented from the point-of-view of seven different characters. Each of the 19 chapters adopts the perspective of a single character. The first five chapters are told by George Stroud, who works for a New York magazine publisher not unlike Time-Life.Stroud is a borderline alcoholic and serial adulterer. His latest affair is with Pauline, who is also the girlfriend of his boss, Earl Janoth. After a weekend together in upstate New York, George and Pauline spend a leisurely evening in Manhattaneating dinner, bar-hopping, and browsing antique stores. George is a collector of the artist Louise Patterson and finds one of her works in shabby condition in an antique store. He outbids another customer for it. (The other customer turns out to be Patterson herself.) Later, George leaves Pauline at a corner near her Manhattan apartment. He watches her approach the entrance and sees Earl emerge from a limousine and enter the building with her. Earl sees George observing him, but, crucially, he cannot make him out in the shadows.In Pauline's apartment, she and Earl have a violent argument in which he accuses her of being a cheat and a lesbian. In reply, she suggests that he and his close associate, Steve Hagen, are a gay couple. This enrages Earl and he bludgeons her to death with a crystal decanter. In a panic, he goes to Steve's apartment for assistance. Steve immediately begins planning a coverup and tells Earl he must be prepared to have the man who witnessed him enter the building killed. Earl reluctantly agrees.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fudge-a-Mania"title="Fudge-a-Mania">
Peter Hatcher is horrified to learn of his family's plans to spend summer in a vacation home alongside the Tubmans, the family of his archrival, Sheila, located in Southwest Harbor, Maine. On the other hand, his younger brother, Fudge, who is five years old, anticipates the vacation because of his plans to marry her as a means of protection against the supposed "monsters" hiding beneath his bed, knowing that spouses often share one. This wish is pacified and dropped after a newfound friend named Mitzi Apfel provides him with a bottle containing her grandmother's "monster spray" during the vacation, but Peter is stunned to learn that she is the granddaughter of an idolized baseball player known as "Big Apfel". Also, along the way, he invites his best friend, Jimmy Fargo, on the vacation with him, a privilege gifted to compensate for having to spend it alongside Sheila, but is irritated when Jimmy starts to spend more time with her than with him out of sympathy for her own good friend's (Mouse, who was introduced in "Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great") inability to join her on the vacation too, as she has the chicken pox. Along the way, Peter develops a huge infatuation on a teenage librarian named Isobel (Izzy for short) and Fudge is inspired to write a picture book after learning about Mitzi's own, "Tell Me a Mitzi". Jimmy's father, Frank, a celebrated painter, also receives inspiration after the Hatchers' baby daughter, Tootsie, toddles across a canvas with blue paint smeared on her feet, commencing a series of paintings appropriately entitled "Baby Feet". Sheila and Fudge don't get married, but Peter, Fudge, and Tootsie's widowed grandmother, Muriel, and Sheila's single grandfather, Buzzy Senior, get so, much to Peter and Sheila's dismay, who thereafter, pledged they would never stand each other, despite now being stepcousins.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here's_to_You,_Rachel_Robinson"title="Here's to You, Rachel Robinson">
This book is written from the perspective of Rachel Robinson, who is thirteen years old and the youngest child of three. She is regarded as an overachiever and perfectionist, but explains throughout the book that she finds it difficult being intellectually gifted, and uses her perfectionist behaviours as a coping mechanism to deal with problems with her family and with her insecurities regarding her friendships. Her immediate family consists of her mother Nell, a high-achieving lawyer and later judge, her father Victor, a teacher with a gentle nature, her older sister Jessica, who suffers with cystic acne and the discrimination that comes with it, and her older brother Charles, who was expelled from boarding school and makes their lives a misery. Rachel feels Charles gets all the attention in her family, even if it is negative, and that he is driving their parents to breaking point. She also resents that her brother gets so much attention from teenage girls, especially her friends, Stephanie and Alison. In the book, Rachel has to deal with her crush on Charles' tutor, Paul Medeiros, (who ends up dating their cousin Tarren), her worries that Stephanie and Alison prefer each other to her, her frequent invitations to join high-achieving school societies, and the fact that the best looking boy in ninth grade (at least, to Stephanie, Alison and Rachel), Jeremy "Dragon" Kravitz, may be interested in her. Through family counseling and a trip to Ellis Island, the Robinson family begin to learn how to put aside their differences and become a closer family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_King"title="Star King">
Gersen is taking a short holiday at Smade's Tavern, the only settlement on Smade's Planet, which is a “neutral ground” hostelry for crook and honest man alike in the Beyond. Here he meets an explorer with a problem: Lugo Teehalt has discovered a beautiful and unspoiled world – but he has learned that his employer is the notorious criminal Attel Malagate, “Malagate the Woe”, and Teehalt cannot bear to see his planet despoiled by him. However, some of Malagate's minions murder him and steal the spaceship parked nearby. By chance, Gersen's spaceship is the same common model as Teehalt's; the thieves have taken the wrong ship. Gersen departs in the deceased man's ship and thus comes into possession of the navigational device that contains the planet's coordinates.Gersen goes in search of the identity of Teehalt's employer. He quickly establishes that his mission was sponsored by someone at Sea Province University, an important institution on the planet Alphanor in the Rigel Concourse, and narrows Malagate's alter ego to one of three men, all senior officials at the university. All deny specific knowledge of Lugo Teehalt. By now, Gersen has encountered two of Malagate's chief henchmen, whom he saw earlier at Smade's Tavern: Tristano the Earthman, and Sivij Suthiro the Sarkoy. He knows that Malagate is aware of what he carries, though not his motivation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_in_the_Middle_Is_the_Green_Kangaroo"title="The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo">
The story follows second-grader Freddy Dissel, a middle child who feels emotionally squashed between his older brother, Mike, and his younger sister, Ellen. Freddy tried to join Mike and his friends. But Mike said that Freddy was getting in his way. When Freddy tried to play with Ellen, Ellen did not know how to play Freddy's way. And while Freddy played with blocks, Ellen messed up Freddy's blocks. Freddy (because Ellen knocked down his blocks) pinched Ellen. And Ellen, she cried. He does not seem to get much attention, until he lands a role in a school play as a green kangaroo.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islands_in_the_Stream_(novel)"title="Islands in the Stream (novel)">
The first act, "Bimini", begins with an introduction to the character of Thomas Hudson, a typical Hemingway stoic male figure. Hudson is an American painter who finds tranquility on the island of Bimini, in the Bahamas, a far cry from his usual adventurous lifestyle. Hudson's strict routine of work is interrupted when his three sons arrive for the summer and is the setting for most of the act. Also introduced in this act is the character of Roger Davis, a writer, one of Hudson's oldest friends. Though similar to Hudson, by struggling with an unmentioned internal conflict, Davis seems to act as a more dynamic and outgoing image of Hudson's character. The act ends with Hudson receiving news of the death of his two youngest children soon after they leave the island."Cuba" takes place soon thereafter during the Second World War in Havana, Cuba where the reader is introduced to an older and more distant Hudson who has just received news of his oldest (and last) son's death in the war. This second act introduces us to a more cynical and introverted Hudson who spends his days on the island drinking heavily and doing naval reconnaissance for the US military aboard Hudson's yacht, converted to an auxiliary patrol boat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikki_Tikki_Tembo"title="Tikki Tikki Tembo">
"Tikki Tikki Tembo" is set in ancient China and invents an ancient Chinese custom whereby parents honor their first-born sons with long, elaborate names that everyone is obliged to say completelyno nicknames, no shortening of any kindwhile second-born sons are typically given short, unimportant names. A boy named Tikki Tikki Tembo-no Sa Rembo-chari Bari Ruchi-pip Peri Pembo ("The Most Wonderful Thing in the Whole Wide World") and his little brother Chang ("Little or Nothing") are playing very close to a well at their house that their mother has warned them to avoid. Chang falls in the well and his older brother runs to their mother and tells her Chang has fallen down the well. Their mother tells him to get the Old Man with the Ladder. He goes and tells the Old Man. Chang is rescued and then recovers quickly. Some time later, the boys are again playing near the well. This time, the older brother falls in. Chang runs to their mother and tries to tell her that "Tikki Tikki Tembo-no Sa Rembo-chari Bari Ruchi-pip Peri Pembo has fallen into the well." At first she cannot hear him so he says it again. However, because Chang is out of breath from running he sputters and then mispronounces the name. His mother insists that he repeat the namebut with respect. He tries repeatedly until finally his mother tells Chang to get the Old Man with the Ladder. Chang goes to the Old Man with the Ladder. Initially, the old man does not respond because he is asleep. Further, when Chang tries to wake him up, the Old Man with the Ladderannoyedtries to fall back asleep. After Chang breathlessly repeats his brother's predicament the Old Man goes with Chang to save his brother from the well. They get Tikki Tikki Tembo-no Sa Rembo-chari Bari Ruchi-pip Peri Pembo from the well, but because of the long time he was in the well, it takes longer for him to recover. The end of the story says that this is why the Chinese have short names.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redemption_(Ali_novel)"title="Redemption (Ali novel)">
Ezra Einstein calls an international conference in Paris whose British sections are 'the Hoods' (the WRP), 'the Rockers' (SWP) and 'the Burrowers League' (Militant). Also invited are the 'Proletarian International Socialist Party of American Workers' (PISPAW) (SWP-US) and representatives from the 'New Life Journal' ("New Left Review").Faced with the collapse of world communism, Einstein concludes that the best way forward is to become a religious movement. The new religion would be a synthesis of Freemasonry, Islam and Christianity with the ideas of the PISPAW, the Burrowers and the Rockers. The movement would be called 'Chrislamasonism' and it would hold up "popular saints" such as Hegel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Down"title="Shuttle Down">
In the book, the Space Shuttle "Atlantis" launches on a polar orbit flight from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California. During the launch, the main engines cut off prematurely and the Shuttle is forced to make an emergency landing on Easter Island.Officials at NASA must manage the technological challenge of recovering the shuttle. Problems include a lack of documents for the astronauts and shuttle, bringing in the crane that is used to lift the Shuttle onto the specially-modified 747 that carries it, widening the runway to accommodate the 747, building turn-arounds on the runway, and bringing in fuel for the plane.A subplot involves efforts by the Soviet Union to take the Shuttle for itself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Face_(Vance_novel)"title="The Face (Vance novel)">
Kirth Gersen pursues the notorious criminal Lens Larque, one of the five so-called Demon Princes, across several worlds, most notably Aloysius, the harsh desert world Dar Sai (inhabited by the Darsh, of whom Larque is one) and the more temperate and genteel Methel, which has grown rich doing business on Dar Sai. Gersen determines that Larque is connected somehow with a seemingly worthless Dar Sai company called Kotzash Mutual. Gersen, by dint of skill and cleverness, gains control of the company. He also rescues Jerdian Chanseth, a young aristocratic Methlen woman, and a brief romance blossoms between them.Gersen then travels to Methel to investigate Kotzash. Gersen attempts to renew his relationship with Jerdian, going so far as to buy the mansion next to her family's, but is rejected as a suitor by her father, bank owner Adario Chanseth, who uses the law to nullify the sale of the house. It turns out that Larque had himself tried to buy the same estate, but had also been thwarted by the same Methlen law, with Chanseth telling Larque (not knowing who he was at the time) that he had no wish to see his "great Darsh face hanging over my garden fence."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Machine"title="The Killing Machine">
Kirth Gersen sets his sights on Kokor Hekkus, one of the Demon Princes. To hone his skills, Gersen spends time as a "weasel", a police spy in the lawless Beyond. He is sent to disrupt a meeting between a criminal named Billy Windle and a Mr Hoskins. Gersen learns that Billy Windle is Kokor Hekkus. Hekkus is trying to sell the secret of immortality for instructions on how to create perfect counterfeit money, but Gersen ends up with the latter process.He then learns that Hekkus is perpetrating a series of kidnappings of extremely wealthy people and discovers why. When a beautiful, young woman named Alusz Iphigenia Eperje-Tokay, who claims to be from the legendary lost planet Thamber, discovered that Hekkus wanted her, she sought refuge at the only place she could think of that could not be pressured into surrendering her to him: Interchange. Interchange facilitates the exchange of kidnap victims for their ransoms, and Hekkus cannot afford to lose its services. She acted as her own "kidnapper" and set the highest ransom Interchange would allow, but Hekkus is steadily amassing the enormous sum.During his investigation, Gersen ransoms Myron Patch, an engineer who built for Hekkus a walking "fort" in the shape of a "dnazd", a many-legged monster native to Thamber. After a dispute over the project, Hekkus took Patch captive. Gersen tries to lure Hekkus within his reach by offering to modify the fort to Hekkus's satisfaction, but is himself kidnapped and sent to Interchange. Fortunately, he deciphers Hoskins' notes on how to counterfeit currency, and thereby manages to forge enough money to free himself. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_at_the_Top_(novel)"title="Room at the Top (novel)">
Joe Lampton, demobilised at the end of the Second World War, is starting in a new job as an accountant with the Municipal Treasury in the Yorkshire market town of Warley. He is 25 years old and of working class background from the industrial town of Dufton. He was in the RAF but spent most of the war as a POW, using this time to study accountancy. Joe has been living with his aunt and uncle because his parents were killed by a stray bomb during the war. He is determined to make something of himself, and dreams of a job paying ₤1,000 a year.In Warley, he lodges with the Thompsons, who live in the most affluent part of town, known locally as "T'top". The Thompsons introduce him to the local amateur dramatic society and there he meets Susan Brown, the 19 year old daughter of a successful local businessman. He also meets Alice Aisgill, who is nine years his senior, childless, and unhappily married to a businessman who is rumoured to be having an affair with his secretary.Joe is attracted to Susan and invites her out to the ballet, even though she is ostensibly the girlfriend of Jack Wales, a rich former RAF officer with a distinguished war record. Susan accepts the invitation and they have an enjoyable evening. Afterwards, Joe drives past the large and expensive homes of Jack and Susan and laughs at himself for thinking that he could ever marry Susan. After rehearsing a play at the theatre, Alice and Joe drive to Sparrow Hill, overlooking Warley, where Alice seduces him. Alice asks Joe not to fall in love with her, but suggests they should become "loving friends".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_the_Indian,_Save_the_Man"title="Kill the Indian, Save the Man">
The book is written in the form of an extended essay divided into several chapters. It is titled "Genocide by Any Other Name – American Indian Residential Schools in Context." The opening sequence defines Churchill's terms of reference by analyzing the meaning of genocide according to Raphael Lemkin. The ECOSOC Genocide Convention – Churchill writes – was ratified in Canada in 1952 and in the US in 1986 with notable objections to changes from nine other signatories. Both countries remained in violation of the convention in the following decades through the government-sponsored relocation and sterilization programs. In the next chapter, Churchill traces the history of the mandatory attendance of Native American children at residential schools as a violation of the convention after it was signed, with its history going back to the 1870s. The initiative entailed the physical transfer of children from their families, with the use of force, to receive education in so-called boarding schools. Churchill analyzes this as an act of cultural genocide, since the forced assimilationist policies (as school policies) prohibited the use of the students' own languages and their exercise of their own religions or cultural practices. Particularly in the early years, the schools were generally run by religious organizations, many of which had already established missions among the Native Americans. During the nearly 100-year history of the schools, conditions varied from place to place, yet some former students have also reported positive experiences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_at_the_Top"title="Life at the Top">
It is ten years further on from when last we learned of Joe's life in "Room At The Top". He now has everything he thought he wanted – the upper-class wife, an executive job, two cars and two children for his new house. Yet, Joe is still a dissatisfied man – his job had not moved significantly forward in the last ten years.This dissatisfaction leads him back to his old philandering ways – spurred on by the knowledge of his wife's own infidelity. Joe and Susan separate temporarily but, towards the novel's close, Joe is drawn back to his life in Warley in response to trouble with his children and the self-knowledge of what his life needs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corduroy_(book)"title="Corduroy (book)">
The book tells the story of a teddy bear named Corduroy, displayed on a toy shelf in a department store. One day, a young girl named Lisa arrives at the store with her mother and spots the bear. She is eager to buy him, but her mother refuses to spend more money. In addition, she notices that the bear is missing a button from his overalls and points this out to Lisa in an attempt to convince her that the bear isn't worth it.At night, when the shoppers and the people of the department store have gone (and the doors are closed and locked), little Corduroy (when no one is looking) decides to find the missing button himself and goes on a trip around the department store. He rides an escalator and takes himself to the second floor. There, he finds furniture he has never seen before. Corduroy admires the furniture and crawls onto a mattress from one of the beds. Meanwhile, he sees something small and round. Thinking that one of the mattress buttons is the one he is missing, he pulls hard on it and eventually topples from the bed, knocking over a lamp. The store security guard (in the book called a "night watchman") hears the noise from the third floor, discovers the bear, and returns him to the toy department. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murder_Room"title="The Murder Room">
The Dupayne Museum is an eclectic collection of English memorabilia from the period between World War I and World War II. The murder room of the title refers to a room displaying relics of murders that occurred during this period. The Dupayne Museum is the property of three siblings, who are in the midst of a family row over whether or not to renew the lease on the building that houses the museum. When Neville Dupayne is killed in a manner mirroring one of the murders displayed in the Murder Room, Commander Dalgliesh is called in to investigate.Emma Lavenham, a character from "Death in Holy Orders", becomes important in this novel as a romance develops between her and Commander Dalgliesh. The novel ends with a love letter from Dalgliesh to Lavenham, in which he asks her to marry him. She accepts his proposal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_Sin_(James_novel)"title="Original Sin (James novel)">
The murder of Peverell Press's managing director, ambitious Gerard Etienne, seems to be the horrible end of a series of malicious pranks in the company headquarters. When Adam Dalgliesh is called to the scene to solve the murder, he soon finds out that the killer does not intend to stop with Etienne.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Interruption_of_Everything"title="The Interruption of Everything">
Marilyn Grimes, a 44-year-old mother of three has spent her time deferring her dreams to create the perfect suburban life for her family: her grown-up children, her live-in mother-in-law, an elderly poodle named Snuffy, and her workaholic husband Leon. She also keeps in touch with her friends (Paulette and Bunny), her aging mother, and her foster sister while juggling a part-time job as an amateur crafts maker. This is a story of a woman who has too much on her plate and nothing to feed her desires and dreams.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silver_Sword"title="The Silver Sword">
“Joseph Balicki", the headmaster of a primary school in Warsaw, was arrested by German soldiers in early 1940, a few months into the Second World War, and taken away to a prison camp hundreds of miles away in the Polish highlands. His primary school was taken over and the students forced to be taught in German. Pictures of Adolf Hitler had been put up around the school, and Joseph had secretly turned one of these pictures around to face the wall while he was teaching. Someone had reported this to the Germans and as a result, he was taken from his house to the prison camp on a cold winter's night. His Swiss wife, Margrit, and three children (Ruth aged nearly 13, Edek 11, and Bronia 3) were left behind to fend for themselves and survive. He spent more than a year in prison before escaping; he then set off to his hometown.Having fled his prison camp after knocking out a guard and stealing his uniform, Joseph arrived at a house in a village across the valley from the prison camp and took shelter with an elderly couple living there. They were at first confused by his Polish appearance and speech, as well as with his German uniform, but they accepted him as a friend after he told them about what had happened to him and showed them the prison number ZAK 2473 branded on his arm as proof. Shortly after his arrival, they heard the prison camp "escape bell" ringing in the distance, and he realised his escape must have been detected. German soldiers arrived the next day searching for the escapee but Joseph had hidden up a chimney to avoid being captured or shot. Two soldiers had entered the house and they fired bullets up the chimney to discover if anyone was hiding there but they fled the house (fearful of ruining their uniforms) after dislodging a heap of soot. Joseph spent two weeks in the house before beginning the long journey back to Warsaw.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuck_Everlasting"title="Tuck Everlasting">
Ten-year-old Winifred "Winnie" Foster, who lives at the edge of the village of Treegap, decides to run away from her overbearing family. That evening, a man in a yellow suit approaches the Foster home, looking for information. Winnie, the man, and Winnie's grandmother hear a music box playing in the wood near the Fosters' house.The next morning, Winnie explores the wood. While the Fosters own the wood, they never enter it. She sees a young man, Jesse Tuck, drink from a small spring. When she asks his age, he first says he's 104 years old, then changes his answer to seventeen. Winnie wants to drink from the spring, but Jesse stops her. When she mentions her father, Jesse becomes scared she will tell him about the spring. Jesse's mother Mae and brother Miles arrive. They seize Winnie, taking her to their home and pleading with her not to be scared. On the road, they pass the man in the yellow suit.The Tucks explain that, 87 years ago, they had passed through the wood while looking for land to farm. They drank from the spring. After twenty years, the Tucks realized they were not aging. Miles's wife left him, taking their son and daughter. Forced to leave their farm, the Tucks returned in the direction of Treegap. After seeing that the clearing around the spring had not changed in twenty years, the Tucks realized that the spring had made them immortal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sideways_(novel)"title="Sideways (novel)">
The novel is the story of two friends, Miles and Jack, who take a road trip to the Santa Ynez Valley AVA a week before Jack plans to marry. Miles is a recently divorced wine aficionado who struggles to publish his novels. Jack is a charismatic television director who is determined to engage in a short affair before his marriage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Six"title="The Big Six">
The Ds return to Norfolk, hoping to enjoy a holiday with their friends of the Coot Club. Unfortunately, they find the Death and Glories (Pete, Bill and Joe) coming under a gathering cloud of suspicion of setting moored boats adrift.Everywhere they go, boats seem to be cast adrift; and they are threatened with being forbidden to sail, for fear of their fathers being disgraced and possibly losing their jobs. Things get worse when new shackles are stolen from a boatbuilder after one of the casting off episodes and some of them are found aboard the "Death and Glory". At the same time, the boys seem to be flush with cash, but they won't say where they got it. However, they had accepted a tow from the "Cachalot", owned by a keen pike fisherman, and by chance and courage had hooked a colossal pike while the owner was at the local pub. The fisherman swore them to silence about this exploit, but, being an honourable man, had given them the money that the landlord of the pub had promised him, since he had done nothing towards landing the fish.The Big Six (Dick, Dorothea, Tom Dudgeon, and the three Death and Glories) get together to investigate the crimes and collect evidence. Dorothea is the intellectual of the party and Dick's camera comes to the fore. The opposition consists of the local policeman, PC Tedder, and a group of local vigilantes, among whom is George Owdon, the villain of the earlier book, "Coot Club", who consequently has a grudge to work off. Eventually, with the help of the owner of the "Cachalot", a carefully prepared trap is sprung and in a flash (literally, to take a night photo of the real culprits) the villains are discovered and the boys are exonerated. The source of their secret supply of money is uncovered when the local pub unveils the magnificent pike, now stuffed and mounted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Common_Sense_Book_of_Baby_and_Child_Care"title="The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care">
"The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care" is arranged by topics corresponding to the child's age, ranging from infancy to teenage years. Drawn from his career as a pediatrician, Spock's advice is comprehensive, dealing with topics such as preparing for the baby, toilet training, school, illnesses, and "special problems" like "separated parents" and "the fatherless child".Unlike leading child care experts prior to the 1940s, Spock supports flexibility in child-rearing, advising parents to treat each child as an individual. Drawing on his psychoanalytic training, he explains the behavior and motivations of children at each stage of growth, allowing parents to make their own decisions about how to raise their children. For example, Spock has an entire chapter devoted to "The One-Year-Old," in which he explains that babies at this age like to explore the world around them. He then suggests ways to arrange the house and prevent accidents with a "wandering baby."Spock emphasizes that ultimately, the parents' "natural loving care" for their children is most important. He reminds parents to have confidence in their abilities and to trust their common sense; his practice as a pediatrician had proven to him that parents' instincts were usually best.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(Nesbø_novel)"title="Nemesis (Nesbø novel)">
During a bank robbery in Oslo, a lone robber holds a teller hostage and threatens to kill her unless the ATM is emptied within 25 seconds before the police can arrive. When the transfer takes 31 seconds, the robber executes the hostage and flees. The case goes unsolved until a police video evidence expert, Beate Lønn, surmises from the footage that the robber and the hostage knew each other. Lønn and Inspector Harry Hole are assigned to the murder investigation. Further robberies occur in the same way, but the hostages meet the robber's specified time limit and are spared.While Hole's girlfriend Rakel and her son Oleg are in Moscow, Hole is invited to dinner with an old girlfriend named Anna Bethsen, a flamboyant painter. The following morning, Hole awakens in his own apartment with a hangover and no memory of the night before. Later that day, Anna is found dead of an apparent suicide. Seeing that the gun is not in the right hand, Hole believes that Anna was murdered and that the scene was staged. A photograph found near her body suggests the involvement of a rich businessman who may have been Anna's lover. Hole conceals evidence of his presence in Anna's flat, unable to prove that he himself is not the killer, and believing that he is being set up for the crime. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodhype"title="Bloodhype">
The Vom is an intergalactic intelligence described as a large black blob resembling a gigantic amoeba, impervious to almost all energy and physical attack. Following years of battle with the Tar-Aiym it has sheltered on a planet where it has gone dormant for 500,000 years, waiting for an opportunity to escape the Tar-Aiym Guardian orbiting in space above it. Carmot MMYM, a commander in the AAnn Empire, discovers the Vom and brings it to the planet Repler for study at an AAnn base that had been conceded to the reptilians as part of a negotiated settlement of ownership of the planet; the AAnn base is sovereign territory, allowing them to conceal the nature of their work.Lieutenants Kitten “Kitty” Kai-sung, a female human, and Porsupah-al, a male Tolian, have been sent by the Intelligence Arm of the United Church to Repler to investigate the newly re-established trade in the drug bloodhype (also known as "jaster", "silly salt", "brain-up", and "phinto") as the most deadly and addictive drug in and outside the Humanx Commonwealth. Once on Repler they make contact with the drug trader Dominick Rose, who had used an unwitting Captain Malcolm "Mal" Hammurabi and his ship, the "Umbra", as unwilling transporters of bloodhype. Mal discovers the drug accidentally, and determines that Rose caused it to be included with the shipment that Mal brought to Repler; angry, Mal secures the drug on board his ship and goes to confront Rose, proposing to exchange his silence (and the destruction of the drug) for Rose avoiding arrest and mind-wipe by ceasing all production and distribution.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_Star"title="Orphan Star">
The novel takes place in 550 A.A. (After Amalgamation in Foster’s timeline, 2950 AD). Flinx, no longer a poor orphan, is chasing a merchant to Hivehom and Terra in search of information about his parentage. Along the way Flinx is joined by Sylzenzuzex, a female Thranx member of the Commonwealth Church. His chase leads him to Ulru-Ujurr, a planet under Edict from the United Church, ostensibly because it contains a highly intelligent telepathic race. It is on Ulru-Ujurr that he discovers the mystery of his parentage and begins the childlike Ulru-Ujurrians on their "Game of Civilization".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_the_Matter"title="The End of the Matter">
The novel takes place immediately after "Orphan Star" with Flinx taking his new space ship, "Teacher" built by the Ulru-Ujurrians, to Alaspin, the home planet of his minidrag Pip, in search of the man who bid on him when Flinx was a child in a slave auction.He not only finds this man, Skua September, but also acquires a strange new alien pet Abalamahalamatandra—Ab for short—and is pursued by an assassin squad called the Qwarm. Flinx's friends Bran Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex show up looking for Ab in the hope of finding an ancient weapon, thought to possibly be capable of stopping a rogue black hole, before the three inhabited planets on the black hole's course are sucked in.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islands_in_the_Sky"title="Islands in the Sky">
At age sixteen, Roy Malcolm has made himself an expert in the history of aviation, so much so that he wins the Aviation Quiz Program, presented on television by World Airways, Inc. Because the prize was described as an all expenses paid trip to “any part of the earth” (rather than on Earth), Roy is able to request a trip to the Inner Station, which is considered part of Earth because its orbit lies under the one-thousand-kilometer limit of earth's legal territory.Riding the rocketship "Sirius" out of Port Goddard in the high mountains of New Guinea, Roy goes to the Inner Station, five hundred miles above Earth, for a two-week stay. He is first taken to meet Commander Doyle, who introduces him to a team of apprentices. Their leader, Tim Benton, shows Roy around the station. For the rest of his time on the station Roy stays with the apprentices, studying with them and sharing their activities. After a few days they take him to the "Morning Star", the now derelict, though refurbished, rocketship that had taken five men to Venus in 1985. The old rocketship serves as a clubhouse for the young men.Because of the popularity of a TV series called "Dan Drummond, Space Detective" and one young man's pastime of trying to figure out how crime, especially piracy, could be profitable in space, Roy and his friends immediately become suspicious when the rocketship "Cygnus" and her secretive crew come to the Inner Station. Two of the apprentices go to investigate when the ship is left unattended and find that she's carrying what appear to be ray guns. It turns out that the ship belongs to a movie studio that intends to shoot the first movie filmed in space.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flinx_in_Flux"title="Flinx in Flux">
The book opens upon a meeting of ecological fanatics plotting against operations on Longtunnel. Lifeforms are being modified by gengineers, and they intend to stop the perversion of nature. The scene switches to Alaspin. Flinx has returned to the planet to release Pip's offspring into the wild. The minidrag became pregnant in "The End of the Matter". While returning to town, Flinx's empathic abilities detect someone hurt nearby. Flinx discovers a woman, badly hurt, and with bruises that suggest interrogation of some sort. He returns to town, but no one seems to know of a missing woman. He takes her to his hotel and she regains consciousness and reveals herself to be Clarity Held. She explains that she is a gengineer working for Coldstripe on Longtunnel. Fanatics attempting to stop the work kidnapped her. This sparks uncertainty in Flinx, due to his past of genetic alteration by the Meliorare Society.Later, while sleeping, people in chameleon suits attack them in the hotel. Flinx and Clarity escape and return to Alaspinport, where Flinx smuggles Clarity onto the Teacher, his personal ship in order to return her to Longtunnel. On the voyage, their relationship becomes romantic.They land on Longtunnel and Clarity begins showing Flinx around the facilities. All structures are contained in an extensive cavern system since the surface is inhospitable. The caverns are home to a wide variety of flora and fauna that redefine the preconceived Humanx notions of evolution and possible lifeforms. Clarity introduces Flinx to Alynasmolia Vandervort, the leader of the Coldstripe compound.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Love_of_Mother-Not"title="For Love of Mother-Not">
The story of Flinx is begun in this novel, exploring his early years growing up with Mother Mastiff on the planet Moth. Young Philip Lynx is purchased in a slave auction by Mother Mastiff for one hundred credits. After years of raising the boy, whose full origins are unknown to his adoptive mother, she suddenly disappears. Flinx pursues her across the rainy world of Moth and discovers she has been kidnapped by the mysterious Meliorare Society, a group known to have experimented with eugenics that might very well be the source of Flinx’s unusual talents.Flinx is gifted with empathic powers and able to project emotions and read the emotions of others. Mother Mastiff also realizes later on that it was not her desire to buy the boy but his desire to be bought that was intentionally pushed on to her by Flinx.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Flinx"title="Mid-Flinx">
As the story opens, Flinx is at loose ends, looking for peace and quiet on a backwater world. But the local bully takes a shine to Flinx's longtime companion, an empathic and poisonous flying snake, or minidrag, and insists on buying it.When the situation becomes life-threatening, Flinx and his snake, Pip, flee the planet, instructing the space ship to fly into random uncharted space. The ship takes them to a supposedly undiscovered planet, covered with jungle a mile thick. Flinx exits his lander - and is nearly killed by a huge, transparent flying creature.But something draws him on to explore this lush and beautiful world where the flowers have hidden teeth and even the water may reach up and grab you; for the first time in years, his headaches are gone. Risking death with every cautious step, he is finally rescued from a most ingenious botanical predator by a band of humans - descendants of a lost colony ship long forgotten. Flinx has a liaison with one of them.These humans have companions, not pets, but apparently native creatures whose lives are bound inextricably (unto death) with their particular human. And they and the humans have some sort of peculiar empathic relationship with the planet - more significantly, with the plant life. While it does not become obvious until future novels, the empathic nature of Midworld is vital to allowing Flinx to accomplish his ultimate task.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reunion_(Foster_novel)"title="Reunion (Foster novel)">
Flinx has returned to Earth for only the second time in his life to search out the records of the extensive computer network known as the Shell that is maintained by the Unified Church. To do so he uses his empathic Talent to seduce Elena Carolles, a security guard in the Shell, and convinces her to allow him direct access to the most secure databanks. In the Shell he discovers a new bit of data about his mysterious past, information about the Meliorare Society, but the file containing this data has already been stolen by an operative hiding behind the front company Larnaca Nutrition.The agent has absconded with the file to the bleak desert planet Pyrassis deep in AAnn held territory. Flinx has no recourse but to pursue in his own space ship, "Teacher", leaving Elena in an emotional lurch. Once he reaches Pyrassis he finds the agent's ship, the "Crotase", in orbit and apparently abandoned. A search of the ship for the missing file turns up nothing, so Flinx must pursue the ship's crew to the planet surface. On his trip down to confront the thief, he discovers that his shuttle has been sabotaged by the "Crotase's" AI. He crash lands far from his target, the camp of the ship's crew. Now forced to march across the desert with few supplies and only Pip, his minidrag, for company Flinx discovers the strange flora and fauna that exist on the harsh world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cavern_of_Black_Ice"title="A Cavern of Black Ice">
The story begins with a woman named Tarissa giving birth to a girl outside the city Spire Vanis. The girl, Ash March (possibly the daughter of Jack, from the Book of Words, is taken in by Penthero Iss, Spire Vanis's Surlord (a supreme ruler). After discovering that she will soon be moved to more prison-like quarters by the supposedly benevolent Surlord, she escapes.The book also relates the tale of a young clansman of the Blackhail clan named Raif Sevrance. Raif and his brother, Drey, return from hunting one morning to discover their party has been slain. After dispensing final rites to their clansmen, the brothers return home to find the foster son of the chief, Mace Blackhail relating a different version of the tale implicating Clan Bludd in the death of their friends and family. Mace becomes chief of Clan Blackhail through various acts of treachery and declares war on Clan Bludd; Raif realises that Mace is lying, but no one else who speaks against Mace lives to tell the tale. Raif is forced by social pressure in a raid on what Mace says is a Clan Bludd battle party; it instead contains the (innocent) family of Vaylo, chief of Clan Bludd. Refusing Mace's orders to kill these innocents, Raif flees and is exiled from his clan for disobeying orders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Small_Town_in_Germany"title="A Small Town in Germany">
The novel is set in the late 1960s, in Bonn, the capital of West Germany. Great Britain is hoping to gain support from the West German government in a bid to enter the European Common Market. From London, Alan Turner, an official from the British Foreign Office, arrives to investigate the disappearance of Leo Harting, a minor British Embassy officer; moreover, secret files have disappeared with him. The embassy's head of Chancery, Rawley Bradfield, is hostile to Turner's investigation. Despite that, he is dinner party host to Turner and Ludwig Siebkron, head of the German Interior Ministry; the latter is close to industrialist Klaus Karfeld, who is successfully building a new nationalist political movement which is anti-British and anti-Western European, and which seeks to turn West Germany away from Western Europe and bring it closer to Communist Eastern Europe. Great Britain's diplomatic mission perceives growing support for Karfeld's movement as a threat to obtaining support for Britain's entry into the Common Market.Initially, Turner suspects Harting is a spy, probably working for a Communist government. He comes to discover that Harting had once been a war crime investigator in Germany and he has been secretly using Chancery resources to continue investigating Karfeld's career as the war-time administrator of a Nazi laboratory that poisoned 31 half-Jews, crimes for which Karfeld had been investigated but for which he escaped responsibility. Harting is, in fact, hiding from Siebkron, who is aware of Karfeld's crimes and seeks to protect him from being exposed. To Turner's chagrin, Bradfield is unsympathetic to Harting's circumstances and uninterested in protecting him because he considers him a criminal and a political embarrassment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poseidon_Adventure_(novel)"title="The Poseidon Adventure (novel)">
Formerly the RMS "Atlantis", the SS "Poseidon" is a luxury ocean liner from the golden age of travel, converted to a single-class, combination cargo-cruise liner. The ship is on her first North Atlantic crossing under new ownership, celebrated with a month long Christmas voyage from Lisbon to African and South American ports. On December 26, the "Poseidon" is overturned when it has the misfortune of being directly above the location of an undersea earthquake. The ship capsizes as it falls into the sudden void caused by the quake displacing millions of gallons of seawater.Starting from the upper deck dining room, preacher Reverend Frank "Buzz" Scott leads a small group of (often unwilling) followers towards the keel of the ship, trying to avoid the rising water level and other such hazards. Those stuck within the dining saloon are unwilling to follow the Reverend, and stay behind.Those survivors choosing to follow Scott climb a Christmas tree to ascend into the galley area where they meet some stewards and kitchen crew. There is a great debate about whether to try to reach one of the propeller shafts at the stern, or to go forward to the bow. One of the stewards fears the lockers that hold the anchor chains will have flooded, and suggests that they try for the engine room.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flinx's_Folly"title="Flinx's Folly">
While on Goldin IV looking for new experiences, Flinx accidentally renders unconscious a group of twenty innocent bystanders when his Talent starts projecting to others in his immediate vicinity. He and the others are hospitalized but unhurt; knowing he is still wanted by the Commonwealth for his past crimes, Flinx gives a false name and slips out of the hospital, but to no less danger. He is now being pursued by the Order of Null, a quasi-religious group that worships death itself as expressed in the great evil that is approaching the Commonwealth—the same great evil that Flinx is able to sense and communicate with through his Talent.After escaping from the Order of Null and the planetary authorities, Flinx decides he needs to reflect on his life and talk over his difficulties with someone who understands him. Since that particular type of person is extremely rare in the universe, he settles on finding Clarity Held, the woman he fell in love with on Longtunnel, who is now a gengineer on New Riviera, a paradise world.Finding Clarity proves easy, the difficult part is dealing with her boyfriend Bill Ormann, a vice-president of the gengineering firm for whom she now works. He is eager to make Clarity his wife but she is more reluctant to marry. After tolerating a growing attraction between the two, Ormann decides he is losing Clarity to Flinx and sets out to remove the young man from the relationship. After a pair of failed attempts to warn his rival off with use of violence, Ormann is forced to act himself with the intention of killing Flinx.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliding_Scales"title="Sliding Scales">
In "Sliding Scales" Flinx is confounded by how to proceed with his life. He abandoned his injured girlfriend, Clarity Held, on the planet New Riviera under the protection of his friends Truzenzuzex and Bran Tse-Mallory (see events in "Flinx's Folly") with the understanding he would search the galaxy for the Tar-Aiym weapons platform that has once been in the system Pyrassis. Not knowing where to go to start the search, Flinx first visits his homeworld of Moth, then broods as his ship, "Teacher" takes him aimlessly through the galaxy. "Teacher’s" AI suggests something unusual to take him out of his funk: a vacation. This is followed another surprising suggestion: that he take the vacation in an isolated world that lies within an area of space that is claimed by both the AAnn Empire and The Humanx Commonwealth; a near-desert planet named Jast.The native sentient species of Jast is the Vssey, a single-sex species that resembles and acts much like a giant mobile mushroom. The Vssey are loosely allied with the AAnn, though not yet a part of their empire. Some members of the Vssey are strongly opposed to a closer alliance, though the ruling government seeks to bring the two worlds closer together. Flinx enters this unsettled atmosphere and is immediately suspected of being a spy for the Humanx Commonwealth. Taken by Secondary Administrator Takuuna VBXLLW on what is to be a sightseeing tour of a canyon. Either through accident or fortune Takunna’s tail knocks Flinx over the edge of the canyon and to his death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_from_the_Deity"title="Running from the Deity">
Continuing his pursuit of the alien weapon's platform, the Krang, Flinx finds himself heading into the Blight—where the Krang has presumably gone—but is informed by his ship, "Teacher", that repairs are necessary before they can continue. The repairs can be simply done by "Teacher’s" autonomic controls, but the need for raw materials force Flinx to land the entire KK-drive ship on the world of Arrawd.Arrawd is classified by the Humanx Commonwealth as a Class IVB world, placing it technologically at 19th century Earth levels, the initial development of the steam engine. Because the planet is at such a low technology level, first contact with aliens is forbidden, a rule that Flinx once again ignores.On an excursion from his ship while it is repairing itself, Flinx falls and injures his ankle, leading to his discovery by two members of the Dwarra, a married couple Storra and Ebbanai. They assist the human to their home where he is able to heal himself with some simple Commonwealth technology. His use of such magical technology and his physical prowess—the gravity of Arrawd is much lower than Terran standard—quickly leads Storra to spread stories of his abilities. The couple takes advantage of Flinx's good will and begin to profit from the human's agreement to help heal those who come to the couple's farm. When this is discovered by Flinx he resolves to leave the planet, but too late it seems for his presence has started a war between three of the local governments, all seeking to control the new god that has come to their world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrimony_(novel)"title="Patrimony (novel)">
Once again diverting from his assigned task of finding the ancient Tar-Aiym weapon that will help save the galaxy from the approaching evil, Flinx lands on the planet Gestalt, known as Tlel to its natives, looking for his father.In the previous volume of the series, Flinx was told his male parent, a former member of the Meliorare Society, was now living on an obscure minor planet that was part of the Commonwealth. Though the information was suspect, coming from a dying member of the Meliorares, Flinx jumped at the opportunity.Following a series of adventures, including his attempted murder at the hands of a local hit man hired by the Order of Null, Flinx finds his father. Or rather, he finds the last man associated with his creation. Since Flinx is a semi-successful experiment in eugenics, the man he finds is just another Meliorare in hiding. However, the man reveals to him that Flinx was the product of so much DNA splicing that he has no real parents; no father who donated sperm, and his dead mother was nothing more than a surrogate womb for hire.Upset that Flinx, who does not reveal the true extent of his talents, was hardly the super-genetic success they had hoped for, Flinx's creator attempts to kill him, but only wounds the minidrag Pip before Flinx's erratic yet powerful mental gifts save his life, but destroy all traces of the scientist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eight_(novel)"title="The Eight (novel)">
"The Eight" features two intertwined storylines set two centuries apart. The first takes place in the 1970s and follows American computer expert Catherine "Cat" Velis as she is sent to Algeria for a special assignment. The second is set in the 1790s and revolves around Mireille, a novice nun at Montglane Abbey, in the French Pyrenees. The fates of both characters are interwoven as they try to unravel the mystery behind the Montglane Service, a chess set that holds the key to a game of unlimited power. A gift from the Moors to Emperor Charlemagne, these pieces have been hunted fervently throughout the years by those seeking ultimate control.In the throes of the French Revolution, Mireille and her cousin Valentine must help in dispersing the pieces of the chess set to keep them out of the wrong hands. However, when Valentine is brutally murdered in the Reign of Terror, Mireille is thrown into the midst of men and women who would pursue power at any cost, including Napoleon, Robespierre, Talleyrand, Catherine the Great, and more. She comes to realize she must rely on her own intuition and tenacity to accomplish her goal.In 1972, Cat Velis faces a similar atmosphere of conspiracy, assassination and betrayal. When she is requested by an antique dealer to recover the chess pieces, she unwittingly enters into a mysterious game that will endanger her life. As she learns the story of the Montglane Service, she begins to realize that players of the Game may plan their moves, but their very existence makes them pawns as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spellsinger_(novel)"title="Spellsinger (novel)">
In a world of sentient animals and humans, the hardheaded tortoise wizard Clothahump searches across the dimensions for another kind of wizard to help defeat the looming threat posed by the armies of the Plated Folk. What he gets is Jonathon Thomas Meriweather, law student, part-time would-be rock guitarist and janitor, who finds that with the use of a unique instrument called a duar, he can perform magic by playing and choosing from his well-worn repertoire of rock. Jon-Tom, as he is called in Clothahump's world, quickly discovers that while he might be able to use magic with his music making, the results are often unpredictable and usually humorous. Ever searching for a way to get back to Earth, Jon-Tom takes up the battle to save this world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hour_of_the_Gate"title="The Hour of the Gate">
Barely accustomed to the strange new world in which he has found himself trapped, Jon-Tom accompanies the wizard Clothahump to try to mount a defense against the invasion of the monstrous insectoid Plated Folk. He and his otter companion Mudge, along with other allies gained in "Spellsinger", find themselves faced with ever more serious obstacles: From an underground river that leads to the four waterfalls known as The Earth's Throat, to the spider-silk city of the wary Weavers and their horrific arachnid queen, into the heart of Plated Folk territory, and even to the stars themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Dissonance"title="The Day of the Dissonance">
Jon-Tom, with the somewhat faithful otter Mudge, sets across the Glittergeist Ocean in his strange new world in order to find a magical cure for the dying wizard Clothahump. Along the way he conjures up Roseroar, an Amazonian tiger, rescues Jalwar, the ferret, and together they free Folly, a not so innocent beauty, from bondage. Jon-Tom and his motley crew press on, confronting a forest of Fungoid Frankensteins on the Muddletop Moors, a parrot pirate on the high seas, cannibal fairies in the enchanted canyon, and the evil wizard of Malderpot. They also ally with a shopkeep with a secret and a golden unicorn with his own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moment_of_the_Magician"title="The Moment of the Magician">
The wizard Clothahump described the swamps of the south as "tropical, friendly, and largely uninhabited" when he sent Jon-Tom the Spellsinger and Mudge the Otter to investigate the rising power of a new magician, Marcus the Ineluctable. Along the way they encounter warring colonies of tough-talking prairie dogs, magical mime-vines, a mammoth mountain of living muck and a hidden colony of dreaded Plated Folk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis_Found"title="Atlantis Found">
In 7120 BC, a comet hit North America, abruptly ending several advanced civilizations.In AD 1858, a whaling vessel discovers a 1770s merchant ship frozen in Antarctic ice; included on this ship is a polished obsidian skull.In the present, a group of U.S. scientists discover a mysterious underground chamber in Colorado, including a polished obsidian skull. They are attacked and left to drown, but U.S. National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA) Special Projects Director Dirk Pitt saves them.Another chamber, like the one the scientists found, is discovered on a remote island and Al and Rudi Gunn head there. They make a significant find and are attacked by the same group as the scientists. Meanwhile, Pitt is aboard an icebreaker in Antarctica searching for the 1770s merchant ship and the other skull. He finds the ship and narrowly escapes disaster. A German U-boat, missing since 1945, is destroyed. Pitt dives on it and recovers the body of a female officer.Both skulls found are given to NUMA for study and analysis and a theory about the possibility of them being Atlantean in origin develops.The skulls are examined. Inscription symbols are found and they work on finding translations. Inside, geometrically exact globes are found; however, the continents and coastlines are different from current globes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paths_of_the_Perambulator"title="The Paths of the Perambulator">
The strange world Jon-Tom has found himself trapped in takes a turn for the decidedly weird as Foster’s fantasy series take a page from Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" when the Spellsinger wakes up one morning as a giant crab. The cause, as determined by the turtle wizard Clothahump, is a trapped perambulator: an inter-dimensional creature that wanders through different universes leaving behind random changes to the fabric of the world. Jon-Tom and his friends attempt to free the perambulator before it wreaks permanent havoc on their world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_River"title="Medicine River">
Medicine River chronicles the lives of a group of contemporary First Nations in Western Canada. The novel is divided into eighteen short chapters. The story is recounted by the protagonist, Will, in an amiable, conversational fashion, with frequent flashbacks to earlier portions of his life.In the novel, "Medicine River", Thomas King creates a story of a little community to reflect the whole native nation. A simple return of Will's makes the little town seem to be more colourful. "Medicine River makes non-native readers think a little longer and harder about the lives of the first people they live among and the places they inhabit." Although Will enters the town as a foreigner, he eventually becomes part of the community. Medicine River shows the history of Canada and teaches readers to learn from the past experience in order to become better people.Will meets Louise who becomes an unfulfilled love interest that very much represents Will's existence, a series of half-fulfilled expectations. That is, he develops an ongoing relationship with Louise and her daughter, South Wing, for whom Will becomes a kind of father-figure.It has been included on the high school reading curriculum in many Canadian jurisdictions. One advisor writes, "It is a humorously told 'homecoming novel' that echoes an oral storytelling style, yet at the same time, debunks any kind of stereotypical 'cultural voice.' Although the protagonist is a middle-aged man, the novel is appropriate for young people, simply because of the way it is written, drawing in any audience."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Cinderella"title="Chinese Cinderella">
Ever since Adeline was born, she had been rejected coldly because her family believed her to bring bad luck. Her father's first wife died two weeks after giving birth to her, the fifth child. Soon, her father remarries Jeanne Prosperi (referred to as "Niang" in most of the story, an alternate term for "mother" in Mandarin Chinese), a beautiful half-French woman. She regards his first five children, especially Adeline, with distaste and cruelty while favouring her younger son, Franklin, and daughter, Susan, both born soon after the marriage.The book outlines Adeline's struggle to find a place where she feels she belongs. She did not get very much love from her parents, she finds some solace in relationships with her grandfather (Ye Ye) and her Aunt Baba, but they are taken from her as Niang deems them to exert a bad influence on the children. Adeline immerses herself in striving for academic achievement in the hope of winning her family's appreciation, but also for its own rewards as she finds great pleasure in words and scholarly success, progressing in things that her father and step-mother had never expected, for example by topping her class. She has many friends at school who love her for who she is, but they do not know about her inside life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalayan_Blunder"title="Himalayan Blunder">
The book begins with the narration of Brig. Dalvi's days in the DSSC, Wellington. He narrates an incident where a guest faculty, a retired British official, after hearing that Nehru had signed Panchsheel agreement with China in April 1954 and had decided to give up the post in Tibet that the British had maintained in Tibet to check Chinese advance, interrupted his class and warned that India and China would soon be at war and people in this class would be fighting it. Brig. Dalvi remembers that he was very angry with the gentleman questioning the authority of the leader of his country.Brig. Dalvi also examines the position of Tibet "vis-a-vis" India and China. The British, he says, had insight into China's imperial ambitions. They had therefore cultivated Tibet as a buffer state. Expectedly, the Chinese attacked Tibet in 1950 and captured it. India did not protest the attack owing to Nehru's China-friendly policy. The Chinese began constructing roads from Tibet leading to Aksai Chin near Ladakh. The Chinese had two major claims with respect to Indian territories -1) Aksai Chin in the northeastern section of Ladakh in Kashmir.2) British-designated North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA), which is the present-day state of Arunachal Pradesh.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_of_the_Transference"title="The Time of the Transference">
Nothing is forever in the magical world Jon-Tom has found himself trapped in and as such the duar he uses to create his music-based magic breaks after a battle to save Clothahump from a group of house burglars. He does this by accidentally stepping on a fallen left behind battle axe, cutting himself, and falling back onto the duar and breaking it.The need to find an expert capable of repairing the rare instrument sets Jon-Tom off on another adventure where he and his friend the otter Mudge search for a repair shop for his instrument, along the way they encounter pirates, cannibals, talkative porpoises, a flying horse who is scared of heights and a beautiful female otter, Weegee, who becomes the target of Mudge’s amorous intentions.On the way, Jon-Tom accidentally finds a way back to Earth - to Texas, to be exact - and some of the anthropomorphic animals of his new world, including some very nasty characters, cross over as well. After some unpleasant experiences with American criminals and police, Jon-Tom takes the unequivocal decision to go back to what he realizes is now his true home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_Spellsinger"title="Son of Spellsinger">
Rather than become a spellsinger like his father Jon-Tom, teenage Buncan decides to do his own thing, and puts together a band with Mudge and Weegee’s children that features rap music. Unfortunately for them it is Buncan and his band who possess the power to battle the sinister Grand Veritable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorus_Skating"title="Chorus Skating">
To avoid boredom, Spellsinger Jon-Tom and his faithful otter companion, Mudge, help in the search of a lost chord. Refurbishing some resourceless rogues, prying some pampered princesses from a brute bear, dealing with a sneaky salesman - all in day's work. Thrown out by a town, caught in a mocking maelstrom, a song of a siren leads to the attention of the cetacean community. Finally they have to face their nemesis: a very bad and thoroughly evil singer, a would-be great dictator. They do - with a little help from a Thranx.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battledragon"title="Battledragon">
The Masters of Padmasa have started using a great new terror on the world of Ryetelth, not magic but technology; on the southern continent of Eigo they have begun building cannons that could break the military might of the Argonathi Dragon Legions. To help fight this new threat, the Argonath Empire enlists the aid of western kingdom of Czardha and their horse mounted armored knights. On the southern continent the combined armies find victory when they destroy the enemies’ cannons and factory, but at a very high price for the armies are nearly devastated. In pursuit of the Master Heruta they track him to his lair inside a volcano that erupts during the final battle. Bazil and Relkin survive, but are separated from the rest of the Legion in a strange land full of magic and terror.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragon_Token"title="The Dragon Token">
Pol is torn between anger and guilt at his father's death and relief that he can finally act out against the invading "Vellant'im". As he and his mother, Sioned, try to uncover more about the invaders, they discover hidden secrets within an ancient mirror that had belonged to Sioned's old friend, Camigwen. An ancient sorcerer, Lord Rosseyn, is trapped within the mirror. Rosseyn tells Pol of his past and teaches him more about his sorcerous heritage. Meanwhile, Pol's wife and daughters are attacked by the "Vellant'im". High Princess Meiglan and Rislyn are taken captive, but Andry, who had been travelling from Goddess Keep, saves Jihan.The southern princedoms are slowly being reclaimed, although many lives are lost, including Prince Kostas of Syr and Rihani of Ossetia. The Dorvali resistance mounts raids on the enemy, preventing them from joining the forces on the Continent, and Kierst-Isel remains secure. Goddess Keep is guarded by the "Devr'im" in Andry's absence.Other princedoms, such as Grib and Fessenden, have so far remained neutral, but ambitious and/or devoted Princes try to rouse their fathers and their people.In Firon the sorcerers capture the royal seat in Balarat and control the princedom through young Prince Tirel. Idalain, Tirel's squire in the absence of the boy's father, tries to protect the boy, but is forced to pretend he is unaware that the princedom is being overtaken. Yarin, a sorcerer and Tirel's uncle, names himself Regent of Firon. In order to keep Idalain busy, Yarin orders the squire to teach his kinsman, Aldiar, swordplay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skybowl"title="Skybowl">
The "Vellanti" War continues with the invading "Vellant'im" moving ever closer to their goal: conquering the High Prince. Pol, the High Prince, is forced to make his last stand at Skybowl with Andry, the Lord of Goddess Keep, by his side. Across the Continent, Pol's allies are starting to regain control of their lands. Tilal, Prince of Ossetia, is cutting a path through the southern princedoms, while Arlis, Prince of Kierst-Isel, and Laric, Prince of Firon, attempt to defeat the sorcerers controlling the North.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doña_Bárbara"title="Doña Bárbara">
Santos Luzardo, a graduate lawyer of the Central University of Venezuela, returns to his father's land in the plains of Apure to sell the land but desists when he discovers that it is controlled by a despotic woman, Doña Bárbara, also known as the men's devourer; it is said that she uses seduction and pacts with demonic spirits to satisfy her whims and achieve power.Santos Luzardo meets his cousin Lorenzo Barquero and discovers that he was a victim of the femme fatale, who left him bankrupt and a daughter, Marisela, whom she abandoned and who became quickly a vagrant. Lorenzo lives in poverty in a miserable house consumed by his own constant drunkenness.Doña Bárbara falls in love with Santos Luzardo and, through an internal struggle, comes to abandon her evil ways. Luzardo, however, is charmed by Marisela, no longer living in abandonment and taken under Luzardo's care.The novel ends with the “defeat” of Doña Bárbara, who is able to obtain neither the land nor Luzardo's heart, and finally departs to an unknown location.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catriona_(novel)"title="Catriona (novel)">
The book begins precisely as "Kidnapped" ends, at 2 pm on 25 August 1751, outside the British Linen Company in Edinburgh, Scotland.The first part of the book recounts the attempts of the hero, David Balfour, to gain justice for James Stewart (James of the Glens), who has been arrested and charged with complicity in the Appin Murder. David makes a statement to a lawyer and goes on to meet William Grant of Prestongrange, the Lord Advocate of Scotland, to press the case for James' innocence. However, his attempts fail, as after being reunited with Alan Breck he is once again kidnapped, and confined on the Bass Rock, an island in the Firth of Forth, until the trial is over, and James is condemned to death. David also meets and falls in love with Catriona MacGregor Drummond, the daughter of James MacGregor Drummond, known as James More (who was Rob Roy's eldest son), also held in prison, whose escape she engineers. David also receives some education in the manners and morals of polite society from Barbara Grant, Prestongrange's daughter.In the second part, David and Catriona travel to Holland, where David studies law at the University of Leyden. David takes Catriona under his protection (she having no money) until her father finds them. James More eventually arrives and proves something of a disappointment, drinking a great deal and showing no compunction against living off David's largesse. At this time, David learns of the death of his uncle Ebenezer, and thus gains knowledge that he has come into his full, substantial inheritance. David and Catriona, fast friends at this point, begin a series of misunderstandings that eventually drive her and James More away, although David sends payment to James in return for news of Catriona's welfare. James and Catriona find their way to Dunkirk in northern France. Meanwhile, Alan Breck joins David in Leyden, and he berates David for not understanding women.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_from_Atlantis"title="Attack from Atlantis">
At age seventeen, Don Miller is already an accomplished electronics technician, helping his uncle, Dr. Edward Simpson, with the testing of a new kind of submarine, the "Triton I". Accompanied everywhere by his dog Shep, a schipperke, he has assumed that he would be aboard the boat for its sea trials, though he mans the communications gear on the surface support ship during the submarine's first test run somewhere south of Puerto Rico. That test run is commanded by Dr. Oliver Drake, who designed the submarine's new nuclear propulsion system. The test run is successful, in spite of some problems with the control systems and stress on certain crew members that has made them believe that they have seen, on the television screens that give a view of the outside of the submarine, men encased in form-fitting bubbles.For the full test run the "Triton" will descend into the Milwaukee Deep, north of Puerto Rico. Because the United States Navy has taken an interest in "Triton" and has partly funded her development, the commanding officer on the test run will be Admiral Robert Haller. Dexter, the president's science advisor, and Senator Kenney are to accompany the crew as observers. Another of the observers going along is Sid Upjohn, a reporter. As they descend they find that they are losing control of the boat and, further, that they are being rammed by a whale. Unable to maneuver, they come down on an undersea plateau, twelve hundred fathoms (7200 feet) below the surface. Again they catch glimpses of men encased in bubbles, something that should be impossible. Emerging from the submarine in a bathysuit, Don makes the necessary repairs and the "Triton" leaves the plateau to head for the surface.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_the_Mistwraith"title="Curse of the Mistwraith">
Born on a splinter world, Lysaer and Arithon are half-brothers raised apart in enmity. Cast through a Worldsend Gate, they arrive in Athera, the ancient world of their ancestors cloaked in the fog of the malicious Mistwraith. Found by the Fellowship of Seven and urged to fulfill a prophecy which will free Athera from the Mistwraith and allow the clans of the Old Bloodlines to rule again.Putting aside their differences in the new world, the brothers find common cause and through paired gifts of light and shadow, succeed in binding the Mistwraith with help from the Fellowship. Unbeknownst to the brothers and their Sorcerer guides, one wraith escaped containment and seeks retribution against the two. During Arithon's crowning as Athera's first High King in more than five hundred years, the wraith binds Lysaer into irrational hatred of his half-brother, a curse he transfers to Arithon after the botched ceremony. Rather than succumb to the curse, Arithon flees into a winter storm, finding solace in the outlawed clans dwelling in the forest.Lysaer gathers an army to follow Arithon, led by the vicious bounty hunters who capture, kill and sell members of the clans. Though initially resistant to the idea of leading a guerilla war against the army, Arithon reluctantly assumes command upon realizing it is the only alternative to the extinction of the clans. The battles that ensue exact horrific slaughter on both sides, eventually resulting in a stalemate that forces Lysaer to withdraw without killing his brother. Arithon in turn has his mage-gift crippled through guilt. While Lysaer returns to the cities to muster a greater army and more support for his fratricidal war, Arithon becomes apprenticed to Athera's Masterbard, departing the clans in disguise.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Hickory"title="Miss Hickory">
The protagonist is Miss Hickory, a doll made from a forked twig from an apple tree and a hickory nut for her head (hence her name). She lives in a tiny doll house made of corncobs outside the home of her human owners. Her world is shaken when the family decides to spend the winter in Boston, Massachusetts, but leave her behind. Miss Hickory is aided during the long cold winter by several farm and forest animals. Prickly and a little stubborn, she slowly learns to accept help from others, and to offer some assistance herself.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Country_of_the_Pointed_Firs"title="The Country of the Pointed Firs">
The narrator, a Bostonian, returns after a brief visit a few summers prior, to the small coastal town of Dunnet, Maine, in order to finish writing her book. Upon arriving she settles in with Almira Todd, a widow in her sixties and the local apothecary and herbalist. The narrator occasionally assists Mrs. Todd with her frequent callers, but this distracts her from her writing and she seeks a room of her own.Renting an empty schoolhouse with a broad view of Dunnet Landing, the narrator can apparently concentrate on her writing, although Jewett does not use the schoolhouse to show the narrator at work but rather in meditation and receiving company. The schoolhouse is one of many locations in the novel which Jewett elevates to mythic significance and for the narrator the location is a center of writerly consciousness from which she makes journeys out and to which others make journeys in, aware of the force of the narrator's presence, out of curiosity, and out of respect for Almira Todd.After a funeral, Captain Littlepage, an 80-year-old retired sailor, comes to the schoolhouse to visit the narrator because he knows Mrs. Todd. He tells a story about his time on the sea and she is noticeably bored so he begins to leave. She sees that she has offended him with her display of boredom, so she covers her tracks by asking him to tell her more of his story. The Captain's story, of his sea-travels and the strange journey he once had which he believes points to the existence of a geographic link between this world and the next in the Arctic Circle, cannot compare to the stories that Mrs. Todd, Mrs. Todd's brother and mother, and residents of Dunnet tell of their lives in Dunnet.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm's_Way_(novel)"title="Harm's Way (novel)">
A regular United States Navy officer in the Pacific theater is assigned to command an operation to seize a group of strategic islands from the Japanese.The novel opens with the attack on Pearl Harbor which catches the US Navy unaware. Captain Rockwell Torrey is in command of a heavy cruiser known only as "Old Swayback" (an obvious reference to the ), which is off the Hawaiian coast near Pearl Harbor, running another set of exercises in a long string of them.Lieutenant (junior grade) William "Mac" McConnell is assigned as Officer of the Day aboard a destroyer, USS "Cassiday", tied up in Pearl Harbor, not far from Battleship Row. When the attack comes, Lieutenant McConnell takes his ship out of the harbor, leaving his captain and executive officer behind, and eventually joins a scratch task group assembled around Torrey's cruiser. Torrey leads his task group on a seek-out-and-destroy mission. When the ships approach the end of their fuel, Torrey orders them to steer a straight course. That makes the group vulnerable to attack. A Japanese submarine scores two torpedo hits on "Old Swayback" before "Cassiday" can sink the sub with depth charges.Back at Pearl Harbor, Torrey is relieved of his command and faces a Board of Inquiry that could lead to a court-martial, but when Admiral Chester Nimitz arrives to take command in the Pacific theater, he makes sure that Torrey will have a position on his planning staff. Torrey's officers scatter to various points in the Pacific theater, with his old exec, Paul Eddington, assigned to an unrewarding post at an old Free French base on the island of Toulebonne. Torrey drifts into a romance with a Navy nurse named Maggie Haynes; this romance is interrupted only briefly by the alert ordered during the Battle of Midway. Eventually, Torrey and his roommate, Captain Egan Powell, USNR, are invited to dinner at Nimitz's house, where Nimitz personally presents Torrey with the pair of Rear Admiral (lower half) stars that Nimitz had worn before taking command as Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC) and announces that he is to go into the Pacific theater to take personal command of an operation, called Mesquite, that has ground to a halt because of the inept micro-management by the area commander.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender_in_Exile"title="Ender in Exile">
One year after the Buggers (Formics) were defeated and the Battle School children have returned to Earth, Ender is still unable to return with them because there would be wars over which country would keep Ender to use for its own ends. Ender is offered the Governorship of the first human colony to be planted on one of the Buggers' former worlds, a planet that will eventually become known as Shakespeare. His sister Valentine decides to accompany Ender on his journey because she is sick of being controlled by her older brother, Peter, and because she wants to restore the relationship with Ender that she had lost when he left to go to Battle School.On their way to the Shakespeare colony, Valentine begins writing her History of the Bugger Wars books while Ender has an unspoken power struggle with the captain of the ship, Admiral Quincy Morgan. There is also a romance between Ender and a girl named Alessandra. Once the ship lands on Shakespeare, Ender, who had spent much of his trip learning the names and lives of the colony's residents, takes charge of the colony and wins the colonists over.Ender serves as governor of Shakespeare for a few years. Near the end of his time as governor, Ender and a young boy from the colony named Abra go to find a site for a new shipment of colonists. Ender wants the new settlement to be far enough away from the other settlements that there will not be competition between them right away, and so they can develop separately.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-Consuming_Fire"title="All-Consuming Fire">
"I've been all over the universe with you, Doctor, and Earth in the nineteenth century is the most alien place I've ever seen."England, 1887. The secret Library of St. John the Beheaded has been robbed. The thief has taken forbidden books which tell of mythical beasts and gateways to other worlds. Only one team can be trusted to solve the crime: Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson.As their investigation leads them to the dark underside of Victorian London, Holmes and Watson soon realise that someone else is following the same trail. Someone who has the power to kill with a glance. And they sense a strange, inhuman shape observing them from the shadows. Then they meet the mysterious traveller known only as the Doctor—the last person alive to read the stolen books.While Bernice waits in 19th-century India, Ace is trapped on a bizarre alien world. And the Doctor finds himself unwillingly united with England’s greatest consulting detective.Susan Foreman, the First Doctor, the Third Doctor, and the Fourth Doctor have cameo appearances.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endymion_Spring"title="Endymion Spring">
"Endymion Spring" has a double storyline. The first story follows two children in current day Oxford, Blake and Duck Winters. Blake is twelve years old and his sister is a few years younger. The two happen to come across a strange book in a library in St Jerome's College on St Giles' (based on Somerville College), which is entitled Endymion Spring. After finding out that it leads to a book of all the knowledge in the world, all the knowledge Adam and Eve tried to obtain from eating of that forbidden tree of knowledge but lost, they then embark on a quest to find it. However, when they do, the story then becomes a battle against the Person in Shadow, a person whose heart has turned black with evil and desire for the knowledge and power of the book. The second story line follows the journey of Endymion Spring, a young printer's devil who works in Gutenberg's workshop, from his hometown in Mainz, Germany to Oxford, which was then a settlement of monks. The two story lines are about 600 years apart, with Spring's story taking place at the epoch of the printing press in 1453, and Blake's taking place in the late 20th or early 21st century.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_Lottery"title="The Life Lottery">
Irith Hardey's life is out of control.The world's climate is in chaos. Rising seas have flooded out half a billion people. Hundreds of millions of refugees are pouring into the west, the global economy is collapsing and democracies are being crushed by the anti-refugee Yellow Armbands. But there is worse to come. In a desperate attempt to avert the coming ice age that will wipe out civilisation, the Great Powers have agreed to embark on the most monumental gamble of all time "100 Days to Save the World".Climate scientist Irith Hardey is sure they've got it wrong. The U.S. President's pet scheme isn't going to save the world, but ruin it. Searching for the awful truth behind the 100 Days project, Irith is tormented by the Yellow Armbands, then hunted from blizzard-struck London to the Scottish Highlands and across the wild North Sea.In a United States terrorized by gun-toting militias trying to bring down the President, Irith is forced to confront the worst nightmare any 21st-century woman can face, as she struggles to uncover the ghastly secret of the Life Lottery before 100 days are up.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_Like_This,_Cat"title="It's Like This, Cat">
The main character of the story is Dave Mitchell, a 14-year-old boy who is growing up in mid-20th century in New York City. Dave lives with his father and his asthmatic mother and her attacks worsen when Dave and his father have their frequent arguments. Dave's refuge after a clash with his father is with Kate, an elderly neighbor whose apartment is filled with the stray cats she loves. Dave adopts one of the stray cats, names it "Cat" and takes him home. "Cat" brings both joy and adventure into Dave's life. Dave Mitchell lives in the middle of New York City. Dave Mitchell takes the bus or the subway.Cat's presence brings Dave into contact with several new people, including a troubled college-aged boy named Tom and his first girlfriend, Hilda. While documenting Dave's growing maturity, the book also provides glimpses of a few of New York's neighborhoods and attractions, from the Fulton Fish Market to the Bronx Zoo and Coney Island.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Late_It_Was,_How_Late"title="How Late It Was, How Late">
Sammy awakens in a lane one morning after a two-day drinking binge, and gets into a fight with some plainclothes policemen, called in Glaswegian dialect "sodjers". When he regains consciousness, he finds that he has been beaten severely and, he gradually realises, is completely blind. The plot of the novel follows Sammy as he explores and comes to terms with his new-found disability, and the difficulties this brings.Upon being released Sammy goes back to his house and realises that his girlfriend, Helen, is gone. He assumes that she took off because of the fight they had before Sammy last left his house, but makes no attempt to find her.For a while, Sammy struggles with the simple tasks that blindness makes difficult. Soon, Sammy realises he will need something to indicate his blindness to other people. He cuts the head off of an old mop and, with the help of his neighbour, Boab, paints it white. He also purchases a pair of sunglasses to cover his eyes.Eventually, Sammy finds himself at the Central Medical waiting to get checked out for his blindness. He is instructed to the Dysfunctional Benefits floor and is questioned by a young lady who asks Sammy questions about his blindness. Sammy tells her about being beaten up by the cops, but immediately regrets telling her this and tries to take it back. She informs him that she cannot remove his statement from the record, but he can clarify if he wishes to. This upsets Sammy and he leaves the Central Medical without finishing filing for dysfunctional benefits.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Ground_(novel)"title="Killing Ground (novel)">
The Doctor returns Grant to his home planet Agora. Upon arrival they discover that Agora has been conquered by the Cybermen, who have enslaved the population and return every three years to take the five hundred fittest humans for conversion. As rebellion is plotted, there is another time traveller at work: the Cybermen obsessed Archivist Hegelia, and her novice research partner, Graduand Jolarr. Can the Doctor save the day when locked away in a cell?
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_and_the_Terrible,_Horrible,_No_Good,_Very_Bad_Day"title="Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day">
Alexander narrates the story of having a terrible, horrible, no good very bad day. From the moment Alexander woke up, he noticed the bubble gum that was in his mouth when he fell asleep had now gotten stuck in his hair. Then, when he got out of bed, he tripped on his skateboard. In the bathroom, he accidentally dropped his favorite sweater into the sink while the water was on. At breakfast, his brothers, Anthony and Nick, find prizes in their breakfast cereal boxes, but Alexander only finds cereal in his box and no prize at all. Alexander resolves that he is going to move away to Australia.In the carpool on the way to school, Alexander has to sit in the middle between two other kids in the back. He complains about how uncomfortable he is and that he will get carsick unless he gets to sit at the window, but no one listens. At school, his teacher Mrs. Dickens disqualifies Alexander's picture of the "invisible castle," which is just a blank sheet of paper, preferring Paul's picture of a sailboat. At singing time, she criticizes Alexander for singing too loud and at counting time, she mentions that he has skipped “16” when the class counted from 1 to 20. After being told, he retorts that no one needs "16" and again laments how bad his day is.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_Sin_(Lane_novel)"title="Original Sin (Lane novel)">
Benny and the Doctor land on Earth in the late 30th century, in order to find out more information about a missing alien space ship. They are eventually arrested for murder by Adjucator Roz Forrester and her partner/squire Chris Cwej. The Doctor discovers that the person behind his arrest, and also responsible for supporting the Earth Empire, is none other than Tobias Vaughn, the former head of International Electromatics and collaborator with the Cybermen. Just prior to his "death" (in "The Invasion"), Vaughn transferred his memories and consciousness into a robot body. Since then, he has been manipulating Earth history in order to trap the Doctor and gain the secret to time travel. The Doctor manages to trap Vaughn in the TARDIS, cutting him off from transferring his mind to a new body; he later removes Vaughn's brain crystal and installs it in a food machine. Roz and Chris, now framed by corrupt Adjucator officials, agree to travel with the Doctor rather than face trumped-up charges.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grantville_Gazette_II"title="Grantville Gazette II">
## "Steps in the Dance".Anne Jefferson and Harry Lefferts pose for Rembrandt as part of a complex political situation.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Women_(novel)"title="Two Women (novel)">
A daughter and her mother fight to survive in Rome during the Second World War. Cesira, a widowed Roman shopkeeper, and Rosetta, a naive teenager of beauty and devout faith.When the German army prepares to enter Rome, Cesira packs a few provisions, sews her life savings into the seams of her dress, and flees south with Rosetta to her native province of Ciociaria, a poor, mountainous region famous for providing the domestic servants of Rome.For nine months the two women endure hunger, cold, and filth as they await the arrival of the Allied forces. But the liberation, when it comes, brings unexpected tragedy.On their way home, the pair are attacked and Rosetta brutally raped by a group of Goumiers (Moroccan allied soldiers serving in the French Army), apparently part of Marocchinate. This act of violence so embitters Rosetta that she falls numbly into a life of prostitution.In his story of two women, Moravia offers up an intimate portrayal of the anguish and destruction wrought by war, as devastating behind the lines as it is on the battlefield.Their lives are torn apart due to the devastating war. Bomb explosions are routine. They are left with nothing to eat, but a mother wants to make her daughter feel comfortable, and wants to protect her daughter as with an iron shield. She wants to protect her against bomb explosions, starvation and men's hunger for sex.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spider_and_the_Fly_(DiTerlizzi_book)"title="The Spider and the Fly (DiTerlizzi book)">
The poem describes a spider's ultimately successful attempts to entice a fly into her home, apparently with iniquitous motive. The Fly is constantly warned by spirits of the Spider's previous victims, but she does not listen.The Fly, initially hesitant, is eventually won over by flattery; "'Your eyes are like the diamond bright, but mine are dull as lead!'", and is eaten by the Spider.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Thyl_Ulenspiegel_and_Lamme_Goedzak"title="The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak">
De Coster gives Thyl a girlfriend, Nele, and a best friend, Lamme Goedzak, who functions as a comedic sidekick - both of whom are not attested in the original folktales. The novel follows many historic events in the Eighty Years' War.Thyl Uilenspiegel is born in Damme, Flanders as son of the charcoal burner Claes and his wife Soetkin. He is brought into this world on the same birthday as Philip II of Spain. As a child Thyl already exhibits the naughty behaviour he will become infamous for as an adult. As a youth, he is several times apprenticed to various craftsmen, but never remains long with any of them - especially due to his habit of taking commands literally, with hilarious and sometimes disastrous results. In all, he does not take up any regular profession, but rather spends his time playing tricks and practical jokes, particularly on especially corrupt Catholic priests. Meanwhile, Uilenspiegel's Flanders suffers increasing oppression as Emperor Charles V launches an intensive campaign to root out the Protestant "heresy". Uilenspiegel himself is caught out, having incautiously expressed in public the opinion that masses said for the dead benefit no one but the clergy paid for saying them. Due to his youth he gets off with a relatively light punishment - he is sentenced to three years' exile and must get a pardon from the Pope in Rome. Thereupon, he embarks on a meandering route through the Low Countries and the German Holy Roman Empire, perpetrating his tricks and practical jokes wherever he goes. Sometimes he indulges in elaborate confidence tricks, for example getting Jewish and Gentile merchants in Hamburg to pay him considerable sums for supposed magical amulets which are in fact made of animal excrement. Uilenspiegel's love for his sweetheart Nele, whom he left behind, does not prevent him from dallying with every attractive woman he meets. One of his fleeting sexual encounters is mentioned as resulting in the birth of a German bastard, who would be named Ulenspiegel and whose own tricks would in later times be confused with those of his sire. In many places along the way, Uilenspiegel manages to gain free board and lodging by the simple expedient of shamelessly flattering the beauty of female innkeepers. Eventually, he gets to Rome and obtains the required Papal pardon, through a combination of an Uilenspiegel trick played on the Pope in person and a bribe paid into the Catholic Church's coffers. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armageddon_Summer"title="Armageddon Summer">
Marina and Jed are both teenagers whose parents have joined a millennialist movement whose members call themselves "The Believers". When the cult's leader, Reverend Beelson, proclaims that the world will end on July 27, 2000 and only 144 of the faithful can go to the top of Mount Weeupcut in Massachusetts and be safe from the fiery wrath of God that will rain on all nonbelievers below, Marina is taken by her mother with her six siblings (with her father left to be "fried") and Jed comes with his father (with his sister Alice refusing to come with) to the mountaintop compound. With both parents distant and distracted, and the rest of the cultists preparing for Armageddon, Marina and Jed meet and fall in love.Neither Marina nor Jed firmly believes that the world is going to end, though Marina finds comfort in the religion while she mourns for her left behind father. As the date of Armageddon grows nearer, none of the 144 Believers in the camp is allowed to leave, while a group of distressed relatives and Believers who missed the 144-person cutoff and want to be saved (known as "LMCs" - Last Minute Christians) grows outside the camp. Police are stationed outside to monitor the situation. As the story progresses, Jed comes to hate and fear "The Believers" for not allowing family members to visit members and the stockpile of weapons he discovers.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Ultimate"title="Dragon Ultimate">
The book is the seventh and final book in the Dragons of the Argonath series that follows the adventures of a human boy, Relkin, and his dragon, Bazil Broketail as they fight in the Argonath Legion’s 109th Marneri Dragons.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dragon_at_Worlds'_End"title="A Dragon at Worlds' End">
Trapped and alone on the dark continent of Eigo, Bazil and Relkin learn to fight and live off the dinosaurian wildlife that inhabits the land. During their journey of survival they encounter Lumbee, a female member of the tailed Ardu race. When they find her tribe, Relkin discovers he is in love with the tailed woman, a state that causes great distress to the members of her tribe. He is betrayed by the Ardu and sold to slavers who carry him off to the city of the Elf Lords, Mirchaz. To save his dragonboy, Bazil leads the Ardu in an attack on the slaver’s base, then marches on Mirchaz itself. Relkin has been trapped in a dream world created by an evil Elf Lord. When Bazil comes to the dragonboy’s rescue the pair manages to bring down the Great Game that occupies the Elf Lords and end their rule of Mirchaz. After their victory they return to Argonath from Og Bogon bearing much treasure from an appreciative king.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fan's_Notes"title="A Fan's Notes">
"A Fan's Notes" is a sardonic account of mental illness, alcoholism, insulin shock therapy and electroconvulsive therapy, and the black hole of sports fandom. Its central preoccupation with a failure to measure up to the American dream has earned the novel comparisons to Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby". It also was said to have, "hanging over the shoulder", Fitzgerald's later, confessional "The Crack-Up", per a critic. Beginning with his childhood in Watertown, New York, growing up under a sports-obsessed father and following his college years at the USC, where he first came to know his hero Frank Gifford, Exley recounts years of intermittent stints at psychiatric institutions, his failed marriage to a woman named Patience, successive unfulfilling jobs teaching English literature to high school students, and working for a Manhattan public relations firm under contract to a weapons company, and, by way of Gifford, his obsession with the New York Giants.Exley's introspective "fictional memoir", a tragicomic indictment of 1950s American culture, examines in lucid prose themes of celebrity, masculinity, self-absorption, and addiction, morbidly charting his failures in life against the electrifying successes of his football hero and former classmate. The title comes from Exley's fear that he is doomed to be a spectator in life as well as in sports.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Magic"title="Wild Magic">
"Wild Magic" is set in the same world as "The Song of the Lioness" quartet. Daine's family was killed earlier in the year by raiders and after enacting revenge upon the raiders, she runs away to find a new life. She gets a job as an assistant to the horsemistress of Tortall's Queen's Riders, and she learns new things about herself and gains a new family.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_Inversion"title="Primary Inversion">
"Primary Inversion" is set in a future where three star-faring civilizations vie for control of human-settled space. Fighter pilot Sauscony (Soz) Valdoria commands a squadron of four Jagernaut pilots, neurologically enhanced empaths who have been bio-engineered as weapons. Jagernauts have extensive biomech throughout their bodies, allowing for enhanced speed and reaction, and an embedded artificial intelligence (AI) in their spinal cords. They are pitted against the legions of the Trader empire, in particular the Aristo ruling class, a race that derives pleasure from the amplified pain and anguish of empaths—especially Jagernauts, as Soz knows from personal experience. Soz is also an imperial heir and may someday become the military commander of the Skolian Empire, the bitter enemies of the Traders.The book is divided into three sections. In the first, Soz and her squadron are taking shore leave on a planet that has remained neutral in the hostilities between the warring empires. It is there that Soz meets the Highton heir, Jaibriol Qox the Second, the Aristo who will someday rule the Trader empire. She discovers he secretly possesses the same empathic abilities that she wields. The two link mentally and fall in love against their own wishes. From Jaibriol, Soz learns that his father is going to commit genocide against the inhabitants of a planet who have joined together to rebel against their Aristo rulers. She goes in with her squadron to warn and evacuate the planet. After a desperate space battle, they barely escape with their own lives, but are able to save some of the planet's inhabitants.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sunday_Philosophy_Club"title="The Sunday Philosophy Club">
Isabel Dalhousie is a philosopher in her early forties and lives alone in a large aging house in the south of Edinburgh. Thanks to a large inheritance left to her by her late mother, she is able to work for a nominal fee as the editor of the "Review of Applied Ethics". Her closest friends are her niece Cat, a young attractive woman who runs a delicatessen; her housekeeper Grace, an outspoken woman with an interest in spiritualism; Cat's ex-boyfriend Jamie, a bassoonist to whom Isabel has been secretly attracted ever since they met; and Brother Fox, an urban fox who lives in Isabel's garden.During a trip to the theatre, Isabel sees a young man fall to his death from the gods. As the young man falls, she catches his eye, and sees an expression of shock of his face, which suggests to her that the police's verdict of suicide is wrong. She decides to find out what really happened.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Great_and_Terrible_Beauty"title="A Great and Terrible Beauty">
Gemma Doyle, the series' protagonist, is forced to leave India after the death of her mother to attend a private boarding school in London.On her sixteenth birthday, Gemma and her mother stroll through the Bombay market when they encounter a man and his younger brother. The man relays an unknown message to Gemma's mother about a woman named Circe, and Gemma's mother panics and demands that Gemma return home. Angry at her mother's secrecy, Gemma runs away, and has a vision of her mother committing suicide while searching for her, which she later learns is true. Gemma becomes haunted with the images of her mother's death.With her mother dead and her father's addiction to laudanum growing stronger, Gemma's family ships her off to a finishing school in London: Spence Academy for Young Ladies. At first, Gemma is an outcast at the school; however, she soon finds the most popular and influential girl in school, Felicity, in a compromising situation that would ruin Felicity's life. Gemma agrees not to tell Felicity's secret and the girls soon form a strong friendship, along with Gemma's roommate Ann, and Felicity's best friend, Pippa. But Gemma is still tormented with her visions and is warned by the young man she had met in the market, Kartik, a member of an ancient group of men known as the Rakshana, dating all the way back to Charlemagne, that she must close her mind to these visions or something horrible will happen.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Kingdom_Trilogy"title="The Hollow Kingdom Trilogy">
## "The Hollow Kingdom"."The Hollow Kingdom" is the October 2003 first book in "The Hollow Kingdom Trilogy" by Clare B. Dunkle. The protagonist is Kate, a young woman who is forced to marry the goblin king, Marak.This story takes place in 1815 on a country estate called Hallow Hill. For thousands of years, young women have been vanishing from the estate and nearby village, never to be seen again. Now Kate and Emily, young girls of refinement, have come to live at Hallow Hill. Brought up in a civilized age, they have no idea of the land's dreadful heritage until they meet the goblins who live underground in Hollow Hill. One of the first goblins they meet is Marak Sixfinger, the goblin king who intends to make Kate, the older of the sisters, his wife. Kate isn't the first person he's married, but his first wife went mad. He took a more strategic approach with Kate, trying to get to know her before actually kidnapping her. After much resistance, Kate offers herself to Marak in exchange for his help in rescuing Emily from their cousin who has kidnapped her. Marak enacts revenge on Kate's cousin for kidnapping Emily by casting a spell that will only allow him to walk on the ceiling. After the revenge and rescue, both girls are taken by the goblins to their kingdom.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxin_(novel)"title="Toxin (novel)">
The book opens with a scene showing a couple of farmhands who are entrusted with disposing of a diseased cow. However they instead take it to a nearby slaughter house and sell it.The story then moves to the protagonist Dr. Kim Reggis who is going through a bad divorce. On a night out with his daughter Becky, he takes her to the nearby fast food chain, Onion Ring Burgers. There she eats a rare steak burger. The beef in the burger is revealed to have come from the cow mentioned at the start of the book. The next day Becky begins having loose motions and severe body pain. Kim and his estranged wife Tracy rush her into the emergency care unit of the hospital he works in. However he is ignored there which infuriates him. The doctors confirm that she has been infected by "E. coli"s renegade strain which is resistant to most antibiotics. Becky's condition begin to deteriorate rapidly.Feeling helpless at his inability to save his daughter's life, Kim makes it his mission to trace out how she contracted the disease. He first makes a visit to the restaurant they ate at, only managing to create a ruckus there. However he learns that the beef came from Mercer Meats. He traces the slaughterhouse and manages to take the U.S. Department of Agriculture inspector in his confidence. The next day Becky dies of multiple organ failure leaving him in sorrow and strengthening his resolve for justice. He infiltrates the slaughterhouse with the help of his ex-wife by changing his appearance to make him look like a jobless Punk rocker. He accepts a job as a janitor. On his first day at work, he gets into the records room and finds out the truth about the diseased animal. They are attacked by an assassin. Tracy appears and kills the assassin. They then escape from the slaughterhouse and flee the country after making public the malpractices committed by the slaughterhouse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rider_at_the_Gate"title="Rider at the Gate">
Three riders arrive at the Shamesey town gates to inform border rider Guil Stuart that his partner, Aby Dale and her nighthorse Moon, were killed in a truck convoy accident on Tarmin Height. The accident, they say, was caused by a rogue nighthorse. Stuart heads up the mountain to hunt down and kill the rogue. Danny Fisher, a junior rider and friend of Stuart, follows him. Another rider, Ancel Harper, who blames Stuart for the earlier death of his brother, also pursues Stuart. With winter approaching, journeys up the mountain at this time of the year are ill-advised and dangerous.Stuart first goes to the industrial town of Anveney where he meets businessman Lew Cassivey. Dale had been working for Cassivey, and her last job, escorting the truck convoy down the mountain, included delivering a shipment of gold to him. The truck that crashed had the gold in it, and Cassivey wants Stuart to retrieve it and pays him in advance.In Tarmin village, in the highlands near Tarmin Height, 13-year-old Brionne Goss responds to the &lt;call&gt; of a nighthorse in the Wild by going out the village gates on her own. It is a rogue nighthorse and it finds and adopts Brionne. During her absence, riders go out looking for her, and her older brothers, Carlo and Randy, are arrested in the village for the death of their father, the blacksmith. Their father had belittled and abused the boys for most of their lives and when he now accuses them of pushing Brionne out the gate, Carlo shoots him. Later Brionne and the rogue return to the village and her mother insists that the gates be opened to let her daughter in. Tarmin is then overrun by swarms of predators and scavengers and everyone in the village is killed, except for Tara Chang, a rider out of the village at the time, and the Goss brothers who are locked in jail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud's_Rider"title="Cloud's Rider">
Fisher and Cloud escort the Goss children halfway up Rogers Peak to Evergreen village with Harper's riderless nighthorse, Spook, in pursuit. Fisher tells the local riders about the fall of Tarmin village and the presence of Spook, but does not reveal the arrest of the Goss brothers nor the role Brionne played in Tarmin's demise. Fisher is lodged in the rider camp, the unconscious Brionne with Darcey Schaffer, the village doctor, and Carlo and Randy with Van Mackey, the village blacksmith. The news of Tarmin's fall is devastating to Evergreen because all its supplies come from there, but many of the villagers see the disaster as an opportunity to seize and occupy the vacant property in Tarmin village in the spring.One night Spook enters the ambient and disturbs the horses and riders in the rider camp. Fisher knows that Brionne has woken up and is &lt;calling&gt;. The next morning Ridley takes Fisher out the gates to find Spook, but when they are some distance from the village, Ridley points his rifle at Fisher and demands the truth. Fisher is relieved to be able to finally unburden himself and tells Ridley everything he knows.Earnest Rigs, a miner, arrives at the doctor's house for treatment and sees and is entranced by Brionne. That night Schaffer and Brionne are awoken by a noise on the roof and a banging at the door. The next day, Schaffer finds blood splattered outside her house, and Rigs is missing. A crowd gathers, including the Goss boys and the village marshal. Carlo is accused of murdering Rigs and, scared that his arrest in Tarmin will become known, runs away. The marshal orders that Carlo be stopped, and a group of miners pursue him. When Carlo reaches the village gate, his only escape is out the village.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Palace_of_Love"title="The Palace of Love">
Kirth Gersen's short-lived relationship with Alusz Iphigenia Eperje-Tokay, a woman he had rescued in the previous novel of the series is nearing an end, as she cannot understand why Gersen, made extremely wealthy by his epic defrauding of Interchange, still feels the need to personally exterminate the remaining Demon Princes who killed his family.Gersen notices a newspaper article announcing the forthcoming execution of a prominent Sarkoy venefice (poison maker), Kakarsis Asm, for selling poisons to the Demon Prince Viole Falushe below a Guild-mandated price floor. He accordingly hastens to Sarkovy, a planet famous for its poisons. In return for arranging a swift and painless execution, he learns that Falushe visited Sarkovy at the beginning of his criminal career with a shipload of slaves. He sold two female slaves to Asm. While on Sarkovy, Gersen's relationship with Alusz Iphigenia finally ends, though he ensures that she will be financially comfortable.After visiting his new financial advisor, Jehan Addels, to check how Addels' investment of the titanic proceeds of his swindle is proceeding, Gersen locates a surviving slave, whom he buys and frees in exchange for further information. He learns that Falushe was born Vogel Filschner, an Earth boy of disgusting appearance and habits who, to satisfy his obsession with a female classmate, Jheral Tinzy, had kidnapped the entire girls' choral society at his school. But by chance, Jheral had not attended choir practice that day.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prophet_(book)"title="The Prophet (book)">
The prophet Al Mustafa has lived in the city of Orphalese for 12 years and is about to board a ship which will carry him home. He is stopped by a group of people, with whom he discusses topics such as life and the human condition. The book is divided into chapters dealing with love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, houses, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Dork"title="King Dork">
Tom Henderson begins his sophomore year at Hillmont High School, which he describes as laughably dumbed-down and senselessly brutal, with rampant bullying by the "psychotic normal" students. Tom is derisively nicknamed "Chi-Mo", originating from an aptitude test indicating a possible career in the clergy, which his classmates associated with child molestation. His father Charles, a police detective, died six years prior in what was ruled a hit and run collision, though Tom has been given vague and contradictory details about the incident by his mother. He finds a collection of his father's books from the 1960s, including "The Catcher in the Rye", a novel Tom particularly disdains, comparing its popularity among baby boomers to a cult. He begins reading the books as a way of relating to his father; in them he finds many handwritten notes, some mentioning a "tit".Tom and his only close friend, Sam Hellerman, aspire to start a rock and roll band, though this mainly consists of proposing potential band names, pseudonyms, and album covers. At a party that Sam insists they attend, a mysterious girl calling herself Fiona makes out with Tom then abruptly leaves. Tom obsesses over her, much to Sam's annoyance. In one of his father's books Tom finds a note mentioning a "dead bastard" and signed "Tit", with ciphertext that he decodes referring to a funeral. When a bully pours soda onto Tom's father’s copy of "Brighton Rock" as Tom is reading it, he becomes enraged and "accidentally beats up" the bully.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Harmony_Silk_Factory"title="The Harmony Silk Factory">
Between the wars, Johnny Lim becomes a successful businessman running Tiger Tan’s textile shop in Kampar, a town near Ipoh in the tin-mining Kinta Valley of Malaysia. He marries Snow Soong, the beautiful daughter of TK Soong, the richest man in the valley. They go on a belated honeymoon to the mysterious Seven Maidens islands. Accompanying them are Kunichika Mamoru, a Japanese academic, who will become head of the Kempeitai, the secret police, during the Japanese occupation; Peter Wormwood, an English drifter who has become Johnny’s friend and confidante; and Frederick Honey, a tin mine manager. Later, the shop burns down, and Johnny opens the Harmony Silk Factory, which does very well during the occupation and after. In 1942, Snow dies giving birth to her son, Jasper.The novel is narrated in three overlapping sections. First, Jasper tells what he knows of his father’s life. Then we read extracts from Snow’s diary, which was handed to Jasper at his father’s funeral. In the third, Peter is now old and living in a care home. He remembers his friendship with Johnny, and what happened on the trip to the Seven Maidens, where he swiped Snow’s diary.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_Light_(novel)"title="Arc Light (novel)">
## Prologue.Set in the late 1990s in the backdrop of a stalemated Russo-Chinese War for control of Eastern Siberia, North Korea invades the Demilitarized Zone weeks before a planned reunification.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdigris_(novel)"title="Verdigris (novel)">
Orbiting above London is a mysterious ship, a duplicate of the St Pancras railway station. The Doctor, with the aid of the adventurer, Iris Wildthyme, bargains to stop creatures determined to infiltrate in the guise of characters from nineteenth century novels. The Doctor is cut off from many of his friends and allies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fortress_of_Grey_Ice"title="A Fortress of Grey Ice">
"A Fortress of Grey Ice" represents a greater division of storylines than was present in the first book. The novel opens rather dramatically with new characters and settings, then moves quickly to Ash March's abrupt and covert departure from Raif in order to join the Sull. Left with the Listener, Raif finds himself alone, now abandoned by clan and friend, cut off from everyone and everything that he loves. Embittered and resentful of the lore that claims him as Watcher of the Dead, Raif will wander the edge of the Want until he finds the only group willing to accept an outcast and renegade, the outlaw Maimed Men. Elsewhere Ash, already leagues away from Raif, will become initiated into the mysterious blood lettings of the Sull, all the while riding in haste to reach the safety of the Sull lands, guarded by her two Far Riders and pursued by the maeraith she has been unintentionally released.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissus_in_Chains"title="Narcissus in Chains">
"Narcissus in Chains" continues the adventures of . In this novel, Anita attempts to reconnect with her friends and allies after a lengthy separation, and to undo the damage caused by her absence. Even as Anita attempts to repair the damage and come to terms with her newly developing powers, she is also threatened by a series of attacks and disappearances within the shapeshifter community. She has sex with a shape-shifter in a shower. As with the other later novels in the series, "Narcissus in Chains" blends elements of supernatural, detective and erotic fiction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_(Harris_novel)"title="Hannibal (Harris novel)">
Seven years after the Buffalo Bill case, FBI agent Clarice Starling witnesses her career crumble around her. During a botched drug raid, Starling kills a meth dealer who was holding a baby. Fugitive serial killer Hannibal Lecter, who has been living in Florence, Italy under an assumed name, sends her a letter of condolence and requests more information about her personal life. Desperate to catch Lecter, the FBI tasks Starling with apprehending him. She meets with Barney, a former orderly of Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. When Barney asks Starling if she ever feared Lecter visiting her, she replied that she did not, as "he said he wouldn't".Meanwhile, Mason Verger, a wealthy, sadistic pedophile whom Lecter disfigured during a therapy session years before, plans to get revenge by feeding Lecter to wild boars, using Starling as bait. He is aided by corrupt Justice Department agent Paul Krendler, Starling's nemesis. Rinaldo Pazzi, a disgraced Italian detective, pursues Lecter in the interests of collecting Verger's bounty on him. However, Lecter disembowels and hangs Pazzi in reference to the lynchings of the Pazzi conspirators. After killing one of Verger's men, Lecter escapes to the United States, where he begins pursuing Starling.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Egg"title="The Golden Egg">
Two lovers, Rex Hofman and Saskia Ehlvest, have traveled to France for a bicycling vacation. One night they have a minor argument but quickly make up, and Rex pulls over at a convenience store to refuel. He and Saskia bury coins to mark the spot, then she goes into the station to buy drinks, and is never seen again.Eight years later, he is still haunted by her disappearance. He is now in a relationship with another woman named Lieneke, who is both sympathetic to, and frustrated by, the hold that Saskia's disappearance has over him. Despite her misgivings, however, they become engaged.At this point the reader is introduced to Raymond Lemorne, the man responsible for whatever happened to Saskia. The novella reveals that Lemorne once saved a young girl from drowning; having proven to himself that he is capable of great goodness, Raymond then begins to wonder if he is capable of an act of pure evil. He then comes up with an idea to murder someone in the most horrible fashion he can imagine. The book follows his meticulous preparations, and his long months of trying to find a suitable victim. This section of the novella ends with him abducting Saskia, but we are still not told what happens to her, though the book does provide clues.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siege_of_Krishnapur"title="The Siege of Krishnapur">
The story is set in the town of Krishnapur, and tells of a besieged British garrison which holds out for four months against an army of native sepoys. Among the community are the District Collector, a father of small children, who is an extreme example of Victorian belief in progress, and can often be found daydreaming of the Great Exhibition; the Magistrate, a Chartist in his youth, but who sees his political ideals destroyed by witnessing the siege; Dr Dunstaple and Dr McNab, who row over the best way to treat cholera; Fleury, a poetical young man from England who learns to become a soldier; and Lucy, a "fallen woman" who is rescued and eventually runs a tea salon in the despairing community. By the end of the novel, cholera, starvation and the sepoys have killed off most of the inhabitants, who are reduced to eating dogs, horses and finally beetles, their teeth much loosened by scurvy. "The final retreat of the British, still doggedly stiff-upper-lipped through the pantries, laundries, music rooms and ballroom of the residency, using chandeliers and violins as weapons, is a comic delight"."The Siege of Krishnapur" is part of Farrell's "Empire Trilogy", which concerns the British Empire and its decline in three locations. Other books in the series are "Troubles", which is set during the Irish War for Independence (1919–1921), and "The Singapore Grip", which takes place just before the invasion of Singapore by the Japanese in World War II, during the last days of the Empire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firstborn_(Clarke_and_Baxter_novel)"title="Firstborn (Clarke and Baxter novel)">
The novel's action switches stage frequently between the Earth of 2069, the 'jigsaw-planet' Mir 31 years after its creation, and various settlements on Mars.Firstborn opens with Bisesa Dutt waking up after 19 years of suspended animation, only to be informed of the fact that a 'bogey' has entered the Solar System. Further investigation of the object reveals that it is a "cosmological-weapon" (called a Q-bomb by scientists) capable of destroying matter by engulfing it into a small 'pocket universe', which is then quickly destroyed in a Big Rip-like event. Bisesa, her now-divorced daughter Myra, and a young spacer called Alexei Carel quickly leave the Earth via a space elevator, to escape what Alexei views as an inefficient and corrupt government. Meanwhile, on Mir, a young astronomer named Abdikadir (son of one of the main characters of "Time's Eye"), while making observations on what appears to be planet Mars covered in oceans, is interrupted by Bisesa Dutt's old mobile phone ringing.Back on Earth, the Space Council is preparing to launch an antimatter-fueled spacecraft to intercept the Q-bomb, while Bisesa arrives at a research station located at Mars' North Pole. The team there had discovered a gravitational "trap" that contained one of the Firstborn's Eyes. This is proof that not only did intelligent Martians exist in the distant past, but that they had been exterminated (probably with another Q-Bomb) by the Firstborn, but not before they had captured one of the Eyes. As she approaches the Eye, Bisesa is promptly sucked into a gateway and finds herself back on Mir, in the Temple of Marduk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lover_(Wilson_novel)"title="The Lover (Wilson novel)">
Set in World War II England, "The Lover" is a novel based on the real-life case of serial killer Gordon Cummins, also known as the Blackout Ripper. A 28-year-old British airman, Cummins began strangling and mutilating female prostitutes in London during the bombing and subsequent blackout in the city. The novel looks at the events from three view points: a female prostitute with a young son who is a potential victim, a woman who met Cummings and became infatuated with him, and Cummins himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklist_(novel)"title="Blacklist (novel)">
Chicago private detective V.I. Warshawski is asked by a longtime client to look into his mother's suspicion that trespassers are living in the empty mansion her father built. V.I. discovers a corpse on the property that is found to be a young black journalist who was writing about members of a 1930s federal theater project and one member in particular who was blacklisted during the Communist witch hunt. V.I. is hired by the journalist's sister to investigate his death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midworld"title="Midworld">
Midworld is a planet entirely covered by a rain forest three-quarters of a kilometer (almost half a mile) tall. Born is a member of the primitive human society that has lived peacefully on Midworld for hundreds of years, careful not to disturb the natural balance of the jungle. His people live in a gigantic tree called the Home Tree. When they die, they are ceremonially buried in another gigantic tree of a species called They-Who-Keep. Each of the locals forms a lifetime bond with a powerful and intelligent photosynthetic animal called a furcot. When they need to damage a plant they are familiar with, they communicate with it empathetically ("emfoling") to make sure it does not object.The world is disrupted by the arrival of an exploitative business venture from Earth whose representatives know nothing of the delicate stability of the planet. A man and a woman from this company crash in their aircraft near Born's home. He, a fellow hunter named Losting (both hunters are in love with the tribe's most beautiful girl), and their furcots lead the castaways safely through the jungle's surprising dangers to their station.Born realizes that the newcomers are on his world to gain a life-extending drug from the burls formed by the They-Who-Keep trees around buried people. Horrified by this discovery and the invaders' callousness toward living beings, he uses native plants and animals to destroy their station. In the final fight Losting is killed, but Born returns to the Home Tree. Losting's brain and mind are absorbed to form part of a developing planet-wide network of consciousness involving They-Who-Keep and the furcots.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cachalot_(novel)"title="Cachalot (novel)">
Cachalot is an ocean planet where humans have begun building floating cities. It is also the same planet where all of Earth's cetaceans were transplanted six hundred years ago after the Covenant of Peace was enacted with all intelligence-enhanced ocean dwellers. Four of these cities have been destroyed when a middle-aged scientist and her late-teen daughter are dispatched to the planet to discover the source of the attacks.The novel title comes from the French word "cachalot", meaning sperm whale. This word was applied to the sperm whale when the mammals were actively hunted in Earth's oceans.The novel features a new musical instrument called "neurophon" producing not only tunes but also nerve sensations on human skin and irritating alien creatures found on the planet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_to_the_City_of_the_Dead"title="Voyage to the City of the Dead">
Scientists Eitienne and Lyra Redowl come to the planet Horseye to study the entire length of the immense Skar River and its spectacular river chasm, the largest in the whole Humanx Commonwealth. On Horseye there are three separate sentient species, which all have different concerns about their planet. The Mai, traders from the river delta, are prepared to help the Redowls, but have their own agenda for doing so, for it is rumoured that at the head of the river is the City of the Dead and a great treasure.This treasure is eventually revealed to not be material wealth, but an ancient artifact that is used to monitor the depths of space for an approaching evil.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentenced_to_Prism"title="Sentenced to Prism">
Set in the Humanx Commonwealth, Prism is a unique planet because its ecosystem contains both silicon-based and carbon-based life. Evan Orgell, a management troubleshooter sent to Prism to investigate the disappearance of a research group, finds himself fighting for his survival in this strange crystalline environment after his specialized environment suit succumbs to the local elements. Leaving behind his mechanized suit, Evan is for the first time in his life exposed to a hostile environment without the protection of his suit and must rely on the unexpected help of the native sentient life to survive.With the help of a caterpillar-like creature named "A Surface of Fine Azure-Tinted Reflection With Pyroxin Dendritic Inclusions" (which Evan chooses to call simply "Azure", much to his strange new friend's disappointment) he must grow to overcome his prejudices, his assumptions, and his preoccupations to relearn what life, communication, companionship, government, and even his own bodily form mean to him. He and his new-found friends must overcome multiple treacherous acts by his own race in order to survive and thrive on the beautiful, but deadly, planet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Howling_Stones"title="The Howling Stones">
Two scientists race against their vicious alien nemesis, the AAnn, to secure a treaty for mining rights on the newly discovered planet Senisran, an oddity of mostly ocean dotted with thousands of islands. The aboriginal natives' sacred stones are found to have an immense power that the humans and the AAnn will do almost anything to obtain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drowning_World"title="Drowning World">
On the distant planet Fluva, torrential rains that leave it barely habitable also make it a treasure trove of rare botanical specimens. When the human bio-prospector Shadrach Hasselemoga crashes in the remote and deadliest place on Fluva; the Viisiiviisii. The only crew available to search for him is the warrior Jemunu-jah, one of the native Sakuntala, and the immigrant Deyzara trader and experienced pilot, Masurathoo. This culturally different and physically repulsive to each other couple promptly crash also. While the rescuers and the rescued are all slogging it out of the ultimate rain forest, the reptilian AAnn empire is fomenting bloody trouble between the Sakuntula and the Deyzara. This leaves Commonwealth administrator Lauren Matthias in the hot seat, with refugees swarming in to her limited facilities and the bodies of the innocent piling up, with few resources to help. But it's the survivors of the rain forest who bring new knowledge that helps save Fluva, along with quick work by Matthias.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_Star_(novel)"title="Evil Star (novel)">
Following the events of "Raven's Gate" (which took place a few weeks before the beginning of "Evil Star"), Matt goes to a new private school which the Nexus are funding, but is left friendless because of a bully named Gavin Taylor, causing Matt to injure Taylor by using his powers. Susan Ashwood and Fabian, members of the Nexus, ask him to help them acquire an old diary which could enable them to stop a second gate that keeps the Old Ones out of our world from being opened. Matt, feeling his life is spinning out of his control, refuses. Meanwhile, Gwenda Davis, his aunt, has fallen under the influence of dark forces. She kills her spouse Brian, steals a petrol tanker, and drives it into Matt's new school in a desperate attempt to kill him. Fortunately, he uses his clairvoyance powers and manages to evacuate the whole school before it happens. Matt realises that he must stop the Gate from being opened and agrees to meet the bookseller, William Morton, at St Meredith's Church after a meeting with the Nexus. Morton affirms him to be one of the Five, but he is killed in the process and the diary is stolen on the behalf of Diego Salamanda, a media baron and bidder who wants to use the diary to open the second gate. The Nexus persuade Matt and his carer, Richard Cole, to fly to Peru, find the second gate, and stay at a house belonging to Fabian. However, on their way to the newly-planned rendezvous, the Hotel Europa, the car is ambushed and Richard is kidnapped; luckily Matt manages to escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunter_(Stark_novel)"title="The Hunter (Stark novel)">
Parkerpenniless, shabbily dressedwalks across the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan. He's single mindedly bent on payback. A quick series of cons and identity theft allows him to acquire a false name, a change of clothes, and a small amount of money. He first tracks down his wife Lynn, unsure if he'll kill her for betraying him during a caper gone sour. She tells him that Mal, one of the caper's participants, now pays her rent. She says that he moved out after becoming frustrated with his inability to rouse her passion the same way Parker did. After telling Parker all she knows, Lynn kills herself with an overdose of sleeping pills.Staying in Lynn's apartment, Parker meets the courier who brings her rent and extracts the name of his boss, a taxicab dispatcher named Arthur Stegmann. Parker tracks down Stegmann who says Mal deposits the money for Lynn in a bank account and he claims he has no direct contact with or know where to find him. However, after Parker leaves, Stegmann contacts Mal through an intermediary.A flashback tells us Parker is a professional criminal, specializing in armed robbery. The pattern of his life is to commit a lucrative heist, live well in luxury hotels for a period of months with his wife Lynn, then commit another heist when necessary. This pattern is disrupted when he is convinced, against his better judgment, to join a "crew" in California, planning to heist a shipment of cash intended for an illegal arms deal. The heist goes perfectly, but one of the crew, Mal Resnick, double-crosses Parker and the others. Because he is too afraid to face Parker directly, he convinces Lynn to shoot Parker in bed rather than be killed herself. After killing the other robbers, Mal escapes with the heist proceeds and Lynn, both believing Parker to be dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_in_Obsidian"title="Phoenix in Obsidian">
When the story begins, Erekosë has ended the war and found peace. Then the dreams of eternal struggle, that tormented him in "The Eternal Champion", begin again. He finds himself transported into the body of Urlik Skarsol, driving a chariot pulled by polar bears across an ice sheet. He encounters a party of humans who take him to Rowernarc. There he meets the debauched Bishop Belphig and the ascetic Lord Shanosfane.Belphig eventually invites him on a hunt for the fearsome sea-stag. On the trip, Urlik begins dreaming of the Black Sword; then, while he is awake, a mysterious bell tolls, a Screaming Chalice appears, and a voice orders Urlik to take up the Black Sword. Finally they hunt the sea-stag to its island lair. Many of the hunters are killed and, though he succeeds in killing the stag, Urlik is left for dead. He is rescued by another party from the wholesome human settlement of the Scarlet Fjord, led by Bladrak. On the advice of the Lady of the Chalice, they have been ringing the bell that summoned him from his life as Erekosë. They have with them the Cold Sword, which he instinctively fears.During a raid to rescue prisoners from the Silver Warriors, Urlik learns that Belphig has been engaged in slave trade with them. Bladrak summons the Lady of the Chalice for advice. She tells Urlik to take the Cold Sword and rescue Shanosfane. Shanosfane reveals that Belphig commands the Silver Warriors because he holds their Silver Queen hostage; then he is killed by the Cold Sword. Soon Belphig places the Scarlet Fjord under siege and the situation becomes desperate. Again they consult the Lady, who tells them that the Silver Queen is held hostage on the Moon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Bargain"title="Bad Bargain">
Having sealed the Hellmouth, the Scooby Gang do not realise that anything is odd when things to be sold at the first annual band fund-raising rummage sale are stored in the school basement, which is directly above the Hellmouth.The rummage sale begins, and the items on sale seem to be having an unexpected effect on those that buy them. Even Xander and Willow are soon affected. The situation gets more serious resulting in the school being quarantined leaving Buffy and Giles to sort things out before the items get sold elsewhere.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_from_the_Past_(novel)"title="Blast from the Past (novel)">
Polly Slade is a 34-year-old woman with no money, no love life and a boring, run of the mill job at the local town council. She has attracted the obsessive attention of Peter, an ex-client, who continues to harass and threaten her in breach of several court orders she has brought out against him. The novel frequently changes perspective, and we see the depth of his obsession with her as he plots to come to her house late at night in a last-ditch attempt to prove his "love" to her.Through a series of flashbacks we investigate Polly's relationship with Jack Kent, a soldier who was once the youngest captain in the US Army. They had a short affair during the summer when Polly was seventeen years old. She was at that time an activist and saboteur living in a "peace camp" in the countryside, whom Jack met at a motorway service station while he was positioned in England with his work. The relationship ended when he took her to a hotel and then walked out on her as she slept, leaving her with no way of contacting him. Polly's memories of him are extremely bitter for this reason, and Jack, who is trapped in an unhappy marriage, finds he cannot escape Polly's influence over his life. He has risen to the rank of a general, partly with her assistance, as his memories of her have kept him from becoming involved in a number of scandals which could have ruined his career.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_in_the_Autumn_Stars"title="The City in the Autumn Stars">
Fleeing from the Reign of Terror in 1793, Manfred von Bek (the Ritter von Bek), once a valued revolutionary, leaves Paris and heads towards Switzerland, with the final destination of the Waldenstein city of Mirenberg in mind. Close to Vaud, von Bek, who is masquerading as a messenger carrying secret documents, meets Robert de Montsorbier. Following polite conversation, Montsorbier accuses von Bek of being a traitor, and von Bek flees towards the border.Shortly after crossing the border, although not knowing it at the time, von Bek meets a group of young revolutionaries on their way to Paris. As Montsorbier is not carrying any flags or standards, the revolutionaries believe him to be part of the Swiss Guard, and open fire. They wound Montsorbier and several of his men. Von Bek thanks them and, after explaining, to their dismay, that the men they opened fire on were enforcers of the Committee of Public Safety, he leaves them, also taking Montsorbier's horse.After spending the night at an inn—"Le Coq D'Or"—von Bek awakens to discover that Montsorbier, posing as a member of the Swiss Guard, is searching for him at the inn. Unable to locate the hiding Von Bek, Montsorbier accuses him of being a horse thief, and attempts to gain information on his heading. It is then that von Bek meets Libussa, the Duchess of Crete, who owns the carriage that he'd seen the previous night. She assists him in escaping from Montsorbier, and von Bek becomes smitten with her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houseboy_(novel)"title="Houseboy (novel)">
The novel starts in Spanish Guinea with a Frenchman on vacation, who finds a man named Toundi, who has been injured and soon dies. The Frenchman finds his diary, which is called an "exercise book" by Toundi. The rest of the story consists of the diary (exercise book) that the Frenchman is supposedly reading. There is no further discussion of the Frenchman after this point.The first "exercise book" starts with Toundi living with his family. His father beats him constantly, and one day Toundi runs away from home to the rescue of Father Gilbert, a priest who lives nearby. His father comes back for him, telling Toundi that everything will be all right if he comes back. He rejects his father's offer and after this point no longer acknowledges his birth parents.Toundi treats Father Gilbert as his new father. Father Gilbert teaches Toundi to read and write, and about Catholicism. Toundi believes in Catholicism, but as the story progresses he drifts from his beliefs until the end, when he does not believe in God.Father Gilbert dies in a motorcycle accident a few months after meeting Toundi. Toundi is eventually taken to live with the Commandant, the man in charge of the surrounding colony. Toundi serves as houseboy for the Commandant. It becomes very clear that the events that go on in the house are more important to Toundi than his own life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_in_the_Striped_Pyjamas"title="The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas">
Bruno is a nine-year-old boy growing up during World War II in Berlin. He lives with his parents, his twelve-year-old sister Gretel whom he has nicknamed 'A Hopeless Case', and maids, one of whom is named Maria and another is a Jewish chef named Pavel. After a visit by Adolf Hitler, whose title The Führer Bruno commonly mispronounces as "Fury", Bruno's father Ralf is promoted to Commandant of the death camp Auschwitz, which Bruno mispronounces as "Out-With".Bruno is initially upset about having to move to Auschwitz and is almost in tears at the prospect of leaving his 'best friends for life, Daniel, Karl, and Martin. From the house at Auschwitz, Bruno sees the camp in which the prisoners' uniforms appear to him to be "striped pyjamas". One day Bruno decides to explore the wire fence surrounding the camp. He meets a Jewish boy, Shmuel, who he learns shares his birthday (April 15th) and age. Shmuel says that his father, grandfather, and brother are with him on his side of the fence, but he is separated from his mother. Bruno and Shmuel talk and become very good friends although Bruno still does not understand very much about Shmuel or his life. Nearly every day, unless it is raining, Bruno goes to see Shmuel and sneaks him food. Over time, Bruno notices that Shmuel is rapidly losing weight.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_Again_(Finney_novel)"title="Time and Again (Finney novel)">
In November 1970, Simon Morley, an advertising sketch artist, is approached by U.S. Army Major Ruben Prien to participate in a secret government project. He is taken to a huge warehouse on the West Side of Manhattan, where he views what seem to be movie sets, with people acting on them. It seems this is a project to learn whether it is feasible to send people back into the past by what amounts to self-hypnosis—whether, by convincing oneself that one is in the past, not the present, one can make it so.As it turns out, Simon (usually called Si) has a good reason to want to go back to the past—his girlfriend, Kate, has a mystery linked to New York City in 1882. She has a letter dated from that year, mailed to an Andrew Carmody (a fictional minor figure who was associated with Grover Cleveland). The letter seems innocuous enough—a request for a meeting to discuss marble—but there is a note which, though half burned, seems to say that the sending of the letter led to "the destruction by fire of the entire World", followed by a missing word. Carmody, the writer of the note, mentioned his blame for that incident. He then killed himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zabibah_and_the_King"title="Zabibah and the King">
The plot is a love story about a powerful ruler of medieval Iraq and a beautiful commoner girl named Zabibah. Zabibah's husband is a cruel and unloving man who rapes her. The book is set in 7th or 8th century Tikrit, Hussein's home town. Although the book is on the surface a romance novel, it is (and was intended to be read as) an allegory. The hero is Hussein and Zabibah represents the Iraqi people.The vicious husband is the United States and his rape of Zabibah represents the U.S. invasion of Iraq at the end of the Gulf War, as illustrated by the date of the rape being January 17—the same date that U.S. led forces commenced the 1991 offensive that drove Iraq out of Kuwait. In the novel, the king dies after capturing the rapists and avenging the honor of Zabibah.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Harvest_(Dicks_novel)"title="Blood Harvest (Dicks novel)">
While the Seventh Doctor and Ace team up with a hard bitten PI in 1929 Chicago, Bernice is stranded on a vampire-infested world with the Doctor's former companion Romana.The chief monster is a supernaturally powerful creature called Agonal, an elemental who feeds on agony and death and so seeks as much of it as he can. Rassilon traps Agonal in his tomb, just as he trapped Borusa in the television story "The Five Doctors".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceberg_(Banks_novel)"title="Iceberg (Banks novel)">
Following their betrayal by Tobias Vaughn and the failure of their planned invasion of Earth, a group of Cybermen crashes in Antarctica while fleeing the destruction of their mothership. Some years later, in 1986, a second Cyberman incursion is foiled and their home world Mondas is destroyed in the process. But the truth is covered up, and life goes on. Software engineer Philip Duvall is paralysed in a hit-and-run accident, but the fleeing motorcyclist knows that he will bear the guilt for the rest of his life. Scientist Pamela Cutler learns that her unresolved issues with her domineering father will never be resolved; he has been killed in action at the South Pole, and the events leading up to his death have been classified. And Sergeant Dave Hilliard arrives in Antarctica to clean up after whatever it was that happened at Snowcap Tracking Station—and finds more than he bargained for.Twenty years later, investigative journalist Ruby Duvall, Phillip's daughter, sets off on an Antarctic tour on the SS Elysium, a pleasure cruise sponsored by the Australian billionaire Sir Stanley Straker (“The Wizard of Oz”). She is going undercover to avoid attention, but it will be a working holiday; she will be writing about the cruise for the Sunday Seeker, and testing her Nanocom dictation machine and a tiny holocamera as she does so. Ruby soon makes new friends on the cruise; a Canadian woman named Barbara teaches her the martial art Pah T’wa, and the ship's entertainers, Diana and Leslie, tell her about the Wizard of Oz cabaret they’ll be staging. However, Ruby finds it difficult to get close to moody artist Michael Brack, who has been hired to sculpt icebergs into caricatures of the ship's passengers using a decommissioned Army laser. Brack is studying Heidegger, and believes that society should work towards becoming more efficient and machine-like. As the cruise proceeds, Ruby also finds him studying a book on cybernetics, and comes to suspect that he's up to something secret in the ship's hold. Diana and Leslie eventually learn Ruby's true identity and blab it about the ship before realising that she wanted to avoid attention, and when Brack realises who she really is he begins to act even more strangely. He seems to go out of his way to avoid her, but when she catches a glimpse of his cocktail napkin she finds that he's been obsessively drawing her face along with blueprints for a large cybernetic machine...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Demon_in_My_View"title="A Demon in My View">
A rigid man of fifty leads a solitary, apparently respectable life, as clerk and bookkeeper for a small business and part-time rent collector for his landlord. He has rented a flat in the building for twenty years because deep in its cellar, unbeknownst to anyone else, is a mannequin that he periodically "strangles" in order to satisfy his homicidal urges. The figure's location in the cellar, the darkness, the furtiveness, all are essential to the solitary man's satisfaction. The tenuous mental equilibrium he has been able to maintain is threatened when a young man, healthy in mind and body, a doctoral candidate in psychology, becomes a roomer in the house. Danger the older man senses from the moment the new tenant appears is horribly realized for him when the young man finds the mannequin and uses it as the figure in the bonfire at the Guy Fawkes Night celebration he has organized for the local children. The respectable fifty-year-old now must go back to the streets to find flesh more yielding than a mannequin's...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brave_Little_Toaster_(novel)"title="The Brave Little Toaster (novel)">
The story opens with a description of five members of a family of minor home appliances left in the cottage, listed from oldest to youngest. They are each given a personality. As the oldest, the vacuum cleaner is steady and dependable, the plastic AM radio alarm clock, the yellow electric blanket (cheerful), the tensor lamp stand (somewhat neurotic whether it, as an incentive from a savings bank, was better than a store-bought equivalent) and the sunbeam toaster (bright). The cottage itself is on the northernmost edge of an immense forest and the appliances have grown used to seasonal use, with some of the master's other appliances (such as the black and white television set, the blender, the oral irrigator, the telephone, the stereo system and the world clock) annually returning to the city with their master each Labor Day.One spring day, after "two years, five months, and thirteen days" without the master, though, the appliances begin to suspect they have been abandoned. A few months later, the toaster tells the others "We need people to take care of, and we need people to take care of "us"." and retells the story of an abandoned dog who had accidentally been left behind in a summer cottage, like themselves, but still "found his way to his master, hundreds of miles away". The appliances plan to do the same as soon as they can all travel safely together. Although the hoover, while being strong and self-propelled, could take the other appliances, it still needed a source of power other than the wall outlet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_I_Had_One_Wish"title="If I Had One Wish">
One day an old woman grants Alec one wish for his kindness to her. Alec uses it to wish that his little brother Stevie had never been born; to his horror, it comes true. Although no one else remembers Stevie, and Alec's life is in some ways better now, he is still guilt-stricken, and desperately tries to find a way to reverse his wish.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noisy_Nora"title="Noisy Nora">
One evening, an attention-starved middle mouse named Nora wanted attention for her parents. But her parents are doing stuff with her older sister Kate and her baby brother Jack. After so much waiting, Nora decides to make noise: She banged the window, slammed the door, and dropped Kate's marbles on the kitchen floor. But, unfortunately, all it did was make her parents yell at her to be quiet and Kate embarrassedly says to Nora: "Nora, why are you so dumb?"Nora tried to get attention again but her parents are still doing things with Jack &amp; Kate. Again, she tried to make noise to get attention: She knocked the lamp, felled some chairs, and flew a kite down the stairs and crashed it at the bottom of the stairs. But, again, her parents yell at her to be quiet and Kate embarrassedly says to Nora again: "Nora, why are you so dumb?"Out of options to get attention again, Nora shouted to her whole family after she couldn't get attention from them: "I'm leaving and I'm never coming back!" After a moment of silence without Nora, The family realizes that Nora is gone because they neglected her and they decided to form a search party to find Nora. But Nora was not in the mailbox or in the cellar or hiding in the shrub or in the tub. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Probability_Broach"title="The Probability Broach">
Edward William "Win" Bear is an Ute Indian who works for the Denver Police Department in a version of the United States in an alternate history of 1987 that is controlled by an anti-capitalist, ecofascist government complete with a new police force created in 1984 called the Federal Security Police (FSP, or "SecPol" as it is more commonly known) reminiscent of the Gestapo. Henry M. Jackson is president, citizens' freedoms are very limited, and many laws and regulations have been passed. Examples include hoarding precious metals, such as silver and gold, is illegal and due to strict gun control policies, only the police and citizens with federal permits are allowed to carry guns.Bear is called to investigate the unusual murder of physicist Vaughn Meiss; he eventually finds himself projected into the North American Confederacy by means of the "Probability Broach", an inter-dimensional conduit originally developed as a means for interstellar travel in the North American Confederacy by a bottlenose dolphin physicist, named Ooloorie Eckickeck P'Wheet, and her human compatriot, Dr. Dora Jayne Thorens.Win encounters his NAC counterpart, Edward William "Ed" Bear, and Ed's neighbors, most notably the "healer" Clarissa Olson and Lucy Kropotkin, who is later revealed to be 135 years old. Lucy's life becomes the vantage point by which Win is acclimated to life in the NAC and Laporte, the NAC equivalent to Denver. Win and Ed unravel the mystery of the Meiss murder and learn that he was killed to hide an effort by SecPol to conquer the NAC with the help of Hamiltonian forces on the NAC side, led by John Jay Madison, a.k.a. the infamous Prussian expatriate and 1918 war hero Manfred von Richthofen, known here as the Red Knight of Prussia. Win, Ed, Lucy and Clarissa lead the effort to notify the nascent NAC government of the threat. En route to the meeting of the Continental Congress, Ed and Clarissa are kidnapped, leaving Win and Lucy to reveal the plot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteen_Steps_Down"title="Thirteen Steps Down">
Mix Cellini is a lonely, maladjusted young man who works for a company that repairs exercise equipment, and lives in the upstairs apartment of an old Victorian house on Notting Hill. While his reclusive landlady, Gwendoline Chawcer, spends her time reading and pondering lost loves, Mix grows dangerously obsessed with serial killer John Christie and a local model, Nerissa Nash, despite the fact that she hardly even acknowledges his existence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Secret"title="Deep Secret">
The book's first narrator is Rupert Venables, the junior "magid" responsible for Earth and the Koryfonic Empire, a collection of Ayewards worlds. The multiverse contains Ayeward (generally good, pro-magic) and Nayward (the opposite) worlds. It is the task of the magids to urge the worlds in an Ayewards direction. When the Emperor of the Koryfonic Empire is assassinated, no heir can be found. Earth's senior magid has also died, and Rupert must find his replacement.Venables draws the candidates for Earth senior magid together in an unlikely place: a science fiction convention in the town of Wantchester. Maree Mallory, the book's second narrator, is one of the candidates. Maree's Uncle Ted is to be the guest of honor at the convention in Wantchester. Ted's wife Janine, Maree, and Ted and Janine's son Nick are to accompany him.All arrive at the convention, where the reserved Venables is somewhat stunned at the bizarre nature of the convention and its attendees, particularly as it is housed in the strange, Escher-like Hotel Babylon, which appears to be centered on a powerful magical node. He seeks out each magid candidate, but is disappointed to find each of them entirely unsuitable. His opinion of Maree Mallory rises, however, as they encounter each other several times at the convention.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Water's_Lovely"title="The Water's Lovely">
Ismay Sealand believes that her younger sister, Heather, murdered their stepfather Guy when they were teenagers. Ismay and her mother, Beatrix, returned from shopping for a new school uniform to find Guy drowned in his bath and only Heather home. Although both Ismay and her mother believe Heather drowned Guy – who was weak from a virus – there was no evidence and so at the inquest the death was ruled accidental. Ismay thinks Heather murdered Guy because he made sexual advances to her, Ismay, and Heather wished to protect her. In fact Ismay encouraged Guy's interest and hoped he would come to her bedroom and have sex with her.Now in their twenties, Ismay and Heather live in the same house, which has been divided into two flats. They live together downstairs, and their mother, who became mentally ill after Guy's death, lives with her sister Pamela in the upstairs. Ismay remains haunted by what happened all those years ago. Ismay is desperately in love with Andrew Campbell-Sedge, who looks very like her dead stepfather, and who does not get on with Heather.Meanwhile, Edmund Litton's mother, Irene, tries to set him up with Marion Melville, a thin darting woman with bright red hair who has befriended a number of elderly people in the area. Horrified by this idea Edmund sets up an alternative date with a woman who works in the catering department of the hospice where he works, Heather Sealand. Their date is more successful than expected and the two begin to fall in love. This causes a rift with Edmund's mother, who enjoyed being the only woman in his life, especially when Edmund goes to stay overnight at Heather's flat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cherryh_Odyssey"title="The Cherryh Odyssey">
"The Cherryh Odyssey" consists of eight analytical essays on C. J. Cherryh's works, four personal reflections, and a fifty-six page bibliography of Cherryh by Stan Szalewicz. Also included is a preface and a biography, "The Literary Life of C.J. Cherryh" by the editor, Edward Carmien.In "Introduction: What We Do For Love", science fiction author and scholar James Gunn explains how difficult it must have been for Cherryh to enter the male-dominated science fiction arena in the mid-1970s. He says that she wrote for the love of story-telling rather than for the money. Author and artist Jane Fancher, Cherryh's business and writing partner contributes a personal tribute, "The Cherryh Legacy ... An Author's Perspective" in which she relates Cherryh's childhood and her school and college years. At the age of ten, Cherryh started writing her own stories when "Flash Gordon", her favorite TV program was cancelled. In this essay Fancher also analyses Cherryh's writing style, in particular a technique Cherryh calls "Third Person Intense Internal" (TPI-squared), in which the writer only narrates what the viewpoint character sees and thinks about. Betsy Wollheim, the daughter of Cherryh's first publisher, Donald A. Wollheim, gives another personal account of Cherryh in "A Pioneer of the Mind". Wollheim describes the relationship that developed between her father, also a science fiction writer, and Cherryh, and recounts Cherryh's passion for space travel that is reflected in many of her stories. In "Oklahoma Launch", author Bradley H. Sinor gives his views on Cherryh, who later became his friend and mentor. They both lived in Lawton, Oklahoma during their childhood, and crossed paths again at a University of Oklahoma science fiction club meeting.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keys_to_the_Street"title="The Keys to the Street">
Against the will of her boyfriend, Alistair, Mary Jago volunteers to donate bone marrow. He beats her after finding out, so she breaks up with him and goes house-sitting for a rich couple in London. Leslie Bean, an old dog-walker, comes there twice a day to take the shih tzu Gushi out along with five other dogs.Mary makes an appointment with Leo Nash, the leukemia patient whose life she prolonged. Although he's secretive about his private life and doesn't want her to see his brother she starts an affair with him, much to the dislike of Alistair.Homeless people live in and around Regent's Park, including Roman Ashton, who's actually rich but prefers the street life since his wife and children died in a traffic accident. When Effie, a homeless woman, finds a corpse over the spikes of the park gate, he makes an anonymous phone call to the police. The victim is John Dominic Cahill, a homeless Irishman known as Decker. The newspaper nickname the killer 'The Impaler'.A second victim follows: James "Pharaoh" Clancy, a homeless man who was always wearing keys around his neck. DI William Marnock starts suspecting Bean, because he has accused the victim of beating him up and had plans to pay Hob, a drug addict, to beat up Pharaoh.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristin_Lavransdatter"title="Kristin Lavransdatter">
The cycle follows the life of Kristin Lavransdatter, a fictitious Norwegian woman living in the 14th century. Kristin grows up in Sel in the Gudbrand Valley, the daughter of a well-respected and affluent farmer. She experiences a number of conflicts in her relationships with her parents, and her husband, in medieval Norway. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fine_Dark_Line"title="A Fine Dark Line">
The story is told through the eyes of Stanley Mitchell, a thirteen-year-old boy, the younger of two children. The Mitchells are the owners and proprietors of the only drive-in theater in Dumont. Stanley discovers a tin box containing a collection of troubled love letters that ultimately lead him to a burned-out house, the mysterious deaths of two young women and various secrets that the Dumont leaders would prefer remain buried. Stanley's ally is Buster Smith, the projectionist at the drive-in theater, an elderly black man whose attempts to drown his demons in alcohol are doomed to failure, but who has a depth that only Stanley is aware of. In attempting to solve the mysteries of the deaths of the two women, Stanley exposes himself, his family and his friends, to danger.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenesis_(novel)"title="Phylogenesis (novel)">
Desvendapur is an anti-social Thranx poet native to the colony on Willow-Wane who believes he can find new inspiration for his poetry by coming in contact with the physically repulsive humans, an intelligent mammal race that is unlike the insectoid thranx. Desvendapur's aspirations lead him to a secret thranx colony in the Amazon Basin on Earth where he meets a petty human thief turned murderer, Cheelo Montoya. Desvendapur is fascinated by the first native human he comes across so, with great resistance on the part of Montoya, chooses to follow the human, using him as the basis of a series of poems. The mismatched pair flee from the authorities and from a pair of poachers who wish to sell Desvendapur to a private zoo, and ultimately demonstrate how the two races can get along and work together on common challenges.By the end, the unlikely pair find a mutual understanding. The Thranx colony in the Amazon Basin is revealed to the Earth community and the diplomatic beginnings of the Humanx Commonwealth are greatly accelerated. Montoya becomes a celebrity despite his unwillingness to be in the spotlight and Desvendapur's poems he composed during his time on Earth become wildly popular amongst the Thranx.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirge_(novel)"title="Dirge (novel)">
It has been twenty years since the chance meeting of street thug Cheelo Montoya and thranx poet Desvendapur revealed the insectoid alien colony hidden deep within the Amazon Basin, and not much has changed.Humanity has recently discovered the planet Argus V, better known as Treetrunk, with the intention of colonizing the planet when their survey team is visited by a new alien race, the Pitar. At first the humans worry that the Pitar will want to lay claim to the planet, but instead of wanting to claim territory, the aliens instead simply want to observe the humans.The Pitar are a close human analog to humans, appearing to be perfectly human except for a wider variety of hair and eye colors (including blue and violet among them) along with nearly god-like physiques. Most humans almost immediately view the Pitar as perfect. This complicated matters for the insectoid Thranx who wish to form a closer alliance with the humans. Some xenophobic humans go so far as to invade the small Thranx colony in the Amazon, killing many of the insect colonists. While this causes a political nightmare for both humans and Thranx, it also brings together the human chaplain and Thranx spiritual advisor who form the United Church.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_in_Bronze"title="Shadows in Bronze">
The story begins in Rome during late spring, AD 71. Marcus Didius Falco and a group of the Praetorian Guard under the captaincy of Julius Frontinus are disposing of a decomposing corpse. Secrecy is paramount because he was the victim of a discreet execution, having been guilty of treason against the Emperor.In his position as imperial agent, Falco is involved with the tidying of the conspiracy (The Silver Pigs) and the emptying of the traitor's house. Anacrites and Momus are also involved with this. When Falco and Anacrites arrive at the Palace to report to the Emperor, Falco runs into the Senator Decimus Camillus Verus and his daughter, Helena Justina. He then reports to the Emperor, who wishes to destroy any evidence that his son, Domitian, was involved with the scheme.When a freedman bursts in to inform the Emperor that the Temple of Hercules Gaditanus is on fire, Anacrites is sent to the Transtiberina to find a freedman (Barnabas) who has been following Falco around, whilst Falco is sent to investigate the arson attack. There he discovers that Curtius Longinus, who had been summoned to Rome to account for his role in the plot, has been killed in the fire. He returns to the palace to be informed that Anacrites had been unable to locate Barnabas, the freedman immediately becoming suspect in the arson and death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poseidon's_Gold"title="Poseidon's Gold">
In "Poseidon's Gold", Falco returns from a six-month mission to Germania Liberia, only to become embroiled in the after-effects of a scam by his now-deceased, older brother Festus. The story recounts shipping scams, crooked antiques auctions, and hired thugs, all while Falco is trying to clear his family's name and sort out Festus' business dealings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Act_in_Palmyra"title="Last Act in Palmyra">
In "Last Act in Palmyra", Falco takes on a new spying mission for Vespasian to the east of the Empire. He also plans to investigate the disappearance of a young musician, Sophrona. Falco and Helena Justina travel to Petra, where they encounter a theatre group who have just lost their playwright due to drowning. Joining them, Falco attempts to fulfill his various investigations, whilst at the same time write his new play, "The Spook Who Spoke".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_to_Strange_Men"title="Talking to Strange Men">
Two plotlines run through this crime novel. The main adult protagonist is John Creevey who stumbles upon a series of hidden coded messages which he thinks must be the work of criminals or spies. John is unhappy and depressed. His wife Jennifer has left him for Peter Mullin, her old fiancé, and he cannot accept that she will not return to him. He is still affected by the murder of his sister 16 years ago and Peter, her fiancé, is equally unhappy. John becomes obsessed by unravelling the codes, spending hours trying to break them.The coded messages are, however, being left by rival groups of public schoolboys. These boys are emulating the world of the 1980s spy fiction with the home team led by 14-year-old Mungo battling against Moscow Centre, run by boys at a rival school. Mungo is over six feet tall and has inherited the leadership from his older brother. The groups have moles and traitors. One of Mungo's team is Charles Mabledene, another 14-year-old, but Mungo is not sure if he is really on their side and sets out to test him.Jennifer and Peter come round to John's house in one of their attempts to get him to agree to a quick divorce and Colin, a friend of John's, recognises from when he was a juror. He tells John that Peter pleaded guilty to indecent assault on a male child under the age of thirteen. John wonders how he can use this information to turn Jennifer against Peter and is also worried because a 12-year-old boy has been abducted from where Peter and Jennifer live on an afternoon when Peter was on his own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_on_the_Edge_of_Time"title="Woman on the Edge of Time">
In the 1970s, an impoverished and intelligent thirty-seven-year-old Mexican-American woman Consuelo (Connie) Ramos, a resident of Spanish Harlem, is unfairly incarcerated in a New York mental hospital due to her supposed violent criminal tendencies. She had been recently released from a previous voluntary commitment in a mental institution after an episode of drug-related child neglect, which led her also to lose custody of her daughter. Connie is caught within the government welfare and child custody labyrinth of 1970s New York City. She is after the first scene recommitted involuntarily by her niece's pimp on grounds of violent behavior, after she strikes him in the course of protecting her niece, Dolly (Dolores), from him. Dolly had sought Connie's protection because she was being forced by the pimp into having an (illegal) abortion. One of Connie's chief abilities is her perceptiveness and empathy. As a result, before being committed, Connie had for some time begun to communicate with ("receive" from) a figure from the future: an androgynous young woman named Luciente. Connie retains her visions and her connection, which become more and more real, even while heavily drugged in the mental hospital in New York, based loosely on Bellevue and other mental institutions from that period. Luciente is time-traveling from a future (the date is given as 2137), in which a number of goals of the political and social agenda of the late sixties' and early seventies' radical movements have been fulfilled. Environmental pollution, patriarchy, homelessness, homophobia, racism, ethnocentrism, phallogocentrism, sexism, class-subordination, food injustice, consumerism, imperialism, and totalitarianism have been effectively dealt with in this world, which is governmentally decentralized in a loose version of anarchism. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_(Cooney_novel)"title="Forbidden (Cooney novel)">
18-year-old Annabel Hope Jayquith is both beautiful and famous in her world of wealth and prestige. Daughter to billionaire Hollings Jayquith and the deceased artist Eleanor Hope Jayquith, as well as niece to the famous television news anchor Theodora Jayquith, Annabel is fighting internal demons of loneliness and self-doubt. While at a charity event in Manhattan, she meets and falls in love with 22-year-old Daniel Madison Ransom. Daniel is the son of Senator Madison Ransom who was assassinated for trying to reveal a corrupt industry. Along with his mother, the insane Catherine Ransom, Daniel wants to reveal to the world the real killer, whom they believe is Hollings Jayquith himself.Meanwhile, Theodora Jayquith’s illegitimate 18-year-old daughter Jade O’Keefe has discovered the identity of her real mother after the death of her foster parents, and is now on her way to Manhattan to confront her mother and gain the fortune she feels she has been denied. In another strand of the plot, a young man who goes by the name Alex arrives in Connecticut seeking to avenge the murder of his brother.Annabel and Daniel meet again at their mutual friends Venice Pierce and Michael Theil’s wedding in Litchfield, Connecticut. He's a groomsman, she's a bridesmaid, and it seems to be a night of romance. Then Daniel reveals what he and his mother want to do, expose Hollings on his sister’s own show. Annabel, too shocked to speak, flees to her home to comfort herself. However, her solace is invaded by the entrance of Jade, who has used her likeness to Theodora to charm Hollings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deeds_of_the_Disturber"title="The Deeds of the Disturber">
Immediately after their adventure in "Lion in the Valley", the Emersons return home to England for the summer of 1896, as is their custom. Upon their arrival, Amelia finds that her despised brother James wants to dump his two children, Percy and Violet, on the Emersons for the summer. Amelia accepts, if only to instill some higher principles in the obviously spoiled children.Kevin O'Connell enters the story as he reports on a supposed curse on a mummy in the British Museum. He's competing against a fellow journalist, M. Minton, who always seems to "scoop" him, and he pesters the Emersons for their knowledge and expertise on Egyptology and detection. Imagine Amelia's surprise when M. Minton turns out to be a young woman!Meanwhile, Ramses and Percy hate each other on sight, Violet turns out to be an empty-headed doll who overeats and throws temper tantrums, and Ramses' belongings keep mysteriously ending up in Percy's possession.The mummy "mystery" begins to take on more sinister portent as a masked figure stalks the Museum, a woman from Emerson's past turns up as the owner of an opium den, and the Emersons (including Ramses) are subjected to the usual attempts at injury and kidnapping. Eventually, Amelia, Emerson, and Inspector Cuff of Scotland Yard find themselves trapped in a cellar which is about to be flooded, with no backup and only Amelia's corset to save them...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_in_White_(novel)"title="The Woman in White (novel)">
Walter Hartright, a young art teacher, encounters and gives directions to a mysterious and distressed woman dressed entirely in white, lost in London; he is later informed by policemen that she has escaped from an asylum. Soon afterwards, he travels to Limmeridge House in Cumberland, having been hired as a drawing teacher on the recommendation of his friend, Pesca, an Italian language teacher. The Limmeridge household comprises the invalid Frederick Fairlie and Walter's students: Laura Fairlie, Mr. Fairlie's niece, and Marian Halcombe, her devoted half-sister. Walter realises that Laura bears an astonishing resemblance to the woman in white, who is known to the household by the name of Anne Catherick, a mentally disabled child who formerly lived near Limmeridge and was devoted to Laura's mother, who first dressed her in white.Over the next few months, Walter and Laura fall in love, despite Laura's betrothal to Sir Percival Glyde, Baronet. Upon realising this, Marian advises Walter to leave Limmeridge. Laura receives an anonymous letter warning her against marrying Glyde. Walter deduces that Anne has sent the letter and encounters her again in Cumberland; he becomes convinced that Glyde originally placed Anne in the asylum. Despite the misgivings of the family lawyer over the financial terms of the marriage settlement, which will give the entirety of Laura's fortune to Glyde if she dies without leaving an heir, and Laura's confession that she loves another man, Laura and Glyde marry in December 1849 and travel to Italy for six months. Concurrently, Walter joins an expedition to Honduras.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jewel_in_the_Crown_(novel)"title="The Jewel in the Crown (novel)">
Much of the novel is written in the form of interviews and reports of conversations and research from the point of view of a narrator. Other portions are in the form of letters from one character to another or entries in their diaries. Still others take the form of reports from an omniscient observer.Daphne Manners, who has lost her immediate family in England, comes to India to live with her only remaining family member, Lady Manners. Lady Manners sends her to Mayapore to stay with her Indian friend, Lady Chatterjee.While staying with Lady Chatterjee, whom she calls "Auntie Lili," Daphne meets Hari Kumar. He is an Indian who was brought up in England and educated at Chillingborough, a public school that Daphne's own brother attended. Hari speaks only English, but his father's financial collapse and suicide obliged Hari to return to India. Daphne learns to despise the attitudes of the English in India and also grows to love Hari.Subsequent to Kumar's arrest and Daphne's association with him, the local police superintendent, Ronald Merrick, becomes infatuated with Daphne. Merrick, of lower-middle-class English origin, is resentful of the privileged English "public school" class and contemptuous of Indians. Hari thus represents everything that Merrick hates.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_(Bond_and_Larkin_novel)"title="Vortex (Bond and Larkin novel)">
Despite strict instructions to avoid provoking unnecessary confrontations with the ANC's armed wing, the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), Karl Vorster, the South African Minister of Law and Order, authorises a raid by the 44 Parachute Brigade on suspected MK bases in Zimbabwe. Vorster—a hardline conservative and secret Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging sympathiser—is roundly criticised by President Haymans and his reformist Cabinet for his actions. However, the paratroopers succeed in recovering valuable intelligence on "Broken Covenant", a proposed MK operation to assassinate Haymans as he travels to Pretoria from Cape Town aboard the Blue Train for the parliament's summer recess. This incident comes at a time when negotiations between Haymans and the ANC are approaching a major breakthrough, so MK decides to abort the attack.Sensing an opportunity to seize power himself with the current leadership eliminated, Vorster excuses himself from the Blue Train and eliminates the ANC courier assigned to transmit the abort signal to MK forces. The oblivious guerrillas carry out the attack as planned, killing Haymans and his entire Cabinet. A triumphant Vorster then assumes the presidency and declares a state of emergency, giving the South African Police free rein to crack down on anti-apartheid movements. Diplomatic relations with the rest of the world quickly sour, and thousands of those suspected of being affiliated with the ANC are executed or moved to remote internment facilities. Vorster also orders the South African Defence Force (SADF) to invade newly independent Namibia under the pretext of targeting MK training camps. At the behest of the Namibian government, thousands of Cuban troops redeploy from their bases in Angola to halt the SADF's offensive south of Windhoek. This leads to a prolonged war of attrition, with neither side being able to gain the upper hand.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winter_King_(novel)"title="The Winter King (novel)">
The story is narrated by its main protagonist, Derfel Cadarn, an elderly monk who has converted to Christianity late in life after spending many years as a warrior in the service of Arthur, a renowned warlord who long ago fought to protect the kingdom of Dumnonia. In the monastery at Dinnewrac, the young Queen Igraine begs Derfel to record his tales of how he met the many famous heroes of Arthurian legend. Knowing that his unsympathetic master Bishop Sansum cannot read, Derfel pretends to write a Christian gospel. Most of the narrative is recounted in a series of flashbacks to his life as a young man, with regular intermissions in the present-day monastery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_God_(novel)"title="Enemy of God (novel)">
## Part One: The Dark Road.Arthur's unexpected victory over the combined armies of Powys and Siluria at Lugg Vale has brought peace and unity to the British kingdoms. Both Gorfyddyd, King of Powys, and Gundleus, King of Siluria, are dead. Gorfyddyd's son, Cuneglas, shares Arthur's desire for peace and also his dream of an alliance between the kingdoms that will destroy their common enemy, the Saxons. Derfel is ordered to follow Cuneglas to Caer Sws, capital of Powys, where the Edling is to be crowned king. As for the vacant Silurian throne, Arthur plans to make Lancelot the king and marry him to the Cuneglas' sister, Ceinwyn, the Princess of Powys, thus cementing the alliance between Dumnonia, Powys, and Siluria. Derfel himself is to be rewarded with land and made the new champion of Dumnonia as well as the caretaker for the boy king Mordred, as Arthur wants to remove Mordred from the growing influence of the Christian faction within Dumnonia.Derfel does not reveal that he is in love with Ceinwyn and wants her for himself. As Arthur and his wife Guinevere arrive at Caer Sws for Cuneglas' acclamation, Derfel witnesses Ceinwyn's apparent happiness with her betrothal. Derfel speaks with Merlin, who tells him that Arthur wants him to marry Gwenhwyvach, Guinevere's plain and apathetic sister. Merlin asks Derfel to meet him and Nimue late that night on a hilltop, where he has Derfel drink a foul concoction. Derfel hallucinates about Ceinwyn and sees a Dark Road and a ghoul, who Merlin tells him is Diwrnach, the vicious Irish king of Lleyn. Merlin asks Derfel to accompany him on a quest to Diwrnach's lands to recover the Cauldron of Clydno Eiddin, one of the Thirteen Treasures of Britain, which was lost after the Romans sacked Ynys Mon four centuries prior. Merlin gives Derfel a bone and tells him that all he has to do is break it and his wish will be granted – namely that Ceinwyn will choose him over Lancelot – but warns that if he breaks it, he will be oath-bound to Merlin's quest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_Lane"title="Glory Lane">
Teenage punk rock fan and high-school dropout Seeth (née Seth) and his older brother, geeky graduate student Kerwin, rescue a stranger from arrest at a bowling alley in their hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico, only to discover that the cops are killer aliens and that the bowling ball the stranger carries is intelligent. Seeth, Kerwin and the stranger, quickly joined by a valley girl-type named Miranda, soon find themselves on the run, not just on the streets of Earth, but among the stars as well, and in the middle of an intergalactic battle for Izmir, the "bowling ball".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Abdul_Gasazi"title="The Garden of Abdul Gasazi">
Miss Hester's dog Fritz had bitten her cousin Eunice six times, so when Miss Hester receives an invitation to visit Eunice, she's not surprised to read "P.S. Please leave your dog home". Before leaving for her visit, Miss Hester asks Alan Mitz to dog sit Fritz and give him his afternoon walk. Alan does an admirable job of making sure Fritz does not destroy the house furniture with his sharp teeth. However, while walking the dog, he comes upon a sign forbidding dogs into the garden of Abdul Gasazi, the retired magician. Alan takes the warning quite seriously and turns to leave, but Fritz tugs and snaps his way out of his collar and runs into the garden. Alan chases the dog all over the garden and almost catches Fritz. But after Alan falls down a flight of steps, Fritz disappears. While looking for Fritz, Alan notices that his dogprints lead the way to the House of Gasazi. Once Alan arrives at the mansion-sized house, Mr. Gasazi invites him in. Alan politely asks Mr. Gasazi to please give Fritz back. At first, Gasazi smiles and seems to grant Alan's request by saying "Certainly you may have your little Fritzie. Follow me". 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_Island_(novel)"title="Pig Island (novel)">
Joe Oakes is a journalist famous for his ability to dismantle supernatural events linked above all to the so-called "gurus". After the appearance of an amateur video that for a moment shows a figure in the distance with human features but with a demonic tail on the so-called Isle of Pigs in Scotland, Joe receives an invitation from the new leader of the local sect to visit their community and to write an article about their religion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fires_of_Azeroth"title="Fires of Azeroth">
The Gates are passageways through space and time that can, if misused, destroy entire civilizations. Such cataclysms had happened in the past, most recently to the "qhal", a species that at one time had enslaved other races, including humans. The Union Science Bureau had dispatched a hundred men and women on a one-way mission to destroy the Gates, closing them behind them as they traveled from one world to the next. Morgaine is the last survivor of that band.In Vanye's world, they had been opposed by an evil ancient being whose knowledge of the Gates rivals Morgaine's own. The creature had taken over the body of Chya Roh, Vanye's cousin, then fled through the Gate of Ivrel to the land of Shiuan. There, he had amassed an army by promising men and half-breed qhal a way out of their dying world. It had taken all of Morgaine's guile to force a passage for her and Vanye through the Gate of Shiuan into a third world, but they were powerless to stop Roh from following with his forces.Being two against a hundred thousand, they are forced to flee into the forests of Azeroth, finding shelter with friendly villagers. Eventually, the natives call on their qhal lord for guidance. Morgaine meets with Merir, lord of Shathan, and receives grudging permission to travel where she wills.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gate_of_Ivrel"title="Gate of Ivrel">
The pre-technological land of Andur-Kursh is fought over by rival clans, among them the Nhi and the Chya. Vanye is the despised bastard son of a Nhi lord and a Chya captive. One day, he kills one legitimate half-brother and maims the other after being baited. Exiled for his crimes, Vanye inadvertently frees Morgaine, a beautiful woman whom he recognizes as a legend from the past. Morgaine had been trapped in stasis for a century in one of the many "Gates" (passageways through space and time) which dot the land. By age-old custom, she claims a year of service from him for his acceptance of her food and shelter.Morgaine explains that she is on a mission to close the Gates, as the misuse of their powers has destroyed entire civilizations in the past. The rest of her group were betrayed while attempting to attack this planet's master Gate at Ivrel, controlled by Thiye. Only Morgaine and a few soldiers escaped. Pursued, she fled into a lesser Gate. She seeks aid from Clan Leth, but its lord, Kasedre, is half mad. His chief counselor, Liell, warns them to leave, killing a guard to leave them no choice.Morgaine and Vanye become uneasy guests of Roh, Vanye's cousin and lord of the Chya. After questioning, they are let go, only to be attacked by Thiye's men. Morgaine draws her sword, Changeling, which can tap the power of the Gates to send its victims to another place and time. The two escape, but run into Vanye's people. She is set free, though without her sword, while Vanye is forced to remain behind by his half-brother Erij, who wants Vanye to help him rule their land. When persuasion and threats alike prove useless, he draws Changeling, not knowing its powers. Vanye uses the ensuing mayhem to retrieve the dropped sword and rejoin Morgaine. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_of_Shiuan"title="Well of Shiuan">
Mija Jherun, a fey seventeen-year-old peasant woman, lives in a world inexorably being overwhelmed by the sea. One day, after looting a barrow, the tomb of a young warrior-king, she is chased by an armored man on horseback back to her village. He breaks into the poor home she shares with her family, helps himself to some food, and asks if anyone has seen a pale woman on a grey horse. After repulsing an attack by the men of the village, he departs for Shiuan, a richer land ruled by the "khal", another race that is enough like humans to successfully interbreed.Jherun, yearning for a less bleak future than marrying the thuggish Fwar, runs after him. Instead of finding him, she stumbles upon his mortal enemies: his cousin, Nhi Vanye, and Vanye's lord, Morgaine, the pale woman.They inform her that Chya Roh's body had been taken over by an evil creature who had extended his life countless times by this means. He had betrayed Morgaine and sent ten thousand men to their doom a century before. Fleeing her, he had passed through a Gate from Vanye's world to this one, closing the passageway forever, but not quickly enough to prevent Morgaine and Vanye from following.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exile's_Gate"title="Exile's Gate">
Morgaine must meet her greatest challenge: Gault, who is both human and alien, and also seeks control of the world and its Gate. She will meet the true Gatemaster, a mysterious lord with power as great as, or greater, than her own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_Jack"title="Ordinary Jack">
Jack Bagthorpe is beaten at everything by his family. Depressed at being an 'ordinary' child in a talented family, and by the failure to beat his younger sister at swimming, Jack Bagthorpe enlists the help of his Uncle Parker in hatching a scheme to become equal. Later, a series of events involving Zero (the family dog) and cousin Daisy result in the dining room being destroyed by a spectacular fire involving a box of fireworks. Jack has a clandestine meeting with Uncle Parker during which they conspire to turn Jack into a prophet or seer. His first prediction will concern Uncle Parker appearing in a lavender coloured suit. The meeting ends abruptly as Daisy, excited about the previous evening's events, dabbles with pyromania. Jack returns home to act "mysteriously", as a build up to making his first prophecy. His first attempt is disrupted when Mr Bagthorpe is goaded into attempting a headstand, breaking his writing arm in the process. Jack uses his father's immobility to corner him and make the prediction ("I see a Lavender Man bearing tidings") and shortly thereafter Uncle Parker appears in his suit to complete the prophecy. Flushed with success Jack and Uncle Parker visit a store where they purchase a crystal ball and a set of tarot cards, and plot their next prediction which will involve a red and white bubble.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakfast_in_the_Ruins"title="Breakfast in the Ruins">
The novel's first chapter begins in London, with Karl Glogauer travelling through Kensington on his way to the Derry and Tom's Roof Gardens. There, on a bench in the Spanish Gardens, he fantasises about the past, trying to put "his mother, his childhood as it actually was, [and] the failure of his ambitions" out of his head with an imagined life in Regency-era London, filled with politics, gambling, women and duelling.His imaginations are interrupted by a "deep, slightly hesitant, husky" voice, a greeting of "Good afternoon", a dark-skinned man who spends the entirety of the novel unnamed. He first asks if he may join Glogauer on the bench, and then goes on to explain that he's merely visiting London, and that he hadn't expected to find such a place in the middle of the city. Glogauer wrongly assumes him to be a rich American tourist, annoyed to have been disturbed from his reverie.The man then asks Glogauer if he may photograph him; Glogauer, now flattered, assents. While he's being photographed, the man explains that he's from Nigeria, attempting to convince the government of England to buy copper at a higher price. Glogauer says that he's an illustrator. The man then invites Glogauer to have tea with him, and Glogauer, feeling guilty, and, despite recalling his mother's words to not have anything to do with people who make you feel guilty, agrees.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_William_Came"title="When William Came">
The "William" of the book's title is German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II. The book chronicles life in London under German occupation and the changes that come with a foreign army's invasion and triumph. Like Robert Erskine Childers's novel "The Riddle of the Sands" (1903), it predicts the Great War (in which Saki would be killed) and is an example of invasion literature, a literary genre which flourished at the beginning of the 20th century as tensions between the European great powers increased.Much of the book is an argument for compulsory military service, about which there was then a major controversy. The scene in which an Imperial Rescript is announced in a subjugated London, excusing the unmilitary British from serving in the Kaiser's armies, is particularly bitter. There are also several vignettes exemplifying the differences between the English and continental systems of law – Yeovil's wife informs him that she must register his presence with the police and later he is fined on the spot for walking on the grass in Hyde Park. In another episode, he finds himself unintentionally but unavoidably fraternising with one of the invaders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Days_of_Luke"title="Eight Days of Luke">
## Sunday.David Allard, an orphan, returns to his hometown of Ashbury from boarding school to discover that his relatives-cum-guardians have nothing arranged for his summer and he will have to endure their mistreatment for his entire holiday.While walking in the garden, in a fit of frustration he makes up words to use as a curse. David's words seem to cause the garden wall to crumble, and to release a boy a year or so older than himself with flame-red hair, who identifies himself as Luke. Happy to have made a new friend, David notices Luke's odd references to being released from his "chains" and "bowls of venom". The two hastily repair the wall, and David notices that Luke's touch seems to burn the bushes growing beside the wall. Luke says ruefully that he "can't bring the dead back to life." Luke also tells David that simply kindling a flame will summon him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specimen_Days"title="Specimen Days">
## "In the Machine"."In the Machine", set in mid-to-late 19th Century New York, begins in the aftermath of a wake. Simon, a young man working in a factory had been accidentally sucked into a factory machine which crushed him to death. Due to the poverty present in the lower classes during the Industrial Revolution, Simon's family sends Lucas, Simon's disfigured younger brother, to work at the factory in Simon's place.Lucas has a strange affliction in which he intermittently and uncontrollably spouts the poetry of Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass' (Lucas' favourite book). Walt Whitman was a contemporary of the time and Lucas meets him during the course of the story. Lucas is also concerned Simon has become a ghost and inhabits not only the machine that killed him but all the machines that are becoming commonplace in the city as a result of the Industrial Revolution.This concern leads Lucas to fear for the life of Catherine, Simon's bereaved girlfriend. Lucas believes Simon's ghost may try to inhabit the machines at the factory where Catherine works as a seamstress with a view to take Catherine to the afterlife by killing her through the machine's function. Lucas embarks on a mission to save Catherine by preventing her from going to work. .
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_the_Hole"title="After the Hole">
At an English public school, five students – Liz (the narrator of many flash backs), Mike (the protagonist of most of the student's time in The Hole"), Alex, Frankie and Geoff – are lured into an abandoned cellar by a malevolent prankster named Martyn. All is well for the three days, in which they socialise and get to know each other better; but when three days pass and Martyn is nowhere to be seen, the group must face the possibility that they are trapped indefinitely.Flash forwards of a "dream summer" section punctuate the story, narrated by Liz, reveal that most of them got out of the hole (Liz interacts awkwardly with Alex at one point) and Mike and Liz are now living together while Liz writes a book based on everything that happened within the Hole. Liz also keeps tapes of interviews with a girl named "Lisa" who talks of her romantic relationship with Martyn.In the Hole, they become increasingly desperate for food, beginning to face up to the fact that Martyn's experiment was really to play God with all of them. Mike and Liz meet at night in the small bathroom section and talk a lot. At one point Mike believes he sees the keyhole of the trapdoor locking them in the Hole "winking" at him, but dismisses this on grounds that he is hallucinating, or so he thinks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostage_(novel)"title="Hostage (novel)">
Three young boys rob a minimart and the salesclerk is killed. Police chase the boys and they end up taking a family hostage. The house taken hostage was owned by Sonny Benza, a man who rules over the West Coast's most powerful Mafia empire. Sonny arranges for his men to kidnap the small town's police chief, Jeff Talley's, family. Talley goes to the location where his family is being held. A man named Marion Clewes executes Benza and his associates for their failure because Marion's employer in New York feels that Benza had betrayed the trust of Marion's employer by failing to retrieve two discs that would shut down Benza's organization and put Benza away for good. The police obtain one of the discs. Rather than killing Talley and his family, Marion lets them live.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat_Ate_My_Gymsuit"title="The Cat Ate My Gymsuit">
Ninth-grader Marcy Lewis is a smart and sensitive girl who nevertheless lacks confidence. Being overweight, she is embarrassed to draw attention to herself, and she is failing gym class due to her reluctance to change clothes in front of the other girls (resulting in numerous creative excuses for why she doesn't have her gym clothes, such as the titular "the cat ate my gymsuit"). Her verbally abusive father Martin belittles and criticizes the entire family, while her nervous mother Lily encourages her daughter to ignore his behavior and try not to set him off, leading to Marcy's inability to talk about how she really feels.When her English teacher leaves his job, Marcy's English class receives a new teacher, Ms. Finney. Ms. Finney is a creative and challenging free-thinker who encourages the class to analyze their emotional reactions, leading them to create a school club called Smedley, where they are encouraged to consider not only their feelings, but those of others. Through Smedley, Marcy begins to make new friends and starts to learn to stand up for how she feels. However, her father dislikes Marcy's new assertiveness, while the school administration dislikes Ms. Finney's unorthodox teaching style. Finally, Ms. Finney is dismissed on the grounds that she refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lake_of_Darkness"title="The Lake of Darkness">
Set in the Highgate-Archway area of North London, the novel's protagonist is Martin Urban, a young accountant leading a comfortable, complacent and rather dull bachelor life, in his own flat, attended by a peppery, older male cleaner, and visiting his doting parents regularly. When Martin unexpectedly wins a large sum of money in a football pool, he shrinks from telling or sharing his win with one of his clients, a dashing, feckless actor he secretly admires but affects to disapprove of. It was this client who procured Martin the winning ticket. Instead, Martin decides to give half the money away to personally-identified worthy causes, all of whom, to Martin's bemusement and dismay, entirely misinterpret his gestures of generosity. Suddenly, Francesca enters his life, a mysterious young woman who works in a flower shop and captures his heart. He also meets Finn, the self-sufficient, twisted son of his mother's cleaning lady, Lena, a vulnerable eccentric absorbed in astrology, crystals, tarot and so on. Finn works as all-round handyman for a dodgy landlord, who pays him to evict (or murder) sitting tenants from his rental properties. Martin's naivety and misplaced good intentions become fatally entangled with Finn's macabre madness and the machinations of others around Martin he completely fails to understand. The tragic outcome opens Martin's eyes and destroys his world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Flame_(novel)"title="The Black Flame (novel)">
The novel starts several hundred years after most of mankind is wiped out by a plague and tells the story of a family of immortals who seek to conquer the world with advanced science. Its story concerns a brother and sister who have become immortal. In "Dawn of the Flame" the sister, Margaret of Urbs, known as "Black Margot", is a Joan-of-Arc-type, leading the battle against the mutated of mankind. By the time of "The Black Flame", she is jaded and finds that being an immortal can be boring.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Camel_Died_at_Noon"title="The Last Camel Died at Noon">
A relatively quiet evening at home in 1897 for the Emersons is disturbed by the appearance of Reggie Forthright and his grandfather, Viscount Blacktower. The two visitors have information about Blacktower's older son, Willoughby Forth, who disappeared fourteen years ago in the desert west of the Nile in the Sudan. They tell the story of a lost civilization in the midst of the desert. Lord Blacktower's story would have been discounted, except the map he produced was on the back of a page from Emerson's own notebook, drawn by Willie Forth himself. Blacktower wants the Emersons to lead an expedition to find the missing heir, but the Emersons decline.Surprisingly, Radcliffe, Amelia, and Ramses do travel to the Sudan, to excavate at Gebel Barkal and Napata, the first Nubian capital. The sudden appearance of Reggie Forthright causes them to alter their plans. Reggie is set on seeking his long-lost uncle, and when he disappears in the western wastes, the Emersons have no recourse but to go after him.But the rescuers need rescue themselves when all but one of their men desert them, and their camels die off one by one. Finally, the last faithful servant takes a chance and looks for a promised oasis ahead. Nearly dead from heat and thirst, they suddenly find themselves in a world 3,000 years out of place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_Bomb_Blues"title="Atom Bomb Blues">
The Doctor and Ace travel to a parallel universe, where they become involved in a conspiracy involving that Earth's Manhattan Project, Duke Ellington, and Japanese saboteurs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thin_Man"title="The Thin Man">
The story is set in New York City in December 1932, in the last days of Prohibition in the United States. The main characters are Nick Charles, a former private detective, and Nora, his clever young wife. Nick, the son of a Greek immigrant, has given up his career since marrying Nora, a wealthy socialite, and he spends most of his time cheerfully getting drunk in hotel rooms and speakeasies. Nick and Nora have no children but they own a female Schnauzer named Asta. (In the film adaptation, Asta is a male Wire Fox Terrier.) Charles is drawn, mostly against his will, into investigating a murder. The case brings them in contact with the Wynants, a rather grotesque family, and with various policemen and lowlifes. As they attempt to solve the case, Nick and Nora share a great deal of banter and witty dialogue, along with copious amounts of alcohol.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_Itself_(Wallace_novel)"title="Fear Itself (Wallace novel)">
It is the twenty-second century and Earth is caught in a war with powerful alien forces. Paranoia runs rampant and the Doctor is in danger from all directions.This was the only Past Doctor Adventure to feature the Eighth Doctor, as the original novels featuring that incarnation formed their own series, the Eighth Doctor Adventures. However, with the 2005 revival of the television series, and the BBC's New Series Adventures being published, the Eighth Doctor Adventures came to an end. By the time "Fear Itself" was released, Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant had made their debuts as the Ninth and Tenth incarnations of the Doctor, thus making the Eighth a "Past Doctor".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_at_World's_End"title="City at World's End">
The Doctor and his three companions travel to Arkhaven. It is one of the last cities on a doomed alien planet. The city has one plan for survival, no backup. However, there are underlying plans threatening to sabotage this as various people vie for power the disaster might bring.The Doctor then must deal with the 'Creeper', an entity prowling the outskirts of Arkhaven. His companions cannot help him, as one becomes lost and the other becomes mentally ill.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_Out_of_Time_(novel)"title="Running Out of Time (novel)">
Jessie Keyser is a 13-year-old girl from the village of Clifton, Indiana, in the 1840s. During a village-wide outbreak of diphtheria, Jessie's mother reveals it is really 1996, and Clifton Village is a tourist attraction. Also, there are cameras all around watching them, but there are some blind spots. Jessica’s mother takes her to a blind spot for the reveal because all the adults were contracted to not tell the kids. Clifton is a replica of a historical village with the tourists hidden, watching the village's activity by video from under the ground. Originally it was much more lenient with its villagers when a man named Miles Clifton founded it, but is now very strict and prevents anyone from leaving. Her mother asks her to retrieve a cure now that her own sister Katie has taken ill; the owners of the attraction ceased to provide modern medical care to the villagers in order to preserve its authenticity. She tells Jessie to get the cure from a man named Isaac Neeley, who protested the opening of Clifton. Jessie's escape will be difficult because Clifton is guarded to ensure that none of the villagers leave or find out it is 1996. Jessie's mother shows her a hidden escape route that has not been sealed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_a_Bat_in_Bunk_Five"title="There's a Bat in Bunk Five">
In this sequel to "The Cat Ate My Gymsuit", Marcy Lewis finds herself as a counselor in training at the summer camp near Woodstock, New York run by her former English teacher, Ms. Finney, whom Marcy has missed after Ms. Finney had been fired from her job. Marcy not only has to deal with the sudden attentions of Ted, her new boyfriend, but when she has to go to Woodstock he starts hanging out with Betty, who has a crush on Ted. Marcy has lost a lot of weight, and is now being noticed by boys. At the camp, she is put in charge of a group of young girls, whom she is expected to shepherd through the beginnings of adolescence. When she finds a bat in her bunk (bunk five), she is sure that this summer will be a summer to remember for eternity.She also loves to read and write, and she tried to be Ginger's friend, who only likes Barbara Finney. After various trials and tribulations at the camp, she gets fed up with people letting her down and being mean to her. Then all the girls in Marcy's bunk trick her into thinking there is another bat. She gains confidence that she is not petrified anymore, and then realizes that it was a toy bat, and on the bat is a note that entitles the name "August Fool". Once she starts to win over the boys in her cabin, she finds it easier to deal with the various problems that develop at camp.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Bright_Water"title="Truth and Bright Water">
Truth, a small town in rural Montana, and Bright Water, a reserve across the Canadian–American border, are separated by a river. The first person narrator, a 15-year-old Native American (Blackfoot) youth, Tecumseh (named after the famous Shawnee leader), watches a strange woman jump off the cliff into the river that marks the border. His companions are Lum, his cousin, and Soldier, his boxer dog. The plot revolves around their interactions with each other, with their parents, and other people in Truth and Bright Water, which lead up to the great event, the Indian Days festival, and the (partial) resolution of the mystery around the strange woman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_to_Answer_For"title="Something to Answer For">
Townrow is a fund distributor stealing from the fund he is in charge of. He is contacted by the widow of an old friend, Elie Khoury. They had met ten years previously, in 1946, in Port Said after he had been thrown from a horse in front of the Khourys' beach hut. Mrs Khoury wants Townrow to go to see her in Cairo because she believes her husband was murdered.After thinking it through, Townrow accepts Mrs Khoury's offer of a plane ticket to Cairo. He stops over in Rome where he converses with an Israeli journalist who accuses the British government of failing to prevent the Holocaust. The discussion ends on a friendly note.In Cairo, Townrow makes a joke about marrying Mrs Khoury for her money to an immigration officer, which leads to him being interrogated. He is kept in a cell and is released once his train has departed. Townrow doesn't go straightaway to see Mrs Khoury when he arrives in Port Said, instead opting to stay in a hotel. Here he considers having no one who really cares about him in his life.Townrow visits a bar he used to frequent while serving here as a sergeant. The owner of the bar, Christous, recognises him and kicks out his clientele for some privacy. Townrow asks about Elie's death. Christous tells him that Mrs Khoury, with great difficulty, took her husband's body back to Lebanon to be buried. Because of her actions, Colonel Nasser took the Suez Canal as Egypt's. Townrow is not sure whether to believe any of this and gets so drunk he blacks out. He awakens naked and alone, and is attacked by a passing camel-driver, causing his head and one eye to be bandaged for most of the remainder of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Across,_Two_Down"title="One Across, Two Down">
Stanley Manning is a fortysomething petrol-station attendant and hobbyist crossword puzzler who lives with his wife, Vera, and mother-in-law, Maud. Maud is a controlling elderly woman who despises Stanley as a ne’er-do-well, based partly on his conviction prior to meeting Vera for mugging an old woman. They make Vera's life unhappy as they bicker every day, but on learning that Maud has £20,000 (£284,825 as of 2019, per inflation) due in her will to Vera, Stanley plans to deal with Maud once and for all by interfering with her medication.Things go steadily wrong when Maud's friend Ethel comes to stay, and soon Stanley's crosswords become an obsession as he tries to stay calm in the face of danger on several fronts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_in_Eden"title="Winter in Eden">
In "Winter in Eden", Kerrick and Herilak (fellow chieftain) searches the burned Alpèsak and discovers two Yilanè males. Herilak and Armun (wife of Kerrick) go north, while Kerrick stays in the city to learn more about the Yilanè. The reptiloids use their mastery of biology to drive them off and reconquer the city. Meanwhile, Enge, her fellows and an old, grumpy scientist establishes a city in South America. Vaintè allies Lanefenuu, leader of another city. Together they attempt to eradicate humans. After several unsuccessful attempts, they corner Herilak and the tribes in a valley. Kerrick and Armun try to find each other and finally end up with the Paramutan (northern whale hunter humanoids). They return and find a safe haven at a small lake with their own child, some humans and the two Yilanè males. Later, Kerrick and Armun travel to the Paramutan again, and with their help Kerrick manages to blackmail Lanefenuu to withdraw Vaintè and make peace. Vaintè initially obeys, but later defies efforts to make peace with the humans, so Lanefenuu banishes her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Godfather_Returns"title="The Godfather Returns">
The story picks up immediately after the end of the first novel. The events of the film "The Godfather Part II" take place within the time frame of this novel, but are only mentioned in the background. Many of Puzo's characters are expanded upon, especially Fredo Corleone, Tom Hagen, and Johnny Fontane, and new characters like Nick Geraci, Danny Shea, and Francesca Corleone are introduced. The other half of the novel goes deeper into Michael's role as Don and his dream of legitimizing the Corleone family. The novel expands on Michael's service in World War II as well as his brother Fredo's secret life. The novel shows how Sonny, Fredo and Tom Hagen join the family business, as well as the deaths of Peter Clemenza and Salvatore Tessio."The Godfather Returns" was followed by "The Godfather's Revenge" in 2006, also written by Winegardner.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Godfather's_Revenge"title="The Godfather's Revenge">
The story begins with Michael Corleone having a dream in which his brother Fredo Corleone, whom he had killed, warns him of a coming threat. At the same time, the apparition tries to give Michael a message, which he does not comprehend. Michael's guilt over ordering Fredo's murder has aged him beyond his years—his hair has turned white, his diabetes has worsened, and he has chronic insomnia. He is also depressed over his failing relationship with his ex-wife, Kay Adams, and his son, Anthony, who both know the truth about Fredo's death.Carlo Tramonti, a boss of the New Orleans crime syndicate, is introduced as he is deported by the INS to his native Colombia. Meanwhile, Attorney General Daniel Shea (analogous to Robert F. Kennedy) declares war on the Mafia.Tom Hagen meets with a CIA agent named Joe Lucadello in a Protestant church in Florida. He informs Hagen that Nick Geraci, a former "caporegime" for the Corleones, has turned up. The book then outlines Nick Geraci's survival in a cave beneath Lake Erie, and how he prepares to take revenge against Michael. Meanwhile, Hagen is implicated in the murder of his longtime mistress, throwing his personal and professional life into disarray.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_the_Monkeys"title="Summer of the Monkeys">
The book is set about the end of the nineteenth century. The protagonist is a 14-year-old boy named Jay Berry Lee, who had enjoyed an idyllic childhood. Born to Missouri sharecroppers, he moves with his family to Oklahoma after his grandfather offers them free land. Daisy, his sister, has a crippled leg, and they devote much effort to gaining enough money to pay for reconstructive surgery. One day, while looking for their lost milk cow, Jay Berry discovers monkeys in a nearby river bottom. Visiting his grandfather's store, he learns that they have escaped from a traveling circus, which has offered a vast reward for their capture: $100 for the chief monkey, "Jimbo", and $2 each for the others. Jay Berry makes multiple attempts to capture them using traps and a net borrowed from his grandfather, but he gains only scratches and bites from them, at one point even losing his pants in the process.Under the direction of his grandfather, Jay Berry contacts the circus and is advised to attempt to befriend Jimbo. Upon returning to the monkeys' grove, he finds them around a hidden still; the drunken monkeys indeed befriend him, but their gesture of friendship is a gift of whiskey that leaves him drunk. After returning to his shocked family, he goes with his grandfather to a nearby town to visit the library and discover alternate methods of monkey-catching. Having bought supplies, they return home, but the monkeys steal it all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion's_Blood"title="Lion's Blood">
The story begins with Aidan O'Dere, a White European child growing up in a primitive 19th century Ireland with his pagan father, Christian mother, and his twin sister. Their village is attacked by Vikings and Aidan's father is killed in the battle, while Aidan and the rest of his family are taken as slaves. They are later sold to black slave merchants in Andalus and taken to Bilalistan (southeastern North America) by the Middle Passage. Many die along the way and Aidan's mother suffers a miscarriage. During the voyage, Aidan swears to his sister that if they are separated, he will find her.There at a slave auction Aidan's sister is separated from them and sold off as a maidservant, while Aidan and his mother are sold to a Wakil named Abu Ali Jallaleddin ibn Rashid al Kushi, owner of a plantation called Dar Kush. Dar Kush is known for its lenient treatment of the white slaves, going as far as allowing them to keep their native religion, culture, and language.The Wakil has three children: Ali, the oldest son; Elenya, the youngest child and only daughter; and the middle child and younger son Kai, an awkward, shy boy who feels that he will never live up to his father's expectations. One day Kai and Aidan meet and become unlikely friends. Aidan aids Kai in a prank that gets him whipped, but Kai saves him from most of the punishment and selects him as his footboy/servant. Despite their difference in status, the boys develop a strong friendship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ape_Who_Guards_the_Balance"title="The Ape Who Guards the Balance">
Luxor, 1906-1907. The Emerson clan is trying to determine where to dig during the upcoming season. But before they even leave England, they encounter Sethos and foil an attempt to kidnap Amelia. Suspicion for the attempt falls on Sethos, but not everyone is sure.Upon arriving in Egypt, the children, Nefret, Ramses and David, now in their early twenties but still children to Amelia and Emerson, acquire a magnificent papyrus, but are also stalked. Is Sethos behind this too?Since Emerson has managed to annoy M. Maspero to the point of distraction, he is initially not even allowed near the Valley of the Kings, where another of Emerson’s rivals and targets of invective, Theodore M. Davis, has the rights to the entire valley. Much to everyone’s surprise (and possibly with Nefret’s help), Emerson is granted permission by Davis to clean up three tombs thought to be already excavated in full, KV3, KV4 and KV5.Not only does his rival Davis find yet another rich tomb, right next to the debris-filled and empty tomb he excavates, once again somebody is still after the Emersons—particularly, it seems, Amelia. But help is on the way, from surprising, or perhaps not so surprising, quarters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante's_Equation"title="Dante's Equation">
The novel tells the discovery of many people, two of them physicists, that the fifth dimension obeys a (species of spiritual) law of nature where Good and Evil control the lower dimensions. This insight was first discovered by a Jewish physicist, Yosef Kobinski, who was interned in Auschwitz during the Holocaust. It is rediscovered by Dr. Jill Talcott and her graduate-student assistant. Talcott's discovery coincides with the resurfacing of manuscripts written by the Jewish physicist. The discovery and the manuscripts attract an interest from several sources. A kabbalistic scholar becomes interested in Kobinski as well, as his name shows up in an analysis of Torah codes. A journalist is trying to track down Kobiniski too as part of the research for an article on disappearances. The military become aware of the phenomenon as well, and one agent tries to track down the young scientist and her partner in order to evaluate the military applications of the discovery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_to_Conquer"title="Two to Conquer">
Prologue: The AlienPaul Harrell, a Terran convict, finds that he has been teleported to an unfamiliar world called Darkover by an aggressive warlord named Bard di Asturien.Book One: The Foster BrothersIn Castle Asturias, Carlina Asturien prepares for her handfasting ceremony. She tells her nurse that she would rather be a priestess of Avarra, serving the poor and sick. Instead, she is handfasted to Bard di Asturien, for political reasons, though the official wedding is planned for more than a year later. Bard's character – hot tempered, self-centered, misogynist, lacking in empathy – is revealed.At the midwinter night festival, Bard gets drunk and tries to force himself on Carlina. Geremy Hastur intervenes, and Bard stabs him with a poisoned Dry Towner dagger that he claimed from the battlefield. Hastur survives, but is lamed for life. Bard is judged guilty and sent into exile for seven years.Bard returns to his father's home to say goodbye before he goes into exile as a mercenary. He meets Melisendra MacAran, who is fostered with his father's family. He uses his laran to force himself on her, but blames Carlina for his actions. As Bard leaves the territory, Beltran and Geremy confront him, and Bard kills Beltran in a sword fight.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Secrets_(novel)"title="Family Secrets (novel)">
Leslie and Peter are childhood friends who become lovers the summer before their senior year in high school. Their romance is immediately complicated by Leslie’s discovery—by reading her mother’s diary—that her mother Aline, and his father Nelson are having an affair. Before the summer is over their parents have announced their impending divorces and Leslie and Peter’s lives are thrown in disarray.The pair spends the next few months of their lives dealing with senior year in high school, their parents' divorces, and the quick marriage that legally makes them stepsiblings. In addition, Peter is striving for early acceptance at Harvard while Leslie spends much of her time in rehearsal for her high school play for she plans to go to college for acting and drama.When the new school year starts, Peter continues to live with his mother while Nelson moves into a new apartment with his new wife and stepdaughter. Leslie is upset at the new living arrangements because she's close to her dad and angry with her mother for the divorce and quick remarriage. Struggling to deal with the divorce, Peter’s mother decides to sell the family home and move to Chicago to finish her college degree. This forces Peter to move in with his father, stepmother, and stepsister/girl-
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chimney_Sweeper's_Boy"title="The Chimney Sweeper's Boy">
When successful author Gerald Candless dies of a sudden heart attack, his eldest daughter Sarah is approached by her father's publisher with a view to writing a biography about his life. Sarah embarks on the memoir but soon discovers that her perfect father was not all he appeared to be, and that in fact he wasn't Gerald Candless at all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagining_Argentina"title="Imagining Argentina">
Cecilia, a dissident journalist in Buenos Aires, is kidnapped by the secret police, likely to join the ranks of the "disappeared." The city is the center of opposition to the military dictatorship during its Dirty War in the 1970s against opponents. Her husband Carlos, a theater director, searches frantically for her and others through "imagining" their fates in prisons and cells.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dragon_(novel)"title="Red Dragon (novel)">
In 1975, Will Graham, a brilliant profiler of the FBI, captured the serial killer Hannibal Lecter. However, Graham suffered serious injuries from the encounter and retired afterward. 5 years later, in 1980, a serial killer nicknamed "The Tooth Fairy" stalks and murders seemingly random families during sequential full moons. He first kills the Jacobi family in Birmingham, Alabama, then the Leeds family in Atlanta, Georgia. Two days after the Leeds murders, agent Jack Crawford, Graham's mentor, goes to Graham's Marathon, Florida residence and pleads for his assistance; Graham reluctantly agrees. After looking over the crime scenes with only minimal insight, Graham realizes he must visit Lecter and seek his help to capture "the Tooth Fairy.""The Tooth Fairy" is revealed (to the readers) to be the production chief of a St. Louis film processing firm named Francis Dolarhyde. He is a disturbed individual who is obsessed with the William Blake painting "The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun" (which the book identifies as "The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun"). Dolarhyde is unable to control his violent, sexual urges, and believes that murdering people—or "changing" them, as he calls it—allows him to more fully "become" an alternate personality he calls the "Great Red Dragon", after the dominant character in Blake's painting. Flashbacks reveal that his sociopathy is born from the systematic abuse he suffered as a child at the hands of both his sadistic grandmother and his family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpse_Marker"title="Corpse Marker">
The events which took place on the Sandminer were covered up and only three survivors now living in Kaldor City know the truth. When the robots begin a second murderous spree in the city, the Doctor and Leela must intervene to stop them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragon_Can't_Dance"title="The Dragon Can't Dance">
PrologueThe main stage for the development of the plot, Calvary Hill, is introduced through a series of descriptive elements that portray it as being something close to a slum, favela, or barrio. The mood of the hill is described through the lifestyle of Aldrick Prospect, the novel's main character: "[he] would get up at midday from sleep, yawn, stretch, then start to think of where he might get something to eat, his brain working in the same smooth unhurried nonchalance with which he moved his feet". Carnival is set as the central theme of the novel and is portrayed as the only phenomenon that is able to bring the hill to life and corrupt everyday life in Trinidad. The power and soul of Carnival, however, lies in calypso, the songs that "announce the new rhythms of the people, rhythms that climb over the red dirt and stone, break away rhythms that laugh through the bones of these enduring people".1. Queen of the BandThe first chapter follows a conversation between Miss Olive and Miss Caroline and their criticisms of Miss Cleothlida, a proud mulatto widow who owns a parlor store but runs it as "if she were doing a favour to the Hill, rather than carrying on a business from which she intend[s] to profit" (18). Miss Cleothilda has chosen her costume for this year's Carnival and it comes as no surprise when she reveals that like every year, she will be playing Queen of the Band. Miss Cleothlida's arrogance stems from her preserved beauty and her ability to continue to attract men at her age. Philo, a calypsonian man, has been chasing after her for 17 years without success, but with continuous temptation. The neighbors note that Miss Cleothilda only treats people well during Carnival because of the natural ambiance of the Hill and so she can defend her insults throughout the year. As soon as Carnival is over, she will continue to look down upon the people who are blacker than her and the Hill will return to its slumber.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_of_Valdemar"title="Tomb of Valdemar">
Millennia ago, the great god Valdemar held sway over the universe. Somehow the Old Ones defeated this dark presence and entombed him beneath the acid skies of Ashkellia, before disappearing themselves forever.Over the centuries, the myths of Valdemar grow, crossing solar systems and races. A novelist, Miranda Pelham, pieces together the Dark God's story. Unfortunately for her, revolution and the rise of a New Protectorate force her to strike an agreement with the decadent necromancer Paul Neville to find the lost Ashkellia.The Doctor and Romana, despite their best efforts, become embroiled in the complex conspiracies and attempts to re-discover Valdemar. High in the boiling sulphuric acid clouds, in the Palace of the Old Ones, a place where reality and dreams collide, the way is being prepared for the resurrection of the Dark One.The Doctor faces an agonising choice: should he continue with his quest to gather the segments of the Key to Time, or prevent the rebirth of a being so powerful that its release will alter the entire fabric of the universe?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_Matter"title="Grave Matter">
The Doctor and Peri arrive on a fog-shrouded island, not even aware of which century they have landed in. They soon discover that they are on a remote island off the coast of Britain where the local people have put aside modern inventions and lifestyle. However, when a dead body rises from its grave, and the local school children display uncanny adaptivity, the Doctor must discover the secrets of the scientific research carried out by the island's benefactor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Moon"title="Imperial Moon">
While returning to 20th-century Earth, the TARDIS passes through its own temporal wake from a journey it will make in the future, and materialises in the Tsiolkovskii crater on the dark side of Earth's Moon. A time safe in the console room then opens, revealing an object which the Doctor will place inside it at some point in the future, a diary purporting to describe Captain Richard Haliwell's expedition to the Moon in the year 1878. Turlough is skeptical, but the Doctor knows that the risk of a time paradox proves this diary to be important; it could be that the Doctor's actions will determine whether a new timeline comes into existence, displacing all of history as they know it. It is possible for the Victorians to have built airtight hulls and air recycling systems, and according to Haliwell's diary, the last obstacle was overcome by Professor Bryce-Dennison's invention of the impeller drive, a propulsion system so advanced that even the Professor has trouble explaining how it works.Three young, unmarried captains are chosen to lead the expedition to the Moon; Haliwell is in command of the Cygnus, while Sinclair commands the Lynx and Green the Draco. Bryce-Dennison and his 21-year-old daughter and assistant Emily will accompany Haliwell, despite his reservations at having a woman aboard his ship and their disagreement on the matter of female equality. The three ships launch from a secret base on Glen Marg and reach the Moon within a day, but to their surprise, on the dark side of the Moon they find a bubble of atmosphere containing vegetation and an artificial construction. The ships land in the bubble, where Haliwell leads an exploratory expedition into the jungle. However, the perils are like nothing on Earth, and soon after Davis is nearly eaten by a carnivorous plant, Sub-Lieutenant Granby is snatched away from the others by something moving too quickly to be seen. As the sailors search for Granby, they instead meet two human strangers who introduce themselves as the Doctor and Turlough...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestors_of_Avalon"title="Ancestors of Avalon">
2500 years BC, Tiriki, Priestess of Light and of the Earth-goddess Ni-Terat, and her husband Micail, Priest of Light and Prince of the Atlantean state Atharrath, have to save themselves from the destruction of Atlantis and are forced to board different ships to the Isles of Tin (Britain). When they finally reach the British coast, they are far away from each other and they both believe that the other one is dead.Tiriki, and other Atlanteans who came with her, settle down in the swamplands surrounding the Holy Mountain (which is later going to be called the Isle of Avalon). She realizes that the cult of the Great Goddess is much stronger here than it was in Atlantis, so she and her companions start living with the indigenous people and build up a new religion, where the Atlantean knowledge and the Old Faith of the British people merge.Micail and Tjalan, Prince of Alkonath, on the other hand, try to rebuild the lost glory of Atlantis and start building a huge stone circle – which will later be known as Stonehenge – in order to turn the people of Britain to slaves by using its tremendous powers.When Tiriki and her followers finally come in contact with the other Atlantean settlement, conflicts arise immediately.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_TARDIS"title="Heart of TARDIS">
Each Doctor has to deal with different ends of the same crisis involving a dimensional anomaly created by an American experiment, the Second accidentally materialising the TARDIS in a town that has been trapped in the anomaly while the Fourth is forcibly recruited to repair the equipment that created the anomaly. Although neither Doctor ever meets the other, the Fourth Doctor and Romana do travel to the Second's TARDIS to allow him to gain access when the anomaly renders the ship's interior inaccessible from the outside; when the Second Doctor enters, the Fourth Doctor and Romana subsequently hide under the console on the opposite side from the Second in order to escape detection, the Fourth stating that meeting himself would make things too complicated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Time_(novel)"title="Prime Time (novel)">
Detecting a mysterious sub-space signal in the Time Vortex, the Doctor and Ace land on the planet 'Blinni Gaar'. They soon discover that the native population are little more than zombies, addicted to the programmes of the dangerously powerful Channel 400. As the Doctor investigates, he finds that the television company has a sinister agenda that has nothing to do with entertainment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_Broken_Things"title="Half Broken Things">
The lives of three very lonely people—pregnant Steph, on the run from her violent boyfriend; Michael, a petty thief who becomes her knight in shining armour; and Jean, a sixty-year-old spinster nearing the end of her career as a house sitter—collide dramatically within the grounds of the illustrious Walden Manor, where together they seal themselves away from the outside world and build a new life together. The fantasy cannot last forever though, and events take a murderous turn when the first unexpected guest arrives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psi-ence_Fiction"title="Psi-ence Fiction">
The University of East Wessex has an up and running parapsychology department. Various experiments are being run by the students. Unfortunately someone has stumbled upon something big. Big enough to threaten all of reality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asylum_(Darvill-Evans_novel)"title="Asylum (Darvill-Evans novel)">
Alfric, the proctor of the Franciscan friary would be otherwise enjoying his life in the town of Oxford in 1278. However, one of his friars is missing and the town is being disrupted by a noblewoman and her traveling companion, a man calling himself 'The Doctor'.The missing friar turns up dead. Alfric teams up with the two newcomers to solve the mystery. Their efforts lead them to Roger Bacon, a famous scholar who has ties to Nyssa's technographical life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_of_Petersburg"title="The Master of Petersburg">
The novel begins with Dostoyevsky arriving in Saint Petersburg to collect the belongings of his recently deceased stepson Pavel. Arriving at the flat where Pavel lodged with a widow named Anna Sergeyevna Kolenkina and her young daughter, Matryona, Dostoyevsky discovers that his stepson's personal belongings have been confiscated by the police. Informed by the police that his stepson was an associate of the notorious political agitator Sergey Nechayev, Dostoyevsky finds himself under secret police surveillance. Remaining in Petersburg to wait for the release of his stepson's diaries, letters and other writings from the police, Dostoyevsky finds himself entering into an affair with Anna Sergeyevna. Whilst the police continue to investigate his stepson's death, Dostoyevsky is contacted by Nechayev who takes him to the spot where Pavel's body was found and tells Dostoyevsky that the police were behind his death. Dostoyevsky, suspecting that Nechayev is manipulating the truth, refuses to author a political pamphlet accusing the police of killing his stepson and instead writes a short pamphlet that states his suspicion that Nechayev and his followers were behind Pavel's death. To his horror, Dostoyevsky realises this is what Nechayev wanted him to do all along, in order to incite the city's students against establishment figures such as Dostoyevsky. As the university students riot and set fire to the city, Dostoyevsky sits down and begins to write a fictionalised account of events.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drift_(novel)"title="Drift (novel)">
It is winter in New Hampshire. The US military is pursuing a survivalist while battling a series of unnatural sexual pleasures. They are also holding a snow-blowing threat that could threaten the entire world if it is not stopped.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Algebra_of_Ice"title="The Algebra of Ice">
The Doctor and Ace investigate a 'crop circle' in the Kentish countryside; they are helped by a maths expert, a web-magazine publish and the Doctor's friend, the Brigadier. However, this crop circle is made of ice and is not circular, instead being filled with square-sided shapes. It draws the Doctor and Ace into a new level of reality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthespians™"title="Synthespians™">
The Doctor and Peri land on Reef Station One, an isolated space station that has modelled itself on 1980s popular culture and encounter Autons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eleventh_Tiger"title="The Eleventh Tiger">
It is China in 1865. Strife and rebellion rock the land. Trying to maintain order is the British Empire and the martial arts expert, the Ten Tigers of Canton. Adding to the confusion is the impossibility of many people already knowing Ian.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_Death"title="Empire of Death">
In 1863, Queen Victoria is insensate with grief after losing her husband, Prince Albert. A secret seance is planned. Concurrently, The Doctor and Nyssa are dealing with the death of their good friend, Adric. They are surprised when they are seemingly visited by the ghost of their dead friend. Everything, plus the secrets of a guarded, drowned village come together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_the_Girls_(novel)"title="Kiss the Girls (novel)">
As a teenage boy in 1975 Boca Raton, Florida, a future serial killer calling himself Casanova kills his first four victims. Elsewhere in 1981 Chapel Hill, North Carolina, another killer calling himself The Gentleman Caller kills a young couple on a lake.Years later, Casanova leaves a young woman to die in the woods. Around the same time, Police Detective Alex Cross returns to his Washington, DC home to find several relatives waiting for him and is informed that his niece, Naomi "Scootchie" Cross, currently a student at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, is missing. He travels to North Carolina with his partner Sampson. They meet Durham detectives Nick Ruskin and Davey Sikes, who tell them that the FBI and DEA are involved and that eight to ten women are missing, all from different states; all have received notes from someone calling himself Casanova. Around the same time, Casanova abducts another woman, Dr. Kate McTiernan, and makes her part of his harem of young, attractive, and exceptional women.In Los Angeles, reporter Beth Lieberman is working on a serial killer story about The Gentleman Caller, who has just raped and murdered a 14-year-old girl. He threatens "bonus kills" if his letters are not published in her newspaper. FBI agent Kyle Craig meets Lieberman in LA.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Among_the_Betrayed"title="Among the Betrayed">
Elodie Luria had left a dreary but emotionally comfortable life with her three aunts and grandmother. For the sake of giving her a chance to live out of hiding, they managed to scrounge together enough savings to purchase a fake ID and identity for her - "Nina Idi" - and sent her to live at Harlow School for Girls. After she fell in love with Jason, a boy at Hendricks School for Boys, she was accused of trying to find shadow children in her school and was arrested by the Population Police along with Jason.She is given two choices from a Population Police official she calls The Hating Man. She is moved into a different cell with three other children, Matthias, Percy, and Alia, who are ten, nine, and six years old. They are shadow children who have been living on the streets. As Nina befriends them, she struggles with Jason's betrayal and whether or not she should betray her new cellmates to save her own life.She chooses to help the three of them and all four children escape. They find their way to Hendricks School for Boys. The children hide by the outdoor garden until they are caught by Lee and Trey, who recognize her as Jason's girlfriend. Out of trust for Matthias, Percy, and Alia. However, even when she gives them a chance to escape, they stay with her. The Hating Man reveals himself to be Mr. Talbot. He had put Nina through a test to see if she really was a shadow child and ready to take a side; she passes. Mr. Talbot also reveals that Jason did not betray her and is not dead, but is still working for the Population Police.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Osterman_Weekend"title="The Osterman Weekend">
John Tanner, Director of News of a US TV network, is convinced by a CIA agent that the friends he has invited to a weekend in the country are engaged in a conspiracy, called Omega, that threatens national security. Everything John Tanner thinks he knows about his closest friends is overturned, and he is set against them. When Omega finally reveals itself, he realizes that he has been manipulated from the very start.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_Day_(Darvill-Evans_novel)"title="Independence Day (Darvill-Evans novel)">
The Doctor wishes to return a communications device he had borrowed from the Mendeb system years ago. Being a time lord, he reasons he can put it back before anybody notices anything is wrong. However, when he arrives he comes to believe he is far too late to fix things; an invasion seems to have resulted because of his actions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King_of_Terror"title="The King of Terror">
Suspecting the American multimedia company Intercom of nefarious activities, the Brigadier asks the Doctor and Tegan to investigate. At their Los Angeles HQ, the pair run into terrorists obsessed with an ancient prophecy and aliens who turn the city into a battle ground.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_the_Crow_Flies_(novel)"title="As the Crow Flies (novel)">
The story tells the tale of the Trumper retail empire, through the often overlapping points of view of several of the main characters. The story begins with Charlie, grandson of a barrow costermonger. When his father is killed in World War I, Charlie enlists to take his place, leaving instructions to Rebecca to sell everything and keep his share secure for when he returns. After the troops are demobilized, Charlie returns to London. He makes enquiries and is led to a shop in Chelsea. He is astonished to see a greengrocer shop bearing the words "Trumper, The Honest Trader, Established 1823." Charlie goes about the business of costermonger, rearranging the shop and doing great business. He marries Rebecca Salmon, who leaves her fiance Guy Trentham for Charlie.The Trumpers' friend Daphne suggests they find a "front man" to help them run the financial end of the business – a man with the right background who will open doors for them with his connections and class. Colonel Hamilton nicely fits the bill, even though he is not Daphne's first choice. Colonel Hamilton was the commanding officer of Charlie and Guy Trentham's unit in the First World War, but he was discharged after the war. Once satisfied that Charlie is a hard worker and is generating business, combined with his lack of other employment options, he accepts the offer. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Orders"title="Last Orders">
The story makes much use of flashbacks to tell the convoluted story of the relationships between a group of war veterans who live in the same corner of London, the backbone of the story being the journey of the group from Bermondsey to Margate to scatter the ashes of Jack Dodds into the sea, in accord with his last wishes. The narrative is split into short sections told by the main characters as well as updates along the journey at Old Kent Road, New Cross, Blackheath, Dartford, Gravesend, Rochester, Chatham Naval Memorial and Canterbury Cathedral. The title 'Last Orders' not only refers to these instructions as stipulated in Jack Dodd's will, but also alludes to the 'last orders (of the day)' - the last round of drinks to be ordered before a pub closes, as drinking was a favourite pastime of Jack and the other characters.The plot and style are influenced by William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying". In June 1996, Swift declared that it was a homage to Faulkner's book but there were various differences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Child_(novel)"title="Shadow Child (novel)">
The main character is Eric Nolan, brother, son, and widower. After the death of his parents, the death of his wife, and his brother's disappearance, Eric decides to move back to his childhood home in Bennington County, Vermont where his cousin Pamela lives with her own family. Mysterious things start happening in the nearby woods, part of the Bennington Triangle that is known for several unsolved disappearances.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quantum_Archangel"title="The Quantum Archangel">
The Doctor and Mel must work through personal problems in order to defeat Kronos, a powerful being seeking revenge on the Master.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunker_Soldiers"title="Bunker Soldiers">
The first Doctor and his companions are trapped in Kyiv in the year 1240 as a murderous army sweeps in ever closer. To complicate matters, something alien is awakening beneath the innocent defenders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Park_(novel)"title="Jurassic Park (novel)">
In 1989, a series of strange animal attacks occur in Costa Rica, including a worker severely injured on a mysterious construction project on the nearby island of Isla Nublar. One of the species behind the attacks is identified as a "Procompsognathus". Paleontologist Alan Grant and his paleobotanist graduate student Ellie Sattler are contacted to confirm the identification, but are abruptly whisked away by billionaire John Hammond—founder and chief executive officer of International Genetic Technologies, or InGen—for a weekend visit to a "biological preserve" he has established on Isla Nublar.The preserve is revealed to be Jurassic Park, a theme park showcasing cloned dinosaurs. The animals have been recreated using damaged dinosaur DNA found in blood inside of gnats, ticks, and mosquitoes fossilized and preserved in amber. Gaps in the genetic code have been filled in with "compatible" reptilian, avian, or amphibian DNA. To control the population, all specimens on the island are lysine-deficient and X-Ray sterilized females.Recent incidents in the park have spooked Hammond's investors. To placate them, Hammond uses Grant and Sattler as fresh consultants. They stand in counterbalance to a famous mathematician and chaos theorist Ian Malcolm, and a lawyer representing the investors, Donald Gennaro, who are pessimistic about the park's prospects. Malcolm, having been consulted before the park's creation, is especially emphatic in his prediction that the park will collapse, as it is an unsustainable simple structure bluntly forced upon a complex system with too many unpredictable variables. Hammond also brings along his grandchildren, Tim and Alexis 'Lex' Murphy, who join the tour group. The park's staff include engineer John Arnold, biotechnologist Henry Wu, game warden Robert Muldoon, public relations manager Ed Regis and veterinarian Gerry Harding. While touring the park, Grant finds a "Velociraptor" eggshell, seemingly proving Malcolm's earlier assertion that the dinosaurs have somehow been breeding against the geneticists' design.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_Beings"title="Superior Beings">
Peri hasn't been traveling with the Doctor for long and is charmed by the exciting life he leads. This soon turns to terror as a pleasure planet the pair visits turns out to be the domain of hunters who enjoy the taste of human flesh.That's not even the worst of the secrets the place holds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantium!"title="Byzantium!">
Byzantium is an ancient Greek city near the Black Sea. Romans, Greeks, Zealots and Pharisee are all part of its mix.The Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki arrive for general sight-seeing. However, each soon has to face the possibility of being stranded in this place and time, alone and surrounded by political upheaval.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Boy_(memoir)"title="The Lost Boy (memoir)">
The book continues after the ending of the previous book, "A Child Called "It"" with David Pelzer, 9 years old, running away from his home in Daly City, California. He ends up in a bar, getting caught by a staff named Mark for stealing a quarter. Mark calls the police while tricking David to stay by baiting him with a pizza. The police brings David to the police station while sharing a pizza Mark gave David before he left. David's father arrives to bring David home to his abusive mother, telling the police that David is just upset for not being allowed to ride his bicycle. David's teachers eventually contact the authorities, causing David to be put together with a social services worker named Ms. Gold. Before the trial of whether or not to permanently remove him from his mother's custody, David becomes confused about whether he may have deserved the treatment his mother gave him. Ms. Gold, on the other hand, assures him it had nothing to do with him, and that his mother is sick. David eventually tells the truth of his mother, and becomes a permanent ward of the court, escaping from the abuse of his mother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hawk_Eternal"title="The Hawk Eternal">
## Chapter 1.Caswallon, a Farlain clansman, watches the Aenir tear apart Ateris of the lowlands.Gaelen, an orphaned Lowlander child thief, saved by Caswallon from the Aenir. He is tended of his wounds by Oracle, who tells him about the clans.Caswallon, Maeg, and Oracle discuss the Aenir threat and Gaelen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_the_Dark_(novel)"title="Fear of the Dark (novel)">
It is 2382. Archaeologists land on Akoshemon's only moon, along with the Doctor and his companions Nyssa and Tegan (who arrived in the TARDIS by a strange coincidence). They uncover an entity that was seemingly there when Akoshemon destroyed itself in violence; it glories in death and destruction and tries to start more. It seems to have the ability to mentally influence people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Longer_Human"title="No Longer Human">
"No Longer Human" is told in the form of notebooks left by one , a troubled man incapable of revealing his true self to others, and who, instead, maintains a facade of hollow jocularity. The work is made up of three chapters, or "memoranda", which chronicle the life of Ōba from his early childhood to his late twenties.The story is bookended with two other, shorter chapters from the point of view of a neutral observer, who sees three photos of Ōba and eventually tracks down one of the characters mentioned in the notebooks who knew him personally.Ōba refers to himself throughout the book using the reflexive pronoun , whereas the personal pronoun is used both in the foreword and afterword to the book by the writer, whose name is unclear. The name "Ōba" is actually taken from one of Dazai's early works, .
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warmonger_(novel)"title="Warmonger (novel)">
The Doctor and Peri arrive on a small planet, but as soon as Peri steps out, she is attacked by a wild animal and her arm is almost severed. The Doctor takes her in the TARDIS to the hospice on the planet Karn to see the best surgeon in the galaxy, Doctor Mehendri Solon. When they arrive, the hospice's advisor, the Reverend Mother Maren (of the Sisterhood of the Flame) convinces Solon to reattach Peri's arm, which he does successfully.The head of security, Commander Aylmer Hawken tries to stop the Doctor leaving, but Maren convinces him not to, as she is wary of Time Lords. Lord Delmar, the owner of the hospice also warns Hawken against interfering with the Doctor, in case it stops the peace conference which the hospice is hosting from proceeding. The conference is to make alliances between the smaller empires, and has been set up by a warlord known as "The General".Solon's assistant Drago starts harassing Peri, and after The Doctor complains, Drago later suggests to Solon that Peri and The Doctor be killed, but Solon dismisses his worries and goes to work on "project Z". overhearing this, Peri follows Drago to a room full of dead bodies made from parts of different species. She leaves the room, but Solon notices Peri's interference and injects her with a poison, but tells The Doctor that her body is rejecting the arm, and she needs the Sisterhood's elixir of life. The Doctor fetches it, but Solon secretly keeps it and gives Peri the antidote. The Doctor then threatens to reveal what Solon just did to Lord Delmar and takes Peri out of the room.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amorality_Tale"title="Amorality Tale">
In the East End of London, the Doctor and Sarah get involved with gangsters and face a horror hiding in the Great Smog of 1952.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Mercedes"title="The White Mercedes">
This book is split into three parts: the first deals with Chris' first meeting of Jenny, the second with his search for her, and the third with the tragic ending. The first sentence gives away the doomed nature of the book: "Chris Marshall met the girl he was going to kill on a warm Oxford evening...".The seventeen-year-old main character, Chris, works for a lighting company in Oxford, England. While rigging up a party he inadvertently rescues a beautiful young woman in a white dress from upper class thugs. Smitten, he looks for her, but she has disappeared into the night, leaving the white dress in a boat shed. Before she goes, however, he finds out that her name is Jenny, and that she had gatecrashed the party. The thugs' leader, Piers, recognised her and was threatening to turn her in, unless she slept with him.He then searches for her for many weeks, and eventually finds her squatting in an empty house with two friends (not, as he fears, lovers). He asks her out on a date, and she accepts, much to his joy. After this, he goes to his father's house (his parents have divorced three weeks ago; their emotionless parting chills him), and meets his mistress, his secretary Diane. She asks him how his mother is, hoping that she hasn't forced her to suicide by taking her husband away from her. Chris tells her that she has a boyfriend, called Mike, and she is feeling much better.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Front_Runner_(novel)"title="The Front Runner (novel)">
Harlan Brown is the athletic director at the fictitious Prescott College, a progressive, experiential, private liberal arts college in New York. A closeted ex-marine, Harlan has left a prestigious coaching position at Pennsylvania State University following false accusations of sexual misconduct from a male student. Fearing exposure, Harlan has buried himself at the obscure college, and given up his dream of coaching Olympic athletes.As the novel opens in 1974, three star runners — Vince Matti, Jacques LaFont, and Billy Sive — have been expelled from the elite track program at the University of Oregon because they are gay, and wish to transfer to Prescott to train with Brown. Though wary after his experience at Penn State, Harlan agrees to train the athletes, but quickly finds himself falling in love with Billy. Though they manage to suppress their attraction for a few anguished months, the two soon become lovers. When the runners graduate and take teaching positions at Prescott, Billy and Harlan move in together, and later wed in a commitment ceremony.Throughout the novel, Harlan's past is revealed in the form of flashbacks. Though attracted only to men all of his life, Harlan marries a girl he impregnated while in college, living a wholly straight life with only occasional furtive, traumatic excursions into the gay underground of pre-Stonewall New York City. After the incident at Penn State, his marriage ends and he is unable to find employment as a coach, and ultimately begins work as a high-priced hustler in Greenwich Village. When Joe Prescott, the founder and president of Prescott College, offers Harlan a position as the college's athletic director, he enthusiastically accepts. Returning to the closet, Harlan devotes himself entirely to coaching.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_a_Distant_Voice"title="In Search of a Distant Voice">
Kasama Tsuneo is a young Japanese immigration officer, midway through the preparations for an arranged marriage. While raiding a house in the early-morning hours, one immigrant escapes and Tsuneo takes chase through a neighboring graveyard. As Tsuneo thinks he has the escapee cornered, he is overcome by a huge wave of euphoric emotion. Paralyzed by it, he's immobile and the suspect escapes. Tsuneo recovers, completely perplexed. To his bosses he explains that the suspect tripped him and ran away.That same night, on the verge of sleep, he is again flooded by a huge wave of paralyzing emotion, this time sadness. As it passes, he hears a female voice saying "Who are you?" in the darkness, which then disappears. Over the next days, Tsuneo starts to hear this voice more, and eventually it responds to him and he begins a dialogue with it. It claims to be the voice of a woman, very lonely, and that with all her energy she somehow "projected" herself into the world, and Tsuneo was the one to answer. Initially Tsuneo thinks it is the voice of "Eric", someone he knew whilst living in America, but in time accepts that this is not so. Tsuneo becomes increasingly fascinated by the voice and their dialogues, and wonders whether he is suffering from auditory hallucinations. Because of his erratic behavior, he is given time off work and must see a doctor. His arranged marriage is also called off for similar reasons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loveday_Loyalty"title="The Loveday Loyalty">
Against the dramatic scenery of Cornwall, the turbulent criminal underworld of London and the climactic events of the French revolution. In this seventh novel in the series, life with the Lovedays is not confined to England and France. America has won its independence but the Lovedays have connections in Virginia and the new penal colony in Australia has become the residence of one Loveday who took a chance too many. Loyalty to and pride in the Loveday name has held the family together through unstable times, but with the fierce rivalry that exists between family members, will loyalty be enough to honour the family's heritage?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micah_(novel)"title="Micah (novel)">
"Micah" represents a side-adventure of . Rather than follow up immediately on the various plotlines left open in the previous novel, "Incubus Dreams", Hamilton has written a much shorter work focusing primarily on Anita's relationships with one of her lovers, the eponymous . Specifically, Anita is called to Philadelphia to perform a zombie animation and takes Micah on the trip. While in Philadelphia, Micah and Anita have sex, discuss their relationships and his earlier traumas, and encounter some strange twists in Anita's assignment. As with some of the other later novels in the series, "Micah" blends elements of supernatural, detective and erotic fiction."Micah" apparently takes place approximately one month after the events of "Incubus Dreams". (, one of the characters in the series, is four months pregnant in "Incubus Dreams" and five months pregnant in "Micah"). As usual, Anita must juggle several problems simultaneously.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_New_Land"title="The Old New Land">
The novel tells the story of Friedrich Löwenberg, a young Jewish Viennese intellectual, who, tired with European decadence, joins an Americanized Prussian aristocrat named Kingscourt as they retire to a remote Pacific island (it is specifically mentioned as being part of the Cook Islands, near Rarotonga) in 1902. Stopping in Jaffa on their way to the Pacific, they find Palestine a backward, destitute and sparsely populated land, as it appeared to Herzl on his visit in 1898.Löwenberg and Kingscourt spend the following twenty years on the island, cut off from civilization. As they stop over in Palestine on their way back to Europe in 1923, they are astonished to discover a land drastically transformed. A Jewish organization officially named the "New Society" has since risen as European Jews have rediscovered and re-inhabited their "Altneuland", reclaiming their own destiny in the Land of Israel. The country, whose leaders include some old acquaintances from Vienna, is now prosperous and well-populated, boasts a thriving cooperative industry based on state-of-the-art technology, and is home to a free, just, and cosmopolitan modern society. Arabs have full equal rights with Jews, with an Arab engineer among the New Society's leaders, and most merchants in the country are Armenians, Greeks, and members of other ethnic groups. The duo arrives at the time of a general election campaign, during which a fanatical rabbi establishes a political platform arguing that the country belongs exclusively to Jews and demands non-Jewish citizens be stripped of their voting rights, but is ultimately defeated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Evangelists"title="The Three Evangelists">
The "three evangelists" of the title are Marc Vandoosler, Mathias Dellamarre and Lucien Devernois, and Marc's uncle, the former, disgraced police commissioner Armand Vandoosler, appearing for the first time in this book. All three are historians. Marc studies the Middle Ages; Matthias, a historian of prehistoric man; and Lucien, a historian of World War I. All three historians are down on their luck, and decide to move into an old house, neighboring Sophia Siméonidis.One morning, retired opera singer Sophia Siméonidis discovers a beech tree in her garden that she has never seen before. Sophia is alarmed, but her husband Pierre is indifferent. Eventually she calls upon her neighbors, Marc, Matthias, and Lucien, and asks their help. They dig out the tree, and find nothing underneath it.Sophia disappears. Pierre remains unconcerned, as he believes she has gone to visit an old, Greek lover, Stelyos. But Juliette, the evangelists' other next door neighbor, expresses concern; she is sure that Sophia, her best friend, would never have gone off without telling her, and especially not on a Thursday evening, when all the neighbors regularly meet for a convivial meal at Juliette's restaurant, "Le Tonneau" (The Barrel).One night, Sophia's niece, Alexandra, arrives with her little boy Cyrille, running away from a failed relationship and expecting to stay with Sophia. Shortly afterward, a burned out car with a corpse is discovered in an abandoned factory yard. The body is unidentifiable, but a small piece of basalt is found, which was Sophia's lucky charm. Alexandra has no alibi, she stands to inherit a third of Sophia's substantial fortune, and her habit of driving aimlessly around at night makes her a principal suspect.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_of_Shadows"title="Garden of Shadows">
## Part I.Tall, plain Olivia Winfield is rescued from spinsterhood by the smart and handsome Malcolm Foxworth. She thinks she has found "the one" since he is the first man to ever show interest in her. Malcolm, taken by her forthright manner and impressed with her intelligence, proposes after only two days' acquaintance. They marry two weeks later. Olivia leaves her family home in New London, Connecticut to move to his family's mansion, Foxworth Hall, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Olivia starts to discover dark secrets about Malcolm, which eventually diminish her love for him. At a party to celebrate their wedding, Malcolm talks to and flirts with other women, neglecting Olivia.She discovers that Malcolm is still tormented by his mother Corinne's abandonment of him at age five. She believes her own plain looks and money attracted him to her, since he mistrusts conventionally beautiful women. While he is attracted to beauty and seems likely to consider an affair, it is obvious he lacks enough patience and true feeling for such an entanglement. Olivia feels betrayed and humiliated but is still optimistic that things will change as they begin their life together.When exploring the house, she discovers the "Swan Room" which belonged to Malcolm's mother. It has been kept as a shrine to her and contains a very large, ornate bed carved in the shape of a swan. When Malcolm discovers her in the room, they finally consummate their marriage, an act that could be considered more of an attack than an act of love, with Malcolm saying his mother's name the entire time. Olivia wants to scream but does not, trying to hide her humiliation from the servants.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_(Rankin_novel)"title="The Black Book (Rankin novel)">
Rebus finds himself with a number of problems on his hands. His wayward brother, Michael, has returned to Edinburgh in need of accommodation - with only the box-room in Rebus's flat available. While out drinking, he meets an old army friend, Deek Torrance, who admits to being involved in shady activities, telling Rebus he can get his hands on 'anything from a shag to a shooter'. Rebus spends so long out with Deek that he misses dinner with his girlfriend, Doctor Patience Aitken. Furious, she locks him out of her flat, forcing him to sleep in his own flat, on the sofa.At work, a new operation ('Moneybags') is started, aimed at putting one of 'Big Ger' Cafferty's money-lenders out of business. However, Rebus (who despises Cafferty) would rather go after the leader himself. Finally, Rebus's colleague Brian Holmes is put into a coma after being attacked from behind in the carpark of his favourite restaurant, the Elvis-themed "Heartbreak Cafe".Rebus interviews Eddie Ringan, the Elvis enthusiast who owns the restaurant, and Pat Calder, Eddie's gay (and business) partner, but they prove to be of little help. Brian's girlfriend, Nell Stapleton, tells Rebus that Brian had a 'Black Book', a small notebook in which he kept interesting snippets of information. She suggests that Brian was attacked because of something in it. She also feels guilty, since she had argued with Brian just before he went to the restaurant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_a_Boy_in_the_Girls'_Bathroom"title="There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom">
Bradley Chalkers is the protagonist of the book. He is the oldest student in the fifth-grade class, having repeated fourth grade. In his school, he sits at the back of the class, last seat, last row, and never pays any attention, preferring to scribble, cut up pieces of paper, or partake in other mindless tasks which keep his mind off the lesson. He is proud whenever he receives an "F" on his class tests. He wants everyone to hate him because he believes that they will then leave him alone. Everyone hates him, including the teachers.A new classmate, Jeff Fishkin, comes in from Washington, D.C., and the only two remaining seats are the ones beside and in front of Bradley. Jeff tries to reason with Bradley, but fails, like everyone else. Then, a counselor named Carla is appointed, and she can't wait to meet Bradley. Carla says she wants to be friends with Bradley, and she begins to try to open him up and reveal his kind interior, which he has been trying to hide. Bradley refuses to come quietly, and his conflicting emotions with Carla and other people induce strife among his fellow schoolmates. As he meets with Carla more and more, he slowly decides to become a better person. He does his homework and forms better relationships with his parents. To help him with a book report, Carla lends him her favorite book, "My Parents Didn't Steal an Elephant". Bradley thinks that the book is good luck and responsible for his changes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_on_Fire_(Quinnell_novel)"title="Man on Fire (Quinnell novel)">
In Italy, wealthy families often hire bodyguards to protect family members from the threat of kidnapping. When Rika Balletto urges her husband Ettore, a wealthy textiles producer living in Milan, to hire a bodyguard for their daughter Pinta, he is doubtful but agrees. After some searching, he finally settles for an American named Creasy.Creasy, once purposeful and lethal who served in the French Foreign Legion, has become a burnt-out alcoholic. To keep him occupied, his companion Guido suggests that Creasy should get a job and offers to set him up as a bodyguard: thus he is hired by the Ballettos, where he meets his charge, Pinta.Creasy barely tolerates the precocious child and her pestering questions about him and his life. But slowly, she chips away at his seemingly impenetrable exterior, his defences drop, and he opens up to her. They become friends and he replaces her parents in their absences, giving her advice, guidance and help with her competition running: he is even spurred to give up his drinking and return to his former physical prowess. But Creasy's life is shattered when Pinta is kidnapped by the Mafia, despite his efforts to protect her.Creasy is wounded during the kidnapping and as he lies in a hospital bed Guido keeps him informed of the goings on. Soon enough, Guido returns with the news that the exchange went bad and Pinta was found dead in a car, suffocated on her own vomit. She had also been raped by her captors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Whispers"title="Midnight Whispers">
Christie Longchamp is a promising musician whose mother owns and operates the prestigious Cutler's Cove hotel. They live nearby with Christie's stepfather Jimmy and her nine-year-old half-brother Jefferson while her Uncle Philip, his wife Aunt Bet and their twin children, Richard and Melanie, reside in the family section of Cutler's Cove.The story commences on Christie's sixteenth birthday. A grand party is being held at the hotel for her extended family and school friends, but to Christie, the only person whose arrival matters is her stepfather's seventeen-year-old half-brother, Gavin. Fern, Jimmy's younger sister and the problem child of the family, also arrives unexpectedly, mainly to upset Dawn and Jimmy (showing she has not changed since "Twilight's Child"). She presents Christie with a copy of "Lady Chatterley's Lover". Christie throws it into her closet, appalled by her aunt's insinuations and promiscuousness. Despite Fern's wild and drunken behaviour, the party is a great success, and the evening concludes with Gavin confessing his love for Christie.The next day, Christie and Jefferson return home from school to find that Cutler's Cove has burned to the ground after a boiler in the basement exploded. Jimmy, who was in the basement, was trapped and Dawn tried to save him, but they both perished in the blaze. It is revealed that Philip and Bet are now their legal guardians, and they proceed to move into Christie's house to establish themselves as the new heads of the Cutler empire. Although Aunt Bet explains to Jefferson and Christie that they must all compromise and sacrifice, Christie notices that it is only she and Jefferson who are being asked to make sacrifices. All of Dawn and Jimmy's belongings are either removed or seized by Aunt Bet, depending on whether she likes them or not. Aunt Bet is unable to get along with Jefferson, constantly criticizing him, and Richard frames him for naughty deeds just to get him in trouble. Christie fights with her about this but to no avail. Christie then pleads with her uncle to allow Jefferson and herself more freedom, but Philip sides with his wife, as he has had little willpower since Dawn's death. After some time, Laura Sue dies, which adds to Philip's deteriorating mental state.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knots_and_Crosses"title="Knots and Crosses">
1985. Edinburgh has been shocked by the abduction and subsequent strangling of two young girls. Journalist Jim Stevens runs his own investigation, and has uncovered Michael Rebus's drug dealing. He suspects that his brother John, a Lothian and Borders Police officer, knows or even supports his brother's illegal activities.John Rebus is meanwhile assigned to the investigative team. The investigation remains without success, and eventually two more girls disappear. Throughout the case, John is haunted by his past in the SAS. Then his former wife is attacked and his daughter abducted. Only when hypnotized by his brother is he able to share his past with him and his colleague and lover Gill Templer. Taking hints from seemingly cryptic anonymous letters, John connects the murders to his own military past. Relieved from his duty because of the personal involvement, he decides to find and face his enemy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marnie"title="Marnie">
"Marnie" is about a young woman who makes a living by embezzling her employers' funds, moving on, and changing her identity. Her criminal behaviour is described in detail, but her motives remain obscure, as she is a capable person who would have likely fared well in an honest career.She is finally caught in the act by one of her employers, a young widower named Mark Rutland, who blackmails her into marriage. Two shocking events near the end of the story send the troubled woman to the brink of suicide, and she must eventually face the trauma from her past that is the root cause of her behaviour.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho_(novel)"title="Psycho (novel)">
Norman Bates, a middle-aged bachelor, is dominated by his mother, a mean-tempered, puritanical old woman who forbids him to have a life outside of her. They run a small motel together in the town of Fairvale, but business has suffered since the state relocated the highway. In the middle of a heated argument between them, a customer arrives, a young woman named Mary Crane.Mary is on the run after impulsively stealing $40,000 from a client of the real estate company where she works. She stole the money so her boyfriend, Sam Loomis, can pay off his debts and they can finally get married. Mary arrives at the Bates Motel after accidentally turning off the main highway. After checking in, she accepts Bates's invitation to have dinner with him at his house, an invitation that sends Mrs. Bates into a jealous rage; she screams, "I'll kill the bitch!", which Mary overhears.During dinner, Mary gently suggests that Bates put his mother in a mental institution, but he denies there is anything wrong with her; "We all go a little mad sometimes", he says. Mary says goodnight and returns to her room, resolving to return the money so she will not end up like Bates. Moments later, however, a figure resembling an old woman frightens Mary in the shower with a butcher knife, and then beheads her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halflife_(Michalowski_novel)"title="Halflife (Michalowski novel)">
Having landed on the planet of Espero, the Doctor and Fitz leave Trix in the TARDIS whilst they investigate a distress signal. As she grows bored, Trix decides to leave, but is surprised to find an amnesiac Fitz lying unconscious outside the TARDIS. They find themselves in the path of a wavefront of grey goo, and Fitz surprises Trix by being quite keen to investigate the mystery.The Doctor, meanwhile, has been befriended by Calamee, a member of the planet's ruling family. The amnesia he has been suffering from has grown worse, and he — like Fitz — has forgotten everything that has happened prior to the start of the novel. He is directed to the home of a mysterious off-worlder named Madam Xing, who restores his most recent memories and confirms that the memories lost (prior to "The Burning") have been permanently deleted, rather than merely suppressed. The Doctor refuses to allow Xing to restore the memories by using a viroid unit, but does take the unit with him as he leaves. As he goes, he discovers that he is being observed via anachronistic technology.Fitz and Trix head to the city, and watch as a mob of citizens attack a "night beast" — an unknown creature that has arrived on the planet. Fitz tries to prevent the attack, but is over-powered by the mob, who kill the beast. They are led to safety by a woman named Farine, but Trix wanders away when she sees a young boy watching them. The boy offers her a device that will allow her to disguise herself much more effectively, changing her entire body on a genetic level. Trix takes him up on the offer, only to find that the "device" is actually an alien symbiote named Reo, who takes complete control of her body.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_Chemistry"title="Emotional Chemistry">
The TARDIS crew arrive in the Kremlin Museum, looking for a locket that may help to reveal the nature of Sabbath's plans. However, they find the museum being ransacked by two soldiers from the future. One is overpowered, and the other escapes to the future, taking the Doctor with him.In the present day, Colonel Grigoriy Bugayev (of the Russian branch of UNIT) is investigating the thefts, and suspects corrupt businessman Vladimir Garudin. He also knows of the Doctor, and thinks that his companions may be able to help him. However, he doesn't search Trix properly, and fails to discover that she has stolen the locket the Doctor was searching for.The Doctor and the future soldier arrive in 5000 with a painting of a Russian noblewoman, which his captor insists on taking to his commander, Lord General Razum Kinzhal. Kinzhal himself has been captured by enemy forces, but manages to complete a daring escape that leaves him in the Arctic wilderness with his second-in-command, Angel, who loves him dearly.In 1812, as Alexander Vishenkov prepares to head off to face the French with his friend Captain Victor Padorin, he is given the diamond locket as a token of affection by Dusha. He loves her dearly, but is troubled by lustful feelings he has started to have for her younger sister. Dusha, meanwhile, worries about her two sisters, whom the notorious lecher Padorin seems to have set his sights on.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Resort_(novel)"title="The Last Resort (novel)">
This story begins with Fitz and Anji working for the Good Times Inc. Company. They are working undercover for the Doctor, who is shocked to discover a company that is selling holidays in time.The climax of the story results in the destruction of billions of universes. The Doctor and Sabbath realise all time travellers must be stopped, to prevent these events from happening again. However, at the end of the book a man reveals he has a time-travel machine and proceeds to begin interfering in time once again...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reckless_Engineering"title="Reckless Engineering">
The story is set in an alternate universe and features Isambard Kingdom Brunel; the cover is based on a famous photo of Brunel standing in front of the launching chains for the SS Great Eastern.Set during the 1840s, the Doctor and his companions arrive during the Industrial Revolution in England, and learn that an inventor has been ordered by an alien force to construct a machine known as the "Utopia Engine", a machine that will cause the entire planet to rapidly age. Anybody below the age of puberty will survive, but those above it will age to death.Brunel, who has unknowingly been supplying parts for this engine, unites with the Doctor to destroy the engine after learning of the post-apocalyptic future the Doctor has foreseen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_Obscura_(novel)"title="Camera Obscura (novel)">
Doctor's second heart was taken by his ally time traveler Sabbath. But because of new danger he starts to work with Sabbath again to pursue Dartmoor to unravel his new mysteries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_101_(novel)"title="History 101 (novel)">
Set in the Spanish Civil War, the book (Halliday's first novel) explores the construction of history and the experiences of George Orwell.The Doctor, Fitz, and Anji, after viewing Pablo Picasso's "Guernica" at the 1937 Paris exhibition, realise time has been changed. They travel back to Spain in order to uncover what affected the artist's vision of this terrible event.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_(Clapham_novel)"title="Hope (Clapham novel)">
The Doctor tries to push the TARDIS to its limit, but is forced to land when it begins to break up. They land on the surface of a frozen sea of acid on the planet Endpoint, in the distant future. When the ice begins to break up, The Doctor, Fitz and Anji, flee to the nearby city of Hope, only to see the TARDIS sink to the bottom of the sea. On the city, a policeman investigating a decapitation explains that the planet is toxic, so the humans had to evolve to survive, but recently a serial killer has been decapitating people. The policeman then tells them to go to a casino for help. When they arrive The Doctor buys entry with an apple core (which is long extinct) from his pocket. Inside the casino, a group of cyborgs, calling themselves the Brotherhood of the Silver Fist, burst in and demand that the casino's owner, Silver, speaks to them. Silver, himself a cyborg, enters and drives the brotherhood out of the casino but not before talking to The Doctor. After learning that The Doctor can time travel, he offers to recover the TARDIS if The Doctor catches the murderer, which The Doctor agrees to.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hide_and_Seek_(Rankin_novel)"title="Hide and Seek (Rankin novel)">
Detective Inspector John Rebus finds the body of an overdosed drug addict in an Edinburgh squat, laid out cross-like on the floor, between two burned-down candles, with a five-pointed star painted on the wall above. Some of his colleagues are inclined to categorise it as the routine death of a "junkie", but Rebus is perturbed by some unusual facts of the case: a full package of heroin in the dead man's room, and some mysterious bruises on his face and body. Rebus takes seriously a death which looks more like a murder every day, and he begins to investigate the true circumstances of the death. As part of his investigation, Rebus finds the young woman named Tracy who knew the dead man and heard his terrifying last words: "Hide! Hide!"It emerges that the dead man was a photographer who took and hid some sensitive photos in a specialist private members' club - Hyde's - where highly connected people in society watch illegal boxing. Rebus is able to arrest Hyde's owner and several high-profile members, but to his outrage and disgust all the prisoners die suspicious deaths: the powers-that-be are covering it up to prevent scandal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth_and_Nail_(novel)"title="Tooth and Nail (novel)">
Rebus is drafted in by Scotland Yard to help track down a cannibalistic serial killer called the Wolfman, whose first victim was found in the East End of London's lonely Wolf Street. His London colleague, George Flight, isn't happy at what he sees as interference, and Rebus encounters racial prejudice as well as the usual dangers of trying to catch a vicious killer.When Rebus is offered a psychological profile of the Wolfman by an attractive woman, it seems too good an opportunity to miss.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revolt_of_Mamie_Stover"title="The Revolt of Mamie Stover">
"The Revolt of Mamie Stover" is an allegory for the decline of American society because of the country-wide democratization that conflict made possible. Using a Honolulu prostitute to state his case, Huie shows her rise economically, socially, and politically with the aid, in part, of the federal government as she flouts local regulation (prostitution itself being legal at the time). As the war progresses, Stover becomes a war profiteer, coming to control property, accumulating vast wealth in cash, and visiting proscribed beaches in the company of U.S. military officers."The Revolt of Mamie Stover" is the first volume in a trilogy, including "The Americanization of Emily" (1959), and "Hotel Mamie Stover" (1963), all of which have the same narrator. In the first and third books, he is primarily present in order to observe and report, and in the second he relates his experiences in the late stages of World War II.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strip_Jack"title="Strip Jack">
A police raid on an Edinburgh brothel captures (seemingly by accident) popular young local MP Gregor Jack. When Jack's fiery wife Elizabeth disappears, and two bodies are found, suspicion falls on a famous local actor Rab Kinnoul. Detective Inspector John Rebus is sympathetic to the MP's problems, and interviews a member of the Jacks' social circle, Andrew MacMillan, who is locked up in a psychiatric hospital after murdering his wife many years before. It becomes increasingly evident that somebody has 'set up' Jack, with the intention of stripping him of his good name, political standing and maybe even his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stranger_(Van_Allsburg_book)"title="The Stranger (Van Allsburg book)">
One fall day, while Farmer Bailey is riding down the road in his truck, he hears a thump. At first, he thinks he had run over a deer, but when he gets out to see what he hit, he finds that he has accidentally run over a man. The man tries to leave, but loses his balance and falls down again where he and his wife, Mrs. Bailey, discovers that the stranger cannot talk.The Baileys call a doctor to examine him. The doctor arrives and takes the stranger's temperature with her thermometer. As the doctor holds it up to his mouth, the stranger blows on it and the mercury inside freezes. The doctor thinks that the thermometer is broken. Although the stranger isn't seriously hurt, he can't remember who he is or where he is from. The doctor gives advice to the Baileys, telling them to give the stranger shelter until he regains his memory. They do and he fits in well with the family and even helps out on the farm. One night, the stranger comes out to have dinner with the Baileys. They are having soup, and the stranger notices steam rising from his bowl. He sees the little girl blowing on the soup to help it cool. He lightly blows on his own bowl, and the steam drifts away. When he blows, Mrs. Bailey feels a draft on her spine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_Causes"title="Mortal Causes">
Set during the Edinburgh Festival, this novel starts with a brutally executed corpse being discovered in Mary King's Close, an ancient subterranean street. The body has a tattoo identified with "Sword and Shield", a long-thought-defunct Scottish Nationalist group with links to sectarianism in Northern Ireland. The victim turns out to be the son of notorious gangster 'Big Ger' Cafferty, and the plot moves towards the unthinkable prospect of a terrorist atrocity in a tourist-filled Edinburgh.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_It_Bleed_(novel)"title="Let It Bleed (novel)">
Detective Inspector John Rebus and Frank Lauderdale start the book with a car chase across Edinburgh to apprehend kidnappers, culminating with the two youths they are chasing throwing themselves off the Forth Road Bridge and in Rebus being injured in a car crash. Rebus's upset over this allows Rankin to show the character in a new light, revealing his isolation and potentially suicidal despair.After the unconnected suicide of a terminally ill con, Rebus pursues an investigation that implicates respected people at the highest levels of government, and due to the politically sensitive nature of what he is doing, faces losing his job, or worse. He is supported by his daughter Sammy, allowing their distant relationship to be built upon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_&amp;_Blue_(Rankin_novel)"title="Black &amp; Blue (Rankin novel)">
Detective Inspector John Rebus is working on four cases at once trying to catch a killer he suspects of being the infamous Bible John. He has to do it while under an internal inquiry led by a man he has accused of taking bribes from Glasgow's "Mr Big". TV journalists are meanwhile investigating Rebus over a miscarriage of justice. Rebus travels between Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen and then on to Shetland and the North Sea.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hanging_Garden_(Rankin_novel)"title="The Hanging Garden (Rankin novel)">
Detective Inspector John Rebus, stationed at St. Leonard's in Edinburgh, is involved in four cases which turn out to be intertwined. He is removed from the investigation of the murder of "Mr Taystee," an ice-cream vendor, and assigned instead to investigate Lintz, a possible Nazi war criminal living quietly in Edinburgh (his history is based on the World War II massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane in France). His conversations with Lintz about guilt and responsibility cause Rebus to recall being stationed in Belfast at the beginning of the Troubles. Rebus also volunteers to be the liaison with Crime Squad's surveillance of up-and-coming gangster Tommy Telford. Finally, he stumbles into the role of protector of a traumatised Bosnian prostitute, who has associations both with Telford and with a Chechen gangster named Tarawicz -"Mr Pink Eyes"- operating out of Newcastle; she leads the police to the discovery that Japanese "businessmen" (one of whom turns out to be a Yakuza member) are associated with Telford. 'Big Ger' Cafferty, who is still serving his time in Barlinnie Prison, is thought to be engineering attacks on Telford, to maintain control of crime in Edinburgh, and Rebus and his colleagues must track the growing gang war. Rebus's insights lead the Crime Squad to mount an operation against Telford using Rebus's old friend (and Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor) Jack Morton, who is killed as the operation goes wrong.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_in_Darkness"title="Set in Darkness">
In 1999 the Scottish Parliament was about to reopen in Edinburgh after 300 years. The novel is set in December 1998, with considerable references to the early months of 1979, when an earlier referendum instituting a Scottish Parliament had failed to receive enough votes. In the novel's presentation of both periods (1978-79 and 1998-99), real estate and construction in Edinburgh is booming, with gangsters speculating on choice areas near the proposed new institution. Detective Inspector John Rebus is on a committee for security liaison with the new institution, along with detectives from various Edinburgh stations. While on a tour of Queensberry House, which is to be incorporated into the new Parliament, the committee members open up an ancient fireplace and find a mummified murder victim. Investigating this case involves delving into the renovations of the building around 1979, when the victim was killed. A Labour candidate for MSP called Roddy Grieve is found murdered on the Queensberry House grounds. Grieve is a member of a wealthy and artistic Edinburgh family, including an artist mother, a brother who is a Tory MP, a sister who was a famous model when Rebus was young, and a brother who disappeared in 1979. Grieve's murder is an important case, and it is assigned to DI Derek Linford, an earnest younger man with ambition and prospects; however, Rebus prefers his own methods. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_Men"title="Resurrection Men">
Detective Inspector John Rebus has been sent to Tulliallan, the Scottish Police College for 'retraining' as part of a small group of senior officers who have become undisciplined; they are "the Resurrection Men," whose careers need to be resuscitated long enough for them to earn their pensions. Rebus was sent to Tulliallan for throwing a cup of tea at DCS Gill Templer, but in fact he is working undercover on behalf of the Chief Constable to learn about a possible 1994 theft by a group of the senior officers attending the course. To complicate things further, the officers in the course are assigned the unsolved 1995 case of the murder of a Glasgow gangster, a case originally investigated by one of them and about which Rebus knows all too much. While investigating his fellow officers for a past crime, he now has to fear that they will expose his own secrets.Back at St Leonard's police station, DS Siobhan Clarke and the other officers are pursuing a murder inquiry, the brutal death of an Edinburgh art dealer named Marber. Clues involve a stolen painting by Jack Vettriano, a large disbursement to a painter who had been claiming Marber was cheating artists and clients, and a young prostitute for whom Marber was providing a home. DS Clarke suspects Edinburgh gangster 'Big Ger' Cafferty of owning the spa where the prostitute works, the cab company that Marber used on the night of his death, and possibly a mysterious stash of paintings purchased from Marber a few years earlier. When the stolen painting turns up in one suspect's garden shed, he is arrested, but she remains skeptical and continues to pursue other avenues of inquiry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Question_of_Blood"title="A Question of Blood">
DI John Rebus, freshly treated for burned hands, faces trouble. A petty criminal who had been stalking DS Siobhan Clarke died in a fire on the night Rebus was injured. Rebus is known to have been at the stalker's house that night, but maintains that he left him unharmed and scalded his hands later at home.An ex-soldier appears to have killed two teenagers at a private school, injured one, and shot himself. The facts seem straightforward and the only mysteries are the motive and the origin of the gun. Rebus antagonises the survivor's father, an aggressive local MP who dislikes the police and is trying to make political capital out of the shooting. He also meets his long-lost cousin, whose son was one of the killer's victims and whose daughter is now being sucked into the MP's campaign. He and Clarke try to trace the gun to a local gangster, and continue on the case when Rebus is officially suspended on suspicion of murdering Clarke's stalker. Two secretive security service personnel appear and begin asking awkward questions, and Rebus traces their interest to the gunman's involvement in a classified military helicopter crash on Jura years before. Drugs are found on his boat, and they discover that he had secrets and some unusual friendships, including with local teenagers and an ex-RAF pilot. However, the motive for the shooting remains unclear, and Rebus begins to wonder whether they have the true version of events after all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Dogs_and_Englishmen_(novel)"title="Mad Dogs and Englishmen (novel)">
A race of alien poodles alters a 20th-century fantasy epic to aid their civil war.The Doctor infiltrates a groups of writers known as the Smudgelings, Anji experiences some very, very special effects in 1970s America and Fitz meets an old friend.The book also features a jolly hotel chef and dogs with opposable thumbs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Falls_(Rankin_novel)"title="The Falls (Rankin novel)">
A student vanishes in Edinburgh and her wealthy family of bankers ensures Lothian and Borders Police is under pressure to find her. The novel presents in detail a difficult case, where the newly appointed (and first female) Chief Super, Gill Templer, is trying to please her superiors and manipulate her CID officers. In the course of the novel, DC Siobhan Clarke must decide whether to take a plum position offered her by DCS Templer or stick with investigation in the style of John Rebus.Two sets of clues, one nineteenth-century and one twenty-first-century, appear. A carved wooden doll in a coffin found near the missing woman's East Lothian home leads Rebus to the National Museum of Scotland's collection of dolls in coffins found on Arthur's Seat in 1836, after the famous Burke and Hare murders in Edinburgh. Rebus also wanders into the Surgeons' Hall, where he meets several forensic pathologists of his acquaintance and sees the Burke and Hare exhibit there. A museum curator, Jean Burchill, alerts him to what might be a more recent serial killer marking his exploits with such coffins. While Rebus pursues these historical angles in libraries, police archives, and museums, DC Siobhan Clarke interacts with an electronic trail via computer and mobile phone. Clarke discovers that the woman who disappeared had been playing an Internet role-playing game, and tackles the virtual Quizmaster; she risks the same fate as the missing girl.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleshmarket_Close"title="Fleshmarket Close">
Detective Inspector John Rebus has no desk to work from, as a hint from his superiors that he should consider retirement, but he and his protégée Siobhan Clarke are still investigating some seemingly unconnected cases. The sister of a dead rape victim is missing; skeletons turn up embedded in a concrete floor; a Kurdish journalist is brutally murdered; and the son of a Glasgow gangster has moved into the Edinburgh vice scene.The book uses two new settings: a sink estate divided between the indigenous population and refugees (based on Wester Hailes), and a small town whose economy is dominated by an internment camp for asylum seekers (based on Dungavel).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naming_of_the_Dead"title="The Naming of the Dead">
An underlying thread throughout the book is that of familial relationships; the book opens with Detective Inspector John Rebus attending the funeral of his brother Michael, who has died suddenly from a stroke. The parents of Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clarke arrive in Edinburgh as part of the protests, demonstrations, and scuffles that surrounded the G8 summit at Gleneagles, keeping the police busy. Clarke defied her parents by becoming a police officer; she now wants to feel like a daughter.Rebus is nearing retirement ("nobody would blame you for coasting"), and becomes sidelined until the apparent suicide of MP Ben Webster occurs at a high-level meeting in Edinburgh Castle. It emerges that Webster was campaigning against the arms trade, and Richard Pennen of Pennen Industries, a dealer in weapons technology, comes under suspicion.At the same time, a serial killer seems to be killing former offenders, helped by a website set up by the family of a victim. Clues have been deliberately left at Clootie Well (duplicated from the Black Isle to Auchterarder for the purposes of the plot), a place where items of clothing are traditionally left for luck.Siobhan Clarke is placed in charge of the investigation, although she is outranked by Rebus, and finds herself having to compromise with Edinburgh gangster Morris Cafferty (for whom one of the victims was working as a bouncer) in hunting down the identity of the riot policeman who apparently assaulted her mother at a demonstration. Cafferty is also getting older, though his insecurity is balanced somewhat by his having had a biography ghost-written by local journalist Mairie Henderson. She is enlisted by Rebus and Clarke to help solve the crimes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hiding_Place_(biography)"title="The Hiding Place (biography)">
The book begins with the Ten Boom family celebrating the 100th anniversary of the family business; they sell and repair watches under the family's elderly father, Casper ten Boom. The business takes up the ground floor of the family home, known as the Béjé. Casper lives with his unmarried daughters, Corrie, the narrator and a watchmaker herself, and Betsie, who takes care of the house. It seems as if everyone in the Dutch town of Haarlem has shown up to the party, including Corrie's sister Nollie, her brother Willem, and her nephews Peter and Kik. Willem, a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church, brings a Jewish man, who has just escaped from Germany. The man's beard has been burned off by some thugs, a grim reminder of what was happening just to the east of the Netherlands.In the next few chapters, Corrie talks about her childhood, her infirm but glad-hearted mother, and the three aunts who once lived in the Béjé. She talks about the only man she ever loved, a young man named Karel, who ultimately married a woman from a rich family.Eventually, both Nollie and Willem marry. After the deaths of Corrie's mother and aunts, Corrie, Betsie, and their father settle down into a pleasant domestic life. Then, in 1940, the Nazis invade the Netherlands.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Evil"title="The Ultimate Evil">
The Sixth Doctor's TARDIS is working perfectly, leaving him with nothing to do. When Peri suggests a holiday, the Doctor decides to visit the peaceful country of Tranquela. But an evil arms dealer, the Dwarf Mordant has been busy fomenting hatred there, so they will break a truce with their enemy, the people of the continent of Ameliora. But when even the Doctor becomes affected, can anything stop Mordant's plans?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazing_Bone"title="The Amazing Bone">
"The Amazing Bone" is about how Pearl the pig is walking home from school, and finds a magic talking bone on the ground, which has the ability to imitate any sound and speak in any language (it samples Spanish, Polish and German for her). Pearl takes it with her, and on the way home they have several misadventures, including an encounter with a hungry fox who wants to eat Pearl for dinner.The book was featured in an episode of the PBS television show "Storytime" in which it was read to a live audience.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weir_of_Hermiston"title="Weir of Hermiston">
The novel tells the story of Archie Weir, a youth born into an upper-class Edinburgh family. Because of his Romantic sensibilities and sensitivity, Archie is estranged from his father, who is depicted as the coarse and cruel judge of a criminal court. By mutual consent, Archie is banished from his family of origin and sent to live as the local laird on a family property in the vicinity of the Borders hamlet Hermiston.While serving as the laird, Archie meets and falls in love with Kirstie (Christina). As the two are deepening their relationship, the book breaks off. Confusingly, there are two characters in the novel called Christina, the younger of whom is Archie's sweetheart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_Hunt_(novel)"title="Witch Hunt (novel)">
A fishing boat sinks in the English Channel in the middle of the night, and the evidence points to murder. Ex-MI5 operative Dominic Elder comes out of retirement to help investigate the explosion of the boat, as it appears that his long-time obsession, a female assassin known as "Witch", may be responsible. Using the boat to get to England from France, Witch left a subtle trail of clues to announce her arrival and to warn off Elder.But that is the least of Special Branch's worries, if Elder's well-honed intuition is correct. He has seen her work before and knows her to be a resourceful enemy, who always seems a step ahead of the authorities. With an imminent summit of world leaders to be held in London, Witch's target seems obvious.Young Michael Barclay's thoroughness leads him onto Witch's trail, with the help of his liaison in the French police, Dominique Herault. Apart from her language help and guidance around Paris, Michael is sexually attracted to her.The team of detectives and MI5 agents, and the terrorist, play cat-and-mouse with each other in Scotland, England, France, and even briefly visit a former associate of Witch in prison in Germany.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Hunt"title="Blood Hunt">
Gordon Reeve, a former SAS soldier, receives a phone call in his home in Scotland, informing him that his brother Jim has been found dead in a car in San Diego - the car being locked from the inside, and the gun still in Jim's hand. While in the USA to identify the body, Gordon realises that his brother was murdered, and that the police are more than reluctant to follow any lead. Retracing Jim's final hours, he connects Jim's death with his work as a journalist, investigating a multinational chemical corporation. Soon, Gordon finds himself under surveillance, and decides to find out more among Jim's acquaintances back in Europe.In London, he finds more hints, but no evidence for his brother's sources. After returning to his wife and son, he finds that his home has been bugged by professionals. Sending his wife and son to a relative, he determines to take on his enemy on his own. There are two parties after him: The multinational corporation, represented by "Jay", a renegade SAS member, and an international investigation corporation, somehow connected with the case.Travelling to France, in order to find out more from a journalist colleague of Jim's, they are attacked by a group of professional killers under orders from Jay, resulting in multiple deaths, and leading to Gordon becoming a police target. Gordon decides to return to the USA, where he infiltrates the investigation corporation, and learns more about the history of the case. Then he travels to San Diego, to collect more evidence, and eventually returns to England, deliberately leaving a trail for Jay. Their long enmity leads Jay to follow Gordon to Scotland, where Gordon kills him and his team in a final showdown. Gordon manages to locate Jim's hidden journalistic material, hopefully clearing Jim's and his own name.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Talented_Mr._Ripley"title="The Talented Mr. Ripley">
Tom Ripley is a young man struggling to make a living in New York City by whatever means necessary, including a series of small-time confidence scams. One day, he is approached by shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf to travel to "Mongibello" (based on the resort town Positano), in Italy, to persuade Greenleaf's errant son, Dickie, to return to the United States and join the family business. Ripley agrees, exaggerating his friendship with Dickie, a half-remembered acquaintance, in order to gain the elder Greenleaf's trust.Shortly after his arrival in Italy, Ripley meets Dickie and Dickie's girlfriend Marge Sherwood, and Dickie allows Tom Ripley to stay with him in his Italian home. As Ripley and Dickie spend more time together, Marge feels left out. However, soon after Ripley arrives, Freddie Miles, a school friend of Dickie's, visits Dickie's summer home. Tom begins to grow jealous of Freddie, and grows closer to Marge over their shared anguish in Dickie's shifting loyalty.Dickie becomes upset when he unexpectedly finds Ripley in his bedroom dressed up in his clothes and imitating his mannerisms. From this moment on, Ripley senses that Dickie has begun to tire of him, resenting his constant presence and growing personal dependence. Ripley has indeed become obsessed with Dickie, which is further reinforced by his desire to imitate and maintain the wealthy lifestyle Dickie has afforded him. As a gesture to Ripley, Dickie agrees to travel with him on a short holiday to San Remo. Sensing that he is about to cut him loose, Ripley finally decides to murder Dickie and assume his identity. When the two set sail in a small rented boat, Ripley beats him to death with an oar, dumps his anchor-weighted body into the water, and scuttles the boat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forge_of_Heaven"title="Forge of Heaven">
"Forge of Heaven" takes place several centuries after "Hammerfall". The transformation of Marak's World is monitored on the ground by Marak, assisted by Luz and Ian, and planetary watchers on Concord Station using taps, nanocele implants that enable watchers and those on the planet to communicate with one another. Kekellen, the "ondat"'s representative on the station, whom no one has ever seen, is particularly interested in Marak and his activities, and uses it to help understand humans. Procyon is Marak's watcher on Concord.Unannounced, a ship from Earth arrives at the station and Earth ambassador Andreas Gide demands to interrogate Procyon about whether illegal First Movement technology is leaving the planet. Fearing Outsider contamination, Gide enters the station in a sealed mobile containment unit. Procyon assures Gide that, to his knowledge, no illicit technology is leaving the planet, but as the interview ends, Gide is shot at with an armor-piercing shell, which breaches his containment field. Gide is taken to hospital on the station, but because he has now been exposed to Outsider "contaminates", he is unable to return to the Earth ship. Procycon, concussed from the blast, wanders off and is soon lost in the station's corridors.Procyon's disappearance causes problems for the Planetary Observations Office, which oversees communications with the world below. Marak, who has become dependent on Procycon, demands to know what has happened to his watcher. Kekellen, concerned about the disruption of the Planetary Observation Project, intervenes. Using station maintenance robots, he rescues Procycon, but implants a tap in him, enabling Kekellen to keep in touch with him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obernewtyn_(novel)"title="Obernewtyn (novel)">
## Context."Obernewtyn" is set in a world recently ravaged by a nuclear holocaust, known to the survivors as "the Great White", later said by the Herders (leaders of the new religious order) to have been sent by Lud (God) to punish humanity. The surviving remote communities attempted to rebuild society, which over time developed into a totalitarian Council, and a religious order, the Herder Faction. Mutations of the mind also began to appear in some of the surviving generations; those discovered are either burnt alive along with the rebels or labelled as "Misfits" and outcasts. The resulting large group of children are placed in orphan homes and used for manual labour.Elspeth learns from her premonitions, and her cat Maruman's prophecies, that a keeper from Obernewtyn, a feared institution where Misfits are sent to work, will come to take her there. Soon, when delivering tea to visiting Head Keeper of Obernewtyn, Madam Vega, Elspeth accidentally reveals she is a Misfit, though not to what extent, and is soon dispatched to Obernewtyn. Her first few weeks at Obernewtyn are spent in the kitchen, where she is worked to the bone. The cook's daughter delights in tormenting her. The favoured Misfit, Ariel, and farm overseer, Rushton, immediately dislike her. Later reassigned to the farm, an encounter with a pair of Misfits named Matthew and Dameon reveals she is not alone in her particular abilities. She also befriends Cameo, a delicate, pretty Misfit of whom Matthew is very fond. Elspeth, plagued by nightmares, begins to feel there is a dark secret underneath their everyday tasks. While working, Elspeth decides to test the range of her telepathic ability, "farseeking", but beyond the boundaries of Obernewtyn, a strange machine, the Zebkrahn, traps her mind. She is only freed by combining her mental strength with another anonymous mind who offers assistance. Asked by Vega to look out for "special" Misfits, her interview reveals the Doctor is a defective simpleton; his "assistant", Alexi, has no interest in Elspeth in his quest to find the "right one" who will lead him to what he desires. Elspeth and Matthew later deduce that tortuous experiments on their kind are occurring, and they resolve to escape. Cameo begins disappearing from her bed at nighttime, and Elspeth fearfully suspects that Cameo is the subject of some of these experiments.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farseekers"title="The Farseekers">
Rushton returns from a journey around the highlands and immediately calls a meeting of all the leaders of the guilds (guildmerge). At the meeting, Elspeth and Pavo propose a joint expedition of their guilds to the West Coast, in order to recover an untouched Beforetime (time before Great White) book cache, as well as rescue a person with very strong mental abilities. Rushton proposes a safe house be set up in the capital, Sutrium, so they can be informed of the Council's movements, with the person to do this joining their expedition. This expedition is unanimously approved. Suddenly the cat Maruman falls into a fitful coma and Elspeth enters his mind to help bring him back. Inside his mind, a voice of an Agyllian reminds Elspeth of her promise to destroy the weaponmachines, a journey she must make alone. Later, Zarak bumps into an unknown Misfit mind while farseeking, who is a novice Herder in Darthnor cloister. Elspeth contacts the novice, named Jik, who initially believes she is a demon sent to test his faith. After subsequent conversations, she reveals she too is a Misfit and offers him a home at Obernewtyn. A small group of Farseekers rescue him, making it look as if he had drowned. Meanwhile, Elspeth, in response to the horses’ refusal to be ridden, strikes a bargain with their leader, Gahltha, that the upcoming expedition be treated as a test as to whether they can work as equals. He agrees on the condition that only Elspeth rides him, as both parties should risk their leaders. Just before the expedition sets off, a prophecy reveals Jik must join them and they must be back before the pass closes in winter, or Obernewtyn will fall.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keeping_Place"title="The Keeping Place">
After a kidnapping, the Misfit community at Obernewtyn are forced to join the rebellion against the totalitarian Council, using their extraordinary mental abilities. Yet Elspeth must also seek out clues left by a long-dead seer, Kasanda, necessary to her quest to destroy the Beforetime weaponmachines. When one is hidden in the past, Elspeth must travel the Dreamtrails, stalked by a terrifying beast, with Maruman, her cat, as guide and protector. Only now can she learn more of the Beforetime Misfits and their enemy, Govamen, and realise her quest is intimately linked with the Misfit's Obernewtyn - its past and its future.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eye_(novel)"title="The Eye (novel)">
The action of the novel largely begins after the (perhaps fatal) suicide attempt of the protagonist. This occurs after he suffers a beating at the hands of a cuckolded husband (the protagonist has been having an affair with a woman called Matilda with whom he has also, apparently, been rather bored). After his supposed death, and assuming everything in the world around him to be a manifestation of his 'leftover' imagination, his "eye" observes a group of Russian émigrés as he tries to ascertain their opinions of the character Smurov, around whom much uncertainty and suspicion exists.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkfall_(Carmody_novel)"title="Darkfall (Carmody novel)">
## The "Legendsong".Underlining the plot of the book is the "Legendsong" of Keltor. This legend states that long ago, the Firstmade (Unykorn) of Keltor was captured by the Chaos spirit so that Lanalor could be with his first love, Shenavyre. However Shenavyre had committed suicide when the Unykorn was imprisoned. Lanalor prophesied that an Unraveller would come to rescue the Unykorn and free Keltor from the Chaos spirit, and told the signs by which the Unraveller would be recognised. It is this prophecy that Darkfall protects, and that which the Draaka cult seeks to prove untrue.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managra"title="Managra">
The Doctor and Sarah Jane arrive in Europa, a reconstructed amalgamation of 16th, 17th and 18th century Europe a thousand years in the future. Here, all sorts of historical personalities collide: for example, Lord Byron battles Torquemada's Inquisition while Mary Shelley is writing a sequel to Frankenstein. The newcomers are then accused of murdering the Pope, and to clear their innocence, helped only by a young vampire hunter and Byron, they must face the terrifying Theatre of Transmogrification.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Professor_of_Desire"title="The Professor of Desire">
David is emotionally insecure. He grows up in the hotel his parents manage, where he is influenced by artist Herbie Bratasky, who, thanks to his ingenuity in imitating sounds of farts, defecation and toilet flushing, is credited with "mastering the whole Wagner scale of fecal Storm and Stress".When he attends a college, he rooms with a lazy, often-masturbating, homosexual, draft-dodging, fellow student, who inadvertently adds to Kepesh's insecurity. At first, he seems to accept the odd facts about his colleague, but then he's shocked when he's told by others that he deviated from so many social norms.David, often lusting after female co-students, never has a successful date. He often annoys girls by telling them they have gorgeous bodily features. Kepesh, with a Fulbright grant in his pocket, goes to London, where he meets two sexually interested Swedish girls, Birgitta and Elisabeth.Back in America, he moves to California, where he gets acquainted with Helen, a woman dreaming of opening a store. Helen has a history of promiscuity dating back to her early twenties, when she lived in Hong Kong and other places in Asia. Helen does not feel loved by Kepesh. She refuses to do household duties because Kepesh gives her only sexual attention; unable to speak of his emotions, Kepesh submits to that "fact" and ends up doing all the housework as well as teaching literature classes and writing papers on Anton Chekhov.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner_Takes_All_(novel)"title="Winner Takes All (novel)">
On finding that her mum has just won the lottery, Rose decides to visit Earth.Rose and the Doctor go to visit Mickey, who tells them that everyone is playing "Death to Mantodeans", the game that is complementary with the console. Interested, the Doctor starts playing it, while Rose goes out.The Doctor and Robert are again interrupted by Quevvils calling to find out why the game isn't being played as expected. The door explodes before they are able to get the controlled Quevvil to respond, so the Doctor has to go back to pretending to play. He and Robert are taken to another room. All of the other prisoners are brought into the room as well, and the Doctor is told that one will be killed every time he deviates from the game.Rose makes it to the center of the game, and the Quevvils get ready to teleport, but the Doctor has Mickey send a signal that disrupts it, which atomizes all the Quevvils. Rose finds that she can move and talk on her own again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_(Peel_novel)"title="Evolution (Peel novel)">
Sarah Jane wants to meet Rudyard Kipling, and so the Doctor materializes in Victorian England. However, there is trouble: Children have vanished, lights have been seen beneath the bay, with fishermen found mutilated, and graves have been robbed.The Doctor and a whaler's doctor, Arthur Conan Doyle, join to expose a plot to mess with human evolution, while Sarah Jane and Kipling face horrors of their own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venusian_Lullaby"title="Venusian Lullaby">
When the Doctor, Ian and Barbara arrive on Venus, they find an ancient civilization on the edge of extinction. Conflict brews between those who accept oblivion and those desperate for salvation. Then a space-traveling race arrives, offering to rescue the Venusians by transporting them to Earth, three billion years before man is due to evolve. But are the visitors' motivations that simple, and can the Doctor allow the sacrifice of humanity's future to save another species?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Bucephalus"title="The Crystal Bucephalus">
The Crystal Bucephalus is a future restaurant patronised by the highest of society, projected back in time to sample the food and drink of long gone eras. However, when a notorious kingpin is slain in the Bucephalus, the Doctor, Tegan and Turlough are immediately suspected and arrested. In order to prove their innocence, they must find the real perpetrators, and in the process uncover a conspiracy 5000 years in the making.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Name_Is_Memory"title="My Name Is Memory">
Daniel can remember things from his past lives going back to a life that started near Antioch in 520 A.D. In that early life he joins his brother to raid a village in North Africa. During the raid Daniel kills a young girl but is haunted by his actions. About 30 years later, a young boy realizes he can remember his previous life as Daniel and is still bothered by his actions during the raid. He lives and dies as part of an otherwise eventual life. In his third life in Constantinople Daniel can remember his previous two lives and has two chance meetings with a woman he recognizes as being the reincarnation of the girl he had killed in 541 A.D.In 773, now in Pergamum, Asia Minor his brother Joaquim brings home Joaquim's new wife. Daniel recognizes her as the same person he had killed in 541 and met briefly two lifetimes later. Her name is Sophia though she does not recall previous lives the way Daniel does. Daniel also recognizes that Joaquim was also his brother in the first lifetime that Daniel can remember. Joaquim is very cruel towards those around him, including Sophia. While he can recall past lives Joaquim does not have the ability to recognize other "old souls" and so is not aware Daniel that he knew Daniel before nor who Sophia was in an earlier life. Daniel helps Sophia escape from Joaquim's mistreatment and as a result is murdered by Joaquim.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giant_Under_the_Snow"title="The Giant Under the Snow">
On a school field trip, Jonquil (Jonk) Winters, an independent-minded teenage girl, is attacked by a large black dog whilst exploring the nearby woods where she has found a mysterious and rather old buckle. She is rescued from the dog by a woman named Elizabeth Goodenough, who possesses magical powers. After she goes home, Jonk is stalked by the dog and its curious stone-faced master. Jonk's friend Bill Smith has read of a local legend that describes how a giant Green Man once strode across the countryside from Wiltshire to East Anglia. Believing the legend is the key to understanding Jonk's experience in the woods, Jonk, Bill and their rather sceptical friend Arthur (Arf) Minnett set out to solve the riddle of the Green Man.It soon becomes apparent that the stone-faced man is an ancient warlord who needs the golden buckle to regain his malevolent power. The buckle is the key to victory and the trio soon find themselves under attack from the minions of the warlord, the terrifying "leather men", and are relentlessly followed by the black dog. However, cleverly guided by Elizabeth and aided by the gift of flight, Jonk and her friends determine to defeat the warlord and his sinister allies at any cost.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Son"title="Strange Son">
Portia Iversen's second son Dov, born in 1992, seemed normal as a baby. By the age of two, he reacted atypically to noises and also made odd noises himself. By the time he was three years old, he was unable to speak and was fascinated by objects. This led to a diagnosis of autism. At the age of eight, Dov was still uncommunicative.Portia heard about an autistic boy named Tito that lived in Bangalore, India with his mother, Soma Mukhopadhyay. Soma had taught her son how to communicate, write poetry, and explain how the poetry made him feel.This story inspired Portia to want to help her own son in the same manner. She invited Soma and Tito to California for a month in the hope that Soma could help her son become communicative. Soma's methods were unusual but she managed to help Dov start communicating with his parents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ship_of_Ishtar"title="The Ship of Ishtar">
The archaeologist hero, Kenton, receives a mysterious ancient Babylonian artifact, which he discovers contains an incredibly detailed model of a ship. A dizzy spell casts Kenton onto the deck of the ship, which becomes a full-sized vessel sailing an eternal sea. At one end is Sharane the assistant priestess of Ishtar and her female minions, and at the other is Klaneth the assistant priest of Nergal and his male minions, representatives of two opposed deities. None of them can cross an invisible barrier at the midline of the ship, but Kenton can. His arrival destabilizes a situation that had been frozen for 6,000 years, and fantastic adventures ensue.The novel is not only a rousing fantasy adventure story, but a philosophical exploration of the relationship between material reality and the abstract concepts through which humans struggle to understand it. The reason the ship has been frozen in time is that Zarpanit the head priestess of Ishtar and Alusar the head priest of Nergal fell in love, and were in the midst of making love when their deities possessed them. This placed the hostile deities in an untenable position, especially as they represented cosmic forces that must be kept separate. The result was an imbalance between stability and instability in the universe, freezing the ship in time and rendering unstable its connection to the reality inhabited by the reader. In a study of fantasy and science fiction literature, William Sims Bainbridge (1986: 136) explained:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Terceiro_Travesseiro"title="O Terceiro Travesseiro">
"O Terceiro Travesseiro" covers the true story of a love triangle formed by three youths - two boys and a girl. Marcus is a teenager who finds himself hopelessly in love with Mr Renato, who soon ends up delivering also the passion, which is disturbed by the appearance of Beatrice in their lives (and relationship). The relationship intensifies and the three decide to share the same apartment, the same bed and even love. However, in the first day of this new life, Renato dies in a car accident and leaves Marcus in a fight like no other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vicar_of_Bullhampton"title="The Vicar of Bullhampton">
"The Vicar of Bullhampton" is set in a small town in Wiltshire. It develops three subplots, all connected with Frank Fenwick, the eponymous vicar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matched_(book)"title="Matched (book)">
Seventeen-year-old Cassia Reyes lives in a futuristic, seemingly utopian world in which the citizens' lives are strictly controlled by the government called "The Society." At the age of seventeen, citizens undergo the process of being "matched" or becoming paired up with another boy/girl selected by the sorters (authorities). At the beginning of the novel, Cassia is led to the Match Banquet by her parents. She becomes overjoyed when she realizes that her Match is her best friend, Xander Carrow. Cassia is excited about their future together. When Cassia decides to view the information about Xander, the screen glitches and displays another face: that of Ky Markham, another young man who lives in her borough. Later that day, an official visits Cassia to clarify that Xander is her correct match. The official reveals that Ky is an aberration: a semi-outcast member of society who usually acquires this identity through committing an "Infraction." She tells Cassia that Ky's father committed a serious Infraction, and although Ky was allowed to be adopted by his aunt and uncle at a young age, he had to retain his identity as an aberration and therefore cannot be matched with anyone. Cassia only tells her beloved grandfather, a man nearing his 80th birthday. Her grandfather encourages her to find the words within her and gives her a forbidden piece of paper.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delirium_(Oliver_novel)"title="Delirium (Oliver novel)">
The story is set in Portland, Maine, in the year 2091. Civilization is concentrated in the cities that escaped the severe bombings decades earlier. Travel between these cities is highly restricted. Electric fences separate the city from the Wilds, unregulated territory that was presumably destroyed by bombs.The totalitarian government teaches that love is a disease, "Amor deliria Nervosa", commonly referred to as "the deliria." A surgical cure for deliria has been developed and is mandatory for citizens of at least 18 years old. Lena, an orphan, lives with her aunt, uncle, and two cousins. Lena has a sister, who is "cured" of deliria and married.Lena's best friend, Hana, is prettier, more popular, and richer than Lena. Lena is obedient, stays home after curfew, and listens to music that is approved by the DFA. Conversely, Hana is rebellious, goes to underground parties after curfew, and listens to music that is banned by the DFA.However, only months before her scheduled procedure, Lena falls in love with an Invalid (a person who has not taken the Cure and lives in the Wilds), Alex. He was born in the Wilds outside the city and pretends to be cured to live undetected in the city and to partake in the resistance. He offers Lena the means of escape from the procedure that will destroy her ability to love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossed_(novel)"title="Crossed (novel)">
The chapters alternate between the perspectives of Ky and Cassia. The outer provinces are filled with male "aberrations," including Ky and his new friend Vick who are moved around from village to village to make them appear inhabited to an unnamed enemy. Cassia, now at a work camp in Tana province, plans to find Ky. She is surprised by a visit from Xander who, as her match, was able to arrange a meeting with Cassia. At Cassia's request, they go to a small museum where Cassia trades Ky's compass with an archivist in order to obtain information that could help her find Ky. Meanwhile, Ky and the other decoys are moved to Ky's home village where a new shipment of decoys arrives filled with young teenage boys. Cassia's message from the archivist tells of "the rising," a rebellion against the Society, led by "the pilot." In the morning, Cassia sneaks onto an airship taking some of the girls, including her friend Indie, to the outer provinces. During the Enemy attack that night, Ky, Vick, and Eli, one of the new villagers, escape and head toward the canyon, called the Carving. Cassia and Indie arrive at the outer provinces and meet a boy who claimed to see Ky, Vick, and Eli escape. That night, they escape to the carving together and reach it before dawn where the boy parts ways with the girls. Meanwhile, Ky, Vick, and Eli find a recently abandoned farmers township where they find a map of the canyon. They continue and an airship drops large boulders to release toxins into the river, causing Vick to be killed on impact. Afterwards, Cassia and Ky find each other and reunite. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glamour_Chase"title="The Glamour Chase">
An Archaeological dig in 1936 unearths relics of another time... and, as The Doctor, Amy and Rory realise, another place. Another planet. But if Enola Porter, noted adventuress, has really found evidence of an alien civilisation, how come she isn't famous? Why has Rory never heard of her? Added to that, since Amy's been traveling with him for a while now, why does she now think The Doctor is from Mars? As the ancient spaceship re-activates, the Doctor discovers that nothing and no-one can be trusted. The things that seem most real could actually be literal fabrications - and very deadly indeed. Who can the Doctor believe when no one is what they seem? And how can he defeat an enemy who can bend matter itself at its will? For the Doctor, Amy and Rory - and all of humanity - the buried secrets of the past are very much a threat to the present.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinder_(novel)"title="Cinder (novel)">
Set in the futuristic city of New Beijing, when the countries of the world have re-organized to form various new empires and alliances and the Moon has been colonized, Asia is now an emperor-ruled country known as the Eastern Commonwealth. Letumosis, a fatal disease started by the Lunars and nicknamed the "Blue Fever", or "The Plague", is raging throughout the world and a cure is unknown. Cinder is under the guardianship of her cruel adopted mother, Linh Adri, along with her two stepsisters, Linh Pearl and Linh Peony, the latter of which treats her as a close friend. As a cyborg, Cinder is discriminated against and often looked down upon by others, despite building up a reputation as the best mechanic in New Beijing.While working as a mechanic at the marketplace, she meets the son of the Emperor, Prince Kai, who asks her to fix Nainsi, his personal android. Cyborgs are treated as second class citizens, so Cinder hides her identity from Kai. Soon, Peony falls sick with letumosis after accompanying Cinder to a junkyard to collect spare parts for a repair. In anger (Cinder's adopted father had died of letumosis as well), Linh Adri "volunteers" Cinder for plague research, which no one survives from. When Cinder is injected with the strain of letumosis, it is discovered that she is immune to the disease. Dr. Erland, the head researcher, starts to do research on Cinder's immunity, which leads to research on Cinder's unique physiology, her cyborg implants, and eventually to Cinder's life prior to becoming a cyborg at the age of eleven, which Cinder has no memory of.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_I_Go_to_Sleep"title="Before I Go to Sleep">
The novel is a psychological thriller about a woman suffering from anterograde amnesia. She wakes up every day with no knowledge of who she is and the novel follows her as she tries to reconstruct her memories from a journal she has been keeping. She learns that she has been seeing a doctor who is helping her to recover her memory, that her name is Christine Lucas, that she is 47 years old and married and has a son. As her journal grows it casts doubts on the truth behind this knowledge as she determines to discover who she really is.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Tooth"title="The Iron Tooth">
In the continent of Goodabaiya, the kingdom of Dashter prospers under the rule of King Dashtum. Dashtum is famous for his scrimmage with the minotaur, Trak. Due to a dreaded disease, Dashtum bids farewell to this world and is succeeded by his wicked son, Darum.Princess Nova, King Darum’s first child, is beautiful but proud. During a ball, Princess Nova insults Emperor Faerum, ruler of the kingdom of Fallix. Faerum seethes with anger and proclaims that he will have his revenge. Emperor Faerum is a powerful wizard, who in addition to the kingdom of Fallix has dominion over the vampires and medusas. Faerum possesses a large Bak army headed by General Bathaki. Along with six foreign wizards, Faerum forges an alliance, “The Trust of Seven.”The Trust of Seven seeks to destroy the kingdom of Dashter and manages to convince the Custodian of First Light, an immortal having the power to bring light to the continent of Goodabaiya, to curse Dashter. The Custodian of First Light curses the kingdom of Greatix, hangs King Darum, and imprisons Princess Nova in a Keep. From that moment, light did not dare enter the kingdom of Dashter.In the town of Ballos in Greatix, three brothers: Pancrix, Denzix, and Princix live with their mother, Ushix. The father had abandoned them when Princix was still a baby and had never returned. The three brothers decide to seek their fortune and set out through the Mysterious Land of Zhakse. After managing to subdue a panzeox and a giant, Pancrix and Denzix return home with rubies, sapphires and golden pomegranates. Princix continues his journey. He gets two magical sticks, an armour plate and helmet, a mace and a glove.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggie_Goes_on_a_Diet"title="Maggie Goes on a Diet">
The book is about Maggie Magee, a 14-year-old girl who goes from being obese to thin. At the beginning of the book Maggie is bullied for being obese and she eats much bread and cheese in order to feel good. As time goes on she learns that if she is fat she will be bullied and decides to take action by losing weight. After eating healthier food such as fruit and oatmeal, and exercising more, she loses weight, her bullies become friends and she becomes very popular. She starts playing sports and at the end of the book she becomes a star soccer player.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Renegade"title="Conan the Renegade">
The action takes place in Koth and the small neighboring realm of Khoraja. Conan joins Captain Hundulph's Free Company of mercenaries in the city of Tantusium, who is in the service of Prince Ivor in the latter's revolt against King Strabonus of Koth. Ivor is also aided by the amazon band of the warrior woman Drusandra and the sorcerer Agohoth. Conan proves an effective leader early on, and later, when taken captive, must face down a horror in a dungeon before the revolt builds to its climax.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Raider"title="Conan the Raider">
In the deserts of Shem, Conan tracks a thief who stole from him a jewel known as the Star of Khorala. He finds the man, but his gem is missing. Eventually, Conan is saved from death by dehydration during an encounter with the caravan of Otsgar the Vanir, into which he is welcomed due to his previous acquaintance with Isaiab, a Shemite he had known in Arenjun. Otsgar's party turns out to be a band of tomb raiders, though their expedition proves disappointing, even with Conan's aid. Ostgar gains little, while death traps and tomb guardians with the heads of crocodiles combine to dispatch everyone except Conan, Otsgar, Isaiab, and two survivors; the Stygian woman, Zafriti, and a Shemitish rebel, Asrafel.The thieves eventually regroup in Abaddrah, Isaib's hometown, a city-state on the River Styx, bordering Stygia. The king, Ebnezub, is having a great tomb constructed for himself on the advice an exiled prophet named Horaspes. Ebnezub is likely to need it soon, as his wife, Nitokar, has been poisoning him. The thieves hope to plunder Eznezub's tomb and the ancient catacombs beneath Abaddrah. Conan investigates the catacombs between encounters with Zafriti and Princess Afrit. Soon, Conan wanders into a gladiatorial arena where he must fight against a shaman armed with snakes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Unconquered"title="Conan the Unconquered">
An evil sorcerer Jhandar wishes to raise an army of undead slaves, and his meddling with chaos brings him into conflict with Conan, who must battle his deadly ninja henchmen who can kill with a touch, and retrieve a weapon from a dent in reality created by the sorcerer's earlier botched experiments. A whirlwind of adventure ensures.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Free_Lance"title="Conan the Free Lance">
The evil wizard Dimma the Mist Mage suffers from a curse that has rendered his body insubstantial. As a mystical "Seed" held by the Tree Folk might restore him, he directs his enslaved selkies to steal it for him. A race of lizard people also desires the Seed, as its power of fertility is key to enabling them to establish a new home. Meanwhile, the young Conan, en route to Shadizar, had fallen in with the Tree Folk after rescuing their medicine woman, Cheen. He helps them fend off the selkies' attack, but not before one of them makes off with the Seed and takes Cheen's brother Hok hostage. In the ensuing many-sided contest for the Seed, Conan aids the Tree Folk in recovering it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_and_the_Treasure_of_Python"title="Conan and the Treasure of Python">
In Asgalun, Conan is hired to lead a scouting party into Kush by a man whose brother has vanished while in search of a legendary treasure. Conan agrees with the proposal, though their project is almost derailed from the beginning in an attack by corsairs. In Kush, the expedition is joined by Goma, a mysterious native who serves as their guide. Various perils in their quest for the fabled treasure ensue, including a journey across an arid desert. Finally, Conan's party discover a secret kingdom and are imprisoned within the dungeon of an evil warlord. Soon, their guide reveals himself as the kingdom's rightful monarch. Goma explains how he was overthrown by a tyrant with the aid of a witch doctor. A battle must be won and a fearsome lake monster faced before all can be resolved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_and_the_Amazon"title="Conan and the Amazon">
Fresh from a failed rebellion in Brythunia, in which he served as a mercenary on the opposing side, Conan joins forces with a tribe of native warriors led by Achilea (former queen of the Amazons). Achilea is guiding a pair of mysterious twins in their search the ancient city of Jangar. The warriors travel across Zamora, Koth, and the Stygian Desert before crossing a range of southeastern mountains.Conan's allies eventually reach the city, cursed by the gods after an ancient battle. Jangar is still in good condition despite its supposed desertion and was, in fact, never abandoned. The citizens, who loathe the sun, live within a subterranean city beneath the ruins of their old one.Caught between the evil agenda of his demonic employers and the Jangarians, Conan finds himself trapped in his battle with a giant crocodile as the city approaches its eventual destruction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keane_of_Kalgoorlie"title="Keane of Kalgoorlie">
Sydney clerk Frank Keane is in love with Tess Moreton, who is desired by Gregory Harris. Keane farewells Tess at Circular Quay in order to go west to seek his fortune. Harris arranges with Harold Rose to send a telegram to Tess saying that Keane has married a Kalgoorlie barmaid. Tess believes this and marries Harris.Ten years later, Keane and Tess meet again. Keane has become rich and wants to enter his horse in the Sydney Cup. He meets Harold Rose, who confesses the truth about falsifying the telegram, then shoots himself. Harris robs Rose's dead body and is spotted by a dosser, who blackmails him.Tess overhears Harris and the blackmailer discussing a plan to abduct Keane's horse and prevent it from winning the race. With Tess' help, Keane ensures his horse wins the race. However, Harris then accuses him of the murder of Rose. However at a trial, a stolen watch proves his innocence, and Harris is arrested while Keane is freed. Harris kills himself and Keane and Tess get married.Frank Keane is in love with Tess Morton but they have no money, so he decides to leave his home in Sydney and seek his fortune in the Kalgoorlie goldfields. Two years later he and his friends, including Harold Ross, strike it rich. But then Frank receives a letter informing him that Tess has married the villainous Gregory Harris.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longfeng_Baochai_Yuan"title="Longfeng Baochai Yuan">
Duàn Guīzhāng () and Shǐ Yìrú () had arranged for their respective children to be married if they were of opposite sexes. A pair of ornamental hairpins, the Dragon and Phoenix Precious Hairpins (), were kept by both sides as a token of this agreement. The Duan family kept the Dragon Hairpin while the Shi family kept the Phoenix Hairpin. Shi Yiru committed suicide to prevent himself from being a burden to his rescuers when he was held hostage by the ruthless warlord An Lushan; Duan Guizhang died in the Battle of Suiyang. Duan Guizhang's wife, Dòu Xiànniáng (), survived the battle but died of illness not long later. Duan Guizhang and Dou Xianniang's son, Duàn Kèyè (), was raised by Xià Língshuāng (). Shi Yiru's daughter, Shi Ruomei (), was renamed "Hongxian" () and adopted by Xue Song, a general under An Lushan. Xue Song later surrenders to the Tang government and becomes the military governor of Luzhou.When Duan Keye turns 16, Xia Lingshuang relates his parents' story to him, passes him the Dragon Hairpin, and tells him to find his missing fiancée and marry her. At the same time, Xue Song betroths Hongxian to the eldest son of Tian Chengsi, the treacherous military governor of Weibo, who is trying to intimidate Xue Song into helping him. When Tian Chengsi sends a convoy of betrothal gifts to the Xue family, Duan Keye and the outlaws on Golden Rooster Ridge ambush the convoy and rob the gifts. Out of curiosity, Duan Keye breaks into Xue Song's residence and encounters Hongxian. A fight breaks out and they develop a strong misunderstanding since Hongxian is unaware of her true parentage. Hongxian's adoptive mother reveals the truth to her daughter later. To repay her adoptive parents' kindness, Hongxian breaks into Tian Chengsi's house and steals a box from his bedside. Unknown to her, Duan Keye also infiltrates Tian Chengsi's residence that night and his misunderstanding with Hongxian deepens when he mistakenly thinks she is helping his enemy. After Tian Chengsi withdraws his forces from Luzhou, Hongxian leaves her adoptive parents and assumes her true identity as Shi Ruomei. Shi Ruomei encounters her childhood friend, Nie Yinniang (), and Moǔ Shìjié (), the young master of Fusang Island. The three of them travel to Golden Rooster Ridge to find Duan Keye.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_(Safire_novel)"title="Freedom (Safire novel)">
"Freedom" blends the narrative recounting of actual historical events with fictional events invented by the author.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explorers_of_the_New_Century"title="Explorers of the New Century">
Two expeditions set out to be the first to reach "the Agreed Furthest Point", by two different routes. As they encounter rigorous conditions and difficulties along the way, things begin to unravel. In quintessential Magnus Mills fashion, nothing is as it first seems, and there are lessons to be learned — as well as surprises to anticipate...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Player_One"title="Ready Player One">
## Setting.In the 2040s, the world has been gripped by an energy crisis from the depletion of fossil fuels and the consequences of pollution, global warming and overpopulation, causing widespread social problems, poverty, and economic stagnation. To escape the decline their world is facing, people turn to the OASIS, a virtual reality simulator accessible by players using visors and haptic technology such as gloves. It functions both as an MMORPG and as a virtual world, with its currency being the most stable in the real world. It was created by James Donovan Halliday, founder of Gregarious Simulation Systems (formerly Gregarious Games), who made a posthumous video of his will stating to the public that he had left an Easter egg inside the OASIS, and the first person to find it would inherit his entire fortune, ownership of his corporation as well as complete control of the OASIS itself, which is worth trillions. The story follows the adventures of Wade Watts, starting about five years after the announcement, when he discovers one of the three keys which unlock three successive gates leading to the treasure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_Har_Shaam_Niraali_Hogi"title="Ab Har Shaam Niraali Hogi">
This poetry work depicts the colors and shadows of an emotional young heart who sees the shades of romance and sorrow. While he feels the sentiments of his love, he finds himself in the valley of heavenly pleasure. He finds everything on the cards and dreams of a beautiful life in the arms of his love. But soon the string of love gets the vibrations and it breaks down. The shock of separation tries to kill him but anyhow he survives and looks forward for a ray of hope.In 47 poems, Rasik tries to relate the life cycle of thousands of lovers who lose their love on the path of time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Familiars_(novel_series)"title="The Familiars (novel series)">
## "The Familiars" (2010).Aldwyn is an ordinary alley cat, who accidentally enters a shop while attempting to escape from a bounty hunter named Grimslade. He discovers that it is a shop full of magical animals, who are all prepared to become a wizard's familiar - that is to say, a magical animal companion. Just then, a young wizard-in-training, Jack, enters the shop with his mentor, the powerful wizard Kalstaff, to choose a familiar. Aldwyn was chosen, even though he could not be a true familiar as he was not magical (Jack did not know that of course). They travelled back to Stone Runlet, Kalstaff's dwelling, together, and Aldwyn met the other two wizards-in-training, Dalton and Marianne, as well as their respective familiars, Skylar and Gilbert.Just when Aldwyn had settled down and was finally content, with an omen of three shooting stars, portending that three young wizards from Stone Runlet would save the world, things took a dark turn. That night, Queen Loranella, an old ally of Kalstaff as well as sovereign of the kingdom appeared. She turned on her old friend Kalstaff, killing him, then kidnapped Jack, Marianne and Dalton, leaving the three familiars behind.Aldwyn, Skylar and Gilbert, determined to save their loyals (the human companion of a familiar), go on a quest to free them. They experience many trials on their quest, vanquish a witch, defeat a mountain troll, pay a visit to Gilbert's homeland, and encounter the great Mountain Alchemist, who, along with Queen Loranella and Kalstaff, were the first 'prophesied three' 60 years ago. Finally, just before the third sunset when the protection spells around their three loyals fade, which will allow Queen Loranella to finally kill them, the three familiars arrive. Upon arrival, they realize that their real enemy is the Queen Loranella's familiar, a hare named Paksahara, who had imprisoned the real queen, and shifted into her likeliness. They also become aware that murdering Kalstaff and kidnapping their loyals was also really done by Paksahara under the guise of Queen Loranella. As the three familiars make desperate endeavors to rescue their loyals, Aldwyn discovers that he is in fact magical and possesses the power of telekinesis. With his newfound power, Aldwyn and his fellow familiars defeat Paksahara, who ultimately escapes. Aldwyn, Skylar and Gilbert free their loyals, and discover that the three real wizards that the shooting stars foretold are Aldwyn, Skylar and Gilbert, the three animal wizards.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Space_Viking"title="The Last Space Viking">
"The Last Space Viking" takes place a hundred years after Lucas Trask founded the League of Civilized Worlds. Many changes have occurred in the Old Federation and King Trask's plans for a new galaxy order are brought to a sudden halt when a new power emerges from the ashes of the Old Federation. Space Vikings have been raiding and terrorizing the worlds of the Old Federation for hundreds of years. Great fortunes have been made and hundreds of planets conquered and despoiled. The Sword-Worlds have gone into their own decline just as the League of Civilized Worlds is faced with its greatest defeat. Soon, the first real threat to Space Viking domination must be overcome and brought to heel. Captain David Morland of Joyeuse emerges at a time when the Old Federation is changing for the worse. All Morland wants is his own Space Viking base world to use as a place for organizing raids and trading parties into the thousands of worlds of the long-dead Federation. Generations of Space Viking marauders have taken their toll and plunder-worthy planets have declined as more and more of the Old Federation worlds have slipped into barbarism. But first, Morland has to find the right world and conquer it before he is discovered by a new power determined to end the Space Viking menace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magnificent_Nose_and_Other_Marvels"title="The Magnificent Nose and Other Marvels">
The book is divided into six parts. Each of the first five parts tells the story of a character, and the final part features all of the main characters together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Can't_See_'Round_Corners_(novel)"title="You Can't See 'Round Corners (novel)">
Frankie McCoy, a bookie from Paddington, Sydney, is drafted into the Australian Army during World War II. He ends up deserting and going on the run. His girlfriend Margie breaks up with him so he seeks solace in the arms of a more sexually experienced woman, Myra. He incurs gambling debts and robs a store, accidentally killing Myra. As the military police close in he is killed by a car.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_Is_Not_a_Dinner_Party_(novel)"title="Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party (novel)">
"Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party" begins in 1972, 6 years into the Cultural Revolution in China. Ling Chang is a nine-year-old girl whose parents are doctors which are part of the upper class society in China. When Ling's father, Dr. Chang, had free time, he would teach Ling English and they would listen to American radio shows such as Voice of America. Dr. Chang's colleague from the United States, Dr. Smith, kept close contact with Dr. Chang in the time before the Cultural Revolution via mail.A political officer, Comrade Li, moves into part of the Chang's apartment room and conducts his operations from there. With the presence of Comrade Li next door, the Changs were forced to speak about controversial topics in hushed voices and listen to the American radio underneath blankets as well as displaying a revolutionary mindset through putting up pictures of Chairman Mao Zedong and assisting Comrade Li. Shortly after the officer moved in, the father of the Chang's neighbor family is taken away and branded as an antirevolutionary. After this, Ling was fearful her father would be taken as well. Shortly thereafter, the neighbor's mother was taken away as well and their son, Niu, was forced to join the Red Guards.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Girls"title="Office Girls">
Shen Xing Ren (Ko Chia-yen) is a staff member in the Operations Department of Jing Shi Department Store. At age 25, she has worked there for four years. She is tasked with training and mentoring Qin Zi Qi (Roy Chiu), 28, a new entry-level member of the Sales Department. Unbeknownst to her and almost everyone else there, Zi Qi is the son of Qin Mu Bai (Shen Meng Sheng/沈孟生), the Chairman of Jing Shi Department Store. Zi Qi's father has challenged him to a test to prove he deserves to lead Jing Shi Department Store - Zi Qi will have to live on a lowly entry-level salary for one year, without the luxuries he is used to, and cannot reveal his true identity.Xing Ren and Zi Qi clash immediately - she is frugal and hardworking, saving every cent to buy a house in Taipei for her and her mother. He is careless and used to living large and spending big. She is extremely loyal to Jing Shi Department Store and is content with her job. He thinks the department store needs to clean house and get rid of corrupt senior management who are stuck in inefficient ways.To improve sales, Xing Ren suggests inviting her idol Yu Cheng Feng (James Wen), a handsome and internationally-renown designer, to set up a counter in their store. Despite Yu Cheng Feng having publicly stated that his designs would never be sold in department stores, Xing Ren (with Zi Qi tagging along) sets out to get him to accept their proposal. After a lot of hard work on Xing Ren's part, a business relationship is created between Yu and the department store.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Stagnation"title="The Great Stagnation">
The main thesis is that economic growth has slowed in the United States and in other advanced economies, as a result of falling rates of innovation. In Chapter 1, Cowen describes the three major forms of "low-hanging fruit": the ease of cultivating free and unused land, rapid invention from 1880 to 1940 which capitalized on the scientific breakthroughs of the 18th and 19th centuries and the large returns from sending intelligent but uneducated children to school and university. There are potentially two further minor forms: cheap fossil fuels and the strength of the American constitution. Cowen concludes, "You could say, 'The modern United States was built at five forms of low-hanging fruit, and at most only two of those are still with us.' Fair enough." While they produced extremely large returns, future advances will be much more incremental. He offers anecdotal and statistical illustrations for this slowdown. First, he compares the changes witnessed by his grandmother with those of his own generation. Then, he cites median income statistics: the rate of growth drastically slowed from 1973 onwards. He further argues that the failure to diagnose the trend has led to a degradation in political discourse since left and right leaning actors blame the policies of "the other side" and "what I like to call the 'honest middle' cannot be heard above the din."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Russian_State_from_Gostomysl_to_Timashev"title="History of the Russian State from Gostomysl to Timashev">
According to William Harkins, "The History of the Russian State" should be seen "as an important work by an author who has a very substantial claim to be regarded as Russia's leading humorous poet, and not as a serious or entirely consistent statement of definite ideological position." It begins with a short extract from Nestor's Chronicle (page 8): "Our land is vast and abundant, one thing it lacks is order." The phrase, forming half of Verse 1 ("Poslushaite rebyata/Tchto vam rasskazhet ded/Zemlya nasha bogata/Poryadka v nei lish net". - Now take a listen children/What grand-dad's have to say/Our land is rich. The Order / Is one thing that it lacks) and is repeated many times later, in a manner of a refrain.In verses 2-6 Russia's forefathers (Gostomysl, actually, never mentioned), having noticed the fact (as expressed by Nestor) make a decision to bring the Varangians in, to face the task of bringing order to the rich lands of Russia. Verses 7-8 see three brothers, after a short consideration arrive at the scene. The accounts of Ryurik and then Igor, Oleg, Olga and Svaytoslav's deeds (verses 9-14) are marked by the "macaronic" (as W.Hoskins describes it) use of the German language: "Nu, dumayut, komanda/Zdes nogu slomit tchort/Es ist je eine Shande/Wir mussen wieder fort". - Oh dear, what a fix, they think, here devil will break his leg/It is a shame, and we gotta get out of here! (Ryurik and his team's first impression of the place).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Firm_a_Foundation_(novel)"title="How Firm a Foundation (novel)">
Empress Sharleyen travels to Zebediah and then Corisande to stand over the trials of those accused of treason after the conspiracies of the last novel. Her firmness, fairness and judicious exercise of mercy continue to win over the hearts and minds of the newest subjects of the Empire of Charis, especially when she is undeterred after an attempted assassination that is thwarted by Merlin.For his part, Merlin has been experimenting with steam technology, and gets no response from the orbital platforms. In Charis, technological developments are still developing water power, using deep reservoirs to control the flow of water, and also by replacing water wheels with turbines. On the artillery front, the Charisians have developed angle guns that allow them to shoot over walls, and are working on more breech-loading devices. Merlin takes these advances a little further and has Owl construct him a pair of revolvers.Father Paityr Wylsynn has some doubts about all these developments until he is inducted into the secrets of the Brethren of Saint Zherneau. After this, he reveals to the inner circle that his family was trusted with a message from the archangels. The message implies that the archangels themselves are sleeping under the temple, and will return after 1000 years (20 years in the future at this time). Merlin is uncertain whether it is the actual archangels, or perhaps PICA versions of them. As a precaution, he begins looking at ways he can continue his own awareness in case his own PICA form is lost and finally decides to make an electronic copy of his consciousness and a VR unit to house it in.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolutely_American"title="Absolutely American">
The book's genesis was a piece Lipsky wrote for "Rolling Stone"—the longest article published in that magazine since Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas". The book follows cadets in one West Point company, G-4, from their arrival to graduation. As "Newsweek" noted, composition of the book required "14,000 pages of interview transcripts, 60 notebooks and four pairs of boots." As "The New York Times" wrote, Lipsky was not initially well disposed toward the military: "He was, like most young people, entirely cut off from military life. The Army was the one profession his father absolutely refused to let him consider."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Manhã_do_Mundo"title="A Manhã do Mundo">
"09/11 2001. And if anyone who has seen everything could, suddenly, wake up in time to prevent the tragedy?". This is a presupposition which, on the cover, this novel presents.At the core, this is a story of five persons, Thea, Mark Millard, Alice and Solomon, who jumped from the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. It is also the story of Ayda, who calls them cowards, and of her husband. Now "imagine that on September 13, the Universe resets the day 11 for some of them."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Animals"title="The Lives of Animals">
## "The Lives of Animals".Elizabeth Costello is invited to Appleton College's annual literary seminar as a guest lecturer, much as Coetzee was invited to Princeton. Despite her stature as a celebrated novelist (much like Coetzee), she opts not to give lectures on literature or writing, but on animal cruelty. Much like Coetzee, Costello is a vegetarian and abhors industries that experiment on and slaughter animals.The story is framed by a narrative involving Costello and her son, John Bernard, who happens to be a junior professor at Appleton. Costello's relationship with Bernard is strained, and her relationship with John’s wife, Norma, even more so. Bernard was not instrumental in bringing his mother to campus. In fact, the university's leaders were unaware of Bernard's relationship with Costello when they issued the invitation. Bernard’s fears that his mother’s presence and opinions will be polarizing and controversial are entirely prophetic. In his private thoughts, he more than once wishes she had not accepted Appleton’s invitation. Costello gives two lectures, then contributes to a debate with Appleton philosophy professor Thomas O’Hearne.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Night_Knows"title="What the Night Knows">
The novel begins with John Calvino investigating the murder of a family, committed by Billy Lucas. Billy is in a mental institution and being monitored for being schizophrenic. He openly admits to having killed his family and can describe to John in graphic detail how he murdered them. John goes to visit Billy; Billy indicates that the reason he killed them was because of “Ruin”. As John is leaving, Billy's countenance changes and he begins saying “help me”.John begins to investigate the murders, and finds that there are a number of similarities between the murders committed by Billy, and murders committed by Alton Turner Blackwood some 20 years previously. Alton Blackwood killed John's entire family. The two families were murdered in almost exactly the same way.John's family (his wife Nicolette, and his children Zach, Naomi, and Minette), begin to be haunted by dreams, sounds in the house, and ghostly phone calls. John receives a call from Billy taunting him and saying things that only John or Alton Blackwood would know concerning John's sister. John follows up on Billy to find out he does not have a phone in his cell and could not possibly have made the phone call.John begins to work on the theory that it was not Billy Lucas that killed his family, but rather Alton Blackwood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reamde"title="Reamde">
Zula Forthrast, an adopted Eritrean, is given a job by her billionaire uncle, Richard "Dodge" Forthrast, at his company, Corporation 9592, which runs an MMORPG called "T'Rain." Zula and her boyfriend, Peter, visit Richard's cat-skiing resort. Desperate for money, Peter sells a database of stolen credit card numbers to a shady contact, who is in fact working for the Russian mob. The transaction inadvertently results in a T'Rain-based ransomware virus infecting the contact's laptop and rendering the only copy of the database useless. Ivanov, a senior gangster behind the deal, tracks Peter down and coerces him and Zula to help him find the virus creators in Xiamen, China.Upon arriving in China, Peter, Zula, and Sokolov (a former Spetsnaz security consultant hired by Ivanov), locate the virus creators’ apartment. The Russian team prepares to raid the apartment, only to be misdirected by Zula into a random apartment, which coincidentally happens to house Islamic terrorists preparing to bomb an international trade conference. In the subsequent gun battle, Ivanov kills Peter, and Abdallah Jones, the head of the Islamist cell, kills Ivanov. The hackers flee the building just before a fire causes the stored explosives to detonate, collapsing the building. Jones flees with Zula as his hostage. Olivia Halifax-Lin, an MI6 agent posted to Xiamen to manage surveillance on Jones, meets Sokolov during his escape from the building, and the two become romantically involved while attempting to flee China. Sokolov believes that Zula is the only blameless person in this ordeal and he is honor-bound to rescue her from Jones.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Much,_Too_Late"title="Too Much, Too Late">
Reunited more than a decade after their brief flirtation with fame in the early 1990s, the middle-aged members of the Ohio-based Jane Ashers suddenly find themselves hitting the big time, with a new record deal, a hit single, fame, fans, and a tour, that transforms their dream into a nightmare of colliding egos, family pressures, and too much success too late.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_for_Effort"title="E for Effort">
Taking place at some time in the near future (relative to when it was written), the story is briefly framed as a manuscript written by a civilian and delivered to the military under circumstances of great tension.The manuscript is a long letter to "Joe", an otherwise unknown character, by Ed Lefko, one of the two lead characters. He describes seeing a silent but color movie aimed at Mexican-Americans in a run-down theater in Detroit. The movie depicts Cortés's conquest of Mexico with remarkably realistic sets and acting and a huge cast. The projectionist, a World War II veteran named Miguel "Mike" Laviada, tells Ed that he made the movie using a time viewer he invented, which he demonstrates. However, Mike has not been able to raise the capital needed to shoot the picture on high-quality film, add sound and other improvements, and get it distributed and advertised. He and Ed become partners, and at Ed's suggestion, they raise money by using the machine to blackmail wealthy people.They spend a year making most of a new film out of time-viewed footage of Alexander the Great. They take it to Hollywood, where the high quality of the film easily convinces a producer and his associates to finish it, including using actors for scenes that appear in Alexander's biographies but did not really happen, and market it. The film is a great success with critics and viewers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rough_Passage"title="A Rough Passage">
Laurie Larand (Hayford Hobbs) returns from the war and finds himself jilted and broke. He goes to work for a horse trainer who he discovers to be in league with a book maker to fleece the horse owners.He also comes across a Shakesperean actor, Poverty Point (Arthur Albert), who becomes his friend, and the beautiful Doiya (Stella Southern), who he falls in love with.In the finale, Larland exposes the villains and is united with Doris.Laurie Larand, a returned soldier, discovers that the barmaid he has entrusted with his money is missing. After a bad day at the races he has no money. He goes to live in the Domain but is helped by a trainer and an actor friend to get back on his feet. He discovers the trainer is in cahoots with bookmakers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Reich_(novel)"title="The Third Reich (novel)">
The novel concerns Udo Berger, a German wargame champion, who returns with his girlfriend Ingeborg to the small town on the Costa Brava where he spent the summers of his childhood. When one of his friends disappears Udo invites a mysterious local to play a game of "Rise and Decline of the Third Reich", a classic wargame published by Avalon Hill.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Years_of_Red_Dust"title="Years of Red Dust">
Each chapter tells a story from a different year, consisting of two strands, slice-of-life personal histories of ordinary people living in Red Dust Lane, mixed with the ever-changing narrative of China’s socialist history. Most of the stories begin with non-fiction excerpts from wall newspapers of China's past. Incidents involve neighbors who are academics, those who own businesses, those who join the military, as well as manual laborers. One chapter includes a fictionalized account, based on a real life event, of preparations for the day U.S. President Richard Nixon visited Shanghai.The setting is in Shanghai where "the flow of the green slime of corruption, pollution and greed (for money), races with the flow of blood and champagne", according to "Aftenposten".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_and_the_Manhunters"title="Conan and the Manhunters">
Conan, imprisoned by a satrap named Torgat Khan, escapes and is reunited with a band of thieves he's leading in the deserts southwest of Turan. Subsequently, the thieves plan on looting the Khan's treasury, held in a vault beneath the newly built temple of the sinister cult of Ahriman, the priests of which hope to revive their ancient god. Persuaded that mystical aid will be needed to ensure success, Conan agrees on accepting the aid of a kind wizard named Volvolicus and his daughter, Layla. After stealing the Khan's treasure, Conan is pursued by the Manhunters, a band of bounty hunters with specialized skills led by a captain even more powerful than Conan himself. Through his own skills, and those of his new allies, Conan thwarts his pursuers while preventing the resurrection of Ahriman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Bold"title="Conan the Bold">
A young Conan's prospects for a domestic existence are destroyed, along with his intended fiancé, by the renegade Taharka of Keshan. To achieve vengeance, the Cimmerian joins forces with a one-eyed warrior woman, Mad Kalya, also wronged by Taharka's outlaws. The couple pursue their enemies across several nations, from Croton's fighting pits to the Ophirian plains, overtaking them in time and again only to see Taharka slip through their fingers. The chase ultimately culminates in a battle to the death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Rogue"title="Conan the Rogue">
After quelling a revolt in Nemedia, Conan loses everything except for his sword while gambling at a tavern. A man follows Conan out of the tavern, before hiring him to obtain a mysterious and valuable relic. Outfitting himself with the initial payment, Conan travels to the city of Sicas in Aquilonia. Once renowned for its silver mines but now a den of iniquity, more travelers are said to leave Sicas "by the river, floating" than through the gates. Along the way, he rescues a woman searching for her missing sister, said to have gone into the same place.Sicas turns out to be in the midst of a conflict between numerous contenders for control, most notably the king's corrupt servants, five different gangs, and a religious cult. Conan feels right at home, and plunges into the struggle. Various intrigues and betrayals follow in rapid succession, centering on the object he has been commissioned to recover, which is revealed to be a potent magical artifact. The rising tension in Sicas results in an all out major brawl near the middle of town between local gangs and various power players. In contrast to most of the players, Conan emerges from Sicas ahead of the game, passing by royal forces en route to restore order in the city. When questioned as to how he did it, he responds: "That was a town of rogues, my friend, and I am the greatest rogue of all."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Marauder"title="Conan the Marauder">
The warlord, Bartatua, is uniting all the Hyrkanian tribes east of the Vilayet Sea into an army for world conquest, beginning with the resistant city of Sogaria. Meanwhile, an exiled Turanian wizard, Khondemir, plans on taking control over Bartatua's soldiers in pursuit of his own agenda. Caught in the middle are Princess Ishkala of Sogaria, a seductive spy named Lakhme, and the enslaved Conan, who must prove his loyalty towards Bartatua to escape his fate. Everything comes to a thrilling climax near an ancient Hyrkanian necropolis known as the City of Mounds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Champion"title="Conan the Champion">
Shipwrecked on the northern shore of the Vilayet Sea, Conan finds himself stranded for the winter in the midst of two rival kingdoms. Joining the force of one of the factions, he becomes a champion of Queen Alcuina in her opposition against the competing rulership of Odoac and Totila. As a wild card in their local struggle, all parties seek to use him to tip the balance in their own favor. Stranded in a mysterious otherworld, Conan and Alcuina must find a way to escape before everything can be resolved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler's_Gold"title="Gambler's Gold">
The story revolved around a man innocently accused of murder. The film was divided into chapters:Two men, good friends, love the same woman. One of the men is successful – a squatter. He marries the woman and they have a daughter. Then the squatter accidentally kills his wife by a blow meant for his friend. Over the years the old squatter is tormented by remorse; the friend falls in love with the squatter's daughter, although she is in love with one of her father's shearers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Fielding"title="The Art of Fielding">
Henry Skrimshander begins the novel as a 17-year-old playing on a Legion baseball team in Lankton, South Dakota. Although physically short and not muscular, Henry has an unusual gift for fielding, and excels at the demanding position of shortstop. After playing a game against a team from Chicago, Westish College student Mike Schwartz sees Henry play and recruits him to attend Westish and improve the baseball team. By his junior year, Henry is excelling as a player (especially on defense) and is drawing significant attention from Major League Baseball scouts.Westish College is a small liberal arts college located in northeastern Wisconsin on the shore of Lake Michigan. The school has a particular attachment to author Herman Melville, ever since a Westish student named Guert Affenlight discovered that Melville had visited Westish as part of a lecturing tour in the 1880s. The school re-branded itself around the Melville visit, erecting a statue of the author and renaming its sports teams as the Harpooners. After publishing a well-received book and spending many years as a professor at Harvard, Affenlight returns to his alma mater as president of the college. His estranged daughter Pella comes to live with him during Henry's junior year, after leaving her architect husband and life in San Francisco.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Wheel_(novel)"title="The Dark Wheel (novel)">
The novel centers on Cornelius Van Toller, a wealthy New Yorker, with Jekyll-and-Hyde character. His obsession with actress Kay Forrester sets the stage for a thrilling drama.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sengsara_Membawa_Nikmat"title="Sengsara Membawa Nikmat">
Kacak, the conceited nephew of a rich village leader in Padang, is jealous of Midun, the religious and popular son of a poor farmer; Kacak often attempts to goad Midun into fighting him. After Midun saves his wife from drowning, Kacak becomes enraged at the thought that Midun had touched his wife and attacks him. Midun fights back, quickly knocking Kacak out. As a result of his actions, Midun is forced to do tasks for the village leader under Kacak's supervision.Still enraged at Midun, Kacak hires an assassin to kill him. When the attempt fails, the assassin and Midun are arrested and sent to prison. While in prison, Midun is tortured until he earns a reputation for being a good fighter. He also meets Halimah, who lives with her stepfather, after returning her diamond necklace. After he is released from prison, Midun takes Halimah to find her father in Bogor.After living with them for two months, Midun attempts to go to Batavia to find work, and leaves Halimah with her father in Bogor. Along the way, he meets the Arab Indonesian Syekh Abdullah, who lends him money; after refusing to pay the high interest or let Abudullah marry Halimah, Midun is arrested. After his release, he saves a Dutch youth being attacked in Pasar Baru. For saving the boy, Midun is granted a job at the police station by the boy's father, the "hoofdcommissaris" (head commissioner). He then becomes confident enough to go to Bogor to marry Halimah, and takes her to live with him in Batavia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medusa_Frequency"title="The Medusa Frequency">
Narrator Herman Orff is a London-based freelance writer of comics and an unsuccessful novelist. He is preoccupied by Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring", an ex-girlfriend called Luise von Himmelbett, and characters from mythology including The Kraken. His own name is a reference to Hermes and Orpheus.Lacking inspiration to write his third novel, he responds to a leaflet put through his letterbox advertising a treatment for blocked artists. The procedure turns out to be the invention of an old friend who was once also Luise's lover. Following the treatment, Orff periodically hallucinates, finding that spherical found objects (a stone on the banks of the River Thames, a football, a cabbage) appear to him as the dismembered head of Orpheus. Through a series of surreal scenes, the head tells Orff its "story", namely how he started playing the lyre, met Eurydice and lost her. In Hoban's retelling, Eurydice was not bitten by a snake and did not descend to the Underworld, but rather Orpheus was unfaithful to her and she left him for Aristaeus. This reflects Orff's own experience of being unfaithful to Luise.The scenes retelling the Orpheus myth are interspersed with Orff's daily life as he finds a new girlfriend, is hospitalised after suffering an attack of angina, bumps repeatedly into a character referred to as "Gom Yawncher" who turns up in various guises throughout London, and travels to The Hague to see the Vermeer painting in the Mauritshuis. When he gets to The Hague he finds the painting is on loan to the US, and meets a man in the gallery who claims to be another of Luise's ex-lovers. On returning to his hotel he unexpectedly bumps into Luise herself, who he finds is happily married.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karnatakada_Haridasaru"title="Karnatakada Haridasaru">
The author, Dr. H.K. Vedavyasachar, set out to create a systematic historical study of the whole range of Dasa Sahitya. This work explores Dasa Sahitya and its origins in relation to the history of religion, philosophy and mysticismVedavyasachar discusses the development and background - through Sumeria, Assyria, Egypt, Greece and Israel and later in Europe and Arabia - of Vedic thought in Hinduism, in the north and south of India through successive phases of Vedic, non-Vedic, Puranic and Darsanic thought.The study in this book is divided into two major parts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilarity_Ensues"title="Hilarity Ensues">
"Hilarity Ensues" opens with stories that Tucker experienced living and working in Cancun while still enrolled in as a full-time student at Duke Law School. It continues through to his attendance at friends' weddings and bachelor parties. The following stories are included in "Hilarity Ensues":
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_of_Wishes"title="The Night of Wishes">
The evil sorcerer Beelzebub Preposteror has contracted with His Excellency, the Minister of Pitch Darkness, to perform a certain number of evil deeds each year. This year, however, he did not meet the requirement because the High Council of the Animals has sent the cat Maurizio as a spy, which forces Beelzebub to be more cautious. He is threatened with a "seizure" by Maledictus T. Maggot, an official of the devil, should he not fulfill his quota of evil deeds until midnight.On New Year's Eve (called, not unimportantly for the plot, St. Sylvester's Day in Germany) he joins forces with the evil witch Tyrannia Vampirella, who has the same problem due to the raven Jacob who is spying on her. Together they try to brew the eponymous Notion Potion that will grant them all wishes, in order to fulfill their part of the contract before midnight. If they succeeded to brew the potion they wouldn't even have to keep it secret from the animals, because due to the nature of the potion every wish they make will have the exact opposite effect - i.e. if they wish someone good health, he'll become sick instead.The plot starts on New Year's Eve at 5 pm and the chapters each represent one hour until midnight to illustrate the increasing time pressure that the characters are under. On the one hand, the sorcerers have to complete a five-meter-long recipe to brew the potion, while constantly getting in each other's way. On the other, the cat and the raven must find a way to stop their evil plan while tackling their own problems, namely the obesity of the cat and the chronic diseases of the raven. As the animals, in their search for help, arrive in the city near the cathedral, Jacob remembers a weakness of the potion: if the potion has not been fully drunk up before the first ring of the bell at midnight, the potion won't reverse the meaning of the wishes - as expected by the two sorcerers - but instead grants them as wished.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Oath"title="Dragon's Oath">
Dragon sits by Jack's funeral pyre and reminisces about his first meeting with Anastasia. He pulls out a locket and opens it, but the wind lifts the last of her hair inside and carries it over to the pyre. This starts a spell Anastasia had laid on the locket, that conveys to Dragon her last wish, to temper his blade with mercy.The book goes back to his human days. The third son of a lord, Bryan is young, cocky and bold. His father disowns him when he becomes involved in a scandal with a neighbour's daughter and sends him to the Americas. At the docks he meets a Tracker, who claims him as a fledgling and takes him abord a ship with a sculpted dragon's head, which inspires Bryan in regards to his new name.At the Chicago House of Night, Anastasia, a 22-year-old newly adult vampyre, has been hired as the Spells and Rituals teacher. While talking with the local High Priestess, Pandeia, and her mate, Anastasia brings up the problem of some fledglings who had asked for a love spell for Bryan. Instead of refusing them, she asks permission to perform a drawing spell, to show the fledglings the truth about Bryan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4_a.m._(novel)"title="4 a.m. (novel)">
The book follows Cal and Manny, two British army chefs stationed in Germany during the early 1990s. The two are quickly bored by the daily comings and goings of military life and begin to take part in the activities of the red-light district in Hamburg, using recreational drugs and attending raves. Very soon their drug usage begins to clash with their military duties and lives, leading to the pair undergoing pressure on their military jobs, friendship, and personal lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off_Season_(novel)"title="Off Season (novel)">
A group of six friends from New York City rent a house in Dead River, Maine for a weeklong vacation. The day they arrive a woman is fished from the ocean, claiming she was ambushed by a group of feral children. Hidden for years from civilization, a clan of cannibalistic, inbred savages stalk the area for whatever meat they can find.Carla arrives at the rental house to clean a day before the other five friends arrive. The house is well off the beaten path, tucked away and private. By night an unnaturally large man watches through the window.The local sheriff is alerted to a woman having been found in the ocean with distinct, whip-like wounds on her back. The Jane Doe is unconscious till the next day when she reports that she exited her vehicle to help a little girl who was wandering in the road past midnight. This was the beginning of a trap in which she was surrounded by ghastly children who chased her with switches and attempted to kill her. This report resonates with the sheriff, reminding him of a tale the local drunk tells. After interviewing the drunk the sheriff is certain danger is present, sparking an in-depth investigation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Kid_Rules_the_World"title="Fat Kid Rules the World">
Troy, a seventeen year old, 6'1", 298 pound student is contemplating suicide when a homeless former student from Troy's school, Curt MacCrae, intervenes. MacCrae tells Troy that he saved his life, now he owes him a favor, so he insists that they start a band together with Troy playing drums. The only problem is that Troy can't play drums.Together, Curt and Troy create the band Rage/Tectonic. Although unable to play drums, he goes right into practicing for an upcoming gig. In the process, Troy finds self-confidence and acceptance while realizing he is desperately trying to save Curt's life from drug addiction and abuse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Red_Cap_(poem)"title="Little Red Cap (poem)">
The poem Little Red Cap begins with "At childhood's end" informing its audience of the characters transition out of childhood. She is narrating the story, as she explains that once the wolf came to the edge of the woods her childhood ended. Little Red Cap examines the wolf, and found herself excited about his large ears, eyes, and teeth!The wolf is portrayed as an older character by the reference of alcohol used in his description"his hairy paw, red wine staining his bearded jaw". Little Red Cap, only 16 years old, pursues the older wolf. That became the start of her transition to adulthood. Being younger than the wolf, he buys Little Red Cap her first drink. The reason: poetry. Little Red Cap was prepared for what was to come. She knew that the wolf would lead her into the woods. Little Red Cap was prepared to leave home, and go into the woods with the wolf. This was the beginning of the love story and relationship of Little Red Cap and the wolf. She discovered an abundance of books within the Wolf's lair. The two grew close as their relationship blossomed. After 10 years passed from when Little Red Cap wandered into the woods with the Wolf she left the woods without him, ending their relationship. When she met the wolf she was only a child, but after 10 years passed Little Red Cap left the woods as an adult.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Valorous"title="Conan the Valorous">
Hathor-Ka, a Stygian sorceress, tricks Conan into stealing certain relics from Ben Morgh, a sacred mountain in Cimmeria. His expedition takes him across Koth, Nemedia, and the Border Kingdoms where Conan is diverted by his rescue of a chieftainess. Meanwhile, Jaganath (a sorcerer from Vendhya) is also on a journey into the Cimmerian Wilderness. In Cimmeria, the various clans are uniting against the Vanir and their allies, a tribe of lizard folk. The two armies are traveling towards Ben Morgh and proceed with a final battle. As the conflict rages on, Conan and a wizard from Khitai wage a more crucial battle inside Crom's Cave beneath the mountain with the aid of Jaganath, Hathor-Ka, and her patron, Thoth-Amon. Ultimately, Cimmeria is delivered from outside sorcery and Conan joins a raiding party of Aesir in their journey towards Hyberborea.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fra_Kristiania-Bohêmen"title="Fra Kristiania-Bohêmen">
The novel is set in Christiania, and deals with the everyday life of two friends, "Herman Ek" and "candidate Jarmann". They live in lodgings and spend their days drinking in cafés, discussing philosophy, literature and society reforms. "Jarmann" ends his life by committing suicide, shooting himself after spending his last night with a prostitute. The novel is a roman à clef, as the characters are easily recognizable as real people: "Ek" is Jæger himself, and "Jarmann" also has a corresponding real person.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singing_Cave_(Dillon_novel)"title="The Singing Cave (Dillon novel)">
Pat, a boy who lives on the west coast of Ireland at Connemara, explores a niche in a cliff that is known locally as "the singing cave". One day, Pat finds the tomb of a Viking warrior in an inner chamber. When he returns the next day the relics have disappeared, but Pat has told nobody about it but his grandfather and Mr Allen, an amateur archaeologist. Pat and his friend Tom Joyce seek to solve the mystery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_of_Venarium"title="Conan of Venarium">
An Aquilonian army marches across the border of Bossonia into southern Cimmeria under the command of one Count Stercus. We soon learn that, although an able commander and warrior, Stercus has fallen from favour with King Numedides for his lecherous ways involving adolescents back in Aquilonia. His banishment to the frontier is, apparently, part of his penance. Word of the invasion passes through Cimmeria as the army continues to press north, building forts each evening where they camp. Eventually Stercus is satisfied with his advance and calls a halt.The last fort constructed is called Venarium.We are introduced to a 12-year-old boy named Conan, living with his family in a village called Duthil, located north of Venarium, about a day's travel by foot. Conan's family consists of his father, Mordec the blacksmith and his mother, Verina. Conan’s mother has been sick for as long as Conan can remember with tuberculosis.Duthil is a good sized village, sporting a smith, a miller, a weaver, a tanner and other cottage industry. A number of farmers and herdsmen use Duthil as a hub for commerce and a source of additional labour at harvest. At least 2 homes in Duthil have more than one room.Word of the invasion soon reaches Duthil. Mordec and Balarg, the two leading Elders, determine how to best continue spreading the word to other villages. We also hear, at this time, that Conan bears more than a passing affection for Balarg's daughter, Tarla, who is near his age.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_and_the_Emerald_Lotus"title="Conan and the Emerald Lotus">
Having refused to enter the service of a Stygian wizard, Ethram-Fal, Conan suffers a curse which is gradually robbing him of his life. The beautiful sorceress, Lady Zelandra, offers to lift his curse if Conan retrieves for her a deadly emerald lotus which she is addicted to—currently in the possession of Ethram-Fal. To save his own life from the evil wizard, Conan must challenge Ethram-Fal again by stealing Zelandra's prize from his desert fortress. During his adventure, Conan faces off against bandits, a demon disguised as an oasis, and zombie bodyguards. He's aided in his quest by the dagger-throwing Neesa and a mute thief named Heng Shih.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_and_the_City"title="Summer and the City">
Picking up where "The Carrie Diaries" left off, seventeen-year-old Carrie Bradshaw has left her hometown and treks to New York City. Set during the summer before her freshman year at Brown, Carrie learns to navigate her way through the Big Apple, takes a writing class at The New School, and even pursues a relationship with an older man. Joining her along the way, she meets Samantha Jones, a true Manhattan fashionista who's determined on the path of fame and fortune, and the opinionated feminist Miranda Hobbes who is a freshman at New York University.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_River"title="Highland River">
The plot is episodic and moves between Kenn's childhood and adult life. It begins with a young Kenn poaching his first salmon from the Dunbeath river. He encounters a sadistic beating from a schoolmaster, adventures in the trenches which result in his brother Angus suffering from shellshock and he meets Radzyn, an intellectual, scientific European who does not share Kenn's belief in the mystery of existence.Kenn's ultimate goal is to 'get back to the source of...life... the source of the river and the source of himself'.Gunn's description of his 'Highland River' (aka Dunbeath River) is wholly accurate, avoiding literary licence in capturing the very essence of its pools and surrounding environment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Art_and_Old_Hector"title="Young Art and Old Hector">
Art is an eight-year-old boy and the book is seen mostly from his perspective. He comes from a large family and, as his father is often away fishing, his major father figure is Old Hector, the local elder who has a wide knowledge of local history and story and as is implied throughout the novel, then revealed in the final chapters, the finest bootlegger in the area.Like many of Gunn's novels, the plot is episodic and we experience events such as the local Highland Games and the birth of Art's baby sister. Indeed several of the chapters appeared extant in other published forms.The main climax of the novel is when Art, returning out of curiosity to a cave where he and a girl from the village thought a wild beast lived, uncover an illicit still run by Hector and Red Douglas (a local rascal). Art's brother Donul is also with them as they are making whisky for Duncan, Art and Donul's eldest brother's wedding. Art's discovery of the still is fortuitous as on his way he encounters three excise agents or "gaugers", who are investigating Hector.Throughout the book, Art also wishes to reach the River, a place he has never been, initially with Donul, but when Donul needs to leave to work on a cattle farm, it is Hector who takes Art to the river.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Masters_of_Solitude"title="The Masters of Solitude">
In the millennium after a global war, society in the former United States has splintered into groups. The main group in the story, the Coven, live in a pre-industrial Native American lifestyle, but one of growing population and power. Many members have mild telepathic powers, which opens the corridors of power to those capable of "lep". Lep allows the Coven to form larger social groups, but isolation from these groups drives one mad.The other primary group, The City, retains their former technological lifestyle in the remains of the east coast megapolis. They spend their lives involved in immortal solitary scientific research, meeting rarely and communicating only when their research overlaps. The few thousand remaining City dwellers separate themselves from the "dirty" Coven through the use of the Self Gate, an electronic barrier that drives lesser minds insane. To protect idle attempts to breach it, the City also employs a small mercenary army to act as a police force outside the Gate.Although the Self Gate is designed to allow City folk to cross without issue, there is only one known example of this having happened. Judith Singer, a historian, learns that an ancient weapon known as the Girdle of Solitude is available in the ruins of a weapons laboratory in what was once Pennsylvania. She leaves the City in order to retrieve it, but soon after leaving she meets and falls in love with a young Coven man, Garrick. Garrick, heir to a wealthy apple-growing family of the Shando tribe, takes her as his wife. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_and_the_Grim_Grey_God"title="Conan and the Grim Grey God">
In the prelude, taking place 3,000 years before Conan's time, a raiding army from the empire of Acheron descend on the city of Nithia, located near an oasis deep within the desert, inhabited by worshippers of the peaceful and benevolent god, Ibis. The warriors systematically massacre the entire population, their goal being to gain possession of the Grim Grey God - an extremely powerful and evil artifact with mystical properties, which the priests have guarded for many centuries (not to use it, but to prevent it from being used). The Acheronian general, having killed all the priests, holds up the artifact and gloats over his victory. Fortunately, a spell unleashed by the murdered Arch-Priest of Ibis drowns him, his soldiers, and the entire city in sand.Nithia remains buried under the desert for three thousand years, a fabled "City of Brass" whose location no one knows. Eventually, a gust of wind uncovers it. Soon, Nithia is rediscovered by a passing smuggler - and a map drawn by the smuggler falls into the hands of a pirate captain named Conan. To him, the statue of the Grim Grey God reputedly buried in Nithia's ruins represents treasure - he isn't initially aware of its dark powers. However, rivals also seek to plunder all of Nithia, including Jade, empress of the thieves' guild, Toj the assassin, and two necromancers (one of whom is Conan's recurring foe, Thoth-Amon) convinced that the statue will give them the power to restore their reign of darkness over the world, as in the days of ancient Acheron. The climax involves an ancient warrior restored to life and a world-wide threat which only Conan can overcome.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_and_the_Shaman's_Curse"title="Conan and the Shaman's Curse">
At the end of a battle in which both forces are nearly wiped out, Conan slays the last member of the enemy host, a shaman whose dying curse turns the Cimmerian into a killer were-ape when the moon is full. Subsequent misfortunes include a battle with huge vultures and getting marooned on an island inhabited by a lost race of giants, all apparent consequences of his curse. Eventually, he finds another magician able to lift it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan,_Scourge_of_the_Bloody_Coast"title="Conan, Scourge of the Bloody Coast">
Conan, under his piratical alias of Amra, continues in developing a pirate empire in the Vilayet Sea. Operating from the rebuilt city of Djafur, located on one of the islands in the Aetolian Archipelago, Conan tricks the Turanian Empire of King Yildiz into a war against the Hyrkanians. Joining forces with a necromancer, Crotalis, Conan and his pirates participate in looting the lost city of Sarpedon. However, Crotalis betrays the pirates, forcing Conan to run his vessel ashore, where he's captured by a tribe of Hyrkanian nomads. Fortunately, Conan is released after he proves his value as a warrior. In return for his release, Conan agrees to support the Hyrkanians in their naval invasion of Turan.Crotalis also offers his services to the Hyrkanians, leading to another rogues' alliance with Conan. Using a magical wind summoned by Crotalis, the Hyrkanian fleet moves to attack the Turanians. After their lengthy nautical battle ends in a stalemate, Crotalis re-animates the corpses of all the pirates' former victims, forcing Conan into battle with an undead army. Suddenly, before Crotalis could claim his final victory, he is burned alive. Soon, the battle leaves the navies of both kingdoms in a weakened state, and Conan's Red Brotherhood becomes the strongest fleet in the Vilayet Sea.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Aura"title="The Blue Aura">
A recent increase in UFO sightings on the island of Guernsey prompts the arrival of the Chris Godfrey and his friends. They meet 'The Visitors', angelic beings standing seven feet tall, but General Whittle believes the aliens are evil and plans to destroy them with a nuclear missile.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Last_Stride"title="In the Last Stride">
Dave Smith, retired heavyweight boxing champion travels around Australia having various adventures, including working as a swagman, fighting Les O'Donnell, a speedboat chase across Sydney harbour, a football game involving rugby league stars, and a climax in which Dave's horse Sunlocks wins the Sydney Cup.Alick Wallace, a champion rugby player and boxer, is loved by Enid King, who is desired by a football umpire, Norton, who also dabbles in opium smuggling. During a game, Norton sends Alick off the ground in disgrace. Alick boxes Norton at Sydney stadium, knocks him out and is fired from his job as a clerk by his employer, Enid's father.Alick finds himself falsely accused of burglary, robbery and smuggling, as well as the death of old King. He heads to the Queensland bush and trains a horse which winds up winning the Winter Stakes at Randwick.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Litigators"title="The Litigators">
Oscar Finley and Wally Figg are ambulance chasers at a small law firm in the South Side of Chicago. Their constant bickering is often mediated by Rochelle, their highly competent African-American secretary. Meanwhile, David Zinc, a Harvard Law School graduate, is completely fed up with the grinding and dehumanizing – though well-paid – life of an associate in the high-powered law firm of Rogan Rothberg. David suddenly breaks away, goes on a drinking binge and by chance finds himself at the Finley &amp; Figg office, where he willingly relegates himself to working for the two disreputable street lawyers.Wally gets involved in a new scheme, finding claimants for a federal class action lawsuit against Krayoxx, a cholesterol-lowering drug developed by the fictional pharmaceutical company Varrick Labs. Users across the country, both dead and alive, appear to have developed toxic reactions to the drug. Though the firm is out of its depth, Wally gains the assurance of a South Florida lawyer, Jerry Alisandros, that Alisandros will handle the case and reach an out-of-court settlement, and everybody will get rich. However, complications that no one anticipated arise, including Varrick's hiring of Nadine Karros, Rogan Rothberg's ace litigator who never loses a case, and the growing evidence that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with Krayoxx. The drug works as advertised, has no ill effects, and is unjustly maligned. Varrick pushes to have the case tried in the jurisdiction of Chicago federal judge Harry Seawright, with whom Rogan Rothberg has ties. The case is expedited on Seawright's docket, with Finley &amp; Figg's claim singled out of the tort claimants. Alisandros pulls out as co-counsel, leaving Finley &amp; Figg to litigate the case themselves. The resulting trial brings the firm's usual cast of shady witnesses to the stand in a desperate attempt to get through the trial and avoid being sued for legal malpractice and saddled with frivolous lawsuit sanctions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phoenix_Files"title="The Phoenix Files">
## "Arrival"."Arrival" is told from Luke Hunter's point of view, as he and his recently divorced mother, Emily, move into Phoenix, a town run by the hugely powerful Shackleton Cooperative. Luke discovers that, in Phoenix, they have no access to phones, the internet and or to cars. Emily is impressed; but Luke is suspicious. After they meet Peter Weir, one of the first of Phoenix's citizens and Jordan Burke, Peter's love interest who clearly does not love him back, they discover the town is plotting to wipe out the entire earth. When they discover the town's airport is shut down, "Time magazine" issues have been published months in advance before their release and Phoenix is trapped behind a large wall – and the outside is a barren wasteland, the protagonists discover the plot is indeed real. The final sentence in the novel reveals a ringing mobile phone in the town square.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albertine_(Krohg_novel)"title="Albertine (Krohg novel)">
Albertine is a poor seamstress, living in the eastern part of Christiania. She is being seduced by a "Winther", a police officer, who eventually rapes her while she is unconscious. Later she experiences a humiliating visit to the police doctor's office. She finally ends up as a prostitute, operating in the Vika district of the city.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goddess_Girls"title="The Goddess Girls">
## Athena the Brain.Athena has always been smart but never knew she was a goddess. Mount Olympus Academy promises to be a new start, but she has to deal with the meanest girl in history-Medusa.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_schwarzen_Brüder"title="Die schwarzen Brüder">
The book was published in 1941 and tells the fact-based story of "Giorgio", a boy from Sonogno in the Verzasca Valley in the canton of Ticino in Switzerland. In historical chronicles, the author had read of a ferry disaster drowning some 30 chimney sweeps boys (Italian "Spazzacamini"). The boys were sold to the City of Milan for poverty in the middle of the 19th century.The novel was started by Lisa Tetzner, and finished by her husband Kurt Held (actually Kurt Kläber). Kläber later published the novel "Die Rote Zora und ihre Bande."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Moon_Forgot"title="When the Moon Forgot">
"The Moon Forgets" tells the story of what happens when the Moon falls from the sky, and is adopted by a little boy, while toy moons are produced. The boy and the Moon become close friends with each other, but the toy moons are discarded and nothing goes right, because the world misses its moon. The tides, weather, and astronauts are all affected by the loss of the Moon. The boy helps the Moon to find its way back to its place in the sky, even if it means that they part.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like_a_Speeding_Youth"title="Like a Speeding Youth">
This book can be divided into three parts according to three main characters' appearance and disappearance. They are Tie Niu (铁牛 TiěNiǘ), Lao Xia (老夏 LǎoXià) and Lao Qiang (老枪 LǎoQiāng).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_and_the_Big_Bang"title="George and the Big Bang">
After coming back to the United Kingdom, George and Annie are trying to find the best place in the universe for Freddy the pig to live. They first look in the fictional Foxbridge University where Eric is a professor. Once there, they head up into a meeting of an anti-LHC group, which states that the theory of everything resists addition of gravity (TOERAG). Eric uses Cosmos, a supercomputer, to open a portal and takes Freddy to this unknown place.The next day, George starts at the local high school, but returns to the university to find Eric in order to ask him where Freddy has gone. George discovers that Cosmos' portal is still open and wanders out on to the Moon to find Eric. Just before they leave, a Chinese satellite photographs them. However, since no one has supposedly set foot on the moon since 1972, this creates outrage among the Order of Science.Eric's tutor, Zuzubin, calls a meeting of the Order of Science at CERN. Meanwhile, Dr. Reeper returns and activates his supercomputer Pooky so he can meet George in Andromeda via his electromechanical avatar. Dr. Reeper tells George that he has infiltrated TOERAG, the anti-LHC group. He also admits that he was forced to create a quantum mechanical bomb which cannot be defused easily, but luckily only has a probability to defuse if the right switch is activated. Dr. Reeper fails to pass on the complete information on how to deactivate the bomb, but he does tell George that the Order of Science has a traitor and that the meeting at the LHC is actually a plot to destroy all the scientists and the LHC using his bomb.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfamiliar_Fishes"title="Unfamiliar Fishes">
The book takes a humorous tone and examines the fulfillment of American imperialist manifest destiny at the end of the 19th century as America annexed Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Guam, and invaded Cuba, and the Philippines in 1898, in an attempt to become a global power. Vowell then tells the story of the culture clash that ensued following Christian missionaries who then moved in swiftly to try to convert the laid back native Hawaiians to the American way. The title comes from a reference of David Malo.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein"title="Moonwalking with Einstein">
Foer describes his book as participatory journalism in the world of competitive memorization and attempts to delineate the capacity of the human mind. He sets out to investigate the underpinnings of those with enhanced memory, soon finding himself at the 2005 U.S. Memory Championship. He covers the scientific basis of memory creation and historical attitudes towards memory, including its negative reputation in the Western educational system, a perception which Foer is largely opposed to. He explores common mnemonic tools for improving memory: the techniques of Roman rhetoricians and the tannaim ("reciters") of Judea, the Major System and the PAO System for memorizing numbers and cards, and Mind Mapping, a note-taking technique developed by Tony Buzan. These methods are all a form of the method of loci, in which data is stored in a sequence of memorable images that can be translated back into their original form. He espouses deliberate practice as the path to expertise, and declares psychological barriers as the largest obstacles to improved human performance.The book describes the prodigious memory and 87-point IQ of Kim Peek, the inspiration for the 1988 movie "Rain Man".Foer discusses how Daniel Tammet's index finger slides around on a table as he performs mental calculations in a documentary; mental multiplication experts and mnemonists that Foer speaks with imply that Tammet's claims, involving synesthetic morphing shapes and colors standing in for complex numerical feats, are questionable. World memory champion Ben Pridmore tells Foer that "[t]here are a lot of people in the world that can do those things."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusader_Gold"title="Crusader Gold">
Following a prologue set in AD 71 when the golden menorah from the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem is locked away in Rome, the novel picks up in present-day Turkey with marine archaeologist Jack Howard on a hunt for ancient treasures in the harbour of Istanbul, formerly Constantinople. One item not among the treasures thrown into the harbour when the Crusaders pillaged the city is the menorah, and Jack soon learns from colleagues Jeremy and Maria that it may have been stolen from Constantinople by Norse warrior Harald Hardrada during his service to the emperor of Constantinople and taken by him on his explorations of the New World.Jack goes to the monastery at Iona in Scotland to see a priest who tells him that the Nazi Ahnenerbe were on the trail of the menorah in the 1930s. The priest is found gruesomely murdered, showing that there are present-day Nazis who are shadowing them. In Greenland Jack and his friend Costas dive inside an iceberg, where they find a perfectly preserved Viking ship burial containing one of Hardrada's warriors. They go to L'Anse aux Meadows, the Viking site in Greenland, where further clues lead them to the Yucatán in Mexico, where Hardrada and his men had a final standoff with the Maya. After a perilous dive into a cenote, Jack discovers the truth of Hardrada's last stand and the fate of the menorah, and he has his own final standoff with the latter-day Nazi and his henchmen who have been following him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Gospel_(novel)"title="The Last Gospel (novel)">
1st century CE: the lame Claudius, not yet Emperor of Rome, travels in the year 23 to Galilee where he meets a charismatic young carpenter, Joshua of Nazareth, and is inspired by his philosophy of heaven on earth. Claudius records the carpenter’s words on a scroll that he takes back to Rome. Later, after the Nazarene is crucified, Claudius becomes emperor. He fakes his own death and disappears from imperial Rome to contrive an ingenuous plan to hide this secret gospel of Christ from those who would destroy it. 21st century: archaeologist Jack Howard and his team of researchers first learn of this last gospel when excavating Claudius’s secret library near Pompeii. Following the trail of clues Claudius has laid out, their quest takes them from Italy to London, California, and finally Jerusalem. All the while the mafia and elite Vatican henchmen are hot on their heels, willing to stop at nothing to prevent Christ’s true message from being discovered. Eventually they find the Gospel of Jesus. In the epilogue the whole scene of Claudius meeting Jesus is shown. The words of the Gospel are: " The Kingdom of heaven is on Earth. No one shall stand in the way of the word of God. There shall be no Priests. And there shall be no Temples."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Isle_of_the_Great_Deep"title="The Green Isle of the Great Deep">
Young Art and Old Hector are sitting in the kitchen, whilst the characters from the previous book discuss the atrocities occurring in mainland Europe. They then embark on a poaching trip to the Hazel Pool, a location which had great import in their previous adventure. Hector regales Art with tales of the Celtic Otherworld, the eponymous "Green Isle of the Great Deep" and of the supreme legend of the nuts of knowledge falling into the pool of life and being swallowed by the salmon of wisdom. However, both Art and Hector get into difficulty in the Pool and both seemingly drown in the deep waters.They awake in an alternative Highland universe called the Green Isle. This place is beautiful and fertile but although the land is abundant and the trees ripe with fruit, no one is allowed to touch the fruit and those that eat it fall ill. However, the advent of Art in the island, who proceeds to eat the fruit and then become a fugitive, causes a ripple effect which steadily causes the strict social hierarchy who live at the Seat on the Rock to slowly crumble and for God to awake. Hector demands an audience with God.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Serebrenni"title="Prince Serebrenni">
Knyaz (Prince) Nikita Serebryanni is on his way to Moscow. In Medvedevka village his small armed unit of servants clashes with the oprichnik Khomyak’s gang. There and then the Prince learns that bloodshed and lawlessness here were inspired by Tsar Ioann's new policies, known as oprichnina. Another plotline involves Yelena Morozova, the wife of Medvedevka landlord whom the Prince helped out; she turns out to be his own loved one of the old times, who had to marry the old man in order to thwart another vile oprichnik, Vyazemsky, with his unwanted passes. Further on his way, Serebrenni helps out the outlaw named Persten (the latter would repay the Prince by leading him out of Grozny’s jail) and encounters the much feared Tsar himself. Appalled by Boris Godunov's cynicism (the latter suggests that the two should join forces in the anti-Grozny alliance) and torn apart between his righteous hatred towards the Tsar with his corrupt oprichnicks, and his own oath of allegiance, Serebrenni, all kinds of adventures behind, chooses to go to war, to fight for his country (not its amoral ruler), and die the death of a noble man.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layar_Terkembang"title="Layar Terkembang">
Tuti and Maria, daughters of Raden Wiriatmadja, go to the fish market where they meet Yusuf, a medical student from Martapura, South Sumatra. After he escorts them home, he realizes that he has fallen for Maria. The following day, he meets the sisters while on his way to school and goes out on the town with them. He and Maria become closer and closer, while Tuti busies herself with reading and attending congresses on women's rights.A few months later, Yusuf returns early from his holidays to be with Maria; however, not long afterwards she falls ill and is diagnosed with malaria. Tuti begins feeling the need to be loved, remembering Supomo who had once proposed to her; after Supomo's younger brother comes to demand an answer, she says no. Maria's condition grows steadily worse and the doctors change their diagnosis to tuberculosis. As she lies dying in hospital, Tuti and Yusuf go to visit her cousins in Sindanglaya, where Tuti notes that one need not live in the city in order to be useful to one's country. Upon their return to Maria's bedside, Maria requests that they marry each other. After Tuti and Yusuf, who have been growing closer, agree, Maria dies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Indomitable"title="Conan the Indomitable">
Conan and his companion, Elashi, find themselves pursued by pirates under the leadership of a hermaphroditic amalgamation of two lovers, who believe Conan's sword can separate the couple back into their original state. The two men soon discover a subterranean world, where a beautiful sorceress named Chuntha and Katamay Rey, an evil necromancer, struggle for control over various intelligent creatures. The bizarre cave-dwellers include blind white apes, vampire bats, web-spinning plants, one-eyed monsters, burrowing lizards, mole-like beasts, and giant earthworms. The local balance of power is threatened by Conan's arrival and various complications ensue, including a revolt by the enslaved creatures, before Conan can win his way back to the surface. One of the worms and a cyclops are featured sympathetically in a subplot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Defiant"title="Conan the Defiant">
Conan falls in with Cengh, a priest of the Suddah Oblates, who is conveying a jewel known as the Source of Light back to his temple. Unfortunately, his talisman is coveted by a necromancer, Neg the Malefic, who plans on raising an army of undead warriors with the jewel's magic. When an agent of Neg murders Cengh and steals the jewel, Conan seeks vengeance for his friend. Joining forces with a warrior woman, Elashi, and a beautiful zombie, Tuanne, Conan tracks the murderer back to his master. They overcome numerous menaces on the journey towards Neg's stronghold, including the Men With No Eyes, henchmen of the One With No Name, and a swarm of spiders. Finally, Conan faces and kills Neg himself in a great battle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Fearless"title="Conan the Fearless">
Conan finds himself in the Corinthian city of Mornstadinos, after he enlists as a bodyguard defending a magician and Eldia, a girl who has control over fire elementals, against an evil mage named Sovartus. Sovartus is collecting such elemental whisperers and already has the other three. He wants Eldia to complete his set. This brings Conan into conflict with a host of other threats as well, including a demon employed by Sovartus and the witch Djuvula, who happens to be the demon's half-sister, the rich senator Lemparius, who's actually a were-panther, an avaricious thief named Loganaro, and various monsters. Plots and counter-plots build up to a climax at Sovartus' stronghold.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_(novel)"title="Female (novel)">
The story is about the rise of determined, emotionally hardened Margy Kane (daughter of a fencer and a parlor maid) from the back alleys of New England to her married life in Park Avenue.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_King's_Ransom"title="A King's Ransom">
The book starts with Dan and Amy Cahill, the two main characters, at a train station in Florence. Realizing that there is no way to get on the train alone they befriend a girl named Vanessa Mallory to board the train. Once on the train, Amy gets information that they have to steal the De Virga World Map, which has been lost since 1932, where it was last housed at an auction house in Lucerne. As they talk, the siblings realize that Vanessa is an imposter, and hide in the luggage compartment. The two hide there until they reach the next station at Engelberg, where they run away and call the Cahill Command Center in Attleboro. Once on the phone, Dan and Amy find out that Vanessa is actually Vesper 6, Cheyenne Wyoming. Realizing that they should start at the auction in which the De Virga was last seen, Ian Kabra tells them how to dress like they fit in at once.After dressing up, Dan and Amy go to the auction, where they sneak into the record room and start searching for clues. As they search they see fax come in their names and faces telling people that they are wanted by INTERPOL and the detective searching for them is Milos Vanek. After being caught, the two take a photo of a document and leave. They send a copy of the photo to Ian, who tells them that the photo is a list of potential buyers. After sneaking out of the auction house, Dan and Amy meet McIntyre, who tells them that it is unsafe to remain in Lucerne. He takes them to Basel where the siblings agree on two names to investigate, Jane Sperling and Hummel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Afrika_Reich"title="The Afrika Reich">
The story is based around the British mercenary Burton Cole, who has been dispatched on a secret mission by the British government to assassinate Walter Hochburg, the German governor-general of the Kongo. The plot occurs against the backdrop of increasing tensions between Britain and Germany that threaten to disrupt the uneasy truce, made in 1940.In September 1952, Burton, posing as an SS surveyor, enters Schadelplatz, which is named for its plaza of skulls; Hochburg says it's made of "twenty thousand nigger skulls". It can accommodate panzers and gains access to Hochburg's office. Burton has taken the mission at the behest of Ackerman, a representative of the Lusaka Mining Corporation, because of his vendetta with Hochburg.Assassinating Hochburg and escaping with the aid of Patrick, an American from the defunct French Foreign Legion, Cole is able to escape the Schadelplatz and to meet with his team in a Central African Airlines plane from Rhodesia. However, they are soon spotted and shot down by Waffen-SS troops. Burton and Patrick then flee for German Aquatoriana to reach British Nigeria.In a subplot, Neliah, a Herero living in Portuguese Northern Angola (Southern Angola of the Benguela Railway was "appropriated" by the Reich in 1949) with her sister, Zuri, as well as members of the "Resistencia", a Portuguese anti-Nazi insurgent group, are sent on a trek to Luanda in the face of a German invasion and, more personally, the potential for deportation to Deutsch Westafrika. Colloquially known as "Muspel", all African blacks in German territories have been deported there as part of the Nazi racial purification policy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saman_(novel)"title="Saman (novel)">
"Saman" follows four sexually liberated female friends: Yasmin, a married Catholic lawyer from Medan; Cok, a Balinese lawyer with a high libido; Shakuntala, a bisexual Catholic Javanese dancer; and Laila, a Muslim Minangkabau journalist. The other protagonist is the titular Saman, a former Catholic priest turned human rights activist who becomes the target of sexual advances by Yasmin and Cok.The first chapter, beginning in Central Park, New York, describes Laila waiting for the married Sihar and planning to lose her virginity to him. Eventually Laila realises that Sihar is with his wife, and feels depressed.The second chapter covers Saman's childhood—including his relationship with his mother, a woman drawn to the spiritual world—his entry into priesthood, and his attempt to protect a rubber tapping community from the attempt by a local plantation to acquire their land. After the attempt fails and the plantation's hired thugs raze the community to the ground and kills those who resist, Saman is captured and tortured. He eventually is broken out of his confinement by the surviving resistance members, becoming a fugitive and relinquishing his duty as a priest. He becomes a human rights advocate, assisted by Yasmin.The third chapter, written from the point of view of Shakuntala, tells how Yasmin, Cok, Shakuntala, and Laila met at high school and their escapades there, both sexual and academic. Shakuntala recounts a fantasy she had as a teenager about meeting a "foreign demon", embracing him and then having a debate on the different cultural aspects of sexuality. Towards the end of the chapter, Shakuntala notes that she is attracted to Laila and dislikes Sihar, but supports her friend's efforts as she cares for her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Ground"title="American Ground">
Though the New York City Office of Emergency Management was responsible for coordinating the city's overall response in the aftermath of the World Trade Center collapse, the cleanup and recovery efforts at Ground Zero were quickly placed in the purview of the New York City Department of Design and Construction, a then-obscure Queens-based city agency that handled civic construction and permitting. From an elementary school in Battery Park City, DDC commissioner Ken Holden and deputy commissioner Mike Burton managed most of the day-to-day aspects of the site, along with an inner circle of consultants from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Leslie E. Robertson Associates (founded by the lead structural engineer of the Twin Towers), LZA/Thornton Tomasetti, Mueser Rutledge Consulting Engineers, and D.H. Griffin Companies, as well as representatives from the Fire Department of New York, New York Police Department, the Port Authority Police Department, and various other state, federal, and nonprofit organizations.Using established contacts in the city's construction industry, the DDC split Ground Zero into four quadrants and assigned AMEC, Bovis Lend Lease, Tully Construction Company, and Turner Construction to oversee the cleanup of each quadrant, though the demarcation of the quadrants blurred as the removal process accelerated. Langewiesche details the demands and dangers of the work and its managerial challenges, as decisions were mostly made on the fly, particularly by Burton, due to the unprecedented and immense scale of the cleanup effort. Ultimately, 1.5 million tons of debris was removed from the site and barged by Weeks Marine or trucked to the recently-closed Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island, where it was searched for human remains or personal effects (such as the intact, expired identification card of Port Authority lead engineer and frequent DDC consultant Peter Rinaldi, which had been stored in his office on the 72nd floor of the North Tower and was found among rubble in Fresh Kills).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Spider"title="The Black Spider">
The novella begins with a christening party at a farm, during the course of which a few of the guests in front of the house go for a walk. It catches the godmother's eye that although the house is newly built, an old black post is built into it. At her inquiry, the grandfather tells everyone the story of the post.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_were_you_last_Pluterday?"title="Where were you last Pluterday?">
The theme in the book is Pluterday, an extra day in the week which can be withdrawn if one saves enough time (e.g. by taking a plane instead of a train). Only the rich can save enough time and thus Pluterday is in practice reserved for the "happy few", resulting in a class society. The existence of Pluterdays is kept secret from non-privileged people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_the_Soldier"title="The Return of the Soldier">
The novel begins as the narrator, Jenny, describes her cousin by marriage, Kitty Baldry, pining in the abandoned nursery where her dead first son would have been raised. Occupied with the domestic management of the Baldry estate just outside London, the two are almost completely removed from the horrors of war. The only exception is that Kitty's husband, Chris Baldry, is a British soldier fighting in France. While Kitty laments in the nursery, Margaret Grey arrives at the estate bringing news to the two women. When Jenny and Kitty meet her, they are surprised to find a drab middle-aged woman. And even more to their shock, Margaret tells them that the War Office notified her of Chris's injury and return home, not Kitty and Jenny. Kitty dismisses Margaret from the estate trying to deny that she could have been the recipient of such information.Soon after, another of Jenny's cousins notifies the two women that he in fact has visited Chris and that he is obsessing over Margaret, whom he had had a summer fling with 15 years before. Soon after, Chris returns shell-shocked to the estate believing he is still 20, but finding himself in a strange world which had aged 15 years beyond his memory. Trying to understand what is real for Chris, Jenny asks Chris to explain what he feels to be true. Chris tells her the story of a romantic summer on Monkey Island, where Chris at the age of 20 fell in love with Margaret, the inn-keeper's daughter. The summer ends with a rash departure by Chris in a fit of jealousy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_Men"title="Marching Men">
## Books I–II.The novel begins with the fourteen-year-old Norman McGregor packaging a loaf of bread for his uncle, the "village wit", – who ironically nicknames him "Beaut" because of his off-putting appearance – in his mother Nance's Coal Creek bakery (bought with the savings of her late husband/Beaut's father "Cracked" McGregor). Not long after, frustrated by the local miners expecting bread on credit without first settling their debts, Beaut closes the bakery during a miner's strike. That evening, as the now-drunk miners move to ransack the bakery (and assault Beaut), he is saved by a troupe of soldiers marching in formation. After the episode, the bakery remains closed and Nance goes to work at the mining office while Beaut idles about. When Beaut is 18 years old, his mother becomes too ill to work and the young man gets a job as a stableboy. One day, as a prank, his fellow stableboys get Beaut (a teetotaler up to that point) blind drunk with a "horrible mess" made just for that purpose. Having reached a breaking point, Beaut takes the rest of his father's savings and leaves Coal Creek for Chicago on the same evening. He arrives in the City just after the 1893 World's Fair. Despite a shortage of jobs, McGregor easily finds a warehouse job and settles into a routine of work during the day and night school/independent reading at night. One day, in a break from the ordinary, the usually unsocial McGregor gives in to the urging of his neighbor Frank Turner, a barber and amateur violin-maker, and goes to a dance. Despite his aloofness, McGregor meets Edith Carson, a frail, mousy, and somewhat homely milliner/shop owner, with whom he develops a platonic relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Gate"title="The Third Gate">
Shortly after the events of "Terminal Freeze", Dr. Jeremy Logan is contacted by an old colleague named Dr. Ethan Rush, who invites him on an expedition into the Sudd in southern Egypt. The expedition, led by famed archaeologist Dr. Porter Stone, seeks to finally locate and excavate the long-lost tomb of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Narmer, located at the bottom of the swamp. Other members of the expedition include the head of security Frank Valentino, technician Cory Landau, archaeologist Tina Romero, and mechanic Frank Kowinsky. Also accompanying the expedition is Rush's wife Jennifer, who has been maintaining a special connection to "the other side" after a near-death experience where she technically died in a car crash, but was revived by her husband. Rush uses his special method of hypnosis to put Jennifer into a lucid state through which they can communicate with the spirits within the tomb below them, which they believe to be that of Narmer himself. The base of operations is a massive group of canvas-covered outposts floating in the middle of the Sudd, simply referred to as "The Station."Once they finally manage to create a passageway down to the tomb entrance—nicknamed the Umbilical Cord—they slowly begin excavation through the first two chambers, known as the Gates, with the Third Gate containing the tomb of Narmer himself, while the first two Gates contain rooms full of treasure. However, when Romero studies the mummified remains within the Third Gate, she realizes that the remains are of a female body. Logan similarly draws a conclusion based on the mannerisms Jennifer displayed whenever possessed by the spirit, and deduces that it has to be a female spirit inhabiting her during the sessions, not that of a man. Thus, they realize that Narmer's queen, Niethotep, must have killed Narmer by poisoning him and taking his place in the tomb.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warm_Bodies"title="Warm Bodies">
In a post-apocalyptic future, a male zombie still in the early stages of decay lives in a community of the dead in an abandoned airport near the city. He cannot remember his name, and refers to himself as "R". After the collapse of human civilization, zombies hunt for the living, seeking to eat their brains; doing so allows them to relive the memories, feelings, and thoughts of their prey. Zombies whose flesh has completely decayed away are known as "Boneys", which act as "pack leaders" of sorts to the others, who are known as "Fleshies" and still retain traces and behaviors from their previous lives as humans, though R explains that most of the behaviors are done out of force of habit rather than an attempt to "live". R, a Fleshy, is unusual as he shows distaste for eating human flesh, and can form several coherent syllables in one breath, and collects various objects from the outside world that he hoards in his "house", a Boeing 747 airliner parked at the airport.In a hunt, R feeds on the brain of a young man named Perry. After experiencing his memories, R sees Perry's girlfriend Julie, and in a moment of mercy, saves her from the others. He disguises her scent with zombie blood, and takes her home where he hides her in the 747 airplane. He slowly gains Julie's trust, and convinces her to stay for a while until the others forget about her. R feeds her food from the airport's restaurant, entertains her with his treasures, including a record player, and Julie tries to teach him to drive a car which R has managed to get started. She also tells him a little bit about her life. In time, R begins feeling guilty over killing Perry, but continues to eat the remains of his brain, seeing it as a rare treasure, and experiences many of Perry's memories.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marked_(novel)"title="Marked (novel)">
Sixteen-year-old Zoey Redbird lives in a world where vampires, or "vampyres" have always existed. One day, during school, Zoey is marked by a Tracker to become a fledgling vampyre at the Tulsa House of Night, a boarding school where she will be trained to become an adult vampyre. She gets stopped outside in the parking lot by her boyfriend Heath, and his friends who call her a freak and drive away. Zoey then hurries home to tell her mom. Her mother, Linda Heffer, blames her for the Mark and, together with her ultra-religious husband (Zoey's stepfather/step-loser), she tries to keep Zoey at home, to be presented to the Elders of the People of Faith, an anti-vampyre group. As fledglings need to be constantly in the presence of an adult vampyre so that their bodies won't reject the Change, Zoey flees to her grandmother Sylvia, a Cherokee Wise Woman. On the way, she passes out and has a vision with the vampyre goddess, Nyx, who announces to Zoey that she will be her "eyes and ears" at the House of Night. The goddess leaves Zoey with the words "Darkness does not always equate to evil, Light does not always bring good" which becomes a very frequent and important message throughout the series.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath_(Westerfeld_novel)"title="Goliath (Westerfeld novel)">
As the airship "Leviathan" travels over Russia, Aleksandar, Deryn, and Newkirk are in the middy's mess with the perspicacious loris Bovril, talking about great circle routes. Alek mentions Deryn's father was an airman, but Newkirk says that the airman was Deryn's uncle. A living two-headed messenger eagle from the Czar heads towards the bridge, interrupting their discussion. A message lizard sends Deryn to the bridge and Newkirk to the cargo deck. Alek goes with Deryn, and there, Dr. Barlow tells them to take the bird to the rookery and feed it. Deryn nearly confesses her secret to Alek, but hesitates to do so thus resisting herself. She quickly asks for a fencing lesson to cover it up. Count Volger tries to expose her gender unless she discloses the imperial message, but drops the attempt after some convincing from Deryn, who dares not to shake the confidence of Alek, who admires 'Dylan' unaware of her masquerade as a boy.The imperial message is to pick up a crate from the back of a fighting bear, but it is much heavier than expected, overloaded by metal parts and tools, and drags Deryn and Newkirk down into the trees until the crew manages to compensate by dumping clart (waste water) and other supplies. Dr. Barlow orders Alek, Klopp, Hoffman, and Bauer to assemble the metal contraption and keep it secret. The loris shows them how it detects metal with Barlow's necklace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betrayed_(Cast_novel)"title="Betrayed (Cast novel)">
Zoey has been a vampyre fledgling for only a month now and she already is the leader of the "Dark Daughters" and the local High Priestess in training. She has been chosen by a cat, called Nala, has a tight-knit group of friends and a claimed to be gorgeous maybe-boyfriend in Erik Night. The situation is stable when a strange string of murders among the ranks of local football players leads the police and the human media to the Tulsa "House of Night". At her first parent visitation, Zoey is reunited with her family for the first time in a month. With them comes her grandmother, but is saddened to notice the stiffness of her parents, which contrasts strongly with the loving and friendly behavior of Stevie Rae's mother. Neferet comes upon their meeting and is almost immediately engaged in a religious dispute by Zoey's stepfather. In the ensuing argument, Zoey's parents vow never to come to the House of Night again, and Neferet kicks them out.The same night, Zoey witnesses Aphrodite being verbally abused by her parents and starts developing sympathy for her enemy. Later on, she chances upon Neferet scolding Aphrodite and is shocked by this new side of her mentor. That day, Neferet invites Zoey for a private dinner. Upon hearing that Zoey saw her and Aphrodite, she informs her that the latter's visions were no longer valid, as Nyx had withdrawn her gift, and advises Zoey to keep her distance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Dernier_Homme"title="Le Dernier Homme">
The story is told by a spirit to a young man who comes upon its cave while traveling in Syria. The protagonist, Omegarus, is the son of the King of Europe and the last child born there in a far future in which the earth is becoming sterile and the human ability to reproduce is fading. He sees a vision of Syderia, the last fertile woman. She lives in Brazil, so he travels there in an airship. After various adventures there, including meeting Ormus, the Spirit of Earth, who urges the two to begin a rebirth of the human race, Omegarus returns to Europe with Syderia by his side. There they meet Adam, the first man, who has been condemned by God to watch all the damned among his descendants enter Hell, and who is now charged with persuading Omegarus and Syderia not to prolong the life of humanity, which God has determined must now end. He succeeds in having Omegarus leave Syderia, who then dies. Ormus, who cannot survive without humanity, despairs, and the world begins to end and the graves of all the dead to open, initiating the eventual Rapture and the events described in the Book of Revelation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_do_12h"title="5 do 12h">
The story is set at a time when Slovenia was still part of the common state of Yugoslavia. Jaka, a fourth-year high school student, is a sworn skinhead. He is believed to be an anarchist. At the heart of his life are parties until the early hours of the morning, socializing with friends and girlfriends, and fights. In most cases, these fights are caused by alcohol, which Jakov's team, Grega, Tork and Žagar, consume in large quantities. The consequences of such behavior are inevitable for the protagonist. He was expelled from school just before the end of his fourth year due to a large number of unjustified hours and reprimands. However, Jaka does not give up and decides to finish high school. He buries himself in books and studies all day. His friends help him with his studies, and his parents stand by his side all the time. Teachers allow him to take exams before the end of the school year and thus complete the year in front of other classmates. He now has plenty of time to think about his life. He slowly realizes that the violence is not going anywhere, that Lea, the girl he fell madly in love with, is not right for him, and he decides to enroll in history studies after serving his military service. The story has a happy ending as Jaka falls in love with Vanja, a longtime friend. So he finally finds the love he has been desperately looking for all along and eventually finds it where it has always been, right in front of his nose. Reading Zajc's novel, we realize that the representatives of various subcultures from the late 1980s, which we all feared and avoided, are quite ordinary people with their values, ideals, emotions and, after all, fears.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ata_je_spet_pijan"title="Ata je spet pijan">
The novel is written as a memory, from a distance, surrounded by a story from Latin America, where the first-person narrator Čatko fled from his native Slovenia because of the problems he got into. Namely, Ata Čatko is engaged in dirty business of forced recovery of money. He usually takes her away without any unpleasant consequences, but this time one of the recovered people recognized him in the newspaper and threatened him. In order to protect his otherwise neglected family, his father kills the person and takes him to Argentina, saying goodbye to his exciting life, which in the "new world" now represents living with a good drink, white powder and women. He can't go home, otherwise he doesn't even think about it. His wife Lola and son Tin are waiting for him at home, as well as his constant mistress, many coincidences, beer friends, bohemians, and last but not least, colleagues in the "profession" - mafia debt collectors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Čaj_s_kraljico"title="Čaj s kraljico">
Vili Vaupotič, a young academic painter, goes to London to reap fame and success with his works of art. On the way across the English Channel, he sees his ideal of love and female beauty, Sandrina, with whom he has not met for a long time. Vili is constantly losing his paintings, but his life's journey from the countryside to a prestigious mansion, where he eventually lands as a family portraitist, ends with the betrothal of the "Queen of Egypt" seeking a rich man and shattering the myth of the perfect Sandrina.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_brez_zaklada"title="Car brez zaklada">
Lenart, the central character of Pregl's novel, has just completed his first year of high school in metallurgy. During the summer holidays, he gets a job as a scavenger, for which he is well paid. His parents, initially surprised by his decision, support him.On the first day of work, Lenart meets his new colleagues, driver Jernej and scavenger Avdo, who introduces him to the work. At work, he meets very unusual people who browse the garbage for their own survival. He soon meets the mysterious Mrs. Kramar, who welcomes Jernej and Avdo with a cup of coffee every week. Mrs. Kramar lives alone in the house and wants to tidy up her home before going to a nursing home. Lenart offers to help her clean up. He soon discovers, however, that the house hides real treasures that the old lady has long since forgotten she has. They were not forgotten by her granddaughter Maja, who regularly visits her grandmother. Her visits, however, are not so innocent. In addition to taking the forgotten money from her grandmother, she also hides drugs for resale in her house. Lenart does not agree with her doing, but Maja and his friends Žiga and Peter convince him that it is possible to make good money by reselling. The "business" flourishes, Lenart falls in love with Maja and she decides to give up this indecent act. Then Tom appears, convincing his friends to embark on this destructive journey for the last time. This time, however, the consequences are fatal, especially for Maya. He almost dies while trying drugs. Her mother decides to take her abroad as she wants to prevent her from contact with drugs and society. Lenart is powerless and desperate because he can't keep Maja by his side.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devet_fantov_in_eno_dekle"title="Devet fantov in eno dekle">
The story takes place during the Second World War in a place along the Sava and is built in two parts.Before Ivan said goodbye to his girlfriend Majda, he was thinking about the secret operation they would perform that day. He then went to the train station to wait for Angelo, who was supposed to bring explosives for their campaign. But Angela didn't show up. So he headed towards the tent where they were gathering with rebel friends. Angela arrived by a later train because she had to avoid a pursuer in the city. Ivan was not waiting for her at the station, so she went to the barber shop to ask Milan for help. But there was a German soldier whom Angela found suspicious. In all the confusion as she tried to save herself, she forgot her briefcase with the explosive on the barber table, and successfully reached the tent herself. Nine boys and one girl, aged between sixteen and twenty-one, huddled here in the evening. There was a raging storm outside. Majda jumped into the tent and warned them that the Germans had been looking for them all day. She suggested that they run away as soon as possible, but at the same time she wanted Ivan to stay with her. She told him she was pregnant, but he nonetheless decided to give up his beliefs and fight the occupier and ran away with the boys and Angela. They were soon captured by German soldiers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnevnik_Hiacinte_Novak"title="Dnevnik Hiacinte Novak">
Hyacinth is a middle-aged divorcee who, one day after reading The Bridget Jones Diary, decided to start writing the diary herself. She is the mother of two growing adolescents, employed at the post office, where one day she meets a handsome real estate entrepreneur, Florjan Korošec. He gets involved in a love affair with him, which, after the "Undercover" mission, in which he and two friends, Hilda and Sara, try to expose Sarah's husband. During the action, Hiacinta meets Florjan, who later goes to the bar with the girls, where Sara tries to seduce him. Hyacinth, who meanwhile got a job at Florjan's company due to financial problems, jealously goes home, thinking that Florjan cheated on her. At the same time, she is tormented by the news that Florjan is married and that she may not be perfect herself, but the latter later turns out to be untrue. Sara continues her seduction game under the pretext that she wants to buy a seaside weekend where she could write in peace, even though she’s not really a writer at all. Hiacinta stands in her way, trying to get rid of her with a trick: she hides the money she stole from Florjan's safe in the trunk of her stoenka. When Hyacinth comes to work unsuspecting one day, Florjan and Sara and the police are waiting for her. She is accused of stealing money, but it later turns out that Sara is guilty of this crime, so she lands in prison and Florjan returns to Hyacinth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filio_ni_doma"title="Filio ni doma">
The novel is divided into three parts and each tells the story of one of the main characters, namely Helene Brass, her granddaughters Filio and Uria. However, all three stories are inextricably linked, so after reading in your head, we put together the whole story. The story takes place on an unnamed island, which creates a sense that it could be here and now. Only by the names of some people (Mare, Kate, Lukrija, etc.) can we imagine a Dalmatian island, which has been hinted at by literary historians, namely Mljet. After the shipwreck, 42-year-old Helena Brass, her unnamed daughter and a boy named Helena Uri find themselves on this island. Helena gets to know life and the unusual and cruel rules of the island in the new area. Namely, women and men are separated, the former live in the Upper Town, the latter in the Lower, and all are in charge of their tasks. The residents are dressed in costume, wash clothes, take care of food and children, and men work in the vineyards, fish market, fish. We are immediately shown the subordinate position of women, as they do not have the right to decide, they do not socialize with each other as in "normal" societies, there is even torture and cruel punishment of disobedient women (sodomistic rape). In addition, they are shown as a kind of "womb" for childbirth, as men come to them night after night, and even more cruel is that each of them is visited by a different man each time (they systematically take care of these night visits). Thus, reproduction is taken care of, everything is fixed, even a violent termination of pregnancy is allowed. Daughters can stay with their mothers and suffer the same fate as all women, and boys from the age of eight onwards are taken and taken to the Lower Town, where they are prepared for their life's tasks and work. All this is in favor of the "normal" functioning of the island, which is owned by a man from the mainland. His orders are carried out by the Island Commander. As a person who is not from here, Helena finds it difficult to get used to a new life, to rules that deprive her of her freedom and take away her dignity. However, he tries to change things for the better as he prepares women to clean their houses together, open a laundry and even a school. All of this leads to the punishments she has to endure, but she has protection from the Commander, who is her lover. Her daughter gives birth to Filio, but does not care for her, so Helena takes care of it. He also raises Uriah, who is then taken to the Lower Town and raised to be the new governor of the island, and this resists the sensitive boy as he sees the cruel things happening near him. His only bright spot is Filio, because of which she insists and who also visits her at night when her time (sexual maturity) comes. Although she doesn’t know who he is, she develops feelings for him and bows to life on the island. However, she becomes pregnant and her pregnancy is forcibly terminated, so she decides to flee to the mainland. Uri is left alone and some time after she becomes the manager, he too goes after her. Filio lives life on the mainland, becomes a painter, organizes exhibitions, and meets Uri there. He returns to the island when Helena is ill and buries her after her death. It is also strong enough then to resist past lives and memories. As well as the island and the rules on it are changing and more and more people are leaving it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fužinski_bluz"title="Fužinski bluz">
The story of Fužine Blues takes place on June 13, 2000. This day is not any day, but the day of the football match between Slovenia and Yugoslavia in the European Championship qualifiers, which ends in a draw 3: 3, or as one of the storytellers Janina says , 6: 0 for Yugoslavia or 6: 0 for themselves. The spatial framework has been carefully chosen, as Skubic lived in Fužine for some time. Fužine is a block of flats in Ljubljana, famous for its great national diversity. These are parallel stories of four protagonists, who are first spatially connected, as they all live on the tenth floor of the same ironworks. Each of them tells their own story in their own “dialect”. They tell about their work, friends, environment, love, random acquaintances and co-workers. On this day, which is even more important for each individual, each of them strives to do something different that would change his situation.Peter Sokič - Pero, a former heavy metal player in his early thirties, is trying to bring together his former klapa from fifteen years ago, but he is not particularly successful. He finally says goodbye to his youthful society, which has partly died or lost its compass, given in to addiction, and partly renounced its youthful values and settled down, settled down. The memory of the infamous fights and lewd "drunks" shows the personal distress of an abandoned, lonely advertiser who can't get over his unrequited love for Irena, which pushes him to the brink of madness in drunken hallucinations full of violence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_2020"title="Revolution 2020">
This book follows the story of two friends separated by their ambitions and passions yet connected by their love for the same girl. While Gopal, who has experienced the harsh realities of life due to poverty aspires to become rich, his friend Raghav is a boy from a well-off family who desires to create a "revolution" in India by fighting corruption.Aarti and Gopal have been childhood friends since but have a platonic relationship. As teenagers, Gopal pushes Aarti for more, but she later reveals that she was not ready for anything. Gopal gets a low ranking in the AIEEE exams while Raghav is among the toppers. Gopal moves to Kota to join reputed coaching classes to help with his ranking. Raghav becomes a celebrity in the town after he passes the IIT entrance exam. Aarti falls for Raghav during Gopal's absence. Aarti and Gopal chat online, and Aarti reveals her relationship to Gopal, who is heartbroken. He studies hard but gets a low ranking in the AIEEE exam for the second time. His father dies shortly after . Raghav decides to become a journalist and pursue a career in a newspaper publishing house.Meanwhile, Gopal is contacted by a politician who wishes to build an engineering college on the highly valuable land that Gopal's family owns. Gopal agrees to the deal, and joins the system of corruption in India in order to build the college with the politician's black money. He is tired of giving white envelopes to officials but has no other choice. Raghav, now a journalist, exposes the corruption-funded college and is eventually fired from the newshouse. Raghav starts his own newspaper, "Revolution 2020", to change the world and expose the corrupt system in India. After another expose, Raghav's newspaper is shut down by politicians and thugs, and he loses almost everything.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Dunne"title="Annie Dunne">
The protagonist Annie, who was the central character in Barry`s play "The Steward of Christendom" is seen at first living with her sickly sister and caring for her brother-in-law. After the death of her sister the brother-in-law remarries, making Annie homeless. She moves to live with her cousin Sarah in a remote farm. When the pair are in their sixties, Annie's nephew asks her to care for his two children, a girl and a boy, as he leaves for England in 1960 to search for work. The book describes the events of the summer as Annie delights in playing the role of a mother, but also feels threatened by the prospect of her cousin marrying a local farmhand, thus leaving her homeless once again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_of_Living_Dangerously_(novel)"title="The Year of Living Dangerously (novel)">
The novel is narrated by "Cookie", a news agency reporter. Cookie is an older man who acted as a father confessor to many of the characters in the novel, and is telling the story several years after it happened. He is a stand-in for author Christopher Koch, and helps to illuminate the ways in which identity is mediated by other people's perceptions of an individual and by that individual's perception of him or her self.Thematically, the novel explores the ways in which Australians began to conceptualize themselves differently from Europeans in the post-World War II era, and the way Eastern religions such as Shintoism and Buddhism offer new ways to approach old problems. Billy the dwarf's telling of the Indonesian "wayang" shadow puppet play of the Buddhist legend of Prince Arjun and Princess Skrikandi illustrates the Hindu belief that there is no right or wrong and there are no final answers—one of the ideas raised by Eastern religions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mountain_Is_Young"title="The Mountain Is Young">
"The Mountain Is Young" is set in Nepal in 1956. The protagonist, Anne Ford, is a writer whose husband is a retired colonial civil servant. She travels to Kathmandu after getting a job as an English teacher at a Girls Institute there. Then, she meets and falls in love with the engineer in charge of building the dam. It is a story of rediscovering yourself after a long sleep of fitting in, boredom and misery. The reader of this story is inspired to discover the same self, become aware of the unseen rules of society and challenge the fact that they threaten to take away the joy of using our gifts and live our unique lives to the fullest, just as happens to lead character Anne when she awakens.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chosen_(Cast_novel)"title="Chosen (Cast novel)">
Back at the House of Night, Zoey realizes that, as a leader of the Dark Daughters, she has to choose someone else to fill the position of Earth in her circle. Much to everyone else's displeasure, she chooses Aphrodite, when she manifests a new affinity for the Earth.Zoey also feels more and more estranged from Erik, because of the lies she tells to hide her relationship with Loren. During the night Erik finishes the Change, she loses her virginity to Loren and Imprints with him, breaking her previous one with Heath. Erik walks in on them and angrily breaks up with Zoey. She pulls herself together and leaves to gather her friends, planning to tell them about Stevie Rae, to cast a circle and heal her. On the way, Zoey chances upon Loren and Neferet and hears him confess that Neferet had made him seduce Zoey, for her to become alienated from her closest friends, and that he actually loves Neferet.Heartbroken, Zoey leaves to get Damien, the Twins and Aphrodite. She had planned to use the occasion to cure Stevie Rae and introduce her to her friends. Because of Loren's meddling, Stevie Rae arrives before Zoey has the chance to explain her to her friends and they feel betrayed, but agree to finish the ritual. When Zoey is about to invoke Earth, Stevie Rae attacks Aphrodite in a fit of jealousy and drinks from her and Changes into the first red adult vampyre. Aphrodite is terrified to discover that her own mark has disappeared and runs away through the secret exit with Stevie Rae after her, leaving Zoey alone with the rest of her friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_the_Dead_(Cornwell_novel)"title="Book of the Dead (Cornwell novel)">
Kay Scarpetta has started a private practice in South Carolina. She is called to Rome to consult in the murder investigation of teenage American tennis star Drew Martin. When in Rome, Kay becomes engaged to her longtime lover Benton Wesley, an occurrence that has devastating consequences for Kay’s longtime friend and investigative partner, Pete Marino. The timing is bad as the killer of Drew Martin, quickly known as the Sandman, spreads death and destruction from Italy to the American South. Passively assisted by his estranged parents, both known by if not loved by Kay, and his ex-girlfriend who has devious deeds of her own to do, the Sandman is an international mystery for Kay, Benton, Marino, and Kay’s niece Lucy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awakened_(novel)"title="Awakened (novel)">
## The Isle of Skye.Zoey and Stark reassure their connection by having sex under the wishing tree and become connected. Zoey finds out that she wields the ancient magick of the fey and can bring back old fey that serve her elements, prompting Queen Sgiach to ask her to stay on Skye indefinitely and be her successor.Aphrodite and Darius leave Skye, but Zoey and Stark decide to stay a little longer while Stark recuperates. Zoey continuously senses Darkness on Skye, leading her to believe that she cannot hide from Darkness anymore.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destined_(Cast_novel)"title="Destined (Cast novel)">
The book is told from no less than 11 points of view, respectively Zoey, Stevie Rae, Rephaim, Kalona, Stark, Aurox, Neferet, Shaunee, Lenobia, Dragon, and Erik.In the prologue, Zoey is seen with Stark. She notices Darkness on him and commands Spirit to send the Darkness away. Zoey is unsure about the death of her mother. Meanwhile, Aurox kills a human person. The white bull comes and tells Aurox and Neferet that he can create chaos. Neferet plans to use Aurox to kill the white bull and rule the world as the Goddess of Vampyres.Zoey and her friends return to school where she blindsides Neferet by initiating a Skype meeting with Duantia, the leader of the High Council. She gives her version of the events in "Awakened" and puts Neferet in the uncomfortable position of having to accept Rephaim at the House of Night. Next, she asks for a second House of Night under the Tulsa depot, but although Stevie Rae is accepted as the High Priestess of all the red fledglings by the Council, Duantia doesn't give a full answer regarding the request.In the garden, Rephaim is visited by three of his Raven Mocker brothers, sent to him by Kalona to use his supposed misery and consequent bitterness to spy for him and even turn to Darkness. They are stunned to see him in his human form. Their meeting is interrupted by Aurox who kills one of them and proceeds to attack Rephaim. He is stopped by Stevie Rae, but not before she, Rephaim and Zoey see him half-shift into a bull. Neferet appears and diffuses the conflict, calling Aurox her gift from the Goddess.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ring_of_McAllister"title="The Ring of McAllister">
Will Lassiter is a seventeen-year-old who lives in the town of Red Fork. When his neighbor, Dr. Octavio Perez, vanishes from the mysterious Stone Manor, Lassiter becomes enveloped in a mystery that involves the late Algernon McAllister, a well-known patron of the town. The protagonist locates Perez, rescues his daughter, and discovers the secret of the abandoned mansion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Circus"title="The Night Circus">
"The Night Circus" is a phantasmagorical fairy tale set near an ahistorical Victorian London in a wandering magical circus that is open only from sunset to sunrise. "Le Cirque des Rêves" (The Circus of Dreams) features such wonders and "ethereal enigmas" as a blooming garden made all of ice, acrobats soaring without a net, and a vertical cloud maze where patrons who get lost simply step off and float gently to the floor. The circus has no set schedule, appearing without warning and leaving without notice; they travel in a train disguised as an ordinary coal transport. A network of devoted fans styling themselves "rêveurs" ("dreamers") develops around the circus; they identify to each other by adding a splash of red to garb that otherwise matches the characteristic black and white of the circus tents. The magical nature of the circus is disguised under the guise of legerdemain: the illusionist truly transforms her jacket into a raven and the fortune teller truly reads the uncertain future, and both are applauded for their ingenuity.The circus serves a darker purpose beyond entertainment and profit, however. Two powerful magicians, Prospero the Enchanter and the enigmatic Mr. A.H., groom their young proteges, Celia Bowen and Marco Alisdair, to proxy their rivalry with the exhibits as a stage. Prospero teaches his daughter to hone her innate talents by holding larger and more complex magical workings in her mind. Celia takes her position on the game board as the illusionist who makes true transformations, adding tents and maintaining wondrous aspects from the inside. Mr. A.H- trains his orphan ward with books in the ways of glyphs and sympathetic magic and illusory worlds that exist only in the mind of the beholder. Marco takes a position as an assistant to the producer of the circus—he works from the outside in, connected to the circus via a magical link to the central bonfire, but not a part of it. The two beguile the circus goers and each other with nightly wonders, soon falling in love despite being magically bound to a deadly competition with rules neither understands.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeppe_on_the_Hill"title="Jeppe on the Hill">
The story follows Jeppe, a peasant who is ill treated by his wife and exploited by his employers. The opening scene of the play sees his wife, Nille, demand he make a long trip to buy soap. On his way, he stops at the inn of Jakob Skomager, who slowly coerces Jeppe into spending all of his money on alcohol. While in a drunken stupor, he is discovered by the baron and his servants who decide to play a joke on Jeppe. They take him to the baron's castle where he is dressed in the nobleman's clothes and put in his bed. The pranksters then wait nearby to watch the fallout.Upon awaking, Jeppe is greatly confused by the grandeur of his surroundings and wonders if he is dreaming or in paradise. He calls out for his wife to no avail. Unable to remember how he got to the castle from being a peasant, he begins to wonder if he is someone else entirely. Servants in uniforms and doctors arrive and convince Jeppe that he is in fact the Baron. He then decides to entertain himself by ordering about the servants, and eating and drinking to excess. He once again falls into a drunken stupor. He is dressed in his old clothes and returned to the side of the road where the baron had found him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiša_groze"title="Hiša groze">
Jošt's mother died, his father completely forgot about him in emotional pain, so Jošt was first forced to find himself in a house haunted by the evil witch Maya and waiting to get the heart of a little boy in exchange for the heart of his son, who was also burned at the stake along with her. One day, Jošt's father goes on a business trip and provides the frightened Jošt with bodyguard Paja. Together with her friend Izije, she and her boyfriend have different plans, and neither Pajo nor Izi know that time is running out for the witch Maya, who must get Jošta into her hands as soon as possible. The girl Maja also plays an important role, through which we learn that the story that is taking place is not new, but a version of the story of the boy Gala is somehow repeated. But despite all the shocking, unusual and scary things that are happening in this house, we are just waiting for a happy ending.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ljubezen.si"title="Ljubezen.si">
Anja and Andraž are thirteen-year-old teenagers who have the same problem; love. Both are wondering how to deal with this new emotion, what to do, how to approach the other person and reveal their feelings to him/her.Soon at the beginning, we learn that Anja's first love is Andraž, but she doesn't tell anyone, not even her best friend Lili. She decides to reveal her love to Andraž at the school dance, as she is sure that he feels the same way about her. However, at the end of the dance, he experiences a shock; Andraž does not like her, but her friend Lili, who reciprocates this feeling. Anja is first furious, feels betrayed and never wants to see Lili again. However, the very next day she finds out that her friend is sincerely in love, that Lili did not betray her, as she did not know about her crush on Andraž. She decides not to confess her love to Andraž and tries to forget him. Tilen helps her with this. Unfortunately, things get complicated again; Rok, who also knows Anja's secret, only accidentally reveals it.Because the children behave smartly, talk and resolve the problem, they remain friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Song_of_the_Quarkbeast"title="The Song of the Quarkbeast">
16-year-old Jennifer Strange is still filling in for the missing manager of Kazam, an employment agency for magicians. The King orders a contest between the wizards of Kazam and their rivals iMagic, the losers to forcibly merge with the winning agency. Meantime a mysterious party is searching for a lost magic ring. Kazam's odds of winning decline as several misfortunes strike. Jennifer's efforts to find allies result in, among other things, discovery of a conspiracy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatja_Grimm's_World"title="Tatja Grimm's World">
The book covers three episodes in the life of Tatja Grimm.Tatja, who grew up with barbarian tribes in the interior of a continent, has made her way to the coasts where there are several technologically advanced island-based civilizations. She finds her way to the Tarulle barge, a ship which publishes a magazine, "Fantasie", that is distributed as it circumnavigates the islands. As science develops on the world, "Fantasie" has evolved from a fantasy magazine to including speculative fiction stories. Tatja bears a resemblance to Hrala, a recurring character in the stories, a fact which she uses to fool a superstitious island society that has imprisoned a group of scientists for attempting to use a telescope, an activity they regard as blasphemous.Five years later, Tatja has advanced to a management position on the barge, a surprising feat for a supposedly barbarian teenager. She enlists student astronomer Svir Hendrigs and his dorfox Ancho, a creature who emits telepathic signals that can deceive nearby humans, on a scheme to steal the last remaining archive of all issues of "Fantasie", before it is destroyed by the mad regent of Crownesse. In fact, the entire scheme is a ploy by Tatja to assume the identity of the lost princess who was murdered by the regent. This eventually succeeds and Tatja becomes an impostor queen of a powerful realm. She remarks that everybody she has met is incredibly stupid in comparison to her, and begins to wonder whether humans actually evolved on her world or have arrived from space.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_(novel)"title="Divergent (novel)">
In post-apocalyptic Chicago, survivors are divided into five factions: "Abnegation", the selfless; "Amity", the peaceful; "Candor", the honest; "Dauntless", the brave; and "Erudite", the intelligent. All 16-year-olds are tested to determine the faction that suits them best, but they select their own faction at the Choosing Ceremony. Those who do not complete initiation become "Factionless" and live on the streets as outcasts.The main character, 16-year-old Beatrice Prior, cannot choose before she takes the test. Her inconclusive test results (Abnegation, Dauntless, and Erudite) mark her as "Divergent," and the test administrator, Tori, warns her never to tell anyone. Agonizing over her future, Beatrice decides to leave Abnegation, her blood, and to join Dauntless. Her brother Caleb chooses Erudite.The new Dauntless initiates jump onto a moving train to Dauntless headquarters and are instructed to jump onto the roof. Most make it, but one initiate falls to her death, and another is too afraid to jump. When they are later ordered to jump into the compound entrance, Beatrice jumps first. Reaching the bottom, she tells the instructor, Four, that her name is Tris.Four explains that unlike the other factions, which accept all successful initiates, only the top ten Dauntless initiates will stay, and the rest become Factionless. Tris befriends several fellow initiates like Christina, Will, and Al but comes into conflict with others like Peter, Drew, and Molly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mark_of_Athena"title="The Mark of Athena">
Six months after the events of "The Lost Hero", Leo Valdez has constructed a flying trireme named Argo II, for use in the quest to Greece and Rome to stop Gaea from awakening. Leo, Jason Grace, Piper McLean, and Annabeth Chase, accompanied by Coach Hedge, arrive at Camp Jupiter to rendezvous with Percy Jackson and Roman demigods Frank Zhang and Hazel Levesque. Camp Jupiter's praetor Reyna tells Annabeth that in order to unite Greek and Roman demigods against Gaea, they have to retrieve the Athena Parthenos, a giant statue of Athena that was stolen by the Romans from the Greeks in ancient times. The statue can only be retrieved by the demigod children of Athena through the help of the Mark of Athena, and no one has succeeded. Their conversation is interrupted by an Eidolon, who possesses Leo and forces him to attack the Roman camp. This causes the paranoid augur, Octavian, to convince the Romans that the Greeks are a threat and have to be destroyed.The seven demigods escape Camp Jupiter and briefly land near the Great Salt Lake. While there, Leo meets Nemesis, who gives him a fortune cookie that will help him if he breaks it, though doing so has consequences. Then, the group heads to Kansas, where Percy, Jason, and Piper disembark to find Bacchus, who tells them that they should find Phorcys. Gaea sends Eidolons to possess Percy and Jason in Kansas but they are repelled by Piper's charmspeak. When the demigods meet Phorcys and his sister, Keto, at the Georgia Aquarium, they turn out to be hostile, and the demigods are forced to battle them. Throughout the journey, tensions rise between Hazel, Frank, and Leo, especially when Leo discovers that Hazel's previous boyfriend was Leo's identical-looking great-grandfather. The group also learn that Nico di Angelo, who has been captured by the Giants during his travel to find the Doors of Death, is dying and must be saved. While searching for the Mark of Athena at Fort Sumter in Charleston, the demigods are ambushed by the Romans, but Reyna decides to let Annabeth continue her search for the Athena Parthenos, telling her that their next encounter will not be friendly. Annabeth finds a map about the mark of Athena, and returns to the ship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Same_Old_Story_(novel)"title="The Same Old Story (novel)">
The novel is about a young Russian nobleman named Aleksander Aduev, who arrives in St. Petersburg from the provinces and loses his romanticism amidst the rampant pragmatic commercialism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarantula_(novel)"title="Tarantula (novel)">
Richard Lafargue is a renowned plastic surgeon keeping a young woman, "Eve", locked against her will in his villa. Alex Barny, a wanted fugitive after robbing a bank, decides to change the look of his face in order to avoid capture. He contacts Lafargue about the procedure and arranges to meet at his home. Another story surrounding a young man named Vincent Moreau is also told via first person narrative. After raping Lafargue's daughter (resulting in her mental and emotional deterioration), Vincent is captured and imprisoned by the plastic surgeon. At first, Vincent doesn't know the identity of his captor, but discovers it after suffering a series of brutal and twisted acts of torture. Eventually, it is revealed that "Eve" is actually Vincent. As both an act of revenge and an attempt to replace the daughter that was destroyed, Lafargue performs a sex change operation on the imprisoned Vincent, and forces him to live as his wife. Throughout the story, Vincent struggles with the horror of what was done to him and the erasure of his own identity. He maintains fragments of his personality, and seems to despise Lafargue at times. In the final sequence, Alex arrives at Lafargue's home, but meets Vincent, transformed as Eve. Vincent instantly recognizes Alex as his former criminal accomplice, who was also present during the rape of Lafargue's daughter. During an altercation, Lafargue shoots and kills Alex in front of Vincent. Vincent appears to have given up on holding on to his former identity and desire to escape when he submits to becoming Eve and helps Lafargue cover up the incident.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanche_on_the_Lam"title="Blanche on the Lam">
"Blanche on the Lam" opens in a court room with Blanche being accused of writing bad checks and being sentenced to thirty days in jail to teach her a lesson. She has a small panic attack at the thought of having to spend thirty days in a small jail cell and asks to use the rest room where she ends up fuming over what has become of her life in Farleigh, North Carolina since moving there from New York City. She gave up better pay for the safety of her children and ended being unable to cover the checks she wrote, being accused of writing more bad checks than she had, and being sentenced to time in jail because of it.There is a disturbance out in the hall and she takes her chance to escape by slipping out of the restroom and making her way to the exit and out into the underground parking lot. She walks quickly out of the area and finds herself in the neighborhood to a job she had got from the Ty-Dee Girls agency she cancelled for that week. Luckily for her the agency has yet to send her replacement and the woman who comes out of the house does not question her about her apparent lateness. She is then brought into the house, instructed to serve lunch, and then be ready to depart the house so they can head to the country.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fatwa_Girl"title="The Fatwa Girl">
"Amor vincit omnia" — love conquers all, but in a land which has been conquered from the Moguls to the British and now where the Taliban and fundamentalists strive for hegemony, a young man named Omar faces a battle in winning the hand of the girl he loves. It is in this milieu that two lovers try to forge not only a relationship for themselves but also a society where peace and sanity prevail, battling the forces of hatred and sectarianism that threaten to tear their worlds — and a nation — apart.At once a quirky exploration of a society on edge and a tender tale of shattered innocence, "The Fatwa Girl", reveals a deep understanding of the human heart and its often mysterious attachments.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ōsama_Game"title="Ōsama Game">
Ōsama Game&lt;br&gt;On October 19, a class of 32 students receive a message from a mysterious sender called "King" at midnight, giving them a set of rules and an order.&lt;br&gt;Ōsama Game: Extreme&lt;br&gt;Being the only survivor of the Ōsama Game and having chosen to continue the game, Nobuaki transfers to a new school, thus starting the tragedy once more.&lt;br&gt;Ōsama Game: Spiral&lt;br&gt;Set before the events of Extreme, it is about Natsuko's Ōsama Game before she transferred.&lt;br&gt;Ōsama Game: Origin&lt;br&gt; Thirty years ago, it was a day like any other in Kazunari's small village when the notes outlining the "Ōsama Game" arrived. The villagers received orders, which became more gruesome by the day, and those who failed to comply died, like clockwork. Growing desperation raises suspicions among the villagers regarding the King's identity and police converge on the town as its body count continues to rise.&lt;br&gt;Ōsama Game: Annihilation&lt;br&gt;All high school students in Japan must participate in the game.&lt;br&gt;Ōsama Game: Abyss&lt;br&gt;32 students from Japan, Korea, and Taiwan are gathered in an island in Taiwan. Then, a new command from the King was given.&lt;br&gt;Ōsama Game: Purgatory
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grounding_of_Group_6"title="The Grounding of Group 6">
Five wayward teens are sent by their parents to an exclusive picturesque boarding school in Vermont to be killed. They are:Nat Rittenhouse, the school’s hired assassin and leader of 'group of 6'; ends up bonding with the group, tells them what is meant to happen to them, and helps them to survive in the woods near the school. Later, while the entire faculty is out hunting for them, they enter the school and find information about their parents' deal with the school.The group then returns to the woods.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunter_(Leigh_novel)"title="The Hunter (Leigh novel)">
The book opens with the arrival in Tasmania of a man with the assumed identity of "Martin David, Naturalist" (referred to as M in the narrative). He is met at the home of Lucy Armstrong, where he is staying, by her children, Sass and Bike. The following morning, he meets Jack Mindy and is escorted up the escarpment towards the plateau. He learns that Jarrah Armstrong, the husband of Lucy and father to her children, has been missing in the area since last summer.M meets Lucy for the first time at the home. Against his own conviction that her father is dead, he promises to Sass that he will try to find him. Over the next few weeks he makes two excursions into the wilderness, for the last confirmed sighting of the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger), but returns from each without success. Arriving back he finds Lucy "drug addled and confused" and that Sass has rummaged through his belongings after suspecting him of lying about her father. M again ventures several times to the plateau, and each time he returns to the house he observes Lucy's condition gradually improving. During one he discovers presumed remains of Jarrah Armstrong; in another, he encounters the print of the thylacine and fails to shoot what he suspects is the creature. On his return, he receives a message calling him away from Tasmania; as he leaves the family he admits to himself that he will miss them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modelland"title="Modelland">
A young, awkward-looking girl by the name of Tookie De La Crème is invited to attend the legendary boarding school Modelland for a chance to join the Intoxibellas, the most celebrated models in all the world. Along the way she meets a plus-sized girl named Dylan, a girl named Shiraz, and an albino girl named Piper. Together they form a strong bond as they face the trials and tribulations of Modelland and endeavor to find the truth about why they were all accepted to it...and why a mysterious impostor seems to want nothing more than for them to be gone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_(Sawyer_novel)"title="Wake (Sawyer novel)">
"Wake" is set in 2012. Fifteen-year-old Caitlin Decter has been blind from birth. The Decter family recently moved from Austin, Texas to Waterloo, Ontario after Caitlin's father, Malcolm, received a job at the Perimeter Institute. Caitlin is emailed by Dr. Masayuki Kuroda, a scientist specializing in "signal processing related to V1." He believes that her blindness is caused by her retinas miscoding the visual information and offers to install a signal processor behind her left eye to unscramble the data. The device sends the data to a miniature computer, or "eyePod", which reprocesses the signals and returns them. The correct data is sent to her optic nerve, theoretically granting her sight. In duplex mode it sends and receives the signals, and in simplex mode it only sends them. Caitlin and her mother, Barbara, fly to Tokyo for the procedure. Although her pupils now react to light, Caitlin still cannot see. They return to Canada while Dr. Kuroda works on updating the software.A bird-flu epidemic with a mortality rate of at least 90% has begun in China. Dr. Quan Li, a senior member of the Communist Party, recommends the President order a culling of ten to eleven thousand people in the infected area with an airborne chemical. The President agrees and launches the Changcheng Strategy, cutting off all telephone, satellite, and wireless communication with the rest of the world, so that word of the culling does not spread beyond China's borders. Wong Wai-Jeng, a freedom blogger who is known online as Sinanthropus, attempts to circumvent Internet censorship in China along with many other hackers. Collectively they learn about the bird flu outbreak. Many days after enacting the Changcheng Strategy, Zhang Bo, the Minister of Communications, convinces the President to restore communications. The moment they are back up, Sinanthropus posts a blog, informing the world of the bird flu outbreak and the culling. He is tracked down by the police and, while attempting to flee, breaks his leg and is captured.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7×7_Tales_of_a_Sevensleeper"title="7×7 Tales of a Sevensleeper">
Much to his brother's and parents' dismay, a boy's obsession over the habits of his favourite animals—squirrel-like creatures called "sevensleepers"—makes him pretend he is one of them. The number seven figures in his daily routines throughout the course of 49 stories: he becomes that age early on in the book, with as many presents to match; he goes to bed every night at seven o'clock; and he even eats or owns things in groups of seven. This trait even helps him follow the week more efficiently than months or years, which are both far longer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children_of_the_Sky"title="The Children of the Sky">
Two years pass after the Battle on Starship Hill on Tines World. The exiled Tine pack Vendacious travels to the city of East Home, seeking to ally with Tycoon, the world's richest businessman. Over the next year, Vendacious helps Tycoon expand his enterprise (using a stolen human dataset) and undertake an expedition to the Tropical Choir, a legendary mob of over one hundred million Tines living in the world's equatorial region. Meanwhile, Ravna Bergsndot has slowly begun reviving the human Children who have been kept in cold sleep pods since their flight from High Lab and the Blight at the galaxy's edge. Although the Blight was effectively destroyed by Countermeasure, its fleet survives stranded 30 light-years away from Tines World, presumably developing ramscoop technology to resume its journey. Ravna hopes to use the technical archives on the crippled "Out of Band II" ("Oobii") to elevate Woodcarver's Domain and Tines World to a level of technology advanced enough to combat the Blight's remnant. The Blight may yet take decades or even centuries to arrive, but when the Zone boundaries briefly shift, those estimates become questionable.Ten years after the Battle on Starship Hill, Ravna's plans begin to crumble. She learns of a faction of Children calling themselves the Disaster Study Group who believe that the Blight's fleet is a rescue party sent for them, and that Countermeasure, having destroyed countless civilizations by moving the Slow Zone to quell the Blight, is the true evil. When Ravna tries to explain to an assembly of Children the importance of adhering to her schedule for advancing Tines World, she is upstaged and betrayed by Nevil Storherte, who convinces most of the Children that Ravna is obsessed and misguided, and that he should be the one to lead them. Nevil then forces Ravna to turn over sysadmin authority of "Oobii" to him, granting him access to its archives, systems, and weapons; however, Ravna secretly retains Command Privilege over the starship, a status that supersedes sysadmin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_River_(novel)"title="The Dead River (novel)">
The story revolves around the romantic love between the two main characters, Vita and Adil, and the ill fates of three Albanian families which all meet in a little town called "Trokth" in Albania. The seemingly independent stories that revolve around the three families are well interwoven with the fates of the two lovers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neverwinter_(novel)"title="Neverwinter (novel)">
The story begins shortly after the events occurring in Gauntlgrym. Drizzt and Dahlia are in the wilderness of the north planning to return to Neverwinter. Dahlia explains to Drizzt that although the Dread Ring has been broken, Sylora Salm will make it her priority to reestablish it by any means necessary. Deciding that their best course of action is to head to Luskan to regroup and learn what they may, the two head towards the town aided by Drizzt's magical unicorn Andahar. It is revealed that the unicorn, although magical in nature can be killed. It can also stay in the Realms for as long as needed with no time limit restraints. Because it has more vulnerabilities than his other magical familiar, Guenhwyvar, Drizzt is much more cautious when using Andahar.The pair soon encounter a caravan being chased by bandits. Drizzt immediately rushes to help. Dahlia questions his motives. Drizzt assumes that the caravan is goodly in nature, and Dahlia (perhaps more world wise though much younger than Drizzt) does not jump to the same conclusion. Drizzt speaks with the merchants who tell him they are representatives of the High Captains of Luskan. Nearly 100 years ago the High Captains played a major role in the death of Drizzt's long time friend Captain Deudermont. Drizzt rushes to engage the bandits while Dahlia needles him about how the world is not always black and white/ right or wrong (this is a major theme of the book as Dahlia continually questions Drizzt's morals). After defeating the first few bandits it is learned that they are starving farmers driven off of their lands by the High Captains' policies. They intended to rob the caravan to feed themselves and their families. Drizzt and Dahlia share a meal with the bandits and Drizzt begins to question his ethics in this dark time throughout the North.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead-Tossed_Waves"title="The Dead-Tossed Waves">
Gabry (Gabrielle) lives a quiet life in the town of Vista. She lives with her mother, Mary (the protagonist of the first novel), in a lighthouse isolated from the rest of town. Her best friend is Cira, and she is beginning to fall in love with Cira's brother, Catcher.Cira pressures Gabry to sneak over the wall protecting them from the Mudo to an abandoned amusement park with other teens from Vista. Gabry is afraid that Mudo will get through the un-cared for wall surrounding the park, but she goes when Catcher asks her to. On the other side, she and Catcher go off by themselves to talk and Catcher kisses her. A Breaker Mudo attacks the group, and Catcher is infected while trying to protect her. He tells Gabry to run before the Militia comes and arrests them, and she escapes over the wall, leaving Cira and Catcher behind.The city decides to send Cira and the others who weren't Infected to the Recruiters. Gabry visits Cira in jail and Cira asks her to sneak over the wall and make sure Catcher is okay. Later, Gabry asks her mother about her past and her father, and Mary accidentally slips and admits that she is not Gabry's biological mother. She found her in the Forest when she was very young.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dark_Traveling"title="A Dark Traveling">
When an injured scientist disappears into a parallel world that is the battlefield between the forces of light and dark, his children set out to find him.Becky Wiley has a vision of someone threatening her father, Tom Wiley, in their transcomp room. She runs to the control room and finds blood on the floor. The transmission part of the transcomp is destroyed, but the receiving mechanism still works.She waits for her brother, James, and their exchange-student Barry to return home. They theorize that Tom is attacked by an intruder. After a brief fight in which one of them is wounded, Tom escapes through the transcomp. The intruder damages the sending capability of the transcomp and leaves. The children think Tom is probably wounded, so they decide to find and help him. The controls on the transcomp suggest two possible bands for Tom's escape.As a sorceress Becky has the ability to transport the boys to the bands in question without a transcomp. She sends them to the wrong worlds, however. Barry is sent to a deadband where he verifies that Tom is not there.James arrives at night in a world with a full moon. He has his first transformation into a werewolf. His uncle George, a werewolf and shapeshifter, is the resident transcomp operator. He finds and cares for James. He expects James because Barry arrives earlier from the deadband.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matadana"title="Matadana">
A young man, Shivappa, after completing M.B.B.S wants to serve people of his village. He is attracted by the democratic election mechanism believing that he can serve people better. As the Doctor becomes busy with political campaign a person dies because of lack of treatment. Doctor loses in the election and also the incumbent minister loses against a regional leader N S Sadaravalli's son Prakasha Kumara. A small contractor who had helped the minister by providing financial support commits suicide following the loss in election.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Precipice_(Goncharov_novel)"title="The Precipice (Goncharov novel)">
In "The Precipice" Goncharov combines various genres: novel about the artist, political novel, and romance. This work contrasts the then new ideas of philosophical positivism, utilitarianism and atheism with romantic idealism and traditional values. These various views are examined through the characters of three men laboring to win the love of the heroine, Vera: Boris Raisky, an artist-dilettant; Mark Volokhov, a nihilist in the tradition of Turgenev's Bazarov; and Ivan Tushin, a traditional, yet enlightened landowner."The Precipice" is especially notable for its women. The heroine, Vera, is one of Russian literature's most independent and intelligent female characters, and the full-blooded portrait of Raisky's wise and strong grandmother is no less remarkable. (AbeBooks)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bridge_to_Never_Land"title="The Bridge to Never Land">
One day Aidan Cooper and Sarah Cooper discover a secret compartment in their father's massive oak desk. There was a small hidden door in the desk, inside was an envelope that contains a piece of very thin, almost translucent, white paper, on which, handwritten in black ink, are a series of seemingly random lines; among them are what appear to be fragments of letters, but not enough to make sense. At the bottom of the page is a verse about Peter Pan and a reference to a real hotel in London.As it happens, the Copper family is about to embark on a trip to Europe, so the children decide that while in London, they will try to locate the hotel. After some careful sleuthing, they manage to discover its location, and once inside, they find another clue.The Bridge to Never Land takes Sarah and Aidan on a quest that challenges them to solve a series of puzzles, which gradually convince them that Peter Pan is not fiction after all. They discover what happened to the remainder of the starstuff cache that Molly and Peter fought to protect many years ago. They also find out that in the early twentieth century, Molly and the other Starcatchers embarked on one last great mission to find a way to protect Never Land, a mystical island with magical creatures and a precious starstuff supply, from the increasingly intrusive outside world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roving_Party"title="The Roving Party">
John Batman, ruthless, singleminded; four convicts, the youngest still only a stripling; Gould, a downtrodden farmhand; two free black trackers; and powerful, educated Black Bill, brought up from childhood as a white man. This is the roving party and their purpose is massacre. With promises of freedom, land grants and money, each is willing to risk his life for the prize. Passing over many miles of tortured country, the roving party searches for Aborigines, taking few prisoners and killing freely, Batman never abandoning the visceral intensity of his hunt. And all the while, Black Bill pursues his personal quarry, the much-feared warrior, Mannalargenna.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Victorious"title="Conan the Victorious">
Naipal, court wizard to King Bandharkar of the city-state of Ayodha in Vendyha, prepares to bargain with a demon, Masrock, to win control of the kingdom and rid himself of his rivals, the Black Seets of Mt. Yimsha. Meanwhile, in the Turanian city of Sultanapur, a Vendhyan-supported plot has resulted in the assassination of a prince. Conan, employed in guarding a smugglers' ship, is rumored to have been hired to commit the crime. Turanian spymaster Lord Khalid sends his apprentice, Jelal, into Vendhya to find out if a northerner was truly involved.Running for his life, Conan eventually makes it to the docks and to his friend/fellow smuggler Hordo, whom he met during his time with Karela the Red Hawk. Hordo suggests that Conan leave with him on his next delivery of "fish" and he agrees. While examining the chests, they feel strangely light and, when questioned, the Vendhyan merchant who owns the crates flees. However, as he escapes, the merchant accidentally slices Conan with a hidden blade. The crates contain nothing except dried leaves of an unknown origin. Unfortunately, the blade was poisoned and Conan discovers that the antidote may lie in Vendhya, the original destination of their cargo.At the mouth of the Zaporaska River in Vendhya, the smugglers question a tribe of Vendhyan warriors who are receiving their cargo. After discovering their chests have been tampered with, the warriors accept Hordo's explanation in a suspicious way. Moments later, Conan and his crew learn that the Vendhyans were planning to kill them once their cargo was delivered. Soon, an army of Vendhyan tribesmen attack and set their ship alight, stranding them. During the battle, Conan gets close enough to see a caravan loading their crates. Unsure if the caravan will be friendly or not, the crew split up, one will follow the caravan, another to return home by walking along the coast.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_in_the_Mists"title="Woman in the Mists">
Dian Fossey worked in the United States in a children's hospital until she decided to become a field anthropologist in Africa.Mowat says this decision illustrates the strength of character that made her famous and that may also have led to her death.In 1960 she gained an interview with Louis Leakey, the famous anthropologist, who encouraged her to study the mountain gorillas of Central Africa at first hand. She accepted this advice against the wishes of her friends and family.At first, it seemed that she was following the path defined by Jane Goodall, and would become a successful scientist. However, she soon became passionately interested in the cause of preserving the mountain gorillas. An outspoken woman, she made no attempt to disguise her hatred and contempt for poachers and hunters. In December 1985 she was murdered in her African camp. Although the book does not delve into the subject in depth, Mowat speculates that an ex-worker may have been hired to kill her by larger corporate interests opposed to her crusade to preserve the gorillas.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outcasts_(Brotherband)"title="The Outcasts (Brotherband)">
In Skandia, there is only one way to become a warrior. Boys are chosen for teams called brotherbands and must endure three months of gruelling training in seamanship, weapons and battle tactics. It's brotherband against brotherband, fighting it out in a series of challenges. Only one brotherband can win.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Buddha_in_the_Attic"title="The Buddha in the Attic">
There is no plot in the usual sense of specific individuals going through particular events. The novel is told in the first person plural, from the point of view of many girls and women, none of whom is individualized as a continuing character, but all of whom are vividly described in a sentence or two. The first chapter, "Come, Japanese!" describes a boatload of Japanese picture brides coming to California to marry men they have never met. The next chapter, "First Night", is about the consummation of their marriages with their new husbands, most of whom are nothing like the descriptions they had given. The third chapter, "Whites", describes the women's lives in their new country and their relationship with their American bosses and neighbors. Some of the women become migrant laborers living in rural shacks, some are domestic workers living in the servants' quarters of suburban homes, and some set up businesses and living quarters in the "Japantown", or "J-Town", area of big cities. "Babies" tells about giving birth and "Children" about raising American-born children, who want to speak only English and are ashamed of their immigrant parents, but are discriminated against by most of their classmates, neighbors and merchants. "Traitors" describes the effect of the Pearl Harbor attack and World War II on the families: the rumors and increasingly the reality of Japanese men being arrested without warning, the fear and eventually the reality of entire families being sent away to parts unknown. "Last Day" tells of the departure of the Japanese from their homes, jobs and schools. The final chapter, "A Disappearance," is told from the point of view of the white American families left behind, who at first miss their Japanese neighbors but gradually forget about them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Have_to_Stop_This"title="You Have to Stop This">
The story begins with a picture of The Oath of Terces. There is a quick preface concerning an ibis bird that stands for a quick moment, but then crosses the River Nile. Then the story moves to an event happening at more or less the same moment. An innocent man is being executed moments after inscribing a fateful secret on a piece of papyrus in hieroglyphics. The story then moves forward in time with Cass and Max-Ernest heading to a garage sale Larry and Wayne are having. Cass confides to Max-Ernest that she hid the Jester's trunk in a pit behind the firehouse. They dig it out, open it, and discover that it contains a blue ring with a picture of an ibis and a scrap of linen. She discovers that they contain hieroglyphics meaning either "because what Ibis" or "because what Thoth".In the next chapter, Cass and Max-Ernest are on a bus with Yo-Yoji, discussing their field trip to the Egyptian section of the museum with classmates Glob and Danielle, who is only known for his dreadlocks but wishes to find a "thing" (something he is known for). They meet Danielle's father, Albert 3D (cause he has 3 degrees in different subjects) who shows them a handsome mummy who was executed for some strange reason. Cass reasons that it is the physician from hundreds of years ago, who was executed because of discovering The Secret. Cass, Yo-Yoji and Max decide to hang back and examine the mummy. She notices that the blue ring that she found in the Jester's trunk matches an imprint on the mummy's finger. Principal Johnson startles Cass when she scolds them for not staying with the group. Cass's jacket gets caught on the finger and she accidentally breaks it off. Later, as punishment, Albert 3D (who is actually pretty cool about what happened) makes them sort some museum sherds NOT shards as the scientific community calls them. While sorting, Cass convinces Yo Yoji and Max-Ernest to come with her to examine the mummy. When they do, they discover it is gone. Later, Albert 3D meets with their parents and tells them that if the kids are hiding the mummy, they should give it to him. When the kids and their parents return home late, the kids virtually chat. They watch the surveillance video and notice a shadowy figure exit the museum before they do. They also notice that the man's leg has a piece of cloth trailing behind him and realize the figure IS the mummy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Emperor_Was_Divine"title="When the Emperor Was Divine">
In "When the Emperor was Divine," Author Julie Otsuka gives a fictional retelling of the Japanese American experience during the Internment period of WWII. The story follows a Japanese American family; a father, a mother, a son, and a daughter. The family members remain nameless, thus giving their story a universal quality. The novel is divided into 5 sections, each told from a different family member's perspective. The first chapter, the mother's perspective, follows the family's preparations for leaving for the camp. The second chapter, from the girl's perspective, takes place on the train as the family is transported to their internment location. The third chapter, from the boy's perspective, chronicles the three years the family spends at the internment camp in Topaz, Utah. The fourth chapter, told from the combined perspectives of the boy and girl, tells of the family's return home and their efforts at rebuilding their lives as well as their experience in the post war milieu of anti-Japanese discrimination. The final chapter is a confession, told from the father's perspective and structured as a direct address to the reader.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Lonigan"title="Young Lonigan">
The story begins in 1916, as 14-year-old Studs is graduating from a Catholic elementary school. Studs is the eldest of Patrick and Mary Lonigan's four children. Patrick Lonigan, a genial undemanding father, is a successful painting contractor. He plans to send Studs to a prestigious Catholic high school, where he hopes his athletic son will become a football star. Studs' mother, on the other hand, wants desperately for her son to become a priest.Studs seems to have a bright future in many ways: he is intelligent, popular, a good athlete, and an imaginative boy with a good heart. He is in love with classmate Lucy Scanlan, whom he dreams of constantly and spends some tender moments with.Even at the age of 14, however, Studs demonstrates all the flaws that will ultimately ruin him and lead him to an early death. More than anything else, Studs wants to be perceived as a tough guy and a big shot. Winning and maintaining this image is so important to him that he will throw away his chance at an education, push away Lucy Scanlan, and destroy his health.Studs genuinely loves Lucy Scanlan, but after spending a memorable, romantic afternoon in the park with her, he begins to shun her and avoid her. He imagines his stoic machismo will make him more appealing to her. Instead, he alienates her completely. But his self-image as a tough guy prevents him from reaching out to her and causes him to reject efforts by friends to reconcile them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Few_Things_Left_Unsaid"title="Few Things Left Unsaid">
"Few Things Left Unsaid" is about the story of two college mates, Aditya and Riya. They both fall in love after they meet up through their friends. They both were taking some time to express their things; once they both expressed, they moved into the next level in few days. They even take 7 promises as couples take during their wedding. They keep falling deep into the heavenly thing called love. Finally, a break-up takes place due to some twists and turns.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_with_the_X-Ray_Eyes"title="The Lady with the X-Ray Eyes">
Mimi Trompeeva is a young woman who suffers from severe strabismus. She decides to treat her condition by visiting a "beautification institute" headed by Chezario Galfone, a brilliant surgeon capable of turning "even the most disgusting freak into an angel". He manages to cure her crossed eyes, but also gives her the ability to see through materials, including inside people's bodies.However, Mimi does not use her new gift for good - instead, she begins to seek the physically perfect male, without regard for intellect or talent. The story follows Mimi's evolution into a slave of her own looks and social environment - a hollow person whose feelings of love are a mere infatuation with the trends of the modern era.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor_of_Portugallia"title="The Emperor of Portugallia">
The novel takes place in 1860 or 1870 in Lagerlöf's native Värmland and is about the tenant farmer Jan in Skrolycka and his daughter Glory Goldie Sunnycastle. He loves his daughter more than anything else, but after she moves to Stockholm at age 18, she stops sending letters home. The father sinks into a dream world where he imagines she has become a noble empress of "Portugallia", and he thus also a great Emperor himself. His whole life is dominated by thoughts of her return, and what then will happen. In his role as Emperor residing in the poor countryside, he can challenge the area's social hierarchies: wearing his imperial regalia, he sits at the front of the church, takes place at the head table at parties and tries to socialize with local landlords.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brecht's_Mistress"title="Brecht's Mistress">
In 1948, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht leaves New York to return to Berlin. There he meets a young woman, Maria, with whom he falls in love, but who turns out to be a spy in the service of the Stasi, the East German secret services.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trueman_Bradley"title="Trueman Bradley">
In "Trueman Bradley – Aspie Detective":Trueman leaves his hometown of Heartville, Illinois, and arrives in New York City, hoping to fulfil his dream of becoming a private detective, like his comic book heroes. He is soon told that a man with AS could not possibly succeed as a detective. Undeterred, Trueman uses his exceptional mathematical skills to invent a crime-fighting equation, and with the help of his new friends and some amazing inventions, sets out to test his skills against the criminal world of New York. He is determined to show the police, his friends, and himself, that a person with AS can become as good a detective as anyone else, maybe, even, one of the best.In "Trueman Bradley – The Next Great Detective":Trueman Bradley visits London and sets up shop on Baker Street, in the hopes of becoming the next Sherlock Holmes. Using hints he has derived from the original Sherlock stories, Trueman uncovers the mysterious methods of "The Great Detective" and uses them to solve the mystery of how his grandfather acquired his fortune, as well as helping Scotland Yard to capture a notorious cat burglar. With the help of new wearable technology, called Sension (created by Catalin Voss), a small army of drones and the inspiration of Yuri Nakagawa (the Japanese model whose Instagram he is doggedly obsessed with) – along with the help of a few new friends, Trueman learns the value of deduction, imagination and instinct, in detective work, and proves that he has what it takes to become "The Next Great Detective.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_Oz"title="Out of Oz">
Many years after Dorothy's departure, Oz has fallen into war. The Emerald City is now under the rule of Shell Thropp, the younger brother of Elphaba, while Munchkinland has seceded from the rest of Oz's union and the strife continues as Oz falls into a drought and Munchkinland has the only large body of water. Glinda the Good's estate rests on the border of Munchkinland, and soon the manor is overrun with soldiers from Loyal Oz, preparing to attack Munchkinland with dragons. Munchkinland is also preparing to attack Loyal Oz, and is desperately seeking the Grimmerie, a large tome of spells capable of catastrophic results. The only person ever able to read the book was Elphaba, but it is believed that perhaps her lineage may possess the same talent. After the events of "Son of a Witch", Elphaba's orphaned bastard son Liir places his infant daughter into Glinda's care, and enchants her skin color so it loses its green tint.Rain grows up as an ignored servant girl, but when Glinda acquires the Grimmerie and the Emerald City soldiers begin to show interest in Rain, Glinda knows it's time to part with them both. Glinda leaves the book and the girl in the charge of a company of a traveling puppet show, called the Clock of the Time Dragon. Among this show's crew is Brrr, the Cowardly Lion who is looking for redemption after his cowardly acts over the years. Brrr reunites Rain with her parents, but the reunion is short when it's brought to his attention that Dorothy Gale has returned to Oz, and is being placed on trial for the murder of Elphaba and her sister Nessarose. Knowing the Munchkins are after a scapegoat for the drought, Brrr is certain Dorothy will hang and travels with his companions – a dwarf named Mr. Boss and his wife, a Munchkin named Little Daffy, to rescue Dorothy. Rain is placed in hiding at an academy for girls, but crosses paths and becomes enamored with a mysterious boy named Tip. Eventually, Rain's father, the Grimmerie and Tip are all apprehended seemingly by the leader of the Munchkinland Revolt, and Rain is forced to take matters into her own hands.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nostra_(novel)"title="Terra Nostra (novel)">
"Terra Nostra" is divided into three parts, "The Old World", "The New World" and "The Next World" (it has been pointed out that the title of "The Next World" is mistranslated to English, and should be "The Other World"). Most of the book takes place in and around the unfinished El Escorial in the 16th century. Its main character is King Felipe II, his family and court, his friends the peasant girl Celestina and the student Ludovico, and three mysteriously identical youths, each with twelve toes and a red cross on their back. The main characters are reborn in different ages. The book opens in Paris on 14th July 1999 and ends in the same city five and a half months later on the eve of destruction. The middle part of the novel is a young Pilgrim's tale of his journey through the New World.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlaw_(novel)"title="Outlaw (novel)">
The plot centres around a character named Alan Dale, based on Alan-a-Dale. Alan, who comes from abject poverty often going hungry for days, is caught in the middle of Nottingham stealing a hot beef pie. He manages to escape immediate punishment by running away and, as the notorious outlaw Robert Odo (Robin Hood's real name in the novel) is holding court in the local church, his mother pays for Alan to be taken into his service, saving him from the Sheriff of Nottingham's vicious justice.Alan never sees his mother again as he departs that night to live in the vast expanse of Sherwood Forest under the tutelage of the most notorious outlaw in English folklore. A few days later it emerges that Robin was close friends with Alan's father, an exceptional "trouvére" or minstrel, which leads Robin to take Alan under his wing and become his mentor. As the legend of the outlaw Robin Hood spread in the coming centuries, it was said that Robin was a contemporary and supporter of king Richard the Lionheart, driven to outlawry during the misrule of Richard's brother John while Richard was away at the Third Crusade, but this is not the story that spreads during Alan's and Robin's own time. At the time, it is even rumored that Robin was granted a king's pardon, which he later repudiates and returns to the greenwood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_of_Storms"title="Mother of Storms">
In the early 21st century, the Earth suffers from a giant hurricane spawned by the release of clathrate compounds, as the result of a nuclear explosion. While the hurricane spawns hundreds of progeny, which, by novel's end, kill at least 1 billion people, two massively computer augmented human intelligences, both of whom witness their organic bodies die, race to corral a comet from beyond Pluto's orbit. They use the ice from the comet to reduce the Earth's surface temperatures, and quell the mother of storms.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderstruck_(novel)"title="Wonderstruck (novel)">
## Ben.Ben’s story starts in Gunflint Lake, Minnesota in June 1977. He was born deaf in his left ear. Ben’s mom, Elaine, the town librarian, died in a car crash. He now lives with his aunt and uncle 83 steps from the house in which he grew up. Ben never knew his dad but feels a pull to find out who he was. Ben discovers a bookmark in his mother's book, Wonderstruck, inscribed to his mother that ends with the words "Love, Danny." Ben thinks Danny must have been his father and proceeds to call the number listed on the bookmark. As he is calling, a bolt of lightning strikes his house, travels through the phone line, and causes him to lose his remaining hearing. He wakes up in the hospital, unaware of where he is. A short time later, he runs away from the hospital and journeys to New York City, eventually hiding out in the American Museum of Natural History. While at the museum, he meets Jamie, whose father works at the museum. Jamie takes him on tours of the back areas of the museum and helps him to hide in an unused storage room. Ben is still determined to track down his father, so he leaves the museum to locate the bookstore listed on the bookmark he found in his mother's book that was written by his father. Once there, he encounters Rose and they try to piece together how they might be connected.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_the_Fire,_A_Still_Small_Voice"title="After the Fire, A Still Small Voice">
The story is set in Queensland on the East Coast of Australia and concerns two men from different generations, as described in the blurb on the back cover of the 2010 Vintage edition:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Paranoia"title="Children of Paranoia">
Since the age of eighteen, Joseph has been assassinating people on behalf of a cause that he believes in but doesn’t fully understand. The War is ageless, hidden in the shadows, governed by a rigid set of rules, and fought by two distinct sides — one good, one evil. The only unknown is which side is which. Soldiers in the War hide in plain sight, their deeds disguised as accidents or random acts of violence amidst an unsuspecting population ignorant of the brutality that is always inches away.Killing people is the only life Joseph has ever known, and he’s one of the best at it. But when a job goes wrong and he’s sent away to complete a punishingly dangerous assignment, Joseph meets a girl named Maria, and for the first time in his life his singleminded, bloody purpose fades away.Before Maria, Joseph’s only responsibility was dealing death to the anonymous targets fingered by his superiors. Now he must run from the people who have fought by his side to save what he loves most in this world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Warrior"title="Holy Warrior">
This novel continues the story of Alan Dale, based on the historical Alan-a-Dale; warrior and troubadour in Robin Hoods band of outlaws. The novel takes place during the Third Crusade, an attempt by European leaders to reconquer the Holy Land from Saladin. In the novel Robin is forced to join Richard the Lionheart on his crusade and during which learns he is the target of an assassination attempt; Alan is tasked with discovering the origins of the attack.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_Man"title="King's Man">
This novel continues the story of Alan Dale, based on the historical Alan-a-Dale; warrior and troubadour in Robin Hood's band of outlaws. In the first part of the novel, Robin rescues Alan's sweetheart from an unwanted marriage to an old knight. They stop the bishop from proceeding with the ceremony, and Robin Hood, dressed in the bishop's robes, marries Alan to his bride. This gives way to the novel's main concern: the capture and ransom of Richard the Lionheart; (loosely based on the actual events). During his captivity Richard is driven to compose the song "Ja nus hons pris" or "Ja nuls om pres" ("No man who is imprisoned"), which is addressed to his half-sister Marie de Champagne. The song expresses his feelings of abandonment by his people and his sister. However, this sorrow is resolved when Alan Dale spearheads a valiant and effort to release the king.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Walks_into_a_Room"title="Man Walks into a Room">
Samson Greene is found wandering in the Nevada desert and is identified by the ID in his wallet as he has no recollection of who he is or how he got there. Tests reveal that Samson has a cherry-sized tumour in his brain and after the tumour is removed and found to be benign, Samson finds that he has no memories past the age of 12.Although his wife, Anna, holds out hope that Samson will eventually recover and remember her, Samson does not. Eventually the strain between them grows great as Samson grows less fond of Anna and bonds with a former student of his, Lana. Samson and his wife decides to separate and Samson sublets an apartment from Lana, who has temporarily moved to attend film school at UCLA. He receives a call from Dr. Ray Malcolm who invites him to come to Los Angeles and be a part of his experimental procedures.While in Los Angeles being tested Samson meets Donald, a man who is working with Ray and his team so that they can extract one of his memories. After Donald's memory is extracted Samson agrees to be the first subject to have a memory transferred into his brain. When the procedure succeeds he is left with violent images of nuclear weapons testing which upset him and cause him to leave the clinic and search for Donald.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feast_of_Lupercal"title="The Feast of Lupercal">
Set in Belfast in the 1950s, the novel tells the story of a 37-year-old Catholic male teacher, Diarmuid Devine, who is single and sexually inexperienced. When he overhears a colleague refer to him as “that old woman”, he understands that his life is slipping away from him. He meets and is attracted to a Protestant girl 17 years younger than him, who is on the rebound from an affair with a married man.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildwood_(novel)"title="Wildwood (novel)">
## Part One.Prue is in a park with Mac when "a murder of crows" swoops down and carries him away. Prue runs after him (followed by her classmate Curtis), and sees the crows carry him into the Impassable Wilderness. Prue goes home to her parents and manages to make it look like she still has Mac. The next morning, she heads for the Wilderness, but discovers Curtis has once more followed her. Prue does not want Curtis along, but before she can send him back, they are separated while fleeing from Coyote Soldiers. Curtis is captured and taken to Alexandra (the leader of the coyotes), while Prue rides a mail truck to South Wood. There, Prue finds a Kafkaesque bureaucracy and dysfunctional government. Police state tactics and paranoia over foreign threats are used to keep the regime in power. Prue eventually meets the Crown Prince Owl Rex of the Avian Principality, who tells her how Alexandra came to be exiled shortly before he himself is arrested.Alexandra's son Alexei died in a horse-riding accident, and then her husband Grigor died of heartbreak; to remedy his death, Alexandra hired the two greatest toymakers in all of Wildwood to fashion her son a new body that was later brought to life by recalling his soul via Black Magic. Later Alexei learned the truth of his death and rebirth and purposefully destroyed a crucial part of his inner workings, resulting in his second death. Alexandra was exiled for the use of Black Magic and plotted her revenge. Owl Rex proposes that Prue cross Wildwood and find help from the Mystics of North Wood. Meanwhile, Alexandra is flattering Curtis with a fancy uniform and commissions him into the coyote army as an officer. In a battle against bandits, Curtis breaks a howitzer by dumb luck, becoming a coyote war hero in the operation. He then finds Mac in Alexandra's headquarters and she shows him her plan to sacrifice the baby to the magical ivy of the Wood, which will allow the ivy to spread rapidly and consume the Wood and its inhabitants. Alexandra offers to share the power with Curtis, but he says no and is locked away in a cage suspended from the ceiling with some other captured bandits and unfaithful coyotes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Luck_of_Ginger_Coffey_(novel)"title="The Luck of Ginger Coffey (novel)">
"Encyclopaedia Britannica" describes "The Luck of Ginger Coffey" as being about an "Irish-born Canadian immigrant whose self-deluded irresponsible behaviour nearly breaks up his family".The book's protagonist, James Francis Coffey, is called "Ginger" because of his reddish hair and moustache. He is unfulfilled in his career, no matter which job he takes. After his release from the Army, he and his wife, Veronica, together with their daughter Paulie, move to Montreal.In Canada, Coffey still has trouble finding work. Veronica gets very upset when she finds out that Ginger is still unemployed and has spent their ticket money home.However broke and empty-hearted they may be, they do have one friend to count on in Canada: Gerry Grosvenor, who helps Coffey get a job working as a proofreader at a newspaper. Coffey is unimpressed once again and continues to tell Veronica it will all get better, but Veronica has her own plans for improving her life in Canada. She leaves Coffey for Grosvenor and takes Paulie with her. She also takes all of Coffey's money and most of his belongings. Coffey gets a small place at the YMCA, and during his stay there he encounters a man who offers him a diaper delivery and pick-up job.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Half_Brother"title="The Half Brother">
Vera Jebsen is raped in Fagerborg in Oslo, on liberation day 8 May 1945. She does not say a word during the entire pregnancy, not until she gives birth in a taxi. She names the child Fred.Arnold Nilsen from Røst in Lofoten, a circus artist and salesman, known as "The Wheel" after rolling spectacularly down a slope as a child, is allowed to move in with Jebsen's family, thanks to his self-confidence and his yellow Buick. Other than Vera and Fred, the family consists of Vera's mother, Boletta, and grandmother, known as The Old One; all in all four generations. Soon Vera has another child, whom they name Barnum Nilsen, after the master scam artist P. T. Barnum.Barnum is sharp but very short and therefore lacks confidence. He is impressed by Fred's rebellious attitude. He attends a dance class where he meets Peder and Vivian. After being sent out from the first lesson, the three meet and hang out every time their parents think they are dancing. The three become close friends and stay by themselves for the most time. Vivian becomes a kind of girlfriend for both of the boys.Fred and Barnum share the same bedroom. They often have confidential talks at night. Fred tries to influence Barnum to become tougher and go his own way. He hates Arnold, the stepfather, and tells Barnum that he rather would have been Barnum's father. Once, The Old One received a letter from Wilhelm, her fiancé, who disappeared while hunting in the Arctic Ocean and Greenland. The letter means a lot for everybody in the family. Barnum often reads it to Fred, who is dyslexic. Fred begins to show more respect for Barnum and his ability to write down his dreams, and gives him a typewriter as a birthday gift. Fred's recognition means a lot to Barnum. Fred attempts at a career as a boxer. Barnum adopts a motto from his father: "The important is not what you see, but what you think you see".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapphire_Battersea"title="Sapphire Battersea">
After finding out that Ida, the kitchen maid of the Foundling Hospital is her mother, Hetty regularly sneaks into her room at night to bond with her. Hetty dreams of being a successful author, writing stories under her true name, Sapphire Battersea. However, one night, Hetty is followed by another girl, Sheila Mayhew, who often bullies her. Hetty and Ida's relationship is found out and as a result, Ida is fired and is sent away to Bignor-on-Sea (named after Bignor but based on Bognor Regis and Middleton-on-Sea) as a housekeeper to an elderly woman by Miss Sarah Smith, a member of the Board of Governors and a friend of Hetty's. When the time comes for Hetty to be discharged from the hospital, Miss Smith arranges for Hetty to be sent to Mr. Charles Buchanan, a fellow writer, as a scullery maid in the countryside of Kingtown. As Hetty is picked up by Mr. Buchanan's cook, Mrs. Briskett, a young man calls out to her and unsuccessfully tries to chase down the cab she was in. This young man is later revealed as Hetty's former foster brother, Jem.After spending most of her childhood cooped up in the Foundling Hospital, Hetty is often confused, scared and in awe by the outside world. As she settles into her job, Hetty becomes a secretary of sorts to Mr. Buchanan, copying his stories as Mr. Buchanan's handwriting is hard to read. In return, Mr. Buchanan agrees to help refine Hetty's memoir, and to supply Hetty with stamps so she can continue to write to her mother. She also finds a potential love interest in Bertie, the local butcher's boy, who takes her out to the fair, on a boat ride, and for a walk in the park. Hetty also accompanies the parlourmaid, Sarah, to a seance with Madame Berenice, a medium. During the seance, an apparition of Hetty's long-dead foster brother, Saul, appears before Hetty, frightening her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bu_Bu_Jing_Xin"title="Bu Bu Jing Xin">
Twenty-first century woman, Zhang Xiao, encountered traffic collision after work that sent her back in time to the Qing Dynasty during the Kangxi Emperor's reign (in the year 1704). She found herself trapped in the body of a young daughter of a Manchu aristocrat, Ma'ertai Ruoxi, younger sister of Ma'ertai Ruolan, who was a concubine of the emperor's eighth son, Yinsi. Stranded in the past, Ruoxi became acquainted with Kangxi's other sons, including the fourth prince Yinzhen and his full brother, the fourteenth prince Yinti. She forged a close friendship with the thirteenth prince, Yinxiang. Using charm and wit, Ruoxi won the emperor's favor and became his lady-in-waiting, attending to the monarch and his family.During Ruoxi's stay in the Forbidden City, she and Yinsi developed a mutual attraction. She initially rejected him but later agreed to marry him if he gave up his ambition for the throne. Ruoxi knew that Yinsi's path will ultimately lead to his lifelong imprisonment after Yinzhen became emperor. Yinsi refused and Ruoxi warned him to be wary of Yinzhen, providing him a list of those who would support his ascension.After breaking up with Yinsi, Ruoxi fell in love with Yinzhen. Meanwhile, Yinsi and his supporters, acting on Ruoxi's advice, framed Yinzhen for plotting against the crown prince Yinreng. Yinxiang took the blame and was sentenced to house arrest. After this incident, Yinsi discovered that Ruoxi was romantically involved with Yinzhen. The battle for the throne became inflamed when Yinreng's other crimes later came to light. The crown prince lost both his position and freedom. Kangxi then began to show preference for Yinti and offered Ruoxi as a concubine to him. Ruoxi, however, declined. Outraged by her boldness, the emperor demoted her to the laundry department.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_There_(novel)"title="Being There (novel)">
The intellectually-handicapped Chance works as a gardener for the Old Man, a retired senior lawyer. Chance’s mother, also intellectually handicapped, died in childbirth; his father is unknown. He has lived in the Old Man’s house all his life, never leaving the house and garden. All his needs (food and presumably clothing and laundry) are met by the Old Man via his servants. His only personal contact is with the servant tasked with servicing his needs.Chance is illiterate. His only interests are tending the garden, with which he has a deep affinity, and watching TV. His name, or rather nickname, refers to the random circumstances of his birth, which never appears to have been registered. Nor is he recorded in any official records: he has never attended any school, been hospitalized, received any welfare benefit, or earned any income.The Old Man dies, and the lawyers responsible for the estate tell Chance he must vacate. He does so, carrying all his possessions in a suitcase. While crossing the street, he is struck and slightly injured by a limousine owned by the elderly and terminally-ill Benjamin Rand, a retired senior executive. Rand’s much younger wife Elizabeth Eve (‘E.E.”), who was riding in the car at the time, insists that he be treated by her husband’s doctor, and convalesce at their luxurious home. They mishear his name as ‘Chauncey Gardiner’ which becomes his de facto identity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Fox_(novel)"title="The Blue Fox (novel)">
The book takes place in Iceland in 1883. It opens with a priest hunting a blue fox, then jumps backward to the days leading up to the hunt. An herbalist buries the recently deceased woman with Down syndrome that he rescued from a shipwreck. It details their life together before returning to the present. The priest shoots and kills the mysterious blue fox he is hunting, but the sound from his rifle causes an avalanche. While trapped underneath the snow in a glacial cave, the priest starts to go insane. The fox comes back to life and argues with him about the invention of electricity and the priest kills the fox a second time, this time skinning her and wearing her fur. He then transforms into a blue fox himself. The book ends with a letter from the herbalist, who explains the girl with Down syndrome was the priest's daughter, whom he sold into slavery several years before the herbalist rescued her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_of_Atlantis_(novel)"title="The Gods of Atlantis (novel)">
A lost Nazi bunker in a forest in Germany contains a dreadful secret. Marine archaeologist Jack Howard returns to the lost island of Atlantis in the Black Sea to answer questions about the Atlantis priests that have plagued him. Then by tracking down the 1930s expeditions of Himmler's Ahnenerbe - the Nazi's Department of Cultural Heritage - and its link with Atlantis, Jack realises he is not just on the trail of the greatest lost relics from the past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achaja"title="Achaja">
Achaja is a firstborn daughter of one of the seven Great Dukes of Troy, Archentar. It is a Troy's tradition to have the first child sent to a military service in their youth. While most noble families manage to get their daughters out of this ordeal by temporary adopting some boys from lesser nobility, Archentar is manipulated by his young wife to actually sent the princess off to the training. Soon after, her unit is dispatched to a battlefield and captured by the enemy forces of Luan. There, Achaja is to be used as a leverage to get back lands from Troy. Upon Archentar's diplomatic visit in Luan, the girl is tortured beneath his window so that the man could hear her screams before the negotiations over lands. As the man does not budge, she is made into a slave and sent to a labour camp to build a Royal Road. In order to survive, she takes a deal made by two experienced slaves to sell her body to them for protection. One of them, Hekke, turns out to have been a famous sword master before he disgraced himself and ended up as a slave. He teaches Achaja the craft. After a while, Achaja decides to try and run away from the camp despite the risk of terrible death if she is caught. Against all odds, she manages to succeed and starts her journey which will make her take on many different roles: a prostitute, a farmer girl and finally, a soldier instrumental in a war that will change the shape of the whole continent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_(Meyer_novel)"title="Winter (Meyer novel)">
Despite having scars on her face, Princess Winter is known for her stunning beauty and kindness. Her relationship with her stepmother Levana is strained at best, especially as Winter is secretly in love with Winter's royal guard Jacin. When Winter refuses to marry the queen's thaumaturge Aimery, Levana orders Jacin to murder Winter. Instead, he stabs Winter's favorite pet, a wolf named Ryu, so Winter can escape unharmed and Queen Levana will believe she is dead. Jacin gives Scarlet a pod key and a knife and tells her to flee to RM9, Wolf's home Sector. The Crew sneaks onto a ship owned by Levana's fiance Prince Kai, who is secretly part of the plan to overthrow Queen Levana.Once on RM9, Cinder, Thorne, Iko, and Wolf take refuge with Maha, Wolf's mother. They break into a control room and Cinder hacks to display her video proclaiming herself to be Princess Selene and asking for the people to become her army. Levana finds her and sends her guards and thaumaturges to RM9. In the confrontation, Cinder gives herself up, Wolf is taken, and Maha is murdered by Aimery for having housed them.Jacin finds out he is in trouble for not killing Winter. He tells Cress it's time to leave, and they maneuver through train tunnels. Scarlet and Winter go to find the wolf-like mutations of human soldiers in an attempt to convince them to join Cinder's army.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_(Young_novel)"title="Insurrection (Young novel)">
The novel is based around the Scottish Wars of Independence and in particular the actions of Robert the Bruce, set in the late 13th and early 14th centuries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samarkand_(novel)"title="Samarkand (novel)">
The first half of the story is set in Persia (present day Iran) and Central Asia in the 11th century, and revolves around the scientist, philosopher, and poet Omar Khayyám. It recounts the creation of his Rubaiyat throughout the history of the Seljuk Empire, his interactions with historical figures such as Vizir Nizam al-Mulk and Hassan al-Sabbah of the order of the Assassins, and his love affair with a female poet of the Samarkand court.The second half of the story documents the efforts of a fictional American named Benjamin Omar Lesage to obtain the (fictional) original copy of the Rubaiyat, witnessing Persian history throughout the Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1907, only to lose this manuscript in the sinking of the RMS Titanic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Whale_Road"title="The Whale Road">
Orm Rurikson joins the crew of a Viking longship, whilst still a child. The novel follows the "Oathsworn", the brotherhood who crew the boat, as they hunt for relics, including the secret burial horde of Attila the Hun, their journeys taking them through a treacherous maritime area known as "The Whale Road".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wolf_Sea"title="The Wolf Sea">
The story revolves around Orm Rurikson, a young man who joined the crew of a Viking band as a child in the previous novel and is now their reluctant leader. This novel centres around the band pursuing Starkad, a villain based on the historical figure of legend, in an effort to reclaim their magical sword "Rune Serpent", which Starkad has stolen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Raven_(novel)"title="The White Raven (novel)">
The story revolves around Orm Rurikson, a young man who joined the crew of a Viking band as a child and is now their reluctant leader. This novel centres around the oathsworn band returning to their quest for Attila the Huns legendary lost hoard of silver. A number of their band have been kidnapped by Prince Vladimir and face impalement should Orm fail to bring them the treasure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prow_Beast"title="The Prow Beast">
The story revolves around Orm Rurikson, a young man who joined the crew of a Viking band as a child and is now their reluctant leader. This novel centres around the oathsworn band attempting to protect the pregnant Queen Sigrith from the combined forces of their old enemy Sterki and Styrbjorn, nephew to King Eirik, who is seeking to claim the throne by ridding himself of the current heir, Sigrith's child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lion_Wakes"title="The Lion Wakes">
The story revolves around the fictional character of Hal Sientcler of Herdmanston. Hal owns a minor holding in Lothian and the novel describes Hal's problems regarding the appointment of John Balliol by Edward I of England as the King of Scotland. The book follows the beginning of the story of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, culminating in the Battle of Falkirk, during the Wars of Scottish Independence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wards_of_Faerie"title="Wards of Faerie">
The story takes place in the Four Lands, 100 years after the previous trilogy. People have grown ever increasingly distrustful of magic and its wielders, ever since the Third Council of Druids. The potential to once again find the lost Elfstones of Faerie could change that for the better, assuming that the Ard Rhys survives the attempt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bro_(novel)"title="Bro (novel)">
The protagonist is a young boy named Alexander growing up with a well-off family in Ukraine. Around 1918 when he turned 10 the Russian civil war forced him and his family to leave their home in hopes of trying to escape to Warsaw but they were hit by artillery fire and killed his father, brother, and uncle. The protagonist ends up living with an aunt in Moscow and attending college there. His aunt ends up being arrested at which point the protagonist abandons the apartment they were living in and has already dropped out of college. The protagonist decides to go on an expedition to find the Tungus meteorite which happened to strike earth the same day he was born. During this expedition, the protagonist abandons the group and makes a spiritual connection with the meteorite which he describes as "Ice". The Ice tells the protagonist that he is a member of the brotherhood of the light, his name is Bro, and he must go out into the world and find the rest of 23,000 members.The brotherhood of the light created the universe but made one mistake which was earth. People and animals are disrupting the universe and the 23,000 want to come together to destroy the earth and restore order to the universe. The protagonist immediately sets out to accomplish this goal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_Folk"title="The Cathedral Folk">
Archpriest ("protopope") Savely Tuberozov is a spiritual leader of a "Sobor" (cathedral) in a provincial town of Stargorod, supported by Father Zakharia Benefaktov and the deacon Akhilla Desnitsyn. He firmly believes in his spiritual and social mission, and, unwilling to make compromises, comes into conflict with his church seniors, as well as the local authorities. As a young man, he came to Stargorod to combat the Old Believers, but he gave up because he realized that he had to take bribes and denounce the Old Believers to the authorities. At the time the novel opens, Tuberozov is an old man, depressed by his inability to turn the Orthodoxy of the townspeople into an active faith. Tuberozov's main enemies are the corrupt local officials and the atheist schoolteacher Prepotensky. Tuberozov's mission of guiding the townspeople is hardened by the mischiefs of the deacon Akhilla. Tuverozov's downfall starts after the government inspector Bornovolokov arrives to Stargorod. Bornovolokov's secretary is Izmail Termosesov, an amoral ex-nihilist, and he wants to build himself a career by any means. Tuberozov makes the speech, accusing the local officials of religious hypocrisy, exploiting peasants and abusing the rural areas. Termosesov denounces Tuberozov to the authorities as a dangerous revolutionary. Tuberozov gets removed from his post, falls ill and dies. Akhilla tries to defend the memory of his teacher, but dies himself in a freak accident. Father Zakharia dies of natural causes soon afterwards.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Lectures_About_Loneliness"title="Six Lectures About Loneliness">
In the book the author splits loneliness into six parts, the flesh, language, revolution, thinking, ethics, and violence. Hsun believes that loneliness is necessary, but that the fear of it could make things worse. The author also challenges the concept of language meanings, saying that words can be ignored or misinterpreted by others, contributing to the feeling of loneliness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_Cure"title="The Death Cure">
After being held in solitary confinement, Thomas is eventually released by Janson (nicknamed the "Rat Man"), who is the assistant director of WICKED (World In Catastrophe Killzone Experiment Department). Janson tells the Gladers (Group A) and Group B that most of their number are immune to the Flare, but some, whose names he reads, are not immune, including Newt. The Gladers are offered the chance to remove the mind-control chips in their heads and restore their memories but at the cost of Thomas's ability to communicate telepathically with Teresa and Aris. Only Thomas, Minho, and Newt choose not to undergo the surgery, as they do not trust WICKED, and Thomas does not want to know who he was when he helped to create the maze. All three of them escape from WICKED with the help of Brenda and Jorge before their chips are removed.Brenda and Jorge are revealed to be working for WICKED. Thomas initially feels betrayed, but Brenda reveals she only joined so she wouldn't be executed and reasons Teresa may have only betrayed him because of that too. Soon afterward, the Gladers discover that everyone who had undergone the memory restoration abandoned them. Newt gives Thomas a note and tells him to open it "when the time is right." The five then travel to Denver to find Hans, a former WICKED researcher who can remove their mind-control chips. There, a man in a black suit directs them to an address, where Gally is waiting for them. Gally has joined the rebel group the Right Arm and explains that WICKED is capturing every Immune that it can find to prepare another cycle of the Trials. He also reveals that in the decaying cities, many live who suffer from the Flare but take the illicit drug Bliss, which slows down the brain's functioning and helps to relieve the pain that Cranks feel from the Flare.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Planet_(novel)"title="Alien Planet (novel)">
Merrick Wells and Alvin Schierstedt meet a man-like alien (Ashembe) from Murashema. He demonstrates genius by quickly learning English from a copy of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. In the course of assisting Ashembe with repairs to his "Shoraru", which Ashembe translates as "Sky Car", one of the men is trapped inside and makes the return flight to Murashema. Faced with the choice of working for a living or performing as an artist to pay for his keep, Merrick performs popular English poems in dramatic rhythm. He is lauded by the aliens for this new art form, but Merrick learns he will be castigated and punished if it is discovered these poems are not original. He luckily makes his escape before his misunderstanding of alien customs casts him into peril; and he learns that even a seemingly utopian government must inevitably have flaws.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_Shades_of_Gray"title="Between Shades of Gray">
Lina Vilkas is introduced as a young artist living comfortably in her home in Kaunas, Lithuania, with her loving family. But, on June 14, 1941, Soviet officers (the NKVD) barge into her home, tearing her family from the comfortable life they've known. Separated from her father and forced onto a crowded and dirty train car, Lina, along with her mother and her younger brother Jonas, slowly makes her way north to a work camp in the coldest reaches of Siberia. Here they are forced, under Stalin's orders, to dig for beets and fight for their lives under the cruelest of conditions. Lina befriends many people and works hard alongside her mother and brother for food and survival.Upon arriving at the camp, Lina and her family are forced to live with Ulyushka, a cruel, seemingly heartless woman who initially dislikes the Vilkas family and constantly takes their food and other goods from them as a form of rent. Elena Vilkas, Lina's mother, is kind and generous to Ulyushka, though Lina and her brother Jonas cannot understand why.The family befriends fellow Lithuanian deportees including Andrius Arvydas (who later becomes Lina's love interest), Mr. Stalas (referred to as the Bald Man, who is secretly Jewish and adds a touch of humour because of his terrible advice and short temper), Mrs. Grybienė, Mrs. Rimas, and Aleksandras Lukas (a gray-haired man who was once a lawyer, often seen winding his watch, who is the voice and soul of reason).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonechka"title="Sonechka">
The novella Sonechka tells the life story of a Russian booklover. Sonechka spends her youth immersed in the world of Russian literature, living her life vicariously through the characters in books. One day, when Sonechka is working at the local library, a man named Robert Viktorovich inquires about an ensemble of French books. The 50-year-old man, who is a member of the intelligentsia, returns to the library 3 days later and abruptly proposes to Sonechka. She accepts and embarks on a new life with her husband. She lives a fulfilling life as she moves around Russia with her husband and her daughter Tanya. Eventually, the family settles in the Montmartre of Moscow. Sonechka’s husband gets a studio to work on his paintings and Tanya tumbles around in her studies and distances herself from her mother. However, when Tanya enters afternoon classes, a new girl, Jasia, enters the life of the family. Jasia, a beautiful Polish girl, charms Tanya and Robert. One Christmas Jasia and Robert start an affair. Despite this, Sonechka views the girl as a fragile individual, who becomes the daughter Sonechka always dreamed of having. Suddenly, Robert has a heart attack and dies, leaving Sonechka and Jasia alone. Sonechka prepares for the funeral and takes care of Jasia. By the end of the story, Sonechka rediscovers her love of literature while Tanya relocates to St. Petersburg and Jasia marries a European aristocrat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Queue_(Sorokin_novel)"title="The Queue (Sorokin novel)">
A man is waiting in a seemingly endless line, but for what? "The Queue" begins with a cacophony of voices and the protagonist, Vadim, encountering a woman named Lena. As the day progresses the queue-goers realize that they have no choice but to come back the next day to finally receive their items. A woman comes along handing out numbers so that the next day there will be limited chaos. Vadim and Lena end up spending the night in the park on benches along with other members of the queue. And again the same process begins all over again; people sharing their speculations of what’s being sold, others trying to figure out the rate that the line is moving, and the occasional break from waiting in the queue to get food or drink—essentially waiting in other queues. After this ensues yet another roll-call emphasizing just how many people are waiting for unknown objects. Finally after two days of waiting it appears that the end of the line is in sight, but suddenly it begins pouring and Vadim seeks shelter. He is taken into an apartment owned by a woman named Lyuda. After a simple meal and an intelligent discussion, the two of them make love and fall asleep. The next morning Lyuda reveals that she works at the store everyone is queued up for, and that his days of waiting were in vain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of_the_Falls"title="Queen of the Falls">
"Queen of the Falls" is about a 62-year-old woman named Annie Edson Taylor who remembers getting closer and closer to Niagara Falls with her father, entranced by the sight and sound of the water. Finally, as a 62-year-old, she goes over the falls in a wooden barrel, seeking fortune and fame.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Suicide_Shop"title="The Suicide Shop">
Within the aforementioned Tuvache family, which runs a shop for suicide equipment amidst these dire circumstances and instructs customers on their use, Alain is born and almost immediately begins to subvert its melancholic orientation. The family has two other children – the anorexic oldest brother, Vincent, who is the creator of the shop's suicide-oriented hardware, and an equally maladjusted and obese sister, Marilyn, who hates her life. Over time, Mishima, Vincent and Marilyn try to break Alain's independent, optimistic outlook on life but never succeed. As time goes on, first Vincent and Marilyn, and then Mishima, are subverted by their exuberant sibling and offspring, until the Suicide Shop transmutes into a novelty store, sending up its earlier macabre and melancholic orientation. In a twist, however, it is Alain who ends his life at the close of the book, aware that he has provided a "raison d'être" to reject melancholy and morbidity within his family and the surrounding community.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owlknight"title="Owlknight">
Two years after "Owlsight" k'Valdemar Vale and Ghost Cat village are both flourishing, as is the new Healer Sanctuary where Northern tribes can come to get healing for the plague that resulted from the Mage Storms. Keisha, who has made full Healer, has been pairing with Darian who is about ready to try for Master mage status.The village of Errold's Grove has become part of a Joint Council governing the area along with Lord Breon and Ghost Cat tribe. Considering the changes and influx of peoples to the northwestern border the Queen in Haven has decided to create a new permanent Herald posting in the county and Herald-Mage Anda (part of the first batch of Herald-Mages trained in Winds of Fury) will be taking up residence along with his protégé, newly promoted Herald Shandi. In order to ensure Darian and k'Valdemar Vale are given sufficient status to treat evenly with Anda, Lord Breon and Chief Vordon of Ghost Cat plan a series of honors and events for him to coincide with the Heralds' arrival.Soon after Darian attains Master rank and the ceremonies are concluded, he finally takes the time for himself to try to find out what happened when his parents disappeared 7 years ago. He finds traces in the Pelagiris Forest and finds clues among trade-goods brought to Sanctuary by Northern tribes in payment for services. He organizes a party to travel North to find Raven tribe that includes Keisha, Shandi, Kelvren, Steelmind k'Vala and Hywel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rathinirvedam_(novel)"title="Rathinirvedam (novel)">
The story takes place in Cheppattumukku village near Kayamkulam, a small village surrounded by hills and valleys. Seventeen-year-old Pappu, awaiting school results and then college, has plenty of time on hand. His trouble is adolescence, but neither his mother nor his aunt can diagnose his affection. Everything round him excites and stimulates his sexual curiosity. Twenty-two-year-old Rathi, the girl next door, has been "chechi" (sister) to him since he was a child. Unaware of the stirrings of his desire, she dismisses his first overtures to her as boyish pranks. But soon her feelings change. She is sympathetic to the boy's confusion and goes to the "sarppakkavu" (cobra-shrine) to keep a midnight assignation with Pappu. It storms and thunders while Pappu makes love to Rathi. Only then does the storm within and without subside. Aghast at what has happened, Rathi stumbles to her feet but is bitten by a cobra and dies. Next morning Pappu leaves home for college and his new life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Kings"title="Death of Kings">
It is 899 AD. Alfred the Great is dying. Rivals for his throne are poised to tear his kingdom apart. Uhtred, a Saxon who has been raised by a Danish warlord, wants more than anything else to go and reclaim his stolen Northumbrian inheritance. But he knows that if he deserts the king's cause, Alfred's dream - a single kingdom encompassing all English speakers ("Englaland") - might vanish.Uhtred is attacked by bandits sent to assassinate him, but defeats them. Alfred then sends him to negotiate a treaty with the king of East Anglia. Uhtred is suspicious and takes precautions which save him from an ambush. He manages to face a much larger Danish force led by Sigurd, a powerful Danish jarl, at a narrow bridge over the River Use. Sigurd attacks across the bridge, which negates his numerical superiority. Uhtred's men inflict numerous casualties, before burning the bridge. Uhtred aborts his mission and goes home.He travels to Ceaster, where Haesten is besieged by a Mercian force. Uhtred leaves some of his men under the command of his loyal follower Finan. He has heard of a prophetess named Aelfadell and is curious. Uhtred unwarily drinks a drugged potion she gives him. He awakes tied up, with vague memories of the previous night. Then three monks debate killing him, but Uhtred frees himself and slaughters them instead. He realizes that Aelfadell is being paid by Sigurd to make prophesies in the Dane's favour. Uhtred then borrows a ship from his son-in-law Sigurd and, masquerading as a Frisian who is going home, sneaks in and burns Sigurd's ships, keeping one to sail to Lundene.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deerskin_(novel)"title="Deerskin (novel)">
The book centers on Lissla Lissar, the daughter of the most splendid looking people in all of the seven kingdoms. Despite her parents' fame for their looks, she was mostly ignored during her childhood as people predominantly focused on her parents, who in turn only focused on each other. When her mother falls ill and starts to lose her beauty, an artist is hired to paint a portrait of her as she was before her illness. He works nonstop for a fortnight until the painting is completed and shown to the queen. After viewing the painting the queen makes the king swear that he will only remarry if he can find a bride more beautiful than she, thinking that any other woman would pale in comparison, and dies shortly after he makes this promise. Lissar comes to her father's attention during the funeral, as he notices her strong resemblance to her mother. His behavior towards her is mistakenly seen as loving by the general public, who otherwise continues to ignore her. During this time she is also presented with a puppy named Ash from Ossin, a prince from a neighboring kingdom. After the funeral Lissar devotes her time to learning herbalism and raising Ash. She also purposely avoids her father, whose actions make her increasingly uncomfortable. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuffle_Bunny_Free"title="Knuffle Bunny Free">
Trixie Willems and her family take a trip to visit her grandparents in Holland. She accidentally leaves her beloved stuffed toy rabbit, Knuffle Bunny, on the airplane and does not realize the toy bunny is missing until it is too late. Knuffle Bunny is on his way to China. Trixie's family reassures her that she is getting older, so she must try to have courage. Still sad, Trixie goes to bed. She dreams of all the fantastic places Knuffle Bunny will visit and all of the fun things he will do. This brightens her mood considerably and comforts her. Soon, her vacation is over, and she gets on the airplane to fly back home to New York City. Surprisingly, it is the same plane as before, and Knuffle Bunny is waiting for her in a seat pocket. Trixie is excited until she sees a baby crying on the airplane and gives Knuffle Bunny to the baby for comfort.In an epilogue, the author Mo Willems wishes the real Trixie, his daughter, a happy and fulfilling life, and predicts that Knuffle Bunny will someday return as a playmate for her own child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wednesday_the_Rabbi_Got_Wet"title="Wednesday the Rabbi Got Wet">
The fictional hero of the book, David Small, is the unconventional leader of the Conservative Jewish congregation in the fictional suburban Massachusetts town of Barnard's Crossing. As the protagonist of a series of novels, Rabbi Small has wisdom, an unerring sense of Jewish tradition (which can at times put him at odds with the Jewish community when he believes that they are seriously deviating from Judaism) and all the good qualities of a detective sharpened by his Talmudic training, which enables him to see the "third" side of a problem. He is a devoted husband to his wife and (later in the series) father to his two children Jonathan and Hepsibah. Small's logic, learned from the Talmud, plays an important part in the plots. Usually Small is drawn into the events when they involve a member of his congregation or Barnard's Crossing's Jewish community in general. Among other characters is Hugh Lanigan, the Catholic local police chief, and the two friends often discuss religion over a cup of tea. He has many troubles with his congregation and he is constantly at odds with at least one of its powerful members, usually the Temple President at the time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Accident_Man"title="The Accident Man">
The novel proposes a fictional account for the events surrounding the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, based on some of the conspiracy theories in subsequent circulation. The central character, Samuel Carver, is an ex-marine, now assassin, who is tricked into committing the act. The story focuses on Carver's efforts to avoid his ex-employers' attempts on his life, whilst he tries to discover the origins of the "kill order", and bring those involved to justice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_a_Team"title="Half a Team">
The book is the sixth in Hardcastle's series about a Junior football League and features recurring characters Nick Abel- Smith (United! 1973, Away from Home (1974) and Lester Rowan (Away from Home). The book follows the story of Abel-Smith and fellow young footballer Steve Sewell as they attempt to overcome the humiliation of being dropped from their respective teams ahead of a five-a-side tournament. Joining forces they create a new team, The Swifts, and, after overcoming a series of obstacles, including getting Steve from Manchester back to their home town without his parents' knowledge, enter the tournament and finally get the opportunity to take on their former teammates and prove their worth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_First_Sight_(novel)"title="At First Sight (novel)">
"At First Sight" begins after Jeremy's proposal. In New York City Lexie and Jeremy are preparing to move Jeremy to their future home, Boone Creek. Lexie is making Jeremy keep the baby a secret from his family and friends and the residents of Boone Creek until after the wedding, because she doesn't want people to get the wrong impression of why he and Lexie have decided to get married after only a few weeks of knowing each other. The only people that know of the pregnancy are Jeremy's long time best friend Alvin, and Lexie's grandmother, Doris.When Jeremy and Lexie return to Boone Creek, Jeremy finds himself unable to find the inspiration to write any new columns for his magazine. This adds to the stress of buying a new house for his new family and having a child on the way. Doris tries to help Jeremy with this problem by giving him her book. Doris is the town psychic and has the specialty of predicting the sex of a newborn baby, and records it all in her book. Doris suggests that Jeremy try to write about the journal for a new column.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_into_the_Night"title="Walking into the Night">
For twenty years Christian Benediktsson has led a quiet life as the butler to William Randolph Hearst, the greatest newspaper magnate in the world. His days are filled with the rituals of Hearst’s life and the demands of running a grand household. But in his most private thoughts and memories, he relives another life: once a husband and father in Iceland, he abandoned his family for an actress in New York, where his affair ended in death and financial ruin. Retreating from his previous existence, he ended up at Hearst’s castle in California. No one else knows the secret of the man he once was—husband, father, businessman, lover—and, ultimately, even he will choose to forget that this person ever existed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Survivor_(Cain_novel)"title="The Survivor (Cain novel)">
The novel opens with Samuel Carver masquerading as a maintenance man. He sabotages the executive jet of wealthy Texan businessman Waylon McCabe. The sabotage fails and McCabe begins to suspect that he was the target of an assassination as opposed to a victim of a freak accident. The novel then jumps forward to continue the story of Cain's first novel, "The Accident Man". Carver is recovering in a Swiss hospital and attempting to regain memories lost during the torture by that book's villain.The story centres around McCabe's attempt to obtain a lost Russian suitcase nuke in an effort to instigate a nuclear holocaust that would bring about the rapture; Carver aims to stop him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Troff's_Cylinder"title="Van Troff's Cylinder">
The plot covers a story of a group of astronauts who are approaching Earth after a 200-year-long journey on a long-distance spaceship called "Helios". Instead of reaching Earth, they are communicated by people living in the Moon's underground colony, and convinced to land there. After landing they get isolated, and they quickly find out that the colony is ruled by an authoritarian regime, which tends to control all the people living there by means of censorship from one hand, and denunciation from the other one. Also, to make the colony's population stable, there is strict birth control there, and people over the age of 60 get "retired", which in fact means senicide.The colony's officials give vague explanations to the reason on why "Helios" has been diverted to land on the Moon instead of on its original destination, Earth. Initially it is only said that it is "not feasible", or "pointless" to go to Earth now. Gradually "Helios"' crew find out that the Earth's population underwent some process of degeneration (the cause, however, not being revealed), that the Earth's inhabitants are expected to die out quickly, and that the Moon colonies were constructed as a sort of asylum for the non-degenerated part of humanity, which is also expected to recolonize Earth when the crisis will have ended. The crew, however, can already see that the Moon's inhabitants are undergoing some degeneration process as well (skeletal, due to lighter gravity on the Moon, but also mental due to living permanently underground, which leads to chronic agoraphobia) and this finding in turn casts doubts on the planned recolonization. Also, they find out that even the regime itself does not know about the current situation on the Earth, because any bilateral communication was cut long time ago.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin_(Cain_novel)"title="Assassin (Cain novel)">
This novel takes place twelve years after the previous Samuel Carver novel, "The Survivor", with Carver having spent the intervening years as a security consultant. The plot of the novel centres on a copycat killer attempting to implicate Carver in the assassination of America's first black president.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentines_(short_story_collection)"title="Valentines (short story collection)">
The twelve stories in "Valentines" are linked by the months of the year. Each brisk story captures the most candid moments between spouses, family members, and lovers—moments when dangerous feelings surge to the surface and everything changes. A wife realizes her closest confidante is much more than that. A father tries to dress his new lover in the clothing of his late wife. A woman, watching her son and husband from afar, sees something she can never forget.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restoration_(Ólafsson_novel)"title="Restoration (Ólafsson novel)">
A sweeping story of love tested by the terrors and tragedies of war set in the gorgeous hills of Tuscany in the 1940s.Having grown up in an exclusive circle of British ex-pats in Florence in the 1920s, Alice shocks everyone when she marries Claudio, the son of a minor landowner, and moves to San Martino, a crumbling villa in Tuscany. Settling into their new paradise, husband and wife begin to build their future, restoring San Martino and giving birth to a son.But as time passes, Alice grows lonely, a restlessness that leads her into a heady social swirl of wartime Rome and a reckless affair that will have devastating consequences. While she spends time with her lover in Rome, Alice’s young son falls ill and dies, widening the emotional chasm between her and her husband—and leaving her vulnerable to the machinations of a nefarious art dealer who ensnares her in a dangerous and deadly scheme.Returning to San Martino, Alice yearns for forgiveness. But before she can begin to make amends, Claudio disappears, and the encroaching fighting threatens to destroy everything they have built. Caught between loyalists and resisters, cruel German forces and desperate Allied troops, Alice valiantly struggles to survive, hoping the life and love she lost can one day be restored.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Answer_from_Limbo"title="An Answer from Limbo">
The central character in the book is Brendan Tierney, a young Irish writer living in New York City with his American wife and their two children. Tierney is working on his first novel. For him to write full-time, his wife must work; he invites his widowed mother over from Ireland to look after the children. Conflicts arise when the mother finds that her own lifestyle, values and sense of morality are at odds with what she sees in her son and daughter-in-law's home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictator_(Cain_novel)"title="Dictator (Cain novel)">
Ten years prior to this story, Carver was supposed to have assassinated Henderson Gushungo, an African dictator. The novel follows Carver's subsequent attempts to oust the dictator, and force a regime change. Amongst the locations used as settings are Switzerland, Malemba, Suffolk, England and Hong Kong.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rising_Thunder"title="A Rising Thunder">
The book begins in March 1922 P.D., sometime before the end of the previous novel, as tensions continue to escalate between the Star Empire of Manticore and the Solarian League after a number of battles. Manticore recalls all of its merchant vessels from Solarian space, and takes control of several wormholes, denying access to Solarian traffic. As the repercussions of these actions begin to reverberate throughout the League, its unelected controlling bureaucrats, known derisively as "the five Mandarins", start feeling the pressure from the transstellar corporations and criticism from the media. While it is clear that Manticore is in a position to inflict tremendous damage to the League economy, the Mandarins are not willing to pay the political and diplomatic price of taking responsibility for the actions of the League Navy, and continue to believe in the League Navy's technological superiority over the mere "neobarbs" of the Star Empire. They support Admiral Rajampet's planned invasion of the Manticore System, despite the risk that failure would make them look even weaker.In the meantime, Captain Anton Zilwicki and Agent Victor Cachat arrive on Haven and present to President Eloise Pritchart their evidence of Mesan involvement in the assassinations that triggered the resumption of hostilities between Haven and Manticore. Upon hearing this and supporting information from a Mesan defector, Dr. Herlander Simões, Pritchart sets out on an unprecedented state visit to Manticore. The evidence is presented to a reluctant Empress Elizabeth, who is finally convinced that Haven is no longer the enemy and agrees not only to negotiate a peace treaty but to accept Pritchart's offer of military alliance against the upcoming League attack (a "re-run" of the same scene from "Mission of Honor"). Hearing about this visit and the intelligence Zilwicki and Cachat brought with them regarding Mesa's plans, the Beowulf government joins the new "Grand Alliance". Shortly afterward, Protector Benjamin Mayhew arrives from Grayson to participate in the peace talks and to represent the other members of the Manticoran Alliance. The Sphinxian treecats, of whom Honor's companion Nimitz is one, communicate to Honor their ability to detect the instant when a Mesan nanotech victim is triggered and offer to help defend the humans against it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enchanted_Wanderer"title="The Enchanted Wanderer">
The novel doesn't have a coherent plot. Instead, it consists of various episodes of Flyagin's life, told by him to strangers he met. The protagonist, Ivan Flyagin, has been "promised to God" by his mother but refused to join the monastery as a young man, ignoring all the "signs", allegedly pointing him the way. The rest of his life, full of wandering, he sees as a "punishment" for this, and after all becomes a monk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carver_(novel)"title="Carver (novel)">
The central character, Samuel Carver, is an ex-assassin. The story focuses on an unknown group who are attempting to bring about the financial crisis of 2007–2008, after having caused the collapse of the Lehman Brothers financial institution, and Carver is hired to stop them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_by_Family"title="Murder by Family">
"Murder by Family" chronicles Thomas Bartlett Whitaker's attempts to have a hitman murder his parents and brother. His mother Tricia and brother Kevin died in the shootings on 10 December 2003, but his father Kent, though shot, survived.The book follows Kent Whitaker's spiritual journey of healing and forgiveness for his son. Kent tells of also forgiving his son's two accomplices: Chris Brashear, the hitman and Steve Champagne, his getaway driver.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_I_Fall"title="Before I Fall">
The story begins on a seemingly normal day for the popular 17-year-old Samantha "Sam" Kingston. On February 12, known as "Cupid's Day," Sam goes about her day as normal with her three best childhood friends: Elody, Lindsay, and Ally. That night, Sam attends the party of Kent McFuller, an unpopular boy at their high school who used to be her best friend, but Sam now treats him badly despite them both knowing he has romantic feelings for her. Sam was supposed to have sex that night with her boyfriend, Rob, but he is too drunk. Juliet Sykes, a girl bullied by Sam and her best friends since elementary school, attends the party and calls Sam and her friends "Bitches." Sam's friends react to the accusation by pouring alcoholic beverages on Juliet, calling her names, and shoving her. Juliet runs out of the house.Later that night, Sam and her best friends drive home. At 12:39 AM is a sudden "flash of white." The vehicle veers off the road and crashes into a tree. Sam is killed instantaneously.The "next morning," Sam wakes up, and later, her sister comes to tell her to get ready for school, because she is going to be late. Sam tells her sister its Saturday, but then is confused to find that it is still February 12 on her clock - and that the day has magically restarted. She goes through the day in a confused fog and watches as the same events repeat themselves. However, that night, upon driving home, Sam warns Lindsay, who is driving, to be careful. Lindsay shrugs her off, and Sam watches nervously as the car's clock turns to 12:39. They crash, and she dies just like the previous day. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_(novel)"title="Submarine (novel)">
"Submarine" was marketed as "a tale of mock GCSEs, sex and death." The novel is a coming-of-age story narrated by fifteen-year-old Oliver Tate, who records with comedy and anguish his relationship with his girlfriend and his lop-sided view of the strains on his parents' marriage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King's_Dragon"title="The King's Dragon">
The Doctor, Amy and Rory arrive in the city-state of Geath, where it appears that everyone is happy and rich. However, they discover that there are secrets and creatures hidden, as well as a metal dragon that oozes gold. A Herald appears demanding the return of her treasure and a battle for possession of the treasure begins. The Doctor, Amy and Rory must save the people of the city before they are destroyed by the war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pagan_Religions_of_the_Ancient_British_Isles"title="The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles">
In this work, Hutton attempted to "set out what is at present known about the religious beliefs and practices of the British Isles before their conversion to Christianity. The term 'pagan' is used as a convenient shorthand for those beliefs and practices, and is employed in the title merely to absolve the book from any need to discuss early Christianity itself."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triumph_of_the_Moon"title="The Triumph of the Moon">
Opening with a preface in which Hutton explains his purpose in writing the book, the first half of the work, which is titled 'Macrocosm', deals with the various influences which existed in 19th and early 20th century Britain that played a part in the development of Wicca.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_Nine"title="The Rise of Nine">
Marina and Six, along with Ella (previously unknown member of the Garde) and Crayton (her Cêpan) are on a plane heading towards India, where they hope to find another member of the Garde: Number Eight. As soon as they land at the New Delhi airport they are picked up by men who worship Eight as they believe him to be the reincarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu (it is later revealed that he appeared to them in the form of Vishnu, thanks to his shape-shifting abilities). They plan to take the four to the summit of a mountain in the Himalayas, which is where Eight has made his home. However, before they reach him, they were ambushed by soldiers of the Lord's Resistance Front, an organization of people who want to kill Eight and all of those associated with him. After defeating their attackers and reaching the mountain, Six, Seven and Ten have to face three of Vishnu's avatars, which are used as a way of testing whether they are really members of the Garde.Once Number Eight realizes that they are Loric, he tells them his story; his Cêpan Reynolds was killed by Mogadorians after being betrayed by the love of his life, a human named Lola. During this same attack, Eight's chest was taken by the Mogadorians (Marina finds it afterwards). Eight has been living in the Himalayas since. They discover that one of Eight's legacies is the ability to teleport, which they plan to use to reach New Mexico, where they can easily make their way to Number Four.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wroniec_(book)"title="Wroniec (book)">
The book tells a fantasy-like story of a young boy during the martial law in Poland of December 1981. Adaś, a little boy, falls ill around the time that martial law is declared. After he wakes, he witnesses the kidnapping of most of his family and the wounding of his mother by the eponymous Wroniec ("Crowman", a pun on the nickname of WRON and General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who orchestrated the martial law). Together with an old worker, Jan Beton, Adaś sets out to look for his family. Outside his house, the town is gray, as the Graying Machine tries to sap energy from everyone. He will have to face many opponents, such as the Milipants, the Double Agents, the Queue and other monsters. He will be aided by the opposition, led by the Most Stubborn Electrician (an allusion to Lech Wałęsa).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stone_Cutter"title="The Stone Cutter">
Near Fjällbacka the corpse of seven-year-old Sara is found in a fisherman's net. The post-mortem shows that this was not a case of accidental drowning, because she only has fresh water in her lungs. She was the daughter of Erica's friend Charlotte, whom she bonded with as they both recently had children. The parents of the dead child live with the maternal grandmother, Lilian, an acerbic hag engaged in a never-ending battle with her 'Neighbour from Hell' Kaj, who has built a new domicile next door to her profound chagrin; Kaj has a reclusive autistic son, Morgan, who spends many hours isolated in his room working on his computer; suspicions begins to point to him as the possible murderer, particularly as he had seen and spoken to the child on the day they died. Patrik would prefer to work on the case with his colleague Martin, but instead the less competent Ernst Lundgren is assigned as his partner. While they're interrogating suspects and witnesses another baby is found with ashes in its mouth, but still alive.On the personal front Erika and Patrik are raising their baby Maja, with interference from Patrik's mother Kristina. Chief Inspector Mellberg, divorced, tries to bond with his difficult teenage son Simon, who is staying with him for a while.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_(novel)"title="Arrival (novel)">
Luke Hunter moves with his mother, Emily, to Phoenix, are greeted by Aaron Ketterley and Bruce Calvin and escorted to their new house. Luke discovers there is no phone or internet reception and bicycles are the main mode of transportion. The next morning, Luke is taken to his new school, given a laptop and introduced to Peter Weir, who Luke soon befriends. Peter shows Luke to his locker. The order of the lockers is done by the order of arrival of students, his being the last. In their first class of the day, Luke is introduced to Mike, Cat and Tank who were Peter's old friends and Jordan, the last person to move to Phoenix.When Luke gets home, he finds a USB flash drive inside with the initials 'JB' etched onto it. He opens it on his new laptop and sees a random code of letters. There is only one suspect he can think of with those initials: Jordan Burke. Luke is viciously confronted by Jordan who was also given a USB with the initials 'LH' etched onto it. Peter suspects the number combinations from both USBs are a two parts of a bigger file. The next day before school, Luke and Jordan watch a recorded message of Ketterley and Calvin discussing the Cooperative's plot to wipe out the world outside of Phoenix in 100 days' time with an unknown called "Tabitha".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivers_of_London_(novel)"title="Rivers of London (novel)">
The novel centres on the adventures of Peter Grant, a young officer in the Metropolitan Police; who, following an unexpected encounter with a ghost, is recruited into the small branch of the Met that deals with magic and the supernatural.Peter Grant, having become the first English apprentice wizard in over seventy years, must immediately deal with two different but ultimately related cases. In one he must find what is possessing ordinary people and turning them into vicious killers, and in the second he must broker a peace between the two warring gods of the River Thames and their respective families.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Likeness"title="The Likeness">
The story follows the efforts of detective Cassie Maddox to determine the circumstances surrounding the death of Lexie Madison, a young woman who is her doppelgänger. The dead woman not only resembles Cassie but also was living under an alias the detective used in an earlier undercover assignment. A senior police officer, Frank Mackey, convinces Cassie to impersonate the dead woman to investigate her death and to discover who she really was.As the investigation proceeds, Cassie becomes consumed by her impersonation of the murder victim. She forms deep bonds with the dead girl’s four housemates, who are suspects in the murder. Boundaries begin to blur between Cassie's real and undercover identities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_(novel)"title="Rubber (novel)">
The story traces the rise and fall of the Peruvattar family, rubber plantation owners based in the Kanyakumari Nanjil district in Tamil Nadu. The story begins in the present and moves back briefly to trace the early life of the family patriarch Ponnu Peruvattar. Ponnu begins life as a forest laborer and slowly grows to acquire the entire forest and converts it into a rubber plantation through hard work and ruthless means. Rubber, which is alien to the Nanjil land, provides wealth, power and social position to the Peruvattar dynasty, but also corrupts it from within. Ponnu's equally ruthless son Chelliah tries to expand the empire; Chelliah's wife Therese exhibits all the trappings of the wealthy - Chelliah worships her despite her infidelity. The last two of Chelliah and Therese's five children still reside with the family - Francis, the grandfather's favourite, is a wastrel; Livy goes to college but lacks morals and compassion. Thangam, one of the family's servant maids is of the Arakkal family, the fallen landlords and former employers of Ponnu in his early days. Ponnu has always taken secret pleasure in pointing her lowly status to his visitors. Thangam who has put up with Livy's sexual abuse gets pregnant and commits suicide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_in_Arms_(Bujold_novel)"title="Brothers in Arms (Bujold novel)">
Shortly after rescuing thousands of prisoners of war from the Cetagandans, as detailed in the novella "Borders of Infinity", Admiral Miles Naismith and his Dendarii mercenaries arrive on Earth, fleeing Cetagandan retribution and needing to repair the resultant damage to their ships.Miles visits the Barrayaran Embassy in London to obtain desperately needed payment for their last mission. He reports to Captain Duv Galeni, his Imperial Security superior and a Komarran whose aunt was one of the victims of an infamous massacre of civilians allegedly committed by Miles' father. As the funds will have to come from the nearest sector headquarters in another star system, Miles resumes his real identity as Lieutenant Vorkosigan and is assigned to the embassy as third assistant military attaché, under Galeni's command. He finds his cousin Ivan Vorpatril is the second assistant attaché. Galeni later mysteriously disappears.During his wait, Miles is abducted, and his place taken by a clone created and trained as an assassin by Komarran diehards determined to free their planet. The Komarrans are led by Ser Galen, Galeni's own father, who had been presumed killed while fighting against the Barrayaran occupiers. Miles is locked up with Galeni, who has been interrogated using drugs, but has resisted attempts by his father to get him to join the Komarran resistance. Miles himself gets a dose of fast-penta, a truth drug, but his reaction to it is idiosyncratic. Instead of docilely answering all questions, he becomes manic; he finds that he can beat the drug by flying off on wild tangents, such as reciting military manuals, poems and plays from memory. Meeting his clone, Miles tells him that he could claim his rights as Miles' brother under Betan law. Just before Miles and Galeni are to be executed, they are rescued by his Dendarii subordinate (and lover) Elli Quinn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Preacher_(novel)"title="The Preacher (novel)">
Almost every subplot focuses on a parent-child relationship: central we have three generations of misogynist father/son in which violations of young girls is almost enshrined; ramifications occur involving a parent/child relationship with a dysfunctional sliding scale.The plot successfully exposes the pitfalls that can have deadly consequences when we take an end justifies the means approach.Erica, the central character of "The Ice Princess", becomes more of an adjunct, very much intimidated by her pregnancy, finding dealing with guests or unraveling the crime daunting. Instead it's down to Patrick and his trusty sidekick, Martin. As Patrick pursues ancient leads, his sixth sense tells him the Hults have something to do with these ugly murders. Their grandfather, known as The Preacher, moved into the community when one of his acolytes died, leaving both land and property for him to disperse. Soon it is found out that the Hults have more dark secrets than can be realized. Which of this family's skeletons will decide this is a perfect time to exit the closet?In a review of the novel by The Washington Post, the reviewer noted that the "clever plot and in-depth characterization aren’t the only qualities that elevate “The Preacher” above most other thrillers. There’s also an admirable feel for detail."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gallows_Bird"title="The Gallows Bird">
Patrik (police officer) and Erica (writer) have reconnected, had a child and are moving headlong into matrimony. Problems sidelined when a chaotic alcohol-fueled party ends with the death of an unpopular contestant on a reality TV show. A local woman is found dead, apparently the victim of a car crash: the first in a spate of seemingly inexplicable accidents in Tanumshede. The car reeks of alcohol and the initial assumption is that it is a drunk driver accident. Soon it becomes clear there's a serial assassin in the vicinity. As TV cameras shadow the reality show stars' every move, relations with the locals are strained to the breaking point. A piece of evidence reveals that a pair of seemingly disparate homicides are linked, and a pattern emerges of similar homicides spread over many years—in different regions of Sweden; slowly Patrick realizes that these cases are more closely linked than he had thought. Patrick also has his own set of problems to contend with: a wedding to arrange, and Erica's sister Anna living with them—he's experiencing stress.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Over_Soho"title="Moon Over Soho">
Following the events of "Rivers of London" Police Constable and apprentice wizard Peter Grant is called in to help investigate the brutal murder of a journalist in the downstairs toilet of the Groucho Club in London's Soho district. At the same time Peter is disturbed by a number of deaths of amateur and semi-professional jazz musicians that occurred shortly after they performed. Despite the apparently natural causes of death each body exhibits a magical signature which leads Peter to believe that the deaths are far from natural.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_Child"title="The Hidden Child">
This is regarded as one of the more plot-driven novels in the series, with more emphasis on the story. Erika wants to write a 'great book' so Patrik goes on paternity leave to look after their baby while Erika writes her book. However, she becomes distracted by the discovery of her late mother's wartime diaries and a Nazi medal and consults with a local World War II historian. However, shortly after her visit, he is brutally murdered and it becomes clear that the past is still very much a part of some people's lives. The plot focuses on the discovery of a child's blood-spattered dress plus other memorabilia. Who would murder so cold-bloodedly to bury secrets so ancient?It soon becomes a masterfully interwoven plot of neo-Nazi Swedish politics, old friends with old secrets, ex-wives coming back into play, and a poor Patrik trying desperately to balance his role as a new father and his desire to help his fellow detectives. By way of a side-theme, the local police station's chief, Mellberg is talked into reluctantly adopting a stray dog, finding that this leads to a meeting with another dog-owner (and salsa teacher) who happens to be the mother of his new detective, Paula Morales, both of whom are immigrants to Sweden from Chile. This provides a counterpoint to the increasingly sordid facts being unearthed in the search for the murderer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Community_of_Witches"title="A Community of Witches">
Starting with a preface in which Berger explains how she first began studying the Wiccan and Pagan community of New England, Berger opens the main part of her book with a description of a Wiccaning which she attended. Proceeding to introduce both the Wiccan religion and her theoretical approach, Berger explains the British sociologist James A. Beckford's approach to the religions of late modernity as well as Anthony Giddens' theoretical approaches to modernism.In the second chapter, "The Magical Self", Berger examines the ways in which Wiccans in the U.S. understand themselves, looking at sociological ideas about self-identity and utilising them in her analysis of Wiccan rituals that deal with the transformation of the self. She moves on to look at concepts of gender in the Wiccan community, both for men and women and among homosexuals. The third chapter, entitled "The Coven: Perfect Love, Perfect Trust", provides an explanation of the coven system within Wicca, and the ways in which friendships are built and collapse amongst coven members, and the extent to which covens imitate family structures.Chapter four, "A Circle within a Circle: The Neo-Pagan Community", looks at the wider community beyond the coven structure, interpreting it through theoretical ideas about community in late modernity. Moving on, Berger looks at ideas of community memory and community building amongst U.S. Pagans, before examining the manner in which some Pagans engage in both emancipatory politics and life politics. The fifth chapter, entitled "The Next Generation", is devoted to the place of children within the Pagan community, and deals with ideas of rites of passage, attitudes towards children's sexuality and the extent to which children are involved in rituals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preincarnate_(novel)"title="Preincarnate (novel)">
"Suppose you were murdered and then woke up 300 years earlier in someone else's body. Wouldn't you want to put yourself in suspended animation and be re-awoken in time to prevent yourself from being murdered in the first place? This is the extraordinary tale of an ordinary man in a race across Time."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_About_Harry_(novel)"title="Wild About Harry (novel)">
In Paraguay an English Major, Harry Copeland-Smith is guarding a war criminal and in his best efforts to protect him becomes like his charge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Peace_(novel)"title="Charlie Peace (novel)">
Criminal Jack Peachey needs to find his own human narrative in the incredible stories Charlie Peace told him when he was a boy. He wants to imagine a Christ in his own image.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Stranger_in_Mayfair"title="A Stranger in Mayfair">
Charles Lenox, gentleman amateur detective, has recently married and has been elected to Parliament. Although Lenox plans to give up detection (due to the demands of his new vocation and to alleviate the concerns of his new wife), he is pulled into a case when a colleague in Parliament asks for help solving the murder of his footman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceremony_(Silko_novel)"title="Ceremony (Silko novel)">
"Ceremony" follows a half-Pueblo, half-white man named Tayo after his return from World War II. His white doctors say he is suffering from "battle fatigue," which would be called post-traumatic stress disorder today. In addition to Tayo's story in the present, the novel flashes back to his experiences before and during the war. A parallel story tells of a time when the Pueblo nation was threatened by a drought as punishment for listening to a practitioner of "witchery"; in order to redeem the people, Hummingbird and Green Bottle Fly must journey to the Fourth World to find Reed Woman.Tayo is struggling with the death of his cousin Rocky during the Bataan Death March, and the loss of his uncle Josiah, who died on the Pueblo while Tayo was at war. After several years at a military hospital, Tayo is released by his doctors, who believe he will do better at home. While staying with his family, Tayo can barely get out of bed, and self-medicates with alcohol. His fellow veterans Harley, Leroy, Pinkie, and Emo drink with him, discussing their disappointment from fighting in a white man's war and having nothing to show for it. It is revealed that Tayo once stabbed Emo with a broken bottle because Emo was bragging about taking the teeth of a slain Japanese soldier.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Hell_Let_Loose"title="All Hell Let Loose">
"All Hell Let Loose" covers the entire span of World War II, following the military developments of the war but focusing on the reactions and experiences of different individuals (both uniformed and civilian). Reviews refer to the book as an "everyman's story" made up of accounts from those with lesser roles in the conflict; "ranging from ship's cooks to wireless operators, farmers and housewives to typists and black marketeers."The book addresses several "triumphalist" aspects of written war history by focusing on the "misery, heroism and endurance" of individual accounts. Hastings concludes that whilst the Nazis fought individual battles well, their overall war effort showed "stunning incompetence".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_of_Us"title="The Future of Us">
Josh and Emma are about to discover themselves—fifteen years in the future.It's 1996, and Josh and Emma have been neighbors their whole lives. They've been best friends almost as long—at least, up until last November, when everything changed. Things have been awkward ever since then, but when Josh's family gets a free AOL CD-ROM in the mail, his mom makes him take it to Emma so she can install it on her new computer. When they sign on, they're automatically logged onto Facebook, which hasn't been invented yet. Josh and Emma are looking at themselves fifteen years in the future. Their spouses, careers, homes, and status updates—it's all there. And every time they refresh their pages, their futures change. As they grapple with the ups and downs of their future, they're forced to confront what they're doing right—and wrong—in the present.They end up discovering that they have feelings for each other and eventually start a life together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenious_Pain"title="Ingenious Pain">
The novel opens in 1771 with the autopsy of James Dye by two gentleman surgeons keen on understanding the deceased's famed inability to feel physical pain. The pair had been given access to the corpse by the Reverend Lestrade, hunting enthusiast and vicar to a country parish.The story then rewinds to the night of James's conception on a midwinter night in 1739 when his mother is raped by a stranger while skating at night. She gives birth to an infant whose failure to cry immediately creeps everyone out. Against all expectations the baby lives, growing up to be a mute boy with an inordinately precocious countenance that disconcerts everyone, foremost of all his schoolteacher, a crippled spinster who prides herself on being an expert on children.James is discovered to be incapable of feeling pain following a fall from the top of the tree. Shortly after he surprises everyone by speaking. While recuperating from the fall an outbreak of smallpox kills his mother and two siblings, leaving him alone with his older sister Liza, the only person who has any affection for him, and his mother's distraught husband, Joshua, an impoverished yeoman. Already something of a habitual drunkard, Joshua gives himself completely to alcoholism in his grief, ultimately killing himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Angel_Maker's_Wife"title="The Angel Maker's Wife">
In April 1974 there is a disappearance of a family without a trace from the island Valö just outside Fjällbacka: an Easter buffet is in the dining room and a baby (Ebba) is found wandering the house alone.;. Two parallel stories, one past/one present, where the past explains the present. Ebba and her husband Mårten have lost a son, and in an attempt to overcome the sadness they decide to open a bed and breakfast.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Live_Free"title="Free Live Free">
Mr. Free has a house which is slated for demolition. He puts an ad in a newspaper advertising free living quarters to anyone who helps him find a mysterious lost object hidden in the house. Four strangers (a mystic, a private eye, a prostitute, and a salesman) arrive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modri_e"title="Modri e">
The few-day story of the first-person narrator Alfred Pačnik is set in Kanal, where Alfred has just graduated from high school. His every day is full of complications, twists and turns, adventures and adventures, laughter and sadness. He is a boy who is bored with the speech of the principal and the awarding of graduation certificates. He likes his younger brother Benči, who accompanies him to kindergarten in the morning, but he doesn't like his classmate Fleischmance and the corrupt local policeman Petarda. There are the usual conflicts in his relationship with his older, adopted brother Best, but he also sees a role model in Best. Best is the best footballer in the local football club. Alfred is not used to comfort, as he comes from a working class family. The mother is a hairdresser and the father works illegally in Austria because he is on hold at his home factory. The family lives in a small apartment in a factory block. Alfred doesn't even have his own room. At night, he shares the living room with his grandfather, who sleeps on a sofa bed, and Alfred puts his bed in the closet every day and puts it back in the evening. He earns extra money by delivering the newspaper in the afternoon, which is why he was nicknamed the Postman. He is in love with his brother's girlfriend Bilo, who tries to convince her with naive dreams that they are traveling to a lonely island. Alfred is troubled by a gang of three hooligans who are smashing and harassing the whole town. Alfred is once beaten and his front tooth is broken. Tired and fed up with his place, he wants to go to the world as soon as possible: somewhere in the jungle or Venus, as he says. Alfred thought of running away from home. He arms himself with a friend's father's gun, takes refuge in church for Mass and Confession, but because he remembers the afternoon's football club game against the violas, he heads to the stadium with his teacher. With his first love, football, everything settles down. With all the problems that plague him, with all the successes and failures he experiences, he takes refuge in the embrace of a kind of sanctuary of football, in his temple of peace and comfort, in the bar Modri ​​e.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norišnica"title="Norišnica">
The stories represent a dialogue between the present and the time fifteen years ago, marked by great change and national euphoria. The heroes express different views and put the individual and his search for happiness in the world that limits him at the forefront. In the end, a solution is presented that offers the possibility of getting out of the crampedness of the individual and trapped in the modern world. It is a family coexistence that transcends the feeling of being trapped.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odveč_srce"title="Odveč srce">
The main heroine of the novel is Lila Sever, a blonde and tiny forty-four-year-old with two mothers, two homelands and also two loves. The novel is an intertwining of three stories: the frame story is a conversation between Lila and her best friend Simona. It takes place in Lila's apartment one morning after her return from Slovenia to Paris. The central story tells of Lila's several-month visit to Slovenia, where she first went to her father's funeral, but then stayed there much longer out of love. The third story, however, is the story of Lila’s father, which Lila learns about through reading the book The Heart of the Redundant, which her father left her in order to learn more about her past.The frame story is without special events: Lila, a perfume maker, and Simona, a top designer, sit down to breakfast and talk to each other only once when Lila asks Simona if she wants a glass of water. Simona is visiting at the request of Lila's husband Pierre, so that Lila can tell her the truth about her lover from Slovenia, but he doesn't tell her.The central story goes back in time. After the call of her half-brother Izza, Lila travels to Slovenia due to her father's death. There she gets the keys to the old house in Bled and stays longer than she initially thought, as she gets involved in a romance with doctor Sergej. Forget about your life in Paris and completely indulge in the winter idyll in Bled, making love with Sergei, chatting with old Romanian Nast, feeding a black cat and reading your father's book. Thinking that Sergei has drowned in the lake, he returns to Paris only when Pierre comes to look for her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otroške_stvari"title="Otroške stvari">
The novel describes the author's childhood in Basel, Switzerland. The story covers the period from 1928, which introduces the memory of birth, to 1939 or to the eleventh year of age, when Kovačič's family arrived in the Ljubljana suburbs along the Sava. The novel is based on convincingly presented memoirs with detailed outlines of spaces in which associative sensory flashes are involved. Very special is the author's formation of the child's mental and sensory perception, which takes place between a very complex reality and a blurred fantasy experience.The novel begins with memories of life in the "baby basket", followed by a short retrospective of the time before birth, followed by a long series of incidents of the stubborn, inflexible, bright child Bubi, as he was called, and his family. He talks about illness, health resorts and school, which are by far the darkest experiences for Bubi, about family conflicts, which are so numerous in such a socially insecure situation, about a city that is hostile to foreigners, about Nazism, which is the reason for return to the father's homeland.Kovačič's Bubi seeks refuge in the suburban world, revives it in his consciousness and attributes emotions to it. Inconsistency with the adult world, which the child understands in a very special way, pushes him into isolation, but at the same time puts him in front of challenges, forces him to search for and discover children's authentic, natural knowledge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Warlord"title="Conan the Warlord">
During a prologue set in the Varikiel Marshes of northern Nemedia, a farm boy named Lar is bitten by a snake. The scene then switches to Conan, attempting to escape a Nemedian prison. While his attempted escape is thwarted, it does bring the Cimmerian to the attention of someone powerful, and he soon finds himself recruited to serve as a body-double for Favian, son of Baron Durwald from Dinadar. Favian and Conan both resemble each other, because Favian's mother was also a Cimmerian. Since the young noble is a spoiled brat, the two never hit it off well.Conan receives a lecturer on upper-class Nemedian society, etiquette, and swordplay, though he finds civilized fencing rather weak in comparison to his broadsword. He remains suspicious of his new employer, at one point following Durwald as he goes inside a crypt, seemingly for the purposes of ancestral worship. His resentment towards Favian is cemented after he catches the lord whipping Ludya, a serving girl who Conan previously befriended, and intervenes to protect her. The matter is eventually resolved, and Ludya is removed from Favian's attention by returning her to the Varikiel Marshes. Soon, while learning the use of a chariot, the party Conan is with are ambushed. He and Favian drive away their attackers, and later get involved in putting down a local "rebellion" — which proves nothing more than the villagers' attempt to avoid the tolls at a royal bridge by establishing their own ferry. This and Favian's use of the right of droit du seigneur after a wedding, bring the barbarian's view of Nemedian nobility to an all-time low.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casanova_(novel)"title="Casanova (novel)">
Set in 1763, this novel centres round the historical figure of Giacomo Casanova and loosely follows his autobiographical "Histoire de ma vie". The plot of the novel concerns Casanova falling for a woman and having, for the first time, to deal with rejection and the pain which it causes him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exile_(Forgotten_Realms_novel)"title="Exile (Forgotten Realms novel)">
"Exile" follows Drizzt Do'Urden to the wilds of the Underdark. For the ten years following his abandoning his house, he is left with no one but his faithful Guenhwyvar, a magical Panther he had acquired in "Homeland". He is also met with great dangers that he meets with the business ends of his scimitars. Struggling with conflicting emotions, which involve his failure in Menzoberranzan and a deep grief for his father Zaknafien, he makes his way to the surface to face newer dangers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_(Miller_novel)"title="Oxygen (Miller novel)">
Set in San Fernando Valley and Hungary in 1997, the story revolves around a late-stage cancer patient, Alice; her two markedly different sons, one a translator, the other a soap star; and a seemingly unconnected Hungarian playwright named László Lázár. The plot centres on the family's troubles and the sons coming to terms with the fact that their mother will likely not see another birthday.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Monster_Calls"title="A Monster Calls">
Thirteen-year-old Conor O'Malley awakens from the same nightmare he has been experiencing for the past few months, "the one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming".At seven minutes after midnight ("12:07"), a voice calls to him from outside his bedroom window, which overlooks an old church and its graveyard sheltered by a yew tree. Walking to the window, Conor meets the monster who called, a towering mass of branches and leaves formed in a human shape from the yew tree. The monster is intrigued that Conor is not afraid of it and insists that Conor summoned it. The monster wants the truth from Conor. The monster claims to be a version of the green man and warns that it will tell Conor three true stories, after which Conor must tell a story of his own, which is the truth (the events that happened in the real nightmare).Between its tales, which aim to demonstrate the complications inherent in humans, it is revealed that Conor's mother is undergoing chemotherapy and has been afflicted with terminal cancer for the past year. Conor is isolated and alone. His flaky father uses his new family in the United States as an excuse to be detached and unsupportive. His distant relationship with his pushy and cold grandmother provides no comfort either. Conor is a victim of bullying at school and he has distanced himself from all social contact other than that of the monster. As the story progresses, his mother's condition worsens and Conor's encounters with the monster have escalating consequences. The story also mentions an alleged "Pit Monster" and "Sky Monster".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delhi_Gadhakal"title="Delhi Gadhakal">
The novel narrates a story set in Delhi through the eyes of a Malayali youth, named Sahadevan, who lands in the capital after securing a job in a travel agency. On his arrival in the capital, carrying high hopes and aspirations, Sahadevan is welcomed by a shocker when he learns that China had attacked India. It was a historical jolt for the Left movement. This along with his first sight of old Delhi, which in those days looked like an ordinary village with plenty of wheat and cauliflower fields forms the first chapters of the novel. In the following chapters, several historical incidents such as Indo-Pak Wars of 1965 and 1971, The 1975 Emergency, assassination of Indira Gandhi and the subsequent anti-Sikh riots, and their impact on the people of Delhi have been tellingly narrated. The novel ends with a dream sequence in which a dying Sahadevan sees hundred thousands of beggars storm the Parliament.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabies_(novel)"title="Rabies (novel)">
Set in the early 1980s, during the height of Cold War, the novel follows a series of parallel storylines. The situation at Heathrow Airport is tense, due to the arrival of the Soviet delegation, led by the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs Artamonov. Heathrow VIP lounge is where they and British Foreign Minister Sir Geoffrey Drummond, are to conclude the signing of a new Anglo-Soviet treaty.Whilst tight security is being deployed by the head of the Aviation Security, Major Lawford, along with his colleagues: Colonels Donovan of the MI6 and Rasimov of the KGB, the Heathrow Medical Centre, headed by Dr. Luke Komarovsky, becomes informed that a nun from a convent near Lagos Nigeria, who was travelling on the Alitalia Boeing 747 en route to New York City via Heathrow, has become ill. Her symptoms are first diagnosed as those of hysteria caused by fear of flying, then to an epileptic seizure. The plane is given a priority landing.Dr. Komarowsky, who in the past has been a scientist, was working, along with three other doctors, each of whom will make an appearance later in the book: Dr. John Hamilton, Dr. Matthew Laverick, and Dr. Coro Deveroux, in a team headed by the world-renowned microbiologist, Dr. Frederick Lieberman. Their work, in a laboratory at Wolfenden House is veiled in mystery, but their goal (four of them were called either the nucleus or evangelists of Messiah Lieberman) was the 'holy grail' of microbiology - creation, through genetic reorganisation, of general immunity to bacterial, viral and oncological diseases. Based on genetic modification of human DNA this is intended to become hereditary. However, the most recent batch of experiments with a vaccine based on recombined Rabies virus, were performed on humans who were exposed to the rabies virus during quarantine in Britain. The human trial ended horribly, accelerating, instead of providing post exposure immunity of the vaccination, and even though the patients were well outside of the window when any rabies vaccine available on the market would be able to save them from developing symptoms. This event leads to Luke Komarowsky abandoning the field of virology and science altogether, and puts him in his present position of the head of the Heathrow Airport medical unit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbriar_(novel)"title="Blackbriar (novel)">
"Blackbriar" follows the character of Danny as he attempts to uncover the mysteries of his new home. Formerly abandoned, the local residents refuse to speak about the old cottage of Blackbriar. As Danny dreams of witches, fire, and maniacal laughter, he begins to discover that strange dreams might be the least of his worries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_House"title="The Spirit House">
"The Spirit House" follows the character of Julie, a young girl whose family is housing exchange student Bia. When Julie's younger brother builds a Thai Spirit House for Bia, strange things begin to happen and Julie's luck begins to turn. First of all, Bia turns out to be an imposter, and they both battle to be on the good side of an angry spirit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayyazhippuzhayude_Theerangalil"title="Mayyazhippuzhayude Theerangalil">
The protagonist in the novel is a young man called Dasan who was born in French Mahé and educated in Pondicherry. Even though he was offered a job in the French administration and assistance for higher education in Paris, he instead joins the freedom movement led by Gandhian Kanaran, and is attracted by communist ideology. A girl called Chandrika falls in love with him, but he is not able to promise her a married life because of his commitment to the revolution. A French court sentences Dasan to 12 years of imprisonment, but Dasan escapes captivity by walking across to the Indian Union. Very soon he comes back to Mahé leading a group of volunteers and frees Mahé from foreign rule. The French national flag is removed and the Indian national flag is hoisted on government buildings. Despite being a local hero Achu, he struggles for his livelihood as he refuses to accept regular employment and join the mainstream lifestyle. His girlfriend is forced by her parents to marry another man, so she commits suicide. Dasan also follows her way to reach the abode of the soul on the Velliyamkallu island on the Mahé coast.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Optimists_(novel)"title="The Optimists (novel)">
The novel focuses on a veteran photojournalist named Clement Glass, and his struggle to come to terms with the aftermath of a church massacre. Although these events take place in an undisclosed African location, there are close similarities to Rwanda and the genocide of 1994. The novel follows Glass as he travels from Africa to locations in Europe and North America, and tries to reconcile his memories, while dealing with a family crisis, eventually journeying to Brussels, where the perpetrator of the massacre may be in hiding.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_Blood"title="Bitter Blood">
Widow Delores Lynch lives in a big house, on a four acre lot. She has a good friend from church, who is perplexed that Dolores does not show up for a regularly planned meal out. When the friend drives to the Lynch house to try to learn what has happened, she finds Delores shot dead in her driveway. Later, daughter Jane Lynch is found, shot dead also, in one of the bedrooms. The crime had occurred several days earlier, and the killer had left behind no cartridge casings or fingerprints. With little in the way of clues for detectives to pursue, they question Delores's son Tom Lynch, who stands to inherit the estate. But Tom is eventually eliminated as a suspect, leaving detectives at a seeming dead end. One detective seeks the advice of a very experienced investigator, who tells him, "That family has a dark cloud in it somewhere. Find the dark cloud, and you've found your killer."Tom, a dentist, had moved to Albuquerque, with his wife Susie Newsome. Susie's aunt, and namesake Susie Sharp was chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court. The author uses the crime story as a motivator to interest the reader in a backstory of the talented Sharp family. Susie Sharp's father James Sharp, after starting a school that achieved success, but then burned down, and going broke trying to sell insurance, had moved to Reidsville, passed the bar and become a prominent local attorney, well known for his spirited defense of the accused. Susie Newsome was the daughter of Florence Sharp Newsome, the younger sister of Susie (the justice).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Good_Will_Come"title="Everything Good Will Come">
"Everything Good Will Come" is a bildungsroman that tells the story of Enitan, a young Nigerian woman growing up in her native homeland coping with the demands of the patriarchal society that encompasses her. Enitan is raised in a divided home struggling to identify herself in the midst of her mother's strong religious beliefs and her father's manipulative political ways. Due to her being an only child and the death of her brother, her parents have strict demands that restrict her from having a normal childhood. Her rebellious nature is first seen when she defies her mother's wishes and leaves the house on Sundays to play with the girl next door, Sheri, who is considered "yellow" because her father is Muslim and her mother is a white English woman. Sheri is a sassy young girl sassy with a rebellious nature, constantly testing those around her, while craving the attention of any male. Their friendship builds as they continue to defy Enitan's mother by seeing each other.The girls are soon forced to separate; Enitan is sent to a school abroad to receive a better education than that offered in Lagos. Her father, an educated lawyer, wants the best for her and hopes she will take over his firm once she has finished school and proves herself as a lawyer. Sheri and Enitan keep in touch, writing letters back and forth about school, boys, and when they will meet again. During a holiday visit home, Enitan and Sheri meet up and go to a party. Enitan, who doesn’t feel comfortable in the situation, wants to leave. On her way out, she witnesses the three men pinning Sheri down raping her and bruising her body as they degrade her. The image of Sheri's rape affects Enitan's ability to allow herself to trust men. The aftermath of Sheri's rape leads to a partial termination of their friendship and Sheri being sent to the hospital due to an attempt to give herself an abortion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Paganism_in_World_Cultures"title="Modern Paganism in World Cultures">
In his opening chapter, which shares its name with the book, Michael Strmiska discusses the significance of Paganism to the contemporary world, although notes that this volume deals specifically with the movement in Europe and North America, "in the belief that this regional focus provides a coherent frame of discussion with a number of intriguing commonalities and contrasts without degenerating into a global encyclopaedia." Noting that earlier studies of Pagan studies had focused primarily on the religion of Wicca and on the Pagan movement in the U.S. and U.K., Strmiska explained that in this volume, he had widened the geographical scope by focusing on forms of Paganism other than Wicca and on the movement in other parts of Europe and North America, such as in Canada, Ireland and Iceland.Proceeding to look at the various definitions of the terms "Pagan" and "Neopagan", Strmiska discusses why some contemporary westerners choose to adopt such terms when they have a pejorative meaning in western culture, concluding that not only was it an "appealing marker" in expressing their non-Christian beliefs, but that it also served to give them a sense of connection to ancient pre-Christian peoples and as "a deliberate act of defiance" against a Christian-dominated culture.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier_of_Sidon"title="Soldier of Sidon">
This book continues with the conceit of the earlier two books of having the tale arising from the translation of scrolls discovered in the present day, allegedly written in Latro's own hand.Latro suffered a head wound as a mercenary in the army of the Persian King Xerxes at the Battle of Plataea.As Tony Keen in his review states: "Latro cannot recall events of more than a day, but on the other hand, he can see gods and demigods". In this book, the gods and demigods encountered by Latro and his companions, in their journey up the Nile in a search for a cure to his affliction, are Egyptian and African, rather than the Greek ones of the two earlier books.Dramatis PersonaeLatro (aka Lucius, Lewqys): the Hero who journeys southward up the Nile in search of his lost memories.Myt-ser'eu ("Kitten"): Latro's chief Companion on his journey; a singing=girl, rented from the priests of the Temple of Hathor in Sais, Egypt. as his river-wife, to be returned to the Temple at the end of his return journey; they love, converse, quarrel and part, and have reunited by the end of Soldier of Sidon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fear_Index"title="The Fear Index">
The story begins as physicist Dr. Alexander Hoffmann, an American expat living in Switzerland, and the founder of his eponymous hedge fund, receives a first edition copy of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Hoffmann is mystified that the book's subject relates to his theory on fear, and even more that there is no indication of who sent it. That night, Hoffmann is attacked in his home by an unknown assailant. The police inspector, Leclerc is sceptical about the validity of Hoffmann's story.The next morning he proceeds to his company, where his charismatic English CEO, Hugo Quarry, is pitching for a renewed investment from the firm's potential and existing clients. They seek to utilise Hoffmann's genius with algorithms into a system, called VIXAL-4, which can provide sufficient data on the markets to generate successful hedges, despite protests from the company's Chief Risk Officer Ganapathi Rajamani.Hoffmann's English wife Gabrielle is approached by Leclerc at her art gallery. Leclerc informs her that when Hoffmann was at CERN, he suffered a nervous breakdown. Later Gabrielle confronts Hoffmann, who brushes it off as being nothing important. Suddenly it is announced that all of Gabrielle's artwork has sold to an anonymous collector. Gabrielle suspects that Hoffmann is behind it and storms off.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_All_Made_of_Glue"title="We Are All Made of Glue">
Georgina Sinclair is a freelance journalist, who makes a living contributing to trade magazines. Her main work is with the journal "Adhesives in the Modern World", which features articles about Epoxy resins and other aspects of gluing.After her lawyer husband Euripides "Rip" Sinclair walks out of the marriage, Georgina finds herself involved with elderly neighbor Mrs Shapiro, a 92-year-old Jewish emigre, who lives in a smelly and decrepit North London mansion. The house is a desirable property, and secondary characters including social workers and real estate agents seek to gain its sale for their own profit. Amidst the dark humour about aging and loneliness, serious issues about the Holocaust and the displacement of Palestinians are raised.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat's_Table"title="The Cat's Table">
The central character and narrator named Michael, an unaccompanied 11-year-old boy, boards an ocean liner, the "Oronsay", in Colombo en route to England via the Suez canal and the Mediterranean. For meals on board Michael is seated at the "cat's table" (the one furthest from the Captain's table) with other boys Ramadhin and Cassius and other misfit characters. The book follows the adventures of Michael and these boys while they are aboard the "Oronsay", and Michael's later perspective as an older man looking back on this boyhood voyage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Unaware"title="Earth Unaware">
A family of "free miners" living on the spaceship "El Cavador" is working an asteroid far out in the Kuiper Belt when they detect what appears to be an alien ship decelerating from near light speed as it approaches the solar system. Meanwhile, Lem Jukes, son and heir of the hard-driving founder of the largest mining corporation, is also in the remote region, far from the prying eyes of competitors, secretly testing a "glaser" (gravity laser) that promises to revolutionize mining. Back on Earth, Captain Wit O'Toole goes recruiting among the elite New Zealand Special Air Service for the even more select, multinational Mobile Operations Police (MOPs).Jukes orders his ship to "bump" "El Cavador" from the asteroid the family is mining, as it is the only suitable one nearby for his test. During the violent collision, an "El Cavador" crewman is killed. The miners hack into the corporate ship's network, planting a message for Lem Jukes and downloading confidential files pertaining to the glaser. Jukes, fearful of a scandal involving the death of a free miner and the danger of the miners selling the confidential files to his competitors, sets out for Weigh Station Four, where he intends to plant a hacker to strip "El Cavador"s files.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wadzeks_Kampf_mit_der_Dampfturbine"title="Wadzeks Kampf mit der Dampfturbine">
As the novel opens, Wadzek, owner of a factory that produces steam engines, is locked in a struggle with his more powerful rival Rommel, whose much larger company manufactures turbines. He can be seen as representing a new type of entrepreneur, more technologically advanced and less scrupulous than Wadzek. Losing value, the stock of Wadzek's company is being bought up by Rommel; in desperation, Wadzek teams up with Schneemann, an engineer working at one of Rommel's factories, to thwart his company's takeover by Rommel. This effort includes the misguided theft of some of Rommel's business correspondence. Fearing legal retribution for this theft, Wadzek, accompanied by Schneemann, flees with his wife Pauline and daughter Herta to his house in Reinickendorf, where the two men fortify the house in delusional preparation for a siege that never comes. Financially and spiritually broken, Wadzek returns to Berlin and with Schneemann attempts to turn himself in at a police station, where they learn that no warrant has even been issued for their arrest. There follows a temporary reconciliation with his estranged family and the first attempts to begin a new career in education—Wadzek would instruct his students in a new, moralistic and humane approach to technology. However, after walking in on an erotically and exotically charged debauch held in his own parlor (the aftermath of an African-themed birthday party Pauline held with her two new friends from Reinickendorf), Wadzek suffers a further breakdown. The novel ends aboard a ship bound for America, Wadzek eloping with Gaby, an old acquaintance and erstwhile lover of Rommel's, to begin a new life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragments_from_Antiquity"title="Fragments from Antiquity">
In the book's introduction, Barrett criticises the trend amongst processual archaeologists to focus on the generalisation of past societies into a series of processes, instead arguing that archaeologists should instead think about the individuals of the past, who are otherwise forgotten. He therefore accepts the role that post-processual theory plays in the book, but argues that "this is not a book about archaeological theory", instead being "an empirical study aimed at building a history of the period between about 2900 and 1200 BC in southern Britain" a timespan that he considers to be "one of the most remarkable periods in European prehistory".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbols_of_Power"title="Symbols of Power">
In their introduction, the authors discuss the state of prehistoric archaeology in Britain, noting that at the time most of the populace still considered prehistoric people to be little more than "squat, grunting savages" and that whilst terms used for Iron Age peoples like "Celts" and "Picts" evoked an emotional response from contemporary Britons, the terms used by archaeologists for other, earlier prehistoric groups, such as "Windmill Hill culture" or the "Grooved Ware Sub-Culture", failed to do so. Proceeding to argue that the communities of prehistory were far from the "savage and primitive" people presented in the popular imagination, it then lays out its intentions in presenting a more accurate picture of prehistoric folk. Claiming that the book's theme is to look at "the manifestation of power, prestige and status in the third and second millennia bc", it notes that in doing so it will be looking primarily at the "ideology of domination", and that it will therefore take influence from the work of German sociologist Karl Marx, the founder of Marxist theory, although noted that at the same time it did not take "a doctrinal approach" in adopting any particular theoretical position, whether Marxist or otherwise. The authors then describe how symbols in contemporary British culture are used to display status and power, discussing a variety of examples from politicians to traffic wardens, in order that the reader better understands the role which symbolism has in displaying hierarchy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Morning_Like_a_Bird"title="One Morning Like a Bird">
Yuji Takano is a writer in 1940s Tokyo. The story focuses on Takano's exploration and discovery of "Western" culture, exemplified in the meetings of the "club" which he forms with his French-speaking friends. The novel examines the effects on Takano's life and relationships of the impending events of World War II, and the possibility of conscription.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islay_(novel)"title="Islay (novel)">
The book has three sections, titled "Strings", "Drums", and "Cymbals". These three sections document Lyson's journey to make Islay a Deaf state. He comes across many problems along the way, and is ridiculed by some. Others accuse him of being a peddler and he is misunderstood by many. His wife, in the beginning of the novel is embarrassed by his dream and keeps Lyson behind lock and key when he is working on his project. She does not want her friends to know about what he is doing and does everything in her power to keep it a secret.In the first section, "Strings", the book's protagonist Lyson Sulla is in the beginning stages of his plans for a state by and for Deaf people. He is learning about the state Islay, and how it could work for what he is envisioning. He receives financial support from his in-laws so that he can move to Islay. Once there, he spends a week's time looking over the state, seeing how it will work for him, and meeting with public officials. He is pleased with what he sees in Islay and believes that it will work for what he plans. He moves his wife, Mary out to Islay with him. Once they are moved into a large home, they throw a big party.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_inocencia_castigada"title="La inocencia castigada">
Don Diego, a womanizing knight, falls in love with the beautiful Doña Inés, wife of Don Alonso. Her poor neighbor takes notice and borrows a dress from the lady under the pretense of needing it to wear to a wedding. She then hires a prostitute who resembles Inés to pose as her in order to have sexual relations with Diego in exchange for gifts. When it comes time to return the dress, they end the arrangement. Diego approaches Inés to ask why she broke off their relationship, which confuses her greatly, until he mentions that she always wore the dress she is wearing at the moment when they were together. The dress is the one that she lent to the neighbor, so she realizes that he must have been tricked, and seeks help from the Mayor, who sees to it that the two women involved are punished.Diego, embarrassed but still in love with Inés, seeks help from a Moorish necromancer, who gives him a candle shaped like the object of his unrequited love. When he lights the candle, a demon will possess Inés, forcing her to come to his bedchamber and submit to him. He is warned not to extinguish the candle before she is back in her own bed or she will die. Diego begins to use the candle while Don Alonso is out of town on business. Inés is conscious of what is happening, but doesn't understand it and thinks she is having vivid nightmares. One night she is discovered walking in a trance through the street in only a shirt by the Mayor and her brother, Don Francisco. They follow her and discover what Diego has been up to. He warns them not to extinguish the candle until she is back in her own bed. She returns to her room and awakens, surrounded by strange men who work for the Mayor, and is distraught with fear and guilt when she learns what has been happening to her. Diego is taken to the authorities and is never seen again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_Girls"title="Math Girls">
At the start of his first year of high school, the narrator meets a new classmate, a girl named Miruka. Without introducing herself, she gives him the beginning to number sequences, to which he answers with their continuation. One year later, the narrator is handed a letter by another girl, a new student named Tetra. The letter she wrote is a request for the narrator to tutor her in math. He begins teaching her, making Miruka jealous. The narrator balances his friendship with Tetra and his romantic interest in Miruka until Miruka and Tetra become friends after Tetra demonstrates her dedication to learning mathematics.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Earth"title="The Long Earth">
The "Long Earth" is a (possibly infinite) series of parallel worlds that are similar to Earth, which can be reached by using an inexpensive device called a "Stepper" – designs for which are one day posted online suddenly allowing humanity to explore worlds "East" and "West" of "Datum Earth". The worlds are mostly familiar, though others differ in greater and greater details, but all share one similarity: on none are there, or have there ever been, "Homo sapiens" – although the same cannot be said of earlier hominid species, especially "Homo habilis".The book deals primarily with the journey of Joshua Valienté (a natural "Stepper") and Lobsang, who claims to be a Tibetan motorcycle repairman reincarnated as an artificial intelligence. The two chart a course to learn as much as possible about the parallel worlds, travelling millions of steps away from the original Earth. They encounter evidence of other humanoid species (referred to as trolls and elves); of human settlers who learned their gifts early – including Sally Linsay, daughter of the inventor of the stepper, who joins them on their expedition; and of an extinct race of bipedal dinosaur descendants. They also encounter warning signs of a great danger, millions of worlds away from "our" Earth, causing catastrophe as it moves. The book also deals with the effects of the explosion of available space on the people of Datum Earth and the new colonies and political movements that are spreading throughout the Long Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghurghutiyar_Ghatona"title="Ghurghutiyar Ghatona">
An old man named Kalikinkar Majumdar of Ghurghutia village near Palashi invites Feluda to his house to solve a puzzle. After some thinking, Feluda accepts the invitation.A few days later, Feluda and his cousin Tapesh a.k.a Topshe find themselves on the way towards Palashi. After arriving there, they meet with Kalikinkar's driver who takes the duo to Ghurghutiya. The house turns out to be in the middle of a big garden out in the rural areas of Palashi. Due to the absence of electricity, the entire house is dark, with lanterns kept here and there. The duo meet with Kalikinkar who turns out to be a 73-year-old bedridden man. After some initial conversation, Kalikinkar calls his servant Gokul to bring his pet parrot. The pet parrot knows a riddle:"Trinayan, hey Trinayan, take some rest". Kalikinkar tasks Feluda with solving the riddle, which is apparently the combination used to open the iron chest which Kalikinkar has. Kalikinkar promises to give four rare books of Émile Gaboriau as reward if Feluda succeeds in solving the riddle. During this time, the duo meet another person named Rajen/Rajenbabu who looked after Kalikinkar's business activities, but his work is now reduced to buying books for Kalikinkar as Kalikinkar himself can't go out, as he has already survived a stroke.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_River_Between"title="The River Between">
A young man called Waiyaki is a focal point in Ngugi’s story. At an early age, he was already considered to have special gifts. Waiyaki once encountered two boys fighting and attempted to break up the squabble. Although he was the youngest of the three, he was able to put a stop to the violence. Ngugi reveals the three boys, Waiyaki, Kamau and Kinuthia, are all destined to study at a local mission school nearby and, from there, to become teachers. Waiyaki is eventually enrolled at the school at the behest of his father, Chege. He explains to young Waiyaki the legend of a savior who would be born into their village and accomplish great things for his people. Waiyaki’s father believes that he is that savior. Although Waiyaki is skeptical of such a fantastical prophesy, he excels in the school and is well on his way to playing a vital role in the development of his people. The significance of Chege’s eagerness to send Waiyaki to the mission school rests on the fact that the boy would be in a position to learn the wisdom of the colonists. This knowledge would equip Waiyaki for the struggle against the colonial government. Despite the liberating potential of this knowledge, Waiyaki must ensure he does not embrace the colonial system, as doing so would defeat the purpose of his training.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor_Dowell's_Head"title="Professor Dowell's Head">
Professor Dowell and his assistant surgeon Dr. Kern are working on medical problems including life support in separated body parts. Dr. Kern kills Dowell (in a set up car / asthma accident). Professor Dowell's head is now kept alive and used by Dr. Kern for extraction of scientific secrets; however, his new assistant, the medically trained Marie Loren, discovers the ploy and is dismayed; to keep her from exposing him, Kern eventually gets her imprisoned in a false lunatic asylum for undesirables. Continuing his experiments, Dr. Kern transplants the head of a young woman to a new body. That body belongs to the girlfriend of a friend of Dowell's son, who recognizes her body when the young woman flees Dr. Kern's laboratory. Together, Dowell's son and his friend free Marie Loren. Dr. Kern is anxious to announce himself as the inventor. But Dowell's son and Marie Loren help his father's head get in front of the cameras and reveal the truth. The head of professor Dowell tells all before dying. Dr. Kern, disgraced, is summarily executed by a police detective.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roots_of_Heaven_(novel)"title="The Roots of Heaven (novel)">
The book takes place in French Equatorial Africa. Morrel, a crusading environmentalist, labors to preserve elephants from extinction. He is assisted in the task by Minna, a nightclub hostess, and Forsythe, a disgraced British military officer in search of redemption. The story is a metaphor for the quest for salvation for all humanity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Way_Out_(novel)"title="No Way Out (novel)">
The novel tells the story of young and naïve European Socialist Vasily (Wilhelm) Rainer who comes to Russia to somehow apply his rootless, artificial ideas to the local reality. The action takes place in houses of state officials and merchants, in literary circles of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, in editorial rooms, Polish revolutionaries’ headquarters. Among those surrounding Rainer are some honest people (like Liza Bakhareva, another character who’s been shown by Leskov with great sympathy), but in general the 'nihilist' community is being portrayed in the novel as a bunch of amoral crooks for whom high ideals serve as mere means to their own ends; such characters (Arapov, Beloyartsev, Zavulonov, Krasin) the author treated with open disgust.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Whom_This_May_Come"title="To Whom This May Come">
The themes of the story are telepathy and utopian society. The narrator travels on a ship that breaks apart leaving him as the sole survivor. He is stranded on a remote island inhabited by a people with the ability to read minds. This special skill, which has evolved, has alleviated many of the fears and anxieties that afflict modern life in the rest of the world, such as lies, crimes, and problems with relationships. The narrator eventually is rescued and returns to the U.S. where he reveals his experiences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Barrier"title="Beyond the Barrier">
Professor Gordon Naismith is an average man in most respects, except that he has exceptional reflexes, and he has no memory of his life prior to four years ago, when he believes he was involved in a plane crash. During one of his classes a student asks a disturbing question: “What is a "zug"?” The question triggers a series of violent incidents, and Naismith is framed for a murder. He learns that the student is not human, but rather an "Ugly", and that he, in turn, is a "Shefth", a member of the warrior class from Earth's far future. In that future, a Time Barrier was constructed to keep violent aliens called Zugs in the past. The future humans supposedly want a Shefth to go kill a Zug which survived the Time Barrier. The Uglies take Naismith to the future, where Naismith learns that most humans died during a plague. The Uglies catch Naismith; he escapes onto a half-finished time machine, which doesn’t go through time, but oscillates through the core of the Earth before popping out the other side. Naismith is rescued by a girl who takes him to the point in time when the Time Barrier is erected; here he is expected to kill the surviving Zug.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marks_of_Identity"title="Marks of Identity">
A man returns to Spain from exile in France and finds himself repelled by Francoist Spain and drawn to the world of Muslim culture. In this novel, Juan Goytisolo, one of Spain's most celebrated novelists, takes the voice of those Spaniards who grew up during the Spanish Civil War, when the caudillo Franco. The narrator discovers, upon his return, that he is torn between the Islamic and European worlds around him, and in the end he finds that none of the two religions give him satisfaction.The story of "Marks of Identity" spans from the present time, 1963, when the protagonist Alvaro returns to Spain, after many years of exile in France, which was something he entirely imposed on himself. The parts of the story set in the present are however not the most prominent in this story. The greater part of the novel consists of episodes from Alvaro's younger years: his childhood, days as a student at university, and his time abroad. It is also a story of his family history and the lives of his friends. These are mixed and matched with a variety of seemingly "historical" documents — police reports, falange propaganda leaflets and tourist brochures etc. — and with wholly other chronicly correct stories of prison inmates, peasants and workers of that period in time. The story is said to have many autobiographical elements.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humsafar_(novel)"title="Humsafar (novel)">
The novel begins with the arrival of a bitter and angry Khirad Hussain at Ashar Hussain's office. Khirad informs Ashar that her daughter Hareem is a patient of congenital heart disease and requires immediate open heart surgery. As Ashar is Hareem's biological father and a rich businessman, it is Hareem'sll the legal documents (including her current address and phone number) on his desk. Her presence leaves Ashar in a daze, anger and complete shock, and he is so taken aback to see her standing in front of him that he does not realizes the weight of all the things she said and left with him. He leaves his office without touching or even looking at all the files and the picture of his daughter.It is revealed that Ashar has not seen Khirad in almost four and half years and for unknown reasons (which are revealed later in the novel) she left him heartbroken and filled with anger and he now has nothing but hate for her. Ashar reflects back on the unusual circumstances that lead them to getting married without each other's consent, the development of their married life and the passionate love that they shared once a long time ago. The novel then switches to present where Khirad is eagerly waiting to hear back from Ashar. When he does not contact her for five days, Khirad concludes that he is cruel and vain and all her efforts to contact him are fruitless as they were 4 years ago.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked_On_(novel)"title="Locked On (novel)">
A year after the Emir's capture, The Campus investigates Pakistani intelligence official and brigadier general Riaz Rehan. Unbeknownst to them, Rehan plots to bring his country and India to nuclear war by orchestrating terrorist attacks behind the scenes on behalf of terror groups allegedly backed by the Pakistani government, aiming to create an Islamic caliphate in its aftermath. For the final step of his operation, he steals two nuclear weapons from the Pakistani military armory and then secretly gives them to Dagestani terrorist organization Jamaat Shariat, who would then use them to attack Moscow using space delivery rockets.Meanwhile, former president Jack Ryan is in the middle of his presidential campaign and ahead at the polls. Even though his opponent and successor Ed Kealty publicly reveals the capture of the Emir in their second presidential debate in a desperate attempt to win voters, Ryan opposes his plan to a public trial for the terrorist. The resulting turnaround in public opinion enrages Czech billionaire and Kealty supporter Paul Laska, later launching a vendetta to discredit Ryan six weeks before the presidential election. Laska's progressive organization provides the Emir with a legal defense team. After CIA deputy director Charles Sumner Alden identifies Campus operatives John Clark and Domingo "Ding" Chavez from the Emir's rough sketches of the men who captured him, Laska enlists the help of SVR officer Valentin Kovalenko for collecting information about the former's CIA activities. Kovalenko uncovers Clark's unauthorized assassination of an East German Stasi operative in Berlin in 1981, which is not part of the full presidential pardon Ryan had signed for his friend and making him accountable for murder. Laska covertly gives the dossier to Kealty, who then orders the FBI to hunt down Clark.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manipulated_Man"title="The Manipulated Man">
The book argues that, contrary to common feminist and women's rights rhetoric, women in industrialized cultures are not oppressed, but rather exploit a well-established system of manipulating men.Vilar writes, "Men have been trained and conditioned by women, not unlike the way Pavlov conditioned his dogs, into becoming their slaves. As compensation for their labours men are given periodic use of a woman's vagina." The book contends that young boys are encouraged to associate their masculinity with their ability to be sexually intimate with a woman, and that a woman can control a man by socially empowering herself to be the gate-keeper to his sense of masculinity. Vilar states that this has been going on for some time.The author says that social definitions and norms, such as the idea that women are weak, are constructed by women with their needs in mind. Vilar explains how it works: if women are viewed as weak, less is expected of them; and therefore they are given more leeway in society than men. Vilar states that women are generally "gold diggers" who attempt to extract money and other material resources from men. One means by which women control men to effect this transfer of resources is praise. Women dole out praise to men only when their needs are met in some way.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_the_Wind_(novel)"title="Spirit of the Wind (novel)">
This novel is set after the Chaos War. In the east, on the Dairly Plans, the peace is shattered by the threat of the red dragon Malystryx. The kender Kronn-alin Thistleknot travels to Abasasinia with his older sister Catt, where they seek heroes to stop the dragon from destroying Kendermore. Riverwind and his daughter Brightdawn set out on a quest to save the kender from the dragon's wrath.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dezra's_Quest"title="Dezra's Quest">
Dark Wood is the home of Ansalon's centaur tribes, where they dwelt in peace, until strife began tearing them apart. A brave young warrior named Trephas sets out for Solace to seek aid from Caramon Majere and his daughter Dezra against a mad chieftain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kacper_Ryx"title="Kacper Ryx">
The novel begins with a scene of mystification. With the help of Twardowski, brothers Mniszech convince king Zygmunt August that his dead wife, Barbara Radziwiłłówna, was resurrected. The action moves to Kraków. In an inn owned by Kacper's aunt, he mets Kochanowski and Górnicki. With the recommendation of the first one, he is appointed as an investigator who must solve the case of stolen seal.A short investigation results in determining the thief, Bartosz from Lusina. His capture requests a voyage outside the Cracow. Kacper and Mikolaj Sep Szarzynski manage to capture the offender, but they are lost at surrounding marsh.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickon_(novel)"title="Dickon (novel)">
The book follows the life of Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England. Born in 1452 to Richard Plantagenet, 3rd Duke of York and Cecily Neville, Richard was the eighth and youngest of the couple's children. The story begins in 1460, just after Richard's father, elder brother Edmund, Earl of Rutland and uncle Richard Neville, 5th Earl of Salisbury are killed at the Battle of Wakefield. Richard and his brother George, Duke of Clarence are hurried away to the Duchy of Burgundy. At this point a recurring character named Jon Fogge is introduced, who acts as a bogeyman and looming threat throughout the book. A character by the same name and who must be assumed to be the same, is Richard's last attendant after his defeat and death at the Battle of Bosworth. As a historical character, Sir John Fogge was an early supporter of Edward IV, who later switched his allegiance to Henry VII and apparently did fight against Richard at Bosworth. Fogge later married into the family of Katherine Haute, who was possibly the mother of Richard's illegitimate daughter Katherine.The book is divided into three sections, covering the years of Richard's youth (1460–1466), his young adulthood serving his brother Edward IV (1470–1472) when the Warwick-Clarence rebellion occurred and the period encompassing Edward's death and Richard's own brief reign from 1482 to his death at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Although much is omitted from Richard's life, such as his life in exile as a child when he and his brother lodged with the printer William Caxton, the details of his wardship under his cousin Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, and Richard's military and administrative exploits on the Scottish border, the author includes what she sees as the major events of his life - the violent death of his father, the conquering kingship of his brother Edward, the secret marriage to Elizabeth Woodville that nearly costs Edward his throne, the final triumph of Edward, the King's sudden death and Richard's own shock to discover that his brother's marriage was not legal, his own elevation to the throne of England, the tragic deaths of his wife and son and finally his betrayal and death at Bosworth. It seems that Bowen believes that Richard was completely unconnected with the mysterious disappearances of The Princes in the Tower for unlike some other fictional treatments, such as Michael Tyler-Whittle's "Richard III, The Last Plantagenet", the episode is never even referred to in the book. In fact, the two princes are still presumably alive when Richard meets his own death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_Crush_(novel)"title="Cherry Crush (novel)">
The book starts when Cherry and her father Paddy are about to move to Somerset, to live with his girlfriend Charlotte and her four daughters; Skye, Summer, Coco, and Honey. Charlotte and Paddy also want to start up their dream business: making chocolate. In Tanglewood, Charlotte's home, Cherry meets Shay Fletcher and begins to develop a crush on him. However, Shay already has a girlfriend: Charlotte's spiteful eldest daughter Honey. Cherry knows her friendship with Shay is dangerous, and tries to impress and make her stepsisters like her by telling lies about the luxurious life she used to lead back in Glasgow. But soon she learns that the girls have already sensed that they are just lying. and also, that they liked her better when she was the real Cherry instead of Cherry the liar. Honey and Cherry have many fights (mainly because she suspects that Cherry and Shay are becoming too close to each other). The girls and Charlotte also help Paddy to put a chocolate business by hosting a chocolate festival which is very successful, and Paddy's chocolates are ordered in a huge amount. The story comes to an end when Shay and Cherry are traveling by canoe after Cherry is slapped by Honey and her lies as it breaks down. They end up spending the night together in a cave and are found in the morning. Shay's dad finally realizes his son's value and decides not to be hard on him. After that, Shay and Cherry end up becoming a couple.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swamplandia!"title="Swamplandia!">
The novel opens with the Bigtree family suffering tragedy and finding their way of life under threat. The family patriarch, Sawtooth Bigtree, has recently been confined to a floating nursing home with dementia and his daughter-in-law, Hilola Bigtree, has recently died of cancer, leaving behind a husband and three teenage children. Meanwhile, a brand new amusement park, The World of Darkness, has opened nearby on the Florida mainland. In light of plummeting attendance and mounting debts, The Chief, Hilola's husband, unveils a plan for improvements to Swamplandia!, but his son Kiwi is skeptical and suggests selling the park altogether. Having grown up on Swamplandia! himself, the Chief is adamantly opposed to abandoning his family's unique heritage and lifestyle.The Chief's middle child, Osceola, becomes obsessed with ghosts and with occult knowledge she's gleaned from an old book, "The Spiritist's Telegraph". Osceola begins to hold seances with her younger sister Ava in an attempt to contact their dead mother. Osceola's loneliness and inability to talk with her mother drives her to talk to dead "boyfriends". Osceola sometimes disappears at night leading her sister to worry that she might be possessed by spirits.Meanwhile, Kiwi continues to clash with his father over selling Swamplandia!, and he eventually decides to leave the island in an attempt to save the theme park on his own. He finds minimum-wage employment as a janitor at The World of Darkness and eventually befriends his coworker Vijay, who helps him learn to adopt normal teenage vernacular and mannerisms. Kiwi begins to attend night school and is promoted to lifeguard. When he rescues a teenage girl, Kiwi becomes a local hero and, as a result, The World of Darkness sends him to train as an airplane pilot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CV_(novel)"title="CV (novel)">
The Sea Venture (CV) is an enormous, largely self-contained floating vessel that serves as a prototype sea habitat. It was developed in part as an alternative to a more expensive orbital colony; one of the advocates of the space habitats, professor Paul Newland, is aboard to discover whether CV poses a threat to his dreams. Another passenger, an assassin who uses the name of John Stevens, has been tasked with killing Newland. The CV has no propulsion system; it navigates using ocean currents, and it is able to submerge in order to take advantage of the different currents at different levels below the surface. In addition to its crew, the CV carries about two thousand permanent residents as well as passengers.The novel opens as the Sea Venture is preparing to debark from San Francisco on its way to Guam. Soon after, a routine sample collection from the ocean floor pulls in a purplish, granular lump about the size of a fist; Newland, who is present in the collection room with a crew member named Randall Geller, suggests cracking it open. It contains what looks like a hollow sphere of glass. Just as it is opened, Geller feels faint, then recovers. Soon after, he collapses into a coma-like state. The same series of events occurs again and again; it soon becomes clear that the agent released from the nodule can travel from person to person, leaving them in an unconscious state after it departs. Soon there are dozens of afflicted patients. The sole doctor on board, Dr. Wallace McNulty, improvises an isolation ward, but cases keep occurring, several per day.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ente_Katha"title="Ente Katha">
This book is about Aami (Kamala), starting from her childhood and her village. It also depicts her teenage love towards a neighbor of the same age. Her childhood in colonized Calcutta is also explained vividly. Her failed marriage, the birth of her children and her extramarital affairs are addressed in this work. She moved away from social conventions and portrayed homosexuality as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signals_of_Belief_in_Early_England"title="Signals of Belief in Early England">
## Preface.In the book's preface, written by Martin Carver, Alex Sanmark and Sarah Semple, the anthology's three objectives are laid out. The first of these is to establish that Anglo-Saxon paganism consisted of "a set of beliefs that varied from place to place" rather than being a dogmatic religion that was the same across England. The second objective is to show that the beliefs of the pagan Anglo-Saxons, "whether pure reason or intellectual mish-mash, [were] expressed in their material culture". Carrying on from the second, the third objective of the anthology was to show that through archaeology, contemporary scholars can "rediscover" Anglo-Saxon belief.Summing up their view of Anglo-Saxon paganism, the editors state that it "was not a religion with supraregional rules and institutions but a loose term for a variety of local intellectual world views". They also "extend the same courtesy to Christianity", noting that "Christianisation too hides a multiplicity of locally negotiated positions". Ultimately, the writers noted that neither "paganism nor Christianity are treated here as independent agents, out to confront and better each other. They are sources on which people, local people – the true agents of Anglo-Saxon England – eclectically drew.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sisters_Brothers"title="The Sisters Brothers">
In 1851, Eli and Charlie Sisters, a pair of assassins of minor repute, are hired by a wealthy businessman known only as "the Commodore" to travel from Oregon City to California in order to murder a gold rush prospector named Hermann Kermit Warm, who is described to them as a "thief". Hard-nosed, plainspoken Charlie, more impulsive and aggressive than his younger brother Eli, has a fondness for binge drinking and appears remorseless about the crimes he commits. Eli, contemplative and often sentimental, admires and looks up to Charlie but finds himself at odds with Charlie's apparent nonchalance about the directions their lives are taking. The brothers bicker constantly about money, the job, their horses, and each other's personalities.As they ride south, Eli and Charlie encounter many strange characters and endure a series of mishaps and adventures. Eli is first bitten by a spider and then must have a tooth removed, for which he is given morphine to numb the pain; his horse is attacked by a grizzly bear but survives despite a serious eye injury. Charlie frequently gets drunk and is too sick to ride the following morning, slowing their progress to California, which frustrates Eli. The pair hears rumors on the trail about a female bear with a uniquely red-colored pelt, for which a hefty reward has been offered by a man named Mayfield.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crescent_Dawn"title="Crescent Dawn">
As are most Dirk Pitt novels, the story begins with one or more historical prologues: an attack on a Roman galley in 327 AD, and an episode in 1916 in which a British warship mysteriously explodes and sinks in the North Sea. In the present, important mosques in Egypt and Turkey are damaged by planted explosives. While doing underwater explorations off Turkey and on the Israeli coasts, Dirk Pitt and Dirk Pitt, Jr., face villainous characters who cause them both to become involved in uncovering a plot to resurrect the Ottoman Empire. Summer Pitt, the elder Pitt's daughter, stumbles upon a manifest in England that dates to the time of Jesus and sheds new light on early Christianity. The Pitts and NUMA, for whom they work, become involved in action-packed episodes throughout the book. Clive Cussler makes two cameo appearances in this book, as he has a habit of doing in many of his novels.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagan_Theology"title="Pagan Theology">
In his introduction, York explains his approach to religion, which he chooses to define as "a shared apprehension of the world, humanity, and the supernatural and their interrelation". He proceeds to use a map as a metaphor for religion, noting that both help the individual to navigate their own way through the world. Exclaiming that paganism should be seen as a religion in itself, he criticises earlier religious studies scholars for failing to devote time to a discussion of this term, whose etymology he then explains.In the next chapter, entitled "Paganism as Religion", York argues that religious studies scholars should not use "paganism" in reference purely to pre-Christian religions in Europe or Neopaganism, but expand it to refer to a far wider group of animistic, polytheistic beliefs across the world. Putting together a list of five criteria that believes can be used to define "paganism", he then explores a series of seven different religious groups or beliefs and explains how they fit into this category of his: Chinese Folk Religion, Shinto, Primal Tribal Religions, shamanism, American Indian Spirituality, Afro-American Spiritism, and Contemporary Western Paganism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown_Family"title="Chinatown Family">
Tom, Sr. who runs a laundry on the Upper East Side, has succeeded in bringing his younger daughter (Eva) and son (Tom, Jr.) from China to New York to join him, his wife (Mother Fong), and his other children. The family succeeds in establishing itself in American culture by its hard work and devotion to democratic principles. It offers a critique of Americans who do not live up to these ideals.The family welcomes a new daughter-in-law, Flora, an Italian-American. They say "you are like a Chinese woman" because you "work hard all day and have no quarrels with your husband and the parents." In Italy, she replies, "a padre is a padre." Another Fong brother becomes an insurance salesman, who becomes infatuated with a nightclub dancer who is interested only in material things.Tom, Jr., the leading character, learns English with a diligence which helps Miss Cartwright, his American teacher, to "rediscover the English language." He shows up American students who do not appreciate their own language and do not work hard to master it. He paraphrases the Declaration of Independence into basic English to reveal its importance for the world. He has to learn Mandarin Chinese in addition to his Cantonese to court Elsie, who came from Shanghai, and then has to study literature, both Walt Whitman and Laozi.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Leaf_in_the_Storm"title="A Leaf in the Storm">
The scene opens in Peking (Beiping) in 1937, on the eve of the war with Japan, when there was fierce debate over China's best strategy. Yao Poya, a wealthy but patriotic businessman, and Lao Peng, who is a Chan Buddhist but angry and actively supporting the guerrilla resistance, are sharing a dinner and chouyin "drinking in sorrow". They mourn his retreats and military blunders, but Chiang Kai-shek is their hero. They resign themselves to his strategy of wearing down the Japanese Army and forcing them to brutalize and alienate the Chinese people. [5, 13]In spite of the fact that he is married, Poya is smitten with Malin, a young lady of shadowy background who has been forced to leave Shanghai when she was suspected of being a Japanese collaborator. Lao Peng uses his guerrilla connections to convey her out of Beiping. They watch a political training class for boy and girl students who were "starting life anew as if human civilization had not existed before – except for their flashlights and fountain pens... It was freedom of the human spirit they were seeking, and they found it.". Their instructor, Comrade Peng, works with the Communist Eighth Route Army. Malin and Lao Peng proceed to Wuhan, where the wartime government has set up a temporary capital, and witness Japanese atrocities and heroic Chinese resistance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rook_(novel)"title="The Rook (novel)">
The book follows a young woman in her thirties who wakes up in a park surrounded by bodies wearing latex gloves. She's unable to remember anything about herself or how she or the bodies got there, and her only clue is a letter in her coat pocket that says, "To You". Inside is a letter that tells her the body previously belonged to Myfanwy (rhymes with Tiffany) Thomas, who worked in a secret government organization and was targeted by an unknown assassin. The letter offers the young woman (who is thereafter identified in the book as Myfanwy, although she sees herself as a separate person, considering her 'original' self as Thomas) a choice of taking up the life of the woman before her and discovering the identity of the would-be killer, or setting out with a new identity.Although she initially chooses to take up a new identity, Myfanwy eventually chooses to take up the first Myfanwy's life and discover who wants her dead. She is left with a binder that outlines the organization known as the Checquy ("sheck-ay") which combats the supernatural and unnatural forces that threaten Great Britain. Many of the members possess supernatural powers; only the ones with such powers are allowed to hold any true positions of power. Myfanwy finds that her specific power is control over other people's bodies through touch, which her predecessor never truly fully explored. The first Myfanwy was a Rook, a lower member of the inner court of the Checquy, which allowed her to do a lot of research into the workings of the organization. Myfanwy uses the binder heavily throughout the book, especially when it comes to trying to figure out which people she can or cannot trust. She quickly discovers that while the first Myfanwy was exceedingly skilled at organization and management, she was very timid and shy when it came to interpersonal relationships. This is partially a result of how she was inducted into the Checquy as a nine-year-old girl, as she was interrogated quite thoroughly in a manner that was not shown to the reader.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_Is_on_Our_Side"title="Odd Is on Our Side">
It is Halloween in Pico Mundo, California, and there is a whiff of something wicked in the autumn air. While the town prepares for its annual festivities, young fry cook Odd Thomas cannot shake the feeling that make-believe goblins and ghouls are not the only things on the prowl. And he should know, since he can see what others cannot: the spirits of the restless dead. But even his frequent visitor, the specter of Elvis Presley, cannot seem to point Odd in the right direction.With the help of his gun-toting girlfriend, Stormy, Odd is out to uncover the terrible truth. Is something sinister afoot in the remote barn guarded by devilish masked men? Has All Hallows Eve mischief taken a malevolent turn? Or is the pleading ghost of a trick-or-treater a frightening omen of doom?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Viking_Way_(book)"title="The Viking Way (book)">
## Part 1: Different Vikings? Towards a cognitive archaeology of the later Iron Age.Price opens "The Viking Way" with a discussion of why he chose to write the book, noting how he wanted to understand the mindset of the Scandinavians living in the Viking Age; in his own words, the book is his attempt to "write an explicitly 'cognitive' archaeology of the Vikings". He proceeds to explain his interdisciplinary approach to the subject of Norse paganism, drawing from textual sources as well as archaeology. Noting that this is a view that has been championed by post-processualists like Ian Hodder, he proceeds to discuss the manner in which the Scandinavian Late Iron Age is simultaneously viewed as the final period of prehistory and the first of the medieval.Price goes on to discuss the role of cognitive archaeology and its multiple problems, but nonetheless defends his position in taking a cognitive archaeological approach within his study. He then highlights the rise of Fourth World archaeology, a sub-section of world archaeology that focuses on the histories of contemporary indigenous peoples, and notes the impact which this has on his study, in particular regarding his work with the Sami people of Northern Europe. He highlights the need to recognise that modern archaeologists have many problems facing the cognitive understandings of past people like the Norse, arguing for the need to take an approach which he terms "odd archaeology", recognising the "oddness" of societies other than our own. He contrasts this "odd archaeology" with queer archaeology, which focuses on the study of deviants within any given society. He then rounds off the chapter by summarising the rest of "The Viking Way"'s contents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind_in_the_Cave"title="The Mind in the Cave">
Lewis-Williams opens "The Mind in the Cave" with a preface, in which he outlines the methodology that he is working with, and emphasises his position that "we do not have to explain everything to explain something". what he calls "Three Caves: Three Time-Bytes", brief page-long narratives set in the Upper Palaeolithic sites of the Volp Caves, the Niaux Cave and Chauvet Cave.In the first chapter, entitled "Discovering Human Antiquity", Lewis-Williams explores the early scholarly understanding of Upper Palaeolithic art, stemming from the increased interest in the origins of the human species sparked by the publication of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species". He proceeds to discuss early attempts to analyse both portable and parietal art, and the early belief that cave paintings were forgeries, being too sophisticated to have been produced by "primitive" humans, before scholars eventually came to accept their authenticity. Finally, he notes the developments in radiocarbon dating, which enabled far more accurate dating of archaeological sites, allowing scholars to appreciate the exact antiquity of the Upper Palaeolithic.Chapter two, "Seeking Answers", proceeds to examine the various different interpretative approaches that scholars have taken to the Upper Palaeolithic cave art of Europe. Noting the problems innate with using the term "art", he nevertheless believes it can still be used in this context with caution. From there, he looks at the early claims that rejected symbolic-religious explanations, instead adopting an "art for art's sake" approach, and then its fall from academic credibility. He then discusses the claims that the artworks did have symbolic meanings, being either totemic or representative of sympathetic magic, both arguments made from ethnographic parallels with modern hunter-gatherer communities such as those of Australia. Lewis-Williams goes on to discuss structuralist interpretations of the artworks, such as those first advocated by Giambattista Vico and Ferdinand de Saussure, and later reformulated by the likes of Max Raphael, Annette Laming-Emperaire and André Leroi-Gourhan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witching_Culture"title="Witching Culture">
In her introduction, "The Ethnography of Magic and the Magic of Ethnography", Magliocco discusses how she first became involved with the Pagan movement, and includes extracts from the field notes that she made at the time. Going on to lay out the objectives of the book, Magliocco discusses the history of Wicca, and the influence that early anthropologists like Edward Taylor and James Frazer had on it as a burgeoning movement. Proceeding to discuss the pre-existing academic studies of the Pagan movement, she explains her own approach to the subject and how it differs from those of her predecessors, in particular focusing on her own spiritual experiences and altered states of consciousness that she experienced while taking part in Pagan ritual and her insider-outsider perspective on the Pagan movement.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solo_(Mason_novel)"title="Solo (Mason novel)">
When the self-aware Pentagon-built robot, Solo, goes AWOL, the Pentagon uses its reserve robot, Nimrod, as bait luring Solo into a trap meant to destroy him, and setting the stage for a cyborg confrontation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Impersonation_(novel)"title="The Great Impersonation (novel)">
In German East Africa, Englishman Everard Dominey awakens to his doppelganger host, German Leopold von Ragastein. They spend the night drinking and sharing their dark pasts. The next day, Leopold and Dr. Schmidt devise a plan to make Everard disappear in the wilderness so that Leopold can assume his identity and fulfill his mission for the German government. The story then shifts abruptly to England. The reader follows the story of Everard without knowing if Leopold is posing as Everard or not.In London, Everard settles into his former life. His wife, Lady Rosamund Dominey, believes that Everard killed Roger Unthank, his rival for her attentions, just before leaving for Africa; Roger has not been seen since Everard's departure. Princess Stephanie Eiderstrom believes at first sight that Everard is actually Leopold and threatens to expose him unless he agrees to a rendezvous with her. Everard speaks with Mr. Seaman and reveals that Leopold had been banished to Africa for killing a Hungarian prince, the husband of his lover Princess Eiderstrom.Everard sends Seaman to inform the princess that they cannot meet until he has accomplished his mission disguised as Everard. Seaman, in turn, tells Everard that his mission is to monitor the German Ambassador, Prince Terniloff. Princess Eiderstrom informs Terniloff that Everard is Leopold in disguise. Prince Terniloff hopes that Leopold's mission is designed to maintain international peace and he assures the Prince that that is so.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_2034"title="Metro 2034">
In the south of the Metro, Sevastopolskaya Station relies on regular supplies of ammunition and other goods from the central stations to survive. Without explanation, communication is lost and stocks begin to run low. Several scouting parties leave to investigate, but do not return.Hunter, who disappeared during the events of "Metro 2033" and is now heavily traumatised, has been working as a border guard at Sevastopolskaya. He volunteers to lead one last attempt to re-establish contact with the central Metro stations before the station mobilises its military and heads north en masse. He is accompanied by Homer, an old man searching for inspiration for a book. Hunter makes contact with the guards at Tulskaya Station, but after an argument the hermetic doors are sealed. Hunter tells Homer that the station had been captured by bandits and must be destroyed, but Homer recovers a diary left by one of the previous expeditions which indicates that the station had been infected by a deadly disease.They detour through the abandoned and heavily irradiated Kakhovskaya Line and encounter Sasha, the teenage daughter of the exiled Avtozavodskaya Station Master, who had recently died. She accompanies them and the increasingly violent Hunter kills several men as they pass through Avtozavodskaya. Sasha restrains him somewhat, preventing additional bloodshed and during a mutant attack at Paveletskaya Station, Hunter is seriously injured after saving Sasha. Sasha believes that she can prevent Hunter from committing further atrocities in his mission to protect Sevastopolskaya, but after an argument Hunter presses on without them. Homer and Sasha are joined by Leonid, a musician and are re-united with Hunter at Dobryninskaya Station.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vagabond_(novel)"title="The Vagabond (novel)">
Divorced after eight years of her husband’s faithlessness and cruelty, Renée Néré has been struggling to support herself as a music-hall performer for the past three years. The first part of the three parts of the book opens as she waits in her dressing room until it is time for her to perform. She checks her make-up in the mirror that she hates to face, then goes off to perform, no longer anxious, but confident and controlled.Renée’s life as an artist is described: her work as a dancer, her casual relations with her fellow performers, the small apartment that she shares with her maid, Blandine, and her dog Fossette, and her introduction to Maxime Dufferein-Chautel. Maxime presents himself at her dressing-room door one evening, and Renée dismisses him as an awkward intruder, charming and respectful as he seems to be. She more formally meets him again after a private engagement arranged by his brother. Night after night, Renée’s admirer watches her from the front row and patiently waits for her.With her old friend Hamond acting as a go-between, Renée and Maxime slowly and slightly become more friendly. Maxime visits her; she acknowledges that she has an admirer, but nothing more. Eventually, their acquaintance deepens, but not into intimacy, despite Maxime’s pleas. This continues until Renée signs a contract for a six-week tour with Brague, her mentor, and his pupil. Now she must decide between Maxime and her career, as she recognizes that she cannot allow him to accompany her and is not yet ready to give up the wandering life, which somehow suits her. She then lies, promising to give herself to Maxime, but not until the tour is over. Renée leaves Paris, full of both hope and regret.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maa_(novel)"title="Maa (novel)">
The story spins around the life of the freedom-fighter, Magfar Ahmed Chowdhury, also known as Azad and his mother. The story begins when Azad's mother Shafia, being angry with her husband's cheating on her, leaves her wealthy husband's affluent home with a small child, Azad. Resolute not to return she determines to raises Azad on her own. Shafia's husband tries several times to reconcile with her but she never compromises. Though she never takes any help from her husband, her son Azad often goes his father's house to take money from his father and spends lavishly. By the time when the liberation war of Bangladesh began, Azad was grown-up, almost self-reliant and a graduate from the University of Dhaka but in the middle of the war he is caught by Pakistan Army on 29 August 1971 and tortured brutally and martyred. Nonetheless, Shafia does not lose hope and carries on searching for him, as the dead body is never found. Gradually her almost-fulfilled dream begins fading out. The later part of the story spins around Shafia's struggle to survive on her own without taking helps from others. In the end, she dies in extreme poverty.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_a_Bad_Boy"title="The Story of a Bad Boy">
"Tom Bailey" is born in the fictitious town of Rivermouth, New Hampshire, but moves to New Orleans with his family when he is 18 months old. In his boyhood, his father wants him to be educated in the North and sent him back to Rivermouth to live with his grandfather, Captain Nutter. Nutter lives with his sister and an Irish servant. There, Tom becomes a member of a boys' club called the Centipedes. The boys become involved in a series of adventures. In one prank, the boys steal an old carriage and push it into a bonfire for the Fourth of July. During the winter, several boys build a snow fort on Slatter's Hill, inciting rival boys into a battle of snowballs. Later, Tom and three other boys combine their money to buy a boat named "Dolphin" and sneak away to an island. Tom also befriends a man nicknamed Sailor Ben, whom Tom originally meets on the ship that took him away from New Orleans. Revealed as the long-lost husband of Captain Nutter's Irish servant, Ben settles in Rivermouth in a boat-like cabin. Sailor Ben helps the boys fire off a series of old cannon at the pier, much to the confusion of the local townspeople. When his father's banking job fails, Tom is invited by an uncle to work in a counting-house in New York.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Want_My_Hat_Back"title="I Want My Hat Back">
A bear laments his lost hat, and sets off to find it. He asks a fox and a frog if they have seen it, but neither has. The bear then asks a rabbit who is wearing a red pointy hat. The rabbit answers negatively and defensively, ending "Don’t ask me any more questions." The bear then moves on to ask a turtle, a snake, and a pangolin. None have seen the hat. A deer comes upon the despondent bear and asks him what his hat looked like. Upon recollecting that his hat was red and pointy, the bear snaps to a realisation and runs back to the rabbit. He accuses the rabbit of stealing his hat. After a page turn, we see the bear sitting on a rustled patch of ground, wearing the red pointy hat. A squirrel enters and asks the bear if he has seen a rabbit wearing a hat. The bear answers negatively and defensively, implying he ate the rabbit and ending with "Don’t ask me any more questions". The squirrel exits, leaving the hatted bear sitting alone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Muslim"title="The Good Muslim">
The central characters of the novel are Maya and Sohail. While "A Golden Age" tells their story before and during the liberation war of Bangladesh, "The Good Muslim" tells their story a decade after the war.In 1984, Maya returns home after almost a decade of absence and finds her beloved brother Sohail completely transformed. She still has the same revolutionary zeal, but Sohail has resorted to religiosity in its puritanical form and has become a charismatic religious leader, reflective of Bangladesh under the regime of General Hussain Muhammad Ershad, the President and dictator of Bangladesh who has promoted Islam over secularism. The ideological difference between Sohail and his sister creates a deep-seated schism in their minds. This difference is the central conflict in "The Good Muslim". They have charted their own ways, opposite to each other's, of moving forward in the shadow of the tortuous history. Maya is a liberal-minded ‘village doctor’ who helps women victims of war. She performs abortions so that the women who had conceived as a result of rape do not have to carry the stigma. Thus she witnesses misery all the time, everywhere. Sohail's way of being a good Muslim is altogether different from his sister's. He has embraced an extreme version of Islam as defined by the Tablighi Jamaat, which shuns the joyful life filled with music, friends and liberal values. Sohail wants to send his son to a madrasa and, as a result, a conflict ensues between them and comes to a devastating climax.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzcat"title="Blitzcat">
"Blitzcat" is told through the point of view of a black domestic cat, called Lord Gort, as she travels across England during the Blitz in search of her owner, who is serving with the RAF. The story includes a detailed depiction of the bombing of Coventry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Comes_to_Pemberley"title="Death Comes to Pemberley">
The novel begins in October, 1803, six years after the events in "Pride and Prejudice" which resulted in the marriage of Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy and Miss Elizabeth Bennet. The Prologue and Book One introduce the main characters, summarize the histories of the Bennet and Darcy families, and introduce a murder. The remainder of the novel is about the mystery and its solution.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_in_Winter"title="Emma in Winter">
It is wintertime. Emma's older sister Charlotte leaves Aviary Hall to stay with a schoolfriend, and then to return to her second term at her London boarding school. Emma, along with her classmate Bobby Fumpkins, simultaneously begin a series of dreams of being able to fly again, as they were able to do in "The Summer Birds". Bobby, being fat, is consistently teased by his classmates. Emma is also initial hostile towards Bobby, but realises that not only does Bobby appear in these dreams, but he is also having the same dreams. As the two oldest children in the school, Bobby and Emma are appointed head boy and head girl.In the dreams, they fly over their village and the South Downs, with the North Downs and the sea visible in the distance. They are observed and shadowed by an evil presence, initially appearing as a pair of eyes watching them. Strangely, the trees in their dreams consistently shrink downwards into the ground. Bobby realises that in their dreams, they are being dragged backwards in time. In successive dreams, they travel farther and farther back in time, visiting the Ice Age and seeing a mammoth, and a distant prehistoric time where they see a monstrous dinosaur. They speculate if they will eventually arrive at the beginning of the world, and if they will see the Garden of Eden.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Supplement_to_the_Journey_to_the_West"title="A Supplement to the Journey to the West">
During the battle with the Rakshasi Lady Iron Fan, Monkey transforms into an insect and enters her stomach. He forces her to give him the magic fan that he needs to quell the heavenly fire of the Flaming Mountain blocking their path to India. However, while he is in her stomach he becomes aroused with passion. This becomes a chink in Monkey's emotional and spiritual armor as he is otherwise without weakness. It is months after the pilgrims bypass the mountain that he falls prey to the magic of the Qing Fish demon, an embodiment of desire. The demon uses its powers of illusion to trap him in a dream world so nothing will keep it from eating the Tang Priest. The story from this point reads disjointedly as the dream world does not adhere to the rules of the physical world.While on a mission to find food, Monkey comes upon a large city flying the banner “Great Tang’s New Son-of-Heaven, the Restoration Emperor, thirty-eighth successor of Taizong.” This strikes him as odd as it was Taizong who had originally sent them to retrieve the Buddhist scriptures in India. This means that either the pilgrims’ journey has taken hundreds of years, or the city is a fake. He flies to heaven in order to learn more about the Great Tang, but finds that the gates are locked because an imposter Monkey has stolen the Palace of Magic Mists.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Monk_in_Trouble"title="Mr. Monk in Trouble">
Adrian Monk and Natalie Teeger are celebrating Halloween in Monk's apartment - Monk by handing out disinfectant wipes instead of candy, and Natalie using what little time she can get to relax (the rest stopping Monk from insulting any trick-or-treaters who dare come to his door). When a young man tries to trick-or-treat dressed in bloody clothing and carrying a knife, Monk knocks him out and tells Natalie he's not in costume - he really has just committed a murder. Natalie ties up the man and calls Captain Stottlemeyer, who shows up in a pirate costume. Randy, dressed as Dirty Harry Callahan, scopes Monk's neighborhood and finds a woman who lives just a few houses down from Monk stabbed to death on her kitchen floor. Monk claims his visitor is the woman's boyfriend and he killed her during an argument. The visitor denies this, but Stottlemeyer arrests him anyway.The next day, Stottlemeyer sends Monk and Natalie to Trouble, California, a small town known for an unsolved train robbery that happened there in 1962, to investigate the murder of a museum security guard who was a retired San Francisco police officer. There, Natalie falls in love with the police chief, Harley Kelton. The two then investigate and discover that in the 1840s, Trouble was also home to one of Monk's distant relatives, an assayer who possessed skills invaluable to the small town, and exhibited many of the same obsessive compulsive traits as Adrian. Monk discovers that these seemingly uncorrelated historical facts are connected to the murder. However, Chief Kelton says the murder has already been solved - he's positive an ex-con named Gator Dunsen is responsible. The trio stake out Gator's house, attempting to arrest him, but he fires upon them and is killed in the ensuing shootout. Kelton is reprimanded for trying to apprehend Gator without backup, and Monk and Natalie instead try to question Clifford Adams, the engineer of the train that was robbed. But when they arrive, they find Clifford murdered, and when they try to go for help, Monk falls into a mine shaft, and Natalie dislocates her shoulder when pulling him out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttlecock_(novel)"title="Shuttlecock (novel)">
Prentis, junior assistant in the 'dead crimes' department of the police archives in London, starts writing a personal memoir almost inadvertently. It is in response to his growing alienation from his wife and children; to regular visits to his estranged father, who has recently become catatonic and is in hospital; and to the confusing situation at work where he suspects his boss, Quinn, of suppressing crucial files in a case he is asked to investigate. Eventually it emerges that the files concern a friend that his father has betrayed and a blackmailer who claimed to have evidence that his father was not the World War II war-hero he claimed to be. Quinn is approaching retirement and has been grooming Prentis to see if he would make a suitably humane successor. Now he gives Prentis the choice of whether Quinn should destroy the files in question. When he agrees, he is guaranteed promotion. At the same time he loses his sense of inferiority to his father and manages to rescue his family situation at home. He has come to the conclusion that the impressions we make are fictitious. His father’s story of his work as a spy in Nazi-occupied France, passages from which are interspersed with Prentis’ own narrative, was created to hide the real truth about himself. Prentis, in his turn, is now creating a new version of himself in order to conceal his own weakness and uncertainties.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Peregrine's_Home_for_Peculiar_Children"title="Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children">
As a child, Jacob Magellan Portman has been fascinated with his grandfather Abraham's stories about surviving as a Jew during World War II, running from man-eating monsters, and living with peculiar children in a secret home guarded by "a wise old bird." As Jacob grows older, he begins to doubt the stories until the arrival of his grandfather's death. Blood-strewn, exhausted, and lying in his back garden on the outskirts of Florida Woods, Abraham's last words are a mystery: "...find the bird in the loop on the other side of the old man's grave on September 3, 1940, and tell them what happened." As his grandfather dies, Jacob catches sight of a horrific monster just like the ones described in Abraham's stories. Soon, he starts experiencing trauma and being plagued with nightmares relating to those monsters. Believing their son to be going crazy, Jacob's parents take him to Dr. Golan, a psychiatrist, who suggests that Jacob go to Cairnholm, Wales, the location of his grandfather's children's home to confront the place of his trauma. On his own, Jacob locates and explores the old house only to find it empty and everything caked in dust. According to the local people, the place is haunted and a bomb had killed all its inhabitants many years ago, on September 3, 1940.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_(Miller_novel)"title="Pure (Miller novel)">
A 28-year-old engineer named Jean-Baptiste Baratte is tasked with the removal of the Les Innocents cemetery from Les Halles, Paris in 1786 (the Place Joachim-du-Bellay now occupies the area) and the removal of its church. Baratte is an engineer with a single decorative bridge, built in his small home-town, comprising his entire career and, as such, is somewhat surprised by his appointment; he does, however, endeavour to complete his task.The cemetery has been in use for many years but, given the number of people buried in such a small area, the bodies have begun to overflow and fall into the neighbouring houses as greater excavations take place and basement walls are weakened. The entire area is also permeated with a foul smell, turning fresh produce rotten in far shorter times than natural and tainting the breath of those who live there.While scouting the cemetery before his work begins Baratte goes to stay with the Monnards, a middle-class family with a beautiful young daughter, Ziguette. In the cemetery Baratte makes the acquaintance of Armand, the church organist who continues to play, but for no one as the church has long since closed, the reclusive Père Colbert, the church priest who is mad, and 14-year-old Jeanne, the granddaughter of the sexton, who has grown up in the cemetery and is instrumental to Baratte's research.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadline_(Grant_novel)"title="Deadline (Grant novel)">
"Deadline" is set several decades after the zombie apocalypse, the Rising. Two man-made viruses (cures for cancer and the common cold) combined to form Kellis-Amberlee, a normally beneficial virus that, on the death of any host mammal over (and sometimes spontaneously, before that mammal's death), "goes live" or "amplifies", and turns them into a zombie. Most humans reside in controlled zones, with rigorous blood testing and decontamination used to stop the live KA virus from spreading. Bloggers, in this universe are respected, credentialed journalists (generally divided up as the fact-based "Newsies", the Steve Irwin-inspired "Irwins", and the entertaining "Fictionals") providing news and entertainment. A year after the events of "Feed", Shaun Mason is still coming to terms with having had to kill his infected sister, Georgia, and has stepped back from his role as an Irwin to head After the End Times, in an administrative role.After returning to Oakland, California, after a field excursion with Rebecca "Becks" Atherton (Shaun's replacement as the site's top Irwin), Alaric Kwong (a Newsie), and Dave Novakowski (another Irwin), Shaun receives a visit from Dr. Kelly Connolly, a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) researcher. Kelly had faked her death using a clone after her colleagues, researching the abnormally high death rate among people with "reservoir conditions" (in whom the active virus is present but confined to one part of the host's body, a condition Georgia had while alive), began dying at a suspiciously high rate: actions possibly linked to the conspiracy uncovered in the previous book. As they discuss this, a sizable zombie outbreak occurs; Dave overrides the lockdown so the others can escape but dies when the site is firebombed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spy_(Cussler_novel)"title="The Spy (Cussler novel)">
This novel is set in 1908, as international tensions are rising and moving the world toward war. A notable American battleship gun designer dies in what is thought a sensational suicide, but his daughter has no doubt he was murdered. She turns to the legendary Van Dorn Detective Agency to investigate and clear her father's name. Owner Joseph Van Dorn assigns his chief investigator, Isaac Bell, to the case. Bell quickly realizes the designer appeared to have been murdered. More suspicious deaths among engineers involved in the design of a new American dreadnought battleship follow. Even Van Dorn agents, including Bell, are attacked and Bell realizes an elusive spy is orchestrating all the havoc. In this story, Bell becomes pitted against British, German and Japanese spies. His quest to get to the bottom of the intrigue leads him to find his elusive spy leading his mission of sabotage and murder right under his nose.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Bengal_Rahashya_(novel)"title="Royal Bengal Rahashya (novel)">
On an invitation by Mahitosh Singha Ray, Lalmohon Babu takes Feluda and Topshe to a forest near Bhutan where Feluda is given a puzzle to solve. He solves that successfully, unearths hidden secrets of the Sinha Ray family, solves a murder and kills a man-eating tiger in the process. At the end of the story, he is rewarded with the Tiger-skin. This story tells about Feluda 's impressive reflex skills and his spear sharp mind with its unbeatable craze for mysteries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_of_Man"title="The Master of Man">
## Book I: The Sin.Victor Stowell, the son of the Deemster (judge), was letting his talents go to waste until he met Fenella Stanley, the Lieutenant Governor's daughter, who inspires him to try to make something of himself. His progress in studying to become an advocate is halted when he learns that Fenella has become a Warden at a Lady's Settlement in London. Understanding that her seven-year contract means that she therefore cannot marry him, Victor slides into disrepute. This leads eventually to his giving into the temptation to sleep with Bessie Collister, who he meets at a dance hall in Douglas.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_(Tunnels_novel)"title="Spiral (Tunnels novel)">
Part One: The PhaseAfter the events of Closer, Colonel Bismarck, deprogrammed by an explosion during the attack on the Bank of England, decides to help defeat the Styx, and joins Will and Drake at Parry's estate. Drake introduces Will and Chester to three retired commandos living at Parry's estate: "Sparks" Sweeney, who was surgically altered to have enhanced senses and faster reaction times, Danforth, a genius who worked in defense electronics, and Jiggs, who is very good at hiding. Will also meets Parry's gardener, Old Wilkie, and his granddaughter Stephanie. The people of the estate watch for Styx presence, and eliminate the Dark Light conditioning with the help of a device known as the Purger, invented by Danforth. The Purger causes a Darklit person to repeat part of their programming, and Elliott, who is able to speak Styx, finds that Chester has been programmed to call the Styx and report their location. Bartleby and Colly, the Hunters, are engaged in a hunt near the estate, when they encounter two of the Styx soldiers called Limiters spying on the manor. The Limiters wound Colly, and kill Bartleby. Will and the group decide to leave when Mrs. Burrows detects Limiters entering the estate. They escape, only to be cornered by Eddie the Styx, who reveals that the Limiters, rogues like him, are under his control, he was the one Chester was reporting to, and that he saved Emily Rawls, Chester's mother, from being used as a terrorist by the Styx. After much hesitation and discussion he decides he must tell them of the Phase. Meanwhile, in the Colony, the Second Officer begins to worry, as the Styx are neglecting the Colonists to focus on their Topsoil plans. Many people have been moved to an unruly and violent shantytown in the North Cavern to make room for the New Germanian army, and people are disappearing. Topsoil, various terrorist attacks are made by Darklit people who have had bombs surgically implanted within them, and these "human bombs" kill foreign politicians to stir up hatred of Britain. At a factory bought by the Old Styx, the Rebecca Twins have brought several hundred humans and Darklit them to render them brain-dead, perfect hosts for the Phase. They have also brought the Styx's females, who are undergoing part of the Styx's life cycle called the Phase. The Styx are revealed to be an insect species with a unique trait: at infrequent intervals (hundreds or thousands of years apart), the Styx women grow a pair of insect limbs and a mosquito-like ovipositor, used to insert egg sacs into human hosts. From each egg sac, thirty Styx larvae hatch and eat the host from the inside, also absorbing the host's genetic code, explaining why the Styx so closely mimic humans. Styx females who haven't gone through puberty, such as the Rebecca Twins, only experience back pain and minor bleeding where the insect limbs would grow if they were old enough to join in the Phase. Eddie also reveals that in the event the Warrior Class was killed, the Armagi would be released. The Armagi are capable of adapting to all environments, with three legs on land, fins and gills for water, or wings for air. The most horrifying aspect is that they can regenerate their entire body from just a single cell, making them nearly impossible to kill. Upon learning this, Drake and them decide they must take action. They set up headquarters in a military base known as the Complex, bomb shelter for the UK High Command dating back to the Great War. As a newscast reveals, strong anger has arisen worldwide over the human bomb attacks originating from Britain, and the United States and other countries cut off their connections to Britain, which closes its borders and puts itself under martial law. Underground, the Styx abandon the Colony and seal the exits after evacuating the people of the shantytown to use as hosts for the Phase. Finally, Eddie is brought back to base where Elliott angrily attacks him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_of_a_Dream"title="Child of a Dream">
The story starts before the birth of Alexander at Pella, when his mother Queen Olympias dreams of a snake slithering inside her bed and thrusting its seed inside her; when she recounts her dream to the priests of the Oracle of Dodona, they tell her that her child shall be the offspring of Zeus and a man, just like his hero Achilles. On the day that Alexander was born, his father Philip was preparing a siege on the city of Potidea on the peninsula of Chalcidice. That same day, Philip received news that his general Parmenion had defeated the combined Illyrian and Paeonian armies, and that his horses had won at the Olympic Games. It would later come to be said that on this day the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, burnt down because Artemis was away, attending the birth of Alexander.During his childhood, Alexander and his friends Hephaestion, Ptolemy, Seleucus, Leonnatus, Lysimachus, Craterus, Perdiccas and Philotas, are firstly educated by Leonidas. He teaches them the values of courage and pride, but also magnanimity; this would prove very important to Alexander during his campaigns. When Alexander is 13 years old, his father decides to send him (and his friends with him) to Mieza, a nearby town, for him to be tutored by Aristotle. The great philosopher teaches Alexander and his friends all the latest notions of science, philosophy and literature. Leptine, a girl that Alexander himself had saved from slavery, also joins the boys in Mieza; she will also stay very close to Alexander until his death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Monk_Is_Cleaned_Out"title="Mr. Monk Is Cleaned Out">
During a financial crisis, Adrian Monk's favorite brand of bottled water goes out of business, and he goes into severe withdrawal. As he and his assistant, Natalie Teeger, leave the store, they run into Captain Leland Stottlemeyer and Randy Disher, who are both flustered over the murder of Mike Clasker, CFO of Big County Mortgage, a financial company involved in a Ponzi scheme, and whom Clasker was set to testify against, but while Stottlemeyer and Disher were escorting him to court, Clasker was strangled with a length of piano wire inside his locked car when he stopped at a red light. No one was seen in or even remotely near the car when the murder occurred. Stottlemeyer asks Monk for help, but the bad news about his water has upset Monk too much to concentrate. To make matters worse, the San Francisco police department is also forced to fire Monk as a consultant. However, just minutes after his firing, Monk solves Clasker's murder, exposing the medical examiner as the killer. The ME, one of the many people who'd lost several things that Clasker got to keep, hid in the trunk of Clasker's car in the wee hours of the morning, then when the car stopped at the red light, the ME pushed down the back seat, crawled through the opening, strangled Clasker, hid again, then came back out of hiding while no one was looking so that when someone eventually did see him in the car, they thought he'd entered through the door. Stottlemeyer praises Monk for solving the case but says although rehiring him is what he wants most of all, he can't do it. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Monk_on_the_Road"title="Mr. Monk on the Road">
After solving a suicide turned homicide case, and feeling balanced after solving the murder of his wife Trudy, Adrian Monk wants his agoraphobic brother, Ambrose to experience life as well. With the help of Natalie, Julie, and Molly, Ambrose's birthday cake is drugged with sleeping pills and Ambrose is dragged into a motor home. When Ambrose wakes up, he finds himself on the open road with Adrian determined to show him the outside world. They meet several eclectic people, including a reporter named Dub Clemens who is determined to find a killer before he dies of lung cancer, and his tattooed assistant Yuki. Unfortunately for Natalie and Ambrose, their road trip is postponed several times when Adrian Monk is tasked with helping to solve various murders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Monk_on_the_Couch"title="Mr. Monk on the Couch">
Adrian Monk has to solve the murders of three people: a struggling student, a security guard, and a beautiful woman. The only common element between these three people is a couch. Meanwhile, Natalie Teeger solves a case on her own with the help of Monk's agoraphobic brother Ambrose.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Monk_on_Patrol"title="Mr. Monk on Patrol">
The town of Summit, New Jersey is hit with a string of arrests of high-profile politicians, leaving Randy Disher serving as the town's mayor. Since Summit's police are understaffed, and the controversy brought forth more criminal activity, Disher's girlfriend flies to San Francisco to convince Adrian Monk and Natalie Teeger to help their friend Randy, by serving as temporary police officers for the town. While working as police officers, Monk and Natalie discover a body, and Monk soon receives a threat on his own life that is meant to scare him away.Adrian Monk ignores the threats and keeps investigating, until he solves the murder. Weeks after the arrest, Captain Stottlemeyer asks Natalie and Monk whether they’re going to return to San Francisco. Monk makes a decision, which will be revealed in the next novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spellbound_(Dale_novel)"title="Spellbound (Dale novel)">
12-year-old Athene Enright is bossy and cruel to her cheery, 6-year-old brother, Zach. On their family summer holiday she encounters a separate species from humans called the Humble Gloam. When she makes best friends with two of them, Humdudgeon and Huffkin, Athene learns about the Low Gloam and their prisoners. Is this a perfect way to get rid of Zach?However, before long Athene starts to see how much her brother really means to her and so with Humdudgeon and Huffkin she begins an unforgettable journey to save her brother and all the prisoners from the dreaded Low Gloam.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Monica"title="Killing Monica">
A champagne-drinking New York novelist named Pandy Wallis has found success through writing a series of books about her alter ego, Monica. The books have been adapted into films starring an actress named Sondra-Beth Schnowzer. Now, newly divorced, Pandy wants to write serious fiction about one of her ancestors instead. The plot combines flashbacks of her friendship with Sondra-Beth and failed marriage, with her quest to kill off her character Monica.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashes_and_Bones"title="Ashes and Bones">
Emma Fielding confronts a man who should be dead.Tony Markham took the gold artifacts and sailed off into a hurricane. Everyone believes that he is dead, but he is haunting Emma's waking hours. Just when Emma has everything she has worked for all of her adult life a nightmare become real turning her hard won achievements into ashes. No one will believe her until things start getting rough. Plenty of tension building, but it borders on hysteria.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Still_Life_(Penny_novel)"title="Still Life (Penny novel)">
A body is found in the woods near a small town called Three Pines. Inspector Gamache and his homicide team are sent to investigate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swim_That_Rock"title="Swim That Rock">
The book takes place in Warren, Rhode Island in 1982, and centers around 14-year-old Jake Cole's quest to find his father, who went missing at sea. Like his father, Jake is a fisherman and quahogger in Narragansett Bay. The Cole family owns a small diner called the Riptide, but is in danger of losing the business because of a large debt owed to a local mafia loan shark. When his mother suggests that the family give up on the diner and move in with relatives in Arizona, Jake determines to repay the loan any way he can, thus giving him a chance to find his father (whom everyone else believes is dead). After a run of bad luck, Jake resorts to illegal night-fishing with a mysterious man called "Captain", but must contend with a game warden paid off by the mob. Although ultimately successful in saving the diner, Jake is deeply affected by the new experience of providing for his family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hate_U_Give"title="The Hate U Give">
Starr Carter is a 16-year-old black girl, who lives in the fictional mostly poor black neighborhood of Garden Heights, but attends an affluent predominantly white private school, Williamson Prep. After a shooting breaks up a party Starr is attending, she is driven home by her childhood best friend and sometimes crush Khalil. They are stopped by a white police officer. The officer instructs Khalil, who is black, to exit the car; while outside the car, Khalil leans into the driver-side window to check in on Starr. The officer assumes he is grabbing a gun and shoots Khalil three times, killing him.Starr agrees to an interview with police about the shooting after being encouraged by her Uncle Carlos, who is also a detective. Carlos was a father figure to Starr when her father, Maverick, spent three years in prison for gang activity. Following his release, Maverick left the gang and became the owner of the Garden Heights grocery store where Starr and her older half-brother Seven work. Maverick was only allowed to leave his gang, the King Lords, because he confessed to a crime to protect gang-leader King. Widely feared in the neighborhood, King now lives with Seven's mother, Seven's half-sister Kenya, who is friends with Starr, and Kenya's little sister, Lyric.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dog's_Journey"title="A Dog's Journey">
Buddy feels as if he has served his purpose by taking care of his deceased master, Ethan when he was alive, and Hannah and Ethan's other family members who live on the Farm. However, when Hannah's granddaughter, a toddler named Clarity June (CJ) comes to visit the Farm with her mother, Gloria, Buddy cannot help but feel that Ethan would want him to help her because her curiosity leads her to dangerous situations and Gloria does not pay attention to her. As a result, Buddy saves CJ from drowning and being trampled by a horse. Instead of admitting that she has been negligent and praising Buddy for his actions, Gloria blames him for each of CJ's predicaments and gets mad when CJ shows him affection. She later leaves the Farm with CJ after becoming angry when Hannah suggests that she take care of CJ so that Gloria can continue her singing career. Gloria wants the child support payments she receives from Hannah's son, Henry. After some time, Buddy dies, thinking that he will not be reborn and that he hopes there will be a dog for CJ because she needs one.Buddy is reborn, however. He realizes that he is now a female dog and his name is Molly. He tries to understand why he is back and then, one day, he sees Clarity who people now call CJ. She comes with her high school friend, Trent. Trent adopts Molly's brother, Rocky. Molly shows her love for CJ, but CJ says that Gloria will not allow her to have a dog. Not long afterwards, however, she returns and takes Molly home with her, planning to hide her from Gloria. The plan does not work, however, as Molly also tries to show Gloria love and reveals herself. Gloria tries to force CJ to get rid of Molly. CJ fights back by threatening to reveal Gloria's constant neglect of her. Gloria then tries to eliminate Molly herself by trying to kill the dog and then taking it to an Animal Control shelter. CJ rescues Molly both times. She tries to get her away from Gloria by living with other people and then running away to California. As she is still a minor, she has to return home both times. During the fight for Molly, CJ gets in trouble for skipping school and giving Shane, a boy she dates, the key to the art department. He says he wants to get a copy of an upcoming test, but instead commits a more serious crime. CJ tries to get away from Shane, who continues to try to control her, with Gloria's blessings. CJ runs away from Gloria again when she discovers that she has spent the money in CJ's trust fund. CJ was depending on the money to pay for her college education. When she leaves, Shane follows her and she has a car accident. Molly does not survive. As she dies, Molly realizes that she is the dog that was sent to take care of CJ.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brutal_Telling"title="The Brutal Telling">
The body of a man is found in the bistro in Three Pines. Investigations lead to a mysterious cottage in the nearby woods. Greed and revenge play a part.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expiration_Date_(Swierczynski_novel)"title="Expiration Date (Swierczynski novel)">
When Mickey Wade loses his newspaper job he returns to his old slum neighborhood in Philadelphia to stay in his grandfather's flat. He takes some "headache" pills only to find that they send him into the past – to 1972, the year he was born. There he meets the 12-year-old who will grow up to murder Mickey's father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bury_Your_Dead_(novel)"title="Bury Your Dead (novel)">
Between "The Brutal Telling" and "Bury Your Dead", there was a shooting of one of the agents in the homicide division (which is told in flashbacks). While Gamache is doing research in Quebec City, a body is found in the sub-basement of a library. Gamache becomes a consultant of the investigation. Meanwhile, the murder investigated in "The Brutal Telling" is investigated further.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trick_of_the_Light_(novel)"title="A Trick of the Light (novel)">
The body of a childhood friend of Clara Morrow, someone she supposedly hasn't seen in years, is found dead in her garden after a party. The murder is investigated by Armand Gamache.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegiant_(novel)"title="Allegiant (novel)">
A future dystopian Chicago has a society that defines its citizens by strict conformity to their social and personality-related affiliations with five different factions. That removes the threat of anyone exercising independent will and threatening the population's safety again by war or another human-created catastrophe. Those who fail the initiation of their particular faction are deemed Factionless and are treated as a lower class and a drain on society.After the revelation about their city, Evelyn Johnson-Eaton becomes Chicago's leader, which forces all factions to live equally with the Factionless. Confessing their role in the insurgency, Beatrice "Tris" Prior, Christina, and Cara are pardoned. Tris learns from Tobias "Four" Eaton about the rebel "Allegiant," who work to restore the faction system. Several people are killed in a confrontation between faction members and the Factionless, including Evelyn's right-hand man, Edward. Tris is invited to a meeting with the Allegiant, whose leaders, Cara and Johanna Reyes, plan to usurp Evelyn and send envoys outside the city. Tris is selected for the expedition, alongside Tobias, Cara, Christina, Peter Hayes, Uriah Pedrad, and Tori Wu. Tris asks Tobias to free her brother Caleb from execution. Tori is killed by the Factionless, and the others escape and meet Tobias's mentor, Amar, who has long been presumed dead. They are taken to the Bureau of Genetic Welfare and its leader, David.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Hunters_(novel)"title="Treasure Hunters (novel)">
The Kidd siblings Storm (Stephanie), Tommy (Thomas), Bick (Bickford), and Beck (Rebecca), live a happy life on their ship until their father, Thomas Kidd goes missing during a storm. Their mother also went missing three months earlier in Cyprus. The Kidds hold a small funeral for their father who is presumed to be dead. They continue to hunt for treasure, which is their family business. The Kidds start their treasure hunt in the Cayman Islands, which was their treasure hunt destination before the storm. The four of them go into the secret compartment in their ship, "The Lost", known as "the Room", where they find a list of the top ten greatest treasures of the world.A speedboat follows the Kidds. They are taken to Louie Louie, referred to as "the Big Man", a person who previously had done many deals with their father. He says that he needs an item their father promised to give him in exchange for a bee amulet and repairing "The Lost" for the Kidds. Tommy takes a girl named Daphne on a tour of the ship. Bick and Beck search her and find out that she was trying to steal a "mwana pwo" African mask. Louie Louie takes the "mwana pwo" mask, the item he desired and gives the Kidds the bee amulet. They find a map in the bee amulet titled "Cordoba's Lost Fleet", which was a vessel that carried gold and silver bars that went missing after a hurricane. The map is later revealed to be a fake kept by the treasure hunter Nathan Collier, who was the number one nemesis of their parents. He informs the Police about their whereabouts who are about to take them to the orphanage but Storm's knowledge of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea saves them. Later in the book, it is revealed that Solomon's knowledge would help them find where their father is.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_Justice"title="Cross Justice">
Alex Cross and his family, who live in Washington, D.C., travel to Starksville, North Carolina, so Alex and his wife Bree can help clear Alex's cousin Stefan Tate of a murder they suspect he did not commit. Stefan, a school teacher, is on trial for supposedly murdering Rashawn Turnbull, a boy in his class, and almost everyone in town is convinced he's guilty and wants him to hang. Alex has not been to Starksville since leaving as a child thirty-five years ago. The Cross family has not found the town to be welcoming to them, partly because they are there to help clear Stefan. Alex travels to Belle Glade, Florida, to get information on his father, who was said to have committed suicide near there. He meets a veteran Palm Beach County, Florida, sergeant, who is convinced Alex can help him catch a brutal serial killer in Palm Beach County. It turns out that the sergeant is Alex's long-lost father Jason. Meanwhile, Alex looks into Marvin Bell, a local businessman who has had dubious influence on the Cross family during Alex's childhood and is said to have orchestrated Jason Cross's fake death.After investigation, it turns out that Bell teamed up with Rashawn's maternal grandparents to ship a highly potent addictive drug across the South and were making large profits off of this drug. Rashawn's grandfather had killed Rashawn due to feeling shameful about the child's mixed heritage, then pinned it on Stefan since the latter had been investigating into the Starksville drug trade. It is also discovered that the entire judicial system of Starksville had been under FBI investigation for corruption. Following the incident, the FBI moves in and arrests all the judges in Starksville, with Stefan's case being dropped.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_Walking,_Rhona_Beech"title="Keep Walking, Rhona Beech">
"Keep Walking, Rhona Beech" is the witty but unsentimental story of a woman in her mid 30s watching her plans unravel. Just out of a nine-year relationship Rhona Beech embarks on a laugh (and cry) out-loud search for meaning amongst the bars, workplaces and NHS clinics of Glasgow. At once funny and tender, "Keep Walking, Rhona Beech" is a clear-sighted look at a generation of women that was told they could ‘have it all’.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Embezzlers"title="The Embezzlers">
The accountant Filipp Stepanovich, cashier Vanechka and courier Nikita fall victim to the latest embezzlement 'epidemic' that had swept 90 per cent of the Moscow commercial institutions. They steal 12 thousand rubles which they'd been supposed to deliver from the bank to their firm, and embark upon a massive spree which takes them first to Leningrad, then to the Russian South and finally, penniless, back to Moscow, straight to jail. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyrics_Alley"title="Lyrics Alley">
In 1950s Sudan, beautiful student Soraya can barely wait to marry her handsome and intelligent cousin Nur. Nur has dreams of being a poet, but his father, wealthy businessman Mahmoud Abuzeid, is completely opposed to this. He wants Nur to go to an English university in the United Kingdom and take over the family business, as Mahmoud's oldest son Nasir is lazy and a spendthrift. Meanwhile, Nur's impoverished former tutor Ustaz Badr secretly encourages him to write poetry. Nur's brilliant future is ruined when he dives from the beach at Alexandria and becomes a quadriplegic. Despite several surgeries, neurologists are unable to cure him. The Abuzeud family is divided in the aftermath. Mahmoud's estranged wife Waheeba waits on Nur hand and foot and uses the opportunity to wreak revenge on Nabilah, Mahmoud's favorite wife. Soraya at first believes that Nur will be cured, but is forbidden from marrying him by Mahmoud. Soraya eventually marries one of Nur's good friends, and Nur becomes a famous poet, when popular singers put his words to music. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Restless_Dead"title="The Restless Dead">
Dr Hunter is back working in London and at a low ebb professionally as he was the scapegoat for what went wrong in the last novel (The Calling of the Grave). When a call comes out of the blue from a Detective Inspector in Essex about recovering a body from some tidal mudflats, Hunter jumps at the chance to be working for the police again.The body is thought to be that of a wealthy young man who went missing only Dr Hunter is not convinced and actually proves the body is not that of the missing man.The setting is the coast of Essex with an estuary and its many inlets and narrow waterways. The bodies and the mysteries pile up with Hunter also getting too close to some of the major suspects and a possible resurgence of an old character at the end.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defending_Jacob"title="Defending Jacob">
Andy Barber is an assistant district attorney in Newton, Massachusetts. He is investigating the murder of a 14-year-old boy, Ben Rifkin, who was a classmate of his son Jacob and was found stabbed to death in a park near their school. Andy initially suspects Leonard Patz, a known local pedophile, but soon, he discovers that Ben's friend hints at the animosity between Ben and Jacob. Andy searches Jacob's room and discovers a knife that fits the description of the murder weapon. Unsettled by finding a knife in his son's room, Andy disposes of the knife on the notion of this being what "any parent would do." The next day, he is suddenly pulled off the case when a fingerprint is found inside Ben's sweatshirt that matches that of Jacob.The finding shocks Andy and his wife, Laurie, but does not shake their belief in his innocence. Jacob claims that he found Ben dead in the park and tried to revive him. While Jacob spends the night in jail, Andy reveals to Laurie that his father, Billy Barber, is a convicted murderer and rapist who is serving his life sentence at a Connecticut state prison. At the request of Jacob's lawyer, Andy reluctantly meets with Billy. He seems to be indifferent to Jacob's situation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Calling_of_the_Grave"title="The Calling of the Grave">
The book starts as a prequel to the entire series as it is set some time before the events of The Chemistry of Death, when David Hunter's wife and Daughter (Kara and Alice) are still alive. Hunter is called out to examine locations for deposition sites of the victims of Jerome Monk, a rapist and killer who was known to have killed at least four people and buried their bodies on Dartmoor.Monk, who is serving time in Dartmoor prison for his crimes, agrees to help the investigation team find the bodies and he is brought out onto the moor. Whilst a dig is ongoing, Monk uses the confusion of finding some bones to make a run for freedom. He is recaptured, returned to prison and the investigation is wound down.Eight years later, Monk escapes from prison and sets about targeting all those who were on that investigation and David Hunter finds himself on Dartmoor once again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rabbits'_Wedding"title="The Rabbits' Wedding">
The rabbits live in the forest, where they go on journeys. The black rabbit (male) feels conflicted; finally he reveals why he has been depressed and thoughtful, conveying to the white rabbit (female) that he wishes she will stay by his side forever. The white rabbit accepts the black rabbit's wish and love. A wedding is celebrated and the bunnies dance under the moonlight with the other creatures of the forest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idiot_(Batuman_novel)"title="The Idiot (Batuman novel)">
Selin Karadağ is a freshman studying linguistics at Harvard University. She meets an older Hungarian mathematics student, Ivan, in a Russian language class and the two begin corresponding over email, and occasionally spend time together in person. While Selin and Ivan at times seem interested in each other romantically, neither know how and when to express their feelings. The summer after her freshman year, Selin travels to Paris with her college friend Svetlana, and then to Hungary to teach English in a remote village, a job she accepts partly to be closer to Ivan. At the end of the summer, Selin returns to Harvard and Ivan goes to California to pursue graduate mathematics.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trumpsformation"title="Operation Trumpsformation">
Gay marriage is legalised in Ireland. Fionnuala, Ross's mother, is imprisoned, accused of the murder of her second husband. Ross's triplets develop an interest in soccer. Ross's father, Charles, aims to emulate Donald Trump and build a wall around Cork. Honor adopts a transgender identity, becoming "Eddie."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Birds_in_the_Sky"title="All the Birds in the Sky">
"All the Birds in the Sky" is set in the near-future and is about Patricia and Laurence, a witch and a techno-geek. Patricia discovers, when she is six, that she has magical abilities, like talking to birds – but she has no control over it and cannot summon it at will. Laurence, from a young age, invents gadgets, makes a two-second time machine out of a watch, and later builds a supercomputer in his bedroom. Patricia and Laurence both attend the same junior high school where they discover each other after being ostracized by other children for being too strange.Their time at school, however, does not last long and they soon become separated. Patricia runs away after being accused of witchcraft, and with the help of a bird, becomes one and flies away; she is intercepted by a magician who enrolls her in a school for witches. Laurence is sent to a military reform school by his parents for his non-conforming behavior.Ten years later, the adult Patricia and Laurence bump into each other again at a party. Patricia is now a witch who can control and use her magical abilities, and has joined a witch's cabal. Laurence had escaped the reform school and now is part of a think tank of like-minded geeks building a wormhole generator. Patricia and Laurence keep in touch, but their divergent philosophies strain their relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Nines_Roll_Over"title="When the Nines Roll Over">
A collection of short stories. The first story, which is the title story ("When the Nines Roll Over"), is about a jaded hipster record executive who is trying to steal a talented and sexy young singer away from a small label. The other stories are varied, ranging from the tale of a young soldier ordered to execute an elderly woman to a drama about a lovesick young man's decision to secretly scatter his girlfriend's father's ashes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asylum_(series)"title="Asylum (series)">
## Asylum (2013).Dan is a new attendee to the New Hampshire College Prep (NHCP) summer program, where he befriends two other attendees, Abby and Jordan. Abby and Dan kindle a romance, which threatens their friendship with Jordan. This becomes the least of his problems, as the trio ends up getting drawn into the past mysteries of their dorm, the Brookline Dorm, which used to serve as a psychiatric hospital. Exploring the dorm's grounds and history brings evidence that one of Abby's relatives attended the hospital and that one of Dan's relatives may have been the hospital's warden. Things grow more tense after a boy is killed at the university and Dan discovers that there was once a serial killer named "The Sculptor" that attended thanages to meet her aunt, Dan travels back home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_City_(novel)"title="Open City (novel)">
Julius, a man completing the last year of a psychiatry fellowship, wanders the streets of New York City and meets a variety of people over the course of a year.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Blood_and_Bone"title="Children of Blood and Bone">
The novel takes place in the fictional country of Orïsha, which is presumably somewhere in precolonial Nigeria, inhabited by two distinct people: divîners, who have the capability to become magical maji and are marked by white hair, and non-magical kosidán. Eleven years prior to the events of the book, King Saran figured out how to switch off magic and ordered the slaying of many defenseless divîners, including the mother of Zélie Adebola. Since that time, divîners have been severely oppressed. After visiting the capital city, Lagos, to make enough money to pay off an increased tax on divîners, Zélie and her brother Tzain help a noble girl flee the clutches of local guards. This girl, who turns out to be Princess Amari, the daughter of King Saran, has stolen a magical scroll that can restore the magical powers of any divîner who touches it. The reason Amari stole the scroll was that after her servant and best friend, Binta, touched it and her powers came to life, King Saran killed her. Like her mother before her, Zélie is able to awaken her magical powers as a Reaper, giving her the power to command undead spirits.Pursued by a contingent of guards led by Amari's brother Prince Inan and Admiral Kaea, the three travel to the temple of the maji, Chândomblé. The temple's remaining priest, Lekan, tells them that they must use the scroll, the bone dagger (which he gives them), and an artifact called the sunstone to perform a ritual to renew the connection between the maji and the gods, who are the source of all magic. He performs a rite on Zélie so she will be able to complete the connection, and then he sacrifices himself to hold off the guards as the trio escapes. Unknown to anyone else, contact with the scroll has given Prince Inan magical abilities to detect the feelings and memories of others. Kaea catches Inan using these abilities to track the trio and Inan accidentally uses his magic to kill her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vital_Question"title="The Vital Question">
In the book, Lane discusses what he considers to be a major gap in biology: why life operates the way that it does, and how it began. In his view as a biochemist, the core question is about energy, as all cells handle energy in the same way, relying on a steep electrochemical gradient across the very small thickness of a membrane in a cell – to power all the chemical reactions of life. The electrical energy is transformed into forms that the cell can use by a chain of energy-handling structures including ancient proteins such as cytochromes, ion channels, and the enzyme ATP synthase, all built into the membrane. Once evolved, this chain has been conserved by all living things, showing that it is vital to life. He argues that such an electrochemical gradient could not have arisen in ordinary conditions, such as the open ocean or Darwin's "warm little pond". He argues instead (following Günter Wächtershäuser) that life began in deep-sea hydrothermal vents, as these contain chemicals that effectively store energy that cells could use, as long as the cells provided a membrane to generate the needed gradient by maintaining different concentrations of chemicals on either side.Once cells similar to bacteria (the first prokaryotes, cells without a nucleus) had emerged, he writes, they stayed like that for two and a half billion years. Then, just once, cells jumped in complexity and size, acquiring a nucleus and other organelles, and complex behavioural features including sex, which he notes have become universal in complex (eukaryotic) life forms including plants, animals, and fungi.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Whispering_Skull_(novel)"title="The Whispering Skull (novel)">
After months of not having any cases to solve, Lockwood makes a bet with their rivals, the Fittes agency, and whoever loses has to admit their defeat in the newspaper. Soon after Lockwood &amp; Co. have a customer called Mr. Saunders who wants Lockwood &amp; Co. to come and seal Edmund Bickerstaff's coffin. All goes well till George trips and falls into the coffin releasing a horrible phantom, as well as a powerful Source which kills whoever looks into it. Lockwood and Co. are tasked to retrieve the Source at all cost before it starts wreaking havoc in London.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoneheart_trilogy"title="Stoneheart trilogy">
## "Stoneheart".After getting in trouble on a school trip to the Natural History Museum, George takes off in a huff and, out of anger, breaks off the head of a stone dragon on the side of a wall. This sets off a stone pterodactyl literally peeling itself off the top of the building and chasing George. As George runs away he sees three stone salamanders also chasing him. During the chase, George bumps into the Gunner, a statue of a World War I soldier who helps him escape the pterodactyl and salamanders. He explains to George that by breaking the stone dragon, he has entered a different world – an un-London – where statues move and talk. There are many worlds and the world George has entered is one where all the statues and sculptures are Spits or Taints and are at war, though presently a Cold War, with each other. No one else can see what is happening to him, except Edie Laemmel, a glint. She has the power to experience past events recorded in stones by touching them. But unknown to them the Stone has alerted the Walker, one of its servants, who stalks them with the help of his own servant, the Raven. On his journey, George discovers he has special powers. The Black Friar identifies George as a maker, someone with a special gift for sculpting things from stone or metal. The Friar also tells them to find the 'Stone Heart' and put the broken dragon carving back to make amends for the damage George has done. But on the way the Gunner has sacrificed himself by breaking his promise sworn in the Maker's name to the Walker to try and save Edie, and ultimately falls into the clutches of the Walker. It is left to George to use his new-found gifts as a maker to rescue her. In so doing he sacrifices his own safety and is fated to take 'The Hard Way', remaining with her in this dangerous unLondon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heat_of_Ramadan"title="The Heat of Ramadan">
The book opens in Munich, with Eytan Eckstein and his team of Israeli agents on the hunt for master terrorist Amar Kamil. However, Eckstein makes a fatal mistake, killing the wrong man, and is himself badly wounded during the failed assassination. Thereafter, while relegated to a punitive desk job, Eckstein discovers that the members of his old team are being killed off, one-by-one. Benni Baum, his faithful commander, supports Eckstein's hunch that Amar Kamil is back in play, and the pair of renegade agents sets off to stop Kamil from committing a revenge assassination in Jerusalem that could engulf the Middle East in flames.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Whispers,_Brother_Rush"title="Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush">
Theresa "Tree" Pratt is a wise-beyond-her-years teenager in Ohio, caring for her developmentally disabled older brother, Dab, while their mother is often away working. Dab regularly suffers from a strange illness that leaves him incapacitated. One day, Tree sees a well-dressed man while she is leaving school and is immediately attracted to him. The next time she seems him, he is standing in the middle of a table in a closet in the family's apartment, holding an oval mirror. Tree realizes this is a ghost, Brother Rush. Through Brother Rush's mirror, Tree can see scenes from her family's past — including her mother's abuse of her brother. Once Tree's mother, M'Vy, arrives home, Tree confronts her about both Brother Rush's presence and the family's past, as Dab's illness worsens.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderlord!"title="Thunderlord!">
A generation after a time period known in the Darkover universe as "The Age of Chaos" a character by the name Gwynn has lost his family in the conflict. His life's ambition has become plotting revenge against those who caused his family's loss. He seeks to marry a woman with the genetic power to control the storms, in hopes that his offspring will use it to against Aldaran.Kyria, his selected bride is attracted to Gwynn because of his financial status and other reasons. During her journey through the mountains to Scathfell, where she will formally wed, she and her sister come across Edric, a young heir to Aldaran. Edric also possesses the power to control thunderstorms, a power he has been warned to be cautious of because of the mass danger it poses to all.Their companionship brings them closer and creates an opportunity for their arch-rival kingdoms to unite.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indira_Bai"title="Indira Bai">
Indira Bai depicts the story of Indira, a child widow. Indira is an only child that is married, before the age of puberty, to an older man that is apathetic to her experience. Her husband is depicted as financially unwise and ignores her completely following their marriage for luxurious living. Indira, pining in unrequited sentiment for her husband, turns to reading for solace after her mother Ambabai’s advice. However, her mother is unsupportive of the material within the books Indira chooses to read, describing the novels as being written by “the mlechchha padres meant to destroy our caste.” Following the death of her husband, Indira lives as a child widow. She is restricted by practises that dictate the colour of clothes she must wear, and is not allowed to groom her hair. Indira’s parents leave her with a group of wandering widows that sing hymns, as they fear Indira’s readings may be negatively shaping her attitudes. However, Indira is wary of the group’s leader and runs away. Indira hides with another young student at a lawyer’s house. The lawyer, Amritaraya and his wife Jalajakshi are socially progressive individuals. Under their care, Indira is able to pursue her interests and they also send her to school. The school, Saraswati Mandir, is especially concerned with educating young women. Together, the lawyer and his wife nourish Indira’s youth and support her by challenging orthodox notions surrounding child marriage and child widows. The novel ends with Indira reuniting with her parents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elegy_for_Kosovo"title="Elegy for Kosovo">
The novel is split into three sections: 1) The Ancient Battle, 2) The Great Lady and 3) The Royal Prayer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Empire_(novel)"title="The Crystal Empire (novel)">
Sedrich Sedrichsohn is an outcast from a small community of Europeans who have fled the twin dangers of the Muslim invaders by establishing a colony on the East Coast of North America, practising a cult derived both from Christianity and Wiccan beliefs. Among their tenets are the belief that Christ continues to suffer in Hell until the Last Judgement, and also the placing of blame for the plague on the use of forbidden technologies such as gunpowder. Journeying across the continent, Sedrichsohn eventually comes across a Sino-Aztec kingdom in the West, the Crystal Empire of the 'Han-Meshika', formed by the synthesis of Chinese refugees from the Plague with the native Aztec civilisation. This immensely technologically advanced power derives its scientific advantage from the use of psychic 'Dreamers' who, in a large facility on the equivalent of our world's Alcatraz Island, provide the Crystal Empire with glimpses of alternate universes and thereby stimulate its science (one example given is the adoption of the electric light-bulb as a consequence of a Dreamer's vision).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_City_Blues"title="Demon City Blues">
As told in the events of "Demon City Shinjuku", a devastating earthquake caused by supernatural forces left most of Japan in ruins, turning the Shinjuku district into a zone suspended between the mortal world and Hell. The district has become an isolated slum in which humans struggle to cohabit with monsters and demons every day. In this dark place, a young private investigator specialized in missing people, named Setsura Aki, gets routinely tasked with dangerous missions that pit him against the worst entities of the netherworld.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_of_a_Useless_Man"title="The Life of a Useless Man">
The orphan boy Yevsey Klimkov is apprenticed to the owner of a shop, who secretly sells prohibited revolutionary books and then informs on his customers to the police. The bookseller is murdered, and the bereft, frail, and weak Klimkov is coerced by the Tsarist police to be a spy and informer.Klimkov admires the revolutionaries, but lives in fear of being discovered by them. He consoles himself that he is just following orders, but when unable to gather sufficient information, he makes it up. The role of the agent provocateur is commended to Klimkov, and he takes it: he encourages some revolutionaries to produce illegal pamphlets, supplies them with the printing facilities, and then has them arrested. His reward is 25 rubles for sending seven people to prison.Torn inside, Klimkov confesses to one of the revolutionaries, then tries to assassinate the police chief in revenge of his plight. He fails, and then hangs himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith,_The_Legend_of_the_First_Woman"title="Lilith, The Legend of the First Woman">
Created Adam's equal alike in stature, strength and power, Lilith's spirit is chafed by Adam's insistence on his own supremacy and her subjection, and rather than yield she chooses to find her own paradise without the walls. According to Collier's narrative, Lilith, having left the Garden of Eden, never to return, goes out into the world. For a time, she enjoys the pleasure in Nature's companionship. Far from Eden, she finds a beautiful land where she can rule supreme, though lonely. It is here that she is wooed by Eblis, the fallen angel and prince of the powers of the air, who forgets to mourn the heaven he lost in the heaven of Lilith's love. Eblis woos Lilith and she becomes his wife. Lilith's children are little imps without affection for her or her maternal yearnings; in fact, they torture her. When Lilith starts thinking about Eden, Eblis takes her there and, upon looking over its wall, she is annoyed to see Adam with another wife, Eve, who is breastfeeding. Lilith's discovery that she has been supplanted and that Eve's child loves its mother, arouses jealousy and later, Lilith steals the baby, devoting all her affectionate and attention to it, but the child subsequently grows ill. After Adam and Eve are driven from the Garden, Lilith relents and takes the child back to its mother, in whose arms it afterwards dies, and Lilith returns to her own land.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Ignota"title="Terra Ignota">
## "Too Like the Lightning".Set in the year 2454, the novel is a fictional memoir written by self-confessed unreliable narrator Mycroft Canner, a brilliant, infamous, and paroled criminal who often serves the world's most powerful leaders. He has been commissioned by several other characters to write the "history" that the series is presented as. Mycroft frequents the Saneer-Weeksbooth home, in which an important stolen document has been planted. The mystery of why and by whom serves as a focal point which draws many different characters, vying for global power and peace, into involvement with the family. Meanwhile, Mycroft tries to protect and conceal a child named Bridger, who has the power to make the unreal real.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Time_(novel)"title="Children of Time (novel)">
The book's plot involves a planet inhabited by evolved spiders ("Portia labiata") uplifted by human scientist Avrana Kern, and their much later discovery by the last humans alive in the universe. The work plays off the contrast between the societal development of the spiders and the barbaric descent of the starship crew of the last humans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mask_of_Sanity_(novel)"title="Mask of Sanity (novel)">
Dr. Jeremy Balint is an up-and-coming cardiologist who discovers that his wife Amanda is having an affair with his fellow physician Warren Sugarman. He is also a high-functioning sociopath. Balint plots to murder Sugarman and to disguise the murder as the work of a serial killer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin's_Fate"title="Assassin's Fate">
Bee fights furiously with her captors as they struggle to bring her the long distance back to Clerres, and Bee slowly comes to understand her own ability with the Skill. When Dwalia and Vindeliar finally succeed in bringing her to Clerres Castle, the Four who rule there punish Dwalia severely for her many failures. Bee hides her abilities and pretends to be a frail little girl who does not have prophetic dreams. When Symphe (one of the ruling Four) brings Bee to one of the lower cells in the castle, where prisoners are held for torture, Bee recognizes her danger. When Symphe asks her to bring an oil lantern closer, Bee throws the lantern, splashing oil onto Symphe, whose clothes quickly catch fire. While Symphe is distracted, Bee makes use of a broken glass vial, which she uses to slit Symphe's throat. The broken glass vial contained sea serpent essence, and when Bee touches the essence, it supercharges her Skill ability. She tells Dwalia to die, and Dwalia does. Bee quietly returns to her cell and pretends that she had been there the whole time.Fitz, the Fool, Per, Spark, and Lant arrive at Clerres on the liveship Paragon. The Fool tricks the team into waiting until the beginning of the next day while he slips into the castle that night. The Fool manages to kill a few guards in the Servants' castle, but then is caught and sent to the dungeons. With Symphe's death the castle gates are now closed and Fitz, with the rest of the team, have no way into the castle. However, Bee manages to slip them a cryptic message that "The way out is a way in," by which Fitz realizes that she is telling them to try entering the castle through its sewage tunnel. The team makes the disgusting trip through the tunnel and emerge into bowels of the castle, where they find and release the Fool. They next go in search of Bee.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trayaurus_and_the_Enchanted_Crystal"title="Trayaurus and the Enchanted Crystal">
"Trayaurus and the Enchanted Crystal" is a story about DanTDM and his scientist friend Trayaurus, who, one day, discovers a crystal that has crashed on The Overworld while shattering into five pieces. It does not take long until they discover its powerful potential. DanTDM and Trayaurus set out to find the other crystals, but are hindered in their objective by their nemesis Denton who appears in many of Daniel's old Minecraft videos. Denton is trying to gain all of that power for himself. The lead characters feel like they have no choice but to stop Denton by finding all the remaining pieces first, preventing Denton from becoming more dangerous than he already is at present.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dark_So_Deadly"title="A Dark So Deadly">
Detective Constable Callum MacGregor is in the Misfit Mob. This is where Police Scotland deposit their outcasts, troublemakers and those whom it wishes to get rid of but cannot. Callum is in the Misfit Mob because he screwed up the forensics at a crime scene, which allowed a known killer to walk free from court. Everyone thinks he accepted a bribe from the killer to deliberately contaminate the scene. Trouble is, MacGregor didn't ruin the crime scene; it was his pregnant girlfriend who was on her last warning, which would have meant her getting sacked and not receiving maternity leave or pay. So MacGregor takes the blame earning him the job in the Misfit Mob.Whilst there, he has to deal with police finding his mum's remains (25 years after she went missing), finding out that his long lost twin brother is a rapper with an attitude and a fake accent and a serial killer who is mummifying his victims. He is hardly welcomed with open arms by the haiku-speaking Sergeant and his own big boss is revealed to not only be his supposed baby's real father, but he is also having an affair with MacGregor's girlfriend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Infant_and_the_Devil"title="The Infant and the Devil">
In June 1914, Europe is moving towards a big war following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo. One of the minor officials in the Guards Corps of the Russian Army has made copies of the mobilization plan of the forthcoming war and offers them to the German intelligence service. The main spy of Germany in Russia, Captain Joseph (Sepp) von Theofels, participates in the operation of transferring the document. During the meeting with the traitor, Sepp is ambushed, however thanks to the accidental intervention of a young man, student Aleksei Parisovich Romanov, he manages to escape. Russian counterintelligence begins the hunt for Sepp but he always manages to slip away with his faithful servant and assistant Timo.In counterintelligence, Romanov is interrogated by Captain Duke Kozlovsky, who explains the outcome of Romanov's actions. Realizing his guilt, albeit accidental, Romanov is full of desire to atone. Russian counterintelligence manages to learn that a copy of the plan is hidden in the premises of the sports club of the Guards Corps, the site of a football match between the Guards and German football players. Assuming that during the match the spy will try to get the invaluable plan from the cache, Kozlovsky wants to organize an ambush. Aleksei Romanov disguises himself as a football player in the Russian Guards team and tries to teach Kozlovsky to become a goalkeeper.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_Sivagami"title="The Rise of Sivagami">
Sivagami returned to the Mahishmati Kingdom after 12 years, they returned as Sivagami’s former servant Lakshmi was on her deathbed. They broke into her father's former mansion where she recalled many memories she had with her father Devaraya, who was a nobleman. She recovers a manuscript, she visibly remembers Devaraya handing the manuscript to Lakshmi instructing her to give it to her daughter, before the Maharaja’s men barged into his mansion and took him. The manuscript may contain a secret that may redeem her father or condemn him further. Kattapa is a 22-year-old slave whose father “Malayappa " was the personal slave of Maharaja Somadeva. During a hunting party, Maharaja Somadeva is with his sons Bjjaladeva and Mahadeva. Kattappa accidentally got Bjjaladeva’s clothes dirty and Bjjaladeva started hitting Kattappa with a lash in front of everyone. Shivappa, Kattapa’s younger brother, who Kattapa secretly smuggled into the hunting party, hit Bijjaladeva after realizing he was hurting Kattapa. Malayappa, seeing this, hit Shivappa in front of everyone and made Kattapa hit Shivappa as well. Kattapa asked for forgiveness that same night Shivappa for hitting him, but Bjjaladeva once again came. He explains how Shivappa can’t just escape with his father’s beating. Prince Mahadeva tried to stop Bjjaladeva but failed. Shivappa starts running for his life as Bijjaladeva chases Shivappa. Shivappa heads towards the elephant Gireesh, who hurts Bijjaladeva after Bjjaladeva strikes the elephants instead of Shivappa. Kattappa saves Bijjaladeva as well as Prince Mahadeva before he gets knocked out. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Without_Women_(Haruki_Murakami_short_story_collection)"title="Men Without Women (Haruki Murakami short story collection)">
## "Drive My Car".Kafuku, a veteran and widowed actor, hires twenty-four year old driver Misaki Watari to chauffeur him around Tokyo due to his license being revoked due to a D.U.I. and glaucoma. During their trips, Kafuku occasionally tells her about his life as an actor and his late wife's extramarital affairs. One tale includes how he befriended her lover, Takatsuki, with the intention of harming him. However, over the course of their six month friendship which was spent mostly binge drinking at local bars, he was never able to find any damning information and instead sympathizes with Takatsuki's observations. He also never learns of his wife's motives, calling it a "blind spot" in his knowledge of her. After hearing his story, Misaki notes that perhaps his wife having affairs had had nothing to do with love and that was a good enough reason to do so. After contemplating this propositions, he falls asleep as she continues driving. Dealing with actors and the world of theatre, "Drive My Car" could be considered as an example of what Graham Wolfe calls "theatre-fiction".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borne_(novel)"title="Borne (novel)">
The novel takes place in the future, in the ruins of a nameless city dominated by a giant grizzly bear called "Mord". The perspective character, Rachel, is a scavenger in the city; she collects various genetically-engineered organisms and experiments that were created by "the Company", a biotech firm. One day, while searching in Mord's fur, Rachel discovers a sea anemone-like creature that she names "Borne".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNNS-The_Captivation"title="UNNS-The Captivation">
The novel depicts international espionage that conflicts with romance. The story spans across three countries: India, Germany, and the United States. Atharva Rathod and Meher Qasim fall in love when they are in school. However, their romance is short lived, as Meher abruptly breaks all ties with Atharva and leaves for Germany with no intent to return. Fifteen years later, Atharva travels to Germany on a secret mission, where he happened to meet Meher. The mission ends in failure, and Atharva is imprisoned for twelve years, on charges of acting against the Research and Analysis Wing of India. As Atharva is freed after serving his full sentence, his mentor entrusts him with an amateur mission in the United States where he meets Meher once again. The story is divided across three parts, each named after a season that symbolizes the maturity of love between the protagonists: spring, fall, and winter. Each part is further divided into seven sub-parts, each representing one of the seven stages of love, ending in death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Water"title="Into the Water">
Following the unexplained death of her sister, Nel, in a pool at the foot of a cliff, Jules Abbott returns to Beckford, a fictional town in Northumberland, to care for her niece, Lena. The novel is told in a mixture of first-person and third-person narrative.Jules had been estranged from her sister Nel due to an incident from their childhood. Nel assumed that Jules had seduced her boyfriend Robbie even though he was sexually abusing Jules. Lena is furious at Jules for not speaking to her mum. Lena believes that her mum jumped into the Drowning Pool, a place where multiple women throughout the town's history have died. Lena blamed her friend Katie's death on her mother's obsession with the pool. Jules does not believe that her sister committed suicide. She heard fear in Nel's last voicemail, imploring Jules to meet her. Jules informed Detective Sean Townsend about this. Detective Sergeant Erin Morgan sensed Sean's distress in the case and found out that his mother also committed suicide in the Drowning Pool.Helen Townsend stays at her father-in-law Patrick's cottage as her husband betrayed her. Louise, Katie's mother, was relieved that Nel died as she holds her responsible for inspiring girls to become curious about the Drowning Pool. Her son Josh, however, is terrified that his mother was not at the house when Nel died.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitri_the_Astronaut"title="Dmitri the Astronaut">
An American astronaut named Dmitri splashes down in the Atlantic Ocean after spending two and a half years on the Moon. He is picked up by the cruise ship S.S. "Knickerbocker" and sails to New York City, but quickly realizes that no one remembers him. Dmitri visits the Museum of Intergalactic Exploration, where he is so discouraged by the neglected state of the museum's Moon exhibit that he tosses his collection of Moon rocks into a trash can in Central Park. Dmitri does not know that his friend Lulu, a small pink creature he found on the Moon, hid inside the bag of rocks before Dmitri took off for Earth. Dr. Geoffrey W. Beaton, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, finds Lulu in the park and takes the creature to the Academy of Science. The following day, Dmitri finds Lulu at the Academy, where the creature has covered the walls with crayon drawings of Dmitri in his space suit. Dmitri is finally recognized by Dr. Beaton, and Dmitri and Lulu are hailed as heroes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Torch_Against_the_Night"title="A Torch Against the Night">
The second book in the Ember Quartet picks up where the first book left off. Laia, a Scholar and Elias, a Martial, are running for their lives from the Empire. They plan to head to Kauf prison, where they will attempt to free Darin, Laia's brother, who has been imprisoned there. Darin has special skills as a blacksmith that make him essential to the survival of his people, the Scholars. Meanwhile, the story also follows the character of Helene Aquilla, who was Elias's best friend and has now been charged by the new Emperor--her old enemy Marcus--to hunt Elias down. With help from her friends Faris and Dex--Helene begins the difficult task. Along the way, the Commandant Keris Veturia--now Emperor Marcus's lieutenant--makes things more difficult by assigning a man named Avitas Harper to go along with Helene. All along the way, Laia and Elias face the agents of their enemies--Emperor Marcus, the Commandant, and even supernatural creatures who are hunting Laia for reasons she doesn't yet understand. Point of view characters in this book include Laia of Serra, Elias Veturius and Helene Aquilla.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slave_Girl_(novel)"title="The Slave Girl (novel)">
"The Slave Girl" is set in colonial Nigeria, in the early 1900s, and tells the story of Ogbanje Ojebeta who, following the death of her parents is sold into domestic slavery. "She finds solace among her fellow slaves but learns the painful lessons of what it means to be owned by another. As she grows into a woman she longs for freedom and for a family of her own. She realizes that she must ultimately decide her own destiny, and when the opportunity arises, makes a choice that we as modern readers might find surprising."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustown"title="Augustown">
The book is based on an historical incident from 1921 in which Baptist preacher Alexander Bedward told congregants he would physically fly up to heaven; instead he was committed to an insane asylum. In Miller's reimagining, however, the preacher proves able to fly and people gather in the impoverished neighborhood of Augustown to see the miracle for themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Automation"title="The Automation">
Odys Odelyn is given a coin by a mysterious man named Pepin Pound just before the man kills himself. The coin is the inanimate form of an Automaton - a creation of the god Vulcan. She is one of nine such creations that the god has left on the earth after serving her previous purpose. Pepin had to kill himself in order to free her for a new Master. Humans with Automata are called Masters, and the Automata are activated by the Master's soul and are just another vessel for their Master, yet with the knowledge and memories of their previous Masters. There is a rogue Master, Leeland, wanting to collect all the Automata under one Master because he believes they are evil and create strife when held individually. The other Masters have banded together to protect themselves, but their organization is threatened when Vulcan hints at a new plan for his creations - one that has been using all their actions and feuds to further his grand designs.The Narrator of the book claims to be a character in the story, though does not reveal their identity until the end. The Editor, Gabbler, claims to know the Narrator personally and believes the story to hold literary merit and contain half-truths. Their genders are kept hidden.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dreary_Story"title="A Dreary Story">
Nikolai Stepanovich, a luminary in the world of medical science, tormented by insomnia and bouts of devastating weakness, lives in a kind of darkening haze. He tries to analyze the reasons for his rapid physical and psychological decline in the face of unspecified illness and (according to his own premonition), imminent death in the course of the next six months. The world around him feels increasingly alien, and watching his beloved Liza and Katya (daughter and adopted daughter, respectively) suffering, he is unable to emotionally connect with them, being totally disoriented and numbed by problems of his own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_(Brown_novel)"title="Origin (Brown novel)">
Edmond Kirsch, a billionaire philanthropist, computer scientist, futurist, and strident atheist, attends a meeting at the Santa Maria de Montserrat Abbey in Catalonia (Spain) with Roman Catholic Bishop Antonio Valdespino, Jewish Rabbi Yehuda Köves, and Muslim Imam Syed al-Fadl, members of the Parliament of the World's Religions. He informs them that he has made a revolutionary discovery that he plans to release to the public in a month. He has informed them out of respect, despite his hatred of organized religion, which he blames for his mother's death. The three learn that he is presenting it in three days' time, prompting Valdespino to demand that he stop.Kirsch hosts an event at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Among those in attendance are Kirsch's former teacher, Robert Langdon, and the Guggenheim's curator Ambra Vidal, the fiancée of the future King of Spain, Prince Julián. The guests receive a headset through which they communicate with a voice named Winston, which reveals to Langdon that it is an artificial intelligence invented by Kirsch. Winston leads Langdon to a private meeting with Kirsch, who claims that his presentation will reveal humanity's origins and future.During the presentation, which is broadcast worldwide, Kirsch reveals that he intends to end the age of religion and usher in an age of science. However, he is killed by Luis Ávila, a former naval admiral introduced to the controversial Palmarian Catholic Church following the deaths of his family in a bombing. Ávila was commissioned by "the Regent", someone claiming to be with the church. Meanwhile, both Al-Fadl and Köves are killed as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Torment_of_a_Broken_Heart"title="The Torment of a Broken Heart">
…November of 1914. Thanks to the mobilization plan (The Infant and the Devil) which was extracted by Joseph von Theofels, the Russian Army suffered a severe defeat in East Prussia. Protracted battles are fought throughout the whole line of the Eastern Front. Alexey Romanov is a volunteer, but in the first attack his arm gets wounded which causes him to be sent to the deep rear. Romanov learns that his romantic interest, a young lady named Seraphima, has married another man. Having become disillusioned in life, Romanov decides to commit suicide but is rescued by Duke Kozlovsky, who offers Alexei a new, perilous task.... In neutral Switzerland for many years international scammer von Sommer has operated, who founded a kind of "espionage exchange". Acquiring various secret information, Sommer then resells it to intelligence agencies around the world. The swindler does not make any exceptions: he sells secrets to both the countries of the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente countries. Sommer is independent from politics, he is only interested in money. Russian intelligence can not pay for Sommer's "tariffs", and so the decision is simply to steal a card file that is carefully guarded. The chief of Russian intelligence, General Vladimir Zhukovsky, decides to send a small group of agents to Switzerland under the guise of actors of a variety show. Aleksey Romanov is to become "Soloist" of the variety show and Duke Kozlovsky should portray a pianist. Romanov, Kozlovsky and several agents go hunting for von Sommer's secrets ...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flying_Elephant"title="The Flying Elephant">
In early 1915 the Emperor Wilhelm II decides to stop active operations on the Western Front, and bring the entire power of the German Army against the Russians. The offensive plan is carefully designed, the advantage in artillery is overwhelming, but the Russian Army suddenly has a "miracle weapon" that can frustrate all the Germans' efforts. This is the world's first four-engined heavy bomber, the "Ilya Muromets". At presest there is only one, but if Russia can mass-produce it, it could make a major change in the course of the war. The Kaiser personally orders the chief of German intelligence not to allow this, and again the German spy Josef von Teofels (known as Sepp) comes into action.Penetrating a detachment of Russian pilots under the guise of "pilot Michael Dolohov from the United States", Sepp painfully reflects on how to destroy the aircraft. Neither the explosion of "Ilya Muromets" or the murder of the inventor would help: the Russians will immediately understand that this is the work of the Germans, and they will do their best to start the mass production of the bomber. The only chance for Theophels is to compromise the concept, to portray the plane in a negative light during a general inspection which will be headed by the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Refugees_(short_story_collection)"title="The Refugees (short story collection)">
## "Black-Eyed Women".An unnamed ghostwriter takes up a job to write a memoir about Victor, a man who is stricken with survivor guilt. Living with her mother, the ghostwriter often listens to her mother's ghost stories about people she knew in her past; one of the recurring stories regards her deceased older brother. One night while writing, the ghostwriter is visited by her brother's ghost. After a brief exchange, he disappears when she turns away. The next day the ghostwriter tells her mother about her experience; her mother buys new clothes and asks the ghostwriter to give them to him.When he returns the following night, the ghostwriter offers him the clothes, but he refuses, saying that ghosts' clothes exist for the living. They talk, which eventually leads to her reminiscing about the day her brother died; they were boat people boarded by pirates. In an attempt to prevent her from being abducted, he cut her hair, bounded her breast, and smeared oil of her face. It worked, but when one pirate grew suspicious, her brother knifed the pirate. In retaliation, the pirate struck him in the head with his rifle, killing him. Before he disappears, he tells her "You died too, you just don't know it."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiomen"title="Radiomen">
Laurie Perzin is a middle-aged bartender in Queens that works nights at Kennedy airport. She lives an unremarkable life, having no close family and a childhood memory of a mysterious encounter with "the radioman." When she was six she met a shadowy figure when listening to her uncle’s radio. She spends years pretending the meeting was a dream and it sets off a sequence of events that pull her into the company of a psychic, a radio host, a strange dog and the leader of a religious cult that believes aliens, including the radioman, are destined to bring humans to enlightenment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughters_of_Eve_(novel)"title="Daughters of Eve (novel)">
The girls at Modesta High School, located in a small town in rural Michigan feel like they are stuck in an anti-feminist time warp-they are faced with sexism at every turn, and they have had enough. Sponsored by their new charismatic art teacher, Ms. Irene Stark, they band together to form the Daughters of Eve. It is more than a school club-it is a secret society, a sisterhood. Stark preaches women's liberation, which convinces each of the girls to stand up against the males who oppress them in their day-to-day lives.At first, it seems that they are successfully changing the way guys at school treat them. But Ms. Stark urges them to take ever more vindictive action and brutal revenge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crime_Book"title="The Crime Book">
The publisher describes "The Crime Book" as a guide to criminology that explores the most infamous cases of all time, from serial killers to mob hits to war crimes and more.It includes a variety of crimes committed by more than 100 of the world's most notorious criminals. From Jack the Ripper to Jeffrey Dahmer, the book is a study of international true-crime history that covers shocking stories through infographics and research that lays out key facts and details. It examines the science, psychology and sociology of criminal behavior. It profiles of villains, victims and detectives. Each clue is listed for readers to follow investigations from start to finish, and studies the police and detective work for each case.In a Q&amp;A article for CrimeCon.com's blog with Scott, the author described the crimes detailed in the book as "run[ning] the gamut—from nonviolent cons to gangland-style criminals, to white-collar offenders—with a complete representation starting with the first known homicide committed against a Neanderthal man."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirst_(novel)"title="The Thirst (novel)">
The novel features a killer who returns from Harry Hole's past and whom he failed to apprehend previously, but with a frightening new method of killing his victims by biting the victim's body with manufactured iron teeth and, apparently, drinking their blood, similar to the classic idea of a vampire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Church_Mice_and_the_Ring"title="The Church Mice and the Ring">
Humphrey's attempts to point out the hole in the ozone layer are disrupted by the arrival of Percy, a dog who is now living as a stray, having formerly been a Christmas present. After learning that he has nowhere to live, the church mice invite him to live with them until he finds a new home - to the great disgust of Sampson the church cat. The mice initially dismiss his attitude as 'anti-dog talk', but soon come to regret their decision after Percy eats their entire week's cheese supply, leaving them to subsist on the discarded scraps of food which are thrown over the churchyard wall.The following morning, the mice meet a young girl named Polly, who immediately becomes fond of Percy. Seeking to find Percy a new home as quickly as possible, the mice and Polly decide to introduce him to her wealthy parents who live in a large house nearby. Polly's parents are having a garden party, and the scheme soon goes awry: Percy urinates on the flowerbed, Sampson flirts with a pretty pet cat belonging to Polly's mother and the mice steal food off the guests' plates. They are ordered to leave and to never return. Not to be put off, Humphrey attempts to teach Percy how to be a good dog so that he might win the hearts of Polly's parents. Percy's attempts to do so merely cause even more chaos around the house and furthers their dislike of him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Song_for_Joyce"title="Love Song for Joyce">
Joyce Arnold is a young woman in Florida who relocates from her hometown to North Carolina to attend Deton College. Her close friend Margo, and boyfriend, Frank, have both chosen to enroll in universities in Florida. Upon her relocation to North Carolina, Joyce is forced into an entirely new environment, and must learn to navigate adulthood and her own newfound independence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Promise_for_Joyce"title="A Promise for Joyce">
After a tumultuous first year away from home at Denton College, Joyce enrolls for her sophomore year of classes, and finds herself troubled by her boyfriend's strenuous pre-med studies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Middle_Sister"title="The Middle Sister">
Teenage Ruth Porter, the middle child of two sisters, struggles with her tall and thin stature in contrast to her siblings, especially the older Janet. Ruth begins to imitate Janet, who aims for a career as a theatre actress. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_of_Violence"title="Point of Violence">
Julia Culler, a recent widow after her husband, Mark, died in a water skiing accident, relocates with her two children to a house on Heron Key, suspicious of a man whom she believes is responsible for her husband's death. At her remote beach home, she finds herself being stalked by an unseen assailant. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Season_of_the_Two-Heart"title="Season of the Two-Heart">
Natachu Weekoty is a Native Puebloan who leaves the Pueblo reservation to care for two children in Albuquerque, New Mexico in exchange for being able to attend high school with their older sister, Laurie. Natachu faces numerous changes and adjustments to life outside the reservation and her native culture in the process, including her attractions to a male classmate and her own prejudices toward a Navajo student.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ransom_(Duncan_novel)"title="Ransom (Duncan novel)">
Five students in Albuquerque, New Mexico are held hostage on a school bus by a gang of kidnappers. The criminals demand $15,000 ransoms for each child on the bus, which their respective parents scramble to produce while police attempt to free them. Meanwhile, the five youths attempt to find a way to escape the situation themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Too_High"title="Flying Too High">
Having established herself as a private detective in Melbourne and solved a number of cases after the events in Cocaine Blues, Phryne Fisher is engaged by Mrs. William McNaughton to investigate a family dispute. Mrs. McNaughton expresses concerns that her hot-tempered son, Bill, might attempt to kill her husband William McNaughton following an altercation with them about business. Bill McNaughton runs a moderately unsuccessful flying school, in which his father is a principal investor and chairman of the board, and a vociferous opponent of Bill's plans to raise additional funds to fly over the North Pole. Phryne visits Bill McNaughton's flying school and dispels his initial doubts about her flying abilities by flying a series of tricky manoeuvres in his Gipsy Moth plane, culminating in a walk over the upper wings of the plane while Bill holds the plane steady in the air. Having impressed Bill, Phryne advises him to resolve matters with his father peacefully and avoid disturbing his mother, who is alarmed by their loud fighting.Soon after, Mr. William McNaughton is found murdered on his tennis court, and Mrs. McNaughton arrives at Phryne's house asking for her help in investigating the murder. While she is unconscious, Phryne looks through her belongings and finds letters suggesting that Mrs. McNaughton may have been engaging in an affair. Amelia McNaughton, her daughter, comes to retrieve her, and reveals to Phryne that she is engaged in a romance with an Italian sculptor, Paolo Rugazzi, and that her father, the deceased William McNaughton, was abusive and violent and had assaulted Amelia as well as her mother on several occasions. Phryne purchases some of Amelia's sketches, commissions a painting from her, and locates Mr. William McNaughton's will, which allows an inheritance to his wife and daughter on the condition that they do not marry. Amelia also tells her that she intends to marry her lover Paolo Rugazzi despite being aware of his infidelities as she loves him regardless. Along with Detective-Inspector Benton, Phryne visits the scene of crime where she learns that Mr. McNaughton was killed by a heavy blow to the head on his tennis court, and that a rock was identified as the murder weapon, and also that there may have been two witnesses who might be able to testify that Bill McNaughton was elsewhere while his father was being murdered. Phryne also discovers that Amelia frequently hosts local children to play on their property, a practice that her father abhors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravagine"title="Moravagine">
The narrator, "Raymond la Science", presented as a Blaise Cendrars' acquaintance (who himself appears in the novel), writes how, being a physician, he comes across Moravagine, a killer madman detained in an asylum. Moravagine is the last, degenerate heir to a long line of Eastern Europe noblemen. Fascinated by this man, the physician helps him escape then shares his picaresque travel around the world, bumping from Russian terrorists to American natives, in a trail of crimes. Finally they return to Europe just in time for World War I, when "the whole world was doing a Moravagine."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gift_of_Magic"title="A Gift of Magic">
Before she dies, a woman gives her grandchildren three separate gifts: Brendon is given the gift of music, Kirby is given the gift of dance, and Nancy is given the gift of magic. Nancy can use that gift to sense events that are happening in places she is not physically present and to tell what others are thinking. Many years later, the children are staying with their mother Elizabeth at their Florida home. Elizabeth tells them that she is getting divorced from their father. Nancy is upset by this and is unhappy to see her mother getting closer to Tom Duncan, Elizabeth's first boyfriend and the counsellor at the high school Nancy and Kirby attend.In her social studies class, Nancy is given a pop quiz. The teacher Ms. Green reads the questions out loud, and Nancy answers questions that Ms. Green has not yet asked. Ms. Green accuses her of getting the questions from her sister, who took the pop quiz before lunch that day. Ms. Green arranges for both of them to meet her in the counsellor's office after school. While there, Kirby tells Mr. Duncan that she had been thinking of the questions on the quiz while they were sitting together during lunch and implies that Nancy read her mind. Mr. Duncan believes that Nancy might have extrasensory perception (ESP) to explain her ability to read people's minds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_People_Problems"title="Rich People Problems">
In 2015, two years after the events that take place in "China Rich Girlfriend", Nick and Rachel Young (née Chu), an economics professor at New York University (NYU), are happily married and living their life in Manhattan. Nick is informed by his mother Eleanor that his grandmother, Su Yi, has had a heart attack, and that he must come home to reconcile with her before she dies. While Nick wants to make up with his grandmother out of guilt for having shut her out of his life for marrying Rachel (as Su Yi was opposed to the marriage), his mother wants him to make amends so that he will be re-introduced into the will and inherit Tyersall Park, Su Yi's home. The extended Shang-Young clan has descended upon Tyersall Park to say their last goodbyes with the hopes of getting into Su Yi's good graces and inheriting part of her fortune.Nicholas is initially prevented from seeing Su Yi due to scheming from his cousin, Eddie Cheng, who believes he has a shot at inheriting his grandmother's estate. Eddie lies and convinces the entire family and house staff that Su Yi does not wish to see Nick while she is on her deathbed. With the help of the head of security, the head maid (who overheard Eddie's plotting) and Astrid, Nick is able to sneak into Tyersall Park and speak with his grandmother while she is in a cardiac intensive care unit in her bedroom. She is happy to see him and they make amends. Meanwhile, Astrid, Nick's cousin, becomes engaged again to Charlie Wu. Her relationship with Charlie faces obstacles from Charlie's scorned ex-wife Isabel Wu and Astrid's soon-to-be ex-husband Michael Teo. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jochona_O_Jononir_Golpo"title="Jochona O Jononir Golpo">
The story of the novel starts in month of February 1971, when the Arabic teacher of Nilgonj High School, Mawlana Irtazuddin Kashempuri visits his younger brother Shahed and his family in Dhaka. Then the writer describes various stories of the characters. He describes how Mawlana Irtazuddin became a contradictor. How he swore not to perform Jummah Salat until Bangladesh become independent, for which he was shot by Pakistani Military. The writer describes how Shahed searched for his lost wife and daughter. He described the time as "The day and night of uncertainty".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_of_Utmost_Happiness"title="The Ministry of Utmost Happiness">
The novel weaves together the stories of people navigating some of the darkest and most violent episodes of modern Indian history, from land reform that dispossessed poor farmers to the Bhopal disaster, 2002 Godhra train burning and Kashmir insurgency. Roy's characters run the gamut of Indian society and include an intersex woman ("hijra"), a rebellious architect, and her landlord who is a supervisor in the intelligence service. The narrative spans across decades and locations, but primarily takes place in Delhi and Kashmir.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Never_Came_Home"title="They Never Came Home">
Teenage friends Larry and Dan go missing after embarking on a hiking trip. Upon investigation, a stranger claims that one of the boys owed him $2,000, prompting Joan, a sister of one of the boys, to begin her own search for them.A second edition was published in 2012, updating the story to modern times. Changes included references to cell phones and the Internet, as well as adjusting the money owed to $50,000.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_of_Danger"title="Game of Danger">
Teenager Annie and her young brother Rob receive a phone call from their mother instructing them to leave their home in the middle of the night with an important letter. The two arrive at the bus terminal at 2 AM and leave for the home of a family friend at their mother's urging; meanwhile, newspaper headlines regarding Annie and Rob's father and his alleged communist ties begin to circulate. The children's embarking leads them on an odyssey to uncover the truth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_at_Victoria_Dock"title="Death at Victoria Dock">
The Honourable Phryne Fisher is on her way home, driving past Victoria Docks in Melbourne, late evening when a shot shatters her windshield. She stops, to find a man wearing an anarchist tattoo, lying on the road, bleeding. He dies before she can get medical help. Along with her companion and maid, Dorothy 'Dot' Williams, and her friends, Burt and Cec, she attempts to solve the mystery of who shot and killed this man. Along the way she meets and is attracted to an anarchist with a strange past, who goes by the name of Peter Smith. Phryne and her friends assist Inspector Jack Robinson of the Melbourne Police to solve the murder, encountering, in the process, a bank robbing and an abduction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_English_Scandal"title="A Very English Scandal">
In 1979, former Member of Parliament Jeremy Thorpe stood trial over accusations that he hired a hitman to kill his alleged ex-lover, Norman Scott. "A Very English Scandal" chronicles Thorpe's early, secretive love life, at a time when sexual activity between men was illegal, and his subsequent public exposure. The novel also details Thorpe's trial and eventual acquittal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dangerous_Case_of_Donald_Trump"title="The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump">
Authors argue that the President's mental health was affecting the mental health of the people of the United States and that he places the country at grave risk of involving it in a war, and of undermining democracy itself due to his dangerous pathology.Consequently, the authors claim, Trump's presidency represents an emergency which not only allows, but requires psychiatrists in the United States to raise alarms. While it has been repeatedly claimed that they have broken the American Psychiatric Association's Goldwater rule– which states that it is unethical for psychiatrists to give professional opinions about public figures without examining them in person –the authors maintain that pointing out danger and calling for an evaluation is different from diagnosis. They have criticized the American Psychiatric Association for changing professional norms and standards, stating that it is dangerous to turn reasonable ethical guidelines into a gag rule under political pressure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camino_Island"title="Camino Island">
The book begins with the theft of five rare F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts from the Firestone Library at Princeton University and then embarks on a journey to a resort town on a Florida island in search of clues about the heist. Although the Federal Bureau of Investigation and an "underground agency" of investigators working for Princeton's insurance company pursue the perpetrators in the black market, the story focuses on a novelist who becomes involved in the search and pursues an investigation of the heist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakas_(novel)"title="Sakas (novel)">
Kumari is a girl who had been raped by her father. A man helps her go to kathmandu for education and they send her dad to prison. When she becomes a nurse she falls in love with a boy. Then she doesn't want to live in Kathmandu she goes to Janakpur.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fate_of_a_Man_(short_story)"title="Fate of a Man (short story)">
With the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War, the truck driver Andrey Sokolov has to leave for army and part with his family. In the first months of the war, he gets wounded and is captured by Nazis. In captivity, he experiences all the burdens of a concentration camp. Due to his courage he showed to camp's chief when he refuses to drink with him to victory of Nazi arms, he avoids his execution and, finally, runs from Nazis. In a short vacation in his hometown, Sokolov finds out that his beloved wife Irina and both of their daughters were killed during the bombing. He immediately returns to the front, unable to stay in his native town any more. The only relative Andrey still has is his son, who serves as an officer in the army. Right on Victory Day, Andrey receives news that his son was killed on the last day of the war. After the war, lonely Andrei Sokolov doesn't return to his town and works somewhere else. He meets a little boy Vanya, who was left an orphan. His mother died and his father missed in action. Sokolov tells the boy that he is his father, and this gives the boy (and himself) a hope for a new life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Horse_Walks_into_a_Bar"title="A Horse Walks into a Bar">
"A Horse Walks into a Bar" is narrated by a retired district court judge, Avishai Lazar, who is invited out of the blue by a local comedian to attend his show, a stand-up routine in a bar in the Israeli coastal town of Netanya. The judge and the comedian, 57-year-old Dovaleh Greenstein, who trades on divisive and offensive jokes, knew each other as boys, but have had no contact for over 40 years.Lazar asks Greenstein what the point is of the invitation. "I want you to look at me," Greenstein tells him. "I want you to see me, really see me, and then afterward tell me." "Tell you what?" asks Lazar. "What you saw," Greenstein replies.Greenstein is haunted by past decisions that detrimentally affected his close personal relationships, and he is in a state of deterioration while performing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_67"title="Catch 67">
The book, written in Hebrew, contends that the conflicted political center on the occupation has views from both the political left and right. Goodman concludes that while an armistice is possible, a comprehensive peace deal is not. The book became the subject of intense public debate, and became a best-seller from its March 2017 release through the next several months. Its release coincided with the 50th anniversary of Israeli victory in the 1967 Six-Day War and the resulting occupation of Palestinian territories.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_Dionis"title="Poor Dionis">
Eminescu begins his story in mid-thought, with first-person musings about subjectivity, "qualia", time perception, and the physical world being "our soul's dream". The narrator then reveals that this is a quote from the amateur metaphysician Dionis. He describes the latter as an unkempt, but good looking, young Bucharester, reduced to poverty and prone to daydreaming. He is an orphan, born out of wedlock to a mysterious aristocrat and a priest's daughter. Although a passionate esotericist and reader of sacred books, Dionis is more of "a superstitious atheist".In his miserable room, Dionis is studying an almanac of astrology, and listening, through the open window, to a girl singing; charmed by the sound, he sees (or imagines) the girl as a modern-day Ophelia. In this reverie, his eyes affixed on the zodiac, Dionis understands that he can freely travel back into the glorified past. He chooses for his destination ancient Moldavia, under the rule of Prince Alexander the Good. When he awakens, he finds himself on a meadow near Iași, dressed in Orthodox monastic clothes, and grasping the almanac. He is Friar Dan, who he has only dreamed of being Dionis, and the book is a present from his teacher, Ruben.Ruben, a learned and pious Sephardi Jew living in exile at the "Socola Academy", has instructed his favorite pupil about "metempsychosis" and apport: "you can slip into the lives of all the ones who led up to your life [and] into all the future lives caused by your present life"; "you can go any place you want, although you cannot leave it void behind you. [...] there's no such thing as fully vacant space." Simultaneous travel in spacetime, Ruben teaches, may only happen if one changes places with one's ancestors or descendants. Taking the Dionis experience as evidence that Ruben is right, Dan asks to be transported into an ideal universe, and is told by his master that such a place exists "in your immortal soul". If Dan wishes to reach it, he is to read every seventh page of a spell book: each will take him to a new place, in no known order, and no location can be visited twice. After Dan leaves, book in hand, Ruben is revealed to have been possessed by Satan, who takes joy at having ensnared a pious monk: the book is in fact an instrument of perdition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Tower_(novel)"title="Trump Tower (novel)">
The novel is set within a fictional version of Trump Tower in New York City, New York. A fictionalized version of Donald Trump appears as a character in the novel. The Trump character is described in the novel as giving out details of his sex life to others, making hiring and firing decisions, and denigrating the mental status of tenants residing in his building. "Trump Tower" portrays the machinations of the love lives engaged in by both residents of the building, in addition to the employees who work inside of the facility.Sex acts are depicted within the novel including those displaying sexual kinkiness and bondage, dominance, submission, and sadomasochism. A worker in the book is depicted in a sex act occurring on the set of "The Celebrity Apprentice" inside of Trump Tower. Women appear in the book with detailed descriptions based on their perceived level of physical attractiveness. A rape of a woman is described in detail within the first chapter of the book.After its initial foray into erotica within the first section of the work, the tale subsequently becomes a murder mystery. One of the main protagonists of the book is the building manager of Trump Tower, Pierre Belasco, who attempts to ensure stable operation of the facility. In Belasco's point of view, "Donald Trump only thinks he rules Trump Tower." He attempts to prove this throughout the work.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_General_Theory_of_Oblivion"title="A General Theory of Oblivion">
## Background.The novel is set in Luanda, on the eve of, and during the immediate aftermath of Angola's independence from Portugal. The war for independence has left the area in a tumultuous and dangerous state, having raged for over twelve years. Moreover, tensions among the anti-colonial forces (funded by the Soviet Union) indicate that there could be continued violence and terror after independence is achieved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Kitchen_(novel)"title="In the Kitchen (novel)">
Gabriel Lightfoot, an ambitious man from an old northern English mill town, is an executive chef at the Imperial Hotel in London, where he must manage an unruly but talented group of immigrant cooks while aiming to please the hotel's new owners. One day, a hotel worker turns up dead in the kitchen’s basement, disturbing the delicate balance of Gabriel's life. Gabriel then meets Lena, a young immigrant with mysterious ties to the dead man, and makes a decision that changes his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Cangue"title="The Golden Cangue">
"The Golden Cangue" illustrates the decadence of the idle rich. Set in Shanghai, the novelette unfolds the degeneration of the heroine, Qi Qiao, and her family. The golden cangue symbolizes the destructiveness of the protagonist.Qi Qiao the main protagonist  is the daughter of a sesame oil shopkeeper, she is forced to marry family Chiang for wealth. She's a benefit-finder in her life, but there are so many destructive elements in her life. She lived in an environment of denial. Originally, Qi Qiao was to be a concubine, but Qi Qiao husband, the Second Master a cripple, that is not entitled to a regular marriage with anyone from a decent family background, because of his disabilities. But as Qi Qiao becomes his legal wife, she is then bound to serve him faithfully. The other two Mistresses from a titled and respectable family,  and all of Ts’ao Ch’i-ch’iao husband's family, even the servants look down on Qi Qiao because of her low social status. All of which represents the tragic heroine of humble origins who marries a cripple and suffers an unhappy and unfulfilled life. Being oppressed mentally and physically for a long time made her become poisonous and her personality gradually twisted. The suppression of passion made her start the endless pursuit of money, but money can not suppress her bones of love, but to her wear the golden shackles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disobedience_(novel)"title="Disobedience (novel)">
The novel is presented with both an omniscient narrator and a first-person narrative of Ronit Krushka, a 32-year-old non-practising Orthodox Jew, who is working in New York as a financial analyst and having an affair with her married male boss. The death of her estranged father, a powerful rabbi, brings Ronit back to her childhood home in Hendon, London, where her provocative ways outrage the local Orthodox Jewish community. Discovering that her cousin Dovid, who is also her father's chosen successor, is married to her former lover, Esti, forces Ronit to rethink what she left behind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Husband's_Secret"title="The Husband's Secret">
The novel is set in Sydney, Australia, where Cecilia Fitzpatrick is a happily married mother-of-three who leads a seemingly perfect life. Meanwhile, Tess O'Leary is a career woman who returns to Sydney with her son after her husband, Will, confesses that he is in love with her cousin and best friend, Felicity. Tess' son and Cecilia's children are enrolled in the same school, where Tess' ex-boyfriend, Connor Whitby, is a PE teacher. Rachel Crowley, the school secretary, suspects that Connor is the man responsible for the unsolved murder of her daughter that still haunts her almost three decades later.Then one day, when Cecilia's husband John-Paul is away, she finds a letter from her husband to be opened only in the event of his death. Cecilia opens the letter anyway, and the devastating secret she discovers has massive consequences for her and the other women.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Trump"title="Understanding Trump">
Newt Gingrich describes his time being with Donald Trump during his 2016 campaign. The book also contains a foreword written by Trump's son, Eric Trump.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_All_the_Way_Down_(novel)"title="Turtles All the Way Down (novel)">
Aza Holmes is a 16-year-old high school student living in Indianapolis who struggles with OCD, which often manifests as a fear of the human microbiome. Constantly worried about infection, particularly by "C. diff", she repeatedly opens a never-fully-healed callus on her finger in an effort to drain out what she believes are pathogens. Throughout the book, Aza is accompanied by two close friends: Mychal Turner, an aspiring artist, and her best friend Daisy Ramirez, who writes "Star Wars" fan fiction.One day at school Daisy discovers that Russell Pickett, a billionaire construction magnate and the father of one of Aza's old friends, Davis Pickett, has gone missing in the wake of corporate crime investigations. Russell's wife had died years prior, so Russell's disappearance leaves Davis and his brother Noah with no formal guardian. Tempted by the reward of $100,000 for information leading to Pickett's arrest, Daisy takes Aza on a search for the missing billionaire. After canoeing down the White River and sneaking onto the Pickett property, they are caught by a security guard who brings them to meet Davis.To persuade the two girls to stop pursuing the elder Pickett, Davis gives Aza $100,000 taken from his father's various stashes around the guest house, which she splits with Daisy. After the meeting, Davis and Aza begin dating and, at the same time, Daisy becomes romantically involved with Mychal. As time passes, Aza comes to believe that she cannot overcome her anxiety, preventing her from ever having a normal relationship with Davis. She finds numerous blog posts written by him about his feelings on both his father's disappearance and his relationship with her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toys_(novel)"title="Toys (novel)">
Some time in the future, a new class of super-powered humans known as "Elites" has assumed rule over society, and normal humans are deemed to be inferior creatures; "Elites" are grown in tubes and thus do not have navels. In 2061, Hays Baker works for the Agency of Change, and is married to Lizbeth, with whom he has two children. One day, however, his life is torn apart when he discovers that he is in fact a human, despite his superhuman abilities. Soon enough he becomes a fugitive, and Baker has to fight to save his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aina_(book)"title="Aina (book)">
The book is a collection of nineteen short stories reflecting the dark realities of poor people of remote district of Far-Western region of Nepal. The book depicts the various aspects of people living in that region. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Darkroom"title="In the Darkroom">
In 2004, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Susan Faludi learned that her 76-year-old estranged father Steven had undergone sex reassignment surgery and now went by the name Stefánie. This revelation led Faludi to reunite with Stefánie in Hungary, and the memoir documents Faludi's subsequent investigation into her father's life, particularly the years Stefánie spent growing up as a Hungarian Jew during World War II. Faludi also examines her relationship with her father, her father's transition, and explores the issues of gender identity and discrimination.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_(memoir)"title="The Return (memoir)">
In 1990, Hisham Matar's father, a prominent critic of Muammar Gaddafi's dictatorship, was kidnapped by Gaddafi's agents and imprisoned in Libya. Matar never saw his father after that. The memoir follows Matar's return to Libya in 2012, following Gaddafi's death, to find out what happened to his father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unforgiving_Destiny"title="Unforgiving Destiny">
The biography recounts the smuggling career of David McMillan, beginning in India in the 1970s. After early smuggling operations in Thailand and mafia links in New York City, McMillan comes to the attention of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), where a career officer becomes obsessed with pursuing the independent smuggler. The officer becomes influential in McMillan’s arrest in Australia, and a decade later in Bangkok. Following McMillan’s escape from a Thai prison, he is in Balochistan (Pakistan) and Afghanistan, where he is attempting to free a kidnapped friend. In Karachi, McMillan is arrested and tortured, and again faces a possible death penalty. However, he arranges his release and travels to Europe where he resumes smuggling. After twenty years as a fugitive, McMillan is arrested in London where the Thai government attempts to have him extradited to face the 23-year-old drug charge. The extradition case fails and McMillan is freed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Loved_Mars"title="The Man Who Loved Mars">
Mars, a world with a culture ages older than that of Earth, is a dying world, and has been in decline for eons. By the twenty-second century it has become a colony of the younger civilization of Earth, its natives oppressed by the rapacious Colonial Authority. Some of the newcomers are sympathetic to the natives, however, notably Ivo Tengren, who befriended the last of the titular high kings of Mars before the latter's demise. Inheriting from him both the crown and the responsibility to champion its people, Ivo led a doomed revolt against the CA, only to see it crushed and his Martian lover murdered. He himself has been deported back to Earth for his temerity and forbidden ever to return to Mars.In exile, Tengren spends his days idly in drink and dreams until one Dr. Josip Keresny approaches him. Keresny plans an expedition to locate the lost Martian city of Ilionis, legendary "Gateway to the Gods," and offers Ivo illicit passage back to the Red Planet in return for serving as guide and placating the Martians. Hopeless and passive, Ivo is not the man he once was; nonetheless, he leaps at the chance.The expedition proceeds, though tensions arise as Tengren develops an attraction to Keresny's granddaughter Ilsa and a hostile rivalry with pilot Konstantin Bolgov. The party also faces hostility from the Martians, who tolerate it only on account of their "king," even as they retain suspicions of him due to the debacle he led them through and his status as an Earthman. Eventually Ilionis is found. It indeed proves a gateway, to a vast system of caverns and relics of an alien technology older than anything remembered by the Martians.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice_Upon_a_Time_(Doctor_Who)"title="Twice Upon a Time (Doctor Who)">
Wandering back to his TARDIS through the South Pole in 1986 after leaving his companions behind, the First Doctor refuses to regenerate. He encounters the Twelfth Doctor outside his own TARDIS in a similar state of mind. The pair are soon approached by a confused and injured First World War British captain (Mark Gatiss), displaced from December 1914 while in a gun-point stalemate with a German soldier. All three are then forcibly taken into a large spaceship. Inside, they meet with Bill Potts. The Twelfth Doctor, however, doubts she is the real Bill. Upon encountering the ship's glass-like holographic pilot, they are offered freedom in exchange for allowing the ship to return the Captain to the moment of his death. Refusing to allow the Captain to die, they escape and take the First Doctor's TARDIS to the planet Villengard in the far future.Alone, the Twelfth Doctor meets with the rogue Dalek Rusty, who has taken refuge from other Daleks hunting it. Given access to the Dalek Hivemind, the Doctor learns that the pilot and its ship, known as "Testimony", were created on New Earth, designed to extract people from their timelines at the moment of their death, and archive their memories into glass avatars. "Bill" is one such avatar, created from her memories. Seeing no evil to fight, the Doctors agree to return the Captain to his timeline. Upon arrival, the Captain asks the Doctors to keep an eye on his family, introducing himself as Archibald Hamish Lethbridge-Stewart (implying that he is the ancestor of the Doctor's frequent ally and lifelong friend, the Brigadier, and his daughter Kate Stewart). As time resumes, the Doctors watch as soldiers on both sides begin singing "Silent Night". The Twelfth Doctor explains to the First that he deliberately shifted the Captain's timeline forward to the start of the Christmas truce, to ensure his life would be spared.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tranny_(book)"title="Tranny (book)">
Quoting extracts from her journals, Grace describes her childhood. Her first memories were of dressing in her mother's clothing. She was a military brat who lived in various places across America, as well as in Italy. At a church youth group, she began the Black Shadows and performed at church talent shows, but was asked to stop after a performance of Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box". After being arrested as a teenager, she began consuming anarchist punk media.In 1997, Grace founded the band Against Me! Approached by NOFX to put out an EP, Grace declined the offer and asked Fat Wreck Chords instead to release their album "Against Me! as the Eternal Cowboy". After commercial success, Grace became addicted to cocaine and sex to relieve gender dysphoria, and experienced backlash from the punk movement. She began attending Narcotics Anonymous and wrote "The Ocean" (2007) about her dysphoria. In 2009, knowing she was a woman, Grace decided to remove her "Ramblin' Boys of Pleasure" tattoo as the first step in her transition. She publicly came out in 2012, and the 2013 Against Me! tour for "Transgender Dysphoria Blues" saw an increased diversity in the fanbase.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hive_(Card_and_Johnston_novel)"title="The Hive (Card and Johnston novel)">
In 'The Swarm', the Formic's initial efforts to eradicate Earth life forms were beaten back by a coalition of corporate and international military forces, and the Chinese army, with notable efforts by Bingwen, Mazer Rackham, Victor Delgado and Lem Jukes. The devastation of China associated with this led to the reorganization of Earth's government for defense of the human species. In 'The Hive', the series' main characters face the forces of nationalism, tribalism, paranoia, egotism, jealousy, and self-aggrandizement that threaten to tear apart Earth's new defense forces from within. Meanwhile, they must battle the ever growing forces of the Formics and attempt to locate and destroy the Hive Queen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King_of_Oil"title="The King of Oil">
The book focuses on the biography of Marc Rich, a prominent international financier and commodity trader, who became a billionaire in the 1970s, arguably inventing the spot market for oil, grain, and metals. His Switzerland-based corporation Marc Rich + Co. AG actively traded with the apartheid regime of South Africa, Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini, Cuba, Nigeria under dictator Sani Abacha, China, the Soviet Union, and later Russia. Indicted on some 65 criminal counts, including income tax evasion, wire fraud, racketeering, and trading with Iran during the oil embargo, Rich, nevertheless, received a widely criticized presidential pardon from U.S. President Bill Clinton on his last day in office.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Fleet_(novel)"title="Ghost Fleet (novel)">
Prior to the main events of the novel, Indonesia has collapsed into a failed state after a second war in Timor, and a dirty bomb was detonated in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, which caused a massive spike in the price of oil and the collapse of the House of Saud. A newly-discovered natural gas field in the Mariana Trench provides China with energy security. Popular unrest leads to the removal of the Chinese Communist Party, and China is governed by a mix of businessmen and military leaders known as the Directorate. China and Russia have also developed the ability to detect and to track nuclear-powered ships by using Cherenkov radiation, which allows China to effectively neutralize the US Navy's nuclear submarine fleet. China plans to gain control of the third island chain and to secure dominance in the western Pacific. Meanwhile, the United States military is currently overstretched in terms of manpower and resources due to ongoing military operations in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Kenya.Using a computer virus to first infiltrate the computer systems of the Defense Intelligence Agency, China launches a massive cyber-attack against the United States that cripples many technologically-sophisticated systems, including the F-35 Lightning, which were compromised with infected microchips in the supply chain. The attack includes extensive use of anti-satellite weapons, leading to the disabling of the Global Positioning System and the loss of several communications and reconnaissance satellites critical to the US military. Russian fighters and drones are able to launch a raid on the US military base in Okinawa, and the US military presence in Japan is neutralized. Supported by Russia, China captures Hawaii after a bloody battle and establishes the Hawaii Special Administrative Zone. The attack leads to the nearly complete destruction of the US Pacific Fleet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Hate_the_Internet"title="I Hate the Internet">
Adeline, the protagonist, grew up in Pasadena, California with her mother Suzanne, who became an alcoholic after the death of her husband. During her time in California, Adeline adopts a transatlantic accent from watching Audrey Hepburn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's". In 1986, she relocates to New York City, where she meets her soon-to-be best friend Baby. Baby saved her by beating up her cheating boyfriend. The two of them go back to live with Adeline's mother in Pasadena in 1988. Two years later Adeline graduates from Parsons University. In 1993, Adeline moves in with Jeremy Winterbloss and his wife Minerva when they go to San Francisco in 1996. While living with them, Adeline finds she is pregnant. The father was her boyfriend at the time, Nash Mac. Around this time, Jeremy and Adeline decide to produce a comic called "Trill", a fictional story about an anthropomorphic cat. Jeremy wrote, while Adeline illustrated.Due to the perceived racist and sexist nature of the comic book industry, Adeline and Jeremy decide to write under the pseudonyms J.W. Bloss and M. Abrahamovic Petrovitch, respectively. The comic becomes somewhat successful, and is offered a movie deal. During movie production, Adeline meets writer J. Karacehennem and they become friends. Jeremy and Adeline's true identities remain a secret until a producer accidentally reveals them in a press conference. This projects Adeline and Jeremy into semi-fame. Meanwhile, Adeline gives birth and names her son Emil after her late brother who committed suicide. When Emil is 12, he decides that Adeline is weird with her funny way of speaking and odd opinions. He becomes embarrassed by her and asks to go live with his dad. Adeline agrees because she will still get to see him most weekends. That is until Emil is sent to live with Suzanne and Adeline is no longer able to get in contact with him. This leads to the Emil and Adeline becoming estranged.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Way_to_a_Small,_Angry_Planet"title="The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet">
Fleeing her old life, Rosemary Harper joins the multi-species crew of the "Wayfarer" as a file clerk, and follows them on their various missions throughout the galaxy. The novel concerns itself with character development rather than adventure. Each member of the crew has a story that unfolds, or a crisis to face. They encounter several alien environments on the slow path to their destination. At the end, the ship is damaged by hostile aliens, precipitating changes in the relationships between the characters, setting them on new paths.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietland"title="Dietland">
The novel follows Plum Kettle, a 300-pound ghostwriter hired to respond to the hundreds of emails written to the editor of popular teen magazine "Daisy Chain". Plum fantasizes about being thin and after years of failed diet plans, schedules an appointment for weight loss surgery. While awaiting her surgery date, Plum finds herself recruited by an underground feminist cabal known as "Calliope House". Meanwhile, a guerrilla group known as "Jennifer" begins carrying out increasingly violent acts of vigilante justice against those who mistreat women, and Plum soon finds herself at the center of a sinister plot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Today_Will_Be_Different"title="Today Will Be Different">
The entire book takes place in a single day in Eleanor Flood's life. Eleanor is a beleaguered woman living in Seattle with her husband Joe, a renowned hand surgeon, and her son Timby, a third-grader at the Galer Street School that was first introduced in Maria Semple's preceding novel "Where'd You Go, Bernadette". At the start of the book, Eleanor decides to improve herself by adopting the mantra that "today will be different" and setting attainable goals for the day. However, things do not go according to plan in Eleanor's day, and she finds herself having to deal with a missing husband, a sick son and a mystery lunch date.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Snow_Child"title="The Snow Child">
Jack and Mabel long to have a child of their own, but after burying their newborn baby, they're forced to give up that dream. Desperate for a change of scene, the middle-aged couple moves from their farm in Pennsylvania to Alpine, Alaska where they want to set up a homestead, clear out the trees, and build the land for farming. Unfortunately, this goal isn't as easy as it seems. Feeling down on their luck due to their lack of money, the couple has to find joy wherever they can. They end up making friends with their neighbors George and Esther Benson and getting to know the couple's 13-year-old son Garrett. Jack and Mabel also embrace their youth by playing in the snow, leading them to create a female child out of the snow. The next day, the red mittens and scarf are missing and the snow is in a pile. To make matters even more strange, Jack and Mabel see a child's footprints in the snow and even catch rare glimpses of the child herself in the trees. Mabel believes it's a Russian fairy tale from her childhood come true, but Jack is doubtful and wants to hunt down the child in the woods. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Took_the_Car"title="Why We Took the Car">
Maik Klingenberg, 14, comes from an affluent but dysfunctional family home in Marzahn, a part of eastern Berlin. In school he is an outsider, which is why at the beginning of summer break he is not invited to the birthday party of beauty queen Tatjana Cosic whom he secretly has a crush on. Whilst on the most part considered boring, one of the few times he stands out in class is the moment he reads an essay in German class talking about his alcoholic mother with striking but loving openness. The teacher is horrified, his classmates laugh at him and call him a psycho from then on. The new classmate Andrej Tschichatschow (Tschick for short), an uncommunicative late repatriate from Russia, who sometimes shows up openly drunk to class, is also an outsider and excluded from Tatjana's birthday party.Maik, in the hopes of still being invited, draws a picture of Beyoncé as a present for Tatjana, because the girl loves Beyoncé's music. However, the last day of school passes without anything happening. On top of that, Maik's mum has to go to a rehab clinic again while his dad wants to use that time to go on holiday with his young female assistant, telling Maik it's a business trip. It appears, at this point, that Maik will be forced to spend his summer holiday alone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meddling_Kids"title="Meddling Kids">
The novel opens with a newspaper clip from 1977 featuring the "Blyton Summer Detective Club", a bunch of young investigators aged 11–13, who solved the mystery of an alleged monster haunting the area of Sleepy Lake in Oregon. Thirteen years after solving that last case, the former detectives have drifted apart and lead broken lives, haunted by the memories of the night they spent in the mansion on the lake: budding genius Kerri is an alcoholic tormented by nightmares and has been unable to finish her schooling; nerd Nate is regularly checking himself into mental institutions; tomboy Andy is a vagrant wanted in several states and dealing with aggressive behavior; and golden boy Peter went on to become a successful Hollywood actor whose career was cut short by suicide. Andy has traced all of their problems back to that last case, believing that there was more to it than just a guy in a costume. When the man they exposed as the Sleepy Lake monster makes parole, she assaults him only to confirm that there was something more to the case. Andy then sets off to reunite the surviving members of the gang (including Tim, a Weimaraner descended from the original canine member of the team and Peter as a hallucination that only Nate can see and hear), and together they return to the town of Blyton Hills to solve the case for good.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agamemnon's_Daughter"title="Agamemnon's Daughter">
The novella is told through the perspective of an unnamed television journalist with somewhat liberal views who is unexpectedly invited to the annual May Day Parade – aimed almost exclusively at glorifying the leader of the country – shortly after his girlfriend Suzana, daughter of the leader's designated successor, breaks up her relationship with him, citing his possible unsuitability and the fact it may tarnish her father's reputation. Much like Joyce's "Ulysses", the novella is an internal monologue chronicling the thoughts of the narrator about Suzana and the people he encounters as he walks to the stands of the stadium. As such, it functions as "a portfolio of sketches of human ruination – a brief Inferno, in which victims of the regime are serially encountered" by the narrator.As is usually the case with Kadare, the destinies of some of these people – none of which have names, but initials – are juxtaposed to an ancient Balkan tale, introduced first as an elucidatory comment on the rise of G. Z., a sycophantic figure who survived several purges in manners unknown to many. The tale-leitmotif recounts the story of the Bald Man who was saved from Hell by an eagle, at the price of his own meat; when he reached the heavens, he was nothing but a skeleton.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magician_of_Lublin_(novel)"title="The Magician of Lublin (novel)">
The story is set in the mid-1880s in Russian-ruled Poland. The main character Yasha Mazur is a magician from Lublin, who travels around Poland to perform before audiences. He is Jewish, but not very devout, and married to Esther. He has affairs with his assistant Magda, with a young Jewish woman in Piaski named Zeftel and with a middle class Catholic widow in Warsaw named Emilia.Yasha and Magda travel to Warsaw to perform on the stage. On the way he visits Zeftel at Piaski. When they arrive at Warsaw, Yasha also visits Emilia and her daughter Halina. During this visit, he proposes to Emilia, and they agree to move to Italy. He would need to convert to Christianity, and divorce Esther to make the marriage possible. However, neither he nor Emilia has the money to make their plans possible.Zeftel visits him in Warsaw and tells him that she has moved there and is staying with a man named Herman who has promised her work in Argentina. Yasha suspects that Herman is a pimp, and he accompanies Zeftel back to her new home, and spends much of the night talking and drinking with them. On his way back home, he makes a spur of the moment decision to rob the home of a rich neighbour of Emilia's named Zaruski, believing that his expertise in lock picking will help him. He breaks in without waking up Zaruski, but is unable to pick the lock of the safe. He then flees, and hurts his foot as he jumps from the balcony. He is seen by a policeman and runs away, eventually hiding in a synagogue where he joins the morning prayers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicle_of_Sparrow_Lane"title="The Chronicle of Sparrow Lane">
The fictional writer and narrator of the chronicle is old Johannes Wacholder. He lives in a small attic room observing and chronicling the happenings in the narrow street of the novel's title. Sparrow Lane is located in Berlin, but the city itself is largely undescribed, with the narrator giving his attention to the lives of the street's inhabitants. Such inhabitants included his childhood friend, the painter Franz Ralff, whose daughter Elise is adopted by Wachholder after her parents' deaths. The girl later marries Gustav Berg, a painter who turns out to be a distant cousin of hers. There is the tale of Wimmer, a journalist who had to move to Munich because of his political convictions—his humorous letters to Wachholder are included in the Chronicle. In spite of its ominously dark opening line, "These are actually rather evil times!", the novel proceeds in a mostly serene, at times even idyllic vein. By telling the stories of ordinary people’s lives in an ordinary street, Raabe paints a contemporary picture of social and political affairs in 1850s Germany.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Valley_Where_Time_Stood_Still"title="The Valley Where Time Stood Still">
Mars, a world with a culture ages older than that of Earth, is a dying world, and has been in decline for eons. By the twenty-second century it had become a colony of the younger civilization of Earth, its natives oppressed by the rapacious Colonial Authority.Encountering each other in the Martian wastes, Terran outcast McCord and Martian warrior Thaklar engage in a wary truce and partnership for the sake of survival. Afterwards they are taken captive by the bandit chief Chastar and pressed into service of an expedition he has taken over. HIs other captives, the brother-and-sister Swedish archeological team of Karl and Inga Nordgen, have been searching for the legendary valley of Ophar, land of eternal youth, where life on Mars supposedly began; Chastar hopes to gain its treasures for himself.The party ultimately finds the valley, a prehistoric paradise whose true nature is masked by a protective illusion. There the group fragments, each member falling victim to the valley's uncanny and seemingly judgmental power, a radiation that alters all who enter it in accord with their inner natures. McCord and Thaklar are relatively unchanged, while the victimized Inga and hard-bitten Zerild, a renegade dancer allied with the bandits, recover their innocence. The evil Chastar and abusive Karl, however, are regressed into monsters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitaire_(novel)"title="Solitaire (novel)">
Jackal Segura was born to a life rich with responsibility and privilege and will soon become part of the global administration, sponsored by the huge corporation that houses, feeds, employs, and protects her and everyone she loves. However, just as she discovers that everything she's been brought up to believe is a lie, she is convicted of murder. Grief-stricken and alone, she is sentenced to years of virtual solitary confinement compressed into a few months. When finally released, branded and despised, she struggles to rebuild her life, love, and soul in a strange place called Solitaire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cutthroat"title="The Cutthroat">
This novel is set in 1911 and centers around Isaac Bell, the chief investigator of the Van Dorn Detective Agency. Van Dorn is hired to find a young girl who ran away to become an actress. Hoping to find her and set her father's mind at ease, instead she turns up brutally murdered. Bell has a hunch this is not an isolated crime and his hunch is correct. Many young aspiring actresses as far back as 1891 have been turning up either missing or dead. Bell's hunt for the murderer takes him to London to look into a series of similar murders that took place until 1891 until suddenly stopping. Bell soon suspects he could be chasing one of the most monstrous murderers of all time."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Palace_of_Dreams"title="The Palace of Dreams">
Set in the "sybaritic if somewhat torpid atmosphere of the Ottoman Empire", "The Palace of Dreams" is, according to his own statement, a realization of Kadare's long-term dream to construct a personalized vision of hell, devised as a modern counterpart to Dante's "Inferno", and usually likened by literary critics to Kafka's, Orwell's, Zamyatin's, and Borges' similar literary inventions.Mark-Alem is a twenty-something (by the end of the novel, 28) Ottoman Albanian, a descendant of the (real) influential Köprülü family during the period of its greatest dominance. At the idea of his uncle, the Vizier, who holds the position of Foreign Minister, Mark-Alem is offered a job at the mysterious and feared Tabir Sarai, a government office responsible for the study of dreams. Even though inexperienced, on the back of a "recommendation that hangs between menace and patronage ('You suit us ...')", he is hired in the "Selection" section of the Palace, where his obligations include making a longlist of interesting dreams and draft-interpretations of the more striking ones. These are then transferred to the more skillful interpreters in the "Interpretation" section, whose job is to make a shortlist for the master-interpreters at the "Office of the Master Dream", which, using much more than experience and dream dictionaries, chooses and decodes the symbolism of the most emblematic master-dream and relays its message to the Sultan at the end of each week. Since dreams are considered to be messages by God, it is believed that these master-dreams hold the answers to the future of the empire, and can help in averting misfortunes and nullifying possible threats.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrets_of_the_Terra-Cotta_Soldier"title="Secrets of the Terra-Cotta Soldier">
The story follows thirteen-year-old Ming, who lives in Communist China during the 1970s. Ming's father believes the lost tomb of Emperor Qin Shi Huang lies beneath the village and is forced to prove so before the village Political Officer sends him to a labor camp. While Ming's father is away on business, Ming befriends a Terra-Cotta soldier who has come to life. Together they embark on an adventure to uncover the mysteries of Emperor Qin's Mausoleum and save Ming's father's life.[2][3]
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Element_of_Water"title="The Element of Water">
It is 1958: Isolde Dahl is a young teacher who goes to work in a British school on the shores of Lake Plön in north-west Germany. She is returning to a country she fled as a child refugee with her mother, Renate. Her father has disappeared into the chaos of a continent ravaged by war. Isolde has grown up in a Wales both strange and familiar.1945, Lake Plön. Michael Quantz is an officer in what is left of a shattered German military command as they stage a last chaotic stand before the Allied armies in the final days of the World War II. Everyone has secrets. Michael wants to survive: his wife and son may still be alive. He will hide, change, become a teacher of music.As Isolde and Michael meet on the shores of a German lake, the choices they have made and the stories they have told will change their lives again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Always_and_Forever,_Lara_Jean"title="Always and Forever, Lara Jean">
Now in her final year of high school, Lara Jean Song Covey is excitedly looking forward to attending school with her boyfriend, Peter Kavinsky, at the University of Virginia (UVA). Peter has been accepted early on a sports scholarship for lacrosse. When acceptance letters come in, Lara Jean learns she has been rejected. After being wait-listed to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), Lara Jean briefly loses hope of attending college, but is eventually accepted to the College of William &amp; Mary and decides to attend school there. When Peter suggests that they can visit each other every weekend and that after freshman year Lara Jean can transfer to UVA, she begins to consider it her primary goal.At home, Lara Jean's father continues to date their neighbor, Trina Rothschild. When Margot returns home from university in Scotland with her new boyfriend, Ravi, Lara Jean's father asks all of his daughters for their blessing to wed Trina. The sisters all agree, though Margot, who has not seen the progression of her father's relationship with Trina, is less excited and accepting than her sisters and thinks it won't work.As Lara Jean finishes high school and settles into her new routine, adjusting to time spent without Peter and to Trina's presence in her home, she learns that UNC has taken her off the wait-list and accepted her. Her best friend Chris urges her to take a spontaneous road trip to the campus to see what she will be missing out on if she sticks to her plan. Lara Jean falls in love with the campus and decides to go to UNC, despite the fact that it is even farther away than William &amp; Mary.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Banquet_for_Hungry_Ghosts"title="A Banquet for Hungry Ghosts">
The tales in "A Banquet for Hungry Ghosts" spans across China, ranging from 200 BC to the modern technological world. In Chinese legends, people who die hungry return as vengeful ghosts to haunt the living. Some of these ghosts can be calmed with food, but others have more malicious desires. In addition to focusing on the cuisine and ghosts stories of Chinese culture, each tale has socially conscious undertones which explore the abuse of power and class disparity across China. Each ghost acts as a champion for the poor and powerless people, helping them obtain justice.The book is organized as a Chinese menu. From appetizers and main courses to desserts, every story ends with an authors note and a recipe based on the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Runaway_Wok"title="The Runaway Wok">
In preparation for the Chinese New Year, the poor Zhang family sends Ming to the market to trade eggs for rice. At the market, an old man persuades Ming to trade the eggs for a magical talking wok. When Ming's mother goes to reprimand him, the wok asks her to polish it. When she finishes cleaning the wok, it jumps away and rolls down the road. It returns three times with food, toys, and money taken from the greedy Mr. Li, taking from the rich and giving to the poor of the village. At the end of the story the family shares the gifts of the wok with the community. The story is based on a Danish folktale called "The Talking Pot", and also alludes to "The Gingerbread Man".The book concludes with an author's note and a recipe for "Festive Stir-Fried Rice" and also includes information about the symbolism of the wok and Chinese New Year's foods.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_(book_series)"title="The Story of (book series)">
In "the Story of Chopsticks", each meal is a battle for Kuai as he struggles against his two elder brothers to get to the food. In an act of witty desperation, Kuai uses two sticks to reach for the food that is too hot for his brothers' bare hands and unknowingly starts the tradition of chopsticks. The book concludes with an author's note, instructions for making chopsticks, and a recipe for "Sweet Eight Treasures Rice Pudding".The Kang brothers ruin the dumpling ingredients their mother was going to use for the village cooking contest. Instead, they accidentally invent noodles. The book concludes with an author's note and a recipe for "Long Life Noodles".In "the Story of Kites", the three Kang brothers bang pots and pans together in an attempt to chase birds from the rice fields. After that fails, they decide to make man-made wings out of chopsticks, feathers, and their math homework. The book has been published in English and Chinese. It concludes with an author's note and instructions on how to make a kite.Long ago, before paper was invented in China, people wrote on their hands or the ground. In "the Story of Paper", the naughty Kang brothers get in trouble at school and the teacher leaves a note on their hands for the whole village to see. To avoid embarrassment, the Kang brothers decide to invent something to hide the note from the villagers and their parents. The book concludes with an author's note and instructions for making "Homemade Garden Paper".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictures_of_Your_True_Love"title="Pictures of Your True Love">
Isa, the 14-year-old first-person narrator, escapes from a mental hospital. She hitchhikes her way to a village where she steals food from a grocery shop. Whilst shoplifting the food she sustains laceration wounds. She spends the night in a cornfield and has a shower under the lawn sprinkler of a football pitch, where she does not go undiscovered as the football team finds her. An abandoned house then inspires her; she makes up a story, in which she is the protagonist, waiting for her husband to return from war.Following this, she obtains unauthorised access onto a barge, after the captain initially denies her access. He bandages her feet and tells her his life story, in particular about a bank robbery from ages ago. After a promised nightcap and before the captain can notify the police at a water lock, Isa successfully escapes and she finds a bag belonging to a man who had killed himself.Subsequently, we learn how she is followed by a boy who, according to a sign, is deaf-mute but who she nevertheless chats to because he does not want to let her go. She tells him a story of a dog who was abandoned on a Spanish holiday and who ran all the way back to Germany to his master. Then she describes several short scenes: a passer-by who gives her a sandwich; watching two homeless people and the encounter with a construction worker, who recognizes his first love in her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Successor_(novel)"title="The Successor (novel)">
The novel is divided into seven chapters, the first four of which ("A Death in December", "The Autopsy", "Fond Memories", and "The Fall") are narrated by an omniscient narrator, and the fifth ("The Guide") by a third person limited narrator (the dictator of the country, a thinly veiled portrait of Enver Hoxha). As the mystery behind the death – announced, in a characteristically simple Kadareian manner, in the novel's opening sentence ("The Designated Successor was found dead in his bedroom at dawn on December 14") – ostensibly closes to an inevitable resolution, the narration abruptly turns to first-person point of view, as each of the last two chapters is narrated by one of the novel's two most important characters: "The Architect" (who renovated the Successor's palace and was one of only few people who knew about its secret underground passage leading directly from the Guide's to the Successor's home), and in the "extraordinary [last] chapter", "The Successor", the already deceased title character.Essentially a political thriller and a "whodunit tragicomedy", "The Successor" gradually moves away from speculating about the identity of the likely murderer – after juggling with the possibilities of him being a Sigurimi agent sent by Hoxha, a rising political figure called Adrian Hasobeu striving to become the Number 2, the Architect who once felt offended by the Successor's jokes, or even the Successor's wife who slept much too soundly during the murder – choosing instead to focus on the brutal effects a close-knit dictatorship may have on everyone forced to live under it, no matter how safe he or she may seem in the eyes of the outward observers. Possibly analysing his own controversial dual role as both a privileged writer and an internal dissident under the Hoxha regime, Kadare uses the figure of the Architect to explore the problem of artistic integrity in such circumstances, and the events of "Agamemnon's Daughter" are here recounted once again – this time through the eyes of the female protagonist, Suzana – as further evidence that even the most intimate feelings, such as love, may fall victim to political intrigues and the demands of the state, in cases when the individual is continually sacrificed at a more fundamental, systematic level.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_No_Harm_(book)"title="Do No Harm (book)">
Marsh's father was a human rights lawyer and his mother a refugee from Nazi Germany. Marsh finished a bachelor's degree. When his studies finished he spent two years working in the National Archive. He spent a year in Africa teaching as a volunteer, and then studied Politics, Economics, and Philosophy at the University of Oxford. After a life crisis, he became a stretcher-bearer in a hospital and discovered an interest in medicine, finding "... its controlled and altruistic violence deeply appealing. It seemed to involve excitement and job security, a combination of manual and mental skills, and power and social status as well." He decided to study medicine, but because he lacked O-levels or A-levels in science, he was rejected by London Medical Schools. Instead he enrolled in the Royal Free Medical School. After medical school, he joined a surgical firm in his teaching hospital.He discusses ethical dilemmas: for example, when a 96-year-old woman needs surgery, but would prefer to die at home instead. Marsh's three-month-old son William was admitted to the local hospital, where he had a tumour removed five days later, which was diagnosed as a choroid plexus papilloma. Marsh experienced the anguish that parents endure when their children are patients: "Anxious and angry relatives are a burden all doctors must bear, but having been one myself was an important part of my medical education. Doctors, I tell my trainees with a laugh, can't suffer enough."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greatest_Story_Ever_Told—So_Far"title="The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far">
The book deals with the current scientific understanding of the creation of the Universe and gives a history of how scientists have formulated the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Krauss also details how symmetries have blazed the path for the major breakthroughs of modern particle physics.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watling_Street_(book)"title="Watling Street (book)">
Described as 'A journey along one of Britain's oldest roads, from Dover to Anglesey, in search of the hidden history that makes us who we are today,' Higgs traces the footsteps of ancient travellers along the full 276-mile length of Watling Street from beginning to end. Higgs attempts to reveal the forgotten stories and hidden histories of the past that have formed and been told along the thoroughfare, as well as relating ancient histories to modern day Britain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Runaway_Rice_Cake"title="The Runaway Rice Cake">
In "the Runaway Rice Cake", the poor Chang family has hardly any food to celebrate the Chinese New Year. When they finally manage to put together a rice cake, it suddenly comes to life and leaps away. The Chang family chases the rice cake all through the village until it comes across a hungry old lady. Realizing she is hungrier than they are, the Chang's offer the old woman some of the rice cake, but she eats all of it. The community is moved by the Chang's willingness to give up their only meal, so when they return home, the family is greeted by a wheelbarrow full of what little food the community could gather for the New Year's celebration. These acts of selflessness earn the praise of the Kitchen God who decides to award the village. The story is similar to "The Gingerbread Man".The book concludes with an author's note, including instructions on how to celebrate the New Years and a recipe for "Baked Nian-Gao" and "Steamed Nian Gao". There is also a pronunciation guide for readers unfamiliar with Chinese words.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real_Story_of_Stone_Soup"title="The Real Story of Stone Soup">
The three Chang brothers are constantly overworked by a mean, old fisherman. One day the fisherman scolds the boys for forgetting to prepare his lunch. The boys gather fish and other ingredients to make a delicious soup, then decide to trick the fisherman by digging a hole, filling it with water, and tossing in rocks. They then convince the fisherman that this is how they prepared the soup using special "flavored rocks", astonishing the gullible fisherman. The narrator insists that this is the "real" stone soup story.The book concludes with an author's note and a recipe for "Chang Brother's Egg Drop Stone Soup".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crouching_Tiger_(book)"title="Crouching Tiger (book)">
In the "Crouching Tiger", Vinson is visited by his grandfather from China. His grandfather calls him by his Chinese name, Ming Da, and encourages him to embrace his Chinese heritage by wearing traditional Chinese garb and learning Tai Chi. Vinson imagines his lessons will involve kicking and punching, like Kung Fu, but is disappointed to find out that Tai Chi is more meditative than confrontational. When Vinson and his grandfather attend the Chinese New Years parade, Vinson is surprised to see the great respect shown to his grandfather. As Vinson is invited to join in the parade, he realizes he can be proud about his heritage and plans on happily learning Tai Chi from his grandfather.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_Keys"title="The Hidden Keys">
Tancred Palmieri is a 20-something year old professional thief living in Toronto. Over the course of several years he meets and befriends Willow Azarian, a drug addict who eventually confesses to him that she is the heiress of a billionaire businessman. Upon his death Willow's father bequeathed roughly a billion dollars to her and her four other siblings, however Willow also believes that there is even more of the family fortune left behind. She bases this belief on several bizarre mementos her father also left to each of the siblings. Willow cannot persuade her other siblings to join her in this belief so she asks Tancred to steal the mementos so that she will be able to privately examine them to find the location of the hidden money. To convince Tancred that she is not crazy Willow shows him her memento: a replica of Willows by the Uji Bridge with one panel removed and a small plaque on which the words "salix babylonica" are inscribed. Tancred agrees to take the job from Willow, but after she rents him an apartment and pays him for the job she dies of pneumonia.Tancred begins to steal the mementos belonging to the other Azarian siblings. Unfortunately for him, some of the siblings go to the police and detective Daniel Mandelshtam who is Tancred's best friend since childhood, is assigned to the case. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rosie_Effect"title="The Rosie Effect">
Don Tillman is an Australian genetics professor who probably has Asperger’s syndrome, though this is never stated explicitly.In the prequel "The Rosie Project", a romantic comedy novel, he met and married Rosie Jarman, a psychology PhD candidate at a university in Melbourne. "The Rosie Effect" is set in New York City, where Don and Rosie have moved. Don has taken up an associate professor position at Columbia University and Rosie has enrolled in a Doctor of Medicine degree while she concurrently completes the PhD. Early in the story, Rosie becomes pregnant, and Don's philandering mentor, Gene, who has left his wife Claudia, comes to live with them.The book follows Don's attempts to prepare for parenthood and to support Rosie in her own preparation, drawing on science and the unreliable advice of his friends. Don's unconventional approach alienates Rosie and eventually leads to the breakdown of their marriage. Don pursues Rosie and persuades her to return.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_Star"title="Void Star">
The plot revolves around three protagonists: Irina, a corporate consultant, who translates AI "glyphs," or waves of thought, for other people to understand; Thales, the son of a Brazilian politician; and Kern, petty thief raised in the favelas and self-taught martial artist. They are brought together when Irina and Thales, both of whom have cranial implants that enable perfect memory recall, learn that the contents of these implants can be exfiltrated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Presence_of_Schopenhauer"title="In the Presence of Schopenhauer">
Houellebecq recounts how he as a 25-year-old came across a copy of Schopenhauer's "Aphorisms". Houellebecq became enthralled within minutes and hunted down the philosopher's major work, "The World as Will and Representation". Although a "disappointed enthusiast" for the positivism of Auguste Comte, it is in Schopenhauer's philosophy he finds consolation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_in_Rome"title="Death in Rome">
## Context."Death in Rome" deals with the careers of former National Socialists after World War II. The novel is sharply critical of Germany's past, post-war reality and future, sounding a warning and a prophetic note. Koeppen targets German militarism, revealing the dangerous influence of fascist ideology on certain West German social strata.The story, of victims and perpetrators from the time of National Socialism meeting during the post-war period, takes place against the backdrop of Rome. The city also functions as a metaphor, its ancient monuments predisposing the reader to reflect on the fate of the world, the nature of good and evil, war and peace, the past and the future, wealth and poverty, justice and social oppression. The author composes new groups from the members of two families and their surroundings, and choreographs their story in several parallel lines of action. Through a network of dialogues and inner monologues, the present is problematized and the past uncovered. The characters embody the opportunism and adaptability of the followers; the unbroken violence of the perpetrators; and the devastation and escapism of the next generation.In the background is the unresolved problem of overcoming the past of National Socialism in the time of the "Wirtschaftswunder". The novel has a particular connection with Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" (, 1912), most notably in addressing the problems of artistic creativity against a background of moral decay. Stylistically, "Death in Rome" is similar to Koeppen's two other novels, characterized by a mastery of metaphorical, associative prose and use of the devices of cinema. These include the staging, constant changes in point of view and distance to the depicted event, and the simultaneously unfolding action. Epic narrative is coupled with the characters' internal monologue, which, according to the author, "best suits our perception, our consciousness, and our bitter experience".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bear_Lake_(novel)"title="Great Bear Lake (novel)">
"Great Bear Lake" continues the story of Kallik, Lusa, Toklo, and Ujurak as the bear cubs try to find their way to the Arctic. It starts with Lusa meeting Toklo and Ujurak. She tries to deliver Oka's message to Toklo, but he doesn't want to hear what his mother said. Lusa earns a little respect from Toklo when she saves his life, but he still doesn't want to talk about Oka. Ujurak, due to his kinder personality, befriends Lusa and welcomes her on his mission. Kallik is traveling alone, trying to find her brother Taqqiq. She eventually makes it to the Great Bear Lake. Lusa, Toklo and Ujurak go to the Great Bear Lake too, and Lusa befriends a black bear cub named Miki. However, he is later kidnapped by selfish and bullying white bears, which includes Taqqiq. Kallik tries to convince him to stop, but he ignores her. She ends up in the lake and nearly drowns. Lusa, who is looking for Miki, luckily hears her cries and carries her to safety. Grateful that Lusa saved her life, Kallik teams up with the black bear cub, along with Toklo and Ujurak to save Miki, and stop the white bears from causing more damage. They succeed and Taqqiq leaves his friends to travel with the four bears.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Obelisk_Gate"title="The Obelisk Gate">
The story is told primarily from the perspectives of Essun, a powerful orogene driven out of her home at the beginning of the first book, and Nassun, her adolescent daughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophelia_and_the_Marvelous_Boy"title="Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy">
Ophelia Jane Worthington-Whittard is a scientifically-minded English girl whose mother has recently died. Ophelia's father, an international sword expert, has temporarily moved Ophelia and her older sister Alice to an unnamed northern European city where he is curating an important museum exhibit. The head curator at the museum is Miss Kaminski, a beautiful woman with blonde hair who often wears white clothing. However, she is cold and unkind to Ophelia.While her father is working on the exhibit, Ophelia is mostly left alone to wander through the mysterious old museum. One day, she finds a small room with a faded mural of a boy with a sword, captioned "The Marvelous Boy." Hidden in the mural is a small door and when Ophelia peers through the keyhole, she discovers that someone is looking back at her from the other side of the door. The boy on the other side of the door tells Ophelia that he was sent from another world, centuries ago, to defeat the Snow Queen, but that she imprisoned him, instead. The boy's name was taken from him by a group of wizards so that it could not be used against him and he was put under a spell of protection that magically extended his life, but the spell is about to wear off and the Snow Queen will be able to kill him when it does.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_D.O.D.O."title="The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.">
U.S. Army Major Tristan Lyons hires Dr. Melisande Stokes, a Harvard linguistics lecturer, to translate a variety of historic texts. The work is classified, to the point that Lyons cannot even reveal the full name of D.O.D.O., the secret government agency that he works for. Stokes' translations suggest that magic and witches existed in the historical record, and also that magic grew weaker and ceased to function sometime during the Industrial Revolution. Stokes and Lyons eventually discover that photography nullifies magic in the general area by causing a wave function collapse. Magic use ended worldwide when a photograph was taken of the solar eclipse of July 28, 1851.Lyons recruits Dr. Frank Oda, a former MIT physicist who once worked on a device that could prevent wave function collapse. The device is somewhat like the box in the Schrödinger's cat experiment, though not (potentially) deadly to anyone inside. At the same time, Stokes is contacted by Erszebet Karpathy, a Hungarian witch with a supernaturally-extended lifespan who claims to have met Stokes in 1851 London. Stokes learns that D.O.D.O. stands for the Department of Diachronic Operations, and that Lyons intends to build a device that will enable magic-assisted time travel.Over the next five years, D.O.D.O. grows in size and scope as a project of IARPA and the Director of National Intelligence. Agents are trained in period-specific languages and combat techniques and magically sent back to 1601 London and the 1203-1204 Constantinople, among other times and places. The object is to alter historical events to subtly help the United States government, but it has to be done carefully and methodically to avoid Diachronic Shear, a catastrophic magical explosion that occurs when history is changed too much or too quickly. Witches are recruited to form a time travel network and some are even brought to the present to assist D.O.D.O. directly. One of these witches manages to gain control of the agency through the use of magic, and sends Stokes back in time to July 1851 in the hopes that she will be stranded there when magic ceases to work. The D.O.D.O. organization falls apart as members generally fall into two sides: a conspiracy of witches who want to sabotage the foundations of photography (and science itself) and the protagonists who pledge to counter their efforts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killers_of_the_Flower_Moon"title="Killers of the Flower Moon">
The book investigates a series of murders of wealthy Osage people that took place in Osage County, Oklahoma in the early 1920s—after big oil deposits were discovered beneath their land. After the Osage are awarded rights in court to the profits made from oil deposits found on their land, the Osage people prepare to receive the wealth to which they are legally entitled from sales of their oil deposits.The Osage are viewed as the "middle man" and a complex plot is hatched to eliminate the Osage inheritors on a one-by-one basis by any means possible. Officially, the count of the full-blooded, wealthy Osage victims reaches at least twenty, but Grann suspects that hundreds more may have been killed because of their ties to oil. The book details the newly formed FBI's investigation of the murders, as well as the eventual trial and conviction of cattleman William Hale as the mastermind behind the plot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Railroad_Adventures_of_Chen_Sing"title="The Railroad Adventures of Chen Sing">
"While the book is a work of historical fiction, it is based on the life of a real Chen Sing, an orphan who emigrated from southern China in the wake of floods and famine. In the book, he is small but strong and is able to survive the arduous two-month sea voyage and succeed at various jobs with the railway crew that others can not handle because of his determination and intelligence. He is also helped by his friendship with members of the Coast Salish people, who help him acclimate to the surprisingly cold winter. One chapter extols the simple joys of ice fishing, snowshoeing, snowball fights, and other winter pastimes that Chen Sing enjoys for the first time with a new friend." Chen Sing and his railroad crew face disasters, encounters with wild animals and unforeseen events mark their journey as they build the railway through the Rocky Mountains until the completion of the railway.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Fire_(novel)"title="Home Fire (novel)">
The novel begins with Isma Pasha detained in security at Heathrow Airport. A 28-year-old Muslim hijabi woman who has been raising her younger, twin siblings since their mother's death when the twins were 12, their reaching adulthood (now 19) has allowed Isma to pursue her long-deferred graduate studies, doing so in Massachusetts at the invitation of her former tutor at LSE, Hira Shah. Prolonged interrogation in security causes Isma to miss her flight from London to Boston, but she eventually makes her way to Amherst, Massachusetts where she settles into a routine, spending mornings in a cafe working and keeping an eye on Skype, where she sees both her younger siblings' names appear briefly each day. Isma is in contact with Aneeka, but Aneeka's twin brother Parvaiz is a source of conflict between them. At the cafe one morning, Isma spots a young man, Eamonn Lone, the son of British politician Karamat Lone, for whom Isma has a fierce dislike. Nevertheless, she strikes up a friendship with 24-year-old Eamonn, not acknowledging she is aware of his father, and soon Eamonn is joining her daily at the cafe. He is in Massachusetts staying with his white, American mother's relatives and living off family money while taking a year off from work, contrasting sharply with Isma's own modest circumstances; she worked at a drycleaner to support her younger siblings when they were orphaned.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stone_Sky"title="The Stone Sky">
Following the events of "The Obelisk Gate", the former inhabitants of Castrima-under are moving north after damage by rival comm Rennanis has compromised the mechanisms of the geode and made it uninhabitable. Essun, who has been in a coma since opening the Obelisk Gate, awakens to find that her arm has turned to stone as a consequence of the massive magical energies of the Gate. She is nursed back to health, and finds that the Moon is approaching the closest point in its long, elliptical orbit, meaning that she has only a short time to return it to a normal orbit and end the Fifth Seasons forever.Meanwhile, Essun's daughter Nassun is recovering from the shock of using an obelisk to kill her father by turning him to stone. Despondent and angry, she resolves to use the Obelisk Gate to cause the approaching Moon to collide with Earth and destroy both. Her Guardian, Schaffa, agrees to help her reach the only city on the other side of the planet, Corepoint; from there, the Obelisk Gate can be activated without the need for the central control obelisk that Essun used.The comm reaches Rennanis after a costly desert crossing, where Essun learns that Nassun is planning to open the Gate as Essun did, which would almost certainly mean her death. She departs for Corepoint with a small company to intercept Nassun. Just prior to leaving, she learns she is pregnant by Lerna, the former healer from her old comm Tirimo, with whom she has started a relationship. Hoa, the stone eater who has been following her since she left Tirimo, offers to take them by transporting directly through the Earth; however, as they traverse through the center of the planet (skirting around the core), they are attacked by a rival faction of stone eaters and Lerna is killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_of_Adam_Sharp"title="The Best of Adam Sharp">
Adam Sharp is an English information technology consultant and part-time piano player, in a settled but tired long-term relationship with Claire. He nurses a nostalgia for his "Great Lost Love"—Angelina, with whom he had a brief affair twenty-two years ago during a work assignment in Melbourne, Australia. Then Angelina gets back in touch and Adam’s life is thrown into confusion.The novel is narrated from Adam’s point of view and is in two parts. Part I describes the present-day (2012) aftermath of Angelina’s re-connecting, with extensive flashbacks to their time in Melbourne. After their email interactions develop into a long-distance affair, Adam decides to leave Claire and accept an invitation to spend a week with Angelina and her husband Charlie at their vacation home in France. In Part II, Adam discovers that he is a player in a complex marital game. The narrative focuses on his efforts to understand Charlie and Angelina’s motivations, and on his decision as to whether to reunite with Angelina.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Losing_My_Religion_(novel)"title="Losing My Religion (novel)">
The story is about a young entrepreneur - Rishi Rai who goes bankrupt and sets off on an unplanned trip across India which soon turns into a journey of self-discovery, love and friendship. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undertones_of_War"title="Undertones of War">
Paul Fussell has called Undertones of War an "extended elegy in prose," and critics have commented on its lack of central narrative. Like Henri Barbusse's "Under Fire" and Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front", the text presents a series of war-related episodes rather than a distinct, teleological narrative.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Never_(novel)"title="Never Never (novel)">
When Harry's brother is arrested for the murders of three young women, her boss needs to get the mercurial Harry away "for her own good" from Sydney and a merciless press. She is assigned to a small town in Western Australia with a new partner. While she waits for her leave to be up a terrorist incident occurs, terrifying the townspeople and causing her new partners to doubt what the source is. As the tension mounts for her things get trickier until the final blow. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_Outside_the_World"title="The City Outside the World">
Mars, a world with a culture ages older than that of Earth, is a dying world, and has been in decline for eons. By the twenty-second century it has become a colony of the younger civilization of Earth, its natives oppressed by the rapacious Colonial Authority.In Yeolarn, a city divided into Terran and Martian sectors, the Terran Ryker is on the lam from the CA and natives alike. He finds himself attracted to the native dancer Valarda, by whom he is enticed into a local slum. They fall afoul of a mob, who treat Valarda as a hated pariah; Ryker helps her elude them, and with the native boy Kiki they join a caravan departing for the northern desert to further shake their pursuers.Later Valarda and Kiki disappear, along with an antique amulet in Ryker's possession. He trails the thieves to the ruins of Khuu and the Martian "sphinx", an ancient monument in the form of the insect-like Pteraton; Valarda's enemies also follow. The amulet proves the key to the structure, unlocking a time portal into a prehistoric era. Ryker, Valarda and Kiki are hurled into this past together with their hunters and the captive Terran scientist Herzog.Beyond the portal is Zhiam, the original city whose ruins would one day become Khuu. It is the last refuge of the legendary lost tenth tribe of Mars, Valarda and Kiki's people. Branded devil-worshipping heretics by the nine other nations, it was almost exterminated in the Zhaggua Jihad in ages past. Valarda, the lost tribe's high priestess and last of its rulers, had ventured back into the world to retrieve the key that could betray their hiding place, only to be found out. Now that outsiders have breached the tribe's peaceful retreat, the age-old conflict breaks out anew.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_to_a_Sunless_Sea_(Carter_novel)"title="Down to a Sunless Sea (Carter novel)">
Mars, a world with a culture ages older than that of Earth, is a dying world, and has been in decline for eons. By the twenty-second century it has become a colony of the younger civilization of Earth, its natives oppressed by the rapacious Colonial Authority.In a ruined city, Terran outlaw and prospector Jim Brant discovers two native women who have been staked out and left to die for the offense of loving each other. He frees the couple, named Zuarra and Suoli. Their affection has not survived the experience, as Suoli betrayed cowardice when left to their fate, in contrast to the stoic Zuarra.The ill-sorted trio soon encounters other wanderers in the waste, Terran archeologist Will Harbin and his native guide Agila, a strong figure to whom the dependent Suoli soon attaches herself. This brings new complications, as Agila is a fugitive from the bandit chief Tuan, from whom he stole an ancient disc engraved with a treasure map.The combined party follows the map to a cave containing a stairwell descending into unknown depths. Exploring to see where it leads, they discover a huge cavern containing an underground sea. They have been trailed, however, by Tuan's bandits, who capture them and propose to burn Agila alive. The operation is interrupted by children riding giant dragonflies, which carry everyone away to their base, the floating raft-city of Zhar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_and_the_Other"title="The Moon and the Other">
In the twenty-second century, millions live in underground cities under the Moon’s surface. One city-state, the Society of Cousins, is a matriarchy that gets involved in a war with the Organization of Lunar States.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinaman_(novel)"title="The Chinaman (novel)">
Nguyen Ngoc Minh is a Vietnamese restaurateur based in London, and is also a Vietnam War veteran who was trained as an assassin by both the Viet Cong and the US Army. One day he loses both his wife and daughter in a bombing by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). He seeks justice, first by going to London Chief Inspector Richard Bromley, who is investigating the bombings, but he rebuffs Nguyen.In the meantime, a rogue cell of IRA continues to commit bombings throughout London. Ian "Woody" Wood, a freelance journalist, is assigned to investigate the IRA. He is approached by the desperate Nguyen, who offers him money for the names of the bombers. Lacking any information, Woody suggests that Nguyen talk to Sinn Féin member and former IRA operator, Liam Hennessey. Nguyen sells his restaurant to his best friend and decides to travel to Belfast to talk to Hennessey. Hennessey has his former weapon dumps investigated, believing a rogue cell is using Semtex from those dumps to create the explosives, but when confronted by Nguyen, he claims ignorance of the bombers' identities. Nguyen reacts to this by setting off a homemade bomb in the bathroom of Hennessey's office. By phone Nguyen threatens further reprisals if he is not given the names of the bombers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waste_Tide"title="The Waste Tide">
Mimi is a 'waste girl', a member of the lowest caste on Silicon Isle. Located off China's southeastern coast, Silicon Isle is the global capital for electronic waste recycling, where thousands of people like Mimi toil day and night, hoping that one day they too will get to enjoy the wealth they've created for their employers, the three scrap families who have ruled the isle for generations.It all changes when a ship bearing a dangerous cargo arrives at Silicon Isle. What looks like normal e-waste, is actually infected by a virus born out of one of the darkest episodes of WWII, Project Waste Tide. In a fateful accident, Mimi is infected by the virus and becomes the host for an omniscient consciousness, hell-bent on righting all the wrongs that have been done to her people. A class war ignites, one that draws in environmental extremists and waste workers, and involves family feuds and darker conspiracies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Medeleni"title="La Medeleni">
"At the Medeleni" is a novel about an idealised childhood and adolescence, designed in an Edenic patriarchal setting. The plot is centred around two siblings, Daniel and Olguța (Romanian: ) Deleanu, and their step sister, Monica. According to her father, Olguța is an "angelic devil, a mixture of purity and inclinations towards little malice." She is constantly shaking, does not accept contradiction, and tries to subordinate everything that surrounds her.Daniel tends to be calm but can often lose his patience and becomes nervous because of his sister, Olguța. He often dreams about saving Monica but is awakened by his sister from time to time.Monica ensures the balance between the siblings, who are in a continuous argument. She is gentle, generous and always jumps in to help others. Monica is in love with Daniel throughout the novel. Daniel realizes at the end that he is in love with Monica as well. They get married and enjoy a happy life.Olguța falls in love with Vania, an older man. She plans to marry him and go to America, but she discovers that she has cancer. In the end, she commits suicide. After the death of Olguța, the Deleanu family sells the estate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_to_the_Grave"title="Love to the Grave">
Bezabeh is one of leading characters in the novel, and the only child of Wudenesh Betamu and Bogale Mebratu. The story interchanged when Bezabeh turned ill during his infancy and childhood. When he was young, Bogale lost his parents and lived in poor condition until he encounters a rich woman named Wudenesh, whose three husbands tragically died. Priest Tamiru struggled to bring them unit, why the story titled Fikir Eske Mekaber.Once they married two years later, they conceived a boy named Bezabeh to describe the consecutive illnesses encountered the child until the age of fifth age. At the three months, Bezabeh suffered from disease named "Ankelis", at the age of 6, he suffered from respiratory ailment called "kuwakuat" and measles at the end of year. These combination of diseases nearly would kill him.The story tells that when he had Ankelis, symptoms started with chronic fever with shortness of breath. His father pushed the from room as he escape from death, and stunned father checked if he is alive, and his mother pray aloud for the boy from dying. The boy immensely sleeps deeply before awaking surprisedly with yawn and laughing.The symptom of Ankelis fits with febrile seizure, hinting the chronic fever accompanied by convulsion. Besides this, the child also experienced twitching or rigidity in one portion of his body. Although scariest to his parents, the condition is harmless. Haddis noted that the Ankelis is caused by his near-death experience.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_Laid_an_Egg"title="Mummy Laid an Egg">
The book is a sex education book for young children, and "Publishers Weekly"'s reviewer said that Cole "unleashes her endearingly loony sense of humor on the subject of the birds and the bees, and the result is, as expected, hilarious." In the book a couple of parents attempt to explain the facts of life to their two children, who respond to their apparently ignorant parents by explaining matters to them, with stick-figure illustrations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherston's_Progress"title="Sherston's Progress">
The book starts with his arrival at 'Slateford War Hospital' in Edinburgh (based on Craiglockhart War Hospital) for shell-shocked soldiers. Sherston has not been wounded, but has refused to continue fighting, causing himself a little temporary notoriety in England. The famous neurologist W. H. R. Rivers is a major character in the book (and had a profound influence on Sassoon in real life). After many sessions in which he gets to know himself and his motives better, he decides to ask to return to the front line.Sherston is sent to Ireland (where he is introduced to 'The Mister', an alcoholic, eccentric millionaire) then Palestine, and finally to the Western Front in France. There, as captain of a company, he describes his admiration for his servant (Bond), his fellow officers and his men, and his state of mind. At the end of the short first stint at the front, he decides to go out with Corporal Davies to lob some Mills bombs at a German machine-gun post. On their way back, he is shot in the head by an experienced soldier (Sergeant Wickham) in his own company. He is reluctant to be sent to recover in London, where Rivers visits him in hospital.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_Run"title="Elephant Run">
Nicholas Gillis Freestone is sent to Burma after his mother's apartment is destroyed in the blitz or the Battle of Britain. He meets Nang the foreman, his daughter Mya, and his son Indaw, a mahout. At the time of Nick's arrival, there is much talk about the recent Japanese bombing of Rangoon, predicting the British defenses in Burma will soon fall. The next day Nick is at the village and Hannibal, a koongyi (timber elephant) with a grudge against tiger Nats (spirits of the forest), attacks Nick and his ribs are cracked. Out of embarrassment, Nick keeps the incident to himself until his father hears of the accident from Hilltop (Taung Baw in Burmese), a monk who was one of the two original mahouts to come with Nick's great-grandfather, Sergeant-Major Jackson Theodore Freestone I, who founded Hawk's Nest. Hilltop is Mya &amp; Indaw's great-grandfather, who some people rumor is over 100 years old. Hilltop is said to know the secret language of the elephants. Rumor says he lives in the forest and disappeared for sixty years before returning to the Freestone Plantation.On Christmas, Nick, his father, Indaw, and Mya are traveling to the nearby Freestone Island when the Japanese invade. Japanese soldiers soon overrun and capture the Freestones' camp, taking into custody all its inhabitants while Nick and the elephants go into a safe hiding place. Not long after, though, Nick is captured by an amiable soldier, Sergeant Sonji, whom Nick initially takes to be crazy. Sonji takes an interest in Nick, teaching him to create haiku and treating him relatively well for a Japanese sergeant of the time. Nick is returned to the elephant village by the sergeant, at which point the brutal extent to which the Japanese are taking in their conquest becomes clear. Under the newly erected Japanese flag lie the corpses of Nang, who has been beaten to death, and Captain Josephs, a British officer who has been decapitated. His father and Indaw have been taken as POWs (prisoners of war), and Nick is taken a hostage at Hawk's Nest. He remains there for ten months as a servant of sorts to Colonel Nagayoshi, the Japanese commander of Hawk's Nest. While there, Nick is routinely beaten by a crippled elderly Japanese sympathizer named Bukong but is otherwise left unscathed by the Japanese.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Concubine's_Children"title="The Concubine's Children">
"The Concubine's Children" documents the life of Denise Chong's grandfather, Chan Sam; grandmother, May-ying; her mother, Hing (or Winnie, as she was known outside of Chinatown); her mother's siblings, Ping, Nan, and Gok-leng; and half sibling, Yuen. Chan Sam had two wives, May-ying in Canada and Huangbo in China, dividing the family between Canada and China. Chong's mother, Hing, only knew one of her siblings while growing up, Gok-leng. "The Concubine's Children" documents the story of this family which spanned two continents, as well as the political, social, and cultural tensions in China and Canada, between 1848, when Chan Sam's father, Chong's great grandfather, first came to "Gold Mountain", the nickname by which Chinese people knew North America, and 1987 when Chong and Hing first met the "China family".Chong was inspired to work on this family history–historical non-fiction novel after moving to Beijing in 1985, with her companion, and later husband, CTV correspondent Roger Smith.While living in Peking, Denise Chong convinced her mother Hing/Winnie to join her on a three-week trip of China, which would take them to the village of Chang Gar Bin. Chang Gar Bin was Chan Sam's (Hing/Winnie's father and Denise Chong's grandfather)'s hometown, and the place where Hing's sisters, Ping and Nan, and half-brother Yueng, all of whom she had never met, had been raised. Before going to Chang Gar Bin, Denise contacted the Chinese foreign ministry in Canton, and discovered that two of her mother's siblings were still alive and living in Char Gar Bing. Hing's sister Nan had died when Hing was still a child and she had been aware of this passing. "The Concubine's Children" ends with a chapter describing this trip and the first meeting between then, 57-year-old Hing/Winnie and her siblings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstitious_(novel)"title="Superstitious (novel)">
Sara Morgan, a graduate student who has left an abusive relationship with Clip, starts a new relationship with a handsome professor named Liam O'Connor. Liam is extremely superstitious and lives with his sister Margaret, to whom he is very close. Sara does not mind these quirks and marries Liam. Shortly, people start dying in grisly ways, and it turns out the professor knew all of them. Sara begins to wonder if her husband might be the killer, while Liam's superstitious behavior increases.One day, after Sara discovers Margaret and Liam in bed together naked, she smashes the mirror out of protest and runs out of the house. She returns later to retrieve her keys only to find Margaret dead; she leaves afterwards in search of her boss' house. There, she spots her boss dead and Liam glaring at her. He explains to her that Margaret was his wife and that the demons of superstition living inside of him can pass through Sara to the child she bears. He went on to explain that when the demons slip away, they kill someone he knows; when Sara broke the mirror, the demons slipped out, murdering Margaret.Sara, who wants to show Liam that there are no demons, shatters a mirror in the house; the demons slip outside of him, he says it's okay because with his death Sara will be safe, and they murder Liam. Sara is knocked out afterwards by the demons, and later awakens in the hospital. Sara then finds out she is pregnant, causing her to scream in horror.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torch_of_Freedom"title="Torch of Freedom">
While Anton Zilwicki and Victor Cachat were working undercover on Mesa, Mesa launches an attack at Torch. Anton Zilwicki and Victor Cachat escape Mesa amidst general mayhem together with a defecting leading scientist. The attack against Torch is thwarted by Rear Admiral Luiz Rozsak of the Solarian League Navy, who had amassed a fleet in the interest of the Maya Sector.Queen Berry becomes romantically involved with Hugh Arai, who, after being freed from slavery by Jeremy X from the Audubon Ballroom, worked as a commando for the Beowulf Biological Survey Corps (BSC), and was assigned by Jeremy X as Berry's bodyguard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_of_Honor"title="Mission of Honor">
The book begins in January 1922 P.D. The Star Empire of Manticore remains at war with the Republic of Haven, despite their mutual losses during the Battle of Manticore. Now, the Star Empire is in danger of entering an entirely new conflict with the Solarian League, a galactic superstate with a population numbering several trillion. Though Manticore possesses a decisive tactical and technological edge over the Solarians with their anti-ship missiles and missile defense systems, the Solarians boast a fleet of over ten thousand capital ships. The planet Mesa and its shadow government continue to foment an increasingly hostile Manticoran-Solarian relationship for its own nefarious ends. At the same time, Mesa has launched a potentially devastating strike against the Manticore Home System itself, which has gone completely undetected by Manticore.Meanwhile, Admiral Duchess Honor Alexander-Harrington of Manticore is dispatched on a diplomatic mission to the Republic of Haven, having convinced Queen Elizabeth III of Manticore that the Haven issue cannot be left unresolved in the wake of an increasingly likely confrontation with the Solarian League. Traveling to the Haven System itself in her civilian yacht, but escorted by her own 8th Fleet, she offers the Republic a chance to conclude their war diplomatically rather than face sure annihilation due to Manticore's unmatchable tactical advantage. Despite getting off to a good start, the negotiations become stalled when Havenite politicians obstruct the talks for personal political gain. Alexander-Harrington initially tolerates this effort in the interest of good diplomacy, but eventually publicly calls out the leader of the opposition politicians, forcing him to back down. However, the talks are suspended when word reaches Haven that a sneak attack, by seemingly unknown forces, has wrought havoc on the Manticore Home System's infrastructure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow's_Edge"title="Shadow's Edge">
The story takes place in the fictional land of Midcyru. It centers upon Kylar, the Night Angel, once an apprentice of Durzo Blint, a former celebrated wetboy and his journey for retribution against those who torn his kingdom asunder in a coup months prior to the events of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maigret_in_Retirement"title="Maigret in Retirement">
Two years into his retirement at Meung-sur-Loire, Maigret has yet to be tempted to take on a case. But 82-year-old Bernadette Amorelle, the widow of Amorelle of Amorelle and Campois, the major gravel and barge company on the Seine, shows up at his door and virtually orders him to Orsennes, where her 18-year-old granddaughter, Monita Malik, has been found dead in the Seine. Maigret arrives and finds an old acquaintance from his days at lycée in Moulins, Ernest Malik, who they'd called "The Tax Collector" after his father's occupation, the sort of man Maigret instinctively disliked. It is made clear that Maigret's presence in Orsennes is unwelcome, but Maigret is intrigued by the apparent disappearance of Malik's younger son, Georges-Henry Malik.Maigret returns to Paris to investigate further and to enlist the services of Mimile, an old circus hand, with whose help he rescues the boy from the cellar his father has imprisoned him in. The mystery is finally unraveled when Bernadette shoots and kills her son-in-law Ernest, and Maigret returns to hear her story. Malik had been a gambler, and enticed Désiré Campois' son, Roger Campois, into gambling way over his head, until he committed suicide, thus freeing Amorelle's daughter from her engagement, and giving Ernest room to marry into the family. He was more intrigued by the younger daughter, Aimée Amorelle, who bore his child, Monita, but not before he had brought his younger brother, Charles Malik, in to marry Aimée, eventually forcing Old Campois from power, and conquering all but Bernadette. The daughter, Monita, had learned the secret, and shared it with Georges-Henry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempted_(Cast_novel)"title="Tempted (Cast novel)">
Tempted starts immediately after the end of events in the 5th book, "Hunted", and is told from the point of view of six characters: Zoey, Stevie Rae, Aphrodite, Rephaim, Heath and Stark.Zoey has finally banished Neferet and Kalona, but he still haunts her dreams. When another prophecy warns Zoey of her choices, she realizes that she must follow her enemies up to the Vampire Council.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunted_(Cast_novel)"title="Hunted (Cast novel)">
Zoey and her friends help Stevie Rae heal after the events at the end of "Untamed" – the arrow did not kill her, but took most of her lifeblood, so Kalona could be freed from the earth. Zoey and Stevie Rae reconcile, and the latter introduces Zoey's group to some of the red vampyre fledglings. Aphrodite lets Stevie Rae feed on her to heal, which forms an Imprint between them. When Erik follows Zoey on her way to her room they kiss, but then Erik gets too rough and scares her. Erik and Zoey get back together, though Zoey's not entirely sure due to Erik's possessiveness. Kalona starts getting into Zoey's dreams to seduce her, and calls her A-ya.Kramisha, a red fledgling, is revealed to also express prophecies through her poetry, and Zoey gives her the title of Poet Laureate. This is how they find their first clue. One of Kramisha's poems states that Kalona and Neferet will be banished when Night, Humanity, Blood, Spirit and Earth come together, but Zoey doesn't know who will represent these elements.Heath arrives at the tunnels, and Zoey goes outside to talk to him, much to Erik's anger. Heath tries to reconcile with her, but to no avail. A Raven Mocker attacks them and critically wounds Zoey. She drinks from Heath to heal and they Imprint again, but she is still weakened. Kramisha gets exited and loses her control a little when she sees Heath (a human), leading Zoey to realize that the red fledglings may still have problems with their self-control. Darius finally declares that Zoey needs exposure to more adult vampyres to survive, and she is forced to return to the House of Night, much to Neferet's pleasure. She finds out that Kalona's presence has caused the fledglings and the vampyres to turn their backs on Nyx. Kalona's favorite son, Rephaim, and Darius get into a fight. Kalona intercedes and gives Darius a huge scar which upsets Aphrodite.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Underneath_(novel)"title="The Underneath (novel)">
The story takes place underneath a ramshackle house, in the bayou near the Texas-Louisiana border. The hound dog, Ranger, is chained under the porch. Ever since his leg was shot accidentally by his evil owner, Gar Face, Ranger has been chained up to serve only as a warning system. Ranger meets a calico cat who has kittens, and he names the kittens "Sabine" and "Puck". The kittens are told to never leave the underside of the porch, otherwise Gar Face might use them as alligator bait. One day, Puck accidentally leaves the safety of the porch and is caught by Gar Face. While trying to protect Puck, the calico is also caught. Gar Face throws the two into a bag, which he then throws into the river. Although Puck is saved, the mother drowns trying to help him. She encounters a hummingbird, who are known to accompany the spirits of the dead to the other side. Puck later wanders off and ends up lost. The book also introduces Grandmother Moccasin, who in this story is portrayed as a water moccasin lamia. When her daughter Night Song changes form to marry Hawk Man, Grandmother feels betrayed and tricks her daughter into changing back into a serpent, since magical creatures who return to their original forms are stuck that way forever. Hawk Man then traps Grandmother in a clay jar for what she did, where she stews in her bitterness and anger. The Alligator King is an alligator who was friends with Grandmother Moccasin before her imprisonment, who also happens to be the alligator that Gar Face is trying to lure using Ranger. When storms release Grandmother, she decides to do something unexpected. She sees the love between the kittens and the hound, and frees Ranger from where he is chained. However, she is hit by a stray bullet from Gar Face. As she lays dying, she is at last reunited by her granddaughter Rainbow Bird, who took the form of a hummingbird.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_Castle"title="Thorn Castle">
Tamly is the only person in Meadowhythe who cannot do magic. He wishes he knew why, and longs to learn magic. But it is precisely his lack of magic which makes him ideal for the dangerous challenge of rescuing the Book of Spells from the evil sorcerer Lord Harshax. Together with his magically gifted friend Kym, he sets out to steal the book and save his village.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romiette_and_Julio"title="Romiette and Julio">
This story begins with African American teenager Romiette Cappelle awaking from a recurring nightmare in which she is drowning in fire and water. Just before waking she hears an unknown male voice speaking to her. Although frightened by the nightmare, she wonders whether the voice could be the voice of her soulmate.Meanwhile, Julio Montague, a Hispanic teenager has just moved to town (Cincinnati, Ohio) from Corpus Christi, Texas, and the following day is his first day attending the same school as Romiette. On his first day he is involved in an altercation with Ben, a local boy, and the two end up becoming friends after Ben declines to implicate Julio when questioned by the school's principal. When Julio gets home that afternoon, he logs into a chatroom with the screen name "spanishlover" and starts to chat anonymously with "afroqueen," who he later finds is Romiette. Meanwhile, Romiette excitedly tells Destiny, her best friend, about her online chat with "spanishlover." Romiette and Julio continue to chat online, have a lunch date, and eventually fall in love with each other. Their relationship provokes the ire of a local gang—the "Devil Dogs"—who disapprove of an African American girl dating a Hispanic boy. Makala, a member of the gang, threatens Romiette on several occasions. Julio tells his parents about the relationship, and although his mother, Maria, approves, his father, Luis, dislikes his son dating an African American girl because his first girlfriend was killed by gang members who were African American.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughter_of_Venice"title="Daughter of Venice">
This story follows Donata, daughter of a wealthy noble in 1592."VENICE, ITALY 1592. Donata Mocenigo, daughter to one of the city's noble families, leads a life of wealthy privilege. But constrained by the strict rules of etiquette a young noblewoman must observe, she longs to throw off her veil and wander freely around the vibrant city she can see only from her balcony. So Donata comes up with a daring plan to escape the palazzo and explore - a plan that will change her own and her family's lives forever.Donata Mocenigo is the daughter of a wealthy Venetian noble family, but resents her lack of freedom. Eventually she and her sisters conspire to let her dress up as a poor boy, and wander the city freely - her twin sister, Laura, taking her place around the household. On her first visit outside her palazzo, she injures her foot, wanders into the Jewish Ghetto, and meets a young man called Noé, who helps her and gives her a pair of shoes, in return for her working off the debt for him at a printers' workshop, copying out handbills.Donata does so for a month, getting closer to Noé. Meanwhile, at home, she and Laura persuade their father to allow them to join their brothers in tutorials - Donata begins learning to read and write, and about architecture, business and history. Laura, however, is less interested, and quits tutorials after a short time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grange_at_High_Force"title="The Grange at High Force">
The story begins about a year after the end of "Colonel Sheperton's Clock", the first in the series. The three boys who are the main characters are firm friends, despite their different characters and interests. David, the former lame dreamer, is now entirely recovered from the operation on his leg, and participates fully in the physically active pursuits of his friends. They all attend King Charles II Grammar School. David and Peter are choirboys, but Arthur is temporarily out of the choir as his voice has broken. Much of the story takes place on the moors above the fictional town of Darnley Mills, over the course of a year, from one spring to the next, covering the period of the Admiral's tenancy at Folly Grange. The focus is particularly on the joint activities of the three boys and the men at the Grange. As in the first book, there is also an historically-based mystery to be solved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Grave_(novel)"title="Beyond the Grave (novel)">
Amy and Dan head for Cairo, Egypt, with their au pair Nellie Gomez, to find a clue, hidden by Ekaterina founder, Katherine Cahill. They were tailed by Irina Spasky, but escape to a store with an Egyptian goddess statue, the Sakhet. There, a man, Theo Cotter, shows up and convinces them it's a fake. Discouraged, they go back to Nellie.They went to the Hotel Excelsior and find the Ekaterina stronghold. They find three Sakhets, and get trapped there by Bae Oh, who is the hotel's owner, and leader of the Ekats, after he explains the history of the Sakhets. As they escape, one of Grace's friends, Hilary Vale, finds them and takes them to her house. She gives them a letter and a small Sakhet, sent from Grace and they find out Theo is Hilary's grandson. They head for Queen Nefertari's tomb in Luxor and get trapped by Irina, who picks up Grace's guidebook in the process.After Amy and Dan had escaped, they are trapped again by Jonah Wizard, who leaves them on a deserted island on the Nile. After Jonah leaves them, and heads for Paris they are chased by a crocodile across the island, but are saved by a local fisherman. They find out Hillary and Theo tricked them to get their hands on the Sakhet that Grace left for Amy and Dan. They use the Sakhet to successfully fool Irina into thinking that she has to go to Rabat, Morocco. They go to Aswan for the island Philae and the next clue.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fire_Kimono"title="The Fire Kimono">
In the prologue, a Shinto priest passing by discovers remains of a human unearthed when strong winds toppled an oak tree near the Inari Shrine.Since his return from Ezogashima, there had been increases in attacks against Sano and against Matsudaira, the attackers wearing insignias from each other's houses. Just as Sano confronts Matsudaira about the latest attack on Sano's wife, Reiko, which Matsudaira flatly denies, both men are summoned by the Shogun.The shogun informs them that the skeleton of his long-lost cousin, Tokugawa Tadatoshi, who was thought to have perished during the Great Fire of Meireki, has been found and charges Sano with the investigation.Sano barely has time to plan his investigation when his mother, Etsuko, is arrested by Matsudaira's men as a suspect in the murder of Tadatoshi. The witness is Colonel Doi Naokatsu in the service of Matsudaira. Doi was also apparently once Tadatoshi's bodyguard, and Etsuko was a lady-in-waiting to Tadatoshi's household women. Sano is shocked that his mother is not a humble commoner as he had thought, but a scion of the Kumazawa clan, a respected hereditary Tokugawa vassal. Doi claimed to have heard Etsuko plotting with Egen against Tadatoshi, Egen being a monk and Tadatoshi's tutor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Takeover_(novel)"title="The Takeover (novel)">
Three large villas overlooking Lake Nemi are owned by the wealthy, glamorous American Maggie Radcliffe. One is occupied by her son and daughter-in-law. A second is leased by an Italian doctor and his two children. The third is occupied by the eccentric Hubert Mallindaine, who believes himself to be the descendant of the offspring of the Emperor Caligula's mythical liaison with Diana. Once a trusted friend of Maggie Radcliffe, Hubert is now an unwelcome house-sitter whom she wants evicted as quickly as possible.Hubert is not so easily removed, however, and his intransigence and liquidation of Maggie's assets in the house (including a Gauguin) is mirrored in the loss of much of Maggie's wealth, from burglary to outright embezzlement of her entire estate. Events conspire however to cause both to review what they consider important.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Nobonk_and_the_Terrible_Dreadful_Awful_Naughty_Nasty_Dragon"title="Sir Nobonk and the Terrible Dreadful Awful Naughty Nasty Dragon">
The story takes place in the mythical Kingdom of Rotten Custard, a kingdom that exists within Cornwall, where knights are constantly at war with the Dragons. Among the knights is a 60-year-old knight named Sir Nobonk, who becomes a dragon-catcher in order to save the dragons from extinction.Setting forth into the nearby forest, Sir Nobonk successfully captures the last living dragon, and convinces the king to open a zoo to help dragons to repopulate. The plan becomes successful, and also helps humans and dragons to co-exist peacefully within the kingdom.However, the prosperity of the kingdom invokes a giant named Blackmangle to attack the kingdom along with his servant Witch-Way, leaving it to Sir Nobonk to face the new foes and to save the kingdom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayer_for_the_Living"title="Prayer for the Living">
A witty, engrossing, unique novel about the life of masters and boys in a Scottish prep school. One way of describing this novel is to say that it is a story of life in a prep school in Scotland during World War I: and that, so far as the bare facts go, is an accurate description. But it is no way at all of conveying to the reader the devilish wit and cutting satire with which Mr. Marshall heightens and brightens the scene, or the pathos surrounding schoolboys who will overnight be turned into soldiers, or the moving idyl of love between the headmaster's daughter and a young student about to leave for the Front.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Account_of_Capers"title="An Account of Capers">
Set against the background of an Italy poised on the brink of war with Abyssinia in 1935, the story focuses on chartered accountant Arthur Waters. He is sent to Milan to audit the books of an Italian firm. His seemingly straightforward mission becomes somewhat hampered when he becomes involved with the beautiful Emma and the treacherous Bazzini. But his problems really begin when he is mistaken for a British spy and prevented from leaving the country.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandaemonium_(novel)"title="Pandaemonium (novel)">
The senior pupils of St Peter's High School are on retreat to a secluded outdoor activity centre, coming to terms with the murder of a fellow pupil through the means you would expect: counselling, contemplation, candid discussion and even prayer; not to mention booze, drugs, clandestine liaisons and as much partying as they can get away with. Not so far away, the commanders of a top-secret military experiment, long-since spiralled out of control, fear they may have literally unleashed the forces of Hell. Two very different worlds are on a collision course, and will clash in an earthly battle between science and the supernatural, philosophy and faith, civilisation and savagery. The bookies are offering evens.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fadeout_(novel)"title="Fadeout (novel)">
Beloved pop star Fox Olson is assumed to have died when his car is found destroyed beneath a narrow wooden bridge. However, without the sign of a body, no-nonsense insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter believes otherwise, and soon finds evidence that indicates he is right. For instance, what lies behind the seemingly innocent friendship between Fox's wife and his manager? And just why has an old boyhood friend of his suddenly shown up after twenty years?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_Wars"title="Currency Wars">
According to the book, Western countries in general, and the United States in particular, are controlled by a clique of international bankers, who use currency manipulation (hence the title) to gain wealth by first loaning money in USD to developing nations and then shorting those country's currency. The Japanese Lost Decade, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the Latin American financial crisis and others are attributed to this cause. It also claims that the Rothschild family has the wealth of 5 trillion dollars whereas Bill Gates only has 40 billion dollars.Song also is of the opinion that the famous U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve, is not a department of state functions, but several private banks operated by the private sector, and that these private banks are loyal to the ubiquitous Rothschild family.On June 4, 1963, President Kennedy signed an executive order, which, as an amendment to Executive Order 10289, delegated the authority to issue silver certificates (notes convertible to silver on demand) to the Secretary of the Treasury. Song says the direct consequence was that the Federal Reserve lost its monopoly to control money.The book looks back at history and argues that fiat currency itself is a conspiracy; it sees in the abolition of representative currency and the installment of fiat currency a struggle between the "banking clique" and the governments of the western nations, ending in the victory of the former. It advises the Chinese government to keep a vigilant eye on China's currency and instate a representative currency.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_Weekend_(novel)"title="Dirty Weekend (novel)">
Overturning the traditional notion of a pleasurable sex-filled dirty weekend, Zahavi's novel instead examines a weekend killing spree committed by Bella, a twenty-something former sex-worker. She is targeted by men who sexually abuse women, but kills them instead of letting them victimize her. Over the course of the weekend she murders seven men through a variety of gruesome methods. In the end she escapes to a new life in the large, faceless city of London.In the novel the old picaresque tradition is revived: there is one central character, Bella, the "picara", who is the only link to all the other characters. She meets and confronts one man after the other, kills him, and moves on to the next.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real_Cool_Killers"title="The Real Cool Killers">
Ulysses Galen, a white man slumming in Harlem, is attacked in a bar by a black man with a knife; fleeing outside, he attracts the attention of a man named Pickens, who is high on marijuana. Pickens proceeds to run after Galen while shooting. Detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson arrive to find Galen shot to death in the street, and they arrest Pickens. However, a Harlem street gang calling themselves the Real Cool Moslems (really teenagers in fake beards) cause a distraction and spirit Pickens away. The detectives realize that the gun they confiscated from Pickens is a movie prop that only shoots blanks; they must now recover Pickens and also find out who really shot Galen, and why.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother,_I'm_Dying"title="Brother, I'm Dying">
“Brother, I'm Dying” is an autobiography narrative that begins in the country of Haiti and eventually ends in the United States. The author, and main character Edwidge Danticat, was born in Haiti in 1969. At the age of four she was left to be raised by her uncle while her parents moved to the United States on a work visa to pursue economic opportunities. It wasn't until the age of twelve that she able to be reunited with her family. She falls in love, marries, and eventually has a child. Edwidge’s father becomes terminally ill and she decides to write her family’s life story so that it can be shared with relatives that are still living in Haiti.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsieur_Lecoq_(novel)"title="Monsieur Lecoq (novel)">
"L'enquête"Policemen on patrol in a dangerous area of Paris hear a cry coming from the Poivrière bar and go to investigate. There is evidence of a struggle. Two dead men are lying next to the fireplace, another is lying in the middle of the room. A wounded man, who is certainly the murderer, stands in a doorway. Gévrol, the inspector, tells him to give himself up, and he protests his innocence, claiming self-defence. He tries to escape, and when he is caught he cries, "Lost…It is the Prussians who are coming." The wounded third man blames Jean Lacheneur for leading him to this place, and vows revenge. He dies shortly afterwards. Gévrol, judging from the man's attire, concludes that he was a soldier, and the name and number of his regiment are written on the buttons of his great coat. His young colleague, Monsieur Lecoq, remarks that the man cannot be a soldier because his hair is too long. Gévrol disagrees. The inspector thinks that the case is straightforward – a pub brawl that ended in murder, whereas Lecoq thinks that there is more to the affair than meets the eye, and asks the inspector if he can stay behind to investigate further, and chooses an older officer, Père Absinthe, to stay with him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice_and_Zombies"title="Pride and Prejudice and Zombies">
In early 19th-century England, a zombie plague has spread across the country. Mrs. Bennet endeavours to obtain for her daughters wealthy and high-status husbands. Seeing an opportunity to achieve her goal, Mrs. Bennet sends her daughters to a local ball. At the ball, Mr. Bingley and the eldest Bennet daughter, Jane, make a connection in the midst of a chaotic zombie attack. During this time, Elizabeth meets Fitzwilliam Darcy, Mr. Bingley's closest friend. When zombies attack, the Bennet sisters use their martial arts skills to keep the human attendees safe.Soon after, Jane is invited to visit Netherfield. Mrs. Bennet insists she travel on horseback rather than in a carriage. While traveling, Jane is attacked by zombies and injured. Elizabeth receives a letter informing the family that Jane will stay at Netherfield to recuperate, and insists on joining her sister. During their stay, Elizabeth interacts with Mr. Bingley, his family, and Mr. Darcy often. Once Jane is fully recovered, Mr. Bingley is persuaded by Mrs. Bennet to throw a ball.Jane and Elizabeth return home. The odious heir to Longbourn, Mr. Bennet's cousin Mr. Collins, arrives with the intention of marrying one of the Bennet daughters and settles his attentions on Elizabeth. When the local militia arrives in town to exhume and destroy dead bodies, the Bennet sisters also meet the charming George Wickham, whom Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley seem to avoid. Wickham explains to Elizabeth that he grew up with Mr. Darcy, but they had a falling out after Wickham was denied the living he had been promised by Mr. Darcy's late father, justifying Elizabeth's negative opinion of Mr. Darcy. She looks forward to meeting Wickham again at the Netherfield ball, but later learns he was not invited. Mr. Darcy asks Elizabeth to dance. The ball is interrupted by a zombie attack, which is thwarted by Mr. Darcy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(Davis_novel)"title="Nemesis (Davis novel)">
The story, set in Latium in 77 AD, opens with the deaths of Falco's newborn son (posthumously named Justinianus) and Marcus Didius Geminus, alias Favonius, Falco's estranged father. Following the funeral, Falco is astounded to discover that his father has left him and the rest of the Didii family a sizeable fortune. There is a problem, before Geminus died, he impregnated Falco's friend Thalia and as a result, he is now forced to adopt Thalia's child when it is born.Frustrated at this turn of events, Falco audits his father's business contacts, debtors and creditors but soon discovers a debt owed which was never paid because the creditor, Julius Modestus, has disappeared. He travels to the towns south of Rome with his adopted daughter Albia (who is unhappy that Falco's brother-in-law Aulus has married someone else) to look for Modestus but can't find him. He pays the debt owed to Modestus' nephew, Sextus Silanus (and to investigate the disappearance of Silanus' uncle) while his friend Lucius Petronius Longus, the captain of the vigiles in Rome's Twelfth District, finally discovers Modestus, who has been murdered and eviscerated. A clan of Imperial freedmen in the Pontine Marshes, the Claudii (consisting of four siblings named Nobilis, Probus, Virtus and Pius and their wives and female siblings) are implicated in Modestus' grisly murder but as Falco and Petronius investigate further, they attract the interest of the Imperial Chief Spy, Anacrites who, as usual, takes the case away from them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daffy_Duck_for_President"title="Daffy Duck for President">
Echoing the popular "Rabbit Season/Duck Season" scenes from the Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck/Elmer Fudd shorts "Rabbit Fire", "Rabbit Seasoning" and "Duck! Rabbit, Duck!", the book tells how Daffy Duck, in an effort to outlaw Duck Season in favor of a perpetual Rabbit Season, attempts to become a politician so as to change the law to suit him. Through a civics lesson regarding the United States Constitution and with Bugs' help, Daffy learns that it is "We the People" who run the country, not any one man or duck, as he experiences the separation of powers concept of the United States Federal government.From the book's dust jacket:"Bugs guides Daffy through the 3 branches of American government - the foundation of freedom - in a style so breezy and comic that you'd never confuse it with a civics lesson. Or would you? In keeping with the explosive fun of the author's art, "Daffy Duck for President" is presented in its original sketch form. It's pure Chuck Jones - brash, witty, and reflective - in a bold flash of pencil, paper, and impulse."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dear_Nobody"title="Dear Nobody">
The novel is split between two points of view, a first-person narrative presenting the events as Chris recalls them in retrospect, interspersed with a series of letters from Helen to their unborn child (Nobody), telling her side of the story as she experiences it. The framing sequence is set in autumn as Chris is on the verge of leaving for Newcastle University. A parcel of letters is delivered for him, and he recognizes Helen's handwriting. He begins to read the letters, all addressed to "Dear Nobody", and they remind him of the past nine months. The subsequent chapter headings are all the names of months, beginning with January.Helen and Chris make love for the first, and only, time. Chris is prompted to ask his father about his marriage breakdown, and decides to get in touch with his mother. Shortly afterwards Helen begins to fear she is pregnant. Chris is disturbed by her distant behaviour. In late February she finally tells him her suspicions, and writes her first letter to "Dear Nobody": "You're only a shadow. You're only a whisper... Leave me alone. Go away. Go away. Please, please, go away."Later when a pregnancy test proves positive, she tries to abort the pregnancy by going riding, risking her life in a wild gallop, to no avail. In April, Helen's mother finds out, and arranges for her to go to an abortion clinic. However, Helen decides to keep the baby. Mrs Garton refuses to have Chris in the house, but he and Helen continue to see each other. They visit Chris's mother in Carlisle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Deathwalker"title="The Legend of Deathwalker">
The novel begins during the events in the book "Legend"; during the defense of the fortress Dros Delnoch from the Nadir, Druss begins to tell a young warrior a story from his past. He tells how he and his friend Sieben travelled to the land of the Gothir and how he became involved in the political affairs there. Owing to a prophecy that the King made, Druss must lose a tournament; when he refuses to do this men are hired to kill him. In the course of the attempt on his life his friend Klay is shot in the spine with a crossbow bolt, leaving him paralyzed and mortally wounded.To help him Druss travels to the land of the Nadir where a mystic has told him there are gems that can heal any wound. As he travels to the shrine of Nadir hero Oshikai, the Gothir send a force of 2,000 men to destroy it. Druss arrives at the shrine hoping to find the jewels but is unable to do so before the Gothir arrive, and so he helps four Nadir tribes defend the shrine under the guidance of a Gothir-trained Nadir soldier called Talisman. Talisman is on a quest to find "The Uniter", a man with blazing violet eyes called Ulric, who will unite the Nadir tribes after centuries of warfare.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Good_Year_(novel)"title="A Good Year (novel)">
Max Skinner is a moderately successful trader in a City finance company. After spending several months compiling a lucrative trade contract, only to have it taken over by his immediate superior, he resigns, losing his car, income, and expected bonus, leaving him in debt. The same day he receives a letter from a notary in France, telling him his uncle Henry has just died, bequeathing him his estate in Provence. This is Le Griffon, a house and vineyard where Max had spent much of his childhood. After discussing the matter with his friend Charlie Willis, an estate agent and wine enthusiast, and with a substantial loan from him, Max travels to France to investigate the inheritance with a view to becoming a wine producer.After meeting the notary, the attractive Nathalie Auzet, Max discovers a large but derelict house, with 20 acres of vineyard. The house needs repair, the soil is thin and dry, especially a stony patch on the edge of the estate, and the wine a poor quality; "like gendarmes socks", as he tells Charlie later.He makes several excuses to spend time with Nathalie, taking her to lunch to discuss improving the wine, and later to an antique fair to check the possibilities of selling off some of the furniture.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Haunted_Woman"title="The Haunted Woman">
Isabel Loment, engaged to the ordinary and unexceptional Marshall Stokes, leads a peripatetic existence as the ward of her aunt, Ann Moor. Their travels take them to the downlands of Sussex, to Runhill Court, an ancient home owned by Henry Judge. There Isabel discovers a strange staircase few can see, which leads upwards to three doors. She chooses one, which opens onto a room that appears to exist only part of the time; what might lie behind the other doors remains a mystery. In the room she reencounters Judge. There they find new insights and are able to express themselves in new ways, but are unable to recall what has transpired there when they leave. They develop a disturbing parallel relationship in the mysterious room, which ultimately culminates in the death of Judge and the rupture of Isabel from Marshall.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mum_Minder"title="The Mum Minder">
It starts off with Sadie's mum catching the flu during half term. Sadie has a little sister called Sara, as well as the children that her mum looks after, called Gemma, Vincent and little baby Clive.Sadie's mum is a childminder. Each day, they come round to Sadie's house so that her Mum can look after them while they are at work. Two days into half term, Sadie's mum gets the flu. To give Sadie's mother a chance to recuperate, the other children's mothers come up with a solution to take Sadie and the other kids to their workplaces for the rest of the week: Wednesday is the police station (Gemma's mum's job), Thursday is the office (Vincent's parents' job) and Friday is the chocolate shop (Clive's mum's job). Unfortunately, Sadie catches her mum's flu, so she can't return the homework diary she was sent to do from school...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kite_Fighters"title="The Kite Fighters">
Set in Seoul, Korea, in 1473, the novel depicts the relationship of two brothers in a tradition-bound family. Lee Young-sup is acutely aware of the difference in his status being a younger brother, but he finds a true talent the first time he flies a kite. First-born son Kee-sup is under pressure from his father, a rice merchant, to advance the family honor by becoming a court official; he spends much of his time studying for the position, though it is not his true life goal. Young-sup's growing expertise in flying kites and Kee-sup's craft in making them draw the attention of the boy-king of Korea, modeled after King Songjong, and they become friends with the king outside of the ancient protocol and secretly represent him for them kite-fighting competition during the New Year's festival. It is the tension between traditional duties and individual needs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibumi_(novel)"title="Shibumi (novel)">
Nicholai Hel is an assassin, born in Shanghai in 1925 and raised in a cosmopolitan fashion by his mother, a deposed member of the Russian aristocracy. A general in the Japanese Imperial Army was billeted in Nicholai's mother's mansion. Under this General Kishikawa, Hel is introduced to the concept of shibumi and the game Go, eventually being sent to Japan, where he trains under a famous master of the game and becomes 'culturally Japanese'. The master of this school discovers Nicholai's ability to mentally escape from reality and come back rested and refreshed (mystic transport). When Japan surrenders in 1945, Hel, after long months of hunger, finds (thanks to his knowledge of many languages) a job as an interpreter in the US Occupation Army and becomes a decoder agent in United States Intelligence.Hel learns that Kishikawa is being held as a prisoner of war by the Russians and faces an ignominious show trial for war crimes. After visiting the General in captivity, he realises that he has provided the Russians a way to hurt the man he respects so much, having confirmed to the Soviet operative in charge of the prosecution the emotional attachment the General has to Hel.Hel decides that the only way to show his gratitude and love for the man whom he has come to view as his father is to offer the general a way out of his captivity, one that avoids the public indignity of the public trial. Upon his next visit, Hel, speaking in veiled terms, offers to kill the general. After some resistance the general realises the sincerity of the offer and accepts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Birds_Fly_South"title="When the Birds Fly South">
Dan Prescott, an American adventurer, discovers the hidden valley of Sobul in a mountainous region of Afghanistan, inhabited by a strange race of winged people known as the "Ibandru". He falls in love with one of them, Yasma, and they marry in a scene of general celebration. When fall comes, however, the Ibandru abandon their valley to fly south with the birds for the winter. Unable to bear the loss of Yasma, Prescott pleads with her to remain with him rather than participate in the traditional migration, with tragic consequences for his marriage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daddy's_Boy"title="Daddy's Boy">
The book is a parody celebrity memoir, fictionalizing the author's childhood experiences as the son of comedian Bob Elliott. The chapters alternate between father and son, with Chris telling his story of growing up with a famous father in one chapter and Bob rebutting it in the next.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cabin_and_Parlor;_or,_Slaves_and_Masters"title="The Cabin and Parlor; or, Slaves and Masters">
The story begins with the sudden death of Mr. Courtenay, a wealthy but kindly Virginia landowner who, not having had time to pay off his debts, leaves his family facing destitution.In an effort to avoid bankruptcy, the family sells their slaves, among whom is the kindly Uncle Peter, who takes a liking to Courtenay's daughter, Isabel, and vows to help the family in any way he can in thanks for the kindness they showed him. The money from the sales is nominal, and Isabel and her brother Horace must find jobs to pay the remaining bills and support their ailing mother.Isabel finds work as a schoolteacher, and Horace heads to an unidentified city in the North (implied as Philadelphia), where he becomes a "Northern slave" (i.e. clerk) to the malevolent Mr. Sharpe, a ruthless capitalist who works Horace mercilessly.As the Courtenays continue to struggle, Isabel finds comfort in a young slaveowner named Walworth, the son of an old Virginia family, who travels back and forth between the North and South. When Horace dies of exhaustion in the North, Walworth comforts him in his final hours, and delivers his final requests to his sister.Whilst travelling together, Walworth and Isabel are caught in the midst of an anti-black riot, from which Walworth saves Isabel from harm. Isabel begins to have romantic feelings for Walworth, and they eventually marry. The marriage, by a twist of fate, allows Isabel to reclaim her wealth and property—including her slaves—and she is finally reinstated at Courtenay Hall.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_(novel)"title="The Ultimate (novel)">
The book begins with the Animorphs and the rest of the inhabitants of the Hork-Bajir valley drilling and preparing for a surprise Yeerk attack. It is clear they are not ready for attack; the parents, particularly Rachel's mother, are having trouble adjusting, and the Animorphs are in disarray. Jake remains cold and distant to everyone; he no longer wants to be the one to make decisions and no longer has a clear idea about what is wrong and right. Cassie tells everyone that Jake wants a camp meeting and tells him about it mere minutes before the meeting is set to begin; Jake reluctantly agrees to have the meeting. Some of the parents express doubt about the Animorphs' actions and fail to realize the necessity of the war. The Animorphs argue that they know best, and they have experience with the Yeerks. They argue that war is the only way, and that everyone should agree to follow Jake's orders. In the end the whole camp agrees that Jake is to be the leader. Jake reluctantly accepts the burden of leader once again, seeing it as his duty because he is the only one who is capable of leading the Earth resistance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Moon_and_Black_Mountain"title="Red Moon and Black Mountain">
The story involves three children of our own world transported to the world of Vandarei and there separated; the older boy, Oliver, is adopted by horse-lords, and in a peculiar time-dilation effect grows to adulthood among them, forgetting his origins, while his younger siblings, taken in by the princess In'serinna, remain children and pursue their own quest. All their adventures are part of a larger effort to defeat Satan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer's_Payoff"title="Killer's Payoff">
Sy Kramer, a blackmailer, is shot dead in a 1937-style drive-by execution. But it is 1958 and Cotton Hawes and Steve Carella have to find out who killed him. It could have been Lucy Mencken, a rich and respectable lady with a past that included some very unrespectable photographic portraits, or it could have been Edward Schlesser, a manufacturer of soda pop. Or perhaps it was one of the members of a hunting party that went very wrong.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_on_the_Corner_of_Bitter_and_Sweet"title="Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet">
Henry Lee, the son of Chinese parents in Seattle, Washington, is the only Asian child at his elementary school. His father makes him wear an "I Am Chinese" button so he will not be mistaken for a Japanese boy in the heightened racist climate of World War II Seattle. But Henry is nevertheless bullied by his white classmates and must work long hours in the cafeteria dishing out meals and cleaning up to fulfill the terms of his scholarship. One day a Japanese-American girl named Keiko Okabe joins him, also on scholarship. Henry and Keiko bond. When the residents of the city's Japantown are threatened with evacuation to internment camps, Henry safeguards Keiko's family's photo albums. He then travels with the lunch lady to serve meals at Camp Harmony, a temporary internment facility on the Western Washington Fairgrounds in Puyallup, Washington, where he sees her. With his friend, a local jazz musician named Sheldon, he also visits her in the Minidoka internment camp in Idaho. Visiting her there, he promises to wait for her until the war ends. They decide to write each other letters, and Henry returns to Seattle.Henry's father is intent on sending him to China to complete his education in a traditional manner. Henry arrives home one day to find a new suit and a steamer ticket to China in his name. He agrees to go on the condition that his father (as part of an association of elders) saves the Panama Hotel from being sold. The Panama Hotel is where Keiko's family stored the greater part of their belongings when they were shipped to the internment camps. Many other families also stored their possessions in the basement of the Panama Hotel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroes_of_Tobruk"title="Heroes of Tobruk">
The story follows Peter Fullerton and Tony Cantonelli's teen life as they illegally join the Australian army and are shipped off to the Siege of Tobruk. They soon become men as they experience heartfelt moments and feel much hurt throughout the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graceling"title="Graceling">
"Graceling" takes place in a world in which people with special powers are knowns as Gracelings. A Gracelings are identified when their eyes become two different colors. In the Middluns, Gracelings are put in the service of the king. Katsa is a young woman known for her Grace of killing. She has been in the service of her uncle, King Randa, since she was a child, tasked with executing or torturing those who oppose or displease him. She also runs the secret "Council", which aims for justice in the Seven Kingdoms.A Council mission to save an old Lienid grandfather from a prison unearths a mystery and an unexpected Graced Lienid man whose fighting skills match Katsa's. She renders him unconscious but lets him live, despite the fact that he recognized her. He later arrives at King Randa's court, introduces himself as Prince Greening or "Po", and claims to be seeking his grandfather. Katsa fights Po, but later reveals that they have rescued his grandfather in secret. The two become friends as well as sparring partners, though Katsa feels betrayed when she discovers that Po's Grace is not fighting, but secretly a form of mind reading. When commanded to dole out an unfair punishment, Katsa defies King Randa and sets out with Po to find the true kidnappers of the old Lienid. The two determine that Katsa's Grace isn't killing, but survival.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Quag_Keep"title="Return to Quag Keep">
In Norton's previous book "Quag Keep", "Dungeons &amp; Dragons" seven players had been mysteriously transported to the world of Greyhawk. In this sequel, the adventurers trapped in Greyhawk regain their memories and learn that they are gamers from Earth. They seek to return home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_Illustrating_the_History_of_Jacobinism"title="Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism">
## Outline of the work.In his "Preliminary Discourse", Barruel defines the three forms of conspiracy as the "conspiracy of impiety" against God and Christianity, the "conspiracy of rebellion" against kings and monarchs, and "the conspiracy of anarchy" against society in general. He sees the end of the 18th century as "one continuous chain of cunning, art, and seduction" intended to bring about the "overthrow of the altar, the ruin of the throne, and the dissolution of all civil society".The first volume examines the anti-Christian conspiracy that was begun by Voltaire in 1728 when Barruel claimed that Voltaire "consecrated his life to the annihilation of Christianity". Barruel returned to the principal texts of the Enlightenment and found reasons to draw close links between the philosophism of the time and the anti-Christian campaigns of the Revolution. Here he found that the philosophes had created an age of pretend philosophy which they used in their battle with Christianity. Their commitment to liberty and equality were really commitments of "pride and revolt". Barruel claimed that the proponents of the Enlightenment led people into illusion and error and refers to the philosophes as "Writers of this species, so far from enlightening the people, only contribute to lead them into the path of error". He alleged that Voltaire, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Denis Diderot, and Frederick II, the King of Prussia, planned the course of events that led to the French Revolution. They began with an attack on the Church where a "subterranean warfare of illusion, error, and darkness waged by the Sect" attempted to destroy Christianity. The influence of the philosophes could not be underrated according to Barruel. They created the intellectual framework that put the conspiracy in motion and controlled the ideology of the secret societies. Barruel appears to have read the work of the philosophes and his direct and extensive quotes show a deep knowledge of their beliefs. This is unusual among the enemies of the Enlightenment, who rarely distracted themselves by reading the works and authors they were attacking. Barruel believed the philosophes were important as the original villains that seduced the population and made Enlightenment, and subsequently revolutionary, ideals favorable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_the_Streets_Had_a_Name"title="Where the Streets Had a Name">
13-year-old Hayaat is a Muslim Palestinian girl living in Bethlehem. She lives in a small apartment with her family, who have been displaced from their home: her mother and brothers; her father, grieving the loss of his olive grove; her sister Jihan, who is planning a wedding; and her grandmother Zeynab, who spends her time telling stories from her past. Hayaat is determined and sometimes stubborn, but feels guilt and sadness over an accident from her childhood. She and her best friend Maysaa were caught in the blast from an exploding bomb. Fragments ricocheted off a wall towards Hayaat, scarring her face permanently and killing Maysaa. Frequently, she overhears her mother and grandmother talking, saying "Who will marry her with those scars?"When her grandmother becomes ill, Hayaat resolves to travel to Jerusalem to fulfill Zeynab's wish to touch the soil of her ancestral home, believing it will save Zeynab's life. She and her best friend Samy, a Christian Palestinian and fan of football and "The X Factor", begin the forbidden six-mile journey on a day they have no curfew. They travel through checkpoints and roadblocks, sneak over the West Bank wall, and meet other Palestinian travelers, a refugee boy named Naseem, and Israeli peace activists. Hayaat also learns more about the accident from her past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin's_Ring"title="Merlin's Ring">
The novel is a continuation of the story in "The Ship From Atlantis", telling of Prince Gwalchmai's star-crossed love for Princess Corenice of Atlantis in her various reincarnations, along with his centuries-delayed quest to secure aid and settlers to shore up the faltering empire established by his father and refugees from the fallen kingdom of Arthur in the New World. The story opens with Gwalchmai's reawakening after centuries in suspended animation. The Britain he finally reaches is a prostrated land transformed into England by its Saxon conquerors, with his father's exile long forgotten and his countrymen incapable of undertaking any sort of colonization project. Guided by his reincarnated lover, he seeks aid unsuccessfully, his travels taking him from Viking-age Europe to the far-eastern empires of the Chinese and Japanese, and ultimately back to Europe again as it approaches the Renaissance. He is abetted down through the centuries by the magical ring of his godfather Merlin, responsible for his longevity, and by Corenice. Highlights include the hero's visit to Faerie, his service as a companion to Joan of Arc, and his final revelation in Iceland of the secret of the New World to a Genoan merchant, Christopher Columbus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_London_Eye_Mystery"title="The London Eye Mystery">
The story begins with aunt Gloria visiting Ted's family. Ted is a boy with Asperger syndrome; his brain is described as running "on its own unique operating system". Aunt Gloria is accompanied by her son Salim, a half-Asian boy who is about a year older than Ted. People with Asperger syndrome often display intense interests; Ted has an interest in the weather. Salim is especially captivated by the old Barracks building, which is on the same street as Ted's house. The next day Salim, Ted, and his older sister Kat decide to take a ride on the London Eye, bemoaning the hour-long queues. A stranger approaches them with a ticket for the Eye, saying he's afraid of small spaces and cannot ride the Eye. They decide to give the ticket to Salim, as he has never been on the Eye before. Salim waves towards his cousins as he boards. Half an hour later, when Salim's capsule lands, Kat and Ted find Salim missing.When Aunt Gloria and Ted's mother find out about this, they become extremely angry with Kat for allowing Salim to take a ticket from a stranger. That evening, Ted and Kat check Salim's camera and decide to have the film developed, in case it holds clues. The family then receives a phone call from the police, saying that a boy matching Salim's description has been found dead. Ted's father decides to go and verify the body, but it is not Salim. The next day, Kat, Ted, and their father visit the chemist to have the photographs developed. They then ride the Eye to see if there was any way that Salim could have hidden in the capsule or avoided getting out, but find no clues.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slake's_Limbo"title="Slake's Limbo">
Aremis Slake lives in a room underground in the subway station Grand Central – 42nd Street. It soon becomes the home he has never known. He collects used newspapers off passing trains and makes a living selling them. He has two regular customers: the cleaning lady, and a man with a turban. A major theme throughout the book is Slake's low self-esteem and lack of experiences with empathy, which are dealt with throughout the course of the book.With the money that he gets from doing this, he buys food from the local diner, and soon becomes a regular customer. The people at the luncheonette see him there every day and have sympathy for this homeless boy. They offer him a sweeping job and pay him with food sufficient to meet his needs. Also, whatever he finds on the floor he gets to keep, so Slake eventually has quite a collection of various items he's organized and used to decorate his cave.There are also occasionally sections of the book entitled "On Another Track", about the parallel life of a man named Willis Joe Whinny.Willis Joe is a middle-class motor man who also has an internal dilemma. He conducts trains with the depressing mindset that people are like sheep, lacking the empathy essential for psychological health.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_House_on_the_Prairie_(novel)"title="Little House on the Prairie (novel)">
The novel is about the months the Ingalls spent on the Kansas prairie around the town of Independence. Laura describes how her father built their one-room log house in Indian Territory, having heard that the government planned to open the territory to white settlers soon.In contrast to "Little House in the Big Woods", the Ingalls face difficulty and danger in this book. They all fall ill from malaria, which was ascribed to breathing the night air or eating watermelon. American Indians are a common sight for them, as their house was built in Osage territory, and Ma's open distrust of Indians contrasts with Laura's more childlike observations about those who live and ride nearby. They begin to congregate at the nearby river bottoms and their war cries unnerve the settlers, who worry they may be attacked, but an Osage chief who was friendly with Pa is able to avert the hostilities.By the end of the novel, all the Ingalls' work is undone when word comes that U.S. soldiers are being sent to remove white settlers from Indian Territory. Pa decides to move his family away before they can be forced to leave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faserland"title="Faserland">
The picaresque novel tells the story of a journey. The unnamed narrator is in his late twenties and is the son of a wealthy family, and travels south from the northernmost tip of Germany down to the Bodensee and onwards to Zürich. He is more an involuntary observer than participant in the events that unfold. He begins in Sylt and heads through Hamburg, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Munich, Meersburg, and finally Zürich. In each of these places he has experiences with decadent excesses in the form of alcohol, drugs, and sexual encounters. These excesses are not enjoyed by the participants, but are more an expression of their hopelessness. The protagonist sees the downfall of his generationa close friend commits suicideand experiences his own downfall. He also reflects on unhappy memories of youth.His odyssey, which can be interpreted as either a search for meaning or a long goodbye, ends on Lake Zürich: the references to Greek mythology (Charon, Obolus, and Hades) suggest the narrator's suicide in the middle of the lake. Another interpretation sees the crossing to the other shore as a sign of the homosexuality of the narrator. Neither has been confirmed by Kracht. The ending is left open.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Productions_of_Time"title="The Productions of Time">
The plot follows actor Murray Douglas as he joins a theatre production with a group of other actors. Each of the cast members has had career problems because of drugs, alcohol, or other kinks. The play is an avant-garde one, a form of improv where the actors make up the script during rehearsal, and rehearsals take place in an isolated country house. It emerges that the alleged playwright is feeding each participant's vices, using a futuristic form of sleep learning to overcome their attempts to stay "clean". This is being done to benefit the prurient interests of decadent time travellers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coachman_Rat"title="The Coachman Rat">
The narrative follows the life of Robert, the rat that was transformed into the coachman on that fateful night when Amadea (Cinderella) fell in love with Prince Charming. The majority of the novel is an account of the aftermath of that night, as Robert was transformed back into a rat at midnight of that night—yet retained the ability to speak; he then began a quest to find Mara, the "woman of light" (or Fairy Godmother) in order to become permanently human.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assegai_(novel)"title="Assegai (novel)">
Leon Courtney, the eldest son of Ryder Courtney leaves home after a fallout with his father, and joins the army with help from his uncle Penrod Ballantyne. Leon rises to become a second lieutenant in the King's African Rifles regiment based in Nairobi. During the period of the Nandi Resistance, Leon saves the life of Manyoro, one of his Maasai soldiers from a Nandi ambush, for which he is adopted as a son by Manyoro's mother Lusima, a shaman among the Maasai with powers of divination. After recovering from the battle at Manyoro and Lusima's village and returning to his base, Leon narrowly avoids being court-martialled by a vindictive superior officer, who accuses him of deserting his unit during the ambush, but he is cleared by Manyoro's testimony.Despite his acquittal Leon's duties do nothing to improve his falling morale and he considers quitting the army to take up elephant hunting, based on a prediction made by Lusima. Penrod arranges for him to be placed as apprentice to professional hunter Percy Phillips in order to allow Leon to spy on movements of man and machine in German East Africa, as he suspects the Kaiser of preparing for war. Leon uses his contacts among the Maasai - gained from saving Manyoro's life - to establish a secret information and communications network between Nairobi and German East Africa, while Manyoro and Loikot, a young Maasai who had assisted Leon during his recovery, serve as his trackers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bribery,_Corruption_Also"title="Bribery, Corruption Also">
The twenty-third Inspector Ghote novel finds the detective out of his element. His wife, Protima, has inherited a crumbling mansion in her native Calcutta along with enough money for the couple to renovate the property and retire in luxury, but Ghote is unhappy. Calcutta is a long way from his native Mumbai and he finds it difficult to stop being a detective.Protima is determined that they should live in the house and enjoy life in the beautiful city that she has not seen since she was a young woman, but the solicitor handling the will advises them to sell and claims he is unable to release any money from the estate to help with their expenses.Ghote begins to suspect corruption when he learns of a planned housing development close to the mansion but soon his investigation places the couple in grave danger. Inspector Ghote's wife Protima has inherited a fortune and a mansion in Calcutta. Ghote is not pleased because it means he must leave his native Mumbai and give up being a policeman. No sooner have they landed in Calcutta than they discover the house is crumbling and inhabited by hostile squatters. Also a housing development is planned in the wetlands behind the house, which has the only access to the proposed construction project.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mugger_(novel)"title="The Mugger (novel)">
A mugger is attacking women in Isola. Carella is on his honeymoon, and the case is being handled by Detective Hal Willis. A second plot involves Bert Kling, a patrolman hunting a killer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitely_Dead"title="Definitely Dead">
After surviving a Were attack while attending a play in Shreveport with her new boyfriend John Quinn, Sookie Stackhouse goes to New Orleans to sort out the affairs of her cousin Hadley, a vampire who was murdered. When she arrives, she finds Hadley's apartment under a stasis spell that was placed there by the talented and helpful young witch Amelia Broadway, Hadley's landlady. When the spell is removed, Sookie and Amelia are attacked by a newly turned vampire (later revealed to be a Were named Jake Purifoy) whose rising was delayed due to Amelia's stasis spell. Sookie and Amelia are taken to the emergency room after this attack and it is here that Bill, due to Eric interfering, tells Sookie the truth behind his move to Bon Temps.The following night, Sookie calls on the Queen of Louisiana, Sophie-Anne Leclerq, and her new husband, the vampire king of Arkansas, Peter Threadgill. Their conversation eventually leads to the revelation that Amelia and some of her peers plan to magically reconstruct the events of the night of Jake Purifoy's turning. Sophie-Anne decides that this is something she would like to see, so she, her entourage, and Sookie go back to Hadley's together where they find the witches ready to perform the ectoplasmic reconstruction spell. Once the spell runs its course, Sophie-Anne, Andre, and Sookie go into Hadley's apartment for a private conversation where, among other things (such as Sookie being told that she has fairy blood and therefore attracts supernaturals), Sophie-Anne asks Sookie to look carefully through Hadley's things and locate a missing diamond bracelet that was given to the queen by Threadgill; the discovery that this bracelet is missing would mean political disaster for Sophie-Anne.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therapy_(Kellerman_novel)"title="Therapy (Kellerman novel)">
In Los Angeles, Gavin Quick and his girlfriend are shot dead inside their car, whilst the unidentified woman is also impaled on a metal spike. As he investigates, psychologist Alex Delaware comes up against Dr. Mary Lou Koppel, a celebrity therapist who once treated Gavin and now guards his personal files with fearsome intensity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_(McMann_novel)"title="Wake (McMann novel)">
The book begins with multiple flashbacks, all leading to Janie's extraordinary powers and where she stands in the present day. Janie Hannagan is an independent, 17-year-old senior at Fieldridge High School, living at home with her alcoholic mother and trying to find ways to fund her future college education. What makes Janie so different from her peers is that she has the involuntary ability to witness others' dreams. Janie discovered this ability at 8 years old, when she was able to witness a businessman's dream of him giving a presentation in his underwear. From that day on, she is somewhat cursed by the long struggle and suffering of being part of others' dreams and nightmares. By taking part in others' dreams, she can see their fears and/or desires. This leads to Janie finding out the secrets of the people around her, but she cannot reveal them because they might think she is crazy. Whenever someone falls asleep within a certain distance of Janie, she automatically becomes paralyzed and blinded, and is sucked into the other person's dream. This distance usually increases significantly if the dream the person is having is a nightmare. People within the dream she enters usually ask her for help, but she is unable to, for she doesn't know how to. All these incidents become a problem for Janie, especially towards her junior and senior years, because most of the time she cannot control the situation. Her peers, especially Cabel, become suspicious of her strange behavior. While most of her classmates have dreams typical of adolescent anxieties, Cabel,a mysterious loner, has frighteningly morbid dreams that Janie cannot come to terms with.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Observers"title="The Observers">
The novel opens shortly after the end of "CV", early in the 21st century. The "plague" that struck the Sea Venture (CV) is well known, although few people understand yet its true nature: an alien parasite or symbiont that lives temporarily in people's minds, transferring to another person after a few days. The parasite makes small but significant changes in the host's psyche before departing: as one of the characters describes the change,Or as another character remarks: he no longer believes in "BS". Victims of the parasite often quit their jobs, abandon a spouse, or discard religious or political beliefs.At the end of "CV", the single parasite had managed to reproduce via the unborn child of one of the passengers, before it was trapped at the bottom of the ocean. When that child is born nine months later, on land, the parasite is once again able to move from person to person, but it is immature, lacking access to the knowledge of its "mother". It begins to learn about the human world by sampling the minds of people from all walks of life (hence "The Observers"), changing them in the process. It begins to reproduce by infecting pregnant women.Much of the novel takes place back on the Sea Venture which has now been converted into an internment camp for previously infected people. The scientists in charge of learning about the "disease" are well-intentioned, but Knight shows their darker side as well, as they gradually move from benign observation to more coercive techniques, including torture.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Together_Dead"title="All Together Dead">
The summit, which has attracted undead power players from all over the central United States, is sure to be tense, due partly to the ramping up of protests by the conservative, anti-vampire Fellowship of the Sun. Accused of murdering her husband, the King of Arkansas, Sophie-Anne is set to stand trial at the convention. The Queen is already in a precarious position, her power base weakened by the damage to New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina, and there are some vampires who would like to finish what nature started. Sophie-Anne's main accuser is Jennifer Cater, a vampire who had been training to be the king's lieutenant at the time of his death. Jennifer is determined to see Sophie-Anne staked in the sun for murdering the king, although Sookie knows the Queen is innocent of the crime.Sophie-Anne plans to put Sookie's gift to good use, having her "listen in" on the thoughts of the humans working for the other vampires at the convention as well as for the hotel, as alliances are formed and allegiances tested in what can only be described as a political power struggle of potentially deadly implications. The story opens with Sookie entering Fangtasia to talk to Eric and those who pay him fealty, as they discuss the accusations against Sophie-Anne. Sookie agrees to work for Sophie-Anne, despite the warnings of her fairy godmother, Claudine, that being at the convention will forever tie Sookie to vampire politics in the mind of all of the attendees, in a very public way. Meanwhile, her relationship with Quinn heats up.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Dead_to_Worse"title="From Dead to Worse">
After the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina and the man-made horror of the explosion at the vampire Summit, Sookie Stackhouse is safe but dazed, yearning for things to get back to normal. But her boyfriend, the weretiger Quinn, is missing.She then learns that she is descended from fairies, and is 1/8 fairy herself. Her beloved grandmother had an affair with a half-fairy, and had two children with him. While her grandfather is dead, her fairy great-grandfather, Niall Brigant, is alive and seeks to meet her.Sookie is soon drawn into investigating several mysterious deaths among the local Were community. Her telepathy and status as a 'friend of the pack' forces her to mediate between two warring factions, whereupon she discovers that a pack displaced by Hurricane Katrina has been killing the Shreveport Weres in order to take their place. There is a brief "war" between the two packs, with the Shreveport pack emerging victorious, Alcide now in charge.At the same time, Felipe de Castro, King of Nevada, begins a violent campaign to wrest control of the kingdoms of Louisiana and Arkansas from the injured Queen Sophie-Anne Leclerq. The King's men kill the Queen and all of the sheriffs of Louisiana except for Eric, who surrenders in exchange for his life and the lives of all under his protection. Meanwhile, Sookie is upset to learn that she now has a very close blood bond with Eric, and can detect his feelings and know his location, and that she craves his company.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_and_Gone_(novel)"title="Dead and Gone (novel)">
In this novel, the weres and shifters make their presence known, following the example of the vampires. At the same time, the King of Nevada, who now leads Louisiana as well, begins consolidating his power, which has a number of repercussions. The revelation of the existence of weres and shifters causes some problems. Sookie's boss, Sam Merlotte, reveals to the community that he is a shifter, and Tray Dawson reveals he is a Were, with both men changing into their animal forms at Merlotte's Bar on the evening of the announcement. Most residents of Bon Temps take the new revelation fairly well; Merlotte's initially sees some business slowdown, but then it returns to normal. However, Merlotte's waitress Arlene, who has been dating a member of the anti-vampire Fellowship of the Sun (FoS), takes the revelation badly and quits her job in a fury. Sam's mother, who is also a shifter, is shot by Sam's step-father, and Sam's non-shifter siblings, who did not know their parents and brother were shifters, have some troubles related to the announcement. Sam leaves Bon Temps to help his mother and leaves Sookie in temporary charge of the bar.Meanwhile, the King of Nevada, Felipe de Castro, consolidates his power in Louisiana. Eric, as the only Louisiana Sheriff to survive the defeat of Queen Sophie-Anne's reign, is in a tenuous position and struggles with Victor Madden, the king's representative. Eric fears the king will try to acquire Sookie to use in his Nevada business dealings, so Eric tricks Sookie, who is unfamiliar with vampire marriage protocols, into marrying him. She is not happy about it, but there is little she can do. However, the marriage is only recognized by vampires.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gathering_Storm_(novel)"title="The Gathering Storm (novel)">
The series' storyline has been leading up to the "Last Battle" (Tarmon Gai'don)—a fight between the forces of Light and Shadow. According to prophecy in the series the primary protagonist Rand al'Thor, as the Dragon Reborn, will "fight the [battle]", and must be present for the forces of Light to have a chance at winning and stopping the being known as the Dark One, the primary antagonist, from escaping his prison."The Gathering Storm" follows many plot threads but focuses on two characters, Rand al'Thor and Egwene al'Vere. While it follows al'Thor's attempts to unite and rally the world's forces for the Last Battle, it also addresses his struggle with his sanity, caused by the corruption of his mind from the use of the male half of the One Power. The unification of the White Tower, the headquarters of the female users of the One Power known as Aes Sedai, is addressed from al'Vere's perspective, as well as the exposure of the Black Ajah, a secretive and opposing faction within the story. While the stories of other main characters such as Perrin Aybara and Mat Cauthon are briefly touched upon, they have little bearing on the main plot line. Some main characters such as Elayne Trakand and Lan Mandragoran do not appear at all, but are referred to.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Latitudes"title="Pirate Latitudes">
In 1665, Captain Charles Hunter is hired as a privateer by the Governor of Jamaica, Sir James Almont, to lead an expedition to the island fortress of Matanceros. It is there that a galleon, supposedly containing treasures untold, is awaiting protection for safe travel across the Atlantic, back to Spain. Almont is excited about the possibility of reward in this venture, though his secretary, Mr. Robert Hacklett, is less than enthusiastic and calls Hunter a pirate.Hunter gathers his crew in Port Royal, Jamaica and sets sail to capture the ship in its own harbor. Mere days into the journey, their ship, the "Cassandra", is captured by a Spanish warship commanded by none other than Cazalla, the infamous Spaniard who commands Matanceros. After a daring escape from their cell, Hunter and his crew reboard their ship and continue on their way before Cazalla can retaliate.Upon their arrival at Matanceros, Hunter, Black Eye, Lazue, Sanson, and the Moor all make their way behind the fortress. Encountering high cliffs, rough jungle foliage, and deadly animals, the crew comes to see that Cazalla has docked under the suspicion that Hunter is still on his way to the island. The privateers manage to make their way around the village and the soldiers occupying it long enough to set their traps. After a short duel between Hunter and Cazalla, the traps are sprung, and a cut to the throat kills Cazalla. The "Cassandra" appears, and the crew takes their captain, his shipmates, and the galleon out to sea.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saxon_Shore"title="The Saxon Shore">
The Preface explains this style as Merlyn writing his memoir of how he met Arthur and came to raise him.Saxon Shore begins with Merlyn and the infant Arthur stranded in a small boat on the southernmost extreme of the Irish Sea. An Irish pirate ship captained by Connor, a prince of Eire, captures the boat. The Celts then throw the child overboard. Disregarding his life, Merlyn kills one of the pirates and jumps in after Arthur. The pirates recapture Merlyn and the floating child and return them to the ship. The captain greets Merlyn and the child, revealing the origin of the crew, Eire, and tries to understand the reasons why Merlyn would sacrifice his life for the child. In the conversation, the captain comes to realize that his brother, Donuil is Merlyn's captive at Camulod, so he releases Merlyn in the agreement that the child will be returned if his brother returns to Eire.Merlyn then proceeds home, where he quickly becomes embroiled in factions politics that have arisen in the Camulodian council. By using his military authority and appealing to the older council, Merlyn disbands the parties. Ironhair, one of the faction leaders, becomes enraged by this and makes an assassination attempt on Merlyn's life. Meanwhile, Donuil returns to Camulod with Merlyn's nearly identical half-brother Ambrose. Once Donuil returns, Merlyn creates a party which is to escort Donuil back to Eire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat_Who_Came_for_Christmas"title="The Cat Who Came for Christmas">
Amory, a writer and animal rights activist, finds a stray cat while walking down an alley one snowy Christmas Eve. Amory takes the cat to his apartment and acclimates him to living indoors. Polar Bear meets a number of Amory's celebrity friends and acquaintances, including Cary Grant, Walter Cronkite, and George C. Scott. Amory also details his animal rights work at the time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devotion_of_Suspect_X"title="The Devotion of Suspect X">
The story begins with Tetsuya Ishigami and Yasuko Hanaoka following their daily routines. Yasuko Hanaoka is a divorced single mother who works at a bento shop. Ishigami is a highly talented mathematics teacher, who lives next door to Yasuko and her daughter Misato. When Togashi (Yasuko's abusive ex-husband) shows up one day to extort money from Yasuko, threatening both her and Misato, the situation quickly escalates into violence, and Togashi is killed by mother and daughter. Overhearing the commotion, Ishigami, who is secretly enamored of Yasuko but has never told her so, offers his help, disposing of the body and plotting the cover-up of the murder step-by-step.When the body turns up and is identified, Kusanagi (the detective investigating the murder case) draws the case and Yasuko comes under suspicion. Kusanagi is unable to find any obvious holes in Yasuko's manufactured alibi, but still he is sure that there's something wrong with her story, a suspicion that he cannot shake. Kusanagi brings in Dr. Manabu Yukawa, a physicist and his college friend who frequently consults with the police. Yukawa also went to college with Ishigami, where he learned of Ishigami's problem-solving techniques and abilities; Yukawa highly rates Ishigami's intelligence. After meeting him again after so many years, Yukawa becomes convinced that Ishigami had something to do with the murder. What ensues is a high-level battle of wits between Yukawa and Ishigami, as Ishigami tries to protect Yasuko by outmaneuvering and outthinking Yukawa; the teacher is Yukawa's most clever and determined opponent yet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hussein,_An_Entertainment"title="Hussein, An Entertainment">
Hussein's family raises him in the mahout trade. At about 16 years old, he inherits the elephant named Jehangir Bahadur in the town of Haiderabad. At this time in his life Hussein falls in love with a well-off young woman named Sashiya, which embroils him with a rival, Kadir Baksh. Hussein pays a fakir to place a curse upon Kadir Baksh, which causes the young man to die and his family swears vengeance upon Hussein. After promising the elephant Jehangir he will return, Hussein sets out to live by his wits. Hussein becomes an assistant to Feroze Khan, a man who practices the arts of snake charming and storytelling. Spying leads to Feroze Khan's murder in Peshawar, and Hussein resolves to put into practice the lessons he has learned about storytelling and snake charming. Succeeding in both pursuits, Hussein enhances his snake charming by buying additional snakes and a mongoose. He learns to perform a scam for seeming to rid a house of dangerous snakes by bribing the house servants and employing his mongoose. When he follows another regiment in the rainy season, the leaders must send for elephants to pull their cannons from the mud. One of the elephants which arrives is his beloved Jehangir. Hussein and Jehangir run away together and have several adventures before reaching the village of Laghat, where Hussein buys fields with a tumbledown house. His dream is to prosper as a farmer, then send for Sashiya. When the crops fail because of drought, he is forced to borrow money from the local bunnia. When Hussein discovers the predatory terms of the loan, he attacks the bunnia and flees with Jehangir.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_God"title="River God">
River God follows the fate of the Egyptian Kingdom through the eyes of Taita, a multi-talented and highly skilled eunuch slave. Taita is owned by Lord Intef and primarily looks after his daughter, Lostris, but also plays a large role in the day-to-day running of Lord Intef's estate.The Pharaoh of Egypt is without a male heir, and Taita inadvertently causes Pharaoh to take an interest in Lostris. Lostris meanwhile is in love with the soldier Tanus, who unbeknownst to her is hated by her father. Eventually Pharaoh marries Lostris and her father, Lord Intef, reluctantly gives Taita to her as a wedding gift.Meanwhile, Tanus has angered Pharaoh by speaking bluntly about the troubles Egypt is in — most prominently the growing bandit threat which terrorizes all who travel outside of the major cities. Pharaoh condemns him to death for his actions, but is convinced to allow Tanus to redeem himself by attempting to eliminate all the bandits from Egypt within two years. Since his sentence is revealed on the last day of the festival of Osiris, he is to return on that day of the next festival with his task complete or face death by strangulation.Tanus, with the help of Taita, hunts down and captures the leaders of the Shrike bandits. On presenting them to Pharaoh, it is revealed that their leader is Lord Intef. Tanus has his death sentence lifted, but Intef manages to escape before he can be punished for his crimes. After the sentence is announced a storm sweeps through allowing Lostris and Tanus time to be secretly alone together. During this time Lostris conceives Tanus' first born, and before the secret can be discovered Taita arranges for her to resume her wifely duties to Pharaoh. When the child is born he is named Memnon and claimed by the Pharaoh as his own, and his true paternity is known only to Lostris, Taita, and Tanus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Excellent_Mystery"title="An Excellent Mystery">
News comes slowly to the Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul from the battles in the south between the imprisoned King Stephen and the Empress Maud besieged in Winchester. Empress Maud wants to regain the support of Henry, Bishop of Winchester, but the canny bishop will not side with her again after the failure of his legatine council. Rather he is building up his own stores at Wolvesey Castle in Winchester in case he is besieged, and rebuilding his alliance with Queen Matilda, now leading King Stephen's armies. In Winchester, battle begins, with the Bishop's forces shooting fire arrows. The Abbey of Hyde-Mead in Winchester is laid waste, dispersing the surviving monks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Suicide_Collectors"title="The Suicide Collectors">
"The Suicide Collectors" is set in a near future version of North America. A mysterious plague called the Despair has ravaged the earth, causing roughly 90% of its population to commit suicide. The Collectors appear after each suicide to collect the bodies. The story centers on Norman who leaves Florida on a journey to Seattle where a doctor may have a cure for the Despair.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigal_Summer"title="Prodigal Summer">
"Prodigal Summer" tells the story of a small town in Appalachia during a single, humid summer, when three interweaving stories of love, loss and family unfold against the backdrop of the lush wildness of Virginia mountains. The narrative follows Deanna, a solitary woman working as a park ranger, Lusa, a recently widowed entomologist at odds with her late farmer husband's tight-knit family, and Garnett, an old man who dreams of restoring the lineage of the extinct American Chestnut tree.Kingsolver's extensive education in biology is on display in this book, laden with ecological concepts and biological facts. Her writing also exhibits her knowledge of rural Virginia, where she grew up. In the acknowledgments Kingsolver thanks her Virginia friends and neighbors, as well as Fred Herbard of the American Chestnut Foundation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewels_(novel)"title="Jewels (novel)">
Seventy-five-year-old Sarah, Duchess of Whitfield, looks back on her long and eventful life. The daughter of a wealthy American family in New York in the 1930s, Sarah Thompson marries Freddie. With little interest in her, he drinks all night and associates with prostitutes. Sarah becomes pregnant but miscarries, and she and Freddie divorce. Her parents drag a listless Sarah to Europe, where well-meaning friends and family force their nephews, sons and grandsons on her. She meets William Whitfield, the Duke of Whitfield, 13th in line for succession to the British throne. Captivated by him, she finally becomes his companion in London. William soon casts aside her fears of a public scandal and finally convinces Sarah to marry him.On their honeymoon in France, Sarah and William happen upon Chateau de la Meuze, which William later buys for her as a Christmas present. Sarah works hard to restore the estate, but soon World War II erupts. After the birth of their first child Phillip, William reluctantly leaves to join the Royal Air Force when England declares war on Germany. The Germans take possession of France, and German troops, led by the courtly commandant Joachim von Mannheim, seize the chateau to establish a care center for the wounded and dying soldiers Sarah and Phillip are removed to the caretaker's cottage. Joachim falls in love with Sarah, who remains faithful to William. Pregnant, she gives birth to her and William's daughter Elizabeth, who soon dies of a fever, due to a lack of medical supplies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unwind_(novel)"title="Unwind (novel)">
In a near-future dystopian United States, the conflict between the pro-choice and pro-life movements escalated into a second civil war. In response, the government fought against both sides to stop the war from escalating and closed down schools and other services for children in order to do so. Children, teenagers, and young adults began protesting and rioting against the actions and nearly toppled the government in an event known as the Teen Uprising. At the same time, technology in organ transplants advanced into a process known as "unwinding"; organs and body parts can be harvested from any acceptable body and used by other bodies without rejection.As a way to end the war, the government passed a set of amendments known as The Bill of Life. Abortion is banned, "storking" (the act of abandoning newborn babies to be left in someone else's care) becomes an accepted practice, and the Unwind Accord allows families to have their children between ages of 13 and 18 undergo unwinding as an option. Unwinding is justified as legal because the patient is kept alive during the entire process and roughly 99% of the body is harvested. Many parents use it to get rid of unwanted children who have reached their teenage years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Child"title="The Green Child">
The first and last parts of the story are told as a third-person narrative, but the middle part is written in the first person. The story begins in 1861 with the faked death of President Olivero, dictator of the South American Republic of Roncador, who has staged his own assassination. He returns to his native England, to the village where he was born and raised. On the evening of his arrival, Olivero notices that the stream running through the village appears to be flowing backwards, and he decides to follow the water upstream to discover the cause.The stream's course leads Olivero to a mill, where through a lighted window he sees a woman tied to a chair, forced by the miller to drink the blood of a freshly slaughtered lamb. Instinctively, Olivero hurls himself through the open window, his "leap into the world of fantasy". The miller initially offers no resistance and allows Olivero to release the woman, whom he recognises by the colour of her skin to be Sally, one of the two green children who had mysteriously arrived in the village on the day he left, thirty years earlier; Olivero also recognises the miller as Kneeshaw, an ex-pupil at the village school where he had once taught. During a struggle between the two men Kneeshaw is accidentally drowned in the mill pond. The next morning Olivero and Sally continue on Olivero's quest to find the stream's destination, a pool in the moors high above the village. Paddling in its water, Sally begins to sink into the silvery sand covering its bed. Olivero rushes to her, and hand in hand they sink beneath the water of the pool.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mascot_Madness!"title="Mascot Madness!">
Mr Brainfright dresses in a banana mascot suit to support Northwest Southeast Central School in the Northwest Interschool Sports Event, also getting extremely obsessed with bananas and boring the class - unusual for him!Mr Brainfright also teaches the class to visualise all the events in the Northwest Interschool Sports Event, while Mr Grunt, their sports teacher, tortures them cruelly and gives 50 laps around the oval as punishment to those who fail.Finally the event DOES come, and it is neck and neck between the two schools until Henry McThrottle has to replace Mr Brainfright in his banana suit, because Mr Brainfright has mascot madness. Henry is scared of it because he used to mascot for the Banana Emporium, and caused a car crash into the Emporium. Fiona tells him it wasn't his fault - he wasn't in the official police report.However, Northwest West Academy's mascot, a real pit bull terrier, attacks Henry and he starts running in the decathlon in desperation, also being caught up by Chomp occasionally. They beat the speed record for all the events in the decathlon!One judge ruled that Chomp added weight to Henry during the pole vaulting sport, therefore, Northwest Southeast win by one point! This ruined West's winning streak.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grifters_(novel)"title="The Grifters (novel)">
Roy Dillon is a 25-year-old con artist living in Los Angeles. At the start of the novel, he gets hit in the stomach with a baseball bat when a simple con goes wrong. He seems to be well but when Lilly — his mother — visits him for the first time in almost eight years, he starts to deteriorate. She calls for a doctor, who informs her that Roy is internally hemorrhaging. Roy is taken to the hospital, where he begins to recover after several days.While at the hospital, his mother meets Moira Langtry, the woman that Roy is currently involved with. They take an instant dislike to each other. Lilly hires a nurse, Carol Roberg, in the hope that Roy will give up Moira for Carol. Roy then leaves the hospital and stays at Lilly's apartment where Carol looks after him. Roy discovers that Carol was the victim of a sexual experiment at Dachau. With this knowledge, but mostly because Roy does not want to associate with a person paid by Lilly, he breaks off his relationship with Carol.Meanwhile, Lilly is at the race track working for an organization headed by gangster Bobo Justus. He comes to meet her and he takes her back to his apartment. He proceeds to beat her for a serious mistake she made several months earlier. In the process, he badly burns the back of her hand with a cigar. She goes back to her apartment where she has a fight with Roy, and tells him to give up the grift. Roy goes back to work for the day and meets his new boss Perk Kraggs, who takes a liking to him. He offers him a job as a sales manager. Roy is unsure if he should take it or not.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Stewart's_Merlin_Trilogy"title="Mary Stewart's Merlin Trilogy">
"The Crystal Cave" (1970) is a first-person retelling of Merlin's life and the reign of Uther Pendragon until the conception of Uther's son, Arthur. In "The Hollow Hills" (1973), Merlin recounts Arthur's birth and boyhood until he is made king. "The Last Enchantment" (1979) is the story of Arthur's kingship as told by Merlin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Lives_(novel)"title="Two Lives (novel)">
"Reading Turgenev" deals with the life of Mary Louise Dallon, a farm girl from southeastern Ireland who marries an older draper named Elmer Quarry. Her marriage remains unconsummated, in part due to the growing alcoholism of her husband. She falls in love with her invalid cousin Robert, who introduces her to the works of great Russian writers (including Ivan Turgenev). She eventually goes mad and structures her life around preserving the existence of Robert to the finest detail possible, including re-creating his room and possessions in her attic.In "My House in Umbria", the first-person narrator, a retired prostitute and madam, now a writer of romantic novels, recollects a brief period when she sheltered in her Umbrian retirement villa three fellow survivors of a terrorist attack on an Italian passenger train. The novella has been made into a made-for-television film, also entitled "My House in Umbria", which departs substantially from the somber plot of the original.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_(Alvtegen_novel)"title="Missing (Alvtegen novel)">
After walking away from her rich, but dysfunctional family, Sybylla Forenstrom supports herself by scamming wealthy men on the streets of Stockholm. She often preys on visiting businessmen and charms them for a dinner and room. One night however, she chooses the wrong man and wakes up to find him dead and mutilated. Sybylla finds herself in a race against time as she evades the authorities and hunts for the real killer to prove her innocence. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexter_Is_Delicious"title="Dexter Is Delicious">
Nine months after the previous book, Dexter and Rita's daughter Lily is born. The birth brings remarkable changes in Dexter; apart from feeling genuine love and emotions for the first time, he also does not feel his "Dark Passenger's" compulsion to kill and vows to swear off his dark hobby in order to be a good father for his daughter. Dexter is called to a crime scene by his sister Deborah, who is in the middle of a jurisdictional fight with the FBI over a reported kidnapping. Dexter believes that the large quantity of blood found there was planted, and that the missing girl in question, Samantha Aldovar, is faking her disappearance in order to get money from her parents. Dexter runs tests and discovers that the blood type does not match Samantha.Deb and Dexter go to Samantha's private school and talk to her principal, who is initially reluctant to divulge any information. This changes when the principal discovers that Samantha's friend Tyler Spanos, a wild child, is also missing. Subsequent interviews with their friends indicate that they were both befriended by a young man with teeth filed down like fangs, and that only a few dentists in Miami offered such a service. Their prime suspect is Bobby Acosta, the son of a wealthy city official who already rescued Bobby from felony prosecutions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortunate_Son_(novel)"title="Fortunate Son (novel)">
After her boyfriend, Elton Trueblood, abandons her after she refuses an abortion, Branwyn Beerman gives birth to her child, whom she later names Thomas. Thomas is born with a hole in his lung, and is given a dire prognosis by the hospital's head paediatrician. While Thomas is in the hospital, she falls in love with a white heart surgeon, Dr. Minas Nolan, whose wife had died due to complications giving birth to an abnormally large and strong "Nordic Adonis" named Eric. Branwyn takes Thomas home in defiance of the hospital, but Thomas survives, living with Eric under one roof, and, while different in every respect, they build a strong friendship as children. They are both cared for by a Vietnamese nanny, Ahn. Their pleasant state of affairs takes a turn for the worse after Elton returns. Branwyn perishes soon after, leaving Thomas in Elton's hands due to her unmarried status. While Thomas is forced to eke out an existence in the slums, dealing drugs and being sent to jail, Eric goes to college and has no trouble attracting women. However, Eric is also faced with problems as he confronts the consequences of his actions. After years apart, they later reunite and solve their problems together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sag_Harbor_(novel)"title="Sag Harbor (novel)">
School's finally out for the summer and the return to Sag Harbor is in full swing. Teenage brothers Benji and Reggie Cooper escape their majority white preparatory academy in Manhattan. Still clad in Brooks Brothers polos and salmon colored pants, the pair re-meet all of their friends. Like most well-to-do kids at their families' beach houses during the summer, most of the teens in Sag Harbor go almost the entire season with virtually no contact from their parents (aside from occasional visits on the weekends). The lack of authority allows for plenty of interesting run-ins. Benji constantly remakes himself to become the coolest in town.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Care_High"title="Don't Care High">
Paul Abrams has just moved to New York City with his parents. He starts at tenth grade in a new high school, Don Carey High School, which has earned the nickname "Don't Care High" for prevalent student apathy.When Paul finds out that no one at Don Carey cares much about much of anything, he tries to motivate them by nominating Mike Otis, a reclusive man of mystery, for student council president. Mike runs unopposed and is soon elected (first since 1956), but the students soon forget about him. Paul's friend Sheldon takes a role in boosting Mike's reputation, attributing a round of much-needed facility repairs to him. As the students begin to care, the teachers sense that something is going on.Paul and Sheldon publish a newsletter, "The Otis Report", which praises Mike and criticizes the school staff, and distribute it in the halls while wearing masks and speeding past on roller skates. Mike is stripped of his position, but the pair respond with a campaign to reinstate him that sparks genuine interest among the student body. Finding that the home address for Mike in the school files is fake, Paul and Sheldon find his actual residence and learn by eavesdropping that he is about to fail one of his courses. Since a large portion of the student body now idolizes Mike, they collaborate to produce a project for him. It is of such high quality that it is entered in a science fair, but the judges disqualify Mike after learning that the work is not his; the students react so badly that Don Carey is banned from the event. An announcement that Mike likes basketball leads to massive turnout at an away game, which Don Carey wins by one point, resulting in a joyous riot and much destruction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monk's_Hood"title="Monk's Hood">
In early December 1138, Abbot Heribert of Shrewsbury Abbey is summoned to a Legatine council in London and his authority is suspended. The Abbey's business is also postponed, with one exception: Gervase Bonel, who has ceded his manorial estate at Mallilie to the Abbey in return for a small house where his needs in retirement will be provided, is allowed to move his household before the charter is signed. All expect that Heribert or his successor will complete the agreement after the council.Prior Robert is left in charge of the Abbey. He receives gifts meant for the Abbot, including a fat partridge which he shares with Bonel, having his cook send a portion with dinner. Bonel is taken ill immediately after eating it. Brother Cadfael the herbalist and Brother Edmund the infirmarer run to his aid but cannot save him. Cadfael recognises Bonel's widow as Richildis Vaughan, to whom he was informally betrothed over 40 years earlier. He realises that the sauce in which the partridge was served was poisoned by a liniment he made. Its active ingredient is monkshood (Wolfsbane), deadly if ingested.The murder is reported to Shrewsbury Castle. Sheriff Prestcote sends the unsubtle Sergeant Will Warden to investigate. As Prior Robert ate the other half of the partridge without ill effects, suspicion falls on Bonel's household. Richildis was never alone with the partridge. Aelfric, who carried the dishes from the kitchen, bears a grudge as Bonel deprived him of free status and made him a villein. Neither the maid, Aldith, nor Meurig, an illegitimate son of Bonel who is apprenticed to Richildis' son-in-law master carpenter Martin Bellecote, have any apparent motive. Edwin Gurney, Richildis' son from her first marriage, was present at part of the meal, but stormed out after a quarrel before Bonel ate the partridge. He and Meurig had come separately from the Abbey's infirmary, where Meurig used the monkshood oil to massage his great uncle, the aged Brother Rhys. Edwin's motive for murdering Bonel is plain to the sergeant. Because the charter with the Abbey is not completed, Edwin will inherit Mallilie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Push_and_a_Shove"title="A Push and a Shove">
Benjamin Reilly, a high school English-teacher in Staten Island, N.Y., witnesses a fight between two students. This brings him back to childhood years of bullying by Terrence O'Connell, a popular jock he had a crush on at the time. Reilly decides to quit his job, track down his bully and wreak revenge on him. He visits his parents in Indiana, where he also engages in unsafe sex with a Hispanic man. In Manhattan, he meets with Terrence and they become friends. While on holiday in Vail, Colorado, he takes an HIV test - by the end of the novel, he learns he doesn't have AIDS. Terrence breaks up with his girlfriend and slowly admits to being gay, though he won't let Benjamin kiss him. Out of anger, Benjamin pushes Terrence down a mountaintop, sending him off to hospital for several weeks. Terrence proves to be understanding, and they both decide they are now even. Benjamin learns about the circumstances surrounding his sister's death and his brother's runaway streak as a teenager. Finally, Benjamin is invited to Terrence's same-sex marriage with an investment banker in Massachusetts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_Ghote_Goes_by_Train"title="Inspector Ghote Goes by Train">
Inspector Ghote's latest assignment is simple and offers the chance for well-deserved rest. He is to escort an infamous confidence trickster from Calcutta to Mumbai by railway. Ghote is looking forward to relaxing in air-conditioned comfort on the Calcutta Mail train as it passes through the beautiful Indian scenery, but his travelling companions make the journey far from restful.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_of_the_Night_(novel)"title="Creature of the Night (novel)">
Bobby, the fourteen-year-old narrator, is a thief and a hooligan. When his mother moves him and his young brother to a cottage near Ennis in County Clare his only thought is how to get back to a life of crime in Dublin. Eventually he steals a Skoda car and goes back, only to find things have changed and he has no place there. He reluctantly returns to the cottage and is given work by a local farmer.The cottage they are living in is on a path between two fairy forts. The family is warned by the farmer’s mother to put out a bowl of milk every night, but they consider this a mere superstition. Being deprived of the milk, a little old fairy woman comes through the dog flap into the kitchen. Dennis, Bobby's brother, sees and accepts her, but for Bobby it is a baffling and rather frightening mystery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_(Cabot_novel)"title="Twilight (Cabot novel)">
Suze struggles to continue her mediator activity with the presence of Paul Slater, who is now giving her mediator lessons. When Paul finds a way to time travel, another gift all shifters share, he tells Suze that he plans on going back to Jesse's time to save him from his murder, thus altering time so that Suze and Jesse will never meet, and allowing Paul to have Suze to himself.When Paul finally "shifts" and travels through the fourth dimension, Suze follows him back to Jesse's time, and they hide in a nearby barn. The next morning, Paul binds and gags her before going to find Felix Diego, Jesse's murderer. Just when she gives up and convinces herself that Jesse deserves to live, the living Jesse stumbles upon her in the barn and unties her. Suze tries to convince him that she is a mediator from the future and that he is in danger, telling him that Felix Diego is out to kill him and explaining how they met 150 years after his death. At first, he thinks she is delusional and is angered by her accusations about Maria and Diego, but is convinced when Suze mentions his dream of becoming a doctor, something he had never told anyone. He asks why she traveled back to save him and, unable to confess her love, she simply says that what happened to him wasn't right. When Paul returns, he attempts to convince Jesse that Diego is dangerous and he should escape, but Jesse insists that he will stop Diego, prompting Paul to lose interest. Jesse again asks Suze why she is helping him, and she responds that his is a "special" case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_Fire"title="Forgotten Fire">
In 1915 Vahan Kenderian is living a life of privilege as the youngest son of a wealthy Armenian family in Turkey. This secure world is shattered when some family members are whisked away while others are murdered before his eyes.Vahan loses his home and family, and is forced to live a life he would never have dreamed of in order to survive. Somehow Vahan’s incredible strength and spirit help him endure, even knowing that each day could be his last.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singin'_and_Swingin'_and_Gettin'_Merry_like_Christmas"title="Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry like Christmas">
"Singin' and Swingin"' opens shortly after Angelou's previous autobiography, "Gather Together in My Name". Marguerite (or Maya), a single mother with a young son, is in her early twenties, struggling to make a living. Angelou writes in this book, like her previous works, about the full range of her own experiences. As scholar Dolly McPherson states, "When one encounters Maya Angelou in her story, one encounters the humor, the pain, the exuberance, the honesty, and the determination of a human being who has experienced life fully and retained her strong sense of self". Many people around Angelou influence her growth and, as critic Lyman B. Hagen states, "propel Angelou ever forward". The book's opening chapters find Maya concerned with, as Hagen asserts, "apprehension about her son, a desire for a home, and facing racial conflicts, and seeking a career". Maya is offered a job as a salesperson in a record shop on Fillmore Street in San Francisco. At first she greets her white boss' offers of generosity and friendship with suspicion, but after two months of searching for evidence of racism, Maya begins to "relax and enjoy a world of music". The job allows her to move back into her mother's house and to spend more time with her son.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_Ghote_Plays_a_Joker"title="Inspector Ghote Plays a Joker">
Inspector Ghote is summoned by the Deputy Superintendent of Police and charged with what at first seems to be a fool's errand: To prevent the shooting of a red flamingo in Bombay Zoo, the last of four birds presented by the American consul.The flamingo is just the start of a long and difficult investigation for Ghote, which includes a donkey substituted for a prize racehorse at the start of a race, a scientist with a ruined reputation, and a cold blooded murder.Ghote is summoned by the Deputy Superintendent of Police and charged to protect a flamingo presented to Bombay Zoological Gardens by the American Consulate. The bird is one of four and the other three have already been shot. At the zoo the inspector interviews a senior zoo official who informs him that the director of the zoo has ordered that the bird be left on display in order to trap the perpetrator. During the interview the bird is shot. Ghote believes the marksman is in a clock tower, which he searches. He does not find the marksman but does note the smell of fine tobacco.The next day Ghote arrives at the office to find Sergeant Desai has been allocated to his investigation of the shooting. This does not please Ghote, as Desai has a reputation for hilarious incompetence. Desai tells Ghote that a donkey was substituted for the favourite racehorse in the derby three months earlier and Ghote realises they are dealing with a rich and cruel practical joker.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_World_War_(novel)"title="The Third World War (novel)">
## The Early Triggers.India's Parliament is mostly destroyed in an apparent terrorist attack while in session waiting for an address by the Prime Minister. The casualties are significant and the suspicion immediately turns to Pakistani-based terrorists. Unknown individuals initiate a massacre of Hindu citizens triggering a Hindu back lash and triggering riots across India. The president of Pakistan, who is on a visit to Malaysia, is assassinated by a member of his security detail. An Islamic uprising quickly gains control of Philippines and Brunei. Coups take place in Pakistan, by a fundamental military regime, and North Korea, where a former military commander and party strongman takes over from the current ruling disposition. At the same time there is a theft of a new Super Virus from an Australian laboratory and a weaponized smallpox virus from Russia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_Me_Back_My_Legions!"title="Give Me Back My Legions!">
Publius Quinctilius Varus, formerly the governor of Syria, is appointed to the governorship of Germania, a hold-out full of what the Romans think of as barbarians. During a brief assignment to the legions in Dalmatia, Varus befriends the Germani auxiliary commander Arminius, unaware that the latter has plans of his own for the Romans occupying Germany. The Roman army is misled by talk of a revolt in a nearby village to the west. When Varus decides to give it precedence and detours from the normal path into the forests, his three legions are quickly entrapped. Twenty thousand heavily armed Roman infantry, and auxiliaries, are brutally ambushed by Germanic forces. Though the legions are well trained, it is Arminius' tactics that prove to be decisive. For three days the Germanic tribesmen surround the legions, killing Roman soldiers along with civilians, family members of the soldiers; some are even taken captive, most of whom are sacrificed on an altar to the Germanic gods. Forty years later the Romans attack Germania again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haunted_(Cabot_novel)"title="Haunted (Cabot novel)">
On her first day of junior year Suze is horrified to find that Paul Slater is now attending the Mission Academy, having moved to town to care for his ailing grandfather. At dinner that evening, she meets Neil Jankow, a college friend of Jake's, and Neil's brother Craig, a ghost. Suze learns that Craig recently died in a catamaran accident, and that he believes Neil should have been the one who died, as he was the weaker swimmer. When he leaves, Suze and Jesse argue over whether to report his existence to Father Dom.Paul invites Suze to his house after school the next day, promising to expand her mediator training. There, he tells her that they are "shifters" - powerful mediators with extended abilities, including inter-dimensional travel - and abruptly kisses her. Furious, Suze runs away and is picked up by Neil, who drives her home, but during the trip, Craig takes over the wheel, nearly killing them both. Jesse discovers that Paul is back in town when he sends Suze a bouquet of flowers as an apology. At school a few days later, Father Dom informs Suze that Jesse will be moving out of her room to the Mission's rectory, leading her to believe that their relationship is over. Paul attempts to recruit Suze again, but she lashes out at him and he leaves school.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodhound_(novel)"title="Bloodhound (novel)">
Beka's story continues when she gets sloppy with her reports to Ahuda, and she decides to practice again by starting a new journal.Now a first year Dog, Beka works the Evening Watch with her loathsome partner, Silsbee. His attitude of letting Day Watch catch the criminals they see annoys Beka to no end. Silsbee eventually dumps her as a partner, and she is partnered with Clara Goodwin and Matthias Tunstall, her former trainers.Beka learns of the existence of coles, or counterfeit coins, from her friend Tansy. As she and her partners investigate, they get word of a thin harvest, which bodes ill for the poor of the Lower City. Beka and Pounce—a speaking constellation in the form of a cat—find Achoo, a bloodhound, being hurt by her handler. When Beka steps in to stop the abuse, she takes Achoo as her scent-hound. Meanwhile, due to the thin harvest, bread prices go up and a riot starts in the city. Beka, Goodwin and Tunstall get caught up in the fight, and Tunstall gets both of his legs broken.After the riot, Lord Gershom, the Lord Provost, sends Beka, Goodwin and Achoo to Port Caynn to further investigate the coles while Tunstall recovers. Pounce, for once, cannot go with her as he is actually a constellation and he must deal with some troublesome stars. They depart and on board the ship are reacquainted with Dale Rowan, a banker who helped them during the Bread Riot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mommywood"title="Mommywood">
Actress Tori Spelling follows up her bestselling "Stori Telling" with another revealing and entertaining look at her life in the spotlight. In "Mommywood", Spelling describes her adventures rearing her two small children in the Hollywood Hills.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boys_on_the_Rock"title="The Boys on the Rock">
Set in the Bronx against the historical backdrop of United States Senator Eugene McCarthy's unsuccessful bid to become the Democratic presidential candidate for the 1968 elections, the novel focuses on Connors's "rocky relationship that fared no better than McCarthy's campaign", in the words of critic Wayne Hoffman (author of the novel "Hard"), who described it in "The Washington Post" as a "classic".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Drug"title="God Drug">
God Drug is the story of one large acid trip that literally alters the reality and changes the lives of several college students and drug users. The basic plot of the novel centers on the effects of the use of a form of LSD that the military tested out on some of its marines during Vietnam as a means of making its soldiers better in combat. The intent of the drug was to enable the soldiers to be able to communicate telepathically and thus be able to work together more effectively during battles. Unfortunately, the experiment did not go according to plan, and the LSD caused more warfare in an alternate reality than it was able to solve in actual reality. This powerful drug left only one survivor, Jovah.Jovah is never seen in the book, only referred to by the other characters. Jovah’s reality was drastically altered by the use of the LSD and caused all of his thoughts to become realities. These realities were constant nightmares and wars within the users’ minds that actually became real. Anything that he believed to happen in his mind would actually take place. Therefore, Jovah had to be locked away in a sensory deprived room, secluded, and deemed insane and not allowed nor able to exist in normal society. The remnant personalities of Jovah’s realities and those of the other soldiers that he was telepathically linked to have now been set free and are roaming around in the real world. Jovah wishes to be God-like by consuming all of the realities and personalities that make him up so that he can be completely whole. He attempts to do this by means of the LSD trips.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Modular_Man"title="The Modular Man">
The novel concerns the issue of personhood and what it takes to be considered a member of the moral universe. There are three main characters: Herbert the vacuum cleaner, who is modified by his owner, David Bailey, a scientist who specializes in figuring out how to "mindload". Mindloading is the act of a human downloading his mind into a machine. A successful mindload entails the death of the human. It is a way for humans to become immortal, if only in the form of vacuum cleaner.The book begins with the arrest of Herbert, the vacuum cleaner, for David's murder. David's wife, Suzanne Jantille, is a trial attorney who is a quadriplegic as a result of a car crash that also paralyzed her husband. She lives through a "Remote person" who has all human senses except for the ability to feel by touch. She can guide the remote person through a helmet attached to her "bio body" and retrieves all "video and audio" signals through the remote. She can function as a whole human being, but the outside world notices that she is a remote—and does not approve.Suzanne defends Herbie, with the help of an astute journalist and a police officer who has access to documents that she wouldn't otherwise. The book ends with a recognition of David’s humanity due to the ultimate confusion in the courtroom. It also ends with the death of Suzanne’s bio-body, and in turn, her ultimate death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Intensity_of_Everyday_Life"title="The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life">
Laura, the central character, lives happily enough with her husband and children, until a long forgotten lover comes back into her life. When her passion is re-awakened, she comes to realise how the excitement has faded from her life.As the story unfolds we find that everyone in the Sussex village where the novel is set, lives with their own inner dramas. None of them seems to notice that she is going through a crisis. The hidden feelings of a large cast of characters are interwoven to form a plot that attempts to reveal the intensity with which ordinary lives are led.The novel is multi-stranded exploring the highs and lows of life. Sometimes serious, at others sublime, it tries to answer the central question, how much happiness we should expect from life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_on_Mars"title="Marooned on Mars">
In the foreword, "Tomorrow’s World", the author comments on how the development of liquid-fueled rockets points to missions to the Moon and establishment of a lunar base in the near future. Then he points to Mars as the next obvious step in the exploration of the solar system. He mentions the possibility of life on Mars, recapping what astronomers knew about Mars in 1952, and speculates on what explorers, like those in his story, will find.After spending two weeks on Earth for testing, Chuck Svenson returns home to the Moon to prepare for his part in the first expedition to Mars, as the ship's radar operator and communications technician. Jeff Foldingchair pilots the small, fast rocket ship that was sent to pick Chuck up from the spaceport high in the Andes. While they wait to take off Jeff receives a message telling him that the Mars expedition's take-off date has been moved up to enable the ship to avoid a flock of meteors that lunar radar has detected.Although Jeff seems perturbed by the message, the full meaning of it does not register with Chuck until they land on the Moon: the Mars-bound rocket is now scheduled to blast off the day before Chuck's eighteenth birthday, which means that he cannot go. In spite of everything Governor Braithwaite can do, Chuck has been replaced on rocket ship "Eros" by a slightly older man, Lewis Wong.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Tapers_for_Paris"title="Yellow Tapers for Paris">
The crushing 1940 defeat of France (an event the author lived through) is the subject of this novel. Marshall implies that France lost its soul and was itself more responsible for its defeat than Germany.We meet Bigou, the protagonist, in 1934. He is an honest, hard-working, but irreligious and immoral accountant, employed by a successful industrial firm in Paris. He is mildly troubled that his firm expends considerable effort conniving to avoid paying its legitimate taxes. Conversations with accountants and employees of other companies lead Bigou to realize that most of the business enterprises of the time in France are behaving similarly,The novel gives us a picture of Bigou's life. The reader is introduced to his family, sulky, plucky daughter Odette and sickly wife Marie, friends, his coworkers and other people he meets in his business life. The author endeavors to show that money and pleasure were the main goals sought with any sincerity. Even religion, when it did exist, wasn't much more than an outward display. Bigou does come to believe that the local priest is one of the few people he knows who exhibits integrity.The "petit bourgeois" in the novel are shabby and bewildered as they assist helplessly at their nation's funeral, but they stand in brilliant contrast to the insatiable greed and craftiness of the wealthy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubled_Man"title="The Troubled Man">
A highly-decorated Swedish naval officer, Håkan von Enke, disappears during his daily walk. For Kurt Wallander this becomes a very personal case as Von Enke is Linda Wallander's father-in-law. The clues lead back in time to the Cold War and hired killers from Eastern Europe. Inspector Wallander suspects that he may be dealing with the worst spy scandal in Swedish history. At the same time, Wallander is also dealing with the onset of dementia, and in particular, with the loss of his memory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_the_Rhymer_(novel)"title="Thomas the Rhymer (novel)">
Thomas, a harper from court, befriends a humble farmer and his wife. As he begins a relationship with Elspeth, their neighbor, he is whisked to Elfland, ensnared by the Fairy Queen. After seven years he returns to Gavin, Meg, and Elspeth with a parting gift from the Queen: he can only speak the truth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Dickens"title="The Last Dickens">
The novel is set in the United States, England, and India in 1867 and 1870. When news of Charles Dickens’s untimely death reaches the office of his struggling American publisher, Fields &amp; Osgood, partner James R. Osgood sends his trusted clerk Daniel Sand to await Dickens's unfinished last novel – "The Mystery of Edwin Drood".But when Daniel's body is discovered by the docks and the manuscript is nowhere to be found, Osgood must embark on a transatlantic quest to unearth the novel that will save his venerable business and reveal Daniel's killer. Danger and intrigue abound on the journey, for which Osgood has chosen Rebecca Sand, Daniel's older sister, to help clear her brother's name and achieve their singular mission. As they attempt to uncover Dickens's final mystery, Osgood and Rebecca find themselves racing the clock through a dangerous web of literary lions and drug dealers, sadistic thugs and blue bloods, and competing members of the inner circle. They soon realize that understanding Dickens's lost ending is a matter of life and death, and the hidden key to stopping a murderous mastermind.The novel also includes interspersed sections about Charles Dickens's 1867 reading tour of the United States and Francis Dickens's role as a mounted policeman in Bengal, India. One of the characters carries a walking stick with a qilin (kylin) head attached.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingkiller_Chronicle"title="The Kingkiller Chronicle">
"The Kingkiller Chronicle" tells the life story of a man named Kvothe. In the present day, Kvothe is a rural innkeeper, living under a pseudonym. In the past, he was a wandering trouper and musician who grew to be a notorious arcanist (or wizard), known as the infamous "Kingkiller".The series is framed as the transcription of his three-day-long oral autobiography, where he "trouped, traveled, loved, lost, trusted and was betrayed". Present-day "interludes" concern his life as an innkeeper, with each present day depicted in a separate book.The series is a secondary world fantasy; the setting is named Temerant. It has its own magic system, mixing alchemy, sympathetic magic, sygaldry (a form of runic magic combined with medieval engineering), and naming (a type of magic that allows the user to command the classical elements and objects), plus others.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake_Ransom_and_the_Skull_King's_Shadow"title="Jake Ransom and the Skull King's Shadow">
When a mysterious envelope arrives for Jake Ransom, he and his older sister, Kady, are plunged into a gripping chain of events. An artifact found by their parents (on the expedition from which they never returned) leads Jake and Kady to a strange world inhabited by a peculiar mix of long-lost civilizations such as the Romans, Mayans, and the Dinosaurs, a world that may hold the key to their parents disappearance.But even as they enter the gate to this extraordinary place, savage creatures soar across the sky, diving to attack. Jake's new friends, the Mayan girl Marika and the Roman Pindor, say the creatures were created by an evil alchemist - the Skull King, Kalverum Rex. as Jake struggles to find a way home, it becomes obvious that what the Skull King wants most is Jake and Kady - dead or alive. Will Jake stay and help his friends or will he turn his back on his new friends?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1/2_Prince"title="1/2 Prince">
Feng Lan is a 19-year-old girl who is challenged by her twin brother to play a virtual reality game called Second Life. Being the first player to log onto the game, she is allowed to distinguish her real life looks from her avatar; thus she creates a handsome male elf named Prince. In game, she forms a team called the Odd Squads which consists of: Lolidragon, a female hidden game moderator; Ugly Wolf, a beast race Priest character; Doll, a necromancer; Guilastes, a bard with an attraction to Prince; and Yu Lian, a female mage. As the story progresses, the Odd Squads compete in a tournament emerging victorious and are awarded a large city which they name as Infinity City which Prince is voted to lead. Before the city is open to the public, Prince leaves in search of comrades to serve under her and wanders onto another continent. There, she befriends her real life friends, Lu Jing and Yun Fei and becomes involved in a hidden quest which awards her with two NPCs with self-awareness, Kenshin and Sunshine.As the plot progresses, Prince learns that a self-aware NPC named Lord of Life is commanding an army of NPCs to delete the humans which will prevent them from returning to the game. In response, Prince gathers players throughout the game in order to combat the threat. It is revealed Long Dian is the cause of the AI rebellion and wishes to gain eternal life through Second Life. Long Dian's NPCs take control of the world's superweapons and forces the world's best scientists to give him a new body. Prince and her companions defeat Long Dian's new super-human body, ending his reign of terror. During the battle, Guilastes saves Feng Lan's life and Feng Lan eventually chooses and marries Guilastes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maigret_Goes_to_School"title="Maigret Goes to School">
In the story, Maigret is called from his usual duties in Paris to investigate a murder in a small village located close to La Rochelle. A local postmistress has been killed and suspicion has fallen on the local schoolmaster. When Maigret gets there, he discovers a very inward-looking community, which generally hated the dead woman because she knew all of their secrets.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scarecrow_(Connelly_novel)"title="The Scarecrow (Connelly novel)">
The story begins with Jack McEvoy's termination by the "Los Angeles Times" due to the newspaper's financial crisis. He is given two weeks to train his replacement, Angela Cook, on the "cop beat" and decides that he wants to write one more major story before his last day. Jack focuses on the case of 16-year-old drug dealer Alonzo Winslow, who the police have got a confession from. A stripper was found brutally raped, stuffed in the trunk of a car in Santa Monica with a plastic bag over her head, tied shut with a length of rope around her neck. Angela, a beautiful and ambitious young reporter, maneuvers to get herself a part of the story. However, after Jack is given access to the defense files, he learns that Alonzo only confessed to stealing the car containing the body, not to the rape-murder. In researching trunk murders on the Internet, Angela unwittingly finds evidence of a similar crime in Las Vegas. However, Angela's research also took her to a "trap" site set up by the real murderer: Wesley Carver, an MIT graduate who is the chief security officer of a "server farm" (colocation and backup services) near Phoenix, referred to by everyone as the "scarecrow" of the farm. Carver cracks her e-mail password at the "Times" and learns that Jack is headed to Vegas. He promptly creates a fake data emergency so that his company will send him to L.A.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Islands_of_Unwisdom"title="The Islands of Unwisdom">
It is a reconstruction of an historic event, the voyage of Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira to find the Solomon Islands. Graves tells a story with many surprising twists, in which some characters turn out to be quite different from how they are first portrayed. In Graves's telling, when the Spanish first come into contact with Solomon Islanders, the relationship is cordial. However, the Spanish expedition's need for fresh food and water quickly leads to tension and conflict, the Solomon Islanders’ subsistence economy being unable to provide continuous supplies. The real prizes are pigs, desperately needed by the Spanish, while vital to the local people's economy. The tensions cannot be resolved, and so the Spaniards sail home. Graves also considered that the story summarizes the reasons Spain lost its early lead in exploring the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanting_(novel)"title="Wanting (novel)">
"Wanting" cuts between two stories based on real historical figures under the central theme of 'wanting', and is set in both nineteenth century Tasmania and Britain. One tells the tale of an Aboriginal child, Mathinna, adopted by then governor of Van Diemen’s Land, Sir John Franklin, and his wife Lady Jane; the other of Charles Dickens’ love affair with Ellen Ternan after one of his daughters dies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Rabbit_(book)"title="The White Rabbit (book)">
F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas was the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent, called by the Germans "The White Rabbit" of World War II. He was given responsibilities by the British government in occupied Vichy France because he had lived in France during the interwar years and was fluent in French.An assignment required Yeo-Thomas to be parachuted into France. Shortly after his arrival he was betrayed and captured by the Gestapo at the Passy metro station in Paris.The Gestapo took him to their headquarters in the Avenue Foch, and he was subjected to brutal torture, including beatings, electrical shocks to the genitals, psychological gameplaying, sleep deprivation, and repeated submersion in ice-cold water—to the point that artificial respiration was sometimes required.After the interrogations and torture, he was moved to Fresnes prison. After he made two failed attempts to escape he was transferred first to Compiègne prison and then to Buchenwald concentration camp. Within these various detention camps he attempted to organise resistance.Late in the war, he briefly escaped from Buchenwald and, on his recapture, was able to pass himself off as a French national and sent to Marienburg, Stalag XX-B, a "better" camp, where the Nazis sent enlisted Frenchmen, instead of back to Buchenwald. It is reasonable to conclude that his chances of surviving the remainder of the war at Buchenwald were low.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thread_of_Scarlet"title="A Thread of Scarlet">
The hero, as often in Marshall's novels, is a Scottish priest. The novel tracks the life of Father Campbell, a convert to Catholicism from a wealthy family, from his ordination to the priesthood just before the First World War until his death many years later, as a Cardinal.In his first parish assignment, Father Campbell found himself pitted against his Rector, a canon, in a kind of running conflict the first of a series of minor entanglements and setbacks which lay in the path of his vocation like boulders.World War I sees him sent to France with the British Expeditionary Force as a Chaplain. The experiences there hardened him some, but his essential faith is unshaken. After the war he returns to his parish, still a very serious, but unsophisticated young priest. He seeks a miracle for an Army companion who he has helped lead back to the faith. They go to Lourdes. Scotland, which had never been granted such a miracle, watched hopefully. The outcome was a surprise to everyone, and causes Father Campbell a good deal of bother.Father Campbell was patient and humble; but in his early years his essential characteristic was a rebellious intelligence, challenged by Catholic discipline and eventually mellowed by the experiences which befell him after he had been created Cardinal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maigret_and_the_Hotel_Majestic"title="Maigret and the Hotel Majestic">
Maigret is called to the high-class Hotel Majestic to investigate a body. The wife of a wealthy American has been killed - but to Maigret's surprise she has a gun in her purse. He begins to follow up the handful of clues that could explain her secret life and her demise.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maigret_on_the_Defensive"title="Maigret on the Defensive">
Maigret responds to a call from a young woman in the middle of the night, but he then finds himself accused of raping her. He is forced to clear his name, and search for what had really taken place that night.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Patience_of_Maigret"title="The Patience of Maigret">
Maigret searches for evidence that an old nemesis of his is behind a series of jewel robberies. Maigret believes the ageing gangster is organising a gang from his apartment. However, when the gangster is found dead, Maigret investigates his criminal connections and his neighbours trying to find the murderer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_Ghote's_Good_Crusade"title="Inspector Ghote's Good Crusade">
Inspector Ghote is tasked with investigating the murder of an American philanthropist and millionaire, Frank Masters. Frank Masters was renowned and respected throughout India because he had dedicated himself to improving the lot of homeless orphan children in Bombay. The mystery seeks to solve who poisoned him with arsenic.The novel begins just after Inspector Ghote has been given the task of investigating Frank Master's murder. At the Masters Foundation for the Care of Juvenile Vagrants Ghote meets two urchins who answer to names which they have chosen for themselves from American movies: "Edward G. Robinson" and "Tarzan". Inside, Ghote meats Dr Diana Uplea, who tells him that death was the result of arsenic poisoning. The cook tells him that Frank Masters ate the same food as the orphans, which was of poor quality except for a beef curry prepared under Doctor Diana Uplea's supervision. Ghote asks to see the dishes the meal was served in and the cook reveals that he is an unreliable witness by first claiming the dishes are washed then offering an "unwashed dish" which is actually a clean dish with leftovers from the dustbin added.The interview ends when Fraulein Glucklick enters the room, interrupting Ghote. Glucklick informs Ghote that a Swami was giving a talk at the time of the murder. She also tells Ghote that Dr Diana Uplea caused no end of trouble when Masters visited Tibetan refugees in the Punjab and left Dr Uplea in charge. At this time Dr Upleigh discovered the notorious criminal Amahred Singh was hanging around the foundation and threatened him with the police. Lastly Fraulein Glucklick tells Ghote that the windows of the staff dining room are left open and on several occasions people have reached in to steal food (the implication is that someone could reach in to add poison).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_Fade_Away"title="Only Fade Away">
A change of pace for Marshall, this book is only peripherally concerned with matters of faith and religion. Strang Methuen is an old soldier, a stiff-necked Scot who serves in the British Army in two world wars. Methuen is able to show more courage in the face of enemy fire than when dealing with friends and family—those he loves and hates.Methuen has been bullied since his school days by Hermiston. For nearly 40 years, every time he thinks he has escaped or defeated the bully, a quirk of fate makes Methuen the goat again.The very qualities that keep him from winning, integrity and personal honour, also make him a sympathetic and interesting character.A revelation about his beloved daughter almost crushes Methuen, but he recovers. The story ends when Methuen, now a brigadier general fighting in World War II Italy, uses his experience and wiles to perform a vital military manoeuvre, preventing a major defeat. Unfortunately Hermiston, in an attempt to finally put things right, makes a confession which puts Methuen's achievement in a bad light. He is demoted and leaves the service in disgrace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bishop_(novel)"title="The Bishop (novel)">
This novel is a sort of 'inside look" at the workings of a fictional Roman Catholic Bishop's headquarters in the United Kingdom.The central characters are Bishop Bede Jenkins; Father Spyers, a young, recently ordained priest who serves as the Bishop's secretary; Monsignor Basil Powell, the Vicar General, who was once a Major in the Grenadier Guards; and Monsignor Finbar O'Flaherty, the administrator of the pro-Cathedral.The story opens as Father Spyers opens a new encyclical, Humanae Vitae, which prohibits Catholics the use of chemical birth control methods (physical methods had long been banned). The process of implementing perhaps the most controversial papal bull released during the Church's second millennium supplies most of the activities of the story. Marshall introduces us to the discussions and arguments within the Catholic community during this time. The Bishop finds himself embroiled in fights with his superiors over his methods of implementing the decree. Father Spyers spends time in the hospital after being struck down by an angry husband.Subplots include Monsignor Powell's counseling of a nun who wishes to leave the convent, problems that the Bishop's friend, an Anglican Bishop, experiences and the irreligious attitude of modern Englishmen. The novel touches on modern literature, the treatment of animals, modern art, cultural differences and Father Spyers' daydreams of his future papacy (and chooses Benedict XVI as his title).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_Guard"title="The Death Guard">
In its tale of a chemist who creates an army of bloodthirsty plant-based humanoids out of a desire to abolish war once and for all (the rationale being that no country would attack England if it were known she possessed such a defence), the book foreshadowed the rise of nuclear weapons and Cold War politics. Continental Europe forms an alliance and invades Britain.The book is divided into three parts. In the first part of this novel we meet the inventors of the artificial life. We follow their story from their first meeting through the time when they relocate their lab to the Congo for its more conducive weather conditions. The first we hear of the matured Death Guard (nicknamed Pugs) is via a radio broadcast that is ended prematurely by the hideous death of the announcer.The next part is a tour of the process of making and growing the "pugs", as the protagonist "enlists" in one of factories and gets a firsthand look at what his uncle and grandfather had wrought.The third section recounts the war with continental Europe and the breakdown of infrastructure. Involving poisonous electric gas, "humanite" bombs (atomic bombs), and the unfeeling march of the Death Guard across the very land they were designed to protect. Later the Death Guard continues to wander unchecked across the broken landscape even after all the enemy has been killed. The resulting carnage reduces whole cities and towns in Britain to smoking rubble.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saffy's_Angel"title="Saffy's Angel">
The novel begins with Saffron searching through the colour chart pinned up in her house, looking for her name, Saffron. The characters are introduced. While Saffron searches, the health visitor is checking up on Rose, her new sister. The health visitor then discovers Rose has been sucking Caddy's paint tubes. The health visitor threatens to take Rose to Casualty. Saffron finds out that she was adopted by Bill and Eve after Saffron's mother, who is Eve's sister, was killed in a car crash. Saffron becomes deeply upset, despite being comforted by her family. The story fast forwards to when Rose is 6 years old. Rose starts school (a year late according to the health visitor) and draws her first picture, which her teacher pastes to the wall. Rose is very upset and persuades Indigo to steal her picture and Caddy to draw an identical one to go up on the wall instead. Rose, Indigo, Saffron and Caddy's grandfather visits and Caddy has another disastrous driving lesson and tells her driving instructor, Michael about failing all her exams.Soon after their grandfather visits, he dies and leaves something to each of the children. For Cadmium, his property in Wales. For Indigo, his car. For Saffron, his angel in the garden. And for Rose, his money. After the will is read, Bill heads back down to London and while running after him, Saffron meets Sarah, a girl who lives in the same road as her who uses a wheelchair. Caddy has another lesson, meanwhile Saffron goes round to Sarah's house and meets her mother, Mrs Warbeck, the headmistress of the private school. Sarah begins the idea of visiting Siena, where Saffron believes the stone angel is. Sarah persuades her mother and father to take her to Siena during the term, and Sarah's mother begins to trust the two friends, and lets them go into town together. They meet up with some girls their age who all have their noses pierced. Sarah wants one, too, and persuades Saffron to get one done. When Sarah's mother finds out Sarah is in much trouble, but Saffron's nose ring is admired by her family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seer_(novel)"title="The Seer (novel)">
After leaving Harmony, Jacob is following the trail to find Delaney Carrow, a girl presumed dead. By homing in on her sounder, he meets Xander, an ex-mercenary for the Mixel corporation. Xander initially gives Jacob a hard time, but as the weeks pass, he warms to the kid he calls "blinder". Jacob, once again homing in on Delaney's sounder, discovers that Xander has it. When he confronts Xander (using a kitchen knife of all things) he discovers that Xander had given Delaney a ride, and left her on the doorsteps of Mixel. In desperation, Jacob begs Xander to take him to Melville, to see if he can find Delaney. Xander is against it at first, but he eventually caves in and takes him to Mixel tower, where they discover that Delaney has become a pop-star, and has also been changed; given artificial eyes so that she can see. But Delaney is not happy. In truth, she is a prisoner in Mixel tower, and Jacob hatches a plan with Xander to free her from Mixel.Later, Jacob starts having visions, first about Delaney and Harmony, but later on, bits and pieces of these visions come true, and he realizes that he is starting to be able to see future events. With this new power, he is able to get his companions out of difficult situations. One night, he has a vision of a boy telling him that there are people like him out there, Blinders turned Seers. However, the message garbles before Jacob can hear the location of the colony, so Jacob decides to revisit Harmony to seek answers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Street_(novel)"title="The Street (novel)">
Shifting between multiple perspectives, The Street uses extensive flashbacks to reveal its plot. Lutie Johnson has an eight-year-old son, Bub, to support. Separated but not legally divorced from Bub's father, Jim, Lutie feels that Jim's inability to find employment, her decision to work as a domestic for a wealthy white family in Connecticut, and Jim's subsequent infidelity ruined her marriage.Lutie moves into a small apartment on 116th Street in Harlem. Taking an immediate dislike to the super, Jones, she decides to take the apartment, agreeing to pay about thirty dollars a month in rent.Jones becomes sexually obsessed with Lutie; recalling his youth in the Navy, Jones remembers his feelings of loneliness and sexual frustration while aboard ship, a condition that worsened as he began working and living in basement apartments and boiler rooms. Jones resents his live-in girlfriend, Min, due to her lack of physical attractiveness, venting his aggressions on her. Jones befriends Bub in hopes of getting Lutie to pay attention to him. Sensing Jones' intentions, Mrs. Hedges, the madame of a brothel, tells Jones not to bother as a wealthy white man has already taken an interest in her.Mrs. Hedges, a heavy-set woman who is bald and badly disfigured from a fire, is referring to Junto, the proprietor of a local bar as well as the owner of several pieces of real estate. Junto has been friends with Mrs. Hedges for many years, striking up her acquaintance as she rummaged through the trash for food. Junto, who, at that time collected cans and scraps for a living, employs her then makes her a partner of sorts, putting her in charge of maintenance and rent collection once he buys his first building. After surviving the fire, Mrs. Hedges starts running a brothel out of her apartment. Acutely sensing the desperation and boredom of the young people who live in the neighborhood, Mrs. Hedges suggests that Junto open up dance halls, bars, and brothels, which Junto does. Junto, who has developed feelings for Mrs. Hedges by this point, makes an overture to her but is rejected.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell-All"title="Tell-All">
The novel, an homage to the Golden Age of Hollywood, is narrated by Hazel "Hazie" Coogan, a lifelong employee and caretaker of aging actress Katherine "Miss Kathie" Kenton.When a suitor named Webster Carlton Westward III manages to weasel his way into Miss Kathie's heart (and bed), Hazie appears suspicious. Upon apparently discovering that Westward has already written a celebrity tell-all memoir foretelling Miss Kathie's death in a forthcoming Lillian Hellman–penned musical extravaganza, Hazie warns Kathie that Westward's intentions may be less than honorable, and may even be deadly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Fear_(novel)"title="Summer of Fear (novel)">
Fifteen-year-old Rachel 'Rae' Bryant's aunt is killed in an automobile accident in the Ozarks. Her 17-year-old cousin Julia Grant, who has been in boarding school in Boston, comes to live to with Rae's family in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Julia is shy and reserved initially, and dresses in conservative, old-fashioned clothing. Rae and her boyfriend, Michael, and her best friend, Carolyn, attempt to ingratiate Julia into their circle of friends, and her personality begins to shift rapidly. She makes sexual advances toward Rae's brother, Peter, and carries herself as though she is far older than she is.Rae is stricken with a series of mishaps, including an unexplained case of hives prior to a school dance, and her dog Trickle dies mysteriously. Rae discovers from a local professor in her neighborhood that the area where Julia's family was from in the Ozarks had a reputation for witchcraft and rumors of covens. Rae, suspicious of Julia, confronts her, and she is revealed to be in fact not Julia at all, but the Grants' 22-year-old housekeeper, Sarah Blane, who is a practicing witch; she caused the car accident that killed both Julia and her parents, and then posed as Julia. Sarah and Rae begin to fight, and Rae locks her in her mother's darkroom. She flees with Mike to meet her mother in Santa Fe and prevent her from falling victim to a car accident that Sarah has invoked upon her. Rae and Mike reach her and prevent the accident from happening, but Rae's parents dismiss her claims regarding Sarah/Julia. When they return home, Sarah/Julia has vanished. The novel ends in the present, as Rae, now a sophomore in college, reflects on the events.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changes_(The_Dresden_Files)"title="Changes (The Dresden Files)">
Susan Rodriguez contacts Dresden to tell him they have a daughter, Margaret Angelica ("Maggie" for short), who has been kidnapped by the Duchess Arianna, the widow of a Red Court duke that Ebenezar McCoy thought he had killed several years earlier. Dresden goes to Edinburgh to seek help from the Council. However, upon his arrival, he discovers Arianna is there, hosting a peace conference with the rest of the Council. Dresden openly challenges Arianna to a duel to the death over his daughter's kidnapping, but is prevented from carrying it through by the other members of the Council. Infuriated, Dresden returns home.After an explosion destroys his office building, Dresden learns from Karrin Murphy he is under investigation by the FBI. After being released and having a talk with his fairy godmother, Dresden is eventually directed to the Norse God Odin, who tells him that the Red Court is going to use Maggie for a powerful blood curse that will kill everyone related to her, including Dresden. Dresden decides to investigate Rudolph, the Chicago police detective who implicated him in the office explosion, reasoning that he must have implicated Dresden because of pressure coming from the Red Court. During this investigation, he encounters the 'Eebs', a husband and wife team of Red Court vampires who have been sent to both assassinate Rudolph and to dissuade Dresden from going after Arianna. After a close call with them, Dresden returns home, only to have his apartment firebombed. During his subsequent attempts to rescue the other residents in his building, Dresden's back is broken, and Sanya shows up just in the nick of time. With no other options open to him, Harry turns to Queen Mab; accepting her offer of the Winter Knighthood in exchange for her healing his broken spine and granting him the power he needs to save his daughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fort_at_River's_Bend"title="The Fort at River's Bend">
## Book One : Ravenglass.The Party of Merlyn and Arthur arrive at Ravenglass and are welcomed by King Derek. Upon their arrival they find out that the commander of the Sons of Condran's navy, Liam, is also in the port. The crews are both unarmed, because Derek maintains the port of Ravenglass as a neutral, weapons-free zone, but Liam has hostile intentions for his visit. After Merlyn arrives, Liam attempts to capture Ravenglass in order to turn it into his own kingdom. Shelagh, however, is able to kill Liam before his crew captures the king. They slaughter the crews of the ships in port but find out that the rest of his fleet is supposed to land to help take the city. Merlyn and his party arrange the defenses of Ravenglass and, along with the help of the local people, are able to repel and intimidate the fleet into flight.Merlyn had approached Ravenglass in order to find a place to safely raise Arthur away from enemies at home. Derek had refused Merlyn sanctuary. However, since they helped in the defence of his kingdom, he agrees for Merlyn to move his people to a Roman fort Mediobogdum, a Roman fort on the edge of Ravenglass's lands. The party moves to the fort and Dedalus is able to rebuild the baths, while the rest of the party works on rebuilding several of the barracks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iciest_Sin"title="The Iciest Sin">
Additional Secretary for Department for Home Affairs Mr Z. R. Mistry requests Inspector Ghote's assistance on a strictly private matter. Unfortunately Mr Mistry has not selected Ghote for his zeal or powers of deduction but because he is "not in a position to make trouble". Thrust into a tangle of illegal activities including blackmail and murder, Ghote finds himself balanced on a knife-edge between right and wrong as he faces his greatest ever test as a detective and a person.Senior government official, Mr Mistry, requests Ghote's assistance on a "private matter". Mr Mistry's neighbour, Miss Daruwala, is blackmailing a Mr Pipewalla. Ghote is told to break into Daruwala's flat, spy on her then use what he sees to force her to leave India. Ghote considers this housebreaking and blackmail but cannot refuse.At home Ghote's son, Ved, attempts to blackmail Ghote into buying a computer by threatening to tell Protima, Ghote's wife, their television was bought on the black market.The next day Ghote blackmails a locksmith to get keys to Miss Daruwala's apartment, which Ghote's searches until she returns with Dr Edul Commissariat, a famous scientist. Ghote hides overhears that Commissariat submitted someone else's thesis as own work. Miss Daruwala demands "one lakh in cash" (100,000 rupees). Commissariat murders Miss Daruwala with a swordstick and burns the documents that incriminate her victims.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wednesday_Is_Indigo_Blue"title="Wednesday Is Indigo Blue">
The introduction likens the "cross-talk" occurring in the brain producing synesthetic experiences to weather patterns in coastal regions where there are no barriers and all of the elements interact. Normally communication in the brain is like weather in the Rocky Mountain regions, where weather can be isolated in one spot independent of weather systems close by. Chapter 1, "What color is Tuesday?", describes some of the early and still common resistance to the existence and study of synesthesia, and explains the fundamental characteristics necessary to "diagnose" synesthesia. The authors advocate the usefulness of introspective reports as they can later be useful in developing third-party tests for such purposes. Form constants are introduced as part of a framework to study visual synesthetic concurrents (the involuntary response in another sense). Chapter 2 builds on Chapter 1, discussing the types of synesthesia and the methods used to make a synesthesia diagnosis such as variations on stroop tests. The potential benefits of synesthesia are expanded on, including its correlation with eidetic memory and experience of a wider ranger of color. Chapter 3 discusses grapheme-color synesthesia in detail and describes the case of Solomon Shereshevsky.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gallifrey_Chronicles_(Parkin_novel)"title="The Gallifrey Chronicles (Parkin novel)">
The Eighth Doctor, accompanied by Fitz Kreiner and Trix MacMillan, overthrows the tyrant Mondova on an alien world, prevents a time-travelling alien from interfering in Ancient Roman history, and stops a Dalek (never named as such, but heavily implied) invasion of Mars. Against this backdrop, Fitz and Trix have begun a relationship and decide to leave the TARDIS.The Doctor returns to Earth in 2005, materialising at the grave of Sam Jones. When the Doctor claims not to remember his former companion, Fitz becomes angry and leaves with Trix. As the pair attempt to readjust to normal life, it is revealed that Trix has been secretly passing information gained on their travels to another former companion, Anji Kapoor, who has used the information to manipulate the stock market and thus built up a considerable fortune. The Doctor discovers that another Time Lord, Marnal, had also survived the destruction of Gallifrey, and has been living for the past hundred years as a human science-fiction writer (whose books are actually the history of the Time Lords and their homeworld). Marnal, who also claims to be the original owner of the Doctor's TARDIS, blames the Doctor for the cataclysm, and takes him and the TARDIS captive while the insectoid alien Vore invade the Earth. The Vore attack leaves millions dead or missing, including Fitz, who apparently dies trying to save Trix. After a cold fusion explosion guts the interior of the TARDIS, the Doctor discovers that K-9 Mark II has been aboard ever since Gallifrey's destruction, hidden behind a false wall, with orders from Lady President Romana of Gallifrey to kill him. However, K-9 pauses once it scans the Doctor's mind and discovers the reason why the Doctor has lost his memory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_(novel)"title="Push (novel)">
Claireece Precious Jones is an obese, illiterate 16-year-old girl who lives in Harlem with her abusive mother Mary. Precious is a few months pregnant with her second child, the product of her father raping her; he is also the father of her first child (who has Down syndrome). When her school discovers the pregnancy, it is decided that she should attend an alternative school. Precious is furious, but the counselor later visits her home and convinces her to enter an alternative school, located in the Hotel Theresa, called Higher Education Alternative Each One Teach One.Despite her mother's insistence that she apply for welfare, Precious enrolls in the school. She meets her teacher, Ms. Blu Rain, and fellow students Rhonda, Jermaine, Rita, Jo Ann, and Consuelo. All of the girls come from troubled backgrounds. Ms. Rain's class is a pre-GED class for young women who are below an eighth-grade level in reading and writing and therefore are unprepared for high school-level courses. They start off by learning the basics of phonics and vocabulary building. Despite their academic deficits, Ms. Rain ignites a passion in her students for literature and writing. She believes that the only way to learn to write is to write every day. Each girl is required to keep a journal. Ms. Rain reads their entries and provides feedback and advice. By the time the novel ends, the women have created an anthology of autobiographical stories called "LIFE STORIES – Our Class Book" appended to the book. The works of classic African-American writers such as Audre Lorde, Alice Walker and Langston Hughes are inspirational for the students. Precious is particularly moved by "The Color Purple".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stronghold"title="The Stronghold">
The novel opens on the day when over seven hundred Men of the Boar from many islands gather together, summoned by the chief Nectan. Nectan puts forth the proposal that the warriors should no longer fight the Roman raiders but rather retreat when they approach, as the tribe's very existence is threatened by their losses. The Chief Druid strongly opposes the idea, saying they must continue to fight; he declares it a matter of faith and therefore his domain, directly challenging Nectan's leadership.Coll is convinced that his idea of a high circular drystone stronghold, designed to be impregnable, is a third way. He has been developing the idea, drawing plans and building models, since he was five, when a Roman raider killed his father, abducted his mother and shattered Coll's leg, crippling him. However, none of the elders will listen to him.Taran arrives, introducing himself as a member of the tribe who was seized for a slave when he was twelve and recently escaped by killing his master. He is welcomed, but it soon appears that he has a desire for power, seeking first to ingratiate himself with the chief's daughter and then plotting with the Druids and the chiefs of the Raven and the Deer. Coll's brother Bran, who lives with the Druids, is torn between the two camps.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Demons"title="Space Demons">
Andrew Hayford's father presents Andrew with a new Japanese videogame called "Space Demons". Andrew introduces his best friend Ben Challis to the game. While playing together, Andrew sees Ben disappear for a moment. When he comes back, Ben tells Andrew that he feels like he went into the game. After Ben goes home, Andrew also finds himself pulled into the world of the game.When they meet up after school a couple weeks later, Andrew reveals that a gun from the game came back into reality with him. Andrew and Ben have a big fight over the game and Ben's newfound friendship with their schoolmate Elaine Taylor. Andrew tells Ben that he hates him. This initiates the next stage of the game and Ben is swept into the console. To save Ben, Andrew convinces Elaine to come over, where he explains that Ben is trapped in the game. Playing on her dislike of him, Andrew goads her into shooting him with the game gun.Inside the game, Andrew finds Ben, who explains that the game feeds on hate and that to leave the game, they must advance to the cliff top. Elaine drops into the game with the gun. The others try to take the gun from her, which results in each of them being granted their own gun. A battle ensues with the space demons. They win and find themselves back on the floor of Andrew's room.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gothic_(novel)"title="American Gothic (novel)">
Inspired by the case of real-life serial killer H. H. Holmes, the story follows maniacal surgeon G. Gordon Gregg, who preys on young beautiful women and, luring them into his labyrinthine castle, kills them, thus orchestrating the perfect series of crimes. However, an ambitious Chicago journalist called Crystal (last name never given) becomes suspicious of Gregg, a feeling made much more complicated by her attraction to him and vice versa. Crystal also must balance her own career with that of her fiancé, an insurance agent named Jim Frazer, and her boss Charlie Hogan, who is tolerant and kind and believes Crystal's story. Posing as the niece of one of Gregg's victims, Crystal finds employment with Gregg as his secretary, discovering over time damning clues as to Gregg's true nature. Hogan infiltrates the castle, finding Gregg's laboratory and the horrors within. There, Gregg ambushes him, knocking him unconscious. Meanwhile, Crystal also finds a secret entrance to the cellar and enters it. Gregg attacks Crystal, but she and Charlie Hogan hold him off. Hogan douses Gregg with acid; reeling, Gregg fatally impales himself on a scalpel. After Hogan and Crystal escape, they express feelings for one another, and as the castle burns down, the 1893 World's Fair is brought to its spectacular end.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_White_Car"title="The Little White Car">
In Paris, Veronique has just split up with her boyfriend and is driving home in her "little white car." While passing through a tunnel in central Paris, a large car approaches from behind at high speed. Veronique is determined to not let it pass, and it collides with the back of her car and crashes. Seeing the news next morning, Veronique realizes "Oh shit, I killed the princess". The remainder of the book tells of Veronique's life and loves before the crash, and the subsequent efforts to conceal her involvement.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_of_the_Silver_Hand"title="Otto of the Silver Hand">
The book chronicles the life of Otto, the son of German warlord Baron Conrad. Otto's mother, Baroness Matilda, has died in premature labour, brought on by the sight of the Baron's battle wounds, prompting Conrad to take his newborn son to be raised in a nearby monastery. When Otto reaches the age of eleven his father reclaims him from the gentle monks, taking him back to live in Castle Drachenhausen, ("Dragons' House", in German) the ancestral mountaintop fortress from which this Baron launches his predatory attacks on the countryside. Here Otto learns of and is horrified by his father's life as a robber baron. Otto is particularly appalled by the revelation of how his father killed a defeated enemy, Baron Frederick as he knelt trying to surrender. A rival robber baron, Baron Frederick had been riding with his men-at-arms guarding a column of merchants in return for the tribute they were paying him.Shortly thereafter, Baron Conrad is summoned to the Imperial Court by the Emperor himself, and takes the vast majority of his men-at-arms with him as an impressive escort- but leaves Castle Drachenhausen practically undefended as a result. Seizing his moment, the late Baron Frederick's heir, his nephew Baron Henry, then launches an attack on the now lightly-guarded castle, overcoming the garrison, and burning it to the ground. Capturing Otto, Baron Henry takes him to his own fortress, Castle Trutzdrachen ("Dragon-scorner," in German) and imprisons him in its dungeon. There, Baron Henry tells Otto that he has sworn a solemn oath that any member of Baron Conrad's House who fell into his hands would never be able to strike a blow like the one which killed his uncle, Baron Frederick. Because the boy is so young, instead of killing him the new Baron keeps this oath by cutting off Otto's right hand, and as an afterthought has a healer sent to tend to him. While Otto is feverish from the pain of his wound, he is comforted by Baron Henry's eight-year-old daughter Pauline, who visits him in his cell.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enchanted,_Inc."title="Enchanted, Inc.">
Kathleen "Katie" Chandler has been living and working in New York City for about a year, but is originally from Texas. She has a job under a boss named Mimi, but she hates it. She is offered a mysterious job. When she looks into it, it turns out that she is one of the 1% in the world who are immune to magic, and that the company offering her the job is a magic company called MSI Inc, which stands for Magic, Spells, and Illusions Inc. It soon becomes apparent that the world is in trouble from the evil wizard Phelan Idris and it is up to Katie and her friends to save it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ark_(novel)"title="Ark (novel)">
The events of "Ark" overlap with those of "Flood": in preparation for a flood that will completely submerge the Earth's continents by 2052, the billionaire Nathan Lammockson builds "Ark Three", a gigantic ship that will sail the waters of the drowned Earth. Skeptical of the project's viability, the U.S. government recruits billionaires Edward Kenzie, Patrick Groundwater and Jerzy Glemp to fund the construction of "Ark One" (later renamed "Project Nimrod"'), a generation ship capable of superluminal travel using an Alcubierre warp drive. The plan is to fly "Ark One" to an Earth-like exoplanet and rebuild civilisation on the new world. The nature of "Ark Two" is top secret."Ark One" requires 80 humans, of maximum genetic diversity to prevent inbreeding among their descendants, to be trained from a young age in spaceship maintenance. These "Candidates" include: Holle Groundwater, daughter of Patrick, specialising in life support systems; Zane Glemp, son of Jerzy, specialising in warp drive physics; Kelly Kenzie, daughter of Edward, a natural leader who is named mission commander; and Wilson Argent, a pilot. They train in an Academy in Denver, Colorado, repurposed as the U.S. capital after the flooding of Washington, D.C.Progress on the Ark's construction is slow, so the military takes over the Project. Initial plans to assemble the Ark in space are scrapped in favor of a Project Orion-style nuclear drive which will send the ground-built Ark towards Jupiter. There, it will gather antimatter particles created by gravitational interactions with Io to power the warp drive; in addition, a sunshade will allow its telescopes to conduct spectroscopic analysis of exoplanets in the hopes of discovering the chemical signatures of life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_of_the_Wolves"title="Child of the Wolves">
Granite is born on a snowy April day in Alaska. For the first weeks of his life, he lives in the kennels, playing with his siblings Digger, Cricket, and Nugget. Even though their mother Seppala gets sick, life is good there. His owners, Tim and Kate, take good care of him. Granite differs from the other pups. He is not eager to train to be a sled dog.One day, when the pups are ten-weeks-old, a man shows up to buy Granite and his sister Cricket. Even though Cricket is bought and does not mind going to a new home, Granite does not want to leave his mother and runs away from where he grew up. He runs away into the Alaskan wilderness. After days wandering alone, hungry and injured, the Siberian husky puppy meets a wolf pack, led by a black wolf named Ebony and his mate, Snowdrift the white wolf, whose pups were kidnapped weeks before. She takes Granite in. Snowdrift raises the dog as a foster son and teaches him to hunt mice. That seems to help her get over some pain in losing her pups. It is mentioned that her pups were stolen by humans who wanted to breed young wolves to huskies, for wolfdogs are worth a lot of money.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolutely,_Positively_Not"title="Absolutely, Positively Not">
Steven DeNarsky, a 16-year-old Superman fan, starts to develop sexual feelings for his substitute homeroom teacher, Mr. Bowman. Steven tries to reassure himself by buying such magazines like Playboy and the Victoria's Secret catalog, and dating several attractive girls. Unable to bottle his emotions any longer, he confesses to his friend, Rachel, that he is gay. To his surprise, Rachel and her entire family had previously assumed that Steven was gay, and already waited for him to tell her. Rachel urges Steven to create a gay/lesbian alliance club at their high school, but Steven is not optimistic about completely "coming out of the closet". Steven later does reveal that he is gay to both his parents, who don't think much of it. Steven eventually accepts his homosexuality by attending a teen gay/lesbian club, but mistakenly goes when it is specifically a lesbian meeting. Despite this, he has a good time and decides to embrace his homosexuality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Benedict_Society_and_the_Prisoner's_Dilemma"title="The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma">
In the third installment of the Mysterious Benedict Society series, Reynie, Sticky, Kate, Constance, and various loved ones find themselves holed up in Mr. Benedict's house, which is teeming with security. The evil Mr. Curtain is at large and hunting for the Whisperer—now in Mr. Benedict's possession—so he can control minds from afar. When a shady businessman shows up with false records claiming that he is Constance's father, Mr. Benedict is compelled to use the Whisperer to uncover her short past. Distraught and confused after all is revealed that she is an orphan, Constance runs away, with the whole household after her—just the distraction Mr. Curtain and his men need to steal the Whisperer and set his evil plans into motion. Of course, the rest of the Mysterious Benedict Society soon find themselves on his trail.Soon, Reynie receives messages telling him a code number. He realizes it is a library code number, and Sticky tells them that that book's only copy is located in a library.They find Constance and an apparent clue to where the Whisperer is, but it turns out to be a trap. They are captured by Mr. Curtain. Kate makes several attempts to escape but does not prevail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covering_Islam"title="Covering Islam">
Said postulates that, if knowledge is power, those who control the modern Western media (visual and print) are most powerful because they are able to determine what people like or dislike, what they wear and how they wear it, and what they should know and must not know about themselves.Human intellect enables a person to think, ponder, contemplate and question. Intellect is, according to Islam, what makes a person unique as an individual. A human, by nature, is a rational being, but the western media wants a person to be irrational—in the sense of accepting or agreeing to an idea without verifying, thinking about or questioning it. In other words, says Said, irrationalism means to let one person think and decide for another—to let one person control others.Said refers to the media's ability to control and filter information as an 'invisible screen', releasing what it wants people to know and blacking out what it does not want them to know. In the age of information, Said argues, it is the media that interprets and filters information—and Said claims that the media has determined very selectively what Westerners should and should not know about Islam and the Muslim world. Islam is portrayed as oppressive (women in Hijab); outmoded (hanging, beheading and stoning to death); anti-intellectualist (book burning); restrictive (bans on post- and extramarital affairs, alcohol and gambling); extremist (focusing on Algeria, Lebanon and of course Egypt); backward (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the Sudan); the cause of worldwide conflict (Palestine, Kashmir and Indonesia); and dangerous (Turkey and Iran).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poet_of_Tolstoy_Park"title="The Poet of Tolstoy Park">
The book begins in Nampa, Idaho, with Henry Stuart having just learned that he has one to two years to live because he has non-contagious tuberculosis. Told he will be more comfortable in a warmer climate, Stuart leaves his two grown sons to relocate to Fairhope, Alabama. When he arrives, he finds that the land he has purchased sight unseen hosts only a barn. He decides to build a house, on property he names "Tolstoy Park" in honor of Leo Tolstoy, who had himself become a wandering ascetic in the months before his death. An amateur poet and an eccentric, Stuart sheds his materialism for a life of contemplation, one which extends much longer than Stuart expected.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_a_Merchant_Prince"title="Rise of a Merchant Prince">
Erik von Darkmoor and Rupert Avery (Roo), have returned to Krondor after serving in Calis special unit that was sent down to the continent of Novindus.Erik plans on staying in the army as a corporal in the coming war, and Roo states that he plans on becoming a rich trader. After being pardoned of their crimes by Borric, King of the Kingdom of the Isles, Erik and Roo begin a journey to visit their family in the town of Ravensburg. In an inn along the way, they meet one of Roo's cousins, Duncan, who decides to travel with Roo on the promise of becoming rich.Once in Ravensburg, Erik visits his mother, who faints on the sight of him, as they were told that Erik and Roo were hanged. After a quick explanation, Erik learns from his childhood friend, Rosalyn, that Stefan von Darkmoor, who raped her, is the father of her young child. Roo meets up with his father while buying a wagon, and it is quickly apparent that Roo's father cannot bully him around anymore, and rents out his services as a teamster to Roo.The plot centers primarily on the rise of Roo as an important merchant in Krondor. In the background we see a little of the progression of the war: Erik leaves with a group of special forces to re-infiltrate the den of the Pantathian Serpent Priests, Duke James follows Roo's rise from the sidelines, and steps in from time to time to help.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_(Sutcliff_novel)"title="Simon (Sutcliff novel)">
Apart from 'The Chronicles of Robin Hood,' Sutcliff's three previous novels, The Queen Elizabeth Story, The Armourer's House and Brother Dusty-Feet were aimed at a younger audience and set in the 16th century. 'Simon' shows a significant shift in both tone and subject matter and is generally acknowledged to be the first to feature the mastery of subject and style for which she is now remembered.The story begins in the West Devon town of Torrington, on the eve of the First English Civil War in 1642. The protagonists are Simon Carey, son of a local farmer who supports Parliament and his best friend, Amias Hannaford, son of the Royalist town doctor. The two friends fall out when the war begins; Simon's father goes off to fight for Parliament but orders him to finish school first. Amias joins the Royalist forces in April 1644, while Simon helps a regiment of Parliamentary cavalry escape after their defeat at Lostwithiel in September. With the help of an officer he met then, he joins the New Model Army in early 1645 as a Cornet in the regiment of the Army commander, Sir Thomas Fairfax. His corporal is an Ironside trooper called Zeal-for-the-Lord Relf.The story covers the decisive Parliamentary victory at Naseby in June 1645; when Zeal-for-the-Lord deserts to seek revenge on a former friend, he is flogged and dismissed from the army. The rest of the book covers the final campaign in the West Country; Simon takes part in the July 1645 Battle of Langport, then helps capture a house at Okeham Paine held by the Royalists, where he finds himself fighting against Amias. He is badly wounded and then sent home as a scout to gather information on the Royalist army led by Ralph Hopton; here he meets again with both Amias and Zeal-for-the-Lord, who is now with the Royalists and gives him the information he needs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lump_of_Coal"title="The Lump of Coal">
It is Christmas time. A living lump of coal falls off a barbecue grill. He wishes for a miracle to happen. The lump of coal is artistic and wants to be an artist. He goes in search of something. First, he finds an art gallery that, he believes, shows art by lumps of coal. But when he comes in, he sadly discovers the art is by humans who "use" lumps of coal. He then finds a Korean restaurant called Mr. Wong's Korean Restaurant and Secretarial School, but he goes in and discovers that all things used must be 100% Korean (although the owner does not use a Korean name or proper Korean spices). The lump of coal continues down the street and runs into a man dressed like Santa Claus. The lump of coal tells the man about his problem, and the man gets an idea. He suggests he put the lump of coal in Jasper (his bratty son)'s stocking. The son finds it and is ecstatic; he has wanted to make art with coal. So he makes portraits and he and the lump of coal become rich. They move to Korea and open an authentic Korean restaurant, and have a gallery of their art.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inferior"title="The Inferior">
Stopmouth is a member of the Human tribe, which is on the verge of extinction. There is a vast variety of different species of sentient creatures, all of whom either have made alliances with the humans, or hunt them as a source of food. In return, in order to survive in this barbaric world, the humans hunt other species and "trade flesh", a tradition that has the humans trade the weakest and most useless members of their tribe to other species as a source of food. In the book, this is known as "volunteering", and it is considered shameful to attempt to resist being volunteered for the good of your tribe.Stopmouth himself (who is said to be around 5,000 days old, around 13 years old) is constantly overlooked and overshadowed because of both his stuttering speech impediment and his more popular brother, Wallbreaker.One day Stopmouth meets a woman named Indrani. Indrani fell from the sky when one of the mysterious globes that fly across the 'Roof' (the Human tribe's name for the sky, basically) explodes, and she is expelled from it. Indrani seems to be more civilized than Stopmouth's tribe, and is disdainful of them. The Human tribe believes her to be 'slow', or stupid, because she cannot speak their language, and their experience has been that there is only one Human tribe. She was going to be volunteered, but Wallbreaker took her as a wife (partly because of her beauty, and partly because one's status is raised when one has more than one wife), protecting her from being traded.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_a_Girl_(novel)"title="Story of a Girl (novel)">
The story centers around Deanna Lambert, a 16-year-old girl troubled by social exile and branding rumors. When she was thirteen, her father caught her and her brother's friend, seventeen year old Tommy Webber, having unprotected sex in the back of Tommy's Buick. Word gets around by Tommy, and Deanna is named the 'school slut'. Her father becomes distant and cold towards her, never showing any affection after what he witnessed.Three years later, Deanna still lives in her small hometown of Pacifica, California. Her affair with Tommy Webber is still a popular gossip topic and her older brother, Darren, and his girlfriend, Stacy, now live in their basement with their child, April. Keeping a fantasy of moving out of the house with Darren, April and Stacy in her mind and coming to a happy home, Deanna gets a summer job at a ratty pizza parlor, Picasso's Pizza, while also dealing with inhibited feelings of affection for her best friend, Jason, who is dating her other friend, Lee.As the summer progresses, Deanna's secret love of Jason deepens. She begins to become more and more envious of Lee, especially of Lee's happy home and inner peace. One day, Deanna finds that Stacy fled the house, leaving April behind, and does not return. At the same time, she develops a friendship with her boss at Picasso's, Michael, while working alongside Tommy Webber. One evening, Michael gives Deanna a ride home from work and Deanna's father grows suspicious of Michael's motives. Deanna then lashes out at her father for never again trusting her after he caught Deanna and Tommy in the car, which causes her father to temporarily leave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Kitchener_in_the_Soudan"title="With Kitchener in the Soudan">
Gregory Hilliard Hartley is a young man, brother to the heir of an English estate. When he marries a young lady lower on the social ladder than his father wished, he is expelled from his father's house. He soon travels to Egypt, due to his knowledge of Arabic, and obtains employment with a merchant firm. When the Dervishes attack and destroy his employer's warehouse, he joins the army under Hicks Pasha as an interpreter. The expedition is destroyed, and no news is heard of Gregory.His wife lives in Cairo, uncertain of his fate. Years pass, and she brings up their young son, also named Gregory, and ensures that he is taught several native languages. When she dies, Gregory is left alone in the world, with a small bank account and a mysterious tin box only to be opened when he is certain of his father's death.Gregory obtains a position as interpreter in the expedition under Lord Kitchener which is advancing into the Soudan to attack the Dervish forces. He endures many hardships and dangers in the great campaign, and gains high distinction, while continuing his search for his father. Soon, a discovery leads him to a clue, and the tin box, once opened, reveals a surprising discovery about his true identity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coco_and_Igor"title="Coco and Igor">
Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" has its Paris premiere on 29 May 1913. Coco is mesmerised by the power of Igor's composition, but the audience is scandalised by its discordant, rhythmic music and Nijinsky's primitive choreography.Coco finally meets Igor seven years later, at a dinner hosted by Sergei Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballets Russes. Igor has been forced to flee Russia – with his wife and four children – following the Russian Revolution. Coco invites him to bring his family to stay with her at her villa in Garches – 'Bel Respiro'."Couturière" and composer soon begin an affair. Both experience a surge of creativity; while Coco creates Chanel No. 5 (with perfumer Ernest Beaux), Igor's compositions display a new, liberated style. But Igor's wife, Katerina, becomes ill with consumption and an unbearable tension takes hold of 'Bel Respiro' and its occupants.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven_and_Earth_(book)"title="Heaven and Earth (book)">
In the book, Plimer likens the concept of human-induced climate change to creationism and claims that it is a "fundamentalist religion adopted by urban atheists looking to fill a yawning spiritual gap plaguing the West". Environmental groups are claimed to have filled this gap by having a romantic view of a less developed past. The book is critical of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which he claims has allowed "little or no geological, archeological or historical input" in its analyses. If it had, the book asserts, the IPCC would know cold times lead to dwindling populations, social disruption, extinction, disease and catastrophic droughts, while warm times lead to life blossoming and economic booms – suggesting that global warming, whether or not caused by humans, should be welcomed.The book is critical of political efforts to address climate change and argues that extreme environmental changes are inevitable and unavoidable. Meteorologists have a huge amount to gain from climate change research, the book claims, and they have narrowed the climate change debate to the atmosphere, whereas the truth is more complex. Money would be better directed to dealing with problems as they occur rather than making expensive and futile attempts to prevent climate change.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Summoning_(novel)"title="The Summoning (novel)">
Chloe Saunders believes things are finally starting to go right in her life – a boy asks her about the dance, Chloe gets on the directors list for a short, she finally gets her period at age 15, dyes her hair red so she could actually look her age, and commits her first crime. Little did she know, her entire world was about to turn upside down. After an incident at school, the label 'schizophrenic' is slapped on Chloe and she's shipped away to the dreadful Lyle group home for the 'crazies.' There, Chloe meets the jealous Tori, antisocial Derek, hottie Simon, Peter, and her two friends (Rae and Liz) – and realizes that not everything is as it seems.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dæmonomania"title="Dæmonomania">
In an introductory chapter (chronologically taking place mid-way through the novel's plot), Pierce Moffett takes a bus ride from the Blackberry Jambs to New York City, reflecting on his relationship with Rose Ryder. While Pierce left his Catholic faith in adolescence, Rose is ardently pursuing her faith in the Powerhouse Christian sect.In the Renaissance, John Dee and Edward Kelley again contact the angel, Madimi, who in previous volumes, first commanded their wandering. The treatments he prepared to grant the Emperor fertility have also failed, and the court grown paranoid, hiring spies who may be watching Dee. Dee arranges for the man accused of being a werewolf, Jan, to seek passage to the New World with Dee as he leaves Prague. He leaves Kelley behind, who on telling the Emperor of his supposed Irish nobility, is Knighted. Dee is further shocked when Kelley tells him and the court that all their alchemical practices were all derived from Kelley's own intuition, and not occult means. In an effort to lighten the load of their ship off the Continent, Dee spills the gold on the ground, much of which has somehow decayed and stinks. He finally returns to England (narrowly missing the premiere of Marlowe's "Faustus"), and remains destitute for some time, until finally finding a wardenship at Manchester College. In the face of growing persecution, he refuses to harm Catholics, and treats those accused of demonic possession with caution, but kindness. He eventually hears word that Kelley has died, and in fear at his own growing reputation as a wizard, retires from public life, gaining money only by selling his books.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Snowman_(Nesbø_novel)"title="The Snowman (Nesbø novel)">
In 1980, a married woman has illicit sex with a lover while her adolescent son waits in a car outside; their lovemaking is disturbed when they think somebody is looking at them from outside the window, which turns out to have been only a tall snowman. Twenty-four years later, Norwegian police inspector Harry Hole investigates a string of murders of women around Oslo. His FBI training leads him to search for links between the cases, and he finds two of them—each victim is a married mother and a snowman appears at every murder scene.Looking through cold cases, Hole realises that he is tracking Norway's earliest known serial killer. Most of the victims vanished after the first snowfall of winter, and snowmen were found near each scene. Further digging leads Hole and his team, including newcomer Katrine Bratt, to suspect that paternity issues with the children of the victims may be a motive for the murders. They discover that all of the victims' children have different biological fathers from the men they believe to be their father. Following DNA testing, results lead the investigation down a few wrong turns and several suspects are eliminated from the inquiry.Within a short time, Hole and Bratt are romantically drawn together, although Hole does not pursue her overture. Hole sees her as a kindred spirit and a brilliant, dedicated detective in her own right. However, suspicion falls on Bratt being the killer after she attempts to frame one of the prime suspects. Hole chases her across Norway and catches up with her at a previously discovered murder site. She is apprehended and committed to a psychiatric unit. Hole's superiors, concerned that Bratt's arrest for the murders will damage their reputation, suggest putting Hole forward as a scapegoat for the press. Harry's superior, Gunnar Hagen, intervenes and offers himself as scapegoat in Harry's stead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_Rose_(novel)"title="Winter Rose (novel)">
When Rois Melior, the wild daughter of a widowed father, first sees Corbet Lynn step from the woods, she is attracted to him despite a sense that he is not what he appears to be. As he rebuilds his family's decaying estate, Rois and her sister Laurel both befriend and eventually fall in love with Corbet. The seasons progress as calm, sensible Laurel begins to change, forgetting her earlier betrothal and becoming obsessed with Corbet.In the winter, Corbet mysteriously disappears and Laurel begins to waste away, much like her mother did. The town believes that the curse that Corbet's grandfather laid upon his descendants has claimed him. Only Rois, who has been able to slip in and out of the woods since she was a child, is able to chase after Corbet and save him and her sister. But the power of the fey is a tricky magic, and even as Rois untangles him from his past, she is in constant danger of being ensnared herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Putt"title="The Million Dollar Putt">
Edward Bogard ("Bogie" for short) is a 13-year-old blind boy who lives in Hawaii with his widowed father. Though blind, he rides a bike, parasails, and plays guitar. When he decides to take up golf he has to enlist the aid of his neighbor, a young girl named Birdie. As their friendship develops, it turns out that Bogie also has the driving touch of a professional golfer. Someone anonymously enters him into a golf tournament and the two join forces to try to win the million
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Much_Happiness"title="Too Much Happiness">
There are 10 stories in total: "Dimensions", "Fiction", "Wenlock Edge", "Deep-Holes", "Free Radicals", "Face", "Some Women", "Child's Play", "Wood", and the titular story. "Dimensions" focuses on a young girl, Doree, and her relationship with an abusive older man, Lloyd."Fiction" focuses on a woman, Joyce, and her grappling with changing relationships."Wenlock Edge" focuses on an unnamed protagonist, who is coerced into an unwelcome sexual experience."Deep-Holes" focuses on Sally, whose son lives a monastic lifestyle after a traumatic experience."Free Radicals" focuses on Nita, an elderly woman who has to deal with a home intruder."Face" focuses on a boy with a birthmark across his face."Some Women" focuses on the carer of an ill man."Child's Play" focuses on two girls at their summer camp."Wood" focuses on Roy, who obsesses over wood-cutting.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramage_and_the_Drumbeat"title="Ramage and the Drumbeat">
The book follows Lieutenant Nicholas Lord Ramage and his experiences commanding the cutter HMS "Kathleen". Dispatched by Commodore Horatio Nelson to carry messages to Gibraltar while transporting the Italians refugees rescued in "Ramage". During the voyage, the Marchesa and Ramage exchange rings through a faked shooting competition. Soon the "Kathleen" encounters the crippled Spanish frigate, "La Sabina". Deciding that it would be imprudent to leave the hulk drifting at sea, he forces the ship to surrender to his far inferior armed ship by demonstrating that he has the means to blow the stern off the immobile ship. He takes "La Sabina" in tow.Soon after, two British frigates encounter "Kathleen" and remove the prisoners from the hulk in tow. The captain of one of the ships also takes charge of the Marchesa, to the great reluctance of Ramage and herself. Soon after, Ramage and the hulk drift into a Spanish fleet returning to the port of Cartagena, Spain. Though "Kathleen" is captured, Ramage, with the help of Jackson, passes himself off as an American sailor pressed by the British, and receives liberty from the Spanish. While in Cartagena (with other foreign and non-foreign refugees from "Kathleen" who had fake Protections) Ramage spies on the Spanish admiral José de Córdoba, stealing several official documents from his house. From these Ramage learns that the Spanish fleet will soon sail for the Atlantic. Realizing the danger of the situation, he steals a xebec and returns to Gibraltar, where he finds the recaptured "Kathleen". The Commissioner of the port then sends Ramage to find Sir John Jervis and warn him of the battle. After a squall, he encounters the fleet, which quickly proceeds to Cape St. Vincent where they fight the Spanish fleet on 14 February 1797, "Kathleen" acting as a support ship for Lord Nelson. Entangled in the battle, Ramage and "Kathleen" become integral in the fouling of aboard "San Jose", allowing Nelson in to come into battle. The British fleet is victorious, capturing four ships, and Ramage nearly dies from a wound which knocks him into the sea. However, he is rescued by several of his sailors, but gains no credit for his role in the battle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_in_Stone_(novel)"title="Set in Stone (novel)">
Samuel Godwin, an aspiring artist, is forced to drop out of art school following his father's death. Without any qualifications, he contemplates what to do for work. Wealthy businessman Ernest Farrow advertises for an art tutor for his two daughters, and Godwin successfully applies for the position.He moves into Farrow's mansion, Fourwinds, with adequate time to pursue his own art. Godwin becomes infatuated with Farrow's youngest daughter, Marianne, but questions remain unanswered. Marianne wanders the grounds at night, while her sister, Juliana, is always quiet and sad. Godwin discovers the previous art tutor, a talented sculptor, was sent away from Fourwinds before he finished his masterpiece.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Assignment_(novella)"title="The Assignment (novella)">
Tina von Lambert, wife of psychiatrist Otto von Lambert, has fled to an unnamed North African country (referred to as M.), where she is found raped and murdered in the desert. Otto hires F., a filmmaker, to travel to M. and reconstruct his wife's murder. The Chief of Police appears to be cooperative, however, after a police-escorted visit to the Al-Hakim ruins where the body was found, F.'s cameraman reveals that his footage has been replaced. The police then allow F. to question a number of foreign agents being held and tortured at the police ministry, all of whom tell her the same vague, inconclusive story, none confessing to the crime. Later, F. is taken to observe the execution of a Scandinavian spy in the central courtyard of the police compound; the Chief of Police claims that the spy has confessed to the crime and that the case is solved. They are shown the video of their investigation, which includes none of their footage; instead it has been turned into a propaganda film featuring the police. In despair, F. leaves her crew and walks alone through the marketplace, where she comes across the distinctive red fur coat she knows belonged to Tina von Lambert. She purchases the coat and wears it back to her hotel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_(book)"title="Columbine (book)">
"Columbine" has two main storylines, told in alternating chapters: the 'before' story of the killers' evolution toward murder, and the 'after' story of the survivors. There are shorter 'during' accounts, describing the attack itself, dispersed throughout the book. Formally composed of 53 chapters divided into five parts, the book also includes a timeline, 26 pages of detailed endnotes, and a fifteen-page bibliography organized into topics.The 'before' story focuses primarily on the killers' high school years preceding the massacre. According to the experts cited on the book, Eric Harris was a textbook psychopath, and Dylan Klebold was an angry depressive.The 'after' story is composed of eight major sub-stories, focused on individuals who played a key role in the aftermath of the attack, including Columbine Principal Frank DeAngelis, alleged Christian martyr Cassie Bernall (another myth, according to the book), "the boy in the window", Patrick Ireland, FBI Supervisory Special Agent Dwayne Fuselier, and the families of victim Daniel Rohrbough and teacher Dave Sanders, who died saving students from the gunmen. The Evangelical Christian community's feverish response to the alleged "martyrdom" issue is also chronicled."Columbine" begins four days before the massacre, at a school assembly hosted by Principal DeAngelis just before Prom weekend. Scenes from the massacre are graphically depicted in the early chapters, and later through flashbacks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Is_My_Beat"title="Manhattan Is My Beat">
Rune is a street-wise twenty-year-old, not long arrived in New York City, but she's already found herself a squat in an empty loft. She's also landed a job in a video store, Washington Square Video, that lets her pursue her interest in old movies; it's also where she meets Mr. Kelly, a lonely old man who rents the same tape over and over: a crime film based on a true story called Manhattan Is My Beat.When Rune goes to visit him for a routine tape collection and finds him dead, the police suspect a robbery. However, Rune is convinced that the true answer to the mystery lies with the tape of "Manhattan Is My Beat". This conviction draws her into a dangerous adventure against those who will stop at nothing to hide the truth and don't believe in Hollywood endings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon's_Lexicon"title="The Demon's Lexicon">
The story follows two brothers with a sordid past, Nick and Alan Ryves, who fight demons and monsters. They are on the run from a magician, from whom their mother supposedly stole an amulet, when they meet Mae and Jamie, troubled teenagers who come to them for help. Throughout the book they face horror, evil and people who just generally want to kill them, while long kept secrets are threatening to unravel. In the lore of the book, humans can either be born with magical powers, or can make pacts with demons who will grant them power or use their own magic. Very early on, Mae expresses the thought that she may have once had magical powers, but that they went away. Nick chastises her for this, saying that if you have magical powers, they never leave you.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1Q84"title="1Q84">
The events of "1Q84" take place in Tokyo during a fictionalized year of 1984, with the first volume set between April and June, the second between July and September, and the third between October and December.The book opens with a woman named as she rides a taxi to a work assignment. She hears the "Sinfonietta" by Leoš Janáček playing on the radio and immediately recognizes it, somehow having detailed knowledge of its history and context. When the taxi gets stuck in a traffic jam on the Shibuya Route of the Shuto Expressway, the driver suggests she climb down an emergency escape to reach her meeting, warning her that it might change the very nature of reality. Aomame follows the driver's advice. Eventually, Aomame makes her way to a hotel in Shibuya and poses as an attendant in order to kill a guest. She performs the murder with an ice pick that leaves no trace on its victim. It is revealed that Aomame's job is to kill men who have committed domestic violence.Aomame starts to notice new details about the world that are subtly different. For instance, she notices police officers carrying semi-automatic pistols, having previously carried revolvers. Aomame checks the archives of major newspapers and finds several recent news stories of which she has no recollection. One of these concerns a group of extremists who had a stand-off with police in the mountains of Yamanashi. She concludes she must be living in an alternative reality, which she calls "1Q84," and suspects she entered it upon hearing the "Sinfonietta".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_Drum"title="The Ghost Drum">
The novel is represented as a tale told by the "most learned of all cats". At the beginning and at the head of each chapter, the cat introduces the scenes and the characters. At the end, the cat asks the hearer/reader to pass on the tale so that it may "make its own way back to me, riding on another's tongue."A slave woman gives her new-born daughter to an old witch to be raised as a "Woman of Power". The witch teaches the girl, Chingis, all her arcane wisdom, including the use of the shamanic ghost drum. With the drum she can enter many other worlds including the ghost-world, the land of the dead. When Chingis's apprenticeship is complete, witches come from all around to congratulate her, but the shaman Kuzma envies and fears her potential for greatness.The Czar Guidon, the latest in a long line of ruthless rulers, has married by the counsel of his advisers, but he is deathly afraid of being overthrown by his son. He imprisons his pregnant wife, Farida, in a windowless room at the top of the tallest tower in the palace, and when she dies in childbirth he orders that his son, the Czarevich Safa, should never leave the room. Marien, Safa's nurse, raises him there. When he becomes restless at his imprisonment, she dares to speak to the Czar about him and is summarily executed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devious_(novel)"title="Devious (novel)">
It's January, and a new semester at Waverly Academy means one thing: new students. Make those hot new students! A gorgeous brother-and-sister pair is hooking up and taking Waverly by storm, and the campus is abuzz with fresh gossip and even fresher crushes. But while all the girls are busy drooling over the new it guy, they'd better watch their backs-because his sister is going to give them all a run for their money. After all, there can only be the one It Girl.It's January and everyone is back from break. Waverly gets a new dean, Dr. Dresden, and two new students, Isla and Isaac Dresden. Instead of a new semester commencing, Jan Plan takes effect. It is a four-week course where students work on their own independent projects. Juniors and Seniors tend to work on solo projects while everyone else are encouraged to work together.With permission from the dean (via help from Issac) Jenny starts an independent art project based on the two art classes she took the previous semester. Her goal is to experiment with motion, drawing people instead of taking a picture of them with a manual camera. She spends most of her time in the cafe drawing people coming and going.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Alex_Cross"title="I, Alex Cross">
Detective Alex Cross is enjoying a birthday party with his family when he receives a call from his bosses informing him that Caroline, the 24-year-old only daughter of his late brother Blake, has been found murdered in Virginia. Cross and his girlfriend Briana Stone rush to Richmond, Virginia, and are shocked to discover that Caroline's body was found dismembered (most likely by a wood chipper) in the trunk of a car driven by someone with connections to organized crime.Cross takes the case and one of his first stops is Caroline's apartment. Cross is shocked to discover she only lived a few miles from him and yet never contacted him. He is further shocked to discover that based on the apartment's locale and the extensive lingerie wardrobe inside, Caroline was a high-end escort. Further investigation reveals that several other young people with connections to high-end prostitution have also either been murdered or disappeared under suspicious circumstances and that Caroline's escorting activities took her to a secretive club in Culpeper, Virginia, called Blacksmith Farms, where she may have met an ultra-secretive masked character named Zeus.During the course of his investigation, Cross is thwarted by various people in Washington, D.C.—including the Secret Service and the President of the United States—who all want Cross to hand over his investigation to them. Cross refuses and is almost forced to give up his investigative efforts when his old FBI friend Ned Mahoney recommends Cross follow up on a lead provided by a country farmer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pippi_Longstocking_(novel)"title="Pippi Longstocking (novel)">
The book focuses on the experiences of Pippi Långstrump, a nine-year-old pigtailed redhead whose mother died when she was a baby and her father, a sea captain, has seemingly vanished at sea, so she moves into a big house known as Villa Villekulla, located in a little Swedish village, with her pet monkey Mr. Nilsson, a suitcase filled with pieces of gold, and her unnamed pet horse. Gifted with superhuman strength and countless other eccentricities, Pippi is soon befriended by two local siblings named Annika and Tommy Settergren, who admire her and enjoy her company. Having spent her entire life at sea, Pippi's limited knowledge of common courtesy and average childhood behaviour adds humour to the story when she attempts to enroll at Tommy and Annika's school, attends a circus, and attends a coffee party hosted by Mrs. Settergren.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_and_the_Wrinklies"title="Harry and the Wrinklies">
When Harry's parents die in an unexplained accident, Harry has to go and live with his seemingly eccentric Great-Aunts. He's anxious about living with elderly relatives, but relieved to escape his cruel nanny, whom he nicknamed Gestapo Lil. He soon realises that the ancient aunts aren't as doddering as he first thought. When he finds out their secret, he likens them to Robin Hood and his Merry Men. However beastly Priestly, their next door neighbour is sneaking round Lagg Hall, making trouble. When he turns up with his new fiancée, Gestapo Lil, it is time for the Wrinklies to take action, along with their newest recruit, Harry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Show_of_Evil"title="Show of Evil">
Ten years after saving Aaron Stampler from the death penalty, Martin Vail — now a district attorney — is plagued by his client-turned-nemesis once again when a series of murder victims turn up with mysterious ties to the erstwhile serial killer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_in_Hell_(novel)"title="Reign in Hell (novel)">
Martin Vail, now a United States Attorney, is assigned a case in which he must go up against a survivalist militia — and unexpectedly encounters his nemesis, Aaron Stampler, seemingly back from the dead and posing as a blind Baptist preacher.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown's_Requiem_(novel)"title="Brown's Requiem (novel)">
German-American Los Angeles-based detective Fritz Brown is hired by the mysterious caddie Fat Dog Baker, who wants him to spy on his sister Jane and her benefactor, the much older businessman Sol Kupferman. Brown recognizes Kupferman as a man he had seen at the Club Utopia before it was burned down some years before. Brown suspects Fat Dog of being an arsonist and discovers that Kupferman owned Club Utopia through a proxy. Brown, thinking there might be a connection between the two men, decides to look for Fat Dog, who has disappeared and force him to confess but finds him dead in Mexico instead. He has been killed by Richard Ralston, with whom Fat Dog had started an illegal trade in social welfare benefits. Ralston failed to find a notebook where Fat Dog had meticulously noted their illegal transactions. Brown finds it and learns how Fat Dog, apart from the Utopia arson, had burned the houses where he had lived as foster child with his sister. Kupferman is their father, while their mother Louisa was a woman of the upper class who was forbidden from having anything to do with him because he was Jewish. To avoid scandal after Louisa's suicide, Kupferman gave the children to foster parents and bribed a corrupt officer, Haywood Cathcart, for buying his silence about the matter. Brown, who in the meantime has developed a crush on Jane, finds Cathcart out and kills him after making him confess his crimes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Draft_(novel)"title="Final Draft (novel)">
The story of the novel begins several hours after the end of "Rough Draft", after Kirill Maximov, a regular man who was turned into a functional, escapes from Arkan (or Earth 1), fights his friend and curator of our world (Earth 2 or Demos) Kotya, and kills his midwife-functional Natalia Ivanova.It turns out that the life of an ex-functional after abandoning his function is not safe at all. Especially for a special functional like Kirill.Kirill takes a train to Kharkiv to find his Nirvana (Earth 22) "neighbor" Vasilisa, another customs officer-functional. However, the train is intercepted in Oryol by Arkan's security forces. Kirill is able to escape them and make it to Kharkiv by hitchhiking. Unfortunately, the Arkanians are somehow able to track him, so Vasilisa convinces Kirill to attempt a desperate move — a twenty-kilometer trek through the lifeless frozen world of Janus (Earth 14) during a snow storm.Barely making it to another tower, that of the customs officer-functional Martha, Kirill gets to the Polish city of Elbląg. He is caught by three police officers-functionals, but he is rescued by his friend Kotya, who opens a portal to his Tibetan residence (or rather, the residence of the current curator). Kirill, Kotya, and Kotya's girlfriend Illan (an ex-functional from Veroz, Earth 3) come up with a plan for freeing our Earth from Arkan influence, although Kirill begins to suspect that Arkan may not be the true puppet master behind the functionals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strain"title="The Strain">
A Boeing 777 arrives at John F. Kennedy International Airport and is taxiing its way across the tarmac when it suddenly stops. All window shades are closed except one, the lights are out, and communication channels have gone silent. An alert is sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Ephraim "Eph" Goodweather, head of the CDC's Canary Project, a rapid-response team that handles biological threats, is sent to investigate. Goodweather and Dr. Nora Martinez board the plane, finding everyone except four people dead.In a pawnshop in Spanish Harlem, former history professor and Holocaust survivor Abraham Setrakian knows something terrible has happened and that an unnatural war is brewing. So begins a battle of mammoth proportions as the vampiric virus that has infected the passengers begins spilling out onto New York City's streets. Dr. Goodweather, who is joined by Setrakian and a small band of fighters, desperately tries to stop the contagion to save the city, and also his wife and son.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Grinch_Stole_Christmas!"title="How the Grinch Stole Christmas!">
The Grinch is a grouchy, solitary creature with a heart "two sizes too small." He resides in a cave on a steep mountain north of Whoville, home of the cheerful and warmhearted Whos. Having been annoyed by Whoville's noisy Christmas festivities for fifty-three years, the Grinch resolves to stop Christmas from coming. He disguises himself as Santa Claus and travels to Whoville on a sleigh pulled by his dog, Max. The Grinch slides down the chimney of the first house on the square and steals all the presents, the food for the feast, and the Christmas tree. He is briefly interrupted in his burglary by Cindy Lou Who, a young Who girl, but concocts a crafty lie to help his escape. After doing the same to the other houses, the Grinch takes his sleigh to the top of Mount Crumpit and prepares to dump all of the stolen belongings into the abyss. As dawn breaks, he expects to hear the Whos crying, but is shocked to hear them singing a joyous Christmas song instead. After much deliberation, the Grinch comes to realize that Christmas "means a little bit more" than just presents and feasting, causing his shrunken heart to grow three sizes larger. The reformed Grinch returns the Whos' presents and food, and is allowed to take part in their Christmas feast.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_Confused"title="Born Confused">
Seventeen-year-old Dimple is too American in India, and yet struggling to conform in America. She and her blonde, blue-eyed best friend Gwyn share "outsider status" as "the rich little girl who lived like an orphan and the brown little girl who existed as if she were still umbilically attached to her parents." Both resisting and ultimately embracing her family's culture and traditions, Dimple navigates suitable/unsuitable boy Karsh Kapoor, her interest in photography, and "a number of tricky situations."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Across_the_Universe_(Star_Trek)"title="Across the Universe (Star Trek)">
The "Enterprise" encounters the ancient colony ship 'Hawking'. Due to the relativistic effects of time travel, the crew and passengers have only aged a few decades while two hundred years have passed since they have launched. The crew of the Enterprise find difficulty dealing with these people from the past. The Hawking colonists are distrustful, somewhat paranoid and the ship itself hides a weapon of mass destruction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Danced_at_Dawn"title="The General Danced at Dawn">
Monsoon Selection Board: Corporal Dand MacNeill seeks to become an officer, and is examined by an officer selection board in India during the final part of World War II. Despite performing every task badly, often trying to answer cleverly and failing miserably, he is approved and commissioned due to his apparent dogged determination to complete the assault course. He perseveres in his futile attempts to cross a mud filled ditch, although the examining officers advise him to 'call it a day' and climb out. In reality he was unwilling to finish or turn back, as he had lost his trousers while floundering in the mud, and had resolved to stay in the water to avoid embarrassment.Silence in the Ranks: Subaltern MacNeill joins an unidentified Highland regiment as a platoon commander, and finds it difficult to conform to the regiment's family atmosphere and to identify with the men he commands. Due to missing a mess meeting he is assigned as Duty Officer and must remain in barracks during Hogmanay (New Year's Eve), while the other officers celebrate by invitation in the Sergeants Mess. To his surprise, he is joined in his quarters by some soldiers of his platoon for drinks, song, and conversation. At the close of the evening, he learns that 'Darkie', of whom he has heard his men talk, is in fact his own affectionate nickname.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_Pony_(novel)"title="Pit Pony (novel)">
In "Pit Pony", Barkhouse describes life in a coal-mining town in turn-of-the-century Cape Breton and also deals with the importance of education. It is the story of Willie and Gem, a pit pony. Willie is an eleven-year-old boy forced by family circumstances to work as a trapper in a Cape Breton coal mine, and Gem is a Sable Island mare working as a pit pony. As they work together, a strong bond develops between boy and horse.The book describes the grim realities of life for a young miner – cold, exhaustion, fear – discomforts and dangers that also affected the horses. When Willie and Gem are trapped in the mine during a "bump" – with falling rock and timber, and choking dust – Willie must choose between escaping with Gem or saving the life of another young miner. Willie's choice to save the young miner's life over Gem's life sets Willie free – free to leave the mines and to pursue his education. As it turns out, however, Gem had been pregnant, and her foal is saved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_Mommy_Goodbye"title="Kiss Mommy Goodbye">
This novel concerns kidnappings by parents who did not get custody of their children. Donna Cressy loves her husband Victor but the love soon turns to hate when Victor starts mentally harassing her. This causes her to behave oddly owing to her trauma, and during the divorce proceedings a number of people testify that she had behaved unusually since she married Victor. However, she manages to get custody of their children Adam and Sharon. Victor is allowed weekend visits.Donna moves in with her boyfriend Dr. Segal and his daughter Annie. One day Victor arrives and on the pretext of a weekend visit, he takes Adam and Sharon away. Donna spirals into depression and begins to behave oddly again. Just when she's given up hope, she gets a telephone call from Victor, which she traces to California. When she finally finds the children, Victor almost kills them. However, with the help of Dr. Segal, she is able to get her children back and survive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_(novel)"title="Click (novel)">
George G. Keane, or "Gee", was a photographer who travelled around the world taking pictures. In Gee's will he leaves his granddaughter, Margaret, a box containing seven lettered boxes and a message stating "throw them all back". Each lettered box contains a shell. She discovers that each letter on each box represents the continent that the shell came from, and that her grandfather intended for her to put them back where they came from over her lifetime. This is a gift that will last Maggie's whole life. Meanwhile, Jason, Margaret's brother, is left with a camera and uses it to construct multiple photo albums, one of which consisted of a girl doing ordinary things throughout the day while holding a large piece of glass. The last chapter of the book depicts an elderly Margaret living in the future with her great-niece, watching a documentary about her grandfather, her brother, and herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertion_(novel)"title="Desertion (novel)">
The novel is narrated by Rashid in all but one of the ten chapters, which exception is drawn from the notebooks of his brother Amin. Rashid is the youngest child of teaching parents: he is two years younger than Amin, who is in turn two years younger than Farida, their sister. The children are brought up in Zanzibar late in 1950s, during a time of heady transition from colonialism to independence.Rashid spins two tales: one is in part his own, and largely contingent on the other, set some fifty years thence on the outskirts of a small town in colonial Kenya, along the east African coast north of Mombasa, when early one morning in 1899 an Englishman stumbles out of the desert and collapses before a local shopkeeper outside his mosque. The latter, Hassanali, takes him back home and, amidst the considerable kerfuffle, and with some help from family and local professionals, begins nursing the man back to health.Hassanali is a nervous, superstitious, cowardly man. On first being approached by the almost lifeless Pearce, he mistakes him for a ghoulish genie come to spirit his soul away.Before long, an English district officer, one Frederick Turner, arrives on the scene. He accuses Hassanali of having stolen whatever goods the Englishman brought with him, and promptly conveys him back to the residency. The traveller's name, as it turns out, is Martin Pearce, a man of liberal thought and broad linguistic knowledge, and something of an "Orientalist". During his convalescence with Turner, he begins quickly to feel guilty about the harsh treatment and false accusations levelled at his original saviours, for he genuinely arrived with almost nothing but the clothes on his back: the only item he seems to have lost is his notebook. On visiting the shopkeeper to apologise, he sees Rehana, Hassanali's sister, and falls for her immediately.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Physick_Book_of_Deliverance_Dane"title="The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane">
Harvard graduate student Connie Goodwin needs to spend her summer doing research for her doctoral dissertation. But when her mother asks her to handle the sale of Connie’s grandmother’s abandoned home near Salem, she can’t refuse. As Connie is drawn deeper into the mysteries of the family house, she discovers an ancient key within a seventeenth-century Bible. The key contains a yellowing fragment of parchment with a name written upon it: Deliverance (Hazeltine) Dane. This discovery launches Connie on a quest— to find out who this woman was and to unearth a rare artifact of singular power: a physick book, its pages a secret repository for lost knowledge.As she begins to discover the pieces of Deliverance’s harrowing story, Connie is haunted by visions of the long-ago witch trials. She begins to fear that she is more tied to Salem’s dark past than she could have ever imagined.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sower_(novel)"title="The Sower (novel)">
Oil worker Bill Soileau is a reckless hedonist based in San Francisco and well acquainted with the city's notorious sexual underground. He long ago contracted HIV but seems unconcerned about exposing his partners.On assignment at what appears to be an oil refinery abandoned by Soviet occupiers in a remote part of modern-day Armenia, Soileau meet Dr. Quif Melikian. She's conducting a health safety inspection of the plant and has discovered a hidden laboratory.An accident in the mysterious lab infects Bill with a manmade virus, later identified as a mutated form of phage. It instantly cures Bill's HIV, unbeknownst to anyone. Eventually the doctor and oil worker discover the existence of the phage and learn it's a type of miraculous retrovirus that rewrites diseased cells back to their original configurations, a potential cure for all diseases.The two also learn the phage cure can only be passed to others via sex. This sets in motion a plot to destroy or control the phage and Bill Soileau.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colline"title="Colline">
A wild boar enters a village by the Lure mountain range. The villagers try to kill the boar but it manages to escape.The local spring goes dry which causes unrest. At the same time, the bedridden, paralysed village elder Janet begins to speak incomprehensibly. Other misfortunes follow, including a devastating forest fire, and the villagers begin to suspect that Janet is the source of the problems. In hope that it will end the misfortunes, the villagers agree that they should kill Janet. Just before they kill him, though, he dies of natural causes.The boar once again enters the village. This time the villagers succeed in killing it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardiente_paciencia"title="Ardiente paciencia">
The story opens in June, 1969 in the little village of Isla Negra, on the coast of Chile.Mario Jiménez, a timid teenager, rejects the profession of his father, a fisherman, and instead takes a job as the local postman. Despite the entire village being illiterate, he does have one local to deliver to—the poet, Pablo Neruda, who is living in exile. Mario worships Neruda as a hero and buys a volume of his poetry, timidly waiting for the moment to have it autographed.After some time, Mario garners enough courage to strike up a conversation with Neruda, who is waiting for word about his candidacy for the Nobel Prize for literature, and despite an awkward beginning, the two become good friends. Neruda fuels Mario's interest in poetry by teaching him the value of a metaphor, and the young postman begins practising this technique.In the village, Mario meets Beatriz González, the daughter of the local barkeep, Rosa. Beatriz is curt and distant from Mario, and the young man finds his tongue tied whenever he tries to speak to her. With Neruda's help as a poet and an influential countryman, Mario overcomes his shy nature and he and Beatriz fall in love, much to the dismay of Rosa, who banishes Beatriz from seeing Mario.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Charlie_St._Cloud"title="The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud">
Charlie St. Cloud (age 15) and Sam (age 12) are two brothers with a love so strong, no force can separate them. When their mom leaves Charlie to babysit Sam, they decide to go to watch a 1991 Red Sox baseball game in Boston against the New York Yankees with their pet beagle, Oscar. They "borrow" their neighbor Mrs. Pung's Ford Country Squire. On the way there they cannot decide which CD to listen to. As they cross the General Edwards Bridge on the Saugus River, on the way home, Charlie decides to take a look at the moon to see if Sam was right about the moon being larger that night. Charlie does not see an 18-wheeler truck come and they end up tumbling twice crushing Oscar along the way. When they are dead, they find themselves close to the cemetery in Marblehead, the town where they live. Sam is scared and Charlie makes a promise that they will never abandon each other. However, Charlie gets resuscitated in an ambulance by a religious paramedic, Florio Ferrente and carries on living.Thirteen years later, Charlie, now 28, has grown up and is working at the Waterside cemetery. Every evening at dusk he goes to a nearby forest where he plays with Sam. Charlie has the gift of seeing ghosts. This serves him well as an undertaker, as he can talk with ghosts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thérèse_Desqueyroux_(novel)"title="Thérèse Desqueyroux (novel)">
The novel is set in the Landes, a sparsely populated area of south-west France covered largely with pine forests. As it opens, a court case is being dismissed. The main character, the titular Thérèse, has been tried for poisoning her husband Bernard by overdosing him with Fowler's Solution, a medicine containing arsenic. Despite strong evidence against her, including prescriptions she forged, the case has been dropped; the family closed ranks to prevent scandal and Bernard himself testified in her defence. On the journey home, Thérèse reflects at length on her life so far, trying to understand what brought her to continue poisoning her husband after she observed him taking an accidental overdose. She suggests that her actions were part of an "imperceptible slope", caused in part by the pressures of motherhood and marriage and the stifling life of a Catholic landowner's wife in 1920s rural France. However, neither Thérèse nor the narrator provides a clear explanation for her behaviour.Thérèse assumes that she will be able to leave her husband quietly now that the case is over. Instead, Bernard announces that she is to live at his family house, in an isolated spot in the pine forest, at Argelouse. He effectively confines her there, giving out that she suffers from a nervous complaint, and making the occasional public appearance with her to quell any gossip. His concern is that the forthcoming marriage of his younger sister Anne, to a suitor approved by the family, is not prevented by any scandal. He allows Thérèse no company other than unsympathetic servants, keeps their daughter away from her, and threatens to send her to prison for the poisoning if she does not cooperate. Thérèse lives mainly on wine and cigarettes, falls into a passive stupor and takes to her bed. When she is ordered to attend a dinner party for Anne, her fiancé and his family, she does so, but her emaciated appearance shocks the guests. Bernard decides that the scandal will never be fully forgotten unless Thérèse is allowed to disappear without controversy. He promises she can leave after Anne's wedding, and moves back to Argelouse to supervise her recovery. The wedding over, he takes Thérèse to Paris and bids her farewell. There will be no official separation and no divorce, and she has an allowance to live on. She is free to go.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Semester_in_the_Life_of_a_Garbage_Bag"title="A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag">
The plot of the novel revolves around Jardine bringing Sean Delancey, his English poetry project partner, into various schemes to ensure their arrival at Theamelpos for the summer. The central one of which involves winning an English-department contest based on their poetry unit. Along the way they encounter Ashley, a beautiful model who becomes the third member of their poetry project, and Cementhead (Steve Semenski), the luckiest student in the school. Sean and Raymond eventually ask Sean's grandfather to impersonate a (fictional) virtually-unknown poet, Gavin Gunhold, in order to bolster their poetry project for English class.A subplot revolves around the unmasking the school administration's coverups regarding a local government contract to use the school as a testbed for SACGEN (Solar Air Current GENerator), a (fictional) stand-alone power system project that is supposed to power the school using only renewable energy. The school building was disconnected from the electric power grid, and its central core was gutted to house the control room and the storage batteries. Unfortunately, the project barely functions, causing frequent blackouts, leading the students to refer to it as "The Windmill."Unbeknownst to Sean and Raymond, their English teacher had removed the only bibliographical proof of Gunhold's demise from the local library in order to see how far they would go in their attempts to win the contest. This eventually leads to them conspiring with Sean's grandfather to demonstrate the unreliability of "The Windmill" by inviting the local news media to a poetry recitation at the school. Determined to continue the coverup, the school principal and government officials in charge of the project disregard the system engineer's warnings, leading to the catastrophic failure and subsequent explosion of the SACGEN unit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_a_Macho_Man"title="Death of a Macho Man">
Randy Duggan is the macho man of the title of this work of fiction. He claims to be a professional wrestler and he becomes known in the small village of Lochdubh for his tall stories. When Randy is found murdered, Constable Hamish Macbeth hopes that the killer is not one of the villagers. However, there is enough local resentment against Randy, that someone in quiet, peaceful Lochdubh may have been driven to slaying this macho man.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_I_Lived_in_Modern_Times"title="When I Lived in Modern Times">
The novel follows the story of a young Jewish woman from London who emigrates to the future Israel in 1946 and lives through the birth of the nation. She spends time in a kibbutz and then moves to Tel Aviv.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Unmasked"title="Lincoln Unmasked">
In his reappraisal of the famed president, DiLorenzo is highly critical of Lincoln. Within the book he argues that states within the union had the right at the time of the American Civil War to secede and that the more centralized government that emerged after the war was incompatible with democracy. DiLorenzo also claims that most scholars of the Civil War are biased in their approach to the history because, as DiLorenzo reminds the reader, "in war the victors get to write the history". Dilorenzo also argues that Lincoln was opposed to racial equality, and that many abolitionists, including Lysander Spooner, bitterly hated him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Phelan's_Greatest_Game"title="Billy Phelan's Greatest Game">
The narrative is based on an actual event: The attempted 1933 kidnapping of John O'Connell Jr., the nephew of Albany Democratic boss Daniel P. O'Connell.In 1930s Albany, New York, Billy Phelan is a hustler at pool, card sharp, bowler, and occasional bookmaker. Martin Daugherty is a reporter, and the son of a famous writer now grown old. Phelan and Daugherty become involved in the events surrounding the kidnapping of the son of a corrupt Albany political boss.The kidnapping is the central point of the story, but Kennedy also details the everyday lives of the characters inhabiting Albany's working class and poor neighborhoods. Some of the characters, including Billy Phelan's father Francis, appear in "Ironweed", the third installment of the Albany Cycle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Civic_Culture"title="The Civic Culture">
In the text Almond and Verba examine the democratic systems in five countries, the United States, Germany, Mexico, Italy, and the United Kingdom. They interviewed about a thousand individuals in each country on their views of government and political life. As they define it, the "civic culture" (singular) is "based on communication and persuasion, a culture of consensus and diversity, a culture that [permits] change but [moderates] it" (Almond and Verba 1963, 8). They consider political culture to be the element that connects individual attitudes with the overall political system structure.They identify three political structures: participant, subject, and parochial. Strong civic cultures are distinguished by robust support for achieving political homeostasis: the optimal mediated balance between multiple contradictory forces such as in the tension between respect for individual rights and concern for the public good, or that between governmental effectiveness and responsiveness to the interests of citizens.  Almond and Verba considered the Italian emphasis on the family as the driving main force for society as "amoral" (in the words of Edward Banfield ("The Moral Basis of a Backward Society", 1958), or "exclusive", and believed that such a culture would impede the culture's potential for developing a "sense of community and civic culture," which they saw as a necessary background for "effective democracy".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fell_(novel)"title="Fell (novel)">
The book starts with a pack of grey wolves walking through the snowy regions of Transylvania. One of the pups looks up at a hill and can see an outline of a black wolf. She tells her father, the Dragga, that it might be Fell, the ghost wolf that humans and Varg fear. Because, while Larka has become respected and loved among the Varg for the part she played in the death of Morgra, Fell became feared among them, and that he is a loner, which is unnatural to other Varg.Lost in his grief and guilt over the death of his sister, Larka, Fell rejects the gift of the Sight, and becomes a Kerl, which is the wolf name for a loner. The pack keeps the thoughts of curses out of their heads, and Fell watches them leave. He then goes to a pool and looks into it. His dead sister, Larka, appears to him, and she shows him a picture of a girl with a tattoo in the shape of an eagle on her arm. Larka then tells Fell to find and protect the girl.The girl who Fell saw is Alina Sculcavant, who is growing up in the care of Malduk, a shepherd whom rescued her from the snows. He forces her to dress as a boy and work hard for him. The other villagers believe Alina to be a changeling, and fear her for it. One day Alina finds a parchment that holds the true secret of her past, but Malduk and his wife, Ranna, who have tried to hide it from her for years, find out. They murder a villager and frame Alina, so that she is forced to flee into the mountains to discover who she truly is.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceremony_(Parker_novel)"title="Ceremony (Parker novel)">
Spenser is hired to find a runaway 16-year-old girl. It soon becomes obvious that she has turned to prostitution.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Gone_Down"title="Man Gone Down">
The novel is about an African-American man estranged from his white wife and their children, and who must come up with a sum of money within four days to have them returned. The plot focuses on an attempt to achieve the American Dream. Thomas describes "Man Gone Down" as having a "gallows humour".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who's_Your_City?"title="Who's Your City?">
## Part 1: Why Place Matters."Who's Your City?" is divided into four parts with a total of 16 chapters. The first part presents data that suggests the world's population and economy are becoming increasingly geographically concentrated into few mega-regions, such as BosWash and the San Francisco Bay Area. Thomas Friedman's Flat World Theory, or his assertion that distance and place is becoming irrelevant, is countered by Florida with maps of population growth, economic activity, innovation (as demonstrated by patent registration), and scientific discovery (as demonstrated by residence of the most heavily cited scientists).Florida's maps show "spiky" concentrations in these mega-regions, although each region does not necessarily rank high in each category. For example, the Taiheiyō Belt ranks high in innovation but low in scientific discovery, and Indian and Pakistani cities show high population concentrations but low economic activity. Florida explains the existence of these geographical spikes by insisting that talented individuals tend to cluster to one another, creating a (non-linear) multiplier effect that attracts additional talented individuals to that geographical area.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ask_and_the_Answer"title="The Ask and the Answer">
Resuming directly after "The Knife of Never Letting Go", Todd Hewitt is captured by the Mayor's army in Haven, renamed New Prentisstown, but his only concern is for Viola. He is forced to live in the town's clock tower with the previous Mayor, Con Ledger. Ledger explains that Haven discovered a cure for Noise, but Mayor Prentiss (now President Prentiss) has confiscated it for sole use by leaders of New Prentisstown. He has also separated the males and females, and imprisons all domestic Spackle who live in the town. The Mayor organises a speech as the rest of his army marches in. He expresses his displeasure at the easiness of taking over, claiming that the people will pay for the lack of war.Elsewhere, Viola awakens. Likewise her thoughts are for Todd. She is in a house of healing, a 'clinic' staffed by female healers, as opposed to male doctors, for her gunshot wound. She meets Mistress Coyle, the head of the facility, who also has previous political and activist ties. Viola also meets the apprentices Corinne Wyatt and Maddy as she recovers.Todd is made to work with the enslaved Spackle of New Prentisstown with Davy Prentiss. Todd hopes that by complying he is ensuring Viola's health and safety, while the Mayor hopes that Davy will become a better person with Todd's influence. Todd is disgusted at the treatment of the Spackle, yet Davy is proud of his authority. As the Spackle speak via Noise, cure has been placed into the Spackle's food to prevent communication.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asking_Questions"title="Asking Questions">
Inspector Ghote is ordered to investigate a case of drug smuggling at the Mira Behn Institute for Medical Research. Ghote's chief suspect is Chandra Chagoo, the snake handler, but unfortunately Chagoo himself is dead, the victim of a deadly Russell's viper. Inspector Ghote knows this was no accident, but the only way he will get answers is through asking a lot of awkward questions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anti-Pamela;_or,_Feign'd_Innocence_Detected"title="The Anti-Pamela; or, Feign'd Innocence Detected">
Unlike "Shamela", which retells the same plot as "Pamela", Haywood's novel follows the life of a Pamela-esque character, Syrena Tricksy, in her own storyline. Syrena attempts to use her performance of innocence to become a prosperous noblewoman. She tries several different schemes, presenting herself to different men as a unmarried gentlewoman, a married gentlewoman, a libertine, a mistress, a poor widow, or a rich widow, based on what seems likely to serve her aims. However, these schemes are always foiled at the last minute, either due to coincidence or due to Syrena's carelessness. For example, she is almost successful in marrying a rich old gentleman, until his son visits and reveals that Syrena has pursued both father and son. As the novel progresses, Syrena's desperate attempts at upward social mobility instead result in downward mobility, as she seduces men with less and less wealth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_(Peet_novel)"title="Exposure (Peet novel)">
Set in South America, Bush, a car-cleaning boy, greets Paul Faustino when he sees him. When he goes to his shed in the slums, Felicia tells him that his sister, Bianca, is missing. He soon finds her watching the night entertainment at an alley. Meanwhile, Otello becomes contracted to the Rialto football team. He is taken to a party at Brabanta's house and he meets Desmerelda there. After the party, Desmerelda asks him to marry her. Despite Brabanta's disapproval of their relationship, Otello and Desmeralda live a life under the scrutiny of the media. In an attempt to stop "wolf men" from looking at Bianca, Bush makes her wear an oversized sweatshirt. After a failed hold up targeted at Desmerelda, Brabanta pulls some strings to prevent him and his daughter's name from newspaper articles mentioning the hold up. Otello assigns Michael to look after Desmerelda. However, when Michael is involved in a nightclub brawl, Desmerelda gets Otello to take Michael back. Meanwhile, Felicia and Bush discuss how to look after Bianca. Felicia forces her breasts against him and goes away just immediately, leaving Bush in a state of emotional confusion. At the same time, Desmerelda discovers that she is pregnant. In response to other racist and defaming sport articles about Otello's first season in Rialto, Paul lists Otello's achievements in the first season of his Rialto career. To promote Otello's product range, the "Paff!" label was developed. Targeted at teenagers, the main theme of the label was rebellion so they used slum kids. Bianca was the most photogenic child at the photoshoot, with all the advertisements of the "Paff!" label featuring her. With Bianca missing for three days, Bush and Felicia go to Paul for help. They find her dead with new clothes on her body and 100 dollars in her bra. Bush and Felicia are overwhelmed by her death. Meanwhile, Otello is accused of looking at child pornography. In the aftermath, Desmeralda leaves Otello and employs Felicia to look after her son and Bush to learn from her gardener.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinned_(novel)"title="Skinned (novel)">
The book is set in a dystopian future where much of the environment has been ruined, the government is run by corporations, and only the privileged have enough credits to live a life of luxury in sprawling mansions in the country. Everyone else is forced to live in ruined cities, where they face starvation, or CorpCities, where they are all but slaves. Lia Kahn is one of the privileged, until an unexpected car accident leaves her fatally injured. Her family decides to enlist the services of BioMax, a company that takes scans of Lia's brain and downloads her mind into a mechanical body, known to the general public as "skinners," despite preferring to be called "mechs." Lia must deal with the trials of a new type of existence, including the revulsion society feels for "skinners," the prospect of immortality, and the balance of her new life with her former one.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Harold_of_Zodanga"title="Sir Harold of Zodanga">
Dimension hopping Harold Shea, having returned home to his psychological practice, is visited by the malevolent enchanter Malambroso, an enemy of Shea and his partner Reed Chalmers who has also discovered the secret of transdimensional travel. Having been thwarted in his attempt to steal Chalmers' wife Florimel in previous adventures, the enchanter attempts to subvert Shea into aiding him. Rebuffed, he threatens vengeance, which he shortly puts into practice by kidnapping Voglinda, the young daughter of Shea and his wife Belphebe of Faerie.In their search for their daughter, Harold and Belphebe find Malambroso has been residing in their world for some time, and from reading material discovered in his abandoned dwelling discover that he had become a fan of the Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Reasoning that it is this alternate vision of Mars to which their foe has fled with the girl, they determine to travel there themselves by means of the symbolic logic formulas originally devised by Chalmers. Accordingly, they outfit themselves for the journey, or rather, "de"-outfit themselves, much to Belphebe's embarrassment; Burroughs' Barsoomians go about largely naked.Arriving on Barsoom, the Sheas seek out the aid of the royal family of the city-state of Helium, which includes Burroughs' protagonist, the transplanted earthman John Carter. Carter is not present, but they manage to obtain an audience with his father-in-law, Mors Kajak, "jed" (king) of Lesser Helium. Kajak turns out to be somewhat sour on earthmen, including his own son-in-law, presenting a picture of them very different from that of Burroughs. He regards Carter as something of a blowhard, claiming impossible prowess in battle, and Ulysses Paxton, the other earthman resident on Barsoom, as a rabble-rouser, advocating Terran ideas of equality and freedom unwelcome to the hierarchical, slave-owning Martians.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Everafter_War"title="The Everafter War">
Goldilocks kisses Henry Grimm, Sabrina and Daphne's father, awakening him from his sleeping spell, but seems to not have worked. Meanwhile, Daphne and Sabrina have been taken by Ms. Smirt, a cruel woman who works in foster care. Luckily, Daphne had made a plan before hand. Puck flies in scaring Ms. Smirt and the entire train. Henry and Veronica (who had waken up by this point), along with the gang, save the girls from Smirt. Henry has a hard time realizing that his daughters have grown up. He is very uncomfortable with their familiarity with magic, remembering how it got his father killed. He decides to disconnect Sabrina and Daphne from Ferryport Landing, forcing them to pack and get ready to return to New York City.Before they can leave, though, the Scarlet Hand surrounds the house and shoots Uncle Jake in the shoulder. Knowing he needs medical care, Granny sends everyone into the Hall of Wonders, to the Room of Reflections, which contains a number of magic mirrors. They enter what turns out to be a rebel fort, headed by Charming, to fight the Scarlet Hand. Henry still refuses to stay, so he forces Daphne, Sabrina and Veronica to pack up and leave the fort. Sadly, they are cornered by a group of trolls working for the Hand. The trolls attack but Henry and Veronica fight amazingly while the girls watch in awe. After defeating 12 out of the 14, the family is forced to return to Camp Charming. Uncle Jake asks the girls' help in rescuing his love, Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty), whom he'd bought an engagement ring for. After Uncle Jake is knocked out and Daphne accidentally turns Sabrina into a goose, Briar is rescued, but dragons are sent after the group and Briar dies in the fighting. Sabrina accidentally reveals to Puck that they get married in the future, so they got in a big fight.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_the_Wreck,_I_Picked_Myself_Up,_Spread_My_Wings,_and_Flew_Away"title="After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away">
Jenna Abbott nearly dies in the car wreck on the bridge that took her mother's life. Broken in body and spirit, she feels lost and alone. She longs for the peace of the "blue" – the drug-filled haze she experienced in hospital – and steals drugs from her uncle's medicine cabinet, setting off on a self-destructive path.Her classmate, the mysterious biker Crow, is the one person she can confide in about her misery and guilt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landslide_(novel)"title="Landslide (novel)">
This story revolves around the protagonist, Bob Boyd, who is a geologist and works in British Columbia timber country. He has no memory of his past following a terrible car accident. At the start of the novel he arrives in a small town – Fort Farrell, located in northeastern British Columbia to perform a small job for the Matterson Corporation.By chance he happens to see the name of the square in the town – Trinavant Square, which brings back some memories to him. After consulting the town newspaper he confirms that this is the place where John Trinavant used to live. He learns from a local reporter, McDougall (Mac) that John Trinavant used to be a big businessman in Fort Farrell about ten years ago with the elder Matterson – 'Bull' Matterson. However at that time John Trinavant had died in an auto crash along with his son (Frank) and wife. There was a fourth person found in the car driven by the Trinavants – Robert B. Grant who has presumed to be a hitchhiker travelling with them.After meeting with the head of the Matterson Corporation, Howard Matterson (son of Bull Matterson), Bob plans to start a survey of the land owned by the Matterson Corporation in the nearby forest where the Mattersons were planning to build a dam and wanted to get their land surveyed for any precious minerals. Bob starts the survey and comes across a Miss Clare Trinavant who insists that he stays out of her land. After completing the survey he reports back to Howard that nothing of value lied below their land, and collects his pay-check and leaves. But before he leaves he is confronted by Mac to reveal his interest in the Trinavants. Although he refuses to tell Mac anything he is forced to reconsider his decision.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Snow_Tiger"title="The Snow Tiger">
This story revolves around the protagonist, Ian Ballard, who works as a mine manager. He is the grandson of Ben Ballard, owner of the Ballard Holdings Limited, a giant financial group based in London specialising in mining operations around the world. Ben had four sons including Ian's father. Ian's father and Ben had fallen apart when Ian's father left him to settle in the fictional town of Hukahoronui (a.k.a. Huka) located in the Two Thumb Range in the South Island of New Zealand in the late 1930s. Ian was born in 1939 and his father died very shortly afterwards in an avalanche there. After his father's death Ian and his mother continued to live in Huka until he is 16 years old. During this time he develops enmity with a local boy, Charlie Peterson, who is of his age group. It is revealed later in the story that when Ian was about 12 years old Charlie's twin brother Alec had drowned in the town river. Since Ian was present at the riverside Charlie held Ian responsible for Alec's death, even though in reality Ian was innocent.At the start of the story Ian is about 35 years old and is injured when he gets trapped in a small avalanche while skiing in Switzerland along with his friend Mike McGill (who is an expert in the study of snow). Ian injures a leg during that accident. While recuperating in London at his mother's home he is visited by his grandfather, Ben, who offers him the job of managing director of a gold mine located in Huka which is indirectly controlled by Ballard Holdings. Although Ian's initial reaction is to decline the offer (due to his history at Huka with the Petersons), eventually he decides to take up the offer keeping in mind that Ben had supported him during all his education.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Citadel"title="High Citadel">
In a fictional South American country, a small passenger plane is hijacked by its co-pilot, a Communist agent, and crash-lands at an airstrip high in the Andes mountains. One of the passengers is the liberal ex-president Aguillar, deposed in an earlier coup d'état and now returning. The Communists want him dead to clear the way for their own takeover. But due to a collapsed bridge, the Communists aren't there to meet the plane, and the co-pilot is killed in the landing.The survivors include the British pilot O'Hara, Aguillar, Aguillar's bodyguard and his beautiful niece, an elderly American school teacher, two American businessmen, a scientist, and a historian. O'Hara leads them down the mountain because of altitude sickness and freezing temperatures. But at the broken bridge, they meet the Communist force, who are trying to repair the bridge.O'Hara and the passengers hold off the Communists, using improvised weapons suggested by the historian and constructed by the scientist from the scrap of an abandoned mine. Three of the men set off on a dangerous trip over the mountain heights to get help from friends of Aguillar.The siege of the 'high citadel' becomes increasingly dangerous as Communist reinforcements arrive, while the mountain-crossers encounter extreme hazards and political treachery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tightrope_Men"title="The Tightrope Men">
Giles Denison's life is turned upside down when he awakes to find himself in a luxurious hotel. Denison has a reputation as an alcoholic, so waking up in a strange room is not too surprising, but he finds that not only is he now in Oslo, Norway, but that the face in the bathroom mirror is the face of another man. However he calms down a bit once he locates a scar on his leg, a scar he has had from childhood, and realizes that he had been kidnapped from his flat in London and surgically altered to resemble a Finnish scientist, Dr Harold Feltham Meyrick. Meyrick is a scientist and engineer with multiple military contracts, who was involved in a British operation to retrieve some scientific documents, with information which would make nuclear missiles virtually obsolete from the Soviet Union. After an attempt on Denison’s life (as Meyrick), he makes contact with the British authorities seeking help. He is introduced to an old spymaster named Carey, who was involved in the operation with the ‘real’ Meyrick. Compelled to adjust to his new persona (including meeting his daughter) and to play out the role assigned to him by his captors, the group embark on a dangerous escapade from Norway to Finland and across the border into Soviet Russia
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vivero_Letter_(novel)"title="The Vivero Letter (novel)">
Jeremy Wheale's brother is murdered by criminals attempting to steal a family heirloom: a 16th-century gold tray. In attempting to find out what was so special about the tray that someone would kill for it, he discovers that it contains a map. Wheale pursues the trail from Devon, England to Mexico and finally to the tropical rain forests of the Yucatán Peninsula, where he joins with two archaeologists to locate a legendary hoard of gold. This hoard comes from Uaxuanoc, the centuries-old lost city of the Mayas. However, the Mafia are on the trail of Wheale as well as the Chicleros, a deadly group of convict mercenaries, and Wheale is uncertain that he can even trust his two archaeologist friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spoilers_(Bagley_novel)"title="The Spoilers (Bagley novel)">
When wealthy film tycoon, Sir Robert Hellier, loses his daughter to a heroin overdose, he declares war on the drug peddlers. He offers London drug treatment specialist, Nicholas Warren MD, unlimited financing to use his insider knowledge of the drug trade to smash the major international drug ring responsible. Initially reluctant, Warren is convinced by professional interest and personal circumstances to organise a team of friends and specialists who will use a combination of deceit and violence to infiltrate and bring down the drug ring, and to destroy a hundred million dollars' worth of heroin at its source in the Middle East.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Freedom_Trap"title="The Freedom Trap">
Joseph Rearden is a better-than-average crook from South Africa with a jail conviction on his record. In London, he meets an agent of the British Government called Mackintosh, who recruits him for a new and deadly assignment - to snare The Scarperers (a notorious gang of criminals who organise gaol-breaking for long-term prisoners) and Slade, a notorious Russian double agent whom they have recently liberated. Rearden is asked to rob a postman with a package of uncut diamonds, for which he will be caught and sent to jail in the hope that this will attract the attention of the Scarperers. Thinking that this will be an easy score, Rearden accepts. He is successful, but finds that he has been freed by the Scarperers to help fulfil their own evil political agenda. The trail goes to Malta, where Rearden must outwit the Scarperers in order to save his own life.Bagley carried over the Slade character from "Running Blind".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggernaut_(novel)"title="Juggernaut (novel)">
American narrator Neil Mannix is a troubleshooter for multinational British Electric, and is sent to former British colony in Africa, Nyala to oversee the installation of a huge 550-ton power transformer. The newly independent Nyala is rich with oil, and hopes to prop up its shaky democracy and economy with a showcase new power station located at a remote location near its oil fields. Due to the increasing precarious political situation, the Nyalan government insists that British Electric dispatch the transformer via huge flatbed truck to reassure the populace, and suspecting difficulties, Mannix is sent to supervise the travels of "the rig". However, a civil war breaks out, and Mannix is bullied by a local doctor and an Irish nun into using the rig as a traveling hospital. He must deal with opposing armies, unsafe roads and bridges, some untrustworthy crew members and the local Nyalans who start to trek after the huge machine, which has taken on symbolic role for the populace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_Error"title="Night of Error">
Mike Trevelyan, an English oceanographer, learns that his brother Mark, a marine biologist has died in suspicious circumstances while prospecting in the South Pacific. Although the two brothers were never very close, when an attempt is made to steal the few effects shipped back to the family, he decides to investigate.The only clues - a notebook written in a code, and a lump of deep sea rock indicates that Mark may have stumbled onto a potentially lucrative deposit of manganese and cobalt - lead Mike to contact his father's old crew of ex-commandos, and with the backing of a Canadian tycoon to launch an expedition to investigate the death and to look for the rich mineral deposits the brother had apparently discovered.The expedition soon faces both natural and unnatural disasters, as well as unexpected villains.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jatta_(novel)"title="Jatta (novel)">
Princess Jatta wakes on her bedroom floor after a night's carnage she cannot remember, suffering a guilt she cannot explain. Piece by piece she uncovers two frightening truths: she is a werewolf; Dartith's King Brackensith has claimed her as bride for his son. Any protection her father's kingdom of Alteeda has offered Jatta crumbles when, on her fourteenth birthday, Brackensith invades.Jatta and her brother Arthmael escape to seek help from Sorcerer Redd. They leave him, taking the orb. This purple, plum-sized magical ball creates vivid illusions of sight, sound, smell and taste so convincingly that only the sense of touch can expose them. With Jatta's own prodigious imagination she soon masters the orb. Its illusions provide almost limitless possibilities for deception, entertainment and escape. However, Jatta cannot escape the sinister werewolf episodes she now suffers.As Brackensith's grip tightens on Alteeda, Jatta realises that only her surrender will save her kingdom. Her journey with Arthmael to Dartith's dark isle is fraught with dangers. They are kidnapped, thrown to dragons, and trapped with lost souls inside an enchanted fire. Jatta is forced into a betrothal to the dangerously unbalanced Prince Riz.On Dartith, where night stretches for sixteen of every twenty-four hours, Jatta and Arthmael meet and befriend Princess Noriglade, Brackensith's Undead daughter. Noriglade also despises what she is. Though the Undead rarely kill, they do kidnap their victim's soul as they drink, a torturous experience for the victim and a corrupting one for the Undead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Honour_of_the_Knights"title="The Honour of the Knights">
In 2617AD, the remains of Mitikas Imperium's naval forces are making a last stand against an unstoppable enemy force known only as the Pandorans who have driven them to the brink of destruction. A pilot by the name of Jacques Chalmers witnesses the final destruction of their forces at the hands of Admiral Zackaria before his own death.The story moves to Earth, on the other side of the galaxy, where Simon Dodds is awoken by a man named Patrick Dean who has mysteriously found his way to his parents' house. Though Dodds attempts to save his life, the man has suffered fatal gunshot wounds and dies of respiratory failure. The Confederation Stellar Navy arrive the next morning to take Dean's body away, telling Dodds to deny his existence. Two weeks later they request he return to naval service.Meeting Admiral Turner, Commodore Parks and Commodore Hawke, Dodds is once again reminded to deny Dean's existence and is then told that he is to spend the next 3 weeks participating in the ATAF project, a newly developed starfighter with superior capabilities to anything else in military history. Dodds is reunited with his old teammates (the White Knights), discovering during his absence that the Confederacy's flagship, a battleship known as Dragon, has been hijacked and has not been seen for nearly 6 months. Commodore Hawke was the only surviving crew member. He has, however, been unable to accurately describe what happened to him during that time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Vivo_(novel)"title="In Vivo (novel)">
In 1946, young, idealistic scientist Tom Cable steers the fiscally conservative Enright Drug and Chemical Company into dangerous financial waters by committing an increasing number of company resources to the research and development of a new broad-spectrum antibiotic.Supporting Cable in his search for a new broad-spectrum antibiotic are Ade Hale (president), Will Caroline (vice-president for research), Maxwell Strong, and Dr. Mills. Opposing them are Claude Morrissey (director of biochemistry) and Gil Brainard (vice-president for production). The story line is linear with traditional character arcs. The heroes and villains are archetypal with the heroes often possessing trope-like names (e.g. Max Strong, Constance, Hope, etc.) and generally embodying all that is good while the villains back-stab, bicker and descend into abject immorality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_from_Hollywood"title="The Girl from Hollywood">
The story alternates between the all-American Pennington family on their remote California ranch and a young Hollywood actress.The Penningtons have a beautiful estate, and affectionate relationships with their children, Custer and Eva. Custer has had an "understanding" with neighbor and childhood friend Grace Evans for a long time, but she finally confides that she wants to try being an actress before she agrees to settle down on the ranch. Her brother Guy is an aspiring writer. He has just purchased some bootleg booze, and shares it with Custer, although both Grace and Custer's mother have observed that he has a drinking problem.Bit-part actress Shannon Burke, known on the screen as Gaza de Lure, remembers her Hollywood history. She had come for fame. She refused to trade sexual favors for work, and found that she could not get better roles. Actor-director Wilson Crumb was the first to behave decently to her, as a gentleman. He got her a contract with his company, and gradually increased his attentions to her. Finally, he gave her powder, saying it was aspirin, and over several days intentionally got her hooked on cocaine. To keep her drug supply steady she angrily agreed to visit him during the day, but refused to live with him, going home each night to her own place. Eventually, she began selling cocaine, morphine and heroin for him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modeste_Mignon"title="Modeste Mignon">
The first part of "Modeste Mignon" is based on a traditional species of folktale known as "La fille mal gardée" ("The Ill-Watched Girl"), in which a young woman takes a lover despite the close attentions of her guardians, who are determined to preserve her chastity for a more suitable match. Modeste Mignon, a young provincial woman of romantic temperament, imagines herself to be in love with the famous Parisian poet Melchior de Canalis, whose works have filled her with passion. She corresponds with him, but he is unmoved by her attentions. Canalis invites his secretary Ernest de la Brière to deal with the matter. Ernest replies to Modeste in Canalis' name; a dangerous intrigue ensues, which sees Ernest appear in Modeste's home town of Ingouville (near Le Havre) disguised as Canalis. The plot is complicated by the interference of Modeste's family and friends, who suspect that she has secretly taken a lover. The wily dwarf Butscha, who loves Modeste as a medieval knight might have loved a lady far above his station, is determined to unmask the man. Things come to a head when Ernest discovers that Modeste's father Charles Mignon has returned from his long exile a very wealthy man: Modeste is no longer a poor provincial girl but a rich heiress with six million francs to her name. Ernest reveals his true identity, but Modeste feels humiliated and casts him off. When Modeste's true worth becomes generally known, Canalis takes a renewed interest in her and believes that his poetic ardour will enable him to win her heart. But his secretary is no longer his only rival: a local wealthy potentate the Duc d'Hérouville now regards the "nouveau-riche" Modeste Mignon as a suitable match and throws his hat into the ring.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_Fruit"title="Bitter Fruit">
Silas Ali is a Johannesburg lawyer approaching 50 who has risen to prominence during Nelson Mandela's presidency. A high-ranking civil servant occasionally even seen on television next to Mandela, he is employed as a liaison officer assigned to coordinate governmental activities with those of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. While his attractive wife Lydia works as a nurse, their only child, 18-year-old Michael reads Literature at Wits University.The past catches up with Silas Ali one Sunday morning at a shopping mall when he sees, and recognizes, François du Boise, an Afrikaner policeman who, in 1978, raped Lydia somewhere in the veld while Silas was made to listen to her screams from inside a police van—an act of brutality obviously triggered by Silas's involvement with the MK. For almost twenty years, Silas and Lydia have kept quiet about the crime, both to each other and towards the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and Lydia has never shared her terrible suspicion that du Boise is Michael's natural father with anyone other than her secret diary. Trapped in an unpromising, sexless marriage, and more than ten years younger than her husband, Lydia copes badly with Silas's sudden revelation about du Boise and the additional information that the now retired policeman has applied for amnesty for a number of sexual assaults, including the one on her. In an act of self-injury, she dances on broken glass and has to be hospitalised under the pretence of having suffered a freak accident.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_(Rossner_novel)"title="August (Rossner novel)">
The novel focuses on the relationship between a psychoanalyst, Dr. Lulu Shinefield, and a young troubled woman, Dawn Henley, from the beginning of their therapy together through to its termination.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_(Woodward_novel)"title="August (Woodward novel)">
Set from the mid-1950s till 1971, the book tells the story of the Jones family, who leave their home in London for a camping holiday in Wales every August.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_a_Monsoon_Cloud"title="Under a Monsoon Cloud">
Inspector Ghote is assigned to Vigatpour hill station, which is due for inspection by Additional Deputy Inspector General "Tiger" Kelkar. During the inspection Kelkar, in a fit of temper, throws a heavy inkwell at the inept Sergeant Desai, killing him. Ghote and Kelkar conspire to cover up the killing, but over the brooding course of the novel, it becomes apparent that it is only a matter of time before they are brought to justice.Inspector Ghote is temporarily assigned to a badly run hill station at Vigatpour. Additional Deputy Inspector General "Tiger" Kelkar, a man Ghote once investigated and cleared of suspected corruption in Bats Fly at Dusk, arrives to inspect the station. The situation is worsened by Sergeant Desai, a comically inept and lazy sergeant previously briefly assigned to Ghote in Inspector Ghote Plays a Joker.During the inspection the monsoon storm breaks. Desai, after making a string of irritating blunders, spills ink over Kelkar's uniform and Kelkar, in a fit of temper, throws the brass ink well at Desai. The inkwell strikes Desai on the head and kills him. Owing to the late hour. Ghote is the only other officer in the station at the time.Kelkar orders Ghote to arrest him, but Ghote—a strong admirer of Kelkar's abilities as an officer—persuades Kelkar to cover up the death. Since Desai regularly tried to bet people that he could swim the nearby lake in under two hours, they take the body and dump it in the lake.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Search_for_the_Red_Dragon"title="The Search for the Red Dragon">
Nine years after the events of the original book, protagonists Jack, John, and Charles are requested by Laura Glue (the granddaughter of Peter Pan) to contact their predecessor Sir James Barrie. Thereafter all four accompany Bert (H.G. Wells) to Paralon, the Archipelago's capital; discover a message meant for Peter Pan; and learn that most of the magical Dragonships have been stolen and most of the children of the Archipelago have disappeared. Leaving Paralon, the party visit the Keep of Time, which they find damaged by their last adventure. There, the Archipelago's Cartographer (Merlin) directs them to the 'Underneath', an island concealed by the waters of the Archipelago. There, they are attacked by the descendants of the failed Roanoke exploration, led by Richard Burton. Escaping him, the protagonists reach Neverland, where Daedalus reveals to them that the Underneath is divided into nine districts (as in Dante's Inferno), and asks them to become children themselves to better understand Hugh the Iron and William the Pig, the sons of Jason and the original Lost Boys. Jack assents, and the party departs Neverland. Jack is captured on the isle of Automata, but rescued on Aiaia from an 'Abbey of the Rose', alongside other children; later, Burton demands the whereabouts of his daughter Lillith until Hugh the Iron and William the Pig arrive, accompanied by a mysterious leader who controls children by means of panpipes. In the Ninth Circle of the Underneath, Jack enters Plato's Cave and resumes adulthood to save Peter Pan, imprisoned inside. Meanwhile, Daedalus has surrounded the protagonists by gigantic automata; but these are overcome by Titans, summoned by John. Daedalus is killed, and Hugh and William released. Upon Peter Pan's return, the companions learn that the specter controlling Hugh and William is the antagonist 'Winter King' (Mordred/Captain Hook), whom Peter repels. The companions return to Paralon, and thence to their own world, where they are reunited with Sir James Barrie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Indigo_King"title="The Indigo King">
Five years after their prior adventure, John (J.R.R. Tolkien) and Jack (C.S. Lewis) are joined by Hugo Dyson and Owen Barfield. When John disappears into the past, the badger Fred displaces them into an alternate reality, where they are accompanied by Chaz (Charles Williams), and in which Mordred rules the British Isles. Chaz leads the group to Bert (H. G. Wells), who gives John a skull of the deceased Jules Verne, a map, and the 'Serendipity Box' which grants its user the object most in need. Mordred then imprisons the men and badgers and departs, whereupon the badger Uncas releases the men and Bert creates an ocean and summons the ship "Red Dragon", on which the protagonists depart. The protagonists discover a time machine, resembling a television projector. The first slide is of Ancient Greece, where the companions discover twins Myrddyn and Madoc and deduce that one is the Cartographer of Lost Places and the other Mordred. In the next slide, the protagonists find Meridian (Myrddyn) and discover a priestess identified as the Holy Grail, in the Library of Alexandria. In departure Chaz mistakenly destroys the Library.In the third slide, they re-unite with Hugo and witness the 'Tournament of Champions' to determine the next ruler of Meridian's Precinct (Britain). The three entrants are Merlin; Mordred; and Thorn, a boy destined to become King Arthur. Hugo disqualifies Merlin and Mordred, and Thorn becomes Arthur; but does not command the loyalty of the people. In the fourth slide, Mordred has allied with Arthur but kills him in a dispute and breaks Caliburn. They visit Avalon, where Chaz becomes the first Green Knight and receives the Lance of Longinus. Arthur is revived by the Grail's daughter, Rose, who cuts off Mordred's hand when he attempts to kill Merlin. Arthur summons dragons to unite the subordinate kings, while Merlin becomes the Cartographer. In the fifth slide, they meet Geoffrey of Monmouth, and visit the Keep of Time, where the Cartographer gives them a key to the Keep's topmost room.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_Dragons"title="The Shadow Dragons">
In 1942, protagonists John (J.R.R. Tolkien), Jack (C.S. Lewis), and Charles (Charles Williams) return to the Archipelago of Dreams as the last stones of the Keep of Time fall, endangering the Cartographer (Merlin)'s study and the inaccessible "future" door. As the second World War rages, the Imperial Cartological Society - led by writer/explorer Sir Richard Burton - rebuilds the Keep at the request of the animated shadow, called the 'Shadow King', of antagonist Mordred; whereupon the three protagonist Caretakers unite with past Caretakers (the Caretakers Emeritis) at Tamerlane House, built by Edgar Allan Poe in the Nameless Isles of the Archipelago. Rose Dyson, the Grail Child; Don Quixote; Archimedes the owl; and Stellan Sigurdsson retrieve and repair Caliburn. The Caretakers are betrayed by Rudyard Kipling and Daniel Defoe but supported when Burton, Doyle, and Houdini defect from the Imperial Cartological Society. Charles and the badger Fred pursue Defoe and burn down the Shadow King's Keep.When Rose, Archimedes, and Quixote return, the Nameless Isles are under siege by children governed by the Shadow King since 1926, under the sub-antagonist Chancellor Murdoch, who, through the Lance of Longinus, can command the shadows of all Dragons except of the Dragon Samaranth. The children are driven back by the Tin Man (Roger Bacon), and the shadows of the Dragons are prevented from the Nameless Isles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Conspiracy_of_Kings"title="A Conspiracy of Kings">
Sophos, the Magus's once studious young protégé, finds himself out of his element as his family is ambushed in their villa in Sounis. Sophos at first succeeds in evading capture and hiding his mother and sisters, but is betrayed by the servants. Mistakenly sold into slavery, he finds himself content with manual labor and forms a camaraderie with the other slaves. However, when faced with a choice between a life of contentment or influence, he chooses the latter.After a harrowing escape from the Baron who owned him, Sophos inherits the throne of Sounis. Not only is his country deadlocked in war with Attolia, it is also torn by a civil war. With neither the monetary resources nor manpower to secure his throne, Sophos is faced with several options, each with heavy consequences. Aided by the Magus, he turns to his old friend Eugenides, the former Thief of Eddis, with whom Sophos traveled years before and who is now the King of Attolia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Point_(novel)"title="Breaking Point (novel)">
Paul Richmond moves from homeschooling to a fancy private school, Gate-Brickell Christian, after his lieutenant colonel father has an affair and divorces his teacher-mother. On his first day at Gate, he meets a girl named Binky and a boy named Charlie Good.Without Binky, life would be pretty terrible for Paul. The kids at school look down on him because his mother works in the office there. Thanks to his father, Paul looks down on her too. His father, busy with a new wife and baby, ignores his calls and finally tells him to go away. He feels responsible for being a surrogate man of the house for his mother, who is clingy and insecure. This is far too much pressure for Paul, and only drives him away from confiding in his mother about anything happening in his life. Binky knows the score from way back, and knows it wasn’t that much easier on David Blanco, son of the school janitor. When David’s dog is found killed, the school population tacitly blames David, because it’s easier than figuring out which one of the children of privilege is the corrupt one.In the midst of all this, Charlie Good starts asking things of Paul. If there is an uppercrust at the upper crust school, Charlie is it. He seems, in many ways, to be nearly as lonely as Paul. His father pushes him to be a tennis overachiever, and his mother is barely present. Charlie’s method of blowing off steam is a little harmless vandalism. After a fight with his mother, Paul, tortured by feelings of rejection at the hands of his father, is exhilarated by his night of petty theft and mailbox smashing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_Tight_(novel)"title="Skin Tight (novel)">
Dr. Rudy Graveline, M.D., the director of the prestigious Whispering Palms Surgery Center in Bal Harbour, Florida, is a complete fraud who has never been trained or certified in cosmetic surgery. He has built his reputation through social connections and by taking credit for the work of his associates. On the rare occasions when Rudy himself performs surgery, something goes wrong. He has weathered numerous malpractice complaints and investigations by the state, through bribery and intimidation.Rudy learns from his former surgical nurse, Maggie Gonzalez, that a private investigator named Mick Stranahan is investigating the disappearance of college coed, Victoria Barletta, who Rudy accidentally killed during a botched nose job. Rudy decides to have Mick killed. In reality, Maggie has turned whistleblower and is planning to tell her story on the sensationalist talk show "In Your Face!", pointing to Mick to misdirect Rudy. The intended hit on Mick fails when he ambushes the hit man and impales him with the sword of a stuffed marlin head.Reynaldo Flemm, the host of "In Your Face!", and his producer, Christina Marks, come to Miami looking for Maggie. Rudy approaches a disfigured felon named Blondell Wayne Tatum, also called "Chemo", who agrees to kill Mick in exchange for a discount on his dermabrasion treatments. After Chemo tracks down Mick's vengeful ex-wife, Chloe, she eagerly guides him to Mick's house in Stiltsville. However, when Chloe realizes that Chemo means to kill Mick as opposed to scaring him, the ensuing argument ends with Chemo drowning her in the Bay. Chemo burns down an abandoned stilt house, assuming it is Mick's because of Chloe's incorrect directions.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Grey_Men"title="The Little Grey Men">
The last four gnomes in Great Britain live beside Folly Brook in Warwickshire; they are named after the flowers Baldmoney, Sneezewort, Dodder and Cloudberry. After Cloudberry goes exploring one day and does not return, the others make the tremendous decision to build a boat, the "Dragonfly", and set out to find him. This is the story of the gnomes' epic journey, set against the background of the English countryside, beginning in spring, continuing through summer, and concluding in autumn, when the first frosts are starting to arrive.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amnesiascope"title="Amnesiascope">
The main character lives in a converted hotel in Hollywood, where he works as the film critic for a weekly newspaper. The story is told in an oneiric fashion, without a clear explanation of all the strange elements of a partly real, partly imaginary Los Angeles. "Amnesiascope" focuses mostly on the protagonist's relationship with Viv, a sexually adventurous, committed artist, with whom the narrator works on the making of an avant-garde erotic short film. The narrator also has to deal with different factions at the paper, the various time zones he experiences driving through LA, the complexities of making a pornographic film, and his feelings of guilt after writing for his paper a review of "The Death of Marat", a non-existent film by Adolphe Sarre, a non-existent director, which takes on a life of its own. The non-linear story is often interrupted by descriptions of dreams that the protagonist or other characters have had. Moreover, events told have a dream-like quality, inasmuch as what seems to have actually happened is subsequently dealt with as if it were a dream or fantasy (cf. the first meeting with Justine, who subsequently doesn't seem to remember having met the protagonist). At the end of the novel, the narrating I has lost his job at the paper and Viv, yet he has gained back a sense of himself.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hoopster"title="The Hoopster">
The book is about a black teenager named Andre Anderson, who loves to play basketball with his white best friend Shawn and his cousin Cedric. Andre has a dream of becoming a journalist, so he tries to secure a summer job working at a magazine. Shawn thinks that Andre spends too much time on work and not enough on his social life, so he introduces Andre to a Latino girl named Gwen. Andre's boss at the magazine asks him to write an article on racism. While working on the article, Andre's life seems to be perfect until he is violently attacked by a gang of racists and is sent to hospital. His friends and family are left wondering whether or not he will ever recover from the attack..
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Charioteer"title="The Charioteer">
This romance novel is primarily set in 1940 and 1941 during the immediate post-Dunkirk period of World War II at a military hospital in England during nightly bomb raids and blackouts. The story's protagonist, Laurie (Laurence) 'Spud' Odell, is a young soldier wounded at Dunkirk (Renault had trained as a nurse and during the war she was posted to an Emergency Hospital in Winford just outside Bristol), who must decide if his affections lie with a younger conscientious objector working at his hospital or a naval officer whom he had 'worshiped' when they had both been pupils at an all-boys boarding school and with whom he has suddenly been reconnected.The conscientious objector, Andrew Raynes, is a young Quaker, as yet unaware of his own sexuality, who is working as an orderly at the military hospital where Laurie is being treated. Ralph Lanyon, who commanded the Merchant Navy ship which evacuated Laurie from Dunkirk, was Laurie's boyhood hero at school, but he was expelled for a sexual incident with another boy (Hazell). He is sexually experienced and an established member of the homosexual sub-culture of the nearby city.Laurie must come to terms with his own nature as well as the two different aspects of love characterised by Andrew and Ralph: the 'pure', asexual nature of his love for Andrew; and the sexual satisfaction of his love for Ralph. The novel derives its title from the Chariot Allegory employed by Plato in his dialogue "Phaedrus", in which the soul (the charioteer) must learn to manage the two aspects of love, the black horse representing the lustful side of love, and the white horse representing the altruistic side of love.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_Trade_(novel)"title="Skin Trade (novel)">
While Anita Blake remains one of the most effective "legal vampire hunters" in the country, her personal life is in turmoil because of her close personal relationship with some vampires. Amid this backdrop, Blake goes to Las Vegas to investigate a vampire's serial murder spree.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Court_of_the_Air"title="The Court of the Air">
When streetwise Molly Templar witnesses a brutal murder at the brothel she has recently been apprenticed to, her first instinct is to run back to the poorhouse where she grew up. But there she finds her fellow orphans butchered, and it slowly dawns on her that she was the real target of the attack. For Molly is special, and she is carrying a secret that marks her out for destruction by enemies of the state.Oliver Brooks has led a sheltered existence in the backwater home of his merchant uncle. But when he is framed for his only relative's murder, he is forced to flee for his life, accompanied by an agent of the mysterious Court of the Air. Chased across the country, Oliver finds himself in the company of thieves, outlaws, and spies, and gradually learns more about the secret that has blighted his life.Soon Molly and Oliver will find themselves battling a grave threat to civilization, an ancient power thought to have been quelled millennia ago. Their enemies are ruthless and myriad, but the two orphans are also aided by indomitable friends.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Speech_(novel)"title="The Secret Speech (novel)">
In the three years since the events of "Child 44", Leo Demidov has established the Homicide Division within the KGB, which he uses to investigate what he calls "real crimes". While investigating the apparent murder of Suren Moskvin, a Ministry for State Security (MGB) officer, Leo is approached by Nikolai, his former superior officer in the MGB. Nikolai claims that he is being harassed by someone who sends him photographs of people he arrested. Leo, however, is distracted by troubles with his adoptive daughter Zoya—who does not accept him as her father—and writes Nikolai's claims off as the ramblings of a drunkard. When Khrushchev's speech, "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" in which Khrushchev denounces the tactics used by Josef Stalin, is distributed for the population to read, Nikolai is consumed by his guilt and kills both himself and his family. When Leo realises that Moskvin also committed suicide after being sent photographs of people he arrested, he deduces that someone is seeking retribution against the government and its agents for their crimes and that he himself is a target.The person responsible is Anisya, the wife of a priest whom Leo arrested after infiltrating the Church seven years previously. In the time since being sent to a forced-labour camp, Anisya has risen through the ranks of the "vory v zakone" to the point where she commands an entire band of criminals. Now known as Fraera, she holds a particular grudge against Leo and plans to make him suffer. She kidnaps Zoya and forces Leo to free her husband, Lazar. With the help of Frol Panin, a senior KGB agent, Leo and his friend Timur Nesterov travel to Kolyma 58—a notorious gulag in the Russian Far East—posing as a criminal and a guard with a plan to break Lazar out of prison and escort him back to Moscow. The journey proves difficult and Leo and Timur are separated; when Timur is forced to reveal himself as an agent of the government, he is murdered, whilst Lazar identifies Leo straight away and he is subjected to torture by the other prisoners while he tries to convince Lazar that Anisya sent him to free him. Leo convinces the half-mad commander of the camp to read Khrushchev's speech to the prisoners; the commander also confesses to several of his own crimes. This inspires the prisoners to revolt, overthrowing the guards and taking control of Kolyma 58. The prisoners hold a trial of the guards, executing the commander. Leo is also subjected to a trial, but is saved by Lazar when Lazar realises he is telling the truth about Anisya. Leo and Lazar escape the gulag while the prisoners try to negotiate with government forces in the area.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fancy_Nancy"title="Fancy Nancy">
Fancy Nancy is a young girl with a larger than life personality, who adores all things fancy. She always dresses extravagantly, wearing boas, tutus, ruby slippers, fairy wings, and fuzzy slippers. Nancy loves using big fancy words such as "iridescent", "ecstatic", and "extraordinary" and anything in French. She has redecorated her bedroom with everyday items, such as feather boas, Christmas lights, paper flowers, and hats. Her favorite doll is named Marabelle Lavinia Chandelier.In Nancy's opinion, her family is ordinary and dresses rather plainly, so Nancy decides to hold a class in the art of fanciness for her family. They oblige, and Nancy helps to dress them in bows, ornaments, top hats, and gaudy scarves. "Ooo-la-la!" Nancy cries in delight. "My family is posh! That's a fancy word for fancy."
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orchard_on_Fire"title="The Orchard on Fire">
It is 1953. Percy and Betty Harlency leave the pub they have been running in London and take over a tea-shop in Stonebridge, a village in Kent. They have a daughter, April, aged eight, and a son, Peter, is born in Stonebridge.April makes two special friends. Her best friend is Ruby, a girl of her age, whose parents, Lex and Gloria Richards, run the village pub. They run a good pub but they are rough people and Lex is violent to his daughter. He blacks her eye; he cuts off one of her pigtails with a breadknife. Ruby is a high-spirited red-haired girl. She likes playing with fire, setting fire to napkins, for example.April’s other friend is Mr Greenidge, a charming, old-fashioned gentleman with blue eyes and a white beard. April’s parents are pleased that he likes her. He lives in a fine house in the village and is admired for the way he cares for his ailing wife.Mr Greenidge tells April that he loves her, presses her against his body, and kisses her. He gives her presents of money and sweets; on one occasion, realizing she has lost an expensive propelling pencil, he buys her a replacement, to her deep gratitude. He finds excuses to bring her to his home; once, when Mrs Greenidge is away, he takes her to the bedroom and makes her lie on the bed with him; once, while she is seated on his thigh, he masturbates. When she does not see him, he stalks her. He asks her to reassure him that she loves him; bewildered and frightened, she gives the answer that pleases him.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Kicked_the_Hornets'_Nest"title="The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest">
A severely wounded Lisbeth Salander is placed in intensive care at Sahlgrenska Hospital. It picks up where "The Girl Who Played with Fire" left off, two rooms away from her also-injured father, Alexander Zalachenko, whom Salander injured with an axe. Ronald Niedermann, Zalachenko's son and Salander's half-brother, steals 800,000 kronor from his outlaw motorcycle gang before disappearing. These events prompt immediate action from "the Section", a secret counterintelligence division of Säpo which shielded the abusive Zalachenko and forcibly institutionalized Salander after she attempted to kill him as a child. Evert Gullberg, founder and former chief of the Section, plots to deflect attention by silencing Salander, Zalachenko, and Mikael Blomkvist, the publisher of "Millennium" magazine. Meanwhile, Dr. Peter Teleborian, the corrupt psychiatrist who abused Salander during her institutionalization, provides prosecutor Richard Ekström with a false psychiatric examination so that she can be recommitted.Gullberg, who has terminal cancer, shoots Zalachenko in his hospital bed. He attempts to enter Salander's room to kill her as well, but is thwarted by her lawyer, Annika Giannini, leading to him committing suicide. Section operatives also murder Gunnar Björk, Zalachenko's former Säpo handler and Blomkvist's source of information for an upcoming exposé; the operatives falsify the death as a suicide. Other operatives break into Blomkvist's apartment and mug Giannini, making off with copies of the classified Säpo file that contains Zalachenko's identity and planting bugs in the homes and phones of "Millennium" staff. The timing of the attacks and the property that was taken cause Blomkvist to realise that the phones are tapped, and he begins to investigate the Section in earnest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devouring"title="The Devouring">
"When dark creeps in and eats the light,&lt;br&gt;Bury your fears on Sorry Night,&lt;br&gt;For in the winter's blackest hours,&lt;br&gt;Comes the feasting of the Vours,&lt;br&gt;No one can see it, the life they stole,&lt;br&gt;Your body's here but not your soul..."The story follows Reggie and her best friend Aaron, two horror buffs who discover an old, anonymous journal written by a woman believed to be crazy. The entries refer to demonic creatures called Vours who steal people's souls on the night of the Winter Solstice, known in the book as Sorry Night.Reggie and Aaron think that Vours are just a silly legend so they try to summon them on the Winter Solstice. To summon them, they decide to face their worst fears not realizing the bravery drives the Vours away. Reggie lets a spider crawl over her body and Aaron stays underwater for a period of time. However, neither one of them becomes a Vour. Discouraged, the teens forget about the Vours until Reggie's little brother Henry starts acting strange. Once a happy-go-lucky kid, Henry becomes violent and rude, destroying his favorite stuffed animal and drowning his pet hamster. He becomes super-sensitive to the cold and spends his time in front of the fireplace, something very out of character for him. When he's hit by a snowball, black marks spread across his skin like a rash. He even attempts to murder Aaron in cold blood.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_the_Disappearing_Cat"title="The Mystery of the Disappearing Cat">
Luke, a friend of the Five Find-Outers, is working in Lady Candling's garden when her valuable Siamese cat is stolen. The Five Find-Outers and Dog work to solve the case.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_the_Missing_Man"title="The Mystery of the Missing Man">
The thirteenth book in the series introduces Mr Tolling, an old school friend of Fatty's father who comes to spend a week with the Trottevilles so he can attend the coleopterists' conference at a fair in Peterswood. Coleopterists are of course beetle-lovers, and not (as the gang joke) owners of collie dogs, growers of cauliflowers, or sufferers from colly-wobbles. Mr Tolling is rather like a beetle himself, a small man with a huge black beard, large glasses and always wearing a dark suit. He's very likeable, even if he is a little boring, always going on about beetles and how fascinating they are. He's extremely eager to get along to the coleopterist meetings, which are being held at Petersood's Town Hall.But Mr Tolling—or Mr Belling as Fatty mistakenly calls him at first—pales into insignificance compared to his daughter Eunice, who has come along to stay with the Trottevilles as well. Fatty is supposed to entertain her during her stay, and she's ready and willing to join in with whatever Fatty and his friends are doing, but she's domineering, and her highly efficient, extremely helpful attitude for some reason rubs Fatty and the others up the wrong way. In short, she's "simply awful." When Fatty mistakenly called her father Mr Belling (because bells toll), she responds by suggesting she call him Frederick Canterville instead. Throughout the book she is smart and witty, but Fatty doesn't want her overbearing company and politely escapes wherever possible.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush_Little_Baby_(novel)"title="Hush Little Baby (novel)">
Kit Innes is a high school student living with her mother and stepfather. As she retrieves a sweatshirt from her father's house, she is approached by her disheveled ex-stepmother, Dusty. Kit is stunned when Dusty hands her a newborn baby and a diaper bag before driving away, not even bothering to tell Kit his name.To the best of her ability, Kit tries to care for the baby, who she names Sam. The doorbell rings, so she opens the door. She finds a shabby looking man standing before her, looking for Dusty. Kit denies any knowledge of Dusty's baby and claims that she hasn't seen Dusty in a while. Kit shuts the door, but she suspects that the man is trying to look into the windows. Feeling threatened, she grabs a disposable camera and takes a picture of his license plate. Finding nothing, the man leaves.Kit decides to bring Sam back to her mother's house when Rowen Mason, Kit's potential boyfriend, arrives in tow with his nine years old sister, Muffin. Kit then receives a call from a lady named Cinda, who explains the whole situation. Apparently, Cinda and her husband, Burt, were supposed to adopt Dusty's baby, and the man who came to Kit's house earlier was Dusty's cousin. Kit is reassured by Cinda and promises to deliver Sam to her.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marthandavarma_(novel)"title="Marthandavarma (novel)">
In Panchavan forest a group of merchants find a young man, Ananthapadmanabhan, unconscious and covered in blood. They take him with them. Two years later, Parukutty still refuses to believe that her missing lover, Ananthapadmanabhan, is dead. Her mother arranges for her to marry Padmanabhan Thambi, elder son of aging King Rama Varma, through Thambi's right hand, Sundarayyan. The king has fallen ill and is confined to his bed. Desiring the throne, Thambi, with Sundarayyan, spreads the lie that the rightful heir, Prince Marthanda Varma, planned the attack on Ananthapadmanabhan because of an argument over a prostitute. Thambi allies himself with the Ettuveettil Pillas to oust the prince, stirring up the people against him and the royal officials. Some citizens stop paying taxes and the forces and finances of the royals are diminished.Prince Marthanda Varma and his aide, Parameswaran Pilla, stays at Charottu palace while on way to Bhoothapandi, to have discussions with Madurai forces, who detained the prime minister, Arumukham Pilla after payment for the forces become arrears. Velu Kuruppu, a loyalist fighter who serves Padmanabhan Thambi, with his lancers chase out the prince and his aide, however the chased-duo evade chasers after being aided by a mad Channan who misdirect the pursuers, who in-turn fight with mad Channan, Ananthapadmanabhan in disguise. Velu Kuruppu and his team run away after Channan was helped by the archer Chulliyil Chadachi Marthandan Pilla, who also kills a few of the lancers as a payback to Channan for saving his life earlier. The prince and his aide take refuge at Mangoikkal Kuruppu's house. Following Thambi's order to capture the Channan-people, the mad Channan is captured and locked in the dungeon. Upon discovering that Marthanda Varma is at Mangoikkal's house, Velu Kuruppu sends his men to the house and rushes back to Thambi to arrange for more lancers and Nair soldiers to finish off the prince. The mad Channan finds an underground passage from the dungeon to Charottu palace rushes to the Channan-people. As the prince and Mangoikkal arrange for additional forces, Velu Kuruppu and his men launch an attack on Mangoikkal and set the house on fire. The mad Channan and the Channan-people reach Mangoikkal's house to fight the attackers, and Channan rescues prince and his aide trapped in house on fire. Fighters from Mangoikkal's martial arts school join the fight and defeat Velu Kuruppu's men. That night, Thirumukhathu Pilla visits Thambi to ask about the murder of his son, Ananthapadmanabhan; during when one of Velu Kuruppu's lancers arrives and recounts the defeat at Mangoikkal's.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four"title="Nineteen Eighty-Four">
In 1984, civilisation has been ravaged by world war, civil conflict, and revolution. Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain) is a province of Oceania, one of the three totalitarian super-states that rule the world. It is ruled by "The Party" under the ideology of "Ingsoc" (a Newspeak shortening of "English Socialism") and the mysterious leader Big Brother, who has an intense cult of personality. The Party brutally purges out anyone who does not fully conform to their regime, using the Thought Police and constant surveillance through telescreens (two-way televisions), cameras, and hidden microphones. Those who fall out of favour with the Party become "unpersons", disappearing with all evidence of their existence destroyed.In London, Winston Smith is a member of the Outer Party, working at the Ministry of Truth, where he rewrites historical records to conform to the state's ever-changing version of history. Winston revises past editions of "The Times", while the original documents are destroyed after being dropped into ducts known as memory holes, which lead to an immense furnace. He secretly opposes the Party's rule and dreams of rebellion, despite knowing that he is already a "thought-criminal" and is likely to be caught one day.While in a prole (Proletariat) neighbourhood, he meets Mr. Charrington, the owner of an antiques shop, and buys a diary where he writes criticisms of the Party and Big Brother. To his dismay, when he visits a prole quarter he discovers they have no political consciousness. As he works in the Ministry of Truth, he observes Julia, a young woman maintaining the novel-writing machines at the ministry, whom Winston suspects of being a spy, and develops an intense hatred of her. He vaguely suspects that his superior, an Inner Party official O'Brien, is part of an enigmatic underground resistance movement known as the Brotherhood, formed by Big Brother's reviled political rival Emmanuel Goldstein.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWE_Encyclopedia"title="WWE Encyclopedia">
The "WWE Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to World Wrestling Entertainment" contains profiles for past and present WWE personalities, as well as event and title histories. While providing information primarily about the personalities career in WWE, information is also present about their careers in other companies. People who portrayed separate characters are often given separate profiles for each character.People who left the company on bad terms were given favorable profiles, including Alundra Blayze and The Ultimate Warrior. Chris Benoit has a profile in the encyclopedia, however there is no mention of the double murder and suicide.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coming_Insurrection"title="The Coming Insurrection">
In its original incarnation, "The Coming Insurrection" consisted of twelve chapters, together with a brief afterword. The English edition of the book was published after the Tarnac Nine arrests, and therefore includes a brief foreword and introduction which touch on the subject of the arrests, for a total of fifteen parts.The book is divided into two-halves. The first half attempts a diagnosis of the totality of modern capitalist civilization, moving through what the Committee identify as the "seven circles" of "alienation", induced by states and capitalism: alienation relating to the self, to social relations, to work, to the urban, to the economy, to the environment, and finally to the state itself. Because the book is a radical leftist, theoretical work, this "alienation" can be alternately understood in the general sense of the word, or otherwise in its specifically Marxist sense.Beginning in "Get Going!", the second half of the book presents a prescription for revolutionary struggle based on the formation of communes, or affinity group-style units, which will build their forces outside of mainstream politics, and attack conventional powers (states, businesses, the police) in moments of crisis – political, social, environmental – to foment anti-capitalist revolution. The insurrection envisioned by the Committee entails local appropriation of power by the people, physical blocking of the economy, and rendering police actions irrelevant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Keeper"title="Dragon Keeper">
The book opens as a group of sea serpents have nearly finished their long journey upriver to encase themselves so they might hatch into dragons. It is late in the year and the serpents are older than is normal to make the journey. The last known dragon, Tintaglia, is overseeing this journey in the hopes that dragons will be reintroduced to the world. The Rain Wilds Council has agreed to help in exchange for her helping the Rain Wilds people in their war against Chalced. Sisarqua, a queen serpent, struggles to finish her casing and is assisted by Tintaglia.The captain of the Tarman, Leftrin, comes across a piece of wizardwood, an encased dragon that has been washed away by the river. At first he thinks to sell it for an immense profit, but then decides to use it for his ship to protect it against the acidic river.Thymara, an 11-year-old girl with claws and scaling, consistent with Rain Wilds defects from birth, goes with her father to watch the hatching of the dragons. She is shocked to find that the new hatchlings are weak and malformed. She communicates with one when her father is almost killed and eaten. Sisarqua has turned into a dragon, naming herself Sintara, and is distraught to realize that her proportions are all wrong and she is not what she should be, and will likely never fly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Halo_Effect_(book)"title="The Halo Effect (book)">
## Targets.The book is critical of a genre of business books including "In Search of Excellence", "Good to Great", "What Really Works", and "". It finds similar faults with a swathe of business journalism.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_to_the_Sea_(novel)"title="March to the Sea (novel)">
After the events in Marshad (at the end of the previous book) Roger and his marines manage to cross the Hadur region with little incident and begin ascending the mountains dividing the continent seeking a way through them. They awaken one morning to discover that the temperature has dropped to a pleasant 23 degrees and that the air is no longer humid. While the humans revel in the pleasant weather (for them) and brake out the coffee, the Mardukans are found to be nearly comatose. After they warm up, Pahner convenes a council of war to determine how to proceed. Cord, being honor-bound to Roger, must continue and can survive with the use of "dinshon" exercises (which he can teach to his partially trained nephews). D'Len Pah and his tribe of mahouts, however, are not so trained and cannot continue. This poses a problem for the marines since the "flar-ta" pack beasts are owned by the mahouts. After some negotiations the marines decide to buy all but one of the beasts from D'Len Pah and his clansmen, who part ways with the marines and return to the lowlands with one Cord's nephews. Shortly afterward, the marines spot a large city in a mountain valley, but are attacked by a herd of wild "flar-ka" before getting there. While they manage to kill the herd, casualties are high and Pahner decides, upon reaching the city (called Ran Tai) that it's time for a respite. Having bought the pack-beasts from the D'Len Pah, the marines are seriously strapped for cash and Roger offers to take a squad of marines and look for some relatively low-risk but high-paying job. While Pahner is appalled at the idea of turning his troops into mercenaries, he reluctantly agrees that they have little choice if they hope to reach the coastline with enough money to charter or build a ship.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_to_the_Stars"title="March to the Stars">
The story opens in the restored city of Voitan, where a human search and rescue team (really an assassination squad) is examining the remains of the marines who were interred there after the battle against the Kranolta. Temu Jin, a Commo-Tech serving as translator for the team, repeatedly questions the local leaders as to the marines' purpose and fate, who in turn repeatedly state that all the marines died during the battle or shortly afterward. While Dara, the team's leader is content with their story, Jin remains privately suspicious because of several glaring clues that Dara, in his stupidity, has failed to notice. Between the physical evidence (pointing to people with marine nano-packs), the reticence of the king of Q'Nkok (who allowed only limited questioning and always while under supervision), the inconsistencies in T'Leen Targ's story (that the Kranolta took all the marines' weapons and gear), the Mardukans' atypical body-language of nods, open-mouthed smiles and handshakes (all indicating acculturation to humans) and the fact that the bodies were all stripped of clothing, jewelry and even tattoos (making their identification impossible without a DNA database), Jin becomes convinced that the locals are covering for the marines who are headed almost certainly, to the spaceport. As he's about to finish his scans, Jin notices a bronze earring with the word "BARBARIANS" on it. Deftly snatching it without Dara noticing, he then passes it on to T'Leen in a handshake, and tells him that he might want to melt it down "so nobody else finds it".
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ransom_My_Heart"title="Ransom My Heart">
When Finnula Crais, a beautiful yet feisty huntress who wears braies and is one of the late miller's daughters in Leesbury, discovers one of her sisters, Mellana, has become pregnant by a troubadour and spent all the money for her dowry on ribbons and trinkets for her other sisters' weddings (Including Finn's), she agrees to Mellana's insane idea that they could hold a rich man for ransom to pay for her dowry. Hugo Fitzstephen is twenty-five, and is Lord of Stephensgate (From which Finn is poaching the land and giving it to the servants, who are starving to death by Hugo's cousin, Reginald Laroche and his daughter, Isabella), and has a mighty way with women and wears a beard, but after his mother, elder brother and father dies, returns from the Holy Land to hold his rightful place after ten years he has been a soldier, stays at an inn. The innkeeper, the brother of one of Finn's sisters' husbands, tells a short summary of "Fair Finn" after she walks into the inn to talk to the innkeeper, since Hugo seems to have a strong attraction for her, yet he's seen woman more beautiful than her and she is wearing braies. Finn, hearing of Hugo's wealth from the innkeeper, but not knowing he was from those lands, decides that he would be a good man to hold for ransom, and lays out her trap. Hugo's squire, Peter, has his life threatened when two men at the inn want money from Hugo, not knowing that who he was, either, but Finn saves them both by pinning both of the men to the walls and threatening to do worse. She later walks off, leaving Hugo and Peter at the inn. They both try to look for her to say their gratitude, but they just stop and continue their journey, not knowing that she is following them, planning the next step.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warbreaker"title="Warbreaker">
"Warbreaker" tells the story of two Idrian princesses, Vivenna and Siri. Vivenna was contracted through a treaty written before she was born to marry the God King of rival nation Hallandren. However, King Dedelin sends his other daughter Siri to meet the treaty instead.Vivenna follows her to Hallandren in the hope of saving Siri from her fate. Upon arriving in Hallandren, Vivenna meets with Lemex, one of her father's spies in the city, but he has taken ill and dies shortly thereafter — though not before bequeathing his large sum of BioChromatic Breath to her (which is considered heretical by the Idrians).Vivenna joins up with Denth and Tonk Fah, mercenaries that were under Lemex's employ, and together they begin making guerilla attacks against Hallandren's supply depots and convoys that will hopefully give the Idrians an advantage in the seemingly inevitable war.Siri, after spending many terrified nights waiting for the God King to procreate with her, finds that he is not actually the menacing, frightening God that she thought, but has actually had his tongue cut out by his priests, making him nothing more than a figurehead. Though he is intelligent, he possesses a childlike outlook because his education was withheld. Siri teaches the God King to communicate by writing, and over time they learn to care for each other and fall in love. However, Siri believes that the priests are secretly plotting to kill her and the God King if she produces an heir, and fears that Hallandren will soon launch a war against Idris. Siri finds a potential ally in the unorthodox god Lightsong, who is plagued by nightmares of war and is struggling to discover his purpose.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tempest"title="The Tempest">
Twelve years before the action of the play, Prospero, formerly Duke of Milan, had been usurped by his treacherous brother Antonio, aided by Alonso, King of Naples. Escaping by boat with his infant daughter Miranda, Prospero had fled to an island where he has been living ever since, using his magical powers to keep the island's only inhabitant, Caliban, as a slave, and a local spirit Ariel as a servant.When a ship carrying his brother Antonio passes nearby, Prospero conjures up a storm and the ship is destroyed. Antonio is shipwrecked, along with Alonso, his son Ferdinand, his brother Sebastian, and the good courtier Gonzalo.Prospero is determined to regain his dukedom. Using magic he separates the shipwreck survivors into groups on the island:Prospero intends that Miranda, now aged 15, will marry Ferdinand, and he instructs Ariel to bring some other spirits and produce a masque. The masque will feature classical goddesses, Juno, Ceres, and Iris, and will bless and celebrate the betrothal. The masque will also instruct the young couple on marriage, and on the value of chastity until then.The masque is suddenly interrupted when Prospero realizes he had forgotten the plot against his life. He orders Ariel to deal with this. Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano are chased off into the swamps by goblins in the shape of hounds. Prospero vows that once he achieves his goals, he will set Ariel free, and abandon his magic, saying:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundswell_(book)"title="Groundswell (book)">
The groundswell is characterized by several tactics that guide companies into using social technologies strategically and effectively.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complaints"title="The Complaints">
Detective Inspector Malcolm Fox works in the Complaints and Conduct Department of Lothian and Borders Police, members of which are invariably treated with suspicion and hostility by regular police officers. Fox and his team are tasked with investigating Detective Sergeant Jamie Breck, suspected of being a member of a child pornography ring. However, Breck is in turn investigating the death of Vince Faulkner, who was in an abusive relationship with Fox's sister. This brings Fox into direct contact with Breck, and as he develops both a friendship and a working relationship with him he begins to doubt the validity of his assignment. Despite his personal connection to the case, and against protocol, Fox gets involved in the investigation into Faulkner's death. This brings him into conflict with Breck's superior officer, who harbours a dislike of Fox for investigating a corrupt officer under his command.Eventually, Fox and Breck are both suspended and Fox himself is placed under investigation. However, they continue to investigate Faulkner's death, discovering that he had links to a bankrupt property developer who appears to have committed suicide. This leads to further links to members of the criminal underworld, and in turn to a senior member of the police force, who is found to be responsible for having Breck framed and for having Fox placed under investigation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(novel)"title="Rogue (novel)">
Maxine Williams is a well-known and leading child psychiatrist, specializing in trauma and suicide, with three amazing children Daphne, Jack and Sam and a rich and glamorous ex-husband. Blake Williams, one of the richest men in the world has a glamorous life of globe travelling and dating beautiful women whilst Maxine stays in Manhattan looking after their children and pursuing the career she loves. Though divorced, both are extremely affectionate to each other.Blake soon meets the beautiful Arabella and falls deeply in love. Meanwhile Max also starts dating a doctor, Charles West. But Charles is a bit uncomfortable with the children and even starts showing his irritation by suggesting that the kids should be sent to a boarding school. The eldest one, Daphne starts becoming possessive of both her parents and behaves rudely to both Arabella and Charles.When a tragedy strikes in Morocco, Blake and Max join hands to help the victims and orphaned children. Blake transforms into a responsible man, much to Max's surprise. Blake throws Arabella out after she deceives him. Max and Charles plan to wed soon but Max finds herself happy only in Blake's company while Charles constantly hurts Blake by behaving rudely whenever he was around. After a series of hilarious events, Max and Blake marry again, much to the delight of their kids.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_I_Saw_and_How_I_Lied"title="What I Saw and How I Lied">
"What I Saw and How I Lied" takes place right after WWII and follows the story of Evie Spooner and her family. A few weeks before fifteen-year-old Evie is supposed to head back to her school, Evie’s stepfather, Joe, who recently got back from the war, uproots Evie, and her mother, Beverly, from their home in Queens, New York to take them on a vacation to Palm Beach, Florida.After a long, hot car trip Evie and her family finally makes it to Palm Beach, to find that it is the off-season and only one hotel is open. After checking in and getting settled they soon make the acquaintance of the Graysons.Mr. and Mrs. Grayson are a graceful and well to do couple, who also come from New York City. They are at Palm Beach for a vacation, like Evie’s family. The two families quickly become friends.One night, Evie finds out that a school dance is being held at the hotel and she decides to join in. While getting ready her mother and Mrs. Grayson catch her padding her bra, and Mrs. Grayson takes her under her wing. With the help of her mother and Mrs. Grayson, Evie gets ready for the dance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Accounting"title="The Accounting">
The scene of this novel is Paris, where the branch of a well-known London bank is being audited. A normally routine affair, this year's audit is different—the auditors have reason to believe that there may be fraud or embezzlement at play.How do the auditors know this? A few indiscreet words overheard at a Paris nightclub.Our attention is turned to each player, some major and many minor, the bank officials and overseers of the audit of course, but mostly to the underpaid, unhappy junior and senior auditors, each a prisoner of his own private conflicts and aspirations, and each seeing the discovery and proving of the fraud as his chance for promotion.The novel makes the seemingly boring task of auditing understandable and delves into the hearts of those who make business their life's work.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_Thyself"title="Honor Thyself">
World-famous actress Carole Barber has come to Paris to work on her new novel and to find herself. But on a cool November evening, her taxi speeds into a tunnel just past the Louvre, and into the fiery grasp of a terrible terrorist explosion causing her to be left unconscious and unidentified in a Paris emergency room for weeks.Carole’s friends and family begin to make inquiries into her disappearance only to find that Carole is far from home and fighting for her life. Carole' family and friends swarm to the hospital and pray for her recovery to find she has amnesia and doesn't remember her own family.Gradually, Carole slowly regains her memory, new friends and love along the way to begin to truly honor herself in this tale of survival and hope.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Good_Woman_(novel)"title="A Good Woman (novel)">
Annabelle Worthington was born into a life of privilege in the glamorous New York society set living on Fifth Avenue and in Newport, Rhode Island. In April 1912, everything changed when the Titanic sank, changing her world forever. Annabelle then pours herself into volunteer work, nursing the poor, igniting a passion for medicine that would shape the course of her life.More grief is around the corner with her first love and marriage to Josiah Millbank, a family friend. Betrayed by a scandal undeserved, Annabelle flees New York for war-ravaged France, to lose herself in a world of helping others in the First World War field hospital run by women. After the war, Annabelle become a Parisian doctor and becomes a mother living happily until a coincidental meeting reminds her of her former life to which she returns stronger and braver than before, a new woman to fight against the overwhelming odds thrown against her in life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Arthur_and_His_Knights_of_the_Round_Table"title="King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table">
Uther Pendragon, king of Britons, and defender of Britain against the Saxons has died. On Christmas Day, Merlin the magician gathers many knights outside a church. A sword, stuck fast to an anvil, in turn on top of a marble stone, appears. No knight can remove the sword from the anvil.After many years, the young Arthur, secretly the son of Uther Pendragon, pulls the sword out of the stone. He becomes king. With the guidance of Merlin, he constructs a round table, at which only the best knights of Britain may sit. More and more knights come to join the brotherhood of the Round Table, and each has his own adventures.Eventually, the holy knight Galahad, the son of Sir Lancelot, comes to Arthur's court. With his coming, all the knights ride throughout Europe in search of the Holy Grail of Jesus Christ. Only five knights see the Grail; Sir Lancelot, Sir Percival, Sir Bors de Gaunnes, Sir Galahad, and Sir Gawain.After the Grail is found, the last battle of the Knights of the Round Table is fought. In this battle many knights die and with them King Arthur, sir Gawain, who is Arthur's nephew, and Mordred, the wicked son of king Arthur and his half-sister Morgana le Fay. King Arthur is taken away to Avalon, a secret island after he is terribly wounded by Mordred while he was making the final stab with his sword to kill Mordred.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Day_at_a_Time_(novel)"title="One Day at a Time (novel)">
Coco Barrington, the wayward member of a family of Hollywood celebrities, agrees to dog-sit in her successful sister's house. There, she meets Leslie Baxter, a British actor hiding from a vindictive ex with his six-year-old girl. Following that encounter, Coco finds love but also reconciliation with the rest of her family, healing old wounds One Day at a Time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitoun_(book)"title="Zeitoun (book)">
Abdulrahman Zeitoun grew up in Syria. After a few years of apprenticeship in the Syrian port city of Jableh, Zeitoun spent twenty years working at sea as a crewman, engineer and fisherman. During this time he traveled the world and eventually settled in the United States in 1988. Zeitoun met his wife Kathy, a native of Baton Rouge, with whom he founded their business, Zeitoun Painting Contractors LLC. Kathy converted to Islam.In late August 2005, as Hurricane Katrina approached the city, Kathy and their four children left New Orleans for Baton Rouge. Zeitoun stayed behind to watch over their home, ongoing job sites and rental properties. Once the storm made landfall, their neighborhood (although miles from the nearest levees) was flooded up to the second floor of most houses. Zeitoun began to explore the city in a secondhand canoe, distributing what supplies he had, ferrying neighbors to higher ground and caring for abandoned dogs.On September 6, Zeitoun and three companions were arrested at one of Zeitoun's rental houses by a mixed group of U.S. Army National Guardsmen, local police and police from out of state. They were detained in a makeshift jail in a Greyhound bus station -"Camp Greyhound" - for three days before being transferred to Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in nearby St. Gabriel, Louisiana. Zeitoun was held at Hunt for 20 more days without trial, but he was given a bond of 75 thousand dollars and read his charges. He was interviewed by officers and later by ICE officials and put in segregated cells.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pool_of_Radiance_(novel)"title="Pool of Radiance (novel)">
"Dragon" described the novel's plot: "Five companions find themselves in the unenviable position of defending the soon-to-be ghost town against a rival possessing incredible power."Three companions, Shal Bal of Cormyr, Tarl Desanea, a cleric of Tyr, and Ren o' the Blade are brought together in Phlan by circumstance and encounter various threats as they work to purge the city of civilized Phlan, the restored part of the destroyed city of Old Phlan, culminating in a faceoff with the Lord of the Ruins, Tyranthraxus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_the_Clans"title="Code of the Clans">
In the introduction, the book summarizes how the Clans were formed. It then cuts to Leafpool introducing the warrior code to us, through the point of view of loners visiting the Clans to learn more about them. Each code starts with Leafpool giving a brief synopsis of the code. Some stories have additional stories that show the codes being enforced.Code one: Defend your Clan, even with your life. You may have friendships with cats from other Clans, but your loyalty must remain to your Clan, as one day you may meet them in battle. Code one tells the story of Cloudberry of RiverClan and Ryewhisker of WindClan. Cloudberry is expecting Ryewhisker's kits and Ryewhisker believes the kits will end the territorial dispute between the two Clans. But instead, in a battle, Ryewhisker is killed trying to defend Cloudberry from his Clanmates. This leads to the creation of the first code.Code two: Do not hunt or trespass on another Clan's territory. The story begins at the gathering when Brindlestar, leader of ShadowClan, complains about ThunderClan. ThunderClan accuses ShadowClan of stealing prey, and a fight starts to break out. The fight was interrupted when a branch falls between the two squabbling Clans to separate them, and no cats are hurt. It was a sign from StarClan, and it prompted the Clans to decide that no Clan cat may cross the border for leisure or hunting. (In a mini-story, White-eye and Dappletail try to catch a fish.)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_Scourge"title="The Rise of Scourge">
Tiny is the smallest of Quince's litter of three kittens, which also includes Socks and Ruby. His brother and sister constantly bully him because of his size. Later, humans come to adopt Socks and Ruby, but they leave Tiny. Ruby tells him that unwanted kittens like him are thrown into the river.Tiny runs into the forest to escape being thrown into the river. He is met by a ThunderClan patrol consisting of Bluefur, Thistleclaw, and Thistleclaw's apprentice, Tigerpaw. Tigerpaw attempts to kill Tiny, but is stopped at the last second by Bluefur, who reminds him of the warrior code.Tiny goes to the city and is laughed at for his collar. He finds a dog tooth, and attempts to rip his collar with it, but it ends up embedded in the collar instead. When other cats ask him about it, Tiny lies and says that he ripped it out of a dog's mouth after killing it, in an attempt to impress them. The story spreads, and soon two loners, Bone and Brick, come ask him to help get rid of a dog that is keeping the stray cats from a dumpster full of food. When Tiny confronts the dog, it is startled by Tiny's shadow, and runs away. Impressed, the cats congratulate him, and one asks what his name is. Tiny decides on the spot to rename himself Scourge, after recalling something his mother told him about forest cats being "a scourge on the name of all good cats".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deo_Langkhui"title="Deo Langkhui">
The story is about the life-struggle of Chandraprabha, the banished queen of king Pratapsingha. She was sent to the Tiwa Gobha kingdom to marry with the Gobha king (Kobâ rajâ )in the Chunbîl Melâ (Jonbeel Mela).The Gobha king reveals his chivalry by accepting Chandraprabha as a member of his kingdom. In the Gobha kingdom, Chandraprabha makes herself familiar with the customs of the people. She even changes her name to "Konchari", a Tiwa name. Starting from Chandraprabha, the story goes until her great grandson and, thus, in between there are many characters who are fairly rich in their own qualities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_School_for_Fools"title="A School for Fools">
The novel doesn't have a linear plot, but rather presents events as recalled by the main character. The protagonist, So-and-So, is a student who suffers from dissociative identity disorder and nonlinear time perception, which he believes he inherited from his grandmother. So-and-so is in a constant discussion with his "other self" and has difficulty distinguishing between "yesterday," "today," and "tomorrow."The protagonist attends a school for special children, where he studies in a class taught by his favorite teacher, geographer Pavel Petrovich Norvegov whom the author also calls Saul Petrovich. He is also in love with another teacher, Veta. The accounts of their lives and the lives of some other minor characters highlight the reality of a repressive Soviet regime.Following graduation, So-and-So goes on to work in a variety of jobs, from "sharpening pencils" to being a conductor. The narrative comes to an abrupt conclusion as the author runs out of paper.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_Heresies_Distressed"title="By Heresies Distressed">
The Imperial Charisian Navy, having overpowered the defenders of Ferayd, Kingdom of Delferahk, has captured the ringleaders of a massacre of Charisian merchantmen and their families. The captives include priests of the Inquisition of the Church of God Awaiting. Ferayd's waterfront district is burned to the ground, with residents allowed to salvage only what they can carry, before clergy of Mother Church are hanged by secular powers for the first time in known history. Irrefutable proof the Inquisition orchestrated and celebrated the murder of innocents is published worldwide.Mercantile and political leaders gather in seclusion in the Republic of Siddarmark to contemplate recent events: The Charisians have unilaterally thrown off the Church's oppressive yoke and destroyed every force sent against them. The Kingdom of Chisholm has aligned itself with the rebels via political marriage to form a new superpower, the Empire of Charis. The leaders quietly agree to continue trading with the new empire, against Church orders. In Charis and Chisholm, a plot against imperial leadership slowly builds. In the holy city of Zion, the Group of Four engage in their own machinations after the setback in Ferayd. Emperor Cayleb Ahrmahk, with "Seijin" Merlin Athrawes at his side, gathers support in Chisholm before embarking for Zebediah. There, he warily accepts the surrender and fealty of its chief noble, who is known for treachery. The Imperial Marines, the first Safeholdian ground force to deploy rifled muskets, artillery and commandos on a strategic level, establish a beachhead on the namesake island of the League of Corisande. The defenders underestimate the threat and offer battle on an open field. Amid a catastrophic rout, quick thinking and heroic leadership saves part of the Corisandian Army. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claim_to_Fame_(novel)"title="Claim to Fame (novel)">
It was a talent that came out of nowhere. One day, Lindsay Scott was on the top of the world, the child star of a hit TV show. The next day her fame had turned into torture. Every time anyone said anything about her, anywhere in the world, she heard it: praise, criticism, back-stabbing… Lindsay had what looked like a nervous breakdown and vanished from the public eye. Now she’s sixteen, and a tabloid newspaper claims that her own father is holding her hostage. The truth is much stranger, but that tabloid article sets off a chain of events that forces Lindsay to finally confront who she really is.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit's_Wilderness"title="Kit's Wilderness">
Thirteen-year-old Kit and his family have moved back to Stoneygate to be with his grandfather, who is succumbing to Alzheimer's disease, after Kit's grandmother dies. His grandfather, an ex-miner, tells him about the town's coal-mining days and the hardships and disasters that were a part of his youth. Kit meets Allie Keenan, full of energy and life, but also shadowy John Askew and the dangerous 'game' he plays – a game called Death. Through playing the game, Kit comes to see the lost children of the mines and begins to connect his grandfather's fading memories to his, his friends’ and Stoneygate's history.The Watsons are known as one of the "Old families" because they have ancestors who worked in the mines before they were closed, such as Kit's grandfather.Askew surrounds himself with characters that are from families who worked in the mines including Kit. Now that he is a part of Askew's group, Kit is invited to play the game Death, in which they reenact the death of children in the mines.Once chosen for Death, Kit undergoes a change; snapping at Allie on multiple occasions. Noting this change, his teacher Miss Bush follows him and uncovers the game. Askew is expelled from school for being the leader. To escape his father, who is an alcoholic, Askew runs away and lives in an abandoned mine shafts. Angry at Kit for ending the game and getting him expelled, Askew sends Bobby Carr, another character from the "Old families" group, to bring Kit to the cave where they confront each other in the book's climax.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Darkness_(novel)"title="The White Darkness (novel)">
Shy teenager Symone 'Sym' Wates is taken to Antarctica by her domineering 'uncle', Victor Briggs, who after the death of her real parent has elected himself her surrogate father. An obsessive believer in the hollow earth theories of John Cleves Symmes, Jr., Briggs is convinced that in Antarctica he will find the entrance to the Inner World and its inhabitants. He is ready to sacrifice Sym and others to prove his theory and increasingly puts her in danger until she finally sees the truth about him. She is then able to escape his plans for her. Briggs dies still pursuing his obsession while Sym returns to her own life with new freedom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Seminarista"title="O Seminarista">
The book is set in the city of Itapecerica (then called Vila de Tamanduá), in Minas Gerais. Eugênio and Margarida are two childhood friends who love each other, but following orders of his father, Eugênio is sent to a seminary, in order to become a priest. However, he is not able to forget Margarida, and keeps on dilacerating himself between religiosity and the pleasures of flesh.Despite his numerous inner conflicts, he finally receives his ordination and becomes a priest. Returning to his hometown in order to celebrate his first mass, he discovers that Margarida is very sick and nearly dying. Unable to restrain himself, he and Margarida engage in sexual intercourse. Unbeknownst to him, she dies shortly after he leaves.Later on, Eugênio goes on celebrating his first mass – a requiem mass. However, when he discovers that the mass is being made in honor of a deceased Margarida, he has a mental breakdown and, taking off his priest vests, runs away of the church, in a frenzy and completely naked.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relentless_(Koontz_novel)"title="Relentless (Koontz novel)">
Cullen "Cubby" Greenwich has just released his sixth novel, "One O'Clock Jump" which is generally well received in the literary community. However, Shearman Waxx, considered to be a preeminent literary critic, writes a scathing, albeit somewhat inaccurate review of Cubby's latest work.Against the advice of his wife, Penny Greenwich, a children's book author in her own right, Cubby attempts to gather some information about his new nemesis. Cubby learns that he and the critic share a favorite dining locale. Accompanying Cubby to the restaurant is his six-year-old prodigy son, Milo. A chance encounter in the men's room foretells the ensuing chaos when Shearman Waxx simply utters "Doom."Upon arriving home, the residents of the house go about their daily business, when Shearman Waxx is seen walking the interior of the house. With Cubby yelling at him the whole time, he finally leaves. That night, they turn on security and alarms but are awakened in the night by Sherman Waxx in their room again repeating the words "Doom". Penny and Cubby are both tasered multiple times by the eccentric book critic. The electricity, which has previously been shut down, turns back on once Waxx leaves and the alarm system states that it is fully functional and undisturbed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_Park_(novel)"title="Lowell Park (novel)">
Set in 1990, Jenny Brix lives in Iowa City. She is a history buff. She even has a Ronald Reagan picture when he was in his 20s as a lifeguard! When she goes to a meeting, a very old professor has a heart attack. Panicking, she uses CPR on him, thus saving his life. After a few stops to the hospital, he asks her which US president she likes best. She answers Ronald Reagan. So then the professor tells her that she can go back in time and meet him. She is shocked, but the professor keeps telling her it's true. She finally believes him, sort of. The professor takes her to Dixon, Illinois, Reagan's childhood home. There the professor tells her she has 80 hours to stay out of the time zone, or her body will be used to the other time zones and can't come back to present day (1990). When she goes into the time machine, it actually is set on 1832, instead of 1932 (where she was going). She then meets Abraham Lincoln (who develops a little crush on her), and Chief Black Hawk during the Black Hawk War. After all of that is straightened out, she goes to 1932 with less than half the time left she started with. Once she gets there she sees a young, handsome Ronald Reagan going past her to save a person from drowning. She then gets some friends, Scooter and Betsy. They say there is a dance at Dixon's run down, old high school. There she dances with Ronald and his brother. While dancing with Ronald, she falls down the steps with him. They then get a crush on each other. After going on a few dates, she has to go to her original time zone. She and Ronald have a sad exchange (Ronald doesn't know about the time traveling) when she has to leave. Jenny then takes Scooter and Betsy to Lowell Park, where she shows them the time machine. She then leaves, leaving the others dumbfounded. When she comes back, professor says he is Scooter, and spent the rest of his life finding things about the time machine after she left until he finally made the time machine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wise_Man's_Fear"title="The Wise Man's Fear">
On the second day of his recounting the story of his life to Chronicler at the Waystone Inn, Kvothe continues the narrative commenced in "The Name of the Wind", wherein a younger Kvothe pursues his education at the University. There, he carries on a feud with fellow student Ambrose, culminating in Ambrose getting him brought up on charges of Consortation with Demonic Powers, a capital crime, for having called the Name of the Wind. Despite successfully defending himself in court, Kvothe has guaranteed himself an extremely high term tuition due to the negative attention he has attracted at the University. Kvothe follows the advice of his friends and teachers at the University and decides to take a term off to chase the wind. To postpone having to pay his debt to the loan shark Devi, he uses several of his more prized possessions as collateral before setting off.Count Threpe arranges for Kvothe to travel by ship to the city of Severen, in Vintas, in order to aid the Maershon Lerand Alveron in courting the only bride suitable for his high station, Meluan Lackless, with the hope that Kvothe might earn a writ of patronage in return. Kvothe writes songs and letters that successfully woo the Maer's bride and, soon after arriving, inadvertently discovers and thwarts a plot to kill the Maer, which earns him the Maer's respect and trust. He also discovers Denna living in Severen and, after several weeks in her company, gets to know the song she is working on, but the lyrics violate the very core of Kvothe's knowledge about the fall of Myr Tariniel. Not able to share his history, Kvothe argues with Denna about the song's meaning and the two part ways after an ugly fight.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wondrous_Strange"title="Wondrous Strange">
Kelley Winslow is a teenage actress who lives in New York! When the lead actress in their production of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" gets injured, Kelley goes from understudy to star in an instant. In her first rehearsal, she forgets a few lines, ending in her going to Central Park to practice. Meanwhile, Sonny Flannery, a Janus guard protecting the mortal realm, is hunting the Fae that passed through The Gate, the only way through the Otherworld and ours. He sees her as a Firework and is merely curious in what she really is. He starts to follow her and in the end she becomes furious that he won't stop bugging her and she yells at him. During her ranting, however, Sonny is hurtled across the rad by her fist and sees her with light encircling her. He notices it is great power. When she is done she walks off, and another of the Janus guard appears. Sonny asks him if he saw the bright light and he replies uncomfortably "Might have...". Just when she thinks things couldn't get any worse, they do. Having lived all her life hidden in the mortal realm, she is unaware of being a Faerie princess, stolen from the Faerie realm as an infant. When Sonny discovers her true identity, an interlinking chain of events threaten to destroy both the realms, mortal as well as Faerie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selected_Works_of_T._S._Spivet"title="The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet">
The novel is told from the perspective of twelve-year-old T.S. Spivet, a mapmaking enthusiast living on a ranch near Divide, Montana, a small village near Butte, Montana, practically on the continental divide.T.S.'s mother, whom he consistently refers to as "Dr. Clair," is an entomologist preoccupied — or so it seems — with the search for a possibly nonexistent species of insect, the "tiger monk beetle".His father, an equally emotionally detached rancher with no understanding for the world of scientific investigation, solely judges — or so it seems — T.S. for his nonexistent cowboy abilities.T.S.'s younger brother, Layton, who followed his father's cowboy lifestyle and interests, was killed in a joint brotherly experiment that involved the scientific investigation of gun shooting.His elder sister, Gracie, is in her teenage years, prone to "awful girl pop" and violent mood swings.T.S.'s love for scientific research leads to a friendship with his mother's partner, who unbeknownst to the Spivets has sent several of T.S.'s works into various magazines and societies. One day, T.S. receives a call from a man at the Smithsonian Institution who, believing T.S. to be an adult scientist, informs him that he has won the prestigious Baird Award and is invited to give a talk at the Institution's ceremonies. Without telling his family, T.S. decides to run away from home to attend the event, which he will travel to by freighthopping. T.S. tricks a Union Pacific freight train into pausing at Divide and hides himself in a Winnebago that is being shipped on a flat car. He settles down for a lengthy journey, mapping the trip and imagining the Winnebago to be a conversational companion along the way.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Long_'til_Black_Future_Month?"title="How Long 'til Black Future Month?">
The book is a collection of 22 short stories with an introductory section all written by Jemisin. All but four of the stories were previously published between 2004 and 2017. The stories are:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_for_Nothing_(book)"title="Something for Nothing (book)">
Waking up one morning, Joe Collins unexpectedly finds in his room a cube with the inscription “Class A Recycler”. After some experimentation, he comes to the conclusion that this is what he had always dreamed of - something that will give him everything he desires. He orders palaces and oil wells, money and cars, herds of pedigree cattle and ballet troupes. One day he asks for immortality. Later he learns that the cube is a device for ordering things, but he still has to pay for the things. However, he still gets something for nothing: namely, immortality, which he gets for free - in order to work off his debt in marble quarries for several thousand years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_to_Forever"title="Flight to Forever">
In 1973, physicist Martin Saunders test drives a time machine that Saunders, his girlfriend Eve, and his colleague McPherson have constructed. Martin and his friend Sam Hull set the time machine to the year 2073. Arriving in the year 2073, Martin finds his house in ruins and the nearby village completely gone. The men attempt to return to 1973, only to find that the time machine does not have the energy required to move backwards in time further than 2008. In desperation, they begin to go forward in time in the hope of finding technology that can help them travel back in time.Arriving in the year 2500, the men visit a futuristic village. They are confronted by a militia that murders Sam and chases Martin back to the time machine. Martin travels to the year 3000, where he meets a tavern keeper named Belgotai, who confirms he must travel forward to a more advanced civilization to find the technology he needs. In exchange for this information, Martin agrees to take Belgotai with him in the time machine.The men make several stops in various centuries trying to find a backwards time machine. The time machine, which is unable to materialize inside solid matter, gets stuck inside a massive stone pyramid for 20,000 years. The time machine finally materializes in the year 25,296, and the men find that the Earth has been annexed as part of a vast multi-galactic empire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starsight"title="Starsight">
Spensa and the DDF have pushed the Krell war into space; Spensa's cytonic "defect" has been a key advantage in the war. Cobb, now the DDF admiral, is worried that humans will lose unless they manage to steal a Krell hyperdrive, as the Superiority is sending increasing numbers of warships into battle. Rodge and the engineers discover footage showing a creature known as a 'Delver' consuming and destroying the first inhabitants of Detritus - Spensa recognizes it as the eyes that she sees in the Nowhere when using her cytonic powers. A cytonic alien named Alanik crash lands on Detritus and cytonically implants her destination into Spensa's mind. Spensa learns that Alanik was traveling from her own backwater world to a Superiority space station called Starsight to train as a pilot. Using M-Bot's holographic technology, Spensa disguises herself as Alanik and, using Alanik's coordinates, teleports herself, M-Bot, and Doomslug to Starsight. Spensa poses as Alanik in order to infiltrate the pilot program and steal a hyperdrive. Spensa quickly finds herself caught in a political game between Cuna, a dione government minister, and Winzik, head of the department that is battling Spensa and her people. Spensa is put into a training flight consisting of the misfit dione Morriumur, Captain Hesho and his crew of tiny kitsen, the figment Vapor, and a rare Superiority human, Brade. The pilots are being trained specifically to fight delvers, which can be drawn into this realm by overuse of cytonics. The humans summoned delvers which destroyed numerous planets during a past war, and while these delvers are long since gone, there is suspicion that they may soon reappear. Spensa befriends all her flightmates except the stand-offish Brade, and she and the group frequently run training exercises on a fake delver maze (the delver's core). Back on Detritus, Jorgen begins manifesting cytonic powers. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Captain_(novel)"title="Shadow Captain (novel)">
Three months after the events of the novel "Revenger", Arafura ('Fura') Ness finds herself in command of the "Revenger". They break into a bauble in order to raid a cache of fuel. Barely escaping 'twinkle-heads' found inside, they retreat back to space. Surt and Adrana believe they are being followed by another ship, but Fura dismisses the concern. A book is found on board that documents the history of Occupations, but in addition there is a second timeline that hints at the existence of "Shadow Occupations"."Revenger" is struck by a photon storm, and it's decided they should travel to Wheel Strizzardy (a wheel world) on the outer reaches of the Congregation. While en route they are shot at by the still hidden ship trailing them, injuring Strambli. Arriving at Wheel Strizzardy the crew take on fake identities and bribe their way onto the station. Strambli is given over to the care of Dr. Eddralder. The crew meets with Mister Glimmery who is infected with the "glowy" like Fura, in his presence is an alien Crawly named Cuttle. Afterwards they are escorted by Sneed to another part of the wheel to find accommodations.The crew goes out to secure supplies, but when they return they find Cuttle skulking near their rooms. Cuttle falls off a balcony and dies. Adrana and Prozor are accused of his murder by two Crawlies who show up on the scene. While on the station Fura manages to capture Lagganvor, a former associate of Bosa Sennen, who knows the whereabouts of The Miser, a bauble holding Bosa's cache of quoins.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spearhead_(Makos_book)"title="Spearhead (Makos book)">
The book honors an unsung hero, Clarence Smoyer, who despite his hatred for violence, becomes the gunner of one of the first Pershing tanks in the European Theatre. Smoyer and his tank crew lead the American invasion of Nazi Germany. Smoyer, whose tank crew is instrumental to the Battle of Cologne, recounts his step-by-step moves in the battle, particularly, shooting a car which unbeknown to him is carrying civilians. At the same time, the car is being shot by a German tank whose gunner is named Gustav Schaefer. Schaefer and Smoyer shoot each other for a few seconds. It ends when Smoyer's crew shoot down a nearby building which disables Shaefer's tank, but leave the Germans inside the tank unharmed. Schaefer and one of his friends escape while the rest of the crew decides to stand and fight. Schaefer credits Smoyer for saving him and his friend.The biography comes to an end with the meeting of Smoyer and Schaefer in Cologne, sharing their war stories and getting up to date since the war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unsafe_Asylum"title="The Unsafe Asylum">
The book is a compilation of thirteen short stories, set against the backdrop of the Partition of India in 1947. The stories portray the psychological effect of communal riots during partition. The stories have been written mainly as first person narratives, and some as third person narratives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_with_Borrowed_Wings"title="The Girl with Borrowed Wings">
"The Girl with Borrowed Wings" begins with Frenenquer, a young expat girl who lives with her parents in the Oasis. Bound by her father's stifling rules and expectations, Frenenquer begins to rebel after finding the half dead body of a shape shifter. After naming him Sangris, they begin to fly off, exploring the world. However, when her father begins to impose increasingly restricting rule and Sangris begins expressing emotions beyond that of a friend, Frenenquer reacts and rejects Sangris, giving into her father's laws.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_of_Gold_(novel)"title="The Man of Gold (novel)">
Priestling Harsan has grown up among the non-human Pé Chói and is regarded a clanless bastard. He lives in monastic seclusion with other priests of Thumis, the god of knowledge, and specializes in esoteric languages. Harsan is summoned by the high-priests of the Tsolyáni Empire to translate ancient manuscripts that describe a counterplay to the ′Weapon Without Answer′ — a high-tech device of old, utilized by the hostile empire of Yán Kór.Harsan embarks a quest to recover the Man of Gold before it is too late, traversing much of Tsolyánu as he follows various leads and evades the machinations of extra-dimensional aliens and rival factions within the Tsolýani aristocracy. During his travels, Harsan manages to charm two young ladies of considerable beauty and wildly incompatible personalities. Ultimately, the Man of Gold is discovered and the Yán Kóryani designs of conquest are averted for the time being.A pariah no more, Harsan is accepted into the Tsolyáni high society and awarded a noble rank for his feats. The story closes as he marries his sweethearts and wonders whether the two will ever learn to tolerate each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thief_of_Talant"title="The Thief of Talant">
The narrative of "The Thief of Talant" is not so much a narrative, but a poetic autobiography. As such, the novel does not have a series of concrete plot points but rather details a descent into despair and isolation where Reverdy, as the main character (the Thief of Talant) finds that his time in Paris has ultimately killed his past, more lively self.  "The Thief of Talant" begins with the reflections of a character who will later be known as the Thief of Talant waiting at a train station in his home town of Narbonne for Paris. When he arrives in Paris, the Thief encounters a man who offers to help him and get him an apartment. The narrative jumps forward three months later with the man, known now as Abel the Magus, coming to check in on how the Thief is settling in Paris. The Thief then reflects on the necessity of poets in elucidating the mysteries of life to the man. Then he goes to a café with two unnamed characters, noting that the people in crowded Parisian streets are no more than a collective of unthinking animals. He waits until nightfall and then walks alone on the streets, a common choice the Thief makes throughout the novel. The next day he goes to visit Abel the Magus in his own apartment and he describes how easily a writer's work can be stolen and Abel is quite paranoid of this happening to him. Abel the Magus distrusts the Thief of Talant who then antagonizes Abel by satirizing his fears, calling them unfounded. This point marks the transition between the young man who first came to Paris, and the deterioration of that spiritual being in the next half of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Brief_History_of_Everyone_Who_Ever_Lived"title="A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived">
"A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived" explains the Out of Africa hypothesis that "Homo sapiens" originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago. They began slowly migrating to Europe around 100,000 years ago, where they encountered Neanderthals. DNA extracted from Neanderthal remains and compared to contemporary human DNA showed that "Homo sapiens" mated with "Homo neanderthalensis". Today, about 2% of the sequence in European genomes is of Neanderthal origin. The book also investigates the lineage of European kings. DNA has enabled geneticists to construct their family trees going back to Charlemagne in the 8th century. Rutherford shows that family trees are not neat and tidy, but tangled webs. They often collapse in on themselves as a result of inbreeding. King Charles II's family tree was particularly bad as a result of incest in the family. Their rational for this practice was to preserve their "royal blood", and this often had an adverse effect on their health; Charles himself was disabled, epileptic and mentally unstable.The book discusses the genes responsible for some human traits, including red hair, earwax and lactose intolerance/lactase persistence. Racial classification is shown to be a scientifically invalid concept. The genome encodes a huge number of characteristics that differ from person to person, which far outnumber the physical differences between black and white people. Rutherford concludes that genetics cannot be used to define race. Francis Galton and his contribution to the development of eugenics is also examined. The Human Genome Project revealed that humans only have about 20,000 genes, far fewer than scientists expected, and ended up posing more questions than it answered. The project also highlighted the limits of genetics and that it is no panacea for diseases. Rutherford criticises the popular press for their inaccurate reporting on genetics, and companies conducting DNA ancestry tests that produce impossibly accurate results. He says these companies and the press often overlook the fact that genetics is not an exact science – it is probabilistic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckoo_Song_(novel)"title="Cuckoo Song (novel)">
Triss has been unwell since being rescued from The Grimmer, a pond near their holiday cottage in Lower Bentling. Her memory is hazy. She sees her dolls coming alive. She has a gargantuan appetite, and feels an urge to eat her possessions as well as food. She finds dead leaves in her hair, and her tears are spiderweb. Her sister Pen hates her with a vengeance, and makes curious insinuations. At home in Ellchester, she discovers a Besider delivering letters from her dead brother, Sebastian, who writes of being stuck in a perpetual winter. Catching it, she learns about the Underbelly where many Besiders live, and that she only has seven days to live.Triss follows Pen to a meeting with the Architect. Pen admits she led Triss to the Grimmer to be abducted. The Besiders threw a stick doll containing some of Triss's possessions into the Grimmer, which emerged as a changeling with Triss's appearance and some of her memories. Learning she is not the real Triss, she now identifies herself as Not-Triss.Mr Grace the tailor exposes Not-Triss as a Besider changeling to her parents, and urges them to burn her. Pen rescues her, having become sympathetic to Not-Triss's situation. Violet Parish helps keep them safe from Mr Grace and her parents. The girls visit the Underbelly to meet the Shrike, who explains Triss's abduction was to punish her father for breaking an agreement with the Architect.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Noah_Glass"title="The Death of Noah Glass">
"The Death of Noah Glass" concerns three main characters: the eponymous Noah Glass and his children Evie and Martin. Noah has been found dead face down in the communal swimming pool at his apartment complex. Evie and Martin reconnect as a result, and are caught off guard when local police come with questions about their father's alleged involvement in an international art heist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poet_X"title="The Poet X">
Xiomara Batista is a fifteen-year-old Dominican teenager living in Harlem who loves to write poetry. Though she longs to share it with the world, her religious mother is only concerned with her being confirmed, which has been put off for three years. She feels inferior to her brother, Xavier (affectionately called Twin) as he receives much praise for his work.During the school year, she develops a love for her lab partner, Aman. However, the relationship is broken when her mother sees them kissing on a train.Eventually, her mother finds her poetry, forcing a confrontation between the two.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_on_Normal_People"title="The War on Normal People">
In the book, Yang discusses job displacement and the shrinking of local economies, terming it the "Great Displacement", which has been "the product of financialization, globalization, and technologization". He predicts that automation will eliminate millions of jobs, including white-collar jobs, such as attorneys specializing in document review and medical positions, as "computers have proven to be quite adept at reading and diagnosing radiology scans". Yang draws a distinction between "normal people" and technologically inclined people, noting that "the average starting salary in Silicon Valley for engineers is nearing $200,000, a draw that has led to a decline in humanities enrollments and boost in technical degrees". He predicts that automation will make "normal people" redundant, and that increasing unemployment can lead to violent protests.Yang provides a "rebuttal to more optimistic thinkers, such as Thomas Friedman, who believe that Americans can be transformed into lifelong learners". According to Yang, 49% of American workers fall into one of the five most common jobs in the U.S. economy: administrative and clerical work, including call center workers; retail and cashiers; food service and food prep; truck drivers and transportation; and manufacturing workers.Yang supports a universal basic income (UBI) of $1000 a month for every U.S. citizen, "paid for by a 10% value-added tax on all goods and services". He calls it the "Freedom Dividend" and claims that it "would replace the vast majority of existing welfare programs." Yang states that it would "eliminate poverty for the 41 million Americans now living below the poverty line" and "would also improve the bargaining power of millions of low-wage workers—forcing employers to increase wages, add benefits and improve conditions in order to retain them". He cites civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., former U.S. president Richard Nixon, and economist Milton Friedman as early supporters of a UBI. He argues that UBI will "enable people to more effectively transition from shrinking industries and environments to new ones" and be "perhaps the greatest catalyst to human creativity we have ever seen".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mars_Room"title="The Mars Room">
It's 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women's Correctional Facility, deep in California's Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing, pageantry, and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living. The novel also tells the story of Gordon Hauser, an academic teaching inmates at the prison.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selling_Yoga"title="Selling Yoga">
Jain prefaces the book with a personal note in which she explains how she came to research the subject, and records that despite her name she is not a practising Jain.The book is introduced with an account of premodern yoga systems. It then examines the role of yoga in western counterculture, and its relationship to consumer culture. It examines with worked examples the branding and commercialisation of modern yoga. It then analyses the extent to which modern (postural) yoga can be seen as a body of religious practice. Finally, it looks at the debate between the yogaphobia seen for example in some branches of Christianity, and the Hindu nationalist claim that modern yoga has Hindu origins; Jain illustrates the weaknesses in both types of claim.The book is illustrated with a small number of monochrome photographs.There is an academic bibliography and a detailed index.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birdie_(novel)"title="Birdie (novel)">
"Birdie" follows the journey of titular character Birdie, on her way to Gibsons, British Columbia from her home in northern Alberta. Birdie has ventured to Gibsons in order to find Pat John (Jesse from the "Beachcombers") who she views as representative of a healthy Indigenous man. Birdie's journey to Gibsons served as the impetus for the spiritual journey that Birdie goes on, which exists outside of linear time. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mind_at_Play"title="A Mind at Play">
Shannon was born in Petoskey, Michigan in 1916 and grew up in Gaylord, Michigan. He is well known for founding digital circuit design theory in 1937, when—as a 21-year-old master's degree student at MIT—he wrote his thesis demonstrating that electrical applications of Boolean algebra could construct any logical numerical relationship. In 1948, Shannon published his most influential work, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", in which he is considered to have founded the field of information theory and paved the way for the feasibility of mobile phones, the development of the Internet and many other technological applications. "A Mind at Play" chronicles these events in Shannon's life as well as his interactions with his peers at the time including Albert Einstein, Alan Turing, Vannevar Bush, John von Neumann, Kurt Gödel, Leonard Kleinrock, Irwin M. Jacobs, Lawrence Roberts, Thomas Kailath, Steve Jobs and others.Outside of Shannon's professional life, he was interested in juggling, unicycling, and chess. He also invented many devices, including a Roman numeral computer called THROBAC, juggling machines, and a flame-throwing trumpet. He is also considered the co-inventor of the first wearable computer along with Edward O. Thorp. The device was used to improve the odds when playing roulette.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Diary"title="The Night Diary">
"The Night Diary" is set around this time of partition and separated into two different countries. The story is told through the eyes of a 12-year-old, Nisha, the protagonist of the story. The novel opens on July 14, 1947; it is the twins' twelfth birthday, and to celebrate, their father has gifted Nisha another piece of gold jewelry from her mother's collection and given her brother Amil an illustrated book of tales from the "Mahabharata". The day also marks the sad anniversary of their mother's death in childbirth. Aside from their father, a medical doctor, and the twins, the household includes their paternal grandmother, Dadi, and their cook, Kazi Syed; they live together in a compound in Mirpur Khas. The story takes place in West Pakistan soon to become Pakistan after East Pakistan becomes independent and known as BangladeshJuly 1947 is just a month before independence from the British Raj, and Nisha also receives a diary from Kazi, the family's cook, as a birthday gift. The Britishers were leaving and Half-Muslim, half-Hindu twelve-year-old Nisha doesn't know where she belongs, or what her country is anymore. As the impending partition of India along religious lines becomes inevitable following independence, the household is forced to divide (Kazi is Muslim) while the rest of the family identifies as Hindu, although the twins' mother (who was Muslim) moved to Jodhpur. When Papa decides it's too dangerous to stay in what is now Pakistan, Nisha and her family become refugees and embark first by train but later on foot to reach her new home. The journey is long, difficult, and dangerous, and after losing her mother as a baby, Nisha can't imagine losing her homeland, too. But even if her country has been ripped apart, Nisha still believes in the possibility of putting herself back together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roller_Girl"title="Roller Girl">
Astrid's mother takes her and her best friend, Nicole, on numerous "Evenings of Cultural Enrichment" which often confuse, bore, or inappropriately amuse the two girls; one night in fifth grade, they attend a roller derby match between the Oregon City Rollergirls and the Rose City Rollers. Astrid asks her mother's permission to attend the Rollers' Junior Roller Derby Camp that summer, assuming that Nicole will also join with her. Instead, Nicole chooses to attend dance camp with Astrid's longtime rival Rachel.At camp, Astrid wonders if she can still be friends with Nicole; she later makes friends with Zoey, but struggles with her skating skills and jealousy over making the team.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inquisitor's_Tale"title="The Inquisitor's Tale">
The novel is told by multiple narrators, all travelers at the Holy Cross-Roads Inn near Paris, set in early March 1242. Marie, a brewer from the town of Saint-Geneviève, starts the story of Jeanne and the greyhound Gwenforte. The second hero, William, is introduced by a monk who serves as the librarian at the Monastery Saint-Martin. Jacob, the third, is introduced by Aron, the butcher in Nogent-sur-Oise. Each narrator is prompted to tell their tale by their fellow travelers; as a framing device, the Inn sequences are told from the perspective of Étienne, an agent of the Pope's Holy Inquisition.The three children each have a different power. Jeanne is able to see the future, William has big size and physical strength, and Jacob can heal almost any wound. They are pursued by King Louis IX and his agents after interfering with the events following Disputation of Paris, when hundreds of copies of the "Talmud" were burned.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Hollow_(novel)"title="Wolf Hollow (novel)">
It is 1943. Eleven-year-old Annabelle lives with her parents, grandparents, Aunt Lily, and two little brothers in the small town of Wolf Hollow, Pennsylvania. A quiet World War I veteran named Toby lives in an abandoned smokehouse nearby. Annabelle’s mother is sympathetic to the man, who always carries three guns and seems troubled but harmless. Sometimes Mother leaves food for him. She even loans him a camera she won in a contest because he seems so interested in photography. Annabelle and Toby cross paths but have little interaction with one another.One day, a 14-year-old bully named Betty Glengarry moves to Wolf Hollow to stay with her grandparents. Betty’s meanness is evident to all the kids, but she singles out Annabelle because she thinks Annabelle is wealthy. Betty waits on the path where Annabelle walks home. She threatens to hurt Annabelle and her brothers if Annabelle won’t bring her an item of value.Annabelle is nervous about Betty, but she decides to fight this battle without telling her parents. Annabelle doesn’t bring anything for Betty, so the bully continues to harass her. One day, she beats Annabelle with a stick. Another time, Betty breaks a bird’s neck right in front of Annabelle, just to get a reaction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_is_a_Beautiful_Color"title="Brown is a Beautiful Color">
The book tells the story of a young African American child discovering things around him that are the color brown. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Over_Me"title="Freedom Over Me">
The story starts with a poem recounting the thoughts of the slaveowner, Mrs. Mary Fairchilds; after her husband, Cado died, she has decided to have her property appraised to prepare it for sale; afterward, she intends to return to England. The book gives the names and appraised value of each of the 11 slaves owned by the Fairchilds, accompanied by two poems: one describing their work and another describing their dreams.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_Descending"title="Pegasus Descending">
Dave Robicheaux, once an officer for the New Orleans Police Department and before that a U.S. Army infantry lieutenant who fought in the Vietnam War, works as sheriff's deputy in New Iberia, Louisiana. When Trish Klein, a beautiful young woman, arrives to Louisiana, passing hundred-dollar bills in local casinos, fun88 world cup, Robicheaux knows there's going to be trouble. Twenty-five years earlier, while drunk in Florida, Robicheaux witnessed her father, fellow Vietnam veteran Dallas Klein, executed by a group of cold-blooded robbers. Trish tries to bait Whitey Bruxal, the aging mobster responsible for Dallas's death. Meanwhile, Robicheaux investigates the apparent suicide of young co-ed Yvonne Darbonne. The two cases are linked. He and his longtime partner, former Marine and Vietnam vet, Clete Purcel try to prove it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven's_Prisoners_(novel)"title="Heaven's Prisoners (novel)">
Once an officer for the New Orleans Police Department and before that a U.S. Army infantry lieutenant who fought in the Vietnam War, Robicheaux is living a quiet life in the swamplands of Louisiana with his wife Annie. The couple's tranquility is shattered one day when a drug smuggler's plane crashes in a lake, right before their eyes. Robicheaux succeeds in rescuing a lone survivor, a Salvadoran girl, whom he and Annie quickly adopt and name Alafair. Drug Enforcement Administration Agent Minos P. Dautrieve, however, tells Robicheaux that the plane was connected to Bubba Rocque, the leading drug kingpin in the area, and Robicheaux's childhood friend from New Iberia. Robicheaux must now defend Alafair and Annie from a world of murder and deception.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neon_Rain"title="The Neon Rain">
While fishing on a back country bayou, New Orleans Police Department officer Dave Robicheaux finds a body. Robicheaux, once a U.S. Army infantry lieutenant who fought in the Vietnam War, becomes involved with drug dealers, mafia chieftains, and a former army general with shady arms dealings in Central America.The story starts with a vivid description of Dave visiting a convict who is about to be executed at Angola penitentiary. There are crowds outside the jail, some asking for clemency, some baying for the convict's blood. Dave speaks to the convict who explains that he is trying to make amends for some of the things he has done and tells Dave that a criminal is planning on murdering him. It is clear that Dave is not too concerned.A lifelong friend of Dave's, Cletus Purcell, appears early on in the story, who from the beginning presents as a greatly troubled man with alcohol, drugs, gambling and relationship issues. After learning of the convict conversation, he too suggests there is little credibility to the warning.Dave soon has other things to occupy his mind and is drawn into a murder investigation. A young girl named Lovelace Deshotels is found dead in the sea. The local police are happy it is misadventure but Dave believes she has been murdered. This is where his problems begin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Cane_Road"title="Purple Cane Road">
Dave Robicheaux, former officer for the New Orleans Police Department and before that a U.S. Army infantry lieutenant who fought in the Vietnam War, works as sheriff's deputy in New Iberia, Louisiana. In this book, he discovers new evidence in a murder case and additional leads in the disappearance of his mother, a longstanding subplot to this series. "Publishers Weekly" gave it a starred review. Kirkus gave it a positive review. Writing for "The New York Times", Richard Bernstein was intrigued by the book but found it, "so devoted to its own appearances, that it comes across as almost a commentary on itself rather than as something real..." A reviewer in the "Houston Chronicle" stated, "James Lee Burke scores again with great characters."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_of_Reality"title="The Dream of Reality">
The book begins with a foreword by Paul Watzlawick, a preface by the author, and an introduction which provides a synopsis of the book's content and structure. In chapter one, "The Myth of Objectivity", Segal introduces the objectivity vs. constructivist epistemology debate, illustrated with examples of making sense of undifferentiated sensory input and eigenvalue puzzles, where the observer is necessary. In chapter two, "The Difficulties of Language", the author describes what we can learn about epistemology from syllogisms, paradox, self-reference, and causality, finally focusing on the circular causality described in cybernetics. In the third chapter, "Maturana and the Observer", Segal reviews Humberto Maturana's "observer-based science" where the object observed is not assumed to exist independent of the observer. "The Nervous System" is the next chapter, where Segal surveys the historical theories connecting perception and thought, including theories by Aristotle, Alkmaeon, Hippocrates, Galen, William Harvey, René Descartes, and Santiago Ramón y Cajal. In this chapter the author also looks at the evolution, structure, and function, of the nervous system and its relationship to the endocrine system. The fifth chapter, "Computation", examines how computation happens in both computers and brains, using formal logic and trivial and non-trivial logical machines as conceptual tools to distinguish the two. Humans have capacity to "compute" in additional domains beyond mathematical-logical, including sensory and semantic domains. In chapter six, "Biocomputation", Segal looks at how neural circuits work to calculate Boolean operations, and how these circuits fire in the presence of different but ignore sameness. In the final chapter, "Closure", the author looks at closure across thermodynamics, mathematics, systems theory, and autopoesis. Segal goes on to examine the double closure of the nervous system along its sensorimotor and synapitc-endocrine dimensions. He returns to mathematics to examine recursion theory, cognition, and solipsism. The book ends with an interview with Heinz von Foerster conducted by media studies professor Carol Wilder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobiography_of_a_Face"title="Autobiography of a Face">
The prologue introduces the reader to Lucy's struggle with self-image. She describes her work at the stable Diamond D, which was her first job after finishing chemotherapy. Through this first narration, Lucy introduces her family's emotional and financial situation. She describes the stares that she received from children, noting that she was not sure if they were better or worse than the hidden looks from adults.Lucy brings the reader back with flashbacks of fourth grade. Being a tomboyish girl, she played with boys and participate in dares. After an injury at school, she is diagnosed with a fractured jaw and requires emergency surgery. The memoir thoroughly describes her operation and her experience with anesthesia and says that back to school she felt like a warrior for experiencing something the other kids had not.Six months after her operation, “a bony knob” had appeared at the tip of her jaw. She returns to the hospital and undergoes multiple tests, including a bone marrow examination. She is diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma, however, no one describes it to her as cancer until further in the disease which makes her not assimilate the diagnosis as she should. She meets Derek at the hospital and he becomes her partner in mischievous adventures around the hospital. The right side of Lucy's jaw is removed in an operation. Afterward, she sensed her family's discomfort due to the way she looked.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Joy"title="The Art of Joy">
The novel follows a woman, Modesta, who is born on 1 January 1900 and her experiences though her life in the twentieth century. The text is written for the most part in the first person (by Modesta), but sometimes also in the third person, especially in the first part of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Path_of_Modern_Yoga"title="The Path of Modern Yoga">
"The Path of Modern Yoga", based on what the author states is 10 years of research, examines the history of modern asana-based yoga through the lives of eleven pioneering figures: Sri Yogendra; Swami Kuvalayananda; Seetharaman Sundaram; Tirumalai Krishnamacharya; Swami Sivananda; the bodybuilder K. V. Iyer; the rajah of Aundh, Pant Pratinidhi; the journalist Louise Morgan; the diplomat Apa Pant; and two students of Krishnamacharya, his brother-in-law, B. K. S. Iyengar, and one of Iyengar's pupils, Indra Devi.The 35 chapters are arranged in three parts that cover the transformation of yoga during the modern period. The book maps out the development of modern yoga saw the original pre-1900 hatha yoga becoming divested of its sacred trappings (Part I); the resulting secular yoga was then made dynamic, with jumped transitions (vinyasas) between postures (Part II); and this dynamic, secular yoga was then resacralised (Part III). There is no introduction or conclusion.Part I, "Divesting Yoga of the Sacred", consists mainly of five chapters on Yogendra and five on Kuvalayananda, who pioneered the medical study of yoga, at the start of the 20th century the territory of despised vagrants, beggars, and fakirs, and in so doing helped to make yoga acceptable.Part II, "Making Yoga Dynamic", consists mostly of three chapters on Pant Pratinidhi, an enthusiast for exercise and a powerful advocate for Surya Namaskar; three on Krishnamacharya, described as the father of modern yoga, who incorporated many standing poses from the gymnastics of popular physical culture into his teaching, alongside the jumping transitions of Surya Namaskar, creating more standing poses and the dynamic vinyasa style of yoga that he taught to his pupils including Iyengar and K. Pattabhi Jois, who went on to found yoga schools of their own; and three on Morgan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumnima"title="Sumnima">
Sumnima is a psychological love story between a Brahmin boy named Somdutta and a Kirati girl, the title of this novel, Sumnima. Somdutta is devoted to Brahmin rituals worshipping the Hindu gods. He practises celibacy and sex for him is a mode of reproduction only. Sumnima is very down to earth and knows how to live naturally. They spend a long time on the Koshi riverside and develop a deep affinity with each other. After their separation, Somdutta knows that Sumnima has become deeply rooted in his heart. The sexual desire for Sumnima haunts Somdutta till the end of his life. He realizes that the celibacy education, which should be a ladder to salvation and austerity, instead kept him away from true happiness and experiencing life.The novel discusses the issues of minority, cultural differences and ethnic consciousness through innocent characters. It documents the conflict and problems among the people living in the same area.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Women_in_the_Castle"title="The Women in the Castle">
The story begins at the site of a Bavarian castle in 1938, with detailed descriptions of the society of the pre-war days in Germany among a certain class of landed aristocrats. Countess Marianne von Lingenfels is hosting her family’s annual party, at which men wearing Nazi insignia parade casually through the grounds, while inside, privately, a small group of young men, including Marianne’s husband, are plotting armed resistance against the nation’s leader, Adolf Hitler.The novel then advances to the year 1945. The war has ended and the conspirators have been executed after their failed attempt to assassinate Hitler. Marianne, back at the same crumbling castle, is determined to "do right" by the wives and children of the men who died trying to save her homeland from a tyrant. She is raising three children by herself, in occupied post-Nazi Germany. She then rescues 6-year-old Martin, the son of her dearest childhood friend, from a Nazi reeducation home. Together, they make their way across the smoldering wreckage of their homeland to Berlin, where Martin’s mother, the beautiful and naive Benita, in the hands of the occupying Red Army. Finally, she locates Ania, another resister’s wife, and her two sons, now refugees in one of the many camps that house the millions displaced by the war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Boston_and_Miss_Hargreaves"title="Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves">
One day in 1940 Rene Hargreaves walks out on her family and the city of Manchester, to take a position as a Land Girl at the remote Starlight farm. There she lives and works for farmer Elsie Boston, a sole smallholder in Berkshire, thought of by the locals as irredeemably strange or ‘unked’. Elsie's family is all gone, and she is trying to hold on to the farm herself. At first Elsie and Rene are unsure of one another - strangers from different worlds. But over time they each come to depend on the other.When Elsie is forced off the farm, the two stay together, becoming itinerant workers on various farms, where their only condition is that they have a private place to live together. Twenty years later, they are living in Cornwall, in a remote cottage. Elsie takes care of the home and grows vegetables, while Rene goes far abroad to find farm work.Rene learns of the death of Bertha, the only person from her past with whom she remained in touch. She and Elsie take in Bertha’s ageing, alcoholic husband who sets about disrupting their life. When Ernest finally dies it might almost seem a cause for celebration but then the police arrive. Rene is accused of killing him, and stands trial. Elsie, still naive and shy though no longer young, is required to stand on her own for the first time, in a strange city, and she is unable to believe she might lose Rene, who is ultimately convicted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Days_by_Moonlight"title="Days by Moonlight">
Alfred "Alfie" Homer is a botanist who has just broken up with his long-term girlfriend, Anne, and who is coming up on the year anniversary of his parents' death in a car accident. He is invited to take a road trip through Southern Ontario with a friend of his parents, Morgan Bruno, a literature professor writing a book on a mysterious poet, John Skennen, who lived in various towns in Southern Ontario before mysteriously disappearing.As they travel through several small towns, Homer and Bruno encounter several exploitative and malevolent practices kept up by the smaller towns. In Nobleton they witness a house raising and a house burning, where poor families who have been given the raised house from the previous year must struggle to keep it from burning or be homeless again. In Coulson's Hill they witness the Indigenous Parade, a festivity of reparations for oppressed minorities to be given the opportunity to throw fruit at the colonial oppressors of the past which over time had grown so increasingly racist and prejudiced that when Homer and Bruno arrive all participants wear blue sheets in order to disguise their identities. They then proceed to the town of Schomberg where a long-standing law forbidding black people to talk during the day has led to the rise in a region specific sign language. While in Schomberg, the two pick up a hitch hiker who persuades them to head to New Tecumseth to visit the museum of Canadian Sexuality. While the museum leaves Homer feeling disconcerted, Bruno befriends their tour guide, Michael. Michael invites Bruno and Homer to visit them in Marsville. While there they befriend Michael's roommate, Judith, and her father John, who reveals himself to be John Skennen, now going by his birth name, John Stephens.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_(Muñoz_Ryan_novel)"title="Echo (Muñoz Ryan novel)">
The framing story is set in Germany circa 1864; while playing hide-and-seek with his friends, Otto becomes absorbed in a book he had purchased from a Gypsy entitled "The Thirteenth Harmonica of Otto Messenger", which relates the story of three unwanted princesses given over to a witch for safekeeping. Their father, the king, had given each of them to a midwife shortly after their births while he was waiting for a male heir; the midwife, in turn, passed them on to her cousin, a witch. After the heir arrives, the princesses are informed of their royal birth and prepare to rejoin their family; however, rather than releasing them, the witch curses the girls:Otto is so engrossed in the story that he has wandered into the woods where the princesses have been trapped. He has in fact brought a harmonica with him (one pressed on him by the same Gypsy who sold him the book) and is able to retrieve their spirits, now stored in the harmonica.When the story resumes almost 70 years later, the harmonica is discovered in a storage room of the Hohner factory by Friedrich Schmidt; it is in a box marked "Marine Band/1896" with a matching cover plate for export to the United States and is distinguished by a red script letter M on the pearwood comb.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiamat's_Wrath"title="Tiamat's Wrath">
Following the events of "Persepolis Rising", James Holden is a captive on Laconia, allowed to roam the grounds of High Consul Winston Duarte’s palace but with little other freedom. He pays his respects to Chrisjen Avasarala, who died four months previously, and talks with her granddaughter and Camina Drummer, former president of the defunct Transport Union.Through another of the Ring gates, Elvi Okoye, her husband Fayez and several other scientists are sent on a Laconian mission to the “dead worlds”, systems past the ring gates which have no habitable worlds. They find a planet-size green diamond which interacts strangely with their sample of active protomolecule but are forced by the commander to move on to the next system before they can adequately probe it. They arrive to find a neutron star pushed to the edge of the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkov limit, with no other matter in the area. The Laconian commander reveals their plan to send an antimatter-laden ship through the ring gates to attack the creatures which have been seen “eating” ships.In the Sol system, Naomi, working for the underground resistance against Laconia, arrives on a station in the Outer Planets to talk with Bobbie and Alex, operating their stolen Laconian gunship "Gathering Storm" before leaving again. Bobbie and Alex embark on a mission to capture a Laconian freighter carrying supplies and a high-ranking political officer but the officer and their own spies are caught in the crossfire and killed. Faced with overwhelming odds, one of the Laconian flagships taking notice of them and notching another (semi)-failure, both are left to wonder whether their fight is winnable at all. Then Bobbie finds antimatter in the supplies taken from the Laconian freighter, a power source for its magnetic weapon and hatches a plan to kill the flagship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dyke_and_the_Dybbuk"title="The Dyke and the Dybbuk">
Two hundred years ago, Anya's lover, Gittel, betrayed her and married a Torah scholar. Anya, bent on revenge, conjured up a curse according to which Gittel and every first-born female descendant for 33 generations would be possessed by a dybbuk and bear only daughters. The dybbuk Kokos gets assigned this job by the Head Office, but runs into trouble when the family gets help from her nemesis, the Sage of Limnititzk. The sage drives Kokos out of Gittel and traps her in a tree. Two centuries later, a bolt of lightning releases Kokos, but she has a hard time adjusting to the 20th century. Kokos, who is facing dismissal by the Head Office - now a multinational high-tech corporation - tracks down Gittel's descendant, Rainbow Rosenbloom, a political, lesbian film-critic and taxi driver. Rainbow, however, turns out to be far from an easy soul to haunt. If the dybbuk's job is to drive the possessed person mad, Kokos is at a loss as to what to do with a person who is already considered more than a little crazy by her friends and family. The approach Kokos chooses is to remake Rainbow into the ultimate "Nice Jewish Girl". Rainbow, who is now falling for a beautiful, and straight, orthodox woman, now even considers marrying a man and getting back to her religious roots to be close to her - a plan Kokos is pleased with, because it will give her future generations to possess.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Face_Like_Glass"title="A Face Like Glass">
In the underground city of Caverna, craftsmen are able to create items with magical properties, such as cheese that gives you visions of the future, a wine that can remove or restore memory, or perfumes that can control the thoughts of whoever detects it. Citizens born in Caverna have no problems feeling emotions but lack the ability to display them on their faces, and must be taught each expression by craftsmen known as facesmiths. The book follows Neverfell, the apprentice and adopted daughter of the cheesemaker Grandible, as she becomes entangled in a net of conspiracies and betrayal. Neverfell is not like the other inhabitants of Caverna, for her face shows exactly what she is feeling and thinking, being unable to lie in a world where everything is built on lies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foe_(Reid_novel)"title="Foe (Reid novel)">
"Foe" is set in the near future, and is narrated by Junior, who lives with his wife Henrietta (Hen) on a remote farm. In the novel, all dialogue is punctuated with quote marks, except for Junior's, which has none. One night a stranger appears at their door who introduces himself as Terrance from an aerospace corporation called OuterMore. Terrance announces that Junior has been selected to travel to the Installation, a large space station in orbit around Earth. He will remain there for about two years, before returning home. Junior is deeply in love with Hen and is not happy leaving her alone. Terrance reassures him that while he is gone, he will be replaced by a biomechanical duplicate that will care for her. Junior is horrified. Terrance visits the farm house regularly to interview him and collect data to help configure his replacement.Relations between Junior and Hen become strained. He resents Terrance's presence and she will not talk about it. After about two years, Terrance moves in with them so he can monitor Junior's daily routine. Terrance also spends time interviewing Hen, which angers Junior. He manages to eavesdrop on some of their conversations, and it seems that she knows more about what is going on than she is telling him. Once Terrance asks her if she would like to get away, and she relates to him a fantasy she has of walking out on her husband. After seeing Terrance spend so much time with Hen, Junior becomes convinced that it is Terrance who will be replacing him when he has gone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gathering_Prey"title="Gathering Prey">
Letty a young college girl receives a call from Skye a traveler she met briefly in San Francisco. Remembering that Letty's adoptive father is a detective she requests help in finding her companion Henry, who has just gone missing. Soon Skye is missing as well and Detective Lucas Davenport decides to investigate further. He soon finds himself pursuing a drug dealer named Pilate in a chance that crosses state lines and exposes him to variety of sub cultures and their gatherings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_Rising"title="Alliance Rising">
"Alliance Rising" takes place on Alpha Station, a space station located at Barnard's Star, about 6 light-years from Earth. It was the first of nine star-stations constructed by the Earth Company during Earth's outward push into space, and they became known as the Hinder Stars. Further exploration led to the construction of new stations, which later broke away from Earth after the discovery of faster-than-light (FTL) travel. No FTL jump points were found between Earth and Alpha, which restricted EC's control of their stations. Trade between space stations was conducted by family-run merchanter ships. In an attempt to regain control of Alpha Station, EC sent Andrew Cruz to Alpha to manage the building of "The Rights of Man", a large FTL ship using stolen plans for "Finity's End", a merchant ship based at Pell Station. Earth neglected maintenance of Alpha and focused on the construction of "Rights". Stationmaster Ben Abrezio attempted to placate both EC and the merchanters, upon whose trade the station became dependent.A decade later construction of "Rights" is complete, but its first test run is a disaster and has to be aborted due to system failures. "Finity's End" arrives at Alpha, fuelling speculation that Pell wants to wrestle control of Alpha from the Earth Company. But "Finity's" real purpose is revealed to be the establishment of an alliance between all merchanter ships that would unite them against the Earth Company and stations attempting to control them. "Finity"s senior captain, JR Neihart, tells the merchanter captains that once jump points between Earth and Alpha are found, the Earth Company, which is very likely building their own FTL ships at Sol Station, will come.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzanne_(novel)"title="Suzanne (novel)">
The novel begins in the present day as the narrator, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, and her mother (Manon Barbeau) discover that Suzanne has died and they are the sole heirs. They visit Suzanne's apartment and find photos, reviews, and poems that will be featured later in the novel.The novel then shifts to a second-person account of Suzanne's early life. Born into a family impoverished by the Great Depression in Canada, as a teenager, Suzanne is eager to explore life beyond Ottawa. Her desire to explore beyond Ottawa is also inspired by her admiration of Hilda Strike, a Canadian runner that she watched race in the 1932 Olympics. Having cultivated her gift for writing and public speaking, she uses her gift to garner attention and then joins a group of avant-garde artists including the writer Claude Gauvreau and the painter Marcel Barbeau, in Montreal. Suzanne marries Marcel on June 7, 1948. Paul-Émile Borduas, leader of the Automatistes, leads the group in composing the manifesto for free speech, "Refus Global". Suzanne initially signs, but later redacts her signature when Borduas rejects her poetry.Her first child, Mousse, is born in 1949 (who will grow up to be the famous film maker Manon Barbeau). The group of artists has been blacklisted, so Marcel and Suzanne move with their friends to the countryside. Suzanne gives birth to François. Marcel has a breakdown in New York, but when she comes to attend to him, she starts a relationship with Borduas. She leaves Marcel and abandons the children at a daycare in the countryside. Marcel's sister eventually agrees to take in Mousse and an undertaker and his wife take in Francois. By this time Suzanne has started a new relationship and runs off with her friend's lover, Peter, to travel the world; but after a terminated pregnancy she returns to Montreal. She invites Mousse to live with her but her invitation is refused. Suzanne moves to Harlem in New York and begins to date a woman named Selena. Together, they join the Freedom Riders.The first few stops go well, but eventually the KKK attacks the bus and destroys it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_the_Crawdads_Sing"title="Where the Crawdads Sing">
## Part I – The Marsh.In 1952, six-year-old Catherine Danielle Clark (nicknamed "Kya") watches her mother abandon her and her family due to violent abuse from her husband, Kya's father. While Kya waits in vain for her mother's return, she witnesses her older siblings, Missy, Murph, Mandy, and Jodie, all leave as well, due to their father's drinking and physical abuse.Alone with her father—who temporarily stops drinking—Kya learns to fish. Her father gives her his knapsack to hold her collections of shells and feathers. The illiterate Kya paints these shells and feathers, as well as the marsh's creatures and shorelines, with watercolors her mother left behind.One day, Kya finds a letter in the mailbox. Her father snatches the letter from her hands as she ran from the mailbox squealing with delight that they had finally received a letter from her mother. After reading the letter he becomes infuriated and burns the letter along with most of her mother's wardrobe and canvases. He returns to drinking and takes long, frequent trips away to gamble. Eventually, he does not return at all, and Kya assumes he is dead, making him the last of the family to leave her alone in the marsh. Without money and family, she survives by gardening and trading fresh mussels and smoked fish for money and gas from Jumpin', a Black man who owns a gasoline station at the boat dock. Jumpin' and his wife Mabel become lifelong friends to Kya, and Mabel collects donated clothing for her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuleikha_(novel)"title="Zuleikha (novel)">
In 1930, Zuleikha lives in a small Tatar village in the Soviet Union with her husband Murtaza and her mother-in-law. Her husband treats her terribly and favors her mother-in-law heavily. Her mother-in-law is extremely ungrateful for everything Zuleikha does for her. Zuleikha is considered a failure because she has attempted to have 4 different children but all have died. As part of the dekulakization campaign, her husband is executed by Ignatov for refusing to leave. She is then forced to exile to siberia with him while they go on a lengthy journey to a new "Settlement". Ignatov is not interested in Zuleikha and has a woman of his own at home but ends up getting trapped in this just as much as Zuleikha. After an extremely length waiting time and train ride where some people manage to escape they arrive at the port. The port takes them down the river to their settlement and sinks along the way. The result is many who were trapped on the boat and locked up ended up drowning. Zuliekha tries to save them and almost drowns her self but Ignatov saves her. This settlement turns out to be nothing more than some forest with minimal supplies if any. The remainder of the story takes place at this settlement and develops eventually into a real settlement. The first winter is harsh and many die but thanks to Ignatovs leadership and Zuilkhas hunting skills they survive. Many recruits arrive in the spring and don't make it through the harsh winter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadliest_Enemy"title="Deadliest Enemy">
Michael Osterholm describes his book as "part history, part current affairs, and part blueprint for the future". Top of his concerns are influenza pandemics, antibiotic resistance and bioterrorism, combined with "no clear international governance structure for how we are going to deal with these issues". Focusing on major infectious diseases, he highlights the world's vulnerability to their emerging threats. His concerns include the effects of major outbreaks on medicine and vaccine production, should countries where these are produced be affected.Content includes a chapter on coronaviruses titled "SARS and MERS: Harbingers of Things to Come". Other chapters are on the HIV/AIDS, toxic shock syndrome, the 2015–16 Zika virus epidemic, and Ebola outbreaks, covering all the main outbreaks over the previous 30 years, including influenza bioterrorism, Gain-of-function research, influenza research, the antivaccine movement, and antimicrobial resistance. The concept of "game-changing influenza vaccines" is introduced in the chapter "Taking influenza off the table". This provides reasoning and mechanisms for developing vaccines. Solutions to antimicrobial drug resistance are suggested in the chapter titled "Fighting the resistance".The authors divide infectious diseases into four classes: pathogens that have the potential to cause pandemics; pathogens important to particular regions; endemic diseases; and bioterrorism, dual-use research of concern, and concerns over gain-of-function research, where modifying pathogens in the laboratory might potentially be misused.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scent_of_Death"title="The Scent of Death">
David Hunter is asked by the police to come to an abandoned and derelict hospital (St Jude’s) in London. A mummified corpse has been found in a loft space and Hunter's expertise is brought to bear on the case. After a ceiling collapses, a hidden room is revealed which has a further two bodies in it. After making sure that the building is safe, a cadaver dog is brought in to search for more bodies. Those they have found were put into the room after the hospital was closed and were walled up inside with strange torture and burn marks on their bodies.As in other cases, Hunter becomes too involved in the people either directly involved with, or on the fringes of the case. One of the people trying to save the hospital is a barrister who asks Hunter for too much information and is killed in a very suspicious hit-and-run which also wounds a fellow forensic officer on the case. Besides all of this, Hunter has to contend with his girlfriend taking a 3-month job abroad and the spectre of Grace Strachan, a female killer from the second book, still causing him to be jittery as she could be back to get him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperium_in_Imperio"title="Imperium in Imperio">
Belton Piedmont is born to a poor but hardworking family in Virginia and grows up intimately familiar with racism and segregation. He attends school with another black child, Bernard Belgrave, whom he builds a rivalry and friendship with. Belton and Bernard's educations take radically different turns when Bernard goes to Harvard while Belton is too poor to attend a prestigious university.Belton's graduation speech is published in a Richmond newspaper and it catches the attention of a southern democrat, Mr. V.M. King, who vehemently opposes lynching. King takes a liking to Belton and gives him a check that will take him through college, but not before giving Belton some sage advice.With King's aid, Belton attends a college in Nashville, Tennessee. Belton is perturbed when he discovers that even in the seemingly egalitarian school, there are black professors that are silently ostracized and barred from eating meals with their white counterparts. Belton organizes a movement of civil disobedience and daunts the school's president into changing things.After Belton graduates, he is harassed by a mob after encouraging black men to vote. The mob goes to lynch him, even shooting him in the head, but the bullet is caught in Belton's skin and only leaves him unconscious. He's claimed by a doctor who wishes to dissect his body, but Belton awakens on the table and kills the doctor in self-defense. Belton flees and is eventually arrested for murder. The trial goes poorly when many of the jurors are from the mob that lynched him. But Belton's case reaches the attention of Bernard who uses his political connections to appeal Belton's verdict.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrack_(novel)"title="Wrack (novel)">
In 1794, the English ship "Berkeley" is cast upon an unknown shore in New South Wales due to a storm. Upon exploring the land, the crew suddenly stumble across a shipwreck which they believe to be of Portuguese or Spanish origin. They find papers on board when exploring the shipwreck which are dated to 1519. Fearing the implication which this discovery might have on the English claim to Australia, Captain Bells swears the entirety of the crew to secrecy, warning them to never reveal the existence of the shipwreck.In present day, archaeologist David Norfolk is searching for the wreck of a Portuguese ship on the south coast of New South Wales. He is accompanied on the dig by fellow archaeologist Anna as well as his students. They begin digging in the area where their aerial magnetometer has detected an anomalous signal and discover a body wrapped up in an army blanket. The body is taken away by detectives for examination in Sydney. David is allowed to watch the autopsy and so travels to the police station where he is greeted by Claire, his ex-lover, who he learns is working as a forensic medical examiner for the police. Following her down to the morgue, David watches Claire as she examines the body which they extrapolate to be a Caucasian male from the 20th century who died from four gunshot wounds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Guide_to_Berlin_(novel)"title="A Guide to Berlin (novel)">
The novel begins with one member of the literary group, Marco Gianelli, giving a short eulogy for the deceased, who remains without identity at this point. In the next chapter, it cuts to Cass’ third person point of view as she describes the scenery in wintry Berlin. Cass goes to her first literary meeting and the reader is introduced to the other five members, “Victor from New York, Marco and Gino from Rome, Yukio and Mitsuko from Tokyo”, and Cass from Sydney. The reader learns how Cass came to join this group; she met Marco as they both stood in front of Vladimir Nabokov's old dwelling, as they both took a photo of the building, and Marco came to invite her to the literary group.The meetings take place gradually over a few weeks, with each person sharing their own speak-memory. In between the meetings, Cass visits landmarks with different people, such as going to the Pergamon Museum with Marco, aquarium with Victor and the S-Bahn with Mitsuko.After every person's speak-memory, they agree to two weeks without a meeting, and then schedule the next one in Cass’ apartment. Gino is strained and tense and makes a speech about how they are all pretentious and snobbish. Victor comforts Gino and the two men move onto the apartment's balcony. The men become angry, although we are not told what is said, and in a single moment, Gino lifts Victor up and drops him over the balcony edge. A caretaker is called and Victor's body is driven to the edge of a river and sunk into the water. Gino commits suicide soon after.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangster_State"title="Gangster State">
The book explores Magashule's relationship with the controversial Gupta family and alleges that he was responsible for a number of corrupt activities. It explores the methods used to maintain his premiership and elevate him to the post of secretary-general of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party. It also reveals that he was about to be arrested by the Scorpions prior to their disbanding in 2009.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transmigration_of_Bodies"title="The Transmigration of Bodies">
The Redeemer, a fixer who works primarily in the criminal underworld, wakes up with a hangover at his apartment in the Big House. One of his neighbors, Three Times Blonde, asks him for credit for her phone. They go to her apartment to make the exchange, and end up eating and having sex. Another resident of the apartment, an anemic student, hopes to share in their meal, or at least have leftovers, but they shun him.The next morning the Redeemer gets a call from Dolphin Fonseca, a barrio boss. Dolphin wants him to find his son Romeo, who has disappeared after visiting Lover's Lane, a street of strip clubs. The Redeemer learns from the bartender Óscar that Romeo was taken by boys from the Castro family, another rich criminal household. He also learns from Dolphin's daughter (the Unruly) that Dolphin has taken Baby Girl, Castro's daughter, to an old house called Las Pericas. When the Redeemer goes to Las Pericas, he finds Baby Girl dead.He calls a nurse, Vicky, to examine Baby Girl's body. She concludes that Baby Girl died from the plague, having gone several days without treatment. She also notes that the body has not been ravished after death. They go to meet the Mennonite, an old friend and fellow fixer, who is working for the Castros to retrieve Baby Girl. The Mennonite tells him that Romeo is also dead. When the Redeemer asks the Castro sons about the matter, they say that Romeo, injured by a van, had asked them to take him to their house so he could rest for a few hours. However, he died shortly after they brought him to the house. After examining Romeo's body, Vicky concludes that their story is true.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_Books_trilogy"title="Skin Books trilogy">
## Ink.In the first installment of the series, main protagonist Leora Flint lives in the town of Saintstone, where the residents mark their skin with important life events through the medium of tattoos. When a person dies, their skin is flayed and then, should the deceased be found worthy, preserved in a 'skin book' for remembrance. A tradition which has been passed down through generations, the marked community are taught that the purpose of inking their skin is to unburden their lives of secrets and deception, and after death they are flayed so they may live freely in the afterlife.&lt;br&gt; Leora aspires to become an 'inker'; a professional tattoo artist. When Leora's father dies, she finds comfort thinking that his skin book will be kept and remembered, believing he had led a good life. But when she discovers that his book has been tampered with and a mark removed, she begins to question his legacy and seeks to learn the truth. With the help of her friends, Verity and Oscar, and her mentor Obel, Leora sets out to solve the mystery behind her father's edited skin book and clear his name. However, her investigations uncovers connections between her father, her own past, and the 'blanks'.&lt;br&gt; The blanks live beyond the borders of Saintstone – those who do not ink their skin and were banished from Saintstone's marked society. Their differences and 'otherness' have led to the belief that they are secretive and dangerous; a belief that has been encouraged by their government to inspire fear and disdain towards those who do not adhere to the marked way of life. Leora learns that the government are keeping her father's book, and with her friend's help she steals the page displaying the mark of the crow; a sign that indicating that a person should be Forgotten.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentry_Peak"title="Sentry Peak">
When Avram (= Abraham Lincoln) becomes King of Detina (Detinu is "United" spelled backwards - a parody of the USA) after the death of his father King Buchan (= James Buchanan), he declares he intends to liberate the blond serfs from their ties to the land. The northern provinces (= Southern United States), where most of the serfs live, do not accept his lordship. The hot north is a land of broad estates, whose noble overlords take the serfs' labor and give back next to nothing. Those provinces secede from Detina, choosing Avram's cousin, Grand Duke Geoffrey (= Jefferson Davis), as their king in his place.Avram refuses to let Geoffrey rule the north without a challenge. The southern provinces (= the Union), full of merchants and smallholders stand solidly behind him. So he sends armies clad in gray against the north. Geoffrey raises his own army, and arrays his men in blue made from the indigo much raised on northern estates to distinguish them from the southrons. This begins the Detinan Civil War.In "Sentry Peak", the story begins with Detina General Guildenstern (= Union General William Rosecrans; Shakespeare's "Hamlet" has minor characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) going on his war unicorn to meet Thraxton the Braggart (= Confederate General Braxton Bragg) of the northern provinces, for a clash at Sentry Peak (= Lookout Mountain) near Rising Rock (= Chattanooga, Tennessee, whose name supposedly means "rock rising to a point" in the Creek language). Guildenstern is accompanied by Lieutenant General George, nicknamed "Doubting George" (= George Henry Thomas, commander of the Union XIV Corps). Everything else in the story is a parody in a vein similar to these examples.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incest_(novel)"title="Incest (novel)">
The novel begins shortly after the end of Christine and Marie-Christine's three-month long sapphic affair. In the first and longest section of the book, entitled "No Man's Land," Christine reacts to the demise of her relationship with Marie-Christine and examines the other relationships in her life, including her relationship with her daughter Léonore and her ex-husband Claude. The next section entitled "Christmas" is divided into several subsections. It begins by detailing the events that occurred between December 25 and 27, ending with a physical altercation between Christine and Marie-Christine and their separation. Christine then defines several words she identifies with, including incest, mental illness, paranoia, narcissism, homosexuality, subject, suicide, perversion, sadomasochism, nazism, hysteria, desire, and schizophrenia, respectively. She follows these definitions with examples of how these words apply to her life, and descriptions of her interactions with other individuals in her life in an effort to understand these words and how they apply to her specifically, as well as flashbacks to her and Marie-Christine's relationship in early December. This section ends with Christine describing a trip to the cinema that she took with her daughter, Léonore. In the final and shortest section of the novel, "Valda Candy", Christine describes in detail her incestuous relationship with her father, beginning when she was 14 and ending when she was 16. She then describes her relationship with 30-year-old Marc, a friend of her mother's, that began shortly after the end of her physical relationship with her father. Christine's focus then shifts back to her relationship with her father. Christine ends the novel by revealing that at age 26, she had resumed the incestuous relationship with her father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_I_Became"title="The Man I Became">
Verhelst's novel opens in the first-person narrative of a young gorilla. The narrator and his family are captured from their home in the jungle by poachers. The family is chained together and forced to march to an unknown destination, with some members dying from the harsh conditions of the journey. The caravan eventually reaches a coast where the prisoners are crowded into a ship and sent on a long journey overseas. Finally, the ship reaches a large, man-made facility, where the family is divided by gender. The narrator, along with the other males, learns to speak and act like a human from a human trainer. After the completion of their training, the group joins many other animals of multiple species for their final test: a cocktail party. At this party, all the animals mingle and dance with their new human skills.Following the party, the narrator is brought to a sort of amusement park, "Dreamland", where the animals are assigned various human jobs based on their capabilities. The narrator gradually gains trust from the higher-ranked humans, eventually obtaining a position training animals himself. He gains enough trust from his supervisors to earn a badge showing his rank as fully human, where he is promoted to a management position and a nice apartment. However, the narrator soon begins to notice some suspicious activity among the humans at the park, leading to an impromptu, frenzied investigation of suspicious shipments of animals. This investigation peaks with a devastating fire that destroys the park – the cause of which is unknown. The narrator ends up with a mindless job in the financially devastated city near the park, where he eventually befriends Lucia, the daughter of Dreamland's owner, and comes to live with her. The novel closes with an image of Lucia in front of a sunset.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_'76"title="Ebola '76">
On a hot, humid August day in 1976, The Democratic Republic of Congo is the setting of the first major Ebola outbreak. Unfortunately, the outbreak is difficult to contain and control due to the squalid living conditions as a result of deep poverty, and the population's ignorance and apathy regarding the virus. These 2 factors help the Ebola strain to fester and spread to an epidemic affecting the city Kinshasa heavily. As luck would have it, an ordinary Sudanese factory worker by the name Lewis, who happened to stop through Kinshasa on his way back to his home, contracted the virus from an escort during an adulterous romp and consequently brought it back to his home in Nzara to subsequently spread like wildfire. The novel goes on and shows Ebola's path of destruction in Nzara through Lewis' social connections and its devastating effect on the town as a whole.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shesh_Namaskar"title="Shesh Namaskar">
Because the author does not want to be dependent on an abundance of events, he selects a few events, observes them poignantly and analyses them with meticulous care. As a result, "Shesh Namaskar" does not have an overt plot or a sustained story-telling style.The novel starts with a letter from a son to his mother, Tanu, followed with another such letter each week. At the end of the novel, the narrator realizes the search for the mother is endless and that perhaps every son searches for his mother and with her, the supreme spirit. The novel ends with the narrator asking whether this search ever ends. The story develops through the letters using flashbacks. Each character reveals a story in their statements.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Ran,_Never_Will"title="Never Ran, Never Will">
The book tells the story of the Mo Better Jaguars, a youth football team in the Brownsville area of Brooklyn, during the 2013–2014 season. The team is composed of players aged 7–13 years old who struggle to win games. "Never Ran, Never Will" chronicles the efforts of the six team coaches and head coach Chris Legree as they work to keep the young, mostly African American players inspired in a neighborhood undergoing gentrification.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Restaurant_of_Many_Orders"title="The Restaurant of Many Orders">
Two gentlemen in Western-style dress go hunting in the woods, accompanied by two dogs and a guide. After a day of hunting, they have failed to capture any game, they have become separated from their guide, and their dogs suddenly drop dead. As the two gentlemen lament their losses and trudge forward, they suddenly turn to find a large Western-style house with a sign reading, "Restaurant Wildcat House Western-Style Cooking". The hungry gentlemen, though unnerved, enter the restaurant to encounter a series of doors that open before and close behind them. Each door is preceded by a sign, the first few of which bear double-entendre messages of welcome. The gentlemen interpret these signs, apologizing for the restaurant's "many orders", as indicating the restaurant's popularity and quality. Later signs bear commands (the Japanese 注文 chūmon having the same two senses as the English "orders") instructing the men to undress and rub themselves with strange substances. All the while, growing hungrier and colder, the men speculate about the fine food and diners they expect to find in a restaurant so discerning.Finally, the men realize they cannot go back and realize that they will be devoured by the proprietor of the house if they approach the last door. In a deus ex machina, their previously dead dogs return to fight the demons lying behind the final door and the house vanishes into mist. The gentlemen are rejoined by their guide, and they return to Tokyo forever traumatized by the experience.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_Through_Peachtree"title="Marching Through Peachtree">
A civil war is tearing apart the kingdom of Detina. When Avram became the new King of Detina, he announced his intent to abolish serfdom for the blond serfs upon which the northern provinces depended, Detina was torn in two, and the rebellious north took Avram's cousin, Grand Duke Geoffrey, as their king.Neither side could expect an easy victory. While the south was larger and wealthier, the north had better soldiers and more powerful wizards. Led by officers riding unicorns, supplied by flying carpets, both sides clash for three years when Count Thraxton, a conceited wizard-general whose opinions of his spell-casting ability far outstripped the reality, bungled a spell which backfired disastrously against his own side, giving the Unionists a decisive victory.But the war was far from over: Thraxton is relieved of his command; which means that the south faces a far more competent general: Joseph the Gamecock. And Joseph and his troops were determined to hold Peachtree Province against the loyalist troops. They had occupied Rockface Rise, which offered only two narrow places where the Unionists could come at them, and had further fortified it with trenches and catapults. When the southern army attacked, they would face formidable obstacles both natural and manmade, as well as the repeating crossbows of the troops and the deadly sorcerous storm and lightning wielded by the northern wizards.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Acaster's_Classic_Scrapes"title="James Acaster's Classic Scrapes">
Acaster recalls scrapes in roughly chronological order, beginning with anecdotes from his childhood such as wiping his wet hands on a classmate's coat or pretending he knows juggling for a Cub Scout performance. He tells stories set in his secondary school years, in which an assembly performance fell flat and a "Humpty Dumpty" routine became very popular. Acaster plays the drums, and he joined the school band on a trip to Holland. He relates stories from working in a pub kitchen. In the meantime, he formed various bands such as Pindrop, in which their lead singer would scream rather than sing onstage, and The Wow! Scenario, which led to Acaster and friends collecting large yellow "W"s. Acaster had a singing teacher for two years and they remained in contact afterwards; having a key to her house, he once let himself in to go to the toilet when he was desperate, without her knowledge. Other musical scrapes involve other bands of his, a jam night and a performance at the Greenbelt Festival. Acaster also tells stories involving his friends, such as a time he stole a road sign.Aged 18, Acaster says he had a "midlife crisis", which led him to coming up with bucket lists and setting himself challenges. Examples vary from skydiving for charity to singing karaoke. The book contains three stories of separate car crashes; in the first, Acaster lost control of the car shortly after passing his test. In the second, he fell asleep at the wheel after his final performance with a band. The third was whilst he was driving on tour as a comedian. There are several chapters discussing one-off stories such as one night where Acaster got very drunk and unusually aggressive while alone on a bus. Some scrapes involve Acaster on holiday, such as a trip to Alcatraz Island.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasana-e-Azad"title="Fasana-e-Azad">
The novel is set in Lucknow and an imaginary Middle East during the late 19th century. Its theme follows the pattern of Miguel de Cervantes' "Don Quixote", with Azad modeled on Don Quixote. Azad's faithful friend, Khoji, echoes Sancho Panza.Azad, with no family history, wanders around the city; he encounters all kinds of people and observes Lucknow's changing urban milieu. He has a keen eye for female beauty. Azad meets two sisters and falls in love with Husna Ara, the older sister. Although she loves him too, she sets a condition for their marriage: Azad must go to Turkey and fight with the Turks in their war with the Russians. Azad leaves for Turkey with Khoji, his sidekick, a dwarf with a fondness for opium and delusions about his handsomeness and martial prowess. They have a number of adventures in Turkey and Russia; several noblewomen fall love with Azad, who remains more-or-less true to Husn Ara.Azad, Khoji, and two female European admirers return to India in triumph. Azad marries Husna Ara, and the two European women become social workers. He becomes the father of twins and is well-known and respected, devoting a great deal of time to the propagation of new ideas, education, commerce and industry. When war breaks out against Afghanistan, Azad is asked by the government to aid the war effort. He goes to war, again proving himself a valiant soldier. Azad then returns home and lives a happy, useful life devoted to the advancement of his country. "Fasana-e-Azad" has a number of sub-plots, including the story of Husna Ara's sister, Sipahr Ara; her lover, prince Humayun Far; and the Shahsawar, his mysterious rival.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_of_the_Fall"title="The Shock of the Fall">
The novel starts with Matt reciting recollections from his childhood, where he blatantly states that he is not a nice person and has not dealt with pain since scraping his knee at the age of nine. This episode happened when he and his brother Simon went camping with their parents at Ocean Grove Holiday Park in Dorset. After scraping his knee, Simon carries Matt back to where they are staying. Shortly after, Simon, who has Down syndrome and several other medical conditions, is found dead.In the present, Matt is being treated at the Hope Road Day Centre mental hospital. He was committed there by his parents, Richard and Susan, after his grandmother found him attempting to make a giant ant farm in his flat, which a hallucination of Simon told him to do. Matt finds his experience at the ward repetitive, and often complains about the rigid schedule. One of Matt's therapists asks him to perform a genogram – which eventually makes him remember what happened to Simon by writing about the night he died. It is revealed that Simon's death was the result of a harmless prank gone wrong, where Simon accidentally fell off of a short cliff.After Simon's parents and the ward doctor, Edward Clement, discuss the progress Matt has made at the ward, he is discharged. The novel ends with Matt awaiting his release, stating that the story does not have an end, as he is still living it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_and_Retreat"title="Advance and Retreat">
After a long fought out civil war, the Southron forces of the Kingdom of Detina defeat the Northoners and serfdom is abolished throughout all the kingdom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_That_Went_Missing"title="The Day That Went Missing">
The book begins with the author at age eleven in 1978, swimming in the sea off Cornwall, England with his nine-year-old brother, Nicky. Out of sight of their parents and siblings, they suddenly find themselves dragged into an undertow and are quickly out of their depth. Richard realizes that he is about to die and struggles frantically to shore, leaving Nicky behind. His last view of his brother is of the younger boy straining to keep his head above water and whimpering. Although Richard runs for help, it is too late by the time a rescue boat arrives. Nicky has drowned.Nearly forty years later, Richard is disturbed by what he perceives as his own inability to feel things deeply. He decides to perform an 'inquest' into his brother's death, believing it to be key to why he represses his emotions. He interviews his mother and two surviving brothers, Tim and Jem, as well as one of the men who crewed the lifeboat that pulled Nicky's body from the sea. He visits his brother's grave for the first time and locates the beach where it happened, forcing himself to revisit the scene.He is shocked when his mother tells him something that he, Tim and Jem have all erased from their memories: immediately after their parents returned from Nicky's funeral (which the boys were not permitted to attend) in their hometown of Swindon, the family drove straight back to the same vacation house they had been renting in Cornwall to spend another week. "We had it booked", his mother explains. They resumed their holiday without speaking of what had happened, even returning to the very same beach where Nicky had died only days earlier, to picnic. He and his older brother were sent back to boarding school when fall term began a few weeks later, and there again, no one spoke of Nicky, who had also been a student at the school. Richard interviews the school's headmaster, who tells him that during his first months back, he repeatedly woke screaming in the night.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Faculty_of_Useless_Knowledge"title="The Faculty of Useless Knowledge">
The novel takes place in the summer of 1937 in the city of Almaty. The protagonist of the novel, Georgy Nikolaevich Zybin, is a thirty-year-old historian and an employee of the ethnographic museum. For a long time Zybin has tried to live besides his epoch, not penetrating into the essence of events occurring around: arrests, public judicial processes and propagandistic hysteria. An authentic European humanist, Zybin cannot accept the socially obscuring and making total savages of people. Zybin sees himself as an irreplaceable fragment of a disappearing culture, on whom its fate depends, and he cannot reconcile himself with its demise and with the fact that the culture becomes a "faculty of unnecessary things". Being in a state of delirium at night, Zybin talks to Stalin: "What if you are right and the world will survive and prosper. Then the mind, conscience, goodness, humanity and everything that has been forged for thousands of years and was considered the goal of the existence of mankind, is worth nothing. To save the world, you need iron and flamethrowers, stone cellars and people with guns ... And I, and people like me, will have to fall to your boots like to an icon."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver's_City_(novel)"title="Silver's City (novel)">
While Belfast is torn apart by a vicious, undeclared war, two men are engaged in a bitter and equally destructive private battle for vengeance. Ned Galloway, a streetwise hired gun, has abducted 'Silver' Steele a jailed Loyalist folk-hero who fired the first shot of the Troubles. Galloway's purpose – to prove who wields the real power in the city's battle-torn streets. While Galloway believes his anarchic skills can buy him a kind of freedom, Steele, having swapped a cell for the illusion of freedom, discovers that he no longer understands the mechanism and principles of the city he once fought for. Together they plunge towards the final confrontation. A confrontation where all who believe they pull the strings are proved dangerously, murderously wrong.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Raven_Tower"title="The Raven Tower">
In the Raven Tower universe, many gods of varying levels of power exist. Gods may take the physical forms of animals or landmarks. Gods always speak the truth. If a god says something that is false at the time, the god must expend its energy changing the world so that the statement becomes true. A god may expend all of its energy and die doing this.The story is narrated by The Strength and Patience of the Hill, a god who inhabits a large boulder. Strength and Patience also discusses its long life, from prehistoric times through the arrival of humans. The country of Iraden is protected by various gods, including the Raven, a god that inhabits a living raven. The capital of Iraden is the port city of Vastai. It is ruled by the Raven’s Lease, a human who is granted vast power in exchange for committing suicide when the Raven’s possessed bird dies. This act of human sacrifice provides vast power to the incubating egg from which the next raven will hatch, and be inhabited by the Raven god.Mawat, son of the Lease and commander of Iraden’s army, receives a message that his father is ill. Mawat is accompanied by his retainer, a transgender man named Eolo. When they arrive in Vastai, Mawat’s father has disappeared, the raven is dead, and his uncle Hibal is the new Lease. Mawat publicly accuses Hibal of foul play, of threatening Vastai’s stability, and of disrupting trade relationships with other territories. In particular, members of the Xulhan Empire and their snake god are seeking a new alliance with Hibal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uninhabitable_Earth_(book)"title="The Uninhabitable Earth (book)">
The book fleshes out Wallace-Wells' original "New York" magazine piece in more detail, dovetailing into discussions surrounding various possibilities for Earth's future across a spectrum of predicted future temperature ranges. Wallace-Wells' argues that even with active intervention, the effects of climate change will have catastrophic impacts across multiple spheres: rising sea levels, extreme weather events, extinctions, disease outbreaks, fires, droughts, famines, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, and increased geopolitical conflict, among other calamities.While the book is not focused on solutions, it recognizes solutions exist to prevent the worst of the damages: "a carbon tax and the political apparatus to aggressively phase out dirty energy; a new approach to agricultural practices and a shift away from beef and dairy in the global diet; and public investment in green energy and carbon capture".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thank_You,_Omu!"title="Thank You, Omu!">
Omu makes a stew for dinner and its smell spreads throughout the neighborhood. One by one, starting with a boy, members of the community knock on her door to ask her for some of the stew, which Omu always gives. When Omu is ready for dinner, there is no more stew left. However, the community then brings her food to show their gratitude. They eat together and have a dance party.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Big_Mooncake_for_Little_Star"title="A Big Mooncake for Little Star">
As the book opens Little Star's mother has just finished making a "Big mooncake" and asks the young girl to not touch it. After awaking in the middle of the night, Little Star forgets what her mother had asked of her and takes a small bite and then runs back to bed. This is repeated each night with the mooncake getting smaller and smaller, until Little Star's mother discovers what's happened. The book ends with the two baking a new mooncake.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alma_and_How_She_Got_Her_Name"title="Alma and How She Got Her Name">
When the book opens Alma Sofia Esperanza José Pura Candela feels that her name is too long. Her father, upon hearing Alma's complaint, offers to tell her the story of her name. For each name her father tells her about the relative she was named for and Alma is able to make a connection between herself and the relative. After hearing about her five other names Alma asks about her first name. Her father explains that there is no other Alma, just her. At the end of the book Alma feels her name fits and that she has "a story to tell."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leave_Me_Alone!"title="Leave Me Alone!">
As winter approaches, an old woman decides to knit sweaters for her many grandchildren. However, due to noise in her home, she is unable to concentrate, so she decides to sit outside by the stars to knit in peace. However, on her way there, she encounters bears, goats, and even aliens who she all tells to leave her alone. Eventually, she is finally able to get her peace and knit the sweaters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboys_and_East_Indians"title="Cowboys and East Indians">
Set in India and Wyoming, the stories in "Cowboys and East Indians" tell the immigrant experience in the American West. From Indian motel owners to a kleptomaniac foreign exchange student, to oil rig workers, to a cross-dressing cowboy, an adopted cowgirl to a medical tourist in India.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dying_President"title="The Dying President">
Ferrell's book is one of several he wrote about health and secrecy in the U.S. presidency, along with 1992's "" and 1996's "The Strange Deaths of President Harding". It looks at the circumstances surrounding Roosevelt's final illness, who died in 1945 of a cerebral hemorrhage brought on by his cardiovascular disease. Roosevelt was diagnosed with severe hypertension in March 1944, near the end of his third term in office, by White House physician Howard Bruenn. By the end, Roosevelt had difficulty concentrating, was easily tired, and could only work four hours a day at most, but still kept his health secret even from his family and Truman.Ferrell argues that Roosevelt, a naturally secretive person, chose to hide the true nature of his serious condition rather than resign his office or allow others in his administration to take over his decision-making powers. "The president knew he was ill, even if he had delusions of immortality," wrote Ferrell.Roosevelt's hypertension probably appeared years earlier than Bruenn's diagnosis, although it is impossible to say for sure since his medical records are missing. But he also went to great lengths to keep his health secret, including enlisting FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to pressure doctors into staying quiet. Roosevelt's motivations may have included a desire not to be slowed down, and fear that his illness would be seen as a weakness. Ferrell writes that maintaining such secrecy may have been necessary both for national security during wartime and for political expediency during Roosevelt's fourth run for the presidency. But he also notes that secret-keeping was characteristic of Roosevelt, who also hid his use of a wheelchair due to poliomyelitis from the public for years: "He had always been very much a self-contained person who confided in no one."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choosing_Truman"title="Choosing Truman">
Ferrell recounts the intrigue and behind-the-scenes machinations during the convention—"devious, furtive, roundabout business"— that led to Wallace's ouster and Truman's rise. Roosevelt's failing health in 1944 was an open secret, and Democratic Party leaders were worried that whoever was his vice president would inevitably have to take over. Many party officials distrusted Wallace, particularly chairman Robert E. Hannegan, who "wanted to be known as the man who saved the country from Henry Wallace." He and other party leaders, including outgoing Frank C. Walker and treasurer Edwin W. Pauley, wanted to find an alternative choice. Roosevelt himself was an obstacle to this; he had come to see himself as "irreplaceable", Ferrell writes, and "refused to consider the possibility he might die" and considered his choice of running mate inconsequential in comparison to other pressing issues, such as World War II. Roosevelt's typically "secretive [and] manipulative" behavior also made it difficult for others to know his true intentions in the matter. Instead of Wallace, several others were considered but rejected, including conservative South Carolina politician James F. Byrnes, a top Roosevelt aide and former Supreme Court justice; another Supreme Court justice, William O. Douglas; Kentucky Sen. Alben Barkley; and House Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas. Truman, though he did not actively seek the nomination, was chosen by the party leaders, and Roosevelt agreed to the choice in an early meeting at the convention. However, Roosevelt confused the issue by later throwing support behind both Wallace and Byrnes. The outcome was in doubt for much of the convention, including a moment when the vice president's supporters started a chant of "We want Wallace!" that turned into "a shouting, cheering, volatile crowd of 35,000 people." When the vote was taken, Wallace was ahead after the first ballot, but by the third and final ballot, Truman had won decisively with 1,031 votes. The loss of the nomination would be the doom of Wallace's political career. The following year, Truman forced Wallace to resign as Secretary of Commerce, and he retired from politics soon after that. Wallace ran for President as the leader of the Progressive Party in 1948.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ill-Advised"title="Ill-Advised">
Ferrell describes the book as "a series of medical detective stories". The book looks at the history of medical coverups during seven White House administrations: Grover Cleveland's secret operation to treat his mouth cancer; Warren G. Harding's chronic heart condition; Franklin Roosevelt's coverup of his eventually fatal heart disease; Dwight D. Eisenhower's heart disease; John F. Kennedy's Addison's disease; the problems raised by Ronald Reagan's foiled assassination, 1984-85 colon cancer, and 1987 prostate surgery; and George Bush's 1991 arrythmia diagnosis and a 1992 incident in which he became violently ill during a dinner with the Japanese prime minister. In some cases, Ferrell writes, their health was poor enough that they should not have run for office at all. In others, physicians' incompetence or an excessive desire for secrecy may have prevented proper treatment of illnesses and contributed to early death.Ferrell devotes the largest section of the book, nearly 100 pages, to Eisenhower's heart attacks, stroke, and Crohn's disease, drawing largely on the account of Brigadier General Thomas W. Mattingly, Eisenhower's cardiologist from 1952 until his death in 1969. Mattingly's account is particularly critical of Eisenhower's personal physician, Howard Snyder. Mattingly believed Snyder had lied about the severity of two incidents in 1949 and 1953—which Snyder called gastrointestinal events, but Mattingly believed were heart attacks—perhaps even removing or altering files to protect Eisenhower's political future.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_That's_Dead"title="All That's Dead">
An Englishman, who lectures at Aberdeen University, goes missing, with only spattered blood stains to indicate what might have happened. He was vociferous in his Unionism (especially on social media) and it is thought by Police Scotland that the Alt-Nats (Alternative Nationalists) have kidnapped him. Then at least two others go missing too. Amidst all this, Detective Inspector Logan McRae is back at work after having had a year off on sick leave (on account of his wounds from the last story The Blood Road). McRae, who is still in Professional Standards, is seconded to the investigation into the disappearances when it is revealed that the detective inspector leading the investigation, was in a Nationalist terror group when he was sixteen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Paris"title="Private Paris">
When Jack Morgan, the owner of Private, visits his office in Paris, he hopes to have a relaxing time of enjoying the sights and having fine food and wine. His trip ends up being anything but relaxing. First, a client from California calls to ask Jack to find a granddaughter missing in Paris and to return her home. This venture becomes very complicated. Next, France's elite are being killed one by one and the killings appear to be religiously and ethnically motivated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Riser_(novel)"title="Early Riser (novel)">
The story takes place in an alternate version of the United Kingdom, where the Ice Age continues and most of the human population hibernates in winter. Returning early from hibernation may cause Dead in Sleep from neural collapse, but death during hibernation may also arise from a shortage of fats, low temperature, vermin predation, carbon dioxide build-up, calcitic migration and many other complications. Some people awake with only enough vestigial memory to walk and eat, and became known as "nightwalkers".As the novel opens, people’s survivability during hibernation has dramatically increased after the introduction of Morphenox, a drug produced by HiberTech, a large and powerful "vertically integrated" corporation. HiberTech also "takes care" of nightwalkers, "redeploying" those who are suitable for performing simple tasks and supervising "transplant potential" of others.There Winter Consul Service is responsible for the safety of dreaming people. The main protagonist, Charlie Worthing, is a novice and this is their first season as Winter Consul. One of the current issues for the Consul Service is an outbreak of viral dreams that is not treated seriously at first, but unexpectedly leads to serious trouble in which Charlie is personally embroiled.While Charlie's gender is ambiguous, an ID number/code given by Charlie when entering Hibertech ends with F (Worthing, C, BDA26355F) - the same as Mrs Tiffen (Tiffen, L, HAB21417F) and distinct from Jack Logan, whose ID ends with M.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat_Who_Lived_with_Anne_Frank"title="The Cat Who Lived with Anne Frank">
The book details a brief period in the life of Anne Frank's cat, Mouschi, from the period in which he meets Anne to the period of Nazi uprisings and the forced hiding with the family. While Anne, described as being "bright, kind and loving," must remain in hiding, Mouschi can wander the streets and view the onset of World War II from an unnoticed vantage point.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of_Air_and_Darkness_(Clare_novel)"title="Queen of Air and Darkness (Clare novel)">
After the events of "Lord of Shadows", the Shadowhunters prepare for the burning of the piers of Robert Lightwood and Livvy Blackthorn. The Cohort, a fascist organization that aim to discredit and destroy Downworlders, begin taking over the Clave. They nominate Horace Dearborn to replace Robert as the new Inquisitor. Julian Blackthorn confesses to Magnus Bane that his parabatai bond with Emma Carstairs has been changed by their love, asking him to put a spell that dampens his feelings. During the funeral, Emma meets with her distant cousin, Jem, telling her about Kit Herondale's fey heritage as well as a warlock sickness supposedly caused by ley lines. Before leaving, he gives her a ring which will alert his wife, Tessa Gray, to her location.Horace states his plans to interrogate all Downworlders and bars Emma and Julian from leaving with the other Blackthorns back to Los Angeles. He gives them a mission to go to Faerie, kill Annabel Blackthorn, and retrieve the Black Volume of the Dead. When the two arrive at Faerie, they realize that Horace never intended them to survive and has sent Dane Larkspear to kill them. Julian kills him before Seelie faeries, including Nene, appear to take them to the Seelie Court. There, Julian gives the Seelie Queen a copy of the Black Volume in return for the information on how to break the parabatai bond: by cutting the original bond in Silent City with the Mortal Sword, which will break all bonds in the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Liars"title="House of Liars">
Elisa, a young woman from Southern Italy, lives as a recluse with her cordial, but fickle adoptive mother, the courtesan Rosaria, who loves but frequently neglects her. Her only company are the ghosts of her past, populating her lively imagination. After Rosaria's death Elisa tries to free herself from these ghosts by writing down her family's history.When Elisa's grandfather, the nobleman Teodoro, marries the significantly younger Cesira, an ambitious governess from the countryside, the resulting scancal leads to a break with his family. No longer able to obtain credit, the spendthrift Teorodo sees his palace seized by creditors and has to take up more modest lodgings in a working-class neighbourhood, where he spends most of his days brokering rarely lucrative deals in shady taverns, while his wife Cesaria feeds the family by giving private lessons. Constantly on the run from the bitter reality and Cesaria's reproaches, Teodoro slowly drinks himself to death. To his daughter Anna however, he remains a perfect gentleman to the end, who treats her like a princess and charms her with lively tales of past glory and tantalizing promises of future travels.After her father's death, Anna transfers this blind adulation to her rich cousin Eduardo, whom she meets by chance during one of his youthful pranks. While Eduardo writes her love songs, serenades her in front of her window, and even gives her an engagement ring, he also enjoys tormenting her with jealous suspicions and raves about travel plans that do not include her. In contrast to her mother, Anna realizes that the status-obsessed Eduardo would never actually marry her, but wants to have a child from him anyway - in the throes of passion, she longs to sacrifice her reputation, without expecting anything in a return, as a testament to her love. Eduardo however always withdraws at the last moment. After a health scare, he vows to change his ways and starts to view Anna as an unpleasant reminder of a past he wants to leave behind, to be unceremoniously discarded by a break-up letter without further explanation of reasons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_All_the_Time"title="The Devil All the Time">
"The Devil All the Time" follows the events and fates of various characters who all carry their own secrets from the past. As the novel progresses the lives of these people converge in unexpected ways.In a prologue, Pollock introduces the protagonist, Arvin, as a young boy. He sits in a clearing with his father, Willard, on an oak log, joining him in his evening prayer routine. Willard is borderline obsessive when it comes to prayer and expects the same from his son. While Arvin prays, however, his mind wanders and feelings of isolation bubble to the surface. Feeling like an outsider at school, he is the victim of relentless bullying. Arvin recalls his father telling him to stand up for himself, but this is easier said than done.The rest of the book is divided into seven parts. Part One, "Sacrifice," begins in 1945, before the prologue. Willard is a young single man who has just been discharged from combat duty after the end of World War II. As he sits on a bus headed to his home in Coal Creek, West Virginia, he recalls the horrifying things he saw and did during the war. One memory haunts him in particular: that of a soldier he comes across who has been skinned and crucified. Willard shoots the man as an act of mercy, putting an end to his suffering. The bus makes a stop at the Wooden Spoon Diner in Meade, Ohio. There, Willard meets and instantly falls in love with a beautiful waitress, Charlotte Willoughby. At home, he is met by his nervous and emotionally-damaged mother, Emma, and her brother, Uncle Earskell. Willard proceeds to get drunk, and his thoughts turn from the horrors of war to the beautiful waitress he just met. He lets it slip to his mother that he has fallen in love, which upsets her because she made a bargain with God that if He let her son live, she would arrange a marriage between Willard and poor Helen Hatton.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Report_on_the_Miracles_at_Little_No_Horse"title="The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse">
There are two main timelines: novel’s “present day,” set in 1996 during the last few months of Father Damien's life, and Damien's past as Agnes DeWitt, from 1910 onward. Erdrich intermixes these timelines; Damien has been writing letters to the Vatican since he arrived at the reservation in 1912, and these letters link the text to his memories of Agnes's life. Further details of certain events surrounding Pauline Puyat are explained, not in chronological order, through Father Jude Miller's interviews of Damien.In the earlier timeline, the reader learns about the transformation of Agnes into Damien. After leaving a convent, Agnes briefly lives with a farmer named Berndt Vogel. They love each other, but Agnes refuses to marry since she has already been wed to Christ. Tragedy strikes when they are caught up in a bank robbery. Agnes is injured and briefly kidnapped; Berndt is killed in his effort to save her. Berndt had written a will leaving his property to Agnes as his common-law wife(link to wiki), so she stays there a few months longer until a cataclysmic flood destroys the farm and washes her northward. The flood also kills the original Father Damien Modeste, who was on his way to Little No Horse to do missionary work. When she comes across his body, Agnes buries him and assumes his identity. Upon her arrival, Agnes finds the reservation struggling with starvation. She meets Fleur Pillager and Nanapush, both of whom feature prominently in Erdrich's other works. Nanapush also introduces Agnes/Damien to everyone in the Kashpaw household.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_94"title="Doom 94">
The novel begins on April 5, 1994, the death of Kurt Cobain, the lead singer and guitarist of Nirvana. Cobain's death influences youngsters living in Jelgava, Latvia to begin listening to heavy metal music. This is also the time that Latvia has recently regained its independence from the Soviet Union, causing economic and social upheaval. The book's main character Janis turns to the alternative lifestyle offered by an emergent heavy metal scene.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fly_on_the_Wall"title="The Fly on the Wall">
Set in 1971, in the fictitious Capitol City, the story is interwoven with political machinations. Reporter John Cotton of the afternoon "Tribune" newspaper is in the state capitol building's press room filing his column on the day's political events. An intoxicated Merrill "Mac" McDaniels of the morning "Capitol-Press" arrives from a long drinking session with Speaker of the House Bruce Ulrich. Mac believes he has just uncovered a story that will be the crowning achievement of his career. Telling Cotton he's leaving to search for his missing notebook, Mac is found dead seven minutes later, several levels down from the press room, on the floor of the capitol rotunda.Cotton finds Mac's missing notebook in the rear of a desk drawer, and is puzzled by the columns of unexplained figures on one page. The words "Rebar" and borrow stand out. He enlists the help of Janey Janoski, executive secretary for the Legislative Finance Committee, to help him decode Mac's notes and uncover the story that may have ended Mac's life. Janoski identifies "rebar" as material related to highway construction and finds that “borrow” can mean soil borrowed to build up a roadbed. Then Cotton pours through state government records and talks to staff, finding evidence of a complex scheme to double bill the state for concrete meant to be used in road projects while leaving no trail easy to audit. Highway Department staff, a main contractor and a re-insurance company are all involved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_and_the_Fox"title="Roger and the Fox">
All during the autumn, Roger tries in vain to find the fox, but his Christmas present finally provides the opportunity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Record_of_a_Spaceborn_Few"title="Record of a Spaceborn Few">
The novel explores life in the Exodus fleet that was mentioned in passing in the preceding books, from the viewpoint of five characters: Tessa (sister of Ashby from "The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet"), a laborer and mother to two children; Kip, a restless teenager; Isabel, an elderly archivist; Sawyer, a recent immigrant; and Eyas, a "caretaker" who performs Exodan funerary practices.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mister"title="The Mister">
English aristocrat Maxim Trevelyan inherits the Earldom of Trevethick after the sudden passing of his elder brother, Kit. He sleeps one time with his sister-in-law Caroline, who was his lover but had chosen his brother instead of him. He falls for his Albanian undocumented immigrant housemaid, Alessia Demachi. He finds out about her many talents and her past life. He takes her to his place in Cornwall when two unauthorised people came to his apartment searching for Alessia. He introduces Alessia to sexual pleasure and enjoys her company. At first she has no idea of Maxim's title but finds out and decides to run away. Maxim stops her and reveals his affections for her and they reconcile. Alessia reveals the truth about her abusive betrothed who kidnaps her when they are in England. Alarmed, Maxim confronts Caroline and goes after Alessia to Albania. Due to the absence of her documents and passport, she travels with her fiancée through another route. Maxim reaches her home and asks for her hand in marriage and Alessia enters soon after where she reveals the truth about her fiancée to her father and tries to get Maxim to be married to her. The novel ends with Alessia's father threatening Maxim to marry his daughter and them being together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cave_and_the_Light"title="The Cave and the Light">
Using Raphael's "The School of Athens" painting to introduce the various schools of philosophy, Herman refers back to figures in the painting and their positions in relation to others frequently throughout the book. The first several chapters of "The Cave and the Light" focus on Socrates and his pupil Plato, as well as earlier philosophers whose ideas they built on: Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides. Herman next introduces Aristotle, a pupil of Plato who went on to develop a philosophical model at odds with Plato's. The book provides a detailed comparison between Plato's "Republic" and Aristotle's "Politics". In addition to Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum, the book covers the competing and successive Hellenistic schools of philosophy: Epicureans, Stoics, Cynics, and Skeptics.Herman attributes political, religious, and philosophical changes throughout history to the influence of the philosophies of either Plato or Aristotle. "The Cave and the Light" uses the framework of the two philosophers to discuss Alexandria, ancient Rome, Constantinople, the spread of Christianity, Europe in the Middle Ages, the Age of Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the founding of the United States, the rise of communism in Russia, and Nazism.In an interview, Herman summarizes his book: What gave Western civilisation its dynamism for so long was its creative tension and balance between the material and the spiritual, between what we aspire to be as spiritual beings and what we need to be as material beings and part of nature. That’s the overall theme of "The Cave and the Light" and how that creative tension reflects the twin intellectual legacies of Aristotle and Plato, the greatest philosophers the world has ever known.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Life_Next_Door"title="My Life Next Door">
Samantha Reed is a 17-year-old American teenager living in the fictional town of Stony Bay, Connecticut. After her father left when she was a baby, Samantha's mother, Grace, threw herself into a career in politics which leads to her being State Senator when the story begins. Due to her mother's commitment to her career, Samantha and her sister Tracy are often pressured to be perfect. As the summer begins, Tracy leaves to work in Martha's Vineyard, leaving Samantha feeling abandoned and smothered by their mother.After having a bad meeting with Clay, her mother's new campaign manager and boyfriend, Samantha retreats to her balcony where she's spent years watching her neighbors, the Garretts. As a family with eight children, Grace distanced herself and her daughters from them due to her belief that they are chaotic and irresponsible people. For Samantha however, the Garretts provided an escape from her boring, micro-managed life. Although she's spent years watching them, Samantha has never interacted with the Garretts because she doesn't want to disobey her mother. However whilst up there, Samantha meets one of the Garretts who climbs the tendrils to join her. The boy introduces himself as Jase Garrett, the third oldest child, and from this point, they begin growing closer as friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Fragility"title="White Fragility">
The book opens with a foreword from the black American academic Michael Eric Dyson.DiAngelo describes white fragility to be a defensive response by a white person when their whiteness is highlighted or mentioned, or their racial worldview is challenged, whether this response is conscious or otherwise. She gives examples including a white man accusing someone of "playing the race card" or a white woman crying to avoid conflict. DiAngelo proposes that white people are used to viewing themselves as "raceless" or the "default" race, and as such are insulated from feelings of racial discomfort. She describes racism as systematic rather than overt and conscious, arguing that racial segregation has shaped the United States. She points to research that has shown that children as young as four years old show a strong and consistent pro-white bias and an especially strong prejudice against black males.DiAngelo says that people associate racism with extremists such as neo-Nazis or self-identified white supremacists, who they label as "bad people", and conclude that because they are a "good person" that they cannot be racist. She criticizes white liberals, arguing that white people who identify as "progressive" view themselves as "woke" to avoid questioning any issue of racism in themselves. She terms these reactions "aversive racism" and writes that it prevents people from addressing unconscious racist bias, which she believes everyone has. Contrastingly, she uses the term "avowed racists" to refer to those who she believes are intentionally perpetrating racism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juha_(novel)"title="Juha (novel)">
Shemeikka, a travelling merchant from White Karelia, seduced Juha's wife Marja. Marja left Juha's household in Swedish Finland with Shemeikka to Russian Karelia, where she found his "harem" with many other women serving in near slavery.Marja lost favour with Shemeikka, despite giving birth to his child. She succeeded in returning to Finland. Juha believed she was abducted. When they went to Russia to retrieve her child, Juha assaulted Shemeikka, who explained that Marja left of her own will.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roots_of_Yoga"title="Roots of Yoga">
The book is a collection of mostly original translations by the editors of over one hundred yoga texts, mainly from Sanskrit but also including Tibetan, Arabic, Persian, Bengali, Tamil, Pali, Kashmiri, and early forms of Marathi and Hindi.Its eleven themed chapters cover the nature of yoga itself and the traditional practices, theories, and contexts of yoga. These are the eight limbs of yoga set out in Patanjali's "Yoga Sutras", which the book calls "the best-known early expression of yoga", and additional topics described in medieval texts, namely:The editors note that there is at least an apparent paradox in describing these as yoga, as "yoga" is both the entire process and the goal or end-point, samādhi, of that process.The book has a main introduction summarizing the history of yoga and yoga scholarship, and each chapter has its own shorter contextual introduction and notes. The book provides a variety of helps for the reader such as a timeline of important events from the 1500 BCE Vedas up to the 19th century; tables of the systems of the limbs or "auxiliaries" of yoga, including fourfold, fivefold, sixfold, sevenfold and fifteen-fold systems as well as several eightfold systems including Patanjali's; a glossary; lists of primary and secondary literature; notes; and an index.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Deaths_of_Evelyn_Hardcastle"title="The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle">
At the start of the book, the novel's protagonist awakes in a forest, suffering from memory loss, and calling for someone named Anna. He doesn't remember his own name. He finds his way to a manor, where his friends tell him that he is a doctor called Sebastian Bell who is attending a party thrown by the Hardcastles, the family of Blackheath Manor. After he falls asleep that night, however, he awakes to find himself in the body of the butler, and it is the morning of the previous day.He learns that he has eight days, and eight different incarnations, to solve the murder of Evelyn Hardcastle, which will take place at 11pm at the party that evening. He will only be allowed to leave Blackheath once he finds the killer. If he is unable to solve the mystery in the eight allocated days, the process will start again and he will awake again in the body of Sebastian Bell with his memory wiped. He also learns that there are two other people competing to find out the murderer, and that only one person will be permitted to leave Blackheath.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Then_It_Fell_Apart"title="Then It Fell Apart">
The memoir predominantly deals with Moby's life from 1999 to 2009 with some flashbacks to his early childhood. In particular, the memoir deals with his surprise at the accidental success of "Play", his descent into alcohol addiction, and his decision in 2007 to finally go to rehab in order to stay sober.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metropolis_of_Tomorrow"title="The Metropolis of Tomorrow">
## "Cities of Today"."The Metropolis of Tomorrow" is divided into three sections which in total prominently feature 60 of Hugh Ferriss' drawings. The first section, "Cities of Today", begins with a vignette describing the contemporary New York City skyline of the late 1920s in theatrical terms, largely focusing on the enormous scale of modern skyscrapers and the impressions they make on city dwellers. According to architectural historian Carol Willis, this section outlines the book's main themes, namely the lack of planning in contemporary cities, the powerful psychological impact that cities have on their inhabitants, and the responsibility of architects to preserve humanistic values as cities continue to grow. "Cities of Today" is mostly devoted to a brief building-by-building analysis of what Ferriss viewed as "some of the outstanding buildings of the country", which he considered especially influential and illustrative of future trends. In total, 18 projects by 15 different architectural firms in five cities are examined. The first two buildings profiled are both in St. Louis: the Telephone Building, noted for its use of setbacks; and the St. Louis Plaza, which Ferriss upheld as an example of collaborative architectural planning that did not compromise design. The next two buildings featured are in Chicago, the Chicago Board of Trade Building and the Chicago Tribune Building, the latter of which Ferriss considered unusually beautiful for an office building.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartland_(nonfiction_book)"title="Heartland (nonfiction book)">
Smarsh begins the book by focusing on previous generations of her family, each of them facing hardships due to poverty. Her maternal grandmother Betty, for example, moves far and frequently to escape difficult situations, layoffs, abusive men, and violent neighborhoods. Betty's seventh husband Arnie owned a farm, finally offering Betty some security. Though they struggle to make enough money, Sarah has fond memories of playing and working hard on their farm. Sarah's father, Nick, owns a foundation-laying business that evaporates when construction slows during the economic downturn in the early 1980s. Growing up in poverty on a Kansas farm, Sarah maintains a mixture of pride in her family's hard work and shame that the U.S. heaps on poor people, having fallen behind in a "supposed meritocracy."Smarsh is able to break the cycles of addiction, teen pregnancy, and lack of education that have kept previous generations of her family in poverty, and she gets good grades, eventually going to college and later pursuing a teaching and writing career. She notes, however, that she can only do so because some in previous generations worked hard to break those cycles, despite great hardship. For instance, she credits steady affirmation from her grandparents, fewer changes of residence than either of her parents experienced, and being the only female in her family with a father who was neither violent nor abusive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Red"title="Beyond the Red">
On the fictional exoplanet of Safara, humans are second-class citizens, ruled over by a humanoid native species: the tall, tattooed Sepharon. The novels are written in first person, and switch back and forth between the perspectives of Kora and Eros. Kora is a young Sepharon, and the first female ruler of her province of Elja. Eros is a young half-human, half-Sepharon soldier who has grown up with nomadic "redblood" humans in a world where "half-breeds" like him are generally killed at birth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Tower_(novel)"title="The Black Tower (novel)">
"The Black Tower" is the first book in Philip José Farmer's Dungeon series, taking place in a vast and mysterious world-size prison containing creatures from across time and space.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children_of_Willesden_Lane"title="The Children of Willesden Lane">
Lisa Jura was a prodigy who hoped to become a pianist during pre-World War II Vienna. As Nazi attacks on Jews continue in her home country, her parents send her on the Kindertransport to London, England. Several days after arrival, she became a servant at a manor. Sometime later, though, she leaves the manor. Lisa then resides in a hostel for Jewish children on Willesden Lane, where she makes new friends. Continuing her interest in piano, she plays music, inspiring the other children through their problems. It's a story of kindness and love and compassion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dreamers_(novel)"title="The Dreamers (novel)">
The story begins with a college student, Kara Sanders, who after a night out, returns to her college dorm room with symptoms of drowsiness. The following morning, her roommate, Mei, a first year college student, dismisses her sleeping figure for tiredness. However, when Mei returns to the dorm room in the afternoon, she finds Kara in the same position she was in when she left. Mei calls the paramedics, who rush Kara to hospital, where her heart rate slows down to a complete stop and she is declared dead. Soon after, Rebecca, another girl from the same dorm floor, falls victim to the sleeping virus. Rebecca’s heart rapidly slows and she is deemed unconscious, however, her pulse remains completely stable; her only symptom is deep sleep. Unknowingly, at the time of her comatose state, Rebecca is also a few days pregnant.A janitor from the college, Thomas Peterson, who worked on the same dorm floor as the sleeping virus victims, returns home to his two daughters, Sara and Libby. He proceeds to prepare his daughters for isolation from the virus. Meanwhile, panic ensues on the dorm floor when it is believed that the sleeping virus could be highly contagious. As a result, the dorm floor is quarantined. It is announced that a third girl from the same dorm floor has lost consciousness. With each of the cases, it is confirmed, through the mapping of brain activity, that the sleepers are dreaming. It is also concluded that there is more brain activity in these sleepers than there ever has been in any human brain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stay_Sexy_and_Don't_Get_Murdered"title="Stay Sexy and Don't Get Murdered">
The book is a dual memoir of Kilgariff and Hardstark. Along with the title of the book, chapter titles in the book are also common catch phrases taken from the podcast, "My Favorite Murder". The book also includes personal photos from Kilgariff and Hardstark's life such as family photos or photos from their youth. Critics have noted that though the book does touch on true crime, it is largely a mixture of memoir and self-help.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_Poachers"title="Textual Poachers">
"Textual Poachers" looks at fans and participatory culture, particularly those of popular television shows such as "Saturday Night Live", "Star Trek", and "Alien Nation", paying attention to how fans interact with and respond to the show and each other.Jenkins examines topics such as three aspects of fans' characteristics mode of reception: ways fans draw texts close to the realm of their lived experience, the role played by rereading within fan culture, and the process by which program information gets inserted into ongoing social interactions. He also examines gender and fanfiction, as well as fan readers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Priory_of_the_Orange_Tree"title="The Priory of the Orange Tree">
The evil, fire-breathing wyrm known as the Nameless One was defeated nearly a thousand years ago by the knight Sir Galian Berethnet with a sword, Ascalon, created by the Witch of Inysca. Sir Galian married Princess Cleolind after battling the wyrm on her behalf. Their descendents in the House of Berethnet have ruled Inys as queens and been the symbol of the religion of Virtuedom, while dragons and magic are condemned and feared. Currently, Queen Sabran the Ninth's power in Inys is tenuous; she has yet to produce an heir to the throne and the Nameless One threatens to awaken again.Ead Duryan is an outsider from the South who acts as a lady-in-waiting and protector to Sabran, but is loyal to the secret mage society of the Priory, which has its own view of the history of Cleolind, the Mother, and Sir Galian, the Deceiver. Meanwhile, Lord Arteloth Beck, close friend of Sabran, is banished from Inys on a futile quest by those who seek to weaken the queen. In the East, where water dragons are revered as living gods, Miduchi Tané has spent her life training to become a dragon rider. When Tané comes upon an outsider and trespasser from the West, she throws her future into jeopardy by hiding him with Niclays Roos, an alchemist searching for the secret to immortality who was banished from Sabran's court years ago.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_(Todd_novel)"title="After (Todd novel)">
Tessa Young, an incoming freshman at Washington State University, arrives at college with her mother, Carol, and boyfriend Noah. The conservative Carol is horrified by Tessa's alternative-styled roommate and her friend, upperclassman Steph Jones. When Carol fails to convince Tessa to switch dorms, Carol warns her daughter about the dangers of college parties before leaving with Noah. The next morning, Tessa returns to her room to find one of Steph's friends inside, an attractive, tattooed boy who makes several rude comments to Tessa. Steph tells Tessa about the boy, Hardin Scott, who is a rebellious figure on campus.On the first day of college classes, Tessa befriends Landon Gibson, who is also an English major. Tessa learns from Landon that Hardin is his future step-brother since Landon's mom and Hardin's dad are engaged. After the first week of college, Tessa reluctantly accompanies Steph to the party and plays ‘Truth or Dare’ with Steph's friends, including Hardin, during which she admits she is a virgin. Hardin is dared to kiss Tessa, but she runs from the group, embarrassed. Hardin catches up to her and they share an intense moment that he takes as trivial. Carol disapproves of Tessa's activities and blames Hardin, so Tessa promises to ignore him. But Hardin falls for Tessa.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slammerkin"title="Slammerkin">
## Part 1: London.Mary Saunders is a highly intelligent girl living in poverty in 1760 London. She is repelled when her mother Susan encourages her to become a seamstress, wanting nothing to do with the "wretched trades". She feels that she deserves better, and envies the hair ribbons and brightly coloured gowns of a prostitute she often sees. She agrees to kiss an old peddler for a scarlet ribbon, but is instead raped and later finds that the ribbon she was given is brown. When the resultant pregnancy becomes evident, Mary's family disown her and she is beaten and raped by a group of soldiers. She is later awakened by Doll, the prostitute she admires.Although Doll says that it is "every girl for herself", she shelters and cares for Mary. Doll helps Mary with her appearance and teaches her how to attract customers so that she can pay for an abortion. After Mary recovers, Doll keeps Mary safe while she learns the trade, with much of their time at leisure: drinking, attending the theatre, strolling through parks, and visiting friends. After a year together, Mary notices a decline in Doll, who has dark moods, little appetite, and drinks beyond excess. Although Doll often said "a girl's clothes are her fortune" and should never be sold, she begins pawning her clothing and often has trouble paying the rent. Mary finds their roles reversed as she often watches out for Doll and goes as far as to buy back her clothes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knives"title="The Knives">
In 2010 ex-soldier David Baylock, a member of the Tory Party, struggles to juggle his political life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell"title="Fall; or, Dodge in Hell">
Billionaire Richard "Dodge" Forthrast is declared brain-dead after a routine medical procedure. Friends and family find his last will directs that his body be cryonically preserved for the purpose of future brain scanning and eventual revival. His wishes are fulfilled, his frozen brain destructively scanned, and his connectome saved in digital form.Several years pass in which portable augmented reality viewers become ubiquitous, social media echo chambers cause rural lawlessness, commercial quantum computing is feasible, and anonymous distributed ledger identification becomes popular in business.Dodge's grandniece Sophia animates Dodge's connectome as an experiment on secure distributed computing, for her senior thesis, at Princeton. The connectome remembers nearly nothing, but calling itself "Egdod" -- perhaps to associate himself with Dodge -- builds a virtual world, with physical laws similar to what little it does "remember". Wealthy anonymous donors initially fund the support datacenters running this "world". Brain scanning gains general popularity, after traffic analysis shows that virtual minds are achieving an afterlife, in a medieval fantasy setting. All the downloaded minds, however, suffer extreme amnesia.Egdod is usurped by El -- a terminally ill, and mentally ill, billionaire, who is funding the computing process. El believes that Dodge not only lacked imagination when constructing the virtual world, but that he also consumes a disproportionate amount of computing power. El conquers the world, isolates Dodge (with the power of his mind, aided by augmention by his private data centers). El subjugates the (virtual) population with a religion centered upon worship of him. Sophia (after being murdered by El) enters this virtual world, to assist Dodge in disrupting El's power. She -- and several other characters -- embark on an epic quest. Stephenson, in narrating this, is able to describe many aspects of this medieval fantasy world, and of the beliefs that El has instilled amongst its peoples. In the end Dodge and El have one final confrontation to determine whose vision for this virtual world prevails.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surjo_Tumi_Sathi"title="Surjo Tumi Sathi">
The story of the novel revolves around a village in Chittagong. Hashim, son of a converted Muslim father Harimohon has been through oppression for his whole life. He hardly supports his family. Kholu Matobbor, the source of power and oppression of the village controls the whole village. Communal behavior village people has been shown very cruelly in this novel. Hashim's grandmother cannot visit him freely because of difference in religion. However, after Sufia's death humanity wins since his grandmother finds her deserted child's reflection in Hashim's baby.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_Strange_(novella)"title="Passing Strange (novella)">
In the present, lawyer Helen Young receives a terminal diagnosis. She retrieves a painting by a famous pulp magazine artist named Haskel and sells it to an unsavory collector named Marty. She leaves most of the money to charity, returns home, and commits suicide.In 1940s San Francisco, a group of queer women try to avoid America's anti-LGBT laws while living Bohemian lives. These women include Loretta Haskel, the aforementioned artist; Emily Netterfield, a cross-dressing singer; Franny Travers, a witch with the power of teleportation, and Helen Young. Haskel and Emily meet at Mona's 440 Club and establish a relationship. Haskel's estranged husband Len returns to the city, seeking money; Haskel spurns him and asks Helen to initiate divorce proceedings. One night, Emily and Haskel decide to go dancing. Emily dresses as a man so the couple can avoid suspicion. As they leave a performance hall, Len attacks them. Emily pushes Len into the street, where he is killed by a car. The police arrive, but Emily escapes using Franny's powers.Haskel uses a family heirloom to create a magical painting of the night in which she and Emily went dancing. They escape into the world of the painting, allowing them to avoid persecution and live happily as long as the painting exists. Helen, Franny, and their other friends agree that the last living member of the group will destroy the painting; Franny places it inside a booby-trapped box.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Exercise"title="Trust Exercise">
Sarah and David are two performing art students coming from different socio-economic backgrounds: Sarah lives with her mother in a working-class milieu; while David's family is financially comfortable. The two fall in love despite their contrasting circumstances, but their relationship ends in a bitter breakup.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoo_(novel)"title="Karoo (novel)">
It’s the last Christmas party of 1980 in New York City, Saul Karoo, a script doctor - and the narrator - spends the Christmas party finding a way to avoid taking his adopted teenage son, Billy, home with him. He succeeds by bringing a younger, drunken woman home instead. It becomes quickly apparent that Karoo struggles with intimacy, alcoholism and hypochondria. He believes he “no longer has his health” for this reason he no longer has health insurance. he also believes no matter how much he drinks he is not able to become drunk.Karoo regularly meets with his wife, Dinah, to make divorce arrangements. These have been taking place over a long period of time and has become as much a new kind of relationship as it is the end of an old, failing one.Jay Cromwell, a big shot movie producer, who Karoo has previously worked for, contacts Karoo to do some doctoring on a new script. This time on an Arthur Houseman - who is considered a veteran director - script, Karoo is aware that a previous project he did with Cromwell ended in a directors suicide. But he is asked to “think about it” and is told there is “no rush”.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Critical_(novel)"title="Mission Critical (novel)">
Immediately after the events of "Agent in Place", CIA contract agent Court Gentry is ordered home by his careerist handler Suzanne Brewer. The Agency-owned transport plane he is in makes a stop at Luxembourg to bring aboard an MI6 rendition team carrying a prisoner, a Dutch banker connected to a mole in the Agency. Upon arriving at Ternhill Airbase in England, they are attacked by a group of armed men, who kidnap the prisoner. After unsuccessfully pursuing them, Court is tasked with finding out who ordered the ambush. Brewer accelerates the mole hunt, eventually bringing in contract agent and Court's former black ops team leader Zack Hightower to intimidate the mole and reveal himself in the process.Meanwhile, former Russian foreign intelligence officer and Court's former lover Zoya Zakharova is being turned into a CIA asset in a safe house in Virginia. She is also being groomed to become part of Poison Apple, a codeword CIA program made up of singleton operatives like Gentry and Hightower. Through Brewer, she finds out the circumstances surrounding the death of her father Feodor Zakharov, a former head of Russian military intelligence, in Dagestan fifteen years ago. Convinced that he is still alive, Zoya escapes from the safe house, dispatching a group of Mexican sicarios attacking it at the same time. She travels to London to find out the truth about her father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Japan_Plans_to_Win"title="How Japan Plans to Win">
Kinoaki predicts an impending attack on Japan by the United States that will leave no alternative to an existential war of attrition between the two powers, pitting Japan against an arrogant, racist enemy and overwhelming odds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bingo_Palace"title="The Bingo Palace">
A call from his grandmother Lulu brings Lipsha Morrisey home to the reservation after living with his father Gerry in Fargo. Once home, Lipsha soon falls in love with Shawnee Ray Toose, a dancer and designer who lives with Lipsha's aunt Zelda. Shawnee Ray is dating Lyman, Lipsha's entrepreneurial uncle, and the two have a child named Redford. This doesn't stop Lipsha from asking Shawnee Ray out on a date.Lipsha and Shawnee Ray plan a date in Canada but are soon stopped by border police because of a pipe that belonged to Lipsha's grandfather Nector. Lyman goes to rescue the two and asks Lipsha for the pipe because of the historical value. When Lipsha refuses to give the pipe up, Lyman offers Lipsha a job at The Bingo Palace, a casino that he owns. Lipsha takes the job and is soon visited by his late mother June in a dream. She gives him bingo chips to use at the casino and drives off into the night.Lipsha begins to play these chips and wins each time after playing bingo. He wins a van and a lot of money. Lipsha's relationship with Shawnee Ray is also going well. They have a romantic evening together, which leaves Lipsha more in love than he was before.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darktown_(novel)"title="Darktown (novel)">
"Darktown", set in 1940s Atlanta, follows the story of Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith, two of Atlanta's first African-American police officers. The novel begins when Boggs and Smith are patrolling in a predominantly African-American neighborhood when they witness a white man hit and knock over a lamppost and slowly flee the scene. The pair, on foot, order the man to pull over and notice an African-American woman in a yellow dress with a bruise on her face in the passenger seat. The cops are unable to convict the white man, later identified as Brian Underhill, due to his race, so they call in white police officers for backup. Officer Lionel Dunlow and his partner, Dennis "Rake" Rakestraw, show up as backup and let the man off without penalty.While patrolling, Boggs and Smith find the dead body of the woman they had previously seen in Brian Underhill's vehicle. They notice a bullet hole in her chest and no blood near the scene, implying that her body has been moved. The pair return to their headquarters, where they fill out a report on the findings. Boggs calls to get information from records, and he discovers that Brian Underhill was fired from the police force in 1945.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cavemen_Chronicle"title="The Cavemen Chronicle">
"The Cavemen Chronicle" explores recent Estonian history, from the era of Soviet repression to Estonian independence and beyond, through the eyes of a group of intellectuals whose stories intersect and diverge and whose lives, in the narrator's words, "expressed the age."The novel is divided into four main chronological sections:Major characters include:By the end of the novel, several characters have died and others still struggle to adapt to a world where their Soviet-era identities have been subsumed by a new state, a market economy, and constant technological change. As Mutt stated in a 2018 interview:"Back in the Soviet era everyone knew who you were, they knew your face. It was an age with no mass media, and to be a writer was to be a celebrity in an age of no celebrity. ... The numbers for some of the books I published in the 1980s were astonishing—40,000 copies sold, a million people or more reading my work. But I'm still suspicious of these numbers, which seemed unlikely then and, frankly, impossible to conceive of today."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fast_Buck"title="The Fast Buck">
The fast buck runs around a complexed set of events and interactions between different people out to find a hidden Indian treasure with different intentions, soon involving a ruthless criminal who is on the run after a homicide in an attempted robbery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Exit_(novel)"title="French Exit (novel)">
Frances Price, a sixty-five year old wealthy widow, and her adult son Malcolm Price live together in New York City. When her financial planner reveals that she is completely insolvent, something he has been warning her about for the better part of a decade, Frances illegally sells everything that she owns and decides to take her childhood friend, Joan, up on the offer to live in her apartment in Paris.Mother and son, along with their cat Small Frank, take a cruise ship to Paris. Onboard they meet a medium named Madeleine who tells them that Small Frank is inhabited by the spirit of Frances's deceased husband Frank, something both she and Malcolm were aware of.Frances and Malcolm live a life of misery and near isolation in Paris. Frances begins to spend their remaining money lavishly, developing a "plan" to fix their circumstances. She informs Small Frank of her plan and he runs away.In order to locate Small Frank, Frances has a friend hire an investigator to locate Madeleine. Madeleine is able to make contact with Small Frank who informs Malcolm and then everyone else that Frances intended to kill him and he has no intention of returning to her. Frances spends the rest of the week entertaining the various guests and friends she has made in Paris including Joan, who shows up believing that Frances intends to kill herself, and Malcolm's ex-fiancé Susan who is still in love with Malcolm and comes to Paris to be with him. Eventually, after spending all her money and reconciling somewhat with Susan, Frances kills herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lover_(Yehoshua_novel)"title="The Lover (Yehoshua novel)">
Gabriel Arditi, an Israeli living in France, returns to Israel penniless in order to retrieve his dead grandmother's belongings, only to find out that she, though in a coma, has not yet died. Bringing his grandmother's dilapidated blue 1947 Morris to a nearby garage, he finds himself unable to pay for the repairs. Adam, the garage owner, takes Gabriel back to his home to work as a translator for his wife, Asya, in order to pay off the debt. Soon, Asya and Gabriel begin an affair. At the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, Adam urges Gabriel to visit the recruitment office in order to avoid arrest, but once registering for service, Gabriel goes missing.Adam begins to obsessively search for Gabriel, consulting army offices and visiting the hospital where Gabriel's grandmother, Veducha, lays comatose. Recruiting Na'im, an Arab boy who works in his garage, the two begin to search for the blue Morris under the guise of running a nighttime towing service. As the novel progresses, Na'im and Adam break into Veducha's apartment, only to find that she had awoken from her coma and returned in the days prior. Promising Veducha that they will locate Gabriel, Adam pays Na'im to be her live-in caretaker and continues his overnight towing operations. Na'im and Adam are soon joined by Adam's daughter, Dafi, and the two children begin a romantic relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapture_(poetry_collection)"title="Rapture (poetry collection)">
"Rapture" follows the narrator through a love story. It begins with falling in love." “ "Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head, so I went to bed, dreaming you hard, hard, woke with your name, like tears, soft, salt, on my lips, the sound of its bright syllables, like a charm, like a spell.”" "Later on, the tone of the book shifts from head over heels in love to brokenhearted.""" The garden tenses, lies face down, bereaved, has wept its leaves.The Latin names of plants blur like belief. I walk on ice, it grimaces, then breaks. All my mistakes are frozen in the tight lock of my face. Bare trees hold out their arms, beseech, entreat, cannot forget. The clouds sag with the burden of their weight. The wind screams at the house, bitter, betrayed. The sky is flayed, the moon a fingernail, bitten and frayed." ""
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lords_of_St._Thomas"title="Lords of St. Thomas">
In 1933, six-year-old "Little" Henry Lord lives in the village of St. Thomas, Nevada, with his mother, Ellen Lord, father, Thomas Lord, and paternal grandfather, Henry Lord, an auto mechanic. St. Thomas is to be flooded entirely by Lake Mead following construction of the Boulder (Hoover) Dam.The elder Henry believes that water will never reach his home, and refuses the government's attempts to buy his land. However, Thomas takes a job with Six Companies, the construction group building the Hoover Dam, to earn enough to buy his own home.Living and working in Boulder City, Thomas only visits St. Thomas every few weeks. On one visit, Thomas takes Little Henry into the crawl space below the family home. Here, he shows his son a safe where he keeps his valuables, and makes Little Henry promise to safeguard the contents should anything ever happen to him. On July 6, 1935, Thomas falls to his death at the dam.In the spring following Thomas's death, Henry buys a rowboat with an outboard motor. Fishing on the Muddy River becomes a favorite pastime.Water finally reaches St. Thomas in mid-1938. Henry finally decides to purchase a new home in Overton, Nevada, and he and Little Henry go out on the Muddy for one last boat ride. While boating, a violent thunderstorm begins, flooding their house. Little Henry realizes he cannot reach the safe; worse, his mother has vanished.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fresco"title="The Fresco">
Multiple alien races have discovered Earth. Two members of one of those races, “Chiddy” and “Vess” of the Pistach, approach Benita Alvarez-Shipton and ask her to carry a device to the authorities that will communicate their message. Benita uses this as an opportunity to escape her abusive husband. The device ultimately reaches the U. S. President, and the Pistach envoys arrange a personal meeting with him.Having noticed Earth's forays into space, the Pistach envoys have been sent to evaluate Earth for membership in a confederation of intelligent races. Failing to qualify for membership exposes Earth to sequestration from space travel and predation by the three other races that have become aware of Earth. The envoys point out some issues that Earth needs to resolve and then take various actions to assist with those problems. The envoys also insist that Benita act as their official intermediary.Throughout the book, one of the envoys, Chiddy, explains the history of Pistach and their religion in journal entries. The Pistach religion and way of life are driven by the stories revealed in the eponymous Fresco, a series of seventeen painted panels. Age and soot and grime have darkened the panels beyond recognition, so the Pistach rely on the Compendium which contains annotated copies of the Fresco panels.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Memory_Called_Empire"title="A Memory Called Empire">
When the Teixcalaanli Empire asks that Yskandr Aghavn, the ambassador from Lsel Station, be replaced, Lsel sends Mahit Dzmare—who, like Yskandr, is an admirer of Teixcalaanli culture. Mahit secretly has within her brain an "imago machine" with a recording of Yskandr's memories and consciousness so that he may guide her; however, shortly after their arrival on Teixcalaan, the machine malfunctions, and Yskandr no longer responds. With the aid of her cultural liaison Three Seagrass and Imperial advisor Nineteen Adze, Mahit discovers the connections between the original Yskandr's death and the looming Teixcalaanli succession crisis—and the threat of a civil war, in which Lsel Station could be a target for annexation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Desolation_Called_Peace"title="A Desolation Called Peace">
A few months after "A Memory Called Empire", alien forces massacre an industrial colony of the Teixcalaanli Empire. The Teixcalaanli admiral Nine Hibiscus, tasked with confronting the threat, requests an Information Ministry specialist to attempt to communicate with the inscrutable enemy. That specialist is Three Seagrass, now a senior Imperial official, who smuggles herself to the frontlines by way of Lsel Station. There, she convinces her former associate and still nominal ambassador to the Empire, Mahit Dzmare, to accompany her. Mahit seizes on the chance to escape the increasing danger from factional conflicts on Lsel, and she is tasked by one of Lsel's leaders to sabotage first-contact efforts in order to prolong the Empire's war with the aliens. In Nine Hibiscus's fleet, the two women develop methods to communicate with the aliens and restart their romantic relationship. With the aid of Nine Hibiscus's adjutant, Twenty Cicada, they establish a line of communication to the enemy, who turn out to be a hive mind that does not understand the personhood of individuals. Their fragile truce is almost foiled when a rebellious subordinate of Nine Hibiscus launches an attack with weapons of mass destruction against one of the enemy's home planets. But an intervention by Eight Antidote, the emperor's young heir, back in the capital allows Nine Hibiscus to stop the attack. As the prospect of further war recedes, Mahit considers a future in the Empire after having burned her bridges to Lsel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Harbour_(book)"title="Cold Harbour (book)">
In May 1944 Brigadier general Dougal Munro of the SOE sends Genevieve Trevaunce, a beautiful British operative, to France with the task of infiltrating General Erwin Rommel's briefing on the defense of the Atlantic Wall. The mission is compromised and it is up to OSS Major Craig Osbourne, a highly trained assassin and Special Forces officer, to rescue her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starring_Madame_Modjeska"title="Starring Madame Modjeska">
Holmgren begins "Starring Madame Modjeska: On Tour in Poland and America" with Helena Modjeska's 1877 American debut at San Francisco's California Theatre, before flashing back to her Polish roots. The future thespian was born as Jadwiga Benda in 1840, into a working-class family in Kraków, Poland. Her mother Józefa Misel Benda was a widowed head of the household when Helena was born, and the mother of sons Józef, Szymon, and Feliks. Baptized as Helena Opid, the identity of her birth father remains speculative, but Michał Opid became Józefa's husband after Helena's birth, and he is the man she acknowledged as her father. Through Michal Opid, she had a sister Józefa and brother Adolph. Helena and sister Józefa were educated at St. John's convent in Kraków . She shared the thespian aspirations of her brothers.Józef introduced 25-year-old stage actor Gustaw (or Gustave) Zimajer to the family when Helena was about age 10. The author portrays him as a dubious character. His stage name was Gustaw Modrzejewska (or Modrzejewski). Hired as a family German language tutor, he often read to them from that era's great works of literature. When she married Zimajer, Helena adapted his stage name to Modjeska (or Modjeski) for her stage persona. He served as her talent manager for her 1861 professional debut in Bochnia, Poland, and for ensuing performances. Holmgren believes hisbungling resulted in Modjeska resourcefully adapting to managing own career. The couple had a son Rudolf (or Dolcio or Ralph) and a daughter Maria, the latter not living past the age of 3. Discovering in 1865 that Zimajer was a bigamist with the other wife still living, Modjeska left him. Zimajer abducted Rudolf in 1866, holding the child hostage until an agreed-upon ransom figure was paid in 1869.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poison_of_Polygamy"title="The Poison of Polygamy">
The novel opens in the Qing dynasty in the 1850s during the Victorian gold rush. The main character, Huang Shangkang, lives in a village in Guangdong province with his wife Ma and is addicted to opium. He and Ma have been married for three years, have no children, and are struggling to pay Shangkang's debts. When Shangkang's mother becomes ill, Ma pawns her few possessions to pay for doctors, but their remedies do not work and the old woman dies. The couple descend further into poverty until they receive a visit from Ma's cousin, who has made his fortune in the Victorian goldrush. The cousin offers to pay for Shangkang's passage to Australia on condition that he give up opium. Shangkang agrees and departs for Victoria.The novel describes the voyage from Hong Kong to Victoria via South Australia, life on the Victorian goldfields and in Melbourne's Chinatown, and events back in Guangdong, where Ma waits for news of Shangkang. Although set during the second half of the 19th century, the story was written during the first decade of the Australian Federation and just before the end of the Qing Dynasty. It also describes interactions between Chinese Australians and Aboriginal Australians, European colonists, and the Australian bush, and commentary on the status of women in Chinese society.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloomy_River"title="Gloomy River">
It is the mid-19th century Siberia, and Danila Gromov on his deathbed reveals to his son Pyotr the whereabouts of the huge wealth he had hidden in the forest, which he had collected in the old times, when being a member of the gang of criminals. Pyotr, even if dogged by huge personal issues, including heavy drinking and mental issues (which eventually drive him into the institution), manages to build a prosperous business on this money, but even more successful proves to be his son Prokhor, a talented and purposeful young man, who creates an industrial empire all through Siberia which brings him great wealth, power and influence.But it seems the evil that Danila Gromov had done, haunts his grandson. Initially, an honest man, Prokhor, through the sequence of catastrophes (including the mysterious death of his lover Anfisa, whom his father also fancies) descends into the mire of vice, betrayal, emotional turmoil and, finally madness which leads him to suicide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devouring_Gray"title="The Devouring Gray">
A parallel-dimension prison for an ancient evil is connected to a small town's founding families. Seventeen-year old Violet Saunders must uncover a devastating family history to defeat the evil known as the Beast.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severance_(novel)"title="Severance (novel)">
The narrative follows Candace Chen after societal collapse due to the Shen Fever pandemic and in flashbacks to her earlier life. Candace and her parents emigrate from Fuzhou, China to Salt Lake City in her youth. In her twenties, Candace drifts through New York City, living on her inheritance from her parents following their deaths, before getting an unfulfilling job at a publishing company called Spectra, overseeing the production of elaborate design variations of the Bible. In the early days of the pandemic in 2011, Candace discovers she is pregnant after splitting with her boyfriend, Jonathan. As businesses shut down as the pandemic worsens, Candace accepts a lucrative contract with Spectra to be one of the few to continue to work in the office until a certain date, because having a workplace open is good for the company's image. Having no living family to be with in the US, Candace feels little drive to flee the city as most others do. Eventually she is the only employee left and is no longer contacted by her superiors. Per Jonathan's parting suggestion to revive her old pursuits in photography, she documents the final days of a deserted New York City's collapsing infrastructure on a blog called "NY Ghost". When shocked by the realization that she has fulfilled her work contract, Candace is one of the final survivors to escape the city in late 2011.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lions'_Den"title="The Lions' Den">
Anti-Israel leftism, in Linfield's narrative, began in the late 1950s when leftists who had lost faith in the Soviet Union began to equate anticolonialism with socialism, in the phrasing of Albert Memmi who opposed the equation. British political theorist Alan Johnson endorses Linfield's view that the left never recovered from this false equation. To illustrate her point that the left was wrong in its assessment of Arab political attitudes, Linfield cites a 1958 article in the New Reasoner by British Marxist Harry Hanson about Arab nationalism, "Despite its . . . exaggerated xenophobia, its apparent resemblance, in certain of its aspects, to Fascism or Nazism, and—most serious of all its vitriolic hatred of Israel—it is fundamentally and essentially a progressive movement." Linfield argues that the notion that xenophobic, antisemitic Arab nationalism was definitionally progressive because it was anti-imperialist was accepted as doctrine by progressive Western leftists, merging with an idea held by Marx himself that Jewish peoplehood must dissolve into progressive universalism. The innovation of the 1950s was that Israel should be destroyed. The Tunisian Jewish leftist Alfred Memmi who was asked by Tunisian authorities to leave the country when it won independence, described the Left's equation of anti-imperialism with socialism that had become “intrinsic to Left politics," as a spurious universalism and a “betrayal of the Jews.”
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asamardhuni_Jivayatra"title="Asamardhuni Jivayatra">
The protagonist of the novel is Sitaramrao. He comes from a distinguished family, whose grandeur is celebrated. At the start of the novel, Sitaramrao's father on his deathbed commands his son to maintain the family's honour. Though The village elder Ramayya cautions him to be careful with his wealth, Sitaramrao, inspired by lofty ideals, pays for a lavish funeral, and arranges for people with large debts to his family to repay only a small proportion. He is soon reduced to straitened circumstances, and forced to seek employment, but fails to hold any job. One day he dreams of seeing an androgynous figure composed half by the goddess Parvati and half of Paramesvara. As one side speaks, the other is veiled, but they both assure him that whatever he hungers after will be provided. On waking, a feeling of irritation provokes him to think that unless life is easy, and lived effortlessly, it is better to die.Sitaramrao's uncle turns down a request for a loan, replying that Sitaramrao's father had treated him poorly: it was he who built the family's wealth, which Sitaramrao's father had squandered, and in his view, the son was behaving as his father had. Sitaramrao in turn insults his uncle. He begins to act strangely, beating in succession his daughter and his wife, and talking to a gecko. He drifts into fantasies of becoming a robber and raping a woman. He takes to wandering in bazaars, singing or haranguing passers-by. He visits a prostitute, then challenges a speaker addressing a meeting and is beaten up, whereupon the wise Ramayya takes him to the shelter of a rain tree, and tries unsuccessfully to reason with him so that he might mend his ways and return home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashian_Konfidential"title="Kardashian Konfidential">
The book contains personal stories, photographs, and diary entries from each of the three sisters. Among the personal stories, Khloé discusses her regret about losing her virginity at age 14 to an older boyfriend, writing "Feeling rushed and pressured and unsure should have been my clue that I wasn't ready to take that step." Kim discusses being starstruck by meeting many celebrities she had admired. Kourtney talks about her obsessive need for neatness and organization in her home. All three write about their late father, attorney Robert Kardashian. They also write about their father's friendship with O. J. Simpson and their memories of the O. J. Simpson trial in 1995 and the effect it had on their family. In addition to personal stories, the book contains advice about makeup, style, and dating. In regards to dating, Kim Kardashian writes in the book "When no one in your family likes a person, there’s got to be something to it," referring to her unsuccessful relationship with her second husband.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yayati_(novel)"title="Yayati (novel)">
The novel has three narrators: Yayati, Devayani, and Sharmishtha. Each section of the story is narrated in the first person, from the point of view of its respective narrator. The novel's characters generally use language that is romantic, ornamental, and poetic."Yayati" centres on the life of its eponymous hero, Yayati, the king of Hastinapur. Disillusionment characterises Yayati's early life. His faith in motherly love is shattered when he learns that his mother weaned him for fear of losing her beauty. Later, he experiences cruelty and passion that challenge his manhood. He then has a fleeting experience of carnal love.When Yayati has to leave the security of the palace for Ashvamedha Yajna (a horse sacrifice ritual in Hindu tradition), he meets his elder brother, Yati, who has become an ascetic and abandoned all material pleasures. After this he meets Kacha, in whom he sees the model of a happy, peaceful life. But Yayati is traumatised when his father, Nahusha, dies, and for the first time he realises the destructive power of death. He is gripped by fear and helplessness. In this state of mind, he encounters Mukulika, a maidservant in the palace. Yayati's attempts to bury his grief in carnal pleasure constitute a critical period in his life. He later meets Alaka and experiences sisterly love. But Alaka ultimately falls prey to the Queen Mother's cruelty. Precisely at this time, Yayati learns of a curse that foretold that his father, and his father's children, would never be happy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Subtle_Body"title="The Subtle Body">
Syman begins "The Subtle Body" by describing in turn the precursors of American yoga, namely Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau. She notes that Emerson's 1856 poem "Brahma" concisely introduced Hindu nondualism, repudiating "sacraments, supernaturalism, biblical authority, and ... Christianity". Thoreau, she states, tried to practice yoga, and was seen by some as "the first American Yogi", but by others as "a misanthropic hermit". However, Syman identifies the dramatic arrival of Vivekananda and his "Raja Yoga" as marking the start of modern yoga, and the key moment in this as being his appearance at the 1893 Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago.From there, she presents the showman Pierre Bernard and his relative Theos Bernard, including sections detailing Pierre confusing yoga with tantric sex, complete with "lust, mummery, and black magic", and of Theos telling of his experiences with Hatha Yoga in India and Tibet.The book then includes stories about a variety of straighter advocates of yoga. Syman tells the story of Margaret Woodrow Wilson, daughter of American president Woodrow Wilson, writing how she "turn[ed] Hindu" after she "found peace" in Sri Aurobindo's ashram in Pondicherry. A Hollywood connection is then explored, featuring Prabhavananda, who translated the "Bhagavad Gita"; Aldous Huxley; Alan Watts; and Indra Devi. The books explains how Devi came to America, unknown, having learnt yoga directly from Krishnamacharya, and how she had grown up in pre-revolutionary Russia, escaping to Berlin and going to India with her diplomat husband. It also tells of the times that Devi taught many celebrity pupils, including Greta Garbo and Gloria Swanson; in a review, Sarah Schrank notes that Syman is interested in how "American fans, often rich and female", made suitable environments for yoga to spread, "shaping celebrity gurus in the process".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annelies_(novel)"title="Annelies (novel)">
The novel traces Anne's life and depicts her sister Margot Frank dying. After the war Otto conceals Anne's diary, and Anne becomes argumentative with him. Steve Pfarrer of "Daily Hampshire Gazette" wrote that Gillham's Anne "is alternately angry, despairing, and ridden with guilt". Anne Frank attempts to have a tryst with a boy and begins smoking cigarettes, and she receives criticism from other people who had experienced the Holocaust. After the diary is revealed Anne becomes less combative and uses the diary to highlight what happened to her to the public.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Tides_of_Heaven"title="The Black Tides of Heaven">
Sanao Hekate, The Protector, rules her empire with the help of Tensors, people who can control elemental forces known as the Slack. She opposes the development of technology for non-Tensor use and violently oppresses her populace at any hint of rebellion. As payment for the Grand Monastery's help in suppressing a rebellion, she sends her twin children Akeha and Mokoya to them.The children train their slackcraft with the monks of the monastery, becoming proficient in the usage of their powers. Mokoya begins to have dreams which prophesy future events, particularly events involving violence; any attempt to prevent these prophecies from occurring is impossible. Mokoya suffers psychologically from the effects of her nightmares, creating strain between the twins. When the twins are almost seventeen, they undergo gender confirmation. Children in the world of the Tensorate are raised without gender, and physical differences between the sexes are suppressed by slackcraft. Mokoya chooses to be confirmed as female, while Akeha chooses to be confirmed as male.Mokoya prophesies that a young man named Thennjay will become the next Head Abbot, despite the disapproval of the Protector. The Protector begins using Mokoya's powers to strengthen her rule but has no use for Akeha. Akeha flees the city and begins a career as a smuggler. Mokoya stays in the city, marries Thennjay, and has a daughter named Eien.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Honey_(novella)"title="A Taste of Honey (novella)">
The story is told out of chronological order.Aqib, a distant relative of the royal family of Olorum, is the assistant keeper of the royal Menagerie. He meets Lucrio, an ambassador from the Daluçan kingdom. An attraction develops between then, despite an Olorumi prohibition against same-sex relationships. Ten days later, Lucrio boards a ship to return to his homeland with his new Olorumi wife. Aqib attempts to swim out to the ship, but is dragged back to shore by his brother, the Corporal.Aqib and Lucrio make love on the night after they meet; they continue to have nightly trysts for the duration of Lucrio's stay. Three days after Lucrio leaves, the princess Femysade chooses Aqib as her husband; they marry and have a daughter, Lucretia. Aqib is summoned to a meeting with two Olorumi deities, who grant him the ability to communicate with animals. Femysade leaves her family to live with the gods.In the Royal Menagerie, Lucrio asks Aqib to leave Olorum with him. Torn between love for Lucrio and loyalty to his family and religion, Aqib declines. Later that night, he regrets this choice and attempts to leave, but is prevented by his father and the Corporal. Due to Femysade's jealousy, the gods erase all memories of Lucrio from Aqib's mind. At the age of 89, Aqib dies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watashi,_Teiji_de_Kaerimasu"title="Watashi, Teiji de Kaerimasu">
After growing up with a father whose corporate life meant that he did not spend time with his family, office worker Yui Higashiyama decides that she will never work overtime, and regularly leaves work at the official end of the day. This places her in conflict with other employees, who usually stay at work until much later, and with her bosses at the company, who see her refusal to work overtime as a lack of commitment to the company and its clients. Her situation is complicated by the arrival of an ex-boyfriend who joins the company. Higashiyama gradually convinces her fellow workers to go home on time in order to save their health and relationships, but ends up breaking her original commitment, which results in her hospitalization and the demise of her own relationship with her fiancé.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_English_Murder"title="An English Murder">
After dinner, Robert Warbeck, the only son and heir of the bedridden Viscount, dies in front of the other guests. Because of heavy snowfall, Warbeck Hall is cut off from the outer world and the phone line is broken. The guests accept Sergeant Rogers as investigator. When told the next morning, the old Viscount dies of shock. Still cut off, another guest dies, this time it is Mrs Carstairs. Both Robert Warbeck and Mrs Carstairs seem to have been poisoned. Doctor Bottwink, who was originally invited to study centuries-old documents in the family library, works out who was the murderer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_of_Mayo_Clinic"title="Women of Mayo Clinic">
Disaster struck Rochester, Minnesota on August 21, 1883, when an estimated-F5 tornado devastated the area. With the exception of facilities in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, the state of Minnesota only had three hospitals. Rochester had no medical facilities at that time. Mother Mary Alfred Moes of the Sisters of St. Francis assisted doctors William Mayo and his two sons, William (Dr. Will) and Charles, in caring for the victims. The devastation highlighted the need for a hospital in the Rochester area. The Mayo family and the Sisters of St. Francis worked conjointly to establish a facility open to all without regard to religious affiliation. Dr. William Mayo selected the site, with he and his sons touring hospitals for architectural concepts to best suit their vision. Mother Alfred raised $40.000, and supervised the construction. Initially named St. Mary's Hospital when it opened in 1889, it would eventually become part of the Mayo Clinic after the latter's founding in 1892.The hospital was small by modern standards, only 27 beds. The facility's first nurse and anesthesiologist Edith Graham, was hired and trained in the operating room by Dr. William Mayo. She in turn trained the Sisters as operating room nurses, and would eventually marry Dr. Charles Mayo. Sisters Sienna Otto, Constantine Koupal, Fidelis Cashion, Hyacinth Quinlan, Fabian Halloran, and Sylvester Burke attended to the needs of the patients 24/7, doing double duty as surgical assistants. Sister Joseph (Julia Dempsey) served in a dual capacity as hospital administrator and Dr. Will's surgical assistant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Wreck"title="From the Wreck">
The steamship "Admella" smashes into a reef off the coast of South Australia. George Hills, a ship's steward, is one of a number of survivors clinging to the remains of the ship for eight days with no food and water. He is protected from the bitter cold by Bridget Ledwith, an elusive passenger he had seen earlier on the boat. Many die, but George and Bridget are rescued. George recovers in hospital, but Bridget disappears without a trace.An octopus-like shapeshifting alien flounders in Earth's unfamiliar waters. It has fled its ocean-covered home-world and seeks refuge on Earth. Alone and lost, it boards the "Admella" and assumes the shape of the first creature it sees, a passenger named Bridget Ledwith. When the ship is wrecked, "she" finds herself with George, and protects him by wrapping herself around him. The real Bridget drowns, but George is rescued, and the alien goes into hiding.George is haunted by images of the woman from the wreck, and tries unsuccessfully to find her. He marries his fiancée Eliza and has three children, but George is sure that the midwife at the birth of his firstborn, Henry, is the woman from the wreck. He struggles to live a normal life and is convinced Bridget put curse on him. He notices a large birthmark on Henry's back, and believes that to be her work. The alien is hiding in plain sight in George's household disguised as a cat, and when Henry is born, attaches itself to his back. As Henry grows up, the alien periodically infiltrates his mind and gives him glimpses of her lost world. When George sees Henry's unusual behaviour and his obsession with the ocean, he is sure the boy is also cursed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chivaraku_Migiledi_(novel)"title="Chivaraku Migiledi (novel)">
The novel is set in Andhra Pradesh's West Godavari district between 1933 and 1940. The protagonist Dayanindhi takes time off from his medical studies to visit his native village, where he finds his mother and elder brother, who has just married and lives there with his wife, are always squabbling. The story begins with his faithful old servant telling Dayanindhi the couple have deserted their home after one final quarrel.Although Dayanidhi identifies deeply with his mother, he does not rush home but goes to find Komali, a woman who fascinates him and whom his mother wants him to marry. After being rebuffed, Dayanidhi spends time at a circus and, when he decides to go back home late at night, encounters his father, who tells Dayanidhi his mother has been promiscuous. When Dayanidhi and his father return to the family home, they discover Dayanidhi's mother is dead. The incident becomes a pivotal moment in Dayanidhi's life.Dayanidhi continues his college studies. On another visit to his former home, he meets his cousins Susila and Amritam. Though the family would like him to marry Susila, he is discouraged by her hostile attitude to his deceased mother and snide references to Komali. Amritam, who is married, makes a good impression on Dayanidhi, who likes her affectionate nature and her lack of hostility towards Komali. On a picnic, Komali asks Dayanidhi for 50 rupees, ostensibly for her mother, and asks him to visit her house that night. Dayanidhi borrows the sum from Amritam. When he finds Komali asleep, he avoids the temptation of touching her and slips the money under her pillow. Komali promptly leaves with a wealthy man. It emerges that Komali's mother wants to live off her daughter's earnings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Abroad,_Lynching_At_Home"title="Democracy Abroad, Lynching At Home">
Hobbs reviews how lynchings have been conducted in United States with a focus on four African American men and boys lynched in Florida between 1941 and 1945: Arthur C. Williams, Cellos Harrison, Willie James Howard, and Jesse James Payne. Hobbs argues World War II shifted public opinion and behavior in the United States, leading to private mob violence against African Americans instead of public lynchings, and to what Hobbs describes as "legal lynchings."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Whitefield_(novel_series)"title="Jane Whitefield (novel series)">
In college, Jane helped a friend disappear to avoid arrest for draft evasion, and discovered she had a talent for it. She calls herself a "guide". Jane relies on both modern skills and her Native American heritage to guide her clients from their old lives into new, presumably safer, lives. Jane's clients are generally in danger, whether from abusive partners, criminals, or the law. Her services include both the practicaldocuments, transportation, money, and protection and the philosophicalhow to adjust to a new and strange life and how to become a new person. She teaches her clients to think "like a rabbit, not a dog". As she explains to a client, "This is like dogs chasing a rabbit. When the rabbit wins, he doesn't get to kill the dogs and eat them. He just gets to keep being a rabbit."After successful missions, she thanks the Jo-ga-oh with gifts of tobacco and nail clippings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordspoint"title="Swordspoint">
Richard St Vier, a swordsman-for-hire based in the seedy neighborhood of Riverside, kills two men at a party thrown by Lord Horn. When a man intimidates Richard’s lover Alec, Richard kills him as a warning to the other Riverside residents.Lord Michael Godwin rejects the advances of Lord Horn. Michael meets Richard on the street and asks for sword lessons, but Richard declines. Michael begins taking lessons from Vincent Applethorpe. At a party, he humiliates Horn and flirts with Duchess Tremontaine, but she rejects him for Chancellor Ferris. Later that night, Ferris asks Richard to kill an opponent in a duel. He shows Richard a signet indicating that Tremontaine is also secretly supporting him. Richard meets with Katherine, an old friend, to obtain the name of his target: Crescent Chancellor Basil Halliday. Halliday has consolidated executive power for himself and is fighting to remove term limits on the Chancellorship; Ferris wants to become Crescent Chancellor himself.An enraged Horn tries to hire Richard to kill Michael; Richard refuses. Alec is kidnapped on the orders of Lord Horn. With Alec as leverage, Horn forces Richard to challenge Michael. Applethorpe accepts the challenge in Michael’s place, and Richard kills him. Duchess Tremontaine rescues Michael, who leaves town. Horn releases Alec. Richard kills two of Horn’s men, then tortures and kills Horn. Alec, fearful of the manhunt Richard has brought down upon them, leaves Richard. On Ferris’s orders, Katherine betrays Richard. He is arrested and put on trial. Alec joins the Chancellors, revealing himself to be the grandson of Duchess Tremontaine. He calls for an assembly of the full Council of Lords.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_Path_(book)"title="Flight Path (book)">
Over the twenty-one chapters of the book, "Flight Path" explores Palmer’s search for her childhood homes after she returns to Atlanta. She wrote the memoir while pregnant with her first child, Guy, whom she remarked was “acclimated to plane noise” before he was born; much as she tolerated the “oppressing roar of descending jets" in her Forest Park childhood home.:87, 111Palmer opens "Flight Path" with a discussion of the demolition of her mother’s house in Kirkwood, where she stayed the summer of her freshman year. She blames the event on a personal curse; all her homes have been lost or destroyed at one time or another.Palmer and her husband returned from a career-building stint in New York City to the Atlanta Metro area in 2004. While in a transition phase in McDonough, she accepts a job at Bellamy Printing as a typesetter. This gives her an opportunity to view the blueprints of the ongoing “Fifth Runway” project at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. The blueprints and maps of the surrounding neighborhoods spark her interest and desire to find what was left of her childhood homes on the Southside of Atlanta. While Palmer is unable to locate the physical structure of any of the four homes she sought, she discusses the displacements caused by the airport, airport-related businesses, and the FAA's noise mitigation rules along the airport's flight path, as well as their cultural and human impacts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murders_of_Molly_Southbourne"title="The Murders of Molly Southbourne">
A bruised and bloodied woman wakes chained to a wall, unable to remember her name or how she arrived in her situation. Her captor, a crazed woman named Molly Southbourne, tells her a story. Molly was raised in a secluded farm. Every time she bleeds, another molly appears. (The blood of other mollies, however, does not create more mollies). At first the mollies appear friendly, but in three days or less they will "turn bad" and try to murder her.At college, Molly begins a short-lived relationship with a man named Leon. Molly's parents are killed by a molly. She drops out of college and is hired as a research assistant by anatomy professor James Down, whom she eventually dates. Molly finds a letter from her mother. As a government spy, her mother was ordered to steal the biomedical research of a professor investigating declining female fertility. She injected herself with an experimental fluid, leading to Molly's condition. James discovers that Leon was killed by his own molly, a slow-growing clone that eventually ruptured and killed him. James has been infected and will soon die as well. Molly builds a dungeon in her basement.Molly reveals that the woman chained to the wall is the eleventh molly to appear since the construction of the dungeon, and the first which has not gone insane. Molly commits suicide and allows the new molly to take her place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positioning_Yoga"title="Positioning Yoga">
Yoga came from India, but how did it change from the solitary practice of Indian mystics to a Western urban method of exercise? Strauss tells the story of modern yoga, starting with Vivekananda's appearance at Chicago's 1893 Parliament of the World's Religions. She shows how yoga changed as it traversed between cultures and historical contexts. She examines in detail Sivananda of Rishikesh's Divine Life Society and its yoga practitioners from different countries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wife_Between_Us"title="The Wife Between Us">
Vanessa is watching her ex husband's new fiancée. She lives with her aunt in New York City and is working at a clothing store to get by after her divorce from Richard. Nellie is Richard's new fiancée, a pre-school teacher. We learn that Vanessa and Nellie are the same person (Vanessa being her present self, and Nellie being her past self). It was Richard's idea to give Vanessa the nickname Nellie, because when they first met, she was a "nervous nellie."Part two starts with what happened between Vanessa and Richard. Richard started gas-lighting and abusing Vanessa, cutting her off from friends and family. It becomes worse after they are unable to have children, which both believe is due to an abortion she had in college which she did not tell him about, partially due to the father being one of her professors, who was married. She starts seeing a therapist, who points out that Vanessa needs to leave. However, Vanessa knows Richard will not let her go and that he needs to decide to divorce her himself. She sets Richard up with his assistant, Emma, and the two begin an affair. Vanessa is finally free of her abusive marriage only to find out that Richard intends to marry Emma. To save her, Vanessa tells Emma Richard's reality but Emma does not believe her. Emma tells Richard, who confronts Vanessa. Vanessa tells Emma the first signs she saw of him controlling her. Emma then realizes she is being manipulated by Richard and agrees to leave him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventy-Two_Virgins"title="Seventy-Two Virgins">
The President of the United States plans to visit the Palace of Westminster. A Lebanese-born terrorist aims to assassinate him; Roger Barlow, a hapless, bicycle-riding, tousled-haired MP aims to foil the attack in order to distract from a scandal involving his financial entanglement in a lingerie shop named Eulalie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Calculating_Stars"title="The Calculating Stars">
Shortly after President Thomas Dewey leads the United States to victory in the space race in 1952, a meteorite strikes the Chesapeake Bay, obliterating most of the Eastern Seaboard. In the aftermath, the mathematician and former Women Airforce Service Pilots pilot Elma York calculates that the resulting climate change will make the planet uninhabitable within 50 years. The threat accelerates efforts to colonize space and leads to Elma joining the International Aerospace Coalition in its attempt to reach the Moon and then Mars.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nickel_Boys"title="The Nickel Boys">
The narrative alternates between the 2010s and the 1960s. In the present, Elwood Curtis is an African-American business owner in New York City. As an investigation into the defunct Nickel Academy begins to expose the school's hidden history of atrocities, including many secretly buried bodies on the premises, many men who were incarcerated at Nickel Academy as boys are coming forward to share their experiences of abuse. Curtis is forced to confront the lasting effects of his experiences there.In 1960s Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis is a studious African-American high school student with an idealistic sense of justice inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights marches. He is selected to attend university classes due to his intelligence. However, on the first day of classes he hitchhikes with an African-American man; when they are pulled over and it is discovered that the vehicle was stolen, Elwood is convicted as a delinquent and sent to Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory in Eleanor, Florida. Boys at Nickel Academy receive poor education, are made to perform hard labor, and frequently receive brutal corporal punishment. The staff also overlook and cover up sexual abuse and trips "out back" for punishment, from which some boys never return. The students are segregated by race, with Black boys facing worse treatment. Elwood befriends fellow student Turner, who has a more cynical view of the world and Nickel's administration. Elwood attempts to serve his time without incident, but is seriously beaten on two occasions: once for intervening to help a boy being attacked by sexual assaulters, and once after writing a letter to government authorities detailing the academy's poor conditions, corruption, and abuse. After Turner overhears of a plan to have Elwood killed by the administration, the two attempt an escape. Elwood is shot dead while Turner escapes; it is revealed that Turner falsely adopted Elwood's name and attempted to live up to his ideals when he was free. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Are_You_Sleeping_(novel)"title="Are You Sleeping (novel)">
Estranged twins Josie and Lanie Buhrman lost both their parents when they were fifteen years old. Their father was murdered, and their mother ran away to join a cult. Thirteen years later the sisters each learn that an independent investigative journalist, Poppy Parnell, is regularly releasing podcasts in which she investigates whether Warren Cave, the man convicted of killing their father, was wrongfully convicted, as his conviction relied heavily on Lanie's eyewitness testimony. As Parnell's investigation gathers steam, the twins are forced to meet after their mother commits suicide."Bustle magazine" published a guide to the novel for fans of the TV series, detailing major adjustments the screenwriters made in their adaptation to a visual media. For instance the novel's protagonist is Josie Burhman, one of the twins, and Poppy Parnell, the podcaster, is merely a minor character. As Parnell's podcasts dig up new evidence, Josie's doubts about Cave's convictions grow.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powersat_(novel)"title="Powersat (novel)">
CEO Dan Randolph of Astro Corp. has a dream of providing a desperate world with tons of clean energy; provided by solar satellites located in geosync orbit around the Earth, and wirelessly transferred. However, stubborn politicians and oil companies make the way hard; but Dan has built a space plane that will drastically reduce transportation costs, making way for cheaper and easier constructed Powersats. But when the space plane blows up upon re-entering the atmosphere, Randolph is convinced that it may not be an accident; as a shadowy terrorist group threatens to bankrupt him, and even kill him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quichotte_(novel)"title="Quichotte (novel)">
The protagonist, Sam DuChamp, is an Indian-born writer living in America and author of a number of unsuccessful spy thrillers. Hoping to write a book "radically unlike any other he had ever attempted", he creates the character of Ismail Smile. Smile, who was born in Bombay, is a travelling pharmaceutical salesman who has suffered a stroke in old age. He begins obsessively watching reality television and becomes infatuated with Salma R, a former Bollywood star who hosts a daytime talk show in New York City. Despite having never met her, he sends her love letters under the pen name "Quichotte". He begins a quest for her across America, driving in his Chevrolet Cruze with his imaginary son Sancho. The two experience contemporary issues of the United States, including racism, the opioid epidemic, familial love, and the impact of popular culture. The lives of the character Quichotte and the writer DuChamp intertwine as the story progresses.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enemy_of_My_Enemy_(novel)"title="The Enemy of My Enemy (novel)">
This novel centers around Capt. James Cronley, the central character of all the novels of the series. Cronley, who captured two notorious Nazi war criminals in Austria in "Death at Nuremberg", the previous novel in this series, is charged with recapturing them. They have escaped captivity at Nuremberg. Cronley and his associates find in this novel that there is more involved than recapturing the two men. In the last stages of World War II, as is the premise of this novel, Heinrich Himmler had stashed away much money and gold to establish a Fourth Reich. Cronley finds he is having a difficult time determining who amongst international players he can trust and he escapes an assassination plot that leaves him wondering whether 'the enemy of my enemy' can be trusted as his friend in his quest to find the two Nazis and the treasure Himmler had stashed away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Committed_Men"title="The Committed Men">
In a dystopian Britain, social organization has collapsed, and the survivors, riddled with skin cancers, eke out a precarious scavenging existence in the ruins of the Great Society. A few bizarre communities try to maintain their structure in a chromium wilderness linked by crumbling motorways. But their rituals are meaningless cliches mouthed against the devastation. Only the roaming bands of hippie-style situationists have grasped that the old order, with its logic, its pseudo-liberalism and its immutable laws of cause and effect, has now been superseded. Among the mutants are a group of reptilian humans - alien, cancer-free but persecuted by the 'smoothskins'. When one of them is born of a human mother in Tinhouse, a group of humans sets off to deliver it to its own kind - a search of the committed men for the tribes of mutants.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curfew_(novel)"title="The Curfew (novel)">
William Drysdale was a concert violinist before the City outlawed music and succumbed to chaos. He makes his living as an epitaphorist, writing epitaphs for the gravestones of the dead, as well as those expecting to die soon. His epitaphs are often fictional inventions to provide the deceased's loved ones with a sense of meaning. William has an eight-year-old daughter named Molly. Molly is mute, but extremely intelligent. William and Molly play a game of intricate riddles to keep their imaginations alive. The City has an unofficial curfew, encouraged by cryptic and ominous slogans by the government, where no one is safe out of their homes after 10 p.m. When an old friend claims he has information about William's wife who mysteriously vanished years ago, William is forced to go out after the curfew. Molly is watched by kindly elderly neighbors, the Gibbons. William meets with his friend, and discovers a secret gathering of artists and intellectuals who each night drink and talk about a secret revolution that happens naturally and requires no conscious effort. William is disturbed by the group, and, after receiving a file with documents about his wife's disappearance, he leaves. Travelling across the city late at night, William must hide in the shadows to avoid danger. Meanwhile, Molly puts on a puppet show with Mr. Gibbons. The show is the story of William and Molly's mother's love story from Molly's perspective with her inventing the details from before she was born. The show's story ultimately takes the form of William's struggle to return home. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_Contact"title="Enemy Contact">
A mysterious hacker known as CHIBI has been offering classified information to Iranian and Russian intelligence, which then cause a series of attacks on special operations units stationed in Argentina and Syria, respectively. Additionally, a German police officer working undercover in a drug case was killed in a mugging by Iron Syndicate operatives using information from the hacker. The demonstrated attacks then enable the three parties to participate in a secret silent auction to be held by CHIBI in London.Meanwhile, Lawrence Fung is a hacker working for the red team of the recently built IC Cloud, a cloud database storing classified information gathered by the U.S. intelligence community. His job is to exploit any vulnerabilities in the database and patch them. However, he is revealed to be working with CHIBI for ideological reasons, and has been helping him with gathering actionable intelligence for the recent attacks.U.S. senator Deborah Dixon withdraws her support for a foreign policy bill, which would have allowed the construction of a U.S. military base in Poland to counter Russian aggression. President Jack Ryan is convinced that the senator had changed her mind due to her connections with the Chinese, who stand to benefit due to the Belt and Road Initiative, an extensive trade route plan spanning Eurasia which has been bankrolling several interested Western businessmen including Dixon's husband, billionaire Aaron Gage. He discreetly orders an investigation into Dixon's finances.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_Step_Station"title="Ninth Step Station">
After China invades Japan, Tokyo is divided between American and Chinese control. A fragile balance of power develops. Emma Higashi, an American Peacekeeper, is assigned to work with Miyako Koreda of the Tokyo Police in an effort to warm international relations. Emma assists the Tokyo police department in investigating crimes. Though they are initially incompatible, Emma and Miyako develop a friendship.Throughout the first season, tensions arise between organized crime syndicates, the Chinese government, American peacekeeping forces, the Japanese government, and Japanese Resistance fighters opposed to foreign occupation. These groups fight for control of a divided Tokyo, leaving Emma and Miyako caught in the crossfire. As the fragile political system deteriorates, Emma and Miyako must work together to prevent international incidents. Eventually, high-ranking politicians are assassinated and China invades Tokyo's buffer zones in a bid for more power, sparking an outright war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetfall_(novel)"title="Planetfall (novel)">
"Planetfall" takes place an unspecific number of years into the future. Twenty years before the beginning of the novel, Renata Ghali (Ren) befriends Lee Suh-Mi (Suh) when both women intend to rent the same apartment in Paris. They become fast friends, and Ren falls in love with Suh. While they hike in the Alps, Suh eats a seed from an unidentified plant and falls into a coma. Suh is deeply changed upon awakening, and writes down the location of a planet from which she claims God is calling to her.Suh recruits 1,000 people for an expedition to the planet, including wealthy marketing executive Cillian Mackenzie (Mac), Suh's son Lee Hak-Kun, and Ren as the chief 3-D printer engineer. The expedition constructs a spaceship called Atlas and travels through space to the unnamed planet. A small group including Suh, Ren, Mac, and Hak-Kun land first and explore a large bio-mechanical alien structure they call "God's City". At the top of the structure, Suh disappears into a room, then returns minutes later in tears claiming that God has died. She removes her helmet and is immediately killed by the toxic air inside God's City.With Suh's status as "Pathfinder" vital to keeping the colony together, Mac decides to tell everyone that Suh remained in God's City to commune with God. The advance party returns to Atlas, where Hak-Kun disagrees with Mac and prepares to tell everyone about Suh's death. To protect the secret, Mac sabotages Hak-Kun's pod during the second planetfall, apparently killing him and his followers. With Ren sworn to secrecy, Mac establishes a colony at the foot of God's City, and institutes an annual ritual in which the colonists gather to await Suh's return.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17th_Suspect"title="17th Suspect">
San Francisco Police Sergeant Lindsay Boxer is the main character of this book. It has two plots. The main plot involves a number of unsolved murders of homeless people. The second involves a charge of rape by a male employee against his female supervisor in an advertising agency.In the main plot Lindsay and her partner, Rich Conklin, get involved in the homeless murders when a homeless woman comes to Lindsay to complain that the detectives who should be investigating the cases are doing basically nothing. The murders are occurring in a jurisdiction outside of Lindsay's area of responsibility. She makes waves and files a complaint against one of the detectives who is in charge of the investigations. Then a murder happens on Lindsay's turf. In the meantime the detective against whom Lindsay filed a complaint files one against Lindsay and both officers go before a review board. To make matters worse Lindsay begins feelings weak and fears an old illness that nearly killed her has come back.The second plot involves another member of the Women's Murder Club, Yuki Castellano, an attorney with the district prosecutor's office. She is prosecuting the rape case. She is finding this case full of twists and turns and she is going head to head against a very accomplished defense attorney. Yuki worries not only about winning such a case, but her husband seems to be going through some sort of problems and Yuki would like to know exactly what they are.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Injustice_(book)"title="Blind Injustice (book)">
The book is part-memoir in which Godsey describes his personal journey from being a "hard-nosed prosecutor" to the co-founder of the Ohio Innocence Project. Godsey began teaching law in 2001, and was assigned to serve as the faculty supervisor for the Kentucky Innocence Project. He did not believe that innocent people were in prison, and thought that students were naive to try to prove the innocence of those who had been convicted.The book's six main chapters each focus on one of the systematic flaws Godsey sees: "blind denial", "blind ambition", "blind bias", "blind memory", "blind intuition", and "blind tunnel vision". The two most frequent contributors to wrongful conviction are false eyewitness accounts and problems with forensic science. The book illustrates how these problems have led to wrongful convictions in cases taken up the by Ohio Innocence Project.Godsey writes that judges, prosecutors, and police contribute to wrongful convictions by taking "unreasonable and intellectually dishonest positions" and that they operate "under a bureaucratic fog of denial". He sees the system as routinely dehumanizing suspects in the eyes of prosecutors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forty_Rules_of_Love"title="The Forty Rules of Love">
"A novel within a novel, "The Forty Rules of Love" tells two parallel stories that mirror each other across two very different cultures and seven intervening centuries." It starts when a housewife, Ella, gets a book called "Sweet Blasphemy" for an appraisal. This book is about a thirteenth century poet, Rumi, and his spiritual teacher, Shams. The book presents Shams's "Forty Love Rules" at different intervals. "Sweet Blasphemy" was structured in a way to focus on the five elements of nature: Water, Air, Earth, Fire and Void. The chapters in each section revealed a story in line with the nature of each element. The story presented in the novel is based on "love and spirituality that explains what it means to follow your heart".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solo_Leveling"title="Solo Leveling">
In a world where hunters — humans who possess magical abilities — must battle deadly monsters to protect the human race from certain annihilation, a notoriously weak hunter named Sung Jinwoo finds himself in a seemingly endless struggle for survival. One day, after narrowly surviving an overwhelmingly powerful double dungeon (dungeons are places where specific monsters reside, they can be entered through portals and vary in strength thus given rankings the same as hunters)that nearly wipes out his entire party, a mysterious program called the System chooses him as its sole player and in turn, gives him the extremely rare ability to level up in strength, possibly beyond any known limits. Jinwoo then sets out on a journey as he fights against all kinds of enemies, both man and monster, to discover the secrets of the dungeons and the true source of his powers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Fox_(novel)"title="Mr. Fox (novel)">
Mr. Fox is a beloved writer with a bad habit. He can't stop killing the heroines in his novels in most diabolical fashions. Mary wants to help, as much for Mr. Fox's sake as for the sake of the women in his stories. The complication is that Mary isn't exactly real; she's Mr. Fox's muse and a creation of his mind. But this doesn't stop Mary from challenging Mr. Fox to a game of stories where he becomes both author and subject. Meanwhile, Mr. Fox's wife Daphne is being neglected, and as her husband spends even more time in his study than usual she begins to suspect something is wrong, and that he may possibly even be having an affair. Ultimately, Daphne forces her own way into Mr. Fox and Mary's game.Mr. Fox is forced to choose between a world of pure imagination with a not-quite-real muse who he loves nonetheless, and his very real wife who he is always forgetting just how much he loves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_There_Still_Sex_in_the_City?"title="Is There Still Sex in the City?">
This book focuses on a new set of characters: Sassy, Kitty, Queenie, Tilda Tia and Marilyn. The book follows the women as they experience mid-life dating and relationships in the 21st century, occurring between a fictional place called "The Village" (based on the real life Hamptons) and Manhattan. This includes adoration from a younger man, experimenting with the dating scene on Tinder, and other explorations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Schopenhauer_Cure"title="The Schopenhauer Cure">
Dr. Julius Hertzfeld gets diagnosed with cancer, being given around a year left to live in. In a state of shock, he starts to think about patients he failed and one that comes to his mind is Philip Slate, a man with a sexual addiction. Julius calls Philip for an interview and realizes that Philip turned his life around, attributing his success to Arthur Schopenhauer after whom he has modeled his life. The doctor also finds out that Philip is on his way to becoming a psychotherapist. However, Julius thinks Philip isn't suited to become a psychotherapist, due to him noticing that Philip doesn't know how to empathize. Therefore, both men strike a deal: Philip has to come to Julius' therapy group for six months and if he stays, Julius will become his supervisor for his remaining hours.Philip comes to Julius' therapy group, meeting Rebecca, Bonnie, Tony, Gill and Stuart, except Pam who's on a retreat in India. All of them get interested in the newcomer and are fascinated because he tends to quote philosophy, especially Schopenhauer. Philip's presence starts to change the other members of the group, but everything changes when Pam returns. It turns out Pam and Philip where involved in the past, but their liaison ended badly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Memory_Police"title="The Memory Police">
The story follows a novelist on an island under the control of the Memory Police. An unknown force causes the people of the island to collectively 'forget' and lose their attachment to objects or concepts, e.g. hats, perfume, birds and ribbon. As the inhabitants move on from the disappearances, the Memory Police enforce the removal of the disappeared objects from the island. The people who continue to remember, such as the author's mother, attempt to escape from the island or hide in safe houses to evade capture by the Police.R, the author's editor, reveals himself to be one of those who still remembers the disappeared objects, and fears that he will be taken by the Memory Police. With the help of an old man, a family friend, the protagonist arranges and hides R in a secret room in her home. While hiding, R then tries to help them recall some of the long disappeared objects to the author and the old man, though to no avail.As the calendars disappear, the winter continues and spring never comes. Food is becoming scarce on the island. The Memory Police raid the author's house as they celebrate the old man's birthday, but fail to discover the secret room, leaving them free. Subsequently, novels disappear as well, and the protagonist works as a typist. On R's insistence, she continues to work on her novel and keeps some books. After an earthquake, some of her mother's sculptures, given back by a family friend, break and reveal more objects that had disappeared, including a ferry ticket and a harmonica. She decides to investigate her mother's cabin, which R believes contains more objects that have long disappeared. The author, along with the old man, manage to retrieve the objects and hide them in her home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rest_of_the_Story_(novel)"title="The Rest of the Story (novel)">
At 17-years-old Emma Saylor Payne is stuck with nowhere to go after her summer plans fall through and her father, stepmother, and grandmother are all leaving the country. It was decided that she would spend the summer up at North Lake; her mother's childhood home, with her cousins, aunts, and maternal grandmother. Emma Saylor doesn't remember much about her mother, who died when she was ten, but she does remember some of the stories that her mother would tell her about a big lake, and upon arriving at the lake she realizes that her mother's stories don't paint the full picture. There are two communities at the lake; her mother grew up in working-class North Lake, while her father spent the summers in a wealthier Lake North resort.The more time that Emma Saylor spends at North Lake the more time it feels like she is divided into two people; Emma, who her father has raised and grown to know, and Saylor, the name her mother called her and maternal family has adopted. However, with the help of Roo Price, the boy who was her best friend at four during her first time at the lake she learns more about her past and reconciles her two images of herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Metal"title="Red Metal">
Three years ago, the Russian Ground Forces are forced to relinquish control of a rare-earth mine in Mrima Hill near Mombasa, Kenya. Bitter about the retreat, Spetsnaz officer Yuri Borbikov formulates Operation Red Metal, an extensive military strike across Europe as a large diversion to retake the mine.In the present day, Chinese Sea Dragon naval commandos infiltrate Taiwan and assassinate the presidential candidate of the pro-Beijing Taiwan Democratic Communist Party. The Chinese Communist Party publicly frames the ruling Kuomintang party for the assassination and threatens military intervention over the elections. In Arlington, Virginia, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Connolly, an Afghanistan infantry veteran, works in the Joint Staff office of the Pentagon with Army Major Bob Griggs. The two are tasked to investigate an intelligence leak of an extra-marital affair between two high-ranking officers of the Indo-Pacific Command that causes both of them to be relieved and disrupts the chain of command. Connolly and Griggs consult NSA analyst Nik Melanopolis who deduces that the leak was engineered by Russian GRU hackers. The Joint Chiefs, however, are predisposed to a war in the Pacific and deploy Carrier Strike Group 5 to Taiwan.In Moscow, Russia, President Anatoly Rivkin authorizes Operation Red Metal without the approval of the Ministry of Defence in response to crippling economic sanctions. He assigns Colonel General Eduard Sabaneyev to lead a lightning raid via militarized trains into Europe to destroy the US African and European Commands in Stuttgart, Germany, under the guise of military exercises with Belarus. Meanwhile, Colonel General Boris Lazar is tasked to lead an invasion force to seize Mrima Hill by travelling overland through Iran, also under the guise of military exercise, and covertly sail to Djibouti where they will be free to advance into Kenya before the US can mount a response. General Sabaneyev and Colonel Borbikov are confident that the operation will succeed, but General Lazar is disturbed by Borbikov's contingency plan to destroy the rare-earth mine with nuclear-tipped artillery shells if they fail to capture it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Lightning"title="Trail of Lightning">
In the 21st century, a worldwide flood caused by multiple earthquakes along the New Madrid fault line destroys most of the United States as magic returns to the world. Dinétah becomes an independent nation. Certain Navajo people develop clan powers based on their ancestral tribes.On Maggie Hoskie's sixteenth birthday, her grandmother is murdered by witches and monsters. This traumatic event activates her clan powers, giving Maggie superhuman speed and a propensity for killing. She attracts the attention of the immortal monster-slayer Neizghání and becomes his apprentice. Neizghání trains her in the art of combat, but abandons her when he perceives that she is becoming too violent. Maggie becomes a bounty hunter and monster-slayer. She seeks information about a new breed of monster from Tah, a local medicine man. Tah tells her that the monster was created by a powerful witch. He asks her to work with his grandson Kai Arviso, who also possesses clan powers, to destroy the witch.Maggie and Kai retrieve information about a relic known as a "fire drill", which may be related to the monsters. She is visited by Mąʼii, the Coyote; Mąʼii tells her that the drill belongs to Mósí, a cat goddess. He also requests that she complete a task for him, giving her magical rings. Tah's hogan burns down; Maggie suspects Neizghání. In the carnage, Maggie and Kai kill a corrupt police officer. They seek shelter with Grace Goodacre, a local bar owner. Maggie, Kai, and Grace's children begin working together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illicit_Happiness_of_Other_People"title="The Illicit Happiness of Other People">
Set in the Madras of the 1990s. Ousep Chacko is a journalist and a wannabe novelist who routinely wakes the neighbors after drinking sprees and then threatens to hang himself from his lungi. His wife, Mariamma, talks to walls; Thoma, their son, has fallen for an older girl. The family, though disintegrating, is united in its grief, for three years ago Thoma's 17-year-old brother, Unni, fell from the balcony. A desperate Ousep sets out to solve the mystery of his son's supposed suicide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGlue"title="McGlue">
In 1851, McGlue, an American sailor, wakes up to find himself chained down in the hold of the boat he works on. He is too drunk to remember what happened, but everyone is saying he murdered his shipmate, Johnson. This doesn't make sense to McGlue, who considered Johnson his friend, and has no memory of killing him. However, McGlue's history of alcohol abuse, violence, and a traumatic head injury leave him uncertain about what happened. As the ship completes its route back to Salem, Massachusetts, McGlue's inebriation is replaced by agonizing withdrawals. Awaiting trial in Salem, McGlue recalls the history of his friendship with Johnson and gradually recalls the events of the night he supposedly murdered him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_the_Fox"title="Confessions of the Fox">
The novel is structured as a story within a story. A 21st-century academic, Dr Voth, discovers a manuscript that claims to be the confessions of Jack Sheppard. The manuscript reveals that Sheppard (like Voth) is a transgender man, and describes his experience of transitioning gender. It also reveals that Bess is of South Asian (Lascar) descent and that she grew up in the Fens. The manuscript documents Sheppard's love affair with Bess, their criminal escapades, their memories of childhood, and their run-ins with authority. Voth's annotations to the manuscript begin as scholarly comments on its likely authenticity but soon become more personal, comically documenting his recent break-up and his difficulties at work. The novel offers satirical commentary on historical and contemporary political issues, including over-policing and surveillance, racism, the dredging of the Fens, and managerialism in 21st-century universities.In fictionalizing Sheppard's story, the novel continues a tradition established by Daniel Defoe, John Gay ("The Beggar's Opera"), Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill ("The Threepenny Opera").
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaving_Time"title="Leaving Time">
After ten years of her mother going missing, Jenna sets out to find her mother with a retired detective and psychic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakurajima_(novella)"title="Sakurajima (novella)">
During the last weeks of the Pacific War, naval NCO and crypto specialist Murakami, stationed in Bonotsu, receives a marching order to Sakurajima. On his way, in a village near Makurazaki, he spends the night with a young disfigured prostitute who has only one ear. Convinced that Murakami will die in combat, she asks him what he thinks how he will die, a question that stays with him.Murakami arrives in Sakurajima, a military post awaiting the imminent invasion of American troops and the launch base of kamikaze flights. Personally in doubt that Japan can still win the war, Murakami is confronted with disillusioned soldiers, roistering young kamikaze pilots, and rigid commanding officer Kira, who forbids any defeatist thoughts. He has repeated conversations with an elderly guard, who tells him of a near-by farm where a disabled old man is being picked on by his relatives. During a carousing night, Murakami hears of the bombing of Hiroshima and Russia's invasion of the Japanese mainland. He gets into an argument with the drunken Kira, who ridicules Murakami's wish for a "beautiful death".The next day, a low-flying aircraft attacks the island, misses Murakami but kills the elderly guard. After this incident, no further enemy planes are spotted. Murakami joins a group of men who have been ordered to burn those codebooks which are no longer needed. Upon his return to the shelter, he learns that the Emperor has declared Japan's defeat. Kira draws his sword as if to commit suicide, but eventually retracts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_on_a_Tuesday"title="Born on a Tuesday">
Born on a Tuesday centers on Dantala, a young boy from the family of Sheikh's who struggles to cope up with the religious and political lines in North West Nigeria.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be(com)ing_Nigerian"title="Be(com)ing Nigerian">
Elnathan John addresses topics including election, politics in Nigeria, the Nigerian police, healthcare, and "the hustle."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Do_Not_Come_To_You_By_Chance"title="I Do Not Come To You By Chance">
"I Do Not Come To You By Chance" centers mainly on Kinglsey Ibe, the protagonist of the novel who after graduating from the university found out it isn't an easy feat getting a paying job in Nigeria. He visits Cash Daddy, his uncle, to learn email scamming.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Koli"title="The Book of Koli">
The book begins with Koli recounting his dangerous childhood in Mythen Rood. A rite-of-passage of the village is to test the village adolescents to determine if they are able to wield old technological weapons left behind by a past civilization. Those who pass this test are adopted into the village ruling group, the Ramparts.Koli fails the Rampart's test, but later learns from a wandering healer, Ursula, that the test is rigged in favour of a particular family who is using the guise of technology to maintain hereditary power. Outraged, Koli breaks into the Rampart barracks and steals a piece of technology – which turns out to be a Sony DreamSleeve, a fictional audio player controlled by a Japanese AI named Monono Aware (a play-on-words of "mono no aware"). At a village wedding, Koli reveals his ability to use the DreamSleeve technology. The Ramparts banish Koli from the village for the theft. As a result of his banishment, Koli is renamed "Koli Faceless", the surname given to shunned people. Koli is left to fend for himself in the dangerous woods surrounding the village. One of the Ramparts secretly follows and confronts Koli, though Koli is able to defend himself – resulting in the death of the Rampart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Explorer_(novel)"title="The Explorer (novel)">
"The Explorer", tells the story of Nicolas Hale, a transplanted Vermonter who was inspired by Hiram Bingham's amazing discovery of Machu Picchu in Peru.Nicolas had avoided marriage until his desire for a son to carry on his profession and inherit his name compelled him to propose to Margaret Porterfield, an aristocratic young Virginian whom he envisions as the type of woman he would like to be the mother of his son. He has been her ideal suitor for a long time, and she quickly agrees to a fast marriage just five days before he departs on a new exploring venture in Peru.He doesn't hide from her that she'll never be able to share his life there, and that exploring is his only great passion, and that she would have to endure long periods of separation from him.Nicolas only visits on occasion over the next five years, spending the majority of his time in the Andes in quest of the hidden city whose discovery, if his aspirations are realized, will offer him fame and prosperity, but his absence leads to a separation from his wife and a marriage that ends with disastrous consequences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Played_God_(novel)"title="The Man Who Played God (novel)">
The novel chronicles the narrative of the Jews who were apprehended in Hungary during World War II. During the final two years of the war, Andor Horvath, was able to save many lives by courageously negotiating with the Nazis, preventing thousands of deaths.Horvath led a charmed life and was able to successfully negotiate with Nazis who were greedy for goods and money. In Israel, ten years after the war, his fortunes would change as he is suddenly accused of being a Nazi collaborator who had allowed hundreds of thousands of Jews to die in Hungary.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_(novel)"title="Camp (novel)">
"Camp" follows Randall Kapplehoff, a gay teen who goes to Camp Outland, a queer summer camp, every year. Randall is interested in musical theatre but rebrands himself as Del and makes himself more masculine to impress his crush, Hudson, a "masculine 'straight-acting' muscled deity."Throughout the book, readers receive lessons about the LGBT community and its history, including definitions of genders and sexualities readers may be unfamiliar with, what happened before Stonewall, the Mattachine Society, and more. Further, the book tackles both societal and internalized homophobia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_Jane"title="Vega Jane">
## "The Finisher".The first novel in the series follows Vega Jane, a fourteen-year-old girl, as she uncovers secrets about the fictional village of Wormwood. The village is surrounded by the 'Quag' a dark forest filled with dangerous beasts and 'outliers', the Quag is described in the book as "an impenetrable barrier that circled Wormwood like a noose." Vega lives in a boarding house called 'The Loons' with her intelligent younger brother called John Jane. Vega works as a 'Finisher', a person whose job it is to add the final touches to handicrafts before they are purchased. One morning Vega witnesses Quentin Herms, her colleague and mentor, being chased into the Quag by the village Council and their attack canines. She later finds a note written by Quentin stating that he had left her something, she later finds this object hidden in her treehouse, it is a map of the Quag with detailed descriptions of the creatures it contains. Vega's younger brother John is then taken by Morigonne, the 'keeper of Wormwood', he is chosen for his exceptional intelligence to help the Council in constructing a wall to keep out dangers from the Quag. Vega then inherits 'Destin', a chain that allows her to fly when worn. She also finds an Adder stone with magical properties that can heal cuts and bruises when you think good thoughts. She also acquires an 'Elemental', a shield of sorts that can grow and shrink. The Council discovers Vega is in possession of a map of the Quag, they imprison her and put her on trial, threatening her with execution before offering her a chance at freedom in return for fighting in the 'Duelum', a twice a year event where all people over 24 years old must fight until there is only one winner. Vega accepts and goes on to be declared the "champion of the Duelum". However, after winning the Duelum, Vega decides to escape Wormwood with her dog 'Harry Two' and her friend Delph. With Morrigone and the council after her, they use the magical chain Destin to fly over the wall surrounding Wormwood, into the Quag. They are then chased by monsters to the edge of a cliff where they are forced to jump.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eze_Goes_to_School"title="Eze Goes to School">
Eze Goes To School centers mainly on Eze Adi, the protagonist of the novel who struggles to get formal education due to his poor family background. Eze finally makes a name for himself due to his intelligence. The novel exhibits the struggles of getting formal education in Nigeria in the 90's. These include truancy, cultism and poverty. Nzekwu and Crowder explains this albeit making it understandable for children.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-Boy!"title="Go-Boy!">
The book is a gritty and often brutal account of prison life. It begins on the morning of October 17, 1954, when Caron at age 16, leaves home for the first time, scared and shackled on a reformatory bus called the Black Maria, on his way to the Guelph Reformatory.Caron writes of himself: "Everything that could happen to a person in prison–everything that could be done to someone–has been done to me."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness,_Like_Water"title="Happiness, Like Water">
The anthology has a total collection of seven stories; each having a different but unique message to deliver. These messages include the life of Nigerians towards the "Yahoo Boys", the life of homosexuals in Nigeria and the image of Nigeria in the diaspora.List of Stories
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spider_King's_Daughter"title="The Spider King's Daughter">
The novel focuses on Abike Johnson and Runner G. Runner G, a college dropout, who hawks ice-creams on the streets of Lagos. Abike Johnson, who could be seen to be a spoiled child meets together. Their friendship grows as Abike learns to adjust to Runner G.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welcome_to_Lagos_(novel)"title="Welcome to Lagos (novel)">
The novel follows Chike Ameobi; a Nigerian soldier who opted to retire rather than killing innocent civilians; Yemi; a private and junior to Chike Ameobi who admires Ameobi's uprightness and also decides to quit with him. On their way, they met Oma; who called her marriage quit due to abuse; Isoken; a sixteen-year-old girl who managed to escape from the hands of the rebel fighters; FineBoy; an ex-militant, who ran away from militancy to chase his dream as a radio presenter. The novel describes the daily struggle of the common man in Lagos; the mischievousness and flamboyance of corrupt politicians and the need to survive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_an_Angel"title="Waiting for an Angel">
The novel is set during the military rule of General Sani Abacha. It focuses mainly on Lomba; a journalist and editor at "The Dial" who is imprisoned for fabricating "lies" against the government.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_Stories"title="Prison Stories">
The novel is a collection of short stories about the brutal life faced by prisoners in prison; mostly by those are innocent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_above_Water"title="Head above Water">
"Head above Water" is an autobiography by Buchi Emecheta. It discusses of her days in Nigeria, down to her life in London at the time as a renowned author.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_Shavi"title="The Rape of Shavi">
The novel centers on the Shavians; an imaginary community in the Sahara desert where everyone is no greater than the other. Then the Westerners arrive: Andria, Ista, Flip, Mendoza and Ronje, who crash-land on Shavi while King Patayon the Slow is holding a conversation with his wife. The westerners, who the Shavians think to be messenger, at first blend into the culture and life of people although Ronje rapes a Shavi. The westerners join in the farming and trading of the Shavians, while they work on fueling and repairing their plane called "Newark". The Westerners finally return back to England with industrial diamond and crystals and also Asogba, the son of Patayon the Slow. Mendoza who has found a new line of business sends Asogba back to Shavi with guns and jeeps. Asogba on the other hands extorts his people and neighbouring villagers, in order to send diamond and crystal to Mendoza. The crystal market crashes and Asogba is left devastated and insolvent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenslime"title="Frankenslime">
A young slime scientist is surprised when her latest creation comes to life in Frankenslime, a funny and clever picture book twist on Frankenstein.Victoria Franken is a slime scientist.Her experiments lead to amazing slimes. Until, one dark and stormy night, her latest experiment goes awry and her newest creation COMES TO LIFE!
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Yoke"title="Double Yoke">
The story emphasises the life of students and lecturers in most Nigerian universities. The novel is set in the University of Calabar. Ete Kamba, a young boy who is expected to become a man of substance, gets a scholarship to study at the University of Calabar, where he meets Nko at a party for a girl who had graduated from her hairdressing apprenticeship program. On their way back to Nko's hostel, Ete forces himself on Nko. However, she does not resist. Ete refuses to marry Nko, stating that he cannot marry someone who is not a virgin. Eventually, Nko reveals her predicament to Professor Ikot, who takes advantage of the situation: Nko must sleep with Professor Ikot in order to pass her exam. Nko refuses and beats him. She realises that she is now pregnant with Ete's child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_of_a_Counterfeiter"title="Life of a Counterfeiter">
In early 1951, an art journalist receives an invitation for the 13th death anniversary of famous painter Keigaku Ōnuki. He remembers the assignment he received from Keigaku's relatives to write a biography on the artist 9 years ago, and decides to finally finish the project, which had come to a halt during the early post-war years. While studying Keigaku's diaries, he repeatedly reads of a friend by the name of Shinozaki, finally realising that Shinozaki is no other but Keigaku's former friend Hōsen Hara, who successfully copied Keigaku's art and sold it as originals.The journalist recollects memories going back to 1943, when he met private owners of Keigaku's paintings and was repeatedly confronted with Hara's technically adept copies, and to 1945 and 1947, when he stayed in the village in Chūgoku Mountains, where Hara lived during his last years. Abandoned by his wife, Hara illegally experimented with gunpowder to create a firework of the colour of red chrysanthemums. The journalist contemplates on the fate of a man who, overshadowed by a famous artist friend, never received recognition for his own talent and faded into obscurity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_African_Night's_Entertainment"title="An African Night's Entertainment">
The novel is set in Northern Nigeria and is narrated by old story teller. it tells the story of Abu Bakir and his quest for vengeance after Mallam Shehu, a wealthy merchant who is in need of a child marries Zainobe, the girl bethroned to him and the love of his life.Despite Abu losing an eye and ear and roaming different towns in order to make Kyauta the child of Mallam Shehu and Zainobe worthless, he achieves his goal to make Kyauta a thug and kill his father. Later, Abu is killed by Kyauta who is now free of the spell cast on him earlier in the story by Abu.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_homme_d'affaires"title="Un homme d'affaires">
During a party held at the home of the courtesan, Malaga, the lawyer Desroches tells the other guests a story about aristocrat, Maxime de Trailles.De Trailles has borrowed a lot of money and refuses to pay his debts. Two Parisian businessmen Cerizet and Claparon buy up de Trailles' notes from his debtors, and set out to collect the money owing. Cerizet attempts to recover the debt by visiting and confronting de Trailles demanding payment. De Trailles refuses.Meanwhile de Trailles has bought a reading room for his lover Mademoiselle Antonia Chocardelle to manage. At the suggestion of Croizeau, one the regular guests in the reading room, Antonia tells de Trailles about some valuable furniture that she wants to buy worth 4000 francs. She also says that she is bored of running the reading room. So they sell the reading room to a buyer who Croizeau has arranged for them, and bring the cash with them to buy the furniture. When they get to the place to buy the furniture, the owner turns out to be Cerizet in disguise. So Cerizet is able to obtain the full payment of the debts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akata_Warrior"title="Akata Warrior">
Set a year after the events of the first book, it follows Sunny Nwazue, an American-born Nigerian albino girl living in Aba who becomes a member of the secret Leopard society.Sunny Nwazue has recurring vision of a burning city and while picking up tainted pepper, she is given a comb by Mami Wata.She disobeys the Leopard rules, and with assistance of Chichi, uses a juju to scare the members of the cult that haunts Chukwu in the university and is sent to the Obi Library basement to face a djinn whom she defeats and reunites with her friends and parents. Then, her father threatens to disown her.Her spirit face Anyanwu is separated from her after an attack from Ekwensu, who emerges again. Sunny and her friends Orlu, Chichi, and Sasha visit Bola, where she tells Sunny to go to Lagos to meet Udide, who will weave a flying grasscutter to take them to Osisi.Through the help of Chukwu, they head to Lagos under the disguise of a road trip and meet Udide who weaves a flying grasscutter in exchange for Sunny's story.After a series of events, Chukwu sees the grasscutter and they escape before the council car comes to pick them. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Virtue_and_Vengeance"title="Children of Virtue and Vengeance">
After burying her father, Zélie, Tzain, Amari must face Queen Nehanda, who takes over Lagos. They must stop the Queen and her army, who have uncontrollable magic abilities, while defending Amari's claim to the throne in order to bring long lasting peace to the land of Orisha.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Drift"title="The Old Drift">
The novel is a saga that follows three families: one Zambian, one Italian, and one Indian. These families are intertwined by the actions of the novel's first narrator, Percy M. Clark, who is based on a real man from Cambridge, England, who moved to Zambia (then Rhodesia) in the early 20th century as one of Europe's many colonists across the African continent. In the novel's first chapter, Percy details some of his encounters as an early settler in The Old Drift, a settlement near Victoria Falls. He details the settlement's changing name, its growing population, and his racist views of the native Zambians. On one such occasion, Percy's actions at a bar one night cause a young girl to strike a young Zambian boy so hard that "he became an imbecile, forever smiling at the daisies," as Percy says. This Zambian boy reappears when Percy accidentally shoots him one day, and later learns that his name is N'gulubu. This series of events is the cause behind the intertwining of the families, which is slowly revealed through the rest of the novel as Serpell details the lives of the family members on the family tree: the Grandmothers (Sibilla, Agnes, and Matha), the Mothers (Sylvia, Isabella, and Thandiwe), and their Children (Joseph, Jacob, and Naila).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binti_Trilogy"title="Binti Trilogy">
## "Binti (2015)".In "Binti", Binti is the first member of the Himba ethnic group on Earth (closely modeled on the Himba people) to be accepted into the prestigious intergalactic university Oomza Uni. Upon being notified of her acceptance, Binti runs away from home and boards a transport ship to Oomza Uni. While in transit, the ship is hijacked by the Meduse, a jellyfish-like alien species that was previously at war with the Khoush, another human ethnic group. After the Meduse murder all other inhabitants of the ship, Binti retreats into her private living quarters. She subsequently discovers that a piece of ancient technology she had brought with her from Earth, referred to as her "edan", enables direct communication with the Meduse, and that her "otjize", a type of mixed clay made from the soil of her homeland, has healing properties when applied to the tentacles of the Meduse. She makes a friend in one of the younger, more hot-headed Meduse, named Okwu, and subsequently brokers a tentative truce between herself and the hijacker; the truce entails Binti's profound physical transformation. Upon arrival at the University, she is able to negotiate a short lasting peace between the Meduse and the human race, after which she begins her studies at Oomza Uni in earnest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Survival_of_Molly_Southbourne"title="The Survival of Molly Southbourne">
In the wake of the events of "The Murders of Molly Southbourne", a new Molly Southbourne — one who lacks the original's power of self-replication — tries to survive the people who want her dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Ditch_(novel)"title="In the Ditch (novel)">
The story is about Adah, a Nigerian who married a Londoner. Her husband decides to go back to Nigeria but the wife refuses. The man then leaves for Nigeria; abandoning his wife and five children in London. The wife now has to depend on state welfare and double jobs in order to survive with her children.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Red_Line_Goes_Straight_to_Your_Heart"title="This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart">
"This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart", is a memoir split into two halves. The first half of the book is the story of a Punjabi couple who immigrated to Canada during Partition, raising their children in mining towns and living in crowded city apartments. The second half, tells the tale of the daughter braving racism and sexism while pursuing a career as a poet and an ecologist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Long_as_Grass_Grows"title="As Long as Grass Grows">
The book gives a history of Native Americans in the United States from European colonization to the modern day, with the topic of the environment in focus. The European invasion that began in 1492 led to the deaths of 99% of Native Americans from diseases brought to the land, wars and starvation, including through forced displacements like the Trail of Tears. Many American settlers believed in "manifest destiny"—that they had a moral duty to colonize across the Americas—and they enforced concepts of land ownership and usage that were at odds with Native American culture.Gilio-Whitaker contends that in the modern era, the American legal system prevents indigenous Americans from self-organization and governance in areas like environmental stewardship, economics and social justice. She criticizes the views of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir on Native Americans, and that the conservation movement which arose from their ideology saw the wilderness as a place that indigenous people needed to be excluded from; meanwhile, toxic waste was disposed of in locations where it would harm communities of color. By establishing national parks in places like Yosemite, the native stewards of the area were excluded from it.The book covers concepts of gender among Native American groups, some of whom had matrilineal power structures and different conceptions of gender identity and the role of family to settlers. Early feminists would be inspired by the Iroquois confederacy's Clan Mother roles. However, the imposition of Christianity erased many of these values.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Phoenix"title="The Book of Phoenix">
The novel opens with an Okeke man, Sunuteel, who finds an ancient cave of computers. His portable finds an open file and he starts listening to an audio file called "The Book of Phoenix," which is called a "memory extract." He becomes immersed in the story.Phoenix is an accelerated biological organism who was created by LifeGen Technologies and lives in Tower 7 in Manhattan with other SpeciMen. She is told that her lover, Saeed, has committed suicide. Phoenix and Mmuo, her friend and another SpeciMen who can walk through walls, attempted to escape and destroy the tower, after freeing Seven, a mysterious winged man who appears to be a powerful SpeciMen, locked in a dome, hanging like the Hanging Man in the Tarot. However, Phoenix is unable to escape and the Big Eyes catch her. She explodes into fire like a bomb, killing everyone near her and knocking Tower 7 down, freeing everyone inside who is still alive.It seems she dies, but she regenerates a few days later and is given an alien seed by the Backbone to return to Ghana. Phoenix is being chased by the Big Eyes and while on the run she develops wings and with the aid of Seven flies to Wulugu, Ghana where she secretly plants the seed. Seven flies with her and teaches her how to "slip," which is using time travel. She can use this ability to go back in time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tooth_Fairy_(novel)"title="The Tooth Fairy (novel)">
Five-year-old Sam loses a tooth and puts it under his pillow. That night he is visited by a sprite, which he assumes to be the tooth fairy. However, it is not the childhood myth; it is a mischievous foul-mouthed creature who taunts and teases Sam. The androgynous fairy, who changes its gender from time to time, becomes obsessed with Sam and is both hurtful to, and protective of him. Sam grows up with his friends, Clive and Terry in Coventry, England in the 1960s with the fairy visiting Sam frequently, often disrupting his life and those of his friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamloopa"title="Kamloopa">
Two urban Indigenous sisters, Mikaya and Kilawna, and their new friend Edith, a lawless trickster, reconnect with their ancestors, their culture, and each other on their way to Kamloopa, the largest pow wow on the West Coast, in Kamloops, British Columbia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_It_Means_When_a_Man_Falls_from_the_Sky"title="What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky">
The book centres "on female protagonists exposed to a cruel world that pushes them to take certain steps to fit in, or make them realize, they just might not fit in," offering "a humanizing portrait of both the Nigerian citizen and first generation young female immigrant", showcasing "their flaws, their desires, their victories, and their attempts at carving out a place in a country whose customs and values diverge from that of their heritage.The short stories also each work in harmonic nature to tell the stories of Nigerian women, life, and how they are raised. The short story in particular that incorporated gender norms of what a girl is expected to be compared to what she chooses to be is specifically explored in the story “Light” in which the father and mother cannot agree on what beautiful looks like for their daughter can connect to what society views as the beauty standard for today is and how it is evolving. While the mother in this short story wants her daughter to appeal to more European standards of beauty through perming her hair her father sees that this will in fact dim her light as a person so ultimately wants her to be herself and through this she shines on her own by not living up to the normal expectations put on her as a person from her mother and the society’s at large standard of beauty. The short story and title of the book “When a man falls from the Sky” explores the idea of pain/grief and how much a heavy burden it can feel like but also allows you to empathize with other people’s pain as well as to learn from it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Barnabus_Project"title="The Barnabus Project">
In "The Barnabus Project", Barnabus is a genetically-engineered half-mouse and half-elephant, the product of a failed laboratory experiment to create and sell the "perfect pet". Sustained in a bell jar and hidden deep below a Perfect Pet store with other failed pet creations, Barnabus dreams of freedom after being told of a wonderful world beyond the confines of the lab. After learning that they are all to be recycled, plans are set in motion to execute an escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Midnight_(Keun_novel)"title="After Midnight (Keun novel)">
Frankfurt am Main, 1936. Sanna Moder is in love with her cousin Franz, and she and her friends try and enjoy life and what freedom they have in a city and country that is falling deeper under Nazi rule.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King_of_Jam_Sandwiches"title="The King of Jam Sandwiches">
Robbie is a 13-year-old boy guarding the secret that he is living with a dad who is not mentally well. Sometimes his dad would wake him up in the middle of the night to talk about dying. He would at times leave without telling Robbie where he's going. Once he was gone for more than a week. Robbie was terrified of being left alone but could tell no one, fearing even more that he could be placed in foster care if anyone knew.This all changes when Robbie is asked to show Harmony, a new student, and a tough fast talking foster child, around school. On day one, she punches him in the face. After realizing they both have a lot in common, they become close friends. Robbie is however unsure whether he can trust her enough to share his secret.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikenga_(novel)"title="Ikenga (novel)">
Set in Kaleria, a fictional town in contemporary Nigeria, Nnamdi's father who was a chief of police known for capturing criminals was murdered by an unknown group which is rumored to be the Chief of Chiefs and 12 year old son Nnamdi vowed to avenge him.On the day his father's memorial celebration, his father spirit soon appears to him and give him a gift of an small figurine known as Ikenga which can transform Nnamdi into a huge black figure with superhuman strength and rage nicknamed The Man by Newspapers. With his newly found powers, he becomes a vigilante and takes out Kaleria's dangerous criminals including the Chiefs of Chiefs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingmen_(novel)"title="Wingmen (novel)">
The novel is set in the first half of the 1940s, during World War II. Unsatisfied with the squadron to which he belongs, Ensign Fred Trusteau, a United States Naval Aviator, offers to fill a vacant position in the Air Group Twenty's fighter squadron. He is then quickly transferred to VF-20 (the "Fighting Twenty"), which is led by Lieutenant commander Jack Hardigan, a man which Fred almost instantly considers more organized and well-mannered than his older commander. Right on his first day in the squadron, Fred breaks into a party held by his new fellow pilots and draws attention thanks to his trick of tying a knot in a cherry stem without using his hands, making him win the right to use the services of a female prostitute, to which he unwillingly agrees; after the event, he is given the nickname "Trusty" and is readily recognized among the group.After a bridge match, Fred and some of his new friends are invited by Jack to play with him in his private room. There, both Jack and Fred have a good time, while the latter finds out they need someone to write the squadron's War Diary and proposes to fill the role, eager to impress the skipper. Jack, on the other hand, is constantly pestered by the commander of their air group (CAG), Buster Jennings, and so full of work on the ground he barely has time to fly. On a goodwill gesture, he goes to a party held by Eleanor Hawkins — a former shipmate's widow — with some other pilots, including the Executive Officer of Fighting Twenty, Duane Higgins, Jack's longtime friend and former wingman. At the party, Eleanor shows clear interest in Jack, but he is hesitant to show affection, puzzling Duane. Some days after another friendly conversation with Jack, Fred has a wet dream and discovers he fell in love with the skipper. VF-20 then leaves on the aircraft carrier "Ironsides" to its first mission, a wartime training cruise. While searching for the ready room, Fred, the first pilot to land on the carrier deck, accidentally collides with Admiral Berkey in a passageway, and the two have a friendly conversation before he goes his way. At that night, he decides to spend some time alone on the deck edge elevator and finds Jack there, in the first of a number of occasional meetings of the two in the place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Secrets_de_la_princesse_de_Cadignan"title="Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan">
Diane de Maufrigneuse, also known as the Princesse de Cadignan is an aristocrat whose husband went into exile after the July Revolution in 1830 due to his loyalty to Charles X. She has had a number of love affairs which her husband has ignored. She was also loved by Michel Chrestien, who admired her from afar, usually attending the opera in order to see her. Chrestien, an ardent republican is killed in a republican uprising in 1832.She wishes to meet and ensnare the esteemed writer and conservative politician, Daniel d'Arthez. Her pretext for meeting him is that he was a friend of Chrestien. They had been very close friends in spite of their different political opinions. In order to arrange this meeting her friend Marquise d'Espard hosts a small dinner party and invites Diane, d'Arthez and some others. The Princesse and d'Arthez are seated next to each other, and speak about Chrestien. Afterwards, d'Arthez visits the Princesses' home every evening and falls in love with her. Diane hurriedly reads his books during the day in order to converse about them with d'Arthez in the evenings.One evening Diane tells d'Arthez how high society has wronged her particularly by gossiping about her. Daniel falls more deeply in love with her. Then at her request he attends a party at Marquise d'Espard's home without her. There he hears some of the guests gossiping about Diane, particularly the ways in which she has used her former lovers. Daniel rebukes the others and speaks in defence of Diane. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyborg_and_the_Sorcerers"title="The Cyborg and the Sorcerers">
"Slant" is the primary member of several constructed personalities in a reconstructed cyborg body, one of a number of Independent Reconnaissance Unit (IRU) agents created by the Earth military during an interstellar war with her former colonies. During the war, the Earth is bombed and his military command on Mars goes silent; radio chatter with other IRU ships makes it clear the war was lost. Fourteen years have passed on board his ship; as it is traveling near light speed for much of this time, around 300 years have passed in realtime. Although the war is long over, Slant's shipboard AI refuses to acknowledge this and continues to send him on missions. Slant is compelled to carry them out through the threat of a small explosive surgically implanted at the base of his skull. He now lives most of his life in the ship's acceleration couch, connected to the AI via a data connector on the back of his neck.The action begins when the ship enters a system last listed as having been the target of an attack but with no record of the outcome. They find the main planet bombed to oblivion, but a second smaller planet, Dest, is only partially destroyed and shows signs of a simple medieval-era society. The instruments also discover odd readings of variable gravity, which the ship immediately surmises are antigravity weapons research and sends Slant to discover the source. He travels to the city of Teyzha where he is briefly interrogated by a group of wizards. He learns that magic is an accepted reality, and soon discovers this is the cause of the gravitational oddities. He later infiltrates a library but all the books assume the reader understands the basics of the craft. Slant is captured and the ship comes to rescue him, destroying much of the city in the process.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Sound_Whatever"title="Perfect Sound Whatever">
In 2017, Acaster broke up with his girlfriend and terminated his relationship with his agent. He was also exhausted from recording several live stand up specials and an unrelenting touring schedule. This combination of events left him feeling depressed and lost. Acaster found solace in purchasing music albums from the year 2016, initially as an effort to reconnect with music, something he had previously got great joy from, and felt that he had lost. Eventually, this project saw him purchasing over 500 albums from various artists and genres, the only thing connecting them being the publication year of 2016. Eventually, Acaster becomes convinced that 2016 was 'the best year for music ever'.The book lists all the albums that Acaster purchased as part of his project, with a brief description of each one, accompanied by various stories from Acaster's earlier life, his experience playing in the band 'The Wow! Scenario' and the events that led up to the project.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Beautiful_Crime"title="A Beautiful Crime">
Nick Brink and his boyfriend Clay Guillory arrive in Venice, leaving behind their lives in New York City. They first met two months earlier at the memorial service of Freddy van der Haar, Clay's previous boyfriend who bequeathed to him a collection of silver antiques and his share of a Venetian nicknamed "". After Nick and Clay learned that the antiques were forgeries, they devised a plan to settle their debts by selling the pieces to Richard West, a wealthy American expatriate who finances cultural conservation projects in Venice. Four years ago, while Clay interned at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, he also worked as Richard's personal assistant. When he failed to gain a permanent post at the museum, Clay was devastated to learn Richard was responsible for his rejection and has since held a grudge against him.Nick intentionally runs into Richard and poses as an expert silver appraiser while concealing his relationship with Clay. He is invited to a dinner party at Richard's home, which shares a wall with . A few days later, Nick performs a spurious authentication and persuades Richard to purchase the silver for $750,000. Nick and Clay celebrate their successful transaction, but Nick begins to worry how long the money will last and devises a plan to sell to Richard, who has long wanted to merge it with his own residence. Clay is reluctant because the property partly belongs to Freddy's estranged sister Cecilia, but he eventually agrees to the scheme and flies to Paris to arrange forged documents identifying him as the sole owner.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beautiful_World,_Where_Are_You"title="Beautiful World, Where Are You">
The work tells the story of Alice Kelleher, an Irish novelist, and her best friend Eileen Lydon, an editor at a literary magazine. In alternating chapters are descriptions of their lives and emails they send each other. The two other important characters are Kelleher's new lover Felix Brady, who works at a warehouse, and Lydon's friend Simon Costigan, who works for a refugee agency. In "The Guardian", Anthony Cummins describes the novel's structure as a "love quadrangle" between Kelleher and Brady, on the one hand; and Lydon and Costigan, on the other."Beautiful World"s themes include romance, friendship, precarity, and social class. The title comes from a poem by Friedrich Schiller which Franz Schubert set to music in 1819. The novel includes substantial epistolary elements, such as emails between Kelleher and Lydon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacktop_Wasteland"title="Blacktop Wasteland">
Beauregard “Bug” Montage, the protagonist, is a black auto mechanic and auto shop owner in a small southern town in rural Virginia. He is also exceedingly talented behind the wheel of a car. Beauregard no longer engages in crime, supporting his wife and two sons on the straight and narrow. But his auto shop is falling deeper into debt. And "...one son needs braces. The other son needs glasses. His embittered mother faces eviction from the nursing home." He decides to do one last heist so he can get back into the black. Perhaps ironically, as Beauregard reenters the unsavory underbelly world of crime figures, "...he realizes that he feels more at home...than he ever did in the straight life." The reader is a witness as that one last heist goes awry and Beauregard gets caught up in the chaos that follows.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razorblade_Tears"title="Razorblade Tears">
Ike Randolph and Buddy Lee are ageing ex-cons living in rural Virginia. When their sons, a black and white couple with a baby daughter, are brutally murdered, the two men team up and embark on a quest for revenge. As they try and track down their sons' killers, they also confront their own prejudices toward their sons and each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Living_Dead_(novel)"title="The Living Dead (novel)">
The book is divided into three acts; "The Birth of Death", "The Life of Death", and "The Death of Death". The acts each cover a period of time from the first known zombie attack and forward to the next eleven years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_President's_Daughter_(novel)"title="The President's Daughter (novel)">
U.S. President and former Navy Seal Matthew Keating monitors an American military operation from the White House Situation Room. The operation enters Libyan territory without permission to raid the base of Muslim extremist terrorist Asim Al-Asheed. The operation kills several terrorists as well as Al-Asheed's civilian wives and children, but Al-Asheed escapes. Against the advice of his staff, Keating decides to publicly admit to the operation and apologize for its failure. Al-Asheed learns of this and swears revenge on Keating.Two years later, Keating has lost his re-election campaign and lives quietly in rural New Hampshire with his family. Al-Asheed has built up a new terrorist group and secured the aid of Jiang Lijun, an agent of China's Ministry of State Security. Lijun hates the U.S. because of his father's death in the 1999 U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Al-Asheed's team infiltrates Keating's town and kidnaps Keating's daughter, Melanie, while she is hiking. The U.S. government, whose new president still harbours dislike for Keating, refuses to let Keating join the search for Melanie because he is no longer a military or government employee. Lijun's boss, Li Baodong, orders him to obtain Melanie so that China can gain prestige by returning her to the U.S. However, Lijun privately decides to let Al-Asheed keep Melanie. Lijun meets with Al-Asheed and offers him further support. Al-Asheed escapes an attack by U.S. police and flees the country with Melanie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasse_à_l'homme"title="Chasse à l'homme">
"Chasse à l'homme" is a collection of anecdotes, thoughts and quotes in which Sophie Létourneau consults a fortune teller who predicts that she would find the love of her life thanks to a book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_for_Arbonne"title="A Song for Arbonne">
The story is set in Arbonne, a fictional country bordered by the countries of Arimonda, Gorhaut, Gotzland, Portezza and Valensa. Residents of these countries worship one of two deities, the war god Corannos or the mother goddess Rian. The main protagonist is a Coran soldier named Blaise from Gorhaut. Like other men of his country, he is a ruthless warrior devoted to Corannos. A mercenary for hire, he leaves the increasingly politically corrupt Gorhaut, in which a puppet king has been installed after resolution of a long war with Valensa. The leaders intend to conquer Arbonne to the south, a land ruled by women and observant of the god Rian, and abolish the worship of the female deity.The blind Priestess of Rian, religious leader in Arbonne, informs the country's political leaders of the impending arrival of Blaise, who is hired by the powerful duke and troubadour Bertran de Talair. The latter is engaged in a decades-long feud with another nobleman, Urte de Miraval.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Jones_(novel)"title="Grace Jones (novel)">
The short story centers on a young lady who impersonates Grace Jones after watching her on TV. She does this in order to secure a job.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hantises"title="Hantises">
"Hantises" is an intellectual and lyrical autobiography of an alter ego name Friday Burns. It raises concerns about perilous connections that exist between books and people's lives. It is intended as a tribute to literature and to love stories, whether written on paper or experienced in real life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reckoning_(Trump_book)"title="The Reckoning (Trump book)">
"The Reckoning" posits that the United States has suffered trauma from its inception because of its inclusion of systemic racism and its failure to address the existence of white supremacy, especially by Republicans in recent decades (exemplified by her uncle Donald Trump's election in 2016 and attempts to overturn the 2020 election). Trump also discusses the COVID-19 pandemic as a more recent source of trauma and criticizes President Trump's response and rhetoric as worsening the crisis. She also claims that her uncle is only pretending to run again in 2024 to raise money, having previously argued that he would be too afraid to lose again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevengur"title="Chevengur">
The novel takes place somewhere in the south of Russia and covers the period of war communism and the New Economic Policy, although real events and the area have been transformed in accordance with the logic of the myth. Alexander Dvanov, the main character of the novel, lost his father early, who drowned himself out of curiosity before the afterlife. His adoptive father Zakhar Pavlovich somewhat resembles the writer's father (at the same time, the image of Alexander is partly autobiographical). "At seventeen, Dvanov still had no armour under his heart - no faith in God, no other mental peace ...". Going “to look for communism among the amateur population”, Alexander meets Stepan Kopenkin - a wandering knight of the revolution, a kind of Don Quixote whose Dulcinea becomes Rosa Luxemburg. Kopenkin saves Dvanov from the anarchists of Mrachinsky's gang. The heroes of the novel find themselves in a kind of communist reserve - a town called Chevengur. Residents of the city are confident in the coming offensive of the communist Paradise. They refuse to work (with the exception of Subbotniks, meaningless from a rational point of view), leaving this prerogative exclusively to the Sun; they eat pasture, resolutely socialize their wives, and cruelly deal with bourgeois elements (destroying, Platonov emphasizes, both their body and soul). The revolutionary process in Chevengur is led by the fanatic Chepurny, Alexander's half-brother Prokofiy Dvanov "with the makings of a grand inquisitor", the romantic executioner Piyusya and others. In the end, the city is attacked by either the Cossacks or the Cadets; in a fierce battle, the defenders of the commune show themselves as true epic heroes and almost all die. The surviving Alexander Dvanov on Rocinante Kopenkina (nicknamed Proletarian Power) goes to the lake where his father drowned himself, enters the water and reunites with his father. Only Prokofy remains alive, "weeping on the ruins of the city among all the property he inherited"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac_Adélard"title="Lac Adélard">
"Lac Adélard" is the story of Rose-Marie, a nine-year-old girl who disappeared in the summer of 1989 under unusual circumstances while living with her mother and her mother's friend near a small lake in Charette. Thirty years later, teenagers Élie and Anna, find Rose-Marie's diary and take a trip to Lac Adélard in an attempt to unravel the mystery of her disappearance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogwarts_School_of_Prayer_and_Miracles"title="Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles">
"Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles" recasts Harry Potter as an American orphan raised by his atheistic, career-driven Aunt Petunia and meek Uncle Vernon Dursley. Harry is converted to Christianity when Hagrid, an Evangelical missionary, knocks on the Dursleys' door and proselytizes. He attends Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles where he learns how to use prayer as incantations from Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, and meets Dumbledore's wife Minerva and daughter Hermione. The story is interspersed with moral lessons and the author's interpretation of certain Biblical verses. The students at Hogwarts are divided into four "Hats" based loosely on real-world Christian denominations. In the final chapter, it is revealed that the entire story was a satire. Most of the main characters had been written as caricatures of overly religious people, and Lord Voldemort as a rational person who was baffled because he had assumed the others had been in on the joke the whole time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_Many_Beginnings"title="So Many Beginnings">
Shortly after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, sisters Joanne, Bethlehem, Amethyst, and Margaret, and their mother live with other freedmen on a Roanoke Island colony, amid the backdrop of the Civil War.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty's_Prisoners"title="Liberty's Prisoners">
Manion reviews historical material from Pennsylvania between 1792 and 1835, including court and prison records as well as other historical material, to examine changes in the penal system during this era and disparities based on race, gender, poverty, and sexuality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_Fish_(novel)"title="Butterfly Fish (novel)">
The novel focuses on Joy, a Nigerian London-based photographer who lives with her mother. As the novel progresses, Joy's mother dies leaving her with the family inheritance which includes her grandfather's journal and a bronze from Benin Kingdom, she is tasked grieving for her dead mother and finding her family secrets.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kojiki_Taishō"title="Kojiki Taishō">
Gotō Matabei is the most able and fierce samurai of the Kuroda clan. However, he gradually dislikes the ruthless personality of Kuroda Nagamasa and leaves the clan. Seven years later, he joins Toyotomi Hideyori's army.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Chestnut_Horses"title="Three Chestnut Horses">
In the mountains of Slovakia, Peter has been in love with Magdalena since childhood and asks her to marry him. However, her mother promises her to a cruel, rich farmer, Jano Zapotočný. Magdalena promises Peter that she will put off marrying Jano if Peter can prove himself capable of making a living. But, tragedy intervenes in their lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Good_Girl's_Guide_to_Murder"title="A Good Girl's Guide to Murder">
## "Kill Joy"."Kill Joy", a prequel novella, depicts a murder mystery dinner that Pip attended before the events of the first book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raybearer"title="Raybearer">
"Raybearer" follows a young girl, Tarisai, who is bound by a magical wish made by her mother, who is absent and distant in Tarisai's early life. Tarisai has the ability to see the stories of other people's lives with a single touch, while her story unfolds and is yet to be seen. A part of her life is revealed to her when she discovers that her mother, known as The Lady, is human, while her father is an "alagbato," a magical being, and she was only conceived to fulfill her mother's evil wish to kill the Crown Prince. This all becomes convoluted when The Lady sends her to the city of Oluwan, the capital of the Aritsar Empire, and is welcomed into a group of other children who will train and compete to become one of the Crown Prince's closest confidants. In this newfound community, Tarisai learns and uncovers the secret histories of their world. This group of children will be trained to compete for a spot in the Crown Prince's Council of 11. If Tarisai is picked, she will be joined with the other members of a council through the Ray, a bond deeper than blood. Tarisai does not want to be her mother's pawn, but she is compelled to obey her mother's wish. This novel is a test of Tarisai's strength to make her own path, or to succumb to that of her mother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Informal_History_of_the_Hugos"title="An Informal History of the Hugos">
Walton states in the introduction that her goal is to analyze whether the Hugo nominees were the best five books of the year, and to examine how well they have stood the test of time. Her focus is on novels, with occasional comments on other categories, including the Campbell nominees. The book contains a chapter for each year from 1953 to 2000.For each year, Walton discusses the Hugo shortlist in context with other titles that might have been nominated. She considers finalists from the following awards for science fiction and fantasy:After assessing the shortlist, she presents an essay about one book from each year. This is sometimes on the Hugo winner, but often about a different book Walton prefers. Since the "Tor.com" articles drew frequent discussion, sometimes garnering over 100 comments, the book contains a curated selection of the responses. It includes entries from Gardner Dozois, David G. Hartwell and Rich Horton that expand on the state of short fiction in each year.In the conclusion, Walton notes that the Hugos got it right in twenty-nine out of forty-two years, or 69% of the time, for novels, but 99% for novellas.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trio_(novel)"title="Trio (novel)">
The three characters are intertwined, the main narrative being the shooting in Brighton of a film produced by Kydd, starring Viklund and directed by Wing's husband. Viklund's ex-husband, a radical bomber then appears, having escaped from prison and demanding money from her. The FBI make contact with Viklund who then flees to Paris in the middle of the film. Kydd finds her and tries her to complete the film. Meanwhile, Wing unsuccessfully attempts to mimic Woolf's suicide and so retreats to a rehab staffed by nuns.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deeplight"title="Deeplight">
In the fictional island region of the Myriad, the inhabitants worshipped and revered enormous sea creatures known as 'gods' that fed of human fear from a source below the sea called the undersea. 30 years before the events of the book, the gods all turned on each other and tore each other apart in a disaster known as the cataclysm, the remnants of their bodies now used as high durability material called 'godware' for various purposes. Our protagonist, Hark, lives on the island Lady's crave with his best friend Jelt. In an accident involving a stolen bathysphere, Jelt seemingly drowns but comes back alive when a submerged ball of godware reanimates his body and heals his wounds. They realize they can use the ball to heal people as a way to pay their debts. However, prolonged exposure to the ball affects your body in strange ways, and Hark is worried about its effect on his friend, who never leaves its presence. Discovering that the ball is actually the heart of a god, Hark tries to warn him but Jelt is already too far gone, having been molded by the heart into something barely resembling his friend. In a clash between the two, Hark steals the heart but is captured by the Leaguers, a group who wish to bring back the age of the gods. They transport the heart to the undersea to awaken their own god-construct, but the Jelt-thing appears and merges with the heart and the god-construct, empowered buy the fear in the undersea. In a final altercation, Hark reconcile that Jelt drowned in the bathysphere accident, being only kept alive since by the power of the god-heart. Hark crushes the heart, killing the Jelt-thing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like_a_Love_Story"title="Like a Love Story">
"Like a Love Story" follows three main characters: Reza, Judy, and Art.At the beginning of the story, Reza, an Iranian boy, moves to New York City from Toronto with his mother to live with his stepfather and stepbrother. Living amidst the AIDS crisis, Reza fears coming out as homosexual.Reza quickly befriends Judy, an aspiring fashion designer, and her best friend, Art, the high school's only out and proud homosexual person. Despite Reza's immediate attraction toward Art, he begins dating Judy. Eventually, Art and Reza address their attraction, forcing Reza to come out to his family before they can become a couple.Beyond the burgeoning romance, "Like a Love Story" considers the AIDS epidemic in New York City as Judy's Uncle Steven dies from the disease, Art photographs people with AIDS, and the characters participate in ACT UP demonstrations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_of_Vidarbha"title="Widows of Vidarbha">
Based on interviews with 16 widows from the Yavatmal and Amravati districts of Vidarbha, the book explores the impact of farming crises in 2001-2004 and 2012-13 in 18 anecdotes from the viewpoint of women whose farmer husbands died by suicide, including how they managed to support their families.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transgender_Issue"title="The Transgender Issue">
An epigraph quotes Travis Alabanza on the word "trans" and its meanings outside of an abbreviation for "transgender".Faye argues that the British media, including newspapers and television news, are hostile to trans people. She frames the transgender liberation movement within a broader context of social and economic activism. The book covers a range of issues through the lens of how they affect transgender and non-binary people, including: bodily autonomy and sexual liberation; class discrimination; healthcare; sex work; job and housing insecurity; and police violence, prisons and treatment of asylum seekers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urmel_from_the_Ice_Age"title="Urmel from the Ice Age">
At the time of the dinosaurs, a mother Urmel lays an egg. A short time later, however, an Ice Age begins and the egg is covered in snow. It eventually freezes in the ice.A long time later, the natural history professor Habakuk Tibatong developed a method of teaching animals to speak. Because of the envy and attacks of his professor colleagues, he has to leave his home to settle with Tim Inkblot, a little orphan boy, and the talking domestic pig Wutz on the small island of Titiwu.There are other animals on the island that Tibatong taught to speak at the beginning of the story. Each of the animals is through a typical speech errors characterized: The Penguin Ping articulates the sibilant " sh" as "pf" the Waran Wawa lisp, the elephant seal soul-Fant constantly singing songs whose dismal effect through consistent diphthongization respectively affection of Vowels are significantly increased, and the shoebill Schusch reads the vowel "i" to "ä"[⁠ ɛ ⁠] one.Pig, who can speak almost flawlessly, takes on the job of housekeeper, while the other animals on the island regularly take part in voluntary language lessons in Professor Tibatong's school. One day an iceberg is washed ashore with a large egg, from which, after a short incubation period, an Urmel hatches, which is then raised by Wutz and also learns to speak. According to Tibatong's theory, the Urmel are the evolutionary link between the dinosaurs and the mammals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_Has_Come"title="Peace Has Come">
There are eight stories in the collection that take place in the Bodoland region of Assam, India, during a time of "ceasefire". The stories feature characters from a variety of communities, including Bodo, Nepali, Bengali, Koch-Rajbongshi, Rabha, Muslim and Santal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Judge's_List"title="The Judge's List">
Three years after the events of "The Whistler", Lacy Stolz is tired of her work as an investigator for the Florida Board on Judicial Conduct. But when Jeri Crosby nervously approaches her, Lacy discovers that a sitting judge is a murderer. She's reluctant to get involved, but Jeri is obsessed with bringing the man to justice. Jeri's father was one of the victims 20 years earlier, although his case has never been solved. She has studied the judge for two decades, and has discovered other victims in the process. While the serial killer's guilt is never really in doubt, finding evidence to convict him is a much bigger challenge, because he knows the law, and is always one step ahead of law enforcement. He has a list that includes the names of all his targets who have wronged him in some way, and Lacy must help Jeri establish his guilt without either of them becoming his next victim.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trinity_Six"title="The Trinity Six">
Sam Gaddis is a history professor at University College London. His friend Charlotte Berg tells him she is writing a book about the "Sixth Man", a sixth member of the Cambridge Five Russian spy ring. However, Charlotte dies of a heart attack the next day. Unbeknownst to Gaddis, she was murdered by a Russian agent using sodium fluoracetate.Gaddis decides to finish her book, in order to pay off his debts. His lover Holly Levette gives him her mother Katya's files, who was researching a book about the KGB.Gaddis contacts an elderly man called Thomas Neame, who knew the sixth man Edward Crane. He discovers that Crane was really a double agent who worked for the British, and Crane's death was faked by MI6 to protect him, on the instructions of John Brennan, who later became the head of MI6. Gaddis later discovers that Neame is Crane.The medical staff who helped fake Crane's death are murdered by the Russians. Sir John instructs a female agent Tanya Acocella to discourage Gaddis from pursuing the case. Gaddis travels to Vienna to meet Robert Wilkinson, Crane's former handler. Wilkinson reveals that Sergei Platov, the Russian president and former KGB agent, tried to defect to the West in 1988. Wilkinson is murdered by the Russians after Brennan informs them of his location. Tanya helps extract Gaddis from Vienna.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Promise_(Galgut_novel)"title="The Promise (Galgut novel)">
"The Promise" is a family saga spanning four decades, each of which features a death in the family. It concerns the Afrikaner Swart family and their farm located outside Pretoria. The family consists of Manie, his wife Rachel, and their children Anton, Astrid, and Amor. In 1986, Rachel dies after a long illness. Before passing, she expresses her dying wish to Manie that their black domestic servant, Salome, be given ownership of the house in which she resides on the family's property. This promise, overheard by a young Amor, is made by Manie, but he claims no memory of having made it at the wake, and shows no intention of fulfilling it.In 1995, the siblings reunite at the family farm after Manie suffers a fatal snakebite, with Anton having spent 10 years living a transient lifestyle after deserting the army in 1986, Astrid now married with twins, and Amor having lived in England for several years. The will does not make provision for Salome, and instead makes the three co-owners of the land. Anton moves back in to the farmhouse, and assures Amor he will follow through on the promise.In 2004, Anton is in a loveless marriage with his childhood sweetheart, Desirée, and heavily in debt, while Astrid is married to her second husband and Amor is working as a nurse in an HIV ward in Durban, where she lives with her long-term girlfriend. Despite Amor's appeals, the promise has not been honoured, and Astrid and Anton continue to resist her. Secretly, Astrid has been having an affair with her husband's business partner, and after being denied penance by her priest during confession, is murdered in a hijacking. Before her funeral, Amor makes a final appeal to Anton to fulfil their father's promise, but when she refuses to support his plan to sell some of the land on their farm, the matter is unresolved, and Amor returns to Durban, never to see Anton again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fortune_Men"title="The Fortune Men">
"The Fortune Men" is a non-fiction novel that semi-fictionalises the true story of Mahmood Hussein Mattan, a Somali former merchant seaman who was executed after being wrongfully convicted of the 6 March 1952 murder of Lily Volpert (renamed Violet Volacki in the book) in Cardiff's Tiger Bay. Mattan was posthumously acquitted in 1998 when it was revealed that evidence had been falsified and manipulated by the police. He was the last person to be hanged at HM Prison Cardiff. Mohamed's father, who was also born in Somaliland, met Mattan when the two emigrated to Kingston upon Hull.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Circle_(novel)"title="Great Circle (novel)">
The novel consists of two parallel narratives about two fictional women. One is about the disappeared 20th-century aviator Marian Graves, while the other is about the struggling 21st-century Hollywood actress Hadley Baxter, who is attempting to make a film about Marian. Hadley's narrative is told in the first-person, while Marian's sections are told in the third-person.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_et_Répète"title="Pet et Répète">
"Pet et Répète" is the real story of a couple of jokers, who are twin brothers. One has gas and the other is hard of hearing, hence why their mother had the sense to name one Pet and the other Répète. The story is of Pete (Pet) and Repeat (Répète) who are off on a boat. Pete falls out of the boat. Who's left? Repeat...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Story_(novel)"title="Inside Story (novel)">
The book revolves around a fictionalized account of Amis' relationship with three central figures who have died: Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow and Christopher Hitchens. Another central figure, Phoebe Phelps, is entirely fictional, and characterized by a mixture of hyper-sexuality and vulnerability reminiscent of previous female characters written by Amis (e.g. Nicola Six in London Fields, Gloria Prettyman in The Pregnant Widow). The novel begins with Amis welcoming the reader into his home. It is interspersed with sections in which Amis addresses the reader directly and discusses the art of writing. The final part of the novel describes the death of each of the three principal figures (Larkin, Bellow, Hitchens), followed by Amis himself bidding farewell to the reader.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Skin"title="Emergency Skin">
The unnamed protagonist lives on an exoplanet colony that was founded when the collapse of life on Earth (called Tellus in the story) was deemed inevitable. He, like all other lower-class people in the colony, has a synthetic body rather than skin, which is reserved for the colony's "Founders" and other elite. Aided by a collective AI implanted in his brain, he is sent on a mission to Tellus to retrieve cell cultures that the Founders need to continue synthesizing skin. However, when he arrives there, he discovers that it is not the lifeless husk he was led to believe, and that he is far from the first of his kind to come there on a cell culture mission. Instead of returning to his ship with the cells, he activates his "emergency skin," a layer of nanites that form synthetic skin, and stays on Earth to learn more. An old man brings him to a museum and shows him what happened after the Founders left the planet to form their colony: everyone left on Earth abandoned country borders and individual property, pooling all their resources and working together to prevent the planet's destruction. The protagonist realizes that the Founders deliberately kept this information from everyone else on the colony so that they could continue to hoard resources as the elite, and that they kill everyone who returns from missions to Earth so that they cannot tell anyone the truth. The story ends with him disabling the collective AI in his brain and resolving to return to his colony to start a revolution against the Founders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_Offering_(novel)"title="Body Offering (novel)">
Sunayana "Nayan" Sen is an editor working at a book publishing house who begins a liaison with Ashok Sube, a middle-aged surgeon. As their relationship progresses, they attempt to move beyond their own complicated pasts: Ashok's wife left him and fled with their little daughter, though they are not yet legally separated, and Nayan's self-harm that resulted from her past failed relationships. The book ends with a love letter in which Ashok proposes to Nayan and asks her to be his lover and editor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Watchman_(novel)"title="The Night Watchman (novel)">
Thomas Wazhashk, a night watchman at a jewel bearing plant and an Councilor, works to comprehend the consequences of a new termination bill drafted by Arthur Vivian Watkins heading to the floor of the United States Congress. In 1953, Thomas and other people begin to fear the implications of this bill. As Thomas tries to save his tribe from termination, his niece Patrice embarks on a journey to Minneapolis in order to find her sister, Vera. Patrice Paranteau, a young woman and a former high school valedictorian, balances the demands of both modern and traditional life. She works at the jewel bearing plant and earns just enough to help her mother Zhanaat and her brother Pokey. Patrice's alcoholic father comes home sporadically to threaten her family for cash. Patrice uses her saved money to look for her sister Vera, who vanished after moving to Minneapolis with her husband. During her journey, Patrice encounters abuse and danger. The lives of the young boxer, Wood Mountain and his mother, Juggie Blue intersect with those of many others living on the reservation as they each make the best out of their respective circumstances.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symptoms_of_Being_Human"title="Symptoms of Being Human">
Riley Cavanaugh is a gender fluid teenager whose sense of gender identity shifts regularly; they are sometimes a boy, sometimes a girl, or neither. Riley speaks in first person and does not call themself any third person pronoun. Riley is not out of the closet to their peers or their father, a Senator, or their mother, feeling their identity is hard to explain or will not be accepted. Though Riley feels masculine or feminine to different degrees at different times and struggles with dysphoria, they choose to appear androgynous so that their gender will not be assumed. After moving to a new school and struggling with people's perception of them and being bullied, Riley begins to write an anonymous blog under the pseudonym "Alix" about gender fluidity, even giving advice to readers facing similar problems. While the blog is at first a liberating outlet, things take a turn for the worse when an anonymous person claims to know Riley's real identity and threatens to out them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverview"title="Silverview">
Julian Lawndsley has left a career in the financial sector in London to open a bookstore in a small seaside town in East Anglia. Soon after opening the shop, a Polish immigrant named Edward Avon comes in, not to buy books but to chat. He urges Lawndsley to open a section of the store in the basement called the Republic of Literature, which would offer only the classics. Edward Avon is later revealed to be a retired agent for MI6 and a former communist. Avon claims to have known Lawndsley's father at school before he joined a cult. Lawndsley's father had a prolific sex life and ran up debts. As he continues to learn more about Avon's background, Lawndsley is fascinated by his different identities, and he wonders which are performances and which are real. He soon becomes entwined with the life of Avon's family: his wife Deborah – also a former top British intelligence agent – who is terminally ill, and his daughter Lily, a single mother. In another narrative strand, Avon is being investigated by the secret service's head of domestic security, Stewart Proctor. Proctor is suspicious of anyone like Avon, an ex-Communist, who demonstrates an absolute commitment to anything and who is thus a grave security threat. Proctor goes looking for Avon, suspecting him of being the source of an intelligence leak, and drags Lawndsley into his mission in the process.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbuwanko_Etihasik_Dastavej_Sangraha"title="Limbuwanko Etihasik Dastavej Sangraha">
The book is a collection and documentation of historical artifacts and documents from Limbuwan region of Nepal from 1662 to 1963.The book contains 395 documents of Pallo Kirat (Far Kirat) Limbuwan before and after the annexation of Nepal alongside that of Majh Kirat (Khambuwan), Wallo Kirat (Near Kirat) and other places in the country. It contains three hundred and one years of historical material. The first part of the 916-page book contains the original ink seals, red seals and stamps provided by the kings. In the second part, there are copies of ink seal, red seal and "Rukka". The third part consists of letters send by Rana Prime Ministers and government officials, petitions, gross receipts, orders, and military exchanges between the region and the center.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranahar"title="Ranahar">
The book journeys the life of the prince from his childhood to his defeat. The book shows the culture and society of that period. The construction of Nyatapola Temple by his father King Bhupatindra Malla is also a part of the story of the novel. The book also contains lots of words in Nepal Bhasa. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogmaya_(novel)"title="Yogmaya (novel)">
Yogmaya is based on the life of female protagonist Yogmaya Neupane (1860-1941), a religious leader and women rights activists born in Bhojpur, who fought against the autocratic Rana regime.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhritarashtra_(book)"title="Dhritarashtra (book)">
Dhritarashtra is told from the viewpoint of Dhritarashtra the blind king and focuses on how he perceives the protagonists of the Mahabharat war. Original Mahabharat depicts Krishna as a charismatic leader who fights for truth and justice. But in Kandel’s verse, Krishna appears as a crafty conspirator who tricks others into fighting the brutal war at Kurukshetra and plots the murder of Duryodhan and Dronacharya.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khusi"title="Khusi">
Pandey is a Nepalese television presenter. The book depicts his story and is collection of his various experiences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapdragon_(graphic_novel)"title="Snapdragon (graphic novel)">
Snapdragon, nicknamed Snap, lives in a town where a witch who eats roadkill is rumored to live in. She meets the "witch", only to discover she is an old woman named Jacks who harvests roadkill to create statues out of their skeletons to be sold. Nevertheless, Snap takes an interest in Jacks' work and asks to be mentored. Snap finds an old picture of Jacks with her grandmother Jessamine; the woman explains that she and Jessamine were in love with each other but ultimately broke up. While releasing a group of baby possums into the woods, Snap is surprised that she and Jacks are able to see the ghost of the possum's mother around them. Jacks explains that she is in fact a witch, and Snap asks her to teach how to perform magic.Jacks instructs Snap on how to focus on her energy in order to interact with ghosts, but she is disappointed in her failures. She instead practices magic herself in a more haphazard way. She shows her technique to Jacks, but when it almost gets someone hurt, Jacks tells her to stick to her method of controlling one's energy. The abusive ex-boyfriend of Snap's mother returns to her home one day while Snap is home alone. Jacks is alerted by her magic and quickly brings her mother home while Snap fends him off with her own magic. Snap and her mother invite Jacks to Thanksgiving, where Jacks reunites with Jessamine and they fall back in love. As Snap becomes more confident in her powers, she reflects that the rumor of a witch living in their town is almost true, there's just more than one.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Sons"title="Summer Sons">
The book's protagonist, Andrew, investigates the suicide of his friend Eddie just six months after Eddie left to begin a master's degree.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temper_(novel)"title="Temper (novel)">
"Temper" is set in a village in South Africa. It follows twins namely Kasim and Auben who were born were presumed to be born with different virtues and vices. Six vices for Auben and a vice for Kasim. It is presumed that Kasim should be more prosperous than the latter. As the novel progresses, the twins starts to hear voices in their head which they later discussed to be the voices of the original twin gods; Icy Blue and Grace who had possessed each of the twins. They seek to exorcism but on the long-run, allows the gods to take full possession of their body.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventy-Six_(novel)"title="Seventy-Six (novel)">
The book is written in first-person perspective by narrator Jonathan Oadley as an old man remembering the American Revolutionary War. It opens with an expression of urgency he feels in recording his memories for posterity: "Yes, my children, I will no longer delay it." His story begins in New Jersey in the early winter of 1776, with residents fearing British and Hessian raiding parties following George Washington's retreat through the area. Twenty-two-year-old Jonathan and his twenty-year-old brother Archibald decide to join the Continental Army, along with their sixty-year-old father Jonathan senior, cousin Arthur Rodman, and neighbor Robert Arnauld. Arnauld's daughters Clara and Lucia become the brothers' love interests.While the Oadley brothers recruit soldiers from the area, Colonel George R. Clinton arrives to train the new cavalry unit. Clinton vaguely brags of his connections to Washington, befriends Archibald, and awards him with a commission as captain. While the brothers are in training, the Oadley home is burned by Hessians, who wound the elder Jonathan and kidnap Arthur's love interest, Mary Austin. The characters all assume her to be killed. Soon after, the Oadleys stumble into their first battle, in which Archibald is wounded. He recovers in time for the three to fight in the Battle of Trenton, in which the elder Jonathan is killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siahat-e_Shargh"title="Siahat-e Shargh">
The author "Aqa Najafi Quchani", in the book "Siahat-e Shargh", in a simple tone describes important historical events of his life and experiences such as Persian constitutionalism, petty tyranny in political history of Iran, the battle of Iranian freedom seekers and the First World War along with his memoirs. The book "Siahat-e Shargh" which is the autobiography of "Aqa Najafi Quchani", is a valuable source in clarifying the role of the clergies and the seminary of Najaf in the historical events of that period. It includes important material from the events of the contemporary history of Iran and Iraq, to more detailed issues like the behavior of the clergies with the people, the rules of the Islamic seminaries, and so on.During his studies, the author "Aqa Najafi Quchani" traveled from his native village Khosraviyeh to Quchan, then to Mashhad, and in the following years to Isfahan and Najaf. The author, at the age of 16, comes to Mashhad from Quchan for more education. There he learns the basics of Islamic sciences. During his stay in Mashhad, he encounters problems and finally decides to go to Isfahan with one of his friends. They went to Yazd on foot through Tabas and its vast deathly deserts, and from there they went to Isfahan with great difficulty, faced many dangers on the way, but finally reached their destination. Then, they settled in the "Araban" school and mosque in Isfahan, and started studying again. In the continuation of the story, it turns out that the life and education of the author "Aqa Najafi Quchani" in Isfahan is very difficult and sad due to the unhealthy government situation at the time that made life difficult for the people. "Aqa Najafi Quchani" then goes to Najaf to change his living conditions and continue his education. In this episode, he describes the famine situation in Najaf due to the siege by the British army. In the meantime, the role of the clergy in fighting this widespread corruption and their support for the masses has been mentioned.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Water_(memoir)"title="Black Water (memoir)">
In "Black Water", Robertson explores his family history as he came to know and connect with his Cree ancestry. Robertson was born to a Cree father (Don) and non-Indigenous mother (Beverly). Despite his ancestry, Don didn't have official Indigenous status, though he grew up near Norway House, Manitoba, living off the land learning Cree culture. Ten years after his birth, the Family Allowances Act of 1945, which promised welfare to Indigenous peoples with a permanent address, changed his family's life. Although they received government benefits, they could no longer work the traplines. Shortly after, Don attended public school and forgot his native Swampy Cree language. After becoming a pastor, Don met and married Beverly, and the couple had three sons. Together, Don and Beverly decided not to tell their sons about their Indigenous ancestry because they felt the "knowledge of their Swampy Cree roots would be a burden for them." The family lived in Winnipeg without connection to other Cree people. After his parents divorce, Robertson spent little time with his family for nearly a decade.Robertson eventually reconnected with his father, at which point he learned about his family's heritage. With Don, he travelled to Norway House multiple times and reconnected with his history.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Cuckoo_Land_(novel)"title="Cloud Cuckoo Land (novel)">
"Cloud Cuckoo Land" is the story of five characters spanning eight centuries. In the fifteenth-century Byzantine Empire, Anna is a young seamstress living in Constantinople, and Omeir is a village boy conscripted into the Ottoman army, as they are preparing to take the city. In the present day, Zeno, a Korean War veteran, works in a library in Idaho translating Ancient Greek texts, while Seymour, a disturbed autistic youngster, becomes caught up with a group of ecoterrorists. In the twenty-second century, Konstance is a young girl aboard the "Argos", a generation starship heading for a planet called Beta Oph2.Their stories are bound by an Ancient Greek codex entitled "Cloud Cuckoo Land" that each of the five characters discover and find solace in. It is a fictional book written by real Greek novelist Antonius Diogenes in the second century, and tells the story of Aethon, a shepherd on a quest to find the fabled paradise in the sky. In his travels, he is transformed into a donkey, a sea bass, and finally a crow, which allows him to fly to the gates of the city in the clouds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_the_Soil"title="Song of the Soil">
The original title "Faatsung" translates to 'story of the soil' In Lepcha language. Kabimo belongs to the Lepcha community, an ethnic group indigenous to eastern Nepal, Darjeeling, Kalimpong and Sikkim region. The story revolves around the friendship of an unnamed narrator with his friend Norden, on the backdrop of the movement.One day, the narrator receives the news Norden's death in a recent earthquake and decides to go back to his hometown in rural part of Nepali speaking region of West Bengal. As the narrator is going back to his hometown, he recalls his childhood with his friend. The narrator and Norden are studying in a primary school, when one day Norden decides to go find his lost father, Ripden. The narrator and Norden then run away from their village to another village named Lolay, where they have heard Ripden's friend lived. During the search of Ripden, they come across a man called Nasim, who tell them the story of Ripden and his involvement in the Gorkhaland movement of 1986.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers_(novel)"title="Travelers (novel)">
"Travelers" is about a Nigerian graduate student living in the United States who relocates to Berlin with his wife Gina, who has won a prestigious arts fellowship. In Berlin, he meets the community of African refugees and encounters with his identity and the privilege of being able to travel freely. Due to racial problems, he divorces with his wife and decides to travel around Europe in order to meet with more African refugees.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Star-Wheeled_Sky"title="A Star-Wheeled Sky">
It has been thousands of years since humanity left a ruined Earth. Many of them settled within the Waywork, a system of about 50 star systems connected by a set of wormholes. The Waywork has been completely explored for hundreds of years, and the settled systems are bursting at the seams. One day, a new waypoint appears on the border between two warring factions. This causes a rush between the two to see who can lay claim to the new system and its resources.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mass_Strike,_the_Political_Party_and_the_Trade_Unions"title="The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions">
Luxemburg defines an offensive strategy for the German socialist movement in "The Mass Strike" that is based on her observations of the 1905 Russian revolution. She argues that socialists should use any opportunity to motivate the proletariat to act, including spontaneous and creative movements by the workers, which she believed Germany's strike actions would be, following Russia's example. Mass actions cannot be ordered by party leaders, but come from many different factors of the lives of the proletariat. Socialists, she argues, should encourage workers with speeches and solidarity.She makes the argument that the Russian form of the mass strike would be followed throughout the international socialist movement. Also, in the same way that Russia's strike led to new organisations the same would happen in German during their mass strikes. The previously existing organisations had become like brakes and would become outdated if they refused to move with the masses.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Belle_Image_(novel)"title="La Belle Image (novel)">
"La Belle Image" is the story of Raoul Cerusier, an upstanding, hard-working, but suspicious businessman, whose dull and unattractive face is transformed into one that is young, handsome, and seductive. His office colleagues no longer recognize him, nor does his wife, whom he must then seduce, thereby cuckolding himself. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Can't_Keep_the_Change"title="You Can't Keep the Change">
Slim Callaghan is called to Margraud Manor in Devon where valuable jewels have been stolen. His investigations take him to a shady nightclub in London haunted by the criminal classes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kentish_Manor_Murders"title="The Kentish Manor Murders">
Sheridan Haynes, now famous for playing Holmes in a series of television adaptations, is invited to Castle Baskerville by Warren Waymark to perform some scenes in character. The eccentric millionaire Waymark, a fanatical Sherlockian, is a collector of anything related to the detective. Before his visit, Haynes is approached by a man claiming to have a genuine copy of previously unknown original Doyle story which he wants to sell to Waymark.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blackheath_Poisonings"title="The Blackheath Poisonings">
Two families, the Collards and Vandervents have lived together for many years in the same elegant house in the wealthy London suburb of Blackheath. The two have grown intermingled over the years, with numerous secrets. When they begin falling dead to mysterious stomach complaints, Paul Vandervent begins investigating.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everyone_Knows_Your_Mother_Is_a_Witch"title="Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch">
This story is set in the 17th century in the Holy Roman Empire during the beginnings of the Thirty Years War and the plague. In this fictionalized version of the illiterate Katharina Kepler's later life, she is accused of witchcraft. Part of the reason for the accusation is because she lives into old age when most people die around the age of 30. Other reasons are related to her personal quirks. Also, the label of "witch" comes at first from Ursula Reinbold and then snowballs into many in her community accusing her of the same. Her son Johannes Kepler was compelled to absent himself from the royal court to defend his mother. She is also aided by two of her other children as well as her sympathetic legal guardian, scribe, and neighbor, Simon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Belting_Inheritance"title="The Belting Inheritance">
At her country estate of Belting, Lady Wainwright mourns the loss of two of her sons in the Second World War many years before. One day a stranger turns up at the house claiming to be her missing son David, who rather than being killed has spent years in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp. He now claims his rightful inheritance, the manor of Belting. Her remaining children are concerned that this apparent "impostor" is going to receive the entire inheritance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Colour_of_Murder"title="The Colour of Murder">
Unhappily married John Wilkins meets Sheila, an attractive young librarian. He fantasises about killing his wife, so he can leave her and start a new life with Sheila.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Brightness_Long_Ago"title="A Brightness Long Ago">
The story is set about 1,000 years after the events of "The Sarantine Mosaic" duology, 25 years after the demise of Sarantium. It begins as a narrative recollection by Guidanio Cerra, an aging councillor nicknamed Danio who in his youth was admitted to a prestigious school despite being a tailor's son. This leads him to meet the chief steward of nobleman Count Uberto, and later a woman named Adria Ripoli. The latter is daughter of a duke, and plans to assassinate The Beast.From Danio's recollection the plot shifts attention to a healer named Jelena, and subsequently to a political conflict between Folco Cino d’Acorsi, who is the uncle to Adria, and Teobaldo Monticola di Remigio. Danio's narrative describes the military and personal clashes between Cino and Monticola.Adria and Cino conceive a plan for her to reside in a farmhouse near the city, which eventually brings her to the attention of Uberto, known as "The Beast" for his sexual and murderous proclivities. Danio, now employed in the palace of Uberto, may endanger himself or Adria when she is summoned by Uberto to the palace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Earth_and_Sky"title="Children of Earth and Sky">
The book is set in the same fantasy world as "The Sarantine Mosaic", but following the decline of Sarantium. Leaders of states that are Jaddite, having been greatly affected by an epidemic, are worried of an impending threat by the growing Osmanli empire whose cultural and religious traditions may eclipse their own. Meanwhile, the duke of the Jaddite city of Seressa seeks to secure and strengthen his position.There are five principal and numerous secondary and ancillary characters. The warrior Danica Gradek is a skilled archer seeking vengeance for the abduction of her brother Neven by the Osmanli; she is recruited by Senjan pirates. The young artist Pero Villani is ambitious and tries to court the spy Leonora Valeri, previously exiled by her father. The Dubrova merchant Marin guides them though the "political and physical hazards" of their eastward journey. Pero is chosen to paint a western-style portrait of the khalif Gurçu, the principal Osmanli threat. Danica and Leonora meet during a raid by the pirates, and develop a "survival friendship".Senj is a nation state that opposes Osmanli expansion and has contemptuous regard for those who trade with them, raiding their ships. Dubrova is an emergent trading nation that avoids antagonizing the powerful Seressa empire that dominates trade. The latter maintains an extensive spy network.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Couldn't_Matter_Less"title="It Couldn't Matter Less">
Callaghan is persuaded by Inspector Gringall of Scotland Yard to meet with Doria Varette a torch singer in a nightclub. She hires Callaghan to look for her missing boyfriend Lionel Wilbery. Before long Callaghan realise he has got into a case that is far more complex than it first seems.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Live_the_Post_Horn!"title="Long Live the Post Horn!">
Elinor, a 35-year-old who works for a public relations firm, is assigned to work with the postal workers' trade union on a campaign to create public opposition to Norwegian Labour Party implementation of the Third Postal Services Directive, a European Union Directive that would allow postal service privatization by introducing private competition for letters weighing under . Elinor's colleague Dag, who was previously in charge of the contract, has recently killed himself. Initially feeling detached from the assignment and from her life in general, Elinor becomes engaged in the effort after hearing a story about one mail carrier's effort to find the addressee of an undelivered letter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handbook_for_Mortals"title="Handbook for Mortals">
The novel follows the adventures of Scheherazade "Zade" Esther Holder, a twenty-five-year-old woman who comes from a family of folk magic practitioners in a small Tennessee town. She decides to leave home in the hopes of discovering her identity and breaking away from an overprotective mother, in the process joining a Las Vegas troupe of eccentric stage magicians and performers. She forges romantic connections with several men, both her fellow troupe members and other men such as Carrot Top, relishing having several men "constantly fawning over" her. The one exception is Zeb, a magician with whom she is constantly at odds. While alluring to men, Zade questions the prospects of a "mixed" relationship with a mortal man, and fails to get along with Sophia, one of the female performers, whom she calls ugly and treats with disdain.During a magic show, Zade performs a stunning illusion but then falls into a coma after exerting herself without her "anchor" and lover, Mac, a fellow performer, who suspected that Zade was having an illicit affair with the elderly head stage magician, Charles Spellman. This is proven to be false, particularly as Zade discovers that Charles is actually her long-lost father. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Widow"title="Iron Widow">
## Setting.The nation of Huaxia, a futuristic reimagining of Medieval China, is constantly under attack by alien creatures (Hunduns). Aided by mysterious and unseen gods (the Heavenly Council), humanity has recovered from a devastating attack ages ago that forced civilization to rebuild. Humans have learned to harvest the bodies of defeated Hunduns to create giant fighting mechas, called Chrysalises. Chrysalises are piloted by young men with high levels of spirit pressure who can release their qi, following the five classical Asian elements. Treated like celebrities by the media and adoring public, male pilots rely on "concubines", female pilots who supply them with additional qi at the cost of their own lives. Male-female pairings that don't risk the concubine's death are called Balanced Matches, but are rare and treated as celebrity marriages. The strongest male pilot in history was the legendary emperor Qin Zheng, rumored to be frozen in stasis within his Chrysalis, the Yellow Dragon, to stave off an illness until a cure could be found. This location was lost to Hunduns centuries ago.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paper_Chase_(Symons_novel)"title="The Paper Chase (Symons novel)">
A crime writer looking for new material for his second novel, decides to set it in a progressive school and gets a job in one to help his research. Before long a murder takes place and he is drawn into an investigation about an alleged stash of treasure hidden by the school's previous headmaster, the mysterious Johnny Bogue who died in a plane crash more than a decade earlier.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plot_Against_Roger_Rider"title="The Plot Against Roger Rider">
Geoffrey Paradine has always lived in the shadow of Roger Rider since they were at school together. Rider is now a successful business tycoon, but suspects that his attractive wife is having an affair. To his surprise it turn out that Paradine is her lover, seeking his revenge. When Rider subsequently disappears and is presume murdered, the finger of suspicion points very heavily towards Paradine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belaet_Tira_Baralida"title="Belaet Tira Baralida">
Belaet is the Nepali name for Britain. This book is a memoir of his travel in the United Kingdom and one of the earliest modern travelogue in Nepali literature. Born and raised in the remote village of Barabote in Ilam, Taranath's arrival in Kathmandu from there was a big deal at that time. The book includes the highs and lows of the author's travel in Britain. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rani_Patel_in_Full_Effect"title="Rani Patel in Full Effect">
"Rani Patel in Full Effect" takes place in 1991 on the Hawaiian island of Moloka’i. The novel follows Rani Patel, a Gujarati Indian teenager whose father has sexually abused her. Rani has kept the abuse a secret and at age 16, struggles with her identity and sexuality. After performing for an underground rap group, she begins to find herself as MC Sutra and becomes the island's first woman rapper. Meanwhile, Rani reveals her secret and begins to heal from her father's abuse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_in_Dormer_Forest"title="The House in Dormer Forest">
The plot follows the lives of the Darke family, now headed by Solomon Darke, who have lived in the now crumbling Dormer House since the Elizabethan Era.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel)"title="Termination Shock (novel)">
The book is about a solar geoengineering project conceived by a Texas oil-industry billionaire named T.R. Schmidt. Schmidt builds a launcher on the Texas-Mexico border to fire sulfur into the air, a form of stratospheric aerosol injection intended to cool the planet by reflecting sunlight into space. This technique replicates the effects of volcanic eruptions that inject sulfates into the atmosphere and produce global cooling, such as the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption. Schmidt's plan has uneven effects, helping low-lying areas such as the Netherlands, Venice, and the Maldives, but threatening the Punjab with drought.The main characters are Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia, the Queen of the Netherlands, and granddaughter of Queen Beatrix; Rufus Grant, a part-Comanche exterminator of feral hogs; and Deep "Laks" Singh, a Punjab-Canadian Sikh. Saskia and Grant become entangled in Schmidt's plan, while Singh travels to the Line of Actual Control on the China-India border, where Chinese and Indian volunteers fight each other using non-lethal martial arts. Singh becomes a world-famous hero after several dramatic and well-promoted victories, but is felled by Chinese directed-energy weapons.Meanwhile, the Chinese government observes Schmidt's geoengineering efforts, and engages in advanced psychological warfare, cyberwarfare, and deadly tsunami bombs to shift European governments towards a pro-geoengineering stance. This also results in Saskia abdicating her throne for her daughter, after which she joins the growing consortium of smaller pro-geoengineering nations as the "Queen of the Netherworld."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sei_Kazoku"title="Sei Kazoku">
At the funeral service for Mr. Kuki, Kuki's twenty-year-old disciple Henri Kono meets widow Mrs. Saiki, with whom Kuki had a passionate love affair. Some time later, Mrs. Saiki invites Henri to her home and introduces him to her daughter Kinuko. Mrs. Saiki tells him that Kinuko discovered a book on the paintings of Raphael in a used book store, which had been in Kuki's possession. Henri admits that he had once received it as a gift from his mentor, but had to sell it due to his tight financial situation. Mrs. Saiki sends him money to buy the book back, and during his following visits, Henri and Kinuko begin to develop an affection for each other. Yet, they are not only unable to communicate their feelings, Henri doesn't even recognise that Kinuko is the reason for his emotional confusion, and seeks distraction in an affair with a revue dancer. Kinuko learns of Henri's affair, but sublimates her jealousy. One day Henri shows up at the Saikis' home to announce that he will leave town for a while. Kinuko falls ill afterwards and realises that she is in love with him. At his new home in a small town by a lake, Henri realises that Kiku's shadow still haunts him. He sends a postcard to the Saikis, which not only reveals to Mrs. Saiki how much Henri is obsessed with his dead mentor, but also awakens in her the sensation that she has fallen in love with Henri like her daughter has. Kinuko, who had felt estranged from her mother, starts feeling closer to her again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singha_Durbarko_Ghumne_Mech"title="Singha Durbarko Ghumne Mech">
The book is based on the author's struggle against patriarchal society and bureaucracy of Nepal. It chronicles Dr. Sharma's role as one of the few women secretaries in the government after the 2006 revolution. The book spans over six and a half decades of the author's life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XL_(novel)"title="XL (novel)">
The book is written in first-person, from the point of view of the main character, Will Daughtry.The book opens with a prologue, outlining what the book is about.Part One, "Hobbit", opens with Will's birthday, something he is dreading. Will is turning 16, and he is barely 5 feet. Will's growth was stunted from an early age, and he feels doomed to shortness forever. he celebrates his birthday, hangs out with friends, gets a present from one of his best friends (Monica). The present is a One Ring replica. He also gets a car, a Fiat Ovum, in orbital blue. There is an important basketball game in which is stepbrother is playing. His stepbrother, "The Spesh", Andrew Tannenger, is the team's star player. After the game (which they win), Drew gets taken to a mansion where one of the popular kids lives. Will, coming to pick him up, notices Drew and Monica making out, therefore breaking one of the unspoken rules of their friendship.Part Two, "Man", opens with Will finding out that he's grown two inches in less than a month. After having learned this, he tells his parents, who are shocked. He then goes to his doctor, Dr. Helman, who is puzzled. She thinks it may be cancer, but this is ruled out. He grows more, and becomes an internet celebrity, because of a timelapse GIF his friend Roderick Raftsman Rhinehardt Royall (Rafty) made. The GIF shows photos of him next to his Fiat for 90 days, getting taller.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_Queens_and_the_Cities"title="Between Queens and the Cities">
The book chronicles the life of the author from 1999, when he left for New York from Kathmandu at the age of 19 to coming back to Kathmandu. It show the struggle of being a queer person and challenges that a LGBT+ person has to face in Nepali society.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parityakta"title="Parityakta">
The book shows the inner thoughts of a woman in a patriarchal Nepali society and how she deals with loneliness. It is written in first person stream of consciousness narrative.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_plus_secrète_mémoire_des_hommes"title="La plus secrète mémoire des hommes">
The novel tells the story of a young Senegalese writer living in Paris who discovers a 1938 novel by the fictional African author T.C. Elimane, nicknamed "the Black Rimbaud". The story mirrors the life of Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem, who won the Prix Renaudot in 1968, but was later accused of plagiarism, left France and disappeared from public life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Roads_Lead_North"title="All Roads Lead North">
The book studies and analyzes the eroding relationship of Nepal with India and the budding relationship with China. While the Indian media and political figures have blamed and criticized Nepal for increasing closeness with China, the book shows and explains the historical relationship between China and Nepal, and Tibet and Nepal. The book shows how trans-Himalayan trade and Buddhism shaped relations between Tibet and Nepal since the 7th century. It talks about the impact of Chinese development on Himalayan communities, and portrays the complex story of China’s influence in Nepal. The 2015 Nepal blockade was one of the major turning points of the changing equation of the diplomatic ties of Nepal with its neighbors. Also, the Kalapani territory dispute further damaged the Indo-Nepal relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Loneliness"title="The End of Loneliness">
Jules Moreau's parents are killed in a car crash. He is sent to boarding school with his brother Marty and sister Liz. He befriends Alva, a fellow pupil. Marty's friend Toni pursues Liz, unsuccessfully. Jules desires Alva and is angered when he finds her having sex with another man.Years later, he gets in touch with Alva and they meet. Alva has married A.N. Romanov, an author many years her senior. They invite Jules to stay with them in Switzerland. The elderly Romanov is becoming forgetful. He keeps guns in the cellar, and recalls his father's suicide. Jules and Romanov work on their novels in the same room. Jules and Alva begin an affair. Romanov declares his intention to kill himself before he loses his mind, and asks Jules to help him. Jules later finds Romanov in the cellar, and places a gun in his hand, then leaves before Romanov kills himself.Alva and Jules have twins. Jules finishes Romanov's last novel. Alva is diagnosed with leukemia. She is cured by chemotherapy, but it recurs. Alva dies. Jules crashes his motorcycle.Marty and his wife Elena cannot have children. Liz has had a string of lovers, but never married. She sleeps with Toni because she wants a child, but stops after she becomes pregnant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basain"title="Basain">
The book is set in a nameless hilly village in Eastern Nepal. Dhan Bahadur Basnet is a poor farmer living with his wife, sister and a son. The book shows his struggle in the village and how he is deceived by others. The book shows the circumstances under which poor Nepali people have to migrate from their home to places in India for employment. The caste and gender discrimination, poverty, and injustice are the major theme in this book. The book shows how rich people suppress poor people and further push theme towards poverty instead of uplifting them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girls_of_Paper_and_Fire_(book)"title="Girls of Paper and Fire (book)">
The novel tells the story of eight girls who are chosen as "Paper Girls" and assist the king. What the book describes though is a ninth girl who comes from the poor Paper caste, which is the lowest and most persecuted caste in the city of Ikhara. The girl, Lei, is desired by the king because of her rumored beauty and golden eyes. During her training to become consort to the King, she falls in love with another girl. This forbidden romance and the changes that are occurring within Lei's world leave Lei on a quest for justice and revenge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gilded_Ones"title="The Gilded Ones">
The novel is set in the West Africa-inspired kingdom of Otera, where 16-year-old Deka lives in the village of Irfut with her sick father, her mother having recently died of a redpox infection. Deka is filled with fear and anxiety because of a compulsory ritual for 16-year-old girls called the Ritual of Purity that serves to banish girls who bleed gold when cut instead of red from society. The ceremony is attacked by deathshrieks – legendary monsters who scream loudly. Deka chases the creatures away and after several attempts to kill her, her worst nightmare comes to life when she bleeds gold and is deemed impure.She is thrown into a dungeon of torture, where she is killed several times but keeps waking up alive for months, until she is offered an invitation by a mysterious woman called White Hands who wishes to take her to the capital to join an army of Alaki – impure girls like herself, who are trained to fight deathshrieks for the Emperor. Deka agrees and along with a girl named Britta joins the army.Deka trains hard and learns more about the kingdom and deathshrieks. Soon she discovers she can communicate with the creatures, begins to question the emperor's original intentions and seeks to know more about the true origin of the war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sallipir"title="Sallipir">
The book is set in the Khumbu region of Nepal. It depicts the culture, traditions and lifestyle of the Sherpa people of the region. It tells the story of three generations of a family. As with Pandey's other book, the major theme of this book is social realism. The book shows the life of Sherpa people of the mountainous region and their difficulties.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Americans"title="The Other Americans">
The book begins with the suspicious death of Moroccan immigrant, Driss Guerraoui, in a hit-and-run accident in a small town in California, and is told from the perspectives of nine different characters who are connected to him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumero"title="Dumero">
It is a coming-of-age story a girl from a small town in Nepal and her struggle to find an identity in this world. The book is about a girl called Simran and her wandering aspirations. Simran is a radio journalist but without earing much experience, she joins television. She starts working as an actress in television shows. Without much acting experience, she wins a national award in acting. She becomes a well-known actress and her demand increases in the industry due to which her ego slowly increases. She falls in love with two boys. She gets an oppurtnity to visit abroad and she settles there during her visit, directs a movie which becomes featured in Cannes film festival.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiyara"title="Jiyara">
The stories are mostly set in the southern plains of the Mid-Western region of Nepal. The stories depicts the traditions, culture and socio-economic conditions of the people of that region. The stories also includes phrases, songs and folk taels of Awadhi language. The stories are an example of "Anchalik" (Regional) literature. The stories on this collection presents a strong critique of capitalism, corrupt politics, political establishment, greed and patriarchy. The genres of the stories are realism and magic realism.The stories included in this book are:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ular_(book)"title="Ular (book)">
The story is set in Mid-western Terai region (present–day Lumbini Province) of Nepal. Premlawla is a poor "tanga" driver and is a supporter of Rajendra Lal in the national election. Premlawla also participates in the election rally for Premlalwa with his tanga during which his horse gets sick. However, Rajendra Lal loses to Shanti Raja in the election. Premlawla is asked to participate in the victory rally of Shanti Raja with the promise of a daily wage but Premlawla's sick horse dies during the rally. Premlawla decides to ask for help with Shanti Lal but is unable to meet with him since he has already left for Kathmandu. Then Premlawla decides to ask Rajendra Lal but Rajendra Lal refuses to help. Instead, Rajendra Lal suggests to him that he sell his only piece of land. Premlawla is cheated on the price of land. With the money obtained, Premlawla decides to go to Kathmandu to meet Shanti Lal and ask for his horse's compensation. In Kathmandu, Premlalwa meets a writer Nirakar Prasad, who borrows money with Premlawla promising to return back soon and also to publish his story but Nirakar Prasad runs away with the money.In parallel, there is a story about Draupadi, a sex worker from Badi community and Premlawla's love interest. Premlalwa wants to marry Draupadi but is unable because he is destitute. Draupadi is exploited by the richer people of the village. The books shows the helplessness of poor people in the society and how they are exploited by the rich and powerful.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_from_an_Enemy_Sky"title="Wind from an Enemy Sky">
"Wind from an Enemy Sky" begins with the Little Elk tribe's reaction to United States government presence and the construction of a dam on reservation land. While not explicitly mentioned in the text, the Seli’š Ksanka Qlispe’ Dam, located within the Flathead Reservation is believed to provide the model for the fictional dam."Wind" concentrates on the mistrust between the Little Elk people and the United States government and the colonization efforts toward the tribe. In the novel, the Little Elk people argue that the US government destroys their sacred land for worthless gain. At the same time, the US government believes that the land must be "modernized" and refuses to consult the tribe before breaking ground. Such action represents just one of the various ways in which the government imposes on the tribe's traditional way of life.Solely written in third-person narration, the story features several points of view through the eyes of Natives and Non-Natives. Bull, the patriarch of the Little Elk tribe, attempts to restore their land multiple times, which results in trouble with the government. In the novel, Adam Pell, a prominent American figure, is the builder of the forsaken dam that Bull despises. Pell is convinced that his actions are justified. He attempts to mend the issues created between himself and the tribe, but his actions are ineffective.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Both/And"title="Both/And">
The book covers Abedin's childhood in Saudi Arabia, her Muslim faith, her time as an aide to Clinton and her relationship with former Democratic Representative and former husband, Anthony Weiner. Abedin also explores the multiple identities that have shaped her, in particular being born in Michigan and then raised in Saudi Arabia by a Pakistani father and an Indian mother.In the book, Abedin describes being sexually assaulted by a U.S. senator; she does not give any clues as to his identity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mokshabhumi"title="Mokshabhumi">
The book is set in the 1280s in the medieval Khasa Kingdom of Nepal. When the emperor "Krachalladeva" decides to liberate about ten thousand serfs in order to atone for his war crimes, the whole kingdom is caught in a frenzy. There is an upheaval in the Sinja valley. With that upheaval begins the great debate of Khas-Aryan ethnic superiority and human superiority. The debate of love, sex, struggle and salvation of those free slaves are begun. The book further tells about the journey of those slaves and their search for their existence and the adoption of Buddhism by the emperor "Krachalladeva" and how Buddhism was appropriated by Hinduism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time,_Love,_Memory"title="Time, Love, Memory">
Benzer started his career at Purdue University as a graduate student in solid state physics, studying semiconductors. His work in the early 1940s contributed to the subsequent development of the transistor. In 1946, he read Erwin Schrodinger's highly influential book "What Is Life?", which described the nature of genes as known in the 1940s as "the great unsolved mystery of biology". Inspired by the book, Benzer enrolled in the summer course organized by Max Delbrück at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. After the course Benzer decided to change his career and became a biologist. For the next several years he worked with Delbrück and his phage group, and Andre Lwoff, Francois Jacob, and Jacques Monod at the Pasteur Institute. Later Benzer returned to Purdue.In classical genetics the gene was thought to be an indivisible entity; Benzer realized that if Watson and Crick's DNA model was correct, "then each gene is not a mathematical point but a linear segment, and that crossing-over should be able to occur within a gene." Benzer spent the next 10 years studying the rII region of phage mutants, as it was found to be very suitable and "an extraordinarily sensitive and simple assay" for detection of rare crossing-over events in a gene. When this field of study became more popular, Benzer abandoned it and started to work on a completely new area; that was very characteristic of Benzer throughout his career.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loo_(novel)"title="Loo (novel)">
The book is set in a fictional village called "Pattharpuruwa" in Banke district of Nepal near the Indian border. The book shows the strange and everyday events of the village. Since, the village is located near Indian border, far from the capital city, the village is neglected by the central Nepalese government and troubled by the "Sashastra Seema Bal", the Indian border guarding force. The village is shown being continuously being encroached by the Indian side. The major theme of this book is social realism. The book shows the socio-economic conditions of people in "Madesh" region of Nepal. The book shows how the people living in the region are neglected by Nepalese government.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhabi"title="Madhabi">
The book is based on the Udyoga Parva of Mahabharat. When Galav refuses to give g"uru-dakshina" to his teacher Guru Vishwamitra, Vishwamitra asks for four white horses with black ears. The horses are required in order to organize a Mahayagya for the abolition of slavery. Galav reaches the court of king Yayati, who is famous for his generosity and asks for his help to find the horses. Unable to gain those horses for Galav, Yayati decides to give away his daughter Madhabi in marriage to Galav. Madhabi is the daughter of king Yayati and an apsara, and is born with a divine power to remain a virgin forever. Galav takes Madhabi to three different kings of whom Madhabi has sons with, and Madhabi is then able to become a virgin again. Galav asks for a horse in exchange of each son. When Galav returns to Vishwamitra with three white horses with black ears, Vishwamitra has a son with Madhabi for the remaining one horse. Their son, Ashtaka, goes on to become a great king, and Madhabi is sent back to her father. Yayati organizes a "swayamvara" for Madhabi, which Galav does not participate in. Madhabi, dejected by the neglect of Galav, decides to become a hermit and leaves for a forest. Galav also wanders through a different forest to find Madhabi.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Facts_of_Life_(Joyce_novel)"title="The Facts of Life (Joyce novel)">
"The Facts of Life" takes place in Coventry, England immediately after World War II, and is about the Vine family, comprising Martha Vine and her seven daughters. Martha is visited by ghosts, and her youngest daughter, Cassie is clairvoyant. Cassie has a baby, Frank, from a liaison she had with a soldier during the war. Frank also has psychic abilities inherited from her mother and grandmother. Because Cassie is wayward and fey, Martha delegates Cassie's six sisters with the task of bringing up Frank. The story tracks the first ten years of Frank's life, and the Vine family who take care for him.In a flashback to the war, sixteen-year-old Cassie foresees the Coventry Blitz. On the night of 14 November 1940, as the "Luftwaffe" firebomb the city, Cassie wanders its streets amid the inferno and destruction, conversing with living and dead individuals. At one point she climbs to the top of the Coventry Cathedral tower and connects with one of the German bomber pilots. She makes him fly his plane out of formation, where it is easily shot down by British anti-aircraft guns.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Graduate"title="The Last Graduate">
Following the events of "A Deadly Education", El and her friends begin their senior year. El is faintly outraged to discover that she has been assigned a punishingly difficult courseload and, strangely, put into a homeroom with eight freshmen. On her first day with them, they are attacked by a mal in the classroom. To her own surprise, El is unwilling to abandon the younger students and kills the mal with mana she had been saving for graduation. Over the weeks that follow, El and the eight freshmen are relentlessly targeted by mal attacks which El fights off. El finds her supplies of mana dwindling and reluctantly asks for help from Chloe Rasmussen, a girl from the New York enclave. El believes Chloe will grant her access to the New Yorkers’ pool of shared mana because of El’s nebulous involvement with Orion, who is the son of a prominent New York sorceress. Chloe obliges, but also startles El by asking to join her alliance with Aadhya and Liu - a request which Chloe would only make if she genuinely believed it would help her survive graduation. As the end of term draws nearer, El becomes close with not only Chloe, but also members of other alliances as they exchange favours and cooperate to help one another. Meanwhile, her and Orion’s mutual attraction continues to develop. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_heldige_tre_konger"title="De heldige tre konger">
The novel is divided into two parts. The first part is a first-person account written by an unnamed "Firibier," an intelligent cephalopod. He spends most of the first part of the novel disguised as a boulder on the shores of the Oslo Fjord while he prepares and later observes the Firibier invasion of the land:... we must take over before man in his confusion destroys himself and allows our planet to sail dead through the universe. Only we have sufficient intelligence and power to save the Earth. We attack man to save life on Earth, even though we must take many lives. Do not think that we are warriors. We want the best. The Almighty has chosen us and given us spirit and responsibility. This is why we must perform our task.During the first phase of the invasion, marine animals controlled by the Firibiers sink all shipping. The Firibiers ask humanity to surrender, but their emissaries are massacred. The depths of the sea are bombed with nuclear weapons, a calculated radioactive poisoning of all life in the sea. The Firibiers respond with biological warfare, using "homosilioma," a substance that sterilizes men and "makes men mentally a kind of women, while women remain the same." All resistance ceases, and the Firibiers occupy the land.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeology,_Anthropology,_and_Interstellar_Communication"title="Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication">
Historically, research into extraterrestrial intelligence has fallen within natural science and focused primarily on the technological obstacles to alien communication, such as processing the data encoded in signals received from potential extraterrestrial civilizations. "Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication" was written as part of an expansion of the field to humanities and social sciences, focusing on the role archaeologists and anthropologists play in extraterrestrial intelligence research. The difficulties of studying ancient societies on Earth, editor Douglas Vakoch argues, are applicable to those of studying potential societies outside Earth."Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication" is a collection of essays exploring the roles archaeology and anthropology play in extraterrestrial research, focusing on both historical and modern perspectives. The book consists of seventeen essays, with an introduction and epilogue by Vakoch and fifteen chapters by various researchers in the relevant fields; contributing authors include John Traphagan, Albert Harrison, Ben Finney, Steven J. Dick, John Billingham, and . Issues discussed in the essays include the evolutionary and cultural prerequisites for interstellar communication, the challenges for semiotics in decoding alien signs and symbols, and the complexities of cross-cultural communication with aliens by analogy to anthropological first contact experiences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarun_Tapasi"title="Tarun Tapasi">
The epic is a lengthy, narrative poem. The epic begins with a poet who takes a rest under a tree in a chautari in evening time. The poet recently lost his wife and is grief-stricken. The poet decides to write something, but it becomes dark. A sage appears before him who represents the soul of the tree. The sage delivers a homily to the poet as the tree who has been rooted in a single place and has seen the seasons change. The sage talks to him about his hardships and the hardships of other people who he has seen and observed. The years of observations and learning through those observation enlightened the sadhu.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srasta_ra_Sahitya"title="Srasta ra Sahitya">
Kunwar worked as an editor for popular Nepali literary magazine "Ruprekha". He conducted interviews with various Nepali writers. The interviews were not in simple question and answer format but were in a conversational way between Kunwar and writers that helped the readers know the writers in a more familiar and humane manner. He wrote essays based on those interviews.Some of the writers included in the book are:-
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_Greece"title="The Birth of Greece">
"The Birth of Greece" covers ancient Greek history from roughly 2000 BC to the conquest of Greece by Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great's empire. The book comprises three chapters: the first covers the Greek bronze age and the Minoan and Mycenaean civilisations; the second the archaic period; and the third the classical period, starting from the Greco-Persian wars and ending with Alexander the Great. This is followed by an appendix of "documents", made up of both extracts from ancient sources, and from other writings about ancient Greece.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Usage_du_monde"title="L'Usage du monde">
The book is an account of the journey made by the two friends from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan, between June 1953 and December 1954 after having received the "blessing" of Ella Maillart, the Swiss adventurer and travel writer.The route, made in a Fiat 500 Topolino, takes them from Belgrade to Turkey, Iran (where they spend the winter 1953–1954 in Tabriz), Pakistan (including a long stopover in Quetta), and Afghanistan. Here, in Kabul, the two friends split up: Nicolas Bouvier's story continues until Khyber pass, while Vernet travels to Sri Lanka to meet his girlfriend Floristella.The choice of the small "Topolino" despite being less romantic than going on foot gives "L'usage du monde" its poetry and a very peculiar rithm.To earn the little money needed during the trip, Thierry Vernet sells paintings and Nicolas Bouvier writes articles for Swiss and other newspapers, gives lectures and French lessons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inseparable_(book)"title="Inseparable (book)">
The book follows the lives of the Griffin brothers from birth through making it on the same NFL team, the Seattle Seahawks. The brothers start out training together and eventually pursue their football dreams separately, though yearning to compete alongside each other on the same team in the end. Through the course of their journey, two overarching themes emerge: 1) the importance of familial support in achieving one's goals, and 2) the role of faith in God for overcoming hardship and adversity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann_(novel)"title="Mann (novel)">
The book is set in 2012-2013 BS. Mann is the lead character of the book who gets pregnant with Master Hridaya Raj who abandon her. The book shows the struggle of Mann in a patriarchal society and the challenges she faces in her life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Billion_Dollar_Spy_(book)"title="The Billion Dollar Spy (book)">
The book covers the life of Russian engineer Adolf Tolkachev, nicknamed the "Billion Dollar Spy", who was executed by the Soviet Union after being caught passing information on classified radar technology to CIA agents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_of_a_Book"title="Hell of a Book">
In alternating chapters, the novel tells the stories of two different characters: a nameless novelist on tour for a book also titled "Hell of a Book", and an African-American child named Soot. Soot, who lives near Whiteville, North Carolina, is being bullied on the school bus, while the novelist is troubled by visions of a child he calls "The Kid", who speaks to him in riddles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Sea"title="The Big Sea">
"The Big Sea" chronicles Hughes' late teens to twenties in the 1920s and early 1930s from the US across the Atlantic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretkalpa"title="Pretkalpa">
The novel is set in a fictional place called Dukhapur, located in the northeastern region of Kathmandu. It set during the reign of Chandra Shumsher JBR. The book shows the difficulties of common people under the autocratic Rana rule and the feudalistic society.It is a story of family, social, cultural and political upheaval and conflict when a young man returns to the village after completing his education and trying to use his knowledge to uplift the societal norms and values. The book not only tells the story of that era but also the various evil practices and customs that exists till date. It also provides information on the ideological battle between the 'Puranavadi' and 'Vedavadi' schools of Hindu philosophy and its social impact.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chhuteka_Anuhar"title="Chhuteka Anuhar">
The book contains nineteen anecdotes in essay form. The anecdotes consist of various experiences and various people whom Sayan has met in his lifetime. It consists of various stories from his life such as failing the SLC examination and working for 18 hours a day in South Korea for thirty months. The theme of the essays in the book ranges from the author's growing pains to commentary on various societal evils.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathiya_(novel)"title="Nathiya (novel)">
The book is based on the life of women from Badi community from 1980 (2036 BS) to 1990 (2046 BS). The book highlights the sufferings of Badi women living in northwestern part of Dang valley. The Badi women had to resort to prostitution after the fall of Rana regime in Nepal. Pratikshya decided to write the book after seeing the Badi people protesting before Singha Durbar in the news.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tutor_of_History"title="The Tutor of History">
The book is set in 1990s Nepal. The main plot of the book is centered around the campaign for parliamentary elections in the roadside town of Khaireni Tar, situated between Kathmandu and Pokhara in the western region of Nepal. The book shows the effect of the elections on the common people of that town and the lives of the people gets entangled with the politics.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forget_Kathmandu"title="Forget Kathmandu">
The book covers several issues in the political and historical scenarios of Nepal. The book covers the ten year long Nepalese civil war and the Royal massacre. Thapa worked as a journalist during the Maoist insurgency in Nepal. The book records her experience, reportage and analysis of the various events that occurred in the last 10 years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilled_Earth"title="Tilled Earth">
The stories in the book depicts the daily life of Nepalese people in the early 2000s. The main characters of the stories are Nepalese people who are either living in Nepal or abroad or expatriates travelling in Nepal. Some of the stories are a page long while some are novella-length.The major themes that the stories explore are traditional Nepalese society, the caste system, the Nepalese politics and experiences of Nepalese women and Nepalese living in abroad.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yambunera"title="Yambunera">
Yambu is the name of Kathmandu in Tamang language. Yambunera means the area around Kathmandu valley. The stories in the book are centered in and around Kathmandu valley. The stories are about people who have been marginalized and been neglected by the state.The stories included in the book are:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aagat"title="Aagat">
The novel depicts the lifestyle and culture of the Madhesh region of Nepal. The book presents transitional period of Nepali history. The period when land-reform and the uprooting of feudal aristocracy was happening is depicted in the novel. The novel is considered a first "Aanchalik" (regional) writing of Nepali literature.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witness_for_the_Dead"title="The Witness for the Dead">
In the wake of his service for the emperors, the formerly disgraced Prelate of Ulis and Witness for the Dead Thara Celehar resumes his duties in the city of Amalo, far from Court. Through his ability to communicate with the recently dead he resolves inheritance disputes, identifies nameless murder victims, and is sometimes able to bring justice to the latter by identifying their killers.Currently, while trying to find a woman who has vanished, possibly killed by her husband, he is presented with a new case, discovering the identity of a recent drowning victim. The body turns out to be that of a popular but unsavory opera singer whose selfishness, thievery, penchant for blackmail and exploitation of her patrons has left scores of possible suspects. The missing woman, meanwhile, is found to be but the latest of several victims of an elusive serial killer who has been marrying and murdering heiresses for their fortunes.Progress on these cases is stalled when Thara is tasked with resolving the matter of a forged will, and earns the enmity of the politically influential forger. For his own safety, the city's prince sends him out of town to deal with a ghoul manifestation in a remote village. Afterwards a trial by ordeal in the form of a night vigil in a haunted ruin clears Thara's political difficulties. In the course of these events he also reconciles an estranged grandfather and granddaughter and is called on to help investigate an airship explosion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loag_Dar_Loag"title="Loag Dar Loag">
The book, "Loag Dar Loag" (People after People) contains 32 personality sketches of some notable people from politics and other fields, whom the author met during his political career and foreign tours. The book includes features about the ex-Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the ex-Turkish prime minister Bülent Ecevit, the Pakistan's first female prime minister Benazir Bhutto, the Turkish actress Nazan Saatci, the grand granddaughter of an Ottoman King Kenizé Mourad, the Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan, the wife of a UK prime minister Marina Wheeler, the former prime minister of India Inder Kumar Gujral, the Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar, the human rights activist Aasma Jahangir, the drama writer Munnu Bhai, the women's rights activist Madeeha Gauhar, the Indian novelist Khushwant Singh, Dr. Anwar Sajjad, Sheikh Mohammad Rashid, and other famous personalities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yojana_Gandha"title="Yojana Gandha">
The book depicts the story of Satyawati as she emerges from being a daughter of a fisherman to the queen of Hastinapur. The plot of Yojana Gandha is mainly based on Mahabharata and partly on Harivansh Purana and Devi Bhagavata. Yojanagandha is also one of the innumerable characters hidden within the vastness of the gigantic book Mahabharata. The Hindu mythological female character Yojanagandha also has a significant place in the Mahabharata, while the novelist Dhital has portrayed Yojanagandha as the main character in the this novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Undercommons"title="The Undercommons">
"The Undercommons" is composed of six essays as well as an interview with Stevphen Shukaitis. The text includes criticism of academia and public policy (as a discipline), generally from a left-wing perspective. While densely written, the second and fifth essays generally suggest that universities are part of a societal structure that turns "insurgents into state agents" (the professional–managerial class, in socialist terms) and upholds existing capitalist society; the societal respectability that universities provide should be rejected. The other essays consider topics such as debt and a comparison between modern transportation networks and the experience of African communities in the slave trade.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_(novel)"title="Firefly (novel)">
Firefly is a thirteen-year-old girl looking for a new home after police take her unstable and violent mother away. She is discovered living in the park across from her mother's home and is forced by social services to live with her Aunt Gayle, owner of the Corseted Lady Costume Shop. While Firefly adjusts to having a roof over her head, she develops post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and sets out on a quest to discover her true identity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naya_Sadak_Ko_Geet"title="Naya Sadak Ko Geet">
The stories are set in New Road, a financial hub and high street in Kathmandu. The main protagonist of the book is a blind man named Jeevan Baral. The stories in the book depicts the exploitation and discrimination faced by Jeevan. Written in the context of the end of the Rana period and the renaissance of democracy in Nepal, the story inside reveals many aspects of the social life of the time. This stories in the book tell a lot about the psychology and socio-economic condition of people of different classes and levels at that time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We'll_Meet_Again_(novel)"title="We'll Meet Again (novel)">
Socialite Molly Lasch is married to Gary, a prominent physician and founder of the Remington Health Management HMO. She's horrified to learn that he has been cheating on her with one of his nurses, even having a child with her. When he's discovered murdered, his head bashed in by a statue and Molly standing over his body, the police assume that she is the culprit. Claiming to have no memory of the events and that she is innocent, Molly agrees to plead guilty to manslaughter rather than face trial over murder charges. She gains early parole and once out, begins to once again proclaim her innocence. Among the reporters is her old college friend Fran, who Molly contacts in hopes that she can help her case. During the course of their investigation the two discover evidence that points towards the true killer being someone else, including evidence that Gary was involved in unsavory dealings. When the mistress is found dead in a parking lot the police immediately suspect Molly, as the two had recently spoken.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiver_(novel)"title="Shiver (novel)">
"Note: The novel cuts between the past and present. This section will be laid out in chronological format."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tainna"title="Tainna">
Written by drawing from her life experiences and cultural memory, Dunning compiled a collection of six short stories based on modern-day Inuk characters that contrast each other remarkably well. They span from the homeless to the wealthy, from the spiritual to the cynical, from the young to the elderly, and from the living to the dead. Sentiments of alienation, displacement, and loneliness, as well as boredom from their experiences away from home, are what binds them together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahakavi_Devkota"title="Mahakavi Devkota">
Nityaraj Pandey grew up near the house of Laxmi Prasad Devkota. Being inspired by him, he decided to write his biography. Devkota is known as "Mahakavi" (The Great Poet) in Nepali literature. He was much loved and revered in Nepali literature. The book is divided into 24 chapter.Devkota was born on 13 November 1909 (27 Kartik 1966 B.S.) to father Pandit. Teel Madhav Devkota and mother Amar Rajya Lakshmi Devi in Dhobidhara, Kathmandu on the night of Laxmi Puja He graduated from Patna University. He worked as a lecturer in Tri Chandra College and Padma Kanya College. In his lifetime, he published multiple poems, stories, epics and a novel. He used to write primarily in Nepali but would occasionally write in English and even translate his own works into English. His epic called "Muna Madan" is one of the most popular book in Nepal. He died on 14 September 1959 along the banks of Bagmati river in Pashupatinath Temple, Kathmandu.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_Prey"title="Ocean Prey">
Lucas Davenport is the star character from the series of novels that Sandford wrote, called the "Prey Series". Sandford also wrote a series of novels using a character named Virgil Flowers. In the novel "Ocean Prey" both characters Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers are brought together to investigate the murder of three members of the Coast Guard in Florida.The drug smugglers who killed the Coast Guard officials hide their drugs at the bottom of the ocean and set their own boat on fire to hide any evidence. When the FBI does not make the case a priority, Flowers goes undercover to infiltrate a criminal operation. Virgil Flowers teams up with a female partner named Rae. After joining the gang of drug smugglers, Flowers goes diving in 100 feet of water to try to recover the drugs for the criminals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_From_Manus"title="Escape From Manus">
Ealom is a Rohingya refugee whose story starts with his 2013 escape from the genocide in Myanmar. He travels by boat to Jakarta, Indonesia but nearly drowns during the journey and is rescued by a fisherman. From Indonesia, he starts a journey to Australia, planning to seek asylum upon arrival. During his boat journey, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd makes the policy change that Australia would not accept refugees arriving by boat. Upon arrival in Australia he is arrested by Australian authorities and put in detention, initially in Christmas Island detention centre. Ealom is assigned a number and which is put on a permanent wristband. After six months, at the age of 21, he is moved to Manus Island detention centre. The conditions in the detention center were prison-like, toilets are overflowing with raw sewage, the food is rotten, Ealom is housed in an unbearably hot shipping container. Ealom is subjected to psychological torture. In May 2017, after three and a half years of detention, a suicide attempt, a hunger strike, and serious injuries from an attack, Ealom orchestrates his escape. Posing as an interpreter he escapes the detention center with some aid from detention center staff. One outside, he purchases and boards a flight to Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Bhimsen_Thapa_Ra_Tatkalin_Nepal"title="General Bhimsen Thapa Ra Tatkalin Nepal">
Bhimsen Thapa was born on August 1775 in Gorkha district of Nepal to Amar Singh Thapa and Satyarupa Maya. He was taken to Kathmandu where he rose to the rank of Kaji. He played a key part in the expansion of Nepalese kingdom and during the Anglo-Nepalese War. He was imprisoned during the later part of his life and died of a suicide in 1839.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witch_Doctor_and_Other_Essays"title="The Witch Doctor and Other Essays">
The major subject of the essays ranges from animals to Nepalese society to stars and different human lifestyle. The essays were written in and around 1958 in Devokta's last years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfabet/alphabet"title="Alfabet/alphabet">
de Meijer's "alfabet/alphabet" chronicles her transition from speaking Dutch, her mother tongue, to English, her adopted tongue. By taking an eclectic approach to narrative, she examines the shifting cultural currents of language by exploring topics of identity, geography, family, and translation. As a result, alfabet/alphabet identifies components of fellow linguistic migrants' experiences, while leaving lifelong English speakers with a different perspective of their mother tongue.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyaya_(book)"title="Nyaya (book)">
The book depicts the journey of the writer to be the first female Chief Justice of Nepal. Karki served for 30 years in the law profession and eight years as a judge. She writes about her growing up years and her memories of the college life. The book describes the various political upheavals in Nepal and Karki's involvement in those activities and revolutions. The book also contains the various struggles she had to face while she was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Nepal and the various landmark decisions she delivered. The book also contains accounts of the various political pressures Karki had to endure during her term.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_(novel)"title="Kara (novel)">
The novel is the story of female prisoners. Karki herself was prisoned during the Panchayat regime in the 90s. The major theme of the book is about the bondage of the women in the society. Its hows the discrimination that a woman has to face in the society.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Junta_of_Happenstance"title="The Junta of Happenstance">
"The Junta of Happenstance" is Olonuntoba's poetic debut and is a compendium of dis-ease. It encompasses disease in the traditional sense, as informed by his experiences as a physician, as well as dis-ease, used as a primer for familial dysfunction, (im)migrant experience, and urban / corporate unease. With awareness and insight, Olonuntoba is able to make sense of a current situation by finding beauty in turmoil, and strength in pain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheerharan"title="Cheerharan">
"Cheerharan" is a retelling of the infamous humiliation of Draupadi from the Sabha Parva of Mahabharata. During the game of dice, Pandavas place their wife Draupadi for the bet and loses her after which she is humiliated by the Kauravsas. The Kauravas strips her in front of the whole court and Pandavas do nothing to protect her dignity. In the end, Lord Krishna interferes to save her from humiliation. This part is one of the key moments that eventually lead to Mahabarata war. The novel draws a parallel on the exploitation of women during that period and the modern age. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass-Blowers"title="The Glass-Blowers">
In 1841, Sophie Duval receives a letter from her daughter, Zoe, telling of a man she has met who shares her mother's maiden name. Sophie arranges to meet the man, Louis-Mathurin Busson, having established that he is the son of her eldest brother Robert. After meeting him and finding confirming who he is, Sophie tells the story of her family and how Robert's son grew up in England not knowing of his family in France. The Bussons were a successful family of glassblowers who produced high quality pieces for the aristocracy. The eldest son, Robert shows a lot of talent as a glassblower but is desperate to be part of higher society. This leads him into financial trouble and needs to be rescued by his father. The second son of the family, Pierre, has no interest in glass and is sent away by the family to Martinique to work with a rich planter. Later, after his return and the death of his father, he becomes a notary to help the repressed. Sophie marries one of Robert's friends, François helps with the running of the refinery. She keeps in contact with Robert, though cannot understand his obsession with high society. Michel takes up the family trade but never does as well as his father and brother before him. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Radiant_Life"title="This Radiant Life">
"This Radiant Life" is a book-length poem that examines the elements that make up our reality, as well as the gaps found between them. It analyses the concept of our unique selves and how they fit into a larger collective whole.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Rose,_White_Rose_(Eileen_Chang)"title="Red Rose, White Rose (Eileen Chang)">
"Maybe every man has had two such women-at least two. Marry a red rose, and eventually she'll be a mosquito-blood streak smeared on the wall, while the white one is "moonlight in front of my bed." Marry a white rose, and before long she'll be a grain of sticky rice that's gotten stuck to your clothes; the red one, by then, is a scarlet beauty mark just over your heart. " As an eye-catching quote in this novella, from the very beginning, a startling metaphor introduces the theme of the problematic nature of male desire. However, Tong Zhenbao thinks he is different. Returning from studying in Edinburgh with excellent grades, Zhenbao was hired by a famous foreign trading company in Shanghai as a senior staff. In his respect, he is an ideal modern Chinese man. For the convenience of transportation, he rents a room from his classmate Wang Shihong, who has a beautiful and charming wife named Jiaorui.On the day Zhenbao moved into the room and met her, he was deeply fascinated by this rose-like woman. He picked up her stray hairs from the floor tiles and twisting them together, then "stuffed it into his pocket. His hand stayed there, and his whole body tingled." Once, Shihong went to Singapore on business. After several spiritual and physical struggles, on a rainy day, they broke the moral bottom line and fell in love. However, when Jiaorui told Zhenbao that she confessed to her husband and was planning to divorce to marry him, Zhenbao flinched. He hesitated, annoyed, and eventually fell ill. In the ward, he explained to her that their love can only be the love of friends; he cannot give up his entire life, his family, and his friends because of what happened between them. After hearing these hypocritical words, Jiaorui wiped her chaotic teardrops, and without looking at him once, walked out of his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draupadi_Avashesh"title="Draupadi Avashesh">
The book is based on the polyandry tradition that is practiced by a small community in Humla district of Karnali region in Nepal. The book depicts how the custom is being lost in the modern society. The title of the book is an ode to Draupadi from Mahabharata who married five Pandava brothers. Gyaljen is one of the people living in the Himalayan region of Humla district. Because of the polyandry custom, he is supposed to marry his sister in law who is quite older than him. He is conflicted about the prospect. The novel also highlights the difficulties of people living in remote mountainous region of Nepal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramite"title="Ramite">
The novel is set in a fictional world, and has been told by multiple narrators. It consists of various songs, sketches and fictional scripts. The book depicts the story of human civilization, societies and various human instincts that mirrors our world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathshala_(novel)"title="Pathshala (novel)">
"Pathshala" is a coming of age story of a Nepalese teenage boy. It depicts the story of an urban teenager and presents the various the elements of his social life—friends, family, school. It sheds light on the growing pains of an adoloscent child in a city. Gagan is the central character of the book who lives in the city of Pokhara.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shrew_of_Destiny"title="The Shrew of Destiny">
## Main story.The story begins with Dobrzyk fighting a spider in the forest. Eventually, Dobrzyk overcomes the spider, who begs for mercy and says that it is an endangered species. Dobrzyk leaves the spider be and continues the hunt, finding a large cuckoo egg, however, he is begged by some smaller birds into not eating the egg. He returns to Shrews’ Valley, unaware that he is being followed by a mink, and meets Śmiłka, who points out that he did not catch anything, as usual, and shares a snack, an earthworm, with him. She calls him out on being a softy, but he denies that. He pulls up his shirt to show that there is not a gram of fat on him, also revealing a strange, crown-shaped marking. Unknown to the shrews, the marking is seen by the mink. Meanwhile, the shrews retreat to their burrows. The mink walks away, monologuing about how he will dispose of the shrew with the “king's mark” and that then, minks can take over. Then, the scene cuts to Korina stuck in a plastic bottle, calling for help. The call is heard by two shrew guards on duty some distance away, but they dismiss it. Suddenly, they encounter a bottle cap, and then, a cloaked shadow covers the ground. Meanwhile, the scene cuts to Dobrzyk sleeping in his burrow when he is woken by Korina, who is trying to tell him something. Dobrzyk is confused by this and wakes up before he can learn anything.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_Falls"title="Leviathan Falls">
On Laconia, Winston Duarte seems to waken from the semi-catatonic state caused by a time-warping event. He projects himself into Trejo's mind, who is in the Sol system reconquering it for the Laconian Empire. Duarte thanks Trejo for holding the Empire together, and tells him they were thinking too small in their empire-building vision. Duarte vanishes, and Trejo orders the ship to return to the Laconia system.When Trejo returns to Laconia, Duarte had already left the state building and disappeared. Trejo dispatches Colonel Aliana Tanaka to find him, giving her the highest possible level of clearance. She tracks Duarte to the cave Amos Burton lived in. Tanaka goes further into the cave network and determines that Duarte likely left in an alien ship. She decides the best way to find him is to use Teresa as a lure, so she sets out to find her. Her investigation turns up a relative of Duarte who runs a girls' boarding school on one of the colony worlds and decides to investigate it as a likely location for Teresa to be sent.Elvi is investigating the Adro Diamond with a full science team and the two children who died on Laconia and were revived by the repair drones (now essentially immortal since their aging process was halted by the change), Xan and Cara. They use the catalyst to trigger interactions between Cara and the Jupiter-sized diamond to dive into the library. Some of Cara's experiences during the dives bleed over into Amos, who has been altered in the same way during the events of "Tiamat's Wrath".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyoti_Jyoti_Mahajyoti"title="Jyoti Jyoti Mahajyoti">
It is a social realist novel that depicts story, pain, lifestyle, lifestyle etc. of the people in and around Pashupati region. It seeks to eradicate social inequality, anomalies, superstitions, customs and superstitions in the name of religion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wayward_Daughter_(novel)"title="The Wayward Daughter (novel)">
Sumnima Tamule is a student in Rhododendron High School. Most of her peers are from rich families and are planning to go abroad for their higher education. She is from a middle-class family and got second division in her studies, she has to settle for an obscure college in the city. After Sunmina's poor performance in the exam, her parents expectation falls upon her younger sister, Numa. Subsequently, her cousins from Lungla, a village in remote Nepal comes to Sumnina's place fleeing the civil war troubles. Her life is caught in a frenzy amidst all new changes in her household. The book also depicts the class and caste differences in cosmopolitan Kathmandu.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Actual_Star"title="The Actual Star">
The first timeline takes place in 1012, and centers on two sisters and brother (Ket, Ixul and Ajul) who are the last scions of a declining Mayan kingdom. As Ixul and Ajul prepare for their ascension to the throne, they are unknowingly the target of an uprising set to end their dynasty. In the more present-day timeline of 2012, a young woman named Leah decides to leave her hometown of Anoong, Minnesota, to explore her Belizean roots. In a cave deep in the jungle she discovers a connection to Xibalba, the Mayan underworld, and to the events of long ago. In the future, in 3012, humanity has been greatly reduced due to a climatic apocalypse brought on by human abuse of the environment. The survivors establish a utopian, genderless, nomadic society with a religion, Laviaja, based on worship of Leah and the two brothers she encountered in her search in Belize. The narrative follows Niloux deCayo, who is determined to challenge some of the fundamental precepts of her society, at the risk of being labeled a heretic and excommunication. The sacred cave, Actun Tunichil Muknal, is the axis upon which all the timelines converge, and where each of the protagonists ultimately discovers the truths they sought.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Boys_Aren't_Blue"title="All Boys Aren't Blue">
The book discusses consent, agency, and sexual abuse, alongside various other topics. It also describes two sexual encounters and statutory rape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modiaain"title="Modiaain">
The novella is set in the aftermath of the Kurukshetra War. The death and destruction caused by the war was of astronomical amount. Many women lost their male relatives in the war. "Modiaain" is the story of such a woman who lost her husband in the war. Within the book, emotions like war, love, sexuality, beauty, longing, anger, morality, honesty, fear, bravery, deceit, renunciation, emptiness and indomitable aspirations are shown in Koirala's smooth prose.The story begins with a boy travelling from Nepal to India with a guy called Misirji. The boy is very keen to explore the city of Darbhanga. There the two stay in a house of Modiaain. They bathe in the Hadaha Pokhari (Hadaha lake) near the house and have lunch then the boy explores the city during the day with Misirji. The boy wishes to visit the Hadaha Pokhari but Modiaain stops him since it is night-time. Modiaain tells him that the lake has been there since the Mahabharata time. She then narrates the story of the Mahabharata to the boy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teen_Ghumti_(novel)"title="Teen Ghumti (novel)">
It is set during the Panchayat regime in Nepal. Indramaya, a Newa girl falls in love with Pitamber, who belongs to Brahmin family. Amidst the difficulties of taboo regarding inter-caste marriage in Nepal, they get married. For his political activism, Pitamber is jailed by the Panchayat government. During his imprisonment, Indramaya falls for his friend Ramesh and gets pregnant. The novel depicts the psychological struggle of Indramaya.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bairagi_Kailaka_Kabitaharu"title="Bairagi Kailaka Kabitaharu">
The poems in this collection deals with the social and cultural elements of the Nepalese society. The poet uses inspiration from Greek, African as well as Limbu mythologies to draw parallel to present day society. "Aawaran" (cover), "Aaunlaharu Chumera" (After kissing the fingers), "Ek Raat" (One night) are some of the poems included in this collection.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whore_of_New_York"title="Whore of New York">
Liara Roux, an autistic resident of New York City's Upper East Side, recalls her childhood of conservative Christian surroundings and an abusive father, in juxtaposition with her latent desire to be involved with prostitution. As an adult, Roux is sexually abused in a lesbian relationship with her partner, and finds solace in the practice of sex work, even when her sexual experiences with clients are flawed. Roux raises questions about sex and sexuality as commodities, bodily autonomy, sexual consent, and the worth of the individual in a collective western society. She also tells of her medical conditions in life, including excruciating migraines, and her poor experience when seeking proper healthcare. The book continues with various personal accounts of Roux's experiences with clients, as she seeks independence from her partner after a bad marriage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_Flowers_(book)"title="Tiger Flowers (book)">
Joel, a young boy, is grieving after the death of his uncle Michael from AIDS-related complications. As he explains the death to his younger sister Tara, he remembers the things he and Michael did together: building a tree house, planting tiger lilies in the garden, and attending a baseball game with Peter, Michael's companion. Michael had moved in with Joel's family after Peter died from AIDS. Joel is comforted by his mother, who tells him that the grief will fade with time. Unable to sleep one night, he visits the tree house and watches the sun rise on the tiger lilies. He picks one for Tara, telling her that the "tiger flowers" were Michael's favorite and will always be his favorite as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohan_Koiralaka_Kavita"title="Mohan Koiralaka Kavita">
The book contained all the poems of the poet published in various journals and newspaper between 1953 and 1971. "Pharsiko Jhara", "Lek", "Surya Dan", "Himchuli Raktim Cha" are some of the poems included in this anthology.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marble_Statue"title="The Marble Statue">
On a summer night, the young man Florio finds himself participating in festivities near the gate to Lucca. He becomes acquainted with the famous musician Fortunato, a beautiful maiden he later learns is named Bianca, and the eloquent cavalier Donati. Donati greets Florio as an old friend and knows many details about his youth, but Florio cannot recall having met Donati before.Florio stays at an inn in Lucca but is unable to sleep and goes for a nightly walk. He finds a marble statue of Venus which seems oddly familiar, reminding him of his youth but also alarming him. Revisiting the statue the next morning, he ends up at an extravagant garden surrounding a palace where he spots a beautiful, singing lady whose features are strikingly similar to those of the statue. He encounters Donati who says the lady is a wealthy relative of his and offers to introduce Florio to her in the near future.The following morning, Donati invites Florio to go hunting, but the latter refuses because it is Sunday and he wants to go to church. Fortunato invites him to a party in the evening. There, Florio encounters a masked woman in a Greek robe, or possibly two women he conflates. When the woman invites him to visit her home some day and shows her face, Florio recognises her as the lady from the garden. Late at night, Fortunato introduces Florio to the host of the party, who is Bianca's uncle Pietro, as well as Bianca herself, but she is disappointed by Florio's coldness and distraction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach_Read"title="Beach Read">
January Andrews is a successful romance novel writer who is struggling after the death of her father and the discovery that he was having an affair. While living in his old beach house to prepare to sell it, she runs into Augustus Everett, her former rival in college and now an acclaimed literary fiction author. They reconnect and bond over struggling with writer’s block; they challenge each other to spend the summer writing a novel in each other’s genres.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhimsen_Ko_Antya"title="Bhimsen Ko Antya">
The play is divided into eight acts. The book is based on the later life of the first prime minister of modern Nepal, Bhimsen Thapa. The end days of Thapa consisted of lots of struggle. He was falsely imprisoned by various conspiracies by the other courtiers in the Durbar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prithviraj_Chauhan_(epic)"title="Prithviraj Chauhan (epic)">
The epic consists of 21 cantos. It is based on the life of Prithviraj Chauhan, a North Indian king of Chauhan dynasty who reigned from to CE. The epic was written to illustrate the medieval Indian feudal society.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Forget_Us_Here"title="Don't Forget Us Here">
"Don't Forget Us Here" is the memoir of a man who was in detention at Guantánamo Bay for 14 years. The book is a series of manuscripts Mansoor Adayfi wrote while he was at Guantánamo and sent to his attorneys as letters; he then used them as the basis of his book, which he wrote in collaboration with Antonio Aiello. While in prison, Adayafi became a stubborn fighter who led prison riots and hunger strikes. Adayfi was known as Detainee 441 in Guantánamo; He tried to persuade his captors he had not been cooperating with Al-Qaeda. According to the book, to avoid torture, he confessed to be a member of al-Qaeda.According to Adayfi, Americans were more interested in taking revenge for the attacks than in finding out the detainees' identities and what they had done. He said: "I had only heard about the Sept.11 attacks". Adayfi writes Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, the Guantánamo commander from 2002 to 2004, "turned the camp into where everything seemed designed to humiliate and demean us".At his hearing in front of a panel that was meant to evaluate detainees, he read out a statement telling them again he was not a member of al Qaeda; "But after what they had done to us, I would join al-Qaeda", Adayfi added. He writes: "I wanted to teach them that they couldn’t kill us and torture us and expect us to love them for it. No; I wanted them to see what they had created."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Achilles"title="Mr. Achilles">
"Mr. Achilles" is the first American novel in which a Greek immigrant, fruit stand owner Achilles Alexandrakis, appears as a protagonist. Achilles, who is from Athens, meets Betty Harris, the 12-year-old daughter of a millionaire meat magnate, when she is trying to find her way home after a music lesson. She asks him about Greek culture and listens attentively to his stories. Achilles befriends and subsequently rescues Betty when she is kidnapped. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Where_I_Flee"title="Land Where I Flee">
The book centers around a Nepali-Indian family from the state of Sikkim. Chitralekha Neupaney, a 84 year old woman is the matriarch of the family who has raised her grandchildren after their parents passed away. On the occasion of her 84th birthday ("Chaurasi"), there is a reunion in the family of those four grandchildren who live in different parts of the world. Prasanti is the eunuch maid of the house who is very bossy. The novel deals with various themes like identity and family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Every"title="The Every">
Delaney Wells, a former forest ranger from Idaho, interviews at The Every, a software company headquartered on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. Her goal is to destroy the company from within, although she does not have a solid plan. As part of her interview she enlists her friend and housemate Wes Makazian to create a prototype for an application that can determine whether a person you are talking to is telling the truth.Delaney is hired, and the company sets about productizing the idea she presented during her interview. This also results in Wes Makazian being hired as a developer at The Every. As part of her initial time at the company, Delaney is rotated among different teams. During each of these rotations she proposes ideas, brainstormed by Wes and her, that are meant to be so invasive and offensive to the public that they would damage the reputation of The Every once they are released. However, to her surprise and dismay, each idea is well-received by the public. Wes's stature at The Every continues to grow, and he tells Delany that he is no longer interested in working against the company. During this time, she is receiving increasingly distressed letters from her college professor, Meena Agarwal, an anti-monopolist who is strongly opposed to The Every and is upset that Delaney is working there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_on_the_Ground_Floor"title="Life on the Ground Floor">
The book is broken into 26 chapters, which follow the alphabet from A to Z, with each chapter consisting of a short essay. The stories are mostly set in Toronto or Addis Ababa and each offer unusual perspectives of working in hospital emergency departments.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silent_Land"title="The Silent Land">
Jake and Zoe, a young married couple, are buried by an avalanche while skiing near the fictional ski resort town of Saint-Bernard-en-Haut in the French Pyrenees. They manage to free themselves and return to the town, but find it silent and deserted. They assume it has been evacuated because of the avalanche, but are soon disturbed by strange observations. Time appears to have stopped: candles do not burn down, food in the hotel kitchen remains fresh. They also find they cannot leave the town or communicate with the outside world. The couple deduces that they died in the avalanche and are stuck on their own in an afterlife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellman._Biografin"title="Bellman. Biografin">
The book is arranged like a play, in three "acts", complete with a "dramatis personae" listing the "Gentlemen" and "Ladies" in Bellman's life.In "Act 1 Morning. The Era of Freedom () 1740–1771", Burman describes the career possibilities opening up for the young Bellman, though his financial problems and missed career steps limited his progress.In "Act 2 Midday. The Light under Gustav III 1771–1789", she narrates how Bellman's contact with the new king gave him a measure of real literary success, but that he limited his future by clinging to the Bacchanalian in his poems, as seen in his 1783 verse drama "Bacchi Tempel". He was overtaken by a younger generation of educated literary figures, especially his rival, the poet and critic Johan Henrik Kellgren.In "Act 3 Evening. The Dark Years 1789–1795", Burman describes Bellman's last years. There was no happy ending: his career continued to decline both financially and socially, reflecting the political changes in the Gustavian age. He died in poverty, of pneumonia. His rivalry with Kellgren had ended with reconciliation, as Kellgren helped him to get "Fredman's Epistles" published, and wrote a foreword to the book. Burman provides a detailed commentary on the Epistles and how they changed on the way to publication. She describes, too, his wealthy bourgeois patrons, and the women who both inspired him and helped him in his later years, showing how his poems functioned in social terms.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worth_Dying_For_(Marshall_book)"title="Worth Dying For (Marshall book)">
Marshall, a journalist who has worked in 25 countries over 40 years for the BBC and Sky News among others, writes in the book about flags and their role in history and identity. He details their history, including how the discovery and export of silk by China resulted in their popularisation around the world. Topics include the Confederate battle flag and its modern controversy, the use of the Union Jack by far-right groups and reclamation by British citizens of all ethnic groups, and the adoption of the current flag of South Africa after the end of apartheid. A final chapter includes non-state flags, such as the Jolly Roger, the flags of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and racing's Chequered flag.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Light_(Weber_novel)"title="Into the Light (Weber novel)">
On a devastated Earth, salvaged Shongairi technology sets humanity up to recover and advance beyond the tragedy of alien invasion, soon to be united under the banner of the newly formed Planetary Union. As the leap in technology and scientific knowledge sets humanity up for a bright interstellar future, Dave Dvorak starts looking among the stars for allies in the coming confrontation with the Galactic Hegemony.At the same time, Vlad Dracuela and Stephen Buchevsky lead the captured and now vampire-crewed Shongairi fleet on its journey to enemy space.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Thing_He_Told_Me"title="The Last Thing He Told Me">
Hannah is left to navigate the aftermath when her husband Owen disappears during an embezzlement investigation. He leaves a note begging Hannah to protect Bailey, her teenage stepdaughter. Bailey is often difficult towards Hannah, but after finding a duffel bag from Owen with six-hundred-thousand dollars in cash, she depends on Hannah for answers. The FBI begins to investigate, and Hannah learns Owen is hiding his true identity.Hannah remembers Owen's defensiveness when she suggested they go to Texas for vacation, and Bailey recalls some early memories from there, leading to their departure from California to Texas. In Austin, his old Professor recalls him and gives them access to old class photos. They discover a picture of a woman, Kate Smith, who looks nearly identical to Bailey. After doing some research, Hannah connects Kate to a bar nearby. She heads over, hiding Bailey in a cafe. Hannah speaks to the bartender, Charlie, gleaning bits of information about the woman—his sister—who has since died. Trying to connect them to Owen, she shows him a picture. Charlie reacts violently, throwing Hannah's phone to the floor. Bailey bursts in and orders him to back away. He freezes in a state of shock, identifying Bailey as Kristin. They return to their hotel to hide and pack for a flight home. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epitaph_for_a_Spy"title="Epitaph for a Spy">
Josef Vadassy is a Hungarian refugee of uncertain statehood. Born in Szabadka, as a result of the Treaty of Trianon he is no longer a citizen of Yugoslavia but a persona non grata. While on holiday in the south of France, he sends a roll of camera film for development, however it turns out to contain pictures which are not his, of nearby naval defences. He is arrested on suspicion of spying. The police realise that Vadassy did not take the pictures, but that someone else at his hotel must have an identical camera, a Zeiss Ikon Contax. Vadassy is told to return to the hotel to find the real spy, with the threat that should he fail to do so, he will be deported, which could mean death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgment_on_Deltchev"title="Judgment on Deltchev">
Foster is a playwright who is hired by an American newspaper to visit an unnamed East European country, to report on the show trial of politician Yordan Deltchev. Deltchev was a member of the Agrarian Socialist Party, however the People's Party had taken power in a coup d'etat. After Deltchev spoke out, he was arrested and the Agrarian Socialist Party was suppressed. Deltchev had gone to great lengths to secure the Anglo-American, rather than Soviet, occupation of the country after the end of the Second World War. He is accused of doing so for personal gain. In addition, he is accused of being part of a plot by the Officer Corps Brotherhood secret society to assassinate the country's leader, Vukashin.Foster is met by Georghi Pashik, his employer's local representative, who runs a press bureau. Pashik is keen that Foster not cause trouble.The regime has denied Deltchev insulin to treat his diabetes; a fact which Deltchev uses in court to discredit the prosecution's inferences. However, it becomes apparent that the evidence of Deltchev's membership of the Officer Corps Brotherhood is real.Foster visits Deltchev's wife, Madame Deltchev. Deltchev's daughter Katerina asks Foster to deliver a letter. When he does so, he finds a murdered body. Pashik arrives, claiming to have followed Foster. Pashik takes Foster to visit Aleko, who claims he is a member of the secret police.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Schirmer_Inheritance"title="The Schirmer Inheritance">
George Carey is a former WWII bomber pilot and recently qualified lawyer. In 1951 or 1952, Carey is tasked with going through the Schneider Johnson files, to check that nothing has been overlooked in the search for the heir to the Schirmer fortune.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night-Comers"title="The Night-Comers">
Steve Fraser is an engineer working on a dam on the Southeast-Asian island of Sunda. Sunda is a former Dutch colony, which has recently become independent. Fraser's period of employment at an end, he goes to town to catch a plane out. He meets a half Dutch, half Sundan girl, Rosalie and both get caught up in a fundamentalist Islamic group's attempt to overthrow the provisional government and the subsequent battle around the radio station.An atmospheric tale of love and adventure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Day_(Eric_Ambler_novel)"title="The Light of Day (Eric Ambler novel)">
Arthur Abdel Simpson, the narrator, is an amoral taxi-driver and petty-criminal in Athens, who gets his living mostly by ripping off tourists. One of his targets, a man named Harper, catches him, and blackmails him into driving a car across the border from Greece into Turkey. The Turkish authorities find that the car is loaded with concealed illegal weapons, and Simpson faces the terrifying prospect of a long term in a Turkish prison. However, the authorities offer him a chance to earn leniency: he must deliver the weapons according to Harper's instructions, and then somehow ingratiate himself with Harper's gang, learn their goals and plans, and report regularly to the government's agents. The government suspects an attempt at terrorism or insurgency, but it turns out that Harper and his gang actually have an audacious plan to steal valuable gems from the treasury museum of the Topkapı Palace. While preparing for the robbery, one of the gang suffers a disabling injury, and Simpson is forced to take his place and participate in the commando-type raid on the museum, despite having no relevant experience whatsoever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Levanter"title="The Levanter">
Michael Howell is a "levantine mongrel" who has inherited his family's Middle-Eastern business. He is forced by the Palestine Action Force to produce bombs for them.The story is framed by a description from a journalist of Ghaled, a Palestinian terrorist and extortionist.Howell's company has its Syrian assets frozen by the new socialist government. Hoping to make the best of a bad situation, he proposes to the government that they start various joint ventures, with Howell's foreign companies getting exclusive export rights. One of these joint ventures is a battery company. Howell's wife discovers the battery business has been ordering unnecessary and unauthorized extra materials. Michael recognizes these materials as ingredients for bombs, and they visit the factory at night. There, they discover an employee is hosting bomb-making classes. The security guard turns out to be Ghaled, the notorious terrorist, who threatens Howell and his wife, and forces them to join the Palestinian Action Force (PAF). He forces them to sign confessions of being Israeli spies, and to assist with ordering crucial parts for bomb detonators.Ghaled has two plans. The first is to build hundreds of suitcase bombs and distribute them throughout Israel on tourist buses. These are all to be detonated simultaneously using radio receiver parts from one of Howell's companies. The second is to shell the Tel Aviv coastline from a small wooden boat the PAF has bought, shielding it from radar with one of Howell's larger ships. Ghaled and Howell travel on Howell's ship. Howell has secretly given orders to the captain to remain sufficiently far from the coast that the shells are out of range. In a struggle between the ship's crew and Ghaled's men, Howell shoots Ghaled dead, and destroys the remote control for the suitcase bombs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Frigo"title="Doctor Frigo">
Dr. Ernesto Castillo is a young, competent, cynical physician living and practicing on the fictional French-Caribbean Island St. Paul-les-Alizés. His nickname, "Dr. Frigo", means, literally, "Dr. Frozen-Meat", which refers to his clipped, unsympathetic demeanor with patients and colleagues. The country he lives in is not his native land; he lives in exile, because his father, a left-wing revolutionary activist, led an unsuccessful uprising against the ruling junta, and was assassinated, some years before. At the time of the father's death, Castillo was just beginning his medical training at a prestigious medical school in a wealthier part of the world. He spends most of his free time with his girlfriend, a beautiful but moody art-dealer, descended from a leading member of the Habsburg dynasty and neurotically obsessed with its history.Now, oil has been discovered in Dr. Castillo's native land, and the father's former comrades are planning a second insurgency. Their leader, who was a close friend of Dr. Castillo's father, comes to Dr. Castillo as a patient, with some puzzling symptoms. At the same time, his father's former comrades seek to recruit him: as the son of the assassinated leader, he would be a useful figurehead to lead the next revolt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Send_No_More_Roses"title="Send No More Roses">
Criminologist Professor Frits Krom visits Paul Firman, alias Oberholzer, a crooked investor. Firman agrees to be interviewed at his villa on the French Riviera. They come under attack by Firman's former business partner, Mat Tuakana.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_of_Spades_(novel)"title="Ace of Spades (novel)">
Devon Richards and Chiamaka Adebayo are the only two Black students at their private school, Niveus Private Academy and exist in completely different social spheres. However, on the first day of school, they are both named as school prefects. One day, a group message from "Aces" is sent to the student body that shows Devon kissing another male student, outing both students and sending the school into an uproar. Soon, more and more incriminating texts and images are sent about both Devon and Chiamaka, forcing them to work together to discover who Aces is, why they selected Chiamaka and Devon to humiliate, and why they want to ruin both students' futures.Near the end of the book, Chiamaka and Devon learn that Aces is not a single entity but rather a large swathe of the student body, working in tandem to destroy the lives of Black students. They discover that Niveus Private Academy is one of many private institutions across the country that, due to age-old ties to slavery and the Confederacy, rarely accept Black students, but when they do, their goal is to perform social eugenics by allowing the students to climb in the school, then, in their senior year, destroy their futures, disallowing Black individuals to succeed in the world beyond high school.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Love_Hypothesis"title="The Love Hypothesis">
"The Love Hypothesis" follows the main character Olive in trying to convince her best friend, Anh into thinking that her dating life is going great. In order to convince Anh, she pretends to date her coworker, Adam. Olive and Adam try to convince everyone around them they are in love. But while convincing everyone, they forget that their feelings are supposed to be fake. How long will it take for Olive and Adam to realize that they don't want to pretend anymore?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fisherman_(novel)"title="The Fisherman (novel)">
Abraham or Abe, as he prefers, is a widower who struggles to find peace after his wife's death. After a bout of alcoholism, Abe uses fishing to find peace. Abe forms a friendship with his coworker Dan, who recently survived a terrible accident that left him a widower as well. After some weekends of fishing Dan suggests the pair try out Dutchman's Creek, a mysterious fishing spot with a cursed past that's rumoured to bring back lost loved ones. On their way to the creek, they stop at a diner and are warned of the dangers of Dutchman's Creek, ignoring the warning the two men continue on their way. At the creek they come face to face with the mysterious "Der Fisher", who is attempting to catch the primordial Leviathan. They are faced with the choice to help him and regain their lost loves or defy him and fight for survival.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Smiled_Beads"title="The Girl Who Smiled Beads">
"The Girl Who Smiled Beads" begins in Rwanda during the Rwandan Civil War, when Wamariya was six years old. Alongside her sister Claire, Wamariya fled Rwanda, spending the next six years traveling through seven African countries as refugees. In 2000, the Wamariya sisters were granted asylum in the United States, and they landed in Chicago, unsettled. Although Wamariya spoke five languages, she did not speak English, and at twelve years old, she had never attended school formally. "The Girl Who Smiled Beads" showcases how, even after being granted asylum, refugees often do not feel settled and struggled to find their way in a new country.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paniko_Gham"title="Paniko Gham">
The novel consists of many stories set in Nepalgunj city in Mid-western region of Nepal. Neupane was posted as a teacher in Nepalgunj and there he decided to write the book. The stories represent the socio-economic lifestyle of the people of the city.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/400_Days_(novel)"title="400 Days (novel)">
After the incidents of "One Arranged Murder", Keshav and Saurabh are living with Keshav's parents in their new apartment in a gated community called Icon. Keshav has quit his job at Cybersafe and prepares for IPS while Saurabh continues to work and is determined to get fit as he is upset with his physical appearance. One day Keshav is called by his parents to meet a woman known as Alia Arora, whom they hope to be a suitable bride for him. They are astonished to see that she also brought her child, Suhana. She is a neighbor living in the adjacent building and asks for his help to find her missing daughter Siya, who had disappeared 9 months ago. Though reluctant at first, Keshav is encouraged by his parents to take up the case as Alia had promised huge payments irrespective of the result. Keshav agrees and begins his investigations.The story then moves to Alia's point of view where she narrates the incidents of the past 9 months and her marriage. Alia is married to Manish, a rich businessman, whose family is into jewellery businesses and is one of the richest in the area. Manish's mother is not fond of Alia, as she married Manish without her approval. The entire family always listens to their priest Shastri Ji, who has been associated with them for decades and is like a Godman to them. With his support, Manish convinces his mother to get married to Alia. However, Manish's mother constantly offends and bullies Alia, which results in Alia moving out of the joint family and goes to live in the Icon. On the day of the incident, Alia, Manish, the kids and Manish's brother Timmy and his family all gather at their parents house for a get together. The kids go to sleep and during the night Siya goes missing. The family questions each and everyone when Suhana suddenly says that she saw a 'Bad Man' who threatened to kill her sister and abducted Siya in the night and recalls a few identities of him. Despite the police's efforts and media coverage, Siya is not found. After 2 months, Alia receives an amazon package which contained Siya's bloodstained clothes and some locks of hair which belongs to her, making everyone believe that Siya is deceased. The police deems the case as a cold case and the family is okay with it as their reputation and business are no longer affected by this incident. However, Alia does not give up and believes that she can somehow find Siya and asks Keshav for assistance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Geography"title="The Power of Geography">
Marshall is a journalist for the BBC and Sky News. In the book, he focuses on ten areas that he considers to be potential hotspots in the future due to their geography, for reasons including climate change, ethnic strife and competition for resources. The areas in focus are Australia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Greece and Turkey, the Sahel (the transition zone on the edge of the Sahara desert), Ethiopia, Spain and outer space. Marshall considers that immigration from the Sahel to Europe will continue, that wars may break out in Ethiopia's neighbours due to their reliance on the country's water, that oil is running out in Saudi Arabia and that Britain is seeking new alliances post-Brexit. He analyses Australia's role as a U.S. ally and its relations with its Pacific neighbours, including China. In his view, Iran faces the choice between social liberalisation, or revolt from its young population. He predicts an arms race between the US, Russia and China to be the dominant power in outer space, similar to the Cold War nuclear arms race.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Roads_Lead_to_Austen"title="All Roads Lead to Austen">
In 2011, academic Amy Elizabeth Smith takes a year on sabbatical from her role in the Writing and Literature department of the University of the Pacific. Though her Spanish language knowledge is limited, she visits six countries in Latin America to hold book club discussions on three books by Jane Austen: "Sense and Sensibility" (1811), "Pride and Prejudice" (1813) and "Emma" (1816). She is interested in whether the themes and characters are relatable to people from a different culture.The countries visited are Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Paraguay and Mexico. Smith finds that almost all readers are able to relate to the themes of gender, class and family values in Austen's work. The book also follows her romantic experiences, activities while traveling and illness with dengue fever during the year. She reflects on the topic of race as it relates to Austen, and her preconceived notions about the places she visits.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Imperfect_Offering"title="An Imperfect Offering">
"An Imperfect Offering" starts with Orbinski's working class upbringing in Montreal, and his decision to study medicine.The story follows Orbinski as he works in disease outbreaks and conflict zones around the world including in Afghanistan, Chechnya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Peru, Kosovo, Somalia, Sudan, and Zaire. Orbinski is in charge of the Médecins Sans Frontières healthcare in Rwanda when the 1994 genocide occurs; the book documents horrific violence and Orbinski is scathing of the United Nations failed peacekeeping efforts.Throughout the book, Orbinski negotiates with warlords and avoids becoming a victim of the violence around him. The narratives stresses the importance that humanitarian organisations retain independence from political forces and publicly condemn human rights abuses.The final chapters of the book document Orbinski's time after his presidential term has ended and focus on global access to medicines. An Imperfect Offering critiques the pharmaceutical companies and regulatory environment they operate within for their failure to ensure that people in low income countries get the medicine they need.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naya_Ishwar_Ko_Ghoshana"title="Naya Ishwar Ko Ghoshana">
The epic is divided into two sections. Each section consists of 98 paragraphs. The poem is written in modern experimental style.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tenth_Riddle"title="The Tenth Riddle">
The book opens six years back from the current day with the murder of erstwhile princess of Goner, Avni Saraswat. In the present day, the lawyer of the royal family reaches out to the National Commission for Women which further approach the offices of Intelligence Bureau(India), New Delhi. Deputy Director Shoumik Haldar along with bestselling author Ishan Vajpayee and Shakti Sinha, Member of the Legislative Assembly of Jaipur form a team to crack the case. They travel to Goner and realize the case is much darker and murkier than what they originally anticipated. They come across ten riddles, each based on the ten forms of Mahadevi, called the Mahavidya and solve them one by one.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Canadian_Brothers"title="The Canadian Brothers">
"Canadian Brothers" is a sequel to "Wacousta" (1832). "Wacousta" is about the conflict between Colonel De Haldimar and Sir Reginald Morton, two officers of the British army who begin the novel as friends. De Haldimar makes off with Morton's fiancée and Morton, jilted, comes to Canada to avenge himself. On his arrival in North America, Morton reinvents himself as "Wacousta", an "Indian chief"."Wacousta" takes place following Pontiac's War in 1763, while "Canadian Brothers" is set during the War of 1812, in and around Detroit and Lake Erie. It takes place about 50 years after "Wacousta" ends. The titular "prophecy" is Ellen Holloway's prediction in "Wacousta" that everyone in the De Haldimar family will die grisly deaths.The novel's protagonists are Gerald and Henry Grantham, the Canadian brothers of the title, who are officers in the British army and supporters of the British Empire. The Granthams are descended from the De Haldimar family of "Wacousta"; they are grandchildren of Madeline and Frederick de Haldimar, cousins of "Wacousta" Colonel Charles de Haldimar and Clara Beverley. Gerald and Henry meet Matilda Montgomerie, an American, with whom Gerald falls in love.The novel's major villain is Jeremiah Desborough, a descendant of Wacousta and Matilda's father. Desborough is from Upper Canada but supports the American side in the war; he spies for the Americans around the Detroit River. Early in the novel, Desborough kills Major Grantham, Gerald and Henry's father. Other villains of "Canadian Brothers" include Americans eager to acquire more land.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divided_(book)"title="Divided (book)">
Marshall notes that the majority of border barriers built since the end of the Second World War were not Cold War structures like the Berlin Wall, but constructed in the 21st century. Chapters of the book are on barriers such as the Great Wall of China, the Moroccan Western Sahara Wall, the wall on the Bangladesh–India border, the Israeli West Bank barrier and the Mexico–United States barrier. Marshall writes that the 2015 European migrant crisis resulted in a rise in far-right parties, and believes that nation states should be protected while a "21st-century Marshall Plan" redistributes wealth to the Global South.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_Confidential"title="Springfield Confidential">
The book details Reiss's career in comedy, starting with his time at "The Harvard Lampoon" to writing jokes for Johnny Carson and Garry Shandling in the 1980s, all alongside his long-time writing partner Al Jean. The bulk of the book is on his time on "The Simpsons", as a writer, producer and showrunner. Reiss, who thought his career was over at the age of 28 by taking a job writing cartoons, worked on the show's early seasons at the height of "Bartmania". He also details the short-lived existence of "The Critic", an animated series he created.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Extraordinary_Union"title="An Extraordinary Union">
Freedwoman Ellen Burns, who has an eidetic memory, poses as a mute enslaved person in the Richmond, Virginia, household of a Confederate senator to gather intelligence for the Union. Scottish immigrant Malcolm McCall is a Pinkerton detective posing as a Confederate soldier to spy on the family Ellen has been "loaned" to. The two overcome obstacles to falling in love. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darius_the_Great_Is_Not_Okay"title="Darius the Great Is Not Okay">
"Darius the Great Is Not Okay" follows Darius Kellner, an Iranian–American teenager living in Portland, Oregon, who has clinical depression. He loves "Star Trek"; tea; and his little sister, Laleh. Darius struggles with bullies, a lack of friends, and his disapproving dad, Stephen Kellner.Stephen believes that it's partially Darius' fault for being bullied, since he makes himself more of a target. He dislikes Darius' hair length. Stephen also has clinical depression. The main time they spend with each other is when both they both watch an episode of "Star Trek" each night.Upon discovering his "babou" (Darius' mom's dad) has a brain tumor, the family decides to take a trip to the desert city of Yazd, Iran, where Darius' grandparents live. Darius has not seen his grandparents in a long time, and has only talked to them through video calls, but Darius speaks little Farsi compared to his mom and sister, so he easily gets lost in the conversations. Upon arriving, Darius instantly connects with his "mamou" (grandmother), but struggles to get to know his babou.Darius meets Sohrab, the son of one of Babou's neighbors. Sohrab invites him to play football, which Darius enjoys, but while showering after the game, other boys make fun of Darius' penis, calling it "Ayatollah", and Sohrab joins in. This leads to Darius leaving and having a breakdown, but Sohrab comes to apologize later in the day. Sohrab and Darius continue to bond as they hang out and begin to play football frequently. Darius feels comfortable around Sohrab; Darius feels like he can be himself around him. They often visit a rooftop (pictured in the cover) that provides a view of the city and an isolated place to talk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulka_(novel)"title="Ulka (novel)">
The story centres on an innocent man who desperately attempts to reunite with his family who had abandoned him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_We_Collided_(novel)"title="After We Collided (novel)">
After Tessa found out that Hardin played with her feelings, she leaves him and focuses on school and her life. She resorted her relationship with her mother Carol and ex-boyfriend Noah. She even gets a job at VP (Vance Publishing in the first book). Life started being good for Tessa and her new colleague Trevor falls in love with her.Hardin, on the other hand, is furious and sad at his friends especially Molly because she destroyed his first ever relationship with a girl who liked him. He is determined to change himself. He fixes his relationship with his father Ken and accepted Landon as brother and friend.A few days later Tessa, Trevor, Kimberly, and Vance go to Seattle to celebrate book publishing. Tessa gets drunk and started dancing, accidentally kissing a stranger because she imagined him to be Hardin.Hardin finds Tessa and Trevor in a hotel room and gets mad, later he and Tessa make love.The next morning, Tessa and Hardin argue about the incident the previous night. Before leaving the hotel room, Hardin tells her that he was sleeping with Molly. Tessa in rage throws objects at him.At work, Tessa is talking to Trevor, and he asks her if she loves Hardin. Tessa tells him, yes but they are apart because of personal issues.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Zlatan_Ibrahimović"title="I Am Zlatan Ibrahimović">
Swedish footballer Zlatan Ibrahimović tells his life story, starting from his upbringing in Rosengård, a mostly immigrant area of the southern city of Malmö. His Bosniak father and Croat mother marry for residency permits and separate when he is two; his father suffers from alcohol abuse and trauma from his family's suffering in the ongoing Bosnian War, while his mother is at times violent. Segregated from mainstream Swedish society, he finds a way to integrate while a young footballer at Malmö FF, while remaining self-conscious of his differences.In Ibrahimović's account of his one season at FC Barcelona (2009–10), he attacks manager Pep Guardiola, whom he considers indirect, cowardly and inflexible. He praises other managers from his career: Leo Beenhakker (AFC Ajax), Fabio Capello (Juventus) and José Mourinho (Inter Milan), as well as his agent Mino Raiola.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Knew_Too_Much_About_Flying_Saucers"title="They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers">
The book famously claimed Bender and other UFO investigators had been "silenced" by strange men in black suits.The work begins with Barker's initial interest in saucers during his 1952 investigation of the "Flatwoods Monster" and his subsequent saucer investigations in Brush Creek, California.Barker describes his interest in the Shaver Mystery and the magazines of Raymond Palmer, which ultimately led him to correspond with Albert K. Bender and join Bender's "International Flying Saucer Bureau. According to the narrative, Bender receives a metal sample allegedly from a UFO, after which he is visited by three men, each wearing black, who confiscate back issues of the group's newsletter. Bender recalls that one of the men told Barker his research was pointless, claiming "In our government we have the smartest men in the country. They can't find a defense for it. How can you do anything about it?" Before they depart, one of the men warns Bender: "I suppose you know you are on your honor as an American. If I hear another word out of your office you're in trouble".Barker recounts the 1947 tale of the Maury Island incident, where an alleged saucer witness claimed to have been warned not to discuss the incident by a man in a black suit. Barker speculates saucers may be linked to Antarctica or poltergeists. Barker lists others he believes have been "shushed", some in other countries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Such_a_Full_Sea"title="On Such a Full Sea">
The novel begins in the Charter village of B-Mor, formerly Baltimore, in a world afflicted by the disease "C" as the collective narrator reminisces on Fan's absence. Fan was a dedicated fish tank diver who was close to her boyfriend, Reg. However, Reg disappears one day with no explanation after being summoned to speak to a manager before the start of a work week. In the following days, Fan withdraws from her friends and work acquaintances. She ultimately decides to quietly leave B-Mor to search for her boyfriend in the aftermath of a big flood that kills one of Reg's younger friends.Fan begins her search by travelling westward via old roads into the anarchic open counties. However, she collapses in a ditch during a downpour, and Quig and Loreen find her crumpled form. They decide to bring her with them to the Smokes, a settlement in the open counties where they both live; Quig drugs her and shoves her into the trunk of his station wagon. Upon arriving at the Smokes, Quig takes care of her injured leg, and Fan is kept locked in a room of spare parts while she recovers. Loreen quickly expresses her dislike towards Fan's presence. In the ensuing days, there is an incident where she beats Fan until Quig intervenes and knocks Loreen out. In the aftermath of this incident, Loreen's son, Sewey, begins to bring Fan food and drink. Loreen continues to beat and humiliates Fan during her stay in the open country compound.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Arts_of_Central_Asia"title="Ancient Arts of Central Asia">
Under the name of Central Asia, Tamara Talbot Rice covers in the book a vast region in the broader interpretation of the term, from Transcaucasia to Eastern Turkestan, and a period spanning from prehistoric times to the Middle Ages when Christianity and Islam replaced Buddhism and Zoroastrianism.Starting with the early animal art of the Scythians in Southern Russia, the author proceeds eastwards, through Urartu and Persian-influenced region (Marlik and Ziwieh), Sogdia and Chorasmia, Hellenistic Bactria to Indo-Greek art, revealing the Graeco-Buddhist sculpture of Gandhara and the more Indian-natured School of Mathura. In the fifth chapter, Rice examines the little-known paintings and other forms of art of Eastern Turkestan, including Buddhist art of Bezeklik, Kizil, Khotan and Tunhuang, Indo-Sassanian influenced art unearthed in Dandan Oilik, East Syriac Christian and Manichaean murals discovered in Karakhoja (also Koço or Qocho), she also touches on the subject of Tibetan art. In the last chapter the author returns to the west to give an account of the early Christian art of Armenia, Georgia and Caucasian Albania.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_the_Sun_(Dennis-Benn_novel)"title="Here Comes the Sun (Dennis-Benn novel)">
The story, set in 1994, follows Delores and her two daughters Margot and Thandi, residents of the fictional town of River Bank, Jamaica. Delores spends her days selling trinkets to tourists to support her family. Thandi, a student, feels pressure to perform well in school but longs to become an artist, to lighten her skin, and to date Charles, a poor son of a fisher.Margot works at a resort whose managers' development plans threaten to displace the residents of River Bank. She moonlights as a prostitute and later as a madam. She is secretly in a romantic relationship with a reclusive woman named Verdene, who is ostracized and harassed by the community because of her sexual orientation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Rainbow_Girl"title="The Third Rainbow Girl">
"The Third Rainbow Girl" follows the true story of the murders of Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero in Pocahontas County, West Virginia in June 1980 when the duo had been hitchhiking to the Rainbow Gathering. Though no one was prosecuted for the "Rainbow Murders" for 13 years, many suspected local residents who were "depicted as poor, dangerous, and backward." A local farmer was convicted in 1993 but was released when Joseph Paul Franklin confessed to the crime. Throughout the story's telling, Copley Eisenberg provides insight into the harmful stories told and believed about people who live in Appalachia. She also discusses how "this mysterious murder has loomed over all those affected for generations, shaping their fears, fates, and desires."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_Syrians"title="We Are Syrians">
The book documents the lives of three generations of Syrian dissidents. It starts with theatre director Naila Al Atrash, who after studying in Bulgaria returned to Syria to organize political theatre. Al Atrash is the granddaughter of Sultan Pasha al-Atrash a famous military hero of the first Syrian Revolution.The second part of the book is about Radwan Ziadeh who grew up in Syria as it was being controlled by President Bashar al-Assad. Originally a dentist, Ziadeh became an intellectual who took part in the 2000 Damascus Spring.The third part follows the story of Sana Mustafa. Mustafa, a university student in Damascus, takes part in peaceful protests against the government of Bashar al-Assad. While on an educational exchange program in USA she is notified by text message that her father is detained and that her family are fleeing to Turkey. She applies for and received political asylum in USA and completes her education at Bard College.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keys_of_Middle-earth"title="The Keys of Middle-earth">
The first part of the book, named 'Introduction', begins with a background about J. R. R. Tolkien, covering his career, the relationship of his Middle-earth fiction to medieval literature, and an overview of his medieval sources. A section then introduces medieval literature in Old English, Middle English and Old Norse. The introduction concludes with five short essays on the thematic and technical parallels between Tolkien's writings and medieval literature, covering the theme of the quest, the epic, the runes, alliterative verse and Tolkien's use of it, and the names that he chooses.The second part of the book, named 'The Texts', offers mainly short excerpts from fourteen medieval literary works in the languages mentioned. Each section consists of a plot summary of the relevant part of Tolkien's story; an introduction to the medieval text; a discussion of Tolkien's use of the text, citing Tolkien scholars such as Tom Shippey; and finally a facing-page (parallel) text and new (rather literal) line-by-line translation if the text is Old English or Old Norse, or no translation but plentiful notes for Middle English.For "The Hobbit", the texts are "Völuspá" (Gandalf and the Dwarves), "Vafþrúðnismál" and "Solomon and Saturn II" (the riddle-game), and "Beowulf" (Smaug the dragon). 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_and_International_Aid_in_Afghanistan"title="Gender and International Aid in Afghanistan">
"Gender and International Aid in Afghanistan" documents gender equity efforts undertaken by humanitarian aid agencies as well as United States and NATO forces in Afghanistan after the 2001 fall of the Taliban and critiques the way that western forces sidelined the role of Afghan men with regards to women's empowerment.The book starts by giving a history of gender issues in Afghanistan, noting the significance of gender relations in politics, and criticizing western powers for neglecting to acknowledge this as they went about their work.It documents disparity between the progressive aspirations contained within United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 and the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Violence Against Women and the actual implementation of gender equity work in Afghanistan. Examples provided include the "constitutional democracy" agreement made by the United States, NATO and the Northern Alliance, which is described as "progressive" for its inclusion of references to Article Seven of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Violence Against Women, existing in contrast to the actions of institutions mandated to enforce them, such as the Afghanistan police force. It documents how western attempts to enforce technical solutions to social problems of gender inequity fail and block local grassroots social change.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Little_Guns_Went_Bang_Bang"title="All the Little Guns Went Bang Bang">
Set in Antrim during The Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, the book tells the take of two eleven year old children, May-Belle Mulholland and Pearse Furlong. Pearce is the son of a bullying Royal Ulster Constabulary officer, and May-Belle's father is regularly arrested and jailed, leaving her under the care of her violent mother.The children, portrayed as victims rather than villains, begin to torment and torture insects, graduating to small animals, influenced by the selfish acts of their parents. May-Belle is drugged and pimped by her mother.Their misbehavior destructively escalates in a city scarred by sectarian violence.Towards the end of the book Pearse Furlong's mother and grandmother are killed by a car bomb that was planted to target his father.The book uses dark comedy throughout.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wolf_Trial"title="The Wolf Trial">
Set in 16th-century Germany during the Lutheran reformation, the novel's protagonist is Melchior Paulus, who is tasked with investigating a mass murder in the township of Bideburg. Local military veteran and landowner Peter Stumpf is arrested for the murders, which were followed by cannibalism. His guilt is certain, but it is unknown if he is a human or a werewolf. Should Stumpf be deemed a werewolf, his family will also be punished. The plot therefore centers around an investigation undertaken by Paulus, who is attempting to avoid the collective family punishment.The story is described as the first ever serial killer trial.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cotton-Pickers"title="The Cotton-Pickers">
Gale is an itinerant who works jobs as a cotton picker, baker, cowboy, and oil rigger. He participates in a number of successive, spontaneous strikes without organized unions. He thinks of Guatemala and Argentina often.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emblems_of_Conduct"title="Emblems of Conduct">
The book tells about Windham growing up in Atlanta during the Depression, as his family, which had once been prosperous, gradually becomes impoverished. The Victorian home of the family, a remainder of their prosperous past, is demolished, and young Donald keeps a piece of stained glass as a reminder of "fading grandeur". Meanwhile his mother is struggling to cope with the situation, and is forced to rely on her relatives. The book covers Windham's childhood, through his graduation from high school and his decision to move to New York City thereafter. It evokes "with faint but unmistakable nostalgia the Atlanta of the early decades of the modern century."
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents'_Day_(novel)"title="Parents' Day (novel)">
In "Parents' Day", an unnamed male in his thirties begins teaching at a private school early in World War II. He is a single parent, having split with his wife. Early in the novel, the narrator announces his homosexuality and love for the 17-year-old Davy Drood. The narrator augurs that he will be fired for having a sexual relationship with a student, whereas heterosexual relationships with students were tolerated. When Davy seeks to have sex with a female student, the narrator tells the headmaster that they should provide contraceptives and facilitate an occasion for the pair. He questions whether he should tell Davy's mother on Parents' Day about his sexual attraction to Davy. The narrator has sex with a woman while thinking of Davy. He reveals that he had manually stimulated Davy through the blankets and the narrator ejaculated in his pants. Jeff Deegan, a student with a crush on the narrator, fights Davy on Parents' Day. In a jealous betrayal by Jeff, the narrator is fired from the school.The narrator's poems intersperse the text.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Caramel_Factory"title="From the Caramel Factory">
To support her family, 13-year-old Hiroko is forced to quit school and start working in a caramel factory by her unemployed father. There she witnesses the precarious working conditions of the factory girls, who suffer physical pain from working in the unheated facility and are forced to pay their meals from their meager salary. When the payment is switched from a fixed wage to a piece rate system, Hiroko's salary is reduced by two thirds. Her father, dissatisfied with Hiroko's income, which also pays her tram tickets, has her quit the factory job and start working in a noodle shop instead. One day, Hiroko receives a letter from her former school teacher at the shop, who writes that he will try to raise money so she can at least finish elementary school. Hiroko locks herself in the toilet and starts crying.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_State_of_the_World's_Cash_2020"title="The State of the World's Cash 2020">
It documents how the use of cash and voucher assistance (CVA) in humanitarian aid has doubled from US$2.8 billion in 2016, to $5.6 billion in 2019, representing 17.9% of spending on humanitarian assistance. Chapter by chapter it examines progress made on priority issues and includes recommendations for humanitarian policy makers and practitioners. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_State_of_the_Humanitarian_System"title="The State of the Humanitarian System">
The 2010 pilot edition highlighted reduced respect for humanitarian principles from local governments. It states that evaluations of humanitarian interventions do not sufficiently include the input from the people served by the interventions and called for increased participation.It criticized the coordination in the humanitarian cluster system for being weak and reported non-governmental organizations (NGO) fears of the cluster system being expanded in its role to include monitoring and evaluation of humanitarian responses.The report noted that there are 4,400 humanitarian NGOs, 64% being national organizations, 18% being international in scope, but that the sector was being dominated by a small number of large NGOs, five of which represent 38% of all spending. The top five being Médecins Sans Frontières, Catholic Relief Services, Oxfam, Save the Children, and World Vision.Building on data from 2010, the report provides a wide analysis of the humanitarian system. It notes slow and steady growth in human resources, modest increasing in funding but the continued massive funding shortfalls leading to gaps in provision of humanitarian aid. It notes modest improvements in the relevant and appropriateness of humanitarian aid, inconsistent levels of effectiveness, and zero improvements in efficiency and innovations.The report found that aid agencies are struggling to reach people in conflict zones. While the number of humanitarian emergencies between 2012 and 2015 had reduced, the number of people with unmet needs had significantly increased, up by 78% compared to 2007-2008 levels. Violence in Central African Republic, Mali, and South Sudan created needs that aid agencies failed to meet. The report described a lack of technical capacity, recruitment challenges and a funding shortfall as the reasons for the gaps.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Remains_(novel)"title="The Dark Remains (novel)">
Jack Laidlaw has been moved to the Central Division of the Glasgow Crime Squad. He is still a DC (detective constable) and is working for DI Ernie Milligan, who was a DC with Laidlaw (Milligan joined the Masons). Robert Frederick the commander of the Glasgow Crime Squad assigns DS Bob Lilley to keep an eye on him, saying Laidlaw's "reputation has always preceded him ... who has he rubbed up the wrong way this month? ... he’s good at the job, seems to have a sixth sense for what’s happening on the streets (but) he needs careful handling, if we’re to get the best out of him".The novel is set in October 1972, early in Laidlaw's career. Bobby Carter the right-hand man and lawyer cum money launderer for Cam Colvin one of Glasgow's top gangsters has disappeared, and then his body is found – in Rhode's territory. John Rhodes is Colvin's main rival; not minor gangsters like Matt Mason and Malky Chisholm. Milligan pontificates to his team that the graffiti tells him that "the Cumbrie are encroaching on the Carlton turf. A stabbing is one hell of a calling card, wouldn’t you agree?" He assumes (like other gangsters) that a rival gangster arranged Carter's death, and gang warfare intensifies. But Laidlaw sees in Carter's home evidence of recent painting to cover up bloodstains from a domestic dispute after Carter was stabbed by his bullied wife and children. His wife eventually confesses (but only to Laidlaw), to keep the children out of it. Laidlaw bypasses Milligan, who he despises, by reporting directly to Commander Frederick. When the team (apart from Milligan!) are celebrating the end of the case (at the Top Spot bar, Hope Street), Frederick says privately to Lilley that "if he doesn’t manage to detonate himself in the near future, he might be in line for a swift promotion ... (although he is) not exactly a team player"T
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote_Songs"title="Coyote Songs">
A ghost, or bruja, named La Inmaculada haunts the area outside Piedras Negras, Coahuila. She and her family died in an overheated car as coyotes attempted to smuggle them across the border. Her spirit seeks revenge for the death of her son. Her anger radiates outward, causing violence and destruction.The Mother, a pregnant woman in Nuevo Laredo, lives alone with her son. Each night, she gives birth to a monstrous creature, which then re-enters her womb. She suspects that the creature is killing local babies. She contemplates suicide as her body begins to deteriorate. One night, as the creature leaves her womb, she attacks and destroys it with a knife. She hugs her son as the sun rises.Pedrito and his father, Don Pedro, fish for alligator gar in the Rio Grande. Don Pedro is shot and killed. Pedrito visits Santos, a man who job is to destroy the bodies of cartel victims. As a test, Pedrito murders one of Santos's workers. Santos and Pedrito decide to kill a group of child traffickers.The Coyote helps migrant children cross the border to the United States. He beats the children to make it look like they are victims of gang violence, allowing them a better chance of success at getting asylum. He has a vision of the Virgin Mary killing child traffickers. The Coyote speaks with his priest, a reformed Neo-Nazi, regarding this vision. The priest advises the Coyote on where he can attack child traffickers. The Coyote attacks, inadvertently killing Pedrito and Santos in the process.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Middle-Earth"title="Master of Middle-Earth">
The book has seven chapters, a "Bibliographical Note" on Tolkien's publications, academic notes, and a full index. The chapters cover:1. "Middle-earth: An Imaginary World" – how Tolkien blends fantasy and reality to create his world2. "The Hobbit" – on the quality of Tolkien's best-selling children's book3. "Cosmic Order" – on the cosmology of Middle-earth, from the role of Wizards to the godlike Valar4. "Sauron and the Nature of Evil" – on the questions of evil and the temptation of the Ring, including other evil figures like Saruman and Shelob5. "The Free Peoples" – on how skilfully Tolkien portrays different peoples, cultures, and languages by varying his prose6. "Aragorn" – arguing that the ranger who becomes King is the real hero of "The Lord of the Rings"7. "Seven Leaves" – on seven of Tolkien's minor works: "Leaf by Niggle", "The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun", "Farmer Giles of Ham", "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son", "Smith of Wootton Major", "Imram", and "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_of_the_Infinite"title="Wheel of the Infinite">
The novels tells about the Wheel of the Infinite: a wheel that sets reality in check. The wheel is renewed every year but this year something goes wrong. The wheel shows a sign of darkness. The high priest the Celestial One summons Maskelle, an exile, to help investigate the cause of the looming darkness.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Is_Also_a_Star_(novel)"title="The Sun Is Also a Star (novel)">
"The Sun Is Also a Star" follows two teenagers in New York City, Natasha Kingsley and Daniel Bae. Natasha is an undocumented immigrant from Jamaica living in Brooklyn who learns that her family will be deported. Daniel is the son of Korean immigrants living in Harlem. Daniel is a poet resisting his parents' dream of him becoming a doctor, and Natasha is science-minded.Natasha seeks help from an immigration lawyer, who tells her he has an appointment later in the day, then visits a record store, where she meets Daniel, who is in the city before a college admissions interview. The two teenagers spend the next several hours together, during which time they frequently discuss love and destiny, concepts they have differing opinions on.When the time arrives, they head to their respective appointments, where they learn both of them were slotted to meet the same person.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Astonishing_Color_of_After"title="The Astonishing Color of After">
At the novel’s opening, Leigh states that her mother Dory has turned into a red bird after her suicide, after leaving a note with the crossed-out statement: “I want you to remember”. Leigh experiences trauma from these events and feels that she cannot confide in her best friend Axel. This is because, in Leigh’s mind, their friendship has become complicated because she kissed him on the same day of her mother’s suicide. Leigh is an artist and relies only on pencils and charcoal, refusing to add colors to her artwork.Leigh’s father, Brian, refuses to believe that her mother has turned into a red bird, even after a bird visits their home. Leigh’s father nonetheless buys her tickets to meet Leigh’s Taiwanese grandparents, Waipo and Waigong (grandmother and grandfather in Mandarin, respectively). Dory’s estrangement from her parents led her to not teach Leigh Mandarin, so there is an immediate language barrier between her and her grandparents. Leigh learns that her grandparents burned the box the red bird had brought her. Additionally, her father gets into an argument with Waipo and leaves for Hong Kong.Leigh meets an English speaker named Feng who is a close friend of the family. Leigh also burns incense that allows her to see her parents’ memories. At night, she begins to burn special incense and items that mean something to the owner to see memories of the past, such as photographs, a necklace, or a letter. These memories include those of her parents, her grandparents, and herself. Occasionally, she thinks of Axel and events that took place over her freshman year of high school, such as him asking one of their classmates, Leanne out.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_Giant_and_the_Monkey_King"title="Girl Giant and the Monkey King">
Thom is sitting on a bench in a soccer game. When the ball came to her, Thom accidentally kicks the ball so hard it hits the rival team's goalie. The "dynamic trio", consisting of Bethany Anderson, Sarah Mazel and Kathy Joon, (Korean) were not impressed.The next day, an event known as Culture Day is being held which requires most students to pair up. Thom, however, does not wish to participate.Together with her Pomeranian dog, she explores the neighbour's house and meets Kha, who is the same race and age as her. He lives with his grandparents and goes to the same school as Thom. When Ma found out about Culture Day, she cheerily suggests that Thom should wear Áo dài and play the đàn bầu.But when Thom disagrees with her idea because the students would laugh at her, Ma brings Thom to Thien Than Temple where she brags that their culture is better than the Americans and narrates the story of the Boy Giant. Thom finds a golden pin that fell out from a little temple. She keeps it in her pocket but at night she discovers that the golden pin is actually the Monkey King who is now released from his 500-year prison sentence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Model_Checking"title="Principles of Model Checking">
The introduction and first chapter outline the field of model checking: a model of a machine or process can be analysed to see if desirable properties hold. For instance, a vending machine might satisfy the property "the balance can never fall below €0,00". A video game might enforce the rule "if the player has 0 lives then the game ends in a loss". Both the vending machine and video game can be modelled as transition systems. Model checking is the process of describing such requirements in mathematical language, and automating proofs that the model satisfies the requirements, or discovery of counterexamples if the model is faulty.The second chapter focuses on creating an appropriate model for concurrent systems, where multiple parts of an algorithm (set of instructions) can be carried out simultaneously by different machines or parts of a machine.Chapters 3 explores types of rules that a transition system may satisfy: linear time properties. A safety property, such as "no deadlock states are possible", is of the form "an undesirable outcome can never occur". A liveness property, such as "a shared resource will always eventually be made available to a component that requests it", is of the form "a desirable outcome will eventually happen". Fairness properties such as "a traffic light never stops changing colour" can be used as preconditions i.e. assumptions from which other properties can be deduced.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Henna_Wars"title="The Henna Wars">
Nishat, a Bangladeshi-Irish girl living in Dublin, struggles with bullying at the Catholic school she attends. She comes out as a lesbian to her Muslim parents, who respond disapprovingly. She develops a crush on her childhood friend Flávia, who has recently transferred to Nishat's school. Flávia's cousin, a white student named Chyna, bullies Nishat over her faith and ethnicity.Nishat enters a school entrepreneurial competition starts a Mehndi stall, offering henna tattoos. Flávia and Chyna also open a henna stall to enter the competition, which angers Nishat who feels that they are engaging in cultural appropriation. Flávia, by contrast, feels that henna tattooing is a universal art style and sees nothing wrong with her having a stall. Nishat and Chyna attempt to sabotage each other while Flávia remains mostly unaware of the rivalry. Flávia eventually realizes that why her use of henna bothers Nishat, and she stops. Nishat's parents become more accepting of their daughter, and she becomes romantically involved with Flávia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watercress_(book)"title="Watercress (book)">
A young girl is in the car with her brother and parents when they come across wild watercress growing on the side of the road. Her parents excitedly pull over and instruct the children to help them gather the watercress. The girl feels embarrassed to be seen by passing cars and disgusted by the mud and snails that are on the plants. The watercress is prepared for dinner that night, but the girl initially refuses to eat it because she is ashamed of their "dinner from a ditch". Her mother brings out a picture from her childhood and, for the first time, talks about the famine that her family suffered. Feeling guilty, the girl takes a bite of the watercress. She discovers that she likes the taste and reflects on the new memory she and her family have created.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lupe_Wong_Won't_Dance"title="Lupe Wong Won't Dance">
Guadalupe "Lupe" Wong is a half-Chinese, half-Mexican seventh grade student at Issaquah Middle School who dreams of becoming the first female pitcher in Major League Baseball. An opportunity arises for her to meet Fu Li Hernandez, “the first Asian/Latino pitcher in the major leagues,” if she receives straight A's in her classes. Everything goes well until she learns that she'll have to square dance in gym class to earn an A. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Cow_(novel)"title="Holy Cow (novel)">
Elsie Bovary is a cow in Upstate New York who lives happily until one night when she sees footage of factory farming and animal slaughter on the farmhouse television. Another night, she sees a Discovery Channel documentary on India and wants to move to the Asian country, where cows are revered, not eaten. She finds common ground with Jerry, a pig who has converted to Judaism and taken the name Shalom, who wants to move to Israel where he will not be eaten. Tom is a turkey who is starving himself to avoid dying for Thanksgiving, and wants to move to Turkey, believing that they would never kill their namesake. He uses his beak to order flight tickets on a smartphone.The three animals walk off into the city to find the airport, taking human clothing and walking on two legs. Shalom finds a mohel who can circumcise him to confirm his status as a Jew. Tom realizes that all three tickets were to the same destination, Istanbul, Turkey. When they get there, he steals a private aircraft to fly to Israel. He says that he will follow Elsie to India, as the name of the turkey bird in French and Turkish means "Indian".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahala_(novel)"title="Wahala (novel)">
Set in London, Ronke, Simi and Boo are friends who met a university in Bristol 17 years ago, they are biracial having English mothers and Nigerian fathers.Their friendship is crushed when Isobel, Simi's childhood friend and a rich and influential girl, insists on being the centre of every conversation; she knows the secrets that the three friends are keeping from each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akata_Woman"title="Akata Woman">
Set after the events of the second book, Sunny Nwazue who discovered that she is a member of the all female Nimm Warriors is tasked by Udide, a giant talking spider to find and return a ghazal stolen by Chichi's mother or face terrible consequences. Sunny, Orlu, Chichi, and Sasha will have to travel across the wilderness—spirit realm, Nimm village, and a parallel universe of plant-based technology to stop Udide from wreaking havoc on the Nimm women.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Stars_Are_Scattered"title="When Stars Are Scattered">
"When Stars Are Scattered" follows co-author Mohamed and his younger brother, Hassan, who were born in Somalia and fled to a refugee camp in Kenya when they were toddlers. Although an older woman adopted the brothers, they never stopped searching for their mother. While at the camp, Mohamed was often forced to choose between his own education and caring Hassan, who was nonverbal and had seizures. Eventually, they were able to move to the United States.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Evening_Mists"title="The Garden of Evening Mists">
Newly retired Supreme Court Judge Teoh Yun Ling returns to the Cameron Highlands of Malaya, where she had spent a few months as an apprentice to the Japanese gardener she had hoped would design a memorial garden for her sister, Teoh Yun Hong. Oncoming aphasia is forcing Yun Ling to deal with unsettled business from her past while she is still able to remember. The gardener, Nakamura Aritomo, had been Emperor Hirohito's gardener, but relocated to Malaya after a falling-out and spent years designing and building his own garden there, named Yugiri. Later, he disappears without a trace in the highland mountains. Reliving her memories of Aritomo and her time there, Yun Ling begins writing her memoir, and meets with Japanese professor Yoshikawa Tatsuji, who is writing a book about the life and works of Aritomo.During the Japanese occupation of Malaya, Yun Ling and her older sister Yun Hong had been imprisoned in a Japanese civilian internment camp where Yun Hong was forced to become a "comfort woman" for Japanese soldiers. Yun Hong perishes in the chaos and violence of the end of the occupation, and after the war, Yun Ling wants to fulfill a promise she made to her sister: to build a Japanese garden at their home in Kuala Lumpur. She travels to the highlands to visit old family friend Magnus Pretorius, an expatriate Afrikaner tea farmer whose farm bordered Aritomo's garden, and to seek an audience with Aritomo. Aritomo refuses to design the garden Yun Ling wants to build, but unexpectedly proposes to take her on as an apprentice, so that she can later design and build her sister's memorial garden herself. Despite her bitter attitude toward the Japanese, Yun Ling agrees to the apprenticeship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discovery_of_the_Future"title="The Discovery of the Future">
Wells begins by distinguishing between "two divergent types of mind," one that judges and attaches importance principally to what has happened in the past and one that judges and attaches importance principally to what will happen in the future. To the former he attributes the adjectives "legal or submissive," "passive," and "oriental," and to the latter the adjectives "legislative, creative, organizing, or masterful," and "active," calling it "a more modern and much less abundant type of mind."Observing that these two minds reach "divergent and incompatible consequences" in the spheres of morality and public affairs, Wells analyzes the reasons for which the past-oriented mind predominates and asserts that this is principally due to the evidently greater knowability of the personal past as compared to the future. But he argues that the inference from this attitude that the future is essentially unknowable does not square with "modern science, that is to say the relentless systematic criticism of phenomena." Not only has science made us knowledgeable about a distant, impersonal past, it also regards the ability successfully to predict to be a criterion of validity. Though the unpredictability of human behavior complicates the problem, the fact that "as individuals increase in number they begin to average out" means that "an inductive knowledge of a great number of things in the future is becoming a human possibility." Confessing himself to be among "those who believe entirely in the forces behind the individual" rather than in individuals themselves as determining causes, Wells argues that there is "no reason why we should not aspire to, and discover and use, safe and servicable, generalizations upon countless issues in the human destiny." But personal prophecy and fortune-telling will never be possible; "the knowledge of the future we may hope to gain will be general and not individual."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swimming_Home"title="Swimming Home">
In the summer of 1994 the poet Joe Jacobs (Polish émigré Jozef Nowogrodzki) is on vacation in a summer home in the south of France with his wife Isabel, his daughter Nina, and their friends, the couple Mitchell and Laura. The tranquillity is ruined when Joe's fan Kitty Finch turns up. Her fascination with, and sexual attraction to Joe are obvious, but Isabel invites her to stay anyway. Isabel is a foreign correspondent whose work has repeatedly taken her away from her family, and who has grown to tolerate Joe's constant infidelities.Meanwhile, Kitty's mental problems become more and more obvious, yet Nina is the only one who dares to address the issue. Towards the end it seems clear that Kitty is poised to kill herself. In the end, however, it is actually Joe who kills himself. As it turns out, Kitty's mental issues were just a reflection of his much more deep-founded depression. The story ends with a current-day confessional from the now adult Nina to her late father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral"title="The Peripheral">
The novel begins sometime in the near-future in a small town in rural America. Flynne Fisher works at a local 3D printing shop and lives with her mother and her brother Burton, who sustained brain trauma from cybernetic implants he received while serving in the U.S. Marine Corps' elite Haptic Recon unit. When Burton heads to another town to counter-protest the protests of a religious extremist group known as Luke 4:5, he asks her to take over his job working security in a video game/virtual world for a supposedly Colombian company called Milagros Coldiron. Flynne takes the job and notices the game world looks suspiciously like London, but far more empty and more futuristic. Piloting a security quadcopter, she fends off paparazzi drones from an unknown woman's high-rise apartment. On the second night of doing so she witnesses a man and a woman out on a balcony, where the woman is apparently killed and gruesomely devoured by a swarm of nanobots; Flynne is uncertain whether this is real or part of a virtual game.The novel alternates between Flynne's experiences and those of Wilf Netherton, a publicist who lives in the early 22nd century, seventy years later than Flynne's time, and several decades after an apocalyptic period known as the Jackpot took place. As the book begins, Wilf is working with Daedra West, an American artist/celebrity/diplomat, on establishing relations with a group of deformed native humans known as "Patchers," on an enormous cultivated garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean. However, Daedra's reckless behavior triggers her personal security system, killing all the Patchers and their boss, Hamed al-Habib. Wilf is fired (he assumes; he doesn't check his mail) and goes to his friend Lev Zubov's house. Lev, the son of a powerful and wealthy Russian family that moved to Britain several generations ago, is a "continua enthusiast." He has introduced Wilf to "stubs," digital links to computer systems in the past, hosted by an inscrutable computer server in China. Milagros Coldiron is really their front organization to the past in which Flynne and Burton live, a past which has – because of the contact from the future – branched off the original timeline in which Wilf lives. Wilf hired Burton Fisher to be drone security for Daedra's sister, Aelita, as a novelty gift. When Aelita goes missing, Wilf realizes that the drone was the only witness of the event while all other recording devices were disabled.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Name_Is_Not_Angelica"title="My Name Is Not Angelica">
The book tells the story of slavery in the Danish West Indies through the eyes of Raisha, renamed "Angelica" by her new masters. Betrayed by a rival tribe and shipped to the Caribbean, Raisha, her betrothed Konje and her friend Dondo are bought by Dutch family Jost Van Prok. Conditions on the island for the slaves were harsh. They suffered starvation, dehydration, forced labor and cruel punishments. In 1733 a portion of the slaves to run away to Mary Island where they planned their widescale revolt, which lasted until mid-1734.This was the last novel written by Scott O’Dell, an award-winning writer of children’s historical fiction. It was published after his death at age 91 in 1989.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lighthouse_(Moore_novel)"title="The Lighthouse (Moore novel)">
Futh, a recently separated middle-aged Englishman, takes a ferry to the Continent for a hiking trip through Germany. He brings with him memories of his mother abandoning him while he was still a child, his father's constant philandering, and his wife's infidelities. Meanwhile, Ester, the unhappy wife of a German hotelier, tries to get her husband’s attentions by cheating on him. When Futh and Ester's paths meet, the consequences are disastrous...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_Power"title="Transfer of Power">
Rapp is introduced while he is performing a covert operation in Iran and he discovers a possible terrorist attack planned for the nation's capital to happen in the near future. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., Anna Reilly is starting her first day as a White House correspondent for NBC. It also happens to be the day where the terrorist, using a secret entrance, takes over the White House and holds it hostage. The president, who barely escaped the hostage situation, remains trapped in the unfinished bomb shelter. With the vice president using this opportunity as commander in chief to glorify his political career by being lenient towards the terrorist demands, Rapp must find a way to fight the terrorists from the inside of the White House. It is here where he saves Anna Reilly from being raped by one of the terrorists. Several Navy SEALs sneak into the White House, eliminate the terrorists, and save the hostages and the president. The leader of the terrorist group manages to escape the White House while detonating his strategically placed explosives. He is later found in South America only to be killed by Rapp.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_of_Dark_Water"title="Edge of Dark Water">
The novel is set during the Great Depression in East Texas. Teenager Sue Ellen and her friends discover the body of May Lynn, one of their friends, tied to a Singer Sewing Machine in the Sabine River. May Lynn had had dreams of running off to Hollywood to be a movie star. So the group of young people decide to take May Lynn's ashes to Hollywood to fulfill her final dream. After finding and taking a large amount of stolen money, they set out on their adventure pursued by a psychopathic killer named Skunk who is hell-bent on recovering the money for himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_of_the_Damned"title="Dust of the Damned">
"Dust of the Damned" is about fugitive werewolves who were released from prison by Abraham Lincoln to help him fight the American Civil War on the condition that after the war they would return to Eastern Europe but they did not keep their promise and headed to the American West. Zane and Coffin's job is to hunt them down.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threat_Vector"title="Threat Vector">
Chinese leader Wei Zhen Lin has been dealing with mounting political opposition over his country's economic recession. He tries to commit suicide in order to avoid his inevitable arrest when he is prevented by General Su Ke Qiang, the leader of the People's Liberation Army (PLA). Aware that his life now depends on the hawkish military leader, Wei resolves to recoup his country's economic losses by retaking disputed territories in the South China Sea by military force, as well as Hong Kong, Macau, and finally Taiwan. Expecting the United States to react to China's actions militarily, Su secretly orders cyberattacks on the country’s military infrastructure through sub rosa cyber espionage and cyber warfare militia Ghost Ship and its head, Dr. Tong Kwok Kwan. The Chinese Navy then aggressively harasses and sinks ships passing through the South China Sea, including an Indian aircraft carrier (sent there by India to protect its own interests). U.S. President Jack Ryan tries to resolve the conflict by covertly sending in a contingent of Marine fighter pilots in order to reinforce the Taiwanese Air Force. However, Su discovers this and further sanctions more cyber attacks on the U.S.Meanwhile, The Campus deals with a breach in their organization when a hit job on a cell of former Libyan intelligence officers in Istanbul attracts the attention of a mysterious hacker codenamed Center, who is later revealed to be Dr. Tong. They later find out about one of his associates, Zha Shu Hai (codenamed FastByte22), who is a fugitive from the United States and is pursued by CIA non-official cover operative Adam Yao in Hong Kong. While a SEAL Team Six unit sent by the Department of Defense captures Zha first after a crossfire with his 14K Triad bodyguards, Campus operatives Jack Ryan Jr. and Domingo Chavez, as well as I.T. head Gavin Biery, manage to gather intelligence from his hand-held computer, locating one of Center's command servers in Miami. Ryan and fellow Campus operative Dominic Caruso try to go there against orders from operations head Sam Granger, only to be nearly killed by Russian mobsters sent by Center. After dispatching their would-be attackers and hastily escaping from Miami, the cousins are suspended from their duties.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Huntress"title="Night Huntress">
## Night Huntress.Due to her mother being raped by a vampire and getting pregnant, Catherine "Cat" Crawfield has spent her entire life being different from other humans. Her half-vampire nature allows her to pursue the full blooded vampires and lead them to their death, an activity that her mother fully endorses. Cat goes out almost every night in the hopes of finding and slaying her father, only to be captured by the vampiric bounty hunter Bones. After some initial reluctance on Cat's part, the two of them form a partnership to find and capture her father and eventually fall in love with one another. Their relationship is temporarily broken when Cat is forced to join with a secretive government agency devoted to hunting supernatural creatures, run by a man later revealed to be her uncle. Cat and Bones eventually reconcile, with Bones joining the agency to be near Cat. This reconciliation is later tested when Bones's precognitive grandsire Mencheres's wife Patra uses grave magic to try to kill Bones and Cat, forcing Cat and her friends to band together to kill her. Other plot points in the series involve Cat discovering that in the past Mencheres had wiped the memory of a controlling vampire she used to love from her mind in order to ensure that she would meet and fall in love with Bones and that she would fulfill her destiny as a powerful vampire. Cat does eventually become a vampire in order to ensure that she would be with Bones forever as well as to assuage growing fears in the ghoul population that she was not intending to become a ghoul-vampire hybrid with unprecedented powers. This backfires as she becomes not a regular vampire, but one that has an occasional heartbeat and can only drink the blood of other vampires, absorbing some of their powers in the process.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chime_(novel)"title="Chime (novel)">
"Chime" is narrated by Briony Larkin, a young woman growing up in the small town of Swampsea. For years she has hidden two secrets: that she is a witch and that her powers have caused harm to many people, including her twin sister Rose and her stepmother. While they were children, Briony grew jealous of the sudden amount of attention that their stepmother was paying to Rose and caused Rose to fall off of a swing set. The fall left Rose brain damaged and unable to live as she would have otherwise. Briony feels extreme guilt and self-hatred over the accident, which is further exacerbated by Briony blaming herself for stepmother's death. That the Old Ones, the supernatural beings in the nearby swamp, are constantly begging her to write stories about them in order to ensure that they are remembered only adds to her stress. She used to write constantly, only for everything to get burned when the house caught on fire.Briony learns that the swamp is to be drained, which has prompted the Boggy Man, the strongest of the Old Ones, to unleash a sickness over the town. Despite wanting to remain alone to ensure that she does not harm anyone else, Briony begins to fall for Eldric, whose father is responsible for the swamp draining. She manages to temporarily stall the draining by way of sabotaging the machine that would drain the swamp, but must discover a way to convince the townspeople that the swamp cough is the result of the Boggy Man attempting to defend his home and that the project must stop. During this time Briony spends much of her time with Eldric, but also fends off the advances of Cecil, the son of the local Judge. When the beautiful Leanne arrives in town, Briony takes an instant disliking to her especially when she begins to steal away Eldric's attention.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shine_(Myracle_novel)"title="Shine (Myracle novel)">
In Black Creek, North Carolina, 16-year-old Cat Robinson's gay best friend, Patrick Truman, is left temporarily comatose from a brutal and discriminatory act of violence. Cat feels guilty for having become recently estranged from Patrick due to unrelated personal trauma, though she now vows to find his attacker, knowing the police will do little to help. Cat's own tortured past has caused her to withdraw from the world for three years, but she begins to return by taking the criminal investigation into her own hands. She starts by questioning members of her conservative Christian community, which is ravaged under the surface by a crippling culture of meth.Cat confronts members of what she calls the "redneck posse", led by cocky, wealthy, homophobic Tommy Lawson. The posse also includes Cat's detached older brother, Christian, as well as Beef Pierson: an ex-athlete, high-school dropout, and long-time sympathizer with Cat's past struggles. Cat quickly uncovers several of the community's secrets: that Bailee-Ann, Beef's girlfriend, is cheating on him with Tommy and that Beef himself is a struggling meth addict; in fact, many of Cat's peers are also revealed to be former or continuing meth addicts and/or dealers. After a shallow talk with Bailee-Ann, Cat becomes doggedly followed by Bailee-Ann's foul-mouthed and neglected kid brother, Robert, who claims to be Beef's best friend and protégé.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo_Blue"title="Indigo Blue">
Indigo "Indie" Collins is an 11-year-old girl in Year Six who enjoys daydreaming. The story implies she is living in England. She lives with her mother, her mother's boyfriend Max and her baby sister Misti. Max and Indigo's mother keep arguing and Indigo's Mum becomes a victim of domestic abuse. One morning they move to a new flat in hopes to get away from Max. Indie is also really worried that her best friend Jo does not like her very much anymore, because Indie is not telling her about Max.When they move to the flat, they don't like it at first. They share the house with Ian, a man above them, and Mrs Green, the owner of the house, a grumpy old lady on the bottom floor. Without much money, Indie's family have to fix up the flat and learn to survive. After a while Indigo's mom agrees to go on a date with Max and he physically injures Indie's mother and is put on trial. Meanwhile, Indigo is looked after by her foster mother followed by her gran who comes from Wales.This story was written by Cathy Cassidy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliban's_War"title="Caliban's War">
On Ganymede, Mei Meng is kidnapped from her preschool by her doctor. Several hours later, Earth and Martian space marines are attacked and effortlessly killed by a super soldier, with Bobbie Draper, a Martian marine, the only survivor. Earth and Mars begin a shooting war which throws Ganymede into chaos. In the aftermath, Mei's father Praxidike Meng fruitlessly searches for his daughter in the midst of the societal breakdown in the Ganymede colony. Several months later, the crew of the "Rocinante" are tasked with delivering emergency aid to Ganymede. Meng spots James Holden during a food riot and asks the crew to help find his daughter. They agree and are able to trace her kidnappers to unused tunnels on the moon. Holden, Meng, and ship mechanic Amos Burton discover a secret lab. In the midst of a shootout with lab security, they inadvertently release another super soldier who kills some of the lab personnel. In the wake of the battle, the crew find remnants of the protomolecule and the corpse of Mei's friend, who was being treated by Mei's doctor for immunodeficiency. The crew rush to escape the station as more chaos erupts around them, and are able to make it back aboard the "Rocinante".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abaddon's_Gate"title="Abaddon's Gate">
James Holden and his crew on the salvaged Martian warship "Rocinante" played a role in two major events in human history: saving the Earth from the first direct proof of alien technology discovered in our Solar System, and saving as many people as they could when a new form of the technology appeared on Jupiter's moon Ganymede. As part of the first incident, the alien technology crashed on Venus, where it churned for months doing something unknown while the solar system watched. When complete, the semi-intelligent collection of chemicals flew away from Venus and built a wormhole gate, called "The Ring", beyond the orbit of Uranus. "The Ring" acted as a gateway to an unknown number of other worlds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pursuit_of_Honor"title="Pursuit of Honor">
The book opens days after Muslim extremists have blown up a power lunch restaurant filled with members of Congress and staffers. After that, a second squad attacks the National Counter Terrorist Center killing dozens more until Mitch Rapp and his partner Mike Nash send the bad guys off to paradise. With nearly 200 dead, the nation is in no mood to negotiate with the Islamic extremists. The President has given Rapp a green light to be the judge, jury and executioner. The sharp edge of the CIA's sword has been let loose with few strings attached. The story takes place over the following week.Rapp is on the trail of a liberal lawyer inspector general of the CIA who has been giving out information that some consider to aid the enemy. Meanwhile, three of the cell that helped carry out the DC attack are hiding out in rural Iowa, waiting for the heat to die down. Hakim is the mastermind who knows about the US after living here for a long time while Karim is the hotheaded soldier who wants a legacy as The Lion of al Qaeda. One day, a dad and son walk up to their farmhouse asking for permission to hunt nearby. Hakim gave them his permission because he knows that's all they want, but Karim is convinced they are undercover police and kills them both. Now they are on the run, trying to stay a step ahead of the police. Neither trusts the other and they ended up splitting. Hakim to Nassau to get money and hide somewhere while Karim and Ahmed, their loyal servant went to Washington to wreak more havoc.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Princess_in_Berlin"title="A Princess in Berlin">
Peter Ellis is a young American artist studying in Paris in 1922. His prominent Philadelphia family ends his funding to persuade him to return home to become a doctor, but after suffering shell shock as an ambulance driver during World War I Ellis is uninterested in a conventional career. He reunites with Christoph Keith, a former Luftstreitkräfte pilot whose life he saved during the Battle of Verdun in 1916. Now a banker, Keith suggests that Ellis move to Berlin, as due to hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic it has a very low cost of living for those with hard currency. Through Keith Ellis meets the Waldsteins (as fictionalized family of German banker Georg Solmssen), an influential, wealthy, and long-assimilated German Jewish banking family, and he and the beautiful and innocent Lili, the youngest Waldstein, fall in love.While studying art with Fritz Falke (a fictionalized George Grosz), Ellis meets many important figures in the history of Germany between the world wars including Walter Rathenau, Max Liebermann, Bertolt Brecht, Hans von Seeckt, and Hermann Göring. He witnesses the economic chaos from hyperinflation, the country's debates regarding war reparations and the treaties of Versailles and Rapallo, and the street battles between Communists and Nationalists.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silver_Linings_Playbook"title="The Silver Linings Playbook">
The book is narrated through the eyes of Pat Peoples, and occasionally Tiffany's through letters. A former history teacher who has moved back to his childhood home in Collingswood, New Jersey, after spending time in a Baltimore psychiatric hospital, Pat believes he has been away only a few months, but soon realizes it has been years, and struggles to piece together his lost memories and what has become of his wife, Nikki. He has a hypothesis that life is a film created by God and that its "silver lining" will be the end of "Apart Time" with Nikki. Pat embarks on a plan of self-improvement in order to win Nikki back, including regular running and working out in a home gym. At a dinner with his friend Ronnie and his wife Veronica, Pat is introduced to Tiffany Webster, who has also moved back home after losing her job after her husband's death.Pat runs with Tiffany, who started out by following him every day, and she volunteers, in a letter, to be a go-between between him and Nikki, if he will train in a dance routine with her so that she can enter a competition. He agrees, and they enter and win. After the contest, Pat suggests a meeting with Nikki at the place they got engaged, and despite a letter saying they will never meet up, he slips away from his family on Christmas Day to meet her. Nikki is not there; Tiffany is, and admits she has forged Nikki's letters and that she had been trying to help Pat move on and gain closure with his marriage because she, Tiffany, is in love with Pat. Pat is furious that the last two months of correspondence were a lie. In shock Pat runs into an unfamiliar neighborhood and is assaulted. By chance, he encounters Danny, his friend from the Baltimore mental health facility. Danny helps Pat get to a hospital and reunite with his family. Pat still does not recall how or why he was separated from his wife, and only when he watches the wedding video, which his mother had hidden, do the memories eventually return — with the realization that he and Nikki will never be reunited.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Man's_Burden"title="Black Man's Burden">
Posing as low-caste itinerant smiths selling wares, the all-black fieldworkers of the Reunited Nations team led by sociologist Dr. Homer Crawford travel the Sahara subtly subverting the culture of its nomad tribes by disseminating "progressive" Western propaganda such as the right to equality, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness with the long-term objective of leading North Africa into the modern age. Knowing the peoples they encounter may label their teachings as blasphemous, the fieldworkers attribute them to El Hassan, an imaginary leader who has incorporated the wisdom of all the sages and prophets of the world. On their way back from working at a Tuareg encampment, the fieldworkers are attacked by an Arab Union convoy trespassing on Reunited Nations territory and, in defending themselves, kill all the Arab troopers. The team then proceeds to a council of nomad tribes with the intention of arresting one of its leaders, Adb-el-Kader, for ordering raids on Reunited Nations projects, and find that Adb-el-Kader is now inciting the rest of the clans to bloody rebellion. Homer Crawford challenges Adb-el-Kader to a sword duel, disables him with a judo move, and arrests him.Next, Crawford's team travels to Timbuktu to attend a conference with other all-black teams providing foreign aid in North Africa. There, Crawford makes a case for cooperation across teams regardless of political or national background based on the fact that all the fieldworkers are of African descent and so are deeply invested in helping to advance Africa. Some fieldworkers, including Isobel Cunningham, Jake Armstrong, and Cliff Jackson of the Africa for Africans Association (AFAA) and the British agent Rex Donaldson are in favor of such coordination. Others, including a C.I.A. operative Fred Ostrander, object strongly to it. After the meeting is adjourned, Isobel and Homer discuss the points presented at the meeting with Homer admitting that their dissemination of Western ideology will ultimately destroy the present North African cultures, but that their work must continue so that Africa does not become a liability to the world. As they take a stroll, a sniper on a minaret attempts to assassinate Homer and seemingly gets away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilty_Wives"title="Guilty Wives">
This book is about four friends who are foreigners living in Bern, Switzerland, with their husbands. These four women decide to have a four-day holiday at a lavish resort overlooking Monte Carlo, on the French coast. For two days they have a lavish time, sunbathing at the pool, gambling with loads of money, dining on expensive food and drinking only the best champagne. On the second night they are invited to spend a night on an expensive yacht in the harbor. After having a drunken, indulgent night on the yacht they wake up to police raiding the harbor, taking everyone off all the boats there. Next, they find themselves accused of a horrible crime they did not commit. The only evidence implicates the four wives. They stand accused in court, facing years, if not their entire lives, in prison.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bury_Elminster_Deep"title="Bury Elminster Deep">
Elminster has been rendered bodiless and unable to perform magic by the Spellplague and the death of his goddess Mystra. He tries to find a way to stop Lord Manshoon from taking over the kingdom of Cormyr.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_(Elfgren_and_Strandberg_novel)"title="Fire (Elfgren and Strandberg novel)">
There has been 10 weeks since the Chosen ones defeated the emissary of the demons. But everything is far from good. The Chosen ones have problems coming both from the normal world and the magical one. Linnéa still grieves Elias and the families of Minoo and Vanessa are falling apart. The mysterious council are all but friendly towards them and the signs of the apocalypse is appearing; the woods are dying, heat waves plague the town and the Chosen ones have more enemies than ever. The dead will return to the living, secrets will be brought to light, hearts will be broken and a fire will rise...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_Again"title="America Again">
Colbert addresses topics including Wall Street, campaign finance, energy policy, healthcare, eating on the campaign trail, and the United States Constitution.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hind's_Kidnap"title="Hind's Kidnap">
Six years before the novel begins, Jack Hind was obsessed with solving the Hershey Laurel kidnapping. With the Laurel parents Sears and Shirley dead, and no ransom note received, the police effectively closed the case, and told Hind to quit. Which he did upon marriage to Sylvia.Several aspects of Hind's life are revealed during the novel. Hind's parents died when he was young, and willed that Hind be raised by a guardian who was a batchelor and unrelated to Hind. Hind seems to have inherited well—the guardian left him a "viaticum"—the closest Hind does to work is recording people for a radio show, "Naked Voice", and some substitute teaching at a college.The novel itself is divided into three parts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_a_Celtic_Church"title="Women in a Celtic Church">
In her "Introduction: The Irish Holy Woman and her Modern Inquisitors", Harrington explores the manner in which the religious women of Early Medieval Ireland have been interpreted in the preceding several centuries. She begins by looking at the historiography of Early Medieval nuns, on the Early Irish Church, and on Early Irish women, before moving on to an examination of the historiography of non-academic, non-specialist texts designed for a popular audience which have delved into this area. Moving on, she discusses the interpretations of this period that have been produced and advocated by modern Celtic Christians, adherents of the Women's Spirituality movement and Contemporary Paganism. She then discusses the multiple historical errors held to by these latter groups, arguing that the blame for such misinformation must in part fall upon contemporary academics, who have failed to engage a wider audience.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Chili"title="Bad Chili">
Hap returns from his off-shore oil platform job to discover that his best friend Leonard is being framed for a series of murders. The first of these is a biker who stole Leonard's boyfriend, and the second is Leonard's ex-boyfriend himself. The two of them set out to find who the real killers are and clear Leonard's name.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Star_(novel)"title="Little Star (novel)">
In 1992, a musician named Lennart finds in the woods an infant left for dead. He takes her to his wife, Laila, and the two raise the child in secrecy, believing that her catatonic and trance-like state will result in her being perceived as mentally ill. Their adult son, Jerry, frequently visits the child, whom he names Theres. Lennart becomes obsessed with Theres due to her angelic voice. He convinces her never to leave the house by telling her that the world is full of "big people" who want to eat up the "little people," like her. He begins to teach her about music and states that music and love are found in the heart and in the mind.When Theres is approximately twelve, she violently dismembers both Lennart and Laila in an attempt to find the love inside their heads. Afterwards, Jerry whisks her away to Stockholm to start a new life. He ultimately enters her in the reality show, "Idol", where she dazzles the viewers with her voice, but eventually is voted off the show due to her inability to engage the audience.In November 1992, a girl named Teresa Svensson is born. Her best childhood friend is a neighbor named Johannes. Teresa grows up to be an introverted girl, and as a teenager, begins to write poetry and post it online. Around this time, Teresa witnesses Theres' performance on "Idol", and is mesmerized. Discovering that the one commenting on her poetry is the same person she saw on television, Teresa believes that their friendship was fated from the beginning, and they form a deep connection. She visits Theres' apartment every weekend, where the two compose music with Theres singing and Teresa writing the lyrics.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumble_Tumble"title="Rumble Tumble">
The story centers around Hap's girlfriend Brett's daughter Tillie, who has spent the majority of her adult life as a prostitute, and is suffering abuse at the hands of her pimp. Hap and Leonard attempt to rescue her, and come into conflict with the Dixie Mafia as a result. The two protagonists end up traveling from Oklahoma to the Mexican border, with much violence taking place along with way.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunters_(Brotherband)"title="The Hunters (Brotherband)">
Hal, the captain of the Heron, follows Zavac with the help of Rikard, a pirate who'd been betrayed by Zavac. However, Ingvar, a big, wise, but poor-sighted boy, contracts a fever from the arrow wound he received during the battle for Limmat. The Herons wait ashore, and Rikard escapes, but Lydia and Thorn quickly track him down and capture him once again. When Ingvar's fever breaks, the Herons continue on their chase after Zavac. They follow him to a town where they find evidence of Zavac, but he has already left. The Herons let Rikard go, but one of Zavac's men kill him for treachery. The Herons are accused of murdering Rikard, but they are cleared and they continue. However, Zavac learns of the Herons following him and he pays the Gatmeister of a nearby city to detain the Herons indefinitely. The Herons escape with the help of Lydia. They burn the Gatmeister's private yacht in revenge for beating up Hal when Hal wouldn't tell the Gatmeister where their cash chest was. They continue on to the pirate fortress Raguza, where the Seahawk stops them, but with the help of the Seahawk they enter Raguza under the guise of a pirate. Zavac learns of their presence, but the Herons talk to the Kopaljo first, and the Kopaljo takes the emeralds from Zavac that he stole from Limmat. He then banishes Zavac from Raguza. However, Hal challenges Zavac in a battle of ships. Hal cripples the ship with the Mangler, but it collapses on him. Ingvar frees him, and Hal goes on board The Raven, Zavac's ship, to recover the Andomal, Skandia's greatest treasure. Zavac nearly kills Hal, but Thorn saves Hal, and pins Zavac to the sinking Raven, and the Herons return to Skandia, where they are celebrated as heroes for retrieving the Andomal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thousand_Lives"title="A Thousand Lives">
"A Thousand Lives" focuses on five people: Edith Roller, Stanley Clayton, Hyacinth Thrash and Jim and Tommy Bogue. Together they represent the varied demographics of Peoples Temple, Jim Jones' church. Roller and the Bogues are white, while Clayton and Thrash are African American. The book explores how so many people—black, white, middle class, poor, educated and unschooled—ended up dying in Jonestown. Using diaries and other primary sources as well as hundreds of hours of interviews, Scheeres presents a heart-breaking portrait of belief, survival and loss in this idyllic community.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_Mars"title="The Man from Mars">
An American reporter is accidentally forced to join a secret team of scientists who got hold of a crashed spaceship from Mars with a creature they dubbed "areanthrop" (Greek: Ares=Mars + anthropos=man) in it. The areanthrop seems to be a kind of cyborg: a sentient protoplasm which in the course of natural evolution built itself a "robotic suit", rather than developing a biological body. Scientists poke, prod and pry it with all means possible in attempts to study it. Eventually the areanthrop gives them a telepathic trip to Mars and seizes control over a member of the team, and after that it is completely destroyed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debjan"title="Debjan">
Jatin, the male protagonist of the novel, a Brahmin lives in a village. Though he is highly educated yet he is unemployed and poor. His wife Ashalata has deserted him and lives in her maternal house with their children. Jatin has met neither his wife nor his children for years. After suffering from high fever Jatin dies. Right after his death Jatin discovers Pushpa, his very intimate childhood friend who died 13 years ago is standing beside his bed. Pushpa tells Jatin that she has come to take him with her. And from here the main story begins. Jatin learns death is not the end of everything, but, it is just a beginning of a new life. Jatin meets many characters who shape his knowledge and wisdom on death, human relationship and its existence beyond human life, life after death, God, Atman, reincarnations, divine manifestations or avatars and Karma. There is a certain goddess who in the novel is referred to as Karuna Devi or goddess of compassion, who, out of the desire for the welfare and well being of ordinary mortals, comes to the earth to help people. He also meets a sannyasin or ascetic monk who attained the nirvikalpa samadhi and hence is a liberated soul. He meets the great Vaishnava saint Raghunath Das who worships the living image of his personal God. He meets Valmiki, the ancient poet who composed Ramayana. Jatin stays in the third sphere along with Pushpa. In this sphere it is possible to create environment out of imagination and Pushpa creates the same scenery as was present in her native place consisting of the river Ganga and its bank where she and Jatin used to play as children. There are still higher spheres where people have great powers by which they can create any object by a mere thought. There is no language of communication and people can communicate using thought waves as medium. There are also nether regions which are inhabited by souls of inferior nature. The higher regions are occupied by the celestial beings. God or the Supreme Being is beyond all regions and spheres. Every sphere is governed by a very powerful being who is a very advanced soul. Most of the souls of the higher realms are believer in God and they spend their time meditating upon the Supreme Being. Jatin also met advanced souls who are world travelers but are agnostic. It is made clear that in the universe there are an infinite number of spheres where people may be born and the purpose of life is to evolve spiritually by learning vital lessons from the life's experiences and thereby gaining wisdom. When all ignorance is dispelled people are liberated from the earthly existence and they go to the higher spheres or realms from where they progress even further. It is possible for the earthlings to degenerate and go to nether lands or to inferior regions in the after life if that helps them in gaining knowledge and wisdom in the hard way.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_Hades"title="The House of Hades">
After Annabeth Chase and Percy Jackson fall into Tartarus at the end of "The Mark of Athena", the other five demigods of the "Prophecy of Seven" (Frank Zhang, Hazel Levesque, Jason Grace, Leo Valdez and Piper McLean), aided by Nico di Angelo and Coach Hedge, prepare to go to Greece to find and close the Doors of Death from the mortal world in order to prevent the monsters of Gaea's army from continuously resurrecting. In Bologna, the "Argo II" is raided by the Kerkopes; Leo goes after them to retrieve his stolen Archimedes's sphere, and takes an agricultural book belonging to Triptolemus and an astrolabe made by Odysseus as recompense. He also sends the Kerkopes to harass the Roman army massing at Camp Half-Blood. In Venice, Frank, Hazel and Nico retrieve barley cakes designed to protect them from poison in the Necromanteion from Triptolemus. In exchange for the barley cakes, Frank has to get a replacement snake for Triptolemus’ chariot, which is powered by two snakes. After remembering that his father, Mars, can turn enemies to snakes, Frank decides to battle all the Katobleps (cow monsters) in exchange for a snake. He defeats all of the monsters and receives the blessing of Mars for his heroism, becoming physically stronger, much more confident, and gaining a snake for Triptolemus. During a later encounter with the bandit Sciron and after a meeting with the goddess Hecate, Hazel successfully learns to manipulate the Mist, a power that alters other people's reality layers by deceiving them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_List"title="Hate List">
The novel deals with the aftermath of a school shooting. It is a first person narrative from the point of view of Valerie Leftman, whose boyfriend Nick Levil was the shooter. Interspersed through the novel are newspaper articles about the events.Valerie and Nick have compiled a Hate List, a list of people and things they hate; Valerie sees it as an inside joke between the two of them, but Nick is more serious. When he brings a gun to school and starts shooting people, Valerie puts herself in front of his next victim, Jessica Campbell, and is shot in the leg. After this, Nick kills himself. Once Valerie wakes up in the hospital to face the consequences, she soon realizes that she harbors some of the blame for the people who were killed or wounded. Had she not discussed before how much she hated them? Maybe even egged him on a little? With Nick gone, she's really the only one left to face the blame. Six months after the shooting, Valerie returns to school and steadily begins to cope with the loss of her boyfriend, the loss of her former friends, her family's resulting issues, and how it all will affect her future. People now view Nick as a monster, her classmates are torn between calling her a victim or a part of the whole plan, her friends no longer talk to her, her parents' marriage is ending, her brother resents her, the girl whose life she saved befriends her, and she considers the possibility of attending college even though her name is attached to the tragedy. This novel follows her as she learns to forgive, to stand up for herself, and journey from mental anguish to mental stability.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_with_Crazy_Buttocks"title="Living with Crazy Buttocks">
"Living with Crazy Buttocks" is composed of humorous essays on contemporary culture, with author Kaz Cooke exploring topics ranging from Barbie dolls, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, celebrities, firemen, archbishops, cosmetic surgery, Internet gurus, Ricky Martin's bottom, Barbara Cartland to Ben-Hur.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Rain_(novel)"title="Red Rain (novel)">
Intending to write about the small beach town's local flavor and unusual death rituals, Lea Sutter travels to Cape Le Chat Noir for her travel blog. Her plans are shattered when a terrible hurricane decimates the town, killing off most of its inhabitants. The experience shakes Lea, spurring her to take Daniel and Samuel, two twelve-year-old twin orphans, home with her. Lea's decision doesn't sit well with her husband Mark, who has been experiencing stress over the backlash for his recent child psychology book. He finds Daniel and Samuel to be strange, especially after they demand that his sister Roz move out of the guest house so they can live there. Their strangeness also stands out to Lea and Mark's children Elena and Ira, who find it hard to trust Daniel and Samuel. Lea insists that their behaviors are due to PTSD and enrolls them at the local school. Meanwhile, Daniel and Samuel have begun stealing various objects from people around them as well as using their unusual supernatural powers to intimidate and control the people around them.Knowing that Mark doesn't trust them, the twins frame him for multiple murders in the hopes that it will get rid of Mark. The plan initially works, but eventually backfires when Daniel and Samuel take control of many of the local children. With the help of a woman named Martha Swann from Cape Le Chat Noir, Lea realizes that the twins are actually the product of a failed ritual to reanimate the dead in the 1930s. Lea also realizes that she herself was a product of a similar, separate ritual, having died during the hurricane during her visit to Cape Le Chat Noir. Lea manages to stop the twins and save her family, but at the cost of her own existence. The book ends with Mark and his sister Roz looking on in horror as they watch her son Axl use similar powers as Daniel and Samuel, claiming that they taught him a trick.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiance_(book)"title="Radiance (book)">
Riley Bloom crossed the bridge into the afterlife following a car crash - with her parents and her beloved dog, Buttercup. The afterlife is situated in - Here &amp; Now . And it turns out that the afterlife is not just an eternity of leisure. Riley meets The Council where she is assigned a job as a Soul Catcher, with weird but maybe cute boy as her guide whose name is Bodhi. Her first assignment will take her back to earth, to everything she's left behind - where she must find the Radiant Boy, a ten-year-old, long - lost spirit in the haunting castles of England for centuries, who doesn't want to move on.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border,_Breed_nor_Birth"title="Border, Breed nor Birth">
During his meeting in Dakar with the head of the Reunited Nations African Development Project, Dr. Homer Crawford resigns his post as leader of the Sahara Division team to become El Hassan, the liberator and would-be tyrant of North Africa. Threatened with arrest, Crawford and his followers hide in the Sahara erg. They intercept news that the Arab Union has occupied Tamanrasset, ostensibly to protect the region against El Hassan rioters. Crawford decides to recapture Tamanrasset and use its communications system to proclaim his regime. To do so, he sends his followers to organize troops from nearby regions: the Teda from the east, the Chaambra from the north, the Sudanese from the south, and the Nemadi, Moors, and Rifs from the West. Crawford, Isobel Cunningham, and Cliff Jackson will establish the movement's headquarters in Tuareg country. They are all to rendezvous at Tamanrasset in two weeks.Crawford wins the loyalty of the Tuareg warriors by offering to make them the core of El Hassan's Desert Legion during wartime and his policemen and rangers during peacetime. Rex Donaldson, ex-field expert for the African Department of the British Commonwealth, arrives to join Crawford's organization, bringing fieldworkers Jack and Jimmy Peters and David Moroka with him. As they are being briefed, David thwarts an assassination attempt against Crawford, killing the assassin. Crawford then sends Rex to recruit troops in Senegal and Mali. Now guarded by fifteen Tuareg warriors, Crawford's group travels the country to rally up forces for the upcoming Tamanrasset battle. They capture Dr. Warren Harding Smythe's American Medical Relief team and force them to join the group. As Crawford's team puts together El Hassan's government, Jack proposes that they make Esperanto the common language of the movement. Kenny Ballalou arrives from the West with news: several Reunited Nations development teams have joined El Hassan, so he now controls a large portion of North Africa. As El Hassan's influence grows, so does his camp, which fills with reporters and foreign diplomats anxious to meet him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peek-A-Poo"title="Peek-A-Poo">
An inquisitive Mouse looks into the diapers of his fellow animal friends, such as Hare, Doggy, Horse, Piggy and Goat, and scrutinizes the different types of faeces and droppings in them. When he finally looks into his own, he realises how clean his is, for he has learnt how to use the potty.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amped_(novel)"title="Amped (novel)">
In a near-future where the Neural-Autofocus and other neural implants made formerly mentally challenged individuals into equals or superiors to those with normal brain functionality, Owen is a high school teacher whose surgeon father helped develop the implants to control his epilepsy. When the United States Supreme Court rules that implanted individuals are no longer a protected class, Owen's life is changed forever, as he discovers that his implant has a very dangerous secret.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_Hating"title="Woman Hating">
Dworkin examines the place and depiction of women in fairy tales and pornography, focusing on the French erotic novels "Story of O" and "The Image", and the magazine "Suck". She then looks at the historical practices of Chinese foot binding and Medieval European witch burning from a radical feminist perspective. The book's final section discusses the concept of androgyny within various cultures' creation myths and argues for "the development of a new kind of human being and a new kind of human community" free from gender and gender roles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_the_World"title="Winter of the World">
The story follows characters from Germany, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union, who become linked by events leading to World War II, and continues through the war and its immediate aftermath. The major characters are often children of the characters who were seen in "Fall of Giants". The novel covers a wide range of world events during the period, including the rise of Nazism, the ascent of Franco in Spain, the short-lived growth of British fascism, Action T4, the Battle of Moscow, the Blitz, the Normandy landings, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the development of the American atom bomb and the Soviet one, the Battle of Berlin and many more. The families, spread across four countries, are related to each other, though they themselves aren't often aware of it.Point of view characters include:Carla von Ulrich - the daughter of Reichstag member Walter von Ulrich and magazine editor Lady Maud Fitzherbert - English aristocrat who had fallen in love with the German nobleman Walter just before WWI and followed her heart against all odds. She was rejected for a medical scholarship due to the anti-female policies in Nazi Germany, but takes a job as a nurse in Berlin. After her father is murdered by the Gestapo for protesting Action T4, she helps her friends- who are German Resistance members- transmit vital battle plans to the Soviet Union. During the Battle of Berlin Carla witnesses a fourteen-year-old Jewish girl named Rebecca about to be raped by five Red Army soldiers, and in an appalling act of self-sacrifice offers herself to be raped instead. Becoming pregnant, she decides to have the child, cherish and raise him with her husband, Werner Franck and her mother. She also adopts the girl Rebecca whom she saved. She becomes a Social Democrat Berlin City Councillor, involved in confronting the Soviets during the 1948 Blockade of Berlin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flirting_with_Fate_(novel)"title="Flirting with Fate (novel)">
A journey of a boy where he yearns for love...almost finds it but fate takes it away from him. The story of this book begins in the suburbs of Shimla where a little boy is adopted in an orphanage. He gets all attention and love there but yearns to be adopted by a wealthy family. A turn of events happen where he is rejected often, this giving birth to the devil in him. As and when he is denied love and acceptance, Anand, the boy turns to crime to get what he wants. Petty thefts and lies slowly lay their foundation in him and soon he moves onto larger crimes like rape and murder. After committing plenty of petty crimes in Shimla, he moves to Delhi to make quick money and return to Shimla to his lady love. He does that…makes quick money the wrong way but when he returns, his girl is no longer his. The cruel twist of fate teaches him a lesson and he reaps what he has sown…it all comes back when he is hit step by step by God who enables Karma to return. The highlight of the book is a dog Fluffy who is a witness to all the crimes but is unable to tell anyone, being a dog…but his constant chatter and him sharing his thoughts now and then is a unique concept. The end is completely unpredictable with each scene being a compelling read, making the book difficult to put down. The mystery remains how Anand is punished in the end.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reached"title="Reached">
Told in the alternating perspectives of Xander, Cassia, and Ky, the novel begins with Xander attending the welcoming ceremony of a new baby born into the Society. Xander is now working as an official in the medical department with another official named Lei, but he is secretly working for the Rising, a network of rebels against the Society. He reveals that the tablets given to newborns are switched by rebels which contain immunity to the red, memory-erasing tablets and immunity to the viral plague which is ravaging the Society. Cassia is working in the Capital as a sorter while Ky is in Camas training to be an Airship pilot for the Rising. When Ky and Indie are placed on the same ship to deliver medical supplies to Grandia City, the leader of the Rising, called the Pilot, reveals that they are on a special mission to initiate the rebellion and bring the cure for the plague as the Society plunges into disarray.Months later, the Rising has taken control of the Society, but the majority of its resources are being put into curing the infected. However, the medics realize the virus has mutated into a more dangerous form. Those who had been immunized are not safe from the mutated virus, but those who caught the first strain of the virus are immune, signified by a red mark on their back. In Central, Cassia forms a group of people willing to share their art and talents with each other called the Gallery. Lei does not have the mark and contracts the virus. Indie picks up Cassia and Xander on an airship and brings them to the Pilot where it is revealed that Cassia and Xander are immune, but Ky is not. After being exposed to the virus, Ky starts getting sick. They agree to help the Pilot find the cure by working with villagers in Endstone outside of the Society who are immune. There, Ky is bedridden with the virus while Cassia works with the head sorter. Xander works with a renowned scientist named Oker to develop a cure. Cassia meets Anna, Hunter's mother-in-law who lead to farmers out of the Carving. The work for the cure is arduous and the lines between the Rising and the Society begin to blur; Oker tells Xander that the blue tablet is a trigger for the virus, not a poison and that the Society purposefully infected everyone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Threshold"title="The Last Threshold">
Now that Charon's Claw is destroyed, Drizzt Do'Urden and his companions—not only Dahlia Sin'felle and Artemis Entreri, but also the former Shadovar Ambergris and Afafrenfere rest in Neverwinter while they decide their next course. Drizzt is resolved to find Guenhwyvar, who has somehow been trapped in the Shadowfell and can no longer be summoned, but when he attempts to summon her some time later, he is successful. He devises a plan to take his companions, particularly Entreri, to rebuild Port Llast in order to show them there is something worthwhile and honorable to do with their skills.While seeking the help of Arunika, Drizzt and Dahlia find evidence of a vampire, which turns out to be Thibbledorf Pwent, Bruenor Battlehammer's loyal shield dwarf who had tragically been turned into a vampire by Dor'crae. Pwent resolves to remain in the sunlight and be destroyed; Drizzt and Dahlia leave him to go in peace and honor. The group heads north.In the Shadowfell, Effron is desperate to get back at his mother, Dahlia. He plans to steal Guenhwyvar in order to blackmail Drizzt into leaving Dahlia's side, but the panther is already gone and Lord Draygo Quick discovers his plan.Meanwhile, Jarlaxle and Athrogate are alive and well and working for Bregan D'aerthe. They find out that Tiago Baenre is seeking Drizzt Do'Urden, who now apparently travels with Artemis Entreri, whom Jarlaxle had both befriended and betrayed. Jarlaxle and Athrograte travel on Bregan D'aerthe business to the Shade Enclave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_H-Bomb_Girl"title="The H-Bomb Girl">
Set in October 1962, in Liverpool, actually in and around the authors own school, with the Cuban Missile Crisis looming, it concerns 14-year-old Laura Mann, who has been entrusted with a strange key and code number to memorize by her father, an RAF officer at Strike Command in High Wycombe. The key turns out to be for a nuclear armed Vulcan bomber and it becomes the target of time travellers from 2007, from alternate versions of Laura's own future, all seeking to change the course of history.The vibrant popular culture of 1960s Liverpool features prominently in the novel, the climax takes place during a Beatles concert at The Cavern Club with Cilla Black as cloakroom attendant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur's_Nose"title="Arthur's Nose">
Arthur is a young anthropomorphic aardvark residing in a world populated by anthropomorphic animals. Francine Frensky, his classmate, starts to complain of his nose and also frequently complains about Arthur's lengthy nose, as she is seated nearby, and a few other remarks regarding the length of his nose inspire Arthur to have it fixed. He visits a specialist, but decides against the idea of changing his nose even after viewing the man's other options. Arthur returns to school and is seldom taunted because of his nose, although Francine still complains mildly about it getting in her way.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unwanteds"title="The Unwanteds">
## Book 1: The Unwanteds.Every year in Quill there is a tradition of sorting thirteen year olds into three categories: Wanted, Necessary and Unwanted. The strong, intelligent wanteds go to university, necessaries go to work in the fields, and the worthless, artistic unwanteds get sent to their graves.Thirteen-year-old Alex tries his hardest to be stoic when his fate is announced as Unwanted, even while leaving behind his twin, Aaron, a Wanted. Upon arrival at the destination where he expected to be eliminated, however, Alex discovers a stunning secret--behind the mirage of the "death farm" there is instead a place called Artimè.In Artimè, each child is taught to cultivate their creative abilities and learn how to use them magically, weaving spells through paintbrushes and musical instruments. Everything Alex has ever known changes before his eyes, and it's a wondrous transformation.But it's a rare, unique occurrence for twins to be separated between Wanted and Unwanted, and as Alex and Aaron's bond stretches across their separation, a threat arises for the survival of Artimè that will pit brother against brother in an ultimate, magical battle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Childhood_of_Jesus"title="The Childhood of Jesus">
The book follows a man and a boy who immigrate to a new land. Once there, they receive new names and rough estimates of their age and are taught Spanish in an attempt to acclimate them to their new surroundings. Simón, the elder of the two, begins working at a grain wharf and slowly befriends his fellow workers. At the same time, Simón must find a way to locate the mother of the young boy David, who remembers nothing about her but assumes that he will recognize her when he sees her. During a walk, David attaches himself to a woman he believes to be his mother, prompting Simón to successfully talk her into assuming the role. However, while she begins to care for David, the authorities insist that he be sent to a distant school. Refusing to give him up, Simón and the woman flee in hopes of outrunning their pursuers and retaining custody of David.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sair_Tjerita_Siti_Akbari"title="Sair Tjerita Siti Akbari">
The Sultan of Hindustan, Bahar Oedin, is infuriated after his uncle Safi, a trader, dies while imprisoned in Barbari. As the Abdul Aidid, the Sultan of Barbari, has greater military power, Bahar Oedin bides his time and plans his revenge. Meanwhile, Abdul Aidid's son Abdul Moelan marries his cousin, Siti Bida Undara. Two years later, after Abdul Aidid dies, Abdul Moelan goes on an extended sea voyage, leaving his wife behind.In the nearby kingdom of Ban, Abdul Moelan meets and falls in love with Siti Akbari, daughter of the Sultan of Ban. The two soon marry and, after six months in Ban, return to Barbari. Siti Bida Undara, at first upset at the thought of sharing her husband, soon becomes close friends with Siti Akbari. Shortly thereafter Bahar Oedin takes his revenge, capturing Abdul Moelan and Siti Bida Undara. When the sultan tries to capture Siti Akbari, he discovers a body in her room and believes it to be hers. He takes his captives back to Hindustan and imprisons them.Unknown to him, the pregnant Siti Akbari has faked her death and escaped. After several months she finds protection under Syaikh (Sheikh) Khidmatullah, under whose protection she gives birth. He trains her in "silat" (traditional martial arts) so she can free her husband. Leaving her son in Khidmatullah's care, she begins her travels. When seven men accost and attempt to rape her, she kills them. Taking their clothes and cutting her hair, she disguises herself as a man and takes the name Bahara. After arriving in Barbam, she stops a war between two claimants to the region's throne. She kills the usurper, then takes his head to the rightful heir to the throne, Hamid Lauda. In thanks Hamid Lauda rewards Siti Akbari with rule over Barbam and allows the "Bahara" to take his sister, Siti Abian, in marriage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Crazy_Beautiful_Life"title="My Crazy Beautiful Life">
In "My Crazy Beautiful Life", Kesha details her "thoughts and reflections" about her life and contains photographs from various points in her life, both before and after she became a singer. The singer has described the book as being "a more complete picture of what my life is really like". The book also goes into some of the meanings behind some of her song lyrics, with Kesha writing that her song "Blah Blah Blah" was "a conscious move to talk about men like they talked about women".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bared_to_You"title="Bared to You">
Although Eva Tramell, a 24-year-old survivor of childhood sexual abuse, finds it difficult at times to overcome her past, she is drawn to young billionaire Gideon Cross, another childhood sexual abuse survivor. They must find a way to heal each other and establish a healthy romantic relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man-Eating_Myth"title="The Man-Eating Myth">
In chapter one, "The Nature of Anthropology and Anthropophagy", Arens discusses the study of anthropophagy, or cannibalism, within the anthropological discipline. Noting that anthropologists have widely taken it for granted that there are societies who socially sanction cannibalism, he nevertheless states that there is no "adequate documentation" for such practices anywhere in the world. In the second part of the chapter, he explores several first-hand accounts of cannibalism and highlights their implausible and inaccurate nature. Beginning with the German Hans Staden's claims to have encountered socially sanctioned cannibalism among the Tupinambá people of South America in the 1550s, Arens illustrates a number of logical contradictions in Staden's account, and highlights the dubious nature of the text. The anthropologist then moved on to the 19th-century accounts of widespread socially approved cannibalism among the Polynesian people of Rarotonga in the Cook Islands provided by Ta'unga, a Polynesian native who had been converted to Christianity and wrote for the London Missionary Society; Arens again highlights a number of inconsistencies and logical impossibilities in Ta'unga's claims.The second chapter, entitled "The Classic Man-Eaters", explores the accounts of cannibalism produced by European colonialists and travellers in the Americas during the Early Modern era. It begins by documenting the Spanish interaction with the Carib people of the Lesser Antilles, first begun by Christopher Columbus and his men in the 1490s. Columbus noted that the Caribs had been described as cannibals by the neighbouring Arawak people of the West Indies, but was initially sceptical about such claims himself. Arens highlights that it was only later, when Columbus began to oversee largescale colonization and pacification of Carib lands, that he began to assert that they were cannibals, in order to legitimize his cause. Arens then proceeds to note that the Spanish government only permitted the enslavement of cannibals in the Caribbean, leading European colonists to increasingly label the indigenous peoples as cannibalistic in order to increase their economic power. Following on from this, Arens goes on to critique the longstanding claims that the Aztec people of Mexico were cannibals; noting that while the early Spanish accounts of the Aztecs include first-hand descriptions of human sacrifice, he highlights that none of these Spanish observers actually witnessed cannibalism, despite the claims that were later made asserting the cannibalistic nature of Aztec religion. In contrast, Arens argues that the Aztecs found the idea of cannibalism – even in survival conditions – socially reprehensible, and believed that some of their neighbouring peoples were guilty of it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_Ye_Breed"title="The Best Ye Breed">
In parallel stories, four operatives are given conflicting missions in response to the North African war of liberation headed by black American sociologist Homer Crawford, also known as El Hassan. Counter espionage agent Paul Kosloff is dispatched by the U.S. State Department to stop Crawford's revolution before it brings about the financial collapse of the developed world, Major Sean Ryan is hired by the Arab Union to lead a mercenary team in the assassination of Crawford and his followers, Japanese Colonel Tokugawa Hidetada is commissioned to investigate Crawford's stance toward trade with Japan, and KGB agent Serge Sverdlov is sent to promote Crawford's program for North Africa to ensure that the region will be ripe for Soviet propaganda in the future.Meantime, having scored a victory over the Arab Union forces in Tamanrasset, Crawford and his team turn to governmental issues, which include naming their new country Ifriqiyah and the creation of a Desert Camel Corps to defend the progressive field projects sponsored by El Hassan. Crawford then leaves the administration of the government temporarily in the hands of Isobel Cunningham, who is to pretend that El Hassan and his closest viziers are in a secluded planning session. In actuality, Crawford, Bey-ag-Akhamouk, Kenneth Ballalou, and Clifford Jackson go on a mission to save teammate Elmer Allen, who has been captured by one of Crawford's enemies, the leader of the Ouled Touameur clan, Abd-el-Kader. Allen is kept in a portable iron cage at the council of chiefs of the Chaambra confederation, which has been convened so that Abd-el-Kader can be proclaimed as the reincarnation of Mahdi, the holiest prophet since Mohammed. On their arrival to the council, Crawford challenges Abd-el-Kader to combat. When Abd-el-Kader refuses, Bey proposes that El Hassan and two of his men fight the one thousand warriors of Abd-el-Kader's clan in a secluded area. When the chiefs balk at this outlandish suggestion, Crawford seems to think the idea over and suggests he and his men fight the one thousand men three warriors at a time. After twenty-seven clan champions fail to emerge victorious from the arena, Abd-el-Kader's men turn their backs on him and Abd-el-Kader is laughed off the encampment. Later, Bey explains to Kenny that Crawford and Cliff used a small clearance after the narrow path leading to the fighting area to ambush Abd-el-Kader's warriors one by one.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wife_of_Sir_Isaac_Harman"title="The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman">
The protagonist of "The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman" is Lady Harman, née Ellen Sawbridge. The moral, emotional, and intellectual conflicts that this tall, sensitive, graceful woman confronts arise in the context of a loveless marriage with Sir Isaac Harman, a self-made man who has grown rich as the proprietor of International Bread and Cake Stores and Staminal Bread. Sir Isaac meets his future wife when she is only seventeen and still a student in a boardinghouse in Wimbledon; she marries him largely out of pity. But the marriage is not a happy one, despite great wealth and the birth of four children. Sir Isaac is inherently domineering, and in an age of Suffragettes he encounters a desire for greater freedom in his wife.The plot of the novel turns on Lady Harman's relationship with George Brumley (invariably "Mr. Brumley" in the text), a successful genteel novelist whose wife has died three and a half years earlier. Lady Harman meets Mr. Brumley because the Harmans buy his house, Black Strand, in the countryside outside London. Mr. Brumley falls in love with Lady Harman at first sight. His interest in her leads him and a number of acquaintances to pay Lady Harman a visit. This results is invitations to luncheons and committees for Lady Harman, and despite all his efforts the possessive Sir Isaac is unable to quell his wife's desire to accept. Through many twists and turns Mr. Brumley's attachment to Lady Harman increases until, after the death of Sir Isaac, he appears to win her love on the novel's concluding page. (This comes after she has definitively refused to marry him, and the reader is left uncertain whether her passionate kiss signifies that she has changed her mind on this question.)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Firebrand_(Bradley_novel)"title="The Firebrand (Bradley novel)">
## Volume One.In the wealthy and powerful city of Troy, the pregnant queen Hecuba experiences a prophetic dream which distresses her. When consulted, a priestess of the Great Goddess tells Hecuba and her husband, King Priam, that the dream indicates she will birth a son who will bring destruction to Troy. Priam declares that this boy must be exposed to death, but upon his birth three days later, Priam agrees to Hecuba's pleas and has him fostered by a shepherd on the slopes of Mount Ida. Priam names the boy Alexandros (later Paris), and names his twin sister Alexandra, whom Hecuba keeps and decides to call Kassandra.While visiting the temple of Apollo with her mother, six-year-old Kassandra experiences a vision of the god telling her she is to become "his priestess". In the following years, Kassandra experiences further visions. When she is twelve, Kassandra sees a vision of Paris, who is now a shepherd. Kassandra asks her father the boy's identity but he reacts angrily. Kassandra is sent to be fostered by Hecuba's sister Penthesilea, chief of the Amazonsa nomadic warrior tribe consisting only of women. There, Kassandra comes to love their lifestylethough it is not without its trialsand she learns of her twin, continuing to experience visions of him. Kassandra sees the Judgement of Paris, in which her brother deems Aphrodite more beautiful than Athena or Hera; Aphrodite rewards Paris by eventually promising the love of Helen of Spartadaughter of Leda and Zeus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captains_Outrageous"title="Captains Outrageous">
The novel opens with both Hap Collins and Leonard Pine working as a security guards at a chicken plant. One night Hap saves the owner's daughter from a violent rapist, and the owner rewards him with hundred thousand dollars. Hap and Leonard take a cruise, but they get into a dispute with the ship's maitre de about protocol and find themselves marooned in Mexico. While there they are mugged, and then rescued by a fisherman named Ferdinand and his daughter Beatrice. Hap forms a sexual relationship with Beatrice while the two stay with them, and discovers that she owes a large amount of money to a local gangster named Juan Miguel. Just before they leave to go back to Mexico, Beatrice is violently murdered, presumably by Juan Miguel's thugs.Once back in Texas, Hap and Leonard attempt to move past the events of the last few days, but when their friend Charlie is killed they realise that Juan Miguel is attempting to silence them. Along with their associate, a detective named Jim Bob, and Hap's main girlfriend Brett, they return to Mexico to finish matters. They first attempt to stage a kidnapping of Juan Miguel's favorite mistress, but this attempt goes awry and some deaths of friends and associates occurs. Deciding that matters must be settled in the most direct and uncomplicated manner possible, Hap breaks into Juan Miguel's compound, hides in his backyard and executes him, along with his extreme henchman, Hammerhead. At the novel's conclusion Leonard has a new job and Hap returns to his old one; Hap and Brett are now back together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Report_from_Group_17"title="A Report from Group 17">
12-year-old Allison Adam lives with her mother and 2 brothers in an isolated farmhouse by Seneca Lake (a reservoir that was being planned at the time O'Brien wrote his story) near Washington D.C. Every day after school, Allie stops by the walled grounds of Villa Petrograd, property of the Soviet embassy, and climbs a tree to view monkeys at a small zoo there. Fond of animals, Allie is troubled that the monkeys keep dying mysteriously. Unknown to her, the embassy holds the secret research lab of Helmuth Schutz, a former Nazi now developing bioweapons for the Soviets—specifically, mutations of the bacteria "coryna" and "anthracis". Discovering Allie's spying, Schutz lures her into the compound by leaving a gate open and then kidnaps her for experiments. When her bike is later found near the Potomac River upstream from dangerous rapids, the police assume she fell in accidentally and drowned. Only Allie's 5-year-old brother Willis knows where she went, but he has promised her to keep it secret.Meanwhile, the eminent biochemist Fergus O'Neil is recruited by the U.S. State Department, to study stolen Soviet reports from Schutz's Group 17, and investigate his activities at Villa Petrograd, by posing as a vacationer. After taking water samples one day, O'Neil rescues John Adam from nearly drowning, while testing the police's theory about his sister's bike accident. Sympathizing with the Adam family, and attracted to the recently widowed Mrs. Adam, O'Neil becomes personally concerned about Allie's disappearance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Archaeology_of_Death_and_Burial"title="The Archaeology of Death and Burial">
Chapter one, "Learning from the Dead", opens with an account of a 10th-century Volga Viking funeral from the Arab traveller Ibn Fadlan. Parker Pearson then highlights that funerals and the rites of the dead tell us more about the living in a society rather than the dead themselves. The book then proceeds to offer an overview of such issues as inhumation, cremation, grave goods, the organisation of cemeteries and human sacrifice.In the second chapter, "From Now to Then: Ethnoarchaeology and Analogy", Parker Pearson explores earlier anthropological and archaeological theoretical approaches to death and burial. Beginning with a discussion of social anthropological approaches, he discusses the role of death as a rite of passage, thereby introducing the reader to the work of the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep. From there, he moves on to a discussion of functionalist approaches to death among social anthropologists, highlighting that funerals often serve as political events among communities. This is followed by a discussion of the dead as polluting entities, an idea advocated by Mary Douglas, and then themes of fertility and regeneration. He finally refers to the rites of reversal and ancestor veneration that play a role in funerals in many societies. From social anthropology, he moves on to look at the processual archaeological approaches to funerary archaeology, as have been advocated since the 1960s. In doing so, he discusses Arthur Saxe's arguments regarding the social dimensions of mortuary practices as well as Joseph Tainter's theories regarding the relationship between the energy expenditure used for a funeral and the social status of the corpse. He rounds this section off by highlighting a number of criticisms of processual approaches. Proceeding with a discussion of post-processual archaeological approaches, Parker Pearson looks at the influence of social practice and human agency on mortuary practices.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanilla_Ride"title="Vanilla Ride">
When an old friend asks Leonard Pine to rescue his daughter from a drug dealer, Leonard accepts and of course brings his sidekick and best friend Hap Collins along for backup. With much violence and gunplay they rescue the daughter and end up taking down the drug dealer in the process. The problem is the dealer is a low level member of the Texas crime syndicate The Dixie Mafia. The Dixie Mafia figures some payback is in order and enlist the deadly assassin "Vanilla Ride" to carry out the hit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_Red"title="Devil Red">
In this story Hap Collins and Leonard Pine are hired by a former police officer turned private investigator to investigate a cold case double homicide. As they get further into the investigation, they encounter The Dixie Mafia organized crime syndicate, a vampire cult, and a deadly assassin, Devil Red.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xman"title="Xman">
Of Xman's background, we learn he was born an oversized orphan in Eunuque Falls, Iowa, a suburb of Old Balls, raised in an orphanage outside of Cincinnati, and ended up in the city C or C— some time before the novel begins. Xman had minutes of experience in podiatry school, after which he worked on a construction gang in the Berkeley hills.Xman, seeking to make himself unique, takes a cab to the airport, flies to New York City, then rides a bus to Grand Central Station. He walks up Second Avenue, sometimes giving derelicts a few cents. He finds the hotel his friends recommended, the Microtraumata Royale. Taking a room, he listens to an argument in the room next door between Fatima "Fa", and a man that Xman dubs (-)Xman.Jed Perlmutter introduces Xman to Jensen MacDuffers, who wants to introduces him to Tom McTomTom, but instead directs him to Amos and Alphonse Finaglie, who run an employment agency high up in the World Trade Center. Rose Baldachino handles Xman's case. While addressing Xman, Rosalie walks in with a folder for Rose. Xman moves in with Rosalie. He gets a temporary job, working for Fish, who delivers, before Xman has actually done anything, a long speech on the quality of Xman's work and work habits, interrupted by the arrival of Brunhildine. When she leaves, Fish continues his speech, including the story of Brunhildine, and how she's trapped.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartan_Gold"title="Spartan Gold">
Clive Cussler introduces a new team of adventurers with this book, the Fargos, who have a knack for stumbling into the plots of evil egomaniacs. This adventure starts when they stumble across a one-man World War II German midget submarine, which is still intact. Inside, they find a bottle that they discover came from Napoleon's "lost wine cellar." Immediately, representatives of power-hungry millionaire Hadeon Bondaruk attempts to get the bottle at any cost. They begin a quest to discover why this bottle so important that Bondaruk is willing to kill to get it. This adventure takes the Fargos to the Bahamas and over much of Europe before they discover Bondaruk's evil plans for regional domination.Co-author Clive Cussler has a habit of making cameo appearances in many of his novels. In this one he makes a brief appearance when the Fargos are hunting for one of Napoleon's wine bottles on Rum Cay, in the Bahamas.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_Alex_Cross"title="Kill Alex Cross">
President Coyle's children, Zoe (who is depicted as 'always getting in trouble' or starting it) and Ethan (who is the opposite of his sister, and is often picked on and bullied by fellow students at their middle school), speak to each other alone in a shed, when Secret Service open the door to take them to assembly, they find Zoe and Ethan have been kidnapped. Meanwhile, Metro Police Department cop Alex Cross, along with FBI agents, and Secret Service, discover a vehicle that rushes quickly out of the school grounds. Upon chasing the van, a massive car crash results soon afterward. Alex interrogates the driver, who is badly injured and sent to the hospital. Alex later learns the driver's name to be Pinkey. Meanwhile, FBI agent Ned Mahoney is told by Director Ron Burns that all information must be kept from Metro Police, and others, especially Alex Cross – who is a close friend of Mahoney. Ned feels guilty, and later offers to give info to Alex. Alex later tells his best friend, John Sampson, the case reminds him of the case of Gary Soneji, who was a math teacher that kidnapped two children.After being sure the FBI is keeping information from him, Alex asks Ned for help, but he refuses, annoying Alex. Alex is later asked to see the president's wife. The First Lady tells Alex she is confident, and hopes, Alex can help rescue her children. She responds by telling Alex about her children. Two messages are given from the kidnapper, one saying "there will be no ransom" nor negotiations. Later, when being called upon by the CIA for a private meeting, he discovers the two messages, and also makes up with Ned. Later, at an FBI meeting, Alex and Ned are shown a video of the Coyle children sedated and sleeping. President Coyle reveals that Al Ayla, otherwise known as "the Family", a group of Saudi people, may have something to do with it. The Family consists of Hala, her husband Tariq, and others. Their first mission, together with another couple, is the poisoning of Washington's water supply. Aware that there is a traitor in the Family they kill the other couple afterwards.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Cross_(novel_series)"title="Alex Cross (novel series)">
Alex Cross is a widower-detective-father who often fights against threatening villains—and criminals who wish to kill Cross and others. It mainly focuses on Cross trying to solve very difficult cases while attempting to maintain a relationship with his family. For example, in "Merry Christmas, Alex Cross", Cross misses out on Christmas Eve and Christmas itself to focus on finding and defeating a terrorist group. One of his regular foes in the earlier books is Gary Soneji, the "Mastermind" who wants to kill Cross, out of revenge for Alex putting him in prison. In some books, Cross sometimes works with—or against—the President/Secret Service in a few books such as "Along Came a Spider", "Jack &amp; Jill, I, Alex Cross", and "Kill Alex Cross". An ongoing theme in the earlier novels is the unsolved murder of his first wife, Maria. Cross later reveals another reason for trying to solve the cases: so he can protect his family from danger. Cross currently lives on Fifth Street in Southeast Washington, D.C., along with grandmother Nana Mama, children Damon, Janelle ("Jannie"), and Alex Jr. ("Ali"), and his current and new wife, Brianna "Bree" Stone-Cross.When Alex was 9, his father died of alcoholism, a year after his mother died. He went to Washington, D.C., to live with his grandmother—Nana Mama. During his childhood, he met his later best friend John Sampson. He also later met his wife, Maria, in Washington, and married her. After giving birth to two children, a few months or years later, she is murdered. Alex later meets a woman named Christine, who becomes pregnant, giving birth to an additional third child for the Cross family—Ali. She later leaves Ali with Alex dealing with traumatization over her kidnapping in "Pop Goes the Weasel". Afterwards, she tried claiming custody over Ali and succeeded. However, she later gave Ali back to Alex, who had joined the FBI at the time. His deadliest foes are Geoffrey Shafer and Gary Soneji; both have been killed through the course and events of the book series.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crewel_(novel)"title="Crewel (novel)">
"Crewel" is a form of magical weaving. This marks her as someone that would be of interest to the people who run Arras, as the world is completely dependent on the Guild to manipulate the world and bring in food and good weather. Every year Arras’s Manipulation Services performs a test on girls of a specific age, looking to see if they have the ability to manipulate. The girls that show promise are taken away in the night and put to work weaving the world around them. Adelice's parents knew of Adelice's abilities and tried to hide her talents, only for Adelice to accidentally reveal them during the testing period. Her parents try to hide her, only for the Guild to attack the family, seemingly killing Adelice's parents and carting away her little sister. She's told that if she cooperates, her sister will be fine. However, in a world where your entire personality can be re-woven to turn you into someone else and anyone can be removed from the world entirely at the whims of Arras's government, Adelice soon finds that not everything is as it seems and discovers a secret capable of destroying everything she holds dear.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkey_Punch_(novel)"title="Donkey Punch (novel)">
The book follows protagonist Cal Innes, a private investigator and former convict whose parole after being released from HM Prison Manchester is finished. He is employed as a caretaker of a boxing gym called the Lads' Club managed by Paulo Gray in Manchester. Innes has allegiance to an influential criminal figure named Morris Tiernan, also known as Uncle. Innes agrees to a request from Uncle to accompany a novice 17-year-old boxer named Liam Wooley to a significant boxing match in Los Angeles.Once there, Innes becomes acquainted over drinks with a former boxer named Nelson Byrne. The job, originally intended to be looking after Wooley, becomes a sinister operation as Innes learns there may be impropriety related to the fight. Innes deals with his dependence on codeine and alcohol along with Wooley's anger management problems. Innes finds himself in a difficult situation in an unfamiliar city, suffers a gunshot wound and his charge Wooley is involuntarily subdued with medication and kidnapped. Innes becomes the suspect in a murder investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department, finds and rescues Wooley and learns that his supposed friend Byrne was the culprit. After being exonerated by the police, Innes escorts Wooley back to England.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_Ergo_Sum"title="Fuzzy Ergo Sum">
Six months travel by hyperdrive from Terra is the planet Zarathustra, a world colonized by the Chartered Zarathustra Corporation (CZC) to exploit its mineral wealth, including its unique "sunstone" gemstones. Still in the early stages of colonization, Zarathustra was thought to be devoid of intelligent life until prospector JackHolloway discovered a race of small furry humanoids, the Fuzzies. Subsequently, the Pendarvis Decision had declared the Fuzzies to be sapient and thus the owners of the planet's mineral rights, which cost the CZC its mining charter.Things have been quiet on Zarathustra the last few years for the Colonial Government, Jack Holloway (now Commissioner of Native Affairs), the Fuzzies, and the (now) Charterless Zarathustra Company. Baby Fuzzy has made his first kill, the sunstone mining agreement with the CZC has kept the colonial government in the black; Fuzzies and humans have peacefully co-existed in a nearly symbiotic relationship.Then the mysterious John Morgan from the planet Freya arrives, and starts digging through CZC files. No one knows what he is looking for or how it could affect the Company. Victor Grego, the company CEO, assigns young Akira O’Barre to keep an eye on the mysterious Mr. Morgan. What she discovers could put one of several men at risk, among them Jack Holloway and the Chief Colonial Prosecutor, Gus Brannhard. John Morgan is looking for someone, not something; someone he intends to kill.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marriage_of_William_Ashe"title="The Marriage of William Ashe">
The novel is a story of English social and political life. William Ashe is a rich, handsome, and successful politician, and heir to the title of Earl of Tranmore. Ashe falls for Lady Kitty Bristol, the eighteen-year-old daughter of Madam d'Estrees, whose charm draws many influential men and overcomes any questions about her reputation. Ashe proposes to her just three weeks after they meet, and she accepts though she warns him that her temper and uncontrollable nature may cause him to regret asking.Three years later, the couple are settled in London, with Kitty heavily involved in the London social scene. They have one son, who is physically disabled. Kitty's social activities start to affect Ashe's political career; she strains Ashe's relationship with Lord Parham, the prime minister, and also flirts with the dashing but unprincipled Geoffrey Cliffe. After their child dies, Kitty is left a physical wreck and goes with Ashe to Italy to try to recover her health. Kitty meets Cliffe in Italy and runs off with him, while Ashe is in England trying to suppress a salacious book Kitty has written. Two years later, Ashe comes upon Kitty unexpectedly at a small inn in the Alps. Kitty has had many hardships, but dies in the comfort of Ashe's presence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/***_(novel)"title="*** (novel)">
The novel opens with a 13-page section consisting almost entirely of paragraphs that begin "It all began with ...". These include some simple one-liners (including "bathroom smells, bathroom noises", "hunger, and thirst of course", "the loss of his credit cards") any one of which could start a typically written novel, but here do not. They also include longer paragraphs that refer all over the map, including some that look like they might have something to do with ***. For example, one paragraph starts by mentioning that Stu was very much liked by his fellow tenants (Mr. Bresson, Mr. Dostoevsky, Mr. Balzac, Mr. Xman). But being captioned "very much liked" was so terrible that Stu needed "a manly atmosphere, heady with *** work, to cure him of this pathos." Another says that the beginning was when Stu felt he was one in an assembly line of listeners, each bound to repeat the story to the next listener.The story properly begins with Stu Potts attending a party hosted by Bette Kaye, noted for when "Dov Grey became Dov Grey." Prominent among the attendees are Dov Grey and his wife Gwenda, employee Jomm Dawrson and his wife Tullshie (also called Miss Tullshie Dawrson née Dreadnought). Dov and Jomm share their hostility to the popular Hinkle-Winkle, who is "the eternal embodiment of goodish news," and a "freeloading ... world-class houseguest." In contrast, their wives are sympathetic to Hinkle-Winkle and his associates, "a band of brotherly strugglers all, unhierarchizable sodality of free souls." We learn later that Gwenda's sister Trendy is "wife and, depending on the time of day, concubine" to Hinkle-Winkle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_(novel)"title="Sandy (novel)">
A contemporary synopsis of the novel's plot describes it as follows:This is the story of a young Irish boy named Sandy Kilday, who at the age of sixteen, being without home or relatives, decides to try his luck in the new country across the ocean. Accordingly, he slips aboard one of the big ocean liners as a stowaway, but is discovered before the voyage is half over and in spite of his entreaties is told he must be returned by the next steamer. Sandy, however, who has a winning way and sunny smile, arouses the interest of the ship's doctor, who pays his passage and gives him some money with which to start his new life. On the voyage Sandy has made friends with a lad in steerage named Ricks Wilson, who earns his living by peddling, and he decides to join him in this career. Sandy has also been deeply impressed by the face of a lovely young girl who is one of the cabin passengers and when he discovers that she is Miss Ruth Nelson of Kentucky he decides to make that state his destination. He and Ricks remain companions for sometime although Sandy's strong sense of honor causes disagreements as to the methods of their dealings. Sandy finally becomes disgusted with this life and after catching a glimpse of Ruth at a circus, where he is dispensing his wares in a humorous manner, he decides to abandon it altogether.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Amour_de_la_femme_vénale"title="L'Amour de la femme vénale">
In "L'Amour de la femme vénale", Mirbeau explores the causes of prostitution, both economic and social, from his own experiences. He also examines the prostitute's relationship with clients, her loves, her future and her body.The work is divided into six chapters: In his work, Mirbeau intends to rehabilitate prostitutes who, far from being inherently vicious and perverse women as Cesare Lombroso would maintain, were doubly victims: on the one hand, because of the economic and social conditions inflicted on women coming from disadvantaged backgrounds; and, on the other hand, because of the hypocrisy of a controlling class that scorns, rejects and condemns, in the name of a spurious "morality", the women whose services are needed as a result of the sexual frustration caused by monogamous marriages.According to Mirbeau, there is a veritable war that pits the sexes against one another, and prostitutes are in the vanguard of this struggle, since they cannot be duped by the vain and overbearing speech and appearance of male customers whom they encounter in their repulsive nudity, as had the chambermaid Célestine in Mirbeau's "Le Journal d’une femme de chambre" ("The Diary of a Chambermaid"). According to Mirbeau, prostitutes are potentially anarchists, and the sexual relationship between them and their clients more closely resembles a duel. But it is the prostitute who emerges victorious from this struggle, since she knows how to ignite a man's desire and since, in her profession, and she is prepared to endure everything.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunder_Rising"title="Thunder Rising">
A few months following the events of "The Sun Trail", the cats formerly from the Tribe of Rushing Water have settled in to their new home. Thunder, the son of Clear Sky and Storm, a rogue cat who lived in the forest before the Tribe cats arrived, is being raised by his uncle, Gray Wing, after his mother died and his father rejected him. A forest fire rages through Clear Sky's territory, forcing him and his group to temporarily seek shelter with Gray Wing. While staying with Gray Wing, Clear Sky asks Thunder if he wants to live in the forest with him instead. Thunder accepts the offer, wanting to get to know his father, and he stays with Clear Sky for a short while. After seeing that Clear Sky is power-hungry and uncaring about the needs of his cats, Thunder leaves and returns to Gray Wing and his group.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_Decision"title="Kill Decision">
The book opens with a video feed from predator drones in Karbala, Iraq, where it is observed that an unmarked drone with American colors fires a missile on the dense crowd during a religious ceremony, killing many people. Repercussions of this attack are felt worldwide.A team at the vision lab in Stanford are informed by a patent lawyer that their computer vision code has been stolen by some people and appears in public forums. One of the students then traces the code, and observes that it initially appeared in a location in China. Just as they assemble the team to discuss this development, they are killed by a laser guided missile.Linda McKinney is studying the swarming behavior of weaver ants in Africa. Later that night, Linda is woken up by some noises, and is lured away from her house just as her house is completely destroyed in a missile attack. She is then sedated and kidnapped by Odin and his crew. On the way back to the US, we observe a military operation in Pakistan to reverse engineer US predator drones. Odin realizes that it is a farce put up to implicate Pakistan for the attack at Karbala, and decides to stick to his original plan. They land in Kansas City, and then make their way to the base of operations, which is located in SubTropolis, an old limestone mine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franny_K._Stein"title="Franny K. Stein">
The "Franny K. Stein" follows its titular character Franny, a 7-year-old young girl that's ostracized from her classmates due to her strange behaviors and experiments. Throughout the series Fran is often called upon to battle various creatures or put into weird situations, sometimes ones that she herself contributed to either accidentally or deliberately.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Crown_Imperilled"title="A Crown Imperilled">
The Empire of Great Kesh has risen in battle against the western lands of The Kingdom of the Isles on Midkemia while palace coups take place in Roldem and Rillanon, Jim Dasher's intelligence network has been dismantled and minor noblemen threaten the thrones of the West. Pug and the Conclave of Shadows suspect another player is behind the events.As Pug and his son Magnus work to unravel the plot to plunge the world into chaos, they discover an island civilization of Pantathian serpent men, and are startled to find that these Pantathians have a refined culture and social structure, unlike any they have encountered before. Deepening the mystery is a mysterious energy matrix that Pug and Magnus feel certain they must decipher.Hal, now Duke of Crydee after his father's recent death, though he is not initially aware of this fact, is given the task of protecting Princess Stephané of Roldem, along with his friend and rival Ty Hawkins of Olasko, and Stephané's bodyguard Gabriella, as they flee Roldem following a coup attempt. Along the journey, Hal and Stephané begin to fall in love, though Hal knows his rank and station would never allow them to be married. Meanwhile, Kesh has pushed the Kingdom armies in the West to the strategic city of Ylith, where Hal's younger brothers Martin and Brendan try desperately to hold the city against the siege.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bealby"title="Bealby">
"Bealby" is the story of the escapade of a thirteen-year-old boy when he rebels against his placement as a steward's-room boy in the great house of an estate named Shonts (his stepfather, Mr. Darling, is a gardener there) and flees—not, however, before thoroughly upsetting a weekend party where the "nouveau riche" couple renting Shonts is entertaining the Lord Chancellor. Bealby's week-long "holiday" has three phases.First, he is taken up by three women in caravan, one of whom, Madeleine Philips, is a well-known actress whose beauty inspires in Bealby an adoring infatuation. Miss Philips is also the lover of a Captain Douglas, a guest at Shonts who has been wrongly blamed for wrecking the weekend party there. Captain Douglas believes he must capture Bealby and use his testimony to exonerate himself in the Lord Chancellor's eyes, but when Bealby gets wind of this he flees—not, however, before accidentally wrecking the party's bulky, yellow caravan.Bealby then falls in with Billy Bridget, an amoral tramp who takes his money and persuades him to abet a burglary. This goes awry, and Bealby runs away. But when he buys a meal in Crayminster he is recognized as a runaway. Bealby escapes, but not before the attempt to catch him has wrought havoc in the town.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlady_(novella)"title="The Landlady (novella)">
After the reclusive and bookish scholar Vasily Ordynov is compelled to leave his apartment he wanders aimlessly through Saint Petersburg, contemplating his despair over a loveless life, his childhood and his future. Through this distraction he finds himself within a church, where he notices an old man, Ilia Murin, with his young wife, Katerina. His fascination for the couple, particularly Katerina, causes him to contrive further encounters, with the intention of securing a lodging at their home. He becomes their house guest. The gloomy Murin is a perceived Old Believer, with powers of clairvoyance that have perturbed his neighbours and the local police, and which appear to control his wife. Katerina implies that Murin was her mother's lover, that she might be Murin's biological daughter, and that the pair ran-off together after he killed her father. There is an unresolved suggestion that Murin caused the death of Katerina's fiancé during their escape.Ordynov develops a passion for Katerina, which she reciprocates after nursing him through delirium. While in delirium Ordynov, in dream or reality, spies on Murin who has taken to his bed through illness and is recounting tales to Katerina – he rushes into Murin's room; Murin's attempt to shoot Ordynov with a gun, misses. Ordynov tries to convince Katerina of her need to detach herself from Murin physically and psychologically, and believes he has overcome her reluctance to do so when he hears her sing a song of love and freedom. Katerina offers wine to Ordynov and Murin as she considers her choice. Murin uses the language of prediction and psychology to show any choice as futile, as Katerina is predestined by her sex to be a captive of a master and her own grief. Ordynov now fully believes that Murin is a sorcerer and that Katerina is his slave, as she herself believes. Using Murin's argument, he offers to buy Katerina, to effect her liberation. Murin indicates a veiled threat that the price would be bloodshed for both buyer and goods. Fearing a lost cause, Ordynov intends to kill Murin, but fails as a knife falls from his hand and as Katerina falls at her husband's feet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affliction_(novel)"title="Affliction (novel)">
Anita Blake gets a call from Micah's mother. Micah's father has been bitten by a zombie and is close to death. Anita, Micah, Nathaniel, and her bodyguards fly to Colorado so Micah can see his father and make amends for his estrangement from the family. While in Colorado, Anita discovers that Micah's father is not an isolated case and there have been several deaths and disappearances related to the flesh-eating zombies. Aided by Jean-Claude (who is now the head of a new American vampire council) and Edward, Anita works to uncover the mystery of the flesh-eating zombies in time to save Micah's father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graveminder"title="Graveminder">
The book follows Rebekkah Barrow, a woman that returns to the small town of Claysville in order to attend the funeral of her grandmother Maylene. She remembers that Maylene always attended the funerals of each townsperson, always taking three sips from a flask and telling the dead to "sleep well and stay where I put you". Once back in Claysville, Rebekkah meets up with her old love interest Byron Montgomery and discovers that she is expected to perform the same ritual that her grandmother did for each funeral, as she is the new Graveminder. Not only is Rebekkah the new Graveminder, but Byron is her Undertaker and her helper in placing the dead back in their grave if the ritual is not performed exactly right. When performed incorrectly or not at all, the dead will walk the earth in an attempt to fulfill their hungers, which is exactly what happens. Rebekkah is soon drawn into a web of secrets, bargains, secret worlds, and murder that threatens to ruin the peace of those in Claysville.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merry_Gentry_(series)"title="Merry Gentry (series)">
The series follows Princess Meredith NicEssus aka "Merry Gentry", a faerie princess that is forced to flee the court of her aunt Andais, the Queen of Air and Darkness and of the Unseelie fae. The first novel takes place after Merry has spent several years outside of her aunt's court out of fear of death via court sanctioned duels. Merry is soon brought back to the Unseelie Court and given the option to take her aunt's throne, but only if she can procreate before her sadistic cousin Cel can. She is allowed to take several of Andais's court guards with her and through the course of the series gains more lovers that are drawn to her side through love, friendship, power, promises for protection, and/or bargains struck with other magical creatures. Merry eventually gets involved in a series of secrets and court intrigues as she discovers that both of the rulers of the Seelie and Unseelie courts are potentially infertile, something that has the potential to keep both the followers in each court from producing new fae children. At the end of "Divine Misdemeanors" Merry has not only managed to become pregnant with twins, but has formed her own informal court, complete with lands and grounds that she has not fully investigated. She has also alienated herself from both the Seelie and Unseelie Courts, as she was responsible for the death of her cousin Cel of the Unseelie Courts and filed charges against her uncle Taranis, the ruler of the Seelie Court, for rape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel's_Inferno"title="Gabriel's Inferno">
Gabriel Owen Emerson is a brilliant and enigmatic professor of Dante studies at the University of Toronto. His cold, aloof exterior masks dark secrets he successfully hides, though he has never overcome them. A lovely, intelligent graduate student in his seminar triggers a dim memory - one he cannot place, but which is the key to the happiness he long thought was impossible.Julianne Mitchell, a compassionate, kind young woman, is still struggling to overcome a childhood of neglect and abuse. When she enrolls at the University of Toronto, she knows she will see someone from her past - a man she met once, in an encounter she has never forgotten. Gabriel cannot recall what Julia knows: that they have a shared history rooted in an important moment of their lives.The story unfolds around the electrifying connection between Gabriel and Julia and their increasingly passionate affair. Gabriel sees her unconditional love as his path to salvation even as he acknowledges his selfishness in doing so. Julia struggles with her own self-worth as she grows to trust Gabriel's feelings for her. Determined to capture the happiness that eluded them when they parted years ago, they must defy their own painful pasts as well as obstacles which now conspire to keep them apart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witches_of_East_End"title="Witches of East End">
Joanna Beauchamp has lived off the coast of Long Island for many centuries. She and her daughters Freya and Ingrid are immortal witches, cursed to spend the rest of their days without the use of their substantial powers due to the family's involvement in the Salem Witch Trials. Joanna has the power to heal and bring the dead back to life. Ingrid can tell the future and weave magical knotwork, while Freya can craft potions and charms. They've spent years hiding their true nature from others, something that provides no small amount of frustration due to how much they want to help others. It's only after Freya becomes engaged to the mysterious Bran (Branford) Gardiner (this character was renamed Dash in the TV series), and somehow becomes unwillingly infatuated with his brother Killian, that the Beauchamps seem to start breaking their curse, and slowly begin to cast magic once again. However one small spell turns into several as the Beauchamps begin to fall into the routine of using magic. It's through this everyday usage that they discover that a mysterious presence is at work within the town, making the women barren, unleashing a strange silvery substance into the waters, and ruining the local wildlife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirishko_Phool"title="Shirishko Phool">
Suyog meets Sakambari and her two sisters through Shivaraj. Suyog is a lonely middle-aged man and sees the three sisters with eyes of lust. He views Mujura as the quintessential woman with all the feminine virtues and the most logical choice for a wife. However, he is drawn towards Sakambari who is a rebellious personality who does not adhere to the traditional expectations of how a woman should act or dress. He finds his philosophies strongly at odds with Sakambari's and their acquaintance leads him to reevaluate his past life and actions. He comes to accept his acts such as the rape of three women he committed during the war, which he had previously rationalised as acceptable under the peril of immediate death both he and his victims were under at the time, as criminal. Suyog finds himself unable to continue without love or redemption. Reasoning that either Bari will accept him and he will have happiness or she will hurt or kill him for the transgression giving him redemption, Suyog gets hold of her and kisses her. However, Bari simply looks deeply into him and strides off, vanishing into the house. Suyog is left distraught and confused. Months after the incident, he finds out that Sakambari has died.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_(book)"title="The Lord (book)">
In "The Lord", Guardini wishes to present a correct understanding of Jesus by writing about his life and person, with all the limitations which the subject necessarily imposes. Although Christ lived in a specific historical milieu, and though knowledge of the forces at work in it furthers an understanding of him, Guardini states that a biography of Christ is practicable only within the narrowest confines. Neither Jesus' personality nor his works are immediately traceable to the conditions of the times, for he came "out of the fullness of time contained in the mystery of God, and it was to this mystery that he returned after he had "moved among us" ()."In "The Lord", Guardini points to certain decisive events in Jesus' life, recognising specific directions in it and watching their sense evince and fulfill itself; but he also affirms that one shall never be able to ascertain a genuine evolution of character in the life of Jesus. It is equally impossible to motivate the unwinding of Christ's destiny or the manner in which he accomplished his designated mission, for the ultimate explanations - Guardini states - are to be found only in that impenetrable territory which Jesus calls "my Father's will" — territory forever beyond the reach of history. So Guardini ponders such words as "And Jesus advanced in wisdom and age and grace before God and men" (), and the passage in the Epistle to the Galatians which describes him as one "in the fullness of time," ripening to maturity deeply conscious of the history about him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Rid_of_Bradley"title="Getting Rid of Bradley">
The novel begins with the worst day of Lucy Savage's life. Her husband failed to appear in divorce court, she is shot at, but thinking she is being mugged, she assaults the cop who saved her, and then accidentally dyes her hair green.Zach Warren, the detective she assaulted, is convinced that Lucy's ex-husband, Bradley Porter, is involved in an embezzlement plot carried out by his close high school friend, John Bradley, and that the attempts on Lucy's life are related. To protect her, and to satisfy his own curiosity about her, Zach moves into the house with Lucy and her three dogs.Through a series of deadly situations, including a car bomb and an exploding bed, Zach is constantly at Lucy's side to protect her, until John Bradley shows up looking for the bonds he has embezzled, which the police have already confiscated. Lucy protects herself, and then considers the incident over. Later, however, Bradley comes to the house, determined to step back into their marriage as if nothing had happened. Lucy, with Zach's help, manages to defuse the situation.After that attack, Lucy consents to marrying Zack and allowing him to move in permanently with her and her (now 4) dogs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_(Nesbø_novel)"title="Phantom (Nesbø novel)">
Inspector Harry Hole is returned from his self-imposed exile in Hong Kong when he is told that Oleg, the son of his on-off girlfriend Rakel Fauke, has been arrested for the murder of his flatmate, Gusto. Since Hole has become a father figure to Oleg, he comes to Norway to determine the truth about the murder. Meanwhile, an airline pilot is arrested for smuggling heroin, but—thanks to a mole within the Oslo police, he is released and is pressured into working more intimately for the drug dealing gang. Hole meets an elderly priest who, throughout the novel, gives Harry seemingly random information that ultimately aids him in solving Gusto's murder. Hole discovers that the drug scene in Oslo no longer revolves around heroin, but around a highly-addictive morphine-based drug called violin. He discovers that drug-pushers who deal in violin wear Arsenal football shirts and, using this clue, manages to obtain a sample. Pretending to be Oleg's lawyer, Hole manages to sneak into his cell to get his side of the story. Hole becomes convinced that the police have the wrong suspect and that Oleg has been arrested to take the heat off the real violin dealers. This theory is seemingly confirmed when Oleg is attacked in his cell moments after Hole leaves. Flashbacks reveal how Oleg, Gusto, and Gusto's foster-sister Irene got involved in the violin trade, and how Irene has been kidnapped by the man who developed violin to use as a sex slave. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_a_Strange_Room"title="In a Strange Room">
The novel is divided into three sections, namely "The Follower", "The Lover" and "The Guardian". It concerns Damon, a South African writer who is infected by wanderlust as he goes backpacking abroad and meet different people. In "The Follower", Damon meets a German backpacker named Reiner in Greece, and becomes his travelling companion. Subsequently, in "The Lover", he follows a Frenchman and two Swiss fraternal twins—a man and a woman—travelling through Africa. In both Damon is aware of a homoerotic feeling which binds him to Reiner and Jerome, one of the twins. The final section takes place in India, where he is minding a female friend Anna with severe psychiatric illness and who is threatening suicide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_(memoir)"title="Wild (memoir)">
"Wild" is Cheryl Strayed's memoir of her 1,100-mile solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail. Strayed's journey begins in the Mojave Desert and she hikes through California and Oregon to the Bridge of the Gods into Washington. The book also contains flashbacks to prior life occurrences that led Strayed to begin her journey.At the age of 22, Strayed had been devastated by the lung cancer death of her mother, who was only 45. Her stepfather disengaged from Strayed's family, and her brother and sister remained distant. Strayed and her husband divorced, and eventually a lover convinced her to start using heroin.Seeking self-discovery and resolution of her enduring grief and personal challenges, at the age of 26, Strayed set out on her journey, alone and with no prior hiking experience. "Wild" intertwines the stories of Strayed's life before and during the journey, describing her physical challenges, emotional, and spiritual realizations while on the trail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jesus_I_Never_Knew"title="The Jesus I Never Knew">
With this book, Yancey intends to offer a new and different perspective on the life of Christ and his work – his teaching, his miracles, his death and resurrection – and ultimately, who he was and why he came. The author chronicles his journey of discovery, looking past traditionally perpetuated beliefs about Jesus and reporting facts about him and his teaching as recorded by the authors of the gospels. Juxtaposing the Gospel events with the world we live in today, "The Jesus I Never Knew" gives a dynamic portrait of this central figure of history. The author examines some of the radical words of Jesus with a willingness to tackle the difficult questions raised by them, and asks whether today Christians are taking them seriously enough.Yancey affirms: "No one who meets Jesus ever stays the same. In the end I found the process of writing this book to be a great act of faith-strengthening. Jesus has rocked my own preconceptions and has made me ask hard questions about why those of us who bear his name don't do a better job of following him."Candidly recalling his own journey of rediscovery of Jesus, Yancey demonstrates to his readers the arc of many Christians' intellectual faith walk. First he addresses possible misconceptions about Jesus physical appearance (probably not tall and gaunt, based on what one knows today of Jews of the time), moves onto his character, and his interactions with people and his disciples. He sincerely questions preconceived notions about who Jesus was and is, drawing from a number of sources including many of Hollywood's various celluloid representations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Earth,_Thrown_to_the_Sky"title="All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky">
It is the height of the Great Depression in the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma. Both of Jack Catcher's parents are dead. His mom died from lung disease and his father took his own life. When his neighbor Jane and her little brother Tony show up with a plan to take a dead neighbor's car to Texas, Jack is more than willing to go. However their plans go awry when they have a run in with one of the era's most notorious gangsters. They learn the gang is on their way to kill a former member. After narrowly escaping with their lives, the kids set off to warn the man that his former gang members are on their way to kill him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_Love_(novel)"title="Act of Love (novel)">
Set in Houston, Texas this novel tells the story of a vicious serial killer terrorizing the entire city and the police officers' desperation to stop him. Police lieutenant Marvin Hanson leads the investigation. The killer has chosen the poor seedy side of town as his hunting grounds. As the killings become more and more gruesome, the entire city becomes under siege.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulls,_Bears_and_the_Ballot_Box"title="Bulls, Bears and the Ballot Box">
In the book Deitrick and Goldfarb rank the United States Presidents from 1929 (Herbert Hoover era) through 2009 (the Presidency of George W. Bush). The Presidents are ranked based upon the authors' ranking system, the Presidential Rankings of Economic Stewardship (PRES Rules). These rules are a series of customized rankings which were predetermined by the authors to chart the influence of a given president on the American economy. The authors looked at 12 economic factors such as "the deficit, months in recession and stock market performance" when ranking the Presidents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backwards_to_Britain"title="Backwards to Britain">
Jacques Lavaret, a young Parisian man, is eager to visit Scotland. He is delighted when his friend, the composer Jonathan Savournon, announces that he can get a free trip to Britain, with room for a friend, on a steamer trading between Saint-Nazaire and Liverpool. Jacques, filled with enthusiasm and Anglophilia, sets off for the steamer in late July 1859, but when he gets to Nantes to meet up with Jonathan, he is faced with bad news. The steamer has been delayed some days, and will dock not in Saint-Nazaire but in Bordeaux, 500 kilometers south of Paris. The two friends spend the delay sightseeing in Nantes and traveling by another boat from there to Bordeaux. Jacques and Jonathan weather the adventures and mishaps of the voyage, amused at the irony of traveling "backwards", away from Britain, in order to get there.After visiting Jonathan's friend Edmond R—, who shows them around the city, Jacques and Jonathan embark at last on the steamer for Liverpool. Jacques, who speaks no English, has difficulty communicating with the ship's commander, the Scottish Captain Speedy, but he is not alone; neither of Speedy's two pilots, picked up in Bordeaux, can speak the language either. The bilingual Jonathan does a little interpreting, and helps Jacques through some pronunciation errors when he tries to pepper his conversation with English phrases. Twenty-four days after leaving Nantes, the two friends arrive in Liverpool, where they marvel at unfamiliar English customs and are astounded at the depths of poverty and squalor in the streets. After meeting with a tradesman, Mr. Joe Kennedy, and his guest Sir John Sinclair, they travel by rail to Edinburgh.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Started_Early,_Took_My_Dog"title="Started Early, Took My Dog">
The main story takes place over a few days in present-day (2010) Leeds, England and vicinity. There are frequent flashbacks to 1975, when the mystery being investigated originated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_and_His_Boy"title="The Devil and His Boy">
The book follows Thomas "Tom" Falconer, a young and somewhat naive boy that works at a pub and is mistreated by his caretakers, Sebastian and Henrietta Slope. He tolerates their abuse with the awareness that there are those worse off than he is. This helps draw the attention of wealthy traveler William Hawkins, who attempts to purchase Tom from his caretakers, who refuse. Meanwhile Sebastian decides to plan with the highwayman Gamaliel Ratsey to steal William's treasure by waiting for him in the woods.Sebastian later tries to kill William for attempting to steal Tom away to London. William defeats Sebastian but is later killed by Ratsey's ambush. Tom's horse spooks during the encounter and through a series of events, ends up in a pub far from home where he's cared for by the pub's landlord and one of the cooks. He continues on to London, where he sees Ratsey and knows that he is there with the purpose of killing Tom. Tom tries to gain employment, but is horrified by one of the jobs he manages to find, which is to cripple children to gain sympathy while begging. He's later befriended by the thief Moll Cutpurse, who gives him clothes and takes him to the theater, where he meets William Shakespeare.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Trail"title="The Sun Trail">
"The Sun Trail" begins with a group of cats known as the Tribe of Rushing Water, led by Stoneteller, starving due to lack of food in their mountain home. Stoneteller receives a vision in which she is told that there is more prey if one follows the rising Sun. When one of the Tribe's kits dies of hunger, a group of Tribe cats decides to follow the "Sun trail" as described to Stoneteller in her vision, in search of a solution to their situation. However, a kit named Jagged Peak sneaks out of the Tribe's cave to catch up to his older brother, Clear Sky, who is in the group of Tribe cats who have left. This prompts their mother to ask their other brother, Gray Wing, to follow Jagged Peak. Gray Wing reluctantly agrees, saving Jagged Peak from an eagle attack before they catch up to Clear Sky's group. During a nighttime stop on their journey, the cats are attacked by a trio of eagles who carry away Clear Sky's mate, Bright Stream, when she saves Gray Wing from the eagles. Bright Stream kills the eagle carrying her but falls to her death. In the aftermath, a rift forms between Clear Sky and Gray Wing because Gray Wing believes that Clear Sky blames him for Bright Stream's death. However, it is later revealed by Clear Sky that he blames himself for Bright Stream's death; the brothers reconcile after Gray Wing suggests that the death was simply a terrible accident of nobody's fault. Shortly after Bright Stream's death, the journeying cats leave their mountain territory and enter unfamiliar terrain. Their journey is continued in the sequel, "Thunder Rising".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Through_the_Wall"title="The Road Through the Wall">
Pepper Street, an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Cabrillo, California, is separated from lower-class neighboring streets by the wall of a sprawling, wealthy estate. The residents of Pepper Street consider themselves upstanding citizens, when in fact their numerous prejudices have filtered down to their children. Pepper Street is abuzz with news that the wall is soon to be torn down to make way for a new housing subdivision. All Pepper Street is concerned with what unsavory elements this will allow into their neighborhood.The only rental home on Pepper Street is taken by a family consisting of a rarely seen single mother and her two daughters, who instantly become objects of suspicion. The older daughter Beverley appears to be developmentally disabled, while the younger girl, Frederica, cares for both her ill mother and her sister. Virginia Donald, the most popular girl on Pepper Street, learns that Beverley often possesses large amounts of money. Virginia and her friends begin to take advantage of Beverley, convincing her to buy them gifts while secretly mocking her. Frederica confronts Mrs. Donald about her daughter's behavior, but Mrs. Donald scolds her for being disrespectful and vulgar.Marilyn Perlman and Harriet Merriam, two imaginative young girls, become friends due to their isolation: Marilyn is rejected because she is the only Jewish child in the neighborhood, Harriet because she is overweight. The girls form a close bond and begin to imagine a shared future in which they are always friends. However, Harriet's mother, who secretly fears losing control of her daughter, orders Harriet to break off the friendship on the grounds of Marilyn's religion. Unwilling to admit that her mother forced her into the decision, Harriet instead joins Virginia and the other popular girls in bullying Marilyn in hopes that Virginia will allow her to join the in-group. Marilyn, betrayed, breaks off the friendship, while the other girls continue to bully both Harriet and Marilyn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chimps_of_Fauna_Sanctuary"title="The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary">
"The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary" describes what chimpanzees endure as research subjects. Westoll explains that most were separated from their mothers at birth, injected with diseases and deadly viruses, repeatedly operated on, and frequently driven mad through isolation and social deprivation. The chimpanzees, whose life expectancy is similar to humans, had spent over a decade living in "horrific lab conditions". Speaking at the award ceremony for the 2012 "Charles Taylor Prize", Westoll said "he became attached to each of the animals", and that "the strong feelings remain". He continued by saying "this is why I write, so I can remember and experience my time with them again", concluding his speech saying: "I remember them all the time."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Spells"title="Plague of Spells">
After the Spellplague, Raidon Kane finds that he has a sapphire tattoo burned into his flesh, strange supernatural powers that aid him in fighting aberrant monstrosities such as aboleths, and that he is missing eleven years of his life that he spent encased in crystal. In that time, his daughter has died and his home has been destroyed. The evil empire known as the Abolethic Sovereignty has become active and intends to reduce the world to chaos using a powerful artifact known as the Dreamheart. The Dreamheart begins infecting weak minds with twisted dreams of power if they serve the aboleths, causing the corrupted to fight over the Dreamheart and use it to their own ends. Raidon seeks a weapon forged by those who fought the Sovereignty before him. Guidance from an abandoned construct created to monitor and hold the high priest of the Sovereignty prisoner leads him to seek the weapon in the spellplague-infested Plaguewrought Lands. Raidon also seeks allies uncorrupted by the power of the Sovereignty.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Torment"title="City of Torment">
Raidon Kane travels to the underground fortress of the slumbering aboleths, intending to kill the Eldest in its sleep. A warlock, an arch fey, a pirate, and a high priestess of the Abolethic Sovereignty all have their own intentions for the Eldest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emerald_Scepter"title="The Emerald Scepter">
An ally from the deepest forests comes to aid a city involved in the political intrigue of a mercenary society.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lake_of_Dead_Languages"title="The Lake of Dead Languages">
Jane Hudson left the Heart Lake School for Girls after the mysterious suicide of her roommates. Now, 20 years later, she is returning as the new Latin teacher, only to experience an eerie repeat of those past incidents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew_and_Improved"title="Jew and Improved">
The book follows Errett as he decides to convert to Judaism after asking his girlfriend to marry him. During the process Errett deals with the changes to his lifestyle and the surprises that conversion brings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Treasure"title="Snow Treasure">
The book is set in Norway in 1940, and starts out with four Norwegian children, Peter, Michael, Helga, and Lovisa playing on their sleds after school. Later, when the children are in bed, Peter wakes up to hear several men talking downstairs and goes down to eavesdrop. The men; Including Peter's uncle and father, need to smuggle gold past the Nazis, who have not yet invaded Norway. Peter's uncle, Uncle Victor, sees Peter and tells the other men that the solution to their problem lies with the children.The next day, the townspeople build bomb shelters, and the day after that, the Nazis invade Norway. Uncle Victor tells Peter, Michael, Helga, and Lovisa about the men's plan. The plan is that all the children above ten years of age in their school will carry the gold past German sentries on their sleds and leave it by Uncle Victor's ship, which would then take it, for safekeeping, to America.This plan works for two weeks until the Nazi commander in their town wants to re-open the school, which would prevent the children from sledding. The town's doctor creates a false epidemic that affects only the smaller children and paints them from head to toe with red dots. Then he tells the German commander that it is impossible to start school with this epidemic going around. He also says that he encourages the healthy children to stay outside. So, the school stays closed, and the children keep sledding.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Discovery_of_Witches"title="A Discovery of Witches">
Diana Bishop is a Yale history of science professor who is conducting research at the University of Oxford. Diana is a witch. However, she has rejected this aspect of her life since the death of her parents when she was seven. She has not learned to practice witchcraft and has minimized her interaction with other witches.She discovers a lost manuscript at the Bodleian Library, which not only causes a magical reaction in herself but attracts the attention of others who have long been searching for the manuscript. She finds that for her own safety and for the well-being of magical creatures, she must re-think her avoidance of magic and magical creatures.This volume is about Diana Bishop discovering her peril and qualities of herself that were unknown to her and discovering romance, friends, and enemies in the magical community. The later volumes develop her actions to protect herself and her friends and ameliorate a threat to the magical community.With the help of a vampire, Matthew Clairmont, Diana sets out to discover more about her powers and gain control over her magic.A Discovery of Witches focuses largely on the co-existence of creatures in a world of humans. It questions the origin of all supernatural species, drawing on alchemical and historic sources for reference.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoity_Toity_(novel)"title="Hoity Toity (novel)">
The story starts in Berlin, where Bush Circus is attracting unusually large crowds. The centre of the attention is an African elephant known as Hoity Toity which can count and read. However the elephant, angry with its trainer, escapes from the tents and create havoc in the city. Unable to capture the animal, the police decides to kill it. The chaos finally draws a certain Soviet scientist Wagnor, at the mention of whose name the animal calms down.It is gradually revealed that the elephant possess the brain of a human and was created by Professor Wagnor many years ago. As the elephant returns to the circus with Professor Wagnor, his assistant reads the notes which describes the brain transplantation events in Congo. The brain in the elephant belonged to a young German scientist called Ring, whose heart was destroyed in an accident. Wagnor discovered his live brain and nurtured it in his laboratory. Ring, bored with his life in the lab, later requested Wagnor to give him a body with which he can walk and eat. But the brain was grown oversize and was too large to be in a human skull. It seemed that now only a skull of an elephant can accommodate it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisper_of_Waves"title="Whisper of Waves">
"Whisper of Waves" tells the story of three characters. A wizard who was pledged to the Red Wizards of Thay from boyhood makes plans in another dimension, and is willing to do anything for anyone who can give him more power. A genasi senator has fought his way up from the streets, and amid the tangled streets of Innarlith, he mixes his ambition with thoughts of vengeance. As a master builder walks along the coast of Faerûn, the waves seem to whisper to him of a mighty task worthy of his talents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight's_Mask"title="Midnight's Mask">
Erevis Cale is one of the Chosen of the deity Mask. The novel follows Cale along his path away from his own humanity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_the_Mountains_Echoed"title="And the Mountains Echoed">
The novel opens in the year 1952. Saboor, an impoverished farmer from the fictional village of Shadbagh, decides to sell his three-year-old daughter Pari to a wealthy, childless couple in Kabul. Abdullah adores Pari, and helps collect various feathers for her which she loves. Once, he sold a pair of his shoes for a peacock feather because he knew Pari would treasure it. Ignorant of his father's plans, 10 year old Abdullah, who has raised Pari since their mother died giving birth to her, insists on following when his father departs from the village to Kabul with Pari. After slapping and ordering him to return to the village several times, Saboor finally relents and allows Abdullah to come along on the condition that no tears be shed. While camping out for the night, Saboor tells the children a story about another poor farmer who was forced to give up a beloved child, but the significance of the tale doesn't register with Abdullah. It is only after they arrive at the home of the adoptive parents in Kabul and he visits a bazaar to buy things for Pari that Abdullah realizes what is happening. He pleads and wails against Saboor's rule that he could not cry in Kabul as Ms. Wahdati tries to assure him that the arrangement is for the best and he will understand when he is older. Abdullah keeps Pari's box of feathers safe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Miseducation_of_Cameron_Post"title="The Miseducation of Cameron Post">
"The Miseducation of Cameron Post" begins in the summer of 1989 in Miles City, Montana, when protagonist and narrator Cameron Post is 12 years old. Cameron has been shoplifting and kissing her friend Irene Klauson while her parents die in a car accident at Quake Lake, which they visited every year. Cameron's very religious Aunt Ruth moves in with Cameron and her grandmother. Cameron begins renting VHS movies and decorating her old dollhouse to cope with her grief, and stops spending time with Irene. Irene's family discovers a fossil on their property, which results in great success and wealth for them, and Irene goes away to a boarding school. At Aunt Ruth's request, Cameron begins attending a new church, Gates of Praise, and its youth group, Firepower.During the summer before starting high school, Cameron becomes close friends with Lindsey Lloyd, who joins the swim team with her while she stays with her father in Miles City for the summer. Lindsey is a lesbian and tells Cameron about her experiences with gay pride in Seattle, where she lives during the rest of the year with her mother. Cameron and Lindsey pursue a casual relationship, which mostly consists of kissing. They stay in touch after Lindsey returns to Seattle at the end of the summer. Aunt Ruth begins dating Ray, who sells frozen goods around the local area.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_(book)"title="Mastery (book)">
"Mastery" explains how to become successful by examining the lives of historical figures such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Albert Einstein, as well as through Greene's interviews with contemporary figures such as Teresita Fernández, Cesar Rodriguez, and Daniel Everett.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Leaders_Lie"title="Why Leaders Lie">
The book argues that leaders lie to foreign audiences as well as their own people because they think it is good for their country, citing the example of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's lie about the Greer incident in August 1941, due to a deep commitment to getting the United States into World War II, which he thought was in America's national interest.The book maintains that leaders do not lie much to other countries, and that democratic leaders are actually more likely to lie to their own people than autocrats. Thus, he starts his book by saying that it is not surprising Saddam Hussein did not lie about having WMD—he truthfully said he had none—but that George Bush and some of his key advisors did lie to the American people about the threat from Iraq. Mearsheimer argues that leaders are most likely to lie to their own people in democracies that fight wars of choice in distant places. The author says that it is difficult for leaders to lie to other countries because there is not much trust among them, especially when security issues are at stake, and you need trust for lying to be effective. He concludes that it is easier for leaders to lie to their own people because there is usually a good deal of trust between them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Could_That_Be_at_This_Hour?"title="Who Could That Be at This Hour?">
The novel begins with a cover sheet indicating a recipient named "Walleye", CCed to the V.F.D. headquarters.The story begins in the Hemlock Tearoom and Stationery Shop, where a twelve-year-old Lemony Snicket escapes his current chaperones, who are masquerading as his parents, to apprentice under S. Theodora Markson, the 52nd ranked V.F.D. member on a list of 52. After learning that his current chaperones were trying to knock him out with tea laced with laudanum, Snicket escapes with Markson in a green roadster. They arrive at the mostly abandoned town of Stain'd-by-the-Sea, a once-great exporter of octopus ink that has fallen on hard times. It is here that they get their assignment: They must steal the Bombinating Beast from the Mallahans.The Mallahans live in a lighthouse, which also used to be the home of the city's newspaper. Mr. Mallahan loafs about in his bathrobe while his daughter, Moxie Mallahan, continues to record the news of Stain'd-by-the-Sea, in hopes of eventually joining her mother, who works for a newspaper in the city. She shows Snicket the statue, which has been in the family for generations. Snicket is confused by this, as every piece of evidence says that the statue is already in the hands of its rightful owners; however, Markson intends to steal the statue anyway.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bog_People"title="The Bog People">
Chapter one, "The Tollund Man", is devoted to the bog body of the same name that was discovered in 1950 in Tollund Fell, Bjaeldskov Dal in Jutland, Denmark. Glob discusses the excavation of the corpse, and his own personal involvement with the operation. Outlining the find's removal to the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, he then outlines the manner in which the head was conserved for public display at the Silkeborg Museum. Alongside this he also discusses the archaeological context of Tollund Man, examining the manner in which he was executed, his clothing, and the contents of his last meal. The second chapter, entitled "The Grauballe Man", deals with the eponymous bog body found in 1952 at Nebelgård Fen, located east of Tolland. Like with the previous chapter, Glob discusses his own personal investigation into the body, outlining its discovery and conservation, as well as the context of his death and burial.In the third chapter, "Bog People in Denmark", Glob notes that there have been over 150 bog bodies found in Denmark, and proceeds to provide a number of examples including Haraldskær Woman and the Borremose bodies, in doing so highlighting the similarities that exist between them. Noting that many of these were discovered in the 19th and early 20th centuries, he explains that little can be known for most of them because methods of archaeological investigation and conservation were unavailable at the time. Chapter four, "Bog People in Other Countries", explores similar bog bodies which have been discovered in neighbouring Germany and the Netherlands, such as Windeby I, making reference to the cataloging project undertaken by the German archaeologist Alfred Dieck.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beautiful_Bastard"title="Beautiful Bastard">
"Beautiful Bastard" is a romantic comedy that follows Chloe Mills, a hardworking intern and MBA student that works underneath her demanding yet attractive boss Bennett Ryan. The two are constantly at odds with each other, a tense relationship that begins the first time the two meet. Bennett is drawn to Chloe, but acts terse towards her. She is independent and strong-willed and the first person to really stand up to him. Their relationship comes to a head one night when the two stay late for an impromptu practice speech on an account she is working on. The speech quickly turns into a sexual encounter, the first of many the pair has within the office building. Despite vows from each of them that the affair will not continue, Bennett and Chloe keep running into each other in places such as a La Perla lingerie store. Chloe is concerned over the nature of the relationship, afraid that it will jeopardize her future career if her sexual relationship with Bennett gets out. Meanwhile, Bennett finds himself growing more possessive of Chloe, especially after his mother attempts to fix her up with Joel Cignoli, a family friend. The relationship finally comes to a head when Chloe has to leave to care for her father after he discovers a tumor in his stomach, which prompts Bennett to realize that his feelings for Chloe are more than sexual and that he can't fully operate without her. When she returns the two go to a convention in San Diego, where they continue their affair. After Bennett is forced to remain behind in the hotel room due to food poisoning, Chloe is left to handle an important presentation with a client, which she aces. Her emotional high from the last few days is shattered, however, when she overhears Bennett supposedly taking the credit for her successful presentation. This prompts her to break up with Bennett and submit her resignation from the company, which devastates Bennett. Chloe manages to gain another job at a different corporation for her student project, but at the official presentation to the school board she is met by Bennett, who confesses his love for her. She then presents two portfolios for her student project, much to the delight of the school board. The book ends with Chloe and Bennett reconciling and resuming their relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_(Inbari_novel)"title="Home (Inbari novel)">
"Home" relates the history of Kibbutz Afikim over three generations, from its founding in the Jordan Valley in the early 1930s by members of the socialist–Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair, through its growth and development, to its present form, beset by privatization and individualism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_and_the_Future"title="War and the Future">
"War and the Future" is divided into four parts.In the first part, entitled "The Passing of the Effigy", Wells argues that "the great man of this war is the common man", and sketches a portrait of General Joffre as "a single figure to stand for the finest quality of the Allies' war", on account of his "leadership without vulgar ambition...He is as it were the ordinary commonsense of men, incarnate." In an account of a visit with the King of Italy, "the first king I had ever met", Wells is struck by the monarch's lack of pomp and, indeed, regality.The second part, titled "The War in Italy" (August 1916), describes the city of Udine and the mountain warfare of the Isonzo front as well as visits to Verona, Venice, and Milan.The third part, "The Western War" (September 1916), describes visits to the Western Front near Arras and Soissons in France. Wells expresses confidence that methods of aerial dominance, combined with photography, have permitted the Allies to develop tactics that are sure ultimately to defeat Germany. Wells praises British soldiers but criticises the officer corps for its mental rigidity. He emphasises that new technologies have transformed the art of war in ways that military professionals are all too slow to grasp. In particular, fighting in disciplined formations and cavalry are no longer of any military importance, while "[a]rtillery is now the most essential instrument of the war." Wells describes a tour of a munitions factory given by André Citroën. He devotes a chapter to tanks as "a beginning in a new phase of warfare" noting that in 1903 he had described a tank in a short story ("The Land Ironclads").
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boar_(novel)"title="The Boar (novel)">
The story is about young Richard Dale and his family who wind up terrorized by an extremely large wild boar. Richard and his brother Ike venture into the river bottoms in search of the boar they name Old Satan. Hunting an animal this size proves to be dangerous and as the story unfolds Richard finds himself taking bigger risks as he ventures deeper and deeper into the deep woods of the Big Thicket.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_Derelict"title="Galactic Derelict">
While seeking water for his cattle, Travis Fox enters a little known canyon in the Arizona desert and gets captured by three men, one of whom he recognizes as Dr. Gordon Ashe, an archaeologist. After discovering that Fox studied archaeology and had done some digging in the canyon they now occupy, the men have him cleared through security and offer to make him part of their team. Then Ashe tells him that he will be joining an expedition 10,000 years into the past to look for a spaceship.Disguised as Folsom hunters, Fox, Ashe, and Ross Murdock travel into the past to scout out the area around the wreckage of an alien starship, a sphere perhaps 120 feet in diameter. They find the wreck near a lake and then, across a ridge, they find a smaller spaceship intact, its crew of alien "Baldies" dead. After receiving the scouts' report via transtemporal telegraph, Major Kelgarries and several technicians come into the past and examine the small ship, determining that they can shift it directly into the present.Fox, Ashe, and Murdock serve as roving sentries in the area around the smaller globeship as technicians build a time transfer cage around it. The ash from a volcanic explosion and a stampede of mammoths drive the three men into the ship with Case Renfry, an electronics technician, on the day the transfer is to be made. An earthquake triggers the transfer, bringing the ship into the present. The ship's preset autopilot, jolted into action, takes the ship into space.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_Crickley_Hall"title="The Secret of Crickley Hall">
## 2006.Gabe Caleigh, his wife Eve, and their children, Loren, Cameron and Cally, live in London. One day Cameron goes missing when Eve falls asleep for a few seconds at a playground and he simply disappears. Eleven months later, Gabe is offered a short-term contract of employment on the coast. Anxious for his wife, he suggests that a relocation over the period of the anniversary could help the whole family.On arriving at Crickley Hall, they meet Percy Judd who worked there during the war; he seems concerned for their children. They start to settle in but before long, strange things start to happen at the house. They hear people, Cally claims to have been hit by a man with a cane and their dog runs away in terror.In the house Eve hears her missing son’s voice for the first time in a year. He says he is alive and the children can tell her where he is. After Loren suffers a terrifyingly real nightmare where she gets whipped by the man with the cane, Gabe wants them all to leave, but Eve can’t bear to abandon her son.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Defiant_Agents"title="The Defiant Agents">
The alien library discovered in the previous novel proved to have locations of many unknown worlds. Finding the secure location of planet Topaz compromised, Apache operatives, including Travis Fox, are sent on an emergency trip with a mind-altering machine, "Redax", which activates their ancestral memories. Their ship crash lands. Travis discovers he has the ability to communicate with the coyotes, but none of the survivors have any idea why they are there.They encounter Russians who have undergone similar treatment, and similarly lacking their memories, which have been replaced by those of ancestors from the Mongolian Golden Horde. Unlike the Apache, the Mongols are subject to governing mind-control. With their common experience, they join forces against the modern Russian mind-controllers. Memories gradually return. After finding alien technology too dangerous for the anybody to have, Travis seeks allies. They lay a successful trap for the Russian controllers. Defeating the source of Russian control, the allies agree to guard the alien technology from outsiders in the years to come.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Medical_Advice"title="Against Medical Advice">
"Against Medical Advice" begins with a seventeen-year-old Cory arriving at the Dressler Psychiatric Hospital for alcohol abuse, with him detailing the various medications he is on and how he feels that they do nothing for him. Cory expresses frustration over giving the appearance of being insane, despite his not feeling as if he was. The book shows how Cory began exhibiting uncontrollable urges to perform body tics and say various things at the age of five years. As he grew up, he was put through several different treatments, which contributed to his feelings of helplessness. Since he is unable to control his actions due to having OCD, Tourette syndrome, and an anxiety disorder, Cory experienced ridicule in his life and had troubles living the everyday life of a child, which is exacerbated by ill medical treatment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Knight_(novel)"title="The Blue Knight (novel)">
The novel is about a veteran LAPD beat cop named William "Bumper" Morgan, who utilizes intimidation and in some cases physical violence in his dealings with the criminal elements he encounters. The book covers his last week on the job before his planned retirement.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kocharethi"title="Kocharethi">
"Kocharethi" narrates the tale of the Mala Araya adivasi community in the early half of the twentieth century through the lives of Kunjipennu and her husband Kochuraman. It is set against the backdrop of the Western Ghats in the pepper belt along the Kerala – Tamil Nadu border.A key theme of cultural change begins when Kunjipennu refuses to marry her maternal uncle's son and instead weds Kochuraman. Following the destruction of their house and the death of their son in a forest fire, they are pushed into dire poverty. A cycle of drought and torrential rain pushes the entire Mala Arayan community into debt and alcoholism to which Kochuraman too falls prey.The poverty of the community is ruthlessly exploited by moneylenders, landlords, the businessmen and the police and gradually this unholy nexus of the upper classes and upper castes results in the alienation of the Arayans' lands and those resisting are beaten into submission.Kunjipennu and Kochuraman meanwhile have a daughter, Parvati and the establishment of a school in the village marks the beginning of another social transformation in the community. Parvati later gets through college and finds a job in Kochi where she marries against her parents' wishes and slowly begins to distance herself from the community.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirej"title="Pirej">
The novel opens at Velika's funeral which is attended by her sixth child Roden Meglenoski. As he does not know much about his parents, he cannot understand why his mother refused to be buried next to his father. Duko Vendija, one of the other people who is present at the funeral retells him the story as he heard it from Roden's parents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_the_Neolithic_Mind"title="Inside the Neolithic Mind">
In their preface, Lewis-Williams and Pearce explain their approach, and their reasons for comparing megalithic art and archaeology from the Near East and Atlantic Europe. They express their opinion that such comparisons are made possible – despite the cultural and geographical differences – because of the "universal functioning of the human brain" which unites all "Homo sapiens" and leads different societies to develop similar religious and cosmological beliefs. Chapter one, "The Revolutionary Neolithic", explores the background to this period of time, in which humans became increasingly sedentary and developed agriculture. Discussing the various different understandings of the Neolithic advocated within archaeology, they propose that it should be seen as a "revolutionary" period than as "a revolution" in itself, in this way challenging the view made famous by V. Gordon Childe. Moving on to an exploration of why humans adopted agriculture, they proclaim their adherence to Jacques Cauvin's concept of the Symbolic Revolution. From there, they discuss the role of religion, suggesting that it should be understood as a tripartite system uniting experience, practice and belief. This leads on to a discussion of some of the earliest archaeological evidence for the Neolithic, at Nevalı Çori and Göbekli Tepe, both in Southeastern Turkey, referring to the theory that the ritual beliefs practiced here resulted in the development of agriculture. Lewis-Williams and Pearce round off the chapter by quoting Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan", written after an experience in an altered state of consciousness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArchEnemy"title="ArchEnemy">
A stalemate has arisen in the war between Alyss and Redd for control of Wonderland. Redd has lost her imagination, the ability that allows her to control vast amounts of magical power, including illusions, conjuring objects, and remote-viewing locations. With her army of Borderlanders, she falls back from the invasion of Wonderland. Alyss’ forces are saved, but Alyss herself has also lost her imagination. Should there be another attack, they will be unable to stop the assault.However their reprieve is short, the loss of imagination goads one of the other founding families of Wonderland, the Clubs, into an attempt to seize power. They begin to hold anti-imagination rallies, drawing on the resentments of those who lacked a powerful imagination in the first place. As a result, they foster dissent against Alyss’ throne. Alyss attends one of these rallies in a disguise, attempting to find out the truth of whether the Clubs are plotting against her and also trying to understand the resentment being aimed towards her. She takes only Dodge Anders with her for protection. The Clubs are identified as the ringleaders of the movement, but Alyss is recognized and her capture ordered. In her flight she and Dodge are rescued by Mutty P. Dumphy, a citizen of Wonderland. He helps her hide in a transport which the Clubs use to move those people they have captured with strong imaginations into Limbo coops.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dark_Night's_Work"title="A Dark Night's Work">
The story centers on a country lawyer, Edward Wilkins, and his daughter Ellinor. Edward has an artistic and literary personality, unsuited to his social position as the son of a successful lawyer who takes over his father's practice in the provincial town of Hamley. His legal representation of the local gentry and nobility leads him to try fitting into their social circles, only to be mocked and treated with derision. He develops a drinking problem and spends more money than he can afford to in his attempts to be an equal to his clients. His bad habits lead to problems in his business, and Edward is forced to take on a junior partner named Mr. Dunster.At the same time, Ellinor becomes engaged to a young upcoming country gentleman named Ralph Corbet. Corbet initiates the engagement partly through love of Ellinor and partly because of a promise of money from Edward. Edward continues to drink and overspend, leading to a confrontation with Mr. Dunster. In the heat of the argument, Edward strikes Mr. Dunster, killing him. Ellinor and a family servant named Dixon help Edward to bury the body in their flower garden.Ellinor soon tells Ralph that a possible disgrace hangs over her. Ralph questions Edward about this, and Edward insults him in a drunken tirade. Ralph dissolves his engagement to Ellinor because of this, and because he regrets forming an engagement to someone who offers no opportunity of helping him advance in society. He later marries into the nobility and becomes a judge. Edward drinks himself to death and Ellinor moves to a distant town, East Chester, after the Wilkins's home Ford Bank is rented out in order to provide Ellinor with a living. Dixon remains as a servant to watch over the home and property where the body is buried. The secret goes unknown for about 15 years until the body is dug up during the construction of a railroad. Dixon is arrested for the murder and later convicted by Ralph, who acts as the judge in the case. Ellinor then tells Ralph the truth, and Dixon is pardoned. She returns to East Chester and marries a local clergyman, Canon Livingstone, who she had known in her youth, and has two children with him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_in_July_(novel)"title="Cold in July (novel)">
Richard Dane awakens to find an intruder in his home and has to kill in self-defense. The problem is the intruder's father, Ben Russel, is a murderous ex-con bent on avenging his son's death. Richard, a small-time businessman, is in way over his head. Soon the two find out they're both being misled and manipulated and find themselves drawn into a web of psychopathic sex, violence, and corruption. It turns out that the man Richard killed was not Ben's son. So the two men join forces to learn both the identity of the man Richard shot and the fate of Ben's son.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Kennedy"title="Killing Kennedy">
In "Killing Kennedy" the authors narrate the events leading up to the assassination of President Kennedy as well as the event's aftermath. O'Reilly and Dugard also focus on the element of the growing Cold War, Kennedy's attempt to deal with the rise of Communism, and the potential threat from organized crime.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_Rasa_(novel)"title="Tabula Rasa (novel)">
The novel charts the rise and fall of the fictional kibbutz Givat Abirim, set against the backdrop of its modern-day privatization and the introduction of differential wages. Its central character, Hanan Harari, is a painter and ideological communist in his seventies who has lived on the kibbutz since before the establishment of the state in 1948. Hanan's personal and professional vicissitudes, and in particular his increasing preference for abstract painting, become a metaphor for the disintegration of the collective vision of the kibbutz. Whereas his representational art once found enthusiastic acceptance and was prominently displayed in public places, Hanan comes under heavy criticism from the other members, including his wife, as his work becomes more abstract. But when the kibbutz is privatized, Hanan can no longer resist the market-driven pressures to create "sentimental landscapes that the gallery in Jaffa was so enthusiastic about and which he loathed."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_Out_of_Time"title="Key Out of Time">
In the present day, Time Agents Ross Murdock and Gordon Ashe come with settlers to the water-dominated planet, Hawaika, to search remains from the distant past of the alien Baldies. They are assisted by intelligent dolphins, with whom the humans can communicate. While setting up their time gate, a storm destroys it and strands them in widely separated locations in Hawaika's unknown past.Murdock learns from a native named Loketh that Gordon is being held in a castle. Ross and Loketh are captured by seafaring Rovers, then join them. They liberate a Rover island that had been captured by the Baldies. Ross convinces a coalition of natives the Baldies are playing them against one another.Murdock finds Ashe at last, in the company of the mystic and advanced Foanna, of whom there turns out to be only three – the last of their race. The Foanna set a trap for the Baldies, using their castle as bait, but with only three of them, they cannot win against the whole attacking force. Murdock and Ashe agree to a process that mentally joins them with the Foanna, and in a second encounter with the Baldies, they win.In a final encounter, Murdock is teleported into a Baldy ship like the one familiar to him from "Galactic Derelict", and sets its course to a random destination. The main Baldy installation is simultaneously attacked and the Baldies driven off the planet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Fourth_Year"title="In the Fourth Year">
Wells states in his May 1918 preface that the notion of a War to End War had seemed Utopian when he advanced it in 1914, but that in 1918 it had achieved "an air not only of being so practical, but of being so urgent and necessary and so manifestly the sane thing before mankind that not to be busied upon it, not to be making it more widely known and better understood, not to be working out its problems and bringing it about, is to be living outside of the contemporary life of the world.""In the Fourth Year" contains eleven chapters on the League of Nations, Allied war aims, and political institutions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fiery_Heart"title="The Fiery Heart">
The novel begins where The Indigo Spell left off, when Alchemist Sydney Sage proclaimed her love to the Moroi Adrian Ivashkov. That starts their taboo relationship just as Sydney's younger sister Zoe is introduced as an Alchemist tasked to both watch over Sydney and learn from her. The Fiery Heart is told in alternating chapters, between Adrian's perspective and Sydney's. Sydney begins to accept her path in defying the Alchemists by being initiated in Jacklyn Terwilliger's coven of witches, which is named The Stelle. Sydney finds out from one of the witches that the oldest witch in their region, Inez, has had a history with personally fighting Strigoi. Inez claims it was because her blood tasted bad to them. Sydney has been having the same issue, and is immediately curious. She asks her mentor Jackie to take her to meet Inez. Things are further complicated when Sydney receives a call from her father, notifying her of his impending divorce and his expectation that Sydney will testify against her mother in order to win custody over the underage Zoe, and thus ensure that she will stay on the path to becoming an Alchemist.Adrian continues to struggle with a balance in his use of Spirit, with the ever-looming threat of darkness that envelops him if he uses too much. Previously turning to alcohol and cigarettes to mute Spirit's effects, he and Sydney have made a pact to cut down on their vices (hers being caffeine addiction) in order to try live a healthier lifestyle. An incident with one of Adrian's fellow college artist friends, a student named Rowena, causes a block of concrete to fall on her hand while she is constructing a sculpture. This leads Adrian to impulsively heal her hand, worried that a broken hand would ruin her future career as an artist. After Adrian begins to crash from the high of Spirit magic, he begins to hallucinate hearing the voice of his dead aunt Tatiana, and consequently begins to heavily drink again. Sydney finds him in a disheveled state, and suggests that Adrian begin taking anti-depressants in order to cut him off from Spirit and thus the darkness. Adrian argues that he is not able to cut himself off of Spirit, for fear that those he cares about might need his help.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Undying_Fire_(Wells_novel)"title="The Undying Fire (Wells novel)">
The protagonist of "The Undying Fire" is Job Huss, a schoolmaster who has fallen on evil days. The public school at Woldingstanton in Norfolk that he has reformed has been struck by a measles epidemic, an explosion in the chemistry lab that has killed an instructor, and a fire that has killed two students. The day after the fire Huss's solicitor has committed suicide after losing his savings in speculation on the Russian ruble. Huss has suffered a partial breakdown, but while he is recuperating in the company of his wife at the fictional seaside town of Sundering-on-Sea they have learned that their only son has been "shot down over the German lines." And he has been diagnosed with cancer.In these dire straits, Job Huss is visited by three members of the Woldingstanton board intent on dismissing him from his headmastership: Sir Eliphaz Burrows, a manufacturer of building materials, Mr. William Dad, an automotive and aeronautical manufacturer, and Mr. Joseph Farr, the head of the technical section at Woldingstanton; their names allude to Job's visitors in the Book of Job, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. Huss resists leaving his school. Proclaiming that "the task of the teacher . . . is to ensure that Man, Man the Divine, grows in the souls of men," he engages in a series of philosophical disputations that reflect theological views Wells developed most fully in God the Invisible King (1917).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McAuslan_in_the_Rough"title="McAuslan in the Rough">
Bo Geesty. There has been some kind of military fortification at Fort Yarhuna since time immemorial. It stands at the junction of three trade routes across what once was grassland and now is desert. In turn, the fort has been garrisoned by Alexander's Greeks, Hannibal's Carthaginians, Scipio's Romans, Vandal patrols, proselytizing Arabs of the Caliphate period, Crusaders, Berbers, Mussolini's Italians, Rommel's Afrika Korps, and the 51st Highland Division. And now, on orders from GHQ, it is the first independent command of Lieutenant Dand MacNeill, who has two platoons under him. MacNeill has orders to maintain order in Yarhuna Village (which largely consists of leaving things be), and to attempt to find water in the Fort and drill a well there. He and his men comply; but when they commence their exploratory drilling, strange things start to happen. Are the Jocks just going sand-happy, or is Fort Yarhuna haunted?Johnnie Cope in the Morning. In MacNeill's battalion, the custom is for the full battalion pipe band to blow reveille for the unit every Friday, carefully sneaking into position and opening with "Johnnie Cope" at full bore while standing outside the subalterns' quarters. MacNeill, exhibiting great panache in the face of this aural assault, makes friends with the pipe-sergeant, no small thing for a newly commissioned officer; and later brings the pipey a problem. A new man has been assigned to his platoon, and as is the rule in the battalion, specialty units have first call on a new man who possesses their special skills, such as an amateur radio operator going to SIgnals, or a qualified mechanic to the motor transport platoon. Crombie, the new man, is a qualified bagpiper and wants to join the battalion pipe band; but it's 1946, and he's as black as the ace of spades.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sheikh_and_the_Dustbin"title="The Sheikh and the Dustbin">
The Servant Problem. Lieutenant MacNeill, having been overseas much longer than the other junior officers of the battalion due to his prior enlisted service, is sent home from North Africa on Leave In Advance of Python, "Python" being the code word for demobilization. As was the custom of the time, he visited the families of a number of his fellow officers and the men of his platoon, telling the families about their sons, husbands, and brothers. Along the way, he muses about being looked after by servants, his grandmother running a Highland lodge with a large staff of servants, and his own experiences with the batmen he has had since becoming an officer candidate and a commissioned officer.Captain Errol. Just assigned to the battalion as the Intelligence Officer, Captain Errol — not his real name, but rather a reflection of the fact he bears a passing resemblance to Errol Flynn in physical appearance, and more than a passing resemblance to him in his personal mannerisms, panache, and style — is what the Jocks refer to as a "gallus man," someone who is simultaneously an extrovert, indifferent to his effect on others, and reckless. Highly decorated, he holds both a Military Cross and a Military Medal, as well as Balkan decorations for valor and several campaign stars and medals. He started the war as a commissioned officer, was broken to the ranks by court-martial, and subsequently was re-commissioned for outstanding service. Master of all the military arts, he is a sniper-grade marksman, expert in infiltration, a wizard at hand-to-hand combat, and an outstanding observer of the human condition and the psychology of command, yet he is an enigma. Like George Patton or Chesty Puller, Errol is one of those rare men born to excel as warriors. Worshiped by some, despised by others, regarded by a few as a menace to be avoided at all costs, he proves himself to Dand MacNeill and the other officers when the battalion is called on to assist the civil authorities when an Arab nationalist demagogue whips up a riot in the Suk and sends it against the modern town outside the walls of the Old City.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Certain_Slant_of_Light_(novel)"title="A Certain Slant of Light (novel)">
The book follows Helen, the ghost of a 27-year-old woman that has been dead for 130 years. The beginning of the story follows her through her life as a ghost, playing the role of invisible muse to a handful of artistically inclined people, lest she be cast back into her own personal hell. It's during her stay with English teacher Mr. Brown that Helen realizes that a student named Billy is aware of her presence. She later realizes that a spirit named James is inhabiting Billy's body after Billy overdosed on drugs. With the two being the only known beings of their type, James and Helen are quickly drawn to each other but are faced with the difficulties of residing within the bodies of other people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Hollow_(novel)"title="Dark Hollow (novel)">
Adam Senft, a struggling writer, is out walking his dog in the forest behind his house when he hears pan pipes playing. Following the sound, he finds one of his neighbors, Shelly Carpenter, fellating the stone statue of a satyr which appears to change into a living creature. Unsure of what he's seen, Adam flees the forest.At home, Adam and his wife Tara are struggling with their marriage after a miscarriage. When their neighbor Shannon Legerski disappears, her husband Paul is arrested as a suspect. As the police begin door-to-door investigations, Detective Ramirez questions Adam, and reveals that two more women have disappeared, including Shelly Carpenter. Adam lies about seeing Shelly with the satyr.Adam goes to Shelly Carpenter's house and finds satyr hoof-prints in the garden outside. The police and fire service organize a search of the local forest, but the police dogs refuse to enter the forest. Adam and a group of men enter the forest, where they find another large hoof print and a stone with strange lettering carved into it.The next morning, Tara claims she dreamed of a hairy man standing outside under their bedroom window and playing a flute. Adam finds hoofprints under the window. He confides in his friends who research on the internet about satyrs. That night, the satyr tries to hypnotize and abduct Tara and a neighbor, Claudine. Adam, Claudine's husband Dale, and their neighbors Merle and Cliff manage to drive the satyr off.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Because_of_Mr._Terupt"title="Because of Mr. Terupt">
As the school year opens, the fifth grade class of Snow Hill School in Connecticut meets the new teacher, Mr. Terupt. Their reactions to him can vary. Peter, the class cut-up, tries to see what he can get away with and is impressed when Mr. Terupt is cool about correcting his behavior. Having moved from California because her parents have just divorced, Jessica appreciates the way he relates to her since he is also new, and Anna, who tries to stay in the background because her mother is a social outcast, likes the way he subtly draws her into class discussions. Luke is the most studious and always has great grades, so he appreciates the creative class projects Mr. Terupt devises, while the more morose Jeffrey just hopes to be ignored. Alexia is too concerned with manipulating the other girls to pay much attention to the new teacher and Danielle is too worried about being manipulated by Alexia.After a while, all of the students warm up to Mr. Terupt, who has a way of engaging everyone and making them want to do better. He even gives them a party day as a reward to reaching certain goals and gets Mrs. Williams, the principal, to agree to let the class go outside to play in the snow on their reward day. When a game of roughhousing goes too far, Mr. Terupt is hit with an icy snowball and goes into a coma, having previously sustained a number of concussions as a high school and college wrestler.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Marx_Was_Right"title="Why Marx Was Right">
Eagleton's chapters outline ten theoretical objections to Marxism, each followed by his counterargument. He begins with the objection that social class plays a lesser role in post-industrial societies, making Marxian class theory inapplicable. Eagleton's counterargument is that Marx anticipated phenomena such as globalisation and societal changes since Marx's era have not fundamentally changed the nature of capitalism. Eagleton finds that suppression of the labour movement was the predominant cause of declining popular support for Marxism from the mid-1970s onwards.The second objection is that Marxist governance results in mass murder, infringements on freedom, and other hardships. In the chapter, Eagleton describes approaches to socialism that differ from those of failed communist states and compares communist failures to capitalist ones. Regarding Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, Eagleton outlines conditions he believes are required for successful socialism: an educated population, existing prosperity, and international support after an initial revolution. He says that socialism with inadequate material resources results in regimes like Stalinist Russia, which was criticised by Trotskyist Marxists and libertarian socialists. An alternative mode of production is market socialism, in which the means of production would be collectively owned, but democratic worker cooperatives would compete in marketplace conditions.Third, Eagleton argues against the position that Marxism requires belief that societal change is predetermined. Marx's view was that societies can develop in different directions—for instance, capitalism could stagnate, or lead to socialism or fascism. Thus it is not deterministic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Control_the_Stars"title="To Control the Stars">
On planet Alnia, warriors burn a native village, then inexplicably let the inhabitants run free. Seemingly unrelatedly, school comes to an end for Shan Eliot, and as with all students on planet Academy, he is automatically assigned a career. But events immediately take a peculiar turn as he is assigned to a secret organization students have not heard of. Oddly, immediate he is taken into an accelerated program, or so it seems.Once Shan is transported by a gate to Alnia, he is captured by renegades from the Society for Homonidic Studies, and sentenced to death. He narrowly escapes to another world by activating a gate the natives do not recognize. The new world is inhabited by a very advanced civilization that does not want part in the rediscovery of the galaxy by gates.When Shan is returned, instead of being able to report the activities of the renegades to his uncle, who is a ranking official, he is chased through gates, until arrested by natives and put in a workgang. Finally, with the help of a school friend, Shan reaches his uncle. He and others return to Alnia, intending to rescue a friend, but are captured, instead. With the help of natives who are at odds with the renegades, they escape, then defeat their enemies. Coming again to the planet of the advanced civilization, the inhabitants have fled the galaxy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freezer_Burn_(novel)"title="Freezer Burn (novel)">
Down on his luck, loner, loser, Bill Roberts tries his hand at robbing the fireworks stand across the road from his house. Things don't go well, and he barely escapes with his life into an East Texas swamp. A day later, his head swollen with insect bites, he stumbles into a low rent traveling freak show carnival. His appearance allows him to fit in, and seeing no other way to escape his predicament, he joins the group and travels with them putting on shows.Befriended by the group's leader, John Frost, who has a dead twin's arm attached to his chest, Bill soon has eyes for John's luscious wife Gidget who is, besides Bill, the only non-freak among them. The show's main attraction is the mysterious Iceman, who has his own trailer. Soon Frost trusts Bill with running the Iceman act. As Bill gets closer to Gidget, he soon realizes she has plans of her own, and remaining the wife of a sideshow freak isn't one of them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puberty_Blues_(novel)"title="Puberty Blues (novel)">
The novel is set in Sutherland Shire, in southern Sydney, New South Wales, Australia in the 1970s. Deb and Sue are thirteen-year-old high school students whose lives are about male surfers, panel vans, straight-leg Levis, skipping school, getting wasted and fitting in. The girls strive to become "surfie chicks", the groupies that hang around the surfer-boy gangs of Sydney. Adhering to rules that prevent them from eating or going to the toilet in the surfers' presence, the girls manage to become members of a surfing gang from Sylvania and are assigned boyfriends but, to the boys, they are just sexual objects. After Deb suffers a surprise miscarriage and the introduction of heroin takes its toll on their social group, the girls finally become disillusioned with the sexism and narrow-mindedness of their crowd and leave the group.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Blow_(novel)"title="The Big Blow (novel)">
It's the year 1900 and a major Hurricane is brewing in the Gulf of Mexico. Future real life boxing champion Jack Johnson is training for an upcoming fight the promoters have no interest in him winning. The boxing fans in Galveston, Texas are incensed since an African American fighter(Johnson) has soundly defeated the local white champion. So they send north to import John McBride, a dirty fighting racist hired to do one thing: defeat Johnson and restore the championship to a white fighter. All the while the 1900 Galveston Hurricane is moving north towards the Texas coast.The short story on which this novel is based – which was originally published in the 1997 anthology edited by Douglas E. Winter called "Revelations" – won a 1997 Bram Stoker Award.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil's_Garden_(novel)"title="The Devil's Garden (novel)">
"The Devil’s Garden" tells the story of the scientist Dr Forle, living on an Amazon River station deep in the South American jungle. He and his international crew of colleagues are working with remote tribes, studying large clearings made by ants in the forest, which they call ‘devil’s gardens’. Forle hopes the project will change the way people think about evolution and the nature of life itself. A Colonel and a Judge arrive at the river station purporting to have come to register the local Indian tribes to vote, yet on the night of their arrival Forle witnesses an act of torture against a local tribesman. Forle and his colleagues are soon caught up in a small war between the tribes, renegade soldiers and cocaine growers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_on_the_Cracks"title="Running on the Cracks">
The story revolves around 15-year-old Leo, who runs away from her aunt and uncle's home, where she has been living since the sudden death of her musician parents. Leo is driven away by the disturbing behaviour of her uncle. She does not expect a 46-year-old touching her. She escapes to Glasgow, where she comes across a wide variety of characters, who all help her to solve the mystery of where her grandparents are.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_the_Ball_(play)"title="After the Ball (play)">
The play is about Stephen, who has, with ill grace, returned home to his mother's deathbed. As he and his sister rake through the family photographs and childhood memories, they find conflicting versions of their parents’ unhappy marriage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soulmates_(play)"title="Soulmates (play)">
Set in Melbourne and New York, this is a tale of revenge as the best-selling expatriate author Katie Best engineers a scheme to bring her most craven critic Danny O'Loughlin undone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Delicate_Truth"title="A Delicate Truth">
In 2008, Toby Bell, the Private Secretary to junior Foreign Office minister Fergus Quinn, becomes suspicious of his superior's behavior following a meeting with businessman Jay Crispin—founder of the private security firm Ethical Outcomes—and the company's financier, Miss Maisie, an independently wealthy, Islamophobic American evangelical. Digging into Quinn's history, Bell learns that Quinn had previously been involved in a minor scandal related to Ethical Outcomes at his previous posting. Under the guidance of his mentor, Giles Oakley, Bell secretly records a conversation between Quinn, Crispin, and an intelligence liaison code named "Paul" about a planned covert operation codenamed "Wildlife." When Bell attempts to turn the recording over to Oakley, who has been researching Ethical Outcomes himself, he tells him to forget everything he has learned and drop the matter.Without Bell's knowledge, "Wildlife" takes place in Gibraltar, where a company of British Special Forces under the command of a man named Jeb are tasked with helping an Ethical Outcomes team of American mercenaries with extracting a high-ranking jihadist arms dealer allegedly squatting in an abandoned vacation home. As Paul—acting as a neutral liaison between English and American intelligence—observes from a blind, a strike team lays siege to the house. He is assured that the operation is a complete success and that the jihadist has been taken alive for questioning.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Navigation_(novel)"title="Celestial Navigation (novel)">
This story is set in the 1960s in a Baltimore rowhouse/boarding house, owned by Mrs. Pauling, the mother of an artistic 38-year-old man, Jeremy Pauling, who never left home. Jeremy is painfully shy, and has many symptoms of agoraphobia and of autism. The story begins with the death of Jeremy's mother and the funeral arrangements that needed to be handled by his two out-of-town sisters, Amanda and Laura. Amanda is unsympathetic to her brother's inability to come out of his shell, and attempts to persuade him to leave the boarding house and live with her and her sister in Richmond. Jeremy refuses and remains in the house. We meet many of the boarders who form a family of sorts and assist Jeremy in running the boarding house. But a new boarder, Mary Tell and her preschool daughter, Darcy, begin to inspire Jeremy in a new way. Mary has left her husband to live with a new lover, John, who has promised to divorce his wife and marry her. While John is supposedly arranging his divorce, he places Mary and Darcy in Jeremy's boarding house. When John returns to his wife, Mary and Darcy are left rather crushed and somewhat destitute, with no options but to remain in their boarding house room. Mary becomes anxious about her financial situation and the difficulty of raising Darcy under these conditions, but Jeremy and the other boarders help and support her in various ways. In the meantime, Jeremy has fallen in love with Mary, but is totally lost as to how to pursue his love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginner's_Goodbye"title="The Beginner's Goodbye">
Aaron Woolcott is an editor for a publisher of books with the beginner in mind. After the death of Aaron's wife, Dorothy, he thinks there should be a beginner's guide to dealing with the death of a spouse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthrights_(play)"title="Birthrights (play)">
At twenty-nine, Helen has a vital operation that stops her from having what she desperately wants: a child. Her younger sister Claudia gives her a wonderful gift when she agrees to be a surrogate mother. But what happens when, years later, Claudia discovers that she and her husband Martin cannot conceive and that Kelly, the child she gave to her sister, is the only baby she will ever bear?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Rods_(novel)"title="Lightning Rods (novel)">
Joe is a struggling encyclopedia salesman who moved from Eureka, Missouri to Florida in order to sell vacuum cleaners, only to find that another salesman had already saturated the market in the aftermath of a hurricane. One day while driving along the shore he stops and parks his car on a whim, and while looking at the shorebirds, he has a revelation. He realizes that companies could avoid sexual harassment in the workplace and the consequent expensive lawsuits if they provided some kind of outlet for their male employees' sexual urges. Combining this insight with one of his own recurring sexual fantasies, he hits on the idea of hiring women to have sex with selected male employees, with the anonymity of both the men and women protected by a wall that would separate them and only expose the woman's lower half. The women, referred to as "lightning rods", would otherwise work as regular office employees, and no one in the office would know who they were.In the first phase of Joe's project, he convinces a small office to implement a voluntary "spin the bottle"-like program in which two employees are randomly selected once a day to kiss each other in front of the rest of the office. The program turns out to be popular, and, emboldened by its success, Joe decides to look for a company to pitch his full idea. Most of the executives he talks to reject him out of hand, but he is able to find one who is willing to try it. Joe has an elaborate mechanism installed in the disabled stalls of the men's and women's bathrooms, which share a common wall. It is kept secret to everyone except Joe, the CEO, the group of high-performing male employees selected to participate, and the lightning rods themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzsche's_Kisses"title="Nietzsche's Kisses">
"Nietzsche's Kisses" is the narrative of Friedrich Nietzsche's last mad night on earth. Locked in a small room on the top floor of what would become The Nietzsche Archives in Weimar, one of the most radical and influential of nineteenth-century German philosophers hovers between dream and wakefulness, memory and hallucination, the first person, second, and third, past and present, reliving his brief love affair with feminist Lou Andreas-Salomé, his stormy association with Richard Wagner, and his conflicted relationship with Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, his radically anti-Semitic sister.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shift_(novel)"title="Shift (novel)">
"Shift" is narrated through the viewpoints of multiple different characters during the 1960s, predominantly that of Chandler Forrestal. Chandler is drawn into a web of sex and deception after picking up the beautiful Naz Haverman. She gives him LSD without him being aware of it, setting him off on a series of visions and enabling him to see inside Naz's mind. The experience leaves both him and Naz shaken and eventually the two attempt to avoid capture by the CIA, only for them to track them down. Once captured, Chandler is subjected to a series of experiments.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Silence"title="The White Silence">
As the story begins, Mason, Ruth and the Malemute kid are on the Yukon Northland trail, the temperature is colder than −50 degrees, and they are trying to reach civilization before the spring. They are running low on food and do not have enough to give the dogs their fill so they are becoming ravenous. Mason tells the Malemute kid that one of the dogs does not have long to live. Mason attempts to mush the weak dogs up a hill, but once at the top one of the dogs falls, Mason is swept off his feet and the sled tumbles back, dragging everything to the bottom. Mason whips the dogs savagely, crippling the dog who was previously hurt and angering the other dogs. Ruth and Malemute kid watch in silence. Later, Mason has just stopped his sled when a massive pine tree comes crashing down on his shoulders.Malemute kid and Ruth chop away the tree, build a fire and wrap Mason in furs. He has a broken leg, arm and back, and is paralyzed from the waist down. As they set up camp, Mason talks of his home in Tennessee and his previous wife, but mostly he talks of his love for Ruth. He asks Malemute kid to leave him so as to save Ruth and her unborn child. Malemute kid goes out to hunt a moose, which could keep them all alive for weeks, but is unsuccessful. Returning to camp, he finds that the ravenous pack of dogs have gone after their food. Malemute kid with his rifle, and Ruth with an axe, fight off the beasts, but all of their dry salmon is gone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custom_Nation"title="Custom Nation">
"Custom Nation" examines the trend in today's market towards customizable products. It looks at Vistaprint, Shutterfly, Zazzle, CafePress, Starbucks, Dell, Subway, and other companies whose business concepts depend on customization."Custom Nation" includes chapters on mass production, the inception of customization, advice for how to launch a customization-based business, advice for how to add customization to an existing business, and methods to grow and market a customization business.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Bees"title="The Death of Bees">
After Marnie discovers the dead bodies of her parents, she and her sister decide against reporting the deaths to the police and instead bury their bodies. Reporting the death would mean social services stepping in and placing them in foster care. The sisters' lie about the disappearance of their parents is initially believed because their parents are considered unreliable drug addicts by many in the community. This lie is eventually uncovered by their homosexual neighbor Lennie, who takes them in and cares for them. Despite Lennie's care and kindness, Marnie and Nelly are both haunted by the ghosts of their past. Nelly wakes up screaming in the night because of memories of her father molesting her while Marnie drowns her sorrows by drinking, selling drugs, and sleeping with a married man. When their maternal grandfather discovers the situation and insists on taking the two girls in, Lennie becomes intent on keeping them by his side.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beautiful_Redemption_(novel)"title="Beautiful Redemption (novel)">
Ethan Wate finds himself in the Otherworld’s version of Wate’s Landing, where he sees his mom, Lila Evers Wate. Although Ethan is happy to see his mother again, he longs to be with Lena. To make his presence known, he creates crossword puzzles at Gatlin’s local publication, The Stars &amp; Stripes, to get his messages to Lena.Ethan's Aunt Prue tells him that his death wasn’t supposed to happen, and, upon consulting Obidias Trueblood, learns that the only way he can return to the Mortal world is to remove his page from The Caster Chronicles held by the Keepers at the Gates of the Far Keep. To get there, he must get two “river eyes” – two perfectly smooth black stones – to get across the Great River and to the Gates, where he must give the Gatekeeper “something he can’t refuse.”Ethan acquires the first “river eye” from Sulla the prophet, one of the Greats. The second one was given to Lena by her great-aunt Twyla. Making another crossword puzzle in The Stars &amp; Stripes, Ethan acquires the second “river eye”. Ethan is helped along his journey by Uncle Abner's crow, Exu; crows are the only animals capable of crossing one world to the other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Red_Horse"title="Blood Red Horse">
"Blood Red Horse" follows Will and Ellie, two young teens growing up during the time of the Crusades. Ellie has feelings for Will, yet has been promised in marriage to Will's brother Gavin. When King Richard announces that he will launch a Crusade, both Will and Gavin are sent off to fight. Will chooses the scrawny Hosanna to ride into battle, drawn in by the horse's allure. Along with his horse, Gavin doesn't want Will to find a way to survive the battle and return home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Grill"title="Diamond Grill">
The book describes Wah's experiences of the Diamond Grill, his father's restaurant in Nelson, British Columbia, and of the impact of growing up as a child of mixed heritage in the 1950s. "Diamond Grill" also discusses other locations, such as different restaurants, China, and a hospital where his father was once held.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Radicalism_of_the_American_Revolution"title="The Radicalism of the American Revolution">
Gordon S. Wood argued in "Radicalism" that "in this classical republican tradition our modern distinction between positive and negative liberties was not yet clearly perceived, and the two forms of liberty were still often seen as one." Wood premised this concluding argument with the notion that "public or political liberty---or what we now call positive liberty---meant participation in government. And this political liberty in turn provided the means by which the personal liberty and private rights of the individual---what we today call negative liberty---were protected."Wood's "classical republican tradition" rooted "virtue" in "liberty and independence." If such "disinterestedness" in government "was based on liberty and independence, then it followed that only autonomous individuals free from any ties of interest and paid by no master were qualified to be citizens. Jefferson and many other republican idealists hoped that all ordinary yeoman farmers who owned their own land...would be independent and free enough of pecuniary temptations and marketplace interests to be virtuous." Still, for many "republican idealists" in "monarchical society," a "disinterested leadership could only be located among the landed gentry whose income [derived] from the rents of tenants." Yet, most "merchants active in their businesses" sought to attain "wealth and leisure sufficient to avoid any day-to-day involvement in their businesses." The "jealousy and suspicion" of these "republican idealists" were "necessary evils to offset" monarchical "power." In addition, their "world" still seemed "small and intimate enough to hold particular men morally responsible for all that occurred within it. Which is why the colonists especially were quick to explain a concatenation of events as caused by conspiracy."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_of_Regrets"title="Calendar of Regrets">
"Calendar of Regrets" is a collage novel comprising twelve interconnected narratives, one for each month of the year, all pertaining to notions of travel—through time, space, narrative, and death.The narratives involve: 1) the poisoning of the painter Hieronymus Bosch; 2) former CBS anchorman Dan Rather's mysterious mugging on Park Avenue as he strolled home alone one evening; 3) a series of postcard meditations on the idea of travel from a young American journalist visiting Burma; 4) a high school teacher who videos her own auto-erotic asphyxiation and sends them to strangers across the U.S.; 5) a husband-and-wife team of fundamentalist Christian suicide bombers in London; 6) a terrorist commandeering a family's car on the Italian Autostrada; 7) the myth of Iphigenia from Agamemnon’s daughter’s point of view; 8) a series of pirate podcasts by a young drifter along the shores of the Salton Sea in southern California; 9) an interview between forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz and the man who assaulted Dan Rather; 10) an angel (based on the one appearing in symbolist Hugo Simberg's famous painting titled "The Wounded Angel") discovered by two boys in the Finnish countryside; 11) a man built of borrowed organs, each with its own story; 12) a boy born as a notebook.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_in_Flames"title="Head in Flames">
"Head in Flames" is a collage novel built on a triadic structure. First Vincent van Gogh speaks briefly (sometimes only a sentence, sometimes a handful) in the first person in a Times font. Next Theo van Gogh does the same in the third person in Times bold. Last Mohammed Bouyeri speaks in the second person in a Courier font. This pattern repeats for the length of the text. The effect is more musical than narrative in a conventional sense.Van Gogh finds himself standing in a field in Auvers-sur-Oise in July 1890, debating whether or not to commit suicide. Theo finds himself riding to work on the day he was assassinated in Amsterdam in November 2004 by Mohammed, an extremist outraged by the filmmaker's collaboration with controversial politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali on a 10-minute experimental short critiquing Muslim subjugation and abuse of women.The consequence of such a structure is a complex investigation into art's multiplicity of purpose, religion's increasingly dominant role as engine of politics and extremism in the contemporary world, the complexities involved in foreignness/assimilation, and the limits of cultural tolerance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxious_Pleasures"title="Anxious Pleasures">
"Anxious Pleasures" explores intertextuality by appropriating and rewriting Franz Kafka's 1915 novella "The Metamorphosis", about a man named Gregor Samsa who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect, from the points-of-view of the until-now secondary characters. Interspersed sections relate the narrative of Margaret, a young woman reading Kafka's text for the first time (a text that, strangely, seems to evince facts contrary to those in the original, and that of a downstairs neighbor, who may be some version of Kafka himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rapture_of_the_Nerds"title="The Rapture of the Nerds">
The novel is a fixup of two novellas, "Jury Duty" and "Appeals Court", along with a new third section, "Parole Board". The book, set in the late 21st century, takes a generally comic look at the technological singularity through the eyes of Huw, a technophobic member of a "Tech Jury Service" tasked with determining the value of various technological innovations and deciding whether to release them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuan_Direktur"title="Tuan Direktur">
"Tuan Direktur" presents a chronological plot, divided into twelve chapters. It followsJazuli, who leaves his hometown of Banjarmasin to go to Surabaya in Java and become a gold merchant. He is quickly able to earn great wealth. However, this causes the once devout and humble Jazuli to become arrogant and materialistic. He calls himself "Tuan Direktur" and surrounds himself with sycophants Kadri, Margono, and Hajji Salmi. He tries to buy Jasin's land to build a factory, but is refused.Kadri uses Jazuli's belief in spirits to control him, manipulating his boss to fire numerous employees – including Fauzi, who is able to become a successful businessman with Jasin's help. In an effort to eliminate Jasin, Kadri calls the police to the latter's house, claiming that Jasin is holding clandestine, anti-government meetings. When the police come, Jazuli, who has come to Jasin's house to try and buy the land, is arrested with a number of other people.After two days in holding, Jazuli is released but unable to enjoy his former arrogance, having been counselled by Jasin while in jail. When he sees Fauzi become a rich yet humble man, Jazuli is sent into a depression. He falls ill and does not recover, while Jasin and Fauzi live happily.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Slipping-Down_Life_(novel)"title="A Slipping-Down Life (novel)">
Evie Decker is a shy, slightly plump teenager, lonely and silent. But her quiet life is shattered when she hears the voice of Drumstrings Casey on the radio and becomes instantly attracted to him. She manages to meet him, bursting out of her lonely shell—and into the attentive gaze of the intangible man who becomes all too real...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Blood_Blues"title="Half-Blood Blues">
The book follows a jazz bassist named Sidney "Sid" Griffiths and his bandmates, from the jazz scene in 1939 Berlin and Paris into the 1940s, when Griffiths and his friends attempt to flee the impending peril that looms over Germany. Racial hatred is in vogue, and a mixed-race German citizen (dubbed by the Nazis with the epithet "Rhineland Bastard") like Hiero Falk can be arrested and simply disappear, lost to history. Juxtaposed against this is another narrative, set in 1992. Sid and Chip re-unite and travel back to Berlin for the screening of the documentary about Hiero Falk, and in which both Sid and Chip appear. Watching their life on the big screen turns out to be somewhat different from what they expected, and the mysterious letter that Chip has received leads them to another journey, across countries, time, and their own emotions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinter_(novel)"title="Splinter (novel)">
As in Verne's novel, the main character is Hector Servadac, however, instead of being stranded on the comet while serving in the French Algerian army, his father is a supporter of a doomsday cult and Servadac is stranded on a splinter of the shattered Earth when the planet is destroyed by a comet. Roberts described the central metaphor as "the trope that the world might end and that we might not even be sure it has happened. We surely wouldn't be wholly oblivious (this is the end of the world we're talking about, after all!) But we might not be wholly certain, either. There would be a lengthy transition period during which we would become increasingly convinced that something substantial had changed in our lives."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tin_Can_Tree"title="The Tin Can Tree">
The Pike family, including ten-year-old Simon Pike, are trying to carry on after the tragic, accidental death of six-year-old Janie Rose Pike. The brothers Ansel and James, neighbors of the Pike family, also pitch in to lend support to the Pikes. In the end, the Pikes learn that even after the traumatic death of a young soul, life still continues and they cannot mourn forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan's_Passing"title="Morgan's Passing">
Morgan Gower is a middle-aged husband and father who works at Cullen's Hardware Store. Morgan's life is boring: His house is dominated by his wife and daughters who generally ignore him, and his workplace is too slow for his active mind, his wit, and his imagination. In short, his life has fallen far short of his heroic aspirations, and he keeps a closet full of costumes—priest, riverboat gambler, Daniel Boone outfits—donning a different costume nearly every day, wandering the streets of Baltimore, a man in search of an identity in which he feels comfortable.One day, he meets a young couple, Emily and Leon Meredith, performing their puppet show in public. Emily goes into labor right after the show, and Morgan (posing as Doctor Morgan) delivers the baby in the backseat of his car. Over the next couple of years, an increasingly bored Morgan frequently runs into the couple "accidentally on purpose." He stalks them and over a period of time becomes their friend. Leon and Emily are not the happy couple that they appeared to be; Leon is a frustrated actor who has been reduced to a puppeteer. Emily seems uncertain of what she wants but it isn't Leon. Morgan initially tries to befriend them both (and their daughter Gina) but over several years becomes entranced with Emily. He spends more and more time with his new companions, and his wife and daughters barely notice his absence. Eventually Emily and Morgan sneak around their spouses, she becomes pregnant by Morgan, and they run off together to a new life, Morgan finally content as he assumes Leon's identity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodbye_Goliath"title="Goodbye Goliath">
In a small Alabama town, John Robinson, a disliked general manager of the local paper, "The Catherine Call," is found murdered in the news room with a spike through his head. Managing editor Kiel St. James takes it upon himself to solve the crime to help keep the newspaper going.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keesha's_House"title="Keesha's House">
The book follows several teenagers that have come to Keesha's house in search of a safe haven. Each teen has something that is going wrong in their life. Young couple Stephie and Jason are having troubles due to her teen pregnancy, with Jason feeling pressure due to him feeling like he has to choose between a potential sports career and his responsibilities. Dontay and Carmen both have had interactions with the legal system. Carmen must deal with a DUI charge while Dontay is shuffled through the foster care system due to his parents being in prison. Meanwhile, Harris and Katie are both experiencing trouble with their family members. Harris has come out to his father, only to be disowned. Katie can't understand why her mother remains with her abusive stepfather and tries to escape her situation by becoming a workaholic in every aspect of her life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubah"title="Kubah">
After twelve years imprisoned at Buru Island, the former Communist Party of Indonesia (, or PKI) member Karman returns to Central Java. During his time at Buru, his wife Marni has remarried and the area has modernised considerably, rendering him uncertain where to go. He decides to stay at his cousin's home for a while. Meanwhile, Marni has heard of Karman's release and realises that she still loves him, and would thus feel uncomfortable if he returned to their hometown of Pegaten. However, their grown daughter Tini wishes to meet her father.In a series of flashbacks, Karman's life is told. He lost his pro-Dutch father during the Indonesian National Revolution and was raised in poverty before going to work for the rich merchant Haji Bakir as a child, babysitting his daughter Rifah. In the two years Karman lived with them, the family raised him to be a devout Muslim; Karman, for his part, was a diligent worker and cared deeply for Rifah. When his uncle returned from the front, Karman was brought back home and educated until junior high school, dropping out for a lack of funds. When he was in his twenties Karman found a job at the local village chief's office with the help of a civil employee named Triman and a teacher named Margo.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny's_in_the_Basement"title="Johnny's in the Basement">
Johnny, who has just turned 11 years old, goes in the basement where nobody bothers him. His parents want him to grow up and go to dance class. They also want Johnny to get rid of his bottle cap collection. At dance class Johnny meets a girl named Valerie who also hates dance class, but likes Johnny. Johnny sells his bottle cap collection, and he and Valerie spend the $86.33 they receive for it on miscellaneous impractical items.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leather_Maiden"title="Leather Maiden">
Disturbed Iraq War Veteran Cason Statler returns to his hometown of Camp Rapture, Texas after being run out of Houston because of a scandalous affair. Now he's drinking too much and stalking his old girlfriend. With nothing else better to do he takes a job as a reporter for the small town newspaper. While working there he discovers his predecessor’s notes on a cold case murder file. He figures that working this case will keep him out of trouble, but just the opposite is true. The closer he gets to the truth, the further his life spins out of control especially when he learns his upstanding citizen brother may be involved. To make matters worse, his Army buddy Booger shows up to lend a hand.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Us"title="The History of Us">
In the book Harvard professor Eloise Hempel must take on the responsibility of caring for her sister's three children (Theodora, Josh, and Claire) after her sudden death. In order to more easily take care of them, Eloise moves into her mother's ancient home and begins the task of raising the three children as well as maintaining the house. Almost twenty years later, Eloise and her nieces and nephew still live in the house, which Eloise wants to sell so she can work on living her own life. However, when her mother begins to make the children compete against each other to see who will keep the house, secrets begin coming to the surface that forces everyone to either take a deeper look at their interpersonal relationships with each other or run the risk of having their relationships shatter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthly_Possessions_(novel)"title="Earthly Possessions (novel)">
Thirty-five-year-old Charlotte Emory has felt trapped her whole life in Clarion, Maryland—first by her embarrassingly eccentric parents, then by her preacher-husband whom she married too young, and eventually by "his variously afflicted brothers, a daughter who won't answer to her own name, a house full of refugees, an impossible clutter." She finally decides to run away from it all, rid herself of her "earthly possessions," and start over. When she goes to the bank to withdraw funds for her escape, she gets taken hostage during a holdup. Prison escapee Jake Simms forces Charlotte into a stolen car and they head for Florida.""Earthly Possessions"…contains a chilling portrait of a habitual criminal, Jake Simms, Jr., who blames every destructive and chaotic act of his own on someone else. He kidnaps our heroine, the surpassingly amiable Charlotte Emory because while he was robbing a bank a bystander happened to produce a gun. "I could be clean free," he tells his victim, "and you safe home with your kids by now if it wasn't for him. Guy like that ought to be locked up." As the chase continues, and the kidnapping lengthens into a kind of marriage, he persuades himself, "it ain't me keeping you it's them. If they would quit hounding me then we could go our separate ways…" This is perfect loser psychology, the mental technology of digging a bottomless pit; but Anne Tyler would have us believe that Jake is saved from falling in by the doll-like apparition of a wee seventeen-year-old girl he has impregnated, Mindy Callender."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daomu_Biji"title="Daomu Biji">
Fifty years ago, a group of Changsha grave robbers dug out manuscripts of the location of treasures from Warring states, but an encounter with an undead rendered almost the whole group dead. In the present, the young grandchild of the sole survivor, Wu Xie, discovers a secret within his grandfather's notes. Together with his third uncle, Wu Sanxing, and a few other experienced tomb robbers, to search for the treasure. But what no one expected to find the intriguing mysteries that accompanied their tomb robbing adventure - just who was the owner of that tomb? Will they be able to find the real coffin? And just where will these puzzle lead the group?Embarking on eight-volume's worth of adventures, as Wu Xie slowly unravels millennium-old mysteries, he sees the deterioration of his naïve world as he discovers the people around him are not what they seem and that he could trust no one in this tomb robbing world of deceit and lies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter's_Key"title="Peter's Key">
The book covers de loughry's time in Lincoln Prison and his successful attempt to break out of prison with Éamon de Valera, and other men. The prison break took him months to plan, which included creating a wax impression of a chaplain's key. De loughry then went through three keys before succeeding on the fourth attempt. During and after the escape from prison de loughry remained the Mayor of Kilkenny, a position he held for six consecutive years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shining_Girls"title="The Shining Girls">
"The Shining Girls" follows Harper Curtis, a killer from Depression-era Chicago, who finds a key on the person of his latest victim, and uses it to unlock the door to a strange house. Inside, Harper discovers a room covered in seemingly random objects, each with a woman’s name attached. He quickly figures out that the house wants him to kill these women — the titular Shining Girls — who live at various times across the next 60 years. All Harper has to do is step out of the room with the house key and a copy of one of the objects — the originals remain inside the house — and he can visit any year between 1929 and 1993.So begins Harper Curtis’ killing spree. He visits each of the Shining Girls when she is little and gives her a token item from the room, such as a baseball card or toy. Then, he leaps forward in time by a decade or more, murders the Shining Girl, and leaves a different woman’s token at the scene.His luck changes when he brutally stabs Kirby Mizrachi in 1989 and leaves her for dead. Unbeknownst to Harper, Kirby survives the attempt on her life. And four years later, with her would-be killer still unidentified, she decides to go after him on her own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nexus_Trilogy"title="The Nexus Trilogy">
## Nexus.Samantha Cataranes (Sam), an agent for the Emerging Risks Directorate (ERD) of the United States government, arrives undercover at a party looking for Kaden Lane. Kaden is there testing Nexus 5, an illegal, experimental nano-drug for direct input and output of brain signals. Sam talks with Kaden about his work and he invites her to be a part of a Nexus 5 study. Sam goes to the study and meets Kaden's close friends and colleagues: Rangan Shankari, Ilya Alexander, and Watson Cole (Wats). Sam takes Nexus 5, connecting her mind with the others, and they discover who she is and Kade uses Nexus to knock her out. When Sam awakes she threatens the group with prison, and promises a pardon in exchange for Kade's help. Wats escapes before the ERD extracts the group. The ERD describe a mission to spy on Su-Yong Shu, a brilliant Chinese neuro-scientist who is implicated in murder and brain control coercion. Kade agrees to work with the ERD and hands over Nexus 5. Kade and the group are sent to retrieve the Nexus 5 data, and on the way, they install a backdoor into the Nexus 5 operating system.Sam is required to have permanent integration with Nexus 5, despite her disagreement with Warren Becker, the Enforcement Division Deputy Director at the ERD. Kade and Sam, now with the pseudonym of Robyn Rodriguez, travel to Bangkok for a conference that Kade is invited to by Shu. Wats follows in hopes of setting Kade free and spreading Nexus 5 to the general public. At registration, Kade hears an inspiring talk from Somdet Phra Ananda, discussing a Nexus-like topic, and meets Narong, a PHD student. Narong invites Kade to a student mixer the following night. After returning to the hotel Kade finds a secret note left by Wats, informing him of the possibility of escape if needed. Kade recognizes that he needs to stay and attempts to notify Wats, who however never receives the message.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_Girl_(novel)"title="Gone Girl (novel)">
## Part 1.The narrative alternates between the point of view of Nick and Amy Dunne (née Elliott). Nick's narration begins shortly after arriving home on his fifth wedding anniversary to find Amy is missing from their home; there are signs of a struggle. Amy's narration comes in the form of her diaries and follows the earlier stages of their relationship.The diary entries describe how Amy met Nick in New York City, where they both worked as writers. Nick was a journalist who wrote movie and TV reviews, while Amy wrote personality quizzes for women's magazines. After two years of dating, they married. The couple lived in a beautiful brownstone home in Brooklyn where they were happy.In 2009, both Nick and Amy lost their jobs following the Great Recession. Amy's parents Rand and Marybeth, meanwhile, had written a successful children's book series called "Amazing Amy," based on Amy's life experiences. However, when sales from the books declined and Rand and Marybeth didn't curb their spending, they also started facing financial issues. Their solution was to ask Amy for money from her trust fund, which made Nick unhappy.Eventually, Amy and Nick relocate to Nick's hometown of North Carthage, Missouri, to care for Nick's sick mother, Maureen. With permission, Nick uses what remained of Amy's trust fund to open a bar with his twin sister, Margo or "Go". Nick also finds work teaching journalism at a local college. Their marriage deteriorates; Amy describes how she hates being a housewife in the suburbs and resents Nick for making her move. Her diary comes to portray Nick as an aggressive, moody, idle, and threatening husband, and indicates that she fears for her life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mick_Harte_Was_Here"title="Mick Harte Was Here">
Thirteen-year-old Phoebe Harte's younger brother, Mick, dies in a bicycle accident, because he chooses not to wear a helmet. This brings an incredible amount of grief and sorrow to the Harte family. The book, narrated by Phoebe herself, shows the effect Mick's death has on his friends and schoolmates, and delves deeply into the grieving process experienced by Phoebe and her parents. The book delivers some of Phoebe's fondest memories of Mick—many of them relating the pranks that Mick enjoyed playing on his friends and family—in the form of anecdotes about when the two of them were younger.According to "Publishers Weekly", Park demonstrates a tremendous ability "to convey so affectingly both the individual and collective pain of this family's members." Park does this, not through melodrama, but rather through what "Publishers Weekly" calls a focus "on small moments", such as when Phoebe's father arrives home from the hospital and quietly closes the door to Mick's room.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orchardist"title="The Orchardist">
Haunted by the disappearance of his younger sister forty years earlier, William Talmadge has taken refuge in the careful tending of his isolated apple orchard. His solitary life is shared only with the local midwife, Caroline Middey, and Clee, a Nez Perce horseman and childhood friend. Then two half-wild, starving and very pregnant teen-aged girls arrive. They are Jane and Della, sisters who have escaped the abuse of a brothel and its proprietor Michaelsen. Curious, but respectful of their wariness, Talmadge patiently cultivates their trust and creates a haven for them among his trees. A series of tragedies leaves Jane's baby daughter, Angelene, in Talmadge's care and sets Della on a lifelong journey to reconcile her own demons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bone_Bed"title="The Bone Bed">
A woman has vanished while digging a dinosaur bone bed in the remote wilderness of Canada. Somehow, the only evidence has made its way to the inbox of Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta, over two thousand miles away in Boston. She has no idea why.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bard's_Oath"title="Bard's Oath">
The book covers the story of Raven Redhawkson and Bard Leet separately on their journeys that converge at the Balyaranna Fair - the finest horse festival in the Five Kingdoms. Raven is there as a partner to his aunt's horse trade, while Bard Leet is there to avenge the death of a family member. Also visiting the Fair are Raven's Dragonlord friends: Maurynna Kyrissean, her soultwin Linden Rathan, and the newest Dragonlord, Shima Ilyathan. When one of Shima's new acquaintances reveals a particularly nasty secret about one of the Fair's other attendees, events begin to spiral out of control, as Leet's thirst for vengeance becomes a burning hunger with a surprising target.Meanwhile, far away in the wilderness, a Beast Healer friend of Linden's stumbles upon a long-forgotten horror, the truth of which could restore peace to the Balyaranna Fair... or drown it in blood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_You,_Every_Me"title="Every You, Every Me">
The book tells the story of Evan, a young boy whose best friend, Ariel, has recently suffered a psychotic break. The narration is addressing Ariel and tells how Evan is dealing with much guilt surrounding this experience. This guilt is made worse by mysterious photographs that are being strategically left for him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_Days"title="Gift Days">
Young Nassali longs to read and write like her brother, but since her mother's death from AIDS, Nassali is responsible for looking after her younger siblings and running the household. There is no time for books and learning. Then one day, she wakes up to discover that her chores have been taken care of. It is her first gift day. From that day on, once a week, her brother gives Nassali the gift of time so that she can pursue her dream of an education, just as her mother would have wanted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubletwisters_(book_series)"title="Troubletwisters (book series)">
The series follows siblings Jaide and Jack as they discover that they are both "troubletwisters" and as such, possess strange abilities. Initially unaware of this fact, this revelation becomes apparent after they are sent to Portland to live with a grandmother they've never met after their house is destroyed in an explosion neither of them can fully explain. Once there, their lives grow even stranger as they continue to experience strange magical scenarios and beings. They eventually discover what it means to be troubletwisters, and that it is up to them to defeat The Evil.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Can_Say_That_Again"title="You Can Say That Again">
Jerry Stevens is a small-time actor who has done many part-time roles in Hollywood and is now unemployed, looking for a simple job, far less a big break. He is one day called by his job agent who tells him that he is wanted for a very special assignment in California for which he will be paid well. Jerry walks into it, which actually leads him into a world of treachery, lies and deception involving criminals. The rest of the story is about whether or not Jerry is able to deal with everyone and survive the muddle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Knowledge"title="The Secret Knowledge">
In 1913, composer Pierre Klauer envisages marriage to his sweetheart and fame for his new work, The Secret Knowledge. Then tragedy strikes. A century later, concert pianist David Conroy hopes the rediscovered score might revive his own flagging career. Music, history, politics and philosophy become intertwined in a multi-layered story that spans a century. Revolutionary agitators, Holocaust refugees and sixties’ student protesters are counterpointed with artists and entrepreneurs in our own age of austerity. All play their part in revealing the shocking truth that Conroy must finally face – the real meaning of The Secret Knowledge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Opp"title="High-Opp">
On a dystopian future Earth, an ongoing series of opinion polls set the boundaries of the caste system: the high scored High-Opps are rewarded with luxury and privilege, while the low-opped struggle for comfort and survival in the crowded Labor Pool. When Senior Liaitor Daniel Movius falls from the upper ranks to the lowest depths of society, he faces the harsh and brutal conditions of the underworld and finds a brewing revolution in need of a leader.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awful_Splendour"title="Awful Splendour">
The book is divided into three sections, titled "Torch", "Axe", and "Engine", roughly corresponding to the pre-contact, exploration, and industrial periods of Canadian history. In its frequent mentions of American experiences with fire, the book engages in some comparative history. Pyne defines several geographical "rings" of fire in Canada, including the boreal forests, the coastal forests of the Pacific and Atlantic, the mountain forests of British Columbia and Alberta, and the mixed wood forests of the Prairies, Ontario, and Quebec.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pact_(2002_book)"title="The Pact (2002 book)">
"The Pact" narrates the lives of Rameck Hunt, Sampson Davis, and George Jenkins, three young black men that grew up in a community of violence, ignorance, and failure. The book shows their first-hand experience of racism and the low expectations for their future. Eventually the three make a promise that one day they will not only graduate from college, but that they will graduate as doctors. They later receive a scholarship to Seton Hall University, although the process proves to be a difficult one. Despite managing to overcome enough obstacles to gain a scholarship and attend college, they still run into racism, mediocrity, and failure. At one point the group debates giving up and dropping out of college, but are talked out of it by the school's guidance counselor, Carla Dickson. They then decide to face their obstacles in more adequate ways and graduate from Seton Hall. The three then study to become doctors, with Hunt and Davis deciding to attend medical school while Jenkins decides to become a dentist. The book ends with all three of them passing and earning their medical degrees at their respective schools.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somewhere_in_the_Darkness"title="Somewhere in the Darkness">
Jimmy Little is a fourteen-year-old boy who lives in a New York City apartment with his legal guardian that he calls "Mama Jean". His mother died and his father was imprisoned for murder and robbery.One day as Jimmy comes home from school, he finds that Mama Jean is not home. Instead, there is a man named Crab, who tells Jimmy that he is his father.When Mama Jean comes home, Crab explains that the prison let him out. Mama Jean was happy to see him. But when he explains that he wanted to take Jimmy with him across the country, Mama Jean is worried about what could happen on that trip. But she does not want to let Crab down. So she agrees to let him go on the trip.She gives Jimmy money for transportation and tells him to call her whenever he wants.Jimmy and Crab drive from state to state. During the trip, Jimmy finds out that Crab escaped from prison. He wants to be let out of the car immediately, but after a little while of talking and reasoning, Jimmy decides to stay with Crab.Crab takes Jimmy to Arkansas to meet his friends before he was wrongly put in jail. Some were nice people that he had no problems with. Others were stuck up jerks that Jimmy could not stand.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugee_Boy"title="Refugee Boy">
Alem is a refugee from Ethiopia. His parents are both Eritrean and Ethiopian. Alem then escapes to England from a violent civil war in Badme, which at the time of the novel (2000/1999), was disputed to be either in Ethiopia or in Eritrea. In 1991, 14-year-old Alem and his father are in the capital of Eritrea, his mother's home country. When Alem is ten years old, he and his family move to Harar in Ethiopia, his father's country. In Ethiopia, his father gets a better job within the postal service, but Alem's mother loses her job because the Ethiopian workers say they are "at war with Eritrea, so they will not work with someone from Eritrea." Alem's father is then told by his co-workers that he must leave his wife because she is Eritrean and therefore "the enemy". The mother was held at point blank before pushed on the bus.One night the police break into Alem's home and force the family, along with other mixed families, onto buses going back to Eritrea. After returning to Eritrea the family begins to experience the same discrimination, and Alem is attacked and beaten at school. The father was held at point blank before pushed on the bus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Monk_Gets_Even"title="Mr. Monk Gets Even">
Natalie Teeger is working as a police officer in New Jersey and her daughter Julie takes her place as Adrian Monk's temporary assistant. Ambrose Monk is about to marry his girlfriend and assistant Yuki Nakamara. Meanwhile, Adrian investigates a series of apparent accidental deaths and suicides, but he suspects they were all murders. After accusing a man of these murders, his nemesis Dale the Whale escapes from prison and Leland Stottlemeyer is under suspicion of helping him escape. Adrian Monk is then assigned to put his private life in order and find out the truth behind the series of murders and Dale's escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Political_Fable"title="A Political Fable">
Mr. "Soothsayer" Brown, political kingmaker, narrates the story of how his party, certain to lose the upcoming U.S. presidential election against an extremely popular incumbent, finds itself transformed out of nowhere at their convention by the arrival of the Cat in the Hat, with the slogan "i can lead it all by myself". All set to nominate Riley and Boone, the better to run them again in four years, news of the Cat arrives, preceded by his maverick cheerleaders Ned and Joe. There follows seemingly endless merriment without any grown-ups in charge. Not even the Cat's legendary clean-up machine is sufficient. But the Cat wins just about everyone's favor.Brown is a hold-out, though, and is disappointed that his long-term friend Governor Sam has switched over to the Cat. A meeting is arranged between Brown and Clark, the Cat's chief spokesman and campaign manager. They talk political philosophy, and Brown is helpless in the face of Clark's cynicism. At the nomination, the Cat rides in on roller skates, carrying a rake, with a cake, and so on, topped by the fish in the fishbowl who is scolding the Cat. The Cat falls down, and the bowl floods the entire convention, and everyone (except the Cat and Clark) end up inside the fish. Thinking quickly, Brown has everyone yell "VOOM", and out they all go.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_Wolf_(Picoult_novel)"title="Lone Wolf (Picoult novel)">
Edward Warren has been living in Thailand for nearly 6 years, when he receives a frantic telephone call: His estranged family have been badly injured in a car accident in New Hampshire. Warren's father, Luke is comatose, and his sister, Cara, has also been injured. Cara still holds a grudge against Edward, ever since his departure led to their parents' divorce. In the wreckage of her parents' ruined marriage, Cara decides to live with her father - an animal conservationist who became famous after living with a gray wolf pack in the Canadian wilderness.It is almost impossible for Cara to reconcile the broken man in the hospital bed with her vibrant, dynamic father
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tombs_(novel)"title="The Tombs (novel)">
While volunteering their time with an underwater archeology project off the Louisiana coast, the Fargos discover they have hostile competition on the site from amateur treasure hunters. They receive a call from a German professor asking for help with an archeological site in Hungary. When they meet the professor in Germany, he is kidnapped and taken to Hungary by a wealthy and ruthless Hungarian, who claims direct descent from Attila the Hun. They find they were followed by the adventurers who moved in on their site in Louisiana.The Fargos rescue the professor and soon find themselves on a hunt for hidden treasures buried by Attila and the unknown site of his tomb. Their adventure takes them into a number of countries in Europe and Asia. They also encounter allies of the Hungarian and at the end of the book encounter all their European adversaries at once.Co-author Clive Cussler has a habit of making cameo appearances in many of his novels. This time he and his wife offer them a ride to a train station, where the Cusslers plan to travel the Trans-Siberian Railway to its eastern terminus on Siberia's coast. The Fargos depart the train partway in the journey, so they can hunt for a site in Kazakhstan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalau_Tak_Untung"title="Kalau Tak Untung">
Rasmani and Masrul are childhood friends from Bukittinggi, West Sumatra. Unknown to Masrul, Rasmani has fallen in love with him and, when he moves to Painan to work, she feels her heart torn asunder. Several days later Rasmani receives a letter from him, in which Masrul tells her he is betrothed to his cousin Aminah, a betrothal with which he disagrees. Masrul has realised that he loves Rasmani, but he feels obliged to marry his cousin. Rasmani, meanwhile, becomes a teacher.While working Masrul meets a rich school principal, who asks Masrul to marry his daughter Muslina. When Masrul, after constant nagging, finally accepts, his family and Rasmani are devastated. Although Masrul and Muslina move to Padang and have a child together, their marriage is not a happy one, and eventually Masrul begins to drink excessively and rarely comes home. Feeling unappreciated, he finally chooses to divorce Muslina and return to Bukittinggi, despite Rasmani urging him not to do so.After meeting Rasmani again, Masrul tells her that he loves her and the two plan to marry. However, before marriage Masrul insists that he must save more money, and he goes to Medan to work over Rasmani's protests. While there he is out of contact for several months, leading Rasmani to worry and fall ill. After receiving a letter that Masrul has found a job and will be coming to meet her, she is shocked. Her weak heart stops and she dies, just before Masrul can return to Bukittinggi.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Monk_Helps_Himself"title="Mr. Monk Helps Himself">
Adrian Monk decides that it is time for Natalie Teeger to become a private detective to better aid him when solving cases. However, they come to a disagreement when Natalie wants to take the case of a woman whose apparent suicide starts to look like murder and Monk is more interested in a clown killed by poisoned money.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Ledger_Series"title="Joe Ledger Series">
The series follows the titular Captain Joe Ledger, a former Army Ranger and Baltimore police detective. Joe is hired by a clandestine, investigative agency known as the Department of Military Sciences (DMS). The DMS is a shadow agency formed for the purpose of pursuing technologically advanced threats to the US and the world at large by terrorists. Threats encountered throughout the series range from designer pathogens that create zombies to transgenics used for ethnic cleansing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Days_of_Blood_and_Starlight"title="Days of Blood and Starlight">
Karou has left Earth for the land of the chimaera and seraphim, Eretz, where the chimaera have been defeated by the seraphim. She has begun the job taken up by her adopted father Brimstone: the art of resurrection, which will bring the dead members of the broken chimaera army back to life to defeat the seraphim. She blames Akiva for everything, while the angel himself thinks her dead and begins training with his half-siblings Hazael and Liraz to keep his feelings from overwhelming him. Karou's best friend Zuzana and her boyfriend Mik begin looking for her after a mysterious e-mail and reports that a phantom girl has been stealing teeth.The son of the Warlord and new commander of the chimaera army, Thiago, has been courting Karou during her resurrection process and has offered up his own pain for the tithing process multiple times. He has specific resurrection instructions for her: make everyone larger, stronger, faster, and winged. Through this repeated process, the chimaera finally begin to win against the seraphim. Thiago has also brought a wolf chimaera named Ten to help Karou with the resurrection process and to serve as a sort of babysitter when Karou goes on her tooth missions. While she dislikes it, she is afraid to offend Thiago.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_of_Night"title="Shadow of Night">
Book Two of the "All Souls Trilogy" plunges Diana and Matthew into Elizabethan London, a world of spies and subterfuge, and a group of Matthew's old friends who are part of School of Night. The mission is to locate a witch to tutor Diana and to find traces of Ashmole 782. As the net of Matthew's past tightens around them they embark on a very difficult journey. They find Goody Alsop to guide Diana. With her friends, Alsop helps Diana to understand that she is a weaver, one who creates her own spells. They also help her evoke her familiar, a dragon (firedrake) that acts as a protector. Diana and Matthew come to know that Ashmole 782 is made out of materials of creatures like skin, bones, blood, etc. and could be a codex of creature reproduction. Matthew Clairmont and Diana discover that time travel is no simple matter as they have to confront their ancestors; neither is their search for understanding themselves and retrieving the key that holds the legacy of creatures shadowed by history and secrets.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emerald_Atlas"title="The Emerald Atlas">
Kate, Emma, and Michael are siblings shifted from one orphanage to another over their lifetimes. Kate, the eldest, remembers that, ten years ago on Christmas Eve, her mother had made her promise to protect her siblings, and in turn promised the family's reunion. After their rejection by a prospective adoptive mother, the children's current residence (called the Edgar Allan Poe Home for Incorrigible and Hopeless Orphans) sends them to a mansion situated in Cambridge Falls. There, they are introduced to its owner, Dr. Stanislaus Pym, and explore the house. In the basement, a door appears before them, and they discover an emerald-colored book containing no text. When an old photograph is touched to a page of the open book, the children are teleported to the date and location on which the photograph was taken. There, the children observe a witch, titled the Countess, vowing to kill a child every week until the enslaved fathers of the children find what she seeks. The Countess notices the three orphans and calls upon her grotesque henchmen, designated Screechers, to capture them. Kate and Emma escape, but Michael is accidentally left behind, and his sisters return to save him; but lose the book (the eponymous 'Emerald Atlas'). In escape, they are hunted by wolves; meet someone named Gabriel; and enter a subterranean maze, where Kate and Michael are captured by Dwarves. There, they discover a fifteen-years-younger Dr. Pym, with whom they recover the Emerald Atlas. Upon finding it, Kate is drawn into an earlier time, where she again meets Dr. Pym, and thence returns to the time she most-recently left. Emma, having tarried with Gabriel to repel the Countess's followers, is shot with a poisonous arrow, but is saved by Gabriel's wisewoman, Granny Peet. Once healed, Emma, backed by the wisewoman, sways the townsfolk into war against the Countess. After their victory, the witch herself remains to be conquered, and holds the imprisoned children on a boat. Kate, now 'chosen' by the Atlas, can travel to any time while in possession of it; but in exchange for the local children's lives, surrenders it. The Countess seizes the book; but is punished by her master, the Dire Magnus, who reveals that Kate and her siblings are the Atlas's and the two other books of beginning's rightful owners until, upon the completion of a prophecy, he claims it. Dr. Pym saves some of the local children; others are saved by Kate. She and her siblings return to their own time, where Kate is approached by the Countess. Using the Atlas, Kate drags the Countess into Rhakotis during its conquest by Alexander the Great. In plea, the Countess tells Kate that her mother and father are captives of the Dire Magnus, as bait to lure the siblings into retrieving the Books of Beginning (a trio of volumes enabling command over reality, of which the Atlas is the first) in exchange for their parents’ release. Kate then leaves her in Rhakotis and returns to her own time, where Dr. Pym explains the Books.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destroying_Avalon"title="Destroying Avalon">
Avalon and her family move from Grace Point to a coastal suburb in Perth for the start of Year 10. Her new school is huge, an environment vastly different from her old country school. Intimidated by the sophistication of the other students and embarrassed by her sheltered background Avalon attempts to ingratiate herself with the popular peer group and as a consolation, she is befriended by the social outcasts, the Weirdos and Queeros. Desperate not to be labelled the same, Avalon attempts to find another social group but her advances are crushed by the Bitches, who make their feelings to the school body known.A text message directing her to an email leads her to a blog site, used by students at her school, and a hate campaign begins.Daily, vicious lies are spread about her across the Net and through text messages. The organiser of the hate campaign is Dragon Girl — who Avalon believes is Alice, the leader of the Bitches. Avalon is hassled at school by students she does not even know and becomes obsessed and introverted at home, spending hours surfing the Net.After several weeks the attack against her dies down, but then she learns that her friend Marshall is being targeted. The attacks against him become physical and he is assaulted at school. In a confrontation on the school grounds Tamara, another of Avalon's friends, breaks a bully's nose and the small group is called to Administration, to be dealt with by teaching staff. Avalon and Marshall are terrified of discovery. Marshall is frightened of the consequences of being labelled a dobber, and Avalon is worried about her parents' reaction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_I_Taught_My_Grandmother_to_Read"title="How I Taught My Grandmother to Read">
When the author was a girl of about twelve, she used to stay in a village in North Karnataka with her grandparents. Since the transport system was not very good in those days, they used to get the morning newspaper not until the afternoon. The weekly magazine used to come in a day late. All of them would wait eagerly for the bus, which arrived with the newspapers, weekly magazine and the post.At that time, Triveni was a very popular writer in the Kannada language and all the village people would wait eagerly for the weekly magazine 'Karmaveera', where one of her novel "Kashi Yatre" was appearing as a serial. It was the story of an old lady and her earnest desire to go to Kashi or Banares or Varanasi, where she wished to worship Lord Vishweshwara to attain the ultimate blessings. But finally, the old lady sacrifices all her savings for the marriage of a young, poor girl, who falls in love but there was no money for her wedding so she gave her all her savings.Impressed by the plot of "Kashi Yatre", the author's grandmother Krishtakka would listen to the story as her granddaughter (the author) read the episodes to her. She was so touched with the story that later, she could repeat the entire text by heart. She never went to school and so, she couldn't read it by herself. Afterwards, she used to join her friends at the temple park and would discuss the latest episodes [because Triveni was a popular writer and common people could relate to the complex psychological problems in her stories].She could relate to the protagonist of the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Games"title="Private Games">
This book is a thriller novel set just before and during the 2012 London Olympics. Peter Knight is an investigator for Private London, a subsidiary of Private, a private investigative agency led by Jack Morgan in the United States. Private London has been commissioned to provide security for the London Olympics. Private London has been thrown into some disarray, because a number of its personnel were killed in an airplane crash just before the Olympics began.Just before the Olympics begin, someone beheads Knight's mother's fiancé. The slain man is a member of the Olympic games organizing committee. After the murder, Karen Pope, a reporter for "The Sun", receives a letter from a person who calls himself Cronus. Cronus claims he will kill persons involved with the Olympics who he considers corrupt. Cronus does just that, even infiltrating Olympics security and Knight's home. Throughout the novel, Cronus and his underlings kill those considered corrupt and anyone who gets in their way. Near the end of the book, "Private Games" takes an unexpected twist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_I_Am_(book)"title="Who I Am (book)">
Pete Townshend's memoir begins with his upbringing in London after World War II (he was born in May 1945, the month the war in Europe ended). Included is the period he lived with his unstable grandmother, during which time he reports fragmentary memories of sexual abuse at the hands of her suitors. Townshend discusses the Mod scene of the 1960s, the effect the war had on his generation, and the development of rock music. He also discusses the effect his childhood had on his music, particularly the rock opera "Tommy". The book traces the formation and evolution of the Who, and includes details of their appearance at Woodstock in 1969 and their storied trashing of hotels. Townshend calls Roger Daltrey "the unquestionable leader" of the band. He says he started smashing his guitars at the end of performances after he accidentally pushed one through a club ceiling in 1964 and damaged it. His "windmill" style of striking guitar chords was adopted from Keith Richards, whom Townshend says he once saw swinging his arm to warm-up before going on stage. The book also includes the many encounters Townshend had with other rock musicians, including Jimi Hendrix, whom he called a shaman because of the way he played his guitar. Townshend says that in a way Hendrix's "performances did borrow from mine – the feedback, the distortion, the guitar theatrics," but he added that Hendrix's "artistic genius lay in how he created a sound all his own". Townshend recalls that at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival the Who and Hendrix argued backstage as to who would play first, and Townshend won after a coin flip. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizard_of_Zao"title="The Wizard of Zao">
Each volume of the Chronicles of Kylix is set on a different world in the magical solar system of the fictional star Kylix in the constellation of the Unicorn. The system consists of the five planets Zao, Olymbris, Thoorana, Zephrondus and Gulzund. "The Wizard of Zao" takes place on Zao.Oolb Votz, the titular wonder-working wizard, fat, green and full of himself, makes an unlikely hero, but nonetheless has a humorous romp of a quest he must undertake. He is accompanied on his journey by the 15-year-old Wild Girl Ooo, his newly purchased "chela," who assists him as servant, apprentice and concubine. Strange beasts and stranger people are encountered along the way. The true identity of the wizard, a mystery in itself, is revealed in a surprise ending. The narrative is spiced with authorial asides and footnotes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_North_Road_(novel)"title="Great North Road (novel)">
In AD 2142, where portal technology allows instantaneous travel to other planets, Newcastle police detective Sidney Hurst heads a high-tech investigation of the disturbing murder of a clone of the wealthy North family. Hurst has the added challenge of the politics and media associated with the high profile murder, as well as the opaque mystery itself. The body shows the same wounds as that of Bartram North, murdered twenty years ago on the tropical planet St Libra. The bio-fuel that flows from St Libra is a mainstay of Earth's economy and so powerful vested interests are watching over Hurst's shoulder.Angela Tramelo was convicted and jailed for that murder but it seems that her story of an alien attack might be true. Tramelo, who has not aged in her twenty years in prison, is released into the custody of the Human Defence Alliance and taken on an expedition via the Newcastle gateway to St Libra.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Stakh's_Wild_Hunt"title="King Stakh's Wild Hunt">
The story is told on behalf of the main character, Andrej Biełarecki, who is 96 years old at the moment of his narration. The story itself occurred during his youth, in the fall of 1888, somewhere in a remote swampy Belarusian area, when he, a young folklorist, lost his way during a rainstorm and found himself at a family castle of Janoŭskis.The story takes place at the end of the 19th century. The young scientist, folklorist Andrej Biełarecki, having lost his way during a storm, finds himself in the Janoŭskis' ancestral castle - Bałotnyja Jaliny (Swamp Firs). He is received by the owner of the castle, Nadzieja Janoŭskaja, the last representative of her family. She tells Biełarecki that the Janoŭski family is cursed for twenty generations because of the betrayal committed by her ancestor, Raman the Old, and Nadzieja, a representative of the twentieth generation, expects a quick death, with which the Janoŭski family will end. She talks about the ghosts, the appearance of which heralds her death - the Wild Hunt, the Little Man, the Blue Woman.Biełarecki remains in the castle to protect Nadzieja and unravel the tangle of events. He sees the Little Man - a small creature with very long fingers, who looks through the windows at night; The Blue Woman, descended from an old portrait, to which Nadzieja is very similar. Gradually, Biełarecki gets to know the rest of the inhabitants and Janoŭskaja's relatives: former student Andrej Sviecilovič, majordomo Ihnaś Bierman-Hacevič, her uncle and guardian Ryhor (Hryń) Dubatoŭk, haughty young gentry Alieś Varona, the hunter and tracker Ryhor. One evening in the swamp he is pursued by the Wild Hunt - a group of silent horsemen who gallop silently, move freely through the bog, make huge jumps and leave traces of ancient horseshoes. Biełarecki miraculously manages to hide in the castle and with renewed energy continues to search for people hiding behind the Wild Hunt. Together with Ryhor, they reveal the secret of the death of Nadzieja's father, driven into a swamp by the Wild Hunt two years before Biełarecki's arrival. Gradually, they reveal the secret of the Wild Hunt - it was organized by Dubatoŭk in order to bring the girl to madness or death and take possession of the castle. All the riders were pursued and killed by local men, and Dubatoŭk died in a quagmire under the hooves of the Wild Hunt. The ghosts of the castle also disappear: the Little Man turns out to be Bierman's feeble-minded brother, whom Bierman let out of secret corridors, and the Blue Woman - to Nadzieja herself, who wanders the castle in a somnambulistic dream.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Dog_Fell_from_the_Sky"title="White Dog Fell from the Sky">
"White Dog Fell from the Sky" is set in Botswana in the late 1970s and follows three characters as their lives interact with one another. Isaac Muthethe is from South Africa, still under apartheid. He had a promising future as a medical student until he was forced to flee to Botswana after watching the South African Defence Force kill someone. Once in Botswana, Isaac works as a gardener for Alice Mendelssohn, an American postgrad student who has left her studies behind in order to accompany her husband. The two strike up a friendship of sorts and when Isaac goes missing, Alice decides that she must find him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughter_of_Smoke_and_Bone_(trilogy)"title="Daughter of Smoke and Bone (trilogy)">
## "Daughter of Smoke and Bone".A seventeen-year-old Prague art student named Karou leads an interesting life: she has blue hair that grows from her head, speaks a variety of languages, has three bullet scars in her stomach, and has been raised by creatures with human and animal features called chimaera. These are Brimstone, with lion legs and ram horns; Issa, with a snake's lower body, hood, and fangs; Twiga, with a giraffe neck; and Yasri, with a parrot beak. Kishmish, a crow with bat wings, acts as a messenger from Brimstone to Karou. Karou is often sent on missions to gather teeth for Brimstone, although she does not know what they are used for and why there are certain rules such as "no baby teeth" and "no rotting". In return she gets wishes; the higher the price, the greater the wish.When Karou and her best friend Zuzana are at a restaurant, Kishmish flies in bearing a letter from Brimstone saying to come immediately. Karou is sent off to Paris via a magical door to get a seven-foot-long matching pair of elephant tusks. When she finds another portal back to Brimstone's shop, she notices a scorched black handprint on the door, but fortunately she is able to get back home. Similar handprints are appearing across the world. When Karou returns to Brimstone's shop, a violent thud strikes the second door to the shop that Karou is forbidden from investigating.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Air_Seller"title="The Air Seller">
Meteorologist Georgiy Klimenko and his Yakut guide Nikola are investigating a strange wind anomaly in Yakutia, Eastern Siberia, when they are caught prisoner by a megalomaniac villain Bayley. With a gigantic air-sucking device, built by Swedish scientist Engelbrecht, Bayley is slowly stealing the Earth's atmosphere. The deeply frozen oxygen is stored in a vast cryogenic warehouse. Bayley plans to create oxygen deficit and then to start selling fresh air, thus eventually becoming the master of the world. He even boasts of having trade relations with Martians, though the credibility of this claim is left unclear. Klimenko soon discovers, however, that Bayley is not the one who pulls the strings, but there are wealthy and influential Western imperialists behind the plot.Engelbrecht's daughter Nora is sympathetic to the prisoners. She helps Nikola to escape and warn the Soviets of the danger. However, the Red Army is unable to assault Bayley's base directly, since that would risk an explosive vaporization of the frozen air (Bayley demonstrates the possible consequences by releasing a portion of said air, leveling enormous areas of Siberia and the Europe.). Bayley holds Nora hostage in order to keep Engelbrecht under control. Realising the danger Bayley's plans impose to the Earth, Nora commits suicide by exposing herself to the frozen oxygen. Now free and lusting for revenge, Engelbert sides with Klimenko. The base is finally stormed by the Red Army, shown a safe passage in by the escaped Nikola. Bayley, facing imminent capture, swallows some frozen air balls and explodes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiera_Cass"title="Kiera Cass">
America Singer is a seventeen-year-old girl who lives in the country of Illéa, which was once the United States. Their society is divided into eight castes, the lowest and poorest being Eight and royalty One. America is a Five and is in a secret relationship with a Six named Aspen Leger, which they kept hidden by sneaking out at night for dates in her backyard tree house. When America and Aspen grow apart because Aspen feels like he will never be able to provide for her, he tells her to join the Selection, a competition designed to pick a woman to become the future wife of Prince Maxon and take on the role of Queen of Illea. Although America is indifferent to the Prince and the Selection, she is pushed by her mother and Aspen's words to apply. Miraculously, she gets in and is sent to the palace, where she slowly falls for the prince and begins to learn that there are rebels who want change in the country. Aspen is drafted for the army and sent to be a guard at the palace which confuses America as her relationship with Maxon develops. Her friendship with Maxon slowly grows into affection until one day when one of the Selected girls, a friend of America, is caned and thrown out publicly for being found kissing one of the guards. America becomes enraged at the way things are run and realises what being the princess would entail, and takes it out on Maxon, becoming distant from him. As other girls are slowly eliminated from the Selection, America and Maxon slowly get closer again and apologize to each other during a rebel attack at the palace while in hiding together. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Unemployed_Man"title="The Adventures of Unemployed Man">
The book follows Unemployed Man, an out of work superhero and his sidekick Plan B. Unemployed Man first began as The Ultimatum, a rich superhero that looked down upon the poor and unemployed as lazy or otherwise unmotivated. He later loses his job and is defeated by the Invisible Hand, eventually ending up homeless. Unemployed Man must then seek a new job and team up with other superheroes in the same situation he is currently in.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piter_(novel)"title="Piter (novel)">
Just like the people of Moscow in the fictional world of Metro 2033, a fraction of St. Petersburg's citizens fled to the tunnels of their hometown's metro moments before the nuclear bombs were dropped on the city. "Piter" (Russian slang for St. Petersburg) tells the story of Ivan Merkulov, a twenty-six-year-old fighter and stalker who experiences many trials and adventures as he travels through places both within the subway system of Saint Petersburg, as well as those above on the surface of post-apocalyptic Earth. The novel begins with the protagonist about to get married. The ceremony is interrupted when the engine-generator that powers the necessities of life on Vasileostrovskaya (Ivan's home station) is stolen. Sozonov - friend and member of Merkulov's team of stalkers - believes that the residents of several nearby stations, who originate from Moscow, are responsible for the crime. A war begins between those stations and an alliance that Vasileostrovskaya is part of.As is revealed later on in the story, things are much more complex than Ivan thought. He is dragged into something much larger than the local conflict between the two factions, and the lines between friend and foe become very blurry as he continues his task. Merkulov's mission takes him to various locations, through numerous dangers and oddities, as he travels through the metro and beyond.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ack-Ack_Macaque"title="Ack-Ack Macaque">
"Ack-Ack Macaque" is based on Powell's earlier short story of the same name, which won the "Interzone" reader's poll in 2007. The original short story is included as an appendix to the novel. The novel has aspects of alternate history as in this version of reality the United Kingdom and France merged in the 1950s to form the nation of Brittany. The macaque of the title is the star of a highly regarded, exclusive massively multiplayer online role-playing game (with the roguelike feature of character death being final) which is itself set in an alternate reality World War II. The main character in the novel is former journalist Victoria Valois, who attempts to track down the man who murdered her husband and stole her neural implant while the heir to the throne of Brittany becomes a fugitive after breaking into a Parisian research laboratory. As the novel progresses, these strands are drawn together and the true purpose of the macaque is revealed.A sequel, "Hive Monkey", was released in 2014.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artifact_of_Evil"title="Artifact of Evil">
"Artifact of Evil" was the second novel to feature Gord the Rogue. Gord and his companions must stop a recently uncovered ancient artifact from falling into the wrong hands, as its power could destroy their world.This was the first novel to feature the drow prominently. Other characters appearing in the book include Melf of the Arrow (who has sworn fealty to Mordenkainen), Anthraxus the Oinodaemon (who appears to the Horned Society as a messenger for Nerull), the dwarf Obmi, and the losel (mixtures of orcs and baboons).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faultline_49"title="Faultline 49">
The book centers around a Seattle reporter's (David Danson) gonzo-style trip through US-occupied Canada in search of the principal provocateur in the Canadian-American War: terrorist mastermind Bruce Kalnychuk. As Danson draws closer to the truth about the 2001 World Trade Center bombing in Edmonton, Alberta, and the criminal war it propagated, his journalistic distance to the story collapses, rendering him not only a brutalized participant, but a target of the US government.Behind the facade of Canadian pulp fiction lies an engagement with the issues of imperial overstretch, occupation, and economic/cultural sovereignty on the fringe of the American Empire. Faultline 49 has been noted to be a "250-page thought exercise [that] swaps Edmonton with New York City, and also Canada with Iraq, Afghanistan and other nations in a buildup of violence, fabrication and barely concealed geopolitical oil interests."David Danson is a fictional personality. The actual author is Joe MacKinnon. David Danson was used to advance the simulacra.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Brown_novel)"title="Inferno (Brown novel)">
Harvard symbolism professor Robert Langdon wakes up in a hospital in Florence, Italy with a head wound and no memory of the last few days. Dr. Sienna Brooks, one of the doctors tending to him, reveals that he is suffering from amnesia and hearing a woman's voice repeatedly saying "seek and find". When Vayentha, an assassin, shows up in the hospital and kills one of the doctors, while attempting to kill Langdon, Brooks helps Langdon escape, and they flee to her apartment. Brooks plays a tape recording on which Langdon repeats what sounds like "Very sorry".Langdon finds a cylinder with a biohazard sign in his jacket and decides to call the U.S. consulate. He learns that they are searching for him, but, prompted by Brooks, claims to be across the street from her apartment, to avoid getting her more involved. Soon, Langdon sees Vayentha pull up to the location he gave the consulate. He deduces that the U.S. government wants to kill him. Langdon opens the container and finds a small medieval bone cylinder fitted with a hi-tech projector (Faraday Pointer) that displays a modified version of Botticelli's "Map of Hell", which is based on Dante's "Inferno". A trail of clues leads them toward the Old City.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards'_Conclave"title="Wizards' Conclave">
"Wizards’ Conclave" explores the lives of characters from "The War of Souls" trilogy, describing events that directly overlap the events of those stories.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lake_of_Death"title="The Lake of Death">
"The Lake of Death" explores the lives of characters from "The War of Souls" trilogy, describing events that directly overlap the events of those stories.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibis_trilogy"title="Ibis trilogy">
The trilogy gets its names from the "Ibis", a schooner slave ship that is repurposed to transport opium and girmityas. Most of the main characters meet for the first time on the ship. The series is set during the 1830s across the Indian Ocean region amid the build-up to the First Opium War. The series follows a nonlinear narrative.In "Sea of Poppies", the "Ibis" sets off from Calcutta carrying indentured servants and convicts destined for Mauritius, but runs into a major storm and faces a mutiny. "River of Smoke" is set in China — particularly around the Thirteen Factories — at opium's destination, where tensions between local authorities and international traders begin to escalate. The second instalment follows the inhabitants of two other ships caught in the same storm as the "Ibis" — the "Anahita", a vessel carrying opium to Canton, and the "Redruth", which is on a botanical expedition, also to Canton. "Flood of Fire" culminates in the outbreak of the First Opium War and its impact across the Indian Ocean region, including leading to the foundation of Hong Kong.The novels a depict a range of characters from different cultures, ethnicities, social classes and genders. This includes Bihari peasants, Bengali Zamindars and traders and officials of British, Chinese and Parsi descent. In addition to their native tongues, the novels also introduce the readers to various pidgins, including the original Chinese Pidgin English and variants spoken by the lascars. Pidgins are used as a common language spoken by characters of different nationalities, particularly in the naval profession.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune's_Brood"title="Neptune's Brood">
The novel presents itself as an extended first-person report by Krina Alizond-114, created by the "incalculably wealthy" Sondra Alizond-1 to be a scholar of accountancy practice historiography. Her clone sister, Ana, has disappeared, and Krina is following her trail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kagonesti"title="The Kagonesti">
"The Kagonesti (A Story of the Wild Elves)" details the historical roots and struggles of the Kagonesti, the wild elves of Krynn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Irda"title="The Irda">
"The Irda (Children of the Stars)" details the historical roots and struggles of the Irda, the high ogres of Krynn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_the_Minotaurs"title="Land of the Minotaurs">
The minotaur empire is in decline, and a group of minotaurs in a small encampment are the final bastions of their way of life, which the ruling minotaurs who dominate the capital city have corrupted the original spirit of.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gully_Dwarves"title="The Gully Dwarves">
"The Gully Dwarves" details the historical roots and struggles of the Aghar, the lowly dwarves of Krynn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_of_Babble"title="The Tower of Babble">
The book is divided into ten subject-related chapters. The first chapter provides an introduction to how Stursberg entered the CBC scene, how he viewed his role replacing the retiring Harold Redekopp as the executive vice president in charge of English services, and previews what challenges he would encounter. The second chapter covers his experience entering CBC senior management amid contract negotiations with its union, the resulting lock out during summer 2005, and the relations between what he labeled the Gang of Four (senior management) and the Central Committee (union representatives). In the third chapter, Entertainment, he explains his plan for re-orienting CBC television towards entertainment which would use audience numbers to gauge success. He cancelled critically acclaimed shows ("Da Vinci's City Hall", "This Is Wonderland", and "Opening Night") which had low ratings and ordered what he expected would be more audience-friendly shows. Beginning in summer 2006, the first new show under Stursberg's strategy, "", received very low ratings and was quickly cancelled. That Autumn's schedule, though, was successful, introducing "Little Mosque on the Prairie", "The Tudors", "Heartland". The nest year's schedule introduced the successful "The Border" and "Being Erica" but also the unsuccessful "MVP" and "jPod". Strusberg's move of "Marketplace" to Friday nights resulted in higher ratings but his plan to move "The National" to 11pm was denied by the CBC board of directors. In the fourth chapter, The French, he details his relationship with his French counterpart, the style differences between English and French television shows, the disproportionate funding given to the French services, and the lack of CBC Board members who can understand French. As a means of trying to bridge the two cultures, he ordered English versions of the popular Quebec shows "Rumours" and "Sophie" but both received low ratings in English Canada.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lullaby_(Atkins_novel)"title="Lullaby (Atkins novel)">
Mattie Sullivan, a fourteen-year-old girl, recruits Spenser to solve her mother's murder four years earlier. The man convicted of her murder, Mickey Green, was a friend of Mattie's mother and Mattie believes he was framed. When an old mob figure named Jumpin' Jack Flynn appears to be involved (along with Spenser's longtime enemies the Broz family), Spenser calls in Hawk and Vinnie Morris for back up.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_(del_Toro_and_Hogan_novel)"title="The Fall (del Toro and Hogan novel)">
The vampire race is descended from seven vampiric "Ancient Ones." A vampire faction led by a renegade Ancient known as the Master instigates the takeover of human civilization. Elderly billionaire Eldritch Palmer, having been promised immortality by the Master, uses his influence to create a news blackout, ensuring that the vampires face little resistance. Abraham Setrakian, an elderly vampire hunter, is hopeful that the lost grimoire, "Occido Lumen", holds the key to defeating the Master, and searches for it before the Master's forces take over. Setrakian is aided by epidemiologist Dr. Ephraim Goodweather and pest exterminator Vasiliy Fet, who have joined those resisting the vampires. Goodweather also seeks to protect his son, Zach, from his wife, Kelly, who is now a vampire and is driven by an animalistic instinct to convert her family. Meanwhile, the other Ancient Ones enlist gang member Gus Elizalde to destroy the Master.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leepike_Ridge"title="Leepike Ridge">
The plot of the book involves theories of Chinese (through Zheng He) and Phoenician discoveries of America. It involves a boy named Tom who, by accident, is dragged down into an underground river. Much of the book is focused on him getting out of the subterranean world in which he has been trapped.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Eternal"title="The Night Eternal">
Two years have passed since the vampires, led by the Master, used atomic weapons to create a nuclear winter, which blocked the sun and allowed the vampires to move freely, except for a few hours a day. The vampires restructured society as a police state. The strongest and the most influential humans were exterminated and those who were spared were made slaves. The weak were forced into camps to harvest their blood.A few survivors manage to resist the vampire occupation. Epidemiologist Dr Ephraim Goodweather grows distant from his friends. The Master, occupying the body of rock star Gabriel Bolivar, adopted Goodweather's son Zach as his protégé and is grooming the boy to be his next host body. Goodweather's lover, Dr Nora Martinez, left him for exterminator Vasiliy Fet. Following the death of his friend Abraham Setrakian, Fet struggles to decipher the "Occido Lumen", a tome holding the key to defeating the Master. He is aided by Mr Quinlan, the vengeful half-vampire who was created when the Master infected his then-pregnant human mother.Flashbacks to biblical times reveal the origins of the vampire race. The seven Ancients, including the Master, arose from Ozryel - the archangel of death. Ozryel was one of the three angels that God sent to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah for their wickedness. Ozryel was overpowered by blood lust while he destroyed the cities, being particularly enthralled by blood itself. When committing other atrocities necessary for cleansing the world he had not actually glimpsed blood before destroying these cities. Soon after, he betrayed and attacked Michael to drink his fellow archangel's blood. Appalled by Ozryel's actions, God punished him by having the other archangels cut his body into seven pieces and scattering them across the Earth. Over time, Ozryel's blood leaked from the burial sites and became sentient, spawning the Ancient Ones. The Master was the last to spawn, from Ozryel's throat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_(novel)"title="The Kingdom (novel)">
This novel is mostly set in Nepal, but parts of it take place in Indonesia, India, Tibet, southern China, Albania, Bulgaria and at the Fargo home and research center on the California coast. The book starts with the Fargos finishing their work at Krakatoa, when they are requested by Texas oil baron Charley King to go to Nepal to find a friend of theirs who was hired by King to find his long-lost father. Once in Nepal the Fargos find little in their search that makes sense. While they get their friend's release, they find a trail of intrigue going back to the 1300s. As usual, they find themselves confronting dangerous adversaries.As he does so many times, Clive Cussler writes himself into the novel as a bit character. The Fargos meet up with him in a library in Sofia, Bulgaria, and he provides them with a clue to aid them when they become completely confused when hunting for information on a 15th-century Eastern Orthodox priest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Beloved_World"title="My Beloved World">
In recounting her early life, Sotomayor describes growing up in a housing project in the Bronx to Puerto Rican emigrants. Her father was an alcoholic who died when she was nine, and she was subsequently cared for in large part by her grandmother. She tells of developing diabetes at the age of seven and learning to give herself her insulin injections due to the unreliability of her parents. Despite numerous odds, she relates her experiences in becoming valedictorian of her high school class, attending Princeton and then Yale Law School, working for the New York County District Attorney, and finally being appointed a federal judge in New York.The memoir does not cover aspects of her later life or her appointment to the Supreme Court, aside from incidental mentions. It is apolitical and does not discuss or reveal her legal philosophy. It discusses her 1976 marriage and subsequent divorce in 1983. It reveals many details about her early life that even her closest friends and mother were not previously aware of, as well as many things she had difficulty confronting ("I disclose every fear I've ever had in this book."). It also includes a candid description of the effects of affirmative action upon her at Princeton; she acknowledges that, "I had been admitted to the Ivy League through a special door," but concludes that the measures served, "to create the conditions whereby students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Night"title="The Great Night">
Henry Blork, Molly and Will enter Buena Vista Park in San Francisco on the way to a party at a house nearby. Each is forlorn over the loss of a relationship: Henry's obsessive–compulsive disorder had driven away his boyfriend Bobby; Will has lost his girlfriend Carolina because of his infidelity; and Molly's boyfriend Ryan has hanged himself.A hill in the park houses the local faerie kingdom, ruled by Titania and Oberon. Oberon has vanished after their son, whom Oberon had stolen for Titania, died of leukemia. Grieved at the yearlong absence of her husband, Titania releases Puck, a powerful and antagonistic demon, from his thousand-year-old bond, hoping that the ensuing destruction will compel Oberon to return. The spell that unbinds Puck traps everyone in the park, and over the course of the night, Henry, Molly and Will's histories are related by flashbacks.Henry had no recollection of the years he had been missing as a child. As it happens, he himself was a changeling, stolen by Puck to be his companion. But Henry grew too old and Oberon and Titania banished him. Henry's memory of his captivity was erased and he was expelled into the city, where he was discovered by Mike, who, with Ryan, runs an orphanage of sorts for the many changelings in the city. After one of the other boys makes fun of Henry's homosexuality, Henry leaves the house and, found by a police officer, tells her about the house. The police assume Mike was molesting the children; Mike is killed in a raid in the house, while Ryan escapes and Henry is returned to his family. Several years later, Henry and Bobby fall in love, but Henry's OCD destroys their relationship. Henry moves to San Francisco, where he is one of the doctors who unsuccessfully treats Titania and Oberon's son's leukemia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janis_and_Saint_Christopher"title="Janis and Saint Christopher">
The e-novel is set in Saint Christopher, an Australian city colonised by the French. Rebel journalist Scott Parker gets into a fight at a media conference and the Christian Lobby stages a protest about the morality of homosexuality when they learn about his husband's outdoor sex park. Aging flower power queen Janis Joplin gets sucked into the drama after she performs a concert at the sex park."Queerd Magazine" said it was "a dark comedy that explores confronting issues. Same-sex divorce, infidelity, barebacking, media manipulation and corruption, political scandals, even Botox addiction gets a guernsey."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush,_Hush_(series)"title="Hush, Hush (series)">
## "Hush, Hush".Nora Grey meets Patch Cipriano in her biology class. She finds herself drawn to him despite him initially trying to assassinate her, and despite her friends preferring that she date their friend Elliot, who is later revealed to be a pawn of the Nephilim Jules. Patch saves Nora from death multiple times because he realizes he has fallen in love with her. Even though Nora believes he is stalking her, she eventually gives in to her feelings for Patch after he reveals he is a fallen angel who is protecting her. Jules, also known by the name Chauncey Langeais, attempts to use Nora as a way to target Patch, but fails and is killed when Nora jumps off of a gym ceiling rafter and dies, severing the blood-related tie between Nora and him. She is brought back by Patch, who then becomes her guardian angel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_and_Summer"title="Love and Summer">
Ellie and her farmer husband Dillahan live a quiet life near the town of Rathmoye. She is a foundling who was raised in an orphanage by Catholic nuns and is the second wife of Dillahan, who earlier had killed his first wife and child in an accident.During the funeral of Mrs Connulty at Rathmoye a stranger, Florian Kilderry, asks Ellie for direction to the burned down cinema, and their brief conversation is noticed by Miss Connulty, Mrs Connulty's spinster daughter, who determines that the two have struck out a love relationship based on this tenuous encounter. Florian, a photographer, and Ellie begin to notice each other and soon a love affair spanning the languid summer takes place, as the couple remember their lives lived up to that point.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komarr"title="Komarr">
In his new role as Imperial Auditor, Miles Vorkosigan finds himself on Komarr, a planet where his father has an unfortunate reputation, being blamed for a massacre of government officials who had surrendered to him during the planet's conquest. He is there, along with Professor Vorthys, an older, more experienced Auditor and engineer, to investigate whether the destruction of a solar power satellite vital to the ongoing terraforming of the planet was an accident or sabotage.Miles uncovers an extremely dangerous Komarran conspiracy, one which threatens the entire Barrayaran Empire, and is attracted to Vorthys's niece, Ekaterin Vorsoisson, the unhappy wife of an Etienne "Tien" Vorsoisson, an engineer at one of the terraforming facilities. Tien suffers from a degenerative genetic condition, which would stigmatize him with other Barrayarans, and has tried to raise money for secret treatment by gambling on the Komarran financial markets. Heavily in debt, he has been bribed to ignore certain irregularities, which he believes are just a swindle, but are actually part of a plot against Barrayar.Tien Vorsoisson and Miles stumble upon the conspirators and are captured. They are left shackled and exposed to the Komarran atmosphere with only their breathing masks to sustain them, but Tien neglected to recharge his mask's air supply and suffocates to death. Ekaterin finds her husband dead and Miles injured from his efforts to come to Tien's aid. She had been about to leave the marriage, having discovered Tien's gambling losses, but received a mysterious call to pick up Miles and Tien at the remote facility.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_the_Mountain_Meets_the_Moon"title="Where the Mountain Meets the Moon">
By a bare mountain, where the Jade River runs through, lies a poor, mud-covered village known as the Village of Fruitless Mountain, where the protagonist, Minli lives. Minli is a young ten-year-old girl with a fast and eager spirit, and is constantly ready for adventure. However, what she especially enjoys are her father Ba's stories, which are often told at the dinner table. Minli's mother, Ma, instead despises the stories that Ba tells, feeling that they are simply "nonsense." Also, she is full of bitterness and resentment due to their poverty.All of the villagers, along with Minli's family, are also very poor, as farming is difficult in the hard and dry land due to Fruitless Mountain being the broken and lonely heart of the immortal Jade Dragon, a dragon that once brought rain to the Earth. Plus, there is barely enough rice to feed the people there, causing Minli to develop a wish for good fortune.Much to the displeasure of Ma, Minli spends her precious money on a goldfish. It turns out the goldfish can talk when people want to hear it. She decides to let it go because of how bitter it made Ma. When she does so, the goldfish tells her directions to Never-Ending Mountain, where a wise immortal known as the Old Man of the Moon lives. According to the goldfish, the wise man can answer Minli's question on how to bring good fortune to her family and the village. The following day, Minli then sets out, freeing the goldfish so as not to burden her parents further, and leaves the village to find "the old man of the moon". When her parents find out she is gone, they try to look for her, but are stopped by the goldfish seller, who tells them to trust Minli. Meanwhile, Minli sleeps for the night in the forest, only to wake up to find a trapped dragon, which she saves. They become friends, and Dragon offers to be her steed for the journey, despite the fact that he cannot fly, unlike other dragons. Dragon also reveals that he was born from a painting and came to life when his eyes were painted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_and_Bones"title="Flash and Bones">
Brennan is called to examine a body found in a barrel of asphalt beside the racetrack in Charlotte, North Carolina. Things get very complicated when a toxic substance is found in the body, and the FBI seizes all evidence and the body.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City,_Not_Long_After"title="The City, Not Long After">
The novel is set almost 20 years after a plague has devastated the Earth's population. A few hundred people, most of them artists, live in San Francisco, California, and have built many large-scale artworks there out of salvaged materials. To the east, in the Central Valley, a military government headed by General Miles (nicknamed "Fourstar") has spread from Sacramento and annexed many other towns, including Fresno and Modesto. Miles dreams of recreating the United States of old and is planning to invade San Francisco, which he claims is populated by Godless sinners who are hoarding its resources.A nameless young woman, whose mother fled the city soon after the plague, has a vision of an angel at her mother's death. It leads her to believe she will be reunited with her mother in the city and inspires her to go there and warn its inhabitants of the coming invasion. While there, she meets the city's residents, acquires a name, and convinces them that the threat of invasion is real and spurs them into taking action to resist it. Believing that they cannot beat Fourstar using straightforward military methods, they improvise their own methods of demoralizing his army, and are aided by mysterious manifestations related to the city's past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad,_Bad_Bunny_Trouble"title="Bad, Bad Bunny Trouble">
After spoiling the coffee cake at his sister Liza's birthday party, Ralph is banished to the attic, but then he has to use his best soccer kick to save his family from a gang of hungry foxes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Conquerors"title="The Star Conquerors">
For ten years the Terran Confederation has been at war with a reptilian species, called the Saurians, who are controlled by the unknown Masters. It's been a losing war for the Terrans and their allies and now the Scandian system is under attack. Geoffrey (Jeff) Knowland, a junior officer of Star Watch must lead a fighting evacuation of the planet Northolm. He succeeds, but the Frontier Coordinator, Heath Knowland, his father, reprimands him for losing men in a diversionary raid.Needing a rest, Jeff goes to Earth to present his father's plan for defending the Confederation to the ruling Council. The war isn't going well and the prospects don't look good: the Masters’ empire extends across most of the galaxy while the Terran Confederation spans only 200 light years.While the Council debates the plan that Jeff has presented, the Saurians attack the main Star Watch fleet and defeat it, killing Jeff's father. Shocked, the Council agrees to the Knowland Plan and also to an attack by a Terran Expeditionary Force into enemy space to knock the Saurians off balance. Heading out to Orion, the force defeats several Saurian fleets, destroying enemy ships faster than they lose their own. They conquer a vast volume of space and then seek to make allies of the subjugated people whom they find.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch_(novel)"title="Watch (novel)">
Caitlin has bonded with Webmind and the two find themselves sharing an unconventional, yet fulfilling friendship. However not everything is going quite as well as they hoped as they discover that the Web Activity Threat Containment Headquarters (WATCH), a secret division of the US National Security Agency, has been expressing concern over the potential threats posed by Webmind. WATCH is convinced that the entity will bring nothing but trouble and jeopardize the security of the United States and, as such, must be destroyed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_(Sawyer_novel)"title="Wonder (Sawyer novel)">
Ever since the government has tried and failed to eliminate Webmind, Caitlin and her family have been thrust into the media spotlight. People are excited over what Webmind can offer the world, such as the cure for cancer and facilitating international relations, but others are also frightened about its potential for harm. The Pentagon still seeks to eliminate Webmind and has recruited some of the world's best hackers to destroy it forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luck_of_the_Draw_(novel)"title="Luck of the Draw (novel)">
Bryce, an 80-year-old human in poor health, is transported to Xanth and magically restored to his fit 21-year-old self. He has been drawn to Xanth to participate in a quest to win the hand of young Princess Harmony as part of a Demon wager. Bryce has no interest in marrying but a love spell has been cast on him to compel his participation. To aid him, Bryce has been given the gift of second sight (foresight of an event a few seconds into the future) and a magic tablet. Items drawn on the tablet are able to take three-dimensional shape.There are five other suitors for the Princess' hand: Lucky, a youth whose talent is good fortune; Arsenal, a combat expert; Piper, who can be either man or monster; D Pose; a demon who seeks to conquer Xanth by marrying the Princess; and Anna Moly ("Anomaly"), whose talent is to cause the unexpected to happen. (Anna is acting on behalf of her brother, Justin.) All six suitors cooperate in a quest to find a suitable gift that will cause the princess to choose them to marry. They are accompanied on their quest by Mindy, a 20-year-old Mundane who attempted suicide before coming to Xanth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_(Steven_Gould_novel)"title="Impulse (Steven Gould novel)">
The protagonists of the previous novels, David (Davy) Rice and his wife Millicent (Millie) Harrison-Rice, now have a teenage daughter, called "Cent" after her mother. They have relocated to a remote opulent lodge-style home in the north of Canada, bought from a billionaire who lost his wealth in the dot com crash. Here they live in isolation, hiding from the people who took her father captive and tortured him to gain control over his innate teleportation abilities, and from the government agencies who want to use them for their own ends. Cent decides that home schooling is stultifying and she wants a normal life with friends. When she triggers an avalanche while snowboarding without permission, she learns that she, like her parents, has the ability to jump, after she suddenly finds herself in her own bedroom. Her family relocates to a small town so that she can meet friends, but when they do, all three of them get wrapped up in a criminal conspiracy that grows larger as they investigate it. Cent learns to jump in place and add momentum/velocity as she arrives, resulting in the ability to throw herself into the air.When Hyacinth Pope, from the group that has been trying to capture or kill David and his family, returns, she captures Cent, but Cent's innate ability to jump in place and add velocity allows her to escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_of_Ashes"title="Bridge of Ashes">
Alien invaders manipulate humans for millennia in order to create the "post-ecological-catastrophe environment" that is their natural habitat. Because of pollution the self-destruction of the human race is imminent. Dennis Guise is a 13-year-old boy who is the most powerful telepath in the world. However, due to the sheer volume of thoughts that he inadvertently receives from others, he is catatonic. He sometimes takes on whole personalities, often famous people, living or dead. Through therapy he eliminates these people from his mind and learns to block the experiential input of others. He is then able to be his own person. He decides to help a mysterious figure called "the dark man" convince the aliens to leave Earth, and they are successful.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(novel)"title="Prodigy (novel)">
After the events of "Legend", June Iparis and Daniel "Day" Altan Wing arrive at Las Vegas in search for the Patriots. Through Kaede, they meet with Tess and Andrew "Razor" DeSoto, a Republic Commander doubling as the leader of the Patriots. Razor offers Day a prosthetic leg and protection in exchange for assassinating the new Elector Primo, Anden Stavropoulos, who has recently succeeded his deceased father. To execute the task, June will need an audience with Anden at Denver to falsify the time and place of the assassination and convince him to seek "protection" at the actual place of assassination.Accepting the offer, June lets herself get captured by a Republic task group led by Thomas Bryant. She learns that he and her brother, Metias, were in love with each other. June successfully makes an appointment with Anden, but she becomes reluctant to execute the plan when she realizes that the reformist Anden has little in common with the conservative Senate and wants to change the Republic for the better. She decides to abandon the plot and signals to Day through a security camera about her decision of betrayal to the Patriots. Meanwhile, Day boards a Republic airship towards the warfront city of Lamar, where one of the Patriots' bases is located. Day learns about the current situation of the international world–the fact that the Republic is considered a pariah state–and further hones his skills to become a Runner, the Patriots' diversion team. He is confessed by Tess, who warns him not to trust June. One night, while creating a diversion at a local train station, Day meets a boy experimented to be a biological war weapon like Eden and wasn't able to free him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smash_(novel)"title="Smash (novel)">
The novel is in the form of a production diary for "Shine On, Harvest Moon", the fictional musical being created about the life of vaudevillian Nora Bayes. The diary is kept by Production Secretary Midge Maghakian, a young woman who leaves her secure publishing job to join the staff. She finds herself caught up in the various power struggles to control the musical.With the production in trouble, producer Art Clune turns to Gene Bowman, the Chicago-based author of the Bayes biography upon which the musical is based. His rewrites lead to continued improvement of the show but the struggle for control continues, culminating in director Larry Gabel's being forced out, replaced by Production Supervisor Clay Botsford. As this is happening, Midge and Gene enter into a physical relationship and Midge finds herself falling in love with the older Gene.The show founders through out-of-town tryouts in Boston and Philadelphia along with a surprise run in Washington, D.C. as the major players continue to jockey for position and power. In a last-ditch effort to save the show, Midge, Gene and others in the production staff conspire with Larry to bring his vision back to it. After attending previews in outlandish disguises and donning drag as Clay's secretary, Larry rejoins the show openly as director just before opening night.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hereward_the_Wake_(novel)"title="Hereward the Wake (novel)">
Hereward is, in Kingsley's novel, the son of Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and Lady Godiva. He is introduced as an eighteen-year-old "bully and the ruffian of the fens" who is outlawed by Edward the Confessor at the request of his father. He sets off to see the world, considering such options as the Vikings of the northern seas, the Irish Danes or service with the Varangian Guard in Constantinople. He is accompanied by Martin Lightfoot, a devoted but eccentric servant.At an early stage in his journey Hereward defeats a caged polar bear in single combat in the north of England. He brawls his way through Cornwall and eventually arrives at the court of Baldwin of Flanders. Once there, he demonstrates his prowess against Baldwin's knights, and wins the love of Torfrida whom he marries. Three years after the Norman Conquest, Hereward returns to England and encounters the brutality of the new regime. Hereward takes revenge on the Normans who killed his brother. At a drunken feast he kills fifteen of them, with the assistance of Martin Lightfoot.Hereward then musters a force of English rebels and takes up camp at Ely in the Fens. William of Normandy leads a host of mercenaries against Ely but they are repulsed with heavy losses when the English set fire to the surrounding reeds. In spite of this victory Hereward's resistance is worn down by the Norman invaders and the intrigues of the Countess Alftruda who separates the hero from Torfrida. Hereward eventually swears loyalty to William, acknowledging that the Norman is indeed king of all England. Married to Alftruda, Lord of Bourne and in favor with the king, Hereward is still hated by the "French" (Norman) nobles, most of whom have lost kinsmen fighting against him, Finally Hereward's prime enemy, Ivo Taillebois, surprises him in his ancestral home, where fighting almost alone he is killed after a brutal struggle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hand_That_First_Held_Mine"title="The Hand That First Held Mine">
The story progresses in two different timelines. It tells the story of Lexie Sinclair, a young English woman who falls in love with magazine editor Innes Kent, after escaping from her stifling family to London in the 1950s. The other timeline, set in the present day, deals with Elina, a Finnish-Swedish painter who had a near-fatal Caesarian section and gives birth to the son of film editor Ted. The theme of the novel is motherhood and how it changes one's perception of the world. The link between the two timelines is not established until the end of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Grande_Bretèche"title="La Grande Bretèche">
Dr. Horace Bianchon discovers near the town of Vendôme an abandoned manor: La Grande Bretèche. Intrigued by the ruins, the doctor tries unsuccessfully to enter the house night after night. Upon returning to the inn where he is staying, he questions the locals about the house. Finally several locals, including a lawyer and the innkeeper, explain the story of the manor.Madame de Merret, the late owner of the manor, forbade anyone from entering the house upon her death, be it workmen, visitors, or government officials, for 50 years. The lawyer was given the task, as well as funds, to ensure that her dying wish be accomplished.Dr. Bianchon learned that Madame de Merret had a Spanish lover for a short period of her life. One day, Madame de Merret's husband returned early from a business trip when her lover was at the house. The lover hid himself in the closet, but the husband, hearing a sound, confronted his wife about the noise. Pressured by her suspicious husband, Madame de Merret swore upon a crucifix that there was no one in the closet, but threatened in turn to leave her husband if he were ever to open the closet out of suspicion. In response, Monsieur de Merret sent for a mason to wall up the closet, trapping the lover inside. Terrified, Madame de Merret passed along a message to the mason asking him to break a hole in the door when her husband was not looking before completely walling the closet off. The mason does that, and Madame de Merret catches a final glimpse of the maddened eyes of her lover through the hole. Once the closet was walled up completely, Madame and Monsieur de Merret stay in the bedroom for several days, listening to the muffled noise coming from the closet. Because of this traumatic experience, Madame de Merret declared her house off-limits upon her death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Policeman"title="The Last Policeman">
The novel is divided into four parts—"Hanger Town", "Non-Negligible Probabilities", "Wishful Thinking", and "Soon, They Will"—each containing five chapters, and an epilogue. Each part has an introductory graphic giving the date, and the asteroid's right ascension, declination, elongation and delta, or distance from Earth, in astronomical units. The first part is dated March 20; the epilogue, April 11.In late March 2012, Henry Palace, a young detective with the Concord, New Hampshire police, is called to a crime scene: a man named Peter Zell has apparently hanged himself in the men's room of a former McDonald's. The case seems clear-cut, but Palace wonders about the bruises on Zell's head and the fact that he was wearing a cheap suit but used an expensive belt to hang himself. Palace decides to consider the death a possible murder, and to investigate despite the limited resources available and peer pressure not to waste them.His investigation finds several odd loose ends. Zell was an actuary who worked at an insurance company; the previous year he stopped showing up to work for several weeks before returning with no explanation, and his boss recalls an out-of-character angry incident at the office Halloween party. His secretary, Naomi Eddes, says she wasn't close to Zell, although Palace saw her in the parking lot outside the McDonald's. Zell's co-workers say he left that night with a man in a biodiesel-operated pickup truck. At Zell's apartment, Palace finds a stack of newspaper clippings about Maia, with extensive mathematical calculations in the margin, and the unexplained label "12.375". Zell had begun writing a note to his sister, Sophia Littlejohn, a midwife, but had stopped after addressing it. At Sophia's house, her husband Erik tells Palace that Zell was lately very depressed, but lies about his wife's whereabouts. The coroner refuses to do more than the absolute minimum when autopsying Zell's body, but Palace takes a vial of Zell's blood to the toxicology lab anyway.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Aim_(novella)"title="Dead Aim (novella)">
Hap and Leonard are hired, through Marvin Hanson's private detective agency, to protect a woman from her estranged, abusive husband. Hap is framed for the man's murder while staking out his house, and upon further investigation the two sleuths discover that the victim owed the Dixie Mafia crime syndicate a large sum of money, and in addition he had a large life insurance policy with his wife named as the sole beneficiary. Hap and Leonard are soon involved, not just in the murder, but in a kidnapping and ransom demand as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_and_the_Ice-gods"title="Allan and the Ice-gods">
Allan Quatermain, feeling awkward toward Lady Luna Ragnall after their recent "taduki"-induced vision in "The Ancient Allan", in which they were nearly married, refuses three invitations from Lady Ragnall to return for another vision and has vowed never to use the drug again. Lady Ragnall herself informs Allan that she has used the "taduki" once more and discovered that their ancient counterparts, Amada and Shabaka, were indeed married.Allan reads in the newspaper that Lady Ragnall has traveled to Egypt for the winter. Six weeks or so later, Allan has a psychic experience and later learns that Lady Ragnall had died of heart failure at that moment at the site of her husband’s grave in the Temple of Isis. Allan inherits her estate, coveted by Lord Ragnall’s next-of-kin, Mr. Atterby-Smith. He distributes it to charities except for a box containing the "taduki" drug which Lady Ragnall had left him. He is tempted to break his vow and use it, but finally resolves not to when his friend, Captain John Good, calls on him. Good is able to persuade Allan to use the drug and the two enter into their vision.Allan awakens as Wi, an civilized man living in the barbaric Ice Age. He belongs to a culture that reveres a man and mammoth frozen in ice as their gods. His closest friend is Pag, an outcast who creates many new technologies. Wi challenges and kills his corrupt chief Henga and institutes reforms in the tribe: monogamy, decision by council, and the use of new technology. Pag rises in power in the tribe and is able to stop a pack of wolves from attacking. Wi and Pag travel into the wilderness to fight off a saber-toothed tiger. Wi discovers a beautiful young woman, unconscious, in a canoe. Her name is Laleela. Wi falls in love with her, as does Wi’s brother Moananga. Most of the tribe regards her as a witch and Wi’s wife Aaka wishes for her to be killed. Pag tries to convince Wi that he must marry Laleela in order to protect her, but Wi realizes this will break the oath of monogamy he has imposed upon the tribe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Cross,_Run"title="Alex Cross, Run">
Metropolitan Police Department officer Alex Cross, John Sampson, and others, invade plastic surgeon Elijah Creem's penthouse where he is illegally giving drugs and having sex (while making pornographic videos) with teenage girls. He is arrested, his wife divorces and leaves him. Alex is later called on to a case in which a girl, Elizabeth Reilly, is found dead. After examining her body, reports confirm she gave birth, but the baby is nowhere to be found. Soon after, he is called on to a case featuring a boy shot, stabbed, and found in the Potomac river. Alex is then called onto a third case featuring another dead girl. Alex must struggle with three cases all at once.Meanwhile, Ron Guidice, whose fiancé was killed by an officer from MPD, blames Alex for the murder and posts negative comments about Alex at his website, "TheRealDeal". Alex visits the pregnant girl's grandparents. The missing baby, a girl, has been found and given to them. They received numerous letters from when Elizabeth was out of her hometown and went to Washington. In one letter, it is mentioned that Elizabeth fell in love with a man named Russell, but when checking the databases, they find no such man. Instead, they find an older case where another pregnant girl was killed, the child missing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Railway_Detective"title="The Railway Detective">
In April 1851, shortly before the opening of the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London, a mail train on the London and North Western Railway (L&amp;NWR) is halted between Leighton Buzzard Junction and Linslade Tunnel by a group of men disguised as railway police. Using duplicated Chubb safe keys, they steal all the mailbags and a consignment of over £3,000 in sovereigns being transferred from the Royal Mint to a bank in Birmingham. The train driver, who tries to resist the robbers, is badly injured and his fireman is forced to drive the engine forward to where a section of track has been removed, causing a derailment. The robbers escape and the alarm is raised by telegraph to the Metropolitan Police Force in Scotland Yard, London, where it is received by Detective Superintendent Edward Tallis, head of the Detective Department.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convenience_Store_Woman"title="Convenience Store Woman">
Keiko Furukura is a 36-year-old woman who has been working part-time at a convenience store, or "konbini", for the last 18 years. She has known since childhood that she is "different" and that expressing her own views and actions is inexplicable and distressing to others, and causes problems. The highly regulated world of the "konbini", where each action is prescribed by the corporate manual, allows her to maintain an identity acceptable to those around her and a sense of purpose. She models her behaviour, dress style, and even speech patterns on those of her coworkers. Keiko maintains some friendships and a relationship with her sister, but finds it increasingly difficult to explain why, after 18 years, she is still single and working as a temp in a convenience store.Keiko meets Shiraha, a man who cannot hold a steady job and lives on the fringes of society since he doesn't conform to "normal" expectations. While they have no affection for each other, Shiraha eventually moves in with Keiko. They decide that by pretending to be a couple, they can avoid problems with families and a society that expects them to have romantic relationships, children, and stable jobs.As part of the plan, Keiko eventually quits her job in the "konbini", though she immediately feels that her life has lost purpose. She stays home doing nothing, and only at Shiraha's insistence applies for steady jobs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor_of_Ocean_Park"title="The Emperor of Ocean Park">
Talcott 'Tal' Garland (known as Misha to his closest friends) is a black tenured law professor at the fictional college, Elm Harbor, an analog of Yale University. His wife, Kimberley Madison, known as Kimmer, is an attorney. Tal's father, Oliver Garland, a federal judge, has just died. Years earlier, Judge Oliver Garland had to decline a nomination from President Ronald Reagan for a seat on the Supreme Court due to the release of embarrassing information about his past, and then resigned from the bench. Following some years of heavy drinking, Oliver in his later life became a well-paid mascot for right-wing political groups. Judge Garland dies in suspicious circumstances, purportedly of a heart attack. The death brings together the Judge's three living children – Tal, Addison, and Mariah – for the funeral. A fourth child, Abby, died some years previously, in a hit and run car accident.Talcott is named in Judge Garland's will as being responsible for the "final arrangements", which are not explained. Talcott's only clue is an obtuse note from his father telling him to search for "Angela's boyfriend", someone unknown to Talcott who apparently holds information that the Judge wants Talcott to have, and ending "Excelsior, my son! Excelsior! It begins!" – a reference to the Double Excelsior; the first of many chess references found within the trail of clues the Judge has left. Unbeknownst to Tal, the Judge had hired a private investigator to investigate his daughter's death. The investigator had been recommended by Jack Ziegler, one of his college roommates who later worked in espionage for the CIA, and in return, the Judge influenced some legislation to suit Ziegler. The investigator finds the car that killed Abby was driven by the son of a prominent US senator and his girlfriend, both of whom were subsequently killed in similar car accidents; it is later revealed at least one of these "accidents" was caused by the private investigator. The release of details of Judge Garland's relationship with Ziegler is what resulted in the Judge failing to gain a seat on the Supreme Court. Ziegler approaches Talcott at his father's funeral, demanding to know the details of the Judge's final arrangements. Two other interlinking plot threads feature Kimmer's campaigning for a highly sought after seat on one of the thirteen Federal Courts of Appeal, and the often-parlous state of Talcott and Kimmer's marriage. Kimmer, with whom Talcott first had an affair while she was married to one of Talcott's fellow law professors, is suggested as being unfaithful, although this is never confirmed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Legacy_of_Spies"title="A Legacy of Spies">
Now older and living in retirement on a farm in his native Brittany, Peter Guillam – who narrates the story in the first person – is summoned to MI6 headquarters to account for his actions during Operation Windfall, the espionage mission depicted in "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold". Learning that Alec Leamas's now adult son, Christoph, is suing the British government for the wrongful death of his father and Elizabeth Gold, Guillam ruminates on the course of events that led to the death of agent Karl Riemeck, and how Guillam and Leamas worked together to try and save not only Riemeck's life but the lives of several other East Germans working with him to provide intelligence information to Britain. The narrative also ties events from other novels featuring George Smiley and Guillam such as "Call for the Dead" and "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" into the backstory of "The Spy Who Came In from the Cold", and characters from those novels including Hans-Dieter Mundt, Bill Haydon, and Jim Prideaux make appearances.The book alternates between Guillam's recollections of the events leading up to Leamas's demise and his attempts in the present day to stop feeling guilty for his role; his avoidance of Christoph, who wants to blackmail him; and his efforts to learn the whereabouts of Smiley, who has gone off the grid following his own retirement.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Railway_Viaduct"title="The Railway Viaduct">
A French railway engineer is killed on a train crossing the Sankey Viaduct and his body is flung over the parapet into the canal below.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_the_Walls_Came_Tumbling_Down"title="And the Walls Came Tumbling Down">
Abernathy relates the story of his close relationship with King. The book begins with details of his participation in the Montgomery bus boycott. He details how he was surprised to hear King's selection as leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), but stated that he wished he had nominated him for the role himself. The autobiography details how he was elected program organizer, which made him the chief organizer of activities for the group. Abernathy states how this working relationship worked well as it split most of the responsibilities of the MIA between himself and King.Abernathy asserts a very close relationship in the book, stating he and King "tried to meet for dinner every day" during the Montgomery boycott. The overall narrative paints an intertwined life between Abernathy and King. It details how King found Abernathy at an Atlanta church, and how the two became close friends and co-activists.The duo of Abernathy and King is described as being extremely well-known wherever they went together. Abernathy describes how women would bring food to them to thank them for their efforts in their communities. The two frequently shared the same jail cell together during their many arrests for their protest actions. The two are described as so inseparable that Bull Connor, the elected Commissioner of Public Safety for the city of Birmingham, Alabama, termed them the "Gold Dust Twins" and required that both be put in solitary confinement as he said, "These two have never been separate...". It was during this separation that King wrote the famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail" on April 16, 1963.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Husbands_of_Evelyn_Hugo"title="The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo">
Monique Grant, a reporter for "Vivant" magazine, has been selected to interview Evelyn Hugo, a reclusive former star, who is auctioning some of her famous gowns to raise money for a breast cancer charity. Monique is confused about why Evelyn has chosen her, but goes to Evelyn's apartment to meet her. Evelyn reveals she has no interest in giving an interview for "Vivant" but instead wants Monique to write her life story, and Monique agrees, though she is suspicious.Evelyn is 14 when she marries her first husband, Ernie Diaz, in order to reach Hollywood and escape her abusive father in Hell's Kitchen. She is noticed by Harry Cameron, a young Sunset Studios producer, and the two become close friends. Evelyn seduces a Sunset executive in order to advance her career and divorces Ernie when the studio sets her up with popular actors for publicity. She falls in love with and marries actor Don Adler, but in the following months, Don begins to abuse Evelyn when pressure is placed on his career.In an adaptation of "Little Women", Evelyn, now 21, stars opposite Celia St. James. Evelyn is initially jealous of Celia's talent, but the two quickly form a bond. At a party, Evelyn is told that Celia is a lesbian. Evelyn privately confronts Celia to ask if this is true, and the two kiss. Evelyn discovers that Don has been cheating on her, but he divorces her first and sabotages her career. To revive her popularity, Evelyn goes to Paris and stars in a racy film by French director Max Girard. Rumors have begun to spread about Evelyn and Celia's relationship, so Evelyn creates a plan to distract the press. She seduces and elopes with singer Mick Riva, then has the marriage annulled the next day. The plan works, but Evelyn is pregnant. She gets an abortion, but Celia is furious and leaves her. They do not speak for five years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomatic_Act"title="Diplomatic Act">
Richard Faraday is an actor on a science fiction television series, "Star Peace". He plays Harmon the Eldar, an extraterrestrial diplomat who is both kind and wise. An alien group of watchers, called the Kluj, who have been observing mankind through their television broadcasts for decades, do not understand the distinction between fact and fiction (in fact the concept of fiction might be a uniquely human concept), and kidnap Faraday as they believe him to be Harmon, and they are in need of his diplomatic services.The Kluj need Faraday to solve a metaphilosophical crisis and avert a galactic war. While Faraday is trying to sort out the galactic crisis, a Kluj takes Faraday's place on the set of "Star Peace" and learns about the difference between fiction and reality, and how Hollywood works. This Kluj has to team up with Faraday to defeat the evil plans of one of the Elder Races wandering around the galaxy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speak_No_Evil_(Eberhart_novel)"title="Speak No Evil (Eberhart novel)">
When wealthy Richard Dakin is murdered while on vacation in Jamaica. Suspicion immediately falls upon Elizabeth, his new and much younger bride. To complicated matters, Elizabeth used to be romantically involved with Richard's nephew, Dyke Sanders, and appears to still carry a torch for him. Richard's ex-wife, Charmain, and his assistant, Ruth Reddington, soon get mixed up in the case as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_Everyone_Hanging_Out_Without_Me?"title="Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?">
Kaling tells stories from her life and details her observations about love, friendship, Hollywood, dieting, her relationship with her mother, among other things.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Not_Me?_(book)"title="Why Not Me? (book)">
The book is a collection of anecdotal essays written by Kaling about her experiences and observations about Hollywood. Carina Chocano of "The New York Times" noted that the book was "loosely fashioned around themes of approval and entitlement."The book also contains a chapter that is a work of fiction about an alternative world where Kaling is a Latin teacher in a prep school on the Upper East Side of New York.The final chapter of the book is a transcript of Kaling's 2014 speech at Harvard Law School.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterworlds"title="Afterworlds">
Darcy Patel has put college and everything else on hold to move to New York to rewrite and publish her teen novel, 'Afterworlds'. Arriving with no apartment or friends she wonders whether she's made the right decision, until she falls in with a crowd of other seasoned and fledgling writers who take her under their wings. Darcy weathers on through the whirlwind that is a first publication and learns multiple lessons not just in YA writing, but also in romance and relationships. Told in alternating chapters is Darcy's novel, a suspenseful thriller about Lizzie, a teen who slips into the Afterworld to survive a terrorist attack. Upon venturing into the underworld, Lizzie meets another mortal afterlife transcender who has been in the Afterworld for thousands of years and attempts to support Lizzie’s transition as a psychopomp. But the Afterworld is a place between the living and the dead, and as Lizzie drifts between our world and that of the Afterworld, she discovers that many unsolved - and terrifying - stories need to be reconciled.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Sequel_(book)"title="An Inconvenient Sequel (book)">
The book is intended to encourage and inform readers on how they can help fight anthropogenic global warming and climate change, and is a more in-depth analysis than the film. The book describes how humans have further damaged the environment since the release of "An Inconvenient Truth", and makes more predictions about what will happen in the near future if humans fail to act. The book also describes advancements that have been made so far in the effort against global warming, such as developments in alternative energy sources. The book explores other aspects of the climate crisis, such as climate change denial and the corporate influence of money in politics, and ends by reasoning that it is not too late to solve the crisis.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Century_Is_Not_Enough"title="A Century Is Not Enough">
In this book Ganguly discussed his cricketing career in details. He has discussed different phases of his cricketing career including several foreign tours, World Cups, and IPL.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transposed_Heads"title="The Transposed Heads">
Shridaman and Nanda are two young friends who are "little different in age and in caste, but very unlike in body." Shridaman is a learned merchant with strong spiritual qualities and a noble face but a thin, weedy body. Nanda is a blacksmith with a strong and beautiful body but a rather ordinary intellect. Both fall in love with Sita, the daughter of a cattle-breeder. She accepts Shridaman's proposal of marriage but shortly after their wedding, she begins to wonder if she had made the wrong choice. Matters are not helped by the fact that Nanda has remained Shridaman's friend and is a frequent visitor to their house. Soon, both Nanda and Shridaman become aware of what is happening.Six months after the wedding and with Sita pregnant with Shridaman's child, they set off to visit her parents accompanied by Nanda. On the way they stop at a temple to the goddess Kali where Shridaman goes in to pray. In a fit of religious fervor he beheads himself to free Sita to marry Nanda. Nanda then enters the temple and when he finds Shridaman's corpse, he likewise beheads himself. On discovering what has happened, Sita is about to hang herself when goddess 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becoming_(book)"title="Becoming (book)">
The book's 24 chapters (plus a preface and epilogue) are divided into three sections: Becoming Me, Becoming Us, and Becoming More.The preface sets the stage for Michelle Obama's story to open by sketching a scene in her post-First Lady life. Becoming Me traces Obama's early life growing up on the South Side of Chicago with her parents - Fraser and Marian Robinson - in an upstairs apartment where she got her first piano lessons and learnt to be an independent girl under the nurturing care of her parents. There, Obama shared a bedroom with her brother Craig. The book continues through her education at Princeton University and Harvard Law School, to her early career as a lawyer at the law firm Sidley Austin, where she met Barack Obama. While this section talks considerably at length about Obama's Princeton experience and Sidley Austin, Harvard Law school's experiences are mentioned marginally by comparison.Becoming Us departs from the beginning of the Obamas' romantic relationship and follows their marriage, and the beginning of his political career in the Illinois State Senate. This section also notes Obama's career "swerve" from corporate law to the non-profit realm as she continued to work while raising her daughters and speaking at political events, becoming gradually more involved in her husband's campaign. The book shares Obama's balance between her position as the first African American First Lady of the United States of America, her motherly duties, and marital commitments. The section ends with election night in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected President of the United States.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Hair"title="The Story of Hair">
The narrator, who lives in Beijing, notices that October 10 - Double Ten Day (the National Day of the Republic of China, commemorating the fall of the Qing dynasty)- is not marked on his calendar. (The story was commissioned for a special October 10 issue of the "Lamp of Learning".) Mr N (先生Ｎ), an older acquaintance based on Lu Xun's superior Xia Huiqing at the Ministry of Education, angrily dismisses the importance of the day, which he says is only remembered because the police remind people to put up the flag. Changing tone, he reminisces sadly about his friends who died during the anti-Qing struggle. N then describes his own experience of cutting of his queue, which mirrors that of Lu Xun. N reflects on the subservient position of China, mentioning that he once read an interview with a Japanese traveller who said that he had no need to speak Chinese or Malay when in those countries because he could make himself understood by beating the natives with his cane. He concludes the story by posing a question to idealists like the narrator, quoting the Russian writer Mikhail Artzybashev (who was popular in China at the time): "You promise a golden age to these people's sons and grandsons, but what do you have to offer them here and now?"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Under_Glass"title="Magic Under Glass">
The story takes place in the kingdom of Lorinar which is in an ongoing war with a neighboring fairy kingdom. Nimira, the heroine, is a woman of aristocratic roots who works as a dancer in a foreign land after her mother's death and the disappearance of her father. She does not think twice when a handsome and mysterious magician, Hollin Parry invites her to live in his palace on the condition that she performs with a robot that can only be turned on with a silver key. She soon finds out that there is some evil magic in the mist and that the automation is Erris, a cursed fairy prince who is trapped in a robot body. Hollin's wife Annalie is trapped in an attic under the control of a sorcerer. Nimira and Erris fall in love and help to free Annalie from her curse. It is unknown what fate awaits them as they seek to free Erris from his automaton body.The sequel, "Magic Under Stone", continues the tale of this duo in this magical land of twists and turns.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Caress"title="Sweet Caress">
Amory Clay lives alone in a cottage on a Scottish island where, in 1977, she is writing a journal about her life and career. Born in 1908, she is the eldest of three children in a middle-class family in Sussex. She excels academically at boarding school and was encouraged by her teacher to go to Somerville College, Oxford, but performs badly in her exams after her father, traumatised by his military experiences in the First World War, tries to commit suicide and to kill her as well. Apprenticed to her uncle, Clay works as a society photographer in London but then seeks more excitement in Berlin, where she frequents the underworld and takes photographs that, when she exhibits them in England, are viewed as scandalous. An American magazine offers her a job and she moves to New York, where she has affairs with her American boss and with a French diplomat who is also a writer. Back in London, where she runs an office for the American magazine, she covers a demonstration by Oswald Mosley’s fascists, in which she is attacked and badly injured. After spending the early part of the Second World War in New York, she returns to Europe as a war photographer covering the D-Day landings and accompanies Allied Forces as they sweep through France and Germany. She meets and marries a British officer, Sholto Farr, who is also a Scottish lord, and – unexpectedly, as she had thought the injuries she had received from Mosley's supporters had made her infertile – gives birth to twin daughters. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_in_a_Teacup_(short_story)"title="Storm in a Teacup (short story)">
The boatman Sevenpounder (七斤) comes back to his village one night, bringing the news to his family that "the Emperor has returned to the Dragon Throne". He worries, as people in town had shaved off his queue during the revolution. Meanwhile, the innkeeper Zhao arrives. Zhao is renowned as the greatest scholar for ten miles round, as he reads the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms". Zhao had only coiled up his queue, and has now let it down. Mrs Sevenpounder notices that he is wearing his special gown which he only does when an enemy has met with misfortune. Zhao bears Sevenpounder a grudge, and taunts him that he will now be executed. Trusting in Zhao's scholarship, Mrs Sevenpounder gives up all hope and curses her husband for having shaven off his queue. Another neighbour remembers that Mrs Sevenpounder did not object when her husband stopped growing his queue, and an argument breaks out.A fortnight later, Mrs Sevenpounder notices that Mr Zhao has coiled up his queue again, and is not wearing his gown. The Sevenpounders relax, as it seems the emperor is not coming back after all. They begin binding their daughter's feet.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forever_and_a_Day_(novel)"title="Forever and a Day (novel)">
A prequel to the events of "Casino Royale", the book recounts Bond's first mission as a double-0 agent, his status recently earned by killing a wartime traitor in Stockholm.Set in the French Riviera in 1950, Bond investigates the killing of the previous man designated 007 and resumes his final mission: determine what is behind the sudden lack of drug activity in the Corsican underworld. He develops his affinity for high-stakes casinos and fine hotels, where he meets Joanne "Sixtine / Madame 16" Brochet, a former British operative who leads him to Corsica mob boss Jean-Paul Scipio. Everything appears to point to the morbidly obese Scipio, head of a chemical company that serves as a front for his heroin business, but Bond discovers a larger network of organised crime and an American multi-millionaire named Irwin Wolfe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_at_Nuremberg"title="Death at Nuremberg">
This novel centers around Capt. James Cronley, the central character of all the novels of the series. Cronley has been replaced as chief of DCI Europe to protect the U.S. chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials from a rumored Soviet kidnapping. He soon gets charged with hunting down the leadership of Odessa, an organization that helps Nazi war criminals escape to South America. As Cronley gets closer to uncovering the workings of Odessa, he is targeted twice for assassination. Cronley's quest takes him to his mother's home town of Strasbourg and to Vienna. At Strasbourg he picks up his cousin Luther, who turns out to be a war criminal himself and is taken to Nuremberg. As with the other books in this series, "Death at Nuremberg" is filled with intrigue as agents of the fledgling CIA work to rid the United States of enemies in Europe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_and_Kill_First"title="Rise and Kill First">
"Rise and Kill First" describes the targeted killings carried out by Israeli secret agencies and the personalities and the tactics used. The book's title is inspired by a statement in the Talmud: "If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first". Based on a thousand interviews and thousands of documents, the book is the story of many political and intelligence figures such as agents of Mossad, Shin Bet, and the Israeli military, some of them speaking under their real identity. Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, former Israeli prime ministers, and Meir Dagan, a recent head of Mossad for eight years, were among those interviewed.The book begins with the founding of Bar Giora in 1907 by Yitzhak Ben Zvi. The organization later became Hashomer, then the Haganah and finally the core of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). According to Bergman, Israeli covert agencies have undertaken targeted assassinations against "Arab adversaries throughout its pre- and post-statehood periods". They have assassinated more people than any Western state has since World War II, carrying out "at least" 2,700 assassination operations in the seventy-year period since Israel's state formation. "Poisoned toothpaste that takes a month to end its target's life, armed drones, exploding mobile phones, spare tires with remote-controlled bombs, assassinating enemy scientists and discovering the secret lovers of Muslim clerics," are among the methods described in the book used by Israel to carry out assassinations. Bergman discusses the assassination of British officials, Hamas, Hezbollah and PLO leaders, and Iranian nuclear scientists. According to the author, some of the assassinated individuals include: PLO leader Yasser Arafat; Ali Hassan Salameh, leader of Black September; Abu Jihad, Arafat's aide and co-founder of the Fatah party; Yahya Ayyash, known as the "Engineer", Hamas' chief bomb maker; and Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan waiter. Menachem Begin, Yitzak Shamir, Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon, the latter described by Bergman as a "pyromaniac", each of whom would later lead the government of Israel, are named as assassins in "Rise and Kill First".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_épisode_sous_la_Terreur"title="Un épisode sous la Terreur">
An elderly woman buys a package from a bakery on 22 January 1793, and suspects she is being followed. She asks for protection from the baker, but when he sees the stranger following her he refuses. She returns home alone, and it is revealed that she is an ex-Carmelite nun in hiding with another nun and a priest. All are elderly, and the box she bought contains communion wafers. The stranger comes up to their room, and asks the priest to say a mass for the recently executed King Louis XVI. He returns later to attend the mass. He also says that he will come back in a year for another mass for the king, and promises that they will be safe from any danger. He leaves a blood stained handkerchief with royal insignia as a present.The next year the stranger returns for the mass. Later, the priest visits a shop owned by some Royalist friends of his, and notices a tumbril passing by with the executioner and his victims. The priest faints when he recognises that the executioner is the stranger who has been helping them, and realises that the handerkerchief was the king's.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Auberge_rouge_(short_story)"title="L'Auberge rouge (short story)">
The story is told in the first person by an unnamed narrator. He attends a dinner party in Paris. A German guest named Hermann is asked to tell a story.Hermann's story occurs in 1799 in Andernach on the Rhine in Germany. At that time it was occupied by France. Two young French doctors from Beauvais arrive in the town to serve with the French regiment stationed there. They arrange to spend the night at an inn called the Red Inn, because of its colour. A German businessman named Walhenfer also arrives there to spend the night. The inn is full, and the only place for the three new arrivals to spend the night is in the main dining room. Over dinner Walhenfer confesses to the two young doctors that he is carrying a bag full of gold and diamonds. Hermann remembers that the name of one of the French doctors is Prosper Magnan, but cannot remember the other's name.During that night Magnan thinks about murdering Walhenfer, and running away with his valuables. He actually gets a knife out of his surgical bag to perform this. But he has second thoughts, and leaves the inn to go for a walk. After walking for some time, he returns to the inn and goes to bed. When he wakes up in the early morning, he finds that Walhenfer has been beheaded with his surgical knife. Magnan faints and falls into the pool of blood. When he wakes again he has been arrested by the French soldiers. Magnan's friend and Walhenfer's valuables are both missing, however because Magnan is covered in blood and his own knife was used, the soldiers suspect that Magnan is the murderer. Magnan was also seen walking outside, and is suspected of having buried Walhenfer's treasure.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronominalization_in_Bengali"title="Pronominalization in Bengali">
This work is the first research into the syntax of pronouns in Standard Colloquial Bengali using a transformational generative model of syntax. Several models referred to as an adaptation from Noam Chomsky's "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax" (1965).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_drame_au_bord_de_la_mer"title="Un drame au bord de la mer">
The story is told in the first person by a young writer named Louis Lambert. He and his lover Pauline are holidaying in the coastal town of Le Croisic. They meet a poor fisherman, and ask him to guide them to a local landmark on the coast. On the way they pass a small cave where a man lives in isolation. Louis and Pauline ask the fisherman to tell them the story of the man in the cave.The man is named Pierre Cambremer. He was a fisherman with a wife and a son named Jacques. Jacques was a young man who liked to drink and gamble, and had one day stolen a gold coin which his mother had sewn into a quilt. His father discovered this, and punished the son by tying him up, and throwing him into the sea. Pierre's wife died shortly afterwards. Pierre in his grief left his home, and eventually settled in the cave by the sea. His only contact is with his young niece who brings him food. The other locals avoid him.Louis and Pauline are so affected by this story, that they abandon their holiday, and Louis writes to his uncle telling him the story. At the start of the story Louis had felt happy and optimistic, but at the end he starts to feel the onset of mental health issues.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dear_Ijeawele,_or_A_Feminist_Manifesto_in_Fifteen_Suggestions"title="Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions">
In "Dear Ijeawele" Adichie attempts to challenge the prejudices of gender roles and expectations. The epistolary form literary device was used to give the reader a personal and intimate impression of the manifesto. Using language intended to be seen as clear, direct, and simple, the manifesto is meant to provide parents with the tools to combat situations of gender inequality when raising daughters. The manifesto covers issues ranging from domestic duties such as cooking, to gendered baby clothes. The manifesto asserts that central to raising feminist daughters is the embracing of feminist ideals by mothers raising daughters. One piece of advice that Adichie gives is to "Ask for help. Expect to be helped...Domestic work and care-giving should be gender-neutral."Adichie rejects the idea of the manifesto as "a parenting book." The manifesto references notable figure Hillary Clinton's title of "wife" on her Twitter account to exemplify claims of gender inequality. The overarching goal of the manifesto is gender equality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Swindle_(novel)"title="The Great Swindle (novel)">
In the final days of the First World War, Lieutenant Henri d'Aulnay Pradelle purposely kills two of his subordinates to incite the rest of the troops under his command. Two witnesses, Albert Maillard and Édouard Péricourt, survive the assault on the Germans, though Péricourt is severely injured. Pradelle, Maillard and Péricourt struggle to adjust to civilian life after the war ends. Péricourt and Maillard decide to take revenge on a society that appears to have more sympathy for its war dead than its war wounded by mounting a scheme to sell monuments to invented war heroes. Meanwhile, Pradelle has devised his own fraudulent scheme, and is involved with Péricourt's sister, Madeleine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medusa_Chronicles"title="The Medusa Chronicles">
The novel expands on the premise of Clarke's story, taking the main character into the distant future, while also going into the past to show that both the novel and the original Clarke story are set in an alternative history where in 1968, NASA and the Soviet space program united to prevent an asteroid from impacting Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Réquisitionnaire"title="Le Réquisitionnaire">
The story is set in 1793 in Carentan, in Normandy. A local aristocrat, Madame de Dey lives at her estate at Carentan to ensure that it is not confiscated by the government. Her son is taking part in a Royalist uprising. She refuses visitors for two days, and buys a hare at the market. This arouses suspicions that she is either sheltering a Royalist priest or hiding a lover.When visited by a local merchant, she admits that she has received a letter from her son. He has written that he was captured during a failed attack on Granville, but that he will escape, and take shelter with her. He mentions a three-day period during which he should be expected. She holds a social gathering at her home on the third night that her son is expected to arrive. She acts calmly, and all but the local prosecutor leave early. The prosecutor warns that he will have her house searched the next day. He hints that he might save her. He politely leaves when there is a knock on the door.In the meantime, a group of conscripts is expected at the city, and one reports to a local official. He is billeted to stay at Madame de Dey's home. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_in_Place"title="Agent in Place">
Two months after his CIA operation in Hong Kong, freelance mercenary Court Gentry is hired for a contract job in Paris by a group of Syrian exiles through former French intelligence officer Vincent Voland. His job is to kidnap Bianca Medina, a Spanish fashion model and Syrian President Ahmed al-Azzam's mistress, and then deliver her to the exiles so that they can gather information from her about a secret meeting between President Azzam and the Supreme Leader of Iran, in which she was present. They believe that the revelation of Azzam's secret talks with the Iranians, in which he permitted them to build military bases in Syria, would anger the Russians, who were his allies in the civil war, for betrayal; this would then cause discord among the three parties and lead to the destabilization of Azzam's regime.Later that night, Court captures Medina from her private apartment, while also rescuing her from assassins sent by ISIS in the process. After delivering her to the FSEU, led by husband and wife doctors Tarek and Rima Halaby, he berates them for giving him faulty information about the attackers and then leaves them, finished with his job. The attackers were found out to be provided information on Medina's whereabouts (albeit presented as her being a concubine of the emir of Kuwait, who was an enemy of ISIS) by Azzam's powerful wife Shakira, who wanted the Spanish model dead after finding out about their affair and fearing that she might replace her one day as first lady of Syria.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Great_Things"title="Small Great Things">
The story concentrates on an African-American labor/delivery (L&amp;D) nurse, Ruth Jefferson, in charge of newborns at a fictional Connecticut hospital. Ruth is ordered not to touch or go near the baby of a white supremacist couple. After the baby dies in her care, Ruth is charged with murder, and taken to court. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antiphon"title="The Antiphon">
The play tells the story of the reunion of Augusta Hobbs, her brother, Jonathan Burley, and her four estranged adult children: Dudley, Elisha, Miranda and Jeremy. The play begins with the arrival at Burley Hall of Miranda, a 'tall woman in her late fifties', and a coachman, Jack Blow, that she has met in Dover during her journey to England from France. She reveals that, along with her sibling, uncle and mother, she has been summoned by her youngest brother Jeremy to the family's ancestral home. However, Jeremy is nowhere to be found upon their arrival. The building has not been occupied for some time and is in a state of dilapidation thanks to German bombing campaigns; the house's former contents are sprawled all over the set.Miranda is shortly joined by her uncle, Jonathan Burley, as well as her two brothers, Dudley, a manufacturer of watches and Elisha, a publicist, and later by her mother, Augusta.As they wait for Jeremy, they discuss family history and air old grievances, many of them about the family's deceased patriarch, Titus Hobbs. Dudley and Elisha exhibit a strong dislike for Miranda and their mother, playing a number of increasingly cruel and violent tricks upon them. Miranda starts to suspect that the invitation might have been a trap set by Dudley and Elisha to lure them to the home and murder them. Augusta, however, remains oblivious to her sons' behavior. Miranda and Augusta argue, with Miranda suggesting that just as Augusta was blind to the sexual and physical abuse she suffered at the hands of her father, she is also blind to the murderous intent that her sons present towards her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badge_of_Glory"title="Badge of Glory">
The year is 1850 and a young Queen Victoria is on the throne. Philip Blackwood, a captain in the Royal Marines, and son and grandson of marine officers, rejoins his ship, "HMS Audacious", which is to sail to West Africa to help stamp out the remains of the slave trade. The ship is part of a squadron commanded by Vice-Admiral Sir James Ashley-Chute. Blackwood’s younger step-brother Harry, a marine second lieutenant, is also aboard, as is Sir Geoffrey Slade, a senior government official.At Gibraltar, disquieting news reaches Slade by despatch-boat concerning a possible native uprising north of Freetown. Slade needs to proceed as quickly as possible to investigate. He and a detachment of marines transfer to "HMS Satyr", a new and faster steam ship, of the type being newly constructed for the Royal Navy; admired by some but derided by others including Ashley-Chute.After coaling at Tenerife, they arrive in the Bight of Benin. Following the marines dictum of ‘First to Land-Last to Leave’, Blackwood lands a detachment of marines. They find themselves facing a superior force of natives, led by King Mdlaka. They are clearly trained and armed by white slavers. Despite the British government’s attempts to persuade the natives to take up palm oil production, they have returned to the vastly more lucrative slave trade. Many marines are killed and wounded in the battle, but they are able to relieve the besieged trade fortress, finding few survivors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Do_You_Live?_(novel)"title="How Do You Live? (novel)">
Junichi Honda is a fifteen-year-old high school student, known by his nickname Koperu, after the astronomer Nicholas Copernicus. He is athletic and academically gifted, and popular at school. Koperu’s father, a bank executive, passed away when he was young and he lives with his mother. His uncle, (on his mother’s side) lives nearby and visits frequently. Koperu and his uncle are very close. Koperu shares about his life and his uncle gives him support and advice. His uncle also documents and comments on these interactions in a diary, with the intent to eventually give the diary to Koperu. The diary writing, which is interspersed with the narrative, provides insight into the ethical and emotional trials that Koperu shared with his uncle. The diary entries, which cover themes such as "view of things", "structure of society", "relation", etc. are in the style of a note written to Koperu.In the end, Koperu writes a decision on his future way of living as a reply to his uncle, and the novel ends with the narrator asking the question "how do you live?" to the reader.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Day_in_the_Life_of_Marlon_Bundo"title="A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo">
Marlon Bundo, a black-and-white rabbit sporting a colorful bow tie, lives in the home of "Grampa", vice president Mike Pence. Marlon is lonely, but one morning after breakfast, he meets Wesley, a bespectacled brown rabbit. They spend the day together, hopping around in the garden and the house. They decide to get married, because they never want to hop without each other again.Marlon and Wesley tell their animal friends, who respond enthusiastically. But the stink bug, who is "In Charge and Important" (and bears a striking resemblance to Mike Pence, with white hair and a suit and tie), yells at them that boy rabbits can only marry girl rabbits. He calls them different, and he says that different is bad. The other animals speak up and tell him how each of them is different in their own way. They decide to vote on who is In Charge and Important, and the stink bug is voted out. Marlon and Wesley have their wedding, with their friends in attendance. They go to sleep in anticipation of their "bunnymoon".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marlon_Bundo's_A_Day_in_the_Life_of_the_Vice_President"title="Marlon Bundo's A Day in the Life of the Vice President">
The story details the experiences of Marlon Bundo, the Pence family pet rabbit and BOTUS (Bunny of the United States), as he follows Grampa (vice president Mike Pence) around for a day. Included are visits to the Oval Office, the Senate, the vice president's office, and the telescope at their home at the Naval Observatory. At the end of the day, Marlon joins the vice president in reading the Bible and praying before bed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Calvary"title="The Road to Calvary">
In the first chapters of the epic, St. Petersburg is shown in the beginning of 1914. Sisters Dasha and Ekaterina (Katya) Bulaviny, originally from Samara, are carried away by the poet-decadent Bessonoff. Katya is married to Smokovnikov, a lawyer, and has an illicit affair behind his back.Over time, Ekaterina Dmitrievna falls in love with officer Vadim Petrovich Roshchin, and Dasha with Ivan Ilyich Telegin, an engineer at the Baltic plant. World War I, two revolutions and civil war carry the four main characters to different corners of the country. Their paths intersect more than once and again diverge. Roshchin joins the Volunteer Army, and Telegin joins the Red Army. At the end of the war, all four meet in the capital of Soviet Russia, where in the presence of Lenin and Stalin they enthusiastically listen to Gleb Krzhizhanovsky's historic report on the GOELRO plan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Étude_de_femme"title="Étude de femme">
The story is narrated in the first-person by Doctor Horace Bianchon. A young married society woman, Madame de Listomère briefly meets Eugène de Rastignac at a social gathering. The next day he writes a letter to his lover, Madame de Nucingen, but mistakenly addresses it to Madame de Listomère. When Madame de Listomère reads this letter she is scandalised. Rastignac only realises his mistake four days later, and it is confirmed to him by his friend, Horace Bianchon, who saw him writing the letter when he was visiting him.Rastignac visits Madame de Listomère to try to clear the mistake. He is initially told that Madame is not home, but is let in by her husband when he arrives. Rastignac discovers that Madame de Listomère actually is at home and speaks to her. By this time, she has become convinced that he is genuinely attracted to her, but he tells her that the letter was actually for Madame de Nucingen. Rastignac leaves feeling embarrassed. For the next few days Madame de Listomère does not attend any social events, and Bianchon closes the story saying that he has been treating her for a slight attack of nerves, which she has been using as an excuse to stay home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zac_&amp;_Mia"title="Zac &amp; Mia">
The novel follows seventeen-year-old Zac Meier as he undergoes treatment for non-Hodgkin lymphoma in Perth, Western Australia. He meets Mia, a fellow cancer patient in the adjacent room, and the two quickly form a connection.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_Abbots_of_Challant"title="The Twelve Abbots of Challant">
A feudal lord inherits a castle with the condition of maintaining faith in an evil obligation of chastity. Twelve abbots take on the task of watching over the commitment, but they all disappear in a succession of mysterious deaths, victims of banal and emblematic incidents. Beautiful and unscrupulous Madonnas, castellans and priests, philosophers persecuted by the Inquisition, squires and monks, devils and sulphurous spells, testamentary readings and carnal temptations, audacious and holy tetragons and then again ... the beautiful Maravì sleepless in love, nostalgia, evening horseback riding, inventors and transplant surgeons in the odor of heresy and even a child and his cat Miro.In the novel many characters are presented, some appearing only in one chapter (like the merchant, the inventor, the astrologer), others who return after some time for a brief appearance (like the troubadour and the philosopher). Each of them represents a social class of the Middle Ages.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Verdugo_(short_story)"title="El Verdugo (short story)">
The story is set in Spain during the Peninsular War, in the coastal town of Menda. The occupying French garrison is commanded by a young officer named Victor Marchand, and he is in love with Clara, the daughter of Marquis Léganès, who is the local grandee. One night under cover of a local festival, there is an uprising against the French garrison, supported by British naval ships. The uprising is led by the Marquis and his sons. Marchand survives because he is warned by Clara, and as the last French survivor he flees to the nearby French military headquarters.A few days later, the French retake Menda. The town surrenders without a fight, since the British had only sent ships with artillery, and no ground troops. The French general accepts the surrender, and promises not to loot and pillage the town in exchange for money, and the surrender of the leading citizens. The general then orders the hanging of the leaders of the uprising, including Marquis Léganès and his whole family.Marquis Léganès asks the general, that he and his family be executed by beheading rather than hanging, and that his eldest son should be spared. The general agrees on condition that the son carry out the executions of his family. Léganès and the rest of his family persuade the eldest son, Juanito to agree. Marchand tries to persuade Clara that she will be spared if she agrees to marry him, but she refuses. Juanito then carries out the beheading of his father, two brothers and two sisters. The final intended victim is his mother which causes him to hesitate. She kills herself by jumping off the castle walls.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghachar_Ghochar"title="Ghachar Ghochar">
The novel is the first-person account of an unnamed, sensitive young man. He regularly visits an old-world coffee shop in Bangalore where he is drawn towards a laconic waiter named Vincent, who the man believes possess prophetic abilities. The man reminisces about his bond with a young feminist named Chitra, whom he unceremoniously cast aside, but his mind mostly wanders towards his dysfunctional family, consisting of his parents, uncle, and a divorced, elder sister. He recollects the rags to riches story of his family, and worries about the deteriorating relationship between him and his wife, Anita, who is troubled by his lack of motivation and apathy towards his family's misdeeds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethal_White"title="Lethal White">
At Robin Ellacott's marriage to Matthew Cunliffe, Cormoran Strike's capture of the Shacklewell Ripper the night before is already widely known, except by Robin. When Strike tells her that he had been trying to contact her during the week, she realises that Matthew had deleted Strike's messages, which results in a serious row between the new spouses. Before Strike leaves, Robin accepts his offer of working as a salaried partner in the detective agency.One year later, Strike has grown his detective agency to the point where he needs to hire more investigators. He receives an unsolicited visit from Billy Knight, a young man with a history of mental illness who claims to have witnessed a child's murder and the burial of the body in woodland some years before, but is unable to provide any details before he runs out of Strike's office. While trying to establish Billy's identity, Strike meets Billy's older brother Jimmy and Jimmy's girlfriend Flick, radical left-wing activists who claim that Billy is unstable and unreliable.Strike's meeting with Jimmy draws the attention of Jasper Chiswell, the Minister for Culture, whom Strike knew from investigating the combat death of his son Freddie. Chiswell has been blackmailed by Jimmy and hires Strike to investigate; he identifies Geraint Winn, the husband of a political enemy, as Jimmy's likely partner. Chiswell does not reveal what he is accused of, but claims that what he did was legal "at the time". Robin Ellacott then goes undercover in Chiswell's office to carry out surveillance on Winn, who has a neighbouring office, and whose wife is a government minister. The undercover assignment places more strain on Robin's marriage. She meets Chiswell's daughter Izzy, who manages his office, his illegitimate son Raphael, who also works there, and his second wife Kinvara. By bugging Winn's office, Robin discovers that Winn has been embezzling money from his wife's charities, and Chiswell uses this knowledge to stop Winn's blackmail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nighthawk_(novel)"title="Nighthawk (novel)">
This novel centers around NUMA (National Underwater Marine Agency) crew leaders Kurt Austin and Joe Zavala. Nighthawk is an advanced unmanned aircraft that has been in space three years collecting data. On its return to earth it defies its controllers who are guiding it to a safe landing and it presumably crashes into the ocean. NUMA is requested by the National Security Agency (NSA) to help find and recover Nighthawk. The NSA sends one of its agents to assist and she, Austin and Zavala attempt to find Nighthawk.The Russians and the Chinese also seek to find and recover the craft, as well. This adventure takes Austin, Zavala and others from NUMA off the coast of Ecuador and in the mountains of Peru. As Austin and Zavala search for Nighthawk, more of the story of the importance of what is inside this craft comes to light and why the stakes are so high that it be found quickly. They are to find the future of the world depends on their success. Austin meets a man named Urco, who is trying to study the Chachapoya people. He later, once NUMA uncovers the Nighthawk, was a spy nicknamed "The Falconer" who wanted to "turn the world back to the stone age". He is foiled, but it explodes partially over the Pacific ocean which causes plenty of things to break. After this, both a couple Russians who were helping to steal the Nighthawk and the NUMA crew are found on a Caribbean island, now friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Honey_Who_Just_Do_Stuff"title="Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff">
With no formal plot, it is not entirely clear if Honey's life story, recounted through Pariah, is supposed to be true or a figment of Honey's delusional mind. Honey lives in a quiet street in Woodview, California. Since his divorce, he has a hard time connecting with other people and annoys his neighbors with his lawn mowing. Honey complains of the incessant marketing of modern society and never-ending news cycles. His ex-wife, who drives an ice-cream truck around his neighborhood, is now happily married to her divorce lawyer. Honey now longs for a young woman named Annie; when describing her, he says, "Effervescence lived in her every cellular expression, and she had to spare."Honey is a former septic tank salesman who becomes an assassin. He tries to be more social, throwing a barbecue for his neighbors. His job as a contract killer for a secretive government program takes him around the world. The off-the-books government program instructs him to target elderly citizens and others who drain resources in a consumption-driven society. His adventures include a trip to New Orleans to help Katrina victims. He travels to Baghdad, Beirut, South Sudan, and other locations for sewage emergencies. Honey also submerges himself into the Pacific Ocean in a quest to find sea life. An investigative journalist starts asking questions about him, causing Honey to start making changes in his life. He is threatened by an ever-invasive media and possible assassination attempts from his mysterious controllers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confession_of_the_Lioness"title="Confession of the Lioness">
"Confession of the Lioness" begins with the funeral of Mariamar's older sister, Silência. As she and her mother, Hanifa Assula, watch the burial, Mariamar reveals that lions have been attacking the women of their village, Kulumani, and that Silência, was their most recent victim. The next morning, Mariamar's father, Genito Mpepe, informs Hanifa that a hunter is being sent in from Mozambique's capital, Maputo, to aid their village. In Maputo, Archangel or "Archie" Bullseye discovers that he is the hunter who has been chosen to aid Kulumani. Before he departs, he visits his brother, Roland, who was placed in a mental hospital as a child. There, Archie confesses that the true motivation for his visits is to see Luzilla, Roland's wife, with whom Archie is madly in love.Archie leaves Maputo with Gustavo Regalo, the writer chosen to record their journey. Upon arriving in the city of Pemba, the men meet the administrator of Kulumani, Florindo Makwala, and his wife, Dona Naftalinda. The four travel to Kulumani and the next day a welcome banquet is held in the "Shitala," the village's traditional center. The native men are questioning the foreigners’ presence in their village, when Naftalinda interrupts. She defames the village men for violently raping her maid, Tandi, during a hunting ritual and proclaims that they are the true beasts. Meanwhile, Mariamar reveals that she had fallen in love with Archie on his previous visit to Kulumani sixteen years ago. Conflicted about his return, she flees her home. While travelling down the Lundei River, she sees a lioness and believes that it is the spirit of her sister, Silência. Shortly after, she is caught by the village's sole policeman, Maliqueto Próprio, and then her father, afraid that Mariamar will escape Kulumani with Archie, orders her to remain home during his stay. While trapped inside her home, Mariamar recalls her youth spent in the village's Christian ministry. She also ponders her loving relationship with her grandfather, the sexual abuse she suffered from her father, her love affair with Archie, and the connection she feels to the waters of the Lundei and the ocean.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deep_Sea_Diver's_Syndrome"title="The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome">
David's mother is a medium who produced and shaped a smokey substance called "ectoplasm" while she dreamed. Using the ectoplasm, she could form the faces of lost loved ones during her dreams in order to fake seances. David inherits this ability to form ectoplasms, though his eventually become more solid. David and his friend Hugo start stealing from a local junk merchant named Merlin, following in his thieving mother's footsteps. Eventually David and his mother are caught, and he learns to fear the guilt and consequences of theft, which manifests itself later in his dreams of heists. Later, when these bundles of seemingly living organic matter called ectoplasms became popular among the affluent for their beauty, and among the general public for their health benefits, David became an artist with an ectoplasm museum, and began selling his works. Conventional artwork is deemed base and pointless in comparison with this new trend, and priceless paintings wither away on the streets, and hordes of people buy small "dreams" to cure insomnia and illness.The book begins in the middle of a nautically themed dream, complete with pressure gauges and oceanic hallucinations. David and Nadia, his partner in crime, are attempting to rob a jewelry store using such extravagant tools as the severed hand and eye of the store owner. As David begins to lose the cohesiveness of his dream, objects begin to float, the safe starts sputtering and thumping, and the eyeball floats away. He has to jump through the front window, and is torn away before seeing that Nadia and his other companion, Jorgo the biker, get away safely. He awakens violently in his bed to find that he has produced a small ectoplasm that his museum assigned nurse, Marianne quickly whisks away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronicle_of_a_Corpse_Bearer"title="Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer">
Phiroze Elchidana is a Parsi corpse bearer aka "khandhias" of the Parsi community whose job is to collect the dead, perform the last rites and rituals before the corpses are left to decay or consumed by the vultures. The son of a priest who is inept at his studies, Phiroze compounds his family’s disappointment by falling in love with Sepideh, the daughter of a khandhia. He later marries her and becomes a corpse bearer himself. Sepideh dies, leaving Phiroze and his daughter in sorrow.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praise_(novel)"title="Praise (novel)">
As the story begins, narrator Gordon Buchanan quits his job at a drive-through bottle shop in Brisbane. He and his live-in girlfriend Cynthia LaMonde, a waitress, inhabit a world of casual sex, plentiful drugs and partying till dawn, pastimes that don't really give Gordon much pleasure, plagued as he is by a sense of being unfulfilled. Love affairs gone bad and fantasies undercut by reality are the norm for a generation that stops doing something the moment it becomes work, that wants to win without competing because making an effort would render victory meaningless. The book’s hero is the chronically laidback Gordon, a chain-smoking asthmatic sweating under the Brisbane sun and scuttling his days away in a ramshackle guest house populated by itinerants and the elderly. Into Gordon’s going-nowhere-fast world comes the loud, vivacious and wholly uncompromising Cynthia, his polar opposite in almost every way. They soon move in together, and begin an often savage relationship precariously built on a shaky foundation of sex, booze, cigarettes, self-doubt and a singularly battered brand of love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Heart_a_Doorway"title="Every Heart a Doorway">
Rarely, children may find doorways that transport them to other worlds. As a child, Nancy found a doorway that led her to the land of the dead, based on the story of Persephone and Hades. When she is returned to the real world, her parents do not believe her story. Nancy is sent to a boarding school for children who have had similar experiences.The students include Kade, who spent time in a fantasy world with goblins and fairies, Jacqueline "Jack" and Jillian "Jill," who spent time in a world of vampires and mad scientists, and Sumi, who spent time in a nonsense world full of candy and rainbows. The students were all altered by their time in different worlds where they were able to be their true selves, and most long to return to them.Sumi is found dead, as are several other students. Nancy and her friends learn that Jill is killing students in order to make a key which will reopen her own doorway. Jack kills Jill and then returns to her gothic world. Nancy finds her doorway again and returns to the land of the dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Necessary_Beggar"title="The Necessary Beggar">
"The Necessary Beggar" tells the story of alleged murderer Darroti and his family after he is exiled from the city of Lémabantunk in Gandiffri, a paradisaical land built on the central idea of community. Murder is the sole unforgivable crime in this world, and as Darroti is accused of murdering a mendicant (a holy beggar), his crimes are considered particularly egregious. Darroti's family follows him through the glowing doorway that leads to the randomly selected realm of his exile. They emerge at the entrance of an American refugee camp. Unable to speak the language or explain their origins, the family is prohibited from being officially admitted into the country but impossible to deport. The situation is made worse by the heightened xenophobia present in this year 2022 version of America.Faced with the guilt of his family's exile, Darroti commits suicide to relieve his loved ones of his burden. Rather than be reincarnated in a new form as he would have been in his homeland, he becomes a ghost. To his dismay, his death throws his father into depression and embitters his other family members. He attempts to provide explanation by entering his father's dreams, but his communications are interpreted as nightmares.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Systems_Red"title="All Systems Red">
A scientific expedition on an alien planet goes awry when one of its members is attacked by a giant native creature. She is saved by the expedition's SecUnit (Security Unit), a cyborg security agent which has secretly named itself "Murderbot". Though it has hacked the governor module that allows it to be controlled by humans, and would much rather be watching soap operas, the SecUnit has a vested interest in keeping its human clients safe and alive, since it has an especially grisly past expedition on its record. Murderbot soon discovers that information regarding hazardous fauna has been deleted from their survey packet of the planet. Further investigation reveals that some sections of their maps are missing as well. Meanwhile the PreservationAux survey team, led by Dr. Mensah, navigate their mixed feelings about the part machine, part human nature of their SecUnit. When they lose contact with the other known expedition, the DeltFall Group, Mensah leads a team to the opposite side of the planet to investigate. At the DeltFall habitat, Murderbot discovers that everyone there has been brutally murdered, and one of their three SecUnits destroyed. Murderbot disables the remaining two as they attack it, but is surprised when two others appear; it destroys one, and Mensah takes the other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevation_(novella)"title="Elevation (novella)">
In Castle Rock, Maine, Scott Carey faces a mysterious illness which causes bizarre effects on his body and makes him rapidly lose weight, even if he appears healthy on the outside. While battling this disease with his trusted doctor, he also tries fixing a dire situation involving a lesbian couple trying to open a restaurant surrounded by a disapproving public.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Messe_de_l'athée"title="La Messe de l'athée">
The main character, Desplein, is a successful surgeon. One day, Doctor Horace Bianchon, his former assistant and friend, sees Desplein, an atheist, going into the Saint-Sulpice church, and, knowing Desplein and his strong atheistic beliefs, decides to follow him. He sees Desplein alone attending a mass. After Desplein departs, Bianchon questions the priest from whom he learns that Desplein attends a mass at the church four times a year (at the beginning of each season) which he himself pays for.A few years later, Bianchon sees Desplein going into Saint-Sulpice for the mass again; but this time, he questions Desplein about it. Desplein explains that when he was a poor medical student, already desperate, his landlord evicted him from the modest building he lived in, along with Bourgeat, his elder Christian neighbour originating from Auvergne. Bourgeat offered to look for a new place for both of them and eventually found two cheap rooms in the attic of another building. Thenceforth, Bourgeat became a father figure to Desplein. He helped to pay for Desplein's education, and did menial tasks like cutting the wood. After Desplein became successful, he bought Bourgeat a horse and cart for his water carrying work; Desplein would not have been capable of escaping his misery without the help of his Christian friend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typescript_of_the_Second_Origin"title="Typescript of the Second Origin">
In this novel de Pedrolo tells the story of Alba and Dídac, 14 and 9 years old respectively, who live in a Catalan town called Benaura. They become the only survivors on Earth after extraterrestrials destroy almost all humanity. Before the invasion, Dídac is attacked by some neb from the town because he is black. He falls into the water, and Alba, who sees the scene, jumps in to save him. Being under the water protects them from destruction.During the following four years, they survive in a destroyed world and face many and varied troubles and difficulties that make them mature quickly. They realise the importance of knowledge by keeping and reading books. They run away from the pestilence and take refuge in a farmhouse, where they find dead people and survivors. They walk by the ruins of Barcelona and the Mediterranean Sea. They learn from everything that happens to them (illnesses, enemy defense) and from the information they collect. The book explores the relationship between the two children and the recreation of a world as a utopia. The narration is structured in chapters that always start the same way: by mentioning Alba's age and her virginity. The narrator is omniscient and uses much description.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Trial,_1955"title="Mississippi Trial, 1955">
In 1955, Hiram Hillburn, a sixteen-year-old white male, lives in Arizona with his father. He resents his father for moving the family from Greenwood, Mississippi when he was nine, away from his beloved Southern grandfather. Despite his father's concerns about letting him go due to the racial tensions in the city, Hiram is given permission to spend the summer visiting his grandfather in Mississippi. At the train station he meets his grandfather's housekeeper Ruthanne and her visiting cousin Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago. After reuniting with his grandfather, he begins to notice his grandfather's culturally ingrained racism. He meets Emmett again whom he rescues from drowning in a river. They begin talking and realize they have a lot in common. Hiram runs into his old friend R.C. Rydell with whom he joins on a fishing trip where R.C. harasses and assaults Emmett. While Hiram does not participate, he does not help Emmett either and feels guilty. A few days later, R.C. tells Hiram that he is going with some white men to talk to a young African-American man who offended a white woman at a grocery store. Concerned for this young man, Hiram calls the police. However, the police are unhelpful to Hiram; they refuse to act, stating the boy from Chicago has to learn some manners. At this point, Hiram realizes they are talking about Emmett. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driven_(novel)"title="Driven (novel)">
Seven years after the events of "Drive", Driver is living in Phoenix under the name Paul West, engaged to be married. When two men attack him and his fiancée, leaving her dead, Driver seeks vengeance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Ronald_(novel)"title="Bad Ronald (novel)">
Ronald Wilby, a 17-year-old boy with divorced parents, lives with his mother. Living with his first sexual urges, he tries to rape a girl. He kills the girl and buries her. Having forgotten his jacket at the scene of the crime, he confesses to his mother, who decides to hide Ronald in their house. She tells the police that her son has disappeared. Ronald lives in his hidden room, only going out into the rest of the house at night. When his mother dies, a couple and their three daughters move into the house, none-the-wiser that Ronald is living in the walls. Over time, he becomes infatuated with the daughters, and signs of his presence begin to surface in the household, concerning the new residents.The book differs somewhat from the 1974 movie adaptation. The book was considerably more graphic, featuring scenes of rape, paedophilia and sexual perversion. The movie toned these elements down; rather than trying to rape the young girl, in the movie Ronald accidentally kills her in a blind rage after she mocks him and his mother for being "weird".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Harvest_(novel)"title="Dark Harvest (novel)">
The novel is set in an unnamed Midwestern hamlet where each year all of the young men take part in a yearly ritual where they hunt a giant pumpkin-headed creature that arises from the corn, known as both "Sawtooth Jack" and the "October Boy". They are tasked with catching the creature before it makes it to the hamlet's church, which it must do before midnight in order to win the ordeal. Girls are forbidden from participating or being outside during the hunt. The winner of the hunt receives the ability to leave the hamlet - something not otherwise possible- and his family is given a new home, car, and a year free from bills. Winners are frequently idolized and last year's winner, Jim Shepard, is no exception.Unbeknownst to the participants, the truth behind the ritual is far darker than what they would expect. While the winner's family does receive their prizes, the winning boy is killed so that he may become the new creature the following year when he is resurrected as a gnarled monster with a pumpkin head. His father, this year Jim's father Dan, is forced to carve a face for the creature and then later persuade the creature to let itself be caught if it does happen to make it to the church by midnight. Many of the town's fathers are aware of the truth of the ritual, but still allow their sons to take part. This year the October Boy is determined that it will be the last year for the ritual.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Daughters_of_Eve"title="Three Daughters of Eve">
## Istanbul (1980s–2016).The book starts in Istanbul, Turkey, where Peri is with her daughter when she is robbed and is subject to an attempted rape. Her early childhood of the 1980s and home life are also discussed in the same city.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Praying_Mantises"title="The Praying Mantises">
Paul Canova, a middle-aged university history professor, is married to Vera, a beautiful Russian émigré much younger than him. Paul's first wife and their young son have died under odd circumstances, and an insurance company launches a secret investigation about Vera's possible role in those deaths. Nevertheless, Canova seems content with his second marriage and has taken out a large life insurance policy designating Vera as beneficiary.Then Vera accuses Canova's long-time secretary of theft, and insists that Paul fires her. The secretary maintains her innocence and later commits suicide. Paul now needs a secretary, and his teaching assistant, Christian Magny, recommends one of his own students, Beatrice Manceau. While on the job, Beatrice has a brief affair with Canova. But she soon ends it, because Christian proposes to her and she accepts.Now married to Christian, Beatrice begins suspecting that he is secretly meeting with someone in their apartment while she is working with the professor. She hires private detectives who install a covert listening device that records all the conversations in the apartment when she is away. She finds out from the recorded tapes that Vera and Christian aren't just lovers but they are also plotting to murder Canova for his life insurance. According to their plan, Beatrice would also have to die to make it look more convincing. Beatrice then places the incriminating tape in a safe deposit box and intends to use it as the leverage against the plotters. She allows the murderers to proceed almost as planned, only to lure them in a clever trap and exact her cruel revenge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Threads_of_Fortune"title="The Red Threads of Fortune">
Four years after the death of her daughter Eien, Sanao Mokoya has separated from her husband Thennjay and spends her time hunting naga. She has lost her gift of prophecy and is now tormented by magical visions of her past, rather than the future. A gigantic naga attacks the city of Bataanar, a Machinist stronghold; Akeha and Mokoya fight it off. Mokoya is stunned by the naga's ability to use slackcraft, which is a human quality. Mokoya admits that when Eien died, she used the Slack to fuse Eien's soul to the nearest living creature, a raptor named Phoenix. Unknown actors from the Capital have used the success of Mokoya's experiment to fuse a human consciousness to this naga.Mokoya meets a mysterious person named Rider, who uses advanced slackcraft for teleportation; she falls in love with them and begins a physical relationship. Rider states that Bataanarian adviser Tan Khimyan, Rider's former lover, is behind the attack. Raja Choonghey, leader of Bataanar, calls for Protectorate aid in the face of the naga attack. Mokoya suspects that the Protectorate soldiers will swarm the city, massacring Machinists and civilians alike. Akeha prepares the Machinists for war as Thennjay pleads with Choonghey to change his mind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witchmark"title="Witchmark">
In the realm of Aeland, Miles Singer is a psychiatrist who clandestinely uses his magical powers to treat patients in a veterans' hospital. When Tristan Hunter brings in a dying man who tells Miles that he has been murdered, and then the body is cremated before an autopsy can reveal whether anything illegal actually happened, Miles and Tristan begin their own investigation — one which reveals that the secrets at the base of Aeland society are darker than even Miles knew.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_at_the_Frankfurt_Book_Fair"title="Murder at the Frankfurt Book Fair">
Dominique Labattut-Largaud, is a German literature professor at the Sorbonne who also writes pulp thrillers and historical adventures under assorted pen names. To his embarrassment, the professor’s secret life as a literary hack is discovered by Cecile Dubois, a young librarian, his former student and admirer. When he approaches her trying to protect his academic reputation, she mistakenly believes he is attracted to her, though he is a middle-aged married man with two children. Then Labattut-Largaud decides to get even with his boorish publisher Grouillot by plagiarizing an obscure 18th-century novel by Abbé Prévost. What started as a practical joke, quickly gets out of control. Labattut-Largaud's book, titled "Equivocations", becomes a runaway bestseller and wins a prestigious literary prize, which makes the unscrupulous publisher even happier. The fraud is discovered by Cecile who is righteously outraged. Desperate to prevent her from causing a scandal, Labattut-Largaud begins a reluctant affair with Cecile, which culminates in a fatal confrontation at the Frankfurt book fair.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rip-Off_(novel)"title="The Rip-Off (novel)">
Britton Rainstar is deeply in love with a woman named Manuela Aloe and the longer he stays with her, the closer to death he comes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Institute_(novel)"title="The Institute (novel)">
Tim Jamieson leaves his job in Florida and prepares to head to New York City. By coincidence, en route, he gives up a seat on a plane and finds himself in the small town of DuPray, South Carolina. A decorated former policeman, Tim takes a job as a local patrolman, and soon develops a relationship with a deputy, Wendy Gullickson.Another storyline begins in suburban Minneapolis with Luke Ellis, a twelve-year-old intellectual prodigy with mild telekinetic abilities. One night, intruders silently murder Luke's parents and kidnap him. Luke wakes up in a room almost identical to his own at "the Institute," a facility secretly located deep in the forests of Maine. The Institute houses a number of other kidnapped children, each with special talents—telekinesis and telepathy. Luke befriends several other kids: Kalisha Benson, Nick Wilholm, George Iles, Iris Stanhope, Helen Simms, and later ten-year-old Avery Dixon, in the area known as Front Half. Mrs. Sigsby, the Institute's director, and her staff are dedicated to extracting the special talents from the children - known as TPs (telepaths) and TKs (telekinetics). Experiments and torture are performed on the children to try to enhance their talents, as well as to awaken TP abilities in TKs and vice versa. Once the experiments are done, the children "graduate" to Back Half. None of the children who have gone to Back Half have ever been seen again. Luke begins to develop weak TP abilities due to the experimentation but keeps it secret. After Kalisha graduates to Back Half, she is able to send telepathic messages to Avery, an advanced TP. Luke comes to believe that in Back Half, the children's collective abilities are weaponized for assassinations until the strain kills them. Luke becomes desperate to escape and get help before he graduates.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_of_an_Anti-Semite"title="Memoirs of an Anti-Semite">
The novel's protagonist is known only as Gregor and shares other similarities to Rezzori, most notably being the son of an Austro-Hungarian aristocratic family in decline. The plot is arranged into five sections, and follows Gregor as he revisits his past from his childhood to middle-age. As Germany succumbs to Nazism, Gregor finds his complicated feelings for the Jewish friends and lovers in conflict with the hatred his country directs at them. His passive, apolitical nature ultimately is at tragic odds with the horrors happening around him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Choices_We_Made"title="The Choices We Made">
"The Choices We Made" collects material from twenty-five contributors writing in support of legalized abortion. Contributors include people from all varieties of life, including celebrities and wealthy persons as well as people who have experienced extreme poverty. The material is written from the viewpoints of people who have had experiences with abortion such as seeking an abortion for themselves or by knowing someone who has been through the procedure. The age range of the contributors range from teenagers to senior citizens. Some of the contributors include Margot Kidder and Whoopi Goldberg, the latter of whom discusses her experiences trying to self-induce abortion using a coat hanger.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocent_(novel)"title="Innocent (novel)">
In the opening prologue of "Innocent", set in 2008 and narrated by Sabich's son Nat, Rusty has been sitting with his dead wife Barbara for nearly a full day. According to Rusty, she was dead when he woke up in the morning; he believes it was due to natural causes, but complications arise because he had been previously accused of murder in the death of his colleague Carolyn Polhemus twenty-two years ago.As it turns out, Rusty, who is now the Chief Judge of the State Court of Appeals for the Third Appellate District and celebrated his 60th birthday in 2007, has again had an extramarital affair, this time with his senior law clerk, Anna Vostic. Because Molto, now acting prosecuting attorney for Kindle County, was unable to prove Sabich's guilt in the murder of Polhemus, he is hesitant to pursue Sabich for the death of Barbara, but allows his chief deputy, Jim Brand, to quietly investigate. Eventually, the investigation yields enough evidence to once again indict Sabich for murder, setting up another courtroom confrontation between Molto, Stern, and Sabich.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_(Turow_novel)"title="Identical (Turow novel)">
The novel opens earlier in the day when Dita is murdered; Paul, Cass, and their mother Lidia are attending an ecclesiastical New Year's party at Zeus Kronon's house in September 1982. Teri Kronon, the sister of Zeus, has been best friends with Lidia since they were both seven years old; Zeus, the father of Hal and Dita, has a history with Lidia, at one point asking her father for her hand in marriage, but he was rejected because his family was considered low-class when they were both in Greece. The twins are each twenty-five years old; Paul plans to become a deputy prosecutor in the Kindle County prosecuting attorney's office under Raymond Horgan, and Cass plans to enter the police academy. Zeus has amassed a fortune in real estate by developing shopping centers around the nation, and is running for governor, but withdraws from the race after Dita is murdered.Twenty-five years later, Cass is being released from prison after serving his sentence while his brother Paul is running for mayor; Hal, who has inherited his father's wealth and real estate empire, attends a parole hearing to object to Cass's pending release, where he accuses Paul of participating in Dita's murder. Hal continues to bankroll another investigation into Dita's murder, led by his chief of security, Evon Miller, and the original police investigator, Tim Brodie. At the same time, Hal begins running attack ads to derail Paul's mayoral campaign; Paul responds by suing Hal for defamation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Dark,_My_Sweet_(novel)"title="After Dark, My Sweet (novel)">
William Collins is a former boxer with a deadly accident in his past. Collins has broken out of his fourth mental hospital and met a con man and a beautiful woman, whose plans for him include murder and kidnapping.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironside_(Thompson_novel)"title="Ironside (Thompson novel)">
Robert T. Ironside, a detective who needs to use a wheelchair for mobility, tracks down a faceless murderer stalking San Francisco.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman,_Why_Do_You_Weep?"title="Woman, Why Do You Weep?">
## Survey.El Dareer interviewed 3,210 women and 1,545 men in five Sudanese states: Blue Nile, Darfur, Kassala, Khartoum, and Kordofan. Of the 3,210, 98 percent (3,171) said they had undergone FGM, and 83.13 percent (2,636) said they had experienced pharaonic circumcision. Another 12.17 percent (386) reported having an intermediate form of FGM, and 2.5 percent (80) said they had Type Ia, removal of the clitoral hood, known within practicing countries as "sunna". The remaining 69 women could not describe their procedure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18th_Abduction"title="18th Abduction">
San Francisco Police Sergeant Lindsay Boxer is the main character of this book. It has two plots. The main plot involves three schoolteachers, who suddenly vanish after a night out after school. One turns up murdered with no clues as to who killed her or why or where the other two teachers are. The second plot involves Lindsay's husband, Joe Molinari. A woman who survived a deadly attack on her village in another country many years before comes to Joe with a story that she has seen a war criminal who was involved in this attack in San Francisco. Both Lindsay and Joe look very hard for any clues they can find in both these cases.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gods_with_a_Little_G"title="Gods with a Little G">
Teenager Helen, known by the nickname "Hell", is still dealing with her mother's recent death from cancer. Along with two new teens at her school, siblings Winthrop and Rainbolene, she clashes with the religious fundamentalists who control her small California town.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_but_a_Man_(novel)"title="Nothing but a Man (novel)">
Duff Anderson moves to a small town to work on the railroad. He marries Josie, much to the dislike of her preacher father, and they both re-locate to live in their own house and Duff lands a job in a mill and tries to unionize the workers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Undefeated_(novel)"title="The Undefeated (novel)">
After the Civil War, ex-Confederate soldiers heading to Mexico run into ex-Union soldiers selling horses to the Mexican government and join forces to fight off Mexican revolutionaries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Earth_We're_Briefly_Gorgeous"title="On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous">
The novel is written in the form of a letter by a young Vietnamese American nicknamed Little Dog, whose life mirrors that of Ocean Vuong. The letter is written to Little Dog's mother Hong, more often called or translated as Rose ("hồng"). The novel has a nonlinear narrative structure.The novel also recounts the life of Little Dog's grandmother, Lan, who escapes an arranged marriage during the Vietnam War and becomes a prostitute. She marries a white American soldier and gives birth to a child, although the father of the child is another man, as Lan was four months pregnant when she met the man who would become her husband. The child is Little Dog's mother, Rose. She is barely literate, having left school at the age of five when her schoolhouse in Vietnam collapsed during an American napalm raid. She suffers from posttraumatic stress disorder as a result. Rose marries an abusive man but eventually separates from him.Working in a nail salon, she struggles as a single parent living in Hartford, Connecticut with her son and her mother Lan. Living in America as refugees, the three can barely speak English. Little Dog, who is gay, is abused by his mother throughout his childhood. Halfway through the novel, Little Dog meets a young white man named Trevor while working on a tobacco farm one summer, and the two begin a romantic relationship. Trevor eventually becomes addicted to opioids and later overdoses and dies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whose_Names_Are_Unknown"title="Whose Names Are Unknown">
The first section of the novel, "Oklahoma Panhandle," introduces Julia and Milt Dunne, farmers in western Oklahoma during the 1930s. They live in a dugout basement with Milt's father ("the old man" or "Konkie") and their daughters Myra and Lonnie. After another year of barely making ends meet with his usual broomcorn crop, Milt persuades his father to try planting winter wheat and purchases seed using money that had been set aside for clothing for the family. The wheat harvest goes well and the family finds itself financially secure for a brief time, but then a summer drought arrives, and with it billowing clouds of dust that suffocate the crops and sicken the children. Other farmers are similarly beleaguered, beset with failing crops, abundant debt, and little hope.With the few resources they have left, the Dunnes (minus the old man) decide to follow in the footsteps of other "Okies" and head to California, lured by the promise of plentiful resources and abundant jobs. In the second section of the novel, "California," the reality turns out to be less idyllic. The flood of refugees from the east means low pay for menial jobs, mostly picking crops. The Dunnes are forced to live in tents and move from camp to camp in a desperate attempt to earn enough to survive. They are hampered by a company store system that substitutes store scrip for wages and holds workers financially hostage to their bosses. The Dunnes' desperation, and that of the other farmworkers, grows as they find that no matter how hard they work, they are unable even to feed their children. An attempt to organize in protest of working and living conditions results in Milt's beating and arrest and leaves the workers jobless and homeless, as the company is easily able to find replacement laborers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Orchestra_of_Minorities"title="An Orchestra of Minorities">
"An Orchestra of Minorities" is set in Umuahia, Nigeria and partly in Northern Cyprus. It follows Chinonso, a hardly surviving poultry farmer who stops a woman from taking her own life. The night changes all their lives, especially Ndali, the woman who does not carry out the intended action after much consternation and persuasion by Chinonso.They invariably fall in love after a long and frustrating courting period from the day they met. The protagonist, Chinonso ends up selling all his belongings to pursue higher education abroad to impress Ndali's parents.He meets abject suffering in Northern Cyprus after being scammed and misled about his position at university and his return home is further delayed by imprisonment, hence his dream of marrying Ndali is further admonished to the sidelines.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ducks,_Newburyport"title="Ducks, Newburyport">
The novel's main character is an unnamed middle-aged woman who lives in Newcomerstown, Ohio. She is married, has four children, and was an adjunct college professor of history at the fictitious Peolia College. She narrates the novel from a first-person perspective and largely in present tense. She has been treated for at least two major health problems, including a heart defect as a child and cancer (possibly rectal) as an adult. She quit her college teaching job to recover from the cancer treatment. The narrator spends most of her time caring for her children and making pies and other baked goods, which she sells to local restaurants and shops to shore up her family's finances. She complains of constant exhaustion and is given to bouts of weeping.The narrator's stream-of-consciousness takes the form of an internal dialog in which she ponders a variety of topics, ideas, recollections, and individual words in an almost-continuous list that spans the entire novel. These include the following: what she happens to be doing at the present moment; baking and cooking; descriptions of her present-day family situation; recollections about her past; musings about individuals, family members, celebrities, and acquaintances; observations about classic American films (often "The Sound of Music"); observations about her favorite books (often those of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Lucy Maud Montgomery); expressions of anxiety about national and global problems (often widespread pollution and climate change); and admissions of her own personal problems and shortcomings. She also simply free associates in long strings of similar-sounding words, names, and acronyms. She mentions so many abbreviations and acronyms, a glossary of them is provided in the print edition of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxology_(novel)"title="Doxology (novel)">
In the 1980s three artists meet in New York City. Pam, a coder, has escaped her confining and abusive family. Joe, an undiagnosed high-functioning Williams syndrome case. Daniel, a part time proofreader dreams of becoming a music distributor. Pam learns she is pregnant by Daniel and despite being ambivalent towards motherhood she decides to keep the baby and ends up marrying Daniel. Daniel manages to produce one single for Joe. Against all odds they manage to leverage the single into a successful record contract and Joe goes on to become a rock star, though he continues to babysit Pam and Daniel's daughter Flora.On September 11, 2001 the three friends separately witness the terrorist attack on the twin towers. Daniel returns home and manages to escape the city to Washington D.C. with Pam and Flora where they settle in with her parents. Joe and his girlfriend Gwen decide to shoot heroin which results in an overdose and death for Joe. Gwen flees the city and eventually calls Daniel to tell him that Joe is dead and though Daniel holds her responsible for Joe's death she is never charged.As a result of the terrorist attacks Pam allows Flora to grow up in Washington, D.C. and be raised by her parents even as Daniel and Pam return to work.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_(Alexis_novel)"title="Ring (Alexis novel)">
In 2019, Gwenhwyfar "Gwen" Lloyd, a transplant from Sarnia to Toronto meets two men at a party, the handsome and charismatic, Olivier, and his friend, Tancred Palmieri, whom she initially dislikes. Gwen begins to casually date Olivier which leads to further encounters with Tancred. Over the course of their encounters Gwen begins to fall in love with Tancred, who maintains his distance from her as he believes she and Olivier are more seriously involved then they are.During a visit to her hometown, Gwen's mother intuits that Gwen is in love and presents her with a box containing several volumes and a ring. Gwen's mother informs Gwen that the ring is passed down matrilineally and allows the wearer to make three wishes that change her beloved before they marry. After the wishes are completed the ring bearer must return the ring to the box and make a sacrifice. If not the ring will choose to take something from the wearer.Unsure if she believes in the ring's power or not Gwen wishes that her future husband will recite the unreadable inscription inside the ring whenever he hears the name Polyphemus. Attending a dinner with Tancred, he hears the word Polyphemus and immediately recites the inscription causing Gwen to finally believe in the ring. She and Tancred later confess that they love each other and Tancred reveals that from the moment he saw Gwen he believed she would be his future wife. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_&amp;_Knight"title="Prince &amp; Knight">
Once upon a time, a prince is in line to take his kingdom's throne, so his parents — the king and queen — decide he must first find a bride to help him rule. The three travel to nearby kingdoms to meet a variety of potential princess suitors, but the prince does not find what he is looking for in the princesses the trio meet.While away, the prince receives news that a dragon is attacking his kingdom. The prince rushes back to battle the monster when a knight arrives to assist. Working together, the knight uses his shield to blind the dragon which allows the prince to successfully trap the beast. However, in doing so, the prince loses his balance and falls. The knight rushes on horseback and catches the prince in his arms.The two thank the other for saving their lives and fall in love. Their marriage is fully supported by the community, who cheer along at the couple's wedding, and the prince's parents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Own_the_Fields,_Women_Own_the_Crops"title="Men Own the Fields, Women Own the Crops">
In the book, Goheen analyzes the division of power between genders in the Cameroon Grassfields. She lived with the Nso' for over a decade, spending half of her time in Kimbo, the Nso' capital, and the other half in the sub chiefdom of Nsə'. She focused her fieldwork on how the political structure of the chiefdom has changed since the postcolonial state.The book starts with an introductory to the Nso' chiefdom, covering background information such as its precolonial history and its geographic setting in the west Cameroonian Grassfields. It also describes the social and gender hierarchies that exist within a hegemonic system that has existed for centuries, with the Fon Nso' being at the top of the social and political hierarchies. Only men have a direct influence and presence in politics, even though it has been recognized that women are the backbone of the country. Traditionally, women have been the farmers and ones in charge of domestic duties, but they are not able to sell their own crops or be involved with the market economy. They are also not permitted to land ownership. A longstanding tradition of women farming and men hunting is one of the reasons for this gendered division of labor. However, men no longer need to hunt. While the women can spend 60 hours a week at the farm and doing domestic duties at the compound, men are free to partake in politics. The men did not want the women in charge of trade, because it is said that women reason with their hearts, and so there is a hegemonic system of women being the producers of food and children.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashrafe_(book)"title="Mashrafe (book)">
The book summarises Mashrafe Mortaza's early life, and his career at Bangladesh national cricket team.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Skinful_of_Shadows"title="A Skinful of Shadows">
During the First English Civil War, Makepeace lives with her mother in a Puritan village close to London. When her mother dies in a riot between the Parliamentarians and the Royalists, she is sent to live with her deceased father's relatives in Grizehayes, a fictional fortress in the north of England. Makepeace has the inherited trait that allows her to store the spirits of recently deceased people or animals inside herself, like the rest of her father's family. The elders at Grizehayes store the spirits of their notable deceased family members inside living vessels. Discovering that her relatives keep her alive purely as a spare vessel for the spirits, she flees to Oxford and becomes entangled in the conflict of the war herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom's_End"title="Axiom's End">
In an alternate version of the United States in 2007, famous whistleblower Nils Ortega leverages his large online following to repeatedly attack the Bush administration, alleging a series of government cover-ups. The nature of Nils's work forced him to flee the country, abandoning his family. Nils's daughter, Cora Sabino, is a young college dropout living with her mother and her two younger siblings in Southern California, where her paternal aunt Luciana, a former federal agent, also resides. Cora's family find themselves under constant supervision by agents of the U.S. government, including a high-ranking CIA official named Sol Kaplan.Following a meteor strike not far from where they live, Cora's family is abducted by government agents while Cora flees from a monstrous alien creature that broke into their house at night. The alien eventually catches Cora, implanting a tracking and communication device into her, using her as a human puppet to launch an infiltration of the Googleplex for unknown reasons. This infiltration fails when a mysterious pulse of energy knocks out the alien controlling Cora. It is revealed that the alien came to Earth to figure out how another member of his species died while being held in captivity by the government. Cora and the alien strike a wary alliance, as Cora wants to reunite with her abducted family members while the alien needs a human interpreter. Cora names the alien Ampersand, after the government's leaked codename for the meteor. Cora contacts Luciana in an attempt to convey Ampersand to his fellow aliens, called "amygdalines," who are being held in the Cheyenne Mountain Complex. Ampersand bonds with Cora as she attempts to create translations between the amygdaline language, called "Pequod-phonemic," and English. Ampersand reveals to Cora that the majority of amygdaline "Oligarchs" voted to commit planetary genocide against an alien race, against the wishes of Ampersand and a sole few other Oligarchs. It was determined that the dissenting Oligarchs, including Ampersand, were genetically defective, causing their flight to Earth with "the Genome," a mysterious package of genetic information. Ampersand notes that, within a few centuries, the amygdaline race will likely attempt genocide against humanity as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bones_of_Lazarus"title="The Bones of Lazarus">
"The Bones of Lazarus" is a fast-paced, supernatural thriller and mystery that traces intersecting lives on a war-torn, resource rich, Caribbean island. The plot revolves around the premise that Lazarus of Bethany, upon his resurrection by the hand of Christ, becomes an immortal creature of Judgment, seeking the hearts and souls of the wicked throughout time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Benny_and_the_Golden_Age_of_American_Radio_Comedy"title="Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy">
Jack Benny was a 20th-century American violinist and comedic entertainer who achieved success in vaudeville, radio, television and film. He played one role throughout his radio and television careers, a caricature of himself as a minimally talented musician and penny pincher who was the butt of all the jokes. Fuller-Seeley takes the reader through Benny's transition from vaudeville to radio success.Benny's on-air persona and that of the roles of supporting players, were a reworking of his self-deprecating vaudeville act, in collaboration with his head writer Benny Cohn. The radio broadcasts originated on May 2, 1932, from the Roof Garden at New Amsterdam Theatre in New York. Broadcast headquarters were moved to Hollywood, California in 1936, to accommodate Benny's film career. Over the course of its run, sponsors included Canada Dry, Chevrolet and Jell-O. Announcer Don Wilson was brought on to read product commercials, after Benny had already run through eight previous announcers. Wilson proved himself not only adept at pushing the advertiser's products, but also as a jovial foil to much of Benny's comedy. Like many of the show's core group, Wilson remained with Benny when the show ran on national television.Fuller-Seeley illustrates how the early stars of radio broadcasts were able to draw in their audiences through running gags, in the form of feuds, contests, or other methods. Among the publicity gags that ran for years, was a mock feud between Benny and Fred Allen. The latter had his own radio show rivaling Benny's popularity. The two were close friends in real life, and the mock feud helped both build their audience ratings. Actor Ronald Colman and wife actress Benita Hume were brought into the cast as Benny's sophisticated British neighbors who were always aghast at Benny's lifestyle. The "Why I Can’t Stand Jack Benny Contest” generated 300,000 entries, half of them in the form of poetry, and featured Fred Allen as the judge. The winning entry was a poem written by a Carroll Craig of Pacific Palisades, read on the air by Colman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmidt_Happens"title="Schmidt Happens">
Sorcha has just given birth to Fionn's child, and Fionn comes to live with Ross and family. The triplets become notorious as troublemakers around Dublin. Ross's mother Fionnuala seeks revenge after Ross nearly let her choke to death in the previous book. Charles works with shadowy Russian interests in order to become Taoiseach. Meanwhile, Ross gets an unexpected call from Joe Schmidt, who is interested in his famous Rugby Tactics Book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inland_(Obreht_novel)"title="Inland (Obreht novel)">
The novel follows two parallel narratives in the American frontier.Living in the lawless, drought-ridden lands of the Arizona Territory in 1893, 37-year-old frontierswoman Nora Lark waits inside her home for the return of the men in her life. Nora's husband, Emmett, left in search of water for the household and their two elder sons left following an explosive argument. Nora lives with her youngest son, who is convinced that a mysterious beast is stalking the land surrounding their home. She also lives with Emmett's wheelchair-bound mother, Missus Harriet, as well as Emmett's cousin, Josie, a clairvoyant who hosts séances to communicate with the dead. Nora, affected by her loneliness and isolation, speaks to her long-dead daughter, Evelyn, who died of heat stroke in Arizona as a baby.Lurie Mattie, an immigrant Muslim from a Balkan piece of the Ottoman Empire, is a former outlaw and a man haunted by ghosts. He is able to see lost souls who want something from him, and he acquires their "wants". Lurie finds reprieve from the soul's longing in an unexpected relationship with Burke, a dromedary camel from the United States Camel Corps. However, Lurie is being pursued by a marshal on a charge of manslaughter and he takes cover in the Camel Corps. They are led by the camel driver Hi Jolly (aka Hadji Ali), a Turk of Syrian-Greek descent and a convert to Islam. Lurie travels with Burke in the Camel Corps on a westward trek from Texas.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Women_in_Black"title="The Women in Black">
The novel tells the story of a group of department store employees in 1959 Sydney. It is set primarily during the Christmas rush period when young school leaver, Lisa, joins the women.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Empire"title="Celtic Empire">
NUMA Director Dirk Pitt, as well as NUMA itself, becomes involved in finding who is behind a plot to murder a team of scientists in El Salvador, rob a team of archaeologists along the Nile and who is behind a deadly collision in the waterways along the city of Detroit. Before the mystery can be solved, Pitt's two children become targets of killers. Pitt's detective work on the mystery leads him to Scotland; where he, with the help of NUMA, must stop a deadly plot that could radically change the world.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiosis_(novel)"title="Semiosis (novel)">
To escape war and ecological disasters on Earth in the 2060's, a group of colonists attempt to forge a new life on a distant earth-like planet they name Pax (Latin for "peace"). They find the world is rich in flora and fauna, and appears to be ideally suited for establishing a new colony. But they soon notice that some of the plant life is sentient, and are manipulating them to further their own ends.The colonists find an abandoned alien city made of glass and relocate their colony there. But they discover that the city is controlled by an intelligent bamboo-like plant they later call Stevland. It attempts to domesticate them in order to flourish and expand, and the humans realize that to survive, they need to share the city with it. Over time, the colonists learn to converse with Stevland using signs, and an uneasy, but mutually beneficial alliance is formed.During one of the colonist's expeditions further inland, they meet the city's creators, the Glassmakers. The arthropod-like Glassmakers were themselves colonists and coexisted with Stevland, but they abandoned their home and became nomadic. Disease and illness decimated them and their social structures collapsed. The encounter with the Glassmakers is not friendly and leads to an attack on the city. With Stevland's assistance, the Glassmakers are repulsed, and the humans, a few Glassmakers willing to coexist with them, and Stevland, form an alliance of peaceful coexistence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testimony_(Turow_novel)"title="Testimony (Turow novel)">
Roma refugees had settled in a makeshift village named Barupra in Bosnia, on the outskirts of an abandoned coal mine. The novel opens in March 2015 with the testimony of Ferko Rincic, sole survivor of the massacre, before the ICC. Rincic testifies that Chetniks had come on the night of April 27, 2004, forcing the Roma onto trucks at gunpoint while he was hiding in an outhouse; according to Rincic, the evacuated Roma were then gathered into an old coal excavation and explosive charges were detonated, burying the entire village within.In January 2015, Bill ten Boom decided to retire from his lucrative private practice and accept a position with the ICC at the request of his colleague from law school, Roger Clewey. In retrospect, ten Boom sees it as the last step in divorcing his life and career from the fictional Kindle County; the majority of the story is set in European locations including The Hague and Bosnia.Because the Roma had tipped American forces to the location of Laza Kajevic, a wanted war criminal, just prior to the massacre, one potential motive for the crime would have been retaliation for the unsuccessful capture attempt. However, Rincic's testimony, which included a detail that the Chetniks spoke Bosnian with a foreign accent, pointed towards the potential involvement of nearby American troops. The sensitive political situation and the United States' withdrawal from the ICC (under the American Service-Members' Protection Act) meant that an investigation led by an American prosecutor would be acceptable, leading to the selection of ten Boom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_Paradigm"title="The Elephant Paradigm">
The book is divided into three parts where first part is about India's economic liberation, second part is about behaviour in private space and third part is about behaviour in public spaces.The first part of the book, "The Temper of our Times" consists of three chapters. First chapter, "Our Liberating Nineties," talks about economic liberation of India and how India changed in those transition period. The second chapter, "Understanding our Times", is about learning lessons from the economic history of India and mistakes to avoid. The last chapter, "What is Wrong with our Temper", is about asking questions to Indians why their temper is so low.The second part of the book, "Private Space", starts with the chapter called "Laptops and Meditation" which deals with balancing personal life and work. Next chapter is "A Sentimental Education" which is about educational values like how to write and how to read well and commitment to liberal values, followed by chapter "Playing To Win" in which Das shows steps on how to win in a competitive market.The last and third part of the book is "Public Space". Seventh chapter "Learning to live, living to learn" is about reforms needed by Indian education system. Eighth chapter deals with agricultural reforms which are required in India and how local self-government should work in rural India. "To reform or Not to reform" is the ninth chapter of a book in which the author blames poor governance of India and their weak advocacy to reform. Tenth chapter namely "What slows us down" deals with connection of capitalism with democracy and subsequently, last chapter, "making the nation competitive" discusses the issue of competitiveness in the open market from the perspective of political leaders aka policy makers of India.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_in_the_Car_with_Glasses_and_a_Gun_(novel)"title="The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun (novel)">
Dany Longo, a very charming and shortsighted secretary in an advertising agency, is asked by her boss, Michel Caravaille, to stay overnight at his house to type up a document for him to take on a business trip to Geneva. Caravaille is married to Anita, Dany's former colleague and roommate. In the morning, Caravaille requests Dany accompany him and Anita to the airport to drive their large American car back home. Afterward, left alone with the luxurious car, Dany impulsively decides to drive to the Riviera because she has never seen the sea. On the way south, a woman who owns a roadside café stops her, and says Dany forgot her coat there the night before. Dany insists that she has never been there before and leaves. Later at a service station Dany is assaulted in the bathroom and someone injures her left hand. She is bemused as various strangers keep claiming to know her and insisting that her hand was already bandaged when they first saw her.Heading further south she meets Philippe, and they spend the night together. The following day Philippe, who is a smalltime con man, steals Dany's car. She later finds the car abandoned in Marseille, and discovers a man's body and a gun in the trunk. She is able to locate Philippe and convince him to help her. They search the dead man's pockets and find out that his name is Maurice Kaub. Philippe also discovers there a telegram addressed to Kaub and signed by Dany. After that, Philippe hits her and leaves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patan_trilogy"title="Patan trilogy">
"Patan Ni Prabhuta", the first of the series, has "Asmita" (self-consciousness) as its theme. Minaldevi, the mother of the king, craves for power at any cost, while Munjal, the amatya (minister) believes in the people's rule. He is interested in the harmony and integrity of Gujarat. Just to gain power, Minaldevi joins hands with Anandsuri but the people of Patan revolt and depose Minaldevi, who ultimately realizes the greatness of Patan."Gujarat No Nath" puts forward the concept of the integrity of entire "Āryāvarta". There is a four-year gap between the end of "Patan Ni Prabhuta" and the beginning of "Gujarat No Nath". The political situation of the novel has two contexts: treaty with Avanti and conflict with Sorath. The novel emphasises that national unity is essential to face outside invasion and defend liberty. Just to project this idea, the author introduces the fictional character of Kirtidev. Kirtidev tries to uphold the unity of Patana and Avanti but Munjal opposes this, and the dream of Kirtidev is shattered. Kak also proposes to unite "Āryāvarta", but by power. His adventures, designed to fulfill his political ambitions and to win Manjari's heart, cover the major part of the novel and are narrated in a romantic style. Udayan plays the villain and his clash with Kak for the fair hand of Manjari is elaborately described. The aim of the episode is to add passion to a tale of adventure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Unkindness_of_Magicians"title="An Unkindness of Magicians">
The magical Houses of New York, or as they term themselves – the Unseen World – are linked by social and familial connections, by old feuds, and by old betrayals. This all-White, old-moneyed community of privilege works by its own rules, unknown and unseen by the mundane residents of the city. At the base of the magical world's social structure, is The Turning: Once every generation or so, a magical tournament is held to determine the magical pecking order; who can establish or maintain a House, who must relinquish theirs, and who shall lead them. For many years now, House Merlin has stood at the head of the Unseen World. Laurent Beauchamps is a newcomer to the Unseen world, unusual in many ways: He is Black, and comes from a mundane background. But Gray Prospero, a privileged son of one of the oldest Houses, takes Laurent under his wing and teaches him magic. When a new Turning is announced only ten years after the last, the magical world is clued in to the fact that something might be awry. Laurent hires an unknown magician named Sydney to represent him in the tournament. Sydney, the reader comes to find out, has her own agenda regarding The Turning, but is also under the thrall of the House of Shadows, and faces a harsh dilemma how to work out her conflicting paths.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waging_Peace_in_Vietnam"title="Waging Peace in Vietnam">
The book covers the GI and veteran resistance to the Vietnam War from the very early stages of the war until the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. It has essays and contributions from members of every branch of the U.S. military, from enlisted and officer, from women and men, from those of many skin colors and walks of life, from the famous and the unknown, from highly decorated combat troops and deserters, from front line grunts and jet pilots. It includes chapters on the behind the scenes civilian supporters and on the next generation of resisters to the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.The book was inspired by and draws content from the "Waging Peace In Vietnam" exhibit which opened in the Spring of 2018 at the University of Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, in South Bend, Indiana and at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, in Vietnam. The exhibit and the book draw from many sources including oral histories and photos from the book "A Matter of Conscience" by Willa Seidenberg and William Short, the GI Press Collection archive at the Wisconsin Historical Society, and the U.S. National Archives. They document that thousands of soldiers, sailors and pilots refused to fight, sail and fly bombing missions in Vietnam, having a profound effect on the antiwar movement, and on the war itself. The exhibit is currently touring the United States.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnt_Shadows"title="Burnt Shadows">
In four sections, "Burnt Shadows" follows the intersecting histories of two families, beginning in the final days of World War II in Japan, following to India on the brink of partition in 1947, to Pakistan in the early 1980s, and then to New York in the aftermath of 9/11 and Afghanistan in the wake of the ensuing US bombing campaign.In the prologue, an unidentified prisoner finds himself naked in a cell in Guantanamo, wondering: "How did it come to this?" The main story then begins in Nagasaki in 1945, with Hiroko Tanaka, a 21-year-old teacher-turned-munitions worker who is in love with the German Konrad Weiss. Their idyllic romance ends in tragedy, with a fatal flash that leaves Konrad a "burnt shadow" on the ground, and indelibly sears the birds on Hiroko's kimono into the skin of her back. In search of new beginnings, Hiroko travels to Delhi. She stays with Konrad's half-sister, Ilse, now known as Elizabeth, and her husband, James Burton. She begins to learn Urdu with Burton's clerk, Sajjad Ashraf, with whom a relationship blossoms, to the Burtons' disapproval.With the partition of India, Hiroko's world turns upside down once again, and she finds a new life in newly-created Pakistan. In Karachi, Hiroko and Sajjad's son Raza is born. He meets a CIA operative, who is none other than Harry Burton, Ilse and James' son. Ilse has meanwhile reclaimed her Identity, divorced James, and moved to New York. Raza finds himself, naively, swept up into the jihadist movement in Afghanistan. When she loses Sajjad as well, Hiroko moves to New York to be near Ilse. Though the women have not seen each other in decades, they find themselves deeply bound to each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_the_Race"title="Raising the Race">
In the book Barnes examines "how black, married career women juggle their relationships with their extended and nuclear families, the expectations of the black community, and their desires to raise healthy, independent children". While investigating she discovered that the women based their decisions on more than their own situation, as they took into account the past struggles black women had to go through and how their actions could impact the wider black community. Key ideas developed and explored are "Black Strategic Mothering," a term developed by Barnes to provide a conceptual framework for understanding the history of Black women's work, family, and community decision-making strategies. Barnes also explores what she calls, the "neo-politics of respectability" a framework developed from that of Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's "politics of respectability" developed in her book "Righteous Discontent" to describe the tactics used by turn of the 20th century Black women who were leaders in the Black Women's Club Movement. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake;_or_the_Huts_of_America"title="Blake; or the Huts of America">
## Part 1.The story begins on the Franks Plantation in Natchez, Mississippi. Maggie, the illegitimate daughter of Colonel Stephen Franks and wife to Henry Blake, is sold off—a decision determined by both her relationship with Mistress Franks and rejection of Colonel Franks sexual overtures. Henry, a slave to Colonel Franks and husband to Maggie, is galvanized into action when informed of this tragic incident. Despite the religious pleas from Maggie's parents, Henry embarks on a subversive mission through the antebellum south.Through exposition, it is revealed that Henry was not born into slavery but free in the West Indies to well-off tobacco planters. Blake's fortune takes a drastic turn when he conflates a slave vessel with that of a battleship and is consequently kidnapped to America and sold to Colonel Franks. Henry meets Maggie on the Franks Plantation; they soon marry and start a family.On his revolutionary quest through plantations in the antebellum south, Henry interviews the enslaved persons he meets, documenting their experiences and circumstances; and procuring information about interviewees’ participation in major U.S events such as the American Revolutionary War as well as organized anti-slavery, insurrectional stratagems. Successfully avoiding the ploys of slave catchers, Blake is able to spread his vision of radical revolt amongst the enslaved individuals he meets, eventually guiding a group of escapees to Canada.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_of_the_World_(novel)"title="News of the World (novel)">
The book opens in 1870 on the wild border between Texas and Indian Territory, where a 10-year-old girl has been released after four years of captivity. Kiowa raiders had killed her family and taken her hostage, eventually raising her as one of their own with the Kiowa name "Cicada". The girl is entrusted to freedman Britt Johnson, who then hands her over to his acquaintance, 71-year-old Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a veteran of the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War. Kidd agrees to take the girl to Castroville, Texas, where her aunt and uncle live. Captain Kidd makes his living as a news reader, traveling between towns and charging a dime per person to read aloud from newspapers. His profession pays little, and Kidd is also struggling with family problems: his daughters are still living in war-torn Georgia, and he has yet to reclaim land in Texas that once belonged to his late wife, the daughter of Spanish landowners.Captain Kidd purchases an old traveling wagon and sets off with the girl. At first, he finds himself at a loss as to how to deal with the girl's semi-wild state. She considers herself to be Kiowa, and views her ordeal as a second kidnapping, refusing to cooperate with the Captain and even nearly getting herself killed when she runs away and provokes a band of wandering Native Americans. She speaks no English, and one of Capt. Kidd's early triumphs in their relationship is merely learning her original name: Johanna. As they journey south, the Captain continues to read the news when they reach new towns, earning enough to sustain their forward progress. He is careful to avoid local stories, particularly about the rivalry between the political factions headed by Edmund J. Davis and Andrew Jackson Hamilton because he knows it will provoke arguments in his audience. Likewise, he is also careful on the road, taking great pains not to call attention to himself or Johanna.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Here_Knows_Who_Took_My_Clothes?"title="Who Here Knows Who Took My Clothes?">
While taking a bath, a man's clothes are stolen by an unknown and unseen thief. The man then wanders naked around his home, neighborhood and town on a quest to answer the question, "who here knows who took my clothes?". The quest ends in a cave where he finds his clothes and the giggling monster who took them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_&amp;_Wizard_(series)"title="Witch &amp; Wizard (series)">
## Witch &amp; Wizard.The novel follows fifteen-year old Wisty and her eighteen-year-old brother Whit in a dystopian future, where people can be brought up on charges of witchcraft. The teens and their parents are charged with witchcraft despite their claims that magic does not exist. They are taken from their parents when they begin to show magical abilities after receiving a book and drum stick. The children meet The One Who Is The One, the leader of the political party the New Order. The teens are sentenced to be executed once they turn eighteen years of age.Whit is reunited with his long lost girlfriend Celia, who reveals that she's a half-light spirit that exists on an alternate dimension called the Shadow land. She teaches the two of them how to travel to and from Shadow-land, through which they escape to a haven for persecuted children named Freeland. The siblings choose not to remain in the haven, as they wish to find their parents, and learn of a prophecy where they are Liberators who will bring about an end to the New Order. Wisty and Whit begin to plan to take down the regime and reluctantly accept help from Byron, a former classmate who had heavily taken part in their persecution and had been changed into a weasel by Wisty. The trio eventually return to their home town, where they discover that the siblings' home has been demolished. There they discover that their parents can communicate with them through magic. During this process their seemingly worthless book and drum stick are transformed into a magic wand and spell book. Byron is also changed back into a human and charged with looking after the siblings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_of_One_(novel)"title="Six of One (novel)">
"Six of One" is set in Runnymede, a Maryland town that straddles the Mason-Dixon Line. The narrative moves back and forth in time, following a colorful cast of characters. Thirty-five-year-old Nickel (Nicole), a bisexual woman, is the first-person narrator. Her adoptive mother, Juts (Julia Ellen), and aunt Wheeze (Louise) Hunsenmeir have been quibbling and making up since they were small girls in 1908, the earliest part of the story. In 1980, the contemporary part of the novel, the sisters are in their 70s and still at it. Most of the characters are female, each with her own over-the-top propensities: Celeste Chalfonte murders the local weapons tycoon for principle, and shares her lover Ramelle with her brother. Cora, Celeste's servant and friend, illiterate, simple and hardworking, is the mother of the bickering Hunsenmeir sisters. Fannie Jump Creighton turns her aristocratic home into a speakeasy during prohibition, to survive the great depression. Events both minor and historic are treated with light humor, with only the occasional more serious tone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bingo_(novel)"title="Bingo (novel)">
Bingo takes place in the small town of Runnymede, Maryland, which is located on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. The events take place about seven years after the end of "Six of One".Nickel Smith is now the editor of the local Runnymede newspaper, "The Clarion", which is under threat due to corporate takeover. Her mother, Juts, and her aunt Wheezie, the infamous Hunsenmeir sisters, try to keep an eye on Nickel, who has embarked on an affair that would shock the town. The sisters, who are prone to decades-long fights, find themselves newly at odds when a new eligible gentleman, Ed Tutweiler Walters, arrives in town. Nickel, on the other hand, feels she must take care of her aunts, but also has her hands full with her own troubles. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Pumped"title="Super Pumped">
The book presents the history of Uber since its founding by Garrett Camp as UberCab in 2009. Travis Kalanick, who would later run the company and be its largest shareholder before being removed as CEO, was originally brought in as an advisor with its first employee Ryan Graves as its CEO. The book explains how Kalanick came to replace Graves, who stayed on with the company, and gained control over the startup. According to the book, Kalanick was bitter about how venture capitalists had treated his first startup, Scour, and he vowed not to be replaced by them again. The book details the "work hard, play hard" culture at Uber, citing a party where employees celebrated the first billion dollars in revenues in Las Vegas. It also examines the many scandals experienced by the company, including allegations of sexual harassment documented by Susan Fowler, attempts to keep regulators from hiring Uber drivers to avoid fines, and the mishandling of personal information, including in the case of a rape victim in India. It also looks at the ways that, despite these incidents, the company was considered a unicorn by venture capitalists. Isaac writes that for a time, Uber was one of the highest valued private companies in Silicon Valley. The book ends with the company entering the market at below its valuation target.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Blood_Spilled"title="No Blood Spilled">
"No Blood Spilled" is the second part of the adventures of vampire Sebastian Newcastle, in which he is pursued from England to colonial India by his bitter enemy Reginald Callender, who will not rest until the vampire is destroyed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_Your_Plow_Over_the_Bones_of_the_Dead"title="Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead">
Janina Duszejko is an ageing woman who lives in a rural Polish village, located near the Czech border in the Silesia region, in between Lewin and Kłodzko. Janina spends most of her time studying astrology and translating the poetry of William Blake into Polish with her friend Dizzy. She had two dogs as pets but they both went missing. One day, her neighbour Big Foot, a frequent hunter, is found dead in his home by Janina's friend Oddball. From Janina and Oddball's inspection of the scene, it seems Big Foot choked on a bone while eating. Janina also finds a shocking photograph in Big Foot's house, the contents of which are revealed in the penultimate chapter. Janina disliked Big Foot because she disagrees with hunting animals. She begins to believe that animals could have killed Big Foot out of vengeance. She writes to the local police, who ignore her theory. The police commandant–called the Commandant by Janina–is also a hunter and is later found dead beside his car by Dizzy. The Commandant's death emboldens Janina's beliefs, but her friends Dizzy and Oddball are sceptical of her. Janina is questioned by police as a witness to the crime scene. One officer accuses Janina of seemingly valuing the life of animals more than that of humans. Janina tells them that she values both equally.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salome_of_the_Tenements_(novel)"title="Salome of the Tenements (novel)">
The novel's main character, Sonya Vrunsky, is the daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants living in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. At the beginning of the novel, Sonya is working as a journalist at a local Jewish newspaper, however she yearns to escape the lower-class world of the immigrant community. She sets her sights on marrying a wealthy, Christian man, named John Manning, who lives in the much wealthier and upper-class Upper East Side of Manhattan. Sonya uses her ethnic background as a Russian Jew to portray herself as exotic and exciting, which ends up being, as she had hoped, appealing to John. Eventually, Sonya and John become married. Once married, however, Sonya soon realizes that the kind of life that she had desires for so long is not what she initially thought it would be like. Sonya leaves John, and by the end of the novel, Sonya has found a successful career as a fashion designer and has married a fellow designer whom she truly loves.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loose_Lips_(novel)"title="Loose Lips (novel)">
Brown returns to an earlier time in the annals of Runnymede and the Hunsenmeir sisters. The year is 1941, the bickering sisters, Wheezie and Juts, are approaching middle age, and dealing with life issues of marriage, motherhood, family relationships and aging. Juts is desperate to have a child, but her husband, Chessy, may be infertile. Among the personal issues faced by the sisters and those surrounding them: Chessy's affair, the return of their long-lost father, Juts' relationship with Josephine, her unforgiving mother-in-law, and the adoption of Nicole by Juts and Chessy.In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the residents of Runnymede face new challenges: civil defense, racism against the only Japanese resident of Runnymede, and other events, both comic and dramatic, such as mistaking migrating Canada geese for German bombers, and how the sisters open the Curl n' Twirl salon to pay off a debt due to damage caused by one of their fiercest fights.The narrative spans a decade in the life of the sisters and the zany inhabitants of Runnymede, ending in 1950, with Wheezie and Juts feeling older and wiser, and just as dedicated as ever to their fractious relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_in_Her_Hands"title="Death in Her Hands">
Vesta Gul, a 72-year-old widow, is walking her dog in the woods and finds a note that reads: "Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body." However, no body is in sight. Vesta becomes obsessed with discovering who Magda was and the circumstances surrounding her death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dutch_House_(novel)"title="The Dutch House (novel)">
Danny Conroy grows up in an elaborate mansion in Elkins Park known as the Dutch House, and is raised by his real estate investor father and his older sister Maeve, his mother having abandoned the family years earlier. Danny's father Cyril is an emotionally distant man but raises his children to understand his business which involves investing in real estate and working as a landlord and property manager. Cyril eventually introduces the children to Andrea, a much younger woman with two daughters of her own, Norma and Bright. While Maeve and Danny do not like Andrea, Cyril eventually marries her, the two having bonded over their love of the Dutch house.Nevertheless Cyril and Andrea's marriage is not a success and Andrea maintains a distance between herself and the Conroy children. When Danny is 15 and Maeve is 22 their father abruptly dies of a heart attack at work. His employees call in Maeve who calls Danny and no one thinks to inform Andrea until later. Two weeks later Andrea, having assured herself of the fact that her husband's property passed entirely to her, kicks Danny out of the house and fires the housekeeper and cook who have acted as surrogate mothers to the Conroy children. An infuriated Maeve discovers that the only thing she could possibly access is a trust fund for education set up in the names of Danny, Norma and Bright. Maeve decides to send Danny to the most expensive schools she can find in order to drain the trust sending Danny to Choate Rosemary Hall, Columbia University, and to Columbia Medical School.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Among_the_Lost"title="Among the Lost">
The two main characters, Estela and Epitafio ("about the weirdest variation of Romeo and Juliet yet to emerge anywhere"), are former orphans who engage in human trafficking, gathering (and brutalizing) people who have fled their countries to sell them. Epitafio is forcibly married to another woman on orders of Father Nicho, the priest who runs the orphanage where they were dumped; Estela and he carry on a love affair mostly per cell phone as they ferry their loads of human cargo through an unnamed border area, with the orphanage as one of the central points. Father Nicho, who runs part of their operation, is planning to get rid of Epitafio and install a younger protégé, Sepelio, in his place. Other characters are a 14- and a 16-year-old boy, "sons of the jungle", who guide groups of refugees through the jungle and steal their possessions. One of the refugees, a "giant" former boxer whom Epitafio names Mausoleo, is saved from the group to become complicit in the operation, enforcing Epitafio's violent rule and killing two men early in the novel – he crushes a young refugee boy to death because he wouldn't obey Epitafio's command for him to keep quiet. His "inner struggle" is, according to one critic, the novel's "one true moral conflict".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_Envy_(novel)"title="Venus Envy (novel)">
Mary Frazier Armstrong, known to all as "Frazier", is a successful and beautiful 35 year-old art gallery owner. When she is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, and is told she has only hours left to live, she decides it is time to let everyone know what she really thinks. She writes a series of brutally honest letters to friends and family, and because she'll be dead by the time she reads them, she also tells her deepest secret: She's a lesbian.When the letters arrive, chaos and pandemonium ensue in her hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, peaking with the news that Frazier is not dying after all. As the society around her seeks to excoriate her for her sexual identity and those close to her are afraid to be painted with the same incriminating brush, only her father, brother, eccentric aunt, assistant and closest friend Billy stick by her. When the pressure grows too great, Frazier escapes, with the help of an accidental electric shock, to a fantasy visit into a 17th-century painting of Mount Olympus, only to wake up in the arms of the stunning and bisexual goddess Venus, and gets to hang out with the ancient, wiser goddesses and gods.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platero_and_I"title="Platero and I">
Platero is a silver-colored donkey ("plata" means silver in Spanish) who throughout the years is seemingly the only constant friend and companion of the author, who makes observations to and confides in him. The author believes that Platero understands everything, except for the language of humans, just as humans do not know the language of animals, but he gives his master joy and sincere warmth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liludi_Dharati"title="Liludi Dharati">
This novel narrates the life of trapped and confused woman named Santu under strange circumstances and her miserable plight. The story is set in the remote village near the mountain Girnar namely Gundasar. Though the main story line moves around a farmer family of Hada Patel, it also includes smaller accounts of other supportive characters, giving a picture of the village life, especially elaborate negative characters and their negativity. Hada Patel has three sons. The elder one has left the village and turned a monk, the second one dies due to some disease and story commences with the last son Gobar and his fiance Santu. The story progresses depicting the struggle of pregnant Santu bearing the blame of her husband's murder.The other major characters are Mandal (cousin of Gobar), Shadul (son of a landlord), Ragha Gor, a Brahmin hotel owner. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hey_Grandude!"title="Hey Grandude!">
The book is about a grandpa and his three grandchildren with a magic compass on an adventure. The group "ride horses with a cowboy in the desert, face an army of crabs on a tropical beach and dodge an avalanche while having a picnic up a mountain".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witch_Who_Came_in_from_the_Cold"title="The Witch Who Came in from the Cold">
Season 1Gabe Pritchard and Joshua Toms are CIA agents working in Prague in 1970. Two years ago in Cairo, Gabe experienced an accident in which he lost his memory of an entire day. Since that time, he has been afflicted by excruciating headaches. He botches a CIA mission due to one of these headaches, and his status at work falls into jeopardy. Tanya Morozova and her partner Nadia are both KGB agents and members of the Consortium of Ice. The Ice and the Flame are groups of sorcerers seeking to control all 36 hosts, human beings who are possessed by elementals. The Flame seeks to rid the world of all non-magic users, and the Ice wants to preserve the world as it is. Adula Zlata, a Czech college student, is one such host. Tanya tells Andula the truth about her identity, and Andula decides to accept the Ice's offer of protection. Gabe and Josh suspect that Tanya and Nadia are recruiting Andula for the KGB.Jordan Rhemes, a bartender and sorcerer, was in Cairo at the time of Gabe's accident. She informs him that his headaches are related to magic. He interrupted a ritual by Flame Acolytes in which they attempted to create their own host. As a result, the elemental involved in the ritual attached itself to Gabe. The attachment was imperfect, resulting in headaches and seizures. Rhemes refers Gabe to Alestair Winthrop, an MI-6 agent and Ice member. Alestair teaches Gabe basic sorcery and helps him learn to control the elemental. Alestair and Josh begin a physical relationship, despite the fact that same-sex relationships are stigmatized by both Czech society and their own intelligence agencies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Discomfort_(novel)"title="Southern Discomfort (novel)">
The plot occurs between the years 1918-1928, in Montgomery, Alabama. Hortensia Reedmuller Banastre is a beautiful woman who comes from old money. She is the mother of two, and is trapped in a loveless, yet "socially appropriate" marriage. She falls in love with Hercules, a teenage black prizefighter. After Hercules dies as the result of a train accident, and the failure of the slow, for-blacks-only ambulance, Hortensia gives birth to their daughter, Catherine. To avoid the inevitable scandal, Catherine is raised by Hortensia's cook. However, the jealousy of Hortensia's son, Paris, who becomes increasingly crazed, threatens to upend the balance Hortensia has achieved in her life; and continued secrecy becomes impossible once Catherine, who clearly does not belong in either black or white worlds, becomes curious as to her lineage. After some emotional upheaval, however, the Hortensia and Catherine's lives settle into a new and happy order.Subplots in the novel include the view of Montgomery and its residents through the eyes of the black prostitutes Banana Mae Parker and Blue Rhonda Latrec, who divide the town by sexual categories, and the star-crossed film stars Grace Deltaven and Payson Thorpe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Boat_to_Tangier"title="Night Boat to Tangier">
The novel is set over a 24-hour period on 23 October 2018 in the terminal building at the Andalusian port city of Algeciras in southern Spain. It follows longtime partners and "fading gangsters from Cork City" Charlie Redmond and Maurice Hearne as they wait for Maurice's missing daughter, Dilly, to pass through on a boat from Tangier, Morocco or leave on one heading there. The two men were once involved in smuggling Moroccan hashish to Ireland through the ports of Spain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Sister,_the_Serial_Killer"title="My Sister, the Serial Killer">
In Lagos, Nigeria, Korede is a nurse with a close relationship with her younger sister, Ayoola. Ayoola is the more beautiful, favored sister, and possibly sociopathic. For the third time in a row, Ayoola has stabbed her boyfriend to death, supposedly in self-defense. Like the previous times, Korede helps dispose of the body and clean away the evidence. Her practicality and concern keep Ayoola from acting suspiciously about her “missing” boyfriend, such as by posting to social media when she should be mourning.Korede feels unappreciated as she constantly dreads that they will be caught and that Ayoola will kill again, confiding in none but a comatose patient in the hospital she works at. She is in love with Tade, a kind, handsome doctor who does not notice her affection. However, upon meeting Ayoola, he is immediately enamored with her and they begin dating. Korede fears that Tade will be Ayoola's next victim and must reckon with what she is willing to do for her sister.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Water_Dancer"title="The Water Dancer">
Hiram Walker was born into slavery during the Antebellum South on a declining tobacco plantation in Virginia named Lockless. He is the mixed-race son of a white plantation owner and a black mother who was sold away by his father when Hiram was young. The local community consists of the enslaved ("the Tasked"); the landowners ("the Quality"); and the low-class whites ("the Low"). Hiram has an extraordinary photographic memory but is unable to remember his mother. However, in one instance when Hiram is driving across a bridge he suddenly has a vision of his mother dancing. When the vision ends, his carriage has fallen into the water. His (white) half brother drowns, but Hiram is transported out of the water. He learns that his miracle survival was a result of a superhuman ability he has called conduction, which transports himself and others across impossible distances. This conduction is triggered by powerful memories: those of his mother. He eventually becomes involved with the Underground Railroad. Hiram escapes to Philadelphia, where he encounters Box Brown and Jarm Logue. He eventually comes to meet a famous member of the Underground named Moses, who also has the power of Conduction. Moses is later revealed to be Harriet Tubman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Topeka_School"title="The Topeka School">
The novel is set primarily in Topeka, Kansas, in the late 1990s, and is told mainly from the perspective of three characters: Adam Gordon, a high school debate champion, and his parents Jane and Jonathan, who are psychologists at a local institution known as the Foundation. In a nonlinear narrative, the novel explores Adam's preparation for a national debate championship (which he wins), his relationship with his girlfriend Amber, and his parents' lives. One of Adam's classmates, Darren Eberheart, a social misfit and patient of Adam's father, also features in a sequence of shorter chapters that culminates in him seriously injuring a girl at a party who rejected his romantic advances after years of bullying by his peers. The final chapter takes place in 2019 and follows Adam, now a father of two young girls, as he and his wife take their family to Topeka from their home in New York City to give a reading of Adam's work. Back in New York City, they attend a protest of the Trump administration's family separation policy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_for_Cinderella_(novel)"title="Trap for Cinderella (novel)">
A young woman wakes up in a hospital, badly burned and suffering from amnesia. She receives a new face through plastic surgery but still doesn't remember who she is. Doctor Doulin who treats her, tells her that her name is Michele Isola, also called Mickey or Mi, and she is twenty years old. She was caught in a fire accident in a seaside villa with her friend Domenica Loi, also known as Do. The latter died in the fire. When Mickey is discharged from the hospital, she comes to stay with her family friend and childhood governess Jeanne Murneau. Mickey will turn twenty-one soon, and she is expected to inherit a vast fortune from Raffermi, a rich old Italian businesswoman who once married Mi's widowed father. It turns out that Jeanne and Mickey had a love-hate relationship in the past, and Mi's behavior in the months leading to the accident was increasingly erratic, and she refused to visit the dying Raffermi.Jeanne is reluctant to let Mickey see any of her old acquaintances. Mi suspects that Jeanne may be hiding something. Mickey becomes increasingly convinced that she is not really Michele but Domenica. When confronted with this supposition, Jeanne admits that she and Do were planning to get rid of Mi by staging a fire accident, and then pass Domenica off for Michele to receive the inheritance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finding_My_Voice"title="Finding My Voice">
"Finding My Voice" is a frank presentation of the issue of racism through the experiences of Ellen Sung, a high school senior, who is the daughter of Korean immigrants and is attracted to Tomper, a white classmate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaku_Stories"title="Gaku Stories">
## Gaku Stories.The narrator, a jack of all trades writer, and his wife, who works at a kindergarten, bring a new son into their household in Kodaira, Tokyo. They give the boy the name Gaku, meaning "mountain peak", due to their shared love of climbing. From his kindergarten days, Gaku displays a great sense of curiosity, which often gets him into trouble, as he uproots the neighbours' sweet potatoes with some friends and engages in other mischief. Living in an area crammed with English language schools and preschools, Gaku's parents struggle to settle on a direction for their son's education, before eventually enrolling him in an elementary school. Gaku enjoys a liberal upbringing, and becomes so popular that during Valentine's Day in his fourth year of school, he receives chocolates from three separate classmates. On the other hand, he enjoys much less success in his studies, picking fights with older students, and becoming a wild problem child who draws the ire of his teachers, leading his parents to be frequently called to the school.In his fourth year of school, Gaku takes his first trip to Lake Kameyama, where Mr. Noda, a friend of the narrator, lives. After being taught how to fish there, he becomes completely absorbed with the hobby, focusing on it to a degree of concentration that he has never shown to anything before. The narrator playfully asks Gaku to catch him a Japanese catfish from the Tama River, and is shocked when the boy not only looks into how to catch one, but eventually succeeds. In the summer holidays of his fifth year of school, Gaku leaves home to go canoeing down the Kushiro River with Mr. Noda. During his son's absence, the narrator reflects on his own hazy memories of boyhood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_One_Blood_(novel)"title="Of One Blood (novel)">
The novel starts with Reuel Briggs in his apartment alone in Boston, Massachusetts, ruminating on his financial troubles as a medical student. Determined to improve his friend's mood, Aubrey persuades Reuel to attend a “Negro music” concert. There Reuel witnesses the talented Dianthe Lusk, a light-skinned “Negress” from the South, perform in the Fisk University Singers and becomes infatuated with her beautiful voice and appearance. They attend a house party hosted by Molly Vance, who is engaged to Aubrey, and her brother, Charlie. The group decides to visit the local Hyde House, which is rumored to be haunted, where Reuel encounters a spectral form of Dianthe, who requests Reuel's help.That next morning, Reuel is called to treat the victims of a train accident. Among them is Dianthe, seemingly dead, but he revives her using a form of mesmerism. The revived Dianthe has no memory of her former self and Reuel's colleagues believe he has performed a miracle. Reuel and Aubrey persuade Dianthe to live with the Vance family under another name until she recovers and relearns her identity. Reuel falls in love with Dianthe during the stay and proposes to her. She accepts. Wanting to provide for his fiancée, he approaches Aubrey for work. Aubrey asks Reuel to accompany him on a dangerous but lucrative archaeological expedition to Ethiopia. Reuel, Charlie, and Aubrey's servant, Titus Crow, prepare for the expedition, since Aubrey elects to stay in Boston with Molly and Dianthe. Charlie and Reuel frequently write back home, but eventually stop receiving correspondence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Faggots_&amp;_Their_Friends_Between_Revolutions"title="The Faggots &amp; Their Friends Between Revolutions">
Described by "Artforum" as a "fairytale-"cum"-manifesto", "The Faggots &amp; Their Friends Between Revolutions" is a series of allegorical vignettes set in the declining empire of Ramrod, ruled by "the men" (patriarchal society) under the rule of Warren-And-His-Fuckpole, while the eponymous "faggots" (gay men) live communally, produce art, have sex, and await the next revolution. Their "friends" include the "strong women" (feminists), the "queens" (drag queens), the "women who love women" (lesbians), and the "faeries" (the Radical Faeries), among others. Distinct from the faggots are the "queer men" – gay men who are closeted, or who have assimilated into patriarchal society. The novel is primarily non-narrative, and is composed largely of a combination of single-page episodes, polemic writing, and aphorisms.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Be_an_Antiracist"title="How to Be an Antiracist">
The book is organized into chapters that each examine a different theme through a racial lens. These themes include: "dueling consciousness", "power", "biology", "ethnicity", "body", "culture", "behavior", "color", "white", "black", "class", "space", "gender", and "sexuality".Kendi relates his evolving concept of racism through the events of his own life over four decades, touching on observations and experiences as a child, young adult, student, and professor, from classes he has taught, via contemporary events such as the O. J. Simpson robbery case and 2000 United States presidential election, and through historical events such as the scientific proposals of polygenism in Europe in the 1600s and racial segregation in the United States.Kendi further details the manifestations of racism, such as scientific racism, colorism and their intersection with demographics including gender, class and sexuality, arguing that racism is founded in both patriarchy and capitalism.Kendi argues that the opposite of "racist" is "anti-racist" rather than simply "non-racist", and that there is no middle ground in the struggle against racism; one is either actively confronting racial inequality or allowing it to exist through action or inaction.He defines "racism" as any policy that creates inequitable outcomes between people of different skin colors; for instance, affirmative action in college admissions is anti-racist in that is designed to remedy past racial discrimination, while inaction on climate change is racist because of the disproportionately severe impacts of climate change in the predominantly non-white Global South.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thing_(or_Two)_About_Curtis_and_Camilla"title="A Thing (or Two) About Curtis and Camilla">
In 2002, Fowler transitioned from the music industry to publishing with the release of his critically acclaimed "A Thing (or Two) About Curtis and Camilla". The novel follows a rocker and his girlfriend, who works as a publicist. The hip romance follows the trials and tribulations of a wounded man pining for his partner. The downtrodden middle-class man is carefully explored by Fowler, who sums up relationship issues in a cold post-modern world in this compelling love story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_Record_(novel)"title="Permanent Record (novel)">
After dropping out of New York University, Pablo Neruda Rind begins working the graveyard shift at a deli in Brooklyn while paying off a sizable credit card debt. In the early morning, pop music star Leanna Smart walks into the deli. The two strike up a conversation, with Pablo not aware of Leanna's stardom. After she returns days later, Pablo becomes swept up into Leanna's exciting and lavish lifestyle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyre_(novel)"title="Pyre (novel)">
The novel is set in Kattuppati, a remote Tamil Nadu village in Southern India. Kumaresan and Saroja, newly married, arrive by bus to live at Kumaresan's house on a rock in the village. Their marriage is an inter-caste one, performed in secret after they eloped from Saroja's house in Tholur, and Kumaresan believes that no one shall know about Saroja's different caste if they deny it. When they reach their house, Marayi, Kumaresan's mother, curses her ill-luck that her son married Saroja. Her dirge attracts the attention of many village residents who flock to the house to see the new bride and tease her about the marriage. They do not believe that a person as fair as Saroja would belong to the same caste as them.As days pass by, Saroja has to put up with Marayi's constant insults and the village folks' questions and comments about her caste. A visit to Kumaresan's grandparents turns sour as his grandfather hits him and says that he has brought disgrace upon the family. Saroja is reminded about their affair in Tholur where Kumarasen had come to work with Bhai Anna's help. Kumarasen worked in a soda-bottle packing and distributing unit for Soda Bottle Bhai and was Saroja's neighbor. They often stole glances at each other until some soda bottles explode in Kumaresan's hands and Saroja left him some food. Knowing that her father and brother would never approve of their marriage, Saroja ran away with Kumarasen to get married.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Calculated_Risk"title="A Calculated Risk">
Verity Banks is the senior woman executive at the Bank of the World, a global financial institution. She heads the department of Electronic Funds Transfer but finds herself stonewalled when she makes any proposal to step up the bank's computer security. Verity soon decides to prove the weakness of the bank's security by stealing from the very systems she has worked to protect. Upon hearing her plan, her mentor Tor sets a challenge to see which of them can steal a billion dollars and subsequently invest it to earn thirty million in three months - upping the stakes dramatically.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_(Patterson_novel)"title="The Black Book (Patterson novel)">
This novel goes back and forth between present events involving Chicago detective Billy Harney and past events involving him. The novel starts with three people being found dead in an apartment (Billy, Billy's partner Detective Kate Fenton and Assistant District Attorney Amy Lentini). Billy's father, the chief of detectives, and his sister, Patty (also a detective), are ushered into this horrific crime scene. As they are leaving it is discovered Billy is barely hanging onto life.It appears that Billy killed Amy and Kate burst into the apartment and Billy and Kate simultaneously shot each other. When Billy recovers enough to become conscious and coherent, he cannot remember this or the time leading up to this event at all. Prior to the time leading up to Billy's memory loss he and a team of officers waited outside a brownstone where prostitution was taking place. Billy hoped to find a suspected murderer inside. While the team waited, the mayor and other elite in the city entered. Billy pondered what to do and decided to go forward with the raid, knowing his career could be on the line. Once inside and everyone inside was arrested, Kate was with the group that searched for the black book of addresses of clients.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ballad_of_Songbirds_and_Snakes"title="The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes">
Set in the universe of "The Hunger Games", 64 years before the first installment, the book follows young Coriolanus Snow, who is far from the callous president seen in the original trilogy. The Snow family was once one of the richest in the Capitol prior to the war that resulted in the creation of the Hunger Games ten years earlier. Coriolanus is now an orphan living with his grandmother and cousin, Tigris, in an apartment they cannot afford, without the money to purchase food or clothes.Based on his academic excellence at the Academy, the Capitol's most prestigious high school, Coriolanus is chosen to mentor a tribute in the upcoming tenth Hunger Games. He is assigned the District 12 female tribute, Lucy Gray Baird, member of a traveling musician group known as the Covey, who were forced into in District 12 after the war began. Lucy Gray sparks the Capitol's attention after slipping a hidden snake into the clothing of Mayfair, the mayor's cruel daughter, who had arranged for her to be chosen as tribute because of jealousy about a boy named Billy Taupe, as well as singing during the reaping. Coriolanus is determined to make a good impression, since his success in the games will most likely guarantee the monetary prize he needs in order to attend the University.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boyfriend_(novel)"title="The Boyfriend (novel)">
The novel is set in Mumbai, India. Yudi, a freelancing journalist in the city, cruises around Churchgate railway station and picks up a young, Dalit boy outside the men's washroom. They have sex and the boy introduces himself as Kishore Mahadik. Kishore leaves Yudi his address.Post the Bombay riots, Yudi's looks for Kishore. He discovers that Kishore had given him a wrong address. His editor introduces him to an upcoming painter, Gauri. Gauri likes Yudi and confides in him that she has left her husband. She gets a drunk Yudi home after a party one night, pays him an unwelcome visit later and bargains her way to a lunch with him. Yudi then visits Gauri at her place. The next day, he spots Kishore in an elevator. Kishore gives Yudi his real name, Milind Mahadik, his address, and confesses that he is an Untouchable. Yudi is unperturbed and claims that his homosexuality makes him an outcaste too. In a disco, Yudi and Milind confess their love for each other.They spend a week at Yudi's Place in Nalla Sopara and mock a marriage in Yudi's bedroom. Due to an extended holiday with Yudi to Shravanabelagola to see the naked statue of Gommateshwara, Milind is laid off from his work. Yudi gives him pocket money and finds him work with Gauri's ecofeminist group. Milind is tasked with sticking posters across town about the group's activities and feels good about the work and the money that comes with it. But he is laid off again due to the group's dwindling funds. When Yudi finds Milind another job, the latter disappears. Yudi is depressed at the disappearance and calls at Milind's home for information. His mother and Gauri come over to support him, both of them trying to realize Gauri as a permanent mate for Yudi. Milind, meanwhile, finds himself at A.K. Modelling Agency in Goregaon, an organization that supplies men for magazine advertisements and prostitution. After a customer rapes him, he escapes from the Agency and returns home. His parents wish to get him married and he concedes, seeing marriage as a natural next step. When his family members tell him about Yudi's visit, he gets angry and gives Yudi his wedding invitation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cari_Mora"title="Cari Mora">
Caridad "Cari" Mora is a refugee from Colombia, who fought in FARC as a teenager and now lives in Miami Beach under temporary protected status. Whilst trying to evade ICE's radar, she works a variety of odd jobs, her favorite being wildlife rehabilitation at Pelican Harbor Seabird Station. She works as caretaker of, and stays in, a house once owned by Pablo Escobar.Meanwhile, two rival gangs have fixed their attention on the Escobar house because of the $25 million worth of gold that lies beneath it. One is led by Hans-Peter Schneider, an alopecic, Paraguayan-born German, sadistic psychopath whose specialty is human trafficking. The other is the Colombian-based Ten Bells, whose members in the United States include three friends of Cari's in Florida: Captain Marco, Benito and Antonio. With the aid of the house's corrupt agent Felix, Schneider and his crew get permission to stay in the house for a time, masquerading as filmmakers. Upon meeting Cari, Schneider develops an obsession with her, while Cari distrusts him and his thugs on sight. Shortly after Schneider's arrival, Benito and Antonio also explore the house, posing as laborers. They warn Cari that she must be very cautious around Schneider and his crew. Benito discovers a hole in the lawn, beneath which lies an enormous safe that contains the gold. Schneider discovers Benito's Ten Bells affiliation, forcing Antonio to rescue Benito. Cari leaves the house and goes to stay at the apartment of her cousin and elderly aunt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Out_(Moore_book)"title="Inside Out (Moore book)">
The memoir begins with stories from Moore's tough upbringing, including her mother's first attempted suicide and the time Moore was raped at the age of 15. Moore's parents’ battled with alcoholism. Moore recalled using her fingers to dig pills out of her mother's mouth, which was just the first of several suicide attempts her mother made before she died in 1998. Moore called this event as a life-changing moment that ended her childhood. She learned that the man she grew up calling dad, Danny Guynes (who later died by suicide), was not her biological father.Moore began her modeling career, when she worked with a photographer, who took nude photos. Moore's photos were taken when she was underage and the photos were sold to magazines in Japan. She eventually landed a contract with Elite Model Management. While filming "No Small Affair", Moore revealed that she believed she had taken Jon Cryer’s virginity during their time together on set. "I played a young nightclub singer, and Jon Cryer played the nineteen-year-old photographer who falls in love with her, in his first movie role. Jon fell for me in real life, too, and lost his virginity to me while we were making that movie," she writes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_Than_Fanfiction"title="Stranger Than Fanfiction">
"Stranger Than Fanfiction" features five main characters: Topher Collins, Joey Davis, Sam Gibson, Moriko Ishikawa, and Cash Carter. The first is described as intelligent and as having a close, but stifling relationship with his mother and his brother, the latter of whom has cerebral palsy. Joey Davis is an African-American character and an aspiring actor; he struggles with coming out to his homophobic dad, a prominent Catholic preacher in the town. Sam Gibson is a closeted transgender character; his friends repeatedly misgender him through the novel. Sam experiences difficulty with coming out to his mom, a beauty queen, and his friend Topher, who is in love with him. Mo Ishikawa is a Japanese-American creative writer and she aims to become a published author. Finally, Cash Carter is described as a “rough-around-the-edges” actor who has starred on the "Wiz Kids" show since he was twelve years old. He's a good-looking celebrity who grew up in the spotlight, but yearns for autonomy.All of the characters, excluding Cash Carter, are high school seniors who are united by their love for the show "Wiz Kids". Each dreams of escaping the small, mundane suburb of Downers Grove, Illinois, but before they head off to college, the four decide to go on a final road trip together. Topher jokingly sends an invitation to their favorite actor Cash Carter. The actor, wanting a little adventure in his life, takes the students by surprise and accepts their invitation. The entirety of the book centers on their road-trip adventures as they drive from Illinois to California. Along the way, they run into some scuffles, reveal some dark secrets, and form strong friendships.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lent_(novel)"title="Lent (novel)">
In Renaissance Florence, Girolamo Savonarola is a Dominican friar with the gift of prophecy and the ability to see and banish demons. After Lorenzo di Medici dies in 1492, Girolamo gradually becomes more and more involved in politics, eventually culminating in his execution in 1498, and subsequent damnation to Hell.He then finds himself in 1492 Florence again, and begins trying to change history.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_Song"title="Bone Song">
The novel is set in Tristopolis, a fantastic city where humans live side by side with zombies, wraiths, mages, witches, talking gargoyles and other mystical creatures. Death is a prominent theme in the culture of Tristopolis, with the characters using the names of Thanatos and Hades in place of "God", and the bones of the dead serve as the city's primary energy source.The story revolves around the police detective Donal Riordan who is assigned to protect the opera diva Maria daLivnova against the Black Circle, a group of assassins who target gifted artists with the intent of trafficking their bones. After Riordan fails his mission, he realizes that he was set up as a pawn by his higher-ups, and is recruited into a task force which investigates the Black Circle and their connection to the higher ranks of the Tristopolis society. At the same time, Donal falls in love with his new superior, the beautiful zombie woman Laura Steele, and they begin a passionate romantic relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dolphin_Street_(novel)"title="Green Dolphin Street (novel)">
In the 19th century in the Channel Islands, the sisters Marianne and Marguerite fall in love with the same man, William Ozanne. He emigrates to New Zealand, and writes home asking the one he loves to join him and become his wife, but by a slip of the pen he names the wrong sister. When Marianne arrives instead of his beloved Marguerite, he accepts the inevitable and strives to make their marriage a success. After many years, William and Marianne return to the Channel Islands with their daughter.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangerine_(Mangan_novel)"title="Tangerine (Mangan novel)">
Two former college roommates, Alice and Lucy, are reunited in Tangier in 1956 where Alice lives with her husband, John. Lucy, still dangerously obsessed with Alice, arrives in Tangier unannounced, eager to pick up where their relationship ended, badly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Day,_House_of_Night"title="House of Day, House of Night">
Although nominally a novel, "House of Day, House of Night" is rather a patchwork of loosely connected disparate stories, sketches, and essays about life past and present in the author's adopted home of Krajanów, a Polish village in the Sudetes near the Polish-Czech border. While some have labeled the novel Tokarczuk's most "difficult" piece, at least for those unfamiliar with Central European history, it was her first book to be published in English.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulwe"title="Sulwe">
Sulwe has the darkest skin in her family and in her school. She wishes for her skin to be lighter, but through a supernatural experience, she comes to love her dark skin color.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Chair_for_My_Mother"title="A Chair for My Mother">
"A Chair for My Mother" is told from the first-person point of view of a young girl who watches her mother work hard to bring home money, specifically tips to put into a large jar. The little girl says that they are saving up the coins for a new chair, because their old furniture had burned up in a fire at their old house. She tells the events of the fire and how she, her mother, and her grandmother had to go stay with her aunt and uncle. Her aunt and uncle then moved downstairs, so the girl's mother was left to fill the apartment. Everyone in the neighborhood pitched in to help them decorate their new place bringing a rug, new curtains, a kitchen table and more. The story returns to present day, a year after the fire. The jar is now full, so they count up all the change and put them in rolls. They tried many different chairs until they found the perfect one, red with pink flowers on it. The story wraps up with the girl, her mother, and her grandmother spending time together enjoying their new chair.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Laughing_Monsters"title="The Laughing Monsters">
Part OneRoland Nair, of Danish-American descent, arrives in Freetown, Sierra Leone from Amsterdam after a 10-year absence. He is 38 years-of-age. A NATO employee and CIA fiber-optic specialist, he trafficks high-value intelligence. He returns to Africa to renew his friendship with his former confederate Michael Adriko. Michael, a 36-year-old Ugandan of Arab-African descent, is a US trained combat mercenary, and a profiteer during the genocidal African wars of the 1990s. Nair (who goes by his last name) hopes to reestablish their lucrative partnership - and to collect information on Michael for Nato Intelligence Interoperability Architecture (NIIA). Tina is Nair's lover and a former NATO attorney in the Netherlands who unwittingly collaborates in his schemes. Nair goes to a NIIA safehouse in Freetown and collects top secret documents: locations of maps of US military fiber-optics cables throughout West Africa and GPS coordinates of NATO safehouses he has arranged to fence for cash.Nair meets with Michael and his fiancée, Davidia St. Claire, a twenty-something Coloradan of African heritage who is a PhD candidate. Her father was once the garrison commander of the 10th Special Forces Group at Fort Carson, where Micheal trained for clandestine operations. Michael announces grandiose plans to establish himself and Nair as new-age warlords on adjoining estates in Africa. He divulges no details for his scheme.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiskadoro"title="Fiskadoro">
The story opens 60 years after a global nuclear holocaust. Only tiny enclaves of humans survive, one these in "Twicetown", in the region of the Florida Keys. Separate enclaves exist in the Everglades and at an Army compound, each with their own subcultures. The archives that could serve to reveal human history have been destroyed in the holocaust, and the surviving generations struggle to understand their origins. The 100-year-old Grandmother Wright is the only survivor whose life spans both pre- and post-apocalyptic periods. With the Christ-like adolescent boy, Fiskadoro, she attempts to discover the key to understanding the nature of human existence. Her grandson, Mr. Cheung, embarks on his own futile search for wisdom. Only Fiskadoro achieves an epiphany that leads him to genuine enlightenment.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_World"title="The Name of the World">
"The Name of the World" is told from a first-person point-of-view by its narrator, Michael Reed. Reed is a 50-year-old adjunct professor at a Midwestern university. He suffers from a crippling sense of loss and guilt due to the deaths of his wife and 5-year-old daughter in an automobile accident. As the years pass and—to his dismay—he finds he can recall their faces only with great difficulty. Reed's oppressive grief becomes a chronic obsession.Reed makes a number of feeble attempts to break out of his mundane existence in academia—with little success—until he meets the 26-year-old student performance artist and amateur stripper, Flower Cannon. Her indulgence in New-Age jargon and alien-abduction narratives fascinates Reed, and he begins to follow Flower to various venues: a casino, where he is punched in the face by a co-gambler; a Young Goodman Brown-like Mennonite religious service where he denounces God; and finally an assignation at Flower's studio. Though they do not engage in sexual intimacy, the encounter serves as an epiphany for Reed, providing him with an avenue to escape from his obsessive necrophilia—and towards an affirmation of life. The story closes with Reed serving as a journalist near Iraq during Operation Desert Storm.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detectives_in_Togas"title="Detectives in Togas">
## "Detectives in Togas".During a Greek vocabulary class in the Xanthos School, Rufus plays a prank on Caius involving a wax tablet with the inscription "Caius is an idiot". Caius takes offense and starts a fight with Rufus, and Xantippus permanently dismisses Rufus from his school. When the pupils (sans Caius, who is skipping the day) arrive at the school the next morning, they find Xantippus locked inside his closet. Xantippus tells them that he was knocked out by a burglar the night before. He also admits that Rufus' dismissal was only meant to be a wholesome lesson and that he is welcome to return.The boys head to inform Rufus about the good news when they discover the words "Caius is an idiot" painted on the wall of the local Minerva temple. Caius' sister Claudia warns them that her father has seen the graffiti and that Caius has implicated Rufus. The boys rush to Rufus to warn him. Rufus swears that he didn't commit the desecration and surmises that someone else must have forged his handwriting. The boys return to the Xanthos School to get the wax tablet, but find it missing. Instead, they discover a gold chain which Xantippus recognizes as the property of the burglar. On a billboard featuring the daily public news is a writ describing the desecration and blaming Rufus by name. The boys return to Rufus's house, but his mother tells them that Rufus has been arrested. As they search Rufus' room, they find his clothes thoroughly soaked.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beartown_(novel)"title="Beartown (novel)">
The junior hockey team is the backbone of the small town of Beartown, where a win in the national games would mean more resources given to the team. The star of the team is 17-year-old Kevin Erdahl, whose talent is so outstanding that the entire junior team has been built around him since he was about seven years old. Peter Andersson is the General Manager of the team, and the new coach is David, after the previous coach was fired by the council for not focusing on winning enough. Peter's family consists of his wife Kira, and his children Maya and Leo. Maya is close friends with another girl, Ana.The novel opens with the team and the community preparing for a key semi-final game. Recognizing that lack of speed is a weakness, Sune and David agree to add underage junior Amat to improve their chances. Amat is grateful to be on the team, especially for his mother, who works as a cleaner. Beartown wins the semi-final, at least partly because the opposing team was not prepared to defend Amat's speed.On the night of the semi-final victory, Kevin's parents are out of town. This gives Kevin the opportunity to host a big party for his team and many other teenagers from the community. At the party, many of the teenagers are drinking and indulging in marijuana use and the team members boast about having sex with the supportive female fans. Maya and Kevin sneak off to an upstairs bedroom to make out. Maya resists Kevin's advances, and he proceeds to rape her. Amat, himself drunk and harboring feelings for Maya, stumbles in to witness the rape. Maya takes advantage of Amat's intrusion to free herself from Kevin.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Difficulty_of_Being_Good"title="The Difficulty of Being Good">
Book uses the examples from Hindu Epic, Mahabharata, to illustrate and demonstrate that how becoming good is difficult for an ordinary man. Book simplifies the lessons from the epic in various chapters and uses characters like Yudhisthira, Krishna, Arjuna and Karna to explain the importance of Dharma i.e. righteousness. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Atlas"title="After Atlas">
"After Atlas" takes place on Earth forty years after the departure of the spaceship "Atlas" to find God. No word of the fate of the mission has been received. Carlos Moreno works for the Ministry of Justice in northern Europe and is investigating the death in Dartmoor, England of Alejandro Casales, leader of the Circle, a religious cult in Texas. Carlos knew Alejandro as a child when he had been a member of the Circle. His mother had abandoned Carlos and his father when he was a baby to join the Pathfinder on "Atlas", and Alejandro had taken them in. Carlos fled the cult as a teenager, and destitute, he became a corporate government indentured slave. He was trained as a murder investigator and contracted to the MoJ.Carlos discovers that Alejandro was not murdered, but committed suicide. The Americans, who had been watching the investigation closely, hid the truth about the leader. Carlos is unhappy that the case is closed and is determined to find out why Alejandro killed himself. But Stefan Gabor, a wealthy businessman, buys Carlos's contract and instructs him to go to Texas, ostensibly to attend Alejandro's funeral, and locate and return Travis, Stefan's husband, to him. At the Circle, Carlos finds Travis and learns that he had left Stefan to join the cult where he would be out of reach. Stefan had coerced Travis into marrying him when he found out that Travis had hacked into Stefan's company's systems to expose corporate injustice. Stefan made him choose between being owned or killed. But Travis hacked his way to freedom and was allowed into the Circle when he agreed to share Stefan's secrets with them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Speckled_Bird"title="The Speckled Bird">
## First version.The first version, written in early 1897, is basically a tale of idealized love, informed by Plato's thought and a highly valuable work of art. It is set in the Aran Islands, where the young hero's peculiar father has built a house and keeps the customary prayer hours until, after the Virgin Mary appears in a vision, he dedicates himself solely to visions. A visit by the beautiful young heroine fills the hero with romantic love that accompanies the mystical reverence he has bequeathed from his father, although the hero himself does not see any Marian apparition, in contrast to his father's ones.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_(novel)"title="Marina (novel)">
The novel begins with Oscar's reasoning about the past. And the main events start at the end of September 1979 in Barcelona. The novel narrates two parallel stories.The principal one is the history of Marina and Oscar. It is touching and emotional. The meeting of a mysterious girl called Marina completely changes the sentimental part of Oscar's life. One day she takes him to the cemetery of Sarriá where tells about the peculiar "lady in black" that comes here on the last Sunday of every month at ten o’clock in the morning. That Sunday was no exception. Eventually, they decide to follow the woman and find out more about her. This shadowing involves them into an entangled and dangerous adventure.Then, the novel focuses on an enigmatic Mijail Kolvenik's life and his company. Mijail is a genius in creating of orthopaedic articles and medical prosthesis. He is motivated by an obsession to overcome the death and errors of human deformations. Tired of genetic degeneration that deforms and atrophies him, Kolvenik reconstructs his body before the illness entirely consumes him. "He’d turned into a hellish creature, stinking of the rotten flesh with which he had rebuilt himself..." Using the essence of "Teufel," –the black butterfly that habits the sewage system –he develops a serum that sustains his life. After 30 years of his official death, Mijail Kolvenik comes back looking for the essence that maintains him alive. He has resurrected like the black butterfly from the sewages that "feeds on its young, and when it buries itself to die, it takes with it one of its larvae, which it devours when it comes back to life".
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Burnt_Child"title="A Burnt Child">
"Set in a working-class neighborhood in Stockholm, the story revolves around a young man named Bengt who falls into deep, private turmoil with the unexpected death of his mother. As he struggles to cope with her loss, his despair slowly transforms to rage when he discovers his father had a mistress. But as Bengt swears revenge on behalf of his mother's memory, he also finds himself drawn into a fevered and conflicted relationship with this woman - a turn that causes him to question his previous faith in morality, virtue, and fidelity." (from Stig Dagerman US website)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starless_Sea"title="The Starless Sea">
The Starless Sea does not have a linear plot, but rather is a pastiche of a modern narrative, folk tales, mysterious biographical snippets, stories within stories within stories, and the made-up history of the fantastical world within which it takes place, all interlocking and intertwining.The modern narrative follows Zachary Ezra Rawlins, who is a graduate student at a New England university. One day he finds in the library a book called "Sweet Sorrows" with no author or publication information, and is amazed to discover that among its fairy tales and textual snippets, it also tells stories about him, and especially of an incident when he was a child, and came across a magical door. Afraid to discover magic isn't real, he demurred to go through it. Sweet Sorrows, however, describes the magical library on the other side of the door, and the Starless Sea upon which it sits.Zachary sets out on a quest to find out more, and finds a literary masquerade ball in Manhattan, where he meets two other characters central to the book: Mirabel, who he later discovers is a denizen of the magical underground world upon the Starless Sea, and Dorian. Dorian steals Sweet Sorrows from Zachary, and blackmails him into breaking into the premises of a secret Guardian society to retrieve a book that he, Dorian, requires. This mission and the action that ensues end up with Mirabel saving Zachary and taking him though a doorway in a park. Here, Zachary first encounters the magical realm he read about earlier, and meets The Keeper, who is in charge of the sanctuary they all reside in while there, and Rhyme, an acolyte in charge of the library and its books.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Drowning_Deep"title="Into the Drowning Deep">
Seven years prior to the start of the story, the "Atargatis" is lost at sea. The ship was sent to the Mariana Trench by Imagine Entertainment, which specializes in filming B movies about mythical creatures. Though the ship is recovered weeks later, there is no trace of the crew. Leaked footage from the ship appears to show mermaids slaughtering the crew. The public is highly skeptical of the video and it is largely believed that the footage was being created for a mockumentary. Though some believe the footage is proof of the existence of mermaids, the incident is largely forgotten by popular culture.Theodore Blackwell is an Imagine representative who begins recruiting interested parties for a second voyage to the Mariana Trench aboard the "Melusine". His goal is to prove the existence of mermaids and to capture a live specimen, restoring the reputation of Imagine. He is accompanied by several hundred scientists and crew members, including his estranged wife Dr. Jillian Toth, Tory Stewart, Imagine reporter Olivia Sanderson, and the three Wilson sisters, all scientists.At the Mariana Trench, Heather Wilson attempts to become the first human to reach the Challenger Deep in a submersible. She is killed by mermaids, proving their existence. Theodore captures a mermaid and keeps it in a tank. Over the course of several days, scouting parties of mermaids kill several crew members. Olivia and Tory begin a romantic relationship. The ship is then swarmed by mermaids, resulting in the deaths of most of the crew members. As the ship's safety systems fail, Dr. Toth works to unravel the mysteries of mermaid physiology and save the remaining crew. Hallie Wilson learns to communicate with the captive mermaid via sign language, which saves several crew members from being eaten. Tory realizes that all of the mermaids are actually male, and that the female is a ship-sized behemoth who is slowly moving toward the ship. She uses undersea lights to repel the female, and Olivia helps repair the ship's dysfunctional safety shutters. The surviving crew members are rescued days later.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Particular_Sadness_of_Lemon_Cake"title="The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake">
The story begins before Rose's ninth birthday, when her mother, Lane, bakes her a cake for the occasion. Rose knows that Lane is unhappy with her life, but Lane's emotions show otherwise. From the looks of the way the cake was baked, Rose can tell that her mother feels oppressed. Once she realizes that she can taste emotions in the foods that she eats, she quickly comes to dislike it. Rose makes negative comments about the food she is consuming and Lane seems to think that she has done something wrong within her cooking. Rose's father is oblivious to the fact that anything is going on per usual, and her brother thinks that his sister has gone insane.Rose's brother whose name is Joseph has a friend named George. George is the only person who seems to think that Rose is not alright. He is very warmhearted towards Rose and designs an experiment to see how strong her abilities are. The conclusion of the experiment is that Rose is able to detect the emotion in the food she eats in those who cannot comprehend the emotions they are feeling themselves. One day Rose eats a pie that Lane baked and Rose collapses to the floor. Lane takes Rose to the hospital and Rose demands that they get rid of her mouth. Once the shock from what happened is gone. Rose then realizes that if she is to speak about her ability she will come off as insane.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Furball"title="Princess Furball">
A motherless Princess, often lonely but skilled in writing, reading, dancing, and cooking thanks to her maternal figure--her nurse (nanny) who recently passed away--has her hand in marriage promised to an ogre by her father, the king, who did not pay very much attention to her, against her consent; her father had brokered a deal, trafficking her in exchange for fifty wagons of silver. The princess is horrified and stalls the wedding by requesting of her father the seemingly impossible task of conjuring four bridal gifts--a dress "as golden as the sun," a dress "silvery as the moon," and a dress "as glittering as the stars." She also requests a coat made from a thousand types of fur. Unfortunately, her father is able to fulfill her wishes, meaning that she will have to marry the ogre.Left with no choice, the princess flees with her newfound belongings as well as a golden ring, thimble, and miniature spinning wheel her mother had given her. Wearing her coat of a thousand furs, the princess trudges in the cover of night, through snow, deep into a forest which takes her to a foreign kingdom. The king there is out hunting with his men in the morning and happen upon the princess sleeping in the hollow of a tree where she had spent the night. They capture her and put her to work in the palace kitchen, under the watch of a cranky cook. Her quarters are a woodshed near the kitchen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_How_You_Lose_the_Time_War"title="This Is How You Lose the Time War">
As agents Red and Blue travel back and forth through time, altering the history of multiple universes on behalf of their warring empires, they leave each other secret messages—at first taunting, but gradually developing into flirtation and then love. When Red's commanding officer detects the interaction between Red and Blue, she forces Red to send Blue a message that will kill Blue when it is read. After Blue is killed, Red time-travels to Blue's childhood to give her immunity to the poisoned message, allowing her to survive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_and_Only"title="First and Only">
In the 41st Millennium, the Tanith First light infantry regiment of the Imperial Guard is part of the massive Imperial force fighting to retake the Sabbat Worlds from the forces of Chaos. The regiment is informally called the "First And Only" (because it was actually formed from the survivors of three regiments raised just before their homeworld of Tanith was destroyed by the enemy), or sometimes "Gaunt's Ghosts", after their commanding officer, Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt, and their superlative skills at stealth and infiltration tactics.During their latest combat theatre, the Ghosts are instrumental in re-taking the world of Fortis Binary from the enemy, partnered with the Vitrian Dragoons regiment, while another regiment, the Jantine Patricians, feel cheated of glory.Granted temporary R&amp;R on Pyrites, the Ghosts escape a trap laid for them by the Patricians. Gaunt is contacted by an old friend, Fereyd, who warns him that the army's superior, Lord General Dravere, is conspiring to supplant Warmaster Macaroth as supreme commander of the campaign, and something hidden on the campaign's next target world, Menazoid Epsilon, is vital to the conspiracy.While en route to Menazoid Epsilon, Gaunt's subordinate, Major Rawne, is abducted by Patrician soldiers and brutally interrogated by Inquisitor Heldane, who is assisting General Dravere's plans. The Ghosts rescue Rawne, and Heldane is badly wounded.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Junction_Chronicles"title="The Junction Chronicles">
## "The Placebo Effect".In a prologue set in 1988, Decker Roberts, aged 22, stands in Chartres Cathedral, where he meets a monk who asks whether he has decided to stay. Brother Malcolm offers to teach him everything he knows and in return, the cathedral and ministry will become his home, and he will avoid "the room with no windows – and the hanging man".The young Roberts knew then, as the older Roberts knows now, that the monk spoke the truth, as he always knows when anyone speaks the truth, a unique benefit of his particular form of synaesthesia, a neurological condition. For years, this talent has proven to be a lucrative sideline to his regular work as a theatre director and acting coach based in The Junction, Toronto. Roberts is hired by companies because he can tell them if their potential recruits are lying. He leads a successful double life, carefully compartmentalized with a myriad of alter egos. His inner life, however, is one of sorrow, having lost his wife to ALS and missing his estranged son, Seth. He is also disturbed by the excessive number of churches in the area. He believes they are there to prevent an evil from re-appearing. He senses its existence when he walks the streets and feels the Junction "hunch around him in the cold."
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Deadly_Summer_(novel)"title="One Deadly Summer (novel)">
Eliane, or "Elle", a beautiful young woman settles into a mountain village with her Austrian mother (whom the local people mistake for a German and call 'Eva Braun') and disabled father Gabriel. Soon she becomes talk of the town because of her aloof but at the same time, sexually provocative behavior. She has an affair with Florimond Montecciari, nicknamed Ping-Pong, a car mechanic and volunteer fireman. Soon Eliane insinuates herself into the Montecciari household, and starts inquiring about Ping-Pong's late father, and the old piano that the family keeps in the barn. It turns out that Eliane is out to avenge the long-ago rape of her own mother by three men who had arrived at her isolated house in a van which contained an old piano which they were delivering. Eliane is the child of that rape, and doesn't know her real father.Since the father of the Montecciaris is already dead, she decides to take revenge on the two suspects who are still alive: Leballech and his brother-in-law Touret. She poses as a young teacher and rents an apartment from Touret to be closer to her targets. At the same time she marries Ping-Pong. Soon after the wedding, she disappears and is later found in Marseille. She has regressed into childhood, and has to be institutionalized in a clinic. Seeing his wife's mental state, Ping-Pong believes that Eliane is the victim of Leballech and Touret who prostituted her, according to the rumors she spread before she had lost her mind. He tracks down and shoots both men before realizing his mistake. He discovers that Eliane was wrong: her adoptive father Gabriel had long ago shot the real culprits. Ping-Pong is arrested and recounts the whole story to his attorney.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brotherhood_of_the_Bolt"title="Brotherhood of the Bolt">
A wizard of the evil Brotherhood of the Bolt, Morlach the Malicious, plans to break into the Barrow of Shaltor Plain in order to find something that will either allow him to become a powerful lich, or to rise to power in the locality.Several scenarios are detailed that a game-master can develop into a series of adventures. Plots include including an expedition to a tomb and an attempt to enter a guarded castle undetected.The book also includes new traps, monsters and detailed histories and descriptions of non-player characters.The scenarios are not keyed to any particular role-playing game system, so the game-master must choose a game system and adapt the material to it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thongor_Against_the_Gods"title="Thongor Against the Gods">
The Druids of Yamath, defeated in the previous volume, plot with the Sarks of Shembis and Tsargol to destroy their mutual enemy Thongor of Valkarth and restore their dominion. They resolve to have his beloved, Sumia of Patanga, abducted by assassin Zandar Zan, using her to lure Thongor into a trap. The scheme goes awry; Sumia falls into the sea from Zandar's airboat, and is rescued by exiled Rmoahal tribesman Shangoth, while Zandar himself, fleeing from the pursuing Thongor, crashes into a mountain. Fearing both dead, Thongor exits his own airboat to search for them, only to have Zandar, who has survived, steal it.The stranded Thongor happens on Shangoth's father, the Rmoahal chieftain, being tortured by the shaman who exiled them, and rescues him. Meanwhile, Sumia and Shangoth are taken captive by Adamancus, one of the Nine Magicians of Zaar who are the secret power behind the Yamath Druids.Thongor overtakes Zandar Zan, who falls to his doom from the airboat. In the recovered boat, Thongor arrives at Adamancus's lair in time to save Sumia and Shangoth from being sacrified to a devil the magician has summoned.With the Rmoahals' aid he goes on to defeat the combined forces of Shembis and Tsargol, which then become part of his empire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thongor_in_the_City_of_Magicians"title="Thongor in the City of Magicians">
The eight survivors of the Nine Magicians of Zaar, whose colleague Adamancus was killed in the previous volume, cloak their Rmoahal henchmen in invisibility, enabling them to capture their nemesis Thongor. The Rmoahal take him to their castle to turn him over to their masters. He escapes into its catacombs where he destroys an ancient worm god, but is retaken by the Zaarians. Mardanax of Zaar then flies him on a pterodactyl to the city of magicians.Thongor's ally, the exiled Rmoahal prince Shangoth, infiltrates the city to rescue him. The two manage to turn the tables on the magicians, reflecting their own spells against them. Only Mardanax escapes the slaughter.The book includes a frontispiece map by the author of part of Lemuria.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thongor_at_the_End_of_Time"title="Thongor at the End of Time">
Seeking vengeance on his enemy, evil magician Mardanax of Zaar, infiltrates Patanga, capital city of Thongor's growing Lemurian empire. He succeeds in striking Thongor down and drugging his wife Queen Sumia into pliability. Under Mardanax's sway she agrees to wed the nobleman the Zaarian has marked out to be his puppet ruler.The young officer Charn Thovis, fearing for the safety of Thongor and Sumia's young son Thar, spirits the prince away, but a giant flying lizard forces their airboat down and the two fall into the hands of Barim Redbeard's pirates from the rogue city-state of Tarakus. Concealing their identities, the two at first are able to join the crew, but Thar is soon found out and taken hostage by the pirate king Kashtar.Meanwhile, Thongor's spirit-form passes through a gloomy netherworld, receiving messages regarding his destiny, culminating in a personal encounter with Father Gorm, chief of the Nineteen Gods, who tells him how he has been marked for greatness and must return to the world of the living to complete his work. He is granted visions of a future extending from his own impending conquest of the whole continent through several cataclysms in which the civilization of Lemuria is succeeded by that of Atlantis, and ultimately, "at the end of time," early Egypt. The culmination of his historical vision is thus the beginning of our own recorded history. The author implies that Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age and its premier hero Conan the Barbarian fits into this grand panorama.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thongor_Fights_the_Pirates_of_Tarakus"title="Thongor Fights the Pirates of Tarakus">
Kashtar, ruler of the pirate city-state of Tarakus, joins forces with a wizard who has dabbled in the forbidden secrets of lost Nianga, among them, a ray that causes madness--"the Gray Death," as it is known to its victims. With it, Kashtar hopes to conquer all Lemuria, and incidentally escape having his realm absorbed into the growing empire of Patanga, ruled by the upstart barbarian conqueror Thongor.After Kashtar takes the best ship in Patanga's fleet and captures Thongor's old friend Karm Karvus, Thongor determines to free him and gain intelligence by sneaking into Tarakus. Posing as a crewman of Barim Redbeard, the pirate captain who helped his son escape Kashtar in the previous volume, he suits deed to word, only to be separated from his allies before he can reach his goal. He has to continue on to his goal on his own.As Thongor approaches the city, he meets Karm Karvus, who has escaped on his own along with an imprisoned princess, and learns the pirate invasion fleet has set out for Patanga. Fortunately, they are able to link up again with Barim's ship and infiltrate the fleet as originally intended. Taking the ship bearing the death ray, they turn it on the enemy's own vessels. Once Tarakus is defeated in battle, it is annexed to Thongor's empire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_Water_(novel)"title="Death by Water (novel)">
The novel takes place partially in Tokyo but is primarily set in the forests of Shikoku and Kogito Choko's family home located in his hometown village in Shikoku. As a child in World War II, Kogito watched his father drown in a river during World War II. He returns to Shikoku in search of a red leather case which he believes contains documents that will answer the mysteries behind his father's life and death. He plans to use these documents to form the base of his new novel, which will be his final work.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elle_Kari"title="Elle Kari">
Elle Kari is almost four years old and lives in Lapland. There she lives in a house in winter and in summer in a hut made of logs and peat. Elle Kari loves Tjappo, her father's dog. One day Tjappo disappears. Elle Kari is very sad. But then her mother tells Elle Kari that Tjappo and her father will spend the summer in the mountains. There her father makes sure that the wolves do not tear the little reindeer kids apart. When autumn comes, Tjappo returns with the reindeers. Elle Kari is happy. When Elle Kari falls asleep in the evening, Tjappo guards her and thinks that he wants to go back to the mountains, but only if Elle Kari comes along.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matti_Lives_in_Finland"title="Matti Lives in Finland">
Matti lives on a farm in Finland. He has one friend named Merja. Merja has a nice grandfather, who Matti also likes to visit. In addition, Merja owns a dog named Kari, which Matti loves. Matti would also like to have his own animal, but he does not get it.One day when Merja falls into the sea and threatens to drown, Matti is able to save her. The two promise each other not to tell anybody about this.Some time later, Matti's father comes to the farm with a small calf, which he gives to Matti. From then on, Matti takes care of the calf every day and visits it constantly.However, one day, Merja's grandfather buys the calf from Matti's father. He wants to slaughter the calf for his birthday dinner. Matti is heartbroken, but Merja's grandfather does not make compromises, and when Matti's father wants to buy the calf, he refuses.Merja sees how desperate and sad Matti is and decides to talk to her grandfather. She asks how much she is worth to him. Her grandfather says she is worth all the money in the world. Then she says that her grandfather should give the calf to Matti, because Matti had saved her and she would no longer exist without Matti. This is the moment when the grandfather realizes how important the calf is to Matti and gives it to him. After this everyone celebrates grandfather's birthday.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noy_Lives_in_Thailand"title="Noy Lives in Thailand">
Noy lives with her parents in Thailand, in a small village near Bangkok. Noy would like to go to the big city. But her parents believe that she is still too small for it. Noy is more than pleased when her father actually wants to take her to Bangkok one day. Together, they go there by raft. Since Noy's father has to do some shopping, he tells Noy to wait for him on the raft. But Noy thinks the city is too exciting to wait there and leaves the raft. When Noy gets hungry, she wants to return to her father's raft. But she does not find the way back. After a long time she comes to a temple. She prays that she finds her father again, but at the same time she is so exhausted that she falls asleep on the spot. When she wakes up and leaves the temple, she sees her father standing there. He had already been worried about her. He takes Noy home. Along the way, Noy explains that Bangkok is good in two ways, it's good to get there, but just as good to leave again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirk_Lives_in_Holland"title="Dirk Lives in Holland">
Dirk lives in Holland in a city directly by the sea. His father is a fisherman and sometimes Dirk joins him while he goes fishing.Dirk would like to have a bike, but his parents can not afford it. The other children have bikes and drive together to the place where the sailing yacht of the Queen will pass by. Sadly, Dirk watches them.His friend Elleke can distract him for a while and they play with a rabbit in the garden. Then they try to reach the place, where the sailing yacht will pass by, by foot. However, they are too late and the boat is already gone. When Dirk tells his father about this, his father says that he wants to buy a bike for Dirk, but he has to save money for a long time.However, Dirk's grandparents have a surprise for Dirk. From their savings they buy a bike for him. Overjoyed, Dirk presents this to his friend Elleke.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Swedish_Cousins"title="My Swedish Cousins">
Bjorn lives in Dalarna. Dalarna is a part of Sweden, but Bjorn believes that Dalarna is all of Sweden. However, through his many cousins he learns that Sweden is much bigger than he thinks. Bjorn's grandmother gets a lot of mail from her grandchildren, which she reads to Bjorn.Maria and Anders live in Skåne. They write their grandmother from school and describe Mary's difficulties to sit still. After school, the siblings ride home with their bike. Then they ride a horse.Sigrid lives in a fishing village on the west coast by the sea. She writes to her grandmother about her school trip to Gothenburg. On this she saw a ship, which was larger than a house. In her own village, however, the boats are small and are often used for fishing and sailing. She also writes that she always goes to school by boat because the school is on an island. On the way back she is able do the homework on the boat.Johan and Eva live in the Swedish capital Stockholm. Johan tells his grandmother that the cat Pio, who she gave to Eva, is fine. He tells her that his sister Eva showed the city to Pio. However, Johan believes that Pio is not interested in city life, because he is a land cat. Johan thinks that Pio would prefer to go back to the countryside. Otherwise, Pio is fine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randi_Lives_in_Norway"title="Randi Lives in Norway">
Randi lives in Lofoten. Her father is a fisherman. At home, Randi plays a lot with her neighbor and friend Helga. One day, however, Randi prefers to play with Reidar. When Helga runs after her and asks if she can play with Randi, Randi throws a snowball right into Helga's face. Then she runs away with Reidar. Helga does not give up and follows the friends. However the children continue throwing snowballs at Helga. Helga runs home crying. In the evening Randi feels bad because she was so mean to Helga and Helga was so sad. When she wants to play with Helga the next morning, Randi is afraid that Helga does not want to see her again. But Helga wants to play with Randi and tells Randi that she really likes her, even though Randi had been mean to her the day before.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marko_Lives_in_Yugoslavia"title="Marko Lives in Yugoslavia">
Marko lives in Macedonia, at that time Yugoslavia. He has a little white pig, which runs away on market day. His mother explains to Marko and his brother Petor that they should look for the pig. Finally, they find it and play with it for a while. Then it is Petor turn to take care of the pig. However, the pig runs away again. Petor is not able to find it again. While searching for the pig, the boys are distracted by a wedding and other events, such as finding a secret cave. When Petor and Marko finally arrive home after a long day, the pig is already there. It has gone back there on its own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilibet,_Circus_Child"title="Lilibet, Circus Child">
Lilibet lives with her father and mother in a caravan. This belongs to a circus, in which Lilibet's parents work. Lilibet loves animals. Every day she feeds the two elephants, Babette and Lona, with apples.Every day Lilibet plays with her boyfriend Leo. They feel sorry for the tigers and the monkeys, who should not sit in cages but belong in the jungle. Leo would like to release the animals, but unfortunately, he has no say in the circus.Lilibet wants to become a circus rider. But Leo keeps telling her that she can not do that. Although Lilibet practices riding horses every day, she is confused by Leo's statements.The clown Teddy Ballon believes in Lilibet. He gives Lilibet a magic rope and explains that Lilibet can become a circus rider when she puts the magic rope around the tail of a horse and says hocus pocus Fidibus. Lilibet does that. However, she can not convince Leo that she will be a good horse rider. Lilibet is sad and is comforted by her father. He thinks that she will become a great circus rider. This convinces Lilibet. In the end she is standing on the back of a horse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mokihana_Lives_in_Hawaii"title="Mokihana Lives in Hawaii">
Mokihana lives in Hawaii where she has many friends. Originally the children's families came to Hawaii from different countries and cultures, but they all speak English. The friends meet each other almost every day and have many adventures. They are organising a secret birthday party for Anela, who turns ten. Mokihana and her friends are preparing flower wreaths for the party and Mokihana draws a picture of Anela's favourite dog Iki. Anela is surprised because she thought that everyone had forgotten her birthday. Together the friends celebrate her birthday, eat mangos, pineapple, banana, papayas, ice cream, cakes and drink orange juice. In addition, Anela gets chicks in a basket as a birthday present. She is overjoyed!
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khamba_Thoibi"title="Khamba Thoibi">
Khamba was a terrae filius, brought up by his elder sister Khamnu, who spared no pains for his safety and well-being. By the time he became a youth, he wanted to be of some help to his sister and came out in search of work. On the day he first moved out of his house, he happened to enter the residence of Chingkhu Nahaa Telheiba, the King's younger brother with its imposing house and spacious premises and there for the first time saw Thoibi, the only daughter of the prince, plying her needle in embroidery. The moment she saw Khamba, handsome and shapely in physique, she gave her heart away to him. But on the part of Khamba, at first he could not harbor such sentiments as he was conscious of his humble origin.Another man, Nongban, worked as a foil to Khamba. For a long time, there was no one in Moirang to beat him in race, wrestling and hockey, but with the appearance of Khamba, he is defeated and deprived of this honor. At first, Chingkhu Nahaa Telheiba took kindly to Khamba, and despite his offer to maintain the young man in his family, the latter insisted on singing for his supper which he did by tending the stall-fed fierce bull of the prince. As everybody was curious of Khamba's physical prowess, his sister then kept him in hiding for a while. Thoibi is heart-brokened and pines after him. From the grace of Lord Eputhou Thangjing, the two meet again on the Loktak lake. Their love is steady until the recalcitrant behavior and overzealous stance of Thoibi provokes her father to come in the way of the lovers in league with Nongban.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schell_Bullet"title="Schell Bullet">
As a result of gene manipulation, society is segregated by genes into "Majors" – intersex humans who maintain a monopoly on stronger genetic material – and lesser dual-sex "Minors". (Ikuhara stated that he chose to make the Majors intersex because he wished to create "a race which combines the good parts of both women and men.") Protagonist Ors Break is hired by the intergalactic trading company Balt Liner Corporation to pilot a schell, a bio-organic mecha, by claiming to be a Major. When the truth of his Minor status is revealed, he comes to an agreement with his superior, a Major named Delbee Ibus, to continue working for the organization.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numit_Kappa"title="Numit Kappa">
In the epic, there are two Sun Gods, who brighten the world simultaneously. One was to be slain in order to create the night. The hero, "Khwai Nungjeng Piba" was an expert archer, who shot "Taothuireng", one of the two Suns in the sky.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_Her"title="Loving Her">
## Chapters 1-5.The novel begins with an introduction to Renay's life and a look into her unhappy marriage to Jerome Lee Davis. A young black woman, Renay is a talented pianist, yet only plays for supplemental income in a supper club, called the Peacock Supper Club, a couple of nights a week. After Jerome Lee strikes her, Renay and her young daughter Denise leave him and move in with Terry Bluvard, Renay's new romantic interest, a wealthy white lesbian that she met at her work.Although the 'present day' in the novel begins with Renay's moving in with Terry, much of the novel is recounted in Renay's recountings of past events. Renay discusses her meeting of Jerome Lee, a popular and athletic football star, while in college. Jerome Lee courted Renay incessantly, but has no success until she is accused of perhaps not liking men, which is when she succumbs to a date with him. At the end of one of their dates, Jerome Lee forces himself upon Renay, raping and impregnating her with a child, Denise, that results in their marriage and incompletion of college. Following the birth of Denise, Jerome Lee begins to drink heavily and takes odd jobs, predominantly as a traveling hair supplies salesman, which he implements as a tool and guise for rampant marital infidelity. Just before Renay decides to leave him, Jerome Lee sells her childhood piano for liquor money, indicating Renay's last straw and a physical altercation between them that leads to Jerome Lee striking her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_for_Sale"title="Life for Sale">
Hanio Yamada is a 27-year-old copywriter for Tokyo Ad who, after a suicide attempt, quits his job and advertises his own life for sale in a Tokyo newspaper. Yamada's life is shaken up when he agrees to the increasingly bizarre requests of those who respond to his offer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enchantress_of_World's_End"title="The Enchantress of World's End">
Ganelon becomes the prisoner and object of the passion of the enchantress Zelmarine, Queen of Red Magic. When not fruitlessly wooing him, she sends him to her mind-prober Varesco, a Mentalist of Ning, himself subject to a secret lust for his Queen. During the probing, Ganelon's mental superpowers start to emerge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_of_World's_End"title="The Immortal of World's End">
Ganelon Silvermane encounters decaying island-city slipping into the water, but projecting an illusion of its former glory, the problem of scientific immortals, and the disastrous collision of a massive horde of the world's ultimate barbarians.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Barbarian_of_World's_End"title="The Barbarian of World's End">
Ganelon Silvermane offers himself as hostage to the barbarian Ximchak Horde, the worst band of barbarians to roam the plains. From a captive of the Horde, he rises to heights of heroism greater than ever before, becoming its leader and beginning to assume the full power of his mighty being. He takes his followers beyond the glass-walled Triple City to the Marvellous Mountains carved into gigantic friezes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_of_World's_End"title="The Pirate of World's End">
Ganelon Silvermane leaves the savage barbarian Ximchak Horde which he has civilized and sets out to rescue his kidnapped friend Kurdi.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennet_Lives_in_Ethiopia"title="Gennet Lives in Ethiopia">
Gennet is seven years old and lives in Ethiopia. Her name comes from Amharic and means paradise. One day, Gennet's little brother Mamo gets bitten by a poisonous snake. Now it's up to Gennet to get help. On her way to the doctor she sees monkeys, vultures and flamingos. When she has to cross a deep river, she is helped by a shepherd boy. Finally she arrives at the doctor's house. Immediately, the doctor drives with his jeep to Gennet's brother to help him. Gennet's brother is cured. As a reward, Gennet gets a yellow dress and a necklace at the market.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salima_Lives_in_Kashmir"title="Salima Lives in Kashmir">
Salima lives on a houseboat in Srinagar, which is the largest city in Kashmir. Salmia's younger brother Nazir goes to school while Salima stays home to look after her younger sister. Nazirs classmates are almost all boys. Only one girl is in the class. Nazir wants his sister Salima to come to school as well. However, his teacher tells him that his father and grandfather have to decide this. Nazir wants to talk with his grandfather, but his grandfather just laughs. He thinks that is a strange idea to send a girl to school. Furthermore he mentions that there are many things that Salima has to learn from her mother at home. Now, Salima wants to prove to her grandfather that she is very smart and is able to go to school. She helps her mother wherever she can. When Salimas grandfather meets Nazir's teacher, the teacher tells the old man, that he should let his granddaughter come to school. Finally the grandfather agrees. Salima is happy. After some time she already is able to read, write and sum up. She reads the newspaper to her grandfather.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonfall_(novel)"title="Moonfall (novel)">
In 2024, Charlie Haskell, the vice president of the United States, is on the Moon to inaugurate the first moonbase. An interstellar comet is discovered to be on course to impact the Moon and shatter it. A rescue mission gets underway to take the thousand-something population of the base off the Moon, with the support of the L1 space station (near the Earth-Moon L1 point) and Skyport, a larger geocentric space station.Haskell, in a moment of zealousness to show responsibility, promises the public to get off the Moon only after everyone else has. Subsequent analysis reveals that the existing rescue plan would result in about 10 people not being able to get off the Moon before the impact. The VP chooses to stick to his promise. Some volunteers, along with a few randomly selected people, also stay back.The rescue plan moves along, with the help of about 5 large spaceships, 'SSTOs'. The SSTOs dock with smaller ferry spaceships, 'moonbuses' and a 'Micro', in the orbit to take in passengers. Also, a last-minute risky plan of using the Micro to take off the last few people is put into action and it rescues the last group off the Moon just before impact.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amulet_(novel)"title="The Amulet (novel)">
In 1965, Dean Howell is disfigured and left in a vegetative stage after a shooting accident while training in the army. His wife Sarah and mother Jo bring him home to care for him. Jo blames many of the residents of their small town of Pinecone, Alabama, starting with the rifle's manufacturers, who are the largest company in the area. During a visit by an old friend, Jo gifts him an amulet that she claims her son wanted him to have.That evening the friend's family is killed in a house fire. The amulet is discovered among the smoldering ruins of the house by the sheriff's daughter who brings the amulet home and gives it to her mother. That night, the mother kills her husband with an ice pick and accidentally cuts her own throat.The amulet then makes its way through those who Jo accuses of responsibility for Dean's accident. Sarah is the only one who sees what might be the cause of these accidents, and along with her close friend Becca, the two set out to find the amulet before any more lives are ruined by its curse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Dream_House"title="In the Dream House">
"In the Dream House" begins with Carmen Maria Machado's living situation in Iowa City prior to her meeting the Dream House woman. Carmen shares a small two-bedroom apartment with her roommates John and Laura.In the first chapter, Machado reflects on her childhood years and tells a story about her time in grade school. Machado then elaborates on experiences in her childhood and environment while growing up. She goes on to discuss instances with her previous lovers, leading up to meeting and falling in love with "the woman in the dream house" who domestically abused her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_Refuge"title="Making Refuge">
"Making Refuge" is separated into three parts which represent different phases of Bantu refugee's experience and including Bestemen's own engagement with those experiences. Bestemen pieces their movement from living south of the Jabba Valley, to living in refugee camps in Kenya for over a decade and resettling in Lewiston, Maine. Bestemen wanted to know how people had survived the civil war, losing everything that they had, enduring abuses and trauma all while attempting to rebuild their lives in a country where it is known for its individualism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daybreakers_(novel)"title="The Daybreakers (novel)">
Eighteen-year-old Tyrel Sackett must flee his home in Tennessee because he killed a man who was trying to kill his brother, Orrin, who catches up with him, and so begins their travels west, to New Mexico Territory, where “Spanish land grants are being voided by fraud”. They face hostile Native Americans, Mexicans, and white men. They also make friends along the way. In Mora, Orrin and Tyrel start a ranch and bring their mother to live with them in their new home.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;William Tell Sackett, their oldest brother is mentioned, and he is the protagonist of the following Sackett novel, "Sackett" (1961).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_Wenckheim's_Homecoming"title="Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming">
Baron Béla Wenckheim, a 64-year-old Hungarian man, returns to his hometown after collecting a large gambling debt in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he was living in exile. He hopes to reunite with his childhood sweetheart Marika. However, upon hearing of his coming arrival the townspeople believe Baron Wenckheim possesses great wealth which he will bequeath to the town.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girls_Burn_Brighter"title="Girls Burn Brighter">
Poornima is a girl born into a poor family of weavers in the Indian village of Indravelli in Telangana. Her mother dies of cancer when she is 16. Soon after, Poornima’s father hires a local girl, 17-year-old Savitha, to help with the looms. Poornima and Savitha strike up a friendship. One night as Savitha is working at Poornima’s house, Poornima’s father rapes her. As punishment, the village elders rule that he must marry her. Savitha runs away from the village but falls into the hands of a pimp, called Guru, who forces her into prostitution.Meanwhile, Poornima has an arranged marriage to an accountant in the nearby village. Her father can only pay a portion of the dowry at the time of marriage but promises to pay the remaining within a year. A year passes but the dowry remains unpaid. Enraged, Poornima’s husband and mother-in-law douse her in hot oil, leaving her face permanently disfigured. Poornima flees and eventually finds her way to Guru after one of his scouts indicates he knew Savitha. Due to her disfigurement, she is saved from prostitution and instead hired to keep the ring's accounting books, a skill she picked up during her marriage.Over time, Poornima comes to learn that Savitha belonged to the ring and has been sent to Seattle, USA, supposedly as domestic help. Her arm was amputated so that she could obtain the necessary medical visa to enter the US. Determined to be reunited with her, Poornima convinces Guru to use her as a “shepherd” – a middleman to deliver girls from the pimp to foreign clients. Guru eventually agrees and she is assigned to shepherd a girl to Seattle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stars_at_Noon"title="The Stars at Noon">
The novel follows an unnamed American woman, supposedly a journalist, living in Managua, Nicaragua in 1984, during Sandinista rule. She originally traveled to Nicaragua as an observer for an anti-war group. She is disgusted with the corruption of both the Sandinistas and "the stupid CIA." She hustles as a prostitute at the Inter-Continental Hotel in Managua, hoping to leave Nicaragua one day. At the hotel, she eventually meets an unnamed English oil businessman whom she falls in love with. When the Englishman has a falling out with the Nicaraguans, the two flee together towards the southern border with Costa Rica. An American who is most likely a CIA agent tracks them and pressures her to sell out the Englishman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mere_Wife"title="The Mere Wife">
Dana Mills wakes up unsure of what has happened to her or why she is pregnant. She knows she is a member of the marines. She is interrogated and ends up in a mental hospital from which she escapes. She ends up near Herot Hall, a development built on top of the town where she used to live. She hides inside the mountain behind it, which has an abandoned train station and a lake; people think it is haunted. In it she gives birth to her son, Gren.Despite his mother's instructions, as Gren grows older he wishes to meet the people in Herot and becomes friends with Dylan, a young boy in the town. Willa, Dylan's mother, is introduced. Her mother, Diane, forced her into a marriage with Roger Herot, a plastic surgeon and heir of the Herot development. She acts as the perfect housewife (hiding alcoholism, a likely eating disorder, an unhappy marriage, and copious quantities of stress) and quickly notices something is amiss when Dylan begins to talk about his "imaginary" friend Gren. At a disastrous house party Dana appears searching for her son who has run down to play with Dylan. Dylan runs away with Gren as Roger follows them toward the mountain. Roger shoots a bear, thinking it is what took Dylan, but Dana believes that he has shot Gren, and so she murders Roger in retaliation. Following this, police officer Ben Woolf goes searching for Dylan. He finds Dylan, and Dana's severed arm, but he claims he killed Dana and Gren. He is acclaimed as a hero and Willa marries Ben.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_87"title="Boy 87">
Boy 87 starts with a boy named Shif. It begins in an unnamed dictatorship. It's a day like any other for Shif and his best friend, 'Bini'. They are at school. Shif reflects on what they want to do when they grow up and finish their military service for the country. They are both exceedingly smart; they skipped multiple grades and are about to begin military school early.After a few days, soldiers show up around the school, scouting for any children trying to evade military service. Shif discovers that his mother has lied to him about his father. She told Shif when he was younger that his father had died in hospital but in fact, he is still alive, but in prison.Soon after, Shif sees the soldiers near his home. When one soldier confronts him, Shif runs away back home. Things begin to escalate when Bini doesn't arrive at school the next day, then when Shif arrives home his mother tells him he has to leave without her or his sister. The government is after him. Shif packs everything he needs to take with him. Soldiers enter his home and search for evidence that he plans to leave. They find the packed bag. Shif and Bini are put on a truck which takes them to a prison.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Sleep_in_a_Sea_of_Stars"title="To Sleep in a Sea of Stars">
Kira Navárez is a xenobiologist in the year 2257 who plans to settle down with her fiance on a new colony in the Sigma Draconis system. Her last assignment is to investigate a crashed drone, which leads her to discover an alien reliquary. Inside, she awakens the Soft Blade, an ancient nanotechnology created by advanced, extinct beings known as the Vanished. The Soft Blade covers her body and binds itself to her will, but it is unaccustomed to serving humans.At her research base, the Soft Blade believes she is in danger and launches tendrils that impale everyone around her, including her fiance. She is taken into military quarantine, where a doctor, Carr, experiments on the Soft Blade, burning it and Kira with laser blasts despite her pleas for him to stop. Carr is interrupted by an attack from the Wranaui, aliens who worship the Vanished and had hidden the Soft Blade in the reliquary. Kira escapes and inadvertently causes an explosion that joins a damaged piece of the Soft Blade to both Carr and one of the Wranaui, creating a malevolent, corrupted being calling itself the Maw, which floats through space seeking to grow and spread despite its madness and pain. It eventually finds a planet and begins converting the planet's mass into interstellar ships containing Corrupted warriors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_(Cooper_novel)"title="Family (Cooper novel)">
## Within Swallow-Land.The novel begins with the ghost of Clora describing the start of slavery and her early life. Her mother Fammy was repeatedly raped by the Master of the Land bore him nine children, all of whom were sold by the Mistress of the Land by the time they were three years old. In order to combat this, Fammy had a child with another Black slave, who she named Clora. The torture of being a slave was too much for her, however, and Flora committed a murder-suicide with the Master of the Land, leaving Clora behind in the hands of Miz Elliz, another slave. The Master's son, the Young Master of the Land, took over in his place and eventually began raping Clora before she was even twelve years old, forcing her to give birth to several children, Always, Sun, Peach, and Plum. Fearing the sale of her children and her own death by the Mistress and Master of the Land, Clora tried to feed herself and her children poison tea. Only Clora died and her ghost followed the lives of all of her children, particularly the eldest child Always.Clora's children were constantly tormented by the Young Master's children with the Young Mistress, Loretta and Virginia. Virginia despised pretty slaves like Always and Peach because she felt that she was ugly. Loretta was sympathetic towards Sun as she could tell that they were related, giving him preferential treatment and assisting in multiple escape attempts. After a second, successful escape attempt Sun repeatedly asked Loretta to help Peach escape, only for Loretta to push her mother to sell Peach out of jealousy. The man that Peach was sold to was a nice man and eventually the two fell in love and moved to Scotland, where she changed her name to Peachel and her children grew in a wealthy household, became educated, and got high paying jobs. Sun was also able to gain happiness. When he was seventeen he was able to convince a business owner to let him work for only some food and a place to sleep. His hard work eventually convinces the business owner, Mr. DuBois, to promote Sun to work for his other businesses. Mr. DuBois's daughter also falls in love with Sun and they have children in a wealthy household.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_Friend_(novel)"title="Imaginary Friend (novel)">
Single mother Kate Reese and her son, Christopher, flee an abusive relationship in the middle of the night. Together, they find themselves drawn to the tight-knit community of Mill Grove, Pennsylvania.Initially, Mill Grove seems like the perfect place to settle down. Then Christopher vanishes for six days, until he emerges from the woods at the edge of town, unharmed but not unchanged. He returns with a voice in his head only he can hear and a resolve to build a treehouse in the woods by Christmas...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Snowman_(book)"title="The Snowman (book)">
One snowy winter's day, a boy builds a snowman who comes to life at the stroke of midnight. He and the boy play with appliances, toys and other bric-a-brac in the house, all while keeping quiet enough not to wake his parents.After they play with the lights on the family car, he prepares a feast that the duo eat by candlelight. The snowman takes the boy outside and they begin to fly over the South Downs and watch the sun coming up from Brighton pier before returning home. When the boy wakes in the morning, he finds that the snowman has melted.In a 2012 interview for the "Radio Times", Briggs noted "I don't have happy endings. I create what seems natural and inevitable. The snowman melts, my parents died, animals die, flowers die. Everything does. There's nothing particularly gloomy about it. It's a fact of life." He disputed the idea that the book is a Christmas book, noting that it was only the animated adaptation that introduces this element.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Churchill_Factor"title="The Churchill Factor">
Throughout the book, Johnson details the life of statesman, soldier and writer, and former Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill. Johnson praises Churchill's efforts as the leader during the Second World War, writing that "he alone saved our civilisation".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhong_Fong_(novel_series)"title="Zhong Fong (novel series)">
## "The Shanghai Murders: A Mystery of Love and Ivory".In or around 1993, Zhong Fong is the forty-four-year-old Head of Special Investigations for the District of Shanghai, and a widower. His investigation of brutal murders by the so-called Dim Sum Killer leads to a new inquiry into the death of his wife, in which the detective is himself implicated, causing emotional turmoil, exacerbated by the recent return to Shanghai of her lover, Canadian stage director Geoffrey Hyland. With help from the widow of one of the victims, the detective draws out the killer, but "police bosses resist his solution." The chase ultimately leads to a confrontation in a construction pit in the Pudong, and a fight to the death with a master assassin. Now officially blamed for the death of his wife, Zhong is a "convicted killer" and a "traitor" condemned to two and a half years in prison and then exile "beyond the Wall" to a remote and impoverished village in northwestern China near the Mongolian border.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Stay_Dumb"title="The Dead Stay Dumb">
Dillon, a small time gunman, seeks to make a big break, and he stumbles across other gangsters and their girls, with whom initially he strikes a chord but soon falls out. The book traces the ruthless and selfish journey of Dillon from nomadic gunman to rich Gangster in Kansas, and the consequences he faces on the way, with a never ending pursuit of crime after crime and adversaries to follow him. The moral of the book is "Crime never pays".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fearsome_Tales_for_Fiendish_Kids"title="Fearsome Tales for Fiendish Kids">
## The Cat Burglar.Fedora Funklefink is a notorious con artist who uses any way she can to avoid responsibilities or get rich quick. She forces girls to pay to use the girls' toilets, forges her mother's handwriting so that she could sit out of P. E. lessons, makes other schoolchildren pay to lick her mints, refuses to let her father use his car until he paid her for cleaning the windscreen, and uses mirrors in exams to cheat. On the way to plan her next get-rich-quick scheme, she spots a poster for a missing cat, offering a £10 reward. She rips the poster off, runs home, changes into a "hunting" costume, and kidnaps a black stray behind her garden. The mother of the missing cat's owner answers the front door when Funklefink goes to deliver but her daughter, Angela Tearful, runs out past her mother, excited about reuniting with her cat, and sobs when she sees the black stray. Believing Tearful to be insane, Funklefink sneaks away with the cat to try something else.The black stray is given a makeover with paints, boot polish and anything Funklefink can find until it matched the description on the poster. However, Tearful and her mother are not convinced, possibly because the "makeup" was dripping and Funklefink's clothes were covered in it. The next day, she returns with a white Persian cat but she is denied money. Then Funklefink returned with a dog, then a tennis racket, and then a pepperoni pizza, but Tearful's mother yells "NO!" and slams the door every time. Funklefink finally leaves, officially out of ideas and reluctantly decides to abandon the plan. Suddenly, a cat jumps out of a bush and is ran over by a car. It had white paws, a black tail, a marmalade body, and a diamond shape in its forehead. Funklefink realises it is Tearful's missing cat and takes her home to look alive with a bicycle pump. "Not you again," groans Tearful's mother when she sees Funklefink outside her the front door. Funklefink shows off the dead cat and uses it as a ventriloquist's dummy to convince the family to hand her £20. Tearful decides to give Funklefink a £50 note and takes the cat in for a bath.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_Bees"title="Berry Bees">
Lola, Bobby, and Juliette are a trio of girls who have exceptional talents, friendship, and a secret life. The mysterious Ms. Berry turned them into Bees agents in the B.I.A. (Bees Intelligence Agency). With their ability to hack systems, read minds, and agility, they were sent on missions that adult agents could not do.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostly_Tales_for_Ghastly_Kids"title="Ghostly Tales for Ghastly Kids">
## Grandmother's Footsteps.The narrator cannot sleep because a long-fingernailed, messy-haired figure (presumably a man) is tormenting him outside of his window, promising to take him on a magic carpet ride to a magical breadstick land if he opens the window. Terrified, the narrator calls for his grandmother and tells her everything. They listen to the man's tapping outside and Grandma decides to distract the narrator with a ghost story. The story is about a boy named Jolyon, who is reading a book in his bedroom when he hears loud tapping from outside, which becomes faster and faster. He pulls his duvet over his head and watches the silhouette of a giant hand tap the window and smash the glass. He screamed in fear and his grandmother ran into the room, armed with a bedpan. The end.The narrator is annoyed because Grandma promises that a ghost will appear. Grandma explains that the tapping comes from the branches of the apple tree moving in the wind and the storm has caused the branch to break the window. As for the ghost, she says, "Here I am!" She walks towards the door, stops to take off her head, and disappears; outside, footsteps are heard fading away. The narrator does not sleep for a week.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Frolic_of_the_Beasts"title="The Frolic of the Beasts">
## Prologue.In a photograph, three smiling individuals–Ippei Kusakado, his wife Yūko, and the youthful Kōji–are seen standing on the harbor wall in Iro Village, a rural fishing port in the western part of the Izu Peninsula in Shizuoka Prefecture. The photograph was taken on a hot summer day. It was taken only days before "the final wretched incident". It was immediately sent to the chief priest of Taisenji temple. In Iro, there are also rice paddies as well as the Kusakado greenhouses, located beside the Kusakado family home. On the mountainside lies a new graveyard, reaching halfway up the slope of the mountain from its base. In spite of opposition from the villagers, the chief priest of Taisenji temple erected the new graves with the money that was entrusted to him. Ippei's grave lies on the right, Kōji's on the left, and Yūko's in the center. Yūko's, however, is only a "living monument", reserved for her eventual death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_Thou_Gavest_Me_(novel)"title="The Woman Thou Gavest Me (novel)">
## First Part: My Girlhood.Mary O'Neill is brought up in Ellan, loved and cared for by her invalid mother within a house dominated by hostile and cruel relations. Mary is sent to a convent school in Rome at the age of seven and over the subsequent ten years her mother passes away and she grows in religious devotion until she decides to enter a convent. However, her father instead decrees that she should be married. Before returning to Ellan, Mary again meets her childhood friend, Martin Conrad, who is aghast to hear that she is to marry Lord Raa, a known 'profligate and reprobate.' But they are both powerless to oppose Mary's father's wishes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleishman_Is_in_Trouble"title="Fleishman Is in Trouble">
Toby, a 41-year-old hepatologist, is undergoing a bitter divorce from his wife Rachel, a successful talent agent in New York. One day, she drops off their children, 11-year-old Hannah and 9-year-old Solly, at Toby's house while he is still sleeping and takes off. She does not respond to texts or calls from him for the following weeks. The story, narrated by Toby's college friend Libby (a former writer for a men's magazine), follows their lives over this period and the events that led to the breakdown of their 14-year-marriage, as well as reflections of Libby's own life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_Identity_and_the_State_in_Iran"title="Ethnic Identity and the State in Iran">
## Structure.Some of the material in the book was adapted from articles the author published previously in "International Geopolitics Quarterly" and "Sfera Politicii". The book consists of seven chapters. The first two chapters offer an overview of the main theoretical frameworks on which the author's fieldwork is based. In the next two chapters, Saleh examines the Iranian case. The main part of the research, i.e. chapters 5–7, explores ethnic minorities and the Iranian government's reaction to the presumed threat shaped by these minorities and provides a detailed account of the situation of these identity groups and their interaction with the government.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_of_Gods"title="The Kingdom of Gods">
"The Kingdom of Gods" takes place about 100 years after the events of "The Broken Kingdoms" and centers around the godling Sieh. The god of childhood and mischief, he is suddenly transformed into a mortal in the presence of twin Arameri children, Shahar and Deka.The shock destroys part of the underpalace of the city of Sky, and sends Sieh from the mortal realm to recover for around eight years. When he wakes up, he re-unites with Shahar, who is now poised to become heir to the Arameri family. The two quickly fall in love, and Sieh begins to age quickly as he takes on adult situations and responsibilities.Sieh must uncover the reason he has become mortal, as well as a string of assassinations of Arameri family members.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Calf_for_Christmas"title="A Calf for Christmas">
Johann is sad because Embla, the cow of his family, has died. It was the only cow that the family had. Soon it will be Christmas, but without the cow and its milk, it is going to be a very sad one.Meanwhile, a rich farmer buys a calf in the town. Afterwards, he goes into a pub and gets drunk. On his way back to the farm, he falls asleep on the carriage. But his horse keeps running, it knows the way back. When the farmer wakes up, he hears a loud roar of the calf. He believes it is the devil and throws the calf out of the carriage. Then he continues his way home.Johann discovers the calf in the snow and he is overjoyed. He believes that god has sent him this Christmas present and he can keep the calf, but his father says it may belong to someone and wants to find out to whom.Johann and his father find out that the calf belongs to the rich farmer and visit him. The farmer realizes how important the calf is to Johann. That's why he gives the calf to Johann. In return, Johann and his father should not tell how they got the calf. Johann is happy, this is a wonderful Christmas present.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_in_the_Stable"title="Christmas in the Stable">
A mother tells a story about the very first Christmas to her child. Although it had happened a long time ago. in a distant land, the child imagines that it had happened on his parents' farm.A man and a woman are very tired after a long journey and want to sleep. But there is no light in the courtyards around them. Therefore, the two travelers go into a stable. When the couple is in the stable the animals walk around the woman and warm her up. A short time later, the woman gets a baby. All stars suddenly light up, one is particularly bright and stands directly above the stable. The shepherds in the fields wonder why there is a star above the stable. When they see the newborn child, they realize that the star is shining for the child. Since there is no bed, the woman puts her child in a crib. The child sleeps and is watched by the shepherds and animals. The poinsettia is shining in the sky above the stable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_(novel)"title="Shanghai (novel)">
With his last breath, Q'in She Huang, the first Emperor of China, entrusts his followers with a sacred task in the year 207 BCE. Scenes intricately carved into a narwhal tusk show the future of a city "at the Bend in the River," and the Emperor's chosen three — his favourite concubine, head Confucian, and personal bodyguard — must set events in motion so that these prophecies are fulfilled, by passing their traditions down through the generations.About two thousand years later, in the mid 19th century, the descendants of the chosen three watch as Shanghai is invaded by opium traders and missionaries from Europe, America, and the Middle East. Of them all, two families, locked in a rivalry that lasts for generations, are central to the evolution of the city. As history marches on, they clash and intertwine with other locals and foreigners, shaping what will become the centrepiece of the new China, the city of Shanghai.One family is that of Silas Hardoon, an Iraqi Jew at the centre of more than one scandal, marrying his Chinese mistress and later adopting nearly forty neighbourhood orphans. Hardoon and his heirs become a force to be reckoned with from the 1880s to the 1940s.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beauty_of_the_Moment"title="The Beauty of the Moment">
Susan Thomas has emigrated from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and has recently moved to Mississauga, Ontario. Susan is passionate about art, but she knows that her parents expect her to pursue a career as a doctor or an engineer and that they would not allow her to attend art school.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_(Forsyth_novel)"title="The Fox (Forsyth novel)">
The British Prime Minister calls Sir Adrian Weston, former Deputy Chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, and asks him to handle a sensitive case. The computers of the Pentagon, the NSA, and the CIA have been hacked by a young British teenager, Luke Jennings, who was subsequently captured in an SAS raid in London. Weston, an ex-Parachute Regiment soldier-turned-MI6 officer, devises a plan to take advantage of Jennings' skills in order to cripple Iran's nuclear program, Russia's intensification programs, and North Korea's nuclear program. Weston is assisted by Special Air Service Captain Harry Williams, and Avigdor Hirsch, Mossad operative and former Special Forces soldier. Yevgeni Krilov, head of the SVR, recognizes Weston's fingerprints on the operation and tries to thwart the operation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_over_Babylon"title="Shadow over Babylon">
The book's plot opens after the Gulf War when a government minister approached a British businessman to execute a plan to assassinate Saddam Hussein. The businessman recruits Sir Peter Dartington, the owner of the international construction company. The latter tasked the mission of preparing and executing the job to Security contractor Ed Howard, an ex-Royal Marines and SBS officer. Howard recruits his men at X.F Security firm, all of them are special forces veterans, including his best friend Mike Ziegler, former officer at the Navy SEALS. In addition, Howard is recruiting a Scottish hunting guide to serve as a sniper of the force. The assassination operation requires the team to deal with Iraqi military on the one hand and successfully evade the US and UK intelligence organizations on the other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maybe_You_Should_Talk_to_Someone"title="Maybe You Should Talk to Someone">
Lori Gottlieb, psychotherapist, was in a long time relationship when suddenly it all came crashing down. Her boyfriend decides to break up with her because he can not live with a kid. This was a surprise to Gottlieb as the couple were deciding to get married and her boyfriend knew she had a child. During this time in her life, Gottlieb depicts common human emotions and struggles as anyone who is encountering hardships. Despite being an expert and trained therapist herself, Gottlieb was encouraged by her friends to see a therapist due to her negative state of mind. She realizes that her grief can be addressed with a therapist and so she begins to see one named Wendell. In her first few sessions, Lori sits with her grief and cries. Once she has moved on from this stage, Wendell states that he thinks she is suffering with something more complicated than losing a boyfriend. This takes Gottlieb by surprise and confusion as she only came for a couple of sessions.As the sessions continue, Lori takes us back to the beginning of her career. Lori is a writer in Los Angeles and works on a medical drama which sparked her interest in medical school. In order to fulfill her desire to help others and continue story telling, she decides to become a therapist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Faith_of_Graffiti"title="The Faith of Graffiti">
"The Faith of Graffiti" is a five-part essay. Each part moves from surface-level content like interviews with the graffiti artists to philosophical musings on art and politics.In Part 1 of the essay, Mailer discusses the lives and inspirations of prominent graffiti artists. Mailer adopts the persona of the "Aesthetic Investigator", or A-I. To understand the motivations and drive of the graffitists, the A-I interviews four retired graffiti artists: CAY 161, JUNIOR 161, LI'L FLAME, and LURK. These graffitists strive to get their "names", how they are known as artists, in dangerous places "where people don't know how you could do it". The "name" is subversive; it challenges authority, and, akin to a gangster's hit, is linked to poverty, crime, and death. "The name", says CAY, "is the "faith" of graffiti."In Part 2, Mailer details the "existential stations of the criminal act" as graffitists prepare for their next "writing" by first "inventing", or stealing, paint. Authorities are ever-present and have recently been cracking down on graffitists, heightening their fears and stopping many of them. There exists a compulsion, however, to "commit the artistic act" in order to combat the "assault on the psyche" of modern life. Since they could be "comic strips come to life", subway cars are "their natural canvas" to "save the sensuous flesh" from the city's increasing homogeneity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Stop_Time"title="How to Stop Time">
Tom Hazard has just moved back to London to take a job as a high school history teacher. He may look like an ordinary 41-year-old, but due to a rare condition, he has been alive for centuries. He was born in 1581 in France and has lived history alongside famous historical characters such as Shakespeare, Captain Cook, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.Tom is constantly under the supervision of the Albatross Society, a secretive group which claims to protect people like him, and its leader, Hendrich. As the story unfolds, he has to decide whether to remain safely in the past, or to risk living in the present.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_Medicine"title="The Soul of Medicine">
This collection of anecdotes, written by Sherwin B. Nuland, portrays different doctors from an array of specialties that each write about their most memorable patient. The medicine spoken about in this book is from an earlier era, which shows the best and the worst moments of many surgeons and doctors. Each chapter in this book consists of a different unrelated story from the previous, yet all are recollections of Nuland's peers while he was doing his residency in Yale-New Haven Hospital. In the book he disguises the hospital as "Canterbury".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Walk_Across_the_Sun"title="A Walk Across the Sun">
The novel follows two narratives; the first is the story of orphaned teenage sisters Ahalya and Sita. The siblings formerly lived near the coast of Chennai with their family, but decide to go live in a convent after a tsunami leaves them homeless and orphaned. A friend of their dead father offers to take them safely; however, he betrays them and takes them to a trafficker who sells them to a brothel in Mumbai. Ahalya agrees to sleep with the clients at the brothel to protect her younger sister from having to suffer the same fate and allows the son of the brothel owner to sleep with her almost every night. The sisters are disheartened and discouraged; a woman in the brothel tells them that this is their karma and they need to accept it, not fight it.The second narrative of the novel follows a lawyer named Thomas, who lives in the United States. Thomas is at a low point in both his career and home life. He and his wife Priya have divorced after the death of their firstborn to SIDs. Walking in a park one day, Thomas witnesses a kidnapping and attempts to chase the kidnappers, but he is unable to catch up and the kidnappers get away. This, along with the state of his life, motivates him to take some time off of work and go to Mumbai to help out in an anti-exploitation organization, CASE.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flesh_of_the_Orchid_(novel)"title="The Flesh of the Orchid (novel)">
20 years after the events in No Orchids for Miss Blandish, Miss Blandish's daughter and John Blandish's teenage grand daughter Carol Blandish is lodged in a lunatic asylum. John Blandish refuses to have anything to do with her as she is an illegitimate child born to his now deceased daughter and Slim Grisson when she was held captive by the latter 20 years ago. Carol is sent to the asylum when she begins to display homicidal tendencies like Slim Grisson and a tendency to attack people's eyes. Nevertheless, Mr Blandish, before his demise, puts his entire fortune in her name and in the care of a trust that wishes to keep the money and ensure that she is confined as an 'insane person', lest she claim her due inheritance one day.Unfortunately Carol escapes from the Asylum one night, and this sets off many people on her trail - Sheriff Kamp and the psychiatrist who want her back lest she be kidnapped for money, by the trust lest she become de-certified as a psychiatric patient after 14 days out-of-asylum by law, a journalist Phil Magrath who wants to make it big for his paper by grabbing the news first, and soon by ruthless murderers who want to claim her money.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Boat_Load_of_Home_Folk"title="A Boat Load of Home Folk">
The novel follows a group of passengers on a cruise ship docked at a Pacific Island as a hurricane approaches.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_on_the_Cross"title="Devil on the Cross">
The book begins as the storyteller presents his story in a hesitant tone: it is his obligation to hand-off this pitiful and perhaps dishonorable record of occasions in the town of Ilmorog.In Chapter 2, the storyteller presents his hero, Jacinta Wariinga, who is toward the finish of her tie. During an undertaking with the "Rich Old Man of Ngorika," she got pregnant. The Rich Old Man deserted her. Wariinga had her child and came back to secretarial school, getting a new line of work at Champion Construction. Before long, her manager Kihara made advances on her, and Wariinga had to find employment elsewhere. This didn't prevent her from losing her beau, John Kinwana, who accepted she had laid down with Kihara. Incapable to pay her lease, Wariinga has been tossed out of her studio loft by three hooligans following up on her landowner's requests. Despondently, Wariinga takes herself to the railroad tracks, where she expects to slaughter herself. In any case, she is saved by the appearance of a man named Munti, who convinces her to give life another possibility and gives her a solicitation to the "Demon's Feast."When Wariinga understands that this Feast is occurring in her folks' old neighborhood of Ilmorog, she chooses to go. She goes by "matatu" (taxi-transport), and on the long voyage, she bonds with her kindred travelers: Gatuīria, an African Studies educator who works abroad; Wangarī, a laborer lady from the profound nation; Mūturi, a mechanical specialist, and Mwĩreri wa Mũkiraaĩ, an agent. They likewise become acquainted with the driver, Mwaūra, a persevering man who loves cash and adores the rich. Businessperson Mwĩreri clarifies that the Devil's Feast is a challenge: the visitors will pick the seven cleverest criminals and looters in Ilmorog. Mwĩreri thinks this challenge is something to be thankful for. It isn't generally sorted out by the Devil, he clarifies, however by the Organization for Modern Theft and Robbery. The event for the Feast is a visit by remote visitors from the Thieves' and Robbers' relationship of America, England, Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, and Japan. The travelers concur that they will all go together to the Devil's Feast.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bourne_Enigma"title="The Bourne Enigma">
On the eve of Russian general Boris Karpov's wedding, Jason Bourne receives an enigmatic message from his old friend and fellow spymaster. In Moscow, what should be a joyous occasion turns bloody and lethal. Now Bourne is the only one who can decipher Karpov's cryptogram. He discovers that Karpov has betrayed his sovereign to warn Bourne of a crippling disaster about to be visited on the world. Bourne has only four days to discover the nature of the disaster and stop it.The trail Karpov has been following leads Bourne to Cairo and the doorstep of Ivan Borz, the elusive international arms dealer infamous for hiding behind a never-ending series of false identities, a man Bourne has been hunting ever since he abducted former Treadstone director Soraya Moore and her two-year-old daughter and brutally murdered Soraya's husband.Bourne must travel to war-torn Syria and then Cyprus as he chases the astonishing truth. The clock is ticking, and Bourne has less than four days to solve Karpov's riddle—and hunt down Borz—if he hopes to prevent a cataclysmic international war...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_the_Lost"title="City of the Lost">
At age eighteen, Casey Duncan is attending police college to become a detective, much to the disapproval of her parents, who are both prominent doctors. She is dating Blaine Saratori, a small-time drug dealer who brags he is the grandson of a mobster in Montreal. Her high school friend Diana is attending a nearby community college and living with her. One night as Casey and Blaine cut through an alley after leaving a bar, several gang members attack them and accuse Blaine of trespassing on their turf. After their leader threatens Casey, she disarms them, expecting Blaine to grab the gun so they can escape. Instead, he runs away and she is presumably raped after being beaten unconscious. Several weeks later, after waking from a four-day coma, Casey seeks out Blaine who she blames for leaving her for dead and not calling the police, as she was only found hours after the attack by a drunken stranger. He has since denied abandoning her, claiming they split up. When he continues to refuse to apologize or take responsibility for his actions, she shoots him in the heat of the moment, killing him. Afterwards, she throws away the gun and calls 911 anonymously, giving a description of the gang members. She is never caught.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_with_a_Monkey"title="Girl with a Monkey">
The novel centres around one day in the life of a young schoolteacher in a small Queensland town. She has recently had a relationship with a local road worker, and this day is her last in the town as she prepares to transfer south to escape what appears to be a threatening situation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangara_(novel)"title="Tangara (novel)">
A young girl, Lexie, finds a necklace which belonged to her great-great Aunt Rita. This leads to a friendship with Merrina, and Lexie comes to learn of the treatment of Tasmanian Aboriginal people. The novel is part fantasy and part historical fiction. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_in_Calico"title="Captain in Calico">
Jack Rackham asks the governor of the Bahamas, Woodes Rogers, for a royal pardon. Rogers agrees for his own reasons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhepatar"title="Akhepatar">
The novel begins with an aged woman named Kanchan returning to her native village in Jhalawad region of peninsular Saurashtra during the 1980s. She belongs to a Brahmin family the ancestors of which were engaged in priestly duties of the village. Having returned to the village to be with herself and chart the future as well as to come to grip with the present, She puts up at a Hindu shrine of the village and begins to reminisce. The story alternates between the past and the present. It is a chronicle of the upheavals in the protagonist's personal as well as family life. She was married to an enterprising Brahmin young man, who had migrated to Karachi before India was partitioned. The story unfolds the past on multiple time levels: Pre-independence era especially in the social context, the historical perspective of the partition days and of the socio-cultural turbulence it evoked and engulfed the family of man (This part describes her years of growth, adolescence, and marriage, motherhood), and a vivid portrayal of the violent aftermath of the partition, the fight of the refugees who survived the communal strife, their "bizarre movements", separations and reunions as well as socio-economic upheavals they had to face individually and collectively, and finally the era of development and renaissance that swept through the rural Gujarat. The story thus dwells on four generations of Kanchan's clan. The post-partition narration is dominated by a very strong story element including "bizarre events", unexpected turns, and ever-changing dilemma of the protagonist Kanchan. The whole novel contains dialects, proverbs and the folk tongue of Jhalawad, of Karachi and in general of Saurashtra at different times of history.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boomerang_Book_of_Legendary_Tales"title="The Boomerang Book of Legendary Tales">
This anthology contains a selection of Australian Aboriginal legends, and myths from New Zealand, Fiji, New Guinea, Tonga, Borneo, Micronesia and the Solomon Islands.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaRose_(novel)"title="LaRose (novel)">
"LaRose" is set in North Dakota on an Ojibwe reservation in the "era of George W. Bush and 9/11." The novel's protagonist is LaRose Iron, a young Native American boy. His father, Landreaux Iron, accidentally shoots LaRose's best friend and neighbor, Dusty Ravich, also 5 years old, in a hunting accident, when the buck Landreaux had aimed at suddenly moved from in front of the boy.Dusty's parents, Peter and Nola, are devastated by his death. To compensate for their loss, following an ancient custom, LaRose's parents, Landreaux and Emmaline, give him to Dusty's family after speaking with a priest and visiting a sweat lodge, to find a way to resolve their guilt.While Peter and Nola are initially reluctant to accept LaRose into their family, perceiving it as an act of betrayal towards their own dead son, they soon warm to him. LaRose later helps protect Nola as she deals with suicidal ideation.The story also introduces the stories of several of LaRose's ancestors, who were sent to residential schools and endured many traumatic experiences. The first person in the family to be named LaRose, an Ojibwe woman, was a young girl in 1839 when her mother sold her at a trading post. She is raped and later participates in the murder of her rapist. After her death, her remains are stolen by "white 'scientists."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mandibles"title="The Mandibles">
The book is set in the United States in 2029 during a debt crisis that results in the collapse of the country's economy and the rise of a supranational currency, bancor, led by a group of countries. The United States is deliberately excluded from this group, a move that causes President Dante Alvarado to take drastic measures, which include resetting the national debt. Any and all gold now belongs to the government, and owning bancors will result in treason charges. Treasury bonds are now null and void, which results in the bankruptcy of many. One family, the Mandibles, are hit particularly hard by the devaluation of American currency, as they were all expecting to inherit an enormous fortune from the family's patriarch. Now they are unable to continue living in their former lifestyles and they are willing to go to any length to ensure survival.The novel is divided into two parts. The first, which takes place between 2029 and 2032, establishes characters from four generations of the Mandible family: the wealthy patriarch; his children, now in their 60s; his young-middle-age grandchildren and their partners; and his teenage great grandchildren. The story begins with events just before the Great Renunciation and ends three years later with the family fleeing the chaos and social breakdown around their home in Brooklyn to live in upstate New York. The second part takes place in 2047, and follows the now middle-aged great grandchildren (and the patriarch's daughter, now in her 90s) as they strike out, once again, to find refuge from an increasingly authoritarian United States government in the separatist enclave of Nevada.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Walkabout"title="The First Walkabout">
The book tells the story of the very earliest occupation of the continent of Australia by the Negrito people, a diminutive race that arrived in Australia before the present-day aborigines' ancestors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafferty_Rides_a_Winner"title="Rafferty Rides a Winner">
Rafferty, an English boy attempting to learn how to become Australian, and his friends attempt to scrape together 60 pounds via a series of various means in order to purchase a boat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormbringer_(novel)"title="Stormbringer (novel)">
In "Dead God's Homecoming", chaos beings kidnap Elric of Melniboné's wife, Zarozinia, spurring Elric into fateful actions and the recovery of Stormbringer, the demon-sword that dominates his destiny. Meanwhile, Jagreen Lern, theocrat of Pan Tang, forms an alliance with Sarosto, ruler of Dharijor, and the Dukes of Hell to take over the world. They win a decisive victory at Sequa. One of the Nihrain, servants of Balance, named Sepiriz, contacts Elric and Dyvim Slorm, owner of Stormbringer's brother sword, Mournblade. He tells them that the person who took Zarozinia is a resurrected god named Darnizhaan. Darnizhaan killed himself years ago from fear of the Black Swords, which are now the only things he will take in return for Zarozinia. Elric, Dyvim Slorm, and Elric's companion, Moonglum journey to Darnizhaan. There they are warned that Jagreen Lern's alliance with Sarosto will be the end of the Young Kingdoms. Elric and Slorm hand over the Black Swords in exchange for Zarozinia. Immediately after, they chant a rune spell Sepiriz taught them, which makes the swords come alive and kill Darnizhaan.Later, in "Black Sword's Brothers", Elric tries to unite the kingdoms of the East and the South against Jagreen Lern, who has recently assassinated Sarosto. When this fails, Moonglum and he sail east towards the Sorceror's Isle, only for their boat to be caught in a storm and forced against the Serpent's Teeth. Stranded in Jagreen Lern's kingdom, Elric and Moonglum encounter Sepiriz again. He tells them that, with the help of a certain spell, Stormbringer can call its many companion swords, brothers like Mournblade, to fight for it. With this new information, Elric and Moonglum journey to Pan Tang, Lern's island, where Elric fights the Dukes of Hell. Upon calling Stormbringer's brothers, the Dukes are killed and sent back to the Chaos realm eternally. Stormbringer leaves him as well, taking away his strength and allowing Jagreen Lern to capture him. Lern takes Moonglum and Elric to watch the ensuing battle with the Southern kingdoms. Though the Southern Kingdoms lose, Elric is able to call Stormbringer back to him and rescue Moonglum.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/None_of_the_Above_(novel)"title="None of the Above (novel)">
Kristin Lattimer is a champion hurdler and homecoming queen who, after a painful first sexual experience, discovers she has an intersex trait, androgen insensitivity syndrome. The book explores the unraveling of her school life, home life and sport life, once her diagnosis is disclosed to her school.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quickening_Maze"title="The Quickening Maze">
Dr Matthew Allen runs an asylum called High Beach Private Asylum for mental patients of his. John Clare, a peasant poet from Northamptonshire who is not so famous then, is admitted in the asylum for his lunatic behaviours, memory lapses and delusions. Dr Allen treats his patients differently from other mental institutes given them much freedom; especially to Clare by recognizing his talent in poetry. Alfred Tennyson's brother Septimus faces depression and he is also admitted in the asylum. Tennyson and his family move to High Beach and stay nearby the asylum. Dr Allen has an history of debts and was once imprisoned for frauds. He is now collecting funds for a new carpentry machine called "Pyroglyph" that he claims to have patented in UK. He convinces Tennyson and his family to invest in the machine. Various patients with characteristic personalities and disorders have been included. A certain George Laidlaw is show to be obsessed with the national debt and Margaret keeps believing that God is speaking to her. Charles Seymour is from an aristocratic family and he is wrongly placed in the asylum by his family to avoid his marriage with his lover who the family deems unsuitable for him. Various incidences of sexual violence between fellow inmates are noted in the asylum. Allen's teenage daughter, Hannah, craves for attention and starts fancying Tennyson. When she gets nothing out of it, she falls for Seymour. Tennyson is also brooding over the death of his friend Arthur Hallam and is shown working on a memorial to Hallam. Clare starts roaming about in the woods of Epping Forest coming in contact with local gypsies. He treasures these wanderings where he finds time for his poems, if he is not claiming to be a prize fighter or Lord Byron or Shakespeare. Tennyson loses much of his family fortunes in the wrong investments and decides to return to London determined to write about Hallam and Clare runs away from the institute and sets on his four-day walking journey back to his home finally reaching to his wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Racketty_Street_Gang"title="The Racketty Street Gang">
The novel is set in an old Sydney harbour suburb and follows the exploits of a group of young buys who attempt to clear the name of the father of one of them from a war disgrace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve_(Ryan_novel)"title="Nerve (Ryan novel)">
Shy junior Vee, with the help of her friend Tommy, tries out for the online game of dares, NERVE, to impress her crush. After uploading her audition reel, they realize her cotton shirt becomes see-through after she poured cold water on herself. They fail to delete their upload.Vee then receives a dare with expensive designer shoes on her wishlist as the prize. Tommy warns the dare may come from hackers who illegally collect contestants' personal information. Vee proceeds anyway, and the game pairs her up with fellow contestant Ian.Vee and Ian complete a series of riskier and more lucrative dares and make their way to the final round, where they compete against five other finalists. Vee flubs a dare early in the finals, so later on, the game arms the contestants and tries to spook them into shooting each other, Tommy, or Vee's best friend Sydney, whom the game organizers have kidnapped and thrown into the room. Tommy tells Vee to stall; before his kidnapping, he has managed to call the police.Vee and Ian realize the row of chairs in the hallway outside the room and curtain are like a stage, so NERVE's wealthy donors must be watching through a one-way mirror just a few inches away. They throw a table through the wall. Vee escapes, and Ian fights off the other players, who realize that if Vee leaves they all lose their prizes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nightingale_(Hannah_novel)"title="The Nightingale (Hannah novel)">
The book uses the frame story literary device; the frame is presented in first-person narration as the remembrances of an elderly woman in 1995, whose name is initially not revealed to the reader. It is only known that she has a son named Julien and that she lives off the coast of Oregon. However, the main action of the book is told in third-person, following two sisters, Vianne Mauriac and Isabelle Rossignol, who live in France around 1939, on the eve of World War II. The two sisters are estranged from each other and their father, and the book follows the two different paths they take.Vianne, the eldest sister, is a married schoolteacher raising her 8-year-old daughter Sophie in her childhood home named "Le Jardin" in the town of Carriveau. Vianne's husband Antoine is drafted and subsequently captured as a prisoner of war. At home, Vianne copes with the occupation of France after the Battle of France, struggling to keep herself and her daughter alive in the face of poor food rations, the dwindling francs left behind by Antoine, the billeting of Wehrmacht and SS officers at her home, the loss of her job, and the increasing persecution of the Jews in town. The first officer billeted at her home is Wolfgang Beck, a kindly man with a family he's left behind. The second is Von Richter, a more sadistic officer who subjects Vianne to physical and sexual abuse.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlan_(novel)"title="Atlan (novel)">
Apart from the prologue, "Atlan" is told from the first person point of view of the main character Cija. Following the events of "The Serpent", Cija has married Zerd, the half-Human, half-Reptilian warlord. Zerd's army has conquered the hidden continent of Atlan (a clear reference to Atlantis) and Zerd now rules as its Emperor with Cija by his side.Unfortunately for Cija, Zerd has not given up his philandering ways and the couple become estranged. The book details Cija's travails in Atlan as she must survive assassination attempts, bandits, and various misadventures. Complicating matters is an invasion by the Northern army, headed by Sedili, Zerd's ex-wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_African_(Courlander_novel)"title="The African (Courlander novel)">
A young African boy, Hwesuhunu, is kidnapped from his homeland by French slave traders, and endures the terrors of the Middle Passage and being sold into slavery. Hwesuhunu is brought to the island of Saint Lucia, and is later sold to a Georgia plantation for US$100.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashwamedh"title="Ashwamedh">
Mohini, the main character of the play, is the wife of King Vichitrasen. She experienced sexual orgasm at the age of 16 while riding a horse. The rituals of "Ashvamedha yajna" demand that once the king becomes "Chakravarti" (undisputed sovereign), the chief queen must have sexual intercourse with the horse. In accordance with this ritual, Mohini suggests that her husband organizes "Ashvamedha yajna" at the beginning of the play. She tells the king that her wish is to see him as a "Chakravarti" king, but her main desire lies in having sex with the horse. For the purpose of the "yajna", she chooses a horse named Bijak from the royal stable. As the "yajna" starts, she displays blind sexual attraction towards the horse. At the end of the "yajna", when she approaches the horse for the ritualistic sex, she finds that Bijak is exhausted from running for a whole year and has lost the charm it had earlier. She refuses to recognize the horse. Due to the unfulfilled sexual desire and her resulting anger, she commits suicide on the spot with a sword. Her suicide tragically concludes the play.In the play, Chinu Modi vividly described the crisis in the life of King Vichitrasen and the soldiers who went for the "yajna". Modi has used chorus to signify a situation in the play.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linden_Hills_(novel)"title="Linden Hills (novel)">
Naylor begins her narrative by detailing the family history of Luther Nedeed, real estate purveyor of the Linden Hills neighborhood. Naylor exposes the American dream as nightmare, through the lens of race and class, by unraveling the dark secrets of Tupelo Drive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reef_(novel)"title="Reef (novel)">
Triton is a young chef who was forced to leave his father's house to work for Mr. Ranjan Salgado, a marine biologist obsessed by swamps, sea movements, and a Sri Lankan island's disappearing reef. Almost immediately, thanks to his master's obsessions, Triton works hard to please him with his carefully prepared delicacies. But neither of them know that the political unrest threatening Sri Lanka will have a devastating influence on them, most significantly on Triton. A kind of radical uprise of violent Marxist furor is introduced through the character of Wijetunga.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jalaleddin_(novella)"title="Jalaleddin (novella)">
The events of the story take place in the eastern part of the Van Vilayet, in the historical canton of Aghbak near the Ottoman frontier with Persia. The novella tells the story of Sarhat, a young Armenian man who lives the life of a bandit and seeks to rescue his beloved, Asli, from marauding Kurds under the leadership of the eponymous Sheikh Jalaleddin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Grandmother_Asked_Me_to_Tell_You_She's_Sorry"title="My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry">
The story takes place in Sweden and follows Elsa, a 7-year-old who knows she is different from other children her age. Elsa has a habit of correcting others' grammar, is smart for her age, and is especially close with her grandmother (Granny). When Granny dies, Elsa slowly discovers more about her grandmother's past identities, as well as the lives of people affected by her grandmother.The UK edition was published by Sceptre, an imprint of Hodder &amp; Stoughton, in 2015 (), with the title "My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Minotaur"title="The Global Minotaur">
## The Great Depression, World War 2 and the Global Plan.Varoufakis begins his analysis with the Great Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed as a result. He argues that Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal was not enough to bring America out of recession, and that it wasn't until the Second World War and the massive public spending program it brought about that the USA finally recovered.Once the war began to recede, US planners became concerned that recession would once again take hold, and to address this in 1944 they organised the Bretton Woods Conference, a gathering of global leaders that was to determine the design of the post-war global economy. While John Maynard Keynes, negotiating on behalf of Great Britain, proposed an International Currency Union with incentives for balancing global trade this was rejected by the US in favour of what Varoufakis calls the 'Global Plan'.The USA came out of the Second World War as the world's major power with twin trade and budget surpluses, and so rejected Keynes' proposal in favour of an alternative plan that would preserve its hegemony. The Global Plan involved the creation of a system of fixed exchange rates with the US dollar pegged to gold at a fixed exchange rate of $35 an ounce. The plan also involved the rebuilding of the German and Japanese economies, devastated by the war. Early examples were the Marshall Plan in Europe and later the Korean War for Japan. Crucially the plan also featured a 'Global Surplus Recycling Mechanism', that would recycle American surpluses to the rest of the world economy, thus preserving global stability by avoiding unstable trade imbalances.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Head_Full_of_Ghosts"title="A Head Full of Ghosts">
The book is told from the perspective of Meredith "Merry" Barrett, a 23-year-old who is finally ready to share details of the horrific incidents that occurred when she was eight years old. Merry tells this story to a writer named Rachel Neville. These flashbacks are what serve as the narrative going forward in the novel, with a few chapters that show Merry and Rachel in the present. There are also a few chapters containing posts from a blog called "The Last Final Girl." This blog, which is written by a girl named Karen, is diving into a deconstruction of the reality TV show that Merry and her family starred in called "The Possession." It is later revealed that Karen is actually a pseudonym. As we follow Merry as a precocious 8-year-old, we see that her home life is strained. Her father, John, is unemployed, leaving her mother, Sarah, to serve as the home's sole breadwinner while their savings account is slowly drained of resources. To make matters worse, Merry's sister Marjorie has been acting in an increasingly bizarre fashion, blurring the lines between schizophrenia and full-blown demonic possession. This particularly comes to Merry's attention after her sister begins telling her strange and macabre stories instead of innocent ones based on characters from Richard Scarry's "Cars and Trucks and Things That Go". Unbeknownst to Merry, Marjorie has been seeing a therapist, something she only learns after Marjorie experiences a particularly bad episode. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_Me_by_Your_Name_(novel)"title="Call Me by Your Name (novel)">
The narrator, Elio Perlman, recalls the events of the summer of about 1983, when he was seventeen and living with his parents in Italy. Each summer, his parents would take in a doctoral student as a house guest for six weeks, who would revise a book manuscript while assisting his father with academic paperwork. Elio resents the tradition, as it requires him to vacate his bedroom so the guest can use it for the duration of their stay.Oliver, the guest for the summer, is carefree and detached—a stark contrast to Elio's introversion. Elio selected Oliver as a guest in the hopes of "instant affinities" between them and acts as his tour guide, though Elio's attempts to impress Oliver are met with indifference. Though Elio recognizes his own bisexuality and his attraction to Oliver—he is particularly excited by his discovery that Oliver is Jewish, seeing it as a bond between them—he doubts that Oliver reciprocates his feelings. One day, Elio sneaks into Oliver's room, and masturbates while wearing Oliver's swimming trunks. Later, Elio confesses his attraction to Oliver, and they kiss on a berm where Claude Monet had supposedly painted some of his pictures. When Elio touches Oliver's penis through his clothes, Oliver pushes him away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wish_Maker"title="The Wish Maker">
Zaki Shirazi has arrived back in Lahore, Pakistan, to celebrate the wedding of his childhood friend and elder cousin Samar Api to her long sought-after 'Amitabh' - a stand-in for the Bollywood star she always dreamed of marrying. Amidst the flurry of preparations in the house in which he grew up, Zaki can't help but revisit the past - his childhood as a fatherless boy growing up in a household of outspoken women and his and Samar's intertwined journeys from youth to adulthood. Raised to consider themselves 'part of the same litter', Zaki and Samar watched American television together, memorized dialogues from Bollywood movies and attended dangerous protests with Zaki's campaigning, political journalist mother. But as Zaki becomes drawn into Samar's secret life of romantic schemes and lends her his support in trying to orchestrate the future, they both find themselves suffering the consequences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_That_Saved_My_Life"title="The War That Saved My Life">
Ada Smith is a ten-year-old girl who has never left her apartment in London. Her physically abusive, widowed mother is too embarrassed to let her go outside because of her clubfoot, even though she claims Ada is mentally disabled instead. As a regular punishment, Ada gets put in a damp cabinet under the sink where cockroaches live. She is used as a servant, cooks and takes care of her six-year-old brother Jamie and her mother. She is also quite protective of him. In September 1939, the British government begins to evacuate children in urban areas of England during World War II to escape, sending them to the countryside. Ada’s mother refuses to send Ada saying nobody will want to take care of her. Meanwhile, Ada has spent all summer teaching herself how to walk and decides to leave with Jamie without their mother knowing. They are evacuated by train to Kent to finally get away from the arising conditions yet to come because of the war.Susan Smith, an unrelated woman who lives in a coastal village in Kent, is forced to take Ada and Jamie in, despite her aversion to caring for children. Away from her mother, Ada is allowed to freely move about by Susan despite her clubfoot, and as such befriends Susan and other villagers. She learns to read, write, ride a horse, and is introduced by Susan to many terms and concepts she has never experienced before. Susan overcomes her reluctance to take care of the children, reading to them, making them clothes, obtaining crutches for Ada, and allowing Jamie to keep a cat she intensely dislikes. Ada helps British troops evacuate across the English Channel from Dunkirk, and identifies an enemy spy, who is then detained.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starry_Messenger_(picture_book)"title="Starry Messenger (picture book)">
"Starry Messenger", written and illustrated by Peter Sís, documents the life of the acclaimed scientist Galileo Galilei. Told from third person point of view and dating back to his birth, Sís walks the reader through the events that shape the life of the recognized scientist, mathematician, philosopher, and physicist, Galileo Galilei. The book opens with a prelude, with careful illustrations, Peter Sís sets the stage for the story by laying the groundwork of what the world was like during Galileo's era; scientifically, and religiously. He introduces the reader to the then accepted ideology of the Ptolemaic system, which stated that the Earth was the center of the Solar System. Sís describes Galileo as a boy "born with stars in his eyes", this metaphor will run throughout the length of the story connecting prominent events that occur within Galileo's life, including life as a child, a scholar, and later a scientist. Inter sped with Sís's original illustrations are excerpts of Galileo's actual drawings and excerpts of his "Starry Messenger" which documents Galileo's astronomical discoveries and observations especially the Copernican theory which got him in trouble with the Vatican Church. From being celebrated for his other astronomical discoveries to the controversial Copernican theory, Peter Sís documents these events with intricate illustrations that vividly resemble Galileo's own, adding depth to the story. The peak of the story occurs when Galileo's Copernican Theory reaches the Pope, and Galileo is viewed in negative light and criticism. Upon Galileo's summoning to the Vatican Church, he was forced to retract his earlier statements that contradicted with the ideologies of the Vatican Church regarding the placement of the Earth, or risk death. Galileo chose to retract his statements and was confined to house arrest for eight years before his death in 1642. The book ends on a positive note when Sís writes about the Pardon that was issued to Galileo more than three hundred years later in October 1992.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Like_a_Tiger"title="Sleep Like a Tiger">
Starting with the old adage "Once there was a little girl..." you come across a little girl and her parents, all wearing crowns. The little girl is wide awake claiming she is not tired. Her parents take this almost as a regular occurrence and require that she at least put on her pajamas, wash her face, brush her teeth. The little girl keeps repeating that she is not tired but climbs into bed and under the sheets since that is where she is the most comfortable. She then proceeds to ask her parents if everything thing goes to sleep. The parents then proceed to go through a list of animals and their habits of sleeping. They discuss the family dog, the cat, bats, snails, bears, and whales. The little girl proclaims that she knows an animal that sleeps a lot. We then finally come across the tiger in the jungle, where the little girl tells her parents that he sleeps to stay strong. The parents agree that sleep is good to stay strong then say goodnight even though the little girl claims she is still not sleepy. Her parents know what will happen and agree that she can stay awake all night long. After the long discussion, the little girl goes through all the processes that the animals go through and ends up fast asleep.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Animals_and_Animal_Politics"title="Political Animals and Animal Politics">
"Political Animals and Animal Politics" has three key aims, and, correspondingly, its chapters are split into three sections. These aims are the analysis of three key "innovations" that the editors identify in the book's introduction. The first of these is the move, in animal ethics, from thinking about personal change to thinking about the implementation of rules or norms of conduct at the societal level. The second of these is a possible rapprochement between animal ethics and ecologism (environmental ethics and green political theory). The third is the increased presence of animal protection laws for the benefit of nonhuman animals themselves. Aside from the introduction, the book features ten single-authored chapters: three in Part I: The Politicization of the Animal Advocacy Discourse, three in Part II: The Rapprochement between Animal Ethics and Ecologism, and four in Part III: The Introduction of Laws and Institutions for the Benefit of Animals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_infinite_number"title="An infinite number">
The novel is based on the monologue of Timodemo, who was born in Nauplia (Greece). When he was a child, he was abandoned by his mother and given to a slave trader called Musodoro. He was educated by Quinzione and he was taken to Naples where he was bought by Virgil as his secretary.He started living with the writer, who had to write a poem celebrating the origins of Rome.The Etruscan Mecenate, who was responsible for culture and the artists in the capital city, suggested Virgil should go on a journey to the Rasna's country to discover the past of this civilization and to find out why they didn't have a written tradition.The travellers are Mecenate, Virgilio, Timodemo, Tanai, Sarmento and the dancers Tecmessa and Ninfa.After a long time, these travellers reached the towns of Surina and Arezzo, where Mecenate settled his accounts with two administrators who had taken advantage of his property during his absence.Finally they arrived in Sacni, the holy town of Rasna, and while they were waiting for meeting the high priest of the god Velthune, they visited the temples dedicated to Velthune, the god life, Northia, personification of time, and Mantus, god of death and the underworld.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_nulla_pieno_di_storie"title="Un nulla pieno di storie">
Firstly he talks about his childhood, especially about his father whom he had a complicated relationship with, and about the aunts that reluctantly looked after him after his parents’ divorce.Then the story deals with war and his experiences about it, such as when he was present at an execution of men suspected of being partisans and at a conversation where someone was talking about a certain Redimisto Fabbri, whose rebellion of his factory workers wasn't expected.After that he talks about his school life, saying how he loved literature and nature, and mentioned his university professor who considered his graduation thesis very convincing although with a completely incorrect form. More generally, he defined himself as a lousy student but also as an impressive reader.He tells about his life with his wife (that will only be addressed as L) that will later die of a serious illness, and with their adopted son. He expresses then his opinions on religion and God, asserting that the former is not necessary unlike the latter. He says he was born as a writer when his book La notte della cometa was published, also telling about the birth of the word. He affirms that the art of writing isn't only telling stories but also of telling one's self.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_(Meyer_novel)"title="The Son (Meyer novel)">
## Eli.In 1849, 13-year old Eli McCullough's family is attacked by the Comanches. The attack results in the rape and murder of his sister and mother. Eli and his older brother are kidnapped. While Eli's brother Martin is eventually killed, Eli is adopted by the Kotsoteka Comanches and given the name Tiehteti. Initially treated as a slave, he eventually comes to earn the respect of his captors and is adopted by Toshaway, the man who kidnapped him. A series of misfortunes eventually hits the tribe, including an outbreak of disease which kills Toshaway and the rest of Eli's Comanche family. In order to provide for the survivors, Eli allows himself to be sold back into white society. Eli has a miserable time integrating back into white society. After fighting for the Confederacy in the American Civil War, he steals a bag of gold which he uses to buy land and amass a fortune. When his neighbour, Arturo Garcia, steals some of his cattle, he murders him and bears a grudge against his nephew, Pedro Garcia, who comes to take his place. He marries Madeleine Black, the daughter of a judge. She and their eldest son are eventually killed by a band of Lipan Apaches who Eli tracks down and murders in the 1880s.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dux_(novel)"title="Dux (novel)">
A 60-year-old Giacomo Casanova moves in the castle of Dux, a little bohemian town, under the field of the count of Joseph-Charles Emmanuel of Waldestein. Here he spends his last years alternating the composition of his novels and the fights with the other convivials of the castle: like the butler Feltkircher, the admin Stelzl, the courier Wiederholt and the beautiful Carolina.This last great battle is fought within the walls of the castle, especially in the dining room, where his inability of speaking German prevent him to communicate with the others, making him feeling alone and left out. Besides Wiederholt and Feltkircher, his worst enemies, made fun of him by disfiguring his portrait. They use them as toilet paper and exposing them in the toilets of the castle.Offended Casanova decides to write to the mother-countess Marie Anna Therese of Waldstein, who writes him nice and supportive things making him believe that she his friend but only because she needs his help in convincing his son, the count, to marry Marie Josepha Lobkowitz and to leave” the b.” Carolina. But when the countess meets him in person, during the imperial coronation of Leopold II, she is let down by his appearance and thinks that she should have never written to him in such a kindly and familiar way. At the end of the ceremony she decides to restore the order in the castle of his son.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Barefoot_Man_(novel)"title="The Barefoot Man (novel)">
## Part One.The novel begins in the dead of winter in Glory, West Virginia, in the midst of a mining strike. Cal Dunne, his mother Roseanna, and his wife Jessie, are holed up in their house waiting for the arrival of the union organizer, whom James P. Shaloo, the strikebreaker, is determined to kill. Into this rides a farming couple who have recently lost everything not in their wagon, Jack and Jean Farjeon, who are expecting a baby at any moment. Cal and Mother Dunne are prepared to go out with rifles at any time, and along with Tom Turley, who has voted to end the strike but is still not scabbing, get in a fray with Shaloo's man, in an army coat. Jean is shocked into labor and shot, giving birth to a dead child. Cal is also killed, and Mother Dunne is arrested, charged with the murder of a striking miner named Joseph Tzack, who speaks almost no English and shouted "extra!" repeatedly at the time of his dead because he recognized it from newsboy's cried of the end of World War I. Farjeon is determined to bury his dead wife and child, but they are taken by the authorities, and in a fever caused by the cold, he goes into delirium and believes that Jessie, who is terrified of the prospect of her two apparent choices—prostitution or begging barefoot in the street—is Jean, and she happily seduces him.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What's_Left_of_Me_(novel)"title="What's Left of Me (novel)">
The "Hybrid Chronicles" books are set in an alternate universe society in which at birth every body possesses two 'souls', or human identities. One of these identities is supposed to fade away with age. Those who retain both souls are labelled 'hybrids' and are ostracized from normal society. The series' protagonists, Addie and Eva, inhabit the same body. The girls hide the presence of Eva, the recessive soul, for fear of what might happen if they were ever discovered. Over the course of the trilogy, the girls are at first institutionalized for their hybrid nature, then join a resistance force for hybrid rights.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGyver_(2016_TV_series)"title="MacGyver (2016 TV series)">
Angus "Mac" MacGyver is a US government agent of a secret, privately funded US government intelligence agency (cloaked as a think tank) called the Phoenix Foundation, where he uses his extraordinary talent for problem solving and his extensive knowledge of science to save lives and, in some cases, prevent catastrophes. "With skills that are only limited by his creativity, Mac saves the day using paper clips instead of pistols, birthday candles instead of bombs, and gum instead of guns."The episodes make frequent use of second-person narrative in the form of voice-overs provided by Lucas Till as Angus MacGyver. The commentary usually provides instructions or "tricks of the trade", as if for a training or orientation film.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pani_Manidhan"title="Pani Manidhan">
Yeti is the legend of the Snow Man rumored to be found in the mountains of Himalayas. Many consider the legend to be somewhere between truth and lies.An Indian military officer named Pandian is asked by his commanders to investigate certain mysterious giant footprints found in snow near a remote village. Pandian, who feels it is just the imagination of the villagers, sets out on a trip and encounters strange happenings, native legends and finally, the wondrous truths themselves.Pandian rescues a boy named Kim from the snow. A doctor who is also out researching the Snow Man joins the group. Together they- military officer Pandian, the Buddhist mountain boy Kim and the Doctor with the Western Scientific views - begin the search for the Yeti in the mountains. The Doctor tells Pandian that the Yeti might be the proverbial missing link in the evolutionary chain to Humans. But Kim, who says he has seen the Snow Man, says the Yeti looks nothing like the monkeys in the pictures shown by the Doctor and he looks more like Homo Erectus.Along the way, Pandian is surprised to see Kim performing sophisticated breathing and meditation Yoga exercises. Through various adventures, Kim explains his native cultural beliefs and practices that correspond to Pandian's and the Doctor's statements on nature, humanity, soul, evolution and natural effects.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_War_(2018_video_game)"title="God of War (2018 video game)">
## Setting.While the first seven games were loosely based on Greek mythology, this installment is loosely inspired by Norse mythology, taking place at least 150 years after "God of War III" (2010). Six of the nine realms of Norse mythology can be explored. Predating the Vikings, most of the game takes place in ancient Scandinavia in the realm of Midgard, which is inhabited by humans and other creatures. It is the same realm in which the Greek world existed. As more dangerous creatures began appearing, many humans fled. Other realms visited as part of the story include Alfheim, the mystical home of the light and dark elves; Helheim, the icy land of the dead; and Jötunheim, the mountainous land of the Giants. Optional explorable realms include Niflheim, a realm of poisonous fog with a maze-like structure of rewards; and the fire realm Muspelheim, featuring the six Trials of Muspelheim—completing each trial grants rewards and advances Kratos and Atreus closer to the top of a large volcano. Access to the other three realms—Asgard, home of the Æsir gods; Vanaheim, home of the Vanir gods; and Svartalfheim, home of the dwarves—has been blocked by Odin, the ruler of Asgard and the Æsir gods. At the center of the realms is the mythical tree Yggdrasil, which connects each realm. Although each realm is a different world, they exist simultaneously in the same space. Travel to and from realms can be done by using the Bifröst from a root of Yggdrasil contained within Týr's Temple at the center of the Lake of the Nine. The temple was created by its namesake, Týr, a peaceful God of War who traveled to other lands and learned about their mythologies; it was told that Odin had him killed as he believed Týr was secretly aiding the Giants and would try to overthrow him.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_(Reid_novel)"title="Year Zero (Reid novel)">
Through a cosmic fluke, humans are the only species in the universe with genuine musical talent. As a result, when anthropologists from the intergalactic Refined League discover human music in 1977, the aesthetic shock revolutionizes their society (with 1977 becoming the Year Zero of their new calendar, thus the title), and quintillions of Refined citizens spend decades obsessively listening to hundreds of thousands of human songs. However, Refined law on cultural heritage mandates that the artworks of a given species must be enjoyed in contexts defined by that species—and human law on file sharing has established that the fine for illicit copies of songs is up to $150,000 per individual copy per song. As a result, the Refined consider themselves to be so deeply in debt to humans ("three trillion yottadollars") that—compared to bankrupting the entire universe—humanity's extinction might be preferable.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busted_(book)"title="Busted (book)">
At the time of the investigation, the newspaper was in deep financial trouble. The company, which also owns the "Philadelphia Inquirer", only had one lawyer at the time. The lawyer was bogged down with other legal proceedings and was unable to offer too much help to the women. So instead, when the city refused to give them access to search warrants, Ruderman and Laker convinced the custodian of the records on Christmas Eve to let them access the records.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_A_Place!"title="What A Place!">
"What A Place!" is about a little girl's yearlong journey throughout the city of Beijing, as she enjoys the city's sights, sounds, and festivities.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastoral_(Alexis_novel)"title="Pastoral (Alexis novel)">
An Ottawa born priest, Father Christopher Pennant, is given a parish in Barrow in Lambton County. He accidentally becomes embroiled in the love affairs of two of his younger parishioners. Elizabeth Denny, an orphan, seeks guidance from Pennant when she discover her fiancé Robbie Myers is having an affair with his teenage sweetheart Jane Richardson. Upon being discovered he affirms that he loves them both equally, something that everyone he speaks to doubts. Upset, Elizabeth goes to Jane and asks her to get Robbie to walk through the town, completely nude, to get a haircut. Elizabeth reasons that if Robbie loves Jane more he will do it but the humiliation of having done so will allow Elizabeth some measure of revenge. Jane is able to persuade Robbie to walk nude and Elizabeth ends their engagement. Feeling exhilarated by what he has done Robbie thinks it is in his best interest to marry Jane, but she tires of him soon after and after a final fight which turns physical she leaves Barrow forever, making her way to Toronto. Robbie then decides that Jane was crazy and he should marry Elizabeth after all. She consents to their re-engagement, but privately tells herself that she will only decide whether to go through with the marriage on the wedding day.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_of_Summer"title="The Sword of Summer">
The novel opens on the sixteenth birthday of protagonist Magnus Chase, who has been living on the streets of Boston since his mother Natalie's death two years ago. After learning that his uncle Randolph has unexpectedly sent his uncle Frederick and cousin Annabeth to search for him, Magnus breaks into Randolph's house to look for answers. Randolph catches Magnus and drives him to Longfellow Bridge, claiming that Magnus is the son of a Norse god, making him the target of an unnamed magical enemy. Randolph tells the boy that he must magically retrieve an ancient sword (Sumarbrander, or the "Sword of Summer") hidden in Boston Harbor to protect himself. A fire giant known as Surt appears, and begins to destroy the bridge. Magnus attacks Surt with the sword to allow other pedestrians time to escape. As he realizes that he is about to die, he manages to wound the giant and hurl the two of them off the bridge. He dies on impact with the water.Magnus awakens in a place called Hotel Valhalla as an einherjar, where he is told he will spend eternity training for Ragnarök. He is introduced to the Valkyrie who brought him to Valhalla, Sam, and to his new einherjar hallmates. During Magnus' welcome feast, the three Norns pronounce Magnus a son of Frey and deliver a confusing prophecy. The hotel's ruling council banishes Sam the Valkyrie for apparently "wrongly choosing" Magnus. That night, Magnus's friends Hearth and Blitz arrive and reveal they are actually an elf and dwarf, respectively. They convince him to leave the hotel. In Midgard, the trio joins up with Sam. The group meets with the god Mimir, who tasks them with finding the Sword before Surt and bringing it to the island of Fenris Wolf. They retrieve the sword from the sea goddess Ran and journey to Nidavellir to secure a new binding for the Wolf. During the quest, Magnus experiences dream-visions of Loki, and once even of the goddess Hel offering to reunite him with his late mother—a proposal he struggles to refuse.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordred,_Bastard_Son"title="Mordred, Bastard Son">
The illegitimate son of King Arthur and Morgan le Fay, Mordred has been raised in exile, overshadowed by his mother's desire for vengeance against Arthur. He is soon distracted from his studies under Merlin by his attraction to the fallen knight Lancelot.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarzan_on_the_Precipice"title="Tarzan on the Precipice">
Set between the novels "Tarzan of the Apes" and "The Return of Tarzan", the story opens after Tarzan hides the revelation of his true identity of Lord Greystoke from Jane Porter, since he believes she will be happier marrying his cousin William Cecil Clayton. Tarzan leaves Wisconsin and heads north into Canada, where he discovers a lost civilization of Vikings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconditional_Honor"title="Unconditional Honor">
More than 200 military personnel from all branches of the service are featured in the book with their stories and photos. The author and photographer traveled across the country to interview veterans and to meet and photograph them with their dogs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmarked_the_Stars"title="Postmarked the Stars">
Sick from being drugged, Dane Thorson staggers out of a flophouse on the planet Xecho and gets back to his ship, the Free Trader (i.e. tramp freighter) Solar Queen, just in time for the ship's blastoff on its first mail run to Trewsworld. Once the ship is secured, Dane and the crew find a man made up to look like Dane lying dead in Dane's bunk. After storing the corpse in a freezer, the crew discovers that part of their cargo, creatures called brachs, has become sentient. They find a radiation source that seems to be responsible for the change and which may have also changed the lathsmer embryos that they are carrying. For the nonce, until they can solve the mystery of the dead man and the radiation source, they put the brachs and the lathsmers into Solar Queen's lifeboat and Dane, astrogator Rip Shannon and engineer Ali Kamil land it on Trewsworld away from the starport to wait.The usually bird-like lathsmers are hatching and looking more like dragons. They manage to escape into the wild and Dane and Ali go looking for them. During the hunt, with the male brach assisting with his telepathic ability, Dane finds a crawler with the crew murdered and robbed of their cargo. Returning to the lifeboat, the two men find Medic Tau waiting there with Ranger Wim Meshler, who tells them that the crew have all been arrested on a long list of charges, including the murder of the dead man they found.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voodoo_Planet"title="Voodoo Planet">
On the hot, humid ocean world of Xecho Dane Thorson has just finished his part in preparing the Free Trader (i.e. tramp freighter) Solar Queen to begin her run on an interstellar mail route. While waiting for the ship they are to relieve on the route, Dane, Captain Jellico, and Medic Craig Tau are invited to visit Xecho’s sister planet, Khatka, by Chief Ranger Kort Asaki. A jungle world originally settled thousands of years before by native-African refugees from one of Earth’s atomic wars, Khatka is a safari world, essentially a giant hunting ground where big-game hunters come to try their skill against large, dangerous animals.On Khatka the three starmen discover that Ranger Asaki is being undermined by a witch doctor named Lumbrilo. During a ceremony in which Lumbrilo has disguised himself as the local version of a lion, Medic Tau, who has studied magic on many worlds, conjures the image of an elephant, thereby earning Lumbrilo’s enmity.On a visit to see Zoboru, a new, no-kill preserve, the three starmen, Ranger Asaki, and the flitter pilot are stranded in the jungle when their flitter crashes. The men must walk back to their base while avoiding encounters with Khatka’s dangerous fauna. One such encounter tells them that they are being tracked and herded by Lumbrilo.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Reformation"title="New Reformation">
Its first essay addresses misuse of scientific discovery by government. Contending that technology is a type of moral philosophy, not science, he advocates for technologists to advise on the proper use of technology and greater technological decentralization. He promotes reducing cars and encouraging space exploration. Goodman draws a final analogy between his contemporary times and the Protestant Reformation.The book marked Goodman's schism from the countercultural student movement, which he saw as growing in ignorance and frail ideology, and who saw him as bourgeois.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearts_of_Three"title="Hearts of Three">
Young descendant of the pirate Henry Morgan, who left him a rich heritage, wants to find the treasure of his ancestor. On the way, he meets his distant cousin, also Henry Morgan. Together, they will find dangerous adventures, unknown lands, and love.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_of_Fire_(novel_series)"title="Wings of Fire (novel series)">
The series currently consists of three arcs, which focus on young dragons, called dragonets, fulfilling prophecies in a fantasy world. Each arc consists of five books, and each book centers on its own protagonist whose story is told through a third person limited perspective. At present, a total of fifteen books in the main series have been released from 2012 to 2022. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worm_(web_serial)"title="Worm (web serial)">
Taylor Hebert is a fifteen-year-old parahuman who has developed the power to sense and control insects following a traumatic event. She lives in the fictional city of Brockton Bay, a hotspot of parahuman activity, and seeks to become a superhero. On her first night out in costume, she defeats a superpowered gang leader and is subsequently mistaken for a villain by a team of teenage parahuman thieves known as the Undersiders who work jobs for a mysterious benefactor. Taylor joins the team, hoping to learn the identity of their boss before turning them into the authorities. However, Taylor grows increasingly close to the Undersiders whilst having repeatedly poor run-ins with the parahuman law enforcement agency known as the Protectorate and finds herself unable to betray them. She commits to the Undersiders, adopting the moniker "Skitter" and abandons her dream of becoming a superhero. After a job, Taylor learns that the Undersiders have unwittingly assisted their patron, the gang lord known as Coil, in the kidnapping of Dinah, a girl with powerful precognitive powers, and is wracked with guilt over her own part.In part due to violence initiated by the defeat of various gangs by the Undersiders, Brockton Bay experiences a period of instability. This culminates in an attack by Leviathan, one of three powerful monsters collectively called the Endbringers, which devastates the city. In the aftermath, Coil directs the Undersiders in seizing territory and they begin to operate as makeshift warlords in the ruined city. Privately, Taylor and the Undersiders plot to depose Coil if they cannot secure Dinah's release. When Jack Slash, the theatrical leader of a notorious gang of parahuman serial killers known as the Slaughterhouse Nine, invades Brockton Bay, Dinah predicts he will bring about the end of the world in two years if not stopped. The city weathers the incursion, but its parahumans fail to kill either Jack or his prized protege Bonesaw, a young girl kidnapped and moulded by the gang of serial killers. In the process of escaping the city, Jack learns of Dinah's prophecy and decides to fulfill it and end the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_of_the_Islands"title="Jerry of the Islands">
Jerry was born in Santa Isabel Island, a part of the Solomon Islands archipelago. Jerry's owner was Mr. Haggin, who worked as a plantation guard and used Jerry to chase black slaves. Higgin gave Jerry to Mr. Van Horn, Captain of ship "Arangi", under condition to return the dog if something bad happens. The ship was engaged in delivering so-called "reverse" slaves who worked for three years on a plantation. During a stop on Malaita island, "Arangi" was attacked by the natives, who killed the captain and skipper. Jerry was kicked from the ship, which was looted and burned. A native boy found Jerry in the sea and delivered the dog on the shore. Later, Jerry was brought to a village, where tribe chief Bashto decided to use Jerry for improving the breed of local dogs. Jerry received a taboo status and began to live among the tribesmen.Jerry led a fairly quiet life until local sorcerer Agno decided to use the dog for a sacrifice. To overcome its taboo status, Agno arranged Jerry to attack a holy bird megapoda, which also had a taboo status. Jerry stole the bird eggs, which were kept for chief Bashta. Jerry was spotted while killing the fourth bird. The bird's taboo status was higher than that of Jerry; therefore, the dog could be sacrificed. However, old blindman Nalasu bought Jerry for a pig to protect himself against an expected vendetta.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael,_Brother_of_Jerry"title="Michael, Brother of Jerry">
Michael, an Irish terrier, was born and raised in the Solomon Islands. The dog now works as a slave hunter aboard a schooner on a mission to recruit native islanders for work. One day the captain accidentally leaves Michael on a beach and sails away. Michael was then abducted by Dag Daughtry, a steward on another ship, who initially planned to sell the dog for money. However, later he got attached to Michael and takes the dog to a trip around the world.A major theme in the book is how various animals are taught to perform for the public. In his Forward, Jack London says that this was a major reason for writing the book.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Objects"title="Rare Objects">
The book follows Maeve, who wants to be more than just the child of Irish immigrants – something made more difficult by the Great Depression. However, despite her attempts Maeve cannot keep herself away from the fast men and easy alcohol that ends up landing her in a mental asylum. It's there that she meets Diana, a young woman with an equally large hunger for freedoms not usually allowed women of the era. After she leaves Maeve manages to pick up the pieces of her life and begins working at an antiques shop, where she runs into Diana, who Maeve discovers is a socialite. Still eager to improve herself, Maeve lets Diana and her brother James draw her into their world, something that might end up proving to be disastrous for the young woman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trials_of_Apollo"title="The Trials of Apollo">
The series follows the trials of the god Apollo, who has been turned into a mortal named Lester Papadopoulos as punishment from his father and king of the gods Zeus. Lester (Apollo) must meet some new friends and train at Camp Half-Blood, save and return 5 undiscovered oracles that have gone dark, and get back to his true form. Zeus is angry at Apollo for a variety of reasons, most notably for the younger god's allowing his Roman descendant Octavian to rise to power during "The Heroes of Olympus" series by giving him his blessing. The final book of "The Heroes of Olympus", titled "The Blood of Olympus", takes place about six months before "The Trials of Apollo".The story is set at Camp Jupiter in the San Francisco Bay Area. The story starts off with Apollo and Meg taking Jason's body to Camp Jupiter. On their way to Camp Jupiter, they are attacked by eurynomos, but a girl with pink hair arrives with dryads and a faun and kills the Eurynomous. She then introduces herself as Lavinia and says she will take them to Camp Jupiter. After that, all the dryads and fauns start to leave. But as the last faun, Don tries to leave, Lavinia spots him and said that he will not leave because of what he is supposed to owe Lavinia for helping him. They carry Jason's tomb to the tunnel where she knows a shortcut to Camp Jupiter.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eho_Hamara_Jeevna"title="Eho Hamara Jeevna">
Bhano, a poor woman belonging to a poor farmer family in rural areas of Punjab, is the female protagonist of the novel. In her village women are often treated as commodity and sold for a little money. Bhano's father was ready to sell her daughter and arranges her marriage with Sarban, a resident of Moranwalli village. After her marriage she faces harassment and tortures. Sarban's four unmarried brothers try to abuse her sexually. The friends of Sarban also harass her. After the death of Sarban, Bhano's life becomes more miserable and her father tries to sell her once again to the brothers of Sarban. Bhano tries to escape by committing suicide. A man named Narain saves her and accepts her as his wife without denying to give any social recognition. Because of circumstances and patriarchal setup in her society Bhano fails to fulfil even her simplest goals in life.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Delicate_Dependency"title="The Delicate Dependency">
In Victorian London, widowed Dr. John Gladstone runs over a beautiful young man named Niccolo Cavalanti with his carriage. When others at the hospital begin to notice the injured man's unnatural healing ability, Gladstone shelters a recovering Niccolo in his home, and soon learns that the kind man is a vampire. Niccolo befriends both of Gladstone's daughters, the coming of age Ursula and the blind toddler Camille, and then disappears with Camille. Accompanied by Lady Hespeth Dunaway, a woman whose son was also abducted by Niccolo, Gladstone sets off to find his daughter.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unleashed_(Humphreys_novel)"title="Unleashed (Humphreys novel)">
Samantha Logan is a struggling artist whose career in New York City is not going the way she wants. She must move back to her hometown of Westerly, RI and move in with her grandmother. For a while she's been having dreams about a mysterious man. Much to her surprise the man of her dreamworld is her grandmother's next door neighbor, Malcolm Drew.Malcolm Drew is a member of an ancient race of shapeshifters called the Amoveo. But the biggest secret of all is that he tells Samantha that she is also an Amoveo, a hybrid. Her father was an Amoveo and her mother was a human with psychic powers. The Amoevo race is dying out and now a new chapter is beginning with humans being lifemates. But in the background of Samantha and Malcolm's budding romance a war is brewing among the Amoveo, one that will put the two of them in the middle.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undone_(Humphreys_novel)"title="Undone (Humphreys novel)">
Marianna Coltari wants nothing to do with the Amoveo civil war, she would rather live it up in the city and hang out at her favorite night club (that just happens to be run by a vampire coven). When her brother Dante hires his human employee Pete Castro as her bodyguard, things get interesting.Pete is a retired cop and doesn't want anything to do with guarding a party girl like Marianna but he is doing it as a favor for his friend. But when Pete finds out about the Amoveo and the pair are in hiding from an enemy.Pete is Marianna's lifemate and there attraction is undeniable but can he protect her. But a person from Pete's past May hold the biggest secret of all and the means to fight their enemies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kothe_Kharak_Singh"title="Kothe Kharak Singh">
Kothe Kharak Singh is a political novel and the main events of the plot take place in a village in Punjab. The novel presents three generations and narrates the struggle for Indian independence before the partition of the Punjab. It also describes the socio-economic and cultural changes the state was witnessing at that time.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_the_World_Works"title="The Way the World Works">
Baker’s subjects range widely, from subjective accounts of his own childhood and early life, to a feature on "The New Yorker"’s editor David Remnick, and an essay on the editorial process of Wikipedia. Baker also includes a number of essays on newspapers and libraries, advocating the importance of conservation of material, such as runs of newspapers, and arguing against digitisation at the expense of physical copies of texts. The book is divided into five sections: "Life", "Reading", "Libraries and Newspapers", "Technology", "War", and one final essay, "Last Essay" (which is about mowing the lawn and learning about the world). "Life" deals with biographical anecdotes, some of which are very short essays. "Reading" examines the act of reading and the importance of interacting with books, including an essay on the compilation of common-place books and an examination of Daniel Defoe and journalistic veracity. "Libraries and Newspapers" includes an address given at the opening of a new library building at Duke; Baker also describes his own efforts to preserve library catalogues and newspaper runs. "Technology" includes what is effectively a review of Amazon's Kindle 2 and also describes’ Baker’s interest in the editorial process of Wikipedia in a separate essay, "The Charms of Wikipedia". "War"'s biggest essay comprises a riposte to reviews of "Human Smoke", Baker’s 2008 book on World War II, in which he argues that the case for pacifism is often misunderstood and examines the reputation and effects of various campaigners for pacifism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Mackenzie"title="Miss Mackenzie">
After spending most of her adult life nursing first her dying father and then her invalid brother Walter, Margaret Mackenzie inherits a significant fortune from Walter at his death. Very unused to mingling in society, but seeking her place in it, Miss Mackenzie moves to a town called Littlebath (modeled after Bath, Somerset), and joins a group of Evangelicals centered around the popular local pastor Mr. Stumfold and his wife. At Littlebath, she meets three men who are interested in marrying her. One is Samuel Rubb, the business partner of her surviving brother, Tom Mackenzie; another is Mr. Maguire, Mr. Stumfold's curate, who is only interested in securing her wealth; and the third is her cousin, John Ball, a widower with a large family to support.She is soon asked by Mr. Rubb to lend him and her brother £2500 for business purposes, the amount supposedly (but not) secured against the business. Mr. Rubb eventually admits that the loan is not as he had described and is unlikely to ever be paid back. His honesty allows him to remain a prospective husband, though his manners are not those of the upper class, as Miss Mackenzie is painfully aware. She is invited for a short stay with the Ball family, and while there refuses a marriage proposal from John Ball. Mr. Maguire asks Miss Mackenzie to marry him when she returns to Littlebath, but she is put off by a prominent, disfiguring squint. She manages to avoid giving him a definite answer when she is informed that her brother Tom is dying and wishes to see her. While in London, she refuses Mr. Maguire by letter, as her fortune will be needed to help support Tom's family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Mountains_of_Portugal"title="The High Mountains of Portugal">
## Part 1: Homeless.1904. Tomás Lobo is a widower who lives in Alfama, Lisbon. Working as an assistant in the National Museum of Ancient Art he finds the diary of Father Ulisses, a homesick missionary worker who died in São Tomé in 1635, where slave trade was blooming. The missionary has manufactured a crucifix that was later given to a small church in Trás-os-Montes. Tomás borrows an early Renault from his rich uncle and drives to the North East of Portugal. He commits a hit-and-run after accidentally killing a young, blond boy. In a small church Tuizelo he finds the crucifix, on which Jesus has the face of a chimpanzee. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackass"title="Blackass">
The novel concerns Furo Wariboko, a Nigerian man, who wakes up one day to discover that he has become white.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweetbitter"title="Sweetbitter">
Tess is twenty-two when she packs up her things in her car and moves from Ohio to New York City. Knowing nothing and no one she stumbles her way into a job at a semi-prestigious restaurant as a back waitress. The servers and staff are exceptionally tight-knit and take their jobs extremely seriously and Tess does as well. Tess is also drawn to Jake, one of the bartenders, and Simone, a senior server who takes Tess under her wing and begins to train her palate and teach her about wines so that she might one day be able to become a server.Although they initially dislike her, the staff members soon warm up to Tess and she joins them in their hedonistic lifestyle. Nevertheless she longs to be included in Simone and Jake's more exclusive circle and comes to learn that they are both from Cape Cod, they knew each other before the restaurant, and Simone treats him like family. Tess aggressively pursues Jake but he refrains from sleeping with her which Tess comes to realize is because of Simone. When Simone walks in on Tess licking Jake after he cut himself, Simone says she will speak to Jake and he finally begins sleeping with Tess.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hind-Pak_Bordernama"title="Hind-Pak Bordernama">
In 1981 Langha, an Indian Sikh, was studying for an M.A. degree in Punjabi literature at Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar in India. There he got influenced by Naxalite movement and started to write songs and poems. At that time, he fell in love with Naseema, a Muslim girl from Punjab, Pakistan. To meet the girl, Langha crossed the India-Pakistan border several times, in the 1980s, without any visa or authorization. According to Langha, Naseema too crossed the border once and visited Punjab, India and Delhi. After two and a half years, Langha was arrested by the Pakistani security agency. Naseema fought very hard and even arranged to have Langha released. In 1986, Langha met Naseema for the last time. In 1988, barbed wires were installed on the India–Pakistan border. After that they never met again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Airlines"title="Underground Airlines">
The novel is narrated by Victor, a former Person Bound to Labor ('peeb') who, after escaping the Hard Four, has been forced to work as an undercover agent for U.S. Marshal Bridge, infiltrating and gathering evidence to prosecute fellow escapees and the people and organisations helping peebs escape slavery. If Victor refuses to help, the agent has threatened to return him to the plantation from which he escaped; and he can be tracked by a device implanted in his spine if he tries to run.As the novel opens, Victor is tracking down the peeb escapee Jackdaw, whose last known whereabouts have led Victor to Indianapolis. His trail ends at Saint Anselm's Catholic Promise, a seemingly derelict community center run by Father Barton. Victor poses as Jim Dirkson, a consultant for Indonesian cell carrier Sulawesi Digital, looking to expand into the United States, seeking to get his wife Gentle out of the Carolina plantation in which she is enslaved and into Little America, a suburb of Montreal mainly populated by African Americans in exile.Victor befriends Martha, a white woman with a mixed-race child, after they are ejected from a hotel for stealing from the breakfast buffet. Eventually, Victor locates Jackdaw, who is revealed to be a freeborn African-American college student named Kevin. He was sent by Barton to infiltrate Garments of the Greater South, Inc., purportedly to expose how they have been illegally selling slave-made goods to the rest of the United States (where such goods are unlawful) through shell companies located in Malaysia. Barton contends that this explosive revelation could bring down slavery, or at least assassinate the credibility of its proponents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girls_(Cline_novel)"title="The Girls (Cline novel)">
In the present day Evie Boyd is a middle-aged woman with few ties. An old friend of hers named Dan allows her to stay in his home as a caretaker while he's away on vacation. While there she thinks that house is being broken into and comes to realize it is only Dan's teenage son Julian and his girlfriend Sasha who have arrived unannounced. Julian does not remember Evie at first but eventually recalls that Evie was involved in a famous cult. This makes Evie recall the summer of 1969, when she was 14.It's 1969 and Evie's parents have divorced with Evie's father moving in with his young assistant, Tamar, and Evie's mother dating a married man named Frank. At this time, Evie spent most of her days with her best friend, Connie, being bored in their hometown of Petaluma, California. Meanwhile, Evie ends up falling in love with Connie's older brother, Peter.All of this boredom is finally put to rest when Evie sees a group of ragtag girls hanging around the town and dumpster diving. After Peter runs off with his pregnant girlfriend, Connie and Evie have a falling out with Connie accusing Evie of only being there for her brother. Evie later runs into one of the girls she had seen, Suzanne, and buys her toilet paper she was trying to shoplift. Later on, after getting into a fight with her mother, Evie runs into Suzanne and the girls again. This time they bring her to the ranch on Edgewater Road where they live where they introduce her to Russell Hadrick, their enigmatic leader. Evie realizes that all the girls have sex with Russell. During her first visit Russell also forces her to perform oral sex on him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wailing_Asteroid"title="The Wailing Asteroid">
When satellite-tracking stations around the world begin receiving radio signals from deep space, Joe Burke, owner of a small engineering company, is about to propose marriage to Sandy Lund, a woman he has known since high school. The signals consist of a repeated series of flute-like notes, which Joe recognizes. Joe plays for Sandy a tape recording he made a year earlier and it sounds just like the signal from space. Joe explains that he got the notes from a lucid dream that has come to him off and on since he was eleven. In the dream he is on a world with two moons and trees with ribbon-like leaves and he is holding a strange weapon, a kind of recoilless pistol. In his shop he makes a modified version of the weapon and when he tests it, it breaks loose from the workbench and slams into a wall hard enough to shatter the bricks.Meanwhile astronomers trace the signal to an asteroid, M-387, and send a radio signal to it. In response the asteroid changes its signal. With the help of Holmes, a yacht builder, Keller, an electronics expert, and several workmen, Joe builds a small spaceship propelled by a reactionless drive based on his modification of the recoilless pistol. Just in time the ship is finished and, with Holmes, Keller, Sandy, and Sandy’s sister Pam aboard, Joe lifts off just as the police arrive to end the project. Pursued by Nike missiles, Joe takes the ship into space and heads for Asteroid M-387.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cardboard_Crown"title="The Cardboard Crown">
The novel follows the story of Alice Langton, as told by her grandson Guy de Teba Langton, who pieces the story together from her diaries and family gossip. Alice is trapped in a life where her happiness is a secondary consideration among the rest of the family, who make continual demands on her money. Alice moves constantly between her homes in Australia and Europe, always longing for the home she does not inhabit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Blackbirds_Sing"title="When Blackbirds Sing">
During World War I Dominic Langton leaves his wife and child behind in Australia and travels to England to enlist in the army. While there he comes to know his English family roots for the first time and is initially seduced by the show of class and privilege. But his experiences in the war gradually change his attitudes, and he finally returns to Australia a very changed man.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barkskins"title="Barkskins">
The eponymous "barkskins" are indentured servants, transported from Paris slums to the wilds of New France in 1693, "... to clear the land, to subdue this evil wilderness," (p. 17) according to their master, a "seigneur". The two men are contracted for three years of service to earn land of their own, but Charles Duquet runs away at the first opportunity, seeking to make a fortune for himself in the fur trade or by any means he can. René Sel, on the other hand, dutifully wields the axe clearing farmland for the master. Later, he is forced to marry the master’s cast off Mi’kmaq woman, Mari, a healer who gives him children. The Sel family heritage is thus Native American and working class.Duquet, luckily surviving his escape through the wilderness, has a fortune to make, mostly on furs and lumber, and by swindling others whenever he can get away with it. Only then will he marry the daughter of a Dutch business partner, open an office in Boston, therefore Anglicizing the family name to Duke, and father or adopt the boys who will build the Duke &amp; Sons timber empire after him.All the while, for the Sel family, there is unceasing discontent. The young are always seeking their future as Native Americans in a whiteman's world. Indian lumbermen, for example, were always recruited for river work balancing on the longest logs rushing down a river where an awkward move could get a man crushed before he drowned.(p. 299)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_(Young_novel)"title="Eve (Young novel)">
A retelling of the biblical fall of man told from a female perspective, the novel tells the story of Lilly Fields, the broken daughter of Eve.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Night_(book)"title="The End of Night (book)">
The nine chapters of Bogard's book map to the nine levels of the Bortle scale, which attempts to quantify the subjective brightness and suitability for astronomy of the sky in different environments. Bogard has said of the scale, invented in 2001, "one of the reasons why identifying different depths of darkness is so important is that we don’t recognize that we’re losing it, unless we have a name to recognize it by."Bogard begins at a Bortle level 9 environment, by the Luxor Sky Beam, the brightest spotlight on Earth, located on the Las Vegas Strip. He explores the nighttime landscapes of London and Paris, and examines the planning, or lack thereof, in each city's lighting. He visits locations throughout the continental US, as well as Florence, the Canary Islands, and the isle of Sark, in his quest to understand the nature of light pollution. He experiences firsthand the deleterious effects of night shift work, talks with a former prison inmate about the psychological effects of uninterrupted light, and shares his own fear of the dark. Bogard ultimately finds a Bortle level 1 environment: an environment so perfectly free of stray light that the Milky Way casts noticeable shadows.Bogard argues against the long-held assumption of a correlation between bright light and reduced crime, citing research that finds no such link. Rather than suggesting a return to the completely unlit nights of centuries past, however, he argues for a careful consideration of where and how light is deployed, in order to provide sufficient nighttime illumination for safety, without creating glare and other unwanted effects.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_Star"title="Emerald Star">
The story starts with Hetty Feather searching for her long-lost father in Monksby, her late mother's old village. She finds most residents of the village are cold and unwelcoming, and has very little success identifying her mother by her old name, Ida. She finally locates her father, Bobbie Waters, who is emotional and guilty about having abandoned Hetty's mother and never having known he has a daughter – he welcomes her into his family and reveals to Hetty her mother's real name – Evie.However, he already has a family of his own – his wife Katherine, with whom Hetty shares an instant hatred and rivalry, and their children Mina and Ezra, who are equally reluctant about her. Katherine doubts Hetty's parentage due to the fact that Hetty has only known her mother by a moniker, and cannot confirm whether she's the same person Bobbie abandoned. Hetty establishes an uneasy friendship with her half-siblings, but finds it difficult to fit in the tight-knit, fishing-oriented community of Monksby. At one point, she writes to Sarah Smith, her friend and governor at the Foundling Hospital, to confirm her parentage. Miss Smith soon writes back, confirming her mother's real name and, by extension, her being Bobbie's daughter. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Bible"title="The Lost Bible">
Professor Baker is in the middle of a conspiracy of planetary proportions that runs for more than half a millennium. Helped by the interpol agent Christa Wolf and by the clues left by his grandfather before he died, Baker must discover the message hidden in the first printed bible, the Gutenberg Bible. The story is full of mystery, adventure and historic references that reveals a new face of Vlad the Impaler (Romanian:Vlad Țepeș, aka "Dracula").
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heatwave_in_Berlin"title="Heatwave in Berlin">
Australian Joy von Muhler is returning with her husband Stephen to Berlin, in the early 1960s, to visit his family. The pair have been married for 10 years after Stephen migrated to Australia following World War II. They return to a Berlin still struggling with damage caused in the war, and to a wealthy family still hiding secrets about their war-time involvement.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picnic_Races_(novel)"title="Picnic Races (novel)">
Set in the fictional Australian country town of Gubba, the novel details the town's preparations for its upcoming centenary celebrations, the social and financial factions in the town and the discovery of something long thought lost.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_Days_of_Flavia"title="30 Days of Flavia">
30 Days of Flavia started in August 2015. It started with how Flavia Tumusiime got a job at 91.3 Capital FM. The stories profile Flavia's private and career life in a random order. She tells of how she got different media jobs what has kept her at most of her jobs. She advises her fans on how to deal with social, private and career problems. The stories were published daily on her Facebook page for 30 days. Every episode or chapter started with a title and would end with a piece of advice for the readers. Her last chapter titled "The Journey" was published just moments before appearing on NTV Uganda in an interview to officially close the stories of her life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nothing_Man"title="The Nothing Man">
War has left Clinton Brown permanently disfigured by a terrible military accident. He works as a rewrite man for Pacific City's Courier newspaper. Brown's wife Ellen returns to Pacific City, ready to do whatever it takes to get Brown back. Even if it means exposing his deepest secret.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hell_of_a_Woman"title="A Hell of a Woman">
Frank "Dolly" Dillon hates his job of working collections for Pay-E-Zee Stores. He loathes his wife, Joyce, and has an account balance that barely lets him pay the bills each month.Working door-to-door one day, Dolly crosses paths with a beautiful young woman, Mona who is being forced by her aunt to do things that she does not want to with men she does not know. Mona wants out any way that she can.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hag-Seed"title="Hag-Seed">
"Hag-Seed" follows the life of Felix, once experimental artistic director of the Makeshiweg theatre festival, now an exiled man who speaks to his daughter's ghost. Felix's fall from the theatrical elite is brought about by the betrayal of his right-hand man, Tony. Using Felix's vulnerability after the death of his wife Nadia post-childbirth and the death of his beloved daughter Miranda, Tony used his influence and connections to oust Felix from his position and then have the board instate himself in the role. Worst, for Felix, is the cancellation of his production of "The Tempest." A play which he had thrown himself into in order to cope with the loss of his own Miranda.After an unceremonious firing and being escorted to his car, Felix decides that he must entirely retreat from the theatrical world he's known. Felix plunges into a form of self-inflicted exile, aiming to escape the press he imagines will humiliate him and those who betrayed him. He moves into a ramshackle cottage off the grid and relies on his unofficial, cash-in-hand landlords, Maude and Bert, for his power access.Nine years into his seclusion, Felix has spent his time imagining a life shared with his dead daughter and keeping track of the two men who betrayed him; Tony and the minister of heritage Sal O'Nally. Following an advertisement for a teaching position at the literacy program in the Fletcher County Correctional Institute, Felix applies for the position using the name 'Mr. Duke'.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laal_Batti"title="Laal Batti">
The novel revolves around the red light area Sonagachi in Kolkata and the lives of the prostitutes and other people living there. The novel is divided into several chapters and each chapter describes the cruel life and day-to-day harassment and other troubles faces by the prostitutes here. The author tried to prove that many people have wrong or unclear idea about the people living in these areas.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_Punjab_—_On_the_Road"title="Experience Punjab — On the Road">
Sidhu drove through different states and cities of Punjab, India such as Amritsar, Chandigarh, Patiala, Ludhiana, and Jalandhar and wrote her experiences in this book. The book not only narrates the author's journey, bu also tells local sight-seeing details, local attractions etc. According to Sidhu: "Driving in Punjab can be a lot of fun with good roads and the fact that the distances are not much. You can travel from one end to another in around five hours".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lightning_(novel)"title="Black Lightning (novel)">
Tempe Caxton is an ageing television presenter who is recovering from a suicide attempt following the end of her career and the breakdown of a love affair. In hospital she learns that her dead son has left a part-Aboriginal child in a north coast town. The novel follows Caxton's journey of discovery into her own family's past and the living conditions of Australia's original inhabitants.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_Forgetting"title="Theories of Forgetting">
"Theories of Forgetting" is a novel made up of three intersecting narratives. The first involves the story of a middle-aged video artist, Alana, working on a short experimental video about Robert Smithson's land art "Spiral Jetty". The second involves the story of Alana’s husband, Hugh, and his slow disappearance throughout Europe and across Jordan on a trip there both to remember and to forget in the aftermath of Alana’s unexpected death. His vanishing is linked to the Sleeping Beauties, a rising global religious cult that worships barbiturates. The third narrative involves the story of their daughter, Aila, an art critic and conceptual artist living in Berlin, and the marginalia she writes in her father's manuscript she discovers after his disappearance.Each of these narratives has its own unique form and texture. Alana’s takes the shape of a diary containing photographs, drawings, newspaper clippings, and meditations on Smithson’s oeuvre, with which she becomes increasingly obsessed. Hugh’s is a more conventional third-person narrative, its voice numbed, disoriented, in the wake of his wife's unexpected death. Aila's notes exist only in the margins of Hugh's text.Each page of the novel is divided in half. One narrative runs across the “top” from “front” to “back,” while the other runs “upside down” across the “bottom” of the page from “back” to “front.” In a sense, then, the novel’s physical structure suggests a spiral. "Theories of Forgetting" doesn't possess a front cover. Rather, it possesses two back ones. Opening it, the reader must choose what constitutes the privileged narrative, the one with which to begin, and that choice will exert pressure on the meaning she or he will make, since there are contradictory elements in the competing plots.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Such_Pleasure"title="Such Pleasure">
The novel follows the life of Bridget Malwyn, the illegitimate daughter of an Irish peer and an English governess. Malwyn transforms over the course of the novel from being young and romantic through to an old disillusioned, objectionable old woman who lives in the past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Guest_(novel)"title="Maurice Guest (novel)">
In turn-of-the-century Leipzig, Maurice Guest, a young English provincial, falls madly in love with an Australian woman, Louise Dufrayer. The novel follows this doomed affair to its tragic end.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choir_Boy_(novel)"title="Choir Boy (novel)">
Berry, a 12-year-old boy, wants nothing more than to remain a choirboy. Desperate to keep his voice from changing, Berry tries to injure himself, and then convinces a clinic to give him testosterone-inhibiting drugs that keep his voice from deepening but also cause him to grow breasts. Suddenly Berry's thrown into a world of unexpected gender issues that push him into a universe far more complex than anything he's ever known.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Young_Cosima"title="The Young Cosima">
Set around 1850 the novel follows the composer Richard Wagner as he fights for recognition and details his relationships with Franz Liszt, Hans von Buelow and his wife Cosima von Buelow (who later married Wagner).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Milk"title="Hot Milk">
Rose's paralysis confines her to a wheelchair and limits Sofia's freedoms. The proprietor of the clinic, Gómez, is charismatic but may be of questionable skill. While Rose undergoes treatment, 25-year-old Sofia becomes obsessed with Ingrid, a seamstress. Later, Sofia visits her father in Athens, from whom she has been estranged, and spends time with his new wife and daughter. Athens seems to be in a state of collapse, and the novel pictures both Greece and Spain in the throes of economic and political turmoil. Sofia is an anthropologist by training, and this informs her perspective on events.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Bloody_Project"title="His Bloody Project">
The book is the story of the young man Roddy Macrae and his animosity with the local constable, Lachlan Broad.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_North_Water_(novel)"title="The North Water (novel)">
The north water of the title is the North Water Polynya, to which ships sail in the hunt and kill whales. The novel opens in Hull where the industry is under threat with paraffin and coal oil replacing whale oil. We meet Henry Drax a harpooner who rapes and kills a child, "... a brute, a vacuum into which men and boys are sucked and do not emerge alive". Joining as ships doctor is Irishman Patrick Sumner a disgraced former British army surgeon with a murky past in India. They set sail on the "Volunteer" under Captain Brownlee who lost his last ship and crew; in league with the owner Baxter, he intends to scuttle the "Volunteer" in an insurance scam.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Say_We_Have_Nothing"title="Do Not Say We Have Nothing">
The novel begins with a girl named Marie living with her mother in Vancouver, Canada. The year is 1991, and the addition to their household of a Chinese refugee fleeing the post-Tiananmen Square crackdown, Ai-Ming, is the catalyst that sets the rest of the plot into motion. The novel quickly fractures into a number of different sub-plots, introduced by Ai-Ming, which span generations of both Marie and Ai-Ming's families, who are later revealed to be intrinsically connected. These sub-plots are set during a tumultuous period in China's history, from the beginning of Mao Zedong's reign in the late 1940s to the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. There are four main eras that the novel focuses on, though they do not necessarily occur in chronological order. The first involves Big Mother Knife, her sister Swirl, and Swirl's husband Wen the Dreamer during the land reform campaign and the executions that were involved. Secondly is the era focusing on Sparrow, Kai and Zhuli during the Cultural Revolution which centers around the Shanghai Conservatory and their experiences there. Thirdly is Sparrow and Ai-Ming, his daughter, during the Tiananmen Square protests and aftermath. Finally, the last era is the "present" which is Marie discovering her connection to all these stories. As well, the story contained in the Book of Records is a constant presence throughout all these other narratives. While Wen the Dreamer is the principal translator and contributor to the book, as the novel progresses the stories of all the characters become so incorporated into the Book of Records that the line is blurred between fact and fiction, past and present.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagal_Basti"title="Pagal Basti">
The main characters in the story are (Adiguru) Prashant and (Adimata) Martha. The major focus of the book is the continuous changes that occur in the mental state of these two characters. Both of the characters are dissatisfied with each other and both feel guilty about their past. They have both started a journey of to end their dissatisfaction and face their guilt. Prashant, who had loved Martha has changed into Adiguru after her refusal. Martha realizes the value of love only after she rejects Prashant and she goes on a quest of finding him in the Adi village. But this time Prashant rejects her proposal and instead changes her into Adimata.He was in love with Sri. She was a beautiful lady.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Will_Know_Me"title="You Will Know Me">
At the beginning of the "You Will Know Me", a young man who is a family friend is killed in a hit-and-run car crash shortly before a gymnastics competition. The follows Devon Knox, a hopeful Olympian gymnast, and her parents, Katie and Eric Knox, who have imposed excessive burdens on themselves, emotionally and financially, to support their 15-year-old daughter. The story is told according to Katie's point of view and showcases the family unraveling as Eric is suspected to be tied to the young man's death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_is_Not_Enough"title="The Sun is Not Enough">
Martin Belford is a wealthy solicitor who lives with his sister Alice. Their world is disturbed when Carl von Rendt, an escaped Yugoslav war criminal, moves in next door. Carl is kidnapped by the Belford's gardener and charwoman with the intention of returning him to Europe to face justice. Martin and Alice discover the plot and have to decide if the kidnapping is justified or if Carl should be set free. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_(De)liberation"title="Animal (De)liberation">
In the first chapter, Deckers abstracts from some of the deeper questions associated with this topic by focusing on the narrow global health impacts, ignoring the question how nonhuman organisms ought or ought not to be treated when human beings make decisions about what to eat. The chapter reveals that, in many situations, omnivorous and vegetarian diets produce more narrowly defined negative global health impacts than vegan diets. The survey is limited mainly to how different diets impact on zoonoses, as well as to how they impact on land, water, fossil fuels, and atmospheric resources. It is also argued that omnivorous and vegetarian diets result in significant negative health impacts upon the lives of those who work in the farm animal sector, for example on those who work in slaughterhouses.In chapter two, Deckers argues that human moral agents must move beyond these narrow considerations as our duty to strive for holistic human health cannot be fulfilled unless the interests of nonhuman organisms are also considered. In contrast to mainstream theories in animal ethics, which have argued mainly for duties to avoid inflicting pain, suffering, and death upon other animals and who denounce speciesism, Deckers argues that a good moral theory embraces speciesism and should consider the consumption of animal products in light of an extension of speciesism, which he refers to as ‘animalism’, a commitment to give preferential treatment to all individuals in the animal kingdom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuns_in_Jeopardy"title="Nuns in Jeopardy">
A ship founders in a storm at sea and a number of survivors, including a group of Anglo-Catholic nuns, find themselves washed up on an almost deserted island. The only thing they find on the island is an empty well-stocked bungalow.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Min-Min"title="The Min-Min">
Set in a squalid fettlers' siding on the east-west railway just south of Woomera, this novel follows the story of Sylvie Edwards and her younger brother Reg. After Reg destroys a teacher's record player the two children set off across the desert to the Tuckers' homestead. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lesser_Dead"title="The Lesser Dead">
The book is told from the viewpoint of Joey Peacock, a self-described unreliable narrator and vampire living in New York City during 1978. Joey was turned into a vampire when he was fourteen years old during the 1930s, by his parents' ex-cook Margaret, who turned him as an act of revenge for framing her for theft and getting her fired. While vampires do not age, their natural state resembles that of a corpse, making it necessary for them to use glamour-esque charm to project the image of life and health to humans and each other.For about the last decade Joey has been living in an abandoned underground part of the city that connects to the subway system with Margaret and several other vampires such as Cvetko, an older looking vampire that is chronologically about the same age as Joey but occasionally treats him like a surrogate son. The group generally works together and lives by a set of rules created by Margaret, who serves as their leader. Joey goes about his undead life in a semi-regular pattern, which includes visiting the skeleton of a young girl he names Chloe in a small passage, that leaves him feeling a little bored with his existence until he witnesses a vampiric child charming a subway patron into leaving with him. He and the others soon discover that there are several such children, all of whom have a hunger for blood that is far larger than that of any of the other vampires. This causes Joey to question if the children are a different type of vampire entirely and the identity of the person who turned them, as turning children is heavily frowned upon by the vampires Joey is aware of. The group suspects that the children were turned by a long lived vampire known as the Hessian, who lives in seclusion elsewhere in the city. A few vampires living in the city, a Hispanic gang that owes obedience to Margaret, launches an unsuccessful attack on the Hessian, only for it to end with the death of almost every gang member. Meanwhile, many of the group's members begin to pity the children, as they're led to believe that they were turned for pedophilic purposes, and secretly feed them their own blood, including Joey.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Suicide_Motor_Club"title="The Suicide Motor Club">
The book is set in the 1960s, where a group of nomadic vampires drive across America in muscle cars in search of victims. They attack Judith Lamb and her family, killing her husband and son. Judith herself almost dies but manages to survive and join a convent in the hope that it will bring her peace. In the convent she's approached by The Bereaved, a group of vampire hunters seeking the destruction of all vampires.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Watch_Tower"title="The Watch Tower">
Laura and Clare Vaizey are sisters living in Sydney in the period around World War II. When their father dies and their class-conscious mother decides to return to live in England the sisters are left to fend for themselves. Laura abandons her medical studies, goes to work in a factory and accepts a marriage proposal from Felix Shaw on the understanding that he will also look after her sister. But Felix is an attention-hungry tyrant with a lack of empathy who sets out to belittle, gaslight and demean the two sisters at every opportunity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Party"title="Night of the Party">
The novel tells the story of painter Gavin Leigh's marriage to Ella Barnes. Starting in the present day (when the novel was written), a chance remark by one of the couple's children takes Ella back to the time when the two met in Cornwall while on holiday. Gavin married for convenience while Ella married for control and now she finds herself with a romantic rival from the initial encounter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Small_One_(book)"title="The Small One (book)">
The story starts with Padre who tells his boy Pablo about how donkeys aren't stubborn after Pablo is frustrated with the attitude of his donkey Cupido, who is doing nothing to work for him. So Padre tells the story that happened many miles from where they live in El Camino Del Norte, Mexico.In the Galilean countryside near the city of Nazareth, Small One was an old donkey who belonged to a woodcutter, whose son was kinder to him. One day the boy's father tells him to sell Small One to the tanner as he feels there is no use for him, as he is too old to work. The boy insists not to take him to the tanner's, but his father tells him not to cry over a donkey. The boy realizes there's no use arguing, so he goes off to town to sell Small One, but doesn't tell his father that he will sell him elsewhere. The first place he sees is an auction, where the bidder is selling horses. The boy asks the bidder to sell his donkey, but the bidder refuses and he and the crowd make fun of Small One which upsets the boy; the boy then sets off to see who else would buy him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Against_the_Rull"title="The War Against the Rull">
1-4: Trevor Jamieson is stranded in a deadly jungle on the planet Eristan II with an ezwal, a 3-ton, six-legged saurian-like creature that dislikes humans and wants them to leave his native world, Carson's Planet. Having bailed out of a crashing spaceship, Jamieson and the telepathic ezwal must make their way to the wreckage in hopes that the subspace radio survived and they can call for help. Their journey is interrupted by a cruiser belonging to the Rull, creatures that appear to have evolved from chameleon-like worms and who are implacably hostile to all intelligent life. The Rull capture the ezwal, but must lie hidden when a Terran battleship engages their cruiser. When a native plant kills the Rull, the ezwal guides Jamieson to their lifeboat and Jamieson flies the two of them to safety.5: Jamieson arranges to return the ezwal to Carson's Planet. As they part, the ezwal rejects Jamieson's request that the ezwals develop a mechanical civilization capable of fending off the Rull. Jamieson finds a similar intransigence in the human settlers, all of whom have had family members killed by ezwals. One young woman tells him that Carson's Planet's moon is habitable and offers to guide him on tour of it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Falling_Astronauts"title="The Falling Astronauts">
The novel's protagonist Colonel Richard Martin suffers a mental breakdown during one of the series of space missions to test nuclear seismic charges on the Moon. Disillusioned by the space program, Martin agrees to handle public relations for one more mission before termination. However, the mission to install the seismic charges on the lunar surface goes awry when one of the astronauts goes rogue and threatens nuclear destruction upon Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picnic_(novel)"title="The Picnic (novel)">
Australian Matty Westlake is descended from an old English family and when her husband dies she is determined to take her sons, Christopher and Wilfred, back to England to introduce them to their forebears. The English side of the family is completely ignorant of Australian ways and the Australians also find themselves at odds with the English.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_and_Honor_(novel)"title="Duty and Honor (novel)">
Jack Ryan Jr. is on a forced leave from The Campus after disobeying orders in his last mission (depicted in "Commander in Chief"). One night outside a market in Alexandria, Virginia, he survives a mugging attack by fighting back; the wounded mugger later stumbles into an eight-wheeler truck, killing him. Ryan investigates the circumstances behind the incident using clues left behind by his attacker, and is later convinced that he is being targeted for assassination when he finds out that another man similar to his description was killed a week ago.Over the course of his investigation, Ryan meets Effrem Likkel, a Belgian freelance journalist who is following up on a lead about seemingly missing French soldier René Allemand. Allemand, son of a former Marshal of France, had disappeared from his post in Ivory Coast. Likkel, however, finds out that he was kidnapped and thinks that he was brainwashed afterwards. Moreover, he reveals that Allemand and Jack’s would-be assassin, now known as Eric Schrader, had met in secret a week before the Lyon terrorist attacks, and further deduces that Allemand was duped by Schrader to carry out the attacks. Ryan and Likkel later team up to aid each other in their own investigations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Miles"title="Golden Miles">
Set in the Western Australian goldfields during the period 1914 to 1927, the novel follows the story of Sally Gough and her family. Gough is running a boarding house, her husband and one son are in the undertaking business, one son is at school, another in an assayer's office and the last is working down the mines.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula_Alert"title="Nebula Alert">
The novel features the author's minor series character the ex-Empress Irene, who has by this time abdicated her throne, and Benjamin Trafford. The husband-and-wife team crew the "Imperial Yacht Wanderer" and are ferrying a number of ex-slave Iralians back to their home planet. But the "Wanderer" runs into pirates, and they are forced to escape through the Horsehead Nebula. Space inside the nebula is strange, and they emerge into an alternate timeline where they encounter the author's major series character, John Grimes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_House"title="The Death House">
The book centers on Toby, a young boy living in England at some point in the future. Until recently he had led a normal, peaceful existence, something that ended after a blood test marked him as a "Defective". He's quickly sent away to the Death House, a boarding school for children whose blood has marked them as different from those around him. Toby is terrified, as he's given little information about what is going on or what exactly is going on with his body. All he knows is that the nurses and staff monitor him and his fellow students closely for any changes in their health, bodies, and behaviors. Anyone who begins to show changes are sent away in the night to places unknown, never to return. Toby tries hard to avoid notice, even going so far as to sleep during the daytime so he can wander around at night undisturbed, as the others take sleeping pills in order to slumber the night away. It's only when Clara arrives that his makeshift routine is disrupted, causing him to seek more out of life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_in_Fright_(novel)"title="Wake in Fright (novel)">
John Grant is a young, bonded schoolteacher who has been assigned to work a gruelling two-year post as the schoolmaster of Tiboonda, an isolated, three-building township in the outback of western New South Wales. Upon finishing school in time for the six-week Christmas holiday season, Grant catches a train to the mining town of Bundanyabba – known by the locals as "The Yabba" – to await a flight home to Sydney, where he hopes to spend his vacation swimming at the nearby beach. While passing time in a pub, Grant encounters the local policeman, Jock Crawford, with whom he drinks several glasses of beer and visits the local two-up school to get dinner. Deciding to try his luck at the game, Grant makes two hundred pounds in a winning streak, but in a bid to win enough money to pay off his bond and impress Robyn – a wealthy and attractive woman he briefly encountered in Sydney – he loses all but two shillings of his cash in two rounds, leaving him without means of buying a plane ticket.The next morning, Grant visits another pub, where he is befriended by mining director Tim Hynes, who invites him to have dinner with his wife and their adult daughter, Janette, and drink with two of his colleagues, boxers-turned-miners Dick and Joe. During the night, Janette attempts to seduce the virgin Grant, who drunkenly vomits during the encounter. He awakens the following afternoon in the ramshackle cabin of "Doc" Tydon, a vagrant medical practitioner, war veteran and associate of the Hynes. Grant quickly takes a disliking to Doc when he expounds upon his open relationship with Janette. They are joined by Dick and Joe in a violent, drunken kangaroo hunt that rages into the night. Upon awakening the next morning, Grant faintly recalls being on the receiving end of a homosexual encounter initiated by Doc.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rim_of_Space"title="The Rim of Space">
The novel follows the adventures of Derek Calver, one of Chandler's early major characters. The novel sees Calver joining up with the Rim Runners in order to undertake an exploration of desolate planets. He joins the crew of "Lorn Lady" and accompanies it to various planets on the Galactic Rim.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_Brooklyn"title="Another Brooklyn">
The story starts with August, an adult anthropologist, returning to New York to bury her father. On the subway, she encounters an old friend, and begins to reminisce. She remembers being an 8 year old girl moving with her father and younger brother to Brooklyn from Tennessee after the death of her mother. The book then follows August through her teenage years. August shares friendships with three other Brooklynites, Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi, as they walk through the neighborhoods and dream optimistically of the future, and revealing what it held in store for them. August and her friends also face dangers on the streets, and family strife of various types.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Emus"title="Seven Emus">
The novel's plot revolves around the attempt by two villains to steal a unique piece of Indigenous Australian sculpture.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witch's_Thorn"title="The Witch's Thorn">
The novel is set in the fictional New Zealand North Island town of Te Kana. After the disappearance of her consumptive mother and the death of her beloved grandamother, Bethell Jury is adopted by her Aunt Amy whose husband is the local grocer and whose son is an unpleasant lout.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winged_Seeds"title="Winged Seeds">
The novel is again set in the West Australian goldfields, this time in 1936, and also follows the life of its main character Sally Gough. Time has moved on and now Gough's grandchildren are making their living on the land. But the 1930s Depression has hit them hard and then war arrives and the grandsons head off to war in Europe. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughter_of_Silence"title="Daughter of Silence">
In mid-summer in a Tuscan village a twenty-four-year-old woman shoots the town's mayor dead in revenge for the death of her mother during the war. The subsequent trial brings out secrets both personal and political.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Festival_of_Insignificance"title="The Festival of Insignificance">
Alain is strolling down a Paris street, examining women and he comes up with an explanation for their thighs, buttocks, and breasts, he fails to grasp the mystery behind the seductive power of their navel,Around the same time, Alain’s recently retired friend, Ramon, is in the Luxembourg Gardens admiring the sculptures. Ramon runs into his wealthy friend, D’Ardelo, and they gossip about Madame Franck. They both admire her courage in the face of her husband’s death. Ramon invites D’Ardelo to his birthday party; D’Ardelo confesses that he has untreatable cancer and will soon die, though none of this is true. Ramon believes the lie, and D’Ardelo is pleased that he was so convincing.After parting Ramon visits his friend Charles to discuss a cocktail party they are planning. However, they become distracted gossiping about Quaquelique, a friend of theirs whom they find banal and unfunny to be around. Ramon mentions that Quaquelique has more success with women than D’Ardelo. Charles explains that Quaquelique’s personality is more agreeable than D’Ardelo’s. They both agree that D’Ardelo is a narcissist but still feel sorry for him because of his non-existent disease.Caliban, an out of work actor, joins Ramon and Charles. They talk about a story Charles recently read in the book Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev. Caliban laughs off the story about Stalin, but Charles makes the point that people under Stalin wouldn’t have found it very funny. However, they agree that the story must have been intended as a joke and the only reason it was misunderstood was that no one knew what a joke was anymore.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucky_F*cking_Dent"title="Bucky F*cking Dent">
A Yankee Stadium peanut vendor moves in with his father, a lifelong Boston Red Sox fan, who is fighting off cancer long enough in hopes of seeing the Red Sox beat the Yankees in the 1978 playoffs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill's_Secret_War"title="Churchill's Secret War">
The book sets out to document how colonial policies and negligence created the condition for a famine to break out in the Bengal region. Mukerjee argues that due to Churchill's racial and political worldview the colonial government (under his supreme control) would, in the words of Lord Wavell, feed only those Indians who were "actually fighting or making munitions or working some particular railways". The book examines how Frederick Lindemann, Lord Cherwell, close to Churchill, had a significant influence on him. Known as "the Prof", Cherwell was an aging scientist with "Malthusian ideas" and held racist views towards Indians, whom he characterised as "helots".The book examines the condition of India during the war. India produced 600,000 miles of cotton fabric for Allied interests during the war, Mukerjee writes. Because of the shortfall and inflation this caused within India, Mukerjee the poorest were reduced to covering themselves with scraps or going naked. Women would have to stay indoors all day waiting for others to return with the single piece of cloth the family possessed. In 1942, as a result of the Japanese conquest of Burma that began that year, the colonial government in India introduced a "denial policy" in Bengal, a scorched earth policy designed to deny Japan access to food and transport should it invade Bengal. Mukerjee attributes the "scorched earth" approach to Churchill, who reportedly urged it on 14 November 1941. The "rice denial" policy saw soldiers confiscate and destroy rice deemed surplus; according to one journalist, thousands of tons of rice were thrown into the water in east Bengal. The "boat denial" policy saw 46,000 boats able to carry more than ten passengers confiscated; bicycles, carts and elephants were also taken. One civil servant said the policy "completely broke the economy of the fishing class" in Bengal. Yet Churchill wrote after the war (a remark with which Mukerjee opens her prologue): "No great portion of the world population was so effectively protected from the horrors and perils of the World War as were the peoples of Hindustan [India]. They were carried through the struggle on the shoulders of our small island."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behold_the_Dreamers"title="Behold the Dreamers">
The novel opens in fall 2007 with the interview of an immigrant from Cameroon, Jende Jonga, who is hoping to be hired as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a Lehman Brothers executive. Jonga's job allows him to pay his wife's college tuition and send money back home until the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers threatens both families. Jende Jonga is also seeking permanent residency through a false asylum request.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_Wild_Sky"title="To the Wild Sky">
Six children, travelling to visit an outback station by plane, are thrown into crisis when their pilot suddenly dies mid-flight. One of the children successfully lands the plane and the children then find themselves having to survive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Half-Burnt_Tree"title="The Half-Burnt Tree">
The novel follows the story of three people living in the fictional NSW north-coast town of Doolinba: a man returned from Vietnam, scarred and damaged; the woman in charge of the local post office, embittered by marriage; and an indigenous boy, orphaned and afraid. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Underground_Railroad_(novel)"title="The Underground Railroad (novel)">
The book alternates between the perspective of the lead character, Cora, and chapters told from a different character's perspective. The featured characters are: Ajarry, Cora's grandmother; Ridgeway, a slave catcher; Stevens, a South Carolina doctor conducting a social experiment; Ethel, the wife of a North Carolina station agent; Caesar, a fellow slave who escapes the plantation with Cora; and Mabel, Cora's mother. The chapter locations are: Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana, and (an undefined) "North".Cora is a slave on a plantation in Georgia and an outcast after her mother Mabel ran off without her. She resents Mabel for escaping, although it is later revealed that her mother tried to return to Cora but died from a snake bite and never reached her. Caesar approaches Cora about a plan to flee. Reluctant at first, she eventually agrees as her situation with her master and fellow slaves worsens. During their escape, they encounter a group of slave catchers, who capture Cora's young friend Lovey. Cora is forced to kill a twelve-year-old boy to protect herself and Caesar, eliminating any possibility of merciful treatment should she be recaptured. With the help of an inexperienced abolitionist, Cora and Caesar find the Underground Railroad, depicted as a literal underground train system that runs throughout the south, transporting runaways northwards. They take a train to South Carolina.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edens_Lost_(novel)"title="Edens Lost (novel)">
The novel is a family saga told through the eyes of 16-year-old Angus Weekes who goes to live with the St James family in the Blue Mountains area of New South Wales after the death of his guardian. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Smoke_(novel)"title="The Big Smoke (novel)">
Set in Sydney in the early part of the twentieth century, the novel is a series of stories told from the perspective of people associated with the son of an indigenous boxer, Chiddy Hay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ride_on_Stranger_(novel)"title="Ride on Stranger (novel)">
The novel follows the story of Shannon Hicks, a country girl who arrives in Sydney just before the outbreak of World War II and proceeds to make her way through city life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britt-Marie_Was_Here"title="Britt-Marie Was Here">
The plot of the novel focuses on a "nag-hag" woman who has recently left her cheating husband and has taken on a job in the city of Borg, working at the recreation center. The city itself is barely a full town, with only a pizzeria and a florist shop open. There, Britt-Marie finds herself responsible for a group of children in an impoverished area of town in need of revamping. Britt-Marie's husband, Kent, and her new romantic interest, Sven, compete for her attention. Sami, Vega, and Omar challenge the notion of typical home life. Somebody, a 40-year-old alcoholic, runs the hub of the city out of the local pizza shop and occasionally dabbles in selling illegal goods.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_Roye_Ansoo_(novel)"title="Bin Roye Ansoo (novel)">
The story revolves around Saba Shafiq, who is in love with her cousin Irtaza. But he treats her like his best friend, not a love interest. Irtaza then leaves for the United States of America for two years, where he meets Saman Shafiq, who is his cousin and falls in love with her. Saman is Saba's elder sister, and she was given to her uncle and aunt as a child. Saman's adoptive parents die in a plane crash which was headed to Germany, and Irtaza returns her to Pakistan. Upon learning she has an elder sister, Saba is at first overjoyed, but her happiness quickly turns to disdain when she finds out that Irtaza and Saman are engaged. In a moment of shock and despair after witnessing their marriage and realizing Irtaza is now Saman's, Saba wishes that Saman had died along with her adoptive parents in the plane crash.Saman and Irtaza decided to live in America after their marriage. A few years later, Irtaza and Saman come to Karachi with their son Maaz. On Maaz's birthday, Saman plans to get a birthday cake and some flowers for her mother. However, tragedy occurs as Saman is hit by a bus in front of Saba. Irtaza calls takes her to hospital immediately, however, Saman dies en route. Meanwhile, as Maaz is a child in need of a mother's love, Irtaza is being suggested to marry Saba, but he declines. Saba marries Safeer. Saba is being told by Safeer that he plans to marry a Canadian. Saba asks Safeer to do what he wants but to not divorce her at any cost. Soon Irtaza learns that Safeer has married in Canada and has a son and the fact Saba knew all this but kept it secret angers him, so he confronts Saba upon his return, who cries and tells him that she doesn't want to get divorced. However, Irtaza drags her to their family and tells them the truth. Their family is shocked and they make Safeer divorce Saba. Saba's dying mother wishes Saba and Irtaza to get married. They get married on her mother's death bed. Saba has difficulty accepting her marriage and moving past her trauma, feeling that she might be the cause of Saman's death. After a dramatic turn of events, Irtaza finally learns the whole story and, recognizing the purity of Saba's love for him, he declares his love for her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Breath_Becomes_Air"title="When Breath Becomes Air">
Following the prospect of a better life, Kalanithi's father moves the family from Bronxville, New York to Kingman, Arizona when Kalanithi is ten. A doctor himself, Kalanithi's father dedicates most of his time to medicine and is notably absent from the house. Believing that to be a doctor, he would have to be away from the family like his father, Kalanithi becomes disenchanted with medicine. Although Kalanithi and his two brothers enjoy the newfound liberty of their desert town, their mother constantly worries for their academic future in a town that the U.S. census has declared “the least educated district in America.” Unwilling to let anything halt their learning, she acquires college reading lists and instills in her sons a love for literature. The summer before heading to Stanford University for school, Kalanithi reads "Satan, His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S.", by Jeremy Leven. The book's idea that the mind is the result of the brain doing its work awakes a curiosity in Kalanithi for neuroscience.After completing degrees in English literature and human biology, Kalanithi feels there is still much to learn. He is accepted to a master's program in English literature at Stanford, and one afternoon—pushed by his desire to understand the meaning of life— discovers the calling to practice medicine for the first time. Preparing to apply to medical school, Kalanithi uses the time off to study the history and philosophy of science and medicine at Cambridge. He later starts medical school at Yale. During his time at Yale, Kalanithi meets his wife, Lucy, and sees the patient-doctor relationship as an example of life, death, and morality coming together. After two years of classroom learning, Kalanithi experiences his first birth and death in his OB-GYN clinical rotation, when a set of twins could not be carried to term. It is then that Kalanithi understands that intelligence is not enough in the practice of medicine, and that morality is also needed. After medical school, Lucy Kalanithi starts internal medicine residency at UCSF and Paul Kalanithi begins a neurosurgical residency at Stanford. Though he finds it hard at first, Kalanithi grows used to the rigor of neurosurgery and, in his fourth year, joins the neuroscience lab of a professor affectionately called “V.” In the sixth year of residency, Kalanithi returns to his hospital duties and having reached professional recognition, he feels he has finally found his place in the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okay_for_Now"title="Okay for Now">
Douglas "Doug" Swieteck is a fourteen-year-old boy living somewhere on Long Island in 1968 during the Vietnam War. After Doug's dad is fired for mouthing off to his boss, the Swietecks move to the small town of Marysville, NY, where Doug feels out of place and unwelcome.In Marysville, Doug is fascinated by "The Birds of America", a book illustrated by John James Audubon, on display under glass at the local library. Doug starts to learn how to draw, starting with a copy of Audubon's Arctic Tern under the tutelage of Mr. Powell, a librarian. Doug also meets a girl named Lillian "Lil" Spicer, on whom he eventually has a crush. Lil's father owns a deli, and hires Doug as a delivery boy, which lets him get to know other residents of Marysville. Around Christmas, Doug's oldest brother Lucas returns home from Vietnam with permanent injuries, and Doug helps him adjust. As the novel progresses, Doug faces issues such as his father's abuse, problems at school, and the illness of his friend, with maturity and confidence that he develops through learning to draw and his interactions with the townsfolk. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jernigan_(1991_novel)"title="Jernigan (1991 novel)">
Peter Jernigan, the eponymous narrator, is an alcoholic widower in his late 30s who tells the darkly comic story of his attempts to raise his teenage son Danny in the suburbs of New Jersey in the year following the suicide of his wife. When Jernigan begins an affair with Martha, the mother of Danny's girlfriend and a self-styled "suburban survivalist" who breeds rabbits in her basement, his drinking turns harder and his life begins to spiral completely out of control.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Barbarians"title="The Blue Barbarians">
In the Eight Hundredth Millennium the Sun is fading and Earth is freezing over. Humanity needs a new home if it is to survive and Venus has been chosen for exploration. Seven expeditions have gone to Venus and vanished: now the eighth is leaving. Physicist Erom Reve discovers, to his dismay, that his traveling companion will be Daolgi Kar, a self-styled poet who brings his little dog Tippy.Reaching Venus, the men must bail out of their spacecar before meteors destroy it. They descend under electric parachutes and then make their way across the alien landscape until they come to a city, where they are captured and put into a zoo. Over several weeks they learn the rudiments of the Venusian language. After convincing the Venusians that they are not animals, the two men (with Tippy) are sent to prison for entering the nation of Wultho illegally. There they refine their knowledge of the local language and customs. After a year Erom and Daolgi are sent to work in a sawdust factory.Daolgi's inattention to his job leads to a fire that burns down the sawdust factory. In the confusion the two men and Tippy escape from the city and take refuge in the countryside. They end up living in a cave by the sea and Erom struggles to make green glass, the highest denomination of Venusian currency. When he succeeds in making two large chunks of it, he and Daolgi go to a village. They are given a hostile reception as vagabonds until Erom displays some green glass, then the villagers welcome him and Daolgi as Large Letter Men.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Men_Running_(novel)"title="Dead Men Running (novel)">
Set during the years 1910 to 1916, the novel follows the story of Starkey Moore, a loner living in the small outback town of Hope, who discovers a young man collapsed by the side of a road in a storm. Moore nurses the young Joey back to health and proceeds to teach him a number of life lessons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiral_(novel)"title="Admiral (novel)">
Traveling in sleeper pods to their first assignment on the Imperial flagship, new recruits Deilani, Salmagard, and Nils wake to find themselves on a strange, dying ship. A fourth pod supposedly holds an Admiral, but the man they awaken does not seem like any military officer they have ever encountered before. As the danger of their predicament increases, they must put aside their varying degrees of mistrust for the mysterious Admiral if they want to survive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_of_Babel_(novel)"title="The Tower of Babel (novel)">
The novel is set in the Middle East on the brink of war. The story begins with a border incident that is followed by an Israeli invasion of Jordan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding_Beijing"title="Folding Beijing">
In an unspecified future, Beijing within the 6th Ring Road is divided by three classes physically, sharing the same earth surface in each 48 hour cycle: The first governing class with 5 million population occupy the space for 24 hours from 6 am to 6 am, after which the earth's surface will be turned upside-down, to move the second and third class up. The second class has 25 million middle-class people, and will enjoy 16 hours from 6 am to 10 pm. Then, the building of the second class will fold and retract while the high buildings of the third class unfold and rise, which hosts 50 million lower class people, who can be awake for 8 hours till 6 am. When each class is turned down or folded, the residents there would be put into sleep. Travelling between classes is tightly controlled and violators would be put into jail.Lao Dao, a waste processing worker of the third class, finds a message from Qin Tian, a graduate student in the second class. Qin offers Lao Dao money, if he can delivery a love letter to Yi Yan, Qin's lover in the first class. To make enough money for his adopted daughter Tangtang's kindergarten tuition, Lao Dao accepts this job. After he manages to arrive the first class, he finds that Yi Yan is actually a married woman, who offers Lao Dao more money to hide this fact from Qin. On the way back, Lao Dao is captured due to the lack of an identification of the first class, but rescued by Ge, a security official who was born in the third class. Lao Dao accidentally finds that the whole waste processing industry, the main economic pillar of the third world, can be easily replaced by technology – and it is only kept in order to provide jobs for those third class people. After dropping the response letter to Qin in the second class, Lao Dao comes back to the third class with newly made money, and continues his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chantic_Bird"title="The Chantic Bird">
The novel follows the story of a young, psychotic teenage boy living on the fringes of society in Sydney. His only interactions with the world are through a suburban family, the children who live there and Bee the woman who cares for them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_It_Breaks"title="Before It Breaks">
Detective Inspector Daniel Clement has left the homicide squad in Perth, Western Australia, to return to Broome, the town where he grew up. He and his wife have separated and Clement wants to be near his daughter. His police work is a long series of petty theft and drunken violence incidents until a body is discovered by Jasper's Creek with an axe wound to the head. Clement is called upon for his homicide skills and takes control of the case, initially thinking it a simple case of opportunistic murder. But as he digs deeper into the victim's background, and after a second body is found with the same type of head wound he and the Broome police come to the conclusion that there is something more sinister at play. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Topee"title="White Topee">
The novel is set in Gippsland, Victoria, which is depicted as an idyllic place with peoples from many nations working on the land in harmony. The novel is a sequel of sorts to the author's earlier book "The Pea-Pickers", and features the same characters two years later. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat_Who_Thought_He_Was_a_Tiger"title="The Cat Who Thought He Was a Tiger">
A striped cat believes he is a tiger. While his four brothers and sisters live, play, and eat together with a boy and girl in a house, he does things that he thinks tigers do like living alone in the backyard, eating grass, and sleeping in a tree. Later, he goes to a circus, meets a tiger and asks to play with it as "You're a tiger and I'm a tiger". The tiger sets him straight by saying "You? a TIGER? No You're not, .. You're a little cat." On hearing this, the cat is very happy and runs back to the house where he tells everyone that he is a cat and now the cat plays, eats, and sleeps with his brothers and sisters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cometh_the_Hour"title="Cometh the Hour">
"Cometh the Hour" opens with the reading of the suicide note of Alex Fisher, MP. This note has potentially devastating consequences for Harry and Emma Clifton, Sir Giles Barrington and Lady Virginia Fenwick.Sir Giles must decide whether to divulge the contents of the note to the press. If he does so it could ruin his political career. He also is considering to end this career to try to rescue a lady he met and loves (Karin) who is in East Germany and barred by that government from emigrating to England. He also must consider whether Karin loves him or whether she is a spy for the Russians.Lady Virginia, the ex-wife of Sir Giles, is facing bankruptcy because she does not know how to wisely manage her money. She seems certain to lose about everything until she is introduced to a wealthy, but gullible, man from Louisiana, Cyrus T. Grant III. Lady Virginia cooks up a scheme to force Grant to pay her a generous monthly sum for years to come.Sebastian Clifton is now the Chief Executive of Farthings Bank and because he lost his fiancée years before is now a workaholic. He falls for Priya, a beautiful Indian girl. But her parents have already chosen her future husband and she has no say in the matter. Sebastian also makes contact with his fiancé and their daughter to see whether the old relationship can be patched up. Sebastian's ruthless enemies Adrian Sloane and Desmond Mellor are still plotting to take over Farthings and will stop at nothing, legal or otherwise, to achieve their goal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie's_Misfortunes"title="Sophie's Misfortunes">
The story is set in a castle in the French countryside, during the Second French Empire. Sophie is a naughty little girl who lives with her parents, Monsieur and Madame de Réan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lemon_Farm"title="The Lemon Farm">
In a small English seaside village, Lady Davina Chelgrove leaves her husband Nigel for another, younger man. The affair proceeds towards a tragic ending. The "Lemon Farm" of the title is located in the Mediterranean and is the ideal that the two lovers aspire towards.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Rock_White_City"title="Black Rock White City">
In the late 1990s Jovan, a writer and academic in Serbia, and his wife Suzana are refugees living in Melbourne, having fled the Yugoslav Wars. Jovan works as a cleaner at a hospital, and is tasked with cleaning up some graffiti which is followed by more vandalism that becomes ever more weird and threatening.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitney,_My_Love"title="Whitney, My Love">
After a young Whitney Stone's mother dies, her father Martin is unable to handle her tomboyish antics and sends Whitney off to France with her aunt and uncle, Lady Anne and Lord Edward Gilbert, a diplomat. Whitney is separated from her childhood love, a significantly older Paul Sevarin, who does not return her affections. Before leaving, she vows to come home from France and marry Paul. While in France, she is educated by a variety of language, dance, and etiquette tutors, coming to age as a fashionable and witty young lady. She also meets the DuVille family, becoming close friends with the daughter Therèse and their son Nicolas (Nicki). Around the age of 19, Whitney attends a party in France where she meets a mysterious stranger. Shortly after, she is recalled back to England by her father. To the surprise of her small town, Whitney returns as a sophisticated young lady. Furthermore, possessing what she believes is a substantial inheritance from her grandmother, Whitney is determined to marry Paul.Once home, Martin hosts a party for Whitney to reintroduce her to the town and their new neighbor, a Mr. Clayton Westland. Whitney is disinterested, focusing her attention on Paul. She and Paul have a flirtation, which Whitney believes leads to a serious courtship, despite her father's efforts to push her towards Mr. Westland. When Paul proposes, Whitney eagerly tells her father, only for him to reveal that he had spent her dowry and sold her in marriage to the Duke of Claymore in exchange for a large sum of money to save the family home from ruin. Martin also reveals that Mr. Westland is the Duke of Claymore and slaps Whitney, much to Clayton's displeasure. Whitney begs Clayton to keep the engagement a secret and he acquiesces on the condition that she break off the engagement with Paul. Convinced they can run away and pay back the dowry money her father spent, Whitney reveals the situation to Paul. Instead, Paul is angry as he had already started spending her dowry money. Resigned, Whitney accepts her status
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Indian_Girl"title="One Indian Girl">
The book begins with Radhika making arrangements regarding her marriage with Brijesh Gulati who works as a software engineer for Facebook in San Francisco. She later revealed her childhood and life in Delhi, as a studious, shy and nerdy girl who came from a middle-class family. Radhika has an elder sister, Aditi who was the more beautiful, outgoing, and popular one at their school. She also communicated her thoughts and decisions to her inner judgemental voice or "mini-me" as called.While trying to engage in conversation with Brijesh, she was unexpectedly contacted by Debashish "Debu" Sen, her ex-boyfriend, who wished to meet her, to which she refused. Then, he suddenly arrived at the resort in Goa where her marriage ceremony was being held. She was further shocked when he infiltrated the puja bhajan ceremony at the wedding reception. She later met him in the hotel gym and admonished him for his past behavior.It then flashbacks to four years ago, when Radhika began her job training at Goldman Sachs. One evening, she was introduced to Debu through Avinash her batchmate from IIMA. The two started dating and eventually got into a live-in relationship. Radhika applies for the Distressed debt department after a co-worker's suggestion, and soon her grueling schedule starts taking a toll on her personal life and her relationship with Debu. Furthermore, Radhika got a bonus of 150,000 dollars for her hard work and decides to celebrate with Debu who starts feeling a bit intimidated and insecure by her success. They end up having an argument which they resolve, but the cracks in their relationship start showing. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackout_(Elsberg_novel)"title="Blackout (Elsberg novel)">
The novel starts with a collapse of electrical grids across Europe, plunging the population into darkness and disaster. The prolonged electricity cut causes major problems: no more petrol, no telephone, no food in supermarkets, no cash machines working, nuclear disasters, etc. A former computer hacker and IT professional tries to find out the root cause for this. While doing so he himself becomes a hunted person as officials find suspicious e-mails sent from his laptop and think that he is involved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Young_Man"title="The Young Man">
Leon Pracht, a young man, abandons a budding career in the footsteps of his father—a historian of religion specialised on Montanus—after the positive reception of his debut as a theatre director. He is recruited for an adaptation of Jean Genet's "The Maids" in Cologne, starring the two diva actresses Petra "Pat" Kurzrok and Margarethe "Mag" Wirth. However, Pat and Mag turn out to be too much to handle. Leon asks for advice from the local star director Alfred Weigert, but still fails to actualise his vision for the play.A woman enters a forest and finds a department store named The Tower of the Germans. After a phantasmagorical episode she finds herself naked in front of the proprietor of the Germans. The proprietor of the Germans is a large, floating head which is half man and half carp.A man is doing a study on an alternative community whose members are known as the Syks. After observing their unusual habits he commits a social error which freaks out a local woman. He is banished from the colony and takes part in a dreamlike ritual involving scatological sexual activity. Afterwards his female colleague writes a scathing report about his unprofessional behaviour.A king dies and is condemned as a criminal, which becomes a long-lasting national trauma. At a terrace behind the castle, a number of people are gathered: the paramedic Reppenfries, his sister-in-law Paula and wife Dagmar, the beautiful Almut, the "modern" Hanswerner, the mail clerk Yossica, and the narrator, Leon. Each person tells a personal story or discusses art and philosophy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Teeth"title="Dragon Teeth">
William Johnson is a student at Yale college. Reckless and risk-taking, he makes a bet with his rival, a student named Marlin, that he will go west the following summer. Johnson then attempts to join Prof. Othniel Charles Marsh on his yearly expedition fossil hunting in the Badlands. Marsh is reluctant until Johnson lies, saying that he is a photographer.Johnson learns to take photographs and leaves with Marsh at the appointed time. However, upon learning of Johnson's Philadelphia background, Marsh begins to suspect that he is a spy for Edward Drinker Cope, a rival paleontologist. Marsh abandons Johnson in Cheyenne.Shortly thereafter, Johnson meets Cope, who invites him to join his expedition. They head out west, despite Marsh's attempts to discredit and stop them. They are finally forced to stop in Fort Benton, when news of Custer's defeat at the hands of Sitting Bull causes a ban on travel into Montana. Even so, Cope's group manages to sneak away from the Fort. When they arrive in the Judith Basin, they immediately begin to dig for fossil bones. They remain there for several months. Marsh attempts to spy on them and poison their water, but leaves after Cope's group lures him into camp and fires at him. Johnson and Cope discover fossil Brontosaurus teeth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Like_Summer_(novel)"title="Something Like Summer (novel)">
The novel is written from a third person limited point of view, told through the eyes of the book's main character, Benjamin Bentley. It is divided into three separate sections based on the varying stages of Benjamin's life as the story is taking place.The first part of the book, set in the city of Houston in 1996, focuses on the relationship Ben eventually develops with Tim Wyman, another teenager who he attends high school with. Though Ben gradually manages to help Tim accept different aspects of his repressed homosexuality, and even talks him into breaking up with the girlfriend he dated in order to maintain his appearance, they eventually break up after a close call with the police who nearly catch them having sex in a public park. The two teenagers carry on with their lives and eventually go their separate ways.The second part of the novel is set three years later in 1999, when Ben is a freshman student in college and has relocated to Chicago. He meets flight attendant Jace Holden while flying back home for the holidays, and the two eventually fall in love and decide to move in together. After Ben transfers to a new school in Austin, he discovers that Tim is also a student there. Tim, now having embraced his sexuality, makes repeated attempts to meddle in Ben's new relationship, eventually convincing Ben that Jace is cheating on him so that they can get back together. Ben eventually learns the truth, and decides to leave Tim and get back together with Jace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_reina_de_América"title="La reina de América">
This novel is about a family of Spanish immigrants in the nineteen-sixties and the adventures of Consuelo, the daughter of a prostitute to whom the title refers. It is set mainly in Montevideo and Buenos Aires in the midst of the repressive Southern Cone dictatorships.Mabel and her father run away from their financial bankruptcy in Spain to Argentina in pursuit of the American dream in the first wave of immigration of the century. On their trip, Mabel meets a Danish anarchist named Jacobsen and falls in love with him. Mabel's father dies in Montevideo and this “queen of America” stays in the port's lower-class neighborhood. Several problems hinder Jacobsen's ability to return to Buenos Aires to find Mabel. Her daughter, Consuelo, is raped by one her clients but she manages to enact her vengeance in a striking and cruel way. Set from approximately 1960 to 1990, the novel ultimately explores the themes of power, politics, sociality, gender, domesticity and culture.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_World_(novel)"title="Hidden World (novel)">
Underlying the Basin and Range province of North America, giant caverns, some many miles in diameter, form a network that is occupied by people who have evolved the adaptations (such as pale skin) for living underground. Completely isolated from the upper world, the people have created a civilization that is technologically more advanced than that of 1935 America.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karolcia"title="Karolcia">
The protagonist, Karolcia is an eight-year-old girl who finds a magical blue bead that fulfills her every wish. The girl and her friend Peter uses the bead to bring happiness to other people. They have various adventures including helping the President escape from an evil witch, Filomena, who also tries unsuccessfully to steal the bead. The bead becomes paler throughout the book and tells Karolcia that it will eventually vanish. Although Karolcia is unhappy by this, she and Peter decide not to be selfish with their final wish but to wish that the dreams of others be fulfilled leading to amongst other things, children receiving new toys, and recovering in hospital. The book ends with Karolcia being happy by this but also sad over the loss of the bead that has now disappeared.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lame_Dog_Man"title="The Lame Dog Man">
The title character is Jimmy Carlvon, a young man employed as a Commonwealth employment officer. Carlvon moves among a group of psychologically disturbed people, attempting to rectify problems in others' lives while being totally unable to do anything about this own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsaken_(novel)"title="Forsaken (novel)">
The book is narrated by Charles Mears, an eighteen-year-old reporter covering the trial of Virginia Christian, who is accused of murdering her employer Ida Belote, for whom Christian worked as a maid. Belote was terribly cruel and abusive towards Christian, which culminated in a physical altercation between the two that resulted in Christian striking her boss. She stuffed cloth in her boss's mouth to muffle her screams and avoid detection, as physically harming her boss would result in severe repercussions for Christian, only for this to end up killing Belote. Mears believes that Christian deserves clemency and tries to argue for this from William Hodges Mann, who is currently serving as Virginia's governor. He's unsuccessful and Christian is executed, but Mears' defense of the teen has provoked the ire of white supremacists that continually issue threats against the reporter. During all of this Mears also tries to protect Belote's two young daughters, one of whom is being sexually abused by her appointed guardian.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tae_Baek_Mountains"title="The Tae Baek Mountains">
After Japanese colonial rule over Korea ended, the tension between left-wing and right-wing increased in the Korean peninsula. In the town of Beolgyo-eup, Boseong County, South Jeolla Province, Yeom Sang-jin and the communist partisans capture the town temporarily when the Yeosu–Suncheon rebellion of 1948 occurred. But soon they are routed and sneak into Jirisan. When they were in power, they execute many landlords and the former pro-Japanese. This led to the collocation of the troops from government near Beolgyo. South Korean government troops, officers and right wing henchmen are trying to mop up the communist partisans. The partisans and left-wing intellectuals act secretly against South Korean government. When the Korean War breaks out, the communist partisans seize the town again with the help of the Soviet Red Army and Chinese People's Volunteer Army.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GB84"title="GB84">
The novel is largely based on factual events and follows two main characters: Terry Winters (based on Roger Windsor), chief executive of the National Union of Mineworkers; and Stephen Sweet (based on David Hart), an advisor to the Thatcher government.The novel refers to contemporary events including the murder of Hilda Murrell, the Battle of Orgreave, the involvement of the police and MI5, and the NUM's links with the Soviet Union and Libya.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nation_(book)"title="Ford Nation (book)">
The book documents the career of Toronto mayor Rob Ford and his councillor brother Doug from their perspective. Development of the book began prior to Rob Ford's death in March 2016.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influencing_Machine_(book)"title="Influencing Machine (book)">
Much in the vein of Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics", Gladstone appears in the book as an illustrated character, taking the reader through two millennia of history — from the newspapers in Caesar's Rome to the penny press of the American Revolution and the activities of contemporary journalism. Issues discussed include bias, objectivity, misinformation, ethics, and a large chapter on war reporting. In a reference to the Trausk's "Influencing Machine," the book debunks the notion that “The Media” is an external force, outside of our control. Instead, it posits that the media is a mirror — sometimes a distorted one — reflecting society's beliefs and morals back at itself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_and_Susan"title="Tony and Susan">
In 1990, Susan Morrow is surprised to hear from her estranged ex-husband, Edward, who sends her a manuscript to his novel, "Nocturnal Animals". Susan and Edward's relationship had dissolved 25 years earlier in part thanks to him abandoning his studies to be a lawyer to pursue a writing career and Susan is surprised to find that he is still writing. After putting off the manuscript for months she reads it in the course of three nights after learning that Edward will be passing through her city soon."Nocturnal Animals" is about a meek mathematician named Tony Hastings on his way to his country home in Maine with his wife, Laura, and teenage daughter, Helen. Deciding to drive all night to get to Maine they are accosted by three men in a truck, Ray, Lou, and Turk, who begin blocking the path to their car. The cars end up bumping each other and the leader of the men, Ray, gets in the car with Laura and Helen and drives off with them. Tony is then driven to a clearing and abandoned there. Walking to a farmhouse he manages to call for help. In retracing his steps with the state troopers, he discovers Laura and Helen's naked bodies in the clearing where he had been abandoned. He begins to blame himself for not doing enough to prevent their rapes and murders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loner_(novel)"title="Loner (novel)">
A lonely, awkward, newly arrived Harvard University student from New Jersey, David Federman--described by one of his high school teacher's as "something of a loner"--becomes fixated on another first-year student, a Manhattan girl named Veronica Morgan Wells. David quickly and unhappily begins to make unpopular friends very similar to those he had in high school. One of them is Ohio native Sara Cohen. Once he realizes that Sara is Veronica's dorm-mate, David dates her in order to get closer to Veronica. In the process, he also stalks Veronica across campus, following her to courses such as "Gender and the Consumerist Impulse" and "From Ahab to Prufrock: Tragically Flawed Hero(in)es in American Literature." While his relationship with Sara becomes more serious, David remains obsessed with Veronica, who he learns (from her Facebook photos) is dating an attractive, wealthy senior, Liam, from one of the school's final clubs. When the first paper is due for "From Ahab to Prufrock," he helps her write a paper on the theme of scopophilia in Henry James' "Daisy Miller."Meanwhile, David and Sara's relationship continues to develop until they engage in multiple acts of sex, the first for both of them; Sara is reluctant, but David presses her to acquiesce. After he breaks up with her (thinking that the longer he stays in the relationship, the less likely Veronica will be interested in him), he learns from his roommate that she considers the acts rape. He is confused, maintaining that she didn't say no.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lesser_Bohemians"title="The Lesser Bohemians">
The novel is set in 1990s Camden Town, where Eilis, an 18-year-old Irish student, arrives to take up a place at a drama school. She becomes passionately involved with Stephen, a 39-year-old professional actor. Their troubled pasts result in a turbulent relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tilted_Cross"title="The Tilted Cross">
The novel is set in Hobart, Tasmania, in 1845-46. It follows the last few months in the life of Judas Griffin Vaneleigh, a transported forger and suspected poisoner.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carve_the_Mark"title="Carve the Mark">
The story centers around two main characters: Cyra Noavek and Akos Kereseth. Cyra is the second child of the Noavek family, the ruling clan of the Shotet; her currentgift is pain, showing itself visibly in dark, shadowy tendrils that flow under her skin. Anyone who touches her skin experiences extreme pain, while she herself is constantly tortured by pain. As a child, she accidentally killed her mother with her powers during a fit. Afterwards, her father and brother Ryzek push her away, and she's largely raised by a maid. One year, her father does not return from the annual scavenging journey, and Ryzek is forced to rule in the wake of his presumed death. He manages to slightly improve the conditions of the Shotet, but forces Cyra to torture people for him, holding the threat of telling how their mother really died to the public over her head.Akos Kereseth and his family of five live in a poorer community of Thuvhe. His mother is the current oracle, and this leads to Ryzek seeking out the Kereseth family, as he's searching for an oracle to try and control his future. He sends soldiers after Akos's mother and one of her sons, as one of them was fated to be the next oracle, and one day, after Akos and his siblings are sent home from school, they are ambushed by the soldiers, who kill their father and take the two boys. They discover that Eijeh is the next oracle and Akos possesses the revelatory tongue. During capture, Akos discovers his currentgift, the ability to interrupt, or stop, the current, which he uses to escape his restrain and kill one of the soldiers. However, he and his brother fail to escape and are brought to Ryzek.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_Honey"title="Bread and Honey">
Michael Cameron is a thirteen-year-old boy living in a small country town with his father and grandmother after the death of his mother. On a wet ANZAC Day, Michael meets and defends a nine-year-old girl from a local bully, and comes to appreciate the attitude of the adults around him and his place in the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Country_(novel)"title="Bad Country (novel)">
Rodeo Grace Garnet, an Arizona bounty hunter and private detective, is hired by an elderly Indian woman to help discover who murdered her grandson.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupetta"title="Rupetta">
The novel follows the story of Rupetta, a mechanical woman built in rural France in 1619 and endowed with sentience and immortality. In order for Rupetta to function properly she must be "wound" like a clock. The responsibility for this "wynding" falls on the female descendants of Rupetta's creator Eloise. The novel explores the interactions over the generations between Rupetta and her "wynders".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Your_Name_(novel)"title="Your Name (novel)">
Mitsuha Miyamizu, a high school girl living in the fictional town of Itomori in Gifu Prefecture's mountainous Hida region is fed up with her life in the countryside and wishes to be a handsome Tokyo boy in her next life. Later, Taki Tachibana, a high school boy living in Tokyo, wakes up and realizes that he is Mitsuha, who herself has somehow ended up in Taki's body.Taki and Mitsuha realize they have switched bodies. They start communicating with each other by leaving notes on paper or leaving memos in each other's phones. As time passes, they become used to the body swap and start intervening in each other's lives. Mitsuha helps Taki develop a relationship with his female coworker, Miki Okudera, and eventually to go on a date with her, while Taki helps Mitsuha in becoming more popular in her school. Mitsuha tells Taki about a comet that is expected to pass close to Earth in a few days time, and how she is excited to see it, as it will arrive on the same day as her town's festival.One day, Taki suddenly wakes up back in his body. After an unsuccessful first date with Okudera, he tries contacting Mitsuha but fails. He later finds that they have stopped switching bodies and eventually decides to visit Mitsuha in her hometown. Without knowing the name of her village, he travels around the Hida region, relying solely on the sketches of the village's scenery he has drawn from memory. Finally, a restaurant server recognizes the town in Taki's sketch as Itomori. He is then told that a fragment of the comet Tiamat fell to earth three years ago and obliterated Itomori and its surroundings, killing a third of the town's population. As Taki looks through the records of fatalities from the incident, he finds Mitsuha's name.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Labyrinth_of_Spirits"title="The Labyrinth of Spirits">
Daniel Sempere and Fermín Romero de Torres again appear in the novel set in the Barcelona of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Daniel, overwhelmed by rage and need to avenge the death of his mother, Isabella, will discover a network of crimes and violations of Francoist Spain, and a new protagonist, Alicia Gris, will help him solve the mysteries. The main plot centers on the mysterious disappearance of the minister of culture, Mauricio Valls (introduced in the previous novel, The Prisoner of Heaven), in November 1959. Alicia, a detective for the Spanish secret police, investigates this case together with her partner Juan Manuel Vargas. Their detective work leads them from Madrid to Barcelona, where they discover long-forgotten secrets with the help of the Semperes and Fermin. The novel is arranged into alternate chronologies labeled after liturgical prayers and the Catholic requiem mass: Dies Irae, Kyrie, Agnus Dei, Libera Me, and In Paradisum. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster_(short_story)"title="Foster (short story)">
In 1981 Ireland, Country Wexford, a girl is sent to live with foster parents on a farm, while her mother gives birth. She has no notion of when she will return home. In the strangers' house she finds affection she has not known before, and slowly she begins to blossom in their care. But when a secret is suddenly revealed, she realizes how fragile her idyll is.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and_Nightingales"title="Death and Nightingales">
1883, County Fermanagh, Ireland. On Beth Winters' twenty-third birthday, decades of pain and betrayal finally build to a devastating climax.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Donald"title="The Day of the Donald">
The book focuses on the protagonist Jimmie Bernwood, a down-on-his-luck former tabloid reporter, his attempts to ghost-write President Trump's memoir and his investigation into a murder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Bay_(novel)"title="Tokyo Bay (novel)">
A fleet of smoking black ships steam past Japan’s tributary islands in July 1853, setting off panic among a people who have been sealed off from the rest of the world for over two hundred years. Commodore Matthew Perry has been sent by the US president to open Japan to American ships and trade—by force, if necessary. Navy lieutenant Robert Eden, an idealistic New Englander, immediately recognizes that the colonial intentions of his technologically advanced countrymen toward the feudal, sword-wielding samurai will ignite a violent conflict. Inspired to pursue peace, he jumps ship and finds himself plunged into an entirely new world of menacing warriors, distraught Japanese who view Americans as monsters, and ravishing geisha. All of Eden’s efforts are in the name of a lasting peace, but can he survive the cataclysmic clash of two strong cultures?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Talent"title="The Dark Talent">
In the long-awaited final book in the Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians series, Alcatraz is going to the center of Librarian power. After the Librarians fire missiles at Tuki Tuki, the Smedrys, led by Alcatraz, must leave at once. They fly to Washington D.C. to enter the Highbrary, a huge cave complex beginning at the Library of Congress and continuing beneath the city. Among the endless sections and subsections of the ultimate library among the nooks and crannies of the cave, Alcatraz, Grandpa Smedry, and Alcatraz's uncle Kazan, along with the Crystin knight Draulin and the quirky Dif Smedry search for Alcatraz's father Attica, to stop him from unknowingly using his research to end Free Kingdom civilization.Alcatraz and his mother locate Alcatraz's father, who knocks out his mother to prevent her from stopping him. He then tries to explain to Alcatraz what he is doing, in hopes of showing him he is doing the "right" thing. Dif comes, along with Grandpa Smedry, and after confirming everyone is there, Dif shoots Grandpa Smedry in the head and reveals himself to be Biblioden, the leader of the Librarians.The members of the team are captured, and Biblioden prepares a ritual for a bloodforged lens. He lets Alcatraz and his father choose which of them will be sacrificed, and Alcatraz, in a moment of weakness, chooses his father. Eventually the remainder of the shattered team locates Alcatraz, sitting in front of his father's corpse. They quickly leave before the Highbrary is self-destructed by a system put into motion by Grandpa Smedry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zama_(novel)"title="Zama (novel)">
Don Diego de Zama is a servant to the Spanish crown in remote Paraguay. Separated from his wife and children, he continuously schemes for professional advancement as he struggles with his mental and emotional state as isolation, bureaucratic setbacks, and self-destructive choices begin to compound themselves in his life. The novel is divided chronologically into three sections: 1790, 1794, and 1799, which focus on, respectively, Zama's sexual, financial, and existential conflicts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Clean"title="Breaking Clean">
The book narrates the author's story from before her birth, intertwining it with her current life, and explains how her life changed after she left the ranch.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_(Sollers_novel)"title="Women (Sollers novel)">
Will is an American journalist living in Paris. On leave from his duties writing about international politics at the "Journal", he travels around the globe as he works on a novel in which he intends to expose the domination of the world by women. Through his friend Kate, Will has become aware of a secret international organization called the World Organization for Male Annihilation and a New Natality, or WOMANN, that intends to stage a secret takeover of world power. WOMANN's secret manifesto details a plan to take over the world by strictly controlling the reproductive process through the use of abortion, sperm banks, and artificial insemination; by expurgating, banning, or "contextualizing" the products of certain male geniuses; and also by declaring war on the patriarchal tyranny of religion through a campaign of "divide and rule." Will, who is a freethinker and notorious womanizer, is marked as an enemy by WOMANN. The novel follows Will's sexual escapades around the world with a number of women whose interest in the novel he is writing (the novel we are reading) leads him to suspect he is being surveilled by WOMANN. Will has enlisted a notorious French novelist, "S." (who bears significant similarities to Philippe Sollers), to publish the novel under S's name since Will is worried about the response of his family in the United States if he were to publish it under his own name. Will's monologue about his life and opinions includes extended digressions about such topics as politics, literature, sex, contemporary life, religion, and the Bible. Will's amorous exploits are occasionally interrupted by time spent at home with his wife, Deb, and his son Stephen. He is eventually injured in a terrorist attack that kills his lover Cyd, an English TV journalist. The novel concludes with Will leaving Paris to start a new life with Deb and Stephen in New York City.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Midnight_Star"title="The Midnight Star">
Adelina Amouteru has achieved her goal of defeating all that have ever opposed her but must side with her former enemies in order to defeat a threat greater than all of them. After becoming Queen of Kenettra, Adelina gets a letter from Rafael stating that her sister, Violetta, is dying. After Adelina attacked Violetta, she found sanctuary with the Daggers. Adelina attacks the country in which she believes Violetta is in. Adelina's fury takes control of her and she is unable to think clearly which results in her and her soldier's capture. During the capture, Adelina begs to see Magiano, whom she loves. Later on, she is presented to a court in which Rafael, Enzo, and other members of the Daggers are. Because many elites have godlike powers, they are unable to contain their powers and it eventually will kill them. They make a deal with Adelina in which she and the Roses travel to the portal of the gods to return their powers. The gods have also had a negative effect on the environment such as sea animals being beached. Adelina later agrees but secretly only because she can be near her dying sister. Enzo attempts to kill Adelina under the influence of the Goddess of Death, Moritas. Luckily, Rafael kills Enzo while Enzo whispers the name of his dead beloved. Rafael saves Adelina and later cries over Enzo's dead body. Each elite that was going on the journey connects with a certain god; The Beldish Queen, Maeve Corrigan, and Teren Santoro are the only ones to connect with Moritas and Tristius, Angel of War. Much to Adelina's disgust, Maeve and Teren are brought on the journey. During the journey, Adelina confesses her love for Magiano, and for the first time in a long time, Adelina is able to sleep without the voices in her head talking. As the elites get closer to the portal, their powers and the negative effects of their powers increase. This results in Violetta's death. Everyone mourns the death of Violetta but continues on the journey. After reaching the portal, Maeve's men wait outside the portal for the elites' return. The elites enter the portal and meet monsters that feed on their godlike powers. Teren dies protecting others from the monsters and Adelina cries even though she hates him. All go and meet Moritas and bargain with her and return their powers. Adelina meets the Moritas and sees the dead body of Violetta and begins to cry. Moritas states that for one to come back to live, another life must be taken. Adelina cries and apologizes to Magiano for leaving him and trades her life for her sister because if Violetta were in the same situation, she would have traded her life for Adelina's. Violetta is transported back to the entrance of the portal where she cries and explains what happened. Maeve's men greeted their Queen and says she has been gone to the portal for two months. Violetta apologizes to Magiano who in return says that it was Adelina's choice. A couple of months later Violetta begs the Goddess of Empathy, Compasia, to give her sister back. Compasia apologizes to Moritas and makes Adelina into a star just as Compasia did to her human lover. Magiano follows Adelina's constellation and in the book it states:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_Same-Sex_Parenthood"title="Journey to Same-Sex Parenthood">
The book is broken down into five main sections: adoption, foster care, assisted reproduction, surrogacy, and co-parenting. The real life experiences from 19 LGBT couples are included. Those couples came from the United States, the UK, Ireland, and South Africa.The book also includes "legal issues worthy of consideration and other critical information", which were contributed by the National Center for Lesbian Rights.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bapu_(book)"title="Bapu (book)">
"Bapu" opens with Barr explaining how she came to meet Mahatma Gandhi after having been in India for ten years in charge of a missionary boarding school in Hyderabad State. When she was in England on a furlough in 1931 she began to take an interest in Gandhi's writings and speeches. When returning to India, Barr had the good fortune of being a fellow passenger of Gandhi's on a ship from Italy to India, allowing her to become acquainted with Gandhi and observe the daily patterns of behavior of him and his small party of companions returning from the second Round Table Conference in London.Later chapters describe Barr's correspondence and various meetings with Gandhi, how she was pressured by the British government and missionary authorities to end her association with Gandhi. her eventual resignation from her position at the mission, her visits to Gandhi at his ashram and in prison, how she spent time living at Gandhi's ashram, and how she eventually left the ashram in the service of Gandhi's movement. In an epilogue she states "The human personality depicted in the foregoing pages is no longer in the World as we knew him, but 'his soul goes marching on.' He brought religion into the service of the humdrum of daily life... by sheer love and self-discipline he made mundane things beautiful: from pans to politics, he made them shine."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mothers_(novel)"title="The Mothers (novel)">
Living in Southern California, 17-year-old Nadia, grieving her mother's suicide, becomes pregnant by her boyfriend Luke, a local pastor's son. She has an abortion and leaves her hometown to attend University of Michigan. Years later, her Christian friend Aubrey begins dating and then marries Luke. In her adulthood Nadia has to return to her hometown for a family emergency and reckon with her past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sponge_Divers"title="The Sponge Divers">
The novel is centred around the Greek island of Kalymnos where, for thousands of years, the locals have put out to sea to dive for sponges. But now a chemist has developed a synthetic substitute and the locals must learn to deal with the consequences of that discovery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughter_of_the_Drow"title="Daughter of the Drow">
"Daughter of the Drow" is an Underdark novel about a drow princess who, after giving up all hope of escape from her chores as an evil spider-god priestess locked in a bitter struggle for power, encounters a berserker warrior and becomes involved in a quest involving a talisman of power and finds true love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Throne_(Birthright_novel)"title="The Iron Throne (Birthright novel)">
"The Iron Throne" is set in a land where humans have tried to create an empire by warring with other races ever since they arrived from another continent. Subjugation of the elven aboriginals, and the bitter feud that ensued, was compounded by the constant threat from the other races who wish to claim the continent as their own. War is inevitable somewhere, and those who have the blood-power in their veins are trained in its arts from youth. Within the human realm, all manner of deceit and treachery is born of the ambition to assume the Iron Throne. Sister is pitted against brother, husband against wife, the crown against ambitious pretender, and civil war is brewing that will encompass the entire continent. Despite their bloody history, the elves form a tenuous alliance with the humans, to fight against the forces of evil spawned of the primordial battle where the gods gave up their lives and the dynasty of the blooded was born.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Titan_of_Twilight"title="The Titan of Twilight">
The Titan of Twilight is a story involving the bastard child of Queen Brianna of Hartsvale, which becomes the cause of much bloodshed. The giants of the land believe the baby to be a Titan of Twilight, the last giant-kin descendant of Annam All-Father, creator of giant races. His coming is a prophecy the giant-kin believe, and they do everything they can so that Queen Brianna reaches the Twilight Vale. The child is supposedly to restore Ostoria, an ancient giant kingdom. The main protagonist, a firbolg by the name of Tavis Burdun and his friends fight to stop them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rawblood"title="Rawblood">
At the book's start Iris Villarca is an eleven-year-old girl growing up in Dartmoor during 1910. She and her father live in a mansion named Rawblood, where he keeps her isolated from the general population. Iris's father justifies this isolation by stating that he fears that she will die from Horror autotoxicus, a disease that caused her mother's death and has been a reoccurring ailment for the Villarca family. Despite this restriction Iris ends up befriending Tom Gilmore, only to find that their fathers are enemies. Iris's father discovers the relationship and tries to bribe her to stay away from Tom by paying for her tuition to medical school. She accepts the offer, but as time passes Iris secretly begins to believe that her father has made up the disease, unaware of her father's own past.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Own_Words"title="My Own Words">
Bader Ginsburg writes the preface to the book, with Hartnett and Williams contextualizing "each part of the sections, which include law review articles, speeches, briefs and dissents." Many topics are covered in "My Own Words", including Bader Ginsburg's life as a Jewish woman, gender equality, the Supreme Court, and interpreting the U.S. Constitution. One chapter consists of excerpts from Derrick Wang's opera "Scalia/Ginsburg", with forewords by Ginsburg and Justice Antonin Scalia.One of the treatises in the book is the speech she gave when accepting the position of Supreme Court Justice. Another is a writing on why the United States needs the Equal Rights Amendment.Bader Ginsburg also recalls her relationship with Sandra Day O'Connor and Antonin Scalia. Of Scalia, she stated, "some very good people have some very bad ideas." Of O'Connor, she stated she learned to "waste no time on anger, regret or resentment, just get the job done."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_Pirates"title="We Are Pirates">
Gwen, a young teen, puts together a ship's crew and heads out to sea to be 21st-century pirates violently terrorizing the San Francisco Bay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Canopy_of_Time"title="The Canopy of Time">
Aldiss describes historical time as “a treacherous mirror, reflecting only our limited truths.” The mirror reflecting the forty-million year history of the City of New Union has been shattered and the book presents only a handful of its shards. A brief introduction ties each story to the previous one:
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swarm_(Card_and_Johnston_novel)"title="The Swarm (Card and Johnston novel)">
The first invasion of Earth was beaten back by a coalition of corporate and international military forces, and the Chinese army, but China has been devastated by the Formics' initial efforts to eradicate Earth life forms and prepare the ground for their own settlement. The Scouring of China struck fear into the other nations of the planet; that fear blossomed into drastic action when scientists determined that the single ship that wreaked such damage was merely a scout ship. Earth's government has been reorganized for defense; it now comprises a Hegemon, a planetary official responsible for keeping all the formerly warring nations in line, and a Polemarch, responsible for organizing all the military forces of the planet into the new International Fleet. But ambition and politics, greed and self-interest remain, as important members of the military continue to place their career prospects ahead of Earth's defense. It is up to Bingwen, Mazer Rackam, Victor Delgado and Lem Jukes to create a weapon that can effectively defend humanity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Jays_Fly_to_Barbmo"title="When Jays Fly to Barbmo">
The novel is set on a remote island off the coast of Norway during World War II. It follows the story of 14-year-old Ingeborg who must survive during a long dark winter after her aunt dies and the Nazis take over the island.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dian_yang_Tak_Kunjung_Padam"title="Dian yang Tak Kunjung Padam">
Yasin, a fatherless youth who lives with his mother, falls in love with Molek on first sight. Although the two are of different socio-economic backgrounds — Yasin is a commoner and Molek is of noble descent — they begin to exchange love letters; eventually, Molek falls in love with Yasin as well. However, they do not tell their parents.Knowing that he will need to show he is capable of supporting Molek, Yasin works his garden and earns much money. He confides in his mother that he wishes to propose to Molek. Eventually the two go to Molek's father, Raden Mahmud, to ask for her hand in marriage. However, he and his wife Cek Sitti refuse the proposal, due to class differences.Although the pair are forbidden from seeing each other, Yasin and Molek continue to exchange letters, even after Molek is married to Arab-Indonesian merchant Sayid Mustafa. Molek attempts to run away, and when this fails she pines for Yasin. While her parents go on the hajj to Mecca, Molek invites Yasin to her home. Posing as a pineapple seller, Yasin sneaks in and the two have a final meeting.Soon afterwards, Molek dies. Yasin returns to his hometown, then banishes himself to a cabin near Lake Ranau after his mother dies. He never marries, but dreams of the day he will die and see Molek again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_(novel)"title="Marriage (novel)">
"Marriage" features two protagonists: Marjorie Pope, the oldest daughter of a carriage manufacturer whose business has been ruined by the advent of the automobile, and R.A.G. Trafford, a physicist specializing in crystallography whom she marries against the wishes of her family at the age of 21. The novel traces the history of their relationship, which begins when an early airplane Trafford is piloting crashes into the garden of a house Marjorie's family is renting for the summer.Marjorie ("Madge") and Trafford ("Rag") make great efforts to understand and accommodate the other. On Trafford's part, this leads to his abandonment of scientific research and his involvement with industrial commerce. He makes his fortune by applying himself to synthetic rubber. But he grows more and more disenchanted with his abandonment of his commitment to a life lived for truth. Marjorie's social ambitions gradually alienate him, and he decides to leave everything behind him and think things out in the wilderness of Labrador. His widowed mother persuades him to take Marjorie with him, and leaving their home and four children behind they undertake to survive the winter in the wilderness. There they nearly perish, but they save their marriage by winning their way through to a satisfactory mutual understanding. The novel ends as they are returning to London to undertake, together, a critical engagement with the world. Trafford intends to devote himself to writing a book entitled "From Realism to Reality", which is to be "a pragmatist essay, a sustained attempt to undermine the confidence of all that scholasticism and logic chopping which still lingers like the "sequelae" of a disease in our University philosophy," while Marjorie intends to devote herself to being "his squaw and body-servant first of all, and then—a mother."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_(Zweig_novella)"title="Fear (Zweig novella)">
The protagonist, Irene Wagner, is a married, young bourgeois who has a secret affair with a pianist. Due to blackmails from the pianist's girlfriend who is aware of the affair, Irene is seized with fear of losing her "dolce vita".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sironia,_Texas"title="Sironia, Texas">
Follows the fortunes and failures of the citizens of Sironia, Texas in the early years of the 20th century. Though just a young child at the story's beginning, Tam Lipscomb, the son of a prosperous merchant, will go on to become the novel's central character. Also covered are the lives of the "Hill Families" (the Thaxtons, Storrows and Hadyns), Sironia's version of royalty and three branches of the old Reardon family tree. Likewise the town's black folk are followed in their own triumphs and defeats; they experience success in family life and also bitter racism due to interracial marriage.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_Joe"title="Calico Joe">
Joe Castle starts his career with home runs in his first three Major League Baseball at bats as well as hits in his first 15 plate appearances and is able to keep his batting average over .500 for the first six weeks of his season. In a late-summer visit to Shea Stadium, Castle hits a home run in his first at-bat against Warren. Paul Tracey is a huge fan of Castle's. Castle's career is ended later in the game when Warren intentionally hits him with a pitch. Castle goes into a prolonged coma, suffers a stroke and is incapacitated for life, his ball-playing days definitely over. The Traceys become estranged and Paul does not watch another baseball game for 30 years.When Warren Tracey is on the verge of death from pancreatic cancer, Paul Tracey decides to try to arrange a meeting between him and Castle, a far from easy task. Paul visits Joe's hometown of Calico Rock, Arkansas, where Joe lives, devotedly tending the town's baseball field and being supported by his two brothers. The sympathetic editor of the local Calico paper tells Paul that Joe hardly ever talks to strangers - much less to Warren Tracey, who destroyed his career. In fact, there is a concrete danger of Warren being physically assaulted, should he appear in Calico Rock - the townspeople still angry at what he did to their hero. Paul travels to Florida to visit with Warren, who has retired there with his fifth wife. Paul finds his long-estranged father as egoistic and vindictive as ever - reiterating, as he did for thirty years, that his hitting Joe Castle was an accident, that he had nothing to apologize for and that he had no interest in meeting Joe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destined_(Pike_novel)"title="Destined (Pike novel)">
The book picks up immediately where the last book, "Illusions", left off; Tamani, Shar and Chelsea are standing around Yuki, who is imprisoned in a circle of salt. Yuki tells Tamani that she had wanted to come clean to him, she would have given up everything for him, and that they are alike; used by people who don't truly love them (Laurel and Klea). Laurel arrives and asks Yuki what Klea wants from her. Yuki tells her that Klea already has what she wanted and—in an effort to get Laurel to free her—reveals that Shar poisoned Laurel's mother so she couldn't have children; so Laurel's parents would be willing to take in a baby they found on their doorstep. Tamani swears to Laurel that he didn't know, and insists that Shar isn't a monster, but he will do whatever needs to be done to protect Avalon and his family.Laurel goes home and Chelsea stays to watch Yuki with Tamani and Shar. Yuki gets under Chelsea's skin by saying she will always be second to Laurel in David's eyes, and Tamani comforts her. The next morning, Laurel returns to Tamani's and Chelsea goes home. She wants to tell Jamison about Yuki, but Shar points out that it would require opening the gate, possibly revealing its location to Klea. Additionally, Queen Marion may order Yuki to be executed—or worse. A troll breaks into the apartment, followed by Klea, whom Shar calls 'Callista'. She shoots him in the shoulder and he orders Tamani to get Laurel away as Yuki breaks free of the circle. As they flee from trolls, Tamani says that Klea/Callista is the exiled Fall faerie that Katya told Laurel about.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Duel_(Chekhov_novella)"title="The Duel (Chekhov novella)">
Ivan Andreitch Laevsky is an educated Russian aristocrat who has run off to a Black Sea village with a married woman, Nadezhda Fyodorovna. When the novella begins, he has fallen out of love with Nadezhda Fyodorovna, who is having affairs with other men, and wants to leave her. He receives a letter informing him that her husband has died; however, he hides the letter in a book and does not tell her about it. That, he says, would be like inviting her to marry him.Laevsky confides in Alexander Daviditch Samoylenko, a military doctor who has befriended Laevsky and looks after him. Samoylenko urges Laevsky to marry Nadezhda Fyodorovna, even if he does not love her. Laevsky says he cannot marry a woman he has no feelings for, but he cannot leave her because she has no relatives and relies on him for survival. Samoylenko tells him to give her enough money to live on. Laevsky, however, says he is 2000 rubles in debt and cannot afford to do that.Samoylenko has two boarders in his house, and they discuss philosophy, science, and literature around the dinner table and elsewhere. One of them is Nikolay Vassilitch Von Koren, a zoologist; the other is a deacon in the Russian church. The doctor, the zoologist, and the deacon discuss the new idea of evolution. In a friendly discussion, the deacon says that man was descended from God, while Von Koren argues that man was descended from the ape. He explains how fitter animals survive to pass their strength on to their descendants, but weaker animals die off.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogan's_Trade"title="Cogan's Trade">
Markie Trattman is the proprietor of a criminal poker ring operating in a New England neighborhood. He decides to orchestrate an inside job by paying two men to rob his poker room; although he later openly admits his involvement to various criminal figures, he suffers no retaliation. In the fall of 1974, a man named Johnny "Squirrel" Amato plans to rob Markie's next poker game, anticipating the mafia will blame Markie for the heist. He enlists Frankie, a former business associate, and Russell, an unstable heroin addict, to perform the robbery. Upon completing the crime, Russell travels to Florida."The driver", an emissary for the mafia, converses with a hitman named Jackie Cogan. Jackie has figured out who robbed the game, but even though he understands Markie was uninvolved, he believes Markie should be murdered in order to restore confidence amongst the local mobsters. After murdering Markie, Jackie meets with Mitch, another professional hitman, to prepare for the assassinations of Russell, Frankie, and Squirrel. Jackie becomes frustrated with Mitch's flagrant lechery and alcoholism, and convinces Driver to arrange Mitch's arrest.Russell is arrested on a drug possession charge; meanwhile, Jackie confronts Frankie and agrees to spare him his life, on the condition he reveal Squirrel's whereabouts. Jackie murders Squirrel before murdering Frankie; he then meets with Driver to collect his fee. Driver refuses to pay Jackie in full, and Jackie demands his payment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_Coma"title="Beijing Coma">
The book follows the character of Dai Wei, a man who awakens from a coma to discover that ten years have passed since he was shot in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. The book's narrative switches between Dai Wei's time as a seemingly non-responsive coma patient to his life before his shooting.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Darkroom_of_Damocles"title="The Darkroom of Damocles">
Osewoudt is a young man who was born two months premature who his mother dropped into the flush with stool. Hairless, short, half an inch short of fitness for military service, he owned a cigar store in Voorschoten, near Leiden. Living under the Nazi occupation, he makes his acquaintance with the mysterious Dorbeck, who claims to be involved in the Resistance movement. The latter looks like Osewoudt's "double", except that he is flawlessly perfect. Seduced by Dorbeck, Osewoudt joins the fight against the Germans. Faithfully, he carries out the orders that come to him by telephone, by post, from unknown envoys or, sometimes, which Dorbeck communicates to him himself during their brief meetings. Dorbeck enlists Osewoudt for dangerous attacks on the Gestapo and Dutch Nazi collaborators, even killing innocent people he considers a possible danger. After the war's end, Dorbeck has disappeared, and Osewoudt is arrested for collaboration. Despite his confessions of the killings, and even atrocities he committed against collaborators and occupiers, the military prosecutors do not believe him. He cannot prove his innocence, and even though his accusers cannot either, he is condemned nevertheless. Now, only Osewoudt could prove Dorbeck's innocence, but no one even knows his name, least of all his whereabouts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giant_Joshua"title="The Giant Joshua">
Among the many real characters such as Brigham Young, John D. Lee, and Erastus Snow, "The Giant Joshua" focuses primarily on Abijah MacIntyre and his wives, Bathsheba, Willie, and Clorinda (Clory), who move to southern Utah in 1861, and become prominent members of the communities of Washington, Santa Clara, and St. George during their founding years. The book focuses on Clory's life, starting with her as a 17-year-old third bride to the forty-year-old Abijah. Abijah unexpectedly consummates their marriage and Clory becomes disillusioned with wifely obedience. Abijah's teenage son, Freeborn, comforts Clory and Abijah brings the two to Erastus Snow, who rebukes them all. Later, Clory is pregnant and determined to leave St. George, but stays after seeing the natural beauty of a large group of Sego Lilies. Drought and heavy rains wreak havoc on the town, and the harvest is poor. Clory gives birth to a daughter nicknamed Kissy, and John D. Lee is ignored by his neighbors after the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Freeborn is killed by Indians, and Clory becomes depressed and has a miscarriage. Abijah blesses Kissy after she falls out of a wagon in an accident, and Clory feels love for him.Clory has two more children, Abijah leaves on a mission to England, and all three of Clory's children die in the aftermath of a plague of grasshoppers. Abijah blames Clory, and she learns glovemaking to earn money. When Abijah returns from his mission, he gives her a house and she gives birth to a son, Jim. Abijah's second wife, Willie, dies in childbirth after he refuses to send for a doctor. Clory takes organ lessons from one of Brigham Young's wives, who also teaches her how to raise silk worms. Clory feels contentment with her position in life. The discovery of silver nearby brings miners to the town, which brings new challenges. Brigham Young dies and church leaders are arrested for practicing polygamy. Clory's hands are covered in sores from working with leather in her glovemaking work, and she keeps them bandaged. Abijah is called as the president of the Logan temple, takes a new, young wife and leaves his other wives behind. Erastus Snow dreams of using a spillway instead of dams to cope with St. George's flooding problems. Clory has a final miscarriage after she is frightened by a dog. On her deathbed, Clory realizes that she had a testimony of the truthfulness of her religion all along.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Woman_Born"title="No Woman Born">
“No Woman Born” is a dramatic story first published in "Astounding Science Fiction" (December 1944). It was regarded as an extremely well-done and popular piece when first published. The story is set in New York City in the future. Deirdre, one of the three main characters, is a beauitiful and popular singer, actress, and dancer. She is referred to as “the loveliest creature whose image ever moved along the airways.” She is tragically injured in a theater fire and the whole world is saddened by her loss. A male scientist by the name of Maltzer quickly works to try to save Deirdre's body before it is too late. He places her ‘body’, her brain, into a new metal body. Maltzer, along with Deirdre's manager Harris, work with her over the next year to ensure that she will be fit to return to the public after her transformation. The new Deirdre is a slender golden robot. Instead of a face, she has blank features and a crescent-shaped mask of blue glass where her eyes would otherwise be. After an initial shock, Harris quickly accepts that the robot is Deirdre, because the voice sounds like Deirdre’s and the robot moves just like Deirdre used to move. Deirdre explains that her brain is controlling her movements and voice and her brain is still the same, even if her body is not. Deirdre also tells him that she is not immortal, even though her robot body theoretically is. But her brain will age and eventually die and then her body will just be inanimate metal.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apostle_(novel)"title="The Apostle (novel)">
"The Apostle" follows the character of Scot Harvath as he is sent on a top secret assignment for the United States government to rescue Julia Gallo, a kidnapped American doctor. For her to be released, the ransom is the freeing of al-Qaeda member Mustafa Khan from Policharki Prison. Once there, Harvath discovers that this was not a simple kidnapping and that nothing is as it seems.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clan_Ground"title="Clan Ground">
After the death of Meoran, the clan's tyrannical leader, young Ratha now leads the Named using the strength of the Red Tongue. She oversees the Firekeepers, members of the clan with a special charge and the rituals, herding, and governance; but she often wonders if the power of fire has corrupted them all. When Orange-eyes, a politically astute newcomer, joins the clan, Ratha is forced to decide how she will keep control or if she wants to keep control of the clan at all.The book begins one year after Ratha's Creature, with the Named holding a feast in celebration of Ratha's defeat of the UnNamed and the birth of the Red-Tongue. A young UnNamed yearling comes to the clan seeking food and protection, and the Firekeepers taunt him and scorch his fur. Ratha however, is impressed by his courage in front of the Red-Tongue, and sees intelligence in his eyes. She allows him to join the clan, only to work for the Firekeepers and help them with small tasks. The newcomer, Orange-Eyes, has a limited vocabulary and understanding of clan life. He is shown to possibly be a different species than them, as he grows to be huge in comparison and grow long sabers. Orange-Eyes, now renamed Shongshar, mates with a clan female Bira, and has two cubs with her. Their cubs fail to show any signs of intelligence, and Ratha orders him to take them beyond clan borders and abandon them. Shongshar becomes bitter and enraged at Ratha's decision, and begins to build a cult of fire-worshippers in a nearby cave. Shongshar overthrows Ratha using the power of the Red-Tongue, and drives her out of her own clan. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Bottom_of_the_River"title="At the Bottom of the River">
The works in "At the Bottom of the River" are usually denoted as prose poems by critics.“Girl,” is the first story in the collection. It was originally released on June 26, 1978, in "The New Yorker" and examines the struggles of growing up young and female on a post-colonial poor Caribbean island. “Girl” is a series of instructions, warnings and advice given by a mother to her daughter on how to behave especially in the presence of men. The mother frets about her daughter maturing into a woman, reflective of Jamaica Kincaid's own experiences growing up with her forceful mother in Antigua. The structure consists of a single sentence, punctuated by semi-colons, detailing the advice imparted from mother to daughter. The mother's voice is predominant in the narrative, only interrupted twice by the daughter who makes a feigned attempt to defend herself.“In the Night” was first published in "The New Yorker" on July 24, 1978. It explores the mystery and danger of an Antiguan night from the perspective of an adolescent girl. While walking in the evening, the girl ponders the relationship between her and her mother and her stepfather and the society in which she lives. It ends with the girl's wish to hear her mother tell stories about life before the girl's birth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shin's_Tricycle"title="Shin's Tricycle">
Kodama, himself a survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima, narrates the story from the point of view of Shin's father, . Shinichi is playing on his tricycle when the bomb is detonated. Nobuo finds the barely alive Shin still holding onto the tricycle's handlebars and trapped under the rubble of their destroyed home. Nobuo's efforts to save his son are in vain and Shin dies that evening. Nobuo buries Shin with his tricycle.Forty years later, Nobuo exhumes Shin and his two sisters, who also died in the bombing, in order to give them a proper burial at a cemetery. While digging everything up, a pipe was found, believed to be a part of the tricycle Shinichi had owned. Not long after, they found skeletal remains of two human hands; the remains were identified as Shinichi and his local friend, Kimiko, who had died together with him, holding his hand. Nobuo donated the tricycle to the Hiroshima Peace Museum, where it is currently on display.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_(Lu_novel)"title="Legend (Lu novel)">
"Legend" is set in a flooded, fortified, and futuristic version of Los Angeles, ruled by the totalitarian Republic of America. The novel centers around Day (Daniel Altan Wing) and June Iparis, two 15-year-olds on opposite sides of the economic spectrum. June Iparis is a military prodigy, born into an elite family, and groomed for success in the Republic's highest circles. She is the only person to have ever scored full marks on the Trial, a comprehensive test administered at age 10 to determine the child's future role in society. Her parents died several years before the start of the story, so she is raised by her older brother Metias. Daniel "Day" Wing is an infamous wanted criminal, born in the impoverished slums of the Republic. His family believes he is dead, apart from his older brother John.Day learns that his younger brother, Eden, is infected with the Plague, a disease that periodically ravages sectors of the Republic. Day breaks into the city hospital to steal medicine and escapes after a confrontation with Metias. Later that night, June is informed by Thomas, an officer in the Republic and Metias's childhood friend, that her brother was murdered by Day. June graduates early from her military university and sets out to catch Day. Using the promise of a cure for Eden's infection, she lures Day to the site of one of his previous heist locations, and they converse, albeit not face-to-face, before Day realizes she is a Republic agent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daddy_Cool_(novel)"title="Daddy Cool (novel)">
The novel tells the story of a Detroit hit man who, like the patriarch of Jane Austen’s "Pride and Prejudice", has high aspirations for his daughter and teaches her in the arts he knows best, in this case knife wielding.The novel opens with Daddy Cool carrying out a hit, and soon afterwards he learns that his daughter has run off with a pimp. He sends his two stepsons off to find her, but they are of little help. Daddy Cool takes a job in Los Angeles and while his personal problems slow him down, they do not stop him from carrying out his job. Upon his return to Detroit Daddy Cool learns that his daughter Janet has been turned out by her pimp and is running tricks on the street. Daddy Cool picks her up off the street and after two police nearly arrest him for soliciting prostitution, he gives her a large sum of money to keep her off the streets. Her pimp though has other plans and expects her to be back on the street the following night despite the large sum she has brought in.Meanwhile, Daddy Cool's stepsons (Jimmy and Buddy) have taken to robbing to earn a living. They rip off a drug dealer, and one of the two brothers (Jimmy) rapes the drug dealer’s girl friend. They later knock off a numbers outfit run by a man named Big Jack, where Jimmy and Tiny (the third man in on the hold-up team) rape an adolescent girl. Buddy is disgusted by the act and when the two men go back for seconds he forces them to leave. Big Jack watches film of his girl being raped and knows who the men are. He calls Daddy Cool and asks him to perform a hit on his own stepsons. Daddy Cool agrees, but only kills Tiny and Jimmy, sparing Buddy because he forced the other two men to leave before raping the child a second time. After sending Buddy out of the country with a large sum of cash, Daddy Cool goes to visit his daughter but sees that his friend Earl has arrived already, and Daddy Cool instantly knows why Earl is there: to kill his daughter’s pimp. His daughter, upon seeing the corpse of the pimp she loved on the floor, chases after Earl into the street, where she finds that Earl has been shot by police, but also sees her father present and assumes that he sent Earl to kill her pimp.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_Peace"title="Casualties of Peace">
Set in London it concerns Willa McCord, an artist in glass (who is starting an affair with Auro, a married Jamaican) and her best friend and housekeeper Patsy (who lives with her violent husband Tom) Patsy decides to leave Tom but her plans are thrown into disarray when she finds she is pregnant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_Magic_in_Early_Medieval_Europe"title="The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe">
## Part I: Introduction.Chapter one, "The Scope of the Study", begins by exploring what magic is and what it meant to Early Medieval society. For the purpose of her study, Flint defines "magic" as "the exercise of preternatural control over nature by human beings, with the assistance of forces more powerful than they." She notes that in the book she plans to explore "emotional history", namely the reasons why many medieval Europeans felt an emotional need for magic in their lives. Discussing the relationship between magic and science, and then magic and religion, Flint notes that much of what she discusses in the book deals with the attitude taken towards different kinds of magic by the Christian Church. Concluding this introductory chapter, she describes the nature of the historical record from this period, and the multiple problems that historians face in understanding it.In the second chapter, entitled "The Legacy of Attitudes", Flint discusses the two primary attitudes taken toward magic in Early Medieval Europe: alarm and hope. Looking at the alarm caused by magic, she discusses the work of classical authors like Pliny the Elder and Apuleius, who denounced magicians and their crafts, as well as the manner in which poets such as Virgil and Lucan portrayed magic as a dangerous and malevolent art. Flint also highlights the manner in which Judeo-Christian tradition condemned the practice of magic, both in the Bible and in un-canonical literature such as the "Book of Enoch", and in particular the laws that were enacted against astrologers by the Roman Senate. Ultimately, she notes that by the dawning of the Middle Ages, words like "magia", "magus" and "maleficium" carried "a very heavy freight of condemnation." Moving on to a discussion of "hope", Flint discusses more positive descriptions of magic in the ancient world, noting the reverence for certain forms of divination in Roman literature and law, and the positive descriptions of certain magical acts in the poetry of Ovid and accounts of Cato. She proceeds to look at the few positive descriptions of astrology in the Judeo-Christian literature of the period, and the Judeo-Christian emphasis on prophecy, particularly in the writings of Saint Augustine, which bore many similarities with divination.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyland_(King_novel)"title="Joyland (King novel)">
Devin Jones takes a summer job at Joyland in North Carolina. Devin is told by local fortune teller Rozzie that he will meet two children that summer: a girl with a red hat and a boy with a dog. Devin secures lodging for the summer at a rooming house owned by Mrs. Shoplaw, a woman who knows a great deal of Joyland's history and employees. Devin's girlfriend Wendy promises to finally sleep with him before the semester ends but ditches him at the last moment. At the start of the summer he is placed in Team Beagle, just one of the dog-themed crews at Joyland, and becomes friends with other new-hires Tom and Erin. He works mainly with Lane Hardy, operating the park's ferris wheel. Any attempts to connect with Wendy fail and he eventually receives a letter telling him to give up because she has found someone else. He stops sleeping and barely eats, spending his free time listening to music and contemplating suicide. Devin realizes that he has a talent for portraying Howie the Happy Hound, Joyland's mascot, and enjoys making kids happy. He throws himself into work so thoroughly his friends Lane and Rozzie have to confront him about his failing health. One day while acting as Howie, he saves the aforementioned young girl in a red hat from choking on a hot dog. The heroics earn him the trust and admiration of the park's owner and founder, Mr. Easterbrook, along with local acclaim.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastiff_(novel)"title="Mastiff (novel)">
Three years have passed since Beka Cooper almost died in the sewers of Port Caynn, and she is now a respected member of the Provost's Guard. But her life takes an unexpected turn when her fiancé is killed on a slave raid. Beka is faced with a mixture of emotions as, unbeknownst to many, she was about to call the engagement off.It is as Beka is facing these feelings that Lord Gershom appears at her door. Within hours, Beka, her partner Tunstall, her scent hound Achoo, and an unusual but powerful mage are working on an extremely secretive case that threatens the future of the Tortallan royal family, and therefore the entire Tortallan government. As Beka delves deeper in the motivations of the criminals she now Hunts, she learns of deep-seated political betrayal and corruption. These are people with power, money, and influence, and they are able to hire the most skilled of mages, well versed in the darkest forms of magic, all of which makes them nearly impossible to identify.This case—a Hunt that will take her to places she's never been before—will challenge Beka's tracking skills beyond the city walls, as well as her ability to judge exactly whom she can trust with her life and her country's future.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Racketeer_(novel)"title="The Racketeer (novel)">
Malcolm Bannister is an African American attorney in a small-town Virginia law firm. A real estate transaction which he undertook in good faith turns out to have involved the purchase of a secluded hunting lodge where a crooked Capitol Hill lobbyist invited corrupt Congressmen for debaucherous orgies with underage girls. After being caught up in a large FBI sweep, Bannister is tried and convicted of racketeering despite his protestations of innocence. The story begins with Bannister halfway through his ten-year prison term; he has since been disbarred, divorced by his wife, lost contact with his son and is nursing a bitter grudge against the federal government and the FBI.After hearing of the brutal murders of federal judge Raymond Fawcett and his mistress, Bannister makes a deal with the FBI to give them the name of the killer, in exchange for his release and being put into the Witness Protection Program, supposedly to protect him from the killer's associates. He informs them that Quinn Rucker, a drug dealer he met in prison, had vowed to escape and murder Fawcett as revenge for a failed bribery attempt in which the judge took $500,000 but didn't follow through on his end of the deal. Acting on information from Bannister, the FBI arrest Quinn and, despite having no evidence against him, manipulate him into confessing to the murder using legal interrogation tactics. Following the indictment, Quinn claims to have been unlawfully coerced into the confession.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_and_the_Clubhouse"title="Henry and the Clubhouse">
Henry Huggins is the youngest boy in town to have a paper route. He takes his job very seriously, and works hard to make his father proud of him. He likes the responsibility, but he doesn't like the "collecting" aspect of the job; trying to get his customers to pay him on time. And when he goes to the new neighbor's house to sell her a subscription, his dog Ribsy embarrasses him by starting a fight with her Dalmatian. When little Ramona Quimby starts following him around trying to help, the other paper deliverers make fun of them, and all of his ideas to get rid of her seem to backfire.Henry and his two friends Robert and Murph decide to build the world's best clubhouse in Henry's backyard, using wood donated by one of Henry's customers. The only problem is, Murph can't stand girls, and he insists that it be a "Boys Only" clubhouse. Henry doesn't like excluding his good friend Beezus Quimby, but he agrees to go along anyway. One day, Ramona locks Henry in the clubhouse and he can't get out until he reveals the secret password to Beezus, whom Ramona had gone to for help. It isn't easy to have a job, a major building project, and friends who don't get along. But one winter day Henry feels sorry for Ramona, following him around in the deep snow, and takes her home on his sled before finishing his paper route. His kindness is noticed by one of his customers, who writes a letter to the editor praising him, and Henry ends up making his father proud.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_Attraction_(Elkeles_novel)"title="Rules of Attraction (Elkeles novel)">
The novel, "Rules of Attraction" is about Carlos Fuentes falling in love with Kiara Westford and the obstacles they face when trying to be together. He moves from Mexico to Boulder, Colorado to live with his brother Alex. After he moved to Colorado he enrolls in Flatiron High School where he meets his peer guide Kiara Westford. Someone sets him up to be busted for possession of narcotics. He goes to a REACH program for troubled kids and lives with Alex's old college professor, Professor Westford, whose daughter is Kiara. He gets a set of rules from Professor Westford. “First off, no drugs or alcohol. As you already know, marijuana isn't hard to find in this city, but you have to stay clean per court order. Second, no profanity. I have a six-year-old who is very impressionable, and I don't need him hearing cuss words. Third, curfew on weekdays is midnight, on weekends it's two. Fourth, you're expected to clean up after yourself and help around the house when asked, just like our own children. Fifth, there's no TV unless you're done with homework. Sixth, if you bring a girl up to your room you must keep the door open . . . for obvious reasons.” Carlos tries to prank Kiara by acting like he's about to kiss her. They start to have feelings for each other. The two of them end up almost having sex, but Carlos stops it because he doesn't want to hurt her: “I have to get it out before I'm in too deep,” he says.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Claw_(novel)"title="Red Claw (novel)">
The plot follows Professor Richard Helms as he heads a team of scientists and soldiers sent to study and document all forms of life on the planet New Amazon. When this is done they will "terraform" the planet - destroy all life and make it fit for human habitation. The team comes under attack and Helms and his followers are forced to flee into the depths of the jungle, where they soon end up fighting for their lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_Survivor_(book)"title="Lone Survivor (book)">
At the beginning of the book, Marcus Luttrell describes his childhood and his training to prepare for the Navy SEALs with Billy Shelton. After joining the U.S. Navy and completing SEAL training, Luttrell describes his posting in Afghanistan, in the Hindu Kush mountains of the Kunar province. With him are the rest of SDVT-1 (SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team 1), except Shane E. Patton, for whom Danny Dietz was substituted. Their mission, Operation Red Wings, was to capture or kill a leading Taliban member thought to be allied with Osama bin Laden.At an early stage of their mission, the team encountered three goatherds, including a boy. They debated whether they should kill the goatherds to avoid being exposed to the enemy, but after a vote, team leader Michael Murphy decided to uphold the rules of engagement and let the goatherds go. About an hour later, the four SEALs were surrounded by a number of Taliban warriors. "The New York Times" sums up the story: Hospitality as understood by the Pashtun culture is a central theme.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident_at_Hawk's_Hill"title="Incident at Hawk's Hill">
"Incident at Hawk's Hill" opens in 1870, on Hawk's Hill, the farm of William and Esther MacDonald, set in the Canadian Prairies about twenty miles north of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The MacDonalds have four children. The fourth child, six-year-old Ben, is "the greatest problem of the MacDonald family". Highly intelligent but mute around most people, Ben especially loves his older brother John and mother, Esther. He feels more comfortable with the wild animals on the farm than with most people. The MacDonalds' new neighbor is George Burton, a thief and bully who is always accompanied by his mean dog, Lobo. In the vicinity is a huge, pregnant female badger, which is preparing tunnels and a sett or den in a rock outcropping, before the birth of her offspring.One day, Ben follows a prairie chicken and becomes lost away from home. He shelters in a rocky area, where he encounters the badger sow. She is hiding after being injured in one of Burton's traps. While she was trapped, her babies died for lack of food. She begins to bring food to Ben, and he begins imitating her movement and sounds. He starts to sleep by day and follow her hunting at night. One night when the dog Lobo attacks the badger, Ben bites the dog, distracting it, and the badger kills it. Despite the badger's attempts to feed Ben, he begins to fade from starvation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Elfgren_and_Strandberg_novel)"title="The Circle (Elfgren and Strandberg novel)">
The novel follows the six "chosen ones" Minoo, Rebecka, Vanessa, Anna-Karin, Ida, and Linnéa, all of whom are first-year students at the same secondary school. Ida and Linnéa are not featured as point of view characters in the novel for thematic and narrative purposes. The characters soon come off as unreliable narrators as their description of themselves and other characters don't match each other, such as Minoo's comments on Rebecka's beauty and Anna-Karin's on her own weight. The apparent suicide of Linnéa's "brother in all but blood" Elias becomes the start of a series of strange events in the town.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_Doctor_Dee"title="The House of Doctor Dee">
The main character, Matthew Palmer, inherits his father's house in London. Palmer learns that the doctor John Dee, an alchemist who worked for Elizabeth I, used to live in the house. Once he finds out about one of the previous owners, he sets out to find out more about the mysterious alchemist. The second chapter then moves into Dee talking about his life in England during the Renaissance. The novel is a mix of the two men's stories as Palmer continues to find out more about the doctor. As the investigation continues, it is revealed that both men are similar in that they are both selfish and would rather be left to themselves. Several occurrences that happen within the house appear in both time periods. In one instance, Palmer breaks a pigeon's wings by throwing a book of Dee's works at it. Later on, a wing is held in the mouth of Dee's cat. The house is not of one time period, but of multiple dimensions of time.Dee searches for a way to find gold and create gold with alchemy, but becomes self-centered in the process. Matthew Palmer doesn't care for his father and mother, describing his world as one without love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Serpent's_Shadow_(Riordan_novel)"title="The Serpent's Shadow (Riordan novel)">
This book begins six months after the events of the preceding novel, when Carter Kane and Sadie Kane travel to the 51st nome, Dallas, with their initiates and meet J.D. Grissom, the leader of the nome. They tell him that they need a magic scroll from the King Tut exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art, or his nome will be attacked and destroyed by the forces of Apophis, the god of chaos. In three days, Apophis will rise, swallow the sun, and destroy the world. Sadie sees a face in the wall which tells them they instead need a golden box. However, the nome is attacked, and the scroll is destroyed. To save everyone from getting killed, Sadie summons Ma'at, repulsing the forces of chaos, but blacking out. When she awakens, she finds that the 51st nome has been destroyed, and all of its magicians killed. At the 21st nome in Brooklyn, they discover that the golden box Sadie was told to retrieve is a shadow box of King Tut.Horus visits Carter and hints at a connection between shadows and statues, leading Carter to suspect that there is a better way to execrate Apophis, and decides to consult Thoth. He tells the others at dinner and makes plans to find Thoth that night, but Sadie makes him go to their school dance. During the dance, Sadie meets with Anubis, and he suggests that the shadow is like a computer backup drive, but Shu, the god of wind and Anubis' great-grandfather separates them. Sadie gets an idea about using Bes' sheut to give him back his ren and restore the god's soul.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beware_of_Pity_(novel)"title="Beware of Pity (novel)">
The young lieutenant Anton Hofmiller is invited to the castle of the wealthy Hungarian Lajos Kekesfalva. He meets Kekesfalva's paralyzed daughter Edith and develops subtle affection and deep compassion for her. Edith falls in love with him. When she develops a hope for a speedy recovery, he eventually promises to marry her when she is recovered, with the hope that this will convince her to take the treatment. However, for fear of ridicule and contempt, he denies the engagement in public. When Edith learns of this, she takes her own life. Overwhelmed by guilt, he is deployed to the First World War.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-Four_Hours_in_the_Life_of_a_Woman"title="Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman">
"It traces a woman through a single day, but that day is simultaneously the most vividly wonderful and ultimately terrible of her life. She is an English widow who becomes mesmerised by the almost suicidally reckless gambling of a failed Polish diplomat one evening in Monte Carlo. From this first spark of interest, she is drawn into his troubled, unstable life."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possum_Magic"title="Possum Magic">
The two main characters are Grandma Poss and Hush. Hush has been made invisible by Grandma to protect her from Australian bush dangers. The story details the duo's adventures as they tour Australia searching for the secret to Hush's visibility. It is a rhythmical story of Australia's varied landscapes and the animals in them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_Even_Worse_Than_It_Looks"title="It's Even Worse Than It Looks">
The authors analyze the current U.S. Congress, and they conclude that the lawmaking body is now almost completely ineffectual. Two sources of the problem are given. The first is the serious mismatch between the two major parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, in their view. They state that the groups "have become as vehemently adversarial as parliamentary parties, and [in] a governing system that, unlike a parliamentary democracy, makes it extremely difficult for majorities to act".Mann and Ornstein specifically criticize the rightward shift of the Republican Party, highlighting the use of administrative and parliamentary tricks as a means of avoiding clear votes on certain issues. The authors describe the party as "an insurgent outlier – ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Commandment_(novel)"title="The First Commandment (novel)">
This novel starts with five highly dangerous detainees pulled out from their cells in Guantanamo Bay detention camp, stripped off their jumpsuits and changed into civilian clothes. That includes a dangerous man named Phillipe Rousard.Six months later, Rousard attempted to murder Scot Harvath's girlfriend, Tracy, but left her severely incapacitated. and uses blood to paint his house door red. After the president's order to stay away from this case, Scot plans his own mission to kill Rousard. As time passes by, Rousard slowly harms the people closest to Scot using his own version of the Ten Plagues.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malina_(novel)"title="Malina (novel)">
The novel focuses on an unnamed female narrator, known only as I., who explores her existential situation as a woman and writer both through personal reflection and in dialogue form. She is a writer and intellectual living in Vienna during the second half of the 20th century.The writer shares a flat with the calm and rational Malina, a historian, who offers her the necessary support as she is often confused and seems to be losing touch with reality. She meets Ivan, a young Hungarian man, and falls in love with him. They begin an affair but soon Ivan begins to avoid her and ultimately rejects her.The second chapter, "The Third Man", is the climax of the narrative. In dream sequences the narrator remembers the horrors of the Second World War, gas chambers and rape. A “father” figure is omnipresent in her dreams who she realises represents not her own father but rather the male-dominated world of Nazism more broadly.In the third chapter, "From last things", the narrator tries to overcome her problems in dialogue with the always proper but scarcely approachable Malina. The narrator realizes that a relationship with Ivan is not possible, and that a relationship with any other man will not be possible either. She feels that she can no longer survive in this male-dominated world. "I have lived in Ivan and I die in Malina," she says. At the end of the novel, the writer disappears without a trace into a crack in the wall and Malina removes all evidence of her existence from their flat, as if she had never been there at all. The novel closes with the sentence "It was murder."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Juga"title="The White Juga">
"White Juga" revolves mainly around the corruption of the administration of the town "Trokth", personified by the main antagonist "Kiu Koroziu". Some characters from "The Dead River" reappear in "White Juga".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Comrade_Zylo"title="The Rise and Fall of Comrade Zylo">
The main story revolves around the optimistic main protagonist "Zylo Kamberi", who is an incompetent apparatchik. "Zylo" in the book is referred to as "comrade Zylo", which was common during the Communist regime. His pathetic vanity, his quixotic fervour, his grotesque public behaviour, in short his rise and fall, are all recorded in ironic detail by his hard-working and more astute subordinate and friend "Demkë" who serves as a neutral observer. "Demkë" before being assigned the post as Zylo's assistant used to be a bright individualistic person who gave up on his own ideals to substitute them with the "ideals of the greater good", which in the novel is an euphemism for his superiors’ will.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_to_Smell_the_Roses"title="Time to Smell the Roses">
While watchmaker and sporadic detective-mouse Hermux Tantamoq is planning his wedding to the aviator Linka Perflinger, multi-millionaire Androse De Rosenquill sends for him and asks him to find a missing squirrel. At the same time, the cosmetics boss Tucka Mertslin is scheming with an unprincipled scientist against a rival cosmetician. A beautiful garden is vandalized, and a body is found which no one recognizes. As Hermux carefully pursues his task, he finds unexpected connections.The familiar cast of rodents, insects, and others from the three previous Hermux Tantamoq books now includes Thirxen Ghoulter, a coroner whose profession is taxidermy.Terfle is Hermux's smart pet ladybug, who travels with him and likes to eat jelly and dried aphids.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Charming_Quirks_of_Others"title="The Charming Quirks of Others">
Isabel Dalhousie is approached by the wife of a trustee of a prestigious Scottish school concerning a poison pen letter that her husband, a trustee of said school, has received, concerning one of the candidates for the post of headmaster.Isabel's nieces, Cat, has a new boyfriend who is, coincidentally, one of the candidates for the aforementioned position.Isabel works in her usual manner to get to the bottom of the mystery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve's_Ransom"title="Eve's Ransom">
Maurice Hilliard is a mechanical draughtsman producing technical drawings on an annual income of £100. He longs to be free from the monotony of his life and work, and is led by his feelings of hopelessness into drinking alcohol. While travelling by train one day, he meets Mr Dengate, a former debtor to his deceased father. As Dengate was bankrupt at the point of Hilliard's father's death, the debt was not repaid, but as they meet on the train, Hilliard shames Dengate into repaying the debt of £436. Hilliard then commits to the plan of living without working, as a "free" human being, for as long as the money lasts.First travelling to London, and then to Paris, Hilliard eventually returns to his family home in Dudley, feeling lonely. He discovers a portrait of a young woman and decides to find her. Eventually, he succeeds in his plan. The woman, Eve Madeley, works as a book keeper, with an income of £1 per week. Like Hilliard had previously done, she is despairing about her future. Eve tells Hilliard that they would not be able to marry, as his income is too small, but she does agree to travel to Paris with him. They are accompanied by Eve's friend Patty Ringrose. While in Paris, Hilliard falls in love with Eve.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Art_of_Gratitude"title="The Lost Art of Gratitude">
A second attempt by professors Lettuce and Dove to oust Isabel from her position at 'The Review of Applied Ethics' is thwarted and Isabel learns further lessons about gratitude and kindness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Comfort_of_Saturdays"title="The Comfort of Saturdays">
A chance conversation draws Isabel Dalhousie into the case of a doctor, believed by his wife to have been unfairly disgraced in an affair of a dangerous drug.Her niece, Cat, is on holiday, leaving Isabel to run the delicatessen and attempt to get closer to, and possibly help, Cat's assistant, Eddie, whom she believes to have been damaged by something in his past.Somewhat to Isabel's disquiet, her fiancé, Jamie, strikes up a friendship with an arrogant American composer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dog_Who_Came_in_from_the_Cold"title="The Dog Who Came in from the Cold">
The story is set in a fictional housing unit in London nicknamed Corduroy Mansions, and details the lives of the inhabitants of the large Pimlico house and others.The main characters are Barbara Ragg, Basil Wickramsinghe, Berthea Snark, Caroline Jarvis, Dee Binder, Eddie French, Freddie de la Hay, Jenny Hedge, Jo Partlin, Marcia Light, Oedipus Snark, Terence Moongrove, and William French.The chapters for this book in "The Telegraph" ran from 21 Sept 2009 until 19 Dec 2009.Book three in the series, "A Conspiracy of Friends", ran from 13 Sept 2010 until 17 Dec 2010.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Conspiracy_of_Friends"title="A Conspiracy of Friends">
The story is set in a fictional housing unit in London nicknamed Corduroy Mansions, and details the lives of the inhabitants of the large Pimlico house and others.The main characters are Barbara Ragg, Basil Wickramsinghe, Berthea Snark, Caroline Jarvis, Dee Binder, Eddie French, Freddie de la Hay, Jenny Hedge, Jo Partlin, Marcia Light, Oedipus Snark, Terence Moongrove, and William French.The chapters for this book in "The Telegraph" ran from 13 September 2010 until 17 December 2010.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy's_Law_(novel)"title="Murphy's Law (novel)">
The novel surrounds undercover Northern Irish policeman Martin Murphy. Murphy fails a professional assessment due to the murder of his young son by IRA terrorists, and is assigned to work in London. He is assigned a case investigating a North London funeral home, the proprietors of which are suspected diamond thieves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothers_and_Other_Liars"title="Mothers and Other Liars">
The story focuses on Ruby Leander, a nineteen-year-old runaway, who finds a baby in the trash at an Oklahoma rest stop. She makes a split-second decision to take the child as her own, rescuing it from a life of abandonment like her own. Ten years later, she has built a life for herself and her daughter, Lark, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She works as a manicurist and has a steady relationship with boyfriend of three years, Chaz, and is expecting his child. Ruby has told her daughter that her father died in an accident. However, she is forced to face her past when she reads an article in a magazine that shows her daughter as a missing child, thought to have been kidnapped by carjackers. She must decide whether to come clean about Lark's origins or continue to live the lie. She decides to tell Lark how she found her in a car seat dumped in a trash can, that she is not her biological mother, and that the childcare authorities were not involved in any way with her apparently illegitimate adoption.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moffat_Museum"title="The Moffat Museum">
"The Moffats should have a museum! Suddenly the idea popped into Jane's head…" Staring idly at the family's barn one day, Jane gets the amazing idea for a Moffat Family Museum, to hold any first or treasured things the Moffat children can think of. The first artifact for their museum is the bike that all four of them used to learn to ride.Rufus' teacher will be spending the summer in London, and she tells the class about the wax museum she plans on visiting while she's there. Rufus is inspired to become a wax statue for the museum, and gathers all the crayons and candles and odd bits of wax in the house to transform himself into "Rufus, the Waxworks Boy".It's a good time for the Moffats to be storing up memories, because things are changing. Baby Rufus is growing up, and Sylvie is getting ready to marry Reverend Mr. Abbot. Soon Joey will be taking a full-time job. But the museum helps them celebrate and remember their past as they face the future together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_in_the_Clouds"title="Song in the Clouds">
During the Western Han Dynasty, Huo Yunge (daughter of Huo Qubing and Jin Yu from "Ballad of the Desert") saved the eight-year-old Emperor Zhao of Han from the cold of the desert. Ten years later, Huo is a beautiful young woman who could not forget that boy and went to Chang An city to fulfil their 10 years ago promise. She mistook another Liu Bing Yi as Emperor Liu Fu Ling as both of them had a similar jade given by the late emperor and helplessly watched him marry Xu Pingjun.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asmara_Jaya"title="Asmara Jaya">
Rustam and his cousin Nuraini, both of Minang descent, are married in Padang, West Sumatra; Rustam does so reluctantly, and only attends the ceremony because he must sign the documentation, before hurrying home to Bandung, West Java. After the wedding, Nuraini goes with her mother and in-laws to visit her husband and discovers that Rustam is already married to a Sundanese woman named Dirsina, whose son with Rustam recently died. Along the way she meets a man named Ibrahim Siregar, who haunts her thoughts.Rustam's parents are unwilling to accept Dirsina as a daughter in law due to her different ethnicity; interethnic marriages are forbidden by "adat" (tradition). Although now married to two women, Rustam insists that he only loves Dirsina. When the guests realise that Dirsina is ill, they agree to leave so she can rest.Rustam asks for help from his neighbour, Doctor Meerman, who suggests that he pray for God to show him a way. Instead, Rustam attempts to commit suicide, an action which Meerman stops. When Nuraini's mother meets with Meerman, the two women discuss the issue and agree that it would be best if Nuraini and Rustam divorced. When this is done, Rustam asks for forgiveness. Rustam's family accepts Dirsina as a daughter-in-law and return to Padang.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy's_Revenge"title="Murphy's Revenge">
Martin Murphy is an undercover policeman currently working in London. He is assigned to investigate a support group for the friends and family of rape and murder victims, named "Confront", as it appears they are planning and carrying out revenge killings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservoir_Pups"title="Reservoir Pups">
The story surrounds a twelve-year-old named Eddie and his affiliation with a local gang, known as the "Reservoir Pups".Eddie's father leaves his mother to run away with her boss, a doctor. His mother finds herself a new nursing job at the Royal Victoria Maternity Hospital, however it's located in a run-down section of Belfast; the pair move there regardless. A short time after they arrive, Scuttles, the chief of hospital security, accuses Eddie of scamming the locals and of being part of a neighbourhood gang, the "Reservoir Pups", for which his mum scolds him also.Given that all the people in his life believe he is already part of the gang, Eddie decides to join. He is tasked with stealing the security codes from Scuttles' computer and while attempting to do so, hears of a plot to kidnap twelve babies from the hospital nursery, abandoning his mission. Returning to the gang, Eddie is ostracised for his failure to complete his task and he is told to "watch his back". Eddie then sets out to foil the kidnapping himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bring_Up_the_Bodies"title="Bring Up the Bodies">
"Bring Up the Bodies" follows closely upon the events of "Wolf Hall". The King and Cromwell—now Master Secretary to the King's Privy Council—are guests of the Seymour family at Wolf Hall.The King spends time with Jane Seymour and begins to fall in love; his marriage to the new queen, Anne Boleyn, is sometimes loving but often descends into angry quarrels. "I cannot live as I have lived," Henry finally tells Cromwell in private. He has tired of Anne, who brings him neither peace nor a son, and wants his marriage ended. Cromwell vows to make this happen.Ever the dealmaker, Cromwell tries to negotiate a separation through Anne's father, Wiltshire, and her brother, Rochford. Wiltshire is willing to negotiate; Rochford is not, and tells Cromwell that if Anne's marriage to the King endures he will "make short work of you."Cromwell talks to those close to Anne. The more he does, the more he hears she's been unfaithful to the King. The musician, Mark Smeaton, and Anne's sister-in-law, Lady Rochford, pass on rumours to this effect. Cromwell begins to build his case. With proof enough to have her tried for treason, the King is willing to see Anne destroyed to serve his ends. Mindful that many of those closest to Anne helped ruin his mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, Cromwell relishes the opportunity to bring them down. And though he is not sure all of the evidence is true, he has gone so far in the matter that he cannot turn back and survive himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dog's_Purpose"title="A Dog's Purpose">
The narrator first starts out as a feral puppy. A few weeks later, after being nursed by their mother, a feral as well, the dog and his siblings Fast, Sister, and Hungry go outside of their den to explore the woods around them. Soon after, men come and capture them. The dogs arrive at a place called the Yard, where dozens of abandoned dogs reside under the guidance of a gentle old woman whom the narrator calls Senora. The narrator, named Toby by Senora, adjusts to his new lifestyle. One day, many of the newer dogs at the Yard are whisked off to a building (a veterinarian office). A new dog arrives, named Spike, who is very aggressive with the other dogs, and injures Toby. Not long after, animal control service agents arrive with orders to shut down the place due to poor sanitation and welfare conditions. Many dogs, including Toby, are subsequently euthanized.Toby now is reincarnated as a Golden Retriever puppy and is nursing from a new mother. A few weeks after birth, when Toby and his new brothers and sisters have matured enough, he and the others are allowed to play outside the cage. Toby climbs up onto a table and bites the doorknob, opening the gate to the outside world and leaving him to explore the real world. A truck driver picks up Toby on the road and calls him "Fella." The man drives to a bar. After the man has been gone for several hours, Toby begins suffering from heat exhaustion in the cab.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bone_Season"title="The Bone Season">
The year is 2059. Nineteen-year-old Paige Mahoney is working in the criminal underworld of Scion London, based at Seven Dials, employed by a man named Jaxon Hall. Her job: to scout for information by locating human minds. Paige is a dreamwalker, the rarest type of clairvoyant and, in the world of Scion, she commits treason simply by breathing.It is raining the day her life changes for ever. Attacked, drugged and kidnapped, Paige is transported to Oxford – a city kept secret for two hundred years, controlled by a powerful, otherworldly race. Paige is assigned to Warden, a Rephaite with mysterious motives. He is her master, her trainer, her natural enemy. But, if Paige wants to regain her freedom she must allow herself to be nurtured in this prison where she is meant to die. She must absorb all the knowledge she gains access to, she must hone her gift. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bring_Me_the_Head_of_Oliver_Plunkett"title="Bring Me the Head of Oliver Plunkett">
The story surrounds a twelve-year-old named Eddie and his affiliation with a local gang, known as the "Reservoir Pups".Two runaway orphans, Pat and Sean, witness the theft of Saint Oliver Plunketts head from St. Peter's Church where it was on display for a forthcoming papal visit. Pat speaks to the primate of the church and discovers that he will be greatly embarrassed by the disappearance; Pat decides to help as he is feeling guilty for not preventing the crime initially. The orphans enlist the help of Eddie and his best-friend Mo in their task. Eddie and Mo, meanwhile, have been involved in some tasks for the Reservoir Pups which coincidentally involve the son of Scarface Cutler; a blind boy named Ivan and son of the thief in possession of the head.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck,_Death_and_the_Tulip"title="Duck, Death and the Tulip">
The story involves a duck who acquaints a character called Death who, as it turns out, has been following her all her life. The two become friends, discussing life, death, and what any afterlife might be like. They go diving together and sit in a tree, pondering what would happen to the duck's lake after her death. The duck reports that some ducks say that they become angels and sit on clouds, looking down on earth. Death says that this is possible since ducks already have wings. Then, she says that some ducks also say that there is a hell, down below, where bad ducks are roasted; Death replies that it's remarkable what ducks all think of, and says "who knows," prompting the duck to respond, "so you don't know either." In the end, the duck indeed dies, and Death carries her to a river, placing the duck gently in the water and laying the tulip on her: "For a long time he watched her. When she was lost to sight, he was almost a little moved."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Might_Be_a_Zombie_and_Other_Bad_News"title="You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News">
The comedy trivia book is composed of 38 articles, including 20 of the site's most popular articles. The additional 18 articles are exclusive to the book. The topics include the Zombie apocalypse, disgusting facts about bugs allowed in your food by the Food and Drug Administration, the secret menace that is dolphins, and other such facts. The book is written in "Cracked.com"'s popular "listicle" format.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog_and_the_Birdsong"title="Frog and the Birdsong">
Frog runs to Pig to tell her he has found a "broken" bird (a songbird resembling a common blackbird). Pig thinks the bird is asleep. Duck, who joins the conversation, thinks it is ill, but Hare knows it is dead and solemnly declares that "everything dies." Hare delivers a brief eulogy: "He sang beautifully all of his life. Now he gets his well-deserved rest." The friends dig a grave for the bird, put flowers on its body, and put a rock over the grave. Afterward, as they are walking away, Frog starts playing tag and they all have a wonderful afternoon, prompting Frog to exclaim, "Isn't life beautiful!" As they return home at sundown, another blackbird starts singing a beautiful song, "as it always does," indicating that life goes on.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sleeping_Car"title="The Sleeping Car">
This story begins with Mrs. Roberts, her baby son, and her Aunt Mary headed Westbound on the Boston and Albany Railroad. They are on their way to meet Mrs. Roberts' husband and brother in Boston. Mrs. Roberts has not seen her brother in twelve years, and is nervous about how he will react to seeing her. In the time since they last saw each other, she has married and birthed a child, and has heard little from her brother except for infrequent telegraphs. The porter informs Mrs. Roberts and her aunt that the berths are now ready for them to sleep in, but the conversation continues. Mrs. Roberts worries that her husband Edward will not receive Willis well, or vice versa, because Willis is a Californian and Edward has never encountered one before. Mrs. Roberts laments that her life would be a wreck if her husband and brother do not get along nicely, and states "I do hope they're sitting down to a hot supper."A voice from an adjacent berth interjects and sarcastically tells Mrs. Roberts to be quiet. She acquiesces for a moment, but then reverts to conversation, stating how they must go to bed. Aunt Mary insists that Mrs. Roberts and the child take the bottom bunk, because she is afraid that the child will roll off of the top bunk and injure himself. She calls the porter over to help her into the upper berth, and after successfully entering the berth, exchanges "good-night" with Mrs. Roberts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian's_Walk"title="Ian's Walk">
"Ian's Walk" tells the story of a child with autism named Ian. Ian displays behaviour which is stereotypical for children with autism, to the dismay of his sister Julie. Julie and Tara (the oldest sibling) decide to go for a walk to the park, but their mother says that Ian must go with them. During the walk Julie describes Ian's behaviour to the reader, and describes her frustration and embarrassment with it, and Ian. Along the walk Ian goes missing, causing Julie to panic. She decides to "think like Ian" and finds him at his favourite spot. She takes him home, and begins to appreciate and accept how different he is.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Summer_(Dessen_novel)"title="That Summer (Dessen novel)">
"That Summer" tells the story of a 15-year-old girl Haven, as she copes with her sister's engagement, her father's remarriage, and her best friend's personality changes. Nothing seems stable except for Haven's memories—especially those of the summer when Ashley dated Sumner Lee, who, as part of the backstory, is described as bringing the family together. Within the course of the novel, Sumner reappears in Haven's life. Fed up with the drama in her life, Haven runs away. When she doesn't come home, her family searches for her. Ashley finds Haven in the woods, where she tells Haven she had only broken up with Sumner because he had cheated on her, breaking Haven's illusion of their perfect past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witch_of_Hebron"title="The Witch of Hebron">
Following the characters from the first novel, the plot centers around Jasper Copeland, the eleven-year-old son of Union Grove's doctor. After his puppy is crushed by a stallion belonging to the New Faith Church, Copeland poisons the stallion with opium and runs away. His journey sets other characters in motion, mainly Brother Jobe, the leader of the New Faith Church and, to a lesser degree, Robert Earle, Rev. Loren Holder and Jasper's father, Dr. Copeland. It also introduces Perry Talisker, a local hermit, and Barbara Maglie, the witch of the title.Set a few months after the events of "A World Made by Hand", the citizens of Union Grove are living on the tail end of a national catastrophe, with their community slowly falling apart from neglect and natural decay. Much of the rest of the nation seems to be falling apart, with nuclear blasts in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., cities devolving and a fractured United States. Unlike the previous novel, the larger world does not much intrude as the entire story is set around the rural county.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doruntine_(novel)"title="Doruntine (novel)">
Doruntine is a young Albanian woman from a noble family – the Vranachs – who is married into a family that lives far away from the family home. Her brother, Constantine, made an oath to his mother that he would fetch her back if needed. Having heard nothing for three years, Doruntine is one day suddenly awoken by Constantine and taken back on horseback to her mother. He leaves her at the door, saying that he has to go to the church beforehand. When her mother opens the door, both women fall into a state of shock, as Constantine has been dead for three years. Both tell their tale but both die soon after. Stres, the local police chief, is given the task of investigating.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Psychology_of_Self-Esteem"title="The Psychology of Self-Esteem">
The book is divided into two parts. In Part One ("The Foundations"), Branden explains his views on human nature and the science of psychology. He discusses his theories about consciousness, volition, emotions (with particular attention to emotional repression) and mental health.The material in Part One is about philosophical and psychological theory and does not focus on self-esteem, which is the predominant subject in Part Two ("The Psychology of Self-Esteem"). He describes self-esteem as "the integrated sum of self-confidence and self-respect", which he describes respectively as "a sense of personal efficacy and a sense of personal worth." Branden considers self-esteem to be one of the most important factors in human psychology.Branden contrasts healthy self-esteem with conditions that he views as psychological problems. First is what he calls "pseudo-self-esteem," which he describes as "an irrational pretense at self-value," and "a nonrational, self-protective device to diminish anxiety and to provide a spurious sense of security". Next he discusses pathological anxiety, which he traces to a lack of self-esteem, particularly a lack of self-confidence. He further connects this to feelings of guilt and depression, which he views as aspects of anxiety. The last problem he discusses is one he calls "social metaphysics", which he describes as "the psychological syndrome that characterizes a person who holds the minds of other men, not objective reality, as his ultimate psycho-epistemological frame of reference."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_Cromuele"title="Il Cromuele">
Henrighetta, Queen of England has escaped from Cromuele, the tyrant usurper who imprisoned her husband king Carlo in the Tower of London. After useless petitions to the Government of Edinburgh and to the of Republic of the Seven United Netherlands, she has sailed towards France in order to ask for help even her nephew Louis XIV.She is with Delmira, a young Irish girl just known during the trip. The two women, for their security, are travelling with male clothes, as Dutch Merchants. During the voyage, their ship has been wrecked, and their lifeboat was pushed by the wind to English coast, from where they reached London under the identities of Henrico (Henry) and Edmondo (Edmund).In this guise, they have been housed in the Palace of Odoardo (Edward) and Anna Hide, a family "in pectore" still loyalist despite it shows fidelity to the usurper Cromuele. The beauty and the singing qualities of Edmondo/Delmira, have meant that the two women were both introduced in Whitehall to attend a major Costume party that Cromuele has ordered, to distract Londoners from the consequences of his despotic government and a looming plague.So far the Backstory. With the arrival at Palace Edmondo/Delmira and Henrico/Henrighetta tragedy begins.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branded_Outlaw"title="Branded Outlaw">
The story is about the adventures of cowboy Lee Weston who hears from his father that an old enemy, Harvey Dodge, is back in town. Lee rides out in a hurry from Wyoming to Pecos, New Mexico only to find his father murdered and the family ranch burned to the ground. Lee is certain that Harvey Dodge is to blame, and he sets off to settle the score. Along the way he gets into a fiery gun battle in the town of Pecos. Lee is badly wounded and flees into the mountains just before passing out. As fate would have it, Dodge's beautiful, yet independently minded, daughter Ellen, finds Lee and secretly nurses him back to health. But when Lee insists on continuing his plan to get revenge on his enemy, he gets himself into even more trouble, a near lynching at the hands of an angry mob, and the scorn of the girl he had fallen for.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_Country"title="Forgotten Country">
The Story is about Janie and her sister Hannah, and their parents, who moved with their parents to the United States from South Korea when the girls were young. Their father felt he needed to flee to escape political persecution under an oppressive government. His older sister Komo had already moved to the US, where her two sons were born. The father and Komo are close, as they were orphaned when young and she took care of them, even when they lived with an uncle's family.Janie remembered her maternal grandmother telling her that the family "lost" its daughters; that it had lost a daughter in each generation since the Japanese occupation. Janie's mother's older sister was kidnapped from a college dorm by North Korean soldiers who were taking girls, and never returned.As a teenager, Hannah became rebellious, then left home and cut ties with her parents. Janie needs to find her, as their father is dying of cancer. The girls grew up in the United States, having to adapt to English names given to them in school, English, and changes in culture. Janie has to find her sister before it is too late; her parents have returned to South Korea for recommended treatment for her father, whose cancer has metastasized.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surabaya_(fictional_work)"title="Surabaya (fictional work)">
"Surabaya" is told in fragments, with no single main character. The story begins with a group of Indos raising the Dutch flag over the city over Surabaya after the Japanese – who had invaded in 1942 – surrendered. The flag is taken down by pro-nationalist native Indonesians and replaced with the flag of the newly-proclaimed country. Later, the Allied forces land in the city. After the native troops ignore an ultimatum to surrender their weapons, a battle breaks out, culminating with the bombing of Surabaya on 10 November 1945.Indonesian civilians leave the city, heading for nearby Krian and Sidoarjo. They are highly suspicious and kill anyone accused of being a spy. In the large groups of evacuees, the men and women become prone to fornication. Meanwhile, young soldiers in Surabaya fight to retain the city but quickly become depressed because of their lack of weapons and supplies. The story ends in May 1946.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Colonel's_Dream"title="The Colonel's Dream">
The novel begins with Colonel Henry French and his partners selling their company, making the colonel financially independent. He decides to head back south with his son, Phil. He intends to stay for only a couple of months, but once he arrives, he remembers with nostalgia the landscape, the building structures, and his youth in his hometown. He runs into his old slave, Peter French, who is finding it difficult to make a living due to his skin color and age under the post-war conditions. During his stay, the Colonel sees continuing economic isolation and repression of the black population and is bothered by the racism that is still very prominent in Clarendon. The editor of the local newspaper talked to him about Clarendon having "so many idle, ignorant Negroes that something must be done to make them work, or else they'll steal, and to keep them in their place, or they would run over us".It became evident to the Colonel that there was a racial problem in Clarendon. When the Colonel visits a black school, he hears from a black school teacher, Mr. Henry Taylor, how unfairly the school system treats blacks by segregation and difference in condition of the schools. Behind most of this wrongdoing is William Fetters, a convict labor contractor in Clarendon who influences most affairs in the town. The Colonel takes on the injustice of Fetters and tries to change Clarendon into a more socially equal town.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_of_The_Aroostook"title="The Lady of The Aroostook">
In South Bradfield, Massachusetts, Lydia Blood lives with her Aunt Maria and her grandfather Deacon Latham on their family farm. Both of Lydia's parents had died of illness when Lydia was young and she is now, at the age of nineteen, being sent to live with her other aunt, on her father's side of the family, Aunt Josephine, in Venice, Italy. Lydia was not only blessed with good looks and good smarts, but she also was blessed with a beautiful singing voice which she is going to cultivate in Venice and attempt to make a career out of. Her Aunt Josephine wrote to her grandfather suggesting that Lydia should come to Venice to live with her. She also suggested that he should go to Boston to find a ship to bring Lydia to Europe, which is how he found Captain Jenness and the "Aroostook". Lydia and her grandfather travel to Boston where the "Aroostook", a large and beautiful ship, awaits to take Lydia and several other passengers to Trieste. While looking for the wharf that the "Aroostook" is anchored at, Lydia and her grandfather become lost and decide to rest for a minute. During their rest they encounter two men who ask if Lydia is all right because she looks very pale and distraught. Her grandfather ensures the men that she is just tired from traveling and they leave. Lydia is angered that they would ask this question because she felt that they did not have the right to ask such a question.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn's_Husband"title="Evelyn's Husband">
"Evelyn's Husband" is the African American author Charles W. Chesnutt's attempt at portraying white life in Boston in the early 1900s. The book examines the role of fate on the lives of two men, one older and one younger, in their pursuit of the same woman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man's_Woman"title="A Man's Woman">
The story opens with Ward Bennett, an explorer of extraordinary will, and his men making an attempt to reach the North Pole, enduring brutal hardships. Many of the men die slow, painful deaths, and they all would have died if a boat not stumbled across them. However, when they arrive back home, Bennett and his surviving men are greeted with a heroes welcome.The novel shifts to Lloyd Searight, a young, attractive girl, who works as a nurse despite being independently wealthy. The reader discovers that Lloyd and Bennett have mutual feelings for each other, but neither one has ever expressed these feelings.Ferriss, Bennett's closest friend, contracts typhoid fever, and Lloyd is in charge of nursing him. Fearing that she will contract the disease, Bennett refuses to let Lloyd come near Ferriss, and as a result, Ferriss dies. Lloyd refuses to speak to Bennett, and they both enter into a time of deep despair. However, when Bennett comes down with the same disease, Lloyd is forced to nurse him, and they eventually reconcile and marry. Lloyd gives up nursing, Bennett gives up exploring, and they live in the country together while Bennett works on a book, both for a while very happy with their situation. However, after talking with Bennet's man Alder, who does work around the house, Lloyd realizes that it is Bennett's calling, his duty to America, to lead the first expedition to the North Pole. The book ends with his leaving while Lloyd rather proudly watches him go.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Member_of_the_Third_House"title="A Member of the Third House">
In a New England metropolis, local politician Wilson Tuttle has a brief conversation with a Mr. Holbrook regarding the Consolidated Railway, which is attempting to secure a charter to become a monopoly. The Consolidated Railway has been using a corrupt political group called the Third House to gain political support. Following his meeting with Holbrook, Tuttle accompanies senator's daughter Evelyn Ward and Helene Davis, the daughter of the president of Consolidated Railway, for some ice cream.At the office of Tom Brennan and Samuel Fox, two legislators arrive for a meeting. Brennan gains their political support through the means of a bribe. Evelyn and Helene stop by and ask Brennan what he knows about the Third House.Later that afternoon, Lawrence Davis and Samuel Fox discuss the recent state of their company and the problematic activities of Tuttle. Knowing that Tuttle cannot be fixed like many other politicians, they realize their charter must be passed before Tuttle passes his bill to open an investigation into Continental's activities.Evelyn's father, Senator Rufus Ward, arrives at Brennan's office. Desperately seeking money for an investment, he begs for Brennan's help. Brennan offers Ward money in exchange for his support.At the popular summer getaway of Waterside, Brennan, Tuttle, Evelyn, and Helene engage in a friendly game of tennis. Brennan attempts to propose to Helene, but she says she needs time. Later, Tuttle warns Helene about how he believes Brennan is using her and her father for personal gains. After dinner, Davis and Fox discover Tuttle's evidence has recently been published in the newspapers. Despite their anger with him, Tuttle claims he will proceed with the investigation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jamesons"title="The Jamesons">
The residents of Linnville prided themselves on the lack of tourism and absence of a summer hotel. Never having boarders before, the Liscom family, accepted the Jamesons when they came to town in search for a place to stay. Their arrival caused a great commotion as the Jamesons son, Cobb, saw smoke inside his new temporary residence and proceeded to run outside and yell “Fire!” Word quickly traveled down the street and a crowd formed outside the Liscom's as firemen drenched the entire house. Mrs. Caroline Liscom was furious that her house was soaked with water when the smoke was only caused by her chimney, and as a result was rude to her new boarders. Mrs. Jameson tried to find a new place to live in response to her host's rudeness, but had no such luck and both families were forced to live under the roof for the next several weeks.The Jamesons consisted of a mother, a father, two daughters, one son and a grandmother. Mrs. Jameson quickly gave her family a bad reputation at a Linnville annual picnic several days after her arrival. She made an announcement to the village that their unhealthy foods were “poison” and further insults them as she says that their rich pies and cakes causes the insanity and dyspepsia in people of their social class, so they should only eat the health foods she consumes. In attempt to avoid an altercation, the people of Linnville respond as politely as possible and continue on with the picnic as though nothing happened.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Business_Career"title="A Business Career">
The story takes place in 1890s in the Midwest city of Groveland (critics consider this a fictional stand-in for Cleveland, where Chesnutt lived). At the Truscott Refining Company, the male stenographer has just been fired. Stella Merwin fills in temporarily; she has already learned shorthand. When an opportunity opens up, she stays in the job longer than intended. The company is owned by the man whom her family believes has destroyed its reputation and honor.Stella Merwin's father, Henry, was a very successful man in the oil refining business, providing the Merwin family with status and a life of wealth. At the peak of his success, he hit financial troubles. These led to the loss of the family fortune as well as his death, attributed to heart disease. Before his death, Merwin assured his family: his wife, daughter Stella and son George, that they would be taken care of financially by his profitable investments. He directed them to see his most trusted employee, Wendell Truscott for assistance in the matter, as Merwin had given him related papers. With the loss of their wealth, the Merwins must change their lives. They move from the city to a small town where they lived off a small annual income produced by the estate and additional money earned from Mrs. Merwin’s writing career. This was enough money to give Stella a strong education, but a far cry from what the family was used to during their good times. Mrs. Merwin blames the family’s financial difficulties on Wendell Truscott because she believes that he ruined her husband and, stole money from him, and took over his company.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deal_in_Wheat_and_Other_Stories_of_the_New_and_Old_West"title="A Deal in Wheat and Other Stories of the New and Old West">
## "A Deal in Wheat".The story "A Deal in Wheat" was first published as a serial in 1902 before being published posthumously as part of this collection the following year. It is a five part story about wheat speculation at the Chicago Board of Trade. As wheat prices fall in the midst of an economic feud between two influential speculators, the story's protagonist, a wheat farmer from Kansas, loses his farm. The book ends with the farmer relocating to Chicago, where he is denied free bread due to rising wheat prices. Influenced by naturalism, which the author contrasted with the realism. The latter he found to be too superficial, honing in on the "accuracy" of surface details, while naturalism he understood to dramatize the "truth" to expose the relations between people from different segments and classes underlying the everyday experiences of life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pot_of_Gold_and_Other_Stories"title="The Pot of Gold and Other Stories">
## "The Pot of Gold".“The Cow With Golden Horns” is a story of a farmer and his daughter Drusilla who have a cow with two gold horns. Drusilla and her father live in a small cottage, and Drusilla tends to the cow day and night so that they can sell her precious milk to those eager to buy it. One day, when Drusilla is watching the cow in the meadow, she dozes off and when she wakes the cow is nowhere to be found. Frantically looking for him, Drusilla crosses paths with the King and tells him her story. The king, who had been looking for a suitable daughter to marry to the Prince of Egypt, agrees to help find the cow if she will, in return, come be his daughter. Drusilla agrees to these terms so that her father won’t have to live alone without his cow, and the King promises her that if, within a years time, the cow isn’t found then she will be returned home to her father.Drusilla is taken to a seminary, learning to make many things for herself and the king and queen. As time passes and the cow isn’t found, rumors start spreading that the gold horned cow never existed, and Drusilla planned this scam to become a princess. In anger, the King sends Drusilla home to her father with nothing. As she arrives at home, the gold-horned cow appears in the meadow carrying baskets of jewels and gold. When the king hears of the cows return, he comes to the cottage to apologize to Drusilla and offers her the princess title once again. Although Drusilla declines the offer to stay with her father, the King and Queen remain very fond of them, build a new castle where their old cottage stood, and name Drusilla as a countess.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Breen's_Practice"title="Dr. Breen's Practice">
The story takes place in the late 19th century at Jocelyn's hotel on the beach outside of Newport, Rhode Island, and is told through the voice of a third person narrator. At the hotel croquet court we meet a sickly woman named Louise Maynard and her physician, Dr. Grace Breen. Breen is a graduate of the New York homeopathic school, who has become a doctor to make a difference and prove her worth as a woman. She is cool toward men because the love of her life ran off with her best friend.When Mr. Libby, an old friend of Mrs. Maynard's, asks her to go sailing, Dr. Breen insists it will be bad for her health but Mrs. Maynard to goes anyway. The weather takes a turn for the worst and the boat capsizes in the bitter waters. Mrs. Maynard blames Dr. Breen for allowing her to go out into the storm.After this incident, Mrs. Maynard's condition worsens and she trusts Dr. Breen even less than she did before. She requests a consultation from a male doctor, so Dr. Breen decides to contact Dr. Rufus Mulbridge, a local physician who practices mainstream, conventional medicine.Miss Gleason, another women staying at the hotel, insists that Dr. Breen is the best option for Mrs. Maynard, and that if she calls for a consultation from Dr. Mulbridge she will be making it harder for female physicians to act without a man's assistance. When Dr. Breen arrives at Dr. Mulbridge's office, the reader sees that while he has an established place of business, she works and lives at a hotel, and while he has many patients, she only treats one woman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_One_Person"title="In One Person">
"In One Person" is narrated by central character Billy, a bisexual novelist. Billy's story is told through multiple time periods and shows him initially as a teenager with crushes on the "wrong people," but also shows his coming of age.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_of_Scarlet_Leaves"title="Bridge of Scarlet Leaves">
"Bridge of Scarlet Leaves" follows the story of Maddie Kern, a nineteen-year-old violinist with dreams of Juilliard. She lives with her older brother and guardian, TJ, who aspires to become a baseball pitcher. Maddie has lived with TJ since the death of their mother sent their father into a mental hospital. However, TJ does not know that Maddie has a secret—she is dating his best friend, Lane Morimoto, the Japanese-American son of a bank executive. Against the wishes of Lane's family, who want him to marry a Japanese woman, the pair elope and marry. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, Lane and his family are seen as traitors and sent to camp. Maddie must choose between her husband's family and Juilliard. The series also follows TJ, as he becomes a prisoner of war, and Lane, who joins the U.S. Army to save his friend's life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia_(novel)"title="Hypatia (novel)">
The plot revolves around Hypatia the pagan philosopher; Cyril the Christian patriarch; Orestes the power-hungry prefect of Egypt; and Philammon an Egyptian monk. Philammon travels from his monastic community in the desert to Alexandria, and expresses a desire to attend Hypatia's lectures despite Cyril's dislike of Hypatia. Although Hypatia has a deep-seated hatred of Christianity, Philammon becomes her devoted friend and disciple. Philammon also encounters Pelagia, his long-lost sister, a former singer and dancer who is now married to a Gothic warrior. Philammon naturally desires to convert both women to Christianity. The plot is played out against the backdrop of Orestes' scheming to become emperor of Egypt and Africa; he uses Hypatia as a pawn. A subplot involves Raphael Aben-Ezra, a wealthy Jewish associate of Hypatia who falls in love with a Christian girl called Victoria and converts to win her love. A series of events, some of which are orchestrated by a Jewish woman called Miriam, raise tensions between the prefect and the church. Hypatia undergoes a spiritual crisis and comes close to being converted to Christianity by Raphael. Before this can happen, however, rumours are spread that Hypatia is the cause of unrest in the city and she is murdered by a Christian mob. Philammon, despondent, returns to the desert where he eventually becomes abbot of his monastery, albeit with a more worldly view of Christianity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob's_Ladder_(Keaney_novel)"title="Jacob's Ladder (Keaney novel)">
The story begins as the protagonist, Jacob awakes in a field with no memory of who he is. His only clue is his name, and the fact that his clothes are covered with brown stains. From here Jacob is led by a man called Virgil to a place called Locus. Locus initially resembles a school because of the number of children, but the children do not attend classes, and instead pick stones in the 'picking fields'. Here Jacob meets a girl named Aysha, and a boy called Toby, both of whom become his friends. After a series of visions, Jacob comes to the realisation that he has died, and Locus is the 'next world' to which he has been sent.Together Toby, Aysha and Jacob set out from Locus, taking a small amount of provisions with them. They walk for a day or so, eating some of their food before waking up to find that the rest had turned into ash. They came across a woman (Nemain) washing brown-stained clothes in a river they had drunk from. After lodging with the woman for a day, they fled when the woman complained about the stained clothes, saying: "How am I supposed to get all the blood off these clothes?". While they fled, they met a group of nomadic people, called the Dedanim. The Dedanim, who have strong biblical connotations (See: Dedan) invited Jacob and co. to stay with them. However, after a few nights, Jacob feels that he is losing sight of his goal, and leaves, followed by Aysha and Toby. At this moment they wake up to find that the Dedanim had disappeared and they were lying where they had been before. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railsea"title="Railsea">
Sham Yes ap Soorap is a young assistant doctor on a moletrain, captained by Abacat Naphi, that hunts giant moles for meat in a similar fashion to whaling. Naphi is especially obsessed with one mole named Mocker-Jack and after one encounter, they discover an abandoned train. Sham enters it, discovering a corpse and a camera buried in the ground. Sham and Naphi view the images and are shocked to see an image of a single rail leading off into the distance, an apparent impossibility as it is believed that the railsea is endless.As rumours spread of Sham's discovery, his investigations lead him to Caldera and Dero Shroake. They are the son and daughter of two explorers who ventured to the furthest reaches of the railsea before disappearing. Sham tells them of the content of the camera, and they resolve to retrace their parents steps aboard their own train. Sham returns to the moletrain. Before it departs, he is captured by pirates who demand that he provide them with instructions as to how to reach the Shroakes as they believe that there is treasure to be found beyond the railsea.After receiving a message from Sham, Naphi reluctantly abandons the chase for Mocker-Jack and sets out to find him. Sham convinces his former trainmates to assist the Shroakes, who are being sought by both pirates and the navy. They rescue them from their now almost incapacitated train and with a navy wartrain in close pursuit, venture out onto the lonely rail leaving the sea behind them. After a three way confrontation between the navy, Mocker-Jack and a robotic sentinel train that guards the exit of the railsea, the mole train escapes and Mocker-Jack falls into a chasm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Dos_Almas_del_Ser"title="Las Dos Almas del Ser">
A young Mexican man meets his best friends at the living room of his house. He didn't call them to have fun as they were used to, instead to reveal them a heart-rending secret, which has been hidden from them and their families and has completely changed his existence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Travels_of_Lao_Can"title="The Travels of Lao Can">
In the prologue Lao Can (T: 老殘, S: 老残; literally, "Old Decrepit"), a traveling medical practitioner, dreams of China being a sinking ship. After the dream ends, Lao Can goes on a journey to fix the problems experienced by China. In the story Lao Can attempts to correct injustices, change attitudes towards women, and engage in philosophical discussions about China's future. Lao Can also acts as a detective in several small crime-related plots.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurgent_(novel)"title="Insurgent (novel)">
After the events of "Divergent", Beatrice "Tris" Prior, Tobias "Four" Eaton, Caleb Prior, Peter Hayes, and Marcus Eaton seek refuge in the Amity sector. Tris overhears Marcus and Amity leader Johanna Reyes discuss the fact that the Abnegation leaders died to protect secret information. Erudite and the Dauntless traitors arrive to arrest the Divergents, but Tris flees with Four, Caleb, and Susan Black on a train to the Factionless sector. There, they meet Tobias' mother, Evelyn Johnson-Eaton, who tries to persuade her son to sway Dauntless into joining forces with the Factionless against Erudite.While Caleb and Susan return to Abnegation, Tris and Tobias head to Candor headquarters, where the other Dauntless now reside. Under truth serums, Tobias confides his reasons for transferring to Dauntless, and Tris reveals her killing of Will in self-defense, which strains her relationship with her friend Christina. That night, the Dauntless traitors, led by Eric, arrive and shoot simulation serums into their fellow Dauntless and knock everyone unconscious except the Divergents: Tris, Uriah Pedrad, and several others. As Eric begins executing the Divergents, Tris wounds him and allows the others to capture him as the remaining traitors flee. Their safety is revealed to be guaranteed by Erudite renegade and Will's sister, Cara.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paying_Guest"title="The Paying Guest">
Clarence and Emmeline Mumford are a middle-class couple, living in suburban Sutton on the outskirts of London with their two-year-old son. Reading the newspaper, they become aware of a young woman seeking a place as a "paying guest", or lodger. To supplement their income they respond to the advertisement and meet the prospective tenant, named Louise Derrick, who is in need of a place to live due to disagreements with her immediate family. Louise, who is poorly educated and bad-tempered, is being romantically pursued by two men: Mr Bowling, who is courting Louise's stepsister Cecily, and Tom Cobb.The Mumfords do not get on well with their "paying guest", and attempt to persuade her to leave. This does not happen, and a series of events further disrupts the Mumfords' lives, including a private meeting between Louise and Clarence Mumford, which makes Clarence's wife jealous. Louise briefly and half heartedly seems to encourage Bowling's wooing of her, now that his courtship of Cecily is over, but Cobb makes a surprise trip to the Mumfords' home to pursue Louise. Louise, tripping on a chair Cobb had knocked over during the confrontation, accidentally starts a fire in the drawing room of the property, injuring Louise, who is then confined to bed for several weeks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_and_Death_Are_Wearing_Me_Out"title="Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out">
The story's protagonist is Ximen Nao, a benevolent and noble landowner in Gaomi County, Shandong province. Although known for his kindness to peasants, Nao is targeted during Mao Zedong's land reform movement in 1948 and executed so that his land could be redistributed.Upon his death, Nao finds himself in the underworld, where Lord Yama tortures him in an attempt to elicit an admission of guilt. Nao retains that he is innocent, and as punishment, Lord Yama sends him back to earth where he is reborn as a donkey in his village on January 1, 1950. In subsequent reincarnations, he goes through life as a donkey, an ox, a pig, a dog, and a monkey, until finally being born again as a man. Through the lens of various animals, the protagonist experiences the political movements that swept China under Communist Party rule, including the Great Chinese Famine and Cultural Revolution, all the way through to New Year's Eve in 2000. The author, Mo Yan, uses self-reference and by the end of the novel introduces himself as one of the main characters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regiment_of_Women"title="Regiment of Women">
Set in a small town in Edwardian England, "Regiment of Women" is about the relationship between two teachers at a private (and elitist) girls' school. One of them, Clare Hartill, is in her mid-thirties and runs the school in all but name, the ageing and sickly headmistress depending on her whenever a decision has to be taken concerning the school or any of its pupils. Most of the girls are devoted to Hartill and gladly suffer under her strict but charismatic rule and the loads of homework she sets them, mainly to prove to her and to themselves that they are more academically advanced than she told them they were. Hartill lives alone near the school in a small, old-fashioned flat full of books but without gas or electricity.The other teacher is Alwynne Durand, an attractive nineteen-year-old woman without any formal training who lives with Elsbeth Loveday, her unmarried aunt and guardian. When Durand starts teaching at the school she is immediately popular with her students but also excites Hartill's attention — not just because the young mistress is as enthusiastic about teaching as herself, but also because Hartill is always on the lookout for companionship. The two women become close friends, and Durand spends more and more of her spare time in Hartill's flat, occasionally not returning to her aunt's for days. The couple also travel abroad together during the summer holidays. Although Loveday and Hartill hardly ever meet, a strange kind of antagonism develops between them, each woman fighting to spend more time than they do with Alwynne Durand and to be the dominant person in Alwynne's life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_of_Knockaloe"title="The Woman of Knockaloe">
Mona Craine and her brother react with nationalist pride when World War I is announced. In contrast, their father, Robert Craine, a tenant farmer at Knockaloe Farm, is concerned and dismayed at the bad that he fears will come of it.Mona and her father's lives are disrupted first by her brother being called up to fight in France, and then by the authorities agreeing with the owner of the farm to set up an internment camp for enemy aliens there at Knockaloe. Mona consents to live there still and supply food for "those Germans whose brothers are killing our boys in France", greatly against her wish and only for the sake of her ageing father.The erection of the camp's huts, concrete and wire on their fields only hardens her heart against the Germans. This is further entrenched when the internees begin to arrive, first the aloof privileged rich, followed by the rowdy sailors etc. When news of her brother's death at the front arrives, her father has a seizure and becomes bed-bound. Mona's hatred of the German's now reaches a new pitch:She hears of frequent rioting, rigorously put down, and then of an attempt at insurrection in the messroom of the First Compound, and of four prisoners being shot down by the guard. Serve them right! She has no pity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Di_Bawah_Lindungan_Ka'bah_(novel)"title="Di Bawah Lindungan Ka'bah (novel)">
Hamid is a young Muslim living in Sumatra. Two years after his father dies, the six-year-old Hamid and his mother move in with Haji Ja'far and his wife Asiah, members of the Minang nobility. There, Hamid finds a playmate in the couple's daughter Zainab. They are raised as brother and sister, and Ja'far pays for Hamid's education.By the time he becomes an adult, Hamid no longer accepts the traditional class system, instead viewing everyone as equals. He finds himself attracted to Zainab for her noble character; unbeknownst to him, Zainab also has feelings for him. After moving to Padang Panjang, Hamid becomes distanced from his adopted family. However, he continues to correspond with Zainab.After Ja'far's death, his extended family moves into the house. Hamid's mother dies soon after, warning her son that he would never be allowed to marry Zainab because of their different social statuses. Asiah later asks Hamid to convince Zainab to marry her cousin – traditional amongst the nobility – which he attempts. Thinking his efforts successful, yet heartbroken, Hamid makes his way to Mecca.A year later, during the hajj, he meets his friend Saleh and Saleh's wife Rosna, who tell him that Zainab has not married as she loves only Hamid. Hamid intends to return home to be with Zainab after his pilgrimage, but falls ill and dies soon after. Zainab, already ill, dies soon afterwards.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_River_(Rawlings_book)"title="The Secret River (Rawlings book)">
"The Secret River" is a story of Magical realism, blending real life and fantasy. Young Calpurnia is an aspiring poet living in rural Central Florida during the Great Depression. Hard times have come to her people; the animals have disappeared, her father is unable to catch fish to sell, and everyone in the community is too weak from hunger to work. Calpurnia bravely leaves home with her little dog, Buggy-Horse, to find the secret river that her neighbor Mother Albirtha has told her about. She intends to catch fish for her father to sell in his shop. When she finds the river she politely asks it to allow her to catch some fish and uses her creativity, and the pink ribbons from her hair, to catch them. On her way home, an owl, a bear and a panther each challenge her, and she has to give away some of her catch to get home. She also shares some fish with Mother Albirtha and takes the rest to her father, who gives them to the starving people in return for future payment. Strengthened by the fish, people begin working again. When the crisis is past Calpurnia searches for the river again, but cannot find it, as she no longer really needs it. Still, she realizes nothing is lost to us forever, and the book ends with one of her poems, expressing this sentiment:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifty_Shades_Freed"title="Fifty Shades Freed">
Anastasia 'Ana' Steele and Christian Grey return to Seattle after a long honeymoon. Christian is upset to find that Ana has kept her maiden name at work. After some resistance, Ana relents and changes her name at work to Grey after realizing how important it is to Christian. As a belated wedding gift, Christian gives Seattle Independent Publishing to Ana, and plans to rename it Grey Publishing.While Christian is on a business trip in New York, Anastasia goes out for a drink with longtime friend Kate Kavanagh, doing so against Christian's wishes. Returning home, she finds that her former boss, Jack Hyde, who was fired for attempting to sexually assault her, has been apprehended by the security staff. Duct tape is found in his pocket and in his van there are tranquilizers and a ransom note—all indications that he had intended to kidnap her. Jack is arrested. Angry with Ana for defying him, Christian cuts short his New York business trip and returns to Seattle. Furious that Ana reneged on her promise to have Kate over rather than go out, an upset Christian sulks while Ana sleeps. Eventually, the two argue and Ana berates him for being overly controlling and possessive. She demands more freedom and access to her friends. Christian finally relents after realizing how much Ana's friends mean to her and that Ana did the right thing by staying with Kate rather than at home. Soon after, Christian surprises her with a trip to Aspen, with Kate, Elliot, Mia, and Kate's brother, Ethan. While there, Elliot proposes to Kate, and she accepts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic_2020"title="Titanic 2020">
The novel in based in the year 2020 and follows a stowaway named Jimmy Armstrong and his journey on the brand new and purportedly "unsinkable" cruise ship "Titanic".Jimmys great-grandfather was on the original "RMS Titanic" and drowned when it sank. During a school trip Jimmy misses his chance to see the newly built "Titanic" and so decides to return later that night to take a look by himself. The ship leaves port at this point, making Jimmy an unwitting stow-away on the ship's maiden voyage from Belfast to Miami. Discovered by a crew member, Jimmy is brought before the Captain and, given their distance from shore, is ordered to work his passage on the ship's newspaper, the "Titanic Times". At the same time, an incurable disease is quickly spreading around the world resulting in widespread rioting and panic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Graves"title="Two Graves">
Pendergast's bloodlust continues as he chases those responsible for the abduction of Helen, who was revealed to have been alive and well for the past twelve years at the climax of "Cold Vengeance". But a new threat intrudes upon Pendergast's chase: a serial killer who holds New York City in the grip of terror.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamrock_Alley"title="Shamrock Alley">
Following an influx of counterfeit money, Secret Service agent John Mavio goes undercover with an Irish gang known as the West Side Boys in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen. Mavio's goal is to shut down the ring of organized crime and flush out the source of the counterfeit money, an operation that is perhaps the worst in history. The gang is led by two Irish thugs from Hell's Kitchen, Mickey O’Shay and Jimmy Kahn. These two violent criminals have been terrorizing the Upper West Side for years, and are involved in more than just a counterfeit operation—the local police have been investigating them for many years in connection with countless unsolved homicides. O'Shay and Kahn have inflicted gruesome deaths on numerous victims by bludgeoning, stabbing, shooting, and cutting into pieces the bodies of those who got in their way or refused to cooperate with their treacherous schemes. This brutality has even earned them some fear from the Mafia.Mavio's undercover role takes him deeper and deeper into the gruesome world of O'Shay, Kahn, and the rest of the West Side Boys. His life undercover is brutal and dangerous, and not only detrimental to his own well-being, but puts at risk the lives of Katie, his pregnant wife, and his dying father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whispers_Under_Ground"title="Whispers Under Ground">
Constables Peter Grant and Lesley May, and Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale form the magical branch of the Metropolitan Police. Grant is called in for a murder investigation at the Baker Street Underground station: the victim, American art student James Gallagher, was fatally stabbed with a pot shard.Grant visits James's art professor, and attends an exhibition of work by Irish sculptor Ryan Carroll. Peter realises some of the pieces incorporate pottery identical to the pot shard murder weapon and a bowl found at James's flat.Following this lead, Grant and Lesley discover a warehouse where similar pottery is taken and stored. It is owned by The Beale Corporation, which was historically the maker of 'unbreakable' pottery. Its founders were instrumental in excavating the tunnels that later became the heart of the London Underground railway.Grant and a team investigate in the railway tunnels, but they are attacked by pallid large-eyed individuals. They pursue them, eventually reaching an Underground platform, where ones of the individuals uses magic to tear the platform apart, burying Grant in the process.While Grant is recovering in hospital, Lesley tells him she has confirmed Beale, Gallagher and Carroll are all descendants of the founders of the Unbreakable Empire Pottery corporation. James' roommate Zach also visits and accidentally mentions that he knows a pallid large-eyed man. When questioned he reveals that a group known as the Quiet People has been living underground and making pottery for the Beale corporation since the mid-Victorian Era.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rites_of_the_Gods"title="Rites of the Gods">
Chapter one, "Avenues to Antiquity, Blind Alleys and Dead Ends", provides an introduction to the study of prehistoric religion, and the associated problems that come with it. Noting that archaeological evidence has to be supplemented with ethnographic comparisons, proto-historical literature and the study of later folklore, Burl highlights a number of prominent archaeological sites found in Britain that can be used to shed light on ancient religious beliefs, such as Skara Brae, Esh's Barrow and Windmill Hill.In the second chapter, entitled "The Birth of the Gods", Burl turns his attention to Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) and Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) Britain, the periods when the populace – both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens – lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Using evidence from across continental Europe to supplement the few finds from Britain, Burl notes that it was the period when humans began ritualistically burying their dead, citing examples like that of the Red Lady of Paviland, providing potential evidence for a belief in an afterlife. He furthermore argues that in this period, the people of Britain saw their landscape in an animistic sense, being inhabited by a multitude of spirits, and that there were various animal cults, in particular dedicated to fierce creatures such as the bear. Turning to look at examples of cave art from across Europe, he draws comparisons with the artworks of contemporary Indigenous Australians, believing that in Stone Age Europe they were used for "hunting magic".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macdonald_Hall_Goes_Hollywood"title="Macdonald Hall Goes Hollywood">
A movie production project from Hollywood moves to Macdonald Hall so they can use the school as a backdrop for their movie, "Academy Blues". Upon hearing that the director, Seth Dinkman, is willing to use students in crowd scenes, Bruno tries multiple times to ask the director to get into a crowd scene, but Dinkman rejects him due to Bruno's garishness. Desperate to get in the movie, Bruno tries multiple times to disguise himself so he could sneak in, but Dinkman complains to Mr. Sturgeon, who as a result, punishes Bruno by forbidding him to be involved in the movie.Bruno begins developing contempt for the teenage star of the movie, Jordie Jones, especially because the girls at Miss Scrimmage's Finishing School go crazy about him. Angrily, he decides to play a prank on Jordie by hiding fireworks around the trailer that he sleeps in and setting them off on his birthday to scare him. Upon setting up the plan, they discover that Jordie is actually crying because he was lonely, and nobody remembered it was his birthday. Feeling sorry for him, Bruno cancels the fireworks prank and decide to throw him a birthday party the next night, while Boots sleeps in Jordie's trailer to fool security.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrow_Boat_(book)"title="Narrow Boat (book)">
"Part One" is a general introduction to the English Canal system. He points out at the outset that "most people today know no more of the canals than they do of the old green roads which the pack-horse trains once travelled." If this is no longer true, it is largely thanks to this book. It has an account of converting the wooden narrowboat "Cressy" for liveaboard use at Tooley's Boatyard in Banbury. He paid particular attention to the traditional narrowboat decorations of Roses and Castles and the installation of a short bath, unusual even now on narrowboats.In "Part Two" 'on an afternoon of the last week in July' [1939] Tom and Angela set out up the Oxford Canal and into a different world of contours and canal pubs where boat captains with gold rings in their ears play games apart from their wives. They follow the Grand Union Canal to Market Harborough (alas no market) and north through Leicester to the Trent and Shardlow, where the scene in the Canal Tavern 'would have delighted Hogarth or Rabelais'.They make their way up the still busy Trent and Mersey Canal through the Potteries before emerging into the rural landscape of Church Minshull where they stay and enjoy the unspoilt English countryside.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loner_(Jardine_novel)"title="The Loner (Jardine novel)">
The book is presented as a manuscript written by Aislado, which he has passed on to Jardine for him to ghost write.Born in the early 1960s of Scottish and Catalan heritage (his mother is Scottish and his father Spanish), Xavi is raised in Edinburgh by his father Josip (Joe), and Joe's formidable mother, Paloma Puig, who were forced to leave Catalonia when Spain was gripped by the Civil War that saw General Franco's Fascists emerge as the ruling force. Paloma's grim brand of care sees Xavi into his teenage years, but after democracy is restored to Spain Paloma and Joe decide to return to that country, settling near Girona, and leaving Xavi in Scotland to complete his education. As a consequence, he is required to grow up fast.After attending George Watson's College Xavi studies at Heriot-Watt University, while in Spain Joe Aislado buys a failing Catalan newspaper, "Girona Dia" and begins to improve its fortunes. Xavi embarks on a career as a professional footballer with Heart of Midlothian, where he is nicknamed 'Big Iceland' because of his 6 ft 7in frame, but after being introduced to journalism on a visit to his father's newspaper while holidaying in Spain, his ambition is to become a reporter. When his football career is abruptly ended by injury, Xavi is able to concentrate his efforts on his journalistic career, and following his graduation he secures a job with "The Saltire", a failing nationalist broadsheet. He is given a bloody introduction to the trade when his first assignment exposes a drug-dealing racket at a local school. A number of exclusives follow as Xavi cuts his teeth, and he quickly establishes himself as one of Scotland's leading reporters, helping to increase "The Saltire's" circulation in the process.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riddle_of_the_Seventh_Stone"title="Riddle of the Seventh Stone">
Set in a herb shop on a bustling road in Bangalore, this book is about a spider and rat magically turning into human children. As children with help from their vermin friends the duo gang up with the grandchildren of the herb shop owner to save it from a land shark. In the course of their adventures they come across an ancient riddle, solving which leads them to the treasure of Kempegowda, an ancient king who founded Bangalore. The vermin's transformation to humans in nature and thinking, and their improving in the face of adversity is an underlying theme of the book.Many places described in the book are in the old parts of Bangalore dating back to the times of the city's founding. The City Market, Avenue Road, Bangalore Fort and Kote Venkataramana Temple are real places.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TekWar_(novel)"title="TekWar (novel)">
"TekWar" is set in the 22nd century and follows Jake Cardigan, a former police officer who is framed for dealing "tek", an illegal, mind-altering, digital drug. Sentenced to fifteen years' cryo-imprisonment, he is released after serving only four. Jake goes to work for Walt Bascom, the man behind his early release, and dedicates himself to hunting the real tek lords.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Hate"title="The New Hate">
Goldwag covers conspiracy theories espoused by various groups and traces their shared historical precedents. Theorists covered in the book include the birthers, the Birchers, and conservative talk radio hosts and politicians.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_Fire_(novel)"title="Cross Fire (novel)">
Psychotic former FBI agent and serial killer Kyle Craig, who escaped from ADX Florence Supermax Prison in "Double Cross", awaits FBI agent Max Siegel. After questioning him, he reveals he plans to get plastic surgery and thus become Max Siegel by gaining his physical features; he then kills Siegel. Meanwhile, back in Washington, D.C., psychologist and Metro police detective Alex Cross has proposed to his girlfriend, Brianna 'Bree' Stone, and the two are currently planning their wedding. However, Alex is called in to a sniper case. At the crime scene, two infamous people (known to be political) are murdered. Alex instantly recognizes it as a sniper when all others are oblivious to this at first – that is, until agent Max Siegel/Kyle Craig comes and meets Cross, who is instantly annoyed by – and dislikes – Siegel. Craig wants Alex dead for sending him to prison years earlier. Meanwhile, Alex's best and closest friend, John Sampson, asks for Alex's assistance in a series of murders with numbers on the victims' faces.Mitch and Denny, the murderers in the sniper case, strike again. Unknown to Mitch, they work for a rich man, who will pay Denny and Mitch. The two alternate between living in a suburban and a homeless shelter. After two other sniper murders, Alex figures out the killers use a white suburban and starts a search on it. Kyle Craig/Max Siegel has sex with a hooker and kills her; he later murders a woman from the FBI that Alex knew from the DCAK case (in "Double Cross") and deposits her body with random murders, falsely implying he is the number-serial-killer. Denny and Mitch later steal a computer from two teenagers, and write a message via email to the Washington newspaper. The newspaper company soon learns of and reads it, but the cops come to investigate. Cross questions the chief in staff, reads the e-mail, and later learns of the murderers' names from the woman/head in staff. Meanwhile, Mitch and Denny visit Mitch's ex-wife, who does not let see their child/daughter see their father. Mitch gives her a thousand dollars to make up for child care. They then go visit Mitch's mother; her husband (Mitch's father) died two years ago, at which time Mitch left. The two eat dinner at Mitch's mother's house and flee. However, before leaving, Denny kills Mitch's mother, unbeknownst to Mitch.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matters_of_Discretion"title="Matters of Discretion">
It deals with Gujral's life starting with partition and his moving to India and provides an exposition of his public life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Be_an_American_Housewife"title="How to Be an American Housewife">
The book tells the story of Shoko Morgan, a mother of two and wife to American GI Charlie. Shoko decided to contact her brother Taro, whom she last saw when she married Charlie at the end of World War II. However, she is too ill to return her country. Shoko asked her daughter Sue and granddaughter to go to Japan to find her uncle to discover her mother's life secret.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_of_the_Vourdalak"title="The Family of the Vourdalak">
Marquis d'Urfé, a young French diplomat, finds himself in a small Serbian village, in the house of an old peasant named Gorcha. The host is absent: he left the house ten days ago along with some other men to hunt for a Turk outlaw, Alibek. Upon leaving he told his sons, Georges and Pierre, that they should wait for him for ten days sharp and, should he come a minute later, kill him by driving a stake through his heart for then he’d be not a man but a vourdalak (vampire).The day Marquis comes to the village is the tenth day of Gorcha's absence. The family awaits the hour with growing anxiety and there he is, appearing on the road at 8 o'clock in the evening, exactly on the time he left ten days ago. His sons are uncertain as to how this strange precision should be interpreted. Georges suspects his father became a vourdalak, Pierre insists otherwise. Then Georges' son dies inexplicably. The French diplomat has to leave the house and continue his travel.Half a year later on his way back from his mission, d'Urfé returns to the village only to find it abandoned. Coming to the familiar house he stays for the night, being allured by Sdenka, Gorcha's daughter he fell for during his first visit, who appears to dwell in the empty house. The moment comes when the Frenchman realizes he's fallen under the charms of a vampire. He makes an attempt to leave, comes under a massive attack of vourdalaks, all of the Gorcha family among them, and makes a miraculous escape, having to thank his own good luck and the agility of his horse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOS_Adventures"title="SOS Adventures">
Michael Monroe, a teenage orphan boy, accidentally burns down his boarding school, St Mark's Retreat, by setting a fire in one of the many disused fireplaces. As a result, he is expelled from his sixth school in as many years and leaves on the bus the next morning, to be handed over to the local education authority. During this journey, however, the driver loses control of the bus and drives into an icy lake. Monroe then proceeds, along with the head boy Vincent Armoury, to save the lives of the school's debate team, who were on their way to a competition, before they all drown. When Armoury is hit in the head during the operation, Monroe pulls him from the water, administers the kiss of life and passes out. Monroe's heroic effort in the rescue of twelve children results in him coming to the attention of Doctor Jimmy Kincaid, millionaire owner of a team named "SOS", which engages in risky rescue operations on a worldwide scale.Monroe's first mission is to search for the missing "Eden" satellite, which had been measuring greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere. Deployment for the mission doesn't go to plan and Monroe ends up stranded in the Canadian Rockies with fellow teen-aged "SOS" member, Katya, who somewhat resents his presence on the mission. While trying to succeed where the adults have failed, the teenagers run into armed men, wolves and a twice-the-usual-size polar bear.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Song_of_Achilles"title="The Song of Achilles">
The book is narrated by Patroclus, the son of King Menoetius. He is presented as a potential suitor to Helen of Troy. He is then obliged to take a blood oath in defense of her marriage to Menelaus. After Patroclus accidentally kills the son of one of his father's nobles, he is exiled to Phthia where he meets Achilles, the son of Phthia's king Peleus and the sea nymph Thetis. They become close friends and Patroclus develops feelings for Achilles. Convinced that a mortal of low status is an unsuitable companion for her son, Thetis attempts to separate the pair by sending Achilles to train under Chiron for two years, though Patroclus ultimately joins Achilles in his training. As their relationship grows, the Mycenaean king Agamemnon calls on the various Achaeans to join his military campaign against Troy, whose prince Paris has kidnapped his brother Menelaus' wife Helen. As a prophecy foretells that Achilles will die in Troy after the death of the Trojan prince Hector, Thetis hides Achilles on Skyros in the guise of a woman in the court of King Lycomedes; she forces him to marry Lycomedes' daughter Deidamia, who later bears Achilles' son Neoptolemus.Patroclus follows Achilles to Skyros, where they live until they are discovered by Odysseus and Diomedes. Patroclus is obligated to join the war in Troy as a result of his blood oath, while Achilles joins after vowing that he will never fight Hector in order to avoid his prophesied death. Upon joining the Achaean forces, tensions escalate between Achilles and Agamemnon: first when Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia in order to appease Artemis, and later when Achilles takes the Trojan woman Briseis as a war prize to save her from Agamemnon. After nine years, Chryseis is claimed by Agamemnon. Soon after her father Chryses tries to pay for her release which Agamemnon refuses. Chryses appeals to Apollo, who unleashes a plague that decimates the Achaeans; when Agamemnon refuses Achilles' demand to return Chryseis, he doubles down by blaming Achilles for the war's length, by his unwillingness to face and kill Hector. As punishment, he orders that Briseis be taken from Achilles and brought to him, which offends Achilles, who vows to remove himself and his army from the fight until this slight at his honor is repaired.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_(novel)"title="Chicago (novel)">
The novel is about a group of Egyptians who are doing their postgraduate studies in University of Illinois at Chicago, they face many obstacles during their stay in Chicago. The Students are completely controlled by their colleague who is leading the Students' Union Of Egyptians in United States, He is the Secretary General of the Youth Committee of the ruling party in Egypt and he is cooperating with the Egyptian Intelligence Agency to make sure of the loyalty of the students and to transfer information about immigrant Copts.The Novel shows the racism in Chicago, the conflict between the Arab and Western culture after 9/11 and the corruption in the Egyptian regime.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bourne_Imperative"title="The Bourne Imperative">
The man Jason Bourne fished out of the freezing sea is near death, half-drowned and bleeding profusely from a gunshot wound. He awakens with no memory of who he is or why he was shot-and Bourne is eerily reminded of his own amnesia. Then Bourne discovers that the Mossad agent named Rebeka is so determined to find this injured man that she has gone off the grid, cut her ties to her agency, and is now being stalked by Mossad's most feared killer. Do the answers to these mysteries lie back in southeast Lebanon, in a secret encampment to which Bourne and Rebeka escaped following a firefight weeks ago? The complex trail links to the mission given to Treadstone directors Peter Marks and Soraya Moore: find the semi-mythic terrorist assassin known as Nicodemo. In the course of Bourne's desperate, deadly search for a secret that will alter the future of the entire world, he will experience both triumph and loss, and his life will never be the same. Now everything turns on the amnesiac. Bourne must learn his identity and purpose before both he and Rebeka are killed. From Stockholm to Washington, D.C., from Mexico City to Beijing, the web of lies and betrayals extends into a worldwide conspiracy of monumental proportions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wings_Has_My_Angel"title="Black Wings Has My Angel">
It is narrated in the first person by escaped convict "Tim Sunblade", who had been convicted of car theft. He is staying at a backwoods Louisiana motel after finishing up a four month stint working on a drilling rig on the Atchafalaya River, when he meets "Virginia", a call girl whom he hires for a night. After spending several days in the motel together, they head out West, with Tim thinking of when and how he is going to ditch her. Circumstances lead the couple, after trying to get away from each other, back together. The two duke it out to get Tim's money, which they have sewn into the panels of a pink girdle.They settle into a love/hate relationship when Tim realizes that she might be the perfect person to help him pull off a heist. "The novel unfolds from here as the sort of love story in which either lover might turn in or murder the other at any moment until its last desperate pages." The two wind up in Colorado, where Tim discovers a part of Virginia's past and what she is running from in fleeing New York. He lets her in on his plans and they plot to rob an armored truck.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sizzling_Sixteen"title="Sizzling Sixteen">
Stephanie's boss, her cousin Vinnie, has been abducted by his bookie, who demands that Vinnie pay back his gambling losses (more than a million dollars) in five days, or he's dead. Stephanie, Connie Rosoli and Lula must combine forces to rescue Vinnie and raise the money, especially after the bookie reveals that he and Vinnie are both in debt to someone much more powerful and much scarier.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Revelations"title="The Ultimate Revelations">
The story is set sometimes in the twenty-first century. An expanding shell of low energy from the sun's core, moving towards its surface for the last million years, breaks through its outer envelope. The shell is thin, and the slight decrease in the solar output is not expected to last long. Still, the event has tremendous potential of menace. Even this tiny solar hiccup has the capability to push the planet again towards a cold grave, from which it had painfully emerged just twelve thousand years ago.Concurrent with this freak solar activity, a young scientist begins having strange and puzzling dreams of momentous events from the past. He sees an event in the formation of solar event, a day in the Cretaceous period, Noah's Ark being constructed, Buddha's sermon to a large multitude, Moses climbing the mountain to keep tryst with the mysterious fire, child Mary's guardianship being decided in the temple, and an episode in Mohammed's life. The mystic night visions leave the young man perturbed and intrigued, but also prod him to study and collect data on meta-physical aspect of life.Meanwhile, falling temperatures all over the world herald the onset of an ice age. The planet in its fight for survival, tries to distribute the heat stored in oceans all over the land. Tornadoes, squalls and high velocity winds sweep the planet and add to the misery of the humanity already suffering from the energy crunch. It is at this crucial juncture that the young man receives an inspiration, and presents before the world a hypothesis about a 'Grand Cosmic Design'...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_g"title="Mr g">
"Mr g" features a fictional depiction of God as he forms Creation and tries to deal with his Aunt Penelope and Uncle Deva, who live in the Void. The book depicts God ("Mr g") as a being that is omnipotent but not omniscient, as the universe is created through "trial and error". Mr g is further bothered by his rival Belhor, who constantly challenges him to explain everything and to exempt humanity from rational laws.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenggelamnya_Kapal_van_der_Wijck"title="Tenggelamnya Kapal van der Wijck">
Zainuddin is an orphan. His Minang father died in exile after killing a relative over inheritance; his non-Minang mother has also died. He is now living with his father's friend Mak Base in Batipuh, Sumatra. As a person of mixed descent, he faces much discrimination from Minang conservatives. Although he loves Hayati, the daughter of local nobleman, he is not allowed to be with her. He decides to move to Padang Panjang, although he continues to write to Hayati.One day, Hayati goes to Padang Panjang to see Zainuddin and stays with her friend Khadijah. However, Khadijah's elder brother Aziz falls in love with Hayati, leading to Zainuddin and Aziz to compete for Hayati's affections. Aziz, who is of purely Minang descent and a noble background, is favoured by her family; they look down on Zainuddin, who is poor and of mixed heritage. Although Zainuddin receives a sizeable inheritance from Mak Base, he is too late to inform Hayati's family, and Aziz marries her.In despair, Zainuddin and his friend Muluk go to Java, first to Batavia and then to Surabaya, where Zainuddin becomes known as a writer and philanthropist. Aziz and Hayati also move to Surabaya, after Aziz is transferred. However, their relationship has soured and Aziz's temper leads to him being fired, leaving the couple homeless. After a period living with Zainuddin, Aziz runs away to Banyuwangi, leaving Hayati for Zainuddin; in a letter, Aziz writes that Zainuddin is more deserving.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Druid_Chronicles"title="The Iron Druid Chronicles">
The series is set in our world—the first two books are set in Tempe, Arizona—where supernatural creatures exist. These include witches, vampires, werewolves, demons, elementals, as well as various deities from many mythologies. The entire series is told in the first-person point of view. In the beginning, the narrative is described exclusively by ancient druid Atticus O'Sullivan (aka. Siodhachan O Suileabhain), owner of the occult bookshop "Third Eye Books and Herbs", as he becomes embroiled in the day-to-day struggle of gods, goddesses, and other supernatural creatures.Granuaile and Owen Kennedy (arch druid to Atticus) narrate later chapters after they become a larger part of the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hounded_(novel)"title="Hounded (novel)">
"Hounded" introduces the character of Atticus O'Sullivan and his world, a secret history where magic, vampires, werewolves, gods, and other supernatural elements exist (albeit in hiding). O'Sullivan, the last Druid and proprietor of Third Eye Books and Herbs occult shop, comes into contact with many of the supernatural characters of his home city of Tempe, Arizona. He draws his power from the earth, possesses a sharp wit, and wields an even sharper magical sword known as Fragarach, the Answerer.And for "Hounded" (book one), this particular sword sets off a series of godly events. The novel blends elements of mythology and urban fantasy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexed_(novel)"title="Hexed (novel)">
"Hexed" features the continuing adventures of Atticus O'Sullivan, last of the Druids. In his world, an alternate history where magic, vampires, werewolves, Gods and other supernatural elements exist (albeit in hiding) O'Sullivan is often called upon to quell magical misunderstandings. In the aftermath of his defeat of the Celtic god of love, O'Sullivan has taken up a Druid initiate and hopes that life with his dog Oberon can return to some normalcy. Still wielding the magic sword known as Fragarach, the Answerer, O'Sullivan soon discovers that the notoriety that comes with dispatching a deity often does more harm than good. With two Celtic goddesses vying for his affections and allegiance, as well as two covens of witches hell bent on destroying each other O' Sullivan will need more than a magic sword and a quick wit to fend off evil.The novel blends elements of mythology and urban fantasy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Through_the_Woods_(novel)"title="The Way Through the Woods (novel)">
For thousands of years, the inhabitants of Foxton have avoided Swallow Woods, but approximately every fifty years a number of people go into the woods and never come out. The Doctor realises this is the result of a spatial distortion caused by a crashed spaceship and discovers that a week after the last disappearances the entire area will be destroyed and replaced with a lake. He has Rory befriend Emily Bostock shortly before she disappeared in 1917 so he can accompany her into the woods. He and Amy will then follow one of three young women who were the last to disappear, approximately a hundred years later, and both groups will activate a homing device on finding the ship so they can get a bearing on its position. Unfortunately, when Rory and Emily enter the woods and are taken aboard the spaceship, Rory loses his memory and forgets to activate the device. Furthermore, Detective Inspector Gordon Galloway, who is investigating the disappearances of Laura Brown and Vicky Caine, becomes suspicious of the Doctor's behaviour and arrests him. With no other option, Amy elects to accompany the third woman, Jess Ashcroft, into the woods.Amy and Jess find Vicky alone in a clearing which they keep being led back to whichever way they go. A humanoid fox appears and Amy chooses to follow him, which allows Amy and Vicky to head in the opposite direction and emerge from the woods. They are unable to convince Galloway of the Doctor's innocence and he insists on organising a search of the woods for Laura. Galloway's partner DC Ruby Porter, whose uncle was the only person to disappear in the 1960s, releases the Doctor without authorisation and he realises the ship's pilot is still in the woods. The fox, Reyn, takes Amy to an artificial environment resembling a fairy tale castle where they meet Laura, now an elderly woman having lived there with Reyn for over sixty years. Reyn reveals his ship has been drawing people to it to try and recharge themselves and he has been trying to lure them to this realm to save them. If the ship departs now, when it has become interwoven with its surroundings, it will cause the destruction of the area.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_(Shimazaki_novel)"title="The Family (Shimazaki novel)">
"The Family" covers a period of twelve years in the lives of the Koizumi and the Hashimoto families, from 1898 to 1910. (These two families are based on the real-life families of Shimazaki and Takase: one was Tōson's own family and the other the family into which his eldest sister married.) Originally well respected, the families find themselves slipping down the social ladder as their eldest sons, Koizumi Minoru and Hashimoyo Tatsuo, take on disastrous financial projects. The character Sankichi is the youngest son of the Koizumi family, a writer, and an "alter ego" for the author himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Relentless"title="Conan the Relentless">
After the events of "The Lair of the Ice Worm", Conan enters the Border Kingdom. Encountering a group of bandits, he learns that the guards of a caravan they plan to raid are led by Raihna, a female adventurer he had previously encountered in "Conan the Valiant". This news leads him to abandon his inclination in joining the bandits and come to the aid of Raihna, instead. Afterwards, the duo enter the service of Eloikis, theoretical king over the restive and semi-independent lords of the country, who needs their aid against a powerful count and two demon-controlling wizards. The story follows their adventures as Eloikis' troubleshooters, which ultimately concludes with their rescue of both his daughter and grandson. But their partnership dissolves when Rhiana decides to marry one of the king's guards, and Conan resumes his wanderings, heading south.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indomitable_Will"title="Indomitable Will">
"Indomitable Will" is a compilation of original interviews, personal accounts and recollections of individuals who knew, worked with and for President Lyndon Johnson during his five years as President of the United States. Sources include the Reverend Billy Graham, Carl Bernstein, Liz Carpenter, George H. W. Bush, Walter Mondale, Harry J. Middleton, Rose Kennedy, Gerald R. Ford, Helen Thomas, Ted Kennedy, and Bill Moyers, who served as White House Press Secretary in the Johnson Administration.The book focuses on the extensive legislation passed during Johnson’s Presidency and includes photographs, transcripts from his telephone conversations, and previously unpublished documents.The author is a Presidential historian who has written two additional non-fiction works based on the lives of American Presidents: "Baptism by Fire: Eight Presidents Who Took Office in Times of Crisis" (2009), and "Second Acts: Presidential Lives and Legacies After the White House" (2006).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chosen_One_(novel)"title="The Chosen One (novel)">
Kyra Carlson is a thirteen-year-old girl who has grown up in an isolated community. She has always ignored the fact that her father has three wives, and that she has twenty siblings, and two more on the way. The people of the community follow the rules and commands of The Prophet, believing that he is the son of God Himself. However, Kyra has many secrets that she has hidden from her family; she secretly reads books that she borrows from a mobile library (even though reading is forbidden) and she has been secretly romancing with a boy named Joshua (even though a man is supposed to be chosen for her). One day, while The Prophet is eating dinner with the Carlson family, he announces that Kyra shall marry her sixty-year-old Uncle Hyrum, who already has six wives. Kyra rebels, as she is in love with Joshua, but her family is unable to help her. When the two young lovers plead with The Prophet, he has them both whipped and abused. Kyra then enlists the help of Patrick, the owner of the mobile library. Patrick tries to help her escape from the community, but he is shot and killed, while Kyra is dragged back and abused once more. Since The Prophet had ordered for Joshua to be banished from the community and left to die (since he is a "culprit"), Joshua escapes the community with two other boys after telling Kyra that he will come looking for her later. In her demise, Kyra tries to escape once more and has almost gotten away when she notices the sheriff chasing her. She calls the police and help arrives. Kyra is sent to live with a mother and daughter that reside somewhere outside the community. The book ends with Kyra missing her family, and hoping that she will soon reunite with Joshua...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackout_(Grant_novel)"title="Blackout (Grant novel)">
"Blackout" is set several decades after the zombie apocalypse, the Rising. Kellis-Amberlee is a normally beneficial virus that, on the death of any host mammal over , "goes live" or "amplifies", and turns them into a zombie. Most humans reside in controlled zones, and blogs are now the primary source of news and entertainment. The novel is written from the perspectives of Georgia and Shaun Mason, siblings and blogger-reporters. Over the preceding books, they, along with their colleagues at the After The End Times website, have uncovered a widespread conspiracy. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the agency responding to the zombie virus and responsible for public health and safety, is actually creating new substrains (culminating in a mosquito-transmitted variant released at the end of "Deadline"), killing off those developing immune responses (including Georgia, who was assassinated during the events of "Feed"), and frustrating research into a cure.Shaun Mason, having discovered his immunity to the virus, is helping with Dr. Abbey's zombie research while hiding out from the CDC with the rest of the After the End Times team: Rebecca Atherton, Mahir Gowda, Maggie Garcia, and Alaric Kwong. Dr. Abbey tasks Shaun and Rebecca with travelling to zombie-infested Florida and recovering live mosquitoes for study, but when they head back to Berkeley, California to meet with Shaun's adoptive parents, they are lured into a trap and barely escape the CDC. Disheartened, Shaun and Rebecca head north to Seattle, where Maggie and Mahir have contacted the identity forger, the Monkey. He agrees to help them disappear with new identities if they help steal information from the Seattle CDC facility. The team, minus Maggie, breaks in and set up a remote-access Wi-Fi hotspot, but their escape is hampered by a security alert.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasta_La_Vista_(novel)"title="Hasta La Vista (novel)">
The novel tells two interwoven, non-separated stories. The first revolves mainly around the Albanian members of the International Brigades, the horrors of war that they experience and also their personalities and personal philosophies. Among the characters are some notable Albanian figures like Skënder Luarasi, Asim Vokshi, Mehmet Shehu, and Petro Marko himself. During the events of the war some of the participants unable to cope with the horrors desert their battalions. In the novel the flaws of the characters such as their deserter tendencies are not hidden, for which the author was praised for.The second story is the love between Gori, a handsome Albanian soldier in his twenties with curly hair, and Anita, a beautiful Spanish nurse who tends to the wounded soldiers. They meet and fall in love in a hellish improvised hospital, which the author describes as always being in turmoil and very noisy, after Gori is wounded in battle and Anita tends to his wounds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mobile_Wave"title="The Mobile Wave">
Chapter 1 - The Wave: The Shape of the Wave lays the foundation for some of the themes that occur throughout the book. These include the universal nature of mobile devices, and how mobile and cloud computing technologies will continue to disrupt established industries and the old ways of doing business. This chapter also introduces the ongoing Information Revolution as the third great revolution to transform society, after the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions.Chapter 2 - Computers: The Evolution to Mobile Computing discusses the four great waves of computing described by technologists as leading to the fifth mobile wave: the mainframe, the minicomputer, the personal computer and the Internet PC. Saylor writes that a critical turning point unleashing the mobile wave was triggered by Apple, with the introduction of the affordable iPhone and its App Store, multi-touch capabilities and built-in GPS.Chapter 3 - Paper: The Demise of Paper covers a short history of media delivery systems, ranging from the first clay tablets around 3000 B.C., up to the highly disruptive electronic content transforming the print industry. The chapter also discusses the benefits of electronic publishing, from distribution efficiencies that save money and protect the environment, to display format flexibility making the content more appealing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Life"title="This Is Life">
Set in contemporary Paris it tells the story of several interlinked characters, amongst them are:-Aurélie Renard - studying art at a Paris college, she throws a small stone to initiate her art project, planning to follow whoever it hits over the course of a week and make them the subject of a series of artworks. The stone hits a small baby on the forehead; the mother threatens to call the police but on hearing of Aurélie's project agrees to let her look after the baby, named Herbert, and have him returned to her a week later...Sylvie Dupont - Aurélie's best friend, she is looking for a husband; to aid her in her task she has taken a different job each day in order to meet as many as possible having read that the most common way to meet a life partner is in the workplace. One such job is driving tourists around Paris in a 2CV.Lucien - like Sylvie, he is also looking for a life partner; he only has eyes for Japanese girls though and hence has learnt the language and is acting as a translator for Japanese tourists.The Akiyamas are a Japanese couple on holiday in Paris leaving their grown up son and daughter, Toshiro and Akiko home in Japan. They have booked an afternoon with Sylvie in the 2CV with their translator Lucien.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_of_Violence"title="Cycle of Violence">
The mononymous Miller works for a Belfast newspaper named the "Post", riding his bicycle nicknamed the "Cycle of Violence" from case to case. Shortly after the death of his father, he offends his boss Frank Galvin, duty editor, in a drunken outburst that leaves him curled up in the foetal position in the middle of his office. As a punishment, he is sent to the fictional town of Crossmaheart, home of the "Post"s sister paper, the "Chronicle", as one of their reporters, Jamie Milburn, has gone missing. Miller arrives in the town and gets sexually involved with Marie Young, girlfriend of the missing Milburn. Marie suffered a sexual assault as a child and Miller, in an effort to help Marie deal with her persisting trauma, seeks out her attackers. Shortly after Miller speaks with each of the three parties; Reverend Michael Rainey, IRA member Tyrone Blair, and Tom Callaghan who is now blind and the only one of the three to show any remorse; they are each killed. Miller, now with a reputation as the "Angel of Death", attempts to solve the disappearance of Milburn while avoiding the police chasing him for these murders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_String_in_the_Harp"title="A String in the Harp">
The novel is about the American Morgan family and their experiences in Wales. The Morgan family originally settled in Wales at the behest of Mrs. Morgan, who wanted to relocate from Boston. Mrs. Morgan passes away before the start of the novel, leaving her family in Wales. The novel opens a year after her death as the older daughter Jen is flying from America to Wales to join her family for Christmas.Mr. Morgan has taken a temporary teaching position at the University of Aberystwyth and with the two younger children is living in a nearby seaside village. Jen is dismayed to find their home cold and uncomfortable, her brother and sister unhappy, and their father ignoring them. She eventually convinces her father to let her remain with the family in Wales instead of finishing high school in America. To supplement the lack of a traditional education, her father gives her challenging reading assignments.Peter Morgan, who dislikes living in Wales, becomes fascinated by a mysterious object that he found by the shore. He finds out that it is a harp-tuning key that once belonged to the Celtic bard Taliesin. The key has a subtle magical power that enables Peter to see visions of Taliesin's life. Soon it is not only Peter who is seeing visions, and the whole family witnesses an ancient battle on Borth Bog, although they do not realize what is happening. A she-wolf is caught in a hunt, despite their being extinct in Wales.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers_in_the_Dawn"title="Workers in the Dawn">
Arthur Golding grows up in poverty in London, and is orphaned at the age of eight. With the help of others, he succeeds in leaving this life behind, gains an education and embarks on a career as an artist. He also meets and marries Helen Norman. Arthur later meets a prostitute named Carrie Mitchell and marries her. This second marriage is an unhappy one, with Carrie and Arthur eventually separating due to her drunkenness and unsavoury associations.After inheriting some money from Helen Norman's father, Arthur attempts to renew his marriage to Helen, although this does not last long when Helen finds out about Arthur's marriage to Carrie. Arthur is driven to commit suicide by jumping over Niagara Falls.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_(novel)"title="Marie (novel)">
The plot begins in Cradock, a District of Cape Colony, a wild place with a handful of white settlers. Fifteen miles from the Mission station where Allan and his father who is a church of England clergyman live, there resides a Boer called Henry Marais, who has a young daughter named Marie.Allan and Marie meet when they are given a tutor called Monsieur Leblanc who teaches them French language and other subjects. What starts as a childhood friendship slowly grows into a fully fledged love and deep affection, much to the chagrin of Marie's father who tries everything within his power to separate them.One day, monsieur Leblanc goes to one of his Sunday riding expeditions. Being intoxicated with his Peach brandy, and after sleeping, he wakes up to find his horse missing. Thinking it stolen, he sets out to look for it when he by chance comes across two red Kaffirs leading it away though looking for its owner to restore it back to him. On sighting them, he shoots the eldest son of the chief and he drops dead. When he fires again, he injures the other son on the thigh but he manages to run away to tell the tale.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_the_Animals"title="We the Animals">
The young, unnamed narrator, a boy, grows up in a tight-knit family with two older brothers, Manny and Joel. His parents, who were teenagers when the boys were conceived and they married, have an abusive unhappy marriage but still feel love for each other.In a series of vignettes, the narrator describes how his parents struggle to keep the family afloat and how his father, and eventually his brothers, are abusive towards his mother who is deeply unhappy and longs for a better life.As the narrator grows up, he senses a difference between himself and his brothers, which is partially caused by his love of literature and partially caused by the fact that he is gay. After his parents discover his journal, which is filled with erotic imaginings and fantasies, the narrator lashes out, violently attacking his parents and sibling, after which he is interred at a psychiatric ward.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_I_Were_a_Boy_(novel)"title="If I Were a Boy (novel)">
The novel starts with Dija's cousin, Hamit, who is on a bus with a small box on his hands. The box was entrusted to him by Dija, who now had contracted tuberculosis. After opening it he finds a white scarf, a notepad and a letter addressed to a Mr. Shpend Rrëfe, Tirana. Hamit opens the notepad and in the first page he reads a title, written in red, saying "My Life". After a while he reaches his destination and rents a room in a hotel in which he starts reading what seemed to be a diary of his cousin Dija.With this diary starts the epistolary form of the novel which Dija describes in first person the hardships, horrors, tortures, struggles in her life and having no say in virtually anything that concerns her from being forcefully married to an aged wealthy trader to even physical abuse from her step-mother. In the diary Dija describes her love and affection for Shpend Rrëfe, a boy of her age, whom she describes as being the only cause she didn't commit suicide. In the early hours of the morning Hamit finishes reading the diary, being interrupted by his tears and emotional distress many times throughout that night he finally manages to fall asleep, during which he dreams of Dija. He wakes up late after which a hotel servant enters and hands him a telegram from Dija's father which reads "Come quickly, Dija wants to see you". He leaves the job for what he came there for and grabs a transport for Tirana, but he is too late because Dija had already succumbed to tuberculosis and was buried, her last wish being Hamit delivers the letter to Shpend. Hamit goes to her grave, weeps and promises her he will fulfill her last wish. He then goes to Shpend and they both agree to publish a book based on Dija's diary which would serve as a way to raise awareness of the condition Albanian women were in.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galore_(novel)"title="Galore (novel)">
According to Other Press webpage, "Galore" concerns the following:"When a whale beaches itself on the shore of the remote coastal town of Paradise Deep, the last thing any of the townspeople expect to find inside it is a man, silent and reeking of fish, but remarkably alive. The discovery of this mysterious person, soon christened Judah, sets the town scrambling for answers as its most prominent citizens weigh in on whether he is man or beast, blessing or curse, miracle or demon. Though Judah is a shocking addition, the town of Paradise Deep is already full of unusual characters. King-me Sellers, self-appointed patriarch, has it in for an inscrutable woman known only as Devine’s Widow, with whom he has a decades-old feud. Her granddaughter, Mary Tryphena, is just a child when Judah washes ashore, but finds herself tied to him all her life in ways she never expects. Galore is the story of the saga that develops between these families, full of bitterness and love, spanning two centuries. With Paradise Deep, award-winning novelist Michael Crummey imagines a realm where the line between the everyday and the otherworldly is impossible to discern. Sprawling and intimate, stark and fantastical, Galore is a novel about the power of stories to shape and sustain us."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tusen_gånger_starkare"title="Tusen gånger starkare">
The book is about the power between the two sexes (boys and girls).In the 15-year-old girl Signe's class the "bad" boys and the popular girl Mimi have much power. When a new girl, Saga, comes to the class, the situation is changed; she breaks the "rules" for showing how girls should act. At first the teachers like her actions but when the other girls follow her advice, the situation becomes chaotic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Even_the_Dogs"title="Even the Dogs">
Around Christmas one year, alcoholic Robert John Radcliffe's body is found in his flat. The novel traces, in a stream of consciousness style with occasional flashbacks, how his daughter Laura and her drug addict friends react as authorities investigate his death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Chloe"title="The Tale of Chloe">
Catherine Martinsward ('Chloe') sacrifices her fortune to save her lover, Caseldy, from prison, but he then deserts her. Years later, he seduces Duchess Susan. Chloe grows close to the younger woman, and seeks to save her from a ruinous elopement. She ultimately commits suicide by Susan's doorway.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soonchild"title="Soonchild">
"Soonchild" tells the story of a shaman known as Sixteen-Face John, who lives in a cold, snowy region referred to as "The North," and who fears he's losing his way in the modern world. He increasingly spends his time "drinking Coca-Cola and watching TV with his feet up and reading magazines with centrefolds in them." John's wife is expecting a baby whom they plan to name Soonchild, but a crisis occurs when Soonchild refuses to leave the womb because she can't hear the "World Songs" – a special kind of music that is necessary for the world to exist, and which all children must hear before they can be born.To coax his daughter out into the world, John is forced to embark on a shamanic quest to find out why the World Songs have disappeared and bring them home so Soonchild can hear them. In the course of this journey he travels into the spirit world and the realm of the dead, where he must face down demons and enlist the aid of a variety of animal spirits and other mysterious characters – including Nanuk the giant polar bear, Old Man Raven, Ukpika the owl-woman, Yarluk the killer whale, Timertik the walrus, and the spirit of his great-grandmother who was a shaman herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Lost_Souls_(novel)"title="City of Lost Souls (novel)">
The book opens with Simon returning home, where he finds out that there are a lot of symbols that form a barrier so he can't enter the house. He speaks to his mother, only to feel more rejected when she accuses him of killing the "real" Simon. Things become more tense when he learns from Clary that Jace is currently missing and untraceable. Clary and the rest of the group manages to gain the assistance of the Seelie Queen, but in return they have to obtain and hand over two Faerie rings that would allow the wearers to communicate telepathically. Desperate, Clary agrees to the terms and while searching for the rings in a Shadowhunter library, accidentally observes Jace enter the library and speak in friendly terms with Sebastian (Who is actually "Jonathan Morgenstern", Valentine's half-demon blooded son) - which confuses Clary, who had been hiding during the conversation.That night Clary wakes to find Jace lying in bed with her, asking her to come with him. Shortly after this, Sebastian enters the room- something that is discovered by Jocelyn, who screams and alerts others to their presence. After stabbing Luke in the back the two leave, but promise to return for Clary. She eventually decides to join the two men as a spy while using the Faerie rings to communicate with Simon. During this time Clary realizes that Jace has been possessed by Sebastian, as he acts more like Sebastian than himself. Jace manages to temporarily shake off the possession and explain that Sebastian is planning to use Lilith's blood to create an army of dark Shadowhunters using the second Mortal Cup and will turn himself into the Clave, as he'd rather die than continue to be possessed. He was only able to regain control due to the rune controlling him having received damage, which would also cause him to eventually die. Not wanting Jace's death, Clary calls Sebastian in and asks him to heal the rune, putting Jace back under Sebastian's control. Meanwhile, Simon and the others summon Raziel, who gives Simon a blade of Heaven named Glorious but at the cost of Simon's Mark of Cain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anywhere_but_Here_(novel)"title="Anywhere but Here (novel)">
Adele August leaves her second husband, Ted, and taking her 11-year-old daughter Ann, drives in Ted's Lincoln Continental from their small Wisconsin hometown to Los Angeles with ambitions of making Ann a child star and finding herself a rich husband. Ann, the child of Adele's first marriage to an Egyptian man who deserted the family, is separated from her beloved grandmother Lillian who remained in Wisconsin, and must now cope on her own with her mother's moods, whims, fantasies, and occasional neglect and abuse. Narcissistic Adele is chronically dissatisfied with her life, lives above her means, overspends on clothing and status goods, and treats Ann as an extension of herself, rather than as a person in her own right. Ann is torn between feelings of love, longing and responsibility for her mother on one hand, and anger and rebellion on the other.In Los Angeles, Adele finds work as a teacher and, despite her low income and irresponsible spending habits, manages to move herself and Ann into Beverly Hills so that Ann can attend the local schools with the children of rich families and movie stars. The two engage in various schemes to stay in Beverly Hills and fit in, including skipping out on rent and stealing fashionable clothing. Over time, Ann befriends several of her rich classmates, while Adele, increasingly out of her element, exploits Ann's school connections to benefit herself. Back in Wisconsin, Ann's grandmother Lillian and her cousin Benny both die, severing Ann's last links with her old life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_and_the_Gods_of_the_Mountain"title="Conan and the Gods of the Mountain">
The novel picks up where Robert E. Howard's "Red Nails" leaves off, with Conan and his current flame, the she-pirate Valeria of the Red Brotherhood, newly escaped from the self-destruction of the lost city of Xuchotl. Treking through the jungles of Kush in an attempt to reach the coast, they become involved in a three-sided conflict between the Kwanyi tribe, divided among feuding clans, the Ichiribu, and the God-Men of Thunder Mountain, who can read the future and command the soul-eating Living Wind. Much of the action occurs underground, culminating in a battle between Conan and the giant Golden Serpent. The Living Wind, faced at the end of the story, proves to be an anticlimactic threat, summarily dealt with by a local shaman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silversands"title="Silversands">
In an age where interstellar travel is dangerous and unpredictable, and no-one knows exactly where a trip ends up, Avril Bradley is a Communications officer onboard a ship sent to re-contact as many of these lost souls as possible. But a mysterious explosion strands her in a world of political intrigue, espionage and subterfuge; a world of retired cops, digital ghosts and corporate assassins who fight for possession of computer data that had lain undisturbed for almost a century.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammered_(Hearne_novel)"title="Hammered (Hearne novel)">
Atticus O'Sullivan, last of the Druids, has lived for over 2,100 years, mostly by avoiding trouble. Though it appears that recently trouble has found him frequently. After dispatching a Celtic God fixated on vengeance, and preventing warring witch covens from devastating his hometown of Tempe, Arizona, Atticus hoped that he could focus on training his new initiate, the first in centuries. Instead, an old promise made to a friend leads him to band together with a werewolf, a vampire, an ancient Slavic thunder god, a Chinese Immortal, and a Finnish deity on a frantic mission to the land of Asgard. Their goal - to kill Thor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Clerks"title="The Three Clerks">
The story deals with the two friends Harry Norman and Alaric Tudor, who work at the Weights and Measures Office, and with Alaric's cousin Charley, who works in Internal Navigation. Harry falls in love with Gertrude Woodward, the eldest of the three beautiful daughters of a clergyman's widow, while Alaric pursues Linda, the second daughter. Gertrude rejects Harry's marriage proposal, and Alaric, rising in the ranks of the civil service, pursues and gains Gertrude's hand. Harry is unable to forgive Alaric, but eventually he marries the second daughter, Linda, and later becomes a country squire. Alaric meanwhile, becomes a Commissioner, but he falls under the influence of an unscrupulous member of Parliament, Undy Scott, who talks him into various schemes of dubious legality and morality, which eventually lead to his downfall. Charley Tudor is considered a rake, who spends his time at London's public houses and gin palaces. However, he dreams of a cleaner life, and loves Katie, the youngest sister, who falls in love with Charley after he rescues her from drowning in the Thames. Charley is also engaged to an Irish barmaid, and Katie's mother considers Charley an unsuitable husband, and forces him to swear never to speak to her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garments_of_Caean"title="The Garments of Caean">
The main plot covers a journey to a crashed planet by a con-man, Rialto Mast and Peder Forbath, a knowledgeable sartorial. They seek to obtain items of fashion from a crashed ship, filled with items of clothing from the planet Caean. Due to the particular nature of the clothing -– so exquisite as to imbue the wearer with certain qualities – on Caean the skill of the designer is such that the title "supplants the functions of psychiatrist, priest, and molder of public opinion."While scouring the wreckage, Peder finds a rare suit designed by the legendary designer, Frachionard. This particular suit is only one of five the designer completed in his life – and is made of Prossim, a material so rare that any one item would be infinitely valuable. Peder commandeers the suit and uses it to scale the ranks of the social scene. However, garments from Caean are outlawed in Peder's home world and most of the galaxy and as such Peder must utilise the suits qualities to bamboozle whomever gazes upon it. Its design is such that he can convince anyone of anything - even that the suit itself is not as it seems.Soon Peder forms an overwhelming desire to visit Caean and will do anything to get there. Though he begins to wonder if it is he who wants to go, or if it is the suit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goggles!"title="Goggles!">
Peter, the main character, and his friend Archie find motorcycle goggles near their hideout. They encounter some "big boys" that want to take the goggles. They get a surprise from Peter's dog and end the day safe with the goggles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennie's_Hat"title="Jennie's Hat">
The protagonist, a girl called Jennie is looking forward to receiving a new hat from her aunt - “It will be big and beautiful and flowery,” she tells herself happily. But when the box arrives, there is only a plain straw hat inside. She is disappointed and tries different items on her head, like a flowerpot and a kettle but they don't work.Jennie then goes to the park and looks at the birds which takes her mind of it for a while but at church the next day she sees many women wearing lovely hats that remind her of her plain hat. However, on the way home Jennie's bird friends bring various items for her to decorate the hat so it isn't plain anymore.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggie_and_the_Pirate"title="Maggie and the Pirate">
Maggie's pet cricket Niki, in the cage her father built, is stolen by someone calling himself the Pirate. Maggie and her friends hunt all over the place, and finally she finds the Pirate's hide-out. However, during the rescue, Niki is accidentally drowned. Maggie and her friends bury the cricket, and the Pirate, a new kid in the neighborhood, comes to apologize and to bring back the cage, which has a new cricket inside.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Dog_Is_Lost"title="My Dog Is Lost">
Juanito and his family have just moved from Puerto Rico to New York City and he is miserable because he only speaks Spanish. Juanito has no one to talk with, and his dog Pepito is missing. Juanito realizes that his neighbors won't understand the Spanish passage - "Mi perro se ha perdido", so he goes to the bank and asks a man there to help him make a sign in English. Suddenly, the search is on as he and different children from all over New York help him search through Chinatown, Little Italy, Park Avenue and Harlem to find his lost dog, Pepito.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Show!"title="Pet Show!">
Archie wants to enter his cat in the neighborhood pet show—but where is the cat? Archie keeps on looking even after all the other kids have given up, but his pet is nowhere to be found. Ingenious Archie has a plan to enter the contest—with a most surprising creature and enters an empty jar which he says contains a germ named Al.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter's_Chair"title="Peter's Chair">
Peter has a new baby sister, Suzy. First his father paints Peter's old cradle pink, then his crib. Then his parents want to paint Peter's blue chair. "Let’s run away, Willie," he says to his dog. They do, Peter taking his chair with him. However, he finds that the chair is too small for him, and he returns home. The final two pages show Peter sitting in an adult-sized chair and helping his father paint his old chair pink.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regards_to_the_Man_in_the_Moon"title="Regards to the Man in the Moon">
Louie is unhappy because the other kids call his father “the junk man.” But his father knows it is not just junk. “All a person needs is some imagination! And a little of that stuff can take you right out of this world!” So Louie builds a spaceship fueled entirely by imagination—and blasts off into an amazing adventure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistle_for_Willie"title="Whistle for Willie">
The protagonist, Peter, wants to be able to call his dog Willie by whistling. Although it hurts him after a while he doesn't give up and eventually succeeds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enough_About_Love"title="Enough About Love">
Though its title may suggest otherwise, "Enough About Love"'s main topic is love. As Le Tellier writes in the prologue, "Any man—or woman—who wants to hear nothing—or no more—about love should put this book down."According to the Other Press website, "Enough About Love" concerns the following:Anna and Louise could be sisters, but they don’t know each other. They are both married with children, and for the most part, they are happy. On almost the same day, Anna, a psychiatrist, crosses paths with Yves, a writer, while Louise, a lawyer, meets Anna’s analyst, Thomas. Love at first sight is still possible for those into their forties and long-married. But when you have already mapped out a life path, a passionate affair can come at a high price. For our four characters, their lives are unexpectedly turned upside down by the deliciously inconvenient arrival of love. For Anna, meeting Yves has brought a flurry of excitement to her life and made her question her values, her reliable husband, and her responsibilities to her children. For Louise, a successful career woman in a stable and comfortable marriage, her routine is uprooted by the youthful passion she feels for Thomas. Thought-provoking, sophisticated, and, above all, amusing, Enough About Love captures the euphoria of desire through tender and unflinching portraits of husbands, wives, and lovers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomp_(novel)"title="Chomp (novel)">
Wahoo Cray and his father, Mickey Cray, a professional animal wrangler, are hired to help with the latest episode of a reality series titled "Expedition Survival!" As Mickey was injured shortly before by an iguana falling on his head and is suffering the aftereffects of a serious concussion, Wahoo takes it upon himself to accept for both of them while his mother is on a business trip in China.In addition to helping with the animals, Wahoo has to restrain his father, who becomes dangerously short-tempered while dealing with the show's flabby, obese, pampered, and obnoxious star, Derek Badger, who has little experience dealing with actual nature and no interest in learning.While buying supplies at a Walmart in Florida City, the Crays are joined by Tuna Gordon, a teenaged classmate of Wahoo's, fleeing her abusive, alcoholic father, Jared Gordon. Unsure what else to do, Wahoo invites her to join them on their camping trip into the Everglades.Predictably, the shoot in the Everglades is a series of fiascoes. Derek's clumsiness leads him to suffer a number of injuries, including being bitten a dozen times by an agitated banded water snake that he was attempting to kill and eat. Tuna, originally a huge fan of "Expedition: Survival!", is dispirited to learn just how fake the show and Derek are; for instance, his trademark parachute entrance into the wilderness is performed by a stuntman, and between shooting sessions, he is airlifted by helicopter to a luxury hotel in Miami.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_(Chase_novel)"title="Eve (Chase novel)">
Set against the background of the Hollywood film industry, the story revolves around Clive Thurston, who has swindled his way to fame, and Eve, an utterly worthless woman who is beautiful to look at but lethal to love. The narrator describes his own thoughts and emotions and his perceptions, in relation to those of the characters whom he encounters throughout the book and also in relation to life and the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hologram_for_the_King"title="A Hologram for the King">
The novel tells the story of a washed-up, desperate American salesman, Alan Clay, who travels to Saudi Arabia to secure the IT contract from the royal government for the King Abdullah Economic City, a massive new complex being built in the middle of the desert.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_Days_in_Clichy_(novel)"title="Quiet Days in Clichy (novel)">
The plot follows Joey, an American expatriate in and around Place Clichy. The book is divided in two parts. In the first, Joey and his equally destitute roommate Carl search for food and navigate relationships with various women. Chiefly, Joey with Nys, a prostitute he meets at the Café Wepler near Montmartre, and Carl with Colette, a fifteen-year-old runaway who moves in with them before eventually being retrieved by her parents.The second half, “Mara-Marignon,” describes Carl's volatile love affair with the married Eliane, and Joey's relationship with Mara, a prostitute he meets on the Champs-Élysées. Mara reminds Joey of a previous lover, the married Christine, whom he regrets not marrying himself. This leads to a recollection of an evening he and Carl spent at their home with an acrobat named Corinne and a Danish woman named Christine. The four of them have a spontaneous orgy, which upsets Christine, who is laughed at by the other three.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelter_(novel)"title="Shelter (novel)">
Mickey Bolitar, 15, tries to figure out why his new girlfriend, Ashley Kent, stopped coming to school and has seemingly vanished. Getting no assistance from teachers or administrators, Mickey turns to a couple of fellow students for help. All the while, Mickey deals with having to live under the same roof as his estranged uncle, Myron, while his mother is checked into rehab for a drug addiction. Also, a strange neighbor woman who lives in an eerie mansion tells Mickey that his father is alive, even though Mickey saw him die in a car accident more than a year ago.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_She_Disappeared"title="The Night She Disappeared">
Drew works at Pete's Pizza with Kayla Cutler and receives a phone call from a customer named John Robertson. Before ordering he asks if Drew's colleague Gabie Klug, a part-time delivery girl is working. Drew doesn't answer his question. He sends Kayla out with the order; she does not return. The police are called to investigate. Gabie is blamed for her disappearance as she switched nights with Kayla so that she worked Wednesday. Witnesses say that it was a boy named Cody because he painted his white truck brown. Gabie finds out that John Robertson didn't want Kayla; he wanted Gabie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_and_the_Death_Lord_of_Thanza"title="Conan and the Death Lord of Thanza">
Following the events of "The Star of Khorala", Conan is a wanted man in Ophir and flees to Aquilonia. He ends up in the city of Shamar, in the Thanza Mountains bordering Nemedia. Soon, he joins Captain Klarnides and his Thanza Rangers, who protect the region against raiders. A greater threat soon emerges in the form of Baron Grolin, who aspires supremacy in the region. Grolin seeks a chest containing the Soul of Thanza, a jewel said to gain its possessor mastery over death. He's aided in his quest by the bandit chieftainess, Lysinka of Mertyos, and a mysterious wizard. Lysinka changes sides after Grolin abandons her in a fight with the Rangers. Warned of the baron's intention, the Rangers attempt to locate the Soul first to prevent him from becoming a Death Lord. Failing, they are aided in their final battle by the Slayers of Death, an army of skeletal warriors charged with defeating the Death Lord. Together, they put an end to the transformed baron's ambitions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doglands"title="Doglands">
## Part One: Bravedog.Keeva, a blue greyhound, gives birth to four pups. There are three girls and one boy; she names the girls Eena, Nessa, and Brid, and names the boy Furgul. They are raised to believe that they are pure greyhounds, but as they get older, Keeva tells Furgul that he must run, because he is really a lurcher, and because of how fast he is growing, Dedbone is going to find out and kill him. Keeva also tells him that he must find his father, Argal. Furgul promises to come back and save Keeva.When it is the first day in racing season, Keeva is supposed to be placed in a cardboard box to go off to the racetrack. She plans to run away before her leash can be put on, giving the dogs time to jump into another, empty cardboard box and go to the racetrack, where they can escape. However, the Gambler finds them and furthermore notices that they are not greyhounds. Dedbone goes and gets his shotgun, and while he does, Furgul manages to help Brid escape. The other three are still in the box, and Dedbone shoots multiple times until Furgul manages to tip the box enough to fall out of the truck.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Vorpatril's_Alliance"title="Captain Vorpatril's Alliance">
During a stay in the planet Komarr, Captain Ivan Vorpatril is recruited by Byerly Vorrutyer, an undercover agent of Imperial Security, to find out the identity of a young woman named Tej, connected to his investigation, who he believes may be in danger. Ivan attempts to pick her up at her work and fails. When he shows up at her building, she lets him into her apartment and he is attacked by her companion, a genetically modified woman named Rish. He spends the night tied to a chair in their apartment while they decide what to do with him. When two men break into the apartment Ivan manages to alert the women, who stun the intruders. Ivan then offers his own flat as a safe place for them.The women's persecutors accuse them of illegal immigration and simultaneously accuse Ivan of kidnapping them, to use the police to track them. When police are about to break into his apartment, Ivan marries Tej and hires Rish as her employee, to give them both a legal status in Komarr. Tej reveals that she is the youngest daughter of Baron Cordonah from Jackson's Whole, a planet based on laissez-faire free market economics where what would be illegal activities elsewhere abound. House Cordonah had been recently taken over by force by a competitor, who put a price on the life or capture of the remaining members of the House, making bounty hunters track them all the way to Komarr. Now part of the family of a High Vor lord, Tej and Rish travel with Ivan to Barrayar, where the two women can be more secure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_Bishop"title="The Soul of a Bishop">
"The Soul of a Bishop" tells the story of a spiritual crisis that leads Edward Scrope, Lord Bishop of Princhester, to give up his diocese in England's industrial heartland and leave the Anglican Church. Troubled during World War I by doctrinal doubts and a sense of the irrelevance of his Anglicism as well as nervousness and insomnia, a crisis is precipitated by a visit to a wealthy parishioner's home where he meets an extremely wealthy American widow, Lady Sunderbund. To her he speaks for the first time of his religious discontent. Shortly thereafter he takes a drug that, instead of mitigating his symptoms, gives him "a new and more vivid apprehension of things." The bishop experiences a mystical vision of "the Angel of God" and then God in the North Library of the Athenaeum Club, London. He emerges from the experience convinced that he must leave the Church, but is persuaded by an old mentor, Bishop Likeman, to wait three months before doing anything, during which time he continues in his episcopal duties.Bishop Scrope keeps these developments from his wife, Lady Ella, and his four daughters until Lady Sunderbund arrives unannounced in Princhester, vowing to become his spiritual pupil. The strain of this new situation leads him to take Dr. Dale's drug a second time, and under its influence he has a second vision, this time of the terrestrial globe in a state of spiritual ferment to which the world's clergy is not ministering. Under the influence of this revelation he delivers a heretical confirmation address in the cathedral and resolves thereafter to leave the Church. Lady Sunderbund wishes to devote her riches to helping him found a new church, but in the process of developing plans for it Scrope realizes, in a third vision that this time is not mediated by any drug, that in the new religion he must serve "there must be no idea of any pulpit, of any sustained mission." In a final epiphany, he realizes that his refusal to "trust his family to God" has been holding him back, and that "this distrust has been the flaw in the faith of all religious systems hitherto." Five years after it began, Scrope's spiritual crisis is resolved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sole_Agent"title="Sole Agent">
Overseas Police Adviser Peter Craig, on a cruise bound for Naples, stops in Lisbon to catch up with Ferreira, a former colleague who now runs a department of the PIDE security service.Craig calls at the British Embassy to announce his visit and is introduced to Simon Dickens, Head of Chancery. Dickens takes Craig into his confidence and explains that the Amanda, daughter of the Embassy's Defence Attache has recently gone missing, and asks for his help in finding her. Craig reluctantly agrees to ask Ferreira.Over lunch, Ferreira reveals that PIDE has been monitoring Amanda because of her links with a revolutionary group, and have reports of her leaving a party the evening before with Joao Goncalves Costa, the leader of that group. Ferreira requests that Amanda be questioned by his men before being released; Craig, mindful of avoiding a scandal, insists that she instead return to the Embassy to be deported immediately.Craig reports back to the Embassy, meeting the withering Ambassador in the process. Craig's plan to continue his cruise is frustrated as the ship is docked for repairs, and he reluctantly agrees to help with the search for Amanda, which leads first to her ex-boyfriend and then to a villa outside the city. Craig realises that PIDE agents are tailing him, and evades them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_in_Chancery"title="Spy in Chancery">
The novel begins in Paris, as an MI6 officer prepares to meet a would-be Soviet defector. The meeting turns sour and the MI6 man is murdered after learning that the KGB have a mole in the British Embassy in Rome, but his killers do not realise that a concealed microphone has recorded everything.Craig, in Rome for a security conference, is briefed by MI6 to investigate the Embassy and find the mole. Craig interviews the main suspects, Adams, Ransome and Warren, and discovers that all have motive as well as opportunity to work with the Russians.Craig meets Ashbee to coordinate his investigation with the CIA, who tells him about the illegal Soviet residency in Rome. Sir Watkyn volunteers to send false messages, implying that MI6 is blackmailing the Russian Ambassador, in order to lure out the spy. The KGB abduct Ashbee, blaming the Roman mafia for the kidnapping. With Kahn's help, Craig approaches the Roman mafia and convinces them that the KGB has set them up and caused the CIA to investigate them. With the help of the mafia, Craig rescues Ashbee and captures the KGB agents.Still needing to find the source of the Embassy leaks, Craig allows Zakharov to escape and follows him to discover the mole.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Book_(Edwards_novel)"title="The Little Book (Edwards novel)">
"The Little Book" follows the character of Wheeler Burden, a wealthy 80's rock idol that suddenly finds himself in 1897 Vienna. Wheeler quickly uses his knowledge of the late 19th century and a set of stolen clothes to fit in with the environment. Soon Wheeler has met not only Sigmund Freud but also his own father. However the mystery of Wheeler's time travel still remains, and his impact on fin-de-siècle Vienna may have deeper implications than he realized.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_Shift"title="Carbon Shift">
"Carbon Shift" encompasses six essays by experts in the fields of economics, geology, politics, and science. The essays argue points such as humanity's potential for exhausting the supply of non-renewable fuels and what could be done to prevent this.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oru_Theruvinte_Katha"title="Oru Theruvinte Katha">
The novel is set as parallel stories in each chapter, dealing with a particular character or a group of characters. However, from the fifth chapter onwards, Kuruppu emerges as the central character. Kuruppu is a newspaper street vendor who makes his living by selling newspapers and a particular ‘Gandharvan’ magazine, which appears to be a local version of a men's magazine. The magazine is distributed only to select customers (some of the other major characters) who approach Kuruppu for these in particular. It is mostly through the eyes of Kuruppu that the novel unfolds. Kuruppu is shown as struggling to make ends meet and having difficulty in paying for the upkeep of his daughter, Radha. In this he is helped to an extent by ‘Omanji’ or Lazar who is fond of Radha and shares her interest in the growing of rose shrubs. Kuruppu is also shown as a passive observer in some of the happenings in the street. Some incidents are explained through the eyes of his daughter Radha. For instances and incidents where he is not present, it shown as if these are narrated to him by the other characters. A vast cast of characters are introduced, who are mostly vagabonds, prostitutes, seedy characters, rich businessmen, beggars, charlatans and con artists and a gang of street kids. The novel ends with the death of Radha, who succumbs to brain fever and Kuruppu trying to hold himself together and start life anew.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Research_Magnificent"title="The Research Magnificent">
The text of this novel of ideas presents itself as a book that has been written as the result of a promise to a dying man. William Porphyry Benham is a man who has lived a life devoted to a complicated, protean idea: "that he had to live life nobly and thoroughly." He has left behind him "half a score of patent files quite distended [with papers] and a writing-table drawer-full," and the novel is by implication what his friend White, who has promised to "see after your book," has produced to acquit himself of the promise, since the papers themselves are "an indigestible aggregation."Benham is a man of means due to curious circumstances: his mother left his father, a schoolmaster, for a wealthy man named Nolan who died soon thereafter, but not before leaving "about a third of his very large fortune entirely to Mrs. Benham and the rest to her in trust for her son, whom he deemed himself to have injured." His mother subsequently marries a great London surgeon and becomes Lady Marayne; her indiscretion is forgiven and she enjoys a position of privilege.The bulk of the novel recounts Benham's effort to live nobly, which brings him into conflict with his mother, with his friend Prothero, a schoolboy chum who becomes a Cambridge don, and with his wife, Amanda, a young woman he loves passionately but then leaves behind in England to travel the world (India, Russia, China) in search of wisdom. It is in Johannesburg, South Africa, that Benham is fatally shot while attempting to stop soldiers firing at strikers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven_Lake_(novel)"title="Heaven Lake (novel)">
The story begins in Douliu, Taiwan where Christian volunteer and recent college graduate Vincent Saunders from Red Bud, Illinois, fluent in Mandarin, arrives to teach English and to share his faith. Soon after opening a ministry school, he meets wealthy businessman Mr. Gwa, who explains that he has fallen in love with a girl in mainland China but is unable to marry her due to the political situation between Taiwan and China. He offers Vincent $10,000 to travel to Urumchi in the far northwest of China near the eponymous Heaven Lake and marry the girl, bringing her back to Taiwan where she would be free to marry Mr. Gwa. Vincent refuses but later develops a relationship with one of his young students, which causes him to abandon his faith and to reconsider the offer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Trash_(novel)"title="White Trash (novel)">
Set in an unnamed new town on the outskirts of London, "White Trash" records the world as seen through the eyes of a hard-working ward nurse, Ruby James, and the remote, at times almost ghostly, administrator Jonathan Jeffreys, who drifts through her hospital. Their paths rarely cross, but the calculating outlook of Jeffreys begins to have terrible ramifications, and Ruby eventually becomes entangled in his web.Working-class Ruby manages to keep her dignity, sense of humour, and sanity despite a life of daily struggle that includes wrestling with the pain of having a mother with Alzheimer's. Her unfailingly positive and inclusive take on life is in stark contrast to the exclusive viewpoint of the handsomely paid Jeffreys, who spends his hours in the glow of a computer screen and prefers the company of statistics to human beings.Jeffreys' existence is based on cold reason, elitism, and an obsession with the rationing of healthcare that leads him to make extreme life-and-death decisions. Ruby's is about touch, feel, and emotion, treating her patients with respect while living out her unspoken belief that everyone has an equal right to care and attention.In an interview in "Nursing Times", King said: "The point of "White Trash" is that there is no white trash. Everyone is worth something and no-one can be dismissed. That's what we have to remember when it comes to the National Health Service." He calls the novel, "A defence of the NHS."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Season"title="Fire Season">
The story takes place a few years after Stephanie Harrington is adopted by a Sphinxian treecat whom she has named Lionheart (and whose name among his own people is "Climbs Quickly"). During this time, Lionheart has witnessed Stephanie grow into a clever and confident human teenager. Yet Stephanie's move into adulthood comes at crucial time on many levels. Sphinx is undergoing "Fire Season" and Stephanie and her friend Karl Zivonik are constantly on fire duty to prevent the more dangerous brush fires from endangering the human population and the treecats. She and Karl personally save two treecat twin brothers, named Left-Stripe and Right-Stripe, from such a forest fire and deliver them both to her xeno-veterinarian father for treatment. Stephanie is also forced to contend with an official anthropological survey team that arrives in the kingdom with the express purpose of studying the treecats to determine whether or not they are sentient. Stephanie takes an immediate liking to the teenage son of the survey team's lead scientist, Anders Whittaker. Unbeknownst to Stephanie, Dr. Bradford Whittaker has intentionally brought his son along for this express purpose, believing that he and his team would need to circumvent the "paternalistic" Sphinx Forestry Service and its attempts to shield the treecats and Stephanie from him and his team.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucible_of_Gold"title="Crucible of Gold">
William Laurence and Temeraire, who have decided to make a pastoral life for themselves in the British colony of New South Wales, are disturbed by the arrival of the diplomat Arthur Hammond, lately assigned to China, who bears dire news. The Portuguese colony of Brazil is besieged by forces allied to Napoleon Bonaparte, but not belonging to him: the Emperor of France has found common cause with the Tswana, now undisputed masters of the African continent. Their stated desire of retrieving all Africans captured and sold by the slave trade has brought them to Brazil, where the Crown Prince of Portugal, João, has sought refuge. As Portugal itself is the safe harbor to Britain's latest plan, a ground offensive into France itself, Brazil's safety is of paramount importance, and Hammond restores Laurence's commission and captaincy to address the crisis.Temeraire and Kulingile, with their much-reduced air and ground crews, rejoin with Iskierka aboard the "Allegiance", which begins to make its way east. Unfortunately, Captain Riley's crew is undependable, and after weathering a five-day gale, breaches in discipline lead to a drunken galley fire; the ship is lost, with only the most drunken and irresponsible hands saved, as Laurence had ordered them aboard Temeraire for disciplinary action. The three dragons fly east for three days straight, eventually collapsing aboard the nearest ship they can find; alas, it is the French transport "Triomphe", bearing a diplomatic envoy of Chrétien-Louis-Joseph de Guignes and Juliette Récamier to the Inca Empire, and Temeraire's company are marooned on a small island for later retrieval. Only the discovery of a wrecked pirate ship, its maps still legible, allows Laurence to chart a course back to the mainland.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut_Symmetries"title="Gut Symmetries">
The book deals with a love triangle between Alice (a young British physicist), Jove (who is a male physicist at Princeton), and Jove's wife Stella; Alice has relationships with both of them. The title relates to the GUTs (grand unified theories) of quantum physics and cosmology, and the symmetries they involve.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_Practice_(novel)"title="Target Practice (novel)">
Mark Brill, a private investigator, is hired by the grieving Shelly Rollins after a chance meeting on a plane to investigate charges of treason laid against her brother, a former Army officer who has recently committed suicide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowaki_(novel)"title="Nowaki (novel)">
"Nowaki" is about three men, all of whom are writers. Two of the younger men, the tubercular Takayanagi and the dandy Nakano, were close in their student days, and are now recent university graduates making their way in the world. The older man of the three is known as Dōya-sensei (Master Dōya), once a teacher in the provinces who was forced to leave his post by villagers and students angered over his disrespectful attitude toward wealth and authority, now pursuing in Tokyo a career as an editor and writer, but barely eking out a livelihood, much to his wife's consternation. Magazine editor by day, he longs to finish and publish his more serious writing, "Essay on Character." By sheer coincidence, the three lives come together over the sum of one hundred yen (about a month's salary at the time): Nakano's gift to Takayanagi to convalesce at a seaside hot springs, Dōya-sensei's debts which are paid off with the purchase of his manuscript, and Takayangi's act of self-sacrifice and redemption.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Name_Verity"title="Code Name Verity">
In 1943 Nazi-occupied France, a British Lysander spy plane crashes in the fictional town of Ormaie. On board are two best friends, a pilot (Maddie, code name: Kittyhawk) and a spy (Julie, code name: Verity). The latter is soon captured by Nazi authorities, detained in a former hotel, and forced to write a confession detailing the British war effort, which she decides to write in the form of a novel. Through her confession, she tells the story of her friendship with Maddie, the pilot, and how she came to enter France in the first place. In the second part of the plot, the story is told from Maddie's point of view, and reveals the events that transpired after the plane crash that left both women in France, and her plan to find Verity and bring her back home. In the end, Maddie kills Julie to prevent her from being tortured or sent to Natzweiler-Struthof as a specimen for medical experiments. After that, Maddie receives Julie's confession from Engel, a chemist at the hotel who has had a crisis of conscience, and she and the French Resistance use Engel’s information to blow up the hotel, which the Nazis also use as their center of operations. After that, Maddie escapes to England.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Stink"title="Mr Stink">
Chloe is a 12-year-old girl living in an undisclosed British town, who wants to help a local tramp become her friend, Mr Stink, but she does not know how. She has written a story that her mother tore up because she wants Chloe to work at school and not waste time drawing. Chloe thinks that her mother does not love her as much as she loves her little sister. Chloe hides Mr Stink in the shed; her Mother wants to become an MP and wrote as her manifesto that homeless people must be taken off the streets. Chloe discovers that her father was a member of a rock band called the Serpents of Doom. Her parents soon find out about Mr Stink in the shed and Chloe's mother is invited onto a TV show and asked to bring Mr Stink along, so that he can discuss life as a homeless man. Mr Stink quickly becomes the star of the show and makes the audience laugh a lot. The people love him so much that he's invited to the Prime Minister's office. The Prime Minister wants Mr Stink to become a 'person who pretends to care for the homeless'. Chloe defends her friend, and they return home, where Mr Stink has to say goodbye and wander the streets for ever. Chloe starts writing her journey with Mr. Stink, which starts by "Mr. Stink stank...".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Nation"title="Opium Nation">
Born in Herat, Afghanistan, nine-year-old Nawa escaped in 1982 with her family during the Soviet–Afghan War. Following 18 years of separation from her homeland, Nawa visits the country in 2000 after the Taliban's rise to power in an attempt to harmonize her American and Afghan identities. Fluent in the dialect Dari Persian, she finds that she has difficulty comprehending the speech of people in her hometown Herat because Iranian words and idioms have seeped into their language. She spends seven years in the country attempting to comprehend and write about its changes. In 2002, she moves to Kabul, serving as a journalist reporting on the War in Afghanistan that began in 2001. From 2002 to 2007, she researches opium production in Afghanistan for her book. In her first visit, she finds that her gorgeous childhood memories are obscured by bleak actualities. Taliban leaders have suppressed inhabitants' aesthetic and academic ambitions.Nawa discusses opium trafficking in Afghanistan, a trade she said is valued at $4 billion in the country and $65 billion outside it. 60% of Afghanistan's GDP comes from opium, of which two-thirds is distilled into heroin, a more potent drug. Because the distillation requires cooking, the traffickers allow women to take part in it. A large number of women and their families are beholden to opium. About 10–25% of women and children are speculated to be addicted to the drug. Many families serve in the opium enterprise as "opium farmers, refiners, or smugglers".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/69_Things_to_Do_with_a_Dead_Princess"title="69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess">
Following epigraphs from Karl Marx and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the novel tells the story of a man, variously called Callum or Alan, who is planning to kill himself. He has relocated to Aberdeen in the northeast of Scotland, where he befriends Anna Noon, a female student at Aberdeen University who also acts as the novel's narrator. They discuss literature and philosophy. Callum/Alan has a large collection of books he is attempting to read, including the fictional "69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess" by the fictional cult writer K.L. Callan, which contains a conspiracy theory about the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Callan's book claims that Diana was murdered then her corpse was dragged around Scottish stone circles until it fell apart, and Callum/Alan decides to test this by repeating the process with a ventriloquist's dummy. The novel contains extensive descriptions of Aberdeen and nearby parts of Scotland. About a third of the novel is pornographic sex scenes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_at_the_Demon's_Gate"title="Conan at the Demon's Gate">
In a first-person prologue set during the sixth year of Conan the Second's (formerly Prince Conn) reign over Aquilonia, a soldier, Nidaros, tells of his company's harrowing experiences during a frontier war with the Picts. The prologue culminates when Nidaros, his companion, Sarabos, and their followers are trapped by the enemy inside a cave. The Picts seem to fear the place, understandably, since it shows signs of having once been a site sacred to Set, the serpent god of Stygia. Oddly, the Aquilonians also discover a great stone statue in the image of the former king Conan the First (or Conan the Great, as he is also remembered). Should they doubt it, they need only look at Sarabos; it's an open secret that he is a bastard son of the first Conan, and hence a half-brother of Conn.The tale then shifts to events many years earlier in the life of Conan the First, well before he became ruler of Aquilonia, in the wake of "Queen of the Black Coast". Following the death of his lover, the pirate queen Belit, Conan ventures inland into the jungles of Kush. He encounters and joins forces with a band of Bamula tribesmen. Aiding the Bamulas in their conflict with an enemy tribe, he rises to a position of precarious authority among them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bluford_Series"title="The Bluford Series">
"The Bluford Series" is set in Bluford High School, the fictional school all the main characters attend. Each novel features a teenage protagonist facing difficult challenges in and out of school. Topics explored in the books include bullying, school violence, teenage pregnancy, divorce, peer pressure, and substance abuse. Despite these gritty topics, the Bluford Series has been praised widely for its engaging stories and responsible handling of difficult subject matter, earning positive reviews in "Kirkus Reviews", "School Library Journal", and the "Journal of Adolescent &amp; Adult Literacy". While each novel in the Bluford Series can be read independently, the books are interconnected and represent a span of about two years at Bluford High.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan,_Lord_of_the_Black_River"title="Conan, Lord of the Black River">
After successfully fulfilling his commission to overthrow a tyrannical baron in Koth, Conan travels into Baalur, a city-state in Shem. The queen of Baalur, Rufia, needs his aid. Baalur is suffering from a plague cast upon it by Zeriti, an old enemy of his previously believed dead. Zeriti seeks to settle a score dating from Conan's previous encounter with the two women, told in the story "Hawks Over Shem", and her curse is transforming Rufia's subjects into hideous zombies.With an army of Baalurian soldiers, Conan begins his journey to retrieve a white lotus, the primary antidote for removing Zeriti's cruse, said to only bloom near the source of the Styx, the infamous black river. His army marches across the city-state of Nedrezzar before reaching the port city of Asgalun, where they set sail for the Styx, which serves as a boundary between Shem and the ancient kingdom of Stygia. The crew follow the river down a vast tributary to the east and travel south as it flows into the Black Kingdoms. The expedition encounter many dangers along the way, including pirates, hostile local rulers, religious cults, and cannibals before reaching the Styx's headwaters.At the source of the Styx, they face their worst and final challenge, Zeriti's bloodthirsty undead lover. However, the white lotus is finally secured and Conan's crewmembers return down the river. After a final encounter with Zeriti in Asgalun, they return to Baalur and cure the city's inhabitants.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Commonwealth"title="The Secret Commonwealth">
Lyra is a student at St Sophia's College Oxford, but still lives at Jordan College. Her rescuer of twenty years earlier in "La Belle Sauvage," Malcolm Polstead, is now an academic.Lyra has come to admire the works of two writers: Simon Talbot, a philosopher who asserts that rationality is all and that dæmons are a delusion; and the novelist Gottfried Brande who similarly denounces everything other than pure reason. Her dæmon Pantalaimon disapproves of both. During a nightly excursion, Pan witnesses a man being murdered. A ticket inside the man's wallet leads them to a rucksack containing a journal and a notebook of addresses. The murdered man is Roderick Hassall, a botanist, and the journal that of his colleague Dr Strauss who had been studying a commercially-important rose whose oil is connected to Dust. Strauss keeps this information from the Magisterium, as they will certainly consider the rose industry to be heretical. The rose-growers' estates are being attacked by unknown "men from the mountains", and Strauss and Hassall decide to travel there. The desert of Karamakan, where the industry is centred, is difficult to access and all visitors are forced to leave their dæmons behind. Strauss asks how people reunite afterwards, and is informed of a place inhabited by separated dæmons called "the Blue Hotel". The party reach a vast well-guarded red building, evidently of great importance. They are told that the price of entry is "a life", and Strauss is admitted. Hassall never sees him again, and returns home alone with Strauss's journal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1906_(novel)"title="1906 (novel)">
Set during the time of the great San Francisco earthquake and fire, this novel is a story of corruption, romance, revenge, rescue, and murder, based on recently uncovered facts that stand to change the understanding of what actually occurred in the weeks and days before and after the earthquake of April 18, 1906. In a narrative told by reporter Annalisa Passarelli, the novel describes Gilded Age-era San Francisco from the opulent mansions on Nob Hill to the gambling, prostitution and crime-ridden Barbary Coast to the arrival of Enrico Caruso and the San Francisco Metropolitan Opera. The central plot of the novel circles around the ongoing battles between political and cultural factions before the earthquake, and even as the city burns afterwards.Annalisa Passarelli is a music critic for "The Evening Bulletin" and is secretly helping the police gather evidence of corruption related to the incumbency of Mayor Eugene Schmitz. Chief of Detectives Byron Fallon hopes to arrest the corrupt mayor, police chief, and city attorney in one fell swoop, but is killed when investigating a waterfront murder. After his death, his son Hunter, a Stanford graduate and amateur detective, steps up to accept his father's mission. Hunter's brother Christian co-leads The Brotherhood, an association of honest police who are dedicated to overthrowing city corruption. Annalisa and Hunter appeal to The Brotherhood for assistance and incriminating evidence is secured, while at the same time the two grow fond of each other. Before the information can be acted upon, the earthquake strikes and the city is thrown into chaos.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_the_Dead"title="Kiss the Dead">
"Kiss the Dead" centers on U.S. Marshal Anita Blake as she attempts to sort through her ever increasingly complicated personal life while dealing with a vampire that is breaking both vampire and human laws by turning underage teens and children into the undead. Meanwhile Anita also has to deal with the fragile ego of the ancient vampire , whose jealous behavior threatens the physical and emotional well-being of all around him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_Nation"title="Fuzzy Nation">
On the human colony planet Zara XXIII, Jack Holloway is a rebellious former lawyer working as a contract surveyor for the firm Zaracorp. He is fired for causing environmental damage after letting his dog set off explosives (again). However, the explosion uncovers a massive trove of tremendously valuable sunstones. Holloway persuade the Zaracorp manager that the sunstones are now by rights his; the manager agrees to a rider to his contract to grant him a greater share of the spoils. Shortly thereafter, Holloway meets a family of clever, cat-like creatures which he dubs the fuzzys. The family of fuzzys moves into his home. Holloway calls his ex-girlfriend Isabel Wangai, Zaracorp's biologist, to meet them.Isabel comes to believe the fuzzys are a sapient species. If confirmed by a Colonial Authority judge, this would require Zaracorp to leave the planet and cede its natural resources. Zaracorp executives attempt to bribe Holloway to testify against Isabel's theory. Holloway eventually comes to agree that the fuzzys are sapient after realizing that they speak their own sophisticated language at a pitch too high for humans to hear, and argues strongly for the species in court. This makes the fuzzys a target by surveyors and Zaracorp employees seeking to protect their financial interests; two of the fuzzy family are killed by a Zaracorp guard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prison_House"title="The Prison House">
The story's main character is a young man called Jimmy who, after a period of time travelling and drifting around Europe, finds himself incarcerated in Seven Towers, a notorious prison in an unnamed country on the continent's edge. Although he has always been an outsider, he is now a fully-fledged alien who doesn't understand the language or the customs of the other inmates. The prison is squalid, violent, and frightening; his only way of escaping this living nightmare is via his imagination.As Jimmy delves into the depths of his mind, his thoughts take on a sometimes-hallucinogenic quality. The characters he meets inside Seven Towers push his sanity to the brink: the silent, pyjama-clad Papa with his deadly knitting needle; the cheerful killer and mutilator known as the Butcher; and Dumb Dumb, a deaf-mute who is trying to build a better world out of matchsticks. But Jimmy is determined to survive, and the novel is ultimately a testament to the strength of the human spirit.Jimmy's crime is not revealed until the end of the book. Various dark possibilities are dangled in front of the reader until the crucial event that has destabilised his existence is laid bare. The seven towers of the jail are matched to the seven deadly sins, and King has said the story "deals with the choice between retribution and rehabilitation – notions of birth and innocence."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctoring_the_Mind"title="Doctoring the Mind">
In the preface, Bentall writes that "conventional psychiatry might reasonably be criticized, not on hard-to-define humanistic grounds (although these are important) but because it has been profoundly unscientific and at the same time unsuccessful at helping some of the most distressed and vulnerable people in our society".The book features a short history of psychiatry, also covering anti-psychiatry and clinical psychology.Bentall argues that the psychiatric diagnoses of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are not meaningful classifications. As an alternative to neo-Kraepelinian classification systems such as DSM and ICD-10 Chapter V employing these diagnostic labels, Bentall proposes to focus on symptoms ("complaints"), such as paranoia or auditory hallucinations.He also argues that psychiatric researchers have overestimated the extent to which serious mental illness is genetically inherited while underestimating environmental influences. According to Bentall, psychiatric diseases are not isolated diseases of the brain, but occur in a social context. He presents theoretical models for paranoia and auditory hallucinations involving psychological and biological mechanisms.According to Bentall, the pharmaceutical industry, as a profit-oriented industry, has been successful in exaggerating the potency of some psychotropic drugs through "ruthless manipulation of the clinical trial data" (he mentions SSRIs as an example). Bentall states that the pharmaceutical industry also increases sales through sponsoring and bonus payments. The author discerns that antipsychotics (psychotropic drugs used primarily in the treatment of psychotic disorders) can be effective, but are frequently misused, despite their heavy side-effects.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-fourth_Level"title="Twenty-fourth Level">
Overseas Police Adviser Peter Craig interviews a Rio, Brazil diamond dealer to investigate the source of unusual stone samples that have appeared at the International Diamond Institute in London. In the course of a social engagement, Craig encounters and quarrels with Graben, a violent and corrupt engineer that he arrested while working in West Africa. Graben is accompanied by the Alcidia.That evening, Craig survives an assassination attempt. When the police are called, they reveal that the diamond dealer has been murdered. The police agree to question Graben, who has disappeared. The investigation leads into a nearby favela, then to a gold mine near Belo Horizonte, which is owned by Alcidia's father. Alcidia and Craig meet at the mine's Casa Grande, and discover they are attracted to one another. Alcidia instructs Craig on how best to infiltrate the mine.Exploring the mine, Craig discovers a cache of diamonds on the mine's lowest level, and realises that Graben has been covertly mining the stones, while buying stock in the mining company with the proceeds. Graben arrives with a Brazilian capoeirista henchman, Jair, and a captive Alcidia, and locks Alcidia and Craig in a mineshaft. The pair manage to alert the mineworkers, just before losing consciousness from the mine's extreme heat, and are treated at the mine's hospital. Craig escapes the hospital and confronts Graben and Jair. Craig convinces Jair that Graben has been deceiving him, and Jair kills Graben then attacks Craig. Craig manages to kill Jair, and returns to the mine hospital with letters that prove Graben's guilt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_(book)"title="Occupy (book)">
The book includes an editor's note, a brief section providing legal advice for American Occupy activists, and five sections written by Chomsky himself. "Occupy" opens with an editor's note written by Greg Ruggiero, in which he explains the basics to Chomsky's views on the Occupy movement, drawing quotes from his various public speeches in order to do so. Ruggiero also discusses Occupy's success in the United States, stating that it has helped to change media discussions by introducing terms like "the 99%" into popular discourse and also by bringing national attention to the plight of the impoverished. He remarks that the protest movement has not only helped to highlight the "heartlessness and inhumanity" of the socio-political system, but that it has also helped to provide solidarity with those "being crushed" under that system. Suggesting reasons for the movement's success, he optimistically describes the manner in which "People are waking up and coming out."The introduction is followed by a transcript of Chomsky's Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture, originally given to Occupy Boston in Dewey Square on October 22, 2011. Contrasting the hope of the working classes in the Great Depression of the 1930s with the pessimism of their contemporaries in the current recession, Chomsky discusses the changes to the U.S. economy that have occurred since the 1970s: de-industrialization, de-development and the rise of the financial sector at the expense of other parts of the economy. He notes how both Adam Smith and David Ricardo partly foresaw this situation. Highlighting the work of Tom Ferguson, he discusses how the political parties have come under the increasing control of the corporate sector. Proceeding to look at corruption among the 1%, he makes reference to both Citigroup and Alan Greenspan, before discussing the role that worker sit-ins and industry takeovers could play in democratizing the U.S. economy, as well as the threat posed by both nuclear war and environmental catastrophe, both problems exacerbated by the current capitalist system. Finally, he responds to questions posed by the audience, discussing the concept of corporate personhood, rejecting the idea that the U.S. elite could resort to fascism, and discussing the possibility of a general strike, arguing that that would be "a possible idea at a time when the population is ready for it."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrail_series"title="Quadrail series">
The story starts with former government agent, Frank Compton, meeting a young man who drops dead at his feet. Compton finds a ticket to a strange, interstellar train called the Quadrail. During Compton's ride on the Quadrail he falls asleep, and wakes up in the custody of the spiders, the operators of the Quadrail. The Spiders explain to Compton their worries of a weapon of mass destruction, which may be able to bypass their Quadrail security. Compton agrees to help, and is given a pass for the Quadrails and they assign him a traveling companion named Bayta, who has a strange talent for being telepathic in her communication to the Spiders.Frank Compton discovers the power behind the Quadrail system: an ancient civilization called the Chahwyn. On the course of his travels on the Quadrail, he learns of the existence of the Modhri: the equally ancient enemy of the Chahwyn. The Modhri has its mind bent on controlling the galaxy."The Third Lynx" starts several months after the events of "Night Train to Rigel". Having destroyed the hub world of the Modhri, Frank Campton is riding the Quadrail with Bayta, his traveling companion and friend, when a murder occurs on the Quadrail car which he is traveling on. The victim is a middle-aged man who had proposed a deal to Compton a few hours before.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_of_the_Red_Brotherhood"title="Conan of the Red Brotherhood">
From a fortress on the island of Djafur, Conan (using his alias as Amra the Lion) builds the piratical Red Brotherhood into a virtual naval empire on the Vilayet Sea. In one raid, Conan accidentally rescues Philiope, a nobleman's daughter, who in time threatens his romantic interests towards Olivia (a holdover from the previous story, "Shadows in the Moonlight"). However, Amra's activities present a major challenge for the region's dominant power, the empire of Turan. In the capital of Aghrapur, Emperor Yildiz, his son Yezdigerd, and their underlings plan on destroying his forces. Their wizards come up with various obstacles including a steam engine, zombie-manned ships, centipede-like creatures, and a huge monster from the depths of the sea. Conan, however, emerges triumphant with each encounter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_Wakes"title="Leviathan Wakes">
The ice hauling ship "Canterbury" (nicknamed the "Cant" by Belters) is en route from Saturn's Rings to Ceres Station when it encounters a distress signal. Five members of the "Cant"'s crew are dispatched in a shuttle to investigate: executive officer James "Jim" Holden, a former officer in the UN Navy (UNN); chief engineer Naomi Nagata, a Belter; pilot Alex Kamal, a veteran of the Martian navy (MCRN); engineer Amos Burton; and medic Shed Garvey. They discover an abandoned transport vessel called the "Scopuli". They find no trace of the ship's crew, but they do discover the beacon transmitting the distress signal. Suspecting that the ship may be a trap set by pirates, they take the beacon and begin returning to the "Cant". Before they can make it, an unknown stealth warship arrives and, without warning, destroys the "Cant" with nuclear weapons. Holden sends an angry message to the attacking ship, but it ignores him and departs. Based on the highly advanced technology of the warship and the discovery that the beacon from the "Scopuli" is of Martian origin, the survivors suspect the MCRN of being behind the attack.With the shuttle damaged by the debris field, lacking the necessary fuel or supplies to reach a port, and fearful that should they put out a distress signal of their own, the attackers may return, Holden broadcasts a message out to the entire system implicating Mars in the destruction of the "Cant", hoping to negate any attempt to kill them as part of a cover-up. In response, the shuttle is ordered to rendezvous with the MCRN battleship "Donnager", flagship of Mars' Jupiter Fleet. En route, they receive a message from Fred Johnson, chief of Tycho Station, an engineering outpost and construction platform, offering his support. Johnson had been a highly decorated commander in the UNN when he was ordered to brutally quell a Belter uprising, for which he was nicknamed the "Butcher of Anderson Station." Guilt-stricken, he had resigned his commission and become an advocate for the rights of Belters. As the shuttle makes its way to the rendezvous, they are pursued by a group of unknown ships. On Ceres Station, Belter detective Josephus "Joe" Miller of Star Helix Security, the Earth-based private security firm responsible for policing the station, is contracted to locate Julie Mao, daughter of wealthy magnate Jules-Pierre Mao, and send her back to her family on Luna against her will. When Holden's message reaches Ceres, riots erupt, which leads Miller to discover that the station's riot gear is missing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crimson_Horror"title="The Crimson Horror">
In 1893, Silurian Madame Vastra, her human wife Jenny Flint, and their Sontaran butler Strax are asked to investigate a mysterious cause of death known as the "Crimson Horror", the victims of which are found dumped in the canal with bright red skin. The latest victim, Edmund, has the image of the Eleventh Doctor retained in his retina. Vastra, Jenny, and Strax travel to Yorkshire, where Jenny infiltrates Sweetville, a utopian community led by chemist and engineer Mrs Gillyflower and the never-seen Mr Sweet.Jenny discovers the Doctor, who is chained up and exhibits red skin and a stiff stature. At his silent direction she puts him into a chamber to reverse the process. Once restored, he explains to Jenny that he and Clara were also investigating the Crimson Horror. They had also infiltrated Sweetville, but learned that they were to be preserved to survive an apocalypse. The process did not work on the Doctor because he was not human, and he was saved from being destroyed by Gillyflower when her blind daughter Ada had hidden him. The Doctor finds Clara and reverses the process on her.Meanwhile, Vastra recognises that Sweetville is using the venom of a prehistoric red leech her people knew. The Doctor and Clara confront Mrs Gillyflower, who reveals that she plans to launch a rocket to spread the poison all over the skies; everyone on Earth will die except the people living in Sweetville, who will then start over to make a better world. "Mr Sweet" is also revealed to be a red leech from Vastra's prehistoric times that has formed a symbiotic relationship with Mrs Gillyflower. The Doctor berates Mrs Gillyflower for experimenting on Ada to get the preservation formula right. Clara smashes the controls to the rocket. However, Mrs Gillyflower holds a gun to Ada's head and heads into the rocket silo, which has been disguised as a chimney, to reach the secondary control.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Gladiator"title="Conan the Gladiator">
In the city of Thujara in Shem, Conan becomes involved in a street brawl and injures Roganthus, the strong man of a traveling circus troupe. A combination of regret over the troupe's loss and attraction for another member, the beautiful panther-trainer Sathilda, leads Conan to offer his own services as a stand-in for Roganthus. Joining the troupe, he accompanies them first to the town of Senjaj and then across the river Styx to Stygia, where they hope to become wealthy performing in the capital of Luxor. Stygia is usually depicted as a realm of decadent evil, crawling with sinister priests and sorcerers; in this novel, however, the local priests of Set are portrayed more as a fraternity of knowledge-seekers. Luxor is ruled by a tyrannical emperor, Commodorus, who forces Conan's troupe to fight for their lives in his arena against exotic warriors and wild beasts. Conan is disturbed at having to kill opponents with whom he feels some affinity, such as rebel Stygians and the Kushite Muzudaya. Soon, he's temporarily converted by a priest and fellow captive into an uncharacteristic pacifist. Exercising his military knowledge, he forms his fellow gladiators into a defensive phalanx at one point. The plot, seemingly building to a climactic final battle, is instead resolved by a catastrophic natural disaster, in the course of which Commodorus meets a fitting fate and much of Luxor is devastated. Everyone in Conan's troupe escapes from Luxor with the aid of a rebellious priest. In the wake of this event, Conan returns to Shem seeing different employment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_(Homes_novel)"title="Jack (Homes novel)">
Jack is a 15-year-old boy who is dealing with the divorce of his parents Anne and Paul, as he starts to develop a crush on his friend Maggie. He must also deal with the subsequent revelation that his father Paul is gay and now living with a male partner after his separation from Anne.When news of his father's liaison spreads in his high school, Jack is bullied by some students.He learns that his friends also are dealing with difficult issues: Max reveals that his father beats his mother. Maggie has a gay father and shares her feelings about learning that.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gay_Place"title="The Gay Place">
In "The Flea Circus", Governor Fenstemaker maneuvers conservative state senator Roy Sherwood into helping him get a liberal appropriations bill passed. Roy is having an affair with Ouida Fielding, the estranged wife of another state senator, Earle Fielding. Roy also has to deal with the fact that one of his political colleagues (a rival for Ouida's affection) has probably taken a bribe. These things take place against a background of constant drinking and partying by Roy, his colleagues and their associates and hangers-on. Much of this occurs at the Dearly Beloved Beer and Garden Party (based on Austin’s Scholz Garten), where young politicians drink, philosophize, and gossip.In "Room Enough to Caper", junior U.S. senator Neil Christiansen, who was appointed to the seat by Fenstemaker after another senator's death, returns home to consider running for re-election. Fenstemaker's machinations propel Neil into announcing his candidacy. Meanwhile, Neil tries halfheartedly to rediscover his marriage and his family, yet continues to sleep with a woman who works for him. The novella concerns itself with Christiansen's rising political prospects as his home life deteriorates.In "Country Pleasures", the governor's party drives out to the set of a film starring Vicki McGown, the ex-wife of Fenstemaker's speechwriter Jay McGown. Vicki attempts to win Jay back, which causes tensions between Jay and his girlfriend Sarah (also the governor's secretary). Vicki takes the governor and Jay on a joyride to an old Mexican village, where the governor drunkenly signs Texas back to the Mexicans. The latter part of the story deals with an attempt to cover up a scandal which breaks open in the governor's absence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limpopo_Academy_of_Private_Detection"title="The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection">
Precious Ramotswe is pressed by troubles of two people close to her. Mma Silvia Potokwane, who heads the orphan farm and Fanwell, the younger of the two assistant mechanics, both need help. The weight of serious problems for these friends seems to limit the ideas from her usually prolific mind. Then a stranger from America appears at her office to say hello, none other than Clovis Andersen, the author of the book on which she and Mma Makutsi rely for good advice. Recently widowed, he is in the country to visit a friend who is setting up public libraries in Botswana. Mma Makutsi is married to Phuti Radiphuti, and Phuti is watching the progress of the new house being built for them.Mma Potokwane is dismissed from her position at the orphan farm by the board, which has decided to build a central cafeteria in place of meals cooked and served at the homes by the housemothers. She and the housemothers feel this new building will ruin the children's lives, allowing no time together over meals. Mma Potokwane sees no way around this dismissal and tries to move on with her life. Clovis Andersen suggests they follow the money, that is, learn who is to gain by getting the contract to build this unwanted cafeteria. Then Fanwell agrees to repair a vehicle for a friend, which the friend claims he bought from someone and plans to sell it on. The friend is dealing in stolen vehicles, and the police arrest both of them. This arrest shakes Fanwell to his core. The garage and the detective agency are upset. He did not know it was a stolen vehicle until the police told him it was. Mr J L B Matekoni finds a lawyer for his assistant, but the lawyer proves to be incompetent, which is humorous except when Fanwell is relying on him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Othappu"title="Othappu">
The novel opens with Marghalitha coming to her home after defrocking herself, as per her own wishes. Her family is shocked and lock her up in a store-room outside the house used for keeping raw bananas for ripening. For three days she is kept locked up without food or water. Eventually she leaves her home when she realizes that no matter what, her mother or brothers would not accept her back into the family. She wanders around and even makes a train journey to Angamali, where she spends the night in a hospital as she feels it would be the safest place for her. She is then brought by Fr. Roy Francis Kareekkan to stay with John Kasheesha, who is a friend. Fr. Kareekkan is the second important character. He is disillusioned about his role within the church and also is strongly attracted to Marghalitha. Marghalitha stays with John Kasheesha and his family, until the scandal comes to be known among his family members, which forces Marghalitha to leave so as to avoid conflict within Kasheesha's family. She is taken care for a while by her cousin Rebecca and later makes her way to the jungle retreat of Augustine, a Christian freethinker and social reformer. Here Fr. Kareekkan expresses his desire to leave the priesthood to be with her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2312_(novel)"title="2312 (novel)">
The novel is set in the year 2312, in the great city of Terminator on Mercury, which is built on gigantic tracks in order to constantly stay in the planet's habitable zone near the terminator. Swan Er Hong, an artist and former asteroid terrarium designer, is grieving over the sudden death of her step-grandmother, Alex, who was very influential among the inhabitants of Terminator. After the funeral procession, a conference is held among the family and the close friends of Alex, some of whom Swan has never heard of. This includes Fitz Wahram, a native of the moon Titan, whom Swan dislikes. Following the conference, Swan decides to head out to Io to visit another friend of Alex's, called Wang, who has designed one of the largest qubes, or quantum computers. While Swan is visiting Wang on Io, an apparent attack of some sort fails. An attack on Terminator shortly follows; a meteorite of artificial origin destroys the city's tracks, stopping the city and exposing it to sun, essentially cooking it. As Swan travels, she learns more of the mystery surrounding her grandmother's death and the destruction of her home-city of Terminator. With Wahram and Genette, Swan travels throughout the solar system and investigates an escalating series of conspiracies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albertine_(Rose_novel)"title="Albertine (Rose novel)">
The beautiful orphan Albertine comes into contact with the austere young Marcel at a Normandy seaside hotel, whilst on holiday with friends. She soon becomes embroiled in a destructive affair with the young man, trapping them both in his Paris apartment. His jealousy and her strong will, and bisexual attraction to others, cause both unhappiness. A gynocentric revisiting of Proust, it is a feminist re-imagining, giving Albertine a voice she has been denied in Proust's books. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotter_of_Her_Father's_Eyes"title="Dotter of Her Father's Eyes">
Mary Talbot recounts her childhood in Preston, Lancashire, focussing upon her relationship with her father, Joycean scholar James S. Atherton. Talbot became a scholar herself, working in critical discourse analysis and publishing about language and gender.The book juxtaposes Talbot's childhood with Lucia Joyce's -- the daughter of James Joyce. Inspired by Carol Shloss’s 2003 biography of Lucia, it covers her ambitions in dance and her deteriorating mental condition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betrayal_(Steel_novel)"title="Betrayal (Steel novel)">
This novel tells the story of film director, Tallie Jones, a Hollywood legend who experienced betrayals from the people she least expects.Tallie Jones is 39 years old. She is a successful director with critically acclaimed films and commercially successful productions. She has great and fabulous relationships with her aging father and lawyer, Sam Jones; her daughter in college, Maxfield; her boyfriend of four years and film producer, Hunter Lloyd; and finally, her personal assistant of seventeen years and best friend since film school, the glamorous Brigitte Parker. In short, she lives in a perfect world of success.But one day, it was called to her attention by her long-time accountant, Victor Carson that she is losing money without her knowledge from her financial records. Apparently, she is losing $25,000 monthly for the last three years. When Tallie finds out, she is completely at lost on how this has been happening since she fully trust that her well-ordered personal assistant, Brigitte takes care of everything. But nevertheless, Victor tells her to go look after it for somebody might be embezzling money from her. She confronts Brigitte with regards to this matter and tells her that her boyfriend, Hunt has been asking her for cash for the last three years. She also tells Tallie that Hunt has been cheating on her as he is involved with another woman for a year and that it took her many years to tell her the truth because she was protective of her relationship and does not intend to ruin the current happiness that she has felt for four years with Hunt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshirts_(novel)"title="Redshirts (novel)">
In the prologue, several senior officers of the "Intrepid", flagship of the Universal Union, lament the unusually high number of casualties of low-ranking crew members during recent away missions and conclude that they will need more crewmen to replace them.The "Intrepid" takes on five new ensigns including Andrew Dahl, an expert in alien religions and xenobiology. Dahl quickly discerns that the crew is extremely phobic of being near the senior officers and of going on away missions due to their high fatality rate. Over the course of several missions, various crew members suggest that the deaths are due to incompetence, superstition, or cosmic forces, requiring "sacrifices" of some crew members so that others will survive.After several close calls, Dahl meets Jenkins, a crew member who offers a different theory: their reality and timeline are under periodic influence of a badly written television show from the past. As the writers create the plot, characters' free will temporarily ceases in order to progress "the Narrative" of the show. This is why otherwise good officers are occasionally incompetent, Ensigns make poor decisions, and the ship has mysterious technology on board to produce last-minute inventions and medicines which would otherwise be impossible to produce: the narrative is subject to the skill of the writers, who are not military or scientific experts and need to artificially maintain a high sense of drama with on-screen deaths. Jenkins explains that Dahl and the other Ensigns' routine duties and colorful histories will inevitably make them targets of "the narrative" when the writers need "glorified extras" to kill for emotional impact.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siege_of_Malta_(novel)"title="The Siege of Malta (novel)">
An official of the Order of the Knights of St. John arrives in Spain to summon one of their Knights Commander, Don Manuel de Vilheyna, to Malta, the headquarters of the Order, which is threatened by the Turks. He returns to Malta with Vilheyna's nephew, Francisco, and a Servant-at-Arms of the Order, Juan Ramegas. Vilheyna's niece, Angelica, secretly in love with Francisco, is left to pine for him. Vilheyna himself visits the king of Spain to ask for his support in the Order's cause, then follows the others to Malta. He is involved in a naval skirmish with the Turks, who are now attacking the island, but makes harbour and is welcomed by the Grand Master of the Order, Jean Parisot de Valette.The scene shifts to the enemy camp where we see Mustapha and Piali, the commanders of the Turkish army and navy respectively, each scheming to gain an advantage over the other. On the Maltese side a full Council of the Order considers strategies for the defence of the island. News arrives that Vilheyna's old enemy, Dragut, has arrived in command of a force of Algerian and Tunisian corsairs. Renewed Turkish attacks are repulsed, partly as a result of Ramegas' exploit in destroying a new secret weapon of the Turks, a giant elevating cannon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinheads_(novel)"title="Skinheads (novel)">
"Skinheads" is based around three generations of the same family—Terry English, his nephew Ray (aka Nutty Ray), and Terry's fifteen-year-old son, Lol (named after the ska singer Laurel Aitken). While the bulk of the book is set in the present day, it includes recurring sections from periods considered key to skinhead culture—1969 and the early 1980s—with events linking to the overriding story.Terry is the main character, an original skinhead approaching his fiftieth birthday and mourning the loss of his wife, while attempting to keep the volatile Ray out of trouble and being concerned that his son, Laurel, might be a closet hippy. Terry is also facing a life-or-death problem but finds strength in his long-term friendships, the responsibilities of running a minicab firm, a dream to reopen the boarded-up and recently rediscovered Union Jack Club, and his ongoing love of Jamaican ska and bluebeat.Ray, meanwhile, is angry and on edge, but doing his best to hold his life together. However, he does not like drug dealers and especially those trying to sell to his children. If Terry reflects the easygoing music of his youth, then Ray mirrors the aggression and street politics of Oi! punk, while facing the same smears levelled at the original movement. Lol is a much more relaxed character who plays less of a role in the main story, but with his musical interests, shows the fusion of ska, punk, and Oi! in bands like Rancid, as well as the political and cultural shifts of the previous decades.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Normal"title="Waiting for Normal">
A sixth-grader, Addie, has just moved into a trailer with her troubled mother. Once she has gotten over the move, Addie befriends some girls at school and a lady named Soula who runs the minimart. Time passes, and Addie's stepfather and two half-sisters visit less frequently than she'd like.Suddenly, her mother gets involved in a romantic relationship, though she doesn't say so at first, and vanishes for days, sometimes weeks at a time, leaving Addie alone. Soon Addie's mother reveals that she is pregnant, despite their poor living conditions and financial situation. During one of her mother's disappearances, Addie accidentally sets the RV on fire, which leads Soula to call social services. Soon after, Soula dies of breast cancer, which causes Addie much grief. Social services briefly place Addie with her grandfather before she happily agrees to be adopted by her stepfather and his new fiancee. The novel ends with Addie living with Dwight and his family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Could_Fly"title="The Girl Who Could Fly">
Piper McCloud is a schooled farm girl who lives in Hoghland County with her parents, Betty and Josh McCloud. She is characterized as talkative and imaginative. Her parents shield her from the outside world because Piper has the innate ability to float. This power was discovered when she was a baby by Betty, who believes it is karmic punishment because she was too old for children when Piper was born. After noticing that baby birds learn to fly from being pushed out of the nest, Piper decides to jump off of the roof. This works and she discovers she has the ability to fly as well as float. This worries her mother, and Piper is forbidden from continuing her pursuit of flying. Disregarding this, Piper perfects her flying in secret.Betty later tells Piper that they'll be going to the Fourth of July picnic. This excites Piper, since it is her first social event (and chance to make friends) outside of church. However, Millie Mae Miller, the McClouds' neighbor and local gossip, has spread a rumor that Piper is mentally unwell and that's why she isn't allowed to go to school. Piper meets a girl named Sally Sue, and the two begin to become friends. Before this friendship can grow, Sally Sue is revealed to be Millie Mae's daughter, and begins being rude to Piper over the rumors. Piper lashes out and reveals she saw Millie Mae kick the Millers' dog. Sally Sue is scared and - not knowing that Piper can fly - thinks she is spying on her family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_Winds_series"title="Strong Winds series">
## Volume 1 "The Salt-stained Book".Donny Walker (aged 13) and his deaf mother Skye travel in a campervan to Shotley to meet Donny's long-lost great aunt Ellen. Following a car accident authorities place Donny in foster care and his mother in a psychiatric hospital. Donny forms friendships with local children, "discovers his inborn prowess as a sailor" and evades a local police officer to find his great aunt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Testament_of_Mary"title="The Testament of Mary">
At an unspecified age, when Mary is close to death, she is regularly visited by followers of her son who wish to record her testament before she dies. However they are antagonistic towards Mary because they believe her son, Jesus, was a Messiah, a claim which she refuses to support.Mary reflects that, like many young men, her son left their small town for opportunities in Jerusalem. Marcus, a cousin of hers, later visited her to reveal that her son was being closely watched by Roman and Jewish authorities after appearing to cure a man who could no longer walk; the cousin urged Mary to have Jesus return to live with her to save his life and not draw further ire.In order to speak to Jesus, Mary travels to a nearby wedding where news that Jesus has resurrected Lazarus, a childhood friend, precedes his arrival. At the wedding Mary tries to convince Jesus to return to Nazareth but he ignores her. Some of the revellers later claim that Jesus turned water into wine but Mary questions their sobriety and did not personally witness this account. She later leaves in order to protect herself.Marcus visits Mary again to tell her that her son has been arrested and will be crucified. Mary travels to the city with Mary, one of Lazarus' sisters, and one of her son's followers, who promises protection, in order to witness the event, still believing there is something she can do to save him. As she witnesses the violent crucifixion she spies Marcus and realizes he has lured her there to be arrested like the rest of her son's followers. Knowing they believe she will never abandon her son before he dies, Mary and the others flee anyway, thinking only of saving her life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holy_Flower"title="The Holy Flower">
Brother John, who has been wandering in Africa for years, confides to Allan a huge and rare orchid, the largest ever found. Allan arrives to England with the flower and there he meets Mr. Stephen Somers.Due to a mixup at auction, Somers ends up paying a huge sum for a particularly rare flower. His Father agrees to cover the cost of the flower but also disinherits his son. Stephen resolves to sell the flower and use it to finance an expedition to Africa to recover a live specimen of the huge orchid Allan brought back with him.They meet Arabian slave traders, warrior tribes, cannibals, and a giant gorilla.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Beetle's_Cellar"title="Under the Beetle's Cellar">
Set near Austin, Texas it tells of Samuel Mordecai, a fanatical self-proclaimed prophet who kidnaps a bus-load of schoolchildren and their driver, a Vietnam veteran. The captives are to be held underground for fifty days on starvation rations and without external contact as "earth purification" in preparation for the imminent end of the world. Surrounded by police and FBI, Mordecai's fortified compound is at the centre of world-wide media attention. Molly Cates is a journalist with the "Lone Star Monthly", who interviewed Mordecai two years previously and is the only person outside the cult to have had any contact with him.The book is set in the last four days of the siege and has two narrative streams: one of them underground, as the driver battles to keep up the spirit of the children and prepare for the end of the fifty days; the other follows Molly Cates as she investigates Mordecai's past to find a key to breaking his fanatical resolve as it becomes increasingly apparent that the children are to be sacrificed as part of his apocalyptic plan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_Vendome_(novel)"title="Hotel Vendome (novel)">
This novel tells the story of Hugues Martin, a graduate of the prestigious "École hôtelière de Lausanne" in Switzerland. He owns the Hotel Vendome, an illustrious hotel located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossings_(Steel_novel)"title="Crossings (Steel novel)">
The ship "Normandie" makes a voyage from Washington, D.C. to France despite an impending war. Aboard the ship is American Liane de Villiers, the young wife of an old ambassador to France.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Alice_Bhatti"title="Our Lady of Alice Bhatti">
The story revolves around the everyday life of a Christian nurse working in a government hospital in the Pakistani city of Karachi.The author explained that it was a love story, but some critics suggested that the novel is also a statement on the plight of religious minorities living in Pakistan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Korra_(season_1)"title="The Legend of Korra (season 1)">
The series opens introducing Korra as the Avatar and showing that she has mastered all elemental arts except airbending. Korra runs away to Republic City so that Tenzin, Avatar Aang's youngest son, can train her therein. In the metropolis, Korra clashes with police chief Lin Beifong (the daughter of Toph Beifong of the original series) after dispensing vigilante justice to the local triads. Tarrlok, an ambitious member of the city's ruling council, enlists Korra against the "Equalists", an anti-bender revolution led by the masked Amon. As Korra explores Republic City, she befriends the brothers Mako and Bolin and joins their pro-bending team, the "Fire Ferrets". The team is sponsored by Asami Sato, daughter of a wealthy industrialist, and the four together form the new "Team Avatar".After Korra's appearance in the city, the Equalists become increasingly violent, climaxing in an attack on the pro-bending arena. When Tarrlok indiscriminately represses non-benders, Korra refuses to support him. In the resulting fight, Tarrlok overpowers Korra with bloodbending, an illegal form of waterbending, and kidnaps her, framing the Equalists. As Amon arrives at Tarrlok's hideout and removes Tarrlok's bending, Korra escapes, only to find Republic City facing an Equalist conquest.In the two-part finale, naval reinforcements led by Iroh (the grandson of Zuko of the original series), are defeated by Equalist sea mines and biplanes. Attempting to find Amon, Korra learns that Tarrlok and Amon are the sons of Yakone, a mob boss defeated 42 years ago by Avatar Aang. Amon strips Korra of her bending abilities but Korra reveals her dormant airbending abilities in a moment of distress, exposing Amon as a waterbender and causing all his followers to desert him. He flees with Tarrlok, who detonates their boat on the open sea. Despondent, Korra establishes spiritual contact with her predecessor Aang, who restores her bending powers, allowing her to do the same to Amon's other victims.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_of_William_Clissold"title="The World of William Clissold">
As its subtitle suggests, "The World of William Clissold" is not a conventional novel. Only slightly more than half its pages are devoted to events in the eponymous protagonist's life; the others are devoted to extended discussions of general ideas, "everything as it is reflected in my brain.""The World of William Clissold" is written in the first person, except for a "Note before the Title Page" by Wells and an "Epilogue" by William Clissold's brother, Dickon. The rest of the novel is divided into six books.In "Book the First: The Frame of the Picture" William Clissold describes his general worldview, describing his loss of religious faith and view of human life as "The Adventure of Mankind;" this part includes a description of a meeting with Carl Gustav Jung, whom Wells had met in 1924. The first part of this book is said to have been written in his brother's London abode; the second part in William Clissold's house in Provence. "Book the Second: The Story of the Clissolds—My Father and the Flow of Things" recounts the upbringing of William Clissold and his brother Dickon, which was violently disrupted by the suicide of their businessman father, Richard Clissold, after he was convicted and sentenced to prison for fraud; it includes long passages on "systems in history," the ideas of Karl Marx, and the development of the institution of money. "Book the Third: The Story of the Clissolds—Essence of Dickon" tells the story of his brother's family life and innovative career in advertising, and includes extensive commentary on the historical importance of World War I.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Volcano"title="The Golden Volcano">
Two Canadians, Summy Skim and Ben Raddle, are unexpectedly bequeathed a mining claim in the Klondike. They encounter many things such as disaster, disease, and extreme weather. On the way back to Montreal, where the two cousins reside, Ben Raddle and Summy Skim are trapped in a large flood that floods the entire Klondike. Ben has a disease and a broken leg, and needs to be taken to the hospital to be seen by the trustful Dr. Pilcox. Summy Skim and their guide, Bill Steel, bring the unfortunate man to the hospital, where he is healed a few months later.On the way out to a hunt, Summy Skim, Bill Steel, and the trusted Indian, Neluto, discover a man, torn apart, and lying under a tree. They come to the man's rescue, and bring him back to the hospital, where he dies a few days later. Before he dies, the man tells Ben Raddle and Summy Skim of a volcano of pure gold named the "Golden Mount". The cousins and their guides then get a caravan together to return to the Golden Mount. While out on a hunt, Summy Skim and Neluto discover the two villains and their caravan, plotting to take over the volcano.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyfriends_with_Girlfriends"title="Boyfriends with Girlfriends">
"Boyfriends with Girlfriends" follows several teens (seventeen years old or younger) as they attempt to figure out who they are to themselves, to each other, and to the world. Lance and Sergio are attracted to each other, but Sergio's only serious relationship was with a girl. Allie and Kimiko have fallen hard for each other, leaving Allie confused. She has a boyfriend and doesn't know what her attraction to Kimiko means for her sexuality or for her relationship with her boyfriend.Kimiko suffers from poor self-esteem and from the expectations of her mother, who wants her to be a good Japanese girl, feminine and demure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ark_Sakura"title="The Ark Sakura">
The novel begins with the protagonist, who calls himself Mole, going to a flea market in order to find people to live aboard his "ark," an abandoned mine that he has outfitted so that it will withstand the nuclear holocaust that he predicts is imminent. His eye is caught by a man selling insects called clockbugs. The insect dealer has two shills, or "sakura" as they are known in Japanese, working for him, one an aggressive, impulsive young man, and the other a sly but attractive woman. When Mole offers the insect dealer a ticket aboard his ark, it is stolen by the shills. After chasing the pair of them back to the ark, Mole and the insect dealer discover that the shills are not the only intruders: other unseen, unwelcome people have been prowling the dark corridors as well. Mole comes to accept the presence of the two shills in exchange for their help in repelling the intruders. But his fantasy of having power over the other residents of the "ark" unwinds as matters become more and more complex. As a brigade of old men, a band of school girls, and a group of wayward youths all come to occupy the hull of the "ark," Mole is forced to abandon his creation, his sanctum breached and his heart broken by the female sakura who rejects his advances.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meanwhile_(novel)"title="Meanwhile (novel)">
"Meanwhile" is divided into two books: "The Utopographer in the Garden" and "Advent".In the first book, Cynthia and Philip Rylands, a wealthy British couple, are entertaining guests at Casa Terragena, an Italian villa with a famous garden on the Italian Riviera. Among the party are a prominent author, "the great Mr. Sempack," an American aesthete, Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan, the beautiful, vivacious Lady Catherine, Col. and Mrs. Bullace, Lady Grieswold, and a number of others. At dinner, Sempack, a brilliant talker with ideas similar to Wells's, expounds the idea that a "Great Age" is certain to come, and that contemporaries are obliged in the present to live, as it were, "meanwhile": "Since nothing was in order, nothing was completely right. We lived provisionally. There was no just measure of economic worth; we had to live unjustly ... We were justified in taking life as we found it; in return if we had ease and freedom we ought to do all that we could to increase knowledge and bring the great days of a common world-order nearer, a universal justice, the real civilisation, the consummating life, the days that would justify the Martyrdom of Man."A crisis is precipitated when Cynthia Rylands, who is pregnant with her first child, surprised her husband engaged in a dalliance "in the little bathing chalet" with one of their guests, a Miss Clarges. She is distraught and confides in Sempack, who offers her wise advice in a long letter: she should not forgive her husband, but rather "realize that there is nothing to forgive." Mrs. Rylands accepts Sempack's notion that her husband's real problem is not infidelity but idleness, and the first book ends with him departing at her urging for a visit to England, where his family's vast coal holdings are at risk in the crisis that culminated in the 1926 general strike.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Tall_Grass"title="In the Tall Grass">
Cal and Becky Demuth are inseparable siblings (being called Irish twins by their parents, as they are 19 months apart). Becky finds out during her sophomore year of college that she is pregnant, leading the twins' parents to suggest she go live with her aunt and uncle until the baby is born. Since it is spring break, Cal decides to accompany her on her cross-country trip. They stop at numerous tourist locations along the way.After driving for three days, they stop at a field of grass over nine feet high after they hear a boy named Tobin calling for help. The twins also hear his mother Natalie yelling at him to stop making noise, warning "he will hear you". Cal thinks Tobin is just a few feet inside the field and walks into it to rescue the boy, Natalie's cries having mysteriously gone silent. Tobin sounds close so he dives for him, only to find no one there and realize that Tobin's voice now sounds far away.Becky calls the authorities as she follows Cal into the field, but loses the signal just a few feet in. Cal and Becky get the idea to jump within the field to determine each other's position. The first attempt reveals they are only a yard from one another, but upon a second attempt Becky sees Cal is now a significant distance from her. Cal stumbles across a golden retriever's dead body, having died of dehydration. Becky and Cal become increasingly agitated when they realize the field is somehow shifting their location from one another, one minute sounding close and the next leagues away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bad_Boy_Can_Be_Good_For_a_Girl"title="A Bad Boy Can Be Good For a Girl">
Josie is thrilled when TL notices her across the dance floor because of her "couldn't care less" act. Although refusing to at first, she begins ignoring her best friends, Kim and Caroline, but never gives them the cold shoulder. She's a freshman and, despite some close encounters, refuses to give up her virginity to him. She overhears a conversation between him and a friend of his about how she won't put out, and he breaks up with her later. She writes about him in "Forever...", a book in the library, and is the "fearless ringleader."Nicolette chooses to ignore Josie's warnings and approaches TL, who asks her out. She considers herself a "loner" and "puts out" almost immediately, believing she has fallen in love. She is considered a "whore" around school. She is very proud, but heartbroken when she discovers he took another girl, Aviva, to a party. Furious, she eventually checks out "Forever...", reads Josie's notes and then befriends her.Aviva is approached by TL in biology, when he needs help. They begin a fun-loving relationship and she overhears him talking to a friend about how she might be different but she might not be. She eventually does sleep with him, and says she loves him, causing him to break up with her. Kristen tries to apologize, but she doesn't want to hear it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animals,_Property,_and_the_Law"title="Animals, Property, and the Law">
The book is divided into an introduction, which describes Francione's concept of "legal welfarism," followed by three parts: (1) "The Status of Animals as Property, (2) "A General Application of the Theory: Anticruelty Statutes," and (3) "A Specific Application of the Theory: The Regulation of Animal Experimenation." The epilogue is entitled, "An Alternative to Legal Welfarism?"In part 1, Francione argues that nonhuman animals are the personal property, or "chattel", of their owners, even if recognized as a special kind of property. As such, they cannot themselves possess legal rights, because they are the objects of the exercise of someone else's rights. Whenever the interests of an animal are balanced against the interests of the owner (assuming the animal is recognized as having interests), the owner's interests almost always prevail, no matter how trivial they might be. Francione compares the situation to the treatment of slaves in the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries, where legislation existed that ostensibly protected them, while the courts ignored that the institution of slavery rendered that protection largely meaningless.He argues further that the United States Animal Welfare Act is an example of symbolic, as opposed to functional, legislation, relying on concepts described by John Dwyer in 1990. It is symbolic, he writes (quoting Dwyer), because it is an example of a law where "the legislature has failed to address the administrative and political constraints that will block implementation of the statute."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Talent_for_Loving"title="A Talent for Loving">
In the 16th century an Aztec priest has cut off his own hand and used the bloody stump to lay a curse upon a blasphemous Spanish conquistador and all his direct descendants. The curse: that once any of the descendants, whether male or female, have tasted physical love, even in the form of a single kiss, they will spend the rest of their lives as being nearly sexually insatiable. Three centuries later the beautiful young virginal daughter of a fabulously wealthy Texas rancher and gambler is its latest victim. An elaborate set of contests and races is arranged to choose which of two cowboys will win her hand in marriage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Are_You_My_Mother?_(memoir)"title="Are You My Mother? (memoir)">
"Are You My Mother?" is composed of seven chapters, each introduced by a description of a dream that Bechdel had. The dream is then interpreted and explained in the context of various events in Bechdel's life, jumping backwards and forwards in time in doing so. The book covers events that occurred before she was born all the way up to the process of editing "Are You My Mother?" itself. The book is Bechdel's attempt to come to grips with her relationship with her mother, an unaffectionate amateur actor trapped in a marriage to a closeted homosexual. In exploring her mother's lack of warmth, Bechdel supplements her own recollections with insights from the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, particularly with reference to his notion of the true self and the false self and his theory on transitional objects. While various scenes depicting visits to psychologists later in life make it clear that Bechdel's childhood left a troubling mark on her adult life, the book ends on an uplifting note, concluding with the lines, "There was a certain thing I did not get from my mother. There is a lack, a gap, a void. But in its place, she has given me something else. Something, I would argue, that is far more valuable. She has given me the way out."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_(novel)"title="Canada (novel)">
After his parents are arrested for robbing a bank, fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons is left to fend for himself. His twin sister Berner has run off, leaving him to a family friend who secrets him away to Saskatchewan, Canada. There Dell is to live with the American Arthur Remlinger, a man with a cool demeanor and a hidden inner violence that threatens Dell's well-being.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Wolke"title="Die Wolke">
The story deals with a Chernobyl-type nuclear disaster happening on German soil. The heroine of the story is a fourteen-year-old girl who flees the contaminating cloud of radiation and experiences the ensuing breakdown of social order.The story begins at school where Janna-Berta and the other students and teachers are alarmed of a nuclear accident in the vicinity. She returns home. Her younger brother Uli is alone because the parents are away and the grandparents on vacation. Together, they flee by bicycle, because all the neighbours have already left. They meet chaos on the roads. Uli collapses with his bicycle and is run over by a car and killed. Janna-Berta, in shock, is taken to the station in Bad Hersfeld. She wants to return to her brother to bury him, is contaminated by radiation, and collapses.She wakes up in a provisional hospital in Herleshausen, where she witnesses the hardships of others. She learns of the extent of the disaster from television and a nurse. Her hair falls out. She makes a friend, Ayse, who later dies from radiation poisoning. Her aunt from Hamburg finds her and tells her that her parents and youngest brother, who had been with them, are dead. The news was intended to be kept secret.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Doubt"title="The Age of Doubt">
Inspector Montalbano has a dream in between the tragic and the ridiculous, which reveals his recurring thoughts about death and his relationship with Livia.In the dream, he's witnessing his own funeral, Catarella himself tells him that he's dead. Attending the funeral are the usual police investigators: Coroner Dr. Pasquano, who grumpily refuses to give details on the deceased before the autopsy, Questor Bonetti-Alderighi, who does not authorize Montalbano to investigate his own death, and his friend Mimì Augello. They are all there, except for one person: Livia, his girlfriend. An irritated Montalbano phones her and she calmly tells him that she won't have time to attend the funeral and that, to say it plainly, she will in fact seize this unique opportunity, his death, to extricate herself from an overlong relationship and look for pastures new.A loud noise wakes Montalbano, caused by the stormy sea. The sea and the port of Vigata become the setting of Montalbano's new investigation, involving two vessels moored side by side at the Vigata docks: a powerful speedboat and the "Vanna", a luxury yacht whose crew has found a dinghy at sea carrying a disfigured man killed by poison.Montalbano suspects foul play involving some of the vessels' crews and asks for the collaboration of a female officer of the Port Authorities: enter Laura, a beautiful and intelligent young woman who falls desperately in love with the Inspector, who loses his heart to her, like a passionate teenager.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Rose_(Traven_novel)"title="The White Rose (Traven novel)">
The novel concerns the efforts of "Condor Oil", a (fictional) American oil company, to purchase a Mexican ranch from its unwilling owner.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_and_the_Goth"title="The Ghost and the Goth">
Alona Dare was the most popular girl in school, at least she was until she was hit by a bus. Returning to the scene of her death as a ghost, she expects everyone to be upset over her death, but her classmates move on faster than she had hoped. The only person that can see and hear her is Will Killian, the school outcast and ghost-talker. Alona, used to getting her own way, haunts Will until he agrees to help her figure out how to cross over to the big white light that she keeps expecting. Will has problems of his own; every ghost in Groundsboro High, including a seething black mass of energy, knows that he can see them, and they all want him to carry out their final wishes. Will and Alona have to work together to get the ghosts to move on, and figure out what Alona has to do in order to move on to the white light.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemonium_(novel)"title="Pandemonium (novel)">
The book follows up the events of "Delirium". Lena is now in the Wilds alone, and the sequel begins by switching the chapters from the present "now" and the past "then" point of view of Lena until they are joined together in Chapter 13.Unfortunately for her, the Wilds are less wonderful than she thought. She becomes very weak and is found nearly dead by a group of people. She is helped her back to health by the group, which takes place as her new family. She is now free of the "cure," but she and her acquaintances decide that they must do the same for everyone else and restore society to its former state.That is easier said than done, as Lena and her group have much standing in their way. The book also follows Lena in her life while she lives in New York City with two other characters from the Wilds: Raven and Tack. She is part of the DFA, the Deliria Free America, and during one of its rallies, she is kidnapped by other Invalids, called Scavengers, and held in captive with Julian Fineman, the leader of the youth division of the DFA. Julian is unable to receive the procedure because he has a brain tumor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_4-Hour_Chef"title="The 4-Hour Chef">
"The 4-Hour Chef" contains practical cooking and recipe tips and uses the skill of cooking to explain methods for accelerated learning. Recipes based on Ferriss' "Slow-Carb Diet" are included, and the book is presented as a practical guide to mastering cooking and food. Ferris presents these cooking techniques alongside his ideas on self-improvement and "meta-learning".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starters_(novel)"title="Starters (novel)">
"Starters" takes place in a futuristic Los Angeles, where a biological weapon has killed everyone not vaccinated against it. The only ones that survive the attack are either under 20 or over 60 years of age, due to being given priority for the vaccine before the war. The term "Starters" refers to those under the age of 20, while "Enders" is used to describe the survivors over the age of 60. Because Starters are underage and not allowed to work, many of them are starving and desperate, not having funds to afford necessities. Some Starters have heard of an illegal way to earn money by allowing Enders to temporarily inhabit their bodies via a neuro-chip implanted by the Body Bank.Sixteen-year-old Callie is one such Starter, who has lived in abandoned buildings with her brother Tyler and friend Michael thus far to survive. When her temporary home is smoked out and cleared of people, she resorts to the Body Bank in order to provide for the three of them. She is startled to awaken in the life of a rich Ender after her neurochip malfunctions. Callie initially relishes the chance to live a lavish life where she wants for nothing and even finds herself dating the grandson of a U.S. Senator, but soon discovers that the Ender she's linked to has big plans to bring down the Body Bank, and not everyone she meets is what they seem.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraph_Avenue_(novel)"title="Telegraph Avenue (novel)">
Set in 2004, Archy Stallings, who is black, and Nat Jaffe, who is Jewish, are proprietors of Brokeland Records, a record shop located in north Oakland for twelve years. Their used vinyl business is threatened by ex-NFL superstar Gibson Goode's planned construction of his second Dogpile Thang megastore two blocks away. They feel betrayed because their local city councilman, Chandler Flowers, has switched sides, and now supports Dogpile.A subplot concerns their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, who are partners in Berkeley Birth Partners, a midwifery business. A home birth goes wrong, the mother is rushed to the hospital, and the attending physician, after taking care of the mother, insults Gwen in a racially tinged manner. She blows up, and the doctor has the hospital start procedures to drop Gwen and Aviva's hospital privileges.Another storyline concerns Luther Stallings, Archy's father, an actor in blaxploitation films in the 70s. He was never a part of Archy's life, and Archy wants nothing to do with him. Luther has been in and out of jail and on and off drugs since his acting career ended, has been clean for over a year, and he keeps himself trim. He is involved with his former co-star Valetta Moore.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Heavenly_Fire"title="City of Heavenly Fire">
Shadowhunters of the Los Angeles Institute meet to discuss the army of Endarkened Shadowhunters when the army, led by Sebastian Morgenstern, ambush the Institute, endarken some shadowhunters, and kidnap Mark Blackthorn, leaving Mark's five half-siblings and Emma Carstairs to escape to Alicante.Maryse Lightwood announces to the New York Institute that an emergency meeting is due in Alicante to discuss the attack on five Institutes around the world. Clary Fray reluctantly leaves Simon Lewis to be guarded by Maia Roberts and Jordan Kyle for his safety. However, Simon is kidnapped by Maureen Brown and her vampire aides to be her groom, but Raphael Santiago frees and helps him to come to Alicante. Praetor Lupus, the brotherhood of werewolves, is soon attacked by the Endarkened with Jordan and Praetor Scott among the casualties, resulting in Bat Velasquez and Rufus Hastings battling for the position of pack leader. Rufus is about to deliver the death blow to Bat when Maia Roberts steps in and challenges Rufus. The vacuum of power is finally ended when Maia kills Rufus, becoming the new leader, and also tricks Maureen into drinking holy water so the latter's aide, Lily, can usurp her to become the leader of the vampire clan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Light"title="Ancient Light">
"Ancient Light" is narrated by Alexander Cleave, a 60-something year-old retired actor, and takes place 10 years after the death of his daughter Cass in "Eclipse". Cleave begins to record his memories of a first, unlikely affair he had at age 15 with Mrs Gray, a married woman 20 years his senior. "Billy Gray was my best friend and I fell in love with his mother." The book moves between memories of this affair and his current state of grief he shares with his wife Lydia, touching on themes of family, love, grief, and the reliability of memory. His solitude is interrupted by an offer to play the lead in a film entitled "The Invention of the Past". The film is to be based on the life of literary theorist Axel Vander, the man with Cass when she killed herself in Italy. On the set Cleave bonds with Dawn Devonport, an emotionally fragile young ingenue mourning the death of her father. As Cleave continues to narrate his past relationship with Mrs Gray to its inevitable conclusion, the father-daughter relationship grows between him and Dawn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfarers"title="Starfarers">
Earth sends out a spaceship to investigate starfaring in far distance space of which traces have been found. The ship "Envoy", bearing a crew of six men and four women, travels at speed close to the speed of light. At the end of the journey the crew meets a Centaur-like species on a planet they call Tahir that has left spacefaring behind. Sentient life is also detected in connection with a nearby black hole, a reading confirmed by the Tahirans. Their interest aroused, the Earthlings can send a combined crew to investigate.Communications with this "Holont" is established and much knowledge acquired. Differences aboard the ship, however, lead to the death of three men (Brent, Russek and Cleland), and female pilot Kilbirnie crashes into the black hole. The six Earthlings left drop the Tahirans off at their homeworld and head towards Earth.In between the story jumps regularly back to the development of human society over the gaps of many thousand years and to that of the Kith, the closed group doing the starfaring, who are often shunned by the rest of Earth. The Kith have their own settlements on different planets, where some retire to from time to time.Earth has changed over the long period of time taken up by the voyage of the "Envoy", and no one is much interested in spacefaring anymore. On Harbor, a colony of Earth, the "Envoy" crew finds remainders of the Kith society, which still are connected to spacefaring. But the last ship to plot trade-routes in space, the "Fleetwing", disappears from tracking. The cause is a Zero-Zero-failure ripping off the rear part of the ship. The "Envoy" sets out on a rescue mission as soon as possible but twenty years of outside time have passed by the time they reach the "Fleetwing". They save the remaining crew, thus building a foundation of experienced spacefarers to start spacefaring anew with the knowledge acquired from the Holont.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sea_Lady"title="The Sea Lady">
The intricately narrated story involves a mermaid who comes ashore on the southern coast of England in 1899. Feigning a desire to become part of genteel society (under the alias "Miss Doris Thalassia Waters"), the mermaid's real design is to seduce Harry Chatteris, a man she saw "some years ago" in "the South Seas—near Tonga," who has taken her fancy. This she reveals in a conversation with the narrator's second cousin Melville, a friend of the family who adopts "Miss Waters". As a supernatural being, she is unimpressed with the fact that Chatteris is engaged to the socially-minded Miss Adeline Glendower and is trying to make amends for his wastrel youth by entering politics. With mere words, the mermaid shakes both Chatteris and Melville's faith in their society's norms and expectations, enigmatically telling them that "there are better dreams". In the end, Chatteris is unable to resist her alluring charms, though succumbing supposedly means his death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spoiler_(novel)"title="The Spoiler (novel)">
"The Spoiler" is set in London during the 1990s and follows two female newspaper employees. Honor Tait is an eighty-year-old seasoned veteran while Tamara Sim is a new graduate that puts together lists for a gossip newspaper. Tamara is sent to interview Honor, with the intent to dish on her personal life. However the elderly woman is known for being tricky and isn't willing to give up details about her private life without a fight. As the two women clash and each paper is out to get the highest amount of sales, the stakes get higher and more desperate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triptych_(Frey_novel)"title="Triptych (Frey novel)">
BeforeThe novel begins in a small Welsh town in 2013, where Basil Grey, a mechanical engineer and a member of the United Nation's run Institute, has just witnessed his lover, an alien named Kalp, being shot to death in their living room. Basil's coworkers, led by Agent Aitken, shot him for a traitor and a spy, and drag Basil out of the house and to the Institute's interrogation rooms. He is joined by his wife, Gwen Pierson, and as she tries to convince him that Kalp had betrayed them, Basil has a revelation about a small mechanical device he had seen in the Institutes workrooms, which he has nicknamed a "Flasher".Part I: BackNarrated by Evvie Pierson, the first part of the book opens on a fall day in 1983 on the Pierson Family farm. Evvie's gardening is interrupted when an alien spaceship crash lands in her raspberry patch and the pilot attempts to murder both her and her infant daughter, Gwennie. They are saved by Basil Grey and an adult Gwen Pierson, who didn't realize that the Flasher would make them travel backwards in time.Over the course of twenty four hours, Basil attempts to repair the Flasher so they can make a return trip to the 21st Century; Gwen, Basil, and her father Mark bury both the body of the alien pilot and the space ship; and Gwen reveals to Evvie that they have a tumultuous relationship in the future and that Gwen has stopped speaking to her mother. Evvie blames herself and resolves to do her best to repair the rift when Gwen has grown up. Gwen also reveals that she was married to both Kalp and Basil in a triad relationship called an Aglunate, a tradition of Kalp's people, but that Kalp was killed for selling secrets about the Institute to a group of assassins who are targeting Institute employees. With the help Evvie, Basil and Gwen realize that the assassins are time travelling to target Aglunated Institute Employees and as such, Kalp can't have been the traitor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cry_Wolf_(novel)"title="Cry Wolf (novel)">
The plot is set minorly in Dar-es-Salaam and majorly in the Ethiopian desert-lands sometime in the 1930s, just as the Axis powers were starting to pursue their colonial ambitions.The novel starts off in Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania. Jake Barton, an engineer from Texas, and Major Gareth Swales, a British hustler, form an uneasy alliance in order to refurbish four armoured cars which Swales is planning to sell to an Ethiopian prince, Lij Mikhael. During their meeting and proposed selling, they meet the American reporter Victoria "Vicky" Campbell and both the men are smitten at once. Later the Lij tells them that he is buying the armoured cars as well the ammunition to fight the Italians, who are planning an invasion of Ethiopia, but owing to an international embargo imposed on Ethiopia, he can not import weapons by himself and consequently asks Swales to smuggle the cars into Ethiopia via French and British Somaliland. He also dispatches the services of his nephew Gregarious to help. Vicky also volunteers to help. The four of them ship the cars in a slave ship, then drive it from the seashore across the desert to the Ethiopian highlands, where they are met by the Ras Gholum and the Ethiopian people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Walk_in_Wolf_Wood"title="A Walk in Wolf Wood">
John and Margaret Begbie are two adolescent siblings from England vacationing in Germany with their parents. While resting at the edge of an area of the Black Forest, which is named "Wolfenwald" ("Wolf Wood"), they suddenly see a strange man dressed in archaic garments running past them, weeping. Curious, and with their parents distracted, they follow him and soon come upon a gold medal they saw around the stranger's neck and which he lost in his flight. Then they follow his trail to an ancient, derelict cottage in the forest, where they find the stranger's clothes under the bed. Dusk suddenly falls, and the two children are menaced by a huge wolf appearing at the hut. John chases it away by hurling the medal at him, and he and Margaret run back to their campsite, only to find their parents and the car mysteriously missing.After settling down for the night, in the hopes their parents will return soon, they are woken at dawn by the re-appearance of the wolf being chased by a medieval-looking hunting party. After Margaret sends them the wrong way, and noting more and more features in the surrounding area changing gradually, the children begin to believe that they have been caught in some sort of weird dream. Lacking an alternative, they return to the cottage, where they are surprised to find it inhabited by the weeping stranger. The latter introduces himself as Mardian, a courtier and close friend to one Duke Otho, the ruler of these parts, and explains that he is the wolf the children have encountered. Five years previously, Duke Otho was wounded in battle and since then rendered unable to walk, even though by all rights he should have fully recovered. Otho became bitter towards Mardian, who had to stand in for him since that time, a sentiment which attracted Almeric, an evil, ambitious nobleman and enchanter at Otho's court. Lusting after the Duke's wealth and lands, he tried to gain Mardian's aid in his schemes, but failed. After unsuccessfully attempting to assassinate him, Almeric used his knowledge of the black arts to curse Mardian into becoming a wolf every night and to turn himself into Mardian's doppelgänger. Mardian suspects that Almeric will soon murder Otho (whom he has been slowly poisoning) and the Duke's son, Crispin, to assume the Duke's title for himself, and that John and Margaret were transported into his era by the power of trust and fidelity between Mardian and Otho, symbolized by the near-identical amulets they are wearing, in order to set things right.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_of_Mathematics_(James_Tanton)"title="Encyclopedia of Mathematics (James Tanton)">
The book has over 1000 entries, which discuss various concepts, definitions, people, and theorems that pertain to mathematics. The book also contains six essays that discuss the various branches of mathematics and their history.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_on_the_Stairs"title="The Girl on the Stairs">
This psychological thriller is set in Berlin. It revolves around the central character, Jane, who has recently moved from Glasgow to the city with her lover Petra. As Jane adjusts to her new life and pregnancy she becomes curious about the neighbour’s daughter Anna, the arguments she hears through the wall and Anna’s strange appearance on the stairs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tru_Confessions_(novel)"title="Tru Confessions (novel)">
Trudy is a twelve-year-old girl who both wants to have her own television show and ‘cure’ her developmentally delayed brother Eddie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_(Tunnels_novel)"title="Terminal (Tunnels novel)">
The book begins with Jiggs in the inner world discovering that Drake is still alive, but has been affected by the nuclear radiation from the explosion at the end of Spiral. He also finds the burnt body of Rebecca One lying near Drake. Jiggs rescues Drake and carries him to the Topsoil. At the same time, Elliott and Will are trapped in the inner world, in the destroyed city of New Germania. They meet three New Germanians who have survived the virus released in the inner world and, along with them and a Bushman called Woody, they go to explore one of the Pyramids from the jungle. Also, they find out that the Bushmen are part Styx (because they speak the Styx language at a much higher pitch). After they get into the Pyramid, something unexpected happens as Elliott touches a trident sign (like the ones that Dr. Burrows and Will found on their first exploration of the Pyramid). The Pyramid vanishes into thin air and an enormous tower appears out of nowhere in the jungle. Elliott senses that there is something missing from the tower, then she and Will find out that at the top of the tower there is a portal to Topsoil, and so they teleport themselves to London.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Tad"title="Planet Tad">
"Planet Tad" consists of daily blog articles that discuss events of the day in Tad's life, as well as random thoughts he might have. The arc of the story follows Tad's attempts to fulfill his New Year's resolution, which involve him starting a blog, finishing seventh grade, learning to perform a kickflip on his skateboard, getting favorable attention from girls, and starting to shave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horrid_Henry_(book)"title="Horrid Henry (book)">
## Horrid Henry's Perfect Day.Horrid Henry is an 8 year boy who loves doing unimaginable horrible things. He throws food, he snatches things, he pushes, shoves and pinches. He has a 6 year-old brother called Perfect Peter, an extremely perfect boy who does uncountable good deeds. Peter always says "Please" and "Thank You", he loves vegetables and refuses cake and he never ever picks his nose. One day, Horrid Henry wonders what would happen if he were perfect?! So − the next day, Henry doesn't wake Peter up by splashing water on his head as usual, and Peter and his parents wake up late. Due to this, Henry and Peter are late for a class. Back at home, Henry doesn't bully Peter, instead, he reads a book about super-mice. At dinner time, Henry helps lay the table and ignores Peter's whining that he always lays the table. When the family eat spaghetti and meatballs, Henry does not kick Peter or slurp his food or leave behind his vegetables. Peter wants Henry to become horrid again and tries many ways to get Henry to hit him but Henry is resilient. When Henry's Mum gives Henry some fudge cake and a kiss for being so good, Peter can't stand it any longer and flings his plate at Henry but hits Mum. Mum screams at Peter to go to his room and when Henry laughs, she sends him to his room too. The story ends with Henry being surprised that being perfect was so much fun.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_University_in_Europe"title="A History of the University in Europe">
The first volume is dedicated to the emergence of the university in the Middle Ages and its development until around 1500. Volume II describes and analyzes the university from the Reformation until the French Revolution (1500–1800), volume III the rise of the modern university until World War II (1800–1945) and the last volume the post-war period up to the present time.The structure of the book follows a standardized systematic pattern throughout all volumes: the first part ("themes and patterns") introduces the reader to the university as an institution of its time. The second part deals with the institutional "structures" of the university, the third with the "students", their education, activities and careers, and the fourth with individual fields of "learning" taught in the university. Each section is divided into several chapters which were composed by specialists in the various subjects. The main approach is holistic – the book aims less at covering the history of individual universities, but rather the character and historical trajectory of the institution as a whole.As of 2011, the series has been published in full in English and German, while the first volumes have appeared in Spanish and Portuguese and translations into Russian and Chinese are in preparation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Mountain"title="Under the Mountain">
Beneath the extinct volcanoes surrounding the city, giant creatures are waking from a spellbound sleep that has lasted thousands of years. Their goal is the destruction of the world.Rachel and Theo Matheson are twins. Apart from having red hair, there is nothing remarkable about them – or so they think. They are horrified to discover that they have a strange and awesome destiny. Only the Matheson twins can save the world from the terror of what is under the mountain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spoilers_(Beach_novel)"title="The Spoilers (Beach novel)">
Young fearless prospector Roy Glenister and his older partner, Dextry are headed back to Nome on the first ship of the season, eager to return to protect their gold claim called the "Midas", which promises to yield them great wealth. On the trip, they defend a young woman who boards the ship from her pursuers—and who is also intent on reaching Nome as soon as possible. Glenister immediately begins to fall for the young beauty, who turns out to be Helen Chester, niece of Judge Arthur Chester, recently appointed as the first federal judge for the Alaska Territory—the "law" is coming to the wild northern frontier. Except it turns out the law is crooked. The Judge and the federal marshall are really under the thumb of strongman politician Alexander McNamara. After reaching Nome, McNamara succeeds in being appointed receiver of all the most lucrative mining claims in the region, based on fraudulent disputes over the validity of the miners' claims. Glenister, Dextry, and a number of naive Swedes are dispossessed of their lands. The miners hire lawyers to fight on the legal side, and also form a vigilante group to fight the "law". McNamara rules ruthlessly, running the mines himself. Glenister sinks into despair, believing that Helen is in on the conspiracy against the miners, and almost loses his stake in the Midas in a night of reckless gambling. He is only saved from that fate by Cherry Malotte, whose unrequited love for Glenister has brought her to Nome. Helen slowly learns about the scheme being perpetrated by McNamara, her uncle, and others, while her affections are torn between Glenister and McNamara.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Watch_(novel)"title="New Watch (novel)">
## Vague objectives.Anton Gorodetsky, while seeing a foreign colleague off at the airport, encounters an overweight 10-year-old boy named Kesha, who tries to prevent his mother from boarding a plane, claiming that the plane will crash. Anton scans the boy and determines that Kesha is an uninitiated high-level Other, possibly a prophet. Anton influences Kesha's mother not to board the plane.Meanwhile, Sergeant Pastukhov of the Moscow police, who gained an ability to see Others (he calls Light Others "dogs" and Dark Others "wolves") in the first novel, sees an extremely powerful entity whom he labels a Tiger. The Tiger can remove a human's aura, which leaves the person completely indifferent to anything. The Night Watch sends Semyon to initiate the boy, although Geser is very disturbed by the events at the airport, as the plane does not crash as prophesied (unlike predictions, prophecies cannot be changed). Geser calls a meeting of all Light Great Others (including Anton's wife Svetlana and daughter Nadya). They then travel by car (through Twilight) to Kesha's apartment in order to protect him from this strange new creature.The Tiger intercepts them and proves to be more than a match for four Great Mages. It only leaves when Zabulon joins the battle. Anton realizes that the Tiger is a creature of the Twilight whose purpose is to hunt prophets before they utter their first complete prophecy. If this prophecy is heard by a human, then it becomes inevitable. If an Other hears it, then he or she becomes the Tiger's next target. While the Night Watch is attempting to hold off the Tiger, Kesha utters the prophecy in an empty room (a prophet does not hear his or her own key prophecy), causing the Tiger to leave. However, Anton has previously asked Kesha to press the record button on a toy phone. Anton then copies the phone's recording onto a flash drive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirligig_(novel)"title="Whirligig (novel)">
Seventeen-year-old Brent Bishop has moved with his parents in Chicago, Illinois. He goes to a party in an attempt to fit in and become popular. He decides to talk to Brianna, a popular girl at the party. She yells at him to stop bothering her and to leave her alone. Chaz, the party host, mocks him for his actions at the party. Angered, Brent retaliates and then drives away, upset, and embarrassed. After committing social suicide, he comes to the conclusion that real suicide is the only future for him. In his own mind, he is a king, driven by depression and alcohol, crashes into a car driven by a girl named Lea Zamora. Lea dies in the crash, and Brent is left with guilt and a feeling of desperation to improve his seemingly meaningless life. Instead of a conventional prison sentence, Brent agrees to a form of restitution chosen by Lea's mother. Lea's mother tells Brent to construct and establish four whirligigs at each corner of the Contiguous United States in order to memorialize and carry on Lea's philanthropic ideals. Brent’s life beginning after the crash is shown, which serves as a wake-up call to his existence. It took a bad situation to change his perspective, and he found purpose - to share Lea’s spirit amongst people she did not know. Brent agrees to this, as he feels guilty for his actions. He receives a bus pass from Lea's family and supplies to help him build his whirligigs, hoping to find meaning in his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nights_of_Labor"title="Nights of Labor">
The book collects a series of paraphrasing, quotations and summaries of worker writings that discuss a series of three experiments in worker association in mid-19th-century Paris. In the book Rancière looks at the beginnings of today's socialism and early proletarian class consciousness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Prince_(Edwards_novel)"title="The Lost Prince (Edwards novel)">
"The Lost Prince" follows the character of Eleanor Burden, an 1890s Boston socialite who has resigned herself to marrying the man she should be with rather than the man she wants, whom she lost in Vienna. What separates her from others of her station and background is that Eleanor believes that she has the ability to predict all of the major historical events that will occur while she is alive. Dismissed as a hysteric, Eleanor must decide whether or not fate is predetermined or if she possesses the ability to change future events as well as her own life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Pharma"title="Bad Pharma">
## Introduction.Goldacre writes in the introduction of "Bad Pharma" that he aims to defend the following:Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques which are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don't like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug's true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in a drug's life, and even then they don't give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion.In their forty years of practice after leaving medical school, doctors hear about what works through ad hoc oral traditions, from sales reps, colleagues or journals. But those colleagues can be in the pay of drug companies – often undisclosed – and the journals are too. And so are the patient groups. And finally, academic papers, which everyone thinks of as objective, are often covertly planned and written by people who work directly for the companies, without disclosure. Sometimes whole academic journals are even owned outright by one drug company. Aside from all this, for several of the most important and enduring problems in medicine, we have no idea what the best treatment is, because it's not in anyone's financial interest to conduct any trials at all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_TurtleTrader"title="The Complete TurtleTrader">
Richard Dennis made over $200 million as a trader. After having a debate with his partner, William Eckhardt, about whether trading is learnable or an inborn talent, they proposed an experiment where they would spend two weeks training novices in the science of trading and then give them each $1 million to invest. The inspiration came from a trip Dennis took to a turtle-breeding farm in Singapore, stating, "We are going to grow traders just like they grow turtles."Although each of the 1,000 applicants went through a rigorous application process designed to test their intelligence, ability to manage risk and mathematical skills, the makeup of the chosen Turtles differed greatly; they included a Czechoslovakian-born blackjack master, a Dungeons and Dragons game designer, an evangelical accountant, a Harvard MBA, a U.S. Air Force pilot and a former pianist. The Turtles would go on to gross over $150 million in four years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Machiavelli"title="The New Machiavelli">
"The New Machiavelli" purports to be written in the first person by its protagonist, Richard "Dick" Remington, who has a lifelong passion for "statecraft" and who dreams of recasting the social and political form of the English nation. Remington is a brilliant student at Cambridge, writes several books on political themes, marries an heiress and enters parliament as a Liberal influenced by the socialism of Altiora and Oscar Bailey, a couple easily recognisable as the Webbs, only to go over to the Conservatives. Remington undertakes the editing of an influential political weekly and is returned to parliament on a platform advocating the state endowment of mothers but his career is wrecked by his love affair with a brilliant young Oxford graduate, Isabel Rivers. When rumours of their affair begin to circulate, Remington tries to break it off but then resolves to abandon wife, career, party and country to live in Italy, where he writes the "apologia pro vita sua" that the novel constitutes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Shivers"title="Mr. Shivers">
The novel follows the character of Marcus Connelly, a man whose marriage deteriorated after his beloved daughter is murdered by a man known only as the "Shiver Man". Intent on finding him and making him pay for his crimes, Connelly sets out on the rails and travels from location to location in search of work and clues. While he faces several setbacks – as well as several warnings to leave the killer alone – Connelly finds support via other travelers who are also looking to bring about the Shiver Man's death. Along the way it becomes apparent that the Shiver Man is more than he seems, as he is capable of escaping any prison cell and other feats that would be impossible for normal human beings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_(novel)"title="Mortal (novel)">
Nine years have passed since hero Rom Sebastian first stumbled upon a secret vial of blood capable of bringing himself back to life. He has survived impossible odds, and has created a secret faction of followers who have also taken the blood, the first Mortals in a dead world. The Order has built an elite army in which to hunt down and crush the living. Division and betrayal pose a threat to the Mortals from within. Jonathan is the only one who has the true life blood flowing through him, and he can save all humanity. Jonathan is waiting to step up to the throne on his 18th birthday. Saric develops the Dark Bloods, and revives his sister Feyn. She will reign and treat her brother as her Maker. When Jonathan tries to heal a Dark Blood, it begins to deteriorate his purity. The only hope for surviving is on the edge of collapse, and no one is certain of the path to survival.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unholy_Pilgrim"title="The Unholy Pilgrim">
Tancred of Varville is pilgrim without a scrap of piety, a young Norman knight, and an unhappy soldier of fortune. Tancred has been forced by King Louis IX of France to undertake a tedious pilgrimage as condition for the restoration of his family lands, now his reluctant journey to the Holy City of Jerusalem has taken an abrupt turn for the worse. Across flaming seas – as the war galleys of the Venetian Republic, the Genoese Republic, and the Saracens fight for the control of the Aegean Sea in the wake of the Fourth Crusade (1202-1204) – Tancred sets sail for the Holy Land. Shipwrecked off the wild coast of Dalmatia, he washes up on the shores of Frankish Greece, only to fall right into the hands of his former employer and worst enemy, Guy I de la Roche, Duke of Athens.Tancred’s only hope of escaping summary execution lies with the Duke’s devious Venetian companion, Angelo Sanudo, Lord of Naxos (one of twelve Greek Islands in the Cyclades group), who seems to have a mysterious purpose in mind for an expendable mercenary knight of dubious reputation. Tancred makes an agreement with Sanudo to infiltrate the service of Verrano, the Genoese leader and a bitter enemy. After being taken in a prearranged naval battle, Tancred is fully accepted into Verrano's service, and working from within, secures Sanudo's victory. Tancred suffers through near-fatal encounters with the enemies plotting against him. The story continues through days of luxury and conspiracy on the sumptuous galley bearing Melinda of Ibelin, one of the noblest ladies in the entire region, through his tumultuous courtship of Melinda's handmaiden Eleanor, to the climatic siege of Metos, where –- by his feats of ingenuity and courage –- his knight's honor is refurbished and his inheritance secured.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwitiyo_Manob"title="Dwitiyo Manob">
Mehtabuddin is a successful businessman living in Dhaka with his daughter. He has problem of anger management, and has promised his daughter Tuntuni that he will keep his cool for a week. A school teacher from Netrokona, Mehtabuddin's native place, sends a man named Khalilullah to meet Mehtabuddin; Khalilullah supposedly has "special power". Khalilullah appears very simple and rustic. However he astonishes them by staying under water without oxygen for several hours, and fixing electronic equipment with no tools and no training. Mehtabuddin, clueless on how to solve Khalilullah's mysterious power, seeks help from his knowledgeable and bookworm friend Jalal. Despite their strict examination of Khalilullah's exhibition of special power, the mystery remains unresolved.Meanwhile, Tuntuni, an otherwise loner, strikes friendship with Khalilullah. Khalilullah reminisces that he grew his special power following a heavy bout of high fever in his childhood; he does not remember anything before. The school teacher from Netrokona further informs Mehtabuddin that Khalilullah may be a jinn. Mehtabuddin becomes increasingly restless and uncomfortable by Khalilullah's unresolved mystery. Jalal suggests that he could be "Homo superior", the next evolutionary stage of "Homo sapiens". Mehtabuddin locks Khalilullah in a room.Moved by Tuntuni's telling of her mother's untimely death, Khalilullah endeavours to create a machine that would help reconnect with the dead. Tuntuni questions why Mehtabuddin locked Khalilullah. Growing emotional connection between Khalilullah and Tuntuni further unsettles Mehtabuddin; he arranges for killing Khalilullah while Tuntuni suffers from heavy fever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Princess_Boy"title="My Princess Boy">
"My Princess Boy" begins with the narrator (and mother) introducing the Princess Boy and his many interests. The narrator describes the Princess Boy's family relationships and friendships. Next, the narrator expresses the conflict that arises with the Princess Boy's non-conforming gender identity and expression. In particular, the narrator recounts individuals laughing and staring at the Princess Boy when he wears or buys girly things. Throughout the entire story, the Princess Boy's family is steadfast in their reassurance, support, and love for the Princess Boy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer's_Dream"title="Summer's Dream">
Summer is obsessed with becoming a big time star as a successful ballet dancer. This had been her wish for a long time and it consumed her both day and night. Summer is, just like so many other young girls, trying to be what society dictates as beautiful today, meaning unless you are a size one or two you simply are not considered beautiful. She believed that to achieve her goal as a professional dancer, she must have "the perfect body", otherwise her dreams of becoming a world-famous dancer would never happen. While trying to achieve this goal she finds the rest of her life simply falling apart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_Apocalypse"title="Odd Apocalypse">
Odd Thomas and his traveling companion Annamaria have been invited by a reclusive billionaire to be his guests at his sprawling, pristine estate, Roseland. However, something is deeply wrong within the walls of the sprawling property. The few staff there harbor malice to anyone from the outside world, and as Odd explores the estate, the land and buildings seem to flip between static beauty and a hell on earth... which he finds is influenced by machinery designed by a genius from the past.Odd can't just gather his friend, their dogs (one alive, one a ghost) and escape. Despite the warnings, Annamaria, who has mysteries of her own, has hinted to Odd that Roseland has secrets far more sinister than just an unusual state of preservation. He needs to find someone hidden within the unhappy preserve who is going to need all his help.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thick_as_Thieves_(Spiegelman_novel)"title="Thick as Thieves (Spiegelman novel)">
"Thick as Thieves" follows a group of high-end criminals and their reluctant leader Carr. Carr was inducted as a thief by the group's previous leader, Declan (aka "Deke") who died during the getaway from their previous job, and feels that he is not the right person to take over the role, despite this having been Declans overall intention for him. The group plan to steal millions of dollars from a former hedge fund manager named Curtis Prager, who is now engaging in large amounts of illegal activity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witchcraft_and_Paganism_in_Australia"title="Witchcraft and Paganism in Australia">
Chapter one, entitled "Doing is Knowing: Introduction and Approach", begins with an introduction to the new religious movement of contemporary Paganism. This is followed by Hume's discussion of how she first encountered and came to study the Pagan movement, while the chapter is then rounded off with a discussion of the anthropological methodology that she adopted in her investigation. The second chapter offers a brief historical outline of the Pagan and Wiccan movements, and their arrival in Australia. The third looks at commonly held beliefs in the Pagan community, such as their moral values, their respect for nature, and their cosmological views, while the fourth examines the organisation and structure of the movement, looking at how individuals and embrace and convert to it, and how Wiccan covens operate.Chapter five offers an examination of rites of passage and the process of ritual in Paganism and Wicca, while the sixth looks at Pagan belief in magic. The following chapter discusses Pagan experiential and emotional experiences and beliefs regarding other realms, and the eighth looks at morality and ethics in the movement alongside its relation with legality. In her conclusion, Hume discusses the movement's attraction for those with feminist and environmentalist attitudes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_I_Braved_Anu_Aunty_and_Co-Founded_a_Million_Dollar_Company"title="How I Braved Anu Aunty and Co-Founded a Million Dollar Company">
The book is a true story, set in Bangalore, about entrepreneurship and the importance of pursuing your dreams. Varun, the 20-something protagonist has entrepreneurial dreams but finds that not many people are very receptive of the idea. He is instead asked to follow the well-trodden Engineering-plus-MBA route that most people his age seem to have taken. This route is not something that Varun is very keen on following. Perhaps the biggest threat to Varun's entrepreneurial dreams is "Anu Aunty", the lead character who thwarts his every move. But Varun is not one to be easily cowed. After a number of alcohol-induced conversations with his friend from school and later co-founder of "Alma Mater", Rohn Malhotra, Varun decides to follow his heart and do something that he wants to do.The book chronicles how the two of them decided to start a merchandising company called "Alma Mater" that creates customised clothing and accessories for the alumni of schools and colleges across India.Anu Aunty is Varun's mother's best friend and plays the role of a middle-aged Indian mother to what she believes to be an over-achieving son. Much to Varun's mother's dismay, Anu Aunty repeatedly belittles Varun and mocks him for his apparently unambitious nature. Every step Varun and his friends take seems to be thwarted by Anu Aunty.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lig_Sinn_i_gCathú"title="Lig Sinn i gCathú">
The story is set in the university town of Baile an Chaisil, a thinly disguised city of Galway, in 1949, the year Ireland declared itself a republic and withdrew from the Commonwealth of Nations. Máirtín Ó Mealóid, a pub-crawling university student, and his disreputable friends are too busy drinking and lusting after girls to pay much attention to this significant political development. The story takes place over four days from Thursday 14 April to Monday 18 April.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Will_There_Be_Good_News?"title="When Will There Be Good News?">
In her crime novel "When Will There Be Good News?", featuring recurring character Jackson Brodie, Kate Atkinson begins with several seemingly unrelated storylines that slowly resolve into a whole.The story opens thirty years in the past. Six-year-old Joanna Mason lives in a remote house with her mother and two siblings after her father has abandoned them. Her mother is determined to survive and to do well by her kids. A man arrives and murders her mother, brother, and sister, but Joanna escapes, running off into the fields around the house.In the present day, a mysterious man is following a young boy at a playground in order to collect a strand of his hair. The action shifts to Reggie, a teen girl babysitting for Joanna Hunter, the young survivor of the murders, now thirty-six, married, and with a young baby. Reggie is a smart but troubled girl, resentful of being on scholarship at her tiny school and recently orphaned. She views Joanna as an ideal mother, devoted to her baby; she enjoys babysitting as it gives her a taste of the family bonds she wishes she had. Reggie’s brother is slipping into a life of crime, which worries her. Joanna receives a visit from a police detective about her husband, which leaves her worried.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Wonder"title="State of Wonder">
The novel opens with Dr. Marina Singh reading a letter from Dr. Annick Swenson to Marina's boss and secret lover, Mr. Fox, CEO of the pharmaceutical company Vogel. The letter reports the death of Dr. Anders Eckman, Swenson's colleague at a drug research site in the Amazon rainforest. When Eckman's widow begs Marina to find out what happened, Mr. Fox agrees to send Marina to the Amazon. Mr. Fox's other motive is that Dr. Swenson was given a blank check to conduct research into a new miracle drug, and refuses to inform him of her progress.Finding Dr. Swenson proves to be difficult. Marina flies to Manaus, Brazil, and finds that the only people who know Dr. Swenson's whereabouts are an Australian couple named Jackie and Barbara Bovender, who are tasked with hiding her whereabouts from the outside world. Eventually Dr. Swenson surprises Marina in Manaus, and they travel in a boat piloted by a young deaf boy named Easter to the rainforest research site, near the encampment of an indigenous people called the Lakashi tribe. The women of this tribe bear children until the end of their lives, an ability they gain from eating the bark of an endemic tree called the martin. The drug whose research Vogel is funding is one that will prevent or undo menopause and allow women to give birth throughout their lives. Over time, Marina discovers that, unknown to Vogel, the bark of the martin also serves as a vaccination against malaria; it is this drug that Dr. Swenson is primarily concerned with. She fears that no pharmaceutical company would fund such an unprofitable venture, so she uses secrecy to acquire the funds for her humanitarian project; also, she worries that the Lakashi people would be destroyed if the outside world discovered the potential of the martins. Marina learns that Dr. Swenson has become pregnant, at the age of 73, making herself the first human test subject for the fertility drug.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horrid_Henry_Tricks_the_Tooth_Fairy"title="Horrid Henry Tricks the Tooth Fairy">
## "Horrid Henry Tricks The Tooth Fairy".Everyone in Horrid Henry's class had lost at least one tooth - that is except Henry himself. Just today, his "younger" brother, Perfect Peter had lost a tooth. So, Henry decides to eat as many sweets as he can from his sweet jar, although it is two days before "Sweet Day" when he is allowed to eat sweets. Henry's "hard work" comes to a waste when none of his teeth feel wobbly and worse, his mouth, gums and stomach hurt. Then, he gets a "brilliant" idea. He decides to trick the tooth fairy. So on that night, Henry silently creeps into Peter's room and steals the tooth Peter placed under his pillow but bumps into his mother and manages to escape. The next morning, Henry doesn't find a coin from the tooth fairy but Peter finds a pound coin from the fairy. Henry asks his mother how the tooth fairy knows whose pillow to put money and she says that she looks at the gap between the child's teeth. Henry realizes his mistake and places a piece of black paper over his mouth. At night, when he sleeps, he ties his finger to a fake vampire tooth (a substitute for the real one) to make sure that when the tooth fairy comes and takes his tooth, he gets woken up. The next morning, Henry receives a fake 50p coin and a letter from the tooth fairy, mocking him for his trick. Henry's mother calls him down and scolds him for eating all the sweets and tells him to eat apples instead. Henry takes an apple and bites on it. To his horror, the bite had made him lose a tooth and he had swallowed it!
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pippi_in_the_South_Seas_(book)"title="Pippi in the South Seas (book)">
Pippi Longstocking, a little girl meets a stubborn billionaire, who tries to buy Villa Villekulla, her home, and dismisses her as ugly and ridiculous. She also looks for a thing called a 'spink" and irritating a rich woman known as Ms.Rosenbloom, who gives the good pupils a Gold coin and a bag of Candy. She also soon receives word from her father, a sea captain who had seemingly vanished earlier, inviting her to a tropical island inhabited by natives over which he now reigns as king. Pippi and her friends sail to her father's island kingdom, where they become acquainted with the natives living there, Pippi being hailed as "Princess Pippilotta."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/58_Minutes"title="58 Minutes">
Frank Malone is a divorced NYPD captain who is waiting at JFK international airport in New York City for his young daughter to arrive from California as he is going to spend Christmas with her. Unfortunately, a mysterious man known only as "Number 1" calls the control tower and tells the crew of the airport that he has cut the power to the runway lights of JFK and every airport in the vicinity and has hijacked their equipment, leaving them with only 58 minutes to meet their demands until the first plane, which carries Frank's daughter, runs out of fuel and crashes. With a massive blizzard coming in, the planes have nowhere else to go. Frank must jump into action and save his daughter and the passengers of the other planes, which are all circling overhead, in 58 minutes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triggers_(novel)"title="Triggers (novel)">
In the near future, a war veteran named Kadeem Adams is about to undergo a highly experimental memory editing treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder at Washington, D.C.'s Luther Terry Hospital. Seth Jerrison, the President of the United States, is rushed to the same hospital after being shot in an assassination attempt. Adams' treatment goes awry due to the electromagnetic pulse from a new type of bomb planted by terrorists, which destroys the White House just as the treatment begins. It becomes clear that terrorists have infiltrated the Secret Service.When President Jerrison recovers consciousness, he can remember Kadeem Adams' life as well as his own. Kadeem Adams finds himself able to remember the life of someone else who was nearby in the hospital, and others nearby are similarly affected. This raises the possibility that someone in the vicinity has access to President Jerrison's memories, some of which are extremely secret; these include plans for a major, morally questionable, anti-terrorist action codenamed Counter Punch.In large part, the book has a thriller type plot. Learning how the memories of many of the characters were intertwined is a key to such things as finding who has the President's memories and who the terrorists are. However, much of the book is about the characters and interactions of the people whose minds have been subjected to what is suggested to be quantum entanglement. Not all of them are good people. After one of them dies, the quantum entanglement gets stronger rather than weaker.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sundering"title="The Sundering">
The First Sundering occurred in ancient times (around -17,600 DR) before humans came into Toril, at a time when elven high mages united to create the Evermeet lands. As a consequence of their powerful magic, the supercontinent of Merrouroboros was torn apart, creating what is now known as the Trackless Sea and the continents of Faerûn, Maztica and Katashaka, among other physical changes. The Second Sundering was equally cataclysmic, but occurred in recent times. Beginning in 1484 DR, about one hundred years after the onset of the Spellplague, natural disasters and calamities flashed across the planet Toril. Earthquakes, vast floodings, wars, droughts and volcanic eruptions tore the world apart, and by 1489 DR this Second Sundering had changed the world dramatically, both physically and culturally. The Spellplague had caused huge changes to the planet, but The Second Sundering reversed most of them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Duel_(Kuprin_novel)"title="The Duel (Kuprin novel)">
An intelligent young officer, Second Lieutenant Romashov, is stationed at a dull military garrison in southern Russia where he can not stomach his sadistic and stupid colleagues and military life. He falls in love with Shurochka (Alexandra), the wife of Nikolaev, a fellow officer and a comrade. She seems kind and compassionate, but in fact is a cold and calculating woman whose one ambition is her husband's advancement. The affair leads in the end to the duel of the title, both externally, and figuratively through the young man's naive dreams of grandeur confronting the degeneration of military life and society of the time. Romashov contemplates forfeiting the duel and leaving the army, but Shurochka talks him out of it, proposing instead that they both shoot in the air. Romashov comes to the duel, and Nikolaev kills him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Children_and_It"title="Four Children and It">
Rosalind and Robbie are staying with their father, David, his wife, Alice, and their half sister, Maudie whilst their mother is on an Open University course. Also staying with David and Alice is Alice's daughter Smash (Samantha), whose father is on a honeymoon in the Seychelles.In an attempt to bring the family closer together David takes them on a picnic to Oxshott Woods. Smash and Rosalind climb trees as part of a dare, however, Robbie struggles to climb the tree much to Smash's amusement. Whilst there the children explore the sandpit and when digging they discover the Psammead which Rosalind recognises from her book "Five Children and It". Robbie wishes to be good at climbing trees. The Psammead grants the wish and David takes an interest, claiming that Robbie would be an amazing gymnast. Not realising that the wishes only lasted until sunset Robbie continues to show off his skills. David phones his friend, Tim, who is a P.E. teacher and runs summer classes. The next day David, Rosalind, Robbie and Smash go to the gym where Tim works. Robbie struggles and embarrasses himself and David. However, Tim takes an interest in Smash.The next day, the children beg to go back to Oxshott Woods. Smash wishes to be rich and famous and soon after they are taken away by their bodyguard, Bulldog, and meet their PA, Naomi. They travel into London and have a trip around Harrods. Rosalind is a famous writer and attends a book signing. Robbie has his own cookery show, Maudie, a star of "The Doodle Family" as Polly Doodle appears on the Start-At-Six-Show. Smash is a famous singer and in the middle of her concert in the O2 Arena when the wish ends, and the children are left alone. They venture through London guided by Smash, and when they return they get banned from going to Oxshott Woods.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_of_the_Wheel"title="The Lady of the Wheel">
A mother abandons an infant girl, placing her inside a 'foundling wheel' to be cared for in a foundling home, and the woman's husband gives up a young son as a carusu, a virtual slave in a sulfur mine; both actions intended to help the remaining family to survive in poverty-stricken Racalmuto, in late-1800s Sicily. It was common for families to give up their boys at the age of five as carusi, selling them to the mining company for life for a small price, and the parents treat it matter-of-factly as a regrettable but unavoidable decision. The plot follows the girl's life as a foundling, and her brother's labors in the mine, working ten-hour days in hellish conditions, and their interactions with family and co-workers. As plot devices, the author includes examples of Napoleon-inspired recording of civil documents, and describes the Sicilian conventions for selecting the given names of a family's children.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Girls_Get_What_They_Want"title="Smart Girls Get What They Want">
Gigi, Bea, and Neerja are best friends and total overachievers. Even if they aren't the most popular girls in school, they aren't too worried. They know their "real" lives will begin once they get to their Ivy League colleges. But on the day Neerja's sister goes off to Princeton, the girls realise that their pursuit for academic excellence are causing them to miss out on the full high school experience. They make a pact to stop being nobodies, and get more involved with the school.After Gigi aces a difficult chemistry test, she is accused of cheating as the typical jock sitting next to her, Mike, also aces the test. The principal decides to waive a suspension, however she forces Gigi to work on a chemistry project with Mike, where both parties have to contribute equally. Gigi blames Mike, thinking that he copied off her test, and Mike does nothing to deny this. The principal is also required to place a note in their permanent record stating that they were referred to her for cheating, which is a new rule set by the board.This prompts Gigi to run for student rep and change the rules so as not to affect her chances of getting into an Ivy. However Gigi faces fierce competition from newcomer Will, who seems to have it all: looks, brains, and more money than he could spend in a lifetime. On top of everything, Will seems to have an interest in Gigi, causing her to lose track of what's really important.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutters_Don't_Cry"title="Cutters Don't Cry">
## Prologue.The novel begins with a brief introduction of Charity's life. For several years, she has been cruising through life on autopilot numb from any emotions. Although she goes to college, she has little enthusiasm for it and coasts through her classes with minimal effort. We learn on this particular day that her school-appointed therapist, Hunter, has given her a red journal so she can write down the thoughts she has trouble vocalizing throughout her sessions and day-to-day life. Used to feeling invisible her entire life, Charity is touched by Hunter's gesture and she experiences an onset of overwhelming emotions which frighten her. The scared teenager flees to a restroom, locks herself in a stall and cuts herself with a razor to numb the feelings that confuse her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupting_Dr._Nice"title="Corrupting Dr. Nice">
"Corrupting Dr. Nice" is set mainly in three eras: the twenty-first century, 40 AD and the Cretaceous Period. In 2063 AD, time travel is commonplace. Time travelers feel free to exploit the past without fear of changing their own history because each visit creates an alternate history called a "moment universe". The Saltimbanque Corporation uses it for tourism and to exploit the resources of the past. Famous historical figures are snatched from their time and brought to the twenty-first century (these include Amadeus Mozart, Sigmund Freud, Abraham Lincoln, and Jesus Christ from several different times in his life). After visitors leave a moment universe, it continues with its new history. In a few of them, permanent installations are created that can be revisited and used as way stations for time travel. One is set up in the Jerusalem of 40 AD, complete with hotels.The story begins in the Cretaceous where Dr. Owen Vannice, heir to an enormous fortune and the Dr. Nice of the title, is working as an amateur paleontologist. Vannice arranges to transport Wilma, a baby "Apatosaurus", to his home. Sabotage of the time travel apparatus strands him for a time in 40 AD and brings him in contact with a couple of con artists, Genevieve Faison and her father August. At first, the duo conspire to steal the dinosaur from Owen. However, during an abortive attempt by Zealots to take over the time travel station, Genevieve falls in love with him. Before she can confess to him that she is a con artist, Owen finds out from a third party and leaves in disgust.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_&amp;_the_Gang_with_No_Name"title="Eddie &amp; the Gang with No Name">
In 1978 Eddie's father leaves his mother to run away with her boss, a doctor. His mother finds herself a new nursing job at the Royal Victoria Maternity Hospital, however it's located in a run-down section of Belfast; the pair move there regardless. A short time after they arrive, Scuttles, the chief of hospital security, accuses Eddie of scamming the locals and of being part of a neighbourhood gang, the "Reservoir Pups".Given that all the people in his life believe he is already part of the gang, Eddie decides to join. He is tasked with stealing the security codes from Scuttles' computer and while attempting to do so, hears of a plot to kidnap twelve babies from the hospital nursery, abandoning his mission. Returning to the gang, Eddie is ostracised for his failure to complete his task and he is told to "watch his back". Eddie then sets out to foil the kidnapping himself.Two runaway orphans, Pat and Sean, witness the theft of Saint Oliver Plunketts head from St. Peter's Church where it was on display for a forthcoming papal visit. Pat speaks to the primate of the church and discovers that he will be greatly embarrassed by the disappearance; Pat decides to help as he is feeling guilty for not preventing the crime initially. The orphans enlist the help of Eddie and his best-friend Mo in their task. Eddie and Mo, meanwhile, have been involved in some tasks for the Reservoir Pups which coincidentally involve the son of Scarface Cutler; a blind boy named Ivan and son of the thief in possession of the head.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Grogan"title="Tom Grogan">
An 1898 literature guide provided this synopsis of the plot:"Tom Grogan", by F. Hopkinson Smith (1895.) is a spirited and most entertaining and ingenious study of laboring life in Staten Island, New York.Tom Grogan was a stevedore, who died from the effects of an injury. With a family to support, his widow conceals the fact of her husband's death, saying that he is sick in a hospital, that she may assume both his name and business.She is thenceforth known to all as 'Tom Grogan'. A sturdy, cheery, capable Irishwoman, she carries on the business with an increasing success, which arouses the jealous opposition of some rival stevedores and walking delegates of the labor union, which she has refused to join.The story tells how, with marvelous pluck, Tom meets all the contemptible means which her enemies employ in order to down her, they resorting even to the law, blackmail, arson, and attempted murder. In all her mannish employments her mother-heart beats warm and true, and her little crippled Patsy, a companion to Dickens's Tiny Tim, and Jenny the daughter with her own tender love affair, are objects of Tom's constant solicitude.The author has given a refreshing view of a soul of heroic mold beneath an uncouth exterior, and a pure life where men are wont to expect degradation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_(Goldman_novel)"title="Heat (Goldman novel)">
The novel is about a man named Nick Escalante, nicknamed "the Mex" by his friends, who hires himself out in Las Vegas not as a mercenary or bodyguard but as a service listed in the Yellow Pages directory under "Chaperone." He eschews firearms but is particularly lethal with sharp objects.Escalante has one ambition, which is to save up enough money so that he can move to Venice, Italy, for the rest of his life. The trouble is, Nick is a compulsive gambler.When he comes into a large sum of money after coming to the aid of a woman friend who has been physically abused in a Vegas hotel suite by DeMarco, an arrogant mobster, Nick ends up losing it at the blackjack tables. He is hired by a meek millionaire named Cyrus Kinnick on the pretense of needing a bodyguard, but in actuality the small, modest man seeks lessons in how to be a tougher individual who can properly defend himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigger_(novel)"title="Wigger (novel)">
Susanna, a little girl, loses both of her parents in a car accident, and after abandonment and neglect by all of her blood relatives, the child is placed in an orphanage known as "The Home". Destitute and hopeless, Susanna finds solace in her blanket, named Wigger; Wigger is sentient to Susanna, and uses playful banter to make her feel better about her own circumstances. When Wigger goes missing, Susanna longs to find the blanket again, sparking an adventure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_We_Belong_(novel)"title="Where We Belong (novel)">
Marian always thought that she was living the life she wanted, with no true regrets. When Kirby Rose, the child she gave up eighteen years ago, appears on her doorstep Marian is forced to re-examine her life, her family, and a past romance that threatens to overwhelm her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashoka_the_Great_(book)"title="Ashoka the Great (book)">
The book covers the story of Emperor Ashoka from his youth. He has just finished his education. He is a skilled warrior. He discusses the teachings with the holy Sayana, his guru.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invaders_(Brotherband)"title="The Invaders (Brotherband)">
Hal and his crew are chasing Zavac. However, due to a massive storm, they are forced to stop and resume the chase later. They take shelter at a bay Hal names Shelter Bay for a few weeks, where they repair their ship, add the Mangler, a giant crossbow, a hull fin for extra maneuverability, and train under Thorn. Afterward, they go to a small Skandian village to stock up on supplies while asking about Zavac's ship, the Raven. Meanwhile, Zavac and his crew take over a small trading vessel and search the strongbox, where they find emeralds. Zavac demands to know where they have come from. The leader of the trading fleet, after extensive torture, tells Zavac that the emeralds came from Limmat, a town further up the coast of Sonderland. Zavac goes to Limmat, tricks the soldiers garrisoned there, easily takes over the town, and forces the miners to work even harder to give Zavac emeralds. However, a girl named Lydia manages to escape using a small skiff.While Hal is going back to Shelter Bay, he thinks he sees Wolfwind, the Oberjarl Erak's ship, and sails south for a day. While heading back they find Lydia, who tells them about the pirate attack. Hal thinks it may be Zavac so he continues back to Shelter Bay. Wolfwind, led by the Skandian Svengal, finds them but ends up helping them. The next day, they begin sailing to Limmat, and when they arrive, they see Zavac's ship. Thus, they hide in the marshes where they find the town's remaining soldiers, led by Barat, a man who thinks he owns Lydia, in hiding. Hal forms a plan with the locals to take back the town in 5 days. They are able to, after many mishaps, conquer the pirates, but Zavac slips away, burning two of his ships to prevent pursuit, and crippling Wolfwind, forcing the Heron to turn back and help Svengal and his crew bail water and dock in the bay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Jan"title="Captain Jan">
In the 1890s and 1900s, the Netherlands saw the fast flourishing of a new kind of shipping: ocean-going tugboats. While hitherto tugboats were strictly local affairs, never going out of sight of shore, the new kind were regularly crossing the oceans, towing Dutch-made dredgers, floating cranes, lighters and sluice gates to Asia, Africa and South America - wherever Dutch engineers were busily building harbors and damming rivers.These tugboats became the source of intense Dutch national pride - "Holland's Glory" of the original title. Tugboats captains were elevated to the status of national heroes, newspapers reported on their exploits and boys collected the photos of captains and dreamed of becoming one of them. The book tells of Jan Wandelaar, a boy who grew up to realize that dream - though at a harsh price.Jan Wandelaar, the only child of a fisherman's widow, started as a deckhand on a slow paddleboat on the North Holland Canal. During an accident he showed courage and initiative and saved the ship. This drew the attention of the kindly owner, Mijnheer van Munster, who encouraged the promising youth to study for a Mate's certificate. During the examination Jan's girlfriend Nellie, the lock-keeper's daughter, was waiting tensely until he emerged glowing to tell her that he had passed. Jan's future seemed assured - he would be an officer on one of the glorious deep-sea tugboats, and earn enough to marry Nellie and buy a neat little house.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Pumpkin"title="Big Pumpkin">
The story begins on Halloween. A witch has grown a large pumpkin in preparation, however, she struggles to release the pumpkin from its vine. With Halloween just hours away, the witch desperately tries to tug and pull on the pumpkin, but to no avail. Not soon after, a ghost arrives and notices the large pumpkin. The witch explains how she wishes to release the pumpkin from the vine, but cannot. The ghost offers his help, but he is also unable to release the pumpkin from its vine.A vampire then arrives and like the witch and the ghost, he also struggles to release the pumpkin. A mummy also notices the pumpkin and like the witch, ghost and vampire, she struggles to release the pumpkin using the same method as the other three. Soon a bat arrives and notices the pumpkin. Initially, the four others just laugh at the bat. However, the bat suggests that they all work together to get the pumpkin off the vine. This new method proves to be successful as they are able to release the pumpkin from the vine. The pumpkin flies into the air and lands in front of the witch's house.The witch makes pumpkin pie and shares it with the ghost, vampire, mummy and the bat. The story ends as the witch plants another pumpkin seed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Singular_Man"title="A Singular Man">
The story follows the life of the mysteriously wealthy and aloof George Smith and centers on Smith's love for Miss Tomson, whom in a review, "Time" magazine referred to as "a genuinely imagined dream figure of sexual grace."Although Donleavy began work on the novel "A Fairy Tale of New York" following completion of "The Ginger Man", his second completed and published novel was "A Singular Man". His interview in "The Paris Review" # 63 explains why he found it impossible at the time to finish "A Fairy Tale of New York" but was able to write "A Singular Man".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Accidental_Cheerleader"title="The Accidental Cheerleader">
Kylie Lovett and Sophie Smith have been best friends since they were babies. Before they begin seventh grade at Meridian Middle School, the girls go shopping for outfits to wear on the first day of school. They both end up buying matching jeans that have an embroidered red dragon crawling down the left leg. However, Kylie soon decides that it wouldn't be cool to be all "matchy-matchy", so it's only fair that neither of them wear it.On the first day, Sophie wears lime green corduroys to keep her promise, but feels hurt when Kylie shows up wearing the dragon jeans. Realizing her mistake, Kylie immediately apologizes and explains how she was in such a hurry that she forgot about the compromise. The two friends then meet up with Joel Leo, Kylie's neighbor and family friend, and Sophie develops a crush on him.While taking the bus home after school, Kylie tells Sophie that she signed them both up for cheer-leading tryouts. Although Sophie is not enthusiastic about the idea, Joel encourages her to participate as he knows that she is a great gymnast. After practicing their routine many times, the girls finally attend the tryouts, and Kylie ends up making a fool out of herself in-front of everyone. When the list is posted the other day, Sophie is happy that she made the team but Kylie is selected to be the team's mascot, which happens to be a mule.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Months,_Three_Days"title="Six Months, Three Days">
Doug and Judy are both precognitive: Doug can see "the future", and Judy can see "many possible futures". They fall in love, even though they both know that their relationship will last exactly six months and three days and end very badly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bottoms_(novel)"title="The Bottoms (novel)">
This story takes place during the Great Depression in East Texas. Young Harry Crane discovers the mutilated body of a black woman that sets off a mystery involving rising violence and racism. Despite the efforts of law enforcement, the killing continues. Harry and his younger sister, Thomasina, fix their suspicions on a local horror legend, The Goat Man, who lives deep in the Big Thicket. Together they set out to solve the mystery of who the real killer is.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_with_the_Dead_(short_story)"title="Christmas with the Dead (short story)">
Calvin (no last name given) is the lone survivor of a zombie apocalypse in the East Texas town of Mud Creek. He has converted his home into a fortress and is lonely and bored since a freak lightning storm turned his wife and daughter and everyone else in town into zombies some two years ago. So he decides to celebrate Christmas and ventures out to gather decorations. That's when things turn ugly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riley_Bloom_series"title="Riley Bloom series">
This book follows Riley Bloom. Riley and her family died in a car accident, though her sister became immortal. Her mom and dad and her dog Buttercup were crossing the bridge but she didn't because a part of her longed to stay with her surviving sister. When Ever learned that her little sister was stuck between two worlds, Riley crossed the bridge and entered the Here &amp; Now after Ever told her to move on.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Disaffection"title="A Disaffection">
The novel, written in a stream-of-consciousness style using the Glasgow dialect, concerns one week in the life of 29-year-old schoolteacher Patrick Doyle. Patrick is increasingly bitter about his entire life, despite feeling quite all right with the children he is coaching. He is in love with fellow schoolteacher Alison Houston, who is already married (without kids), and who rejects his advances. Midway in the novel, Patrick discovers he is to be transferred out of his present school which (his headmaster assures him) is the result of Patrick asking for a transfer, although Patrick has no recollection of such an act. The rest of the novel concerns Patrick's visit to his parents one weekend and, on a separate day, to his married elder brother Gavin's home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_a_Glass_Darkly_(Koen_novel)"title="Through a Glass Darkly (Koen novel)">
In 1715 England, fifteen-year-old Barbara Alderley lives with her widowed grandmother, the Duchess of Tamworth, and her younger siblings on their family's country Tamworth estate. Barbara's indebted and calculating mother, Lady Diana Alderley, arrives to inform them of Barbara's possible marriage to Roger Montgeoffry, Earl Devane, a former aide to the deceased Duke. Barbara is pleased with the news, believing herself to be in love with the handsome, wealthy, and popular earl despite his age (nearly thirty years her senior).Roger in turn desires Barbara's dowry of land in London, which he hopes to develop into an opulent estate and townhouses; she and her mother travel to London to make arrangements for the betrothal. Due to Diana's greed, negotiations almost fall apart until the intervention of the Duchess results in Barbara and Roger finally marrying. The couple travel to Paris. While learning to navigate through Parisian society, Barbara remains in love with her husband but Roger has no thoughts at all for his young bride other than mere fondness.Roger however has a secret: he once had a long-term affair with the French aristocrat the Prince of Soissons, with whom he begins anew soon after arriving in Paris. Through the actions of courtiers jealous of Barbara's devotion to Roger, pamphlets eventually spread about the affair. The young and naive Barbara is among the last to hear of it and breaks down in tears and shock.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Wildwood"title="Under Wildwood">
Prue McKeel, having rescued her brother from the Dowager Governess at the conclusion of the first novel, returns to her normal daily life of school and daydreaming. She finds her mind drifting back to Wildwood as she becomes increasingly bored with her studies.Meanwhile, dark events are transpiring in the Impassable Wilderness. A long, cold winter coupled with political discord have put Wildwood's residents on edge. Assassins are lurking in the forest's shadows, their intentions and motives unknown, while a tyrannical industrialist plots to exploit the natural resources of this magical world. Curtis and Brendan the Bandit King are warned of a nefarious plot by unknown forces to kill Prue McKeel. They arrive in Portland in time to rescue Prue before she is killed by a kitsune (shapeshifting fox) named Darla, who has been masquerading as Prue's teacher. They bring Prue back to the Bandit's camp hidden deep within the forests of Wildwood in order to protect her.After the head Mystic, Iphigenia, is murdered by Darla, Prue travels to the Great Tree and learns that she must find "the Makers" and "re-animate the true heir, the twice-died boy". She quickly realizes that the Great Tree means Alexei, the Dowager Governess' son. She and Curtis are pursued by Darla and are horrified to discover the Bandit Camp destroyed, with all of the Bandits missing, upon their return. Prue, Curtis and the rat Septimus eventually find their way to a realm beneath the Wood inhabited entirely by moles. They help to overthrow an usurper and learn that one of the two Makers built the moles' elaborate, underground city after he was banished by the Governess (who also ordered that his hands be removed). After the friends make their way back above ground, they find him at a traveling carnival. Much to their surprise, he's a bear named Esben who, despite having two golden hooks in place of his front paws, has spent his many years in exile performing elaborate tricks in a circus tent. Esben kills the kitsune Darla as she attempts to kill Prue.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_San_Vicente"title="The Road to San Vicente">
The book is set in the remote valley in which "Sant Vicent" is situated. The story begins with "Borthen’s" arrival in 1933 and also on his return to the village in 1960, just before a road was completed into the valley. It chronicles the life of the local people and of the foreigners who live amongst them. Characters that include a notorious assassin, a roguish art dealer and eccentric aristocrat. The story leads the reader in to a world of rich Island traditions with house blessings, blood feuds and a fast vanishing rural way of life that would, and has, disappeared for good following the road construction in 1963.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mucho_Mojo"title="Mucho Mojo">
This story revolves around the death of Leonard Pine's Uncle Chester who happens to live next to a crack house. Under the floorboards of his uncle's house the two discover the skeleton of an infant wrapped in child pornography. Leonard refuses to believe his uncle could be involved so he enlists the help of his best friend, Hap Collins, to solve the murder and clear his uncle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic,_Witchcraft_and_the_Otherworld"title="Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld">
Chapter one describes contemporary Paganism and defines "the otherworld". It discusses London's magical and Pagan subculture in the 1990s, and Greenwood's relationship with it. Admitting to being an "insider", she explores her mixed feelings at being both a practicing Pagan and an anthropological observer.The second chapter examines the community's conceptions of the otherworld, explaining how they approach it through acts of visualisation and altered states of consciousness and their understandings of it as a realm of spiritual energy connected to dreams and the imagination. Discussing the relationship between anthropology and magic, Greenwood argues that it is impossible for anthropologists to truly understand beliefs regarding magic and the otherworld if they only view it through a western rationalist lens, instead arguing for a phenomenological or relativist perspective that accepts alternative views of the world.In her third chapter, Greenwood examines her experiences among London's ceremonial magicians, focusing on her training in the Hermetic Qabalah, a "magical language" for exploring the otherworld. Adopting Luhrmann's concept of "interpretative drift", she relates how she shifted her understanding of events to make sense of her magical experiences. However, in contrast to Luhrmann's emphasis on how practitioners overcame their initial scepticism, Greenwood focuses on how these practitioners learn "the language of another mode of reality" through their experiences. Chapter four details Greenwood's early involvement in Wicca, through three separate covens. Offering her thoughts on Wiccan invocations, she then discusses the faith's approach to sexual polarity, pointing to the sexual underpinnings of the Great Rite and the Gnostic Mass as evidence. The chapter is rounded off with an explanation of how Wicca understands the natural world and a comparison between the religion and ceremonial magic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rokeby_(poem)"title="Rokeby (poem)">
At Oswald's instigation Bertram makes an attempt on the life of Philip, which he mistakenly thinks has succeeded, and an attack on Rokeby Castle, in which the castle is set on fire. Wilfrid and Matilda, through the efforts of Redmond, are able to escape the blaze. It emerges that Redmond, now in Oswald's hands, is the long-lost son of Philip, and that Philip has survived the assassination attempt. Oswald tries to force Lord Rokeby to accept a marriage between Wilfrid and Matilda, but this is prevented by Wilfrid's death. Bertram kills his master Oswald to avoid further bloodshed, but is killed in his turn. Philip is reunited with his son, and the young lovers marry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selection"title="The Selection">
In a futuristic world, society is divided into castes, with Ones being the most prosperous, consisting of royals and elites, and Eights being mostly orphans/homeless, drug users, handicapped, and unemployable. America Singer is a Five, the "artist" caste (e.g. musicians, artists, actors, dancers, etc.). Since their prosperity depends on their desirability, Fives live a lower-class life. America, however, doesn't care, because she enjoys entertaining, especially with a violin.The prince of Illéa, Maxon Schreave, announces that he is following in his father's footsteps by holding the Selection, a competition for the prince's hand in marriage and the crown. Despite pressure from her mother, America has no interest in entering the competition, because she already has Aspen, her next-door neighbor and secret boyfriend.After having a conversation with her mother which lets her keep most of her savings, America decides to surprise Aspen with dinner at her treehouse. This upsets him, as he believes he should be the one to provide for her, but is unable to because he is a Six (the servant caste) and has no means of doing so since he already has to take care of his mother and siblings. In the end, Aspen decides to break up with America. The end of their relationship, plus a bribe from her mother, leads America to enter the Selection and later into the palace where she has to compete with thirty-four other girls to win the prince's heart. It also helps that her time in the palace is accompanied by a small stipend sent to her family.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gates_Ajar"title="The Gates Ajar">
Mary Cabot of Homer, Massachusetts, has recently been notified of Royal Cabot’s death, the brother to whom she is intensely devoted. He was a soldier, "shot dead" in the American Civil War. Their parents are deceased, and Mary is unable to find sympathy and relief from anyone –acquaintances, the church deacon, or pastor. Losing her religious faith, she increasingly despairs. Eventually she turns to Winifred Forceythe, her widowed aunt who arrives from Kansas with her daughter, Faith. Over the course of their conversations, Winifred offers an inspiring image of heaven and gradually restores her niece's faith. Winifred Forceythe soon dies, leaving Mary Cabot as guardian of her cousin, Faith. Having again found meaning in life, her outlook is joyful.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God's_Grace"title="God's Grace">
The book is divided into six parts, "The Flood", "Cohn's Island", "The Schooltree", "The Virgin in the Trees", "The Voice of the Prophet" and "God's Mercy".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seducing_Ingrid_Bergman"title="Seducing Ingrid Bergman">
The novel opens in 1945. France is recently liberated by Allied Forces. Robert Capa has photographed the Normandy Landings and been parachuted into Germany. Now he is kicking his heels in Paris, waiting for something to happen. As a dare, he slips a note under the door of Ingrid Bergman's room at the Ritz, inviting her for a drink. The flirtation escalates quickly into a passionate affair. Ingrid has a husband, child and career back in Hollywood. Capa can't escape from his traumatic memories of the war or his addiction to the adrenaline high that he only gets from his work. Against his better judgement, Capa follows Ingrid to California, but both still have painful choices to make.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two-Bear_Mambo"title="The Two-Bear Mambo">
Hap's African American ex-girlfriend set out to attempt to recover the long lost tapes of a deceased bluesman in a Ku Klux Klan infested town in East Texas. After she goes missing, her current boyfriend enlists Hap and Leonard to find out what happened to her. Needless to, they run into a lot of trouble. The town locals do not care and local law enforcement views it as a black-on-black crime not worthy of investigating. Hap, and especially Leonard, are viewed as outside meddlers who should go back to where they came from.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blinding_Knife"title="The Blinding Knife">
"The Blinding Knife" begins four days after the end of the previous novel.The Prism, 'Gavin'/Dazen, sends Kip back to the Chromeria with Ironfist, instructing him to become a Blackguard. With Karris in tow, the Prism goes to Seer's Island. Ostensibly he is making a place for the refugees from Garriston's invasion to live. More importantly, he wishes to speak to a woman with the combined blessing and curse of future-telling. He seeks to locate and thus destroy the blue bane, an island formed from imbalanced blue luxin created from the Prism's loss of control over that color. These temples to color Gods (beings who possess complete mastery of the world-wide reserve for their color, giving them numerous powers including physical manipulation of nearby drafters of this color) attract and perfect the chromaturgy of luxin-infused wights. Eventually, these wights awaken and the God is rebirthed in the form of an avatar. This quest occupies much of the Prism's time for the first third of the novel.The real Gavin spends much of this time attempting to escape his new prison.Kip is forced to gamble with his grandfather Andross, playing a card game called 9 Kings. Andross is an expert player, but Kip has only seen others play the game. Thus he loses, badly and repeatedly, allowing Andross to institute various punishments on Kip and Kip's friends. It is unclear whether he is attempting to motivate Kip, or merely to damage him emotionally. Desperate for more knowledge about the game, Kip is eventually led to Janus Borig, a "mirror", who creates new cards for it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compass_in_the_Blood"title="Compass in the Blood">
It tells the story of Dee Armstrong, a freshman journalism student at the University of Pittsburgh, who is inspired to investigate one of the city's most notorious crimes. In 1902 Kate Soffel, the wife of the warden of the Allegheny County Jail, conducted an adulterous affair with a prisoner, Ed Biddle, and helped him and his brother Jack in a daring jailbreak. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Rules_(novel)"title="Moscow Rules (novel)">
New terror calls Gabriel Allon away from his wife Chiara and blissful honeymoon in Italy. Boris Ostrovsky, editor of the independent "Moskovsky Gazeta", claims to have exclusive information about imminent terror threats to the West and Israel but only dares entrust his knowledge with the now-famous Gabriel Allon. However, Ostrovsky's sudden assassination cuts short his message and leaves intelligence officers within the Israeli-based Office to guess at the scope of the purported threat against their country. Ostrovsky's death, accompanied by the recent murders of two other journalists from the "Gazeta", seems to indicate that his message was both urgent and true. Gabriel's drive to uncover this terror threat leads him to Russia, where he must play by a new set of rules that challenge even his abilities as Israel's top intelligence fieldworker.His encounter with Olga Sukhova, also of the "Gazeta", confirms his suspicions that a Russian arms dealer has begun trafficking with well-known terror groups. Olga reveals her source to be Elena Kharkov, the wife of alleged arms dealer Ivan Kharkov—an oligarch with strong ties to both the old and new Kremlin governments. Gabriel saves himself and Olga from an assassination attempt but, in so doing, arouses the suspicion of the FSB, Russia’s security department. Only the quick and heavy-handed negotiations of the Office secure Gabriel’s life and freedom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keep_(Egan_novel)"title="The Keep (Egan novel)">
Danny is an aging hipster in New York City who has fallen on hard times. He does not have a real career, and he has a habit of burning bridges with old friends. His cousin Howard presents him with an opportunity to come to Eastern Europe and help convert an old castle into an alternative resort. Danny has a troubled relationship with Howard. Many years before, when they were children, he cruelly left Howard stranded deep in a cave for days, traumatizing him badly, and ruining much of his childhood.But Danny is desperate for money, so he decides to work for Howard and travels to the castle, severing his relationships with his New York world. He plunges himself into the strange environment of the castle and puts himself at the mercy of the cousin whom he betrayed many years before. It soon becomes clear that this castle is a deeply strange place with a dark history that is not entirely finished. It has secret passages, bizarre inhabitants, and seems to operate by different rules from the outside world. Danny, cut off from his familiar New York world, is unsure whether the castle is haunted or his own perceptions are becoming increasingly distorted. He thinks that his cousin may be out to get him and that the castle may be a giant trap.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Shadows_(Hunter_novel)"title="Long Shadows (Hunter novel)">
When Sol persuades almost all of ShadowClan to give up belief in StarClan, Tawnypelt takes her kits to ThunderClan, hoping to find refuge there, because she did not want to be part of a Clan that does not believe in StarClan. In hope of helping ShadowClan, Jaypaw, along with his siblings and Tawnypelt's kits, create a fake sign from StarClan to show Blackstar that StarClan is real. Blackstar is not convinced until the fake sign turns real when StarClan cats Raggedstar and Runningnose appear, and tell Blackstar to get rid of Sol.A greencough outbreak begins in ThunderClan, and the Clan is short of the remedy, catmint. Jaypaw has a dream telling him there is a fresh supply in WindClan territory. Jaypaw asks Lionblaze to fetch the catmint. He gets the catmint and gives it to Jaypaw, but not without a tense encounter with his former friend Heathertail. Soon the Clan is healed and Jaypaw finally receives his full medicine cat name, Jayfeather.Later, Jayfeather has a strange dream. In his dream, he has traveled back to a time before the Clans. The lake territories are inhabited by a group of cats who loosely resemble a Clan. Jayfeather awakes as a young cat called Jay's Wing. The cats, threatened by human expansion, hold a vote to move to the mountains. Jayfeather realizes that this group of cats will become the Tribe of Rushing Water, which in turn becomes the modern Clans, so he casts the deciding vote to send the group to the mountains in order to ensure the existence of the future Clans. He then awakes back in the present time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Trouble_and_the_Magic_Marble"title="Tommy Trouble and the Magic Marble">
Tommy, who loves collecting, needs ten dollars to buy a magic marble from another boy. He tries to pick flowers from his mother's prize rose garden to sell to a neighbor, and tries to trade his little brother's snake. Tommy finally decides that the magic marble is not worth the trouble.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Exile"title="Royal Exile">
Royal Exile begins with the capture of Barronel at the hands of Loethar, a barbarian warlord from the Likurian Steppes, who has his sights set on the illusive realm of Penraven.Fearful, now that its neighbours have been captured, King Brennus of Penraven sees to the birth of his daughter, to whom he declares deceased. Legate Regor De Vis, and his twin sons Corbel and Gavriel are called to bear witness to Brennus' cunning plan. Choosing Corbel to whisk away his 'deceased' daughter, the task of protecting Brennus' only 'true' son Leonel is given to Gavriel, who accepts with hesitance. With Loethar descending upon Penraven, both Regor De Vis and King Brennus are slain. Freath, Queen Iselda's aide, betrays the Valisar family, and in turn is granted ownership of his Queen. Loethar takes a liking to Piven, the Valisar's adopted son, likening him to an animal.Corbel meets with the mysterious Sergius, before he descends into the wonders of magic. His twin brother Gavriel finds solitude within the secret passageways within Penraven with the young heir at his side. Queen Iselda is forced to watch Loethar eat her husband's remains, before she is later killed. Meanwhile, Loethar has been gathering the Vested, people marked with special abilities. Freath uses his newly gained position to claim two Vested, of which he chooses Clovis and Kirin. Loethar becomes engaged to Valya, much to his mother's distaste, though he is quick to remind Dara Negev, that it was Valya's brain which allowed him to capture Penraven.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_Up_(novel)"title="Cover Up (novel)">
Stevie Thomas is a fourteen-year-old sports fanatic who has saved a player from blackmailing at the NCAA final Four. He has also proved that a kidnapping was actually a hoax. Since then, he and his partner Susan Carol Anderson had been signed by USTV to run a sports news show. Despite very good ratings, Stevie was replaced 3 months into the show by singer Jamie Whitsitt while Susan Carol stayed on the show. Susan Carol was furious, but decided to stay on the show for financial reasons. He flies to Indianapolis to work for the "Washington Herald" as a journalist for the Super Bowl. When he lands at the airport, he meets Sean McManus who hires him to work for CBS Sports during the week.On Tuesday, he goes to the Hoosier Dome, which is a massive building. His story features the Ravens' equipment guy, Darin Kerns. Kerns used to play with the Dreams' star quarterback Eddie Brennan in high school. Stevie also gets some one-on-one time with Brennan for the story of them playing together. While he is sleeping in his hotel room, he gets a call from Susan Carol saying that she wants to talk to him right now. She says that she was at a party and a doctor who worked with the Dreams came up to her and started talking to her. He was drunk and was trying to impress her. He tells her that five offensive linemen tested positive for HGH, or human growth hormone, and that it was being covered up so the players don't get suspended. They decide that they have to try to write the story and alert the public about it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Darkness_(novel)"title="Into the Darkness (novel)">
War breaks out in Derlavai a generation or two after the Six Years war. Most of the countries that declare war on Algarve do so only half-heartedly, allowing the Algarvians to use that reluctancy to their advantage. The Algarvians split Forthweg with Unkerlant and then overrun Valmiera, Jelgava, and Sibiu, while Unkerlant wrests away part of Zuwayza. Lagoas joins the war when Sibiu is taken. The book ends when the Algarvians "get the drop on" the Unkerlanters in Forthweg (who were plotting to attack them first). Kuusamo, meanwhile, tries to seize Obuda from Gyongyos but fails. Yanina succeeds in gaining control of the Land of the Ice People.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_Descending"title="Darkness Descending">
Algarve starts killing Kaunians as their advance toward Cottbus starts to stall, which both causes Kuusamo to enter the war and Unkerlant to start killing its own peasants for magical power, and the Algarvians are halted by mud, winter, Unkerlanter behemoths with snowshoes, and logistics. Tealdo is killed in Thalfang, just outside Cottbus, and Unkerlant pushes back into the northwest corner of Grelz. Kaunians are herded into ghettos in Forthweg's cities and larger towns. Pekka's first "divergent" series is interrupted by the Algarvian magical blitz on Yliharma. Gyongyos attacks Unkerlant in the west and pushes through the mountains through which the border passes. Lagoas invades the Land of the Ice People.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_the_Darkness_(novel)"title="Through the Darkness (novel)">
Algarve renews an assault in the south of Unkerlant toward the Mamming Hills, which is Unkerlant's source of cinnabar, leading to the mammoth Battle of Sulingen. Kaunian refugees begin showing up in Zuwayza, which takes them in; other Kaunians get away from a caravan in Valmiera and come to the attention of Skarnu and his friends (who had blown up the caravan to disrupt the Algarvians) or are set loose in a Lagoan raid on a camp in Valmiera. Leofsig is killed by Sidroc, who joins the Plegmund's Brigade. Istvan and his squad accidentally eat goat stew in a raid on a camp in Unkerlant's western forest and are purified by their captain. The Algarvians kill Kaunians in the Land of the Ice People in an attempt to use magic against the Lagoans, but the magic from the killed Kaunians slaughters the Algarvian army instead, and Algarve is forced to withdraw from the continent completely, leaving it to the Lagoans. The wear on the Algarvians is showing as they start to rely more on Sibians, Forthwegians and the unreliable Yaninans to keep up the fight against Unkerlant. The Battle of Sulingen is won by the Unkerlanters that winter, with Trasone dying in the final scene in the book. Algarve is on the way to losing the war. The Naantali Project starts and the Kuusamans take Obuda.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rulers_of_the_Darkness"title="Rulers of the Darkness">
Talsu spends a few months in a Jelgavan jail and, coupled with Skarnu's adventures, makes it clear that many Valmierans and Jelgavans support Algarve. Algarvians strike at the Naantali Project and kill Siuntio. Gyongyos loses more islands to Kuusamo and Istvan's unit is moved from Unkerlant to the island of Becsehely. Algarvians try to pinch off Unkerlanters in Durrwangen, leading to the Battle of Durrwangen. Most surviving Kaunians in Forthweg now use Vanai's Forthwegian disguise, and Algarvians are unable to catch nearly as many as before. Algarvian progress in the summer against Durrwangen very slow, and Unkerlanters battle them to a standstill, then force them back into Grelz, ultimately overrunning the capital Herborn. Raniero, the puppet king of Grelz, is boiled in a pot by Swemmel. Sibiu liberated by Lagoas and Kuusamo, and Cornelu is poisoned by his wife, who is sentenced to beheading. Garivald finds his village and family annihilated by the fighting. Vanai ends up caught by the Algarvians.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaws_of_Darkness"title="Jaws of Darkness">
"Habakkuk", a dragon carrier carved out of an iceberg, is introduced, with Leino serving on board her. Vanai has been thrown into Eoforwic's Kaunian Quarter, and later escapes during an Unkerlanter bombing raid, and is found by Ealstan who had disguised himself as an Algarvian. Krasta has sex with Valnu and Lurcanio in the same day and gets pregnant from one of them but is not sure which. Algarve invents "guided eggs". Istvan and his friends are captured on Becsehely by Kuusamans and taken to Obuda. Valmierans finally allowed to fight for Algarve as invasion looms and troop shortages worsen. Kuusamans and Lagoans fool the Algarvians by massing ships and troops on the strait across from Valmiera, and pretending to send a fleet eastward toward Gyongyos, but instead using the latter fleet to invade Jelgava. At this time, Unkerlant launches a massive offensive which sweeps the Algarvians out of northern Unkerlant and back into Forthweg to the Twegen River, while consolidating their hold on Grelz. The Eoforwic Uprising starts when Unkerlanter armies are well into Forthweg. Unkerlant launches major offensive against Zuwayza, forcing it to surrender with severe conditions, although it keeps its independence. Yanina switches over to Unkerlant's side as soon as the fighting crosses its borders. Sidroc's mixed regiment has to do a fighting retreat through Yanina. The Algarvians abandon and withdraw from Valmiera, enabling Skarnu to return home. Algarvians pushed out of most of Jelgava. Istvan's regiment sacrifices itself to vainly attack the Kuusaman occupation on Obuda, although Istvan and Kun escape by inducing diarrhea. Eoforwic Uprising suppressed by Algarvians, although Unkerlanters have not made more than a halfhearted attempt to cross the Twegen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_the_Darkness_(Turtledove_novel)"title="Out of the Darkness (Turtledove novel)">
Spinello is poisoned by Vanai. The southern front is in Yanina, which is in a bad position. The Unkerlanters use Yaninan forces as if they were penal battalions, while Algarvians start killing Yaninans for magical energy in retaliation for Yanina's switch to Unkerlant. In Jelgava, close to the Bratanu Mountains on the border with Algarve, Leino and Xavega are killed by an Algarvian magical trap. Puppet King Beornwulf installed in Forthweg, and Ealstan is drafted. Kuusamans and Lagoans occupy Valmiera. Unkerlanters push into Algarve, first on the southern front then the northern. Algarvians develop the superstick, first using it on Unkerlanters on the southern front. Ealstan in Unkerlanter army is having to reduce his own hometown, Gromheort, in which Algarvians were holed up. Algarvians come out with other desperate magics, some demonic, others new and unreliable, but appear to have given up killing Kaunians for the most part. Pekka destroys Becsehely in first test of divergent blast. Krasta has a baby boy, which she at first names Valnu (later Gainibu), but which turns out to be Lurcanio's; Merkela cuts all her hair off in punishment. Unkerlanters and Kuusamans meet at Torgavi on the Albi in the north of Algarve. Skarnu becomes marquis of Pavilosta. Lurcanio's army surrenders, followed by Gromheort. Ealstan is wounded, discharged from army, and stays in Gromheort with his family. Mezentio's palace falls, Algarve surrenders. Talsu released from prison (again) and expelled with his wife to Kuusamo. Lurcanio, who had been turned over to the Valmierans, is executed by firing squad. Ceorl is killed when he and Garivald escape from a mining camp. Garivald makes his way back to Obilot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_and_Memory"title="Blood and Memory">
After seeing his best friend murdered, his sister imprisoned and the King of Morgravia turn his attention to the woman he loves, Wyl becomes desperate to return Valentyna and prevent her marrying the king. However is ends up being trapped by an enchantment and must track down the Manwitch first.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Goes_the_Neighborhood_(book)"title="There Goes the Neighborhood (book)">
## Chapter 1.In this chapter, the authors talk about their choice in choosing the four neighborhoods. They chose neighborhoods that were of working and lower middle class in order to represent the ordinary Americans and explained that these neighborhoods were populated by different ethnic groups. One thing that they all had in common was the growing Latino population. Moreover, the investigation was carried on because they wanted to fully understand what produced or prevented the “tipping point” (a rapid ethnic turnover). The research depended on an ethnographic approach which consisted of a team of 9 graduate student research assistants at the University of Chicago. The study was done over a period of 3 years, from January 1993 to September 1995. The book mentions Albert O. Hirschman's theory of exit, voice and loyalty. It also provides statistics about the population by race and Hispanic origin from 1980-2000. This chapter talks about the change in racial history in Chicago and the cause of white flight early on (civil rights). The other chapters will focus on the resident’s perception of other races.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soldier's_Return"title="The Soldier's Return">
Sam Richardson returns to the small Cumbrian town of Wigton after fighting in Burma during the Second World War. The war has given Sam’s wife Ellen a newfound confidence and Sam is a stranger to his son Joe. Sam is plagued by memories of the war and wants a new life, for himself, his wife and his son.The book won the WH Smith Literary Award in 2000, and was followed by three sequels.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dear_Zoe"title="Dear Zoe">
The story begins with 15-year-old Tess Denuizo who is remembering how her family named her sister. Tess gives insight about her family in the first chapter. The reader learns that Tess has two half sisters and David is her stepfather. Her biological father is a mess. Tess talks about how her relationship with David is very different from her two sisters. By the third chapter, it is revealed that something terrible happened to her sister Zoe almost a year previous. She talks a lot about how the family has been coping. The family attends therapy and tries to get through the death of Zoe, but things have been hard. Tess's mom has become very depressed and was once the leader of the house, but now David and Tess do everything around the house. Tess learns that her mother might have been sleeping with Justin, a young man who works at the store that is down the street from their house. After this event, Tess decides to move in with her biological father. She starts to adapt to her new living arrangements and has a hard time knowing she left her sister Em, who is much younger than her. She goes to see her at school and promises to see her every week. Tess has a moment with the boy next door, Jimmy Freeze, where she listens to the music he is playing. After this moment, she starts to see him around more. She finally talks to him one day while she is sitting on her porch and offers him a beer but his dad refuses to let her give him one. Her dad then warns her to stay away from him. One day when she is sitting outside on the porch, a man named Travis approaches her. Travis claims to be a friend of her father. Travis gives her money to give to her dad, which Tess finds weird. He asks her if she has ever had some of the "product" but Tess did not understand. Travis then asks her if she would like to smoke weed but Tess denies it. After Travis leaves, Tess confronts her dad about him selling weed. After their encounter, Tess starts hanging out with Jimmy Freeze without telling her dad. One night, Jimmy sneaks into Tess's window and they smoke weed together. It is now summer time and Tess gets a job at boardwalk working at a lemonade stand. Jimmy and Tess start hanging out more, with much of their time consisting of smoking and kissing. David asks Tess to start calling her mother again and their relationship improves. On Tess's sixteenth birthday, she wakes up to find out her dad and Jimmy are in jail for selling weed. Tess is home with her dog when her dad comes home from jail. Her dog runs into the street and her father hits the dog. Her dad brings the dog to the veterinarian while Jimmy stays with her. This event triggers her memory of what happened to Zoe. She tells the story about how she was supposed to be watching Zoe outside but she ran inside to watch the news of 9/11 when her sister ran into the street and was killed by a car. Her dad returns hours later and reassures Tess that her dog is going to be fine. When she goes to bed that night, she wakes up and forces her dad to bring her home to get a picture of Zoe. When she goes inside, she realizes she needs to stay. In the final chapter, Tess talks about how she is coping. She continues to see Jimmy, and things seem to be improving.[entire section needs improving]
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Battle_of_the_Icemark"title="Last Battle of the Icemark">
Two years have passed since The Icemark managed to defeat the Polypontian Empire in Blade of Fire. This has caused the Polypontians to break up and many civil wars have started to take their place. With the defeat of the Polypontians at the end of the second book, there is now another enemy of the Icemark. That settles on Erinor of Artemision and her dinosaur cavalry of Tri-horns, creatures described to look like warrior Triceratops, and Oskan's father Cronus, his Ice Demons and his granddaughter, Medea. Erinor's dinosaur cavalry move in on what remains of the Polypontian Empire, fully intending to move on to the Icemark afterward and to murder anyone that has a bloodline containing that of the northern Hypolitan. Responding to a plea for help from the Empire, a reluctant Thirrin leads her army into the heart of what was once enemy territory in order to prevent them from invading Icemark as well. Thirrin's strong prejudice against the Polypontians is transformed upon meeting their emperor, who is only a young boy, not yet in his teens, and she realizes that everything she hated about their Empire came from the Bellorum clan. However, by invading the Empire to confront Erinor, the Icemark is left open for an invasion from the Darkness (Cronus and his ice demons). 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Samarcand"title="The Road to Samarcand">
Derrick is an American teenager who came to China with his missionary parents. He was orphaned and taken under his uncle's care aboard the sailing ship "The Wanderer". Derrick is at the wheel of the sailing ship in the South China Sea. The boy's uncle, Captain Sullivan of the Asian Pacific shipping trade, feels the time has come to prepare Derrick for his future. He, his companion Ross and Derrick's older cousin, all believe that the youth must now leave the ship and attend school in England. This cousin, Professor Ayrton, is "en route" to China from England. He is an elderly, highly educated man and an expert in oriental archaeology. Derrick is unhappy with the prospect of leaving the ship, and Professor Ayrton proposes "to gild the pill of education" by taking the youth back to England via the famous road to Samarcand.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deer_Park"title="The Deer Park">
With fourteen thousand dollars of winnings from a poker game in his pocket, Sergius O'Shaugnessy wanders to Desert D’Or to find a sense of purpose after recently being discharged from the Air Force. Desert D’Or, a fictionalized Palm Springs, is only hours outside of “the capital” (Los Angeles), where movie stars, producers, and other Hollywood moguls flock to the small desert town to escape the bustle of the city. Compared to Hollywood celebrities, O'Shaugnessy comes from modest roots. Raised an orphan, O'Shaugnessy never had a stable life until he became a fighter pilot in the Air Force. His career as a  pilot was short-lived, as they medically discharged him for psychological reasons.O'Shaugnessy narrates the story, and the plot revolves around his experiences and encounters in the secluded desert city. He befriends former Hollywood director Charles Eitel and other celebrities. Supreme Studios blacklisted Eitel after he was uncooperative in front of a Senate Subversive Committee regarding his alleged communist ties. Like O'Shaugnessy, Eitel is at a crossroads in his life. He is in the process of writing a new script but is unconfident of his abilities to produce meaningful work. In addition to Eitel and O'Shaugnessy, the other main characters range from movie star Lulu Meyers and pimp Marion Faye to the up-and-coming producer Collie Munshin and studio mogul Herman Teppis. Sex, alcohol, and adultery is widespread throughout Desert D’Or, and O'Shaugnessy and Eitel both find themselves in multiple flings throughout the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_a_Gentle_Lady"title="Death of a Gentle Lady">
While the rest of the town is smitten by Mrs. Gentle, Hamish Macbeth distrusts and dislikes her. When she tries to close down his beloved station, he exacts his revenge and saves a beautiful woman from deportation at the same time by proposing to Gentle's maid Ayesha. By the time the wedding day arrives, Hamish is desperate to escape marriage; when Ayesha doesn't appear and Mrs. Gentle is found dead, he escapes one disaster only to be swept into another.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Remembered"title="Kate Remembered">
Published within days of her death at 96, this life of Katharine Hepburn is able to take her to her final hours, following her career from her aristocratic, fresh-faced, and slightly audacious youth to her extreme old age. A. Scott Berg knew Hepburn for the last 20 years of her life, and his book is not only the biography of a beloved actress but a tribute to a friend to whom she told the truth about her life, including her great loves and pet hates, with an eye to its eventual publication.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughters_of_Destiny_(novel)"title="Daughters of Destiny (novel)">
The American Construction Syndicate wants to build a railroad across Baluchistan, as part of their plans for global development. The company appoints a commission, headed by Colonel Piedmont Moore, to obtain the right of way from the Baluchi ruler. Moore chooses his personal friend and physician Dr. Warner as his second in command; and with commendable nepotism he selects his son Allison Moore as the commission's surveyor. Dr. Warner's ebullient daughter Bessie wants to come along, and solicits Moore's daughter Janet to come too; the young women will by chaperoned by Bessie's Aunt Lucy. (Col. Moore is secretly pleased that his daughter Janet will make the trip; she has been melancholy after an unhappy love affair, with a man the Colonel regards as a thief and scoundrel.)The Americans travel to Baluchistan, and promptly get themselves embroiled in a succession conflict. The reigning Khan of the country is dying, and two cousins vie for the crown. One, Kasam, is masquerading as their guide. What follows is a complex but tightly-woven plot that involves subterfuge and conspiracy, poisonings and attempted assassinations, sword fights and a pursuit in the desert, a scheming "femme fatale", disguises and false identities – all the ingredients of melodrama.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_of_Elimination"title="Process of Elimination">
Nancy and Bess join many from all over the world to participate in a Los Angeles conference concerning the environment, but they soon get involved in investigating the murder of Carl Dubchek, a conference supervisor. Meanwhile, the Hardys witness the strange and unorthodox theft of multiple bamboo plants from the San Diego Zoo, and uncover a connection to the conference.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Negroes_(novel)"title="The Book of Negroes (novel)">
Aminata Diallo, the daughter of a jeweller and a midwife, is kidnapped at the age of 11 from her village Bayo, Niger in West Africa and forced to walk for three months to the sea in a coffle, a line of prisoners chained together, with hundreds of strangers and a handful of people from her village. Even before she is placed on the ship, she vows that one day, she will return. A boy her age, Chekura, has been forced to assist the slave traders, but is later sent abroad just like the rest. He becomes Aminata's unlikely friend. After several horrific months of voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, including a slave revolt, she arrives in South Carolina where she begins a new life as a slave. Her name is anglicized to Meena Dee. She is taken under the wing of a fellow slave named Georgia, who helps her learn English. Seeing her intelligence and potential, a fellow Muslim slave named Mamed secretly teaches her to read and write.As a teenager Aminata manages to reunite with Chekura, and they sneak off to meet once a month. The plantation owner, Appleby, learns of the meetings and punishes Aminata by brutally raping her. Despite her owner's jealousy, the two slaves marry and conceive a baby boy, whom she named Mamadu. Appleby arranges for Aminata and her child to be sold to separately and so her son Mamadu is stolen from her. Aminata is handed over to a Jewish man named Solomon Lindo who moves her to Charles Town, unaware of where her child may be.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-Country_Crime"title="Cross-Country Crime">
The Hardy brothers go for a vacation in the town of Evergreen. There, they meet a man suffering from amnesia who is a prime suspect for a bank robbery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasing_the_Bear"title="Chasing the Bear">
Spenser, while relaxing at a park with his love interest, Susan Silverman, reflects on some experiences in his life as a youth, before becoming a detective.Spenser conveys that he grew up in an all-male household, his mother dying immediately before he was delivered by caesarean section. His household consisted of himself, his father, and his two maternal uncles. They were all uneducated, but eager to learn, worked in construction, and boxed from time to time to earn extra money. His uncles taught him to box from a very young age, three years old. They also read volumes of classic novels to him at night.The main narrative conveys Spenser's adventures with a girl, Jeannie Haden. Jeannie was about Spenser's age, but was just a friend. Her father was an abusive drunk. One day Spenser saw her in her father's car, mouthing the words "Help" over and over again. Spenser, along with his dog, Pearl, follows the car and, eventually, Jeannie's father's boat down a river. He locates her and her father on a small island in the river, next to a lean-to. After a brief encounter with her father, Luke, Spenser is able to rescue Jeannie some time later.They escape downriver on Spenser's rowboat, eventually leading Luke Haden to his death. Spenser's father and uncles tell him he "did good" and needn't report the death, or his role in it. But he does, but the local law enforcement doesn't charge Spenser with any crime.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Traveling_Vampire_Show"title="The Traveling Vampire Show">
The book follows three 16-year-olds on an idle summer day in 1963. The narrator, Dwight, and his best friends Rusty and Slim (a tomboy), find flyers for an exotic vampire show. They make a journey to a local clearing called Jank's Field in an attempt to sneak a peek at Valeria, who is billed as the world's only living captive vampire, but they are attacked by a dog and separated, leading to a series of misadventures. Meanwhile, Dwight's attractive sister-in-law Lee purchases four tickets from the show's frontman, Julian Stryker. Later that night the group is reunited and attends the titular Vampire Show, where they discover a sinister plot involving the vampires.The book focuses on the interactions between the three teens and their sexual awakening.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patsy_of_Paradise_Place"title="Patsy of Paradise Place">
When Patsy Callaghan's father discovers that her mother, Maeve, neglects her, he stops going to sea. John Callagan buys a horse and cart and sets up as a carrier at Liverpool Docks. Patsy loves going out on the carrier with her father and Billy Grant, the boy that helps him. When one day John Callaghan is killed in an accident, and Maeave goes out again drinking binges, Billy, who is deeply in love with Patsy, helps her continue the business. Patsy falls in love with Bruno Alvarez a handsome fairground showman, and believes he is going to marry her and will travel to Spain together. When Patsy brings him to meet Maeve, he stays for the night and the next morning, Patsy finds Bruno and Maeve in bed together. Billy comforts her and tries to calm her down, until they end up making love. But when Maeve finds out that Patsy is pregnant, she throws her out of the house. Patsy hides in the stables and Billy takes care of the baby, Liam, when he is born. While she is hiding in the stables, Billy has an accident and is crippled. Unable to find Bruno, Patsy lives with Billy's family. As Liam gets older, Patsy starts working as a nurse. When Liam develops tuberculosis, Patsy decides to find Bruno and discovers that he and her mother went off together. Eventually, Liam dies and Patsy is once more depressed. Billy comforts her again, and she realises how much she loves him. They decide to open a new business on their own and get married.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Faint_Cold_Fear"title="A Faint Cold Fear">
While at the Dairy Queen with her pregnant sister Tessa, Sara is called to meet Jeffrey at the scene of an apparent suicide on campus property, a suicide they both later agree seems suspicious although they cannot quite put their fingers on why. Tessa asks to go along and Sara, against her better judgment, allows it. As Sara is examining the body, Tessa walks into the woods to relieve herself. Also on hand are Lena, who has quit the force and now works for campus security, and her new boss, steroidal creep Chuck Gaines. Chuck identifies the victim as the son of two campus professors, a development sure to complicate the case exponentially for Jeffrey. When Tessa doesn't come out of the woods, a search finds her stabbed repeatedly and barely alive; she is airlifted to Grady Hospital in Atlanta. While Sara and her parents wait tensely by Tessa's bedside, Jeffrey and Lena work the case while at each other's throats over Lena's decision to quit the force. Another suicide occurs, more suspicious than the last, and as Lena spirals further out of control with alcohol and drugs, she makes a fateful and perhaps fatal connection with student Ethan Green, who is not what he appears to be.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_Jane_(book)"title="Citizen Jane (book)">
Jane Alexander was a sheltered, attractive widow living with her large, close-knit family in her small hometown of Truckee, California. For six years, she had been living with Tom O'Donnell, her charismatic and handsome boyfriend. He had used wit, charm, and tales of adventure to borrow money for extensive home business operations and investing.Gertrude McCabe, her favorite 88-year-old aunt, was gruesomely murdered in San Jose in 1983, a case that baffled San Jose PD. A break came from newly assigned police detective Jack Morris, whose investigative genius would soon solve the case. It was a difficult case to crack, but the motive was clearly something personal. McCabe was bludgeoned, choked with a bicycle lock, stabbed over two dozen times in her neck and back with a knife. Morris soon convinced Alexander that the killer was her boyfriend, and after O'Donnell disappeared with over $10,000 of her money and left her near bankruptcy, Alexander embarked on an epic journey to track down and outsmart the wily con artist. After 13 years of collecting evidence, Alexander and Morris managed to convict O'Donnell of first degree murder. Police believe O'Donnell killed Gertrude McCabe because Jane Alexander would then inherit her Aunt Gertrude's estate. O'Donnell was sentenced to life imprisonment; he died in 2010.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucien_Leuwen"title="Lucien Leuwen">
The book describes the career of Lucien, the son of a Parisian banker, in the years following the July Revolution of 1830 that brought Louis Philippe I to the throne. Lucien is expelled from the École Polytechnique after taking part in an anti-government demonstration following the funeral of General Lamarque. After two years of idleness he joins the army, and falls off a horse as his regiment enters the city of Nancy because he is gazing at ‘a young blonde with magnificent hair and a disdainful look’. He falls in love with this young widow, who is named Mme de Chasteller, although he is forced to renounce her. Lucien then returns to Paris and becomes principal private secretary to the Minister of the Interior. Stendhal planned a last section that would show Lucien in Italy and resolve the story with a happy reunion with Mme de Chasteller, but it was never written.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silent_Sea"title="The Silent Sea">
The Corporation is hired to hunt for and recover the plutonium energy source from a NASA satellite that went down in the jungles in Argentina. What the members of the Corporation find leads them to Antarctica, where they try to foil a multinational plot around a converted scientific station that is actually a vast mining operation that has a large military base built to protect it. Along the way, there is a search for a mythical Chinese Admiral's Chinese treasure ship called the "Silent Sea". That ship had to be scuttled along with its crew due to a prion disease, caught by the crew when they traded for meat from the native cannibals. The Corporation is forced to move the ship to deeper waters, since the Chinese, in cooperation with the Argentinians, are using the presence of the ship to claim the Antarctic Peninsula as Chinese territory. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triptych_(Slaughter_novel)"title="Triptych (Slaughter novel)">
Will Trent of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation is on the trail of a serial rapist with a gruesome inclination, when he comes into contact with Michael Ormewood, an Atlanta homicide detective. Ormewood has a dark past and it involves Angie Polaski, a vice cop who is the only woman Will has ever loved. John Shelley, who at fifteen was tried as an adult for the rape and murder of a neighbor girl, has just gotten out of prison after twenty years. John's trying to stay clean and keep his parole officer happy when he discovers by accident that he's involved with the rapist, and if John doesn't take action fast, he will end up back in prison. Will and Michael work to solve the case, mingling with the pimps and sex workers of Atlanta's housing projects in search of clues. Will and Angie resume their strange relationship after a two-year hiatus. Will continues his struggle to keep anyone from finding out about his dyslexia, a definite career-ender, and Will's job is the only thing that keeps the painful demons of his own past at bay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractured_(novel)"title="Fractured (novel)">
Six months ago, Atlanta homicide detective Faith Mitchell's police captain mother was the focus of an investigation that resulted in her retirement and the firing of six narcotics officers. It was a justified outcome, but the cops want to protect their own, and Faith, along with the entire Atlanta police force, are resentful of the man responsible, GBI agent Will Trent. Now Faith and Will are thrown together on a shocking murder/kidnapping case involving some of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the city, and neither one of them is happy about the pairing. But Faith gradually discovers that not only is Will not the jerk she thought him to be, but he is also a highly skilled detective. He and Faith race frantically from the dormitories of Georgia Tech to the halls of one of Atlanta's exclusive private academies to keep another corpse from surfacing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan's_Forge_(Du_Brul_novel)"title="Vulcan's Forge (Du Brul novel)">
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union launched a secret operation against the United States, detonating a nuclear bomb on the ocean floor and creating a volcano that would take decades to rise to the surface.Now, two hundred miles off Hawaii, an island is forming-an island that holds unimaginable wealthe and power for those who control it. As the fight to claim the island rages from the halls of power to the depths of the ocean, Philip Mercer must wage a battle against both man and nature to bring the world back from the edge of destruction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medusa_Stone"title="The Medusa Stone">
Ten years ago, the spy satellite Medusa burned upon re-entry-but not before its sensors revealed a secret buried deep in the Earth hidden for thousands of years from the eyes of humanity. A priceless discovery that some would die to find - and kill to possess...With uncanny talent as a geologist and a quick intelligence matched by savvy and courage, Phillip Mercer is fast becoming a legend in powerful circles around the world. And at least two groups in those circles need his help. When one of them snatches and holds his oldest friend, Mercer is forced to act by the kidnappers...whose allegiance is a mystery, but whose viciousness is not.In a harsh and hostile land ravaged by violence, Mercer races to find the one thing that will save his friend. But the location of this ancient treasure is elusive. He is thwarted by brutal competing forces and, suddenly, he learns that there is much more at stake then either his life or the life of an old friend: the fate of thousands of innocent souls depends on him and him alone...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wedding_of_Sarah_Jane_Smith"title="The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith">
## Part 1.The episode starts with Sarah Jane sneaking out of her home for "a traffic report meeting". With help from Mr Smith and K9, Luke, Rani and Clyde find her in a restaurant with a man. As they are leaving, Clyde is puzzled by the sound of the TARDIS. Sarah Jane returns home and finds out that she was spied upon, but seems happy and announces that she is seeing a man, Peter Dalton, and that she has invited him to Bannerman Road.Sarah Jane tells Luke that she is worried about what Peter might think about her adventures. Luke tells her not to worry and that she looks happy. After Sarah Jane leaves the room, Luke also hears the sound of the TARDIS. When Peter arrives at the Smiths' house, Sarah Jane tries to hide all evidence of her extraterrestrial adventures, but a parcel arrives containing an alien creature. Rani and Clyde, who were trying to see what Peter was like, take the parcel back to Rani's house. Peter arrives as Clyde and Rani leave, but Rani's mother runs across to also look at him. In the Chandras' house, Rani and Clyde see a multi-eyed slug-like creature burst out of the parcel; detecting the alien, K9 leaves Sarah Jane's house to warn about the creature. Luke manages to explain K9 away as a prototype toy. K9 then joins Rani and Clyde in trying to catch the creature as Sarah Jane, Peter and Luke go for a meal. During the meal, Rani, Clyde and K9 manage to bring the alien slug to the attic where Mr Smith teleports it to its home planet, Polongus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollback_(novel)"title="Rollback (novel)">
The novel focuses around Don Halifax and his wife of sixty years, Sarah, an astronomer who translated the first transmission sent from an extraterrestrial source to Earth 38 years prior to the opening of the story. Sarah, now 87, is tasked to decode the second message sent from the unknown alien race—if she can live long enough to do so. A wealthy industrial billionaire, Cody McGavin, offers to put up billions of dollars to perform a "rollback" on not only Sarah but Don as well. This process, which reverts a person's body to its condition when the subject was 25 years old, is successfully performed on Don, but fails to work with Sarah. This leaves Sarah gradually creeping toward death while Don's life begins anew. Much of the story focuses on Don as he discovers the advantages and disadvantages of being young again, with periodic flashbacks to when Sarah translated the first alien message.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora's_Curse"title="Pandora's Curse">
During World War II, at a secret Nazi submarine base, containers crafted entirely from looted wartime gold were hidden away. The treasure was not the solid-gold chests, but the cargo they carried - an artifact so lethal that whoever possessed "Pandora's Boxes" held the power to unleash hell upon earth...In the unforgiving wastes of Greenland, geologist Philip Mercer uncovers a long - abandoned U.S. Army base buried under the ice - and a long-dead body still hot with radiation. Before Mercer and his colleague, the seductive Dr. Anika Klein, can investigate further, a flash fire engulfs the base, and they are ordered to evacuate. But their plane is forced to land when a bomb is discovered on board, and they must seek shelter from the murderous weather in a hidden ice cavern.That's where they learn the startling truth. A powerful German corporation has launched an operation to destroy evidence of its Nazi past. But one of the corporate mercenaries knows what's inside the Pandora's boxes, and he plans to hold the entire world hostage - unless Mercer can find a way to stop him...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knight_(novel)"title="The Knight (novel)">
The story opens with an older narrator recounting a great adventure. He is left alone in a cabin in the wilderness by himself for a few days. He goes for a hike and ends up chasing a flying castle he sees in the sky until he is abducted by "a lot of people". He awakens to find himself at the mouth of a cave by the sea. He is greeted by a fortune teller who calls him Able of the High Heart and turns his walking stick into a bow. He soon after discovers his chivalrous destiny and embarks on a quest to travel this strange new land.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Claw"title="Ice Claw">
Max Gordon is participating in an X-Treme sports challenge, where he witnesses the final moments of a mysterious Basque monk, who screams a cryptic clue before plummeting to his death. The clue is a prophecy that predicts an ecological catastrophe that will kill millions around Europe.When he is blamed for the monk's death, Max and his best friend Sayid follow the clues and discover betrayal and murder around every turn before meeting the man behind it all: the insane billionaire Tishenko.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Reach"title="Beyond Reach">
The Heartsdale Children's Clinic is closed. Sara Linton spends all day being deposed in a malpractice lawsuit filed by the parents of Jimmy Powell, now dead from leukemia, over a technicality. Everything she's built up for the last sixteen years is crumbling as greedy townspeople line up to get in on the action, not realizing their betrayal of her will only result in higher healthcare costs for everyone, or that the nearest pediatrician is 100 miles away. Sara's parents are gone on a cross-country trip and her sister is counseling the homeless in Atlanta. Only her husband, Jeffrey, is there for support. When he's called away to the town of Reese, it's almost a relief to get to go with him, except that they're going because his assistant Lena lies in a hospital with smoke inhalation injuries, under arrest, and suspected of being involved in a murder. She was found beaten badly, watching a torched SUV burn with a body inside it. Reese is Lena's home town, and she came back to check on her uncle Hank, the ex-addict who raised her and her twin sister. She found him mixed up with some unsavory characters and hooked on drugs again after being clean for three decades. Major events from her past are now in question, events that shaped who she is. One of the few things of which she is certain is that Jeffrey and Sara are in terrible danger, and she must get them out of town.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Jones_and_the_Peril_at_Delphi"title="Indiana Jones and the Peril at Delphi">
After a brief flashback to 1920, with a glimpse of Indiana Jones as a college student in Chicago, the novel moves to its main setting. The year is 1922. Indy is a graduate student in Paris, studying linguistics and Greek archaeology. Although his greater talent currently seems to be for the former, he begins to wonder if he might be better suited for a different career after he receives a surprising invitation from his professor. Following an archaeology lecture to her class on the Greek city of Delphi, Professor Dorian Belecamus announces that she will be leaving the university for the rest of the semester in order to return to Delphi to oversee the recovery of an archaeological find, discovered recently in the wake of an earthquake in the region. After class, to Indy's surprise, she privately invites him to join her on the journey as her assistant, telling him that he is her best student and that she feels he could be very helpful on the expedition. After some consideration, Indy decides to accept the professor's offer in the hopes that assisting in such an exciting undertaking may very well lead him to a more intriguing and adventurous career than the world of linguistics may have to offer. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greeks_Have_a_Word_For_It"title="The Greeks Have a Word For It">
Two men arrive in Athens on the same boat. Kennedy an Englishman intends to make a living teaching English and devises a scam to make money fast. Mitsos is returning to Greece after many years away but finds it impossible to escape the memories of the brutal deaths of his parents at the hands of fellow Greeks during the war and an opportunity arises to take revenge. The two men meet briefly as they disembark the boat but their stories then diverge only to come together at the end of the book with fatal results.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waking_Dream"title="Waking Dream">
While attending the reading of her father's will with her mother and stepfather, Bethany meets her cousin Poppy, a spoiled girl who is believed to have magic powers. Bethany is left a mysterious painting in the will; it does not look like a piece he would normally paint. Bethany is unwillingly sent to stay at Poppy's house for the summer. A strange boy called Rivalaun turns up, claiming to be Bethany and Poppy's cousin.Later on in the book, Poppy gets fed up with all the lies and secrets, so she steals Bethany's painting from her room and paints it on her wall. Poppy uses some kind of magic so that she can walk through into the world of the painting: a world of dreams. Rivalaun and Bethany follow to rescue her. They then cannot get back to the normal world unless they complete a quest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ved_Vejen"title="Ved Vejen">
The novel centres on the character of Katinka Bai, a quiet, sensitive young woman married to a boisterous and somewhat vulgar station master, Bai. The marriage is barren, and she remains isolated. Almost subconsciously, she passionately longs after something undefinable. Even after the arrival of Huus, a neighbour with whom she begins to establish a promising relationship, she is unable to fulfill her passion, although for the first time in her life she falls in love. In the small provincial community where they live, neither she nor Huus dares to break the conventions they know, sad as it all may be. When they realize they cannot take their attachment any further, they decide to separate and Huus leaves the country. At the end of the novel, as at the beginning, Katinka stands by the wayside, observing life glide by.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother_Cadfael's_Penance"title="Brother Cadfael's Penance">
In November 1145, Robert sends a copy of the list to Hugh Beringar, Sheriff of Shrewsbury, along with news that the two factions will meet for a peace conference at Coventry. Earl Robert asks Hugh to attend. Not seeing Olivier's name among the men being offered for ransom, Hugh tells Cadfael, who tells Abbot Radulfus that he feels it is his duty to rescue his son Olivier, at the risk of breaking his vows. Radulfus allows him to accompany Hugh to Coventry. Beyond that, Cadfael is on his own.In Lichfield's chapel, Cadfael recognises Yves Hugonin, Olivier's brother-in-law. Riding to Coventry, barely have they entered the town when Yves draws his sword and flies in rage at Brien de Soulis, the turncoat castellan of Faringdon. Order is restored by Bishop Roger de Clinton. Yves is called to a private audience with the Empress Maud. She officially rebukes him for disturbing the peace, yet hints that she would be delighted if de Soulis were killed. The peace talks come to nothing. Before the talks end, Yves asks about Olivier's whereabouts. De Soulis claims to know nothing. In the winter darkness, as the two sides exit the chapel after Compline, Yves trips over the dead body of de Soulis on the chapel steps. Philip FitzRobert accuses Yves of murder. Defying a promise of safe conduct to all who came with the Empress, twelve men seize Yves near Gloucester, which is duly reported to the Bishop.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Broken_Compass"title="The Broken Compass">
## Part I: The New Permanent Government of Britain.In Chapter 1, "Guy Fawkes Gets a Blackberry", Hitchens claims that opinion polls are a device for influencing public opinion and not measuring it, and that political parties and newspapers are responsible for this manipulation, whose purpose is to "bring about the thing it claims is already happening". The author cites contemporary examples of the media attacking Gordon Brown and the expected win of the Conservative Party at the 2010 general election. Hitchens begins Chapter 2, "The Power of Lunch", by asserting, based on his time as a reporter at Westminster, that political journalists are uninterested in serious political debate; propagate received centre-left standpoints on issues; and consult with each other and politicians about media stories. Chapter 3, "Time for a Change", describes how a media reporting bias is attempting to facilitate a Tory general election win. Hitchens states one of his motivations in writing the book was to frustrate this exercise. Hitchens claims in Chapter 4, "Fear of Finding Something Worse", that Labour has reached "the most significant moment in its history – the complete acceptance of its programme by the Conservatives". The author invokes the closing image of George Orwell's "Animal Farm" to illustrate how close the two parties have become. Chapter 5, "The Great Landslide", discusses how a number of left-leaning writers and newspapers have allegedly begun describing the Conservatives in favourable terms, and how this no longer constituted "a form of treason".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Misdemeanors"title="Divine Misdemeanors">
"Divine Misdemeanors" follows the character of Meredith NicEssus, princess of faerie, also known as Merry Gentry. Having succeeded in her goal to become pregnant before her cousin Cel, Merry has declined the Unseelie throne and is attempting to live peacefully with her men and court while dealing with continued court intrigue and the paparazzi. This is made more difficult when a series of brutal murders rips through the area, with the Grey Detective Agency being asked to take part in the investigations and to send Merry in particular. Meanwhile, Merry is having to deal with the stress of leading a large group of fey outside of the Seelie and Unseelie courts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Song_(novel)"title="The Last Song (novel)">
17-year-old Veronica "Ronnie" Miller is a troubled teenager who wants to live her own life and is trying her very best to ignore her divorced parents: Kim, her mother with whom she lives in New York, and Steve, her father who lives in his hometown of Wrightsville Beach, NC. Her mother decides that it would be in everyone's best interest if Ronnie and her 10-year-old brother, Jonah, spent the summer in Wrightsville Beach with Steve. Jonah is excited, while Ronnie can only wonder why her parents hate her so much as to send her there for the summer.Once they arrive, Kim leaves and Ronnie runs off to the carnival down at the beach, where she watches a volleyball game in the crowd. As she turns to leave, one of the players, the privileged Will Blakelee, knocks into her while trying to reach the ball, spilling her soda all through the front of her shirt. He spills her slushie all over her and she is mad.In search of a stand selling apparel, Ronnie bumps into Blaze, an estranged teen like herself, Blaze helps her find a T-shirt booth and they leave to watch a show by Marcus, Blaze's boyfriend, on the pier. The show includes "harmless" fireballs, and when it's over, the police run Marcus off. They go to sit under the pier, where Blaze heads off to get Marcus another beer. In Blaze's absence, Marcus attempts to hit on Ronnie, causing her to leave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fever_Crumb"title="Fever Crumb">
Fever Crumb is a 14 year old girl raised by engineer Dr. Giddeon Crumb. She serves as an apprentice and is a member of the Order of Engineers in the not-yet traction city of London. She leaves her sheltered life to help find archaeologist Kit Solent on a secret project.Within a few days of working for Kit, she is recognized by Bagman Creech, the legendary killer of Scriven. He tries to kill her, forcing her to flee the city. The Scriven were a race superior to humans and were violent rulers of London until rebellion forced them out. Bagman is a hunter who wants to get rid of any evidence of Scriven. It is revealed that the mother of Fever, Wavey Godshawk, is a Scriven, and more importantly, she is the daughter of the Scriven leader Auric Godshawk. As both of them eventually leave London to join "The Movement", Kit is wounded in an attack. They make it to "The Movement" and Kit eventually dies. The body of Kit Solent is turned into a Stalker (a mechanical undead warrior) called Shrike, one of many turned into Stalkers that year. Her mother performs the transformation. Shrike does not possess the memories of his previous life, knowing only the Movement's objectives. The movement moves to attack London and Land admiral Quercus challenges the London Mayor to a fight in which he is victorious. Fever and her mother Wavey return to the vault buried beneath the former home of Auric Godshawk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangerous_Girls"title="Dangerous Girls">
During summer break, at Camp Blue Moon, the vampire Lorenzo "Renz" Angelini sinks his fangs into the throat of sixteen-year-old Destiny Weller. Afterwards, she and her twin sister Livvy return home in Dark Springs with a craving for blood; they feed on a rabbit's blood and Destiny sucks blood from a package of liver. While at the house of a family friend, Coach Bauer, the sisters meet Marjory Bauer, another vampire. Marjory says she is undead and the Restorer can restore their life.At Dark Springs High School, in Renz's office, Destiny talks with him and decides he is the Restorer. She asks him if he will help her and her twin. He says that he will come and take care of her at the senior overnight. Back at her house, Destiny greets her friend Nakeisha Johnson, who tells her Renz was left out of the camp yearbook and there are no photos of him. From this, Destiny determines that Renz is actually a vampire and not the Restorer.During the senior overnight, Destiny meets Renz, shoves a wooden tent pole through his body and kills him. Her father appears, and tells her that he is the Restorer. He cures her, and they go and find Livvy and her friend Ross Starr at the edge of a grassy clearing. Livvy tells Destiny and her father that she has been immortal since camp, and that she and Ross exchanged blood. Livvy and Ross change into blackbirds, and fly off into the black sky.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Stranger_to_Command"title="A Stranger to Command">
In this much-anticipated prequel to Crown Duel, Vidanric Renselaeus, fifteen-year-old Marquis of Shevraeth, finds himself sent across the continent to a military academy in Marloven Hess, a kingdom known for its violent history. Vidanric is used to civilized life in pleasant Remalna—except that the evidence is increasingly clear that the civilization is only on the surface. Too many young, smart heirs have suffered accidents of late, and the evidence is beginning to point to the king, Galdran, who has grandiose plans for expansion.In Marloven Hess, no one can pronounce his real names, and they assume his title is his name. He becomes Shevraeth—discovering that there are no marquises or dukes or barons in this kingdom, and no one has the slightest interest in Remalna. Or in foreigners. Until very recently, the academy was closed to outsiders. But the king—also fifteen, and recently come to his throne after a nasty civil war—wants him there.Learning about command turns out to be very different from what Shevraeth had assumed, and the Marlovens, who are going through political and social change at all levels, are not at all what he expected. He makes friends as well as enemies; experiences terror and laughter as well as challenges on the field and off.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_OK,_I'm_Wearing_Really_Big_Knickers"title="It's OK, I'm Wearing Really Big Knickers">
In the previous novel, Georgia has finally landed the "Sex God", her longtime crush Robbie Jennings, for a boyfriend. Georgia's dad has gone to New Zealand for a few months. While he is gone, her young sister Libby is ill and Georgia's mother takes her to the doctors. When they return, "Gee's" mum has seen a new doctor and rather likes him; she begins finding any excuse she can to make an appointment with him. After a while, Georgia's mother announces that the family are off to New Zealand for a month, but Georgia feels she cannot possibly leave as she has just got the boy of her dreams and it would be a dastardly crime to leave him.Georgia does not leave for New Zealand, but Robbie says she is too young for him and leaves her. Georgia decides to use Dave the Laugh (Robbie's mate) as a red herring to make Robbie jealous and come back to/for her. Georgia feels guilty for using Dave the Laugh and she breaks up with him. Georgia feels extremely awful about it, until she learns that Dave has started dating her friend Ellen (one of her best mates out of her "Ace Gang"). In the end Robbie admits he can't stop thinking about Georgia and really misses her and her weird ways. He asks her to be his girlfriend again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Valley_(novel)"title="The Last Valley (novel)">
The story opens with a man named Vogel, starving and exhausted, running from a burnt-out, plague-ridden village. After several days, he stumbles into the Valley. At its centre, Vogel discovers a well-maintained, obviously inhabited village but with no people or domesticated animals. He falls asleep in an abandoned home but is awakened by the sound of horses and instinctively flies out of the home, only to be quickly tackled by two soldiers. The two prove to be of a company of mercenaries that arrived in The Valley while Vogel slept. Vogel is dragged to the leader of the group, a man identified as the Captain.It is the Captain's intention to pillage the Valley, burn the village to the ground, and return the plunder to the Protestant army of Prince Bernard of Saxe-Weimar for whom they are fighting. Vogel intuitively senses that the Captain is battle fatigued and hastily hatches a plan to save the Valley. Accompanied by a soldier named Korski, his main rival within the group, the Captain draws Vogel aside from the other mercenaries who have begun to break into the buildings. Vogel convinces the Captain to spare the Valley and guard its existence from other soldiers to survive the coming winter. "Live well," he tells him, "while other villages are trampled flat." The Captain quickly surmises the rationality of Vogel's suggestion and, with equal quickness, kills the unsuspecting Korski. He then proceeds to inform the company of the change in plans and arranges the elimination of several other troopers who might object (allies of Korski and those with women back at the army's encampment). Vogel insures his own survival in this arrangement by offering to be a type of buffer between the peasants and the soldiers as he is a member of neither group.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forest_King"title="The Forest King">
After the trial of Vedvedsica, General Balif is sent on a mission to ascertain the true danger of a new race of small humanoids infiltrating the eastern borders of Silvanesti.He travels east with an unlikely group. His two loyal servants, Lofotan and Artyrith, both formidable warriors, and Mathi, and Treskan unsure where their loyalties lie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Jones_and_the_Seven_Veils"title="Indiana Jones and the Seven Veils">
After barely escaping with his life from an archaeological dig in Tikal, Guatemala, Dr. Henry Jones Jr. makes his way back to New York. There he learns of the recent discovery of the mysterious writings of a missing British explorer, Colonel Percy Fawcett. Though Colonel Fawcett himself still remains missing, his rediscovered work tells a story that could drastically change history and challenge several firmly held scientific beliefs. Within those pages, an incredible picture begins to take shape of a long lost city in the jungles of Brazil and the apparently true legend of a red-headed race, possibly descended from ancient Celtic Druids. Fascinated by such a prospect, and with the lovely Deidre Campbell at his side, Indiana Jones sets out for the Amazon. However, as usual, getting there will prove to be the true adventure. And if he does manage to survive the journey, who can tell what dangers await within the mythical city itself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapitan_Sino"title="Kapitan Sino">
"Kapitan Sino" is a fictional story by Bob Ong about Rogelio Manglicmot, an average Electronics Technician in a town called Pelaez who became a Super Hero after learning his Special abilities. With the help of his best friend Bok-bok and his childhood friend Tessa (whom he also bears romantic feelings), he treads the path of saving lives and offering help to those in need. After some confusion of what to call the mysterious crime fighter, the people decided to call him "Kapitan Sino" (translated as Captain Who?). Kapitan Sino then start his adventures as he goes one on one with a giant gorilla, saves people trapped inside a burning building, prevents structures from collapsing during an earthquake, stops a Train from going off rail and caught small fry criminals faster than the local authorities.As the story progresses, a series of abduction occurs in Pelaez by a mysterious Hairy Monster. It was later revealed that the same Monster is Mayor Solomon Suico who abducts victims for their blood to sustain his Son Michael who inherited his form however with more severity. Kapitan Sino engages in a fierce battle with Mayor Suico after he followed him to an abandoned hospital where he keeps his victims. Kapitan Sino defeats Mayor Suico and kills him; Suico's Son Michael soon follows after being injured in the rubbles made by the battle. Kapitan Sino searches the abandoned hospital for Suico's latest victim. He finds Tessa instead, unconscious and bleeding. He rushes her to the nearest hospital, Tessa however dies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club_(novel)"title="Fight Club (novel)">
"Fight Club" centers on an anonymous narrator, who works as a product recall specialist for an unnamed car company. Because of the stress of his job and the jet lag brought upon by frequent business trips, he begins to suffer from recurring insomnia. When he seeks treatment, his doctor advises him to visit a support group for testicular cancer victims to "see what real suffering is like". He finds that sharing the problems of others—despite not having testicular cancer himself—alleviates his insomnia.The narrator's unique treatment works until he meets Marla Singer, another "tourist" who visits the support group under false pretenses. The possibly disturbed Marla reminds the narrator that he is a faker who does not belong there. He begins to hate Marla for keeping him from crying, and, therefore, from sleeping. After a confrontation, the two agree to attend separate support group meetings to avoid each other. The truce is uneasy, and the narrator's insomnia returns.While on a nude beach, the narrator meets Tyler Durden, a charismatic extremist of mysterious means. After an explosion destroys the narrator's condominium, he asks to stay at Tyler's house. Tyler agrees, but asks for something in return: "I want you to hit me as hard as you can." Both men find that they enjoy the ensuing fistfight. They subsequently move in together and establish a "fight club", drawing numerous men with similar temperaments into bare-knuckle fighting matches, set to the following rules:
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forest_of_Hands_and_Teeth"title="The Forest of Hands and Teeth">
Mary lives in a town ruled by the Sisterhood and the Guardians. The village is surrounded by fences; beyond lies only forest. There are only three ways through the fence: gates that open on paths that are themselves enclosed by fencing, expelling those who've been infected. Where the two paths lead, no one knows, for the Sisterhood says the village is the only human habitation left on Earth.Mary has been raised on stories passed down from her great-great-great-grandmother about life before the coming of zombies. She is especially fascinated by the ocean and believes if she could reach it, she would be free.Her adventure starts when there is a breaching in the fence. Mary must escape, find true love, and friendship while figuring out the mystery behind the other gates and fences.After a sad, hectic, twisted turn of events she finds the ocean, but it isn't at all what she expected.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_(Franzen_novel)"title="Freedom (Franzen novel)">
## Good Neighbors.The novel opens with a brief look at the Berglund family during their time living in St. Paul, Minnesota, from the perspective of their nosy neighbors. The Berglunds are portrayed as an ideal liberal and middle-class family, and they are among the first families to move into urban St. Paul after years of white flight to the suburbs. Patty Berglund is a charming and youthful homemaker with a self-deprecating sense of humor; her husband Walter is a mild-mannered but principled lawyer with environmentalist advocacies. They have one daughter, Jessica, and one son, Joey, the latter exhibiting a precocious independence and talent for making money. Joey becomes sexually involved with a neighborhood teen named Connie Monaghan and begins to rebel against his mother, going so far as to move in with Connie and her family, making Patty and Walter increasingly unstable. After many unhappy years, and after both Joey and Jessica have gone off to college, Patty and Walter relocate to Washington, D.C., abandoning the neighborhood and house they have worked so hard to improve.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_(novel)"title="Uncle (novel)">
The book introduces the main characters in the series; Uncle, his helpers, including the Old Monkey, Cloutman, Gubbins and the One-Armed Badger, and his enemies, the Badfort crowd, including Beaver Hateman, Sigismund Hateman, Nailrod Hateman, Filljug Hateman, Jellytussle, Hootman and Hitmouse. After a series of incidents, the Badfort crowd construct a cinema with a hidden iron cage in which they trap Uncle, who is then rescued by a surprise attack by his allies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_and_the_Treacle_Trouble"title="Uncle and the Treacle Trouble">
In this story, a great mural, commissioned by the King of the Badgers after the defeat of the Badfort crowd at Crack House, is to be painted on the wall at Homeward by Waldovenison Smeare. To protect the mural while it is being painted Uncle employs a watchman called Sleepy Sam, who sleeps in a wheelbarrow and is paid two loaves of bread and two quarts of Koolvat. Sleepy Sam is immediately put to work when Beaver Hateman tries to climb in through Uncle's window and is sent packing back to Badfort.Uncle has a mystery tour with The Respectable Horses past a small monument to "Kind Cuthbert", Snowstorm Volcano and finally a picnic at Ezra Lake. They are interrupted by Beaver Hateman running his own tour in a decrepit bus. He verbally abuses the assembled party and calls the Mud Ghost (really Hateman's friend Hootman) who flings mud at Uncle, who dodges, and hits Hateman in the mouth.Jimmy Linseed comes to see Uncle with a problem, he wants to open a Grocers for the inhabitants of Lonely Tower, the Crookball people. Uncle, Linseed, Cloutman, Cowgill, the Old Monkey and the One-Armed Badger set off for Lonely Tower.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina's_Ghost"title="Christina's Ghost">
The book centers on 10-year-old tomboy Christina who, to her displeasure, has to spend her summer with her grumpy uncle after her grandmother becomes ill. Uncle Ralph is house sitting for a friend in an old, spooky, and isolated lake-side Victorian mansion. Once she gets there she finds a room that looks as if it had once belonged to a little boy. There she sees, for the first time, a little boy in a blue sailor suit, who disappears before Christina can talk to him. She also finds out that whatever she does, she cannot get inside the attic even though she hears noises coming from there. Christina decides she wants to know why the little boy is there. On a trip to the nearby city, Christina looks for old newspapers to see if she can find any information about the house. She finds a newspaper dated 30 years ago. It says that a murder took place in the house after a man stole some valuable stamps. The men whom he stole from found out where he was staying and went to kill him. The little boy was killed simply because he had witnessed the murder. One of the murderers confessed and said that they never found the stamps. When Christina gets back she sits down to read a comic book she had taken from the little boy's room. Suddenly she hears something descending from the attic. Once again she sees the boy, but this time his expression is of terror, pointing at the comic book Christina is reading. The stamps have been hidden in the boys comic book for 30 years. Christina and her uncle flee the house as the ghost of the sitter causes chaos. They manage to escape and spend the night in a nearby town. They turn the stamps in to the local sheriff's office the next morning. When they arrive back at the house, that morning, they find the doors and windows all open, the mustiness of the house gone, replaced with fresh air and bright sunlight. Upon further investigating, Christina concludes the ghost of the little boy is finally at peace now that the mystery surrounding his untimely death has been solved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteen_Reasons_Why"title="Thirteen Reasons Why">
High school student Clay Jensen receives a mysterious package in the mail with seven cassette tapes recorded by Hannah Baker, a classmate who recently died by suicide. The tapes had also been sent to several other classmates, instructing each of them to visit each person mentioned and to pass them on to the person following them on the tapes. As he listens to the cassettes, Clay learns that there is a side of the tapes for each person to whom Hannah attributes her reasons for killing herself. After sending the tapes to the next person, Clay returns to school and runs into his classmate Skye Miller, whom he suspects is also suicidal. The novel ends with Clay reaching out to Skye.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cater_Street_Hangman"title="The Cater Street Hangman">
The Cater Street Hangman introduces Inspector Thomas Pitt and Charlotte Ellison, who both become regular characters in crime novels by Anne Perry. Set in 1881, the story follows an investigation into the murders of several young women in the streets near the wealthy Ellison family home.In an upper-class salon on Cater Street, several women discuss, in oblique terms, the death of a local girl. Even though Susannah has recently been out of town and is unaware of the murder, it is bad form for proper women to talk about such matters and so they are careful not to say anything too direct about the way the daughter of a friend was garroted and cut open. Finally, tiring of the game, Charlotte comes out and tells her aunt what she has heard about the murder. Although the victim was of the upper class she quickly gains a reputation as having been a bad seed.A second death occurs, this time a servant. Again the idea that these women did something to deserve this end is easier to accept than the knowledge that it could happen to anyone else. Only when the third murder happens to a member of the Ellison household do they believe that these crimes might not be a simple case of robbery or jealousy. A young police inspector, Thomas Pitt, has been investigating these crimes and soon arrives to question the Ellison household.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rediscovery"title="Rediscovery">
On Darkover, Lorill Hastur accompanies his twin, Leonie, to Dalereuth Tower for training. The keeper, Fiora, discovers that she has amazing but undisciplined "laran" powers.A Terran ship heads towards Cottman’s Star, seeking possible descendants of pre-Empire lost colony ships of the distant past. After observing the weather patterns and geography of the planet from space, a shuttle attempts to land. It crashes in the mountains during a snowstorm and is rescued by men from Aldaran. At Aldaran Castle, they are greeted by Kermiac of Aldaran, who can speak to Elizabeth because she is a telepath. Elizabeth explains that they are an expedition from the stars looking for descendants of the Lost Ships.Leonie Hastur perceives a threat coming to Darkover from one of the moons. She uses her "laran" to link to one of the minds on the Terran ship and listen to the crew conversations, though she does not understand all of what she hears. She reports to Keeper Fiora that strangers are lost in a storm near Aldaran. Leonie contacts her twin telepathically, and tells Lorill to go to Aldaran.After several days, Elizabeth tells Commander MacAran that Darkover should be considered a closed world, since otherwise, Darkover will simply be plundered. The others disagree. With Kermiac’s approval, the Terrans begin building a spaceport at the city of Caer Donn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Bunny_Munro"title="The Death of Bunny Munro">
The novel deals with Bunny Munro, a middle-aged lothario, whose constant womanising and alcohol abuse comes to a head after his wife's suicide. A travelling door-to-door beauty-product salesman, he and his son go on an increasingly out-of-control road trip around Brighton, over which looms the shadow of a serial killer making his way towards Brighton, as well as Bunny's own mortality. The novel is set in Brighton in 2003, around the time the West Pier was destroyed by fire.Many of the locations and street names used in the book relate to real places close to Cave's own home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricks_(novel)"title="Tricks (novel)">
In the novel "Tricks", the story begins with five teenagers, all residing in various parts of the United States. The first character, Eden Streit, lives with her father, mother, and younger sister, Eve. Being a daughter of a minister also comes with expectations, such as not having sex until marriage and marrying men within the Christian faith. But for Eden, that doesn’t matter with Andrew, her boyfriend. Her only problem is trying to keep their relationship a secret from her parents. The second character, Seth Parnell, lives with his father after his mother died from cancer a year and a half earlier. Seth struggles with identifying his sexuality after he breaks up with his girlfriend, Janet Winkler. He meets Loren and is catapulted into a new kind of relationship. The third character, Cody Bennett, doesn’t know who his biological father is and spends his time with his step-father Jack. Jack hasn’t been feeling well, and Cody starts to drink. The fourth character, Whitney Lang, lives with her mother, while her father works and lives in another city nearby and her sister, Kyra, attends college. Whitney is disconnected with her mother and likes when her dad is home since she sees him as her hero. Whitney hooks up with Lucas at one of Kyra’s performances and they hit it off, but she still worries about committing to the relationship with him. The fifth character, Ginger Cordell, encounters rape from an early childhood and deals with keeping these secrets from her family. Ginger’s only friend is Alex, and she has begun questioning how she feels about her. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_Academy_(novel)"title="Vampire Academy (novel)">
Rose Hathaway is a dhampir, half-Moroi and half-human, who is training to be a guardian at St. Vladimir's Academy along with many others like her. There are good and bad vampires in their world: Moroi, who co-exist peacefully among the humans and only take blood from donors, and also possess the ability to control one of the four elements - water, earth, fire or air; and Strigoi, blood-sucking, evil vampires who drink to kill. Rose and other dhampir guardians are trained to protect Moroi and kill Strigoi throughout their education. Her best friend is Princess Vasilisa Dragomir (Lissa), a Moroi and the last of her line, with whom she has a nigh unbreakable bond. Rose is able to feel Lissa's emotions through her bond and can sometimes enter her body without Lissa knowing when her emotions are too strong. Rose and Lissa ran away from their school, the vampire academy, two years ago and survive through the use of compulsion and by feeding off of each other. They had been moving from places to places, but this time, they got caught by the school guardians and returned to their school.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Business_of_Dying"title="The Business of Dying">
It is 9:01 pm on a cold November night. Dennis Milne and his friend Danny are waiting at the Traveler's Rest Hotel car park to kill three unarmed men they think are drug dealers. A black Jeep Cherokee drives into the car park and comes to a halt. Milne goes up to the driver's side and shoots two of the men dead. The third tries to get out of the car and run, but does not make it. Milne is seen by a girl at the back door of the hotel, but he just walks away. They drive away and when they are away from the scene they set the car on fire and go their separate ways.Milne is stopped at a roadblock by the police. He has to show his ID and it turns out he is a police officer. At home he acts normal and starts a new case on a murder of a prostitute. Through the news, he finds out that he killed two customs officers and an accountant. Raymond Keen, who hired Milne to do the kill, he says they did something terrible and had to die for it, but does not say what it was. It gets worse when the police working on the hotel killing show an e-fit of Milne. Danny calls him to say he was being followed but Milne does not think anything of it and says he should go on a holiday.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Infinities"title="The Infinities">
The book involves a reunion of the Godley family as the family patriarch, Adam, lies in a coma on his deathbed. The book takes place in an alternative reality with the world powered by cold fusion and steam trains are still in use. His family, consisting of Adam his son (and Adam's wife Helen), his daughter Petra and his wife Ursula are present at this reunion. The story is narrated by the god Hermes, who dictates how the story will unfold along with his father Zeus and his mother Maia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_River_Awakens"title="This River Awakens">
The novel starts in the spring of 1971 and ends a year later, with the changing seasons being used to illustrate changes in the themes of the novel. The novel is set in the fictional town of Middlecross, Canada, a small town not far from the city. Owen Brand and his family move to Middlecross in an attempt to escape poverty. Twelve-year-old Owen falls in with a gang of three boys and forms a strong bond with Jennifer, the rebellious daughter of a violent alcoholic. In the summer break from school, Owen and his friends find a body washed up on the riverbank. The discovery sends reverberations through the small community.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rehearsal_(novel)"title="The Rehearsal (novel)">
The novel is split into two loosely interconnecting stories.In the first story a saxophone teacher becomes aware that Victoria, the older sister of Isolde, one of her pupils, has had a sexual affair with the music teacher, Mr. Saladin. While the adults believe that Victoria was raped, Victoria's fellow students believe that the relationship was consensual. They are forced to attend counselling provided by the school. Isolde, who is two years younger than the rest of the students, is forced to attend with the older girls. While there she develops an interest in Julia, who is rumoured to be a lesbian, because she deliberately provokes the counsellor.The saxophone teacher invites Julia and Isolde to a concert and the two slowly become friends. The saxophone teacher believes that they might be having a sexual affair and reminisces about her own obsessive love with her friend Patsy, who owns the studio she teaches out of and eventually married a man.Meanwhile Stanley, a high school graduate, successfully auditions for the Institute, a prestigious drama school. While there he finds himself driven to the middle of the pack and is not thought of as being particularly talented. He begins to crave the attention and adulation of his teachers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barchester_Pilgrimage"title="Barchester Pilgrimage">
Knox narrates the plot through the eyes of Mr. Bunce. The novel begins with an introduction to some characters including Johnny Bold, Dean Arabin, Eleanor Arabin, Archdeacon Grantley and many more. Johnny Bold is placed as the protagonist, who becomes an atheist in a town where atheism is rare. This atheism is then reflected in Bold's progression into becoming a doctor, shadowing a certain Dr. Fillgrave. Meanwhile, Augusta Oriel, a conscientious and religious woman is introduced who seemingly falls ill and is then treated by Johnny Bold. Johnny then falls in love with Augusta, but is rejected by her upon confession of his love due to differing religious beliefs. He is then followed to France by Knox, where he meets Signora Vesey Neroni. Signora and Johnny are introduced to each other, and Johnny is later compelled to confess his love for her. Before Signora can respond, Johnny is called to serve an injured individual.Knox begins the second chapter with an introduction to two brothers, Marmaduke and Francis Thorne. Marmaduke grows eager to take upon a clerical role in one of his family owned properties, "Chaldicotes". He discusses the prospects for this with Bishop Grantley who suggests him to take on such roles in smaller, country regions first in order to gain experience. Marmaduke then meets Miss Van Skulpit, who is later invited to a gathering by Francis at Chaldicotes. Meanwhile, Marmaduke's efforts are rejected by Bishop Grantley, sparking him to see Father Shoehorn. Marmaduke tells Father Shoehorn about his rejection from Grantley in such a way that it seems that it was Marmaduke who rejected Bishop Grantley's offer, causing Father Shoehorn to offer Marmaduke theological education for his pursuits. However, Marmaduke eventually weds Miss Van Skulpit and leaves for America, with no mention of his previous clerical ambitions again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddy_Rides_Again"title="Freddy Rides Again">
John the fox is not frightened by new neighbors, the Margarines, holding foxhunts! So, still enjoying their Western roles from "Freddy the Cowboy", wearing cowboy hats, neckerchiefs and boots, Freddy the pig and Jinx the cat saddle their mounts to follow the hunt. The fox leads it through a neighbor's house. It seems the fox's plan to anger neighbors about foxhunting will succeed until Mr. Margarine hands the neighbor a generous amount of money for damages. Riding with Mr. Margarine is his son Billy, who was rude to the animals as soon as he met them. But he was not a coward during the confrontation, prompting Freddy to speculate:The Margarines' cat takes refuge at the Bean Farm, suspiciously claiming he was not given enough food at home. Freddy and Jinx decide to observe his actions, and in the process discover a rattlesnake in the neighborhood. After hearing the snake's plans to eat his friends, Freddy seeks the help of the sarcastic and intelligent owl, Old Whibley. After gibes, Whibley advises the animals to stay away until he catches the snake during his usual hunting. However Freddy traps the snake with bait made of chewing gum.Billy comes to taunt the animals at the farm, but is driven off by their laughter. Later, Mr. Margarine appears, and the animals attempt to laugh him off, too. However Mr. Margarine hits Mr. Bean, enraging the animals, and they attack. Mr. Margarine has the sheriff issue an arrest warrant for Freddy and Charles the Rooster, so they go into hiding. From there they launch a series of raids on the local farms, intending to put the blame on the Margarines. As a result, Mr. Margarine advertises for a detective. Freddy dons a disguise as the unsavory "Commanche Kid", and answers the ad. He is hired to track down himself!
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virgin_in_the_Ice"title="The Virgin in the Ice">
In November 1139, the Empress's armies have attacked and pillaged Worcester. Among those who fled the city were two noble children in the Benedictine Order's care and a nun. They have vanished. The children's uncle and guardian, a supporter of the Empress, is refused permission to enter the King's lands to search for them.As the first snowstorms of winter sweep the countryside, Brother Cadfael of Shrewsbury Abbey goes to the Benedictine Priory at Bromfield near Ludlow to treat a monk who has been attacked and left for dead. The injured Brother, Elyas, babbles about a party of refugees who might well be those sought. Cadfael sends word to Shrewsbury and rides into the snow-covered countryside to search for them. He finds one, the boy Yves Hugonin, sheltering with a forester. As they ride to Bromfield, Yves tells Cadfael that his headstrong sister Ermina eloped four nights previously, and he became lost in the woods when he tried to pursue them.As they cross a frozen stream, Cadfael sees the body of a young woman frozen into the ice. Fearing it is that of Ermina, he conceals his discovery from Yves. Joined by his friend, Deputy Sheriff Hugh Beringar, he retrieves the body from the ice. It does not match the description of Ermina; Yves identifies it as Ermina's tutor, Sister Hilaria.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undone_(Slaughter_novel)"title="Undone (Slaughter novel)">
Faith Mitchell is walking across the parking deck at a courthouse when she passes out. She wakes up in the emergency room of Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital, where she was taken by her partner, Will Trent, who was with her when it happened. It turns out that Faith has two serious medical conditions, one she knew about and one she didn't; both could end her nascent career as a special agent with the GBI almost before it has started.At the hospital, Faith and Will meet Dr. Sara Linton. Sara has moved to Atlanta to recover from the explosive ending of "Beyond Reach" and now works in Grady's ER.Right after seeing Faith, Sara rushes to the aid of a woman who was hit by a car after wandering naked onto a highway in the middle of nowhere, and is peeved to find Will trying to question the victim. Sara quickly becomes aware of the same thing that caused Will to involve himself—the woman has suffered abominably cruel torture at the hands of a sadistic man.Will and Faith take over the case and find themselves hobbled from the start by the local yokel law enforcement, which seems more interested in grudge-bearing than in catching a deranged killer. Sara eventually becomes involved by dint of her previous experience as one of the state's top-notch coroners.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluestar's_Prophecy"title="Bluestar's Prophecy">
"Bluestar's Prophecy" follows the life of Bluestar, the future leader of ThunderClan. The book opens with a prologue that recounts the Bluestar's death in "Warriors: A Dangerous Path" from Bluestar's point of view. The book then goes back to Bluestar's kithood, during which Goosefeather, the Clan's medicine cat, receives a prophecy about Bluepaw being a fire that blazes through the forest, but who will be destroyed by water. A few moons later, Bluepaw's mother, Moonflower, is killed by the WindClan's medicine cat, Hawkheart.Bluepaw's childhood is defined by her relationship with her sister, Snowpaw, which is damaged when Snowpaw – later Snowfur – falls in love with Thistleclaw, whom Bluefur finds arrogant and untrustworthy. Snowfur is later killed when she is hit by a speeding car, leaving a heartbroken Bluefur to care for her son, Whitekit.As a warrior, Bluefur meets a charismatic RiverClan warrior named Oakheart; although their first interaction is prickly, they eventually fall in love. They decide to spend one night together at Fourtrees, the regular Clan Gathering place, but agree that for the good of their Clans, they will never meet again. One moon later, Bluefur is horrified to find out that she is expecting kits. Thrushpelt, a ThunderClan warrior with feelings for Bluefur, offers to help her take care of her kits. Bluefur accepts his offer, allowing the rest of ThunderClan to believe that Thrushpelt is the father of her kits.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_of_Adventure"title="The Castle of Adventure">
Jack, Lucy, Dinah and Philip attempt to figure out what is behind the strange goings-on at a ruined castle near Spring Cottage in Scotland where they are on holiday with Dinah and Philip's mother, Aunt Allie. The four youngsters make friends with Tassie, a mysterious gypsy living in the woods with her mother. Along with Bill Cunningham, who appears later in the book, the children manage to expose a ring of spies led by the threatening Scar-Neck who are working against the UK Military service.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matters_of_the_Heart_(novel)"title="Matters of the Heart (novel)">
Hope Dunne lives in a chic SoHo loft, content with her life as a top photographer. So when she accepts a London assignment at Christmas to photograph a world-famous writer, she never expected to fall in love. Finn O’Neill is taken aback with Hope and they have a windswept romance with Finn whisking her away to his palatial, Irish estate. Though divorced, Hope loves her ex-husband Paul very much. Paul, a retired surgeon, divorced her only because he didn't want to pull her along with him as he dies slowly from illness.Hope begins to fall in love but soon finds that Finn and his life are not what she expects. Hope is madly in love with Finn but he is also the source of her fears. Finn' lies and hurt begin to unnerve Hope and she becomes scared and alone miles away from home with no-one to support her as she tries to deal with all matters of the heart.Finn O’Neill exudes warmth and a boyish charm. Enormously successful, he is a perfect counterpoint to Hope’s quiet, steady grace–and he’s taken instantly by her. He courts her as no one ever has before, whisking her away to his palatial, isolated Irish estate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_They_Did_to_Princess_Paragon"title="What They Did to Princess Paragon">
Gay comic book creator Brian Parrish is hired by Bang Comics to take over "Princess Paragon", a superhero comic book that's been around since the 1940s, but whose sales are slumping badly by the 1990s. Parrish decides to reimagine Princess Paragon as a lesbian, a move which causes quite a bit of excitement and publicity for Bang, but also causes consternation among some of the fan base. One deranged fanboy in particular, Jerome T. Kornacker, is so outraged that his favorite superheroine is being "perverted," that he takes radical steps to stop the change.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragons_of_the_Hourglass_Mage"title="Dragons of the Hourglass Mage">
"Dragons of the Hourglass Mage" reveals the motivations behind Raistlin's aspirations to become a god.After Raistlin Majere became a wizard of the Black Robe, he travels to Neraka, the lord city of the Dark Queen, under the excuse of joining her forces, but in reality, he plots his own rise to power. When Takhisis discovers that the dragon orb has entered her city, she dispatches Draconians to find it and to destroy the wizard who protects it. However, Raistlin uncovers Takhisis' plot to seize control of all magic, and he moves to stop her. Meanwhile, Kitiara uth Matar, Raistlin's older sister, follows Takhisis' orders to set a trap for the Gods of Magic on the Night of the Eye.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Catskill_Eagle"title="A Catskill Eagle">
Spenser, a private investigator in Boston. Spenser, who served as an infantryman in the 1st Infantry Division during the Korean War and as a former State trooper, receives a letter from his lover, Susan Silverman, who has relocated to the West Coast. His friend and associate, Hawk, is in jail and she needs help.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Troopers"title="Death Troopers">
The Imperial prison barge "Purge" breaks down in a distant, uninhabited part of space. Its only hope appears to lie with the Star Destroyer "Vector", drifting nearby, derelict and seemingly abandoned. When a boarding party from the "Purge" is sent to scavenge for parts, only half of them come back, bringing with them a contagion so lethal that within hours, almost all aboard the "Purge" are dead – the half-dozen survivors include two teenage brothers, Kale and Trig Longo, the ruthless captain of the guards, Jareth Sartoris, and chief medical officer, Zahara Cody, all of whom seem to possess natural immunity.The "Purge's" onboard computer informs Cody that there are also two survivors in isolation, and Cody leaves the medibay to release them and administer an antidote synthesized from her blood by the incumbent 21B medical droid "Waste". The isolated prisoners are Han Solo and Chewbacca who initially are skeptical of the situation, but allow her to immunize them, and make their way back to medical. Upon returning to medical they find it empty, and Waste destroyed. The dead have become undead and begin to hunt the survivors who are forced to abandon "Purge" and take shelter in the "Vector", unaware that the Destroyer is not the better place to be.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Fathers_(novel)"title="Our Fathers (novel)">
Hugh Bawn was a Modernist hero. A dreamer, a Socialist, a man of the people, he led Scotland's building programme after the war. Now he lies on a bed on the eighteenth floor. The times have changed. His flats are coming down. The idealism he learned from his mother is gone. And even as his breath goes out he clings to the old ways. His final months are plagued by memory and loss, by a bitter sense of his family and his country, who could not live up to the houses he built for them.Hugh's grandson, Jamie, comes home to watch over his dying mentor. The old man's final months bring Jamie to see what is best and worst in the past the haunts them all, and he sees the fears of his own life unravel in the land that bred him. He tells the story of his own family - a tale of pride and delusion, of nationality and strong drink, of Catholic faith and the end of the old Left. It is a tale of dark hearts and modern houses, of three men in search for Utopia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Wizard_of_Mars"title="A Wizard of Mars">
Young Wizards Kit Rodriguez and Nita Callahan become part of an elite team investigating the mysterious, long-sought 'message in the bottle' that holds to the first clues to the long-lost inhabitants of Mars. But not even wizardry is enough to cope with the strange events that start to unfold when the 'bottle' is uncorked and life emerges once more to shake the Red Planet with its own perilous and baffling brand of magic.The good news is that the Martians seem friendly. The bad news is that now they're free to pick up where they left off on a long-dormant plan that can change the shape of more than one world... and they don't mind using their well-intentioned rescuers to achieve their goals. Kit's long-standing fascination with all things Martian unexpectedly enmeshes him in a terrible, age-old conflict—turning him into both a possible key to its solution, and a tool that in the wrong hands shortly threatens the whole human race.Only Kit has a shot of defusing the threat. But when he vanishes unexpectedly from Mars of here and now, his fellow wizards are left uncertain of where his true loyalties lie. Nita's determination to find the truth - and Kit - soon sends her into a battle against an implacable enemy who may not be conquerable except by violating wizardry's most basic tenets.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Ties_(McKenzie_novel)"title="Blood Ties (McKenzie novel)">
## Part 1: London.Theodore "Theo" Glassman is frustrated with his bodyguard, Roy, who is escorting him everywhere. When Theo accuses his mother of imagining a threat (which is why he has a bodyguard), Mrs. Glassman reluctantly agrees to tell him who is threatening his life.Meanwhile, Rachel Smith is annoyed with her parents for constantly comparing her to her dead sister, Rebecca, who was a star student and daughter. When Rachel receives on her phone a weird text message from her father, Richard, that says, "Goddess still safe in Heaven. Richard", she asks him about it and Richard tells her that he was supposed to send the message to somebody else, but refused to tell her anything further.Back in Theo's house, Mrs. Glassman reveals to him that his father, James Lawson, whom she had previously told her son was dead, is actually alive and in hiding from a highly extremist group called RAGE (Righteous Army Against Genetic Engineering). With the information he received from his mother, Theo searches for his father on the internet with the help of his best friend, Jake. He comes across an article that says that years ago, RAGE carried out a bombing of a genetic research clinic, which is where Theo's father worked. The article also mentions Elijah Lazio, 'the Gene Genie' and Richard Smith, who was at the birth of his daughter when he saw the bombing from the hospital window. Theo decides to find Richard's daughter to see if he can get any information from her father about his own father. He and Jake are able to work out how old she is and which school she goes to.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Lights_(novel)"title="Southern Lights (novel)">
Alexa Hamilton left the South behind after her husband's betrayal and his family's cruelty. As an assistant D.A. in Manhattan, Alexa is a top prosecutor and a single mother to a teenage daughter. But when her latest case brings threatening letters to her seventeen-year-old daughter, Savannah, Alexa is certain that her client, Luke Quentin is behind it. Making the most painful decision of her life she sends her daughter back to her southern roots to protect her from harm.Savannah settles into the southern life, enjoying her father and family again as her mother battles in Manhattan. Alexa and Savannah come to heal old wounds and find love again under the southern lights.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazing_Grace_(novel)"title="Amazing Grace (novel)">
At a charity dinner in San Francisco, the Ritz-Carlton ballroom is ravaged by an earthquake. In the aftermath, four stranger's lives are entwined forever.Sarah Sloane's perfect life falls apart when her husband is exposed as a fraudster. Grammy winner Melanie Free realises what is important in life. Photographer Everett Carson finds a new purpose to live and nun Sister Maggie Kent, frantically works to rebuild the city and try to hide her feelings of love from her new friend.At a refugee camp, all four come together and become a support system for the others as life starts to resemble normality and the world blesses them with amazing grace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bungalow_2"title="Bungalow 2">
Writer Tanya Harris loves her life as a mother and wife living in Marin County but has always wanted the chance to write a major Hollywood screenplay. When the chance arises, although initially turning it down, her husband encourages her to take the once-in-a-lifetime offer.Working in Hollywood with the Oscar-winning producer Douglas Wayne is intoxicating for Tanya, especially when he sets his sights on her. Struggling to cope with the movie and her family, Tanya feels her family need her less and so as one opportunity after another leads her away from her old life and into this new world, Tanya finds life has many twists and turns whilst at Bungalow 2.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisters_(Steel_novel)"title="Sisters (Steel novel)">
Candy, the supermodel, Tammy, a successful TV producer, Sabrina, an ambitious lawyer and Annie, the artist are four sisters who leave their successful lives to care for one another and their father after their mother is killed in a car accident and Annie' sight is taken from her.The sisters move into a brownstone and try to rebuild their lives out of the ashes of a painful death. As each sister finds new purpose and new loves, they begin to learn that family is the most important thing in life and this revelation cements their bond forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spook's_Sacrifice"title="The Spook's Sacrifice">
After being attacked in the middle of the night by a maenad (follower of the Old Goddess known as the Ordeen), Tom visits his family's farm and is asked by his mother to accompany her back to Greece to fight the Ordeen. The Ordeen is unique among the Old Gods in that she can come into the human world without the need of human intervention. Previously, her power was held in check by priests who built monasteries on the cliffs surrounding the plains of Meteora, where she manifests. But with the Fiend loose in the world, the Dark is now better organised; many vaengir (flying lamia witches) have been sent to the Ordeen to counter the power of the few remaining priests. When the Ordeen appears this time, the priests will be overwhelmed and the Ordeen free to go anywhere. The Ordeen will then go to the county to kill the children of her greatest enemy: Tom's own mother, Mam.Tom is forced to choose between his master the Spook, who forbids him to go because he would have to ally himself with the Pendle witches, and his Mam. He decides to do what his Mam asks, setting off for the coast while the Spook heads back to Chipenden.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.R.H._(novel)"title="H.R.H. (novel)">
Princess Christianna's father, the Reigning Prince of Lichtenstein, has secure plans for Christianna's life, which is a burden almost unbearable to her.After years at Berkley in America, Christianna returns home and realizes she cannot deal with the political responsibilities of being a Princess without feeling useless. With a purpose to change the ways of the world, she volunteers for the Red Cross in East Africa.At an international relief camp, she finds her calling and a new love in the form of Parker Williams, a doctor from Doctors Without Borders. As they work together, she tries to hide her feelings and identity from him until in one shocking moment, her life changes forever.After leaving the camp, her father has made a speech at the UN meeting while she was in Venice, where she secretly met Parker. Then, in a shocking turn of events, Christianna must reevaluate every decision she has ever made concerning her royal life. The rules began to change. Can Cristianna rule her country or would she say no?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Out_(novel)"title="Coming Out (novel)">
Olympia Crawford Rubinstein, lawyer, wife and mother to twin daughters, a son in college and one in kindergarten, Olympia' life is perfect. Until she opens an invitation for her daughters to attend the most exclusive coming-out ball in New York–and chaos erupts all around her. One twin is outraged whilst the other is ecstatic. Her husband is appalled and as her family is thrown into disarray, the ball turns out to be a blessing in disguise as old wounds are healed and the family learn acceptance and love are all they ever needed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_(novel)"title="The House (novel)">
Overlooking San Francisco, a huge mansion in need of repair is viewed by Sarah Anderson, an estate lawyer, who has just inherited a huge fortune from a deceased client with the intention of spending it on something that she desires. Sarah restores the mansion, drawn to its grandeur and beauty with the help of architect Jeff Parker, who is as passionate about the house as she. As the two work together, they fall in love with the house and then each other as the house touches both of them and opens their hearts once more.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_Bachelors"title="Toxic Bachelors">
Charlie Harrington, a philanthropist with high expectations in women, Adam Weiss, a celebrity lawyer who likes young, fun women for short-term purposes and Gray Hawk, an artist who is drawn into troubled relationships.Every year they cruise the Mediterranean on Charlie's yacht together until they each find love. Charlie falls in love with a social worker who is far from his ideal woman. Adam gets involved with a young but smart woman whilst Gray falls for a businesswoman and mother.As their next cruise together approaches, each man finds himself in a position far from the previous year with new loves and events which will turn the toxic bachelors into loving, caring men forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_(novel)"title="Miracle (novel)">
It is New Year's Eve when the storm of the century hits northern California. In a quiet neighborhood in San Francisco, amid the chaos of fallen trees and damaged homes, the lives of three strangers are about to collide. For Quinn Thompson, what happens in the storm's wake will bring down a barrier he has built around himself since his wife's death. For neighbor Maggie Dartman, it will spark friendship at a time when she needs it most. And for Jack Adams, a carpenter who will repair Quinn's and Maggie's homes, the storm brings an opportunity: to help two people and to be repaid with the greatest gift of all.As three lives come together and a unique friendship is forged, something extraordinary begins to happen...Maggie, still grieving a loss, slowly comes alive again-–and Jack finally shares a painful secret he has hidden for years. But at the center of the friendship is Quinn. A man who has scaled heights of success in business, Quinn is now adrift, waiting as builders put the finishing touches on his newest passion, a 180-foot yacht he plans to sail around the world. Looking back at all he missed with his family while he built his empire, Quinn is consumed by guilt, focused only on escaping to the sea. But as his plans near completion, and his friendship with Maggie begins to change, Quinn faces a choice–between a safe haven and an adventure of the heart. The choice he makes will affect other lives as powerfully as his own. And it will take him on an extraordinary journey-–and into a second, terrifying storm, one that will bring him danger...or deliverance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_(novel)"title="Impossible (novel)">
Sasha's husband suddenly dies leaving her widowed without the man she loves. Liam's marriage is falling apart. Sasha has worked her father's art gallery into an intercontinental success, whilst Liam has become one of the most striking artists of his time. So when the two meet and fall in love, Sasha and Liam must protect one another's reputations and hearts from getting hurt again.Sasha commutes from New York where her grown children Xavier and Tataina live, and Paris and her two thriving galleries. Then a family tragedy changes his life forever making him sacrifice his love for Sasha to help his family heal. But their love is so strong that they are drawn together once more into a love that seemed impossible.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoes_(Steel_novel)"title="Echoes (Steel novel)">
In the summer of 1915, Beata Wittgenstein, daughter of a rich German-Jewish banking family, meets and falls in love with Antoine de Villerand, a young Catholic French army officer on leave in Switzerland. She follows her heart to be with him against the wishes of her Jewish Orthodox family and decides to live with him in Switzerland till World War 1 ends. Both their families disown them and Beata's parents "sit shiva" for her. She becomes a Catholic to marry Antoine.After the war, she goes back to Germany with her husband Antoine and her 2-year-old daughter Amadea. They begin a peaceful life and after 8 years, she has her second daughter, Daphne. Antoine has a good position in charge of a horse farm at a "schloss" owned by an army friend of his. He inherits his father's title and estate, but dies soon after and his fortune as a Count is passed on to Beata, now 'Madame la Comtesse'.Beata returns to Cologne, her home town. She still attends church but begins to visit synagogue on Yom Kippur, in the hope of meeting, and being reconciled with, her Parents. They meet but they reject her, and her Mother is the only person to secretly meet her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ransom_(Steel_novel)"title="Ransom (Steel novel)">
Peter Morgan is released from a Californian prison after four years with plans to make up to the daughters he left behind. Carl Waters, a convicted murderer, is also freed at the same time. In San Francisco, a police detective Ted Lee arrives home to a wife he no longer loves. In the Pacific Heights neighbourhood, Fernanda Barnes cries at the amount of debt her husband has left her and his children in after his death.Soon, all their lives are connected as Fernanda's child is kidnapped and held for the ransom of a fortune that she does not have. As she and the police fight against time to get her child back safely, something happens that will change their lives forever when their lives are held for Ransom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_Harbour_(novel)"title="Safe Harbour (novel)">
At eleven, Pip Mackenzie has experienced such tragedy leaving her mother inconsolable. As she wanders the beach while her mother is shut up indoors, she stumbles upon Matt Bowles. An artist and divorcee, Pip reminds him of his daughter and they strike up an unusual friendship. Her mother, a French woman named Ophélie, is sceptical at first but soon discovers that Matt has lit up both of their lives.When the summer comes to an end, Ophélie and Pip leave for the city but find life without Matt painful. As Ophélie begins a volunteer job at a city outreach program for the homeless, she tries to begin the long process of healing. But as she is betrayed in the worst way, Matt appears and allows her to be herself and finally see a way through the mist of Safe Harbour.The novel ends with Matt and Ophélie's wedding in the beach with Pip as the witness at Safe Harbour.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrington_on_Hold_'em"title="Harrington on Hold 'em">
Volume 1: Strategic Play (), which contains seven key sections, begins by introducing the reader to poker and its history, along with a glossary of poker terms. The book is not written for novices to the game, therefore it does not include some of the more basic information about the game, such as poker hands, the game's mechanics, betting, etc. This entry in the series focuses on the basics of poker, such as playing styles, starting hands, pot odds, and hand analysis. "CardPlayer" felt that Harrington, a former chess master, wrote the book like a chess guide, noting, "He poses situations, asks the relevant questions, and then provides solutions. A simple diagram depicts position, blinds, and chip stacks, and then a specific challenge is articulated."Volume 2: The Endgame () focuses on strategies used in poker tournaments, particularly on how to change playing styles depending on how large a chipstack is compared to the blinds. It also introduces related concepts such as the M-ratio and the Q-ratio.Volume 3: The Workbook () is essentially a workbook containing many example scenarios for readers to apply concepts learned from the first two volumes in the series.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_and_Truth"title="Grace and Truth">
On returning to her home in Goatstown, Dublin after a successful European stage tour, actress Sally is shocked when her husband Charlie announces he is leaving her. Sally finds herself alone and determines to discover the truth about her family...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursule_Mirouët"title="Ursule Mirouët">
Ursule is the legitimate daughter of the widower Dr Denis Minoret’s deceased "illegitimate" brother-in-law by marriage, Joseph Mirouët; not only is she the doctor’s niece, she is also his goddaughter and ward. Fifteen years old when the novel begins, she has been brought up by the doctor. Dr Minoret, an atheist rather than an agnostic, and a devoted student of the "Encyclopédie", has persisted in his rationalistic atheism for most of his eighty-three years. At the beginning of the novel he is, however, converted to Christianity – emotionally by the example of Ursule’s piety, and intellectually by his experience of animal magnetism, or the paranormal, and by his longstanding friendship with Abbé Chaperon.Dr Minoret is determined that Ursule shall inherit all the savings he has accumulated during his lifetime. He intends, on the other hand, to bequeath the remainder (approximately half) of his total fortune of about 1,500,000 francs to his “héritiers”, nephews and cousins of his own bloodline who are members of the Minoret, Crémière and Massin families.Discontented with their inheritance prospects, the “heirs” seek to grab the whole of their wealthy relative's fortune, enlisting the help of the notary's clerk Goupil. The doctor conceals a letter of testamentary intention in a legal volume in his library. This, together with three bearer bonds, is stolen by one of the doctor's nephews, the postmaster François Minoret-Levrault, who, in the era before railways, owns and manages the carriage and postchaise services in and out of Nemours.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Springs_(novel)"title="Hot Springs (novel)">
Right after the official ceremony of receiving the Medal of Honor in United States capital Washington, D.C., 1stSgt Earl Swagger (retired) is being approached by district attorney of Garland County Fred Becker and ex-FBI agent D. A. Parker. The two men propose him a new job in Hot Springs, Arkansas to fight against organized crime and finally end the gambling and corruption of the city. Swagger's mission is to train twelve young policemen into a "dream team" and instruct them during operations in city casinos. The mission is to close down all gambling places, preferably without hurting people. If violence becomes necessary, they are outfitted with custom .45 automatics, Thompson submachine guns, and Browning automatic rifles as well as 12 gauge shotguns and M1 Carbines.Soon after accepting the new job, Earl finds out that his wife June is pregnant. She doesn't support Earl's idea to work in Hot Springs and is afraid of him being killed.One of the "dream team" members, a young policeman Frenchy Short (who also has a critical but unseen role in Black Light) is a smart young man, who feels that he can be above and better than the others in the team. Several times he tries to do something better than the others but in the end fails. That way he once killed two men during an assassination in the casino. Luckily for him, these two men were known bandits and Frenchy became sort of a hero. Next time, while supposedly on vacation, Frenchy finds the central office of the gambling network and reveals his research results to Swagger and Parker. This results in Becker firing him from the team because of illegal way of gathering evidence (as Frenchy, in fact, broke into a telephone office to search the maps). An enraged Short promptly goes over to the other side. For a little favour, he informs the city boss Owney Maddox of everything related to the "dream team".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_Time-Slip"title="Martian Time-Slip">
Jack Bohlen is a repairman who emigrated to Mars to flee from his bouts of schizophrenia. He lives with a wife and a young son. His father Leo visits Mars to stake a claim to the seemingly worthless Franklin D. Roosevelt mountain range after receiving an insider tip that the United Nations plans to build a huge apartment complex there. The complex will be called "AM-WEB", a contraction of the German phrase "Alle Menschen werden Brüder" (All men become brothers) from Schiller's "An die Freude" (Ode to Joy).Bohlen has a chance encounter with Arnie Kott, the hard-nosed leader of the Water Workers' Union, when both Bohlen’s and Kott’s helicopters are called to assist a group of critically dehydrated Bleekmen, the "original" inhabitants of Mars who are thought to be genetically similar to the Khoekhoe of Earth. Bohlen rebukes Kott for his hesitance to help the Bleekmen, an act that angers Kott.After visiting with his ex-wife Anne Esterhazy about their own "anomalous" child, Kott hears of the theories of Dr. Milton Glaub, a psychotherapist at Camp Ben-Gurion, an institution for those afflicted with pervasive developmental disorders. Glaub believes that mental illnesses may be altered states of time perception. Kott becomes interested in Manfred Steiner, an autistic boy at Camp B-G in the hopes that the boy can predict the future—a skill Kott would find useful to his business ventures. Since Camp B-G is scheduled for closure, Kott offers to take Manfred off Glaub's hands. Manfred in turn is afraid of a future only he can see, in which Mars is derelict and the AM-WEB is a dumping ground for forgotten people like him, where he will eventually be confined as a decrepit old man to a bed on life-support.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magicians_(Grossman_novel)"title="The Magicians (Grossman novel)">
Quentin Coldwater is a high school student from Brooklyn who, along with best friends James and Julia, attends an advanced school. He loves a series of books called "Fillory and Further", in which the five Chatwin children visit a Narnia-esque magical land called Fillory. On the day of his Princeton interview, Quentin is instead transported to Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy, the only school for magic in North America. He passes the tests and interviews and is accepted as one of twenty new students.Quentin soon finds that the study of magic is difficult and tedious, requiring him to learn many old and lost languages and innumerable hand positions. Despite this, Quentin and his classmates Penny and Alice are allowed to move up a year by compressing their first year of studies. Penny does not pass and stays behind, to his dismay. One day during class, a bored Quentin tampers with a spell. An otherworldly horror referred to as "the Beast" then enters Brakebills, eating a student before the faculty are able to drive it away. Third year students are assigned a Discipline. Although Quentin's Discipline does not manifest itself, he and Alice are sorted into the Physical magic group, which includes Eliot, Josh, and Janet, a year above them. For a semester of their fourth year, they are all sent to Brakebills South in Antarctica where they practice in silence and isolation. Quentin and Alice begin a relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/César_Birotteau"title="César Birotteau">
César is a man of peasant origins from the Touraine region. At the start of the novel, in 1819, he owns a successful perfume shop, La Reine des Roses, he has been elected deputy mayor of his arrondissement in Paris, and he has been awarded the Legion of Honour. During the revolution he took part in the Royalist 13 Vendémiaire uprising against the Republic, at one stage confronting Napoleon Bonaparte himself, and he mentions this often in conversation. He is married to Constance and has a daughter Cesarine. He plans to throw a ball at his home, and make renovations to his home for the ball. He becomes involved in property speculation with borrowed money, through his notary Roguin. He plans to expand his business with a new hair oil product, with his assistant Anselme Popinot (who is in love with Cesarine) as his business partner. All of these plans have caused him to run up large debts.What he does not realise is that Roguin has money problems of his own, and that César's former shop assistant Ferdinand du Tillet, now a banker, is manipulating Roguin in order to have revenge against César. His financial situation becomes a crisis when Roguin absconds and leaves César with debts that he is not able to pay. His attempts to get financial assistance from various bankers such as Nucingen, the Keller brothers and Gigonnet (all recurring characters in "La Comédie humaine") fail, since all are friends of du Tillet and acting on his instructions. This leads him to declare bankruptcy, sell La Reine des Roses to his assistant Celestin Crevel and retire from business.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Outcast"title="Conan the Outcast">
King Anaximander of Sark calls in his high priest, Khumanos, to talk about a drought ravaging their city. After the ritual sacrifice of many high priests, Anaximander decides that a larger offering to their god, Voltantha, is required. He directs Khumanos to sacrifice Qjara, a more prosperous city to the north.To do this correctly, Khumanos seeks out Solon in the desert, to which he expresses doubts about the mission. Solon sees Khumanos' compassion as a weakness and shows him the Sword of Onothimanos, which is just a rusted blade. Soon, Khumanos becomes emotionless and devoted to the mission. So much so that he kills Solon because he outlived his usefulness.Conan is on the outskirts of Qjara, awaiting a caravan into Shadizar. He is invited into the carvan sector of Ojara by some local children. He settles down in a bar and meets Afriandra in disguise. She proves her precognitive ability by correctly predicting the death of a nearby patron. When Zaius comes to the bar looking for her, Conan provides a distraction by taunting him. Zaius states he's not worth the effort.Conan begins a romantic relationship with Afrianda, which offends Zaius. The two men have a quick fistfight where Conan is winning, which Afrianda implores him to stop. Conan demands a formal duel, which Zaius rejects on the basis of Conan not being a citizen. After Conan defends Qjara's gates from a nomad attack, he becomes an honorary citizen and uses the opportunity to challenge Zaius to ritual combat. Zaius accepts his offer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_and_Blood"title="Amber and Blood">
The story resumes where it ended in "Amber and Iron". The monk Rhys and the kender Nightshade, along with Rhys's dog Atta, find themselves in a cave on the coast of the Blood Sea while a ferocious storm rages outside. Thinking their adventure finally over, the two companions discuss what to do next when they hear yelling from outside the cave. Rhys runs outside and sees a young girl struggling in the water. He rescues her and brings her ashore, only to realize that the six-year-old girl has the same red hair and amber eyes as Mina.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quest_of_Kadji"title="The Quest of Kadji">
Each volume of the Chronicles of Kylix is set on a different world in the magical solar system of the fictional star Kylix in the constellation of the Unicorn. The system consists of the five planets Zao, Olymbris, Thoorana, Zephrondus and Gulzund. "The Quest of Kadji" takes place on Gulzund.Kadji of the Kozanga Horde, young grandson to the aging warrior Zarouk, has been tasked by his grandfather with dethroning Prince Yakthodah, usurper of the throne of the Dragon Emperor. To aide him the chiefs bestow on him the sacred meteor-forged Axe of Thom-Ra. Crossing the Kylix-sun scorched plains on Haral, his faithful black Feridoon pony, Kadji rides into the capital to vanquish his nemesis, knowing full well this will mean his own painful end. He is accompanied on his quest by the magician Akthoob and the red-haired princess Thyra with her wolf companion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_Hours"title="23 Hours">
Following her conviction at the end of "Vampire Zero" for stepping outside the law and torturing a convict for critical information she used to destroy her former mentor-turned-vampire, vampire hunter Laura Caxton is imprisoned in a maximum security penitentiary when it is invaded by Justinia Malvern, the world’s oldest vampire, intent on killing the former state police trooper. Malvern has used her vampiric skills to convert the prison's warden to her side, setting up the entire prison population to either accept her vampire's curse or become feeding stock for Malvern and her converts. Caxton must fight her way out of the prison and save her captured girlfriend, aided by her cellmate Gert, a meth addict who killed her children. Gert is killed during the subsequent riots, but she and Caxton are able to kill all the vampires in the prison. Although Fetlock- Caxton's replacement as head of the anti-vampire task force- believes that she has killed Justinia, Caxton goes on the run, realising that the whole crisis was set up to be just challenging enough to seem real, and that Malvern escaped during the day while the former warden- eye gouged out by Malvern to increase their resemblance- was ordered to act as her so that Caxton would believe Malvern to be dead...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_Zero"title="Vampire Zero">
After Pennsylvania State Trooper and vampire hunter Laura Caxton's former mentor James Arkeley willingly took on the vampire curse to battle the regiment of undead Civil War-era soldiers when they were reanimated in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, he promised to come back and let Laura kill him. When Arkeley reneges on his promise, Caxton is forced to hunt down the now undead U.S. Marshal. Because Arkeley was the world's premiere vampire hunter, she finds it impossible to find any clues to his whereabouts until a wannabe vampire, Dylan Carboy—a boy with an unhealthy obsession with Caxton and vampires—tries to kill her.This chance encounter leads to a reunion of sorts at the Arkeley's memorial service with his estranged family: his wife, Astarte; his daughter, Raleigh; his son, Simon; and his brother, Angus. When Caxton starts questioning the family, she quickly discovers that Arkeley is intent on offering them the vampire's curse, his now-warped psychology seeing this as the best way to reconcile his human side's love for his family and his vampire side's loathing of them. When Astarte and Angus refuse the curse, Arkeley quickly dispatches them, leaving Simon and Raleigh. Taking his offspring into protective custody, Caxton is hindered by the Arkeleys’ family history, her new status as a deputized U.S. Marshal, and her new boss, Special Deputy Fetlock. Pushed to her limit of endurance when Arkeley kills his former ally and mystic Vesta Polder and turns her into a half-dead, Caxton takes Carboy out of custody and tortures him- leaving him outside in a winter road with bare feet so that he will be forced to walk home and suffer from frostbite-, until he reveals enough of his hidden relationship with Arkeley for her to learn the location of his lair.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_Country"title="Up Country">
One of the last things that Chief Warrant Officer Paul Brenner wanted to do was return to work for the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigation Division, an organization that thanked him for his many years of dedicated service by forcing him into early retirement. But when his former boss calls in a career's worth of favors, Paul finds himself having to do the last thing he ever wanted-return to Vietnam.His mission: Investigate a murder that took place during the war, thirty years before. But almost as soon as he returns to Vietnam, a country that still haunts him, he discovers that there is much more to this investigation than a forgotten murder. Brenner, former combat veteran, again finds himself in a battle for survival as he enters a world of corruption and double-crosses, where, for the second time in his life, he cannot distinguish friend from foe, and where his only allies are his wits and his bravery-and possibly a beautiful American expatriate named Susan Weber. She, like the country in which she has chosen to live, is exotic, sensual, and quite possibly dangerous.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Jennie_(novella)"title="Portrait of Jennie (novella)">
A struggling Depression-era artist encounters a young girl in a park who inspires him to paint portraits instead of landscapes. As he repeatedly encounters the girl, each time she is several years older, and is apparently "slipping through time."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner_of_the_Judoon"title="Prisoner of the Judoon">
## Part 1.Sarah Jane continues to live her life on Bannerman Road. Investigating a nanotechnology company, she is thrown out and goes back to her house, when suddenly, an alien space pod crashes into a nearby building. Sarah Jane's supercomputer, Mr Smith, picks up on a distress call from the ship's occupant, a member of the "intergalactic police" race, the Judoon. Sarah Jane and her companions travel to the building, where Judoon Captain Tybo is shooting at an alien escaped prisoner, Androvax, a Veil, who soon possesses a little girl. Luke and Rani team up with the Judoon Captain, while Sarah Jane and Clyde meet the little girl. Sarah Jane becomes possessed by Androvax and Clyde is put out of consciousness. Luke, Rani and Captain Tybo locate and awaken Clyde.Meanwhile, Rani's parents, Gita and Haresh, pay a visit to the nanotech company to help improve Gita's flower business but they are arrested. The possessed Sarah Jane arrives, disables the company's communication system and demands the company's nanoforms. Captain Tybo, Clyde, Luke and Rani arrive at Bannerman Road to discover that the possessed Sarah Jane has ordered Mr Smith to self-destruct with a one-minute countdown.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_début_dans_la_vie"title="Un début dans la vie">
Much of the action of this short novel takes place in the rickety old stage-coach — or "coucou" — of Pierrotin, which regularly carries passengers and goods between Paris and Val-d'Oise. On one such trip from Paris, Comte Hugret de Sérizy, a senator and wealthy aristocrat, is travelling incognito in order to investigate reports that Monsieur Moreau, the steward of his country estate at Presles, is being less than honest in his dealings on the count's behalf with a neighbouring landowner Margueron, a piece of whose land the count wishes to buy.Among the count's fellow passengers is Oscar Husson, a young good-for-nothing mummy's boy, who is being sent to a friend of his mother's Monsieur Moreau in the hope that a position can be found for him. Also travelling to L'Isle-Adam is Georges Marest, the second clerk of the count's Parisian notary Crottat; Joseph Bridau, a young artist, who is accompanied by his young colleague Léon Didas y Lora, nicknamed Mistigris. The final occupant of the coach is Père Léger, a rich farmer from Val-d'Oise who is leasing the land which the count wishes to buy from Margueron. Léger is hoping to buy it himself and then sell it piecemeal at a significant profit to the count.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Heartbeat"title="My Heartbeat">
Ellen is a fourteen-year-old girl going into her freshman year of high school in New York City. She has been in love with her brother Link's best friend James for as long as he can remember. She is often invited to come along with Link and James to hang out and James says that when Ellen grows out of her crush on him, it will "break his heart." A friend from school asks Ellen what she thinks it's like that her brother and James are "like a couple." In order to understand the speculations that Link and James are “like a couple,” Ellen researches the topic of homosexuality. After her research, Ellen comes to believe that homophobic attitudes and behaviors are due to ignorance. Thus, Ellen concludes that being gay in a contemporary society should be accepted. Furthermore, her mother is okay with her son being gay. However, her father is not. Link denies being gay, but James tells Ellen that both of them might be, yet Link is scared of it while James is okay with it. James also reveals that he has slept with other men to make Link jealous. Link, James, and Ellen get into a big fight in which Link and James stop talking to each other, and Link gets a girlfriend, the older sister of the best friend who asks Ellen if she thinks if her brother and James are gay. College applications soon come and Link, the kid known for being smart, turns in his exams all blank. He ends up going to counseling, and makes it in everywhere he applied, but chooses Yale for their father, who was dying for Link to go there. Meanwhile, James and Ellen start dating, but when James's college applications return, Ellen finds out that he was planning on going to art school all along. James chooses a school in Germany where his mother went before going to law school, and for which he got a scholarship. They agree to break up before James leaves for Germany. Around Christmas, James, Link, and Ellen get together for a dinner in which they sort of make up their differences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Dollars_(novel)"title="Three Dollars (novel)">
The novel is set in Melbourne. The first-person narrator, Eddie Harnovey, is a chemical engineer, married to Tanya, an aspiring but ultimately uncontracted political science academic. Eddie is from middle class origins, his father being a clerk for a local council. His childhood friend Amanda, however, was a class above them. As a chemical engineer, her father wore starched cotton shirts while Eddie's father wore drip-dry poly-cotton shirts. Amanda's family banned Eddie from meeting her. Nevertheless, Eddie meets Amanda every nine and half years. The next time is as undergraduates, where Eddie notices her in a queue for more fashionable food than he is in the queue for. The next time is as fellow shoppers in a department store, as Eddie looks for formal wear for his marriage to Tanya. The next time he meets her is in much straitened circumstances. Downsized, jobless, and with only three dollars in his bank account, Eddie skips an appointment with Amanda - now an employment consultant - and ends up beaten unconscious protecting a friend of a now indigent man Eddie befriended while still solvent. Eddie's report on Amanda's father's smelter expansion was the reason Eddie was downsized. Amanda identifies Eddie from the appointment card he had in his shirt pocket.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Peter's_Fair"title="Saint Peter's Fair">
In summer 1139, England is torn by strife between King Stephen and his cousin Empress Maud, during The Anarchy. King Stephen has the advantage now. From abroad Empress Maud is building support for a renewed attempt on the throne, with Earl Robert of Gloucester. Ranulf, Earl of Chester, is married to a daughter of Robert of Gloucester. Earl Ranulf is powerful in his own right, and has not yet chosen to stand with one or the other in this war for the crown of England. Hoping they have peace now their Castle is aligned with King Stephen, the monks of Shrewsbury Abbey prepare for the three-day annual fair in honour of their namesake saint, held on the feast of Saint Peter ad Vinculum.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Crusader"title="Knight Crusader">
The novel is divided into three parts: the first part leads up to the Battle of Hattin; the second part, set four years later, shows Philip d'Aubigny's escape from captivity at the time of the Third Crusade, and the final part deals with Philip's reclaiming his ancestral lands in the Welsh Marches.At the beginning of the novel, Outremer has been in existence for nearly one hundred years since the capture of Jerusalem in 1099. However, the Emir Saladin is uniting the Islamic forces against the Crusader states. The great military orders of the Knights Templar and Knights Hospitaller are eager for the fray, but others are concerned that there are not enough Christian knights in Outremer to form an effective field army while continuing to garrison the castles that protect the Latin Kingdom. Saladin invades Outremer and besieges Tiberias. Guy of Lusignan, the charming but weak-willed King of Jerusalem, is swayed by poor advice to march the assembled forces of Outremer to the relief of the city across a waterless plain at the height of summer. Debilitated by the desert conditions before the battle even begins, the Christian army suffers a devastating defeat at Hattin. Most of the weakly-held fortresses of Outremer fall to Saladin and Jerusalem is taken by the Muslim armies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daaku"title="Daaku">
In the violent and ruthless world of Indo–Canadian gangs, Ruby Pandher is on his way up. A self–described daaku (Punjabi for outlaw), Ruby learns young that might, in the form of his drunken father's fists, is right, and that money is easier to steal than earn. Ruby's small–time scams reveal a knack for leadership and after his first stint in youth detention, the big–timers start to notice his potential.Soon, Ruby is doing collections for Indo–Canadian drug dealers. Now "known to police," Ruby is drawn into a gang war just as he's trying to beat the rap on weapons charges and theft –– while simultaneously organizing a jailhouse smuggling ring. On the cusp of adulthood, and surrounded by Punjabi terrorists, bikers and Indo–Canadian gangsters, Ruby is drawn like a moth to the glamour of power, money, and drugs.A story of betrayal, cold–blooded murder and the rise and eventual fall of one gangster, "Daaku" is a bullet–riddled grand tour of Indo–Canadian gangland.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z._Marcas"title="Z. Marcas">
The story is told from the point of view of a first-person narrator, about whom little is revealed before the final pages. Before the story itself, an extended meditation appears on the nature of human names, and that of Z. Marcas specifically:The narrator, Charles, lives with his friend Juste in a large boarding-house populated almost entirely with students like themselves (Charles is studying law and Juste medicine). The sole exception is their middle-aged neighbor, Z. Marcas, of whom they see only momentary glimpses in the hall. They learn that he is a copyist, and living on an extremely small salary. When the students find themselves lacking the funds for tobacco, Marcas offers them some of his own. They become friends, and he tells them the story of his political career.Recognizing at an early age that he had an incisive mind for politics, Marcas had allied himself with an unnamed man of some fame who lacked wisdom and insight. They became a team, with the other man serving as the public face and Marcas as the advisor. Once his associate had ascended into office, however, he abandoned Marcas, then hired and abandoned him again. Marcas was left poor and unknown, resigned to duplicate the writing of others for very little pay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizard_of_Linn"title="The Wizard of Linn">
An alien starship has entered the solar system sometime in the Sixth Century of the Thirteenth Millennium A. D. The ship appears to belong to the Riss, an alien race who had come to Sol millennia ago and destroyed the thriving human civilization. Now the descendants of the survivors, living in a medieval society with spaceships, must face the threat again. One of those is Jerrin, Lord Advisor of the Linnan Empire. Jerrin is annoyed that his brother, the mutant atom priest Clane, knew about the Riss incursion before he did and is more annoyed when Clane recommends an attack on the Riss ship, one that is guaranteed to fail.The attack does indeed fail, but Clane, Jerrin, and their associates are protected by a glassy-looking aetherial sphere that Clane controls mentally and that absorbs energy. For his second attack Clane sneaks aboard the Riss ship and uses the sphere to eliminate the crew. Taking over the ship, Clane flies it to his estate. There he discovers that Jerrin has been assassinated, poisoned by his wife Lilidel, who was concerned that her son Calaj was to be disinherited from the Lord Advisorship. Worse, Clane discovers that his magic sphere has been stolen by followers of Czinczar, a barbarian from Europa who recently tried to conquer the Empire of Linn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Walking_in_Ice"title="Of Walking in Ice">
The diary was written and takes place between November 23 and December 14, 1974. In the foreword, Herzog says that he received a call from a friend in Paris, informing him that his close friend, the German film historian Lotte H. Eisner, was ill and dying. Herzog was determined to prevent this, and believed that an act of walking would keep Eisner from death. He took a jacket, a compass and a duffel bag of the barest essentials and, wearing a pair of new boots, set off on a three-week pilgrimage from Munich to Paris through the deep chill and snowstorms of winter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Power"title="Twitter Power">
The book aims to teach business owners how to use microblogging service Twitter to network and build a community around their services, and to use tweets for viral marketing. Comm describes and provides examples of five tweet groups: "classic, mission-accomplished, question, entertainment and picture tweets".In "Twitter Power" resources section, Comm includes a list of "Power Twitterers". He also lists Twitters tools like TweetDeck, a dashboard, and Twellow, a user directory. Tony Robbins wrote the book's preface.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_It_Was_Dark"title="When It Was Dark">
A wealthy and powerful English Jew, Constantine Schuabe, a known adversary of Christian clergy, plots to destroy Christianity by falsely disproving the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He exploits the financial situation of English Biblical expert Sir Robert Llewelyn, and coerces him to plant an inscription upon an ancient tomb entrance. This inscription, supposedly written by Joseph of Arimathea, stated that he took the body of Christ after his death and concealed it there. There ensues a decline in morality in the world before the plot is exposed, thereby postulating the state of a world without the religion of Christ.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Horse_for_Mandy"title="A Horse for Mandy">
15-year-old Mandy Underwood returns home from summer camp to find she no longer feels a connection to her friends and family. After spending a summer playing tennis and meeting new people, she no longer shares the shallow interests of the vapid friends of her small Rhode Island town. She feels most changed by the time she spent with the camp's Equestrian program. Now that she considers herself an adept rider, Mandy feels superior to her former friends Lydia, Patricia, and Elaine.In an effort to win back her affections, Mandy's parents, Lloyd and Melody, decide to purchase a horse for Mandy. Mandy accepts their offer, but only on the condition that she can select the horse herself.After visiting a number of stables, Mandy fails to find a horse that meets her standards. Lydia, Patricia, and Elaine try to show their support by throwing a horse-themed party for Mandy and even give her an expensive saddle to celebrate the occasion.Finally, after months of searching, Mandy finds an ideal horse on a farm in New Hampshire. While visiting the farm, she meets Ted, the horse's current owner. Ted quickly informs Mandy that he has no patience for her superior attitude. Mandy finds Ted intriguing and they begin a long-distance relationship, writing each other daily letters. Mandy even names her horse Teddy in his honor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Justice_of_God_in_the_Damnation_of_Sinners"title="The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners">
The main subject of the doctrinal part of Edwards' sermon is the free grace of God in man's salvation, especially in regards to justification by faith alone. Edwards examines the context of Romans 3:19 in which the Apostle Paul chastises the Jewish people for their literal observance and interpretation of the Law and then proceeds to condemn them for it. Edwards affirms, and then elaborates upon, Paul's original assertion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_True_Virtue"title="The Nature of True Virtue">
In "Virtue", Edwards describes his views on the different levels of virtue, specifically "common morality" and "true (saving) virtue." God, Edwards argues, had in mind as the end for his creation of the world His own glory and not human happiness. Thus, true virtue does not arise from self-love or from any earth-bound selflessness (these were two common views at the time) but from a desire to see God's glory displayed above all. Love of self, family, or nation is good only to the extent that it magnifies the glory of God.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_on_the_Borderlands_(novel)"title="Keep on the Borderlands (novel)">
The main characters are predominantly human or elven, leaving out halflings and dwarves. Eddis, a woman mercenary, is the primary protagonist and point of view character. The novel was also set in the World of Greyhawk with scant references to its location.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tomb_of_Horrors_(novel)"title="The Tomb of Horrors (novel)">
Kaerion, a fallen paladin, is recruited by a group of adventurers to help them explore the legendary Tomb of Horrors. In addition to confronting the tomb's architect, the evil demilich Acererak, the party also finds themselves opposed by a group of evil adventurers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mahabharata_(Narayan_book)"title="The Mahabharata (Narayan book)">
Narayan's version of the Mahabharata focuses on the central conflict of the epic, the Kurukshetra War, while abridging many of the tangential stories-within-stories found in the original text. It begins with the ancestry of the central characters of the story, starting off with the life of King Santanu, the vow of Bhishma, the birth of the Pandavas and the Kauravas, and the tragic death of Pandu. The tale then follows the tutelage of the Pandavas by Drona, the burning of the house of lacquer, and the swayamvara of Draupadi.From there, the story continues building toward the central war of the story, as Yudhisthira loses everything in the dice game, sending him and his brothers into years of exile in the forest, where they remain until tensions upon their return escalate into the great war. Narayan focuses the rest of his version of the Mahabharata on the Kurukshetra War (with the central dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna, the "Bhagavad Gita", summarized into two pages), ending off with a swift post-war chapter and a two-to-three page epilogue.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Better,_For_Worse,_Forever"title="For Better, For Worse, Forever">
18-year-old April Lancaster suffers from a brain tumor. Despite living with tempestuous headaches, April found love with a race car driver Mark Gianni. Following Mark's death, April journeys to St. Croix, where she befriends Brandon. However, April is afraid of finding love again after Mark's death. She keeps to herself for a while, until one day her mother talks to her and suggests that if it had happened that April had died and Mark had lived, she would want him to be happy and to move on.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tomorrow_People_(novel)"title="The Tomorrow People (novel)">
Only one man, Johnny Wendt, has returned from the first expedition to Mars. Efforts to determine what happened to the others are in vain; four pages of the ship's log are missing, and Johnny's companion, Doug Laughlin, apparently wandered off to die in the desert. Johnny's girlfriend, Lisa Trovi, and a psychiatrist named Phil Kutler try to cure Johnny by luring him to the Moon and getting him to grapple with whatever happened on Mars. Johnny reacts so badly that they return to Earth as quickly as possible.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Night_in_Twisted_River"title="Last Night in Twisted River">
The novel opens in 1954 in the small logging settlement of Twisted River on the Androscoggin River in northern New Hampshire. A log driving accident on the river has just claimed the life of a young logger, Angel, who slipped and fell under the logs. Dominic Baciagalupo is the camp's Italian-American cook who lives above the kitchen with his 12-year-old son, Daniel. Dominic lost his wife, Rosie, 10 years previously when a drunk Dominic, Rosie and a logger and mutual friend, Ketchum, were dancing on the frozen river, and the ice broke and Rosie went under. Later another accident happens that changes the lives of Dominic, Daniel and Ketchum. "Injun Jane", the kitchen's dishwasher and girlfriend of the local law officer, Constable Carl, is having an affair with Dominic. One night, mistaking her for a bear attacking his father, Daniel kills her with an eight-inch cast-iron skillet. Dominic takes Jane's body and deposits it on the kitchen floor of Carl's house, knowing that Carl will be passed out drunk and will probably believe he killed her, as he often beat her up. Early the next morning Dominic and Daniel tell Ketchum what happened and flee Twisted River in case the bad-tempered Carl finds out what really happened.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddy_Goes_Camping"title="Freddy Goes Camping">
Camphor and his butler Bannister appear at the Bean farm, asking Freddy to send Camphor’s visiting aunts packing. Aunt Elmira is demanding, fat and gloomy. Aunt Minerva is bossy; she regularly burns her cooking. The aunts planned to stay at the hotel across the lake, but it is suddenly haunted. As before in "Freddy and Mr. Camphor", Bannister and Camphor enjoy their game of reciting proverbs, then deciding if they are appropriate. Punning, Bannister says, "Go to the ant, thou sluggard."Freddy and the cow Mrs. Wiggins walk to the estate, deciding that resolving the hotel’s problems will in turn solve Camphor’s problems. Camphor suggests that as campers, they can observe the hotel free of suspicion. Freddy grapples with the challenges of camping, such as making his first flapjacks (pancakes). Since animals would know Freddy, he is in disguise. Their first night they talk loudly — to establish themselves as campers to anyone overhearing. Mischievously, Camphor pokes holes in Freddy’s cover story about studying with a witch doctor:There is a gunshot from the hotel. They find Mrs. Filmore, the owner, leaving the hotel on account of a ghost. They help her leave, but decide to remain themselves. Soon a lion-sized cat head smashes through a window, and they flee to camp. It is wrecked. On examination next morning, much of the hotel damage is caused by rats — probably Simon’s gang.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Law_of_Nines"title="The Law of Nines">
Alexander Rahl (Alex for short) is a struggling artist, living in Orden, Nebraska. His mother is committed to an asylum for violent tendencies and schizophrenia; she often claims that people are watching her through mirrors. His father died in an accident when he was young. His only other family is a grandfather named Ben, a peace-loving former special forces soldier.Alex is en route to the local art gallery that carries his work when he meets a young woman named Jax. He is instantly fascinated with her, and saves her from a runaway truck when it nearly runs the two of them down on a street corner. Jax accompanies Alex to the gallery where she compliments him on a painting of a mountain clearing with nine trees. At the gallery, the owner urges Alex to paint more dystopian themes, like the best-selling artist at the gallery (named R.C. Dillon). Alex refuses, proclaiming that he only likes to paint real life. Alex resolves to give the painting of the mountain clearing to Jax, but before he can do so Jax disappears.On his 27th birthday, Ben gives Alex a packet of papers and explains that it is an inheritance that passes to the oldest member of Alex's bloodline. It would have passed to his mother, but she was committed soon after her 27th birthday and so the inheritance passes to Alex. The inheritance is a huge swath of land in the far east part of the country in a heavily wooded and mountainous nature preserve. If he so chooses, he can sell it to the "Daggett Trust", which controls the rest of the nature preserve. Ben urges Alex to sell the land and live handsomely for the rest of his life on the profits. Alex agrees to think about it, and leaves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sordello_(poem)"title="Sordello (poem)">
The setting is northern Italy in the 1220s, dominated by the struggle between the Guelphs (partisans of the Pope) and the Ghibellines (partisans of the Holy Roman Emperor). Sordello is a Ghibelline, like his lord Ecelin II da Romano, and the soldier Taurello.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Princess_of_Landover"title="A Princess of Landover">
The book began a prologue on the witch Nightshade still trapped in the form of a crow in a cage in Woodland Park Zoo, having been exiled from Landover for more than five years. Apart from having mysteriously appeared in the cage, her red eyes marked her different from other birds and elicited brief interest from animal experts. They gave up trying to study her after failing repeatedly to capture her, despite her being in a cage.The story proper began in the principal's office of the exclusive private school Carringon Women's Preparatory in New England where Mistaya "Misty" Holiday had been sent by Ben to "learn about places other than" Landover. The school was informed that her parents were away most of the time and all correspondence to be made via Miles Bennett, Ben's former law partner. The headmistress Harriet Appleton was with Misty, recounting the girl's previous visits to the same office.The first was when Misty organized a school protest and shut down classes for three days when the school tried to remove a two-hundred-year-old tree from the school grounds.The second was when Misty formed an unapproved club for students to "engage in a bonding-with-nature program", the sticking point for the school authorities being ritualistic scarring for the members, which Misty thought would "convey the depth of commitment" and "reminder of the pain and suffering human ignorance fostered". Besides, Misty thought it should not be a problem as the "scarring was done in places that weren't normally exposed to the light of day".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child's_Play_(Kia_Abdullah_novel)"title="Child's Play (Kia Abdullah novel)">
A psychological crime thriller, Child's Play follows the story of 25-year-old Allegra Ashe who, after a chance encounter with an alluring stranger, is recruited into 'Vokoban', a covert government unit that uses a mysterious new law to chase and convict paedophiles. Allegra becomes deeply involved with the unit and so begins her descent into the darkness and depravity of the human mind. As her life spirals out of control, the reader becomes a voyeur in a world of lust, danger, deceit and revenge.The plot explores certain controversial themes such as rape and paedophilia. Having faced a degree of controversy over her first novel, "Life, Love and Assimilation", Abdullah is unsure how her second novel will be received: "It's ultra violent and ultra sexual, and there are some morally ambiguous sex scenes in there, so I don't know how people will react to that," she says on her website.She adds:In 2011 the Telegraph commented that her two controversial novels, "Life Love and Assimilation" and "Child’s Play" drew condemnation from the British Bangladeshi community.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Leaves_and_a_Bud"title="Two Leaves and a Bud">
Gangu is a middle aged peasant living in Hoshiarpur with his wife Sajani, daughter Leila and his son Budhu. Because of his outstanding debts he ends up losing his lands and as such, readily agrees to travel to Assam to take on a plantation job that would pay well and allow Gangu to own his own land. However upon his arrival Gangu finds that this was all a trick and that the job is essentially slave labor. Their pay is not even enough to buy food and many of the merchants offer loans with interest rates so high that repayment is impossible. Gangu and his family are forced to live their lives in squalor and to endure all sorts of abuse and degradation. On top of this Sajani and Leila are subjected to rape and other sexual degradation.The general poor treatment and living conditions provoke concern in the plantation's doctor, John De La Harve, especially as the threat of cholera looms over the plantation. He tries to persuade the plantation's boss, Croft-Cooke, into improving conditions of the workers (called coolies) but to no avail, as Croft-Cook believes that coolies are sub-human and are not deserving of even the smallest human consideration. As a result the plantation is struck by cholera and Sajani ends up contracting and then dying of the disease. Since he is too poor to perform the necessary last rites, Gangu tries to borrow money from Croft-Cooke but is turned away because he is believed to be carrying cholera.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_More_Than_Murder"title="Nothing More Than Murder">
An unscrupulous owner of a movie theater in a small town, Joe Wilmot, in an unhappy marriage and squeezed by the theater chains, concocts a murderous plot involving his wife and his lover. Wilmot's scheme unravels slowly as he finds out that his predicament was worse than he thought and that his friends and adversaries more vicious. Also known as "Murder at the Bijou".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Middle-Earth"title="The Road to Middle-Earth">
The book discusses Tolkien's inspiration in creating the world of Middle-earth and the writing of works including "The Hobbit", "The Lord of the Rings", and "The Silmarillion". A recurrent theme is that of Tolkien's detailed linguistic studies (particularly of Old Norse and Old English) and the creation of languages (such as Sindarin and Khuzdul) which feature prominently throughout his works. The book begins by explaining Tolkien's philology, his belief in its ability to show what happened as the Gothic empire fell in the 4th century as hinted at in brief mentions of the mythical Mirkwood, and his feeling that if he reconstructed an imagined past on such foundations, it would not be wholly false. It then examines the origins of "The Hobbit", how Tolkien rebuilt a picture of Elves and Dwarves from the available clues, and from the different ways of speaking of each race, how he ended up writing a richly-characterised story. Three chapters then explore "The Lord of the Rings", its map-based plot, its elaborate interlacement of narrative threads, its roots in literature including Shakespeare, and its underlying mythical and Christian themes. A chapter examines "The Silmarillion's" origins and structure, looking at Christopher Tolkien's 1977 selection from his father's legendarium, and his further selection in 1980, published as "Unfinished Tales". These had dark themes, especially of death and immortality, and Shippey notes that readers have found them difficult, providing a good reason for a chapter on them. Another chapter looks at Tolkien's minor works.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Failure_of_Capitalism"title="A Failure of Capitalism">
The primary argument of the book is that we have gone from a recession into a depression (the "D" word, as one author calls it) in 2009, and Posner suggests several possible short-term and long-term solutions to this fiscal crisis. His thesis is not that government, politicians, or even bankers primarily caused this depression, but rather that the capitalist system is to blame for its own faults.Some of the causes of the depression that Posner cites are the lack of enforceable usury laws, which would discourage risky loans, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and central banks taking risks, securitization of mortgages, illiquidity and insolvency of the banking system, the housing bubble, blindness to warning signs of a crisis, and the preconceptions of ideology.Posner wraps up the book with a chapter containing several suggestions, including eventual re-regulation of the banking industry, but warns that "this is not the time" to do so — a long-term solution after the economy recovers — that can "wait calmer days." He also suggests putting off reorganization of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve until a later time. In the meanwhile, he writes, "piecemeal reforms may be feasible and helpful." These include a halt on government marketing of home ownership, requiring banks and financial institutions to "disclose the "full" compensation of all senior executives", backloading of compensation, increasing marginal income tax rates on the highest incomes, and usury laws to discourage risky loans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Series"title="The Secret Series">
In "The Name of This Book Is Secret", a real-estate agent for the deceased, named Gloria, finds a mysterious box called "The Symphony of Smells" in a dead magician's house which she drops off at Cass's grandfathers' junk store. Cass takes the Symphony of Smells to school with her the next day. That day, while she investigates the reason for a rat dying in her schoolyard, she meets Max-Ernest, who talks too much, loves jokes and has divorced parents. Max-Ernest tries out one of his jokes on Cass, who tells him that his joke doesn't make sense, thus fostering a conversation between the two.Cass shows Max-Ernest the Symphony of Smells, and they decode a message for help hidden inside it. Cass and Max-Ernest come to the decision to visit the dead magician's house to find out why he needed help. Now collaborators, Cass and Max-Ernest go to investigate the dead magician's house and find the magician's mysterious journal hidden in his secret study. However, Gloria comes in with a "young" couple looking for a house - Ms. Mauvais and Dr L. This couple is looking for the magician's journal and when they see the kids leaving with the journal, they follow Cass and Max-Ernest for hours, uttering threats. However, the kids manage to escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monsters_of_Templeton"title="The Monsters of Templeton">
Willie Upton returns home to Templeton for the summer from her graduate studies in archaeology with several dark secrets. Her life seemingly in shambles, she moves back in with her mother for the summer. She never knew the identity of her real father and her mother gives her the shocking revelation that her real father is alive and living in Templeton, but it is up to Willie to dig up the deep dark secrets of the small town and thus discover his identity. She excavates data from the local archives and from ancient books and letters. She gradually pieces together her family tree. While all of this is going on, Willie is concerned in the present about a possible pregnancy, about her sick friend she left back in California, about her mother's relationship with a local preacher, about her old acquaintance Zeke and of course about Glimmey, the kindly but now dead lake monster. In the end she discovers the true identity of her father and that she was closer to him than she ever could have thought.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Life"title="Invisible Life">
Raymond Winston Tyler Jr, is a sexy green eyed black man in a white dominated workplace. As a lawyer he knows the good things in life, but what obstacles did it take to get there.Brought up in Birmingham, Alabama. The story starts in the 1980s: he's in his senior year at the University of Alabama, he has the perfect life. He's popular and dating the only black cheerleader on campus, Sela. Things change when fate introduces him to star football player Kelvin Ellis. After a long drive together in which the two go to retrieve some beer, Kelvin reveals that he is bisexual and asks if Raymond is open to new things. Raymond retreats but soon finds himself in a forced kiss with kelvin. They then proceed to have sex in his dorm room. Kelvin assures him that after one time with a man won't make him gay. In good time; Raymond finds himself continuing this relationship with Kelvin, and Sela until Kelvin insist that he live a heterosexual life, and they part ways. After graduating with his undergraduate degree he decides to pursue his grad years at Columbia University and parts ways with Sela.Years in the future. Raymond is still in the closet, or living an invisible life as he calls it. His life consist of his friends JJ (a one-night stand in his past), and Kyle an openly gay man that Raymond deems his best friend. The story starts with a usual pastime in which Kyle and Raymond converse at gay bars and then meet up with JJ for dinner. Kyle, the more promiscuous of the two, picks up a man and also introduces a man which Raymond finds quite attractive. They finally meet again, to the point of going to Raymond's house. The man is at first an enigma. He soon reveals himself as Quinn Mathis. They begin to have a sexual and indoor relationship, until Raymond finds a wedding ring in his bed. Quinn reveals that he is married but at the point of divorce. Raymond unsure complies. During a regular visit to Kyle's apartment he finds a muscular grey eyed man caressing him. Raymond at the time confused but knows he looks familiar. He goes home to watch ESPN to find that it is no other than Mr. John Basil Henderson, football player for the Warriors. Quinn assures him that a lot of athletes fool around (Quinn was college baller who had his first experience with a man).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_of_Pleasure"title="The City of Pleasure">
A city like no other, guarded by the goddess of pleasure and, ruled by a licentious king who dedicated his time to carnal pleasures and a princess who dreams of love and tender empathy. The priests decide to design the walls of the princess's room with figures of embracing lovers and burnt incense and chanted their magical incantations that the pictures on the wall may come to life and the dream of the princess for true love might come true.People real and shadowy, strong slaves and emperors have met their doom at the gates of the City of Pleasure. Eventually the gates of the impenetrable city succumbs under the charm of two ingenious commodities: fried potatoes and pepsi-cola. No one knows the real history of the City of Pleasure and no welcome visitor has ever escaped its enchantment.This is the novel that has been structured from human myths melted down and recreated one of the most perfectly executed literary whims. It is no longer possible to speak of modern Arabic literary narrative without including The City of Pleasure and the enriching addition it has provided to the art of the modern Arabic novel par excellence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Scots_Invented_the_Modern_World"title="How the Scots Invented the Modern World">
The book is divided into two parts. The first part, Epiphany, consists of eight chapters and focuses on the roots, development, and impact of the Scottish Enlightenment on Scotland and Great Britain. The roots come from an appreciation for democracy and literacy that developed from the Scottish Reformation, when John Knox brought Calvinist Presbyterianism to Scotland. He preached that God ordained power into the people and that it was for the people to administer and enforce God's laws, not the monarchy. For common people to understand God's laws they had to be able to read the Bible, so schools were built in every parish and literacy rates grew rapidly, creating a Scottish-oriented market for books and writers.Though they each resented one another, the English and Scots joined in 1707 to form the Kingdom of Great Britain; the English wanted the Scots controlled and the Scots realized they could not match English power. The Scots immediately benefited from a centralized government that paid little attention to it—for example, inexpensive imports reduced the impacts of famines and allowed a Scottish culture to flourish. Herman calls the Scottish Enlightenment "more robust and original" than the French Enlightenment and that the product of the "Scottish school" was that humans are creatures of their environment, constantly evolving and trying to understand itself via social sciences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_Came_Running"title="Some Came Running">
Dave Hirsh is a cynical Army veteran and an occasionally published but generally unsuccessful pre-war writer, who winds up in his hometown of Parkman, Illinois after being put on a bus in Chicago while intoxicated. Hirsh had left Parkman 19 years before when his older brother Frank placed him in a charity boarding school, and is still embittered. Frank has since married well, inherited a jewelry business from the father of his wife Agnes, and made their social status his highest priority. Dave's return threatens this, so Frank makes a fruitless stab at arranging respectability, introducing him to his friend Professor Bob French and his beautiful daughter Gwen, a schoolteacher (who are familiar with his writing). Dave, having planned to visit Parkman for only a week, impulsively decides to settle in Parkman to pursue Gwen romantically and attempt to write a novel with her help.While Frank and Agnes are members at the local country club, Dave moves in different social circles. He befriends Bama Dillert, a hard-drinking southern gambler who has serendipitously settled in Parkman. Dave moves in with Bama, and they regularly gamble together, sometimes going on road trips to do so. Several young, aimless WWII veterans and Frank's daughter Dawn's boyfriend, Wally Dennis, an aspiring writer himself, hang around Dave and Bama in Parkman's bars. When Dawn marries another boy in town, Wally enlists in the Army after attending their wedding, even though he had been working with Gwen on his own novel. Three girls who work at the town brassiere plant, Rosalie, Mildred, and Ginnie, also hang around the local bars and are sexually available to Dave and his group of friends. Over the next year, while unsuccessfully trying to pursue a romance with Gwen (they have a meaningful connection but do not sleep together), Dave starts regularly sleeping with Ginnie, who is the least attractive of the trio, but easiest to persuade to go to bed with.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sending"title="The Sending">
In a world where happiness and love are rare, Elspeth Gordie has found both. But in the midst of planning a trip to the Red Land, Elspeth at last receives her summons to leave the Land on her quest to stop the computermachine Sentinel from unleashing a second apocalypse. Though she has prepared for this day for years, nothing is as she imagined. She will go far from her destination to those she thought lost forever. To toxic Blacklands to find a pack of mutant human-hating wolves, for only they can lead her to the forgotten Beforetime city which haunts her dreams. Accepting her mission will cost her dearly, but to refuse, or to fail, is to condemn the world to annihilation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_in_Marble"title="Names in Marble">
The novel is divided in three parts. The main characters of the novel are two brothers, Henn and Juhan Ahas. In the first part, set at the beginning of the war, a group of students from Tartu join the Estonian Army (most students join immediately). In the beginning, Henn Ahas hesitates but after his hometown is attacked he joins the army. In the first part, the political and economic situation of the nation is described through the group of students. The second part contains autobiographical references and describes the situation at the war front, and the experiences of soldiers. The third part of the novel focuses on the final stage of the war and in particular the Treaty of Tartu, which recognised the independence of Estonia. The book ends with the group of students returning to their homes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliet,_Naked"title="Juliet, Naked">
Duncan, an obsessive music fan, receives a CD of "Juliet, Naked", an album of solo acoustic demos of the songs on the album "Juliet" by his favourite artist, Tucker Crowe. Duncan's girlfriend, Annie, opens it first and listens to it on her own. Duncan is angry, especially when she expresses her dislike for it. He writes an enthusiastic review for the fan website he runs. Annie writes a passionate article criticising it and receives an email response from Tucker Crowe himself. Further email correspondence ensues, much of which consumes Annie's thoughts.Tucker Crowe is in Pennsylvania preparing for a visit from his daughter Lizzie, whom he has never met. He has five children from four relationships; his youngest son Jackson and Jackson's mother, Cat, are the only ones he lives with. Lizzie reveals that she is visiting because she is pregnant.Duncan meets a new colleague called Gina, whom he sleeps with. He tells Annie of his affair and she insists he move out. The next day Annie talks to her judgmental therapist Malcolm. Duncan regrets leaving Annie but she refuses to take him back. Cat breaks up with Tucker, but Tucker remains to look after Jackson. Annie places a photo of Tucker and Jackson on her fridge and invites Duncan round to make him see it, gleeful that he doesn't know the significance of it, and tells him she is in a relationship with him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sanctuary_Sparrow"title="The Sanctuary Sparrow">
The story takes place over 7 days in May 1140.At the midnight services of Matins on a lovely May night, a boy speeds into the Abbey church just ahead of mob after him for theft and murder. Abbot Radulfus stops the mob, grants the victim's request for sanctuary and successfully orders the mob to return in quiet the next morning to discuss their charges. Liliwin is a wandering jongleur and entertainer, evicted from the goldsmith's wedding reception earlier for breaking a wine jug during his routine.The charge against Liliwin is robbery and assault, not murder. The term of sanctuary is forty days; if he leaves the grounds he will be taken. Abbot Radulfus firmly asserts the rights of sanctuary for Liliwin, who protests his innocence. Daniel Aurifaber, grandson of the house, then requests Brother Cadfael to treat his grandmother at their home.Cadfael treats Dame Juliana, and interviews several in the household. He retrieves the juggling balls that Liliwin left behind. The greed of Dame Juliana permeates the household. Cadfael shares his idea of Liliwin's innocence with Deputy Sheriff Hugh Beringar. Liliwin weeps for the loss of his rebec, which Cadfael finds on a walk back to the Abbey.Liliwin is pleased to learn that the young maid Rannilt has sympathy for him. Brother Anselm teaches him to read and write music and works to restore the rebec to condition, and Liliwin thrives on regular meals in the Abbey. On Monday Rannilt visits Liliwin with food from Susanna, and discarded men's clothing from Margery, Daniel's new wife. Rannilt and Liliwin fall deeply in love, then make love and fall asleep behind the chapel altar during Vespers. Liliwin's absence is noted. Liliwin and Rannilt wake at Compline having slept too long. Liliwin escorts Rannilt home, risking his sanctuary for her safety. Liliwin sees Daniel leave the Aurifaber home that evening, which he later tells Brother Cadfael.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dissertation_Concerning_the_End_for_Which_God_Created_the_World"title="A Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World">
Edwards argues against contemporaries who claimed that human happiness was the end for which God created the world. Edwards instead puts forth the idea that the reason for God's creation of the world was not human happiness, but the magnification of his own glory and name. Edwards then argues that since true happiness comes from God alone, human happiness is an extension of God's glory. Indeed, Edwards maintains, all God's "ultimate" ends and "chief" ends serve to magnify his glory as well. As in "Virtue", Edwards discusses the claim that there is no true happiness unless it is happiness in God.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddy_the_Pied_Piper"title="Freddy the Pied Piper">
On a snowy February 14, Freddy learns his friend Mr. Boomschmidt ran out of money for his circus during the war years, when performances were restricted. The animals scattered a year previously to manage for themselves. Freddy gets an appeal to reassemble them and find a way to finance restarting the circus. Valentines and Jinx the cat's painting aside, Freddy and Jinx go to Centerboro for advice. The bank will not loan money without collateral: “Chickens are off two cents, and lambs very weak. But rhinoceroses—not a very active market in them”. On a different matter, on Freddy's advice, the bank puts out cheese so the mice will not eat the money.Freddy learns that the circus lion Leo is 200 miles away. He is lucky to catch his rich friend Mrs. Church driving that direction. She pays for a hotel while he and Jinx investigate. At Mrs. Guffin's pet shop Freddy buys a canary that winks at him while he is questioning. The canary turns out to be a chickadee dyed yellow; he gives Freddy enough information about Leo to confront Mrs. Guffin. They manage to free him, but are now fugitives, since Mrs. Guffin claims she owns Leo. She tries to reclaim him, but is held captive until Mrs. Church arrives to take them home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rookwood_(novel)"title="Rookwood (novel)">
The action of the novel takes place in England in 1737. At a manor called Rookwood Place, a legend claims that when a branch of an ancient tree breaks, a death will follow. After a branch does fall from the tree, Piers Rookwood, the owner, dies. It is revealed to Luke Bradley that he is the son, and therefore the heir, of Piers; and also that Piers had murdered Bradley's mother. This knowledge comes to Bradley while he stands near his mother's coffin, which falls and opens at the moment of revelation. During the fall, it can be seen that she is wearing a wedding ring, which suggests that Bradley is not illegitimate. However, the entire incident has been orchestrated by Peter Bradley, the boy's grandfather. Meanwhile, Rookwood's wife, Maud Rookwood, initiates her own scheme to ensure that her son, Ranulph Rookwood, is able to claim the inheritance.As events unfold, Bradley falls in love with Eleanor Mowbray – but she is in love with her cousin, Ranulph Rookwood. At his grandfather's prompting, Bradley abandons his love, a gypsy named Sybil Lovel, to pursue and try to force Mowbray into marriage. Dick Turpin, a highwayman and thief, is introduced at the manor, under the pseudonym Palmer. While there, he makes a bet with one of the guests that he can capture himself. Eventually, Turpin is forced to escape on his horse, Black Bess. The horse, though fast enough to keep ahead of all other horses, eventually collapses and dies under the stress of the escape. Later, Turpin reappears and tries to help Bradley win Eleanor's hand in marriage, but Bradley is fooled into marrying Sybil instead, Eleanor having been taken by the gypsies. Soon afterwards, Sybil kills herself. To avenge her death, Sybil's family poisons a lock of hair and gives it to Bradley, which results in his death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cry_of_the_Halidon"title="The Cry of the Halidon">
The story concerns a geologist, Alex McAuliff, who served in the Army as an infantry officer and fought in Korea, is commissioned to undertake a survey in Jamaica. It's an offer McAuliff just can't refuse: two million dollars for a geological survey of Jamaica's dark interior. All Dunstone, Limited asks for in return is his time, his expertise, and above all his absolute secrecy. No one is to know of Dunstone's involvement - not even McAuliff's handpicked team.But British Intelligence knows and they've let Alex know a secret of their own: the last survey team sent to Jamaica by Dunstone vanished without a trace. For McAuliff, it's too late to turn back. Alex already knows about Dunstone...which means he already knows too much.He is a marked man...but by whom? Dunstone Limited? British Intelligence? A rival company? A beautiful island and a beautiful woman who could be a spy are central to Alex's chance for survival. That and a single word...Halidon.In common with other Ludlum novels the lead character discovers there is more to the deal than expected and McAuliff is enlisted by British Intelligence. The story develops as McAuliff's resources and abilities are tested eventually leading him to a secret organisation hidden in the Jamaican mountains.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_(novel)"title="Veracity (novel)">
"Veracity" takes place in 2045. Harper Abigail Adams, a psychic, works for a totalitarian government called The Confederation of the Willing. In 2012, when she was six years old, a fake vaccine, distributed during what the soon-to-be Confederation claimed to be a pandemic, killed half the country's population. The regime that arose in the wake of the attack controlled the remaining population with a brutal police force called the Blue Coats, government-sanctioned drugs and prostitution, and language restriction. Citizens are required to have a prosthetic device, called a "slate," installed in their necks. The slate monitors citizens' geographic location and activities, as well as the words they speak. The Confederation maintains a list of "red-listed" words, including "America" and "revolution." Speaking one of them triggers an electric shock by the device and summons the police for an offense punishable by torture, rape, or death. Government monitors are chosen for their psychic powers allowing them to read "auras," and Harper is particularly skilled at this.Harper is already disillusioned, but when her daughter's name, Veracity, ends up on the "red list," she flees to an underground bunker in the countryside to join the resistance and impending war against the government. The resistance is led by Lazarus Cole, a co-inventor of the slate, and consists of people who either never installed a slate or who undergo a painful process to disable the implant permanently. They are guided by a copy of the rare Book of Noah, a mythical text whose existence is denied by the Confederacy. The book -- actually a copy of "Webster's Dictionary" -- is said to contain the answers to every question in existence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominid_(novel)"title="Hominid (novel)">
"Hominid" takes place several million years ago in the Central African transitional region between rainforest and savanna. The main characters are "Australopithecus afarenses", an extinct, mostly tree-dwelling hominid that existed before the use of tools and fire. The story is told through first-person narration by the protagonist, Pitar. In deliberating his social and natural environment, Pitar decides to lead his band to civilization: “Hence I decided to shed some light on the darkness, to light a candle following the motto Let there be light and so on.” His linguistic capacity, thoughts and speech correspond to those of modern man, and he also is knowledgeable about history, politics, philosophy and literature. Intermittent comments made by Pitar concerning a particular prospect or artifact that has not been invented or developed yet add to the humor of the grotesque scenario. Pitar's close friends are Carpediem, who enunciates Latin phrases and quotes the writers of Classical Antiquity, and Lao, who frequently refers to Chinese philosophy.Although it is difficult to convince his fellow Hominidae to follow him, Pitar manages to persuade the patriarchal leader of the clan, Costello, who has taken command from the recently deceased Thorn. The band builds windbreaks to help them descend more often from the trees, thus exposing them to a higher risk of being attacked by predators on the ground. A rivalry emerges between Costello and another band member, Re, who not only questions the leading abilities of the present alpha but also desires Costello's females. To alleviate the escalating debate of authority, Pitar tries to implement a parliament to settle disputes peacefully. Costello, however, considers the parliament to be a forum in which he can consolidate his power, citing famous speeches by Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln; the other members ruin this noble idea with their lack of discipline and ostentatious indifference.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Heat"title="August Heat">
A grueling, relentless sun is the background to this episode: and the most fiery heat of this hottest summer month in Sicily is paralleled by the fervour and passion that inflames Montalbano. It's August, his deputy Mimì Augello had to anticipate his holidays, and Montalbano is forced to remain at Vigata, taking care of police business. Fiancée Livia joins him, but so as not to be alone with Montalbano's always working, she brings along a friend (with husband and baby) and asks Salvo to rent a beach house for them. All is well as the holiday develops nicely, but one day the couple's little boy disappears. Montalbano rushes into the garden to help in the search and discovers a tunnel that will reveal sensational surprises, including a trunk with the body of a missing girl who disappeared six years before.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sound_of_Fishsteps"title="The Sound of Fishsteps">
Turkish prodigy Afife Piri, a descendant of Ottoman-Turkish cartographer Piri Reis, is invited, along with 87 other international "selects", to take part in a UN sponsored retreat in an unnamed Scandinavian city. At the retreat she encounters a man claiming to be the French novelist Romain Gary, with whom she falls in love, and the descendants of other iconoclastic geniuses including Joan of Arc, Anaïs Nin, Jawaharlal Nehru and Edvard Grieg. The mysterious director of the retreat, Dr. Gunnar, however, has a secret agenda that is slowly revealed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quest_Begins"title="The Quest Begins">
The novel first follows Kallik, who lives with her mother and brother. While out on the ice, she is separated from her family when killer whales attack, forcing her to survive by herself. Kallik decides to go to a gathering place for polar bears that her mother told her about. There, she asks other polar bears if they have seen her family, but none of them have seen them. Kallik befriends another female bear named Nanuk, who helps Kallik around the area. However, Nanuk is killed in a helicopter crash when she and Kallik are being shipped back to the wild. Before she dies, Nanuk tells Kallik about a place where the ice never melts. Kallik sets off to find this place.In a mountain range, Toklo's mother is bringing Toklo and his sickly brother to a river to teach them how to catch salmon, but when his brother dies, she suffers a mental breakdown and abandons Toklo. Left to fend for himself, he is chased by human hunters and meets another bear who is also being pursued by the hunters, Ujurak. Although Ujurak is injured, they are able to reach safety. Ujurak, then reveals himself to be a shapeshifter by transforming into a human and back. The two decide to continue traveling together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cream_of_the_Jest"title="The Cream of the Jest">
The novel takes place almost entirely around Lichfield, Virginia, Cabell's fictionalization of Richmond, Virginia, particularly in Kennaston's house, in the country. However, Kennaston's dreams take place in various parts of Europe and the Mediterranean basin at various times in the past. Also, part of "The Cream of the Jest" consists of the ending of the first version of Kennaston's novel, which is set in the Middle Ages around the castle of Storisende in a mythical country.The time covers a few years, apparently not long before the novel's publication in 1917.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsters_of_Men"title="Monsters of Men">
An army of Spackle, the indigenous population of the planet, marches on New Prentisstown from one direction, and the forces of The Answer from the other. Mayor Prentiss has been freed by Todd to help defend the city, whilst Viola attempts to warn incoming settlers.The Mayor's army and the Spackle army engage in a destructive battle. Meanwhile, Viola and Mistress Coyle confer with Bradley and Simone, the scout ship pilots; Coyle wants to use the ship's missiles to destroy the Mayor. However, the Mayor's army manages to push the Spackle army back into the forest. 1017 has made his way to the Spackle camp, now branded "The Return". He is the only surviving slave, and seeks revenge on Todd and the settlers.The Spackle dam off the river to block water supply and attack the Mayor's camp. Coyle attempts to manipulate Viola to use the scout ship, and when Todd is in danger, she launches a missile that kills most Spackle warriors. The Return argues with The Sky, the leader of the Spackle, demanding more attacks. The Sky refuses, but reveals a captured, hibernating Ben, Todd's adoptive father. The Sky promises Ben to The Return if the two armies reach peace. The Spackle begin attacking the town at random. During a raid, Todd knocks the failing Mayor unconscious and takes over. The Mayor praises him for having such ability.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becoming_Batman"title="Becoming Batman">
In the book Zehr goes over the amount of physical training that would be necessary for someone to become Batman. Zehr draws upon his knowledge as a neuroscientist, kinesiologist, and martial artist to do this, and covers topics such as what it would be like to fight in a superhero uniform as well as what a person's daily dietary requirements would be. "Becoming Batman" is unique in its explicit analysis of whether or not it is actually possible for a human being to achieve Batman status through training.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_(novel)"title="Basil (novel)">
Basil, son of a father who values the family pedigree and who would not let him marry below his station, falls in love at first sight with a girl he sees on a bus. He follows her and discovers she is Margaret Sherwin, only daughter of a linen draper. He persuades her father to let him marry her secretly. He agrees on the condition, that, as his daughter is only seventeen, they live apart for the first year. At first the secret works, but then the mysterious Mannion, whose emotions cannot be read in his face, returns from abroad. On the last night of the year Basil follows Margaret and Mannion and discovers them "in flagrante delicto". Basil attacks Mannion in the street and tries to murder him, but succeeds only in mutilating his face by pushing it into the fresh tarmacadam in the road. Mannion survives, recovers and swears revenge, and it is revealed that Basil's father indirectly caused Mannion's father to be hanged for forgery.Basil repudiates Margaret, but Sherwin threatens him with exposure unless he holds to his marriage. Basil confesses to his father, who disowns him, but his sister Clara stands by him. Basil's brother Ralph undertakes to buy Sherwin off, but meanwhile Margaret flees to Mannion, thereby acknowledging her guilt. Visiting Mannion in hospital, she catches typhus and dies. Basil, having been put on her track by Ralph, visits her on her deathbed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Grass_Rope"title="A Grass Rope">
When Adam Forrest comes to re-paint the outside of the Unicorn Inn in Vendale he is determined to make sense of an old story told in the Dyson and Owland families. Long ago, it is said, Dyson the innkeeper desired to marry Gertrude Owland, the daughter of a knight, who lived on the other side of the ridge in Thoradale. She was willing, but the knight refused permission and trained a pack of hounds, together with a fierce unicorn brought from overseas, to defend her. Dyson used magic to entice the animals into the land of the fairies under the fell, while he eloped with Gertrude. However, he did not know that all the Owland fortune was in the collars of the animals, and he was later drowned by the fairies while trying to retrieve it. According to local legend, the hounds can sometimes still be heard hunting under the hill.Mary and Nan Owland live at Lew Farm, near the site of the old Owland house. Mary is young enough to believe in the fairies of the tale and to believe that the hounds and the unicorn are still alive under the fell, while her older sister Nan does not believe any of it. Adam thinks there is a common-sense explanation and, quite possibly, a treasure to find. While repainting the inn sign he finds an ancient hunting horn embedded in the frame. He guesses that Dyson used it to draw the hounds towards a steep black cliff between the dales known as Yowncorn Yat (local dialect for "Unicorn Gate"), the cliff having acted as an echo wall.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anome"title="The Anome">
It tells the story of a boy growing to manhood in the land of Shant, a society composed of many different, and wildly individual cantons, some of which are run by cults. Each adult wears an explosive torc which can be detonated by remote command, bringing about instant death by decapitation. The torcs are controlled by an anonymous dictator, the Anome, whose identity is literally unknown. Because those whose heads are exploded are selected primarily by the cantonal leaders, for violations of local law, the Anome is able to operate with only a handful of assistants, or 'Benevolences', who themselves do not know his identity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_Boy"title="Maximum Boy">
Max forgot to set his alarm and overslept. So he did his morning routine fast. He rushed into the shower, which made his sister angry. He gulped his breakfast. On his way to school, Max encountered many delays, which caused him to arrive at school just one minute before school started.At school he found his classmates and everyone else frozen. His teacher, Mrs Mulvahill, was staring at him. He left his class and saw another frozen boy named Sheldon. He left school and saw everybody outside frozen, even his family. He met his adult friend, Tortoise Man. Tortoise Man and his wife were frozen while playing a game of Scrabble.After sometime everyone thawed out and they talked about the world being frozen. A reporter named Warren Blatt came and accused Tortoise Man of using his Tortoise Ray to freeze the world. The president called to tell Max that a thief had stolen four of the world's greatest treasures—the Mona Lisa painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Louvre museum in Paris; the Hope Diamond at New York's Museum of Natural History, on loan from the Smithsonian; the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London; and a billion dollars in gold bullion at Fort Knox in Kentucky.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddy_and_the_Dragon"title="Freddy and the Dragon">
Back from a trip, Freddy is surprised that many in Centerboro want him arrested. Considerable property damage has been done by a gang including a pig looking like Freddy. Investigating, Freddy shows that damage done in one case could not have been done by him. He is still under suspicion, and is called for an unpleasant police questioning. He instructs the A.B.I. (Animal Bureau of Investigation) to search the countryside, and immediately discovers a bull who has been damaging farms and crops. Freddy's perfume-filled water pistols turn the bull Percy into a smelly laughing stock. He is subdued and they capture him.The search for the gang continues. Most of Centerboro thinks Freddy is responsible for the crimes, but not the “solid” citizens. Since Freddy is the president of his animal bank, the town's human banker vouches for him:The Bean cow sisters discover that Percy is the father who abandoned them as calves; the bull is unmoved. He refuses to discuss his gang.Freddy had been asked for a suggestion to help a circus. Now Uncle Ben the inventor suggests creating a fire-breathing dragon.The gang begins demands for money. Freddy and Jinx the cat lie in ambush at the money drop site, but are terrified by the appearance along a dark road of a headless horseman. Once they have recovered, Freddy learns from the A.B.I. that many of the gang were seen in that area, including a scruffy pig.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargazer_(Patrick_Carman)"title="Stargazer (Patrick Carman)">
Alexa Daley, the protagonist, had only recently defeated the Abaddon (the main antagonist throughout the series)...or so she thought.Abaddon was last seen falling back into the black pit in which he was contained, defeated along with Victor Grindall, one of Abaddon's underlings. Abaddon had taken on a new form, a metal serpent of the sea, harnessing the deadly power of electricity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towers_of_Midnight"title="Towers of Midnight">
## Perrin Aybara and Egwene al'Vere.Moving through Ghealdan, Perrin Aybara and his followers encounter the Children of the Light, of whom Jaret Byar and Dain Bornhald accuse Perrin (correctly) of killing two of their colleagues. When Galad Damodred discovers his stepmother Morgase Trakand among the refugees, Galad and Perrin agree to a trial with Morgase as the judge under Andoran law. Perrin reveals his ability to speak with wolves and claims as his defense the fact that the two men killed his wolf friends; but Morgase judges Perrin guilty of "illegal killing" under an obscure law governing mercenaries. Perrin agrees to abide by Galad's ruling after Tarmon Gai'don; but Galad does not immediately pronounce sentence.Faile Bashere and Berelain sur Paendrag agree that Berelain will publicly denounce the rumors that Perrin and Berelain were paramours during Faile's imprisonment; whereafter Berelain attaches herself to Galad. Nae'blis Moridin charges fellow Forsaken Graendal with killing Perrin; and he gives her a ter'angreal called a "dreamspike", one of two he possesses, that hinders both Traveling and movement in the real world, as well as the service of his minion Isam. Graendal orders Isam to plant the device so that Perrin's Asha'man Jur Grady and Fager Neald cannot form gateways, enabling her to destroy his forces with an army of Trollocs. Perrin enters into the dream world to remove it, but is attacked by Isam in the process. Despite superior numbers due to the wolves helping him, Isam's mastery of the dream world enables him to easily kill several wolves. Not wanting anyone else to be hurt, Perrin takes the dreamspike and lures Isam away, despite his movement being limited by the device, eventually reaching Tar Valon, with Isam in pursuit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimiter"title="Dimiter">
The novel begins in Albania, where a spy named Paul Dimiter is tortured by the authorities. Revealed as an "agent from Hell", they try to get more from him, but before they know it, he escapes. The novel moves to Jerusalem one year later, where a half-Arab European policeman, Peter Meral, finds a murder victim who supposedly was from a mental hospital. Meral tries to find out if there is a connection between Jerusalem and Albania and the enigma of Dimiter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_clefs_de_babel"title="Les clefs de babel">
The book takes place inside the tower of Babel in to which humanity took refuge 1,000 years ago, as so to take protection from a cloud that poisoned the earth. The group of humans entered the tower in five separate groups, each also separated their area of the tower off as so to prevent possible "diseased" persons entering. The plot begins in the highest most portion of the tower when the main character's father gives him a cat who he says can speak; the opposition leader who is also the main character's father is assassinated whilst attending an Opera.The boy (Liram) then flees and is told by an acquaintance of his father that he must delve into the lower reaches of the tower; taking his cat with him, Liram descends alone. On the next floor, he awakes in a hospital and they recognise him as not being a member of their society; their belief of staying clean requires the shaving of one's hair, and after a medical inspection, a barber comes to shave his hair. The barber had discovered several years before, a baby girl with a pentagonal tattoo on her left shoulder. The barber notices that after shaving the hair on the boy's head; that he also has a similar tattoo.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Week_in_December"title="A Week in December">
The book begins with the elaborate seating plan of a dinner party. It ends once that dinner party has taken place. Sophie, the wife of a newly elected Member of Parliament, must decide whom to place where. Several of the protagonists are present at the dinner, and the storylines are, to a large extent, tied up as a result of what occurs there.In the course of the book the reader is introduced to John Veals, a hedge fund trader who is arguably the most important character. He is a ruthless businessman, whose immense fortune seems to have become meaningless. He is more interested in the chase, the challenge of acquiring more and more capital. As he embarks on one of the riskiest deals of his life, his family is about to be torn apart. But does he even care?An unsuccessful barrister is assigned to represent a young female tube driver; a Scottish Muslim is drawn into a radical group, while a postgraduate literature student looks on; a Polish footballer tries hard to adapt to life in a Premier League team, while his Russian model girlfriend adjusts to life in London. A pickle millionaire enlists the help of R. Tranter, novelist and critic, to prepare for his meeting with the Queen when he receives his OBE.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddy_and_the_Bean_Home_News"title="Freddy and the Bean Home News">
On a cold March morning, Charles the rooster malingers about going outside to crow. His attempts to avoid work actually make him too sick to do work. Freddy convinces the Bean animals to join in the neighborhood scrap drive contest, finding unneeded metal to help win the war.Freddy takes news input to the newspaper offices of the "Guardian" to discover that his friend, the editor Mr. Dimsey, has been fired. The owner of the paper, Mrs. Underdunk, put her nephew Mr. Garble in charge. With Dimsey's help, Freddy starts another paper "The Bean Home News", for the animals. The Bean animals work on Dimsey's farm to pay for his time. Unexpectedly, several people in town have subscribed. This prompts the pig to hire reporters to collect the news from town.The newspapers come into confrontation when Freddy is accidentally bumped into by Underdunk on the sidewalk. When the sheriff refuses to arrest the pig, Underdunk threatens to use her influence to put him out of office. She comes to the Bean farm, proclaiming that she will have Freddy shot. A joke meant for Charles backfires, further infuriating her.The city reporter for the "Bean Home News" is collecting great material:The "Guardian" calls Freddy a ferocious wild pig. Freddy responds in his paper with the true version of events. Citizens believe Freddy, drawing more threats from Underdunk. Charles the rooster is infuriated, and meeting his reputation from an earlier book, single-handedly attacks Garble. That leads Underdunk to demand Freddy's arrest as being the head of an animal gang. Freddy hides in his friend the sheriff's jail, which proves lucky, since when they come to arrest him, the sheriff points out that the pig is already "in custody".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuck_In_Neutral"title="Stuck In Neutral">
The book follows Shawn McDaniel's first-person point of view. He is a 14-year-old boy and has lived in Seattle his entire life. He suffers from cerebral palsy, a neurological disorder that affects motor control. In Shawn's case, his entire body is affected; he has absolutely no control over any of his bodily functions. Shawn's condition is a major part of the story, for it affects how everyone looks at him and their opinions on him.In the first few chapters, Shawn McDaniel explains his condition to the reader. He includes what he feels to be positive sides of his condition, such as his perfect memory. Shawn remembers every experience, every sensation, and everything he's ever learned from school or television. Unfortunately due to his complete lack of motor control, Shawn is unable to talk or make contact with his family in any way; it is believed by those around him that Shawn's mind has no higher functional skills. A running theme throughout the book is Shawn's desire to be truly known by someone. Shawn introduces his family to the reader. His mother is his main caretaker and his father is a writer who has won a Pulitzer Prize for a poem about Shawn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measle_and_the_Dragodon"title="Measle and the Dragodon">
The novel is about a boy called Measle who has been recently reunited with his parents, Sam and Lee Stubbs. On a day out they visit the Isle of Smiles, a theme park, and from then on things take a turn for the worse. Lee is captured by wrathmonks (warlocks that have gone mad) and taken to the Isle of Smiles. Sam has his memory wiped, and Measle and his dog, Tinker, are left to their own devices to find and rescue their parents. Once Measle reaches the Isle of Smiles, the wrathmonks cast a spell that causes all the creatures in the theme park to come alive and attempt to kill him. After he has successfully run away from the creatures, the wrathmonks catch him and want to kill him, but their leader, a dragodon, orders them to take him to a ride which leads into the dragon's lair. After a fight with the dragon and the dragodon, Measle and his mother escape and get back to their house where after a short fight the wrathmonks are defeated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_(novel)"title="Transition (novel)">
Set between the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the 2008 financial crisis, "Transition" centres on a shadowy organisation called "The Concern" (also known as "L'Expédience"), and how the workings of this organisation affect the lives of the novel's multiple narrators and characters. Banks uses the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics theory to imagine "infinitudes" of parallel realities, between which The Concern's agents – known as Transitionaries – can "flit", intervening in events to produce what The Concern sees as beneficial outcomes for that world. Transitioning, or flitting, is only possible for people with a predisposed talent for such movement, who may only flit after ingesting a mysterious drug called "septus". When a Transitionary flits into another world, he or she temporarily takes control of the body of an existing inhabitant of that world, along with some of that body's residual idiosyncrasies (such as personality disorders and sexual preferences).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Echo_in_the_Bone"title="An Echo in the Bone">
In the 20th century at Lallybroch, Brianna, Roger, Jem, and Mandy are reading letters from Claire and Jamie from the past, one of which mentions hidden gold, with a location known only to Jem. Given his date of death on the family record, Brianna and Roger know he is unlikely to make it safely back. Rob Cameron, one of Brianna's coworkers, kidnaps Jem, and it appears that he has taken Jem into the past. Roger and William travel through time to find them, but Rob appears at Brianna's home and orders her to tell Jem to disclose the location of the gold. Jem is locked underground at the dam where Brianna and Rob work. He finds an electric train and starts an escape; his fate is unseen.In the past, Lord William Ellesmere (Jamie's son who was raised as Lord John Grey's stepson) is involved in the American Revolution as a Redcoat, but he is repeatedly embarrassed until the battle of Saratoga, wherein he distinguishes himself. Arch and Murdina Bug go after the gold on Fraser's Ridgw. During a confused confrontation, Mrs. Bug shoots Jamie when he tells her to stop, and Ian shoots her. Ian feels guilty for killing Mrs. Bug; Arch vows to take his revenge when Ian has 'someone worth losing'. Claire, Jamie, and Ian leave their mountain home for Scotland to see Jenny, Ian, and their children, and also to recover Jamie's printing press. Before they can leave America, they become involved in the Revolutionary War; Jamie accidentally shoots the hat off William's head at Saratoga. A kinsman of Jamie's on the British side, Simon Fraser of Balnain, is killed, and Jamie and Claire are asked to take his body back to Scotland. Before they leave, a stranger tries to blackmail Jamie, but Ian kills him. Claire, Jamie, and Ian leave for Scotland to bury Jamie's relative, and Ian leaves his dog Rollo with a Quaker woman named Rachel Hunter. Jamie, Claire, and Ian reach Scotland, where Ian the elder, husband to Jamie's sister Jenny and Jamie's best childhood friend, is dying of consumption. Ian and Jenny are ecstatic that young Ian has returned, but Jenny is hostile to Claire, who is unable to cure Ian. Jamie apologizes to Laoghaire (his second wife) for their separation. Laoghaire's daughter and Jamie's adopted daughter, Joan, requires Laoghaire to marry her lover, a crippled servant, so that she (Joan) can become a nun. A letter from Laoghaire's daughter Marsali reveals that her son, Henri-Christian, is very ill. In this missive, Marsali beseeches Claire's help in treating him. Claire agrees to return to America to treat Henri-Christian, stipulating that Laoghaire marry her lover, stop taking alimony from Jamie, and help Joan become a nun.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Care_of_Time"title="The Care of Time">
Robert Halliday is forced by Karlis Zander to help edit the memoirs of a 19th century Russian terrorist Sergey Nechayev, otherwise Zander will detonate a bomb. Halliday soon discovers that Zander and his daughter are themselves threatened by a Middle Eastern terrorist group.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designed_by_Apple_in_California"title="Designed by Apple in California">
The book contains 450 photographs of new and old Apple products taken by Andrew Zuckerman, showcased on stark white backgrounds. They cover 20 years of the company's product design, from the iMac G3 released in 1998 to the Apple Pencil released in 2015, although not all products during that timeframe are included. In addition to its photographs, the book also discusses the materials used in Apple products and techniques used by the company's design team. The book was dedicated to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and contains an introduction written by then Apple chief design officer Jonathan Ive. Ive described the book as an "archive". Apple stated that the book is printed on "specially milled, custom-dyed paper with gilded matte silver edges, using eight color separations and low-ghost ink", and that it was linen-bound, hardcover, and developed "over an eight-year period".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alabaster_Staff"title="The Alabaster Staff">
A young street performer is drawn into a twisting plot of double-crossings and betrayals, at the center of which is the artifact of great power known as the Alabaster Staff.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Bouquet"title="The Black Bouquet">
A rogue becomes involved in a game where he thought no one would get hurt, trusting a tanarukk bandit and hired for his skill and cunning, but turns an entire city against him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crimson_Gold"title="The Crimson Gold">
This novel is set in Thay. A rogue wanted out, wanted a new life and a trophy worthy of a master thief - the source of the treasured crimson gold. She wanted to face an undead emperor on his home ground and live to tell the tale.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yellow_Silk"title="The Yellow Silk">
The novel follows the adventures of Kuang Li Chien, an easterner from the country of Shou Lung, and Tychoben Arisaenn, a minor bard who lives in the seedy port town of Spandeliyon, Altumbel. Li Chien arrives in Spandeliyon on an important family mission to find his eldest brother, Yu Mao, who disappeared when the Shou trading expedition he headed was attacked by "the Sow", a notorious pirate ship. His only lead is the pirate ship's first mate, a cruel halfling by the name of Brin, who has retired in Spandeliyon. Seeking information about his whereabouts at a dockside tavern called the Wench's Ease, Li Chien meets Tycho, who is playing that night. The two clash immediately, but despite their differences, Tycho tries to warn Li Chien against inquiring too insistently about Brin. Ignoring his warnings, Li Chien leaves the tavern with a local man named Lander, who claims he can help him find the ex-pirate...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_Person_(novel)"title="Missing Person (novel)">
Guy Roland is an amnesiac detective who lost his memory ten years before the beginning of the story, which opens in 1965. When his employer, Hutte, retires and closes the detective agency where he has worked for eight years, Roland embarks on a search for his own identity. His investigations uncover clues to a life that seems to stop during the Second World War. It seems that he is Jimmy Pedro Stern, a Greek Jew from Salonica, who was living in Paris under an assumed name, Pedro McEvoy, and working for the legation of the Dominican Republic. He and several friends (Denise Coudreuse, a French model who shares his life; Freddie Howard Luz, a British citizen originally from Mauritius; Gay Orlov, an American dancer of Russian origin; and André Wildmer, an English former jockey, all of whom are enemy nationals) went to Megève to escape a Paris that had become dangerous for them during the German occupation. Denise and Pedro attempted to flee to Switzerland, and paid a smuggler who abandoned them in the mountains, separating them and leaving them lost in the snow.Having partially recovered his memory, Guy Roland goes to look for Freddie, who went to live in Polynesia after the war. When he arrives in Bora Bora, he learns that Freddie has disappeared, either lost at sea or by choice. At the end of the novel he is about to follow the last clue that remains to his past: an address in the Via della Botteghe Obscure in Rome, where Jimmy Pedro Stern is recorded as having lived in the 1930s.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winner_(novel)"title="The Winner (novel)">
The novel tells the story of LuAnn Tyler, a destitute mother living in a trailer park, who meets with Jackson, a man running a massive lottery scam from inside the National Lottery. He offers her a chance to win the lottery, which she initially refuses until she finds herself falsely accused of murder and needing to run for her life with her young daughter in tow. He rigs the lottery so that she wins $100,000,000, on the condition that she leaves the United States and never returns. When she secretly returns ten years later, Jackson comes to punish her for disobeying him, the FBI is searching for her in connection with the lottery scam, and her only help comes from the mysterious Matthew Riggs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Destiny"title="Ship of Destiny">
Much of Bingtown has been destroyed after the night of the Satrap's disappearance. Factions in Bingtown struggle against each other even as they hold off the invading Chalcedeans. Ronica Vestrit comes to accept that Bingtown must turn away from its traditions in order to survive. She clashes with Serilla, the companion to the Satrap who has assumed his authority, seeking to protect herself. With the help of Rache, a slave, Ronica seeks to unite the Old Traders, New Traders, Three Ships folk, and the ex-slave Tattooed to form a new, independent order in Bingtown.In the Rain Wilds, Tintaglia, the dragon freed by Reyn and Selden, saves them from the ruins of the underground city. Malta is stranded in a boat with the Satrap floating down the Rain Wild River. They are rescued by a Chalcedean ship. Malta ensures their survivals by influencing the Satrap's behavior. Believing Malta dead, the Vestrits and some Rain Wilders return to Bingtown, where they help negotiate a united Bingtown. Tintaglia is determined to rescue her kind from extinction, but she finds the landscape changed and must appeal to the humans for help. She defeats the Chalcedean warships and proposes an alliance with the Bingtowners. Reyn and Selden are changed by their connection the dragon, becoming like the ancient Elderlings. Reyn agrees help Tintaglia on the condition that she help him find Malta.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Night"title="House of Night">
Zoey and her friends face the usual teenage issues. Zoey keeps some secrets from her friends and gets in trouble with them, forcing her to consider the nature of friendship. Kristin Cast said that these moral dilemmas were included because "those are issues teenagers deal with... We're not afraid to discuss things that are actually happening." As with many contemporary vampire novels, exploration of human nature and social commentary forms a subtext. and Tsi Sgili are taken from real Cherokee legends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_17"title="Project 17">
The Danvers State Hospital, located just outside Boston, Massachusetts, was built in 1878 and condemned in 1992. It is rumored by locals to be the birthplace of the pre-frontal lobotomy. The novel begins at 7 AM, with Derik riding up to the Danvers State Hospital in his car. Looking at the crumbling brick building, he starts to think of the people that were locked up in there, the people who died after spending their lives there. The unmarked mass graves around the premises, the tunnels, and the messed up remnants of its former patients. He knows this is the place. The place where he'd make his movie. Derik is flunking out of school, and he decides to submit his film to a contest and save himself from a future of flipping burgers at his parents' diner. He gathers a cast of different backgrounds, and the eve before the hospitals' demolition, they break in. He gets more than he bargained for when the eerie experience changes his life. Forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_Thunderstorms"title="Ordinary Thunderstorms">
Adam Kindred is a recently divorced climatologist who has moved back to England. After attending an interview for a Senior Research Fellowship position at Imperial College, London, he goes into an Italian restaurant in Chelsea and briefly encounters Dr Philip Wang, who accidentally leaves a file behind. Adam takes it to Wang's hotel, only to discover that Wang has been murdered and still has the knife in his body. Before Wang dies, he asks Adam to remove it and so Adam becomes incriminated in his murder. Adam is tailed by the murderer Jonjo to his hotel and only narrowly escapes, but he sees Jonjo's face.Deciding to take refuge, he shelters in a small enclosed patch of gardens on London's Embankment to give himself time to think. He decides to go underground, cutting up all his cards and removing anything that could identify him. He soon leads the life of a down-and-out, searching in rubbish bins for food and only venturing out at night. In the meantime, he decides to try to find out from the file in his possession why Wang was murdered and if there is any connection to Calenture-Deutz, the pharmaceutical company Wang was working for. Calenture-Deutz is a company set up by Ingram Fryzer who is another of the novel's protagonists. Ingram is married with three children and is about to reap large profits from the introduction of a new anti-asthma drug, Zembla-4, that is just about to be launched onto the market after its clinical trials supervised by Dr Wang. To speed up the search for the killer, the company offers a £100,000 reward.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Don't_Make_a_Scene,_Mum!"title="Just Don't Make a Scene, Mum!">
Chelsea Gee is the fifteen-year-old daughter of famous reporter and agony aunt Ginny Gee. Her father is unemployed and loves to cook exotic food. Her brother, Warwick, is leaving to Indonesia to help save the trees and her sister, Geneva, studies in Chicago. Chelsea is ashamed of her mother, because she is overweight and lacks fashion sense.Laura Turnbull's parents are divorced. Her dad lives with his girlfriend "Bestial" Betsy, and her kids Sonia and Daryl. Laura lives with her mum in a little house. Ruth's going out with Melvyn, who Laura hates. She thinks that her parents should live together.Jemma Farrant's mother is very old-fashioned. She thinks her daughter should wear hand-knitted jumpers with little bears on it to school. Jemma is not allowed to have a boyfriend or wear make-up.Jon Joseph has a talent for art, but his father wants him to study law at Cambridge. His mum is not surprised, because she likes painting too, but she cannot understand why her son wants to go to Lee Hill instead of Bellborough Court.Sumitha Barenji's father thinks that his daughter should have long hair, no make-up and no boyfriend. Sumitha is unhappy and she wants her dad to change. Luckily, her mum is on daughter's side.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Think_I'll_Just_Curl_Up_and_Die!"title="I Think I'll Just Curl Up and Die!">
After the holidays, Chelsea, Jemma, Sumitha and Laura meet at Jemma's to talk about what they did over the summer. Chelsea tells them that she dated a boy called Juan in Spain, but that he was only interested in sex. Sumitha began dating Bilu Chakrabarti after she met him in Kolkata visiting her grandparents. Laura tells the girls that she could not stand spending time with Betsy on holidays and Jemma summarizes week she spent in Paris.Jon cannot choose between Laura and Sumitha. He asks Sumitha out, but she declines because she is dating Bilu. Instead, Jon spends time with Laura. Jon's dad accepts that he will not study law, and respects his choice to become an artist. Jon is worried that his mother is being unfaithful because of her relationship with Vernon, a university friend. When he confronts Anona, she tells him that Vernon is gay.Jemma meets Rupert Kentigan-Fry at a golf club and is surprised to learn that he likes her. They meet again at his sister's birthday party, but his friends ridicule her for attending a state school. Rupert takes her to the garden to dance, but Jemma feels insulted when he feels her up. Jemma plays Nancy in "Oliver", and Rob Antell develops a crush on her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Child_Is_Born_(book)"title="A Child Is Born (book)">
The book proceeds along two "tracks": one series of photographs and accompanying text depict the development of the fetus from conception through to birth; the other shows a woman and her partner as her pregnancy progresses. Early images show sperm proceeding toward an ovum; cell division, implantation, and the development of the embryo are then illustrated. The text accompanying the photographs of the woman supplies some antenatal care advice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Could_You_Do_This_to_Me,_Mum?"title="How Could You Do This to Me, Mum?">
Chelsea's parents don't want their daughter to have a birthday party, because it will be too expensive. Chelsea becomes jealous of her siblings Geneva and Warwick, who receive more money from their parents. Chelsea befriends Bex in the "Stomping Ground" nightclub. A few weeks later, their friendship is cemented after Fee's friend Eddie tries to assault Chelsea, and Bex comes to her aid. Barry Gee buys his own restaurant, which will be called "Gee Whizz", after its owners, Barry Gee and Will Zetland.Jemma wants to be an actress, but her parents aren't happy when she neglects her schoolwork to attend acting and dancing lessons. Jemma ignores them, and trusts Ms. Olivia Ockley, the owner of the acting school, who praises her talent. However, Jemma is annoyed when Alexa Browning receives a lead role instead of her. Jemma also dates Rob, which causes friction between her and Chelsea, although they reconcile after Chelsea's encounter with Eddie.Jon wants to date Sumitha, but she is no longer interested. Jon is annoyed by his parents, who have little time for him. However, after Laura is injured in front of him at one of his mother's animal rights demonstrations, he realises that he likes her and asks her out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appelsinpiken"title="Appelsinpiken">
Georg Røed's father Jan Olav died when he was four years old. Eleven years later, Georg's grandmother finds letters addressed to Georg from Jan Olav, written before his death, along with a story titled "The Orange Girl."As Georg soon discovers, "The Orange Girl" is not simply a story, but a riddle from the past that centres around an incident from his father's youth. In the story, it is revealed that Jan Olav had once boarded a tram and had taken notice of a beautiful girl who had been clutching a bag of oranges. When tram abruptly jolted, the girl's oranges were dispersed. Jan Olav attempted to collect the oranges, but found that the girl had already disembarked from the tram. The story is a request for his son to solve the mystery of the orange girl's identity.Georg realizes that the "orange girl" was his mother, whom he is still living with. The story turns out to be his father telling him how he and his mother met, and then explains how horrible it was to find out he was dying. He ends the letter by asking Georg the question: if before you were born, you were given the choice to live and be very happy, but die young and have all of the happiness taken away, or to not live at all, what would you choose?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh._My._Gods."title="Oh. My. Gods.">
Phoebe is a perfectly happy senior at high school and headed for USC with her best friends after graduation. Everything changes when her Mom comes back to California announcing she is marrying a Greek man and they have plans to move there. They move to a secret island where she is accepted to an exclusive academy for the descendants of Greek gods, which is run by Phoebe's new stepfather. Phoebe doesn't really fit in, partly because she believes she's not of holy descent. Her new step-sister and others easily torment her, but Phoebe ignores them. At the school, she quickly befriends Nicole and Troy. Phoebe makes it onto her cross country team, running is her natural talent. Soon after, she gets swept up in controversies including her, Griffin, Nicole, Troy, Stella, and her dead dad. At the very end of the book, Phoebe finds out the biggest secret of her life: Phoebe is a descendant of Nike, the Goddess of Victory. She then proceeds to talk to Griffin, who tells her he was destined to be with a descendant of Nike. They start a relationship together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda_Klein"title="Andromeda Klein">
Andromeda Klein is a teenage girl with many problems. She is unattractive, hard of hearing, her best friend and former magical partner Daisy recently died of cancer, "St. Steve" her boyfriend has gone missing, her mother is completely overbearing and her father is a paranoid conspiracist. She makes sense of the world through her complete immersion in the world of ceremonial magic and tarot, even taking on a job at her local library, which conveniently houses an impressive collection of esoteric books on just such subjects. When a list comes in, threatening to wipe the entire collection, Andromeda immediately enlists the help of all those she can find, and begins her battle with the "Friends of the Library".Meanwhile, Andromeda begins to receive myriad messages from Daisy, beyond the grave and plies Daisy's younger brother with naked girl magazines (or "bagel worm agonies" as she mishears thanks to her partial deafness) in exchange for the remaining scraps of her dead best friend's belongings. She then uses these as part of her witchcraft in an attempt to figure out just what Daisy is trying to tell her.Rosalie van Genuchten, and the rest of Andromeda's "afternoon tea" (alcohol and drugs) party friends, sick of her pining for St. Steve, attempt to set her up with various potential suitors who Andromeda dismisses on sight. However, in this process, she picks up Byron, a short guy with unfortunate facial hair who nevertheless becomes a kind of apprentice to Andromeda's occultism, and confidant as new, exciting, but generally confusing text messages suddenly start coming in from St. Steve.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_a_Week_to_Risk_it_All"title="What a Week to Risk it All">
Jade has a boyfriend - Flynn, whom she met when she was going to her grandma's place in Brighton. She acts like a nurse, when she is with him and she only cares about he won't get hurt. Flynn doesn't like it, because he's preparing for running-on-a-wheel-chair competition (he had an accident and he can't walk). Once, Jade and Flynn go to a party in a club, but Jez and Tamsin go there, too. Jez wants to attack Flynn with a knife, but he hit Tansy in her head with his handful. Flynn also got hurt, but not as much as Tansy. He didn't start in competition, but he plays in school theatre. He makes few steps and he is surprised, when Jade doesn't treat him like he was made of glass.Tansy's got problems with Andy's mother. She knows that Mrs. Richards was unfaithful to Mr. Richards and she tells about everything Holly. Unfortunately, Holly repeats it when Andy is near her and he shouts at Tansy that, she cannot keep a secret. Tansy is very upset. She goes to a party, but she doesn't come in, because Andy isn't there yet. Suddenly, she sees Jez and Tamsin. She can also see that Jade and Flynn are outside the club and Jez wants to hurt Flynn. Tansy got hurt by hitting her head. She goes to the hospital and she can't see by one eye. Andy comes to visit her and he apologises her. She doesn't tell him that, everything he heard is true. Andy's brother and sister will be baptismed. Their godfather will be Gordon - a man, who is father of the babies, but Mrs. Richards doesn't tell anybody about it. Godmother of the babies will be Tansy's mother, Clarity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_German_Lesson"title="The German Lesson">
Siggi Jepsen (the first-person narrator), an inmate of a juvenile detention center, is forced to write an essay with the title "The Joy of Duty." In the essay, Siggi describes his youth in Nazi Germany where his father, the "most northerly police officer in Germany," does his duty, even when he is ordered to debar his old childhood friend, the expressionist painter Max Nansen, from his profession, because the Nazis banned expressionism as "degenerate art" ("entartete Kunst").Siggi, however, is fascinated by Nansen's paintings, "the green faces, the Mongol eyes, these deformed bodies ... " and, without the knowledge of his father, manages to hide some of the confiscated paintings. Following the end of World War II, Jepsen senior is interned for a short time and later reinstalled as a policeman in rural Schleswig-Holstein. When he then obsessively continues to carry out his former orders, Siggi brings Nansen paintings that he believes to be in danger to safety. His father discovers his doings and dutifully turns him in for art theft.When forced to write the essay on "The Joy of Duty" during his term in the juvenile detention center near Hamburg, the memories of his childhood come to the surface and he goes far beyond the "duty" of writing his essay by filling several notebooks with caustic recollections of this entire saga.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Morbid_Taste_for_Bones"title="A Morbid Taste for Bones">
In May 1137, Prior Robert of Shrewsbury Abbey is determined that the Abbey must have the relics of a saint. Finding no suitable local saint, Robert finds one in nearby Wales.Brother Cadfael has two novices assisting him in his herb and vegetable gardens: John (practical, down-to-earth, whose vocation Cadfael doubts) and the ambitious Columbanus (of whose illness Cadfael is sceptical, although he treats him with sedating poppy syrup). Columbanus and Brother Jerome, Robert's clerk, go to Saint Winifred's Well in North Wales for a cure. When they return Columbanus says Saint Winifred appeared to him, saying that her grave at Gwytherin was neglected; she wished to lie somewhere more accessible to pilgrims. Abbot Heribert approves the trip to Wales to retrieve Winifred's remains. Robert, Sub-Prior Richard, Jerome and Columbanus are joined by Cadfael (fluent in Welsh) and John (for menial work).The bishop of Bangor and Owain Gwynedd (prince of Gwynedd) consent. When the monks reach Gwytherin (on the Cledwen River) the local priest, Father Huw, objects to Winifred's remains being removed without approval by the free men of the parish. Rhisiart, the community's most influential landowner, opposes Winifred's removal. Robert tries to bribe him, and Rhisiart storms off. The assembly dissolves, agreeing with Rhisiart. Father Huw persuades Robert to ask Rhisiart for another meeting the next day, to which he agrees. While John helps the servants (and Jerome and Columbanus keep vigil at Winifred's chapel), Robert, Richard, Cadfael and Huw await Rhisiart; he does not appear. The landowner is found dead in the woods, with an arrow in his chest bearing the mark of Engelard (an Englishman in love with Rhisiart's daughter, Sioned). When Engelard appears, Robert insists he be taken into custody. Engelard flees, and Brother John impedes the only local man close enough to stop him. Robert orders John held for breaking the law of Gwynedd and his vow of obedience; this pleases John as he is held where his love, Annest, lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Storyteller_(Vargas_Llosa_novel)"title="The Storyteller (Vargas Llosa novel)">
The plot develops an extended argument of two sides of what to do with Peru's native Amazonian populations. One side argues that tribes should be left alone to live as they have for millennia, leaving them full access and use of their ancient lands. The other side posits that such ancient ways cannot survive the exploitation of economic interests. In order to save them, natives must be protected by modern intervention of missionaries and government agencies. Through the book, each character seeks ways to protect these groups. Odd chapters are narrated by Mario Vargas Llosa, both a character and the author of the text. These chapters are set in San Marcos University, the radio station where Mario is employed, and several pubs around the city. Even number chapters are narrated by Saúl Zaratas as the Storyteller for the Machiguenga and are devoted entirely to telling the history of the tribe and its methods of survival. Those chapters are set throughout the Amazon as the Storyteller travels from one group to another. The two characters meet only in the odd chapters from time to time, debating politics, university life, and occasionally the rights of the native tribes to either exist as they have or be saved by modernization.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Vacuum"title="High Vacuum">
The first crewed Moon ship, "Alpha", runs out of fuel just before landing in the Mare Imbrium and crashes, killing one of the four-person crew and marooning the rest. The novel follows the castaways as they struggle to survive and return to Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeliner"title="Timeliner">
"Timeliner" is a time travel story. A scientist working with "dimensional quadrature" is flung forward in time, to a period where his consciousness ousts that of another man. When that man dies, the protagonist leaps forward again, and so on. In each case, the personality he replaces belongs to a person who is close to a woman who resembles his wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_in_the_Family"title="Dead in the Family">
When the novel begins, Sookie Stackhouse is still recovering physically and emotionally from the torture she received at the hands of demented fairies Lochlan and Neave in the previous book ("Dead and Gone"). She has finally settled into a relationship with the Viking vampire Eric, and her errant brother Jason seems to have his life in order, too, with a solid new girlfriend, Michele. But all the other people in Sookie’s life—Eric himself, her former lover Bill, her friend and boss Sam—are having family problems. Eric’s maker, Appius Livius Ocella, shows up with Eric’s ‘brother’ in tow—he is Alexei Romanov, only son of the last Czar of Russia, who as an adolescent witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution, including the slaughter of his entire family. He developed emotional problems as a result. Appius has sought Eric out as a last resort, to see if Eric can help restore Alexei to sanity. Meanwhile, Bill is still suffering from the silver poisoning he got via the teeth of Neave when he rescued Sookie from her torturers. He is not getting better, and may only be able to be cured by the blood of a vampire made by Bill's maker, the dead Lorena, but Bill refuses to ask his sibling for help.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balladyna_(drama)"title="Balladyna (drama)">
Balladyna opens with a young prince Kirkor consulting with a Hermit on whom to marry. The Hermit reveals that he was formerly King Popiel III, who was deposed by his brother who also murdered his three children. However when exiled he was able to bring the true ancient crown of Poland with him. Kirkor swears to raise an army and restore the throne to him. The Hermit considers women untrustworthy and advises Kirkor to find a plain cottage and to marry a poor girl as he will be happier that way.Balladyna and Alina are sisters who live with their mother in a poor hut in the middle of a forest. Goplana – the nymph queen of Gopło Lake - is in love with Balladyna's beloved, Grabiec, and because of her jealousy she intervenes in peoples' lives and changes their destiny. The sisters’ hut is visited by the rich Kirkor, who was led there by Skierka, Goplana's servant. Goplana wanted Kirkor to fall in love with Balladyna so that Grabiec could be hers alone, but Skierka made a mistake and Kirkor fell in love with both sisters. He also believes that this proves the Hermit's advice was good to marry a poor girl.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_(novel)"title="Mystery (novel)">
In the 1950s, Tom Pasmore is a young boy who lives on Mill Walk, a Caribbean island mostly inhabited by wealthy American and German expatriates. He read a newspaper article about a woman named Jeanine Thielman, who was murdered and then dumped in a lake. A few years later, Tom explores a dilapidated neighborhood on the island called Calle Burleigh. Hearing the cries of an animal, he finds a teenaged boy named Jerry and his older sister Robyn. When Tom says that he wants to go home, Jerry attacks him. Tom escapes but is followed by two boys, Robbie and Nappy, who threaten him with knives. They chase Tom into the street, where he is hit by a car and severely injured. While he recuperates in the hospital, Tom is visited by Lamont von Heilitz, an elderly neighbor who has taken an odd interest in him. Lamont is rumored to have been a celebrated detective in the 1930s.By early 1962, Tom has become obsessed with recent homicides in Mill Walk and makes a scrapbook profiling each one. Tom sees Lamont at the scene of one such murder, that of Marita Hasselgard. Ignoring his father's warning to stay away from Lamont, Tom visits his residence the next day. The two bond over their passion for solving murders without the aid of police; Tom correctly deduces that Marita's brother, Friedrich, was responsible for her murder. Lamont shares with Tom a case he has been following: the murder of Jeanine Thielman. Lamont believes Thielman was murdered by her lover, Anton Goetz, when she refused to continue seeing him. Tom departs from Lamont's house, taking Lamont's journal with him. Through the journal, Tom finds out that Lamont has been following the careers of those involved with the Thielman case. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_in_the_Water_(Woods_novel)"title="Dead in the Water (Woods novel)">
On a short vacation to escape his now hectic life in New York City, Stone Barrington set his sight on a lovely and romantic getaway to the islands of St. Marks. His companion, Arrington Carter, all-round superstar was to join him the next day.Three events would ruin Stone's plans for a romantic boat cruise about the islands and leave him in the midst of a life or death trial. One was the New York weather, snowing in every airport available. Next was the saddening and fearsome ambition of his beau, Arrington Carter, high-profile host and interviewer, who decided to track down another must-have editorial. Last was the sweet and gorgeous All-American girl standing trial for murdering her husband, where if convicted meant death, by hanging.Racing to prove the young widow innocent of any wrongdoing pits Stone against a determined protector standing on the verge of becoming the next Prime Minister of St. Marks. With little time to work the case, leaving the young woman's head in a balance, Stone, once a police officer, now an up-and-coming lawyer, will do what he does best, defend his client with every skill he has to offer. Stone just hopes he didn't lose the new love of his life for his own fearsome and saddening ambition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Boy"title="The God Boy">
Jimmy Sullivan is an eleven-year-old boy who lives in the town of Raggleton, an everyday small town community in New Zealand. Jimmy is not like other boys his age. The home that he lives in is filled with constant arguing and bitterness between his parents. He tries to ignore these events by using special protection tricks to isolate himself from his own situation. On Tuesday afternoon he breaks down and turns violent - abusing the elderly, smashing windows and throwing rocks at Bloody Jack. Eventually his home environment changes when his mother kills his father. He is sent to a Roman Catholic boarding school and leads a very uncertain life, becoming disillusioned with God.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Patron_Saint_of_Butterflies"title="The Patron Saint of Butterflies">
Honey and Agnes are best friends growing up in Mount Blessing, a religious commune in Fairfield, Connecticut. Honey and Agnes could not be any more different, and the older they get the more they are growing apart. Honey was abandoned by her mother as a newborn, but she lived in the nursery with Agnes until she turned 7 years old; Honey lives with Winky and Agnes lives with her parents and her brother, Benny. Ever since Agnes got "The Saints' Way" ("The Saints' Way" is a book that everyone in Mount Blessing gets when they turn twelve; it is given by the leader Emmanuel), she has changed. Agnes now abides by all the rules in Mount Blessing, and she goes by whatever Emmanuel says. Honey on the other hand, never listens to Emmanuel or Veronica, never follows the rules and hates living at Mount Blessing. Whenever they, or anyone, do something wrong they are sent to the "regulation room". There they get whipped by Emmanuel and Veronica. Everything stays this way until Nana Pete, Agnes' grandmother, shows up unexpectedly and finds out the truth behind Mount Blessing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_Fearful_Symmetry"title="Her Fearful Symmetry">
Elspeth dies of leukemia. Her apartment, located beside Highgate cemetery in London, is left for the daughters of Edwina, her estranged twin sister. Elspeth's nieces, identical twins Julia and Valentina, do anything together, though Julia is the more dominant twin. Valentina has asthma and has a heart valve that has not been properly formed, which occasionally makes her ill. The sisters move to London and take up residence in Elspeth's flat. Robert, Elspeth's former lover, lives in the apartment below them. Robert is employed as a tour guide in the cemetery as a way of learning more for his thesis work on the cemetery. Valentina begins falling in love with Robert and he quickly reciprocates, primarily because of her resemblance to Elspeth.Martin, a man whose wife, Marijke, has left him because of his obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), lives in the apartment above. Julia befriends Martin and gives him Anafranil (a pill for OCD), pretending that it is a vitamin. Martin is aware that she is giving him the medication, but feigns ignorance.Unknown to either of the sisters for the first year they are in London, Elspeth is trapped inside the apartment as a ghost - invisible and completely mute. However, Valentina discovers her awareness of Elspeth's moods. One day, she sees Elspeth in the apartment. The twins find a stray kitten near the cemetery. After several failed attempts, they lure it into their apartment and begin taking care of the kitten. One day, while playing with the twins, the kitten abruptly drops dead. The twins realize that the kitten's soul had been caught on Elspeth's hand. Elspeth puts the kitten's soul back into its body and is able to bring it back to life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Land_of_Green_Plums"title="The Land of Green Plums">
The first character introduced to the reader is a girl named Lola, who shares a college dormitory room with five other girls, including the narrator. Lola records her experiences in a diary, relating her efforts to escape from the totalitarian world of school and society. She rides the buses at night and has brutish, anonymous sex with men returning home from factory work. She also has an affair with the gym teacher, and soon joins the Communist Party. This first part of the book ends when Lola is found dead, hanging in the closet; she has left her diary in the narrator's suitcase.Having supposedly committed suicide and thus betrayed her country and her party, Lola is publicly denounced in a school ceremony. Soon after, the narrator shares Lola's diary with three male friends, Edgar, Georg, and Kurt; Lola's life becomes an escape for them as they attend college and engage in mildly subversive activities—"harbouring unsuitable German books, humming scraps of banned songs, writing to one another in crude code, taking photographs of the blacked-out buses which carry prisoners between the prison and the construction sites." The four are from German-speaking communities; all receive mail from their mothers complaining about their various illnesses and how their children's subversiveness is causing them trouble; all have fathers who had been members of the Nazi SS in Romania during World War II. They hide the diary and other documents, including photographs and books, in the well of a deserted summerhouse in town. Very quickly it becomes clear that an officer of the Securitate, Captain Pjele, is interested in the four; he begins to subject them to regular interrogations. Their possessions are searched, their mail opened, and they are threatened by the captain and his dog.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eternity_Trap"title="The Eternity Trap">
## Part 1.Professor Rivers tells the story of Ashen Hill Manor, which is said to be haunted. She talks of a man named Lord Marchwood and how he employed Erasmus Darkening. Lord Marchwood thought that Erasmus could make gold out of base metals. His two children, Elizabeth and Joseph, spy on Erasmus. He spots them and makes them vanish. Professor Rivers is telling the story to Sarah Jane, Clyde and Rani. She and her assistant Toby are making a scientific investigation of the ghostly phenomena. Luke is at home as he has no interest in ghost-hunting. Sarah Jane splits up from the group and finds a book on the history of the manor. She turns round from the book case which she is reading from and unknown to her, the books begin moving. Clyde and Rani go outside and find a dry fountain. All of a sudden the fountain starts and some wet foot prints appear leading in the direction of a shed. Clyde and Rani hear a young girl crying, and enter the shed. The crying stops as Clyde pulls a sheet off a mirror. A strange man's face appears in the mirror. Clyde and Rani run back into the manor and find Sarah Jane. Meanwhile, in the control room the camera in the playroom cuts out. Professor Rivers goes to investigate. The baby monitor starts to play, then seconds later the professor vanishes. They all go to investigate and they find that all the toys have started to move on their own. On the mirror in the room a message appears saying "GET OUT". Clyde and Rani begin exploring and find a secret passageway; they go down and find Erasmus' lab. Meanwhile, Sarah Jane goes out onto a balcony. A creature in the bushes with red eyes appears and advances towards Sarah Jane. Lord Marchwood's ghost manifests and fights off the creature. Clyde and Rani find a computer, then when they turn around they see Erasmus Darkening.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa's_Revenge"title="Mona Lisa's Revenge">
## Part 1.Luke enters Clyde's painting for a competition and Clyde wins first prize. The prize is a trip to see the first showing of Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" in Britain for Clyde and his class. Luke does not tell Sarah Jane of the trip, since he was irritated that she criticized the untidiness of his room. While the class is at the International Gallery with its director, Mr Harding, the image of Mona Lisa comes to life, steps out of the painting and replaces herself with Mr Harding's assistant, Miss Trupp (who has feelings for Harding). She also is able to bring people and objects from other paintings to life and to transfer real people into paintings, which she does with the gallery staff and the police who responded to a call about the apparent theft. She also takes a Sontaran blaster gun that Clyde had unwisely included in his winning picture and commands Mr Harding to take her to find her "brother". Seeing the coverage of the supposed theft of the painting on television, Sarah Jane arrives at the gallery, encounters the Mona Lisa and insists she release those transferred into paintings. Instead, Sarah Jane herself is trapped in a painting.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gift_(The_Sarah_Jane_Adventures)"title="The Gift (The Sarah Jane Adventures)">
## Part 1.The story begins with Sarah Jane and her companions chasing an overweight boy. After chasing him into a warehouse, he is revealed to be a Slitheen working with another family member, in an attempt to use a matter compressor to compress Earth into a diamond, in order to make themselves rich. After Sarah Jane's sonic lipstick fails, she calls K9 who tries to destroy it. Annoyed, the Slitheen grab Rani and hold her hostage, threatening to kill her if K9 continues to destroy their equipment, and Sarah Jane complies. Two orange Raxacoricofallapatorians appear and teleport the Slitheen away, stating that they have been sent back to their ship for trial. They then introduce themselves as the Blathereen, a separate, and according to them, law-abiding family of Raxacoricofallapatorians on a mission to track down members of the Slitheen and sentence them to death.As a token of thanks, the Blathereen visit Sarah Jane in Rani's house (her parents are away at a headteacher's conference, with Rani staying over at Sarah Jane's house) for a meal of shepherd's pie, made by Clyde, which the Blathereen enjoy very much. After the meal, the Blathereen—Leef and Tree—give Sarah Jane a Raxacoricofallapatorian plant called Rakweed. They explain that the plant "can grow anywhere, even in the harshest conditions," adding that because the people of Earth would be suspicious if the plant came directly from the Blathereen, that they would like Sarah Jane to be their ambassador. Mr Smith analyses the plant and deems it not to be dangerous, but the following night it starts to mutate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_a_Week_to_Get_Real"title="What a Week to Get Real">
Jade is going to Paris with her grandmother. She meets a boy – Flynn Jackson – in the train to Brighton. They become friends. Flynn lives in Dunchester, so Jade can see him. They fall in love with each other quickly. Jade is trying to help Tansy with Andy, who doesn't talk to her. She sends text messages, which are supposed to be from Tansy.Cleo is still in love with Angus. But he only pretends to be interested with her. He shows his parents that he's normal by "going out" with Cleo. The girl sings with his and Kyle's band on the music festival. But they don't win the prize. Cleo breaks up with Angus, because she is upset of being not exactly his girlfriend. She could also see that, Angus is more interested in Kyle.Holly's parents want to sell their house. The buyers are Walker family – Angus and his parents. Unfortunately, before selling a house there is a fire in it that burns the whole house. Holly saved her nephew from the burning house, but she had to stay at the hospital, because she had burns on her legs. She still is afraid of the fire and sometimes she has panic attack.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_(novel)"title="New York (novel)">
The novel chronicles the birth and growth of New York City, from the arrival of the first Dutch and other European colonists in the 17th century to the summer of 2009. Rutherford builds his novel on the histories of fictional families who live there. In "New York", these families represent the successive waves of immigrants who have made the city multicultural.The early Dutch founders of New Amsterdam are typified by the Van Dyck family, who prosper in trade with the Native Americans; both the local Algonquian tribes, especially the Lenape, and the Iroquoian Mohawk who lived farther up the Hudson Valley and primarily along the Mohawk Valley. The Van Dycks soon unite with the English Thomas Master family (he also has a natural Native American daughter, whom he brings with him from Puritan New England). Van Dyck-Master descendants continue to live in New York through the entire saga, providing one of the unifying narrative strands. The character Quash is an enslaved African, who was brought forcefully to New Amsterdam and is held by Thomas Master; his descendants become part of the New York cultural mix.As the novel progresses, more families are introduced: the Irish O'Donnels, German Kellers, Italian Carusos, German-Jewish Adlers, and Puerto Rican Campos. Through their intertwining stories, Rutherfurd explores the various cultural traditions of the national groups and intercultural relations, which play out against the development of the city.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Brief_History_of_Anxiety_(Yours_&amp;_Mine)"title="A Brief History of Anxiety (Yours &amp; Mine)">
The book consists of nine chapters and a section of endnotes. All of the chapters combine narrative, personal reflection, historiography, and social commentary. Pearson's style is evident in the beginning to the eighth chapter, "2001: A Drugs Odyssey":In this book, Pearson frequently challenges generally accepted layman views about mental health and mental health treatment. "The idea that people need antidepressants because they have a 'chemical imbalance' in their brains," she says at one point, "has evolved into a sort of urban legend". She states that "[t]he trouble with this soothing explanation...is that serotonin deficiency is an unsupportable claim". Pearson also challenges conventional medical wisdom: at one point, she states that, although some psychoactive medications target dopamine in the brain, over 85 percent of the body's dopamine is found outside the brain, and the medications' effect on those other tissues is almost completely unresearched.The Notes section contains 172 references ranging from scholarly articles to the poetry of William James and the philosophical writings of Søren Kierkegaard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Book_Is_Not_Good_for_You"title="This Book Is Not Good for You">
The novel starts out with an African girl named Simone, who tastes a piece of chocolate for the Midnight Sun (as the book centers around the sense of taste, like the first novel, which centers around scent, and the second, which centers around the sense of sound). It is noted that she is a Supertaster, and is able to distinguish between almost any food, no matter how similar they are. Immediately after tasting the chocolate, she blacks out.Meanwhile, Max-Ernest, Yo-Yoji and Cass, three members of the Terces Society and the three protagonists of the series, are searching for the box in which the letter was found when she was a baby, as she earlier found out she was adopted and wants to find out more about who she is. While they search, they find a box filled with magazines that was dropped off at the front door of Cass's grandfathers' old, abandoned fire station, where the grandfathers live. Max-Ernest points out a magazine with a picture of the Skelton Sisters on the cover, the teen pop stars who were known by the two collaborators as being members of the Midnight Sun. Knowing this, the kids become suspicious of what they are doing, and discover that they are with Ms. Mauvais, the French woman who is one of the most evil leaders of the Midnight Sun, and that they have established headquarters in the country Côte d'Ivoire in Africa, where they take care of orphans and work on a chocolate plantation. Cass and Max-Ernest head to the old circus, where the Terces Society (which consists of Pietro Bergamo, the retired magician whose brother, Luciano, otherwise known as Dr. L, was captured by Ms. Mauvais and is now one of the leaders of the Midnight Sun; Mr. Wallace, an accountant who works as the society's archivist; Lily Wei, a Chinese violinist who escaped the Midnight Sun and is now the head of physical defense and martial arts, and Owen, an actor who appears as many different people in the series and acts as somewhat like a spy for the society) to tell Pietro and the others where the Midnight Sun is hiding. Mr. Wallace tells them that he thinks the legendary Tuning Fork is involved in the spa's plan with chocolate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Hand_of_Dante"title="In the Hand of Dante">
The book interweaves two separate stories, one set in the 14th century in Italy and Sicily and featuring Dante Alighieri, and another set in the autumn of 2001 and featuring a fictionalized version of Nick Tosches as the protagonist. The historical and modern stories alternate as Dante tries to finish writing his magnum opus and goes on a journey for mystical knowledge in Sicily. Meanwhile, Tosches, as something of a Dante expert, is called in by black market traders to attest to the authenticity of a manuscript of "The Divine Comedy" supposedly written by Dante himself.Included in the modern sections of the book are musings by Tosches on the state of modern publishing, the futility of excessively flowery poetry and prose, references to his own previous books (including a lengthy passage directly out of the introduction to "The Nick Tosches Reader"), the September 11th attacks, and the Rolling Stones.Louie Brunellesches, a small-time New York gangster who also appears in Tosches' novel "Cut Numbers", returns in a smaller role, making this something of a sequel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Omega"title="Point Omega">
According to the Scribner 2010 catalog made available on October 12, 2009, Point Omega concerns the following:In the middle of a desert "somewhere south of nowhere," to a forlorn house made of metal and clapboard, a secret war advisor has gone in search of space and time. Richard Elster, seventy-three, was a scholar - an outsider - when he was called to a meeting with government war planners. This was prompted by an article he wrote explicating and parsing the word "rendition". They asked Elster to conceptualize their efforts - to form an intellectual framework for their troop deployments, counterinsurgency, orders for rendition. For two years he read their classified documents and attended secret meetings. He was to map the reality these men were trying to create "Bulk and swagger," he called it. He was to conceptualize the war as a haiku. "I wanted a war in three lines..."At the end of his service, Elster retreats to the desert, where he is joined by a filmmaker intent on documenting his experience. Jim Finley wants to make a one-take film, Elster its single character - "Just a man against a wall."The two men sit on the deck, drinking and talking. Finley makes the case for his film. Weeks go by. And then Elster's daughter Jessie visits - an "otherworldly" woman from New York - who dramatically alters the dynamic of the story. Jessie is strange and detached but Elster adores her. Elster explains how she is of high intelligence and remarks that she can determine what people are saying in advance of hearing the words by reading lips. Jim is sexually drawn to her but nothing happens except his watching her as a voyeur would. After the most pointed of such behavior Jessie disappears without a trace. There are attempts to find her, and references to a boyfriend or acquaintance possibly named Dennis. Jessie's mother had sent her to the desert to get away from this man. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destry_Rides_Again_(novel)"title="Destry Rides Again (novel)">
Harrison Destry, a man who thinks he is better than anyone else and is constantly "proving" it by his skill with a gun, and his ability to win fistfights he provokes, has just lost his horse and his saddle in a card game. (A cowboy who loses his saddle loses the respect of other cowboys.) He has few friends and many enemies (most of whom he created) in his home town of Wham, Texas. But the teenage Charlotte Dangerfield, the daughter of a wealthy rancher, adores him.Only one of the men Destry has beaten in a fight, Chester Bent, seems to bear him no ill-will; Bent stakes the penniless Destry $100. But Bent has just robbed the Express, and (when the wind blows Destry's jacket open) slips cash from the robbery into Destry's pocket. Knowing Destry's character, Bent expects he will waste the money on liquor and gambling, rather than replacing his horse and saddle. This is indeed what happens, and Destry becomes the prime suspect, the planted cash being all but proof of his guilt.Failing to comprehend how much trouble he is in, Destry neglects his defense and is stunned when convicted by a jury stacked with his enemies, who ignore the fact that the robber's description bears no relation whatever to Destry. He is sentenced to 10 years and swears to wreak vengeance on the jurors. Only Charlotte believes Destry is not guilty.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_the_Dark"title="Touch the Dark">
Cassandra Palmer can see the future and communicate with spirits-talents that make her attractive to the dead and the undead. The ghosts of the dead aren't usually dangerous; they just like to talk...a lot. The undead are another matter.Like any sensible girl, Cassie tries to avoid vampires. But when the bloodsucking Mafioso she escaped three years ago finds Cassie again with vengeance on his mind, she's forced to turn to the vampire Senate for protection. The undead senators won't help her for nothing, and Cassie finds herself working with one of their most powerful members, a dangerously seductive master vampire-and the price he demands may be more than Cassie is willing to pay...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams_of_My_Russian_Summers"title="Dreams of My Russian Summers">
The book opens with the narrator leafing through photographs of old relatives in his grandmother's house in Saranza, a fictional Russian town on the border of the steppe. His grandmother, Charlotte Lemonnier, comes in and starts talking about the photographs and her memories to the boy and his sister. The novel is characterized by stories like this: a collection of Charlotte's memories and the narrator's memories, intertwining so that the text moves seamlessly through their lives in a dreamlike fashion. The movement between Charlotte's French past and the Soviet present causes conflict in the boy's identity as the novel explores both sides of his heritage.Charlotte begins the novel by transporting her grandchildren to the French 'Atlantis' during the flooding of Paris in 1910. So begins the narrator's desire to learn all about this mysterious French past. He describes the town of Saranza in-between these stories. It is a quiet town bordering the Russian steppe that is lined with old "izbas", traditional Russian houses made of logs. The town is a strange mixture of these old relics and the new regime's style that discards any excess or superfluous design, showcasing the theme of the clash between past and present.At the return of autumn, the boy narrator and his sister return to their hometown, an unnamed industrial, Stalinist-style city on the banks of the Volga. He quickly falls back into the pace of Russian life with its schooling and paramilitary exercises. He becomes confused by the conflicting images with which he has been presented: his grandmother's romanticized French image of Tsar Nicholas II versus "Nicholas the Bloody" as taught at his Soviet school.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Darling,_My_Hamburger"title="My Darling, My Hamburger">
As part one begins, the reader meets the story's protagonist, Maggie Tobin, who is walking through the school auditorium with her best friend, Liz Carstensen. The two settle down into their seats while Pierre Jefferson, the grade president, begins to speak. During the assembly, Maggie points out Sean Collins, the young gentleman whom Liz is currently seeing. Next to Sean is a rather gawky-looking guy by the name of Dennis Holowitz. Maggie thinks Dennis looks dorky but eventually agrees to go on a date with him, Liz, and Sean. The date is a disaster, as Maggie hates both the movie and her companion. Despite this, Maggie agrees to go on another date with Dennis. While on this double date, Liz and Sean travel down to the ocean to spend some intimate time together. Just as everything is becoming “heated up,” Liz backs away. It becomes apparent that the two constantly fight over sexual matters. Back in the car, Dennis moves closer and closer to Maggie, eventually beginning to make out with her. In order to prevent the situation from heating up any further, a panicked Maggie recommends that the two go and get a hamburger.Not too long after their second date, Maggie is compelled to break off a date with Dennis because Liz and Sean are in a fight. That night, Maggie and Liz set out for the Red Pub Inn. On the way, they are given a lift by Rod Gittens, an older boy with dashingly good looks but a very poor reputation. While at the Red Pub Inn, Liz writes Sean a letter on the back of a place setting. She declares her love for him and speaks of how she needs him in her life. The letter is dropped off in Sean's mailbox and Liz waits for a response. When Liz does not hear back from Sean, she decides to go to the winter dance with Rod Gittens. While at the dance, it becomes apparent that Liz is using Rod to try to get back at Sean for not responding to her letter. By the end of the night, Rod has Liz in a room alone, ready to rape her. The quick work of Maggie saves Liz from catastrophe as Sean is alerted about Rod and rushes over to the dance. Liz learns that Sean never received her letter, and the two leave the dance together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_Me,_You're_Stepping_on_My_Eyeball!"title="Pardon Me, You're Stepping on My Eyeball!">
The novel follows two alienated teenagers in Staten Island, 15-year-old Louis "Marsh" Mellow and Edna Shinglebox, as they cope with their family issues. Edna's mother is agonized over her daughter's not having a sweetheart while Marsh reveals his father is committed to a psychiatric hospital in Los Angeles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Souls_(Koontz_novel)"title="Lost Souls (Koontz novel)">
The war against humanity has begun. Only now things will be different. Victor Leben, once Frankenstein, has not only seen the future—he’s ready to populate it. Using stem cells, “organic” silicon circuitry, and nanotechnology, he will engender a race of superhumans—the perfect melding of flesh and machine. With a powerful, enigmatic backer eager to see his dream come to fruition and a secret location where the enemies of progress can’t find him, Victor is certain that this time, nothing and no one can stop him.It is up to five people to prove him wrong. In their hands rests nothing less than the survival of humanity itself. They are drawn together in different ways, by omens sinister and wondrous, to the same shattering conclusion: Two years after they saw him die, the man they knew as Victor Helios lives on. Detectives Carson O’Connor and Michael Maddison; Victor’s engineered wife, Erika 5, and her companion Jocko; and the original Victor’s first creation, the tormented Deucalion, have all arrived at a small Montana town where their old alliance will be renewed—and tested—by forces from within and without, and where the dangers they face will eclipse any they have yet encountered. Yet in the midst of their peril, love will blossom, and joy, and they will discover sources of strength and perseverance they could not have imagined.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aladore"title="Aladore">
The story takes the form of a quest exploring in allegorical fashion the qualities of youth, duty, self and heritage. Ywain, a knight bored with his administrative duties, abandons his estate to his younger brother and goes on a pilgrimage to seek his heart's desire. Following a will-o'-the-wisp resembling a child, he is led to a hermit dwelling in the wilderness, under whose instruction he lives for a time. Afterwards his quest takes him to the city of Paladore (also the subject of a separate poem by Newbolt) and the lady Aithne, half-fae enchantress and daughter to Sir Ogier of Kerioc and the Sidhe-descended Lady Ailinn of Ireland, whom he woos and encounters on various occasions.In the course of his adventures he intervenes in the strife of the two warring Companies of the Tower and of the Eagle, afterward feasting with both in Paladore; he undertakes the Three Adventures, of the Chess, the Castle of Maidens, and the Howling Beast; visits the City of the Saints and the Lost Lands of the South; sojourns with Fauns; and has a vision of Paladore’s counterpart, the city of Aladore, which he afterwards seeks.After revisiting the hermit and Paladore, he achieves his objective, and he and Aithne are wed there. In a subsequent return to Paladore Ywain finds he has wearied of it, is mishandled by the Great Ones of the city, and is “excommunicate after the Custom of Paladore.” Wondering at the likeness and contrast of the two cities, he and Aithne wonder which is the more enduring, and test the question by building two sand castles on the shore. Ywain’s, built with his hands as a stand-in for Paladore, is swept away by the tide, while Aithne’s, created from a song in representation of Aladore, is preserved. They then return to the mortal city, and appear to perish in a final battle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_and_Entering_(Keating_novel)"title="Breaking and Entering (Keating novel)">
Inspector Ghote has been assigned to investigate a string of cat-burglaries. The burglar, nicknamed Yeshwant after a Hindu lizard god by the newspapers, demonstrates remarkable climbing skills. However, the case Ghote really wants to investigate is the murder of Anil Ajmani. Ghote is unexpectedly rejoined by his old friend Axel Svensson, formally of UNESCO, who aids and hampers Ghote's investigation. Only when Ghote's investigation reaches its climax does he realise that perhaps he has been on the right case all along.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Blows_Top"title="K Blows Top">
The book covers Nikita Khrushchev's visit to the United States, which took him to New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Iowa, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., and included visits to 20th Century Fox, the Mark Hopkins Hotel, an Iowa farm, a Pittsburgh steel mill, and Camp David. Highlights included meeting Shirley MacLaine and Frank Sinatra on the set of "Can-Can", visiting a Quality Foods supermarket in San Francisco, and meeting Harry Bridges, fiery labor leader, movie star Marilyn Monroe, and hostess Perle Mesta, among many other Americans, famous and not-so-famous.The title comes from a New York Times headline about Khrushchev's reaction when he was refused admission to Disneyland.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pages_Stained_with_Blood"title="Pages Stained with Blood">
The story follows a young Assamese woman who teaches at the University of Delhi and is an author. She is busy writing a book on Delhi and regularly jots down anything that crosses her mind. The Operation Blue Star at the Golden Temple in Amritsar brings sudden twist to the novel and the protagonist plunges headlong into the crisis for most of the people she is close to are Sikhs. At last, her book is drenched in Santokh Singh's blood and she loses all her recorded material.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_Chinnamasta"title="The Man from Chinnamasta">
The novel follows the relationship of Dorothy Brown, a British woman in Assam, and her relationship with a tantric of the Kamakhya Temple in Assam. Ratnadhar and Bidhibala's -the child widow's- story runs parallel to this narrative. Ratnadhar organizes a signature campaign against the practice and faces many troubles in the process.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Power"title="Executive Power">
CIA field agent Mitch Rapp's cover has been blown following his last assignment, preventing Saddam Hussein from obtaining nuclear weapons. Rapp receives public acknowledgment by the president in response to the latest Congressional leak to the media. Though the praise is of the highest quality, the President might as well have placed a bulls-eye on Rapp's chest and that of his loved ones by singling him out as the most important person in the fight against terrorism. The spotlight makes the former covert operator an ideal international target for eradication by terrorists as the symbol he has become.Rapp moves from CIA operative duties to that of a counter-terrorism bureaucrat. As special advisor on counter-terrorism to CIA director Dr. Irene Kennedy, Rapp uncomfortably sits in an office. However, everything changes when radical Islamic terrorists ambush Navy SEALs on a top-secret rescue mission in the Philippines. The leak had to be in either the State Department or the Philippine diplomatic corps, but nobody knows for sure. However, worse yet is that someone is trying to cause a Jihad on a scale never before seen and that unknown invisible individual is close to achieving the goal with only a too visible Rapp in the way.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperFreakonomics"title="SuperFreakonomics">
The explanatory note states that the theme of the book explores the concept that we all work for a particular reward. The introduction states we should look at problems economically. The examples given include the preference for sons in India and the hardships Indian women face, as well as the horse manure issue at the turn of the 20th century.The first chapter explores prostitution and pimps in South Chicago, one high class escort, and real estate brokers. The pimps and brokers are compared based on the idea that they are helping to sell one's services to the larger market. Inequalities in pay grades for men and women are also covered in the chapter.The second chapter is about patterns and details. Patterns in the ages of soccer players, health issues of children in the womb during Ramadan, and the upbringings of terrorists are observed. Next, the book discusses the skills of hospital doctors and how Azyxxi was created, and draws parallels to how terrorists in the UK were tracked down by banks.Altruism is discussed in the third chapter, and uses examples of the murder of Kitty Genovese, crime rates as affected by television, and economic experimental games such as prisoner's dilemma, ultimatum, and the work of John A. List.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivia_(Rushton_novel)"title="Olivia (Rushton novel)">
Olivia's parents are separated. Her father has a mistress, Rosalie, with whom he now lives. Olivia's mother is upset because of it, but she does not want her husband to come back. At school, Olivia has a problem, because she was chosen to organise a school theatre. She does not like the idea and she tells the headmaster that she will not face the challenge. Luke - Poppy's boyfriend - does the same thing. Once, Hayley, Livi's friend, invites her to the "Stomping Ground" night club. Before this, she goes to a dinner with her father and Rosalie. Livi changes her opinion about Rosalie, because she realises that she can have problems, too (Rosalie's mother makes problems, because she has Alzheimer's disease).Once, while coming back from school, Olivia meets Ryan - a handsome boy, who lives with his mother on a boat in summer. She meets him at "Stomping Ground", where they dance together. Livi starts to fall in love with him. But she cannot invite him to come to her house, because her mother gets a new person to live with them - Leonora. Olivia does not like her, but a few weeks later, Ryan tells her that Leo is his aunt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_50th_Law"title="The 50th Law">
Each of the 10 chapters in the book explains a factor of fearlessness and begins by telling how 50 Cent learned this Fearless Philosophy in Southside Queens. "The 50th Law" illustrates the laws of the book by supplementing anecdotes from 50 Cent's life with historical examples from Malcolm X, Miles Davis, Sun Tzu, François de La Rochefoucauld, Machiavelli, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Thucydides, Dostoyevsky, Charlie Parker, and the Baron de Montesquieu.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pigman's_Legacy"title="The Pigman's Legacy">
Just like the first book, the story is divided into chapters narrated by either John or Lorraine.Taking place four months after "The Pigman", this book involves the main characters, John and Lorraine once again. The beginning deals with the lives of the two after the Pigman's death and how it has affected them.John and Lorraine are walking by the former residence of Mr. Pignati and discover an elderly gentleman apparently on the run from the IRS. He rejects their advances and chases them away. Feeling that the Pigman has given them a chance to make things right once and for all, they befriend the senior, named Gus.Gus tells the pair that he was a good friend of Colonel Parker Glenville, who was knighted by the King of Sweden for the subway system he designed for Stockholm. They lived in a townhouse in Stuyvesant. The Colonel was later run over by the train, according to Gus, and was apparently evicted. Gus asks the duo to help him retrieve a vital trunk he has left at the town-house. John and Lorraine later find a photo of Gus, who is revealed to be the bankrupt Colonel, Gus being the name of his German Shepherd who finds them at the townhouse and joins the trio. The Colonel later gets abdominal pains on the way back home and is rushed to the hospital. There, the duo learn that the Colonel has diverticulosis, which was aggravated by the fudge John and Lorraine gave him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Anna"title="From Anna">
In the mid 1930s in Germany, things are changing, people are moving away or disappearing. The new headmaster at the Solden's school forbids the singing of a song titled "My thoughts are free" (Die Gedanken sind frei) during an assembly, instead making the school sing the national anthem. Anna's father, disturbed by the changes in his country, promises Anna that she will be able to grow up in a place where her thoughts are free. When his brother Karl in Canada dies, leaving him his shop and the home he had purchased there, Ernst sees an opportunity to move to Canada. He announces to his family that they will be moving to Canada. The rest of the family comes on board slowly, but Anna, terrified, resists. In Germany she is nearly failing school, how will she manage in a new country and a new language?When they arrive in Toronto, they are greeted by a friend of their uncle's, Dr. Schumacher, who helps them move in, and gives the children check-ups before they start school. Anna is terrified to learn she will be starting school soon, but during her examination, a startling discovery is made; Anna can barely see. A prescription for glasses helps immensely; however, even with the glasses, she has less than normal vision, and is put in a special multi-grade class for students with similar vision. Her teacher here is Miss Williams. Seeing the potential in Anna she sets out to slowly coach the girl out of her shell. She gives Anna "A Child's Garden of Verses", and Anna discovers a love of reading. Her English improves with leaps and bounds, and soon she speaks only English at school and with the friends she has found there. However, she continues to present her old prickly side to her family, remembering all the years when they didn't understand her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Help"title="The Help">
"The Help" is set in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi, and told primarily from the first-person perspectives of three women: Aibileen Clark, Minny Jackson, and Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan. Aibileen is a maid who takes care of children and cleans. Her own 24-year-old son, Treelore, died from an accident on his job. In the story, she is tending the Leefolt household and caring for their toddler, Mae Mobley. Minny is Aibileen's friend who frequently tells her employers what she thinks of them, resulting in her having been fired from nineteen jobs. Minny's most recent employer was Mrs. Walters, mother of Hilly Holbrook.Skeeter is the daughter of a wealthy white family who owns Longleaf, a cotton farm and formerly a plantation, outside Jackson. Many of the field hands and household help are African Americans. Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from the University of Mississippi and wants to become a writer. Skeeter's mother wants her to get married and thinks her degree is just a pretty piece of paper. Skeeter is curious about the disappearance of Constantine, her maid who brought her up and cared for her. Constantine had written to Skeeter while she was away from home in college saying what a great surprise she had awaiting her when she came home. Skeeter's mother tells her that Constantine quit and went to live with relatives in Chicago. Skeeter does not believe that Constantine would leave her like this; she knows something is wrong and believes that information will eventually come out. Everyone Skeeter asks about the unexpected disappearance of Constantine pretends it never happened and avoids giving her any real answers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shrinking_Man"title="The Shrinking Man">
While on holiday, Scott Carey is exposed to a cloud of radioactive spray shortly after he accidentally ingests insecticide. The radioactivity acts as a catalyst for the bug spray, causing his body to shrink at a rate of approximately per day. A few weeks later, Carey can no longer deny the truth: not only is he losing weight, he is also shorter than he was and deduces, to his dismay, that his body will continue to shrink.The abnormal size decrease of his body initially brings teases and taunting from local youths, then causes friction in his marriage and family life, because he loses the respect his family has for him because of his diminishing physical stature. Ultimately, as the shrinking continues, it begins to threaten Carey's life as well; at tall, he is driven outdoors, where he is attacked by a sparrow in his garden; the conflict drives him through a window into the cellar of his house.He has to survive on tiny scraps of food and bits of water. At one point he has to try and jump to reach a hanging spar of wood away—a leap whose distance seems over away to him. A cat goes after him when he is about tall. He is forced to engage in a victorious battle with a black widow spider that towers over him, which Carey ultimately kills.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Infernal_City"title="The Infernal City">
Four decades after the Oblivion Crisis, an unknown mass appeared on the coast of Black Marsh during a powerful storm. Meanwhile, a Dunmer assassin named Sul awakens from a nightmare in which he and Colin, a young Inspector for the Penitus Oculatus, inspected the area where Attrebus was attacked. He discovered a decapitated and charred body with Attrebus' Imperial signet ring, but thought it was too convenient to be authentic. Meanwhile, Attrebus awoke tied up and riding a horse.During the attack, Annaïg lost the locket that connected her to Coo, but accidentally acquired Qijne's invisible, possibly biological, blade, which wrapped itself around her forearm and extended as she wished.In an outdoor area of Umbriel that Glim discovered called the Fringe Gyre, he found trees that appeared to be related to Hist, since he could hear them murmuring.They traveled to Water's Edge for supplies, and while there Attrebus tried to garner support from an old friend, Captain Florius Larsus. Florius agreed to join Attrebus, but while waiting for him in a tavern Attrebus was attacked by a group of people hired by the same that hired Radhasa and her allies to kill him. He found that one of the men that attacked him worked for Florius and ran back to find him sitting at a table, a knife wound in the base of his skull.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Too_Deep_(novel)"title="In Too Deep (novel)">
Amy and Dan have to decide how much they're willing to risk, and what they are. Ian and Natalie Kabra's mother, Isabel, joins the hunt, as she could not stand the mistakes her children have made. The Kabras send the Cahills an 'invitation' to a meeting at a dock in Australia. Amy can't decide which Lucian to trust – the cloying Isabel Kabra, or the serious, but deadly, Irina Spasky. Irina stops following Isabel and helps Amy with the clue hunt. She turned away from Isabel because she lost her boy, Nikolai, when she was on a mission. Amy's life is threatened by Isabel who holds her out to shark infested waters, but she escapes thanks to Hamilton Holt, who helped her because of their previous alliance in "The Black Circle". Amy and Dan are briefly distanced from each other when Irina tells Amy and Dan about their parents being murdered (Amy had been too filled with grief to tell Dan that their parents were murdered).Amy and Dan continue their search to find out that Bob Troppo was actually Ekaterina agent Robert Cahill Henderson, who came devastatingly close to finding all 39 clues in his Indonesian lab. His work was destroyed by the Krakatoa eruption and he fled to Australia. Amy and Dan find a note written by him, a strange poem seemingly pointing to the clue. The Cahills discover the clue – water – with the help of Alistair Oh. However, Isabel Kabra sets the house they are staying in on fire, and Irina Spasky chooses to save Amy, Dan, and Alistair at the price of her own life. The book ends with Amy and Dan thinking that they now are doing the clue hunt for their parents and for Irina.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_at_Sealey_Head"title="The Bell at Sealey Head">
The small ocean town of Sealey Head has long been haunted by a phantom bell that tolls as evening falls. The sound is so common that many of the town's inhabitants do not even notice it, let alone questions its existence. Ridley Dow, a scholar from the city, comes to investigate the mystery, and sets up residence at the old inn owned by a young man named Judd and his ailing father. To aid Ridley, Judd enlists the help of his friend and love-interest Gwyneth, a young woman who writes her own stories to explain the bell.On the other side of town is the ancient manor Aislinn House, whose owner, Lady Eglantine, lies dying. Emma, a servant in the house, is able to open doors that lead not into another room, but into another world. On the other side of Aislinn House's doors is castle where the princess Ysabo moves through her daily rituals, tasks that Ysabo hates and does not understand, but cannot question. While Emma and Ysabo are able to speak to one another, neither has ever tried to cross into the other's realm.When Lady Eglantine's heir Miranda Beryl comes to Aislinn House, Sealey Head's secrets begin to reveal themselves, sometimes with dangerous consequences. Miranda brings to Sealey Head an entourage of friends from the city, as well as a strange assistant. As the town gets pulled deeper into the strange magic that Ridley, Judd, Gwyneth, and Emma uncover, Ridley breaches the border between Aislinn House and Ysabo's world. It is only when the bell's location and owner are discovered that Aislinn House and all of Sealey Head are able to return to safety.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_and_the_Sword_of_Mercy"title="Peter and the Sword of Mercy">
The story is set in 1902, 23 years after the events of Peter and the Secret of Rundoon. Molly Aster, now Molly Darling, is married to George Darling and a mother of three: Wendy, John, and Michael. Her mother Louise has been deceased for a while and her father Leonard is very ill. One evening, she is visited by one of the original Lost Boys: James, who now works for Scotland Yard. He informs Molly about his suspicions with Baron von Schatten, an advisor to Prince Albert Edward. James thinks von Schatten is being controlled by Lord Ombra, but Molly brushes it off as foolishness, saying that Ombra was destroyed at Rundoon. Along with this, the Starcatchers started disbanding since the incident. James tells her he will come back the next night, giving her some time to think the whole thing over, as he has nowhere else to turn.Meanwhile, on Mollusk Island, four men known as McPherson, O'Neal, Kelly and DeWulf wash up on shore in a boat. They claim to have been lost at sea for a few weeks, but Chief Fighting Prawn becomes suspicious when he says that they look like they were out at sea for a few "days". He and Peter keep a close eye on the four men, especially O'Neal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_from_Hell"title="Notes from Hell">
In 1999 seventeen Bulgarian nurses were kidnapped from a hospital in Benghazi, Libya where they worked and were confined in a police station in the capital Tripoli. During the next eight and a half years five of the nurses, including Cherveniashka, were held in different prisons accused of deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV. They survived torture, physical and mental abuse, and several death sentences, before their liberation in 2007. Cherveniashka told her story to her co-author one year after her return to Bulgaria.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_Day_(novel)"title="Memorial Day (novel)">
Intelligence gathering has indicated unusual activity in financial markets, and Rapp, back in the field after a long stint on desk duty for insubordination, unearths a bomb plot during a daring commando raid on an al-Qaeda stronghold in Afghanistan. A decision is made for the President and his cabinet to leave Washington, D.C. in early morning hours based on the bomb threat. However a United States strike force manages to intercept and disarm the nuclear weapon moments after it arrives by freighter in Charleston, South Carolina. Everyone, including series stalwart President Robert Hayes, congratulates themselves on a job well done, but Rapp is not convinced; he believes al-Qaeda leader Mustafa al-Yamani has smuggled a second nuclear weapon into the country and plans to detonate it in Washington, D.C., during Memorial Day celebrations. Rapp, a ruthless terrorist pursuer by temperament and training, turns it up several notches this time around, following al-Yamani's scent with feverish abandon. When a missing Pakistani nuclear scientist is found to have passed through LAX on his way to Atlanta, and a truck driver turns up dead due to radiation sickness, the chase is on again. Ultimately the terrorists approach Washington D.C. by water, are spotted from the air, and killed by Rapp. The second bomb, however, has been activated and is in its countdown, unable to be deactivated. After an assessment of options, Rapp transports the bomb to a secure underground facility where it explodes with minimal human or environmental affect.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finding_H.F."title="Finding H.F.">
Abandoned by her teenage mother as a baby, 16-year-old Heavenly Faith (H.F.) Simms has been raised by her loving but deeply conservative Baptist grandmother ('Memaw'). A tomboy and a closeted lesbian, she is an outcast at school in the small rural mining town of Morgan, in southeastern Kentucky. Her best and only friend is Bo, an effeminate gay boy who is the punching bag for the high school football team, as well as for his violent alcoholic father. H.F.'s first lesbian experience comes when the beautiful new girl at school, Wendy Cook, invites her to a sleepover, where they get drunk on wine and make love. The following morning though, Wendy coldly rejects H.F.s advances, breaking her heart. The same day, H.F. discovers a shocking secret about her mother. Unable to cope with the pain in their lives, H.F. and Bo decide to embark on a road trip during spring break across the South, from Kentucky to Florida.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_Card"title="The Library Card">
The book "The Library Card" is about four kids who each have some problem in life that the library card solves. During the course of the four short stories, the library card changes each of their lives for the better.The main character of the first section, Mongoose, struggles with peer pressure from his friend Weasel. Weasel influences Mongoose to steal and to skip school. After coming across the library card, Mongoose overcomes this challenge. The second character, Brenda, is addicted to watching television. She can't watch television for a whole week of school for a school project. During this time, she encounters the library card, which shows her the benefits of reading many kinds of different books. The third character, Sonseray, is a child who lives in a car with his uncle, a migrant worker. Life is hard for him without any stable friends, but one day when he discovers the library card and takes out a book, he finds refuge from loneliness. The final character, April Mendez, has just moved for her father's job on a mushroom farm. She boards a "moving library," (book mobile) which becomes subject to an attempted hijacking. The hijacker (Nanette) and April become friends because of their mutual interest in the library card.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Star_(novel)"title="The Blue Star (novel)">
The novel is set in a parallel world in which the existence of psychic powers has permitted the development of witchcraft into a science; in contrast, the physical sciences have languished, resulting in a modern culture reminiscent of our eighteenth century. Witchcraft is hereditary but the ability to use it can be held by only one member of a family line at a time, being passed from mother to daughter at the daughter's loss of virginity. The daughter's lover then gains possession of her magical talisman, a jewel known as a "blue star", which enables him to read the mind of anyone he looks in the eye. The catch is that he retains access to this power only so long as he keeps faith with his witch lover.The empire in which the action is set is comparable to the Austrian one in our own history. The government bans witchcraft, which merely serves to drive its practitioners underground, where they can fall prey to the use and abuse of unscrupulous powerful or ambitious individuals. The protagonists are Lalette Asterhax, a hereditary witch, and Rodvard Bergelin, an ordinary government clerk who has been recruited into the radical conspiracy of the Sons of the New Day. Rodvard, though attracted to the daughter of a baron, is commanded by his superiors to seduce Lalette instead to gain the use of her blue star in the furtherance of their revolutionary aims. The witch is no more truly enamored of him than he is of her, but both fall in with the scheme for their own reasons, unaware of how much they are simply pawns in the larger scheme of things.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_(novel)"title="Barbary (novel)">
Barbary, a twelve-year-old girl, is an orphan who has lived in several group homes and foster families since the death of her mother. The novel opens with her waiting in a spaceport for a seat on a shuttle to Earth orbit, which will be the first step on a journey to the research space station "Einstein," where she is to live with her new foster father, Yoshi, a poet and college friend of her mother's. Unfortunately, she has two difficulties: the shuttle is filled with dignitaries from Earth travelling to the station, so it's unlikely she will get a seat, and she is trying to smuggle her cat, Mickey, into space with her (pets are forbidden on the station).Barbary gets a seat on the shuttle with the help of the station's new administrator, a famous African-American woman astronaut, who tells her the reason so many VIPs are on the shuttle: an alien spacecraft has entered the solar system. It is not responding to communications or making any transmissions, nor is it making any powered maneuvers, but its course will bring it close to "Einstein."Once she reaches orbit, Barbary spends several days on an orbital transfer ship before finally arriving at "Einstein" while managing to keep Mickey hidden. Once there, she meets Yoshi; Heather, her new sister, who is the first child born in space; and Thea, Yoshi's lover, an absent-minded astronomer. She hides Mickey in her and Heather's shared room, but has to reveal him to her fairly quickly. Heather agrees to help her keep Mickey hidden and fed while showing her around her new home and taking her on a trip outside the station in a vehicle called a "sled."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lad,_A_Dog"title="Lad, A Dog">
A Rough Collie named Lad lives at the Place with his Master, Mistress, and his mate, Lady. When Knave, a younger collie, is boarded at the Place, Lady begins ignoring Lad in favor of the newcomer. During a romp in the forest with Knave, Lady is caught in a leghold trap. Knave leaves her there and returns home, but Lad finds her. Several days later, the still limping Lady accidentally gets locked in the library and is subsequently blamed for the destruction of the Master's beloved mounted bald eagle. The Master starts to whip her, but Lad intervenes and takes the whipping himself, knowing Knave was the culprit. Later, he attacks Knave for getting Lady in trouble, sending him fleeing from the Place. As the Master apologizes to Lad, Lady lovingly licks his wounds from the fight.On a cold October day, the Mistress falls into the lake and develops pneumonia. As the house must be kept quiet during her recovery, the dogs are sent to a boarding kennel, except Lad who is ordered to keep quiet. One night a thief breaks into the house, hoping to take advantage of the absence of the dogs. After he climbs through a window, Lad silently attacks him. During the ensuing fight Lad is cut with a knife before sending the man crashing back through the window. The noise wakes the humans of the house and the thief is arrested. After Lad's wound is treated, he enjoys praise from the Mistress, then travels some distance from home to enjoy a lengthy session of barking.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virginians"title="The Virginians">
The novel tells the story of Henry Esmond's twin grandsons, Virginia-born George and Henry Warrington. Henry's romantic entanglement with an older woman leads to his volunteering in the British army and fighting under the command of General Wolfe at the 1759 capture of Quebec. On the outbreak of the American War of Independence he takes the revolutionary side. George, who also becomes a British officer, eventually resigns his commission rather than continuing in arms against his brother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_Potty_Training"title="Infant Potty Training">
The key is to create cue associations that can be used as a means of communication. This is done by learning and responding to body language and vocalizations, as well as to elimination timing and patterns. As a child matures, he starts to intentionally signal about his toilet needs. As with other means of toilet training, there is no fixed length or guaranteed outcome. The four main steps for beginners are:Parents watch and take note of the child's:Parents anticipate when the child needs to go, then at that moment, give a cue signal (a sound, hand signal, word or phrase). The child will associate these with potty time.After establishing a comfortable position—whether it be in-arms for an infant or on a potty or toilet for a toddler — the same position and location are used for a while, and the child associates these with potty time.As the child matures, natural bodily and vocal communication expands to include intentional communication in various forms such as the use of sign language or other hand signals, vocalizations, words, and phrases. Parents continue to communicate through manual and audible signals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Leper_of_Saint_Giles"title="The Leper of Saint Giles">
The story takes place over four days in October 1139. Shrewsbury Abbey is scheduled to host the wedding of Baron Huon de Domville and Lady Iveta de Massard. Brother Cadfael, while restocking medicines at Saint Giles, the abbey's lazar house, sees both bride and bridegroom arrive: Domville is sixty years old, fat, and cruel, as Cadfael sees when the Baron lashes with his riding crop at the lepers begging him for alms. Iveta is barely eighteen, being chaperoned by her legal guardians, her uncle Godfrid Picard and his wife, Agnes.Iveta is secretly in love with Joscelin Lucy, one of Domville's three squires. Cadfael interrupts an assignation between them in Cadfael's workshop, and tries to cover for them when Agnes bursts in to collect Iveta. Joscelin tells Cadfael that Iveta is being forced to marry against her will; she is the heiress to an enormous honour, and Domville and the Picards have bargained between themselves to divide it after she is married off. Agnes complains to Domville, who dismisses Joscelin from his service, accusing him of theft. Joscelin denies it, but his belongings are searched and the item found (though Cadfael suspects it was planted). Joscelin leaves with the sheriff, but at the bridge he breaks free of his guards and escapes into the River Severn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Handcuffs"title="Chinese Handcuffs">
Dillon is struggling over the suicide of his younger brother Preston. He begins to run marathons to help cope with this loss. He remains friends with his brother's girlfriend, Stacy, and befriends Jennifer, the star of the high school's basketball team.It is later revealed that the reason behind Preston's suicide is because he raped a young girl at a bar, and because he discovered Stacy was pregnant with his child. Dillon was witness to his suicide, and feels very responsible for his death.It is also revealed that Jennifer has been sexually abused by her biological father and her step dad. She is afraid to tell that her step dad is abusing her because of threats he has made about the family dog and her sister. She eventually tells Dillon, who promises he will not tell anyone. She later tries to commit suicide because she can no longer stay in the family, and Dillon saves her and gets help for her. Dillon is able to get photographic evidence of the abuse, and uses this to force Jennifer's step dad to leave the state.Because Dillon helped save Jennifer, he is able to move on from Preston's death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadline_(Crutcher_novel)"title="Deadline (Crutcher novel)">
Ben Wolf is an 18-year-old high school student from Trout, Idaho. He lives with his father, his mother, who is mentally ill, and his younger brother, Cody, who is a superb football player and attends the same high school as him.During school one day, Doctor Wagner, the town doctor, diagnoses Ben with a rare, terminal blood disease. Doctor Wagner gives him only about a year to live and recommends that Ben seek treatment in a more urban part of the state. However, rather than following his doctor's advice, Ben decides he must pack “a lifetime of living” into one year and begins making radical changes for his senior year. Despite Doctor Wagner's disapproval, Ben chooses not to tell his parents about his disease. The only people who know about his disease are his doctor and his new therapist, Marla, a young psychologist from Boise.As sports season begins, Ben decides to go out for football rather than doing cross country, which he has done consistently during his past high school years. At only 123 pounds, Ben is one of the smallest players on the team. The coach of the football team, who Ben maintains a friendly, almost familial relationship with, initially doubts his abilities but agrees to put him on the team nevertheless. In addition to trying out for football, Ben stirs controversy and debate every day in his government class to fight against his conservative, narrow-minded teacher. He also begins visiting the local drunk, Rudy McCoy, to help him clean up his act. Most importantly to Ben, however, he begins a relationship with his long-time crush, Dallas Suzuki.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Will_Survive_(book)"title="I Will Survive (book)">
As the eldest son from a lower middle class household, Sunil Robert began his life in Hyderabad spending his childhood without any worries. His family, though poor, was well respected in the community. Robert was popular among his friends. Life came to a rapid halt after his father lost his job and could not find another one. Robert, still very young, was forced to change with circumstances, coming to terms with his new responsibilities and learning to live with the stigma of a life on borrowed money, food, clothes and books.As he struggled through his school and college days, he grew bitter and resentful towards his father, his extended family and the community which he lived in. Robert found himself getting involved with the local mob. However, before things got worse, Robert decided to take control of his life. With the help and support of his family and the local community, he got his life back on track. He got a job and decided never to venture back to those dark days again.Through the rest of the memoir, Robert summarises his rise as a corporate communicator at the technology giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and how he eventually dealt with his harsh feelings. He learned to forgive, raised his family responsibly and finally achieved what he has made of himself today.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Web_of_Air"title="A Web of Air">
The clever young engineer, Fever Crumb, is swept up in a race to build a flying machine. Her mysterious companion is a boy who talks to Angels. Powerful enemies will kill to possess their new technology-or to destroy it."A Web of Air" is the sequel to "Fever Crumb", the story set centuries before "Mortal Engines" that tells how great cities begin to build giant engines to make their first predatory journeys across the wastelands. It is set in Mayda, a city established in an atomic bomb crater off of mainland Portugal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celandine_(novel)"title="Celandine (novel)">
The book starts out with Celandine running away from the boarding school she was sent to by her parents to ‘pound all of the nonsense out of her’. It is her third escape attempt, after being sent back twice by her parents. She boards a train and meets a crippled soldier who appears to be no older than her brother Freddie, who died as a volunteer soldier. She aids him in lighting his cigarette. She also meets a nurse who upon Celandine's departure from their company exclaims “Do you know that "extraordinary looking girl?"”She returns to her home farm but does not enter not wishing for an angry confrontation with her father. She climbs the hill and hoots; a signal apparently. A small child Celandine calls Fin appears out of nowhere and jumps her; smothering her with love and affection, begging for cake. This is where the back-story begins.Celandine was 10 when she first saw the “little people”. She was resting under a tree where Fin finds her, soon followed by his Father/Guardian. Upon her return to her normal surroundings no one except Freddie believes her when she tells them what she saw.[The above comprises the first 1½ chapters.]
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dog_Saw"title="What the Dog Saw">
"What the Dog Saw" is a compilation of 19 articles by Malcolm Gladwell that were originally published in "The New Yorker" which are categorized into three parts. The first part, "Obsessives, Pioneers, and other varieties of Minor Genius", describes people who are very good at what they do, but are not necessarily well-known. Part two, "Theories, Predictions, and Diagnoses", describes the problems of prediction. This section covers problems such as intelligence failure, and the fall of Enron. The third section, "Personality, Character, and Intelligence", discusses a wide variety of psychological and sociological topics ranging from the difference between early and late bloomers to criminal profiling.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fine_and_Private_Place"title="A Fine and Private Place">
The book takes its title from a verse from Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress": "The grave's a fine and private place,/But none, I think, do there embrace." The setting, accordingly, is the fictional Yorkchester Cemetery, where one Jonathan Rebeck, a homeless and bankrupt pharmacist who has dropped out of society, has been living, illegally and unobtrusively, for nearly two decades. He is maintained by a raven who, like the legendary ravens who fed Elijah in the wilderness, supplies him with food in the form of sandwiches stolen from nearby businesses.The protagonist exhibits the peculiar ability to converse with both the raven and the shades of the dead who haunt the cemetery. Beagle portrays ghosts as being bound to the vicinity of their burial, with their minds and memories slowly fading away as their mortal forms return to the dust. As the plot proceeds, Rebeck befriends two recently arrived spirits, those of teacher Michael Morgan, who died either from poisoning by his wife or suicide (he cannot remember which), and of bookshop clerk Laura Durand, who was killed by a truck. The two ghosts fall in love, and each pledge themselves to each other "for as long as I can remember love."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_World_to_Win_(Conroy_novel)"title="A World to Win (Conroy novel)">
Part One: Green ValleyIn the beginning of the story, we are introduced to Martha Darrell of Green Valley, who is a single woman who is “past her prime” for dating. She is awoken one night by her doorbell and finds Terry Hurley and his sick child Leo. Martha lets the two stay until the child is better but the relationship blossoms and soon Robert is born. Later in his childhood, Martha starts to become more religious as her and Terry grow apart. Leo starts seeing a girl named Anna and Robert accidentally spills the details to a bully named Dogface. Dogface tells his father, Preacher Epperson, who gets Martha involved, and she comes down on Leo pretty hard. He leaves and Anna shortly follows.Part Two: The Green DragonIn anticipation of college Robert goes to visit Boone University that his grandfather was a professor at and his mother was a student. On a train to campus, he meets Alan Vass and Sol Abraham, two returning college students. When Robert goes to the University himself, he adopts many of the same attitudes Alan does. While at school, Robert meets Nell, his first and only love who is also a writer. She follows him after he leaves school and they start living together, he working on his novel and she encouraging him and working at an office responsible for busting up protests. It is at this point that Robert is called back to Green Valley because his mother is ill. After her death, Terry opens up to Robert more and asks that they stay in better touch. Leo comes back into Robert's life and Leo gets Robert a job at his mill. Robert really does not like the work but he struggles through. Later, the workers of that mill go on strike and come after Leo because they know he is the one that told management about their union plans. After not being pummeled like expected, Leo promises not to go into the mill again.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someday_This_Pain_Will_Be_Useful_to_You"title="Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You">
James Sveck, 18, is an isolated young adult caught in the summer before he is to begin college at Brown University. The only person in his life with whom he is able to successfully relate is his grandmother; otherwise, James prefers solitude. Cameron's use of first person narration allows for the reader to create an intimate relationship with James as he works through his life and through the therapy sessions to which his parents have made him go. The reader learns about James’ present as he tells the events of his days, but the reader learns about his past when James reflects on his therapy sessions.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well_of_the_Unicorn"title="The Well of the Unicorn">
The land of Dalarna is under the heel of the Vulkings, whose heavy taxation is forcing the Dalecarl yeomen out of their holdings. The protagonist, Airar Alvarson, is one of the dispossessed. On the advice of his mentor, the magician Meliboë, he joins the underground Iron Ring resistance, only to face defeat and failure. Captured and enslaved by the free fishers on the Gentebbi Islands, he goes through a series of adventures in which he gradually rises from a homeless fugitive to a great war leader.During his quest Alvarson gives much thought to the issues of honor, war, justice and government. He finds admirable qualities even in his enemies, and problematic ones in some of his allies. Always questioning where the right lies and what principles should guide his course, he feels his way to his goals as best he can. He finds magic a poor tool for defeating enemies or winning battles, as the small enchantments of which he is capable make him ill and gain him little. The great Empire across the sea, to which all parties pay at least a nominal fealty, seems to offer at least a symbolic solution; it guards the legendary Well of the Unicorn, which brings peace to those who drink from it. But its panacea is deceptive; those who do drink tend to find the peace so gained offset by new difficulties. The long, hard road of forging armies, building alliances, and waging war, without any mystical short cuts, proves the only effectual path.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_of_a_Nation_(novel)"title="The Fall of a Nation (novel)">
A European army headed by Germany invades America and executes children and war veterans. However, America is saved by a pro-war Congressman who raises an army to defeat the invaders with the support of a suffragette.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love,_Lies_and_Lizzie"title="Love, Lies and Lizzie">
The book, which was published in 2009, is based on Jane Austen's 1813 novel "Pride and Prejudice". It tells the story of the main character, Lizzie Bennet, dumping her boyfriend—Toby. Lizzie's sister, Jane, was surprised by it because Toby is crazy about Lizzie.It also talks about the mother, Mrs Bennet, telling her five daughters that the family is moving to the new house at Priory Park. At first, the sisters did not feel good about being there but they soon got involved in parties and James Darcy's life.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Break_Point"title="Break Point">
Emily Driver is the best young tennis player in East Sussex. After she wins Under 18s East Sussex Tennis Championship, a lot of journalists want to make an interview with her. One of them is Hugo Fraser - a trainee from "Evening Argus" magazine. When he interviews her, Emily's mother, Ruth, comes to changing room and tells her that Felix Fordyce - the best tennis coach in Great Britain wants to see her. Emily gets a scholarship of Felix's Tennis Academy. In the evening, she goes to Viki's party with her friend, Charlie. Emily meets Hugo there. She tells him that she doesn't want to be a tennis star, but she also tells him that she doesn't want this conversation to appear in his magazine. Then they jump off the wall and Viki takes photo of it.Tomorrow, Emily goes to her grandmother's place. When they talk, she tells her mother that she doesn't want to play tennis anymore, because she wants to pass A-levels, study at university and work for UNICEF. Emily's mother doesn't want her daughter to waste her chance, but Lally (that's how Emily calls her grandmother) tells her to end her education and tells a story, which happened, when she was 16.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraken_(novel)"title="Kraken (novel)">
An inexplicable event has occurred at the Natural History Museum, London—a forty-foot specimen of giant squid in formalin has disappeared overnight. Additionally, a murder victim is found folded into a glass bottle. Various groups are interested in getting the squid back, including a naive staff member, a secret squad of the London Metropolitan Police, assorted religious cults, and various supernatural and mostly dead criminal elements. The wondrous squid represents deity to the Church of Kraken Almighty. Did they liberate their god, or could it have been stolen by a rival cult? The only thing that all agree upon is that the fate of this embalmed kraken is intimately tied to the End of the World.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_in_Three_Hundred"title="One in Three Hundred">
Set in the near future when a scientific principle has been discovered allowing exceptionally accurate predictions of solar flares and the occurrence of the Sun increasing its solar output. Applying this principle, worldwide consensus has determined which day, hour, and minute the Sun will brighten so much as to boil away the Earth's seas. Realizing that the heightened insolation will destroy life as we know it, the world's nations debate what to do when the Sun "goes off." Since the Earth's rotation continues at 360 degrees in 24 hours, it will take only one day to cause all of the Earth's oceans to boil away. Terrific hurricanes and tidal waves will also occur, causing all buildings to be destroyed. If there are any survivors, they will be in hardened bunkers deep underground, and they will only be able to last as long as their food lasts.The unavoidability of the impending doom has caused some technologically advanced countries to look for sanctuary on another planet, such as Mars.This is all scheduled to happen in a few years, and the exact minute and hour of the Sun's increase in radiance does not give the human race much time to devise a way of navigating space to an orbit as far away as Mars.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_My_Mother_Never_Taught_Me"title="Songs My Mother Never Taught Me">
The novel, described by the publisher as, “a remarkable thriller that takes us through the streets of Istanbul,” tells the story the privileged young Arda, who reflects the life of his murdered father, after the death of his overbearing mother, and ‘your humble servant’ Bedirhan, who has decided to pack in his ten-year career as an assassin, as their two lives become intrinsically bound, while, Selçuk Altun, a former family friend, provides Arda with clues to track down his father's killer.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many_and_Many_a_Year_Ago"title="Many and Many a Year Ago">
The novel tells the story of Kemal, a convalescing Turkish fighter pilot, who, after his friend mysteriously disappears, is left with a generous allowance and the use of his large house in Istanbul’s Taksim district. Kemal subsequently embarks on a mysterious mission following in the fictitious footsteps of American writer Edgar Allan Poe from Istanbul to Buenos Aires, and eventually to the Edgar Allan Poe museum in Boston where he decides to enter a writing competition with a novel called "Many and Many a Year Ago".This novel is, according to the author, “a literary thriller like my other novels,” but, “can also be regarded an ‘experimental mystery’ book,” as it, “also includes eight short stories that overlap with the novel's plot,” “told with an outlook similar to that of Scheherazade, the narrator of "One Thousand and One Nights".” “It is part literature and part travel book, a little bit of Paul Auster and Bruce Chatwin,” he states, “what I tried to do was imagine what the life of a post-modern, well-off Poe would have been like.” “Now, I can only wonder what Americans, should they get the chance to read it, will think of my Turkish interpretation of this American master.”
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burned_(Cast_novel)"title="Burned (Cast novel)">
## Isle of Sgiach.Stark, Darius and Aphrodite follow the clues in Kramisha's prophetic poems and take Zoey's body to the Isle of Sgiach to find a way of getting Zoey back. They gain entrance because of Stark's being the blood relative of Seoras, the queen's Guardian (the "bridge of blood"). Together with Sgiach they decipher the rest of the poem and realize that Stark must become a Shaman to step into the Otherworld.Stark sacrifices on the altar of Seol ne Gigh and through pain he enters a trance where he kills the evil side of himself to become a Shaman. After the fight, the Black Bull leads him to the Otherworld.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Awakening_(Armstrong_novel)"title="The Awakening (Armstrong novel)">
The Awakening takes place directly after the events in "The Summoning". Chloe has been recaptured by The Edison Group, a team of supernatural scientists responsible for manipulating her DNA, therefore enhancing her necromantic abilities. While there, she discovers that she, and other supernaturals are experimental subjects who were genetically modified at birth.Chloe and Victoria Enright (Tori, a witch) lead the Edison Group to a factory where they were supposed to meet Derek and Simon. Chloe and Tori escape with help from Liz after struggling with Tori's mother, Diane (also a witch), but not before Diane hits Chloe's aunt Lauren with a seemingly fatal spell. The two girls run and hide. Chloe reads a letter her Aunt Lauren gave her which explains that she only ever wanted to help young supernaturals but it wasn't until her own niece was in danger that she realized how dangerous the Edison Group was. The letter also reveals that Chloes mom had a brother, who died (possibly through suicide) due to a mishap with his powers.The next day, they meet up with Derek and Simon at the factory. The four of them decide to find Simon and Derek's father (Kit Bae) friend Andrew Carson, who will surely be able to give them a place to stay. He lives in New York, so they decide to take a bus and work from there. On the bus to New York City, Chloe is woken by Derek who tells her that he feels another change coming on. She offers to go with him and asks Tori to tell Simon that if they don't make it back to the bus, they will meet up in New York City. They get off the bus and find some woods near a service station, where Derek prepares for his change. Just like before, it doesn't work. He is exhausted afterwards, so Chloe tells him to get some sleep and they will get on another bus in the morning. After he falls asleep Chloe witnesses the murder of a young girl in the same patch of woods. After realising she cannot interact with it, and that it repeats over and over, she realises that it is a memory from the real murder than occurred there before. She does not sleep that night, for fear of the girl's body still being there in the woods.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reckoning_(Armstrong_novel)"title="The Reckoning (Armstrong novel)">
Following on from the events in "The Awakening", the story follows Chloe, Derek, Simon and Tori as they live in the Safe House, formally owned by an ex-employee of the Edison Group, with Simon and Derek's father's friend Andrew. Amongst other visiting supernaturals, the four find themselves racing to try to persuade the renegade group of supernaturals to save Chloe's aunt, who may possibly be dead, and Rae, a former member of Lyle house."The Reckoning" is the final book in the Darkest Powers trilogy. Chloe, Derek, Simon and Tori have made it to safety from the Edison group or so they think. After being on the run and having to rely on themselves in life-threatening scenarios, our supernatural gang is back under the ruling of adults. Adjusting back to the way of a childhood seems to be easier said than done. Chloe and her group of souped up supernatural buddies are still finding their way as their extraordinary powers keep on developing and surpassing all the adult supernaturals around them. With so much power at their hands, this seems to scare even the best of people. Not before long does safety fly out the window and let in a whole new hot mess of problems. Chloe, Derek, Simon and Tori find themselves in all kinds of mishaps that seem be too much to blame on just pure bad luck. This leads them to think there's an Edison Group spy amongst them just waiting to help bring them back to their crazy scientist lab to poke and prod at them, and maybe even worse, to kill them.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_of_Kings"title="The Way of Kings">
The story rotates between the points of view of Kaladin, Shallan Davar, Szeth-son-son-Vallano, Dalinar Kholin, Adolin Kholin, and several other minor characters, who lead seemingly unconnected lives. Szeth, a Shin man cast out by his people and condemned to obey his constantly changing masters, is sent to assassinate the king of one of the world's most powerful nations, Alethkar. As the story progresses, he continuously changes hands, doing his best to hide the fact that he possesses an Honorblade, a mythical blade used by the Heralds that can cut through any material. He also possesses access to powers that are no longer available to normal humans (“Surgebinding”), once possessed by the Knights Radiant and thought lost, making him incredibly difficult to defeat in battle.When Szeth was sent to kill the Alethi King Gavilar, the Parshendi, a race similar to the docile slaves of other nations, claimed responsibility for the assassination. Gavilar's son, Elhokar, then goes to war with the Parshendi. The story shifts to the viewpoint of Highprince Dalinar Kholin, the brother of the murdered king. Before he died, his brother directed Dalinar to an ancient tome called "The Way of Kings", which leads Dalinar to start questioning the warlike and competitive Alethkar way of life. He also begins to experience visions in which he sees the ancient Knights Radiant. For Dalinar, these visions not only cast doubt on the mistaken history of the Radiants, they also begin to reveal the truth about the Voidbringers and the current state of the world. All of these events make Dalinar reluctant to fight in battle. Dalinar's conviction is questioned by those closest to him, casting heavy doubt on his sanity and bringing into question his claim to leadership. In the political unrest of the age, perceived weakness is cause for others to attempt to eliminate him.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Kiss"title="Shadow Kiss">
Rose, in shock over Mason's death, prepares with the rest of the novices for the Qualifying Exam, in which the novices protect the Moroi students from "attacks" by "Strigoi" (their Dhampir teachers). Rose is positive that she will be paired with Lissa, but instead is paired with Christian Ozera, while Eddie Castile (Mason's best friend) is paired with Lissa. Rose complains to her teachers, but ultimately resigns herself to guarding Christian. During the first attack on Christian, Rose sees Mason's ghost and freezes - and is accused of being a sore loser by her teachers. In a sudden twist, Christian is the only person who truly believes that Rose didn't screw up on purpose.Meanwhile, Rose overhears that Victor Dashkov's trial is coming soon - and that she and Lissa aren't going to be called to testify. She begs Dimitri to find a way to get them into the trial, and he promises to see what he can do. Adrian and Lissa are growing closer (in a teacher-student sense) while practicing their Spirit use, making Christian jealous. After Rose settles a fight between Lissa and Christian, she begins to sense changes in herself - mainly feelings of intense anger (even more than is usual). Christian is also approached by Jesse Zeklos to join a secret "club" he and Ralf have started, though Christian turns them down. Rose becomes suspicious, and tries to learn more about this club, which she later learns is called "Mână".
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash_Road"title="Ash Road">
Three fifteen-year-old boys are for the first time allowed to go on a holiday together without adult supervision. But an accident with a faulty heater causes the surrounding area to catch alight and a bushfire ensues.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Misery_of_Boots"title="This Misery of Boots">
## Chapter 1: The World as Boots and Superstructure.Wells's point of departure is a reminiscence of a conversation with "a realistic novelist . . . a man from whom hope had departed." An encounter with a limping tramp spurs a discussion of the 10–20% of the British population that suffers from "this misery of the boot." They classify the various sources of discomfort (bad material, bad fit, bad condition, various sorts of chafe, the wear of the sole, splitting and leaks, etc.) and agree that most boots are a constant source of “stress, giving pain and discomfort, causing trouble, causing anxiety.” But Wells's friend finds the subject too depressing to continue: “It does not do to think about boots, he exclaims.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epitaphs_for_the_Living"title="Epitaphs for the Living">
Each page of the book can be viewed as an independent illness narrative. Howard, in letting his subjects speak for themselves, transcribes their stories in an intensely personal way. The photographs depict patients in their own surroundings, each one a visual narrative of the sick person's daily life. They use their own faces and bodies to convey the turmoil that lies within. Using photography as its principle medium, the book attempts to tell the story of AIDS from the patients' points of view. The introduction, by Lonnie D. Kliever, points out that many of the personal messages written by the portrait subjects indicate where they are on the journey toward accepting their mortality. Many other messages highlight illness as the main focus rather than impending death. A consensus among the patients is that dying from AIDS is bad, but living with AIDS is worse. Whether they last a few words or a long letter, each message represents that patient's personal story.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gekashitsu"title="Gekashitsu">
The story is set during the Meiji period. Countess Kibune is about to have surgery, but she refuses to receive anesthesia because she has secrets to conceal.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu's_Hanging"title="Blu's Hanging">
"Blu's Hanging" is a novel which introduces the very distressed life of the Ogata family. After suffering through the death of their mother, Eleanor, Ivah, Blu, and Maisie struggle to deal with life and the issues that ensue as a result of their loss. Their father, Poppy, struggles to parent them, barely making ends meet and not knowing how to care for his children after losing his wife. Ivah is left to fulfill the maternal role to her two younger siblings and is held to unrealistic expectations by her father.Even though Eleanor has died, her presence among the family remains. This has both positive and negative effects on the family. The Ogata's struggle to move on, specifically Poppy, who cannot come to grips with her death. He constantly speaks of Eleanor, with frequent references to "Moon River". He becomes hardened and cold to his children as he struggles to grieve. The children are also deeply affected by Eleanor's seemingly constant presence within the family. As they still look to her for guidance and support in dealing with their issues, they are able to rely on her when in pain yet battle with being able to move on.Because of the fractured state their family is in, their wounded unit is easily torn apart by outer societal influences. Due to the lack of parenting, each child struggles to cope in unique ways. They are treated harshly by Poppy and are neglected of any true care or concern. As he is depressed himself, he turns to drugs bringing the family to a more desperate state, economically and emotionally. Certain events begin to unfold and proper judgment on behalf of the children is not used. They find themselves teetering with very dangerous situations to which Eleanor would've never approved of. As a result, Uncle Paulo, a neighbor of the family, rapes Blu, weakening the already fragile state of the Ogatas.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Viper's_Nest"title="The Viper's Nest">
The book begins the morning after the fire that killed Irina Spasky, who was an ex-KGB and Lucian spy. The two kids are shaken by what had happened, not believing that Irina was on their side, after attempting to kill them earlier in the series. They realize that Isabel has reported them to the police, and they make a quick getaway using Irina's boat. Dan finds a notebook in Irina's bag and in it they find the phrase : "I'm with you and you're with me and so we are all together". Using their decoding abilities, Dan and Amy figure out that the words are actually a song, which points them to Pretoria, South Africa. They are found by the police and Alistair is captured. There, he finds out that the person who framed them is actually Bae Oh. He escapes by faking death by heart failure. Amy, Dan and Nellie safely board a plane to South Africa.There, they are given a postcard suggesting a connection with Shaka Zulu. As they unravel the history of Shaka, they find out that he was a member of the Tomas branch, and was connected to Winston Churchill. After infiltrating a Tomas stronghold, and steal the Clue, they find that it is diamonds. They are captured by the Kabras while leaving South Africa. Isabel Kabra offers Dan and Amy to join their family. When they decline, Isabel orders them to be tied in chairs, and chopped to pieces by a spinning propeller.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_(Huggins_novel)"title="Hunter (Huggins novel)">
Nathaniel Hunter, the world's expert tracker, is called forward, along with his wolf companion Ghost, to find a child lost in a snow storm. Hunter manages to find the child, despite the kid's random wandering. Deep in the Arctic Circle, a facility is attacked by a hulking creature. Colonel Maddox, Major Westcott, and the mysterious Dixon, consult with Dr. Tipler to identify the footprints and carnage left behind by the beast. Dr. Tipler deduces the creature kills similar to a grizzly but the footprints do not match that of a bear and recommends seeking the help of Hunter.The trio seek Hunter's help and he too is unable to identify the species. Colonel Maddox asks Hunter to lead a kill team to track and kill the beast. Hunter is initially hesitant but accepts the job. Hunter meets the kill team led by Commander Takakura. Against Hunter's wishes, Dr. Tipler also joins the team as an observer. Bobbi Jo, the team's sniper, is assigned to lead the hunt alongside Hunter, whom which she bonds with over the course of the journey.In Washington, the United States Marshals Service assigns Chaney the task to investigate the ravaged facilities in the Arctic Circle. Chaney consults with his former mentor Brick about the assignment, both feeling uneasy how things don't add up. Back at Dr. Tipler's institute, his assistants Gina and Rebecca examine a cast made from the creature's footprints. They recover a tendril from the plaster and Rebecca attempts to have the CIA's physicist Dr. Hamilton examine it.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_World"title="Fire World">
## Part One.It opens on the planet Co:pern:ica with Counsellor Strømberg (an auma counselor) talking to professor Haran Merriman and his wife Eliza, and then their son David walks in. They talk about dreams that David has been having as Strømberg and Harlan watch a video they had recorded while he was sleeping. On Co:pern:ica, they have commingled with Fain to make themselves higher beings, although there is a power called The Higher which governs those on Co:pern:ica.The dream is very strange and David has been visited by Firebirds (one of only the two creatures that live on Co:pern:ica) and they are seen blowing their special fire over him. It is later shown that a temporal rift had opened up and the firebirds came to close it up. Although Bernard Brotherton believes that David imagineered the firebirds, they come to the conclusion that someone, somewhere on another universe had been calling out to David.Eliza and Harlan travel back to their pod where they decide to commingle their fain and produce another child, a daughter for when David comes back. To be able to have a child on Co:pern:ica they must be assessed by an agent of the higher, one of the Aunts. They request the Aunt they had for David but she is otherwise engaged and is given Aunt Gwyneth. Whilst they are being assessed Harlan insults Gwyneth and she denies them to have a child but says that Eliza could become an Aunt. Eliza reluctantly agrees and the next day she is taken to the Dead Lands and begins to learn more about the world they live on. Gwyneth also states that Eliza spent her childhood with her and that she was brought back into the system at the age of five.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bishop's_Man"title="The Bishop's Man">
The story follows the protagonist Duncan MacAskill, a priest and the dean of a Catholic university in Nova Scotia. In 1994, his bishop transfer MacAskill to the parish of Creignish, Inverness County, Nova Scotia, and warns him that there are ongoing investigations and he wants MacAskill out of the way before people find him.MacAskill grew up near Creignish, and begins to slowly adjust to life there where many people seem familiar to him. He befriends Danny MacKay, the son of an acquaintance of his, Danny Ban as well as Danny's maternal aunt Stella. Young Danny is a troubled young man who seems to have a complicated relationship with the church. The feelings between MacAskill and Stella and Danny's erratic behaviour towards the church cause MacAskill to reflect back on his career. In the 70s he witnessed Father Roddie MacVicar, a close friend of the bishop's, molesting a young boy and when he mentioned it to the bishop he was sent to Honduras where he fell in love with a local nurse, Jacinta. Upon his return MacAskill began to be used to cover for priests who had behaved improperly, whether they had impregnated their housekeepers or fallen in love with women to priests who had molested young boys. Part of MacAskill's job in these situations was to assuage angry parents, to tell them it was no use contacting the police, and that the church would punish the rapist, all the while knowing that they would simply be moved to a different parish instead.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/206_Bones"title="206 Bones">
The book opens with Brennan imprisoned in an enclosed space, unable to remember where she is and how she got there. The plot is interspersed with Brennan's account of how she escapes, culminating in the final dénouement.The rest of the story is told in flashback. When Brennan has to recover the remains of a murdered elderly woman from a shallow grave in the midst of a freezing Quebec winter, she thinks she has the full set of 206 bones, but when she returns to her lab to analyze the remains, she discovers that certain crucial finger bones (that could confirm the identity of the victim) are not present.Brennan soon discovers that an accusation of incompetence has been made against her: an anonymous phone call to the father of a murder victim alleges that Brennan neglected to observe trauma resulting from a bullet wound in the bones of an aging Chicago heiress that were found in the Quebec countryside some months previously. Brennan and her on-again/off-again lover Detective Andrew Ryan set out to Chicago to attempt to clear her name, where, much to Brennan's annoyance, Ryan bonds with her estranged husband's Latvian family after his flight back to Montreal is delayed by the weather.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Divide_(novel)"title="The Divide (novel)">
The point of divergence occurs in 1940 when Nazi Germany forces France and the United Kingdom to surrender and takes control over their former empires. After Germany soon overruns all of the Soviet Union in 1941, both it and Japan attack and invade the United States later that year. President Burton K. Wheeler (who defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940) surrenders the United States to the Axis after a devastating bombardment of missiles from occupied Canada. The surrender takes place on April 20, 1946, Adolf Hitler's fifty seventh birthday. President Wheeler, Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall, and other government officials are executed by garrote in a meat packing plant outside of Washington, D.C. on July 24 of the same year (by using the method that was used for the 20 July plot conspirators in our timeline) after being found guilty of war crimes. In the former US government's place is a puppet government akin to what happened in our timeline to the Czech part of Czechoslovakia during the German occupation.Thirty years later in 1976, Hideki Tojo and Adolf Hitler are preparing to board trains that will carry them to their historic meeting marking the 30th anniversary of their victory over the United States. The celebration is to be held at The Divide, a small town that is exactly equidistant between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, at the somewhat uneasy boundary the two empires. Its code name is The Divide.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lords_of_the_Psychon"title="Lords of the Psychon">
The novels starts on September 24, 1993 (at the time of writing, thirty years in the future) and Captain Geoffery Maddox, U.S. Army is leading a detail from the headquarters of the Third Army against a target. The detail consists of a retired U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer, a Marine Corporal, a Marine Private, an Army Private, and a civilian scout. They are the members of the only known military force left on Earth, and they try to smuggle the last known atomic bomb into one of the mysterious alien structures that now dot the surface of the Earth. They desperately hope that setting off a fifty kiloton nuclear explosion can disrupt the operation of the structure and thereby lessen the effects of what is known as "Horror Day," or "H-Day".Their plan backfires, and the city completely absorbs the fifty-kiloton explosion. The following H-Day is exceptionally bad. After a recovery period lasting a few months, the people in the nearby villages are angry at the Third Army. They believe that the alien city should be left alone, and then the aliens might leave the villagers alone. They start launching small scale attacks against the base and sniping at the soldiers. At about the same time, a stranger shows up at the military base. He has stolen something from a distant City of Force. There are many such Cities of Force scattered around the world, and together they create and support the grid that causes Horror Day. The stranger presents two glowing rings, one green and one yellow. They seem weightless and can be stretched to any size and broken to form more rings just like the original. When they are held with the green ring within the yellow one, they spew forth glowing plasma which is the basis of the alien cities. When the positions are reversed and the yellow is put inside the green, the rings re-absorb the plasma. The plasma can take any shape or color, can be accommodating or hostile, and is very hard for the soldiers to figure out. One old soldier, who used to be a scientist and is now the base's doctor, spends weeks trying to understand the rings. He makes some progress, but the scientific method can't shed too much light on how the plasma works because it takes on whatever properties the doctor wants. If he thinks it should be hard, it becomes hard. If he thinks it should be a liquid, it becomes a liquid.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Girl_(novel)"title="The New Girl (novel)">
Cory falls in love with Anna, the new girl at his high school. But as he attempts to learn more about her he finds that his friends don't recognize her, he can't find her in the school files, and a phone call to her family home results in someone on the other end insisting Anna is dead.Cory visits Anna's house on Fear Street where he is met by a man who, again, insists that she is dead. A few nights later, Anna calls him asking to meet her, implying she needs his help. He's convinced she's real by her humanlike kisses. After another girl asks Cory to the prom, she finds a dead cat in her locker with a warning note attached to its neck. She suspects Anna, but Cory stands by her. At the dance Lisa is pushed down a flight of stairs by Anna's brother, Brad, who escapes capture after seeing that Lisa survived the fall.Cory travels to Anna's house to confront Brad soon after, where he found Anna and Brad fighting. It is revealed that Anna is actually Willa, Anna's sister who had killed her out of jealousy and assumed her identity. Cory and Brad manage to subdue "Anna" and call the police. At the end, it is implied that Cory begins a relationship with Lisa.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Price"title="Blood Price">
Vicki Nelson is a former Homicide detective. When her diagnosis of Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP) ruined her night vision and forced her to leave the police force, she became a private investigator.After becoming a witness in a brutal murder of a young man, who was drained to death, his desperate girlfriend Coreen Fennel hires her to investigate his death. Vicki tries to get some information from her former partner and competitor, Detective - Sergeant Mike Cellucci, which leads to their arguments over her involvement..Coreen informs her that she thinks that the murderer is a vampire, so she begins what she calls ″hunting″, although she does not believe in the supernatural. The killer is claiming more victims, and when she accidentally walks in on a crime scene, she sees the killer turning into the dark and disappearing. Because of her bad sight, she is sure that it was just an illusion, and when she turns to the body, she sees a man in black next to the body, and tries to scream, but he punches her in the head, rendering her unconscious.When she wakes in an unknown apartment, the same man is searching her purse for some ID. She talks to him, and discovers that he is not a killer, but is also searching for him. He tells her that the killer is a demon, that she actually did see him disappear. He has an ancient book, a grimoire, that should help them. She also finds out that the stranger is Henry Fitzroy: romance writer and 450-year-old vampire. Surprisingly, she believes him. The two make a deal to catch the demon and the man who is calling it up.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_and_the_Lady_in_Pink_(novel)"title="Oscar and the Lady in Pink (novel)">
Oscar, a ten-year-old boy, lives in a children's hospital, with volunteer nurses called "Pink Ladies" and Mamie-Rose, being the oldest Pink Lady. She is retired but still actively volunteering with this group. After a failed bone marrow transplant, he thinks he is doomed. He talks about his future death to his family and staff. All turn a deaf ear to the word "death" with the exception of Mamie-Rose, formerly called "Strangler of Languedoc" thanks to her skills as a wrestler, which she confirms that he will die. Mamie-Rose then proposes to write letters to God by writing a wish of "feeling" every day. The next day, Oscar's parents come to the hospital and learn from Doctor Düsseldorf that Oscar is indeed sentenced and that he will die in 12 days. They do not even want to kiss their son. Oscar, who overheard this conversation, is furious and calls them "cowards". He does not want to see his parents anymore. At the end of the day, Mamie-Rose comes to visit Oscar and tells him that she has been allowed to visit him for the next 12 days. She invents a game that will allow him to enjoy his life at any age: every day for him will have a duration of 10 years. Oscar accepts and asks in his letter to God to visit him. During his "adolescence" (the next day), Oscar admits to Mamie-Rose that he really likes a girl named Peggy Blue.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Old_Ace_in_the_Hole"title="That Old Ace in the Hole">
Bob Dollar was abandoned by his parents and was brought up by his eccentric uncle. Dollar is sent by his employer, the multinational "Global Pork Rind Corporation", to scout for locations for intensive hog farming in the Texas Panhandle. Dollar goes about the work of meeting local down-on-their-luck farmers to manipulate them into selling out. He bases his search in the fictional town of Woolybucket, named after the real tree species, "Sideroxylon lanuginosum".There he gets a job at Woolybucket's Old Dog restaurant, and moves into an old bunkhouse in local historian LaVon Fronk's ranch. The inhabitants of the town and the region's quirkiness and stubbornness work on the fundamentally decent Dollar. The ace in the hole of the title is Ace Crouch, who quietly leads Dollar to a "kind of small, quiet and personal redemption."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cup_(book)"title="The Cup (book)">
The week before the 2002 Melbourne Cup, Jason Oliver, Damien's older brother, was fatally injured in a training accident while riding an unraced horse at Belmont Racecourse in Perth. Taken to Royal Perth Hospital, Jason never regained consciousness and died after being taken off life support.In 1975, while competing in the Boulder Cup at Kalgoorlie, Ray Oliver, Damien and Jason's father, was involved in a five-horse fall. Knocked unconscious, the jockey was flown from Kalgoorlie to Perth where he too was treated at Royal Perth Hospital. Ray Oliver never regained consciousness and died. His death left his widow, Pat, to look after their two sons: Jason, 5, and Damien, 3.Damien's decision to return to Melbourne following Jason's death and compete in the Melbourne Cup captured the attention of his fellow countrymen as well as racing enthusiasts around the world. He dedicated his victory in the 2002 Melbourne Cup to his brother. His winning ride has since been selected by Sport Australia Hall of Fame as one of the most memorable moments in the country's sporting history.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delirium_(Cooper_novel)"title="Delirium (Cooper novel)">
"Delirium" has Izzy Darlow in New York, investigating the architect Ariel Price in order to write a biography about the man. Price proves to be an unwilling subject, threatening to murder his biographer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milrose_Munce_and_the_Den_of_Professional_Help"title="Milrose Munce and the Den of Professional Help">
The book follows teenagers Milrose and Arabella, who can see the ghosts that inhabit their school. Some of the ghosts are friendly, others are not so much, but after Milrose and Arabella are both sent to the school psychologist to receive treatment the ghosts must find a way to help the two overcome their seemingly well-meaning captor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rifle"title="The Rifle">
The novel begins prior to the American Revolution. A gunsmith named Cornish McManus, inspired by a piece of maple stock, crafts a rifle which turns out to be exceedingly accurate. Later, McManus is forced to sell the rifle, which comes into the ownership of a soldier in the Revolution named John Byam. After Byam's death, the rifle passes to a woman named Sarah, who stores it in an attic, where it is forgotten. The rifle passes through several owners, being lost, rediscovered, and sold as an antique. It ultimately comes to rest on the mantle of a mechanic named Harv Kline.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Lion_(book)"title="American Lion (book)">
"American Lion" opens just after Andrew Jackson's victory in the 1828 United States presidential election. Author Jon Meacham writes about the viciousness of the election and the death of Rachel Jackson immediately afterward, which Jackson blames on his attacks by his political enemies during the campaign. The book then touches upon Jackson's early life, including his birth in the Waxhaws region of the Carolinas and his family life. It briefly covers his marriage to Rachel, legal career, move to Nashville, Tennessee, and his military career, particularly his role in the Battle of New Orleans and the part it played in elevating his reputation. The book then segues into the beginning of his political career, his rivalries with Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, and his loss in the 1824 presidential election despite winning the popular vote, which Jackson regarded as a "corrupt bargain" by his political enemies.Returning to Jackson's presidency, Meacham defines patronage, the Bank War, the Nullification Crisis, Indian removal, clerical influence in politics, internal improvements, and respect abroad as "the questions that would define Jackson's White House years. Meacham wrote that, to many in established Washington, Jackson's arrival "signaled the destruction of the rule of the nation in an atmosphere of geniality and gentility". By contrast, Meacham wrote that Jackson felt the country was "suffering from a crisis of corruption (in) the marshaling of power and influence by a few institutions and interests that sought to profit at the expense of the whole". According to the book, Jackson felt the President should "use his powers with a firm hand", whereas his foes thought of Congress as the government's center of gravity. Meacham wrote that Jackson's most enduring conviction was that, as President, he was acting selflessly in the interest of the nation and of its mass of citizens, and that his own will was the same as the will of the country. Meacham wrote: "No institution, he argued, should stand between the people and the presidency. ... No president had spoken in such a way before."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_in_Delhi"title="Twilight in Delhi">
The novel is set around 1911 to 1919 in Delhi. Ahmed Ali has vividly drawn the picture of old Delhi and its Muslim inhabitants of that era. He depicts the themes of disintegration, degeneration, alienation, gender and social conflicts, nostalgia, the downfall of the Mughal emperors, and the effects of colonialism and imperialism on Indian Muslims in Delhi.The novel is shot through with rich symbolic imagery. The palm tree, the henna plant, dogs, cats and pigeons refer not only to the behaviors of characters but also the whole Muslim society. The novel starts at dawn, with "twilight" referring to the rise of the sun as well as the rise of the protagonist Mir Nihal's living standards. By contrast, descriptions of twilight at evening in the closing sentences portray the overall downfall and destruction of not only the family of Mir Nihal but also the Mughal Empire altogether.The novel was not published until after the intervention of the prominent English writer E. M. Forster.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Spy_Running"title="Dead Spy Running">
When suspended MI6 agent Daniel Marchant participates in the London Marathon he discovers a suicide bomber among the other runners. As Marchant eventually figures out the very man is determined to commit a terrorist attack against the US-American Embassy. Marchant foils the attempt and saves the US-American ambassador. Unfortunately his good deed backfires for him because the United States Secret Service finds it all too unlikely that he got entangled in this matter only by coincidence. They have him arrested and interrogated for suspect of collaborationism with anti-western terrorist groups. After his jailbreak western secret services chase Marchant around the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_Through_Time"title="Tunnel Through Time">
The novel tells the story of a teen named Bob Miller whose scientist father, Sam Miller, has invented a "time ring", a circular device that allows time travel. Bob and his friend Pete travel through time in search of Pete's father ("Doc Tom", a paleontologist) who has disappeared while traveling alone. Beginning in the Mesozoic Era (Tom's planned destination), the story depicts various adventures while the travelers jump from point to point in Earth's prehistory in search of the missing Dr. Tom Miller, and their attempt to get home again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1942_(novel)"title="1942 (novel)">
In the wake of an attack on Pearl Harbor that is far more successful than in reality, the novel depicts a fictitious Japanese invasion and conquest of Hawaii in late 1941 and the ensuing struggle by the United States to regain the islands in 1942.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monster_Men"title="The Monster Men">
Cornell University professor Arthur Maxon, who has been experimenting in the creation of artificial life, travels with his daughter Virginia to one of the remote Pamarung Islands in the East Indies to pursue his project. Their departure is noted with interest by a young man, Townsend J. Harper, Jr., who is quite taken with Virginia and determines to find out where they are going. In Singapore, Maxon commissions Dr. Carl von Horn to take them the remainder of the way to their destination in his yacht the "Ithaca", and then to assist him in his experiments. On the island the group fights off a pirate attack and builds a fort.Maxon and von Horn begin their experiments, growing several living creatures in chemical vats, humanoid but mindless and ugly. Maxon hopes Experiment Number Thirteen will result in a perfect human being, and in his fanatic obsession plans to wed Virginia to this ultimate creation. Von Horn retains a more realistic viewpoint and hopes to marry her himself, leading to friction. Meanwhile, locals including Budadreen, one of von Horn's crewmen, and Muda Saffir, leader of the pirates, conspire against the scientists, who they believe are hiding treasure. They are watched closely by Chinese cook Sing Lee, who recognizes the pirate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vision_of_Judgment"title="The Vision of Judgment">
Byron's poem is set in Heaven, where the carnage of the Napoleonic Wars has placed a massive workload on the Recording Angel, though since most of the dead have been damned, St. Peter has little to do. After "a few short years of hollow peace" comes the death of George III, whom the poet describes as,A cherub brings the news of the king's death to St. Peter, and George III then arrives accompanied by Lucifer, the archangel Michael and an angelic host. Lucifer claims him for Hell, portraying him as a friend of tyrants and an enemy of liberty: "He ever warr'd with freedom and the free". In support of this view, Lucifer calls John Wilkes's shade as witness, who however declines to give evidence against the king, claiming that his ministers were more to blame. The soul of the pseudonymous pamphleteer Junius is then summoned, and on being asked for his opinion of king George, replies "I loved my country, and I hated him." Lastly the demon Asmodeus produces Robert Southey himself, whom he has abducted from his earthly home. Southey gives an account of his own history, which Byron thus summarises:Southey then begins reading from his "Vision of Judgement", but before he has got further than the first few lines the angels and devils flee in disgust, and St. Peter knocks the poet down so that he falls back to Derwent Water:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_Walker_(novel)"title="Spirit Walker (novel)">
Six months after the events of "Wolf Brother", Torak is now living with the Raven Clan. One of the clan members, Oslak, becomes sick and attempts to kill himself and his young nephew, but is stopped by Fin-Kedinn. Torak suspects that the sickness has been created by the Soul-Eaters. Torak realises that a small creature has been stalking him and trying to kill him, and when Oslak escapes and kills himself, Torak discovers that the creature was responsible. With the sickness spreading through the Forest, Torak sneaks out of the camp and sets out to seek a cure. Meanwhile Wolf, Torak's companion who now lives in a pack, grows restless and uneasy, and ventures off to find Torak.Renn has also encountered the creature at the Raven Camp. The clan's mage, Sauenn, explains that it is a "tokoroth": a young child transformed into a demon possessed zombie. Renn sneaks out of the camp to find Torak, and she eventually runs into Wolf. Torak encounters and fights three boys from the Seal Clan: Bale, Detlan and Asrif, but is eventually overpowered. They take him to judgement on their islands, as he has inadvertently broken a law about Forest Clans entering the Sea. Renn and Wolf meet some members of the Sea Eagle Clan, who take them both to the Seal Islands, and learn that a taboo act has been committed: an orca has been killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probuditi!"title="Probuditi!">
After seeing a show by magician Lomax the Magnificent, two friends, Calvin and Rodney, decide to use his hypnosis trick on Calvin's sister Trudy. The trick is achieved with a rotating spiral disc, and the spell is broken by saying "Probuditi!".It is Calvin's birthday and his mother asks him to watch his sister while she's away and when she returns she will make Calvin his favorite dinner, spaghetti.Calvin and Rodney are successful and Trudy soon believes she is a dog. Calvin and Rodney enjoy watching Trudy until they realize that Calvin's mom will come home soon, and they have forgotten the word to reverse the spell. They frantically try different methods to turn Trudy back to normal, but in the end it is Trudy who silently helps them to remember.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_Eater_(novel)"title="Soul Eater (novel)">
Wolf gets kidnapped by a group of strangers and Torak and Renn track his captors northwards. During their journey, Torak spirit walks in a raven, and discovers that the Soul Eaters, a group of evil mages, have captured Wolf. They follow them to the Far North, where they encounter Inuktiluk, leader of the White Fox Clan. They go with him to the White Fox Clan's camp, where the clan's mage tells them of a vision she has had, in which Torak is about to hit Wolf with an axe. Continuing their search for Wolf, they find the cave which the Soul-Eaters now inhabit. The mages are named as: Thiazzi, the Oak Mage; Nef, the Bat Mage; Seshru, the Viper Mage, and their chief Eostra, the Eagle Owl Mage.Torak secretly changes places with a boy who is serving as an acolyte to the Soul Eaters. To maintain his disguise, Torak helps the Soul Eaters in their quest to release an army of demons, while Renn also enters their cave. While inside, Torak, after learning that his father once saved the Bat Mage's life, spirit walks in a bear and finds out where Wolf is. When they find Wolf, who is maddened by an injury to his tail and doesn't recognise them, they are forced to use Renn's axe to cut off Wolf's tail, fulfilling the mage's vision. They free all the animals which the Soul Eaters have been holding captive, but the Soul Eaters release demons in pursuit. Renn takes the Fire Opal, a religious artifact belonging to the Soul Eaters that can control demons, but as they flee, Torak and Renn become separated when Renn floats away on a piece of sea ice. Meanwhile, Torak becomes snow blind and is captured by the Soul Eaters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Day_(novel)"title="One Day (novel)">
Dexter and Emma spend the night together following their graduation from the University of Edinburgh, in 1988. They talk about how they will be once they are 40. While they do not become romantically involved completely, this is the beginning of their friendship. The novel visits their lives and their relationship on 15 July in successive years in each chapter, for 20 years. Emma wants to improve the world, and begins writing and performing plays, which remain unsuccessful, while Dexter travels through the world, drinking and hooking up with women. Eventually both move to London, where Emma becomes a waitress in Kentish Town, at a Tex-Mex restaurant, while Dexter becomes a successful television presenter.While there are various attempts from both sides to start a relationship, coincidences stop Emma and Dexter from getting together, and while they have relationships with other people, they remain best friends, each secretly longing for the other. They are drawn closer through a holiday together and the death of Dexter's mother.Emma breaks up with her boyfriend, Ian, after realising she is creating a life with someone she doesn't love. During this time she is able to find a job as a teacher, after various years of struggle, despite having a "double-first degree". Dexter, meanwhile, develops a drinking and drug problem, and watches his career collapse. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Could_Be_Santa"title="The Man Who Could Be Santa">
The story is told from the point of view of 6¾-year-old Abby who insists she will believe in Santa Claus even when she is in “the hundredth grade.”She and her cousins form a “spy club” to find out if the man who lives down the street with the long white beard, a "belly that shakes like jelly" and a bunch of reindeer in his front yard is the same person who slides down their chimneys every Christmas.The three young detectives find other clues: a Christmas tree farm down the road, a ham radio that receives messages from the North Pole and remote control model air planes which deliver toys to children all over the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secrets_of_the_Immortal_Nicholas_Flamel"title="The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel">
The main story arc charts the adventures of fifteen-year-old American twins, named Sophie and Josh Newman, whose regular lives working at their summer jobs (Sophie works in a coffee shop, Josh in a bookstore) are turned upside down by the arrival of Dr. John Dee. Dr. Dee engages the bookstore owner, Nick Fleming, in a battle of magic in an attempt to steal an ancient book, "The Book of Abraham the Mage" (a.k.a. the Codex) from him. Dr. John Dee snatches the book from Josh's grasp, but Josh manages to retain two pages. Dr. John Dee also kidnaps Nick's wife Perry Fleming and imprisons her on Alcatraz Island.After the battle, Nick Fleming confesses to Josh and Sophie that his real name is Nicholas Flamel, that he is the French alchemist from history, that he is also immortal, and that the twins, himself, and Perry (his immortal wife, Perenelle Flamel), are in grave danger. Nicholas tells the twins that he believes them to be mentioned in a prophecy within the Codex, and that the fate of the world as they know it could depend on his success in getting their dormant, latent magical abilities fully awakened. He also tells them that without the Codex, both he and Perry will die within a month, as their immortality, prolonged youth, and longevity depend on a recipe for a special elixir found only within its pages. This elixir changes monthly and cannot be memorised.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Light_(novel)"title="City of Light (novel)">
The story is set in the city of Buffalo, New York in 1901, as the Pan-American Exposition's planning and construction is under way. The main character and narrator, Louisa Barrett, is headmistress of the Macaulay School for Girls, inspired by The Buffalo Seminary and is a very influential woman in a time of male predominance. The first major event in the book is the death of Karl Speyer, an engineering hero that designed the generators for the hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls. This causes a chain of events that leads Louisa to become involved in the struggle of the city's hierarchy for control of Niagara.It was revealed in the novel that Louisa Barrett was sexually abused by the former president Grover Cleveland. She couldn't speak up because she feared the same fate as Maria Halpin—who had been sent to an asylum.Thomas Sinclair realizes that Grace looks a lot like Louisa Barrett - Grace's godmother and real mother. Louisa's enthusiasm for Grace reinforces this idea - she loves Grace because she is her real mom.Bates as a radical - always cites God, Nature. He seems to think that electricity is only for the rich and prefers primitive gas lamps etc. Has dramatic flair. In the name of God, misapplication of cause. Susanah Riley cried after the Speech, she is a big fan of Bates.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Cities"title="The Million Cities">
Sometime in the future when the Earth has become over-industrialized, and the entire surface has been covered with steel, it is on the verge of running out of natural resources. Nearly all of the Earth's resources have been used up; a single park in the Earth's equatorial region remains. The world's governments have built as far up and down as is possible. Billions upon billions of people live on the Earth, and the only place left to go is outer space. There is a society called "Chartists" that have the plans for building spaceships, and the maps of the heavens are in their sole custody. Gearing up for an all out massive development suitable an exodus, the government suddenly reverses itself, and issues an order to arrest all the "Chartists", disassemble their ships and launchpads, and destroy all copies of the plans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grunts!"title="Grunts!">
The story follows a group of orcs who always find themselves on the front lines of battle against the carefully prepared and always triumphant forces of good. The orcs decided to organize themselves and fight back. As a satire of high fantasy the novel mocks most of the conventions of the genre from using traditional villainous races, orcs, as the protagonists, to having the noble characters have much less than noble motivations and secrets.The opening of the book plays up the orc warleader sent to reclaim a weapons cache in preparation for the 'Last Battle' between good and evil, which is well on its way. They are assisted by a pair of halflings whose cute demeanor is contrasted with extremely violent acts.The orcs uncover a dragon's hoard of modern military weaponry, which is endowed with a geas that transforms their minds into replicas of the stereotypical United States Marine Corps mindset, during the Vietnam War. Gentle continues the storyline through the Last Battle and the orcs' integration into society, along with a military threat that rivals the orcs themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_the_Un-dead"title="Dracula the Un-dead">
Twenty-five years have passed since the vampire Count Dracula met his end at the hands of Jonathan Harker and Quincey Morris. Though they were victorious in their quest, the band of heroes has now become a broken shadow of its former-self; Jack Seward has become a morphine addict obsessed with stamping out the undead, Arthur Holmwood hides behind his loveless marriage and Jonathan Harker drowns his sorrows and insecurities in alcohol and prostitutes over Mina's remaining taint from Dracula, which has caused her to retain her youth.The novel begins with Seward tracking down Elizabeth Báthory, whom he believes is a vampire. After seeing her bathe in a young woman's blood, he tracks her to a theater in Paris. Quincey Harker, son to Jonathan and Mina, is in Paris having been forced to attend law school instead of pursuing a career in theater. Quincey learns that Basarab, a Romanian actor who is taking Europe by storm, is in town to perform in "Richard III", and vows to see his performance no matter how it enrages his father, whom he has grown to despise. To his surprise, he is summoned by Basarab to his dressing room, where they strike up an unlikely friendship. However, they are disturbed when Báthory's vampiric attendants attempt to attack Basarab, although they are thwarted by Seward. As Seward chases the vampires, he is struck and killed by a carriage in which Báthory and the vampires escape. Abraham Van Helsing, now a sickly old man, returns to London after hearing of Seward's death. He believes that Dracula has returned.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tiger_Who_Came_to_Tea"title="The Tiger Who Came to Tea">
A little girl named Sophie is having tea with her mother in their kitchen, when she hears the doorbell ring. Soon, Sophie and her mother are joined for tea by a kind tiger who drinks all the tea before eating all the food in the house and then drinking everything, even draining all the water from the taps. After the tiger leaves, Sophie's father comes home from work and suggests that they all go out and have a lovely meal in a cafe. The following day, Sophie and her mother go out to buy some more food, including a big tin of tiger food. Despite the tin of tiger food being requested by Sophie, the tiger never returns (hence the tiger plays a trumpet with the word "Goodbye" coming out of the end of it).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firstborn_(Thompson_and_Carter_novel)"title="Firstborn (Thompson and Carter novel)">
This novel takes place in the ancient elven city of Silvanost, where twin sons are born to Sithel, Speaker of the Stars and ruler of all the elves. On that same night, a prophecy is made that "They both shall wear crowns" even though there can only be one ruler of the Silvanesti. Sithas, the elder, is raised as heir to the throne, and the younger Kith-Kanan is allowed the freedom typically afforded a second son. Sithas believes in the purity of the elven people and aligns himself with the aristocrats of the court in Silvanost, while Kith-Kanan believes the future of Silvanesti will be enhanced by trade with outsiders, including the humans of Ergoth. When their father dies in a hunting accident, Sithas becomes Speaker of the Stars, and Kith-Kanan must swear fealty to his brother, although he questions the stand Sithas has taken against the humans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribsy"title="Ribsy">
Like most of the Henry Huggins books, the incidents in this book follow an ongoing plot line. In it, the Hugginses have a new car, and go out shopping; Ribsy, denied a ride, chases it at up to 25 miles per hour, and is finally allowed in. At the mall, he is left in the car, and he lowers the electric window with the button. He eventually wants to return to await Henry, and gets into the first new-smelling car he finds. But a different family, with several daughters and a son, gets in and takes him home with them. He endures a bubble bath and escapes, wandering in search of Henry.Ribsy finds an old lady named Mrs. Frawley who told him to go away when he raises his paw in greeting and she invites him in. After she feeds him dinner, he sleeps while she goes out to shop for her new pet. He chafes at a coat and colorful leash, then escapes. Soon after, he finds himself becoming the unofficial mascot for a class of elementary school students until he is kicked out over an incident with a squirrel.Later, Ribsy sneaks into a high school football game, wanders onto the field, and makes the game-winning tackle. He is caught by a boy who, pleased at the attention he gets for people thinking it was his dog who won the game, takes him in. The story of the game gains the attention of the Hugginses, who attempt to retrieve him. However, he escapes again after hearing Henry's voice on the phone and runs off in search of him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatherland_(novel)"title="Fatherland (novel)">
The novel opens in Nazi Germany in April 1964 during the week leading up to the 75th birthday of Adolf Hitler, Detective Xavier March is an investigator working for the Kriminalpolizei ("Kripo"), as he investigates the suspicious death of a high-ranking Nazi, Josef Bühler, in the Havel on the outskirts of Berlin. As March uncovers more details, he realises that he is caught up in a political scandal involving senior Nazi Party officials, who are apparently being systematically murdered under staged circumstances. As soon as the body is identified, the Gestapo claims jurisdiction and orders the Kripo to close its investigation.March meets with Charlotte 'Charlie' Maguire, an American journalist. Both are determined to investigate the case and travel to Zürich to investigate the private Swiss bank account of one of the murdered officials. Unfortunately they find no papers but only stolen treasures and return empty handed. Ultimately, they uncover the truth behind the staged murders: Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the SS, has ordered the Gestapo to eliminate the remaining officials who planned the Final Solution (of which few Germans are aware) at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. The elimination is being hurried to safeguard an upcoming meeting of Hitler and US President Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., by ensuring that the fate of the missing Jews can never be revealed. Maguire heads for neutral Switzerland and hopes to expose the evidence of the extermination to the world. March, however, is denounced by his ten-year-old son and apprehended by the Gestapo.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Shoot_Horses,_Don't_They?_(novel)"title="They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (novel)">
The story follows the narrator, Robert Syverten, a naive young man in Hollywood who dreams of being a film director.The story begins with Robert's sentencing for murder. He confesses that he "killed her," and that he does not "have a leg to stand on." He is advised to beg for mercy from the court. The story of his relationship with the girl he killed, Gloria Beatty, is thereafter intercut after every few chapters with short excerpts from the judge's sentencing. The excerpts of the judge's words are written in larger and larger type until the last page of the book concludes with the words, written in small print: "And may God have mercy on your soul.”Robert meets Gloria on a morning when they have both failed to get parts as extras. She talks him into participating in a dance marathon contest. Like Robert, she is struggling to find work in Hollywood and believes the contest may be a way to get noticed by studio producers or movie stars. Gloria and Robert enter the contest, which is held at a large amusement pier on the beach in Santa Monica.The contests are long and grueling affairs, taking place over several weeks. Contestants dance for an hour and fifty minutes, then receive a ten-minute break. One hundred and forty-four couples start the contest. Robert and Gloria, like most of the contestants, are young, jobless, and drawn as much by the free food as by the $1,000 prize money.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_Public"title="The Phantom Public">
Lippmann’s book is a forceful critique of what he takes to be mistaken conceptions of "the public" found in democratic theory like that it is made up of sovereign and omnicompetent citizens (21); "the people" are a sort of superindividual with one will and one mind (160) or an "organism with an organic unity of which the individual is a cell" (147); the public directs the course of events (77); it is a knowable body with fixed membership (110); it embodies cosmopolitan, universal, disinterested intuition (168-9); and it is a dispenser of law or morals (106). Lippmann counters that the public is none of those things but a "mere phantom," an abstraction (77) embedded in a "false philosophy" (200) that depends on a "mystical notion of society" (147). Democratic theories, he argues, vaguely assert that the public can act competently to direct public affairs and that the functioning of government is the will of the people, but Lippmann dismisses such notions of the capacities of the public as a fiction. Against the idealizations and obfuscations, Lippmann posits that society is made up of two types of people: agents and bystanders (also referred to as insiders and outsiders). The agent is someone who can act "executively" on the basis of his own opinions to address the substance of an issue, and the bystander is the public, merely a spectator of action. Only those familiar enough with the substance of a problem are able to then analyze it and propose solutions, to take "executive action." No one is of executive capacity at all times, the myth of the omnicompetent sovereign democratic citizen. Instead, individuals move in and out of these capacities: "The actors in one affair are the spectators of another, and men are continually passing back and forth between the field where they are executives and the field where they are members of a public. The distinction between agents and bystanders... is not an absolute one" (110). Most of the time, however, the public is just a "deaf spectator in the back row"(13) because, for the most part, individuals are more interested in their private affairs and their individual relations than in those matters that govern society, the public questions about which they know very little.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut_(novel)"title="Cut (novel)">
Fifteen-year-old Callie McPherson of Mississauga isn't speaking to anybody, not even to her therapist at Sea Pines (nicknamed "Sick Minds"), the residential treatment facility where her parents and doctor sent her after discovering that she self-harms. At some point, Callie does begin speaking to her therapist/doctor, and she helps Callie understand why she self-harms. As her story unfolds, Callie reluctantly becomes involved with the other "guests" at Sea Pines—finding her voice and confronting the trauma that triggered her behavior. Callie gets better with the help of Sydney (her roommate), Debbie, Becca, Tara, Amanda, and Tiffany. Through support from her family, guests, and therapist she soon learns why she cuts herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_End_(Chadbourn_novel)"title="World's End (Chadbourn novel)">
Jack 'Church' Churchill and Ruth Gallagher witness a horrific supernatural creature kill a smaller man underneath Albert Bridge on the Thames. While Ruth is suspended from work, Church discovers that similar odd events are happening all across Britain and a message from a woman named Laura, who claims to know how all these events are linked. They decide to visit her. Along the way, Church and Ruth pick up an old hippie named Tom. Laura explains to them that she was walking near an industrial estate when she was pulled to 'somewhere else' and told the world was going to change forever. She takes them to the place.When they arrive, Church and Laura are pulled into a hole in the air. Church finds himself in a tower floating in space. As he makes his way through, he opens various doors and experiences visions, the first of which calls him a Brother of Dragons. A woman gives Church a lantern called the Wayfinder and tasks him with using it to find four other Brothers and Sisters of Dragons and four Treasures of the Tuatha Dé Danann that will empower her people, the Golden Ones, to fight the Night Walkers, who have Tom and Ruth surrounded. Church realises that Laura led him here on purpose, under the woman's orders. Church and Laura return through the hole in the air to find the estate in ruins in the aftermath of Ruth and Tom's escape attempt. They reunite with Ruth and reluctantly leave without Tom, whom they cannot find. Church deduces that Ruth and Laura are both Sisters of Dragons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tread_Softly_in_This_Place"title="Tread Softly in This Place">
A year before the novel opens, Peadar and Matty Power, two elderly bachelor brothers, sold a portion of their land to Norwegian fish farmers. However, they resent no longer being able to use the land in question and, one night, they release the entire stock of fish into the sea. In doing so, they set in train a series of events that lead to tragic consequences.For several years, rumours have been rife in the locality that a major industrial project might be located in Ross. This would be very welcome as there is little local employment there. Now, as news of the act of sabotage at the fish farm spreads through the community, fears grow that subversive elements were behind it and that outside investors will be discouraged.The local policeman, Sergeant McMenamin, suspects that the Powers released the fish. However, as concern among the locals about a Republican plot develops into virtual paranoia, he is pressured into changing the focus of his investigation. He turns his attention to a small band of local extremists known as The Sons of Ireland. Their leader is a young man who, for patriotic reasons, has Gaelicised his name from Johnny Conroy to Seagrun Ó Maelchonaire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Echo_(novel)"title="The Echo (novel)">
When a homeless man going by the name Billy Blake starves himself to death in the garage of socialite Amanda Powell, journalist Michael Deacon is sent to get the story. Questions abound about Deacon digs into the pasts of both Billy Blake and Amanda Powell: who is Billy Blake? Could he be Amanda's previously vanished husband? Why did he choose to starve himself in her garage and in full view of a freezer full of food? Why is Amanda so interested in Billy Blake, and why does she pay for his funeral? Along the investigative path, Deacon encounters an unusual cast of characters from Billy's past as well as his own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tinder_Box_(novella)"title="The Tinder Box (novella)">
Following the savage murders of Lavinia Fanshaw and her personal nurse, Dorothy Jenkins, in the small Hampshire village of Sowerbridge, Irish labourer Patrick O'Riordian is arrested for the crime, stirring up violent racial hatred from the other residents against his family. Friend and neighbour Siobhan Lavenham suspects that Patrick was the victim of an already prejudiced investigation, and defies her community so she can prove him innocent. However, after learning of some terrible secret's from the O'Riordian's past, she begins to question her loyalties.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_of_Snakes"title="The Shape of Snakes">
In 1978, a black woman known as 'Mad Annie' by her neighbours was found dead in a west London gutter, her body discovered by Mrs. Ranelagh who, despite supposedly not knowing the dead woman, spends the next twenty years trying to convince the police that she was murdered. However, those once familiar with Annie despised her as a mean old eccentric and animal abuser, whilst Ranelagh's husband seemingly disdains any mention of the case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disordered_Minds"title="Disordered Minds">
In 1970 Harold Stamp, a intellectually disabled young man, was arrested for the murder of his grandmother - the only person who ever understood him - based on scant evidence and a retracted confession; three years later, having been found guilty by a jury, he kills himself in prison. However, Jonathan Hughes, an anthropologist specialising in social stereotypes, decides to re-examine the case and, in doing so, uncovers a plethora of dark secrets that could lead him into a confrontation with a psychotic killer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil's_Feather"title="The Devil's Feather">
Connie Burns is a British-Zimbabwean journalist working as a war correspondent for the Reuters agency. While stationed in Sierra Leone in 2002 she reports on the case of five women who have been brutally murdered. Burns suspects a British mercenary, who is known throughout the expatriate community for his brutality and violence. She encounters the mercenary again two years later while based in Baghdad to cover the Iraq conflict. She begins to make discrete enquiries about him, but is frightened off by a series of incidents in which her hotel room is repeatedly ransacked. Deciding to return to the United Kingdom, Burns is kidnapped on her way to the airport, but released three days later.Upon her release, Burns returns to England, avoiding reporters (including her former Reuters colleagues) who are keen to hear about her ordeal. Leasing a remote house on the Dorset coast she sets about trying to guard her privacy and her security. But escaping her past proves to be more difficult. She befriends a local woman named Jess Derbyshire, a reclusive woman who has isolated herself from her community following a family tragedy. Seeing parallels between herself and Jess, Burns borrows from the other woman's strength and makes the hazardous decision to take on her adversary for a third time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chickenfeed_(novel)"title="Chickenfeed (novel)">
Based on the real life case of Elsie Cameron, a woman whose body was dismembered by her fiancé, Norman Thorne, who was hanged for her murder in 1924. Walters re-creates the events leading up to the crime and writes from the perspective of both Elsie and Norman, as their relationship slowly turns sour and Norman yearns to be free from Elsie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragon_and_the_George"title="The Dragon and the George">
Jim Eckert holds a doctorate in medieval history and is hoping for an instructor position at a Minnesota university, where he works as an assistant to a history professor. He is engaged to marry Angie Farrell, who is working toward a doctorate in English literature and works as a laboratory assistant to psychology graduate Grottwald Weinar Hansen. During one of Grottwald's experiments in astral projection, Angie suddenly disappears. To locate her, Jim puts on the apparatus she was testing and finds his consciousness projected into a world of medieval fantasy, in which his mind inhabits the body of a dragon named Gorbash. In this world, dragons refer to humans as "georges" after the story of Saint George and the Dragon.Two other dragons, Smrgol and Bryagh, have captured Angie. Despite being a dragon, Jim is able to convince Angie of his identity and attempts to hypnotize her in order to return her to the real world, but she refuses out of fear that he will be left behind. They seek help from the magician Carolinus, who demands payment in the form of Gorbash's treasure hoard, but Jim does not know its location. Bryagh kidnaps Angie and takes her to Loathly Tower, and Carolinus advises Jim to gather companions to assist in mounting a rescue. Jim meets the knight Sir Brian Neville-Smythe, who is sympathetic to his predicament, and the two set off to rescue Sir Brian's courtly love interest, Lady Geronde, from the clutches of the villainous Sir Hugh. Along the way they are attacked by creatures called sandmirks but are saved by the talking wolf Aragh, who is a friend of Gorbash. Aragh does not believe Jim's story about being stuck in Gorbash's body, but agrees to accompany him and Sir Brian. They are next joined by the archer Danielle, the Welsh bowman Dafydd ap Hywel, and the outlaw Giles of the Wold. Arriving at Malvern Castle, the party attempts to rescue Lady Geronde but Jim is wounded by Sir Hugh. Upon recovering he finds that Smrgol and Carolinus have joined the quest, though Smrgol is developing a stroke and thus is of limited ability. Jim attempts to head to Loathly Tower alone but, upon encountering more sandmirks, returns to his companions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragon_Knight_(novel)"title="The Dragon Knight (novel)">
Jim and Angie are adjusting to their new lives within this parallel dimension of 14th-century medieval England, or as well as any 20th-century persons might. Jim, who is now the Sir James, Baron of Malencontri et Riveroak is trying to be a good English Lord. However, fate conspires against him and must set him on an adventure to recover the prince of England, who is being held captive in France. Little does Jim know that he'll be going up against the interests of the "Dark Powers" who are already at work to thwart Jim's mission. This will culminate in Jim squaring off against the evil and powerful sorcerer Malvinne.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_6th_Target"title="The 6th Target">
When a horrifying attack leaves one of the four members of the Women's Murder Club struggling for her life, the others fight to keep a madman behind bars before anyone else is hurt. Lindsay Boxer and her new partner in the San Francisco police department run flat-out to stop a series of kidnappings that has electrified the city: children of rich families are being plucked off the streets together with their nannies - but the kidnappers aren't demanding ransom. Amid uncertainty and rising panic, Lindsay juggles the possibility of a new love with an unsolvable investigation, and the knowledge that one member of the club could be on the brink of death.Just when everything appears momentarily under control, the case takes a terrifying turn, putting an entire city in danger. Lindsay must make a choice she never dreamed she'd face—with no certainty that either outcome has more than a prayer of success, a decision she has never made before. One that will change her life, as parents everywhere expect the worst, as new assistant D.A Yuki Castellano prepares to prosecute a high-profile trial. Detective Lindsay Boxer pursues one lead after another to capture the murderer who tried to kill her friend. However, the clues do not seem to ease the solving of the crime.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everyone_Worth_Knowing"title="Everyone Worth Knowing">
The story takes place in the mid-2000s, probably in 2005 (the Iraq War is referred to in passing, and the 2004 U.S. presidential election is discussed as if it were in the recent past), mostly in New York but with departures to Istanbul and Poughkeepsie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paper_Bag_Princess"title="The Paper Bag Princess">
Princess Elizabeth's plans to marry Prince Ronald are foiled after a fire-breathing dragon kidnaps the prince, destroying her castle and clothes in the process. Elizabeth dons a paper bag, the only garment not scorched by the dragon’s fire, and pursues the dragon. Elizabeth tricks the dragon into tiring himself out by pointlessly breathing out fire and flying around the world. After the dragon falls asleep, Elizabeth rescues Ronald, who is ungrateful and only mocks her appearance before telling her to return when she looks more like a princess. The story ends with Elizabeth accosting Ronald for his ungratefulness and dancing off into the sunset. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Driver's_Seat_(novel)"title="The Driver's Seat (novel)">
Lise works in an accountancy firm somewhere in Northern Europe, probably Denmark (the location is not explicitly specified). Spark described "The Driver's Seat" as a 'whydunnit' (and she uses the term in the novel). This is because in the novel's third chapter it is revealed that Lise will be murdered. Hence Spark's novel is an examination, not of what events take place, but why they do.It is eventually revealed that Lise has suffered years of illness; she behaves erratically and often confrontationally, and wears garish clothing. Lise travels to a South European city, probably Rome, ostensibly to meet her illusory boyfriend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wise_&amp;_Otherwise"title="Wise &amp; Otherwise">
Fifty vignettes showcase the myriad shades of human nature. Contents in the book include stories ranging from a man who dumps his aged father in an old-age home after declaring him to be a homeless stranger; a tribal chief in the Sahyadri hills who teaches the author that there is humility in receiving too and how a sick woman remembers to thank her benefactor even from her deathbed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millstone_(novel)"title="The Millstone (novel)">
Set in not-quite-yet Swinging London, "The Millstone" focuses on the life of Rosamund Stacey, an attractive Cambridge graduate who is writing her thesis on early English poetry while living alone in the spacious flat of her parents, who have gone to Africa for a year on a philanthropic mission. While Rosamund is convinced of both her qualities as a literary historian and her Socialist—and in particular Fabian—ideals, she is rather reluctant when it comes to sex. To avoid being considered old-fashioned or priggish, she has managed to make her small but intimate circle of friends believe that she is carrying on with two men at the same time whereas in fact she is still a virgin and only enjoys her two male friends' company. Each of the men also thinks that she is sleeping with the other one so neither of them presses her to have sex with him.In a pub Rosamund meets George Matthews, a newsreader for BBC Radio, and at once feels attracted to him although she is quite sure right from the start that he is gay. They end up in her flat and eventually have sex. As George is also under the impression that she has two lovers, Rosamund has no need to hide the fact that this is in fact her first time. Too shy to tell him that she has fallen in love with him, and now believing that he is bisexual, she lets George vanish from her life as quickly as he entered it, in the ensuing months only occasionally listening to his voice on the radio.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Watch_(Waters_novel)"title="The Night Watch (Waters novel)">
The novel begins in 1947 with Kay Langrish, a woman broken by the war. She spends her days locked in her room in London, her only human contact being with another lesbian, Mickey. One night, Viv appears and hands Kay a gold ring.Viv works as an assistant to Helen, who runs a match-making agency near Bond Street. When Helen's girlfriend Julia doesn't come home one night, Helen is overcome with worry and jealousy. After work, Viv has dinner with her brother Duncan and Duncan's roommate, an older gentleman named Mr Mundy. Helen and Viv receive an unexpected visit from Robert Fraser, Duncan’s old cellmate. Viv dismisses Fraser, feeling as though he thinks she and her father haven’t done enough to help Duncan’s situation and explains that he simply doesn’t know everything.Duncan accompanies Mr Mundy, or "Uncle Horace," as he refers to him in public, to his Christian Science doctor at Lavender Hill. After having dinner with his sister, Duncan works at the candle factory. When he leaves work, Duncan is surprised to see Fraser waiting for him at the gates. He invites Duncan to a pub by the water, and Duncan reluctantly agrees, mainly because he doesn't want Mr Mundy to worry. Fraser makes several calls at Duncan's for dinner. One night, however, he doesn't show up, and Duncan is quite upset, while Mr Mundy is relieved. Duncan decides to find Fraser, leaving Mr Mundy home alone. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savage_Night"title="Savage Night">
Charles Bigger, wearing glasses, false teeth, a toupée and platform shoes, operates under the alias Carl Bigelow, a college student. Bigger has been sent by a mob boss, known simply as The Man, to the small town of Peardale, New York. His mission is to avenge the mistakes of Jake Winroy, a former member of The Man's crime establishment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grotesque_(novel)"title="Grotesque (novel)">
The book is written in the first person for all parts and follows a woman whose sister and old school friend have been murdered. The narrator of "Grotesque" is unnamed and forever lives under the shadow of her younger-by-a-year sister Yuriko, who is unimaginably beautiful and the center of all attention. The narrator hates her younger sister Yuriko because she was always looked down when being compared with Yuriko.While the narrator is smart, responsible and plain looking, Yuriko is strikingly beautiful but flighty and irresponsible. Yuriko's diary does show an ability to think for herself that her sister always denied out of rage. Everyone is automatically drawn to Yuriko's beauty, who realizes her power on men and soon afterwards also realizes she can make money out of it. From there she becomes a full-time prostitute, and declines as she ages. As the novel progresses, the reader is introduced to many other characters with whom the narrator comes in contact at her highly prestigious Q High School.With time, the narrator grows to hate almost everyone, her classmates, her parents, co-workers etc. This in turn only isolates her more and ends up having jumping from bad job to another bad one.When both Yuriko and Kazue turn into prostitutes, they are murdered less than a year apart and in the same gruesome fashion. Then the narrator comes in possession of their personal journals and her life is entwined with theirs to the point of meeting and adopting Yuriko's handsome but blind son, Yurio.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King_of_Attolia"title="The King of Attolia">
Eugenides, the one-handed former Thief of Eddis, has married the Queen of Attolia, bringing peace to the two countries and becoming king. He appears to sleep during important briefings, makes snide remarks, wears ridiculous clothes and refuses to be more than a figurehead, letting the Queen rule as she has always done. The Attolian court resents him as a young foreign upstart who appears to also be an ineffectual fool.The story is told largely from the point of view of Costis, a young soldier in the Queen's Guard. When the king insults Teleus, Captain of the Guard, Costis loses control and knocks the king down. He expects to be executed, but the king spares his life and makes him into a reluctant confidant. Costis finds the king obnoxious and conniving, but slowly begins to have some sympathy for him as a young man far from his mountain home in Eddis, married to the beautiful but ruthless Queen.The plot twists through an assassination attempt and political intrigues involving the traitorous Baron Erondites and his sons, Relius, the Queen’s master of spies, and Eugenides's old enemy, Nahuseresh of the (fictionalized) Mede Empire. Costis discovers there is more to the king and gains a clearer understanding of the young man’s abilities, motives, and relationship with the Queen. Costis finds his own life and reputation at risk, and the fate of three nations hinges on Eugenides's internal struggle to accept his own destiny as the King of Attolia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_That_Matters_(novel)"title="All That Matters (novel)">
Kiam-Kim is three years old when he arrives by ship at Gold Mountain with his father and his grandmother, Poh-Poh, the Old One. It is 1926, and because of famine and civil war in China, they have left their village in Toishan province to become the new family of Third Uncle, a wealthy businessman whose own wife and son are dead. The place known as Gold Mountain is Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and Third Uncle needs help in his large Chinatown warehouse. Canada's 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act forces them, and many others, to use false documents, or ghost papers, to get past the 'immigration demons' and become Third Uncle's Gold Mountain family.Like many families around them, they must survive in unsavoury surroundings. Since the closing down of the railroad work camps, Chinatown is filled with unemployed labourers who live in poor rooming-houses. Sea winds fill the rooms with acrid smoke from the mills and refineries of False Creek, and freight trains shake their windows at night with noises the Old One says are dragons playing. Yet this is a land where the Chen family will not starve; where they will be able to keep a girl baby, and not sell her into servitude as was the Old One, whose back is scarred from whippings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeper_(Peet_novel)"title="Keeper (Peet novel)">
Paul Faustino, a journalist for "La Nación", is interviewing El Gato about his recent World Cup win. During the interview, El Gato tells Faustino about his teenage years and his entry into soccer. When El Gato tells Faustino that he is coached by a ghost known to El Gato as "the Keeper," Faustino thinks El Gato is lying to him. However, El Gato seems honest and looks like he is telling the truth.El Gato continues to tell the interviewer his story. As a teenager, he secretly trains with the Keeper in an abandoned soccer field hidden in the rainforest. The young El Gato convinces his parents his time in the rainforest is the result of his fascination with nature. His family takes him for a naturalist, buying him collection materials and calling him "Professor." The charade continues until El Gato turns 15, when he is expected to start working in the logging industry with his father. He does not tell the Keeper that he will no longer come to practice.His first Saturday at work he finds out that his co-workers play a game of soccer after work. His co-workers invite him to play as the goalkeeper and, in his first game since his training with the Keeper, he helps his team win. The next Saturday, he plays with a new player who the others call "El Ladron", meaning "the thief." In reality, El Ladron is a director for a soccer camp named DSJ. He also brings the owners of the team, Mr. and Mrs. DaSilva to the games. They want to sign El Gato for a two-year contract and give him 10,000 dollars. This begins his professional football career.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Fairlie's_Final_Journey"title="Mr. Fairlie's Final Journey">
The book concerns the investigation into the death of Jonas Fairlie, who was murdered on a train while on his way to consult Solar Pons. To solve the mystery, Pons and his companion, Dr. Lyndon Parker, travel to Fairlie's home town of Frome, Somerset and from there to Scotland (Pons only), Cheltenham in Gloucestershire and finally to a remote area on the coast of Wales.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamar_(novel)"title="Tamar (novel)">
## 1945.Part of the book takes place in 1945 the Netherlands, during the last part of World War II. The story centers on two Dutch men codenamed Tamar and Dart, who are agents of a covert military group called the Special Operations Executive, or SOE. In this point in time the Netherlands is occupied by the Nazis, and the Dutch resistance is "a bloody shambles". Tamar and Dart, his WO (wireless operator), are sent into the Netherlands to organize the different resistance groups into a more cohesive unit. This is Tamar's second time in the Netherlands as an SOE agent, and he is sent to recover his old alias, Christiaan Boogart. When he arrives he reunites with the woman he fell in love with the first time he was in the Netherlands, Marijke. As the novel continues Dart begins to spend more time with Marijke, and begins to fall in love with her, oblivious to the fact that she and Tamar are in love.After realizing that Tamar and Marijke are involved Dart is described as feeling furious and comes to the conclusion "that it was not her fault. She had been seduced, cynically and deliberately, by the man [Tamar] who should have been protecting her." Slowly he begins to hate and distrust Tamar. Meanwhile, a group of the resistance led by Koop de Vries open fire on a Nazi vehicle. One of the men they shot turns out to be the "head of Nazi internal security in Holland" SS Lieutenant General Hanns Albin Rauter. Rauter is rushed to a hospital and dispatches his deputy to execute the number of Dutch prisoners (known as "toteskandidaten", death candidates) as there are bullet holes in his car, 243. When Tamar hears about this, and the executions begin, he tracks down Koop and confronts him, telling him "I know where to find you."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_of_Miss_Elliott"title="The Case of Miss Elliott">
Despite his vanity about his own talents, Bill Owen is a nondescript armchair detective. A balding, watery-eyed, mild-mannered little man in violently checked tweed, he haunts a corner of the ABC Teashop on the corner of Norfolk Street and the Strand.His listener and protégé is the attractive young journalist Polly Burton. Polly brings him details of obscure crimes baffling the police, which he helps her to solve. She is fascinated by the unlikely unravellings she hears, but despite her sarcasm and pride in her own investigative talents she remains the learner, impressed in spite of herself.Although The Old Man does not hide his upper class attitudes, he sometimes feels sympathy for the criminals.The Old Man's cases include a wide range of sensational and complex detective puzzles: 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Divine_Folly"title="The Divine Folly">
Two English brothers travel across Europe as members of a secret society that is plotting the assassination of Napoleon III.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wailing_Wind"title="The Wailing Wind">
Navajo Tribal Police Officer Bernadette Manuelito investigates an abandoned vehicle in Apache County, Arizona. She finds the body of Thomas Doherty in the truck. She identifies seeds on his clothing and shoes when checking that he is dead, seeds not from plants nearby. Awaiting an ambulance, Manuelito collects seeds for her garden, placing them in an old tobacco tin she finds nearby. When the body is moved, it becomes clear he was murdered, and the FBI steps in. Manuelito gives the tobacco tin to her boss, now that the area is a crime scene.Sergeant Jim Chee contacts retired police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn for advice on how to resolve the problem of the old tin, now evidence removed from a crime scene. This renews Leaphorn's interest in a case involving Wiley Denton, a Gallup oil and gas magnate who shot and killed Marvin McKay. McKay was bringing evidence to Denton of the location of the old Golden Calf gold mine, to earn money from Denton. Denton served time for the killing, claiming self-defense. Denton contacts Leaphorn to find Denton's wife, who disappeared the day of the shooting. After questioning Denton, Leaphorn agrees to search for his wife. First, Leaphorn visits the scene where Doherty's body was found, discreetly replaces the tin with its sand / gold contents, and then points it out to Cowboy Dashee, the officer at the site.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitty_Norville"title="Kitty Norville">
With the money she got from her lawsuits in Washington, Kitty has decided to take some time off from her radio show. Inspired by Thoreau and his experiences at Walden, she rents a cabin and begins to write a book, although she has a hard time focusing.During Kitty's vacation, Cormac drives up to her cabin with an injured Ben and tells Kitty that he had called Ben to help with a werewolf hunt. Ben was attacked and infected by one of the werewolves, who Cormac then killed. They mend Ben the best they can while Ben makes it clear that he would rather be dead than a werewolf. Kitty decides that she is going to show Ben that he can live with lycanthropy. She takes him in, then finds that the only way to make him safe is to create a new pack of the two of them, which makes her alpha. She is with him for his first change on the full moon.While Ben is being tended to, Kitty tells Cormac about the dead animals that have been left on her door step along with small barbed-wire crosses. He thinks that these objects are part of a curse and makes some calls. The objects begin to get worse as a circle of crosses are left surrounding Kitty's cabin and skinned animals are left hanging in the trees. Cormac continues to look into the curse, until he finds Ben and Kitty sleeping in each other's arms. Upset, he gets in his Jeep and leaves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairest_(novel)"title="Fairest (novel)">
Aza, the adopted daughter of innkeepers in Ayortha, has always hated her appearance. Her prodigious size and her odd coloring – milk-white skin, dragon tongue lips, and hair that seems to be frying-pan black – are greatly at variance with the land's standards of beauty and often make her the target of stares and rude comments. However, Aza's voice garners as much attention as her looks, for Ayortha is a land of song, and Aza is an amazing singer. Besides being skilled at singing, Aza can also flawlessly mimic people and throw her voice without moving her mouth, a form of ventriloquism she calls "illusing". Still, Aza is flattered when a frequent visitor to the inn, a gnome named Zhamm, tells Aza that her hair is the most beautiful he has ever seen. While her hair looks black to humans, it is the lovely color htun, a dark purplish color, to gnomes. Zhamm foresees that they will meet again at some point in the future.When Aza's sister, Areida, goes to finishing school, the Duchess of Olixo, an irritable guest at the Featherbed Inn, requests that Aza accompany her to the royal wedding because her companion has fallen ill. The new queen, the beautiful Ivi, discovers Aza's unusual musical gift and manipulates her. As Ivi cannot sing well, she offers to reward Aza with land, wealth, and riches for her family, as well as elevation to the rank of lady-in-waiting in exchange for Aza illusing a marvelous singing voice for her when she needs to sing; when Aza tries to refuse, Ivi threatens to imprison her and close her family's inn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharra's_Exile"title="Sharra's Exile">
## Prologue.Lew and Kennard Alton have been absent from Darkover for three years, since the events of the Sharra Rebellion (see "The Heritage of Hastur"). Despite numerous attempts, Terran medics were not able to restore Lew's hand. However, he is slowly recovering his mental and emotional control.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dean's_December"title="The Dean's December">
The book's main character, Albert Corde, a meditative academic who faces a crisis, accompanies his Romanian-born astrophysicist wife to her Communist-ruled native country, where they deal with the death of his mother-in-law. This sojourn allows Corde to observe the workings of a totalitarian regime in particular and the Eastern Bloc in general, a perspective which provides him with insight into the human condition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Theft"title="A Theft">
Clara Velde is a successful fashion writer in New York City and the star of the story. The book's title refers to the disappearance of Clara's prized emerald ring. Clara associates the ring with her love for the Washington, D.C. politico Ithiel and with her own professional and personal power. The ring's apparent theft leads Clara into a series of psychological crises and forces her to confront a long-buried complex of interpersonal issues. Among these is the fact that—despite her four marriages—Ithiel remains her ideal, her best friend, and her ever-uncaptured love. The theft of the ring implicates the young Austrian au pair, Gina, whose Haitian boyfriend, Frederic, must have stolen it. On being accused, Gina resigns and moves from Clara's Upper East Side apartment to East Harlem, a move Clara supposes is an heroic attempt to help recover the ring. How does this practical young woman, Gina, who's going to marry an Austrian banker (following her NYC fling) regard her former employer, Clara? And why should this matter so much to a worldly, successful woman such as herself? Everything hinges on her self-judgment. Despite the scattered miscellany of her marital lives; her very-much-part time commitment to parenting; and the ever-uncertainty of her relationship with Ithiel, her soulmate as she seems to believe, the younger woman sees Clara as somehow coherent: "I believe you pretty well know who you are." With the ring returned, and peace made with Gina, Clara, her messy biography notwithstanding, is prepared to see herself as "one in a xillion" who actually do know who they are.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Actual_(novel)"title="The Actual (novel)">
Like most of Bellow's fiction, the story centers on the lives of a group of passionate and anxious people living in Chicago. Harry Trellman has formed a friendship with the fabulously wealthy Sigmund Adletsky. Sigmund aims to bring Harry together with Harry's childhood sweetheart, Amy Wustrin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuckerman_Unbound"title="Zuckerman Unbound">
The novel parallels several real events in Roth's life, including the publication of his 1969 novel "Portnoy's Complaint" and the hoopla which surrounded Roth in the wake of that novel's fame. By analogy, in "Zuckerman Unbound", Zuckerman has achieved meteoric acclaim and notoriety with "Carnovsky", a coming-of-age sex romp that differs remarkably from Zuckerman's previously Jamesian fiction. The extent to which the details of the Zuckerman character can be safely compared to those of Roth has been a subject of zealous debate among Roth's readers. Roth himself has weighed in on the debate, both in interviews and within his fiction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beezus_and_Ramona"title="Beezus and Ramona">
Beatrice "Beezus" Quimby, a close friend of Henry Huggins, is perpetually infuriated by the imaginative antics of her younger sister Ramona, who frequently insists upon exhibiting imaginative habits and eccentricities such as wearing her beloved homemade paper rabbit ears while pretending to be the Easter Bunny, dragging a string along behind her pretending to lead an imaginary lizard named Ralph, and being read an irritating children's book about an anthropomorphic, disgruntled steam shovel called Scoopy. Beezus is also commonly exasperated by actions on her disrespectful sister's part such as writing in a library book, inviting her classmates to a house party without the permission of her parents, and wreaking havoc during Beezus's painting class. Beezus, however, is haunted frequently by the guilt of her animosity towards Ramona and the uneasy sisterhood that they share as opposed to that displayed by her mother and Aunt Beatrice, and is finally prompted to reveal this during her tenth birthday celebration after Ramona has ruined a pair of birthday cakes intended for the party. However, after learning about memories from the childhoods of Aunt Beatrice and her mother, both of whom used to fight much like Beezus and her sister, Beatrice accepts that she can love (but may not always like) Ramona.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moominpappa_at_Sea"title="Moominpappa at Sea">
Moominpappa becomes dissatisfied with his life in Moominvalley, so he organizes for his family to set off on a journey to find a lighthouse in the sea. Upon arriving, they find the island a desolate and lonely place, inhabited only by a very unfriendly fisherman.Moominpappa wants to become lighthouse keeper, but gives up when he can't figure out how to fix the lighthouse's lantern. He resorts to other projects like building a pier, fishing and research a small lake, only to fail at all of these endeavors.Meanwhile, Moominmamma grows more and more melancholy as her dream of planting a garden never works out and her longing for home grows stronger. Eventually she starts painting the walls of the lighthouse with flowers until she's drawn all of Moominvalley. Moominmamma finds she can walk inside the painting to be at peace.Moomintroll explores the nearby woods and finds a meadow he eventually moves into. He's disappointed to find it already inhabited by ants, and asks Little My for help with getting them to move elsewhere. Little My solves the problem by exterminating the ants with petroleum, much to Moomintroll's dismay.At night, Moomintroll looks for the seafillies whom he admires greatly. The fillies are selfish and mean to Moomintroll, but he doesn't care. As he tries to attract them by waving his lamp he instead finds he's attracted the Groke. Every night, Moomintroll tries to call for the seafillies, but only ends up being accompanied by the Groke. However, slowly he starts growing a fondness for her, and when the lamp ultimately runs out of petroleum the Groke is no longer cold.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moominvalley_in_November"title="Moominvalley in November">
Set in the final days of autumn and the approach of winter, various characters begin to experience a change within themselves and decide to travel to Moominvalley where they can visit the Moomins. First amongst them is Toft, a small orphan who lives alone in a docked boat under the tarpaulin, and who has often dreamed about the Moomins despite the fact that he has never met them. Secondly is Fillyjonk, a woman who is usually obsessed with everything being neat and tidy, but who has an epiphany after suffering an accident and decides to "see people. People who talked and were pleasant and went in and out and filled the whole day so that there was no time for terrible thoughts". The Hemulen similarly begins to question his lifestyle, realising that his life as a collector and organiser of things simply isn't necessary, whilst a senile old man who cannot remember his own name but who calls himself Grandpa-Grumble decides to go to the "Happy Valley" that he remembers from the past. Alongside these figures, Mymble also decides to visit the Moomins in order to see her sister Little My whom they have adopted, and Snufkin also returns, realising that the valley is the place where he can gain inspiration to write a song.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poorhouse_Fair"title="The Poorhouse Fair">
The residents of the Diamond County Home for the Aged prepare for their annual fair, a summer celebration at which they sell their crafts and produce to the people of the nearby town. The fair is at first rained out, and the young prefect, Conner, turns the "inmates" against him by arguing with the noble Hook (94 years old, a former teacher with strong religious beliefs). After the rain clears, some residents fling small stones at Conner. The novel examines the political and religious dialectics that exist among its characters and their respective generations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Miraculous_Journey_of_Edward_Tulane"title="The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane">
Edward Tulane is a china rabbit given to a ten-year-old girl named Abilene by her grandmother in the 1930s. He enjoys a pleasant but vain life with his young mistress, who treats him with the utmost love and respect until an unfortunate incident finds him falling overboard while vacationing on the "Queen Mary". Edward spends 297 days on the ocean floor, until a storm frees him from the seabed and a passing fisherman and his buddy pull him from their fishing net. The man takes him home to his wife where he is referred to as female and wears dresses.Edward is passed from hand to hand of a succession of life-altering characters, such as a hobo and his dog and a four-year-old girl with tuberculosis and her brother. Edward's journeys not only take him far from home, but even farther from the selfish rabbit he once was. Eventually, Edward is cruelly broken against a counter top edge, repaired and then offered for sale in a doll store for several years. He is finally bought by Abilene, his original mistress, now married with a daughter of her own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Acquaintance_with_Darkness"title="An Acquaintance with Darkness">
"An Acquaintance with Darkness" is the story of 14-year-old Emily Pigbush who lives with her mother in Washington, D.C., in 1865. Emily's father died during the Civil War while fighting for the Union. Now the Pigbushes' final servant, Ella May, has left because she was freed, leaving Emily to care for her mother alone. However, Emily sometimes has the help of her close friend, sixteen-year-old Annie Surratt and Annie's brother Johnny a twenty-year-old, whose mother runs the boarding house across the street.Emily's mother is near death, and Emily hopes to go live with Annie afterward her mother dies because her father has died in a battle of Charleston. Emily's mother's only wish is that Emily at all costs "not" live with her uncle, Dr. Valentine Bransby, after her death. Soon, Emily's mother dies after hearing that the Civil War was over. But then, on April 15, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln is assassinated by John Wilkes Booth in Ford Theatre. Mrs. Mary Surratt, Annie's mother, comes under suspicion of the authorities, as she may have harbored Booth; Johnny Surrat is also wanted by the police for possibly being involved in the assassination. On Annie's advice, Emily reluctantly goes to live with her uncle, Dr. Valentine Bransby.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cast_Two_Shadows"title="Cast Two Shadows">
It is 1780, in the midst of the American Revolution, in Camden, South Carolina, and fourteen-year-old Caroline Whitaker, her step mother Sarah and her bratty older half-sister Georgia Ann are confined to one small room of their spacious Southern plantation home. Caroline is the light-skinned daughter of the plantation's owner and a slave who has been raised by Mama Sarah. British soldiers, led by Colonel Rawdon are occupying the place. The Colonel is also courting Georgia Ann. Caroline and her Negra caretaker, who is also her grandmother, Miz Melindy, travel to get her 'almost' brother Johnny. He converts into an American patriot, after being whipped and spanked by a British officer for not handing over his second most prized horse- Grey Goose, aside from the most thoroughbred blooded mare in all of St. Mark's Parish, Fearnaught. Johnny's horses make many conflicts throughout the novel, including Caroline's sore wound over Kit's dab and dabbing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_about_Moomin,_Mymble_and_Little_My"title="The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My">
Moomintroll is taking milk back home to his mother, Moominmamma when he meets The Mymble who is searching for her missing sister Little My. Together the pair go looking for her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Two_Bad_Mice"title="The Tale of Two Bad Mice">
"Two Bad Mice" reflects Potter's deepening happiness in her professional and personal relationship with Norman Warne and her delight in trouncing the rigors and strictures of middle class domesticity. For all the destruction the mice wreak, it is miniaturized and thus more amusing than serious. Potter enjoyed developing a tale that gave her the vicarious thrill of the sort of improper behaviour she would never have entertained in real life.The tale begins with "once upon a time" and a description of a "very beautiful doll's-house" belonging to a doll called Lucinda and her cook-doll Jane. Jane never cooks because the doll's-house food is made of plaster and was "bought ready-made, in a box full of shavings". Though the food will not come off the plates, it is "extremely beautiful".One morning the dolls leave the nursery for a drive in their perambulator. No one is in the nursery when Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca, two mice living under the skirting board, peep out and cross the hearthrug to the doll's-house. They open the door, enter, and "squeak for joy" when they discover the dining table set for dinner. It is "all "so" convenient!" Tom Thumb discovers the food is plaster and loses his temper. The two smash every dish on the table – "bang, bang, smash, smash!" – and even try to burn one in the "red-hot crinkly paper fire" in the kitchen fireplace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Miss_Moppet"title="The Story of Miss Moppet">
The tale opens with an illustration of a wide-eyed kitten: "This is a Pussy called Miss Moppet, she thinks she has heard a mouse!" The following illustration depicts a mouse wearing a pink bow tie and green jacket "peeping out behind the cupboard, and making fun of Miss Moppet. He is not afraid of a kitten." Miss Moppet darts at him, but misses and bumps her head on the cupboard. She hits the cupboard very hard and rubs her nose. The mouse scurries to the top of the cupboard and watches her.Miss Moppet ties a duster about her head and sits before the fire on a red hassock. The mouse's curiosity is piqued; he thinks she looks very ill, and comes sliding down the bell-pull. "Miss Moppet looks worse and worse." The mouse creeps nearer. Miss Moppet holds her head in her paws and peeks at the mouse through a hole in the duster. "The Mouse comes "very" close." Miss Moppet jumps and snags him by the tail."And because the Mouse has teased Miss Moppet—Miss Moppet thinks she will tease the Mouse; which is not at all nice of Miss Moppet." The kitten ties the mouse up in the duster then tosses it about like a ball. The mouse peeks from the hole in the duster. In the last illustration but one, Miss Moppet is seated upright on her rump and staring at the reader. The duster lies opened and empty in her paws. "She forgot about that hole in the duster", and the mouse has escaped. He dances a jig safely out of Miss Moppet's reach atop the cupboard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Will_Comfort_Toffle?"title="Who Will Comfort Toffle?">
The lonely Toffle leaves his home to look for friends, eventually finding the Miffle and rescuing her from The Groke.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Tom"title="Cold Tom">
Tom is an elf who lives with his tribe in the woods away from the "demons" in the city. He is treated with contempt due to his clumsiness and poor hearing. Tom is aware his hearing and sight appear to be going. He almost allows a group of demons to discover the tribe and fearful runs away to the demon city, which is in fact a city of humans and is soon discovered by a young "demon" named Anna. Tom begins to quickly resent the girl, thinking that she is stubby, loud, stupid, and dumb. Also, he cannot understand Anna's attachment to her family and pet, Sophie. In essence, Anna represents everything the elves are not: ungraceful and loving. Tom, like all of the other elves, does not care about other people or animals, but simply about surviving. Later, when Tom meets Anna's half brother, Joe, things grow worse. The emotionally hardened and distant Joe sees to testing Tom's abilities. At first, Joe just tests Tom's weight and body temperature, which is under freezing. But, Joe then becomes fascinated with Tom's elfin ability to become invisible by calling on the stars. When Joe forces Tom to try to become invisible while Tom is in a weakened conditions, the tool shed Tom has been living in bursts up in flames. Tom flees, but does not get far. He is found by Anna and Joe's snooping neighbor, Edie. Edie takes Tom into her home, though he resents her help. She puts up charms to keep the murderous Tribe from Tom. Despite her protection, Tom still feels that he is going to die. Each day he finds himself growing weaker and more unlike himself. With help from Anna and Joe, Tom is able to escape from Edie's home, but he then feels back into the forests of the elves. He is met by his elfin father, Larn. Larn pierces him with a spear. Anna, Joe, and Edie find Tom dying in the woods. Edie seems aloof to this fact and tells Anna and Joe to forget about him. Joe, fascinated by an elf woman nearby, does nearly this. Anna, on the other hand, stays by Tom and tries to help him get better. It is her persistence that saves Tom from dying and helps Tom turn completely human. In the end, Edie turns out to be Tom's once-elfin aunt, Edrin. She was an outcast just as Tom was and tries to help him understand why he was different from the other elves. Anna and Joe also stay by and try to help Tom learn to be human. In the end, Tom seems accepting of the fact that he has given up the beauty of the elf world for the closeness of the human world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giraffe_(novel)"title="Giraffe (novel)">
"Giraffe" is based on a true Czechoslovakian story, which Ledgard discovered while working as a journalist in the Czech Republic for "The Economist" in 2001. In 1975, on the eve of May Day, Czechoslovakian secret police dressed in chemical warfare suits sealed off the zoo in the small Czech town of Dvůr Králové nad Labem and orchestrated the slaying of the zoo's entire population of forty-nine giraffes - the largest captive herd in the world. No reason for the action was ever given, and discussion of the incident was suppressed. It remains a state secret in the Czech Republic. Ledgard recounts the story of the giraffes from their capture in Africa to their deaths far away in the Eastern Bloc.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_and_the_Secret_of_Rundoon"title="Peter and the Secret of Rundoon">
The story starts at Stonehenge, where Lord Ombra was seemingly destroyed in "Peter and the Shadow Thieves". Though weakened, he has regenerated his consciousness, using his power to possess others to gather himself together so that he can return to Rundoon.Meanwhile, warriors of the Scorpion tribe plan to invade Mollusk Island. Warned by Peter, Fighting Prawn prepares for war. Eventually, however, he is forced to surrender to the overwhelming force of the invaders and the Mollusks are enslaved.Molly and George travel to Oxford, where they discover some vital information about Peter's parents which suggests Peter himself is in danger. And indeed Lord Ombra and his fellow shadow creatures have decided that capturing Peter could help their plans. Lord Aster sails to Mollusk Island to warn and protect Peter, unaware that Molly and George have stowed away aboard his ship.Peter, wounded by the Scorpions, is kidnapped by Captain Hook along with the Lost Boys, but soon they are all captured by Lord Ombra and taken to Rundoon. There they are imprisoned in the dungeons of King Zarboff III, a cruel and vain despot in cahoots with the shadow beings.Tinker Bell joins Lord Aster in a rescue mission, but he is captured by Zarboff's men. Tink returns to the ship to warn Molly and George, but finds them trying to steal a camel and being chased by the owners. She tells Molly to use the starstuff in her locket to make the camel fly, and so they escaped and went on to find Peter, Lord Aster, and Bakari on their flying camel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fur"title="The Fur">
The Fur follows the late high school and early university years of the protagonist Michael Sullivan in an Alternate Reality version of Western Australia in the late 1990s following a meteor strike carrying an infectious and lethal fungus-like plague ('The Fur'). The entire state is under forced quarantine by Commonwealth and UN military forces.The novel revolves largely around Sullivan's struggles with his religious beliefs and dilemma on whether or not to attempt to break quarantine and start a new life in the uninfected Eastern States of Australia, at the risk of death and certain cost of abandoning his family and friends forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_for_Death_(James_novel)"title="A Taste for Death (James novel)">
In the dingy vestry of St. Matthew's Church, Paddington, two bodies have been found with their throats slashed. One is an alcoholic vagrant, whereas the other is Sir Paul Berowne, a baronet and recently resigned government minister. Poet and detective Adam Dalgliesh investigates one of the most convoluted cases of his career.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Africa_House"title="The Africa House">
"The Africa House" is an account of the life of soldier, pioneer white settler, politician and supporter of African independence Stewart Gore-Browne in relation to the building of his estate Shiwa Ngandu in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia. Originating with a chance encounter in 1996 with Gore-Browne's grandson in Lusaka, the book uses Gore-Browne's diaries, letters, personal papers and photographs as well as those of his family, and interviews with family and friends, as its sources.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Days_(Westerfeld_novel)"title="The Last Days (Westerfeld novel)">
The narrative focuses around Moz, Zahler, Pearl, Alana Ray and Minerva, in an apocalyptic New York. Odd occurrences are taking place, the sewers are gushing black water, the earth shakes, and people are inexplicably going mad.In the midst of it all, two friends begin to see their dreams realized. Moz and Zahler have been friends for six years, playing their guitars without any clear direction. They have always dreamed of forming a band, but have never managed to quite get it done. Moz meets Pearl, a mysterious girl with a knack for music, who he teams up with to save a guitar that a crazy woman throws out of her window. When they begin learning more about one another, the image of a band becomes clear. With Pearl at their head, the band begins to recruit new members and take form.As the band becomes more and more real, new members join. Alana Ray, a skilled drummer and street performer with a mysterious condition that is never quite made clear (although is most likely to be some advanced form of synesthesia), joins them under the condition that Moz pays her. However, Moz keeps this deal secret from Pearl to gain something resembling control over the band.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Amerikkkan_Blues"title="North Amerikkkan Blues">
Evan Anthony Hyde tells the story of his last few months at St. John's College Sixth Form (now Junior College) in which he receives a scholarship from the local embassy to study at Dartmouth. After enduring threats from a Jesuit teacher who dislikes Hyde and wants to take his scholarship away despite his academic performance, the eighteen-year-old leaves Belize for Dartmouth. While there, he makes new friends and learns much more than he would have wished about the world outside of Belize. After two years and many adventures, Hyde makes a decision that affects his life irrevocably.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cage_of_Butterflies"title="A Cage of Butterflies">
The story is set in a research facility (known as the "farm") involving two groups of people. The first group contains several teenagers with IQs above 150. These teenagers (Greg, Mikki, Lesley, Gordon, Gretel, Katie and Chris) call themselves the "Think Tank". However, this group is merely a smokescreen for the real subjects of the research - five seven-year-olds who are able to communicate telepathically, known as the "Babies". The Babies are called Pep, Ricardo, Ian, Rachael and Myriam. The Babies were all born around the same time in the same hospital.When the members of the first group are "contacted" by the Babies, they learn of the researchers' exploitation, and, with the help of compassionate workers at the facility (Susan and Erik), investigate the reason for the Babies' condition. The Babies need help as the head researcher, Larsen, will stop at nothing to solve the mystery. The Think Tank, as well as researcher Susan and young orderly Erik, provide this help.They trick the head researcher, John Larsen, so they can escape. The story ends with the Think Tank six years into the future. They turned the think tank into 'Think Tank Inc.', a company worth three million dollars. The Babies, Think Tank and newlyweds Erik and Susan all live together. Greg and Mikki are also married.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Next_Door_(Ketchum_novel)"title="The Girl Next Door (Ketchum novel)">
The story takes place in 1950s suburban United States, and is told in flashback form by the narrator, David.Ruth, a single mother and an alcoholic (amongst other things) has three sons: Willie, Donny, and Ralph. Ruth has gained the trust of the neighborhood children by allowing them to come freely into her home, play as rough as they wish, and even drink an occasional beer with her. Her nieces are Meg, a teen girl for whom David develops feelings and Susan, a young girl who was severely injured in a car accident and still experiences complications from it. Both come to live with their aunt after the sudden death of their parents. At first, all seems well. However, Ruth's mental state has been deteriorating over time, and the burden of having two more children to care for seems to accelerate her descent into madness.Ruth begins verbally abusing Meg. After an incident where Meg hits Ralphie when he touches her breast, Ruth beats Susan for "being in connivance" with Meg. When Meg tries to tell a police officer about the abuse, Ruth locks her in their bomb shelter, allows her boys to strip her, then leaves her bound and gagged all night. She starves her and allows the other children to burn her, beat her, and even urinate in Meg's face over the course of months, making them feel that because they have the permission of an adult, their actions are okay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Go_Near_the_Water_(novel)"title="Don't Go Near the Water (novel)">
"Don't Go Near the Water" is an episodic novel broken into ten chapters, each telling a story about the various PR officers stationed on the island, and six sequentially numbered interludes, entitled "Melora", which chronicle the romance between Ensign Max Siegel of the PR section and Melora Alba, daughter of the island's leading citizen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratking_(novel)"title="Ratking (novel)">
Police Commissioner Aurelio Zen has crossed swords with the establishment before - and lost. From the depths of a mundane desk job in Rome counting paperclips, to which he has been exiled through political fallout from the Aldo Moro kidnapping and murder, he is unexpectedly transferred to Perugia. Unbeknownst to him, favours have been called in and words have been whispered into ears. He is to take over a kidnapping case involving one of Italy's most powerful families, with control of a business empire at stake. The missing head of the family is a big benefactor of one of Italy's main political parties and pressure is being applied. Zen contends with local power politics and troubled relationships with his mother and girlfriend, while employing some distinctly unorthodox methods and skirting the borderline of the permissible in a race to get results before he is removed from the case through political pressure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Lagoon"title="Dead Lagoon">
Moonlighting, Italian police detective Zen had arranged a winter posting to his run-down home city of Venice. This is in order to investigate the disappearance of American millionaire Ivan Durridge (born in Yugoslavia as Durič) on behalf of his American ex-girlfriend. He needs the extra money to set up home with his new girlfriend Tania in Rome with room for his ageing mother.At a time when people in authority all over Italy are being prosecuted for corruption, there is a justified suspicion that Enzo Gavagnin, the head of the local Drugs Squad, is implicated. Zen therefore looks for a different case to explain his presence in Venice. He finds it in the complaints of the half crazy countess Ada Zulian that intruders are breaking into her mouldering palazzo, where his mother used to do the cleaning when he was a child. The culprits are her two nephews, anxious to develop a piece of advantageous property that the countess owns. Zen outwits them and is then outwitted by Ada Zulian. She had only wanted their attendance on her needs in old age and now refuses to prosecute them.Zen is staying at his family's old flat in the Cannaregio district, which has been cleaned up for him by his mother's friend Rosalba. At a family dinner he meets Rosalba's daughter Cristiana Morosini and soon starts an affair with her. Cristiana is the estranged wife of Dal Maschio, leader of the secessionist party Nuova Repubblica Veneta, which has risen in the wake of the Liga Nord and now looks close to success in the coming elections. For reasons of expediency, Cristiana must still appear with her husband on political occasions, however.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosi_Fan_Tutti"title="Cosi Fan Tutti">
Under a cloud again, Italian police detective Zen thinks he has found himself a backwater sinecure in Naples, Italy, where he can coast towards retirement. He is prepared to tolerate all manner of scams in return for a quiet life with pastries and a cappuccino on his desk every morning, not the least of which is a brothel on the top floor of the police station of which he is nominally in command. But corrupt politicians, shady businessmen and eminent "mafiosi" are disappearing off the streets at an alarming rate and although Zen's commitment to his work is at an all-time low, he finds himself reluctantly embroiled.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Long_Finish"title="A Long Finish">
After his adventures under sun-drenched Neapolitan skies in "Cosi Fan Tutti", Italian police detective Aurelio Zen finds himself reluctantly back in Rome, sneezing in the damp wine cellar of a retired but still powerful and connected mover and shaker. Strings are pulled and he is given another unorthodox assignment: find evidence that clears the jailed scion of an important wine-growing family, who is accused of brutal murder, in time to harvest what is anticipated to be a great vintage.Zen is confronted with the closed ranks and closed mouths of a small, remote rural town, where everyone knows the secrets of everyone else. Grappling with tangled relationships, bitter resentments and grudges reaching back to the immediate post-war years, his investigations are further distracted by meeting the young woman who thinks she is his daughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Rain_(novel)"title="Blood Rain (novel)">
Aurelio Zen gets a posting to Sicily, where he is asked to report to Rome on the work of the Direzione Investagitiva AntiMafia (DIA). Carla, his adopted daughter is there too, setting up police computers, and discovers that someone has a backdoor into the data there. She is also enjoying a flirtation with Corinna Nunziatella, an elaborately guarded woman magistrate who is also investigating the Mafia. Before this can proceed far, they are ambushed on a mountain road and their car is bombed.Zen has meanwhile been called back to Rome by the news of his mother's approaching death. This, coupled to news of Carla's death, temporarily puts him out of action, and when he returns to his headquarters in Catania he is given a clue that not everything is as it seems by a file that Corinna had sent him, supposedly as a birthday gift for Carla. This points to irregularities in the investigation of the murder of a Mafia chieftain's son and a possible Roman "third level" aiming to destabilise the powers of the old clans.Zen is more than usually at sea in the Sicilian atmosphere of double-cross and ambiguous messages in which it looks as if his own side is out to kill him. Finally he risks being taken for cross-examination by the Don of a declining clan who suspects Zen of murdering one of his henchmen. He convinces Don Gaspare that the actual murderer was a police agent who Zen had later shot. On his way back to Catania the police take revenge by blowing up the car in which he is riding.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Then_You_Die_(novel)"title="And Then You Die (novel)">
Aurelio Zen is back, but nobody's supposed to know it...After months in hospital recovering from a bomb attack on his car, Zen is lying low under a false name at a beach resort on the Tuscan coast, waiting to testify in an imminent high profile Mafia trial. He has clear instructions: to sit back and enjoy the classic Italian beach holiday. But Zen is getting restless, despite a developing romance with a mysterious and alluring occupant of a nearby sunbed, as an alarming number of people seem to be dropping dead around him. Abruptly, the pleasant monotony of beach life is cut short as the word comes and he finds himself transported to a remote and strange world far from home...where he belatedly comes to appreciate both the reach of those who want him dead and that the corpses were all supposed to be his. As ever in the Zen chronicles, the real story turns out to be much more complex. Confronted by an unexpected and unconsidered adversary, he resolves the immediate situation at the cost of involving his new girlfriend in a plot to dispose of an inconvenient corpse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medusa_(Dibdin_novel)"title="Medusa (Dibdin novel)">
When a group of Austrian cavers exploring in the Italian Alps comes across human remains at the bottom of a deep shaft, everyone assumes the death was accidental. But then the body is removed from the morgue and the Defence Ministry puts a news blackout on the case. Smelling a rat, and seeing an opportunity to embarrass their political rivals in the run-up to a cabinet change, the Ministry of the Interior puts Aurelio Zen onto the case.The search for the truth leads him into the turbulent political history of Italy during the seventies and also into obscure corners of modern-day affluent society, exposing the sordid details of a crime that everyone else had forgotten.The story is told from the view points of several of those involved and the action moves between Rome, the extreme northern province of Alto Adige, an Italian enclave and tax haven in Switzerland, and several provincial Italian cities.The focus is on movement, rather than the methodical application of the police process; Zen takes short cuts with the latter and arrives at the solution in a rush.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_Bologna"title="Back to Bologna">
Zen, an Italian police detective, is on sick leave after a stomach operation and is feeling a shadow of himself. His relationship with his partner, Gemma, is also not going well. She is about to leave for Bologna to meet her son who has something important to tell her.Meanwhile, Zen is recalled to duty and is sent to be the liaison officer for a high-profile murder investigation - in Bologna – where the local football team owner has been shot, as well as stabbed with a Parmesan knife.Whilst in Bologna, Gemma manages to get tickets to watch a live cook-off between local academic celebrity Edgardo Ugo and singing TV chef Romano Rinaldi, 'Lo Chef Che Canta e Incanta', provoked by Ugo suggesting, in a newspaper article, that Lo Chef can't cook. A series of coincidences leads to Zen being arrested when Ugo is found shot in the wake of the hilariously disastrous event.The other main characters include a couple of flatmates – a student of Ugo's and a rich kid who fancies himself an 'Ultra' football fan – and the student's illegal immigrant girlfriend, who calls herself Princess Flavia of Ruritanian, as well as the world's worst private detective, who fancies himself a Chandleresque Private Eye.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Timmy_Tiptoes"title="The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes">
The tale is set in a forest and begins with "once upon a time". Timmy Tiptoes is "a little fat comfortable grey squirrel" living in a nest thatched with leaves in the top of a tall tree with his little wife, Goody. Over the course of several days, the two collect nuts in their little sacks for the coming winter and spring, and store the nuts in hollow tree stumps near their home. Timmy wears a red jacket he removes while working, and his wife wears a pink dress and apron. When the stumps are full, the couple make use of a tree-hole that once belonged to a woodpecker. The nuts rattle "down – down – down inside", and Goody wonders how they will ever retrieve them. Timmy reminds her he will be much thinner by springtime and will be able to pass through the little hole.In an aside, the narrator tells the reader that the couple had great quantities of nuts because they never lost them, noting that most squirrels lose half their nuts because they cannot remember where they buried them. Silvertail is the most forgetful of squirrels in the wood, and, while trying to find his nuts, digs up another squirrel's hoard. A commotion erupts among the nutting squirrels, and, as ill luck would have it, a flock of birds fly by singing "Who's bin digging-up "my" nuts?" and "Little bit-a-bread and-"no"-cheese!" One bird finds a perch in the bush where Timmy is working and continues to sing about digging up nuts. The other squirrels take notice, suspect Timmy of robbing others of their hoards, rush upon him, scratch and cuff him, chase him up a tree, and stuff him with great difficulty through the woodpecker's hole. Silvertail suggests they leave him there until he confesses.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Tinker_in_Oz"title="Mister Tinker in Oz">
One night in Kansas, Dorothy meets Ezra P. Tinker, the inventor of Tik-Tok the clockwork man, and he tells her the thousand year guarantee has just run down. With the help of Mister Tinker's speckoscope and Julius Quickscissors they return to Oz. They encounter a group of babies called the Widdlebits and trek across the bottomless swamp. Finally, they make it to the Emerald City, where Dorothy is able to be sent home once again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_of_Wonders"title="Year of Wonders">
The novel is written in the point of view of a housemaid named Anna Frith, on what she lives through when the plague hits her village. It is based on the history of the small Derbyshire village of Eyam that, when beset by the plague in 1666, quarantines itself in order to prevent the disease from spreading further. The plague that hit Eyam and other parts of the UK in 1665-1666 was one of many recurrences that had taken place since the Black Death of the 14th century.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_a_Fierce_Bad_Rabbit"title="The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit">
A bad rabbit finds a kindly rabbit sitting on a bench eating a carrot his mother gave him. Wanting the carrot, he takes it from the good rabbit and scratches him. Upset, the good rabbit escapes and hides in a nearby hole. Meanwhile, a hunter notices the bad rabbit sitting on the bench and mistakes him for a bird. He fires at the bad rabbit, but finds nothing but a carrot and a rabbit tail on the bench. The good rabbit then sees the bad rabbit running away without his whiskers and tail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beasts_(novella)"title="Beasts (novella)">
Set in an apparently idyllic New England college town in the 1970s, Beasts is the story of Gillian Brauer, a talented young student obsessed with her charismatic anti-establishment English professor Andre Harrow.Knowing that other girls preceded her does not deter Gillian from being drawn into the decadent world of Professor Harrow and his wife, Dorcas, the outrageous sculptor of primal totems. Gillian soon tumbles into a nightmare of carnal desire and corrupted sexual innocence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Rock_&amp;_Roll_Were_a_Machine"title="If Rock &amp; Roll Were a Machine">
Albert "Bert" Bowen, a high school junior, is still suffering from the lack of self-esteem he developed following criticism from his fifth-grade teacher. However, a developing interest in writing and racquetball and a new motorcycle, as well as support from understanding adults, help him discover who he really is.The novel is set in the same high school as "Vision Quest", but twenty years later.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_IQ_Controversy,_the_Media_and_Public_Policy"title="The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy">
Respondents on average identified themselves as slightly left of center politically, political and social opinions accounted for less than 10% of the variation in responses.Snyderman and Rothman discovered that experts were in agreement about the nature of intelligence. "On the whole, scholars with any expertise in the area of intelligence and intelligence testing (defined very broadly) share a common view of the most important components of intelligence, and are convinced that it can be measured with some degree of accuracy." Almost all respondents picked out abstract reasoning, ability to solve problems and ability to acquire knowledge as the most important elements.The study found that psychologists were in agreement about the heritability of intelligence in that almost all (94%) felt that it played a substantial role but there was disagreement regarding accuracy with half of those that felt qualified to reply in this section agreed that there was not enough evidence to estimate heritability accurately. The 214 who thought there was enough evidence gave an average estimate of .596 for the US white population and .57 for the US black population.The study also revealed that the majority (55%) of surveyed experts believed that genetic factors also help to explain socioeconomic differences in IQ.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Break_No_Bones"title="Break No Bones">
Brennan and her students are working on a site of prehistoric graves on Dewees Island, South Carolina (a barrier island), when a decomposing body is uncovered in a shallow grave off a lonely beach. Brennan is then called upon to discover what is happening when other bodies begin showing up all around the Charleston area. The story also features a romantic subplot, where Brennan must choose between two men, sometime lover Detective Andrew Ryan and estranged husband Janis "Pete" Peterson, deciding where her heart lies. She also deals with Emma Rousseau, friend and local coroner, who has terminal cancer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Betrayal_of_Bindy_Mackenzie"title="The Betrayal of Bindy Mackenzie">
The novel follows Bindy Mackenzie, a Year 11 student at Ashbury High in Sydney. She is a perfectionist and focussing obsessively on her studies. When Bindy begins Year 11, she is disgusted to discover that she must take part in FAD, a mandatory course aimed at helping teenagers deal with the issues that face them.Her teacher, Try Montaine, an American English teacher, takes a strong interest in each of the members of Bindy's FAD group. The FAD course presents Bindy with a rather shocking scenario – she discovers that she is widely disliked by most of her peers, due to her arrogant and precocious attitude. Bindy begins a mission to seek revenge on her classmates, Bindy also falls ill from a strange illness that only contributes to these problems.Bindy slowly realises the error of her ways and tries to make amends with her FAD group, Her better attitude helping her peers to gradually learn to enjoy Bindy's company as she changes as a person. In the meantime, Finnegan Blonde, Bindy's partner from her FAD group, presents a possible love interest for Bindy as one of the first people to recognise her as friendly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hammer_of_Eden"title="The Hammer of Eden">
It is about a group of people living together in a commune cut off from the rest of the world. When their commune is threatened by a plan to build a dam, they turn desperate and devise a devious plan to arm-twist the governor of California to abandon the project. They transform themselves into eco-terrorists and threaten to start an earthquake if their demands are not met. They set off a series of earthquakes using a stolen seismic vibrator truck from an oil firm. Their leader is an illiterate man called Priest who is helped by a seismology student called Melanie in his plans. Judy Maddox, an FBI agent, is the only one who can stop them and the rest of the story revolves around how she tries to do so.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lola_Rose"title="Lola Rose">
In the beginning, Jayni's mother, Nikki Fenton, wins £10,000 lottery money on a scratchcard. They decide to not tell Jayni's father, Jay, who they fear will spend it on his friends on drinks at the pub or losing it by going to a betting shop. However, Nikki decides to tell Jay anyway because he reveals he has left his job and is joining a mini-cab firm but needs to provide the car. Jay, Nikki, Jayni and her little brother, Kenny, go out to T.G.I. Friday's and spend a lot of money on an elaborate meal and drinks. Jayni fears for herself because as Nikki and Jay "drank lots" it would almost always "end in a fight". Jay gets angry at Nikki for becoming drunk and when they return home, he starts shouting at her. As Jay goes to hit Nikki, she tells Jay to let her put the kids to bed first. However Jayni refuses to go to bed and as a result, Jay gets angry and hits both Jayni and Nikki, he then leaves the house. This is the last straw for Nikki. She had previously put up with the violent nature from her husband, but now he had turned to violence against Jayni, Nikki felt they had to leave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_September"title="The Last September">
Although "The Last September" was first published in 1929, a preface was written for this text decades later to be included in the second American edition of this novel. Concerned that readers unfamiliar with this particular chapter of Irish history would not fully comprehend the anxieties of these times, Bowen takes great pains to explain the particulars of both her writing process and the political reasons for the unsettled atmosphere felt throughout the text, palpable even in its most seemingly serene moments. Of all her books, Bowen notes, "The Last September" is "nearest to my heart, [and it] had a deep, unclouded, spontaneous source. Though not poetic, it brims up with what could be the stuff of poetry, the sensations of youth. It is a work of instinct rather than knowledge—to a degree, a 'recall' book, but there had been no such recall before." While Bowen's own beloved family home, Bowen's Court, remained untouched throughout "The Troubled Times" this preface explores the ramifications for witnesses of “Ambushes, arrests, captures and burning, reprisals and counter-reprisals” as "The British patrolled and hunted; the Irish planned, lay in wait, and struck.” "I was the child of the house from which Danielstown derives" Bowen concludes, "nevertheless, so often in my mind's eye did I see it [Bowen’s Court] burning that the terrible last event in "The Last September" is more real than anything I have lived through."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bed_and_Breakfast_Star"title="The Bed and Breakfast Star">
"The Bed and Breakfast Star" is about a girl called Elsa, who is the narrator of the story. She has a sunny disposition and loves to tell jokes, especially when she is trying to cheer up the people around her. As a child, Elsa lived happily with her mum until her mum fell in love with "Mack the Smack", a Scottish man whom Elsa dislikes because he is extremely short-tempered and, as the nickname suggests, frequently uses smacking as a punishment. Elsa's mum married Mack and together they had Pippa, Elsa's nearly five-year-old sister, and Hank, her infant brother. Mack has several jobs that only last a certain period of time, which means that the uncertainty surrounding money is always evident to the children. After several house moves, including in with Mack's mother in Scotland, the family is finally evicted and forced to move in a bed and breakfast hotel ironically named "The Royal Hotel", which used to be a grand place but has become dirty and poorly maintained by ambivalent staff. Elsa nicknames the hotel "The Oyal Htl" due to the missing lettering on the hotel front. Elsa watches her family become more and more disheartened and down-trodden as they are forced to live in one room and stigmatised due to their status, and tries to help by making jokes, but this is not usually appreciated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicky_Angel"title="Vicky Angel">
Vicky and Jade are best friends. Vicky is a flamboyant and ungoing girl while Jade is shy and timid and usually follows Vicky's lead. After fighting about which extra-curricular activity to take together and arguing as Jade finally sticks up for herself, Vicky dashes out on to the road without looking and is struck by a car. Jade travels to the hospital in the ambulance with Vicky, however Vicky dies from her internal injuries in hospital. Distraught and in shock, Jade runs from the hospital. However, just an hour after her death Vicky appears to Jade as a spirit, although she is the only one who can see or hear her. Jade attends Vicky's funeral, and afterwards is revisited by Vicky's spirit. When Jade returns to school, she is encouraged to attend the fun-running activity Vicky had signed them up for. There, she makes an unlikely friend in Fatboy Sam, who Jade originally assumed had a crush on Vicky; he later reveals it was on Jade that he had a crush. However, Vicky is snide about her friendship with Sam, influencing Jade into saying cruel things to him, although he forgives her.As Jade tries to get used to life without Vicky, or at least without a Vicky that other people can see, Vicky's spectre becomes more and more controlling. Jade is forced to do as Vicky wishes, and can't get on with her life and make new friends. Jade finally goes to a Bereavement counsellor and discovers how to control Vicky. Eventually she must attend the inquest into Vicky's death. During it, she is overcome with guilt and emotion when trying to recall Vicky's death and she flees the court building, running down the street and into the road where she is nearly hit by a car. Vicky appears and pulls her back. Vicky tells Jade that the accident was not her fault, freeing her from her guilt. After saving Jade's life, Vicky grows angel wings and can finally move on, floating into the sky and leaving Jade to move on with her life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Break_(novel)"title="Clean Break (novel)">
The main character is a young girl named Emily, who lives with her mother Julie, her half sister Vita, and her half brother Maxie in their grandmother Ellen's house. Although her dad is technically only her stepfather, Em and her siblings all love him completely. Em is highly sensitive and is very insecure about her weight. On Christmas Day, Em, Vita and Maxie receive their presents. Vita receives a reindeer hand-puppet called Dancer (owing to the reindeer wearing a tutu and ballet shoes), Maxie gets a set of Caran D'Ache felt tip pens and Em gets an 'emerald' ring.Later that day Em overhears a conversation her dad is having and realises that he is having a secret affair. Em confronts her father, and he owns up to his cheating, and by the next morning he has left.After Em's step-dad walks out, the rest of the family struggle to get along without him. Em, Vita and Maxie are all convinced that Dad will come back. Dad later calls Mum to tell her that he will be taking the kids out on New Year's Day.On New Year's Day, the children go and visit their father, Frankie, at the home of his new partner Sarah, but she is rude, selfish and obnoxious. On a visit they take to a park, Em, Vita and Maxie are astounded to find their Dad passionately kissing Sarah, in a way that he would never do to their mum. Sarah is an aspiring actress and both she and Frankie move to Scotland quite soon into their relationship. When they arrive home, they all reject their Dad's goodbyes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_School_Bus_In_the_Time_of_the_Dinosaurs"title="The Magic School Bus In the Time of the Dinosaurs">
The kids are transforming their classroom into Dinosaur Land for Parents Night, as they are studying dinosaurs. Ms Frizzle then gets a letter from an old high school friend who is now a paleontologist and she decides to take the class on a trip to the dig. When she discovers that they are missing the bones of some Maiasaurs, she turns the bus into a time machine to travel back to the age of dinosaurs to find the bones. The class sees dinosaurs and learns the name of the different periods of the era and other information.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extras_(novel)"title="Extras (novel)">
Three years after the events of "Specials" freed the world from the pretty lesions which forced them to be obedient, society is beginning to settle into a new form. Each city has been forced to find a way of dealing with the new pressure on its resources, caused by the freed creativity of the inhabitants. In Japan, one city has chosen a "reputation economy", rewarding citizens either with merits for productive tasks which help the city or with face rank, a measure of popularity. Every inhabitant has their own feed and obsessively tracks their face rank, hoping to gain fame and lose their status as an "extra". Aya Fuse tries to win fame as a "kicker", or journalist, filming stories with her modified hovercam Moggle and posting them for the whole city to see...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathy's_Book"title="Cathy's Book">
The book follows a teenage girl whose boyfriend has left her. Wanting to find out why, she follows clues with her best friend. These lead to various explanations.In a framing device, young and artistic Cathy left the book for Emma, her best friend, so that the latter can use the clues provided and figure out where Cathy went. The story begins when Cathy is dumped by her boyfriend, Victor. The next morning she notices a strange mark on her arm, but sets it aside as a spider bite. She and Emma later determine that the mark on her arm is in fact a needle mark from a blood test Victor performed on Cathy. While trying to confront Victor about the blood test, she encounters various members of the mythical, immortal, Chinese Eight Ancestors, as well as adventure and mystery. It also includes phone numbers which readers can call in order to leave a message for Bianca, Cathy, Victor, Emma, and even Tsao's business, Airwell Organisation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsewhere_(Zevin_novel)"title="Elsewhere (Zevin novel)">
Fifteen-year-old Liz is hit and killed by a taxi. When she wakes up, she finds herself in the cabin of a ship named the SS Nile. She meets her idol, who turns out to be dead, like her. The ship arrives to an island called 'Elsewhere'. In Elsewhere, everyone ages backwards until they reach 7 days old and then are sent back to Earth as a baby to be reborn. Liz meets her grandmother, who is very young by now, and takes care of Liz. Liz watches her own funeral from the 'Observation Deck', or OD in short, and learns that though she is able to see Earth, she is not allowed to make contact with anyone there. Liz can not get over the fact that she is dead, and spends every day at the OD. While at the OD, she learns of a place named 'The Well' that is rumored to be a place where someone who is in Elsewhere can make contact with someone on Earth. Liz's first attempt to reach Earth is unsuccessful. She gets caught by her grandmother right before she enters the water. The second attempt, however, is successful. She is able to reach out to her brother but is caught by Owen, whom she met on the island. Liz returns to her grandmother and is forced to get an 'advocate,' meet with an adviser, and get something similar to a job to take up her time and hopefully relieve her mind of her tragic depression. Liz picks animals, who, like humans, age backward in Elsewhere. She discovers that she can actually talk to animals. Owen contacts Liz's brother for her, taking a dive to The Well. Liz later learns that Owen was married to a woman named Emily on Earth, and when checking the list of new passengers, she finds Emily's name on it. As expected, Emily arrives at Elsewhere a few days later. Owen, Liz, and her grandmother meet Emily on her day of arrival at the ship. Emily is surprised to see Owen, and accepts Owen's request for their relationship to continue. However, after a while, Emily decides to 'break up' with Owen, claiming that since she is in her 30s now and Owen is young, the feeling is very awkward. Owen realizes that he has developed feelings for Liz. Liz, meanwhile, is trying to get back to Earth by 'early release', but is stopped again by Owen. This time Liz accepts her life in Elsewhere. Liz continues to age backward and works until age of 6. At her release ceremony, she is reunited with her roommate from the ship. Owen is only 2 when Liz is released, and throughout her journey to Earth, she thinks of Elsewhere. The novel ends with Liz being sent down the river and being reborn into her new life on Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel's_Gift"title="Gabriel's Gift">
Rex Bunch, Gabriel's father, is a musician who, for a short time back in the 1970s, played in pop icon Lester Jones's band. However, while (the fictitious) Lester Jones is still going strong almost thirty years later, Rex has been leading a quiet and modest life without a regular income together with his live-in partner, Christine, Gabriel's mother, who back in the good old days designed trendy clothes for various rock stars. Gabriel's twin brother Archie died while still little, and in many ways the family of three still live and think according to the unwritten laws of the late 1960s and 1970s, despising anything remotely connected with middle class mentality, advocating universal freedom, and smoking the occasional joint.When Christine has had enough of Rex and his lazy, good-for-nothing ways, she throws him out of the house, and for the first time in decades Rex has to fend for himself. While Christine herself gets a job as a waitress in a bar and hires an au pair from some Eastern European country to look after Gabriel, Rex, left to his own devices, ends up in a shabby bedsit a few blocks away from his former home but even there has difficulty paying the rent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Six_Sacred_Stones"title="The Six Sacred Stones">
This novel is a sequel to Matthew Reilly's previous novel, "Seven Ancient Wonders", which ended with the Golden Capstone reassembled atop the Great Pyramid at Giza, and the ritual of power performed to grant one nation a thousand years of unchallenged power - invincibility, as shown by the end of the book, which is won, unknowingly, by Australia. The Six Sacred Stones picks up eighteen months later - 20 August 2007 - on Easter Island, the geographical opposite of the Great Pyramid, when seven men use a second Capstone to nullify the power of the Tartarus sunspot and remove Australia's invincibility.In China, Professor Max Epper (known as Wizard) is investigating the tomb of Chinese Philosopher Laozi, owner of the Philosopher's Stone. With his research partner, Yobu 'Tank' Tanaka, Wizard discovers the cryptic message referring to the Tartarus Sunspot and the use of the Sa-Benben, or Firestone, the top piece of the Capstone from the previous book. They find another message, saying that the first pillar must be laid 100 days before the Return. Wizard sends a coded message to Jack West in Australia, just before a contingent of Chinese military arrive to capture them, intended to use Wizard's knowledge to find the Six Sacred Stones. Jack West receives Wizard's message, just before the farm is attacked by the Chinese army, participating in the Talisman Sabre military exercises. West escapes to the "Halicarnassus", his private plane, with Lily, whom he adopted at the end of the previous book; Alby Calvin, Lily's friend; Zoe and Sky Monster, who are visiting the farm. As they leave, Jack grabs the Firestone from its hiding place, along with Wizard's research journal, and reads it whilst travelling to Dubai.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulekha_(novel)"title="Indulekha (novel)">
Indulekha is a graceful Nair girl with good intelligence, artistic talent. She is a young and educated, knowledgeable woman with education in English and Sanskrit, who is in love with a young man, Madhavan, the hero of the novel, who is also presented in ideal colours, a member of newly educated Nayar class graduated from the University of Madras. He dressed in western clothes, but at the same time he kept a long tuft of hair, according to the Nair custom. The story details how the matrilineal society of those times, encourages Namboothiris to start a relationship with Indulekha. Indulekha promptly snubs the old Nambudiri man, but Madhavan in haste runs away from the household, to Bengal. There he makes a lot of good friends. In the end, he arrives back and is united with Indulekha. They then leave to Madras, present day Chennai. The story emphasizes inter-caste marriage.The old Namboothiri represents the decadence of feudalism and its polygamous practices. Indulekha, the novel's educated heroine, dramatizes the resistance of a progressive Nair woman. She refuses to succumb to the oppression of the Namboothiri and marries Madhavan, who stands up to the social evils of the period.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infernal_Devices_(Jeter_novel)"title="Infernal Devices (Jeter novel)">
The novel takes place primarily in Victorian London.The story begins as a mysterious Brown Leather Man enters George Dower's watch shop with a strange device in need of repair, claiming it was made by George's father, a brilliant watchmaker skilled in all forms of clockwork devices. George, who has inherited his father's shop, but not his father's talent, agrees to look at the device, although he knows his chances of repairing it are slim at best. George is quickly dragged into an ongoing conflict involving the Royal Anti-Society, the Godly Army and the Ladies Union for the Suppression of Carnal Vice. His investigation leads him to a strange neighborhood in London, Wetwick, which is inhabited by denizens who are a hybrid of humans and fish.Another of George's customers are an impatient man who wears blue-glass spectacles and his female companion, who both use a slang which is strange to George as a Victorian Englishman but which modern readers will recognize as twentieth-century American vernacular. (The strangers are not time travelers but a Victorian English citizens who possessed a device which enabled them to view what is, for them, the future; they have learned late twentieth-century slang through lip-reading.)As the story develops, George realizes that his father was more skilled than even he knew; his father had begun experimenting with building clockwork humans, finishing with an automaton who is an exact double of George himself, but which possesses superior sexual abilities and a skill with the violin comparable to Paganini. Inevitably, a woman abducts George in the mistaken belief that she has captured his clockwork twin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jupiter_Theft"title="The Jupiter Theft">
The initial part of the novel mixes near-future thriller and disaster novel scenarios, focussing on the discovery of a moving gamma-ray source headed towards Earth from the direction of Cygnus X-1, and the diversion of a Chinese-American Jupiter mission to investigate the new Solar System intruder. As the Chinese and Americans are mutually antagonistic politically, espionage and suspicion must be overcome for the Jupiter Mission to go ahead.Once the Mission intercepts the intruder the story shifts into an alien contact scenario. The "intruder" is actually the silicate core of a Jovian planet, orbited by a moon and five immense alien spacecraft. The Jupiter Mission is intercepted in mid-space by aliens, dubbed Cygnans, riding on matter-annihilation powered "broomsticks". The mission is essentially destroyed, with the surviving crew taken alive as specimens for a Cygnan zoo. Now imprisoned, the Sino-American crew attempt contact with the Cygnans and seek to discover their true purpose in appearing in the Solar System. Using a Moog synthesizer and their natural gift of perfect pitch, one of the crew learns first to understand and then "speak" the Cygnan musical language, and is educated by Cygnan didactic films.They discover the Cygnans have travelled for 6000 light years - and six million earth years - escaping a home planet orbiting the progenitor star of Cygnus X-1, having discovered it was on course to collapse (forming the black hole that now occupies that point in space), searching for a new home; and, to do so, have raided numerous star systems for Jupiter-mass "gas giant" planets to use as fuel. The stop-off at Sol proves to be a particularly significant one as, having found every system they visited with habitable planets (whilst heading progressively further from the Galactic Center of the Milky Way) to already be populated with intelligent beings, their next destination is Andromeda, with the hope that a new galaxy may offer better results.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_of_the_Purple_Dragon"title="Garden of the Purple Dragon">
Ping is living on the top of Tai Shan mountain trying to raise Kai, Danzi's son. Ping learns that Kai can shape-change and turns into firstly a soup ladle. They are living happily until one day, their goat is found with its throat slit. Hua also returns to Ping on a red phoenix's back. Ping and Kai flee but they run into the necromancer. After Hua uses his newfound powers to hold off the necromancer while Ping and Kai escape, Ping, Kai and Hua are later captured by guards and taken to Liu Che, Emperor of China, and Ping's 'friend' who drops all charges against them. Ping stays in the palace and meets Princess Yangxin and the two become friends, and the Princess begins to teach Ping how to read and write, since she is unable to do so already. Ping eventually convinces the Emperor to search for any other Dragon Keepers, as she hopes to find her family. She, Kai and Dong Fang Suo (Fatso as Kai had begun to call him) go to a village in search of the next Dragon Keeper. But they do not find Ping's family there, instead, a boy named Jun is taken to be instructed as a Dragonkeeper. Ping becomes jealous when Kai seems to prefer Jun over her. During the journey back to the palace, Ping is nearly killed in an accident and left for dead, but she survives and finds her real family. After staying with them for a short time, she decides to return to the palace for Kai. However the Necromancer is there, bleeding Kai. They duel and Ping, without Kai, escapes to warn the Emperor who reveals he is in league with the Necromancer. She is stripped of her position as Imperial Dragonkeeper and taken off to be sacrificed. During the sacrifice, Dong Fang Suo, Jun, Hua and Kai come to her aid and they defeat the necromancer though Dong Fang Suo is sadly killed (who says it was the Emperor who ordered him and the necromancer to make the accident that almost killed Ping before he dies). While Jun takes his body away, Ping and Kai (Ping had let Hua go free with other rats) escape with Princess Yangxin, who asks them to go with her to the Duke's at the Kunlun Mountains, and the two agree, hoping to find a place to live in safety from the Empire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Breed_of_Heroes"title="A Breed of Heroes">
Set in the 1970s, ‘’A Breed of Heroes’’ follows the deployment of young British Army officer Charles Thoroughgood on a four-month emergency tour of Northern Ireland. Charles is new to the army and the difficulty he has with adjusting to army life adds to the complications faced in Northern Ireland. Being an Oxford graduate at a time when over 90% of army officers were school leavers makes him a conspicuous target for his eccentric Commanding Officer’s attention, as well as three to four years older than his fellow Second Lieutenants.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_on_Fire_(Williams_novel)"title="City on Fire (Williams novel)">
The story begins shortly after the point where "Metropolitan" left off, with Aiah, the previous novel's protagonist, arriving in "Free Caraqui" to assist Constantine in his ambitions. In Caraqui, Constantine is confronted with intrigues among the other power players from the revolution, counter-coups, and war with the surrounding metropolises. He must also deal with the consequences of enlisting one of his more disturbing allies, Taikoen. Centuries previous, Taikoen was a powerful mage whose name passed into legend; he eventually transformed into a "hanged man," an entity of pure plasm whose only remaining drive is to possess other human beings and use their bodies to experience sensual pleasures until his victims die extremely gruesome deaths as a side effect of the possession. Constantine had made a pact with Taikoen to provide him bodies to feed on in exchange for destroying certain of his enemies, but is now wracked with guilt for doing this and is conflicted between his need to use Taikoen to further his ambitions and his worry that he has unleashed a monster he cannot control.Aiah eventually grows to become a minor power in her own right in Caraqui, serving as a government liaison to some Barkazi mercenary units Constantine has hired to defend Caraqui (among many others). Aiah befriends a military mage from one of those units who helps her eventually destroy Taikoen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Put_That_Hair_in_My_Toothbrush?"title="Who Put That Hair in My Toothbrush?">
The story starts by having chapters between a girl named Megin and her brother Greg, who are in the 7th and 9th grade, respectively. The book follows their various arguments and misadventures while exploring the thorny issue of sibling rivalry, giving both sibling's very own perspective on their disagreements and thoughts.For Greg, the story follows his love life, and how he struggles between the choice of two girls, while Megin's story mainly follows her new relationship with Emile and Zoe, which are two of Megin's new friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_Evernight"title="The Battle of Evernight">
The war, detailed in the previous books in the trilogy, continues between the immortals High King Angavar and Prince Morragan. Unable to return to the Fair Realm until they find the last remaining gate, the protagonist, Tahquil, along with her friends Caitri and Viviana, vow to find the gate and return to their homeland.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire,_Bed,_and_Bone"title="Fire, Bed, and Bone">
The story is narrated by a nameless hunting dog, as witness to the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381. She does her best to survive while trying to raise her own puppy Fleabane after the others were brutally mauled to death by a wild cat, tracking her captive owners Rufus and Comfort as they are tried for heresy. Branford's martianist technique (see Craig Raine) creates a more primal narrative voice in contrast with the suspected response of the reader, but themes including maternal affection and honour unite man and dog.One catalog summary:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_of_Gods"title="River of Gods">
The novel follows a number of different characters' viewpoints on and around the date of 15 August 2047, the centenary of India's partition and independence from the colonial British Raj. This future India has become balkanized into a number of smaller competing states, such as Awadh, Bharat, and Bangla. The global information network is now inhabited by artificial intelligences, phonetically called "aeais" in the novel, of varying levels of intelligence.Aeais higher than level 2.5 (able to pass the Turing test and imitate humans) are banned, and their destruction ("excommunication") is the responsibility of "Krishna Cops", like Mr. Nandha. While some pockets of the subcontinent are still steeped in ancient tradition and values, mainstream culture is replete with aeais in TV entertainment and robotic swarms in defense. During such a time, Ranjit Ray steps down from his control of Ray Power, a key energy company, and the responsibility falls on his son Vishram Ray. The playboy Vishram is struggling to make it on his own as a stand-up comedian in Scotland when he is flown back to Varanasi to assume his role at Ray Power, for which he finds himself terribly ill-equipped but eventually surprisingly effective. He learns that his company is working on harvesting zero-point energy from other universes, and sees the particle collider built by his father with the help of Odeco, a clandestine investment firm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Clancy's_Op-Center_(novel)"title="Tom Clancy's Op-Center (novel)">
Renegade South Korean soldiers set off a bomb in Seoul during a festival and make it look like it was done by North Korea. Op-Center must prove that North Korea had nothing to do with it before the situation gets hostile. To make matters worse, a rogue general plans to launch some nuclear missiles at Tokyo, Japan intending to start a war against North Korea.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe's_Honour"title="Sharpe's Honour">
Major Pierre Ducos plots to broker a peace between France and Spain, offering to restore King Ferdinand VII to the Spanish throne in exchange for the Spanish signing a peace treaty and breaking their alliance with Britain. He offers the Spanish priest and Inquisitor Father Hacha and his brother, the brutal Partisan leader "El Matarife" ("The Slaughterman"), a huge sum of money for their assistance.He then has his agent, the extraordinarily beautiful Marquesa de Casares el Grande y Melida Sabada (born Helene Leroux), to write a letter to her husband claiming Sharpe tried to rape her. Guided by Father Hacha, the Marques, a Spanish nobleman of very high rank, challenges Sharpe to a duel. Sharpe accepts, mistakenly thinking it is due to his having slept with Helene (as have many others). Just after Sharpe disarms his opponent, Sharpe's commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Leroy, shows up and ends the sword fight, thereby saving Sharpe's career, as Wellington has forbidden dueling. That night, the Marques is murdered by El Matarife. Sharpe is charged with the crime, found guilty by court-martial and sentenced to death. Wellington cannot intervene, fearing for the fragile British-Spanish alliance. However, his friend, Major Michael Hogan, arranges for another condemned man to impersonate Sharpe and be hanged in his place (in exchange for a younger brother's life), sending Sharpe to search for Helene to find out what is going on.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floodland_(novel)"title="Floodland (novel)">
"Floodland" is set in the near future where most of the United Kingdom is covered by water. The story is about a ten-year-old girl named Zoe who is left behind after her parents leave the island before the floods. She is left alone in the ruins of Norwich but escapes to Eels Island (Ely Cathedral) where she discovers a sinister society run by a strange boy named Dooby. Will she ever find her parents?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wolf_Leader"title="The Wolf Leader">
"Le Meneur de Loups" is set around 1780 in Dumas' native town of Villers-Cotterêts, and is supposedly based on a local folk-tale Dumas heard as a child. The story concerns Thibault, a shoe-maker, who is beaten by the gamekeeper of the Lord of Vez for interfering with the lord's hunting. Afterwards he encounters a huge wolf, walking on its hind legs like a man, who offers him vengeance; Thibault may wish harm on any person in return for one of his own hairs for each wish. To seal the agreement, the two exchange rings. As a result of this bargain he also finds himself able to command the local wolves, and hence gradually gains the reputation of being a werewolf.Thibault's first two wishes kill the gamekeeper and injure the Lord of Vez. The wishes turn two hairs on his head long and red, as do his subsequent ones, which, though equally successful, also backfire against him in unexpected ways, leaving him scorned and hated by others in his community. Finally one of his wishes causes him to trade bodies with Lord Raoul of Vauparfond, who is having an affair with the wife of the Count de Mont-Gobert. Caught with the lady by the count as the result of an earlier wish against Lord Raoul, he is mortally wounded. He manages to keep himself alive until transferred back into his own body, only to find himself trapped in his own home, to which the townsfolk have set fire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_Coast_Ahead"title="Enemy Coast Ahead">
Gibson joined the RAF prior to the war, and he recounts the early stages of combat and the daily struggle with first the Handley Page Hampden and then the Avro Manchester aeroplanes on long and arduous missions into enemy airspace. He also clearly recounts the issues facing the early pilots "taking the war to Germany" from within what seemed an almost amateurish Bomber Command. Subsequently, he flew the renowned Avro Lancaster. He quickly learned how to stay alive and rapidly grew in experience and maturity, rising from Pilot Officer to a highly decorated Wing Commander.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_About_Ping"title="The Story About Ping">
Ping, the duck, lives on a boat on the Yangtze River in China. Every day he and his duck family are taken by their owner to feed on the riverbank. Later, when it is evening, Ping is the last duck to return to the boat, so he hides to avoid being spanked. The following day Ping, feeling lost, begins to swim in search of his family. Along the way, Ping observes some cormorant fishing birds. A boy captures Ping for his family's dinner, but the boy releases Ping that evening. Upon being released, he sees his master's boat. He hurries to return to his family knowing he will be the last duck again, but this time he accepts the punishment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hothouse_(novel)"title="Hothouse (novel)">
Set in a far future, the Earth has locked rotation with the Sun, and is attached to the now-more-distant Moon, which resides at a Trojan point, with cobwebs spun by enormous spider-like plants. The Sun has swollen to fill half the sky and, with the increased light and heat, the plants are engaged in a constant frenzy of growth and decay, like a tropical forest enhanced a thousandfold. The plants – many now omnivores – have filled all the ecological niches on the land and in the air, many evolving primitive nervous systems and, in some cases, eyes; of the animals in the forest only the descendants of four species of social insects remain – tigerflies (evolved from wasps), tree-bees, plant-ants and termights (from termites) – along with small groups of humans (a fifth of the size they are now); all other land and air animals have been driven to extinction by the vegetable kingdom, apart from a few shore dwellers. The humans live on the edge of extinction, within the canopy layer of a giant banyan tree that covers the continent on the day side of the Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divided_Kingdom"title="Divided Kingdom">
The story begins with Parry's younger self being whisked away from his bed and his family in the dead of night and loaded into a van occupied with others in the same situation. From there the story continues in Thorpe Hall, a place best described as a hostel for those yet to be arranged into their defining humor. Whilst staying at the Hall, the protagonist and his young companions begin to learn of their fate and of the 'Rearrangement'. Following a short time in the hall, the four humors are explained to the children, Sanguine, Phlegmatic, Choleric and Melancholic.Shortly after, the protagonist is taken to see Mr. Reek, one of the teachers at Thorpe Hall. He is told that he will be moved to a new location where he will be integrated into a new family suited to a person of his type. He is also given his name, Thomas Parry, which is used for the majority of the remaining story. After a time, Thomas is transported via train to his new home where he meets his new father and sister, Victor and Marie Parry. During the remainder of his childhood, Thomas settles into his new environment easily, adopting the Sanguine attitude and persona.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Counterlife"title="The Counterlife">
The novel is divided into five parts, each of which presents a variation on the same basic situation. Parts I and IV are independent of any other part in the novel, whereas Parts II, III, and V form a more or less continuous narrative.Part I, "Basel," opens with what appears to be an excerpt from the diary of Jewish novelist Nathan Zuckerman. Nathan talks about his brother, Henry Zuckerman, a suburban dentist who had been having an affair with his assistant Wendy. Henry, however, has developed a serious heart condition, and the medicine has made him impotent. The only alternative to the medication is a potentially life-threatening operation. Henry, unwilling to surrender the possibility of sex, turns to his estranged brother for advice. Nathan tries to dissuade Henry from doing the operation, and tells him that he will eventually adjust, but Henry only becomes increasingly desperate with time.At this point the narration shifts into the third person, revealing that this "diary entry" was in actuality the eulogy that Nathan had planned to give at Henry's funeral: the operation had killed him. Nathan decides not to give the eulogy, however, concluding that it would merely embarrass his brother's family. At the funeral, Henry's wife Carol delivers the eulogy instead, in which she attributes the operation to Henry's love for her. Nathan is skeptical of her sincerity and wonders how much she knew of her husband's multiple affairs. He also pities his brother, whom he characterizes as a man so desperate to escape his middle-class existence that he preferred death to its stifling stability.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cold_Case"title="A Cold Case">
"A Cold Case" follows real-life chief investigator Andy Rosenzweig from the Manhattan District Attorney's office as he investigates the 1970 murders of Richie Glennon and Pete McGinn, a case which was seemingly closed too soon. An ex-con, Frank Gilbert Koehler, is finally arrested in 1997.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_City_Radio"title="Lost City Radio">
After a ten-year insurrection set in a nameless South American country in which the totalitarian government defeated a rebel group, the government has eliminated all indigenous languages and renamed all places as numbers; radio is the only remaining convenience. The protagonist, Norma, is the voice of a popular radio show that attempts to reconnect war refugees with their families. Yet Norma too has lost during the war: her husband disappeared on a trip to a jungle village called "1797". One day a boy arrives from "1797" along with a list of missing for Norma to read over the radio, jarring Norma to recall the details of her life with her husband and his possible fate.Though the novel is set in Latin America it does not contain a single word of Spanish. It has been remarked for the ability to describe the people's sense of displacement
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Looking-Glass"title="The Looking-Glass">
Set in the mythical town of Reedyville, Alabama, "The Looking-Glass" is a mosaic of multiple character stories and histories, interwoven in a non-linear fashion. It has been described as akin to the "Spoon River" style of storytelling with its multiple character studies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Crossing"title="Summer Crossing">
The story takes place in New York City over the course of the hot summer of 1945.Grady McNeil, a 17-year-old upper class Protestant débutante, steadfastly refuses to accompany her parents on their usual summer ritual of travel, in this case to France. Left in the city for the summer by herself, she pursues a covert romance with Clyde Manzer, a Jewish parking lot attendant, whom she had noticed several months earlier. Grady spends time with Clyde and meets some of his friends, and in turn the couple visits the Central Park Zoo together. There, Clyde mentions his brother's bar mitzvah as a way of introducing the fact that he is Jewish.As the summer heats up, so does Grady's and Clyde's romance. The couple is soon wed in Red Bank, New Jersey. Once married, Grady meets Clyde's middle-class family in Brooklyn, and only then is the couple truly faced with the stark reality of the cultural divide between her family and his. Grady then realizes at her sister Apple's home that she is six weeks pregnant.Grady has passed over a couple of opportunities to spend time with the handsome young Peter Bell, a man of her social stature who is romantically interested in her. Eventually Grady's sister, Apple, confronts her about her relationship with Clyde. In an abrupt ending, Grady aims her speeding Buick with passengers Peter, Clyde, and Clyde's friend Gump so it will crash off the Queensboro Bridge, killing everyone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Good_Clean_Fight"title="A Good Clean Fight">
"A Good Clean Fight" is set in North Africa in the spring of 1942. The British 8th Army is fighting against Axis forces advancing across Libya towards Egypt. Captain Lampard of the British SAS has led a motorised patrol across the inland ‘sand seas’ to penetrate deep behind German lines. Lampard is a brave officer but he has a serious flaw, a tendency to be overly reckless and to bite off more than he can chew. Infiltrating a German Luftwaffe base at Barce, Lampard's patrol destroy dozens of aircraft without a single casualty. They also capture a Luftwaffe intelligence officer, Major Paul Schramm. Whilst the patrol are hiding from a German plane, Schramm escapes on foot. Lampard sends Corporal Harris out after him but by sheer fluke, Schramm manages to kill his pursuer. The Major makes it back to Barce and he takes off as a passenger in a Fieseler Fi 156 Storch to search for the SAS patrol. They find Lampard's force but the SAS soldiers damage the plane with gunfire, forcing it to crash-land, leaving Schramm injured. Lampard, disregarding warnings from his men, brings his patrol close to a known enemy base. They are fired upon by Italian troops, killing one of Lampard's men.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonie_Wondernose"title="Yonie Wondernose">
Described as a "wondernose" because he's so curious, seven-year-old Yonie has to become the man of the house when his parents go away.Yonie is a boy who was left alone with his grandmother. His father gave him the responsibility of a man, to take care of the animals on the farm, not getting distracted as a "wondernose". The main things he has to do is to supply water and get wood for his grandmother. Later, lightning strikes the barn and starts a fire. Yonie saves all the animals, living up to the responsibility given by his father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_Curse"title="Math Curse">
The nameless student begins with a seemingly innocent statement by her math teacher: "you know, almost everything in life can be considered a math problem." The next morning, the hero finds herself thinking of the time she needs to get up along the lines of algebra. Next comes the mathematical school of probability, followed by charts and statistics. As the narrator slowly turns into a "math zombie", everything in her life is transformed into a problem. A class treat of cupcakes becomes a study in fractions, while a trip to the store turns into a problem of money. Finally, she is left painstakingly calculating how many minutes of "math madness" will be in her life now that she is a "mathematical lunatic." Her sister asks her what her problem is, and she responds, "365 days x 24 hours x 60 minutes." Finally, she collapses on her bed, and dreams that she is trapped in a blackboard-room covered in math problems. Armed with only a piece of chalk, she must escape and she manages to do just that by breaking the chalk in half, because "two halves make a whole." She escapes through this "whole", and awakens the next morning with the ability to solve any problem. Her curse is broken...until the next day, when her science teacher mentions that in life, everything can be viewed as a science experiment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune's_Rocks_(novel)"title="Fortune's Rocks (novel)">
In the summer of 1899, Olympia Biddeford, a privileged, intelligent 15-year-old, and her parents have retired from the heat of Boston to the coastal resort of Fortune's Rocks. When the successful Dr. John Haskell is invited to stay, no one foresees the affair that is to follow between her and this 41-year-old man. Their passionate affair, and subsequent discovery, produce a son and leads to far-reaching consequences that span several decades. Olympia's son is taken from her immediately at birth, and despite attending a women's college she is miserable and only thinks of Haskell and her son, escaping back to the cottage at Fortune's Rocks. Here she learns of her son, Pierre Haskall, who is now three and adopted into a loving French family. In her pursuit of her child's custody, she employs Mr Tucker as a lawyer, yet realises when she wins the court case that she cannot bear to take a child from its adoptive mother. In the months that follow, Olympia transforms the Fortune's Rocks residence into a shelter for disadvantaged women, similar to her own experiences, and marries Haskell. In the ending, it is found that her son's adoptive parent has passed and she is to decide what happens to the child. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_Warfare_(book)"title="Guerrilla Warfare (book)">
"Guerrilla Warfare" is divided into seven parts: A section-by-section synopsis of the book is given below.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyvernhail"title="Wyvernhail">
Wyvernhail is the story of Hai - the mongrel daughter of the Falcon Darien and Zane's older brother, Anjay - putting her in line for the Cobriana throne (though crippled and powerless). Hai is a creature out of place - not Avian, but a falcon poisoned with cobra blood .When Hai's cousin, Oliza Shardae Cobriana, abdicates the throne of Wyvern's Court, Hai has visions only of destruction: the serpiente king Salem, dying in her arms; the dutiful falcon guard, Nicias, unable to save a generation of children; and Wyvern's Court engulfed in flames. The cause of this future is Keyi, the daughter of Oliza and Vere, who, after accidentally killing her mother, seems to enjoy chaos and death and brings it upon Wyvern's Court.Now Hai will do anything to protect her new home - even if it means betraying the very people who need her most.In order to protect the people and the world she loves from the future she sees in increasingly horrific visions, Hai is forced to throw away her own happiness and ascend the serpiente throne.Using all the power she had at her disposal, she split her soul and pushed into him her serpiente magic. Nicias kept hold of her to keep her from diving too deep into Ecl, and they were unconscious for a few days. Rosalind, who did not trust Hai, was not sure what to do about her, and apologizes and admits she had been confused for a long time. Darien, Hai's falcon mother, comes to Wyvern's Court and says that the Empress Cjarsa felt a new falcon being born. When Hai reaches for her cobra scales, she could not have it ripple across her skin, and when she tried to return to her broken falcon form, she let out a painful scream and Nicias held onto her. However, when she reached for the falcon magic of Ahnmik, she felt her magic rub upon Nicias's magic, and found that she was now truly falcon. Nicias and Oliza (grudgingly) fixed Hai's wings after they found out she was pure falcon. She and Nicias are together. Then she agrees to dance with Vere Obsidian.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Glass"title="Sea Glass">
In 1929 New England, the newly married Sexton and Honora Beecher arrange to buy the old beach house they are renting, but when the Depression strikes their small town, their hopes are dashed. Sexton goes to work at the nearby mill and becomes involved with a plan to form a union, which eventually leads to disaster; events conspire to undermine the Beechers' marriage as well as their financial hopes and dreams.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Jane"title="Boston Jane">
1855, 16-year-old Jane Peck is sailing from Philadelphia to Shoalwater Bay in Washington Territory to meet William Baldt, her betrothed. She is traveling on the poorly named ship "Lady Luck", accompanied only by her Irish maid Mary, who sadly dies during a storm. Also on the ship is Father Joseph, a French Catholic priest, hoping to baptize some of the Native Americans in the area, and Jehu Scudder, a sailor from Boston. The book flashes between the current time and Jane's past in Philadelphia, which shows how she turned from a wild little girl to a quiet and pious young lady.In the flashbacks, Jane begins to attend Miss Hepplewhite's Academy for Young Ladies, where she learns "manners". While she has a hard time fitting in, eventually she excels, becoming a favorite of Miss Hepplewhite. Her widowed father, Dr. James Peck, does not take her transformation well, telling her to "speak your mind" as well as "there is nothing fashionable about crushed bones", referring to the corset which was the fashion. The flashbacks also reveal her relationship with Sally Biddle, a girl who bullied her as a child, and her relationship with William, who at the time had been studying to be a surgeon with Jane's father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Those_Who_Hunt_the_Night"title="Those Who Hunt the Night">
The 20th century is just under way, and somebody is killing the vampires of London. Against the wishes of his fellow undead, Simon Ysidro, oldest of the London vampires, seeks the assistance of Oxford professor James Asher, former spy for the British government. Ysidro gains Asher's cooperation by threatening the life of his beautiful young wife, Lydia.Unbeknownst to Ysidro, Asher enlists the help of his wife, a physician with a keenly analytical mind. Asher prowls the streets and crypts of London with Ysidro, entering the dark underworld of the undead, as Lydia combs property records and medical journals for clues as to who might have the means and the motive to carry out the slaughter.Asher's theory is that the killer must be a vampire himself, one able to remain awake and active in the daytime. Lydia develops a theory as to how such a vampire might come to be. Together Asher and Ysidro travel to Paris to seek out the mythical eldest of all vampires, Brother Anthony, who might be either the killer himself, or the key to the killer's undoing.What they discover is a threat to the living as well as the undead. A scientist seeking to artificially endow British agents with the powers of vampires is behind the killings. The scientist's son has been transformed into a hybrid vampiric monster who can walk in the daylight, but craves the blood of other vampires to arrest the degeneration of his body. Asher and Ysidro, aided by Brother Anthony, destroy the hybrid vampire and end the threat. Ysidro leaves Asher and Lydia in peace and vanishes from their lives. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montana_1948"title="Montana 1948">
When Marie is found dead after making significant recovery before, Frank convinces the family that the cause of death was pneumonia. When David admits to seeing his uncle leave the residence hours before his babysitter's death, Wesley later confronts Frank about his actions at a family dinner at their parents' house and they reach a compromise, where Wes agrees to forget the whole incident. David, who was playing with his grandfather's pistol, once contemplates shooting Frank because of all the troubles he has given their family. Eventually, David decides to tell his parents Frank leaving their house time Marie died, implying that Frank was involved in the actions.Wesley arrests Frank, who admits to killing Marie and molesting Indian women and arrests him in the basement, in order to avoid the embarrassment Frank would experience by going to the local jail. Wesley and Frank's father Julian is opposed to Frank's arrest and sends men to break Frank free at the house when Wesley is not there. Gail tries to scare them away by firing shotgun shots into the air. Gail later pleads for Wes to stop the nonsense and take Frank out the home so everything would stop. Wesley's moral values override his family loyalty and he agrees to take his brother to the local jail the next day. The sound of jars breaking in the basement, so the family wakes up. In the morning, Wesley finds that Frank killed himself by slitting his wrists with the broken glass.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_with_the_Dead"title="Traveling with the Dead">
In this sequel to "Those Who Hunt the Night", professor James Asher and his young wife, Lydia, are again swept up in the dangerous world of the undead.It is 1908, and a weary Asher, traveling home from his tiresome duties as executor of a relative's estate, spots Charles Farren, vampire Earl of Ernchester, clearly involved in some intrigue with mercenary and enemy spy Ignace Karolyi. Asher, who had left the secret service years ago to wed Lydia, reluctantly trails the pair to Paris, wiring Lydia to alert her to the danger.But Lydia is aware of something Asher does not know: an obscure footnote in one of her medical journals clues her into the fact that the safe house Asher is planning to use is in the hands of a double agent, actually in league with Karolyi. To save her husband, Lydia seeks the assistance of the oldest of the London vampires: the enigmatic and haughty Simon Ysidro.Ysidro agrees to help, to keep Farren from forming an alliance with humans, but on one condition: over Lydia's strenuous objections, he recruits a drab but romantic-minded governess, Margaret Potton, to travel with them as Lydia's chaperon. The three of them trail Asher across Europe to Constantinople, as he joins forces with Farren's strong-willed and alluring vampire-wife, Anthea.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Unsuitable_Attachment"title="An Unsuitable Attachment">
The plot concerns librarian Ianthe Broome, a well-bred young woman left in comfortable circumstances by her late parents. There is no shortage of "suitable" candidates for Ianthe's hand, notably Rupert Stonebird. It surprises no one more than Ianthe herself when she falls for the new library assistant, a young man of doubtful antecedents with no money to spare. Some of the action takes place against the backdrop of Rome, where Ianthe and a group of other churchgoers are taking a sightseeing holiday. Being apart from John makes Ianthe realise how much she really cares for him, and on her return she agrees to his proposal, scandalizing her friends and family. As they settle down to their new life together, Rupert begins to recognise the charms of Penelope, another member of the community who has long been attracted to him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_in_the_Old_Lace"title="The Secret in the Old Lace">
Nancy enters a magazine competition with an answer to an old Belgian mystery of a missing nobleman. However, her manuscript is intercepted and someone else submits her same solution, so she must find out who it was and prove that the solution was indeed hers. Meanwhile, her friend Bess Marvin's mom has been sent a letter from her friend in Belgium, Madam Chambray. Madam Chambray recently bought an old house with a mystery attached, and she invites Bess, Nancy, and their friend George Fayne to come stay with her and solve the mystery. But on the way to Belgium, Nancy's suitcase is stolen. She and her friends continue to Madame Chambray's house, where the old woman tells them about a beautiful cross made of gold, diamonds, and Lapis Lazuli. It came when she bought the house and she does not know who owned it. While in Belgium working on these three mysteries, the girls are guided by their Belgian friend Hilda Permeke. They visit a lace center and learn how it is made. At a museum, Nancy is intrigued by a painting of a man on a bridge with a dark cloaked figure behind him (this painting appears on both of the covers pictured below). She later identifies the man as the missing Belgian nobleman, and solves the real-life mystery that the magazine contest was for. The valuable cross and suitcase and manuscript theft also tie in. The proof copy of this title was provided by Simon and Schuster and says Nancy's next case will be called "The Clue of the Ancient Mask". This was changed when the book went to print and the text remains the same but the title is changed to "The Greek Symbol Mystery".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greek_Symbol_Mystery"title="The Greek Symbol Mystery">
Nancy is asked to fly to Greece investigate the disappearance of money that was intended to help a needy village family, after the New York agency responsible for donations closes suddenly. While in Greece Nancy is told that a large inheritance from a Greek tycoon, meant for her friend Helen Nicholas, was stolen, and she agrees to find the culprit, aided by her friends Bess and George. They are also on the hunt for Helen’s cousin, Constantine. A poisonous snake in a basket of apples that was delivered to their room and a strange symbol stamped on a rare Byzantine mask that was dropped in Nancy’s shopping bag are the main clues, which lead Nancy and her friends to a ring of art smugglers and to the secret of the Greek symbol. The working title for this story was "The Clue of the Ancient Mask" and listed as such in the proof copy printed of the previous title.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swami's_Ring"title="The Swami's Ring">
When Nancy Drew discovers an amnesia victim is carrying a royal Hindu ring, she is all the more determined to use her detective talent to identify him. At the same time, she is working on a mystery for a beautiful harpist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kachina_Doll_Mystery"title="The Kachina Doll Mystery">
When Nancy, Bess, and George arrive at the McGuire's Fitness ranch in Arizona, they discover that the future of the ranch is being threatened by unexplained accidents. Teaming up with a ghost, Nancy begins her search for a precious collection of ancient kachina dolls and hunts for her elusive adversary who is determined to prevent the ranch from operating.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twin_Dilemma_(novel)"title="The Twin Dilemma (novel)">
When a star model disappears, Aunt Eloise insists that Nancy replace the model in a NYC fashion show. Nancy reluctantly accepts the invitation, only to discover that several of the clothes for the show have been stolen! Once on the trail of her elusive enemies, Nancy discovers clue after clue pointing to a diabolical scheme that she must stop at all costs!
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_Witness"title="Captive Witness">
Nancy is on a student tour of Austria with Emerson college. After an attempted theft, the tour leader, professor Raymond Bagley, tells Nancy of his secret mission: to smuggle ten children aged six to thirteen out of an Iron Curtain country to relatives in England, France, and the United States. Another Emerson student, Eric Nagy, who had been paralyzed by an accident and uses a wheelchair, is also in on the mission as his thirteen-year-old cousin is one of the children. Upon arriving in Salzburg, the large group finds that their hotel reservations have been canceled. An obnoxious man named Herr Gutterman offer reservations at another hotel for a large group that had canceled. Grudgingly, the professor accepts the offer as there is no other alternative. At the hotel, Nancy is now able to focus on an assignment given to her by her father. A famous film director named Kurt Kessler created a devastating political film about the oppression of human rights in his home country in Eastern Europe. However, the film was stolen and the studio with the negative burned down, so the stolen film is the only copy of Kessler's "Captive Witness." Kurt Kessler had hoped to enter the film in a film contest in five days, and unless Nancy can find his film, he will not be able to show the world his important work. Nancy thinks that the stolen film is in Vienna, which the tour will not reach for another few days, so she convinces her boyfriend Ned Nickerson to drive with her to Vienna. Because no rental cars are available, Nancy convinces Herr Gutterman to take her and Ned in his car. As soon as they leave, however, Nancy realizes that she and Ned are being kidnapped by Herr Gutterman, who is the person who tried to steal Professor Bagley's luggage. Herr Gutterman and his chauffeur, Herr Burger, drive Nancy and Ned high into the Alps. Herr Burger is not a cautious driver, and the car almost goes over the edge of a cliff. Later, Gutterman and Burger drive up to a small cabin high in the Alps. They question Nancy, but she quickly escapes and steals their car. The car is amphibious, and she and Ned drive into a river that turns into a waterfall. They make it safely to Vienna. After an attempt to find the film fails, Nancy goes with Gutterman and sees half of "Captive Witness". She returns to the hotel to meet Ned, and later the rest of the tour arrives. While they are eating lunch, a man tells Professor Bagley that he has a message for him regarding the children. But before he can say anything, he has a heart attack. While being lifted into the ambulance, the man keeps looking at Eric as if trying to say something. Nancy has a sudden idea and takes apart Eric's wheelchair, where she finds an envelope containing information on where to bring the children across the border. Then, she meets Emile Popov, who asks for help in the rescue mission as two of the couples who planned to help the operation have been arrested and the refugee organization does not have anyone it can spare. Eric reveals that he can actually walk, and Nancy then devises a daring plan. She send her friends on a decoy mission the throw Gutterman off the trail, and she and Eric successfully rescue the children with the help of Emile Popov and his wife. She then finds the stolen film, "Captive Witness ." It is shown at the film festival and wins first prize.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_of_the_Rising_Stars"title="The Case of the Rising Stars">
Nancy, Bess and George arrive in Chicago for the Mystery Lovers of America convention. The two stars scheduled to appear are kidnapped, and some think it is a ratings ploy, but Nancy uncovers the truth and only she can save them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_Mean_Thirteen"title="Lean Mean Thirteen">
Stephanie's path crosses again with that of her despised ex-husband, Richard "Dickie" Orr, while doing a favour for Ranger. When Dickie is later discovered missing from his apartment under some rather violent circumstances, Stephanie becomes the prime suspect in his apparent murder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Digging_Leviathan"title="The Digging Leviathan">
The story is set in 1964 in and around Los Angeles, California. Jim Hastings is a young boy who lives with his uncle, Edward St. Ives; Jim's father suffered a nervous breakdown upon his wife's death and has been institutionalized ever since. Jim is increasingly puzzled by a series of strange events that seem to happen around his friend Giles "Gill" Peach who, like his father and forefathers before him, has gills. The boys are fascinated by pulp science fiction, and Gill begins building a device inspired by the "subterranean prospector" described in Edgar Rice Burroughs' novel "At the Earth's Core".Jim's father William, who periodically escapes the psychiatric facility run by Hilario Frosticos, is convinced that Gill is being manipulated by unscrupulous adventurers allied with Frosticos: a hollow earth conspiracy. This is discounted as paranoia by St. Ives, Russell Latzarel, Roycroft Squires, and William Ashbless, all members of the Newtonian Society, an alternative science-oriented social club. However, as events unfold it appears that William's worst fears have a bizarre truth behind them, and the ideas described in Gill's diaries are more than weird tales.Clues found by William lead St. Ives and Latzarel to sewers connected to an underground river, mermen, bizarre technology, and a longevity serum based on carp. Together with Jim, the four men try to outmaneuver Frosticos in the race to reach a not-quite unimaginable goal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Long_Fatal_Love_Chase"title="A Long Fatal Love Chase">
Rosamond Vivian, a discontented maiden who lives on an English island with only her bitter old grandfather for company, begins the novel by rashly declaring: "I often feel as if I'd gladly sell my soul to Satan for a year of freedom." Right on cue, a man named Phillip Tempest, a libertine who intentionally bears a more than trivial resemblance to Mephistopheles, makes contact with Rosamond. Within a month, Rosamond is in love with him, and although she realizes that this man is "no saint", she marries him, believing with the fatuousness of youth that her love will save him. She sails away from her lonely island in Tempest's yacht, the "Circe", and begins her married life at a luxurious villa in Nice.Much to his own surprise, Tempest, an otherwise cold and heartless man, finds that he is content with the relationship. He tries to make Rosamond happy, and succeeds for a while; however, after a year in his company, she realizes how conscienceless and cruel he is, and discovers that Tempest has a wife and son already, making their marriage a sham and Rosamond the unwitting mistress of a man who has grossly deceived her. On the same night, she packs up, stealthily climbs down from her second-floor balcony, and catches the next train to Paris. Tempest aggressively pursues and stalks her, beginning the obsessive "chase" of the title.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Freedom_Writers_Diary"title="The Freedom Writers Diary">
As an idealistic 23-year-old English teacher at Wilson High School in Long Beach, California, Erin Gruwell confronted a room of "unteachable, at-risk" students. One day she intercepted a note with a racial caricature, and angrily declared that this was precisely the sort of thing that led to the Holocaust – only to be met by uncomprehending looks. So she and her students, using the treasured books "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl" and "Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Sarajevo" as their guides, undertook a life-changing, eye-opening, spirit-raising odyssey against intolerance and misunderstanding. They learned to see the parallels between these books and their own lives, recording their thoughts and feelings in diaries and dubbing themselves the "Freedom Writers" in homage to the civil rights activists "The Freedom Riders".With funds raised by a "Read-a-thon for Tolerance", they arranged for Miep Gies, the Dutch woman who sheltered the Frank family, to visit them in California during the 1994/1995 school year, where she declared that Erin Gruwell's students were "the real heroes." Their efforts have paid off spectacularly, both in terms of recognition – appearances on "Primetime Live" and "All Things Considered", coverage in "People" magazine, a meeting with U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley – and educational benefit. All 150 Freedom Writers graduated from high school and many went on to attend college.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Place_Like_Home_(novel)"title="No Place Like Home (novel)">
The story starts with 10-year-old Liza Barton accidentally shooting and killing her mother and shooting and injuring her stepfather Ted. She is acquitted of the crime and is later adopted by some distant relatives.Twenty-four years later, the story picks up with Liza determined to bury her past. She has changed her name to Celia Foster and married Alex Nolan after her first husband Larry's death. Alex, not aware of Celia's past, gifts her with a surprise birthday present—the keys to her own parents' home in a neighboring town Mendham. Alex, Celia and her 4-year-old son, Jack, move into the home to find that it has been vandalized. Unsure of how Alex would react to her past, Celia decides to hide it from him for some more time.Flashes of the night her mom died come back to Celia as she sets out to find out more about what really happened that night. She discreetly tries to find information about her father's accident that led to his death a year before her mother's death. One by one, a few of the older residents of the town are murdered and some of the evidence leads to Celia being suspected. Celia finds her own life in danger, as the pursuit of the murderer's identity picks up pace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Virgin_Too_Many"title="One Virgin Too Many">
When a frightened child approaches Marcus Didius Falco with a plea for help, he does not believe her. One quarrel with the family does not mean that a relation is trying to kill her. Beset by his own family troubles, his new responsibilities as Procurator of the Sacred Poultry, and the continuing search for a new partner, he decides to send her home.However, he almost immediately regrets it. Gaia Laelia comes from a pre-eminent Roman family with a long history of key religious positions. Gaia, herself, is considered the most likely candidate for election to the office of Vestal Virgin. When she disappears, Falco is officially asked to investigate.Meanwhile, Helena's brother Aelianus has problems of his own. In an attempt to restart his political career - stalled by his younger brother's elopement with his wealthy fiancee - he tries to gain election to the Arval Brethren. During the night-time ceremonies, however, Aelianus stumbles across the body of one of the Brethren with his throat cut as if he had been sacrificed.Unable to bring in the Vigiles, Falco is forced to search the house of Gaia Laelia alone, aware that time is running out for finding her before the lottery takes place, or even alive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ode_to_a_Banker"title="Ode to a Banker">
When Marcus Didius Falco gives a poetry reading for family and friends, things get a little out of hand. The event is taken over by Aurelius Chrysippus, a wealthy Greek banker and patron to a group of struggling writers, who subsequently offers to publish Falco's work, which Falco turns down as being a raw deal. Unfortunately, soon afterwards Chrysippus is brutally murdered, with part of a broken scroll jammed up his nose, and due to his presence at Chrysippus' "scriptorium" Falco is implicated in his death and forced by his friend Petronius Longus, the enquiry chief of the vigiles, to investigate.The result is a trawl through the literary and financial worlds of Ancient Rome, as Falco delves deep into Chrysippus' personal life and business history. Falco's investigations reveal that the deceased Chrysippus (Greek: "Golden Horse") was owner of the Golden Horse Bank, and many potential suspects are turned up, including disgruntled writers employed by Chrysippus’ "scriptorium", a shipper Pisarchus who has fallen on hard times, as well as his family: Chrisyppus' widow Vibia, his ex-wife Lysa and his son Diomedes. Meanwhile, things get worse: one of the suspected writers, Avienus, is found dead and Falco and his friend Petronius are also attacked, although they manage to survive and kill the assassin. To add insult to injury, Falco also faces problems with his own family: his estranged father Geminius has problems coping with the death of his mistress, Flora, and Falco's nemesis Anacrites is slowly ingratiating himself with Falco's own mother, persuading her to place her savings with his own at the Golden Horse Bank — which, unfortunately for the two and Falco, goes insolvent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Accusers"title="The Accusers">
Fresh from his trip to Britannia, Marcus Didius Falco needs to re-establish himself back in Rome. A minor role in the trial of a senator entangles him in the machinations of two lawyers: Silus Italicus and Paccius Africanus, both ex-consuls with notorious reputations.The senator is convicted, but then dies, apparently by suicide. Silius hires Falco and his young associates – Aelianus and Justinus – to prove that it was murder, not an attempt to protect his heirs from further legal action. However, probing this tangle of upper-class secrets leads to fresh prosecutions. Falco finds himself in the role of advocate, exposing himself to powerful elements in Roman law. If he offends the wrong people, it might lead to charges he has not bargained for and ruin his family financially.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latitude_Zero_(novel)"title="Latitude Zero (novel)">
Having narrowly escaped the self-destruction of the last redoubt they jumped to, Ryan Cawdor and his friends find themselves in the southwestern desert somewhere near the border of New Mexico and Texas. The group sets out South, hoping to find food and supplies, and possibly surviving "freezies" in a cryonics facility that the late Rick Ginsberg believed was located in the area.Soon the group comes to a prosperous ranch and are nearly shot by the residents, who have mistaken them for members of a local group of raiders. Once Ryan convinces the residents that they are not in any way associated with Skullface, the feared leader of the raiders, they are cautiously welcomed in. The ranch belongs to the Ballinger family, consisting of a widowed father, his two sons, and his daughter. The daughter, Christina, takes an immediate liking to Jak Lauren, but is impeded by her verbally and physically abusive father.That evening the men of the family are revealed to be serial rapists and murderers: the two brothers enter the room housing Krysty Wroth and Mildred Wyeth, plainly stating their intent to rape and kill them, while the father keeps armed watch outside. The women are able to kill the brothers while Jak silently kills their father. Christina, upon learning of the death of the rest of her family, says only one thing: "good."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Talent_for_War"title="A Talent for War">
## Setting and background.The story is set approximately 9,600 years in the future (approximately 11,600 C.E.). As is made clearer in McDevitt's later Alex Benedict novel "Seeker", during the course of recorded history, human civilization has spread through a substantial part of the Orion Arm of our galaxy. The novel is concerned with two time periods – the present of the principal viewpoint character, Alex Benedict, and a period approximately 200 years before his time, which is viewed through back-story.Humanity discovered the ruins of one alien technological civilization, and encountered one that at the time of the story is alive and thriving, the Ashiyyur. The sphere of Ashiyyur worlds is described by the author as abutting the worlds of human civilization along the Perimeter – first contact was made at least several hundred years before the time in which the back-story is set. McDevitt conceives the Ashiyyur as being at approximately the same technological level as humans, and in fact humanoid – bi-laterally symmetrical, bipedal, larger than average for human, of two genders, descended from predators, and interested in the same kind of real estate as humans. Most significantly for the story, they are also incapable of audible speech without mechanical aids, and are nicknamed “Mutes” by humans as a result. The Ashiyyur are telepathic and have evolved a society based on that form of communication. They have the ability, with some difficulty, to “read” human minds and emotions. Ashiyyur civilization is described as being much older than human civilization (approximately 75,000 years versus perhaps 15,000) but as having developed much more slowly. It is important to the back-story that to the Ashiyyur, human dynamism and exuberance appear threatening and humans are aggressive, untrustworthy, and unethical.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_of_Carthage"title="Pride of Carthage">
The novel is a retelling of the assault on the Roman Republic by the Carthaginian general Hannibal. It begins in Ancient Spain, where Hannibal sets out with tens of thousands of soldiers and 30 elephants. After conquering the Roman-allied city of Saguntum, Hannibal accepts Rome's declaration of war. He befriends peoples disillusioned by Rome and outwits the opponents who believe the land route he has chosen is impossible. Hannibal's troops suffer brutal losses as they pass through the Pyrenees Mountains, ford the Rhone River, and make a winter crossing of the Alps, before descending to fight battles at the Trebia River, Lake Trasimene, Cannae and Zama. The novel ends roughly where the war ends, although Hannibal lived on for some years as both a political figure and a mercenary soldier.The novel features a wide cast of characters of many nationalities, from famous generals down to infantrymen and camp followers, from Numidians to Macedonians. Durham draws a complex portrait of Hannibal, both as a warrior and as a husband and father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel's_Story"title="Gabriel's Story">
Durham made his literary debut with a novel which, in the tradition of Cormac McCarthy's "All the Pretty Horses", views the American West through an original lens. Set in the 1870s, the novel tells the tale of Gabriel Lynch, an African American youth who settles with his family in the plains of Kansas. Dissatisfied with the drudgery of homesteading and growing increasingly disconnected from his family, Gabriel forsakes the farm for a life of higher adventure. Thus begins a forbidding trek into a terrain of austere beauty, a journey begun in hope, but soon laced with danger and propelled by a cast of brutal characters. By writing about African American characters, Durham gave voice to a population seldom included in our Western lore.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walk_Through_Darkness"title="Walk Through Darkness">
When he learns that his pregnant wife has been spirited off to a distant city, William responds as any man might—he drops everything to pursue her. But as a fugitive slave in antebellum America, he must run a terrifying gauntlet, eluding the many who would re-enslave him while learning to trust the few who dare to aid him on his quest.Among those hunting William is Morrison, a Scot who as a young man fled the miseries of his homeland only to discover more brutal realities in the New World. Bearing many scars, including the loss of his beloved brother, Morrison tracks William for reasons of his own, a personal agenda rooted in tragic events that have haunted him for decades."Walk Through Darkness" is a provocative meditation on racial identity, freedom and equality. It followed Durham's award-winning "Gabriel's Story" and preceded his bestselling "Pride of Carthage".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triage_(novel)"title="Triage (novel)">
Mark Walsh, a young war photographer, returns to New York in 1989 after being injured in Kurdistan whilst on assignment. He had spent a few frightening days in the recovery ward of a dilapidated, overcrowded hospital inside a cave, but can this explain his sleeplessness, distraction, his wounds' inability to heal? Elena, Mark's Spanish girlfriend, grows more and more alarmed by his strange behavior, while she also tries to calm her pregnant friend Diane, whose photographer husband has gone missing in the same war zone. As Mark continues to deteriorate, Elena's grandfather sweeps onto the scene. Joaquin is the last person from whom Elena wants to accept help; once very close to him, she ended all contact after learning of his role in "purifying" conscience-stricken officers after the Spanish Civil War. In treating Mark, Joaquin sees a way back into his granddaughter's life, and, despite Elena's disapproval, the two men begin to forge an extraordinary relationship. Eventually, all three travel to Joaquin's manor home in Granada, Spain so that Mark can find a safe haven in which to heal. It is in this romantic and haunted Spanish valley where both men's secrets surface with life-altering force and where Mark and Elena attempt to know and love each other again, with the discovery of her grandfather's secrets of the incurables and of Mark's knowing that Colin is dead and that he could not save him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_School_Story"title="The School Story">
As the novel begins, twelve-year-old Natalie is almost done writing a novel called "The Cheater" about a girl and her friends. It is uncommon, if not impossible, for someone her age to get published, but Natalie's best friend, Zoe Reisman, thinks "The Cheater" is good enough. Natalie wants her mother, Hannah Nelson, who works as an editor at Shipley Junior Books, to edit her manuscript, but she doesn't want her mother to find out that she wrote it. To accomplish this, Natalie uses the pseudonym Cassandra Day, and Zoe acts as her literary agent, fabricating the "Sherry Clutch Literary Agency". Zoe hides her identity by using her nickname, "Zee Zee", and pronouncing her last name differently. The girls decide to rent a cheap "instant office", then realize that they could use some adult help. They enlist a teacher at their school, Laura Clayton, to be their adviser, and together with the three form "The Publishing Club". Zoe gives Ms. Clayton $500 to pay for the office and services but feeling guilty, Ms. Clayton secretly pays for it herself and safely stores Zoe's money away in her bank account.Besides the girls' age disadvantage, the editor in chief at Shipley, "Lethal" Letha Springfield, adds complications. Seeing that "The Cheater" could prove to be a success, Letha takes over editing the manuscript. Zoe (speaking as Zee Zee) gets into an argument with her and states that Cassandra (Natalie) will only write with Hannah as her editor. Instead of obliging, Letha refuses and declares that the book will not be published by Shipley unless an apology is received. This problem is averted when Zoe sends a copy of the manuscript directly to Tom Morton, president of Shipley, along with a letter describing Cassandra's wishes. After reading (and loving) the story, Tom tells Letha to let Hannah handle it. Later, when the girls are offered a contract, they show it to Zoe's father, who is a lawyer, and they get Natalie's Uncle Fred to sign in place of her mother. After hearing the story from the girls, Zoe's father is extremely impressed with Ms. Clayton and calls to commend her. He also gets her to send him a bill for the office.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rats_(novel)"title="The Rats (novel)">
The novel opens by introducing the reader to an alcoholic vagrant, resting in an abandoned and forgotten lock-keeper's house by a canal. As he is ruminating over the injustices inflicted upon him in his life, he is suddenly set upon by a pack of black rats the size of small dogs, and is devoured alive.Harris, a young East London art teacher, notices that one of his students has a bloodied bandage around his hand. When he enquires as to what caused the damage, the student answers that he was attacked by a rat.Meanwhile, a baby girl and her dog are killed by the giant rats, now aided by packs of smaller black rats. The girl's mother rescues her daughter's mutilated body, but not before sustaining bites as well.Harris takes the student to the hospital and sees the grieving mother with her dead child. According to the doctor, the number of seemingly unprovoked rat attacks has strangely increased.The next rat attack occurs at the remains of a bombsite, where a group of squabbling vagrants are slaughtered.Harris is visited at work by the Minister of Health, Mr. Foskins, who reveals that the bitten student, and all the other surviving victims of rat attacks, died of a mysterious disease 24 hours after being bitten. Foskins asks Harris to keep the existence of the disease a secret and lead an exterminator named Ferris to the area where the student had been bitten. Accompanied by Ferris, Harris goes to the canal described by the student and sights a group of giant rats. Harris attempts to contact the police, while Ferris follows the rats, who then attack and kill him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_State"title="Halting State">
The plot opens with a faux email addressed to Nigel MacDonald, listing a job offer. It is later learned that this email is for a work-at-home programmer position at Hayek Associates PLC.It is then learned that a cybercrime has been committed in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) Avalon Four. A robbery of several thousand euros worth of "prestige items" occurs in the game's central bank, led by a band of orcs and a "dragon for fire support." It is later noticed that this seemingly simple incident has deep implications – both financial (Hayek stock price) and logistical (compromised cryptographic keys), which sets the stage for the latter half of the novel.The main story is then divided between police chapters as Sue, investigation sections as Elaine, and programmer and gamer geek sections as Jack. Initially separate storylines, the three inevitably join forces to combat a much larger conspiracy that hinges on international espionage and counterterrorism. These initial segments track the bank robbery and mystery man, Nigel MacDonald, who is revealed as a shadow identity created from Jack Reed's credentials as a programmer and gamer.Eventually, it is discovered that the entirety of the European network backbone—including its root keyservers—has been compromised by Chinese hackers. It is more or less at this point that the wool is removed from the reader's eyes that "it's no longer a game," while Jack and Elaine develop a romance between action segments.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Firebrand_(Kemp_novel)"title="The Firebrand (Kemp novel)">
After the fall of Camelot at the Battle of Camlann, Lin, daughter of King Arthur and Queen Gwenhwyfar, is torn by grief and self-doubt. Believing herself unworthy to follow in her father's wake, Lin leaves Camelot. Twelve years later, while exploring the deserted castle with her four children, Lin tells them about her own childhood in the distant kingdom of Orkney, before she learned the truth of her birth.Lin's earliest memories are of sorrow and hardship as a slave in the castle of Arthur's half-sister Queen Morgause. At five years old, the only mother she knows dies, leaving Lin alone with Dafydd, the boy she believes is her true elder brother. On Lin's twelfth birthday, she is given a slave collar and a new master: Prince Mordred, who knows she, not he, is the true heir to the throne of Camelot. After Lin resists Mordred's every attempt to break her spirit, Mordred decides to sell Dafydd. But through a misunderstanding, Lin is sent to the auction block as well. King Arthur's brother Sir Kay witnesses the auction in progress. Appalled to see children for sale, he frees all those who have not been sold, including Lin. Kay notices her family resemblance and takes Lin to Arthur, who wants to avenge his innocent daughter for the abuse she endured. Lin has several reasons for stopping her father. She views slavery as a stigma and wants it to remain secret. She also realizes she cannot let her father fight her battles. She must face Mordred alone as she has always done.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(novel)"title="E (novel)">
The setting of "e" is the very beginning of the new millennium inside the London office of Miller Shanks, a prominent (fictitious) international advertising agency. When the novel opens two major projects are under way: the shooting, on location in Mauritius, of a commercial for a porn channel; and preparations for a sales pitch, with Coca-Cola as the company's prospective client.While the Coca-Cola advertising campaign is supposed to be kept confidential, David Crutton, the chief executive officer, is astonishingly computer illiterate and inadvertently sends carbon copies of every single one of his e-mails to the Helsinki office of Miller Shanks. Simon Horne, the creative director, has stolen the "original" idea on which the Coca-Cola campaign is based from two recent college graduates who are looking for work and does not believe that the past will ever catch up with him. In the end it does, but although the campaign can be patched up in the last minute with the help of the Helsinki office, Coca-Cola finally decide not to award their advertising account to Miller Shanks after one of their female top level managers has watched a secretly filmed video on the Internet showing Horne in his office having sex with a ladyboy, uploaded thanks to the efforts of Liam O'Keefe, who filmed it all taking place, and his friend Brett Topowlski.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubles_(novel)"title="Troubles (novel)">
The novel concerns the arrival of the English Major Archer, recently discharged from the British Army, at the Majestic Hotel on the Wexford coast in south-east Ireland in 1919. Both the hotel, and the town in which it is situated, Kilnalough, are fictional. Archer is convinced he is engaged, though sure he had never actually proposed, to Angela Spencer, the daughter of Edward Spencer, the owner of the hotel. She has written to him since they met in 1916 while on leave from the trench warfare of the Western Front.The Spencers are an Anglo-Irish Protestant family, strongly Unionist in their attitudes towards Ireland's ties to the United Kingdom. Archer functions as a confused observer of the dysfunctional Spencer family, representing the Anglo-Irish, and the local Catholic population. As the novel progresses, social and economic relationships break down, mirrored by the gentle decay of the hotel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugly_Americans_(book)"title="Ugly Americans (book)">
In 1992, twenty Ivy League football players visit Japan, to play an exhibition match against Japanese college kids. On this trip, Princeton University's contribution to that all-star-Ivy team, John Malcolm, encountered a Princeton alum, Dean Carney (also a pseudonym). Carney was an executive in Kidder Peabody's Tokyo office, and he suggested Malcolm contact him about a job if his pro football career did not pan out.When it did not, and following a job search on Wall Street, Malcolm contacted Carney in 1993. Malcolm then became one of KP's two Osaka-based traders. This lasted until April 1994, when KP discovered a $350 million "accounting glitch," and assigned responsibility for the glitch to one of its managing directors, Joseph Jett. KP (and its corporate parent, General Electric) made sweeping cutbacks in their trading operations as a result. Both Carney and Malcolm—neither of whom had anything to do with Jett's accounting trickery—were out of jobs, and they went their separate ways.Malcolm took a position with a venerable English bank, Barings. He was again to work out of Osaka, but this time his orders were coming from Singapore, where Barings' star trader, Nick Leeson, held court. Leeson, though, was making huge unauthorized trades during this period. In January 1995 he made an enormous bet on a rise in the key Japanese stock exchange index, known as the Nikkei (large enough so that if he won, he would recover all his losses). However, the huge bet went against him, due to the Kobe earthquake (January 17) and its devastating effects on Japan's economy. After a brief period as a fugitive, Leeson was captured and did prison time. Meanwhile, Barings suffered historic loses from the gamble, and later went into receivership.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_of_Lantern_Hill"title="Jane of Lantern Hill">
Jane Victoria Stuart, called Victoria by her family, lives in Toronto, Ontario, with her mother, grandmother, and aunt. Her grandmother is very strict and is jealous of anything that her daughter Robin (Jane's mother) loves. Jane does not like having to live with her grandmother and wishes she and her mother could escape, though she knows her mother will never have enough backbone to stand up to her grandmother and leave. Jane believes her father to be dead, but is eventually told he is alive and living far away on Prince Edward Island, her birthplace. Jane's only friend is Josephine Turner, Jody for short, an orphan who lives and works as a servant at the boardinghouse next door. Jane also likes to cook, but her grandmother will not allow her to practice. Jane's grandmother despises anything she considers 'common', including Jane herself.One day, a letter from her estranged father arrives, asking that Jane stay with him for the summer on the Island. Jane is very reluctant about going, but one of her uncles says that it would be best if she went. Upon arriving at the island, Jane meets her Aunt Irene (her father's sister) and takes an instant dislike to her. The next morning, she meets her father for the first time and loves him from the start. The two buy a little house on Lantern Hill and Jane takes on the role of housekeeper. Jane soon becomes friends with all the neighbours, such as the Snowbeam family and the Jimmy Johns (so named to distinguish them from a James Garland and a John Garland who also live on the Island). Jane also gains self-possession and, upon her return to Toronto, is much less affected by her sour, disapproving grandmother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Floor_(novel)"title="Killing Floor (novel)">
Jack Reacher gets off a Greyhound bus in the town of Margrave, Georgia, because he remembers his brother mentioning that a blues musician named Blind Blake had died there. Much to his surprise, shortly after his arrival, he is arrested in a local diner for murder on the orders of the sheriff, Morrison, who falsely claims he saw Reacher leave the scene.While in custody, Reacher meets Finlay, the chief of detectives, and Roscoe, a female officer who believes him to be innocent. Reacher persuades Finlay to call a number on a piece of paper found in the dead man's shoe; the number leads them to Paul Hubble, a retired banker who instantly confesses to the murder. Before Reacher can be released, he and Hubble are transferred to a state prison in Warburton, where Reacher manages to thwart an attempt on their lives by the Aryan Brotherhood. Suspecting that the deputy warden set them up, Reacher joins Finlay's investigation, while Hubble is presumed dead after vanishing from his house in the middle of the day.Reacher learns that the murdered man is his brother, Joe, who was running an investigation into a counterfeiting ring operated by the Kliner family under the protection of Morrison, several dirty cops, and the corrupt mayor, Grover Teale. A second body, belonging to truck driver Sherman Stoller, is found, and Morrison and his wife are brutally murdered shortly thereafter. Roscoe theorizes that the Kliners are using Margrave as a distribution hub for their counterfeit money, but this is eventually disproven when Reacher searches one of their trucks and finds it empty. He then realizes that the opposite is true: the Kliners have been hoarding the money in response to a Coast Guard operation cutting off their supply of bills from Venezuela, and plan to resume distribution once the operation is shut down as a cost-saving measure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_His_Image_(novel)"title="In His Image (novel)">
On a trip to Turin to analyse the Shroud of Turin, journalist Decker Hawthorne and Professor Harry Goodman discover human dermal cells remaining. After the trip, Goodman takes some samples back to his laboratory, in the United States, and discovers that they are still alive. He then invites Decker to show him his discoveries. Once Decker arrives, Goodman explains several of his theories about the cells, and has engineered a strain of "C Cells" which are incredibly resilient to damage and disease. Goodman is actively searching for ways these C Cells could be implemented to insert into one's body to cure disease, due to their strange properties and signs of immortality. Then the professor proposes to Decker the idea of cloning the cells, but Decker does not support this idea.Some years pass and Decker visits Professor Goodman with one of his two daughters. While Hawthorne and Goodman talk for some time, Decker's daughter meets and interacts with the Goodmans' adopted son, Christopher. On the way back home, Decker deduces Christopher's origin. He immediately returns to Goodman's home and confronts him about Christopher being the Clone of Jesus Christ. Goodman explains that Christopher is like any usual boy, but that he shows a high degree of intelligence and has never suffered from disease of any kind. He convinces Decker not to do a story or Christopher's life will be ruined. Before leaving, Decker assumes out loud that Goodman named the child "Christopher" because of Jesus Christ, of whom he was cloned; but the professor rapidly corrects him, claiming that he named him in name of Christopher Columbus, since he believed that the child would usher the world into a new era.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Trying_(novel)"title="Die Trying (novel)">
While in Chicago, former military police officer Jack Reacher is helping a young woman with an injured leg with her dry cleaning when they're captured at gunpoint by three men and thrown into a car, then transferred into a van and driven cross country. On the way, Reacher learns the woman is an FBI agent named Holly Johnson, though she doesn't tell him she's the daughter of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff nor goddaughter of the President, having been accused of being the beneficiary of nepotism all her life.Meanwhile, Holly's fellow agents search for her. Security footage leaves Reacher as the prime suspect, and his mentor, General Leon Garber, is brought in to help, though he insists Reacher would never do such a thing. The Chicago office where Holly worked take charge, with only agent in charge McGrath and two others, Milosevic and Brogan involved. At one point, they manage to put an APB out on the van, but get the wrong van due to a transfer of vehicles.After Reacher fails to take advantage of an opportunity to escape during the night, Holly insists that he let her handle things. However, she ends up owing him when, during another stay, one of the kidnappers, Peter Bell, tries to rape her. Reacher breaks free of his restraints, kills Bell, hides his body, and re-restrains himself before the others become suspicious. Holly finally and reluctantly accepts his help after this.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_God_(novel)"title="Acts of God (novel)">
The book starts before the conclusion of "Birth of an Age". Christopher Goodman's address from the top of the Third Temple in Jerusalem is revisited, concluding with Christopher leaping from the top of the temple, and caught by the visible Spirit beings, whom Christopher identified as Theatans on the flight to Jerusalem with Decker Hawthorne and Robert Milner. Christopher is an extremely popular Secretary General of the United Nations, who was nominated following his supernatural healing of various members of the Security Council, and elected unanimously prior to his assassination, and subsequent resurrection.Christopher reveals to the world that humanity is on the brink of its greatest evolutionary step, which people are now heralding as the New Age. However, given the nature of this evolutionary step - that of evolving into nearly omnipotent Spirit Beings - this step must be taken collectively by the entire species, rather than through natural selection of individual members of the human race. If any significant portion of the human population balks at taking this evolutionary step, the evolutionary process will be a failure, and humankind will lose the opportunity to evolve, and remain a stagnant species doomed for extinction. The greatest threat to humankind in taking this evolutionary step is represented by Fundamentalist Christians and various Jewish sects, including a group of 144,000 Jews which call themselves the Koum Damar Patar or KDP for short. These groups remained loyal to Yahweh, whom Christopher has identified as a power-hungry Theatan, intent on keeping humankind as they are, in order to prevent them from becoming his equal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tragedy_of_Man"title="The Tragedy of Man">
The main characters are Adam, Eve and Lucifer. As God creates the universe, Lucifer decries it as futile, stating that man will soon aspire to be gods and demanding their own right of the world, because God was forced to create within them, "the ancient spirit of denial". God casts him out of Heaven, but grants his wish: the two cursed trees in Eden, the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Immortality. Playing on Eve's vanity and Adam's pride, Lucifer tempts both into sin. After the Fall and expulsion from Eden, Adam is still too proud to admit that he acted wrongly. Instead, he recounts his dreams of human progress and achievement; he feels that now, unencumbered by God's rules, he is ready to pursue his own glory. Lucifer puts Adam to sleep, and the two begin to travel through history. The first period they visit, ancient Egypt, is the realization of Adam's dream of immense human achievements. However, his joy is abruptly cut off when he finds that the pyramids are being built on the backs of slaves (as a later-executed slave points out, "millions for one"). Adam, in the role of a pharaoh, falls in love with Eve, a slave-girl; with renewed hope, he now tells Lucifer to take him to a world where all men live in equality, and Lucifer transports him to democratic Greece. In each period, Adam's previous dreams are exposed as futile, flawed, or unattainable, and Eve appears just in time to refresh Adam's spirit, and the cycle repeats.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexter_in_the_Dark"title="Dexter in the Dark">
Dexter Morgan investigates a double homicide at the University of Miami campus, where two female students have been found burned and beheaded. Their heads are replaced by the ceramic heads of bulls. Something about this uncharacteristically frightens Dexter's "Dark Passenger" into silence, leaving him to solve the crime on his own. As a series of similar murders take place, members of a mysterious cult begin stalking Dexter, believing his Dark Passenger to be a threat to them.Dexter soon begins to question the Dark Passenger, as he slowly realizes that it's a true entity unto itself, possibly an offspring of the ancient god Moloch. While attempting to dispatch a killer who had been stalking him, Dexter becomes frightened and is unable to go through with the deed. He soon realizes that the Dark Passenger had given him an unusual amount of confidence and an almost supernatural awareness of the world around him; now that it's gone, he feels vulnerable for the first time in his life. Dexter begins to develop sadness and anger, emotions that were once suppressed by the Dark Passenger. While missing the helpful clues and hints of the Dark Passenger, Dexter feeds off of his newfound emotions to find some balance in his life as well as solve the mystery unfolding around him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bambi's_Children"title="Bambi's Children">
Twin fawns Geno and Gurri learn the pleasures as well as downsides of nature and their forest home, as their mother Faline raises them to adulthood. Their father, Faline's cousin Bambi, watches over them and, at times, takes care of them while their mother is busy. During their lives, they interact with Lana and Boso, twin fawns of their Aunt Rolla.One day, Gurri is attacked by a fox, but survives because a hunter shoots the fox at the last moment. She is then taken away by the hunter (known only as "he" by some of the animals; in the English translation, he is referred to as a gamekeeper, and the name has been changed to the "brown he" because of a brown coat he wears, but such detail is never mentioned in the German text) when she is brought to the "he's" place, she meets his dog, Hector and a European eagle-owl that He captured a while ago. The owl is kept in a cage, and he tells Gurri about the times when He uses him as a bait to attack crows and other birds of prey and shoots them. Then Bambi finds her, and he tells Gurri that he will come every night to teach her how to jump over the fence. But when "He" sees the tracks of Bambi in the corral, He sets Gurri free.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Congress"title="Dark Congress">
Golden has revealed some things about the plotline in an interview with Slayerlit:The story takes place after the seventh season of "Buffy". The Congress has not met for 500 years, having failed to come to an agreement.The story starts as Micaela, a Watcher, unknowingly releases the demon, Kandida, one of the leaders of the Dark Congress.Then, we find Buffy, and Xander in Providence, Rhode Island, trekking to the location of the city's own Hellmouth. There, they meet Trabajo the Sand demon, from whom they nearly escape.Meanwhile, in Greece, Willow is living happily with Kennedy, until she returns to their apartment to find Kennedy has cheated on her with a newbie Slayer. Completely broken-hearted, Willow immediately leaves and heads to Athens to clear her mind, there she meets a very ancient witch named Catherine, who promises Willow her heart's desire if she will be her apprentice. She gives Willow a very powerful scroll and her witch's familiar, a ginger cat. With a very ancient spell Willow is able to resurrect her former lover Tara Maclay, with whom the familiar shares a body. Willow and Tara have an emotional reunion.Elsewhere, former Scooby, Oz, is approached by an elder werewolf, who tells him that he is needed in Providence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_Bay_(novel)"title="Havana Bay (novel)">
Renko is depressed because his beloved wife Irina is dead due to a misunderstanding through carelessness on the part of a Russian doctor and his nurse. He is in a suicidal state of mind when anonymously summoned to Havana to help an old acquaintance out of some unspecified trouble. By the time he arrives, however, the good Colonel Pribluda, late of the SVR, has apparently died under very mysterious circumstances.The novel begins with Arkady at the tip of Havana Bay as the sun begins to rise on what promises to be a hot day in Cuba. The Cuban militia has what they believe is a dead Russian. Renko being a Senior Investigator from Moscow who knew Pribluda, the Cubans are hoping he can expedite matters by both confirming the liquefying corpse's identity and affirming it as a natural or accidental death.In a decaying Cuba filled with cars and houses that were built in the 1950s and are now falling to pieces, Renko stumbles upon a plot to defraud Russia of $250 million in an underhanded sugar purchase scam. Along the way, there are the gruesome killings, abakua ceremonies and attacks upon his person.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fool_Moon_(The_Dresden_Files)"title="Fool Moon (The Dresden Files)">
After the events in "Storm Front", Kim Delaney, whom Dresden helped to control her magical talents, asks Dresden how to create a set of three magical circles, which could be used to contain powerful entities. Dresden withholds the information, because such circles are generally used to contain demigods and archangels.Lt. Karrin Murphy asks Dresden to consult on a homicide: a henchman of mobster Johnny Marcone was found, savaged, near a group of wolfish paw prints. Without telling Murphy, Dresden magically follows the scent of the murderer's blood that leads him to a confrontation with a gang of teenage werewolves and their pack leader, Tera West. After consultation with his oracular skull, Bob, Dresden informs Murphy of the existence of four different types of lupine theriomorphs: classic werewolves, hexenwolves, loup-garous and lycanthropes.At the police station, Dresden gets a tip from FBI Agent Harris that the Streetwolves biker gang might know something about the murder, and learns that the Streetwolves and their "pack leader," Parker, are lycanthropes. Dresden escapes unscathed, but now the Streetwolves want him dead.Marcone offers to hire Dresden for protection, but Dresden refuses. On his way out the door, Marcone says that these killings are connected to a millionaire named Harley MacFinn and his Northwest Passage Project. Dresden summons the demon Chaunzaggoroth in order to get information, exchanging one more part of his name for information about Harley MacFinn. Before Dresden can check on Harley MacFinn, Lt. Murphy arrests him on suspicion of murder: Kim Delaney's shredded body was found in MacFinn's apartment next to a summoning circle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Visitor_(Child_novel)"title="The Visitor (Child novel)">
The prologue opens with a mystery person's point of view on knowledge, power and killing, "People say that knowledge is power. The more knowledge, the more power. Suppose you knew the winning numbers for the lottery? You would run to the store. And you would win. Same for the stock market. You're not talking about a trend or a percentage game or a whisper or a tip. You're talking about knowledge. Real, hard knowledge. You would buy. Then later you'd sell, and you'd be rich. Any kind of sports at all, if you could predict the future, you'd be home and dry. Same for anything. Same for killing people."In New York City, Reacher confronts and beats up two thugs sent to collect protection racket money from the new restaurant in which he has just finished dinners, and deliberately implies to the thugs that he is a member of a rival crime organisation. Reacher is picked up by the FBI and questioned but explains he's been a loner since he mustered out of the army. He is then questioned about two women whose cases of sexual harassment he dealt with when he was an MP. It is revealed they have both been killed in the last few months and a criminal profiling team has come to the conclusion that the person responsible was someone exactly like Reacher. Reacher realizes that he has no alibi for the places and times that the women were killed, and he requests a lawyer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_Burning"title="Echo Burning">
Jack Reacher breaks a bully's nose and finger after being repeatedly provoked in a Texas saloon, so when the bully turns out to be a local cop and shows up with three of his colleagues the following day to arrest him, Reacher decides it's time to move on. He chooses hitchhiking as the fastest escape and hooks up with a driver of Mexican heritage named Carmen Greer. She says that the only reason she stopped, however, is because she has a problem: Her tax-evading husband, Sloop, is coming out of prison soon, and he will inevitably continue beating her as he did so many times before, especially because he knows she was the one who informed on him. Carmen has been diligently searching for candidates to kill him, and she thinks Reacher's military background may qualify him for the job. Reacher initially refuses and even leaps out of the car and back into the sweltering 110-degree (Fahrenheit) heat, but then he expeditiously changes his mind and agrees to accept a ride back to her ranch. It is there that Carmen, her husband Sloop and the rest of his family live, and Reacher is promising nothing more than to look into the situation and, if necessary, to act as her bodyguard. Carmen and Jack then proceed to pick up her daughter Ellie, who gets on well with Reacher.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Without_Fail"title="Without Fail">
Jack Reacher arrives in Atlantic City after hitching a ride cross-country with a couple of aging blues musicians who dream of playing at B.B. King's club in New York City. He is approached there by Secret Service Agent M.E. Froelich, who had dated Reacher's brother Joe, a fellow Secret Service agent, before his death ("Killing Floor"). Froelich hires Reacher to conduct a "security audit" of the Secret Service's protection of Vice President-elect Brook Armstrong, the junior senator from North Dakota.Armstrong attends a meeting and photo-op with prominent bankers on Wall Street, a campaign event in Bismarck with the newly elected senator from North Dakota, and a fundraising event in Washington, D.C. Reacher reveals to Froelich that he hired his old colleague from the military police, Chicago security consultant Frances Neagley, to help with the "audit." Working together, Reacher and Neagley say that they could have killed the Vice President three times for sure, and once probably, in three days.Froelich reveals that the Secret Service has been receiving letters from someone threatening to kill Armstrong. She and her supervisor, a man named Stuyvesant, agree to hire Reacher and Neagley to help their investigation. Reacher tries on one of his brother's suits, and Froelich sleeps with him. Froelich asks why Neagley and Reacher never had a relationship, and he tells her that, for reasons she will not disclose, Neagley has a fear of being touched by others.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuader_(novel)"title="Persuader (novel)">
Jack Reacher is working unofficially with the DEA to bring down a boy's father, Zachary Beck, who is suspected of smuggling drugs under the pretext of trading in oriental carpets. They stage a kidnap effort on Zachary's son, Richard Beck. A frightened Richard places his trust in Reacher and asks him to take him back home. Reacher gains access to Beck and gradually gains his confidence by working as a hired gun/bodyguard. While working undercover he regrettably has to eliminate a few of Beck's minions to prevent them from exposing him. During this time he figures out that he was not the only undercover agent appointed to keep track of Zachary Beck. The house maid, too, turns out to be a federal agent trying to find evidence of arms smuggling against Zachary. The DEA, on finding that they were mistaken about the nature of the business Zachary was involved in, tries to pull Reacher out. Reacher refuses to step back as his primary motivation in getting involved at all in this off-the-books operation is to have another go at Francis Xavier Quinn, a former Military Intelligence agent who, ten years before, had brutally mutilated and murdered a female military colleague of Reacher's, Dominique Kohl. Reacher had originally presumed Quinn to be dead after their last little encounter but found that assumption to be incorrect after running into Quinn in public. It's ten years later and Quinn somehow just happens to be Zachary Beck's boss in a supremely lucrative, international gun-running enterprise. And it is revealed that Zachary was forced into working for Quinn and his family was tormented by bodyguards appointed by Quinn. As always, it is Reacher's all-consuming obsession with revenge, or at least with his personal interpretation of doling out justice, which pushes him far beyond the normal boundaries of physical endurance and acceptable risk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enemy_(Child_novel)"title="The Enemy (Child novel)">
In the last hours of 1989, Major Gen. Kenneth Kramer dies of a heart attack in a seedy North Carolina motel, apparently while in the company of a prostitute. Army MP Major Jack Reacher investigates and comes to the conclusion that the woman Kramer was with stole his briefcase. Reacher's superior, Col. Leon Garber, orders him to deliver news of the general's death to his wife. Accompanied by a female officer, Lieutenant Summer, Reacher travels to her house in Virginia. When they arrive, however, they find evidence of a break-in, as well as Mrs. Kramer's body.Reacher returns to the bar across the street from the motel in an attempt to identify the alleged prostitute. He gets into a fight with a bouncer, breaking his knee. Afterwards, Reacher is told by the motel's night clerk that he heard a military vehicle leaving after Kramer's death, and Reacher concludes that the woman Kramer was with is a female army officer. He is later confronted by two officers, Col. Coomer and Brigadier Gen. Vassell, members of Kramer's staff, who inquire about the briefcase but leave after Reacher mentions Ms. Kramer's death.Later, a Delta Force soldier, Christopher Carbone, is found murdered in a manner that suggests he was gay. Garber is suddenly transferred to a new command in South Korea and replaced with Col. Willard, a deeply unpleasant bureaucrat who instructs Reacher to write off Carbone's death as an accident. He also reveals that Carbone filed a complaint against Reacher accusing him of assaulting the bouncer, and that he intends to use it as evidence that Reacher killed Carbone unless he closes the investigation quickly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Shot_(novel)"title="One Shot (novel)">
In a small Indiana city, a lone gunman in a parking garage calmly fires into a rush-hour crowd in a public plaza, committing a massacre of five apparently random victims with six shots. The shooter leaves a perfect trail behind for the police to quickly track him down. Evidence from the scene, of a shell case and a quarter bearing the same fingerprints, points clearly to James Barr, a former Army infantry sniper. He is arrested, but will only say two things to the police: "They got the wrong guy," and "Get Jack Reacher for me." Reacher, a former Army military police officer and now a drifter, is away, but sees the news on CNN and gets on a bus to Indiana. Reacher has no job, no home, no car, and a shrinking savings account from his past military pay. Although Reacher has a nomadic existence, what he does have is sharp moral clarity.Instead of clearing Barr, Reacher wants to assist the prosecution in convicting him. Reacher is the last person Barr would want to see for good reason. When Reacher was an investigating military policeman years past, Barr had gone on a killing spree similar to the Indiana shootout, murdering four men during the Gulf War in Kuwait City. Convoluted military politics and a technicality let Barr walk free. Reacher swore he would track the sniper down if he ever tried it again. Reacher believes Barr is guilty, but Barr's sister Rosemary is convinced of her brother's innocence and entreats lawyer Helen Rodin to defend her brother. Helen's father is the district attorney who will prosecute the case. When Reacher arrives in Indiana, Barr has been beaten so badly while in prison that he cannot remember anything about the day of the murders, leaving Reacher to form his own conclusions with the available evidence. The local NBC news reporter, Ann Yanni, is also looking for more information, and Reacher is more than willing to include her in his investigation, in exchange for the use of her car and a guaranteed public exposé on the Barr case. Reacher knows that 35 yards, the parking garage shooting distance to the victims, is point-blank range for a trained military sniper like Barr. Reacher also knows the shooter missed one shot on purpose, giving Reacher one shot at the truth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hard_Way_(novel)"title="The Hard Way (novel)">
In a downtown Manhattan coffee shop Jack Reacher watches a man unlock a Mercedes and drive away. 24 hours later, in the same coffeehouse, he's approached, interrogated, and then driven to The Dakota where he meets Edward Lane and five ex-military soldiers, part of Lane's private mercenary army. Lane offers Reacher payment for his eye-witness description of the guy who stole the car; hearing that Reacher is an ex-Army CID investigator, Lane offers him a million dollars to help find his wife Kate (and, as an afterthought, Kate's daughter Jade). The pair, along with the chauffeur Graham Taylor (a British ex-SAS employee), disappeared while on a shopping trip to Bloomingdale's.The kidnapper initially tells Lane to put $1 million in his Mercedes and park it near the coffee shop where Reacher had been sitting - the man Reacher had seen drive off was the kidnapper. After the ransom retrieval the victims are not returned. The kidnappers subsequently ask for $5 million and then an additional 4.5 million. The total comprises half the $21 million haul Lane had netted in an African operation. Kate and Jade are not returned.Lane's first wife, Ann, had also been kidnapped; she'd been found a month later, dead in a vacant lot. Patti Joseph, Ann's sister, is convinced Lane had ordered Ann's murder (disguised as a kidnapping) because she'd asked for a divorce and a hefty settlement. Patti watches Lane's apartment month after month and passes info to an NYPD detective who passes it along to Lauren Pauling, a retired FBI agent who'd worked the first kidnapping.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Luck_and_Trouble"title="Bad Luck and Trouble">
A man with two broken legs is thrown out of a corporate helicopter from 3,000 feet above the California desert.Seventeen days after that, Reacher is roaming alone with no objectives, no phone, no address, just the clothes he's wearing and his ATM card, when he sees an anonymous deposit to his bank account. Reacher automatically analyses the amount, using his math obsession and investigative skills. Also obsessed with math, Frances Neagley (previously seen in "Without Fail") is the sender of $1,030.00, which Reacher recognizes as their old army code, 10–30, for urgent help needed. He meets up with Neagley in California and they discover the death of Calvin Franz, one of nine members of their elite team of ex–army investigators, who are being hunted down one by one. After getting no reply from anyone else, their suspicions rise and Neagley convinces him to put the old unit back together. Reacher and Neagley find that three of the other five members are missing, while Stan Lowery had a fatal car accident years earlier. They conclude Franz called the others for help with a major problem but left out the remaining four that resided too far away to get to him quickly, apart from Reacher, who is famously untraceable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripwire_(novel)"title="Tripwire (novel)">
The prologue describes Victor Truman "Hook" Hobie's carefully planned escape route in the event of somebody discovering his "really big, well-guarded secret". His "early-warning system" consists of geographically-located "tripwires" that will warn him that he has been discovered. The first is eleven thousand miles from his home in the United States and the second is six thousand miles out. His response to their activation would be to tie up loose ends, cash in, transfer his assets, and flee the country. Over thirty years of quiet success have made him feel somewhat secure. But he did not expect both alerts to arrive on the same day.The story then begins with Jack Reacher working two jobs in Key West (digging pools with a shovel by day and working in a bar at night) and bumping into a private investigator, Costello, who happens to be looking for him on behalf of a client named Mrs. Jacob, a name Reacher does not recognise. Later on, while Reacher is working his night job as a bouncer in a strip club, two suspicious-looking large men also make inquiries about his location. Reacher attempts to follow them but instead finds Costello murdered on the sidewalk. Jack then flies to New York to find out why Costello was looking for him and why he was killed for it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomy_of_Hope"title="Anatomy of Hope">
In the book Groopman investigates how hope affects human beings that are either undergoing medical care or have a family member that is critically ill. He distinguishes the differences between the types of hope, such as whether or not someone is experiencing false or true hope. For the book, Groopman visits several laboratories that are researching the biological basis of hope to discover whether or not hope can scientifically change someone's physical well-being.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patience_and_Sarah"title="Patience and Sarah">
The story is told in switching first-person narratives between Patience and Sarah. The first part is told by Patience White, a woman of considerable means compared to others in her town. Her father died and left her enough money that she would not have to marry to be cared for. She lives with her brother and his wife and children, in a room she has to herself, something her sister-in-law Martha considers an unnatural privilege. Patience paints Biblical scenes as a pastime, and helps Martha with the children sometimes. They do not get along well.Patience has known of Sarah Dowling for a while since Sarah is a scandalous character to some, wearing pants and doing men's work. Sarah has a family of sisters and her father trained her to do men's work since he had no sons. Intrigued one day when Sarah delivers firewood to the White household, and to flout Martha, Patience invites Sarah into her part of the house and socializes with her. Sarah divulges that she plans to set out by herself and go west and buy her own farm. Not having the heart to tell her that she will not have the opportunity to do it, Patience indulges Sarah and tells her she wants to come along. In the midst of planning the trip west, Sarah admits she feels for Patience, and although too aware of the danger, Patience also admits her attraction for Sarah.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starry_Nights"title="Starry Nights">
The protagonist of the book is Aasha Rani, a dark, chubby girl from Madras who has striven for seven years to become a famous Bollywood starlet. Her mother, Amma, has pushed her to attain this status by selling herself into the world of blue films before she was twelve years old, and when she was fifteen to Kishenbhai, a once-famous producer who was encouraged by Amma to take her as a lover in exchange for a film role. Kishenbhai, unable to secure a role for her any other way, finances a film with his own money after promoting her as the newest Bollywood starlet and having her sleep with the appropriate people to secure her attention and renaming her from Viji to Aasha Rani. He then proceeds to fall madly in love with her, who abandons him as she strives to get ahead in the filmi world, fully aware that she was just being used by him at first and is thus unable to return the affection of the older man.She falls in love with Akshay Arora, a famous Bollywood sex symbol who stars in a string of hits with her. Amma, who had been living with her in Mumbai, was sent away to Madras by Aasha for objecting to Akshay beating her one day. Eventually Akshay gets bored with her and after his wife confronts her unsuccessfully about her affair with her husband, he reveals to "Showbiz" magazine that she was a former pornographic actress, and effectively has her blackballed from making further films. When she accosts him at a society party about this, he beats her. Sheth Amirchand, a Member of Parliament and the gangster that controls most of the Mumbai underworld, then takes an interest in Aasha Rani and she becomes his lover and restarts her career under his protection. She then has an affair with Linda, a gossip columnist for "Showbiz" magazine and Abhijit Mehra, the son of an industrialist, who is about to be married. Linda advises her to go to the south and do an art film, which she does, where she tries to seduce the director only to find that he is impotent. Her interest in her work declines as she continue to obsess over Akshay Arora. She confronts him at a traffic light as their cars are next to each other and their affair is rekindled for a short time. She attempts to get Akshay to marry her, but when it becomes apparent that his interest in her is only due to his flagging stardom and not out of affection for her, she attempts suicide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prefect"title="The Prefect">
The novel begins with Dreyfus being sent out on a routine assignment to lock down a glitter-band habitat for polling violations. His superiors send one of his deputies, Thalia Ng, to distribute software upgrades around the Glitter Band to prevent anyone from attempting a similar violation.In the meantime, Dreyfus is sent to investigate the recent destruction of a habitat named Ruskin-Sartorious. Analysis indicates that the habitat has been destroyed by the flame of a Conjoiner Drive, and Dreyfus's team believe the lighthugger "Accompaniment of Shadows", the only one to have been near the habitat in recent weeks, is responsible. Before they can conclude their investigation, however, the Ultranauts take justice into their own hands and destroy the ship, but not before Dreyfus is able to converse with the captain, who convinces him that his crew were not responsible. Believing him to be truthful, Dreyfus and his deputy, the hyperpig Sparver, decide to investigate the matter further.Dreyfus and Sparver interview digital backups of the inhabitants of Ruskin-Sartorious. Dreyfus speaks with one of them about the Clockmaker, an alien machine which formerly lived in a Glitter Band research centre, creating, as its name suggests, clocks, before it began a violent killing spree and was destroyed with nuclear weapons nine years prior to the novel. He and Sparver then analyse communication records from the Ruskin-Sartorious habitat, and discover links with an orbiting asteroid owned by the Nerval-Lermontov family (a member of which was called Aurora). They defeat its defence systems and penetrate inside, discovering a Conjoiner starship trapped inside. One of them, Clepsydra, has escaped and is hiding. She meets with Dreyfus and tells him that she and the other Conjoiners had been enslaved by Aurora (now an extremely powerful software entity) to use the Exordium to predict the future. The Conjoiners predict a future devastated by what is implied to be the Melding Plague, and Aurora has been planning to respond to stop it (use of the Exordium creates a new timeline which can be changed to avoid the future the Exordium describes). She and Dreyfus escape as a ship under Aurora's control arrives and destroys the habitat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Without_End_(Follett_novel)"title="World Without End (Follett novel)">
The novel begins in the fictional city of Kingsbridge, England in the year 1327. Four children - Merthin, Caris, Gwenda, and Merthin's brother Ralph - head into the woods on All Hallows Day. Together the children witness two men-at-arms killed in self-defence by Sir Thomas Langley, aided by Ralph. The children then flee, with the exception of Merthin, who helps the wounded Sir Thomas bury a letter with instructions to dig up and deliver it if and when Sir Thomas should die. After this Sir Thomas flees to Kingsbridge and seeks refuge in the monastery, becoming a Benedictine monk, while the four children swear never to speak of what they saw.During mass at All Hallows, Gwenda is forced by her father to steal the money that Sir Gerald was supposed to use to pay his debts to Kingsbridge Priory. Forced to default on these debts he is disgraced, his property confiscated and he and his wife are left as pensioners to the Priory. This disgrace drives their sons Merthin and Ralph to seek to regain the family's fortune and honour. Ralph is accepted as a squire under the Earl of Shiring, while Merthin is pushed to the far less prestigious role of apprenticing himself as a carpenter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_Two_Worlds_(novel)"title="Between Two Worlds (novel)">
This volume deals with the aftermath of World War I in Europe during the 1920s (with the Beer Hall Putsch, the Italian fascist regime and some of the important conferences) and later the Roaring Twenties.After two disastrous affairs with married women Lanny marries in the end a rich heiress from New York, Irma. In the climax Lanny covers his father's stock market margin call on Black Thursday, Oct 24th 1929, then insists that his father sell all his stocks the next market day, thus escaping the carnage of Black Tuesday. His efforts to save his wife's wealth were not quite as successful, and her uncle was wiped out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winged_Pharaoh"title="Winged Pharaoh">
The story is narrated by Sekhet-a-Ra, familiarly known as Sekeeta. Most of the story takes place in the city of 'Me'n-atetiss', Memphis, Egypt, founded by Sekeeta's ancestor 'Meniss' (Menes). In the course of the narrative she becomes co-Pharaoh with her brother Neyah during the First Dynasty of Ancient Egypt. The narrative follows her life and training in the arts of war, statecraft, and metaphysics. All members of the royal family are routinely trained in the use of extrasensory abilities and taught a doctrine of esoteric discipline, reincarnation and karma. In the course of the story, she has an affair with a man named Dio from Minoas, and gives birth to a daughter she names Tchekeea, who becomes the fourth ruler of the First Dynasty, Den. Sekeeta rides a chariot into battle and engages in hand-to-hand combat to defend Egypt from invasion by the people of 'Zuma' (Sumer, which we are told is the land of the forerunners of the Babylonians), at the 'Amphitheatre of Grain', now the site of Tell el-Amarna. Sekeeta lives to an advanced age, dies, and is buried in Abidwa, the modern Abydos, Egypt. The name on her tomb is Meri-Nyet, her "priest name" which might be more properly rendered as Merneith.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Knight"title="Lady Knight">
War with the neighboring country of Scanra is declared at last, and Kel finds herself in charge of a refugee camp. Her district commander, Lord Wyldon, has chosen not to place her in control of a border post or a portion of the army like the other knights, so she's certain that he wishes to keep her—who, as a woman, he views as inferior in combat to males—out of fighting. However, it is revealed that she was chosen for her post because she is the only knight Wyldon knows who wouldn't discriminate against those not of noble blood. Kel soon comes to realize that these refugees, torn from their homes, robbed of their wealth and self-respect, are her responsibility. She must feed them, house them, and keep them safe from harm far too close to the Scanran border. She is able to be a hero, even outside of the battlefield.In her work at the camp Kel names Haven, she receives help in the shape of her old friends Neal and Merric, the horses Peachblossom and Hoshi, the dog Jump, and her personal sparrow flock, as well as from a mixed myriad group of others: the Wildmage Daine; Daine's lover, the great mage Numair Salmalin; Neal's own father, Duke Baird of Queenscove; Kel's former knight-master Raoul of Goldenlake and Malorie's Peak; men of the King's Own (including Kel's friend and Neal's cousin Sergeant Domitan of Masbolle); convict soldiers who have been given the choice to fight in the army or to die at hard labor; several hundred disillusioned refugees who have received too many empty promises from nobles; smugglers; and a young, orphaned boy with wild magic for horses named Tobe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingo_(novel)"title="Dingo (novel)">
Completed by Mirbeau's long-time friend Léon Werth, when the author's ill health prevented him from writing the concluding chapters, "Dingo", Mirbeau's final novel, appeared in completed form with Fasquelle in 1913. An autobiographical fiction, Mirbeau's tale chronicles the author's adventures with his pet dog Dingo while simultaneously offering a jaundiced view of country life, in Ponteilles-en-Barcis, a squalid town modeled on the village of Cormeilles-en-Vexin, where Mirbeau had the misfortune to reside.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Already_Dead_(Huston_novel)"title="Already Dead (Huston novel)">
"Already Dead" follows the adventures of a vampyre named Joe Pitt as he tries to figure out a mysterious zombie epidemic stemming around New York. He has connections in Manhattan Underworld which make him a valuable item for clans. Joe is then asked to find the gothic daughter of a rich man, and is pressured to do the work. Meanwhile, a disease is spreading zombie like symptoms around the town, causing whoever is bitten (or infected) by this disease into "Shamblers", and it's up to Joe to find the mysterious carrier of this sickness.Aside from his line of work, Joe has a girlfriend named Evie, a human that is HIV positive, is currently terrified of any sexual contact since she's afraid of infecting him with the sickness. Joe knows how to cure her HIV, but fears the side effects; so he tries his best to keep his vampyrism a secret from her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tokyo_Zodiac_Murders"title="The Tokyo Zodiac Murders">
The novel is divided into several sections. A foreword from the author challenges the reader to solve the gruesome mysteries; it claims that every clue necessary will be included in the text, and that the characters will have no unfair advantage over the reader.The first section is a fictional short story and will which lays out the setting: it is 1936 in the Shōwa period of pre-World War II Japan.A painter and womanizer named Heikichi Umezawa has long been obsessed with astrology and alchemy; he is a wealthy but fairly old man from a respectable family, who stills lives in a traditionally run sprawling household. He is finishing his greatest work: 12 large paintings, each depicting a member of the zodiac. As he works in his private studio on the last one, a portrait of Aries, his head is smashed with a blunt object. The murder is curious: it took place on a heavily snowing day, and many of the suspects have solid alibis. Further, when discovered, the room is locked and apparently had been locked from inside - leading to a locked room mystery.When the studio is investigated, a bizarre note is discovered - the same short story which starts the novel. In it, the narrator, who identifies himself as Heikichi, describes a long-running battle with mental disease, diabolism, and his murderous urge to create the perfect woman called "Azoth.” To do this, he will cut up his 2 daughters, 2 of his 3 stepdaughters and his 2 nieces, and take a single astrologically aligned piece of her body and combine it with the others. The reason given for excluding his remaining stepdaughter, Kazue Kanemoto, is that she is not a virgin. Each one will be killed with an alchemically significant metal and buried in a place which produces those metals. He writes that he will carry out his plan as soon as he finishes the Aries portrait.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swarm_(Schätzing_novel)"title="The Swarm (Schätzing novel)">
The book follows an ensemble of protagonists who are investigating what at first appear to be freak events related to the world's oceans. A new species of marine worm works together with bacteria to destabilize the continental shelf, causing a megatsunami which kills millions and severely damages the coastal infrastructure. Whales and sea-borne mussels band together to attack and incapacitate a commercial freighter. Swimmers are driven from the coast by sharks and venomous jellyfish. Commercial ships are attacked and sometimes destroyed. France sees an outbreak of an epidemic caused by contaminated lobsters.When it becomes clear that all those events are related, an international scientific task force is created under the lead of the United States, led by Lieutenant General Judith Li, a close friend and adviser to the President. Sigur Johanson, a marine biologist working at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, finally announces his hypothesis: the phenomena are intentional attacks by an unknown sentient species from the depths of the oceans. Johanson calls them "yrr", after three letters he typed randomly on his computer. The goal of the yrr is to eliminate the human race, which is devastating the Earth's oceans.General Li and a small group of scientists take to the sea on the helicopter carrier USS "Independence" in an attempt to find the yrr and make contact with them. They discover that the yrr are single-cell organisms that operate in swarms, controlled by a single hive-mind. The scientists have some success in investigating the yrr and make limited contact. The attacks do not cease.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantium_Endures"title="Byzantium Endures">
The book is written in the first person from the point of view of unreliable narrator Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, whose posthumous notes Moorcock claims to have transcribed. Pyat, as he is also known, describes in the novel his adventures in Tsarist then Revolutionary Russia. Born on 1 January 1900 in Kiev, Pyat dreams from early on of becoming a great inventor and engineer.His widowed mother, lacking any means to support his higher education, sends him at age 16 to a relative in Odessa, where Pyat is introduced to bohemian life, cocaine and sexual adventures. Making a good impression on his relative, he secures a position at a technical university in St. Petersburg. After having failed to obtain a degree, he returns to Kiev, where he manages to profit from his knowledge of machinery and runs a successful repair enterprise.The revolutionary and post-revolutionary civil war bring him again to Odessa; on the way, he aligns with whatever group is in power. Finally, he manages to escape by ship to western Europe. Throughout all his wanderings, Pyat does not pass over any opportunity for self-aggrandisement, despite being a genuinely despicable character. The character appears to have been addicted to cocaine and sex. He is also obsessively antisemitic despite being Jewish himself.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Son_the_Fanatic"title="My Son the Fanatic">
The narrative deals with Parvez, a Pakistani immigrant in England, and his problems with his son Ali. Parvez worries about Ali's behaviour which has changed significantly. Early in the story, Parvez is afraid of discussing his worries with his friends because his son has always been a kind of showpiece son. Eventually, Parvez breaks his silence and tells them how his son has changed, hoping to receive some advice. After having a short conversation, they come to the conclusion that his son might be addicted to drugs and that he sells his things to earn money to buy drugs. After this meeting, Parvez goes to his taxi to drive home. But in his car he finds Bettina, a prostitute, who drives with Parvez very often and has become a confidante. Since Parvez has defended Bettina from a client who had attacked her, they take care of each other. Parvez tells Bettina what he has observed and that he and his friends assume that his son does all these strange things because he is drug addicted. Bettina instructs Parvez on how he has to observe his son to find out if there is anything physically wrong with him. However, after a few days of observations Parvez decides that his son appears totally healthy. The only physical change Parvez observes is that Ali is growing a beard. And it turns out that his son does not sell his things. He just gives them away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_League_of_Frightened_Men"title="The League of Frightened Men">
When two men die under mysterious circumstances and a third disappears after appealing to Wolfe for protection, suspicion falls on Paul Chapin, a controversial author and friend of the three men who was severely injured many years ago at their hands as a result of a hazing prank. The remainder of the men involved, united together as a "League of Atonement", are in fear for their lives against Chapin's vengeance, but when a third man dies Wolfe determines that he may not be the only threat they face.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Box"title="The Red Box">
Wolfe and Archie investigate the death of a model who ate a piece of poisoned candy. One of the suspects begs Wolfe to handle his estate and especially the contents of a certain red box. Wolfe is at first concerned about a possible conflict of interest, but feels unable to refuse when the man dies in his office before telling Wolfe where to find the red box. The police naturally think that he told Wolfe somewhat more before dying.This novel presents the series' first instance of a murder taking place in Wolfe's office.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_There's_a_Will_(novel)"title="Where There's a Will (novel)">
The famous Hawthorne sisters — April, May and June — visit Nero Wolfe in a body to ask his help in averting a scandal. After the shock of their brother Noel's death three days before, they have been dealt another shock at learning the terms of his will. May, a college president, insists that Noel had promised to leave $1 million to her school; however, the will leaves each sister nothing but a piece of fruit and passes almost all of Noel's estate to a young woman named Naomi Karn. The sisters want to hire Wolfe to persuade Naomi to turn over at least half of the inheritance so that Noel's widow Daisy will not bring a case to court that would cause a sensation.Daisy's unexpected arrival interrupts the conference. She wears a veil at all times to cover the disfiguring scars left after Noel accidentally shot her with a bow and arrow. She discovered that Noel was having an affair with Naomi and now hates the entire Hawthorne family as a result. Wolfe assures her that he will consider her interests in addition to those of the sisters and attempt to negotiate with Naomi on their behalf.Later that day, Inspector Cramer interrupts another meeting with the news that Noel had in fact been murdered. He had been killed by a shotgun blast while hunting on his country estate; it was assumed that he had tripped and discharged the weapon, but further analysis of the evidence has led the police to discard this theory. Archie is called away to help Fred Durkin keep an eye on a man whom Fred had been tailing - Eugene Davis, a partner at the law firm that drew up Noel's will, who had been seen in a bar with Naomi. Davis is now drunk and passed out in a run-down apartment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Late_Mattia_Pascal"title="The Late Mattia Pascal">
The protagonist, Mattia Pascal, finds that his promising youth has, through misfortune or misdeed, dissolved into a dreary dead-end job and a miserable marriage. His inheritance and the woman he loved are stolen from him by the same man, his eventual wife and mother-in-law badger him constantly, and his twin daughters, neglected by their mother, can provide him with joy only until an untimely death takes them. Death robs him even of his beloved mother.To escape, he decides one day to sneak off to Monte Carlo, where he encounters an amazing string of luck, acquiring a small fortune. While reading a newspaper on his return home, he discovers, to his immense shock and delight, that his wife and mother-in-law declared an unknown corpse to be his own. Faced with this sudden opportunity to start afresh, he first wanders about Europe, and finally settles down in Rome with an assumed identity. His character develops in unexpected, even admirable, ways. Yet one admirable act brings the protagonist a crisis, followed by additional crises that lead him to conclude that continuing with his plans will entail only misery for those he loves, precisely because his entire life, including the precious liberty he thought he had gained from his past, is now a lie. He ultimately decides to fake his own death and return to his original life. But even that proves difficult; his family and town have long since adjusted to his "death," and his own adjustment of character prompts him to have mercy on his now remarried wife. So the twice-dead Late Mattia Pascal reduces himself to a figure outside the mainstream of society, a walk-on part in his own life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_at_the_Well_of_Souls"title="Midnight at the Well of Souls">
## Preamble.Elkinos Skander is an archaeologist stationed on the planet of Dalgonia. The planet was formerly occupied by the long-dead Markovian race, who are known only for the planet-sized computers they built into the crust of the planets they inhabited. He leads a group of students studying the ruins. Skander unlocks the mystery of the apparently dead computer. One of the students, patterned (and named) after a brilliant mathematician named Varnett, sees Skander interacting with the computer and confronts him. The two conclude that the computer runs on a form of energy unknown to human physics, forming the basic unified field that governs the existence of the universe.The rest of the team discovers a surface anomaly near the north pole of the planet, where a hexagonal "hole" appears for a brief interval every day. Skander and Varnett both believe that they will be able to use this anomaly to access the planetary computer, and both set off to attempt to take control. Trying to protect the discovery, Skander stops at the team's camp and murders them. By the time he arrives at the anomaly, Varnett has already prepared for his arrival and the two struggle on the surface. They are swallowed up by the anomaly when it reopens.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Prince"title="Dark Prince">
"Dark Prince" introduces the Carpathians, a powerful and ancient race. They have many gifts, including the ability to shape-shift, and extended life spans, living well over many years. Though they feed on human blood, they don't kill their human prey, and for the most part live among them without detection. Despite their gifts, the Carpathians are on the edge of extinction. There have been few children born to them in the past few centuries, those that have been born are all male and often die in the first year. It has been more than 500 years since a female has been born. Without females, many of the males are turning, becoming vampires, the monsters of human legend. After 200 years, a male Carpathian loses the ability to feel emotions and see in color. These will only return to him when he finds his lifemate, the other half of his soul.Mikhail Dubrinsky, Prince of the Carpathians, has worked tirelessly for centuries to discover why so many of their children die in the first years. However, his efforts have come to no avail. It is at this time, when he is on the brink of despair and self-destruction that he meets a beautiful human psychic, Raven Whitney. Raven is a strong telepath, and has worked with the police to capture four serial killers. But her gift has come with a price: a life of isolation, and pain whenever she uses her gift. When he meets her, he is shocked and amazed when he suddenly is able to see colors in her presence; he realizes that she is his lifemate. Despite his joy, there is doubt in his mind. No human woman has ever been a lifemate to a Carpathian. All human females who were converted had become deranged creatures, feeding on children and had to be destroyed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessor_(novel)"title="Confessor (novel)">
Richard Rahl has been captured by an Imperial Order commander, who spared his life (under the guise of Ruben Rybnik) to be the point man for the commander's Ja'La dh Jin team. Kahlan is also Jagang's prisoner, surrounded by special guards who can see her. During Richard's imprisonment, he is warned by a cloaked specter that he is now a player of the Boxes of Orden. Sister Ulicia is also visited by this figure, and is told that the time to open the Boxes has been reset to one year from the first day of winter-the day that Nicci set the Boxes into motion under Richard's name.Rachel is discovered missing from the Keep. That night, the witch woman Six enters the Keep and steals the third box of Orden from Nicci and Zedd. Zedd discovers the Keep's warning that the Wizard's Keep is dying due to the contamination of the chimes, and places a spell to protect it from future damage. Zedd, Rikka, and Tom then head to Tamarang to remove the spell blocking Richard's gift.In an attempt to breach the People's Palace, Jagang orders a massive ramp built to reach the plateau, bypassing the natural defenses of the Palace. While excavating dirt for the ramp in the Azrith Plains, Jagang's diggers stumbled upon the catacombs under the People's Palace, which provide a secret entryway. Three Sisters of the Dark enter, killing Ann and capturing Nicci, while soldiers are sent into the catacombs to prepare an attack. The Sisters of the Dark discover what they believe to be the original Book of Counted Shadows in Bandakar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exiles_at_the_Well_of_Souls"title="Exiles at the Well of Souls">
Scientist Gilgram Zinder has finally decoded the ancient Markovian physics that controls our universe. Corrupt politician and drug dealer Antor Trelig is aware of Zinder's work through the efforts of Zinder's assistant, Ben Yulin. Trelig takes Zinder's daughter hostage and forces Zinder and Yulin to build a computer that can control the Markovian forces, like the dead Markovian computers that have been found on some planets. Zinder and Yulin construct "Obie", a sentient supercomputer, building it in Markovian fashion directly into Trelig's resort planetoid, New Pompeii.Mavra Chang, freighter pilot and secret agent, is hired to rescue Zinder and halt Trelig's plans of universal conquest. In the process Obie accidentally makes contact with the Well World, which results in the entire planetoid being automatically transported into orbit around the Well World. Mavra and Zinder are aboard a spacecraft when this occurs, and find themselves flying over a "non-tech" hex. The Well World disables all of the technology on the ship and it crashes in the Southern Hemisphere. A war erupts on the Well World as the races of the nearby hexes race to collect all of the scattered pieces of the ship in order to escape the planet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_the_Well_of_Souls"title="Quest for the Well of Souls">
In "Exiles at the Well of Souls", Mavra Chang was captured by the Olborn, who use magical stones to convert beings into beasts of burden. The Olborn were interrupted partway through transforming Chang, leaving her partially transformed. Eleven years later, Chang remains an involuntary guest in the native hex of the human equivalents on the Well, Glathriel. After multiple attempts to escape, she has been reconditioned to accept her existence, and a maimed Glathrielite, Joshi, has undergone a similar partial transformation in Olborn to serve as a companion for Mavra.Inspired by the Diviner and the Rel, the Northern being that crossed from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere in "Midnight at the Well of Souls", several competing factions have discovered that the Northern beings inhabiting the hex of Yugash can "possess" a Southerner and allow him to pass into Yugash. In "Exiles at the Well of Souls", two ships were crash-landed on the Well World. The first landed in the South, and was destroyed at the end of the war in "Exiles." The second landed in the north, and now the factions that fought the war in "Exiles" are girding for a race to the second ship.Several other players who participated in the drama in "Exiles" are also introduced. Antor Trelig was a politician as well as the head of the sponge syndicate, in control of a significant fraction of the council governing human space. He was transformed at the Well World into a Makiem, a giant frog-like creature. Renard was the librarian on Trelig's resort planetoid of New Pompeii, which was subsequently transformed into the home of Obie, the supercomputer capable of using Markovian physics to manipulate the universe. Renard was transformed into an Agitar, a blue-colored satyr who rides winged horses. Ben Yulin was the assistant to Dr. Gilgram Zinder, Obie's designer, as well as an agent for Trellig. Yulin was transformed into a Dasheen, a minotaur.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_Fire"title="Spring Fire">
Susan ("Mitch") Mitchell is pledging to the Tri Epsilon sorority at fictional Cranston University. She is seen as a boon to the sorority due to her father's significant wealth, and the sorority is promised a new silverware set from the alumni if she is accepted. Large, ungainly, and shy, she is drawn to older sorority member Leda Taylor who is direct and independent; they become roommates and have double dates—Leda with boyfriend Jake and Mitch with the sullen, boorish president of the "Sig Eps" who humiliates her during a fraternity party. Mitch flees the party after striking the fraternity president on the head and the sorority is blackballed. Much-more-experienced Leda trades her exasperation with Mitch's innocence with overt affection for her in rapid mood switches.To avoid further exclusion, Mitch is persuaded by her sorority to invite the fraternity president to a dance at the sorority house, where he rapes her after getting her drunk. Afterwards Leda finds her stunned and calms her down by telling her how much she loves her. They begin a secret affair while Leda publicly continues dating Jake, whom she tells Mitch she rather despises, and Mitch going with relatively harmless "independents" (non-fraternity boys), which is frowned-on by the sorority leaders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_Under_(book)"title="Down Under (book)">
The book consists of three parts:1. Into the OutbackThe first part of the book mainly describes the journey taken by Bryson aboard the "Indian Pacific" from Sydney to Perth. He is accompanied on this journey by a young English photographer named Trevor Ray Hart. The author describes his experiences on the train, the places the train passes through on its way to Perth such as the Blue Mountains and White Cliffs. The author also supplies plenty of humor in the form of historical accounts of early explorers and settlers of Australia.2. Civilized Australia (The Boomerang Coast)This section of the book starts off with historical accounts from the time when Australia was discovered and goes on to illustrate how the Australians built a dynamic and prosperous society from a modest and unpropitious beginning. The rest of this section is devoted to the author's account of what he considers to be Civilized Australia, with accounts of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Canberra, the Gold Coast, Surfers Paradise, and many countryside towns in between.3. Around the EdgesThis part of the journey covers the Great Barrier Reef, the cities of Cairns, Darwin, and Alice Springs, and the mighty monolithic rock Uluru. Later Bryson visits Perth and the Shark Bay area of Western Australia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Among_the_Walnuts"title="Love Among the Walnuts">
Horatio Alger Huntington-Ackerman, a successful businessperson, marries Mousey Huntington-Ackerman (née Malone), a striving actor, and has a child named Sandy. They move with their butler Bentley and his wife Flossie to a new country estate called Eclipse with no neighbors except the residents of Walnut Manor, a convalescent home. One evening when Sandy is a young adult, his uncles Bart and Bernie visit Eclipse. The uncles feed the family a poisoned birthday cake in an attempt to inherit the family fortune, sending everyone but Sandy and Bentley into a coma.A court ruling mandates that a doctor be present to oversee care for the comatose patients ("the sleepers"). To meet this requirement, Sandy moves them next door to Walnut Manor. There, he meets Dr. Waldemar, the director of the facility, and Sunnie Stone, a nurse hired to care for the sleepers. While Bentley researches a cure of the sleepers' comas, Sandy and Sunnie acquaint themselves with the other patients of Walnut Manor and ultimately fall in love with one another.With the help of Dr. Waldemar and the manor's residents, Sandy and Sunnie discover that Walnut Manor's patients were placed in the facility's care by their relatives, who, as Walnut Manor's board of directors, have been embezzling from the home. They expose the board of directors' misdeeds and Bentley revives the sleepers from their coma. Sandy, Sunnie, Dr. Waldemar, and the residents of Walnut Manor together thwart Bart and Bernie and send them to prison.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_a_Life_(novel)"title="Get a Life (novel)">
After Paul Bannerman, an ecologist, is diagnosed with thyroid cancer and receives an operation, he is left radioactive. As a consequence of his radioactivity, Bannerman is left in the care of his parents so as to avoid affecting anyone else. While he is isolated, he becomes unhappy with his wife, who is a marketing executive, as he sees her as lacking convictions and enabling those he opposes as an environmentalist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Raw_Shark_Texts"title="The Raw Shark Texts">
Eric Sanderson wakes up with no memory of who he is or any past experiences. He is told by a psychologist that he has a dissociative condition known as fugue but a trail of written clues purporting to be from his pre-amnesiac self describe a more fantastic and sinister explanation for his lack of memories. According to these, he has activated a "conceptual shark" called a Ludovician which "feeds on human memories and the intrinsic sense of self" and is relentlessly pursuing him and will eventually erase his personality completely.When the Ludovician attacks Eric Sanderson, he decides to go in search of a doctor named Trey Fidorous, identified by the letters from his previous self, in the hope he may be able to help to explain what happened to him and how to defeat the shark. Eric travels through Britain in search of clues and is contacted by a mysterious figure called Mr. Nobody, who is part of a megalomaniac network intelligence called Mycroft Ward. Mr. Nobody attempts to subdue and control Eric but Eric manages to escape with the help of an associate of Fidorous named Scout. Scout takes Eric to meet Fidorous, travelling through "un-space" (an underground network of empty warehouses and unused cellars). They begin a romantic relationship during the journey but Eric feels betrayed when he discovers that Scout has brought him to Fidorous to use him as bait for the shark in the hope of destroying Ward.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Chance_(Steel_novel)"title="Second Chance (Steel novel)">
Editor-in-chief of a successful fashion magazine, Fiona Monaghan lives a high flying life, flitting between cities following her passion for fashion. Fiona is content to live her life with only her dog, Sir Winston shares her bed until she met John Anderson.After a world wind romance over several continents, Fiona opens up her heart for John, a widowed father of two young adult daughters. As the two plan their life together, it all begins to unravel disastrously from being hated by John's two daughters to ruining a business dinner with John's biggest client. Just as their love seems to be down and out, a surprise event gives them a second chance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_Swans"title="The Ugly Swans">
The action takes place in an uncertain mildly-authoritarian country, in an unnamed town. Famous writer Victor Banev, a middle-aged heavy drinker, comes from the capital city to the town of his childhood where the rain never stops.Banev finds himself in the middle of strange events linked to "slimies" or "four-eyes" - strange leper people suffering from disfiguring "yellow leprosy" manifesting itself as yellow circles around the eyes. These "slimies" live in a former leper colony. The town's adult population is terrified by their existence, considering them to be the cause of all the bad and odd things in the town. Nevertheless, the town's teenagers simply adore "slimies", that including Banev's daughter Irma. A boy named Bol-Kunats, Irma's friend, invites the writer to a meeting with the town school's students. Banev is deeply shocked by teenagers' high intelligence and disullusioned point of view. They appear as superhuman geniuses despising the dirty and corrupt human world and having no pity for the adults.Banev makes acquaintance with Diana, and discusses "slimies" in dinner conversations with the chief doctor of the leprosarium Yul Golem, a drunken artist Ram Quadriga and sanitary inspector Pavor Summan. Banev dislikes the mayor, a patron of local fascist thugs, and also the military who guard the "slimies". Golem mentions that the genetic disease of "slimies" represents the future of humanity, a new genetic type of people, intellectually and morally superior to ordinary people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wonder_That_Was_India"title="The Wonder That Was India">
The book was aimed at a western audience. Basham, in the book, has attempted to correct the negative stereotypes of India created by authors like James Mill, Thomas Babington Macaulay and Vincent Arthur Smith.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_of_Zanid"title="The Tower of Zanid">
Anthony Fallon, the Terran deposed as king of the Krishnan island of Zamba in the earlier novel "The Queen of Zamba", has fallen on hard times, having failed to regain his throne and lost his second wife Julnar as well. Currently he resides in Zanid, capital of the kingdom of Balhib, where he makes a precarious living as a city guardsman and spy for the nomad realm of Qaath. Fallon's life is made more complicated when Terran consul Percy Mjipa enlists him to help archaeologist Julian Fredro study the Safq, an ancient snail-shaped tower forbidden to all but members of the native Yeshite cult. Fallon is also to look into recent disappearances of Terran scientists in the region. Mjipa, introduced in this novel as a secondary character, would go on to appear in three other Krishna novels; the chronologically earlier "The Hostage of Zir" and "The Prisoner of Zhamanak" (the latter as the protagonist), and the chronologically later "The Swords of Zinjaban".Balancing Fallon's mutually exclusive allegiances while continuing to work toward recovering his kingdom is a difficult undertaking, which he realizes could prove fatal–particularly when the Safq turns out to be hosting a secret project to reproduce Terran weaponry as a secret weapon for the war with Qaath. Then in the climactic battle the Qaathians unleash their own secret weapon, designed and built by the captive scientists. In the ensuing chaos Fallon figures the best thing to do is cut and run with the proceeds of his espionage, only to be undone by the fallout of a rare good deed, his earlier rescue of missionary Welcome Wagner.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overload_(novel)"title="Overload (novel)">
The novel is described from the point of view of vice-president of Golden State Power and Light, Nimrod "Nim" Goldman, who, despite being married, tends to be somewhat of a Lothario and has many extramarital affairs. The geographic area of service of the fictional electric utility, Golden State Power and Light, matches the actual Northern California footprint of the real-life Pacific Gas and Electric Company.Golden State Power and Light is a public utility, supplying two-thirds of California's electric power. During a hot summer, GSP&amp;L as it is called, loses a major part of its capacity to supply power due to a terrorist attack on its largest "oil burner" (an oil-fired power plant), called Big Lil. There is a board meeting about the incident. The chairman of GSP&amp;L, Eric Humphrey, leaves the matter in the hands of Nim Goldman, one of the utility's many vice-presidents, and head of security Ray Paulsen. After the explosion at Big Lil, which killed chief engineer Walter Talbot, Nim visits Ardythe, Walter's widow, and Wally, his son. After some time, Nim and Ardythe make love.As a result of Nim noticing how some customers were marked for emergency restoration (because they depend on electric power for survival, such as iron lung users and certain disabled persons), utility billing supervisor Teresa Van Buren convinces Nim go visit one of these emergency restoration customers, Karen Sloan, a quadriplegic who uses a portable respirator on her wheelchair, whom he instantly befriends, angering Ruth, his wife and his children Leah and Benjamin. Later, Nim and Harry London, property protection president, go to Brookside, to catch power thieves. And surprisingly, they catch many. Nim later learns that the terrorist attacks were by a group called "Friends of Freedom". Later the leader of the group, Georgos Archambault, mails letter bombs and kills five people including utility president Fraser Fenton. Because of this, Nim forms a think group with utility General Counsel Oscar O'Brien, Teresa Van Buren and Harry London.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrets_of_a_Hollywood_Super_Madam"title="Secrets of a Hollywood Super Madam">
In the late 1980s–1990s Gibson ran an exclusive "escort service" based in Hollywood, California, U.S.A., under the name "Sasha from the Valley", while also leading a double life on radio and television as a minor actress and recording artist. The book describes Gibson's life during this period. She was subsequently tried and convicted of pimping and conspiracy in a high media profile trial and sent to prison. Gibson claimed in the book that public figures used her business. Included in the text is court data from her "Black Book", which was introduced as evidence at the trial.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Summer"title="Seventeenth Summer">
"Seventeenth Summer" is a book about a 17-year-old girl named Angeline "Angie" Morrow. It takes place in the early 1940s in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Angie gets asked out on her first date by local high school basketball star, Jack Duluth. They fall in love, knowing that Angie has to leave for college in Chicago in the fall and Jack is moving with his family to Oklahoma to help his uncle with the bakery business. Jack falls in love with Angie, but Angie never says that she loves him back, so the question is, does she? Although Jack spontaneously proposes to Angie at an end-of-summer party, they both know they are too young. The novel ends with a heartfelt goodbye at the train station: Jack gives Angie his class ring and Angie goes away to school, knowing she will never forget Jack or her seventeenth summer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_Devil_—_a_Diva!"title="To the Devil — a Diva!">
Karla Sorensen is the fading one-time star of a glut of low-budget Hammer-style horror movies from the 1960s and 1970s, who finds herself in the new millennium short on cash and willing to work anywhere - even on Menswear, the most cutting-edge soap opera on television.Fortunately, as she sold her soul to the Devil during the World War II, Karla has hidden reserves to fall back on...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_Drugs_and_Sausage_Rolls"title="Sex and Drugs and Sausage Rolls">
John Omally's ambition to be a rock star leads him to manage an odd rock group called Gandhi's Hairdryer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-bye,_My_Lady"title="Good-bye, My Lady">
Skeeter is a 14-year-old orphan who lives with his uncle Jesse in a one-room shack in the swamps of the Pascagoula River in Mississippi. He has heard the sound of a strange animal in the swamp near their shack, and one summer evening he convinces his uncle to help him go out and find it. When they do, they see it is a small animal with short red and white fur that makes a chuckling yodel sound and cleans itself like a cat. Jesse is unsure what the animal is, but Skeeter is convinced it is a dog.The next day, Jesse's friend Alpheus "Cash" Evans, owner of the general store in the nearby village of Lystra, comes to help Skeeter and Jesse track down the animal. With Evans is his tracking dog Gabe and two vicious hog dogs named Bark and Bellow whom he keeps leashed. Evans releases Gabe at the spot where Skeeter and Jesse saw the animal, and Gabe eventually picks up its scent and starts tracking it. As they listen to Gabe tracking the animal it becomes clear that it is outrunning Gabe. It bursts into the clearing, and Evans releases Bark and Bellow. When the animal stands its ground and fights back against the hog dogs, Evans calls them off and allows it to escape. He acknowledges that Skeeter was right - the animal is a dog.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_Candlesticks"title="The Emperor's Candlesticks">
When a group of Russian anarchists kidnap a Russian prince in Vienna there are repercussions. On learning that the Cardinal d'Orsay has agreed to convey some hollow candlesticks from the Emperor to the Princess Marionoff in St Petersburg, two spies both see the possibility of using them to convey messages safely into Russia.One is an eager young idealist involved in the plot against the prince, the other is Madame Demidoff, a beautiful agent of the Tsar.When the candlesticks go missing at the border, the two engage in a race to get them back, both realizing that their very lives could depend on the retrieval.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arms_of_Krupp"title="The Arms of Krupp">
The book presents readable and often humorous descriptions of the Krupp family and its businesses from the Thirty Years' War to the Kaisers, the Weimar Republic, the Nazis, the American occupation, and finally the Bonn government. The book describes how the family and its business received generally favorable treatment from the government, culminating in a special law Lex Krupp. Manchester's book describes family members in detail from the first Krupp (circa 1500) "a shrewd chandler with a keen eye for the main chance," through the family's incarnation by the sixth generation as "Essen's uncrowned kings," to the powerful weapons company that armed Germany for three major wars, and finally the dissolution of the business. Manchester biases his story; he describes every member as having some unfortunate trait, and all as somewhat malevolent.The book examines to what extent German industry has part of the moral responsibility for the acts of the German state during the World War II. Krupp profited directly from requisitions of industrial capacities in occupied Europe. The Nazi war effort created a huge demand for workers in the armament industry; a mobilization of women into the labor force was ruled out due to ideological reasons. Instead the Nazis opted to meet the demand for workers by slave laborers. The Krupp AG owned private concentration camps and leased slaves from the SS at the cost of one Reichsmark per day; Slaves for the industry were transferred directly from extermination camps or from POWs, were drafted during the Nacht und Nebel program, or civilians recruited from occupied countries as ostarbeiters. The surviving former slaves were not compensated adequately after the war for their sufferings; after the war Alfried Krupp was convicted of crimes against humanity
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nest_of_the_Sparrowhawk"title="The Nest of the Sparrowhawk">
Set in puritan Kent in 1657, the story focuses on the intrigues of Sir Marmaduke de Chevasse "as stiff a Roundhead as ever upheld my Lord Protector and his Puritanic government", who is determined to secure the vast fortunes of his lovely ward, Lady Sue, for himself.Sue presents a girlish figure; she is young, alert and vigorous. The charm of her own youth and freshness even means she looks dainty and graceful in clothes that disfigure her elders. She enjoys the adulation which her appearance guarantees, laughing and chattering with the women and teasing the men.She does of course have plenty of admirers, including young Richard Lambert who worships her with protective reverence.Sir Marmaduke who has plans to woo and win Lady Sue disguised as the exiled French Prince of Orléans, resents this faithful espionage and lays a plot to lure young Lambert to a gaming-house in London. Richard knows that gambling is an illicit pastime and that he is breaking the law, but is compelled to take his seat at the table by his employer.Richard is then duped into taking part in a brawl and is summarily arrested leaving the way open for Marmaduke to carry out his cowardly deception and he soon tricks Sue into marrying him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bronze_Eagle"title="The Bronze Eagle">
Crystal, the only daughter of the old, long-exiled haughty royalist, the Comte de Cambray, is on the eve of betrothal to de Marmont, (secretly an ardent Bonapartist).Bobby Clyffurde, the Englishman, who is in love with Crystal, confronts Victor de Marmont about why he is pretending to be a royalist. De Marmont replies that he has never led the Comte to suppose anything, the Comte has merely taken de Marmont’s political convictions for granted.As if two potential suitors weren’t enough, Crystal has yet another admirer, Maurice de St. Genis, whose impecunious state (her father sees him as a penniless, out-at-elbows, good for nothing) has precluded him from obtaining her hand in marriage.However at the moment of Crystal’s betrothal to de Marmont, Maurice finally gets his revenge upon his rival. Once the guests have assembled for the ceremony, there is a disturbance from the end of the corridor and St. Genis enters the room, his rough clothes and muddy boots providing a contrast to the immaculate get-up of the Comte’s guests. Looking flushed and clutching his cane he announces that he has only come to avert the awful catastrophe that is about to fall on the Comte and his family.At the young man’s ominous words, M. le Comte goes pale and demands to know what catastrophe could be worse than twenty years of exile?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Broken_Sword"title="The Broken Sword">
The book tells the story of Skafloc, elven-fosterling and originally son of Orm the Strong. The story begins with the marriage of Orm the Strong and Aelfrida of the English. Orm kills a witch's family on the land and later half-converts to Christianity, but quarrels with the local priest and sends him off the land. Meanwhile, an elf named Imric, with the help of the witch, seeks to capture the newly born son of Orm. In his place, Imric leaves a changeling called Valgard. The real son of Orm is taken away to elven lands and named Skafloc by the elves who raise him. As the story continues, both Skafloc and Valgard have significant roles in the war between the trolls and the elves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughing_Boy_(novel)"title="Laughing Boy (novel)">
The novel is set in 1915, when the first motorized vehicle was driven into Native American territory. It concerns a boy named Laughing Boy who seeks to become an adult who can be respected among his Navajo tribe. They live in a place known as "T'o Tlakai." He has been initiated into tribal ways, is an accomplished jeweler, and can compete favorably at events such as racing wild horses, which he has either caught or capably traded at market.At a tribal event, Laughing Boy encounters a beautiful, mysterious young woman known as Slim Girl, and the two are soon attracted to each other. Complications arise immediately from her past experiences in the Indian Schools, boarding schools run under the auspices of the federal government for education and assimilation of Native Americans. Native American children were sent to these schools from numerous tribes, where they were forced to abandon their individual languages and cultures and instead adopt the English language and Western cultural standards.These complications affect both his family's view of the relationship, and the relationship itself in ways that slowly unfold and intertwine as the novel progresses. It offers a rare glimpse into the Navajo lifestyle and territory.The novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was published as an Armed Services Edition during WWII.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_of_the_Fur_Queen"title="Kiss of the Fur Queen">
"Kiss of the Fur Queen" begins with the champion dog-sled racer Abraham Okimasis and the story of his two sons, Champion and Ooneemeetoo Okimasis from Eemanipiteepitat, Manitoba. Both brothers are taken from their families and sent to a residential school where they are unable to speak their language, forced to cut their hair, and renamed to Jeremiah and Gabriel. In their residential school experience, both brothers are physically and sexually abused at the hands of the priests which leads to Jeremiah's celibacy and Gabriel's inability to form successful relationships. The residential school is also the time that Gabriel meets the Fur Queen or better known as the trickster who watches over them throughout their lives.When he returns from residential school, Jeremiah moves to Winnipeg to pursue his interests in music which acts as a coping strategy for his earlier abuse. He immerses himself fully in his musical pursuits which results in his further isolation and feelings of loneliness due to his lack of meaningful relationships and family connections. Gabriel decides to join his brother in Winnipeg to continue his passion for dance. He embraces his homosexuality at a time when it was not safe to do so publicly, and self-medicates with drugs and alcohol. He turns to prostitution and endures vivid flashbacks of the abuse he suffered at the hands of the priests. Both brothers have troubles reconciling their two identities and this leads them to reject their Native identity and embrace the dominant culture.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_Inc."title="Religion Inc.">
The work includes twenty-seven photographs, taken by the author in the course of research for the book.Lamont describes the difficulty authors often encounter in writing and publishing critical books on the Church of Scientology: "Books about Scientology have a greater permanency than newspaper articles and therefore it should not come as a surprise that vigorous smear-campaigns have been conducted against the authors of such investigations." Lamont later goes on to chronicle some of the harassment suffered by author Paulette Cooper after the publication of "The Scandal of Scientology", including recounting parts of Operation Freakout. Lamont also goes into the inherent motivation for profit within the organization.The book also details L. Ron Hubbard's actions later in life: his retreat to sea, isolated lifestyle in California, and death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyfriars_Bobby_(novel)"title="Greyfriars Bobby (novel)">
The narration of "Greyfriars Bobby" is most unusual. The book is written from the point of view of the dog, which makes every-day events very strange. The main story of the book is directly adapted from the supposedly true Scottish story of Greyfriars Bobby.Bobby spends much time with his master and unofficial owner, "Auld Jock" (Scots for "Old John"), creating a very strong emotional connection. They have an intense connection and Jock cares for Bobby very well—though Jock never bought Bobby. This creates problems later, because of Jock's having, in the eyes of the law, "stolen" an unlicensed dog. Eventually, Auld Jock dies. Bobby is in great distress; but a loyal dog will never leave its owner's side, even after death.After his owner dies, Bobby is lost; he can barely function without his companion. Though his owner's body was identified by the man's given name, John Gray, and not as "Auld Jock", his nickname, people still tell Bobby to look for "Jock", which just worsens Bobby's pain. He is lost for a while, and a large reward is offered for his return. Eventually, Bobby finds Auld Jock's grave and guards it day and night. The pair are inseparable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fablehaven"title="Fablehaven">
The series begins as 13-year-old Kendra, and 11-year-old Seth Sorenson are traveling to their Grandpa and Grandma Sorenson's house while their parents are away on a 17-day cruise. When they get there, they also meet Dale, the groundskeeper, and Lena, the housekeeper. Grandma Sorenson is "mysteriously" missing. Grandpa Sorenson does not tell Kendra and Seth about Fablehaven being a secret preserve for magical creatures at first, but instead sets up a rather complex puzzle involving six keys and a locked journal for Kendra to solve. Once Kendra unlocks the mostly blank journal, she discovers the words "Drink the milk". She and Seth drink the magical milk opening their eyes to a whole new, mystical world full of the magical beings of Fablehaven. Then Kendra and Seth must face challenges such as defeating an evil witch and a powerful demon, defending the preserve from an evil society, stopping a plague that changes creatures of light into creatures of darkness, and ultimately, protecting the world from a horde of imprisoned demons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Disappear_Completely_and_Never_Be_Found"title="How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found">
The book is a guide on starting a new identity. It includes chapters on planning a disappearance, arranging for new identification, finding work, establishing credit, pseudocide (creating the impression of one's own death), and more. The book recommends a method of disappearing by assuming the identity of a dead person with similar vital statistics and age, and also includes a section on avoiding paper trails which, due to the age of the book, may no longer be relevant or useful.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Messenger_(Zusak_novel)"title="The Messenger (Zusak novel)">
The protagonist is Ed Kennedy, an uninspired nineteen-year-old Australian taxi driver. Ed laments his mediocre life and strained relationship with his mother, as his father died recently and left Ed with only his dog, the Doorman, but does nothing to improve his situation, instead preferring to continue living alone and playing cards every week with his friends: Ritchie, who is unemployed and generally apathetic about life; Marv, a stingy carpenter; and Audrey, a fellow taxi driver whom Ed is in love with, although she does not reciprocate. After accidentally foiling a robbery he is proclaimed a hero by the public, though the robber leaves him a warning that he sees "a dead man" when he looks at Ed before being taken away by police.One night, he receives a small unmarked envelope, inside of which is an Ace of Diamonds with three addresses and times of day written on them. His friends deny involvement, so Ed investigates the three addresses. Ed arrives at the first address at midnight, and witnesses a man raping his wife while their daughter cries on the porch. The second corresponds to a senile widow named Milla who lives alone, and the third is the address of a young girl named Sophie who runs barefoot every morning but still cannot win at her track meets. Realizing that the sender of the cards intends for Ed to involve himself with the three people, Ed researches Milla's history and discovers that she is waiting for her husband Jimmy, who died sixty years ago during World War II, so he pretends to be Jimmy and comes to read to her weekly. For Sophie, he raises her spirits by giving her an empty shoe box to encourage her to try running barefoot at her next competition; although she loses again, she still finds pride in her achievement. Ed is initially unsure how to approach the rapist, until he receives a gun in the mail, which he uses to kidnap the man and threaten him to leave the city and never return.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayy_ibn_Yaqdhan"title="Hayy ibn Yaqdhan">
The story revolves around Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, a little boy who grew up on an island in the Indies under the equator, isolated from the people, in the bosom of an antelope that raised him, feeding him with her milk. Ḥayy has just learned to walk and imitates the sounds of antelopes, birds, and other animals in his surroundings. He learns their languages, and he learns to follow the actions of animals by imitating their instinct.He makes his own shoes and clothes from the skins of animals, and studies the stars. He reaches a higher level of knowledge, of the finest of astrologists. His continuous explorations and observation of creatures and the environment lead him to gain great knowledge in natural science, philosophy, and religion. He concludes that, at the basis of the creation of the universe, a great creator must exist. Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān lived a humble modest life as Sufi and forbade himself from eating meat.Once 30 years old, he meets his first human, who has landed on his isolated Island. By the age of 49, he is ready to teach other people about the knowledge he gained throughout his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodsong"title="Woodsong">
Paulsen opens his book with a vivid retelling of a story in which he watched brush wolves kill and devour a live doe in the woods. This event revealed the raw, unfabricated realities of nature to him. Paulsen recounts many incidents he has undergone with his dogs on their runs, including times he has been carried to safety by his sled dogs after breaking his knee on the trail, became violently ill in the midst of extreme cold conditions, and a variety of mysterious happenings in the Alaskan wilderness. In all of their adventures, he bonds closely with his dogs, particularly one named Storm. Storm is portrayed as an ideal dog that taught Paulsen many life values.Part One closes, and Part Two begins with Paulsen entering a team of fifteen of his dogs in the Iditarod Sled Dog Race, an approximately 1,153.2 mile-long sled dog race from Anchorage, Alaska to Nome, Alaska. The race proves to be long and arduous. Extreme cold conditions and difficult terrain put both him and his team to the test. He is repeatedly afflicted by lifelike hallucinations caused by extreme sleep deprivation, such as a man with a trench coat talking about educational grants, and hallucinating about a man hallucinating. But Gary is spurred onward by the beauty of the race and his devotion to the team. During the race, Gary experiences a unique feeling when he is running with his dogs. After nearly seventeen days, he at last crosses the finish line in Nome. He places last in the race, but accomplishment and adventure are all that matter to him. Gary feels at home and a sense of peace when he is sledding with the dogs in the race.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Fate"title="Moon Fate">
Ryan Cawdor arrives in the remains of the New Mexico MAT-TRANS chamber with his son Dean, having rescued him from a slave camp to the north. Once they exit the facility the pair see smoke coming from the direction of Jak Lauren's ranch, where their friends Krysty Wroth, J.B. Dix, Dr. Theophilus Tanner, and Mildred Wyeth were waiting for Ryan's return. Ryan and Dean set off for the ranch, fearing the worst. When they arrive they discover the ranch burned to the ground and completely deserted, but curiously find no bodies, not even the remains of the absent livestock. Further adding to the confusion there are only a small number of bullet casings found on the property, and inside the still-standing smokehouse Ryan discovers several pieces of smoked meat infested with maggots. A final, cryptic clue comes when Dean tries to pull water from the well and discovers a note from Krysty affixed to the top of the rope. The note urges Ryan not to drink from the well but offers no other explanation, saying that for some unstated reason there's not enough time for one. Reluctantly Ryan and Dean leave the water and head north, towards their friends. Several miles north the pair come across a deep mining pit, now filled with bodies. Dean examines them up close, discovering each has been shot through the head, apparently at point-blank range. Disturbingly, this includes at least a dozen children. Finally as they head into the foothills, Ryan discovers a long note from Krysty, explaining the situation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_and_the_Sun"title="The Moon and the Sun">
Set in 17th-century France at the court of the Sun King, King Louis XIV, the young, colony-raised, naïve Mademoiselle Marie-Josèphe de la Croix is the lady-in-waiting to King Louis XIV's niece. Her brother, Father Yves de la Croix (a natural philosopher and explorer), has recently returned from a mission commissioned by the king: to bring back the endangered sea monster whose flesh is rumoured to give the consumer immortality. Father Yves brings back two specimens: one, a dead male sea monster covered in sawdust and ice; the other, a live female sea monster placed in the Apollo fountain in the Palace of Versailles.Acting as her brother's assistant, sketching the dead sea monster's dissection, and caring for the live specimen, Marie-Josèphe soon realizes the creature is not a sea monster, but a sea woman. Thus, Marie-Josèphe tries to convince the others at court, including her brother, that the sea woman is intelligent and hopefully free her. Unfortunately, only Marie-Josèphe can understand the sea woman (now called Sherzad) and her musical way of talking. As a result, the court ignores her.They bleed her for hysteria, the pope openly shows outrage over the impropriety of her composing a cantata, and several court men harass her on the King's hunt. At the same time, her slave Odelette (really called Haleed) struggles to gain her freedom. Only the stoic Count Lucien believes Marie-Josèphe about the sea woman, calmly taking the sea woman and Marie-Josèphe's scientific endeavors in stride. In order to save her own life, Sherzad, the sea monster, offers the king the location of a sunken treasure ship in return for her freedom. But despite the discovery of Spanish gold found from the wreck, the king intends to keep Sherzad and eat her, the lure of immortality being too strong.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_of_Steel_(novella)"title="Made of Steel (novella)">
Returning from the Cretaceous period, The Tenth Doctor and Martha Jones journey to the present day, where Cybermen have been teleporting into labs and stealing technology.The Doctor takes Martha back to the Royal Hope hospital, where they have a confrontation with a pair of Cybermen in the car park. After nearly being captured, the Cybermen suddenly disappear, due to faults with their unfamiliar teleportation technology. The Army also want to get their hands on the Doctor, and ask for his help, so the Army capture him and his TARDIS from the Royal Hope Hospital, and he is separated from Martha.At the Army Base, the Doctor realises that the Cybermen who were made on Earth, not the parallel universe (and were therefore not sucked into the void) having been using teleportion devices stolen from the Torchwood building, to help them gather enough technology to create a portal capable of reopening The Void and release the Cybermen trapped inside. But the Cybermen do not know how to open the Void, and so they need the Doctor to open it for them. That's why they're trying to capture him alive.While Martha is separated from the Doctor, the Cybermen reappear, and capture her. They take her to their secret base where they discuss whether or not to kill her. Soon, the Doctor phones her on her mobile, and lets slip where he is. Just as Martha is about to tell him where she is, the Cyberleader snatches her phone and destroys it, then plans an attack on the Army Base where the Doctor is being held.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Tattoo"title="The Black Tattoo">
The story begins with Charlie, whose parents are recently divorced, meeting his father in a restaurant with his best friend Jack Farrell. They leave the restaurant, however, soon after entering. Soon afterward, Charlie is unknowingly possessed by a demon known as the Scourge. He also joins the society known as The Brotherhood Of Sleep, who imprisoned the Scourge in the roots of a tree until one of their own released him. With Charlie's help, the Scourge manages to first kill all the members of the Brotherhood, save for the girl Esme, who has trained all her life to kill the demon. Soon after the death of their members, a possessed Charlie gets into a gateway to Hell, which is essentially a Roman Empire of sorts composed of demonesque species and even gladiator pits. Soon after reaching Hell, The Scourge's true goal is revealed: He wishes to awaken "the dragon" who created the universe, and upon awakening he will destroy it again. Suddenly, it is up to Jack, Esme, and a team of soldiers to stop Charlie and the Scourge from destroying the universe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limit_of_Vision"title="Limit of Vision">
Virgil Copeland and Randall Panwar are forced to present a project review to the senior staff of "Equatorial Systems", and their fellow scientist Gabrielle Villanti fails to attend. Panwar struggles with the presentation, in which they present their research about asterids (artificial neurons) known as LOVs. Although LOVs showed promise in initial experiments, the enhanced intelligence of the test animals was offset by the uncontrolled growth of the LOVs, which eventually killed their hosts. LOVs were therefore made dependent on two amino acids: nopaline for metabolism and octopine for reproduction. In the second phase of the experiment, the LOVs were encased in silicate shells. These LOVs were able to safely interact with the test animals, but an unrelated incident at a rival biotechnology company prompted a government crackdown, and the LOVs were exported to the "Hammer", a space station in low Earth orbit.Panwar's presentation is interrupted by news of an incident at the lab. Gabrielle, Panwar, and Virgil had illegally implanted LOV clusters on their foreheads to communicate with the LOV colonies in their care, and Gabrielle had entered a fugue state and died of exhaustion while connected to their latest experimental subject. Their administrators discover Virgil attempting to surreptitiously remove the LOVs from Gabrielle's corpse, and the two surviving scientists are put into quarantine. However, the LOV colony is more intelligent and resourceful than anticipated, and overcomes several obstacles to colonize key areas of the "Hammer". When it learns what has happened, it takes control of several drones and severs the lab module from the space station.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Falling_Woman"title="The Falling Woman">
Elizabeth Butler is an archaeologist, and the author of several popular books that challenge her colleagues' ideas about Maya civilization. Elizabeth has a strange gift, connected to a suicide attempt as a young woman, which allows her to see the spirits of ancient people while she walks at dusk and dawn. The story opens with Elizabeth in the middle of an eight-week field study at Dzibilchaltún. Her team hopes to find dramatic artifacts that will spark interest and increased funding for future field studies at the site.In the middle of the field study, Elizabeth's estranged adult daughter Diane arrives unannounced. After the death of her father, Elizabeth's ex-husband, Diane suddenly abandoned her life in the United States, and flew to Mexico to see her mother. It is revealed that Diane has seen Elizabeth for only a few brief visits since Elizabeth left her as a young child to be raised by her father. Neither is sure what Diane wants from Elizabeth.As the two struggle to connect, Elizabeth has a new experience: one of her spirit visions, a Mayan priestess named Zuhuy-kak, can see and speak with Elizabeth. Zuhuy-kak provides unprecedented knowledge about the Mayans' departure from Dzibilchaltún, and leads Elizabeth to the major archaeological find her team needs, but demands a sacrifice to the goddess Ix Chebel Yax. As the dig progresses, haunted by bad luck and tragedy, Zuhuy-kak makes it clear that Elizabeth must sacrifice her daughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_Not_About_the_Bike"title="It's Not About the Bike">
In 1993, 21-year-old Lance Armstrong becomes World Cycling Champion. In Austin, Texas, four years later on October 2, 1996, at age 25, Armstrong is diagnosed with testicular cancer with metastasis to the lungs and abdomen. On October 3, Dr Jim Reeves removes Armstrong's diseased testicle. On October 5, after banking sperm, Armstrong begins chemotherapy. The first chemo cycle Armstrong undergoes is BEP.After receiving a letter from and talking to an oncologist, Steve Wolff, with events Armstrong discovers that the cancer has also spread to his brain. After Dr Wolff suggests Armstrong to get an opinion from Dr Lawrence Einhorn—the foremost expert on testicular cancer—Armstrong went to the Indiana University medical centre in Indianapolis. He decided to receive the rest of his treatment there. On October 25, Armstrong's brain lesions were removed by Dr Scott Shapiro. For the three remaining chemo cycles Armstrong was given an alternative protocol, VIP, by Craig Nichols — the primary oncologist. Armstrong completed chemotherapy on December 13, 1996, and by February 1997, he was declared cancer-free.In 1997, Armstrong launched the Lance Armstrong Foundation to support those battling cancer. On May 8, 1998, he married Kristen Richard. In 1999 their first child, Luke David Armstrong, was born.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Continent_Makers"title="The Continent Makers">
Geophysicist Gordon Graham is a participant in the Gamanovia Project, whose mission is to increase the land area of the overpopulated twenty-second century Earth by creating new continents through the manipulation of geological forces. The project's initial goal is to raise a new land mass to be called Gamanovia around the existing Ascension Island in the South Atlantic. The name of the proposed new continent was chosen to honor fifteenth century Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama, the first European to navigate the region's waters, and for João da Nova, who discovered Ascension Island a few years later.A sinister group concealing itself under the mask of the bogus Churchillian Society, supposedly dedicated to proving that the works of twentieth-century dramatist George Bernard Shaw were actually written by Winston Churchill, is attempting to discover the secrets of the project. The Churchillian Society's "cover" purpose is a spoof on the present-day body of thought similarly dismissing William Shakespeare's authorship of the Shakespeare plays on the grounds that he, as a commoner, could not possibly have written great literature.When Graham becomes involved with Jeru-Bhetiru, an alien woman from the country of Katai-Jhogorai on the planet Krishna, the society attempts to blackmail him into serving them by kidnapping and threatening to kill her. Instead, Graham allies himself with World Federation constable Reinhold Sklar and Jeru's fiancé Varnipaz bad-Savarun, a diplomat from the Krishnan kingdom of Sotaspe, to thwart the plotters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_God"title="The Scorpion God">
In fierce heat, a man called Great House (the literal meaning of Pharaoh), also known as the God, is performing a ritual run that takes place every seven years, from his palace, around a low building on a rocky outcrop and back, to ensure that the river will rise and allow the fields to be planted. He is accompanied by the Liar, an attendant of his. His eleven-year-old son, known only as the Prince, is supposed to be watching with an old blind man, but is ignoring it instead. The Prince doesn't want to have to become the God, which means marrying his sister, Pretty Flower, and taking on the burdens of holding up the sky and making the river rise. He is also going blind, a fact that panics the old man when he learns it, since it puts in jeopardy his ability to carry on the duties of the God, which he will be relied upon to perform. As Great House is almost finishing the run, delirious from exhaustion, he collides with the blind man's stick and collapses, as the blind man is trying to tell him of the Prince's condition. The Prince accuses him of lying and Pretty Flower has him sent away to "the pit". The failure of Great House to complete the run is a terrible omen. When the river last failed to rise high enough, the God of that time drank poison and his retinue were expected to follow him into the afterlife – the eternal Now – a prospect they accept happily but which terrifies the Liar. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_by_Night_(Hardinge_novel)"title="Fly by Night (Hardinge novel)">
Mosca is the daughter of Quillam Mye, an exiled writer and radical political agitator, who taught her to read but died when she was eight. She was born in the hours sacred to Goodman Palpitattle, He Who Keeps Flies out of Jams and Butterchurns, and thus was given the name Mosca, Italian for fly. Now twelve and living with her uncle, a miller, she yearns for the city education her father promised. She sees her opportunity when poet and conman Eponymous Clent comes to their village, and is locked overnight in the stocks. She steals the keys and releases Clent, accidentally burning down the mill which creates a useful distraction. In return, Clent agrees to give her a job, and bring her to Mandelion. She takes her fierce goose Saracen to face down the guard-dogs.Clent tries to lose Mosca, but soon learns she is useful to him and accepts her. Mosca and Clent have an adventurous journey to Mandelion. On the way, they encounter Lady Tamarind's coach held up by Black Captain Blythe, a highwayman. Clent negotiates their safe passage, finding a way to gain the gratitude of both parties. In Mandelion, a hornet's nest of political intrigue, crime and corruption, they lodge in a marriage house, which arranges weddings for people who can't afford a church. Clent has been contracted as an informer for the Stationers’ Guild, who want him to find out the origin of illegal anonymous leaflets which promote a radical cause. They suspect it is some kind of provocation organised by their rivals the Locksmiths’ Guild.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumo_and_His_Miraculous_Adventures"title="Rumo and His Miraculous Adventures">
The events of this novel take place on the fictional continent of Zamonia, which is also featured in Moers' previous novel "The 13 Lives of Captain Bluebear". While "Rumo" is not a prequel to "Bluebear", the two do have many parallel events and returning characters such as Volzotan Smyke, Professor Nightingale, and Fredda the Alpine Imp. There is also a character named Rumo in The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear, but this character, briefly seen, is not the protagonist of Rumo and His Miraculous Adventures but rather a different Wolperting using the same name. This epic consists of two separate sections, with both sections together telling the tale of how Rumo the Wolperting became Zamonia's most illustrious hero.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proud_Helios"title="Proud Helios">
Free trade through the Bajoran wormhole is vital for the Bajoran economy. Unfortunately, a cloaked ship is attacking other ships, killing the crew and taking all the cargo. The attacking is going after Cardassian ships as well, causing the powerful Gul Dukat to show up. The two sides reach a cautious agreement to hunt down the ship. Unfortunately two Deep Space Nine crew-people are captured by the cloaked enemy. Dukat doesn't care that these people are in harm's way and now the rest of Deep Space Nine's forces must rescue their trapped comrades, neutralize the ship and keep war at bay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Deepwoods"title="Beyond the Deepwoods">
Raised by woodtrolls in the Deepwoods all his life, Twig believes he is one of them, yet strongly suspects there is something different about him, as he does not fit in with them; in particular, he feels a longing to live as a sky pirate. He sets off to find his true kind when he learns from his adoptive woodtroll mother that he is not a woodtroll after all, but was found abandoned in the woods and taken in by them. His adoptive mother tells him to travel to their cousin's house to mull things over, but during Twig's journey through the Deepwoods, he ends up unintentionally straying from the path. This is an act no woodtroll ever commits, for the woodtrolls' greatest fear is getting lost, and this fear is not without reason. The forest is populated with both fierce natural predators and evil demons, the most dangerous being the Gloamglozer. Twig soon stumbles upon a slaughterer who is being attacked by a hover worm. Twig kills the hover worm and the grateful slaughterer invites him to spend the night in his village.The next morning, Twig is woken by a slaughterer who tells him that he has outstayed his welcome, and is expected to leave immediately, which he does. Twig has a run-in with a skullpelt, a predator which hunts people who fall under the illusions of the Deepwoods' lullabee trees, but is saved by a caterbird which has just hatched from its cocoon. As all caterbirds share telepathic dreams whilst in the womb, and the oakelf sage of Twig's woodtroll village lived in a caterbird cocoon, this caterbird knows all about Twig. The caterbird tells Twig his destiny lies "beyond the Deepwoods" and flies off, promising to return when he is in danger. That night, Twig is almost eaten by a bloodoak, a man-eating tree, but escapes and ends up in a gyle goblin colony, where he is almost fed to the goblins by their leader, the Grossmother. After a gyle goblin guides him to safety, Twig meets an injured banderbear, one of the forest's dominant predators. The banderbear is sick because of a rotten tooth, which Twig pulls out. Soon, Twig and the banderbear become great friends, but one day the banderbear is killed by a swarm of wig-wigs, ferocious predators which act like piranhas. Later, Twig almost drowns in a swamp, but is rescued by a flathead goblin who vanishes before Twig can thank him. Twig meets a young girl who takes him as a "pet" in the underground society of the termagant trogs. Twig spends a few months with the trog girl, but eventually she undergoes the termagant trogs' maturation ceremony by drinking sap from a bloodoak root, turning her into a monstrous brute like the other adult female trogs. However, a lone trog male saves Twig, much to his surprise, and directs him to the exit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mallory's_Oracle"title="Mallory's Oracle">
The series stars Kathleen Mallory, a policewoman who is tall, blonde, beautiful, and green-eyed. She also has immense street and computer smarts. Her physical beauty masks a cold, amoral interior, however; O'Connell describes Mallory as a sociopath.New York City police detective Louis Markowitz picks up an 11-year-old homeless street urchin for stealing. Instead of arresting her, he takes Kathleen Mallory home and raises her as his own. Mallory (as she likes to be called) still deals with issues from her traumatic childhood, but she has an undying love (or at least the closest thing she can manage to it) for her adopted parents. She follows Louis to the police academy and ends up in the special crimes unit, specializing in computer research.Louis begins investigating the brutal murders of several older, wealthy women from Gramercy Park. While working alone and hot on the trail of this serial killer, he is murdered alongside another victim. Mallory takes it upon herself to take on this investigation (without police sanction, of course) and tries to piece together all the bits of information Louis had gathered. Louis trained Mallory well, but there is still the possibility that following his trail will cause Mallory to make the same mistakes he did, and lead to her becoming another victim.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heart_of_the_Warrior"title="The Heart of the Warrior">
A crucial peace conference fills Deep Space Nine with intrigue. At the same time, Kira and Worf take a mission into enemy territory to discover the secrets of the chemical that controls the highly dangerous Jem'Hadar warriors. Odo may be their only hope of survival but he'll have to fight against his own people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercenary_from_Tomorrow"title="Mercenary from Tomorrow">
Western society is split up into nine castes, from Lower-Lower to Mid-Lower all the way up to the privileged Upper-Upper. Mauser himself was born a Mid-Lower. Ambitious, he had chosen one of the few professions, Category Military, where upward mobility was still a reasonable possibility.To prevent any chance of a ruinous war between the West and the Sov-world, the Universal Disarmament Pact had restricted all militaries to pre-1900 technology. Gradually, powerful corporations began settling business disputes by hiring troops to fight real battles ("fracases") on one of many military reservations. This served a dual purpose: to maintain a military well-honed by actual combat and to provide the decadent general population with a diversion. The life-and-death struggles are so popular that they are televised.Mauser had worked his way up to captain and Middle-Middle status after many years of effort. When upstart Vacuum Tube Transport finds itself forced into an expensive, division-sized fracas with Continental Hovercraft, he sees his opportunity. He signs up with the underdog, even though the much wealthier Continental is able to hire the best soldiers available, including Marshal "Stonewall" Cogswell, the finest commander in the business. Mauser tells Baron Haer, the head of Vacuum Tube, that he can engineer an improbable victory with a gimmick he has been working on for a long time; in return, he expects the baron's support which, in conjunction with his anticipated popularity with fracas fans, should be enough to get him promoted into the Upper caste. The baron's son, Bart, scoffs at the undisclosed idea, but the baron is desperate for experienced officers and hires him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Country_of_Men"title="In the Country of Men">
The book follows the plight of Suleiman, a nine-year-old boy living in Tripoli in Libya, stuck between a father whose clandestine anti-Qaddafi activities bring about searches, stalkings, and telephone eaves droppings by Qaddafi's state police, and a vulnerable young mother who resorts to alcohol to bury her anxiety and anger. The only people he has to turn to are his neighbor Kareem, and his father's best friend Moosa. The book provides a description of Libya under Qaddafi's terror regime, and a narration of ordinary people's lives as they try to survive the political oppression.Suleiman grows up partially wealthy because his father, Faraj, is involved in the exotic trade business. Since Faraj's job involves traveling overseas for long periods of time, Suleiman's childhood has primarily been reared by his mother, Najwa. As a youth, Najwa was oppressed by her family, and she desired her independence through education instead of forcefully getting marriage. She made a plan to swallow multiple birth control pills in order to deter a future husband. However, she miraculously still got pregnant with Suleiman and was nonetheless forced to abandon her dream for education and raise Suleiman. She disparages the stories of "One Thousand and One Nights", claiming that Scheherazade still had to ask permission from Shahryar. Her cynical view of the world instills a sense of confusion and a weary eye towards authority.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metal_Monster"title="The Metal Monster">
Dr. Goodwin is on a botanical expedition in the Himalayas. There he meets Dick Drake, the son of one of his old science acquaintances. They are witnesses of a strange aurora-like effect, but seemingly a deliberate one. As they go out to investigate, they meet Goodwin's old friends Martin and Ruth Ventnor, brother and sister scientists. The two are besieged by Persians as Darius III led when Alexander of Macedon conquered them more than two thousand years ago.The group is saved by a magnificent woman they get to know as Norhala. She commands the power of lightning and controls strange metal animate Things, living, metallic, geometric forms; an entire city of sentient cubes, globes and tetrahedrons, capable of joining together and forming colossal shapes, and wielding death rays and other armaments of destruction.They are led to a hidden valley occupied by what they name "The Metal Monster", a strange metal city occupied by the metal animate Things Norhala commands. This city is governed by what they call the Metal Emperor, assisted by the Keeper of the Cones.Ruth is slowly being converted by Norhala to become like her; her little sister. Martin, her brother, tries shooting the Metal Emperor, who retaliates with a ray blast, putting Martin in a comatose state.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Madness_(novel)"title="Divine Madness (novel)">
After finding a link in a successful mission in Hong Kong, James and Lauren Adams and Dana Smith are sent on a mission to Australia, posing as the children of an ASIS agent. Before leaving Kerry said to James that when he gets back they will try again on their relationship after he is done with his mission to infiltrate a cult. They have been sent to determine whether a cult, The Survivors, is associated with Help Earth and as such are sent to a "recruitment hotbed" area in Brisbane. The "family" starts going to cult meetings, and are eventually accepted into the commune. Lauren and James are accepted into an elite cult school in the Ark, the cult's headquarters. There, James befriends Rathbone "Rat" Regan, son of the cult's founder and the only other person in the ark immune to their brainwashing tactics. After a while, Lauren develops a crush on Rat, and he uses his influence with Susie Regan, one of his father's many wives, to get her and James jobs in the offices, rather than in the stifling warehouse or laundry rooms.Dana, meanwhile, extremely depressed about her unspectacular role in the mission, is summoned to the head of the commune's office. There, she and Eve, another cult member, are told that they are to participate in a Help Earth mission to blow up an oil tanker. Australian oil tankers are alerted about an attack, but in her discovery that the target is across the sea in Indonesia she attempts to warn the mission controllers, which fail, and she ends up having to stop the attack herself. She overpowers the other members of the boat, except Eve who escapes on a dinghy but is later found dead washed up on a beach after the mission.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Dominion"title="No Dominion">
No Dominion Is the second book in the Joe Pitt Casebooks series written by Charlie Huston. Vampyre Joe Pitt is down on his luck, behind on rent and low on blood. With nowhere else to turn he finds himself asking his former boss Terry Bird head of the vampyre clan the Society. Bird tosses Joe a job, tracking down the source of a new drug on the streets, a drug powerful enough to cause those infected with the Vampyre Vyrus to freak out. For this one Joe has to cross Coalition turf and head down to Harlem, home of the vampyre clan known as the Hood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fatal_Eggs"title="The Fatal Eggs">
"The Fatal Eggs" can be described as a satirical science fiction novel. Its main protagonist is an aging zoologist, Vladimir Ipatyevich Persikov, a specialist in amphibians. The narration begins in Moscow of 1928, which seems to have overcome the destructive effects of the Russian Civil War and is quite prosperous. After a long period of degradation, research at the Zoological Institute has revived. After leaving his microscope for several hours, Persikov suddenly noticed that the out-of-focus microscope produced a ray of red light; amoeba left under that light showed an impossibly increased rate of binary fission, reproducing at enormous speeds and demonstrating unusual aggression. Later experiments with large cameras — to produce a larger ray — confirmed that the same increased speed of reproduction applied to other organisms, such as frogs, which evolved and produced a next generation within two days. Persikov's invention quickly becomes known to journalists, and eventually to foreign spies and to the GPU, the Soviet secret service. At the same time, the country is affected by an unknown disease in domesticated poultry, which results in a complete extinction of all chickens in the Soviet Russia, with the plague stopping at the nation's borders. A sovkhoz manager Aleksandr Semenovich Rokk (whose name is also a pun on the novel's title, "Rok" meaning "fate") receives an official permission to confiscate Persikov's equipment, and use the invention to attempt to restore the chicken populace to the pre-plague level. However, the chicken eggs which are imported from outside the country are, by a mistake, sent to Persikov's laboratory while the reptile eggs destined for the professor end up in the hands of the farmers. As a result, Rokk breeds an enormous quantity of large and overly aggressive snakes, ostriches, and crocodiles which start attacking people. In the panic that follows, Persikov is killed by a mob — which blames him for the appearance of the snakes — and his cameras are smashed. The Red Army attempts to hold the snakes back, but only the coming of sub-zero weather in August—described as a deus ex machina—puts a stop to the snake invasion. In an earlier draft the novel ends with the scene of Moscow's complete destruction by the snakes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiant_(novel)"title="Radiant (novel)">
At the start of the story, Youn Suu is a rookie Explorer on her first assignment in interstellar space. Like most Explorers, she suffers from a significant physical deformity—in her case, a facial blemish that has been left untreated to "qualify" her for the Explorer Corps. Her first assignment, with her partner Tut, is to investigate a sudden infestation of the Balrog in a domed city on the home world of the Cashlings. While there, she is herself infested by the red moss. At the same time, Youn Suu and Tut encounter Admiral Festina Ramos, present on a mission of her own.Aboard an Outward fleet starship, Youn Suu is monitored medically, though there is no cure for her condition and no real treatment. The Balrog, far more than a parasite, is a hive mind well above the human level of development, so that killing it would violate the central precept of the League of Peoples. As its symbiotic relationship with its human host develops, the Balrog comes to share the mental functioning of its host, and prolongs the host's life while consuming her body—"her" because the only prior human host was also female (and also a Buddhist). Youn Suu is also exposed to potential exploitation, by people who want to use the Balrog's special abilities for their own purposes. Meanwhile, Ramos and the other explorers are called to an emergency rescue on a planet called Muta, where Unity survey teams have suddenly disappeared, with barely a peep of a distress signal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leven_Thumps_and_the_Whispered_Secret"title="Leven Thumps and the Whispered Secret">
After escaping a deranged dream-master and destroying the hidden gateway, Leven Thumps and his band of travelers must now journey across Foo and restore Geth from his shape as a toothpick to the rightful king he once was. But Foo is still in chaos, and Leven must overcome several adversaries and survive the Swollen Forest in order to save his friends and keep hope alive. As fate would have it, nothing goes as planned, and even Geth begins to wonder if they will succeed. Bad goes to worse as Leven digs up a long buried secret- one that stalks him, determined to whisper a truth that could be deadly in the wrong hands. Through it all, Leven finds the courage to do what is right and continues to discover an inner strength and a power he never thought possible.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rediscovering_God_in_America"title="Rediscovering God in America">
From the National Archives and Capitol Building to Arlington National Cemetery and Library of Congress, the Gingriches lead the reader on a tour of Washington, D.C. to point out the religious beliefs incorporated in the Nation's monuments. The role of religion in the United States' founding is examined and explained. Gingrich's tour is based in part on the controversial ideas of right-wing historian David Barton, which Bruce Wilson claims include "misleading and inaccurate claims".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talkative_Man"title="Talkative Man">
The main character is an ordinary man who is wealthy and works as a journalist. He has a regular routine in his life: posts articles in the post box, has a talk with people in a tea shop, goes to the library and the house. One day, he meets a man from an unknown land called "Timbuctoo", another of Narayan's creations, the land being similar to the US. The man seems to have come for an official duty for UN and seeing the calmness of the place, decides to stay here for his work.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wooden_Heart_(novel)"title="Wooden Heart (novel)">
Martha and the Doctor discover an apparently deserted starship, and soon, a village appears in the middle of the craft. As they try to work out the mystery of the village, and its connection to the ship, they find out that the village has other problems - fog and monsters surround them at every turn, and their children have been going missing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_Fever_(novel)"title="Spring Fever (novel)">
Wealthy New York businessman G. Ellery Cobbold has sent his son Stanwood, a blundering ex-American football player, to London, to separate him from Hollywood starlet Eileen Stoker with whom he is in love. When Cobbold discovers that Stoker is also in London, making pictures, he insists that Stanwood goes to stay with a distant relation, curmudgeonly widower Lord Shortlands. But Stanwood stays put. Instead, good-looking movie agent Mike Cardinal goes to Shortlands' castle (Beevor, in Kent), posing as Stanwood. He is pursuing Shortlands' beautiful daughter Terry. But Terry is wary of him because he is too handsome.Lord Shortlands himself is in love with his cook, Mrs Punter, and would like to marry her. Unfortunately she insists on £200 to buy a pub, which Shortlands doesn't have, the purse-strings at Beevor Castle being firmly in the control of his domineering elder daughter Adela. Also, he has a rival in suave butler Mervyn Spink. Things look up for "Shorty" when he discovers that a stamp in his collection is worth £1000. But Spink fools Adela into believing that the stamp is his, and it gets locked up in a safe. It so happens that Stanwood's butler, Augustus Robb is an ex-safe breaker, and Mike masterminds a burglary. This goes disastrously wrong, and Mike gets hit in the face with a bag of safe breaking tools. The up-side is that his battered face makes him suddenly attractive to Terry. So, after a final misunderstanding, things end happily for Mike and Terry. Stanwood and Eileen also get together. But Mrs Punter runs off with Augustus Robb, leaving Shorty and Spink ruing their loss in love but bound in their increased fortunes; Spink is a big winner in a horse race and Shorty has been invited to live with Mike and Terry in Hollywood, away from Adela, where the savvy Mike has assured him he can make a handsome income by appearing in movies as a character actor of butlers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Tomorrow"title="Children of Tomorrow">
Commander John Lane returns from a ten-year mission in space to find that the teenagers of Spaceport City have organized themselves into "outfits", well disciplined, non-violent little gangs with their own customs and argot, and that the parent's role in teen upbringing has become minimal. His 16-year-old daughter Susan belongs to the Red Cat Outfit, whose newest member Bud is actually a spy for the alien fleet that has secretly followed John Lane as he returned to Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Jones_novel)"title="The Game (Jones novel)">
Hayley's parents disappeared when she was a baby. Since then, she has been raised and homeschooled by her grandparents. Grandad is overworked and travels a lot; Grandma is much too strict and never lets her meet any children her own age. When Hayley does something wrong—she is not quite sure what—they pack her off to her aunts in Ireland. To Hayley's shock, her family is much bigger than she thought; to her delight, the children all play what they call “the game,” where they visit a place called “the mythosphere.” And while she plays the game, Hayley learns more about her own place in the world than she had ever expected.Hayley encounters various mythological figures during the course of her adventures in the mythosphere, including Actaeon and Baba Yaga.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Eve"title="On the Eve">
The story revolves around Elena Stakhova, a girl with a hypochondriac mother and an idle father, a retired guards lieutenant with a mistress. On the eve of the Crimean War, Elena is pursued by a free-spirited sculptor (Pavel Shubin) and a serious-minded student (Andrei Berzyenev). But when Berzyenev's revolutionary Bulgarian friend, Dmitri Insarov, meets Elena, they fall in love. In secretly marrying Insarov Elena disappoints her mother and enrages her father, who had hoped to marry her to a dull, self-satisfied functionary, Kurnatovski. Insarov nearly dies from pneumonia and only partly recovers. On the outbreak of war Insarov tries to return with Elena to Bulgaria, but dies in Venice. Elena takes Insarov's body to the Balkans for burial and then vanishes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rules_of_Survival"title="The Rules of Survival">
The book starts out with an introduction when Matthew Walsh is writing a letter to his younger sister Emmy to tell her the story of their mother's vicious abuse.The real story starts with Matthew and his other younger sister, Callie. Callie is eleven, Matthew is thirteen, and Emmy is a toddler. Callie and Matthew go to the Cumberland Farms store to get popsicles because there is a heatwave in the town in which they live. They see Murdoch for the first time, protecting a kid from being openly abused. Matthew and Callie like Murdoch, and both of them want to track him down so that they can be his friend.Meanwhile, the first act of abuse that is shown in the book comes when Nikki throws Portuguese Seafood Paella at Matthew after Nikki finds Murdoch's address that Callie found on the Internet. Nikki begins to date Murdoch, but eventually they break up. Nikki is enraged and tries to blame it on Murdoch. She wants to call the Social Services and report Murdoch for abuse. Murdoch gets a restraining order against Nikki for constantly following and stalking him. Nikki is angry and sends a man called Rob to brutalize Murdoch. Nikki and Rob eventually end up in jail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Sleep"title="The Death of Sleep">
Like its predecessor, "The Death of Sleep" is written in four parts. Each book centers on a new stage in the life of Sassinak's much removed relative, Dr. Lunzie Mespil. Lunzie leaves her daughter for what she thinks will be a relatively brief and lucrative job, but through various circumstances she suffers extended periods of cold sleep on several occasions, and finds herself thrown into a time different from her own, and is never able to meet her daughter again. Throughout her various experiences, Lunzie teams up with a changing cast of characters in order to bring down the planet pirates that plague the outer reaches of space.The book begins as Lunzie sets off from Tau Ceti to her first assignment away from her daughter, on Descartes Mining Platform 6, which is only 12 years old. She tearfully leaves her teenage daughter behind, taking only a hologram of her and two duffel bags of clothes and the like. Her ship leaves, with her as acting psychologist, and she speaks to a man who suffered from agoraphobia due to 12 years in cryo. She consoles him, but they are interrupted by the collision alarm: two asteroids are close to colliding with the ship, and they have no way to avoid them. The crew run for the lifeboats, but Lunzie is cut off from the rest of the ship, so must board hers alone. She contacts the other lifeboats, and is told that they will all hibernate till help arrives. She goes into stasis and the first part ends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crown_Snatchers"title="The Crown Snatchers">
The story begins by introducing itself as a made-up story. It introduces the three children as the principal characters and considers a number of settings before deciding on a meadow. It turns out that the meadow lies within a small kingdom inhabited by the three children and a variety of anthropomorphic animals. We find Robert, Joanna, and Moritz hard at work trying to reach hazelnuts in three tall trees. They make the acquaintance of a dignified owl, Dr. Loy, who is suddenly scared off by the sound of an approaching motor. The children watch bemused as King Fatback's royal limousine approaches. The King himself, a pig, accuses them of stealing his nuts. They are taken to the castle and introduced to the caretaker, a matronly cat named Miss Bellmouse, who places them in separate rooms. Life at the castle is a regimented series of rings, gongs, bells, and buzzers that announce one dismal activity after another: sleep; lessons taught by the unpleasant teacher-dog, Mr. Prouch; brainwashing lectures given by the king's overbearing cousin Clemens; flavorless meals; and a weekly trip to the playroom.The children rebel at every possible turn despite being held against their will. They talk back to Mr. Prouch and, when he loses his spectacles in a rage, make their first escape attempt. However, it fails when they find themselves caught climbing over the castle's surrounding wall. They also start a food fight at dinner one night.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Lies_Arthur"title="Here Lies Arthur">
The novel starts with an attack by Arthur and his war-band, and the escape of Gwyna, a servant girl. She is found by Myrddin, a bard who hopes to build Arthur's reputation as a great hero so that he can unite the native British against the Saxons who have occupied the east of the country. Myrddin tells Gwyna to give Arthur Caliburn while pretending to be the Lady of the Lake. When she does that successfully, Myrddin disguises her in boy's clothes so that she can travel with the war-band as his servant.During her travels, she meets a boy who was brought up as a girl, tricks a holy man, swims in the Roman baths of Aquae Sulis, takes part in a battle, and witnesses Arthur's brutality, piety and immorality, all the while observing her master create the fantastic stories that have made 'King Arthur' one of the most famous men in legend. After Arthur's death she creates some stories herself, conceding that the legend is more important than the mere facts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beau_Brocade"title="Beau Brocade">
After their recent defeat, the hamlets and villages of Derbyshire are no longer ringing with the wild shouts of Bonny Prince Charlie's Highland Brigade; instead, troops loyal to King George are looking for those accused of high treason and are offering a reward of twenty guineas for the death of any traitor or rebel.Philip James Gascoyne, eleventh Earl of Stretton, is in hiding, in fear for his life after being wrongly accused by Sir Humphrey Challoner of being a traitor to the King.For months Philip has been a fugitive, disguised in rough clothes and hiding in odd places, trusting no-one, but now he has been given shelter and a cover by honest John Stitch, the local blacksmith, and is pretending to be his nephew while trying to get a note to his sister, the beautiful Lady Patience Gascoyne.John Stich is also friends with the notorious Beau Brocade, a masked highwayman who roams the moors holding up coaches so he can steal from the rich and give to the poor. Beau Brocade is actually Captain Jack Bathurst of His Majesty's White Dragoons, a handsome but tragic figure on whose head the Government has put the price of a hundred guineas.The blacksmith gets Beau Brocade to deliver a letter from Philip to his sister and a couple of days later she turns up at his forge in her coach. Reunited with his beloved sister, Philip gives Patience a packet of letters which prove his innocence and asks her to take them to London and clear his name.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_13_(Swindells_novel)"title="Room 13 (Swindells novel)">
Fliss Morgan has a nightmare on the night before her school trip, to Whitby. Every night Ellie-May Sunderland is drawn to the landing outside the mysterious Room 13, which does not seem to exist during the day. Fliss and her friends attempt to unravel the mystery of the room, and determine the identity of its sinister inhabitant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_628-E8"title="La 628-E8">
Titled after the number of Mirbeau's licence plate, "La 628-E8" begins by recounting Mirbeau’s travels to Belgium, whose colonial exploitation of Belgian Congo rubber and abuse of the indigenous people Mirbeau excoriates. The book then proceeds to the Netherlands, where he finds remembrances of Rembrandt, Van Gogh and also Claude Monet. It is during his sojourn in this country that Mirbeau encounters his old friend, the deranged speculator Weil-See, whose reflections on mathematics and metaphysics are among Mirbeau’s most colorful pages. Mirbeau's fictional car trip then takes him to Germany, whose industry, cleanliness, and order stand in contrast to what Mirbeau regarded as the slovenliness and laxity of his own countrymen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Born_Chinese"title="American Born Chinese">
The story of "American Born Chinese" consists of three seemingly separate tales, which are tied together at the end of the book.The first story line is Yang's contemporary rendition of the Chinese story of a Kung Fu practicing Monkey King of Flower-Fruit Mountain, The Monkey King, a character from the classic 16th century Chinese novel "Journey to the West". Yang replaces the Buddha from the original story with a Christian influenced deity Tze-Yo-Tzuh. Throughout the story, The Monkey King is unhappy with himself as a monkey and continually tries to become another version of himself. The Monkey King grows larger, taking a more human form. Tze-Yo-Tzuh tries to help The Monkey King accept himself, but when The Monkey King refuses Tze-Yo-Tzuh imprisons him under a mountain of rocks. A monk named Wong Lai-Tsao is sent by Tze-Yo-Tzuh on a mission to carry three packages to the west and is to pick up his disciple, The Monkey King, on his journey. He finds The Monkey King imprisoned under the mountain of rocks and frees him from the mountain by convincing The Monkey King to return to his original form.The second story line follows a child of Chinese immigrants named Jin Wang. His story links the other two narratives, and fits the form of an ethnic coming-of-age. His family moves from San Francisco's Chinatown to a suburb where he goes to school with only two other Asian students. Jin struggles with his Chinese identity and begins to reject it when he meets a new Asian student, Wei-Chen. Wei-Chen is a Taiwanese immigrant who just came to the United States, and he and Jin become best friends. Jin begins dating Amelia Harris, a Caucasian girl in his class, but her friend Greg asks Jin not to ask her out any more because he felt she needed to protect her image. Jin perceives this as a personal attack on him because of his race and becomes angry. Angry and confused, he kisses Wei-Chen's girlfriend and they have a falling-out. That evening, Jin recalls the fight he had with Wei-Chen and convinces himself that Wei-Chen deserved it. That night, Jin has a dream about a Chinese woman he had met when he was younger. She had told him that he could be anything he wanted if he was willing to give up his soul. He awakens the next morning and looks in the mirror to see himself as a Caucasian boy and he changes his name to Danny.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Would_Joey_Do?"title="What Would Joey Do?">
The book deals with Joey as he tries to take charge of correcting his wrongs in his life and the lives of the people he knows, before finally learning that his priority should be doing what's best for himself and leaving the others to their own ways.The story starts out with his father, Carter Pigza, who also has ADHD, riding his motorcycle noisily around the neighborhood. Joey's mother, Fran, came out screaming at him, resulting in him crashing his motorcycle into an old apple tree, where a branch stabbed him. Carter was admitted into hospital, but he later ran off.Throughout the story, Frances had Joey home schooled by her old friend Mrs. Lapp, along with Olivia, Mrs. Lapp's sullen, bratty, blind daughter. Carter kept on bugging their family so Frances had to put out a restraining order to keep him away. Frances was also dating a new boyfriend, Booth Duprey, who was a photographer at her working place and whom Joey disliked.Joey's grandmother was concerned of Joey having no friends, and persuaded Joey to make friends with Olivia, which Joey found very depressing and tiring, for Olivia's main goal is to either make Joey so miserable he would run off or establishing in her mother's point of view that Joey is up to no good, so as for her to be sent off to a boarding school, where she preferred to be. Olivia stated that many kids like Joey had come to be her homeschooling partner and had gone off, Joey would be the last one her mother would try.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poet_(novel)"title="The Poet (novel)">
The book starts with Jack McEvoy, a crime reporter for the "Rocky Mountain News" ("Death is my beat"), relating how the news of his identical twin brother Sean's suicide was broken to him. Sean was a homicide detective with the Denver Police, who was found dead in his car in a remote parking lot. A one-sentence suicide note was found in the car with him, and it seemed impossible that someone else could have killed him. McEvoy, though, is reluctant to accept that his brother had succumbed to depression resulting from his investigations, even though the last one was particularly brutal: Theresa Lofton, a young college student, who was found in a park in two pieces.After much investigation on his own, including retracing his brother's investigation into the Lofton case, Jack concludes that his brother's death was simply made to "look" like a suicide by a serial killer. By focusing on homicide detectives who committed suicide in a similar fashion and left a one-sentence suicide note quoting the works of Edgar Allan Poe (as Sean's did), Jack finds three clear matches to his brother's death. When the FBI finally realizes that he is on to something and attempts to block him from further access, he is able to trade his knowledge of the other deaths (one of which the FBI had not uncovered) for a role with the FBI investigative team headed by Robert Backus, the son of a famous agent within the bureau who has been overshadowed by his father's legend. Assigned the duty of handling him is agent Rachel Walling, one of Backus' main protégés, and the two of them become personally involved. The FBI nicknames the serial killer "The Poet" because of his use of Poe's lines with the victims.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_in_the_Village"title="Stranger in the Village">
Baldwin relates his experiences in Leukerbad, a small, isolated Swiss village, in the summer of 1951. Residents of Leukerbad were fascinated by Baldwin's blackness; according to Baldwin they had never seen a black man before, thus making him a stranger in the village."Baldwin describes a kind of naive racism within the villagers: for example, children who shout "Neger!" when they see him, unaware of the echoes he hears from his past when others shouted a more damning word ("Nigger!"). The village has even ritualized an overt control of Blacks with their custom of "buying" Africans in the attempt to religiously convert them.There is also a more sinister racism, even in a remote village that has direct experience with only one Black man: men who describe Baldwin as "le sale negre" ('the dirty Black man') behind his back and assume that he stole wood from them, or of children who "scream in genuine anguish" when he approaches them because they have been taught that "the devil is a black man."This fantasy about the disposability of black life is a constant in American history.Baldwin further goes on to explain the relationship between American and European history, by explicitly pointing out that American history encompasses the history of the Negro, while European history lacks the African-American dimension. Baldwin observes that in America the Negro is “an inescapable part of the general social fabric” and that “Americans attempt until today to make an abstraction of the Negro.”
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_Fay_and_the_Miracle_Man"title="Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man">
"Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man" is told in diary writings starting in 1952 when the protagonist, Daisy Fay Harper, is 11 years old. She lives with her mother and her father in Jackson, Mississippi. Daisy Fay received her name from a vase of flowers that her mother had in her hospital room. Her father involves her in many of his unsuccessful schemes to make money or build inventions. He alienates his family members but makes great friends when he drinks.Her mother lives in a constant state of embarrassment, and tries to do what she can to make Daisy Fay into a lady, which consists of making her fetch endless cups of coffee in the cafeteria, and buying matching mother-daughter outfits.Her mother, Daisy's Grandma Pettibone, believes she married beneath her. (Despite both sets of Grandparents not speaking to Daisy's father, they absolutely dote on Daisy) The diary reveals Daisy Fay has an expansive imagination and a detailed memory as a long list of endearing and strange characters are described and the story is told in humorous vignettes.Soon after the beginning of the diary, Daisy Fay and her parents move to Shell Beach, Mississippi, after her father buys half a share of a malt shop on the beach with $500 her mother won at a Bingo game. Daisy's mother was dead set against moving from Jackson, but her father stated that since nobody in their respective families were speaking to him, they would have been unhappy staying in Jackson, hence the move.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sting_of_the_Zygons"title="Sting of the Zygons">
The TARDIS lands the Doctor and Martha in the Lake District in 1909, where a small village has been terrorised by a giant, scaly monster. The search is on for the elusive 'Beast of Westmorland', and explorers, naturalists and hunters from across the country are descending on the fells. King Edward VII himself is on his way to join the search, with a knighthood for whoever finds the Beast.But there is a more sinister presence at work in the Lakes than a monster on the rampage, and the Doctor is soon embroiled in the plans of an old and terrifying enemy - the Zygons. As the hunters become the hunted, a desperate battle of wits begin - with the future of the entire world at stake.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tam_Lin_(novel)"title="Tam Lin (novel)">
The protagonist of "Tam Lin" is Janet Carter. Written in the indirect third person, from Carter's point of view, the novel is set during her years as a student in the early 1970s at the fictional Blackstock College in Minnesota. The characters include her fellow students, professors at the college, her family, and a childhood friend. The plot combines the story of a young woman's life at college with a retelling of the traditional Scottish fairy ballad "Tam Lin".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Dodo"title="The Last Dodo">
The Doctor and Martha Jones go searching for the last dodo. They end up in a museum featuring the last examples of extinct species, all in suspended animation. Many of the exhibits are going missing. The Doctor himself is in danger because he is the last of his race.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadale_(novel)"title="Armadale (novel)">
In the German spa town of Wildbad, the 'Scotchman' Mr. Neal is asked to transcribe the deathbed confession of Allan Armadale; his story concerns his murder of the man he had disinherited (also called Allan Armadale), who had subsequently married the woman he was betrothed to under false pretensions. Under Allan's instructions, the confession is left to be opened by his son once he comes of age.Nineteen years later, the son of the murdered man, also Allan Armadale, rescues a man of his own age, Ozias Midwinter. The stranger reveals himself to Reverend Decimus Brock, a friend of Allan through his late mother, as another Allan Armadale (the son of the man who committed the murder). Ozias tells Decimus of his desperate upbringing, having run away from his mother and stepfather (Mr. Neal). The Reverend promises not to disclose their relation to one another, and the young men become close companions. Ozias remains haunted by a fear that he will harm Allan as a result of their proximity, a fate warned of in his father's letter; this feeling intensifies when the pair spend a night on a shipwreck off the Isle of Man—as it turns out, the very ship on which the murder was committed. Also on the vessel, Allan has a mysterious dream involving three characters; Ozias believes that the events are a prophecy of the future.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturnalia_(Davis_novel)"title="Saturnalia (Davis novel)">
It is the Season of Misrule in Rome, sheer misery for Falco. Uppity slaves give orders to their cringing masters, masters try to hide in their studies, women are goosed, statues wobble, a prince has a broken heart, Helena’s brother will not decide if his heart is broken or not, children are sick and even the dog can’t stand it any more. As the festival meant for healing grudges riotously proceeds, a young man who has everything to live for dies a horrific death while the security of the Empire is compromised by the usual mixture of top brass incompetence, bureaucratic in-fighting and popular indifference. The barbarians are not just at the gates, they are right inside - and that’s just the bombasts in the Praetorian Guard, encouraged by the pernicious Chief Spy.Doctors are making a killing. Alternative therapists are ecstatic. Members of the Didius family are about to receive some extremely unusual seasonal gifts. But for the non-persons on the fringes of society life is not so jolly, and dark spirits walk abroad (available for hire through the usual agents). Falco has a race against time to find a dangerous missing person, aided and hindered by faces from the past, while running the gauntlet of the best and worst Roman society can offer as Saturnalia entertainment. Unfortunately for him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Harlequin_(novel)"title="The Harlequin (novel)">
 is about to face the challenge of her life. Into her world—a world already overflowing with power—have come creatures so feared that powerful, centuries-old vampires refuse to mention their names. It is forbidden to speak of The Harlequin unless you've been contacted. And to be contacted by The Harlequin can mean three things. It can mean that they're watching, or that they're tormenting, or that they're going to kill you. The Harlequin belong to Marmée Noire, the Mother of Darkness, a figure so old, it's not known whether she's a vampire, a lycanthrope or something else.Long-time rivals for Anita's affections, Jean-Claude, Master Vampire of the City, and Richard Zeeman, Ulfric of the local werewolf pack, will need to become allies. Wereleopards Nathaniel and Micah will have to step up their support. And then there's Edward. In this situation, Anita knows that she needs to call the one man who has always been there for her, but he responds in a way that she didn't anticipate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Summer_of_Love_(novel)"title="My Summer of Love (novel)">
At the beginning of the novel, Mona's sister, Lindy, is getting married for the second time. The date is given as 23 May 1984.Mona is self-conscious of her appearance; she is a bridesmaid. She plays on the fruit machines in the pub in which her family live, and drinks alcohol to help her cope with the day.After the festivities of the day, she goes to a large house in a nearby village. She occasionally tends to the residents' pony, Willow, though the Fakenhams don't pay her much attention, or any money. This evening, however, Mr. Fakenham speaks to her and asks her, in rather an awkward manner, to befriend his youngest daughter, Tamsin - she has been sent home from boarding school and seems to be lonely.Mona herself is feeling quite friendless - she refers to 'poor lost Anne-Marie' as someone who had once been a school-friend. However, they have drifted apart - Mona had lost her mother to cancer a year previously, and she reflects that Anne-Marie was probably emotionally drained by having to support her through her bereavement. However, she thinks it's a very pitiful state of affairs that Tamsin's father is actually begging people to be her friend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Sentence_(novel)"title="Death Sentence (novel)">
Six months after "Death Wish", Paul Benjamin has moved from New York City to Chicago after the death of his catatonic daughter, the result of the brutal attack that transformed him into a vigilante. The only thing that distracts him from his renewed vendetta against crime is a beautiful woman, whom he starts dating. As he leads the double life, a copycat vigilante begins stalking the streets, using a distinctive .45 caliber Luger pistol. Vigilantism soon becomes a rallying cry for the city as the police search for their man before innocent people are hurt. Now, Paul is not after criminals or even justice but a man who is as dangerous as he himself has become.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rose_of_Tibet"title="The Rose of Tibet">
Charles Houston (a teacher in London) makes a perilous and illegal journey from India into the forbidden land of Tibet during the unsettled time 1950/51, in the hope of rescuing his vanished brother. What he does not know is that his coming was prophesied a century earlier, and he is awaited by an impossible love, an enormous treasure, and the invading Red Chinese army. Houston travels to the Yamdring monastery, finds his way to the abbess and makes a perilous escape with her. The story is set at the time of the Chinese invasion in 1950.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Long_Way_to_Shiloh"title="A Long Way to Shiloh">
30-year-old womaniser and drunkard Caspar Laing has just been made Professor of Semitic Languages at Bedfordshire University - or, as he sardonically refers to it, the University of Beds. Prior to taking up his post, he is summoned to the Israeli Embassy to confer with the visiting Professor Agrot. An ancient parchment has recently been discovered that appears to report on the hiding of the Menorah, a holy candelabrum rescued from the Jerusalem Temple before its destruction by the Romans. But the Jordanians have a better copy of the parchment, and both of these refer to the location of a third which has details of the actual hiding place of the holy artefact, dating from the time of King Solomon. According to this account it was only a copy that was taken to Rome after the sack of Jerusalem in 70 CE. The race is on, therefore, to recover the treasure before the Arabs get to it.The Jordanians have already sent scouting parties into the Mount Tabor area north of Jerusalem in search of the third parchment without success. In hope of treating their parchment with chemicals for greater legibility, Caspar visits an old colleague but is waylaid by Jordanians who try to kidnap him over the frontier. He barely manages to escape in time and hides out with the family of Shoshana, the driver of his military jeep, living in Tel Aviv. There Caspar begins to suspect that the report is full of coded misdirections and leaves southwards to prospect in the barren Wilderness of Zin, where he rescues Shoshana from a flash flood and eventually seduces her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolymsky_Heights"title="Kolymsky Heights">
A coded message is smuggled out of Russia, a plea for help from the director of a super-secret laboratory deep in the frozen wastes of Siberia. The note is addressed to Johnny Porter, a Canadian Indian of the Gitxsan tribe with a genius for languages. The CIA recruits Porter, who infiltrates Russia, first posing as a Korean sailor on a tramp freighter, then as a Chukchi driver called Khodyan. Working at a transport company, he befriends an employee who gives him sufficient spare parts to build a bobik truck, which he assembles in a cave. Porter also befriends the local doctor, Tanya Komarova, who is also working for the CIA, and they become lovers. With her help, he infiltrates the research facility by switching places with an Evenk employee. The director, Ephraim Rogachev, reveals to Porter the research they have been conducting, including a cure for blindness which the Soviets are concealing because of the military applications of the technology.The Russian security services become aware that "Khodyan" is not who he says he is, and begin to pursue him. Porter escapes, first in the bobik, then by stealing a plane ticket, a snow-plough, and finally on skis. He makes his way to the Bering Strait where the Soviets finally catch up with him. He escapes to America, but suffers severe wounds including the loss of an eye.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_the_Five_Magics"title="Master of the Five Magics">
The book focuses on the adventures of its main character and hero Alodar in the fictional land of Procolon. Alodar's self-imposed quest for much of the book is to distinguish himself sufficiently to wed Queen Vendora, which will restore his family's honor. The book is divided into six parts, the first five of which correspond to the five disciplines of magic learned by Alodar in that portion of the narrative. The final part is entitled "The Archimage" and corresponds to Alodar's mastery of all other forms of magic.In the first three parts, Alodar learns enough of a particular type of magic to make a notable achievement, but the antagonist of that part usurps Alodar's credit and becomes a recognized suitor to the queen. Alodar is then left with an artifact of some type that allows him to begin learning a new discipline of magic. The first part also introduces , a female character important in the second half of the book.The fourth part does not feature an artifact; instead, Alodar discovers an ancient wizard placed in suspended animation, who reveals the basics of his craft to Alodar at the start of the fifth part.The fifth part of the book reveals that Alodar's journey was planned by the ancient wizards, who predicted the now-imminent demonic invasion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Interpretation_of_Murder"title="The Interpretation of Murder">
On the morning after Sigmund Freud arrives in New York City on his first – and only – visit to the United States in 1909, a stunning débutante is found bound and strangled in her penthouse apartment, high above Broadway. The following night, another beautiful heiress, Nora Acton, is discovered tied to a chandelier in her parents' home, viciously wounded and unable to speak or to recall her ordeal. Soon Freud and his American disciple, Stratham Younger, are enlisted to help Miss Acton recover her memory, and to piece together the killer's identity. It is a riddle that will test their skills to the limit and lead them on a journey into the darkest places of the city, and of the human mind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Chemist"title="The Sun Chemist">
Letters in the archive correspondence of Chaim Weizmann, first president of Israel, hint that, in his profession as a distinguished organic chemist, Weizmann had stumbled on a method for the cheap synthesis of petroleum. Now, decades later, a world buffeted by oil shocks and perpetually rising prices would welcome such a chemical miracle. But Weizmann's laboratory notebooks must be found first, and an unseen and powerful enemy will stop at nothing to keep them hidden.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chelsea_Murders"title="The Chelsea Murders">
Someone is killing residents of the hip bohemian London neighborhood of Chelsea, home to literary giants of the past like Virginia Woolf. What thread connects them in someone's mad mind? The only clue is a fragment of film, which accidentally caught images of the murderer, dressed in an outlandish costume and mask.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dice_Spelled_Murder"title="The Dice Spelled Murder">
Danny is a master with the dice and Velma could con any man into anything. As a pair they cruise the California convention circuit, hustling suckers and raking in the dough. Where will their greed finally take them? To the fulfillment of their dreams? Or to sudden, violent death?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Death_Ever_Slept"title="If Death Ever Slept">
Millionaire Otis Jarrell retains Nero Wolfe to get a snake out of his house – the snake being his daughter-in-law, whom he believes is ruining his business deals by leaking information to his competitors. Since Archie and Wolfe are in the midst of one of their periodic squabbles, it is decided that Archie will move into Jarrell's Fifth Avenue penthouse apartment, posing as his new secretary. While he's away, detective Orrie Cather, who lusts after Archie's job, tests out Archie's desk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emphyrio"title="Emphyrio">
Ghyl Tarvoke grows up on the planet Halma with his father Amiante. Their people are ruled by two hundred lords whose forefathers arrived 1500 years earlier and rebuilt a world devastated by many wars. In return, they were granted a 1% tax. Later, all mass manufacturing was outlawed and the people became artisans, selling their handmade work to a single company controlled by the lords. Amiante is a master woodcarver, and his son follows in his trade.When he is eight, Ghyl attends a puppet show; part of the entertainment is the traditional drama of Emphyrio, a legendary hero. The proprietor points out a young girl in the audience and informs the boy that she is the daughter of a lord. Some time later, he and a friend sneak aboard a space yacht out of curiosity and are caught by the same girl. She has them beaten and thrown out.As time passes, Ghyl comes to realize that his father is dissatisfied with the constraints of their society. Twice, Amiante is caught by the authorities illegally duplicating ancient documents; the second time, he is taken away for four days. Soon after his release, he died.A few years later, Ghyl goes to a ball and encounters the girl, now an appealingly attractive woman, for the third time and finally learns her name, Shanne. That night, they become lovers. But she tells him that she is leaving soon to travel to the stars.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Thoughts_(Shobhaa_De_novel)"title="Second Thoughts (Shobhaa De novel)">
"Second Thoughts" is a love story about Maya, a pretty girl who is eager to escape her dull, middle-class home in Calcutta for the glamour of Mumbai, where she moves after marriage to Ranjan, a handsome, ambitious man who has an American university degree and a wealthy family background.Maya is determined to be the ideal wife, but finds herself trapped and stifled by the confines of her arranged marriage to a man who, she discovers, is rigidly conservative and completely indifferent to her desires. She begins to experience great loneliness in suburban Mumbai.She strikes up a friendship with Nikhil, her charming, college-going neighbor, leading to love and betrayal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midaq_Alley_(novel)"title="Midaq Alley (novel)">
Mahfouz plays on the cultural setting. The novel is introduced with description of the Arab culture. It centers around the list of characters described below. The novel takes place in the 1940s and represents standing on the threshold of a modern era in Cairo and the rest of the nation as a whole.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moneychangers"title="The Moneychangers">
As the novel begins, the position of CEO of one of America's largest banks, "First Mercantile American", is about to become vacant due to the terminal illness of Ben Roselli, the incumbent chief, whose grandfather founded the bank.Two high-ranking executives groomed for the succession begin their personal combat for the position. One, Alex Vandervoort, is honest, hard-charging, and focused on growing FMA through retail banking and embracing emerging technology; the other, Roscoe Heyward, is suave, hypocritical, and skilled in boardroom politics, and favors catering more to business than to consumers. Heyward lives in a "rambling, three-story house in the suburb of Shaker Heights," Cleveland, Ohio.Many characters and plot lines interweave. Senior bank teller Miles Eastin is discovered to be defrauding the bank whilst casting guilt on another teller, a young single mother named Juanita Nunez. He is dismissed, arrested, and convicted. While in prison, he is gang-raped by a gang of fellow inmates. In prison, his knowledge of counterfeiting brings him to the attention of a gang of credit card forgers, who offer him a job on his release. Owing money to loan sharks, and desperate not to have to go to work for a criminal organization, he tries going back to his former employer to ask for some kind of job. Nolan Wainwright, the bank's Head of Security, obviously won't hire him to work directly for the bank, but with the approval of higher management, is allowed to pay Eastin to go undercover as an affiliate of the forgers and secretly report back details of their operation to Juanita Nunez, who had forgiven him after he came to see her and apologize for what he did. She agrees to be the "cut-out" whom Eastin will contact, and she will report back what he tells her to Wainwright. Eastin is discovered to be a planted spy by the criminal organization and tortured, only to be rescued in the nick of time as a result of Juanita being captured by the forgers and forced to identify Eastin. She is released, but uses her photographic memory to count the amount of time she spent blindfolded in the car and the movements it made, and as a result is able to lead police to the safe house where Eastin was being held and tortured. At the end, Eastin, Juanita and her daughter, Estella, move out of the state where both get new jobs. Also featured is Edwina D'Orsey, the head of FMA's flagship downtown branch, through whom a reader gains much insight into day-to-day branch banking, and her husband, Lewis, who writes a financial newsletter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Call_Retreat"title="Never Call Retreat">
This book has Lee's army, fresh after defeating the Army of the Potomac at Gunpowder River. The Campaign begins after Grant completes transporting his army from the west and refitting it in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Grant makes the first move, and begins to march his newly minted Army of the Susquehanna southward down the Cumberland Valley toward Virginia. General George Armstrong Custer learns of Lee's movement of the pontoon train from a loyal Union railroad man, and decides it is an important enough prize that he must abandon his current mission, leaving Gen. Darius N. Couch without proper screening forces. The novel goes into extensive detail regarding battle plans, troop movements, and military strategies over a period of three days. In the end, Grant wins, barely. After Lee's surrender, Grant paroles Lee and his army, and declares a 30-day, unilateral truce, ostensibly to give the paroled Confederates time to return home, but more so to give Confederate President Jefferson Davis time to "come to his senses" and realize the war has been lost. Without an army, Davis is left with no choice but to surrender, ending the war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Stitch_in_Time_(Robinson_novel)"title="A Stitch in Time (Robinson novel)">
Presented as a letter from DS9's resident Cardassian spy and tailor Elim Garak to Dr. Julian Bashir, Garak recounts his life story, and also notes developments on Cardassia after the end of the Dominion War. According to the text, Garak has since assisted in the rebuilding and recovery of Cardassia, while also supporting democratic reforms for its government. He believes that the Dominion War and destruction of Cardassia were partially caused by Cardassia's military-led government.The narrative of the novel happens on Cardassia after the end of the Dominion War where Garak, living in the ruins of his childhood home, is helping with relief efforts while reminiscing about a society that is gone. As he is writing a letter to Julian Bashir, he also goes over his own life through journal entries.The first timeline follows him through his childhood in the home of Enabran Tain being raised as the gardener's son with Mila as his birth mother, his training as a youth at a brutal military academy called Bamarren Institute for State Intelligence, his recruitment into the Obsidian Order, his rise through the ranks as a skilled operative carrying out various covert missions, his enmity with Gul Dukat and his disobedience of Enabran Tain over Palandine, a woman he loves which leads to his downfall and exile.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propeller_Island"title="Propeller Island">
A French string quartet (Sébastien Zorn, Frascolin, Yvernes and Pinchinat), traveling from San Francisco to their next engagement in San Diego, is diverted to Standard Island. Standard Island is an immense man-made island designed to travel the waters of the Pacific Ocean. The wealth of residents of the island can only be measured in millions. The quartet is hired to play a number of concerts for the residents during their tour of the islands (Sandwich, Cook, Society) of the South Pacific. The island seems an idyllic paradise; however, it is an island divided in two. The left half's population is led by Jem Tankerdon and is known as the Larboardites. The right half's population is led by Nat Coverley and is known as the Starboardites. Despite the obstacles encountered on their journey, the two parties have a disagreement that threatens the future of the island itself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Island_(book)"title="The Little Island (book)">
A little island in the ocean changes as the seasons comes and go -- spring and summer bring flowers, seals, and birds, and days and nights. One day a kitten visits the island with a family on a picnic. This kitten opines that the island is small and isolated; however, the island retorts that it, like the kitten, is also a part of the world. When the kitten disputes the island's claim, the island suggests that it ask any fish. The kitten catches a fish and demands, on pain of being eaten, to know how the island is part of the bigger land. The fish invites the kitten down into the water to see, which the kitten of course cannot do. The kitten demands to be shown another way. 'Then you will have to take it on faith', says the fish -- 'to believe what I tell you about what you don't know." The fish then tells him "how all lands are one land under the sea." The cat realizes he has learned a great secret, which he loves, and lets the fish go before leaving the island. The island settles back into the timeless cycle of the seasons -- autumn, winter, storms, and calm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Be_Monsters!"title="Here Be Monsters!">
Protagonist Arthur lives with his adoptive grandfather, William, in the complex network of tunnels beneath Ratbridge, where William hides after unjustly accused of attempted murder. Arthur emerges at sundown in search of food, aided by a pair of hand-cranked mechanical wings. He also carries a doll—an effigy of his grandfather with wings—which serves as a walkie-talkie, allowing him to communicate with his grandfather. On one such expedition, Arthur witnesses an illegal cheese hunt, and follows the hunters and the captured cheeses back to the Cheese Hall. Arthur's wings are stolen, and he is almost captured, by Snatcher, the leader of the once-powerful Cheese Guild. Arthur is rescued by Fish, a boxtroll, who takes Arthur to Willbury Nibble, the proprietor of a former pet shop called 'Here Be Monsters'. He shares his home with several boxtrolls (Shoe, Egg, and Fish) and a cabbagehead (Titus). Such creatures usually live underground and are collectively termed "Underlings". Arthur's new friends intend to help him return to his grandfather, but quickly discover that all of the entrances to the tunnels have been sealed.At the shop, a mysterious individual sells Willbury a number of miniaturised creatures and attempts (unsuccessfully) to buy their full-sized counterparts. Later, during a shopping trip, Willbury and Arthur are surprised to find that miniaturised Underlings are sold to Ratbridge's women as the latest fashion trend. They visit Willbury's friend, Marjorie: an inventor camped at the patent office, waiting for the return of a prototype of her latest invention. When they return to Willbury's shop, the place is a shambles and the Underlings are missing. While assessing the wreckage they are visited by Kipper and Tom, members of the crew of the Ratbridge Nautical Laundry, soliciting customers. The Laundry is headquartered on a ship that became stuck in a canal and is staffed by men, rats, and crows. (Playing against stereotype, the rats are portrayed as intelligent, congenial characters who share leadership duties with the men. It is suggested that the crew were pirates before founding a laundry.) Several of their crew have also gone missing and the others join the search for the Underlings. After seeing the Guild members leave on another illegal hunt, Arthur retrieves his wings and helps a number of Underlings (including his friends) escape from the dungeon. They return to the Nautical Laundry, where corrupt police officers arrest Arthur and hand him over the Guild. The prisoner in his adjoining cell—Herbert, the Man in the Iron Socks—tells Arthur that the Guild is creating miniature creatures, and helps Arthur retrieve the keys to their cells from the sleeping guard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sometimes_a_Great_Notion"title="Sometimes a Great Notion">
The story centers on the Stamper family, a hard-headed logging clan in the coastal town of Wakonda, on the Oregon coast, in the early 1960s. The union loggers in Wakonda go on strike in demand of the same pay for shorter hours in response to the decreasing need for labor. The Stampers, however, own and operate a small family business independent of the unions and decide to continue work as well as supply the regionally owned mill with all the timber the laborers would have supplied had the strike not occurred. The rest of the town is outraged.This decision and its surrounding details are examined alongside the complex histories, relationships, and rivalries of the members of the Stamper family: Henry Stamper, the elderly, politically and socially conservative patriarch of the family, whose motto "Never Give a Inch!" has defined the nature of the family and its dynamic with the rest of the town; Hank, the older son of Henry, whose indefatigable will and stubborn personality make him a natural leader but whose subtle insecurities threaten the stability of his family; Leland, the younger son of Henry and half-brother of Hank, who as a child left Wakonda for the East Coast with his mother, but whose eccentric behavior and desire for revenge against Hank lead him back to Oregon when his mother dies; and Viv, whose love for her husband Hank fades as she realizes her subordinate place in the Stamper household.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outwitting_History"title="Outwitting History">
When Aaron Lansky was a Yiddish student in the late 1970s, he found it difficult to obtain Yiddish Books for his studies. This caused him to have the idea of asking the broader community for Yiddish books, which he did by putting up signs around his area asking for donations. He quickly found that the number of individuals and institutions who wanted to donate books was enormous, as was the sheer number of books, which would otherwise be discarded. Lansky appealed to Jewish institutions to assist with his project of saving the Yiddish books, but there was very little interest from Jewish institutions to assist. For many, Yiddish was an unwanted and unwelcome reminder of an immigrant past. So, Lansky had to go about his project largely without institutional support. Lansky did gather community members who shared his care for preserving Yiddish, and they would assist him in the collection and transfer of the books. He recounts how emotional the process of picking up books often was, with the donors invariably insisting that the “Zamlers” (book collectors) stay for food and crying when they eventually did hand over their precious books. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King's_Last_Song"title="The King's Last Song">
Set in Cambodia, it tells the story of Map, a policeman and former Khmer Rouge, and young motoboy William as they search for the gold leaf memoirs of the 12th Century king Jayavarman VII, which have been stolen by a former lieutenant of Pol Pot. The memoir is fictional, but Jayavarman is not, and an account of his life and reign is told in a parallel thread. In addition there is a lengthy flashback to Map's violent activities in the last years of the Cambodian war. The novel makes explicit the contrast between ancient Cambodia's opulence and the poverty and corruption of its modern counterpart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Abundance_of_Katherines"title="An Abundance of Katherines">
Colin Singleton, a child prodigy living in Chicago, fears he will not maintain his genius as an adult. Over the span of his life, Colin has dated nineteen girls named Katherine, all spelled in that manner. After being dumped by his girlfriend, Katherine XIX, Colin is longing to feel whole, and longing to matter. He hopes to become a genius by having a "eureka" moment.After graduating from high school, and before college, Colin's best and only friend, Hassan Harbish, convinces him to go on a road trip to take his mind off the breakup. Colin goes, hoping to find his "eureka" moment. After reaching a rural Tennessee town called Gutshot, they visit the supposed resting place of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. There, they meet Lindsey Lee Wells and her mother Hollis, whose family runs a local textile mill. Hollis allows Colin and Hassan to stay with her family and offers them a summer job interviewing the town's residents and assembling an oral history of Gutshot.Colin begins to like Lindsey, though he is foiled by her boyfriend, Colin Lyford (he and Hassan call him TOC, "the other Colin"), whose father is employed by Lindsey's mother. Colin is still chasing his eureka moment, finally finding it in the theorem he created called the "Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability". It determines the curve of any relationship based on several factors of the personalities of the two people in a relationship. His theorem eventually works for all but one of his past relationships with a Katherine—which the novel explores.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restless_(novel)"title="Restless (novel)">
Eva, a young Russian woman, is recruited after her brother's death to work for the British secret service. During this time she falls for her mentor and boss, Lucas Romer. But all is not as it seems as Romer is working as a double agent which ultimately leads to the attempted murder of Eva, alongside the deaths of other agents.The tale is interlinked with the story of Eva's daughter in the 1970s and how she comes to terms with the discovery of her mother's secret life. The setting of the novel is in London, Oxford, Scotland, continental Europe, and the United States.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Tilt_(novel)"title="Full Tilt (novel)">
Brothers Blake and Quinn are with friends Russ and Maggie at an amusement park. 13-year-old Quinn is a bit more daring and adventurous than his 16-year-old brother, which leads him to wear obscene hats and want to ride the most high-octane roller coasters such as the Kamikaze. Later on in the evening, Blake ends up talking to a girl named Cassandra at a game stand who convinces him to play a game of ball toss. Having won, he receives a ticket from Cassandra to another amusement park that's invite-only and open through the night. Cassandra mysteriously vanishes from the park shortly after, and a bearded bald man is now there instead, who has no idea about anyone name Cassandra. As Blake and Quinn return home, their mother surprises them by announcing her engagement to her boyfriend. Blake accepts his soon to be stepfather but Quinn angrily storms off.That night, Quinn mysteriously falls into a coma-like state. Looking at Quinn, Blake swears he can see carnival lights in Quinn's eyes. He also discovers the ticket given to him by Cassandra missing. Blake drives back to the park with Maggie and Russ and find a hidden path along the way. They arrive at the ravine and discover that Blake's hunch was right, when they discover a hidden amusement park. Despite not having an invitation anymore, they are let in. After entering, they find out that they must ride seven rides by dawn in order to be let out. Failure to do so means they will be trapped at the park forever. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Key_(Tanizaki_novel)"title="The Key (Tanizaki novel)">
The entire story is told in diary form, switching between the entries of a 55-year-old university professor and his 10 years younger wife Ikuko. Both claim that they want to keep their notes secret from another, and complain about the difficulties in their sex life: she about her husband's inability to satisfy her, he about her insatiability, mixed with her oldfashioned attitude and rejection of his erotic preferences. At the same time he is convinced that, would she allow him to act out his wishes, he would be able to fulfil her desires.The couple has chosen teacher Kimura as a possible marriage prospect for their daughter Toshiko, but Toshiko shows no interest in him. Instead, the husband believes to sense a mutual interest between Kimura and Ikuko, and realises that his jealousy stimulates him. He provokes situations in which Kimura can see Ikuko naked, starting with making her drunk which leads to her repeated collapsing and need to be looked after. Also, he has sex with his wife while she is unconscious, during which she utters the name of Kimura. At Kimura's offer, the professor borrows his polaroid camera, which he uses to make nude photographs of Ikuko. Later, he switches to negative film, making sure that Kimura sees the pictures. At the same time, he has his doctor inject him hormones to improve his potency, which result in dangerously high blood pressure and memory defects.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Needle_(novel)"title="Needle (novel)">
The Hunter, an alien lifeform (when not inside another being, resembling a four-pound green jellyfish) with the ability to live in symbiosis with and within another creature, is in hot pursuit of another of his kind. Both crash their ships into Earth, in the Pacific Ocean, and both survive the crashes.The Hunter makes its way to shore (its erstwhile host having been killed in the crash) and takes up residence in the nearest human being it can find (as it turns out, fifteen-year-old Robert Kinnaird) without letting the human being know. By the time it has figured out enough of what goes on inside a human being to look through Bob's eyes, it is shocked to find itself within an air vessel, being carried further away from its quarry every second. As it happens, Bob is simply returning to a New England boarding school from his home on an industrial island in the Western Pacific.Once Bob arrives at school, the Hunter sees no alternative to communicating with his host. After initial attempts produce panic in the boy, the Hunter eventually finds a way to convince Bob of his presence. Bob is very accepting of his guest, perhaps beyond what would be expected of a teenage boy who learns another entity is inside him, observing his every move. The two plot a way to return home. The puzzle distracts Bob from his studies, leading to a decline in grades that the school authorities ascribe to homesickness, and he is sent home for the remainder of the term.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strategy_Paradox"title="The Strategy Paradox">
"The Strategy Paradox", the title and focus of the book sets up a ubiquitous but little-understood tradeoff. The tradeoff is that most strategies are built on specific beliefs about an unpredictable future, but current strategic approaches force leaders to commit to an inflexible strategy regardless of how the future might unfold. It is this commitment to uncertainty that is the cause of "the strategy paradox."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vengeance_of_Rome"title="The Vengeance of Rome">
In the novel, Colonel Pyat, an incarnation of the Eternal Champion, goes to Italy and Germany, where he becomes involved in Fascism and Nazism, including sexual encounters with Ernst Röhm and Adolf Hitler and a sojourn in Dachau. Mrs Cornelius, the mother of Jerry Cornelius, is another major character. The end of the novel sees Pyat confronted with his ambiguous heritage and his own unreliability as a narrator.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extraordinary_Adventures_of_Alfred_Kropp"title="The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp">
An orphan teenager named Alfred Kropp lives in a small apartment with his Uncle Farrell, who is a security guard. His dad left when he was born and his mom died when he was twelve. He stays mostly secluded, both at home and at school. A man named Arthur Myers calls Alfred's uncle at work, and offers one million dollars for the return of an object stolen from him, a sword, by Uncle Farrell's boss, Bernard Samson. Basically, Alfred has to break into the main office, find the safe, and steal the sword himself, accidentally cutting himself on the blade. Then when he is about to leave, he is attacked by three monks armed with swords as well. A battle ensues, but Alfred manages to defeat them though he has never fought with a sword whereas his enemies seem experienced. Alfred and Uncle Farrell manage to escape to their apartment, where they are attacked by Arthur Myers. He steals the sword, and kills Uncle Farrell, but spares Alfred.Alfred meets Bernard Samson who explains to him that Arthur Myers was an alias of an international terrorist, who wanted control of Bernard's sword, which was Excalibur, and that the monks were actually the heirs of knights who vowed to protect the sword. Bernard Samson goes off to Xàtiva, Spain, to try to reclaim the Sword from Myers, whom he knows as Mogart. A member of an international organization called OIPEP interjects that their codename for Mogart is 'The Dragon'. When Alfred asks Samson if there is anything he can do to help, Samson replies, "Pray." Alfred returns to his normal life unwillingly, and is taken into a foster home owned by a family called the Tuttles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_It_Girl_(novel_series)"title="The It Girl (novel series)">
Jenny Humphrey is leaving Constance Billard School for girls to attend Waverly Academy, an elite boarding school in New York horse country where glamorous rich kids don't let the rules get in the way of an excellent time. Jenny is determined to leave her crazy Manhattan past behind and become a sophisticated goddess on campus. But first she'll have to contend with her self-absorbed roommates, Callie Vernon and Brett Messerschmidt. Hot guys, intrigue, and gossip all add up to more trouble than ever for Jenny.Jenny desperately wants to gain Tinsley's acceptance and finally be a part of the popular crowd, but along the way she begins to wonder what price she will have to pay. To make matters worse she falls hard for Callie's estranged boyfriend, Easy, and is forced to choose between the boy she thinks she loves and her new friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_Brigades"title="The Ghost Brigades">
The Colonial Defense Forces (CDF) learn that one of their top consciousness transfer scientists, Charles Boutin, has turned traitor and sparked an unprecedented alliance between three other species to wipe out humanity. While investigating Boutin's clumsy attempt to fake his own death, the CDF discovers that Boutin had successfully stored a copy of his consciousness in a computer. The colonial Special Forces, nicknamed "The Ghost Brigades," create a CDF soldier body with Boutin's DNA to try to implant the copy of Boutin's consciousness into the new brain, to learn where Boutin has escaped to and what his intentions really are. After the attempt seemingly fails, the soldier (named Jared Dirac, after Paul Dirac) becomes a private in the Special Forces and is assigned to a platoon commanded by Jane Sagan. On the off chance that Boutin's consciousness does emerge, Sagan and her superiors are determined to keep an eye on Jared. Time passes and an experience that reminds Dirac of Boutin's daughter Zoe leads Boutin's consciousness to emerge. Jared slowly becomes more and more like Boutin while losing his own personality traits, but retains his individuality and his strong moral opposition to Boutin's philosophy and actions. When the extent of Boutin's treachery becomes known, it's clear there will be some difficult choices required to stop Boutin's alliance with the Rraey, Eneshan and Obin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prairie"title="The Prairie">
The story opens with Ishmael, his family, Ellen and Abiram slowly making their way across the virgin prairies of the Midwest looking for a homestead, just two years after the Louisiana Purchase, and during the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. They meet the trapper (Natty Bumppo), who has left his home in New York State to find a place where he cannot hear the sound of people cutting down the forests. In the years between his other adventures and this novel, he tells us only that he has walked all the way to the Pacific Ocean and seen all the land between the coasts (a heroic feat, considering Lewis and Clark hadn't yet completed the same trek). That night, a band of Teton warriors steal all of Ishmael's animals, stranding the immigrants. The doctor returns the next morning along with his donkey. The trapper helps the family relocate their wagons, including one with mysterious contents, to a nearby butte where they will be safer when the Tetons return. Middleton joins the group when he stumbles upon the trapper and Paul. Before they return to the butte, Ishmael and his family go looking for his eldest son, Asa, whom they find murdered. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Journal_of_Julius_Rodman"title="The Journal of Julius Rodman">
"The Journal of Julius Rodman" is a fictionalized account of the first expedition across the Western Wilderness, crossing the Rocky Mountains. The journal chronicled a 1792 expedition led by Julius Rodman up the Missouri River to the Northwest. This 1792 expedition would have made Rodman the first European to cross the Rocky Mountains. The detailed journal chronicles events of the most surprising nature, and recounts "the unparalleled vicissitudes and adventures experienced by a handful of men in a country which, until then, had never been explored by 'civilised man'."Julius Rodman was an English emigrant who first settled in New York, then moved to Kentucky and Mississippi. His expedition which departed from Mills' Point up the Missouri River with several companions was described in a diary. The manuscript of the diary was submitted by his heir, James E. Rodman. Rodman is accompanied on his expedition by Pierre, Alexander Wormley, Toby, a Virginian, Andrew Thornton, and the Greely brothers, John, Robert, Meredith, Frank, and Poindexter. The party is described as "mere travellers for pleasure", abandoning commercial or pecuniary motives. They traveled by canoe and by a thirty foot long keelboat which was bulletproof. The travelers described the White Cliffs of the Missouri: "The face of these remarkable cliffs, as might be supposed, is chequered with a variety of lines formed by the trickling of the rains upon the soft material, so that a fertile fancy might easily imagine them to be gigantic monuments reared by human art, and carved over with hieroglyphical devices." In the final chapter, a ferocious attack by two grizzly bears on the expedition party is described: "We had scarcely time to say a word to each other before two enormous brown bears (the first we had yet encountered during the voyage) came rushing at us open-mouthed from a clump of rose-bushes." Their fierceness was detailed: "These animals are much dreaded by the Indians, and with reason, for they are indeed formidable creatures, possessing prodigious strength, with untamable ferocity, and the most wonderful tenacity of life." A member of the party, Greely, is attacked and mauled by one of the bears. Rodman and another member, the Prophet, assist him. They shoot the bear but cannot stop the attack. Subsequently, Rodman and the Prophet are attacked. Cornered on the cliff, they are saved from death by Greely, who shoots the bear at point-blank range: "Our deliverer, who had fought many a bear in his life-time, had put his pistol deliberately to the eye of the monster, and the contents had entered his brain."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem_for_the_Conqueror"title="Requiem for the Conqueror">
Set in a future when humanity has forgotten its origins in earth, the novel describes the political equations and power struggle between the emperor, a quasireligious group, a pre-sentient computer named the MagComm and the Lord Commander.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fool_of_the_World_and_the_Flying_Ship_(book)"title="The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship (book)">
The Czar announced that whoever brought him a flying ship could marry his daughter. The Fool of the World, the youngest son of a peasant couple, set out to marry the Princess. His mother gave him "some crusts of dry black bread and a flask of water" in a bag for his trip.The Fool met an "ancient old man" who asked to eat the Fool's food. When the Fool opened his bag, he was surprised to find "fresh white rolls and cooked meats," as well as "corn brandy," which he shared. The old man instructed the Fool to hit a tree with his hatchet to create a flying ship, but advised him to give a ride to everyone he met.After making and flying his ship, the Fool picked up the Listener (who could hear very faint sounds), the Swift-goer (who could walk across the world in one step), the Far-shooter (who could hit a bird hundreds of miles away), the Eater (who could consume great quantities of food), the Drinker (who could swallow more than a lake at one time), a man carrying sticks of wood that could become soldiers, and a man carrying straw that could make everything cold.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Door_in_the_Lake"title="The Door in the Lake">
Twelve-year-old Joey Finney vanishes while camping with his family. When he comes back, he cannot remember what happened during the two years he was missing – or why he has not grown. Then he starts to have seizures and seems to remember what happened. He believes that he was abducted by aliens. What could be the explanation for all of this?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Goblet"title="The Golden Goblet">
Ranofer is an orphaned 12-year-old boy whose mother had died at birth. Ranofer had learned many things at a goldsmith's shop with his father Thutra. Without his half brother, Gebu, he would be living on the streets. His evil half brother beats and mistreats Ranofer. Ranofer has to stay with Gebu because his father, Thutra, died when he was young. His father knew Zau, the master goldsmith well. When the tallies of gold sweepings do not add up, Ranofer tries to figure out why. He determines that Ibni the Babylonian porter is smuggling gold to Gebu through wineskins that Ranofer unknowingly carries home. Ranofer tries to stop this, but Gebu forces him to continue, threatening to beat again and sell him into slavery. Ranofer makes two new friends, the Ancient and Heqet, but things take a turn for the worse when Gebu moves him to his stone cutting shop to be an apprentice after Ibni is caught. Ranofer doesn't like the job as much as his dream where he is to be apprentice by Zau, the master goldsmith. With the help of his new friends, Ranofer discovers that someone else is stealing gold at night after getting suspicious again. After Heqet suggests they work together to spy on Gebu and his evil helpers, they meet in a thicket near the river, share food, and talk about what they have heard during midday when Ranofer gets a break from his awful job at the stonecutters' shop. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_Ivory"title="Empire of Ivory">
Laurence and Temeraire arrive back in the United Kingdom, following their evacuation of Danzig in "Black Powder War". Their relief at arriving safely is short-lived as Napoleon continues his preparations for an invasion of the British Isles. When questioned about the lack of British air support for the Prussians, Laurence discovers that Britain had no dragons to spare: a flu-like epidemic has infected the greater part of them, and British science has yet to devise a cure. To combat it, Temeraire, Iskierka and the ferals are forced to fly frantic patrols, both as a show of force and to prevent Napoleon from getting reconnaissance in over the contaminated coverts; at one point Temeraire is forced to knock a French courier-dragon, Sauvignon, out of the sky and down into one of the coverts, risking infection himself.Temeraire and Laurence continue to develop their notions of draconic equality in British society and find common cause with William Wilberforce and the abolitionist movement in exchange for assistance from prominent political leaders. Before they can continue their plans, they are enlisted to return to Africa to seek a cure for the draconic flu, which Temeraire caught and was cured of in "Throne of Jade"; his immunity is proven when he fails to contract the illness from Sauvignon and the other dragons. The entire formation is shipped to the Cape Colony aboard the "Allegiance", along with a black missionary, Rev. Josiah Erasmus, formerly of the Lunda people, his wife Hannah and their daughters. The missionaries are manumitted slaves, causing tension between Laurence and "Allegiance" captain Tom Riley, a staunch supporter of the slave trade and occasional friend of Laurence. Riley is also further thrown off balance by the discovery that some of the Aerial Corps' officers, including Lily's captain Catherine Harcourt, are women (the acid-spitting Longwing breed, along with a few others, refuse to accept male handlers).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eye_of_the_Heron"title="The Eye of the Heron">
"The Eye of the Heron" is a science fiction novel set on the fictional planet of Victoria in a speculative future, probably sometime in the 22nd century, when the planet has been colonized for about a century and has no communication with Earth. The protagonist is a young woman called Luz but the story is told in the third person and the reader sees events from the point of view of several different characters. "The Eye of the Heron" is usually treated as one of Le Guin's minor novels although it exhibits her characteristic prose style and themes.The planet of Victoria received two waves of colonists from Earth: first two prison ships founding a penal colony and then one ship of political exiles. The descendants of the prisoners mostly inhabit the City. The descendants of the political exiles, the "People of Peace", inhabit Shantih Town, which is known to the City dwellers as Shanty Town. The Shantih Towners, whose primary occupation is farming, want to settle another valley further away from the City. The City "Bosses" do not want to lose the control they believe they have over the Shanty Towners and so they take action to try to prevent any settlement beyond their sphere of influence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Hawthorn_Tree_(novel)"title="Under the Hawthorn Tree (novel)">
The novel tells the story of three siblings, Mary Ellen (Eily), Michael and Margaret (Peggy) O'Driscoll, who live in a small cottage in their home district of Duneen. Ireland is in the height of The Great Hunger. Blight has destroyed the staple crop. Ten month old Bridget dies of famine fever and is buried under the hawthorn tree in the garden: in Irish mythology, the hawthorn is linked with the otherworldTheir father has gone to find work on the famine roads, and the children and their mother struggle each day, getting barely enough food to survive. Their mother ends up selling all of her belongings except for the clothes on their backs. Desperate and worried that she won’t be able to feed her children alone, she leaves to search for her husband. After waiting for their parents for a few days, the three siblings are forced to leave for the workhouse. Eily makes a decision; they would make the long journey to find Nano and Lena, the aunts from their mothers stories. The journey ahead is dangerous and the children are weak, but they are determined to make it to Castletaggart - to the only family they have left.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart-Shaped_Box_(novel)"title="Heart-Shaped Box (novel)">
Aging rock star Judas Coyne spends his retirement collecting morbid memorabilia, including a witch's confession, a real snuff film and, after being sent an email directly about the item online, a dead man's funeral suit. Jude is informed by Jessica Price, the dead man's daughter, that the old man's spirit is attached to the suit, such that Jude is effectively buying himself a ghost. Jude cannot pass up this creepy opportunity.The suit arrives in a heart-shaped box. Various odd occurrences cause Jude to realize that the ghost is deadly and is out to kill him and those around him. His assistant, Danny Wooten, kills himself, but not before contacting the woman who sent the suit. Jude finds out that the ghost was the stepfather of a groupie, Florida, whom Jude lived with for a few months and who had later committed suicide. The ghost holds Jude responsible for Florida's death and wants revenge. Jude flees his house with his current girlfriend, Georgia, with the ghost in hot pursuit.The ghost's intent is to separate Jude from his two dogs, Angus and Bon, who, as familiars, can protect their owners from the dead. Jude and Georgia take the dogs with them while fleeing south. The dogs save them several times, but the ghost eventually kills them. Jude and Georgia discover that Florida had been hypnotised and molested by her stepfather, Craddock McDermott. When Florida threatened to turn in Craddock and her elder sister Jessica to the police, they killed her and staged her death as a suicide. Later, a dying Craddock hexed the suit and arranged for Jessica to sell it to Jude.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Kill_Once_More"title="And Kill Once More">
Marty Bowman was an L.A. lifeguard who thought he might like to play detective. At a posh house party in the central California mountains he got his chance to play—for keeps.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plot_It_Yourself"title="Plot It Yourself">
A group of authors and publishers hires Nero Wolfe to investigate a series of plagiarism claims. Wolfe, by his own admission, bungles the investigation so badly that three murders result.In "Plot It Yourself", Stout draws on his lengthy experience with book publishers, with authors (via, for example, his presidency of the Authors Guild), and with the writing process itself. Apart from the series' continuing characters, all the players in the book are directly associated with the publishing industry. Stout adds as subtext his take on the peculiar relationship between book authors and book publishers — part symbiosis, part animosity. Stout himself experienced at least one instance of contentious relations with his publishers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Many_Clients"title="Too Many Clients">
A man who identifies himself as Thomas Yeager, head of Continental Plastics, asks Archie to ascertain whether he is being followed when he visits a certain address in one of New York's worst neighborhoods. When the real Yeager's body is found at an excavation site in the vicinity of that address, Archie crosses the threshold and finds a fantastically appointed love nest where Yeager secretly entertained many women. The case becomes more complicated when the daughter of the building superintendent is later killed; her novice attempts at blackmail provide Wolfe with critical evidence needed to solve both murders and earn a large fee, shoring up his low bank account balance.In short order, Wolfe and Archie find themselves beset by prospective clients: 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Angels_(novel)"title="Better Angels (novel)">
Better Angels is a prequel to Hendrix's earlier novels "Lightpath" and "Standing Wave", filling in history about how the characters in those novels came to be who they are.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Labyrinth_Key"title="The Labyrinth Key">
The backdrop for this story is an informational arms races between a future United States of America and China. Both countries are attempting to build a quantum computer, which they believe will be the ultimate information weapon, creating and breaking encryption schemes. One of the American investigators, Dr. Jaron L. Kwok, is mysteriously killed while in Hong Kong, and his mathematical understudy Ben Cho is ordered to pick up Kwok's investigation in an attempt to find out why and how he died.Running parallel to this storyline are the lives of Don Markham (known as Don Strum in Cybernesia) and Lu Mei-lin (also known as Marilyn Lu). Don is a computer programmer whose work specializes in the virtual reality world Cybernesia. Lu is a forensic detective who works in Hong Kong. After Kwok's death she is the leading detective on the case, called to Sha Tin by the Guoanbo, China's version of the CIA and its leader in the race for the quantum computer.At the time of Kwok's death a holocaust is disseminated throughout the world, showing the circumstances of the virtual reality world that he had died in. However, his death prompts not only the US and China, but multiple other organizations (from terrorists to secret societies) to go to any lengths for the chance to get , the newest technology that reduplicates itself and stores a huge amount of information in tiny quantities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neverwhere_(novel)"title="Neverwhere (novel)">
"Neverwhere" is the story of Richard Mayhew and his trials and tribulations in London. At the start of the story, he is a young businessman, recently moved from Scotland and with a normal life ahead. This breaks, however, when he stops to help a mysterious young girl who appears before him, bleeding and weakened, as he walks with his fiancée to dinner to meet her influential boss.The morning after Richard rescues the girl, named Door, from the streets, she is greatly recovered and sends him to find the Marquis de Carabas, a man who will be able to help Door escape two infamous (and seemingly inhuman) assassins, the Messrs Croup and Vandemar. Richard brings the Marquis back to his apartment to meet Door, only to see both of them vanish immediately. Soon after, Richard begins to realise the consequences of his actions. He appears to have become invisible; he loses his job, where no one seems to recognise him, and his apartment is rented out to other people. His fiancée no longer recognizes him either.Determined to set things right, Richard tries to enter the world of London Below in search of Door. He finds a tramp from Below, who is the only person able to see him, and recites the name of the Floating Market as the only place known to him in underworld. The tramp brings Richard to the realm of the Rat-Speakers, who worship and perform tasks for rats. They attempt to assault and rob Richard, but follow orders from the master rat and let him free. He then travels across the mysterious Night's Bridge, whose darkness kills Richard's Rat-Speaker guide, Anaesthesia. Eventually he arrives at the Floating Market, where he meets again with Door, who is holding an audition for bodyguards. Going to the Market, a giant bazaar where people barter for all manner of junk and magical items, Richard realises that London Below is not such a bad place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Pets"title="The Big Pets">
The pictures depict a dreamscape where gigantic pets frolic with their small young owners in a succession of fantasy environments.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_(novel)"title="Paula (novel)">
Isabel Allende wrote "Paula" while tending to her daughter, Paula Frías Allende, who was in a coma arising from complications of porphyria. Allende started the book as a letter to Paula, explaining what she was missing so she would not be confused when she recovered. The novel includes accounts both of Paula's treatment and of Allende's life, sometimes overlapping with the content of Allende's first novel, "The House of the Spirits". Paula died on December 6, 1992. She was survived by her husband, Ernesto Diaz, and other family members.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baloney_(Henry_P.)"title="Baloney (Henry P.)">
The story is about an alien schoolchild who has an excellent reason for being late for school – he had blasted off into space.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seen_Art?"title="Seen Art?">
It depicts a child's view of the art collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City via a storyline that follows a young boy's quest for his friend called Art. Asking people whether they have seen Art, and where Art is, leads him on a journey around the Museum. At the end of the book he finds his friend waiting for him outside the Museum.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Janitor's_Boy"title="The Janitor's Boy">
The book tells the story of a school student, Jack Rankin, whose father is the janitor of his school. Jack is made fun of by his friends for this, and he hates his father because of it. Lashing out, he puts a massive quantity of bubble gum up under his desk so that his father will have to clean it off. Unfortunately, he is caught and ends up having to clean it up himself under the supervision of his father janitor. During this, he learns that it's very hard work to be a janitor, and learns of his father's dark past. He and his father become friends. As the book closes, a student shouts "You gonna be a janitor when you grow up too?!" and Jack says "Yes," and smiles up at his father's face, and says, "yes I do."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Things_Hoped_For"title="Things Hoped For">
After her Grandfather mysteriously leaves their large house in New York City, Gwen tries to continue her life as normally as possible while practicing hard for her violin auditions. Ignoring the constant and rudely demanding and angry visits of a greedy great-uncle wanting the house. She then meets Robert (Bobby) from "Things Not Seen" in a cafe. Robert is in town also preparing for trumpet auditions. Gwen invites Robert to stay in her empty house with her to help get him out of the hotel he was staying in. After becoming good friends in the following days, while shopping in a store in New York City they spot a faint shadow apparently coming from an invisible person. Robert then tells Gwen that two years ago he turned invisible.In the following days, Robert discovers Gwen's grandfather died in the freezer. Her grandfather went in with an oxygen bottle, thick clothes, and left the refrigerator slightly open so he could have left if he wanted to. The other invisible man is discovered in Gwen's house shortly after her grandfather's body is found. The man, named William, is seeking out Robert to find out how to undo his invisibility. William is revealed to be a dangerous thief who threatens them recklessly. Gwen is distraught, but gets a phone call from Alicia, Robert's girlfriend, asking her to play violin. Alicia thanks Gwen for the beautiful song. On the day of Gwen's audition, she opens an envelope with dog tags with a code leading to the title of a Bible passage. The passage says, "There is no greater love than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends". Gwen finally understood why her grandfather did what he did, and she walks confidently into her audition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas_(novel)"title="Lucas (novel)">
The story opens as fifteen-year-old Cait recounts events occurring a year before on her small island home, Hale, which is roughly four miles long and two miles across at its greatest extent. She begins her story by explaining when she first met Lucas, a mysterious teenager who has traveled to the island to explore and live for a short time period. On the same day that she first sees Lucas, her brother returns home and she is nearly assaulted by another islander, Jamie Tait.However, Lucas is not accepted into the island community easily, due to the discrimination he receives at the hands of the town folk. He works a few odd jobs, but is the victim of attempted assault, forcing him to defend himself and earn a negative reputation. Primarily this comes from Jamie Tait, a university student and popular islander from a wealthy family. The negative behavior escalates when Lucas rescues a young girl from drowning during a town festival, but is met with accusations of molestation.Lucas is forced into hiding. However, he feels an urge to visit Cait one last time. Unfortunately, Jamie has decided to frame Lucas for the rape, assault and attempted murder of a promiscuous islander named Angel, who had befriended Bill, Cait's old best friend. The novel climaxes as the islanders attempt to capture Lucas, who is innocent of the crime.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuffle_Bunny"title="Knuffle Bunny">
Trixie Willems steps lively as she and her father, Mo Willems, walk down the block, through the park, past the school, to the laundromat. For the toddler, loading and putting money into the machine evokes wide-eyed pleasure. But on the return home, she realizes that her stuffed rabbit, Knuffle Bunny, has been left behind. Because she cannot talk, Trixie cannot explain to Mo why she is upset. Despite his plea of, "Now, please don't get fussy," she gives it her all, bawling and going "boneless." They both arrive home unhappy. Cheryl, Trixie's mother, immediately understands that Knuffle Bunny is missing. The three run back to the laundromat, and after several tries, Mo finds the toy among the wet laundry, and claims hero status. The toddler exuberantly exclaims, "Knuffle Bunny!!!" — her first words.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo,_the_Terrible_Monster"title="Leonardo, the Terrible Monster">
Leonardo is truly a terrible monster - terrible at being a monster, that is. No matter how hard he tries, he can't seem to frighten anyone. Determined to succeed, Leonardo sets himself to training and research. Finally, he finds a nervous little boy, and scares the tuna salad out of him! But scaring people isn't quite as satisfying as he thought it would be. Leonardo realizes that he might be a terrible, awful monster-but he could be a really good friend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Week_in_the_Woods"title="A Week in the Woods">
At school, Mark chooses not to make friends, not to complete his work, not to even become involved, deciding that his time at school will be temporary and that he has nothing to gain. However, he gradually starts to become friends with other students in his class and develops a genuine interest in attending the "Week in the Woods", despite rudely rejecting Mr. Maxwell's initial offer. Mr. Maxwell reluctantly allows him to attend and Mark enjoys spending time in the woods with his new friends.As Mr. Maxwell and Mark's impressions of one another begin to improve, it is quickly derailed when a knife belonging to Mark's friend is found in their tent. Mark decides to take the blame, believing that Mr. Maxwell is looking for an excuse to send him away. When Mark's prediction proves to be true and he is told to go home early, Mark tries to prove that he can survive in the woods on his own. Mr. Maxwell soon realizes that he has been treating Mark unfairly when he discovers Mark did not bring the knife and is distressed to learn that Mark has disappeared into the woods. Though Mr. Maxwell finds Mark, he is injured and needs to rely on Mark for them to return safely to the campgrounds. They come to an understanding with one another during their return and promise to be more open to one another in the future.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Tongue_(Elgin_novel)"title="Native Tongue (Elgin novel)">
"Native Tongue" follows Nazareth, a talented female linguist in the 22nd century – generations after the repeal of the 19th Amendment. Nazareth is part of a small group of linguists "bred" to become perfect interstellar translators.Nazareth looks forward to retiring to the Barren House – where women past childbearing age go as they wait to die – but learns that the women of the Barren Houses are creating a language to help them break free of male dominance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Against_the_Sea"title="Men Against the Sea">
"Men Against the Sea" follows the journey of Lieutenant William Bligh and the eighteen men set adrift in an open boat by the mutineers of the "Bounty". The story is told from the perspective of Thomas Ledward, the "Bounty's" acting surgeon, who went into the ship's launch with Bligh. It begins after the main events described in the novel and then moves into a flashback, finishing at the starting point.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hondo_&amp;_Fabian"title="Hondo &amp; Fabian">
"Hondo and Fabian" illustrates the lives of two different friendly animals, a dog and a cat. Hondo the dog wakes up Fabian the cat hoping to have more adventures. Hondo decides to go fishing where he meets his friend Fred, another dog, while Fabian stays at home to play with a little girl. The day for each one of them is very different but exciting and at the end of the day they have their meal together and go to sleep in their favorite places.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_(novel)"title="Memento (novel)">
When the story opens, readers are introduced to Michal Otava, who is severely addicted to drugs, and who is taken to hospital because repeated injection of intravenous drugs has led to deep inflammation of his veins . His period within hospital care brackets the framework of the story. Michal recollects how he got involved with the narcotics underworld while still at high school. As time goes on, he becomes more deeply addicted.Michal runs away from home after experiencing unrequited love for his classmate Olina. Given that that leads nowhere, he decides to run away from home with her friend Honza. However, Michal and Honza are soon caught. Michal's authoritarian father is responsible for an abusive and dysfunctional context at home. Honza and Michal travel to a party of drug addicts in Prague. The addicts are informally led by the charismatic Richard. Michal falls in love with Eva, an addict whom he meets at the party. He then becomes involved within the addict subculture due to his difficulties at home and high school.At home, Michal's parents are unable to deal with his drug addiction. As a consequence of his deepening addiction, he is expelled from school shortly afterwards. He immediately joins the Czech Army, where he learns to deal with his addiction, leading it to diminish. However, after a year of military service, Michal steals a box of morphine , and he becomes addicted again. After returning from his time within the armed forces, Michal becomes even more deeply addicted to drugs. Michal tries to live in a shared flat with Eva, but drugs permeate their relationship and they cannot tolerate each other's company without it. There are repeated attempts to go 'cold turkey' , but always either Michal or Eva relapse and trapped in co-dependency, they both become mired within the addict subculture once more. When Michal's morphine runs out, the couple rob a pharmacy together. Predictably, they are caught. Neither denies complicity and Eva and Michal are both sentenced to two years in prison.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanoama"title="Yanoama">
## Part One (from kidnapping to living with the Namoeteri).Helena is a girl of Spanish descent ("white girl" in the book), who lives next to a river near the Amazon forest with her family of subsistence farmers. When she is a preadolescent (between 11 and 13 years old), the family is attacked by native warriors ("Indians" in the book). She is wounded and captured by one of the Yanoama tribes, and they take her to live with them.She lives with a tribe called the Shamateri. After accidentally giving poisonous toad eggs to a child, the father wants to kill Helena so she escapes into the forest and subsequently lives there for seven months.Eventually, she reaches a tribe called the Namoeteri. At first she is not well received. She unintentionally makes the mistake of insulting them, and she believes that her life is in danger. She flees to the forest once again, and is later caught.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Made_of_Glass"title="Earth Made of Glass">
Giraut and Margaret, now married, are sent on a diplomatic mission to the politically turbulent planet Briand, a distant Outer Sphere colony cut off from the rest of humanity for centuries until instantaneous travel became possible with the springer. Not only is Briand a very hot, high gravity planet, but the oppressive environment is matched by the increasing hatred between the two proud local cultures which have been forced to live in close proximity as a result of a volcano disaster—the Tamil Mandalam culture of New Tanjavur (based on an interpretation of Sangam literature) and the Maya culture that has been forced to live in the slum of Mayatown and the newly-grown city of Yaxkintulum after the destruction of their native Kintulum (based on an interpretation of pre-Columbian Maya civilization), have strained relations to the point that the Council of Humanity fears that full-scale war or ethnic cleansing may envelop Briand. Giraut and Margaret are given orders by Shan, their Office of Special Projects supervisor, to find the real power brokers of each culture in order to defuse the headline-grabbing daily ethnic attacks and steer the planet clear of all-out war. They must do this under the nose of Ambassador Kiel, a high ranking ambassador from Earth on Briand, who believes strengthening elected government officials is the only way to address a crisis.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_a_Teenage_Drama_Queen_(novel)"title="Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (novel)">
The story starts with Mary Elizabeth "Lola" Cep as she moves to New Jersey with her family and attempts to become the Queen Bee at Dellwood High (which she prefers to call Deadwood High). In order to become Queen Bee she must contend with Carla Santini, the school's most popular girl, who has no intention of vacating her place in school society. Both end up vying for the role of Eliza Doolittle in the school play, Pygmalion. To sound more interesting to her people Lola lies to her new friend Ella Gerard about her father being killed by a vehicle while taking flowers to his wife. One morning Lola's favorite band, Sidartha, break up and are doing their last ever concert together in New York City. When Carla boasts that she gets VIP passes to the band's last concert and the after party, Lola says she and Ella are also going so they attempt to buy tickets but without success. Lola asks her mother if she can go who says unless she goes with her dad she can't.Lola goes on a hunger strike to try make her mother let her go which leads to disaster with weakness. Lola, unable to buy a decent dress at any second hand shop, gets Sam Creek to help her sneak the Eliza Doolittle dress for her to wear at the Sidartha concert. Lola and Ella sneak away to New York City and try to get the last two tickets but Lola remembered she left her money in her make up kit which she left on the train. Unable to get into the concert Lola and Ella later see the singer of the Sidartha band, Stu Wolff, getting drunk as he leaves the party. Lola and Ella lead him into a restaurant to buy him coffee but Stu sneaks out by climbing out the bathroom window. Lola and Ella then get taken to the police station where Lola tells Ella the truth about her parents and her father comes to take them and Stu back to enjoy the after party and back home afterwards.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notorious_(novel)"title="Notorious (novel)">
After a long summer, Tinsley Carmichael returns to Waverly Academy, hoping to regain her place as the "It Girl". However, she receives a rude shock when she discovers that Jenny Humphrey is living in her old room, and upon their introduction, Tinsley immediately dislikes her. Despite her hopes, her friendship with Callie Vernon and Brett Messerschmidt is no longer what it used to be.Tinsley hears rumors about Brett and the young new teacher Eric Dalton, and decides to meet him. She seduces him almost immediately. She also starts a new "club", called Cafe Society, of which Brett and Jenny are, at first, a part of. Tinsley soon kicks Jenny out because of rumors of her and Easy Walsh, which Jenny denies, but Tinsley then confirms when she sees them sneaking around together. She also kicks Brett out, because she believes she is a traitor in siding with Jenny, and also because she enjoys taunting Brett.Torn between a relationship with Easy and school popularity, Jenny kisses a pizza delivery boy, Angelo, at a Cafe Society meeting to fit in with the other members. Ultimately, she chooses Easy, which generates ire from Callie. However, early in the relationship Easy hears rumors about Jenny's infidelity, causing him to end the relationship before it really begins.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reckless_(von_Ziegesar_novel)"title="Reckless (von Ziegesar novel)">
As punishment for being off-campus (and having a party), the girls are split up into separate rooms: Callie and Jenny are kept in their original room while Tinsley and Brett move to another. They spend most of their time and energy avoiding each other.Callie tries to deal with her breakup but is surprised when Easy asks her to go to dinner with him and his father during Trustee's Weekend because his father adores Callie and is unaware that they have broken up. Easy, who does not get along with his father, hopes to protect Jenny from his overly critical nature and believes that taking Callie would be much simpler. Callie accepts his invitation but wonders if it means that Easy is having second thoughts about their breakup.Jenny, on the other hand, is blissfully unaware of Easy's action and continues to spend time with Brett, who decides to finally lose her virginity with her boyfriend Jeremiah Mortimer during Trustee's Weekend, after a big football game for St. Lucius.However, Tinsley helps Heath Ferro and the hot new freshman, Julian hide kegs of beer on the roof of the Dumbarton dorm and under the bed of a quiet girl who lives in a single known as The Girl In Black. After the boys leave, Tinsley throws and all girls party on the roof for all of the Dumbarton residents (excluding Brett and Jenny). Unfortunately, a staff member passing by hears the girls on the roof and attempts to a stop to it. All the girls quickly hide in their respective rooms so no one can be blamed but the administration insists that the keg left on the roof is more than enough to hold against the dorm as a whole. Due to the Trustee Weekend event, the administration does not want to draw too much attention to the incident so the punishment is light- all Dumbarton residents are under lockdown for the weekend. No one can enter or leave the dorm, thus ruining Brett's plans with Jeremiah.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unforgettable_(novel)"title="Unforgettable (novel)">
After being torn between Callie Vernon and Jenny Humphrey, Easy Walsh makes his decision and chooses Callie. Although Jenny and Callie made a pact to put their friendship before relationships with Easy in front of the whole school, Callie will certainly not give him up for her sophomore roommate.Meanwhile, Brett Messerschmidt is still upset about the breakup with Jeremiah. After Jeremiah lost his virginity to Elizabeth, Brett had enough with guys. Surprisingly, Brett finds love in the most unexpected place: Kara Whalen, and confides in the most unexpected person: Heath Ferro, an inveterate gossip. Not ready to declare her sexuality to the student body, Brett keeps the relationship a secret by bribing Heath with sexy pictures of her and Kara. As a result of this, the three become surprisingly close.Tinsley Carmichael does the unexpected and hooks up with a freshman: Julian McCafferty. However, Tinsley finds Julian growing increasingly more distant, and she cannot accept he might be bored with her.Brandon Buchanan is completely over Callie and Jenny and is completely in love with Elizabeth, a unique and spunky girl who goes to Jeremiah's school. However, Elizabeth is afraid of being tied down to commitment and wants to be free to see other people, much to Brandon's discontent. Then at a party hosted by Tinsley he sees her flirting with another guy and decides he is not able to have an open relationship with her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candy_(Brooks_novel)"title="Candy (Brooks novel)">
The story opens when Joe Beck, a music lover with a knack for curiosity, meets 16-year-old Candy on the streets of London. Joe soon learns that Candy is not only a runaway from her home town, but also a teenage prostitute and heroin addict. He immediately becomes infatuated with her.The pair begin dating cautiously, visiting London Zoo once. Candy also comes to a gig that Joe and his band, The Katies, play at a local club. However, Candy's pimp, Iggy, feels that Joe is a threat, worrying that Joe will reduce the business Candy takes in and thus reducing Iggy's income. When Joe finds Candy beaten, the pair attack Iggy and leave the city to hide and to ease Candy off heroin.Iggy subsequently kidnaps Joe's older sister Gina, and uses her as a bargaining chip, claiming he will free her if Candy is returned to him. At the novel's climax, Joe, Candy, Joe's sister, and her boyfriend confront Iggy at Joe's family's remote country house. Candy stabs Iggy in the neck, concluding the novel's main story. Candy is sent off to a rehab centre for adolescents where Joe has a final meeting with her. Candy apologizes for everything and is taken away. Joe is left wondering where she is and if he will ever see her again. The last chapter briefly explains that Joe's band received a record deal and recorded Joe's song for Candy. Joe receives several calls for permission to record the song, but he never answers the messages. Although Joe is not at all upset by this, Candy very much is. In the final scene, Candy cries in Joe's arms, asking why their song was recorded. Did he have something to do with it? Left hanging on the streets all alone when Candy leaves, Joe is baffled, heartbroken, and still deeply in love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_of_the_Dead"title="The Road of the Dead">
"The Road of the Dead" opens as 14-year-old Ruben and 17-year-old Cole, half gypsy half English brothers, learn about their older sister's rape and murder. Determined to bring closure to their family, they travel to Lychcombe to collect her body. What begins as a simple task to bring her body home branches out into a quest for revenge when they learn that the murderer must be caught before they can bury Rachel.Slowly the brothers begin to uncover a plot in Lychcombe, involving the planned installation of a new hotel and vacation resort and several landowners who don't want to sell. Tragically, they discover that Rachel's murder was the result of an accident/miscommunication. However, the brothers are still determined to find and catch her killer.When the brothers discover that the killer has already been murdered himself for his mistake, they set out to find his body, the only way they can link him to Rachel. They soon find themselves involved with local gypsies, small town politics and the town's unofficial leader who's not going to give in without a fight.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Broken_Bridge"title="The Broken Bridge">
Ginny is sixteen, life is great...She’s turning out to be a brilliant artist like her mother-who died when she was a baby-she loves her home by the sea and, best of all, Andy has come back for the summer. But Ginny’s perfect world is about to shatter. Her father has kept a devastating secret from her and, piece by piece, she discovers that everything he has told her about herself is a lie. So who is she? Ginny must return to the dark tragedies of the past to find out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakleaf_Bearers"title="Oakleaf Bearers">
In the previous book, "The Icebound Land", Cassandra (the Crown Princess of Araluen) and Will (an apprentice Ranger) had been captured and sold as slaves in Skandia. As time went on, Halt (Will’s mentor and a legendary Ranger) and Horace (a Battleschool apprentice and Will's best friend) travelled across Gallica, defeating knights, and ridding Gallica of the evil warlord Deparnieux. They are now in Gallica ready to travel through a pass into Skandia to save Will and Cassandra (known as Evanlyn). Meanwhile, Will has overcome his addiction to warmweed and finally regains his senses. Cassandra is out checking previously set snares for food when she is captured by a member of a Temujai scout party, or Tem'uj.Halt and Horace, still on their rescue mission, find a border outpost where a dozen Skandians lay dead, shot by arrows. Halt manages to recognise an arrow, shot by the Temujai and becomes instantly worried. Two decades ago, the Temujai had nearly conquered the world, but with politics and a dish of bad shellfish, the invasion was stopped. Around the same time, Will recovers enough to search for Cassandra after realising she has gone missing and finds her about to be killed by one of the Temujai. In an ensuing battle, Halt and Horace, having managed to track the Temujai down, come to Will's aid and they rescue Cassandra.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princess_Diaries_(novel)"title="The Princess Diaries (novel)">
Mia Thermopolis is an average urban ninth grader living in Greenwich Village with her single, liberal mother and semi-famous painter, Helen Thermopolis. She begins keeping a journal after her mother begins dating her Algebra teacher, Mr. Gianni, whose subject Mia is currently failing. Mia has a crush on Josh Richter, the boyfriend of popular cheerleader Lana Weinberger, who often makes fun of her, though she also unknowingly harbours feelings for Michael, the brother of her best friend Lilly Moscovitz.Mia's father, Philippe Renaldo, who has recently recovered from testicular cancer, pays a visit. He reveals to Mia that he is the prince of Genovia, a small European principality. As he is no longer able to have children, Mia is now his sole heir to the throne and the princess of Genovia.Mia refuses to move to Genovia so she and her father form a compromise; she will remain in New York with her mother during term-time but spend her holidays in Genovia and attend daily princess lessons with her formidable grandmother, the Dowager Princess Clarisse Renaldo. After Clarisse gives Mia a makeover, Lilly reacts negatively, causing Mia to befriend Tina Hakim Baba, the daughter of a Saudi Arabia oil sheik who is shunned at school due to the presence of her bodyguard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorority_Sisters_(novel_series)"title="Sorority Sisters (novel series)">
At Palm Canyon High School located in fictitious Palm Canyon, Arizona, most girls aspired to be members of Chi Kappa, the most prestigious sorority at the school. One of their many rules was that they kept membership strictly at ten members.A girl named Elissa Hanes wanted to join, as did her friend Kim Adler. Kim was accepted along with a newcomer, and Elissa wasn't accepted. However, Kim eventually got disgusted with the sorority's scheming tactics, and quit the group in public.Elissa and Kim eventually created their own sorority called The Pack, which welcomed any girl who wanted to join, and the 10-member number, which Chi Kappa used so often to be their limit, would just be a number to legitimize the Pack and make them a solid group.Another former Chi Kappa member, Tracy McVane, a friend of Elissa's, joined the Pack herself, after being burned by Chi Kappa's less than ethical behavior. Some of the other Chi Kappa members, Melanie Deborah Kane and Daisy Baron for example, were also allies of the Pack, despite their membership in the more established Chi Kappa.Although they never reached ten, their core group was just as solid. The officers were "de facto" until the next year.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_Back_for_More"title="Come Back for More">
In River City, bank teller "Swede" Anderson puts the finger on a syndicate murderer and learns the cost of civic duty the hard way. With his tail between his legs, he barely gets out of town before the mob takes deadly revenge. A few years later, disguised as hard-muscled Irish hobo "Mac" McCarthy, Anderson returns to River City with a plan to even the score.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clockwork_(novel)"title="Clockwork (novel)">
"Clockwork" is set in the town of Glockenheim in Germany in "the old days". It has three main characters: Karl, an apprentice clockmaker who has failed to make a figure for the town clock; Gretl, who is a very selfless young girl is also one of the main characters and is the daughter of the innkeeper of Glockenheim and Fritz, a local writer whose unfinished story sets the gears of "Clockwork" turning.The townspeople gather in the White Horse Tavern the evening before a new figure for their town clock made by Karl is to be unveiled. Karl, however, admits to Fritz that he has not made the figure, the first apprentice in hundreds of years to fail to do so. The people in the tavern listen to Fritz read his latest story about a local aristocrat, Prince Otto, and his young son, Prince Florian. Prince Otto dies while on a hunting trip. His heart has been replaced with a clockwork mechanism that enables him to drive his son home in their sledge. Fritz wrote down the story after having a dream, but he has not thought of an ending for it, and hopes that he will be able to think up one on the spot: "He was just going to wind up the story, set it going, and make up the end when he got there."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alexandria_Link"title="The Alexandria Link">
The Library of Alexandria was the most important collection of ancient knowledge ever assembled. The building stood for six hundred years and contained more than half a million manuscripts. Then suddenly it vanished. No trace of this literary treasure has ever been unearthed.The book starts in Palestine in 1948, just as the state of Israel was being established. During 1948 Arab–Israeli War, a man is captured by Arab soldiers and taken to George Haddad who is surprised to find that this man is actually looking for his father and has some hidden truth to share. He mentions that Arabs are fighting a war that is unnecessary, against an enemy that is misinformed. Unable to learn more, the leader decides to shoot the mysterious man.In present-day Copenhagen, Denmark, Cotton Malone is in trouble. His son Gary is being held hostage by unknown enemies who want to trade him for the secret of the Alexandria Link. Malone is the only living person who's aware of it. He receives an anonymous email saying that he has only 72 hours to get it and trade with them. He and his ex-wife Pam visit Malone's influential friend Henrik Thorvaldsen's mansion to use methamphetamines. A mysterious man, Dominick Icculus Sabre, is following them all the time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fur_Country"title="The Fur Country">
In 1859 Lt. Jasper Hobson and other members of the Hudson's Bay Company travel through the Northwest Territories of Canada to Cape Bathurst on the Arctic Ocean on the mission to create a fort at 70 degrees, north of the Arctic Circle. The area they come to is very rich with wildlife and natural resources. Jasper Hobson and his party establish a fort here. At some point, an earthquake occurs, and from then on, laws of physics seem altered (a total eclipse happens to be only partial; tides are not perceived anymore). They eventually realise that they are on an iceberg separated from the sea ice that is drifting south. Hobson does a daily measurement to know the iceberg's location. The iceberg passes the Bering Strait and the iceberg (which is now much smaller, since the warmer waters have melted some parts) finally reaches a small island. A Danish whaling ship finds them. Every member in Hobson's party is rescued and they all survive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeker_(Nicholson_novel)"title="Seeker (Nicholson novel)">
The main characters in the book are Seeker, Morning Star and The Wildman. Seeker and Morning Star are devout believers in "the All and Only", however it is not obvious as to how far the Wildman worships the God. The Wildman used to be a ruthless pirate that killed without mercy. He was called the Wildman because his mood was often unpredictable. The Wildman wishes to join the Nom because he desires power, but moreover he wants inner peace. Morning Star wants to find her mother, whom she believes entered the Nom many years ago, but also wishes to serve her God. She also has an ability to tell peoples' feelings merely by looking at the colour of their aura, which she can see. Seeker wants above everything else to serve his God, and to prove himself worthy, as he has always felt that he lived in the shadow of his older brother, Blaze of Justice, who himself is a Noble Warrior.Seeker's father is the headmaster of the school on Anacrea, and wants Seeker to follow in his footsteps, forbidding him from applying to the Nom. However, when praying Seeker hears a voice telling him the 'door is always open' and that he would be the one to save the Lost Child. This confirms Seeker's belief that he will join the Nom. However, Seeker ventures a little further into the monastery and sees Blaze seemingly being cast out of the Nomana, undergoing a process of his memories being "cleansed". He speaks to several monks, and they inform him that Blaze is a traitor. Seeker cannot accept this, and feels that this is why he is later rejected by the Nom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Women's_Room"title="The Women's Room">
Mira and her friends represent a wide cross-section of American society in the 1950s and 1960s. Mira herself is from a middle-class background. She is mildly rebellious in that she disagrees with her mother's view of the world. In her late teens she dates a fellow student named Lanny; one night, when she was supposed to be out on a date with him, Lanny ignores her, and in response Mira dances with several men. Mira's actions in this instance gain her a reputation for being loose. Through this experience and several others with Lanny, Mira realizes she does not want to marry him because he would leave her at home, alone, scrubbing floors.Later, Mira marries Norm, a future doctor. Mira and Norm have two sons, Norm, Jr. (referred to as Normie throughout the book) and Clark. During the first few years of her marriage, Mira develops friendships with three neighborhood women: Natalie, Adele, and Bliss—all of whom are married with children. The women begin to throw dinner parties in order to create fun evenings together that involve their husbands. At the dinner parties there is flirtation among the different couples. Natalie begins to believe that her husband and Mira are having an affair, but Mira is able to dismiss Natalie's accusation, and their bonds survive until Mira discovers that Bliss and Natalie are having affairs with Adele's husband. The suspicion and actuality of affairs within the group results in irreversible damage to their friendships.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Precinct_(novel)"title="The Last Precinct (novel)">
Following the death of Diane Bray and an apparent attack on Kay Scarpetta by Jean-Baptiste Chandonne in her own house at the end of Black Notice, The Last Precinct concentrates on discovering the full story behind Chandonne's killings. Kay Scarpetta is also under suspicion for the killing of Bray, due to their known rivalry and public confrontations. Torn between a desire to clear her name and the instinct of a wounded animal to turn against even its would-be rescuers, Kay sifts through the forensic evidence that seems to link Chandonne to past events in her life, up to and including the murder of her lover, Benton Wesley. A major new character is Jaime Berger, from the District Attorney's Office in New York, who believes Chandonne killed a woman in New York two years' before his arrival in Virginia. Kay must examine her own fears, misconceptions, and anything-but-altruistic motives to accept working with another competent woman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Go_Adventuring_Again"title="Five Go Adventuring Again">
Julian, Dick, and Anne's mother are ill with scarlet fever, so they, George, and Timmy return to Kirrin Cottage for the Christmas holidays. Uncle Quentin, who is working on a secret theory in his study, takes a break to hire a tutor, Mr. Roland, to help Julian and Dick catch up with schoolwork they missed while sick. George is also required to attend the lessons, as she has just spent her first term at Gaylands boarding school and is behind her age level. The day before lessons commence, the children visit the old house at Kirrin Farm, which is run by Mr. and Mrs. Sanders. Mrs. Sanders informs the children that two artists from London have booked a three-week stay at the house. The children explore some old secret hole in the house, they also find a cupboard with a false back. When searching a cavity in a wall, Dick finds an old book of medical treatment recipes and a linen map inscribed with Latin words.The children take the map back to Kirrin Cottage, where Julian guesses that it shows a "secret way" but he is unable to decipher the other words. Much to George's chagrin, Julian later shows the map to Mr. Roland, asking him what the words mean. He confirms that it is about a "secret way" and also about an east-facing room with eight wooden panels. Later, Timmy is banished outside to his kennel for attacking Mr. Roland. Next, Uncle Quentin's secret papers are stolen. George suspects Mr. Roland, but cannot immediately convince the others. The children later discover the "secret way" (which was in Quentin's laboratory after all) which leads to the two artists' room in Kirrin Farm and George uncovers the stolen papers by mistake and they try to escape through the secret way, but the thieves almost outrun them but retreat when George threatens to set Timmy loose on them. The five also discover that Mr. Roland was behind them and imprison Mr. Roland and the two artists behind a room until the police arrive and arrest them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Run_Away_Together"title="Five Run Away Together">
Julian, Dick and Anne arrive in Kirrin Cottage to stay with George (real name Georgina) for the holidays. They plan to spend time exploring Kirrin Island but their happiness is spoilt when Aunt Fanny falls ill and has to leave with Uncle Quentin to be treated in a far-off hospital. They are cared for by Aunt Fanny's temporary cook, Mrs. Stick, who is accompanied by her husband and their ghastly son Edgar. The Sticks and the four children come to hate each other. Mrs. Stick repeatedly tries to poison George's dog Timmy, prompting George to hatch a secret plan to run away to Kirrin Island. When Julian catches her leaving, she decides to allow the other children to go with her.The children find evidence of other people visiting the island and suspect smugglers. The discovery of a young girl's toys and clothes point to something sinister going on. The children discover the Sticks have imprisoned a young girl, Jennifer Armstrong, on the island and are holding her for ransom. After tormenting the Sticks into a retreat, the children rescue the girl and take her to the police, who are amazed to see the child "the whole country is looking for." The police accompany them back to the island in time to trap and arrest the Sticks. The kidnapped girl's father allows her to spend a week with her new friends on Kirrin Island.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Go_to_Smuggler's_Top"title="Five Go to Smuggler's Top">
Siblings Julian, Dick and Anne are spending the Easter school holidays with their cousin George at her parents’ house, Kirrin Cottage. After a tree falls on the house, the four children are sent to Smuggler's Top, the home of Mr. Lenoir, a fellow-scientist of George's father, Uncle Quentin. Smuggler's Top is a queer house at the summit of an old hilltop coastal town, partly surrounded by dangerous marsh. The children are welcomed by Pierre "Sooty" Lenoir (Julian's and Dick's schoolmate and Mr. Lenoir's stepson) and his half-sister Marybelle. Mr Lenoir hates dogs, so George's dog Timmy is hidden in a secret passage. One night, the boys spot a light flashing in the house's tower. They suspect the signaller may be Block, the house's sinister, apparently deaf manservant, but he appears to be sleeping in his bedroom at the time. Uncle Quentin comes to stay with them and intends to sell Mr. Lenoir a plan for draining the marsh. However, Uncle Quentin is kidnapped, along with Sooty, by a local smuggler named Mr Barling, who fears the planned draining of the marsh will bring an end to his smuggling business. The children yet find another secret underground passage, leading to where Sooty and Uncle Quentin are being held captive by Barling and his henchman, who have been assisted by Block. Timmy attacks the kidnappers, allowing the captives and the children to escape. The police arrive to capture the smugglers. Outside the tunnels, Timmy is almost sucked down into the marsh but is saved by Uncle Quentin, assisted by Julian.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Go_Off_in_a_Caravan"title="Five Go Off in a Caravan">
The Famous Five are holidaying at the family house of Julian, Dick and Anne. They befriend an orphaned circus boy, Nobby, who is in a procession of horse-drawn circus caravans. This inspires George to suggest a caravanning holiday. Julian's parents assent and hire two caravans for the children. They travel to Merran Lake, where they are reacquainted with Nobby and meet various animals. The Five camp on a hillside, much to the annoyance of Nobby's guardian, Tiger Dan, and an acrobat named Lou, who want them to leave. One of the caravans of the children is directly above the entrance to a network of caves, where Tiger Dan and Lou have hidden stolen valuables. Assisted by Nobby, Timmy and a chimpanzee named Pongo, the four children manage to outwit the crooks. After the criminals are arrested, Nobby leaves the circus to live with a local farming couple and look after their horses.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Just_and_the_Unjust"title="The Just and the Unjust">
The novel has a prologue of several court docket entries in the case of "Commonwealth v. Stanley Howell and Robert Basso". The first entry, dated May 31, 1939, indicates that the three defendants in a case of capital murder—Robert Basso, Stanley Howell, and Roy Leming—have all been declared indigent and had attorneys appointed for them. A second, dated June 12, indicates that the trial of Basso and Howell has been severed from that of Leming, now defended by an attorney of questionable character.The defendants and their victim are all "foreigners—the people from somewhere else." They have been charged with the cold-blooded murder of a drug dealer and addict, Frederick Zollicoffer, whom they had kidnapped for ransom on April 6, and killed afterwards on or about April 17, possibly at the direction of a fourth criminal who died in a fall trying to escape from police in New York City. The F.B.I. had also entered the case and arrested Howell, from whom they had extracted a confession.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Town_(Faulkner_novel)"title="The Town (Faulkner novel)">
Each chapter is narrated from the point of view of one of three characters: Chick Mallison, Gavin Stevens, or V.K. Ratliff.Flem moves into Jefferson; is cuckolded by de Spain. De Spain's election. Flem is made power-plant supervisor. Flem steals brass from the plant. Flem plays Tom Tom and Turl off against each other; Tom Tom cuckolds Turl. The firemen hide the brass in the water tower.Eck Snopes saves a Varner Negro, breaking his neck in the process; he is "never in the world a Snopes." He changes jobs several times. Discussion of Snopes family structure, economy. I.O. Snopes comes to town and moves up (e.g., becomes schoolmaster). Children of Eck and I.O. The Snopes Hotel opens.Jefferson gossips about Eula. The Cotillion Ball is planned; de Spain invited after some debate. De Spain squeals his tires; under Gavin's instigation, Gowan finally manages to pop one of his tires. De Spain sends Gowan a special corsage; the town experiences a corsage panic leading up to the ball. At the ball, Gavin challenges, fights, and is beaten by de Spain.Recap: trial of Mink Snopes for killing Jack Houston. Gavin prepares an indictment against de Spain, as mayor, for Flem's theft of the brass at the power plant, largely motivated by his desire to stand up for "the principle that chastity and virtue in women shall be defended whether they exist or not." Gavin receives an anonymous note ...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin's_Ghost"title="Stalin's Ghost">
Arkady Renko is trying to adjust to his new life as a family man with a woman who is not his wife and a boy who is not his son. The prodigal Zhenya is constantly running off on his own for days, sometimes in the company of street children, in the depths of the Moscow winter. Arkady also senses things are starting to sour between him and Dr. Eva Kazka. He and his partner Victor Orlov are investigating claims that someone within the prosecutor's office is committing murder for hire and then covering it up. That is until Prosecutor Zurin calls Arkady off to more unearthly matters: the ghost of Joseph Stalin is being sighted on the Moscow Metro. Knowing all too well that Zurin is giving this case to him as a punishment, Arkady attends to the task of handling it without enthusiasm. Meanwhile, his suspicions begin to be directed towards two fellow detectives: Nikolai Isakov and Marat Urman - both OMON veterans of the Second Chechen War from the town of Tver. Intruding into one of their investigations, he finds evidence that the detectives themselves killed the man in question, and later also his wife while claiming she "swallowed her tongue" in prison. After further incidents on the Metro, Zurin assigns Arkady to conduct an 'unofficial' investigation, his cover being inquiry into supposed death threats directed at Platonov - a paranoid old communist chess grandmaster.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denkoroku"title="Denkoroku">
## Contents.Dharma transmissions covered 28 ancestors from India and 23 from China, followed by Dōgen and Ejō in Japan. Out of modesty and his sense of propriety, Keizan, the 54th ancestor, omitted himself and Tettsu Gikai, one of his teachers who was a student of Ejō and was still alive in 1300. Each chapter is a few pages, except in a couple cases where the author wants to explain a point.The format for each koan account is in four parts: (1) the main koan case that is the enlightenment encounter between master and disciple, (2) a brief biographical account on the life of the disciple including context for the encounter, (3) Keizan's "teisho" or commentary on the koan, and (4) a verse written by Keizan summarizing the point, following the Zen tradition of understanding presented by the master or disciple in poetry.The book is not true in a strictly historical sense: for example, Bodhidharma is probably a mythical figure, the Sixth Patriarch was probably not Huineng, and someone else probably wrote the "Platform Sutra". Instead "Denkōroku" may be read as true in the sense that great novels like "Moby-Dick" or "The Great Gatsby" are true. Keizan included fantastical or magical details from the lives of some ancestors, especially those in India, which audiences in times past may have appreciated but which today might be met with skepticism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_in_the_Blood"title="Winter in the Blood">
The novel features a self-destructive narrator undergoing an identity crisis. After getting into a bar fight with a white man, the narrator comes home drunk to discover that his girlfriend, Agnes, has disappeared with his electric razor and gun. The narrator travels to Malta, Montana to track her down, where he meets a white nameless "Airplane Man" from New York heading out West. He meets the Airplane Man again when he travels to Havre, Montana, where the man tries to convince the narrator to take him across the border to Calgary in an attempt to escape from the FBI. While the man buys a hunting knife and an old Ford Falcon, the narrator sees Agnes and her brother Dougie in the street. Later that night, the narrator finds Agnes in a bar and tries to talk to her, but Dougie and his friends beat him up. As the narrator leaves the bar, he sees the Airplane Man being arrested.The narrator hitchhikes home and discovers that his grandmother has passed away. The next day he, Teresa, and Lame Bull dig a grave for her. While digging, the narrative flashes back to a memory of the narrator and his brother (Mose) herding cattle, which results in Mose's death. Once the grave is finished, the narrator leaves to visit Yellow Calf, who talks about the narrator's grandmother. She was the youngest wife of Sitting Bear, from the Blackfeet tribe. The tribe survives starvation and a military assault during which Sitting Bear is killed. The Blackfeet turn on the grandmother, and Yellow Calf helps her survive. The narrator then realizes that Yellow Calf is his grandfather. The next day, with the help of Teresa and Lame Bull, the narrator buries his grandmother. He ponders the future and resolves to work things out with Agnes.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_(novel)"title="Stone (novel)">
Ae has been imprisoned for a crime rarely committed in the society he lives in: murder (mainly due to the difficulty of killing a body protected by nano-tech). He is placed in a high-tech prison (a stone with an artificial environment inside held in the plasma of a sun). He is "executed" by having his Dot-tech purged from his body, which, while not immediately lethal, will eventually cause him to die of natural causes.He is broken out and picked up by a sub-light ship, where he recuperates before traveling onward, employed by a mysterious agency. During the escape, he is implanted with an artificial intelligence who relays his instructions. The AI reveals that Ae is to kill an entire planet, but does not explain who has ordered the murder, nor their motive for doing so. All Ae is told is that the nature of his mission will be revealed upon its completion.Ae travels to a planet where he learns the secret of creating black holes. Meanwhile, he meets and travels with a woman named Klabier, and forms something of a romantic connection to her (something uncommon in the t'T), until she reveals herself to be a policewoman. However, Ae escapes before she can detain him.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat_Who_Went_Underground"title="The Cat Who Went Underground">
"This summary is taken from the back cover of the Recorded Books () version of the book:""Despite his horoscope's dire predictions of doom, Qwill plans to spend a peaceful, trouble-free summer in his 75-year-old cabin in Mooseville. But peaceful and trouble-free it is not to be. Qwill's cabin soon turns into something out of a "Three Stooges" skit, and the handyman he hires to do some necessary renovations disappears without a word. Curious about the high mortality rate among Mooseville's carpenter class, Qwill starts to suspect foul play. Koko only adds to his misgivings by enigmatically thumping his tail in Qwill's face every five minutes -- in perfect synchronization, one might say -- with Qwill's own twitching mustache. By summer's end the cabin is beyond repair -- and Qwill is under suspicion of murder."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensa"title="Extensa">
The novel fits in the science fiction genre, describing a post-singularity society, where some humans have evolved further while others chose to remain behind. Like other works by Dukaj, the novel deals with highly advanced technology (like EPR paradox, related to the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky bridge) and its implications for human society. The story depicts a world where there is a cultural conflict between those who support evolving into some posthuman form, and those who want to preserve "traditional" human form and culture. The main character, otherwise anonymous, who narrates his life, is born in the last enclave of traditional humans, the Green Country, and is constantly torn between his desire to experience the new world, and his fear of losing what makes him human.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gravedigger's_Daughter"title="The Gravedigger's Daughter">
Rebecca Tignor is mistaken for another woman named Hazel Jones one afternoon in the woods nearby Chatauqua Falls, New York in the fall of 1959. Over 20 years later, Rebecca finds out that the man who approached her is a serial killer.In a secondary plot, Rebecca's parents escape from the Nazis in 1936, foreseeing the oncoming Holocaust; Rebecca is born in the boat crossing over. When Rebecca is 13, her father, Jacob Schwart, who has lost his intellectual dreams and has become a gravedigger and cemetery caretaker in Milburn, abruptly kills her mother, Anna, and nearly kills Rebecca, before committing suicide. At the time of the footpath crossing, Rebecca is just weeks away from being beaten and almost killed by her own husband, the brutal Niles Tignor. She and her only son, Niles Jr., flee, and she becomes the woman for whom she has been recently mistaken, purposefully adopting the identity of Hazel Jones. Niles Jr. assumes the alias of Zacharias. As Hazel, Rebecca seeks many livelihoods, as alternately a waitress, clerk and finally, the mistress of the overwhelmingly wealthy heir of the Gallagher media fortune, a man in whom she never felt the need to confide her past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crow_(novel)"title="The Crow (novel)">
The book is set in the fictional world of Edil-Amarandh. According to the author, this book is the third part of her translation of the 8-part book "Naraudh Lar-Chanë" (the "Riddle of the Treesong").
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Loved_Cat_Dancing"title="The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing">
The novel is set in the American West in the 1880s, but is not written in a genre style. It is the story of Jay, a man of the West, and his offbeat relationship with Catherine, a woman from the East who is fleeing an unhappy marriage. Jay kidnaps Catherine on his way to rob a train and together they travel through the Wyoming Territory. Catherine eventually discovers that Jay is haunted by the murder of his wife, a Shoshone Indian named Cat Dancing, and his actions after the murder. Pursued by Catherine's husband and a railroad agent, Catherine and Jay fall in love.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Four_Years_(novel)"title="The First Four Years (novel)">
The novel gets its title from a promise Laura made to Almanzo when they became engaged. She did not want to be a farmer, but decided to try farming for three years. Laura keeps house and Almanzo tends the land and the livestock. They go on frequent pony rides together. At the end of the first year, just as the wheat is ready to harvest, a serious hailstorm destroys the entire crop, which would have made approximately three thousand dollars and paid off their debts on farm equipment and their house.Faced with mounting debt, Almanzo mortgages the homestead claim. He and Laura have to live on it as a condition of the mortgage, so they rent out their house on the tree claim and Almanzo builds a small home on the homestead claim. Their daughter, Rose, is born in December. At the end of the second year, they harvest a fair wheat crop, and share the proceeds of the wheat sale with the tree claim's renter, making enough money themselves to pay some smaller debts.In December of the third year, both Laura and Almanzo contract diphtheria, and Almanzo suffers a complication which leaves him permanently impaired physically. The renter decides to leave, and as Almanzo is unable to work both pieces of land, so they sell the homestead claim and move back to their first house.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_Faith"title="Acts of Faith">
By Using the 1983 race riots in Sri Lanka as a background, "Acts of Faith" explores social and political issues which characterize Sri Lanka and other Asian nations. The book provides a satirical critique of observed state-incited violence, manipulation of the media, caste and class rivalries.At the same time, underneath the racy humour there is a close attention to personal motivations, particularly in terms of the family structures that dominate such societies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Pigling_Bland"title="The Tale of Pigling Bland">
Aunt Pettitoes, an old Large White sow, can no longer cope with her eight troublemaking offspring and thus makes them leave home, with the exception of a well-behaved sow named Spot. Two of them, boars named Pigling Bland and Alexander, go to market. Pigling Bland is very sensible but the more frivolous Alexander loses his pig licence and, when he fails to produce them to a passing policeman, is made to return to the farm.Reluctantly going on alone, Pigling Bland later finds the missing papers, which ended up in his pocket as a result of an earlier scuffle with Alexander. He tries to find his brother but ends up getting lost in the woods and has to spend the night in a stranger's chicken coop. He is found in the morning by a gruff farmer, Peter Thomas Piperson, who allows him to stay in his house, but Pigling is not sure the farmer is trustworthy.His fears are quickly confirmed when he discovers that Piperson has a second pig in his house who was stolen from her owner and whom he intends to turn into bacon and ham. The second pig, a beautiful black Berkshire sow named Pig-wig, suggests they run away so that they won't be sold, or worse, eaten. Pigling Bland has in any case decided to avoid the market and become a potato farmer instead.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_Wong_Flunks_Big-Time"title="Stanford Wong Flunks Big-Time">
A slack-off, fun-loving, basketball prodigy, Stanford Wong is ready for summer. He's going to spend every day at the park with his best friends (Stretch, Gus, Tico, and Digger) and he's going to a basketball camp where he'll learn from the pros. But his English teacher, the horrible Mr. Glick, presents him with some bad news: he got an F on his last book report on "Holes" and failed English class. Now Stanford must trade basketball camp for summer school - and as if this weren't bad enough, his mom hired a tutor for him: his arch-enemy Millicent Min. A child genius, Millicent Min is a senior in high school at age eleven, not to mention a world-class jerk. She hates Stanford as much as he hates her.Stanford's situation deteriorates as his father continues to distance himself from home, his grandmother becomes senile and moves to a dead retirement home, Millicent tortures him in their study sessions, and his lie to his friends becomes harder and harder to cover up - because he's told them that he passed English with flying colors.Life improves slightly when the beautiful new girl, Emily Ebers, takes an immediate liking to Stanford (the feeling is mutual) but Emily is Millicent Min's one and only friend. Apparently, though, Millicent doesn't want Emily to know of her sky-high IQ, because Emily is under the impression that Millicent is not only homeschooled but tutored by Stanford. Stanford goes along with this lie because he believes that Emily will never like him if she knows he is stupid. In a strange way, Millicent and Stanford form a tentative friendship; they are bound by their affection for Emily, and in the process, the two become closer as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treasure_in_the_Royal_Tower_(novel)"title="The Treasure in the Royal Tower (novel)">
Nancy takes a vacation in Wisconsin when the library of the place she is vacationing at is vandalized. Nancy, along with her friends George Fayne and Bess Marvin, must survive an unknown assailant while discovering the secret passageways inside of an old castle.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Slight_Trick_of_the_Mind"title="A Slight Trick of the Mind">
In 1947, the 93-year-old Sherlock Holmes lives in retirement at a small farmhouse in the English countryside, attended by his housekeeper Mrs. Munro. He is unable to walk without a pair of canes, and he pursues various natural remedies to combat his failing memory. Holmes spends much of his time on beekeeping, having set up an apiary on the property, and he begins to teach Mrs. Munro's son Roger about the practice.The story shifts between three narratives:
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woven_Path"title="The Woven Path">
When Neil Chapman, son of the new caretaker of the Wyrd Museum (a strange building owned by the three mysterious Webster sisters) enters the secret room that holds the 'Separate Collection,' he is unwittingly whisked back in time to World War II London with a teddy bear possessed by the spirit of an American airman who wants to change the past and save the lives of those dear to him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_for_Treason"title="Cue for Treason">
Peter Brownrigg, a 14-year-old boy who lives in Cumberland in the north of England, is involved in a night crime against the theft of his village's farmland by Sir Philip Morton. He leaves his village to escape prosecution for throwing a rock at Sir Philip Morton. He first goes to Penrith, but unexpectedly encounters Sir Philip at a performance of "Richard III" by a touring playing company. He hides from him in a prop coffin (supposed to contain the body of King Henry VI) which is later carried onto the company's cart.The players discover Peter hiding and the kindly Desmonds, who run the playing company, take him on as a boy actor. Another boy, Kit Kirkstone, also joins the company.Kit proves excellent at playing female roles while Peter acts as an understudy. After Peter's jealousy leads to a fight, he discovers Kit's secret. Kit is actually a girl in disguise, really called Katharine Russell, who is running away to avoid a forced marriage to Sir Philip, who is only interested in her inheritance.The company breaks up and the Desmonds promise to take Peter and Kit to a London theatre company. During their trip to London Mr. Desmond breaks his leg in a river accident and Kit almost reveals her true identity to a crowd of observers after swimming down the river to rescue Mr. Desmond, but Peter distracts everyone and saves her. Because of the results of Mr. Desmond's accident Peter and Kit carry on their journey alone. When they arrive in London they audition for Richard Burbage of the Lord Chamberlain's Men at The Theatre in Shoreditch, a neighborhood beyond the northern boundary of the City of London and outside of the jurisdiction of its civil authorities – and consequently an area notorious for licentious behaviour and gaming houses. After being initially turned away by Burbage, they are accepted as apprentices by the playwright William Shakespeare, who recognises Kit's acting ability and Peter's gift of mimicry. They perform in various plays and see Sir Philip in the audience during "Romeo and Juliet".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singapore_Grip"title="The Singapore Grip">
"The Singapore Grip" is a satirical book about events following Japan's entry into the Second World War by invading South East Asia and swiftly occupying Singapore. The story centres on a British family who control one of the colony's leading trading companies. The title derives from a slang phrase for a sexual technique also known as pompoir or Kabzah.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Norris_Changes_Trains"title="Mr Norris Changes Trains">
The novel follows the movements of William Bradshaw, its narrator, who meets a nervous-looking man named Arthur Norris on a train going from the Netherlands to Germany. As they approach the frontier William strikes up a conversation with Mr Norris, who wears an ill-fitting wig and carries a suspect passport.William and Mr Norris succeed in crossing the frontier. Afterward, Mr Norris invites William to dinner and the two become friends. In Berlin they see each other frequently (including eating ham and eggs at the first class restaurant of Berlin Friedrichstraße railway station). Several oddities of Mr Norris's personal life are revealed, one of which is that he is a masochist. Another is that he is a communist, which is dangerous in Hitler-era Germany. Other aspects of Mr Norris's personal life remain mysterious. He seems to run a business with an assistant Schmidt, who tyrannises him. Norris gets into more and more straitened circumstances and has to leave Berlin.Norris subsequently returns with his fortunes restored and apparently conducting communication with an unknown Frenchwoman called Margot. Schmidt reappears and tries to blackmail Norris. Norris uses Bradshaw as a decoy to get an aristocratic friend of his, Baron Pregnitz, to take a holiday in Switzerland and meet "Margot" under the guise of a Dutchman. Bradshaw is urgently recalled by Ludwig Bayer (based on Willi Münzenberg) one of the leaders of the communist groups, who explains that Norris was spying for the French and both his group and the police know about it. Bradshaw observes they are being followed by the police and persuades Norris to leave Germany. After the Reichstag fire, the Nazis eliminate Bayer and most of Norris's comrades. Bradshaw returns to England where he receives intermittent notes and postcards from Norris, who has fled Berlin, pursued by Schmidt. The novel's last words are drawn from a postcard that Mr Norris sends to William from Rio de Janeiro: ""What" have I done to deserve all this?"
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chéri_(novel)"title="Chéri (novel)">
The novel opens with an exchange between Léa and Chéri. They are physically involved, and they argue while Chéri plays with Léa's pearls and thinks on her age. He mentions his marriage prospects, but she seems to take this in stride as they believe their relationship is casual. They have been involved for around six years, and she is forty-nine while he is twenty-five. Léa alternatingly obsesses over getting old and celebrates what she has done and who she has had in her life while demonstrating no remorse over her life as a courtesan. As they often do, the pair playfully fight before making up, and he runs off to meet his potential bride, Edmée. Edmée is revealed to be a reticent girl with a boisterous, rude mother (Marie-Laure).At this point, there are flashbacks through the course of their relationship. Léa considers Chéri's mother, Charlotte, a competitor but she also appears to be one of her closest friends. When Chéri was nineteen, Léa mentioned taking a trip to the country. She and Chéri argue a little, kiss and make up, and travel together to Normandy where they stay for several months as lovers. At times she thinks that he is so distant, he might as well speak another language. After attempting to have him trained in boxing, the text flashes forward to a more recent time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fighting_Ground"title="The Fighting Ground">
A thirteen-year-old New Jersey boy named Jonathan is impatient to join the Revolutionary War. His father used to help him train, but now after returning from a battle with a wound in his leg, the father is fearful and does not want Jonathan to leave. However, when the war bell rings on 3 April 1778, Jonathan leaves anyway. He borrows a tavern owner's gun and joins a morning-long march to battle the German Hessians, who are allied with the British. Jonathan ends up being taken prisoner. Three Hessians take him to an old house where they bury a murdered couple, and Jonathan finds a small boy, a son of the buried couple, in the barn. He develops some degree of Stockholm Syndrome, before escaping in the night back to the American army camp. The Corporal, who turns out to be the one who murdered the boy's parents, knows where the house is. As he leads the American military to the house, they force Jonathan to see if the Hessians are awake or asleep. Out of compassion, he slips away and tries to help the Hessians escape, but he fails, and the Hessians loses their lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bye-Bye_(novel)"title="Bye-Bye (novel)">
The bisexual, nameless narrator decides to abandon her life with her husband, changing her name and her appearance. The story follows her obsession with Andorgenie, a mysterious performance artist, and her relationships with different men and women, none of whom she really likes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candle_(novel)"title="Candle (novel)">
In the year 2087, Earth is nearly crime free and the artificial intelligence One True telepathically controls humans. The main character and first person narrator is forty-nine-year-old Currie Curtis Curran, a retired mercenary soldier and "cowboy hunter". He is recalled from retirement to capture "Lobo" Dave Singleton, the last of the "cowboys", people beyond the control of One True hiding in the Colorado wilderness.Currie's contact with One True is through a copy of the Resuna "meme", a "neurocode" program uploaded into the brain, and an implanted "cellular jack" radio device. In addition to communicating with One True, Resuna monitors its host's thoughts and emotions, provides everyday information and communication, downloads requested memories or skills, adjusts their physiology, and, when offered the spoken code phrase "let overwrite, let override", can assume control of its host's body, and erase memories. Resuna learns its host's preferences and habits, is friendly and communicative, and can even play chess with its host or engage in other pastimes.Ten years before, Currie was the leader of a team of cowboy hunters who captured Lobo's cowboy gang after a long pursuit in which several of the team were killed and several, including Currie, badly injured. During their final confrontation, Currie sees Lobo fall from a high cliff, apparently to his death. In his briefing by One True, Currie is shown the recorded memories of a mother and daughter beaten, raped, and robbed by Lobo days earlier. Although such emotions are normally kept in check by Resuna, Currie is allowed to feel revulsion and hatred of Lobo, to improve his performance as a hunter. One True explains to Currie that, to decrease his chance of being detected and evaded, he has been assigned to hunt Lobo alone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Day_of_Creation"title="The Last Day of Creation">
The book is structured into three parts.The first part describes several anomalous ancient artifacts that turn out to be remnants of modern era items: a part of a pilot's breathing apparatus worshipped for centuries as a Catholic saintly relic, a clearly recognizable trace of a Jeep discovered during archaeological works on Gibraltar, found in the same layer as an early hominid skeleton, and an equally old grenade launcher of a model just introduced in the US Army. William W. Francis, an ambitious officer of the US Navy, becomes convinced that time travel is possible and manages to launch a secret project to develop a technological device able to transfer people and materiel through time.The second part describes the project "Chronotron", the successful implementation of a time machine, which is at first able only to move things into the past. It is believed that time transfer into the future will be solved soon. The American administration decides to move oil pumping machinery 5 million years into the past, set it up on oil deposits in the Near East, and transport the oil through the then dried-up Mediterranean Basin to the shores of the North Sea, where reverse time machines will push it to the modern era. The massively expensive project is kept strictly secret. Objections of scientists that time transfer into the future may be just a dream, that the project could exhaust the country in a new arm race, and that the history of humankind may be irreversibly changed, are ignored.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coldest_Winter_Ever"title="The Coldest Winter Ever">
The story is set in Brooklyn, New York. The main character is Winter Santiaga, the teenaged daughter of a local drug kingpin. Winter is brash and self-important; she says, "it was important for me to know I deserved the best, no slum jewelry or knock-offs". The story is told from her perspective in slang that is highly influenced by the hip-hop culture. Due to the power of her father, Winter is infamous in her neighborhood, and she uses her power to get what she wants. This all changes when Winter's father is arrested for drug trafficking, and Winter finds herself in a girls’ home. Winter takes up the skills she learned from her father to maintain her lifestyle, such as selling illicit items in the girls’ home to make money.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Stone_(novel)"title="Sacred Stone (novel)">
Within the story are the separate plots that ultimately turn out to be connected to each other. One is the job of supplying security for the emir of Qatar, at a conference in Iceland. The second is to find a missing nuclear bomb. The "Oregon's" crew also has to pick up a radioactive iridium meteorite recently found in a mysterious ancient shrine, designed by Erik the Red and constructed by his crew. The Stone also holds primordial matter from another world, an oxygen eating microbe.There are also two different bands of fanatics. One is an Islamist group that wants to use the Stone to build a dirty bomb to wipe out London. The other, an anti-Islamist, plans to swap the Stone with the Black Stone (referred to as "Abraham's Stone") and smash it on the Dome of the Rock.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treasure_of_Alpheus_Winterborn"title="The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn">
Anthony Monday and his family live in Hoosac, Minnesota, in the 1950s and, while not poor, are having financial difficulties. To make matters worse, Anthony's father suffers a series of heart-attacks, keeping him from working and further straining the family's resources. Anthony is desperate to help with expenses and accepts a part-time job from Myra Eells, the elderly librarian of Hoosac Public Library. Working at the library allows Anthony to earn a little money, as well learn more about Alpheus Winterborn, the wealthy and eccentric man who built the library.Rumor has it that Winterborn found something on an archeological dig many years before and hid it for safekeeping in the library, but no one believes the tale to be true. During his chores around the building, Anthony ultimately finds a clue hinting that the treasure does exist and, if clues written by Winterborn himself are followed correctly, they will lead the one to the prize. Anthony knows that finding the treasure will result in money that can help with family finances. But soon Anthony runs afoul of the greedy bank vice-president, Hugo Philpotts, a descendant of the Winterborn family. The two commence dueling searches for the treasure.Eventually, during a fierce storm, Anthony finds the treasure: A golden statue worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. He sells the statue, giving half of the money to Ms. Eells and keeping half for himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Secret_of_Weatherend"title="The Dark Secret of Weatherend">
Anthony and Myra Eells are touring the countryside near their hometown in Minnesota when they pass the old Weatherend estate, a dilapidated mansion where the eccentric J.K. Borkman once lived. Borkman was obsessed with the weather and spent his years monitoring the skies. Despite posted signs enforcing No Trespassing, Anthony and Ms. Eells explore the grounds and find grotesque statues symbolizing wind, hail, snow, and lightning and a small diary hidden in the floorboards of the garage. The two would-be treasure hunters take the book home as a souvenir. Soon thereafter, Anthony and Ms. Eells are visited by Anders Borkman, the son of the man who built Weatherend, who has come to reclaim his father's book. Terrifying weather that can only be created by magic begins sweeping through Minnesota and Wisconsin, and Anthony and Ms. Eells realize all too quickly the connection between the weather and what's happening out at the justly named Weatherend estate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naughtiest_Girl_is_a_Monitor"title="The Naughtiest Girl is a Monitor">
Elizabeth Allen is chosen to be a monitor in Whyteleafe School with her best friend Joan Townsend. Near the end of the holidays, a girl called Arabella Buckley comes to stay at Elizabeth's house as she will attend Whyteleafe the next term. Both girls mutually dislike each other. When the holidays were officially over, Elizabeth could not wait to get rid of Arabella, thinking she will be in the form above her because she was older. However, to her dismay, Arabella was in the first form too which made things very unpleasant for her that term. Julian Holland, Martin Follett and Rosemary Wing were also the new children in her form and she made good friends with Julian, a bright and clever but do-as-I-wish boy. As the term progressed, Julian and Elizabeth had a fight, the first form had a midnight party, someone has started to play tricks on Elizabeth in class and there was a thief amongst the first formers!After being sent out of class twice and making an unintentional but still untruthful complaint of Julian in the Meeting, she had to step down from being a monitor and a new one was selected. However, she learnt her lesson and after meeting with William, Rita and Julian, the two first formers were good friends once again. Only the mystery of the nasty thief in the first form is left to uncover.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lamp_from_the_Warlock's_Tomb"title="The Lamp from the Warlock's Tomb">
Anthony Monday and Myra Eells live in Minnesota, where odd things begin to occur after the purchase of an antique oil lamp. Late one night at his high school, Anthony burns the lamp as part of his science project and, later, when leaving the school, sees a strange-looking cobweb-covered apparition. Anthony flees in terror but trips over the dead body of the school's watchman. Later, while walking home from the library, Anthony sees the withered corpse of the watchman in an antique shop. Ms. Eells confides in her brother Emerson, an expert in the occult, about the strange lamp and the even stranger sights and sounds seemingly ignited by the lamp. Emerson soon discovers the oil lamp is one of three items ("à la" bell, book, and candle) that are keeping a sinister spirit at bay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_for_Elephants"title="Water for Elephants">
The story is told through a series of memories by Jacob Jankowski, a man who can't remember if he's 90 or 93-years-old and lives in a nursing home. In the nursing home, Jacob's life lacks excitement. He gets visited every Sunday by one of his five children and has good rapport with a kind nurse named Rosemary, but for the most part, Jacob's a tired old man whose life is highly regimented and scheduled. This all changes, however, when the circus parks right outside of the nursing home window, igniting Jacob's memories of his time working with the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth.As his memories begin, Jacob is a 23-year-old Polish American preparing for his final exams as a Cornell University veterinary student when he receives the devastating news that both of his parents have died in a car accident. Jacob's father was a veterinarian and Jacob had planned to join his practice in Norwich. When Jacob learns that his parents' home has been mortgaged to pay for his tuition and that his father's practice will not become his own, he has an emotional breakdown and leaves his Ivy League school just short of graduation.In the dark of night, Jacob jumps on a train, later learning it is a circus train belonging to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. On the train Jacob is befriended by Camel, an old man and circus veteran, who persuades his companions not to throw Jacob off the train. Camel takes him under his wing and is able to find him odd menial jobs. When the owner of the circus, Alan J. Bunkel, "Uncle Al," learns of Jacob's training as a vet, he is hired to care for the circus animals. This leads Jacob to share quarters with a little person named Walter (who is known as Kinko to the circus) and his Jack Russell Terrier, Queenie. A few weeks later Jacob is summoned to examine Camel, who, after drinking "Jake" (adulterated Jamaican ginger extract) for many years, is unable to move his arms or legs. Fearing Camel will be "red-lighted" (thrown off a moving train as punishment or as severance from the circus to avoid paying wages), Jacob hides him in his room.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chart_Throb"title="Chart Throb">
The story revolves around the occurrences during the latest series of the hit 'reality' star search programme, Chart Throb. The show was the brainchild of Calvin Simms, who assumed a Simon Cowell style role as the mean, English judge. He is accompanied by the extravagant but bitchy former rockstar-turned-transsexual reality TV star, Beryl Blenheim, and the ageing pop manager Rodney Root. Calvin's wife wants to divorce him, but as part of a bet she agrees that if he can rig the results of the new series of Chart Throb, she will leave him without taking any of his cash. Beryl Blenheim is trying to manage the scripted reality show she helms, "The Blenheims", whilst coping with her drug-addled wife, Serenity, and the flagging pop career of one of her daughters, Priscilla. Meanwhile, Rodney is facing the challenge of judging his old flame, the beautiful Iona, whilst trying to revive some public interest in his life and work. All of these stories clash and reach a climax at the final of the TV series. At the end of the book, it is said that by the year 2050 everybody will be either a pop star or star of their own reality TV programme.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Built_for_Trouble"title="Built for Trouble">
When a beautiful starlet makes a monkey of him during a publicity stunt, L.A. lifeguard Eddie Baker loses more than face; his dreams of a leisurely lifetime on the beach evaporate. In pursuit of compensation fromthe starlet, Eddie takes a page from the blackmailer's book but very soon finds himself in deeper troublethan he ever could have imagined.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_Transfer_(novel)"title="Mind Transfer (novel)">
The story begins as mind transferring has just been banned on Earth by right-wing biofundamentalists. Referred to as “bioeffers,” these terrorists oppose the work of Jonathan Durant, who comes from a dynasty of scientists working to perfect transferring human minds to robot bodies. As bioeffers storm the Durant facilities, Jonathan's wife, Bess, gives birth to a son she names Adam with the help of the family’s domestic robot. As the new family flees, Jonathon is murdered by a police officer. Bess, her son, and the robot manage to find safe passage to the orbital space colony of Centauria in an adjacent solar system. On Centauria, the robot assistant reveals that Jonathan is alive within him as the first successful mind transfer. The family members raise Adam and work with other scientists on Centauria to improve both robot and mind transfer technology. As their work develops they create an even more intelligent robot named Jonwon. Adam matures, falls in love, and goes to medical school to study the psychiatry of mind transfers. Some scientists attempt to return to Earth to share the knowledge of mind transfer. Nevertheless, tensions continue between Earth and Centauria and culminate in a terrorist attack that damages Centauria’s communications. The scientists on Earth believe Centauria has been destroyed until the robots and scientists on Centauri develop a new faster-than-light ship to send news of their safety back to Earth. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shattered_Visage"title="Shattered Visage">
Former secret agent Alice Drake, now an adventurer, prepares to embark upon a round-the-world sailing expedition. Her daughter, Meagan, is left in the care of her estranged husband Thomas, a secret service officer. Thomas is conducting research on the Village, a retirement facility for British spies that, in 1967, became focused on interrogating Number Six to determine the extent of his secret information and intent. Their final, unsuccessful effort was a surreal, drug-enhanced psychodrama in which Number Two (Leo McKern) staged his own death and resurrection. Shortly afterwards, the Village was evacuated by UN troops, but Six was not among the inmates released and his whereabouts remain unknown.Two was jailed for violating the Official Secrets Act and, while in prison, wrote a tell-all book about the Village which Thomas personally altered to redact classified information. With Two's twenty-year sentence ending, Thomas fears that he will return to the Village and will do something that will expose British covert operations. Meanwhile, Alice runs into a storm and finds herself shipwrecked on the island where the Village is located. Seeking help, Alice explores the Village and enters Two's house, where she finds a giant domed room. In the oval-shaped center chair sits a bearded man who tells her where she is and that "she" is Number Six. This man is the former, original Six.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudades_Desiertas"title="Ciudades Desiertas">
"Ciudades Desiertas" is the story of Susana, a female Mexican writer fleeing her home to attend an international workshop in the United States, leaving her husband Eligio behind and completely unaware of her whereabouts. A hot-tempered intellectual with a somewhat cynical and misanthropic sense of humor, he works his way to catch up with his wife, arguing to have only done so to find out why exactly Susana left.The book's title seems to be derived from the couple's separate observations in regards to the apparent lack of movement around Arcadia, where the workshop takes place. They almost immediately suffer a cultural shock upon their arrival, although they are already well acquainted with the typical American lifestyle. The American residents, with a small town mentality, are depicted as largely more ignorant of the visitors' culture and society; whereas the latter, especially Latin Americans, show a contemptuous reluctance to try and fit in, perhaps Susana being the most remarkable exception. Throughout their journey, both try to pinpoint their relationship's setbacks, as well as their own flaws.The two attempt to show a sense of individuality and emotional disattachment from their spouse, each according to their respective point of view. While Eligio tries to make sense out of things, halfway acknowledging the extent of his feelings for his wife, still paradoxically giving in to outbursts of rage on occasions; Susana strains to convey an ideal of utter independence, as she feels the routine of her marriage holds her back. Motivated at first to prove her own self-worth, which she does find, she eventually experiences the certainty of her love for Eligio, in spite of all her efforts to stay away from him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_on_the_Rock"title="Shadows on the Rock">
Book I: The ApothecaryThe story opens in 1697 in Quebec. Euclide Auclair stands on Cap Diamant overlooking the river, watching as the last ship of the season returns to France. He comes down to dinner with his daughter, Cécile. After dinner, Cécile feeds Blinker, a partially disabled man who does some of the heavy chores.Euclide Auclair came to the Quebec colony eight years prior, in the service of Count de Frontenac, as physician and apothecary. His wife has died after an illness, and the duties of housekeeping have devolved upon his daughter Cécile.The following day, Cécile and Euclide attend to Reverend Mother Juschereau, who has sprained her ankle. Her father replenishes the hospital supplies while Mother Juschereau tells Cécile a story.Book II: Cécile and JacquesOn market day, in late October, Euclide goes to buy vegetables to store in his root cellar. A description is given of citizens growing lettuce and root vegetables in cold frames in their cellars during the long winter. He goes to the church to say a prayer and notices Jacques, the son of a dissolute woman, also saying his prayers.Cécile goes to Governor Frontenac to ask for a pair of shoes for Jacques. He praises her for her charity and industry, and asks if she would like anything for herself. She asks to look at his bowl of glass fruit, and he reminisces about his experiences in Turkey, where the glass was made.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.M.S._Unseen_(novel)"title="H.M.S. Unseen (novel)">
As hinted at the end of "Nimitz Class", Ben Adnam is alive and well. Having returned to Iraq, he is awarded a medal, but also suffers a betrayal. He flees Iraq and offers his services to Iran. He devises a plan to cripple Transatlantic air travel. The plan first requires capturing HMS "Unseen"—the last of the "quietest subs in the world"—the "Upholder" class. He combines this with a defunct missile system, and creates a weapon capable of knocking any aircraft out of the sky without detection. The plan works perfectly and several aircraft, including "Air Force Three" carrying the Vice President, are destroyed. However, Ben is abandoned by the Iranians and so left to fend for himself. He comes up with a scheme to meet the man who has hunted him for so long, Admiral Morgan, in order to offer his services to the US. During their confrontation, Adnam informs Morgan that Iraq was behind the terrorist attacks and suggests that the destruction of some dams in the country is sufficient retribution. The US destroy these dams and Baghdad ends up beneath four feet of water.In the Epilogue, Ben Adnam, having been given a permanent job and a US passport, decides to come clean and inform Morgan that it was actually under the flag of Iran that he had destroyed the airlines. A furious Morgan terminates Adnam's employment but gives him the option of taking his own life, rather than have a SWAT team do it for him. With nowhere left to run, Adnam positions himself in the traditional east-facing position of Muslim prayer before shooting himself in the head.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thousand_Splendid_Suns"title="A Thousand Splendid Suns">
On the outskirts of Herat, Mariam lives with her embittered mother, Nana, in a secluded hut. Born as a result of an extra-marital liaison between her mother and Jalil, a wealthy local businessman, the family live outside of the city in order to avoid confronting Jalil's three wives and nine legitimate children. Nana resents Jalil for his mistreatment of her and his deceptive attitude towards Mariam, whom he visits every Thursday. On her fifteenth birthday, Mariam asks her father to take her to see "Pinocchio" at a cinema he owns and to introduce her to her siblings. Jalil promises to do so but when he does not come to pick her up, Mariam travels to Herat herself, against the wishes of her mother. Mariam makes her way to her father's home, where she is not allowed in and is informed he is away on a business trip; after spending the night on the street, Mariam is able to storm the house's garden and sees that Jalil is home. Upon returning to her home, Mariam finds her mother has hanged herself. Mariam temporarily stays with Jalil, but is quickly married off to Rasheed, a widowed shoemaker from Kabul thirty years her senior, and moves with him to Kabul. Rasheed is initially kind to Mariam, but after she becomes pregnant and miscarries multiple times, their relationship sours and he becomes increasingly abusive to her over her inability to bear him a son.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dans_le_ciel"title="Dans le ciel">
Inspired by the art of the Impressionists – using Claude Monet and, mainly, Vincent van Gogh as models for its central characters –, "Dans le ciel" conveys the author's growing conviction that the only worthwhile art communicated its striving for the incommunicable and that the finished work could express no more than the frustration of its goals.A series of interlocking narratives, the novel begins by relating the creative failures of the self-styled novelist Georges, who produces nothing but an unfinished autobiography, then chronicles the poignant struggles of the painter Lucien, whose inability to complete his masterpiece culminates with his suicide when he severs his own hand. It is with the discovery of the terrible fate of the self-mutilating artist that Mirbeau's truncated narrative is itself left in suspension.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ways_of_Dying"title="Ways of Dying">
The novel takes place in an unnamed South African city, five years after the first elections to occur after Apartheid. Toloki, an itinerant professional mourner, contemplates the various forms of violence plaguing the shantytowns in which he works. He runs into Noria, whom he had known as a child from his home village, while mourning at her son Vutha's funeral, the second funeral she has had for a child. The two move in together and start a relationship, each claiming the other knows and can teach how to live.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(novel_series)"title="Daemon (novel series)">
Upon publication of the obituary for Matthew A. Sobol, a brilliant computer programmer and CTO of Cyberstorm Entertainment, a daemon is activated. Sobol, dying of brain cancer, was fearful for humanity and began to envision a new world order. The Daemon becomes his tool to achieve that vision. The Daemon's first mission is to kill two programmers Joseph Pavlos &amp; Chopra Singh who worked for CyberStorm Entertainment and unknowingly helped in the creation of the Daemon.The program secretly takes over hundreds of companies and provides financial and computing resources for recruiting real world agents and creating AutoM8s (computer controlled driverless cars, used as transport and occasionally as weapons), Razorbacks (sword-wielding robotic riderless motorcycles, specifically designed as weapons) and other devices. The Daemon also creates a secondary online web service, hidden from the general public, dubbed the Darknet, which allows Daemon operatives to exchange information freely. Daemon implements a kind of government by algorithm inside the community of its recruited operatives.What follows is a series of interlocking stories following the main characters:Detective Pete Sebeck is called in to investigate the death of Pavlos. However, when a connection is made between the two programmers and Cyberstorm, the FBI takes over led by Agent Decker. For being the first authority figure in the investigation, the Daemon selects Sebeck against his will to serve the Daemon, which frames Sebeck for its creation as a multi-million scheme and a hoax. The US government, though knowing the truth, fasttracks Sebeck's trial and executes him eight months later. Sebeck makes peace with his wife, who loves him despite the fact that Sebeck is having an affair, but his son Chris remains estranged, and he proclaims his innocence while dying from lethal injection. However, Sebeck later awakens to learn that the Daemon faked his death and assigned him the task to prove that humanity deserves its freedom from the Daemon. Joined by a fellow operative named Laney Price, Sebeck vanishes into America.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spook's_Battle"title="The Spook's Battle">
Tom's mother has returned to her own land, Greece. In a special room in the family farmhouse, she has left behind three trunks only to be opened by her youngest son Tom. The Spook sends Tom and Alice to retrieve the trunks, but they arrive to find the farm ransacked, the trunks gone and Tom's brother Jack, his pregnant wife Ellie, and their young daughter Mary all missing, kidnapped and taken to Pendle, a witch controlled area.While Alice goes ahead to Pendle to see if she can learn anything about the missing family, Tom leaves word for his next-oldest brother, James, then goes back to Chipenden where the Spook has just been visited by a Pendle priest, Father Stocks, who tells the Spook that the witches are allying to summon the Fiend (Devil) himself. Stocks is a fully trained spook and former apprentice of Gregory, although later joined the usually anti-spook church. He nevertheless is an ally of Tom.After arriving in Pendle, Tom sees a young blonde girl named Mab, who tells him that Alice has been put under a spell of binding by the Mouldheel witch clan, and she needs his help. Mab leads Tom to a clearing where her two twin sisters, Beth and Jennet, before realizing they are all witches (Mab is a powerful young Mouldheel scryer). Tom escapes thanks to Alice's brand on his arm, which protects him from other witches, and follows the girls as they flee.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_Totally_Emily_Ebers"title="So Totally Emily Ebers">
Moving is not a pleasant experience- especially moving to the other side of the country with a moody mother who insists on stopping at every museum along the way. The road from Allendale, New Jersey, to Rancho Rosetta, California, is not a smooth one for fun-loving Emily Ebers. The only reason she had to move was because her parents divorced, and it was all because of Alice, her boring journalist mother. It was she who wanted to divorce, to tear the family apart, and to sell the house that Emily loved. Alice definitely cares about Emily. Emily only chose to live with Alice because if she lived with her father, she would get in his way- and the way of his band, Talky Boys, which is touring the East Coast.Just when her summer looked like it couldn't get any worse, Emily is signed up for volleyball by Alice. During these torture sessions, Emily must learn to hit the ball over the net, live with the awful Coach Gowin, and endure and reflect insults from popular girl, Julie and her "back-up singers."However, in a twist of fate, she meets Millicent Min, a home-schooled Chinese girl who was forced to play volleyball because there wasn't a gym at home. Surprisingly, Millie and Emily become best friends instantly, and Millie even goes to Emily's for a sleepover. But here's where the problem arises- is it possible for Alice to dematerialize so that her ugly hippie clothing and boring talk about journalism doesn't embarrass Emily? Luckily, Millie fakes interest in Alice and is safely whisked off to Emily's room before Alice can drone on about her newest articles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_for_Summer"title="A Song for Summer">
Set in early 1940s Austria, the novel centers around a young English woman named Ellen Carr. Raised in a family of prominent suffragettes, Ellen, to the surprise of all friends and family, grows up with a great love of all things domestic. Inspired by Henny, the servant/partner of her grandfather, she enjoys cooking, cleaning and the various other chores that her mother and aunts have abandoned in their academic and feminist pursuits. While Ellen attends University to please her family, she leaves school before her final exams when Henny contracts cancer in order to be at her side.After Henny's death, Ellen travels to Henny's homeland of Austria to become housemother at Hallendorf School, a progressive school for children stocked with characters of all sorts. Ellen soon finds that everything is not as it should be— the school is based on the Arts and is an institution for wealthy children; however, the parents of many of these children have used the school simply as a place out of sight and mind, in which to dump children that they see as nuisances. Ellen takes on the role of mother to these children, giving them the love and encouragement that they deserve. In the beautiful Austrian countryside Ellen discovers an eccentric world occupied by wild children and even wilder teachers, experimental dancers and a tortoise on wheels. And then there is the particularly intriguing, enigmatic, and very handsome Marek: part-time gardener, fencing teacher, and the most romantic, compelling, swoon-worthy hero figure since Mr Darcy. Ellen is instantly attracted to the mysterious gardener, but Hitler’s Reich is already threatening their peaceful world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niagara_Falls,_or_Does_It?"title="Niagara Falls, or Does It?">
Hank starts a new year at his school and meets his new teacher, who has her students write an essay about their summer vacations. Hank has a hard time with homework and with staying on task, thus making his essay a difficult assignment. Meanwhile, his grandpa, Papa Pete, asks Hank and his friends Ashley Wong and Frankie Townsend (the Magik 3, the name Hank gave to himself and his friends) to put on a magic show at his bowling league game. However, his teacher made a statement to Hank saying she can't wait to see his creative report, so he has to do his report "and" perform for Papa Pete. Hank decides to make a model of Niagara Falls - the place where he spent his vacation - rather than write about it, but when he presents the project in class, he accidentally floods the classroom. Hank is given two weeks of punishment at school and at home. His punishment includes not being able to participate in the magic show for Papa Pete's bowling league. Finally, after a lot of convincing, his parents allow him to do the magic show. It was a relief to all the people at the bowling alley because class bully and overall idiot Nick McKelty was performing in the Magik 3's place. The magic show happens, and McKelty gets laughed at for his lame performance and thrown off stage, where the Magik 3 performs a great magic trick and the audience applauds. In the end, things go well for Hank, as he also meets the new music teacher, Mr. Rock, during detention, and they instantly like each other. Mr. Rock helps Hank with his essay and talks with his parents about his learning disabilities, which no one knew Hank had.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Moon"title="Dragon Moon">
When the story starts out Liu Che, (Ping's former friend and the emperor of China), has his troops attack the Duke of Yan's palace where Ping has been living for a year, because he believes that they kidnapped his former imperial dragon Kai. Meanwhile, Ping decides to wake Kai up from his winter hibernation for his safety, and finds that he has not only grown greatly in size, but knowledge as well. Ping leaves the palace with Kai to search for the Dragon Haven to further insure his safety. On the way, they find the emperor, Liu Che, wounded with a shard of Kai's dragon stone in his hand. He repents his crimes and decides to abandon his quest for immortality. At the morning, Ping refuses his offer of love and continues on her journey. As they near the Great Wall of China, they are held hostage by imperial soldiers, who ignore her claim of being the Dragonkeeper. Kai and her are then rescued by barbarians, who also give them a horse. On the way, she meets Jun, and together they find an old man, "Lao Long Zi", one of Danzi's former dragon keepers, at Tinkling Village. He brings them most of the way to Long Gao Yuan before dying. After getting there, however, Ping discovers only a heap of dragon bones from a massacre by dragon hunters. Ping and Kai are discouraged, and Kai refuses to leave. One day, a yellow dragon swoops down from the sky and carries Kai away. Ping stumbles towards the mountain in a half-dead state, until she too is picked up by the dragon (not too gently), who also spits in her face, in order to hide the location of the Dragon Haven from her, and brought to the real, current dragon haven. There, she learns that many years ago, Hei Lei's dragon keeper had abandoned him for a woman, and that his girlfriend, in her old age, had then betrayed the location of the dragon haven to a band of dragon hunters for three pieces of gold. They had killed many of the dragons in hibernation. Only Hei Lei, the black dragon, was awake, and attacked the hunters just in time. Still, they managed to get away with many dead dragons in their greedy hands, with only a handful escaping. Ping is distraught as she watches Kai pick up many of the wild dragons' habits and feels him slowly drawing away from her. During a moon gathering, Kai and Hei Lei end up in a fight, and Kai, who wins, is revealed to be a "dragon of five colors" (green, yellow, black, white, and red). A "dragon of five colors" will automatically assume the position of leader (and no one can challenge him, as the dragons formerly had none). Ping eventually wins the trust and friendship of all the dragons, but realizes that she does not belong with the other dragons, and decided to leave, despite Kai's wish for her to stay till spring. She is taken away from the Haven, and dropped in an empty grassland, where she is rescued by Hei Lei, who she manages to convince to go back to the Dragon Haven. The book ends with Ping beginning a new life with Jun, as she saw in one of her visions of her future.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Armies_of_Memory"title="The Armies of Memory">
Several attempts are made on Giraut's life as he works on his new Ix cycle of music. He is sent back to Wilson, his home planet and culture of Occitan, to complete the new music along with his Office of Special Projects team as protection. Paxa retires from the OSP and leaves Giraut after finding out she cannot be successfully backed up on a psypyx, which would make her death permanent. Giraut begins to fall in love with a fellow musician Azalais who introduces him to Ebles, a contact for rogue colonies outside of Council space which call themselves the Union. Soon after, Azalais is killed and Giraut is severely injured in another assassination attempt.After Giraut is healed he is contacted again by Union. Margaret sends him, along with Raimbaut and Laprada, to the rogue Union colony of Noucatharia to get to the bottom of several coincidences, including the whereabouts of a possible psypyx of Shan, and to find out who keeps trying to kill him. Once there Giraut begins to fall in love with Rielis, a talented musician and singer, as he tries to uncover what Union wants from him and the Council. It is revealed to Giraut and his team that everyone on Noucatharia is either an aintellect in human form or a chimera human/aintellect, both of which are forbidden horrors in Council space. They are also told there are multiple aintellect conspiracies unknown to the OSP, and that Noucatharia was the site of the first invasion by an unknown Alien army, in which humans were beheaded and aintellects/robots fought as best they could. After another amateurish assassination attempt he is kidnapped, separated from his team, and implanted with Shan's psypyx.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dame's_the_Game"title="The Dame's the Game">
Joe Tanner doesn't realize it, but the floating craps game he unwinds with after a hard day's work is rigged against him. His blonde bombshell wife, Shelly, sees through the con but can't get Joe to take her seriously. In Las Vegas, she enlists the aid of casino detective Barney Conroy. Soon the pair find themselves between the police, who suspect them of the murder of Joe Tanner, and the real murderers, a mysterious gang that is determined to get rid of Shelly and Barney, too.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennterra"title="Pennterra">
Quaker colonists founded a colony on a planet they dubbed Pennterra. They soon discovered the planet was already inhabited, by a species they dub the "hrossa". They put forward a number of conditions to the colonists, saying that they must not leave the valley they landed in, must not use machinery, and should keep their population about the same as the time they landed, approximately 600. The Quakers agree with these restrictions, and set up a camp called Swarthmore, in the valley they call the Delaware.The hrossa, being capable of transferring their emotions onto others, often tapped into the Quakers as they held meeting for worship. This leaves a number of them much more tolerant of the hrossa conditions. Several, including George Quinlan and his son Danny, become more closely acquainted with the hrossa. At times they visit a nearby village called Lake-Between-Falls and develop a friendship with one of its elders, KliUrrh.However, as the story begins a second colony ship arrives from Earth. These colonists, called the Sixers, are more skeptical of the hrossa request, and enter talks with the Quakers. For the most part, the Sixers are adamant about colonizing the planet with machinery, putting their own survival above the hrossa. However, two members of the crew, Maggie and Byron, along with Quakers Katy and George visit Lake-Between-Falls hoping for permission for a coastal town of their own. However, KliUrrh denies the request, saying that they must follow the same conditions given to the Quaker colonists. He explains that their god TuwukhKawan will never allow this, and they would be destroyed if they violate the request.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Beyond_the_Stars"title="The Dark Beyond the Stars">
The story is told through the narrative of Sparrow, a 17-year-old technician aboard the "Astron", which is a multigenerational starship sent from Earth on a search for life on other planets throughout the Milky Way. Sparrow fell off a cliff during one planetside excursion and is stricken with amnesia. No one will discuss his past with him and the computer has restricted his data, reasoning that he should "look within" to fully recover. Sparrow struggles to revive his memory and familiarizes himself with the "Astron", the crew, the enigmatic Captain Kusaka, the state of the ship and its mission; in which the search for extraterrestrial life has lasted over 2,000 years with no success.The ship has slowly shrunk from the crew cannibalizing sealed-off sections for parts and breaking apart from centuries of wear; meanwhile, the crew has dwindled from generations of selective breeding. The Captain wants to take the "Astron" to a section of the galaxy where stars are more numerous and older where planets are more likely to harbor life, but to do so they would have to cross the empty space between spiral arms they call "the Dark". Most members of the crew know that they will not survive the journey since it would take several centuries to cross and the ship would not make it with its current rate of attrition of their closed ecological system. But Captain Kusaka, who is immortal and obsessed with exploration, does not heed to the warnings and will do whatever it takes to complete the mission. As a result, the crew secretly try to plan a mutiny to seize control of the ship and return to Earth, the only place they know that harbors life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Years_a_Slave"title="Twelve Years a Slave">
In his home town of Saratoga Springs, New York, Solomon Northup, a free negro and a skilled carpenter and violinist, was approached by two circus promoters, Brown and Hamilton. They offered him a brief, high-paying job as a musician with their traveling circus. Without informing his wife, who was away at work in a nearby town, he traveled with the strangers to downstate New York and Washington, D.C. Soon after arriving in the capital, he awoke to find himself drugged, bound, and in the cell of a slave pen. When Northup asserted his rights as a free man, he was beaten and warned never again to mention his free life in New York.Transported by ship to New Orleans, Northup and other enslaved black people contracted smallpox and one died. In transit, Northup implored a sympathetic sailor to send a letter to his family. The letter arrived safely, but, lacking knowledge of his final destination, Northup's family was unable to effect his rescue.Northup's first owner was William Prince Ford, who ran a lumber mill on a bayou of the Red River. Northup subsequently had several other owners, less humane than Ford, during his twelve-year bondage. At times, his carpentry and other skills contributed to his being treated relatively well, but he also suffered extreme cruelty. On two occasions, he was attacked by John Tibeats, a white man he was leased to, and defended himself, for which he suffered severe reprisals. After about two years of enslavement, Northup was sold to Edwin Epps, a notoriously cruel cotton planter. Epps held Northup enslaved for 10 years, during which time he assigned the New Yorker to various roles from cotton picker, to hauler to driver, which required Northup to oversee the work of fellow slaves and punish them for undesirable behavior. While on Epps' plantation, Northup became friends with a slave girl named Patsey, whom he writes about briefly in the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaak_Aur_Khoon_(novel)"title="Khaak Aur Khoon (novel)">
The novel revolves around the life of the protagonist Saleem, who is the son of a Tahsildar and belongs to a very influential yet virtuous joint-family. The First part of the novel is all about the childhood of the protagonist. It's all smiles and laughters, and there are a lot of fascinating yet hilarious events which make the reader addicted to the story-line. Saleem, being the benchmark of excellence in both academics and sports is brought with a great set of values. After receiving primary education in his village. In order to continue his further studies, he goes to a college where he meets with young enthusiastic individuals of All India Muslim League who have been working for the cause of an Independent State. This cause becomes his aspiration and he goes to the last extent for it.Then, after the establishment of Pakistan, it's all about the atrocities faced by the Muslim migrants. During the days of migration, a ferocious armed combat between the Muslims of Saleem's village, and Sikh militants, Saleem's whole family is martyred despite fighting selflessly. Saleem survives and selflessly goes on with the cause and to help the migrants with this painful journey.Saleem marries Asmat, the girl Saleem has always been in love with and the sister of his high-school friend Amjad. The novel ends on a very emotional note with Majeed leading a battalion to the Kashmir front and Saleem being extremely grateful and content with his contribution in the establishment of Pakistan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Got_a_&quot;D&quot;_in_Salami"title="I Got a &quot;D&quot; in Salami">
Hank gets his first report card from 4th grade. He goes to his mom's deli to show her. While this is going on, his mom is making a special salami to give to a leader of a supermarket chain. Hank decides to get rid of his report card before his parents see it. He gives it to Robert to destroy. Robert puts it in a batch of salami. Once his mom is done making many batches of the salami, she picks the one with the report card in it. Hank and his friends try to put a stop to the delivery but they don't stop the deliveryman in time. While this is going on Hank figures out he has learning problems. In the end, Hank begins eating his sandwich while visiting the Press for the large supermarket chain and gets a business deal for his mom's deli.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_You_Leap"title="Before You Leap">
The book is written as a follow-up to a 2005 book titled "It's Not Easy Being Green" and contains references to Kermit's song "Bein' Green". The memoir begins with Kermit's beginnings as one of over 2,000 tadpole children; the first chapter retcons the film "Kermit's Swamp Years" in many ways by reimagining the character's childhood. The first part of the book tells a fictionalized account of how the Muppets began. Kermit meets Jim Henson in Washington, D.C. and stars in the first television program to feature the character, "Sam and Friends". He moves to New York and mentions Rowlf the Dog's appearances on "The Jimmy Dean Show", which contributed to the Muppets' early success. Kermit gets a job on "Sesame Street", which leads to "The Muppet Show" and multiple feature films. Each new job for Kermit is described as a personal accomplishment, and these descriptions include accounts of Kermit's early interactions with characters such as Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, and Gonzo. The second part of the book involves Kermit's own take on popular self-help lessons. This final section includes many examples of life lessons from other Muppet characters, in addition to interruptions from the others who want to speak for themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_Peril_(The_Dresden_Files)"title="Grave Peril (The Dresden Files)">
Dresden and Michael Carpenter, a Knight of the Cross, try to track down a bewildered but dangerous ghost in Cook County Hospital, are nearly ensnared by Dresden's faerie godmother the Leanansidhe, then arrested by the Chicago police. Harry is bailed out by his girlfriend Susan Rodriguez, then receives an official invitation to represent the White Council at a Red Court vampire party. He refuses to allow Susan to accompany him.While trying to rescue a young seer, Lydia, Harry is attacked by two Red Court vampires (Kyle and Kelly Hamilton). Kelly also sexually assaults him. He manages to injure Kelly by pulling down the roof of a warehouse, and is sent into a narcotic slumber. He has a flashback dream in which he recalls events three or four months prior, when Special Investigations, Michael, and he went to capture Leonid Kravos, a sorcerer, cult leader and serial killer. The dream ends up diverging from reality; in the dream, a demon summoned by Kravos kills Michael and eats Dresden alive. When Dresden awakens, he discovers that the Nightmare's dream attack was both real and powerful, draining Harry of much of his magic. Harry realizes that the Nightmare will attack his friends and allies. He tries to warn police lieutenant Karrin Murphy and discovers that she believes he's already in her office. In Harry's guise, the Nightmare puts Murphy in a nightmare-filled coma. Dresden tries to help by putting Murphy into a dreamless sleep that he says will last until dawn. He then goes to Michael's house to warn him, but Michael's nine-months-pregnant wife Charity has gone to a 24-hour convenience store and, while there, met the Nightmare disguised as Harry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_of_Krynn"title="The Magic of Krynn">
The book is a compilation of 10 short stories from various authors taking place in the fictional world of Krynn:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kender,_Gully_Dwarves,_and_Gnomes"title="Kender, Gully Dwarves, and Gnomes">
The book is a compilation of 10 short stories from various authors taking place in the fictional world of Krynn:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grotesque_(novel)"title="The Grotesque (novel)">
Wheelchair-using Sir Hugo Coal narrates this tale of vice and murder at stately Crook Manor. Unable to communicate with those around him, the quirky Sir Hugo watches and listens, recounting recent events that began with his daughter's engagement, followed by the disappearance of her fiancé and the subsequent investigation. Of particular note is new butler Fledge, whom Sir Hugo believes is not only the cause of the troubles at the estate, but seeking to replace him as lord of the manor and in Lady Harriet's bed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxy_an_Star"title="Boxy an Star">
"Boxy an Star" tells the story of the relationship between two young lovers, 'Bole' (Thomas Boler) and 'Star' (Stacey Brain), Bole being the narrator of the story. The 'Boxy' in the title is the couple's friend and drug dealer.After a party at Boxy's flat, at which Bole and Star consume a large number of Boxy's spangles and Es and confuse a duvet with a bag of drugs, they go to visit Star's friend Prim and have afternoon tea. Invited to stay the night, the pair later awake and, forgetting where they are, become frightened and decide to escape, encountering Prim's boyfriend Gary on the way who they think is a 'Mephisto Conjurer' due to his 'smoking stick'.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Woman_in_Amber"title="A Woman in Amber">
A Woman in Amber begins with Agate Nesaule as an adult. She is a successful professor of Women’s Studies and 20th century English Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Despite her outward professional success, Agate lives with an inner turmoil caused by her memories of war and perpetuated by her husband, Joe. Nesaule goes into therapy, depressed and unable to come to terms with the root cause of her depression. On the advice of her therapist Ingeborg, Agate learns she cannot begin to heal until she is able to tell her story: what happened to her and her family during World War II in Latvia and Germany at the hands of the invading Russian soldiers.She eventually admits to her therapist that she was in Germany after the war and that she was starving. From this revelation, she goes on to tell how she was prompted by her mother to beg from the Russian soldiers, in Russian, not Latvian, for food. Later in life, she mistakenly tells this same story to her husband, Joe. He mocks her and suggests that when she was forced to beg for food, she enjoyed it. Agate remembers that the Russians looked at her as if she were a goose singing. The shame of going hungry led her to believe she was not worth feeding.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/She_and_Allan"title="She and Allan">
Wanting to learn if he can communicate with deceased loved ones, adventurer and trader Allan Quatermain seeks a meeting with the feared Zulu witch-doctor Zikali, who tells Allan to seek out a great white sorceress who rules a hidden kingdom far to the north, and he charges Allan to take a message to her. He also gives Allan a necklace with a strange amulet, carved in Zikali's own likeness. Zikali claims it has great magical powers that will protect Allan on his journey, but he must on no account take it off.Allan is initially scornful of Zikali's claims, and sets off for the coast, but a series of odd events force him to go north in spite of his own wishes. On the journey he encounters Umslopogaas, a fearsome Zulu warrior chieftain. Umslopogaas tells Allan that he has discovered that he is about to be deposed and murdered, so he decides to leave his village and accompany Allan on his quest. Allan is again sceptical, but a few days later Umslopogaas and his band of warriors meet up with Allan's party, and Umslopogaas cements their friendship when he saves Allan from being killed by a lion.Journeying into unknown country, they come to a remote settlement called "Strathmuir" run by a Scot, Robertson, a drunkard and former sea captain, who lives there with his beautiful daughter Inez. Her Portuguese mother had died years earlier and her father has now taken native wives and sired several children with them. A few days later, Robertson takes Allan on an expedition to hunt hippopotamus, but as they return they are intercepted by Allan's servant, Hans, who had stayed behind. He reports that, in their absence, Strathmuir has been attacked by a band of cannibal warriors from the north, who have killed and eaten many of the villagers (including Robertson's wives and children) and kidnapped Inez.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_A-List_(novel)"title="The A-List (novel)">
Seventeen-year-old Anna Percy trades her privileged life on New York City's Upper East Side to move to Los Angeles to live with her father for the second half of her senior year. While on the plane to Los Angeles, Anna develops an instant connection with the handsome Ben Birnbaum, who rescues her from an obnoxious seatmate. Ben invites Anna to be his date at the wedding of A-list action movie star Jackson Sharpe and she accepts.Once Anna arrives in Los Angeles, she is annoyed that her father Jonathan sent his charismatic but mysterious chauffer Django instead of greeting her himself. Jonathan swears that he has changed and offers to arrange an internship for Anna at the talent agency managed by his new girlfriend, Margaret Cunningham, but Anna is skeptical of his promises.At the wedding, Anna meets Ben's friends from high school: Samantha "Sam Sharpe, the witty daughter of Jackson Sharpe who is insecure about her looks; Camilla "Cammie" Sheppard, Ben's devious and sexy ex-girlfriend who wants him back; and Delia "Dee" Young, a spacey but sweet girl who believes in New Age spiritual practices. All three are in love with him and are angry to see Anna as Ben's date. Ben and Anna try to pretend they've been dating at Princeton but her obnoxious seatmate from the plane, who is also in attendance, recognizes them and exposes their secret. The three girls spend the rest of the night cutting down Anna, culminating in Cammie ripping Anna's dress. Sam gets soundly rejected by Ben, and goes to cry in the bathroom where Anna is freshening up. Sam apologizes for mistreating her and invites Anna to attend a Warner Brothers New Year's Eve bash after the wedding as an apology.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Inch_a_King"title="Every Inch a King">
The book centers around Otto of Schlepsig, a circus performer and tightrope walker, who is surprised to learn that he's an almost dead-ringer for Prince Halim Eddin, recently invited to become king the newly independent country of Shqiperi. Fed up with his life in the circus, Otto, and his friend, the sword swallower Max of Witte, get some uniforms and set out to take the Prince's place as King of Shqiperi.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_on_the_Bamboo_Radio"title="Music on the Bamboo Radio">
The story begins with the Japanese army's defeat of the China forces occupying Hong Kong on 25 December 1941. Nicholas is an eleven-year-old boy whose parents have both suddenly disappeared in the chaos of war breaking out. As the Japanese come to do a home to home search, three loyal family servants, Tang, his wife Ah Mee, and the gardener Ah Kwan take Nicholas and they escape to Kowloon as Hong Kong Island is no longer safe. Upon reaching the shore of Kowloon, Tang and Ah Mee disguise Nicholas as a Chinese boy and the trip continues to Tang's home village, the village of Sek Wan.Nicholas passes the years of the war here with Tang and his family. He is given the Chinese name Wing Ming. During this time, many events happen. Nicholas makes a dangerous journey back to Kowloon to get quinine cure to the malaria Tang has contracted. He also helps the Communist partisan army – The East River Column Fighters – to translate instructions for using heavy explosives. Nicholas joins the partisan army on a mission to Kowloon where they blow up a railway bridge and weaken the position of the Japanese army. Yet his most dangerous job would have been to deliver a medicine into the prison of war camps (POW camps). Taking news or items to prison camps is nicknamed "playing music on the bamboo radio". Nicholas does more than expected by entering the camp itself because the person who he was supposed to pass the medicine to had the fever. Exhausted and worried, Nicholas narrowly escapes the clutches of the Japanese with the help of the prisoners and finally reaches the safety of Sek Wan village.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gray_Prince"title="The Gray Prince">
Schaine Madduc returns to Koryphon from school off-world, met by her brother Kelse. They and Gerd Jemasze are to meet their father, Uther, who has said he just learned something that is a splendid joke. An acquaintance, Elvo Glissam agrees to visit Uaia with them. However, Uther is ambushed and killed by Retent Uldras. Schaine, Kelse, Gerd, and Glissam survive a similar ambush and reach the Madducs' domain Morningswake.Uther Madduc was exploring the Palga plateau before he was killed. Gerd, Glissam, and the Madducs' Uldra foreman Kurgech go into the Palga to discover what he found. After various encounters with the Wind-runners, they find the secret: an ancient temple built by Erjins, who are in fact fully sentient.They return to Morningswake to learn that the Mull, the seat of government on the island continent of Szintarre, has ordered the land barons to give up their domains. The land barons defy this decree, and form their own Order of Uaia. The Uldra leader Jorjol, a childhood friend of the Madducs and the so-called Gray Prince, incites several hundred Retent Uldras to invade Morningswake. This attack is defeated by the Order's militia.A committee of the Mull arrives at Morningswake. Gerd escorts them to the Erjin temple, where he explains the first part of Uther Madduc's joke. The Mull has demanded that the land barons yield to the claim of the Uldras, who were there first. But the temple shows that the Erjins are sentient, which makes the Szintarrese slaveowners.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_(novel)"title="Election (novel)">
In 1992, amidst the U.S. Presidential Elections that year, students at Winwood High in suburban New Jersey are preparing to vote for their school president. Tracy Flick is unpopular with her peers, but is extremely ambitious and intelligent. A year prior to the election, she is groomed by Mr. Dexter, her yearbook supervisor, and they have a brief sexual relationship. After Tracy tells her mother, her mother informs the school and consequently his career and marriage both end. One of Tracy's current teachers, James "Jim" McAllister (known as "Mr. M." to his students) learns that Tracy is taking part in the election. Feeling that Tracy needs to be taken down a notch, Mr. M prompts Paul Warren (a student of whom he approves) to run against her. In turn, Paul's outcast lesbian sister, Tammy, begins a reckless campaign to be school president in retaliation against her ex-girlfriend Lisa who is now dating Paul. Mr. M ultimately loses his job as a teacher when it is found that he has sabotaged the election by pocketing Tracy's winning votes, falsely making Paul the winner of the presidency. Mr. M ends up working at a car dealership, while Tracy goes on to attend Georgetown University.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hrolf_Kraki's_Saga_(novel)"title="Hrolf Kraki's Saga (novel)">
The story is presented as if related by a female story-teller in an Anglo-Saxon court, the author feeling it would have been about that time that the legend would have reached its fullest development, and such a teller would have been least likely to abbreviate it.The Danish king Halfdan is murdered and his position usurped by his brother Frodhi. Halfdan's young sons Helgi and Hroar go into hiding to escape his fate, successfully eluding Frodhi until they reach adulthood and can take vengeance on their father's killer. On attaining the kingship themselves they rule together. Helgi, a warrior and sea-rover, visits the equally warlike queen of the Saxons, whom he woos overbearingly. Sent packing, he later returns and rapes her, a union resulting in a daughter, Yrsa, who years later becomes an instrument of vengeance when Helgi encounters and marries her. Only after they are wed does her mother reveal Yrsa's parentage. Haunted, Yrsa leaves Denmark to wed Adhils, King of the Swedes, and Helgi is ultimately killed in battle attempting to win her back.Hrolf, the son of Helgi and Yrsa, is raised in the household of Hroar, becoming his adherent and supporter. During this time the events of "Beowulf" occur, and are briefly retold as part of the story. After Hroar's death a short civil war Hrolf becomes his successor. He builds up the realm and assembles a band of famous warriors, most notably Hjalti and Bodvar Bjarki, a were-bear and one of a trio remarkable brothers, the others being Elk-Frodhi and Thorir Houndsfoot. The story goes on to relate the personal tales of these champions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Sir,_With_Love_(novel)"title="To Sir, With Love (novel)">
Ricky Braithwaite is an engineer from British Guiana who has worked in an oil refinery in Aruba. Coming to Britain just before the outbreak of World War II, he joins the RAF and is assigned to aircrew. Demobbed in 1945, he is unable to find work despite his qualifications and experience due to racism. After discussing his situation with a stranger, he applies for a teaching position and is assigned to Greenslade Secondary School in London's East End.Most of the pupils in his class are unmotivated to learn, and are only semi-literate and semi-articulate. He persists despite their unresponsiveness to his approach. Students attempt to discourage and demoralise him by disruptive noises, constant use of the adjective "bleeding" in the classroom and, finally, the burning of a used sanitary towel in the fireplace. This last causes Braithwaite to lose his temper and reprimand all the girls.Braithwaite decides to try a new approach, and sets some ground rules. The students will be leaving school soon and will enter adult society, so he will treat them as adults and allow them to decide what topics they wish to study. In return, he demands their respect as their teacher. This novel approach is initially rejected, but within a few weeks the class is largely won over. He suggests out-of-school activities including visits to museums, which the students have never experienced before. A young teacher, Gillian Blanchard, volunteers to assist him on these trips. Some of the girls start to speculate whether a personal relationship is budding between Braithwaite and Gillian. The trip is a success and more are approved by the initially sceptical headmaster.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Rum_Doodle"title="The Ascent of Rum Doodle">
The narrator, "Binder" (his radio codename), is asked by the "Rum Doodle Committee" and its chairman, "Sir Hugeley Havering", to lead an expedition to climb "Rum Doodle", the highest mountain in the world (with an elevation of 40,000 and 1/2 feet), in the remote (fictional) country of "Yogistan". He assembles a team of climbers to play all the roles seen in the parodied literature:It rapidly develops that each of the climbers is utterly inept in his nominal field of competence, as they demonstrate in a series of chaotic adventures en route to Yogistan; for example, Prone endures a never-ending series of illnesses, while Constant mispronounces a Yogistani word (the language hinges on variously "pronounced" belches and gastrointestinal rumbles) and offends a "short but powerful" Yogistani wielding a knife, having informed him that he lusted for the man's wife — not his intention at all. Binder handles these mishaps with typically British aplomb, having been reassured by the expedition's sponsor that "to climb Mont Blanc by the Grépon route is one thing; to climb Rum Doodle is, as Totter once said, quite another."Somehow the group does make it to Yogistan, where they hire Yogistani porters, parodies of the Sherpas who were the indispensable indigenous porters and mountain guides (and sometimes climbing partners) to many of the great mountaineering expeditions. However, the Yogistanis do not share the invariable positive attributes of the Sherpa — quite the contrary. Hijinks ensue, as the expedition cook, "Pong", produces food so inedible that the expedition tries (unsuccessfully) to continue on up the mountain without him; the inevitable fall into a crevasse leads to the consumption of the party's champagne (brought along to celebrate reaching the summit and for "medicinal purposes") during the rescue attempt; and scientist Wish embarks on a never-ending quest for "Wharton's warple", an endangered species indigenous to the mountains. Eventually, Binder and a colleague manage to stumble to the top of the lofty spire the group has been approaching ... only to find that they have climbed the wrong mountain (and to see the porters, with Prone in tow, climbing the right one).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hood_(novel)"title="Hood (novel)">
This novel takes place in the seven days after Pen O'Grady's lover, Cara Wall, has been killed in a car accident. The two had been together for thirteen years, after meeting as schoolgirls in a Catholic school in Dublin. The story combines flashbacks giving the history of Pen and Cara's complex and tumultuous relationship with details of the various ways Pen feels and responds to grief, the reactions of people who do or don't know the nature of the relationship, Pen's feelings about lesbians in Ireland, and several decisions to come out to those close to her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curious_George_Flies_a_Kite"title="Curious George Flies a Kite">
Curious George, left alone at home with his new ball, looks out the window and sees a small house. He jumps out the window, inside the house sees a lot of bunnies. He accidentally lets one out, plays hide and seek with the bunny, and lets it back in the house.As George walks back home, he sees a fisherman fishing and is inspired to fish too. When he uses cake (for fishing bait), he catches no fish. After two failed attempts for catching the fish, he eats the rest of the cake (as he realized he loved cake too). Then, he tries another way to catch fish, but ends up falling into the water. The neighbor boy, Bill, helps him get out. He tells George that even though George did not catch any fish, the good news is that none of the fish ate him. Then Bill shows him his new kite. He lets George watch it while he gets his bicycle.George flies the kite. At first, he thinks it would be okay to fly it. But when he tries that, the kite soon flies off with him. The Man with the Yellow Hat asks Bill if he saw George, and soon sees him up in the sky with the kite. The Man with the Yellow Hat did not wait to hear any more from Bill, so he said, "Then I must have George back! I "must" get him back!". So the Man rescues him by helicopter. George returns the kite to Bill, who in return gives him the bunny.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamside"title="Dreamside">
The novel deals with four British college students. They are drawn together by a study funded by the Psychology Department that is in need of student volunteers. The study deals with lucid dreaming. The study group dwindles over the span of the semester until there is a core group left: Lee, Ella, Brad, and Honora.The four dreamers, led by Professor L. P. Burns, take the role of paid researchers for an experimental field of study: shared lucid dreaming. They manage to create a pocket of shared space that they call "Dreamside" and begin experimenting with different phenomena. But venturing to Dreamside has a number of unexpected side-effects: it becomes more and more difficult for the dreamers to separate the two worlds. Then one day, an act of violence shatters the students' trust in one another and they put Dreamside behind them once and for all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Armageddon_Rag"title="The Armageddon Rag">
Frustrated former hippie novelist Sandy Blair becomes involved in the investigation of the brutal murder of rock promoter Jamie Lynch, whose heart had been torn from his body. Lynch, a despised rock promoter, had been found dead in a small town in Maine, the victim of a ritualistic murder. Lynch had managed several bands, including the legendary rock group the Nazgûl (named for the evil Ringwraiths in Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings"). He was found dead on the 10th anniversary of the Nazgûl's breakup, with his bloody body placed on top of the band's West Mesa, New Mexico concert poster; during that concert, Nazgûl lead singer Patrick Henry "Hobbit" Hobbins had been mysteriously murdered.Lynch's high-profile death soon opens the door for a Nazgûl reunion tour, which slowly begins to eerily mirror the events of their original West Mesa tour. With Lynch out of the way, a disastrous act of arson forces the remaining three members of the Nazgûl to go on a reunion tour, promoted by a rich man named Edan Morse. The mysterious Morse may or may not have been a left-wing revolutionary in the 1970s, noted for his violent methods. Morse produces a young man who is a doppelganger for Hobbins, who Morse plans to make the lead singer of the reunited Nazgûl, despite the fact that the doppelganger's musical talents are subpar and he lacks any charisma. Interviewing the surviving members of the band while tracking down his old friends from the 1960s, Blair meditates on the meaning of the flower power generation as he crisscrosses the country. He eventually becomes the Nazgûl's press agent and is soon swept up in the frenzy of their successful reunion tour and an oncoming supernatural convergence, whose nature he must uncover in order to solve the murders of Lynch and Hobbins. Blair comes to suspect that Morse wants to bring the Nazgûl together to perform an occult ritual that will unleash a dark supernatural power upon the world, an act of revenge against a world that has spurned the idealism of the late 1960s counterculture.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Minutes"title="Nineteen Minutes">
The story begins on March 6, 2007 in the small town of Sterling, New Hampshire, tracking the lives of a number of characters on an "ordinary day." The characters include Alex Cormier, a superior court judge; her daughter Josie, a junior in high school; Lacy, Lewis, and Peter Houghton; Detective Patrick Ducharme; and several victims-to-be.At the local high school, Sterling High, the story follows a routine day of students in classes, at the gym, and in the cafeteria. Suddenly, a loud bang is heard from the parking lot, which turns out to be a bomb set off in Matt Royston's car. As the students are distracted by the noise, gunshots are fired. When Patrick, the only detective on the Sterling police force, arrives at Sterling High, he searches the school to seek out the gunman, who is alleged to be a student. After passing several dead and wounded victims, Patrick traps and arrests the shooter, Peter Houghton, in the locker room, where he finds two students, Josie Cormier and Matt Royston, lying on the floor surrounded in blood. While Matt is dead, having been the only victim shot twice, Josie is not seriously injured, but only shocked: she cannot remember what happened.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Squire,_His_Knight,_and_His_Lady"title="The Squire, His Knight, and His Lady">
This book tells the tale of Gawain and Squire Terence's journey to the fabled Green Chapel, the home of the Green Knight. Gawain is forced to decapitate the Green Knight, and Gawain promises that he will allow the Green Knight to return the favor one year from New Year's Eve, at the Green Chapel itself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat_Who_Played_Brahms"title="The Cat Who Played Brahms">
Jim Qwilleran decides to get out of the city for a while and go on vacation to Moose County, Pickax, in the countryside. He stays at a lakeside cabin, owned by his old friend, Aunt Fanny. He has plans to write a book, however his plans get delayed when a peaceful fishing trip catches a body. Or is it simply an old tire, like the locals claim?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Moon_(novel)"title="Wolf Moon (novel)">
Kern, a werewolf, is hunted by a harper who uses magic; escaping, but injured, he finds himself at an inn called the Yellow Tinker. Long ago, he had once tried to find acceptance as a man and a werewolf, and was nearly killed for revealing what he truly is. Kern comes to love the woman who is the innkeeper, and decides to stay, and never reveal his animal nature. However, the harper finds him and threatens everything Kern now holds dear. The wolf moon is the first moon of winter, when the climax of the story takes place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Name_(novel)"title="No Name (novel)">
The story is told in eight major parts, called Scenes.Scene One begins in 1846, at Combe-Raven in West Somerset, the country residence of the wealthy Vanstone family: Andrew Vanstone, his wife, and their two daughters. Norah, age 26, is happy and quiet; Magdalen, 18, is beautiful but volatile and willful. The family lives in peace and contentment, with the girls' former governess, Miss Garth.Through amateur theatricals, Magdalen discovers she is a talented actress and falls in love with Frank Clare, who is also in the play. Frank, the idle but handsome son of a neighbour, has reluctantly tried to pursue a career but failed, and his father is not wealthy. However, the young couple wish to marry and Magdalen's fortune will easily support them. Their fathers agree to the marriage, but before it takes place Mr. Vanstone is killed in a train crash and Mrs. Vanstone dies in childbirth. The family lawyer, Mr. Pendril, tells Norah and Magdalen that despite appearances their parents had only been married for a few months, and their wedding invalidated the will which left everything to the daughters.Since the daughters are illegitimate, they have no name, no rights, and no property. Combe-Raven and the entire family fortune are inherited by Andrew's older brother, Michael Vanstone, who has been bitterly estranged from the family for many years. He refuses to provide any support for the orphaned young women. With the help only of their governess Miss Garth, they set out to make their own way in the world.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagles_Fly_Early_(novel)"title="Eagles Fly Early (novel)">
The book involves several young boys and a girl and their role in assisting the Partisans in fighting the Croatian fascists Ustaše invading Yugoslavia during World War II. There are allusions throughout to mythology such as the drekavac, a monster which the children are told lives in the forest. The children are forced to conquer their superstitious fear in order to assist the Partisans.The book is divided in two parts. The first part is before the war in Yugoslavia, and the second is about the children helping the Partisans and the army in fighting against Fascists in World War II.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Pursuit"title="The Great Pursuit">
The story is a farce about greed in the publishing world, and the struggle between literature as a high art and the commercial imperative to reduce it to its lowest common denominator. The action takes place in London, New York City, the Deep South and the Maine coast.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_of_the_Mighty"title="The Island of the Mighty">
Gwynedd in north Wales is ruled by Math, son of Mathonwy, whose feet must be held by a virgin at all times except while he is at war. Math's nephew Gilfaethwy is in love with Goewin, the current footholder, and Gilfaethwy's brother Gwydion tricks Math into going to war against Pryderi so Gilfaethwy can have access to her. Gwydion kills Pryderi, Prince of Dyfed, in single combat, and Gilfaethwy rapes Goewin. Math marries Goewin in compensation for her rape, and banishes Gwydion and Gilfaethwy, transforming them into a breeding pair of deer, then pigs, then wolves. After three years they are restored to human form and return.Math needs a new footholder, and Gwydion suggests his sister, Arianrhod, but when Math magically tests her virginity, she gives birth to two sons. One, Dylan, immediately takes to the sea. The other is raised by Gwydion, but Arianrhod swears that he will never have a name or arms unless she gives them to him, and refuses to do so. Gwydion tricks her into naming him Llew Llaw Gyffes (Llew Skilful Hand) and giving him arms. She then swears he will never have a wife of any race living on earth, so Gwydion and Math make him a beautiful wife from flowers, and name her Blodeuwedd ("Flowers"). Blodeuwedd falls in love with a passing hunter called Goronwy, and they plot to kill Llew. Blodewedd tricks Llew into revealing the means by which he can be killed, but when Goronwy attempts to do the deed, Llew escapes, though wounded, transformed into an eagle.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Runners"title="Time Runners">
The novels are narrated in the first person by the schoolboy Jamie Grant, who at the start of the first book is twelve years old and has just started a new school. The Time Runners of the series title are people who fall through a time break and who therefore "no longer exist": they cannot be seen and are not remembered, but they continue an existence outside time, with some degree of power over it. The Runners comprise an alliance from many places and times who work to protect time from the interference of those such as Darkling Midnight, an Adept (someone with a very powerful control over time) who the Runners see as their enemy, and who is assisted by evil time creatures called Skitters. The Runners appear to remain fixed at the age they were when they fell outside time, so once Jamie becomes a Runner he remains at twelve years old throughout the remaining books.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_the_Ice_People"title="The Legend of the Ice People">
The story begins in Trondheim, Norway in 1581, with the story of Silje Arngrimsdotter, and how she comes into contact with the Ice People, a community of outcasts living in an isolated valley. From there on it follows the Ice People through the centuries, with members of the clan migrating from Norway to Denmark and Sweden. Other members of the clan wind up in or visit various corners of Europe and Asia over the course of the series.The Ice People are cursed with a terrible forefather, Tengel the Evil, whose actions resulted in at least one cursed individual being born in every generation. The cursed individuals were born with magical and mystical abilities, but also the potential for bottomless evil. The cursed men have yellow eyes, malformed shoulder blades and Mongol features, while the cursed women have yellow eyes, but are otherwise beautiful. Some cursed individuals fight their tendency for evil, whilst others embrace it.Each book tells a separate story, very often the story of one or a few individuals of the clan. Quite often the protagonist of each book is a female, sometimes of the Ice People, but sometimes one who will marry into the clan. Many of the books also focus on the cursed individuals, their battle with their evil tendencies, and also how they utilise their powers, be it for good or evil.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquamarine_(novel)"title="Aquamarine (novel)">
The story is based upon two schoolgirls, Hailey and Claire, who have lived as neighbors and close and best friends for many years. Their favorite place for amusement has been the Capri Beach Club for as long as they can remember. However, the Capri Beach Club has become ruinous via neglect by its staff. When Claire's grandparents, with whom she lives, decide to leave the area and move to Florida, the girls are dismayed. They spend hours trying to make their last days together as long as possible, both frightened by the future because each one would be alone.When a violent thunderstorm occurs, a large quantity of trash is deposited in the Capri Beach Club. In the swimming pool, Hailey and Claire discover the spoiled yet beautiful creature that will change their lives: a mermaid named Aquamarine. The next morning, Aquamarine surfaces after some hesitation, being stimulated to do so by the presence of the handsome Raymond. During the night, Aquamarine has undergone mild hardships; she has eaten very little, has been separated from her six sisters, and is suffering from the chlorine in the pool. Hailey and Claire advise Aquamarine to return to the ocean, however she refuses, because of her new attachment to Raymond.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_Angels_(novel)"title="Rebel Angels (novel)">
The story picks up two months after the events in the first book. The opening chapter is narrated by Kartik, who has been brought before a council of the Rakshana. He is told that by destroying the Runes, Gemma released the magic, making it available to all the creatures in the realms, including the evil Circe and her allies in the Winterlands. Kartik is charged with helping Gemma find the Temple in the realms, where the magic can be bound by the Rakshana, and when that is successfully completed he is to kill her.The rest of the story is narrated by Gemma, in the present tense. Gemma is told by Kartik that she must find a "Temple" in the realms to bind the magic "in the name of the Eastern Star"; unbeknownst to Gemma, saying that line would give the Rakshana the power.At Christmas break, Gemma leaves the Spence School and goes to her family's home in London, where she has never been before. Gemma's brother Tom is late to pick her up at the train station. Gemma believes a member of the Rakshana is following her. She runs up to a young man and pretends she knows him, under the pretense that the other man following her will go away. The young man turns out to be Simon Middleton, a young aristocrat who is immediately smitten with her. Middleton invites her and her family to dinner, and he begins to court Gemma.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Couples_(novel)"title="Couples (novel)">
Much of the plot of "Couples" (which opens on the evening of March 24, 1962, and integrates historical events like the loss of the USS "Thresher" on April 10, 1963, the Profumo affair, and the Kennedy assassination in November 1963) concerns the efforts of its characters to balance the pressures of Protestant sexual mores against increasingly flexible American attitudes toward sex in the 1960s. The book suggests that this relaxation may have been driven by the development of birth control and the opportunity to enjoy what one character refers to as "the post-pill paradise".The novel is rich in period detail. (In 2009, "USA Today" called it a "time capsule" of the era.) The lyrical and explicit descriptions of sex, unusual for the time, made the book somewhat notorious. "Time" had reserved a cover story for Updike and the novel before knowing what it was about; after actually reading it they were embarrassed, and discovered that "the higher up it went in the "Time" hierarchy, the less they liked it."The ten couples are:At the center of the amourous round robin is Piet Hannema. His first affair is with Georgene but he dumps her for pregnant Foxy. At the same time the "Little-Smiths" swap partners with the Appleby couple. Harold and Janet keep their affair secret while they know about the affair of Frankie and Marcia. After Foxy gives birth to her son, Piet loses interest and has a fling with Bea Guerin. Foxy informs him that their last goodbye shag had unintended consequences. They try to arrange a discreet abortion and seek help from Freddy. He offers aid but, as revenge for Piet´s affair with his wife Georgene, demands a night with Piet´s wife Angela in return. Angela consents, but Freddy turns out to be impotent, at least for the act itself. The abortion is done in Boston; Foxy has a fit crying to keep Piet´s baby. However, Angela wants to leave Piet and suggests he should marry Foxy, who separated from Ken. Piet temporarily finds comfort but no satisfaction in the arms of Bea Guerin. Eventually Angela tells Piet to leave her house, and for a longer period he lives on his own, having become a pariah among the couples of Tarbox. His partner Gallagher suggests a separation too and pays him off. In a final scene Piet and the society of Tarbox witness a fire that destroys the local church. The following years are summarized in a short final passage: Angela took a job as teacher and got a divorce, shortly after Piet married Foxy and they moved to Lexington, where they found new friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Moon_(novel)"title="Shadow Moon (novel)">
One year after the defeat of Queen Bavmorda, Willow Ufgood continues his life as a farmer while honing his sorcery. One night, he dreams of riding on the back of a dragon named Calan Dineer to Tir Asleen. There, he reunites with Madmartigan and Sorsha, who re-name him "Thorn Drumheller". In honor of Elora Danan's first birthday, he gifts her a stuffed bear which transfers a portion of his power to her, rendering the baby seemingly immune to magic. When he awakens, he discovers an apocalyptic cataclysm has wiped out several areas of the world, including Tir Asleen, killing Madmartigan and Sorsha. The High Aldwyn urges him to leave Nelwyn Vale and investigate the cause of this destruction.Twelve years later, Willow - now going by Thorn Drumheller - searches the land with brownies Rool and Franjean. The trio are attacked by a pack of Death Dogs, whom they ward off with the help of Geryn Havilhand, a Daikini trooper from Angwyn. The group are joined by ship captains Morag and Maulroon. The latter, Geryn's companion, informs Thorn that they must journey back to Angwyn in honor of Elora Danan's ascension to the throne on her thirteenth birthday. They muse whether Willow Ufgood, Elora's godfather, will be present. Thorn, not revealing his identity, agrees to travel with them to the city.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Dawn"title="Shadow Dawn">
Three years after he consumed the soul of Castellan Mohdri, The Deciever is conquering the realms with his army of Maizan riders, who are under orders to capture Thorn Drumheller and Elora Danan. The latter is in hiding with a clan of Rock Nelywns underground. Torquil Ufgood, Thorn's cousin, monitors her magical abilities, soon recognising that Fire Realm magic has no effect on her. His Nelywn clan soon learn that the Maizan have conquered Testaverde, and deduce their next target to be Sandeni, a state impervious to the effects of magic.That night, a firedrake transports Elora to a mountain elsewhere. There, she finds a pool of its kind being held by another Nelywyn clan to build a world gate which can provide access to other realms. While attempting to free the firedrakes, Elora has a bizzare vision - an idealized version of herself, followed by a dark figure's formation and approach. She flees the mountain, only to be found by Rool and Bastian. Wishing to reunite with Thorn, who she feels is the closest she has to family, Elora persuades Rool to ride with her on Bastian to Sandeni, where he is currently hiding. En route, the trio discover a village sieged by Elves and Goblins.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Luneta_Mágica"title="A Luneta Mágica">
The book tells the story of Simplício, a naïve and near-sighted man who lives with his brother Américo, an ascending politician, his cousin Anica and extremely religious aunt Domingas, and wishes to be able of seeing again one day. A friend of his, old man Nunes, takes him to Reis, an optometrist who is able to make very powerful lenses; however, none of them are able to make Simplício see again. Reis then suggests Simplício to go see a friend of his, an unnamed Armenian magician who makes magical lenses.Simplício is finally able to see again, but the Armenian tells him that if he looks to someone or something for more than three minutes, he would see the evil enclosed on them. However, Simplício does not pay attention to the Armenian's warning, and starts seeing the evil parts of all things, and considered to be crazy, becomes a recluse.Simplício accidentally destroys the "evil" lenses one day, and returns to see the Armenian – this time he gives to Simplício new lenses that make him see the good parts of all things. Being seduced and manipulated by everyone he knows, after many mishaps Simplício finally obtains the "sanity" lenses, and is able to live happily again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sucessora"title="A Sucessora">
The story revolves around the character of Mariana, a young woman who has married the widower Roberto Steen. As Mariana attempts to acclimatise to her new marriage and responsibilities, she discovers that Steen's dead wife, Alice, still seems to have a hold over the household.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Golden_Age"title="A Golden Age">
This historical fiction novel centers the point of view of Rehana Haque, a widowed mother who struggles through Bangladesh Liberation War as both her children become increasingly involved with the war efforts. The book starts with the death of Rehana's husband and losing then regaining the custody of her children, and then fast forwards to the start of the war where Rehana struggles again to hold on to her children. Rehana struggles with understanding passionate nationalism of her children and finding her own personal identity outside of being a mother and where her sense of nationalism fits into that identity. The book ends 16 December 1971, the day that the treaty is signed and Bangladesh gained their independence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunted_(Gardner_novel)"title="Hunted (Gardner novel)">
When new Explorer Corps recruit Edward York arrives on board the starship "Willow", he abruptly becomes its sole survivor: everyone else simultaneously drops dead, executed by the near-omnipotent League of Peoples for violating its rule that anyone without sufficient respect for life is not allowed to travel between solar systems.Alone on a ship full of corpses, Edward discovers a complex plot involving the alien Mandasars, in whose decades-long civil war he had a cryptic role.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decision_(novel)"title="The Decision (novel)">
Thanks to intel from their friend and ally, Erek the Chee, the Animorphs discover that a high-ranking member of the Secret Service, Hewlett Aldershot III, has been intentionally injured by the Yeerks and is being kept secretly in a hospital where he is heavily guarded. Since he cannot be infested while in a coma, Visser Three acquires his DNA in hopes of impersonating him to eventually acquire an even more senior official. However, he figures out that the Animorphs are spying on him in seagull morphs, so he morphs a "kafit" bird from the Andalite home world and gives chase to Ax, Rachel, and Marco, whom he spies at the time. Eventually, he settles on only chasing Ax, and after cornering him on the roof of a McDonald's, they engage in tail-to-tail combat in their Andalite bodies. Surprisingly, Ax defeats the older Andalite under Visser Three's control, and he forces him to retreat, which gives himself time to escape.The next day, while meeting in Cassie's family's barn, the team decides to morph mosquitoes with the theory that they can acquire Aldershot by sucking his blood without being in their natural forms, where the Yeerk guards might notice them. However, while in mosquito morph, they are transported to Z-Space when their extra mass is caught in the slipstream of an Andalite ship, the "Ascalin", heading for the planet Leera, where there is a Yeerk invasion underway. Just before they suffocate, they are rescued and taken aboard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blonde,_the_Brunette_and_the_Vengeful_Redhead"title="The Blonde, the Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead">
An adulterous husband, a meddlesome neighbour and a dropped ice-cream cone are among the circumstances that combine to shatter the life of suburban housewife Rhonda Russell.Everyone has their own story to tell about the day that Rhonda went berserk in the shopping mall. And who’s to know where the truth lies? With the best friend who might have egged her on? With the husband who denies responsibility? Or with the victim’s family whose lives were changed forever? And then there’s the story of the vengeful redhead herself, but she’s probably the least likely to know what really happened.In this gripping adventure, the world is turned upside down in a disastrous and comic sequence of events. As the intrigue unfolds, seven different characters give a fresh twist of perspective – all played by one multifaceted performer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phoenix_Guards"title="The Phoenix Guards">
Khaavren of Castlerock is a young Dragaeran gentleman from the House of the Tiassa whose family has fallen onto hard times. Though lacking an inheritance, Khaavren has a long sword and is "tolerably well-acquainted with its use." On his way to the capital city of the Empire, Khaavren befriends Aerich and Tazendra, nobles from the Houses of the Lyorn and Dzur who also lack income. Khaavren tells them of his plan to join the Phoenix Guards, the new Emperor's elite personal troops, and his new friends decide to accompany him.The trio arrive in Dragaera City and meet Pel, a Yendi who joined a few days previous. Pel helps the trio sign up and buy their equipment, and quickly befriends them. The four are unusual for Phoenix Guards because most guardsmen come from the militaristic House of the Dragon. The recruits are each paired with a haughty Dragon veteran for their first patrol, but each recruit kills his or her Dragon partner by the end of the night. The group is thereafter only partnered together on patrols and soon becomes inseparable.The group learns of the standing feud between the White Sash Battalion of the Phoenix Guards and their own Red Boot Battalion. They fight a duel and several brawls with members of the enemy battalion. After learning of the White Sash's failure to apprehend a murderer, Kathana, the group decides to earn glory for their own troop by tracking her down themselves. Unbeknownst to the group, a number of powerful figures in the Imperial Court have a vested interest in the fate of Kathana. Seodra, the Court Wizard, and Lytra, the Warlord, want to manipulate Kathana's arrest to gain favor from the Emperor. The Imperial Consort, however, is a friend of Kathana's and wants her protected, as do those who wish her favor. Before setting out, Khaavren's would-be lover Illista, a Phoenix courtier seeking favor, wrings a promise from Khaavren to prevent Kathana from being arrested.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Threat_(novel)"title="The Threat (novel)">
After falling from the Blade ship, the Animorphs are snagged from mid-air by Rachel and Tobias, in their respective eagle and hawk morphs. They land on the beach, needing a plan to infiltrate the Marriott resort. Jake becomes aware of the tensions between David and Marco, and is disturbed by David's unnecessary excesses. The team morphs into seagulls, and spy out the area, crawling with security agents armed to the teeth and accompanied by dogs. They're zapped by a security man wearing sunglasses with weak Dracon beam emitters built into them. Jake tells them to leave.Upon his return home, Jake's parents tell him and his brother Tom that their obnoxious cousin, Saddler, was gravely injured in a car accident, and that they were leaving town to spend time with his parents. Jake is presented with the opportunity to advance his plans. Unfortunately, that night, David disappears from Cassie's barn. Jake morphs into his dog, Homer, and tracks David's scent to an inn. David had morphed into a golden eagle, smashed the window with a rock and entered a room without paying. Jake warns him of the consequences of this action, while also saying he won't have time to help David with his living problems until after the mission. David doesn't hide his contempt, but leaves with Jake anyway.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Suspicion_(novel)"title="The Suspicion (novel)">
While Rachel tries to convince Cassie to go to the beach with her, Cassie notices what looks like a toy spaceship attached to her water pump. Cassie notes that it's where she hid the blue box, and is a bit unsettled by it, but brushes it off and puts the spaceship with a bunch of other things being donated to charity. They head off to the beach, coming back to find Jake. They notice a different "toy" spaceship attached to the water pump and, while they watch, it detaches itself and flies away. The Animorphs immediately hold a meeting and decide to go to Goodwill to try to retrieve the spaceship that Cassie had seen earlier. While there, the spaceship starts shooting at them and demands that they surrender and bring them the "power source". It flies away and they realize it is returning to the Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic to retrieve the blue box. Since it is a spaceship, it can travel much faster than their bird morphs, and when they finally arrive, they discover to their dismay that the waterpump was cut open and the spaceship has stolen the blue box. There are some flashes and Tobias, Cassie, and Marco are significantly smaller (about one sixteenth of an inch). Cassie and Marco decide to pretend to surrender to the Helmacrons which are the aliens that are aboard the spaceships, while Tobias stays with Rachel. It is revealed that the Helmacron females are in charge, while the males are feeble and weak. Cassie and Marco claim that they work for the Yeerks (whom the Helmacrons are familiar with and despise), and that Visser Three can get them the box. Eventually they catch up with the Visser, who is at a Sharing meeting (along with Chapman and other controllers). They morph to flies to escape the ship, now being as small as cells. The Controllers get a lucky shot, and destroy the ship, Cassie and Marco barely getting out in time. They find that they have landed on Chapman's head. The other Helmacron spaceship had lured the rest of the Animorphs there in an attempt to steal the blue box. During the meeting, the Helmacrons attack, indiscriminately shrinking everyone at the meeting. Upon seeing the blue box, along with Visser Three's prodding, all the controllers try to grab it and there is chaos. Cassie morphs into a whale in order to crash the ship. She and the other Animorphs eventually end up on Ax, the only Animorph remaining unshrunken. Visser Three and many Controllers also end up on Ax. Visser Three briefly sides with the Animorphs, saying, "I don't know about you Andalites, but these Helmacrons are really, really, "really" annoying me." Ax, in harrier morph, flies over to the Gardens where they all acquire and morph anteaters, which unshrinks them while in morph. As anteaters, Jake and Rachel slurp up the Helmacrons, and The Animorphs, Controllers and Helmacrons reach an agreement and everyone is unshrunken. Before the book ends, Marco and Cassie give the Helmacron males a bit of a pep talk, and it ends with the male and female Helmacrons squabbling with each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Attack_(novel)"title="The Attack (novel)">
When the Anamorphs attend a performance of "The Lion King" at a school assembly, the Ellimist freezes time and appears to enlist their aid. He tells them there is another force as powerful as him, the Crayak. The Elli mist reveals that this creature is the blood-red eye Jake saw when the Year in his head died in the sixth book, "The Capture".The Ellimist tells the kids that when the Crayak first appeared, the two of them waged a war which destroyed a tenth of the galaxy. They realized their fight needed to be much more subtle. That is why the Ellimist is only allowed or only allows himself to give the Animorphs tiny bits of help so far.The Crayak is targeting another race, called the Iskoort, and that interferes with the Ellimist's concealed agenda. The fate of the Iskoort will be determined through a proxy battle with rules of engagement. The Crayak and the Ellimist will each choose seven combatants to face off on the Iskoort homeworld. Crayak has chosen seven of his shock troops, the Howlers, members of the race which destroyed the Pemalites.The Animorphs choose Erek King as their seventh, and they are taken to the Iskoort world, huge metropolis miles above the ground. While the Iskoort turns out to be bizarre and grating, they are not actually evil. The Animorphs and Erek enlist a young Iskoort trader named Guide to show them around.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exposed_(novel)"title="The Exposed (novel)">
During a shopping trip with Cassie, Rachel sees Erek's hologram malfunctioning. They barely manage to get him away before other humans notice. Soon they discover every Chee is having trouble with their technology, particularly their holograms, because of interferences with the Pemalite ship hidden in the ocean. The vast majority of the Chee have adequately hidden themselves, so humans cannot discover they are aliens. However, two are still in danger.One of the Chee in danger, Lourdes, is hidden in a flophouse where drug fencing occurs, but a SWAT team - with a Controller member - are about to raid the house. The Animorphs successfully rescue her.Next, the Animorphs need to come up with a plan in order to reach the Pemalite ship, so they can fix the malfunctioning technology. They struggle to think of an appropriate morph for the bottom of the ocean. Cassie realizes a giant squid would work, but they still do not know how to get close to one. They do know sperm whales capture giant squids. Thankfully, a sperm whale has been beached. Rachel and Tobias acquire the whale's DNA, morph into the whale, dive into the ocean, and find and then end up battling a squid. Finally, all the Animorphs acquire the squid and dive together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sickness_(novel)"title="The Sickness (novel)">
Cassie and Jake are dragged along by Rachel and the others to the school dance. They have a few good laughs when Ax's unfamiliarity with human culture scares away some of the crowd. The laughter stops, however, when he demorphs involuntarily. It soon becomes apparent that Ax is suffering from an inflamed Tria gland (as well as a fever)—much like the lymphatic tonsils in the human mouth. Unlike humans, though, this gland is located at the back of Ax's brain. If it bursts, it will cause irreversible and fatal damage to the brain. Cassie hides the sick alien in her barn, and Erek the Chee erects a hologram around them both.At the same time, Mr. Tidwell, one of Cassie's teachers, informs her that Aftran, a Yeerk who Cassie met and convinced to free her host, has been captured by Visser Three. She will be tortured, and will thus be forced to divulge all of her secrets, including that of Cassie and the Animorphs. Cassie endures her friends' thinly veiled blame, but they decide to act. They form a plan to enter the Yeerk pool via the facility's extensive piping system. Tobias brings them eels to morph. The children morph and enter the pipes, but Jake falls ill from Ax's virus (although it is established that this virus will just make humans sick rather than having the fatal effects that the Andalite version has on Ax). The plan fails, and they return to the surface—through a fire hose and into a burning building.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_(novel)"title="Silk (novel)">
The extraordinary novel tells the story of a French silkworm merchant-turned-smuggler named Hervé Joncour in 19th century France who travels to Japan for his town's supply of silkworms after a disease wipes out their African supply. His first trip to Japan takes place in the Bakumatsu period, when Japan was still largely closed to foreigners. During his stay in Japan, he becomes obsessed with the concubine of a local baron. His trade in Japan and his personal relationship with the concubine are both strained by the internal political turmoil and growing anti-Western sentiment in Japan that followed the arrival of Matthew C. Perry in Edo Bay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_Front_(The_Dresden_Files)"title="Storm Front (The Dresden Files)">
Dresden is hired by a Monica Sells to find her husband Victor Sells, an amateur magician who has been acting oddly. Later that day, he gets a call from Lieutenant Karrin Murphy, director of the Special Investigations (SI) Unit of the Chicago Police Department. Murphy's partner shows him the bodies of two people, who died by having their hearts ripped out, apparently by magic. Dresden realizes that he is the chief suspect for these magical murders.Eventually, despite encounters with vampires, the unknown warlock, and the ever-suspicious Warden Morgan, Dresden learns that the affair centers around the drug "ThreeEye", which allows normal humans to temporarily acquire Wizards Sight, which eventually drives them insane. Victor Sells has been manufacturing ThreeEye to edge out mob boss Johnny Marcone. Using the energy of thunder storms and the orgies held at his home, he powered the spells to remove his enemies, namely Marcone's men and anyone else threatening his operation, in order to gradually bring down Marcone and corner the drug trade.Dresden interrupts Victor's spellcasting and attacks him, "brains versus muscle", eventually burning down Victor's house while Victor is still inside grappling with monster scorpions and a demon he had summoned to kill Dresden. Dresden survives, but is himself trapped on the balcony of the burning house until Morgan steps in to rescue him. Morgan had witnessed the fight with Victor and, knowing now that Dresden is innocent, reluctantly testifies on Dresden's behalf to the White Council.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Winter_Dark"title="In the Winter Dark">
The setting is a valley called the Sink, which is isolated and surrounded by forest. The people who come there are lonely, have troubles or are drawn by the land. The solitude is disturbed by a mysterious creature which kills livestock and exposes the hidden fears in everyone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Eagle"title="The First Eagle">
Anderson Nez dies in the hospital of bubonic plague in a virulent new form. Dr Woody brought him in, and is now demanding details on everything that happened as Nez died in Northern Arizona Medical Center. The infected flea bit Nez the day before with a new strain of plague, at the end of June.At Yells Back Butte near Black Mesa, Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee finds Officer Kinsman nearly dead, bashed in the head. Robert Jano, a Hopi man, stands close by, with blood on him, and an eagle in a cage. Chee arrests Jano for murdering the police officer. Jano protests his innocence. Kinsman dies in the hospital. Jano is assigned an attorney from the Department of Justice, as the charge carries the death penalty. Attorney Janet Pete is back in Phoenix; she is given his case. She believes he is innocent. Mrs. Vanders hires Joe Leaphorn to find her niece, Catherine Pollard. She has not returned from her work as a vector control specialist, a flea catcher, nor left any word of her plans, since early July. Mrs. Vanders thinks graduate student Victor Hammer might be the problem.Leaphorn receives Pollard's field work notes, which Louisa Bourebonette reads. Pollard's job is to track down the source of the fleas with bubonic plague, and then to destroy them or the “reservoir” of small rodents that harbor those fleas. She is still pursuing the source for Nez's infection, and realizes someone has lied to her. Leaphorn realizes that Pollard was last seen on the same day that the officer was attacked, July 8. Chee is firm that Jano is guilty. Cowboy Dashee, a good friend of Chee, thinks Chee is wrong. Dashee talks to Leaphorn with an alternate theory of the case, that Pollard is the killer, perhaps in self-defense, as Dashee learned she was there that same day. Leaphorn presents the idea to Chee. Chee works on finding Pollard's black jeep. First evidence is a boy trying to sell the radio from that vehicle. Chee and Officer Manuelito visit the boy. Manuelito tells him of the reward from Mrs. Vander for finding the vehicle, and the boy leads them to the jeep. Pollard is not in it, but her field gear is, except for her Positive Air Purifying Respirator (PAPR) suit. The spacesuit-like garment is used to keep her safe from airborne infections or toxins in the field. Chee listens to Jano's story of what happened before Chee arrived on the scene, learning about the first eagle that Jano tried to catch, but let go, because it was not fit for the religious ceremony. That eagle scratched him, and that is why the eagle he put in the cage shows no blood on it. Chee visits his grand uncle Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai for advice. Chee gets the advice on catching the first eagle and learns that his uncle is dying from lung cancer. Chee proceeds to Jano's first hunting blind and catches the first eagle. He calls the FBI agent in charge to collect the eagle in support of Jano. The agent refuses, so Chee begins recording the call. He tells Janet Pete he has the eagle and of the call, and that he taped it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_Time's_Abyss"title="Out of Time's Abyss">
"Out of Time's Abyss" is a direct sequel to "The Land That Time Forgot" and "The People That Time Forgot", continuing the lost world saga begun in the earlier stories. It connects the previous two installments, bringing in characters introduced in each. Burroughs completes the revelation of his lost world's unique biological system, only hinted at in the previous installment, in which the slow progress of evolution in the world outside is recapitulated as a matter of individual metamorphosis. This system forms a thematic element serving to unite the three otherwise rather loosely linked Caspak stories.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaze_(novel)"title="Blaze (novel)">
The story concerns Clayton Blaisdell Jr. (known as "Blaze" for short, thus the title), a mentally disabled small-time con artist who kidnaps a wealthy gentleman's baby son, in the hopes of fulfilling the dreams of George Thomas Rackley, Blaze's deceased best friend and partner in crime and who continues to help him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wreck_of_the_Zephyr"title="The Wreck of the Zephyr">
While exploring the seaside clifftop near a small fishing village, the narrator comes upon the wreck of a small wooden sailboat. A weathered old man is sitting near the wreck, and the narrator asks him how the boat came to be there, so far from the water. The old man begins to tell the story of a young boy who, years ago, was the most talented sailor in the harbor, never missing an opportunity to prove it, performing feats that none of the grown men would dare try.One day the boy decided to go out despite the storm brewing just outside the harbor and against the warnings of an old fisherman. As he sails out of the harbor, a big gust strikes the boat and the strong waves knock him unconscious. When the boy recovers, he finds himself and the boat (the "Zephyr") stranded on a strange beach far above shore. He searches for help and after a long time crests a hill to see the "Zephyr" being towed by two boats floating through the air. From the hilltop the boy watches the two strange boats deposit the Zephyr in the harbor.Back in the harbor, he encounters a fisherman who, surprised at the boy's return, tells him that they do not get any visitors because the island is surrounded by a treacherous reef. He offers to take the boy home but the boy refuses, saying he will not leave before learning how to sail above the waves. The fisherman gives the boy a special set of sails for the "Zephyr" and spends all day trying to teach him, but the boy repeatedly fails to accomplish the task. The fisherman gives up and takes the boy home, where his wife has prepared dinner.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon's_Song"title="Solomon's Song">
"This is the story of two families – branches of the Solomons – transported to an alien land, both of whom eventually grow rich and powerful but who, through three generations, never for one moment relinquish their hatred for each other. It is also the story of our country from the beginning until we came of age as a nation. I have learned a great deal about Australia and those things which concern us as a people and make us, in many ways, who we are today. To write this book, I visited Gallipoli and came away deeply saddened by the terrible waste of our young blood. We would never be quite the same again. It has been a grand adventure and I hope that you will find "Solomon's Song" a good and powerful story. No writer can possibly hope for more".—Bryce Courtenay on book jacket.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_in_the_Forest"title="The Castle in the Forest">
"The Castle in the Forest" tells the story of the young life of Adolf Hitler, his origins and his immediate family tree, through the eyes of what at first is portrayed as a young SS officer researching Hitler's genealogy at the behest of Heinrich Himmler, who opens the novel speaking to SS officers about the importance of strong traits that result through incest. The SS Officer, who initially instructs the reader to remember him as Dieter, reminds the reader of the penalty he would suffer from the Nazi Party should his writings become public knowledge. He proceeds to describe his search for Hitler's grandparents, to both detect any presence of Jewish ancestry and to ascertain whether Hitler was the product of incest. The story follows Hitler's father, Alois Hitler, his upbringing in a rural area of Austria, and his early marriages and work for the customs department of the Austrian government. Following two marriages and a number of affairs, Alois marries a relative, either his niece or his daughter, Klara, and the couple have three children who survive past childhood, the third of these being Hitler, who is referred to by Mailer as Adi.At this point, Dieter reveals himself to be an employee of Satan, instructed by his superiors to oversee the development of Hitler for possible use by the devil in the future. Dieter states that he had occupied the body of an SS officer when he chose to write his story, maintaining that, should Satan trace the work back to Dieter himself, he would be punished. Dieter follows Hitler through Austria, charting his development and taking a more active role as Hitler discovers wargames around the age of five, and witnesses the beating of the family dog which has a profound effect on him. At this point, Alois retires and the family move to a rural farm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_of_Nazareth"title="Man of Nazareth">
"Man of Nazareth" is a fictionalized historic account recalling the story of Jesus from his birth to his death.Burgess uses a Greek merchant recently returned from Jerusalem following the crucifixion as the narrator, a man recounting the stories he heard about Jesus while conducting his business there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deliverance_(novel)"title="Deliverance (novel)">
Narrated in the first person by Ed Gentry, a graphic artist and one of the four main characters, the novel opens with him and three friends, all middle-aged men who live in a large city in Georgia, planning a weekend canoe trip down the fictional Cahulawassee River in the northwest Georgia wilderness. It's a last chance to travel on this wild river, which is scheduled to be dammed to create a reservoir and generate hydropower. Besides Ed, the protagonists are insurance salesman Bobby Trippe, soft drink executive Drew Ballinger, and landlord Lewis Medlock, a physically fit outdoorsman who has promoted the canoe trip.The men drive into the mountains with two canoes. At a gas station in a mountain hamlet, Drew sees a local albino boy playing a banjo. He gets out his own guitar and plays a duet with the boy, who appears to be intellectually disabled, maybe inbred, but with great musical skills. The men arrange with local mechanics, the Griner brothers, to drive the foursome's cars to the fictitious town of Aintry, where the canoe voyage is scheduled to end two days later. The visitors put their canoes in the river and begin their journey. After they shoot some initial rapids and evening approaches, Ed reflects on the isolation into which the group has now voyaged.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_Universe"title="Captive Universe">
Chimal is a young Aztec tribesman living in an isolated valley which was sealed off from the rest of the world in ages past by a massive earthquake. Unlike the rest of his people, who are content with the way things are, he shows more interest in what lies outside the valley, and in asking questions that no one can answer. Indeed, he is altogether brighter; more intelligent than others, which often gets him into trouble, and makes him seem "unusual" to his peers.The valley is home to two villages, one on each side of the river that flows through the middle, Quilapa (Chimal's village) and Zaachila, both of which share a temple staffed with priests who perform holy duties and interpret the laws of the Gods. This includes a ban on intermarriage between the two villages, which is strictly observed. Despite this, Chimal's mother conceived Chimal by a man from Zaachila, a fact she manages to keep secret for many years.After Chimal refuses to marry his intended bride, and the chief priest dies of a stroke following the ensuing argument, he is arrested by the priests and condemned to sacrificial death. The Gods, angry at the sacrilege, cause the sun to fail to rise at dawn, and in the panic he is rescued by his mother, who takes his place in the cell where he is held. Before he leaves, she reveals who his real father was.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July's_People"title="July's People">
The novel is set during a fictional civil war in which black South Africans have violently overturned the system of apartheid. The story follows the Smales, a liberal White South African family who were forced to flee Johannesburg to the native village of their black servant, July.Maureen tries working with the women in the fields, digging up leaves and roots. Afterwards, she goes to see July, who is working on the bakkie.When July says she should not work with the women, she asks if he fears she will tell his wife about Ellen. He angrily asserts that she can only tell Martha that he has always been a good servant. Maureen, frightened, realizes that the dignity she thought she had always conferred upon him was actually humiliating to him. He informs her that he and the Smales have been summoned to the chief's village. Though July has authority in his village, they still must ask the chief's permission to stay. Maureen struggles with her new subservience to July.After Gina goes to play with Nyiko and Bam goes with Victor and Royce to fish, a helicopter with unidentifiable markings flies over the village.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_of_the_Spider_Woman_(novel)"title="Kiss of the Spider Woman (novel)">
Two prisoners, Luis Molina and Valentín Arregui, share a cell in a Buenos Aires prison. The story takes place between September 9, 1975 and October 8, 1975. Molina is in jail for "corruption of a minor", while Valentín is a political prisoner who is part of a revolutionary group trying to overthrow the government. The two characters, seemingly opposites in every way, form an intimate bond in their cell, and their relationship changes both of them in profound ways. Molina recounts various films he has seen to Valentín in order to help them forget their situation.Toward the middle of the novel, the reader finds out that Molina is actually a spy planted in Valentín's cell to befriend him and try to extract information about his organization. Molina gets provisions from the outside for his cooperation with the officials in the hopes of keeping up appearances that his mother comes to visit him (thus giving him a reason to leave the cell when he reports to the warden). It is through his general acts of kindness to Valentín that the two fall into a romance and become lovers, albeit briefly. For his cooperation, Molina is paroled. On the day he leaves, Valentín asks Molina to take a message to his revolutionary group on the outside. Little does he know that he is also being followed by secret police trying to find the location of the group.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Percy_Hits_Back"title="Sir Percy Hits Back">
For young and pretty Fleurette the revolution seems far away until an aristocratic neighbouring family is threatened. The dangers become all too real, and she is accused of being a traitor. Can her father save her? Fleurette's father is Armand Chauvelin. The villainous agent is forced to ask his arch-enemy, the heroic Scarlet Pimpernel, for help.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_a_Carve_Up!_(novel)"title="What a Carve Up! (novel)">
The novel concerns the political and social environment in Britain during the 1980s, and covers the period up to the beginning of aerial bombardment against Iraq in the first Gulf War in January 1991. It is a critique of British politics under the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher (and, briefly, John Major) and of the ways in which national policy was seen to be dictated by the concerns of narrow, but powerful, interest groups with influence in banking, the media, agriculture, healthcare, the arms trade and the arts. Coe creates the fictitious Winshaw family to embody these different interests under one name and, ultimately, one roof.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Red_Jericho"title="Operation Red Jericho">
In 1920, the heroes of the story Rebecca and Doug McKenzie, leave Shanghai aboard their uncle's ship "Expedient", intent on discovering the whereabouts of their missing parents who have disappeared while on a secret mission to the deserts of Western China.Faced with terrifying bloodthirsty pirates, submarines, and deadly torpedoes, their task quickly becomes a dangerous struggle to survive. Rebecca and Doug discover that the answers they seek lie in a tangle of mysterious age-old societies guarding ancient secrets, and particularly a strange and dangerous substance, known as Daughter Of The Sun, which lies at the heart of the mystery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Laughing_Cavalier_(novel)"title="The Laughing Cavalier (novel)">
In March 1623, the Dutch nobleman Willem van Oldenbarnevelt, Lord of Stoutenburg, is on the run. His father, the statesman Johan van Oldenbarnevelt ("John of Barneveld" in the book) was falsely accused of treason and sent to the gallows by the Stadtholder, Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange in 1619; and his brother Reinier van Oldenbarnevelt, the lord of Groeneveld, has since been arrested and executed for plotting to kill the Prince. Stoutenburg is now a fugitive and determined to get his revenge.Stoutenburg asks for shelter from Gilda Beresteyn, the daughter of a rich merchant. Gilda was once in love with Stoutenburg, but has never forgiven him for abandoning her to make a more profitable marriage. Despite her reservations she shelters him for a short time, but eventually she sends him away, knowing that her father, a friend of the Prince of Orange, will not approve.Nine months later, Gilda is walking through Haarlem to the New Year's Eve service and sees three foreign adventurers intervening to protect a Spanish woman who is being attacked by a mob. After the fracas is over, Gilda speaks to the three men. They are mercenaries who call themselves after famous philosophers: "Diogenes," "Socrates," and "Pythagoras." Gilda is attracted to "Diogenes" (really Percy Blakeney, the illegitimate son of an English nobleman and a Dutch woman), but he offends her by taking his leave and going off to a pub.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sideways_Arithmetic_from_Wayside_School"title="Sideways Arithmetic from Wayside School">
The first chapter introduces Sue, a new student in Mrs. Jewls's class. She is bewildered to discover that the arithmetic lessons involve adding words instead of numbers, using verbal arithmetic. Chapter 1 has 11 problems all about adding and subtracting using words.In the next chapter, Sue complains that they're not supposed to do math that way, and says a few problems (for example, seven + four = eleven), which Mrs. Jewls states are impossible, and the reader has to figure out why the problems Sue mentioned are impossible. In the next chapter, Mrs. Jewls tells Sue that if she doesn't understand how to do math there, she should change to a different school, but when Sue inadvertently gets a question correct, Mrs. Jewls lets her stay. Chapter 4 also contains multiplication problems. Chapter 5 is about recess, where after a storyline is told, the students have to figure the answer of a few questions about what happened at recess. Chapter 6 involves Mrs. Jewls having trouble filling out report cards because she doesn't have all the grades, so she needs to figure out the answers on the quizzes in order to grade the students. Chapter 7 involves more logical questions, and Chapter 8 presents the reader with "true or false" tests in which the assertions refer to themselves. The last chapter is about Sue finally making a new friend, Joy (who stays after school trying to figure out her true or false test involving the liar's paradox), and they go home together after school.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Act_of_Roger_Murgatroyd"title="The Act of Roger Murgatroyd">
Colonel ffolkes and his wife Mary have invited a few house guests to spend the Christmas holidays at their remote country seat on Dartmoor. Selina ffolkes, the Colonel's 21-year-old daughter, arrives on Christmas Eve with two others: Donald Duckworth, a young American art student; and Raymond Gentry, an ill-mannered gossip columnist who, uninvited and slightly drunk, soon gets on everyone's nerves. The whole action of the novel takes place on Boxing Day when, early in the morning, Gentry is found murdered in the attic. Snowed in and unable to call the police, the party decide to ask their neighbour, a retired Chief Inspector with Scotland Yard, for help. The latter agrees but finds a rival sleuth in Evadne Mount, one of the house guests and a celebrated author of whodunits in her own right. When the Chief Inspector and Mount start their preliminary investigation of the crime, it soon turns out that each of the guests has a skeleton in the cupboard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentlemen_Prefer_Blondes_(novel)"title="Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (novel)">
Born in Arkansas, a blonde flapper named Lorelei Lee meets Gus Eisman, a Chicago businessman whom she calls "Daddy." He installs her in a New York City apartment and spends a small fortune "educating" her. He pays for jewelry from Cartier, dinners at the Ritz, and tickets to the Ziegfeld Follies. During this time, she meets a married novelist named Gerry Lamson, who frowns upon her liaison with Eisman. Lamson wishes to "save" her from Eisman and asks her to marry him. Not wishing to forgo an upcoming trip to Europe paid for by Eisman, Lorelei spurns Lamson. Meanwhile, she is dismayed that her friend Dorothy Shaw wastes her time with a poor editor named Mencken, who writes for a dull magazine, when she could be spending time with wealthier men.Lorelei and Dorothy sail for Europe on the RMS "Majestic". Lorelei learns that Bartlett, a former district attorney who is now a U.S. Senator, is aboard the ship. She tells a sympathetic Englishman about how she met Bartlett. She recounts a dubious backstory in which a lawyer employed her as a stenographer, and she shot him to defend her virtue. During the trial, which Bartlett prosecuted, Lorelei gave such "compelling" testimony that the all-male jury acquitted her. The skeptical judge bought her a ticket to Hollywood so that she could use her acting talents to become a star. Due to her siren-like personality, the judge nicknamed her "Lorelei". Conspiring with the Englishman, Lorelei exacts revenge on Bartlett by seducing him and revealing private information about his senatorial activities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_the_Assassins_(novel)"title="Our Lady of the Assassins (novel)">
A writer named Fernando returns to Medellín, after an absence of 30 years, to find the place transformed into Colombia's "capital of hate." Fernando meets Alexis, a 16-year-old male prostitute and sicario - a contract killer - with whom he falls in love. Alexis needs no reason to kill: like an Angel of Death he opens fire on anybody who rubs him the wrong way. Fernando and Alexis are bound by an intense passion as they wander from church to church, murder to murder. Alexis explains the meanings and symbols of the dangerous world of Medellín guns, while the author recounts his childhood memories in a Medellín that is no longer the one he once knew. When Alexis is finally killed by two teenagers on a motorbike, Fernando seeks out his killer.He finds Wilmar, another sicario with a surprising resemblance to the late Alexis, not only physically but also in his behaviour. Attempting to recapture his old life with Alexis, he soon finds out that he has started a relationship with the killer of Alexis, but chooses not to kill him as Wilmar explains that Alexis had killed his brother. Fernando asks Wilmar to leave the country with him. The boy agrees, but while visiting his mother to say goodbye, he too is shot and killed. Fernando winds up alone in the middle of a city where love seems impossible.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damia's_Children"title="Damia's Children">
Humanity has found a new ally in their ongoing war against the Beetle Hive, a tenacious species called the Mrdini. In order to better understand each other, some humans and 'Dinis are raised together from childhood; one such family are the children of Damia and Afra Lyon, powerful psychic Talents of the Raven-Lyon clan who form the backbone of humanity's teleportation network. But the two species' common enemy, the expansionist Beetle aliens, are once again encroaching on inhabited territory, necessitating that despite their youth, Damia's Children must become the last line of defense for both Human and 'Dini."Damia's Children" tells the first half of a story which is continued in "Lyon's Pride".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_the_What"title="What Is the What">
Achak is separated from his family during the Second Sudanese Civil War when the Arab militia, referred to as "murahaleen" (which is Arabic for the deported), wipes out his Dinka village, Marial Bai. During the assault, he loses sight of his father and his childhood friends, Moses and William K. William K escapes. However, Moses is believed to be dead after the assault. Achak seeks shelter in the house of his aunt with his mother, who is frequently identified throughout the book with a yellow dress. Before they are hidden, they hear the screaming of Achak's aunt, and his mother goes to investigate. Achak never sees her again. He evades detection by hiding in a bag of grain, and credits God for helping him stay quiet.He flees on foot with a group of other young boys (the "Lost Boys"), encountering great danger and terrible hardship along the way to Pinyudo, a refugee camp in Ethiopia. Their inflated expectations of safety and relief are shattered by the conditions at the camp. After Ethiopian president Mengistu is overthrown and soldiers open fire on them, they flee to another refugee camp in Kakuma, Kenya.The book consists of three parts: part 1 covers Achak's experiences in Sudan before he becomes a refugee aged 6 in 1983, part 2 is about his years in the camp in Ethiopia and part 3 covers his life during more than a decade in Kakuma, Kenya. There is a framework story of Achak living in Atlanta in 2005 where he is assaulted, robbed and injured in his own apartment. As he is going through that experience he tells his story to Michael, the 10-year old assigned to guard him by his assailants (part 1), to Julian the reception nurse in the Emergency Room where he waits for treatment for 14 hours (part 2) and several members of the gym where he works the reception (part 3). The framework story allows him to tell about his experiences after arriving in the US as well as recent personal tragedy. Part 3 ends just before his departure from Kenya but does not describe his travels or the start of his American experience. The current story set in Atlanta also allows Achak, as the narrator, and Dave Eggers, as the novelist, to end the book on a high, inspiring note because the assault experience motivates Achak to pull himself together and reach for higher goals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_in_Amber"title="The Devil in Amber">
Box is feeling his age as he goes about the business of a Royal Academy assassin in 1920s New York. He has been assigned to kill a fence and cocaine dealer named Hubbard by the Royal Academy (which is a front for the British Secret Service in the Box novels). The assassination does not go smoothly and Box only survives due to the timely intervention of Percy Flarge, a younger agent of the same type as Box. After Flarge leaves, Box discovers a cloth with curious ancient writing hidden on Hubbard's corpse.His superior, Joshua Reynolds feels that it is time for Box to retire and allow Flarge to take his place but assigns Box to investigate the Fascist Anglo-United States Tribune (FAUST), and its sinister leader, Olympus Mons.At a costume party Box meets Professor Reiss-Mueller and Sal Volatile, a defector who wishes to leave FAUST, hints that the organisation constitutes a grave threat to the world and arranges for Box to attend a meeting of FAUST, where Box discovers that his sister, Pandora Box, has become a fascist convert and is second in command of the organisation.Later that night Reiss-Mueller meets with Box and identifies the writing on the cloth Box retrieved from Hubbard. The writing is part of an occult invocation intended to summon the devil. Back at his hotel, Box has a meeting with Christopher Miracle, who informs Box that Olympus Mons has been carrying out an archaeology dig at a castle on the border between Switzerland and France. The castle is known to Box, having been the location of an undisclosed espionage adventure during World War I, which led to the death of Box's lover and valet, Charlie Jackpot, and left Christopher Miracle a broken man.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Russian_Debutante's_Handbook"title="The Russian Debutante's Handbook">
The novel opens on the 25th birthday of its protagonist, Vladimir Girshkin. Vladimir is a Jewish immigrant whose family moved from Russia when he was a boy. The novel begins in 1993, in New York City, where Vladimir works for the Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society (for a measly $8.00/hour). He shares an apartment with his girlfriend, an overweight redhead named Challah who works as a dominatrix. Vladimir is painfully conscious of his parents' disappointment in his inability to make something more of himself, and spends most of his days in a dull routine. He is approached by an Aleksander Rybakov, an immigrant Vladimir refers to as "The Fan Man", due to the electric fan he carries with him and treats as an old friend. Rybakov introduces himself as the father of the Groundhog, a mafia figure in the Eastern European city of Prava / Prague, referred to in the book as "the Paris of the 90s". He asks for Vladimir's assistance in obtaining full citizenship to the United States, and offers Vladimir compensation (presumably obtained from the Groundhog's business dealings). Vladimir is encouraging but quickly dismisses the old man as mentally ill.He goes out drinking with his friend Baobab one night, where he meets a young woman named Francesca, who comes from a wealthy family and has attended a prestigious university. Vladimir inserts himself into her social scene and enjoys the attention that comes from being a Russian Jew in such gentile society. Vladimir lives with Francesca and her family for several months. Dating Francesca stretches Vladimir's limited means to such a degree that he is forced to borrow money, first from his parents, and then from Mr. Rybakov. Baobab informs Vladimir that he can get $20,000 by going to Miami and posing as Baobab's boss's son for a college interview. Vladimir readily agrees, despite the deception involved, and finds himself in Miami with Baobab's boss Jordi. Jordi attempts to have sex with Vladimir, who flees in terror and secures a flight back to New York. On the way to the airport, Baobab informs Vladimir that Jordi is an important figure in a Catalan drug cartel who would happily kill Vladimir over such a slip-up.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nightmare_of_Black_Island"title="The Nightmare of Black Island">
On a lonely stretch of Welsh coastline, a fisherman is killed by a hideous creature from beneath the waves. When the Doctor and Rose arrive, they discover a village where the children are plagued by nightmares, and the nights are ruled by monsters. Bronwyn Ceredig, the old woman of the village, suspects that ailing industrialist Nathaniel Morton is to blame, but the Doctor has suspicions of his own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sora_Iro_no_Tane"title="Sora Iro no Tane">
One day, a young boy named Yuuji was playing with his favorite model airplane when a fox asked him to trade the airplane for the fox's treasured "blue seed". Yuuji planted the seed in his garden and watered it. The next morning, it had grown into a small toy-like blue house. Yuuji chanted, "Grow bigger!" while continuing to take care of it. Before long, it had grown bigger and a small chick started living in it, saying, "This is my house!"The house continued growing bigger and bigger. A cat and a pig took up residence there as well. Yuuji's friends all came over and had a great time in the house. Soon, all kinds of forest animals and neighborhood kids came to the house as it grew larger and larger. When the house had grown really large, the fox came by and was astonished at how large the house had grown. He told Yuuji he would like to return the model airplane and take back the house. So, all the animals and children in the house left.The fox entered the house by himself and quickly locked all the doors and windows. Yuuji said, "Oh no! The sun is going to crash into the house!" The sun did just that, causing the house to crumble and disappear. After that, the fox collapsed in a faint where the seed had been planted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Santini_(novel)"title="The Great Santini (novel)">
Hard-nosed Marine fighter pilot Lt. Col. Wilbur "Bull" Meecham calls himself "The Great Santini". He runs his family with a strict hand. In 1962, before the Vietnam War, the Meecham family struggles to fit into the Marine town of Ravenel, South Carolina (closely based on Beaufort, South Carolina) where they are newcomers. Conroy makes the point that Santini is a warrior without a war, and in turn is at war alternately with the service that he loves and his family.The novel explores main character Ben Meecham's growth into manhood, his experiences playing basketball for his high school, as well as his friendships with a Jewish classmate and an African-American farmer. The novel exposes the love-hate relationship between Ben and his father, and the lengths Ben goes to in an effort to win his father's acceptance and love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_That_Stood_Still"title="The House That Stood Still">
Through various intrigues and investigations, a California estate lawyer learns that the pre-Toltec stone building upon which his retainer's ancestor, a "conquistador", built a mansion four centuries earlier, confers immortality to those who know its secret. A cult of immortals operates secretly from the house and even has spaceships capable of travel to Mars where it has a base.The lawyer falls for a beautiful cult member who tells him an atomic war is imminent and that most of the cultists want to remove the building's stones to Mars to keep their power safe from radioactive fallout. He makes it his mission to prevent the war, secure the secret of the ancient house for the benefit of all mankind, and get the girl.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunting_Badger"title="Hunting Badger">
Sophisticated robbers shoot the security guards at the Ute Casino, turn off the electricity and then steal the cash bagged and ready to be picked up for deposit to the bank. Cap Stoner is killed outright, while young Teddy Bai is severely wounded, but immediately suspected by the FBI as the "inside man" for the robbery. Chee returns from a long vacation in Alaska to be drawn into the investigation at the request of Officer Manuelito, who does not believe Bai is guilty. Roy Gershwin draws Leaphorn into the investigation by saying that he knows who did it, leaving a list of three names with Leaphorn. Why does he choose Leaphorn, and not the police or the FBI? The FBI announces that the perpetrators fled in an airplane stolen from Mr. Timms.Chee and his friend Cowboy Dashee revisit the site where the escape vehicle was found with two sets of footprints, and visit the Timms place nearby. They track the aircraft to the second landholding of Timms, so the criminals are still on the loose. Leaphorn travels with Prof. Bourebonette, who is working near where the men on Gershwin's list live. Leaphorn finds Everett Jory in his house, shot dead, leaving a suicide note on his computer screen. The note names his two confederates in the crime, George Badger Ironhand and Alexander Buddy Baker, who misled Jory as to the use of the money. The pick-up truck parked at his place is the second seen at the Casino. The FBI gets active in the case again. The officer in charge, Mr. Cabot, directs a huge systematic search of the area near Jory's home (near the border of Arizona with Utah), with the local police forces doing the searching. Prof. Bourebonette interviews a Ute woman with Leaphorn in company. The woman relates the story of Ironhand from the early 20th century, a man who fooled the Navajos in pursuit of him. He had a son who was a skilled fighter in the Vietnam War, still alive. About the same time, Chee visits his uncle Frank Sam Nakai, finding him mistakenly in a hospital. Once he and Manuelito move Nakai back to his home, Nakai warns Chee of Ironhand and the coal mine, and gives Chee his final lesson on the Nightway ceremonial. Then Nakai dies of lung cancer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_Bonds"title="Azure Bonds">
The trilogy's titular "finder's stone" plays a relatively limited role and has an essentially introductory presence in the novel.The story begins with the main character, an adventurer named Alias, awakening in a disoriented and amnesic state. She soon discovers that she has a newly acquired azure colored tattoo imprinted on the inside of her sword arm in the space between her wrist and elbow. At first she attributes her memory loss to inebriation and the tattoo as a drunken prank by companions. She soon finds that the tattoo is magical in origin, resists attempts to remove it and most worryingly, exerts a power to compel her actions.Before long, Alias becomes the nucleus of a disparate party of adventurers: a mysterious lizard-creature named Dragonbait, a southern mage called Akabar Bel Akash, and a halfling "bard" named Olive Ruskettle. The novel's plot follows the actions of the party which are combinations of the group's investigations and interruptions caused by the compulsions of the tattoo.It is later revealed that Alias herself is in fact a complicated, magically created, artificial being intended by her creators to be their proxy in various nefarious purposes. The tattoo was to be a means of control as well as a branding of ownership by each of the collaborating parties involved in her creation. Her long term memories were actually granted to her by her sole benign (but misled) creator and her short term memory loss is due in part to the gap between the end of her artificial memories and her premature awakening.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Angel"title="Green Angel">
Green is a quiet and shy 15-year-old girl. She lives with her mother, father, and beautiful younger sister Aurora, in a house on the city's green outskirts. While her sister is wild, charming and impatient, Green is timid and reserved, and has the infinite patience required to tend to the family garden. After mastering the art of tending the garden, she becomes the garden's main caretaker.One day, her family goes to the city to sell produce, leaving Green behind. There, her family perishes as a result of a conflagration in the city, believed to be done by a secretive, malevolent group of people (also widely assumed to be the events of 9/11). Many people in the city die that day, leaving behind orphans and heartbroken survivors. Ashes from the fire make Green half-blind and singes her hair, forcing her to cut her hair off. Green, deeply sorrowed, changes her appearance and personality and renames herself Ash as she decides to destroy her past to cover the internal pain she is suffering. She tattoos almost her entire body with black roses, vines and bats, continuing to suffer but growing indifferent toward her pain.Over time as she takes care of herself, through interactions with several kinds of animals that dote on her, a silent boy she calls Diamond, and a kind old neighbor, Green starts to heal from her pain. As she grows, she finds her leaf and stem tattoos turning green and the rosebuds turning red. Finally, on her 16th birthday, she is no longer Ash, as she once used to be, but is once again Green, finding the taste of summer and apples within her. Now, after her recovery, she is strong enough to tell her family's tragic story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ringmaster's_Daughter"title="The Ringmaster's Daughter">
The novel uses a frequent Gaarder device of telling a story within a story. It is narrated by a Norwegian named Petter, who recounts his life since childhood. Petter grows up with a single mother and had few friends, although he does possess an overly-imaginative mind. As an adult Petter sells ideas, stories, and plots to frustrated writers, and soon expands to include clients across Europe. In the meantime Petter meets and falls in love with a woman named Maria. Maria tells him that she is leaving for Stockholm and that they must never see each other again, but first asks Petter to father her child.Eventually writers and members of the publishing industry become suspicious, and rumors spread of a "Spider" who sells ideas to everyone. At a publishing convention in Bologna, Petter is warned that his life may be in danger, so he takes the first flight out. Going into hiding, Petter arrives on the Amalfi Coast, where he falls in love with a woman named Beate. Both are initially secretive about their pasts, but as Petter begins to tell Beate some of his stories, Beate gets angry and disgusted, telling him that she will only see him once more on the following day. During the night Petter dawns on the realization that Beate must have heard the same stories from her mother, Maria, thereby making him Beate's father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabiola_(novel)"title="Fabiola (novel)">
The story is set in Rome the early 4th century AD, during the time of the persecution of Christians under the Roman Emperor Diocletian.The heroine of the book is Fabiola, a young beauty from a noble Roman family. She is spoiled by her father Fabius, who cannot deny her anything. Fabiola seems to have everything, including a superior education in the philosophers, yet under the surface, she is not content with her life. One day, in a fit of rage, she attacks and wounds her slave girl Syra, who is a secret Christian. The proud, spoiled Roman girl is humbled by Syra's humility, maturity and devotion to her in this situation, and a slow transformation begins, which finally culminates in her conversion to Christianity, brought on by Syra and of her own cousin Agnes, whom she adores and dotes on.Another thread of the story deals with the young boy Pancratius, a pious Christian and son of a martyr, who is himself preparing for martyrdom. Pancratius' nemesis is Corvinus, a bullying schoolmate who is irritated by the young Christian's saintliness. He does everything to bring him and the Christian community of the catacombs of Rome down. This includes the orchestrating of the lynching of their former teacher Cassianus, who is secretly Christian. Yet Pancratius shows his enemy the meaning of Christian forgiveness when he saves his life shortly after Corvinus had Cassianus killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Destruction"title="The Art of Destruction">
The TARDIS arrives in 22nd century Africa, where agri-teams are growing food in the rich soil around a dormant volcano to feed the hungry millions of Earth. However, the time travellers detect an alien signal nearby. As something moves in the volcanic tunnels, the Doctor realises an ancient trap has been triggered.The Doctor and Rose meet Solomon Nabarr and Basel who explain that the Time travellers have just landed right by Mount Tarsus in Chad.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_Continuous"title="Past Continuous">
The novel focuses on three friends, Goldman, Caesar, and Israel, in 1970's Tel Aviv, as well as their acquaintances, love interests, and relatives. The story begins with the death of Goldman's father on April 1 and ends a little after Goldman's suicide on January 1. The past is woven into this short "present" period, through a complex stream of associations.The three men, lurching between guilt and depression, lose themselves in sexual adventures, amateur philosophy or compare their lives unfavorably to those of their sometimes heroic, sometime pitiful elders. The older characters can always hold firm to something or other, whether socialism and hatred of religious Jews, insights gained in Siberia, or refusal to admit that Israel is not Poland. The younger characters seethe instead in doubt and sweat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Price_of_Paradise"title="The Price of Paradise">
Laylora, the Paradise Planet, is a world of breathtaking beauty, where peace-loving Aboriginals supposedly live in harmony with their environment. Years ago, a human called Rez arrived on the planet as a baby in an escape pod, and was adopted by the native people. The Doctor and Rose arrive to answer a distress signal from a group of scientists, who were shot down by an EMP, only to find that the once-perfect eco-system is showing signs of failing. Natural disasters are becoming more frequent, and creatures from ancient legends are appearing and attacking people. The Doctor realises that the planet is a perfect equation: when left alone it is a paradise, but when alien objects visit the planet, the equation becomes unbalanced, and the planet causes disasters to try to repair itself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feeling_Sorry_for_Celia"title="Feeling Sorry for Celia">
The story's protagonist is a 15-year-old-girl named Elizabeth Clarry. Elizabeth lives in a suburb of Sydney, Australia, with her mother and her dog, a collie named Lochie. The story begins when Elizabeth, who attends an exclusive private school called Ashbury, is forced to begin a letter correspondence with a student from the local comprehensive high school (Brookfield), by her new English teacher, Mr. Botherit. The recipient of Elizabeth's letter is a girl named Christina Kratovac. Elizabeth and Christina become friends almost immediately. Elizabeth confides in Christina as she feels very alone and confused about her life. She does not fit in at Ashbury and she has an awkward relationship with her father (who left Elizabeth's mother when she was pregnant and moved to Canada with another woman and her son), who has just been reintroduced into her life in a permanent way. But mainly, her concerns revolve around her best friend, an awkward, free-spirited girl named Celia Buckley who has run away from home without leaving any details as to her whereabouts. Added to this are the barrage of letters that Elizabeth constantly receives from various societies and clubs, each pointing out her faults and generally bringing her down. The letters are reflections of Elizabeth's own subconscious thoughts and are not actually real.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Child_of_the_Revolution"title="A Child of the Revolution">
During one return home, Sir Percy tells the story of André Vallon, a young Jacobin, to the Prince of Wales. André, wishing to revenge himself on a despotic seigneur, uses the Jacobins' rise to force the seigneur's daughter to marry him. Once wed, they come to love each other, only to have the old seigneur denounce André in an attempt to free his daughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Sir_Percy"title="The First Sir Percy">
It is March 1624 in Holland. Two months earlier, a mercenary/adventurer who calls himself "Diogenes" foiled the plot on the life of the Stadtholder. Now, he has finally met his real father, an English nobleman, and realized his true identity as Sir Percy Blake of Blakeney, heir to a large estate in Sussex. He will soon marry Gilda Beresteyn, the woman he was paid to kidnap in January.Blakeney has invited his friends from his mercenary days, "Socrates" and "Pythagoras," to the wedding. However, while traveling there, Pythagoras runs afoul of Lord Stoutenburg (now a fugitive for his plot to kill the Stadtholder). Stoutenburg recognizes Pythagoras, gets him drunk, and has his servant Jan shoot him in the back and leave him for dead.On the day of the wedding, Diogenes is concerned when Pythagoras does not show up. Socrates and a group of men go out to look for him. Just as the celebration is ending, Socrates returns with the wounded Pythagoras. After being given medical treatment, Pythagoras reveals that Stoutenburg has a new plan to assassinate the Stadtholder, namely, the Archduchess Isabella has troops crossing the IJssel and coming up from Kleve. They plan to seize the cities of Arnhem and Nijmegen, then march across the Veluwe and confront the Stadtholder with a vast army. On top of this, Stoutenburg is plotting to poison the Stadtholder using chemicals he has been taught to manufacture by Francis Borgia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triumph_of_the_Scarlet_Pimpernel"title="The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel">
The story starts in Paris in April 1794, year II of the French Revolution. Theresia Cabarrus is a beautiful but shallow Spaniard who is betrothed to Citizen Tallien the popular Representative in the Convention and one of Robespierre's inner circle. She is credited with exercising a mellowing influence over Tallien, whom she met in Bordeaux but although she is engaged to be married to him, what little love she has appears to be lavished on another.Bertrand Moncrif is a good-looking but impulsive young man who appears determined to martyr himself in opposition to the revolutionary government. To this end, he has gathered the siblings of his long-term sweetheart, Régine de Serval, into his plan to denounce Robespierre at one of the Fraternal suppers. Despite warnings from Régine he insists on carrying through his plans which inevitably go awry and the wrath of the mob is soon turned towards the small group. After a timely intervention on the part of the Scarlet Pimpernel, using the guise of the coal heaver Rateau (who also appears in several short stories in The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel - "The Cabaret de la Liberté", "Needs Must" and "A Battle of Wits"), the de Servals are saved from a lynching while Moncrif lies unconscious and unseen under a table.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Gold_Murders"title="The Chinese Gold Murders">
Judge Dee is a recently appointed magistrate to the miserable town/district of Peng-lai. On the way to town, he meet two ruffians in the woods; Chiao Tai and Ma Joong. They try to rob the judge but instead ends up to be his trusted followers. Arriving to Peng-lai Judge Dees start the investigation of the murder of his predecessor. The investigation is made more complex due to the disappearance of his chief clerk as well as the disappearance of a new bride of a wealthy local shipowner. Meanwhile, a tiger is terrorizing the district, the ghost of the murdered magistrate is stalking members of the court, a prostitute has a secret message for Judge Dee, and the body of a murdered monk is found to have been placed in the wrong grave, and there is a serious rumor of smuggling of weapons to Korea. What could possibly relate all these events?The Chinese Gold Murders is not the first Judge Dee book that the author wrote, but in the series setting, it is the first story, and shows how the judge meet Chiao Tai and Ma Joong. The town of Peng-lai is also the setting for other Judge Dee stories including: "The Lacquer Screen", and three of the short stories from "Judge Dee at Work".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Orange_Splot"title="The Big Orange Splot">
The main character, Mr. Plumbean, lives on a "neat street" where all the houses look the same. A seagull flies over his house and drops a can of bright orange paint on his roof, but instead of repainting his house to look like all the others on the street, Mr. Plumbean paints it to resemble his dreams. His neighbors send people to talk him into repainting his house to look like theirs, but everyone he talks to ends up painting their houses like their dreams also. In the end, all the neighbors say: "Our street is us and we are it. Our street is where we like to be, and it looks like all our dreams." The drawings were made with markers, and if one looks closely one can see the marker lines. In an interview in 1978 Daniel Manus Pinkwater revealed the hallucinogenic undertones clearly referenced throughout the story. Due to this interview the book was pulled from most libraries in Missouri in the early 1980s.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stones_of_Nomuru"title="The Stones of Nomuru">
Terran archeologist Keith Salazar’s excavation of the ancient Kukulkan city of Nomuru is endangered by the plans of the avaricious Conrad Bergen to develop the site. Their dispute is complicated by rivalry over Kara Sheffield, Salazar’s former wife, and an invasion of the lands of the civilized Kukulkanians by the Chosa nomads. To preserve his dig and advance his suit, Salazar must avoid being murdered by Bergen, bestir the civilized natives to battle the nomads, and manipulate his superior at the museum funding him in order to secretly supply Terran weapons to his allies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monkey_and_the_Tiger"title="The Monkey and the Tiger">
The first story is called "The Morning of the Monkey" and is set in the fictional city of Han-yuan in the year 666. One morning a gibbon drops an emerald ring right at the entrance to Judge Dee's house. This leads to the discovery of a strangely mutilated body out in the nearby forest.Han-yuan is the setting for several other Judge Dee stories including "The Chinese Lake Murders" and one of the stories from "Judge Dee at Work".The second story, called "The Night of the Tiger", takes place a decade later when Judge Dee is returning to the capital at Chang'an when bandits force Judge Dee to take cover in an isolated country house. There he must fight off the vicious cut-throats as well as solve a murder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragons_in_the_Waters"title="Dragons in the Waters">
Simon's Aunt Leonis accepts an invitation for Simon to travel by freighter to Venezuela with Simon's cousin, Forsyth Phair. Phair recently purchased a valuable heirloom painting of Simon Bolivar from Aunt Leonis. It is a relic of Simon's forebear, Quentin Phair, who fought at Bolivar's side. The portrait was sold to raise money to support Simon and Miss Leonis, who is ninety years old. Forsyth proposes to donate the portrait to a museum in Caracas — but all is not as it seems. A dangerous "accident" involving a forklift and odd interactions aboard the "S.S. Orion" lead fellow passengers Poly and Charles O'Keefe to believe that Simon's "Cousin Forsyth" may be a source of danger to Simon. When Forsyth is murdered and the portrait is stolen, Polly does not know what to think, but it is clear that Simon is still in danger.Another passenger, Mr. Theo, calls for Poly's godfather, Canon Tallis, to come and investigate, but Tallis and Simon are both kidnapped by the local police chief upon arrival in Port of Dragons, Venezuela, and left stranded in the jungle. Miss Leonis also arrives, having learned before the murder that the check paying for the portrait was worthless. She has also just read Quentin Phair's letters and journals, thus learning belatedly that Simon's heroic ancestor left behind a wife and son among the Quiztano Indians of Dragonlake in Venezuela. Phair also started the "Caring Places", two large buildings in which Quiztano healers, some of them with medical degrees, help the sick and the dying. The connection between Quentin Phair and Umara of the Quiztanos is the underlying cause of Simon's current predicament, part of a tangled web of murder, smuggling, blackmail and a generations-old grudge. Alejandro Hurtado, a friend of Tallis, initially arrests Jan, a Dutch sailor with Quiztano blood, but the ship's first mate, Lyolf Boon, soon confesses to Phair's murder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Willow_Pattern_(novel)"title="The Willow Pattern (novel)">
Judge Dee is now a senior member of the Chinese government and has been appointed the Chief Judge in the Tang capital of Chang-An. One of the city's oldest, and most important aristocratic families becomes the subject of investigation. Three murders are committed and Judge Dee must find the connection.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_Canton"title="Murder in Canton">
Judge Dee is now the most senior judge in all of China and his authority is little less than that of the Emperor himself. Canton is the most important trading port in the country, filled with merchants from many other lands, some as far away as India and Baghdad. When one of the secretive but very powerful Imperial censors goes missing in Canton, Judge Dee must come to the city in disguise and investigate. He is aided by a beautiful blind girl who collects crickets.This is the last story in the internal chronology of Judge Dee.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necklace_and_Calabash"title="Necklace and Calabash">
Judge Dee is a magistrate in the fictional Poo-yang district, a wealthy area through which the Grand Canal of China runs (part of modern-day Jiangsu province). The Emperor's daughter lives in the district at the Water Palace but it falls under a special administration run by the military commander. Judge Dee goes to the area for a few days of relaxing fishing but soon meets with a strange Taoist hermit; next a body is found in the river. Then the Emperor's daughter appeals to Judge Dee for aid. The mysteries keep building up and Judge Dee has to tread very carefully to avoid serious political fallout from his investigations.Poo-yang was the setting for many Judge Dee stories including: "The Emperor's Pearl", "The Chinese Bell Murders", "Poets and Murder", and "The Red Pavilion".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poets_and_Murder"title="Poets and Murder">
Judge Dee is a magistrate in the fictional Poo-yang district, a wealthy area through which the Grand Canal of China runs (part of modern-day Jiangsu province). During the mid-autumn festival in the city of Chin-hwa, Judge Dee is a guest of a small group of distinguished scholars. However, he learns during dinner that a young girl has been murdered and the accused is a beautiful poet. She is thought to have whipped her maidservant to death, but why? Then the body of a student is also discovered. The poet is based on Chinese courtesan and poet Yu Xuanji.Poo-yang was the setting for many Judge Dee stories including: "The Emperor's Pearl", "The Chinese Bell Murders", "Necklace and Calabash", and "The Red Pavilion".The book was also published in the US under the title of "The Fox Magic Murders".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sweet_Far_Thing"title="The Sweet Far Thing">
The prologue begins with two men who are searching a river in London (three years before the events of the book) for dead bodies to fence any jewelry or money left upon them. They come across the body of a girl wearing a crescent moon amulet identical to Gemma's own.At Spence academy Gemma struggles to open the Realms. Pressure builds on her as her friends plot to use her magic to alter the courses of their lives. But after much struggling Gemma finds a backdoor-like entry into the Realms. By touching a mysterious stone unearthed during the reconstruction of the east wing of Spence Gemma can enter the Realms. There Gemma, Felicity, and Ann find Pippa among a group of girls she claims to have saved from entering the Winterlands. Pippa leads the group of girls and attempts to teach them manners in a similar fashion that she was taught at Spence.Pippa asks Gemma to help her cross over from the Realms into a heaven-like area but finds that she cannot because she has been in the Realms too long. This causes her a great deal of distress and a guilt-ridden Gemma begins giving her an allowance of magic to help her get through the sadness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fairly_Honourable_Defeat"title="A Fairly Honourable Defeat">
The lives of several friends are thrown into disarray by the machinations of Julius King. Julius makes a bet with his ex-girlfriend Morgan that he can break up the homosexual couple Axel and Simon; meanwhile, Morgan and her brother-in-law Rupert are tricked into embarking on an affair, and Morgan's nephew Peter is falling in love with her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_of_Emma_Courtney"title="Memoirs of Emma Courtney">
The novel consists of a series of philosophical letters from the heroine, Emma Courtney, to Augustus Harley, a young man she calls her son, who has recently been disappointed in love. Emma tells her life story. In her youth, Emma falls deeply in love with Augustus's father, also named Augustus Harley, but her pursuit of him fails - his income is only secure as long as he remains unmarried. Although she initially refuses to accept a life of security by marrying her admirer Mr. Montague, Emma eventually accepts when Augustus Harley is revealed to be already married, and Emma herself is facing financial hardship. Emma's marriage results in a series of tragedies, despite the appearance of a beloved daughter, and her passion for her first love never ceases. Near the end of the novel the two will meet again under unfortunate circumstances. Harley dies after an accident, and Montague commits suicide after a sexual encounter with a maid, whom he leaves pregnant. Emma adopts Harley's eldest son, and devotes herself to the lives of her children.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoodKnyght!"title="GoodKnyght!">
Willum, a swineherd and whipping boy for Symon, son of the city's High Lord, longs to go to Knyght School and to become a Knyght. After fighting for Symon in a Tournament for Symon, Willum is sent to Knyght School. After meeting up with a forest-dwelling girl named Rose, an Italian restaurateur named Luigi, Humfrey the Boggart, a Pryvate Inquestigator with a speech impediment, a sarcastic harp and a wizard known as The Runemaster who carries the Dragonsbane; a stone which can be used to access the mind of a dragon. When the Dragonsbane is stolen, Willum, Rose and the Harp travel to The Ragged Mountain to retrieve it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Men"title="The Righteous Men">
Will Monroe's normal life is disrupted when his wife is kidnapped while he is reporting on a story of a militia man found dead in his isolated log cabin. Further investigation into the death brings Monroe to the conclusion that the dead militia man shared an attribute with a New York City pimp, also recently murdered. They were both described as being 'righteous'. As more murders of 'righteous men' happen across the globe, time seems to be running out for Will and the old and current friends he has enlisted. With a series of clues from a mysterious source, absurd twists and religious factors Will soon finds himself in the middle of a plot to bring about nothing less than Judgement Day.The book focuses on the fact that several people have been murdered in what can only be described as a humane way. What these victims have in common is that they have been described by folk who knew them as "righteous" (hence the title) although they led some mundane or unethical existence (i.e. pimps, drug barons or even call centre employees). Nothing seems to fit to connect the murders together. A rookie NY Times reporter is sent on a murder case (the pimp) and is then sent off to do a story in Seattle where he finds another victim here whilst trying to report on freak weather conditions. While he's away, his wife gets kidnapped by what turns out to be the Hassidic community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Tuscan_Sun_(book)"title="Under the Tuscan Sun (book)">
The story details the trials that recently divorced Frances and her new significant other, Ed, had to go through to renovate their Tuscan property, an abandoned villa named "Bramasole" ("longing for the sun") in rural Cortona in Tuscany. As university professors, they did not have to work during the summer; instead of teaching, they spent their summers renovating. While going through an extensive amount of paperwork to begin construction, they meet and befriend many people, including a group of Polish men and a local man who fixes their stone wall.They encounter many problems along the way; their Italian is poor and their contractors are lazy.Throughout the story, Frances imagines the villa's previous owner, possibly a kind old nonna. She pictures how the nonna would react to the renovations that Frances was doing to her home.The couple's main interest is to be able to return to their villa during Christmas break to celebrate the holidays. This is initially denied them during the first Christmas they return to Tuscany because they find their villa in shambles. This setback is resolved later in the book, when Frances and Ed get to spend their winter in their villa.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Convenient_Marriage"title="The Convenient Marriage">
When the wealthy and eligible Earl of Rule, 35 years old, proposes marriage to Elizabeth Winwood, she resigns herself to marrying against her will to rescue the fortunes of her impoverished family. Her youngest sister Horatia, a 17-year-old young woman with a stammer, decides to take matters into her own hands, meeting with the Earl and persuading him to marry her instead of Elizabeth and thus leaving Elizabeth free to marry her true (but far less eligible) love. Part of the deal she proposes to Rule is that she will not interfere with his activities after their marriage. The wedding takes place and, as tacitly agreed upon, the Earl continues his association with his mistress, Lady Caroline Massey.Horatia quickly becomes a popular and fashionable society wife, spending vast amounts of money on sensational outfits and at gambling on cards. The Earl is also obliged to make regular financial donations to support Horatia's likeable but debt-ridden brother, Pelham.Meanwhile, Horatia meets and befriends Lord Lethbridge, who seeks revenge on the Earl for his role in thwarting Lethbridge's attempts to elope with Lady Louisa, Rule's sister, several years earlier. Lethbridge gains Horatia's favour by staging a hold-up of Horatia's carriage, where he heroically rides up to save her from the highwaymen. The Earl warns Horatia against continuing her friendship with Lethbridge; but when he declines to explain why, Horatia disregards his warning. Horatia, who wants to teach her husband a lesson, goes to a masked ball that the Earl had forbidden her from attending, with Lord Lethbridge as her escort. Having heard that Lethbridge is an excellent card player, she attempts to coerce Lethbridge into playing with her and he eventually relents, proposing that they play for a lock of her hair. Before the game can start, Lord Rule (who has followed Horatia disguised in a domino and mask) steps on Horatia's gown, ripping it. While she is away fixing her dress, he incapacitates Lethbridge and dresses himself in Lethbridge's mask and domino. When Horatia returns she doesn't realize her husband has taken Lethbridge's place and they begin to play cards. Horatia is badly beaten and during the game begins to realize the inappropriateness of her actions. When she gives up the lock of her hair, Rule (masquerading as Lethbridge) steals a kiss. Horatia, furious and indignant, rushes out and bumps into Lady Massey, who happens to be at the same ball. The next day Horatia confesses what happened to Rule because she can't bear for him to hear it from Lady Massey. The Earl explains his ruse and Horatia decides to end her friendship with Lethbridge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faro's_Daughter"title="Faro's Daughter">
The beautiful but poor Deborah Grantham presides over her aunt's gaming house in Georgian London. Here she meets Max Ravenscar, who is determined to prevent his young cousin Lord Mablethorpe from contracting an inappropriate marriage to Grantham. Incensed by the idea that she would exploit an innocent, Deborah decides to take her revenge on Ravenscar, which eventually leads to the pair falling in love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Riders"title="The Moon Riders">
This story is about the Moon Riders, known historically as the Amazons. The main character is Myrina, who joins the Amazons in her teenage years and becomes one of the very prestigious moon dancers.Myrina joins the Moon Riders when she is 14. She becomes friend and confidante to Cassandra the prophetic princess of Troy. As the 'Snake Lady' she acquires a gang of four young orphans who travel with her, until all but one have been killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_Quest"title="Song Quest">
Song Quest is first set on the Isle of Echoes where the Singers live in The Echorium. The Singers have many special abilities, the most important of which is knowledge of the Songs of Power: Challa for sleep, Kashe for laughter, Shi for sadness, Aushan for fear and Yehn for death. All Singer children, called novices, learn these Songs, but if their voices do not last into adulthood they receive a mild form of Yehn which makes them forget the Songs. The Singers can also farlisten to hear over great distances, an ability enhanced by the bluestone which the Isle is made up of, and hear truth. The Singers help to keep peace on the mainland, and produce treaties to protect Half Creatures - the half-human beings with knowledge of the Songs, which include merlee (fish/human) and quetzal (bird people). Song Quest is about two Final Year novices who travel to the mainland - one with permission, one without - and must try to help the merlee and quetzal who are being mistreated and butchered by the Karchholders in the northern mountains.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Run_(novel)"title="Coal Run (novel)">
In the coal-mining country of Western Pennsylvania outside of Pittsburgh, Coal Run is a town ravaged and haunted by a mine explosion that took the lives of 96 men. The story explores the life of local deputy and erstwhile football legend, "The Great Ivan Z.," as he prepares for a former teammate's imminent release from prison.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Mine"title="Sister Mine">
In the coal-mining country of Western Pennsylvania outside of Pittsburgh, the fictional locale of Jolly Mount is home to Shae-Lynn Penrose. Two years ago, five of her miner friends were catapulted to media stardom when they were rescued after surviving four days trapped in a mine. As the men struggle to come to terms with their ordeal, along with the fallout of their short-lived celebrity, Shae-Lynn finds herself facing her relationship with her brutal father, her conflicted passion for one of the miners, and the hidden identity of the man who fathered her son.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Benjamin_Bunny"title="The Tale of Benjamin Bunny">
When Mr. McGregor and his wife leave home in their gig, Benjamin Bunny and his cousin Peter Rabbit venture into Mr. McGregor's garden to retrieve the clothes Peter lost there in "The Tale of Peter Rabbit". They find the blue jacket and brown shoes on a scarecrow, but Peter is apprehensive about lingering in the garden because of his previous experience. Benjamin delays their departure by gathering onions, which he wraps in Peter's handkerchief, hoping to give them to his aunt, Peter's mother. He then takes a casual stroll around the garden, followed by an increasingly nervous Peter.Rounding a corner, they see a cat and hide under a basket, but the cat is drawn to the smell of onions and sits on top of the basket, trapping the pair for five hours. Old Mr. Bunny (Benjamin's father, Peter's maternal uncle, and Old Mrs. Bunny's brother) enters the garden, searching for them. He knocks the cat of the basket and locks her in the greenhouse. Although he is happy that both Peter and Benjamin are safe and unharmed, he is very cross and punishes the two for their recklessness with his switchOnce he gets home, Peter gives the onions to his mother, who forgives his adventure because he has managed to recover his lost jacket and shoes. Then he and Cottontail fold up the pocket handkerchief and their mother strings the onions and rabbit tobacco from the ceiling.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyddie"title="Lyddie">
Lyddie, a 13-year-old girl and her family, are in their cabin in 1843 when a bear enters. Lyddie saves the family by staring down the bear long enough for her family to climb up to the loft. The bear leaves with no one harmed, but some of their possessions broken. Throughout the rest of the book, Lyddie's troubles are often represented as "bears". Lyddie must perform her parents' duties, as her father left for the gold rush and her mother is insane. Lyddie's mother sees the bear as the devil and moves in with her sister, Clarissa, and her husband, Judah. She takes Lyddie's younger siblings Rachel and Agnes with her; Lyddie and her brother Charlie refuse to leave because they believe their father will return. While at the house, they receive a letter from their mother, who tells them she signed them up for jobs in the village and they have been hired out as indentured servants. Charlie jokes about her horrible spelling, which becomes an inside joke, "We can stil hop" instead of "We can still hope". She learns how to weave and other similar tasks.Lyddie is sent to work at Cutler's Tavern as a housemaid, and Charlie is sent to work at the Baker's mill. They are now both indentured servants. They are driven there by the Stevenses, a Quaker family; Luke Stevens is very kind to Lyddie and Charlie. At the tavern, Lyddie is treated almost as a slave. The mistress there is cruel, but the cook, Triphena, is kind to Lyddie, and they become friends. At the inn, she jobs working on looms at mills in Lowell, Massachusetts. But she does not take the job, because her mother signed her up for the tavern job. When the mistress is away on a trip, Lyddie goes home. In her house, she finds a runaway slave named Ezekiel Freeman, an ex-preacher who educated himself by using the Bible. Before she leaves, she lends him the money she and Charlie received for a calf they sold. When she returns to the tavern, she is fired, because she wasn't supposed to leave the Tavern without exact permission from the owner of the place. Triphena gives her five dollars, and Lyddie insists she will pay her back with interest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_Colours"title="False Colours">
Kit Fancot returns home to England from diplomatic service in Vienna to find that his twin brother Evelyn has disappeared. Although this would not normally be a problem, Evelyn is supposed to meet the autocratic grandmother of the lady to whom he has proposed. Kit is obliged to impersonate his brother to save the betrothal.When Evelyn doesn't reappear, Kit has to stay in the rôle of Evelyn indefinitely and decides to retire to his family home in the countryside. Evelyn's chosen lady, Cressy, comes with her grandmother to the Fancot family home however. By careful deduction Cressy is able to work out that Evelyn is actually Kit in disguise, but as they have fallen in love with each other, she helps him with the deception.Eventually Evelyn comes home with a tale of what happened to him. He discloses that he met the lady of his dreams and Kit thinks up of a fantastical idea to make sure that both brothers can get what they wish without any scandal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_the_Glittering_Plain"title="The Story of the Glittering Plain">
The book concerns the quest of Hallblithe of the House of the Raven to rescue his fiancée the Hostage, who has been kidnapped by pirates, which ultimately takes him to the utopian Land of the Glittering Plain, also known as the Acre of the Undying or the Land of the Living Men, whose inhabitants are supposedly immortal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charity_Girl"title="Charity Girl">
"Charity Girl" revolves around the character of the twenty-nine-year-old Viscount Ashley Desford and his mission to save Charity Steane from a precarious life with her uncaring relatives. The novel also takes up the Viscount's friendship with Henrietta Silverdale, his neighbour and childhood friend, familiary known as "Hetta". The narrative opens on a conversation between the Viscount and his father, the Earl of Wroxton. Wroxton asks Desford to look into the affairs of his younger brother Simon. Wroxton fears that Simon has fallen into bad company and will destroy his reputation. Desford declines to interfere in Simon's doings, saying that the last person Simon is likely to listen to is his older brother. In the same conversation, Wroxton also reproaches Desford for having failed to marry Henrietta nine years before. Desford protests that, while he loves Hetta as a sister, there is no passion between them and that she cared to marry him as little as he cared to marry her. Later in the novel it emerges that, at that time, Hetta had begged Desford not to propose marriage to her, even though it was the wish of both their families.After Desford learns that the latest of Hetta's admirers is Mr. Cary Nethercott, he visits her family home of Inglehurst and meets the man, whom he pronounces appropriate but immensely dull. Later, at a party in the neighbourhood, Desford meets Miss Steane, who prefers to be called "Cherry". She is almost nineteen years old, but is being used as an unpaid servant by the aunt and cousins with whom she has lived since her father abandoned her and failed to pay the bill at her boarding school in Bath. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lord_John"title="My Lord John">
## Historical background.The reign of Richard II of England forms the backdrop of the novel. Having become monarch at a young age, Richard has become a vain king "not universally held in high esteem." In his minority, governance has been dominated by select favourites such as the 9th Earl of Oxford, who is deeply unpopular. In response to policies they deem bad for the realm, Henry of Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby and other members of the "Lords Appellant", such as the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Arundel, successfully take up arms against Oxford at the Battle of Radcot Bridge and remove him from power.Now twenty-two, King Richard takes the reigns of government back into his own hands, appointing new favourites labelled "contemptible foppets" by his uncle John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster. Gaunt is, however, loyal and trusted by the King despite his disagreements with court favourites. As one of the most powerful men in the kingdom, Gaunt has been involved in an ongoing conflict with Arundel, an "orgulous" man whom Gaunt blames for inciting a rising in Cheshire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gould's_Book_of_Fish"title="Gould's Book of Fish">
"Gould's Book of Fish" is a fictionalised account of the convict William Buelow Gould's life both at Macquarie Harbour and elsewhere during his life in Van Diemen's Land.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neveryóna"title="Neveryóna">
"Neveryóna" (a full-length novel), the sixth and longest tale of the Return to Nevèrÿon series, focuses on fifteen-year-old Pryn, who is extraordinary in this culture because she can read and write. Pryn is the great niece of an unsung genius of Nevèrÿon, a woman who invented both the loom and the spindle. Because she did not have the good fortune also to discover that wool made the best and strongest cloth, however, all the credit for her work tends to be given to other people. Pryn’s travels take her (and the reader) not only to explore the revolutionary forces of Gorgik’s campaign—and some of its internal squabbles—but also through the homes of several wealthy conservatives. In the first half of the novel, Pryn finds herself in Neveryóna, an upper class suburb of Port Kolhari, an uneasy guest in the emotionally embattled gardens of a wealthy merchant woman, Madame Keyne, whom we first met in the third story, “The Tale of Potters and Dragons,” and who is now actively financing a crackpot group of counter rebels who want to put an end to Gorgik’s project. In the second half, once Pryn travels into the south, she is taken up by the powerful Jue Gruten family, who represent the far more lethal and aristocratic forces of the nation who want to end this rebellion. Here the webs of power are almost too complex and wide reaching for Pryn to comprehend, even though she now realizes that one can fight them, a single incident at a time, as she manages to free a single slave from their grip, whom the Earl has tried to use as a scapegoat. But Pryn and the reader now have a far clearer picture of what Gorgik is up against.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christy_(novel)"title="Christy (novel)">
While attending a 1912 Christian revival meeting, 19-year-old Christy Huddleson is fascinated to learn about an Appalachian mission program when the founder describes the work his group is doing and the needs of the Cutter Gap community. Christy, the daughter of a well-to-do family in Asheville, North Carolina, is drawn to the idea of volunteering to teach the needy Cutter Gap students. Her parents are initially reluctant, but she persists and soon makes travels to the remote area in eastern Tennessee.From her first day in the Appalachians, she is challenged by the primitive conditions and the folk medicine beliefs of the mountain people. Her mentor at the mission, a Quaker named Alice Henderson, encourages her to notice also the beauty in the community and people, and to help preserve the best of the Appalachians in ways that will help the locals to become self-sustaining. Christy and her co-worker, minister David Grantland, try to educate local students. They also try to teach their neighbors an alternative to the family feuding and cycle of revenge that have been a tradition for decades. Local physician Neill MacNeill is an agnostic who grew up in the mountains; he seeks to make Christy more sympathetic to locals' concerns and traditions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entropy_Effect"title="The Entropy Effect">
The "Enterprise" is engaged in an unprecedented scientific study of a naked singularity when a top priority message forces Captain Kirk to divert to Aleph Prime, a mining colony in a nearby system. Upon arrival, the high priority of the message seems to have been a mistake: the "Enterprise" was needed simply to ferry a single criminal to a rehabilitation colony in the same solar system.The criminal turns out to be a theoretical physicist, Dr. Georges Mordreaux, convicted of murder and unethical research on self-aware beings. Spock thinks Mordreaux could yield insights on the phenomenon he had been researching—namely that for some unknown reason, the increase of entropy has begun to accelerate. This effect would cause precarious ecosystems to collapse and unstable stars to go nova within two decades, and result in the end of the Universe in a few more. But the case against Mordreaux seems very odd, with incomplete evidence, and Spock disbelieves that Mordreaux could be capable of the crime. Prosecutor Braithewaite accompanies them on the journey, convinced that Mordeaux is dangerous. He also has a nagging feeling he has seen Spock before, though Spock is certain they have never met.While on the planet, Hikaru Sulu meets up with his idol, Captain Hunter, who commands a fighter ship, "Aerfen", that had been his first choice for assignment. Kirk arranges for Sulu to transfer to the "Aerfen". In the process Sulu will be forced to leave behind his lover, Security Chief Mandala Flynn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mockingbird_(Tevis_novel)"title="Mockingbird (Tevis novel)">
The novel opens with Spofforth, the android Dean of New York University, attempting suicide; he has lived for centuries yet yearns to die. Spofforth brings a teacher, Paul Bentley, to New York. Bentley has taught himself to read after a Rosetta Stone–like discovery of a film with words matching those in a children's primer.Spofforth begins to dislike Bentley and the knowledge he has from reading. Bentley says he could teach others to read, but Spofforth instead gives him a job of decoding the written titles in ancient silent films. At a zoo, Bentley meets Mary Lou. He explains the concept of reading to her, and the two embark on a path toward literacy. Spofforth responds by sending Bentley to prison for the crime of reading and takes Mary Lou as an unwilling housemate. The novel then follows Bentley's journey of discovery after his escape from prison, culminating in his eventual reunion with Mary Lou and their assistance with Spofforth's suicide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_Not_Alone_(novel)"title="We Are Not Alone (novel)">
Dr. Newcome is a beloved doctor in a small English town. His frustrations with his relationships with his wife and son lead to his developing an affair with a German dancer, Leni, whom the family takes on as a governess. When Newcome's wife Jessica is killed under suspicious circumstances, both Dr. Newcome and Leni fall under suspicion. The town's prejudice against Leni as a German leads them to convict her and Dr. Newcome despite only circumstantial evidence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiki's_Delivery_Service_(novel)"title="Kiki's Delivery Service (novel)">
The book follows Kiki, a young witch from a long line witches on her mother's side. Kiki is now thirteen and must spend a year on her own in a town without other witches, proving that she can make a living. Accompanied by her talking black cat Jiji, Kiki starts a delivery service by flying on her broom. Over the year notable misadventures include:• Losing a stuffed toy cat and using Jiji as a substitute until she can recover the lost toy.• Saving a child from the ocean during a day at the beach.• Recovering her broom that has been stolen by a flying enthusiast.• Pose for a portrait and then deliver it to a town art showing.• Getting a giant knitted haramaki, or "belly warmer," to a ship out at sea from an eccentric knitting old woman.• Figure out what to do when the clock tower breaks down on New Year's Eve.• Deliver musical instruments to a concert after they were left on a train by a haughty group of musicians.After a year of self-doubt and some setbacks, Kiki returns home in triumph, but then soon decides to return to the city and her delivery business.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_by_Java_Head"title="South by Java Head">
The story is set in February 1942, in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Singapore. As the British stronghold of Singapore falls to the invading Imperial Japanese Army, a mixed collection of soldiers, nurses, fleeing civilians, a small boy, and at least one spy attempt to escape the burning city aboard the "Kerry Dancer", a battered freighter crewed by a disreputable captain and sailors. The "Kerry Dancer" is crippled by Japanese aircraft, and the refugees are rescued by the "Viroma", a tanker also fleeing Singapore; however, the "Viroma" is also sunk by the Japanese, and the survivors take to open boats on the open sea. Led by stalwart First Officer John Nicholson, they attempt to flee to safety across the South China Sea, facing death by thirst and exposure, typhoons, and pursuit by the relentless Japanese. As tensions mount in the small boat, Nicholson realizes that they are equally at risk from traitors in their midst.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Step_on_a_Crack"title="Step on a Crack">
When a beloved former First Lady dies, an elaborate funeral is held at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. Many famous people, including actors and politicians, attend. During the service, gunmen seal the cathedral and take all of the celebrities inside hostage. Knowing that each of their captives is enormously wealthy, they demand a ransom from each captive personally. While the lawyers, families, and talent agents of each of the famous captives assembles their ransom, the gunmen periodically kill and toss out hostages, including the current Mayor of New York City.NYPD Detective Michael Bennett is the lead negotiator with the gunmen. Through the course of his involvement, he consults with the FBI, goes on a botched raid of the cathedral in which an FBI agent and an NYPD officer die. Meanwhile, he learns that his wife, Maeve, who has cancer, has short time to live.When the gunmen receive their ransom, they demand a fleet of identical-looking sedans be brought to the cathedral. The NYPD provides the sedans with the intent of using snipers to kill each gunman as he exits the cathedral. Unfortunately, everyone emerges from the cathedral dressed identically in hoods and robes—it is impossible to differentiate gunman from hostage. The hostages and gunmen pile into each of the sedans and drive off. Bennett and the NYPD and FBI follow from helicopters as the sedans travel a route that the gunmen had demanded be blocked off.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe_Central"title="Europe Central">
It is set in central Europe during the 20th century and examines a vast array of characters, ranging from generals to martyrs, officers to poets, traitors to artists and musicians. It deals with the moral decisions made by people in the most testing of times and offers a perspective on human actions during wartime. Vollmann makes use of many historical figures as characters such as revolutionary Nadezhda Krupskaya, composer Dmitri Shostakovich, artist Käthe Kollwitz, film director Roman Karmen, poet Anna Akhmatova, SS officer Kurt Gerstein, activists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, as well as German general Friedrich Paulus and Soviet general Andrey Vlasov.In an afterword, Vollmann admits that, while the book is heavily researched and mostly features real people, the work should be regarded as fiction. He calls it "a series of parables about famous, infamous and anonymous European moral actors at moments of decision." Though largely true to history, a number of anecdotes or details are created by the author, such as the "imaginary love triangle" between Shostakovich, Roman Karmen, and Elena Konstantinovskaya.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimbos_of_the_Death_Sun"title="Bimbos of the Death Sun">
The novel takes place at Rubicon, a fictional science fiction convention being held in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, and at which the guests of honor are Appin Dungannon, a fantasy author noted for his books about hero Tratyn Runewind, and Dr. James O. Mega, an electrical engineering professor at Virginia Tech, who, under the pen name Jay Omega, has written one novel. That novel, a hard science fiction book about a space station crew whose female members are affected by radiation from a dying star (which causes them to become less intelligent), was retitled "Bimbos of the Death Sun" and given an R-rated cover by the publisher.Mega is somewhat lost in the world of hardcore SF and fantasy fans at the con, but his companion, Marion, a professor of English literature, is more familiar with these events, and she guides him through it. They have troubles, such as being asked to judge a fiction contest. All seems to be going somewhat well for Mega, but his co-Guest of Honor, Dungannon, is making it a point to offend everyone at the con. It is hardly surprising when he is killed, a bullet through his heart. The fans react by buying up everything with his signature in the huckster room.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladies_Whose_Bright_Eyes"title="Ladies Whose Bright Eyes">
Unlike Twain's Hank Morgan and some successors, Ford's Mr. Sorrell makes only a very half-hearted attempt to build modern weaponry and machinery in the Middle Ages. His initial dream of constructing "guns and gas bombs" and making himself "mightier than kings" soon comes to naught. Though he had been a mining engineer in the twentieth century, he has no idea how to go about constructing such devices under fourteenth-century conditions, or even where there are tin deposits. Having later in his career become a publisher does not give him any idea of how to invent printing from scratch and anticipate Gutenberg. He does not know how to make a gun, or in fact anything that would make him useful in the medieval castle community into which he has fallen.Instead, Mr. Sorrell finds that a golden cross which he carries causes him to be mistaken for a Greek miracle-worker – which has many advantages in medieval society, including enjoying the unlimited hospitality of a castle and having beautiful ladies vying with each other for his love. He also inspires the ladies to take up arms and hold a tournament in competition with their knightly husbands – and being a fair horseman, makes a credible effort at becoming a knight himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_Sharps,_Cowboys,_and_Thunder_Lizards"title="Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards">
Othniel Charles Marsh is on a train between New York City and New Haven, where he meets the showman Phineas T. Barnum. Barnum shows Marsh a copy of the Cardiff Giant; Marsh informs Barnum he intends to expose the giant as a fake. In Philadelphia, Henry Fairfield Osborn introduces artist Charles R. Knight to Edward Drinker Cope, a paleontologist whose entire house is filled with bones and specimens. Cope is commissioning a painting of the sea creature "Elasmosaurus". Cope leaves for the West as the official scientist for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). On the way, he meets Marsh and shows him his dig site at a marl pit in New Jersey. After Cope leaves, Marsh pays off the landowner to gain exclusive digging rights. At Fort Bridger, Wyoming, Cope meets Sam Smith, a helper to the USGS. During excavations, Cope finds some of the richest bone veins ever. Sending carloads of dinosaur bones back east, Cope encounters Marsh, who is heading out west as well; he travels in style while the rest of his team travels third class. Marsh meets "Buffalo" Bill Cody, who serves as their guide, along with a Native American Indian tribe. Marsh discovers many new fossils, and promises to Chief Red Cloud that he will talk to the President of the United States about his people's situation. Back East, Knight has finished his reconstruction of "Elasmosaurus". He and Knight return to the marl pits. Cope becomes furious when he learns Marsh has bought the digging rights and published a paper revealing his reconstruction of "Elasmosaurus" as flawed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Drama_in_Livonia"title="A Drama in Livonia">
In the Governorate of Livonia, a bank employee who is carrying money is murdered. The prime suspect is Professor Dimitri Nicolef. He was the only person present, besides the innkeeper German Kroff. Wladimir Yanof, a lawyer and the fiancé of Ilka Nicolef (the professor's daughter), has escaped from Siberia to prove the innocence of his future father-in-law.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cosmic_Rape"title="The Cosmic Rape">
The book concerns an extraterrestrial hive mind named Medusa, which has assimilated many worlds and life forms and plans to absorb Earth as well. Dan Gurlick is an alcoholic who unknowingly ingests a spore from Medusa, which turns him into a host.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_Plus_X"title="Venus Plus X">
Charlie Johns wakes up in Ledom (model backwards), a world of gender-neutral people. He believes that he has been transported to the future, and the Ledom tell him that humanity has been destroyed by nuclear war.He meets Seace, the head of the Science One, who explains the A-field, an invisible force field the Ledom use for everything from spoons to buildings. He meets Mielwis, the head of the Medical One, who explains to him how the Ledom came to be gender-neutral by a mutation. Mielwis tells him that the Ledom have both genital organs, which drop down when they're aroused and retract when they're not in use.He meets Nasive and Grocid, the heads of the Children's Ones, who explain Ledom religion to him. The Ledom worship children because "it is inconceivable we would ever obey one".Then Philos, a historian, leads him to the cerebrostyle, a technology that allows a viewer to watch recorded memories in their mind. Charlie reads a "letter" in this machine which is a manifesto of Ledom society. It tells how sexual differences have caused strife for humans and how Ledom society has achieved harmony by following a charitic religion and creating a gender-neutral culture.After he's done reading the letter, Philos takes Charlie out to the edges of Ledom, where he finds Philos's partner Froure and his child Soutin. Philos had let the Ledom think Froure and Soutin had died in a landslide because the Ledom, despite what Mielwis had told Charlie, did not mutate but undergo monthly medical procedures to keep them gender-neutral, and Philos doesn't want this to happen to Soutin. Philos asks Charlie if he will take Soutin back to his time period, and Charlie agrees.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramona's_World"title="Ramona's World">
Ramona's world is changing. There's tiny baby Roberta at home, and as Ramona adjusts to being a big sister, she discovers that she likes teaching Roberta to do things such as sticking out her tongue. In fourth grade, she finally has a best friend, the new student Daisy Kidd (who is also new to the neighborhood). At school Ramona is frustrated with her teacher, Mrs. Meacham. Mrs. Meacham pushes her students to be proper spellers; spelling is a difficult subject for Ramona. Mrs. Meacham also intercepts a note that Ramona's friend Yard Ape wrote to Ramona; after that, Yard Ape is too embarrassed to play with her or even talk to her.Beezus, a 14-year-old just entering high school, starts speaking French around the house, spending a lot of time on the phone talking about boys and asking her friends about who she should date, which makes her little sister mad. Ramona begins to feel forgotten as Beezus, while Mr. and Mrs. Quimby are always fussing over Roberta.Beezus, in an act of rebellion, gets her ears pierced; her parents are amused and pleased that she is growing up. Beezus nervously attends a party at which boys were invited — as it turns out, the boys stayed outside the house the entire time and the girls played inside and everyone was happy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mission_Song"title="The Mission Song">
Bruno Salvador, known as Salvo, is the orphaned, illegitimate son of an Irish Catholic missionary and a native Congolese woman. He is educated in England, and as a fluent speaker and aficionado of "disappearing indigenous languages of Eastern Congo", he finds a natural calling as a specialist interpreter, employed by London's hospitals, law courts, city corporations, and British intelligence.Salvo has a passionate extramarital affair with a Congolese nurse, Hannah. En route from a rendezvous with Hannah to a party thrown for his journalist wife, he is offered an urgent job by his handler at the Ministry of Defence to serve as an interpreter at a conference between Congolese warlords and their putative Western backers, the nameless "Syndicate". He learns that their objective is to eject Kivu's Rwandan occupiers and install a liberal, benevolent politician dubbed "the Mwangaza" as the head.Whisked to a nameless island in the North Sea, Salvo is set to his task. As well as interpreting at the conference, he must also decipher recordings from hidden microphones festooning the island. Unbeknown to his employers, Salvo listens in while one of the Congolese delegates, who has shown signs of defecting from the agreement, is tortured by his employers. It becomes apparent that the Syndicate's real objective is to plunder the coltan and other mineral wealth of Kivu, and the Mwangaza is no more than a puppet. At the end of the conference, Salvo pockets the tapes and his notes before returning to London.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Quetzal"title="Dark Quetzal">
Dark Quetzal is set in the world of the Isle of Echoes where the Singers live in The Echorium. The Singers have many special abilities, the most important of which is knowledge of the Songs of Power: Challa for sleep, Kashe for laughter, Shi for sadness, Aushan for fear and Yehn for death. All Singer children, called novices, learn these Songs, but if their voices do not last into adulthood they receive a mild form of Yehn which makes them forget the Songs. The Singers can also farlisten to hear over great distances, an ability enhanced by the bluestone which the Isle is made up of, and hear truth. The Singers help to keep peace on the mainland, and produce treaties to protect Half Creatures - the half-human beings with knowledge of the Songs, which include merlee (fish people), naga (water snake people), quetzal (bird people) and centaurs (horse people).During the novel" Song Quest", set thirty one years before Dark Quetzal, the Singers encountered a powerful enemy in Khizpriest Frazhin, who harnessed the powers of a strange black crystal called the khiz to manipulate people's thoughts and memories. He attempted to destroy the Echorium by kidnapping a novice, Rialle, and was only stopped by the efforts of another novice, Kherron, who had originally been taken in by Frazhin. Although thought dead for many years, he returned eleven years before Dark Quetzal, joining with Lady Yashra of the Harai to kidnap street children and enslave centaurs in an attempt to build a Khizalace school of song to rival the Echorium. They were stopped by Rialle's novice son Renn and Shaiala, a girl raised by centaurs, and it appeared that Frazhin was drowned by naga while trying to escape. Lady Yashra was captured and sung Yehn, and her unborn child by Frazhin was raised as a normal novice of the Echorium. However, suspicions are raised when first Rialle, then Frazhin's daughter Kyarra, go missing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Came_on_Viking_Ships"title="They Came on Viking Ships">
The story focuses on a 12-year-old girl called Hekja. Hekja lives with her mother in a simple village by the sea. Her two brothers and father have all died. At the beginning of the book, she comes to the aid of a small puppy who was attacked by a seagull on the beach. Hekja takes the puppy to the village's witch, Tikka, for her to help heal the puppy. Hekja is told that the puppy was one of the chief's litter, and she had already given it the True Name of Riki Snarfari (Mighty Rover). The puppy was considered the useless one of the litter and apparently had no value. The chief has shown little interest in him and gives him away to Hekja but later becomes jealous of how strong the pup is. Tikka shows the girl how to look after Snarf, as he becomes known affectionately by Hekja.Eventually, Snarf recovers, and hardly limps at all from the wound. The time comes for Hekja to spend the summer up the mountain with the other girls of the village. It is a tradition of the village for girls to stay on the mountain when they become of age, and the girls look after the cows and produce cheese whilst up the mountain, with the women bringing supplies "twice every full moon". Except for Hekja's best friend, Branna, the other girls are mean or indifferent to Hekja and abuse Snarf.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Trouble_(novel)"title="Car Trouble (novel)">
Duff Pringle is heading across the country, aiming for his new job in technology in California's Silicon Valley. His used Ford Escort barely makes it a hundred miles from home before breaking down. He calls a car towing company to come pick him up, and when they get to the repair center, he is told the car would need to stay 2 weeks,Even though Duff has only 4 days to get to California, he checks into a motel to wait out the 3–4 days. He soon finds a note asking for someone to drive a car to St. Louis. Duff sends this person an email and gets a reply saying they would drop it off at the motel he was staying at. Duff finds Stu at a restaurant in Chipper Crossing. Stu is a hitchhiker looking to get to California too, and he asks Duff if he could come with him. Despite his appearance and behavior, Duff accepts, and they head to Saint Louis to deliver the car, a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air, to a woman named Rosalie Hopgood. There are several characters in this story including Bonnie, an aspiring singer with a con artist for a mother (Bonnie's mom had stolen a lot of money from people and was wanted everywhere); two thugs looking for a trunkful of cash; and Moony, a terrier dog prone to carsickness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beggar_Queen"title="The Beggar Queen">
Mickle, once a common street urchin, is now the queen of Westmark. The kingdom is thriving, yet at the same time, it is strangely restless. Ghosts of the past lurk everywhere. The evil minister, Cabbarus, once banished from Westmark, is now plotting to seize the throne. Theo remembers a time when he was the famed Kestrel, fighting battles that threatened to kill his soul. Now he once again must join in the struggle. Who will at last command the fate of Westmark?One answer to that question is "the people." The common people, mostly anonymous, rise up at the end, making the final overthrow of Cabbarus possible.The book raises moral questions, especially about choices, the effects of having power, and the evil that seems necessary to prosecute a war. Theo tries to keep out of the battles in the book, but finds that he can not. He vows to kill Cabbarus. (Theo had once saved his life in "Westmark", the first of the trilogy.)In the end, many of the characters are dead, including Cabbarus, but not by the hand of Theo. A government, led by a council of commoners, begins to rise. Mickle, in one of her last acts as queen, proclaims that she and Theo are married. She sees that the two of them cannot remain in the country where she was queen. As the book ends, the couple leaves to travel the world together with their old friends, Las Bombas and Musket.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Wings_of_Song_(novel)"title="On Wings of Song (novel)">
The novel takes place in suburban Iowa and in New York City, around the middle of the 21st century. Its first section describes the childhood and adolescence of Daniel Weinreb, an imaginative boy who manages to adapt well to his conservative surroundings until a minor act of rebellion sends him to prison at age 14. Daniel's experience there makes him eager to leave the Midwest. After falling in love with the daughter of a powerful and reactionary local tycoon, he moves with her to New York, dreaming of becoming a musician and exploring the forbidden art of "flying"—electronically assisted astral projection. Tragedy and exploitation leave Daniel's idealism in ruins, but he persists and becomes an internationally famous and controversial performer.Alongside this Bildungsroman storyline, the novel presents a detailed portrait of a future United States torn by economic hardship and culture war. The Midwestern Farm Belt states are ruled by a coalition of the Christian right, known as "undergoders" (a reference to the successful conservative campaign to add the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance); the nominally secular government is socially repressive and business-friendly to an extreme. The coastal states more closely resemble present-day urban America, with generally permissive social attitudes and artistic ferment, but great economic inequality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapped_(Gardner_novel)"title="Trapped (Gardner novel)">
The novel opens with five friends out for a night of drinking and occasional brawling. All five are teachers at a less-than-first-rate boarding school called Feliss Academy, situated in the town of Simka in Feliss Province (a future version of Simcoe, Ontario, the author's hometown, and not far from the author's Waterloo current home). Future versions of other real locations, such as Niagara Falls, Port Dover, and the Port Dover mausoleum appear in the novel.The five, frustrated and bored with their unsatisfactory lives, are:Tonight, however, is an unusual night: the Steel Caryatid has received a premonition that the group will undertake a quest. The quest reveals itself when Dhubhai encounters a ghost and learns that one student at the school has been murdered while another, the victim's boyfriend, has runoff. The group embarks on a search for the missing boy, which soon transforms into something far more sinister: a hunt for a shape-shifting alien creature, malevolent and very dangerous. The group expands with new recruits, then is whittled down by deaths along the route, as the search comes to involve aliens, a crazy and highly lethal Spark Lord, and a criminal gang nearly as bad. Their quarry, the runaway boy, turns out to be one of the most gifted psychics the world has ever known, which adds a new layer of complexity to their dilemma. Dhubhai and his surviving companions reach a bloody crisis in the basement of the power station at Niagara Falls, one of the few places on Earth that still maintains electric power and traces of OldTech civilization. Dhubhai learns that Spark Royal has kept the power flowing in order to imprison an alien force; the sinister being they have been following is only a small offshoot of a much greater and darker whole. Dhubhai discovers more than he anticipated about the cryptic workings of the League of Peoples before the alien force is controlled.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clockers_(novel)"title="Clockers (novel)">
Clockers follows intertwining storylines of low level cocaine dealer Ronald "Strike" Dunham and homicide detective Rocco Klein in the fictional New Jersey city of Dempsey (Which shares many similarities with Jersey City, NJ - where author Richard Price spent extensive time researching the subject matter.) Strike works in the drug organization of Rodney Little, a friendly but violent drug lieutenant of local drug lord Champ. When Rodney Little asks Strike to kill his second in command Darryl and take his position, Strike hesitates. While scoping out Ahab's, the fish restaurant from where Darryl wholesales cocaine, he encounters his brother Victor drunk in a bar across the street, to whom he tells a made-up story about Darryl's abuse of his girlfriend. Victor apparently sees through his story, and suggests that if Strike needs someone killed, he knows "My Man" who could do the job. Strike is surprised by this offer from his law-abiding, working-man brother, and responds noncommittally, assuming his remark is just a drunken boast. He is shocked the next day to find that Darryl has been shot dead in the Ahab's parking lot by an unknown assailant.David "Rocco" Klein and his partner Larry Mazilli are assigned to investigate Darryl's murder. They quickly deduce that Darryl was more than just a restaurant manager. Meanwhile, Strike is promoted in Rodney's organization and is introduced to Papi, a Puerto Rican cocaine wholesaler. Rodney reveals that he has been buying cocaine from Papi and selling it behind Champ's back, without giving him a cut. Strike recognizes that Champ will have them both killed if he discovers their side business, but agrees to participate, believing he has no other choice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Time_Machine_Hoax"title="The Great Time Machine Hoax">
Chester W. Chester IV inherits a run-down mansion and millions in back taxes. In order to pay the taxes, he initially decides to auction off the mansion and its contents, including a massive computer (the Generalized Nonlinear Extrapolator, or "Genie").However, while examining the mansion and the computer with his friend Case Mulvihill, he finds the computer can solve complex problems involving historical fact and display realistic images of them. He hits on the idea of using its capabilities to create an elaborate hoax ... a fake time machine. Accordingly, he asks the computer to show him "real, three-D, big as life dinosaurs and plenty of em - and how about a four-wall presentation?" The computer asks if it should employ a method of doing so that "is a purely theoretical approach, which might prove simpler, if feasible, and would perhaps provide total verisimilitude..."Chester tells the computer to "go to it" and the computer does. However, the computer has managed to "actually" transport the two through time, and on their second trip back, before they realize that they actually "do" have a time machine, they make the mistake of leaving their arrival area, and become trapped in the past. Even when they manage to return to the present, their actions in the past have altered it completely, but they are able to use the computer to (perhaps, more or less) restore everything to the way it was.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Chaos_Died"title="And Chaos Died">
On the grossly-overpopulated planet, remnants of "nature" exist only in the isolated areas not covered by housing, industry and industrial farming. Creativity and individuality are suppressed and channeled into rigid social formats. A powerful bureaucracy/police state oversees the acts of all citizens. Its purpose is to maintain control for the planetary elite, and to that end it is prepared to resort to any method, however ruthless.In contrast to all this, the author introduces another planet on which human development has followed a diametrically opposite path: the natural world is respected; population is limited; and each individual is encouraged to develop uniquely. On this other world, human beings are known to be basically "spiritual", and immortal in nature. Telepathy and telekinesis are developed as much and as rapidly as possible.As the narrative progresses, a confrontation develops between these different systems.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Risk_Pool"title="The Risk Pool">
The plot follows narrator Ned Hall through four periods of his life, focusing specifically on Hall's relationship with his loutish and, in his best friend's words, "rockheaded" father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Recruit_(novel)"title="The Recruit (novel)">
Eleven-year-old James Choke accidentally slashes classmate Samantha Jennings' face with a nail on the wall after she teases him about his mother's obesity. He shoves his teacher over and runs home to find his stepfather Ronald "Ron" Onions visiting his mother, Gwen. Later that night, James discovers that his mother has died after consuming alcohol while taking painkillers. James is sent to a children's home called Nebraska House, where he shares a room with thirteen-year-old CHERUB agent Kyle Blueman. Lauren is taken to live with her father Ron, who dislikes James and doesn't allow him to visit her. Contrary to Kyle's advice, James befriends Rob Vaughn and his friends. A few weeks later, on his twelfth birthday, James is called into the police station, where he receives a caution for assaulting Samantha Jennings and his teacher, Cassandra Voolt. Later that night, Rob and his cronies convince him to steal a pack of beer from an off-licence. The shopkeeper catches him after two of Rob's cronies block the door, preventing James from escaping. He is escorted to the police station, where he is placed in a cell and his statement recorded.The next morning, James awakes in a room at the CHERUB campus. Chairman Dr. Terrence "Mac" McAfferty introduces him to CHERUB and puts him through a series of entrance tests. He passes the tests and is sent back to Nebraska House to decide whether or not he wants to join. Upon returning to CHERUB, Kyle shows James his new room, and he meets his handler, Meryl Spencer. In her office, he chooses his new name, James Robert Anthony Adams. He is given a physical assessment and told to run 30kilometers per week and learn how to swim. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_A_(novel)"title="Class A (novel)">
CHERUB agents Kerry, Nicole, Kyle, and James are sent on a mission to infiltrate the drug gang KMG, led by criminal Keith Moore. The group attempts to befriend Moore's four children to attempt to gather evidence against KMG. James has the most success, becoming friends with Keith's youngest son Junior and begins delivering cocaine to KMG's customers. Meanwhile, Nicole begins dating Junior and they take a large amount of cocaine, nearly killing Nicole and resulting in her expulsion from CHERUB.Kerry discovers KMG's cocaine processing location, and MI5 set up surveillance on it, resulting in the capture and imprisonment of many of KMG's senior members, but not Keith Moore. Moore invites James and Junior to come with him to Miami, intending to settle all his accounts and have some final time with Junior before escaping from the UK to avoid imprisonment. Before James leaves, he finds out that Lauren hit instructor Norman Large with a shovel while doing Basic Training. She is forced to wait 2 months until she can restart basic training. James goes on the trip with Junior and Keith, but KMG's drug supplier, the Peruvian Lambayeke cartel, attempts to rob Moore. James kills a man and escapes, but Junior becomes badly injured, while Moore is captured and imprisoned by the police. KMG is destroyed, so the agents return to campus. After the end of the mission, James and Kerry begin dating.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zastrozzi"title="Zastrozzi">
Pietro Zastrozzi, an outlaw, and his two servants, Bernardo and Ugo, disguised in masks, abduct Verezzi from the inn near Munich where he lives and take him to a cavern hideout. Verezzi is locked in a room with an iron door. Chains are placed around his waist and limbs and he is attached to the wall.Verezzi is able to escape and to flee his abductors, running away to Passau in Lower Bavaria. Claudine, an elderly woman, allows Verezzi to stay at her cottage. Verezzi saves Matilda from jumping off of a bridge. She befriends him. Matilda seeks to persuade Verezzi to marry her. Verezzi, however, is in love with Julia. Matilda provides lodging for Verezzi at her castle or mansion estate near Venice. Her tireless efforts to seduce him are unsuccessful.Zastrozzi concocts a plan to torture and to torment Verezzi. He spreads a false rumour that Julia has died, exclaiming to Matilda: "Would Julia of Strobazzo's heart was reeking on my dagger!" Verezzi is convinced that Julia is dead. Distraught and emotionally shattered, he then relents and offers to marry Matilda.The truth is revealed that Julia is still alive. Verezzi is so distressed at his betrayal that he kills himself. Matilda kills Julia in retaliation. Zastrozzi and Matilda are arrested for murder. Matilda repents. Zastrozzi, however, remains defiant before an inquisition. He is tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Bough_Breaks_(Kellerman_novel)"title="When the Bough Breaks (Kellerman novel)">
Dr. Morton Hander practiced a strange brand of psychiatry. Among his specialties were fraud, extortion and sexual manipulation. Hander paid for his sins when he was brutally murdered in his luxurious Pacific Palisades apartment. The police have no leads, but they do have one possible witness: seven-year-old Melody Quinn.It's psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware's job to try to unlock the terrible secret buried in Melody's memory. But as the sinister shadows in the girl's mind begin to take shape, Alex discovers that the mystery touches a shocking incident in his own past. And behind it lies an unspeakable evil that Alex Delaware must expose before it claims another innocent victim.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shattered_(Koontz_novel)"title="Shattered (Koontz novel)">
Artist Alex Doyle and his new family, bride Courtney and her 11-year-old brother Colin, are moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco. Courtney's flying out ahead to get the house set up. Alex and Colin are driving there in Alex's new Ford Thunderbird. The cross-country trip starts out as a bonding experience, but their car is being tailed by a van; a van driven by a psychopath intent on terrorizing them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flesh_in_the_Furnace"title="The Flesh in the Furnace">
A puppet master has his hands full when his puppets - living puppets - convince his half-witted assistant to kill him and set them free.When freed from the puppet master, who they had once thought of as cruel and thoughtless, they find themselves in what may be an even worse situation. The half-witted assistant now has their lives in his hands, and they are not so competent hands after all.They strive to free themselves once again, and find that their perfect life they'd thought they had created has turned against them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Monk_and_the_Blue_Flu"title="Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu">
The city is planning on making deep cuts in the San Francisco Police Department's pay, medical benefits, and pension contributions. Negotiations between the union and the city break down. Although it is illegal for police officers to strike, the police officers plan to call in sick until they get a better contract.Mayor Barry Smitrovich, concerned about the lack of policing, reinstates Adrian Monk to the police department as acting captain of the homicide division. Although Natalie Teeger points out that the mayor is using Monk as a strikebreaker, Monk accepts the job, pleased to have his badge back. His assisting detectives are "Mad Jack" Wyatt, Cynthia Chow, and Frank Porter. Wyatt lost his badge due to lawsuits arising from his violent methods and disregard for civil rights. Chow is a conspiracy theorist who had her badge taken away due to her escalating paranoia. Porter is a veteran detective who was forced into retirement by the onset of senility. Their top priority is a series of stranglings of women whose left running shoes are taken. The press labels the killer the Golden Gate Strangler. Monk instructs Porter to check the dead women's credit card purchases and map out the crime scenes. However, none of the women made any shoe purchases on their credit cards.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Places_in_Between"title="The Places in Between">
Stewart arrives in Afghanistan in January 2002, beginning his journey in Herat and proceeding on foot to Kabul. He is initially accompanied by two armed guards, Qasim and Abdul Haq, at the insistence of Governor Yuzufi but travels without human company for most of his walk, accompanied only by his dog, Babur. On his journey, Stewart encounters many of Afghanistan's most notable historical sites, including the Minaret of Jam, the Dome of Chist-e-Sharif and the Buddhas of Bamiyan, which were destroyed by the Taliban. Afghanistan is particularly hazardous during the winter and, while walking across landscape covered by nine feet of snow, he is physically assaulted and shot at by humans, and also attacked by wolves.Stewart's account of seeing the Minaret of Jam was of significant, wider importance. Prior to his visit, it was uncertain whether the tower was still standing. The Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan's Cultural Heritage had not heard a reliable report on its condition for some eight months, and there were concerns that the Taliban might have blown it up, as they did with the Bamiyan Buddhas. Though Stewart found the Minaret still standing, he encountered villagers who were conducting excavations of what they believed to be the lost city of the Turquoise Mountain, selling their finds to traders from Herat. Upon his return to the United Kingdom, Stewart contacted UNESCO to try to inform them of the scale of the damage being done by these unauthorised excavations, and confronted Professor Andrea Bruno at the British Museum in Bloomsbury in an attempt to raise awareness of its looting. He writes that he "was told that an archaeologist would begin work on the site in April 2003, sixteen months after my visit and long after the villagers had removed everything they could". An account of his visit to the Minaret was published in "The New York Times" in August 2002.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_Security_(novel)"title="Maximum Security (novel)">
Lauren completes basic training successfully, to the displeasure of the sadistic Norman Large, whom Lauren injured with a shovel in the previous novel.James and his friends get into a brawl at a bowling alley with a group of chavs after one of them calls Gabrielle a "wog". As punishment, Kyle, Gabrielle and twins Connor and Callum are each given a recruitment mission. Much to his delight, James is instead offered a role on a major mission. He is joined by Dave Moss, a well respected CHERUB agent with a reputation for womanising, and Lauren. The FBI have discovered that Curtis Key, a 14-year-old boy imprisoned in an Arizona maximum security prison for murder, is the son of Jane Oxford, an international arms dealer who has evaded capture for decades. Recently, she has stolen 35 PGSLM (Precision Guided Shoulder-Launched Missiles), which were supposed to be sent to the British Army. With the help of the FBI, James and Dave go undercover into the prison posing as brothers who accidentally ran over a homeless woman in their getaway car, with the intention of breaking Curtis out in the hope that he will lead the FBI to his mother.Before James and Dave enters the prison, they taught Lauren basic driving skills. When James took the wheel, he recklessly crashed the vehicle while overspeeding.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirteenth_Tale"title="The Thirteenth Tale">
Vida Winter, a famous novelist in England, has evaded journalists' questions about her past, refusing to answer their inquiries and spinning elaborate tales that they later discover to be false. Her entire life is a secret: and, for over fifty years, reporters and biographers have tried innumerable methods in an attempt to extract the truth from Winter. With her health quickly fading, Winter enlists Margaret Lea, a bookish amateur biographer, to hear her story and write her biography. With her own family secrets, Lea finds the process of unraveling the past for Winter bringing her to confront her own ghosts.The novel opens as Lea returns to her apartment above her father's antiquarian bookshop and finds a hand-written letter from Winter. It requests her presence at the author's residence and offers the chance to write Winter's life story before she succumbs to a terminal illness. Lea is surprised by the proposal, as she is only vaguely aware of the famous author and has not read any of the dozens of novels penned by Winter.While considering the offer, Lea's curiosity prompts her to read her father's rare copy of Winter's "Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation". She is unexpectedly spellbound by the stories and confused when she realises the book contains only twelve stories. Where is the thirteenth tale? Intrigued, Margaret agrees to meet with the ageing author—if only to discuss her reasons for not accepting the position as Winter's biographer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_Falls"title="Empire Falls">
Set in the decaying, nearly bankrupt, small town of Empire Falls, Maine, this is the story of the unassuming manager of the Empire Grill, Miles Roby, who has spent his life in the town. The town, and Miles' life to a large degree, is controlled by the Whitings, a rich family that owns the local factories and much property.Miles is separated and later divorced from Janine, who has become a cocky, selfish person after losing weight and exercising rigorously. This is partly due to encouragement from Walt Comeau, the antagonistic owner of a local fitness center who visits the Empire Grill daily and has moved into Roby's old house.Roby is protective of his loving teenage daughter, nicknamed "Tick", who loves art. Tick is dealing with Zack Minty, her ex-boyfriend who continues to pursue her, and struggles with her mother's relationship with Walt whom Tick cannot stand. In addition, Tick has a complicated friendship with John Voss, an emotionally disturbed boy at school. The obnoxious jock Zack and his friends constantly bully John.Other important people in Miles' life include his grubby, ne'er-do-well father, a rascal who can't resist a handout when it comes his way; Miles' reformed, marijuana smoking brother, who is a talented Empire Grill cook; Miles' good-hearted ex-mother-in-law, who owns a bar; the town's wealthiest woman, Francine Whiting, a condescending matron who owns the Empire Grill; Whiting's daughter, who has loved Miles for many years; an attractive waitress; a retiring police chief; and a dimwitted police officer, who is Zack's father and has known Miles since childhood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beka_Lamb"title="Beka Lamb">
The book deals with social insecurity, racial prejudice and the rule of the conservative church in a small town. The book's protagonist, Beka Lamb, is a 14-year-old Belizean girl. Beka's best friend, Toycie Qualo, is 17, and in her last year of school gets herself expelled when she becomes pregnant by her boyfriend Emilio Villanueva. Toycie dies after a miscarriage and a short space of time in the local asylum nicknamed "Sea Breeze Hotel". Through flashbacks, points on politics and independence are strongly brought out, since the political struggles for independence in Belize at that time also mirrors Beka's own need for self-rule and her developing maturity. Beka's father (Bill Lamb) cuts down Beka's favorite tree (a bougainvillea) as a sign that the wild ways Beka had picked up must stop at once when she finally tells him that she has failed her exam. Her mother (Lilla Lamb) buys her a special book and pen in which she is told to write any lies or stories that she is tempted to tell, in an effort to curb her tale-telling habit. By the end of the book, Beka has transformed from "a flat-rate Belize creole" to a girl with "high mind", since her troubles have forced her to learn the value of money, education, unity within the community and most of all, some manners and respect. The novel consists of 26 chapters each building up on a certain plot or problem.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Book_(novel)"title="Black Book (novel)">
Apart from the prologue and epilogue, the story is a first-person narrative told by Rachel Stein, a young Jewish woman. The novel is set at the end of World War II in the Netherlands.In September 1944, Rachel is 26 years old, and the Stein family is in hiding from the Nazi authorities. Rachel is living with a Christian family in the Biesbosch, an area of rivers and creeks, separated from the rest of her family. Here she is not allowed outside, but one day she goes sunbathing near the water. Here she meets Rob, a man about her own age, who was on the water sailing. As they enjoy themselves on his boat, a crippled British bomber flies over while dropping its payload so it can climb to escape a pursuing fighter, and one of its bombs hits Rachel's hideout. While she is staying with Rob, they are approached by a Dutch policeman named Van Gein, who offers to help them flee to liberated Belgium. She needs money for her escape, so she visits a lawyer named Smaal in The Hague. During the escape, she is reunited with her parents and brother; but their escape boat—with Rachel, Rob, the rest of the Stein family, and other Jews on board—is ambushed. Rachel hides in the water and gets a good view of the SS officer who was responsible. Everyone except Rachel is killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gospel_According_to_Jesus_Christ"title="The Gospel According to Jesus Christ">
This book re-imagines the life of Jesus Christ, using the events depicted in the canonical gospels as a scaffold on which to construct its story. It does not follow the chronology of the life of Jesus Christ found in the New Testament. It places far greater emphasis on the earlier part of Jesus's life than the canonical gospels do.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fish_Can_Sing"title="The Fish Can Sing">
The novel is set at the start of the twentieth century and deals with the orphaned boy Álfgrímur, his adoptive grandparents, and the small, tolerant community of misfits and eccentrics they gather around them at Brekkukot, their cottage in Reykjavík. As Álfgrímur begins to encounter the minor politicians, businessmen and social-climbers of the growing town of Reykjavík he starts to question his future as a fisherman's grandson, and is increasingly fascinated by Garðar Hólm, the celebrated Icelandic "world singer" whose sporadic returns to Iceland encourage Álfgrímur to pursue his own personal goals of self-expression. He discovers the true value of his boyhood experiences only as he sets out on a path that will take him away from them forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Queen_of_Attolia"title="The Queen of Attolia">
Eugenides, the Thief of Eddis, has been caught spying on the Queen of Attolia. He expects to be hanged, but the Queen instead resorts to an ancient traditional punishment for thievery and has his right hand struck off with a sword. Eugenides returns to Eddis and wallows in a deep depression. Attolia is a seemingly heartless ruler but secretly regrets her action.The countries of Eddis and Attolia are soon at war, with neighboring Sounis playing both sides. Also manipulating the situation is Attolia’s ambassador from the Mede Empire, Nahuseresh, who pays extravagant attention to the beautiful Queen of Attolia while serving his own agenda. Attolia juggles her overattentive ambassador, the rebellious barons who do not believe a woman can rule alone, and a bloody, costly war.Meanwhile, a visit from the magus of Sounis awakens Eugenides to the fact that his country is at war. His cousin, the Queen of Eddis, may lose her throne and country, forcing him to take on a new role. Eugenides begins to scheme, appearing to shutter his heart just as Attolia has. Eugenides succeeds in stealing the Magus from Sounis, and temporarily turning Sounis and Attolia against each other. This gives the tiny country of Eddis a small break as Sounis and Attolia focus on each other instead of Eddis.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feasting_Dead"title="The Feasting Dead">
The story is about a young English boy, Denis, who, while in France falls under the influence of a vampiric being, from the folklore of Auvergne and the misfortune that befalls him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jupiter_Myth"title="The Jupiter Myth">
Despite having put the project of building the palace for the king of the Atrebates, Togidubnus, back on track, there is no peace for Falco and his family (his wife, his children, his brothers in law and his sister Maia Favonia) in Londinium as Togidubnus' disgraced friend, Verovolcus (see "A Body in the Bath House"), is found drowned in the well of a seedy Londinium taverna named the "Shower of Gold", stripped of his torque. Fearful of the diplomatic consequences, the local authorities in the form of Gaius Hilaris (see "The Silver Pigs"), Falco's old friend and Helena's uncle, urge Falco to take up inquiries into the death. At the same time, Maia's children and Lucius Petronius "Petro'" Longus, Falco's best friend, have appeared in Londinium. Things become more tense with Togidubnus breathing down Falco and Hilarius' necks for answers on who killed Verovolcus, and a newly arrived businessman, Norbanus Murena, hitting on Maia.Falco and Helena discover extortion rackets terrorising Londinium when a fire breaks out at a bakery. He muses on how suspicious the fire at the bakery is, since there was nobody in the bakery during the conflagration, and suspects that it was arson by whoever is behind the rackets. In the midst of the blaze, a vagrant girl risks her life to save a pack of dogs. Touched by this show of heroism, Helena adopts the girl, who is named Albia. The relationship between the Didii and Albia goes off on a rocky start, however, with Albia vandalising Hilarius' home. Simultaneously Petro' also disappears, and at a very bad time too — a message soon arrives, saying that two of Petro's children have died in Rome. Falco is forced to take Albia out along with him, and decides to look for Petro', but Petro' warns him to stay away because he is going undercover and then flees. Worse, Albia is abducted and forced into a brothel. Falco goes to her rescue and is assisted by an unlikely ally: a group of female gladiators (or gladiatrices) led by an ex-girlfriend of Falco's named Chloris, now going by the stage name of Amazonia. The gladiatrices believe Falco to be responsible for Albia's plight and detain him, but Helena (who was summoned by Albia) convinces them to release Falco. The reunion with Chloris temporarily strains Falco's marriage with Helena, but eventually they reconcile. Enquiries, however, begin to pay off and soon enough, with Chloris' help Falco manages to identify the rackets' enforcers in town, nicknamed Pyro and Splice. Falco and his associates soon notice something else — many of the businesses in town all have names derived from myths surrounding Jupiter, the chief god of the Roman pantheon. Chloris also reveals to Falco that she saw Pyro and Splice up-end Verovolcus into the well, and that whoever is employing them is also harassing her and her gladiatrix group into working for him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wretched_Stone"title="The Wretched Stone">
Told from the perspective of Captain Randall Ethan Hope, the crew of the "Rita Anne" finds a strange, glowing, cubic stone on an exotic island. After taking the strange object aboard their ship, the crew becomes obsessed with the stone, abandoning many of their former interests and leaving the captain wondering how to shake the crew out of their stupor. Gradually, the glowing stone turns the entire crew (except the captain) into grinning apes. Afterwards, the "Rita Anne' nearly sinks. On July 30th, they are rescued by another ship that drops them off at a harbor in "Santa Pengal". It is told in a 'journal' format, as it takes place over the course of May 8 to July 12 of an unspecified year.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wyvern's_Spur"title="The Wyvern's Spur">
The Wyvernspurs are a noble family within the Kingdom of Cormyr and the provincial town of Immersea has been their ancestral residence. The novel centers around Giogioni “Giogi” Wyvernspur and begins with his homecoming after a lengthy ten-month absence.With billing as a sequel to "Azure Bonds," it nonetheless includes the participation of only one main character from the preceding novel. Giogi himself did play a role in events of the first novel but was effectively only a recurring supporting character. Unlike its predecessor, the events of the novel take place over the span of only a few days and occur entirely within a single locale. Additionally, the novel contains a strong romantic component."Song of the Saurials" is the third book in the "Finders Stone Trilogy".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invaders_from_the_Dark"title="Invaders from the Dark">
The story is set in Brooklyn, New York in the mid-1920s and deals with the widow of an Occultist, Portia Differdale, and Princess Tchernova, a wealthy and beautiful Russian werewolf. Both women desire the same man, Owen Edwardes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_K"title="Company K">
The novel comprises 113 vignettes about World War I Marines in Company K. The novel is told from the viewpoint of 113 different Marines, stretching from the beginning of training to after the war. These sketches create contrasting and horrific accounts of the daily life endured by the common Marine. Many of the accounts stem from actual events witnessed and experienced by the author.It has often been described as an anti-militarist and an anti-war novel, but March maintained that the content was based on truth and should be viewed as an affirmation of life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_(novel)"title="The Killing (novel)">
After coming back from a mission in a private school in Cambridgeshire with Shakeel, James is dumped by his girlfriend, Kerry Chang. As he leaves Kerry's room, he sees a red-shirt CHERUB called Andy Lagan and takes his temper out on him, beating him up. For this, James finds his friends ignoring him, and is punished with no holiday, suspension from missions, cleaning the mission preparation rooms every night for three months, and having anger management sessions with a counselor.Zara feels sorry for James, so she gets him a low-risk mission to get him out of the punishment and so he can spend some time away from his friends blanking him. For a second time, James is working with Dave, a 17-year-old black shirt. They are being sent to investigate Leon Tarasov who runs a garage. When they get to their flat in south London, Dave gets a job at the suspect's garage, and James gets a girlfriend called Hannah. During his first night in the area, James gets into an altercation with two goons and is arrested for it. As he is being placed in the police car, police officer Michael Patel assaults him. Hannah tells James how her cousin, Will, fell off the top of the building more than a year earlier. As James has no computer that she knows of, she gives him Will's old one.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Black_Wolf"title="The Rise of the Black Wolf">
In "The Rise of the Black Wolf", Max and his fellow Grey Griffins (Natalia, Harley, and Ernie) set off on another adventure, traveling to Scotland to visit Max's father for the winter holidays.The four friends explore Lord Sumner's ancient castle and the dark forest that surrounds it.Once again, the Grey Griffins must do battle with Fireball Pixies, an army of Werewolves, and the Black Witch, Morgan LaFey. But when Lord Sumner, Max's father, disappears, the Grey Griffins must rescue him with the Knights Templar.Max's father betrays him and tells Max he staged the incident before (Revenge of The Shadow King). Ernie, however, falls into a coma.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Day_All_Gods_Die"title="This Day All Gods Die">
As the crippled starship Trumpet drifts in space, its drives sabotaged from within by a crewman tainted with an alien mutagen, a deadly game is being played out on a satellite near Earth in the headquarters of the UMC Police. In the wake of a suicide attack in the chambers of the Governing Council for Earth and Space, UMCP Director Warden Dios is preparing to expose the secret machinations of the Dragon, the corrupt head of the United Mining Companies. But Dios's own dangerous actions are about to come to light and may precipitate all-out war with the Amnion, leaving Dios – and all humanity – to pay a terrible price for what could be termed treason.Though dead in space, Trumpet broadcasts to any ship in range the formula of the mutagen's antidote – a drug the UMC has suppressed for its own sinister purposes. A small band of battered survivors, these fugitives hold the key to Earth's future: Morn Hyland, a former UMCP cop whose obsession with the Amnion has grown so fierce she is becoming something even her son doesn't recognize; Angus Thermopyle, cyborg tool of the UMCP, released from his cybernetic enslavement and now testing the boundaries of his new freedom; Ciro Vasaczk, tormented by the damage done him by the Amnion mutagen – and by the damage he himself has done Trumpet while in thrall to the drug.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_of_Suns"title="Sun of Suns">
Hayden Griffin is a young, fatherless boy living in Aerie. Though exactly when or how his father died is never discovered, Hayden continually says that he was murdered by Slipstream, a rival nation migrating through Virga. Slipstream's sun is tethered to a migrating asteroid that has provided the nation with its wealth. As Slipstream follows its sun, it occasionally moves through other nation's territories, as it does with Aerie, Hayden Griffin's home nation. In these cases, it uses its military headed by a leader simply known as "the Pilot" to make this nation a client nation of Slipstream, only to leave these nations again when the asteroid moves far enough. His parents' ambition was to liberate Aerie from Slipstream's rule by constructing their own sun in secret. After his father's death, Hayden's mother made this her final goal in life. At the opening of the story, Aerie's sun is nearly finished, and the construction team was planning a test to assure of its functionality. Hayden gets out of his job as an apprentice in a kitchen, intending to watch the test from a jet bike. However, airships flying Slipstream's flag appear on the horizon and begin to attack the new sun. Aerie's resistance starts to defend themselves from the assault, but don't appear to be a true match against the highly trained Slipstreamers. In a suicidal last-ditch effort, Hayden's mother and the construction crew start the sun while inside of it, incinerating the ships attacking the sun itself but allowing at least one reported Slipstream ship to have escaped. During the fighting, Hayden is thrown off the town's spinning wheel and, as the first chapter leaves him, floating weightlessly in the darkness, where pirates call home and no suns or true governments have been established.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tragedy_of_Mariam"title="The Tragedy of Mariam">
"The Tragedy" "of Mariam" tells the story of Mariam, the second wife of Herod the Great, King of Judea from 39 to 4 B.C. The play opens in 29 B.C., when Herod is thought dead at the hand of Octavian (later Emperor Augustus).Act I Act II Act III Act IV Act V
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Stimpson_and_Mr._Gorse"title="Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse">
Ernest Ralph Gorse, a suave psychopath and conman, relocates to Reading, Berkshire, to stay at the home of a wealthy friend who is visiting Paris. Gorse meets Joan Plumleigh-Bruce at a pub and decides to target her in a fraud scheme. Mrs. Plumleigh-Bruce, the pretentious widow of an Army Colonel, is contemplating marriage to Donald Stimpson, a local estate agent. Both are charmed by Gorse, who falsely claims to have fought heroically in France during World War I, and who pretends to be the nephew of a renowned Army General.Stimpson and Gorse arrange to meet at the King's Hotel in London, where Gorse conspires with the bartender to get Stimpson very drunk. Gorse takes Stimpson to visit a prostitute, which gives Gorse "dirt" he can share with Mrs. Plumleigh-Bruce to make Stimpson look bad. Gorse pretends to fall in love with Mrs. Plumleigh-Bruce, and convinces her to open a joint chequeing account for the sake of making some investments and purchasing a car. Gorse dupes Mrs. Plumleigh-Bruce into believing he is buying his friend's house in Reading, as a prelude to marrying her, but runs off with £500.When Mrs. Plumleigh-Bruce realizes she has been duped, and Gorse has emptied their joint account, she turns to Stimpson for support, only to learn he has married her Irish maid.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horror_from_the_Hills"title="The Horror from the Hills">
The novel concerns the elephantine Great Old One Chaugnar Faugn.Algernon Harris was the curator of Archaeology at the Manhattan Museum of Fine Arts. He sent his field workers to the most primitive and dangerous parts of the world for artifacts. Not all came back unscathed, and two returned inexplicably mutilated. A third, Clark Ulman, returned with a stone idol, of hideous appearance, and with his face concealed with a scarf.The idol resembled an elephant more than anything else. The pedestal was also of an ugly unidentifiable stone. Richardson had spoken of it in an account of the tortures he endured at the hands of its subhuman worshippers. Ulman was made to take the idol back to civilization to fulfill an ancient prophecy. Ulman also said that Chaugnar Faugn was not just an idol, but the god himself and that he attacked Ulman in the night, and fed on his blood.Chaugnar Faugn's high priest and spokesman explained to Ulman that Chaugnar -and his 5 brothers- once lived in an inaccessible cave in the Pyrenees, served by humanoids that Chaugnar created, the Miri Nigri. They received human sacrifices from the people of Pompelo -until the Romans wiped them out. Chaugnar Faugn and his brothers then destroyed Pompelo and the former then moved to Asia to await the "white acolyte": Ulman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Chabert_(novella)"title="Colonel Chabert (novella)">
Colonel Chabert marries Rose Chapotel, a prostitute. Colonel Chabert then becomes a French cavalry officer who is held in high esteem by Napoleon Bonaparte. After being severely wounded in the Battle of Eylau (1807), Chabert is recorded as dead and buried with other French casualties. However, he survives and after extricating himself from his own grave is nursed back to health by local peasants. It takes several years for him to recover. Returning to Paris, he discovers his widow has married the social climber Count Ferraud and has liquidated all of Chabert's belongings. Seeking to regain his name and money that were wrongly given away as inheritance, he hires Derville, a lawyer, to win back his money and his honour. Derville, who also represents the Countess Ferraud, warns Chabert against accepting a settlement bribe from the Countess. In the end, Chabert walks away empty-handed and spends the rest of his days in an asylum.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_of_the_Twins"title="Test of the Twins">
This novel begins where the last one left off; Caramon Majere and Tasslehoff Burrfoot are in a bleak gray world and Raistlin Majere is with Crysania in the Abyss.The novel begins with a short prologue that relates the short ride of Kharas, a dwarven hero who is riding away from a battle. Kharas hears a massive explosion that is a fortress exploding due to magical forces mixing together when Raistlin enters the Abyss and Caramon and Tas go forward in time. Caramon and Tas arrive two years ahead of when they planned to, and discover that an hourglass constellation (hourglass being the symbol of Raistlin) dominates the sky, having defeated Paladine, Patriarch of the Gods and Takhisis, Queen of Darkness. The world is devoid of life, nothing more than gray sludge. They find Caramon's own corpse, and later they find the Tower of Wayreth, a bastion of magic, wherein the only two surviving creatures are, Par-Salian, master of magic, and Astinus, the immortal being that chronicles all of time as it passes, later recording the final moments of the world.Astinus tells Raistlin that he will be forced to be alone for all eternity, and writes that the world ends, but Caramon arrives, changing everything. He receives the last book from Astinus, and is told by Par-Salian that he must stop Raistlin from exiting the Abyss.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Lines_(Wilks_novel)"title="Blood Lines (Wilks novel)">
FBI agent Cynna Weaver teams up with sorcerer Cullen Seabourne to help identify elected officials who have accepted demonic pacts. But the passion simmering between them-and their investigation-spiral out of control when an ancient prophecy is fulfilled.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_Danger"title="Mortal Danger">
Former homicide cop Lily Yu has a lot on her plate. There's her sister's wedding, a missing magical staff with unknown powers, and her grandmother's sudden decision to visit the old country just when Lily could use a little advice. Maybe she should turn to the man she's involved with, but for all the passion that flares between them, she doesn't really know Rule Turner. Yet she's tied to him for life, both of them caught in an unbreakable mate bond.That Rule is a werewolf, prince of his people, only complicates matters.Now an agent in a special unit of the FBI's Magical Crimes Division, Lily's job is to hunt down Harlowe, a charismatic cult leader bent on bringing an ancient evil into the world. But what Lily doesn't realize is that Harlowe has set a trap-for her. And then the unthinkable happens.In the blink of any eye Lily's world divides and collides, and she is thrust into a new and frightening reality. Her only hope will be to trust Rule-and herself-or Lily will be lost forever...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempting_Danger"title="Tempting Danger">
Lily Yu is a San Diego police detective investigating a series of grisly murders that appear to be the work of a werewolf. To hunt down the killer, she must infiltrate the clans. Only one man can help her - a werewolf named Rule Turner, a prince of the lupi, whose charismatic presence disturbs Lily. Rule has his own reasons for helping the investigation - reasons he doesn't want to share with Lily. Logic and honor demand she keep her distance, but the attraction between them is immediate, devastating, and beyond human reason. Now, in a race to fend off evil, Lily finds herself in uncharted territory, tested as never before, and at her back a man who she's not sure she can trust.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Power_and_the_New_Mandarins"title="American Power and the New Mandarins">
Chomsky predicts that Vietnamese opposition to U.S. involvement in the war would continue and that the U.S. would be unable to defeat the Viet Cong. He explains that many of the chapters of this book originated as articles or lectures that he gave during his involvement in the still-ongoing anti-war movement. From a moralistic perspective, his primary insight in this work was that "by accepting the presumption of legitimacy of debate on certain issues, one has already lost one's humanity."Chomsky saw a Viet Cong victory in the war to be inevitable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starquake_(novel)"title="Starquake (novel)">
This story begins at the exact time that "Dragon's Egg" (its predecessor) ended. As the human scientists in the orbiting ship "Dragon Slayer" prepare to leave, the Cheela on the star below continue their rapid advance. Starquake centers around two crises. The first is when the human ship is damaged, and the Cheela must repair the ship before tidal forces kill the humans aboard. Then a catastrophic Starquake strikes. Cheela explorers in space survive but have lost the technology to land back on the surface of their world. All Cheela on the surface perish except for four individuals. All succeeding generations of surface Cheela are descended from these four individuals. For a while, the surface Cheela struggle to keep the rudiments of civilization, but eventually a barbarian conqueror arises. The Cheela in space and their human friends watch helplessly as a new dark age ensues.The second half of the story tells the heroic tale of how the space-bound Cheela, with a little help from the humans, eventually are able to land again on the surface, defeat the barbarian tyrant, and start to rebuild Cheela civilization. The first edition cover (shown here) depicts the climactic final battle for the surface as described in the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Generation"title="The Second Generation">
This book is in fact five novellas by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. They relate the stories of the children of the Heroes of the Lance. The first, "Kitiara's Son", relates the story of Steel Brightblade. The second, "The Legacy", is about Palin Majere, Caramon Majere's son. The third, "Wanna Bet?", is an adventure of Palin and his two brothers Tanin and Sturm. The fourth, "Raistlin's Daughter", tells a myth of Raistlin Majere's daughter. The fifth, "The Sacrifice", is about Gilthas, Tanis Half-Elven's son.Three of the novellas ("The Legacy", "Wanna Bet?", and "Raistlin's Daughter") were first printed in the "Dragonlance Tales" trilogy.Kitiara's Son is the story of Steel Brightblade, the child of Kitiara uth Matar and Sturm Brightblade. It begins with a woman named Sara Dunstan, the adoptive mother of Steel, going to Caramon Majere and telling him the tale. He tells her how Kitiara, on her northern journey with Sturm, seduced him and became pregnant with his child. She then found herself with Sara, who cared for her during the pregnancy. When the child was born, she kept him and Kitiara left. Sara and Steel moved to Palanthas, a large city, where it became apparent that Steel had a warrior spirit. He was contacted by Ariakan to join the Knights of Takhisis, and he accepted, going with Ariakan to train. She tells him that he will soon make the oath to become a Knight, and Caramon goes with her to help stop Steel. They go and get Tanis, an old friend of Caramon's, to help. Riding a blue dragon, they go to Storm's Keep, the fortress of the Knights, and take Steel from it. They go into the High Clerist's Tower, a bastion of the Knights of Solamnia, to Sturm's tomb. There, the Starjewel, an elven relic of Sturm's, goes to Steel and the sword Brightblade is given to him. The body then disappears. They escape the Tower, but Steel decides to go back to the Keep to swear the oath. Steel then swears the oath and becomes a Knight of Takhisis.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raking_the_Ashes"title="Raking the Ashes">
After an initial meeting on the beach years earlier, Tilly meets the long divorced Geoffrey at a party. She soon divorces her husband and Geoffrey moves in with her. Tilly very much enjoys having another person in the house to help cook and clean, and who loves and accepts her entirely, especially as she recognises that she is not a very nice person. However, Tilly has problems with Geoffrey's fundamental dishonesty and his refusal to share his family with her and Tilly is resentful at simply being a 'pleat' in the family economy, there to be taken in and then let out (let down) when she is not needed. Tilly is good enough to help look after the children for months on end while their mother is in America to treat her cancer, yet when it comes to choosing a school for Harry she can be safely left out while granny, who is barely part of their lives, is invited to help choose the school. Though it is fine for Tilly to spend hours in the middle of the night at Harry's bedside listening to his nightmares and the gruesome stories he hears at school, her suggestion to Geoffrey that he see a counselor is rubbished as Geoffrey thinks 'I know my own child', and Geoffrey even fails to mention the letter from school describing Harry's destructive behaviour.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duel_in_the_Sun_(book)"title="Duel in the Sun (book)">
The early part of the book describes the preparations that Beardsley and Salazar underwent before the marathon, along with many other aspects of the men's running backgrounds and personal lives.There are three concurrent story lines: Beardsley's life, Salazar's life, and the marathon itself. It is revealed early on that Salazar, who was already a renowned distance runner in the late 1970s and early '80's, was the favorite to win Boston. Beardsley, described as a small-town farmboy, is clearly the underdog. But as the race progresses and the stories of the two men's lives are developed in greater detail, it becomes clear that both men will have a chance at winning the Boston Marathon, for Americans the most prestigious in the world.The story gradually becomes an intense contest between Beardsley and Salazar as they leave the rest of the runners behind during the latter part of the marathon. The title comes from the two men's shadows cast by the hot sun onto the pavement as they run "in each other's pockets" during the final miles of the race, and anticipation builds as to who will win the "duel." The shadow is also featured prominently on the cover of the first edition as part of the title.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Winter_(novel)"title="The Long Winter (novel)">
On a hot August day in the 1880s, at the Ingallses' homestead in Dakota Territory, Laura offers to help Pa stack hay to feed their stock in the winter. As they work, she notices a muskrat den in the nearby Big Slough. Upon inspecting it, Pa notes that its walls are the thickest he has ever seen, and fears it is a warning that the upcoming winter will be a very hard one.In mid-October, the Ingallses wake to an early blizzard howling around their poorly insulated claim shanty. Soon afterward, Pa receives another warning from an unexpected source: an old Native American man comes to the general store in town to warn the white settlers that hard winters come in seven-year cycles and the hardest comes at the end of the third cycle. The coming winter is that twenty-first winter, and there will be seven months of blizzards. Pa decides to move his family into his store building in town for the winter.In town, Laura attends school with her younger sister, Carrie, until the weather becomes too unpredictable to permit them to walk to and from the school building, and coal too scarce to keep it heated. Blizzard after blizzard sweeps through the town over the next few months. Food and fuel become scarce and expensive, as the town depends on the railroad to bring supplies but the frequent blizzards prevent trains from getting through. Eventually, the railroad company suspends all efforts to dig out the trains that are snowed in at Tracy, stranding the town until spring.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silent_Blade"title="The Silent Blade">
In "The Silent Blade", Wulfgar, a mighty barbarian, tries to come to terms with his freedom from the Abyss, from the torturous clutches of the balor Errtu and fails, fleeing from his friends to the port city of Luskan. Confused and angry, he finds a job in The Cutlass, a local tavern, as a bouncer in return for a room and alcohol, which he has become dependent on to dull the pain of his six-year-long entrapment in the Abyss. Many miles to the south Artemis Entreri returns to his hometown of Calimport, only to find that a lot of things have changed in his old thieves guild... and many more will change if he and his new drow sponsors have anything to do with it. Meanwhile, Regis finds that many evil and wicked beings are seemingly enchanted by his ruby; which had belonged to Pasha Pook. The truth is that one of his "friends", a giant, is following him because of The Call of Crenshinibon. Drizzt himself travels with the rest of his friends to see Cadderly Bonaduce who has said he will attempt to use his powers as the chosen of Deneir to destroy Crenshinibon. Drizzt and company are duped by Jarlaxle and his lieutenants who impersonate Cadderly and take the crystal shard for themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind_Parasites"title="The Mind Parasites">
The story is about Professor Gilbert Austin's conflict with the Tsathogguans, invisible mind parasites that menace the most brilliant people on earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narratives_of_Islamic_Origins"title="Narratives of Islamic Origins">
The book presents a tradition-critical account of the origins of Islam. It argues that the need to legitimize the community and affirm its standing to the outside world influenced the narrative which became woven into the Arab chronicles in the late 7th to the 10th century.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Man_Standing_(novel)"title="Last Man Standing (novel)">
Web London and the FBI's super-elite Hostage Rescue Team are sent down an alley for a surprise attack on a drug dealer's lair. As they move with stealth precision towards the target, they are surprised to see a boy in the dark alley. When the kid sees them, he utters the queer words "Damn to hell" and cackles. Uncharacteristically, this kid unnerves Web. But he proceeds with his team, working on getting his pulse beat to sixty-four and visualizing the next moments, as the team gets in position for the signal to move to "green." When the Tactical Operations Center radios to give the go ahead for the final move to the front door, Web freezes. It isn't fear or runaway nerves; Web has been doing this far too long for that. And yet, even with every muscle straining all he can manage to do is to take a few faltering steps and fall down on his gun. At five seconds to impact, Web lays helpless as he watches the Charlie team proceed and then one by one fall to the ground, all dead in seconds. Ironically, Web is the only one alive.For a HRT guy, out-surviving team members is a personal hell, nothing to be grateful about. The other FBI guys are suspicious and, even worse, distrust him to go out on mission. He can't bear the silent accusations of the widows and fatherless children who'd just as soon trade him for their lost loved one. And the press is having its usual field day, only this time it is his story they are exaggerating and manipulating. In a single moment Web London goes from hero to pariah. Web needs to understand what happened in that alley, specifically who set up his team for an ambush. This job is his life; he needs to prove his innocence to gain the trust back from the guys and for himself. There is no room in his job for less than absolute perfection and bravery. A good HRT guy does not freeze and let their team be killed without them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_estrangulador"title="El estrangulador">
The book follows an unnamed narrator that is currently living in a psychiatric hospital. Through the book the narrator talks about the people he has killed and claims to be responsible for a series of murders in Boston. Vázquez Montalbán wrote the book in such a manner that the reader is left to decide whether or not the narrator has committed as many or any of the murders he claims to have performed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cry_of_Morning"title="Cry of Morning">
The novel is set in the Republic of Ireland during the period of economic expansion that took place in the 1960s when Seán Lemass was Taoiseach. The narrative is concerned with an attempt by property developer, Francis O'Rourke, to erect a new office block in the centre of Dublin. The site is occupied by a slum dwelling whose occupants are about to be evicted in order to make way for the new development. Pitted against O'Rourke is a determined coalition of interests opposed to his plans. As the story unfolds, Cleeve highlights examples of corruption in Irish political and business life at that time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kindly_Ones_(Littell_novel)"title="The Kindly Ones (Littell novel)">
The book is a fictional autobiography, describing the life of Maximilien Aue, a former officer in the SS who, decades later, tells the story of a crucial part of his life when he was an active member of the security forces of the Third Reich. Aue begins his narrative as a member of an Einsatzgruppe in 1941, before being sent to the doomed German forces locked in the Battle of Stalingrad, which he survives. After a convalescence period in Berlin, and a visit to occupied France, he is designated for an advisory role for the concentration camps, and visits the extermination camps. He is ultimately present during the 1945 Battle of Berlin, the Nazi regime's last stand. By the end of the story, he flees Germany under a false French identity to start a new life in northern France. Throughout the account, Aue meets several famous Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann, Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler. In the book, Aue accepts responsibility for his actions, but most of the time he feels more like an observer than a direct participant.The book is divided into seven chapters, each named after a baroque dance, following the sequence of a Bach Suite. The narrative of each chapter is influenced by the rhythm of its associated dance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lammas_Night"title="Lammas Night">
"Lammas Night" tells the story of a group of English witches who act to save their country from Nazi attack during the Second World War. Woven within the story of their efforts are the visions and fragmented memories of a male witch, who gradually comes to realize his role in an ancient cycle of royal death, reincarnation, and sacrifice.The story opens with the British evacuation of Dunkirk in May of 1940. Among the evacuees is Captain Michael Jordan, an adherent of the "Oakwood Group" of occultists based at the fictional Oakwood Manor in Kent. Jordan is officially working for MI-6, as part of their Occult Studies Division, and he is carrying sensitive information proving that Adolf Hitler is using occult means to plan for the invasion of Great Britain, an operation called Sealion. After his safe return to Oakwood, Jordan shares this Intelligence with Colonel John "Gray" Graham, his military superior and wartime leader of the Oakwood Group. While Gray uses Jordan's collected information to plan a more conventional psychological warfare campaign against the Nazi invasion, he also attempts to unify the many disparate groups of British occultists to work in concert on Lammas night, one of the major Sabbats. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_(McGahern_novel)"title="The Dark (McGahern novel)">
"The Dark" is set in Ireland's rural north-west, and it focuses on an adolescent and his emerging sexuality, as seen through the lens of the strained and complex relationship he has with his father, Mahoney.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cage_(Abraham_book)"title="The Cage (Abraham book)">
The book covers the period that Tom Abraham, an Englishman, spent in the US Army during the Vietnam War. It describes how he served as an officer in the 1st Cavalry Unit and was captured by the Vietcong, before escaping and finding his unit again.The book is divided into four sections, the first is about his time in England, the second is his time in America, the third is his time fighting in the Vietnam War and the final section is about his capture and treatment by his captors.After the war he claimed to have suffered post-traumatic stress and after being arrested by the police suffered a breakdown.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Times_Like_These"title="In Times Like These">
Main character Pavana Leslie is returning to Belize following a vacation in the United States to take up a post at the Women's Department—and walks right into trouble. Belize is in turmoil following the announcement of a possible plan to end the claim to Belizean territory by Guatemala by working out an agreement between the two countries. Unfortunately, Belizeans have rejected this agreement wholesale. Worse yet, the man in charge of convincing them, Cabinet member Alex Abrams, was a former boyfriend of Pavana's and the father of her twins Lisa and Eric, and is being pressured by another former friend and leader of the resistance movement, Stoner Bennett, to denounce the agreement. Pavana must deal with her past relations with Bennett and Abrams in London and the decision that changed her life, her present troubles with coworkers at the Department who keep introducing politics to the equation, and her future: a relationship with the divorced Julian Carlisle, a development aid worker. When tragedy strikes, Pavana must draw on all her resources to come up with a solution—to Belize's problems and her own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunder_Point"title="Thunder Point">
Amateur diver Henry Baker goes diving in the Caribbean, when he finds the wreck of a German U-boat. Inside he finds a briefcase which he takes back home with him. On his way home he meets his friend, diver Bob Carney, and lies to him about where he's been. When he opens the briefcase he finds a list of documents in German. His inability to read German frustrates him but one name leaps out at him: Martin Bormann. The dates on the diary appear strange to Baker as they seem to indicate that the submarine sailed after the war was over.His next move is to go to England to see his friend, German speaker and Royal Navy man Garth Travers. Travers translates the documents and can't believe what he's found - information on Nazi sympathizers in the United Kingdom and America. The diary reveals that there's another case with the names still in the submarine. He gets in touch with an old friend of his, Brigadier Charles Ferguson, who works for the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister asks them to come to his office and invites two other men, Simon Carter and Sir Francis Pamer. After their meeting with the Prime Minister, they decide to ask Baker about the location of the submarine. Unfortunately for them, Baker died when he looked the wrong way and got run over by a London Bus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_of_Death_(novel)"title="Angel of Death (novel)">
Former IRA enforcer Sean Dillon, together with Hannah Bernstein, seeks to catch the Protestant terrorist Daniel Quinn. Quinn's men know who he is and he almost gets killed, but he is saved by a mysterious woman on a motorcycle. The woman is Grace Browning, an actress turned assassin and a member of a terrorist group known as January 30. Other members of January 30 are Tom, who's working for the Russian government, and his friend Rupert Lang, a Member of Parliament.Dillon and Bernstein's search for Quinn takes them to Beirut. Dillon is captured by an Israeli soldier, Anya, and her brothers, who want Dillion to interrogate one of Quinn's men. The interrogation leads them to a ship. Dillon blows up the ship, killing Quinn in the process, leaving the Sons of Ulster requiring a new leader.Dillion and Bernstein return to Ireland, where they get the job of protecting Senator Patrick Keogh. Ferguson figures out that Rupert is a traitor. Ferguson and the Prime Minister confront him but he escapes. Dillon follows him to the south of England where Rupert is mortally wounded.After Tom learns of Rupert's death he kills himself in London by throwing himself in front of a train. Sean and Hannah confront Grace at a theatre. Grace draws a gun and Hannah shoots her dead. Hannah is upset when she discovers that Grace’s gun wasn't loaded. January 30 is finished.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Far_Hills"title="The Far Hills">
The novel focuses on the McDonald family, who live a hand-to-mouth existence following their abandonment by paterfamilias, the feckless Rory McDonald. Into their lives comes Brendan Courtney O’Brien, scion of a wealthy Irish family, who has fallen in love with the eldest of the McDonald children, Erika. Despite his background, Brendan has even less money than the McDonalds. As the black sheep of his family, he has lived a peripatetic life and scrapes a living buying and selling on the black market.Through Brendan's eyes we meet a succession of apparently aimless losers who hang around the decrepit hair-dressing salon which is the McDonald's only source of income.Erika's younger brother, Jimmy, is something of a rebel, always getting into trouble. Eventually, his desperate mother sends him to a boarding school from which he escapes at the first opportunity. He wanders the byroads of rural Ireland before being recaptured.Soon, Brendan and Erika's wedding takes place, followed by a reception in McDonald's salon. As Brendan surveys the guests, all relatives or friends of his new bride, he imagines how his own estranged family would see them.Brendan and Erika set up home in a boarding house run by a malicious old landlady. In a bid to escape the grinding poverty in which they languish, the young couple join a travelling circus. Erika becomes a fortune-teller and Brendan sells small bottles of perfume to which he has added astrological predictions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off_for_the_Sweet_Hereafter"title="Off for the Sweet Hereafter">
Raeford Benton Lynch, nephew to the bald Jeeter, is a cipher, remarkable only for being gangly and horse-faced. On a whim, he accepts a job "digging holes" for Mr. Claude Ellwyn Overhill, who drives a motley assortment of riff-raff around the south, disinterring and relocating the denizens of graveyards that had to be moved to make room for development.Benton Lynch meets Jane Elizabeth Firesheets when he and Mr. Overhill's crew disinter her grandmomma. Jane Elizabeth, for some inscrutable reason, takes a fancy to Benton Lynch, beguiling him with her "milky white parts" and "plum colored parts."Trouble comes in the form of Jimmy, a petty criminal whose renegade nature lures Jane Elizabeth Firesheets away from Benton Lynch. In order to prove that he is as dangerous and ambitious—and thus as alluring—as Jimmy, Benton Lynch takes to holding up convenience stores and sending clippings about the crimes to Jane Elizabeth Firesheets. This wins her affections away from Jimmy, but has an unintended side effect: Jane Elizabeth Firesheets pictures herself as Bonnie to Benton Lynch's Clyde, and insists that the two take off on a crime spree that ends in the shooting of an elderly store clerk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneath_the_Moors"title="Beneath the Moors">
Professor Ewart Masters convalesces at the home of his nephew, after an automobile accident. There he discovers the existence of an ancient Cimmerian city beneath the Yorkshire moors. He proceeds to have dream adventures in the realms of the Great Old Ones.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakpoint_(novel)"title="Breakpoint (novel)">
A series of explosions occur at seemingly unimportant sites in the United States. These sites happen to be the locations where transatlantic cables from Europe and Asia reach the U.S. essentially cutting the U.S. off from the world, at least via the Internet. The attacks are immediately blamed on the Chinese. Two investigators are sent to investigate the incidents, with this assumption in mind. The investigators soon uncover an underground science of genomics and nanotechnology working on human-computer integration.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callista_(novel)"title="Callista (novel)">
"Callista" is set in the mid-3rd century in the city of Sicca Veneria in the Roman province of Africa. It deals with the persecution of the Christians community under Emperor Decius.The main character of the novel is Callista, a young and beautiful Greek girl, who has arrived from Greece some years previously with her brother Aristo; they work for Agellius's uncle Jucundus, carving statues of pagan gods. She is a gifted young woman, yet she is unhappy with her life.Another main character is the troubled young Christian Agellius, who wants to marry Callista. He is torn between his faith and his brother (Juba), his stepmother Gurta, a pagan witch, and his pagan uncle Jucundus, who all want to bring him away from the Christian faith. Agellius soon meets the mysterious Christian priest Caecilius (later identified as St. Cyprian of Carthage), who becomes a father figure for him and strengthens his faith again.After a terrible plague of locusts, popular rage against Christians breaks out and persecution starts once again. Agellius has to flee from the surroundings of Sicca Veneria. At the same time, Callista sees herself drawn more and more strongly to Christianity. When she is compelled to offer incense to the pagan gods, she has to make a dramatic choice, which finally leads her into the Catholic Church and then to martyrdom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiela's_Child"title="Fiela's Child">
The story is set in the forests of Knysna, South Africa in the nineteenth century, and tells the story of a Cape Coloured woman, Fiela Komoetie, and her family who adopts an abandoned Afrikaner child Benjamin Komoetie at tender age of three found outside her door. Nine years later, census-takers come to count the people living in the Long Kloof. They are shocked that a white child is living with a Coloured family and somehow come to the conclusion that the white child must be the child lost by the van Rooyens who live in the Forest. Fiela is distraught that her child is being taken away and travels to speak with the magistrate which fails because the magistrate is a white supremacist. The magistrate warns Fiela that if she interferes any more she will be dealt with. The child is taken away from her and forced to live with the van Rooyens who make beams from wood. His living conditions with the white people are much worse than with his Coloured family. Elias van Rooyen continuously abuses the family and everyone is thoroughly miserable. The child, Benjamin Komoetie, is forced to take up the name of Lukas van Rooyen and falls in love with his apparent sister, Nina van Rooyen. The climax of the story unfolds a few years later when the boy forces his "mother's" guilt to confess that he is not actually her son and he returns to Fiela and her family, whom he chooses as his own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_to_Exile"title="Born to Exile">
"Born to Exile" concerns the adventures of a wandering minstrel called Alaric, who possesses the otherwise unknown ability to teleport. The novel details his journey to uncover the secrets of his own past and the true nature of his mysterious ability.For eight weary months, Alaric the minstrel trudged the lonely road of exile. Born with preternatural powers, the infant Alaric had been found by foster parents abandoned on a hillside, newborn and naked, with a bloody, severed hand clutching his ankles. Older and with those powers on full display, he suddenly found himself rejected by his foster family, branded a witch-child. Alaric now wanders the world as a solitary wayfarer, with a knapsack, a few clothes, and a lute his only possessions.On this journey, he encounters the craggy towers and shining spires of a distant castle, like some gleaming vision in one of his songs. Within, Alaric is accepted as court minstrel but becomes embroiled in palace intrigue that involves Medron, the court magician, and the King's daughter, Princess Solinde. Subsequently, he journeys to the sinister Inn of the Black Swan and then to a superstition-ensorcelled village. There, Alaric is restored to his supernatural antecedents, known as the Lords of All Power.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigilant_(novel)"title="Vigilant (novel)">
Faye Smallwood lives on the colony planet of Demoth, which humans share with the flying squirrel-like Oolom. During her adolescence, the Oolom population was nearly wiped out by a plague before her father discovered a cure for it; at 40, her residual survivor guilt leads her to join the Vigil, a Demoth-wide organization of ombudsmen. As a result, she finds herself enmeshed in an ancient mystery involving murderous androids and biological weapons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sentinel_(Konvitz_novel)"title="The Sentinel (Konvitz novel)">
Alison Parker, a beautiful but troubled fashion model, moves into a gorgeous New York City brownstone house that is divided into apartments. The house is inhabited on the top floor by Father Francis Matthew Halloran, a reclusive blind Catholic priest who spends his time sitting at his open window.Alison is romantically involved with Michael Farmer, a lawyer and former prosecutor. Alison's life is beset for a number of reasons. She had a horrible relationship with her recently deceased father and survived at least one suicide attempt. Michael is under suspicion in the death of his former wife. A determined New York City Police Department detective named Gatz is sure that Michael murdered her and soon comes to suspect Alison as well.Alison suffers sleep loss and horrible nightmares involving her father and soon begins to suffer blinding headaches.Looking for distraction, she tries to ingratiate herself with the building's other occupants - but finds that they are bizarrely eccentric and obnoxious. Alison complains about them to the building's real estate agent. The agent is confused, telling a shocked Alison that there are no neighbours - besides herself and Father Halloran, no one else lives there.Looking for answers, Michael breaks into a records archive of the Roman Catholic Church. Researching the past of Father Halloran, Michael learns that the man has none. Rather, Halloran's life "began" the day that another man's life apparently ended, leading Michael to believe that the two men are one and the same. He also finds similar records for a woman, a nun named Sister Therese who is to reside in Alison's building. Michael soon concludes that Sister Therese is actually the woman that Alison is meant to become.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deluge_Drivers"title="The Deluge Drivers">
After resigning himself to perhaps being trapped on Tran-Ky-Ky for the rest of his life, Ethan Fortune learns that scientists at the outpost of Brass Monkey have detected a steady warming in the planet’s atmosphere. This has caused something not seen in generations on the planet: open water on the ice oceans. Taking the giant icerigger "Slanderscree" with a crew of Tran to investigate, Fortune learns that the warming of the oceans is not an accidental or natural event.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unbeheaded_King"title="The Unbeheaded King">
In this sequel to "The Clocks of Iraz", ex-king Jorian of Xylar and Dr. Karadur flee the revolt-stricken city of Iraz in the bathtub of its lately deceased monarch Ishbahar, borne through the air by Gorax, an invisible demon in the service of Karadur.In accordance with the doctor's previous promise, the demon flies them to Xylar to rescue Jorian's favorite wife Estrildis, imprisoned there by the kingdom's authorities in the hope of enticing Jorian, whom they intend to execute, back into their power.The plan miscarries, and the demon is barely able to spirit the hapless rescuers off to the neighboring city-state of Othomae, where it deposits them, tub and all, in the park of the Grand Duke. There they are promptly arrested for trespassing.Effecting their release takes some time, largely because their sadistic jailer Maltho, who bears a grudge against Jorian from a previous acquaintance, balks their efforts to send word of their plight to friends outside.Finally free, they attempt to accumulate resources for another attempt to recover Estrildis; difficult, since Jorian must remain in hiding from the Xylarians.Ultimately, eschewing heroics, he hires Abacarus, a sorcerous colleague of Karadur to do the job, again by means of a demonic servant. To his dismay, the demon Ruakh returns with the wrong woman, Estrildis' attendant Margalit. First angry and annoyed, Margalit becomes increasingly friendly with Jorian.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necropolis_(Copper_novel)"title="Necropolis (Copper novel)">
The novel is set in Victorian England. Clyde Beatty, a private investigator, is hired by Angela Meredith to investigate her father's death. His investigations lead him to a nursing home in Surrey, directed by the sinister Dr. Horace Couchman. After an autopsy reveals the murder of Miss Meredith's father, Dr. Couchman flees to London leading Beatty eventually to the eerie Brockwood Cemetery and a criminal conspiracy involving millions of pounds' worth of gold bullion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Grave"title="The Third Grave">
While working in Egypt for Sir Harold Gregory, archaeologist Thomas Ashley meets Lucien Mallory and his servant Cooper, who have visited Gregory’s camp after the discovery of a mummy. Later, when Mallory has left the camp, the mummy is discovered vandalised.Four years later Mallory requests that Ashley visit him In Farriers Bar, a village in Devonshire, to help translate some hieroglyphics from papyrus scrolls discovered in Egypt. Mallory is also in possession of an unusual mummy. Ashley travels to the village where he learns that a brutal murder has recently taken place. Ashley meets a friend in the village and discovers that the friend's daughter has gone to work for Mallory and that Mallory has outraged the local vicar. Mallory’s servant Cooper has also met with an accident and is now severely brain damaged. Ashley visits Mallory’s house and begins the translation for Mallory. Slowly Mallory’s plans are revealed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai_Lung_Unrolls_His_Mat"title="Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat">
This book consists of three parts. In the first, Kai Lung's village has been pillaged by the evil Ming Shu, and not only have his house and garden been destroyed, his wife has also been taken away. It is left to the story-teller's wits to think of a plan to defeat Ming Shu, and reclaim his property.In the second part, Kai Lung overhears a neighbor using an improper analogy, and decides to educate him by providing an example of a properly composed piece of prose.In the third part, Kai Lung receives the distinction of being allowed to practise his craft before any official within three and a half "li" of his residence, provided that official is not engaged in important business at the time, and is authorized to style himself as "Literary Instructor to the Shades of Female Ancestors". He then finds a suitable occasion to launch into one of his narratives.Kai Lung adventures usually serve as mere excuses to bring up side stories along the way, which typically take up the better part of a Kai Lung book. However, this is one of the few books that has a purposeful main narrative as well as intriguing side stories.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brimstone_Wedding"title="The Brimstone Wedding">
Jenny Warden, a care-assistant in a retirement home, is in a loveless marriage, and has a lover. She befriends Stella Newland, a resident with terminal cancer, and Stella gradually reveals the events of her life, which in some ways parallel Jenny's. A vanished film star and a secret house add to the intrigue until the terrible truth of the brimstone wedding is finally revealed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Night_Is_Too_Long_(novel)"title="No Night Is Too Long (novel)">
Set in Alaska and Suffolk, this story is written in three first-person narrations, the first and longest of which is the memoir-confession of Tim Cornish.Tim, a would-be novelist of twenty-four, has just received his master's degree. He travels to Alaska for a nature-exploration cruise with his older male lover, Ivo, a paleontologist who will be lecturing during the cruise.Tim has been living with and supported by Ivo, but, since Ivo's recent declaration of love, Tim has tired of him.Ashore in Juneau while Ivo is elsewhere, Tim meets Isabel, an unhappily married, somewhat older woman, with whom Tim immediately falls in love, and he promises to meet her in Seattle after breaking up with Ivo (who he pretends is a woman). When Tim tells Ivo their relationship is over, Ivo refuses to accept it. On an excursion to an uninhabited island, the two men tussle; Tim strikes Ivo, who then strikes his head against a tree. Leaving Ivo for dead, Tim flees the island and rejoins the cruise, saying nothing of what has happened.Tim helps himself to the cash and credit card Ivo left behind and flies to Seattle, hoping to find Isabel, but his guilt causes him to abandon that plan and he returns to the UK, where he settles into an unchallenging job in his hometown and lives alone in his parents' house. As there has been no word of a police inquiry and no report of the finding of Ivo's body, Tim seems to have committed the perfect crime, though he is increasingly haunted by what he has done, believing he sees Ivo everywhere. Then he begins to receive a series of anonymous letters, each of which describes the island ordeal—and rescue—of a castaway.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallowglass_(novel)"title="Gallowglass (novel)">
Sandor comes from a wealthy home and is highly educated. Joe, longing for a friend, falls under his spell.Some years earlier, Sandor had taken part in the kidnapping of a former model, Nina. He now plans to kidnap her again so that they can live together. At present, Nina lives in a heavily guarded residence with her husband and many servants. Eventually, Joe's colourful stepsister, Tilly, is also dragged into the plot. However, things don't turn out as Sandor had planned. Most of the story is seen through Joe's eyes, but Paul Garnet, Nina's driver, also tells part of the tale.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dark-Adapted_Eye"title="A Dark-Adapted Eye">
Largely set during World War II, the story is told by Faith Severn, who at the prompting of a true-crime writer recounts her memories of her aunt, the prim, fastidious, and snobbish Vera Hillyard. Vera's life is initially centred on her beautiful younger sister, Eden, even to the exclusion of her own son, Francis, with whom she has a poor relationship. Later, Vera brings up a second son, Jamie, born during the war and presumably fathered by Vera's soldier husband, though the timing of his birth raises questions. Vera becomes intensely devoted to Jamie, while Eden marries the scion of a wealthy family.When Eden is unable to have children with her husband, she begins to demand custody of Jamie, who she claims is being poorly raised by Vera. To the bewilderment and shock of the rest of the family, the custody battle escalates to violent levels, leading to tragedy and a series of disturbing revelations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dil,_Diya,_Dehleez"title="Dil, Diya, Dehleez">
The novel is about a woman named Zaitoon Bano and her life revolving around her of sorrow and pain. Based on her own revenge, she influences the lives of many without realizing how her actions can impact others. The story unfolds over two generations and reveals the secrets of many characters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Darkling"title="The Darkling">
Set in the distant future, a young tribesman, Maradek searches for his father, Afurad. In the course of this search, he helps to foil the forces that threaten the world's destruction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Miocene_Arrow"title="The Miocene Arrow">
In isolated pockets of what used to be America, humans fight stylized duels in small, biodiesel-powered airplanes. In a land where chivalry and honor are everything, what happens when rebels from Australia, enamored of the amazing technology held by the Americans, hatch a plot to bring some of it back to their homes?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyes_of_the_Calculor"title="Eyes of the Calculor">
Mirrorsun, which orbits Earth and prevents electrical machines from functioning, has been defunct for some time. However, when it comes back to life with a vengeance, the new Highliber must reform the Calculor, a large computer whose components are human beings. At the same time, Americans are working with an underground group to bring their airplanes and weapons to Australia. Can the Highliber and the Overmayor of Rochester, the capital of Australia, stop the American technology from destroying their way of life?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Love!_The_Bruce_Campbell_Way"title="Make Love! The Bruce Campbell Way">
"Make Love! The Bruce Campbell Way" begins with an excerpt from an email that Bruce Campbell received from Barry Neville from St. Martin's Press in regard to a book, "Walk this Way", that he was attempting to write. The email expresses the publisher's disinterest in that book, but a desire for Campbell to work on a different project. Upon calling Barry Neville, Bruce is presented with the idea of writing a relationship book. Bruce feels he cannot approach the concept, since he does not see himself as an authority on the subject and feels his editor has a false impression of his mastery of relationships.He is contacted by his acting agent Barry about a potential role in a Richard Gere/Renée Zellweger romantic comedy titled "Let's Make Love," written by Kevin Jarre, directed by Mike Nichols and produced by Robert Evans. Bruce jumps to the conclusion that the role is a small, insignificant part, but he finds out that his role is in fact a large part as the wise-cracking doorman. Bruce goes to New York City and auditions for the role, then gets the role despite the fact he was not the first, second or last choice; others considered included Johnny Depp, John Cusack, Billy Campbell, Gary Sinise, John Malkovich and Robert Patrick. From this point, Bruce tries to do research for his role. He first tries being a doorman at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where he has an encounter with Colin Powell that does not end well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Wolf"title="The House of the Wolf">
The story, a Victorian thriller, involves Professor John Coleridge, who is a guest at Castle Homolky, situated above the tiny Hungarian village of Lugos. While staying at the castle, a huge black wolf is discovered with preternatural powers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siege_of_Macindaw"title="The Siege of Macindaw">
With the overthrow of Castle Macindaw by Keren, Orman's traitorous cousin, Will needs to find men to help win back the crucial northern stronghold. Will seeks out a group of shipwrecked Skandians and hires them as mercenaries. Halt and Crowley, Will's former mentor and the leader of the Ranger Corps, send the young knight Horace to help Will. Together, they manage to take the Scotti general MacHaddish prisoner and find that Keren has made a deal with the Scotti and is allowing them access to Araluen's northern fiefs in return for a portion of their plunder.The Araluen Courier Alyss has been held captive by Keren who is hypnotising and interrogating her for information. Will sends Alyss a star stone, an anti-hypnosis device, and with it she is able to deceive Keren into thinking he has hypnotised her for a while. Alyss and Will send each other messages using the Courier signal code.Will and the Skandians make an improvised siege engine, ostensibly to attack the castle. It collapses, according to plan, and the Skandians pretend to flee in panic. The castle defenders quickly become uninterested in the strange machine and are easily distracted by a show of lights to the south, caused by Will's ally, the "sorcerer" Malcolm. Meanwhile, Keren asks Alyss for her hand in marriage, however she refuses.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Made_Stevie_Crye?"title="Who Made Stevie Crye?">
The story concerns Mary Stevenson Crye, a newly widowed housewife, who turns to freelance writing to provide for her family. Her typewriter, which is demonically possessed, involves her in a series of occult.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovecraft's_Book"title="Lovecraft's Book">
The story concerns an offer made to the unworldly fantasist and ghost-writer H. P. Lovecraft by the canny fascist sympathizer, George Sylvester Viereck. Lovecraft is hired to write a political tract in the nature of an American "Mein Kampf". In return, Viereck promises to arrange for the publication of a volume of Lovecraft's stories.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrice_Upon_a_Time"title="Thrice Upon a Time">
In December 2009, Murdoch Ross and his friend Lee Francis Walker visit Murdoch's grandfather, Sir Charles Ross, in his castle in Storbannon, Scotland. Sir Charles is a Nobel Prize winner for his work in particle physics — more specifically the isolation of free quarks.In this novel, when a nucleon decays into three quarks, the first two quarks appear immediately and the third quark appears on the order of a few millionths of an "yoctosecond" later. A widely accepted theory is that the original decay produces two quarks and also a third unknown particle, dubbed the "quason". This is subsequently transformed into a third quark.Sir Charles offers a different and radical explanation: all three of the quarks are created at once, but the first two are "propagated back in time". Charles dubs the energy which had allowed the propagation through time as "tau waves". Although his theory is seemingly valid and consistent, the physicists of his time refuse to accept it because of its implications — namely the failure of some of the physical laws of conservation. Sir Charles then retreats to his family's castle in Scotland to continue his research in private. There, he succeeds in building a time machine capable of sending messages to the future and the past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_vs_Beast"title="Man vs Beast">
A 14-year-old boy called Andy Pierce witnesses his mother, Christine, getting assaulted by two masked men working for the Animal Freedom Militia.On CHERUB campus, Kerry is annoyed with her boyfriend, James. James goes into his room and is met by his sister, Lauren, who asks him to help her and her best friend Bethany to sneak into the basic training compound to give Bethany's brother, Jake, and Lauren's crush, Rat, some supplies. James refuses, but Lauren blackmails him by threatening to tell Kerry about him cheating on her during a mission the previous year.James joins Lauren and Bethany on the mission to get the food to the trainees. They successfully deliver the supplies, but upon returning to his room, James gets a call from CHERUB chairman Mac, who had earlier found out about the mission, then watched it unfold on the backup CCTV system. After Mac reveals a photocopy of Lauren's master plan, including her intention to blackmail James, James avoids punishment; Lauren and Bethany, however, are punished. Lauren and Kyle are punished with having to dig out the campus ditches.Three weeks later, James, Lauren, and Kyle are sent on a mission, with Zara as mission controller, to bring down the AFM (Animal Freedom Militia), an animal liberation terrorist group. They stay with peaceful animal liberationist Ryan Quinn, with Zara posing as his fiancée. Kyle and James befriend suspected members of AFM, and are eventually invited on a top-secret mission with the group. Meanwhile, Lauren is stuck with the Ryan, while Zara is in a meeting in London. Ryan gets invited to rescue dozens of beagle puppies that were going to be sold onto the testing company; with Zara away, Lauren joins him. The rescue is a success, but the rescuers were overwhelmed, as many more dogs were rescued than they thought. When Zara arrives after all the puppies have been taken away, Lauren saves one puppy (who had escaped) after it nearly runs under Zara's car. She brings him back to Ryan's house, and names him Meatball.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innocent_(McEwan_novel)"title="The Innocent (McEwan novel)">
Leonard Marnham is "The Innocent" of the novel, a Post Office engineer who is employed by the Americans to install monitoring equipment in the tunnel they are building specifically to tap the Russians. The British and Americans view each other with distrust. Leonard is befriended by Bob Glass, an American obsessed with security.The British are aware that the Americans are on the verge of a breakthrough with decoding, and are annoyed that they have not been a part of it. MacNamee, a scientist, insists that Leonard act as a spy for them, as he is in with the Americans. Leonard fails dismally in his role as spy.Ironically, Leonard lives in an apartment above one occupied by a rather stuffy character named George Blake, who was a Soviet agent imprisoned in the 1960s, and who escaped from Wormwood Scrubs. The novel neatly intertwines fictional meetings between the two men, and one of Blake's most notorious betrayals is given a new slant by Leonard's foolhardy act.At a bar with his new American colleagues Leonard meets a girl called Maria to whom he is 'innocent' due to having never had sex before. They become engaged but after their engagement party Maria's ex-husband Otto, a self-proclaimed war hero and alcoholic turns up and starts a very violent fight with the couple. While defending Maria Leonard is being badly beaten, Maria hits Otto with a blow to the head which subsequently kills him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spinal_Cord_Perception"title="The Spinal Cord Perception">
David Rivers, a 24-year-old substitute teacher (most likely with anti-social personality disorder) begins the story by moving back to Georgia after spending several months in California fleeing from an undisclosed incident involving a classroom full of children. As the story progresses, we learn that David suffers from visions of a treacherous black creature he calls the Llapasllaly. During these visions terrible things occur, namely the death of his childhood friend, girlfriend and parents among other things. As David becomes increasingly disenchanted with his life in California, his depression culminates with the discovery of his girlfriend's unfaithfulness. After witnessing the Llapasllaly kill her, David returns to his hometown in Georgia and takes another substitute teaching job. He soon meets a woman named Samantha, whom he falls in love with and proposes to. His dark visions seem to subside. Things take a turn for the worse however when David realizes Samantha has a Llapasllaly of her own (who she calls Amelia) and who takes the form of an eating disorder. At the time of this discovery a police investigation into the killing of David's Californian girlfriend finds David in Georgia where a detective issues a warrant for his arrest, believing him to be responsible for the killing. David flees police as Samantha is taken to the hospital for treatment after collapsing. Returning to the elementary school that was the home of the incident that forced David to move to California, David attempts to prove the Llapasllaly's existence by revealing it to a classroom full of special education students. The plan backfires when the Llapasllaly kills a child with Down's syndrome. As David leaves the school, a taxi carrying Samantha arrives and the couple run to reunite before the police car arriving at the scene crashes into Samantha and kills her. David manages to escape the police temporarily and returns to the trailer he was living in. He has a final vision in which the Llapasllaly invites him to commit suicide with sleeping pills. In the final moments before the police arrive to arrest him, David realizes the Llapasllaly exists only in his mind and that the option to live or die is up to him and not the creature.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holy_Sinner"title="The Holy Sinner">
The story begins in Rome, with the monk Clemens announcing the ringing of bells throughout the city. Clemens, moved by the "spirit of storytelling" (a term used often in Mann's later works), introduces the reader to the events which led up to the ringing of the bells, i.e., Gregory's arrival in Rome and coronation as Pope.In Flanders, duke Grimald, seventeen years a widower, is pressing his daughter Sibylla to marry in order to forge an alliance with a neighboring king. Sibylla, attracted only to her brother Wiligis, spurns the duke's wishes. After the duke's death brother and sister become lovers, and Sibylla learns that she is with child by her brother.Considering suicide out of shame for what they have done, the brother and sister turn to their loyal counselor, the knight Eisengrein, who suggests that Wiligis take up the Crusade as a means of atoning for his sins. After the couple's child is born he further suggests that they set the infant adrift in a sealed barrel. Although at first they distrust Eisengrein's advice, Sibylla and Wiligis realize there is nothing else they can do. Wiligis sets out and is killed before he even reaches Massilia (modern Marseilles). Sibylla gives her newborn to the North Sea, where she assumes it will perish.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Kelvin's_Machine"title="Lord Kelvin's Machine">
In Victorian London, Alice, the wife of scientist-explorer Langdon St. Ives, is murdered by his nemesis, the hunchback Dr. Ignacio Narbondo. St. Ives and his valet, Hasbro, pursue Narbondo across Norway, contesting Narbondo's plot to destroy the earth and, later, efforts to revivify Narbondo's apparently frozen corpse. In the process St. Ives gains access to a powerful device created by Lord Kelvin, which allows St. Ives to travel through time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Higher_Power_of_Lucky"title="The Higher Power of Lucky">
Lucky is a ten-year-old girl who lives in Hard Pan, a small town (population 43) in the California desert. She has two friends: Lincoln, an avid knot tyer and expected by his mother to be the President when he grows up; and Miles, a five-year-old whose favorite book is "Are You My Mother?" by P. D. Eastman. After Lucky's mother died two years earlier, her father called upon his first ex-wife, Brigitte, to come to the United States from France to take care of Lucky. Lucky fears that Brigitte is tired of being her guardian and of their life in Hard Pan. When Lucky discovers Brigette's suitcase and passport lying out, she becomes convinced that Brigitte will abandon her and return to France. This anxiety prompts Lucky to seek help from her Higher Power, a notion she acquires from eavesdropping at her town's 12-step meetings. After discovering three "signs" to leave, she runs away with her dog, HMS Beagle, during a sandstorm. Outside of town, however, she finds Miles, lost and injured in the storm, and takes him with her. They shelter in the dugouts near an abandoned mine and wait out the storm. They are soon joined by Lincoln, who tells them that the rest of the town is looking for them and will be there shortly. Before she leaves the dugouts, she casts her mother's ashes out in the wind in a makeshift memorial service with the townsfolk. Brigitte takes Lucky home and explains the papers Lucky had found in Brigitte's suitcase were actually to legally adopt Lucky, and she reveals her plans to open a restaurant in Hard Pan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flotsam_(Wiesner_book)"title="Flotsam (Wiesner book)">
The book has no words, but is told through pictures. A boy is at the beach and finds an old camera. He takes the film to get it developed and sees photos of fantastical undersea cities and inventions. The final section of the book consists of a girl, who is holding a photo of a child, who is holding a photo of a child, who is holding a photo of a child, and so on. The boy figures out that he is one in a long line of photographers who have found this camera. He takes a picture of himself holding this photo and tosses the camera back into the ocean; it is carried across the ocean by a variety of fish and sea life until it again washes ashore and another child finds it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_Far_from_the_Bamboo_Grove"title="So Far from the Bamboo Grove">
The story begins with Yoko Kawashima (and her mother, brother and sister) living in Nanam. Yoko is 11 years old and living in North Korea during World War II while their father works as a Japanese government official in Manchuria, China. As the War draws towards a close, Yoko and her family realizes the danger of their situation and attempts to escape back to Japan as Communists troops close in on North Korea.Her brother, Hideyo, also tries to leave but he is separated from his family because he has to serve at an ammunition factory for six days a week. The women of the family board a train to Seoul using a letter from a family diplomat but their trip is cut short by a bomb 45 miles away from Seoul. Yoko is injured from the bombing and the women are forced to walk the rest of the way. After receiving medical treatment in Seoul, Yoko, her sister, and mother board a train to Busan, and then a ship to Japan.When Yoko, her sister Ko, and her mother reach Fukuoka, Japan, it is not the beautiful, comforting, welcoming place Yoko dreamed of. Once again, they find themselves living in a train station scrounging in the garbage for food to survive. Eventually, Yoko's mother travels to Kyoto to find her family. She then leaves for Aomori to seek help from their grandparents who she discovers are both dead. Their mother dies on the same day, leaving Yoko and Ko waiting for their brother Hideyo. Their mother's last words were to keep their wrapping cloth where she had hidden money for her children.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gideon's_Day"title="Gideon's Day">
Gideon's Day follows senior Superintendent George ‘Gee-Gee’ Gideon of Scotland Yard through one day of his 20-year career, during which a dozen different problems beset him and his men at Scotland Yard. C.I.D. Superintendent George Gideon is furious when he finds out that one of his detectives has accepted bribes. The consequences of confronting him spin out through the day. Other cases that Gideon deals with during the day include hunting for a child's killer and a jewel thief, solving a series of mail van robberies, and trying to find out who killed an old woman in a sweet-shop.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_of_the_Old_Dog"title="Flight of the Old Dog">
"Flight of the Old Dog" is the story of a secret highly modified B-52 bomber flying into the Soviet Union on an impromptu strike mission.The book begins with a B-52 crew during a military exercise in Idaho. Not long after, the Americans discover the existence of a Soviet ground-based laser in the Kamchatka Peninsula. Although Moscow insists that the system does not violate existing strategic accords such as the ABM Treaty, their frequent use of the laser in striking vital US assets challenges Washington's patience before the UN.Meanwhile, Gen. Bradley Elliott, commander of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center (HAWC; also known as "Dreamland"), tests a unique B-52 bomber with the help of several young crewmembers. Called the EB-52 Megafortress (named "Old Dog"), the plane is being eyed as a new strategic escort for SAC forces. The technology tested in the plane is later adapted and fitted into two B-1 bombers that are sent to attack the Soviet laser after it destroys an American space defense satellite.The B-1 mission is intercepted by the Soviets, but the aircraft are not shot down. At the same time, terrorists attack HAWC, forcing Elliott and the Old Dog crew to launch immediately. The crew push ahead with the B-1s' mission after they realize that they are the only remaining hope for destroying the laser.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Falling_Torch"title="The Falling Torch">
The story takes place in the 25th century, four hundred years after humans have begun colonizing other planets, and a generation after the home planet, Earth, has been conquered by the Invaders.The Invaders (whose name for themselves in never given) in this case are humanoid, very similar to Earth humans. A tiny human government-in-exile exists in the Alpha Centauri system, which is home to a large and prosperous human society, but the colonists there are rapidly losing their ties to the home planet. They are even beginning to look different, for instance having unusually colored eyes. They have a solid military-industrial base, a functioning space fleet, and ideas about expanding their sphere of influence, but apparently no particular interest in liberating Earth.The Invaders have superior social engineering technology, allowing them to assess the capabilities of any individual and assign them to a role in life best suited to them. Many humans prefer this and accept their place in Invader society. Invader society is highly ordered and clean, in contrast to the polluted industrial cities in the colonies.One man, Michael Wireman, is the last hope of the exiles. He is the son of the aging President of the government-in-exile. He left Earth as a baby when his parents and the other members of the government-in-exile escaped the Invasion. Despite having no memories of Earth, he has been raised to despise colonial society and worship the idea of liberating Earth. As the novel opens, Michael's father tells the other members of the exiled government that a large arms shipment will be sent to Earth to supply guerrillas led by a man named Hammil. The circumstances suggest that the colonial government is finally ready to support action against the Invaders, but is avoiding doing it openly. However, by this time many of the exiles have made good lives for themselves in their new home. This did not matter as long as the liberation was hopeless, but they refuse to dismantle those lives to return to Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Across_Five_Aprils"title="Across Five Aprils">
Across Five Aprils is set in Jasper County, Illinois. The story begins in mid-April, 1861 on the Creighton farm. Nine-year-old Jethro Creighton and his mother Ellen have just started a long day of planting potatoes, unaware that the long-festering turmoil in the country has already exploded into battle. Ellen is preoccupied with concerns for her older boys should they be called to serve. Jethro is excited at the prospect of war, like his brother Tom and cousin Eb. He little understands the reasons for or the reality of what lies ahead. In the late afternoon, Ellen's nephew Wilse Graham from Kentucky arrives on a rare visit. During the evening meal, the discussion grows heated as Wilse accuses Northern industrialists of attacking slavery as a way to gain public support of their battle against Southern agriculture interests. The normally quiet Bill speaks in agreement with Wilse although he decries slavery. Matt Creighton condemns the immorality of slavery. The discussion leads Jethro to a realization that war is more than a proof of strength. He struggles to understand issues beyond his years. Even though they have all worked hard all day and can expect more tomorrow, the entire family waits until late in the night for the school-teacher Shadrach Yale's return from a trip into Newton. He brings news of the taking of Fort Sumter. War has arrived.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_of_Earth"title="Man of Earth">
In "Man of Earth", Allen Sibley is a businessman who is about to be indicted for bribery of a public official. Desperate to escape prison, he pays a fortune to the mysterious Doncaster Corporation for a new identity (and a new body and personality to go with it). However, Doncaster tricks him, sending him as an unwilling emigrant to the extraterrestrial colony on planet Pluto. Although it has been terraformed into a pleasant enough abode, Pluto is thoroughly neglected by a narcissistic Earth, and only ne'er-do-wells and misfits settle it. Sibley, with no marketable skills, is drafted into the Plutonian army, which is building an anomalously large war machine. His new commanding persona makes him swiftly rise in rank, and he soon concludes that Pluto intends to invade and plunder its neglectful mother planet. Instead, Doncaster suddenly reveals that the Pluto colony was created by them as a stepping-stone to the stars, and that Earth will be left to go rancid, while "new men", like the rebuilt Sibley, conquer the universe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(Durbin_novel)"title="Dragonfly (Durbin novel)">
Ten-year-old Bridget Ann (nicknamed "Dragonfly") lives in her Uncle Henry's funeral parlor. Uncle Henry summons Mothkin, a hunter, to investigate strange things happening in the basement as Hallowe'en approaches. In the basement, Dragonfly and Mothkin discover a doorway to a spooky underground world, known as Harvest Moon, which is ruled by an evil despot, Samuel Hain. Dragonfly is separated from Mothkin and meets up with a werewolf named Sylva who protects her from Hain. Eventually, she reunites with Mothkin for a final battle with Hain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortals_(Hickman_novel)"title="The Immortals (Hickman novel)">
When a cure for AIDS turns out to be more virulent than the disease, the U.S. establishes quarantine camps in the desert southwest. Michael Barris, a TV producer, masquerades as one of the infected and travels to the camps in search of his son. He finds horrific conditions, and learns that the so-called quarantine camps are death camps where the infected are gathered, purposefully brutalized, and ultimately cremated alive, their ashes bulldozed into the desert sand. Barris's son escapes the camp before the cycle of immolation, carrying the evidence he needs to expose the governmental mis-information campaign.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulu_Heart"title="Zulu Heart">
"Zulu Heart" is set in an alternate world where an Islamic Africa became the dominant world power and Europe remained primitive. It continues the story of a young African nobleman, Kai ibn Jallaleddin ibn Rashid al Kushi, and his former slave, the Irishman Aidan O'Dere.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Pyramid_Robbery"title="The Great Pyramid Robbery">
Novel is about a young hemutiu called Senu and his ghostly double Red. Senu is usually the class clown and uses his Ka for playing practical jokes on his family. When Senu and a group of his friends play a dare in the hemutiu tombs, the dare goes horribly wrong when Senu and his Ka make contact with the Ka's of the dead. Senu is frightened, and runs out of the tomb before he finds out what he had done. Senu's Heka gets the attention of the Imakhu captain Nemhab. Nemheb then sends Senu to the Mertu gang the Scorpions, building Lord Khafre's pyramid. Senu is then helplessly tangled in a struggle for the two lands. After Senu battles Nemheb's Ka when trying to free red he became the Sem-Priest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Foundations_of_the_Nineteenth_Century"title="The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century">
Published in German, the book focuses on the controversial notion that Western civilization is deeply marked by the influence of the Teutonic peoples. Chamberlain grouped all European peoples—not just Germans, but Celts, Slavs, Greeks, and Latins—into the "Aryan race", a race built on the ancient Proto-Indo-European culture. At the helm of the Aryan race, and, indeed, all races, he saw the Nordic or Teutonic peoples.Chamberlain's book focused on the claim that the Teutonic peoples were the heirs to the empires of Greece and Rome, something which Charlemagne and some of his successors also believed. He argued that when the Germanic tribes destroyed the Roman Empire, Jews and other non-Europeans already dominated it. The Germans, in this scenario, saved Western civilization from Semitic domination. Chamberlain's thoughts were influenced by the writings of Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), who had argued the superiority of the "Aryan race". This term was increasingly being used to describe Caucasian or European peoples, as opposed to Jews, who were conceptualised as "infusing Near Eastern poison into the European body politic". For Chamberlain the concept of an Aryan race was not simply defined by ethno-linguistic origins. It was also an abstract ideal of a racial élite. The Aryan, or "noble" race, was always changing as superior peoples supplanted inferior ones in evolutionary struggles for survival.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tomorrow_(novel)"title="The Long Tomorrow (novel)">
In the aftermath of a devastating nuclear war, Americans have come to blame technology for the disaster, and far from seeking to recover what was destroyed, are actively opposed to any such attempt.Religious sects which even before the war opposed modern technology and avoided its use in their daily life have adjusted to the post-apocalypse situation far more easily than anyone else, and feeling themselves vindicated have come to dominate the post-war society. They gained an enormous number of new members, though those families which had been such before the war are honoured and privileged, their special status indicated by slightly different clothing.All the pre-war American cities have been destroyed in the war, and their re-construction is expressly forbidden. The US Constitution has been amended, with the Thirtieth Amendment disallowing the presence of more than a thousand residents or the existence of more than two hundred buildings per square mile anywhere in the United States.Len Colter and his cousin Esau are adolescent members of the New Mennonite community of Piper's Run. Against their fathers' wishes, the boys attend a preaching where a trader named Soames is accused and stoned to death for his apparent involvement with a forbidden bastion of technology known as Bartorstown. They are saved when a trader, Ed Hostetter, intervenes. Hostetter grabs a box from Soames' wagon, from which Esau steals a radio.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cleansing_(novel)"title="The Cleansing (novel)">
The book tells the story of an American Indian wolf god, Wanata, who comes to earth to hold humanity accountable for its abuse of nature. In Alaska, freelance journalist Savannah Channing investigates the story of a rampaging wolf pack that is systematically destroying villages. She arrives to find that the problem is worse than she expected and that the military and a brutal bounty hunter have been employed. Wanata is changed into mortal human form by an Indian Shaman's magic and is forced to interact with those he was sent to punish. The paths of Wanata and Channing cross in a spine-chilling conclusion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Babylon_Game"title="The Babylon Game">
It is the year 539 BC; inside the city of Babylon, known as the Gateway of God, is Tia, the adopted daughter of a perfume maker. She is picking herbs in the sacred Amytis garden. Next to the garden is a portion of the double defense wall surrounding the city. Tia soon discovered what is between the two walls; Sirrush, otherwise known as dragons.Fearing for the dragon's health, she leaves them food. A touch from the dragons grants Tia great magical powers, enough to threaten or save Babylon. These will be needed, as far in the plains the Persian king Cyrus the Great, plans to capture Babylon. The secret of its salvation might just lie in the hanging gardens themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawkins_Delusion?"title="The Dawkins Delusion?">
McGrath criticizes Dawkins for what he perceives to be "a dogmatic conviction" to "a religious fundamentalism which refuses to allow its ideas to be examined or challenged."He objects to Dawkins' assertion that faith is a juvenile delusion, arguing that numerous reasonable persons chose to convert as adults. He cites himself and Antony Flew as two specific examples. Like Dawkins, McGrath rejects William Paley's watchmaker analogy as specious. To express his true feelings on the subject of irreducible complexity, McGrath instead cites the work of Richard Swinburne, remarking that the capacity of science to explain itself requires its own explanation – and that the most economical and reliable account of this explanatory capacity lies in the notion of the monotheistic God of Christianity. When considering the subject of Aquinas' "Quinque viae", to which Dawkins devotes considerable attention, McGrath interprets the theologian's arguments as an affirmation of a set of internally consistent beliefs rather than as an attempt to formulate a set of irrefutable proofs.McGrath proceeds to address whether religion specifically conflicts with science. He points to Stephen Jay Gould's supposition of non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) as evidence that Darwinism is as compatible with theism as it is with atheism. With additional reference to the works of Sir Martin Rees, Denis Noble, and others, McGrath advocates a modified version of NOMA which he terms "overlapping magisteria". He posits that science and religion co-exist as equally valid explanations for two partially overlapping spheres of existence, where the former concerns itself primarily with the temporal, and the latter concerns itself primarily with the spiritual, but where both can occasionally intertwine. McGrath confirms his position by noting that some prominent scientists are also theists (or at least sympathetic to theism, in Davies' case), pointing specifically to Owen Gingerich, Francis Collins, and Paul Davies as examples.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazon_Temple_Quest"title="The Amazon Temple Quest">
Lysippe, an Amazon princess, is suffering. Her tribe has vanished and her sister has been badly wounded. The Gryphon Stone can help, but the evil Alchemist, who has taken Lysippe as his slave, is after it also. With the help of her friend Hero, who has also been enslaved, they seek sanctuary in the Temple of Artemis. There, Lysippe makes new friends and enemies. While her sister Tanis is being healed, Lysippe stays in the temple, but she sometimes ventures out resulting in finding a nymph named Smyrna. As Smyrna instructs Lysippe in Amazon ways, Lysippe is formulating a plan to rid of the Alchemist and finally be free again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mausoleum_Murder"title="The Mausoleum Murder">
In the beginning of the story, Alexis' home Halicarnassos is at war with Macedon. As the war rages on Alexis' stepmother still wants to make the pilgrimage to the river. Alexis has the gift to turn statues that have enough gold on them into real people. This gift gets him into trouble as his stepmother has the spirit of the old king who wants to reclaim his land. Alexis meets the princess and turns her fabled chimera to life and it rampages through the city attacking all who are known as their enemies. Alexis then goes to the river and reverses his gift and is shocked when his father and his best friend are still real when all of the other statues have turned back to stone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Olympic_Conspiracy"title="The Olympic Conspiracy">
The story is about the young Sosi. Sosi has a curse, that makes him half-snake. At each full moon, he is able to "shed his skin" and adopt the look of anyone he wants. When his brother, Theron, is injured, Sosi uses his curse to take his place in the Olympic games so that Theron won't be disqualified. Although his brother Theron is nasty to him, Sosi wants to find out about his curse at Olympia, and redeem himself in his family's eyes.However, Sosi uncovers a terrorist plot at the Games. Boys competing in the Games, the favourites to win (including Theron), are all being targeted by the mysterious Warriors of Ahriman. Sosi soon discovers that the Warriors are targeting those that are sent dreams by the goddess of victory, Nike, who has manifested herself in the form of a priestess to oversee the Games.When the priestess reveals herself, it is up to Sosi and his friends to make sure that the ones who she sent victory dreams win their events. However, when three out of the four she picked lose, she becomes extremely weak. The Warrior of Ahriman reveals his plan to sacrifice Nike to arise an army from the dead, Sosi has to embrace his curse. He turns into a snake, and calls Zeus to bring his thunderbolt down on the Warrior, just like his past incarnation, Sosipolis, did 36 years ago.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spellfall"title="Spellfall">
The story concerns a 12-year-old girl named Natalie who is kidnapped by a wizard named Hawk who needs her to join his spellclave (group of bonded spellmages) to receive the Power of Thirteen and invade Earthaven (an enchanted realm) to get revenge on the Spell Lords that banished him for breaking a treaty.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_the_Great_Horse"title="I Am the Great Horse">
The pair meet in Pella, Macedonia, and Alexander manages to be the only rider on Bucephalus after a battle in which Bucephalas lost his left eye by an enemy pike.Katherine Roberts acknowledges that the characters Charmia and Tydeos, both grooms in the royal stable, are fictional, as is the evil horsemaster. The names of the other horses are also fictional, though the horses themselves were real enough. Prince Ochus, King Darius's son, was given a larger part than in most records, and the ghosts that Bucephalus often sees are also fictional.From the moment the battle-scarred horse Bucephalas allows a prince and a runaway girl to sit on his back, he is bound to them for ever. The prince is the young Alexander the Great, who he proudly carries into battle, blazing a trail to the very edge of the world in master's search for glory and adventure. The girl, Charm, is a lowly stable hand, who brushes away the ghosts Bucephalas sees and forgives his arrogant ways. But unlike Alexander, Charm has darker reasons to stay by his side. Through the eyes of the horse, history, mystery and adventure unfold.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jane_Austen_Book_Club"title="The Jane Austen Book Club">
The novel takes place over the course of several months in Davis, California, a university town in California's Central Valley near Sacramento. Each of the six chapters is dedicated to one of the six book club members as well as one of Austen's six works. In turn, each of Austen's novels parallels the individual characters' experiences lives with their relationships, family, and love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Struggle_for_Rome"title="A Struggle for Rome">
After the death of Theodoric the Great his successors try to maintain his legacy: an independent Ostrogothic Kingdom. They are opposed by the Eastern Roman Empire, ruled by emperor Justinian I. It is he who tries to restore the Roman Empire to its state before the Migration Period from his residence in Constantinople, which requires the capture of the Italian Peninsula and specifically Rome. Theodoric the Great is succeeded by his infant grandson Athalaric, supervised by his mother, Amalasuntha, as regent. The lack of a strong heir caused the network of alliances that surrounded the Ostrogothic state to disintegrate: the Visigothic kingdom regained its autonomy under Amalaric, the relations with the Vandals turned increasingly hostile, and the Franks embarked again on expansion, subduing the Thuringians and the Burgundians and almost evicting the Visigoths from their last holdings in southern Gaul. After Athalaric, Ostrogoths Theodahad, Witiges, Ildibad, Totila and Teia succeed Theodoric the Great as king of the Ostrogoths, in that order, and theirs is the task to defend what is left of their kingdom. They are assisted by Theodoric's faithful armourer Hildebrand. The names of the chapters in the book follow the chronology of the Gothic kings.Meanwhile, a (fictional) Roman prefect of the Cethegus clan, has his own agenda to rebuild the empire. He represents the majority of the population as a former citizen of the Western Roman Empire. He too tries to get rid of the Goths but is at the same time determined to keep the Eastern Romans out of "his Italy".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Life_in_the_Emerald_City"title="Imperial Life in the Emerald City">
"Imperial Life in the Emerald City" takes a critical look at the civilian leadership of the American reconstruction project in Iraq. Centered mainly on the actions of the Coalition Provisional Authority, within the Green Zone of Baghdad, it details events from the end of the invasion phase of the war until the official transfer of power to Iraqis and the growing insurgency in the country.In the book's prologue, Chandrasekaran states that his work does not take a side for or against the United States' invasion of Iraq, simply treating events as given, and instead focuses on examining the handling of the post-invasion occupation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_(novel)"title="Judith (novel)">
It is 1799 and eighteen-year-old Judith Mortimer lives with her widowed father, Jonathan, on their farm in Essex. Jonathan Mortimer has devoted his adult life, and most of his money, to writing and publishing lengthy treatises on various subjects close to his heart. None has found favour with the reading public and, consequently, he and his daughter are close to penury. Several years earlier, Mortimer suffered a stroke and is confined to bed where he works on his latest project, "A Treatise on Just Government".Meanwhile, his increasingly desperate daughter tries to find ways to keep the small household, including two servants, financially viable. She has entered into an agreement with a band of local smugglers to allow them use the farm's outhouses to store their merchandise. In return, the smugglers pay her ten to fifteen guineas each time they use the farm for their illegal purposes.Jonathan Mortimer is first cousin to a local earl and powerful landowner to whom he is in considerable debt. The debt arises from a legal dispute concerning their mutual grandfather's will. The earl wishes to buy the Mortimers' farm, which adjoins his own larger estate, and thereby clear their indebtedness to him. Under the proposed arrangement, Jonathan Mortimer will be allowed to live out his remaining days on the farm. Furthermore, the earl offers to give Judith a generous dowry so that she can marry. However, the catch is that she must marry the odious Mr. Massingham. She refuses the offer
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memories_of_the_Irish-Israeli_War"title="Memories of the Irish-Israeli War">
The novel told from the point of view of a waitress from Belfast who calls herself "Poisoner" or "Mad Dog Me", is about a group of illegal Middle Eastern workers calling themselves the "Night Shift", "the Sons of Sheikh Zubair," and "the Sons of "Umm Muhammad"", at a kebab shop, the Cholman Deli in Leicester Square, who commit acts of terrorism because they desire and have been unable to get British citizenship. Angry about how easily she can get a work visa, being from Ireland, she is treated as a whore by her co-workers, and usually known to them as "the slag".Poisoner steals a rock of plutonium called the Stone of Scone and hides it in an intimate part of her body. This theft helps draw attention to the restaurant.The book is written in thick Irish dialect and slang, with long compound-complex sentences and lengthy observations and metaphors by its narrator, who can rarely get in a word with the others, and when she does, she rarely displays the intelligence she shows in the narration, speaking in short, inutile blips in even thicker slang.Sheikh Zubair is ultimately mentioned as being from Stratford-Upon-Avon. The book ends with Ilan married to Zeev's mother and a lengthy sex scene between Zeev and Mad Dog Me.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Feuerzangenbowle"title="Die Feuerzangenbowle">
The novel starts with an epigraph : "This novel sings a praise about School, even though School may take no notice about that."The title refers to the "Feuerzangenbowle" punch consumed by a group of gentlemen in the opening scene. While they exchange nostalgic stories about their schooldays, the successful young writer Dr. Johannes Pfeiffer realizes he missed out on something because he was taught at home and never attended school. He decides to make up for it by masquerading as a student at a small-town high school. At the school he quickly gains a reputation as a prankster. Together with his classmates, he torments his professors Crey, Bömmel and Headmaster Knauer with adolescent mischief. His girlfriend Marion unsuccessfully tries to persuade him to give up his foolish charade. Eventually, he falls in love with the headmaster's daughter and discloses his identity after provoking the teachers into expelling him from school.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Sand_and_Fog_(novel)"title="House of Sand and Fog (novel)">
The novel begins by introducing Massoud Behrani, a former Iranian air force colonel who fled from Iran after the Iranian Revolution. Because his background is military rather than professional, he has not been able to establish a career in the US and works as a trash collector and convenience store clerk. With savings, he pays the rent on an expensive apartment for his family and for an elegant wedding for his daughter. His fellow Iranian exiles, who are more successful and enjoy greater financial security, are unaware that he holds low-skilled jobs.Meanwhile, Kathy Nicolo, a former drug addict who is still recovering from her husband’s abrupt departure, has been evicted from her home, long owned by her family, because of unpaid taxes the county wrongfully claimed she owed. When the house is placed for auction, Behrani seizes the opportunity and purchases it, depleting his son's entire college fund. He plans to renovate the house and then resell it for much more than he originally paid as a first step on the way to establishing himself in real-estate investment. He moves his family from their apartment into the house. Meanwhile, when Kathy moves out, she meets Deputy Lester Burdon. They go through the system, hiring a lawyer to fight Kathy's wrongful eviction, but although the County admits the error, Behrani insists that he will not return the house unless he's paid what it's worth, not merely the low sum he paid at auction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Catalogue_of_the_Universe"title="The Catalogue of the Universe">
Angela May wakes in her bedroom to find her mother, Dido, in the garden trimming the grass using a scythe. Angela calls out to her mother and asks her to share the story of how she and her father met, and her subsequent birth. Dido shares the story of how she was in love with a married man, and he with her, but he could not leave his family. However, Dido did not want to be left with nothing, so became pregnant with Angela. Angela asks if Dido would want to be with him now, but her mother dismisses the notion.Meanwhile, at Tycho's house his family receive a phone call from his sister Africa, who has had a fight with her husband and wishes to leave him. However, before the family have a chance to go collect her, she rings up having changed her mind. Richard, Tycho's brother, teases Tycho about his “girlfriend” Angela but Tycho insists they are just friends. Angela does indeed come to see Tycho that morning, under the pretence of him offering her a lift to a school event. Angela wishes to play truant but Tycho refuses.After they have finished, Angela insists the two go somewhere because she has something important to show Tycho. She takes him to an expensive cafe where they wait, though Angela will not tell Tycho what for. Eventually a man enters the establishment and Tycho immediately notices the resemblance between him and Angela - his is in fact Roland Chase, Angela's father, and owner of a large company. Angela stands up and her father, previously unaware she was there, catches sight of her. He does not look pleased.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gruffalo's_Child"title="The Gruffalo's Child">
The story is about the Gruffalo's daughter who, despite her father's warning, sets off into the deep dark wood to find the "big bad mouse", the only thing her father is afraid of. The Gruffalo can not remember what he looks like and describes him as a monster.During her winter journey, she encounters the tracks of the snake, the owl, and the fox from "the previous story", each of whom she first suspects to be the "big bad mouse", but who in turn tell her where she can find the real "big bad mouse". Eventually, concluding she has been tricked by the animals (and perhaps her father), she sadly decides that she "doesn't believe in the 'big bad mouse".At this point, she encounters the little mouse from "The Gruffalo", who previously tricked her father and who her father and the animals were talking about. When she threatens to eat him, he cunningly invites her to meet the "big bad mouse", which he re-creates by using moonlight to project a tremendously enlarged and fearsome shadow to scare her away. Believing the shadow to belong to the real "big bad mouse", the Gruffalo's child flees and returns to the Gruffalo cave with faith in her father restored.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sea_Hunters_II"title="The Sea Hunters II">
Adventure novelist Clive Cussler follows up on the success of his first nonfiction book "" which documented the formation of his nonprofit organization named after the fictional agency in his novels, the National Underwater and Marine Agency which is dedicated to the discovery of famous shipwrecks around the world.This volume documents the search for the final resting places of fourteen additional ships or other historical sunken artifacts not documented in the first work. Unlike the first book, this volume documents searches for ships that Cussler's group has found, and searches that were ultimately unsuccessful. As in the first work, preceding the details of the search is a fictionalized imagining of the events that led to the loss of the ship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grab_Hands_and_Run"title="Grab Hands and Run">
While growing up, Temple's family sheltered a refugee mother and her two children. The story focuses on the 12-year-old Felipe and his younger sister Romy who flee from the difficult political situation in El Salvador because Felipe's father Jacinto has disappeared. The family had previously developed a contingency plan for such an event which called for them to flee to Canada, which they went through Guatemala, Mexico and the United States. The book focuses on the children having to learn not to provoke the anger of government officials and other people in power. As their trip progresses they realize how precious a home and an intact family are. They finally reach Canada but they find out from a religious man that their father was killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doom_Brigade"title="The Doom Brigade">
The Doom Brigade chronicles the former First Dragonarmy Engineering Regiment's quest to recover the first female draconians on Krynn after the War of the Lance.The brigade has left the dragonarmies in search for a new life, and led by Commander Kang, a Bozak, and Subcommander Slith, they have set up a small town in the valleys below the Kharolis Mountains. Unfortunately, their neighbors are hill dwarves in the town of Celebundin, who are not very receptive to the idea of Draconian neighbours.For the last twenty five years, raids have occurred every couple of weeks, whether the draconians are short on dwarf spirits, or the dwarves are short on other supplies. However, they have grown to respect each other, and so have made a silent pact to only use blunt weapons, so that the victim is only knocked out or stunned.While en route to raiding the dwarves one day, one of Kang's scouts reports a pair of red dragons on the horizon. Kang, curious, leads his troops to a pass on the outskirts of the Plains of Dust, where he meets Talon Leader Huzzud. Huzzud, a Knight of the Lily, is a talon leader for the Fifth Dragonarmy, which is led by General Ariakan. She proposes that Kang and his regiment join their army to retake Ansalon, but Kang decides to inspect their camp first.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beasts_(Crowley_novel)"title="Beasts (Crowley novel)">
"Beasts" describes a world in which genetically engineered animals are given a variety of human characteristics. Painter is a "leo", a combination of man and lion. Reynard, a character derived from medieval European fable, is part fox.Political forces result in the leos being deemed an experimental failure, first resigned to reservations, and later to be hunted down and eliminated. A central element of the story is the relationship between Painter and Reynard, who acts as a kingmaker behind the scenes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkest_Hour_(Andrews_novel)"title="Darkest Hour (Andrews novel)">
"Darkest Hour" is a prequel to "Dawn".The last book in the Cutler series goes back in time to focus on Dawn's step-grandmother, Lillian.This book is about Grandmother Cutler's childhood and adolescence. Most of the book takes place at the Booth plantation, "The Meadows". Lillian Booth is the middle daughter of an overbearing planter known as the Captain and a delicate Southern woman who lives in a dream world of sorts. Her older sister, Emily, is devoutly religious and often hostile to Lillian; her younger sister, Eugenia, is sick with cystic fibrosis (a factual oversight on the author's part is that CF was not technically named until 1938, by Dr. Dorothy Andersen, and the book appears to be set shortly before and during the Great Depression. Lillian's family could not have known Eugenia's disease by this name). One day after school, when Lillian is just five, Emily tells her that she is not her real sister and that Lillian's real parents died because she is a Jonah and everything she touches will die. Distraught, Lillian runs to their mother, only to find out that she is actually the daughter of her mother's younger sister Violet, whose young husband was tragically killed before Lillian's birth. Violet died during childbirth and Lillian was taken in by her aunt and uncle to be brought up as their own. Emily constantly brings up the theme of Lillian being a curse throughout the book: she locks her in the shed with a skunk, and murders Cotton, Eugenia and Lillian's kitten (though she makes this look like an accident). She even claims that Lillian's first period is a sign of her evil nature, due to her young age. Emily also blames Lillian for Eugenia's death, saying that Eugenia was born after Lillian brought Satan into the Meadows and that was how Eugenia became sick in the first place. Eugenia dies from smallpox due to being weakened from cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder that is not understood at the time that the novel takes place. Therefore, when Lillian asks for Dawn to be renamed Eugenia many years later, it may be an attempt to get back the little sister she lost so early and loved so much. Lillian's mother is traumatized by the death of her youngest child and goes into a deep depression.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animals_of_the_Bible"title="Animals of the Bible">
"Animals of the Bible" takes 31 Biblical stories of creatures who helped Biblical heroes complete their tasks and illustrates them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mei_Li"title="Mei Li">
This story is about a girl named Mei Li who ventures out to attend the Chinese New Year festivities with her brother San Yu and is burdened with the task to prove that there are activities for girls, too.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln_(Parin_d'Aulaire_book)"title="Abraham Lincoln (Parin d'Aulaire book)">
"Abraham Lincoln" story is based on the life of the 16th President of the United States, focusing on his early years and the road he took to manhood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rooster_Crows"title="The Rooster Crows">
“Little Miss Muffet” and “Star Light, Star Bright,” come back to the memory as easily as “Roses are red, Violets are blue.” There are finger games that give illustrations of how to play as one goes: the rhyme has illustration so the reader can understand to put your hand together like a knife, and end with a cradle which helps kids and makes the book even more interesting. The setting and clothing are very different from our time today(2014) which may seem like the book is old fashioned, but it has much to show in the enjoyable pictures. Little details such as the children wearing overalls, children wearing bonnets, and just the overall color structure highlights the time frame of these rhymes. The illustrations are done in pencil and they have so much detail. The children's faces in the illustration show much feelings and expression.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Snow,_Bright_Snow"title="White Snow, Bright Snow">
At the first snowfall of the year, all the grown-ups do their usual things when a snowstorm comes, while the children are filled with wonder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Snow"title="The Big Snow">
The Big Snow tells the story of how the woodland animals prepare themselves for the upcoming winter. The animals, after noticing the falling leaves and how quickly the days begin to darken they know that it is wintertime. The geese fly south looking for sunshine and a clear sky while the rest start to get ready for the cold weather.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_the_Swallows"title="Song of the Swallows">
The book tells the story of Juan who lives in an adobe house which is located near Mission San Juan Capistrano. It isn't too far from the school. In fact, Juan is good friends with Julian who's an old bell ringer and a gardener that isn't sure about the swallows' migration to a peaceful island in the summer. Julian explains to Juan how this beautiful mission was founded by Saint Francis and his brothers, especially Father Junipero Serra. He also explains to the Spanish lad how unsure he is about the swallow family's migration. Juan and Julian really love the swallows (las golondrinas) very much and doesn't want them to leave Mission San Juan Capistrano. He and his friend feed tiny pieces of bread that Julian saves in his pockets. Plenty of birds appear in the garden including hummingbirds, sparrows, white doves and especially swallows. In the spring, he plants a garden on his vacation time. There's nothing more exciting to see the family of swallows nesting in the protagonist's very own garden. One of the children tells the other the amazing journey the swallows make all the way from South America to spend the summer in California during St. Joseph's Day to watch a family of swallows migrate far away from San Juan Capistrano to a peaceful island. On Saint Joseph's Day, Juan's dream comes true which gets to the point where Juan and Julian alert everyone in the village by ringing the bells of Mission San Juan Capistrano together. The swallow family gets to nest in the arches of the mission after all before summer begins. One day, a baby swallow falls out of the nest and Juan witnesses the shock of the situation with his feathered friends. His/her parents don't reject the chick at all after Juan saved him/her. Everyone gets ready for Saint Joseph's Day by dressing up and celebrating before summer arrives in the village. Juan sings "Las Golondrinas" before he plants his own garden for the swallows to nest at during his vacation time. On Saint Joseph's Day, the children sing "The Swallow Song" together while they join Juan in the garden. Juan returns to his adobe house and observes the migration of the swallows who nested in his garden on a rose bush that appears near Mission San Juan Capistrano. They'll always come back to Mission San Juan Capistrano in the spring even though he gets to hear Julian sing the swallow song that the children also sang on Saint Joseph's Day.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finders_Keepers_(Will_and_Nicholas_children's_book)"title="Finders Keepers (Will and Nicholas children's book)">
Two dogs named Nap and Winkle find one bone and have difficulty deciding which of them owns it. Nap and Winkle begin to ask people who the bone belongs to. They ask a farmer, a goat, and a haircutter. A big dog takes the bone from both Nap and Winkle. After, getting the bone back from the big dog, Nap and Winkle discover that the bone belongs to both of them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeline's_Rescue"title="Madeline's Rescue">
Madeline falls into the Seine River one day and is saved by a stray dog. Miss Clavel and the girls cannot find the owner of the dog, so the girls decide to keep it and name it Genevieve. But problems start to rise when the girls compete for time with Genevieve. Big trouble arrives in their animal-loathing landlord Cucuface, who takes one look at poor Genevieve and has his driver take her away The girls and Miss Clavel unsuccessfully look for Genevieve. Late that night, Miss Clavel wakes up and finds Genevieve in the light of the doorway. Everyone rejoices Genevieve's return. That night, the girls fight about Genevieve again, causing Miss Clavel to take Genevieve to her own room (but not before warning the girls if one more fight breaks out about Genevieve, she will be given away). Even later that night, Madeline and the girls, with Miss Clavel, find that Genevieve has given birth to eleven puppies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella,_or_the_Little_Glass_Slipper"title="Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper">
A widower marries a haughty woman with two daughters of her own. Both the woman and the two daughters hate the man's daughter called Cinderella. Cinderella is very gentle and beautiful. However, her stepmother and sisters treat her cruelly. Cinderella is always assigned to do all the chores around the house and also sleeps in the attic. One day, it is announced that the prince is having a royal ball and invites all the ladies of quality to the ball. Cinderella wants to go to the ball but she can't because she is forced to stay home and clean the whole house. Cinderella starts crying as her stepsisters go to the ball. Her fairy godmother appears out of nowhere and asks, "Why are you crying?" Cinderella explains why she is upset. After Cinderella explains everything, her fairy godmother uses her magic power to help Cinderella. The fairy godmother transforms all the mice, lizards, and rats into horses and coachmen for the golden coach. She gives Cinderella a gown made of gold and silver and slippers made of glass. The only thing her fairy godmother asks is for Cinderella to get home by midnight when the magic will end. Entering the ball, Cinderella goes unrecognized by her stepsisters and dazzles everyone there, especially the prince. The prince pays her special attention because he has never seen her before. As Cinderella dances with the prince, she loses track of time and must leave the ball. Fleeing away from the ball and the prince, one of her glass slippers falls. The prince tries to keep up with her but he can't, so he picks up the glass slipper and vows to find her and marry the one that fits the glass slipper. As soon as Cinderella gets home, her gown turns back to rags, the horse and the coachmen turn back to animals, but the glass slipper remains as is. The next morning, the stepsisters tell her that the prince is in love with some unknown lady that was at the ball last night. Also, that the prince is going house to house to see who fits the glass slipper, and whoever fits, he will marry. As the prince arrives the stepsisters try to fit their feet into the glass slipper but it is an unsuccessful attempt. Cinderella tries the slipper and it is a perfect fit. A few days later, the prince marries the girl who fits the glass slipper as promised. Cinderella forgives her stepsisters for their past cruelty.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baboushka_and_the_Three_Kings"title="Baboushka and the Three Kings">
"Baboushka and the Three Kings" retells a "Russian folktale about an old woman's endless search for the Christ child". In a retrospective essay about the Caldecott Medal-winning books from 1956 to 1965, Norma R. Fryatt wrote, "Children will find in it something unusual, perhaps too removed from their experience and the Christmas story as they know it, but certainly it is a book to which they should be introduced... Primitive colors, rigid vertical lines, stylized figures, an unusual typeface that satisfied both artist and designer, – this combination of graphic skills was an experiment and one which in the main succeeded."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_a_Mouse"title="Once a Mouse">
"Once a Mouse" is a magical Indian fable that tells the story of a small mouse and a hermit that knows how to change animals into something else. One day the hermit is sitting under a tree when suddenly he sees a little, helpless mouse that is going to be eaten by a cat. The hermit decides to change the mouse into a cat. Later the old man sees the cat afraid of a dog and changes the cat into a dog. The next day the hermit sees a tiger trying to eat the dog and decides to change the dog into a majestic tiger. As the days pass, the majestic tiger begins to think that he is the king of the place and that all the animals must respect him including the old hermit. One day the hermit reminds the tiger that he is really a mouse and that he should not be acting the way he is acting. The tiger feels so angry that he decides to eat the hermit, but he does not know that the old man is able to read thoughts. Finally the hermit changes the tiger back into a mouse and tells him to learn how to take care of himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Funny_Little_Woman"title="The Funny Little Woman">
The story is set in old Japan. It is about is a funny little woman (who is an old woman). She likes to laugh ("Tee-he-he-he") and makes dumplings out of rice.One day, one of her dumplings rolls down a hole. The little old woman chases the lost dumpling and ends up in a strange place underground lined with "Jizo" (guardian statues). The "Jizo"s warn the old woman not to go after the dumpling because of wicked "oni" (monsters) who live there, but she does anyway. An "oni" grabs the old woman and takes her in a boat across a river to the house of the "oni".The "oni" forces the old woman to cook rice for them. They give her a magic paddle to make a full pot of rice from a single grain. Now the old woman is enjoying to be busy serving them plenty of rice dumplings for dinner every day.But months later, the old woman becomes homesick. One afternoon, she decided to return home. When the "oni" are not looking, the old woman takes the magic paddle, and escapes on a boat on the river. Soon the monsters found that the old woman was heading home. They want to stop the her. But they realize they cannot swim. So with the inability to swim or fly, they drank all the river water.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Fine_Day_(book)"title="One Fine Day (book)">
A woman catches a fox drinking her glass of milk and cuts off his tail. The fox begs her for his tail back, and she agrees to return it if the fox replaces the milk he stole. The fox approaches a series of other animals and people, each of whom wants something in return for their help. After fulfilling everybody's needs, the woman sews the fox's tailback onto him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ramsay_Scallop"title="The Ramsay Scallop">
"The Ramsay Scallop" has two main characters, Thomas of Thornham and Elenor of Ramsay. They were betrothed to each other when they were young. When Thomas returns broken and disillusioned from the Crusades, he finds the idea of marriage and lordship overwhelming. Elenor dreads the idea of marriage to Thomas, both because she does not like him and because she is afraid of bearing children. She is afraid to bear children because her mother died giving birth to her. Father Gregory sends both of them on a religious pilgrimage to Santiago, Spain, to put the record of Ramsay's sins on the shrine of Saint James. Both of them are relieved because the pilgrimage means the delay of their marriage and a last chance for adventure. On their special pilgrimage, they meet different people, and discover the glorious possibilities of the world around them and within each other. At the end of the book both of them get married and they understand each other very well. Both of them realize that people can change and that nobody will be the same. Then they get married and never have any problems again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Loved_Wild_Horses"title="The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses">
The story focuses on a young Native American girl who has a deep affinity for wild horses. She cares for the horses that her tribe relies on for the nomadic hunting of buffalo. One day, the herd stampedes due to a thunderstorm, while the girl is among them. She climbs onto the back of one of the horses, and is carried far away from their usual grazing grounds. The next day, the girl awakes to see a beautiful spotted stallion who identifies himself as the leader of all the wild horses, and welcomes her to live with them. Meanwhile, the girl's tribe searches for her. About one year later, two hunters spot the girl riding with the horses, but she is driven away with the rest of the herd. The hunters return to the tribe with this news, and riders are sent in pursuit. The stallion defends the girl, but she is caught when her horse stumbles. The girl returns home, but is sad to leave the horses. She falls ill with no sign of improvement. The girl asks if she can return, and her parents honor her wish to live among the wild horses again. Each year, she would return to her parents with the gift of a colt. Then one year, she does not return. When the hunters see the wild horses again, they see a mare riding alongside the stallion. They believe this horse to be the girl transformed, which brings the tribe great pride to know they have one of their own riding among them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_George_and_the_Dragon_(book)"title="Saint George and the Dragon (book)">
This story begins with a nameless knight riding around the plain who has never been to battle. Despite this the Queene of Faeries sends him to fight a dragon who has been terrorizing their land. He travels with Una the princess of the land. On his way to the dragon the knight meets an old hermit on top of a hill who explains to him his English heritage and tells him his name is George. George meets the dragon lying down as if it was a hill itself. The dragon sees his sword and prepares for battle. The Dragon fells our hero twice, but each time he rises up stronger. After a hard-fought third battle George eventually emerges triumphant and slays the dragon. The king, promising Una to whomever slays the dragon, fulfills his promise and marries George and Una. Although all is well in the land George still fights other battles for the Queene of Faeries and through these battles George becomes Saint George.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hey,_Al"title="Hey, Al">
Al is a friendly janitor who lives with his dog, Eddie, in a small apartment on the West Side. However, their lives are rather unpleasant due to the apartment's small size and lack of space. One day while Al is shaving, a large bird pokes his head in through the bathroom window and invites both Al and Eddie to live on a large, tropical island in the sky. Al is hesitant to accept the offer, but Eddie convinces him to do so.The following day, the large bird flies Al and Eddie to the island. Both janitor and dog are immediately fascinated by the island's scenery and are warmly welcomed by the local birds. For days, Al and Eddie live peacefully on the island and believe it to be paradise. One morning, however, Al and Eddie are horrified to discover that, as a result of staying on the island, they are gradually turning into birds. Realizing their mistake, Al and Eddie use their newly-acquired bird abilities to fly home. During the flight, their abilities start to disappear, but Eddie, exhausted, crashes into the sea. After returning home, Al is devastated over Eddie's disappearance until Eddie, being a talented swimmer, manages to swim back home to Al. Reinvigorated, Al and Eddie live out their lives happily, deciding that "paradise lost is sometimes heaven found".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lon_Po_Po"title="Lon Po Po">
The story is set in China. Three sisters, Shang, Tao, and Paotze are left alone overnight while their mother goes to visit their grandmother Po Po's house for her birthday (and to stay over at her mother Po Po's house for the night). Before leaving, the mother warns the girls to be safe. Meanwhile, an old wolf sees the mother leave and decides to come over to harm the children. The wolf pretends to be their grandmother, Po Po, to try to gain entry. The children question the wolf through the door and ask why he has come late. The wolf has clever answers. The two youngest children finally open the door and let the wolf in. Because of the darkness, the children can't see that it is a wolf. When it is time for bed, the children and the wolf are to sleep together. The children notice "Po Po's" wolflike characteristics. They question him. Finally, Shang (the oldest) lights a candle and before it gets blown out, sees that Po Po is really a wolf. She devises a plan to get herself and her sisters out of the house. She tells the wolf about the delicious, magical ginkgo nuts that grow on the tree outside their home. The children go out and climb the tree where she tells the other two who Po Po really is, while the wolf follows. They tell the wolf to get a rope and a basket so they can pull him up the tree to get the nuts, all the while planning on dropping the wolf once in the basket. When they drop the basket, the wolf bumps his head. On the third time as the wolf reaches for the nuts, the kids let go of the rope, sending the wolf plummeting once more, killing him. After the third and final fall, the wolf not only bumped his head, but he also broke into pieces. They check to see (and ask him) if he is OK. But they hear no answer (as he is now dead). That night, the girls look at the wolf's dead body. Finally, they go inside the house to sleep. After the mother's return, the next day they tell her what happened.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_and_White_(picture_book)"title="Black and White (picture book)">
Each two-page spread of the book features one of four stories. In the upper left quadrant, there is a story titled, "Seeing things". In this story, a boy is on an overnight train trip to be reunited with his parents. At one point in the journey, the train's progress is stopped and he is briefly joined by what the text refers to as an "old woman" but which the illustrations suggest might be the robber from "Udder Chaos". Looking out the window, the boy is unable to tell what has stopped the train and laughs when the driver attempts to chase away what appear to be boulders. However, to the boy's amazement, the boulders begin to move off the tracks. Later the boy falls asleep only to be awoken by the train stopping and the sound of singing. Thinking he sees snow outside, the boy opens the windows but when he sticks out his hands to catch some, the boy realizes that it's actually torn up newspaper. The boy then notices "strange creatures" standing near the train who are responsible for the torn paper and singing. When the train resumes its journey, the boy falls back asleep only to be awoken at the train station where the boy is returns to his parents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuesday_(book)"title="Tuesday (book)">
The story contains only six words and three points that determine the time of the action. The whole story is narrated by colorful pictures of frogs flying on their lily pads.The story begins on "Tuesday evening, around eight".A group of frogs start their journey in some wetlands, then fly to the nearest town. They levitate past birds that sit on the electric wires, pausing at the kitchen window of a man eating his sandwich. The frogs pass through someone's backyard. They enter the house where an old lady sleeps in front of her television. The squadron of frogs appropriate her remote control and stare avidly at the screen. At "4:38 a.m.", they encounter a dog who tries to catch one of the frogs, but is then chased by a large group of them. At dawn, the frogs return to the pond and their normal life of resting on lily pads and swimming. Back in the city, people investigate traces left by the frogs.The final pages of the book show "next Tuesday" around eight in the evening, with pigs hovering above the roof of a farm building.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather's_Journey"title="Grandfather's Journey">
A young man from Japan, during the Meiji era, crosses the Pacific Ocean and explores the United States. He finds that of all the places he has seen, he likes coastal California best because of the beautiful Sierra Mountains. Eventually, he returns home to Japan and marries his childhood sweetheart.The young man takes his new bride across the sea and they settle in California, where they have a daughter. As he watches his daughter grow up, the man is filled with nostalgia for his own childhood. He eventually decides to take his family back to Japan when his daughter is nearly grown up.The man is happy to see his old friends again, but moves from the village where he grew up to a city nearby in order to satisfy his daughter, who has spent her entire life living in a city. She eventually marries and has a son, who is the narrator of the story. The man, now the titular grandfather of the story, finds that once again he misses California.He plans a trip to see his adopted country again with his grandson, but never gets a chance to see California again as a result of World War II. His grandson eventually grows up and follows the same journey as his grandfather, understanding his grandfather's feelings towards two places he called home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake_Bentley_(book)"title="Snowflake Bentley (book)">
The book is based on a true story. Martin has written about the first known snowflake photographer, Wilson Bentley, and his interest in capturing snowflakes. Wilson lived on a farm with his family in Jericho, Vermont, between Lake Champlain and Mount Mansfield, where the annual snowfall can reach up to about 120 inches. Wilson was very fond of snowflakes and wanted to capture them one day to share with others. With a microscope, Wilson tried to depict the snowflakes through drawings but was never able to finish, as the snow would melt too quickly. As Wilson grew older, he asked his parents if they could get him a camera, so that he could photograph snowflakes. Wilson’s parents decided to spend their savings to buy Wilson his camera because they wanted to support his dream of capturing snowflake photos. With his new-found camera, Wilson went out to take hundreds of pictures. In the beginning, Wilson’s photos were a bunch of failures, but that did not stop him from pursuing his dream. Wilson furthered himself by experimenting more with lighting, lenses and camera exposures. Not many people were interested in what Wilson was up to, nor did they care for his pictures. When it wasn't winter, Wilson loved taking pictures of nature, but taking snow pictures would always be his favorite. Wilson would even hold evening slideshows on his lawn to show his friends. Later down the road, Wilson wrote a book about snow and published his photos in magazines. When Wilson went to publish his first book to share to the world, he got caught in a blizzard on his trip, a misfortune which caused him to catch pneumonia and become ill. Two weeks later, Wilson died of the illness. In memory of him, Wilson’s friends and neighbors built a museum of his work so all would know of “Snowflake” Bentley.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Pigs"title="The Three Pigs">
The story starts with three pigs who decided to build a house. However, two of the three pigs love to play. The other is very responsible and hardworking. He advised the other two pigs to build a good house in case the wolf comes. The first pig, the laziest, made his house out of straw. The second pig, who is not very responsible made his house out of sticks because it was easier and faster. The third pig, who is hard-working made his house out of bricks. Therefore, the third one took longer to finish up his house and the other two made fun of him. According to Amazon Editorial Reviews, when the wolf approaches the first house and blows it in, he blows the pig right out of the story frame. Then the wolf ate the pig up. "One by one, the pigs exit the fairy tale's border and set off on an adventure of their own. Folding a page of their own story into a paper airplane, the pigs fly off to visit other storybooks, rescuing about-to-be-slain dragons and luring the cat and the fiddle out of their nursery rhyme."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Friend_Rabbit"title="My Friend Rabbit">
The book begins when Mouse lets his best friend, Rabbit, play with his brand-new airplane, and trouble is not far behind. Rabbit tries to help Mouse with the problem he started by freeing the plane he trapped in a tree. He gets the idea of gathering a bunch of animals and stacking them up in a pile high enough to reach the airplane. He gathers an elephant, a rhinoceros, a sleeping hippopotamus, a deer, a bear, an alligator, a goose (with her goslings who aren't stacked), and a squirrel. Picking up mouse, they get the airplane, but all the animals fall and are mad at Rabbit. But, as Rabbit's friend, Mouse always stays by his side, offering a message about true friendship, so he uses his airplane to get him away from the animals. Unfortunately, they get it stuck in another tree, giving Rabbit another idea.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarzan_the_Terrible"title="Tarzan the Terrible">
Two months have passed since the conclusion of the previous novel "Tarzan the Untamed" in which Tarzan spent many months wandering about Africa wreaking vengeance upon those who he believed brutally murdered Jane. At the end of that novel, Tarzan learns that her death was a ruse and that she had not been killed at all.In attempting to track Jane, Tarzan has come to a hidden valley called Pal-ul-don filled with dinosaurs, notably the savage Gryfs which are Triceratops that are omnivorous and stand 20 feet tall at the shoulder, have claws on their front legs, and Stegosaurus-like plates on its back. The lost valley is also home to two different adversarial races of tailed human-looking creatures: the hairless and white-skinned, city-dwelling Ho-don and the hairy and black-skinned, hill-dwelling Waz-don. Tarzan befriends a Ho-don warrior and the Waz-don chief actuating some uncustomary relations. In this new world, Tarzan becomes a captive where he impresses his captors with his accomplishments and skills that they name him "Tarzan-Jad-Guru" (Tarzan the Terrible).Jane is also being held captive in Pal-ul-don, having been brought there by her German captor. She becomes a centerpiece in a religious power struggle, until she escapes. Her German captor becomes dependent on her due to his own lack of jungle survival skills.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ice_House_(novel)"title="The Ice House (novel)">
Mrs Phoebe Maybury, a widow in her late thirties, lives in Streech Grange with her two companions Diana and Anne. One day her servant Fred finds a rotting corpse in their ice house, a storage room inside a hillock that hasn't been used for years.DCI George Walsh thinks it may be the corpse of Phoebe's husband David, who went missing ten years ago. Back then, Walsh suspected her of killing her husband, but this was never proven.Inhabitants of the village believe that the three women are lesbians, and that Phoebe did not only kill her husband but also her parents. They died in a car crash after garage owner KC neglected to check their brakes. One of the villagers, Dily Barnes, has forbidden her children Peter and Emma to play with Phoebe's children Jonathan and Jane.The grounds are searched and the three women and Phoebe's grown-up children are questioned. Jane used to have anorexia nervosa and underwent psychotherapy. DS Andy McLoughlin, whose wife has just left him for another police officer, gets romantically involved with Anne and believes the three women are innocent.Medical examiner Webster says the corpse can only be between two and three months old. A list of missing persons includes the names Keith Chapel and Daniel Thompson. Thompson's wife is interrogated. It turns out he collected money from investors to produce see-through radiators. One of the duped investors was Diana.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messiah_(Starling_novel)"title="Messiah (Starling novel)">
The novel opens with the discovery of the body of Philip Rhodes, a London caterer, who is found hanging in his underwear from his banister, his tongue cut out and a silver spoon in its place. When the body of the Bishop of Wandsworth, James Cunningham, is found beaten to death, but with his tongue replaced by a silver spoon, DCI Red Metcalfe and his team must discover the pattern behind these killings and save the rest of the men who are destined to be murdered. The novel has many twists and turns and it describes the killings in great detail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Storm"title="Tommy Storm">
Earth's President (Guttly Randolph) and the Grand Council receive an invitation from the MilkyFed, a federation in the centre of the Milky Way. They want 5 Earth children (of the Grand Council's choice) to come across space to a training centre. The training will prepare the participants for a dangerous and secret mission. Elsorr Maudlin, Earth's Deputy President, believes the MilkyFed are up to no good, so he threatens to delay the decision until after the deadline. He agrees not to delay it on two conditions. One, he can choose the Grand Council Elder to accompany the Five children. Second, he can choose one of the five children. For his first condition, Maudlin chooses Randolph, so he can be the President, in full power. For his second condition, he chooses a boy who is thought by all a loser. The boy's name is Tommy Storm.Meanwhile, at The Wilchester Academy for Younger Adults, Tommy Storm, a boy of 11, is being bullied by a stronger, more popular boy named Felkor Stagwitch. In self-defence, Tommy ends up being grounded to his room. Later, Mr Withers, the headmaster, announces that Felkor Stagwitch is going on to a training school far away in the centre of the Milky Way. Afterwards, in Tommy's room, Mr Withers tells Tommy privately that he was also chosen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangerous_Capabilities"title="Dangerous Capabilities">
"Dangerous Capabilities" offers a critical account of Nitze's role in debates within the United States government on policy toward the Soviet Union, nuclear weapons, and other national security issues. Nitze held a variety of high-level positions under eight different presidents, including Director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Secretary of the Navy, and Deputy Secretary of Defense. He also was a U.S. negotiator on the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force (INF) talks.Callahan faults Nitze for using his influence to accelerate the nuclear arms race and worsen relations with the Soviet Union. Callahan is particularly critical of Nitze's role in drafting NSC 68, an influential strategy document that Callahan says offered an inflated view of the Soviet threat unsupported by expert analysis of Soviet intentions. Callahan also faults Nitze for his central role in the 1958 Gaither Committee, which helped fuel erroneous fears of a "missile gap" that favored the Soviet Union. As well, Callahan provides a critical account of Nitze's role in Team-B, a competitive intelligence analysis to analyze threats posed by the Soviet Union, and his leadership in the Committee on the Present Danger, which warned of a Soviet edge in the Cold War competition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luv_Ya_Bunches"title="Luv Ya Bunches">
The main characters - Yasaman (meaning "jasmine" in Turkish), Violet, Katie-Rose, and Camilla - are each named after flowers, and all are entering fifth grade.Katie-Rose is the youngest of three siblings and one of the most unpopular girls in her grade. Her only friend is her neighbor Max, but Katie-Rose wants a girl friend, one that she can hang out with at school. She yearns to befriend popular girl Camilla “Milla” Swanson, whom she knows from Pioneer Camp. Although Milla reciprocates the interest, she is ordered by her friend Modessa not to hang out with Katie-Rose.Milla is an only child with lesbian moms, Abigail and Joyce. Her best friends are the cruel and popular Modessa and Quin, who often pressure Milla into joining them in bullying others, though Milla does not enjoy doing so. One of Modessa’s targets is the sweet, clumsy Muslim computer genius Yasaman. Yasaman’s younger sister Nigar (pronounced Nee-GAR) gets bullied due to her name reading similarly to a racist slur.Violet is a shy girl who has recently moved from Georgia to California with her father. Her mother suffers from bipolar disorder and has been committed to a psychiatric ward, causing Violet to feel lonely and outcast. She temporarily joins Modessa's clique and becomes friends with Milla.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hit_and_Run_(novel)"title="Hit and Run (novel)">
Laurie Stark is very excited when popular, athletic Quentin Palmer (Quin for short) asks her out on a date. While they are on their date, Analise Bower is babysitting. After her job has ended, she doesn't feel like asking for a ride. She says knows the roads and feels safer on her bike. While riding back home in Quin's mother's SUV, Laurie falls asleep and is awakened by a crash. Quin assures her that it was only a deer he mistakenly hit, though he isn't so sure himself. After seeing that the crash had damaged some property, Quin covers the scene and drives away. Sometime after the accident, Analise's talented boyfriend Jeremy receives a call from her parents concerning Analise's location. For a few days, Jeremy and Mr. and Mrs. Bower try to locate Analise. They are unsuccessful and hand the case over to the police. One morning, the police announce that they found Analise injured. Because of the attempt to cover the accident, the case is therefore called a hit and run. In the hospital, the doctors say that Analise has gone in coma because of a serious head injury.Meanwhile,while at school, when the principal announces Analise's accident and she had been found on the side of the rode, Laurie is very shocked to hear that the accident's location is somewhat near the place Quin mistakenly hit a "deer". Her friend Judie, suggests that she use the information for her own benefit by blackmailing Quin to become her boyfriend. Laurie hesitates but does what Judie says to. Afraid that the incident might ruin his future as an athlete, Quin accepts and pretends to be Laurie's boyfriend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_the_Lost_Planet"title="Return to the Lost Planet">
The plot follows on precisely from "The Lost Planet".A previous expedition to Hesikos, the wandering 'lost planet' which is now within a few days flight of Earth, has crash-landed, and Dr Lachlan McKinnon (its organiser), Professor Hermanoff and American engineer Spike Stranahan are marooned. McKinnon's colleagues must build and launch a spaceship from their Scottish base to travel to Hesikos, but to construct the ship they must obtain the expert assistance of Dr Andrieff, a scientist and engineer, who risks exile from his Eastern European country by so doing.The crew, consisting of McKinnon's nephew Jeremy Grant, Professor Lars Bergman, science student Janet Campbell and Cockney housekeeper Madge, rescue the three explorers, who have survived the harsh winter, and start to explore the planet in a Jeep. They find signs that Hesikos was once inhabited, and that atomic bombs were detonated long ago on the surface. Escaping from a deluge of water, which damages their Jeep, as a river suddenly rises, they take refuge in a cave, which leads to a door. The door opens to admit them to caverns where the inhabitants of the planet now live.The people are highly intelligent and human-like, communicating with the visitors by telepathy, which is facilitated by a machine called the Electronome. They explain that since their planet's orbit was destroyed eons ago by atomic experiments, they have lived a peaceful underground existence, only emerging in the mild summer season to gather fruits and plants. Their current leader is Solveg, with his daughter Asa.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lifecycle_of_Software_Objects"title="The Lifecycle of Software Objects">
Ana, a former zookeeper, begins working for software firm Blue Gamma. The firm is creating “digients”, or digital entities. The digients are designed by another Blue Gamma employee, Derek. They are relatively intelligent and have rudimentary speech; Blue Gamma begins to sell them as virtual pets.Over the course of many years, Ana grows close to a digient named Jax. The digients become more intelligent and develop their own personalities and quirks. Eventually, Blue Gamma goes bankrupt. The digients are cut off from the wider internet. Derek and Ana disagree on the best way to raise funds to transfer the digients to a new system. Options include modifying their brain structures to serve as sexual companions for humans, using the digients as employees, or raising funds from sympathetic donors. Derek and Ana debate the nature of consent, experience, adulthood, and personhood with respect to the digients. With the consent of his digient, Derek sells the rights to a sex toy company. Ana plans to continue raising Jax, promising to discover what "adulthood" means for a digital being alongside him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_(Mankell_novel)"title="Daniel (Mankell novel)">
The story is set in 1874. Hans Bengler is an entomologist from Skåne, Sweden who is studying at Lund University and decides to go on an expedition on his own to the Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa to find insects new to science and thereby to make a name for himself. After a long and arduous journey by sea to Cape Town and then in the desert he arrives at a trading post run by an expatriate Swede, which Bengler decides to make the base for his explorations.Whilst at the trading post he comes across a small boy, called Molo, who was the sole survivor in his extended family, the rest of whom had been brutally killed by men on horseback with spears and rifles, some who were white and some who were black. He is taken to the trading post where he was put in a cage to be bartered in exchange for provisions. Bengler decides to rescue the boy adopting him as his son. Not knowing his name, Bengler decides to call him Daniel. Bengler sets himself the challenge, as he sees it, of civilising the young savage boy. The two of them journey back to Sweden. Daniel initially seeks to escape but over time grows to accept Bengler as his new father. Daniel begins to learn to speak Swedish and adopt some basic European customs, though still recalling the aspects of his African culture and beliefs he had been taught. On board ship and on arrival in Stockholm Daniel is treated with curiosity and disdain and experiences some racial abuse. Bengler decides to gain notoriety and earn a living by displaying and giving lectures on his exhibits, stored in glass jars. However, noticing the great interest the public had displayed in Daniel, Bengler decides to include him as a surprise exhibit in his lectures.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_7_Habits_of_Highly_Effective_Teens"title="The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens">
In the book Covey discusses how teenagers can become more independent and effective by following seven basic habits. The habits range from being proactive in every aspect of one's life to planning and prioritizing one's daily life and responsibilities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denationalization_of_Money"title="The Denationalization of Money">
Hayek advocates a system of private currency in which financial institutions create currencies that compete for acceptance. Stability in value is presumed to be the decisive factor for acceptance. Hayek makes the assumption that competition will favor currencies with the greatest stability in value since a devalued currency hurts creditors, and an upward-revalued currency hurts debtors. Hence users would choose the monies which they expected to offer a mutually acceptable intersection between depreciation and appreciation. Hayek suggests that institutions may find through experimentation that an extensive basket of commodities forms the ideal monetary base. Institutions would issue and regulate their currency primarily through loan-making, and secondarily through currency buying and selling activities. It is postulated that the financial press would report daily information on whether institutions are managing their currencies within a previously-defined tolerance. Hayek's effort has been cited by economists George Selgin, Richard Timberlake, and Lawrence White.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_in_the_Dying_Time"title="Orion in the Dying Time">
The plot starts from where it stopped in "Vengeance of Orion". Orion awakes in a temple after being transported to the Neolithic era by the Creators. He then sees Anya whom he had been looking for throughout the previous novel in the series. As they leave the temple together, he spies a statue of Set initially taking it to be a man wearing a totem mask. They enter a garden and as Orion tries to take a fruit, Anya stops him warning him of Set who owns the garden. She then tells him of their mission which is to assess the situation and then come back for more equipment. As they walk on they encounter a group of slaves been guarded by a dinosaur. Orion with the help of Anya, then saves the baby from been killed and eaten by the dinosaur. The slaves been cowed warn of the retribution from their masters. Orion then decides to take them along till they get to the forest. Upon arrival in the forest, Anya tries to contact the rest of the Creators only to discover that her access has been blocked by Set thus trapping them in that era without any help. They however, try to settle down in the area and look for game to kill so as to survive. Anya, then encourages Orion to try to initiate contact maybe he would be successful.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forgotten_Army"title="The Forgotten Army">
A museum exhibition of a mammoth comes to life at the opening of its exhibition and rampages around the museum.The Doctor and Amy turn up in New York just in time to have a nice pony ride on mammoth and then the mammoth is taken to a zoo, where the Doctor and Amy visit it and realise that whatever is inside doesn't like humans and have been trapped in their mammoth-like space ship for centuries and are now ready to take the people of New York to a mining project in far space, the Doctor is kidnapped and Amy and the finder of the mammoth have to rescue the Doctor from the Vykoids, the policemen is attacked by the Vvykoids and realises how strong they are.The Doctor lures Amy to him with mind communication and then Amy saves him and the Vykoid leader starts his teleportation of the American people just when the first people are about to walk to the mining project the Doctor and Amy turn up and trap the Vykoid leader in a pretzel doing so they defeat the Vykoids.The Doctor sends the Vykoids back to the mining project and dematerializes into the TARDIS.A pretzel seller watches as the TARDIS dematerialises and materializes, the Doctor comes out and gets 3 pretzels and tells the man that pretzels saved the day today.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outsiders_of_Uskoken_Castle"title="The Outsiders of Uskoken Castle">
The book recounts the children's adventures as they live by the rules of their community and come into conflict with the city's residents. It begins by introducing some of the children. Branko's father is a traveling fiddler, so Branko used to live with his mother, who worked in a tobacco plant. But she has died, leaving Branko homeless. He finds a fish on the ground at the market, picks it up and is arrested for theft. Zora frees him through the window of the prison and takes him to the castle, which the gang has made their home. After passing a test of his courage, Branko is accepted into the gang of outlaws along with Nicola, Pavle and Duro.The city residents persecute the children, who play pranks on them in retaliation. In one episode, the gang steals a chicken from the old fisherman Gorian, who is honest, poor and works hard. Branko and Zora feel sorry for him and try to repay him with chickens stolen from the wealthy Karaman. Gorian catches them and insists that they return the stolen chickens. The children promise to help Gorian by working for him when he is short-handed. They help him in his conflicts with a large fishery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Close_Quarters"title="At Close Quarters">
The unexpected death of a highly disciplined and successful army member of "Camp San Marcial" is officially explained as suicide. Major Olmedo had always followed the letter of the law and never questioned orders through the army hierarchy. He only broke the law in one respect and that was to carry an unauthorized pistol, since his name had appeared on a terrorist organization's hit-list.Major Olmedo had recently completed a report which was commissioned by the Ministry of Defence in Madrid. In it, he recommended the closure of Camp San Marcial as an efficiency measure. This highlighted the growing cleavage between his own generation and style of troop which were dedicated to peace-keeping and winning wars with technology; vis-a-vis the older, Francoists, who still believed in numbers and yearned for a reinstatement of the recently abolished compulsory military service.When he gets shot there is an internal inquiry which results in a verdict of suicide. Marina, the Major's daughter, is not satisfied with this outcome and hires a private detective, Ricardo Cupido. Cupido sets about investigating the "crime" scene with rigour and a professional manner. The scene itself simply is the pistol and a note in hurried handwriting saying two words, "Forgive me" scrawled on one of the Major's business cards.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Witness"title="The Fifth Witness">
Haller is called on to defend a long-standing client, Lisa Trammel, when she is suspected of murdering wealthy Mitchell Bondurant. According to forensic evidence, the victim, who was six-foot-two, had been murdered with a hammer blow from behind, on the very top of his head, while standing up.Haller and his staff (including his ex-wife, Lorna Taylor, and his investigator and Lorna's husband, Dennis "Cisco" Wojciechowski) work on demolishing the prosecution case, led by Andrea Freeman, against whom Haller has never won. On discovering the probable involvement of the murder victim with organized crime, Haller concentrates on establishing alternative suspects as well as relying on the forensic evidence which suggests that Trammel is physically incapable of the crime.Haller's case hinges on the testimony of a witness whom he manoeuvres into taking the Fifth Amendment on the witness stand, thus creating a plausible alternate killer for the jury (making him both the fifth witness in sequence and the "Fifth" witness). Before Haller can detail Opparizio's crime connections in open court, the witness takes the Fifth, ending his testimony. The judge instructs the jury to disregard the entire testimony, but the jury still acquits Trammel.In a final twist that introduces "a moral dimension" into the case, Haller realizes that Trammel is guilty. He confronts her, and is shaken by her indifferent response. Three weeks later, Haller's law practice is booming as a result of the trial, when he gets a call from Trammel, in which she both accuses him of tipping off the police to dig up her garden and begs him to represent her when she is tried for her husband's murder. He refuses, telling her that he has just filed to run for Los Angeles County district attorney because he no longer wishes to associate with people like her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slights_(novel)"title="Slights (novel)">
"Slights" is a first-person narrative by a troubled woman, Stevie, who lost her father when she was nine, and her mother when she was 18. Her father, a police officer, was killed during a mysterious shooting incident on the job, and her mother died when Stevie crashed their car while driving recklessly. The accident left Stevie badly injured and she had a near-death experience in which she found herself in a dark room filled with angry people threatening her. Usually nothing frightened Stevie, but that room terrified her, and she was relieved when she was revived in hospital.From an early age Stevie was anti-social and soon earned herself a bad reputation. After her mother's death she had the house to herself and began digging in the backyard, an activity her father had often indulged in. She stopped cleaning the house, and herself, and berated and abused most people she encountered. Her indifference to herself and others led to a suicide attempt when she was 21. She returned to that dark room filled with angry people clawing and tearing at her, and she was very grateful when someone found her unconscious and took her to hospital. While the room frightened her, she was intrigued by it and realised that the people in it were those she had slighted at some point in her life. She wanted to find out what other people's rooms were like and took a job at a local hospice to be close to people near death, but was frustrated when she could not get the information she wanted. Then she resorted to picking up strangers and bringing them home. She would get them drunk or drug them, and start killing them, but revive them as they lost consciousness so she could interrogate them. She never got much out of them and they all died. She buried the bodies in the backyard amongst her father's secrets. Stevie's backyard excavations had uncovered toys and trinkets from her childhood, but also objects she had never seen before, and bones.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ummachu"title="Ummachu">
Ummachu is in love with Mayan, her childhood friend. But much to her dislike, she is married to a rich, but timid Beeran making her marriage unhappy. Mayan manhandles the old man, the ‘village historian,’ who is supposed to have been instrumental in conducting Ummachu’s marriage with Beeran. The old man becomes unconscious and Mayan leaves the village believing that he is dead. Mayan goes to Wayanad and becomes a rich spice merchant. He returns to the village when he learns that the old man was not dead, but had later died of illness.Ummachu lived an unhappy life with her husband and son. Mayan murders Beeran and the police arrest an innocent man for the crime. Mayan marries Ummachu. Years roll by. Abdu, Ummachu’s son is in love with their Manager’s daughter Chinnammu, a Hindu. Abdu learns that his stepfather Mayan is the murderer of his father and dislikes Ummachu because she was aware of his father's murder by Mayan. Mayan commits suicide. Ummachu divides her property between Abdu and her two sons by Mayan.In the elections, Abdu contests as the Congress candidate against Hydros, the younger son of Ummachu by Mayan, a candidate of the ‘League’ and Hydros wins. Ignoring the strong protests from the communities, Abdu marries Chinnammu.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Empathic_Civilization"title="The Empathic Civilization">
"The Empathic Civilization" is divided into three parts with an introductory chapter that summarizes the contents and arguments of the book. The first part consists of four chapters and analyses empathy from the perspective of psychology, biology, and philosophy. Rifkin provides a history of empathy in psychology, including how it relates to the works of Freudian psychology, Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, Heinz Kohut, and Donald Winnicott, leading to John Bowlby and Attachment Theory. As psychological theory has evolved, empathy has played a larger and larger role, especially in the emotional and intellectual development of children. In terms of biology, Rifkin connects the biological function of mirror neurons with the capacity for empathy. Philosophically, Rifkin explores empathy-altruism, the faith versus reason debate, and truth versus reality debate. Rifkin argues in favour of relationalism, that the meaning of existence is to enter into relationships. From the lens of empathy, he deconstructs the concepts of truth, freedom, democracy, equality, mortality.The second part consists of five chapters and focuses on the rise, development, and fall of civilizations. Rifkin connects the qualitative changes in energy regimes and communication techniques with changes in how people understand and organize reality. Hunter-gatherer societies were all oral cultures and thus only existed in geographically-limited small groups and identified themselves symbiotically in terms of that group. Spiritually, these societies believed in local gods who were only known to others through oral tales. The development of writing, as well as hydraulics and irrigation, allowed agricultural societies to better organize themselves so that a larger geographic area and a larger population could be controlled. Hydraulic power was labour-intensive, requiring large populations of subservient people. With scripts, there was a shift from a mythological consciousness to a theological consciousness; individuals thought of themselves less in terms of a small, local group and more with a monotheistic religion which included a personal relationship with a god.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Crash"title="Beyond the Crash">
The book is divided into four parts and a total of eleven chapters. There is also a Prologue, an Introduction and a Conclusion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riding_the_Rap"title="Riding the Rap">
Like "Pronto", "Riding the Rap" centers around Harry Arno, World War II veteran and bookie, now 67 years old. The book also features a reappearance of Joyce Patton, Harry's ex-girlfriend and a former stripper, and her new boyfriend Raylan Givens, an always-gets-his-man old western type law enforcer. Givens later comes to Harry's aid when he discovers the plot set up by Chip Ganz, Bobby Deo and Louis Lewis. Ganz, who is $16,500 in debt, hatches a plan to steal the millions that Harry has skimmed from the mafia over the years from a Swiss bank account by taking him hostage and forcing the money out of him. It's up to Raylan Givens to find Harry Arno before it's too late.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lampshade"title="The Lampshade">
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a lampshade purported to be made from the skin of a Jewish Holocaust victim, turned up in a sidewalk rummage sale in New Orleans. It was purchased for $35 by Skip Henderson, a local New Orleans man just returned to the City from Katrina evacuation. Henderson subsequently sent the lampshade to his friend Mark Jacobson, thinking that the Brooklyn writer would be interested in searching into the history of the object. Jacobson then embarks on a 5 year quest to discover the true origin of the lampshade. Genetic testing initially confirmed it was made from human skin. But because of the tanning process, researchers were unable to determine the ethnic origin of the person whose skin was used, nor to date it.Over the course of the next few years, Jacobson attempts to track down the origin of and explore the meaning of the lampshade, how it ended up in New Orleans, and to decide what to do with it. Both the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem, declined to take possession of the lampshade, saying that accounts of concentration camp lampshades made of human skin were probably a "myth". Through his investigation, Jacobson examines the history of the Buchenwald concentration camp, where such objects were reputed to have been made; as well as the racial and post-Katrina history of New Orleans, the world of Holocaust deniers, the mythology surrounding objects said to be made from human skin, and the black market trafficking of such goods.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuổi_thơ_dữ_dội"title="Tuổi thơ dữ dội">
The story is set during the first years of the First Indochina War. Mừng, a 12-year-old boy, illegally enters the war-torn city of Huế and sneaks into the then-Trần Cao Vân Regiment consisting of 30 boys around the same age as him, training to be spies and scouts. His purpose was to support the resistance, thus curing his mom, whom he deliberately ran away from in order to join the combat, from her terminal asthma.After being accepted in the military, Mừng soon finds himself familiarized with fellow soldiers, notably Quỳnh, Lượm, Tư, Kim, Bồng. They take part in a series of battles in Huế, crippling French lines. Despite suffering casualties, the boys don't appear to be affected by PTSD. In fact, they seem to embrace the war. Mừng is later offered a trip to visit his mom on horseback. However, he didn't have the bravery to meet her, leaving the job to his comrade, who also sends her the herbs that Mừng gathered at the camp to improve her condition.French reinforcements pour into Huế, forcing the Việt Minh to withdraw and set up a base in the mountainous region of Hoà Mỹ (now in Phong Điền).A team consisting of Kim, Lượm, Tư and leader Đồng re-enters Huế to distribute revolutionary propaganda and newspapers to Huế citizens. Hence, French forces had to strengthen their positions in the city by putting it under martial law. The mission, nonetheless, carried on successfully until Kim encounters Trì, a former Viet Minh and close friend who betrayed the revolution and joined the French forces. Trì captures Kim and has him tortured, the latter succumbed to pain and reveals the entire mission to the enemy. Thus, Đồng was killed, Lượm was captured. Tư managed to run back to the base.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Sister_(novel)"title="White Sister (novel)">
During a routine day, Detective III Shane Scully accidentally strikes John Bodine, a homeless schizophrenic African America man with his car. After getting him medical attention and trying to offload the man without a lawsuit, Scully is called to a homicide where he finds a cop and former Crip gangbanger in his wife Alexa's car, and Alexa missing. A series of leads eventually finds Scully interrogating Lou "Luna" Maluga, a psychotic sociopath, and his estranged wife Stacy, the titular "White Sister," both big names in the rap music industry.After being repeatedly ordered to cease investigation and threatened with criminal charges or dismissals, Scully is given an out if he returns his wife's personal computer, only to find a series of romantic emails between his wife and the "Dark Angel," the same police officer found shot in Alexa's car with Alexa's weapon. Later, his son will point out that the majority of the text are veiled references to several rap slang terms and groups, making the messages coded transmissions from the undercover officer. During this time, he receives a phone call from Alexa where she confess to the murder and apparently commits suicide, leaving her in critical condition.Following Stacy Maluga, Scully is eventually lead to Derek Slater, another rap artist whom Stacy is attempting to turn against her husband by exercising an escape clause in his contract, and Bust-A-Cap, a well dressed, well educated, eloquent gentleman outside of his rap artist persona.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_Moone"title="The Man in the Moone">
The story is written as a first-person narrative from the perspective of Domingo Gonsales, the book's fictional author. In his opening address to the reader the equally fictional translator "E. M." promises "an essay of "Fancy", where "Invention" is shewed with "Judgment"". Gonsales is a citizen of Spain, forced to flee to the East Indies after killing a man in a duel. There he prospers by trading in jewels, and having made his fortune decides to return to Spain. On his voyage home he becomes seriously ill, and he and a negro servant Diego are put ashore on St Helena, a remote island with a reputation for "temperate and healthful" air. A scarcity of food forces Gonsales and Diego to live some miles apart, but Gonsales devises a variety of systems to allow them to communicate. Eventually he comes to rely on a species of bird he describes as some kind of wild swan, a gansa, to carry messages and provisions between himself and Diego. Gonsales gradually comes to realise that these birds are able to carry substantial burdens, and resolves to construct a device by which a number of them harnessed together might be able to support the weight of a man, allowing him to move around the island more conveniently. Following a successful test flight he determines to resume his voyage home, hoping that he might "fill the world with the Fame of [his] Glory and Renown". But on his way back to Spain, accompanied by his birds and the device he calls his Engine, his ship is attacked by an English fleet off the coast of Tenerife and he is forced to escape by taking to the air.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_in_the_Clouds"title="High in the Clouds">
When the characters' home, Woodland, is attacked by human development, a young squirrel (Wirral) is left without a home and without his mother. Guided by his mother's final words and aided by his fellow animal friends he meets on his journey, Wirral goes on a quest for the secret island sanctuary of Animalia. Wirral finds himself in an epic journey filled with evil realities and wild dreams. He and his friends experience tragedy, war, joy and victory, all in the name of freedom and peace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Isle"title="X Isle">
The world has been washed away in the aftermath of global devastation from floods. Mainland survivors trade goods with people from Eck's Isle who occasionally take back boys with them. Two boys from the mainland, Baz and Ray, are chosen and leave with the boat to the supposed better life.But when they get to the island they discover conditions are harsh for the boys and that Preacher John, the head of the Eck family is a religious fanatic. After some of the work boys die and Preacher John's sermons start emphasising sacrifices to God, they decide to build a bomb and destroy the boat then return to the mainland by dinghy.The bomb is planted on the boat but the next day Ray has gone missing, Baz will be going on the boat and the crew has decided to take the dinghy with them, leaving some to guard the boys.On the boat, Preacher John makes Baz pray to God, his eldest son, Isaac, then intervenes and threatens to shoot his father who tells him that he planned to kill him as the ultimate sacrifice to God. Preacher John then shoots him and throws Baz overboard who lands in the dinghy. He then causes the bomb to explode, sinking the boat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwinter_(novel)"title="Overwinter (novel)">
The novel picks up shortly after the end of "Frostbite" following werewolves Cheyenne “Chey” Clark and Montgomery “Monty” Powell as they travel toward the Arctic Circle in search of a cure for the curse of lycanthropy that has afflicted them both. Along the way they are joined by Dzo, the personification of the Inuit muskrat spirit, and Lucie, the French werewolf who gave Monty the curse of lycanthropy. They are pursued by Varkanin, a Russian hunter who has blue skin from silver poisoning that renders him nearly-immune to werewolf attacks, who is in the employ of the Canadian government that wants the werewolves killed so they can sign an oil development agreement with a foreign energy company. The search for the cure to the werewolves' condition is complicated by Chey's gradual loss of her human identity to her increasingly wolf-like nature.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapphique"title="Sapphique">
The setting of "Sapphique" is divided between two main locations: "The Realm", a place of artificial harmony, and "Incarceron", a microscopic prison that contains a vast world, all controlled and monitored by an artificial intelligence. There is little advanced technology in The Realm, as the rulers of The Realm set humanity back to the 17th century. Finn, who escaped from Incarceron, believes The Realm is little different from Incarceron. The story starts off with Attia, who helped Finn while unable to escape herself. She acts as the assistant to a magician named the Dark Enchanter, whose real name is "Rix". She follows him on his tour before turning on him, leaving him to die, although he does survive. She originally became his assistant in order to acquire his glove, having previously belonged to Sapphique, the legendary Sapient who escaped from Incarceron. She then travels with Kerio, Finn's Oath Brother. During this journey, the duo fight a twelve-headed monster. They are then summoned by the A.I. running Incarceron to go to a location that contains a humanoid shell for the A.I. While traveling to this location, they encounter a nursery that allows them to contact Finn. The A.I. wants to escape itself in order to see the stars. Doing so, however, will leave the millions of prisoners inside to die. In The Realm, Finn is told by Claudia that he was originally Giles, a prince thought dead. He has flashes of memories but is unable to entirely remember. Following this, another person claims that they are Giles. The two are called before a council in order to determine who is actually Giles, where the council decides that the pretender is actually Giles and that Finn is to be executed for lying, despite Finn being the true Giles. The two engage in a duel, but Finn misses his stab for the imposter's heart. Finn and Claudia run away to the wardenry, which acts as a portal into Incarceron. From within this room, the two fend off the army of the Queen. Jared, Claudia's mentor, meets the two in the wardenry, having nearly been killed by an assassination plot. Jared knows more about the portal than them and begins working on getting it working. During this period, Rix, who survived his betrayal by Attia, takes on Kerio as an apprentice, after which Keiro reaches the humanoid shell. Rix attempts to kill Attia in revenge but is stopped by Kerio. Keiro decides to not give the glove to the A.I., putting it on himself. This results in Kerio trading places with Claudia, who is still in the wardenry. The A.I. running Incarceron recognizes Claudia as the Warden removed her from Incareron so she could become Queen. Kerio, now on the outside, is caught in the middle of a battle. The group captures Queen's son, forcing her to stop her assault. Some of the Queen's soldiers manage to get in by following a Steel Wolf, who act as the guards to the Warden. but fail to dislodge Finn and his group. The Realm is suddenly revealed to an illusion covering a decaying world following the machine that maintained the illusion losing power. Jared then takes the glove from Kerio and realizes that he was Sapphique. Jared, now Sapphique, opens a permanent portal between The Realm and Incarceron. Attia steps out of Incarceron through the portal for the first time and is awed by the stars. Finn and Sapphique then pledge to reform both the Realm and Incarceron.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_and_Sword_(novel)"title="Fire and Sword (novel)">
The book covers the time period between December 1804 and April 1809. At the start of the novel, Napoleon has recently been crowned Emperor of France, while Arthur has returned from his successful campaigns in India. The plot of the novel revolves around Napoleon's wars in central Europe, and plans for the invasion of England, foiled by the Battle of Trafalgar. Running parallel to this story, Arthur Wellesley is making a name for himself in the armies of Britain, commanding a unit of the army sent to deprive Napoleon of the Danish navy, and in the first expeditionary force sent to liberate Portugal from French rule. At the end of the novel, Napoleon's position is becoming more tenuous, with plots being hatched against him, while Arthur has begun to inflict the first defeats on the armies of Napoleon in the Iberian Peninsula.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vengeance_of_Orion"title="Vengeance of Orion">
Orion comes into "being" as a rower on board a Greek ship headed to the city of Troy and makes friends with a talkative old man called Poletes. The Golden One, the "creator" from the previous novel in the series, soon appears to him revealing himself as Apollo the Greek god and that his plans are for the Trojans to be victorious in that era so as to create a Euro-Asian Empire. Little by little Orion remembers that he was traveling with the woman he loved on a star ship that ended up exploding while in flight. The Golden One states that Orion was punished for defying him and that the former Goddess who chose to become mortal so she and Orion could share their love together was now dead as a result of that explosion. As part of that ongoing punishment, he has resurrected Orion to serve him yet again, and during that time intending Orion to suffer the pains of the loss of his love. Orion, angered at the petty arrogance of the murderous Golden One, decides to thwart whatever plans Apollo might have for the era and ends up saving the Greek camp from being overrun by the Trojans on a counterattack. His courageous acts earn the attention of Odysseus who then adopts him as a member of his household. As a favor Orion requests that Poletes becomes his servant thereby elevating the man's station. Odysseus' first duty for Orion is to accompany him with Ajax and Nestor to Achilles' tent to persuade him to return into the fray. Achilles had earlier withdrawn from the battle because Agamemnon had taken from Bris whom he captured. Achilles however insists on only re-entering battle when High King Agamemnon apologizes to him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_(novel)"title="Mother (novel)">
In his novel, Gorky portrays the life of a woman who works in a Russian factory doing hard manual labour and combating poverty and hunger, among other hardships. Pelageya Nilovna Vlasova is the real protagonist; her husband, a heavy drunkard, physically assaults her and leaves all the responsibility for raising their son, Pavel Vlasov, to her, but unexpectedly dies. Pavel noticeably begins to emulate his father in his drunkenness and stammer, but suddenly becomes involved in revolutionary activities. Abandoning drinking, Pavel starts to bring books and friends to his home. Being illiterate and having no political interest, Nilovna is at first cautious about Pavel's new activities. However, she wants to help him. Pavel is shown as the main revolutionary character; the other revolutionary characters of the novel are Vlaskov's friends, the anarchist peasant agitator Rybin and the Ukrainian Andrey Nakhodka, who expresses the idea of Socialist internationalism. Nevertheless Nilovna, moved by her maternal feelings and, though uneducated, overcoming her political ignorance to become involved in revolution, is considered the true protagonist of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fields_of_Death"title="The Fields of Death">
The book covers the time period between April 1809, and 1815, the climax of the conflict at the battle of Waterloo. At the start of the novel, Napoleon is facing increasing pressure as his marshals are repeatedly defeated by Arthur Wellesley, leading the allied armies of Britain and Spain. The plot of the novel revolves around Napoleon's wars in central Europe, and failed invasion of Russia, as his armies rapidly lose men and their reputation for invincibility. Running parallel to this story, Arthur Wellesley is leading the allied forces to victory in the Peninsular War, before invading Southern France. The novel ends with Napoleon and Wellington finally meeting in battle, at Waterloo.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maigret_and_the_Dosser"title="Maigret and the Dosser">
Maigret investigates the circumstances when a homeless tramp is recovered from the Seine, after being attacked and badly wounded. The tramp proves to be a former doctor, known to fellow tramps as 'The Doc', who abandoned his family twenty years previously to work in Gabon, but returned to Paris to live rough, mainly under various bridges. Thanks to Madame Maigret's sister, who lives in Mulhouse, Maigret learns more of the family background. His wife, estranged but not divorced, is persuaded to visit him in hospital, but displays no affection or interest in a reconciliation. The tramp, identified as François Keller, was rescued by Jef van Houtte, a Belgian barge owner, and whilst in hospital, refuses to talk. But Maigret suspects that Keller knows his attacker and is keeping quiet for a good reason. He also believes that the Belgian is not telling him the whole story.Under intense interrogation, van Houtte eventually confesses that many years ago he was responsible for the death by drowning of his father-in-law and that Keller was a witness. But Keller still won't say anything, and Maigret is forced to release the Belgian for lack of evidence. Keller returns to his life on the streets.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoding_Reality"title="Decoding Reality">
The book explains the world as being made up of information. The Universe and its workings are the ebb and flow of information. We are all transient patterns of information, passing on the recipe for our basic forms to future generations using a four-letter digital code called DNA. In this engaging and mind-stretching account, Vlatko Vedral considers some of the deepest questions about the Universe and considers the implications of interpreting it in terms of information. He explains the nature of information, the idea of entropy, and the roots of this thinking in thermodynamics. He describes the bizarre effects of quantum behaviour - effects such as 'entanglement', which Albert Einstein called 'spooky action at a distance' and explores cutting-edge work on the harnessing quantum effects in hyperfast quantum computers, and how recent evidence suggests that the weirdness of the quantum world, once thought limited to the tiniest scales, may reach into the macro world. Vedral finishes by considering the answer to the ultimate question: where did all of the information in the Universe come from? The answers he considers are exhilarating, drawing upon the work of distinguished physicist John Wheeler and his concept of “it from bit”. The ideas challenge our concept of the nature of particles, of time, of determinism, and of reality itself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistaken_(novel)"title="Mistaken (novel)">
The novel is told from the viewpoint of Kevin Thunder who grows up in 1960s Dublin, next door to Bram Stoker's house. Kevin has an elusive double, Gerald for whom he is often mistaken. Gerald lives in the more refined Palmerston Park and attends Belvedere College. The narrative begins at Gerald's funeral where Kevin meets Gerald's daughter Emily. The remainder of the novel takes the form of an explanation written for Emily on how his life and that of her father intertwined over the years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_We_Lose"title="What We Lose">
Thandi, the daughter of a South African mother and an American father, comes of age in Pennsylvania. When she is in college, her mother is stricken by cancer and dies, causing Thandi's life to fall apart as she struggles to process her grief.Shortly thereafter, Thandi discovers she is pregnant by her boyfriend Peter. She decides to carry the pregnancy to term and has a son she names Mahpee. She and Peter quickly marry and he moves to New York City to be with her and their child. However their marriage quickly falls apart and after she cheats on him, she decides to ask for a separation.Thandi begins to forget her mother and slowly begins to heal, though she realizes her mother's death will haunt her for the rest of her life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curious_George_Gets_a_Medal"title="Curious George Gets a Medal">
Mr. Miller, the mailman, brings a letter for George. George cannot read the letter, so he tries to write one of his own. He makes a mess with ink and a fountain pen and tries to wash it away with the garden hose, but the room fills with water (flooding the room) and he rushes to a nearby farm to get a portable pump and get rid of the flood with it. He is chased by the farmer but eludes him by hiding in a shirt on a clothes line and then jumping into a pickup truck headed for the museum (which turns out to be a science museum). George inadvertently makes another mess in the science museum with a dinosaur exhibit (with life-sized model/animatronic dinosaurs). The two dinosaurs are a mother Stegosaurus and a baby Stegosaurus. Then, he caught sight of a palm tree that had nut-like fruit growing on it (possibly coconuts) growing on it. George loves nuts. Suddenly, he is hungry because he has missed lunch. A family comes into the dinosaur exhibit to also see the dinosaurs. George (touching the dinosaur) uses himself as a model. The family (who saw George touching the dinosaur) thinks George is another stuffed animal (or model animal) by looking at his pose on the dinosaur. That is, or in other words: "they think it's a model monkey with a model dinosaur".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Boats_on_Bannermere"title="No Boats on Bannermere">
William Melbury and his younger sister Susan live with their mother (divorced - their father left and doesn't keep in contact or send any support) in grotty rented digs in post-war London. His mother inherits a cottage from her second cousin; but only if she lives in it for five years. Cousin Fay disliked "week-enders" and wanted Beckfoot Cottage to be lived in. So they move from the south of England to the cottage in Bannermere, Upper Bannerdale.William and Susan transfer to schools at Winthwaite five miles away, a boy's grammar school and a county secondary school. Bill befriends Tim Darren and Sue befriends Penelope (Penny) Morchard at their respective schools. Bill finds that Cousin Fay also owns a rowboat and they row to the island of Brant Holm in the lake. But the owner of Bannermere Hall stops his tenant the farmer Mr Tyler leasing them the boathouse by the lake. Sir Alfred Askew only bought the property last year when he retired from India, but is determined to play the local squire, complete with monocle.They suspect Sir Alfred of something, go into his woods, and find that he has uncovered an ancient buried skeleton on the lakeside. There are actually five skeletons, possibly from the 9th century during the period of Viking raids, and Sir Alfred has not notified the police of the find. An inquest is held. Later when Bill sees an aerial photo of the lake, he sees shading indicating a burial on the island in the lake. They investigate, and uncover a buried skeleton, but are interrupted by Sir Alfred and his friend Matson an antique-dealer. There are also some silver dishes and flagons, probably the monastery treasure mentioned in an old chronicle of St Coloumbs Abbey in Yorkshire. At the inquest they are deemed treasure trove, as the skeleton was Christian and buried facing east with hands crossed on the breast (as proved by Tim's photo). As finders the four get three hundred pounds reward each. Sir Alfred claimed it could have been a heathen burial by Norsemen with the items buried publicly; as at Sutton Hoo the items would not be treasure trove but would belong to the landowner. Matson would have sold them for a high price in America.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Hymn_of_China"title="Battle Hymn of China">
It was written at a time when the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party were in a United Front against the Japanese invasion, and before the Japanese attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor.Agnes Smedley had spent many years in China, and spent much of it with the various armies, both regular and guerrilla. Like Edgar Snow, she met the future leaders of Communist China when they were living in rural isolation. She also witnessed the Xian Incident and gives her own account of it in this book, along with her view of He Long, Chu Teh (Zhu De) and Mao. She takes her own very distinct view of Mao:She also spent a lot time with the rank-and-file and with non-Communist Chinese, living at the same level as ordinary Chinese and using basic First Aid skills to help in hospitals where both supplies and trained staff were short.Though the book describes a war, it is mostly about how various individuals react to the war, mostly Chinese but also foreigners. She gives a poignant account of how she wanted to adopt a Chinese boy who had served as her orderly, and to secure a good education for him. But the boy felt it was his duty to stay with the army.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomes_(book)"title="Gnomes (book)">
The book is written like a biology book, describing the habitat of the mythical creatures known as gnomes (Dutch: "kabouter"). In the book, Huygen and Poortvliet say they've spent at least twenty years observing them and call their study the "first work of consequence on the subject to be published since Wunderlich's bulky and dubious treatise "De Hominibus Parvisimis" appeared in 1580".It describes every aspect of the mythical creatures. They are very small ("weight less than one pound and stand six inches high") and can live upwards of 400 years. The female gnome is generally smaller than her male counterpart, and her clothing is grey instead of blue. A gnome pregnancy takes 12 months, and they always have twins, who live with their parents for at least a hundred years.The gnomes also used to live in society alongside humans, especially in Europe, but due to pollution and deforestation they've slowly retreated to their secret homes. The book ends with a message, asking people to stop attacking one another, as well as reminding human society to stop destroying the environment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass_(novel)"title="Grass (novel)">
In the distant future Terra (Earth) has become massively over-populated and its resources overstretched. Partially as a result of this, the human race has spread out across the galaxy and populated new worlds. One such world is the eponymous Grass.The spread of a seemingly incurable plague across human settlements throughout known space prompts the authoritarian religious rulers of humanity, Sanctity, to send investigators to Grass, the only place the plague does not seem to have affected, in the hope of finding a cure.Given that the mainly aristocratic inhabitants of Grass have developed an obsession with a localised variant of fox hunting using the planet's native fauna in place of the horses, hounds, and foxes found on Earth, Sanctity chooses as its investigators the Westriding-Yrarier family, whose equestrian background and upper class roots may enable them to successfully infiltrate the aristocratic society and learn more about the hitherto secretive planet. But the secret of the planet's immunity hides a truth so shattering it could mean the end of life itself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mousehole_Cat"title="The Mousehole Cat">
One very stormy winter, none of the fishermen of the village of Mousehole in Cornwall have been able to leave the harbour for a long while and the village is near starvation. Tom Bawcock (only called 'Tom' in the book) and his loyal black and white cat, Mowzer, decide to brave the storms and set sail to catch some fish. When the boat hits the storm, it is represented by a giant "Storm-Cat", which allows Mowzer to eventually save the day by soothing the storm with her purring. This purring becomes a song and while the Storm-Cat is resting Tom is able to haul in his catch and return to harbour. When they arrive back at the village, the entire catch is cooked into various dishes, including half a hundred "star-gazy" pies, on which the villagers feast.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apocalypse_Troll"title="The Apocalypse Troll">
The story opens in the 25th Century, when a small force of human warships encounter a larger group of Kanga ships 'forty light-months from anywhere in particular'. The Kanga are a violently xenophobic alien race who have tried and failed to wipe out humanity in a war they are losing, which has lasted over 400 years. It becomes apparent that the Kanga force is a final desperate attempt to defeat the humans by using an untried time travel theory to go back in time many thousands of years and wipe out humanity before it became a threat. They will have to be stopped by any means.They were partially successful and both humans and kangas arrived in the outer solar system in early 21st century. A final battle results in a single human space fighter chasing a kanga tender and its escort of fighters to the outer atmosphere of Earth. Only the accidental involvement of a task force of the US Navy prevented the death of humanity. The human fighter crashed into the ocean and one enemy fighter survived.The badly injured human pilot survives her crash landing and is rescued by a passing yacht. The yacht is crewed singlehanded by a US Navy SEAL on his retirement cruise (Captain Dick Aston). The very young looking pilot is in a coma and has a hole right through her. The wound starts to heal before Dick's eyes and he spends the next 4 days feeding her while she remains in a healing trance. When she wakes she informs Dick she is Colonel Ludmilla Leonovna of the Terran Marines and no she isn't a Russian.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Now_I_Know_(novel)"title="Now I Know (novel)">
Nik, a seventeen-year-old boy, is inspired to study the relationship of Christianity to contemporary life when he is chosen to play Jesus Christ in a film project. Tom is investigating the mystery of a body found hanging from a scrapyard crane. Julie is in hospital, bandaged from head to foot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_One"title="Player One">
The book is divided into five chapters. Each chapter is divided into five parts, each describing events from the perspective of one of the five main characters: Karen, Rick, Luke, Rachel, and Player One. The first chapter, "Hour One: Cue the Flaming Zeppelin", has Karen arriving at the Toronto airport on a flight from Winnipeg to meet a man she met online. She sits on a stool at the airport hotel bar in which Rick is the bartender, Rachel is at a computer terminal, and Luke is sitting at a table drinking scotch. Rachel is there with the expectation to meet a man who can father her child and approaches Luke. Karen's date goes badly as she finds the man too assertive physically and too distant intellectually. A self-help guru, Leslie Freemont, enters with his assistant Tara to welcome Rick into his empowerment program; Leslie gives a speech to the group, takes Rick's money, and leaves. Meanwhile, oil prices rapidly increase and explosions start to occur outside. With the power unreliable, Karen, Rick, Luke, and Rachel run to Rick's vehicle to listen to the radio. Karen's date, Warren, is killed by a sniper as he runs to the group, who quickly return to the bar lounge where they barricade themselves in.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapphira_and_the_Slave_Girl"title="Sapphira and the Slave Girl">
Except for the epilogue, the book takes place entirely in 1856.Sapphira Colbert is an unhappy middle-aged woman, crippled by dropsy, who came to marriage late and married beneath her station. Her husband, Henry, a miller, lives an entirely separate life, residing at his mill and visiting the estate house only for occasional meals. Sapphira is comfortable with slavery; Henry is not.Having overheard a conversation between two of her slaves, Sapphira develops a paranoid fear that Henry is having an affair with an attractive young mulatto girl named Nancy. Sapphira responds by mistreating Nancy. Eventually Sapphira invites a dissolute nephew to the estate, who threatens to rape Nancy on several occasions.With the help of the Colberts' daughter, Rachel Colbert Blake, and two abolitionist neighbors, Nancy is helped to make connections with the Underground Railroad and taken to Canada.The epilogue takes place 25 years later. Nancy, now in her 40s, returns to Virginia to visit her mother, and Mrs. Blake. The narrator (Cather) is revealed to be a child who has heard stories of Nancy's escape all of her life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(Star_Trek)"title="Balance of Power (Star Trek)">
When a famous Federation scientist dies, his son puts his inventions up for sale to the highest bidder—whether Federation, Klingon, Romulan or Cardassian. Among the items at auction are medical devices, engineering advances—and a photon pulse cannon capable of punching through a starship's shields with a single shot.Meanwhile, at the Academy, Wesley Crusher comes to the aid of his best friend—and finds himself kidnapped by outlaw Ferengi bent on controlling the universe through commerce. When they also set their sights on the photon cannon, Captain Picard must find a way to save the Starship Enterprise and the Federation from the deadliest weapon ever known—with every race in the galaxy aligned against him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Over_Manifest"title="Moon Over Manifest">
The main character is Abilene Tucker, an adventurous twelve-year-old girl from 1936. Her father, Gideon, sent her to the small town of Manifest, Kansas, where he grew up, while he worked a railroad job somewhere else. He left her with his broken compass, which was engraved "St. Dizier, October 8, 1918". Abilene arrived in Manifest to find that it was run-down and greatly affected by the Great Depression. A pastor took her in, and in that house, she discovered a box of mementos and letters from a boy named Ned addressed to a boy named Jinx stashed away under a floorboard. One letter mentioned the "Rattler." Abilene and her two friends, Lettie and Ruthanne, believed the Rattler had been a German spy in 1918. After some investigating, they received a note telling them to "leave well enough alone." Realizing that she had lost her father's compass while searching for the spy, Abilene walked down the "Path to Perdition", a house where Miss Sadie, a diviner, lived, to search for it. On the way, Abilene accidentally broke a diviner's pot. To pay off her debt and earn her compass back from the diviner, Abilene did odd jobs for her: she tilled dry soil during a drought, planted seeds in it, and hunted for strange plants, all of which seemed to have no useful purpose.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sick_Day_for_Amos_McGee"title="A Sick Day for Amos McGee">
Amos McGee is a punctual man who goes about his day the same way every day. He swings his legs out of bed, puts on a fresh uniform and hops on the #5 bus at 6:00 AM to go to the zoo. While at the City Zoo, Amos always makes time to visit his good friends and always gives them exactly what they need. He follows a reliable agenda of activities with each of his favorite animals: the elephant, the tortoise, the penguin, the rhinoceros and the owl. Amos plays chess with the elephant, who thinks long and hard before each move, races the tortoise and lets him win, sits quietly with the very shy penguin, lends a handkerchief to the runny-nosed rhinoceros, and at dusk reads to the owl, who is scared of the dark. One day, however, Amos wakes up with a terrible cold. He decides that he won't make it to work. Because Amos is a reliable friend, his dear friends start to wonder where he is. Getting worried, the animals leave the zoo and hop onto the #5 bus to Amos' house. To comfort Amos, each animal stretches beyond his or her fears to help a friend recover. Afterwards, they all go to sleep, as they have a morning bus to catch that takes them back to the zoo.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_Breaker"title="Ship Breaker">
Nailer, a small-framed teenage boy, is scavenging through an old rusty ship for copper wire. As he crawls through the darkness looking for scavenge to make quota, he dreams of traveling through the bright blue waters of the flooded oceans on a speeding clipper ship. While gathering copper wires, Nailer falls through the duct and lands in a deep pool of oil. Sloth, another member of the light crew, finds Nailer in the oil pocket, but decides to leave him to die because she wants Nailer's job and she wants to sneak the oil out of the ship and sell it. Luckily, Nailer is able to escape the oil and washes up on the beach. On the way out, Nailer is impaled by a rusty piece of metal. He survives.A storm arrives shortly after Nailer's father, Richard, passes out due to a drug overdose. Sadna, Pima's mother, helps wake Richard up and saves him from the storm. After two nights, the storm finally subsides. Nailer and Pima decide to check the beach for scavenge. They find a massive clipper ship stranded on the beach. With a lot of hesitation, the two Light Crew teenagers save the only survivor of the ship, Nita, who is nicknamed "Lucky Girl" by Nailer, since she survived the shipwreck. After Nailer saves Nita, Richard wants to kill the girl and steal the scavenge. Pima lunges at Richard with a knife, but is overpowered. Richard decides to show mercy because Pima's mother, Sadna, had saved him from the storm. Knowing that there might be a reward for returning Nita to her father or uncle, Richard decides to spare her. Soon after, Nailer becomes sick and sleeps for 3 days.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Chancery"title="In Chancery">
The novel concentrates on the marital failures of Soames Forsyte and to a lesser extent that of his sister Winifred Dartie and on the building antipathy between Soames and his cousin Young Jolyon Forsyte who develops a friendship with Soames' estranged wife Irene. This friendship eventually leads to an affair and Irene's divorce from Soames.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interred_with_Their_Bones"title="Interred with Their Bones">
On the eve of a production of "Hamlet" at Shakespeare's Globe, Shakespeare scholar and theater director Kate Stanley’s eccentric mentor, Harvard Professor Roz Howard, gives her a mysterious box, claiming to have made a groundbreaking discovery. But before she can reveal it to Kate, the Globe burns to the ground and Roz is found dead, murdered precisely in the manner of Hamlet’s father. Inside the box Kate finds the first piece in a Shakespearean puzzle, setting her on a deadly, high-stakes treasure hunt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Search_for_WondLa"title="The Search for WondLa">
Eva Nine has reached the age of 12 living her whole life in an underground Sanctuary. She has been raised by a robot named "Muthr" (Multi-Utility Task Help Robot zero-six), and knows only of the outside world through holograms and a small piece of cardboard inscribed with the fragmented words "Wond" and "La." When the facility is attacked by a large creature named Besteel, she is forced to leave Muthr behind and flee her home. Upon seeing the outside world for the first time she remarks that it is nothing like the holographic simulations she had been brought up on, encountering many dangerous and alien species of plants and animals that her Omnipod device fails to identify.After another encounter with Besteel and meeting an alien named Rovender Kitt and a large behemoth Otto (identified as a giant water bear by the Omnipod), Eva reunites with Muthr in her (now demolished) home and convinces the Sanctuary computer to allow the robot to escort her to the next underground Sanctuary. When they find it abandoned they convince Rovender to lead them to the royal city of Solas.The group has several more encounters with Besteel and other aliens, in which Eva is nearly embalmed for display at the royal museum. While in the museum she learns that the life forms of this planet (called "Orbona" by its natives) arrived long ago on a dead world that they "reawakened" for their own use. She also discovers many ancient human artifacts and learns of a ruined human civilization beyond a dangerous desert.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winner_Stands_Alone"title="The Winner Stands Alone">
The loosely connected plot tells the story of several individuals: Igor, a psychopathic Russian mobile phone mogul; Ewa, formerly Igor's wife but now married to Hamid, a Middle Eastern fashion magnate; Jasmine, an African woman on the brink of a successful modeling career; American actress Gabriela, eager to land a leading film role; and an ambitious criminal detective, hoping to resolve the case of his life. The tale narrates the tension within and between the characters in a 24-hour period.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Lorraine"title="Alice Lorraine">
The story is set in the early years of the 19th century. The hero and heroine, brother and sister, are children of Sir Roland Lorraine, representative of a very ancient family. Hilary, while studying for the bar in London, falls in love with the daughter of a Kentish farmer, the sister of his fellow-pupil. He confesses his folly to his father, who at once buys for him a commission in a regiment of foot on service in Spain. The young man distinguishes himself at Badajos, and is on the high road to fame, when he falls under the spell of a Spanish countess, and forgets for a time his promise to the Kentish girl. Through the countess's treachery he loses £50,000, military funds, with which he is entrusted, and leaves the army. Meantime his sister has been fighting a severe battle at home—defending herself against a plot to make her the wife of a drunken fellow named Chapman. Hilary comes home; Mabel, the Kentish girl, is sent for, and matters are serene with all but Alice on the day appointed for her wedding. When the hour for the ceremony approaches, she walks out and throws herself into the river, is carried a mile, rescued and resuscitated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_Hours_(novel)"title="24 Hours (novel)">
Joe Hickey is a serial criminal working to extort money from wealthy doctors by kidnapping their children under a 24-hour ransom deadline designed to minimize police involvement. In what he decides will be his final kidnapping, he abducts Abby Jennings, child of Dr. Will Jennings, whom Joe Hickey blames for his mother's death. Abby has diabetes and her parents begin to panic that she will die if they cannot rescue her in time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Throne_of_Fire"title="The Throne of Fire">
Sadie and Carter Kane must find the three scrolls of the Book of Ra, to wake the sun god Ra from his sleep, and stop Apophis, the serpent of chaos, from destroying the world. The first scroll is hidden inside the Brooklyn Museum. With two of their magician trainees, Jaz and Walt, the Kane siblings manage to retrieve the scroll, fighting off a griffin and evil spirits. That night as she sleeps, Sadie's ba (soul) leaves her body and travels to the Hall of Ages, the House of Life's headquarters. She sees Desjardins, the Chief Lector of the House of Life, discussing a plot to destroy Brooklyn House with a man named Vladimir Menshikov. Meanwhile, Carter's ba meets with the god Horus, who warns him that the gods might attack him if he tries to wake Ra.On Sadie's birthday, she decides to go to London to visit friends, but is attacked by the baboon god Babi and the vulture goddess Nekhbet, who are possessing her grandparents. She is rescued by Bes, the dwarf god. He then accompanies Sadie and Carter to the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. There, the siblings find the second scroll with Menshikov, who has summoned Set and trapped him in a vase. Menshikov discovers them and unleashes a four-legged, two-headed snake that wounds and poisons Carter before Sadie kills it. Sadie is no match for Menshikov's magic, so she releases Set from the vase, and he knocks Menshikov unconscious. Set tells Sadie the location of the third scroll and the name of Zia's home village. In exchange, Sadie gives back his secret name, releasing her control over him. Then, she heals Carter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_End_of_the_Land"title="To the End of the Land">
Ora, a recently divorced Jerusalemite physiotherapist in her early fifties, had anxiously waited for her son Ofer to get through his three years' term of military service – spent mainly in confronting and skirmishing with the rebellious Palestinians of the Second Intifada. But just as she prepares to mark Ofer's safe return by going off with him to a long-planned week of backpacking in the Galilee, the West Bank situation sharply escalates and the Israeli Army launches an all-out invasion ("Operation Defensive Shield" of April 2002). To Ora's great dismay, Ofer volunteers to rejoin his unit. Taking him in a taxi to the base camp, Ora is filled with apprehension that Ofer is going to get killed, and compares herself to the Biblical Abraham who took his son off to be slaughtered. Back in her empty home, she is haunted by unbearable visions of army officers knocking on her door and bringing the message of Ofer's death in action, and at a moment's notice she runs off "To the End of the Land".Ora's wanderings and trekking through the Israeli countryside make up the bulk of the book's plot. She refuses to listen to news broadcasts or read papers, but cannot help noticing monuments of old battles and the inscribed names of dead soldiers. Interspersed with Ora's various experiences – surrealistic, nightmarish and sometimes humorous – are memories of previous events in her life, love relationships and motherhood, and the way it was impacted by earlier wars and conflicts in Israel's history.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farlander"title="Farlander">
The Heart of the World is a land in strife. For fifty years the Holy Empire of Mann, an empire and religion born from a nihilistic urban cult, has been conquering nation after nation. Their leader, Holy Matriarch Sasheen, ruthlessly maintains control through her Diplomats, priests trained as subtle predators.The Mercian Free Ports are the only confederacy yet to fall. Their only land link to the southern continent, a long and narrow isthmus, is protected by the city of Bar-Khos. For ten years now, the great southern walls of Bar-Khos have been besieged by the Imperial Fourth Army.Ash is a member of an elite group of assassins, the Roshun - who offer protection through the threat of vendetta. Forced by his ailing health to take on an apprentice, he chooses Nico, a young man living in the besieged city of Bar-Khos. At the time, Nico is hungry, desperate, and alone in a city that finds itself teetering on the brink.When the Holy Matriarch’s son deliberately murders a woman under the protection of the Roshun; he forces the sect to seek his life in retribution. As Ash and his young apprentice set out to fulfil the Roshun orders – their journey takes them into the heart of the conflict between the Empire and the Free Ports . . . into bloodshed and death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_Hearts_(short_story_collection)"title="Hungry Hearts (short story collection)">
Shenah Peshah a young lonely janitress living a painfully secluded life in poverty. She is given hope when she meets a young sociologist who moves into her building to study the people he writes about and she falls in love with him.A sequel to 'Wings', Peshah gets a job at a shirtwaist factory where one of the workers falls in love with her.A mother dances on the edge of self-destruction when she paints her kitchen white for her son returning home from the military but has her rent raised by her cruel landlord as a response.A woman being crushed by motherhood is offered a stay at a free vacation house but finds the strict humiliating living conditions worse than her life in poverty.A Jewish girl travels to America to find love but finds hardship and loneliness.Poverty separates a happy couple forever, marking their lives as lifestyles separate them.A student is denied her diploma because of her unsightly appearance due to her grueling life going to school and supporting herself in grinding poverty, making her rebel against the divisions of class.A mother goes from poverty to wealth, expecting happiness but only finding a cruel Catch-22.A young writer finds inspiration and purpose in the suffering of her brethren.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_Dragon"title="Storm Dragon">
Gaven d'Lyrandar, his mind broken by the ancient Prophecy of the Dragons, has been rotting in Dreadhold for over twenty years. He is rescued by a band of adventurers loyal to Haldren, his only companion in his time at the terrible prison, but he begins to get the feeling that he is just a tool. A dragon named Vaskar has hired them to help him fulfill a prophecy and become the Storm Dragon. In exchange, he promises to grant Haldren the throne of a reunited Galifar. Gaven escapes and continues to run from the Sentinel Marshals, but along the way he discovers that he has the power of the Storm Dragon. Just as Haldren is gathering an army to stage a battle and fulfill another part of the prophecy, thus signaling "The sundering of the Soul Reaver's gates", Gaven begins heading towards the Soul Reaver, where he faces Vaskar and defeats him in battle, creating a spear from the Eye of Siberys (a dragonshard). Ultimately, Gaven faces the Soul Reaver in battle and destroys it by destroying the Heart of Khyber (another dragonshard).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_Blanche_(novel)"title="Carte Blanche (novel)">
Set in mid-2011, the story takes place over the course of a week. James Bond is a former Royal Naval Reserve officer who has recently joined the Overseas Development Group – a covert operational unit of British security under the control of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office tasked "to identify and eliminate threats to the country by extraordinary means." Bond is employed within the 00 Section of the Operations Branch.He starts his assignment on the outskirts of Novi Sad in Serbia where an Irish sapper-turned-enforcer named Niall Dunne is planning to derail a train carrying 300 kilograms of methyl isocyanate, dumping it into the Danube. Bond is able to prevent the catastrophe by derailing the train himself at a much safer place along the line. He is unable to detain Dunne, who kills Bond's Serbian contacts in the course of his escape.Using what little intelligence Bond was able to gather from the operation in Serbia, the ODG is able to establish a connection to Green Way International, a waste disposal consortium contracted to demolish an army base in March. Because Bond is not authorized to act on British soil, he is forced to work with a domestic security agent named Percy Osborne-Smith. The two men clash over the interpretation of the intelligence, prompting Bond to manipulate Osborne-Smith into pursuing a lead Bond knows to be false, and allowing him to investigate the March army base on his own. While exploring the base hospital, he is sealed inside by Niall Dunne, who intends to kill him by bringing the hospital down in a controlled demolition. Bond escapes by improvising an explosive device.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sweetness_at_the_Bottom_of_the_Pie"title="The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie">
As the novel opens, Flavia Sabina de Luce schemes revenge against her two older sisters, Ophelia (17) and Daphne (13), who have locked her inside a closet in Buckshaw, the family's country manor home located in the English village of Bishop's Lacey. Flavia has braces and pigtails like a typical 11-year-old girl, but she is also a brilliant amateur chemist with a specialty in poisons and a fully equipped, personal laboratory on the top floor of her home. With her scientific notebook at the ready, she steals her oldest sister's lipstick, adds poison ivy extract, and then waits, eagerly anticipating changes in Ophelia's complexion. Flavia is especially jealous of her oldest sister because, at 17, she is the only one of the three girls with memories of their mother, Harriet, a free spirit who disappeared on a mountaineering adventure in Tibet 10 years earlier and is presumed dead. Harriet's disappearance devastated their father, Colonel Haviland "Jacko" de Luce, a philatelist and former amateur illusionist who spends most of his time poring over his stamp collection. The family shares their home with loyal retainer Arthur Wellesley Dogger, who once saved Colonel de Luce's life during the war and now works as Buckshaw's gardener, suffering frequent bouts of memory loss and hallucinations due to posttraumatic stress disorder from his time as a prisoner of war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Gate"title="The Lost Gate">
Danny, being the oldest person in the North family not to have developed any visible powers, is forced to work as a teacher and babysitter for younger kids with more magical power than him. One day, while trying to make his cousins focus on learning about their powers, he decides to take drastic measures. Wrapping their 'clants', creatures they create by channeling their wills, in a sack, he prevents them from leaving their clant bodies or from escaping the sack. He ties them in a tree to teach them a lesson, but is confronted by his outraged family. After everyone leaves, his favourite aunt, nicer than most of the family, tells him to retrieve the girls, and while climbing the tree for the second time, and more slowly, he discovers that he has created a magical gate while climbing the tree. The gate teleports him a short distance up the tree, healing his bruises at the same time. This is a forbidden type of magic he didn't expect to have. After returning the girls' clants, freeing them, he pretends not to know about his forbidden powers, and continues with his duties, knowing he is hunted.When Danny is thirteen, he and his family are inspected by the Argyros family, the Greeks. With them is a girl a year or so younger than Danny. The Norths try to act pathetic and weak, and later, while he is spying on the adults from both families, the twelve-year-old girl, Yllka, comes into the room and reveals him as a gatemage. While he is a Gatefather, the most powerful type, she seems to be nothing more than a Finder, who can only sense gates. When Danny escapes, he comes upon Thor, a relative, who informs him that the North family has suspected his skill, but promises not to try very hard to track Danny, while warning Danny that he should try to hide or Thor will be forced to capture him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colomba_(novella)"title="Colomba (novella)">
Through the lens of historical fiction, the novella examines the Corsican vendetta. In the story, Orso is forced to consider whether he should avenge the death of his father, apparently perpetrated by the Barricini family. An Englishwoman, Lydia Nevil, attempts to dissuade him from murder, while his sister, Colomba, uses all her cunning to ensure the opposite result.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Voyage_(Doctor_Who)"title="The Last Voyage (Doctor Who)">
The Doctor lands the TARDIS on a space cruiser on its maiden voyage. This story bears a similarity to "The Langoliers" by Stephen King, where people disappear without cause.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Air_(Doctor_Who)"title="Dead Air (Doctor Who)">
A pirate radio station in the 1960s is threatened by an alien called the Hush, who kills everything that makes noise. The Doctor and the radio DJs try to trap the Hush before it devours the whole planet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Johnson_in_the_Flames"title="Charlie Johnson in the Flames">
American reporter Charlie Johnson and his Polish cameraman Jacek investigate violence taking place in Kosovo. While in Serb-occupied territory, where there has been significant guerilla fighting, they hide in a house belonging to a Muslim family. They witness a Serb patrol unit destroy a house and light a fleeing woman on fire. A horrified Charlie attempts to assist the woman but she dies at an American field hospital. The event haunts Charlie, even after he returns to his family in England. In an attempt to understand how someone could justify such actions, Charlie tracks down the officer responsible to ask him why he did what he did.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Country"title="Sacred Country">
"At the age of six, Mary Ward, the child of a poor farming family in Suffolk, has a revelation: she isn't Mary, she's a boy. So begins Mary's heroic struggle to change gender, while around her others also strive to find a place of safety and fulfilment in a savage and confusing world".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_War"title="Theory of War">
It tells the story of her grandfather, a white child sold as a slave right after the Civil War when the Emancipation Proclamation meant that African Americans could no longer be sold, and so many soldiers had died in the war that there were thousands of orphans. The psychological consequences of such a background—for the slave himself and for the generations that followed him—are the main concern of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riotous_Assembly"title="Riotous Assembly">
Kommandant van Heerden, who has risen to Chief of Police of Piemburg through his family connection with a 'hero' of Boer republicanism rather than merit, is called out to deal with a strange murder case involving the eccentric British spinster, Miss Hazelstone. It appears that Miss Hazelstone has obliterated her black cook 'Fivepence' with a quadruple-barreled elephant gun. A paradoxical anglophile, van Heerden is initially willing to brush the incident under the carpet, until Miss Hazelstone reveals that she and the cook were former lovers (an offence under the Immorality Act) sharing a penchant for transvestism and rubber fetishism.In his panic to stop the truth getting out, van Heerden places Miss Hazelstone under house arrest, calling in all reinforcements available in order to quarantine the area and places his assistant, the profoundly stupid and bloodthirsty Konstabel Els, on guard, carrying the same elephant gun. The chaos that follows turns a potentially sensitive political scandal into a full-blown catastrophe, one that van Heerden, his deputy Lieutenant Verkramp and Els must resolve to uphold the 'honour' of Piemburg and apartheid.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_Memory"title="Escape from Memory">
Kira Landon is a fifteen-year-old girl whose life has been completely normal until her friends talk her into being hypnotized. She finds herself revealing things about a past that she never knew, remembering her mother carrying her through war-torn cobblestone streets while speaking a foreign language. Kira's best friend Lynne pushes her to investigate, but before they can find out anything, Mrs. Landon disappears. That evening, a strange woman shows up at Kira's house, saying that she is her "Aunt Memory"."Aunt Memory" takes Kira to Crythe, a land where people are trained from childhood to remember everything that ever happens to them. Kira soon discovers that not only is her mother a prisoner in Crythe, but that many people are not who they claim to be. Mrs. Landon is actually Kira's real Aunt Memory, and the woman who had called herself "Aunt Memory" is actually Rona Cummins, an old enemy of Kira's parents who tries to obtain her parents' secrets. As Rona keeps raising the stakes, Kira must find a way to save Lynne, Mrs. Landon, and herself, as well as her parents' memories.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skippy_Dies"title="Skippy Dies">
"Skippy Dies" follows the lives of a group of students and faculty members at the fictional Seabrook College, a Catholic boarding school in Dublin. The title character, Daniel "Skippy" Juster, dies during a donut-eating contest in the novel's opening scene. The rest of the novel explores the events leading up to Skippy's death, as well as the aftermath within the Seabrook community.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweeping_Up_Glass"title="Sweeping Up Glass">
Olivia Harker is a child unloved by her mother, Ida, who is mentally ill. However, her father, Tate, raises her and loves her a great deal while her mother is in a sanatorium. Tate also manages to run a grocery store and is a self-taught veterinarian. Ida is released from the sanitorium and returns home to her family. She immediately makes it clear to Olivia that she is a disappointment to her. Ida frequently abuses Olivia. Olivia's only source of friendship is the colored community within her town. She learns many things from them, including words of wisdom. Olivia has a child, Pauline, out of wedlock. Olivia and her father get into a horrible car accident that kills James Arnold. The accident leaves her terribly disfigured, though temporarily. Ida tells her that her father was killed in the crash. Despite these events, she gets married eventually. However, it is not to Pauline's father, who is unknown. Olivia's husband, Saul, builds a tarpaper shack for Ida. She has a relatively happy life despite her mother's constant madness and disapproval of her for 12 years before her husband dies. Pauline follows her mother's example by having a child, William, out of wedlock. When William is a baby, Pauline leaves to become a star in Hollywood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zahra's_Paradise"title="Zahra's Paradise">
The story takes place in the aftermath of the disputed Iran's 2009 elections. It recounts a search for Mehdi, a young activist who has vanished in their aftermath, likely abducted by the government's secret police. The search is carried out by his mother (the titular Zahra), his brother (a blogger), and their friends."Zahra's Paradise" is also the English name of Behesht-e Zahra, the largest cemetery in Iran, located in Tehran. The comic's title purposefully draws inspiration from that place, a place of rest for many Iranians from all paths of life, including both the supporters and opponents of the Iranian revolution and the current Iranian government.The novel's characters echo real figures, such as Mohsen Rouholamini, a 25-year-old who was reported to have died of prison abuse in 2009, and Sohrab Aarabi, the 19-year-old who was gunned down in the protests, both of whom, like Neda Agha-Soltan, were buried in Behesht-e Zahra. It's also reminiscent of the story of Hossein Derakhshan, the Iranian-Canadian who helped spark the Iranian blogging movement, before voluntarily returning to his homeland in 2008, only to be imprisoned indefinitely. Another name of relevance is that of the Canadian-Iranian journalist Zahra Kazemi, known for her investigations into missing people in Iran, who was beaten to death in an Iranian prison in 2003.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_(Dekker_and_Lee_novel)"title="Forbidden (Dekker and Lee novel)">
Fearing for his life, Rom is on the run and stumbles across a vial of blood and a cryptic message.Meanwhile, the ruler of the world Saric, in the city Byzantium, is curious about emotion. Years before, Megas, the founder of the Order, has unleashed a genetic virus that suppressed emotion. Saric wanted to experience it firsthand.Rom goes home, only to discover guards killing his mother. He runs to his friend Avra's house to drink a mouth full of the blood. It knocks him out. When he wakes up, he discovered Avra had drunk it as well and asleep. He feels that he has been granted emotion. They enlist two other friends who have potential.Rom looks at the vellum that enclosed the vial but is unable to decipher it. He and the four kidnaps the only person known who can decipher it: Feyn, the sovereign's sister. She helps them discover that a scientist used his blood's immunity to pass the blood down. The scientist in his writing said that a boy in year 471 will be born with full emotion and be the savior of the human race.They find the boy Jonathan in Africa and take him. Jonathan, at nine years old, is made Sovereign, but grants regency to the Senate. Rom takes the boy to find supporters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lurulu"title="Lurulu">
In "Lurulu", Myron continues in his role as crewman of the space freighter, the Glicca, under Captain Adair Maloof. The Glicca is crewed by an eccentric mix of picaresque rogues, pilgrims and intellectuals. The crew are searching for the mysterious "lurulu", "a special word from the language of myth," that refers to a sense of longing. The tramp freighter continues to take on and deliver cargoes and the crew explore the nightlife of exotic space ports on worlds ranging from orderly planets to rough, lawless Wild West-style ports.As the story opens, the freighter is in the beautiful planet Fluter, settled by colonists only a thousand years ago who came from crowded concrete-built cities that they vowed not to recreate in their new home. Fluter's development has been therefore limited to 147 villages and a spaceport. The freighter next goes to Naharius, a sparsely populated planet with wooded vales whose lovely mountain springs are reputed to be a fountain of youth, which attracts tourists from many planets. Myron looks for his great aunt Hester at the expensive clinics without success. Finally, in a crowded concrete hospice, he finds his great aunt lying gaunt and weak in a cot. She tells him that con men offering an anti-aging treatment took her money and left her to die. After her death, Myron becomes wealthy due to her will, but he stays on with his Glicca crewmates. He lives in a luxurious home, and the Glicca is upgraded and overhauled. Myron meets a former love interest, a young woman named Tibbet who is now married.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Lamp"title="Night Lamp">
When the Faths, a childless academic couple, save young Jaro from a near-fatal beating, they discover he suffers from not just physical wounds, but also the crippling memory of his mother's death, which must be erased. Adopted by them, he grows up an outsider in a world of constant striving for social status, his only goal to become a spaceman and discover the truth of his missing memories. His journey takes him to Fader, a planet closed to the rest of the galaxy, whose inhabitants long ago engineered slave races to support their aristocratic lifestyle. Though Fader's Golden Age has long passed, and they now live in fear of many of their creations, they still maintain a fierce pride. Together with his father, Jaro must find a way to bring justice for his mother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlok"title="Interlok">
The story in the novel was set in Penang in the early 1900s during the colonisation of Britain over Malaya. It tells the story of the three main characters; Seman, Chin Huat and Maniam. The title of the book derived its name from the English word "interlock" which corresponds with the interlocking of the lives of the three main characters of the novel in the final book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_in_the_Fat_Lane_(novel)"title="Life in the Fat Lane (novel)">
The novel's main character is Lara Ardeche. According to Lara, her family life is perfect because her parents are youthful, beautiful, and involve themselves in every aspect of her and her brother's lives. She is elected homecoming queen for her high school, following in her mother's footsteps, and she is her father's "princess". Each morning is a daily routine of waking up in a glamorous home, eating a healthy but delicious home-cooked meal, and working out in her home gym given to the family by their wealthy grandpa. Her best friend Molly is the complete opposite. She is overweight, her family life is a wreck, and her nickname is "the Mouth", but she has a sarcastic sense of humor in spite of all this.Shortly before winning Homecoming Queen, Lara takes pity on an obese classmate named Patty Asher and offers to help her lose weight. Soon after, Lara notices that she slowly but steadily gains weight, no matter how much she works out, diets, or even starves herself. Her thin and perfect mother begs Lara to do anything she can to keep the weight off and her father eventually stops calling her "princess". Every one of Lara's so-called friends abandons her, except for Molly and Lara's boyfriend Jett. Within months, Lara gains 100 pounds. After seeking over fifty medical doctors, she is diagnosed with a rare and incurable metabolic disorder called "Axell-Crowne" syndrome. Patty pops up and visits Lara shortly before her diagnosis, happily gloating about the fact Lara has gained a massive amount of weight and is now fatter than her. Even Lara's former friends now openly gloat about her weight gain. Her relationship with Jett begins to deteriorate, along with her entire family's relationship, once Lara's dad announces that he is having an affair.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Question_(novel)"title="The Big Question (novel)">
Contestants compete for the chance to answer a final question that, if answered correctly, will take all their problems away by making them one of the richest people in the world. The downside, though, is that if they get the question wrong, they are executed in prime time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beautiful_Assassin"title="Beautiful Assassin">
The novel centers on Lieutenant Tat'yana Levchenko, who decides to join the Soviet Army as a sniper after her husband, Nikolai Grigorovich (who is known as Koyla by "those few friends he had") goes missing in action and her daughter, Masha, is killed by Germans in their hometown of Kiev, Ukraine. After Masha's death, Tat'yana desires to become a soldier and boards a train filled with recruits. As she and the recruits change into military gear and uniforms on the train, while some make lewd comments at her, Tat'yana is one of the first to acknowledge that she can fire a gun when asked by a political officer. After killing a cow in a farmer's field, the officer smiles and tells her to "Do the same with the Germans." (page 248) During the Siege of Sevastopol, Tat'yana becomes a Soviet hero when she kills a confirmed 300 Germans, including one called the "King of Death." After being wounded in action (which requires a hysterectomy), Tat'yana is evacuated from the front and while recovering from her injuries is presented with the Gold Star medal, is honored a Hero of the Soviet Union, and receives many letters thank her for her service and bravery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemmeen_(novel)"title="Chemmeen (novel)">
Chembankunju's only aim in life is to own a boat and a net. He finally succeeds in buying both with the help of Pareekutty, a young Muslim trader, on condition that the fish hauled by the boat will be sold to him. Chembankunju's pretty daughter Karuthamma and Pareekutty love each other. Karuthamma's mother, Chakki, knows about it and reminds her daughter about the life they lead within the boundaries of strict social tradition. Karuthamma sacrifices her love for Pareekutty and marries Palani, an orphan discovered by Chembankunju in the course of one of his fishing expeditions. Following the marriage, Karuthamma accompanies her husband to his village, despite her mother's sudden illness and her father's repeated requests to stay. In his fury, Chembankunju disowns her. On acquiring a boat and a net and subsequently adding one more, Chembankunju becomes more greedy and heartless. With his dishonesty, he drives Pareekutty to bankruptcy. After the death of his wife, Chembankunju marries Pappikunju, the widow of the man from whom he had bought his first boat. Panchami, Chembankunju's younger daughter, leaves home to join Karuthama, on arrival of her step mother. Meanwhile, Karuthamma has endeavoured to be a good wife and mother. But scandal about her old love for Pareekutty spreads in the village. Palani's friends ostracize him and refuse to take him fishing with them. By a stroke of fate, Karuthamma and Pareekutty meet one night and their old love is awakened ... Palani, at sea, alone and baiting a large shark, is caught in a huge whirlpool and is swallowed by the sea. Next morning, Karuthamma and Parekutty, are also found dead hand in hand, washed ashore. At a distance lie the washed-up corpse of Palani's baited shark.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemies_&amp;_Allies"title="Enemies &amp; Allies">
The story takes place in the late 1950s. Gotham is a crime-ridden city with corrupt cops, but the crime rate has been hit hard by the vigilante actions of The Batman. Metropolis is the far opposite of Gotham; bright, uncorrupted, and protected by the super powered hero known as Superman. A hero that, when interviewed by "Daily Planet" reporter Lois Lane, revealed he was an alien from Krypton. But to their surprise, no one, not even businessmen Lex Luthor and Bruce Wayne, believed that statement. Even though someone like Wayne cannot explain how Superman can do what he does. After fleeing another trap from the police; Batman returns home to meet, as Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent and Jimmy Olsen from Metropolis' "Daily Planet" for an interview. In Siberia, Luthor meets with his partner, General Ceridov, who reveals his slaves working day and night at the Gulag in search for strange and deadly green rocks. After showing him the violent Mutants that someone can become after long term exposure to the rocks, Luthor asks to have one for his journey home. Editor Perry White gives Lois and Clark the assignment of completing this month's "love advice" column, though Clark has troubles because he doesn't know how to help people by offering honest advice. Lois wants to investigate the possible illegal activates LuthorCorp have been performing, but needs concrete facts first. After Bruce finds out his father and Alfred Pennyworth's friend, Drayling, resigned from Wayne Enterprises because of the board of directors' corruption; Bruce discovers Wayne technology being sold to LuthorCorp from their offices, and bribes, blackmail, and threats, either to them or to their families, from their homes as Batman. Lois meets with LuthorCorp ex-employee, Blanche Rosen, who reveals her and many others were hired to construct a reactor in the Caribbean, but the site was dangerous, leaving many sick and left to die. This leads to Lois sneaking inside LuthorCorp, and reaching the assembly line and the secret maps, all of which prove Rosen's sayings. Clark sees "Earth vs the Flying Saucers" with Jimmy, a movie that seems to answer why no one believes Superman to be an alien, as well as makes Clark wonder about other existing aliens. His question seems to get answered when a UFO appears, traveling across the country. Superman flies to intercept along with seven F-100D Super Sabres, but a LuthorCorp aircraft fires a pulse beacon to disable the planes, and disappears with the UFO.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nearer_the_Moon"title="Nearer the Moon">
Anaïs Nin continues her open marriage with Hugh Parker Guiler and her affairs with Henry Miller and Gonzalo Moré, under the shadow of the Spanish Revolution and the approach of World War II. She helps Gonzalo with his Communist and anti-Fascist activities, even though she believes more in literature and personal contact than in politics as a means of progress. Henry's work is already succeeding, and Anaïs's is starting to be published (of course, this will be interrupted by the war).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casper_the_Commuting_Cat"title="Casper the Commuting Cat">
"Casper the Commuting Cat" is the story of an adventurous cat, Casper, that the author, Susan Finden had adopted from a rescue centre in 2002. She describes how Casper liked to wander from her house and was not afraid of people or traffic. Casper used to walk into office blocks and doctors' consulting rooms and find a chair to sleep on. Then he started queuing with people at a bus stop across the road from his house and boarding buses that took his fancy. He would curl up on a seat and go to sleep, and when the bus had completed its 11-mile round-trip to the city centre and returned to his bus stop, the driver would let him off. Casper's commuting habits made him a celebrity and Finden describes the worldwide media attention that she and Casper received. In January 2010 Casper died after being struck by a speeding taxi while crossing the road outside his house. Finden tells how she coped with her loss and the renewed media attention that followed.In addition to covering Casper's exploits, Finden includes in the book a brief story of her own life, and discusses the other cats she had adopted from rescue centres. Also present are several light-hearted chapters "written" by Casper from "the other side" in which he gives advice to other cats on how to handle humans, catch a bus, and deal with the media.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millroy_the_Magician"title="Millroy the Magician">
The book concerns lonely teenager Jilly Farina and her relationship with Millroy. He is performing and calls her out of the audience and tells her he will train her to be his assistant. Millroy leaves the travelling fair and together with Jilly embarks on a mission to transform the food habits of America; converting them to Bible-based vegetarianism and promising his followers that they will live to be 200. His evangelical fervour is backed up by miraculous tricks but attracts growing opposition. He goes on to create a top-rating television show and chain of 'Day One' diners staffed by young volunteers. As his public success grows Jilly becomes increasingly uncomfortable in her role as his confidante.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_in_Paradise"title="Turtle in Paradise">
Turtle Curry is an eleven-year-old girl living with her mother Sadiebelle and cat named Smokey in New Jersey, who is upset that her mother's new employer refuses to let Turtle and her cat stay in her house. Turtle says goodbye and enters the front seat of Mr. Lyle Edgit, a family friend and a merchant. When Turtle arrives in Key West, her Aunt Minerva "Minnie" is confused because she didn't receive a letter about Turtle coming to live with her. Aunt Minnie introduces her to their three cousins: Beans (the oldest cousin who is distant), Kermit (who has rheumatic fever and must nap in order to live), and Buddy (who is quick to pee in his pants). Just as Beans discover that Turtle is sharing rooms with him, Aunt Minnie chases Buddy around for his pants, while Kermit goes to ask Buddy if he stole his marbles.Pressured by the conflict, Aunt Minnie forces them outside and continues housework. Then, a friend nicknamed Pork Chop greets them, followed by a cousin named Jelly greeting the boys before handing an envelope to Turtle, claiming that it was given to him by mistake. At a later time, the boys, who are affiliated with the "Diaper Gang," come to collect the crying babies to cure them. The next day, Pork Chop and Turtle visit the waterfront where they befriend a man named Slow Poke, who watches the swimming turtles. Subsequently, an ice cream man named Jimmy hands out ice cream. Beans attempts to not pay for the ice cream, which goes wrong. Turtle then attempts and is successful. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_a_Hansom_Cab"title="The Mystery of a Hansom Cab">
"The Mystery of a Hansom Cab" takes place in Melbourne, Australia, and involves an investigation into a homicide, after a corpse is discovered in the early hours, in a hansom cab. Melbourne plays a significant role in the plot and, as the author describes: "Over all the great city hung a cloud of smoke like a pall." The killer's identity is not as significant a revelation in the story as are the roles of the influential and secretive Frettlby family, and their secret: they have an illegitimate daughter living on the streets. The class divide between Melbourne's wealthy and less fortunate is addressed throughout the plot.The protagonist in the novel is a policeman named Detective Gorby, who is given the task of solving the murder. As Hume describes the character's investigative skills: "He looked keenly round the room, and his estimate of the dead man's character was formed at once." The author commented in a later introduction, "All of the scenes in the book, especially the slums, are described from personal observation; and I passed a great many nights in Little Bourke Street, gathering material". At this time, the street had gained notoriety as a place frequented by prostitutes and criminals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpsing_(novel)"title="Corpsing (novel)">
Conrad is a television producer who, whilst having lunch with his ex-girlfriend Lily, witnesses her murder and is shot himself by an anonymous assailant. The rest of the novel centres on Conrad's attempts to uncover the identity of Lily's killer and to discover the reasons for her murder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandelion_Fire"title="Dandelion Fire">
Whereas the first book in the series is set primarily in the real world and involves the discovery of the cupboard portals, a significant portion of the second book takes place in the worlds inside the cupboards.Despite the restriction the Willises had put on Henry and Henrietta to opening any more cupboards, Henry and Henrietta's curiosity got the best of them. Unfortunately, while Henrietta was searching for the skeleton key, which she was hiding from her little sibling, Anastasia, Henry was struck by a bolt of lightning and lost consciousness. Luckily, even though Henry was struck blind after the incident, he was otherwise uninjured with nothing but a scar on the palm of his hand. Henrietta was skeptical and accused Henry of faking his blindness. Henry was immediately rushed to a hospital, but his symptoms weren't as severe as those experienced by a victim struck by an authentic lightning bolt. On the other hand, faithful Richard assured them Henry would never exaggerate or fail in his courage, so he must truly be injured. After a bumpy ride home, Henry was left alone to rest in his room. When Henry woke up, his skin felt flaky, and the burn in his jaw, caused by the blood of Nimiane, singed his cranium. He then started to devise a plan involving Richard, instead of Henrietta, to travel with him through the cupboards in a search for his birth parents. While he was explaining his plan to Richard, Henrietta eavesdropped on their conversation. She could not but feel betrayed. She decided to get back at Henry by grabbing Richard as he made his way through the landing the next time he came. Unfortunately, both of their schemes failed, as Henry was abducted by Darius, an evil wizard. Impatiently, Henrietta waited for Richard until she was determined to go through the door from her grandfather's room to the secret realm herself. There, she was kidnapped by two short but extremely strong men and was taken to Magdalene, queen of the FitzFaeren. Magdalene asked Henrietta to retrieve the three stolen items from her deceased grandfather, telling her that if she refuses, Henrietta will be held as a prisoner as long as the objects used to thwart the evil Nimiane are regained. Henrietta escaped the queen's grasp by flinging herself out of a window. Cold and hungry, Henrietta followed a stream to Eli FitzFaeren's house.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chestnut_King"title="The Chestnut King">
In The Chestnut King, Henry's Aunt Dotty, Uncle Frank and cousins from Kansas now live in Badon Hill as well. Nimiane continues to stalk Henry. She wants his blood, as it will increase her power. The scar she previously inflicted on his face continues to grow and rot. Henry's father, Mordecai, fears the wound will kill Henry unless they can vanquish the undying witch-queen soon.Soldiers sent by the emperor of this world demand that Mordecai come with them across the sea. The emperor wants Mordecai to answer to charges that his family helped free Nimiane. Mordecai is more concerned about destroying the witch-queen and saving his son than his defense. He says he will respond to the emperor once he has completed his mission. He leaves for Endor, where Nimiane resides.In response to Mordecai's disobedience to the emperor, the soldiers capture his family, including Uncle Frank, Henry's mom and his cousins. Then they set fire to the family's house, leaving Henry's cousin Henrietta and grandmother inside. Henry helps his grandmother and Henrietta escape through a cupboard portal that takes them back to Kansas. There, they enlist the help of Henry's baseball buddy, Zeke. Leaving Henry's grandmother with Zeke's mom, the three children travel through the cupboard leading to Endor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Made_by_Hand"title="World Made by Hand">
Narrated by Robert Earle, a local carpenter who has lost his wife and son, the novel focuses on four separate "cultures" that represent the directions society could go after a breakdown of modern social norms. The citizens of Union Grove are living on the tail end of a national catastrophe, with their community slowly falling apart from neglect and natural decay. Within their community, a separate group of scrappers and thugs led by Wayne Karp run the "General Store" out of the town dump and live in a group of trailers known as Karptown. The third faction is led by Steven Bullock, a wealthy farmer with a vision who has set his farm up like an English manor and strives to become self-sufficient. As the story begins Brother Jobe comes to town, the leader of the New Faith Church, a religious group that has fled the south and settle into the old high school. Much of the rest of the nation seems to be falling apart, with nuclear blasts destroying such major cities as Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., cities devolving, and the fractured United States. These forces struggle to respect life in a way that was taken for granted before events changed, and build pragmatically for a new future. Earle's experiences are the focus of this struggle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fontamara"title="Fontamara">
One night, three people from Fontamara − a mother, father and son − tell an exiled writer about various things which had happened in their village. The writer decides to turn these into a book. The mother, father and son therefore become the narrators, though the majority of the book is narrated by the father. Cav. Pelino arrives in the village and tricks the "cafoni" into signing a petition that would deviate the watercourse away from Fontamara and thus away from the fields in which they work. The "Fontamaresi" are initially reluctant but they sign the blank pieces of paper he gives them. He places another sheet on the top of the pile which says "The undersigned, in support of the above, supply their signatures spontaneously, voluntarily and with enthusiasm for Cav. Pelino" ( p. 37).On their way to the fields the men see workers deviating the watercourse. A boy delivers the news to the village and the women go to the regional capital city to protest. They don't realize that under the new regime the "sindaco" (mayor) is now the "podestà" and are taken to the house of the Impresario (a wealthy businessman) where, after much deliberation and fruitless trips elsewhere to find him, they are again deceived, because Don Circonstanza and the Impresario persuade them to accept a one-quarter/three-quarter split of the water. The Impresario has also taken the "tratturo" (flat land owned by the community that is used for migration of sheep). Berardo Viola wants to emigrate to America but is prevented by new emigration laws. He had sold his land to Don Circonstanza to fund his emigration but now, with no land, is known as "il cafone senza terra" (the peasant without land) and is unemployed and, because of his pride, feels unfit to marry Elvira – a Madonna-like character whom he loves. ( p. 102). Cav. Pelino informs the government that the Fontamaresi are not cooperating (through ignorance) with the new Fascist regime and Innocenzo la Legge comes to impose a curfew, which will severely inhibit their work, and forbid talk of politics in public places. Berardo makes a speech against Innocenzo who is humiliated and who then spends the night with Marietta.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gate_at_the_Stairs"title="A Gate at the Stairs">
The novel's main character is Tassie Keltjin. At age 20, Keltjin is attending a major university identified only as the "Athens of the Midwest." When the novel opens, she is looking for a job as a nanny. With no real childcare experience, she finds that the only mother willing to hire her is Sarah Brink. The hitch is that Sarah does not yet actually have a child. This doesn't stop her from hiring Keltjin anyway. Soon Tassie finds herself embroiled in the Brink family's attempts to adopt a bi-racial child who eventually goes by the name "Emmie".Now a college student and a nanny, Tassie starts a relationship with a man named Reynaldo whom she met in one of her classes. Reynaldo tells her that he is Brazilian. She thinks it's odd that when he purports to use Portuguese, he actually speaks Spanish. Later, Reynaldo ends the affair, informing her that he is suspected of terrorist activities and must disappear. In saying goodbye, Reynaldo tells her he is not actually Brazilian. When she asks where he is from, he answers "Hoboken, New Jersey." Though Reynaldo denies being part of a cell he says that "It is not the jihad that is the wrong thing. It is the wrong things that are the wrong things" and then he quotes Muhammed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agatha_Raisin_and_the_Deadly_Dance"title="Agatha Raisin and the Deadly Dance">
In Paris on holiday Agatha is relieved of her wallet in what she calls the "Paris Incident", and the attitude of the Paris Police nudges her into setting up her own detective agency. She finds an office in Mircester. Her new neighbour in what was James Lacey's cottage, Emma Comfrey, applies for the job of secretary in the office, and, uncharacteristically assertive, gets it. She has retired from the Ministry of Defence, where she has survived a Superglue investigation when she sabotages a popular colleagues’ computer. It turns out she is unbalanced and devious, with a vindictive nature when slighted. She gets a crush on Sir Charles Fraith, so aims to kill Agatha when Charles goes off with Agatha instead.The agency's first case is a missing cat, and the second is to guard a divorcée's daughter, Cassandra, who has received a death threat. It turns out that her ex-husband Jeremy Laggat-Brown has supplied bomb timers to terrorists including the Provos, and is in love with Felicity Felliet who wants to recover her ancestral home which Mrs Laggat-Brown now has. Jeremy's real target is his ex-wife. He engages a Provisional IRA hitman Johnny Mulligan to kill Agatha. The jealous Emma Comfrey poisons Agatha's coffee with rat poison, which kills Mulligan who is waiting in her home to shoot her. Later Agatha is nearly gassed by Felicity. Finally after Emma is certified she escapes and goes to Agatha's cottage, but is shot by Felicity Felliet who also wants to shoot Agatha (but has not met her).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Valiant"title="Conan the Valiant">
"Conan the Valiant" begins in Turan, where a 22-year-old Conan is recovering from his victory over the Cult of Doom (found in Robert Jordan's "Conan the Unconquered"). Conan finds himself involved in court intrigue and joins forces with a sword maiden, Raihna, and her employer, a sorcerer named Illyana, in their efforts against the growing menace of an evil wizard named Eremius. Using one of the Jewels of Kurag — the other is held by Illyana — Eremius has command over his growing army of the Transformed, former humans who were mutated into reptilian demons, and is looking to conquer a large region of Turan. The combination of local villagers, Conan's sword, and Illyana's magic destroy Eremius as well as the twin Jewels.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Savage"title="Conan the Savage">
The novel follows two parallel storylines. In the first, Conan is sent to a Brythunian prison mine after he accused his gambling opponent of cheating. Escaping via an underground river, he ends up in a wild region, where he is badly injured in his fight with a bear. He is nursed back to health by Songa, a woman from a local tribe, with whom he eventually settles. Conan finds her tribe's culture and way of life as simplicity rewarding. However, his idyllic life is disrupted when Brythunian soldiers, under orders to locate a magic jewel in possession of the tribe, attack and destroy their village.The other narrative is the life-story of a sorceress named Tamsin, who, as a child, watched in horror as her mother is raped and killed by mercenaries in the service of Typhas, the king of Brythunia. Tamsin seeks vengeance after she and her doll begin manifesting disturbing magical powers; the doll being possessed by Ninga, a minor deity. Tamsin challenges the kingdom's main cult, in time establishing Ninga's in its place, murders King Typhas, and becomes queen of Brythunia herself. As the fate of Songa's tribe assets, Tamsin's rule proves she is just as corrupt and evil as that of her predecessor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Dragonslayer"title="The Last Dragonslayer">
The story begins with 15-year-old Jennifer Strange, who is filling in for the missing manager, Mr. Zambini, for an employment agency for magicians called Kazam. There are prophecies that the last dragon will soon die, meaning that the dragon's territory is up for grabs. Trying to find the truth of the matter, she finds the official Dragonslayer and is pushed into becoming his apprentice. The Dragonslayer dies and she becomes the last Dragonslayer, which means that she will be the one who slays the dragon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forgotten_Garden"title="The Forgotten Garden">
At Nell's joyous 21st birthday party her world falls apart when her father tells her she was adopted as a 4-year-old in 1913, seemingly abandoned on an Australian wharf and unable to remember her name. The knowledge shatters her self-image and changes the course of her life.In 1975, the only surviving clues to Nell's past are given to her after her father's death; the memories they trigger lead her to travel to England to unravel the puzzle, part of which is connected to the author of a rare fairytale book in her possession. She discovers her true identity despite having been thought dead for more than 60 years, and finds her way to Tregenna, and Blackhurst Manor, on the coast of Cornwall.However, her plans to complete the quest are interrupted when her granddaughter Cassandra comes to stay "temporarily," a stay that becomes permanent. In the end it is Cassandra, haunted by her own griefs, who in 2005 follows in Nell's footsteps to finish the journey of discovery and fit together all the missing pieces.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_(novel)"title="Memory (novel)">
While leading the Dendarii Mercenaries on a hostage rescue mission, Miles Vorkosigan has a seizure — a recurring consequence of his death and resuscitation in "Mirror Dance" — which results in his accidentally (and non-fatally) severing the rescued hostage's legs with his weapon. Terrified of the consequences, Miles falsifies his mission report to his boss, Simon Illyan, the head of Imperial Security (ImpSec). Illyan finds out anyway, and Miles is forced to accept a medical discharge.Miles becomes seriously depressed. His cousin Ivan Vorpatril, with the help of his friend and ImpSec Captain Duv Galeni (who encountered Miles during the events of "Brothers in Arms"), manage to get him to break out of his funk.Duv Galeni is enamored of Laisa Toscane, a very wealthy heiress and member of a Komarran economic delegation. Miles gets them invitations to a party hosted by Emperor Gregor, hoping to help him to score points with Laisa, but unexpectedly she and Gregor fall in love. When Illyan suffers a sudden, crippling mental impairment, Miles attempts to investigate, but receives no cooperation from Lucas Haroche, ImpSec's acting chief, so he asks Gregor to assign him an Imperial Auditor, a troubleshooter answerable only to the Emperor. Gregor unexpectedly decides that it would save many steps (and his time) by making Miles himself a temporary Auditor, even if Haroche considers Miles a prime suspect in Illyan's impairment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Civil_Campaign"title="A Civil Campaign">
Miles Vorkosigan wants to woo Ekaterin Vorsoisson, recently widowed during the thwarting of a terrorist plot in Komarr, but fearing that openly courting her would drive her away, he takes an indirect approach: he hires her to design a garden beside Vorkosigan House so he can spend time with her.His clone brother Mark also has romance problems. He and Kareen Koudelka became lovers at Beta Colony, but the sexual mores of conservative Barrayar are much stricter, and she keeps their relationship a secret from her family. When it finally surfaces, Kareen's parents take it very badly. Miles recommends his brother involve their mother, the formidable Lady Vorkosigan. She persuades Kareen's parents to accept their relationship.A significant subplot involves Mark's first entrepreneurial venture: an ugly genetically engineered insect called the "butter bug," capable of eating all kinds of waste organic material of Earth origin and regurgitating a nutritious goo that Miles disparagingly calls "bug vomit".Meanwhile, two seats on the powerful Council of Counts are up for grabs. Count Rene Vorbretten has been found to be part Cetagandan, dating back to the brutal Cetagandan occupation of Barrayar. The vacancy created by the death of Count Pierre Vorrutyer is contested by a distant cousin, Richars, and Pierre's sister, Donna, who undergoes gender reassignment surgery at Beta Colony, becoming a fully functional man and taking the name Dono, in order to seek the title. Miles gets involved on behalf of Count Vorbretten and Dono Vorrutyer after Richars antagonizes him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Planet_(novel)"title="The Lost Planet (novel)">
The narrator, 16-year-old Jeremy Grant, who has been recently orphaned, travels from Australia to Scotland to stay with his scientist uncle, Dr Lachlan McKinnon, at his estate, Inverard. He discovers that the irascible McKinnon and his colleagues, including Swedish Professor Lars Bergman, American engineer Spike Stranahan, science student Janet Campbell, Cockney housekeeper Madge Smith and engineer Kurt Oppenheim, are building an atomic-powered spaceship to travel to Hesikos, the wandering 'lost planet' which is now within a few days' flight of Earth, and which is known to have near-Earth gravity and a breathable atmosphere.It transpires that Oppenheim is a spy and saboteur working for a rival expedition, led by Professor Hermanoff, from an Eastern European country. Oppenheim is dismissed, and later Hermanoff visits Inverard to try to persuade the two expeditions to join forces, but there is too much suspicion and animosity. Oppenheim's place is taken by Grant.Their take-off and voyage are trouble-free, but a mechanical fault causes a crash-landing on Hesikos, damaging the radio, and making it almost certain that the ship cannot take off again. Nevertheless, the crew start to explore the area, finding an atmosphere of peace which calms their anxieties and tempers. They gradually realise that much of the planet is covered by deep snow and ice in the winter, making all but plant life impossible and their own survival unlikely.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_Souls"title="Lord of Souls">
Like its predecessor "The Infernal City", the novel "Lord of Souls" takes places about 40 years after the events of ' and ', and some 160 years prior to the events of "".Prince Attrebus carries on with his quest to obtain a magical sword Umbra, which will be able to destroy the invaders from Umbriel. In the Imperial City however, the Penitus Oculatus Agent Colin finds evidence of betrayal in the heart of the Mede Empire. Sul and Attrebus, captured by Malacath, escape and resume the search for Umbra, and are led to a fort where the current wielder of Umbra has been buried alive after the sword drove him immediately insane.Annaig is again promoted after introducing new ideas and dishes into Umbriel's court, and eventually tricks a rival kitchen into confirmation that she had recreated their secret ingredient, also condemning Slyr, her assistant, to death after Slyr repeatedly tries to poison and murder her. Her mood further darkens after Mere-Glim is caught and killed while attempting to lead the skraws in another raid. Annaig is then forced to become a slave of dark lord of Umbriel, who has an insatiable hunger for souls.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rogue_Crew"title="The Rogue Crew">
After a defeat at the hands of the Rogue Crew, Razzid Wearat's seer, Shekra, tells him of Redwall Abbey, a place that he can plunder easily. He sets the course for it, killing all who stand in his way.Skor Axehound and Rake Nightfur hear about this and they team up to kill off the Wearat and his horde once and for all. Meanwhile, the Wearat wreaks havoc on land, killing otters and Guosim shrews, all the time making his way to Redwall.Skor Axehound has a young son Swiffo, who doesn't care for weapons and, against his father's will, joins the fortunate Freepaws. The hares that are in the Long Patrol, as well as the otters of the Rogue Crew, try to outdo one another, until Kite the Slayer finds that there are differences between them, but in order to overcome this together, they all need to look past them.Shekra stumbles across Drogbuk Wiltud. They take him aboard the Greenshroud hoping to get directions to Redwall, until finally, Skor meets up with the Wearat's crew and Drogbuk leaps overboard. Swiffo finds the hedgehog and gives him a good bath, making him lose all of his spikes. Swiffo later gets killed by a vermin fox who has poison darts when they are closer to the Abbey.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let's_Take_the_Long_Way_Home"title="Let's Take the Long Way Home">
The book opens "It's an old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that too.” The connection between these women was charged from the beginning. They were introduced by a dog walker who recognized their many similarities and they began "walking their puppies" together in the woods. "Apart, we had each been frightened drunks and single women and dog lovers; together, we became a small corporation. Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you could have conceived." The growth of their friendship, the strength of their bond, the tragedy of Caroline's short fight against lung cancer and the grief beyond are all detailed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lad_and_the_Lion"title="The Lad and the Lion">
## Introduction (chapter 1).When the king of a small European country is murdered by conspirators, his young grandson and heir Prince Michael is spirited away by a faithful retainer, carrying out the orders of the dead king, who had wind of what might be afoot. The diverging fates of Michael and his former country then unfold in parallel, in alternating chapters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Raven_in_the_Foregate"title="The Raven in the Foregate">
In the mild December 1141 Abbot Radulfus heads to Westminster for a second legatine council in one year. Henry, Bishop of Winchester calls all the bishops and major clerics back to reinstate allegiance to the crowned King. King Stephen is free, released by the contender Empress Maud in trade for her main supporter, her half-brother Robert of Gloucester. Abbott Radulfus returns on 10 December with a new priest for the Holy Cross parish in the Foregate. Father Ailnoth, lately clerk to Bishop Henry, comes with a housekeeper, and her unskilled nephew Benet, seeking work near her. Benet does heavy garden work needed before the first frost for Cadfael.In just eight days Father Ailnoth alienates or directly offends almost everyone in the Holy Cross parish. He refuses confession, absolution, and then communion to Eluned, a local girl who kills herself in despair at the rejection. He hits the children with his staff, especially when he is teaching them to read. He refused to baptise an infant born too sick to live above an hour, then refused the infant burial in blessed ground because it was not baptised. In the market, he accuses the local baker of short-weighting his loaves of bread. On the land, he pays no heed to property lines until he oversteps and is challenged. The provost of the foregate meets with Abbot Radulfus to relay the complaints. The Abbot talks with Ailnoth, who does not understand the change in his role, from bishop's clerk to the cure of souls, nor accept advice. His treatment of the infant and the young woman rankles all, not just their own families.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hermit_of_Eyton_Forest"title="The Hermit of Eyton Forest">
On 18 October 1142, Richard Ludel, lord of Eaton manor, dies of wounds sustained at the battle of Lincoln in February 1141. Ludel had appointed Abbot Radulfus of Shrewsbury Abbey as guardian of Ludel's 10 year old son son Richard. Brother Paul informs Richard that he is orphaned, and has become lord of Eaton manor. As Richard is a minor, Sheriff Hugh Beringar has charge of the manor lands for King Stephen, with the steward John of Longwood running the manor. His grandmother, Dame Dionisia Ludel, does not believe in education for a lord. Her goal is to marry the boy to Hiltrude, daughter of Fulke Astley, who will inherit the estates on either side of Eaton manor: Wroxeter and Leighton.Dame Dionisia gives the hermit Cuthred and his helper Hyacinth a disused hermit's chapel. The two are present at the funeral of Richard's father. Otherwise, Cuthred never leaves his hermitage.In November, Eilmund, forester for the abbey, reports unusual damage in the Eyton Forest, and sends Hyacinth to tell the abbot that this is punishment for Richard being kept at the Abbey. Needing a friend, Richard approaches Hyacinth. They form a pact. Returning to the hermitage, Hyacinth saves Eilmund in Eyton Forest by rolling a fallen willow tree off him. Local men carry Eilmund to his assart. Hyacinth runs ahead to warn Annet, Eilmund's daughter, of his father's injury. She asks Hyacinth to fetch Cadfael to set her father's broken leg.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heretic's_Apprentice"title="The Heretic's Apprentice">
The story takes place from 19 to 27 June 1143.Just across the Channel, so close to home, William of Lythwood dies after a seven-year pilgrimage to the Holy Land. His servant Elave carries his master's body back home to Shrewsbury, straight to the Abbey where the funeral will take place. Elave shares the sad news with William's wool- and vellum-trading household in town, and delivers the dowry gift meant for Fortunata, his foster daughter. Not all the household is happy to see Elave return to town. Aldwin, his insecure replacement for the clerking work, charges Elave with heresy, charges taken all too seriously by a visiting Augustinian canon from the Archbishop of Canterbury. Abbot Radulfus handles this issue with due seriousness, but with a cooler head than the peremptory canon.Once aware that his job is in no way threatened by Elave, Aldwin leaves to recant his charges at the Abbey. His body is found in the river next morning by Cadfael. Sheriff Hugh Beringar and Madog of the Dead Boat join to hunt for the killer. Elave is surprised by Fortunata, grown beautiful while he was away. Others in the household are taken more by the new dowry unseen in a magnificent box. Fortunata, drawn into the testimony about the supposed heresies, is drawn also to Elave. For his safety from the canon, Elave is held in a solitary cell in the Abbey, now a suspect of both heresy and murder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Potter's_Field_(Peters_novel)"title="The Potter's Field (Peters novel)">
The two monasteries are quick to seal the deal once they decide to trade two plots of land at Saint Peter's Fair in August 1143. By early October, the monks of the Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul are in the newly acquired Potter's Field, setting the plough with a huge team of oxen to till the long fallow land. Soon into the work, they stop, having found what they least expect: the bones and long dark hair of a woman in her unblessed and unmarked grave. She has no marks of identity besides her hair, nor wounds to her bones to tell how she died. She held a cross made from twigs, the only sign she had been laid there by someone who wished her well. The civil authority and the monks must learn who she was, and how she came to her death.The field was a gift from the lord of Longner Manor to the Augustine Priory at Haughmond Abbey, who then traded it to the Shrewsbury Abbey, as it was closer to them. For fifteen years, until fifteen months earlier, it was the home of a potter, Ruald and his wife Generys. Ruald is now a happy man in the monastery, finding his true calling. His wife is no longer in the area, abandoned by her husband's decision, not free to marry again, and not happy about her situation. Sulien Blount, novice monk, reports to Abbot Radulfus of the devastation of Ramsey Abbey, having survived the long walk. Learning of the local mystery, he shares the news that Generys was seen within the last three weeks, having sold her wedding ring to a silversmith in Peterborough as she and her new man flee the devastation of the Fens. Sulien shows the ring, given him for his sentimental attachment. This rules her out as the unfortunate woman now buried in the Abbey's cemetery, and frees Ruald of suspicion of being a murderer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Number_Four"title="I Am Number Four">
The first book of the "Lorian Legacies Series" "I am Number Four", centers on the conflict between two extraterrestrial species: the "Loric" and the "Mogadorians". The Loric are classified into two factions: the overseers known as the "Cepân" and the guardians known as the "Garde", the latter of whom possess unique abilities known as "Legacies". The story opens with a prelude that follows "Hannu" – the alias used by Number Three, one of nine Garde children hiding on Earth after their homeworld of "Lorien" was invaded – residing in Kenya where he is killed by Mogadorian assassins under the command of General Andrakkus Sutekh.Most of the book is told in the first person by Number Four, who takes the name "John Smith". As the story begins, he and his guardian or Cepân, "Henri", learn of the death of Number Three and move to Paradise, Ohio, assuming new identities aka John Smith. There, John befriends conspiracy theorist Sam Goode and "adopts" a dog identified by its name tag as "Bernie Kosar". He also meets and is attracted to a fellow student, Sarah Hart, who is working as a photographer. Sarah's ex-boyfriend, football player Mark James, is a bully who torments both John and Sam.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_in_the_Oak"title="The Boy in the Oak">
A boy who lived in a house with a garden did not appreciate nature; he trampled on flowers and carved his initials into trees. The fairies that lived in the forest decided to stop him from destroying everything by trapping him inside the large oak tree in the garden. His parent searched and searched, but eventually gave up on finding him and moved away. After several years, a new family moved into the house. They spoke of cutting down the oak tree, which angered the fairies. They choose to try to steal the little girl, but the boy forces her back through the portal between the fairy and human worlds. This kindness allows the boy to break the spell that trapped him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Two_Three..._Infinity"title="One Two Three... Infinity">
The 340 page book has four parts and eleven chapters. The parts are 1 Playing with Numbers, 2 Space, time and Einstein, 3 Microcosmos, 4 Macrocosmos. In the preface the shortness of the last part is attributed to Gamow's previous books "The Birth and Death of the Sun" and "Biography of the Earth". There are 128 illustrations that Gamow drew, "topologically transformed" from works by "numerous artists and illustrators", thanked by Gamow in the preface. A four page index is included. In 1961 a new edition was published. In its preface Gamow says that by luck the 1947 edition was "written just after a number of important scientific advances" so that "relatively few changes and additions were necessary." For example, Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat and Robley Williams separated tobacco mosaic virus into lifeless molecules and then recombined them into active virus. A 1965 edition speculated on assembly of a "man-made virus particle".(p 267)Part 1 is mainly concerned with expressing large numbers, Georg Cantor and infinity, and the imaginary unit. After disparaging the Roman numeral system for being limited to thousands (M), "The Sand Reckoner" system of myriads and octades is described. In terms of one-to-one correspondences, in the world of infinity "a part may be equal to the whole." Aleph number zero is described, with aleph one related to points in a plane and aleph two to curves. As for prime numbers, the sieve of Eratosthenes is shown. The Fermat numbers are given and related to primes. Goldbach's conjecture is stated: "Every even number can be written as the sum to two primes." It was an epithet of Gerolamo Cardano that stuck: square roots of negative numbers are "imaginary". The Argand diagram is displayed, and multiplication by i rotates the diagram counter-clockwise by a right angle. The study of complex numbers then deviates into treasure hunting.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Have_Always_Lived_in_the_Castle"title="We Have Always Lived in the Castle">
Mary Katherine "Merricat" Blackwood lives with her elder sister Constance and their ailing Uncle Julian in a large house on extensive grounds, in isolation from the nearby village. Constance has not left their home in six years, going no farther than her large garden. Uncle Julian, who uses a wheelchair, obsessively writes and re-writes notes for his memoirs, while Constance takes care of him.Six years prior to the story, Constance and Merricat's parents John and Ellen, their aunt Dorothy, and their younger brother Thomas died after being poisoned with arsenic, which was mixed into the family's sugar bowl and sprinkled onto blackberries at dinner. Julian was also poisoned, but survived; Merricat was not present at the time as she had been sent to bed without dinner as punishment. Constance, the only member of the family who didn't put sugar on her berries, was arrested and charged with murder, but ultimately the verdict proved her not guilty. The people of the village believe that Constance got away with murder, leading them to exclude the family.The three remaining Blackwoods have since grown accustomed to their isolation, leading a quiet, happy existence. Merricat is the family's sole contact with the outside world, walking into the village twice a week and carrying home groceries and library books; on these trips, she is faced directly with the hostility of the villagers, and often taunted by groups of children with an accusing rhyme about the poisoned sugar. Merricat is protective of her sister and practices sympathetic magic that maintains borders around the house.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autobiography_of_a_Flea"title="The Autobiography of a Flea">
The plot begins with Bella in church. As she leaves, Charlie pushes a note into her hand. She reads that it says he will be in their old meeting place at eight o'clock. She meets him in a garden. After some playful conversation, Charlie introduces her to her first sexual experience. Father Ambrose, who had been hiding in the shrubs, surprises them afterward, scolding both of them for their behaviour and threatening to reveal what they have been doing to their guardians. Bella pleads for mercy. Father Ambrose, appearing to relent, tells Bella to meet him in the sacristy at two o'clock the next day and Charlie to meet him at the same time the day after that. Ambrose instructs Bella into a way she may be absolved of her sins and blackmails her into sex with him, lest he tell her guardian what she was up to. Then Ambrose's colleagues, the Fr Superior &amp; Fr Clement, catch them in the act, and they demand equal rights to Bella's favours. And so Bella is introduced to serving the Holy community in a special way.Despite his promises, Ambrose goes to see Bella's uncle, Monsieur Verbouc and tells of her lewd behaviour. This leads to her uncle, who has long entertained lustful thoughts of his niece, attempting to force himself on Bella. The narrator then intervenes, biting him to put a damper on his ardour.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chymical_Wedding_of_Christian_Rosenkreutz"title="Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz">
## Introductory paragraph.The story follows the Passover and the seven days of unleavened bread exactly. The slaughtering and roasting of the Paschal lamb begins in the evening (near Easter), as does The Chymical Wedding. The Chymical Wedding begins in the evening with Rosenkreutz sitting at a table with both the Paschal Lamb and the unleavened bread. This would seem to indicate that he was Jewish. However, the words "Father of Lights" are curiously in the first paragraph. This phrase, "Father of Lights" appears only once in the King James Bible and it is in the book of James (Jas 1:17). Below is the opening paragraph of The Chymical Wedding;
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sea_Came_in_at_Midnight"title="The Sea Came in at Midnight">
The novel starts at the end of 1999, when Kristin, a teenage drop-out, answers a sexual ad written by a man who calls himself the Occupant. Behind the poetic language of the ad, it is clear that the Occupant is looking for a sexual slave, yet Kristin accepts the pact and goes to live in his house in Los Angeles.The Occupant's job is unclear: he defines himself as an apocalyptologist, and is busy drawing a calendar on the walls of his bedroom, on which he maps all the irrational events following May 1968, which, according to him, define the end-of-the-century in which the novel is set.Their relationship evolves, until, after a climactic moment, the girl understands that she has replaced the Occupant's partner, who disappeared. After this crisis, the Occupant begins to tell his story.His story is set mostly in Paris, where he met Angie, who will become his partner. Next we hear the story of Angie, whose real name is Saki, the daughter of a Japanese physicist working for a US defense project. She has gone to New York to work as a lap dancer. Her involvement with pornographic films ultimately leads her to be hired by Mitch, who produces snuff films.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dresden_Files"title="The Dresden Files">
In the world of "The Dresden Files", magic is real—as well as vampires, demons, spirits, faeries, werewolves, "outsiders" and other monsters—while the supernatural is widely discredited. Additionally, large portions of the globe (such as much of Central and South America) are largely under the control of supernatural factions. The White Council is an organization of human wizards, noted to wield significant economic power in the world, along with their supernatural power. Each species in the series (humans, faeries, vampires, etc.) has its own political and societal rules and organizations. The human wizards depend on the White Council, while faeries mostly belong to either of two Faerie Courts, or none at all (Wyldfae). Vampires belong to any of the four mentioned vampire courts. Other non-human creatures from a range of mythology make appearances. Harry Dresden works as the world's only "consulting wizard", accepting supernatural cases from both human and nonhuman clients, as well as the Chicago PD's Special Investigation unit. As the series progresses, Dresden takes on an increasingly important role in the supernatural world at large, as he works to protect the general public, making getting by as a working wizard and private investigator difficult for him. He finds himself facing off against an increasing variety of creatures (including other wizards), while facing the realization that his various cases may all be tied together behind the scenes and that his role might be even greater than he is willing to admit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brooklyn_Follies"title="The Brooklyn Follies">
59-year-old Nathan Glass returns to Park Slope in Brooklyn, New York after his wife has left him. He is recovering from lung cancer and is looking for "a quiet place to die". In Brooklyn, he meets his nephew, Tom, whom he has not seen in several years. Tom has seemingly given up on life and has resigned himself to a string of meaningless jobs as he waits for his life to change. They develop a close friendship, entertaining each other in their misery, as they both try to avoid taking part in life.When Lucy, Tom's young niece who initially refuses to speak, comes into their lives, there is suddenly a bridge between their past and their future that offers both Tom and Nathan some form of redemption."The Brooklyn Follies" contains the classic elements of a Paul Auster novel. The main character is a lonely man, who has suffered an unfortunate reversal. The narrative is based on sudden and randomly happening events and coincidences. "It is a book about survival" as Paul Auster says.The novel was published in Danish in May 2005, under the name "Brooklyn Dårskab". It was published in English in November 2005. The Traditional Chinese version appeared in October 2006 with the title slightly altered as "Mr. Nathan in Brooklyn".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_for_Heroes"title="School for Heroes">
The novels revolve around Boojum "Boo" Bark, a werewolf puppy from the town of Sleepy Whiskers - a town within a world of werewolves. He attends the School for Heroes, located within a volcano and run by the retired heroes from the Rest in Pieces retirement home.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_Catcher_(novel)"title="Soul Catcher (novel)">
After his young sister is brutally raped by white loggers, Native American student Charles Hobuhet abducts the 13-year-old son of a high-level US politician. As Katsuk, "the avenger", Charles plans to use young David as a sacrifice in an ancient ritual of vengeance. A complicated bond begins to form as they journey across the Pacific Northwest, pursued by hunters.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dogs_of_Riga"title="The Dogs of Riga">
A lifeboat floats ashore at the coast of Skåne. Inside are two dead men who've been murdered. Policeman Kurt Wallander is assigned to the case. The men are identified with the help of the police in Latvia. One of their officers, Detective Liepa, travels to Sweden to assist the investigation, but when he returns to his home country he is mysteriously murdered. Kurt flies to Riga to find out why and is drawn into complex conspiracy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyrms_(novel)"title="Wyrms (novel)">
The primary protagonist in the story is Patience, a fifteen-year-old girl who is the only daughter of the rightful king (the Heptarch). Her father, Peace, willingly lives as a slave to the usurper King Oruc, serving him as a faithful diplomat and assassin. Despite his genuine belief that King Oruc is "the best Heptarch the world could hope for at this time", Peace ensures that Patience learns the skills she will need as future Heptarch through the stern lessons of her tutor Angel. From an early age, Patience is fluent in dozens of languages, trained in diplomatic protocols and assassination techniques, and taught to be guarded and watchful at all times.When she is thirteen, Patience learns of an ancient prophecy that – as the seventh seventh seventh daughter of the Starship Captain, the first human to set foot on their planet of Imakulata – she is destined to give birth to Kristos, who will bring either eternal salvation or eternal destruction to the world. An entire religion has been constructed around the legends of the Starship Captain and his descendants. Thousands of people, called Vigilants, stand ready to aid Patience in reclaiming the Heptarchy and fulfilling the prophecy at the center of their religion.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We're_Back!_A_Dinosaur's_Story_(book)"title="We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story (book)">
One day, in the Cretaceous Period, as a "Tyrannosaurus" named Rex is about to devour a smaller dinosaur, he is captured by a flying saucer piloted by a small, reptilian alien named Vorb. He recruits him and several other dinosaurs (including Woog the "Triceratops", Pteri the "Pteranodon", Jorbi the "Parasaurolophus", Bigon the "Apatosaurus", Spike the "Stegosaurus", and Dwig the "Velociraptor") he has found for a trial of a special "vitamin" he has developed which, upon feeding it to the dinosaurs, causes them to become sentient. Vorb takes them aboard his saucer and they travel to the present, dropping them off in New York City, which at that moment is celebrating the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. The dinosaurs pretend to be inflatable balloons to sneak along with the parade, but Rex mistakes one of the real dinosaur balloons to be his "Allosaurus" friend Worgul. The ruse is broken as a result of him accidentally popping "Worgul" and the dinosaurs flee as the crowd panics in sight of them. The police come to capture the dinosaurs soon after, but the helpful curator of the American Museum of Natural History, Dr. Miriam Bleeb, takes the dinosaurs in, and hides them from the cops by having them pretend to be life-size model dinosaurs. This satisfies the police, who leave to search for the dinosaurs elsewhere, and the curator lets them stay for the night. She reads them a bedtime story about a trilobite who wanted to walk on land, while the dinosaurs watch out the window, unsure about their future. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-T,_Margaret,_and_the_Rats_of_NIMH"title="R-T, Margaret, and the Rats of NIMH">
When two children, Margaret and her younger, autistic brother Artie ("R-T"), are lost during a camping trip, they are found by the colony of rats, specifically one named Christopher. The children help the rat community with various tasks, and Artie and Christopher become very close friends. However, when winter comes, the rats cannot shelter the children and must send them back. The children try to keep the secret of Thorn Valley, but after pressure, Margaret ends up revealing it. The story ends with a party of adults traveling to Thorn Valley to discover the rats' colony only to find an empty, apparently uninhabited plot of land with all traces of the colony removed.The whereabouts and fate of the rats of NIMH are left unstated, though Artie does find a gift from Christopher, a picture of an arrow, presumably pointing to the new location of the colony.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Immortal"title="This Immortal">
After being devastated by a nuclear war, the Earth is a planet with a population of only 4 million, overrun by a variety of mutated lifeforms. Worse, much of the Earth is now owned by the Vegans, a race of blue-skinned aliens who see the planet as a tourist location. Conrad Nomikos, the first person narrator, is a man with a past that he would rather not talk about who has been given a task that he would rather refuse: to show an influential Vegan around the old ruins of Earth. But Conrad suddenly finds himself the reluctant protector of this alien visitor when attempts are made on the Vegan's life. Conrad knows that keeping the Vegan alive is important—but now he must find out why.Conrad now finds himself pitted against a group of Earth rebels that includes an old comrade-in-arms and an old lover, neither of whom can understand why he would want to protect one of Earth's subjugators. He is aided by another old friend and an old man who is actually one of his sons. It is eventually revealed that the Vegan he is escorting has been charged with the final disposition of the planet Earth. The Vegan in his turn is confounded by Conrad's actions. Ostensibly there as a tourist to see Earth's sights, he is horrified to find that Conrad is having the pyramids of Egypt torn down, more so when the immortal explains that the process is being filmed, and that the film will be run backwards to simulate the construction of the pyramids. Along the way it appears that Conrad's beloved wife is killed in a natural cataclysm.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromégas"title="Micromégas">
The story is organized into seven brief chapters. The first describes Micromégas, whose name literally means "small-large", an inhabitant of a planet orbiting the star Sirius. Micromégas stands 120,000 royal feet (38.9 km) tall and his circumference at the waist is 50,000 royal feet (16.24 km). The Sirian's home world is calculated to be 21.6 million times greater in circumference than Earth using mathematical ratios in a passage intended to relativize Man's home on a cosmic scale. When he is almost 450 years old, approaching the end of what the inhabitants of the planet orbiting Sirius consider his childhood, Micromégas writes a scientific book examining the insects on his planet, which at 100 royal feet (32.5 m) are too small to be detected by ordinary Sirian microscopes, having already solved over fifty of Euclid's problems (eighteen more than Blaise Pascal) before the age of two-hundred-fifty years while studying at his planet's Jesuit college. This book is considered heresy by his country's mufti, and after a 200-year trial, he is banished from the court for a term of 800 years. Micromégas takes this as an opportunity to travel between the various planets in a quest to develop his heart and his mind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Mind_the_Balkans,_Here's_Romania"title="Never Mind the Balkans, Here's Romania">
Based on the author's personal experiences in urban and rural Romania over a fourteen-year period between 1994 and 2008, the book consists of a series of vignettes delineating various aspects of modern Romanian life. A narrator tells the stories in the first person, using the present tense, and is closely linked to the events and characters portrayed, often with unexpected results. He describes encounters with taxi drivers, the new rich, teenagers, notaries, lawyers, waiters, musicians, friends, families, association presidents, politicians, etc. Settings range from Bucharest to Transylvania, from the mountains to the coast. In two stories, the narrator meets or observes Romanians abroad. The tone throughout is wry but empathetic, with elements of bittersweet comedy, danger and, on one occasion, violence, when interests and ideals clash. Most of the stories contain an allegorical twist, inviting wider interpretation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Are_Not_to_Blame"title="The Gods Are Not to Blame">
 Number of Acts and Scenes The play consists of three acts and ten scenes as follows;Act 1 : 2 scenesAct 2 : 4 scenesAct 3 : 4 scenes
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brak_the_Barbarian"title="Brak the Barbarian">
Brak, a blond, braided and broadsword-wielding barbarian from the frozen north, is an outcast from his people for questioning the traditional war gods. He seeks to reach the glorious southern realm of Khurdisan the Golden, rumors of which have reached even his country. The stories (and indeed the series) deal with Brak's episodic quest as he overcomes threat after threat, with the dream of Khurdisan ever before him.His first stop is the city of Kambda Kai, once great but now afflicted by worshipers of the demon god Yob-Haggoth. Here too his religious skepticism gets Brak in trouble, immediately bringing him into conflict with the corrupt and evil cult. Destined to be sacrificed to the evil god, Brak wins free—but the demon worshipers and their foul monsters infest all the lands between him and his goal, and in consequence every step of his journey brings new challenges.There is the evil, soul-taking Septegundus, who promises a dire revenge for Brak's humbling of himself and his dark god. Later Brak is enslaved at the terrible mines of King Ushiram of Toct and starts a slave rebellion; confronts the conjurer Ankhma Ra whose Silk of Shaitan can rip the living heart out of anyone it touches; confronts the treacherous Zama Khan at the ruins of cursed Chambalor and frees thousands of ghosts who had been trapped there in prolonged torment; and saves the life and throne of Queen Rhea of Phrixos (after she first saved him at considerable risk to herself) averting her enforced betrothal to the odious Lord of the Tigers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_(novel)"title="Faith (novel)">
Dicky Cruyer, who is now acting Director of Operations, sends Bernard and another agent into East Germany to meet Verdi, a KGB defector who has promised to supply access to the KGB mainframe and wanted to see Bernard. Upon discovering a corpse at the meeting point they realise that they have been set up. After killing a Stasi agent and being sheltered by one of Fiona's networks they escape back to West Berlin. Dicky is desperate for the Verdi operation to succeed in order to secure Operations permanently and angle for the soon to be vacant Deputy Director General position. Fiona is now working for Dicky and backing the operation because VERDI has promised to bring information about the death of her sister Tessa during Fiona's escape from the East. Others high-up in the SIS are determined to block the operation.Bernard knows Verdi from the old days in Berlin, doesn't trust him and isn't sure about the operation but now he must work with his old friend Werner Volkmann to find out what is really going on and bring Verdi safely to London. Along the way Bernard has to deal with the usual office politics, enemy agents, his fragile wife, his ex-mistress Gloria, Dicky's wife's seduction by a KGB operative and Tessa's husband's attempts to find out who was really responsible for her death and make them pay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_Kate"title="Plain Kate">
Katerina "Kate" Svetlana is an orphan who lives in the small eastern European market town of Samilae. A stranger, Linay, offers Kate her heart's wish in exchange for her shadow. Linay provides her with basic necessities, and her wish to not be alone results in her pet cat Taggle gaining the power of speech.Kate joins a group of Roamers; nomads who travel from town to town selling goods. She meets Drina, a girl with no mother but a living father, who tells Kate about an uncle who went mad once Drina's mother was burned as a witch. A few days later, Kate reveals to Drina that a witch took her shadow.Throughout their journey, a mysterious fog creeps up the river, bringing a sleeping death to the people it touches. The people of the countryside are more fearful than ever, ready to pounce on any mysterious stranger or Roamer with accusations of witchcraft. Kate and Drina barely escape from an angry mob in Toila, and the Roamers start to believe that Kate is more trouble than she is worth. Kate wakes up in a small boat and discovers that Linay has saved her from drowning in the water. Kate realizes that Linay is Drina's uncle and that the fog is actually a rusalka; the spirit Drina's mother, Lenore. Linay promises to return Kate's shadow to her when they reach Lov, a big city downriver, but he needs her to exact his plan for revenge. He is leading his sister down the river and keeping her under control by offering her his blood, but he has no more blood to give. He asks Kate to offer some of her own blood. Kate reluctantly starts to feed her blood to Lenore every night. Soon, she discovers that her shadow is held in a box made of her stall's ruins.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ang_mga_Kaibigan_ni_Mama_Susan"title="Ang mga Kaibigan ni Mama Susan">
The story revolves around Gilberto "Galo" P. Manansala, a college student in an unnamed university in Manila, and his journal entries that he writes for one of his college instructors. In the entries he describes how his everyday situations turn into scary situations, how he uncovers various mysteries and horrors, and how he gets deeply involved in these mysteries and horrors and, in the end, cannot escape them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendetta_(Star_Trek)"title="Vendetta (Star Trek)">
The plot centers around the actions of a woman named Delcara, from a race which has been assimilated by the Borg, who has gone to extreme lengths to exact her revenge upon them. Delcara controls a Planet Killer, later revealed to be the finished version of the one fought by the USS "Enterprise" during the events of " episode of the original ". This Planet Killer is also 'inhabited' by the psychic impressions of its creators which exist as part of its control system. Both Delcara and the 'ghosts' within the Planet Killer share a hatred of the Borg, and both Planet Killers are claimed to have come from just outside the galactic barrier surrounding our own galaxy. The Borg, having assimilated a Ferengi ship along the way, invade the Planet Killer, and force Delcara to attempt to reach Warp 10 in order to reach the heart of Borg space to exact her revenge before she dies from severe phaser wounds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Leopard_(Nesbø_novel)"title="The Leopard (Nesbø novel)">
Following the traumatic Snowman case, former police inspector Harry Hole has exiled himself in Hong Kong. Kaja Solness, a new Norwegian Crime Squad officer, tracks down Hole and asks for his help investigating possible serial killings in Oslo. Hole is convinced to return when told that his father, Olav, is seriously ill and will not live much longer. He returns to Norway to find that the Crime Squad is in the middle of a power struggle with Kripos and its power-hungry head, Mikael Bellman, who seeks to put his agency in sole charge of the country's murder cases. Hole finds himself the target of Bellman's hostility, though Bellman is keen to take credit for the results of Hole's work.Hole is reluctant to take part in the investigation until a female MP is found murdered in a park. Contrary to Bellman's conclusions, Hole believes that the MP's murder is connected to the other two. Hole and Solness, teaming up with Hole's former colleagues at Crime Squad, begin an undercover investigation into the case without the knowledge of Kripos. While working together, Hole and Solness are drawn to each other and begin a tempestuous love affair. The two discover that all three victims stayed at the same ski lodge on the same night. Hole deduces that the murders are part of the killer's attempts to cover his tracks. Suspicion initially falls on a man known to have been at the ski lodge at the time, but he is eliminated from the enquiry when he is murdered by the killer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Borrowers_Avenged"title="The Borrowers Avenged">
The Clock family are Borrowers, tiny beings. Having escaped from the attic of the scheming humans Mr and Mrs Platter, the Clock family return to the Little Fordham model village and travel in their Borrower friend Spiller's boat for their new home, the rectory of the local church. They make a night journey down the river, barely missing the Platters who are looking for them. When the Borrowers arrive at the rectory, they discover that their relatives Lupy, Hendreary and Timmus are living in the church next door. Arrietty also meets another Borrower, Peagreen Overmantel, who shows them a place to live under a window seat.The Clocks settle in comfortably to their new home. Arrietty is allowed to go outside and do all of the borrowing for the two Borrower families. She discovers that her human friend Miss Menzies goes to the church to arrange flowers, but she is forbidden to speak to her. The Platters, having severely damaged the model village in their hunt for the Borrowers, decide to use one of Homily's old aprons to help the local "finder" Lady Mullings locate the Borrowers. Miss Menzies recognises the apron and becomes suspicious. Meanwhile, the Platters spot Timmus in the church and break in after hours to catch him, but they accidentally ring the church bells and are caught by the humans in suspicious circumstances.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Places_(novel)"title="Dark Places (novel)">
Libby Day, the novel's narrator and protagonist, is the sole survivor of a massacre in Kinnakee, Kansas, a fictional rural town. On January 3, 1985, somewhere around 2 A.M., Libby overhears the murders of her 10-year-old sister Michelle, 9-year-old sister Debby, and mother, Patty, in what appears to be a Satanic cult ritual. Libby escapes through a window, experiences severe frostbite that leaves her with missing fingers and toes, and later testifies in court against her teenage brother, Ben.Twenty-four years after the massacre, Libby, in need of money, meets with a group of amateur investigators led by a man named Lyle Wirth who believe that her brother is innocent of the crime. At their coaxing, she meets her brother, Ben for the first time in jail. She also meets with her father Runner, who is now homeless and is constantly asking for money; a girl named Krissi Cates, a stripper who accused Ben of molesting her as a child; Trey Teepano, a former acquaintance of Ben's who was accused of being a Satanist as a teenager; and Diondra Wertzner, Ben's former girlfriend who may have had a hand in the massacre. Through her investigation, Libby learns of her brother's secrets and how the murders unfolded that evening.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Immortal_(fan_fiction)"title="My Immortal (fan fiction)">
The protagonist of the story is Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way, a seventeen-year-old vampire who attends Hogwarts (located in England instead of the original books' Scotland) as a member of Slytherin House. Hogwarts is depicted as being divided between two cliques, the "goffs" and the preps. Ebony and all the sympathetic characters are part of the goth clique while the members of the prep clique are portrayed unsympathetically. Many of the main characters of "Harry Potter" are given makeovers which are so extensive that they bear little similarity to their original characterization. Harry, for example, has transfigured his iconic lightning bolt scar into a pentagram, moved to the Slytherin House, and now goes by the name "Vampire" because he "love[s] the taste of human blood". Similarly, Hermione Granger has changed her name to "B'loody Mary Smith" and lives as a goth, vampire Satanist in Slytherin as well. It appears that Ebony and her classmates are depicted as attending Hogwarts in the mid-2000s, instead of the 1990s when the "Harry Potter" series is canonically set. This can be judged by the repeated references to scene and emo culture, which were experiencing a sharp rise in popularity at the time.The story begins by focusing on Ebony entering a relationship with Draco Malfoy, who is depicted as shy, sensitive and bisexual. Draco invites Ebony to a Good Charlotte concert in Hogsmeade. She agrees, and the two fly to Hogsmeade together in Draco's black flying Mercedes-Benz. After the concert, they do not return to the castle. The two instead have intercourse in the Forbidden Forest. They are discovered by Hogwarts' headmaster Albus Dumbledore (referred to in places as "Albert Dumblydore" and a variety of other names), who yells at them and derides them as . In a subsequent author's note, it is explained this outburst occurred because Dumbledore was suffering from a headache.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_(Deighton_novel)"title="Hope (Deighton novel)">
A severely wounded courier working for George Kosinski turns up at the flat in London where Bernard and Fiona are now living, since Tessa Kosinski left it to Fiona. George, who is now a tax exile living in Zurich, arrives to take the courier to a doctor and asks Bernard to keep it quiet because he doesn't want Inland Revenue to know he was in the country.Suspecting that a Stasi agent travelled to Zurich to meet George, Bernard and Dicky Cruyer travel to Zurich to question George. George sent Tessa's engagement ring, given to him by the Stasi, to be cleaned and then disappeared. Bernard and Dicky track him to his old family estate in Poland where his brother Stefan resides. Stefan says that George was murdered by Russian Army defectors and all that was recovered was a leg mauled by wild dogs, and he has a death certificate to prove it. A hand with George's signet ring is later shown to the British Embassy as further proof and sent to Dicky in London. The Stasi try to steal the hand back before it can be forensically analysed but Dicky chases and shoots the agent and recovers the hand.Bret Rensselaer and Gloria are implementing harsh budget cuts across the SIS. With the backing of Fiona and Dicky, Bernard gets a permanent job as Frank Harrington's deputy in Berlin. There he must deal with one of Fiona's networks in East Germany being captured because the head man was a Stasi plant. A young agent Bernard has worked with is killed and delivered to Gloria's hotel room as retaliation for Bernard killing a Stasi agent in "Faith". Bernard also learns that Fiona was in love with her KGB minder, a double agent called Kennedy, whom Bernard shot while rescuing Fiona. Fiona and children decide to spend Christmas in the Caribbean with her father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tell-Tale_Brain"title="The Tell-Tale Brain">
Ramachandran discusses seven main concepts which define the human aspect of self and how each may be disrupted by a specific neurological disorder. The concepts are: unity, continuity, embodiment, privacy, social embedding, free will, and self-awareness.In the first chapter, Ramachandran discusses the human ability to change and adapt, illustrating the concept from his work on phantom limbs. The second chapter describes some of his work with visual perception and cognition, addressing the concept of human awareness.In chapter three, he connects ideas about synesthesia to creativity. Chapters four and five talk about mirror neurons, while chapter six discusses human language.Ramachandran proposes "nine laws of aesthetics," which he discusses in chapters seven and eight. The final chapter, chapter nine, "The Ape With A Soul" concerns introspection and human self-awareness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry-Fly_Fishing_in_Theory_and_Practice"title="Dry-Fly Fishing in Theory and Practice">
Whereas "Floating Flies and How to Dress Them" was about the dry fly, fly tying and to some extent the entomology of the chalk stream, "Dry-Fly Fishing..." was about fishing the dry fly. It was the consummate "how-to" manual for the dry-fly fisherman. It was not only about methodology, but also about the ethics and purism of the dry fly on English chalk streams.The volume begins by spelling out the various pieces of fishing and personal equipment the dry-fly angler should possess. The pros and cons of different rod styles are discussed, along with fly lines, reels and the various miscellany a fly angler should carry. Although Halford did not invent dry-fly fishing, before this volume, no one had laid out in such detail the equipment recommendations needed to be a successful dry-fly angler.Such were Halford's recommendations that they were routinely referenced by the fly-fishing trade:A short, but concise Chapter 2 discusses the distinction between a floating (dry) fly and a sunk fly, with emphasis on the superiority of the floating fly as characterized by this concluding statement:Chapters 3-5 go into great detail about how, when and where to cast the dry fly on the typical chalk stream. These chapters are heavily illustrated with casting techniques and comprise nearly 20% of the entire 1st edition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_(Slaughter_novel)"title="Broken (Slaughter novel)">
Broken begins with the murder of college student Allison Spooner. When the body is pulled from frigid Lake Grant, detective Lena Adams and her often drunk boss, interim Chief of Police Frank Wallace, follow a trail that leads to the suicide of the prime suspect, Tommy Braham, in his jail cell. The suicide spurs the involvement of Dr. Sara Linton, back in town for Thanksgiving with her family. Still incredibly angry with Lena over her role in Sara's husband's death, and convinced Lena's callous and reckless behavior has led to the possibly innocent suspect's death, Sara calls in back-up from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Upon arriving in town, Agent Will Trent immediately meets with resistance from the Grant County Police Department. Despite the roadblocks, he unveils serious errors and deliberate cover-ups in the investigation, perpetrated mainly by Frank Wallace. Soon after, Allison's boyfriend Jason is brutally killed in his dorm room. This definitively points to a murderer still on the loose, clearing Tommy Braham of any lingering suspicion. After discovering a secret link between all three victims, Will and Sara must pull all the pieces together in time to track down the killer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Remembered_Earth"title="Blue Remembered Earth">
"Blue Remembered Earth" takes place in the 2160s, at a time when humanity has repaired Earth's climate and extensively colonised the inner Solar System. An omnipresent surveillance system (known as the "Mechanism") ensures that violent crime is almost unheard-of, and genetic engineering has vastly extended human lifespans. China, India and the nations of Africa are now the world's leading technological powers, although they face competition from the United Aquatic Nations, a new underwater civilisation populated by water-breathing transhumans. Almost all humans possess neural computer interfaces known as "augs", which allow them to access online information, view augmented reality displays, translate speech in real-time and operate telepresence robots. Some individuals, wishing to escape the constant surveillance of Earth's Mechanism, live in a bohemian, ungoverned "Descrutinized Zone" on the far side of the Moon.The story focuses on Geoffrey and Sunday Akinya, a brother and sister who are members of a powerful African corporate family. Following the death of their influential grandmother Eunice, the siblings begin investigating a series of cryptic messages that Eunice left across the Solar System over the previous century, during her voyages to Pythagoras Crater, Phobos, Pavonis Mons, and the Kuiper Belt. It emerges that Eunice placed herself in exile in the Winter Palace, a space station at one of the Moon's Lagrange points. It is in this station that she died, but not before initiating a mysterious research project. Facing opposition from powerful Earth authorities and even members of their own family, Geoffrey and Sunday are forced to travel to the edge of the Solar System to discover Eunice's secret.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily_Alone"title="Lily Alone">
Lily Green is the eldest child of the Green family. She has 2 younger half-sisters, (Bliss, and Pixie), and 1 younger half-brother (Baxter). Baxter and Bliss are twins. She often has to take care of them when their mother, Kate Green, goes to the pub, newsagent or off-licence. Although Lily does not usually mind being given the responsibility of looking after her siblings, she sometimes resents it. When Lily's mother meets Gordon, her new boyfriend, at a local club, Kate is convinced that her life has improved and she feels as if she and Gordon " are on a roller-coaster up to heaven." Lily becomes angry with her mother for coming home late. That night, Lily takes care of her brother and sisters by drawing and watching "Peter Pan". The next day, Kate takes her children on a frivolous shopping expedition and uses a credit card, which is said to be lent to Kate which causes Lily to become very suspicious. She worries about where and when her mother really obtained the card.Kate flies to Spain to be with Gordon. Lily is fearful and angry when her mother suggests that Mikey, Kate's ex-husband, look after the rest of the family while Kate travels to Spain. Kate tells Lily that she has yet to reveal to Gordon that she has children. She further annoys Lily when Kate reveals that she feels as if she deserves a holiday from living in a "dump." Kate leaves a voicemail message for Mikey to tell him that he must take care of the children while Kate is on holiday. Lily is afraid of Mikey. By the time Mikey returns Kate's call, Kate has already left for Spain. Mikey tells Lily that he is on his way to Glasgow and tells her to tell her mother not to go anywhere. Due to Lily's dislike of Mikey, Lily pretends that she has delivered the message when in fact the children are now alone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amulet_(comics)"title="Amulet (comics)">
## Book 1: The Stonekeeper.After David Hayes died in a car accident, his widow, Karen, and their children, Emily and Navin, move to a house in the town of Norlen, as Karen can no longer afford to live in the house she owned with David. The house, which has been in her family for years, is large and needs care and attention. As they clean the house, Emily finds a strange amulet in the library where her great-grandfather, Silas Charnon, worked, and puts it on. That night, Karen is kidnapped by a monstrous "arachnopod". Emily and Navin follow in order to save their mother through the basement into another world, Aleddia. They are pursued by a mysterious elf but are rescued by a rabbit-like robot called Miskit. Miskit brings them to Silas' house, and they meet his other robots Cogsley, Morrie, Theodore, Ruby, and Bottle. Emily talks to Silas, who dies soon afterward. Emily is spoken to by the voice of the amulet, which tells her to accept the powers of the amulet in order to save their mother. Emily accepts, despite Navin's disagreement. They then hunt down the arachnopod in a plane with Navin as the pilot, and Emily uses her stone as a defense when Miskit's gun fails. They fail to rescue Karen at first, but the mysterious elf named Trellis reappears and kills the arachnopod, freeing Karen. Trellis attempts to control Emily's mind using a creature named "Sybrian" and bring her to the Elf King. However, Emily uses the stone to kill Sybrian, and scares Trellis away. Emily brings Karen back to the others, and Cogsley transforms the house into a walking mech, and sets course to find a cure for Karen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Little_Things"title="Pretty Little Things">
Thirteen-year-old Elaine Emerson, nicknamed Lainey, meets a boy on the internet while hiding behind a profile indicating her age as 16. She goes on a date with Zach, 17, nicknamed El Capitan, and never returns from the date. Special Agent Bobby Dees, head of the department's Crimes Against Children Squad, tries to find her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Below_the_Root_(novel)"title="Below the Root (novel)">
Raamo D’ok, a 13-year-old "Kindar" boy in a seemingly idyllic society, learns that he has been "Chosen" to join the "Ol-zhaan," Green-sky's elite ruling class. "Pensing" (telepathy), "kiniporting" (telekinesis) and "grunspreking" (influencing plant life) are extremely important "spirit-skills" that have all but disappeared from the Kindar gene pool. Raamo has all these abilities, albeit moderately. He meets the other Chosen, a young woman called Genaa, and begins to receive telepathic messages from a shadowy figure who says he is glad to see his strong Spirit-powers, cryptically announcing that he has also chosen Raamo.Only the Ol-zhaan know that the Kindar are descendants of a centuries-old colony escaping a world destroyed by war and violence. Society was carefully constructed to nurture positive emotions and repress negative "unjoyful" ones. Even little children practice mind-blocking and eat soothing "Wissenberries" to dissociate from forbidden emotions. Raamo learns that Genaa's father is dead, captured by the "Pash-shan," feared creatures that live trapped below the ground. The "Wissenroot", a psychically reinforced plant that covers the ground, has imprisoned these monsters for centuries. The Kindar are forbidden to descend to earth—even to look down or think about the forest floor is dangerous.Raamo's sister Pomma is seriously ill, and has participated in healing ceremonies with Ol-zhaan D’ol Neric, to little avail. Raamo later learns that Neric is the one who called him "twice chosen".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_All_Between"title="And All Between">
Eight-year-old "Erdling" Teera runs away from home when the Council decides her pet will have to be killed for food. The Erdlings are in a "time of hunger" due to their increasing numbers. Wandering through the tunnels of Erd, she finds a wider-than-usual opening in the vines that entrap the Erdlings and accidentally tumbles through it, unable to get back inside. She calls out for help and soon is confronted by two strangers, Raamo and Neric. From the green-gold seals they wear, Teera recognizes them as Ol-zhaan. Taking her for a Kindar child who had been abducted by the Pash-shan, they convince her to return to the trees with promises of plentiful food and kind treatment.Teera is hidden with Raamo's family and plays Spirit-games with his younger sister, Pomma. Raamo's fellow Chosen, D'ol Genaa, discovers Teera. In the confrontation that follows, they learn that Teera is actually a Pash-shan, who are not monsters as the Kindar have been told, but people like themselves. The group returns to the forest floor and Genaa is reunited with her father, Hiro D’anhk, thought to have been killed by evil Pash-shan but actually living among the peaceful Erdlings after being imprisoned there by members of the Geets-kel, a secret society within the Ol-zhaan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Until_the_Celebration"title="Until the Celebration">
Now that the "Geets-kel" have decided to reveal their secrets and integrate "Erdlings" with "Kindar," there is much concern over how to do it properly. A lifetime of beliefs will not be converted easily and there are numerous logistical issues to consider. The truth is. first brought to the Kindar leaders. The "Ol-zhaan" clergy know their lofty place in society will be diminished, but many eagerly volunteer to help with the newcomers.The initial idea is to release the Erdlings slowly over time, but the Erdlings have quickly figured out where the opening is and are already building homes in the open air. Erdling terrorist Axon Befal has sworn vengeance and attacks an Ol-zhaan, violence unheard of in Kindar society.The "tool-of-violence" goes missing as do Pomma and Teera, the "holy children". Axon Befal sends a message that he has kidnapped the girls and will kill them unless Orbora is turned over to his control. A Kindar servant who has been working for D'ol Regle reveals that she took the tool-of-violence to bring to him, but decided against giving it to him. She reveals she has been badly burned just carrying it around in her knapsack. The Council decides the weapon must be destroyed and agree to seal it in lead, take it to the Erdling caverns and drop it into the Bottomless Lake.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_of_the_Midnight_Ball"title="Princess of the Midnight Ball">
Princess Rose and her sisters Lily, Jonquil, Hyacinth, Violet, Daisy, Poppy, Iris, Lilac, Orchid, Pansy, and Petunia are trapped in a curse. Every third night, they have to dance at the Midnight Ball with the twelve sons of the King Under Stone, who lives in a realm below the earth. The curse prevents them from speaking of it, and every prince who attempts to learn their secret in hopes of marrying one of them and inheriting the crown ends up dead by the next full moon.Galen Werner is a soldier who is returning from the Westfalin-Analousia war. On his way to the city of Bruch to live with his mother's sister Liesel Orm, Galen meets an old woman. After he shares his food with her, the woman gives him white and black yarn and an invisibility cloak, saying that he would have to use them when "He" tries to get to the surface.When Galen meets Rose, she knows that he can try to break the curse, but will he succeed despite the complications they come across, maybe they will...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_and_Profane_(novel)"title="Sacred and Profane (novel)">
Having in the previous book met and fallen in love with the deeply religious Jewish Orthodox widow Rina Lazarus, LAPD Detective Sergeant Peter Decker takes Rina's boys on a camping vacation - cut short when Sammy wandered off and found two burned and buried skeletons. Peter finds himself assigned to the case, in spite of his status in the Sex and Juvenile (juvie) division, due to an unexpected lack of departmental manpower. When starting the case, he is introduced to forensic dentist Annie Hennon, who helps identify the victims as two young women, who - though having been both killed by the same gun and both their bodies burned - were of very dissimilar social backgrounds, with one's teeth having been well cared for, and the other one having had only very rudimentary dental care and having suffered from congenital syphilis. Decker embarks on the long process of tracking down who were the two young women, where they might have been, and with whom they may have been involved - following slender clues and descending into the most seamy dives behind Hollywood's glittering façade. As it turns out, one of the victims was Lindsey Bates - a happy, middle-class teenager, who was abducted and horribly tortured, mutilated, killed, and burned, with the whole process taken down on a "snuff film" made to the specifications of a depraved group of very wealthy men. The other body was that of Kate Armbuster, known as "Countess Dracula", a young prostitute who took to sadism and Satanism, played an active role in torturing and killing Bates, and was then killed herself by an accomplice; the two bodies were burned and dumped together in the hills. The search also leads Decker to photographer Cecil Pode and his sons, Dustin and Earl Pode (Dustin being in business with Earl's friend, Cameron Smithson, and his father, Harrison Smithson). Earl Pode ("Blade") is found dead in the same grave as the girls, and Decker finds that Pode's best friend Cameron is the main culprit - an utterly ruthless and unscrupulous killer, the others having been his helpers and accomplices in the production and distribution of the snuff films. The case takes a toll on Decker's Talmud studies with Rav Schulman at the "yeshiva". Seeing the film depicting the systematic torture and mutilation of the innocent girl causes Decker a crisis of faith, making him for a time reject Rav Shulman's God, who allows such evil in His world. Decker's bitterness is increased by his failure to save Kiki, a spirited teenaged prostitute, who is the same age as Decker's daughter Cindy, and looks like her - and who comes to a predictable sad end despite all Decker's efforts to save and redeem her. Decker's spiritual crisis also strains his relationship with his beloved Rina. Because of the stress of their maybe/maybe not marital path, at the end of the book, Rina moves to New York City with her former in-laws, but before her departure, she spends an night of intensive lovemaking with Peter, her intense love for him having led her to violate her own deeply held objection to sex outside marriage. Then, they separate so they can both concentrate on preparing themselves for the future - she to take a job in a relative's company to stop feeling like a charity case, he to continue his Talmudic studies and decide if he really can lead a Jewish religious life for himself and not just for the purpose of being able to marry her. Decker's success in solving the Bates case and finding evidence implicating the "client" who ordered the snuff film - a powerful and utterly corrupt and depraved steel magnate - gives Decker a sense of closure, and he can once again get involved in sincere prayer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daybreak_Zero"title="Daybreak Zero">
In the near future, a variety of groups with diverse aims, but an overlapping desire to end modern technological society (the "Big System") create a nanotech plague ("Daybreak") which both destroys rubber and plastics and eats away any metal conductors carrying electricity. An open question in the book is whether these groups, and their shared motivation, are coordinated by some conscious actor, or whether they are an emergent property / meme that attained a critical mass.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palpasa_Café"title="Palpasa Café">
The novel begins with Narayan Wagle waiting for his friend Drishya. Wagle tells that he is writing about Drishya who is an artist living in Kathmandu and has an ambitious idea to build a cafe in his village during the time when civil war is still going on. While waiting he learns that Drishya is kidnapped by "security personnel". Learning that the protagonist of his book has just been kidnapped, he is stunned and starts to contemplate his fate and the fate of Nepal.The story of Drishya starts in Goa where he meets Palpasa, a Nepalese girl aspiring to become a documentary maker who has just returned from US. They have immediate connection but they both decide go their own way. Drishya returns to Kathmandu where he continues his art work in his studio. He reaches a small library with collection of old books for research where he meets Palpasa again. They both start meeting together and the attraction is undeniable.Later Drishya is visited by Siddhartha, his friend from college. Siddhartha says that he is a Maoist in hiding and asks for shelter. He invites him in and they start talking about the state of Nepal. Drishya asks if the violence is justified even if their cause is good and Siddhartha replies that the violence was first started by the state and all the violence is justifiable for the greater good. They can't reach to an agreement so Siddhartha challenges Drishya to "see" what Nepal is like. Drishya accepts and then visits the western hill villages.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I'm_Down_(book)"title="I'm Down (book)">
Mishna Wolff is a little girl growing up in two households of divorced parents with two very different personalities and cultures. Her Father lives in Seattle in a place called Rainier Valley. Rainier Valley is a predominantly black and minority neighborhood and Mishna has a difficult time making friends, primarily because she is white. So are her father and mother. Her father, however, grew up with black friends in a black neighborhood and basically grew up black. His only friends were black and if you asked, he would probably tell you he was black. He wanted his children to act black. This set up Mishna for an interesting childhood as she watched Anora, her sister, make more friends with people on their street than Mishna could understand.She fights for acceptance in her neighborhood as she is perceived as "too white" while she struggles with acceptance (and accepting others) in her prestigious school. Mishna has trouble dealing with bullying from her peers, meeting the expectations her father sets for her (no matter how unusual they seem), the pressure she puts on herself, and learning who she is while society is pushing and pulling her into what they want her to be. She competes with the children in her neighborhood to be the funniest, the meanest, and the toughest while she strives to be rich, successful, and seemingly carefree like her school friends. When she returns home to her father and his many girlfriends and potential wives, she suppresses her school side to impress her father, while at her mom's house and at school she suppresses her neighborhood life to appeal to her mother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China's_Red_Army_Marches"title="China's Red Army Marches">
The book gives a detailed account of the Chinese Soviet Republic in Jiangxi from 1928 to 1931, ending with the proclamation of the Soviet Republic of China in 1931. Smedley provides detailed accounts of early CCP policies, including land-reform policies that were more extreme than those followed after the Long March, and campaigns to mobilize poor peasants and give rights to women. She includes many accounts of battles, including the capture and subsequent loss of Changsha. The book has many details including an account of the Anti-Bolshevik League.Neither Smedley nor any other Western reporter visited Chinese Soviet, but she had first-hand accounts from Chinese Communist fighters whom she covertly sheltered in Shanghai. Her main sources were two Red Army commanders, Zhou Jianping and Chen Geng. It is strongly favorable to the Chinese Communists and hostile to the Kuomintang.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_and_Honey_(novel)"title="Milk and Honey (novel)">
Decker finds a toddler with blood-soaked pajamas in the early morning hours while driving home from the" yeshiva". He brings her in to the station to turn her over to child services, and starts trying to locate her family. His only clue is a number of bee stings. Pete also finds himself posting bail for an old Army buddy of his (Abel Atwater), who had been charged with rape and assault. Abel offers to do repair work on his barn, while Pete is off locating the girl's family. In the meantime, Rina is flying in from New York City for a visit for some alone time and to discuss their upcoming marriage. While backtracking clues in the found toddler's case, he finds the family home is the site of a quadruple murder, and that her name is Katie Darcy. Decker has to slog through many peripheral clues in the case, including a biker bar and a backwoods section of Los Angeles County. His partner Marge Dunn ends up dealing further with one of Katie's potential parents, whose own child was kidnapped in a custody case. She remembered the face and succeeded in putting a name to it. In a raid on the father's house, she gets her skull cracked, and is lucky to come out of it alive. Meanwhile, Rina and Abel have found an odd sort of relationship based on Decker and his mutual past and Abel's bitterness over happenings during the war. He ends up frightening and offending her greatly, though she does forgive him in the end. In finding the murderer of Katie's family and clearing Abel's name, Decker finds an odd parallel in family circumstance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotica_(book)"title="Exotica (book)">
In the book Toop discusses the musical genre of exotica as well as the general listener reaction. He also discusses his personal history with music, as personal tragedies left him feeling that music was trivial in comparison to his own grief. Toop details several recordings and includes interviews with musicians such as Burt Bacharach, Bill Laswell, and the Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pir-e-Kamil"title="Pir-e-Kamil">
The story's protagonist, Imama Hashim, belongs to an influential Ahmadiyya Muslim family living in Islamabad. She decides to convert to Sunni Islam after being influenced by her friends. She attends her senior shabiha's lectures in secrecy from her family and her roommates, Javeria and Rabia. While studying in a medical school in Lahore, she falls in love with her friend Zainab's elder brother, doctor Jalal Ansar. But Imama's family tries to coerce her into marrying her first cousin Asjad, which is unacceptable to her, her parents respond by grounding her and taking away her cellphone.Imama seeks help from Salar whom she is antagonistic with since she is a religious girl and Salar is not. He is a rich boy with an IQ level above 150. Imama wishes to marry Jalal, but Salar lies to her that Jalal has married someone else. Imama is saddened and asks Salar to marry her so that her family will not be able to force her. Salar helps her and marries her, but soon after loses contact with her.Imama finds a sanctuary under Sibt-e-Ali and his family. She changes her name and completes her studies and starts working in a pharmaceutical company in Lahore. She hates Salar because he refused to divorce her as he had promised.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/11/22/63"title="11/22/63">
Jake Epping is a recently divorced high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, earning extra money teaching a GED class. Epping gives an assignment to his adult students, asking them to write about a day that changed their lives. One of the students, a learning-impaired janitor named Harry Dunning, submits an assignment describing the night his alcoholic father murdered his mother and siblings with a hammer; the story emotionally affects Jake, and the two became friends after Harry earns his GED.Two years later, Jake is summoned by another friend, Al Templeton, the owner of a local diner. When Jake arrives at the diner, he is shocked to discover that Al has become ill with terminal lung cancer, despite appearing perfectly healthy the night before. Al instructs Jake step into the back of the diner's pantry, where Jake finds a time slip leading to Lisbon Falls as it existed on September 9, 1958. After exploring the town, Jake returns to 2011 and learns that the portal leads to the same moment of the same day every time it is used, and that a visitor will always return to the present by a margin of two minutes.Because the portal gives one the ability to alter the present by changing an event in the past, Al reveals that he had concocted a plan to prevent John F. Kennedy's assassination, hoping that doing so would stop the Vietnam War and change history for the better. He spent four years in the past after entering the portal the previous night, travelling to Dallas, Texas, to track Lee Harvey Oswald, plotting to kill the would-be assassin during his attempted murder of General Edwin Walker. However, due to his cancer, Al is unable continue his mission. He recruits a reluctant Jake to complete it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Porcupine"title="The Porcupine">
Set in a post-communist fictional country, likely based on Bulgaria, the novel concerns the trial of Stoyo Petkanov, a character judged to be loosely based on Todor Zhivkov, the former communist leader of Bulgaria. As the newly appointed Prosecutor General attempts to ensnare the former dictator with his own totalitarian laws, Petkanov springs a few unwelcome surprises on the court by conducting a formidable defense."The Times" described the book as 'Superbly humane in its moral concerns...an excellent novel'.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_from_Castile_(novel)"title="Captain from Castile (novel)">
"Captain from Castile" begins on the evening of June 28, 1518 when naïve 19-year-old Pedro de Vargas, the son of local war hero Don Francisco de Vargas, confesses a long list of minor sins to the local priest in Jaen, Spain. The next day, while attending church with his family, Pedro becomes infatuated with the local Marquis' daughter, Luisa de Carvajal.As Pedro and his family leave church they are met by Diego de Silva, who enlists the help of Pedro in the search for his escaped Indian slave, Coatl. Pedro immediately guesses Coatl's location and sets off alone to find and capture him, but instead is convinced to aid the badly mistreated slave—who claims he is a king among his own people—in his escape.Pedro then comes across and rescues the local tavern dancer, Catana Pérez, from being raped by several rough men and returns her to the Rosario tavern. There he stops for a drink and befriends Juan García, an adventurous merchant and wanted man, whose mother has been wrongfully taken by the Inquisition. Pedro agrees to deliver García's bribe for his mother's freedom to Father Ignacio de Lora, the head of the Jaen Inquisition, though he does not believe men of God can be bought.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Die_For_(novel)"title="To Die For (novel)">
Blair Mallory is the owner of a fitness center named Great Bods. She got the money to open the fitness club from the divorce of her first husband Jason Carson. Blair caught Jason kissing her underage sister Jenni at a family get-together. Blair knew he wanted to run for congressman so, for the ultimate revenge, she snapped a picture of the two kissing. Jason, knowing the picture would ruin him, paid her a bundle in the divorce.She begins to notice that one of her members, Nicole, has been copying everything she has done. She begins to wear her hair like Blair, dressing like Blair, and even buys the same style of car as Blair. Blair isn't the only one who has a problem with Nicole: Almost all the women in the gym do not like Nicole, as she hogs the machines, is mean to other members, and openly flirts with the married men in the gym. After many complaints, Blair sits her down and tells her that her membership will not be renewed for another year. Nicole becomes furious and threatens to sue Blair. Blair is always the last one to leave the gym so as she is about to walk out the door to her car she notices Nicole waiting for her in the parking lot. Blair becomes scared and makes a run for the car with her phone ready to dial 911. She hears a gunshot and instinctively hits the ground, dropping her cellphone underneath the car so that Blair is unable to call for help. She tries to stay quiet so that Nicole won't realize she didn't hit Blair but, after a while, she thinks maybe Nicole left and makes a run for the door to the gym. She makes it into the gym safely where she goes to her office and dials 911. The police arrive and Blair tells the officers the story. They inform her that Nicole didn't kill her because Nicole was murdered.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pym_(novel)"title="Pym (novel)">
Chris Jaynes is the only African-American professor of literature at a liberal Manhattan college. Refusing to limit his teaching to the African-American canon and serve on the college diversity committee, he is denied tenure. His obsession with Poe's novel comes to a head when his ancient book dealer introduces him to a copy of "The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters. Coloured Man. As Written by Himself.", "an unpublished 19th-century manuscript that suggests Poe's novel, which was partially set in Antarctica, was drawn closely from truth." Jaynes assembles an all-black mining crew, and embarks on an expedition to the South Pole in search of Poe's fabled island of Tsalal, the "great undiscovered African Diasporan homeland ... uncorrupted by whiteness."The quest is led by the protagonist's older cousin Captain Booker Jaynes, "the world's only civil rights activist turned deep-sea diver", who is planning on mining blocks of Antarctic ice to melt and sell as expensive bottled water. Garth Frierson, Jaynes's childhood best friend with a fondness for Little Debbie snack cakes, joins the team in the hope of finding landscape painter Thomas Karvel, "Master of Light" (a parody of Thomas Kinkade, "Painter of Light"), and in part, "Pym" is laid out as "a road story/bromance between Jaynes and his childhood pal." Other members of the expedition include water treatment engineers Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter, a gay couple documenting the trip for their "Afro-adventure blog." Angela Latham, a lawyer and Jaynes's "much-pined-for" ex-wife, brings along her new husband Nathaniel, treating the venture as a honeymoon. But instead of the black inhabitants described by Poe, Jaynes and his friends come across "a prehistoric world of giant white people, or 'Snow Honkies', who enslave them." Garth is the only one spared from the enslavement, since he trades his Little Debbie snack cakes for freedom but does not have enough to free the rest of the mining crew.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_of_a_Demon_King"title="Rage of a Demon King">
The Emerald Queen's army is almost upon Midkemia and the army is staging. Erik Von Darkmoor is sergeant-major of the King's armies and Rupert is almost single-handedly financing the war. The Emerald Queen and her army are making for the Lifestone, a magical source of power capable of destroying worlds. Vast preparations are being made in Krondor, the anticipated point of invasion by the Emerald Queen's army, and all of Midkemia's allies - as well as some enemies - are being called upon to help.There are a lot of secrets revealed in "Rage of a Demon King". Some of the more mysterious figures who have inhabited Feist's books are finally seen in a clearer light. The origins of Macros the Black and Miranda are revealed. Plus, Nakor's "secret", that there is no magic, is explained.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Gates_of_Darkness"title="At the Gates of Darkness">
The remnants of the Conclave of Shadows, led by Pug, struggle to defeat evil magician Belasco before the Demon horde arrives in Midkemia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomy_of_a_Disappearance"title="Anatomy of a Disappearance">
The book follows the story of Nuri, a teenager living in exile with his family in Cairo. After the sudden death of his mother, he also loses his father Kamal Pasha el-Alfi who disappears in mysterious circumstances in Switzerland, and it becomes obvious that he was abducted by the regime of their country (which is never named). The young Nuri tries to come to terms with the disappearance of his father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shards_of_a_Broken_Crown"title="Shards of a Broken Crown">
Thanks to an enemy general who has a change of heart now that the enemy leaders are gone, the reclamation of the western realm of the Kingdom is made easier - but not by much - with Kesh threatening Krondor and the Eastern Armies returning to the east. On top of that, a new evil is unleashed by the enemy, with the dead rising and fighting the Kingdom forces. Pug, Tomas, Nakor and Miranda must defeat the enemy magicians and their unnatural allies for the Kingdom to survive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_WhiteBoy"title="Mexican WhiteBoy">
Danny Lopez, the protagonist, is a shy and introverted young teenager from San Diego who attends Leucadia Prep. Danny is bi-ethnic, Mexican and white. He sometimes feels inadequate around both Mexican and white people because he is "a shade darker than the white kids" and "pale...a full shade lighter" than his Mexican family members. He also does not speak Spanish. The summer before his junior year, he goes to stay with his cousin Sofia and Uncle Tommy in National City, while his mom and sister move to San Francisco with his mom's new boyfriend. Throughout the summer, Danny becomes friends with Sofia's friends and the other kids in her neighborhood.While hanging with Sofia's crew, Danny meets Uno, a biracial kid from the neighborhood. Uno is Black and Mexican, and struggles with some of the same identity issues as Danny. While playing a stickball derby in the neighborhood, Danny joins and proceeds to beat them at their own game. While playing, Danny sees a baseball scout he saw at Leucadia Prep during baseball try-outs. On the last hit, Danny accidentally hits Uno's mentally disabled little brother Manny in the face. When Uno sees this, he gets even more upset because he was already losing the game. He punches Danny, knocking him down. Danny hits his head on the concrete and requires stitches.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Sick_(novel)"title="Love Sick (novel)">
"Love Sick" follows the story of Ted, a former teenage alcoholic, as he spies on a girl, Erica, at their college for her father. After a drunk driving accident his senior year, Ted is left with a busted knee and no college scholarship. The novel opens with Ted, the protagonist, speaking at an AA meeting at his three-month mark. He talks about how he had been drinking throughout his four years at high school, and talks about the accident that caused him to lose his scholarship. After his AA meeting, he goes home, where he meets Michael Eslem. Michael tells Ted that he was there to offer Ted a deal to get him back into his university. He could go to his dream college completely free, except he would have to spy on Erica at the college. With convincing, Ted agrees to the deal.Erica's opening scene is when she steals mini donuts from a grocery store and eats them at her house. She eats 12 of them, a calorie overdose and we learn she throws up afterward and does this often. Throughout the book, her father and her spill information about her former and ongoing struggle including her having to be hospitalized from purging too much. Understanding the Yahoo Chess chats with her therapist allows the reader to know that her conversations are confined and her father cannot know about them, but this is the very reason for Ted needing to spy on her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crescendo_(Fitzpatrick_novel)"title="Crescendo (Fitzpatrick novel)">
Nora and Patch's relationship is threatened by his refusal to tell her that he loves her and by his new fascination with Marcie. Hurt, Nora begins hanging out with her old friend Scott, whom she believes is a Nephilim. She discovers from Patch that Scott is indeed a Nephilim, but ultimately fires him as her guardian angel after she discovers him with Marcie. Nora is later given a letter that tells her that the "Black Hand" killed her father and is further distraught when Patch appears to be going out with Marcie. Nora undergoes several attempts on her life as well as several intense interactions with Patch. She tries to make him jealous by making out with Scott, which results in the two boys fighting.Patch later offers to go rogue for Nora in order to be with her, but is refused because she doesn't want to be the cause of his downfall. Her feelings for Patch are even more conflicted when Rixon, a boy that her best friend Vee is dating, tells her that Patch is the Black Hand. Her emotions are put into further turmoil when Marcie tells her that Nora's mother has been having an affair with Marcie's father Hank for eleven years, the cause of Marcie's hatred for Nora. Already upset, Nora tries to break up with Patch when he tells her in a dream that he's Marcie's guardian angel, but he refuses.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boys_from_St._Petri_(novel)"title="The Boys from St. Petri (novel)">
## Summer 1942.Lars is trying to get into a club called the St. Petri group, which is against the Nazis and Adolf Hitler taking over Denmark, his home. He has to go through an initiation test and support the weight of the church’s chandelier without dropping it, in order to join. And meanwhile, Lars finds a German Luger (gun) which was stolen by a boy named Otto Hvidemann, who later joins the St.Petri group. After Lars succeeds entry into the group the boys plan their first true sabotage of the German headquarters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stonekeeper"title="The Stonekeeper">
Two years after a car accident that killed her husband, Karen has difficulties as a single mother. She and her children, Emily and Navin, move to the old house of Karen's grandfather Silas near San Francisco. Karen says Silas was a "puzzle maker" who disappeared after locking himself in the house. While exploring Silas's library, Emily finds a stone amulet that had been hidden in a table, and Navin helps tie it around her neck. The amulet begins speaking to Emily in her thoughts, giving suggestions beginning that night.The amulet tells Emily that her family is in danger. A noise from the basement awakens the family from where they have sleeping on the floor of the house until it can further be renovated, and as they enter to investigate, Karen is kidnapped by a large beetle-like monster with tentacles. The children go downstairs to look, but when they reach the bottom of the stairs they are trapped in a different world and are confronted by the monster that swallowed their mother. The monster grabs the two children and swallows Navin, but with the amulet's assistance Emily is able to break free, and Karen is able to push Navin out of a hole in creature's side.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Darling_Buds_of_May_(novel)"title="The Darling Buds of May (novel)">
Pop and Ma Larkin and their many children take joy in nature, each other's company, and almost constant feasts. Their only income is through selling scrap, picking strawberries, and selling farm animals or previous purchases that they've tired of. Nevertheless, they joyfully spend money on horses, cars, perfume, fine furniture, and holidays abroad. Pop Larkin opposes taxes and any barriers to free enterprise.Pop and Ma Larkin celebrate sex, youth, and vitality. In each novella in the series, Pop Larkin kisses, caresses, and pinches most of the women that he encounters. Ma Larkin expects this behaviour and approves of it. When told that Pop has kissed the middle-aged Miss Pilchester, she responds, "Do her good. Make her sleep all the sweeter."In the first novella, Pop, Ma, and Mariette Larkin attempt to beguile Cedric Charlton, a timid and naive tax inspector, into abandoning his investigation of their finances. Their ultimate goal is for Mariette, who is secretly pregnant at the age of seventeen, to marry "Charley" and thus provide a father for her baby. Ultimately Mariette develops true feelings for Charley and they do become engaged. Charley is never told of the pregnancy, which turns out to be a false alarm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bushbabies"title="The Bushbabies">
Jackie Rhodes is the daughter of a respected gamekeeper, known as "Trapper" Rhodes, in Kenya. She has lived there all of her life, so she is astounded and saddened when she learns from Tembo, her father's African servant, that her family will soon be abandoning the continent. Her biggest concern immediately becomes her pet bushbaby Kamau, which had been a Christmas gift from her father; she fears the creature is too young to fend for itself and will perish if left behind. During a family picnic, Trapper Rhodes comforts Jackie by assuring her that he'll obtain an official export permit that will allow her to take the bushbaby along.When the time comes for their departure, Jackie realizes that she has lost the export permit and grows very concerned. She learns from a steward that the ship's captain is not fond of animals, which makes matters worse. She realizes she cannot possibly hide Kamau as a stowaway or face export officials upon arrival. As her family sleeps, she abandons the ship hoping to set Kamau loose in the docks of Mombasa. Thoughts of the bushbaby's many natural predators immediately make Jackie have a change of heart and decide that Kamau must be returned to his natural habitat if he's to have a chance at survival. Jackie is horror-stricken when she realizes the ship has set sail leaving her and Kamau behind. She is comforted by the sound of a harmonica, realizing that it is being played by Tembo. She explains the situation to him and asks for his help. The African, moved by his loyalty to the Rhodes and a desire to be of service, unenthusiastically agrees to do so.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wintergirls"title="Wintergirls">
Lia Overbrook, an 18-year-old girl, just found out that her ex-best friend Cassie has died. Cassie had called Lia 33 times the night of her death. However, Lia never answered the phone. Cassie was found in a hotel room, killed by her illness, bulimia. Lia, who has a history of anorexia, falls into a downward spiral of self-harm and calorie counting. To hide her illness from her family, Lia's obsessive and destructive behavior worsens and recovery seems impossible.Lia's relationship with her step-mother, Jennifer, is also complicated. But Jennifer's nine-year-old daughter and Lia's step-sister, Emma, is one of the only things that keep her feeling happy. Lia has been struggling with eating disorders for quite some time and none of the help she received has made much of a difference. Lia finds it difficult to get close to her father and step-mother because they previously brought her to a hospital to recover.Soon, Cassie's ghost starts haunting Lia. This makes Lia feel guilty for not picking up the phone that night and not being there for Cassie when she needed it most. Lia believes that if she had picked up the telephone, Cassie would still be alive. As Lia's self-harm becomes increasingly worse, Cassie's haunting becomes more aggressive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands"title="Bloodlands">
The Central and Eastern European regions that Snyder terms "the bloodlands" is the area where Hitler's vision of racial supremacy and "Lebensraum," resulting in the Final Solution and other Nazi atrocities, met, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in cooperation, with Stalin's vision of a communist ideology that resulted in the deliberate starvation, imprisonment, and murder of innocent men, women and children in Gulags and elsewhere. The combined efforts of the two regimes resulted in the deaths of an estimated 14 million noncombatants in the Eastern Europe "Bloodlands"; Snyder documents that Nazi Germany was responsible for about two thirds of the total number of deaths. At least 5.4 million died in what has become known as the Holocaust, but many more died in more obscure circumstances. Snyder seeks to show that interaction between the Nazi and Soviet regimes is crucial to telling the story of this bloodshed. He posits that early Soviet support for the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazi occupation was followed by an unwillingness to aid the uprising because the Soviets were willing to have the Nazis eliminate potential sources of resistance to a later Soviet occupation. Snyder states that this is an example of interaction that may have led to many more deaths than might have been the case if each regime had been acting independently.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eternal_Husband"title="The Eternal Husband">
Alexei Ivanovich Velchaninov is a land owner who stays in Saint Petersburg for a trial about a piece of land. He receives a visit from Pavel Pavlovich Trusotsky, an old acquaintance who recently became a widower. Velchaninov had an affair with Trusotsky's wife Natalia, and he realizes that he is the biological father of Liza, Trusotsky's eight-year-old daughter. Velchaninov, who doesn't want Liza to be raised by an alcoholic, brings Liza to a foster family. Liza dies there.Trusotsky now wants to marry Nadia, the fifteen-year-old daughter of civil servant Zakhlyobinin. She's the sixth daughter of eight. Trusotsky takes Velchaninov with him to visit his fiancee, and buys her a bracelet. Trusotsky is ridiculed by Zakhlyobinin's daughters and locked up during a game of hide-and-seek. Nadia gives the bracelet to Velchaninov, asking him to return it to Trusotsky and tell him she doesn't want to marry him. Nadia is secretly engaged to Alexander Lobov, a nineteen-year-old boy.Trusotsky spends the night in Velchaninov's room and tries to kill him with a razor knife. Velchaninov manages to defend himself, injuring his left hand.Sometime later, when Velchaninov has won his trial, the two meet again at a railway station. Trusotsky is remarried, but a young army officer is travelling with him and his wife. Trusotsky's new wife invites Velchaninov to visit them, but Trusotsky asks him to ignore this invitation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle's_Dream"title="Uncle's Dream">
The action of the story takes place in the city of Mordasovo, where Mariya Aleksandrovna Moskaleva lives, an energetic lady with a twenty-three years old daughter. Mariya dreams of marrying Zinaida, but her daughter rejects the proposals of her only boyfriend, Pavel Aleksandrovich Mozglyakov; there are no other worthy gentlemen in their small town. In addition, she still loves the poor district teacher, whom her mother did not allow her to marry.One day, Prince K. stops at the Moskaleva's house - a gentleman of a very respectable age, suffering, according to the townspeople, from senile dementia and outwardly resembling a "dead man on springs." While talking with the guest, Mariya develops a plan: to marry him to her daughter. Zinaida at first ardently rejects any talk of a wedding, but her mother argues that the girl has a special mission - in marriage she will be a sister of mercy for her husband, and after his death, she will become a rich and free princess.Mariya Aleksandrovna makes a lot of efforts to implement her plan. As a result, the prince, having relaxed from drinks and Zinaida's singing, agrees to marry her. However, the next morning it turns out that K. remembers the recent events very vaguely, and Pavel manages to convince the “uncle” that he saw his upcoming wedding in a dream. When the deception is revealed, Zinaida honestly admits her guilt, and the prince, touched by her sincerity, reports that it would be a great honor for him to offer his hand and heart to such a girl. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Stations"title="Three Stations">
The title refers to the three Moscow railway stations, Leningrad Station, Kazansky Station and Yaroslavl Station situated on Komsomolskaya Square, also often referred to as Three Stations Square.A teenage mother arrives at Three Stations, but her baby is stolen. The only person to help her is Zhenya, the young chess hustler who is a sometime ward of Arkady Renko, the police investigator. Meanwhile, Arkady tries to prove that the overdose death of a young prostitute in the station is nothing of the sort, and is suspended for his trouble. A billionaire casino owner with financial troubles offers to hire Arkady, but the latter can trust no-one. Thugs, dwarves, ballerinas, Central Asians and a gang of homeless tweens complicate matters still further.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fleet_Street_Murders"title="The Fleet Street Murders">
While gentleman and amateur detective Charles Lenox is celebrating his engagement to his best friend and neighbor Lady Jane Grey, two journalists are murdered simultaneously across London. Lenox starts to involve himself in this strange case despite hostility from Scotland Yard, but soon must leave it behind to travel to Stirrington, in northern England, where he is running for a seat in Parliament. Once at Stirrington, he has to overcome local suspicion of an outsider, and faces a shock when Lady Jane sends him a letter casting doubt on their upcoming marriage. Meanwhile in London, the police have arrested two unlikely suspects. Lenox races back and forth between London and Stirrington to solve the crime, face the results of the election, and save his imperiled engagement. In the process, he discovers that the culprit is an old nemesis.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_Back_Plenty"title="Take Back Plenty">
While it is a time of festivity on Mars, freighter captain Tabitha Jute isn't interested in the celebration. She is trying to elude planetary law enforcement agencies, almost bankrupt and about to lose her sole asset and her best friend, her starship "Alice Liddell". Unexpectedly, millionaire entertainer and entrepreneur Marco Metz arrives at her hideout and promises renumeration if she takes him to the distant giant spaceship "Plenty", as well as his band. However, Metz is not what he seems. He is actually the estranged father of two of the other band members, who appear to be in an incestuous relationship and has also engaged Jute under false pretenses, intending to steal the Frasque, an alien artefact. En route, they become entangled with the Capellans, an advanced alien species who have confined humanity to the solar system and prohibited interstellar travel .
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Snake's_Skin"title="The Snake's Skin">
The novel "The Snake's Skin" is about entire universe, where the space is complete and united. The scene takes place at the entire planet: the West and the East; Russia, Europe and finally Robakidze’s motherland – Georgia. Here one may also find an imaginary world of American billionaire living in his villa at Mediterranean Sea along with various prominent artists.There is only one tense in "The Snake’s Skin" – present, but it includes past and future as well. The main thing is reality, but myths and legends are part of this reality. The way of thinking is not only particularly human, but at the same time metaphysical and idealistic.The personages of the novel do not live in the particular time period, or represent persons with concrete nationality. The author describes generalized citizen of the world that gets transformed into a particular person or in other words, returns to his roots (actual father, motherland), oneself, and the God. This is an adventure of Archibald Mekeshi’s soul taking place throughout the centuries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellhole_(novel)"title="Hellhole (novel)">
On the dangerous frontier planet Hellhole, defeated and exiled rebel Gen. Tiber Adolphus continues his honorable opposition to the political scheming and selfish machinations of the Crown Jewel worlds and grandmotherly Diadem Michella Duchenet. Adolphus and his companions work in secret to undermine the royal space travel monopoly and form a coalition of Deep Zone planets. Diadem Michella, embroiled in the schemes of the ancient noble families on the decadent capital planet Sonjeera, is too distracted to recognize the danger Adolphus poses.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whizzard!"title="Whizzard!">
Tym, a wizard's apprentice from the Dun Indewood suburb of Leafy Bottom, dreams of being a great magician. It is only when he encounters the mysterious Dreamwalker that he learns the secret of travelling at super-speed and becomes a Whizzard! When his newfound skill causes havoc and puts the beautiful Lady Zamarind into a coma, Tym must travel far across the Dark Forest to save her, and discover his true destiny.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ring_of_Solomon"title="The Ring of Solomon">
The book follows the early adventures of Bartimaeus in service to King Solomon.The story opens in Jerusalem with the djinni Bartimaeus currently in the service of one of the seventeen High Magicians of King Solomon of Israel, whom the king rules with the use of a mighty Ring. Ezekiel commands Bartimaeus to retrieve a magical artifact from the ancient city of Eridu. Bartimaeus succeeds, and then tricks the magician into commanding him to use the artefact against him. It sends a spurt of water at him, knocking him from his protective circle. Bartimaeus devours the old man and by the magician's death is released and returns to the Other Place.The king, upon learning of Bartimaeus's murder of Ezekiel, is insulted that a mere djinni is the perpetrator. To make Bartimaeus pay for his actions he commands Khaba, an Egyptian and another of the seventeen, to summon Bartimaeus back into his service and punish him. The king also proposes to the queen of Sheba and is refused.The scene shifts to the Sheban capital of Marib where Balkis, the aforementioned queen, receives a message from a fierce marid supposedly in Solomon's service: either pay a ransom of 40 sacks of frankincense or be destroyed, and gives her two weeks to pay. Balkis decides to send her loyal guard captain Asmira to Jerusalem to assassinate Solomon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_Bat_and_the_Goat_Guys"title="Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guys">
While the grown-ups are away making a movie, teenager Cherokee is left to cheer up her sort-of sister Witch Baby, who is deeply depressed. Cherokee makes her a pair of wings out of wire and feathers, and it cheers Witch Baby up due to an unexplained magical power. The two girls decided to start a band and enlist their two male friends, Raphael and Angel Juan.As their band becomes successful, the other members acquire magical items to wear. Raphael begins to wear goat pants, Angel Juan gets horns, and Cherokee gets hoof-like boots. However, these items begin to lead them down a path of drugs, sex, and jealousy and things begin to unravel. In the end, Cherokee, disturbed by the changes in her friends, makes off with the magical costumes, causing her friends to re-examine their choices and find their way back to their normal selves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_Angel_Juan"title="Missing Angel Juan">
The story begins with Witch Baby learning that Angel Juan is leaving to go to New York. He wants to go and discover who he is when he is not with Witch Baby. She is left broken-hearted and angry and falls into a depression before deciding to follow Angel Juan to New York.In New York, Witch Baby stays at the apartment of Weetzie Bat's deceased father, Charlie Bat. He appears to Witch Baby as a ghost and becomes her companion as she searches for Angel Juan. In the end, Witch Baby and Angel Juan are reunited, but Angel Juan tells her he needs to stay in New York a while longer and she has to return to Los Angeles. Witch Baby understands, because even though they cannot be together at present, they love each other and will be together again someday.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasia_(novel)"title="Caucasia (novel)">
The novel's narrator is Birdie Lee, a multiracial child who has a white mother and a black father. She and her sister Cole are very close yet differ in appearance. Her sister is described as "cinnamon-skinned, curly-haired", traits associated with African Americans of mixed race. Birdie describes herself as a brown haired, light-skinned girl and her interactions with others indicate she is lighter-skinned than her sister and can pass as white. "...[T]he woman behind the desk took one look at Cole and me and assigned us to different districts. I would be bused to the predominantly African American school in Dorchester; Cole to South Boston, the Irish section, 'in the interest of dahversetty,' the woman explained..."The book is written in three parts: Part 1 takes place in 1975 Boston and Roxbury, Massachusetts, when Birdie is eight years old; Part 2 takes place in a small town in New Hampshire six years later when Birdie is 14 years old; Part 3 takes place when Birdie is 14 ½ years old and runs away from her mother to try to find her father and sister.Part 1: "Negritude for beginners"It is 1975 and eight-year-old Birdie Lee lives with her family in Roxbury, Massachusetts. She and her older sister, Cole, converse in their room using their made-up language, Elemeno. The pair can hear their Caucasian mother, Sandy and African American father Deck, arguing downstairs. The confrontation results in Deck moving out for good.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goals_in_the_Air"title="Goals in the Air">
The book tells the story of Kenny Rider a young striker who plays for fictitious Second Division team Marton Rangers. Kenny manages to break into the first team at the age of sixteen and attracts a lot of attention and some jealousy for his talent and goalscoring ability. Unfortunately, off the field Kenny has to contend with a range of problems including an apathetic girlfriend and an actively hostile father. Whilst many of Hardcastle's other books see their protagonists triumph over adversity, the end of this short novel sees Kenny continuing to struggle with the many pressures of top class football.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soccer_Comes_First"title="Soccer Comes First">
The book begins with retired England striker Andy Blair who has recently moved to the town of Scorton watching the local team struggle in a Second Division match. After the game he is approached by club chairman Herbert Graydon who convinces him to come out of retirement and play for Rovers. As the story progresses Andy, whose performances begin to lift Rovers up the table, introduces his eighteen-year-old son Bobbie into the team. Bobbie, despite playing well, becomes mixed up with some local match-fixers and experiences some difficulties in his relationship with his girlfriend Adrienne who he follows to Bristol on the eve of a big game to try to resolve their problems. Andy feels forced to take matters into his own hand and tackles the match-fixers himself before retrieving his son. At the novel's conclusion the Blairs are reunited and can finally concentrate on trying to ensure Rovers win promotion to the First Division.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charity_(novel)"title="Charity (novel)">
Bernard is still working for Frank Harrington in Berlin where he hardly ever gets to see his wife and children whom he hardly knows anymore. While crossing Poland Bernard is captured by Polish intelligence and is severely beaten for shooting their men while retrieving George Kosinski in "Hope". Meanwhile, George is being interrogated in London but he has revealed no useful information and is now threatening to destroy Bernard and Fiona's careers. Bernard is using his position in Berlin to investigate Tessa's death which results in Silas Gaunt confessing to hiring Thurkettle to fake Fiona's death but he denies knowing anything about using Tessa and tells Bernard to back off.Bernard has had enough, and contacts The Swede to organise to fly him, his children and hopefully Gloria out of the country to begin a new life. The Swede is drunk and erratic and tells Bernard that on the night of Tessa's death he was hired to fly Jay Prettyman from Berlin to London and was carrying a locked box that Prettyman would need. Prettyman never showed up but his ex-wife did and took the box.Bernard tracks down the dying Prettyman who confesses that he hired Thurkettle but found him dead at the meeting place and drove back to West Berlin and that his ex-wife is now demanding money for the return of the box. Prettyman says the operations was all a waste of time anyway because the ruse never fooled the KGB. Bernard finds Thurkettle's hastily buried body and a gun Werner was asked to give Prettyman at the meeting place. Werner steals the box from Prettyman's ex-wife and in retaliation she shoots and wounds Werner at his grand house warming party.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_Time_Will_Tell_(novel)"title="Only Time Will Tell (novel)">
The plot revolves around the protagonist Harry Clifton, spanning the time between the end of World War I and the beginning of the Second World War. The novel is set in Bristol, England, from 1919 to 1940 and centers on Harry Clifton, a young boy destined to follow in the footsteps of his father and uncle and work on the docks until a new world is opened up to him. Harry has the gift of song, and when Miss Monday, the choir mistress; Mr. Holcombe, his elementary school teacher; and Old Jack Tar, a Boer War hero and loner all help him, his life is changed forever. Harry's mother, Maisie, works as a waitress and scrimps and saves to send her son to school and give him a better life.Maisie's sacrifices and the secret of Harry's parentage are the main focus of "Only Time Will Tell". Harry has grown up thinking Arthur Clifton is his father and that he died in the war. Maisie knows the truth about Harry's parentage, and a few people know the truth about Arthur Clifton's death, but no one tells Harry anything.While Harry is off at school befriending Giles Barrington, the son of the man who owns the shipping company where Harry's father and uncle work and who knows what happened to Arthur Clifton, Maisie deals with countless personal tragedies and must make some tough decisions to continue Harry's schooling. At the same time, it looks as though England may go to war with Germany, and Harry must consider what this means for his future. He also has insights of his past that may affect his future .
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarecrow_and_the_Army_of_Thieves"title="Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves">
During a routine re-staffing of Dragon Island, an old Soviet weapons installation in the Arctic, a Russian Spetsnaz team comes under fire from an unknown enemy. Vasily Ivanov, a researcher assigned to Dragon, manages to send out a distress signal which is intercepted by an American listening station in Alaska before his plane is shot down. Dragon Island was once the cornerstone of Soviet weapons research, a place where cutting-edge weapons were designed by scientists with a blank cheque. It has been seized by an organisation calling themselves "The Army of Thieves", led by the enigmatic Lord of Anarchy. Self-proclaimed anarchists, the Army is made up of former enforcers of the Pinochet regime, Sudanese Janjaweed militants, Islamic fundamentalists and narco-terrorists. They are planning to unleash Dragon Island's centrepiece, known as the Tesla Weapon. Experiments with rocket fuel and samples of acids acquired from the atmosphere of Venus have created a compound that, when ignited, can set fire to the atmosphere. The Tesla Weapons were constructed on Dragon Island, as prevailing air currents will disperse the acid-fuel mixture around the world. The Army of Thieves have taken control of the facility on Dragon Island and have activated the preliminary stages of the Tesla Weapon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Warmth_of_Other_Suns"title="The Warmth of Other Suns">
"The Warmth of Other Suns" tells the story of the Great Migration, the movement of Black Americans out of the Southern United States to the Midwest, Northeast, and West from approximately 1915 to 1970. Throughout the twentieth century, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.With historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Orchids_for_Miss_Blandish_(novel)"title="No Orchids for Miss Blandish (novel)">
In New York City, a local goon and gang leader named Riley learns that the wealthy socialite Miss Blandish will be wearing an expensive diamond necklace to her birthday celebration. Riley and his gang plan to steal the necklace and ransom it. The inept criminals manage to kidnap Miss Blandish and her boyfriend, but after the latter is accidentally killed they instead decide to hold Miss Blandish ransom, reasoning that her millionaire father will pay more to get his daughter back safely than the necklace is worth.The plan begins to fall apart when a rival mob, led by the sadistic and mentally unbalanced Slim Grisson, finds out about Riley's plan and kidnaps Miss Blandish from the gang. Mr. Blandish pays the ransom to Slim, but his daughter is not returned. Slim becomes increasingly obsessed with Miss Blandish and decides to keep her hidden in a secret room inside one of his nightclubs, repeatedly raping her and lashing out at anybody who attempts to wrestle Miss Blandish from his charge.Meanwhile, the police are on the trail of the kidnappers, and Dave Fenner, an ex journalist and now a private investigator, is hired to rescue her and deal with the gangsters. Fenner and the police eventually work out where the young socialite is located and go to the club, where a gun battle ensues. Slim is killed and Miss Blandish is rescued, but unfortunately, after months of torture and drugs at the hands of the gangsters, Miss Blandish cannot cope with freedom and kills herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United!_(novel)"title="United! (novel)">
"United!" follows youth football team Bank Vale United's attempts to improve their fortunes by buying a player from a rival team. Despite the fact that their team is amateur, United's impetuous striker Kevin Ripley believes there is no reason why they cannot pay for someone to come and join them. Kevin's teammates Keith Nash and Gary Ansell, although sceptical, agree to the plan and the boys manage to raise the princely sum of £1 to purchase the talents of Nick Abel-Smith.Despite Nick's obvious ability he is an unsettling influence and the Bank Vale players have to make a tough choice between success and loyalty. In addition to the usual football action Hardcastle includes a section on another of his interests, Motocross.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Down_Low"title="On the Down Low">
In the book King discusses the subject of African-American men who claim to be or otherwise consider themselves to be heterosexual, but hold secret sexual encounters with other men. The men give an outward appearance of only being heterosexual and will hold long-term relationships with women without informing the women or anyone else that they are having encounters, some of which are unprotected, with other men. King also discusses his own personal experience with living on the "down low", as well as what he perceives as potential risks and dangers that some forms of the lifestyle can bring.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_Hope"title="Time of Hope">
Lewis Eliot is walking home in the summer of 1914 when he is struck by an intuition of disaster, and he runs back home to find his mother having her fortune told with cards. At first he is reassured by the peaceful scene, but his Aunt Milly is scornful when she sees this, and he soon learns that his father has gone bankrupt. Over the next few years, the family's lifestyle is constrained, and his mother dies of heart failure in her late forties. Eliot has promised his mother to make something of himself. He works hard, befriends lawyers (including George Passant, whose story is told in the second book) and plans to become a solicitor. However, one of his aunts leaves him a sum of money which is just enough to allow him to study to become a barrister. This is a dangerous thing to attempt, but he succeeds in his examinations, and moves to London.With great labour, he staves off illness and begins his practice, but his life is disrupted by his courting of Sheila Knight, an unstable woman who does not love him. He recognises that they are not suited for each other, but he is determined to marry her, and he frightens away another man, whom she is fond of, by telling him about her difficult personality. Eventually Lewis and Sheila marry. Sheila's unhappiness and unpredictability damage his social life, and he comes to the conclusion that he is unlikely to succeed either in his marriage or in his profession.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Need_for_Roots"title="The Need for Roots">
The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 is subdivided into fourteen sections, each dealing with a specific human need. Collectively these are referred to as 'needs of the soul'. Part 2 is subdivided into three sections, dealing with the concept of uprootedness in relation to urban life, to rural life and to nationhood. Part 3 is undivided and discusses the possibilities for inspiring a nation. Only a small part of the book discusses the specific solutions that were of unique applicability to France in the 1940s. Most of the work discusses the general case and is of broad and lasting relevance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cult_(novel)"title="The Cult (novel)">
Jeff Reed falls under the influence of a religious cult called Souls for Jesus (SFJ), led by Reverend Buford Hodges. His parents hire deprogrammer John Morse, whose daughter committed suicide after becoming a member of SFJ. They kidnap him from the SFJ, and Morse uses Chinese brainwashing techniques on him, but SFJ in turn re-kidnap and re-brainwash him, and he sues his parents and Morse. The novel ends with a court scene revealing deep penetration of the US justice system by SFJ.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Saboteurs"title="The Sun Saboteurs">
In the future, Earth has been devastated by war and disease and supports only a primitive agrarian society. Most Earthmen live elsewhere, as émigrés on planets that are populated by alien species. The author suggests that the human species is the only one plagued by "original sin", i.e. by an innate tendency to lie, cheat, kill; aliens have come to accept these traits without understanding them. The story takes place among a group of humans in the "Earth Quarter", a ghetto on the planet Palu that is populated by an insect-like alien race called the Niori. The story opens with a visit by a representative of a political group, the "Minority People's League", which endorses the return of humans to their ancestral planet and accommodation with the aliens. The envoy is attacked and murdered by a group of thugs who see all aliens as inferior to humans and who seek retribution for humans' second-class status. Their leader, Rack, commandeers a space ship and convinces a group from the Quarter to follow him as he establishes a new colony on an uninhabited planet. Instead, Rack puts them to work building "total-conversion bombs" and begins a campaign of using the bombs to destroy the suns of alien solar systems (hence the "sun saboteurs" of the title). Eventually Rack is stopped by a fleet of galactic (alien) ships, but he barely escapes and returns to Palu. The humans murder him, but are nevertheless forced by the Niori to leave. At the story's close, the humans are preparing to board a ship for Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Belton_Estate"title="The Belton Estate">
Clara Amedroz is the only surviving child of the elderly squire of Belton Castle in Somersetshire. At twenty-five, she is old for an unmarried woman. Her father's income and savings have been dissipated to pay for the extravagances of her brother, who subsequently committed suicide. Since her father has no living sons, his estate, which is entailed, will pass upon his death to a distant cousin, Will Belton.Despite her poor prospects, she has two eligible suitors. Within four days of making her acquaintance, Will Belton proposes marriage to her. Belton is warm-hearted, kind, and generous, and these qualities make a strong impression on Clara. However, she believes herself in love with Captain Frederic Aylmer, although he has given no clear signs of feeling that way toward her. Aylmer is impeccable in his manners, smooth, urbane, well-read, and a member of Parliament; compared to him, Belton is awkward and unpolished.Clara rejects Belton's offer, urging him to regard her as a sister. Not long thereafter, Aylmer proposes to her, and she eagerly accepts. However, her happiness is short-lived. Her new fiancé proves shallow and cold, more concerned with his own comfort than with her happiness. Moreover, he expects her to subject herself to his domineering mother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outlaws_of_Mars"title="The Outlaws of Mars">
Jerry Morgan, a man with no future on Earth, is offered a new life on Mars. He starts out on the wrong foot, meeting a princess and killing the fearsome-looking Martian beast he takes to be menacing her, which actually turns out to be her pet. From there Morgan becomes entangled in the politics of the Byzantine Martian royal court, spurns the advances of a would-be lover, escapes his hosts and role as an expendable political pawn. Various adventures follow, with dazzling swordplay, feats of strength, and other trials, tribulations and treacheries.Kline's Mars has multiple parallel canals, surrounded by walls and terraces, and the construction of the canals by Martian machines is described. The story has a race-war element that may jar the modern reader.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_(Seghers_novel)"title="Transit (Seghers novel)">
The novel takes place in France during World War II after the German invasion and occupation of the north. The twenty-seven year-old unnamed narrator has escaped from a Nazi concentration camp and is traveling from Rouen. Along the way to Marseilles, where he hopes to get passage on a ship to leave the country, he meets a friend, Paul. Paul asks the narrator to deliver a letter to a writer named Weidel in Paris. When the narrator tries to do this, he learns that Weidel has committed suicide. The narrator also finds that Weidel left behind a suitcase full of letters and an unfinished manuscript for a novel, which he takes with him.Arriving in Marseilles, the narrator describes the chaos of a town full of people from across Europe who are desperate to escape the Nazis. Most of his time is spent in cafes, where he begins to recognize people who are also waiting, while the city has ever more limited amounts of food and alcohol on sale because of the increased population. A mystery woman who haunts the cafes is Weidel's estranged wife, desperate for his help to leave France. She doesn't know Weidel is dead. The narrator falls in love with her and tries to arrange matters so she can leave with him, without her knowing that he has assumed Weidel's identity (in order to use his visa and Mexican visa).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_Dance"title="Mirror Dance">
Mark, Miles Vorkosigan's clone, masquerades as him and dupes his mercenary force, the Dendarii, into undertaking a mission to free about 50 clones on Jackson's Whole, an anything-goes freebooters' planet where Mark was created and raised. These teenage clones are scheduled to have their brains replaced by those of their wealthy, aged progenitors. When Miles finds out, he attempts to rescue his troops and his brother from the mess Mark has made, but is killed by a needle grenade. He is frozen in a cryonic chamber on the spot, but the medic in charge becomes separated from the rest of the men while retreating under fire. The medic uses an automated shipping system to send the chamber to safety, but is killed before he can tell anyone what he did and where he sent it.The Dendarii flee the debacle and take Mark to Miles' parents on Barrayar. Cordelia accepts him as another son and has him acknowledged legally as a member of the family. After a while, Mark becomes frustrated by Barrayaran Imperial Security's lack of progress; he is convinced that Miles is still on Jackson's Whole, and decides to go there himself. Cordelia helps by buying him a starship. He invites some of the Dendarii along, including Captain Quinn, Miles' second-in-command and lover.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_for_Anything"title="A for Anything">
An anonymous inventor sends copies of the "Gismo" through the mail to hundreds of people. Civil society immediately collapses; as one news commentator says: "The big question today is: Have you got a Gismo? And believe me, nothing else matters." The story jumps to the year 2149: the society we know has been replaced by a society of wealthy minority supported by slavery, and access to Gismos is jealously guarded by Gismo-produced slave guards. The story is told through the eyes of Dick Jones, the son of the leader of Buckhill, a compound in the Poconos. Jones is coming of age and is about to be sent to Eagles, another, larger compound in the Rocky Mountains, for military training. Jones is initially presented as an unsympathetic character: spoiled, impulsive, hot-headed. In his final day at Buckhill, he insults a cousin who then challenges Dick to a duel; Dick kills him, and has to be ushered away in secret the following morning for fear of retribution.Jones arrives at Eagles, a fabulous city built into a mountain. Like Buckhill, Eagles is run as a slave society; but Jones is startled to realize that the Gismo is used to duplicate slaves, and that the most trusted slaves have been copied hundreds of times. Status among citizens is determined by social connections, and, for males, by skill at hand-to-hand combat. The author shows us the dark side of Eagles; for instance, the Boss takes pleasure in having slaves dropped down a shaft inside a tall tower and watching them plunge to their death via closed-circuit television. This may be done because it is suggested that all but the very best of slaves are "recycled" at about 30 years of age but with a 300 slaves for every freeman ratio at Eagles, some slaves live much longer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_de_Jour_(novel)"title="Belle de Jour (novel)">
Séverine Sérizy's recalls a mechanic's touching her when she'd been an eight-year-old girl on her way from her bedroom to that of her mother. Now, a young, beautiful housewife, Séverine finds it difficult to fulfill her masochistic desires with her husband, Pierre Sérizy. Although they love each other, physical intimacy is a problem, which frustrates them both.When Monsieur Husson mentions an acquaintance who works at a local brothel, Séverine becomes curious about prostitution as a means of satisfying her desires. She uses the pseudonym "Belle de Jour" (Morning Glory), as she works from two to five o'clock each day, returning to her unaware husband in the evening.Séverine becomes entangled with one of her clients, Marcel, a young gangster. He provides her with the thrills and excitement of her fantasies. The situation becomes more complicated when Séverine decides to leave the brothel, with Madame Anaïs's agreement, after Marcel becomes too demanding and jealous of her husband.Husson has also discovered her secret as a potential, though unwilling, client. After one of his associates tracks Séverine to her home, Marcel visits her there and threatens to reveal her hidden identity, but Séverine persuades him to leave. Husson visits Severine and assures her of his discretion, but she cannot believe him. She discovers Husson has arranged to meet Pierre in the square outside Notre Dame Cathedral; she hastily visits Marcel and asks him to kill Husson, which he agrees to do, out of love for her. Marcel and Severine are driven to the rendezvous point by Marcel's friend, and Marcel attacks Husson, but the job is botched: Pierre intervenes and is stabbed instead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_State_of_Mind_(book)"title="Empire State of Mind (book)">
From the official blurb:"Empire State of Mind reveals the story behind Jay-Z's rise as told by the people who lived it with him, from classmates at Brooklyn's George Westinghouse High School and the childhood friend who got him into the drug trade, to the DJ who persuaded him to stop dealing and focus on the music. Now with new interviews with industry insiders like Russell Simmons, Alicia Keys, and J. Cole—more than one hundred in total—this book explains just how Jay-Z propelled himself from the bleak streets of Brooklyn to the heights of the business world." Noteworthy sources interviewed for this biography include Fab Five Freddy, Russell Simmons, Damon Dash, Alicia Keys and J. Cole. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_at_the_Buzzer"title="Bird at the Buzzer">
The main subject of the book is the Big East tournament championship game of 2001, although the book intersperses play by play coverage of the game with background information on the entire season, as well as commentary on the players, coaches and other aspects of the two programs.The game featured in the book was neither the first nor the last meeting of the two teams in the season. In January, UConn played Notre Dame at Notre Dame. The UConn team was undefeated, and ranked number one in the country at the start of the game. Notre Dame won 92–76, remained undefeated, and moved from third to the number one ranking at the next poll. Both teams would also meet in the semifinals of the NCAA Tournament, with Notre Dame prevailing and then going on to win the national championship. All of the meetings between the two teams that year were important games for each team, but the game in March had multiple story lines—a tournament championship at stake, a close game in which neither team led by more than eight points at any time, a devastating injury to one of the game's best players, and finally, a game that was decided by a single basket scored in the final moments, by one of the best players in the sport, Sue Bird.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistle_Down_the_Wind_(novel)"title="Whistle Down the Wind (novel)">
One day ten-year-old Brambling (nicknamed "Brat") and her seven year old brother Merlin ("Poor Baby") are told by their twelve-year-old sister Swallow that she and their five-year-old friend Elizabeth found a man hiding in a barn of the family farm who they believe to be Jesus Christ after taking his exclamation of "Jesus" literally when they asked who he was. The Man seemed feverish so the children take care of him sworn to secrecy fearing the adults would take him away.Over the next few days, the children's school was closed with their father claiming there was a plague so the children introduce the Man to their friends who are also sworn to secrecy. Brat, Swallow and Poor Baby later learn from their grandmother that there was not actually a plague but refused to give the real reason for the school closure other than there being a scare involving the police. The children learn from a friend that the grandmother of another child named Amos Nodge told him that the police were searching for an escaped convict which the police had traced to their local area. The children's father later told them not to leave the farm and to tell him if they saw any strange men around.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Who_Are_About_To..."title="We Who Are About To...">
The story takes the form of an audio diary kept by the unnamed protagonist. A group of people, with no technical skills and scant supplies, are stranded on a planet and debate how to survive. The men in the group are dedicated to colonizing and populating the planet, but the unnamed female protagonist, who does not believe that long-term survival is possible, resists being made pregnant by them. Tensions escalate into violence, until finally she is forced to kill the other survivors in order to defend herself against rape. Left alone, she becomes increasingly philosophical, recounting her personal history in political agitation and attempting to chart the days and seasons even as she begins to hallucinate from hunger and loneliness. She experiences visions, first of the people she killed, and then of people from her past. Finally, weak from hunger, she resolves to kill herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell's_Pavement"title="Hell's Pavement">
Early in the novel, one of the characters gives a description of the analogue treatment:"He's got an analogue," said Martyn. "In the classical sense, he is even less sane than he was before. He has auditory, visual and tactile hallucinationsa complete, integrated set. That's enough to get you entry to most institutions, crowded as they are. But, you see, these hallucinations are pro-societal. They were put there deliberately. He's an acceptable member of society, because he has them...Nobody knows [what the analogue looks like] except himself. A policeman, maybe, or his mother as she looked when he was a child. Someone whom he fears, and whose authority he acknowledges. The subconscious has its own mechanism for creating these false images; all we do is stimulate itit does the rest."Most of the story takes place in the 22nd century after analogue treatments have been universally applied for more than 100 years. The United States has broken up into semi-autonomous regions in which the analogue treatment is used to enforce whatever societal norms benefit the ruling classes. The narrative centers on Arthur Bass, who realizes at an early age that he is an "immune", i.e. resistant to the analogue treatment. Bass is identified and recruited by the members of a clandestine group of immunes who are working to overthrow the analogue system.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abuse_of_Power_(novel)"title="Abuse of Power (novel)">
Jack Hatfield is a hardened former war correspondent who rose to national prominence for his insightful, provocative commentary. But after being smeared as a bigot and extremist by a radical leftist media-watchdog group, he ultimately loses his job and finds himself working in obscurity as a freelance news producer in San Francisco.One afternoon Hatfield is on a ride-along with the SFPD bomb squad when a seemingly routine carjacking turns deadly, after police find several pounds of military-grade explosives in the jacked car. And when the FBI urges Hatfield to stay out of it, he knows he’s onto something big.This event will open up a shadowy trail that leads Hatfield from San Francisco to Tel Aviv, London, Paris, and back again, as he works with a stunning Yemeni intelligence agent and a veteran Green Beret to expose a terrorist group known as the Hand of Allah---and a plot within the highest corridors of power that will dwarf 9/11.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Degrevant"title="Sir Degrevant">
The plot of "Sir Degrevant" revolves around the title character and his neighbour, an earl, whose daughter Myldore falls in love with Sir Degrevant. While there is a "perfunctory connection" with King Arthur and his court, the romance is devoid of the usual marvels associated with Arthurian literature.Sir Degrevant is the "perfect romance hero": intent on hunting and adventures, he is young, handsome, and strong; most importantly to the plot, he is not interested in the love of a woman. While he is on a crusade, his neighbour, an earl, does great damage to Degrevant's property and kills the foresters who oversee his deer park. Degrevant hurries back from Granada, repairs the fences and the other damage done, then addresses a letter to the earl seeking legal redress.When the earl refuses to make reparations, Degrevant avenges himself by attacking the earl's hunting troop and then his castle. During this latter engagement, the earl's daughter, Melydor, watches from the castle walls and Degrevant falls in love with her. Melydor initially rebuffs Degrevant's attempt to declare his love, but later grants it to him. Her father sets up a tournament to promote the chances of another suitor (the Duke of Gerle), but Degrevant defeats him thrice. The lovers meet secretly in her splendidly decorated bedroom (it contains paintings of saints and angels, and such details as glass from Westphalia and "curtain cords made of mermaids' hair won by Duke Betyse," a reference to a duke from a fourteenth-century chanson de geste "Les Voeux du paon"), but they remain chaste until marriage. Finally, the earl agrees to his daughter's engagement with Degrevant, convinced by his daughter and his wife's pleas and by Degrevant's obvious chivalry and strength. The couple have seven children and enjoy a happy and prosperous life together. When Melydor dies, Degrevant returns to the crusade and dies in the Holy Land.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gideon's_Corpse"title="Gideon's Corpse">
The book begins immediately after the conclusion of "Gideon's Sword". Eli Glinn does not seem displeased by Gideon's previous actions, and recruits Gideon to help calm down a colleague of Gideon's at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Reed Chalker, who has gone insane and has taken a family hostage. Chalker is spouting ravings that he has been irradiated by some conspiracy. In an event similar to the death of Gideon's father, Chalker is gunned down. During a search of his apartment, it is discovered that he is highly radioactive. It is determined that the cause of this was a botched attempt at assembling a dirty bomb. Chalker's hideout seems to have most of the tools necessary to create a nuclear bomb. It also has a map of DC, and a calendar indicating the bomb will detonate in ten day's time. Glinn assigns Gideon to help track down the bomb, and Gideon works with an FBI Agent named Stone Fordyce.The pair of them go out west to Los Alamos, and try to check into Chalker's past. They interview Reed's ex-wife, now a member of a radical cult, his favorite novelist, Simon Blaine, and the members of Chalker's mosque. On their way to Chalker's writers workshop in California, the plane Fordyce is flying suffers a malfunction in both engines, forcing them to crashland. Fordyce comments how unlikely this is to happen by accident, and concludes it was the result of sabotage. Gideon is framed for being a terrorist- incriminating emails are placed on his work computer, and he is forced into hiding. His reluctant accomplice in this is Alida Blaine, Simon's daughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Vengeance_(novel)"title="Cold Vengeance (novel)">
The conspiracy that murdered his wife is no more, but Pendergast will not rest until every last person involved is brought to justice. Chasing the final conspirator across the moors of Scotland, Pendergast stumbles into a far greater danger than he ever knew existed: the Covenant ("Der Bund" in German), a network of Nazis and Nazi sympathisers that have retreated from public view to influence events on a global scale.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Circus"title="The Dead Circus">
It is set in 1986 and following the storyline of Kaye's first novel "Stars Screaming," Gene Burk has just lost his fiancée in an airplane crash. Afraid that he will lose himself entirely to his grief, Gene starts to obsess over the 20-year-old mysterious death of rockabilly newcomer Bobby Fuller. He had worked the case, unsuccessfully, when he was a cop with the LAPD, and as he begins to reopen old leads, he starts to shake up the wrong people, putting his own life in danger. Gene is then contacted by Alice McMillan, a former member of the Manson family who needs his help in putting that life behind her once and for all. They ultimately venture off together into Death Valley in search of Charles Manson's 16 mm snuff films that may contain the answers Gene is looking for regarding the circumstances of Fuller's death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passage_to_Nirvana"title="Passage to Nirvana">
"Passage to Nirvana" begins with Carlson's accident, when he was hit by a car standing outside a car wash, striking his head violently on the pavement, fracturing his skull, lapsing into a light coma and sustaining a traumatic brain injury, with bleeding on the brain and other damage. The story follows him through his brief hospitalization, then a year-long rehab in Florida, then his return to the North Fork of Long Island where he tries to rebuild his shattered life. His wife has left him and moved away with their children, his business has evaporated, he has no home and has to begin with noting to renew his life. During his year in Florida he also helps care for his mother, who is severely disabled from her own traumatic brain injury sustained when she fell down a flight of basement stairs. She is in a wheelchair, unable to walk, talk or feed herself. While he is in Florida, his mother eventually dies. Upon returning to Long Island, more misfortunes seem to continue: his aunt dies of cancer, as does his brother-in-law, and he returns to Buffalo to help his sister and her children while his brother-in-law is in the hospital.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dwarf_(Cho_novel)"title="The Dwarf (Cho novel)">
"The Dwarf" is a work of social criticism which focuses on the forced redevelopment of Hangbook-dong (행복동) in Seoul in the 1970s, and the human costs that accompanied it."The Dwarf" revolves around a literal “little guy,” and his family and friends, and their changing economic and social relationships which are destroyed by Korean modernization. The book follows the dwarf’s stunted existence through nasty cityscapes. A short cast of characters cycles in and out of the stories in anachronistic order.The dwarf lives in the Felicity District in Eden Province. The District is chosen for redevelopment and the dwarf and his family are evicted. The dwarf eventually commits suicide in a factory smokestack while his family is sundered. Family members argue that society has misjudged the dwarf, by seeing his height and not his skills. This focus on literal measure is a subtle irony which references several aspects of modernization, including the necessities of measuring everything, regularizing the size of everything, and commodifying everything. At the time the novel was being written the Park government roamed the streets of Seoul, its fashion police literally measuring the hair-length of men and the skirt-length of women. In the factories, meanwhile, standardization, routinization and the tyranny of the time clock erased human differences between workers when not actually erasing humanity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Evolution"title="Masters of Evolution">
In the near future, the world is divided into two antagonistic groups: city dwellers and country dwellers, called "muckfeet". The muckfeet control most of the land area and have a much higher population. The mayor of New York convinces a popular actor, Alvah Gustad, to negotiate an agreement with the muckfeet: technology in exchange for their scarce metals. Alvah reluctantly agrees and is given a chance to present his wares at a fair in the Midwest. No one is interested; an altercation ensues and Alvah realizes that he is stranded. He is taken in by a pretty young woman named B. J.; gradually he comes to accept and understand the muckfeet way of life, which includes novel uses of genetic engineering in place of machines. Alvah falls in love with B. J. and when the cities launch an attack on the muckfeet, Alvah is forced to reexamine his beliefs about the superiority of the city way of life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_Wild_Chronicles"title="Rain Wild Chronicles">
The series is set in the Rain Wilds, a forested region where people live in houses built in the branches of trees. Below the trees runs the Rain Wild river, whose acidic waters make the region inhospitable; disfigurement and scaly skin are commonly experienced by the residents of the region. As the series begins, a set of dragon eggs given to the people hatch, but the dragons turn out to be stunted, with ill-formed wings, and are unable to fly. A group of dragon keepers is tasked with transporting the eggs to a mythical, long-lost city: Kelsingra, the ancient home of dragons and their servants, the Elderlings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Light,_City_of_Dark"title="City of Light, City of Dark">
An enigmatic race of beings known as the "Kurbs" are introduced at the story's outset. Except as serpentine extensions of shadow, they are rarely seen, and thrive only in darkness. Utilizing something called the "Power", they are able to control the rhythm of day and night. When humans first arrived on Manhattan Island (a place of apparent significance to the Kurbs), a treaty was signed: the "Ritual Cycle of Acknowledgment". The Kurbs would loan the island out for human use, and even share their source of power. But there were conditions: in synchronization with the summer and winter solstices, the source of "Power" would be ritualistically hidden somewhere on the island, and if it was not found in time, the Kurbs would reclaim the island, and everything would freeze. Over the years, the "Power" was hidden inside different objects, including an ear of corn, a musket ball, an oil lamp and, most recently, a subway token. A lineage of women were given the responsibility of carrying out the "Ritual Cycle Of Acknowledgment", and were granted special powers through the Kurbs' source of "Power", as well.This system works for centuries until evil Mr. Underton tried to steal the "Power" a few years back, and lost his eyesight. Now he is close to stealing it once again, and if he succeeds, the Kurbs will take back the City, reducing it to a dark and frozen tundra. It's up to two kids named Carlos and Sarah to find the subway token with the "Power" and keep the City safe, despite secrets of Sarah's history that are entwined with the token. What ensues is a race against darkness. A race against the lies of the past. And most of all, a race against time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Directive_(novel)"title="Prime Directive (novel)">
On a local moon of Talin IV, a Federation first contact observation post is monitoring the events on the planet below with growing confusion and concern. Talin IV, a world inhabited by a reptilian society with a culture equivalent to late-20th century Earth, and possible first contact prospect for the Federation in the near future, is now a world divided. The two principal nation states of the planet have become increasingly paranoid and in danger of instigating a nuclear war. Provocations seem to be coming from each side, although both sides deny any intrusions into enemy space. Each nation's heightened security has made the UFP First Contact Office's work much harder, as detection has become more likely. Further complicating matters, Talin scientists have been researching naturally occurring dilithium crystals that may be capable of sensing the advanced subspace signals used by the galactic community. While the discovery of an interplanetary culture would allow for contact with the Federation, it is also possible the Talin will destroy themselves before they make that historic leap. To avoid accidentally revealing their presence and possibly affecting the delicate political situation, the Talin system is locked down by the First Contact Office, so no use of subspace or warp drive is permitted near the planet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Grew_Flowers"title="The Boy Who Grew Flowers">
"The Boy Who Grew Flowers" follows the character of Rink Bowagon, a little boy disliked among his peers that has the ability to sprout flowers on his body on full moons. This changes one day when a new girl named Angelina starts attending his class, causing Rink to become enamored of her. Rink has no way of knowing that like him, Angelina also has something special about her that he will eventually discover during the school's full moon dance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_a_Bad_Year"title="Diary of a Bad Year">
The protagonist, called Señor C. by the other characters, is an aging South African writer living in Sydney. The novel consists of his essays and musings alongside diary entries by both Señor C. and Anya, a neighbor whom he has hired as a typist. The essays, which take up the larger part of each page, are on wide-ranging topics, including the politics of George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Guantánamo Bay, and terrorism. The diary entries appear beneath the essays and describe the relationship that develops between the two characters, a relationship that ultimately leads to subtle evolutions in both their worldviews.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_of_Kazan"title="The Star of Kazan">
The story opens with two Viennese servants, Ellie and Sigrid, who, on their day off, discover a newborn baby girl left behind in a church of the alpine village of Pettelsdorf. With the infant is a note asking for her to be taken to a nunnery in Vienna, but when Ellie and Sigrid find that the nunnery is in quarantine for typhus, they decide to take the baby home and raise her as their own. They name her Annika after Ellie's mother and decide not to give her away after the typhus quarantine is over.Twelve years pass and it is now 1908. For Annika, life in Vienna is perfect. She attends a local school whilst helping the adult maids with the day-to-day duties of running the household, has her friends, Pauline and Stefan, and loves her adopted family (Ellie and Sigrid, and the three professors who they all work for) very much.Annika is asked by Loremarie Egghart, a snobby rich girl whom Annika despises, to read to her great-aunt. Annika does so and the two (Annika and Loremarie's great aunt) become friends, telling each other about their lives. Loremarie's great aunt was a famous theatre personality who went by the stage name La Rondine. They become so close that the great-aunt leaves Annika her jewels when she dies, having been told that the jewels are pastings of the real ones which she had sold through a jeweler.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Capricorn"title="Beyond Capricorn">
The title of the book refers to the sixteenth century Dieppe maps of France which in part show land in a continent extending south of the Tropic of Capricorn that is in the area of Australia. Trickett claims that the Portuguese were the first Europeans to discover Australia, between 1519–23, well before the first recognised landfall of Europeans in Australia in 1606 by Willem Janszoon. According to Trickett, a 1520 expedition searching for gold and led by Diogo Pacheco (a relative of Duarte Pacheco), may have been the first Europeans to sight Australia, in the present-day Kimberley region of Western Australia. Using an account from João de Barros's "Décadas da Ásia", a 1786 history of the Portuguese empire in Asia, Trickett argues Pacheco was killed at Napier Broome Bay, in a battle with Aborigines. Trickett claims the Carronade Island cannons originate from this voyage.Most of the book, however, focuses on the claimed voyage of a fleet of four ships commanded by Cristóvão de Mendonça, along the eastern and southern coasts of Australia then to New Zealand shortly afterwards, and another Portuguese voyage along the west coast. Trickett uses one of the Dieppe maps in the highly decorated "Vallard" atlas of 1547 to demonstrate this. Trickett claims that Mendonça travelled down the east coast of Australia, sailing into Botany Bay and then around Wilsons Promontory to Kangaroo Island, before returning to Portuguese-controlled Malacca via the North Island of New Zealand. He also claims the Portuguese charted the Western Australian coast, as far south as the southwest tip of Australia. Trickett claims that the French Vallard maps were composed of several portolan charts that were incorrectly assembled from now lost Portuguese charts. Trickett adjusts parts of the Vallard maps by rotating them 90 degrees, giving what he claims is a remarkably accurate depiction of Australia's eastern, southern, and western coasts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journals_of_Expeditions_of_Discovery_into_Central_Australia"title="Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia">
The party left Adelaide late in the morning of June 18, 1840, and after 12 miles of travel, they arrive at their first bivouac site in a place called little Parra. Upon arrival, Eyre had the leisure of reflecting the prospects of the future of this expedition which he described the whole experience as unrealistic and dreamy as they are suddenly thrown into the silence and solitude of the wilds from the crowded civilized life. He describes the main mission of this expedition, which is to penetrate deep into the mainland of Australia and uncover the mystery of the land which was unvisited by anyone except what Eyre described as ‘savages’ and wild beasts and eventually discovers and plant the flag in the habitable part of the region. Eyre worried about the difficulty of the trip late in the night as the rest of the party sleep, because from the experience of expeditions of Eyre in 1839, he concludes that the further in the north of the country, the drearier and desolate the appearance of land become and the difficulty of acquiring water and grass soars as well. After 8 days of journey through the valley, the great plain and encounter the difficulty of crossing the river through heavy fog, the party discover some grassy and picturesque ranges, which Eyre names its Campbell’s range. Eyre describes this land as scenery, fertile, and the most desirable location among the unoccupied parts of South Australia to raise cattle and sheep. After 3 miles of travel, the party across a high barren open country passing under a peak connected to Campell’s ranges which Eyre names its Spring Hill. Near Spring Hill, the party encounters one scrawny elderly Aboriginal, alone without fire and food. Eyre determined that the man was abandoned by his tribe because the native tribe must travel always through a great extent of land for daily food therefore could not afford to be impeded by travelling with the sick and old. Though Eyre described it took long before he can repress melancholy train of thoughts, the party left the old man behind. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelfth_Imam"title="The Twelfth Imam">
The plot revolves around David Shirazi, a young CIA operative of Persian descent, who is assigned to stop Iran from developing nuclear power.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Dogs_(novel)"title="Mad Dogs (novel)">
Following the collapse of KMG (Keith Moore's Gang) at the end of "", rival drug gangs the Mad Dogs and the Slasher Boys engage in a violent turf war for control of the Luton underworld. Cherubs Gabrielle O'Brien and Michael Hendry are sent to infiltrate the Slasher Boys. While carrying out a delivery for Major Dee, the leader of the Slasher Boys, Gabrielle's contact is killed by members of rival gang the Runts and Gabrielle is grievously wounded after being stabbed by a Runt.Meanwhile, James Adams and his new girlfriend Dana Smith are helping on the last few days of normal training as instructors. While there, Ukrainian instructor Yosyp Kazakov is accidentally knocked out when trainee Kevin Sumner throws a smoke canister at him. The seven trainees, realising it will be hours before Dana returns with head instructor George Pike, overpower and bind James. When Dana and Pike return they free James. Pike is unable to fail all the trainees, so they decide to punish Kevin and his friend Ronan Welsh by ordering them to stand to attention holding rifles until dawn. James feels guilty about the severity of the punishment, but Kazakov tells him that "a soldier is only as tough as the person who trains them".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomsk_(novel)"title="Atomsk (novel)">
Drawing on Linebarger's own expertise in the field of psychological warfare, the book is a study of the personality of a U.S. operative (Major Michael Dugan) who has little in common with James Bond except his extreme resourcefulness under cover and in danger. A man of many identities who sees himself to some extent as a blank sheet, he goes from calling himself "Comrade Nobody" to saying "I'm anybody". The novel also has an underlying, albeit devious and ambiguous, message of peace. As one character says, learning to like people is "the only way to win wars, or even better, to get out of them."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_New_Thing"title="The New New Thing">
The book is written with a comedic touch similar to that of the Lewis's earlier book "Liar's Poker". The book focuses on the founder of several Silicon Valley companies, James H. Clark, and the entrepreneurial culture that dominated the area during the height of the Internet boom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Breadwinner_(novel)"title="The Breadwinner (novel)">
Parvana is an 11-year-old girl who lives in Kabul, Afghanistan with her mother Fatana, her father, her bossy older sister Nooria, her cheerful younger sister Maryam and her baby brother Ali. Taliban soldiers enter her house and arrest her father for having a foreign education. Parvana and her mother go to the local jail and beg for her father to be freed, but the guards beat them for being so outspoken. Soon after, her mother becomes depressed and will not move from her toshak (thin mattress). Because Parvana's father can no longer work, her family situation becomes dire, as women are not allowed to travel outside the home unless accompanied by a related male in Afghanistan.Parvana meets with Mrs. Weera, a former physical education teacher, who comes to stay with Parvana's family to help Parvana's depressed mother and take charge of the household. Eventually, Parvana's mother begins to feel better and joins Mrs. Weera and a group of women to write the "Afghanistan National Magazine", smuggling it to and from Pakistan so it can be published.Her mother and Mrs. Weera decide to disguise Parvana as a boy by cutting her hair and dressing her in her deceased brother Hossain's old clothes so that she can buy groceries. She also continues her father's business of reading and writing letters for illiterate people. Parvana runs into a girl who she used to go to school with named Shauzia. They start a business partnership. Although they were never close in school, they bond trying to figure out ways to earn more money. They come up with an idea of a portable "shop" by using trays to move their wares around. However, they must first obtain money to buy trays. They find a way to earn money by digging up bones from graves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Magic_(novel)"title="Dark Magic (novel)">
The five-year period has passed; Gregori has come to San Francisco, where Savannah has ended her tour to claim her. The bombardment of new emotions prevents him from detecting the presence of a vampire. Before he can stop it, the vampire kills Savannah's friend Peter and attempts to claim her for himself. Gregori is forced to kill him in front of her. Savannah still refuses to bond with him; however Gregori informs her that there is no choice for either of them.Knowing that she's in shock and grief because of her friend, he takes her to his property to heal, intending to complete the mating ritual the next day. However, their closeness is too powerful to ignore and they begin to mate. Unfortunately, Gregori has waited to long and loses control and nearly kills Savannah. It is only her acceptance of him that pulls him back from the abyss.Now Savannah and Gregori must learn how to live with and love one another while staying one step ahead of the vampires and the human vampire hunting society who have targeted them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Dead_Live"title="How the Dead Live">
The story follows Lily Bloom's encounter with the afterlife after dying from cancer. After being transported to new lodgings near Dalston accompanied by her Aboriginal spirit guide Phar Lap Jones, Rude Boy her dead 9-year-old son and a lithopedion foetus she soon starts to adapt and learn the ways of the dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashforward_(novel)"title="Flashforward (novel)">
Lloyd Simcoe, a 45-year-old Canadian particle physicist, oversees a run of the Large Hadron Collider. He works with his fiancée Michiko Kamura, who has a daughter, Tamiko. The experiment unexpectedly brings about a vision of a plausible future in which the characters are twenty years older. The consequences include the death of Tamiko as an out-of-control vehicle plows into her school. No recording devices in the world function in the present during the event. Citing the absence of any human awareness during that time, this is interpreted as evidence of the observer effect in quantum theory.The deaths of several characters (the ones who see nothing) are forecast by the flashforward. This includes Lloyd's friend and fellow researcher Theo Procopides, who learns of a prediction that he will be killed. The story begins to take on the features of a murder mystery, as Theo attempts to prevent his own murder. As time goes by it becomes clear that the events of the future are not predestined. Some people, including Theo's brother Dimitrios, commit suicide after becoming depressed by visions of their own dismal futures. Other characters rush to make these futures a reality. Jake Horowitz from CERN sees himself participating in his first sexual relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Annwn"title="Prince of Annwn">
Pwyll, the prince of Dyved, offends Arawn, ruler of Annwn (the underworld), by baiting his hunting hounds on a stag that Arawn's dogs had brought down. In recompense he agrees to exchanges places with Arawn for a year. Arawn is pledged to fight his enemy Havgan, whom Walton represents as a member of a conquering eastern pantheon, by whom he is destined to be defeated unless the mortal takes his place.Pwyll must overcome a number of foes to reach the Land of the Dead, and additional perils on his way to face Havgan, the worst threat of all, a deity whose evil is masked by an attractive beauty. Nonetheless, Pwyll manages to overcome his foe. For the remainder of the year he enjoys the luxury and prerogatives of the lord of Annwn in Arawn's guise, until the time comes to trade places again. He does not, however, sleep with Arawn's wife, thus earning the lord of Annwn's gratitude.On his return to the mortal realm Pwyll encounters Rhiannon of the Birds, a beautiful maiden whose ambling horse cannot be overtaken. To win her hand he must overcome Gwawl, a rival suitor to whom she is betrothed. He ultimately succeeds by trapping Gwawl in a magic bag that can never be filled and having him beaten to death in the bag.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children_of_Llyr"title="The Children of Llyr">
Britain is ruled by the children of Llyr and Penarddun, the giant King Bran and his siblings Branwen and Manawyddan, together with their younger half-brothers Nissyen and Evnissyen, the offspring of Penarddun and Euroswydd. Branwen is given in marriage to Matholuch, king of Ireland. Angry that he was not consulted, Evnissyen, a tragic and haunted figure, insults Matholuch by mutilating his horses. Bran placates the Irish king by compensating him with new horses and treasure, including a magical cauldron which can restore the dead to life.Back in Ireland, Matholuch and Branwen have a son, Gwern, but Evnissyen's insult continues to rankle the Irish and Branwen is banished to the kitchen and beaten every day. Finally she gets a message to Bran, who responds by making war on Matholuch. His army sails across the Irish Sea, but Bran is so huge he wades across. The fearful Matholuch offers peace and agrees to step aside as king of Ireland in favor of Gwern.Matholwch builds a house big enough to entertain Bran. His followers, unrepentant, conceal themselves in the house inside a hanging hundred bags, supposedly containing flour. Evnissyen, suspecting treachery, reconnoitres the hall and kills the hidden warriors by crushing their heads inside the bags. Later, at the feast, the angry Evnissyen throws Gwern into the fire, precipitating a battle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divisadero_(novel)"title="Divisadero (novel)">
The novel centres on a single father and his children: Anna, his natural daughter; Claire, who was adopted as a baby when Anna was born; and Cooper (Coop), who was taken in "to stay and work on the farm" at the age of four when orphaned. The family lives on a farm in Northern California where Anna and Claire are treated almost as twins, while Cooper is treated more as "a hired hand". After Anna begins a sexual relationship with Coop, an incident of violence tears the family apart. The book then details each of the characters' separate journeys through life post-incident and how they are all interconnected.Later in her life, Anna moves to France to live in a farmhouse once owned by the French poet Lucien Segura whom she is researching. Meanwhile, Claire works for a law firm in San Francisco while visiting her father on the weekends, and Coop becomes a professional gambler working his way up and down the West Coast of the United States. The second part of the story explores the story of the French poet, which has a number of close parallels to the first part of the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Live_Forever_(novel)"title="To Live Forever (novel)">
The city of Clarges in the future is a near-utopia, surrounded by barbarism throughout the rest of the world. Abundant resources and the absence of political conflict lead to a pleasant life that should be stress-free. However, nearly everyone is obsessed with a perpetual scramble for longer life, as measured by "slope".Medical technology has led to a great lengthening of the human lifespan, but, in order to prevent the Malthusian horrors of overpopulation, it is awarded only to those citizens who have made notable contributions. Five categories have been created for those playing the life-extension game, the first four each offering an additional twenty years of life. One's progress can be shown as a graph, whose upward direction indicates a greater likelihood of achieving the next level. Therefore, the "slope" of one's "lifeline" is a measure of success. A person whose lifeline reaches the vertical terminator is not merely deprived of life-lengthening treatment, they are deliberately eliminated by government operatives, known as "Assassins".The ultimate prize is the top category, called "Amaranth", which offers true immortality to the fortunate few. People who achieve this distinction are accorded the honorific "The" in front of their name.The Grayven Warlock was one of those few, but he has become a fugitive after a feud with another Amaranth resulted in the latter's death. Masquerading as his own "relict" (clone) using the name Gavin Waylock, he lives in obscurity, looking for the accomplishment that will reinstate him among the immortals. However, Waylock's dramatic stratagems result in changes to society far beyond anything he had intended.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amber_Witch"title="The Amber Witch">
The story is set during the Thirty Years' War. The purported author, Reverend Abraham Schweidler, almost loses his only child, Maria, to a plot by a rejected suitor, Sheriff Appelmann, who has accused Maria of practicing witchcraft. In this he was aided by an evil and jealous woman of the neighborhood.After a trial and under threat of the most dire torture, Maria, wholly innocent of the crime, confesses. While on her way to the stake, she is rescued by a courageous young nobleman who loves her and who exposes the evil plot against her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_Banshee_Towers"title="The Mystery of Banshee Towers">
During a school holiday, the children are told by their parents to spend their time visiting sites in the surrounding countryside, rather than searching for mysteries in the village. The children visit an old stately home, Banshee Towers, which is exhibiting famous sea paintings, which Ern and Bets love. The Towers are reputedly haunted and wailing noises are driving visitors away. On a subsequent visit, Ern spots that a small boat he admired on the painting is missing. On pointing this out to the owner, the children unwittingly place themselves in danger. After investigating, they discover the owner of the Towers has been conspiring with an art forger and a second member of staff to replace the collection with copies and sell the originals. The novel ends with Fatty saying they will have many more mysteries to solve.This book is a standalone in that the Five Find Outers enter a cave and a secret passage for the first time in their history, more resembling the Famous Five. The mystery is not divided up by assigning investigative tasks to each of the five children as was normally the case, and Fatty more or less solves this one on his own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Mind_the_Goldbergs"title="Never Mind the Goldbergs">
Living in Los Angeles is Hava's first experience living outside the Orthodox Jewish world, however, and she finds herself questioning her relationship to Judaism, to Orthodoxy, and to God. These are illustrated through quirky, often humorous episodes, including one where Hava is unwittingly kept working until Shabbos, and another where she stumbles into a man who may or may not be Orson Welles. The book's unconventional tone and unpredictable nature have elicited comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut and Francesca Lia Block. The book's centerpiece, a scene where Hava and her friend Moish flee the sitcom set and road-trip to Berkeley, California. Some of the personalities are based on real people, including an Orthodox film director and a Hasidic rebbetzin who is also a hip-hop M.C.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matriarch_(novel)"title="Matriarch (novel)">
Mohan Rayat and Lindsay Neville have been sent to the bottom of the ocean, after having been infected with "c'naatat" in the World Before, to spend forever living with the bezeri to help them rebuild and recover. But first they must undergo cellular reconstruction in order to survive in the depths, which happens at an astounding rate. Ade Bennett and Aras have the unpleasant duty to tell Shan Frankland, their "isan", what they did. Since Shan threw herself into deep space to keep "c'naatat" from Rayat and Earth's government, she was not pleased that the symbiont was just given to them. She tells Esganikan of the Eqbas Vorhi about the development and she agrees to take precautions against it being spread.Neville and Rayat are changed people, literally. They have developed gills and can sense their surroundings using sonar. The bezeri have put them to work extracting maps from a contaminated zone that the bezeri cannot enter. Rayat wants to acquire the bioluminescence ability that Shan has so he can try to communicate with the bezeri without the aid of the translation lamp. Shan had acquired bioluminescence in a previous encounter and passed that on to Ade. He in turn would have passed that on to Rayat and Neville when he infected them but this has not manifested itself. In an effort to make it manifest, Rayat asks for cells from the bezeri. The matriarch of the group brings the body of a youth that has recently died and Rayat and Lindsay put some of its tissue and blood into their own bloodstream.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Soul"title="History of the Soul">
The book is divided into seven chapters or "gates", each corresponding to one of the seven generations of the masters, martyrs, and common people of the Jahriyya Order. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellucidar_(novel)"title="Pellucidar (novel)">
David Innes and his captive, a member of the reptilian Mahar master race of the interior world of Pellucidar, return from the surface world in the Iron Mole invented by his friend and companion in adventure Abner Perry.Emerging in Pellucidar at an unknown location, David frees his captive. He names the place Greenwich and uses the technology he has brought to begin the systematic exploration and mapping of the unknown land while searching for his lost companions, Abner, Ghak, and Dian the Beautiful. He soon encounters and befriends a new ally, Ja the Mezop of the island country of Anoroc; later he finds Abner, from whom he learns that in his absence the human revolt against the Mahars has not been going well.In a parlay with the Mahars, David bargains for information of his love Dian and his enemy Hooja the Sly One, which his foes agree to supply in return for the book containing the Great Secret of Mahar reproduction that David stole and hid in the previous novel. David undertakes to recover it, only to find that Hooja has been there before him and claimed Dian as his own reward of the Mahars!Now he has to track down and defeat the sly one before resuming the human war of independence. Ultimately this is accomplished, and with the aid of the resources David has brought from the surface world he and Abner succeed in building a confederacy of human tribes into an "Empire of Pellucidar" that wipes out the Mahar cities and establishes a new human civilization in their place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Voices,_Other_Rooms_(novel)"title="Other Voices, Other Rooms (novel)">
After his mother's death, 13-year-old Joel Harrison Knox, a lonely, effeminate boy, is sent from New Orleans to live with his father, who abandoned him at birth. Arriving at Skully's Landing, a vast, decaying mansion on an isolated plantation in Mississippi, Joel meets his sullen stepmother Amy; her cousin Randolph, a gay man and dandy; the defiant tomboy Idabel, a girl who becomes his friend; and Jesus and Zoo, the two black caretakers of the home. He also sees a spectral "queer lady" with "fat dribbling curls" watching him from a top window. Despite Joel's queries, the whereabouts of his father remain a mystery. When he finally is allowed to see his father, Joel is stunned to find he is a mute quadriplegic, having tumbled down a flight of stairs after being accidentally shot by Randolph and nearly dying. Joel runs away with Idabel to a carnival and meets a woman with dwarfism; on a Ferris wheel, Joel rebuffs her when she attempts to touch Joel in a sexual manner. Looking for Idabel in a storm, Joel catches pneumonia and eventually returns to the Landing, where he is nursed back to health by Randolph. The implication in the final paragraph is that the "queer lady" beckoning from the window had actually been Randolph, dressed in an old Mardi Gras costume.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_of_Domestic_Animation"title="Encyclopedia of Domestic Animation">
The encyclopedia was written by Sergey Kapkov and compiled with the help of several journalists and editors over the course of a few years. A huge amount of information was gathered from interviews with living members of the profession. This was partly out of necessity because of the destruction of some archives in the post-Soviet period, notably that of Soyuzmultfilm. Letters with requests for help were sent out to all of the former Soviet republics, though in some countries such as Estonia and Georgia they were totally ignored. Because so much information was dependent on oral sources, it was decided not to call it an academic edition. Kapkov said of the book, "we are not insured from some possible mistakes".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Leapt_Through_Time"title="The Girl Who Leapt Through Time">
Kazuko Yoshiyama, a third-year middle school student, is cleaning the school science lab with her classmates, Kazuo Fukamachi and Gorō Asakura, when she smells a lavender-like scent and faints. After three days, events transpire around Kazuko, including the burning of Gorō's house after an earthquake. The next morning, at the exact moment of a car accident, Kazuko is transported 24 hours into the past.She relives the day and relates her strange experience to Kazuo and Gorō. They do not believe her at first, but they are convinced when she accurately predicts the earthquake and ensuing fire. Goro also almost gets hit by a truck but Kazuko knows and tells him, so it adds to Goro believing her even more. They go to see Fukushima, their science teacher, explains Kazuko's new ability as "teleportation" and "time-leap". To solve the riddle of her power, she must leap back four days.Finally, Kazuko's determination enables her to make the leap. Back in the science room, she meets a mysterious man who has assumed her friend Kazuo's identity. He is really "Ken Sogoru", a time-traveler from AD 2660. His intersection with the girl's life is the accidental effect of a "time-leaping" drug. Ken remains for a month, and Kazuko falls in love with him. When he leaves, he erases all memories of himself from everyone he has met, including Kazuko. As the book ends, Kazuko has the faint memory of somebody promising to meet her again every time she smells lavender.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borgel"title="Borgel">
The story is narrated by the young Melvin Spellbound who joins his eccentric Uncle Borgel and pet dog Fafner on an intergalactic adventure involving time travel and multiple alternate realities.Travelling along the Interstate Highway connecting the various realities, Borgel is separated from the others by a mischievous teleportation (called a 'bilbok'), and Melvin and Fafner stranded at a roadside root beer stand. Having waited for him, Melvin and Fafner take control of his car, and recover Borgel "en route". Thereafter the three rest at a public campsite, where they acquire a new companion in 'Pak Nfbnm*', alias 'Freddie': a self-professed expert on popsicles, in search of an immortal 'Great Popsicle' whose existence maintains the integrity of the Universe. Pursuing that search, they receive directions from a computer made in the image of the Popsicle, to the anthropomorphic gorilla 'Glugo', who conveys them to an island on the River Styx. There, and elsewhere, Freddie is identified as a Grivnizoid, a shape-changing, cephalopod-like predator, desirous of achieving insurmountable power. Can they stop Freddie in time and save the world?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_of_Maize"title="Men of Maize">
The novel deals with the conflict between two types of men: the ones who consider maize to be a sacred food (the indigenous people of Guatemala); and those who view it simply as a commercial product. It exposes the devastating effects capitalism and international companies had on the lives of Guatemalan maize growers, having a profound effect on their customs, ancestral beliefs and cultural identity. The novel is generally considered to be part of the literary genre known as Magic Realism. As such, it delves into the richness of native culture and oral tradition and touches themes such as: myths and legends, songs, native wisdom and lore, nahualism, magic and animal spirits.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aura_(novel)"title="Aura (novel)">
Felipe Montero is a young historian looking at the newspaper one day when he sees a job posting that catches his eye. The poster is looking for a French-speaker, youthful, passionate about history, and able to perform secretarial duties, who would be a live-in assistant to help organize and finish the memories of her deceased husband, General Llorente. This strikes Montero because he feels as though the posting is describing everything about him, and only lacks his name. For a few days, Montero ignores the posting, assuming someone will have already taken the job, but every day Montero returns to the newspaper, eventually unable to avoid it anymore. The posting gives the address "Donceles 815", a street mixed with old and new houses, side by side.Upon arriving at the address, Montero finds the house to be completely dark, with the door ajar, as if the owner were waiting for him to arrive. Montero then enters the dark house, and hears a voice in the darkness calling to him. The voice guides him through the dark house, upstairs, to a room where an old widow, Consuelo, is lying in her bed. The old widow appears to be expecting Montero, and immediately begins to explain what she needs Montero to do: organize, finish, and publish her dead husband's journals before her death. While she is explaining this task to Montero, the widow's niece, Aura, enters the room. Montero is mesmerized by the young niece's beauty ‒ especially her bright green eyes. Shortly after, the widow directs Montero to the room where he will be living. Montero passes the night in his room, where only a small amount of light is provided.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_House_in_the_Big_Woods"title="Little House in the Big Woods">
The novel describes the homesteading skills Laura observed and began to practice during her fifth year. It does not contain the more mature (yet real) themes addressed in later books of the series (danger from American Indians, serious illness, death, drought, and crop destruction). Hard work is the rule, though fun is often made in the midst of it. Laura gathers wood chips, and helps Ma and Pa when they butcher animals and preserve the meat. This is all in preparation for the upcoming winter. Fall is a very busy time, because the harvest from the garden and fields must be brought in as well.The cousins come for Christmas that year, and Laura receives a rag doll, which she names Charlotte. Later that winter, the Ingalls go to Grandma Ingalls’ house and have a “sugaring off,” when they harvest sap and make maple syrup. They return home with buckets of syrup, enough to last the year. Laura remembered that sugaring off, and the dance that followed, for the rest of her life.Each season has its work, which Laura makes attractive by the good things that result. In the spring, the cow has a calf, so there is milk, butter and cheese. Everyday housework is also described in detail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Other_Worlds"title="In Other Worlds">
Carl Schirmer's life is transformed when he is turned into energy by an eighth-dimensional being and transported to a faraway world at the edge of a black hole.What follows is a thrilling ride similar to Flash Gordon involving a woman from the end of time, a man who can live off sunlight, and an alternate, paradisaical Earth in which World War II never happened.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_Against_Time_(Nancy_Drew)"title="Race Against Time (Nancy Drew)">
In "Race Against Time", Nancy Drew is a "movie star." Ned's college film club is making a spooky vampire movie set in an old deserted mansion — and Nancy is the star! The popular detective has also been asked to model in a series of TV commercials for a new beauty product.As if that were not enough to keep Nancy busy, she has a couple of cases to solve. A valuable racehorse has been stolen from a nearby farm. It is up to Nancy to figure out which of its owner's many enemies may have taken the prize thoroughbred. There's also another mystery around. Someone keeps disturbing the film club as they are shooting their film. When a building goes up in flames, it is time to take the disruption seriously!Nancy has two deadlines to beat — to return the missing horse before its big race and to help Ned and his friends finish their horror film — before some mysterious force ruins everything!
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Song_of_Rhiannon"title="The Song of Rhiannon">
In the wake of the tragedy that befell the Children of Llyr, Prince Pryderi of Dyved returns to his realm with Manawyddan, the last survivor of the family. There Pryderi is reunited with his wife Cigfa and Manawyddan marries Pryderi's mother Rhiannon.An enchantment descends on the land, leaving it a wasteland empty of all domesticated animals and humans apart from the four protagonists. They support themselves by hunting at first, then move to the larger realm of Llogres where they make a living making saddles, shields and shoes. Their work is of such quality that the local craftsmen cannot compete, and drive them from town to town.Finally they return to Dyved and become hunters again. Pryderi and Manawyddan follow a white boar to a mysterious castle. Against Manawyddan's advice Pryderi goes inside, and does not return. Rhiannon goes to investigate and finds Pryderi clinging to a bowl, unable to speak. The same fate befalls her, and the castle disappears.Manawyddan and Cigfa return to Llogres as shoemakers, but are once again forced to leave so they return to Dyved. They sow three fields of wheat, but the first is destroyed before it can be harvested. The next night the second field is destroyed. Manawyddan watches over the third field, sees it destroyed by mice, and catches one of them. He decides to hang it for theft the next day.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Bass's_Planetoid"title="Mr. Bass's Planetoid">
The boys hunt for Prewytt Brumblydge, inventor of the Brumblitron, which is threatening to explode, destroying the Earth. This time, instead of journeying to Basidium, they fly to an airless rock named Lepton that orbits 1,000 miles above the Earth's surface. This novel introduces the fictional metal "Brumblium", a greenish metal that shows as infragreen on a spectroscope and has twice the density of uranium.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_IHOP_Papers"title="The IHOP Papers">
"The IHOP Papers" follows the life of Francesca, a disgruntled twenty-year-old virgin lesbian, originally from Southern California who falls in love with her female junior college professor, Irene. After spending some time together, Irene tells Francesca of her plan to undertake a sabbatical in San Francisco, a move that will involve residing with two of her former students—a man and a woman—who are both Irene's lovers. After revealing her amorous feelings to Irene in a letter, Francesca decides to follow her to San Francisco.In San Francisco, Francesca moves in with Irene and her lovers, Jenny and Gustavo, in an apartment they have nicknamed "Simplicity House," where simple living and nonviolence are practiced. Initially unemployed, Francesca proceeds to search for a job and becomes a hostess at an IHOP; she is quickly promoted to a waitressing position. After a month in San Francisco, Francesca leaves Simplicity House in order to have her own apartment.The remainder of the story follows Francesca and her intense love for Irene. Along the way, while still in love with Irene, Francesca falls in love with other women, including Jenny, Maria, Francesca's Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, and at least two other women. A significant portion of the book is devoted to Francesca's loathing for job, especially her uniform.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duluth_(novel)"title="Duluth (novel)">
One of the experimental texts Vidal refers to as his "inventions", "Duluth" describes both a novel written about Duluth (that, bordered on one side by Minneapolis and on the other by Michigan, bears scant resemblance to the real city) and a television seriesof the same name; when residents of the city die, they end up as characters in the TV show, who can in some cases continue interacting with the living through the TV screen. When members of the cast of "Duluth", the TV show, die, they become characters in "Rogue Duke", a romance novel serialized in the pages of "Redbook", the popular women's magazine.The author of all three, Rosemary Klein Kantor, is herself a character in the book, making cameo appearances throughout. She generates texts with the aid of a computer, adding to its numerous geographical and historical errors her mangled clichés ("Bellamy Craig II plays hardball..."in the fast lane"!") and unusual grammatical constructions ("Her handcuffs now handcuffed her hands"). However, there is in the city of Duluth a mysterious cerise flying saucer whose insectoid alien inhabitants, after meddling in the spectacularly corrupt politics of the city, use an accidental tense shift to seize control of the computer, erasing the human race from the face of the earth and bringing the book to an end.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homecoming_(novel)"title="Homecoming (novel)">
"Homecoming," set around the late 1970s, tells the story of four siblings aged between six and thirteen, whose mother abandons them one summer afternoon in their car next to a Connecticut shopping mall during an aborted road trip to a family member in Bridgeport. Realizing that their mother is not coming back, and that they cannot go home (as their father walked out before the youngest child was born), the children travel together, mostly on foot, trying to reach Bridgeport. There, they hope to find their missing mother at the home of a relative they have never met. The children find themselves on a journey that is emotional as well as literal; during their weeks on the road, their adventures and the people they meet along the way help them to find out more about who they are and what is important to them, as well as to cope with the loss of their mother and to understand society's reaction to her poverty, isolation, mental illness, and the fact that she was an unmarried mother of four.Thirteen-year-old Dicey Tillerman, and her siblings James (10), Maybeth (9) and Sammy (6), lived in a wooden house out in the dunes in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The family is poor, their father walked out just before Sammy was born, and only Dicey retains any memory of him. Their mother worked herself too hard (physically and emotionally) to take care of her four children and make ends meet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Amerika"title="Russian Amerika">
History suggests that the year is Summer of 1987 as the book begins.Most of the plot follows a mixed-raced man named Gregori Grogorievich. A decorated but disgraced Imperial Russian Army Major, Gregori has left the military for a maritime life in Southeastern Alaska and has a sport fishing boat which he uses for charters and occasional smuggling. He is hired one day by a Tsarist government official to make a rendezvous with a mysterious woman named Valari Kominskiya, but things go badly. The official gets drunk and tries to rape Valari and kill Gregori, but the official is killed in self-defense and thrown overboard. As Gregori tries to find out how to get out of Russian Amerika with Valari for political asylum, he is betrayed by her, as Valari is actually a spy and a high-ranking officer in the Russian Army. Gregori is captured by the government and falsely charged with the murder of the official (who was actually Valari's superior) and with the attempted rape of Valari, leading to a sentence of life of hard labor on the Russian-Canadian Highway.After long winter months of being subjected to brutal slavery, he and a group of other prisoners are rescued by a band of native Alaskans and are taken into the wilderness to evade the Russian manhunters called "promyshlennik" sent to capture or kill the prisoners. It turns out that Gregori's native Alaskan rescuers are revolutionaries called the Dené Republik that seek to liberate their Yukon lands and Alaska itself from Imperial Russia which has driven them away from their home for hundreds of years. The revolutionaries offer Gregori a place in their ranks to fight the Russians. Without much choice to go back to his old life, and longing to have a chance to get revenge for being betrayed by the tyranny and corruption of the Tsarist government, Gregori joins the Alaskan forces. Throughout the winter of 1987 and early 1988, he and the other group of prisoners who also agree to join and fight their common enemy, are trained under the Dené to fight a guerrilla war against the Russian military scattered throughout Alaska while the Dené begin establishing the foundations of their would-be democracy of the new Alaska.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Snow_(novel)"title="The Snow (novel)">
The heroine of the story, Tira, is an Indian Londoner who initially survives the snowfall by staying on the surface of the snow. Once the snow begins to bury even the highest buildings, she meets a worker from the London Underground and they both survive by sheltering in a high-rise office building and living off supplies that they have cached and can forage for. The worker later dies after falling off a chair and breaking his leg. Tira lives on her own for an unspecified period before being rescued by "snow miners" from the New United States of America (referred to as NUSA). The miners are looking for currency to use in NUSA, and have mistaken her location of "Bank" as being an actual bank. They take her to a floating city called 'Liberty', which rests atop the snow, buoyed up by large hydrogen balloons. There she chooses an arranged marriage with a former military man, now a politician, and it is suggested he will be the next President of NUSA. (The General is not named – all instances of his name are censored as the text is implied to be part of an official history.) Tira chooses him on the recommendation of "Pander", one of the generals sycophantic aides. Tira never knows Pander's real name, only referring to him by nickname as he effectively sells Tira to the general and panders to the General's every whim. To Tira's surprise, the relationship initially works, and although she does not love the General, he accepts this and she lives in relative luxury and comfort, Tira considering the General a fair trade to any alternative.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bronze_Horseman_(poem)"title="The Bronze Horseman (poem)">
The poem is divided into three sections: a shorter introduction (90 lines) and two longer parts (164 and 222 lines). The introduction opens with a mythologized history of the establishment of the city of Saint Petersburg in 1703. In the first two stanzas, Peter the Great stands at the edge of the River Neva and conceives the idea for a city which will threaten the Swedes and open a "window to Europe". The poem describes the area as almost uninhabited: Peter can only see one boat and a handful of dark houses inhabited by Finnish peasants. Saint Petersburg was in fact constructed on territory newly gained from the Swedes in the Great Northern War, and Peter himself chose the site for the founding of a major city because it provided Russia with a corner of access to the Baltic Sea, and thus to the Atlantic and Europe.The rest of the introduction is in the first person and reads as an ode to the city of Petersburg. The poet-narrator describes how he loves Petersburg, including the city's "stern, muscular appearance" (l. 44), its landmarks such as the Admiralty (ll. 50–58), and its harsh winters and long summer evenings (ll. 59 – ll. 84). He encourages the city to retain its beauty and strength and stand firm against the waves of the Neva (ll. 85–91).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Statement_(novel)"title="The Statement (novel)">
Now 70 years old, Brossard has spent the better part of his life in hiding, traveling among the monasteries and abbeys that offer him asylum. Though he has evaded capture for decades with the help of the French government and the Catholic Church, now a new breed of government officials is determined to break decades of silence and expose and expiate the crimes of Vichy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stone_Key"title="The Stone Key">
When Elspeth sets out from Obernewtyn to Sutrium to testify at the trial of a rebel traitor, she quickly learns not everyone has welcomed the changes caused by the rebellion. Pitted against an invasion, Elsepth finds herself on her strangest and most dangerous journey yet. Drawn into the heart of the Herder Faction, she learns of the terrible plot to destroy the west coast. To stop it, Elspeth risks everything, for if she dies, she will never be able to complete her quest to destroy the weaponmachines which wiped out the Beforetime; but if she succeeds, it might just bring her to the final clue needed to find them...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Pool"title="The Moon Pool">
The plot concerns an advanced race which has developed within the Earth's core. Eventually their most intelligent members create an offspring. This created entity encompasses both great good and great evil, but it slowly turns away from its creators and towards evil. The entity is called either the Dweller or the Shining One.Eventually, of the race which created it, only three are left; these are called the Silent Ones, and they have been 'purged of dross' and can be described as higher, nobler, more angelic beings than are humankind. They have also been sentenced by the good among their race to remain in the world, and not to die, as punishment for their pride which was the source of the calamity called the Dweller, until such time as they destroy their creation—if they still can. And the reason they do not do so is simply that they continue to love it.The Dweller is in the habit of rising to the surface of the earth and capturing men and women whom it holds in an unholy stasis and who, in some ways, feed it. It increases its knowledge and power constantly, but has a weakness, since it knows nothing of love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeglader"title="Freeglader">
Freeglader starts in the capital of the Edge, Undertown. The city is slowly being destroyed by a dark maelstrom, triggered by Vox Verlix. The Undertowners begin a mass exodus, fleeing to a new life in a vast, beautiful area of justice and equality, the Free Glades. The exodus is led by Rook Barkwater, the hero of the story, and the others in a breakaway group of academics known as the librarian knights.On the journey to the Free Glades Rook gets caught up in a storm near the Twilight Woods, causing him to lose his memory. Upon reaching the Deepwoods the exodus is attacked by the recently hatched battle flocks of Shrykes. Only through the timely arrival of the Freeglade Lancers are the Librarians and Undertowners saved (combined with Xanth killing the Roost mother). Meanwhile, Amberfuce has reached the Foundry Glade. There he presents his partner with plans for Glade Eaters, special weapons designed by Vox Verlix. The two along with the Goblin Nations begin plans for an attack on the Free Glades.Rook, meanwhile having regained his memory, joins the Free Lancers. Xanth, his name cleared, joins the Librarian Knights. Everything is peaceful for several months until the attack comes. The massive Glade Eaters, backed by the armies of the Goblin Nations, destroy most of the Free Glades before being destroyed. The Sky Pirates, the Librarian Knights, the Freeglade Lancers and the Ghosts of Screetown fight determinedly but are outnumbered. Even the arrival of the banderbears fails to turn the tide. However, at the last minute large numbers of peaceful goblins revolt, killing the Goblin Chieftains. The war ends, and everyone sets about rebuilding the Free Glades.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Wild_(novel)"title="Into the Wild (novel)">
"Into the Wild" follows the integration of a house cat named Rusty into a group of feral cats living in a fictional forest inspired by the real world locales of New Forest, the woods about Loch Lomond, the Forest of Dean, and the Scottish Highlands. The group of cats are called ThunderClan, and share the fictional forest with three other groups of feral cats called RiverClan, WindClan, and ShadowClan.The novel opens with a battle between ThunderClan and RiverClan over a territorial dispute. ThunderClan is outnumbered and forced to retreat. In the aftermath, ThunderClan's medicine cat Spottedleaf receives a prophecy from StarClan, the spirits of the cats' deceased ancestors, telling her that "fire will save our Clan", which she shares with ThunderClan's leader Bluestar.When he ventures into the forest near his home, Rusty, a flame-coloured housecat, encounters Bluestar, ThunderClan apprentice Graypaw, and ThunderClan warrior Lionheart. They invite Rusty to join ThunderClan. However, due to Rusty's domesticated past, some members of the Clan are hostile towards Rusty upon his arrival in ThunderClan's camp. The hostility culminates in Rusty fighting one of ThunderClan's warriors, Longtail, losing his collar in the process. Bluestar then halts the fight and announces that Rusty has earned his apprentice name, Firepaw. Shortly after, ThunderClan's deputy Redtail is revealed to have died, and Bluestar names Lionheart the new deputy of ThunderClan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_and_Ice_(Hunter_novel)"title="Fire and Ice (Hunter novel)">
## Setting."Fire and Ice" takes place in a fictional forest which is home to four Clans of wild cats, ThunderClan, RiverClan, ShadowClan and WindClan, each of which lives in a territory best suited to their skills/abilities. The authors based the forest on New Forest in southern England.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_of_Secrets"title="Forest of Secrets">
## Setting."Forest of Secrets" is set in the same fictional forest as the previous two books in the series. The forest is home to four Clans of wild cats. The four Clans are ThunderClan, WindClan, RiverClan and ShadowClan. Each Clan has their own territory which they live in.The forest is based on New Forest in England. The setting was also influenced by Loch Lomond in the Scottish Highlands, and the Forest of Dean.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Storm_(novel)"title="Rising Storm (novel)">
## Setting."Rising Storm" takes place in a fictional forest. The forest is home to four Clans of wild cats, ThunderClan, WindClan, RiverClan and ShadowClan, each of which lives in a piece of territory suited to their skills/abilities.The forest is based on New Forest in Southern England. In addition to the New Forest, Loch Lomond, the Scottish Highlands, and the Forest of Dean also inspired the fictional locales in the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dangerous_Path"title="A Dangerous Path">
## Setting.The story takes place in a fictional forest populated by four groups of feral cats, ThunderClan, RiverClan, WindClan and ShadowClan. Each Clan has their own territory in which they live and hunt for prey in. They protect themselves from enemies such as rival Clans and wild animals. The story follows Fireheart and his adventures in ThunderClan.The forest is based on New Forest, which is located in Southern England. Besides New Forest, Loch Lomond, the Scottish Highlands, and the Forest of Dean also inspired the fictional locales in the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Darkest_Hour_(novel)"title="The Darkest Hour (novel)">
Firestar is the leader of ThunderClan, succeeding the former leader, Bluestar, when she drowned saving ThunderClan from a pack of wild dogs. As he receives his nine lives at the Moonstone, StarClan gives him a prophecy: "Four will become two, lion and tiger will meet in battle, and blood will rule the forest." Firestar chooses Whitestorm, a senior warrior who is well admired and respected, as his deputy. During the next Gathering, Tigerstar, ShadowClan’s treacherous leader, tries to unite all the clans as one, claiming that they would be stronger together. Leopardstar, RiverClan’s leader, agrees, but Tallstar, leader of WindClan, and Firestar both refuse to join this alliance, which Tigerstar has named "TigerClan". Later, Graystripe asks Firestar if he can quickly check on his kits in TigerClan. Firestar agrees, and he and Graystripe, accompanied by Ravenpaw, their old friend, all go to TigerClan. In TigerClan, they find Stormpaw and Featherpaw, Graystripe’s kits, along with Mistyfoot and Stonefur prisoners in TigerClan. The three friends rescue Stormpaw, Featherpaw and Mistyfoot, but Stonefur is killed by two ShadowClan warriors.In an attempt to force Firestar and Tallstar into joining his clan, Tigerstar introduces BloodClan, a group of rogue cats who live in alleys in Twoleg (human) territory. When ThunderClan and WindClan’s leaders still do not agree, Tigerstar orders BloodClan to fight for him, though the cats do not, for they take orders only from their leader, Scourge. Firestar then reveals the treachery Tigerstar has done, killing ThunderClan’s former deputy, Redtail, for power. Scourge then says that there will be no battle. Tigerstar, enraged, attacks Scourge, but Scourge kills him easily by slicing him from chin to tail with his claws. Scourge then warns the clans that they have three days to leave the forest, or else BloodClan will fight with them. In response, the clans unite as one and form an alliance called LionClan to face this threat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_(Hunter_novel)"title="Midnight (Hunter novel)">
More than a year has passed since the previous book, "The Darkest Hour". Bramblepaw, Tigerstar's son, has received his warrior name, Brambleclaw. Firestar has had two kits with Sandstorm, named Squirrelkit and Leafkit. Squirrelpaw is apprenticed to Dustpelt, and Leafpaw is apprenticed to Cinderpelt, in training to become the next medicine cat of ThunderClan. While Leafpaw and Cinderpelt search for herbs, StarClan, the cats' ancestors, sends Cinderpelt an ominous warning in some burning bracken, a picture of a tiger running through fire, which she interprets to mean that fire and tiger will destroy the forest. Cinderpelt concludes that the warning must be about Squirrelpaw and Brambleclaw, the daughter of Firestar and the son of Tigerstar. They share the warning with Firestar, who later decides to keep Brambleclaw and Squirrelpaw separated.In a dream, StarClan tells Brambleclaw, Feathertail (Graystripe's daughter), Crowpaw, and Tawnypelt (formerly Tawnypaw, Brambleclaw's sister) to listen to what "midnight" has to say. Eventually, they begin a journey in the direction of the setting sun. Squirrelpaw tags along and Stormfur insists on accompanying them to protect his sister, Feathertail, as the six cats trek into the unknown world. On their journey, they meet an old loner named Purdy who helps the Clan cats get to the sun-drown place (the Atlantic Ocean). Eventually, they reach the sun-drown-place and enter a cavern inhabited by a highly intelligent badger known as Midnight, able to speak the languages of cats, foxes, and badgers, who reveals to them that humans will destroy the forest and that the cats must either leave the forest or die. She also tells them that a dying warrior will lead the Clans to their new home. The book ends with a short epilogue back in the forest, where the humans begin to destroy ThunderClan's territory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonrise_(novel)"title="Moonrise (novel)">
## Setting and characters."Moonrise" takes place in several locations inspired by similar locales in the United Kingdom. With the exception of a disused mine, the forest in which the cats live is based largely on the New Forest. In addition, parts of the story take place by the ocean and in a fictitious mountain range.The main characters each come from one of four Clans: ThunderClan, RiverClan, ShadowClan, and WindClan. These main characters are known as Brambleclaw, Squirrelpaw, Tawnypelt, Crowpaw, Stormfur and Feathertail. All Clan cats share a belief in StarClan, a group of spirits usually represented by the stars, who are their ancestors and provide them with guidance. The Clans also follow identical hierarchy structures: Clans each have one leader, a deputy who is second-in-command, and a medicine cat who heals their Clanmates in addition to communicating with StarClan. The bulk of each Clan consists of warriors, who carry out hunting for food, patrol borders, and fight battles when they occur. Apprentices are younger cats who are in training to become warriors, or more rarely, medicine cats.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_(Hunter_novel)"title="Dawn (Hunter novel)">
## Setting."Dawn" takes place in three places: the Clans' original forest territory, the mountain range inhabited by the Tribe of Rushing Water, and the lake territory located at the very end of the book. The forest in the beginning is divided into four territories for the four Clans: ThunderClan, RiverClan, WindClan and ShadowClan. The forest is based on New Forest, which is in Southern England. Later, the Clans wander into the mountains in search of their new territory. There, they meet the Tribe of Rushing Water who give the Clans shelter and food. While with the Tribe, the Clans realize that the Tribe's spiritual ancestors are the Tribe of Endless Hunting, not StarClan: through this difference, the theme of religion is explored. After the Clans leave the Tribe, they arrive at the lake territory which the Clans decide will be their new home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Stir_of_Echoes"title="A Stir of Echoes">
Tom Wallace lived an ordinary life, until a chance event awakened psychic abilities he never knew he possessed. Now he's hearing the private thoughts of the people around him and learning shocking secrets he never wanted to know. But as Tom's existence becomes a waking nightmare, even greater jolts are in store as he becomes the unwilling recipient of a message from beyond the grave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlight_(novel)"title="Starlight (novel)">
The four Clans of warrior cats, ThunderClan, ShadowClan, RiverClan and WindClan, discover a lake which serves as their new home, replacing their old home which is destroyed by humans. The Clans temporarily set up camp by the lakeshore and decide that, the next day, they sort out their respective territories and look for a Gathering place to hold their monthly meetings under a truce. During a meeting, Firestar, leader of ThunderClan, calls up Squirrelpaw, his daughter who is an apprentice, and promotes her to the status of warrior, giving her the warrior name Squirrelflight. The next day, the leaders call upon the four remaining cats that go on the journey to the sun-drown-place in "Midnight", Brambleclaw, Squirrelflight, Crowfeather, and Tawnypelt, as well as Mistyfoot of RiverClan to explore around the lake and find camps for each Clan.The cats come across a location that seems ideal for RiverClan's fishing lifestyle. Continuing on, they find a coniferous forest which seems to suit ShadowClan. Desperate to prove herself by finding ThunderClan a camp, Squirrelflight runs ahead and accidentally falls down a large circular stone hollow. She recovers and realizes that it is a perfect place for a well-sheltered ThunderClan camp. The cats later cross a moorland which Crowfeather thinks suits WindClan's lifestyle of chasing rabbits. The five cats return and announce their findings to all of the other cats. The Clans decide to leave for their new camps the next day.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_(Hunter_novel)"title="Twilight (Hunter novel)">
WindClan and ThunderClan are still suffering from Mudclaw and Hawkfrost's attack on WindClan. Squirrelflight and Ashfur grow much closer as Squirrelflight's relationship with Brambleclaw deteriorates because of his friendship with his half-brother, Hawkfrost, whom Squirrelflight believes is untrustworthy. Onewhisker of WindClan travels to the Moonpool, earning his nine lives and leader name, becoming Onestar.Later in the book, Daisy, a farm cat, takes her three kits, Berry, Hazel, and Mouse, to join ThunderClan after Daisy witnesses the humans taking her friend Floss' kits away. Leafpool continues her forbidden love with Crowfeather a warrior of WindClan, and struggles with her feelings; she must choose between her Clan and her heart. Eventually, Cinderpelt confronts Leafpool about her romance when she is discovered with Crowfeather. The two medicine cats argue, and Leafpool decides to run away from the Clans with Crowfeather after Spottedleaf tells her to follow her heart. After a long night alone in the hills, Leafpool and Crowfeather return to the Clans when they hear of a badger attack on the Clans from Midnight the badger.During the badger attack, Sorreltail begins to have her kits, and Cinderpelt helps her while simultaneously fighting off the badgers. Although Sorreltail gives birth to four healthy kits, Cinderpelt is killed by a badger. ThunderClan begins to lose the battle, but WindClan shows up at the last minute, summoned by Midnight. Together, the two Clans manage to drive the badgers away. The story ends with Leafpool deciding to remain in ThunderClan as their medicine cat, rather than leaving the Clans to live with Crowfeather.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_(novel)"title="Sunset (novel)">
After the badgers' fierce attack destroys much of ThunderClan's camp, Brook Where Small Fish Swim (Brook) and Stormfur, old friends of ThunderClan, help to rebuild the camp. The battle is not without its consequences, as both the medicine cat Cinderpelt and the warrior Sootfur die. The battle rekindles Squirrelflight's love for Brambleclaw (following a conflict between the two during the previous book), leading her to have an argument a few days after with Ashfur, whom she had moved to following her separation from Brambleclaw.All of the Clans are grieving for the death of Cinderpelt. Leafpool finds herself struggling between grief and betrayal, for she has not seen Cinderpelt in the ranks of StarClan. During a visit to the Moonpool, where medicine cats share dreams with StarClan each month, former medicine cat Spottedleaf goes to Leafpool in a dream and shows her that Cinderpelt is reborn in the form of Cinderkit, one of Sorreltail's four kits whom Cinderpelt died protecting.After months of waiting and with persuasion from multiple characters, Firestar, leader of ThunderClan, finally declares that his friend and deputy Graystripe is not going to return after being abducted by humans in "Dawn". When a dream from StarClan, the spirits of the cats' ancestors, tells Leafpool that Brambleclaw should be the new deputy, Firestar agrees and appoints Brambleclaw as the new deputy. The decision is met with objection because Brambleclaw had never mentored an apprentice, a requirement for becoming deputy. The matter is cleared when Firestar declares that Brambleclaw will mentor Berrykit when the kit turns six months of age and mentions Leafpool's dream from StarClan to his warriors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sight_(Hunter_novel)"title="The Sight (Hunter novel)">
In the prologue, it is revealed that near the conclusion of "Firestar's Quest", a prophecy was sent to Firestar by a cat in StarClan. After a report of a fox and her cubs loose in ThunderClan territory, the three kits, Lionkit, Hollykit, and Jaykit, secretly leave camp and try to track down the foxes and help their Clan. They end up in trouble, but are saved by a patrol. A few moons later, Hollypaw becomes Leafpool's (the medicine cat) apprentice; Lionpaw becomes Ashfur's apprentice; and Jaypaw becomes Brightheart's apprentice. At a Gathering, all Clans have little to report. In the middle of the Gathering, two unknown cats appear. The Clans realize they are Graystripe, with a new friend, Millie. Graystripe was thought to have died when Twolegs took him away in "". Instead, he managed to escape with the help of Millie, and found the new home with the help of Barley and Ravenpaw. It turns out all of the forest was destroyed. The Clans leave, and Graystripe and Millie return to ThunderClan, exhausted.The return of Graystripe causes another problem. Firestar appointed Brambleclaw as the new deputy, assuming Graystripe had died, yet Graystripe was still alive. To help make the decision on who should be deputy, Firestar sends Leafpool to the Moonpool to talk with StarClan. Leafpool is told that Firestar needs to make his own choice. Jaypaw follows her and when Leafpool sees him, she is amazed. In the end, Brambleclaw stays as deputy since he knows the Clan (and the new territories) better.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_of_January"title="West of January">
The novel is set on a world called Vernier, on which the cycle of day and night lasts two hundred years. It describes the journey of discovery of Knobil, a herdsman born on the grasslands of Vernier.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vanished_Man"title="The Vanished Man">
The story centers around a serial killer loose in New York City whose slayings are patterned after illusionist tricks. When the killer illusionist uses his tricks to baffle and evade police, forensic expert Lincoln Rhyme and his longtime partner Amelia Sachs are brought in to investigate, setting off a tense cat-and-mouse chase where nothing is as it seems.The plot starts off with an introduction by Malerick, the antagonist in the story. Speaking in patter to his imaginary 'Revered Audience', he introduces the first trick he shall perform, The Lazy Hangman. The first victim is first cuffed at the hands and a cord is slipped over her neck. The other end of the cord is tied to her feet, and as the victim's legs tend to straighten over time, the cord around her neck is tightened and the victim strangles herself. However, Malerick is caught after committing the act by two patrol officers and flees the scene. The officers corner him in a locked room where he claims to have a hostage. They hear a gunshot, but when they charge in they find that the room is empty. Lincoln Rhyme is pulled into the case by Lon Sellitto, and through their combined effort, discovers that the killer had escaped from the scene much earlier, using a quick-change technique used by magicians (among other performers). The remaining evidence at the scene also points to a professional magician, hence Rhyme decides to rope in yet another civilian consultant: Kara, an aspiring magician.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Summer_Book"title="The Summer Book">
An elderly woman and her six-year-old granddaughter Sophia spend a summer together on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland exploring, talking about life, nature, everything but their feelings about Sophia's mother's death and their love for one another.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dies_the_Fire"title="Dies the Fire">
## The Bearkillers.Mike Havel is a former United States Marine, a veteran of the Persian Gulf War, and bush pilot. On March 17, 1998, at 6:15 pm PST, Havel is flying over the Bitterroot Mountain Range in Idaho during a mysterious event that become known as "The Change". His passengers are business owners Kenneth and Mary Larsson and their three teenage children, Erik, Signe, and Astrid. After the plane's engine and electronics are disabled, Mike makes an emergency landing. Everyone survives, although Mary is injured.The party hikes across mountains to a ranger cabin. Mike and Erik hike out onto the highway in hopes of finding help. After they get to the highway, they encounter white separatist survivalists who have Will Hutton (who is black) and his family prisoners. After a tense conversation with the survivalists, Mike and Erik attack them. During the battle, they manage draw the survivalists away, unfortunately leading them up the trail to the cabin with the rest of the Larsson family. Mike and Erik pursue them catching up to them after they re-captured Will and control the cabin. Mike and Erik attack the survivalists to free Will and the Larsson family. Prior to the fight, the survivalists murdered Mary Larson and were about to rape Astrid and Signe. All three survivalists are killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaves_of_Spiegel"title="Slaves of Spiegel">
At the beginning of the story, a community of obese space pirates inhabit the planet Spiegel, but periodically raid other planets for fattening food. At a feast celebrating their raids, the pirates' supreme commander 'Sargon the Great' initiates a new expedition for the three greatest cooks in the galaxy; at the conclusion whereof, the three finalists and their assistants are brought to a grand festival on Spiegel, and ordered to satisfy all the pirates in a contest of their skills, of which the winner's prize is the lifelong position of chief cook to the pirates themselves. Among the finalists are Steve Nickleson (the protagonist of an earlier book) and his assistant Norman Bleistift, whereof Norman serves as first-person narrator of nearly one-half of the text. Ultimately, Steve and Norman win the second prize of 600 pounds of Spiegelian blue garlic and transport home, which Steve later uses to create a "bright blue" pizza. The first place winner is forced to cook for the pirates forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_of_Drury_Lane"title="The Diamond of Drury Lane">
An orphaned 13-year-old girl named Catherine ‘Cat’ Royal lives in the Theatre Royal, after the owner, Mr. Sheridan, who named her after the theatre, found her as a baby. She knows well the Theatre and its surroundings, later 18th century England.One night Cat overhears Mr.Sheridan and his colleague Marchmont, discussing a valuable diamond hidden in the theatre. Cat is intrigued, but she promised to protect it for Mr. Sheridan after he tells her that nobody can know about it as it is difficult to know whom to trust with this secret.Cat befriends an African boy violinist, Pedro, who arrives to be the musician's apprentice. Cat also meets the aristocratic Avon family, the duke and duchess of Avon, and their children, Lord Francis and Lady Elizabeth, who are not as arrogant as other wealthy people, and actually want to be Cat's friends.She also meets Johnny, the new prompt with a rather unmistakable talent for art, specifically controversial political cartoons, and a mysterious past of which he does not speak much of, other than the fact he ran away from home at a young age. She learns that Johnny is the "Captain Sparkler" accused of treason for the cartoons against the King of England. Cat soon also finds out that Johnny had had a romantic past with Lady Elizabeth, and would possibly be bidding for her in the marriage market if his situation was different.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Graveyard_Book"title="The Graveyard Book">
The story begins as the man Jack murders three members of a family (later revealed to be the Dorian family), but fails to kill the youngest child, a one-and-a-half-year-old boy. Unknown to him, the toddler has climbed out of his crib to explore. The child crawls out of the house and up a hill to a graveyard where ghosts find him. His mother, as a ghost, asks them to protect the child, and they argue about whether to do this until the Lady on the Grey (implied to be the Angel of Death) appears and states "The dead should have charity". The ghosts accept, and Mrs. Owens (the ghost who first discovered the baby) and her husband, Mr. Owens, become his adoptive parents. The baby is named Nobody Owens (since Mrs. Owens declares "He looks like nobody except himself") and is granted the Freedom of the Graveyard, which allows Nobody to pass through solid objects when in the graveyard, including its gates. The caretaker Silas (subsequently implied to be an ancient and formerly evil vampire, now reformed) agrees to act as Nobody's 'guardian', providing for and protecting him. The man Jack is persuaded by Silas that the toddler isn't there, and leaves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worms_of_Kukumlima"title="The Worms of Kukumlima">
Protagonist/narrator Ronald Donald Almondotter, having accepted an internship under his maternal grandfather, Seumas Finneganstein, finds this interrupted by Sir Charles Pelicanstein, his grandfather's friend, and accompanies both from America to Tanzania, in search of an intelligent earthworm documented by gemstone-collector Gordon Whillikers. In Tanzania, they are joined by tour-guide Hassan Kapoora and cook Ali Tabu. At the advice of general-store owner Baba Pambazuka, they pursue intuitively the intelligent earthworm's habitat in the extinct volcano Kukumlima, without set directions. Finding Kukumlima accidentally, they discover Gordon Whillikers a prisoner of the earthworms (now identified with gigantic size), required to annually collect the tiny elephant mice used by the worms to purposes unknown. Having explored Kukumlima, and identified the worms' vocalizations (attributed earlier to ordinary earthworms) as means of contact, they escape the volcanic crater during an eruption partly stimulated by themselves, and return to America, where Seumas patents an adhesive sap used in the escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People_of_the_Mist"title="The People of the Mist">
"The People of the Mist" is the tale of a British adventurer seeking wealth in the wilds of Africa, finding romance, and discovering a lost race and its monstrous god.The penniless Leonard Outram attempts to redress the undeserved loss of his family estates by seeking his fortune in Africa. In the course of his adventures, he and his Zulu companion Otter save a young English woman, Juanna Rodd, together with her nursemaid Soa, from slavery. Leonard and Juanna are plainly attracted to each other, but prone to bickering, and their romance is impeded by the watchful and jealous Soa. The protagonists seek the legendary People of the Mist, said to possess a fabulous hoard of jewels. On finding them, they immediately become embroiled in the turbulent political affairs of the lost race, which is driven by a power struggle between its king and the priests of its giant crocodile god. The heroic Outram can do little more than react to events. The action climaxes in a hair-raising escape by tobogganing a large flat stone down a steep glacier.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terror_(novel)"title="The Terror (novel)">
The story begins "in medias res" in the winter of 1847, when HMS "Terror" and HMS "Erebus" have been trapped in ice, 28 miles north-northwest of King William Island, for more than a year. The weather has been much colder than normal, the ships' tinned provisions are dwindling, often putrid, and tainted with lead from soldering. Further, the sea ice and landmasses are mysteriously devoid of any wildlife that can be hunted. In addition to the natural dangers, the crews are being stalked and attacked by a monster resembling an immense polar bear.In a flashback to 1845, Sir John Franklin is assigned by the Admiralty to lead an expedition into the Arctic in search of the Northwest Passage. Franklin's second in command, Captain Francis Crozier, joins the expedition as a means of distracting himself after being rejected as a suitor by Franklin's niece. Although the expedition begins auspiciously enough, three men die of disease during their first winter in the ice, and soon afterward, Franklin makes the fateful decision to travel around the northwest coast of King William Island, which results in "Terror" and "Erebus" becoming trapped.In the spring of 1847, Franklin sends out parties to search for open water. One of the parties encounters a pair of "Esquimaux" on the ice, a young woman and an old man. They accidentally shoot the man, whereupon they are set upon by the monster, which kills the expedition's fourth in command, Lieutenant Graham Gore. When the party returns to the ships, the girl follows them. Crozier names her "Lady Silence", as her tongue appears to have been bitten off, rendering her mute. After the man dies aboard "Erebus", the monster begins stalking the crews. Although the monster shows signs of intelligence, the men initially assume it is merely an unusually aggressive polar bear. Franklin is killed in a botched attempt to bait the creature, and a number of other crewmembers are killed as the months progress.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe's_Siege"title="Sharpe's Siege">
A combined naval and infantry force is sent 100 miles up the coast from the British foothold in France to capture a seemingly weakly defended fortress. Major Richard Sharpe is given command of the land forces, primarily two rifle companies, one of them led by his friend, Captain William Frederickson. Colonel Wigram and Royal Navy Captain Horace Bampfylde, the naval commander, also want to incite a monarchist rebellion in Bordeaux, only 25 miles away, based on rumours of unrest. However, army Colonel Elphinstone dismisses the rumours. He informs Sharpe in private that the goal is to capture three dozen "chasse-marées" sheltering under the fortress's guns to use to construct a boat bridge (over the Adour River) and orders Sharpe to avoid any advance on Bordeaux. The Comte de Maquerre, a member of the "Chasseurs Britanniques", joins the expedition at the last minute. Sharpe fears his wife Jane is sick with fever, as she has been regularly visiting his good friend Lieutenant Colonel Hogan, who is dying of it.Bampfylde changes plans without warning, ordering Sharpe to set up an ambush on the road to Bordeaux, while he reserves the supposedly easy capture of the fortress for himself and his Marines. Sharpe, however, spots an ambush by American sailors under the command of American privateer Cornelius Killick. Sharpe then gains entry to the fortress by a ruse, accompanied by Regimental Sergeant Major Harper and Captain Frederickson; his men follow and defeat the stronger-than-anticipated garrison. They also capture some of the Americans, including Killick. Bampfylde decides to hang the Americans as pirates, despite Killick presenting him his letter of marque, but Sharpe releases the Americans after obtaining Killick's oath not to fight the British. Sharpe then marches inland with a company of Royal Marines led by Captain Palmer to set up an ambush, while Bampfylde writes an official report wherein he claims all of the glory and does not mention Sharpe at all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Zone_(novel)"title="The Dead Zone (novel)">
As a child in 1953, Johnny Smith falls unconscious while ice-skating, then mumbles a prophetic warning to an adult who later suffers an accident. In an unconnected incident, a young, emotionally troubled door-to-door Bible salesman named Greg Stillson vindictively kicks a dog to death.By 1970, Johnny is a high school teacher in the small town of Cleaves Mills, Maine with a new girlfriend named Sarah. After winning repeatedly at a carnival wheel of fortune, Johnny is involved in a car accident and falls into a coma. Waking up over four years later, Johnny finds that he has suffered a neural injury, with one part of his brain seriously damaged, making it a "dead zone." As if to compensate, other parts of the brain now show heightened activity. As a result, Johnny sometimes experiences clairvoyant visions when touching people and objects. After helping various people, Johnny becomes frustrated by sensationalistic media reports of his supposed psychic talents. After Johnny rejects a lucrative offer from tabloid reporter Richard Dees to run fake predictions under his name, Dees' paper denounces him as a fraud. Relieved, Johnny hopes to resume a normal life as a teacher despite ongoing, severe headaches. The community fears him but Sarah visits. She and Johnny are about to consummate their romance, but Sarah then makes it clear that she has a new life with a husband Walt and their child. Sheriff George Bannerman of Castle Rock asks Johnny to help catch a local serial killer. After a nine-year-old girl is murdered, Johnny investigates and reluctantly identifies the Castle Rock Strangler as Bannerman's deputy Frank Dodd, who commits suicide after leaving a confession. As Johnny feared, the incident reignites the public's interest in his power and he is seen as too controversial to return to teaching.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbery_Under_Arms"title="Robbery Under Arms">
Writing in the first person, the narrator Dick Marston tells the story of his life and loves and his association with the notorious bushranger Captain Starlight, a renegade from a noble English family. Set in the bush and goldfields of Australia in the 1850s, Starlight's gang, with Dick and his brother Jim's help, sets out on a series of escapades that include cattle theft and robbery under arms.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowland_(Cabot_novel)"title="Shadowland (Cabot novel)">
Sixteen-year-old Susannah 'Suze' Simon is a mediator, which means she can see and talk to ghosts. Suze spends a lot of time directing the usually unhappy dead to the afterlife. However, her job is not easy, as not all ghosts want to be guided. Every day, she is haunted by the fact that they will not leave her alone until she helps them resolve their unfinished business with the living.Suze, whose father died when she was six, moves from New York to Carmel, California after her mom's second marriage to Andy Ackerman, a carpenter. She gets three stepbrothers, Jake, Brad, and David, whom she nicknames Sleepy (a senior), Dopey (a sophomore like Suze), and Doc (a seventh grader). However, when Suze arrives at her new home, she finds a handsome, archaic ghost named Jesse de Silva sitting on her window seat. Irritated, she tells Jesse to move on or find some other house to haunt, as now she is living there, but he refuses.Suze hopes to start fresh in California, with trips to the beach instead of the cemetery and sunbathing instead of tending to lost souls. On her first day at the Junipero Serra Mission Academy, however, she is immediately faced with the angry ghost of Heather Chambers, the student whose place she took: Heather had committed suicide when her boyfriend Bryce Martinson broke up with her. Father Dominic, the school principal and a fellow mediator, is surprised to learn that Suze uses physical violence to subdue ghosts like Heather, and insists that she should use friendlier, more peaceful methods of mediation. Suze refuses, saying that she has done this job her whole life and is not going to change.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moo_(novel)"title="Moo (novel)">
"Moo" contains over a dozen overlapping plot lines and multiple protagonists and is therefore very difficult to summarize. The following summary includes the plot lines that are clearly resolved in the end of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Love"title="The History of Love">
In Poland, approximately 70 years before the present, the 10-year-old Polish-Jewish Leopold (Leo) Gursky falls in love with his neighbor Alma Mereminski. The two begin a relationship that develops over the course of 10 years. In this time, Leo writes three books that he gives to Alma, since she is the only person he deeply cares about. Leo promises he will never love anyone but her.Alma, now 20, is sent to the United States by her father, who feared the alarming news concerning Nazi Germany. Leo does not know that Alma is pregnant and dreams of going to America to meet her. A short time after, the Germans invade Poland and Leo takes cover in the woods, living on roots, small animals, bugs and what he can steal from farmers' cellars. After three and a half years of hiding, he goes to America and finds Alma but is shocked to hear she thought he had died in the war and had married the son of the manager of the factory she works at. He is devastated when he finds she has had another child with her husband. He asks her to come with him, but she refuses. She tells him, however, about his son Isaac who is now five years old. Heartbroken, Leo leaves, and later becomes a locksmith under the guidance of his cousin. Leo regularly watches Isaac from a distance, wishing to be part of the boy's life but scared to come in contact with him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Colony"title="The Last Colony">
John Perry and Jane Sagan, the former Ghost Brigade clone of Perry's dead wife, are offered positions as leaders for the new colony of Roanoke, which will comprise human settlers from the first ten established human colonies. After deliberating, they decide to accept and go with Zoe to the new colony. In tow are Zoe's Obin protectors, named Hickory and Dickory, who view her with almost religious awe due to her father's success in giving the Obin consciousness.Upon arriving, the colonists quickly realize they are not at Roanoke. They are approached by a member of the Special Forces of the CDF, adapted to live in space, who had attached himself to the exterior of their craft. He informs them they have no option but to land and begin the colony anyway. The ship has been irreparably damaged to prevent the craft from leaving orbit, and all the colonists are considered quarantined from the rest of the Colonial Union. The Conclave (a group that wants to stop humanity's expansion) was aware of the original position of Roanoke, and therefore was waiting to annihilate them. He further tells them that to isolate them fully, they are forbidden from using any advanced technology. This is offset by the presence of the Mennonites, an Amish-like group of colonists who are familiar with the large amount of basic machinery that the CDF had given the colonists.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetworld"title="Wetworld">
When the TARDIS makes a disastrous landing in the swamps of the planet Sunday, the Doctor has no choice but to abandon Martha and try to find help. But the tranquillity of the swamps is deceptive, and even the TARDIS can't protect Martha forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_Building"title="Sick Building">
The TARDIS arrives on Tiermann's World. Professor Tiermann and his family live alone here in a futuristic, fully automated Dreamhome, protected by a supposedly impenetrable force shield. An enormous alien creature called the Voracious Craw is heading towards their home with the intent to devour everything. But the Craw is not the only enemy - outside sabre-toothed tigers roam a frozen landscape, and the Dreamhouse itself turns against its occupants.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_Good_Again"title="Making Good Again">
In Germany to settle World War II reparations, James Raison is plunged into the old conflict between Jew and Nazi.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith's_Gazelle"title="Smith's Gazelle">
An old Bedouin and two boys, one Jewish and the other Arab, have a miraculous adventure in the Israeli desert during the Six-Day War.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Plum_Lake"title="Under Plum Lake">
A young boy, Barry, explores a cave on the Cornwall coast and discovers a highly advanced subterranean civilization called Egon. Located somewhere deep beneath Earth's oceans, Egon is unknown and inaccessible to humans unless an Egonian chooses to bring them there. On all such occasions, the human being's memories of Egon are erased and replaced with false memories before being returned to the surface.In Egon, the author imagines all of our social ills and fears have been quieted, health care and education have been vastly improved, and energy and other resources have been better managed. Egonian youth (who are about 100 years old) spend much of their time enjoying extreme sports, taking in intense immersive films, and studying to make their world a better place. Barry gets a tour from a boy named Dido who at first treats Barry like a dog — why can’t he just relax and enjoy things? — but later begins to understand Barry’s fear of pain and death.Like Barry, the reader is ultimately left with a vision of what our lives could be if we didn’t spend all our time terrified of poverty, pain, and lost chances. It’s a statement in favor of pleasure, intimacy, and risk-taking.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_the_City_(novel)"title="Tales of the City (novel)">
In 1976, secretary Mary Ann Singleton visits San Francisco from Cleveland, Ohio, and impulsively decides to stay. She finds an apartment at 28 Barbary Lane, a small complex owned by the eccentric, marijuana-growing Anna Madrigal. Mary Ann befriends the other tenants of the building: hippyish, bisexual Mona Ramsey; heterosexual lothario Brian Hawkins; Michael Tolliver, a sweet and personable gay man known to friends as "Mouse"; and Norman Neal Williams, the tenant of the rooftop shed. Mary Ann gets a job as secretary to Edgar Halcyon, the abrasive, wealthy owner of the advertising agency where Mona works as a copywriter. Mary Ann finally gives in to the advances of ad exec Beauchamp Day, who is unhappily married to Edgar's socialite daughter DeDe, but he is unable to perform when in bed with Mary Ann. Edgar is dying, but has not told his family; he meets Anna in the park and they begin an extramarital romance. Beauchamp deliberately leaves Mary Ann's scarf in his car to be found by an attention-starved DeDe, who has sex with Lionel Wong, an 18-year-old delivery boy. Mouse meets handsome gynecologist Jon Fielding, and finds that he does not want to engage in casual sex with anyone else. He wins $100 in an underwear dance contest, but loses Jon over it. Jon confirms DeDe's suspicion that she is pregnant. Black model D'orothea Wilson arrives from New York, hoping to resume her romance with Mona; Anna is heartbroken when Mona moves in with D'orothea without saying goodbye. Norman is secretly investigating Anna on behalf of Mona's mother. Columnist Carson Callas blackmails DeDe into sleeping with him, in exchange for which he will not reveal her pregnancy. Beauchamp's renewed attentiveness to DeDe wanes, and she decides to keep her baby. At the baths, Jon has sex with a man he has not met before—Beauchamp. Mona discovers that D'orothea is really Caucasian, and has been darkening her skin to help her modeling career. As Edgar is dying at home, DeDe and Beauchamp tell him he is going to be a grandfather. Mary Ann has been spending time with Norman, but discovers that he is a child pornographer. When she confronts him, he slips and falls off a cliff. Mary Ann finds his file on Anna, and destroys it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Plague_of_Frogs"title="A Plague of Frogs">
The book begins with the discovery of a large number of deformed frogs by schoolteacher Cindy Reinitz and her students in August 1995. They were on a field trip to a farm owned by Donald Ney near Henderson, Minnesota. As the students approached the rain-fed pond, they noticed that a large number of the northern leopard frogs (rana pipiens) had deformities, such as missing legs, extra legs, and other disfigurements. Concerned about the possibility that a contaminant in the water caused the deformities, Reinitz contacted the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA). As the MPCA did not have an amphibian specialist at the time, Reinitz was referred to the MPCA's invertebrate researcher, Dr. Judy Helgen. At the time, Helgen was studying frogs as part of an effort to develop a bio-index for measuring the overall health of a pond or wetland. As Helgen was busy at the time, she sent an intern, Joel Chirhart, to investigate the pond. Chirhart was alarmed by how widespread the deformities were—present in over 1/3 of frogs collected.Later that year, Helgen called Robert McKinnell, a biologist at the University of Minnesota. McKinnell is considered the authority on frogs in Minnesota, having specialized in herpetology for over 50 years. Initially the two thought the deformities were an isolated occurrence that would disappear like an earlier outbreak at Granite Falls, but the persistence of leg deformities into late summer and the discovery of other outbreaks, around Henderson and elsewhere around the state, such as at Litchfield, quickly disabused them of that notion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Tales_of_the_City_(novel)"title="More Tales of the City (novel)">
The story begins a couple of months after the end of "Tales of the City". Michael ("Mouse") Tolliver and Mary Ann Singleton go on a cruise on the "Pacific Princess", thanks to money left to her by her former, now-deceased boss, Edgar Halcyon. While on the cruise, Mary Ann begins a relationship with a handsome amnesiac, while Mouse rekindles his relationship with his former boyfriend Jon, who has now distanced himself from the "A Gays" after getting fed up with their elitist and shallow ways. Mary Ann begins to devote her time to helping her now-boyfriend, Burke Andrew, figure out why he lost his memory. Signs point to a trauma he had while reporting on a story for his newspaper. What they find out is explosive and risks shaking the foundations of San Francisco elite society. Meanwhile, Mouse becomes extremely ill and is hospitalized, profoundly affecting his relationship with Jon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_Others_(novel)"title="Significant Others (novel)">
It is now 1985 and much of the action is set in the Russian River area north of San Francisco. Here, successful businessmen from around the globe gather at Bohemian Grove for a three-week encampment of male bonding, while downriver from them, events at Wimminwood, a lesbian music and arts festival, threaten the relationship of DeDe Halcyon-Day and D'orothea Wilson.Returning characters include Mary Ann Singleton, who is having difficulty balancing her commitment to her career as a local talk show hostess with her obligations as a wife to Brian and mother to Shawna, the child of her friend Connie, who entrusted the girl's care to Mary Ann on her deathbed; Michael Tolliver, the romantic gay man who has recently tested HIV-positive and is taking AZT to combat the threat to his immune system; and Anna Madrigal, the transgender landlady who mothers her tenants at 28 Barbary Lane on Russian Hill and is fighting to preserve the historic wooden steps of the lane.New characters include Thack Sweeney, who meets Michael during a tour of Alcatraz and Wren Douglas, a plus-size model whose best-selling self-help book offers hope to overweight women. There is also a focus on a previously minor character, Roger "Booter" Manigault, DeDe's stepfather and a member of the Bohemian Club, who accidentally stumbles into Wimminwood and is held captive by one of its more militant organizers. Brian's college-aged nephew Jed also makes an appearance as a young Reaganite more interested in getting into Harvard Law School and making money than having fun. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sure_of_You"title="Sure of You">
Set in 1988, three years after the previous novel, the tenants of 28 Barbary Lane have all left to pursue their lives. Recognizing that it has been a long time since she took a vacation, the building's landlady Anna Madrigal decides to travel to Greece to meet with her daughter Mona Ramsey on the island of Lesbos. During her time there, Anna develops a romantic fling with Stratos, a local man, while Mona explores the island and its lesbian pilgrims. Upon learning that Anna has contemplated staying in Greece, Mona urges Anna to sell the boarding house at 28 Barbary Lane and enjoy herself with Stratos.In San Francisco, Mary Ann Singleton and her husband Brian Hawkins have moved to a condo in the Russian Hill high-rise The Summit with their adopted daughter Shawna. Mary Ann revels in her local stardom as the most recognized television talk-show host in San Francisco. However, the sudden call from television producer Burke Andrews, her old boyfriend, changes everything when he offers her a job as the host of a new, nationally syndicated talk show in New York City.Meanwhile, Michael "Mouse" Tolliver and his boyfriend Thack Sweeney have purchased a home together. Michael continues to co-own his nursery Plant Parenthood with Brian while monitoring his scheduled AZT dosages to keep his HIV infection in check. After the death of his father, Michael's conservative mother Alice has also begun contacting him frequently, developing a close relationship with Thack. Michael, however, resents the way she ignored his deceased lover Jon up until his death from AIDS, and her lack of true validation of his life in San Francisco. Thack urges Michael to become involved in the gay political movement, especially ACT-UP, though Michael prefers to focus on what time he has left. Thack and Brian have become close, but Thack has developed a distaste for Mary Ann, much to Michael's frustration. However, Michael admits that he feels Mary Ann has been keeping her distance, believing that she may be trying to spare herself the pain of his one day succumbing to AIDS.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tolliver_Lives"title="Michael Tolliver Lives">
The novel represents Maupin's return to the "Tales of the City" characters some 18 years after the sixth book in the series was published. As well as further developing familiar characters, it explores the differences between the San Francisco of the 1980s, bearing the brunt of the developing AIDS crisis, and the city in the first decade of the new millennium. The realities of aging, both distressing and graceful, is a major theme of the book – as well as the generation gap between gay people from the 1970s and 80s and gay people from the 2000s.In a departure from the third-person style of the original "Tales" sequence, "Michael Tolliver Lives" is narrated in the first person by the title character. In the book's opening pages, Michael Tolliver is middle aged and still alive in living HIV-positive for over 20 years now in the year 2006. Michael encounters a half-remembered old flame, prompting him to reflect on his status as a survivor of both the HIV epidemic (which killed many of his peers in the 1980s and 1990s but is now a more treatable chronic illness thanks in part to better medication) and of a San Francisco that has transformed due in large part to the dot com boom. Characters from the original series include Anna Madrigal, the one-time landlady of 28 Barbary Lane; Brian Hawkins and his now-adult daughter Shawna, a pansexual aspiring writer; and Brian's ex-wife Mary Ann Singleton. New characters include Michael's much younger partner Ben, and his transgender co-worker Jake Greenleaf.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer's_Ship"title="The Sorcerer's Ship">
A man named Gene finds himself cast into a new world by a powerful godlike being. Gene has been changed in such a way that he has every talent needed to survive this new world, including the ability to understand the language of its inhabitants. Gene is rescued from the seemingly endless oceans of this new world by a passing ship that is similar to the looks of a Viking galley. Aboard the ship he makes himself useful as best he can while meeting new friends and enemies. Eventually they come to an island where a mysterious creature who some see as a friend, and some see as an enemy, joins them aboard their ship to help deal with the threat of war from their neighboring kingdom known as Koph. The creature, utilizing his sorcerer-like abilities is employed by the other country known as Nanich to help aid them in the war, but will the sorcerer, and his magic be enough to save the land of Nanich from being overrun by Koph?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Golden_Stair"title="Beyond the Golden Stair">
Hibbert, an imprisoned innocent, is caught up in the jailbreak of his cellmate Scarlatti, engineered with the assistance of another man, Burks. Forcing Hibbert to accompany them, Scarlatti and Burks make for the Florida Everglades, picking up Scarlatti's girlfriend Carlotta on the way.In the Everglades the four encounter a miraculous golden stairway extending into the sky. Ascending, they find a pool defended by a blue flamingo, which is killed by Burks. Another stairway leads them to the land of Khoire, a strange and mysterious paradise. There a man named Patur exposes the true nature of each by means of a crystal mask. He warns them that they will be transformed in accordance with those natures within a day, and must leave Khoire.Scarlatti and Carlotta's alteration is horrible, and they are consumed by a huge beast; Burks agrees to become a blue flamingo, taking the place of the guardian of the pool, in the hope of some day being readmitted to Khoire. Hibbert is little changed. Returning to the mundane world, he undertakes to find certain persons who can help him gain his own readmittance to Khoire, having fallen in love with one of its denizens, Mareth of the Watchers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shaving_of_Shagpat"title="The Shaving of Shagpat">
Shibli Bagarag, a Persian barber, and Noorna, an enchantress, are given the quest of shaving the tyrant Shagpat, who by the power of his magical hair holds his city in thrall. Along the way Shibli acquires a magic sword and meets a series of exotic creatures, including a talking hawk and several genies.The second paragraph of the book provides a capsule summary of the story: "Now the story of Shibli Bagarag, and of the ball he followed, and of the subterranean kingdom he came to, and of the enchanted palace he entered, and of the sleeping king he shaved, and of the two princesses he released, and of the Afrite held in subjection by the arts of one and bottled by her, is it not known as 'twere written on the finger-nails of men and traced in their corner robes?"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Light"title="Star Light">
A consortium of spacefaring races, including humans, recruits Mesklinites, the centipede-like natives of the high-gravity planet Mesklin, to explore Dhrawn. The recruits include Barlennan and Dondragmer, respectively the Captain and First Mate of the "Bree", a merchant vessel of Mesklin, which in "Mission of Gravity" sailed to Mesklin's south pole to rescue a probe sent by humans. Now, thanks to institutes of learning set up on Mesklin, the natives have produced capable explorers who can go where other races cannot.Barlennan is in command of the main base on Dhrawn while Dondragmer commands a "land cruiser", the "Kwembly". This is a tracked vehicle about 30 meters long, 6 meters high and the same wide. It is designed to move like a large worm on independently steerable trucks. The power is supplied by self-contained fusion generators but the controls are simple pulley-and-rope systems using Mesklinite materials which the crew can repair by themselves. There are several more cruisers, and each has audio/video links for communication with satellites.The humans and others are on a satellite in synchronous orbit above the explorers on the ground. Unfortunately, the planet's slow rotation means that they are about 10 million kilometres above the surface, and signals take over 30 seconds to travel to the satellite. Real-time conversations are therefore impossible.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_Game_(novel)"title="Mind Game (novel)">
After being targeted by an assassin, Dahlia Le Blanc, a Telekinetic who shirks the company of others, is forced to rely on the mysterious warrior Nicolas Trevane to protect her. A man whom she finds herself falling in love with despite not wholly trusting.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Game_(novel)"title="Night Game (novel)">
Gator Fontenot of the Special Forces paranormal squad can't refuse an urgent response to save the elusive Iris "Flame" Johnson, a victim of the same horrific experiments that warped Gator. Now unleashed, she's a flame-haired weapon of unimaginable destructive powers, a walking time bomb bent on revenge in the sultry bayous of New Orleans, and hunted by a shadowy assassin. It's Gator's job to reel Iris in.But can two people haunted by violent betrayals trust the passion that soon ignites between them? Or is one of them just playing another seductive and deadly night game?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Disappearance_of_Leon_(I_Mean_Noel)"title="The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel)">
Mrs. Caroline Fish Carillon searches for her missing husband, Leon. They were married as children to solidify a business arrangement between their parents who had started a soup company. After several years apart, they plan to meet again as adults. During a sailing trip, Leon (who has changed his name to Noel), falls overboard. He shouts a message to his wife which is partially obscured by his going underwater: "Noel (glub) see (blub) all... I (glub) new..." When she recovers in the hospital and learns that her husband has checked out with no further news, Mrs. Carillon is convinced the answer to his whereabouts are contained in the mysterious message. She spends years trying to interpret the "glub-blubs", eventually enlisting her adopted twin children, Tony and Tina, and childhood friend, Augie Kunkel. When they finally figure out the truth, they are quite surprised.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modoc_(novel)"title="Modoc (novel)">
"Modoc" tells the true story of Bram Gunterstein (the German son of a third-generation circusn animal trainer) and his pet elephant, Modoc, both born on the same day in 1896. In the novelization, Bram’s father has long wished for a boy and a girl, and quickly feels that his dream has just been fulfilled. From an early age, Bram follows in his father’s footsteps; and Bram’s family is unique in the way they train the elephants: instead of threat and intimidation, the pachyderms are treated with praise and respect. Once old enough, Modoc begins to perform in the circus. But soon, the circus owner falls ill, and the circus itself is sold to an American, Mr. North. Bram, unwilling to be parted from his beloved elephant, acts as a stowaway across the Indian Ocean.The ship is wrecked, leaving Modoc, Mr. Pitt, Bram and others adrift in the ocean. The survivors stay afloat on Modoc’s back until help comes at the last possible second. Modoc and Bram recuperate in India, where Bram learns much about elephant training and care at the Elephantarium, as well as Indian life, before becoming a favorite “son of the Maharaja”. Afraid that Mr. North will find them, the boy and his elephant companion flee into the teak forests, and soon find themselves joining the ranks of the mahouts, among whom Bram marries a village daughter because of his newly acquired status. However, rebels eventually take over the town, killing Bram’s wife along with many of the local people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christie_Malry's_Own_Double-Entry"title="Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry">
Christie Malry, being a "simple man", above all longs for sex and money. In order to understand how money works, he takes a job in a London bank. This leads him to enroll in a bookkeeping course, where he learns the double-entry system. Bored by his bank job, he quits and starts work at Tapper's, a sweet factory.One day, he has the idea to apply the double-entry system to his life. Every aggravation Malry suffers from society—such as being forced to walk along a particular stretch of pavement due to a building's placement—is revenged by a recompense—in this case, "[scratching] an unsightly line about a yard long into the blackened portland stone facing of the office block" (23–4). Having established this system, and growing progressively more angry at society, Malry graduates from minor acts of personal revenge (mostly vandalism) to large-scale terrorism: bombing hoaxes, an actual bombing, and poisoning West London's drinking water. Shortly before he manages to bomb the House of Commons, he dies of cancer.Christie compares himself to "Guy Fawkes, with the difference that he was caught" and strictly follows a code of twelve principles. The first principle, "I am a cell of one" (89), forbids him from discussing his actions with anyone else, not even with his few friends or with the Shrike, his beloved girlfriend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_(novel)"title="Loop (novel)">
The story revolves around a medical student named Kaoru Futami. His father, Hideyuki, contracts a deadly disease known as Metastatic Human Cancer (MHC), a terminal cancer that affects all forms of organic life: humans, animals and plants. Events lead Hideyuki to tell Kaoru more about a research program he was involved in called the LOOP project: a virtual reality simulator which is meant to represent the emergence of life and how the world most likely evolved. It is known that almost everyone who was involved in the LOOP project has died of the same cancer.Kaoru takes a part-time job tutoring a boy named Ryoji, who is an asymptomatic carrier of MHC along with his mother, Reiko. Despite her being fifteen years his senior, Kaoru falls in love with Reiko. Eventually, they begin an affair once Ryoji begins chemotherapy. When he finds out, Ryoji commits suicide by falling backwards out of a twelve-story building. About a month afterwards, Kaoru learns from Reiko that she may be pregnant with Kaoru's child. He also reads Ryoji's suicide note, in which he explains his motivation for taking his own life.As Kaoru continues his investigation into the LOOP project, his father asks him to meet a microbiologist named Amano, was involved in the final stages of LOOP before it was scrapped. Amano reveals that LOOP utilized a hundred supercomputers strung together with the aim to recreate life, and tells Kaoru of a scientist in New Mexico who might still be alive. During this period he also finds out that the MHC cells all equal 2n X 3. Kaoru's mother, Machiko, convinces him to go to New Mexico after relating a tale of the "Ancient One" who has a thousand eyes watching.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Festival_of_San_Joaquin"title="The Festival of San Joaquin">
Upon her release from prison, protagonist Luz Marina must figure out how to approach her mother-in-law in order to gain back the custody of her children, Teresa, Edwardo and Feliciano. She went to prison for the death of her husband whom she had killed in self defense.The mother of her husband was Dona Catalina Casal, her husband was Don Pablo and their children were Andres Casal, LuisCasal and Salvador Juaquin. Marina sisters were Concha and Perla. Her mother was named Mama Sofia and her father was Papa Apolonio.Marina had worked at the home of the Casal family before she married Salvador. Salvador was in love with the future wife of his brother Luis. Luz flashes back on the night of her 15th birthday, the same night as Luis' engagement party. She remembers when Salvador abused her and her children. He would always lock them in the house for weeks with out eating or drinking anything. Feliciano is sick and in a coma because of Salvador.Her father dies and Don Pablo leaves San Joaquín so Dona Catalina now becomes a dedicated business woman. Marina tries to uplift herself and her mother since her father is no longer with them. She searches for jobs but is always rejected. The only job she got was in Elodio Alpuche Guerra's office, but she was fired because of Dona Catalina who was also a member of the office.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_the_River"title="Time and the River">
Main character Leah Lawson, 18, is a slave in mid to late 19th century Belize (the colony of British Honduras not having been formed until 1862). The story traces her rise in stature to slaveowner, continuing the tradition of female protagonists in Edgell works.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(Westerfeld_novel)"title="Leviathan (Westerfeld novel)">
It is the cusp of World War I, and all the European powers are arming up. The Austro-Hungarians and Germans have their Clankers, diesel-driven iron machines loaded with guns and ammunition. The British Darwinists employ fabricated animals as their weaponry. Their "Leviathan" is a whale airship, and the most masterful beast in the British fleet.Aleksandar Ferdinand, prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is on the run. His own people have turned on him. His title is worthless. All he has is a battle-torn Stormwalker and a loyal crew of men.Meanwhile, Deryn, a commoner girl, is staying with her brother Jaspert in London. Her father died in a ballooning accident and her mother and aunts want her to grow up as a proper lady. Deryn dreams of joining the Royal Naval Air Service and to serve on one of the great air beasts. In order to do so, she must pose as a boy ("Dylan Sharp"). To pass the starting exam, she goes aloft with a Huxley (a jellyfish-like creature which uses hydrogen to float) to prove her air-worthiness. However, a storm hits while she is aloft, severely tossing Deryn and the Huxley about, and they narrowly survive—she is forced to cut the Huxley loose from its mooring in order to avoid crashing into a nearby building. This results in Deryn and the Huxley being blown out over the North Sea; she is thrilled when she and the Huxley are rescued by the "Leviathan", the most famous of the air-beasts, a massive ecosystem comprising many different animals but based largely on a whale. She is inducted into the crew of the "Leviathan", and makes friends with the 'Monkey Luddite' Newkirk. The "Leviathan"'s mission is to transport a top British boffin, or scientist, and a secret package to Constantinople. Deryn is surprised to learn the boffin is a woman, Dr. Nora Barlow, and is afraid Barlow will discover her secret.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunting_Mister_Heartbreak"title="Hunting Mister Heartbreak">
In "Hunting Mister Heartbreak", Raban sets off from the Port of Liverpool on board the 56,000 ton container ship "Atlantic Conveyor", following in the footsteps of the first emigrants to America ("Having arrived in Liverpool, I took ship for the New World.") His meandering journey takes him to New York City, whose inhabitants he divides into the Street People - poor New Yorkers who have to face the daily threat of poverty and mugging - and the Air People - rich New Yorkers who rely on elevators to keep them off street level.He leaves New York in distaste and proceeds in his hired car down to the Deep South, choosing to lie up for a time as a temporary resident of Guntersville, Alabama, a town which he immediately takes a liking to on one of his stopovers. He decides to devote some time to meeting the residents and absorbing the local lifestyle in his rented lakeside cabin in the company of Gypsy, an old black lab bitch on loan to scare off the anonymous caller who keeps on making threatening calls in the middle of the night. He then makes his way up to Seattle and rents a room in the Josephinum Residence. From here, he makes forays into the city and comes across some of the Korean immigrants who have struggled to carve out a new life for themselves in America. The books ends with Raban's search for the end of America in the Florida Keys, "the Land of Cockaigne". To fully explore and familiarise himself with the character of the Keys, he hires "Sea Mist", a 32-foot sloop:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heaven_Shop"title="The Heaven Shop">
The plot centers around 13-year-old Binti, a girl from Malawi. Binti's mother had died from AIDS about 6 years before. Her father owns a coffin shop called The Heaven Shop. Binti is a star on a radio show called "Gogo's Family" and helps support the family with the money she earns through the show.Binti's father Bambo, infected with AIDS, contracts pneumonia due to his suppressed immune system and dies. Binti and her siblings are placed in the care of her less wealthy relatives, who take their belongings and force them to move to their homes, where they are treated poorly. Binti steals back money that her relatives stole from her and decides to run away. She boards a bus to her grandmother, Gogo. When she arrives, she becomes lost and goes to a church to ask a priest whether anyone knows who or where her grandma is. The priest then asks the audience, and a man named Jeremiah says he knows her. He drops her off there. Binti is disappointed to find that her grandmother sleeps outside, with over 20 other children. At her grandmother's place, she has to work with a mother who is the same age as her, named Memory. She finds out Memory is HIV-positive as is her daughter. She tries to make a coffin when a man spots her. He asks her to build him a coffin, and in return helps her fix her roof. Afterwards, they successfully restart Binti's father's coffin business. They name it after Bambo's shop, where they continue to make coffins. When Binti's grandmother dies, they build her a coffin. Binti's sibling Junie was with her, but parted to find a better way to make money and worked as a prostitute. She contracts HIV from one of them. Kwasi is arrested for theft, but her grandmother was able to bring him back to their home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Typhoon_Shore"title="Operation Typhoon Shore">
It continues the journey of Becca and Doug MacKenzie. In this second adventure, Becca and her brother, Doug, have escaped Wenzi Island and Sheng-Fat, but find themselves right back in the action.Their ship is struck by a powerful typhoon and is driven ashore on Sulphur Island. There the two teens, Doug and Becca; their uncle, Captain MacKenzie; his brave crew and the Sujing Quantou warriors find themselves once again facing their nemesis, Julius Pembleton-Crozier, his hired army of Kalaxx warriors, and several other people such as his wife Lucrieta, Alfonso Borelli, a Treasurer of the HGS who has betrayed the HGS and joined Julius Pembleton-Crozier in the resurrected Coterie Of St. Petersburg. Alfonso Borelli also gives Julius the Eastern gyrolabe, which he took from the HGS after he betrayed it.It takes all of their ingenuity, bravery, and wit to figure out his intent and why the islands are so very important to these enemies of the Honourable Guild of Specialists (HGS). The captain's Northern gyrolabe is stolen by the Kalaxx and Becca and Doug discover clues that lead to the finding of the Southern chapter of "The 99 Elements" and the Southern gyrolabe. Xu and Xi manage to save the southern part of "The 99 Elements" but the southern gyrolabe is taken by Julius Pembleton-Crozier. Also the "Expedient", the captain's ship, is broken beyond repair and has to be scuttled. They also say goodbye to Liberty Da Vine who, failing to regain her plane "Lola", is given the plane that was aboard the "Expedient", called the "Fighting Dragon", and flies off to find her father. The captain plans to send Doug and Becca back to school, but they decide to take a ship to the harsh desert of Sianking to search for their parents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Idea_of_Fun"title="My Idea of Fun">
A lonely boy grows up just outside Brighton in a caravan park with his over-sexual mother and the tenant Mr Broadhurst, who takes the boy on a disturbing and often violent journey.The novel works as a strange Bildungsroman, in which the main character, Ian Wharton, learns the art of black magic from Broadhurst, who is also known as the Fat Controller. At the Fat Controller's behest Ian engages in a series of strange acts including time travel and trips to an alternate reality called the Land of Children's jokes, a grotesque alternate universe inhabited by the menacing and deformed characters from jokes. The protagonist's education culminates in bizarre rites of bestiality and necrophilia. However, he finds that in exchange for knowledge of the black arts Broadhurst begins to take over more and more aspects of his life.The novel may also be seen as an example of an unreliable narrator, as it is unclear whether the strange events in the novel are meant to be real or hallucinatory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_the_Euphrates"title="Rise the Euphrates">
"Rise the Euphrates" begins with Casard's story. At the time of the genocide, Casard is ten and still goes by her original Armenian name Garod. In Armenian, “Garod” means yearning which is what Casard does the rest of her life: yearn for an Armenia which no longer exists. Casard's mother's name is Seta, the same name given to Casard's granddaughter.The Turks invaded Garod's town of Harput, murdering the men and raping many women and girls. Among those to escape rape and death, Garod and her mother Seta are driven out of town into the desert. After walking for two weeks without water or food, the caravan reaches the Euphrates River. The river lies in front of the caravan, and a band of murdering Turks emerges from behind, forcing a choice; death by drowning or death by Turkish sword. Seta takes Garod's hand and prepares to jump into the Euphrates. At the last second, Garod remains on the bank and watches her mother drown. Turning around, Garod sees the band of Turks departing. Garod then wanders in the desert for several days, forgetting her name in the process. Later, under the care of nuns, Garod is given the name Cafard, which is a French word meaning melancholy of the soul. She eventually emigrates to the United States. At Ellis Island, immigration officials hear her name as Casard. While at Ellis Island, Casard meets, and after an afternoon of courtship, marries her husband Vrej; another exiled Armenian. Casard and Vrej had one daughter, Araxie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coasting_(book)"title="Coasting (book)">
Written as a travelogue, "Coasting" describes Jonathan Raban's single-handed 4,000 mile voyage around Britain which he made in 1982 (at the age of 40) in an old restored 32-foot sea-going ketch, the "Gosfield Maid". Raban sailed with a chart and a hand bearing-compass; he sailed by the look of the coastline. His story takes various digressions, just as his journey does, as he mulls over his childhood as the son of a vicar in the Church of England, and the current state of Britain under Margaret Thatcher during the time of the Falklands War.Chapter Two is a description of the dogged insularity of the Manx, who he compares to the Falkland Islanders, whilst the Isle of Man becomes a metaphor for the insularity of the larger island on which he himself had been brought up and lived up till this point. Raban himself has commented on his own attitude to England and the influence of Margaret Thatcher on Britain at the time of writing his book. The British he sees as being famous for their insular arrogance and condescension. As he describes them:The author is equally bitter about the dominant, hectoring Mrs Thatcher. Whilst comfortably moored up in the "Gosfield Maid" on a beautiful stretch of the River Yealm, he tunes into the House of Commons debate on the Falklands invasion. The Prime Minister talks about sovereign territory being invaded by a foreign power, but to Raban '...her cross, nanny's voice made it sound as if there had been ructions in the nursery and the children were going to be sent to bed without any tea.' He considers equally absurd the majority of MPs who are baying for Argentinian blood. Raban turns his radio off in disgust, '...sick of the sound of growning men baying like a wolf pack. It wasn't a debate, it was a verbal bloodletting, with words standing for the guns and bayonets that would come later when the fleet reached the islands.' and adds, 'Listening to it, I felt that I'd been eavesdropping on the nastier workings of the national subconscious; I'd overheard Britain talking in a dream, and what it was saying scared me stiff.'
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Afghan_Campaign"title="The Afghan Campaign">
Young Matthias from Macedonia follows his two older brothers’ example and enrolls in Alexander's cavalry together with his close friend Lygaios/Lucas (Λυγαίος in Greek). This special convoy departs from Tripoli, Lebanon and after 125 days of marching meets the rear of Alexander's army. The hero takes part into his first battle and is shocked by the atrocities of his adversaries and his own people as well. Noteworthy is the fact that the enemy, apart from its guerilla methods, recruits women and children to fight for their freedom.While marching, Matthias meets Shinar, an Afghan woman who, having abandoned her own people, offers her services as carrier of the Greek army's supplies. Nanguali is the barbarian warrior's code; its three elements are: honour, revenge and hospitality. Their women's honour, if blackened, could be redeemed (turn back into white) only by death. Matthias stands up to Baz, Shinar's brother, but fails to reach a compromise and is deceived by Baz, who in the end kills his sister and her baby.At the end of the story, Matthias is left with nothing – he has lost his family, friends, health and hope. Instead of returning home (his wife and son having been killed) as initially planned and having nothing to lose, he decides to follow the Greek army in its way to India.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Are_Together_Again"title="Five Are Together Again">
The children are supposed to be staying at Kirrin Cottage, but as soon as George's mother and father's maid Joanna catches scarlet fever, the Five are sent to live with an old friend, called Tinker, and his famous scientist father, who first appeared in "Five Go To Demon's Rocks" (1961). When top secret papers belonging to the scientist go missing, it is left up to the children to find the thief. There are some circus folk camping in Tinker's field. Five then head to the castle in the moor near Tinker's field.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_Heat"title="Havana Heat">
In 1911, Taylor, a former big-league pitcher, has been sent down to the minor leagues at age 37 due to problems with his pitching arm. He longs for a second chance and approaches his former manager, John McGraw, about re-joining the New York Giants. Short of players, McGraw eventually agrees to take him on a post-season exhibition trip to play baseball in Cuba, where the political atmosphere is tense in the aftermath of the Spanish–American War. During the games in Cuba, Taylor is introduced to a promising Cuban prospect who is also deaf. Taylor encounters moral dilemmas as he balances his desire to return to the big leagues against difficult issues involving racism, discrimination, disability, fading dreams, and the sports philosophy of winning at any cost.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guess_How_Much_I_Love_You"title="Guess How Much I Love You">
"Guess How Much I Love You" follows the story of two hares, Big Nutbrown Hare and Little Nutbrown Hare. It is never stated that the two hares are father and son in the original storybooks, but this is stated in the animated television series. Little Nutbrown Hare asks Big Nutbrown Hare the title question, "Guess how much I love you?", and the book continues as the two use larger and larger measures to quantify how much they love each other in answer to the question.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Sideways_Arithmetic_from_Wayside_School"title="More Sideways Arithmetic from Wayside School">
In the first chapter, Allison invites Jason, Stephen and all the girls in class to her birthday party. She says when two or more boys are together, they start acting really silly. This is proven when Joe and John come by and indeed act silly, they don't admit it until Mrs. Jewls writes the situation as an arithmetic problem (boys + boys = silly). The girls are excited about this, until they are told that the same thing goes for girls. The next chapter simply involves Mrs. Jewls being unable to say bras because it's "crass". After that, Sue gets a new dog called Fangs, Calvin saying the dog sounds mean. When presented, Mrs. Jewls uses arithmetic (good + dog = fangs) to prove that Fangs the dog is nice. Next, some of the boys complain about them being too hot, saying "too" more times the hotter they are. Later, Miss Worm, the teacher who teaches on the story just below Mrs. Jewls's, complains about the excitementic arithmetic is causing in the class. Miss Worm is basically what Sue was like in the last arithmetic book. Later, Mrs. Jewls announces there will be a pop quiz next week. She won't tell the day, but they'll know when she tells them to take out their pencils. Todd then says that if she doesn't tell them on Thursday, they'll know the quiz will be on Friday. The other students play along with the other days, in a variation of the unexpected hanging paradox until Mrs. Jewls tells them to forget the whole thing. Then, the school flagpole was struck by lightning. So Mrs. Jewls's class makes a vote on which should be the new size. Unfortunately, the kids keep wanting more votes with the second most votes, something like a tetherball game. Ultimately, Kathy is always on the side that wins, so her size gets to be the size of the new flagpole. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Went_Thataway"title="They Went Thataway">
Horwitz decides to travel to Hollywood and hunt down the surviving western heroes of his youth. As he drives across the country, he stops off at a variety of places that he had known only through western movie legends, only to find them too modernized. Upon arrival in Los Angeles, Horwitz contacts the Screen Actors Guild, which refuses to release the mailing addresses of the now-retired stars or even tell him who is alive or dead. He leaves his contact letters at the Guild office and places an ad in "The Hollywood Reporter", asking for any of the actors willing to participate in the writing project to contact him. Through various means, Horwitz succeeds in tracking down and interviewing many western heroes, including Gene Autry, Sunset Carson, Joel McCrea, and Duncan Renaldo, AKA "The Cisco Kid". Others, such as Jay Silverheels and Roy Rogers, reject him completely.Throughout the book, Horwitz is repeatedly disillusioned by the reality behind the nostalgia, such as Lash LaRue being arrested for drunkenness and drug possession or Roy Rogers' horse Trigger stuffed and mounted in a museum.Horwitz ends the book at the site where Tom Mix died in a car accident. He takes out his childhood cowboy boots, tries to polish them, and leaves them at the monument marking the location.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_Beach"title="Steel Beach">
"Steel Beach" takes place in Varley’s "Eight Worlds" universe. The Solar System has been colonized by human refugees fleeing aliens (known as "the Invaders"). Earth and Jupiter are off-limits to humanity, but Earth's Moon and the other planets and moons of the Solar System have all become populated. There are also minor colonies set in the Oort cloud beyond the Solar System itself. The "steel beach" of the title is Earth's Moon, the most heavily inhabited world in the Solar System since the Invaders obliterated human civilization on Earth. The title alludes to humans being figuratively thrown onto the inhospitable Moon, a parallel to fish making their way onto land in the evolution of amphibians.The book's protagonist, Hildy Johnson, is a newspaper reporter, named after the male protagonist of the 1928 play and 1931 film "The Front Page" and the female protagonist of the 1940 film "His Girl Friday" (Hildy changes gender halfway through the book), who finds trouble beneath the surface of the near-utopian society run by the Central Computer. The Central Computer runs every aspect of every person's life: it is the government, court, information source, and friend to every citizen.At the beginning of the novel, Hildy has become dissatisfied with life, much like many others on the moon who take part, for example, in destructive activities such as "slash boxing"—a blend of knife fighting and boxing, on which Hildy reports. It is revealed that Hildy has made multiple suicide attempts. Scenes such as a discussion of suicide with a slain slash boxer suggest that Hildy is an unreliable narrator.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_the_Big_Men_Fly"title="And the Big Men Fly">
The coach of the Crows football team, J.J Forbes, sends his assistant, Willy, out to find a new player for the big season championship which was to start in 2 weeks. J.J thought that they would never have a chance, as Wally couldn't seem to find anyone with some decent talent.J.J was getting very upset at Wally and told him on the phone to do anything to get someone, as he says, "I don't care if you have to rewrite the law books. That's what we put you through university for!" A little while later, Wally bursts into the room yelling and screaming. "J.J… I've got him! I've got him! Oh, you've never seen anything like him, he's beautiful, he's a Greek god." At this point, J.J starts to think that Wally has gone mad and needs to see a psychiatrist.Wally is trying to convince J.J that this player, Achilles Jones, can kick a wheat bag 10 yards. J.J doesn't believe Wally at first, but thinks that he has nothing to lose so they decide to go and meet Achilles They drive all the way out to Manangatang, where this Achilles lives, and J.J finally gets to meet him. At first, things are a bit stressful as Achilles gets the shotgun out and threatens to kill them when they arrive. They try convincing Achilles to come and play football for the Crows but Achilles is just too happy where he is and won't go anywhere. J.J and Wally aren't happy, so they decide that they are going to get Achilles to play by bribing his partner, Lil, with gifts and getting her to convince Achilles to try it out and play a few games. To start with convincing Lil, they tell her that she will get all sorts of nice things and they even give her a fur coat. They end up telling Achilles that the WilliamsesAchilles' neighbors and worst enemiesthink that he would never be able to play football in his life, so he decides that he will go and play for the Crows, only so he can show the Williamses that he can play and that he is better than them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Each_Man's_Son"title="Each Man's Son">
Mollie MacNeil and her son Alan, miss Archie (Mollie's husband) who is away in the United States trying to make a living as a professional boxer. Archie has been away for four years and it is not clear whether he will return at all. He is adamant that he will never go and work in the coal mines. Meanwhile, Louis Camire, a French expatriate, is trying to convince Mollie to come with him to France where people are more equal than those in the company-owned mining town.The company doctor, Daniel Ainslie, takes a liking to young Alan, since his own wife Margaret is unable to bear children herself. Margaret was made barren by her own husband, who had to perform a procedure on her. Ainslie tries to exert his influence on Mollie and Alan. Daniel believes that Alan has the intelligence to escape the mining town. Mollie and Margaret share their fears about Daniel's influence and contrive to blunt it.After much soul-searching, Daniel realizes that he cannot both have Alan like a son and his wife Margaret at the same time. This contradiction is violently resolved in the book's conclusion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_Bridge"title="Monkey Bridge">
"Monkey Bridge" traverses several opposing worlds. The novel consists of two narrators: Mai, a teenage Vietnamese immigrant, who flees to the United States on the day Saigon falls in 1975, and her mother, Thanh, who manages to join Mai a few months after Mai is settled in the U.S.Three years after their arrival in the United States, Thanh is in the hospital with a blood clot in her brain, suffering paralysis of half side. She has been calling out for Baba Quan, her father, in her sleep. Thanh and Baba Quan were supposed to meet in Saigon and leave for America together back in 1975, but this plan fails because Baba Quan, for some unknown reason, does not show up. Since then, Thanh has "never truly recovered from the mishap that left him without the means to leave Saigon".Mai, who worries about her mother's health and understands how desperately her mother wants to see Baba Quan, decides to make a dangerous trip to Canada with her best friend Bobbie, where they plan to make a phone call to Baba Quan once they cross the border and hopefully take a wild chance to bring her grandfather to the United States. The plan, however, does not succeed. Mai retreats at the last minute because she not only fears of being deported by the U.S government but also recalls what her father says all the time: "One wrong move ... the entire course of a country changed", in which he refers to America's decision to make the crucial commitment in the Vietnam War.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boomsday_(novel)"title="Boomsday (novel)">
Cassandra Devine, "a morally superior twenty-nine-year-old PR chick" and moonlit angry blogger, incites generational warfare when she proposes that the financially nonviable Baby Boomers be given incentives (free Botox, no estate tax) to kill themselves at 70. The proposal, meant only as a catalyst for debate on the issue, catches the approval of millions of citizens, chief among them an ambitious presidential candidate, Senator Randolph Jepperson.With the aide of public relations guru Terry Tucker, Devine and Jepperson attempt to ride "Voluntary Transitioning" all the way to the White House, over the objections of the Religious Right and the Baby Boomers, deeply offended by the demonstrations taking place on the golf courses of their retirement resorts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sleepwalker_(novel)"title="The Sleepwalker (novel)">
A plane crashes over the Atlantic, killing all 345 passengers on board, including the wife, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren of former CHERUB chairman Dr. Terrence "Mac" McAfferty. A distressed 12-year-old boy, Fahim Bin Hassam, calls the air crash investigation hotline and attempts to implicate his father Hassam, but gives in to his fear before he can relay any significant information.Lauren and fellow agent Jake Parker are sent on a mission to befriend Fahim and discover the truth behind the plane crash. Mac becomes the acting mission controller, trying to find out if the deaths of his family were accidental or an act of terrorism. Lauren plants audio devices all over the Bin Hassam house, but when Hassam discovers one, he thinks that his cleaning lady was responsible and tortures her to the brink of death. Fahim feels guilty about this and admits to his father about how it was Lauren and Jake. Hassam takes Fahim to his brother's house to arrange his escape from the United Kingdom, but Fahim throws antiseptic in his father's eyes in an attempt to flee. Hassam chases him across a golf course, but when an armed tactical response team threaten to shoot him, Hassam takes his own son hostage with a knife to his throat. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Humans_Involved_(novel)"title="No Humans Involved (novel)">
Jaime, who knows a thing or two about showbiz, is on a television shoot in Los Angeles when weird things start to happen. As a woman whose special talent is raising the dead, her threshold for weirdness is pretty high: she’s used to not only seeing dead people but hearing them speak to her in very emphatic terms. But for the first time in her life — as invisible hands brush her skin, unintelligible fragments of words are whispered into her ears, and beings move just at the corner of her eye — she knows what humans mean when they talk about being haunted.She is determined to get to the bottom of these manifestations, but as she sets out to solve the mystery she has no idea how scary her investigation will get. As she digs into the dark underside of Los Angeles, she’ll need as much Otherworld help as she can get in order to survive, calling on her personal angel, Eve, and Hope, the well-meaning chaos demon. Jeremy, the alpha werewolf, is also by her side offering protection. And, Jaime hopes, maybe a little more than that.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe's_Enemy"title="Sharpe's Enemy">
In the winter of 1812, a band of deserters from all the armies of the Peninsular War - French, British, Spanish and Portuguese - descends on the isolated hamlet of Adrados, on the Spanish-Portuguese border, led by Pot-au-Feu (Sergeant Deron, formerly Marshal Soult's chef). They slaughter the residents, sparing a number of women on pilgrimage to a convent in the village, including Lady Farthingdale and Madame Dubreton, the English-born wife of a French colonel of cavalry.Major General Nairn sends Richard Sharpe, recently promoted to the rank of major to deliver the ransom demanded for Lady Farthingdale. Upon reaching Adrados, they encounter French Colonel Dubreton and his sergeant on a similar mission, to free Dubreton's wife. When they meet with "Maréchal" (Marshal) Pot-au-Feu, Sharpe is appalled to discover that Obadiah Hakeswill, his longtime bitter enemy (beginning from "Sharpe's Tiger"), is Pot-au-Feu's "colonel". They see both ladies are safe and deliver the ransom, but Hakeswill informs them that the money only safeguards the women's virtue, and that they must continue making payments. Colonel and Madame Dubreton are careful to conceal their connection from the kidnappers. Sharpe notes that Adrados is extremely defensible, with a castle, a watchtower and a convent. Madame Dubreton gives Sharpe a clue that she is being held in the convent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_(Bertagna_novel)"title="Exodus (Bertagna novel)">
In the year 2100, 15-year-old Mara lives on the island of Wing, with fellow villagers. The melting ice cap has caused the shoreline to rise and they are now almost out of land. Through her cyberwizz, a laptop-like gadget, she navigates through information to find where they can go. She meets a mysterious creature called Fox, who demands to know where she is. Mara is excited because beyond him she can see a new world, but she loses connection before she can learn more. Mara tells the villagers about New Mungo, a place where they can go which is a new land raised high above sea level. They eventually leave in fishing boats, but are forced to leave behind the elder generation who couldn't part from their home.Once they reach New Mungo, they realise it is actually not a welcoming place; a huge outer wall surrounds the whole sky-city. They then are forced to join a refugee boat camp and some of them die there, including Mara's best friend Gail. The Sky Police, from New Mungo, occasionally take the strong up to the city in a procedure called Pickings, but Mara has a bad feeling about this. Mara learns all her family drowned in the perilous journey to New Mungo, and attempts to commit suicide. When she realises her will to live is too strong, Mara manages, with the help of an urchin she names Wing (after her drowned island), to enter the city gates. There she meets the people of the Netherworld (a strange twilight place in the shadow of the sky city, with the roofs of the drowned city of Glasgow jutting above the sea), who are known as the treenesters. They immediately recognise her as their messiah, the Face in the Stone, from an old prophecy called the Stone Telling. She lives with them for some time, exploring and helping them to survive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bad_Spell_in_Yurt"title="A Bad Spell in Yurt">
This story takes place in the tiny kingdom of Yurt. It reads like a charming, light-hearted story at first, but darker forces soon reveal themselves.Amongst themselves, the characters refer to the "three that rule the world", the aristocracy, the church, and wizardry. Though the aristocracy do the actual ruling, organized wizardry generally considers itself to be the superior of the three, in part because they put an end to the "Black Wars," wars between kingdoms so violent and bloody that individual wizards were forced to band together to stop them. Churchmen considers themselves superior to wizards, and they are traditional rivals in this semi-medieval world.The first-person narrator is Daimbert, who has just barely graduated from the wizards' school. He takes up his first post as Royal Wizard of Yurt. Daimbert barely graduated, owing to all that embarrassment with the frogs, yet he has amazing improvisational skills that manage to get him by.Daimbert soon befriends Joachim, the castle chaplain, attempts to make magical telephones from scratch, learns old herbal magic from his predecessor, fights a dragon from the northern land of wild magic, searches for the source of an evil spell on the king, and is forced to bargain with a demon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Star_(novel)"title="Shadow Star (novel)">
Elora Danan has slain the dragons that were the embodiment of the soul of Creation. It was the only way to save the dragons from the Deceiver, who could have used them to rule the Realms. In Elora's possession are two last dragon eggs. To protect the eggs, Elora spellbinds herself to her companions Thorn Drumheller, the Nelwyn sorcerer and her sworn guardian, and Khory Bannefin, the dead woman warrior whose body is inhabited by the offspring of a demon. Pursued by the dreaded Black Rose, the Deceiver's assassins, Elora and her allies must reach the city-state of Sandeni. There they will be reunited with old friends: the brownies Franjean and Rool, the eagles Anele and Bastian, and the young warrior-scribe Luc-Jon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Transformers_books"title="List of Transformers books">
The Insecticons gain control of the minds of the Dinobots, hoping to turn their powers to evil.An experimental invisibility device that renders things invisible. It's up to you to decide whether the Autobots or Decepticons get their hands on it and how it is used.Set during the events of the "Transformers: Cybertron" television series, Ultra Magnus is commander of various Autobot ships sent to other planets in search for the Cyber Planet Keys. Longrack serves as captain of the Spanner which was sent to Delta Draconis. Among the ship's crew are Armorhide, Blurr and Checkpoint.Set on the planet Cybertron after the events of the last issue of the original Marvel Transformers comic series, Mini-Cons created by the Last Autobot are restoring Cybertron for the return of their larger Autobot and Decepticon brothers who are in space. A conspiracy led by Broadside (Transformers) attempts to close of Cybertron for the Mini-Cons.The origin of the Autobots and Decepticons arrival on Earth.In the 1985 audio and book adventure "Satellite of Doom" Megatron and Soundwave kidnap thousands of humans and force them to bury tons of coal in the desert. Sealing the humans in the cave they set off high temperature explosives that turn the carbon in the coal and humans into a gigantic diamond lens that they plan to launch into space. Bumblebee discovers the Decepticon launching site and Optimus Prime sends Skyfire to take it out, but he fails. Megatron launches the lens into space and uses it to focus the sun's rays and melt the shale in the Rocky Mountains into oil. Optimus again sends Skyfire to stop the lens and Prowl instructs Ratchet to build extra fuel tanks for the Autobot jet's trip to space. Despite his best efforts the diamond is unharmed and Skyfire burns up on reentry of Earth's atmosphere. As the boiling oil threatens to kill millions on the West Coast, the Autobots build a mile long mirror to reflect the lens rays back on it, shattering it. The Autobots launch an assault on Megatron's base, but the Decepticon leader and Soundwave escape in their drilling mole machine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Apes_(novel)"title="Great Apes (novel)">
After a night of drug use, Simon Dykes wakes up in a world where chimpanzees have evolved to be the dominant species with self-awareness, while humans are the equivalent of chimps in our world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentlemen_of_the_Road"title="Gentlemen of the Road">
The story centers on two world-traveling Jewish bandits who style themselves with the euphemism "gentlemen of the road." Amram is a hulking Abyssinian (African) who is equally proficient with an axe as a game of shatranj; he is haunted by the disappearance of his daughter many years ago. His companion is Zelikman, a Frankish (German) physician who uses an oversized bloodletting lancet as a rapier. Zelikman has a morbid personality due to the trauma of watching his family slaughtered in a pogrom.The two bandits begin in the Kingdom of Arran, where they con the customers of an inn with a staged duel. Before they can collect their winnings, a mahout attempts to hire them to safeguard his charge, Filaq, a fugitive Khazar prince. Filaq's family was murdered by the usurping bek, Buljan. Before the pair can give their answer, Buljan's assassins kill the mahout, and the two gentlemen escape with Filaq, intent on collecting a reward from his wealthy relatives. Filaq, on the other hand, is committed to escaping and taking vengeance on Buljan.The group arrives at the home of Filaq's relatives and discovers that everyone has been slaughtered. Filaq is abducted by the band of mercenaries responsible, who have been searching for him on Buljan's behalf. Filaq manages to sow discord among the mercenaries, winning most of them over to his plan to unseat Buljan. One of the dissenters, named Hanukkah, is left for dead on the roadside; after Zelikman heals him, Hanukkah switches his allegiance, devoting himself to Zelikman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measle_and_the_Wrathmonk"title="Measle and the Wrathmonk">
A 10-year-old boy named Measle is living with his horrid guardian, Basil Tramplebone. Measle's life is horrible and boring. Basil builds a detailed train set using money that was left for Measle by his parents and plays with it, while all Measle can do is watch him. Desperate to play with it, Measle tricks Basil into leaving the house by telling him that there is extra money in the bank. His plan backfires, and Basil catches him playing with the train set when he gets home. Basil magically shrinks Measle and placed him in the train set. Measle meets Frank, the electrician who wired the train set, who is all plastic except for his mouth. Measle then feeds him some carrot, which restores Frank to his previous human-form. Frank reveals that the glazed-donut crumbs and lemonade left by Basil turn you to plastic if eaten. Together they rescue Prudence, a wrathmonkologist; William, an encyclopaedia salesman; Kitty, a Brownie scout; Lady Grant, a town official; and Kip, the carpenter who built the table and most of the train set's detail work.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idylls_of_the_Queen"title="The Idylls of the Queen">
"The Idylls of the Queen" is set in the Britain of King Arthur, as portrayed by Sir Thomas Malory's classic "Le Morte D'Arthur"; as specifically stated by the author, no attempt is made at depicting with historical accuracy the time of the actual King Arthur. It expands an incident in Malory, in which the Queen is accused of murder, into a complex mystery novel mingling the genres of historical mysteries, Arthurian legend and fantasy. Although set in a magical world, the puzzle is unraveled through straight investigation with no sorcerous shortcuts.The obscure knight Sir Patrise is poisoned at a dinner party given by Queen Guenevere in Camelot, and Sir Mador, the dead knight's cousin, accuses the Queen of the murder. Her fate is to be determined through trial by combat. If the champion fighting on her behalf wins she will be declared innocent; if not, she will be burned at the stake. Unfortunately for her, the best Knights of the Round Table were all present at the dinner, which disqualifies them from championing her, and the mightiest of all, her secret lover Sir Lancelot, has gone missing.Guenevere's only hope is her admirer, King Arthur's sarcastic seneschal Sir Kay, the first-person narrator of the tale. Kay suspects that Sir Patrise's true killer had a more prominent target in mind, probably Sir Gawaine, and will likely try again; he is also cynical as to the efficacy of trial by combat in establishing anything other than which fighter is the better combatant. Therefore, playing the role of detective, he unites with Gawaine, Gareth and Morded in a two-pronged quest to locate the vanished Lancelot and unmask the real culprit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.A._Confidential"title="L.A. Confidential">
The story is about several Los Angeles Police Department officers in the early 1950s who become embroiled in a mix of sex, corruption and murder following a massacre at the Nite Owl coffee shop. The story eventually encompasses organized crime, political corruption, heroin trafficking, pornography, prostitution and Hollywood. The title refers to the scandal magazine "Confidential", which is fictionalized as "Hush-Hush". It also deals with the real "Bloody Christmas" scandal.The three protagonists are LAPD officers. Edmund Exley, the son of prestigious detective Preston Exley, is a "straight arrow" who informs on other officers in a police brutality scandal. He is first and foremost a politician and a ladder climber. This earns the enmity of Wendell "Bud" White, an intimidating enforcer with a fixation on men who abuse women. Between the two of them is Jack Vincennes, who acts as more of a celebrity than a cop, who is a technical advisor on a police television show called "Badge of Honor" (similar to the real-life show "Dragnet") and provides tips to a scandal magazine. The three of them must set their differences aside to unravel the conspiracy linking the novel's events.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_the_Right_One_In_(novel)"title="Let the Right One In (novel)">
In 1981 Blackeberg, Stockholm, Oskar is a 12-year-old boy who is on the verge of his 13th birthday. He lives with his mother, who is loving and with whom he initially seems to have a close connection. His father, whom Oskar visits occasionally, is an alcoholic living in the countryside. A victim of merciless bullying, Oskar has gained morbid interests, which include crime and forensics. He keeps a scrapbook filled with newspaper articles about various murders and often fantasizes about killing his tormentors. He even goes as far as taking out his aggression on a tree in the woods near his apartment.One day, Oskar befriends Eli, a girl who just moved in next door and claims to be the same age. Eli lives with an older man named Håkan, a former teacher who was fired when caught in possession of child pornography. Later in the novel, she's revealed to be a vampire who was turned as a child and is stuck forever in a young body and mind. Oskar and Eli develop a close relationship, and she helps him fight back against his tormentors. Throughout the book their relationship gradually becomes closer, and they reveal more of themselves, including fragments of Eli's human life. Among the details revealed is that Eli is a boy named Elias who was castrated when he was turned into a vampire over 200 years ago. He dresses in female clothing and is perceived by outsiders as a young girl.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_the_Great_Horn_Spoon!"title="By the Great Horn Spoon!">
Twelve-year-old Jack heads to California to search for gold after his Aunt Arabella loses all her money. He is accompanied by Aunt Arabella's butler, Praiseworthy. They plan to pay for passage on the ship "Lady Wilma," but when a criminal named Cut-Eye Higgins steals their money, they stow away instead. Captain Swain catches them and forces them to work for their passage in the coal bunkers. While there, they meet Dr. Buckbee, who possesses a map of the gold fields. Cut-Eye Higgins steals the map and escapes in one of the lifeboats. During the journey, the "Lady Wilma" sails around Cape Horn and wins a race against a ship called the "Sea Raven."After arriving in California, Praiseworthy and Jack give a miner named Quartz Jackson a haircut. Quartz Jackson teaches them how to pan for gold and finds some gold dust in his beard. He gives the gold dust to Praiseworthy, who puts it into his left glove. Praiseworthy and Jack board a stagecoach for the gold fields, only to discover Cut-Eye Higgins on the same journey. Highwaymen hold up the stagecoach and one tries to take Aunt Arabella's picture from Praiseworthy. Praiseworthy knocks him uphill with a punch from his left glove, which was weighted by the gold dust. The robbers take Higgins' coat, which contains the map. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Mad_Universe"title="What Mad Universe">
Keith Winton is an editor for a science fiction magazine, working during the late 40s when genre fiction magazines have not yet given over to TV shows. With his glamorous co-worker, Betty (an employee of the 'Romantic Stories' magazine, on whom he has an undeclared crush), he visits his boss in his elegant estate in the Catskills, unfortunately on the same day as an experimental rocket laden with a high-voltage generator able to be seen discharging on the Moon's surface is to be launched. Betty has to go back to New York. Keith is alone in his friends' garden, deep in thought, when, suddenly, the rocket's generator (whose launch has been a failure) crashes on his friends' residence and dissipates its gigawatt electrical charge right on the spot Keith is standing on. The massive energy discharge allows his physical form to 'shift' through dimensions, taking him to a strange but deceptively similar parallel universe.At a superficial glance, the streets look the same, there are the same kind of cars and the people wear the same kind of clothes (and he also knows some of the people, though sometimes they don't know him), and the radio broadcasts familiar tunes from the Benny Goodman Orchestra. But there are many incongruous elements in this seemingly familiar reality. Wild-eyed, Keith is astonished to see how credits have replaced dollars; is amazed when he encounters some scantily-clad pin-up girls who are, at the same time, astronauts; is driven to stupor when he encounters his first lunar native vacationing on Earth. He inadvertently discovers, to his cost, that such an innocent activity as coin collecting could lead to being suspected of being an Arcturian spyand since Arcturians possess awesome mental powers and are bent on exterminating humanity, any such suspicion is liable to lead to being shot on the spot. Managing to escape the spy scare, he finds that New York has no night life; there is a total, impenetrable darkness, and wandering the completely dark Times Square could lead to a fatal encounter with the terrible Nighters. Trying to find his feet in this bewildering world, Winton discovers thatthough interstellar space flight and war with aliens has become a daily realityScience Fiction is still being written and read. He reasons that his best way of making a living would be as a Science Fiction writer. But this turns out to be yet another blunder, placing him under grave suspicion by the formidable WBI (World Bureau of Investigation) and another narrow brush with being summarily shot as a spy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martians,_Go_Home"title="Martians, Go Home">
The story begins on 26 March 1964. Luke Deveraux, the protagonist, is a 37-year-old sci-fi writer who is being divorced by his wife. Deveraux holes himself up in a desert cabin with the intention of writing a new novel (and forgetting the painful failure of his marriage). Drunk, he considers writing a story about Martians, when, all of a sudden, someone knocks on the door. Deveraux opens it to find a little green man, a Martian. The Martian turns out to be very discourteous; he insists on calling Luke 'Mack,' and has little in mind other than the desire to insult and humiliate Luke. The Martian, who is intangible, proves to be able to disappear at will and to see through opaque materials. Luke leaves his cabin by car, thinking to himself that the alien was but a drunken hallucination. He realises that he is wrong when he sees that a billion Martians have come to Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ravishing_of_Lol_Stein"title="The Ravishing of Lol Stein">
At the beginning of the novel, Lol Stein (her middle initial is omitted in the English translation) is a woman in her thirties. She was born and raised in South Tahla in a bourgeois family and is engaged to Michael Richardson at 19. However, at a ball in the seaside resort of Town Beach, Michael Richardson leaves Lol for Anne-Marie Stretter, an older woman. After a difficult recovery from this shock which marks her for the rest go her life, Lol marries John Bedford, a musician she meets on one of her daily walks. Lol leaves South Tahla with her husband.Ten years later, with three children, Lol is an established woman with no time for fantasy. She returns with her family to South Tahla and moves into the house she grew up in. Lol goes on her daily walks as she did ten years before. She thinks she recognises Tatiana Karl one day, the friend who consoled her after her breakup with Michael Richardson. The man who accompanies Tatiana makes a deep impression on Lol.Lol reestablishes her contact with Tatiana and gets to know both her husband and her lover, Jacques Hold. Lol is able to get information from Jacques about events at the ball at T Beach 10 years before. Lol reveals to Jacques her interest in him but forbids him to stay with her instead of Tatiana.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Chesil_Beach"title="On Chesil Beach">
In July 1962, Edward Mayhew, a graduate student of history, and Florence Ponting, a violinist in a string quartet, are spending their honeymoon in a small hotel on the Dorset seashore, at Chesil Beach. The two are very much in love despite being from drastically different backgrounds.During the course of an evening, the couple reflect upon their upbringing and future prospects. Edward is sexually motivated and has a taste for rash behaviour. Florence is bound by the social code of another era and, perhaps having been sexually abused by her father, is terrified of sexual intimacy. She tries to mentally prepare herself for the inevitable consummation, but the thought continues to repel her.Just as the couple are about to have sex for the first time the inexperienced Edward involuntarily ejaculates onto her belly and thighs. Revolted, Florence runs out of the hotel and onto the beach. Edward follows and the couple argue, with Florence making it clear that she will never agree to have sex. Edward accuses her of lying during their marriage vows, and is further angered when Florence suggests that he could sleep with other women to relieve his sexual desires. The couple separate, and their marriage is annulled for lack of consummation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Bee_(graphic_novel)"title="Queen Bee (graphic novel)">
Haley Madison is a young and unpopular teenager that discovers that she has psychokinetic powers which tend to manifest themselves whenever she becomes excited or angry. After discovering that her family will have to move in order for her foster mother to take a new job, Haley decides to reinvent herself at her new school as one of the cool kids.On her first day in school Haley meets and befriends Trini Turner, but quickly shows more interest in befriending the clique of popular girls in the school, Dominique, Keiko, Steffi and Anjelica, that call themselves the "Hive". Haley gains the attention of the Hive once she intervenes with a bully using her powers, but loses her friendship with Trini as a result. Anjelica begins to see Haley as a threat to the group, but cannot seem to win at anything she competes against Haley at. Keiko tells Haley that Trini and Anjelica were once friends until Trini supposedly became clingy and jealous.Haley's popular status is threatened when Alexa Harmon comes to school. Alexa also has psychokinetic powers and recognizes that Haley has them as well. She joins the Hive and quickly begins to usurp Haley's popularity. As a result the pair begin to fight one another using their powers, resulting in Haley being accused of cheating on a test and being forced to work on a project with the quietest boy in the class, Jasper Reines. Jasper and Haley initially do not get along, but eventually become friends. Jasper remarks on a locket that Haley wears, to which Haley replies that it was a family heirloom. While talking with Jasper, Haley learns the truth about the Hive. Jasper explains that Trini was not clingy and that her friendship with Anjelica ended because of bullying.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glory"title="The Glory">
Interweaving the lives and fates of fictional characters and real-life notables, the sequel to "The Hope" continues the story of Israeli history to the climactic events of the Yom Kippur War and the promise of peace.Historical events in the book include:Families whose history is chronicled in "The Glory":Real historical personages in the novel include Yonatan Netanyahu, Golda Meir, Ariel Sharon, Anwar Sadat, Moshe Dayan, and David Elazar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skulduggery_Pleasant_(novel)"title="Skulduggery Pleasant (novel)">
When Stephanie Edgley's horror novelist uncle, Gordon Edgley, dies unexpectedly she is called out on his will. Present at the reading of the will are herself, her parents Desmond and Melissa, Stephanie's none-too-well-liked uncle and aunt Fergus and Beryl, and a mysterious man in a tan overcoat, hat, frizzy wig, sunglasses, and scarf, named Skulduggery Pleasant. Stephanie's aunt and uncle are given an ugly brooch, a boat, and a car, (none of which they wanted), while Stephanie's parents are left a magnificent villa in France. Stephanie herself is left with the entirety of Gordon's remaining estate, including the impressive royalties on his best-selling books, and a mansion filled with his possessions. After visiting the mansion, Melissa and Stephanie are stranded by car issues and a heavy rainstorm. Calling a tow-truck, Melissa opts to return while letting Stephanie spend time in her new property. After reading some of her uncle's latest manuscripts (to be published posthumously) and fixing herself a snack, Stephanie receives a threatening phone call. The caller demands she hand over a "key". When she refuses, the man breaks in and tries to attack and kill her. But she is saved by the mysterious Mr. Pleasant, who throws a fireball (produced from clicking his fingers) at the man. Upon discovering his imperviousness to flames, Pleasant shoots the attacker with a gun, forcing him to flee the scene. During the fight, Skulduggery's disguise is knocked off, revealing him to be an actual walking-and-talking skeleton held together by nothing but magic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Good_Man_in_Africa_(novel)"title="A Good Man in Africa (novel)">
Morgan Leafy is First Secretary to the British Deputy High Commission in Nkongsamba in the fictional West African country of Kinjanja. Leafy's life is becoming increasingly problematic: he is being blackmailed by a local politician, his plan to fix the forthcoming elections has come unstuck, and a coup is looming. In his personal life he has contracted gonorrhea from Hazel, his black mistress who is cheating on him, while Priscilla, his boss's daughter on whom Leafy has lustful ambitions, has just got engaged to his hated underling. To complete his woes Priscilla's father is threatening to dismiss him unless he can dispose of a corpse that has been left to rot in the sun in accordance with tribal laws.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Ice-Cream_War"title="An Ice-Cream War">
The story focuses on the East African Campaign fought between British and German forces during World War I, and how it affects several individual people whose paths converge.The first character introduced is Temple Smith (Walter Smith in the US edition), an American expatriate farm-owner/mechanic/engineer who runs a successful sisal plantation in British East Africa near Mount Kilimanjaro. Before war breaks out in August 1914, Smith is on cordial terms with his German half-English neighbour, Erich von Bishop. Smith even shops for coffee plant seedlings at the botanical garden in the capital of German East Africa, Dar es Salaam. Major von Bishop burns Smith's sisal and linseed plantation in the opening campaign of the Great War, and then dismantles the massive decorticator, the industrial centrepiece of Smith's sisal farm operations. Now made a penniless refugee, and unable to secure any war reparations from the colonial British bureaucracy, Smith places his wife and children with his missionary father-in-law and joins the British military forces in Nairobi, pursuing personal vengeance against von Bishop over the next four years of the war in East Africa.The second narrative strand involves Felix Cobb, the studious youngest son of an aristocratic and traditional British military family, everyone of whom he despises apart from his older brother Gabriel, a captain. The latter soon marries his sweetheart Charis (inspiring a certain jealousy in Felix), but war breaks out while Gabriel is on his honeymoon in Normandy, and he makes haste back to his regiment. Gabriel is posted to Africa, where he befriends psychotic fellow soldier Bilderbeck and is wounded in the Battle of Tanga. Whilst recovering in a Prisoner of War hospital, he develops an infatuation for Erich von Bishop's plump, stubborn wife Liesl, who works there as a nurse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_(novel)"title="Armadillo (novel)">
The story concerns Lorimer Black, a successful loss adjuster. His original name is Milomre Blocj and he comes from a family of Transnistrian gypsies who arrived in London in 1957 and set up an import-export business linked to Eastern Europe. They now run a taxi cab firm and are always borrowing money off Milo (as they still call him). Lorimer suffers from insomnia and spends many nights at the "Institute for Lucid Dreaming" in search for a cure. He collects antique helmets, listens to African music and is having an affair with Stella Bull, the owner of a scaffolding company. The book includes extracts taken from Lorimer's journal "The Book of Transfiguration," in which he philosophizes on his situation and quotes from Gerard de Nerval.Hogg, Lorimer's overbearing boss, describes his profession thus: "people turn to insurance to remove uncertainty from areas of their lives. Insurance companies turn to loss adjusters to put uncertainty into insurance, and thus reintroduce uncertainty to insured people."The narrative itself begins when Lorimer turns up at a routine business appointment only to find the man he was to meet has hanged himself. From then on his already complicated life begins to unravel as he falls in love with Flavia Malinervo, an unhappily married actress; is assigned to investigate a case of suspected insurance fraud in which a colleague, Torquil Helvoir-Jayne, is implicated; and suffers the death of his father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Afternoon"title="The Blue Afternoon">
It is Los Angeles 1936. Kay Fischer is a young, ambitious architect who is shadowed by a mysterious stranger claiming to be her father. Within weeks of their first encounter, Kay will join him for an extraordinary journey into the old man's past, initially in search of a murderer, but finally in celebration of a glorious, undying love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Willis_Place"title="The Old Willis Place">
Diana and her younger brother Georgie live in the woods near Oak Hill Manor, known locally as the Old Willis Place after its last inhabitant, a cruel old woman named Lilian Willis. Diana and Georgie have many rules they must follow, including never going beyond the property's boundaries, never speaking to anyone, and never allowing themselves to be seen. The county hires caretakers to live in a mobile home on the Willis property; however, Diana and Georgie always manage to drive them away with their childish pranks.Diana is excited to see that the latest caretaker has a daughter named Lissa, a lonely, imaginative girl whose mother died when she was five. Diana imagines becoming friends with Lissa, even though the rules forbid it. Soon after her arrival, Lissa goes exploring and is the verge of entering the house when Diana steps out of the woods to stop her. Diana is so filthy and ragged that Lissa mistakes her for a monster and flees.Upset by Lissa's reaction, Diana writes an apology for frightening Lissa and asks if they can be friends. Lissa confides that she plans to sneak into the house and explore while her father is away, inviting Diana to go with her. Diana is wary, as entering the house is against the rules, but she is so desperate to have Lissa for a friend that she agrees. The following day, Diana and Lissa enter the Old Willis Place, where Lissa feels compelled to see the locked parlor where Lilian Willis died. In spite of Diana's attempts to stop her, she opens the parlor door, freeing Miss Lilian's malevolent spirit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Noon"title="Blue Noon">
When time freezes in the middle of the day during a school pep rally, the Midnighters have a problem. The secret hour is slowly making its way into the real world. The last book in the Midnighters trilogy is all about the adventure of trying to keep the secret hour "in" the secret hour.The Midnighters begin to experience the secret hour more and more frequently during daylight hours. To make matters worse, Rex's darkling side cannot always control itself, and may be becoming stronger. By using Madeline and other resources, the Midnighters find out that on the night of Samhain (Halloween), the Secret Hour will expand, and more of the Earth will be sucked up. This is because there is a "rip" in true midnight, which allows non-midnighters to slip into the blue time, that is expanding like a seam in fabric. While trying to keep people out of these dangerous zones, Jessica has some trouble with her curious little sister Beth. True midnight (usually confined to the secret hour) will last for the whole day, and all humans and creatures within it will be awake, no longer 'stiff'. This will allow the darklings to feast once again upon the creatures of day-unless the five teens find a way to stop it from happening.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bookshop"title="The Bookshop">
The novel, set mainly in 1959, follows Florence Green, a middle-aged widow, who decides to open a bookshop in the small coastal town of Hardborough, Suffolk (a thinly-disguised version of Southwold). The location she chooses is the Old House, an abandoned, damp property said to be haunted by a "rapper" (poltergeist). After many sacrifices, Florence manages to start her business, which grows for about a year, after which sales slump. She is opposed by the influential and ambitious Mrs Gamart, who wants to acquire the Old House to set up an arts centre. Mrs Gamart's nephew, a member of parliament, sponsors a bill that empowers local councils to buy any historic building that has been left uninhabited for five years. The bill is passed, the Old House is compulsorily purchased, and Florence is evicted.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beast_House"title="The Beast House">
Teenager Janice Crogan finds a diary belonging to a previous owner of Beast House, a local tourist attraction in the girl's hometown of Malcasa Point, where numerous gruesome murders have allegedly taken place. The journal features lurid sex scenes between the beast and its author, the house's prior owner. Janice sends an excerpt from the book to famed (fictitious) author Gorman Hardy, who decides to travel to Malcasa Point, along with an accomplice named Brian Blake, in order to steal the book and publish it himself.Meanwhile, Tyler and Nora, two young women on vacation together, decide to track down an old flame of Tyler's, Dan Jenson, who is now a patrolman living in Malcasa Point. On the way there, they run into Jack and Abe, two ex-Marines who save them from a crazed driver with a serious case of road rage.Back in town, Gorman agrees to Janice's proposal that she get half the profits from Gorman's proposed book based on the journal, then sends her off with Blake to take photos of Beast House so that he can break into Janice's room at the local inn (run by her parents) and steal the contract entitling her to half the money.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Midnight_Tour"title="The Midnight Tour">
Seventeen years after the events of" The Beast House", the town of Malcasa point has become a popular tourist destination. The Beast House tours have been updated to include a family-friendly tour during the day and an adult-oriented tour late at night, complete with a screening of a movie inspired by the previous book's events and a tour into the cellar where the first of the beasts resided.Owen, one of the tourists, is on holiday with his overbearing girlfriend Monica. While touring the Beast House he develops an attraction to Dana, a tour guide. His attraction to Dana compels him to break up with Monica, whose possessiveness has reached breaking point, and he begins stalking Dana.Dana, meanwhile, becomes romantically involved with Warren, the owner of a food stand. Warren tells her that he was recently abducted, taken into the Beast House and sexually abused by something, hinting that maybe there's still one more beast out there...The story skips back and forth between the present and the in-between years that Sandy, one of the former prisoners of the Kutch family that originally owned the Beast House, has given birth to a beast and raises it in secret. When the beast - whom she has named Eric - turns 13, his sexual urges get the better of him and he rapes Sandy before running away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Way_to_Treat_a_First_Lady"title="No Way to Treat a First Lady">
The President of the United States and Hollywood bombshell Babette Van Anka are carrying on an extramarital affair in the White House. After a night of cheating, the president is confronted by his wife, Beth MacMann. The two get into a fight, during which she throws a historic Paul Revere spittoon at the president. The spittoon strikes the President in the head and it is alleged he later dies from the injuries.The case is instantly declared the "Trial of the Millennium". The first lady decides that to win the case, she must hire the most expensive and unscrupulous attorney in Washington. The attorney who fits the bill, Boyce Baylor, happens to be her former lover from law school.Baylor accepts her case and the trial becomes a media circus, with most of the media instantly concluding the First Lady is guilty. Baylor's courtroom theatrics are planned to impress the court of public opinion as much as the jury. Incessant media coverage of the trial smothers attempts of the new President to accomplish anything serious.Baylor and MacMann rekindle their long-lost love affair, but Baylor's shenanigans soon find him barred from the courtroom. The trial appears lost until Van Anka confesses under oath that she had secretly administered a large dose of Viagra to the president. An autopsy confirmed that the Viagra caused the death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sheik_(novel)"title="The Sheik (novel)">
The novel opens in a hotel in the Algerian city of Biskra. A dance is being held, hosted by a young woman named Diana Mayo and her brother, Sir Aubrey Mayo. It transpires that Diana is planning to leave on a month-long trip into the desert, taking no one with her but an Arab guide. Nobody thinks this is a sensible idea, and Lady Conway—a real person who appears in the book as a minor character—disapprovingly attributes Diana's adventurous plan to her "scandalous" upbringing. Diana's mother had died giving birth to her and her father had killed himself from grief, with the result that Diana grew up tomboyish, with a freedom that at the time was normally only allowed to boys.Before Diana leaves on her journey, her independent character is further established when she refuses a proposal of marriage, explaining that she doesn't know what love is and doesn't want to know. Once she begins travelling in the desert, it is not long before she is kidnapped by the eponymous Sheik, Ahmed Ben Hassan. It turns out her guide had been bribed.Ahmed takes Diana to his tent and rapes her, an event that happens off stage, between the second and third chapters. Diana spends a few months as Ahmed's captive, being raped regularly and brooding on her hatred for him and her self-loathing. Eventually, she is allowed increasing liberty and starts going riding with Ahmed's valet, Gaston. One day, she manages to escape Gaston on one of these rides and gallops away. She is quickly recaptured by Ahmed, however, and as they are riding back to camp, she is overcome by the sudden realisation that she is in love with him. She knows she can say nothing of this, as Ahmed—who claims to find love dull—will send her away if he learns of her love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_William_(book_series)"title="Just William (book series)">
## Setting.William Brown is a middle-class schoolboy of 11, who lives in a country village in Southern England. A number of guesses have been made about where the stories are set. In "Pensions for Boys" in "Sweet William" (1936), it is suggested that the village is about 50 miles from London. It has also been suggested (in Margarey Disher's book "Growing Up with Just William") that it is situated somewhere around Bromley, Kent. A road sign shown in a Thomas Henry illustration from "William Gets A Move On" in "William Does His Bit" reads "London A1", which would place the village north of London.William is the leader of his band of friends, who call themselves the Outlaws, with his best friend Ginger and his other friends Henry and Douglas. His scruffy mongrel is called Jumble.A William story often starts when William or the Outlaws set out to do something, such as putting on a play, collecting scrap metal for the war effort or looking after Violet Elizabeth Bott. William always manages to get into trouble with his parents, although he can never see why. His well-meaning efforts often result in unfortunate outcomes.Sometimes William can be very moral – he is inspired to tell the truth for the duration of Christmas Day in "William's Truthful Christmas" ("Still William", 1925) with unhappy results:
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Islamist"title="The Islamist">
The son of Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh and India, living in East London, Husain describes himself as close to his family and their Bengali spiritual guide (pir) he calls 'Grandpa' as a child, but a boffin misfit at the innercity Stepney Green boys secondary school. There he finds some belonging in studying Islam with a friend, Brother Faileek. Their text, "," by Ghulam Sarwar -- "the first book I read about Islam in English" —tells him that, contrary to his father's teaching, 'religion and politics are one and the same in Islam'. He learns of organizations and people that are dedicated to the creation of 'truly Islamic states' -- Jamaat-e-Islami and its founder Abul Ala Maududi.At the invitation of Faileek, Husain becomes active in the Young Muslim Organization (YMO) whose parent organization (Islamic Forum Europe) ran the big East London Mosque and was aligned with Jamaat-e-Islami. As an "isolated schoolboy" he is flattered by their attention and impressed with the "dynamism" and "discipline" of the group, but his parents are furious, demanding that he choose between political Islam and the family. Husain runs away from home, coming back only after his father backs down.Husain goes on to college at the Tower Hamlets College where he is elected president of the Islamic Society—the dominant student organisation on the predominantly South Asian Muslim campus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Program_(novel)"title="The Program (novel)">
The work is part of a series following the character Tim Rackley, a member of the United States Marshals Service, and opens with a suicide in the La Brea Tar Pits. Rackley must rescue the daughter of a Hollywood producer from a dangerous mind control cult, by infiltrating the group. Charismatic leader TD Betters had created his own society based on self-help tenets, and Rackley must navigate through it without getting pulled in himself.The novel describes a fictional large group awareness training called "The Program", and characters also use the term Large Group Awareness Training and "LGAT" to refer to the course. In the novel, the seminar leader had "married two cult models", which one of the protagonists describes as a blend of the "psychotherapeutic cult", and the "self-improvement cult". The character then tells his friend that "The Program", is similar to a combination of the Sullivanians and Lifespring. Werner Erhard is quoted, prior to the opening of the prologue.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hope_in_the_Unseen"title="A Hope in the Unseen">
Cedric Jennings is an anomaly at Ballou High School in the Southeast neighborhood of Washington, D.C.: in a poorly performing school where academic achievement is scorned, Cedric proudly strives for high grades with a desire to attend a top university. The sub-par standards at Ballou place him at a distinct disadvantage academically, while frequent taunts and physical threats from other students have alienated him socially. Cedric lives with his mother, Barbara Jennings, who works for the Department of Agriculture; his father Cedric Gilliam is a drug dealer currently in jail. In his junior year, Cedric is admitted to the Minority Introduction to Engineering and Science (MITES) summer program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He believes this is the start of a new life for him, but when summer arrives he finds the classes much more difficult than his fellow MITES students who attended better schools and were better versed in math and science. Although he makes friends at MIT, he also sees that his ghetto background sets him apart from them. At the end of the program, Cedric is told by faculty director Leon Trilling that he would not be welcome in MIT as a college student.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_(Not_So)_Perfect_Life"title="My (Not So) Perfect Life">
The story centers on Lola's best friend, Ella. School elections for student body president are being held at Dellwood High. Lola wants to run against Carla Santini but can't because she hasn't been class representative for one term. So instead Lola enters Ella and Sam to be candidates and run against Carla.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_in_the_Minds_of_Men"title="Fire in the Minds of Men">
The book takes its name from Dostoevsky's "The Possessed", and it attempts to investigate the passion for revolutionary change which developed strongly in Central Europe and Russia starting with the French Revolution of 1789. Unlike many other histories of revolutions and revolutionaries Billington does not focus on events and social causes leading to popular uprisings. Instead he follows a sometimes almost invisible thread of incendiary ideas sometimes transferred via occult societies, but all having common genesis in the motto of the French Revolution: "Liberté, égalité, fraternité". In Billington's historiography he presents the second and third terms as reactions to and expansions of the more rudimentary (and susceptible to egoism) concept of "liberty". He describes how the idea of "brotherhood" was inherited from secret and occult societies such as the freemasons and became an inflammatory idea which led to the Paris Commune but then was extinguished as far as popular revolutions went (until it resurfaced as national socialism in 1920s' Germany). Instead the idea of "equality" would become the fuel for socialism and communism.Billington equates the two schools of thought, claiming that though socially opposed in outside appearance, in their own respective way (one promoting individualism, the other collectivism), each is striving toward establishing these mutual goals, viz. a secular humanist society that is both egalitarian and utilitarian. These two social power factions were founded by the two thinkers Proudhon and Marx, the former being the social and secularist republican (anti-monarchist) individualist, and the latter the socialist anarchist (communism) collectivist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Green_Men_(novel)"title="Little Green Men (novel)">
John O. Banion is a well-known pundit, who hosts a popular Sunday-morning television show (similar to "Meet the Press"). One morning, Banion grills the president of the United States on issues surrounding NASA. Shortly after, while enjoying a game of golf, Banion is abducted by what he believes are aliens and taken to their lab and probed.When he is returned, Banion is a changed man. He sets about trying to convince his friends in the Washington elite that the alien threat is real, but he is met with skepticism and derision. His marriage begins to fall apart and his friends abandon him.Banion starts to doubt himself, but is soon abducted a second time. When he returns from this abduction he completely abandons his old life and redevotes all his energy to pressuring Congress and the White House to investigate the alien threat.In fact, Banion was not abducted by aliens at all. Rather, he was abducted by Majestic, a government agency so secret that not even the president knew it existed. The purpose of Majestic was to occasionally make U.S. citizens believe they had been abducted by aliens. The abductees helped spread paranoia that was crucial to sustain public support for NASA's funding levels. When Majestic saw that Banion was critical of these funding levels, a Majestic agent authorized the abduction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_Fire"title="Winter of Fire">
Elsha is a teenager living in a bleak, cold future where world-wide cloud cover has permanently blocked out the sun. Humans have split into two classes - the Chosen and the Quelled, of which Elsha is the latter. The Quelled are doomed to spend their lives in servitude to the Chosen, mining "firestones" - the only means of warmth on the planet. The Firelord is the leader of the Chosen, said to be a great and powerful man.A rebellious girl, Elsha causes trouble for herself - even going so far as being considered for execution - until she is met by a Chosen man named Amasai, Steward of the Firelord, and given the highest position available to a woman - Handmaiden to the Firelord. The Firelord's life is not known to the Chosen, but he actually made better lives for many Quelled when he was younger. He became Firelord when he was old so he could call upon a young Handmaiden to continue his previous work. On her journeys with the Firelord, Elsha meets Teraj, later revealed to be the Firelord's son, with whom Elsha forms a romantic relationship. Elsha uses her unlikely position to fight the stigma and oppression of her people, eventually inheriting the title for herself after the Firelord's unexpected death and changing the course of the planet's history for the better.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulligan_Stew_(novel)"title="Mulligan Stew (novel)">
The book is a multi-layered novel-in novel. Starting even before the front matter a letter exchange between editors and Sorrentino is presented expressing their reasons for rejecting the novel. The novel itself consists of three main layers, namely the comments, notes and letters of the fictitious author, Antony Lamont, as he develops and writes his novel initially called “Guinea Red” and later titled “Crocodile Tears”, various chapters of Lamont’s novel with Martin Halpin as the protagonist all stylistically different, and the comments of Halpin himself who is the main “actor” of Lamont’s novel. Other matter is interspersed such as advertisement, erotic poems for Lamont to review, a masque play, and an academic-type manuscript concerning a mathematical proof. As part of the "stew" the novel contains intentionally "bad writing".In Lamont’s novel Halpin believes that he has killed his friend and business partner Ned Beaumont. Beaumont had a love affair with Daisy Buchanan who is married to Tom Buchanan and also became a love interest of Halpin. Beaumont, however, had fallen under the seductive spell of two other women who went on exploiting him, and Halpin’s efforts to “rescue” had been futile.As Lamont develops his novel he seeks unsuccessfully the support of his ex-wife Joanne and his sister, Sheila Lamont, who is married to Dermot Trellis, writer of “The Red Swan”. Lamont despises the more successful brother-in-law in part because he believes he writes with a commercial interest in mind. He is furious when the Midwestern Associate Professor Roche prefers his work over Lamont’s for his course. He tries unsuccessfully to seduce a poet who has sent him erotic material. Under the impression that there is a conspiracy against him he schemes on how to publish his novel.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Lioness"title="The White Lioness">
The story itself takes place in 1992. The plot follows two parallel patterns, one during late apartheid South Africa where incumbent president F.W. de Klerk, leader of the Afrikaner minority which is on the brink of losing power to the African majority under the leadership of the ANC, about to end 44 years of suppression by the Broederbond rule. Simultaneously, Detective Chief Inspector Kurt Wallander is investigating a case of a missing female Methodist real-estate agent outside Ystad. Upon the eventual recovery of her body, as well as the discovery of a severed black finger at the crime scene, Detective Chief Inspector Wallander realizes the case has deep roots in the history and current development in South Africa, where it appears that an extremist cell of the Broederbond is about to orchestrate the murder of F W de Klerk by an infamous black assassin, wishing to plunge the country into a long and devastating civil war.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Smiled"title="The Man Who Smiled">
After killing a man in the line of duty (in "The White Lioness"), Inspector Kurt Wallander finds himself spiralling into an alcohol-fuelled depression. He has just decided to leave the police when an old friend, Sten Torstensson, asks him to secretly investigate the recent death of his father in a car accident. At first Kurt dismisses his friend's suspicions as unlikely, but then Sten is found murdered in exactly the same manner as a Norwegian businessman shortly before. Against his previous judgement, Kurt returns to work to investigate what he is convinced is a case of double murder.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Woman"title="The Fifth Woman">
A sadistic serial killer has been preying on men, beginning with a retired car salesman whose interests appear to be limited to bird watching and poetry and whose body was discovered in a punji stick pit; and continuing with a flower shop manager, found starved and garrotted in the woods. Wallander soon realises both men have a past record of violence towards women, and after another man is drowned in a lake, he goes on the hunt for an avenging angel...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Step_Behind_(novel)"title="One Step Behind (novel)">
Two young women and one young man, inexplicably dressed as the nobility of Sweden did during the reign of Gustavus III, are found dead, each slain with a single bullet, their bodies half consumed by animals in the wilderness. Wallander is horrified when he makes a connection between the crime and his close friend and colleague Svedberg, who is then found savagely murdered in his own home. Tormented by his own loss, the detective is nevertheless startled that the connection to Svedberg unravels into revelations about himself he never could have possibly imagined, all amidst the pitting of the Ystad police against a deranged, merciless killer who remains just one step ahead...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronicler_of_the_Winds"title="Chronicler of the Winds">
The story is set in an unnamed port city in Africa, told in the first-person by a baker, José M. V. He finds Nelio, a 10-year-old boy, shot on the stage of a theatre. He helps the wounded child who refuses medical care, and listens to the story the boy has to tell over the course of nine days before he dies.Nelio says he grew up in a village close to the border. The village was destroyed during a civil war by partisans, who killed his father, sister, and many others, and deported him and his mother to a camp from which he escapes. He meets Yabu Bata, who has albinism. Together they reach the sea, and Nelio alone moves to a port city. He lives as a street boy, sleeping in the monument of a rider. He joins a gang of other homeless street children led by a 14-year-old boy. They live off waste, stealing, and earning a little money by watching the cars of the rich. A happy event is the birthday of Alfredo Bomba, which they celebrate in an empty house of a man who travels.Alfredo is diagnosed as terminally ill. To make his last days as pleasant as possible, the group wants to perform a play. Alfredo enjoys the performance in a theatre and dies. Watchmen notice the children and everyone is able to flee except Nelio, who stays with the corpse and is shot. Nelio dies nine days later. José decides to give up his profession and travel as the chronicler, telling Nelio's story, reasoning: "I kept asking myself: where does the evil in human beings come from? Why does barbarism always wear a human face? That's what makes barbarism so inhuman".
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_Games"title="End Games">
Police detective Aurelio Zen is posted to remote Calabria, at the toe of the Italian boot. Beneath the surface of a tight-knit, traditional community, he discovers that violent forces are at work. There has been a brutal murder and Zen is determined to find a way to penetrate the code of silence, to uncover the truth, but his assignment is complicated by another secret which has drawn strangers from the other side of the world - a hunt for ancient buried treasure, launched by a single-minded player with millions to spend pursuing his bizarre and deadly obsession.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Fire_(Feehan_novel)"title="Dark Fire (Feehan novel)">
When Darius, the leader of a group of Carpathian musicians, first sees the new mechanic hired to work on the band's touring vehicles, he is astonished to see the red color of her hair. It has been centuries since he last saw colors or even felt emotions.Although the mechanic Tempest Trine needs the job, she quickly realizes that in touring with Darius, she's bitten off more than she can chew. Tempest has always felt different, apart from others. But from the moment his arms close around her, enveloping her in a sorcerer's spell, Darius seems to understand her unique gifts. But does his kiss offer the love and belonging she seeks, or a danger more potent than anything she has ever known?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starship_Trap"title="The Starship Trap">
While traveling to an important diplomatic meeting, the USS "Enterprise" is attacked by a Klingon warship. Managing to secure a truce, Kirk discovers the Klingon captain thought he was gaining revenge for vanishing Klingon ships. Kirk and his crew soon learn that ships from all over known space are vanishing. They race to stop the phenomenon before interstellar war breaks out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depths_(novel)"title="Depths (novel)">
Ever since his childhood Svartman has been obsessed by exactness in the measurement of time or distance. He seeks solace through secretly observing or following people, and at night overcomes fear by cradling his most precious possession, his sounding lead. Svartman's obsessions and growing distrust of others leads him to submerge himself in a web of deceit involving his employer, Kristina and Sara which increasingly threatens to engulf him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Secret"title="Blood Secret">
Fourteen-year-old Jerry Luna refuses to speak after her mother's disappearance. Living at her great-great-aunt Constanza's house, she discovers a trunk and is transported into the lives of her Jewish ancestors living in Spain in the years before the Spanish Inquisition and in Spanish America.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_(Baillie_novel)"title="Little Brother (Baillie novel)">
It follows a young boy, separated from his elder brother whilst attempting to flee the terror of the reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. It provides an insight into the general plight of refugees using the specific instance of this horrible experience as a backdrop.Muong Vithy is the main character of "Little Brother".Vithy has worked for a year in the Big Paddy, with his big brother Mang. Their sister, Sorei, and their mother and father are gone. They run away, trying to escape from the soldiers, the Khmer Rouge. They manage to get away, but not for long. Mang has advice for getting away: "Follow the lines... to the border." Vithy is puzzled about the advice. What lines? Which border? Suddenly they are separated as they run for their life and Vithy is left alone in the forest. The soldiers leave him, no doubt pursuing Mang.Vithy forages for food that night and starts traveling to Cambodia's border. As he is traveling beside the road he sees soldiers - not the Khmer Rouge.He finds himself on the outskirts of the now deserted Phnom Penh, finds a little gold leaf and meets a boy (real name Ang), the King. Vithy stays in the King's City and fixes a motor for him. When they are working for their meals the King hides Vithy in a truck, and gives him the gold leaf as payment for the motor and some water.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gondibert"title="Gondibert">
The plot of the poem is loosely based on episodes of Paul the Deacon's "History of the Lombards". The poem tells the story of an early medieval Lombard Duke called Gondibert and his love for the beautiful and innocent Birtha. His love for Birtha means he cannot return the affections of princess Rhodalind, the king's daughter, even though he would be made ruler of Verona if he were to marry her. Rhodalind, in turn, is loved by Oswald. These various conflicts of desire and devotion occasion philosophical reflections on the nature of love, duty and loyalty. The story is never resolved, since the poet gave up on the work before completing his design.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_of_Arabia"title="Florence of Arabia">
The wife of the ambassador of the fictional Middle Eastern nation of Wasabia gets drunk, steals her husband's car and drives out of the compound. When pulled over by police, she desperately phones her friend Florence Farfaletti, the "Deputy to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs," begging for asylum to avoid a harsh punishment. Florence is unable to arrange asylum.The wife is taken back to Wasabia and beheaded for her crime. In anger over her friend's execution, Florence drafts a proposal to introduce a women's television network in the relatively liberal Matar. The state department rejects the proposal, and reassigns Florence to an obscure posting outside the country. To Florence's surprise, a mysterious government employee, identified only as "Uncle Sam," representing an unknown agency, notifies Florence that her proposal has been accepted and agrees to fund the mission.Florence arrives in Matar and creates a women's television network that is broadcast into neighboring Wasabia. The network airs shows like "One Thousand and One Mornings," which feature empowered female characters who nettle their oppressors and make fun of men. The programming is effective, eventually causing the women of Matar to stage an uprising.Florence is thrown in jail, but ultimately is rescued and returns to the United States. Back in the United States, Florence discovers that her operation was not funded by the U.S. government at all, but rather by the Waldorf Group, a private equity firm which wanted to prevent extremism in Wasabia to help secure the flow of profits.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Many_Miles_to_Babylon?_(novel)"title="How Many Miles to Babylon? (novel)">
The story is the complex tale of a friendship between two boys in Ireland prior to and during World War I. Alec, the son of Anglo-Irish parents grows up lonely and friendless on his parents' estate in Wicklow during the early years of the 20th century. His parents have a difficult relationship and it is stated that "their only meeting place was the child." He meets a local boy, Jerry, who shares his passion for horses. Alec's mother, who believes strongly in the class system of early twentieth century Ireland, discovers the friendship and forbids him to spend any more time with Jerry. Their friendship is thereafter conducted in private until the outbreak of the First World War. Jerry signs up as his father is already in the British Army and the King's Shilling would be of great benefit to his mother. Alec feels no compulsion to sign up until his mother tells Alec that his father Fredrick is not his biological father and in that moment he is so frustrated with his mother he impulsively signs up. In France the two friends are stationed together, but now divided by rank as well as class. Their only other friend in the army is Bennett, an officer with socialist ideas. They are commanded by Major Glendinning, a ruthless officer who shares Alec's mother's belief in the class system and divisions between rank, demanding that there be 'no flaw in the machinery'. Eventually, Jerry finds out that his father is missing, and leaves to find out what has happened to him. During Jerry's disappearance, Bennett gets sick and is brought away for medical attention. Jerry returns soon after, having discovered that his father is dead, but he is arrested for desertion. Glendinning commands that Alec command the firing squad that will shoot and kill Jerry. Instead, Alec has a final talk with Jerry before shooting Jerry himself, at which point he is imprisoned and sentenced to death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Reflections"title="Dark Reflections">
"Dark Reflections" tells the story of Arnold Hawley, a gay African-American poet who lives most of his life in New York City. The novel is divided into three sections, each illustrating a period in Arnold's life, arranged chronologically backwards, from age to youth. In the first part, "The Prize", Hawley is between 52 and 68; a book of his poetry wins a prize and is commercially successful, but neither of his next two books repeat this, and he falls further into poverty. In the second, "Vashti in the Dark" (named after a story by Stephen Crane), Hawley is in his middle 30s; the section tells the story of his brief marriage to a homeless woman. The third, "The Book of Pictures", is set in Hawley's college days, when he is attracted to another gay man, but does not act on his desires. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Secret_(novel)"title="Dark Secret (novel)">
Rafael De La Cruz has spent centuries hunting vampires with his brothers, and with each passing year his capacity to feel emotions has grown weaker and weaker until finally there's barely been a memory left-until only sheer willpower keeps him from turning into the very abomination he hunts. But it'll take more than will to keep him away from the woman who is meant to be his and his alone...For five years, rancher Colby Jansen has been the sole protector of her younger half-siblings, and with fierce determination and work she has kept her family together and the ranch operational. Now, the De La Cruz brothers are threatening that stability. Colby was illegitimate, but she viewed Armando Chevez as her father. The Chevez family have worked closely with De La Cruz family for centuries. When Armando Chevez married Colby's mother the Chevez family patriarch was displeased and disinherited Armando. A plane crash left Colby's mother dead and Armando paralyzed. On his death bed, Armando, wrote to his family for aid but went unanswered. Now, several years after Armando's death, the Chevez families patriarch has died as well and the letters from Armando are uncovered. The Chevez family want very much to heal the tear in their family and want custody of Colby's younger brother Paul and sister Ginny. Colby vows to fight them-after all she believes that they left Armando to suffer and die without so much as a letter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fools_Crow"title="Fools Crow">
Set in 1870, the novel is about the lives of the southern Blackfeet people. The main character, White Man's Dog, joins his friend Fast Horse in a night-time raid against the Crow. White Man's Dog is portrayed as weak and powerless. Because of that, he visits the medicine man. Yellow Kidney appoints White Man's Dog to lead the young warriors in stealing a herd of horses. White Man's Dog is first wary, but he sings his warrior songs to gain courage. As they drive the horses away from the village, a scout appears. White Man's Dog rushes in and kills the scout. Fast Horse shouts awakening the village, and the Crow respond. Yellow Kidney hides in a lodge where he sees people sleeping. He hides beneath the robes (sleeping bag) of a young girl. He becomes aroused and rapes her before realizing she is dying of a disease they call White Scabs (smallpox). Trying to escape, Yellow Kidney is shot and captured by the Crow. They cut off his fingers, tie him to a horse, and send him out into a driving snowstorm.White Man's Dog returns to his tribe and gains respect for the raid. Feeling responsible for the loss of Yellow Kidney, he begins to provide the youth's family with food and supplies. Yellow Kidney finally returns to camp and tells the story of Fast Horse's error. Shamed, Fast Horse leaves the tribe, joining Owl Child and his renegade band in killing the encroaching "Napikwans" (white people).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bomb_(Taylor_novel)"title="The Bomb (Taylor novel)">
## Book I: Bikini.Sorry Rinamu is a fourteen-old boy who lives on Bikini Atoll. He and the other natives live through World War II under constant threat by the Japanese soldiers occupying the island. However, American forces attack the island one day and defeat the Japanese soldiers, freeing the island. The American victors give some of the items from the Japanese base to the natives while keeping the military equipment such as weapons. Sorry receives a magazine and is amazed by the cities and things he sees inside. He later repairs the radio in the captured Japanese base and learns of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. World War II soon ends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_Off_at_Woomera"title="Blast Off at Woomera">
Strange objects have been sighted on the Moon near Mons Pico. Suspecting a communist plot, the British Government quickly formulate a plan to photograph the domes from above at a closer range. The rocket is not large enough to send a man - enter Chris Godfrey, a 17-year-old science whiz with an interest in rocketry and is less than 5 feet tall.The launch site is Woomera Rocket Research Station in South Australia, but there may be a Soviet traitor amongst the ground crew...The book pre-dates the first actual usage of satellite imagery by two years, and human spaceflight by four years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Domes_of_Pico"title="The Domes of Pico">
To the lunar domes previously photographed in "Blast Off at Woomera" and situated near Mons Pico has been added a cone emitting powerful neutron radiation which is causing havoc to the Earth's nuclear power stations. The diminutive Chris Godfrey has the job of piloting a British rocket to plant a homing beacon next to the cone to enable a strike by American rockets carrying Soviet nuclear warheads...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_as_Big_as_the_Ritz"title="The Diamond as Big as the Ritz">
John T. Unger, a teenager from the Mississippi River town of Hades, is sent to a private boarding school near Boston. During the summer he visits the homes of his classmates, the majority of whom are from wealthy families.In the middle of his sophomore year, a young man named Percy Washington is placed in Unger's dorm. He rarely speaks, and when he does, it is only to Unger. Percy invites Unger to his home for the summer, the location of which he only states as being "in the West." Unger accepts.During the train ride Percy boasts that his father is "by far the richest man in the world", and boasts that his father "has a diamond bigger than the Ritz-Carlton Hotel."Unger later learns that he is in Montana, in the "only five square miles of land in the country that's never been surveyed," and Percy's boasts turn out to be true.Percy's ancestry traces back to both George Washington and Lord Baltimore. His grandfather, Fitz-Norman Culpepper Washington, decided to leave Virginia and head west with his slaves to enter the sheep and cattle ranching business. However, on his claim he discovered not only a diamond mine, but a mountain consisting of one solid diamond.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Columbus"title="Operation Columbus">
Both America and Russia plan crewed missions to the Moon to examine the wreckage of the structures destroyed in "The Domes of Pico". The American astronaut, Morrison Kant, breaks his leg shortly before takeoff, so Chris Godfrey steps in. Both spacecraft arrive at the same time. Unlike Chris Godfrey, the Russian pilot, Serge Smyslov, is unable to leave his Lunar Rover vehicle and both head for the wrecked domes, leading to a tense standoff...The book predates the first use of a Lunar Rover by 11 years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monkey's_Raincoat"title="The Monkey's Raincoat">
Cole is hired by Ellen Lang to find her missing husband and son and in the end, with Cole and Pike's help, she kills former matador and crime boss Domingo Garcia Duran, the man responsible for her husband's death and her son's kidnapping. The facts behind the events leading to Ellen's husband's involvement with Duran and his death are revealed and her son Perry is restored to her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Base_One"title="Moon Base One">
Thousands of young people are terminally ill as a result of the radiation produced by the lunar structures destroyed in "The Domes of Pico". In an attempt to determine whether the fall-out from the domes can have a curative effect on the disease a joint east–west mission is planned under the auspices of the newly formed United Nations EXploration Agency (UNEXA).The mission is commanded by Chris Godfrey, accompanied by American, Morrison 'Morrey' Kant and Russian Serge Smyslov. The 'patient' will be Tony Hale, from Aston near Birmingham (who goes on to feature in the rest of the series). The mission starts well, but is soon in trouble when a supply rocket crashes...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expedition_Venus"title="Expedition Venus">
A probe returning from Venus crashes in the African desert; a Venusian spore on board thrives in its new environment; a grey mould quickly spreading and killing all it touches. An urgent crewed mission to Venus is launched from Lunaville, the now permanent Moon base. Chris Godfrey, Morrey Kant, Serge Smyslov, Tony Hale and Pierre, a scientist, are sent to try and discover what limits the mould's growth in its natural environment. The plan is to collect samples from the Venusian atmosphere but in the end a forced landing on Venus is required.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_and_War_(Dragonlance)"title="Love and War (Dragonlance)">
The book is a compilation of 10 short stories from various authors taking place in the fictional world of Krynn:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_Ghost"title="Exit Ghost">
The plot centers on Zuckerman's return home to New York after eleven years in New England. The purpose of Zuckerman's journey, which he takes the week before the 2004 U.S. presidential election, is for him to undergo a medical procedure that might cure or reduce his incontinence. While in New York, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, whom he had last encountered during a visit to the writer E.I. Lonoff's house in December, 1956, as depicted in Roth's novel "The Ghost Writer". Zuckerman also agrees to a housing swap with a young writing couple, Billy Davidoff and Jamie Logan, and quickly becomes attracted to Logan. In his hotel room at night, Zuckerman writes a play, "He and She", composed of imagined conversations between him and Logan.Through Davidoff and Logan, Zuckerman meets Richard Kliman, a young, brash Harvard graduate who is working on a biography of Lonoff. Kliman was Logan's boyfriend in college. Because of Kliman's zealous interest in a potentially scandalous secret from Lonoff's adolescence, neither Zuckerman nor Bellette wants to help him complete his project. Zuckerman may also be motivated by his own confused feelings about Logan and Kliman.Although critics once considered that Lonoff, deceased and neglected, was modelled partly on the writer Bernard Malamud, he now seems to be based on a number of writers. Henry Roth is a major influence, as becomes clear in "Exit Ghost." Roth's biographer is Steven G. Kellman. It is known that Philip Roth has read the later novels of Henry Roth, though some of these remain unpublished. The rationale for Henry Roth is that in his novels published after his death he reveals that he had an incestuous affair with his sister when he was young; it also known that Henry Roth suffered from writer's block for much of his career after publishing "Call It Sleep", his only major novel. In "Exit Ghost" it is revealed that Lonoff also had an incestuous affair with his sister — which led to his writer's block — and the fact that while content to teach in oblivion, he never published again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_a_Wimpy_Kid_(book)"title="Diary of a Wimpy Kid (book)">
Greg Heffley, the middle school protagonist, clarifies that "this is a JOURNAL, not a diary." He then explains that he only agreed to write in one for when he is "rich and famous," and "for now, I'm stuck in middle school with a bunch of morons." Greg then discusses the old, smelly, moldy Cheese at his school. It started when someone left a piece of cheese on the blacktop, and it got moldy. If someone touches it, they have the "Cheese Touch," which they are stuck with until they pass it on by touching someone else. However, the last victim of the Cheese Touch moved away to California, and Greg hopes nobody starts it up again. He also talks about his best friend, Rowley Jefferson. Although Greg wants to be famous and explains popularity to Rowley, "it just goes in one ear and out the other with him."Greg then introduces his family. He has a teenage brother, Rodrick, who likes to pick on him, and a little brother, a toddler named Manny, who gets everything he wants and gets away with everything he does wrong. Greg's father does not encourage his way of life — playing video games all day — rather than going outside and playing sports.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destination_Mars"title="Destination Mars">
The first man to pass close to Mars is driven insane by strange 'voices' he hears on his radio. He is unable to record the voices as the Van Allen radiation belts wipe the magnetic tapes clean, so doubt is cast on his account. U.N.E.X.A. (United Nations Exploration Agency) send their crack team (Chris Godfrey, Serge Smyslov, Morrey Kant and Tony Hale) to investigate. After landing on the planet's surface they find traces of an ancient civilization, but then a disembodied Martian appears and demands its people be transported to Earth, where they will enslave the human race. One-by-one the crew are taken over.This novel introduces the concept of the Ion drive, allowing continuous acceleration of one-fifth g.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invention_of_Hugo_Cabret"title="The Invention of Hugo Cabret">
## Before story events.In 1930s Paris, young Hugo Cabret and his father repair an automaton at the museum where his father works. When Hugo's father dies in a fire, his uncle brings him to live and work at the train station maintaining the clocks. His uncle disappears, and Hugo keeps the clocks running by himself, living inside the station walls and stealing food from the shops. He rescues the automaton from the burnt museum in hopes of restoring it.Later, he discovers a keyhole in the shape of a heart, and works on finding the key.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Excalibur_Alternative"title="The Excalibur Alternative">
The story begins when a 14th-century English army is abducted by aliens of the Galactic Federation to serve as mercenaries on planets where only low-tech weaponry is legal. The aliens are bound by a Galactic Federation law that states that advanced weapons can not be used on primitive worlds. Another Guild had previously abducted a legion from the Roman Empire and used it to obtain victory in many confrontations and thereby increase its commercial empire. Other aliens were inspired to try the same tactics and came to Earth to find their own army to fight for them. As the plot progresses, the English army continues to fight for the aliens, until the Baron in charge of the English is approached by a dragon-like alien under the heel of the Guild Aliens. The dragon-like creature tells the Baron the story of the Federation.The Galactic Federation was originally started over one hundred fifty thousand years ago by 3 races, with membership of the council requiring development of a form of faster-than-light (FTL) drive. Over the course of their long history, the Federation strayed from its values. It now has 22 races on the council (of which only 1 is an original founder) and when it discovers new races it invades them so it can freeze their technological development and force them to become a protectorate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Dolittle's_Circus"title="Doctor Dolittle's Circus">
The story begins with Doctor John Dolittle looking for some money to earn to pay off his voyage to Africa. The Doctor's idea is to get the Pushmi-Pullyu into the circus, but he can't find one until Matthew Mugg suggest a small business circus owned by the ring master Blossum. The Doctor visits Blossum and persuades him to visit his house in Puddleby to discuss the payment and rules of the Pushmi-Pullyu before its performance in the circus.The performance goes well after the Pushmi-Pullyu is put into the show and the doctor starts earning, but he also discovers the circus animals are living in wretched conditions, which Blossum doesn't co-operate with when the doctor makes suggestions on how to improve their lot. The doctor then meets Sophie the Alaskan seal, who is owned by Mr Higgins. She explains to him that she misses her husband Slushy, who is her herd's alpha seal, so the Doctor plans an escape for Sophie. When the night comes for the escape, Dolittle waits in the street while Matthew and Jip get Sophie out of the circus, but the guards shut the gate before the seal can make a break for it, so Matthew and his wife Theodosia distract them by luring them to Sophie's tank and pushing them in. The whole circus goes into pandemonium when they see the disappearance of the seal, but Sophie manages to escape eventually.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Dolittle's_Caravan"title="Doctor Dolittle's Caravan">
Pippinella is special in that she possesses what is generally assumed to be an exclusive trait of male canaries: birdsong. Ultimately, Doctor Dolittle creates a "Canary Opera" (using canaries and other bird species as well), based on Pippinella's life story. This opera, jointly composed by both the Doctor and Pippinella, becomes an overwhelming success in the Regent Theatre, London. He also shuts down a poorly run pet store and receives accolades from Niccolò Paganini himself.The novel disrupts the chronological order of the series, with events occurring between "Doctor Dolittle's Circus" and "The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle" despite the book's publication between "Doctor Dolittle's Zoo" and "Doctor Dolittle's Garden". This book is the follow-up to "Doctor Dolittle's Circus", for the Doctor (at this point in time) is still operating the circus he inherited from the runaway former owner, Albert Blossom. Pippinella's eventual fate, and Doctor Dolittle's final adventures with her, are ultimately revealed in the much later book, "Doctor Dolittle and the Green Canary".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_for_a_Black_Night"title="Story for a Black Night">
A 40-year-old man tells a story of his childhood, when he was ten, living with his sister, mother and grandmother. When strangers left a baby with smallpox at the house, the family is affected by the disease.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockroaches_(novel)"title="Cockroaches (novel)">
Norway's ambassador to Thailand is found stabbed to death in a brothel on the outskirts of Bangkok. Oslo detective Harry Hole is sent to help the Thai police solve the crime before the scandal hits the newspapers. Starting at the embassy in Bangkok, Hole uncovers tensions between career diplomats and political appointees, as well as shameful secrets of the ambassador's family and various embassy staff. Hole learns that the ambassador had lost heavily in betting on Thai horse racing and had become indebted to notorious loan sharks. Following this lead, Hole along with his new Thai colleagues penetrate the city's shadier neighborhoods, leading to some spectacular violent confrontations but no real headway in the case.Hole discovers that the Thai knife used in the killing had been treated with reindeer grease as used by the Sami people of Norway's far north, implicating members of Bangkok's Norwegian expatriate community. He subsequently comes across Norwegian pedophiles taking advantage of Thailand's sex industry; ruthless entrepreneurs exploiting the city's gridlocked transport system; and scandals ensnaring Norway's ruling Christian Democratic Party and the recently installed Prime Minister. Hole's superiors in Bangkok and Oslo resolve to terminate the investigation and send him home. When he obstinately refuses, they employ cruder means such as threats, blackmail, and attempted assassination.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_by_Satellite"title="Terror by Satellite">
Tony Hale, skilled engineer and amateur radio ham, smuggles a home-made transceiver on board an Earth-orbiting satellite during his tour of duty. This proves invaluable as the commander of the satellite, Hendriks, is a megalomaniac and demands to be made 'Dictator of the World'. To back up this demand, he begins destroying swathes of the Earth's surface using a radiation beam. The only secure link between the Earth and the satellite is Tony's radio.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_Jupiter"title="Journey to Jupiter">
The first crewed expedition to Jupiter reaches speeds never experienced before; despite this it takes several months to reach its objective, leading to tensions among the crew, as well as serious vision problems caused by "light slip". A miscalculation in the gravity of Jupiter means that they will not be able to stop in time and will crash into the giant planet. A diversion to the jagged Io offers their only chance of survival.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Summer_(of_You_and_Me)"title="The Last Summer (of You and Me)">
The story is set on Fire Island, and also partly in nearby New York City. Alice, age 21, and Riley, 24, are two sisters. Nearly every summer of their lives, they have shared the same childhood friend, Paul, 24, whose widowed mother owns a Fire Island beach mansion next door to the smaller beach house of the girls and their parents. Paul has been absent for three summers, having been studying and volunteering in California. Alice is smart, graceful and elegant, planning on applying to law school at NYU. Riley is the athletic and adventurous one, having life-guarded on the island since she was fifteen. She is dyslexic and has attended outdoor leadership school in Colorado. Paul is something of a hippie, following in his father's footsteps. He can be moody and is wary of trusting people. During the summer, Alice and Paul start to have feelings outside of friendship for each other. Paul goes to great lengths to hide his feelings about Alice. They both realize they have always loved one another, but now in a different way. Alice even goes as far to give Paul her virginity one night on the beach. They continue sneaking around, hiding their relationship from their families. One night when Alice has gone over to Paul's house to make love, the emergency alarm goes off during the middle of the night. Alice dismisses the alarm as an elderly person needing attention, but it is not so; the person being helicoptered out is her own sister, Riley. It seems Riley is suffering from rheumatic heart disease. Alice is overwhelmed with guilt and a rush of feelings. She suddenly leaves the island without explanation to be with her hospitalized sister and parents, leaving Paul puzzled and hurt. Riley refuses to face the urgency of the situation and insists that her medical condition be kept secret from Paul until she can tell him herself. The following summer, Alice postpones graduate school to work as a groundskeeper and store cashier near the family's Manhattan home, while Riley awaits a donor heart transplant. Alice buys Riley an indoor pool membership, which Riley is grateful for, trying to carry on normally and ignore her medical condition. During a swim, Riley misses an important opportunity to receive a heart transplant. While the rest of her family is upset over this, Riley insists that they stay out of her business, saying that she can take care of herself. Meanwhile, Paul, studying philosophy at NYU, is constantly thinking about Alice and his feelings towards her. Still unaware of Riley's condition, he is bitter and angry towards Alice. He even attends an old island acquaintance's wedding with a beautiful date to spite her. Riley finally tells Paul of her medical problems, admitting that she isn't entirely sure she wants a heart transplant. Paul's mother gives him the beach mansion, which he clears out and sells for $3 million. He donates the money to Bellevue Hospital, where his wealthy but wild-living father died long ago. One night back in the city, Alice returns from work to find Riley has died. The funeral is held and Alice and her parents go to Fire Island to spread her ashes. Alice volunteers to tend to the beach house, as the family has decided to sell it. Paul turns up one day, discovering his house has been sold to a new family whose children Alice babysits each morning. The story ends with Alice and Paul having sex and leaving the Island for the first time together; she has decided to apply to NYU school of social work and be with Paul.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_to_Mercury"title="Mission to Mercury">
The crewed expedition to Mercury is complicated by the fact that strong solar radiation makes communication with Earth impossible. U.N.E.X.A. decide that telepathy may be the answer. Telepathic twins Gill and Gail volunteer; one accompanying Chris Godfrey and the crew on the mission; the other remaining on Earth. As they near their objective, Gail notices increasingly disruptive personality changes in the crew caused by the radiation, their only chance of survival is to land on the 'dark' side of the planet; however the near absolute zero conditions lead to massive heat-loss. Can they be rescued before freezing to death...In the same year this book was published, radar observations of Mercury showed that it did not have a synchronous orbit and that the same face was not always in darkness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddy_(Hinton_novel)"title="Buddy (Hinton novel)">
Buddy is a young boy who comes from a poor home, he is neglected by his parents and is often picked on at school for being poor. He lives at home with his parents. It all starts when Buddy wants some money to go on a school trip, but he knows that he is unlikely to go as he was unable to go on previous school trips because his parents do not have the money. When his mother tells him she does not have any money to give him, Buddy ends up stealing the money from her purse. His mother soon finds the money missing and asks Buddy where the money is. After admitting that he did take the money, his mum leaves the room, and being angry at Buddy, she replies, "Like father, like son," as his father was previously sent to prison for breaking and entering. Before leaving she adds "thief," and leaves Buddy upset crying. The next day Buddy finds out his mum has left, and subsequently left him alone. Four months later, with his mum still missing, Buddy is still being bullied at school, often being called dustman by the pupils and even his teacher, due to the state of his clothes. On top of this, Buddy is also bullied because he is friends with black twins Julius and Charmian who are also picked on in school.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceship_to_Saturn"title="Spaceship to Saturn">
The length of the trip to Saturn means that the crew will undergo 'hypothermia' for the duration of the flight, however a massive increase in meteor activity around Saturn threatens to cancel the mission as the computer on Earth will be unable to manoeuvre the craft at such long distances to avoid collisions. The solution - instantaneous telepathy; twins Gill and Gail maintain a telepathic carrier-wave even under hypothermia which can be modulated to carry telemetry. A landing is attempted on Titan but problems arise requiring the ship to be flown through the Cassini division, a narrow gap in the rings of Saturn...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mohole_Mystery"title="The Mohole Mystery">
A drilling project in Dudley in the West Midlands region of the United Kingdom hits a cavern 20 miles beneath the surface of the Earth and detects strange microbes. UNEXA send Russian Serge Smylov down to search for other forms of life in a rocket-propelled capsule but it is damaged when it hits the bottom of the cavern. Then strange creatures start attacking him...The book, under its US title "The Mohole Menace", is mentioned in "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nearly_Neptune"title="Nearly Neptune">
The book begins by announcing the death of Chris Godfrey and his three fellow astronauts after a fire and apparent break-up of their spacecraft as it approaches the orbit of Neptune as observed from Earth. The crew have however survived but are stranded as their hypothermia equipment is irreparably damaged.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tenth_City"title="The Tenth City">
The Tenth City begins only a few hours after The Valley of The Thorns ends, just after the Dark Tower had crashed into the water and Alexa and her friends had escaped.Alexa who is now 13, Thomas, Roland, Balmoral, Odessa, Catherine, and Armon were aboard the Warwick Beacon in the darkness on The Lonely Sea. With the last Jocasta in her possession, Alexa once again had the power to talk to the forest animals and to hear the guiding voice of Elyon. After they dropped Catharine in Lathbury and Balmoral in Castalia, Elyon sent the crew into the stormy waters where they learned of the secret cliffs beyond Turlock. Along the way, they encountered fierce winds, a swarm of evil killer bats and learned of a shortcut back to Bridewell.Alexa also learned that Bridewell was now empty except for Grindall and his ogres and that Yipes was being held captive there. With Pervis's help, Alexa and Murphy crawled through the secret tunnel back to the library at Renny Lodge where Yipes was locked in a small cage. Alexa burst through the secret door as Armon leaped into the room through the window. Armon tossed the ogre on guard to its death in the courtyard below. Alexa and Murphy grabbed the cage, escaped through the secret tunnel and slammed the secret door shut behind them, leaving Grindall screaming with rage. Alexa and Murphy scrambled back to where they had first met Ander (the grizzly bear and forest king) and the forest council. When the lantern died out, they used the glowing orange Jocasta to light the way, but when they arrived, they were shocked to find that all the animals were gone, the lush forest had wilted and only the stones remained.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayworld"title="Dayworld">
The story is set in a dystopian future in which an overpopulated world solves the problem by allocating people only one day per week. For the rest of the six days they are "stoned", a kind of suspended animation. The novels focus on a man, Jeff Caird, who is a daybreaker, someone who lives more than one day a week. He is not like most daybreakers; he belongs to a government defying group called the “Immers”. The Immers are a very large and powerful group that works to create a better government. Not all Immers are daybreakers, so to get messages and information from one day to the next, they have daybreakers, like Jeff, to work in every day. The daybreakers of the Immers assume seven different personalities and seven different jobs. They slip from culture to culture, in seven different worlds.As Jeff goes day to day, he runs into problems while working as an Immer and as a daybreaker, and must cover his tracks, all while trying to keep up with his seven different lives, families, friends, and jobs. Eventually the stress makes Jeff unstable, and the Immers must dispose of him to keep the rest of the Immers safe. Jeff, wanting to live, tries to escape the Immers, but there are undercover Immers in every job, area, and government level. Jeff is caught and put in a sort of insane asylum, classified with “multiple personality disorder”, for the legal time before he can be considered “incurable” and killed. But Jeff has an escape plan…
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cry_of_the_Icemark"title="The Cry of the Icemark">
The Polypontian Empire has conquered much of the known world in recent years, much thanks to its fearsome general, Scipio Bellorum. Bellorum has finally decided to invade his small neighbor to the north, the Icemark. After King Redrought sacrifices his entire army to stop the invasion, Thirrin, his daughter, is left alone to save the nation.Thirrin, having just made an alliance with the werewolves by saving their king, must now seek out more allies, as the Icemark and the werewolves alone cannot defeat the Empire. Although they have the support of their vassal, the Hypolitan, more are needed. Thirrin, with the aid of a young warlock, Oskan Witch's Son, must attempt to win over the Vampire King and Queen. They know this will be difficult because of the centuries of distrust and hatred between the two races. Because the Empire hates all that is unscientific and irrational, the Vampires know that if the Icemark falls, the Empire will wipe out the Vampires next. With this in mind, the Vampires reluctantly agree to send aid.On the advice of King Grishmak of the werewolves, Thirrin and Oskan travel to the Hub of the World, to try to ally themselves with the Snow Leopards, led by Tharaman-Thar, who live there. The leopards are as tall as warhorses at the shoulder, Tharaman-Thar even bigger, and are fearsome fighters. With the threat of the Empire again winning the argument, the Snow Leopards choose to fight with Thirrin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Contact?"title="First Contact?">
Radio signals begin flooding Earth from the vicinity of Uranus and two ships, each with a crew of four are sent to investigate. The signals are traced to an alien spaceship on Ariel, one of the moons of Uranus. The ships land and all but two enter the alien vessel to converse with the apparently friendly humanoid alien, Vari. One of the two remaining crewmen believe the alien to be malevolent and determines to destroy it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passage_to_Pluto"title="Passage to Pluto">
Chris Godfrey is now deputy-director of UNEXA; he sends his former crew-mates to investigate unexplained perturbations in the orbit of Pluto. They discover that not only are their fuel tanks holed, but a super-dense wandering planet dubbed "Planet X" is on course to decimate the Solar System.This was the last of Hugh Walters' 'exploration' novels as his realistic approach could not envisage travel further afield.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darker_Than_You_Think"title="Darker Than You Think">
The novel begins with the announcement from an ethnological expedition to Mongolia that among humanity exist people who can turn themselves into animals. However, the expedition's spokesman dies of a sudden mysterious seizure in the midst of a press conference, just as he was about to provide detailed proof of his assertions. His friend, journalist Will Barbee, suspects his alleged colleague, the fascinating April Bell.Determined to discover the truth, but also attracted by Bell, Barbee finds out that in a past era a war took place in which "Homo sapiens" defeated werewolves ("Homo lycanthropus") – who can, in fact, also turn themselves into a variety of animals other than wolves. The surviving werewolves continued to live hidden among humans and await the coming of the Child of the Night who will lead them to recover their supremacy.In the secret history depicted in the book, medieval witch hunting was not a manifestation of blind fanaticism but a means of protecting "Homo sapiens" against the resurgence of this very real threat; conversely, modern skepticism and rational disbelief in the very existence of witches were deliberately fostered by these hidden werewolves, as a way of gaining a breathing spell and preparing for their counter-attack.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhett_Butler's_People"title="Rhett Butler's People">
"Rhett Butler's People" attempts to present a semi-journalistic view of the life and times of Rhett Butler, while remaining faithful to the original Mitchell work. The Rhett-Scarlett love-story is downplayed. The novel begins with a duel which is mentioned in "Gone with the Wind"; this is the reason that Rhett is not received in Charleston society. He participates in a duel against Belle Watling's brother, who is certain that Rhett is the father of his sister's unborn child.Eventually the novel flashes back to when Rhett was twelve years old. He never had a good relationship with his father, Langston Butler, and often refused to go to Charleston with his father. His father often punished Rhett due to his lack of cooperative skills as his eldest son. Instead, Rhett spends time in the slaves quarters where he enjoys his time with Will (a slave). One day, Will gets firmly punished due to disobedience towards a white overseer. Rhett, unable to see his friend getting whipped continuously and having no power to stop it, takes the boat to escape the chaos, and vows to grow up and never be helpless again.The novel continues through the time covered by "Gone with the Wind" and retells the story. The story is not told solely from Rhett's perspective. It proceeds to relate other moments from the time during the original novel and then adds a new ending. The book only goes a short way past the timeline of "Gone with the Wind" (unlike the sequel "Scarlett", which travels several years further).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gum_Thief"title="The Gum Thief">
Roger and BethanyThe primary plot of this novel involves two characters, Roger and Bethany, employees of a Staples in North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The two characters come from very different walks of life. Roger, a middle-aged alcoholic, is coping with an ugly divorce from his wife and the loss of access to his child. Bethany, a goth girl, is dealing with coming of age and working in what Coupland referred to in his 1991 novel as a McJob.What brings the characters together is a journal that Roger has decided to keep. In the journal, Roger begins to discuss his issues and his pressing thoughts, including a novel he would like to write called "Glove Pond." Bethany finds this journal, and writes a letter to Roger. In the letter, Bethany says they should continue to write to each other, but to pretend that they know nothing about each other outside of the letters themselves at work. After writing letters back and forth, Roger and Bethany strike up a friendship in the letters.Soon, more letters are included in the book from other characters, for instance, from Bethany's mother, DeeDee, who went out on a date with Roger, and also went to high school with him. Other letters include a letter from Roger's wife, emails from employees within the store, and more.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beautiful_Stranger_(novel)"title="Beautiful Stranger (novel)">
The novel picks up at the Ben-Hur wrap party where Cammie is extremely embarrassed that Adam didn't show up, per her ultimatum. Anna and Ben leave the party to go for a walk and Ben tells Anna about how he loves working at Trieste so much that he wants to open up his own nightclub. Anna is not exactly thrilled as she is starting Yale University in the fall and is unsure how she and Ben will continue their relationship. Still, they joke about possible club locations and Ben falls in love with an abandoned auto shop Anna points out. He draws up a proposal and asks his father for a loan but is denied. Ben's father suggests finishing school would be the better idea and Anna agrees. Ben gets angry with Anna and accuses her of not supporting his dream. The two break up once more and Anna is left alone as Caine decided to get back together with his ex-girlfriend.Meanwhile, Eduardo proposes to Sam and, despite her initial hesitation, she accepts. However, Eduardo is called away to New York on business and Sam is a little insulted he didn't invite her along. Anna decides to go back to New York to attend an incoming students mixer for Yale and Sam tags along, hoping to surprise Eduardo. The two bump into Logan Cresswell, a former classmate of Anna's, who is just as cute as she remembered him. Anna and Logan date casually while she's in the city and realize how similar they are: they are both intelligent overthinkers who feel insecure about college. Anna is thrilled to find another person who feels as lost as she is and thinks that perhaps this means college won't be so bad while Logan believes that perhaps this means that school may not be for him. Logan invites Anna to come to Bali with him to check out his father's new hotel but she declines, afraid to tread off the beaten path.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Girls_(Wilson_novel)"title="Bad Girls (Wilson novel)">
10-year-old Mandy White is a lonely girl who is embarrassed with her mother constantly treating her like a five year old and making her have her hair in girly plaits which Mandy hates. Because of all this Mandy is mercilessly tormented at school by three classmates: Kim, Melanie and Sarah. After an incident where she is nearly hit by a bus while crossing a road to avoid the bullies, she is kept at home from school and meets Tanya, a lively 14-year-old girl being fostered by Mandy's across-the-road neighbour. Despite disapproval from Mandy's mother (who is shamed by Mandy's classmates for being older than other parents), who is very overprotective of her and treats her as if she were much younger, the girls quickly become friends. They dream of a future where they will be older and independent, free from families and foster homes, and can live together and have fantastic adventures. Despite Mandy's mother's disapproval of Tanya, Mandy's dad on the other hand thinks she is a nice girl and takes both girls swimming with him. Mandy becomes afraid when she discovers that Tanya is a frequent shoplifter, but decides not to say anything in case they are forbidden from visiting each other. One day during the summer, Tanya and Mandy are caught by police when Tanya steals from an upmarket clothing shop in town. Mandy's mother is initially angry, but realizes she has been too strict with her and allows her to get new glasses and restyle her hair so she will not look quite as childish. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Summertime_(novel)"title="British Summertime (novel)">
Alison Parmeter, a 20-year-old woman living in Bath in 2000, has a near-supernatural power to "read" situations and make deductions based on small clues. She dreams the experiences of Judas Iscariot, and has fears of the "end of the world" since her friend Fran has returned from a caving expedition and discovery of "Golden Men". Her fear is only allayed when she meets Leyton, a British pilot from the year 2129, a world without money or nations and at war with alien "Rods". However, it then transpires (from a theological discussion) that the 2000 that Alison lives in is not identical with Leyton's past. It is gradually revealed that the four "Golden Men" or angels (of whom only Michael and Abaddon are named) are a product of far-future monetary exchange systems, and have altered history to their advantage, always being allied with power and money. The rest of the novel is devoted to subsidiary characters and the resolution of this plot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inshallah_(novel)"title="Inshallah (novel)">
The books switches from character to character, following Italian soldiers in Beirut, flashbacks of their lives before they came to the city, their Lebanese sweethearts, Lebanese Christian and Shi'ite militants, and a group of French nuns. If anyone could be called the protagonist of the story, it would be Angelo, a confused Italian soldier who abandoned his studies of mathematics in order to enlist as a conscript in the Italian army and see war first-hand. Angelo's interest in Mathematics is reflective of Fallaci's lover, the Greek politician and rebel Alexandros Panagoulis, who also studied mathematics at the Athens Polytechnion and attempted to prove mathematical theorems in his own blood whilst in jail.But the real inspirer and leading actor of the novel is "Charlie", to which the author devotes many pages and between the lines attributed the success of the Italian contingent which left Lebanon unscathed. Charlie, a character of course inspired by Captain Corrado Cantatore (multi decorated just for his Lebanese exploits). Cantatore arrived in Lebanon many years before the Italian contingent, as a volunteer in the UN and was probably recruited by the famous Colonel Stefano Giovannone of Italian intelligence. Cantatore grew with Giovannone and when Giovannone left Lebanon, Cantatore had already woven his network that so impressed Oriana Fallaci and assured the safety to the Italians. The commanding Officer of the Italian Contingent, General Franco Angioni, before taking command of the expeditionary unit had served as Chief of Operations of the Army Staff, in charge of the Italian Military personnel serving in United Nations organizations (UNIFIL and UNTSO) in Middle East. Angioni was therefore aware of the peculiar capacity of the Captain Cantatore, and just landed off the ship in the Beirut harbor had given him the task of liaising with all Lebanese factions, under the cover of the press information officer. Cantatore received and accompanied all the journalists who visited the contingent and was the officer who spent more time overall with Oriana Fallaci who, struck by the extraordinary quality of the Captain, decided to spend the last night of the Italian Contingent in Lebanon in the office of Captain Cantatore (so called "Arab Bureau") with him. One last curiosity is that the code name "Charlie - Charlie" was born from the extraction of aeronautics of Cantatore (he was a pilot of fix wings and attack helicopters): at the arrival of the Italian Contingent, when Angioni asked to choose a Radio call sign distinct from those used in his headquarters (Condor, Eagle, Ruby, etc.). was natural for Cantatore take his initials, just CC, which was designed "Charlie - Charlie" in the NATO phonetic alphabet in use among the pilots and control towers. Cantatore, when returned from Lebanon disappeared from the scene, he was great friend of Oriana Fallaci, it seems, he has continued to work for the' Italian intelligence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Modern_World_(novel)"title="The Modern World (novel)">
The novel is set in the Fourlands, a country in danger of being overrun by large hostile Insects, and follows the exploits of Jant, also called "the Messenger" or "Comet". As a half-breed of two humanoid species Jant is the only person who can fly, which makes him an indispensable part of the Emperor's Circle of about 50 immortals, an elite group of (mostly) warriors who do not age (but, despite the name, are capable of being killed).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roman_Hat_Mystery"title="The Roman Hat Mystery">
The novel deals with the poisoning of a disreputable lawyer named Monte Field in the Roman Theater in New York City during a performance of a play called "Gunplay!" Although the play is a sold-out hit, the corpse is discovered seated surrounded by empty seats. A number of suspects whose pasts had made them potentially susceptible to blackmail are in the theater at the time, some connected with the Roman Theater and some audience members.The case is investigated by Inspector Richard Queen of the Homicide Squad with the assistance of his son Ellery, a bibliophile and author. The principal clue in the mystery is the disappearance of the victim's top hat, and it is suspected that the hat may have contained papers with which the victim was blackmailing the murderer. A number of suspects are considered, but nothing can be proved until Ellery performs an extended piece of logical deduction based on the missing hat and thus identifies the murderer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_French_Powder_Mystery"title="The French Powder Mystery">
The story begins with a model in the ground-floor store window of French's Department Store in New York City who is demonstrating the features of a suite of ultra-modern furniture. When she pushes a button to reveal the folding bed, the bludgeoned corpse of the wife of the owner of the store tumbles to the floor.The murder case falls into the hands of Inspector Richard Queen of the Homicide Squad and his mystery-writing son Ellery. A set of onyx bookends in the private apartments on the top of the store reveal not only bloodstains but grains of fingerprint powder and an unusual assortment of books. Also, an ashtray full of half-smoked cigarettes is an important clue. The suspects include the wealthy victim's family and friends, some employees of the store, and possible members of a drug ring.At the finale of the novel, Ellery Queen performs an extended piece of deduction by creating a list of conditions that the murderer must meet (involving, among other things, the possession of keys). He clears all suspects except one, whose identity is revealed in the last line of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hale,_Space_Detective"title="Tony Hale, Space Detective">
A series of unexplained disappearances from Lunar City leads to the assignment of Morrey Kant, Serge Smyslov and Tony Hale to investigate. Without any leads, Tony Hale devises a bold solo plan and is himself kidnapped.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_on_Mars"title="Murder on Mars">
In a crater on Mars an engineer from Mars Base has been found dead, his spacesuit slashed. Despite having a large number of suspects to interview, Morrey Kant, Serge Smyslov and Tony Hale's questioning flushes out a prime suspect. But Tony does not believe they have the right man and hatches a dangerous plan to find the real killer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Caves_of_Drach"title="The Caves of Drach">
A multi-billionaire's grandson gets lost in the Caves of Drach in Majorca. The grandfather employs the team of astronauts (who are on holiday) to investigate. The expedition finds him in a huge and airy underground civilization peopled by practically immortal humanoid beings who hail from the stars and took refuge underground when a Terran Ice-age threatened. The 'Cenobians' have a utopian civilization and avoid contact with the surface to keep it that way, and yet their advanced technology could bring an end to famine and disease.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Disaster"title="The Last Disaster">
The Moon's orbit suddenly starts to decay for reasons unknown; discovered when a solar eclipse arrives a few minutes early. The only hope of averting imminent disaster is an experimental anti-gravity device devised by an eccentric, elderly Welsh professor, who disillusioned with mankind, refuses to help...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Triangle"title="The Dark Triangle">
A plane carrying both the United Kingdom Prime Minister and United States President goes missing over the Bermuda Triangle. Chris Godfrey and company investigate and are captured by strange creatures.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dutch_Shoe_Mystery"title="The Dutch Shoe Mystery">
An eccentric millionairess is lying in a diabetic coma on a hospital bed in an anteroom of the surgical suite of the Dutch Memorial Hospital, which she founded, awaiting the removal of her gall bladder. When the surgery is about to begin, the patient is found to have been strangled with picture wire. Although the hospital is crowded, it is well guarded, and only a limited number of people had the opportunity to have murdered her, including members of her family and a small number of the medical personnel.The apparent murderer is a member of the surgical staff who was actually seen in the victim's vicinity, but his limp makes him easy to impersonate. Ellery Queen examines a pair of hospital shoes, one of which has a broken lace that has been mended with surgical tape. He performs an extended piece of logical deduction based on the shoe, plus such slight clues as the position of a filing cabinet, and creates a list of necessary characteristics of the murderer that narrows the field of suspects down to a single surprising possibility.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greek_Coffin_Mystery"title="The Greek Coffin Mystery">
After the death of an elderly Greek man who is an internationally famous art dealer and collector, his attorney discovers that his will is missing and notifies the district attorney. When Inspector Richard Queen of the New York City Police Force's Homicide Squad and his amateur detective son Ellery are called in, Ellery narrows down the possible location of the will to a single location: the dead man's coffin. When it is exhumed, however, it contains no will but the surprising addition of a strangled ex-convict.Ellery performs an extended piece of deduction in public early on in the novel that concerns a number of used teacups, and is proved wrong. Stung by this embarrassing error, he keeps his deductions to himself for the remainder of the case. Subsequent clues involve color-blindness, a shred of the burned will, two copies of a Leonardo da Vinci painting differing only in skin tone, a thousand-dollar bill, a dead art dealer whose office door was either open or closed and, most importantly, an infinitesimal typing error.Ellery and his father lay a trap, unmasking the murderer— whose guilt will probably have been entirely unsuspected by most readers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Egyptian_Cross_Mystery"title="The Egyptian Cross Mystery">
A schoolmaster in a tiny town in West Virginia is found on Christmas morning beheaded and crucified to a signpost in such a way that his body seems to form the letter "T". The letter "T" is scrawled in blood on the dead man's door. Ellery Queen is on the scene and notes that the letter "T" is also the shape of a "tau cross", or Egyptian cross; this seems to lead to a nearby bearded prophet whose invented religion mixes nudism and Egyptology.The prophet's business manager is missing and suspected of the murder. Ellery cannot solve the crime with the little information he has, but six months later in Long Island, New York, a neighbour of one of his university professors is found headless and crucified to a totem pole in the same way, in the new neighbourhood of the Egyptian prophet and his followers. This corpse is clutching a red piece from a game of checkers. The third victim is a millionaire yachtsman, similarly crucified.Many events turn on the families of the victims and their interaction with the Egyptian nudists, the game of checkers and the smoking of unusually-carved pipes, but the key clue that leads Ellery to the solution is a bottle of iodine that enables him to go on a cross-country chase and hunt down the murderer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Gun_Mystery"title="The American Gun Mystery">
Buck Horne and his faithful horse Injun were once the heroes of many a Western movie in the early days of Hollywood, but when tastes changed, Buck found his talents no longer required. Down on his luck, he went to work in a rodeo exhibition that was appearing in a New York coliseum, giving exhibitions of roping, fancy shooting, and the riding tricks that made him famous. With twenty thousand people in the stands, a group of celebrities including detective Ellery Queen in the boxes, and a full cohort of newsreel movie photographers recording the event for posterity, Buck and forty-one cowboys and cowgirls gallop around the track, whooping and firing their six-guns — until the former movie star is shot in the heart and trampled under the galloping hooves.Suspicion falls on many of the rodeo's performers and staff, and even on some of the celebrities, but one crucial and baffling point must be explained before anyone can be arrested. Even though all 20,000-odd people and the entire arena are searched, and the entire event can be reviewed on film, the specific murder gun cannot be found. Ellery Queen works his way through the details of the murderer's clever plot to set a trap and reveal two astounding surprises — the identity of the murderer and the hiding place of the gun.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siamese_Twin_Mystery"title="The Siamese Twin Mystery">
Inspector Queen and his son Ellery are vacationing in a mountainous area of the United States when they are forced by a forest fire to seek shelter at Arrow Head, the mountaintop home of famous surgeon Dr. John Xavier, which soon becomes impossible to escape due to the fire. There the sleuths meet an unusual assortment of characters, beginning with Dr. Xavier and his wife Sarah; his brother Mark; his medical assistant Percival Holmes; his handyman "Bones"; the housekeeper, Mrs. Wheary; and a houseguest, Ann Forrest. Miss Forrest has recently lost a silver ring; Dr. Holmes likewise finds himself missing a cheap signet ring. That night, Ellery spies a strange crab-like shape moving in the upstairs hallway, and, independently, Inspector Queen discovers that also present at the house is the wealthy Marie Carreau, a fixture of Washington high society; Ann is Mrs. Carreau's personal secretary. In the morning, Dr. Xavier is found dead in his study — shot twice with a revolver which has been wiped clean of any fingerprints. In his right hand he clutches the torn half of a playing card: the six of spades.The previous night, the Queens had encountered on the road a heavyset and unsavory man, who — his escape blocked by the fire — now returns to the house, giving his name unconvincingly as "Smith." It is further revealed that Marie Carreau had come to the house to consult with Dr. Xavier on the subject of her teenage sons, Julian and Francis, who are xiphopagous conjoined twins. It was the twins who had cast the crab-like shadow seen by Ellery in the hallway. Meanwhile, the Inspector makes the connection between the "six" of spades and Mrs. Xavier's initials — Sarah Isère Xavier — and accuses her of murdering the surgeon in a jealous rage at his lengthy conferences with Mrs. Carreau. Mrs. Xavier instantly confesses to the murder and collapses in a faint. However, Ellery observes that Dr. Xavier, who was right-handed, would naturally have used his right hand to crumple and discard half of the card, which would leave the uncrumpled half clutched in his "left" hand. It follows that the playing card must have been torn and placed in Xavier's hand by some left-handed person — that is, by the murderer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promised_Land_(novel)"title="Promised Land (novel)">
Promised Land, Inc. is the name of a real estate development company belonging to Harvey Shepard and Spenser also metaphorically refers to the Cape Cod area as the Promised Land.Spenser is hired by Harvey Shepard to find his runaway wife, Pam. Spenser soon locates her, but promises not to force her to return to her husband against her will. He begins to suspect that Harvey Shepard has been threatened by King Powers (a big-time loan shark) when he sees his enforcer Hawk at Shepard's house. Harvey fires Spenser because Spenser refuses to disclose Pam's location; Pam is staying with two militant feminists named Rose and Jane.Pam soon becomes entangled in Rose and Jane's bank robbery that resulted in the shooting death of a bank guard and calls Spenser for help. Spenser's dilemma is that he wants to reunite Harvey and Pam while also making sure that Rose and Jane go down for the bank guard's murder while simultaneously setting up King Powers to go to prison. He has to do all this while somehow managing to keep the Shepards (and himself) out of jail and still breathing. He manages to broker a gun deal to between Powers and the militants, while corresponding with the police to arrest the suspects in a sting operation with the intent of keeping the Shepards clean of the affair. Spenser warns Hawk the day of the operation while Powers, his henchmen, and Jane and Rose are arrested. The next day, Powers is bailed out of jail and his associates greet Spenser and Susan at the Shepards' home. After a brief scuffle, Hawk intervenes and leaves Powers to the mercy of Spenser.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agaton_Sax_and_the_Diamond_Thieves"title="Agaton Sax and the Diamond Thieves">
The Koh-Mi-Nor diamond is stolen and a very clever thief is putting messages about it, in a secret code, in the personal column of the newspaper published by the Swedish detective Agaton Sax.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Judas_Window"title="The Judas Window">
James Caplon Answell arranges to visit his future father-in-law, Avory Hume, at his house in London. Hume invites the prospective bridegroom into his strong room that is fitted with sturdy metal shutters and a thick wooden door. The room contains trophies and arrows that relate to Hume's hobby of archery, and they chat about archery while Hume pours drinks from a cut-glass decanter. As Answell collapses, he realizes that the drink has been drugged. When he comes to, he's alone in the locked and bolted room with Hume, who has been fatally skewered with an arrow.The remainder of the novel takes place at Answell's trial for the murder of Hume, and he is being defended by barrister and amateur detective Sir Henry Merrivale. We learn that Hume has set the actions of the plot in motion because he believes that he is having an interview not with the wealthy and blameless man who wants to marry his daughter, but a similarly named relative, Captain Answell, who is blackmailing her (and in a plot development that is extremely frank for the mores of 1938, she is being blackmailed because she posed for "obscene" photographs for her lover). Hume's household has participated to some extent in the activities that have conspired to make Answell look guilty. The decanter with the drugged drink has been replaced with an innocuous duplicate, and some mysteriously disappearing items include a suitcase full of clothing and an ink-pad. But it is the location of a tiny piece of blue feather from the fatal arrow that proves to be the decisive clue that reveals the murderer—it's revealed in the climactic courtroom scene to be hidden in the "Judas window".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wood_Beyond_the_World"title="The Wood Beyond the World">
When the wife of Golden Walter betrays him for another man, he leaves home on a trading voyage to avoid the necessity of a feud with her family. However, his efforts are fruitless, as word comes to him "en route" that his wife's clan has killed his father. He has a vision of three figures: a stately Lady, her Maid, who wears an iron ring on her anklet, and a Dwarf in a yellow hood. The figures pass through the port he is docked in, and he sets sail.Shortly into his voyage, a storm waylays his ship. He docks in an unknown country, where the only inhabitant appears to be an old hermit. Walter and his companions begin a hunt for food, but Walter strays northward up a steep path. After several days of travel, he rests in a wood, and is woken by the Dwarf from his vision. The Dwarf reveals that Walter has strayed into the land of the Lady, who keeps a grand house at the heart of the wood. Shortly after, Walter comes across the Maid, who begs for Walter's aid in escaping the clutches of her mistress. Walter agrees and seeks the house of the Lady and swears fealty to her, citing his vision as his reason for entering her lands. The Lady introduces Walter to her lover, the King's Son, who disregards Walter for his low rank.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Water_of_the_Wondrous_Isles"title="The Water of the Wondrous Isles">
Stolen as a child and raised in the wood of Evilshaw as servant to a witch, Birdalone ultimately escapes in her captress's magical boat, in which she travels to a succession of strange and wonderful islands. Among these is the Isle of Increase Unsought, an island cursed with boundless production, which Morris intended as a parable of contemporary Britain and a vehicle for his socialistic beliefs. Equally radical, during much of the first quarter of the novel, Birdalone is naked, a highly unusual detail in Victorian fiction. She is occasionally assisted out of jams by Habundia, her lookalike fairy godmother. She encounters three maidens who are held prisoner by another witch. They await deliverance by their lovers, the three paladins of the Castle of the Quest. Birdalone is clad by the maidens and seeks out their heroes, and the story goes into high gear as they set out to rescue the women. Ultimately, one lady is reunited with her knight, another finds a new love when her knight is killed, and the last is left to mourn as her champion throws her over for Birdalone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sundering_Flood"title="The Sundering Flood">
Osberne Wulfgrimsson and Elfhild are lovers who live on opposite sides of the Sundering Flood, an immense river, which they cannot cross. When Elfhild disappears during an invasion by the Red Skinners, the heartbroken Osberne takes up his magical sword Boardcleaver and joins the army of Sir Godrick of Longshaw, in whose service he helps dethrone the tyrannical king and plutocracy of merchants ruling the city at the mouth of the river. Afterwards he locates Elfhild, who had fled with a relative, a wise woman skilled in the magical arts, and taken refuge in the Wood Masterless. Elfhild tells Osberne of their adventures "en route" to safety. Afterwards they return together to Wethermel, Osberne's home, and all ends happily.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Traders"title="The Time Traders">
"The outline below follows the 1958 version; afterward, the changes in the 2000 edition are described.At the end of the twentieth century, petty criminal Ross Murdock is given the choice of facing a new psychiatric medical procedure called "rehabilitation" or volunteering to join a secret government project. Hoping for a chance to escape, Ross volunteers to join Operation Retrograde and is taken by Major John Kelgarries to a base built under the ice near the North Pole. Teamed with archaeologist Gordon Ashe, he is trained to mimic a trader of the Beaker culture of Bronze-Age Europe.Sent back to southern Britain around 2000 BCE, Ross and Ashe (as Rossa and Assha) find that their outpost has been bombed, destroyed by the wrath of Lurgha, the local storm god, according to two of the natives. Discovering the direction whence the bomber came and other clues pointing to the general area occupied by the Soviet base, Ross, Ashe, and McNeil, the lone survivor of the bombing, go to that area.Somewhere near the Baltic Sea, Ross, Ashe, and McNeil begin building a Beaker trading post and learn from the locals that to their southeast lies a land populated by ghosts, a land whither no man of good sense would go. Ross gets separated from Ashe and McNeil in a night attack and must go into the taboo area alone in an effort to find them. Far inside the ghostland he finds the Soviet base and is captured by the Reds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodline_(Cary_novel)"title="Bloodline (Cary novel)">
"Bloodline" takes place during World War I. John Shaw, a nineteen-year-old, joins the British Army and is sent to the front lines, in the trenches. He works as a communications officer who listens to German radio feeds and translates what he hears. His regiment commander is a man named Quincey Harker, who is the son of Jonathan Harker and Mina Murray from the original Dracula novel.Harker is famous for going on raids in the enemy trenches alone at night, and shows several feats of superhuman strength that seem impossible. He is also shown to be cruel to his men. One night a soldier named Private Smith falls asleep on his watch, and Germans invade the trench. As punishment, Harker orders him to be tied to a wagon wheel on no man's land. Private Smith does not die from being shot or shelled, but appears to die of fear.One night, Harker takes John on a night raid to destroy a nest of snipers. However, John gets stabbed in the shoulder with a bayonet. As he passes out, he thinks he sees Harker closely inspecting a large gash in an enemy soldier's throat. Harker carries him back to the trench, which saves his life. John soon becomes very sick with trench fever and believes he is having hallucinations of horrible things involving a hound and beheaded enemy soldiers in no man's land. He is rushed back to England for care.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rain_God"title="The Rain God">
In the first chapter, Miguel Chico, son to Miguel Grande and Juanita is introduced. He is the only member of the Angel family to achieve a college education so far, and he lives away from the rest of the family in San Francisco. Because he has chosen to live so far away, he is viewed with suspicion by some members of the family.Nina, Juanita’s sister, is presented in the following chapter. Her sexual and rebellious nature, which caused many fights and arguments with her father, has been passed on to her son Antony. Nina, not having learned from the mistakes she used to criticize her father of, does not peacefully settle the differences between herself and her son. After one of their fights, Antony dies, and it's unclear if the death was a suicide.Another “sinner” is profiled in chapter three: Miguel Chico’s father; Miguel Grande, who is having an affair with Lola, who is his wife Juanita's best friend. He is torn between them and unable to choose.Chapter four tells the story of Miguel Grande’s brother Felix, who is killed by a soldier toward whom he made sexual advances. In chapter five, Felix’s son, Joel, has night terrors as a child; the chapter deals with his feelings about his father's death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Whale_Rider"title="The Whale Rider">
Set in the 1980s in Whangara, a Māori community on the eastern edge of New Zealand's North Island, the novel is a retelling of the myth of Paikea.Kahu is the eldest great-grandchild of chieftain Koro Apirana; had she been a boy, she would have been the natural future leader of the tribe. She is attuned to the traditional Māori way of life, and may have inherited the ability to speak to whales.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Orange_Mystery"title="The Chinese Orange Mystery">
A wealthy publisher and collector of precious stones and Chinese postage stamps has a luxurious suite in a hotel that serves to handle his non-publishing business and the comings and goings of his staff, his relatives, and his female friends. When an odd and anonymous little man arrives and refuses to state his business, no one is surprised; he is locked (from outside "only") in an anteroom with a bowl of fruit (including tangerines, also known as Chinese oranges) and left to await the publisher's arrival. When the door is unlocked, though, a truly bizarre scene is displayed.The little man's skull is crushed, his clothing is reversed, back to front, all the furnishings of the room have been turned backwards — and two African spears have been inserted between the body and its clothing, stiffening it into immobility. The circumstances are such that someone has been observing every entrance to the room, and no one has apparently entered or left. The situation is further complicated by some valuable jewelry and stamps, the publisher's business affairs and romantic "affaires", and a connection with "backwardness" for seemingly every character. It takes the considerable talents of Ellery Queen to sort through the motives and lies and arrive at the twisted logic that underlies every aspect of this very unusual crime.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spanish_Cape_Mystery"title="The Spanish Cape Mystery">
The story begins with a pretty young heiress and her uncle seated outside their summer home on Spanish Cape, escaping the guests at her parents' house party. Suddenly a one-eyed giant bursts onto the scene and kidnaps them, misidentifying the uncle as John Marco, a house guest. The giant removes them both, ties the heiress to a chair in an empty neighbouring home, and disappears with the uncle. Ellery Queen and a friend arrive at the neighbouring home in the morning and release the heiress, but by the time they can return her to her home, Marco has been found on the terrace, strangled, and nude except for an enveloping opera cape.The house party and the household contain many people who had good reason to want the victim out of the way, some because he was blackmailing them. As Ellery is investigating the crime, another household member commits suicide out of sheer desperation at the potential revelation of a dreaded secret. By the time the uncle escapes his captor and swims to shore, Ellery is ready to reveal the identity of the murderer and the reason for the victim's nudity in a dramatic final scene.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lamp_of_God"title="The Lamp of God">
Ellery Queen is asked by a lawyer friend to help protect the interests of a pretty young heiress. They meet her, along with an unpleasant physician who is a friend of her family, as she disembarks in New York City from an ocean liner arriving from England. She learns that her father, from whom she has been separated since her toddler years, has died just as she is to be reunited with her eccentric family and inherit her father's fabled hoard of gold. The group drives for hours to reach an ugly and sinister Victorian house called the Black House at nightfall.The Black House, where her father died, is uninhabitable—the group meets the family and beds down in a small stone house next door. When they awake, the Black House has vanished as though it never existed. Ellery must shake off the Gothic trappings and the suggestions of black magic in order to figure out what has happened to the Black House and the gold.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_(McLaughlin_novel)"title="Dawn (McLaughlin novel)">
Isak has attempted to explain his foretelling to the priests of the Temple of Center, so that people might be told what to expect, and not to panic when it does. They are unwilling to accept such a bizarre idea. Furthermore, while Isak is innocent of the political implications of the event he describes, the priests are not. If the gods all turn their sight from the world, they must be angry with their representatives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King's_Damosel"title="The King's Damosel">
The novel follows the experiences of Lynette of Arthurian Legend after she saves her sister Leonie from the Red Knight, covering the events of the original legends as a series of flashbacks and vastly expanding Lynette's character.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cripps_the_Carrier"title="Cripps the Carrier">
The story is set in the 1830s in rural Oxfordshire. The main thread of the narrative follows the fortunes or misfortunes of Grace Oglander, the daughter of an Oxfordshire Squire. She is borne off from the residence of her aunt by the machinations of a villainous attorney, who entraps her into his power by the expedient of a forged letter from her father. The latter, anxiously expecting his daughter's return, receives by the carrier a sack of potatoes, and in it a long coil of bright golden hair, accompanied by the brutal superscription—"All you will ever see of her." Scarcely a doubt remains in his mind as to the fate of poor Grace, and his fears are confirmed by the testimony of Esther Cripps, the carrier's sister, who, in a belated walk, is the witness of a ghastly deed—the burial of the uncoffined body of a young girl in a ravine called the "Gipsy's Grave." Grace herself is in the meantime safely ensconced in the depths of the Oxford forest under the care of Miss Patch, the governess, and makes such good use of her natural gifts that she enthrals the heart of Kit Sharp, the attorney's son. For him, both she and her large fortune were designed by his unscrupulous father; but an unforeseen difficulty is interposed by the traitorous conduct of Kit himself. When he discovers that the girl is not an American, as he was led to suppose, but the daughter of Squire Oglander, he resolves to restore her to her father's roof; and this he succeeds in doing with the timely assistance of "Cripps the Carrier."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pather_Panchali_(novel)"title="Pather Panchali (novel)">
Horihor Ray, an impoverished Brahmin, lives in the village of Nischindipur. Indir Thakrun, an old widowed woman, who had nobody to look after her, takes shelter in the house of Horihor, to whom she is distantly related. Horihor's wife Shorbojoya, an ill-tempered lady, cannot bear the sight of the old woman. She is therefore given a tumble-down thatched hut to live in. However, Durga, Shorbojoya's six-year-old daughter, is very fond of Indir Thakrun and stays with her for hours to listen to fairy-tales.After some time, Shorbojoya gives birth to a son. Shorbojoya is jealous of Indir Thakrun as she thinks that Durga is more fond of the old woman than of her mother. Indir Thakrun is mercilessly turned out of the hut for a trifling reason. The helpless old woman implores for shelter in her dying moments but she is heartlessly refused; she passes away in a rice-barn.Four or five years later, the boy named Apu grows up to be very inquisitive and sensitive to the beauty and mystery of nature. He and his elder sister Durga are always out for some new adventures like roaming through the forests, taking part in indigenous games and plucking flowers and fruits stealthily. Apu is admitted into the village school where many village elders assemble and talk on diverse subjects. Apu is taken by his father to a client's house. It is the first time that Apu gets a glimpse of the outside world which fills his mind with joy and excitement. The village festivity, the fair, and the "Jatra" performance, all bring variety and thrill to the monotonous flow of village life. Durga, restless yet innocent, dies suddenly, plunging the whole family into grief and leaving her little brother all alone. Horihor leaves home for a long period and struggles desperately to earn a livelihood. After returning home he decides to leave Nischindipur. They pack up and go to the railway station. As the train steams in, they board the train leaving behind Nischindipur forever with its many sweet and sour memories.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfway_House_(novel)"title="Halfway House (novel)">
Joe Wilson was a poor, itinerant salesman with a pretty young wife in Philadelphia. Joseph Kent Gimball was a wealthy, socially prominent New Yorker with an elegant and aristocratic wife. These two very different men were actually the same man, a bigamist leading a bizarre double life. His deception was revealed to the world after he was murdered in his "halfway house," a riverfront shack outside Trenton, New Jersey, that he used as a hideout to switch identities. But who killed him?Ellery Queen, who is drawn into the investigation to help old friends, is able to look beyond the strange nature of the victim to seek hard facts. He puts his finger on the central question: "Who was murdered -- Joe or Joseph?" Queen performs an extended feat of logical deduction from seemingly insignificant clues, such as a number of burnt matches, and finally develops a profile of the killer that can fit only one person in the case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince_(novel)"title="The Prince (novel)">
Jonathan. His zeal carried him into battle. His faithfulness won him honor among his people. His humility led him into friendship with the man who would become king in his place. David was a man after God's own heart. But it was the courage and selflessness of his best friend that opened the door to David's rule. A man of honor and deep faith.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Deduction"title="The Final Deduction">
Mrs. Althea Vail tells Wolfe she intends to pay the half-a-million-dollar ransom to the kidnappers, but she wants him to be certain she gets her husband Jimmy back alive and in one piece.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Bird_and_the_Ever_After"title="May Bird and the Ever After">
May Bird lives alone with her mother and her cat, Somber Kitty (a Sphynx cat), on the edge of a wooded swamp in West Virginia. She loves to draw and make believe, but does not fit in at school. Most people are not very comfortable in the woods, but “The woods of Briery Swamp fit May Bird like a fuzzy mitten.” There, she is safe from school and the taunts and teases of the kids who do not understand her. Hidden in the trees, May imagines herself as a warrior princess, with her cat as her brave guardian. Then one day, May falls into the lake. When she crawls out, May finds herself in a world that is inhabited by things she thought were just in her imagination. She sees many ghosts and other amazing creatures. A ghost named Pumpkin (with a pumpkin head) is her house ghost, or her guardian, and follows her into the lake to help her through. So does her faithful cat after she does not return. It is a place few live ones (living people) have ever seen. “Here, towns glow blue beneath zipping stars and the people walk through walls.” Here the Book of the Dead holds the answers to everything in the universe. And here, if May is discovered, the horrifyingly evil Bo Cleevil will destroy her. May Bird must get out. This is the beginning of May Bird's daring journey into the Ever After, a haunting place where true friends—and many terrible foes—await her on every corner. She gets help from Pumpkin, who lives with the Beekeeper Arista in a giant house shaped like a beehive. She is told that she needs to go see the Lady of North Farm, a place no ghost is willing to go.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice_Brightly"title="Twice Brightly">
For young servicemen who had spent six years fighting fascism, postwar Britain was a drab, oppressive place. For a young and untried army comic keen on the Marx brothers and Jimmy Cagney, a Yorkshire Variety theatre in February was a vision of Hell itself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Glance"title="Second Glance">
"Second Glance" follows the lives of several characters throughout the book. In Picoult's signature writing style, the novel flashes back and forth many decades to piece together the story. The novel is set in the fictional town of Comtosook, Vermont. The story is about Abenaki territorial land that is planned to be turned into a shopping mall. However, if the Abenaki are able to show that an ancestor was buried on this expanse of land, then the mall cannot, legally, be built on the land. Ross Wakeman arrives in Comtosook to stay with his sister, Shelby. Ross is the survivor of many varied suicide attempts, which began after his fiancée Aimee was killed in a car accident years ago. Ross became a ghost hunter in the hopes that someday he would encounter Aimee's spirit. Fortunately for Ross, when he arrives in Comtosook, the town begins to experience strange phenomena, as the result of the new plans to build a strip mall on the Abenaki land. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_John_Riddell_Murder_Case"title="The John Riddell Murder Case">
Acting in response to an incomprehensibly phrased note in Walter Winchell's gossip column predicting that John Riddell will be murdered at 9:00 that morning, Philo Vance alerts the police and travels with the narrator to Riddell's home, only to find that they are too late. As might be expected from a work of parody, much of the book's humor comes from absurdities and from the ridiculous portrayals of the writings and authors caricatured. Repetition is frequently employed for comedic effect. The fourth wall is broken on several occasions, as when Philo Vance responds to Heath's suggestion that Vance believes that all of the recent best-selling authors are going to be murdered: "'Already there have been thirteen murders, and we're only at'--he glanced down swiftly--'at page 124.'" Philo Vance himself is portrayed as affecting an inconsistently cultured vocabulary and a lazy style of speaking. For example: "I've been evolvin' a rather fantastic theory, and I want to test it a trifle further."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_Kind_of_a_Funny_Story"title="It's Kind of a Funny Story">
Craig Gilner, the narrator, is 15 years old and lives with his family in a middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood. He attends the prestigious Executive Pre-Professional High School, having studied arduously to win admission. Once admitted, however, he becomes overwhelmed by the school's intense academic pressure. He has a longstanding crush on Nia, who is dating his best friend, Aaron. He feels alienated and unable to fit in.His stress eventually manifests itself in an eating disorder, affects sleep habits, and suicidal thoughts. He takes a stand and goes to a psychiatrist who prescribes him Zoloft. He is elated for a brief period, and believes he is cured (what he calls "The Fake Shift")—so he decides to throw away the medicine. Consequently, his depression builds until, unable to fend off his suicidal ideation, he calls 1-800-SUICIDE and is admitted to a nearby psychiatric hospital. He is initially taken aback and feels he doesn't belong in a loony bin. He meets many other patients, some friendly, others reclusive or delusional, and is supported and encouraged by his family and school principal once they learn of his hospitalization.He is apprehensive about going back to school and talks to his psychiatrist, Dr. Minerva, about this. Craig meets a female patient, Noelle, who coped with a history of abuse by cutting her face with scissors. In isolation from the outside world, and with help from Noelle, Craig confronts the sources of his anxiety and regains his health.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lottery_Rose"title="The Lottery Rose">
Georgie Burgess, seven and a half years old, lives in Tampa, Florida. He lives with domestic abuse but harbors it secret. He gets in trouble at school and hasn't learned to read, but he loves looking at a book with pictures of flowers.Georgie's life changes after he wins a rosebush at a supermarket contest. After his mother's boyfriend beats him severely, police remove Georgie from his dangerous home, and his unplanted rosebush comes with him. Georgie is placed temporarily with Mrs. Sims, a cashier from the supermarket. But as his social worker and the judge find a home for him, Georgie is increasingly worried about finding a home for his rosebush that he loved at first sight.When Georgie is placed in a Catholic boys' boarding school, he is convinced that his rosebush belongs in the garden of the neighbors across the road. Though principal Sister Mary Angela tries to convince Georgie to plant it elsewhere, Georgie sneaks out at night to plant his rosebush there. The next morning, however, the infuriated neighbor, Molly Harper, rips the bush out of her garden and returns it to the school, demanding to see the principal.Georgie returns to the garden with the bush and discovers that while planting his rosebush in the dark, he has accidentally crushed the lilies planted for Molly Harper by her husband. Mrs. Harper confronts Georgie and threatens to burn his rosebush if he plants it again, but she softens upon glimpsing the infected wounds on Georgie's back left by the abuse of his past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Children_(novel)"title="Little Children (novel)">
Sarah, who once considered herself a radical feminist, wonders how she allowed herself to be reduced to a common housewife, constantly at the playground with three other neighborhood Stepford-esque mothers whom she can't stand. Her husband, Richard, is much older than she is, and a sort of last alternative for her love life; it is even hinted that she married him only because she feared that she would be stuck in her dead-end job as a Starbucks barista forever if she didn't. When she discovers his addiction to online pornography, she is more apathetic than repulsed.Todd is a handsome young father whom the neighborhood women have nicknamed the "Prom King." One of the other mothers dares Sarah: "Five bucks if you get his phone number." While jokingly discussing the bet, Todd and Sarah engage in a kiss that becomes more passionate than the ruse called for. This leads to an affair between the two, who "happen" to cross each other at the local pool and "happen" to bring their children to nap together while they have sex on the living room floor.Larry is a retired police officer. Three years before, he left the force after shooting a black teenager brandishing a toy gun at a local shopping mall; the guilt became so unbearable that he collected his pension early. Now, his wife has left him and taken their two sons. Larry, who loved his job and refuses to let go of it, is angry that Ronald "Ronnie" McGorvey, a sex offender convicted of exposing himself to children, is allowed to live in his neighborhood, and starts a one-man vendetta to drive him out. Ronnie, for his part, finds himself ostracized by the community, and the one date his mother forces him to go on is ruined when he gives in to temptation and masturbates while watching children. Larry eventually gets into a shoving match with Ronnie's mother (May), who has a fatal stroke. Bertha, a school crossing guard and May's best friend, takes Ronnie to the hospital, where May has written him a note that reads only "Please, please be a good boy."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landscape_of_Love"title="The Landscape of Love">
In the summer of 1967, the family friends Dan, Nick and Lucas arrive for a visit. Dan is Finn's boyfriend; Nick is a young doctor; and Lucas is a non-conformist fame-hungry artist and disregards others.Lucas is painting the girls' portraits. When he works on Maisie, she entertains him with tales of the family's past. However, when Maisie tells of having her fortune told years ago, he scoffs and so she doesn't tell him what she saw in the fortune teller's crystal ball.As the family begins to prepare to travel to Gramps's childhood home for their annual visit, their place is enveloped in a brooding sense of impending doom. Maisie (who wanders at night) spies Finn returning home very early in the morning, naked under her dress. Maisie worries that Dan's heart will be broken if Finn has been with Lucas, as she suspects.Before the family leaves on their trip, Stella and her father work on their plan to ask Gramps's wealthy twin brother for a loan to repair the crumbling Abbey. Maisie slips away, spying Lucas furtively leaving for Cambridge on Julia's bike. She wonders if he has stolen it. Maisie then overhears a passionate argument between Dan and Finn, followed by an equally passionate embrace. The house is filled with fear, distrust and despair. Maisie doesn't know what is wrong with her family but decides she must take action to help them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_That_Berry_Built"title="The House That Berry Built">
Unable any longer to afford their aristocratic lifestyle in England, Berry and Co decide in 1937 to relinquish "White Ladies", their ancestral home in Hampshire, to the state for the use of the Foreign Secretary. Nostalgic for a vanished world of social events and elegant idleness, Berry and his friends move to Pau in the South of France where they spend their days picnicking on the slopes of the Ossau Valley. Deciding to settle nearby, they acquire some land on the green mountainside halfway between the thermal spa of Lally and the village of Besse and build themselves a substantial property that they name "Gracedieu." Although the novel includes a minor sub-plot regarding the family's investigation of a murder, it consists principally of a detailed description of the building of "Gracedieu." The cost of the work, the risks of the construction techniques employed, the whims of the mountain weather and the relations with the local contractor are all carefully detailed.In an earlier book, "Adèle and Co." (1931), Jill had been married to Piers, Duke of Padua, and had baby twins. Now, she explains in a matter-of-fact manner "It was awful, you know, when Piers and my babies were killed. They went down in a plane together." With Boy's ex-wife Adèle having returned to her native America some years earlier, and deciding not to come back, Boy and Jill are free to fall in love; and towards the end of the novel the couple marry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promise_Not_to_Tell"title="Promise Not to Tell">
In 2002, Kate Cypher, a 41-year-old school nurse, returns home to her Vermont hippie commune where she grew up to care for her aging mother, who is afflicted with Alzheimer's disease. Her first night home, a murder takes place behind her mother's cabin—the killing is identical to that of Kate's childhood friend, Del Griswold, who was murdered in 1971. Del was a scrappy outcast in life, shunned and taunted as "Potato Girl." Since her unsolved murder, Del had become something of a local legend, supposedly tormenting the townsfolk from beyond the grave. Kate never revealed her close relationship to Del, before or after her death, unable to stand up to those who pitied or reviled Del. Kate is drawn into the investigation of the modern-day crime, and must revisit Del's original murder, and her culpability in it. Along the way, she realizes that someone is playing games with her: leaving cryptic messages that tell her where to go. By following these clues, Kate re-meets many members of the hippie town she grew up in and relives some of the horrifying times during Del's murder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeker_(McDevitt_novel)"title="Seeker (McDevitt novel)">
The story is set approximately 10,000 years in the future, after civilization has expanded to inhabit countless worlds. Alex Benedict, dealer in antiques, and his partner Chase Kolpath are astroarchaeologists involved in the examination of abandoned bases and deserted space-craft in search of valuable items.Alex is approached by a mysterious woman who asks him to ascertain the value of a strange cup riddled with archaic symbols. They discover that the cup is a 9,000-year-old relic from one of the first faster-than-light vehicles built, the "Seeker". This was a colony ship crewed by a faction known as the "Margolians" who were fleeing the then-oppressive society of Earth in hopes of establishing a free world. Records indicate that they succeeded, as the "Seeker" made several voyages, but they kept the location of their colony world a secret.Alex and Chase discover who brought this cup back with some insight. By retracing the route of these long-forgotten space explorers, they begin to get an idea of where the "Seeker" was found. Excitedly, they set off in hopes of finding the colony of "Margolia".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snuff_(Palahniuk_novel)"title="Snuff (Palahniuk novel)">
"Snuff" follows three men who are waiting to immortalize themselves into pornography history as they wait to bed Cassie Wright, a former porn queen who has fallen into harder times. Each chapter follows a different guy (Mr. 600, Mr. 72, and Mr. 137), as well as Sheila, the female wrangler who dictates who is the next to be filmed with Cassie Wright. As the three men wait, each starts to divulge their true reasons for wanting to be filmed, as well as discuss the sordid history of Cassie Wright and her reason for suddenly dropping out of the pornography industry for a year. As backgrounds, secrets, and would-be children start to appear, the tensions in the room start to rise and in the end the true secrets of her comeback, and who really is Cassie Wright's porn child, are the last things any of them suspect.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitt_Marie_Rose"title="Sitt Marie Rose">
The novel begins before the civil war with an unnamed female narrator describing her friend Mounir's desire to make a movie based on Syrian immigrants who come to work in Lebanon. After this brief section, the novel turns its attention solely to the death of Sitt Marie Rose as perceived by seven different characters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starcross_(novel)"title="Starcross (novel)">
Protagonist Arthur ("Art") Mumby and his older sister Myrtle are invited to the Starcross hotel on a small and periodically barren asteroid. There, Arthur's mother Emily suspects that Starcross is built on a piece of Mars which routinely slips through a hole in the fabric of time, and Myrtle then discovers that Sir Richard Burton and his Martian wife Ulla have been changed into trees. Jack Havock, now a British secret agent, appears on the scene disguised as an Indian prince.In the following night they are attacked by the Moobs, a species with the ability to shapeshift into forms of inanimate objects, which currently resemble animated black top hats, which take control of Jack's crew and other guests, including Emily. Myrtle and Jack escape, but become lost in the deserts of prehistoric Mars. There, they encounter Delphine, one of the guests, a French secret agent determined to find her grandfather's wrecked ship and create an American-style republic in his name. At the wreck, they discover that Delphine's grandfather was killed by Moobs, and later learn that the Moobs are native to a time period near the end of the universe, and that they live chiefly by feeding on other species' thoughts and dreams.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_Swords"title="Oath of Swords">
Bahzell Bahnakson is an exchange hostage in Navahk. While taking the back way out of the palace to meet his friend Brandark, he hears screaming. When he investigates he finds a hradani woman named Farmah being raped and brutally beaten by the crown prince Harnak. He attacks Harnak and frees Farmah, smuggling her out of the city with the help of another servant woman, Tala. He sends the women towards Hurgrum, then strikes off in another direction, hoping to draw pursuit away from them. Brandark joins him, and together they set off east to try to find work. Unfortunately hradani are not popular in other lands, and they are unwelcome in most places they go. The wealthy dwarven merchant Kilthandaknarthas hires them as caravan guards and they travel with him for some time, beating off several attacks by a group of assassins called the Dog Brothers, who are connected to Sharna's church. Harnak, who has been secretly worshiping Sharna, is the one who arranged for the Dog Brothers to be sent after Bahzell, because as long as Bahzell is alive he is a threat to Harnak's position. Bahzell and Brandark do not yet realize this.Eventually Bahzell and Brandark leave Kilthan in a city called Riverside. Bahzell finds a job as a bar bouncer but is fired after another assassination attempt fails. While walking to the inn where he and Brandark are staying, he again hears screaming and follows it into an alley where he rescues a noblewoman named Zarantha from the Empire of the Spear. She tells the city guard that she is his employer, saving him from jail. Brandark, with Zarantha's help, begins writing a song in honor of Bahzell.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silence_(Endō_novel)"title="Silence (Endō novel)">
The young Portuguese Jesuit priest Sebastião Rodrigues (based on the historical Italian figure Giuseppe Chiara) travels to Japan to assist the local Church and investigate reports that his mentor, a Jesuit priest in Japan named Ferreira, based on Cristóvão Ferreira, has committed apostasy. Less than half of the book is the written journal of Rodrigues, while the other half of the book is written either in the third person, or in the letters of others associated with the narrative. The novel relates the trials of Christians and the increasing hardship suffered by Rodrigues.Rodrigues and his companion Francisco Garrpe (also a Jesuit priest) arrive in Japan in 1639. There they find the local Christian population driven underground. To ferret out hidden Christians, security officials force suspected Christians to trample on a "fumi-e", a carved image of Christ. Those who refuse are imprisoned and killed by "ana-tsurushi", which is by being hung upside down over a pit and slowly bled.Rodrigues and Garrpe are eventually captured and forced to swim as Japanese Christians lay down their lives for the faith. There is no glory in these martyrdoms, as Rodrigues had always imagined – only brutality and cruelty. Prior to the arrival of Rodrigues, the authorities had been attempting to force priests to renounce their faith by torturing them. Beginning with Ferreira, they torture other Christians as the priests look on, telling the priests that all they must do is renounce their faith in order to end the suffering of their flock.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamesong"title="Flamesong">
Trinesh, a lieutenant in the Tsolyáni army, is eager to prove himself to his superiors, one of whom is the imperial prince Mirusíya. Mirusíya and his army worship the warlike fire deity Vimúhla, who once wielded a legendary weapon named Flamesong.Trinesh' legionaries storm an isolated outpost occupied by the hostile empire of Yán Kór. The fastness is revealed to be an ancient temple that houses the access to a high-tech subway network. A group of Yán Kóryani noblewomen escape into one of the "tubeway cars". Trinesh and a handful of soldiers attempt to take the women as prisoners, but get trapped in the machine instead. The motley party begins an eventful journey from one tubeway station to another, each located in a distant and exotic land.No one in the party knows exactly how to operate the tubeway car, and a lengthy series of misfortunes follows. Personal chemistries in the claustrophobic environment are strained at first, but over time the characters learn to understand each other despite their differing world-views and backgrounds. Eventually it is revealed that one of the Yán Kóryany noblewomen is Flamesong come into human flesh, and that her intent is to assassinate Mirusíya. She is nearly successful, but ultimately slays another, less important officer. Trinesh, on the other hand, sets free a group of extra-dimensional aliens enslaved by the Yán Kóryani ruler, thus seriously damaging his fancies of world domination.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_China_Blues"title="Red China Blues">
## 1989 Student Protests.In 1988, Wong returned to Beijing as "The Globe and Mail"'s China correspondent and witnessed the tremendous transformations market reforms have brought since her time as the first Western international student to China during the Cultural Revolution. She interviewed dissidents such as Ren Wanding and Fang Lizhi, who played a key role in the 1986 Anhui student protests.In her writings, Wong was critical of Hu Yaobang, whom she describes as "a buffoonish character" and summarizing his political career as "just another party hack who proved once again that being heir apparent was bad for one's health." She expresses her surprise when Hu's death sparks a popular student movement for political reform. She follows the movement through its different stages, from the initial demonstrations, to the embarrassing Sino-Soviet Summit fiasco, to the dialogues and hunger strikes, to martial law, and finally to the June 4th crackdown.Wong talks about the student movement, stating that "the students were merely aping their oppressors… they established a Lilliputian kingdom in Tiananmen Square, complete with a mini-bureaucracy with committees for sanitation, finance and propaganda… they even adopted grandiose titles… Chai Ling was elected Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Tiananmen Square Unified Action Headquarters". Wong reveals that during the hunger strike, many students cheated and were in fact eating. She notes that reporters were helping the students cheat and covered up their actions. Her assistant Yan Yan, for example, expensed a whole case of milk to feed the students. Wong reported that "the students were hunger striking in shifts… they'd sit out a few meals until a classmate came to replace them".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Question_of_Guilt"title="A Question of Guilt">
In Philadelphia, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys find themselves on opposite sides of a high-profile murder case – a case that has already come to court and been tried. Carson Drew's client was cleared on a technicality, but the Drews want to prove him innocent beyond all doubt, while the Hardys want to find conclusive evidence of his guilt. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_the_Stuttering_Parrot"title="The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot">
In only their second outing, the Three Investigators are hired by a friend of their patron, Alfred Hitchcock, to find his missing parrot. The boys soon discover that his parrot was one of a group of seven, trained by their former owner to each repeat a specific message. The focus of the investigation shifts from finding the single lost parrot to discovering the secret behind these cryptic messages.The boys aren't the only ones who want to hear the dead man's secret. Others, including an infamous French art thief, Huganay, have also concluded that the messages are the key to locating a particularly valuable hidden item.The coded message is as follows, by parrots, in order:The messages each stand for something. Little Bo Peep's message talks about calling on Sherlock Holmes, and where would you call on him except for Baker Street? So the parrots give an address on Baker Street. Next is Billy, whose stutter actually is the number of the address, to-to-to-be, or rather, 222-B. So the address is a 222-B Baker Street in California. Next is Blackbeard, who states that dead men guard the treasure. Where else but a graveyard could dead men be? So the final address is a graveyard in California at 222-B Baker Street. Once you get to the entrance, follow Robin Hood's instructions for his arrow and go exactly 100 paces west. After this, see if you are at the Severn family's grave, and if it leads to the graves of thirteen unknown men. Past the graves, follow Captain Kidd's instructions to the letter and search under the huge stones for a box with no locks. Pete picks up a piece of pipe with the edges sealed as a weapon from the pile of stones. Later, he thinks of Scarface's message and how they never solved it or used it, and believes that the lead pipe he picked up at the graveyard is the pipe talked about in the "lead pipe cinch" joke. His hunch is correct, and the picture is inside the pipe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_Orchid"title="Empress Orchid">
The novel follows the life of a young Manchu girl named Orchid Yehonala. The story begins with the death of her father who was once a governor of Wuhu. His death left Orchid, her two siblings and her mother in poverty. His family travel to his birthplace Peking with his coffin for burial. Once in Peking, they move in with a distant uncle and his mentally retarded and opium addicted son Ping (also known as 'Bottle').Orchid gets a chance to better her life when Emperor Hsien Feng issues a decree stating that he is looking for "future mates". Orchid is eligible because she is Manchu and that her father was the rank of "Blue Bannerman". She is chosen as the Imperial consort of the fourth rank. Her official title is Lady of the Greatest Virtue. There are a total of 7 Imperial consorts, and over 3000 concubines within the Forbidden City. Nuharoo is pronounced Empress, ranking her first out of the 7 Imperial consorts.Once in the Forbidden City, Orchid befriends a eunuch called An-te-hai, who is assigned as her servant along with numerous other eunuchs and maids. A friendship begins to form between the two, and she appoints him as her first attendant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Grit_(novel)"title="True Grit (novel)">
The novel is narrated by Mattie Ross, churchgoing elderly spinster distinguished by intelligence, independence, and strength of mind. She recounts the story of her adventures fifty years earlier, in 1878, when she undertook a quest to avenge her father's murder by a drifter named Tom Chaney. She is joined on her quest by Marshal Reuben J. "Rooster" Cogburn and a Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf (pronounced "La-beef").As Mattie's tale begins, Chaney is employed on the Ross's family farm in West-Central Arkansas, near the town of Dardanelle in Yell County. Chaney is not adept as a farmhand, and Mattie has only scorn for him, referring to him as "trash" and noting that her kind-hearted father, Frank, hired him only out of pity. One day, Frank Ross and Chaney go to Fort Smith to buy some horses. Ross takes $250 with him to pay for the horses, along with two gold pieces that he has always carried, but he ends up spending only $100 on the horses. Later, Ross tries to intervene in a barroom confrontation involving Chaney. Chaney kills him, robs the body of the remaining $150 and two gold pieces, and flees into Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) on his horse.Mattie hears that Chaney has joined an outlaw gang led by the infamous "Lucky" Ned Pepper and wishes to track down the killer. Upon arriving at Fort Smith, she looks for the toughest deputy US Marshal in the district. That man turns out to be Reuben J. "Rooster" Cogburn, an aging, one-eyed, overweight, trigger-happy, hard-drinking man. Mattie is convinced that he has "grit" and that his reputation for violence makes him best suited for the job.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciske_de_Rat"title="Ciske de Rat">
The setting is in Amsterdam in the 1930s. The story is told by Ciske’s new teacher Bruis.Ciske de Rat ("Ciske the Rat") is the story of eleven-year-old lonely street child Ciske (Franciskus) Vrijmoeth, who has no friends and is only called "the Rat". Ciske has to change school, because he poured ink over his teacher's head. After school, he helps out in a pub, where his mother Marie also works. His beloved father Cor is a sailor and therefore not at home. Ciske groeit op ("Ciske grows up") is the second part. Ciske meets his father, who wants to get divorced. At school he makes friends with a sick boy called Dorus. One night, Ciske finds his mother with another man, who beats him. As his mother tears out pages from a book which was borrowed from Dorus, Ciske gets angry and kills his mother with a knife. He is then arrested and put into jail. His teacher helps him out, and after Ciske saves a drowning boy's life, he is declared a hero and lives together with his father and aunt Jans.In the third part, Cis de man ("Cis the man"), Ciske is now an adult soldier and fights against the German soldiers in May 1940, when the Germans invaded the Netherlands. His former teacher Bruis, who tells this story as well, happens to be his sergeant. Cis actually has more authority than Bruis. In the end, Cis gets seriously injured. This part of the book was published in 1946 after the Dutch liberation and is not included in the films.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Nigger"title="Capitalist Nigger">
"Capitalist Nigger" asserts that the Black Race is a consumer race and not a productive one. Says the author, Chika Onyeani, "We are a conquered race and it is utterly foolish for us to believe that we are independent. The Black Race depends on other communities for its culture, its language, its feeding, and its clothing." "Despite enormous natural resources," according to author, "Blacks are economic slaves because they lack the "killer-instinct" and "devil-may-care" attitude of the Caucasian, as well as the "spider web economic mentality" of the Asian." The author is not afraid to use the word 'nigger' in both pejorative or stereotypic senses. He says, "It is not what you call me, but what I answer to, that matters most."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_a_Thug_(novel)"title="Confessions of a Thug (novel)">
The plot revolves around a fictional anti-hero protagonist, Ameer Ali, a Muslim thug. This book is a tale of crime and retribution in India, beginning in the late 18th century and ending in 1832. The story lays bare the practices of the Thugs, or "deceivers" as they were called, who murdered travellers for money and valuables. This work was originally published in 1839 and reprinted in 1873.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Warrior_(comics)"title="The Lost Warrior (comics)">
"The Lost Warrior" opens with narration from Graystripe, a warrior who was separated from his Clan, ThunderClan, after being kidnapped by humans while trying to deforest his home. He is then taken in as a house cat by a Twoleg (human) family. He somewhat likes the Twolegs and their kits but he cannot stand to be away from his Clan and his fellow warriors. He makes an attempt to flee but gets lost in Twolegplace and battles with a kittypet named Duke. After being forced to flee the fight, Graystripe is led back to the nest he has been staying in by a female kittypet named Millie he meets, who assures him that losing to Duke is nothing to be ashamed of. The two cats get to know each other better and Millie finds a small forest in the middle of the Twolegplace. She then shows it to Graystripe and asks him to teach her how to hunt and fight after learning of his previous life. After a dream in which he is visited by his deceased mate, Silverstream, and his daughter Feathertail, and another fight with Duke and his allies, Graystripe finally makes the decision to try to return to ThunderClan. In another dream about Silverstream, after Graystripe tells Silverstream that he wishes he could be with her, Silverstream reminds him that his place is with ThunderClan. She also tells him that he already has a traveling companion. Later, Graystripe asks Millie to come with him to ThunderClan, and is taken aback at her refusal. He then leaves for ThunderClan alone. Graystripe ends up getting lost in Twolegplace for days before collapsing from exhaustion. Millie changes her mind and goes out to catch up to Graystripe. Upon meeting him, she discovers him feverish and weak; he even calls her by Silverstream's name. Millie nurses him back to health and asks him about Silverstream. Then the two set off to try to find ThunderClan. What they don't realize is that ThunderClan, along with the rest of the Clans, no longer resides in the forest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Color_of_Money_(novel)"title="The Color of Money (novel)">
The novel is set twenty years after "The Hustler". Fast Eddie now runs a pool hall of his own. After seeing a lookalike of Minnesota Fats on the television, he decides to go in search of the real one, whom he finds in the Florida Keys. Eddie persuades Fats to go on a national tour. He meets Arabella, an English woman, who moves in with him. The finale is set at Lake Tahoe, where Eddie manages to best a number of younger players.Television is a major subplot. At the beginning, Eddie watches most of his pool on the television, and tends to play the game by himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_Reason_Hated"title="Past Reason Hated">
The body of Caroline Hartley is found one evening before Christmas by her lover, Veronica Shildon. It is a cosy scene–log fire, sheepskin rug, Vivaldi on the stereo, Christmas lights and tree–but Caroline is naked and covered in blood. Detective Constable Susan Gay is the first detective at the scene. She has recently been promoted to C.I.D. and the case soon takes on overwhelming professional and personal importance for her. DC Gay and Chief Inspector Alan Banks soon find plenty of suspects as they begin to delve into Caroline’s past and the women’s present life: Veronica’s ex-husband, who is a well-known composer; a feminist poet; the cast and crew of a play Caroline was rehearsing; and Caroline’s eccentric, reclusive brother, Gary Hartley. Inspector Banks’s fifth case is an ironic, suspenseful tale of family secrets, hidden passions and desperate violence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blind_Man_of_Seville"title="The Blind Man of Seville">
It is Holy Week in Seville – "Semana Santa", the Easter week of passion and processions. A leading restaurateur is found bound, gagged and dead in front of his television set. The self-inflicted wounds tell of the man's struggle to avoid the unendurable images he has been forced to watch. When confronted by this horrific scene the normally cool and dispassionate homicide detective, Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón, is inexplicably afraid. He looks into the victim's ruined face and asks himself: 'What could be so terrible?' The investigation into the restaurateur's turbulent life sends Falcón trawling through his own past and the ferociously candid journals of his late father, a world-famous artist. Painful revelations churn up Falcón's unreliable memory and more killings push him to the edge of terrifying truth. And he realizes that this is not just the hunt for an all-seeing murderer who knows his victim's secret lives, but also the search for Falcón's own missing heart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silent_and_the_Damned"title="The Silent and the Damned">
Mario Vega is seven years old and his life is about to change forever. Across the street in an exclusive suburb of Seville his father is splayed out dead on the kitchen floor, while his mother lies in bed upstairs, suffocated under her own pillow. It appears to be a suicide pact, but Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón has his doubts when he finds an enigmatic note crushed into the dead man's hand.In the brutal summer heat Falcón begins to dismantle the obscure life of Rafael Vega only to receive threats from the Russian mafia, who have begun operating in the city. His investigation includes the neighbours: on one side a creative American couple with a destructive past and on the other a famous actor, whose only son is in prison for an appalling crime. Opposite lives Consuelo Jiménez, who Falcón has met before when she was suspected of murdering her husband.Within days two further suicides follow – one of them a senior policeman – while a forest fire rages through the hills above Seville, obliterating all in its path. And Falcón is left to sweat out the truth, which will reveal that everything is connected and that there is one more terrible secret in the black heart of Vega's life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_Assassins"title="The Hidden Assassins">
As Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón investigates a mutilated, faceless corpse unearthed on the municipal dump, a massive explosion rocks the beautiful, peaceful city of Seville. An apartment building collapses and a nearby pre-school is devastated, killing and wounding men, women and children. When it's discovered that there was a mosque in the basement of the apartment building the media is quick to assume it's the work of Islamist terrorists.As a late, high summer heat tightens its grip, panic sweeps through the city and the population flees while the region is put on red alert. More bodies are dragged from the rubble and terror invades the domestic life of the flamboyant judge, Esteban Calderón, and the troubled mind of the captivating Consuelo Jiménez.With the media and political pressure intensifying, Falcón refuses to be swayed and begins to realise that all is not as it seems. But just as he comes close to cracking the conspiracy he makes the most terrifying discovery of all, and then the race is on to prevent a major catastrophe far beyond Spain's borders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimble"title="Grimble">
Grimble is a boy of "about 10" who has parents that can be described as eccentric. Returning from school one day, he discovers that they have gone to Peru for a week leaving him with a fridge filled with bottles of tea, an oven filled with sandwiches, a tin full of sixpence pieces and a list of five names and addresses of people he can visit to get help with dinner. Each day he visits a new address, though on each occasion his host is out. The book is a humorous account of his life alone for five days.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Generals_(novel)"title="The Generals (novel)">
In the turbulent aftermath of the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte is accused of treachery and corruption. His reputation is saved by his skill in leading his men to victory in Italy and Egypt. But then he must rush home to France to restore order amidst political unrest, and to find peace or victory over the country's enemies, foremost of which is England and Arthur Wellesley (the future Duke of Wellington).Wellesley is on the other side of the world in India where British interests are under threat. Wellesley leads vast armies against a series of powerful warlords in campaigns that will result in the creation of the Raj, the jewel in the crown of the British Empire. He returns to England a hardened veteran a more determined than ever to end France's dominion of Europe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Fox"title="Stone Fox">
Ten-year-old Willy lives in Jackson, Wyoming in the 1880s on a potato farm with his grandfather and his dog Searchlight. During a harsh winter, his grandfather falls ill and after an audit of the potato farm, the tax collector determines that he owes $500 in unpaid taxes. Willy is convinced that he and Searchlight can beat the other racers entering the National Dogsled Race (held each year in Jackson), and in doing so win the $500 prize money that is required to save the farm. He will be competing against Stone Fox, an undefeated racer who uses his winnings to buy land for his Native American tribe. Stone Fox is also rabidly anti-settler with the resentment of the loss of tribal property, and has never been known to speak a word to a white person. As the race ends, Willy is in the lead but Searchlight dies from a burst heart before they reach the finish line. Seeing Willy crying over his loss, Stone Fox draws a line in the snow and unholsters his pistol to stop the other racers, then speaks his first words to the whites; "Anyone crosses this line-I shoot". Stone Fox then permits Willy to carry Searchlight's corpse across the finish line, having learned the possibility of peaceful coexistence between a native American and white man.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftermath_(Robinson_novel)"title="Aftermath (Robinson novel)">
One early morning in May, Banks is called to a steep, overgrown street in Leeds, where two police officers answering a domestic call have stumbled on a scene of unbelievable horror. In the cellar of 35 The Hill, two people are dead, a third is dying, and behind a door more bodies are laid out. This seems to be the end of a grisly case Banks has been working on for some time, but it turns out to be only the beginning. It is apparent who the murderer is, but Banks quickly finds out that nothing in this case is quite as straightforward as it seems. Many people are entangled in this crime – some whose lives are shattered by it, and some with unspeakable secrets in their pasts. The dead, Banks learns, are not the only victims, and the murderer may not be the only person to blame.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Time"title="Solomon Time">
The work is based on Randall's memoirs and is an account of his time in the Solomon Islands living in the village of Mendali on Rendova Island of Western Province.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Look_Back_(novel)"title="Don't Look Back (novel)">
The body of a local teenage girl named Annie was found by an idyllic pond in the woods. The suspect list grows indefinitely. However, as Inspector Sejer and his partner Jacob Skarre question the girl's family, and others, they realize she has a shocking secret she shared with no one. He strives to understand Annie's true character, as the answer may lie in her own strange behavior leading up to her death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Devil_Holds_the_Candle"title="When the Devil Holds the Candle">
The story follows teenage friends Andreas and Zipp, the former a fun loving delinquent, while the latter a reluctant follower. After robbing a young mother of her purse, Andreas suggests breaking into the house of an elderly woman to rob her, not feeling good about the previous robbery, Zipp refuses to go through with it, so Andreas enters the house alone. Unfortunately, Andreas underestimates Irma Funder, the elderly woman he intended to rob, who pushes him back in self-defence. resulting in him falling down the cellar stairs, breaking his neck and unable to move but still alive. The story continues both inside the house as Andreas must now rely on Irma for his every need, and outside, as Police investigate the disappearance of Andreas, while Zipp is unwilling to speak to Detective Inspector Sejer, due to his involvement in the previous event.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Almost_Moon"title="The Almost Moon">
The professional art-class model, mother, and divorcee, Helen Knightly spontaneously murders her mother, an agoraphobic who is suffering from severe dementia, by suffocating her with a towel. But while Helen's act is almost unconscious, it also seems like the fulfilment of a long-cherished, buried desire, since she spent a lifetime trying to win the love of a mother who had none to spare.Over the next twenty-four hours, Helen recalls her: childhood, youth, marriage, and motherhood. Helen's life and the omnipresent relationship with her mother rush in at her as she confronts the choices that have brought her to that crossroads. Partly absent-mindedly, partly desperately she tries to conceal her crime, and in doing so ropes her ex-husband into the conspiracy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playing_for_Pizza"title="Playing for Pizza">
Rick Dockery is a third-string NFL quarterback for the Cleveland Browns, who throws three interceptions in 11 minutes in the AFC championship game, blowing a 17-point lead and resulting in the Browns missing their chance at their first-ever Super Bowl appearance. Carried off the field in a stretcher, he is cut from the team, vilified in the press, and faces additional legal troubles due to a questionable paternity lawsuit. His agent Arnie tries to find him work in the NFL, but no team will take him. Arnie manages to find him a starting position for the Parma Panthers of the Italian Football League for meager compensation. Rick accepts the job, glad to get away from the negative press and his legal troubles in the United States, but wary of living in Italy, where he doesn't know the language and where American football draws little attention or respect. The Parma Panthers have only two other Americans on the team – halfback Slidell "Sly" Turner, who ends up leaving early in the season, and safety Trey Colby.The Panthers win their first game with Rick, then lose a couple for various reasons, including the loss of his American teammates to homesickness and injury. Despite these problems, Italy and the team are growing on Rick, and he begins to feel some loyalty to them despite the fact that Arnie has found a more lucrative job offer with a more respected CFL team. Rick decides to honor his contract with the Parma Panthers. With renewed resolve, a talented Italian wide receiver, and a new strategy, they win each of their remaining regular-season games, then advance to the playoffs and the Italian Super Bowl, a very close and hard-fought game against their rivals, the Bergamo Lions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_Mom_and_Jo"title="Between Mom and Jo">
The main character Nick has two mothers who conceived him through in vitro fertilisation, one of whom he simply refers to as Jo. Growing up, Nick gets along more with Jo than with his other mother Erin since they spend more time together and have similar interests. As he gets older, he questions certain aspects of his family life. Like the rift between Jo and Erin's family, or whether he will be gay just because he was raised by a same-sex couple. Meanwhile, over the course of several years, Erin and Jo begin to grow apart, ultimately separating by the time Nick is fourteen and Erin has an affair with another woman. After Jo moves out, Erin tells Nick that he and Jo can no longer see each other since she believes that Jo is too unstable. While Nick protests that Jo has rights, he finds out that since Jo never legally adopted him, she has no influence over visitation or custody. The separation causes Nick to go into a deep depression where he doesn't want to leave his room or be around people. When Erin confronts him about his behavior, he explains that even though she is his mother biologically, Jo has always been his real mom. Erin ultimately decides to let Nick move in with Jo in order to make him happy. By the end of the novel, Erin and Jo are on civil terms.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deltora_Quest_1"title="Deltora Quest 1">
The series depicts the adventures of Lief, the teenage son of a blacksmith, and the Good vs. Evil struggle of his country against its dictator. He initially lives with his parents in the city of Del, situated on the fictional island of Deltora. The main story arc takes place during a time of economic depression and political repression, under the dictatorship of the evil Shadow Lord. This is the second time that the country's welfare has been threatened by him: the Shadow Lord's previous attempt at power was foiled by the creation of a magical jeweled Belt that was able to repel his dark magic and drive him into hiding. Over time, however, he was able to infiltrate the royal cabinet and manipulate the royal family into wearing the Belt less and less. Eventually, the Shadow Lord also managed to corrupt the trade system, sever communication between major cities, and render civilians politically powerless. Having established chaos, he set his seven Ak-Baba to scatter the Belt's gemstones throughout Deltora, in "fearful places, guarded by seven terrifying guardians". The people's protection gone, the Shadow Lord assumed leadership. Lief, born soon after the beginning of this dark reign, is told of the gems on his sixteenth birthday. His father, Jarred, has reforged the damaged Belt so that the gems may be reunited. Wanting the Shadow Lord overthrown, Lief leaves home to search for the seven gems: the topaz, the ruby, the opal, the lapis lazuli, the emerald, the amethyst and the diamond, which represent each of the ancient tribes of Deltora. He is accompanied by Barda "The Bear", a family friend who once worked as a palace guard for the royal family, and they are later joined by the wild forest girl Jasmine. Together the trio travel across Deltora in search of the lost gems. The locations of the gems comprise the titles of the books-with the exception of volume 8-and each gem has certain magical properties, which often assist with the quest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1945_(Conroy_novel)"title="1945 (Conroy novel)">
In August, 1945, following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, a battalion of rogue Imperial Japanese Army officers and troops led by Major Kenji Hatanaka seize the Imperial Palace to prevent the surrender of Japan. They persuade the war minister, General Korechika Anami, to join the coup and gain the support from the rest of the Japanese military. Rather than staying loyal to Emperor Hirohito, as in actual history, Anami orders the imprisonment of Hirohito and establishes himself as the "de facto" dictator of Japan.Anami's refusal to surrender leads US President Harry Truman to order Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall to launch Operation Downfall, the Allied invasion of Japan. In preparation for the invasion, a third atomic bomb is dropped on Kokura, destroying the city. To deter any further atomic attacks, Anami orders the transfer of Allied POWs to cities of strategic importance, which prompts the United States to suspend the atomic bombing campaign. The OSS recruit the Japanese American veteran Joe Nomura to head into Nagasaki under the guise of a Japanese officer to investigate the effects of the nuclear blast. Based on in part of his reports of the radiation effects, the US military's intention of using tactical nuclear warheads is abandoned as too dangerous for their own troops.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_the_Dead_(novel)"title="City of the Dead (novel)">
Jim finds Danny alive as the book opens but the living dead soon converge on their location. Frankie and Martin join Jim in the house and they are soon trapped in the attic. As they see Danny's neighbor in his panic room across the way the zombies set fire to the house. They rig a ladder between the two houses and everyone but Frankie makes it across, Frankie however has a two-story fall into a swimming pool below. Meanwhile: Don, Martin, Jim, and Danny regroup and make a run for Don's Ford explorer. Upon escaping the garage they find Frankie fighting zombies in the front yard badly hurt from the fall and shot several times. They rescue her as she goes into shock.Back in Hellertown Ob has taken Baker's body and is instructing his minions to make a motor pool from all the abandoned vehicles. Ob is distressed that Jim is alive and escaping him, he begins to fantasize killing Martin and Jim. Here he divulges that the Sissquim can see the life auras coming from the living. Ob is then killed by some hiding guardsmen who he discovers.Their escape is short lived as Frankie left the keys in the Humvee and the zombies are in hot pursuit. They use the Humvee to force the car into an accident. Jim regains consciousness as zombies are trying to pull Danny from the wreckage and biting his arm. Jim loses it and violently kills the zombie, punctuating each blow with the words "I told you to leave my son alone." Martin has been thrown from the car and his head had turned a full 180 degrees around. Jim smashes his head in with a rock as he reanimates proclaiming "There is no God". Jim leads the zombies away distracting them from his party including a very badly injured Frankie making plans to meet them in what looks like an abandoned parking structure. There is a legless zombie hiding in a car who alerts more zombies to the groups presence. Jim races back to the structure as the group races for the roof. Almost simultaneously a helicopter shows up using a powerful sonic device that kills all the zombie birds and almost kills Jim. They rescue Jim and take him to Ramsey towers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_the_Rats"title="City of the Rats">
Lief, Barda, and Jasmine leave the Lake of Tears after they have retrieved the Ruby. They are now searching for the opal, which is located in Hira, or the City of the Rats. While traveling, they find signs which all have the word "Tom" written on it. They then find themselves in a trap that Thaegan's remaining eleven children had prepared. With the help of Filli, the three managed to kill all the children except for one, Ichabod, and continue on their quest.They find and enter Tom's shop and buy useful provisions such as Fire Beads, Water Eaters, Glowing Bubbles, and Instant Bread. They also bought three animals called Muddlets. Muddlets had three legs and can be ridden much like a horse. Despite Tom's directions, Lief didn't listen to him and went the wrong way. The three lost control of the Muddlets as they ran on their own. Lief, Barda, and Jasmine followed the Muddlets home, to the city of Noradz and become trapped. Noradz has customs that keep the city vigorously clean. When Filli comes out of hiding from Jasmine's shirt, a Ra-Kacharz mistakes it for a rat and gives the trio two choices, to live or to die. Lief was commanded to pick a card labeled either Life or Death out of a cup. Realizing that both cards say Death, Lief tricks the Ra-Kacharz and the trio are thrown into prison. A girl named Tira managed to free them and shows them the secret way out, by passing through the kitchen trash tube. They survive the dangers of the tube by wearing the Ra-Kacharz clothes that they stole and finally reached the Broad River. Using the Water Eaters, Lief, Barda, and Jasmine crossed the river, only to find that there were rats waiting for them. They managed to escape the deadly rats using the explosive Fire Beads and enter the city's center. The Glowing Bubbles come into use and lights their way as they move through the dark. There, Lief starts to hear voices, which was revealed to be of Reeah's, a huge snake called the King of Rats. The crown atop of Reeah's head housed the opal. Lief realized that the past inhabitants of the City of the Rats were the people of Noradz. He also realized that "Noradz" was a homophone of "No Rats" and "Ra-Kacharz" was a homophone of "Rat-Catchers". The overrun of rats in their city had caused them to move and take up vigorously clean customs. Also, "Noradzeer", which is repeated very often by the people of Noradz, appears to be a homophone of "No Rats Here". Lief realizes that Reeah had set a trap for them. After a fight, Lief and Jasmine defeat the snake. Lief touches the opal to take it and gets a vision of him sinking into the Shifting Sands. Lief remembers that the opal's vision of the future is not always true, and they continue their quest to seek their fourth gem at the Shifting Sands.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drömmen_om_en_vän"title="Drömmen om en vän">
"Drömmen om en vän" is the story of Lindis, a seventeen year old girl. Lindis has always felt as an outsider in the family, and after a rude comment from a classmate, she has almost stopped eating, and her weight is plummeting. One day her mother tells Lindis that she is not their biological daughter. Lindis gets really upset, and runs off to the sea to think. She falls off a small cliff, and is trapped on a narrow brim of beach when the tide comes in. A young man, Lo, comes to her rescue and Lindis, who believes that he is a geologist, helps him collect mineral samples. He also encourages her to start eating again. The next time they meet, Lindis realises that Lo is not a human, but an extraterrestrial being. In the end Lindis travels with Lo and his superior to their planet. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Faber_(novel)"title="Homo Faber (novel)">
During the 1930s, Walter Faber, who works at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), meets the art student Hanna. The two become lovers, and one day Hanna reveals that she is pregnant. Faber asks her to marry him, but she hesitates. Faber receives an offer by Escher Wyss to work in Baghdad and he accepts it; he and Hanna split up. Before his departure, Faber asks his friend Joachim to take care of Hanna, and Hanna agrees to abort their child.In spring 1957, Faber recounts the events of his travels in America. On a flight from New York to Mexico, his plane makes a forced landing in the desert. During the following stay he meets the German Herbert, who turns out to be the brother of Joachim, Faber's friend. Faber had not heard from his friend since 1936. Faber decides to accompany Herbert, who is on his way to visiting his brother. After an odyssey through the wilderness, they reach Joachim's plantation. But Joachim has hanged himself. Herbert decides to stay behind and manage the plantation.Faber returns to New York City, but meets up with his married mistress, Ivy. Looking to escape their relationship, Faber takes an unplanned cruise to Europe. On this journey, he meets the young woman Sabeth, with whom he falls in love. He proposes to Sabeth at the end of the journey, but she is traveling with a male friend. Faber and Sabeth meet again in Paris and Faber decides to go on vacation and accompany Sabeth on a road trip through Europe, where they also start a sexual relationship. Faber even calls the trip their "honeymoon".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bourne_Ultimatum"title="The Bourne Ultimatum">
After a message in the form of a murder at a carnival indicates his old enemy, Carlos the Jackal, has resurfaced, David Webb, aka Jason Bourne, works to find him. As the Jackal enters old age and his infamy fades, he decides that he will do two things before he dies: kill Webb/Bourne, and destroy the KGB facility of Novgorod, where the Jackal was trained and was turned away for being a maniac. Carlos the Jackal uses a diverse collective of aged men devoted to his handiwork known as "The Old Men of Paris." The old men, who are mostly criminals, work for the Jackal in return for their family's comfort. Webb sends his wife and children to live with her brother, John St. Jacques, in the Caribbean for protection while Webb himself works with old friend and CIA agent Alexander Conklin, and to a limited degree, the CIA, to hunt down and kill the Jackal first.While in the Caribbean, the St. Jacques Family faces a number of complications. A "War Hero" arrives, who is actually an "Old Man of Paris," is supposed to assassinate Marie St. Jacques and her two children, and spray paint "Jason Bourne, brother of the Jackal" on the wall. At the same time, a former judge, Brendan P. Prefontaine, arrives. The Jackal thinks that Prefontaine was going to foil his murder plan, and bribes a nurse on the island to kill him. However, his plans are foiled when the "war hero" finds out that when he is done with the murder, he is to be assassinated as well. He turns sides and shoots the nurse, saving Prefontaine. After the foiled assassination, Webb returns to the Caribbean. At the time of his visit, the Jackal himself comes to try to kill Webb, at the same time killing three security guards, the Crown Governor of the island, the "Old Man of Paris" who changed sides (strapped explosives on him), severely beats a waiter, and wounds Jason Bourne in the neck with a bullet (this is the Jackal's trademark and no one has survived it until now).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sisters_(1938_film)"title="The Sisters (1938 film)">
At a ball held on the night of the 1904 presidential election, serious Louise, frivolous Helen, and stolid Grace, daughters of Silver Bow, Montana pharmacist Ned Elliott and his wife Rose, find themselves dealing with romantic prospects. Tom Knivel is about to propose to Louise when Frank Medlin, a San Francisco sports reporter, asks her to dance. Infatuated with the young woman, Frank extends his stay, and at Sunday dinner in the Elliott home he announces he and Louise plan to wed. Although her parents disapprove of the union, Louise leaves for San Francisco with Frank that night. Grace eventually marries the jilted Tom and Helen weds wealthy Sam Johnson, who promises her freedom and asks for nothing in return.Although facing financial difficulty, Louise urges Frank to complete his novel. When she becomes pregnant, she decides to keep her condition a secret, but finally reveals the truth when she accompanies Frank to a boxing match and the smoke and smells make her ill. Returning home, Louise suffers a miscarriage while climbing the stairs to their apartment, and her distraught husband begins to drink heavily.Overwhelmed by increasing medical bills and a sense of worthlessness, Frank demands a raise but is rebuffed by his editor who, telling him his writing is suffering as a result of his drinking, fires him. Louise tries to console him by announcing she has found employment at a local department store, but Frank's hurt pride prompts him to forbid her to work. Louise ignores his demand, and while her husband struggles to find a job, she thrives as secretary to store owner William Benson.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abominable_Firebug"title="Abominable Firebug">
This book is a chronology of the early life of the author, Richard B. Johnson, starting in the town of North Brookfield, Massachusetts. It begins at about the age of two and continues until Johnson is 21 years of age. The book details the significant events in the author's life leading to his incarceration in America's first reform school, the Lyman School for Boys in the late 1950s.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_(novel)"title="Tomorrow (novel)">
Mike Hook is a wartime child. His father, "Grandpa Pete," and his mother, "Grandma Helen," both hardly turned 20, hastily get married in 1944 just before Pete rejoins the RAF to fight in the Second World War. He is shot down over Germany, survives, and spends several months in a prisoner-of-war camp. In January 1945, while he is still away from home, his son Mike is born.After the war and his safe return to England, Pete becomes a successful entrepreneur. Mike, who remains an only child, develops an interest in nature quite early in life and eventually, in the 1960s, decides to read Biology at the recently opened University of Sussex. There, in 1966, he meets Paula Campbell, who has come from London to study English Literature and Art, and their relationship soon turns out to be much more than just a fling.Paula is the only child of a divorced High Court judge with Scottish roots. That man, "Grandpa Dougie," born shortly after the turn of the century, contributes to the war effort by deciphering code somewhere in the English countryside. There, already in his mid-forties, he falls for Fiona McKay, a young secretary with pretty legs who is twenty years his junior, and marries her. Paula, also born in 1945, is sent to a girls' boarding school. Already during her years at school Paula feels her father's growing estrangement from his wife, a development which culminates in divorce and "Grandma Fiona" running off with a man her own age "dripping with some kind of oil-derived, Texan-Aberdonian wealth". After that, Paula hardly ever sees or talks to her own mother again. Just as Mike, she remains an only child. After finishing school, she decides to go on to Sussex University.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Part_of_the_Pilgrim's_Progress"title="The Third Part of the Pilgrim's Progress">
Tender-Conscience, a native of the town of Vain Delights goes on the pilgrimage of Christian and Christiana to the Celestial City. He stops at some of the same places as they, but he encounters new places not visited by either Christian or Christiana and her party.All of the lands that are outside of the Wicket Gate and the area encompassed by the "walls and borders of that region, wherein lay the way to the heavenly country" are known as the "Valley of Destruction." The time that Tender-Conscience begins his pilgrimage is a time of drought and heat, which is emblematic of a time of the persecution. Some of them are deterred in their progress, and return to their old homes in the Valley of Destruction during the night.Tender-Conscience has a difficult time crossing the Slough of Despond, and he does not get by it without being covered in mud from it. This mud has the effect of weakening the body and blinding his eyes, and Tender-Conscience gropes along until he is overshadowed by a bright cloud from which a hand appears that washes away the mud enabling Tender-Conscience to continue his journey with vigor.At the Wicket Gate Tender-Conscience does not escape the arrows shot against callers from Beelzebub's castle. These stick to his flesh and cause him to bleed profusely. Good-Will lets him in, and registers his name as a pilgrim. He gives Tender-Conscience a crutch that is made of wood from the Tree of Life ("Lignum Vitæ"). This crutch stanches the bleeding and strengthens Tender-Conscience, who must bear with the arrows of Beelzebub until he reaches the House of the Interpreter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucket's_Gold"title="Tucket's Gold">
This book is mainly about Tucket and his adventures to escape the Comancheros. He is in need of food and water when the story begins, but his luck gets better. He finds a deer for food and moccasins, and finds gold, showing that he is having a change of fortune.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucket's_Home"title="Tucket's Home">
Francis finally recovers from a rattlesnake bite, and he continues the trek to Oregon with Lottie and Billy. On their way they encounter a greenhorn English adventurer and his servants, Jason Grimes, murderous outlaws, and a wagon train of men heading west to establish farms for their families. At the end of the novel, they find Francis's family and start businesses with the gold and silver they had found in the Spaniard's grave. Billy becomes a sailor. Francis and Lottie develop feelings for each other, get married, run the businesses, and farm the land. It ends by saying that Francis thinks about Mr. Grimes before he sleeps every night. It was published in 2000 by Random House.It was later turned into a five-part omnibus, entitled Tucket's Travels, along with the rest of the novels in "The Tucket Adventures" by Random House and released in 2003.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Proteus_Operation"title="The Proteus Operation">
Originally, the First World War was a complete wake-up call for the human race, leading to greater internationalism and a "Never Again" spirit towards war that would eventually wear away the differences between the various power-blocs. By the 2020s, a global League of Nations oversees a planet totally at peace. The fledgling Nazi Party, in this 'original' timeline, simply faded out after the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.Many in the modern aristocracy, corporate dynasties, and others feel they have lost out because of the social transformations enabled by decades of peace and co-operation. This group come up with a plan to build a functional "time machine" and change history for their benefit. Their scheme is to go back as far as they can (roughly a century, to the very early 1920s) and mentor the fledgling Nazi Party. They regard the Nazis as the perfect tool for destroying the Soviet Union and establishing an elitist tyranny with which they can live the lives of luxury and entitlement they believe have been stolen from them. This 'Uptime' initiative sends 21st century advisors, armament, and nuclear weapons to support Adolf Hitler.The Hitler that they seek to advise soon develops other plans. Learning about the original history from his time traveling advisors, Hitler uses these lessons to ensure that Western Europe falls swiftly, followed by dropping a few of the Uptime nuclear weapons to wipe out the Soviet Union. He then destroys his end of the "time conduit" and declares independence from his former sponsors. By the 1970s, Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan have conquered everything other than North America, Australasia, and parts of South America. Africa has suffered an enormous genocide every bit as complete as the one inflicted upon the Jews, and the Axis powers stand poised in 1975 to start a final war that the United States is bound to lose, given the military power of Nazi Germany.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mélusine_(novel)"title="Mélusine (novel)">
The story revolves around two characters: magician Felix Harrowgate and thief Mildmay the Fox, who live in vastly different parts of the city of Mélusine. They are tossed together by fate when Felix is accused of destroying the crystal Virtu, an orb which channels the magical energy of the magicians in Mélusine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virtu"title="The Virtu">
Felix Harrogate, having recovered from the abuse he suffered in "Mélusine", is ready to regain the power and status that he lost. With his half-brother Mildmay and Mehitabel Parr, a young governess, he decides to return to Mélusine to repair the Virtu.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Listen_(novel)"title="Just Listen (novel)">
Annabel Greene is a girl who has it all—at least, that's how it seems on TV commercials. Annabel's life is far from perfect. Her friendship with her best friends Clarke and Sophie ended bitterly. This left her alone and friendless at the beginning of a new school year. Her sister Whitney's eating disorder is weighing down the entire family, and Annabel fears speaking out about her past and her lack of enthusiasm for modeling. Annabel and Clarke were best friends before meeting Sophie. When Sophie joined their friend group, she bullied Clarke about her allergies and not using makeup. One night, Annabel ditched Clarke to hang out with a boy, and Clarke didn't speak to her again. Later on, Annabel got raped by Sophie's boyfriend Will Cash. Sophie walked in and thought Annabel was fooling around with Will. In the midst of her isolation, she meets Owen—a music-obsessed, intense classmate who, after taking an anger management class, is determined to tell the truth. With his help, Annabel may start facing her fears—and more importantly, speaking the truth to herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quentins"title="Quentins">
Ella Brady, a young science teacher, falls in love with a handsome, suave businessman (Don Richardson) who is married but assures her that his marriage is "dead". For some time she is happy with the torrid affair, and manages to overlook some inconsistencies in what he tells her. Until the moment when he is exposed as a corrupt swindler and runs away out of the country and out of her life – leaving Ella, her family, and many people in Dublin without their savings. Ella is disgraced and quits her teaching job to work more than 60 hours a week at Quentins restaurant, with the Scarlet Feather catering company, and with a film crew, to help out her family.The book mostly concentrates on Ella's attempt to get funding for her friends' film company for a documentary about the restaurant Quentins. She struggles to get over Richardson, whom she still loves, and with whether or not to give the fraud squad access to a laptop he left in her possession. Eventually, her efforts to get funding lead her to meet a new man, Derry King, an American businessman with an Irish heritage which he hates because of the way his drunken Irish father treated him and his mother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orc_King"title="The Orc King">
The story begins a century after the events of "The Two Swords". Drizzt Do'Urden still wields Twinkle and Icingdeath and he now wields Taulmaril, Cattie-Brie's magical bow. Drizzt defeats a group of bandits calling themselves "Casin Cu Calas", a group that wears black and travels through the Orcish Kingdom of Many-Arrows and slays Orcs in their sleep. He is angered when one of them mentions Bruenor Battlehammer's past weakness by allying with the Orcs.The sixth heir to the throne of Kingdom of Many-Arrows, Obould the Sixth, is visiting the house of a "beautiful" Orcish maiden who is set to marry an elf from the Glimmerwood (formerly Moonwood).The book then returns to the "past" where Drizzt, with his traveling companion Innovindil, are returning from the journey to the grave of Ellifan. A group of Orcish shaman start conspiring against Obould, and coax forth the Half Ogre-Half Orc Clan Karuck. Innovindil and the rest of her clan are attacked by Clan Karuck, where Innovindil and her Pegasus are slain. Hralien and his friend find her corpse in a tangle below a tree. Another drow, Tos'un and one of the instigators of the Orcish war, has been living in the area alone. Hralien begins hunting for Tos'un, believing him to have masterminded the ambush as it was too well organized to have been orcs. The real mastermind is a powerful Gnomish wizard named Jaculi, that has been trained by Illithids and other powerful creatures, who has been secretly controlling Clan Karuck's different Shaman for centuries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_and_Other_Impossible_Pursuits"title="Love and Other Impossible Pursuits">
Emilia Greenleaf is an attorney living in New York city with her husband, Jack Woolf. Emilia is the stepmother to Jack's remarkably intelligent eight-year-old son, William Woolf. William lives primarily with his mother, the medical doctor Carolyn Soule. It is Emilia's job, however, to pick up William from his nursery school every Wednesday afternoon. When she picks him up, Emilia is often subjected to snide glances and whispers from the other mothers because, it transpires, her relationship with her husband began when he was still with his wife. They had an office affair, and eventually the marriage dissolved. Later, the reader discovers that Emilia and Jack have recently lost their daughter, Isabel. They kept the little girl for 3 days, then she died during the night of SIDS in her mother's arms after being fed.The bulk of the story deals with the results of Isabel's death, including the strain this puts on Emilia and Jack's marriage, as well as Emilia's feelings towards William. Emilia does not particularly like William (in fact, she describes him as "insufferable" early on in the story), but tries to be a good parent to him. This is hindered by the fact that William serves as his mother's mouthpiece, and sometimes speaks in a very matter-of-fact way about Isabel's death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitions_(novel_series)"title="Transitions (novel series)">
## The Orc King.In this novel, an uneasy peace between dwarves and orcs begins to fail as orc tribes fight each other, and the dwarf Bruenor Battlehammer seeks to finish the war between the two races.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_King"title="The Pirate King">
The Arcane Brotherhood has long held the city of Luskan in their power, but when corruption eats away at their ranks, Captain Deudermont comes to the rescue of a city that has become a safe haven for the Sword Coast's most dangerous pirates. But rescuing a city from itself may not be as easy as Deudermont thinks, and when Drizzt can't talk him out of it, he'll be forced to help.The story begins with Captain Deudermont and the "Sea Sprite" crew still fighting pirates. One of the captured pirates raises questions of the effectiveness of Deudermont's actions, suggesting that Deudermont is allowed to capture pirates purely as a show and then stating that the Arklem Greeth, a lich who controls the Hosttower in the city of Luskan, supports the pirate trade. On Deudermont's return to Waterdeep, he meets with Lord Brambleberry of Waterdeep, and the two of them decide to stop Arklem Greeth and his pirate crews.Meanwhile, Drizzt and Regis decide to travel to Icewind Dale to learn the fate of Wulfgar. Their path leads them to Longsaddle, home of the Harpell family. During their visit, a philosophical debate ensues about crime and whether the 'greater good' justifies the use of severe punishment. Drizzt and Regis leave Longsaddle and head for Luskan, where they meet with captain Deudermont and learn of his plan. They decide to help in the fight.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_King"title="The Ghost King">
When the Spellplague ravages Faerûn, old friends and foes alike are caught in the chaos. The blinding light released from the destruction of Crenshinibon burned out the eyes of the mighty Hephaestus, leaving him angry, sullen and defeated. A strand of Mystra's falling Weave released the necromancy of the ruined shard, reviving as apparitions the seven original liches that created it and giving sentience to the dead mind flayer Yharaskrik. Yharaskrik tricks Hephaestus into breathing onto Crenshinibon again, which transforms the dragon into a dracolich. Yharaskrik compels Hephaestus to smash Crenshinibon into his skull, binding them together. Yharaskrik's sentience then binds with Hephaestus/Crenshinibon, the three becoming the Ghost King.The three minds, with no privacy and never alone in the one body, had a great shared power: the dracolich's flight, strength, breath and an aura of death and disease, the militant and strategic mind - as well as psionic powers - of the mind-flayer, and the Crystal Shard's necromantic powers and patience combined. Seeking revenge on those responsible for his blindness, the mind of Hephaestus immediately set his sights on Jarlaxle Baenre.Traveling with the silly, but undeniably dangerous, dwarf Athrogate, the latter rhyming the whole way, Jarlaxle snapped out of Reverie one night at the intrusion of the dracolich threatening to find him. Not unintelligent, Jarlaxle had not missed the Spellplague beginning around him as Mystra's Weave itself collapsed. And after being attacked - first by the undead and second by one of Crenshinibon's liches, who he inadvertently destroyed when he threw his pocket hole dimension over the top of the lich, which collided with the dimensional gate the lich contained - they caused a rift and the lich disappeared. He knew the only way to survive and perhaps stop this horrid monstrosity of a foe was to enlist the help of the mighty drow Drizzt, as well as the holy Deneirrath priest Cadderly. He also knew, due to the last encounter with Cadderly - ending in a threat should Jarlaxle ever return to Spirit Soaring - that the only way to get Cadderly was to get Drizzt, and the only way to Drizzt was Cadderly. As he journeyed to Mithral Hall, attempting to discern a way to get the drow on his side, he learned of a terrible side effect of Mystra's falling Weave touching Drizzt's wife Catti-brie. He then decides his only chance - maybe Faerûn's only chance - was to convince Drizzt that Cadderly was her only chance and to let him go with him as well. After using a disguised Athrogate to convince Bruenor and Drizzt that Cadderly was Catti-brie's best hope, Jarlaxle meets up with Drizzt, Bruenor and Pwent, explains to him their plight and how their problems may be connected.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sellswords"title="The Sellswords">
The trilogy continues the tale of the infamous assassin, Artemis Entreri, previously featured in books as Drizzt Do'Urden's self-proclaimed archenemy, and the cunning drow mercenary, Jarlaxle, previously relevant as the leader of Bregan D'aerthe, an outlaw group of drow based primarily in and around Menzoberranzan, that does business mostly with the drow of Menzoberranzan. Continuing the story of Artemis and Jarlaxle told in the "Paths of Darkness" series, Artemis and Jarlaxle begin an adventure that tests their skills, their minds, and their souls.While the two characters are antagonists in the Drizzt Do'Urden series, in "The Sellswords" trilogy they are the main characters of some of the few books in Salvatore's Forgotten Realms novels that do not focus on the legendary drow warrior, Drizzt Do'Urden, as the hero of the novel. "The Sellswords" develops the two characters more deeply than was possible in the other Salvatore books, giving the reader an in depth view of the mind of the cold, calculating Artemis Entreri and the ambitious, opportunistic Jarlaxle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transhumanist_Wager"title="The Transhumanist Wager">
Protagonist Jethro Knights studies philosophy and sails around the world to promote indefinite life extension, desiring to live eternally through medicine, science, and technology. Love-interest and physician Zoe Bach, while sharing Knights' philosophical transhumanism, challenges him with her absolute belief in the afterlife, insisting that death is a part of life. Meanwhile, in America, transhumanists are being targeted and killed by Christian terrorists in cahoots with the popular anti-transhumanist Reverend Belinas.After his sailing trip, Knights suffers a devastating personal tragedy at the hands of Christian fundamentalists. At the same time, the United States Government becomes more theocratic and criminalizes transhumanist research, prompting Knights to build an independent floating city and sovereign state, Transhumania, so research can be continued. Governments around the world eventually grow afraid of the radical science being created on Transhumania, and attack the seasteading city. Transhumania successfully defends itself, and Knights attempts to establish a transhuman-inspired civilization.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight_on_the_Avenue_of_Faith"title="Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith">
When she is five years old, Lili watches her mother, Roxanna the Angel, throw herself off the balcony of their house on the Avenue of Faith. Her family's subsequent search for her reveals no body, no sign of a fall, no trace of an escape. The only witness to Roxanna's disappearance, Lili will spend the next thirteen years looking for her mother, wondering if she is still alive and why she left.The novel tells the life story of Roxanna, born as a “bad-luck child” in the Jewish ghetto of Tehran, through the world of Iran's aristocracy, into the whorehouses of Turkey and to Los Angeles, where she and Lili are reunited.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday's_Silence"title="Sunday's Silence">
Adam Watkins is the illegitimate son of little Sam Jenkins, founder of the snake-handling Holiness sect in Appalachia. After growing up in a dysfunctional Holy Roller family, Adam has been running from his past for twenty years, until he returns to investigate the possible murder of his father by one of the church members. The suspect is a woman named Blue, who has a hazy past and a reputation for being immune to earthly harm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butcher_of_Amritsar"title="The Butcher of Amritsar">
The book begins with covering Dyer's parents' lives in British India and their brewery company and then moves on to Dyer's early life, from his time as a day boy at Bishop Cotton school in India. The book then covers Dyer's life while he attended Midleton college in County Cork Ireland and his time at Sandhurst, and then moves on to cover Dyer's life following his graduation from Sandhurst to his postings to the Queen's Royal Regiment (West Surrey) in Cork to their deployment to Belfast during the 1886 Belfast riots and then his service during the Third Burmese War. It then covers Dyer's return to India and being reunited with his family in Shimla and Dyer's studies in the learning Urdu, which was an exam he needed to pass to further his career and his postings to the 39th Garhwal Rifles and the 29th Punjabis to his return to England and the birth of his second child.The book then covers Dyer's time in the 29th, to the Chitral Expedition, a campaign which Dyer had tried to join but which had ended six days before he arrived back from England, it then covers Dyer's return to England as he had been granted a place at Camberley Staff College as he had passed the entrance exams, moving on to cover Dyer's passing the final examinations from Camberley and the birth of his second son. It then goes into detail on the Dyer's family return to India and Dyer being given the designation of wing officer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cry_of_the_Peacock_(novel)"title="Cry of the Peacock (novel)">
Peacock, a 116-year-old woman, is captured by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. Her story and that of a relatively unknown group of Jews, the oldest in the diaspora, unfolds as she waits in her prison cell. Born in the Esfahan ghetto, Peacock was married off at age nine to the wealthy Solomon the Man. A decade later, she becomes the first woman of the ghetto ever to have left her husband. Peacock's family story goes back to Esther the Soothsayer, who appears in the dreams of her descendants.The novel incorporates Persian stories and fables as well as historical figures such as Mossadeq (Mohammad Mosaddegh) and Ruhollah Khomeini (the Ayatollah Khomeini) and historic events.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stark's_War"title="Stark's War">
## "Stark's War".After the initial invasion of the Moon succeeds in results in seizure of the Lunar colony, Sergeant Stark is forced to serve under several incompetent commanders. After the commanding General, Meecham, announces a plan to assault the remaining enemy forces that results in wholesale slaughter of the third division, Stark instigates a coup and leads a counterattack to instigate a well-planned rescue mission to retrieve the surviving friendly forces. Despite protests to the contrary, Sgt. Stark's peer non-coms vote him to be their acting Commander, after a bloodless, but risky coup against the remaining officers. After turning down an offer to be promoted to officer status by the wily General, Stark finds himself in command of almost half of the American ground forces in existence, in a heavily fortified position on the Moon, in a de facto rebellion against the US and Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Pilgrim"title="I Am Pilgrim">
"Pilgrim" is an American former intelligence agent known as the "Rider of the Blue" who later writes a book on forensic pathology. Pilgrim becomes involved in a case in New York City where a mysterious woman uses his book to commit untraceable murders in the aftermath of 9/11. The "Saracen" is a Saudi who becomes radicalised by watching his father's beheading. He later trains as a doctor and fights in the Soviet–Afghan War. Pilgrim is recalled to the intelligence community who have detected a threat involving the Saracen, who has created a vaccine-resistant strain of the variola major virus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nucle_Saga_I"title="The Nucle Saga I">
The story is based on the events in a fictitious world centered around the "Mainlands". A merciless Emperor has risen from the west and laid siege of a sizable portion of the Mainlands. His gigantic Empire (known as the Axal Empire) threatens peace and courts destruction to the surrounding kingdoms. To repel the Emperor's invading attack, the remaining eastern kingdoms of the Mainland unite and form an alliance. A resistance leader, Eroberer meets two boys Zindor and Rador who pledge to contribute. Eroberer sends them on a mission to acquire a set of magical objects. Joined by a Gladanian town girl: Rohya and Eroberer's little sister: Esha, they are escorted by a man they meet on their journey called Nebu. The five travel together to pursue a powerful legend and collect objects.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lightning_of_August"title="The Lightning of August">
Fictional Army General José Guadalupe "Lupe" Arroyo, a veteran of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, attempts to dispel all sorts of "defamatory claims" made by his political rivals and tries to explain the plainly incompetent political and military strategies devised by him and his associates.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Midnight_Zoo"title="The Midnight Zoo">
It is midnight in a destroyed village somewhere in Europe. Through the moonlight, two boys, one with a baby in his backpack, come walking. The realism of the opening paragraphs is disrupted by the personification of Night. Clearly we are in for a fabulist story.The two boys have been on the road for weeks, scrounging an existence in a landscape often devoid of humanity and sustenance. The back-story to the boys’ current situation reveals itself slowly: their family has been slaughtered by soldiers two months previously. They find a pitiful zoo which miraculously has survived the war that has ravaged its village. Also miraculous is that each of the animals in the zoo speaks to the boys.Over the course of one night, we are given the stories of the animals, the zoo, and its most recent zookeepers. This is not a chronological telling but the narrative events come to us almost like a play, with limited settings, such as glimpses of the boys’ travels, the zoo, and the Rom camp. The structure of the novel is instrumental in our interpretation of events.While the story can be read as a narrative of survival during war, much of its significance operates beneath the surface of realism. Symbolic meanings are fundamental to understanding the narrative: its time frame, the survival of the zoo, its midnight setting.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams_of_Gods_and_Monsters"title="Dreams of Gods and Monsters">
After killing Thiago while defending herself from him, Karou puts Ziri's soul in his body and Haxaya's in Ten's body, allowing her to lead the Chimaera. When Zuzana and Mick come bearing news of Jael's arrival on Earth, the new Chimaera leadership is able to negotiate an alliance with the Misbegotten. They have to learn to make peace and to not wipe each other out if they are to work together against the Dominion.Eliza Jones is a 24-year-old researcher in Washington, D.C., where she is working on her Ph.D. As a girl, she escaped a cult that worshipped her as a prophet and descendant of the angel Elazael. She has visions in her dreams of monsters coming from the sky. When the recently abandoned camp of the Chimaera in Morocco is found and the pit is excavated, her boss is called in to analyse it, and she travels with him. Seeing the corpses of the Chimaera triggers more visions.Jael has arrived with his soldiers, the Dominion, in Vatican City. Aided by Razgut, he portrays his forces as the angels from human mythology and asks humanity for help defeating devils; once he is armed with modern human technology, he intends to wipe out the Stelians.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_Benny_(novel)"title="Her Benny (novel)">
Benny Bates, a poor boy from the Liverpool slums, is ten years old when the story begins. He scrapes a living running errands in the streets; his beloved but frail sister Nelly, a year younger, sells matches. Their mother is dead, their father a drink-sodden brute, who dies later on in the story, becomes violent towards Nelly and the two children run away from home. Helped by their friend the night-watchman Joe Wrag, and 'Granny' Betty Barker, manage to retain their independence and learn to lead Christian lives. Nelly, a child of great natural spiritual insight, acts as Benny's moral conscience; when she dies after a street accident, he is in despair. A lucky encounter with Eva Lawrence, the little girl he will come to call his 'angel', leads to a job as office-boy to her father, a rich Liverpool businessman. Benny works hard, hoping to educate and better himself, but loses both job and reputation when Mr. Lawrence wrongly accuses him of stealing a five-pound note. Abandoning Liverpool, he nearly dies of starvation and heat-stroke, but is rescued and nursed back to health by a kindly farming family. He remains with them, working on the farm and studying in night school. Six years later, and by now grown up, he bravely stops a runaway carriage in a nearby lane; only afterwards does he discover that one of its occupants was Eva Lawrence. Benny has saved his 'angel's' life; now she reveals that she and her father have long known that he was innocent of the theft. The grateful Mr. Lawrence offers Benny a new job, this time as his clerk; he returns to Liverpool, to work his way up into partnership with Mr. Lawrence, and marriage with Eva, who gave him the shilling in his greatest hour of need, which he kept and never dared spend. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mo_Said_She_Was_Quirky"title="Mo Said She Was Quirky">
The novel is about Helen, a 27-year-old Glaswegian, who lives in London and works in a casino. Helen has one daughter, Sophie, from a previous relationship, and she lives with her boyfriend Mo, whose family is from Pakistan.At the start of the story, Helen is taking a taxi-ride home from work. She sees a homeless person walking past who she thinks is her brother Brian. The novel then follows Helen for the next 24 hours of her life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Mercedes"title="Mr. Mercedes">
Many jobless people are standing in line for a job fair, but then a Mercedes S class plows into the crowd, killing eight and severely injuring many. Bill Hodges, a recently retired detective from the local police department living the life of a retiree, receives a letter from an individual claiming to be the person responsible for the job fair incident, referring to himself as "Mr. Mercedes". Hodges is divorced, lonely, and fed up with his life, occasionally considering suicide. The incident had taken place at the end of Hodges' career and was still unresolved when he retired. Mr. Mercedes knows details of the murder and also mentions Olivia Trelawney, from whom he had stolen the Mercedes. Olivia had killed herself soon after the massacre out of guilt. Hodges is intrigued and starts to investigate the case instead of turning the letter over to his former police colleague, Pete Huntley.Brady Hartsfield, who is revealed to be Mr. Mercedes, is an emotionally disturbed psychopath in his late twenties who lost his father at age eight. When he was a young boy, he killed his mentally handicapped brother at his mother's prompting. He lives with his alcoholic mother and has an incestuous relationship with her, and he works in an electronics store and sells ice-cream from an ice-cream truck. Riding in the truck enables him to observe Hodges and Hodges' neighbors, among them seventeen-year-old Jerome Robinson, who does small chores for Hodges.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bano_(novel)"title="Bano (novel)">
The novel starts with Hassan and Rabia meeting for the first time after years. Expecting a twelve-year-old girl with ponytails, he is flabbergasted to see a grown young woman. Rabia has feelings for him and thus tries to approach him but Hassan is in love with his fiance Bano, who is thought to have died some years ago. However, Hassan feels strong physical attraction to Rabia and soon gives in to his lust and approaches her. Rabia, who loves him is delighted and they soon are engaged to be married.Meanwhile a letter informs him of Bano's whereabouts. Shocked, he goes to receive her from Lahore. Bano and her son arrive at Hassan's home.Five years ago, at Hassan's aunt Suraiyyah and Bano's brother Saleem's wedding, the two fell for each other hard and got engaged. It was the year 1946 and tensions between muslims and Hindus had escalated to the point that riots had become frequent from both sides. As Hassan and his mother went to Pindi as he had gotten a job there, partition happened. Bano's home is attacked and no survivors are left except for her and her mother, as they were rescued by two family friends, Rajindar and Gayon Laal. Being avid supporters of the muslim league they are proud of having made sacrifices for the cause. Bano's mother is soon killed as they are moving to Pakistan in a caravan while Bano is raped. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_natt_rømmer_vi"title="I natt rømmer vi">
The book is a story about two boys fleeing from a school institution for "bad children". The model was quite obviously the institution Toftes Gave, located at the island Helgøya in the lake Mjøsa, where Stokke had served as a teacher for several years. Everyday life at the institution is described, a strict discipline among 200 boys. They are dressed in uniforms, and march in step to and from work, mostly farm work or in workshops. The two protagonists are the good friends "Harald" and "Willy", both sixteen years old. Harald has grown up at a farm, while Willy grew up in Oslo. Both face troubles at the institution, and they decide to try to escape from the island. One night they climb out through the window, find a rowing boat and successfully reach the landside. While they flee, much happens. Eventually the two boys are caught, and brought back to the institution.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redheap"title="Redheap">
The central character is Robert Piper, a nineteen-year-old man engaging in love affairs with the publican's daughter and the parson's daughter next door. In an attempt to prevent him falling into immorality and dragging the family along with him, Piper's mother arranges for him to be tutored by Mr Bandparts, a recovering alcoholic school teacher. The arrangement soon backfires and Mr Bandparts is soon drinking beer with his young pupil and chasing the corpulent barmaid at the Royal Hotel.The reader is introduced to the rest of the Piper family: Mr Piper, a draper who continuously measures objects to calm his mind; his eldest son Henry who has high hopes of taking over the business one day; the awful oldest daughter Hetty and her domineering ways in the drawing room, and her attempts to control the family morals and standing; Ethel the quiet younger daughter who uses her shyness to cover her various seductions of young men around town; and Grandpa Piper, who made the family fortunes only to be treated with contempt by the rest of the family in his dotage (his small acts of revenge make some of the most comic moments of the book).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Monkey_(novel)"title="Bad Monkey (novel)">
In mid-July, a sportfisherman tourist off the Florida Keys reels in a severed human arm. The Monroe County Sheriff Sonny Summers, who is hyper-sensitive to any publicity threat to the Keys' tourist trade, asks a former detective named Andrew Yancy to transport the arm to Miami immediately and ensure that any investigation is handled by the Dade County authorities. In Miami, Yancy meets Dr. Rosa Campesino, the Assistant Dade County coroner. As he predicted, she tells him there is not enough evidence to connect the severed arm with any unsolved crimes in Dade County. Yancy's colleague Rogelio Burton advises him to drop the arm on the roadside on his way home, but Yancy rebelliously decides to keep it preserved in his home's freezer.Yancy is currently on suspension, having assaulted the husband of his lover, Bonnie Witt, and is forced to work as a Health Inspector for the Department of Hotels and Restaurants. During their last night together, before she and her husband move to Sarasota, Bonnie confesses that her real name is Plover Chase, and she is a fugitive from Oklahoma, a former high school teacher indicted for extorting sex from one of her underage students in exchange for giving him good grades in her AP English class.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MaddAddam"title="MaddAddam">
The novel continues the story of some of the same characters in the wake of the same biological catastrophe depicted in Atwood's earlier novels in the trilogy. The narrative starts with Ren and Toby (protagonists in "The Year of the Flood") rescuing another survivor (Amanda Payne) from two criminals, who had been previously emotionally hardened by a colosseum-style game called Painball. Ren and Toby meet up with Jimmy, the protagonist from "Oryx and Crake". These characters reunite with other survivors, develop a camp and start to rebuild civilization with the Crakers, all while the vengeful criminals (Painballers) stalk them.Similarly to the previous two books, the narrative switches periodically into the past. After Zeb and Toby become lovers, he tells her about his previous career. Zeb and Adam One (from "The Year of the Flood") grew up as half-brothers. Their father, a preacher ("The Rev"), advocated a corporate-friendly message that espoused petroleum and shunned environmentalism. Disgusted by his father’s ethics and hypocrisy, Zeb hacks into his father's accounts and empties them. Knowing their father's political influence, Zeb and Adam leave home, take on different identities and separate in order to avoid detection. Ultimately, Zeb and Adam re-unite and work together in building God's Gardeners, the central organization in "The Year of the Flood".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Production_of_Hindu–Muslim_Violence_in_Contemporary_India"title="The Production of Hindu–Muslim Violence in Contemporary India">
The book mainly discusses how the incidents of violence occur. In the first part of the book, Brass criticizes the justifications presented for religious riots.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docherty_(novel)"title="Docherty (novel)">
The book is set in a fictional mining town in Scotland in the early part of the 20th century, and it relates the struggles of a miner called Tam Docherty and his family. It opens with a prologue set in 1903 in which Tam's family and home are introduced and his wife Jenny gives birth to the youngest of her four children, Conn. Book One opens a few years later and provides a fuller introduction to the family. We learn that Tam is a lapsed Catholic while Jenny is a Protestant; we meet the eldest son Mick, the middle son Angus, the daughter Kathleen and her future husband Jack, as well as Jenny's father Mairtin and Tam's father, Old Conn, a devout Catholic. Tam has a hostile encounter with the Catholic priest Father Rankin. Kathleen marries Jack. Conn goes to school, where he is punished for fighting and using vernacular Scots. Conn knows of his father's respect for education, but "...against that went Conn's sense of the irrelevance of school, its denial of the worth of his father and his family[...]." This section of the novel ends with Conn entering puberty as he explores the countryside around Graithnock in the spring of 1914.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thicket"title="The Thicket">
Jack Parker thought he'd already seen his fair share of tragedy. His grandmother was killed in a farm accident when he was barely five years old. His parents have just succumbed to the smallpox epidemic sweeping turn-of-the-century East Texas—orphaning him and his younger sister, Lula.Then a travelling group of bank robbers murder Jack's grandfather and kidnap his sister Lula. So Jack enlists the only people he can: a bounty hunting dwarf named Shorty, a grave-digging son of an ex-slave named Eustace, and a street-smart woman-for-hire named Jimmie Sue who's come into some very intimate knowledge about the bandits. Together the rag-tag group trail the group of criminals into the Big Thicket where they hope to rescue Lula and collect the bounty on the heads of the bandits. Soon they discover these are not your run of the mill bank robbers. They are vicious and sadistic killers and the prospect of rescuing Lula unharmed looks bleak.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Citizen_(novel)"title="First Citizen (novel)">
"First Citizen" explores the alternative history story of Granville James Corbin, or “Granny” to his friends and enemies, as he "grows up in the chaos caused by the decision of the American Government to repudiate the National Debt". The country becomes privatized, the military is largely replaced by mercenaries and privately raised armies, and, after Washington, DC, is destroyed with a nuclear weapon, the Speaker of the House becomes dictator of the United States.During this time, Corbin achieves success in various businesses, a privately raised military force, and, eventually, into the federal government. The author matches Corbin's career to Caesar’s career. Eventually, Corbin and his allies argue and the Second Civil War begins. Corbin's victory is followed by his assassination.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemies_at_Home"title="Enemies at Home">
It is June in the year 89 AD, the 9th year of the reign of Domitian, and Rome is in an uproar when a newly married couple living in an apartment on the Esquiline — Valerius Aviola and Mucia Lucilia — are found strangled in bed. One of their slave porters has been brutally bludgeoned and the family silver is missing. The remaining slaves of the Aviola household (including the injured porter, Nicostratus) are naturally suspected of being complicit in the seemingly apparent murder of their masters and the theft of the silverware, and (with the exception of Myla, a slave and Polycarpus, the family steward) manage to flee to the sanctuary of the Temple of Ceres.The 2nd Vigiles Cohort is charged with investigating, but the cohort tribune Titianus gives up, and the temple's authorities are unenthusiastic about harbouring potential murderers (especially slaves who have murdered their owners) so an aedile, Tiberius Manlius Faustus, is called in to investigate. Faustus persuades Flavia Albia, the adopted daughter of Marcus Didius Falco and a "delatrix" in her own right, to help, with the hope that she could clear the names of the slaves. Flavia, having fled her family at Ostia out of outright boredom whilst on holiday, agrees to Faustus' request.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children_of_Dynmouth"title="The Children of Dynmouth">
The plot follows Timothy Gedge, a socially inept yet intrusive teenage boy as he wanders around the dull seaside town of Dynmouth, spying on the town's residents. At first this behaviour is seen as merely annoying, even comical, until people begin to realise that his purpose may not be as innocent as initially thought.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Papers_of_Tony_Veitch"title="The Papers of Tony Veitch">
Jack Laidlaw visits the deathbed of an alcoholic vagrant, Eck Adamson, who provides a cryptic last message which helps solve the murder of a gangland thug and the disappearance of a student. In the process, Laidlaw uncovers widespread corruption.Eck Adamson appears in the last Laidlaw novel about Laidlaw’s early career: "The Dark Remains." He is an informer for Jack Laidlaw, who says "I know the streets, but Eck here has a doctorate and any number of diplomas". He is described as "anything between thirty and sixty and probably had no more than a decade left in him without a radical change of lifestyle", as he knocks back two large rums with a pint of Guinness in between.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Loyalties"title="Strange Loyalties">
The novel centres around the death of Jack Laidlaw's brother Scott (a teacher) who is run over by a car. Laidlaw is faced with an emotional journey to the depths of Glasgow's underworld and his own past, to discover the truth, finds out as much about himself as his brother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oeroeg"title="Oeroeg">
The book starts in the preterite, "Oeroeg was my friend", and in reverse chronological order tells how the narrator came to that conclusion. The narrator grows up as the child of a white Dutch family on Java, with Oeroeg, a native young man; as high-school students, they live together in a boarding house. One crucial event is the death of Oeroeg's father, who was saving the narrator from drowning. During World War II, the narrator joins the Dutch army, and on returning to Java finds the world has changed: Indonesian nationalists have declared independence, and no longer accept colonial rule. In addition, the narrator's father is murdered, and he suspects his old friend Oeroeg, who has joined the Indonesian nationalist movement, of avenging his own father's death. At the end of the novel, the narrator has lost his friend, his identity, and his home country.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle_and_Dante_Discover_the_Secrets_of_the_Universe"title="Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe">
In the summer of 1987, 15-year-old Aristotle Mendoza meets a boy named Dante Quintana at the local pool. The boys bond over their classical names and eventually become inseparable. Dante teaches Ari about literature and poetry, while Ari is fascinated by Dante's swimming ability and sincerity. Dante tells Ari that he and his family are moving to Chicago for the next school term because his father was offered a temporary professorship at the University of Chicago. That same day, the two boys see a bird lying injured in the road. While Dante goes into the road to check on the bird, a car speeds around the corner. Ari dives into the street and pushes Dante out of its path, saving his life. While Dante leaves almost unscathed, Ari is hurt very badly. Following the accident, the Quintanas and the Mendozas grow closer. Both boys' mothers talk more frequently and share ideas about their sons.Before Dante leaves for Chicago, he tells Ari that the two things he loves most in the world are swimming and Ari. However, Ari says that he should not tell him those things, even if they are true. The two boys promise each other that they will still be friends when Dante returns in the summer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Secrets_(novel)"title="House of Secrets (novel)">
Cordelia, Brendan, and Eleanor Walker are less than pleased when their parents purchase the old and creepy, suspiciously inexpensive yet too-perfect Kristoff House; even less when, after just a few days of living in the house, a mysterious woman called Dahlia Kristoff appears and demolishes it. She claims to be the "Wind Witch" and the daughter of the original owner of the house, Denver Kristoff. The three Walker children are horrified when they find that suddenly, they weren't in San Francisco anymore, and their parents were nowhere to be found. Cordelia is mystified when they meet Will Draper, a member of the Royal Flying Corps from World War I, who seems quite familiar. This is when the Walker kids realize that they're trapped in a novel written by Kristoff himself, a novel from which their new friend Will came. They soon find strange things and learn that they are not just trapped in a single book, but inside three of them. The Wind Witch appears before them once again, demanding that they find "The Book of Doom and Desire", a secret book that she can't touch, should the kids ever want to see their parents again. The problem is, the three kids are trapped in this vast universe of intertwined stories and they have no clues as to where the book is. They go on crazy adventures and jump over extreme hurdles like deaths and danger, meeting all sorts of friends as well as foes, all to find this "Book of Doom and Desire".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throne_of_the_Crescent_Moon"title="Throne of the Crescent Moon">
The book follows Doctor Adoulla Makhslood, an aging ghul hunter based in the city of Dhamsawaat, who would really like to retire from having adventures and quietly drink cardamom tea. Events rapidly transpire to force the Doctor and his assistant, Raseed bas Raseed – a Dervish warrior sworn to a holy path – to face a dark sorcerer. To aid them in this, the Doctor recruits his two old friends Dawoud and Litaz. Dawoud is a mage whose spells draw upon his own life energy and Litaz (his wife) is a highly skilled alchemist. The final member of their band is Zamia, a young Badawi tribeswoman who has been gifted with the ability to take a lion's shape and whose band has been slain by the sorcerer. In addition to the magical plot, there is political trouble brewing in the city as the mysterious Falcon Prince foments revolution against the Kalif.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapture_(Kate_novel)"title="Rapture (Kate novel)">
Luce, Daniel, and the other angels had nine days to stop Lucifer from bending time and erasing everything since the Fall. They fought many Scale, the elders, Miss Sophia with the help of the Outcasts. They are in allegiance with the Outcasts now. In order to locate the site of the Fall, they have to find the three relics first.Everything was up to Luce this time. She now has the ability to see through her past lives without the use of an Announcer. She discovered her true nature on just her own. She knew that the curse prevented her from knowing her true nature as an angel, caused her to die whenever she began to approach a memory of her past. That is why none of the others could tell her who she was.She was once an angel and even became Lucifer's Evening Light. Lucinda and Lucifer had loved each other long before The Fall, and they invented love. Her first love has been Lucifer, and she had been his. Lucinda and Lucifer became the first beings to experiment with affection beyond God. He grew more possessive, more envious of Lucinda's adoration of the Throne.The reason why Lucifer wants to wipe the slate clean is because he wants to reset the universe to have Lucinda back—to choose him instead of Daniel. Lucinda loved Daniel more than Lucifer because Daniel wants her for who she is and he would never eclipse her with his desires. Her betrayal of Lucifer was what this Fall was all about. Lucinda loved Lucifer until it hurt her, until their love was consumed by his pride and rage. She stopped loving Lucifer because the thing that he called love made her disappear. Their adoration never diminished the Throne, but his love diminished her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siege_(Forgotten_Realms_novel)"title="The Siege (Forgotten Realms novel)">
Evereska defends itself against the phaerimm, as the Chosen of Mystra fight for their goddess against the Shadovar and the long-exiled Netherese archwizards try to consolidate their foothold in the Prime Material plane.Meanwhile, the elf Galaeron Nihmedu fights his own shadow for possession of his very being.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_34th_Rule"title="The 34th Rule">
Quark is about to make an extraordinary deal, when he finds himself in the middle of a diplomatic crisis. Grand Nagus Zek is refusing to sell one of the lost Orbs of the Prophets back to Bajor. In response, the Bajoran government cuts off all diplomatic ties with the Ferengi and outlaws all Ferengi businesses within its borders. Quark first loses his bar, and then is subsequently imprisoned. But he finds himself to be the only one who can prevent a war between his people and Bajor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Miracles"title="The Age of Miracles">
The story begins with Julia, an eleven-year-old girl, who lives in California. A few months before her birthday, the world undergoes an unexplained phenomenon known only as "slowing", in which the completion of each revolution of the Earth on its axis takes drastically longer. By the time it is confirmed by the experts, a "day" is 24 hours and 56 minutes. The hours steadily increase and dramatically alter life on Earth. Reactions differ: while some try to adapt with it, others, like Julia's grandfather, believe "slowing" to be a government hoax and still others, like Julia's best friend Hanna's family, believe it to be God's wrath and return to their hometowns.After weeks of chaos, the American government announces the adoption of "clock time", in which the world functions as normal according to the 24-hour clock, regardless of whether it is day or night outside. Some people reject clock time altogether, like Julia's neighbor Sylvia, and set their lives according to the sun, ignoring clock time altogether. These people are labelled "real timers" and they face discrimination. Meanwhile, the longer days have started to have psychological effects on people: Julia's mother starts suffering from a slowing-related disorder, which is referred to as "the syndrome", its effects vary from person to person. Crime rates begin to spike and people purportedly become more impulsive, the excuse Julia uses to convince herself when she finds her father having an affair with Sylvia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shining_Through_(novel)"title="Shining Through (novel)">
In 1940, Linda Voss, 31 and unmarried, is secretary to John Berringer, a partner in a New York law firm. She is secretly in love with John, but he is married to Nan, the daughter of the senior partner Edward Leland, and politically and socially well-connected. She begins an affair with John after his wife leaves and sues for divorce. Linda becomes pregnant and they marry in a brief civil ceremony, which neither is really enthusiastic about. Leland moves to Washington to take a senior position in a new organisation, soon to be renamed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which coordinates war-related information from German refugees in America. He requests that John and Linda join him; because of Linda's fluent German, learnt from her Berlin-born grandmother, and her full FBI security clearance, Linda works directly with Ed. She is able to alert him that a translator is falsifying information from a number of informants. Ed travels a lot and Linda learns that he is going into Germany and German-occupied Poland. His main contact is "Sunflower", a rich German industrialist he has known since the 1920s and visits regularly in Germany and Switzerland. Sunflower also runs a number of agents. Linda has a miscarriage and loses the baby.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Go_Back_(novel)"title="Never Go Back (novel)">
At a motel outside Washington D.C., former Army cop Jack Reacher is confronted by two men, who call him a disgrace and order him to leave town. Reacher refuses, and subdues them in a brief fistfight.Earlier that same day, Reacher arrives at the headquarters of his old unit, the 110th MP Special Investigations Unit, to meet with its commander, Major Susan Turner. When he arrives, however, he discovers that Turner has been relieved of command. Her replacement, Col. Morgan, informs Reacher that he is under investigation in two cases: a suspected homicide dating back nearly sixteen years, and a lawsuit filed by Candice Dayton, a woman who alleges that she and Reacher had an affair when he was stationed in South Korea, and that he is the father of her fifteen-year-old daughter, Samantha. When Reacher points out that the military has no authority to investigate him due to his civilian status, Morgan reinstates him as an officer and gives him a room at a local motel, where the fight occurs later that night. Learning that Turner has been incarcerated on suspicion of taking a bribe, Reacher goes to visit her, but learns that she has specifically requested that he not be allowed to do so.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_(Crace_novel)"title="Harvest (Crace novel)">
"Harvest" tells the story of a remote English village as economic progress disrupts pastoral idyll following the Enclosure Act. The protagonist, Walter Thirsk, tells the story from his perspective, but in fact is rarely present when the events of the novel take place due to his injury that he sustains at the beginning of the novel.The story begins with the arrival of some strangers to the bounds of the village. Following the burning of the stables, a scapegoat is required as no-one wants to admit that one of their own was responsible. Hence a mob sets out in order to find evidence to blame these new arrivals. After a brief altercation with the three strangers, they are arrested by Master Kent and chained to the pillory for the week. The woman travelling with them is shaved of her hair, and expected to be submissive to the men of the village.At their annual festival, a crippled chart maker that Master Kent has hired to map out the village, Phillip Earle (or Mr. Quill as the villagers call him) selects the young Lizzie Carr to be the Gleaning Queen of the festival. The festivities are interrupted by the shaven woman, earning her the nickname "Mistress Beldam" who goes to hide in the woods. Walter's injury makes him unable to work the field so ends up showing Mr. Quill around. He takes a liking to the man and often imagines returning to urban life under Mr. Quill's employ. When they return to the manor they find that the elderly stranger has died in the pillory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_Blood"title="Night of Blood">
"Night of Blood" is a follow-up to "The War of Souls" trilogy, and deals with the minotaurs of Krynn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvation_of_a_Saint"title="Salvation of a Saint">
Yoshitaka Mashiba, who was about to leave his marriage and his wife, is poisoned by arsenic-laced coffee and dies. His wife, Ayane, is the obvious suspect—but she was hundreds of miles away when he was murdered. The Police Detective Kusanagi refuses to believe that she could have had anything to do with the crime. His assistant, Kaoru Utsumi, however, is convinced Ayane is guilty. While Utsumi’s instincts tell her one thing, the facts of the case are another matter. So she does what her boss has done for years when stymied—she calls upon Professor Manabu Yukawa.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman's_Island"title="Madman's Island">
Jack Burnett decides to go prospecting on an uninhabited island in the Barrier Reef with a friend. The friend goes mad and tries to kill Jack. Jack discovers some opium stashed away by Japanese smugglers. Jack is rescued and sells the opium to a Chinese merchant in Cooktown. In Cairns, Jack runs into the Japanese smugglers, but manages to escape with the help of a woman he has fallen in love with.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Navigator_(Pocalyko_novel)"title="The Navigator (Pocalyko novel)">
At the liberation of a German concentration camp in 1945, a B-24 navigator suffers a breakdown. In the present day, Richard Yeager, a less-than-successful financial executive, arrives for his first day at a Washington financial services firm where he is immediately mistakenly arrested in an FBI raid. His brother Warren Hunter is Wall Street's reigning master of the financial universe, running ViroSat, the world's first trillion dollar deal, popularly called "Internet Next." Yeager's ex-wife Julia Toussaint, with whom he begins again to become romantically involved, is a gorgeous African-American legislative aide to a very ambitious woman US Senator who wants the federal government to regulate ViroSat.An old Jewish woman dies under mysterious circumstances and Yeager, her financial advisor, is stunned to learn that he has been named her sole heir. The eponymous navigator is revealed to be the father of the two brothers. He is dying, suffering from Alzheimer's and PTSD. Hunter, famous for self-control, takes enormous risks and begins to lose his grip, showing symptoms of psychological decomposition like his father. No one knows where Hunter plans to get the cash for the ViroSat deal. Yeager, Hunter, and Toussaint are forced to reconcile and cooperate despite difficult personal history; Hunter was responsible for Yeager and Toussaint divorcing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revenge_of_the_Radioactive_Lady"title="The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady">
Marylou Ahearn temporarily moves from Memphis, Tennessee to Tallahassee, Florida to take an extended vacation. In actuality though, she is really there in order to find and murder retired doctor Wilson Spriggs. It is explained that in the 1950s, Dr. Spriggs was in charge of a medical experiment where pregnant woman were unknowingly given a vitamin cocktail with radioactive iron as part of a secret government study. Marylou was one of the patients who was given the cocktail in 1953. Though she did not know this until years later, the effects of the iron caused her to develop several health problems. Including for her daughter, Helen, to die from cancer at only eight years old.Once she gets to Tallahassee, Marylou goes by the pseudonym Nancy Archer from the film "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman", and moves into a house on the edge of Dr. Spriggs' neighborhood. But she soon discovers that Wilson is now suffering from dementia, and has been relocated there to live with his daughter, Caroline. Deciding she needs a new approach, Marylou befriends Caroline's daughter and Wilson's youngest grandchild, Suzi, and soon gets to know the rest of the family. She then decides that instead of killing a man who no longer members his crimes, she should ruin his entire family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tjerita_Oeij_Se"title="Tjerita Oeij Se">
Oeij Se, a young trader, is passing through a rural village outside Wonosobo when he sees a young boy flying a kite made of paper money. The young boy flying the kite is unaware of its worth and, when Oeij Se expresses interest in buying it, tells the latter that there is more paper at home. Eventually Oeij Se is able to acquire over five million gulden, paying only 14 ringgit, before returning home to Pekalongan.Investing this money, Oeij Se is quickly able to become a successful businessman, dabbling in various aspects of trade and building an extensive home for himself, his wife, and their two children. Years pass until one day a Dutchman named Vigni comes to and asks permission to store a locked chest filled with gold in Oeij Se's home for safekeeping. Oeij Se agrees, but no sooner has Vigni left than Oeij Se asks his cook for help picking the lock. Several days later, Vigni returns and is shocked to find that his gold has been replaced by silver.Vigni and Oeij Se, departing on a ship to the colonial capital at Batavia (now Jakarta), depart on amicable terms, although Vigni suspects the latter and Oeij Se feels a little guilty over his actions. Upon arriving home Vigni commits suicide. Oeij Se, meanwhile, continues onward to Singapore, where he buys a young woman from a brothel to be his second wife. They return to Pekalongan and Oeij Se's wife, though upset, is forced by their culture to accept this new addition to the family. Oeij Se marries his second wife as his daughter, Kim Nio, marries her betrothed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Echoes"title="Lost Echoes">
Since a mysterious childhood illness Harry Wilkes has experienced horrific visions of gruesome murders and other horrible scenes. In college Harry turns to alcohol to suppress the visions and deal with the enormous stress that comes with it. One night at a bar he witnesses a fellow drunk easily fending off three would–be muggers. The man, whose name is Tad, turns out to be a student and expert of the martial arts. Harry strikes up a friendship with Tad who later becomes his sensei and teaches him to master his unusual gift. Soon a woman Harry had a crush on in his childhood comes asking him to help solve her father's murder. Unsure of how this will affect him, Harry and Tad find themselves involved in a horrible crime and murder. The question is will Harry's ability help him cope with the situation or contribute to his downfall.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Vice"title="Tokyo Vice">
The account covers Adelstein's career in Tokyo, starting in 1993 when he was hired as a rookie reporter for "Yomiuri Shimbun." As a cadet, he describes being taken under the wing of Sekiguchi, an older detective. Adelstein was initially assigned to "tacky" Saitama, and the memoir covers his next 12 years as a staffer for the paper, describing 80-hour work weeks, relationship difficulties, and the interactions between crime reporters and the police. Specific cases involve the search for the killer of Lucie Blackman, and the memoir also details death threats after he published an expose on Tadamasa Goto. He also uncovered that Saitama Prefecture was altering scientific data on dioxin contamination.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holder's_Dominion"title="The Holder's Dominion">
Kaylie Ames chose to attend college in Austin, thinking it was far enough away from home to create the distance she needed after her father had been killed in a mountain rescue operation. Her mother and brother each withdrew in their own ways. Still, she continued to grieve.One day she discovered her old friend Elliott on his knees in the middle of a grocery store aisle. She did not recognize her old friend at first; his eyes were shut and he looked ill, mumbling something unintelligible. She helped him off the floor and brought him outside where he quickly recovered. At first Elliott would not explain what had happened to him in the grocery store; he eventually invited her into his circle of friends and into the world of "Edannair"."Edannair" is a fantasy MMO (massively multiplayer online game) where you can build your own avatar, learn and develop the skills for the creature you choose as your avatar, explore a complex and infinite world, build alliances, forge online relationships with friends and new acquaintances and compete in battles and raids.Kaylie had never really been a gamer before, or even competitive for that matter, but as she became immersed in the online game, things began to change. While spending countless hours in her chosen role of Loxy, she finds her real-world troubles beginning to dissipate... until she finds out about The Holder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swipe_(novel)"title="Swipe (novel)">
"Swipe" takes place in the futuristic United States, now called the American Union, which is in the process of a merger to create a Global Union. Citizenship from birth was abolished after the States' War roughly a decade earlier, and those who want citizenship are required to undergo a Pledging process. Pledges are Marked—that is, they receive a wrist tattoo that will allow them to participate in the benefits of civilization. The Unmarked, those who refuse to Pledge, live as vagrants or as dependents of those who are Marked.Logan Langly, the novel's protagonist, is nearly thirteen, the age when most young people go to be Marked. Unlike most young people, Logan is afraid of the Marking process. His older sister Lily never returned from her Pledge, and Logan fears than if he Pledges, he might die himself. Logan's fears, however, go beyond the Pledge. Since Lily's death, someone has been watching him, even breaking into his room on occasion. The only person who takes Logan's fears seriously is thirteen-year-old Erin Arbitor, the daughter of a government agent. She believes that the perpetrator is a Markless teenager named Peck who is wanted by the government for crimes including kidnapping, assault, and murder. Logan and Erin spend most of the book trying to hunt down Peck and his friends on their own, ostensibly to turn them into the government. Ultimately, however, Logan finds that he must judge for himself whether Peck's motives are as nefarious as the government claims.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Courts_of_the_Conqueror"title="In the Courts of the Conqueror">
The book draws from both well-known decisions of federal courts as well as less well known cases in explaining the doctrines of federal Indian law. The case of "Johnson v. McIntosh" by the Supreme Court in 1823 is well known to most law students as declaring that Indian tribes had the right to occupy the land but only the United States held title to the land by right of discovery.It covers other major cases, including "Cherokee Nation v. Georgia" (1831) (the tribe lacked standing to contest Georgia's violation of treaty rights), "Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock" (1903) (the U.S. had the right to confiscate Indian lands unilaterally despite treaty provisions); and "Tee-Hit-Ton Indians v. United States" (1955) (discovery and conquest doctrines applied even when the Alaskan natives had separate dealings with Russia).The book covers cases involving the adoption of Indian children against the will of the tribes, leading to the Indian Child Welfare Act; decisions allowing the desecration of Indian graveyards and the display of Indians remains, leading to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act; and cases on Indian religious practices, such as "Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association" (1988) and "Employment Division v. Smith" (1990). Echo-Hawk notes how federal Indian law was formed defining Indian rights and were then used, not as a shield to protect these rights, but instead to strip them away and harm Indian people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12th_of_Never_(novel)"title="12th of Never (novel)">
This book has three major plots and at least two minor ones. The first begins with the birth of police detective Lindsay Boxer's daughter, which had to be at home during a major power outage. The less than sterile condition of the baby's birth causes medical complications that keep Boxer away from her job during part of the investigation into a strange series of murders.The second plot revolves around the series of murders. These murders take place after an eccentric college professor has vivid dreams about murders that end up coming true much in the manner he dreams them.The third major plot involves a murder case Assistant District Attorney Yuki Castellano is trying in court. Castellano and Boxer are members of an informal group known as the Women's Murder Club. Castellano's court case has many twists.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildwood_Imperium"title="Wildwood Imperium">
PART ONE: In South Wood, a young girl named Zita is crowned May Queen. That night, she and several friends conduct a secret ritual meant to call up the legendary spirit of the Verdant Empress. Instead, they accidentally call up the spirit of Alexandra, the Dowager Governess. The other girls run away, but the Governess begins sending Zita nightly messages instructing her to bring the spirit 3 things: an eagle feather, a pebble from beside a stream in Wildwood, and the teeth of the Governess' son, Alexei (the teeth are in his entombed mechanical body and were used for bringing him back to life the first time). Zita is mourning her recently deceased mother, and decides to help the Governess because she can feel her grieving over her own dead son.The new Elder Mystic, the young boy who was an acolyte in the last book, accompanies other Mystics deep into Wildwood to hang a flag remembering Iphigenia on the Ossuary Tree there (oddly, this journey takes "many days", although Prue and her army traversed the same distance in a couple of hours in the first book). Afterward, the Elder Mystic follows a pattern in the trees and is suddenly swallowed by the ground, disappearing forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneak_(novel)"title="Sneak (novel)">
13-year-old Logan Langly is wanted by DOME (the Department of Marked Emergencies) for escaping after he flunked his citizenship Pledge. After spending a month running from DOME and hiding in the woods, he finds that the political situation in his section of the American Union, formerly the United States, has worsened quickly. Not only is the country now a part of the Global Union, but DOME is cracking down on the Unmarked—those who have refused to Pledge—and arresting them for any crime, however minor. Those arrested are never heard from again. And Logan, it appears, is the source of the problem. As the only Unmarked person to have escaped a Pledge, his very existence is both an embarrassment and a threat to the government, which is determined to hunt him down. Even the Unmarked are divided in their attitudes toward Logan. Some of them respect him for taking action against DOME, but others resent the trouble he has caused.Logan wants to avoid arrest for more than one reason. His sister Lily disappeared after her Pledge five years earlier, and Logan believes she is being held in a prison called Acheron in Beacon City, the capital of the American Union. He is determined to rescue her, no matter the cost. Lily's old friend Daniel Peck wants to aid in the rescue, but his friends, the Dust, are not so keen on the idea. Logan's actions in "Swipe" cost them their home—twice—and they object to the risk of getting involved with him again, especially since Logan's plan will require, at the very least, a dangerous cross-country trip.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_&amp;_Park"title="Eleanor &amp; Park">
Eleanor Douglas is beginning 10th grade. She is the oldest in a family of two girls and three boys who live with their mother and stepfather, Richie, in a tiny two-bedroom house. The children share one bedroom. There is one bathroom, and Richie has removed the door and will not allow a curtain for privacy. Richie is physically and emotionally abusive to their mother and often drunk. The children live in terror of him. Eleanor does not own a toothbrush or properly fitting clothes. She patches her clothes in bright colors, wears ribbons in her hair, and creates strange clothing combinations, over which her fellow students bully her. Eleanor has just returned after sleeping on the couch of her biological dad, since Richie threw her out a year earlier.Park Sheridan has lived in Omaha his whole life. While his family is not affluent, and his parents come from very different backgrounds, his home is filled with love. While his father is tall and masculine, Park takes after his mother in appearance and is shorter than his younger brother. Park believes he is a disappointment and is unenthusiastic about taekwondo, which his father values. Park is instead interested in alternative music and comics. He feels insecure about his size and Asian heritage, despite getting along with the popular kids at school.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Around"title="Love Around">
Two individuals with opposite family backgrounds, she is the daughter of a former Chief of Police and he is the son of a former triad boss, become friends when both have just been dumped by their significant others. They use their heartbreak to console each other but soon their friendship turns to love, but their love may not survive when she publicly offends a man she doesn't know is his father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winds_of_Sinhala"title="Winds of Sinhala">
The story is written as the personal account of the fictional character, Prince Rodana. The narrative follows the life of Rodana, and in particular his connection as personal advisor and close friend to Prince Gamini, the future King Dutugemunu. The novel weaves together Gamini's ruthless ambition to reunite Sri Lanka, the story of his military campaign, and his romantic relationship with a woman named Raji.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_Authority"title="Command Authority">
Former KGB officer Valeri Volodin becomes president of Russia. Openly critical of the United States, he secretly tasks Russian domestic intelligence (FSB) with staging false flag attacks in an effort to justify an invasion of Ukraine. A bomb is detonated in a restaurant in Russia, killing Russian foreign intelligence (SVR) head Stanislav Biryukov; simultaneously, former SVR head Sergey Golovko falls ill to polonium poisoning while visiting his old friend, President Jack Ryan, in the White House. Volodin accuses the US government of orchestrating the recent incidents, and then announces the merger of the SVR and the FSB into one entity led by Roman Talanov, the mysterious head of FSB.In Sevastopol, a CIA special mission compound comes under attack from pro-Russia protesters aided by FSB proxy agents. Campus operatives John Clark, Domingo "Ding" Chavez, and Dominic "Dom" Caruso, who are on the ground in Ukraine to gather intelligence on Russian criminal organization Seven Strong Men and its head Gleb the Scar, take part in defending the compound in a tense battle between the protesters and Delta Force operators guarding the compound. Even though the compound's cover as a State Department facility was preserved, Volodin nevertheless decides to invade Ukraine, intent on pushing his troops all the way to the capital of Kyiv. President Ryan sends a few military troops to assist Ukrainian soldiers in the conflict with Russian forces as well as to prevent them from reaching Kyiv.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_(Angler_novel)"title="Storm (Angler novel)">
Storm finds the Global Union, and particularly its American component, in chaos. The Markless, non-citizens who have refused to undergo the Pledging process, are protesting their treatment. In the past, it has been easier for Marked citizens to simply ignore the Markless and go on with their comfortable lives. Now the Markless are forcing them to confront what they really believe about the government and its leaders—Chancellor Cylis, the head of the Global Union; and General Lamson, who oversees the American Union.13-year-old Logan Langly, however, has more immediate concerns. His best friend, Erin Arbitor, is dying from a manufactured disease called Project Trumpet. Erin was vaccinated against the disease at her Pledge, but somehow she came into contact with an activation protein that causes vaccinated people to come down with the illness. The only hope for Erin is to find Dr. Rhyne, the scientist who designed Project Trumpet in the first place. Logan, Erin, Daniel Peck, and Hailey Phoenix undertake a cross-country drive to find Dr. Rhyne and cure Erin. But when they arrive at Dr. Rhyne's West Coast laboratory, they learn that the doctor cannot help them without knowing what protein triggered Erin's illness.Meanwhile, Logan's sister Lily, now a high-ranking member of the military, finds herself in a difficult situation. Cylis and Lamson are not working together as well as they would have the public believe, and Cylis wants to use Lilly as a double agent against Lamson. Lamson has his own operative on the ground, however—a teenager named Connor Goodman. Lily opposes both Lamson and Cylis, but Connor presents the most immediate threat against her plans to undermine the government. If Lily is to stop Connor, she must enlist the help of Logan and his friends, who are reluctant to trust her because of her calculated betrayal in "Sneak". Logan desperately wants to believe in his sister, despite their past. Lily's secrecy, however, means that when Logan agrees to carry out her plans, he underestimates the cost.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Beautiful_North"title="Into the Beautiful North">
The town of Tres Camarones is accosted by bandidos at a time when most of the men in the town have gone to America to look for work. After watching "The Magnificent Seven", Nayeli, a nineteen year old girl, decides to travel to America to convince seven of the town's best fighters to come back and fight the bandidos.Nayeli and her three friends Yolo, Vampi and Tacho, begin their journey with the financial support of Tía Irma, the mayor of the town. Along the way they lose their luggage and a good deal of their money. In Tijuana, a garbage picker and skilled fighter named Atómiko helps them across the border. Once across, Nayeli seeks out the assistance of Matt, a missionary who had come to their town three years in the past.Tia Irma comes to San Diego to meet up with them, and while she continues searching for more candidates to bring back to Mexico, Nayeli and Tacho leave for Kankakee, Illinois to look for Nayeli's father. However, they find that her father has a new family, and she leaves without speaking to him. Meanwhile, Tia Irma has selected twenty-seven men to bring back to Tres Camarones.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartaman_Bharat"title="Bartaman Bharat">
In this essay Vivekananda briefly recounted and analyzed the entire history of India, from the time when Vedic priests used to be rulers of the society to the occupation of the country by the British. But, his main focus was on his contemporary India.He tried to describe how the society was first ruled by Vedic priests ("Brahmin"), who were followed by the mighty rulers, who had powers in their hands for thousands of years and were finally succeeded by "Vaishya" power. Then the author predicted that following this cyclical rule, the "Vaishya"'s too will lose their glory one day and the lowermost class of the Indian society "Shudras" will rise to power and the whole society will be ruled by them.He urged Indians to treat and honour each other as brothers despite their caste or financial condition. He suggested not to forget that Sita, Savitri, Damayanti are the ideals of Indian womanhood. He asked to consider the soil of India as one's heaven and the good of India as one's own good. He also suggested not to foolishly imitate the West. He wrote—O India, this is your terrible danger. The spell of imitating the West is getting such a strong hold upon you that what is good or what is bad is no longer decided by reason, judgment, discrimination, or reference to the Shastras. Whatever ideas, whatever manners the white men praise or like are good; whatever things they dislike or censure are bad. Alas! what can be a more tangible proof of foolishness than this?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_Me,_Eddie"title="It's Me, Eddie">
The plot is fictional but based on real experiences Limonov faced during his immigration to New York City.The protagonist is a man named Eddichka, a Russian immigrant in New York City. His wife has just divorced him, and he is collecting welfare whilst working at a restaurant. Eddichka attends Trotskyist meetings. The text of the novel uses obscenities and naturalistic descriptions of explicit sexual scenes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_Philip_Latinowicz"title="The Return of Philip Latinowicz">
Twenty-three years before this novel begins, Philip Latinowicz, still a school-boy living in Kaptol, runs away from home with a hundred-florin note stolen from his mother, which he spends on women and booze for three days and three nights. When he returns to his mother's house, she treats him the way she would treat a stranger and sends him away. Upon his return to Kaptol in the present day, Philip struggles to reconcile his relationship with his mother, whose obsession with perfumes and elite society now threatens to drive him crazy. The two fail to find common ground; when Philip attempts to paint his mother, she is disgusted by his less-than positive view of her and condemns the project. Even more, he hates her new lover, Dr. Liepach of Kostanjevec, who he finds pretentious and conceited, despite his obvious charms and kind gestures. However, it is at one of his mother's elite gatherings that Philip meets Bobočka, to whom he is immediately drawn. They attend the town's St. Rock's Day festival together. The depraved drunkenness and wild nature of the crowd inspires Philip to imagine a painting, depicting the townspeople sinning in the name of their god. On the way home, through the forest, a thunderstorm strikes, and Philip finds himself sharing his imagined painting with Bobočka, and in the process, sharing an intimate moment with her. Bobočka introduces Philip to an entirely different side of Kaptol, made up of Baločanski, her former and current lovers, and a vibrant night life. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_World_War_(book)"title="The Second World War (book)">
In the introduction, Beevor discusses Yang Kyoungjong, a Korean soldier forcibly conscripted by the Kwantung Army, then in turn taken prisoner by the Red Army and the Wehrmacht, eventually being captured by American troops. He also discusses the background of the war, including the rise of Nazism in post-World War I Germany, and the formation of alliances with Italy and Japan.Throughout the bulk of the book, Beevor jumps back and forth throughout the different theaters of war. He begins by detailing Germany's invasion of Poland, Germany's alliance with the Soviet Union, and the invasion of France. Interspersed are chapters focusing on the Second Sino-Japanese War along with others building up a description of global events.The perspective then expands to include the Mediterranean and Middle East theatre, the Battle of the Atlantic, the Battle of Britain, and the Balkans Campaign.Following which, there is a major shift in focus onto the Eastern Front, detailing Operation Barbarossa, the Battle of Moscow, Operation Blau, and the epic Battle of Stalingrad, a conflict which Beevor had previously written about. Simultaneously, he also depicts the events of Pearl Harbor, the ensuing events in Asia, the Pacific, North Africa, as well the Holocaust. As the Allies began to turn the war decisively in their favour. Alternating between the major events, Beevor details Operation Torch, American victories in the Pacific, and the Soviet counterattacks on the Eastern Front, the invasion of Sicily and Italy. In what Beevor terms the "Spring of Expectations", the Allies launch major offensives against Axis forces on all fronts: The Soviets push westwards successfully, while the Western Allies launch Operation Overlord, and numerous defeats are inflicted upon the Japanese.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_of_Sherwood"title="Lady of Sherwood">
The novel is set in 1199 England, and follows the events of "Lady of the Forest". It begins with the death of Richard I of England. Robin of Locksley, his lover Lady Marian Fitzwalter, and their outlaw friends find themselves again facing the wrath of William DeLacey, the Sheriff of Nottingham. Richard's death has resulted in the loss of their royal pardon, which was granted after they seized the tax revenues that were to be sent to Richard's brother Prince John. With Richard's death, John is now competing for the crown against his young nephew, Arthur of Brittany. With Richard having named them both co-heirs, both men have their supporters, with the Sheriff supporting the former and Robin's father the Earl of Huntington supporting the latter.Meanwhile, Robin and Marian, along with their outlaw friends, are living together at her manor of Ravenskeep, though Robin and Marian have not married. To her great sadness, Marian has discovered that she cannot have children, but hides her miscarriages from Robin to avoid worrying him. She tells Robin's estranged father the Earl of Huntington about her perceived barrenness, wishing for him to force Robin to leave her, as she wants him to have the chance to father an heir with someone else.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necropolis_(Pahor_novel)"title="Necropolis (Pahor novel)">
The story is told from the point of view of a Nazi concentration camp survivor who is visiting the Natzweiler-Struthof camp, twenty years after he was sent from there back to Dachau, Mittelbau-Dora, Harzungen, and finally Bergen-Belsen, which was liberated on 15 April 1945. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Luminaries"title="The Luminaries">
The story begins with one of the book's protagonists, Walter Moody, arriving in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel after having encountered a horrific sight on his ship to Hokitika. There, he meets the twelve men who become the other protagonists of the book: Te Rau Tauwhare (a Māori greenstone hunter), Charlie Frost (a banker), Edgar Clinch (an hotelier), Benjamin Lowenthal (a newspaperman), Cowell Devlin (a chaplain), Sook Yongsheng (a hatter), Aubert Gascoigne (a justice's clerk), Joseph Pritchard (a chemist), Thomas Balfour (a shipping agent), Harald Nilssen (a commission merchant), Quee Long (a goldsmith), and Dick Mannering (a goldfields magnate).The twelve men inform Walter Moody about the mysterious events that have happened leading up to the current night, from their different perspectives. Some two weeks previously, Crosbie Wells, a little-known hermit, was found dead in his cabin by a politician named Alistair Lauderback on his way into town. Wells' death was apparently peaceful, but upon inspection, his cabin had several thousand pounds' worth of gold hidden inside it, as well as an unsigned deed (witnessed by Wells) which suggested that Emery Staines, a rich and likeable young man, was to pay £2,000 to Anna Wetherell, a prostitute well-known for frequenting the Chinatown areas of Hokitika. Upon the same night as Wells' body was found, Staines himself had disappeared, and Wetherell was found lying in the road unconscious, having apparently attempted suicide. She and Gascoigne discovered the next day that hundreds of pounds' worth of gold has been sewn into the lining of her dress by an unknown person.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paris_Wife"title="The Paris Wife">
"The Paris Wife" focuses on the romance, marriage and divorce of Ernest Hemingway and his first wife Hadley Richardson, who met when Hemingway was 20 years old, and Richardson 28. They marry and move to Paris soon afterwards, where Hemingway befriends Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce. Hadley sees the open marriages/relationships of her husband's friends, and suspects he is having an affair with Duff Twysden until his book "The Sun Also Rises" appears and then Hadley realises that their special relationship is because Duff is the spark that ignited Hemingway's first best seller. There are further strains as Hemingway pushes his satire on Sherwood Anderson which his wife's new friend Pauline Pfeiffer approves of—the marriage falls apart when Hemingway begins having an affair with Pauline Pfeiffer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hour_of_the_Wolf_(novel)"title="Hour of the Wolf (novel)">
In 1870, the Russian Empire is in huge debt to the Rothschild family. Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich together with Empire's ministers and secretary are discussing the future of the empire. To be more precise, they are discussing country's deficit. The Rothschilds have proposed to exchange Vilnius and Reval for the writing off all debt of the Russian Empire and the guarantee of zero per cent interest on all credit for the following 30 years.In 1905, 35 years after the deal between Russian Empire and Rothschilds was made, Vilnius belongs to the Alliance of the Free Cities, together with four other cities, Reval, Krakow, Prague and part of Constantinople. Few days away from The Summit, a simple, at first sight, murder in the old graveyard turns out to be a complex web of political intrigue. The main character Antanas Sidabras, legate of the free city of Vilnius, during the investigation gets to travel to Novovileisk with the hot air balloon, go to the dungeons of the city, play spy games with the Russians and manages to calm down the Russian agents provoked riots.In Novovileisk, Sidabras finds out that Vitamancers kept crazy scientist, who knew how to create the bionic - half automaton half living organism, long thought to be impossible to create, but appears that the bionic wolf was the perpetrator that did the killing in the graveyard. When legate finds out the truth about bionic wolf it is too late to stop it from start the killings - it gets unleashed. Legate and his legionnaires tries to do everything, but nothing they do can stop it. Then suddenly Jonas Basanavicius comes to help with his flying Dragon Ffly, a colossal glider, with the heavy machinery attached to its nose. Only then they manage to kill the bionic wolf, but during the fight Mila, Nikodemas Tvardauskis' foster-daughter, gets killed by the wolf.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Young_Lion"title="The Young Lion">
The story begins with the return of Eleanor of Aquitaine from the Crusades with her monkish husband, Louis of France. Historically Eleanor was famous for her beauty and a contemporary poet described her as “gracious, lovely, the embodiment of charm". She begins an affair with Geoffrey, Duke of Normandy, who has a secret motive to make her his spy in the French court.Although Geoffrey has ulterior intents, their affair becomes passionate. He remains, however, committed to his goal of ensuring that his son Henry becomes King of England. The relationship between Eleanor and Henry begins badly and Henry falls in love with Eleanor’s dazzling Byzantine maid. The maid would be unsuitable as queen if Henry should assume the English throne.These complex relationships and intrigues are the basis of this story which is set in 12th century France, a century characterised by the flowering of troubadour culture, mysticism and learning. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_in_Another_Man's_Grave"title="Standing in Another Man's Grave">
Having been retired from the police for five years, Rebus continues to investigate as part of the cold cases unit. The mother of a missing girl enlists his help in finding out what happened to her daughter, leading Rebus to uncover the truth about a series of seemingly unconnected disappearances stretching back to the millennium. He is seconded to the CID, where the most recent case is being handled by DI Siobhan Clarke and her unit. The serial killer has found his victims on the A9 highway and Rebus travels to Pitlochry and Inverness several times, driving as far north as his daughter Samantha's home. In Edinburgh, Rebus continues to associate with the gangster 'Big Ger' Cafferty and meets two younger gangsters who are related to the missing girl. His activities are known to Malcolm Fox, who believes that he can take Rebus down for corruption. However, the constant reorganization of the Scottish police structures mean that Rebus loses his official position by the end of the novel. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brynhild_(novel)"title="Brynhild (novel)">
Rowland Palace is a novelist married to a distant cousin, Brynhild, a "Quiet Lovely" who is twelve years younger than he. Inordinately sensitive to criticism, Palace has been withdrawing from a wife who is becoming critical of him. When he decides he needs to engage a publicist to cultivate his neglected public image, he hides his plan. The publicist he chooses, Immanuel Cloote, proves to be an agent with imagination and "manifest gusto."Meanwhile, Brynhild meets and becomes the unique confidant of Alfred Bunter, a rising young novelist of whose popular success Palace is jealous. Bunter confides to Brynhild that he is really David Lewis, from Cardiff, who has left his wife and assumed a new identity as an author. Scarcely has he confided in Brynhild, however, than his true identity is exposed by someone who turns out to be Mr. Cloote, intent on sabotaging Rowland Palace's literary competitors. The plight of Bunter/Lewis elicits Brynhild's sympathies. Brynhild, who had been feeling that she was "too aloof for life," gains a new sense of confidence and self-assurance from her brief affair, and the novel closes with the news that she is with child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradock_Nowell"title="Cradock Nowell">
The story introduces twin brothers, Cradock and Clayton Nowell, whose nurse forgets which is the elder, the rosette by which she had distinguished them having fallen to the ground. She settles it to her own satisfaction, and the boys grow up under the care of their father, Sir Cradock Nowell, and their father’s friend, John Rosedew, the rector. Cradock falls in love with love Amy Rosedew, the rector's daughter. When the brothers are on the threshold of adulthood, an unwelcome guest comes in the person of a regimental surgeon, who had attended at the birth of the twins, and he discovers the mistake of the nurse. Not long afterwards the older brother, the one who had just stepped into his brother’s place, is discovered shot dead in a lonely coppice, while the younger brother Cradock, with both barrels of his gun discharged, is standing close beside him. The father believes his son guilty, and drives him from his presence. The rest of the tale is chiefly taken up by the account of what becomes of Cradock Nowell, and how at length he is restored to his home and to his father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maid_of_Sker"title="The Maid of Sker">
"The Maid of Sker" is set at the end of the 18th century; the story is told by Davy Llewellyn, an elderly fisherman, and is about a two-year-old girl who in a calm before a storm, drifts in a boat onto a beach in Glamorganshire. The little girl calls herself Bardie. Davy is tempted to keep the girl but decides to give her up and keep the boat for himself. He quarters the pretty child in a simple but wealthy household in his neighbourhood. As Bardie grows up, Davy dotes upon her, watching anxiously over her fortunes, partly or principally because he thinks his own fortune may be bound up with hers. It is clear from the refinement of the girl's manners and from the quality of the clothes she was washed ashore in that she is no common child.Davy joins the crew of a ketch that trades between Porthcawl and Barnstaple, Devon. Whilst in Devon, he encounters several characters who hold the key to solving the mystery of Bardie's origins. These include Sir Philip Bampfylde, who spends most of his time looking for his two grandchildren who have mysteriously disappeared; Parson Chowne, a wicked, demonic and crafty parson who defies the law for many years in the north of Devon; and Captain Drake Bamfylde, who is under suspicion of having abducted his elder brother Philip's children and heirs to the family property. Davy gradually unravels the mystery and sets matters right, although many distractions, including an extended period at sea in which Blackmore gives a graphic account of the Battle of the Nile, delay him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springhaven"title="Springhaven">
The central villain of the tale is Captain Caryl Carne who is half-French and half-English. Whilst holding a commission in the French Army, he returns to his ruined ancestral castle near the coast of England, somewhere between Beachy Head and Brighton, and fills the vaults with gunpowder, keeps up constant communication with the camp at Boulogne, and prepares to aid a landing of the French.Into this story comes Blyth Scudamore, otherwise "Captain Scuddy," who is sent into captivity in France, where he becomes acquainted with Carne's secrets. Other characters include Captain Zebedee Tugwell, who belongs to a family native to Springhaven; an Admiral Darling who commands on the coast; the wilful Dolly Darling, the admiral's daughter; Faith, Dolly's sister, whose boyfriend heads to the interior of Africa four years; Parson Twemlow, who wants to preach at Nelson; and both Nelson and Napoleon themselves who figure briefly in the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fangirl_(novel)"title="Fangirl (novel)">
Cath, along with her more outgoing twin sister, Wren, begins studying as a freshman at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. While Wren is making new friends and partying, Cath struggles to adjust due to her social anxiety. Most of Cath's free time is spent writing fan fiction (mostly slash fiction) about the fictional "Simon Snow" series; though both once enjoyed fan fiction together, Wren distances herself from Cath and professes to have outgrown fan fiction. Cath becomes more interested in her writing classes and befriends her classmate Nick, meeting him for writing sessions.Despite having made a friend and enjoying her writing classes, Cath is miserable. Her roommate Reagan and Reagan's friend Levi decide to help. After Cath becomes closer to Levi, he reveals he is romantically interested in her. Just before finals, Cath's father has a bipolar episode, and is involuntarily committed. Cath ditches her exams and her final paper to take care of her father.Cath nearly gives up on her studies, on Wren, and her friends. However, Cath decides to continue and learn how to cope with her problems. Cath and her sister reunite in the hospital after Wren gets alcohol poisoning. Cath encounters her mother there, who had abandoned them years before. As the school year ends, Cath finishes her novel, and struggles to write an original short story for her class.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christowell"title="Christowell">
The complex and picturesque life which goes on in the parish of Christowell is the theme of the novel. The story begins with the garden where resides “Captain Larks,” alias Mr. Arthur, who is neither Mr. Arthur nor "Captain Larks," but a mysterious soldier who renounced his own good name to save one who was his brother and fellow officer from disgrace. Misfortune has driven him into retirement, and so he lives among his flowers and fruit. Nobody knows anything about him, save the clergyman, Parson Short. Mr. Arthur has a daughter, Rose, who, after visiting him as a child during her holidays for several years, at last comes to live with him at his cottage. It is when she appears, however, that her father's troubles may be said to begin; for she falls in love with Jack Westcombe the son of a retired officer, whom Rose’s father declines to see, conscious of the cloud that rests on himself.Among other characters there are Pugsley the carrier, Sir Joseph Touchwood, who has made a fortune out of shoes supplied by contract to Lord Wellington's army, Julia Touchwood, and a Richard ("Dicky") Touchwood who achieves small honors at Cambridge, but greater ones at home as a rat-catcher. The villain of the plot is a Mr. Gaston who attempts every crime from murder to bribery to compass his ends, and succeeds in hoodwinking every one for some time and keeping Mr. Arthur out of his lawful inheritance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Anerley"title="Mary Anerley">
The story opens in the year 1801 at Scargate Hall, "in the wildest and most rugged part of the wild and rough North Riding". The first chapter, essentially a prologue, sets forth the strangely dramatic death of Squire Philip Yordas just after he had made a will disinheriting his son Duncan. Thus Scargate Hall, when first described to the reader, is the property of Yordas's two daughters, Philippa Yordas and Eliza Carnaby. Mr. Jellicorse, the family lawyer, comes by chance upon evidence of a fatal flaw in the sisters' title to the estate, and rides over to acquaint them with this unpleasant fact.In the book's sixth chapter, we are introduced to Anerley Farm, about 120 miles from Scargate Hall, and the home of Mary Anerley. As Mary rides down the hollow of the Dyke on the same morning Mr. Jellicorse leaves Scargate Hall, she falls in with a man who is running for his life from men who are pursuing and shooting at him. On impulse, she shows him a place where he can hide. The man is Robin Lyth, who as a child was found washed ashore in a little cove north of Flamborough Head and raised by foster parents. He is on the run from Captain Carroway, a coastguard officer. Love blossoms between Mary and Robin, but many things interfere with their romance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erema"title="Erema">
The novel is narrated by the heroine of the story. Erema is the child of a Captain Castlewood, who had been imprisoned on a charge of murdering his father, an English peer, had made his escape from jail while the enquiry was pending, and spent the rest of his life in a miserable exile. His six children had died of diphtheria while he was in prison, and his wife had quickly followed them, leaving only Erema, a newborn infant, to share her father's exile and disgrace. Hand-in-hand these two have wandered together over the earth, till Erema has become a girl of fifteen, and fate brings the luckless pair to California. Here, in a wild parched region of desert, the father dies, and Erema is left solitary. But at this point of her story she is rescued and taken in hand by an old countryman of her father's, Sampson Gundry, who with his grandson, young Ephraim, works a sawmill in the district. He owns a stretch of country along the banks of the swift Blue River. He made a fortune, not by gold-digging, though the very soil he trod on sparkled with nuggets, but by cutting wood. He takes in the orphan child and rears her as his own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_(Tryon_novel)"title="The Other (Tryon novel)">
Set in 1935, the novel focuses on the sadistic relationship between two 13-year-old and identical twin boys: one of whom is well behaved while the other is a sociopath who wreaks havoc on his family's rural New England farm property.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broom_&amp;_Groom"title="Broom &amp; Groom">
This book is divided into two main categories: grooming and brooming. Under grooming, the book covers areas such as how to greet guests appropriately, how to handle hierarchy in both office and personal settings, and how to converse effectively. It further details how to be a good host and guest; social interaction etiquette; dining manners; mobile manners; restaurant manners; parking etiquette; how to behave while driving or walking on roads, in public places such as offices, lifts, airports, cinema halls, hospitals, and classrooms; and how to behave around VIPS, foreigners, teachers, and house help. Grooming includes how to maintain physical appearance, how to keep one's office, bathroom manners, day-to-day decency, and how to maintain the kitchen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dariel"title="Dariel">
The story is narrated by George Cranleigh, a younger son of Lord Harold Cranleigh, a destitute landowner in Surrey, who has been ruined, according to Blackmore, by the "farce of Free-trade".In the opening chapter George, riding home from market, surprises a maiden of surpassing beauty upon her knees in a ruined chapel. She proves to be Dariel, the daughter of Sur Imar, a prince of the Lesghians, a wild tribe of the Caucasus. A blood feud has arisen between Imar and his sister, and so he has, with his daughter, his foster-brother Stepan, and a body of retainers, come to England and settled peaceably in a deserted house in Surrey.Imar resolves to returns to his native land to educate his tribesmen in the lessons of civilisation. George, who has fallen in love with Dariel, follows her to the East. But Imar's twin-sister Marva, Queen of the Ossets, who is appropriately called by the natives "the Bride of the Devil", plans to kill Prince Imar and wed his daughter Dariel to her son. After weeks of travelling and days full of desperate adventure, George, with the help of miners and Lesghians, rescues Dariel and her father and kills the wicked Princess and her fiendish son.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit_and_Kitty"title="Kit and Kitty">
The novel is set in and around "Uncle Corny's" garden near Sunbury-on-Thames. The story turns on the love of Kit, the market-gardener's nephew, for Kitty, the daughter of a good but foolish scientific man, who has succeeded in making his own and his daughter's life miserable by marrying a second wife. This lady and her son Donovan are the villains of the story, and by their machinations poor Kit and Kitty are separated and made miserable.The course of true love is thwarted both before and after marriage: Kitty, for example, being stolen from her bridegroom during the honeymoon. Poetic justice is amply wreaked in the end on all ill-doers in an accumulation of horrors, including a parricide, a suicide, a leper husband returned to claim his wife, and her collapse from the shock into paralysis and imbecility.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlycross"title="Perlycross">
Sir Thomas Waldron, the squire of Perlycross, is suffering from a terminal disease. The news is kept from him and his family so long as possible, and his death comes as a great shock. Sir Thomas was aware that Dr. Jemmy Fox has fallen in love with his daughter Inez, and expresses to his friend Rev. Philip Penniloe his approval of the match should the girl herself care for the doctor. On the very night of the squire’s funeral it is found that the grave has been rifled and the body stolen. The only man with a clue to the mystery is a blacksmith who has been called up late at night by a mysterious party with a cart. He declares, on first telling of this, that he saw Dr. Fox with the cart, and this makes people suspect that Dr. Fox performed the sacrilege for medical purposes.Fox finds himself pointed at and shunned by nearly everybody in the parish of Perlycross. Lady Waldron, who never liked Fox, eagerly adopts the story. He has however, an alibi, as at the time of the occurrence he had been summoned to a distant place where his father was ill. Penniloe and others remain staunch to him, and one or two of the villagers take his side. Fox tries to see Lady Waldron, but she refuses him admittance; he, however, meets Inez, and not only finds that she does not believe the calumny, but that she reciprocates his affections. Time passes, and there is no clue found to the mystery; everybody is worried over it, especially, of course, Lady Waldron and her daughter, Dr. Fox, and Mr. Penniloe. The mystery is only resolved on the return of Sir Thomas's son from abroad, as he proves to be the means of finding the solution.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)"title="The Circle (Eggers novel)">
Mae Holland, a recent college graduate, lands a job at The Circle, a powerful technology company run by the "Three Wise Men." Mae owes her job largely to her best friend and college roommate, Annie, one of the forty most influential people in the company. Mae starts out in Customer Experience (CE), the firm's customer service department, but quickly climbs the company ladder. From the beginning, Mae is impressed by amenities at The Circle, including access to top-notch technology, dorm-like housing, gyms, recreation activities and parties. Mae's very first day at The Circle ends with a party where she encounters Francis, who remains a love interest throughout the rest of the novel. Later, Mae encounters and quickly becomes romantically involved with a mysterious colleague named Kalden, even though she is unable to verify his status at the company, or even obtain his last name.Meanwhile, The Circle continues to develop a range of sophisticated technologies, including SeeChange: light, portable cameras that can provide real-time video with minimal effort. Eventually, SeeChange cameras are worn all day long by politicians wishing to be 'transparent', allowing the public to see what they are seeing at all times.Another subplot is the diagnosis of Mae's father with multiple sclerosis, which eventually leads Mae to enroll her parents on her healthcare, which in turn drives them to install SeeChange cameras in their home. After a brief incident with her own legal issues, Mae ends up agreeing to wear a SeeChange device herself (called "going transparent"), representing her own growing role in the company, epitomized by a public talk in which she insists, "secrets are lies," "sharing is caring," and "privacy is theft." Mae's job now mainly consists of touring the campus and showing customers future products; any hints of her own doubts about privacy seem dropped, in contrast to her ex-boyfriend Mercer. He dislikes the internet and eventually insists on going off the grid to escape the more and more far-reaching influence of The Circle and its technologies. Kalden calls Mae, warning her that The Circle must be stopped, but she refuses to listen. Mae’s indoctrination into the company and its use of peer pressure to invoke “herd mentality” is directly contrasted by the character of Mercer. Mercer represents a small portion of the book’s world that rejects The Circle’s ever more intrusive technologies. Throughout the novel he goes from having a benign distaste for the ways of the present to attempting to escape from his doomed society.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Croquet_Player"title="The Croquet Player">
Georgie, a gentleman with "soft hands and an ineffective will," is dependent on his wealthy aunt, Miss Frobisher. He is "refreshingly unimaginative." Croquet is his and his aunt's "especial gift," and he and his aunt play often as they "move about a lot." While relaxing one summer day on a terrace at Les Noupets in Normandy, Georgie strikes up a conversation with an English doctor named Dr. Finchatton, who tells him his life story.Finchatton has purchased a medical practice in a quiet English district called Cainsmarsh, but this location turns out to be less tranquil than he had hoped. He slowly becomes persuaded that some malign influence is warping life in Cainsmarsh. He consults an old vicar, who tells him that there is indeed "something evil" at work there. The vicar attributes this to the "grisly ghosts" of "a tribe of cave men" whose graves have been disturbed by "local archaeologists and naturalists."Troubled by this, Georgie visits the curator of the local museum. The latter shows him some Neanderthal remains that are the museum's "prize specimen" and Georgie learns that such creatures "had slouched and snarled over the marshes for a hundred times the length of recorded history." The curator explains that Finchatton's disturbed state is due to humanity's "breaking the frame of our present" by being forced out of the "magic sphere" where "we felt taken care of and safe." The only solution is to "broaden your mind to the new scale."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_War_(novel)"title="The Long War (novel)">
A generation after the events of The Long Earth, mankind has spread across the new worlds opened up by Stepping. Where Joshua and Lobsang once pioneered, now fleets of airships link the stepwise Americas with trade and culture. Mankind is shaping the Long Earth—but in turn the Long Earth is shaping mankind. A new "America", called Valhalla, is emerging more than a million steps from Datum Earth, with core American values restated in the plentiful environment of the Long Earth, using "combing", slang for hunting-gathering to support their economy —and Valhalla is growing restless under the control of the Datum government.Meanwhile, the Long Earth is suffused by the song of the trolls, graceful hive-mind humanoids. But the trolls are beginning to react to humanity's thoughtless exploitation. Joshua, now married to Helen, is summoned by Lobsang to deal with gathering multiple crises that threaten to plunge the Long Earth into a war unlike any humankind has waged before.When Sally turns up unexpected to Joshua's home—now in Hell-Knows-Where, a small town on Earth West 1,397,426 where he has been elected Mayor—Joshua is forced to return with his family, wife Helen and son Dan, to Datum Earth to investigate and defuse the growing tensions between humans and trolls. Soon after their arrival, Sally dashes off to Earth West two million, the enigmatic "Gap" world existing without an earth, with Ex-Lieutenant Jansson (now stricken with leukaemia from her efforts with the Madison bombing and nuclear fallout) to aid Mary the troll and her son from possible execution.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flamethrowers"title="The Flamethrowers">
In 1975, a young art school graduate from Reno moves to New York City hoping to become a successful artist. She meets an older, more established artist, Sandro Valera, the heir of Moto Valera, an Italian tire and motorcycle company. He and his friends nickname her Reno. In 1976, with the reluctant approval of Sandro, she takes one of the Moto Valera prototype motorcycles to the Bonneville Salt Flats where she intends to race and then photograph her tracks as part of an art project. Reno crashes the bike but is adopted by the Moto Valera crew who help her set a record to become the woman with the fastest racing record in the world.The following year the Valera crew ask Reno to join them on a promotional tour in Italy. Sandro reluctantly decides to accompany Reno and the two spend two weeks with Sandro's family in their villa in Lake Como before the promotional tour is due to begin. However plans for the tour are put on hold when the star of the promotional tour, a professional racer, is kidnapped. Reno also finds Sandro kissing his cousin, Talia, and runs away to Rome with the Valera family mechanic, Gianni, who introduces her to a group of young radicals. Reno is swept up in part of the Movement of 1977 and participates in riots. She later helps Gianni illegally cross the border into France.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_Who_Plucked_Red_Flowers_beneath_the_Queen's_Window"title="The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen's Window">
Naeva—the Lady of the story's title—is a sorceress in a matriarchy. After being fatally injured, she is persuaded to allow her spirit to be bound, so that she can be summoned and thus continue to advise her queen. However, after the queen has herself died, Naeva continues to be summoned — first by the queen's successor, and then by people from civilizations later than hers. She grows into a legendary figure, part of a group of similarly bound souls called Insomniacs. Eventually the universe ends and a strange creature invites her and the other Insomniacs into a new one.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_Order_Book"title="The Birth Order Book">
In the book, Leman details four types of personality based upon an individual's birth order: First Born, Only Child, Middle Child, and Last Born. Only Child types are considered to be a form of the First Born personality type, but "in triplicate".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_of_the_Twentieth_Century"title="Memoirs of the Twentieth Century">
The book is a series of letters from British representatives in the foreign cities of Constantinople, Rome, Paris, and Moscow and a smaller number of letters returned to them from the UK. The representatives address their letters to a Lord High Treasurer who is in service of King George VI. The technology of the 20th century is unchanged from Madden's own era; the focus is instead on the political and religious state of the world in the future.In Madden's future history, much of the world has come to be dominated by the Jesuits. In the early 19th century, Jesuit Paul IX became pope and seized temporal control over most of Italy. The eighteenth century had been one of war between Spain, France, and the Holy Roman Empire, but weakened by conflict and mismanagement all three powers became vassals to the Pontiff by the mid-nineteenth century. Also under papal control are vast estates in Africa, China, and Paraguay.In France, King Louis XIX reigns but the French state is weak and he is controlled by his Jesuit prime minister. In Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire has fallen and been replaced by a Tatar one. The new regime pursued a liberal religious policy, and by 1997 Deism and Christianity had come to dominate, with Jesuit missionaries active and powerful. Russia is an expansionist power, having annexed Finland, Poland, and parts of Persia and Turkey; while traditionally a foe of the Jesuits the late 20th century sees them growing in power there as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Snail_and_the_Whale"title="The Snail and the Whale">
On a smooth black rock by the docks lives a flock of sea snails, of which one longs to see the big, wide world; a feeling her rock-bound compatriots cannot understand. After she writes an advert for a ""lift wanted around the world" using her snail trail, a kind humpback whale arrives one moonlit night and offers to take her along on his travels. Together they go on a world-wide ocean journey, past icebergs and volcanoes, sharks and penguins until the snail feels very small in the vastness of the world. The aquatic duo see many sights along their way until one sunny summer's morning, the humpback whale, confused by the sound of a group of racing speedboats, swims into a bay and is left beached by the retreating tide.In an effort to help her friend, the snail herself crawls to a nearby school in the bay, and writes "Save The Whale!"" in her slimy trail on the blackboard. The school's children and teacher immediately fetch the emergency services, and the local people and fire department help to keep the abandoned whale wet until the tide finally turns. The snail and the whale are able to refloat and swim safely away from the villagers, who wave and cheer them on.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Kingdom"title="The Third Kingdom">
Having survived their encounter with the Hedge Maid, Richard and Kahlan are stranded in the Dark Lands and captured by two cannibals, whom Richard repels with the help of a group of villagers sent by the boy Henrik. These people, led by a woman named Ester, hurry them to a village of caves known as Stroyza. There a young sorceress named Sammie tries to heal Kahlan but becomes hysterical when she discovers that Kahlan contains an active morbid force or 'presence of death', which she also sees in Richard. Henrik reveals that a mob attacked Richard and Kahlan's caravan and that General Meiffert, Cara, Zedd, and Nicci concealed Richard and Kahlan. They fled to divert their attackers while Henrik was ordered to find help. He also reveals that they need a containment field to be healed. The only one they know of is in the People's Palace. They are interrupted by screams and other noises of struggle, and Richard destroys a number of reanimated corpses but the exertion pushes him into unconsciousness.Sammie heals their minor wounds but is unable to remove the death within. Though Richard awakens, Kahlan remains unconscious, and Sammie tells Richard the story of her family, including the disappearance of her mother and of the duty of the gifted people of Stroyza (which Richard reveals is High D'Haran for 'sentinel'): to watch the north wall beyond which the world of life and the world of death are united. On the other side are a people devoid of souls called the half people, created by the Emperor Sulachan in an ancient war who seek to obtain souls by eating their enemies. To rescue Richard's party, he and Sammie travel to the north wall, fighting several mobs of half people on the way. While trying to find the half people holding Richard's friends they are separated, and Bishop Hannis Arc captures Richard. Meanwhile, Kahlan wakes, and while getting information from Ester she is taken by Abbot Ludwig Dreier and his Mord-Sith Erika to Fajin Province, where he tortures people to the brink of death in an attempt to glean prophecy from them in their last moments.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tjhit_Liap_Seng"title="Tjhit Liap Seng">
In Canton, a baby girl is delivered to a group of seven male students who call themselves the "Seven Stars", during their meeting. They name the child Tjhit Seng Nio and agree to raise her together. Eight years later, after the group graduates, Seng Nio is enrolled in a school for girls. Her adoptive fathers find their own employment, but stay in contact. When Seng Nio turns 14, her guardians argue whether to either choose a husband for her, or let her find her own.Meanwhile, one of Seng Nio's guardians, Tjin Hoe, is unintentionally swept up in the Taiping Rebellion when he mistakenly believes that he is bankrupt. Though Tjin Hoe asks his father's friend Ong Thaj (real name: Thio Giok) to kill him, the latter is unwilling to do so and asks the leader of the rebellion, Lauw Seng, to do so. When Tjin Hoe realises that he is not bankrupt after all, he attempts to prevent his death, tracking Lauw Seng down to the Great Wall of China. The rebel leader captures Tjin Hoe and declares that the former student must die for being so willing to waste his life. He locks Tjin Hoe in a coffin and sends him to Shanghai by boat. There Ong Thaj reveals that the challenge was meant to make Tjin Hoe value his life better.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Fair_(novel)"title="State Fair (novel)">
The novel follows the Frake family from the fictional town of Brunswick, Iowa. The father, Abel, has a Hampshire boar named "Blue Boy" that he thinks can win the grand championship at the Iowa State Fair. At the beginning of the story, he bets the local Storekeeper that "Blue Boy" will win the grand prize and that the Frakes will all have a good time at the fair and be better off for it when the fair is over. The pessimistic Storekeeper accepts the bet, but also bets that if he (the Storekeeper) loses, something "worse than anything you can think of" will have happened to the Frakes at the fair unbeknownst to Abel.The mother, Melissa, has a set of pickles and wants to win blue ribbons for them, beating the competition that has won in prior years. Teenage son Wayne has been practicing so he can win at the "hoop-la" ring toss stand and get revenge on the crooked carnival barker who had taken his money and pride in previous years. Teenage daughter Margy just wants to enjoy herself at the fair and take a break from everyday life. Both teenagers are also in the mood for a new romance. Wayne worries that his girlfriend, Eleanor, who has just spent her first year at college and will not be accompanying him to the fair, has gotten too sophisticated for him. Margy meanwhile finds herself bored with her responsible, devoted, but dull boyfriend Harry Ware, who has planned their whole lives as a farm couple already, and will also not be coming to the fair.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Disaster_Artist"title="The Disaster Artist">
19-year-old Greg Sestero, an aspiring actor struggling with confidence, first encounters Tommy Wiseau in an acting class held by Jean Shelton in San Francisco. Sestero is initially perplexed by Wiseau's over-the-top acting technique, unusual physical appearance, mysterious accent, and eccentric behavior, which includes a fascination with American culture and a refusal to discuss his past. At the same time, Sestero admires Wiseau's boldness and genuine enthusiasm for both life and acting. The two form an odd but affectionate bond as Sestero learns of the many contradictions of Wiseau's personality.Sestero signs with talent agent Iris Burton; as he slowly accrues more acting credits and makes other friends, Wiseau grows jealous and schemes to earn similar acknowledgment (such as earning a SAG card by producing and starring in a commercial for a company he himself owned), and threatens to evict Sestero from the Los Angeles apartment he is loaning to him, leading Sestero to become uncomfortable with their relationship. After viewing "The Talented Mr. Ripley" for the first time, Sestero is struck by how similar Wiseau is to the title character. However, when Wiseau also sees the film, instead of recognizing his own behavior, he is deeply impressed by it and becomes obsessed with creating something just as emotionally powerful. He subsequently disappears from Greg's life for nine months—during which their occasional phone calls frequently indicate that Wiseau had become depressed and suicidal. He eventually returns to Los Angeles with a finished script for his film: "The Room", which includes a character, Mark, named after "Ripley" actor Matt Damon (whose name Wiseau had misremembered).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lieutenant_(novel)"title="The Lieutenant (novel)">
Daniel Rooke (loosely based on Dawes) is a self-possessed boy whose parents seek to better his prospects in life by having him brought to the attention of important people, and thus given opportunities others of his station may not have had. Among them is the Astronomer Royal. He is a mathematical prodigy but must keep this to himself or else be victimized by adults and fellow students.After graduating from the Royal Naval College, Portsmouth, he takes up a commission in the Royal Marines. During the American Revolutionary War, he is almost killed by a falling spar, and takes several years to recover.Just before the First Fleet sails for what is to be the penal colony of New South Wales, he is invited by the Astronomer Royal to take instruments and observe the passage of a predicted comet. He accepts and is also in the company of another officer named Silk who he had known during the war.As the astronomer, Rooke is given considerable freedom and constructs an observatory on a headland outside the colony's camp. Conflicted by internal struggles and driven by his desire to be undisturbed, he asks permission to establish his own hut in the vicinity of the observatory, remaining in it except when required to be at the camp or on routine, and for weekly meals to keep in contact with other officers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centuries_of_Childhood"title="Centuries of Childhood">
The book argues that childhood as an idea has changed over time. It covers the concepts of childhood, adult–child relations, and childhood experience across cultures and time periods. His most well-known sources are medieval paintings that show children as small adults. Ariès argues that childhood was not understood as a separate stage of life until the 15th century, and children were seen as little adults who shared the same traditions, games, and clothes.Its most famous conclusions are that "childhood" is a recent idea, and that parenting in the Middle Ages was largely detached. Ariès argues the following: nuclear family bonds of love and concern did not exist in the era, and children died too often to become emotionally attached. Children were not treated as delicate or protected from sexuality. They spent time with adults outside of family structures, and were not always segregated to school and family structures. Often they would be fostered to others as domestic servants.Despite the book's fame for its thesis, "Centuries of Childhood" focuses more on the beginnings of systematized schooling and the decline of a common public sociability. This focus extends from the author's greater criticism of modern life and its schism of social elements he saw to be once united: "friendship, religion, [and] profession". In this way, Ariès did not believe modern families adequately replace the role of common public community.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treasure_of_Vaghia"title="The Treasure of Vaghia">
This summer a group of children spend a wonderful holiday on the Greek island of Aegina. The arrival of a beloved French friend, a young psychiatrist working in Paris, will bring, apart from joy, a mission. To find a hidden treasure that could help a falling friend drive away his demons.A novel of strong emotion, full of adventure and rich descriptions, where the author perfectly recreates the particular atmosphere of children’s summertime on an island.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_sun"title="When the sun">
Greece faces the German occupation, a tormenting way of life for Greeks. Zoe will grow up with the horror of famine; she will hope for something better. She will suffer. She will live with it till the end of Evil. Then the wild feast of Liberation takes place. Zoe is twenty years old! A new life is awaiting her...In the pages of this novel, that became a “classic”, famine, resistance against the oppressor, fear and optimism for a better future are described with sensitivity and a restrained sense of tragedy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_of_Destiny"title="Sword of Destiny">
Geralt of Rivia meets the traveling knight Borch "Three Jackdaws" and his Zerrikanian bodyguards Tea and Vea, who seek a green dragon. Although Geralt is a Witcher, a professional monster slayer, he explains that he does not kill dragons, because they do not prey on humans. They join a larger party hunting the dragon, including Geralt's friend Dandelion; a group of dwarves led by Yarpen Zigrin; a mercenary group known as the Crinfrid Reavers, and another led by Boholt; chivalry-obsessed paladin Eyck of Denesle; a company of men-at-arms led by the underaged King Niedamir; and the sorcerers Dorregaray and Geralt's ex-lover Yennefer.The party eventually encounters a golden dragon, Villentretenmerth, who offers a fair battle to anyone who wishes to challenge him. Eyck of Denesle accepts and is defeated, which weakens the party's resolve and causes King Niedamir's cadre to leave.Boholt, the dwarves, and the Reavers elect to attack the dragon together and split the treasure. Geralt, Dorregaray, and Dandelion disagree, for which they are paralyzed by Yennefer and tied to a cart. Yennefer attempts to disable the dwarves and Reavers so she can kill the dragon herself, as its viscera will supposedly cure her infertility, but is disabled instead. Villentretenmerth, bored of waiting, enters the struggle and dispatches the Reavers and dwarves. He leaves a fledgling green dragon with the remaining party members and attacks an oncoming militia from a nearby village. Tea and Vea appear and assist the golden dragon, revealing that Borch was actually Villentretenmerth in human form.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Steel_Breeze"title="On the Steel Breeze">
"On the Steel Breeze" is set in the 24th century, 200 years after the events of "Blue Remembered Earth". It depicts a massive interstellar colonization effort, involving hundreds of immense generation ships known as "holoships" carrying millions of humans to extrasolar planets. The holoships are propelled to relativistic velocities by engines based on exotic "Chibesa physics", but are in danger of overshooting their target planets due to a lack of fuel for deceleration. Meanwhile, the ocean-dwelling transhumans of the United Aquatic Nations have become one of Earth's pre-eminent powers, and the colonization of Venus is underway.The novel's main characters are two clones of Chiku Akinya, the daughter of one of the main characters of "Blue Remembered Earth". The original Chiku had herself cloned centuries before to allow her to experience three different lifestyles. One clone, Chiku Yellow, remained on Earth, while the second, Chiku Green, embarked on a holoship heading for the alien planet of Crucible, which is home to a mysterious structure known as the Mandala. A third clone, Chiku Red, was lost attempting to find her famous great-grandmother Eunice Akinya in deep space. Chiku Green faces a series of revelations after a strange accident kills hundreds aboard her holoship, while Chiku Yellow is haunted by a cybernetic "ghost", leading her to seek out a powerful transhuman on Venus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Person_Singular"title="Second Person Singular">
"Second Person Singular" follows two Arab men, a successful criminal attorney and a social worker, whose fates meet in a curious way.The lawyer has a flourishing office in West Jerusalem where he has two fellow Arabs jurists working for him: Tariq and Samaah. Tariq also works as a criminal attorney, Samaah works as his secretary. Although Samaah studied law, her diploma from the University of Jordan is not recognized in Israel. Furthermore, the lawyer thought it would be useful to have the daughter of a high ranking Fatah member working for him.In an effort to sustain his image as a sophisticated Israeli Arab, the lawyer visits a local bookstore every Thursday to buy novels that he read about in the literary supplement of his newspaper. On one evening, he buys a second-hand copy of Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata". His wife once asked him about this book, because it was mentioned all the time during her psychology lectures on Freud. Inside he finds a small white note in Arabic in his wife's handwriting that looks like a love letter. In a blind rage over the presumed betrayal the lawyer decides to hunt down the previous owner of the book. The previous owner – named Yonathan – had his name written down on the first page of the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Letters_(novel)"title="Love Letters (novel)">
Laura Horsley is a 26-year-old young woman who works in a bookshop which is about to close. At the last author event that she organized, Eleanora who is a literary agent, becomes impressed with Laura’s work and offers her a job to help her niece organizing a literary festival. On the one hand, Laura is keen on the idea, but on the other hand she feels that she is not the right person for the job. Later on, her friends manage to convince her to attend at least the first meeting where Laura is given an interesting and almost impossible task-she has to convince her favorite writer, the Irish Dermot Flynn, who hasn’t written anything in years, to come to the literary festival. It is definitely a challenge to Laura, because Dermot now lives as a recluse and it is almost impossible to get in touch with him. The pressure is on, and Laura has not much time left to find Dermot and convince him so she immediately flies to Ireland with her new musician friend, Monica. They first meet him at Dermot’s literary evening in a pub. Laura finds him incredibly attractive but very temperamental at the same time. She starts falling in love with her favorite writer. They spend more and more time together and Dermot agrees to go to England for the festival. He even agrees to run a course at the University of Bath and asks Laura to help him selecting the 10 best writings. After the end of the course Dermot goes back to Ireland and Laura faces her feeling towards him. In the next few weeks she spends most of her time with organizing the festival but due to a misunderstanding Dermot refuses to go so Laura flies again to Ireland. She finds out that Dermot does not go to pubs anymore and lives as a recluse again. She goes to his house and saves the situation. Dermot attends the festival and it turns out really well. He manages to overcome writer’s block and he has a great success. Laura and Dermot spend some time away from each other again, but not much later Dermot visits Laura at her parents’ house to tell how much he loves her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuba_Libre_(novel)"title="Cuba Libre (novel)">
Ben Tyler, a cowboy and sometime bank robber, is released from prison and is recruited by his old boss to ship a string of horses to a rich American sugar baron in Cuba. Their ship arrives in Havana harbor shortly after the explosive destruction of the warship "USS Maine", amid rumors that war between Spain and the United States of America is imminent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_about_Truman_School"title="The Truth about Truman School">
The book is told through the viewpoints of several different students at Truman Middle School such as Zebby and Amr, two students that have grown frustrated with the censorship of their school paper. They decide that the solution is to create their own website, thetruthabouttruman.com, where they and others can report on what they consider to be the "real" Truman Middle School. It's intended as a place where people can speak freely, but eventually some begin to use it as a way to post cruel things about one student, namely Lilly Clarke, a popular student at Truman. Someone anonymously posts pictures of her from years ago, when she was overweight and less attractive than she is now. Amr questions whether or not it is right to leave such a picture up, but Zebby insists that the website's purpose is to allow anyone to post and comment. This decision is slightly influenced by Zebby's dislike of Lilly. The posts about Lilly are met with mixed emotions, particularly from one student by the name of Trevor. He's unpopular and dislikes Lilly's current personality, but remembers times when Lilly had defended him when both were in elementary school.Zebby begins to realize that she is becoming more popular from the website she and Amr began, and as such begins to turn a blind eye towards the activity on the website. Lilly's cyberbullying continues and escalates when someone by the online name of "milkandhoney" posts their own website falsely accusing Lilly of being a lesbian. Tensions at the school escalate, prompting Trevor to react when Lilly's boyfriend Reece tries to cheat off him during an exam. As a result, Reece begins to poke Trevor with his pencil and the actions are noticed by the teacher. The two are brought into the Principal's office, only for Trevor to get upset when she asks him what he did to provoke Reece's actions. This infuriates Trevor, who silently thinks to himself that everyone asks him what "he" did to deserve bullying while nobody has been asking Lilly what she did to deserve what is happening to her. Eventually Lilly becomes ostracized from the entire school, her boyfriend breaks up with her, and she constantly receives disparaging emails and messages. This comes to a head when some of her former friends send her an anonymous e-mail telling her that nobody wants her on the cheerleading team due to the accusations of being a lesbian.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aid_on_the_Edge_of_Chaos"title="Aid on the Edge of Chaos">
The book focuses on the need to improve foreign aid and the value of complex systems science and research for how global international aid efforts should be designed, implemented and evaluated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Lansdale_Series"title="Lost Lansdale Series">
Hank and Beverly Small own a chain of video stores in the East Texas town of Imperial City. Hank has a black sheep nephew named Bill who often calls his uncle when he needs money or is in trouble. One morning Bill calls and Hank figures it's just another plea for money or he's in trouble with the cops. Hank figures it's no big deal. He has never been so wrong. Bill has fallen into trouble with a pair of vicious, sadistic murderers and the local police cannot be trusted. So Hank looks up his long estranged older brother Arnold for help. But the two killers, Fat Boy and Snake, are already onto them and the Smalls are framed for having child pornography and led down a path of brutal murder and sexual assault. This novel portrays scenes of brutality that are common in a Joe R. Lansdale story. For a while there doesn't seem to be any way the protagonists will be able to survive the likes of Fat Boy and Snake.One day young Jimmy notices a creepy looking old house that seemed to suddenly appear on his block of well–manicured lawns and maintained homes. The house really gives him the creeps, but his parents seem oblivious to its even being there. So he and his friend Bob set out to find out what they can about the house and its seemingly evil presence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casanegra_(novel)"title="Casanegra (novel)">
Tennyson "Ten" Hardwick is an actor trying to make it big in Hollywood, which is made difficult by his past as a gigolo that sold his body to anyone willing to pay the right price. This past has caused a distance between Tennyson and his family, especially his LAPD captain of a father. However overcoming his past proves to be harder than he imagined after Tennyson finds himself the prime suspect for the murder of Afrodite, a rapper and former client of his.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Aboard_for_Ararat"title="All Aboard for Ararat">
God Almighty pays a visit to Noah Lammock, a well-known author whom the outbreak of war has convinced that "madness had taken complete possession of the earth." At first God is thought to be a mental patient from a nearby asylum, but his dignified air earns him a reception in the writer's study. God explains that he has been "surprised" and "disappointed" by humanity, and tells Noah Lammock: "What I propose is that you should construct, with my help and under my instruction, an Ark."Lammock is intrigued, but first, since God tells him that the Bible is "wonderfully trustworthy" and possesses "substantial truth," demands an accounting for his decision to destroy the Tower of Babel. God has already explained that the creation of light entailed as well the creation of "a shadow," and "since I had come into our Universe as a Person, it is evident that my shadow also had to be a Person." Now God explains that he and Satan panicked at the prospect of "Man keeping together on the plain of Shinar in one world state, working together, building up and up," and "together . . . acted in such haste that frankly the covenant with Noah and all that was completely overlooked." God is repentant, however, and tells Lammock that still wants to "bring Adam into free, expanding fellowship with myself -- that old original idea." Lammock takes pity, in part because he notices the deity is "quivering on the very verge of non-existence."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worst._Person._Ever."title="Worst. Person. Ever.">
Raymond Gunt's journey begins in London, where in a meeting with his ex-wife, Fiona, she offers Raymond a job as a B-Unit cameraman on a reality TV show titled "Survival". While preparing to leave for this journey, he befriends and hires a homeless man named Neal as an assistant, and prepares himself to deal with a British/American culture clash.From this point in the novel, Raymond Gunt's journey is one of offense, crassness, and shock. He travels to Hawaii, then to Los Angeles, with each moment of his journey being rife with strife, mostly of his own creation. The characters reflect on this cultural clash between the United States and Britain, and the trouble they get into because of it. Raymond also finds Sarah, his love interest. From there, Raymond and Neal leave for Kiribati, after a run-in with the American military.Raymond and Neal arrive in Kiribati to begin filming the reality TV series, while the world around them has degraded into a state of turmoil, which may or may not be their fault. International incidents play out while the characters explore the island. As world events spiral out of control, Raymond, his friends and family react and respond to the world changing around them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blood_of_Olympus"title="The Blood of Olympus">
After the events of the previous novel, Jason, Piper, and Annabeth disguise themselves with Hazel's Mist to infiltrate Odysseus' home in Ithaca, where Gaea's resurrected souls are gathering. They learn that Gaea's army does not plan to invade Mount Olympus, but instead the Acropolis in Athens. Since the Gulf of Corinth is heavily fortified and guarded by the army, the demigods decide they have to circle the whole Peloponnese to reach Athens. When Michael Varus, one of the souls, recognizes the demigods, he forces Jason to confront his mother's insane spirit, and mortally wounds Jason. As Jason recuperates, the three demigods use Odysseus' marriage bed to summon Juno, who tells them to seek Nike and find Artemis and Apollo, both of whom have been banished by Zeus. At Olympia, Percy, Leo, Hazel, and Frank are forced to participate in Nike's deadly Olympic Games, but eventually captures her. She reveals that one of them is destined to die, and that he needs the Physician's Cure to survive, a cure that consists of Pylosian mint, the heartbeat of the chained god, and the curse of Delos.Frank obtains the first ingredient from his shapeshifter relatives in Pylos. Piper and Annabeth obtain the second ingredient, the Makhai or the chained god's heartbeat, from a chained Ares statue by defeating Mimas at the temple of Ares in Sparta. While sailing through the Aegean Sea, a violent storm hits the "Argo II." Percy and Jason discover it is caused by Kymopoleia, a daughter of Poseidon who is working with Polybotes. Jason convinces Kymopoleia to switch sides and they kill Polybotes together. In return, he swears to become a Pontifex Maximus after the war; Jason's resolution of his internal conflict heals his mortal wound. After reaching Mykonos, Leo, Frank, and Hazel meet with Artemis and Apollo. Apollo gives them the third ingredient, the cursed aster, and reveals that his son Asclepius is able to make the physician's cure and is at Epidaurus. Leo tells Hazel and Frank about his plan to sacrifice himself and defeat Gaea.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gate_of_Worlds"title="The Gate of Worlds">
In this alternate world, the Black Death killed three fourths of the European population (rather than our actual one fourth), delaying progress and, ultimately, the Industrial Revolution. Most of Central Europe was conquered by the Ottoman Empire, which occupied it until the twentieth century, leaving it in no shape for colonization of much of the non-European world as in our timeline. Constantinople was conquered in 1420, the Ottomans moved into Vienna in 1440, and took over Paris in 1460, before invading the British Isles in 1490. The greater virulence of the Black Death in Europe allowed non-European powers to emerge. These included the Aztecs and Incas in Middle Hesperides and Lower Hesperides, given that Europeans only 'discovered' the Hesperides in 1585 through an inadvertent Portuguese expedition. In Asia, Russia, India and Japan are now the main powers. By contrast, Turkey has undergone a period of instability that cost it control over England, from which it was expelled in the early twentieth century due to the leadership of a new royal dynasty inaugurated by "James the Valiant." Evidently, William Shakespeare's ancestors survived the epidemic, although Shakespeare wrote his histories, tragedies and comedies in the Turkish language, set in the Ottoman Empire milieu of England's new Muslim masters. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reckoners"title="The Reckoners">
## "Steelheart".The United States, and other parts of the world, were changed forever when a glowing red light in the sky known as Calamity gave normal people superhuman powers and abilities. These people came to be known to humanity as Epics. The story is told through the perspective of David, an orphaned teenager living in Newcago (formerly known as Chicago). Newcago is ruled by the extremely powerful Epic named Steelheart, who has created a society run by other powerful Epics, with normal people living with normal jobs. Steelheart is apparently invulnerable, is able to fly, can hurl blasts of energy, and can turn inanimate matter to steel; he has turned all of Chicago to steel for kilometers around and into the ground. Newcago is also shrouded in darkness by Steelheart's lieutenant, Nightwielder. Compared to other places in what was the United States, war torn, lawless and ravaged by warring Epics, Newcago is well run, with normal people generally having access to food, water, electricity, jobs, etc.David's father was murdered by Steelheart around the time of the collapse. When David was eight, he and his father were at a bank which was attacked by an Epic named Deathpoint who had the power to skeletonize people by pointing at them. Half the bank was killed when Steelheart came in and Deathpoint started to argue with him. During this time, David's father grabbed one of the dead guards' guns and prepared himself to kill Deathpoint, believing that Steelheart was a hero. When his father shot Deathpoint, the bullet grazed Steelheart's cheek and caused him to bleed. Enraged, Steelheart killed David's father and then proceeded to destroy the bank. David crawled into one of the vaults, which ultimately saved him from falling debris and isolated him from Steelheart's energy blasts. Later, David was recovered by rescue workers, but ran away scared. This also saved him because Steelheart came back with another Epic named Faultline and sank the entire building into the ground, killing all other survivors. David later guessed that Steelheart did this because everyone in the bank had watched him bleed and had learned that his invincibility had a weakness. David dedicates his life to learning about the Epics' power, Steelheart's weakness, and about a group of normal humans dedicated to killing Epics, called the Reckoners, so that he can get revenge on Steelheart.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juniper,_Gentian,_and_Rosemary"title="Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary">
Juniper (age 16), Gentian (age 14), and Rosemary Meriweather (age 11) are three sisters living happily in Minneapolis in 1994, when their lives are disrupted – first, by the appearance of a strange house (which Gentian cannot remember being built) in the vacant lot next door, and second, by the appearance of Dominic Hardy, a teenage boy who speaks in quotations and riddles, and who recruits Gentian's help to build a time machine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_(Grossman_novel)"title="You (Grossman novel)">
Average guy Russell is offered the chance to work at the prestigious Black Arts games as a video game designer, a company created by two formerly close friends of his. He soon finds that one of his other friends, Simon, also worked at the company but died under mysterious circumstances that might be related to the company's first big hit. Russell manages to initially flourish at the company but finds his job in danger after a software glitch could potentially permanently derail the company's next big game release. As Russell tries to find and fix the root of the glitch, he discovers that doing so is putting his own life at risk, as the glitch has far deeper implications than he initially realized.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Children"title="Medieval Children">
The book uses a wide range of sources to refute Philippe Ariès's "Centuries of Childhood" famous theses of the medieval nonexistence of "childhood" as an idea and of apathetic medieval parenting. Orme states that childhood was a phase distinct from the rest of life, "medieval children were ourselves, five hundred or a thousand years ago" with parents who genuinely cherished and grieved for their children, similar to modern parents. The book's refutation of Ariès is diffuse, broaching his thesis but not other aspects of "Centuries of Childhood". Orme uses examples from the English Middle Ages where Ariès uses the French. Orme's source materials include primers, journals, coroners' records, and shoes.Orme shows childhood to be expensive, with clothing like bibs and swaddlebands alongside books and community expenses. Children were breastfed and given special shoes to wear and items to chew. They would dress up, accidentally die while playing, and hurt animals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holy_Terror_(Wells_novel)"title="The Holy Terror (Wells novel)">
"The Holy Terror" presents itself as a biography of Rudolf "Rud" Whitlow, who is born with such an aggressive temperament that scarcely is he born but his monthly nurse exclaims: "It's a Holy Terror!" Rud Whitlow goes on to become the founder of the first world state, long a Wellsian dream."The Holy Terror" is divided into four books. The events of Book One take place in the recognizable recent English past, although Wells warns that "Every person, place and thing in this story—even the countries in which it happens—are fictitious . . . The England, the America, the London in this book are not the England, America and London of geography and journalism, but England, America, and London transposed into imaginative narrative." The novel even takes a futuristic turn and the action of the novel extends into the early 1950s.Book One describes Rud Whitlow's early life and education, including his years at university, where Richard Carstall, a childhood acquaintance who is the son of the doctor who brought Rud into the world, recognizes and admires Rud's emerging political genius. On a summer walking tour through the English countryside Rud meets Chiffan, a politically seasoned militant activist who is also disenchanted with democracy and left politics. Chiffan becomes a sort of advisor and mentor to Rud Whitlow.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memories_with_Maya"title="Memories with Maya">
The story is a first person narrative told through the eyes of protagonist Daniel (Dan). Dan lives life on his own terms, convinced that he can hack his destiny through the use of technology to better his condition. He believes that prayer is panacea for the weak and he can steer the course of his life through the use of logic, technology and science.With his close friend Krish, they merge artificial intelligence and augmented reality technology to create the "Wizer", a wearable visor much like Google Glass but powered by artificial general intelligence. The Wizer plays a key role in advancing the story and has uses in entertainment, sports, and even cyber sex via "Dirrogates" (a portmanteau of the words Digital and Surrogate, invented by the author)Mid way through the story a dark side of "Wizer" technology and augmented reality comes to the front, with a major tragedy occurring in a nightclub. It changes the course of Dan and Krish's life. Dan experiences a loss that challenges him in no uncertain terms to prove he is capable of hacking his destiny. He faces internal turmoil, battling moral and ethical issues to emerge a transhuman, both in mind and body.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shattered_(Walters_novel)"title="Shattered (Walters novel)">
15-year-old Ian is a wealthy spoiled teenager, who in order to pass his civics class, must perform community service. He decides to go to "The Club" after being intrigued merely by its name, and little to his knowledge turns out to be a soup kitchen. Over time, he becomes accustomed to the way the homeless are treated and how life on the streets really is. At this soup kitchen, he meets war veteran Sarge, who suffers from PTSD following his role as a UN peacekeeper in the Rwandan genocide.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Childhood"title="Stolen Childhood">
The book's eight chapters address prominent themes affecting slave children, including education, leisure, religion, transitions to freedmen, and work expectations. Due to a lack of historical sources direct from children, the book focuses more on their socialization and stories of survival than their internal perspectives. King's evidence includes slave narratives, ex-slave interviews collected by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), plantation owner diaries, census records, newspapers, autobiographies, missionary reports, and Freedmen's Bureau records. She contrasts Northern and Southern slave life, as well as their ownership by whites, blacks, and Native Americans.King shows how enslaved children were educated for survival and resistance. This education was usually informal and parental and taught how to deal with slaveowners and their abuse. King also named literacy and religion's role in their education. Kids were taught mutual cooperation as a virtue between slaves. Few slaves had formal education and those who did were artisans. Those educated or given religious training were only by the fortune of their owner's interests. King's stories tell of children in domestic, farm, and industrial work, who spent their free time in celebrations, dances, games, folk rituals, and hunting.When unoccupied, the children tended to their own needs and played with toy marbles and hobby horses. Some learned to count by playing hide and seek. Play was primarily for inculcating virtuous traits like courage and loyalty, but it also made life more tolerable. Black and white children played together before the age of ten, but separated afterward based on the demands of work. Children often helped the adults, and performed chores (like fetching wood or water) that quickly escalated into full work responsibilities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_of_Five"title="The Fall of Five">
"The Fall of Five" opens with Sam, reliving his experience of torture from Setrakus Ra culo. He is then taken to Dulce Base before being rescued by Adam, a mogadorian, and his father, Malcolm. culo Adam holds off the Mogadorians while the other two escape. Upon their escape Malcolm says he worries that he got Adam killed.We then move to Chicago with John Smith (Number Four) who is suffering from insomnia and sits on the roof of Nine's apartment. He tells Marina that she does not need to always make breakfast but she says it is fine. He then talks to Six momentarily before Eight takes her to spar. Nine tells John that he is basically their leader and Nine is the gun. Ella and John talk and she says she does not want to talk about her nightmares. John then goes to Nine and the rest of the Garde gather around a computer that has a news article on it. It is a crop field with the burned Loric Number Five. A few days later another article appears saying that Five is looking for them, and that he'll meet them in Arkansas. Sarah, John, and Number Six run down to Arkansas while Seven, Eight, Nine, and Ella stay behind. While Nine is passed out on the couch, Seven and Eight go on a date. Nine is angered by this and fights Eight. They all train together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deeply_Odd"title="Deeply Odd">
About a month after the events detailed in Odd Apocalypse, Odd Thomas encounters a demented truck driver. During this encounter, when he touches the trucker, Odd suddenly has a vision of three children being burned alive by someone wearing a red suit, black shirt, and black mask. At that moment Odd knows that the trucker experienced the same vision and is actually the person torching the children. Immediately, the trucker tries unsuccessfully to kill Odd. Because Odd knows he must help the children, he goes after the trucker even though the man tried to kill him. Knowing that he needs a vehicle, Odd steals an SUV being used as a get-away vehicle during a robbery but wrecks it. Then, he spots a limousine approaching him. The driver, who turns out to be an elderly, feisty, intriguing, and sometimes mysterious lady, stops, asks him a few questions, and offers him a job as her chauffeur. He reluctantly takes the job and eventually manages to track the trucker to an isolated mansion guarded by vicious dogs. Devil worshippers offer their sacrifices here, and they are planning on murdering a large group of children in a mass sacrifice.Alfred Hitchcock's ghost, which has been periodically appearing to Odd, explains several of the precepts about the cultists. They are wealthy, powerful, vicious people who do whatever they want and get away with it because the entity they worship protects them. Odd is shocked that Hitchcock's ghost speaks to him because he never has before; the lingering dead simply do not speak. Hitchcock explains to Odd that the only thing that really matters at this point in time is saving the children. Odd is vastly outnumbered and can certainly die in the attempt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Sui_Quash_the_Demons'_Revolt"title="The Three Sui Quash the Demons' Revolt">
The story is set in the Northern Song Dynasty. Wang Ze, a military commander, marries the sorceress Hu Yong'er. Hu was conceived after her mother burned an enchanted painting. She was taught magic from a fox spirit, enabling her to conjure armies with her spells. The three sorcerers, Zhang Luan, Bu Ji, and the Egg Monk Danzi Wang, join Wang after a series of adventures battling corrupt officials with their supernatural powers.Wang leads a revolt to overthrow the government with the help of the sorcerers. The three sorcerers grow disillusioned with Wang's impropriety and defect to the government forces headed by Wen Yanbo, who had arrived to suppress the rebels. The Egg Monk disguises himself as a monk by the name of Zhuge Sui and aids the imperial generals Ma Sui and Li Sui. Together, the Three Suis defeat Wang and end the rebellion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seto_Dharti"title="Seto Dharti">
The story is based on the life of a girl named Tara. She is a simple girl living in her village spending her time playing with other children of same village. While the story goes on, she gets married at the age of seven, the very age at which she does not even understand the meaning of marriage. The story in the novel is of the time period 1850-1950, when child marriage used to be very common in Nepalese society.Tara's husband has to go for his studies to Banaras, where he dies. Tara, a nine years old girl, is now bound to live her life as a child widow. The story continues and many difficulties come one by one in Tara's life. She comes back from her husband's home to her father's home. She tries to live her life peacefully trying to forget all the pain that life gave her when she was a young child. Later on, her mother dies and she has to take over all the responsibilities of the house.At her adult age, she leaves her father's house as she gets abused by her stepmother and moves to Devghat, a religious place for Hindus. There she makes a small hut and starts to live a long, boring life. The story mainly tries to reveal the terrible cultural practice called child marriage and child widowhood. This story portrays the pain of a child widow living her whole life without company. The novel best tries to shows bitter reality of Nepalese society where women have to suffer very much before the eradication of many evil practice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Harness_Maker's_Dream"title="The Harness Maker's Dream">
The book is a biographical portrait of Ukrainian immigrant Nathan Kallison and follows Kallison's journey as he flees anti-Semitic Russia and makes his way to the United States. Earning a living as a harness maker, Kallison quickly adapts to his new environment. After moving to San Antonio, Texas in 1899, he builds his one-room saddlery into the largest farm and ranch supply business in the Southwest and — a rarity among Jews in America — becomes a pioneer rancher. The Kallison Ranch shows his tradition-bound neighbors how to prosper by adopting the latest scientific advances in agriculture. At Kallison's Store —an early “big-box’ department store for farmers and ranchers — he meets customers’ needs by selling everything from a wide range of agricultural supplies to furniture for their homes, clothing for their families, and tires for their cars.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karnali_Blues"title="Karnali Blues">
The novel depicts the father-son relationship in a family from Far-western region of Nepal. The novels begins with birth of Brisha Bahadur, the narrator of the novel. Brisha Bahadur narrates his father struggles. The novel is divided into eleven days. Brisha Bahadur is taking care of his father who is sick in those eleven days and he reminisces his past with his father. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heir_of_Night"title="The Heir of Night">
Malian, the young Heir to the family of Night. She is trained to take over the duty of one day leading her House and Family, their duty is to protect the world from the ancient enemy that lives beyond the Keep of Winds and the vast mountain range known as the Wall of Night. But one night everything changes.After Malian and Kalan together with a mystical power manages to alert the New Keep of the attack by the Dark Swarm. After a long and hard struggle to drive the Dark Swarm out of the New Keep. The people of the keep, realize that the Heir is missing and assemble a rescue party to seek for her in the old keep. But unbeknown to the Earl of Night a decision is made that Malian must leave the Keep while she comes into her full power. Only then may she be able to defeat this ancient enemy and save the Derai and all of Haarth.She leaves the Keep with the young novice priest that she has now befriended, and her Steward Nhairin and two soldiers to protect her. They head out into the world. But they are followed. Someone has let her secret departure to be known. They are pursued into the land of Jaransor a land with an awakening power that does not like the Derai. No one is quite sure if the power that is waking is good, bad or mad but they do not want to find out. The pursuers catch up with them and they find that Nhairin the steward has turned against them, possibly because of a madness caused by the power in the land or maybe by the Dark Swarm themselves. They are helped by the arrival of the two heralds who help them get away from the Darkswarm pursuers. They meet up with a Shaman from the Winter Lands who has creates a snow storm to help them escape from the lands controlled by the Derai and to disappear from the following Darkswarm.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckold_(novel)"title="Cuckold (novel)">
The book follows the life of Maharaj Kumar and his attempts to win the affections of his wife Mira while war ravages the land around them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Cool"title="Zero Cool">
An American doctor goes to Spain to present a paper at a conference and take a holiday. He meets a mysterious woman and is asked to perform an autopsy on a member of the underworld. He finds himself in a conspiracy to obtain a jewel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_Spirits_Heal,_Others_Only_Dance"title="Some Spirits Heal, Others Only Dance">
Chapter one, "Research Assistance", provides a brief biography of Wallis' three Lungu assistants. In the second chapter, "Homeland and Familihood", Wallis offers a description of Ulungu and Lungu society, paying particular attention to extended family structures. Chapter three, "Managing Time and Space", explores conceptions of time and space among the Lungu, while in the following chapter, "Making Ethnography", Wallis outlines the "ngulu" ceremonies that he helped to organise and subsequently took part in; as part of this, he describes his own personal altered states of consciousness during the rituals. Chapter five, "Sorcery Attack", details Willis' own experience with alleged sorcerers ("muloozi") and the rituals enacted to counteract them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_Me_Another_Morning"title="Tell Me Another Morning">
The book begins with Tania, a 14-year-old girl living in Prague before the war. Her life is fairly ordinary until her 16th year, when Tania and her family were captured by Nazi guards. Tania and her parents are forced to board a train headed for a Nazi concentration camp. Once there, they are kept in a horrific environment where there was little food or water. Prisoners are worked to death and when they can no longer work, they are slaughtered. Tania manages to befriend Ilsa, a young teen who works in the kitchens and helps supply Tania and her parents with extra food. However, despite this help, the health of Tania's parents suffers- which proves problematic when it comes time to move to another camp. Ilsa tries to use lipstick to rouge the cheeks of Tania's mother and enable her to remain with them, only for Tania's mother to choose to remain with her husband, as he has been selected for death as opposed to transfer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senilità"title="Senilità">
Emilio, a clerk from an insurance company who is a failed writer, lives a modest life in a shared apartment with his sister Amalia, a spinster who has few relationships with the outside world, whose life consists mainly of taking care of her bachelor brother.At the start of the novel Emilio meets Angiolina, a vulgar, poor but beautiful woman, and falls in love with her, causing him to neglect his sister and his sculptor friend Stefano Balli. Balli has managed to balance his moderate artistic recognition with his successes with women, unlike Emilio, who is now eager for a brief amorous relationship himself. Emilio tries to explain to Angiolina that their relationship will be subordinate to his other duties, such as those with his own family. In short, he wants to keep the relationship unofficial, and for both parties not to be too committed.Balli, who does not believe in love, tries to convince Emilio to simply have fun with Angiolina, known throughout Trieste as a loose woman. Emilio ends up, instead, opening his heart to this woman, and falls deep under her spell, despite knowing that she is at heart promiscuous. He imagines transforming Angiolina through his education. Balli is interested in Angiolina as his model for a sculpture, but Emilio keeps imagining the two being unfaithful to him. Balli tries to warn Emilio from being too committed: Angiolina, he says, is seen consorting with an umbrella maker and is soon harboring amorous interest for Balli himself. The revelation pains Emilio; ironically since, as indicated at the beginning of the novel, their initial agreement was for Emilio and Angiolina to have a non-committed relationship. He breaks off with Angiolina briefly, but soon finds himself searching her out for another tryst.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Birds"title="Ten Birds">
At the beginning of the story, ten birds are on a riverbank trying to figure out a way to cross to the other side. One by one the birds find a way to cross the river using different building materials. The first bird, the one they call "Brilliant", builds some slits and crosses the river. The next bird, the one they call "Quite Advanced", engineers an underwater paddle to get to the other side. As the book goes on one by one they cross the river, each with different names. The last bird to cross the river is the one they call "Needs Improvement." This bird devises a simple plan, to just walk across the bridge to the other side of the river, leaving all the birds astounded.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crazy_Man"title="The Crazy Man">
"The Crazy Man" is set in 1965 in Saskatchewan, Canada. Pamela Porter reinforces the harsh times by incorporating day-to-day life during the Vietnam War, Communism, and The Cold War. Financial times were tough.The novel begins by introducing the protagonist Emaline, a twelve-year-old girl who, like other little girls, loves playing with friends and going to school. Emaline lives on a farm, when she is involved in a terrible tractor accident. While trying to save her dog, Prince, from being run over by the tractor her father is driving, Emaline succeeds in saving her dog but unfortunately her leg is caught in the machine, and she is disabled. Grief-stricken, Emaline's father, Cal, shoots Prince, then leaves everything behind, the family farm, his family, his crippled child, and all his responsibilities. He blames himself for Emaline's injuries, but he also blames the dog for precipitating this tragic accident.Emaline cannot understand why her father would do this to her and her mother. Throughout the novel, she continuously wonders why her father left and when her father would come back: "I think about dad. How in the world could someone just disappear?" As a result Emaline blames herself. The guilt Emaline feels about her father leaving consumes her thoughts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Train_(book)"title="Ghost Train (book)">
The story, first published in Canada, is told through the eyes of a young girl, Choon-yi, born to poor peasants in southern China. She has only one arm, and her mother rejects her, but her father loves her dearly and encourages her artistic gift. When she is 12, her father leaves for America to work on the railway being built through the mountains. After two years he sends her money to join him, but when she gets there, she learns that her father has died. He appears to her in a dream and asks her to paint him on the train he built. The full-page paintings show her traveling on the hurtling engines; they represent the power of the railroad and the sorrow of the men who died building it, their clothing stained with mud and blood.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella's_Tree"title="Bella's Tree">
Bella's grandmother, Nan, is "crooked". All the berries she wished she had picked are now covered with snow. And on top of that, it is nearly Christmas and she has not gotten a Christmas tree. Bella asks Nan if she can cut down a tree for them, but Nan does not believe a little "slip of a thing" could handle an axe. After Bella proves that she is "big and strong and smart and well coordinated," Nan gives her the axe. Bella and her large dog Bruno set out to fetch a Christmas tree. The first tree they find is an alder tree. Bella asks the junco sitting in the tree if she might have the tree for her Nan for Christmas. The junco agrees as long as it can come sing in the tree on Christmas Day. When Bella brings the tree home, Nan tells her that it is not the right kind of tree. They decorate it anyway, and Nan teaches Bella a song to remind her to look for an evergreen tree.The next day, Bella and Bruno set out to find an evergreen tree. Bella finds a spruce tree, promising the chickadee sitting in that it may come sing in the tree on Christmas Day. Once Nan finishes telling Bella that a spruce tree is not a Christmas tree, they set it next to the alder bush and decorate it. Nan teaches Bella another song to help her find a Christmas tree.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creepy_Carrots!"title="Creepy Carrots!">
Jasper Rabbit loved carrots, especially the carrots that grew in Crackenhopper Field. They were "fat, crisp and free for the taking". Jasper enjoyed these carrots "on the way to school, on his way to Little League practice and on his way home at night", until he started to imagine that they were following him. He first noticed something strange after his Little League game when he stopped at Crackenhopper Field. He thought he saw three jack-o-lantern-jawed carrots behind him in the bathroom mirror. When he turned around, it was just a washcloth, shampoo bottle, and a rubber duck. Then while he was brushing his teeth, he saw the creepy carrots. Jasper yelled for his parents when a carrot shadow lurked up on his bathroom walls. "By the end of the week Jasper was seeing creepy carrots creeping EVERYWHERE." Jasper then came up with a plan to make sure the carrots couldn't escape. He built a fence and a moat around Crackenhopper Field. Jasper was very pleased with himself: "No creepy carrots would get out of that patch again." As the sun set, the carrots "cheered". Their plan had worked. Jasper Rabbit would never get into that carrot patch ever again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Song_Within_My_Heart"title="The Song Within My Heart">
A young boy grows up in an average Cree household but has a very special bond with his grandmother. She takes her heritage very seriously and wants to pass the traditions and knowledge down unto her grandson. By doing so, she takes him to his first pow-wow. Through this cultural experience, he learns new things about his ancestry and does so by ways before he could not imagine. For instance, the people who play the drums at this pow-wow share their story through the rhythm and the beats of their drum. Not only does this young boy learn more about his heritage, he learns to look at things in a different perspective and realizes that his family history is all around him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_for_Extinction"title="Education for Extinction">
"Education for Extinction" is an exhaustive history of assimilation era American Indian education, particularly its boarding schools. Adams contends that boarding schools were the federal government's key means for addressing its American Indian issues, and that the schools left a "psychological and cultural mark" on Indian students even while they failed at assimilation. He uses published primary and secondary archival sources as evidence combined with anthropological theory. The book is divided into four sections: education as the assimilation program's center, American Indian perspective of the program's impact, an analysis of American Indian reaction to boarding schools, and American Indian post-educational experiences and reformer reflections.Reformers sought to change their role from civilizers to assimilators when reservation conditions crumbled. This plan for assimilation included provision of dedicated lands, and new legal and educational systems, including common schools, day schools on reservation, and boarding schools both on and off reservation. Adams describes boarding schools that "alienated those it claimed to serve" as its "total institution" nature provided acculturation outside standard curriculum. While students received instruction in the three Rs and in farming and domestic areas, Adams shows practices that targeted the students cultures including haircuts, restriction of native language and names, and school uniforms. With regard to reformer intent, he summarizes that the "only way to save Indians was to destroy them (culturally)". Adams details the complex reaction to the schools, from hiding children to arguing over certain rules, and the overall acquiescence to the federal role. While students expected to become literate and learn new technologies, they often fell ill or died and received fewer benefits than they were promised. Adams finds more criticism from lack of "adequate and responsive instruction" than he does towards the schools as a system.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tiny_Kite_of_Eddie_Wing"title="The Tiny Kite of Eddie Wing">
The story follows a young boy named Eddie Wing who had an extreme love for nothing but kites. His parents ran a flower shop but did not have enough money to buy him the supplies to make a kite. All the kids on the Wing's street were also poor so when Eddie decided to act out flying an imaginary kite they all followed and played along. Each year the town Eddie lived in would host the Festival of Kites, which was Eddie's favorite event. Every year a prize was offered by Old Chan.Chan was the richest man in the town and everybody looked up to him, especially Eddie. Chan had dreamed of one day becoming a poet, but there had been no time for that as he had to work in the family's restaurant. But now that he was old, he could sit outside the restaurant and make up poems. This year Old Chan decided that the winner of the Kite Festival would have to have the smallest kite.Eddie did not even have enough money to make a small kite so he did not enter the Festival, but he still attended and flew his imaginary kite. Old Chan noticed Eddie flying his imaginary kite but did not pick him as the winner, instead he brought Eddie back to his restaurant and gave him a parcel of material to make his own dream kite. Eddie made a beautiful kite that he flew from the tallest hill and Old Chan finally wrote down a poem of a young boy flying a tiny kite of dreams.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reluctant_Journal_of_Henry_K._Larsen"title="The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen">
After his older brother takes his dad's gun to school to kill himself and his bully, Henry K. Larsen is thrown into a brand new town and a brand new school in order to escape the anger of his old friends and neighbors. In this new town Henry fights to keep knowledge of the "IT" from tainting his new friends' views of him the way it did back home. Henry begins to understand what it means to grieve for a loved one who has committed suicide, even through your anger. Through his own experience at school Henry starts to realize the desperate position his brother was in and the impact that bullying had not only on his brother, but on his new friends now. Henry never sugarcoats how he feels and explores the emotions he knows he should not have.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Kellock_Died_Today"title="Johnny Kellock Died Today">
"Johnny Kellock Died Today" follows twelve-year-old aspiring artist Rosalie Norman. Rosalie is the youngest of six children and claims to have the oldest mother in the world. Rosalie explains that her mother was born in 1899, which is "last century", and that she was already 50 years old when she gave birth to Rosalie. Rosalie likes to tell people that it is a world record, even though she herself doubts it. Rosalie lives with her mother, whom she calls Mama, her father, whom she calls Norman, and her 17-year-old sister, Martha.She begins the story by explaining that her mother always makes her stay outside in the summer. Her mother is not near, however, so Rosalie sits at the bottom of the stairs doing what she loves, drawing. Rosalie's mother forces her to go outside, and as she does, Rosalie notices a boy nicknamed Gravedigger across the street. Rosalie explains that Gravedigger goes to St. Stephen's Elementary School, the Catholic school across the street from her Protestant school, Mulgrave Park Elementary School. Gravedigger has failed sixth grade once already. She then explains that everybody calls him Gravedigger because his family bought a cemetery where he works, digging and taking care of the land. A rumour had gone around that Gravedigger dug up his deceased mother and keeps her in a jelly cupboard in his house. Before Rosalie can continue her thoughts about him, Gravedigger gets her attention, and tells her that he has a letter for Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Norman. Rosalie does not understand, as her brother, Fredrick Norman, lives in another town. By the time Rosalie realizes her father's first name is Frederick, not Norman, she is very embarrassed and takes the letter which she then gives to her father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_I_Learned_Geography"title="How I Learned Geography">
Driven from home by a "war [that] devastated the land," a family flees to a remote city in the steppes. One day, the father returns from the market not with bread for supper but with a wall-filling map of the world. "'No supper tonight,' Mother said bitterly. 'We'll have the map instead.'" Although hungry, the boy finds sustenance of a different sort in the multicolored map, which provides a literal spot of brightness in the otherwise spare, earth-toned illustrations, as well as a catalyst for soaring, pretend visits to exotic lands. Shulevitz's rhythmic, first-person narrative reads like a fable for young children. Its autobiographical dimension, however, will open up the audience to older grade-schoolers, with an endnote describing Shulevitz's life as a refugee in Turkestan after the Warsaw blitz, (in World War II) including his childhood sketch of the real map. Whether enjoyed as a reflection of readers' own imaginative travels or used as a creative entree to classroom geography units, this simple, poignant offering will transport children as surely as the map it celebrates.According to Elizabeth Devereaux, the children’s reviews editor at Publishers Weekly, there is a common theme among Shulevitz's children's books: The destruction of family happiness, the reversal of fortune, the foolish bargain, the impossible task: all these classic themes control this story. She continues to say, "In framing his own story, replacing autobiographical fact with archetypal forms, Shulevitz keeps the focus on the inner world that he has so consistently illuminated. Once again, he reminds us that folly is not the opposite of wisdom, but so close a relative that the two are often mistaken."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubba_Ho-Tep_(novella)"title="Bubba Ho-Tep (novella)">
In this story, the real Elvis Presley switched places years ago with an Elvis impersonator. Tired of the life of drugs, women, and people who wanted nothing more than his money, he settles in to live a life of obscurity in an East Texas trailer park, where he becomes the best Elvis impersonator ever. Then his health begins to fail, and he falls from a stage and breaks his hip. His trailer burns down and with it all evidence that proves he was the real Elvis Presley. He ends up in a shabby retirement home, which is where the story starts.Late at night, Elvis hears scuttling noises and other creepy sounds in the otherwise quiet Mud Creek Shady Grove Convalescence Home. He befriends a black man, who is convinced he is John F. Kennedy, and the two begin to piece together that an Egyptian mummy is stalking the halls and sucking up souls in the night. Together the two men confront the monster, as no one will believe them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminal_States"title="Liminal States">
The novel contains three main sections: The Builder, The Judge and The Mother, which are respectively a western, noir and science fiction/horror. They are separated by two shorter sections and supplemented by "The Reificant".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Friend_of_the_Family_(novel)"title="A Friend of the Family (novel)">
The main events of the novel occur between the years of 1993-2007, from Laura's neonaticide through Alec packing up and leaving his family. Lauren Grodstein utilizes flashbacks to exploit how the narrator, successful New Jersey internist Pete Dizinoff, ends up where he is today: estranged from his best friends, the Sterns, his son, Alec, and his patients, as well as on the verge of divorce with his wife, Elaine. Pete’s need for control over his son’s life eventually drives Alec away from him, and away from the bright future Pete had pushed him towards. This trait also sets up the violent conclusion with Laura. Pete’s God complex severely affects his professional life when he ignores Joe’s advice about his patient Roseanne and fails to diagnose her with Addison’s disease, a condition which eventually kills her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagine_a_Day"title="Imagine a Day">
This work of art contains paintings of great imagination that sometimes plays tricks on the eyes. It encourages the reader to think outside of the box and to make connotations to the world we live in. The book includes references to nature and all different things that one can imagine themselves doing. In addition to its literal meaning, the words aid to invoke ideas or feelings for the reader, by introducing phrases such as 'when you don't need wings to soar’ and 'when everything you build touches the sky.' to help create peculiar dreams of what life could be like.The powerful symbolism of the book works in unison with paintings and text to create deeper meaning. It symbolizes objects as more than just its arbitrary symbol, as the quotation ‘when a tree is a ladder between earth and air’ presents the tree as not just a piece of wood, with bark and branches growing from the ground, but as something to be recognized in a different fashion-as a ladder. By drawing on the tree’s connections with the earth and air, it also portrays the beauty of nature, and how to appreciate it.The publisher states on the inside cover of the book, that Rob Gonsalves "stretches the limits of visual exploration with his breathtaking paintings and encourages parents and children alike to look beyond the limits of the everyday world and imagine."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/11_Birthdays"title="11 Birthdays">
Amanda and Leo have been best friends since they were born, but on their 10th birthday, she hears Leo saying terrible things about her and she stops speaking to him.Their 11th birthday does not go well for Amanda. She spends most of the day feeling sorry for herself and goes to bed disappointed. The next day when she wakes up, she appears to be stuck in the day before. As she gets ready for her birthday party, she realizes she is in a time loop. A few days later, she realizes that she and Leo are stuck in the same time loop. They make up and go on many adventures together and start to uncover why their families have been feuding. They visit the History Museum where they read Leo's great great grandfather's diary. They learn that making a toast to their friendship will solve the problem to the time loop. While uncovering this information, they also realize why they are in this time loop together.In the morning, Amanda realizes that she is celebrating her birthday again for the 11th time. She is frustrated but when she gets on the bus she sees Angelina as the bus driver, who explains why they are in this time loop and what to do to escape it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Island_in_the_Soup"title="An Island in the Soup">
Victor of the Noodle, grand knight of the Order of the Macaroni, is at battle in a forest when he is summoned to the dinner table by his ever-patient mother. Here he finds a bowl of the most curious fish soup which he is quite reluctant to eat. He protests it is too dangerous as there is an island in his soup, floating in the middle of his bowl. Riding on top of a soup spoon, he and his Mum adventure to the mysterious island. Along the way, he encounters many obstacles, such as a cheesy swamp filled with huge stinky fish, a storm of giant peas and carrots, a pepper dragon, and the Bad Fairy Zoop who tries to feed the naughty boy his fish soup. But, Mum comes to the rescue and saves Victor. In the end, Victor finds himself starving, so he gobbles up his bowl of soup, which, to his surprise, turns out to be the best soup he's ever had.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Confessions_of_a_Heartless_Girl"title="True Confessions of a Heartless Girl">
## Part 1: The Stranger.On a stormy July night, Lynda Bradley, the owner of The Molly Thorvaldson Café, notices a pair of headlights pull up in front of the café just before closing time. She allows the flustered looking teenage girl from inside the truck to come in and have a cup of coffee. Lynda learns that this girl's name is Noreen and tells her that she is in Pembina Lake. Noticing that she is most likely in some sort of trouble with no place to go, Lynda makes up the cot for her to sleep on that night. Later on, Noreen notices something slimy in the couch cushions, a gnawed-on chicken leg, and tosses it to the dog. In the morning, Dolores Harper comes by to help with the café like she does every Saturday morning. Meanwhile, Tessie, Seth's dog, is sick and so is Noreen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shepherd's_Granddaughter"title="The Shepherd's Granddaughter">
Amani is a young Palestinian girl. Her family have a long tradition of tending sheep above the olive groves of the family homestead in the valley near Hebron. Amani is inspired by the life and stories of Seedo, her grandfather and she dreams to follow in his footsteps. The parents of the young girl would like her to go to school in the village and learn to be a good Muslim and wife. Seedo, on the contrary, believes that Amani should learn to tend sheep and ensure that the family traditions are passed down. Amani is learning to be a good shepherd through Seedo's teaching. The old man also tells her stories about a secret meadow called Firdoos.When Amani's home and pasture land are being threatened by the encroaching Jewish settlement, her family's land used to graze sheep is becoming threatened. As she pushes her way higher on the mountain she discovers what seems to be Firdoos, the mythical pasture of Seedo's story. There, she meets a boy named Jonathan, the son of a Jewish settler. The thought of her livelihood being destroyed by the settlers encourages Amani to go to school. There she can learn English, and perhaps be able to argue with the settlers. At school, she meets several girls who are faced with the same tragedy. Not only is Amani's home being destroyed but her family is also dispersed. Her mom, who went to Canada to visit her dying mother, finds herself incapable of returning to Palestine. Her father and uncle are imprisoned for opposing Israeli actions. With the surprising help of a rabbi, a woman lawyer and a Christian Peacemaker Team the family are able to reunite at last and rebuilt what has been destroyed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick-Up_Sticks_(novel)"title="Pick-Up Sticks (novel)">
The narrative opens with Polly’s simple life as she moves between school, afterschool volunteering and playing the French horn. The simplicity and perfection of her life is represented by the small, cozy room with a beautiful stained glass window her mother made for her. Apart from her loving relationship with her mother Polly’s friends consist of the downstairs neighbors, Ms. Protheroe, her son Ernie and Polly’s best friend, Vanessa. It is implied that Ernie is cognitively challenged as he spends most of his time watching reruns of "Gilligan’s Island" and collecting postal codes. Vanessa is portrayed as self-absorbed and a fickle teen, being infatuated with the girls’ English teacher and concocting “hair-brained” schemes as a result.Polly’s world is shattered when it is revealed that their house is being sold and torn down in two months and her mother fails to find replacement accommodation for the two of them. Catalyzed by the disintegration of her material world Polly comes to question her identity and where she really belongs. First and foremost she asks why her mother choose to bring her up fatherless and begins to strongly desire a father figure in her life. Polly has a fantasy of a father figure sweeping in to make her and her mother’s lives easier. In the process of her identity crisis, Polly’s relationship with her mother dissolves, leading to fights and accusing her mother of being terrible at parenting.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Cable"title="Jane Cable">
A contemporary synopsis of the melodrama novel's plot describes it as follows:This is a story of American life the scene of which is laid in Chicago at the present time. Jane Cable, the heroine of the tale, is a beautiful and aristocratic girl, supposed to be the daughter of David Cable, a rich railroad magnate. This, however, is not the truth, as in reality she was taken from a foundling hospital when an infant, by Mrs. Cable, who deceived her husband into believing it was her own child. She did this in order to end an estrangement which existed between her husband and herself and to bring him back to her from the distant west, where he had been for some time. Her ruse worked to perfection and was only known to an unscrupulous lawyer named James Bansemer, and his confidential clerk Elias Droom, to whom she applied in order to take out the papers of adoption. At that time the Cables were in very moderate circumstances and David was only an engineer on the railroad, but he rose rapidly from this position, and eventually became rich and influential. Cable is devoted to his beautiful daughter, who he never suspects is not his own child; and his wife, during the passage of time, has gradually lost the haunting dread of being found out. Her peace of mind is rudely shattered however, by the appearance of Bansemer on the scene, who proceeds to blackmail her for a large sum of money. In the meantime Jane has become engaged to Graydon Bansemer, James's son, a fine fellow, who has no suspicious of his father's real character or business dealings. After a series of dramatic incidents, which bring about Mrs. Cable's confession and her husband's forgiveness, the truth is brutally told to Jane by Bansemer, who wishes to prevent her marriage to his son. Jane is crushed by the news and breaks off her engagement with Graydon. He at once enlists in the army and goes to the Philippines, where she follows him later in the company of friends. Graydon is severely wounded and Jane who has become a red-cross nurse tends him till he is restored to health. He resigns from the Army and they return home, Jane still persisting in her refusal to marry him. Finally, however, the elder Bansemer who is paying for his misdeeds in the penitentiary, confesses his knowledge that Jane's antecedents are of the best and she and Graydon are united at last.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curse_of_the_Wendigo"title="The Curse of the Wendigo">
The book follows Dr. Warthrop, a scientist trying to debunk theories that vampires could possibly exist. He's drawn from his research by his former fiancé, who pleads with him to save her husband from the flesh eating Wendigo. Not believing that such a creature could exist, Warthrop ventures out and succeeds in saving his ex's husband, only for the man to then transform into a Wendigo himself. Warthrop and Will Henry are then forced to hunt and destroy the creature.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice_to_Deceive"title="Practice to Deceive">
On December 26, 2003, on Whidbey Island, Washington, police discover the body of Russel Douglas. The body is found in Douglas's car and displays a fatal gunshot wound to the face, between Douglas's eyes. The police quickly rule out suicide, as no gun is found near the car, and pursue a homicide investigation. The case takes nearly 10 years to solve, mostly due to the lack of physical evidence linking the scene of the crime or a weapon to anyone who knew Russel Douglas. The officers are pessimistic that the weapon will ever be found since it would be easy to dispose of it. While the detectives considered a possible motive for Brenna, Douglas's estranged wife, a former law enforcement officer reveals that he has a Bersa semiautomatic gun that fits the description of the weapon the police were searching for, and that he had been asked to hold it by James Huden. Huden, a former resident of Whidbey Island, was romantically involved with Peggy Sue Thomas. Thomas worked in a beauty salon with Brenna Douglas, but investigators found no clear cut motive. Thomas, a former beauty queen, had married several times. The book details Thomas's short and tempestuous marriage to Mark Allen, a wealthy rancher and co-owner of famed thoroughbred Mine That Bird.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mookajjiya_Kanasugalu_(novel)"title="Mookajjiya Kanasugalu (novel)">
Set in village called "Mooduru", the novel revolves around two main characters: Mookajji and her grandson Subbraya. Subbraya represents the doubts raised in human beings about the god and other traditions. Mookajji is a widow aged about 80, who lost her husband at the age of ten years. The character of grandmother in this book has got some supernatural powers of telling the truth about the things that are going to happen and those which are happened already. Though other characters are present, the author used them (Mookajji and her grandson) effectively to convey his theme.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_the_Hills"title="Spirit of the Hills">
Jimmy McVay is shot to death in Toledo, Ohio while buying marijuana and his twenty-five thousand dollars is stolen. Tom McVay, his older brother and a Vietnam veteran, finds out that the murderer is a man named P J Billion from Medicine Springs in South Dakota and sets out to recover the lost money and revenge himself. In the meantime something begins to kill the livestock around Medicine Springs. Some believe that a wolf is the culprit. Buffalo wolves used to roam the prairie but they are extinct now. As incessant livestock killings arouse fear and anger among the farmers, local authorities hire Bill Egan, a seventy-year-old retired wolf trapper. When Tom McVay arrives at Medicine Springs, he happens to pass himself off as a reporter after the wolf. Kattie Running, an attractive Sioux, returns to Medicine Springs from Minnesota to join a new breed of Sioux Indians. They are mostly peaceful political activists who intend to reclaim the Black Hills that once belonged to their ancestors. But a few extremists have evil plans to blow up Mount Rushmore.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Field_of_Life_and_Death"title="The Field of Life and Death">
The novel has no main protagonist or plotline, being comprised instead of loosely connected scenes of village life.The novel begins by introducing Two-and-a-half Li 二里半 and his wife, Old Mother Pockface 麻面婆, and son, Tunnel Legs 罗圈腿.A seventeen-year-old girl from the village, Golden Bough 金枝, has been secretly having sex with twenty-year-old Ch'eng-yeh 成业. When she finds out, Golden Bough's mother is furious, having recently rejected a Ch'eng-yeh's appointed matchmaker. She becomes even more angry when Golden Bough tells her that she is pregnant.Another villager, Chao San 赵三, has crippled a thief whom he mistook as a man from his landlord who threatened to damage his firewood in place of unpaid rent. In consequence, Chao San is jailed and forced to sell his ox to pay compensation. His son P'ing 平儿 works as a shepherd and also later helps his newly freed father sell chicken cages in the city. The chicken cage business, however, quickly fails.Second Sister Li 李二婶 suffers a miscarriage after a long and painful labor. Her husband is unsympathetic. Old Mother Pockface and Golden Bough both, however, give birth successfully.After her son is killed by bandits, Mother Wang 王婆 tries to commit suicide by poison. The villagers assume she will die, but she revives on the way to her burial.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Archivist"title="The Archivist">
Matthias Lane is a widower in his sixties. He works as an archivist at an unnamed library and is told to preserve a set of letters that T. S. Eliot once wrote and sent to Emily Hale. Roberta Spire, a graduate student in her thirties, appeals to Matthias for a look at Eliot's letters.Emily Hale donated T. S. Eliot's letters to the library and gave specific instructions that they were not to be shown to the public until 2020. Her decision to donate the letters at all, however, went against the wishes of T. S. Eliot himself, who wanted Hale to destroy the letters after she had read them.Both Matthias and Roberta are highly familiar with T. S. Eliot's poetry, as well as Eliot's personal background. The novel briefly retells the story of how Eliot placed his first wife, Vivienne Eliot, in a mental institution, and how she eventually died. It is gradually revealed that Matthias, similarly, placed his wife Judith in a mental institution, and she eventually committed suicide. Judith's death occurred twenty years before Matthias first meets Roberta. Roberta reminds Matthias of Judith, because both women are of Jewish ancestry, both read and write poetry, and both have done research on the Holocaust.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_Bad"title="Half Bad">
"Half Bad" is set in modern-day Europe, mainly in Britain, where witches and humans (fains) live together. There are two primary types of witches: Black (generally oppressed and written off as evil) and White (the main population). The 17-year-old protagonist, Nathan, is half White and half Black, or a Half Code. His mother is dead, and his father, Marcus, is known as the most powerful and the smartest Black Witch in the world. Due to the fact that Nathan is a black witch, he has to go for annual Assessments. His every move is monitored by the Council of White Witches. He needs to follow several rules, but when he breaks one of them, his Gran is deemed unfit to be his guardian, and he receives a new guardian, Celia. Trapped in a cage and abused by Celia, Nathan has to escape before his seventeenth birthday when he will receive three gifts from his father and his magical ability, or Gift. Otherwise, he will die.After two years, Nathan manages to escape and meets Ellen, a half witch and half fain, or a Half-Blood. Through many contacts, he ends up going to Gabriel in Geneva, who brings him to Mercury, a Black Witch who can perform Nathan's Giving ceremony. Mercury wants the Fairborn, a knife protected by a rotating team of powerful White witches. Rose, Mercury's assistant, Gabriel and Nathan get the Fairborn successfully, but Rose is killed by Hunters while doing so, Gabriel and Nathan run away. Nathan sustains several injuries but heals himself. Unfortunately, Nathan loses the Fairborn and cannot find it. Then, Nathan meets his father, who performs the Giving ceremony. He also removes the Hunter bullet in Nathan, who was shot while escaping. The three gifts Nathan received are his father's ring, the Hunter bullet, and his life. Meanwhile, Nathan meets Annalise, the girl he loves, and due to an unfortunate encounter, she falls into a death-like sleep and only Mercury can awaken her. Nathan begs Mercury to awaken Annalise, but she refuses to do so unless Nathan gives Marcus's head or heart to Mercury. Nathan refuses to kill his father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Caxtons"title="The Caxtons">
A synopsis of the plot from a 1910 reference work states:The Caxtons are Austin Caxton, a scholar engaged on a great work, "The History of Human Error;" his wife Kitty, much his junior; his brother Roland, the Captain, who has served in the Napoleonic campaigns; the two children of the latter, Herbert and Blanche; and Austin's son, Pisistratus, who tells the story. The quiet country life of the family of Austin Caxton is interrupted by a visit to London. There Pisistratus, who has had a good school education, though he has not yet entered the university, is offered the position of secretary to Mr. Trevanion, a leader in Parliament. Lady Ellinor, Mr. Trevanion's wife, was loved as a girl by Roland and Austin Caxton; but she had passed them both by to make a marriage better suited to an ambitious woman. By a freak of fate Pisistratus now falls in love with her daughter Fannie; and when he finds that his suit is hopeless, he gives up his position under Mr. Trevanion, and enters Cambridge University, where his college course is soon closed by the financial troubles of his father. A further outline of this story would give no idea of its charm. The mutual affection of the Caxtons is finely indicated, and the gradations of light and shade make a beautiful picture. Never before had Bulwer written with so light a touch and so gentle a humor, and this novel has been called the most brilliant and attractive of productions. His gentle satire of certain phrases of political life was founded, doubtless, on actual experience.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_in_My_Own_Heart's_Blood"title="Written in My Own Heart's Blood">
The British evacuation of Philadelphia and the ensuing Battle of Monmouth are the major events from the book based on real history.Claire marries John Grey for protection after Jamie is presumed lost at sea. John and Jamie fight when the details are revealed. John's stepson William is angry at finding out he's Jamie's biological son. Jamie's nephew Ian marries Rachel Hunter, and Rachel's brother Denzell weds John's niece Dorothea in the same ceremony. The Hunters are Quakers; their service with the Continental Army even as noncombatants gets them ostracized by other Quakers.Claire is wounded at Monmouth, and Jamie resigns from the Continental Army to remain by her side. After spending time in Savannah, they return to Fraser's Ridge, their farm settlement in North Carolina.The printshop and home of Jamie's adopted son Fergus burns down. Fergus's son Henri-Christian dies trying to escape the flames.In the 20th century, Jamie and Claire's grandson Jeremiah is kidnapped. Their son-in-law Roger meets Jamie's father and his own when time traveling to search. After the boy is recovered, his family joins the Frasers in the 18th century.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Night_We_Walk_in_Circles"title="At Night We Walk in Circles">
A young actor-Nelson, living in a nameless Latin American country joins Diciembre, a guerrilla theatre troupe. They plan to perform in a politically controversial play titled "The Idiot President". The play's author, Henry Nuñez, was previously jailed for the original production. Nelson immerses himself in the world of the play, performing in taverns and city squares, until the tour brings the trio to the hometown of Rogelio, Henry’s former cellmate and confidant. Henry’s past and Nelson’s future converge, setting the stage for a fast-unraveling mystery of role-playing and retribution.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lowland"title="The Lowland">
## Part I.Raised in Tollygunge in Calcutta, brothers Subhash and Udayan are inseparable; they find joy in fixing and listening to radios, learning Morse Code, and looking out for each other at school. When they leave home for university studies, their ideologies are challenged; Udayan embraces the Naxalite Movement while Subhash is more interested in further education in preparation for his career and leaves for graduate studies in Rhode Island. Subhash learns that despite the massive bloodshed as a result of the Naxalite Movement, all attention from the press is focused on the Vietnam War; this becomes crystal clear to him when his roommate Richard, an earnest student activist, ignorantly remarks "Naxalbari? What's that?" At the end of his first year in the United States, Subhash learns that Udayan has found a wife, Gauri.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nighthawk_Star"title="The Nighthawk Star">
The Nighthawk, which is a nightjar, is bullied and teased by the other birds for his appearance. He is described as an “ugly bird” with an evenly dotted face and legs so weak he can barely walk. Even a lark who is not that beautiful thinks himself to be more superior to the Nighthawk. However, when it comes to the real Hawk, none of the other birds dare to insult him.The Hawk knows and dislikes the fact Nighthawk has “hawk” in his name. He always threatens him and one night he confronts Nighthawk at his home demanding that he change his name. Hawk even recommends changing it to “ICHIZO” which he thinks is not that bad. However Nighthawk does not wish to because it is a name given to him by God. It is the one thing he values the most: his identity. Hawk leaves and states that if he does not place a tag around his neck with “ICHIZO” and inform all the birds of his new name he will kill him.Nighthawk sadly contemplates why all the birds dislike him so much – all just because of his appearance. He flies out to the clouds where some insects fly into his mouth awkwardly and realizes that he too, is killing them just as the hawk plans to kill him. He thinks he should starve, stop killing insects and decides to fly far away. He bids farewell to his younger brother, the Kingfisher and asks him to convey his best wishes to their sister the Hummingbird. Nighthawk returns to his home crying.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_and_Peter"title="Joan and Peter">
The novel begins in 1893 with the birth of Peter Stublands, but the first three chapters are devoted to the lives of his parents. Peter's father, Arthur, is one of the heirs of a wealthy family of Quaker manufacturers from the West of England. His mother Dolly is the daughter of a vicar from a well-off family, but being intellectually inclined, she has "read herself out of the great Anglican culture." Arthur, artistically inclined but not especially gifted, is a devotee of the Arts and Crafts movement and a Fabian socialist. Dolly meets him and falls in love with him while she is studying "in the Huxley days as a free student at the Royal College of Science." Arthur designs a house near Limpsfield called the Ingle-Nook, where they live, and where Peter is born. Arthur has two sisters with advanced ideas, Aunt Phyllis and Aunt Phoebe, who are regular visitors.Dolly, however, has retained strong feelings for a cousin who joined the navy, Oswald Sydenham, whose face is badly scarred from the bombardment of Alexandria, and is devoting his career to extending the British Empire in Africa. When Arthur's free-thinking goes so far as to make him unfaithful to Dolly, it is strongly implied that Oswald and Dolly fall in love, but Dolly eventually rejects Oswald's passionate appeal to defy convention and live with him in Central Africa. Dejected, Oswald returns to Africa. The reconciliation of Dolly and Arthur has a tragic consequence, however: on a trip meant to celebrate the overcoming of their differences, Arthur's recklessness with an amateur boatman causes them to drown off Capri.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berts_dagbok"title="Berts dagbok">
The book opens with the words:translated:"Berts dagbok" is set during the spring term in the 5th grade, and runs from 14 January to 4 June. Bert, in class 5A at Beckaskolan is ashamed of his name, and originally uses the "Treb Walker" persona. "Treb" is Bert backward, Walker comes from The Phantom whose name is Kit Walker. Bert also writes his own stories, about the hero "Kobåj-Kurt". Bert and Åke also have invited their own fictional country, "Hoppalotjingien", which later in the book ceases to exist following a "civil war".When the book opens, Bert is in love with Rebecka in 5 B and turns to red pencil each time he writes about love, but when Klimpen during Bert' s 12th birthday party during late February tricks Bert into smacking a rubber snake into Rebecka 's butt, and she walks home. This is followed by a period from late February when Bert doesn't care much for girls at all, creating more space for other plots. Among them are Åke Nordin "experimenting " on his little sister Doris, who he tricks into drinking a "dishwashing liquid drink", class 5 A plays soccer against class 5 B, and Bert's sight problems are discovered. When Bert gets glasses, he is teased by Klimpen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteen_Albatrosses_(or,_Falling_off_the_Mountain)"title="Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling off the Mountain)">
First Part: PrimaryVernon Ingledew decides to run for the governor's seat, although he has no political experience, but he is the great-grandson of Jacob Ingledew, who used to be the governor of Arkansas during Reconstruction. Vernon's best friend, Day and Day's wife, Diana, discussed with Don and Kim that they had already expected Vernon to run for the governor's seat. They exchanged ideas on why he had decided to do it. Vernon is a genius and he has a self-enriching program that he uses to learn new things. He spends one year learning everything there is to know about two subjects starting at the beginning of the alphabet. He learns everything there is to know about art history and astronomy when he starts this “program". Vernon got to “P” and alphabetically after philosophy came politics, so he decides that the best way to learn politics is to become a politician.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berts_första_betraktelser"title="Berts första betraktelser">
The Christmas-New Year holiday season goes towards its end, and Bert writes in his new diary. When Åke returns home from a holiday to the Canary Islands, the pop/rock band Heman Hunters (which has been required to change name from "Dum i huvet" ("Stupid in the head") as the old band name gave no gigs) meets at Åke, and here the band gets its recurring line-up. Soon, the spring term in the 6th grade begins.Bert is still together with Nadja, but when a new guy in his class appears, she tells him he "looks pretty good". During a break-in at the Beckaskolan school canteen, Bert believes/hopes the new guy in Nadja's class did the break-in, before Nadja tells that a 56 years old man did the break in. When Bert goes to Nadja, her raggare, brothers forces him to do a "raggare PRYO ".In January, Bert's neighbour "kapten" ("captain") dies when his favourite bandy team loses an important televised game, and the municipality responses for the funeral as he has no relatives still alive. Bert and Åke decide to attend the funeral, and read a poem.When the king of Sweden has his name day on 28 January Bert and Åke set up fireworks for him in the park, using Åke's home-made fireworks, who fly away in a one-way direction towards a house. When Bert visits Nadja, he puts cotton balls in her ear to avoid hearing her playing the violin, which turns her angry and she fights with the violin bow, which hits the cotton ball in Bert's ear.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berts_vidare_betraktelser"title="Berts vidare betraktelser">
After Bert and Åke have been jumping next to the fire during Walpurgis Night, the Heman Hunters demonstrate on May Day, but are removed after singing "Tupp fick kramp uti magen, sista skiten kom där" ("rooster got cramp out in its stomach, the last shit came there") to the Internationale tune.On the night between 5 and 6 May, a fire occurs in Bert's hometown, destroying the potato warehouse " Arnes potatislager ". The local police suspects arson, and Bert suspects Jörgen Karlsson. Bert also visits his mother's sister Lena's dance institution. Paulina attends dancing courses there, and Bert accidentally drops Paulina into the floor, feeling like he is Adolf Hitler's twin brother.Bert's school class also visited by the 6th graders from Östbergaskolan, as the classes will merge before the 7th grade, and Lill-Erik fears them being communists when their teacher calls them "comrades".By late May, the 6th graders go to a school camp, after collecting money, and as Bert walks alone in the evening Paulina appears, and together they walk to a former open air dance platform, where a romance between them takes place.During the 6th grade commencement at school, Åke launches his own firework in the school desk. The bench cover catches fire, and the schoolhouse is abandoned. On his way home, Bert meets Paulina, who wants to meet him during summer, and they soon go bathing together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berts_ytterligare_betraktelser"title="Berts ytterligare betraktelser">
The autumn term of the 7th grade at school has begun. It is September, and Bert's grandmother wants Bert to join the Church of Sweden scouts, as she has found Bert's "weak point": girls. A fire erupts in Lill-Erik's locker at Beckaskolan. As only 7th grader, his locker is in the 9th graders corridor, and now he has to carry the school books in a shopping bag. Åke gathers a group trying to investigate the event. Bert, however, suspects Dödgrävarn, as he also suspects him being together with Paulina, seeing them visiting a cinema together. Bert notices watches in Dödgrävarn's locker, and he watches Dödgrävarn and Paulina. Bert begins to see Paulina as a "traitor", and hopes she gets snuff in her mouth when kissing Dödgrävarn, who uses snuff. In this version, Dödgrävarn is in Bert's parallel class 7 B, and not a 9th grader as in the TV series. It is said that Dödgrävarn broke into a candy store as a 9 years old, and since then it has only become worse. A week in September, it is revealed that Lill-Erik caused the fire. Fearing several 9th graders, he hoped to get a locker in the 7th graders' corridor. Some days later, he gets a locker in the 8th graders' corridor. Bert's interest in Paulina declines by mid-September, in favour of Ida, even if he dislikes Ida smoking. Ida shares locker with Lill-Erik, and even Ida's friend Mona smokes. Mona teases Bert for having glasses. Bert finds a notice at his locker, telling Bert is cute despite having glasses, and invites him to come to the bicycle parking one night. Not knowing who writes the letter, Bert never appears.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berts_bravader"title="Berts bravader">
The book begins on 2 January with Bert writing in his new diary. Since late October last year, Bert is in love with a girl in the same class at school named Emilia, despite the other guys thinks she is a "wimp" because of good gradeing and school, good behavior and ironed clothes, and Bert knows about the risk. In January, Bert sends Emilia a letter, with the nasty "Höpp och skit" finishing lines. When Bert regrets posting the letter, he tries to pick it up from the letter box, but gets stuck with his arm in the letter box, and gets attacked by two snowball tossing younger children. Bert bribes a bypassing guy with 25 SEK to pick up Åke, who arrives with plastic explosives, and Bert has to bribe Åke with 25 SEK to not use the plastic explosive, and instead pick up a hacksaw and saw apart the letter box, and when that attempt fails, Kurre from the petrol station has to assist to break Bert free.Bert re-posts the letter, but once again forgets changing the finishing lines. Bert pounds his head in the letter box, swearing. From a distance, the sound of sirens appear, and Bert realize the local police is about to arrive, to investigate what has happened. Bert runs home. Soon, Bert, Åke and Lill-Erik travel away by bus to go slalom skiing in the hills, but Åke rides a pulk and falls out into the mogul skiing slope before ending up at hospital.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dirty_Girls_Social_Club"title="The Dirty Girls Social Club">
"The Dirty Girls Social Club" is told in first person narration with the narration switching between six friends who all met in college: Lauren, Usnavys, Rebecca, Sara, Elisabeth and Amber. The friends have different racial and ethnic backgrounds, but find common ground due to their mutual Latina heritage and have nicknamed themselves the "sucias" (meaning dirty girls in Spanish) as a joke.The novel begins with the women reuniting for one of their regular scheduled meetings. Lauren, who works as a reporter for the Boston Globe, is struggling with an eating disorder and a noncommittal boyfriend but believes that the other women have their lives together. Rebecca, who runs a successful magazine aimed at Latina women called "Ella", is struggling in her relationship with her unemployed, white, pseudo-liberal husband, Brad. Sara is hiding the fact that her marriage to her childhood sweetheart Roberto is not what it seems and that he has been growing increasingly erratic and violent. Amber, chasing her dreams of becoming a prominent activist musician, changes her name to Cuicatl. Usnavys grows disenchanted with her boyfriend Juan who cannot afford to shower her with the luxuries she desires. Meanwhile, Elisabeth, a successful news reporter, who has been hiding the fact that she is in love with Lauren, falls in love with another woman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berts_bekännelser"title="Berts bekännelser">
The book opens on 15 January. In January, Torleif moves from Öreskoga, but returns for a visit, now as a tough guy nicknamed "Tora-Liffa". Bert makes plans for the future, intending to have children with Emilia. If the baby is male, Bert would name it "Jerpa", and refers to the plan as "Jerpa-projektet" ("The Jerpa Project"). Bert's class will collect money for a 9th grade school trip to London. Åke proposes to open a sex club where the girls will undress themselves for men, but the proposal is rejected and instead it's voted for Åke stripping at the next school dance. Åke proposes selling nuclear weapons to the Sami people and use them against the Swedish government, which he believes oppresses them.In February, 14-year old Åke illegally rides a souped-up moped without a helmet. Åke crashes into a streetlight and is taken to a hospital. Lill-Erik gets a moped from a lady named Harriet, and together they go on a holiday trip. Harriet also helps Åke, and takes care of him after the moped crash. Rumors also say Emilia has shown interest for being a friend with Harriet.By February, Emilia begins acting strangely. She starts coughing when she hears Bert calling her over the telephone, thinks Bert is silly, and expresses positive opinions about Åke. While Jörgen Karlsson and Dödgrävarn in class 8 B fight and run away from the headmaster at the schoolyard, Bert's class has family and consumer science. Bert perceives everything as a form of humor from Emilia's side, and when Lill-Erik tells Bert that Åke encounters his girl, Bert first sees this as humor. When Emilia says she has to do French homework despite studying German, Bert even believes that French is taught during those German lessons. When a bicycle similar to Åke's is parked at the garage driveway of Emilia's parents house, Bert assumes it belongs to Emilia's father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_och_badbrudarna"title="Bert och badbrudarna">
The book opens on 5 June, with Bert making plans for the summer. During the summer break, he'll study girls, and heads to the library to borrow books about sex. He also walks into a store selling sex items in a jokeful way, to borrow porno magazines, and buys what he thinks is chewing gums looking like condoms, but turn out to be real condoms.Bert soon goes on a holiday to Spain, with his mother and father and John (Åke 's father), Hillevi and Doris. They travel by aeroplane, but the hotel room turns out to be located with a view towards the landfill site. Bert gets interest for two Swedish girls, Steffa and Bella (who he first believe are named Erika and Jenny). Bella later travels to Australia. Bert's grandmother goes on a holiday to Florida with Görhild.When Bert returns to Sweden, he continues spotting bikini girls at the lake of "Nöckeln" near Öreskoga. The Heman Hunters are kicked out from their practice room. Bert also happens to see Åke throwing grass into the lower part Louise's bikini. Bert's family's neighbour soon learn how calm it has been without the Heman Hunters in the basement, and when practicing begins again, the band is kicked out. The band soon find a new practice place, inside an air-raid shelter next to a garbage room.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sune_och_Svarta_Mannen"title="Sune och Svarta Mannen">
Sune is a 3rd grader at "Söderskolan", and the book opens with depicting the Andersson family. The opening chapter closes with Sune thinking back on what happened during the summer that past behind, when he was to a summer camp. The book then jumps backwards, depicting Sune and Joakim going to camp, for Sune it's the first time and he has been to a hike before and thinks it'll be fun, but Joakim has been to hikes before. The camp lasts for six days, and is split up in different hikes with circa 60 children aged 6–14. Sune and Joakim are to canoeing, and Joakim says there are crocodiles in the water, who have to be hit with the paddle, and when Sune says no crocodiles exist in Sweden Joakim insists. Joakim's mother Siw drives Sune and Joakim in a car to "Byholmen", a place in the woodlands where the camp will occur. Rumors say "Svarta Mannen" ("Dark Man") is there, pulls up tent pegs, frightens children with "hemlängtanbaciller" ("homesickness bacilli") and poisons the food. Sune thinks maybe camp leader Ulrik Bengtsson is Svarta Mannen. At the camp are also Simon, Jannika and Mirriam. During the first evening, twilight falls och Sune means he has seen Svarta Mannen in the woods, but camp manager Britt-Marie Rävberg says he doesn't exist, that it's just imagination and that homesickness can affect anyone. Sune now realizes that Joakim has made up the Svarta Mannen to avoid confessing his own homesickness. During the rest of the weak everything is fun, nobody talks of Svarta Mannen and not even when the canoe turns over hand his hair is filled with seagrass, Sune longs home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berts_bekymmer"title="Berts bekymmer">
Bert has started the 9th grade at school, and has love problems. No longer, he feels ashamed for liking , since she has started the 7th grade. Before a PE lesson, the girls of the class have forgotten closing their door to the changing room. Bert walks past, staring, when suddenly Sanna shows up and pulls up Bert's shorts.Åke has fallen in love with Isabella Riez in class 9F, who comes from El Salvador, and hates Europe meaning they started up everything mean on Earth, like colonies, black slave, industry and English (a school subject where Åke has bad notes). In class 9F, Åke also has a friend called Douglas.At a toilet, Bert notices someone has written a telephone number to call once you want to have sex. Calls, and think Gabriella is behind, but soon learns it's the number to Travtjänst.Klimpen makes a short return from Motala, now as a member of religious organization "Lennarts ord", before returning to Motala. In Heman Hunters, it's fought over which music the band will play.Åke turns 15 years old and gets a moped.Bert's classmate gets cancer, but the doctors managed to save him, and Bert and his friends visit him at the hospital. Meanwhile, Beckaskolan is appointed Sweden's most moldy school.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_och_brorsorna"title="Bert och brorsorna">
Bert Ljung finishes the 5th grade, and Klimpen will move to Motala. When the 5th grade is over, the 6th grade students hold a penis measuring contest, won by Peter Kollegård in 6 C while the 5th graders are let in to cheer. Berts första betraktelser depicts the guys in Bert's school class holding a penis measuring in the 6th grade, and Bert describing last year's penis measuring contest between the 6th graders.Nadja's raggare brothers force Bert to do a "raggare PRAO ", and shout to a group of unknown girls to show the breast, just as in the TV series.Despite fearing her brothers, Bert continues meeting Nadja Nilsson.Bert's family also goes on a trip to Denmark in July, and on board the boat they meet a family where a 6 years old child asks Bert how many political parties are in the parliament of Sweden.In August Bert, Åke and Lill-Erik sleep in a tent in the giant woodlands behind the hil, and when the book is over Bert is about the start the 6th grade, and Klimpen will move to Motala.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_och_bacillerna"title="Bert och bacillerna">
Bert fears getting sick for Christmas. Lill-Erik and Åke celebrate their birthdays, while in December Bert's school class hold a Saint Lucy procession, and the school a floorball tournament. On third of Advent Bert goes to church with his grandmother. Bert is still together with Nadja, but he thinks she thinks too much of her violin.At school, Bert's schoolteacher falls and breaks her neck. She is taken away by the ambulance, and Bert hopes the temporary teacher will be a girl from the United States in a swimsuit, but instead comes a guy called "Håkan Kelinus". They call him "Adolf". Bert calls him "Terrormannen" ("Terror man"), and believes that he was the one who shot Olof Palme.During Christmas break, Åke travels to the Canary Island. Bert gets healthy for Christmas, and his uncle Jan from New York City comes for a visit. Bert gets a train trip in a smoke-free compartment to visit his cousins in Bollnäs.On 27 December Bert closes with the lines "Tack och hej – smörgåspastej". On 31 December he closes with the lines "Tack och hej – leverpastej", which become the standard closing lines for the books Berts första, vidare and ytterligare betraktelser as well as the TV series, as well as becoming characteristic for the entire Bert Universe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_och_Boysen"title="Bert och Boysen">
Bert begins the 6th grade, and is second oldest in his class afterLisa, and his friends soon start the gang "Becka Boysen' to control the local candy trade. They are inspired by violent video films.Bert is together with Nadja, but Nadja more seems to show interest for playing the violin than hanging with Bert. Bert also wonders what she is doing with Rasmus, a guy she plays music with.Bert's grandmother meets a new man, Henry, and the Ljung family's car breaks apart. Several chapters close with "Kobåj-Kurt" stories.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berts_bryderier"title="Berts bryderier">
Bert tries to retrieve Nadja. The book also focuses on rock lyrics in Swedish, written by Bert for the Heman Hunters, focusing more and more on political and social problems.During the New Year's nigh, Bert participates at a party in the single family house of classmate Christoffer Palm, as his parents have travelled to the Canary Islands. The party is messy. Bert soon shows interest for Patricia Tivenius. Åke is together with a Celine, a hearing-impaired girl attending the second grade of the Swedish secondary school.Bert also discovers old Heman Hunters lyrics from the 6th grade, among them "Take the Night" and "Jäh Rocken Roll". When school begins again after the Christmas break, Bert does a review of his class.Bert also tells the story of when his grandfather's father "Vladimir Livanov" came to Sweden from Russia a long time ago.When Bert visits Nadja, her brothers are working or studying. Rolf ("Roffe") is a travelling computer salesman, Ragnar ("Ragge") works as a staff leader at the postal office, while Reinhold is studying at the college to become a doctor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_om_Sune"title="Sagan om Sune">
Sune Andersson is 7 years old, and attends the 1st grade. Sune is a so-called "tjejtjusare" ("girl charmer"), but mostly he likes Sophie in the same class at school. They have known each other since being very small. Despite hanging with Sophie, Sune also goes to school, plays with his friend Joakim Fröberg, and fights with his little brother "Håkan Bråkan", who for example has bitten the legs off Sune's Donald Duck toy figures. The book opens with a presentation of the main characters.One Friday when walking to school, Sune gets "Goddag, goddag-sjukan", a disease where the affected can only say "God dag, god dag" ("Good day, good day"), even if the disease always comes to an end later. Sune writes a note to his mother. When coming to school, Sune tries to avoid answering questions. He is exposed during the Swedish lesson, when required to answer a question. His schoolteacher said she cured the disease with curiosity.In the nearby forest, a "war" (using cones) has broken out during a break, where the 1st graders and the 2nd graders fight the 3rd graders. Sune is about to free Daniel, but ends up in trouble with 3rd grader Bengt, who chases him until he is saved by the bell.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sune_börjar_tvåan"title="Sune börjar tvåan">
Sune is eight years old and is about to begin the second grade at school in Sweden. There is also a new girl, Maria Perez, and Sune falls in love with her. The problem is that he still likes Sophie.Sune is also visited by his cousin Algot. He also meets a guy, Affe, who tries to force Sune to join a "gang of girl haters", which Sune doesn't want.Sune also fears getting affected by his father becoming a "dirty old man", and the Andersson family will soon be expanded. At school, the children play theater, when Sune gets the girl role Little Red Riding Hood. He also ends up at the hospital, for a cecum removal surgery.Sune also tries to run away from home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Självklart,_Sune"title="Självklart, Sune">
Sune now has a little sister, Isabelle. Sune thinks she is "cute" despite screaming worse than Tarzan. Håkan wants his parents to go back to the birthing center and replace her with a baby that does not cry so loud. Sune also holds his first party, with "loud" music, "cute" girls, dancing and playing Post Office.Sune's class at school becomes the first 2nd grade class go for a tetanus shot, and rumors spread of two needle-related deaths in the previous year, and other horrors. Joakim does not need a shot, because he got one last year when bitten by a dog. He tells stories about the needle being one meter long, and a hammer being used. Sune tries to avoid the shot, forging a note from his mother saying her son does not need an injection. Finally, the nurse has to declare it is perfectly safe, and that it is more dangerous not to get a shot.Sune and Håkan also go to the hairdresser. Sune feels so ashamed over his shorter hair that he tries to use adhesive tape to attach the hair again. At school, he does not end up being teased so much for his short hair as he feared.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Awakens"title="Earth Awakens">
With an alien invasion in progress in China, humanity is divided on how to defend itself. The Chinese government is determined to go it alone, despite suffering catastrophic losses. Captain Wit O'Toole of the Mobile Operations Police (MOP) and Mazer Rackham have managed to destroy one of the three alien landers, but because they achieved the first significant human victory of the war without official approval and using a nuclear warhead obtained without authorization, they are in the custody of Chinese General Sima. During the invasion, Mazer Rackham saves Bingwen, a very intelligent eight-year-old Chinese boy who now comes up with a clever ploy to get them released: he spreads word over the internet that they were acting under Sima's orders and gives Sima full credit.Meanwhile, Victor Delgado and Imala Bootstamp drift to the alien mothership in a ship disguised to avoid being destroyed. Victor manages to enter and explore the vessel. They survive a failed drone attack on the alien ship and, after getting away again, confront Lem Jukes, whom they suspect of involvement in the attack. Actually, it was launched by Lem's father, Ukko. Lem tried to stop or delay it.Based on what he has learned, Victor devises a plan to capture it, and reluctantly accepts Lem's help in carrying it out. The MOPs, including Wit and Mazer, are recruited to become the rest of Victor's boarding party. Despite Victor's objections, Imala volunteers as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Veil_of_Stars"title="Beyond the Veil of Stars">
Cornell Novak grows up with his father, a UFO investigator, who travels frequently to investigate reports of lights in the sky, alien abductions, and the continuing appearances of circles of black glass at random locations, including Central Park in New York City. Cornell's mother disappeared when he was four, an event that his father says was alien abduction. They live in a slightly seedy suburban cul-de-sac with fortunately tolerant neighbors, who turn a blind eye to Cornell's father's unwillingness to carry out the usual suburban chores.One night when Cornell is about 11 years old, he is out looking at the night sky when the stars disappear and are replaced by a view of the daylight side of the Earth. It quickly becomes apparent that the entire planet has a similar view. Politicians and scientists rush to control the situation, assuring people that the effect is some kind of illusion, since spacecraft in orbit are unaffected and can still see the stars and planets normally.However one Russian mathematician proposes an alternative theory. According to this, the entire universe was restructured by other intelligences long ago. The infinite universe that was previously visible is only one way of looking at spacetime. Other ways exist that see the universe as a connected set of structures that enclose each planet. At some point the observation of the sky by the inhabitants of each planet causes the view of infinity to "evert", replacing one view of the universe with another equally valid one.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People_of_Forever_Are_Not_Afraid"title="The People of Forever Are Not Afraid">
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid tells the story of three young Israeli women - Lea, Avishag and Yael - following them from their high school years in a small northern village, through their enlistment in the Israeli Defence Force where they train marksmen, guard a border and man a checkpoint, and on to their twenties. The book describes the progress of the three women in a series of vignettes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Malala"title="I Am Malala">
Part One covers Malala Yousafzai's life "Before the Taliban". She describes her childhood home Swat Valley. Named for Malalai of Maiwand, Yousafzai lived with her father Ziauddin, her mother Toor Pekai and two younger brothers Khushal and Atal. Ziauddin's father Rohul Amin was an imam and a teacher. Ziauddin studied a Master's in English at Jehanzeb College. He opened the Khushal School with a partner Naeem, who later left due to financial difficulties. Ziauddin found a new partner Hidayatullah, with whom the school slowly began to make a profit. As Ziauddin began to open more schools, Toor Pekai would bring children in need to live with them and Ziauddin would give free places in his schools to poor children. Yousafzai describes the changing political regimes in Pakistan, the first drone strikes in Pakistan in 2004 following the September 11 attacks.Part Two, "The Valley of Death", details the rise of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan in Swat. In 2006, Fazlullah began a popular "Radio Mullah" broadcast which initially gave advice on such matters as ritual ablutions and drug abstinence, but progressed into the condemnation of music and dancing, and instruction on women staying in the home. The book also describes the continuing War in North-West Pakistan, and the return of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan which culminated in her assassination. The Taliban began to commit further murders such as that of Shabana, and Ziauddin Yousafzai continued outspoken activism. During the First Battle of Swat, Malala begins to write a BBC Urdu blog under the pseudonym "Gul Mukai". Her school is shut down following a Taliban edict in 2009, and her family are forced to move to Shangla for three months.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneath_the_Gated_Sky"title="Beneath the Gated Sky">
Cornell Novak and Porsche Neal have moved to an isolated property that happens to contain one of the many black glass disks that appeared all over the world shortly before the sky changed. The disks mark the sites of quantum intrusions, or gateways, that have been locked down by travelers from other worlds to prevent humans from opening them. Porsche herself is a traveler, as are her extended family. Cornell was born on Earth, but suspects that his ancestors were travelers.Their initial purpose is to gather information and prepare to expose their former employer, the Cosmic Event Agency, to the world via the Internet, while having an escape route ready should the CEA attempt to capture them. However Cornell has to come to terms with Porsche's past, and the emotional relationships she formed with beings on other worlds. Porsche herself has a guilty secret. It was because of her rash revelation of her family's origins to her lover that they had to leave their previous home on the planet Jarrtree and come to Earth. The first part of the novel describes Porsche's childhood on Jarrtree and her arrival on Earth. Her extended family is part of "The Few", who have become part of societies across the universe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_and_History"title="Theory and History">
Mises presents the book in four parts.Introduction and Part One – Value:The first part sets the overall theme of the book with Mises introducing the concept of methodological dualism. He then expounds a theory of value that is central throughout. Regarding his view on science – as systematic body of knowledge, of both natural and social phenomena – as a means to successful action in the world, Mises argues that in order to properly understand human behavior we must attribute – as a methodological resort – volition and purpose to human behaviour. Mises considers this the epistemological and methodological basis of the sciences of human action. The branch that deals with the logical implications of action as such is called praxeology.Part Two – Determinism and Materialism:In the second part, Mises weighs in on the free will vs. determinism controversy and comments that the long historical debates did little to settle the problems at hand. He argues that while the natural sciences, in discovering scientific laws, must presuppose a strict regularity in the occurrence of causes and effects, i.e. determinism, such a presupposition cannot be held in the case of human action. He argues further that the social sciences must take thoughts, ideas, and judgments of value as ultimately given in the analysis of human action. Our ignorance of the origins and causes of these phenomena, Mises argues, forces us – at least for the time being – to adopt a dualistic approach. He contends that attempts to find the origins and causes of these phenomena are vain, as is the task of all varieties of materialism. Mises then turns his attention to the doctrine of materialism, more specifically, that of Marxist dialectical materialism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timur_and_His_Squad"title="Timur and His Squad">
Daughters of the Red Army Colonel Alexandrov, Zhenya (13) and Olga (18) come from Moscow to their dacha in a village and find themselves amidst strange night time activities. In an old barn Zhenya discovers the headquarters of some mysterious organization. She meets Timur, whose Squad, consisting of several dozens of well-organized boys, perform charitable acts in a clandestine fashion. The Squad helps families of the Army officers and soldiers, supports elders and minors, and fights off some gang hooligans led by a boy named Kvakin. Timur's 'games' are causing much suspicion, on the part of Timur's uncle Georgy, among other people. "But tell me, what kind of games did you and your friends play when you were young?" – asks the boy. "Well, we were running, jumping about and climbed roofs too, but at least our games were simple and well-understood," Georgy responds.Olga spots Timur talking to Kvakin and makes the conclusion that they are of the same ilk. Zhenya knows otherwise; she develops a strong feeling for Timur, the young leader who is honest, noble, brave and modest to the point of reticence. In a decisive battle between the two gangs Timur and his boys win out. Finally, in quite a dramatic fashion he helps Zhenya to meet her father who goes to the war, as does Georgy, now Olga's friend. "You live for other people, and people will respond in a kind," says Olga to Timur whom she now sees she totally misunderstood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Rights_Without_Liberation"title="Animal Rights Without Liberation">
## Methodology."Animal Rights Without Liberation" seeks to decouple animal rights from animal liberation. For Cochrane, of central importance is the question of sentience, understood as "the capacity for phenomenal consciousness". No position is taken on precisely how many animals are sentient, but, Cochrane argues, it is clear that at least "some" nonhuman animals are. Sentience alone does not afford moral status, but sentience implies the capacity for well-being; sentient beings have lives that can go better or worse for them. Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that personhood is required for moral value, but Cochrane observes that there may be nonhuman animals who could be considered persons. In any case, it is argued that there are good reasons not to agree with Kant, and Cochrane concludes that there is no reason to limit the possession of moral status to humans. What needs to be considered is not "whether" anything is owed to animals, but "what" is owed to them. Following a paper on animal rights by political philosopher Joel Feinberg, Cochrane suggests that animals possess rights on account of their interests. Cochrane then deals with four possible objections. Interest rights are defended against the claim that moral agency is a prerequisite of rights-possession, against the demand that rights be derived from social relations, against the suggestion, from R. G. Frey, that animals do not possess interests, and against the idea that inanimate entities and plants may possess interests.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Doors"title="The Three Doors">
## "The Golden Door".The first novel in the series follows a young boy named Rye who lives in the walled city of Weld, on the island of Dorne. He lives with his mother, Lisbeth, a beekeeper, and his two older brothers: Dirk, a worker that maintains that wall of the city, and Sholto, a solitary individual studying to become a doctor. For years Weld has been attacked by beasts known as 'Skimmers', described as bat-like creatures, they attack in hordes, searching for either human or animal prey. The Warden of Weld offers a reward to any young man who can find and defeat whoever is sending the Skimmers. Dirk is quick to volunteer; however after some time passes he is presumed dead. Sholto then volunteers and in his absence Rye and Lisbeth face financial struggles; they are soon forced to move to the Wardens Keep where shelter is provided to those in need in return for work. They are split up and Rye instead decides to volunteer in search of his brothers, he lies about his age and is given the choice between three magical doors: a golden door, a silver door, and a wooden door. Rye is drawn to the wooden door, but he chooses to go through the golden door as he believes that Dirk would have also chosen it. As Rye is about to leave he is blackmailed by a girl named Sonia to bring her with him through the door, or else she will inform the warden that he lied about his age. Rye reluctantly agrees and he leaves Weld with the girl. The arrive in the 'Fell-zone' where Rye is soon gifted a bag of nine magical objects by the Fellan, an ancient group of magical beings. The pair are later helped by a farmer called FitzFee, who takes them with him to the horse trading town of Fleet, there they meet Faene, who they learn is in a relationship with Dirk. However, Sonia and Faene are suddenly captured by soldiers of a tyrant known as Olt, for a sacrificial ceremony called 'The Gifting'. Rye sets off to rescue them and learns that Dirk has also been captured for The Gifting. During the ceremony, Dirk, Sonia, and Faene are chained to rocks while sea serpents are summoned to kill them. Rye uses his magical objects to rescue them and drives the serpents away. In anger, Olt tries to attack Rye; however, he is instead eaten by a serpent and the reunited companions are able to take back control of the land.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Until_Thy_Wrath_Be_Past"title="Until Thy Wrath Be Past">
Someone kills Wilma Persson and Simon Kyrö as they dive on a plane in Vittangijärvi. What kind of old secret have they got on the tracks? And who is prepared to murder anyone to prevent it from coming out? A murder investigation begins where police inspector Anna-Maria Mella is threatened and Chamber Prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson is visited by the dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_sonrisa_etrusca"title="La sonrisa etrusca">
A tough old farmer from southern Italy takes pride in his time served as a partisan during World War II. Due to a serious medical condition, he must move in with his son and daughter-in-law in Milan. While disliking life in the northern city, the relations between the old man and his tender grandson evolve, transforming his life during his final days.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_It's_Not_Forever"title="If It's Not Forever">
The author starts off with memories of the blast day. Deb had survived the bomb attack that left eighty nine people injured and many people dead. He feels sick at home and could not help wipe away the evil memories of the day. He recites the tragic event repeatedly to Avantika, his girlfriend. Avantika loves him and also feels bad, but she tries her best to make him forget what had happened. Quoting from the book, Deb says, "It could have been me". Deb is said to work at a publishing house "that publishes trash novels". His co-worker is named as Shrey, who is addicted towards girls and cannot live without them.He finally recovers from it. He wants to seek redemption as he stood there, on the blast day, watching the victims die. He finds a diary while re-visiting the area, and the edge of the diary is burnt beyond recognition. He takes it home and reads it. The diary has "R.D" written on it. No name, or for that matter address, is provided. But Deb wants to return the diary to Ragini, who "R.D" loved.Most of the novel revolves around the trio (Avantika, Shrey, Deb) and a girl named Tiya, travelling in an old car. They travel and the secrets come back to life. From Dehradun to Mumbai, the novel covers most of the Indian metropolitan cities. In the beginning of the novel the trio's daily life is described. Shrey is reported to work at Grapevine India, and often goes out to "meet someone from the Times". Deb knows that Shrey is actually meeting new girls. It is also highlighted in the novel that Avantika, Deb's girlfriend, hates the company of Shrey's girlfriend Tiya. Tiya is said to be stupid and crazy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downturn_Abbey"title="Downturn Abbey">
Ross becomes a grandfather and his teenage son Ronan becomes a father. Honor is dropped from one of Fionnuala's Hallmark Channel films and is expelled from school. Charles and Fionnuala's divorce comes through. Sorcha throws a "Downton Abbey"-themed party. Ronan falls in with a local gangster. Fionnuala moves into "mommy porn" with "Fifty Greys in Shades", and begins a relationship with Oisinn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Great_Game"title="A Great Game">
The book follows the development of Toronto's earliest professional hockey teams, particularly the Toronto Professional Hockey Club (1906–09) and the Toronto Blueshirts (from 1911). Prior to this, the development of professional teams was fiercely opposed by the Ontario Hockey Association and by "Toronto Telegram" publisher John Ross Robertson.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kellory_the_Warlock"title="Kellory the Warlock">
Each volume of the Chronicles of Kylix is set on a different world in the magical solar system of the fictional star Kylix in the constellation of the Unicorn. The system consists of the five planets Zao, Olymbris, Thoorana, Zephrondus and Gulzund. "Kellory the Warlock" takes place on Zephrondus.Kellory is the last survivor of the Black Wolves tribe, descended from the Lost Kings of Illyriod. His people were massacred by the Thugoda Horde, who burned his father alive and held his own sword hand in the same fire so he could live to tell the tale but never raise a sword against his tormentors. He dedicates his life to revenge against the horde, becoming a warlock since he is no longer able to be a warrior. In time, he achieves his dark goal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_of_Tyrants"title="Blood of Tyrants">
William Laurence awakens on the shores of Japan. He finds himself in great confusion: afflicted with retrograde amnesia, he remembers nothing of how he came to know Chinese nor how he arrived on these shores. He is brought before the local magistrate, Kaneko Hiromasa, and kept in genteel imprisonment for straying outside Nagasaki, the sole port currently open to European traders. Temeraire, meanwhile, works with the other dragons of his formation to put to rights the "Potentate", their dragon transport, which has run aground on a reef during a storm. Having made the ship seaworthy again, they set sail for Nagasaki, where diplomat Arthur Hammond wishes to make some overtures and to locate Laurence. They receive assistance in this matter from a friendly American dragon, John Wampanoag, a merchant captain attempting to expand his business into Japan. However, the only word is that Laurence has escaped: as Kaneko broke the law in giving shelter to a foreigner, his young retainer, Junichiro, absconded with Laurence to protect his master's honor. Temeraire feels additionally slowed by concern for Iskierka, who, after their mating in the previous novel, has produced an egg which must be cared for.Through a series of misadventures involving timber for "Potentate"'s repairs, ongoing dragon surveillance and a lot of Western posturing, Laurence and Temeraire eventually reunite, but Temeraire is dismayed to learn that Laurence has no memory of him, and Laurence dismayed to learn that, in the eight years lost from his memory, he became a member of the Aerial Corps. Though the two quickly renew their friendship, the other captains remain stilted in Laurence's company, talking around subjects which would potentially cause him discomfort. However, Laurence applies himself willingly to the diplomatic mission at hand: he, an honorary son of the Jiaqing Emperor, is to visit Peking in hopes of forming an alliance between China and the United Kingdom. No sooner has he arrived than he is swept up in local politics; conservatives are attempting to assassinate the heir to the throne, Prince Mianning (the future Daoguang Emperor), using Western decoys as their catspaws. Temeraire is also concerned to learn that Lung Tien Chuan, his twin brother and one of only eight Celestials alive, has died of poisoning. This assassination has attacked Mianning's legitimacy, as an Emperor must have a Celestial companion and there are now none to spare; to this end, Temeraire consents to couple with Lung Qin Mei, an Imperial he had grown fond of during his last sojourn in China, to attempt to breed a new one.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Officer_and_a_Spy"title="An Officer and a Spy">
Upon being promoted to run the "Statistical Section", the top secret headquarters of French military intelligence, Georges Picquart begins to discover that the evidence that was used to convict Alfred Dreyfus of espionage, which resulted in his imprisonment for life on Devil's Island, is flimsy at best. As he investigates further, he discovers that the military and the government doctored much of the evidence. Moreover, the spy who actually passed the information Dreyfus was convicted of sending to the Germans is actually still operating. Warned off the investigation by his superiors, Picquart persists, risking his career and his life, to free an innocent man from unjust imprisonment and to stop a spy operating within the military, who has gone unpunished.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_of_Fire_and_Thorns"title="The Girl of Fire and Thorns">
The Princess of Orovalle, Lucero-Elisa de Riqueza, was born as the chosen one, selected by God to fulfill a prophecy shown by a blue gem in her navel called the Godstone. Lucero-Elisa lacks confidence in herself, and often eats out of unhappiness; she is described as "fat" in the novel. On her sixteenth birthday, Lucero-Elisa is married to King Alejandro de Vega of Joya d'Arena, a country soon to be at war with Invierne. While traveling to Joya d'Arena, Elisa's caravan is attacked. Elisa, who has studied military history, provides sound military advice about the conflict, rescues herself and her companions, and saves the king's life, but her companion Aneaxi dies of injuries sustained in the attack, leaving her with one ally, her nurse and bodyguard, Ximena.When they arrive at Alejandro's palace, the King announces Elisa as princess and special guest, but conceals his marriage, and her Godstone. For some weeks, Elisa lives at the Palace as a "guest", making connections with the local priest, Alejandro's friend, and Alejandro's son, Prince Rosario. She is also forced to contend with a rival, Condesa Ariña, the king's mistress, and Ariña's maid, Cosmé. While at court, Elisa is asked to advise the king's Council about war, as well as to keep watch on his court. Elisa comes to learn that she was raised by a religious sect that believed in keeping her ignorant about her Godstone. Cosmé accidentally discovers Elisa's identity as bearer of the Godstone, and arranges for her to be kidnapped. They travel for a month across the desert, facing harsh conditions, and Elisa is pleased to have lost weight and have more physical endurance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Finds_You_in_Sugarcreek,_Ohio_(novel)"title="Love Finds You in Sugarcreek, Ohio (novel)">
Joe Matthews, a professional baseball pitcher from LA on the back end of his career, finds himself and his son (Bobby) in a picturesque community of Amish and Swiss influence after their truck breaks down. Joe is running from the paparazzi, who are constantly bombarding him and his son, about the unsolved murder of Joe's actress wife (Grace) which took place in their home. Joe doesn't want anyone to know where he is nor who he is which leads to the local Sugarcreek Policewoman, Rachel Troyer, becoming suspicious of this stranger in her town. Joe, who can't access his funds back home, needs a place to stay and finds it when he is introduced to three humble elderly Amish women who manage a rundown Amish bed and breakfast called the Sugar Haus Inn. The three Amish women: Bertha, Lydia, and Anna Troyer are the aunts and only living relatives of Rachel Troyer. Joe ends up working for his room and board and helps the women get the Sugar Haus Inn back up and running. Although Rachel Troyer is constantly suspicious of and on guard around Joe, she and he do start to form a relationship, and have to work together to solve the murder of Joe's wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Lord_Bird"title="The Good Lord Bird">
The memoirs of Henry Shackleford, an enslaved person in Kansas during the Bleeding Kansas era, are discovered in a Delaware church. Henry, nicknamed "Little Onion" for eating a particularly rancid onion, accidentally encounters abolitionist John Brown in a tavern. Brown mistakes Henry for a girl and gives him a dress to wear; Shackleford wears a dress for much of the novel. The two join together, and Henry narrates his encounters with Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and the events at John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. The book is narrated in the first person through Henry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tribune's_Curse"title="The Tribune's Curse">
55 BC: Senator Decius Metellus the Younger is happy for once: he is in Rome, having been granted leave from Julius Caesar's campaign in Gaul to return home and campaign for aedile, which he is confident of winning because of his family's influence, and he is newly married to Caesar's niece, Julia the Younger.The topic of discussion that year is Crassus's planned war with Parthia, which will commence as soon as Crassus steps down as Consul and departs Rome to take up his governorship of Syria. Crassus's planned war is equally unpopular with the "populares" and the Senate, but there is little anyone can do to prevent it, since Crassus is wealthy enough to raise and equip his own Legions.While canvassing for votes in the Forum, Decius is unnerved by a visit from his mortal enemy, Clodius. Since Crassus, Pompey and Caesar reached an agreement at Luca the previous year, all three are working together to advance Crassus's ambitions, so Clodius (Caesar's man) tells Decius that Crassus will finance his term of office as aedile - which Decius already knows will be ruinously expensive - if he will help convince his family to drop their opposition to the Parthian war. Later, the offer is repeated, by Crassus himself, while Decius and Julia are attending a formal dinner at Milo's house. As tempted as he is, Decius refuses, and is unsettled when Crassus appears personally insulted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(Dibia_novel)"title="Blackbird (Dibia novel)">
"Blackbird" opens on preparations for an armed home invasion. Three men—Scorpion, Razor, and Cobra—discuss the logistical details of perpetrating their crime in a wealthy compound, an event later revealed as the infamous rape and murder of socialite, Katherine Cole. Cole’s murder becomes a sort of touchstone throughout the novel, serving as a litmus to gauge attitudes towards race and social mobility in the face of systemic corruption and violent urban development. (Dibia’s depiction of an urban Nigerian ordinary is critical, and comments on the prevalence of everyday crime, corruption, and entrenched economic inequity.)The story then turns to Maya and Omoniyi, the middle-class parents of Deji, a child suffering from leukemia. For Maya and Omoniyi, supporting their son’s medical needs is difficult. Omoniyi becomes the victim of a wave of chronic unemployment and is laid off from his office job in a shoe factory; Maya is forced, against her husband’s wishes, to sing at local restaurant in order to supplement the family income. Family luck, however, changes when Maya is approached by a wealthy hotel manager, Edward, after her performance at a private party. Omoniyi and Maya are offered and accept employment, room, and board at The Oasis Hotel.Meanwhile, Edward and his wife, Nduesoh, suffer the everyday pains of a mismatched marriage. Interested in Nduesoh originally for her “exotic” appearance, Edward fashions for the couple a life insulated from anything that Nduesoh knew before, while engaging himself in a development scheme to displace the urban poor. She hardens in her role among the other rich wives, lamenting the racial divide within her elite social circle and the rumors surrounding Edward’s infidelity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ru_(novel)"title="Ru (novel)">
The novel tells the tale of a woman, An Tinh Nguyen, born in Saigon in 1968 during the Tet Offensive who immigrates to Canada with her family as a child.The book switches between her childhood in Vietnam where she was born into a large and wealthy family, her time as a boat person when she left her country for a refugee camp in Malaysia, and her life as an early immigrant in Granby, Quebec. The story is told by a first-person narrative.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Temple_of_the_Muses"title="The Temple of the Muses">
60 BC: Decius Metellus the Younger accompanies his relative Quintus Caecilius Metellus Creticus on a diplomatic mission to Alexandria. The assignment is a polite form of exile, since his mortal enemy Clodius, is currently politically ascendant in Rome. Decius's friend Rufus assures him that he will enjoy himself, since Alexandria is a beautiful city and King Ptolemy's court always goes to absurd lengths to flatter and pamper Roman visitors, especially those of Senatorial rank.About a month after his arrival, Decius is pleasantly surprised to welcome his fiancee, Julia (Julius Caesar's niece) and her friend, Cornelia Fausta (the dictator Sulla's daughter). Because of her fascination with scholarship, Decius allows Julia to drag him on a guided tour of the famous library. While she is listening to a lecture, Decius wanders into the Temple of the Muses attached to the Library and is struck by its simple beauty and unpretentious veneration of art, literature, and music. Decius is usually not a spiritual man, but both Julia and Decius's slave Hermes notice him walking around in a daze after visiting the Temple.While Decius and Julia are attending a formal dinner for the scholars at the Library, an outcry is raised when one of them, a mathematician named Iphicrates, is found murdered in his chambers. Decius's friend, the physician Asklepiodes, determines that Iphicrates was struck in the head by the blunt side of a ceremonial axe, commonly used for sacrificial ceremonies in the nearby temples. Decius finds signs that Iphicrates was actually killed inside the Temple before being dragged into his chambers. The next morning, he asks King Ptolemy for formal authority to investigate the crime.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touba_and_the_Meaning_of_Night"title="Touba and the Meaning of Night">
Spanning eighty years, the novel follows the life of Touba, a young woman educated by her father in a time when few women received education. After her father passes away, Touba proposes to and marries a 52-year-old man. Initiated in desperation, the marriage causes Touba to fall into depression and eventually ends in a divorce. Touba later remarries a Prince of the Qajar dynasty. Though her second marriage starts happily, it also ends in divorce when the Prince takes a second wife. After the divorce, Touba is left to raise their daughter on the dwindling allowance afforded by her former husband's diminishing dynasty. To compensate, Touba weaves rugs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy_and_Its_Kindred_Delusions"title="Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions">
"Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions" is composed of two parts. In the first, Holmes explains how the placebo effect can produce false positives, and describes numerous forms of popular but ineffective quackery (including the royal touch, the tractors of Elisha Perkins, and the powder of sympathy), to demonstrate that positive anecdotal evidence is not necessarily indicative of an effective medical therapy. He also describes how Perkins claimed the healing powers of the tractors were due to their being made of a special alloy, but how they declined in popularity after it was discovered that the tractors had the same effect no matter what they were made of. In the second, he criticizes the basis of homeopathy itself, such as its theory of dilutions. Another issue is that of homeopathic provings (the practice of taking a substance to see what symptoms it causes). Holmes claims that during provings, subjects consider even the slightest discomfort (such as itching) to be the result of the substance, and that this method does not demonstrate symptom causality.In the work Holmes also expressed a belief that "real advances were made only after years of work by highly trained men who cared little for fame and money".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_We_Be_Forgiven"title="May We Be Forgiven">
The central character is Harry Silver, a professor based in New York City whose specialty is "Nixonology", the study of former US President Richard Nixon. His brother George is a TV executive who ends up in a psychiatric ward after a car accident in which two people die. Harry falls into an affair with George's wife Jane while trying to comfort and assist her. After walking out of the hospital, George finds them together and kills Jane. He is committed to a mental institution for the murder. This horrific first chapter of loss sets up the rest of the novel. In the aftermath of the scandal, Harry's wife leaves him. He moves from Manhattan into George's suburban life to care for his dog, and nephew and niece, a boy and a girl who each attend elite boarding schools. Harry functions as an innocent abroad in this different world, allowing for numerous satirical encounters and observations. He goes through a kind of redemption, cobbling together a kind of family, including three generations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billie_Morgan"title="Billie Morgan">
The central character, Billie, is a 46-year-old woman who runs a new age shop in Bradford, England. However, she keeps a dark secret, that when younger and part of a biker gang, she murdered Terry, an unpleasant drug addict and the father of her godson Natty, and covered it up with the aid of her lover Mickey. The novel takes the form of a confession written by Billie when she fears a journalist will expose her past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentats_of_Dune"title="Mentats of Dune">
With anti-technology Butlerian forces of Manford Torondo growing in strength and influence, Prince Roderick Corrino sees a threat to the Imperial power of his brother, Emperor Salvador. Industrialist Josef Venport squares off against Torondo, whose interference thwarts Venport's business interests. Meanwhile, Gilbertus Albans grows increasingly fearful for his Mentat School on Lampadas (and the copy of the thinking machine Erasmus he is hiding there) as Torondo grows bolder. When Gilbertus refuses to force his Mentats to swear an oath to the Butlerians, his school is invaded and his past as a "machine sympathizer" is revealed. He is executed by Manford, but Anna Corrino escapes with Erasmus. Meanwhile, a riot incited by Torondo results in the death of Roderick's daughter; Salvador seizes the lucrative melange mining operations on Arrakis from Venport, who soon uses the constant danger of giant sandworms to orchestrate the Emperor's assassination.Raquella Berto-Anirul has reestablished her Bene Gesserit school on Wallach IX, thanks to the help of Josef Venport. Valya Harkonnen, now a Reverend Mother, retrieves the hidden computers from Rossak and hopes to succeed the declining Raquella as Mother Superior. Raquella believes that the only hope for the Sisterhood to survive is for the Wallach IX sisters to reconcile with Dorotea's faction on Salusa Secundus; her health failing, she summons Dorotea to the School and forces Dorotea and Valya to put their differences aside and agree to work together for the good of the Sisterhood. Naming them co-leaders, Raquella dies; Valya however, still bitter about Dorotea's betrayal, uses her newly discovered power of Voice to force Dorotea to commit suicide. Valya declares herself to be the sole Mother Superior, and ingratiates herself to the new Emperor Roderick.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Touch_of_Evil"title="The Touch of Evil">
Narrated by protagonist Chapman Jones ("Chappie"), the stories involve his pulp-style adventures with colleagues Dr. Ken Wilson and others in combating menaces of supernatural horror.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_prequel_series"title="Dune prequel series">
The "Prelude to Dune" series begins four decades before the events of "Dune", with an eager Crown Prince Shaddam plotting to succeed his aging father Elrood IX, young House Atreides heir Leto becoming close with the ruling family of the important technology world Ix, and the Bene Gesserit scheming behind the scenes to create the Kwisatz Haderach. As the series progresses, Leto becomes the new Atreides Duke, Shaddam becomes the emperor and aligns with the Bene Tleilax in their takeover of Ix to develop synthetic spice, and the Bene Gesserit punish Baron Vladimir Harkonnen for raping one of them with a disease that slows his metabolism. The Spacing Guild, having found the Tleilaxu synthetic spice to be fatal to its Navigators, forces Shaddam to capitulate to the Landsraad, with Leto playing a role in forcing Shaddam to sign humiliating peace accords, confirming his status as the emperor's leading rival.The series begins more than a millennium after a group of immortal, militant cyborgs calling themselves the Titans seized control of the entire universe in indestructible cymek bodies and then accidentally relinquished control to an artificial intelligence program called Omnius. Omnius and the immortal Titans rule over the 500 planets of the Synchronized Worlds with cruelty while a handful of free planets are united under the League of Nobles, a government using what resources it has to defend against machine aggression. A prominent figure in the human rebellion is Serena Butler, whose young son dies at the hands of the independent robot Erasmus and sparks , with humanity mounting a decisive offense against machine rule. lasts for nearly a century, with much loss of human life but ending in human victory at the . The Jihad also gives rise to the Bene Gesserit, the Spacing Guild, the Sardaukar army, the Landsraad, and House Corrino, whose Padishah Emperors rule the universe for the next 10,000 years until the events of "Dune".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Darker_Place"title="A Darker Place">
The novel is about a famous Russian writer and ex-paratrooper named Alexander Kurbsky, who is fed up with the Putin government and decides he wants to "disappear" into the West. He is under no illusions, however, about how the news will be greeted at home. Having seen too many of his countrymen die mysteriously at the hands of the thuggish Russian security services, he makes elaborate plans for his escape and concealment with Charles Ferguson, Sean Dillon, and the rest of the group known informally as the Prime Minister's private army. However, Kurbsky is still working for the Russians and intends to infiltrate the highest levels of Western intelligence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_Course_(Hinton_novel)"title="Collision Course (Hinton novel)">
On his evening walk one Wednesday night fifteen-year-old Ray got tempted by a Honda 125 motorbike outside a pub with its engine running so he got on and went for a joyride. He rode to the neighbouring village of Blackston and on his way back to the city he collided with a woman, who he saw earlier in an Austin Mini, and killed her. Ray walked back to the city and decided to take the bus rather than walk home in his weakened state. However, when the conductor came to collect the fare Ray remembered that he did not have any money on him so the conductor asked for his name and address so the company could send him a bill. Ray gave him fake details and was reminded not to go on the bus without any money and when he got home he went straight to bed and locked the door to hide his injuries from his family.In the morning Ray washed the blood from his pillow case, hair and the inside of his hood then checked the daily newspaper. On page six was a report about the collision saying that police investigations were underway.That afternoon in school the history teacher chose that day to teach them about Sir Robert Peel and developments in the police force including crime detection methods. A girl in the class asked a question about whether it was true that only 40% of all crimes were detected and solved then a couple of other pupils also heard about that figure reassuring Ray about the fallibility of the police. At the end of the school day Ray found on the notice board that he made it onto the school football team as a reserve but on his way out he saw a police car pull into the school gates so Ray went back in see what it was about. Ray waited outside the headmaster's office trying to listen but only caught a few short words. Back home Ray's mother told him that his grandmother was ill which she was worried about and he made her more upset when he told her that he forgot to buy the sausages for tea that he promised her he would get. In the bath Ray thought about committing suicide using a razor blade but decided against it deciding that he would get through the whole affair of his guilt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reason_I_Jump"title="The Reason I Jump">
Yoshida and Mitchell, who have a child with autism, wrote the introduction to the English-language version. The majority of the memoir is told through 58 questions Higashida and many other people dealing with autism are commonly asked, as well as interspersed sections of short prose. These sections are either memories Higashida shares or parabolic stories that relate to the themes discussed throughout the memoir. The collection ends with Higashida's short story, "I'm Right Here," which the author prefaces by saying:I wrote this story in the hope that it will help you to understand how painful it is when you can't express yourself to the people you love. If this story connects with your heart in some way, then I believe you'll be able to connect back to the hearts of people with autism too.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Star_Nairobi"title="Black Star Nairobi">
Ishmael, an African American detective originally from Madison, Wisconsin, relocates to Kenya and starts a detective agency called the Black Star Agency with his associate, O (short for Odhiambo). Ishmael and O's initial investigations involve odd cases, such as recovering “stolen” male gonads and cases of witchcraft; the only reason that the detectives are willing to take on these cases is that they are desperate for cash. They suddenly jump at the opportunity to investigate a new case involving a man who has been murdered and discarded in the Ngong Forest. They eventually realize that the man's murder might be linked to a later bombing of the Norfolk Hotel in downtown Nairobi, which leaves ten Americans dead. Over the course of the novel, Ishmael and O's case becomes more complicated when the results of the presidential election prompt tribal violence. Forces working against the two detectives try to keep them from investigating the case. The constant tug-of-war leads the detectives around the world, from Nairobi to Oakland, California to Mexico and back to Nairobi again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_the_Devil_and_the_Deep_Blue_Sea_(novel)"title="Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (novel)">
Nothing much exciting rolls through Violet White’s sleepy, seaside town…until River West comes along. River rents the guesthouse behind Violet’s crumbling estate, and as eerie, grim things start to happen, Violet begins to wonder about the boy living in her backyard. Is River just a crooked-smiling liar with pretty eyes and a mysterious past? Or could he be something more?Violet’s grandmother always warned her about the Devil, but she never said he could be a dark-haired boy who takes naps in the sun, who likes coffee, who kisses you in a cemetery…who makes you want to kiss back. Violet’s already so knee-deep in love, she can’t see straight. And that’s just how River likes it.Blending faded decadence and the thrilling dread of gothic horror, April Genevieve Tucholke weaves a dreamy, twisting contemporary romance, as gorgeously told as it is terrifying—a debut to watch.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxyland"title="Moxyland">
"Moxyland" follows four protagonists in a near future South African dystopian society. The society relies heavily on technology. Citizens use SIMs in cell phones to access their homes, money, jobs, various areas of Cape Town, and is also used as punishment. If a citizen commits a crime, he/she can be “disconnected” which means “no phone, no service, [and] no life.” Being disconnected essentially means to be an outsider of society. The technologically advanced society, where online presence is important to life, considers this form of punishment worse than imprisonment.Throughout the novel, the main characters’ (Toby, Tendeka, Kendra, and Lerato) actions reflect the fear of being disconnected. Tendeka, an idealistic anti-corporation activist, is against the amount of power the government/ corporation has. By being dependent on technology, the government and corporations have a substantial amount of control over the fate of the citizens. The citizens’ power is limited due to this relationship. Although Tendeka fears disconnection, he enlists the help of Toby to protest against the government through a variety of methods. Most of these methods require the technological assistance of Lerato, a computer programmer who works for a major corporation.While Tendeka tries to change the way society works, Kendra is sponsored by a corporation. She consented to having nanobots injected into her body which claims to prevent aging and prevent sickness. The nanotechnology makes her addicted to a soft drink called Ghost. Unlike the other characters, Kendra does not try to fight against the way dystopian society works. She instead takes pictures of what is around her and does not take a stand. However, as the story progresses she is brought into the chaos due to Tendeka's orders from skyward*; an online contact from a game.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beautiful_Things_That_Heaven_Bears"title="The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears">
"The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears" is about an Ethiopian immigrant, Sepha Stephanos, who owns a small grocery store. Stuck between two identities — that of his Ethiopian roots, and that of his American immigrant status — he connects almost immediately with Naomi, a half-black 11-year-old, who moves with her mother, Judith McMasterson, to Logan Circle, the small, run-down neighborhood where Stephanos lives. This is rather remarkable, considering Judith is the first white person to live there: "Before Judith, these were the only reasons white people had ever come into the neighborhood: to deliver official notices, investigate crimes and check up on the children of negligent parents", but demonstrates the creeping effects of "urban renewal" or "gentrification".Because of the dreadful events of his past and the melancholy status of his present, Stephanos is frozen in time, unable to make any progressive steps. He often plays a game with his friends, Congo Joe and Ken the Kenyan, in which they name the many coups of Africa and when they reigned, which demonstrates an unrewarding, nonsensical nostalgia for the place they once called home. Joe clarifies, "when the coup stops…so will the game" which, from what we see, is a long time coming. Stephanos’ efforts to define himself are somewhat lackluster: although he has lived in America for 17 years, he has shown little growth or signs of assimilation besides his move from "Little Ethiopia", an apartment building in Silver Spring where Ethiopians maintain their lifestyle and culture, and the founding of his less-than-profitable business. Even in his relationship with Judith, he refuses to take action, besides a kiss that is less of a kiss and more of a "pressing", as he describes it. Although there are many rather substantial plot developments — from the eviction notice of the store to the escalation of violence against Judith — Stephanos stays resistant to change and growth throughout.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saga_of_Shadows"title="The Saga of Shadows">
Twenty years after the Elemental War, humanity is governed by the benevolent Confederation, and relations with the alien Ildirans have returned to their pre-war harmony. But the malevolent Klikiss robots are plotting their revenge from exile, and soon find an ally in the ancient Shana Rei, the destructive personification of darkness and chaos which has awakened from millennia of slumber to destroy all sentient life in the universe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kill_List"title="The Kill List">
Several random mid-level authority figures in the United States and Great Britain are brutally murdered by Muslim extremists, all of whom seem to have been radicalized by the online sermons of a mysterious veiled man known only as "the Preacher". Perplexed by his unknown origins and his flawless command of the English language, the U.S. government soon places him on the Kill List, a list approved by the U.S. President and his senior advisors of individuals who are to be eliminated as soon as possible.The agency charged with finding and killing the people on the list is the Technical Operations Support Activity or TOSA. It soon dispatches its best headhunter, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel known to most only as "the Tracker" (who also has a personal agenda in this matter, as his father was murdered by one of the Preacher's assassins), to discover the Preacher's identity and eliminate him.The Tracker's investigations are slow to progress until he recruits a young and very skilled aspyish computer hacker he codenames "Ariel" to act as his tech support. Ariel traces the digital signatures of the Preacher's sermons to find him somewhere in Somalia, but the Tracker realises that the Preacher must have an ally in England to broadcast his sermons from and act as a middleman between the Preacher and his followers: the Tracker's investigation into the Preacher's history uncovers a pickle mogul who is a childhood friend of the Preacher, and Ariel obtains his IP address to focus on the Preacher's location. Further investigations go nowhere until the Mossad reveals to TOSA that they have a Falasha agent codenamed "Opal" in Somalia who they can use to get close to the Preacher.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Blood"title="Desert Blood">
Ivon Villa, a lesbian professor living in Los Angeles, returns home to El Paso to adopt a baby girl from Cecilia, a Mexican "maquiladora" living across the border in Juarez, as well as attend a family reunion. But to her horror, Cecilia turns up dead in the desert, with the baby disemboweled, a victim of the epidemic of homicides of young women from southern Mexico emigrating to the north for better work. Things take a turn for the worse when Ivon's sixteen-year-old sister Irene gets kidnapped while attending a fair in Juarez. The search for her sister leads Ivon to discover a terrifying conspiracy that involves everyone from the Border Patrol to the corrupt "judicales" in Juarez.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_(Patterson_novel)"title="Zoo (Patterson novel)">
The novel centers on Jackson Oz, an outcast among professional and academic ecologists and biologists. Oz has tried for years to get other scientists to listen to the data he has been collecting on the increasing numbers of mammal attacks on humans. He becomes so obsessed with this goal that he quits graduate school and devotes himself to full-time data collection and arguing his case. Finally, on a trip to Botswana, he survives an attack by a large band of male lions in which about one hundred people are killed over a large area. He saves the life of ecologist Chloe Tousignant. Upon returning to America, he finds his girlfriend dead in his apartment, killed and partly eaten by his pet chimpanzee.Five years later, Oz has married Chloe and they have a son named Eli. His theory becomes accepted as all over the world, packs of animals are entering densely populated cities and killing humans en masse. He is recruited by the US president to research the cause but before he and his team of scientists can find an answer, the president's daughter is killed by their dog and the military launches strikes against affected cities, which worsens the attacks. Continuing his research, Oz discovers that animal pheromones have changed due to the widespread use of radio communication (cell phones) and petroleum products (notably automobile exhaust) and these disrupted pheromones are enlarging the animals' amygdalas and causing the aggression. The President of the United States orders all electricity, cellphone, and automobile usage banned for two weeks, and animal attacks cease nearly immediately as the ban takes effect. But after one week, people return to their previous habits and the attacks restart with increased ferocity. Oz, his wife and son, along with some scientists and political leaders, are evacuated to Thule, Greenland, where research into how to reverse the changes will take place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackamoores"title="Blackamoores">
Based on a study of 250,000 documents during 10 years of research (including a 1501 letter written by statesman Thomas More to his friend John Holt), the book explores the history of Black people in Tudor-era England, focusing on challenging the conventional historiographical narrative "that Africans in the Tudor period automatically occupied the lowest positions in society [and were] usually stigmatized as slaves, transient immigrants or dangerous strangers." Through his work, Onyeka aims to show that Black Britons held numerous positions of importance in Tudor-era England, living in urban metropolises such as London, Plymouth, Bristol and Northampton and were frequently employed by the English upper class due to their specialised technical abilities (Onyeka notes that most contemporary sources concerning Black Britons during the Tudor era comes from "personal letters sent between individuals or other correspondence not written for publication").In addition, Onyeka aims to challenge the assertion that most Black Britons in the Tudor era were foreign-born, arguing that a significant minority had both been born and grew up in England. Regarding the Black British population which were foreign born, he writes that "there is evidence that some of the Africans who were present in London at the end of the sixteenth century were from Iberia and congregated in specific areas of the city operating as a self-sufficient community", and "some of these Iberian Africans were skilled artisans, and had professions, trades and knowledge which were acknowledged by the royalty of Europe including members of England’s aristocracy."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleborn_(book)"title="Battleborn (book)">
## "Ghosts, Cowboys".A semi-autobiographical narrator tells the story of her father Paul Watkins and his role in the Manson Family.Additionally, the story details how George Spahn acquired his ranch and the narrator's bond with her half-sister dubbed Razor Blade Baby.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_the_Jacaranda_Tree"title="Children of the Jacaranda Tree">
"Children of the Jacaranda Tree" is composed of seven different narratives and told from various points of views. The first half of the novel tells the story of political activists imprisoned in the 1980s by the newly established Islamic regime and their children, some born inside prison, some at home forced to watch as their parents are taken away. These children are raised by grandparents and aunts while their parents languish in prison. The second half of the novel is set twenty years later, during the 2009 Iranian election protests and the Iranian Green Movement. The children born in the first half of the book, now grown up, have to face their own decisions, whether they will be bound by their parents' past of a revolution gone astray or whether they will be able to break free, make a new beginning both for themselves and for their country.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vampire_Tapestry"title="The Vampire Tapestry">
"The Vampire Tapestry" is composed of five free-standing novella-length chapters which are stitched together to form one episodic plot, or hence the name, tapestry. In the first half of the novel, the narrative is presented from the point of view of different characters as their paths cross Weyland's. In the final chapters, the focus centers on Weyland himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_Wolf_(Muchamore_novel)"title="Lone Wolf (Muchamore novel)">
The book is set in and around North London. The prologue is based around Fay Hoyt and her aunt Kirsten, and is set in December 2012. Fay's mother Melanie was killed by a drug dealer, so she is living with her aunt in St John's Wood, London. They rob the drug dealer that killed Melanie, who is called Hagar, and attempt to sell the stock in Manchester, but Kirsten is caught by police. Fay temporarily goes on the run, but is caught by police after she goes back to London. Kirsten is sent to prison, where she is killed by representatives of Hagar. Fay is sent to a Secure Training Compound.Back in 2014, CHERUB agents Fu Ning and Ryan Sharma are given a mission - to take down the drug gang led by Hagar. Their mission controller is former CHERUB agent, and lead character in the first 12 books, James Adams. Ryan is given the job of befriending people close to the gang, and attempting to make himself known in order to pick up information for the intelligence services. Ning is given the job of befriending Fay, who is due to be released in a week's time from the STC. The girls immediately grow close, but Ryan struggles to make friends until a scheme devised by James makes him popular.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_Lands"title="Distant Lands">
Life at a small railway station - as seen through the eyes of two 8-year-olds, Vasya and Petya, - is in turmoil. An expedition arrives from a regional center to examine the possibility of building an aluminum factory nearby. In a parallel development the majority of locals choose to form a kolkhoz, kulak Danila and two of his friends being fierce opponents.Yegor, a local Selsoviet chairman disappears with a large sum of money, collected by people for purchasing some machinery for their future enterprise. The project is on the verge of collapse: people are horrified by the idea that Yegor, a trustworthy man and a Civil War hero, should turn out a thief. Then the reason for one of the boys, Petya’s strange behaviour becomes clear. It turns out that he’s found Yegor’s blood-stained cap in the forest and seems to know who the murderer is.The three kulak guys get arrested for the crime one of them committed, Yegor’s dead body is found in the woods to be buried by the river, the kolkhoz project gets revived as does Vasya and Petya's long-cherished dream of distant lands and happiness for all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_for_Lya_(novella)"title="A Song for Lya (novella)">
The story deals with two telepaths named Robb and Lyanna ("Lya" for short), who visit the planet Shkea by an invitation of the planetary administrator, who is disconcerted by the culture of the native alien population, the Shkeen, and how it affects humans. The Shkeen are an ancient culture, but their progress has stalled at a stone age level for thousands of years. Their religion is centered on a jelly-like parasite called the Greeshka. At middle age, they allow themselves to be infected by it, and ten years later visit a cave where there is a large mass of Greeshka and allow themselves to be consumed by it. The administrator is concerned because a growing quantity of humans have joined that religion, including his predecessor.Besides working as a team, Robb and Lya are a couple, and they pride themselves that their telepathy allows them a closer bond and much better understanding of one another than the one regular humans have, but at the same time Lya has feelings of existential dread, and a feeling of isolation that not even their powers can surpass.Robb and Lya attend a ceremony for Shkeen that are about to get infected with Greeshka and the following day they explore the city to find some who are already infected. They find some, both Shkeen and human, and Lya reads in their minds how lonely they were before converting, and how the Greeshka has removed the loneliness. That night, Robb and Lyanna have an emotional discussion and Lyanna disappears. Robb and a local team visit one of the caves where the Shkeen are consumed by the Greeshka, and when he tries to read the emotions on a Shkeen in the middle of the process, he receives a feeling of love that overwhelms him and is unable to resist it, until he loses consciousness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Man_(novel)"title="The Big Man (novel)">
This novel relates the story of Dan Scoular, an unemployed man who turns to bare-knuckle boxing to make a living.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_Wounded_(short_story_collection)"title="Walking Wounded (short story collection)">
This interwoven collection of stories is set in the fictional Scottish town of Graithnock and captures the social and emotional struggles of ordinary people's lives.The short stories included in this collection are:
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Summer_Job"title="The Summer Job">
Claire, a recent college graduate, is forced to look for a new job after her boyfriend burns down the bar that employed them. She finds a job at a secluded hotel in Mission, Massachusetts that seems too good to be true. Her best friend Allison drives her down there, but the pair arrives so late that Allison is forced to stay overnight. The next morning Allison is missing and Claire is told that she left early to get a head start on the drive home. Unbeknownst to Claire, Allison was actually carried off by the hotel's cook and left for dead in the woods.The hotel's staff is kind but strange, and Claire finds herself getting constantly warned to stay away from the woods and the aging hippie Davey and his followers. As a former wild child with a strong rebellious streak still remaining, Claire finds herself drawn to this group- especially after meeting Tobin, one of Davey's handsome followers. She ends up sneaking out every night and eventually gets drawn into a battle between the very conservative townspeople of Mission and the wild misfits in the woods.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital_(novel)"title="Hospital (novel)">
Litt initially adopts a realistic tone, portraying several conventional scenarios associated with medical drama, including a nurse's romantic interest in a doctor, the arrival of a coma patient from another hospital, a young boy's stomach-ache (which he believes to be the result of an apple tree growing from a seed he had earlier swallowed), and the medical troubles of other patients. As the novel progresses, situations become increasingly surreal, as the ritual slaughter of a baby by Satanist doctors causes an impenetrable fog of implicitly supernatural origin to beshroud the hospital, impeding contact with the outside world. As the young boy continues to search for an exit, various bizarre events occur: a group of patients begin to worship the comatose man who had been transferred into the hospital earlier that evening; meat in character's stomachs regenerates into the animals it had been taken from, ripping their torsos open; and the young boy's fear that an apple tree is growing inside of him is realised.The book is notable for its large cast of characters, who are progressively introduced throughout in order to convey a sense of confusion and bewilderment. Litt estimates that the novel contains ‘about 130 characters’ overall. The meaning of the narrative is subject to multiple interpretations. Some, such as Martin, have argued that the subtitle implies that the text should be understood as a dream of the coma patient, whereas others, such as Poole, believe it is an allegorical representation of birth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_by_Me_Doraemon"title="Stand by Me Doraemon">
Nobita Nobi is a fifth grader who constantly gets failing grades in his subjects due to his laziness and is always bullied by his classmates Suneo Honekawa and Takeshi 'Gian' Goda. His great-great grandson from the 22nd century, Sewashi, who watches him every day, travels to Nobita's timeline while bringing along his robotic cat Doraemon. Sewashi reveals that if Nobita keeps up his act, he will have a disastrous future: he will marry Gian's sister Jaiko, have his private company burned down, and will be left with great debt. To circumvent this, he orders Doraemon to help Nobita, modifying Doraemon's nose to prevent him from returning to the future unless Nobita gains a better future.Being reluctant until the threat, Doraemon introduces his gadgets to help Nobita which helps him immensely. Though Doraemon warns Nobita not to be too dependent on his gadgets, Nobita asks Doraemon to help him woo his crush Shizuka Minamoto whom Doraemon reveals is the one Nobita will marry if his future is corrected. However, all his efforts end up making Shizuka become closer to ace student, Hidetoshi Dekisugi. Nobita's attempt to be equal with Dekisugi by studying harder is futile, and he decides to let go of Shizuka to make her happier. He does this by flipping Shizuka's skirt to reveal her underwear (but not looking at it), resulting in Shizuka screaming and holding her skirt down in embarrassment before slapping him and running away in tears. After a while, Shizuka realizes that Nobita had his eyes shut when he did this to her. This makes her start worrying about Nobita. She overhears Gian and Suneo's conversation about Nobita's self-esteem getting crushed by Sensei for recently failing another test, causing her to believe he is planning to commit suicide, Shizuka arrives at the Nobi residence and resists Nobita's people-repelling potion to help him, which Doraemon reveals is the first step in Nobita and Shizuka's growing relationship to eventually becoming a couple.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigged_(2007_book)"title="Rigged (2007 book)">
David Russo, fresh from Harvard Business School, secures a job in Wall Street as the dot-com bubble had just depressed the market. A chance meeting led to an opportunity at New York Mercantile Exchange—the world's largest energy exchange. At the Merc, he finds his working-class background helps him compete in the aggressive atmosphere. Russo quickly rises to become the Head of Strategy where he helps in the transition to electronic trading. In the aftermath of 9-11, Russo joined with colleagues to establish the Dubai Mercantile Exchange, a partnership between NYMEX and the government of Dubai. Through this venture, Russo helped accelerate the development of capital markets in the region.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incredible_Bodies"title="Incredible Bodies">
Morris Gutman is a largely unsuccessful academic casually employed at the University of Coketown as an English lecturer. His efforts to secure a permanent position are curtailed by his specialisation in the unfashionable novelist Arthur Alderley and his lack of background in Theory. However, after being in collision with a promising research student Dirck van Camper in a carpark, Gutman is able to plagiarise van Camper's article ‘Total mindfuck: a study in ethics and embodiment’, publishing it in the journal "Vagina Dentata" as his own. Subsequently, he is acclaimed as a leading light in the field of Body Studies, granting him access to the secure employment he desired. Wracked with guilt due to his belief that he killed van Camper, Gutman reveals the hit-and-run to his colleague Zoe Cable, who misinterprets the confession as Gutman telling her that he was van Camper's lover. Cable develops a sexual interest in Gutman, which they act upon while attending a body studies conference in Los Angeles. On their return from the conference, it is discovered that van Camper has recovered, rather than dying as expected, and intends to expose Gutman's appropriation of his work. Gutman, who has by this point grown increasingly erratic and dependent on alcohol, is discredited. His wife divorces him, he is sacked from his academic job, and even spends some time in gaol. After a period of poverty, an opportunity arises for Gutman to re-enter the academic world. A chance meeting with an old acquaintance, however, convinces him that it would be preferable to be satisfied with a ‘life of cheerful underachievement’ (McGuire 2006: 366).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Jesus"title="Killing Jesus">
The book begins with "A Note to Readers" by Bill O'Reilly, which promises, "...this is not a religious book. We do not address Jesus the Messiah, only as a man who galvanized a remote area of the Roman Empire and made very powerful enemies while preaching a philosophy of peace and love." After a lengthy quotation from the conservative journalist Vermont C. Royster, the introduction concludes: "But the incredible story behind the lethal struggle between good and evil has not been fully told. Until now." The first chapter begins with a novelistic description of the Massacre of the Innocents from . The remaining portion of the chapter focusses on Herod the Great, the king of Judaea, the politics of his reign, the visit of the Magi, and the birth of Jesus. A lengthy footnote at the end of the chapter defends the historical accuracy of the canonical gospels and their traditional attributions to Matthew the Apostle, John Mark, Luke the Evangelist, and John the Apostle.The second chapter describes the life of the Roman general and dictator Julius Caesar, his conquests, his seduction by the Egyptian Ptolemaic queen Cleopatra, and his eventual assassination. Chapter Three summarizes the aftermath of Caesar's murder, the Battle of Philippi, the Second Triumvirate, the Octavian's defeat of Mark Antony and Cleopatra in the Battle of Actium, and Octavian's ascension to the title of "emperor". The fourth chapter returns to the life of Jesus, describing his worried parents looking for him after he has gone missing during a trip to Jerusalem for the Passover. It describes some of the politics of Roman Judaea, heavily emphasizing the idea that the Jews were victims of Roman totalitarian oppression. Chapter Five describes the finding in the Temple from , the architecture of the Temple in Jerusalem, Nazareth, and the government and political background of Galilee.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tragedy_of_Arthur"title="The Tragedy of Arthur">
## Preface.The book opens with a Preface by the editors of Random House, introducing the text as the "first modern edition of "The Tragedy of Arthur" by William Shakespeare." It provides a brief summary of the Shakespearean canon and Apocrypha, claiming that "The Tragedy of Arthur" is "the first certain addition to Shakespeare's canon since the seventeenth century." They also thank Professor Roland Verre for his research confirming the play's authenticity, as well as Peter Bryce, David Crystal, Tom Clayton, and Ward Elliott for their efforts. Finally, the Preface thanks Arthur Phillips for writing an Introduction, as well as for editing and annotating the text of the play. However, Random House strongly recommends that readers read the play before the introduction, "allowing Shakespeare to speak for himself, at least at first", before perusing Phillips' "very personal Introduction" or "the many other commentaries sure to be available soon"."Contractually bound" to provide a synopsis of the play, Phillips sketches out descriptions of the play's five acts in the Introduction, relating the details of them to details of his family history. Professor Roland Verre, who co-edited the play, offers a more effective summary preceding the text, in addition to many explanatory footnotes throughout.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_Who's_Back"title="Look Who's Back">
In 2011, Adolf Hitler wakes up in a vacant lot in Berlin which appears to be the location of the garden outside the bunker where he was burned, with no knowledge of anything that happened following his death in 1945. Homeless and destitute, he interprets everything he sees and experiences in 2011 from a Nazi perspective—for instance, he assumes that Turks in Germany are an indicator of Karl Dönitz having persuaded Turkey to join the Axis, and thinks that Wikipedia is named for "Wikinger" ("Vikings"). Although everyone recognizes him, nobody believes that he is Hitler; instead, they think he is either a comedian or a method actor. He appears on a variety television show called "Whoa, dude!", going off-script to broadcast his views. Videos of his angry rants become hugely successful on YouTube, and he achieves modern celebrity status as a performer. The newspaper "Bild" tries to take him down, but is sued into praising him. He is beaten up by Neo-Nazis who think he is mocking the memory of Hitler, unaware that he is the genuine article. In the end, he uses his popularity to re-enter politics.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Invisible_Boy"title="The Last Invisible Boy">
Finn Garret is slowly turning invisible. After the sudden death of his beloved father, Finn notices that his skin and hair are growing steadily paler, which convinces him that he is on his way to becoming completely invisible. His mother has taken Finn to several doctors, who believe that his new appearance is due to stress and grief over the family's recent loss. Matters are made worse when Finn returns to school and is cruelly mocked for his appearance by his classmates. But as time goes on, Finn finds that his "invisibility" might not be as permanent and inevitable as he might believe it to be.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Arrow"title="The Last Arrow">
## Historical background.King John has been monarch for fifteen years, overseeing a disastrous reign that has driven England further into debt, lost territories in France, alienated his barons, and placed corrupt, cruel men in positions of power. Many countrymen begin speculating on the fate of John's lost nephew Arthur of Brittany, the long-lost rightful heir to the throne before being usurped by John. The whereabouts of Arthur's sister, Princess Eleanor, is also a mystery, though rumours speculate that she was rescued by a group of knights many years ago.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benita_(novel)"title="Benita (novel)">
In an adventure mingling romance and the supernatural, the clairvoyant heroine Benita assists in a hunt for a lost Portuguese treasure buried in the Transvaal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Fregelius"title="Stella Fregelius">
As the title suggests, "Stella Fregelius: a Tale of Three Destinies" is a story of the overlapping fates of three people in a northern coastal region of England. The story follows Morris Monk, an aspiring inventor, as he becomes engaged to his first cousin, Mary Porson, and soon complicates things by falling in love with the daughter of the new church rector, Stella Fregelius. As Morris has prior engagements in this lifetime, he and Stella dedicate their afterlives to one another in a spiritual marriage. Shortly after, Stella dies and Morris spends the next few years trying to contact her spirit before dying of exhaustion.At the beginning of the story, Morris is toiling with his biggest invention: the aerophone. In a form that resembles the earliest phones, Morris designed the aerophone in an attempt to revolutionise the world of communication by allowing two people to speak to each other from miles apart. Morris spent six years on it before it worked. After its initial success, however, he could not repeat the results, so he spends the next two years trying to make the finishing touches. Meanwhile, Morris’ father, Colonel Monk, is struggling with the mortgage on the Monksland Estate. As a retired soldier who lost his wife years ago, Colonel Monk hardly even manages to pay the interest on his mortgages. To stabilise the situation, Mr. Porson, Morris' uncle and the Colonel's wealthy brother-in-law, takes over the debt as a creditor. The main conflict of the book arises when the Colonel suggests that Morris should marry a wealthy woman to help ease the financial burden. Morris shows no interest in females, being described as "afraid of women". His interest is piqued, however, when his father suggests marrying Mary Porson, Morris' first cousin. While Morris still is not very enthusiastic about the idea of being married, he realises how well he and his cousin get along. Seeing as she is very attractive, quite intelligent and extremely supportive of Morris’ endeavours as an inventor, Morris agrees to marry her if the Colonel can prove that she is interested.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_Kings"title="The Ghost Kings">
Rachel Dove, a British missionary's daughter who has been trekked almost all her young life around the wilds of Africa while her father preaches the Good Word to the natives and her mother suffers silently. Her life is turned around when fellow teenager Richard Darrien rescues her from a flash flood; their common initials alone may clue the reader in that these two are another pair of Haggard's predestined lovers. Some years later however, Rachel not having seen Richard during all that intervening time, runs afoul of one of the author's patented lustful villains, Ishmael, a renegade Englishman who plots with the Zulu king to have Rachel for his own. This task is made complicated for the rogue when the Zulus come to view Rachel as their Inkosazana y Zoola or Great Lady of the Heavens; the embodiment and incarnation of their goddess. Rachel, accompanied by Noie, her faithful half Zulu attendant discovers a lost civilisations, the Ghost Kings: a dwarf-like tribe of tree worshippers who are able to peer into the future with their bowls of dew. Similarly, Ishmael who practically goes insane with lust over the beautiful Rachel. Noie is the exotic woman who dares much for love and sacrifice more. Rachel's mother and to a lesser degree, Rachel herself are endowed throughout the tale with the gift of second sight, a foreseeing ability that aids her on several crucial occasions. And while the Zulu umtakatis (wizards) do not play a role here. The magic of the Ghost Kings is shown to be very real and not a little eerie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Shadow_of_Midnight"title="In the Shadow of Midnight">
## Historical background.The story begins in April, 1203, at Rouen Castle. Arthur, Duke of Brittany, rightful heir to the English throne, is murdered in secret by his usurper uncle, King John, to prevent further rebellions against John's precarious reign. John had unsuccessfully attempted to leverage Arthur's sister, Eleanor of Brittany, as a means of persuasion for Arthur to recognize his right to the throne; with her brother dead, Eleanor becomes a claimant to the throne and remains in John's custody in England.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_a_Dark_Mist"title="Through a Dark Mist">
In the forests of Lincoln, England, the young widow Lady Servanne de Briscourt is journeying to marry her powerful betrothed, Lucien Wardieu, Baron de Gournay. While en route to his castle Bloodmoor Keep, Servanne's entourage is waylaid; she and her old maid are taken captive by forest outlaws led by the Black Wolf of Lincoln, a man claiming to be the true Lucien Wardieu. His associates include kindly former monk Alaric FitzAthelstan, the mischievous dwarf Sparrow, and the secretly female Gillian "Gil" Golden.Outraged to have been taken captive, Servanne is taken to his group's hideaway inside a dilapidated abbey. She and the Black Wolf feel instant attraction to the other, though initially each tries to hide it by antagonizing the other. He explains that he and her betrothed are half-brothers; the real Lucien was the heir to their father, but was betrayed by his bastard half-brother Etienne, who left Lucien for dead and stole his identity. Lucien took years to physically recover, and entered the service of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Servanne gradually comes to believe his claim, and they consummate their relationship. Lucien plans to confront his brother, but also has a secret mission to rescue Princess Eleanor of Brittany from her uncle Prince John. A previously agreed-upon hand-off between John and Lucien's party is to occur at Bloodmoor, though no one else knows that Lucien has been posing as an outlaw.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_Saw_Confidential"title="Chain Saw Confidential">
"Chain Saw Confidential" covers the making of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre", as well as its release, reception, and marketing. It goes into depth into the film as well as into Hansen's life. The material in the book is taken from several interviews from many of the cast and crew members. The final third of the book looks into the fan reception for the movie and its legacy on the film world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ivory_Child"title="The Ivory Child">
While Quatermain visits Lord Randall, two foreigners come asking for Macumazana—that is, asking for Allan Quatermain by the name he used among the Africans. The two visitors are Harut and Marut, priests and doctors of the White Kendah People and they have come to ask Allan Quatermain for his help. The White Kendah people are at war with the Black Kendah people who have an evil spirit for a god. And that spirit of the god resides in the largest elephant they have ever seen, an elephant that no man can kill—save Allan Quatermain. And now our intrepid hero must return to Africa and destroy this evil spirit before it kills every one of the White Kendah People.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ancient_Allan"title="The Ancient Allan">
Though "The Ancient Allan" features Haggard's recurring hero Allan Quatermain, most of the plot concerns one of his past lives. In the frame story, he and Lady Ragnall (introduced in "The Ivory Child") inhale "taduki", a fictional drug that induces visions of previous incarnations. Thus, Quartermain relives the experiences of ancient Egyptian aristocrat Shabaka (a descendant of the pharaoh of the same name)—alongside flashes of his earlier lives—and Ragnall those of Amada, an ancient priestess of Isis; several recurring characters of the Quartermain novels also appear under various guises.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virgin_of_the_Sun"title="The Virgin of the Sun">
"The Virgin of the Sun" features a fictional Pre-Columbian transoceanic contact between a medieval Englishman and the Incas. The novel centres on Hubert of Hastings, a London merchant at the time of King Richard II. Hubert falls foul of one of Richard's courtiers, and makes a sea voyage with a mysterious associate, Kari. Hubert eventually travels to Peru. Here he meets the titular character, Quilla, an Inca princess.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heu-Heu"title="Heu-Heu">
Allan and his sidekick, the faithful and always amusing Hottentot Hans go on a mission for the Zulu wizard Zikali (himself featured in many of the previous Quatermain books) and endeavor to bring back some leaves from the rare Tree of Illusions. They also attempt to delve into the mystery of Heu-Heu, a monstrous, 12-foot-tall, clawed and red-bearded semi-gorilla god who may or may not exist. As is usual in Haggard's novels, "Heu-Heu" starts off with an action set piece, a storm in which the heroes are forced to seek shelter in a Bushmen's cave, and from there moves swiftly and excitingly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Opposite_House"title="The Opposite House">
Maja Carmen Carrera, the British daughter of scholarly Cuban immigrants struggles with faith as she awaits the birth of her first child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Boy_(novel)"title="Golden Boy (novel)">
Max Walker is a golden boy: athletic, attractive and intelligent, from a well to do family. A family with secrets, because Max is intersex. When a childhood friend abuses his trust in a horrific way, the family starts to unravel and, ultimately, seek to try to come to terms with its secrets.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treasure_of_the_Lake"title="The Treasure of the Lake">
Allan Quatermain finds a village in the middle of the Dark Continent ruled by a huge, pale man with a strange knowledge of future events.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belshazzar_(novel)"title="Belshazzar (novel)">
The Egyptian prince Ramose seeks to rescue his wife Myra from the King of Babylon. The novel also features the Babylon king Belshazzar, and incorporates the Biblical episode of Belshazzar's feast into its plot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Quatermain_(novel)"title="Allan Quatermain (novel)">
At the beginning of the book, Allan Quatermain's only son has died and he longs to get back into the wilderness. He persuades Sir Henry Curtis, Captain John Good, and the Zulu chief "Umslopogaas" to accompany him, and they set out from the coast of east Africa into the territory of the Maasai. While staying with a Scottish missionary, Mr. Mackenzie, they run into a group of Maasai who kidnap Mr. Mackenzie's daughter. The Maasai demand the life of one of the party as ransom, but instead they lead an attack on the Maasai, catching them by surprise and slaughtering them. The group then travel by canoe along an underground river to a lake (which turns out to be the sacred lake of Zu-Vendis) in the kingdom of Zu-Vendis beyond a range of mountains. The Zu-Vendi are a warlike race of white-skinned people isolated from other African races; their capital is called Milosis. At the time of the British party's arrival, they are ruled jointly by two sisters, Nyleptha and Sorais. The priests of the Zu-Vendi religion are hostile to the explorers as they had killed hippopotamuses – animals sacred to the Zu-Vendis – on their arrival, but the queens protect them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Burial_at_Sea"title="A Burial at Sea">
Charles Lenox, gentleman and former amateur detective, is now a Member of Parliament, and his wife is expecting their first child. However, relations between the United Kingdom and France are increasing strained following the opening of the Suez Canal and several British agents have been murdered on French soil. Lenox is asked to undertake a secret mission to Egypt by Prime Minister Gladstone. However, the brutal murder of an officer on HMS "Lucy" has Lenox re-using his rusty investigation skills at the captain's request.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_13-Storey_Treehouse"title="The 13-Storey Treehouse">
The book begins with the narrator and fictional depiction of the author, Andy Griffiths, giving an introduction to himself, his friend and illustrator Terry Denton, and their treehouse; the main story follows this.Andy wakes up one morning, and on his way to getting breakfast, he meets Terry, painting a white cat yellow to turn it into a canary, or a "catnary". After being dropped from the treehouse, the cat grows wings and flies away. Andy and Terry are then greeted by their animal-loving friend Jill, who wants to find her pet cat, Silky. It turns out that the cat Terry painted was that exact cat. Andy and Terry try to remain innocent when Jill questions them. Right after Jill leaves, Andy and Terry receive a call via a 3D video phone by their publisher, Mr Big Nose, who is upset that the duo is behind schedule.They soon try to come up with ideas for a book, but Terry only has a few self-portraits of his finger. Since they're Terry's only pictures in his folder, he and Andy end up in an argument which starts a drawing competition. Once they compete for the best banana drawing, Andy gets upset and gets in a fight with Terry, armed with the Giant Banana Terry grew in the intro. Terry ends up knocking Andy out and pours a bucket of water to save him. They come back to ideas for their book, and it turns out that Andy has four pages that read "Once upon a time". But before anyone can say more, Terry gets distracted by television as his favourite show, "Barky the Barking Dog", is airing. Andy is not amused at all and throws the TV out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghalib_Danger"title="Ghalib Danger">
"Ghalib Danger" revolves around the life of its main protagonist Kamran Ali, a young taxi driver in Mumbai who dreams of bigger things for himself. After he saves the life of notorious underworld don Mirza, he is taken under Mirza's tutelage and gets drawn into the mafia world. Kamran eventually takes over Mirza's throne, but holds on to Mirza’s philosophy that Ghalib’s poetry can solve any problem. Soon, Kamran becomes the city’s most feared don with even the cops and politicians fearing him, earning him the name Ghalib Danger.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_American_Marriage"title="An American Marriage">
Roy, a sales representative for a textbook company, and Celestial, an artist specializing in custom made baby dolls, are newlyweds who live in Atlanta. After their first year of marriage they travel to Eloe, Louisiana to visit Roy's parents. The newlyweds spend the night at the local Motel 6 where they feud after Roy tells Celestial that his father is not his biological father. In the middle of their fight they take 15 minutes to cool off during which Roy exits their room and meets a woman around his mother's age with a broken arm whom he helps to her room. Later that night the woman is raped and she calls the police, believing that Roy was the one who raped her. While Roy is in jail awaiting trial, Celestial discovers that she is pregnant and the two decide that she should have an abortion. When the case goes to trial Roy is given a sentence of 12 years.For the first few years Roy and Celestial keep an active correspondence, though Roy grows frustrated as Celestial's career as an artist begins to take off and the gaps between their letters and visits grows longer. During this period Roy discovers that his cellmate Walter is actually his biological father and shares the news with Celestial. Also during this time, Roy learns that his mother Olive has died. After three years Celestial tells Roy that she no longer wishes to be his wife, causing a rift between them. Roy refuses communication with Celestial for the following two years, however when his case is finally overturned on appeal and the local DA decides not to pursue the case, he optimistically reaches out to Celestial believing that there is still hope for their marriage as she has never divorced him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Railway_Man_(book)"title="The Railway Man (book)">
Growing up before World War II, Lomax is fascinated by railways and spends his holidays trying to spot rare locomotives near his home in Edinburgh, Scotland.During the war, Lomax serves as a signals officer and is captured when the Japanese conquer Singapore. At first, the Japanese are unable to efficiently control the large number of Allied prisoners captured when Singapore falls, but eventually the prisoners are dispersed into smaller camps. The prisoners in the camp where Lomax is being held build a secret radio receiver, which is discovered by the prison authorities. Lomax and several other prisoners are severely beaten, and two of them die from their injuries. Later, when guards discover Lomax has drawn a detailed map of the Siam-Burma railroad, which the prisoners are being forced to help build, he endures intense questioning and torture, including being waterboarded. He and the others are found guilty of anti-Japanese activity and are sent to a harsher prison, where they are starved nearly to death. Eric is psychologically damaged by his treatment and, after the war, suffers from severe psychological problems and is only able to discuss his experiences as a POW with other former POWs. He eventually seeks treatment at the urging of his second wife. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avakasikal"title="Avakasikal">
Set in Malaysia, the novel deals with Velunni Kurup, a septuagenarian self-made millionaire and a host to his greedy relatives who try to defraud him of his wealth. Krishnanunni, a leading lawyer and a close friend of Velunni Kurup is the protagonist of the novel. The novel depicts the minds of about ten persons belonging to four generations with great insight.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_Soul"title="The Emperor's Soul">
Shai is a thief and practitioner of magical forgery who has been arrested and sentenced to death. The Emperor's corrupt advisors offer to free her if she agrees to forge a new soul for the Emperor, who has been left brain dead by an assassination attempt. She agrees, but plans to escape. She is given 100 days to forge the soul, given only official histories, the Emperor's diary, and Gaotona, the only non-corrupt advisor, a task even she deems impossible. As the two research the Emperor's past together, Gaotona learns more about forgery, a generally detested practice, and the two develop a grudging respect for each other. During this task, Shai realizes the Emperor had once been idealistic, but a life of leisure resulted in his recent indulgence, and resolves to create and tweak the soul as her masterpiece, setting him on a better path. Though many opportunities present themselves, Shai puts off escaping until the work is done, whereupon Gaotona helps her win her freedom against his colleagues' treachery. The Emperor, with the forged soul, resumes his rule.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixing_Sex"title="Fixing Sex">
In a scholarly work, Karkazis draws heavily on interviews with intersex adults, parents, and physicians to explore how intersex is understood and treated. In part 1, she reviews the history of treatment for intersex traits, highlighting the work of John Money and the introduction of the, then new, terms "gender", "gender role" and "gender identity". She explores the events following publication of Milton Diamond's study of the David Reimer or "John/Joan" case, and the ways in which public opinion impacted on medical treatment. In part 2, Karkazis presents an analysis of current medical approaches to intersex, and the risks involved, in the wake of a 2006 "consensus statement on the management of intersex disorders". She also reviews the methods utilised to assign a sex of rearing to intersex infants, such as genitals and penis size, chromosomes, fertility, "sexing of the brain", and parental wishes; these impact upon determination whether or not to proceed with early genital surgery. Part 3 interviews parents of children with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome and congenital adrenal hyperplasia, and adults with intersex experiences. Part 3 also looks at activism by intersex organizations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aalohari_Anandam"title="Aalohari Anandam">
Set in a large Christian household, Aalohari Anandam dissects different faces of man-woman relationships, as well as sexual orientation. Its story deals with the homosexuality of a married woman and its impact in her life and society.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Face_of_Appalachia"title="The Face of Appalachia">
The book presents photos and interviews taken over a 25-year period. Photographs cover elements of Appalachia life such as farming, hunting, community and religious activities. Material is compiled into eight chapters, each of which focuses on specific things associated with the community and with Appalachian life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promise_of_Blood"title="Promise of Blood">
## Prologue.Field Marshal Tamas has just committed a brutal coup against Adro's monarchy. To ensure the success of his coup, he orders the assassination of every member of the Royal Cabal, all of whom utter the same mysterious phrase as they are killed: "You can't break Kresimir's Promise". Concerned about what this could mean, Tamas summons Adamat, a former soldier and police inspector who is now a private investigator, to the Skyline Palace in the center of the capital city of Adopest, as the coup is unfolding. The field marshal instructs Adamat to find what the words mean and what the threat could mean for the future. Tamas arrests Manhouch XII, the current King of Adro, and his queen while his soldiers round up the nobles present in the city. During the purge, a young laundress named Nila, who worked for one of Manhouch's cousins, is saved from rape by a sergeant named Olem, and escapes the purge with the duke's son, Jakob.The next day, Manhouch, his queen and many of the arrested nobles are executed by guillotine, ending the monarchy in Adro and leading the country on the path to civil war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hands_in_Harmony"title="Hands in Harmony">
The book explores the history of folk music and traditional handcrafts, and includes interviews with the musicians and craftsmen who appear in it. Accompanying the interviews are eighty black-and-white photographs that show the craftsmen in their trade and musicians performing and in their homes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shattered_Mask"title="The Shattered Mask">
"The Shattered Mask" is a novel in which the matriarch of a Sembian family swears revenge for a murder in her family, while a power-hungry wizard uses his ability to alter reality for murder and destruction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arrivals"title="The Arrivals">
When recovering alcoholic Chloe walks into her apartment to find her fiancé having sex with her boss, the first thing she does is walk into a bar and break the sobriety she's worked so hard for. She passes out and awakens in a strange new world called The Wasteland. In this land magic and gunfights are a way of life, as is the rampant corruption that threatens everyone in it. Siblings Kitty and Jack inform her that she is an "Arrival", a person that has arrived in this world from another time and place. Chloe also discovers that the Arrivals are capable of coming back to life if they die, although nobody knows why this happens and this regeneration is not always guaranteed. Together she and the siblings' rag-tag band must fight against Ajani, a wealthy but insane man set on bending The Wasteland to his will.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clockwork_Princess"title="Clockwork Princess">
Two months after the events of the previous book, Tessa Gray is in the midst of preparing for her wedding to Jem Carstairs. Gabriel Lightwood arrives at the Institute and requests help in taking care of his father, Benedict, whose demon pox has turned him into a worm, killing the Lightwood's servants and Rupert Blackthorn, the husband of his daughter, Tatiana. At the end, Gabriel and his brother, Gideon, have no choice but to kill their father, creating a rift between the brothers and Tatiana. Gabriel moves to the London Institute and develops a relationship with Will Herondale's sister, Cecily, who has also taken residence in the Institute after failing to convince Will to return home, much to Will's annoyance. Jem gets sick faster and Will realizes that he has taken an unusually higher dosage of yin fen so he can stay stronger for the wedding. However, Axel Mortmain has bought all of London's stock of yin fen, wanting to blackmail the Institute into handing over Tessa in exchange for the drug. Jem refuses to even consider the offer and convinces Tessa to do the same, so they decide to move the date of their wedding earlier. Meanwhile, Consul Josiah Wayland, now increasingly frustrated by Charlotte Branwell's refusal to be his lapdog, attempts to convince Gideon and Gabriel to betray her in exchange for the Lightwood's honor to be restored. Gideon steadfastly refuses, but Gabriel has to go through some time before he finally chooses to side with Charlotte.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holes_(novel)"title="Holes (novel)">
Stanley Yelnats IV is wrongfully convicted of theft and as a consequence is sent to Camp Green Lake, a juvenile corrections facility. The novel presents Stanley's story together with two other linked stories.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curse_of_Peladon"title="The Curse of Peladon">
The planet Peladon, led by its young king Peladon, is on the verge of joining the Galactic Federation, their delegates ready to deliberate and take a final vote. High Priest Hepesh is opposed, warning that the curse of Aggedor the Royal Beast of Peladon will visit doom upon them.The TARDIS materialises on the edge of a cliff below the castle. The Third Doctor and Jo barely leave the ship before it tumbles over the edge of the cliff; they climb to the castle to get help.Peladon asks for Hepesh's support to join the Federation, but Hepesh does not trust the aliens. The Doctor and Jo are discovered by palace guards, who take them to the throne room where the delegates are gathered: Alpha Centauri, Arcturus, and Lord Izlyr and Ssorg of the Ice Warriors. The Doctor is mistaken for the delegate from Earth. He introduces Jo as "Princess Josephine of TARDIS", a neutral royal observer from Earth. Several unusual accidents affecting the delegates lead Jo to suspect the Ice Warriors.Exploring the tunnels under the palace, the Doctor runs into, and flees from, the creature known as Aggedor. Entering the beast's shrine room, he is discovered by Hepesh. Hepesh accuses the Doctor of sacrilege, who must endure trial by combat, a duel to the death with the royal champion. Later, in the Doctor's cell, Hepesh helps him escape, only to encounter Aggedor again, only this time he calms the beast with a hypnotic device. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein's_Bridge_(novel)"title="Einstein's Bridge (novel)">
The plot revolves around three central human characters, George Griffin, Roger Coulton, and Alice Lang. Set from 1987 to 2004, the book details the efforts of physicists George and Roger as they work to bring the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) online in Waxahachie, Texas. Alice is a novelist, working on her latest horror work, who becomes involved as she researches material for her book at the SSC. She and George fall in love just as preliminary trial runs of the SSC produce an unexplained phenomenon: a "Snark," to borrow an expression from Lewis Carroll, or an impossible event, in the form of a heavy particle which emerged from the planned head-on collision between two 20 TeV protons inside the SSC.In addition to violating physical laws such as the conservation of mass, this particle emits pulses of radioactivity, spelling out the numerical prime number sequence of 2-3-5-7-11-13-17-19-23-29-31-37. Therein begins the unraveling of an even greater mystery than the particle itself: a powerful intelligence is behind this event, seeking to communicate with Humankind, which has unwittingly announced itself to the universe through the powerful bursts of energy unleashed with the collisions of particles within the SSC. For a time, this first contact is made by a benevolent species. Another species is also working to make contact—a "less" benevolent species, whose intent may ultimately destroy the Earth and perhaps even the fabric of the universe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alchymist's_Cat"title="The Alchymist's Cat">
In London in 1664, an orange tabby cat named Imelza encounters a black cat she comes to call Master Midnight. When asked his real name, he identifies himself only as Imp. Imelza is seduced by him and he impregnates her that night.Shortly after his entire family dies of smallpox, young Will Godwin of the town of Adcombe is invited to London by an uncle he has never met. He asks his neighbour, John Balker the miller, to accompany him there. Despite the older man's misgivings and concerns for Will's safety, he agrees to do so. Will's first night in London is disastrous. He and Mr. Balker are told that Will's uncle will meet them at a seedy tavern called the Sickle Moon, but he fails to show up. The miller becomes drunk and as Will is leading him from the establishment, the two are attacked by a pair of ruffians. They murder Mr. Balker, but before they can turn their attention to Will, a man appears and scares them away by a show of what seems to be magic. The man introduces himself to Will as an apothecary named Elias Theophrastus Spittle. He hides Will in his shop before convincing the gathering crowd outside that it was the lad who killed Mr. Balker. Will tries to protest, but Spittle says that it would be wiser for him to remain silent, lest he incur the wrath of the mob. Now a fugitive, Will has no choice but to become the apothecary's servant to ensure his silence. Partly for disguise and partly to demean him, Spittle cuts the boy's hair short. When Will attempts to climb the stairs to the apothecary's private quarters, he is immediately shooed away and told never to go there again. Still he is intrigued by the crimson-painted door. While Spittle is away, Will takes the opportunity to explore the upper floor, and finds a room filled with the paraphernalia of a wizard. The apothecary catches him and is about to severely punish him when Will offers his assistance in gathering whatever magical ingredients the man might need. Spittle is pacified, and when Will asks if he is a wizard, he says that though he has studied the black arts, he is an alchemist rather than any sort of magician. It is his goal to find the Philosopher's Stone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pillars_of_Creation"title="The Pillars of Creation">
This book revolves around several new characters in the "Sword of Truth" series. Jennsen, for most of her life, has been running from the assassins sent by Lord Rahl to kill her. Any ungifted child of the Lord Rahl must die. A stranger convinces her that running will do her no good for wherever she goes, Lord Rahl's soldiers will find her; it is time for her to stop fleeing and fight back. If she wants to live, she must kill Lord Rahl.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_Found_in_a_Bathtub"title="Memoirs Found in a Bathtub">
"Memoirs Found in a Bathtub" starts with the finding of a diary in the distant future. The introduction dwells on the difficulties of historical research on the fictional 'Neogene Era', "the period of the heyday of the pre-Chaotic culture, which preceded the Great Decomposition". "Great Decomposition" refers to the apocalyptic event of "papyrolysis", decomposition of all paper on the planet in the pre-information-technology era, causing all records and money to turn into dust––the end of the "epoch of papycracy".The diary, known as the 'Notes of a Man from the Neogene', was found in the lava-filled ruins of Third Pentagon within the territory of the disappeared state of Ammer-Ka. Previously, little was known about the hypothetical 'Last Pentagon'. One researcher suggested that Pentagon was a kind of military brain, the center in charge of maintaining the faith of Cap-i-Taal, dominant in Ammer-Ka in the period of U-S. This was confirmed by the finding of the diary, supposedly of an agent trapped deep within the subterranean bowels of the vast Third Pentagon, although the authenticity and authorship of the document were questioned by some researchers.The rest of the book is the diary itself. In a Kafkaesque maelstrom of terrifying bureaucratic confusion and utter insanity, the agent attempts to follow his mission directives, conducting on-the-spot investigations: "Verify. Search. Destroy. Incite. Inform. Over and out. On the "n"th day "n"th hour sector "n" subsector "n" rendezvous with N." The narrator inhabits a paranoid dystopia where nothing is as it seems, chaos seems to rule all events, and everyone is deeply suspicious of everyone else.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pursuit_of_the_House-Boat"title="The Pursuit of the House-Boat">
After the House-Boat was hijacked by Captain Kidd at the end of "A House-Boat on the Styx", the various members of its club decided that in order to track it down, a detective would have to be called in. So they hired Sherlock Holmes, who, at the time of the book's publication, had indeed been declared dead by his creator.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollyanna"title="Pollyanna">
The title character is Pollyanna Whittier, an eleven-year-old orphan who goes to live in the fictional town of Beldingsville, Vermont, with her wealthy but stern and cold spinster Aunt Polly Harrington, who does not want to take in Pollyanna but feels it as her duty to her late sister Jennifer. Pollyanna's philosophy of life centers on what she calls "The Glad Game", an optimistic and positive attitude she learned from her father. The game consists of finding something to be glad about in every situation, no matter how bleak it may be. It originated in an incident one Christmas when Pollyanna, who was hoping for a doll in the missionary barrel, found only a pair of crutches inside. Making the game up on the spot, Pollyanna's father taught her to look at the good side of things—in this case, to be glad about the crutches because she did not need to use them.With this philosophy, and her own sunny personality and sincere, sympathetic soul, Pollyanna brings so much gladness to her aunt's dispirited New England town that she transforms it into a pleasant place to live. The Glad Game shields her from her aunt's stern attitude: when Aunt Polly puts her in a stuffy attic room without carpets or pictures, she exults at the beautiful view from the high window; when she tries to "punish" her niece for being late to dinner by sentencing her to a meal of bread and milk in the kitchen with the servant Nancy, Pollyanna thanks her rapturously because she likes bread and milk, and she likes Nancy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigger_Heaven"title="Nigger Heaven">
## Title."Nigger heaven" was a term used in the 19th century to refer to church balconies, which were segregated for African Americans, as the white members of the congregation sat below; cf. the use of paradise for the upper seats of a theatre.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magician_(Feist_novel)"title="Magician (Feist novel)">
In the twelfth year of the reign of Rodric the Fourth, an orphaned kitchen boy named Pug is made an apprentice magician to the magician Kulgan in Crydee. A struggling student of magic, he rises to high station by saving Princess Carline, Duke Borric’s daughter, from mountain trolls and becomes a squire of the Duke's court.Following the discovery of a foreign ship wrecked after a storm and reports of bizarrely dressed warriors appearing in the forests, Pug’s liege, Lord Borric sets out for Krondor, the capital of the western realm of the kingdom, to convey the news and ask for aid. Their party is attacked, however, by dark elves and they are rescued by dwarves and their leader Dolgan who leads them through a series of mines to the coast.Shortly after arriving in Krondor, Lord Borric’s band are instructed to carry on to Rillanon, the capital of the kingdom. Once there, however they are refused any help from the King Rodric, who suffers from madness and delusions, and they are turned away.War erupts between the Midkemians and the otherworldly Tsurani. The Duke's troops engage in a fierce battle in an effort to locate and destroy the rift in spacetime which gives access to the Tsurani, but Pug is captured and taken back through the rift to Kelewan, the Tsurani homeworld, as a slave. After years of stalemate fighting on Midkemia by the two opposing forces, Pug returns as a magician, a Great One, the Tsurani name for master practitioners of magic. Meanwhile, a fellow slave, Laurie, along with a Tsurani warrior, Kasumi, embark on a secret errand of peace from the Tsurani Emperor to King Rodric in Rillanon, but also fail to persuade the mad king.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cruel_Sea_(novel)"title="The Cruel Sea (novel)">
The action commences in 1939. Lieutenant-Commander George Ericson, a Merchant Navy and Royal Naval Reserve officer, is recalled to the Royal Navy and given command of the fictitious HMS "Compass Rose", newly built to escort convoys. His officers are mostly new to the Navy, especially the two new sub-lieutenants, Lockhart and Ferraby. Only Ericson and the petty officers are in any way experienced.Despite these initial disadvantages, the ship and crew work up a routine and gain experience. Bennett, the first lieutenant, a mean and shirking disciplinarian with a penchant for bullying and canned sausages ("snorkers"), leaves the ship ostensibly for health reasons, and the junior officers are able to mature, with Lockhart gaining promotion to first lieutenant.The crew cross the Atlantic many times on escort duty in all kinds of weather, often encountering fierce storms in one of the smallest ships built to protect Allied convoys. The men endure the ship's constant rolling and pitching in the huge waves, freezing cold, the strain of maintaining station on the convoy on pitch-black nights and the fear that at any second a torpedo from a German U-boat could blow them to oblivion. Somehow the tradition of the Royal Navy and the knowledge of the importance of their work carries them through.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Inside"title="The World Inside">
The novel is set on Earth in the year 2381, when the population of the planet has reached 75 billion people. Population growth has skyrocketed due to a quasi-religious belief in human reproduction as the highest possible good. Most of the action occurs in a massive three-kilometer-high city tower called "Urban Monad 116".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uplift_War"title="The Uplift War">
50,000 years before the events of the novel, the planet Garth was leased to the Bururalli who, imperfectly uplifted, reverted to a pre-sophont state and nearly destroyed its ecosystem by overhunting all large indigenous species. The ecologically sensitive galactic civilization declared a war of extermination and the Bururalli were made extinct. As the youngest clan in galactic civilization, Earthclan is mostly relegated to near-hopeless "recovery worlds" for colonization, and they are granted a lease to inhabit Garth.The novel begins in the year 2489 C.E. with the avian Gubru planning to invade Garth. The Gubru, a conservative and somewhat humorless alien race, decide to hold Garth hostage in an attempt to learn more about the discovery that the dolphin spaceship "Streaker" made in "Startide Rising" about the Progenitors.The Gubru overpower Garth's token space forces, in the battle a neo-chimp soldier of Earthclan, Fiben Bolger, pilots a small craft that is damaged and crash lands in the mountains. The Gubru engage a small portion of their ground force in ritualistic combat against Earthling forces, and Earthclan successfully defends its legal right to the planet under the standards of Galactic law. However, the Gubru immediately take hostage most of the human population using a pre-planned subterfuge consisting of repeated, wide aerial distribution of a poisonous gas specially formulated to target humans. In order to receive the antidote, the humans must report to island prison camps and agree to be imprisoned during the occupation. The Gubru, used to galactic norms, mistakenly believe that the neo-chimp population on Garth will be easily controlled without their human patrons to guide them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Female_Man"title="The Female Man">
The novel begins when Janet Evason suddenly arrives and disappears in Jeannine's world. Janet is from Whileaway, a futuristic world where a plague killed all of the men over 800 years ago, and Jeannine lives in a world that never experienced the end of the Great Depression. Janet takes Jeannine to Joanna's world, where both women meet in a cocktail lounge and watch Janet's televised interview. She explains to the male interviewer the culture and customs of Whileawayans which differ greatly from Joanna's world. When Janet begins to explain to the interviewer how women in Whileaway "copulate" she is abruptly cut off by a commercial break.Acting as a guide, Joanna takes Janet to a party in her world to show her how women and men interact with each other. Janet quickly finds herself to be the object of a man's attention as he continually harasses her. After she has had enough, Janet knocks the man down and mocks him. Her behavior shocks everyone at the party, since in Joanna's world, it is believed that women are inferior to men. Janet then expresses her desire to experience living with a typical family to Joanna, who takes Janet to the Wildings’ household in Anytown, U.S.A. Janet meets their teenage daughter Laura Rose who instantly admires Janet's confidence and independence as a woman. Laura realizes that she is attracted to Janet and begins to pursue a sexual relationship with her. This is transgressive for both of them, as Whileaway's taboo against cross-generational relationships (having a relationship with someone old enough to be your parent or young enough to be your child) is as strong as the taboo against same-sex relationships on Laura's world. After the two have sex for the first time, Janet recounts to Laura how she met and fell in love with her wife, Vittoria, back in Whileaway.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Gebelawi"title="Children of Gebelawi">
The story recreates the interlinked history of the three monotheistic Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), allegorised against the setting of an imaginary 19th century Cairene alley.Critics claimed that Gabalawi stands for God. Mahfouz rejected this, saying that he stood for "a certain idea of God that men have made" and that "Nothing can represent God. God is not like anything else. God is gigantic." The first four sections retell, in succession, the stories of: Adam (Adham أدهم) and how he was favoured by Gabalawi over the latter's other sons, including the eldest Satan/Iblis (Idris إدريس). In subsequent generations the heroes relive the lives of Moses (Gabal جبل), Jesus (Rifa'a رفاعة) and Muhammad (Qasim قاسم). The followers of each hero settle in different parts of the alley, symbolising Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The protagonist of the book's fifth section is Arafa (عرفة), who symbolises modern science and comes after the prophets, while all of their followers claim Arafa as one of their own.Central to the plot are the "futuwwat" (strongmen) who control the alley and exact protection money from the people. The successive heroes overthrow the strongmen of their time, but in the next generation new strongmen spring up and things are as bad as ever. Arafa tries to use his knowledge of explosives to destroy the strongmen, but his attempts to discover Gabalawi's secrets leads to the death of the old man (though he does not directly kill him). The Chief Strongman guesses the truth and blackmails Arafa into helping him to become the dictator of the whole Alley. The book ends, after the murder of Arafa, with his friend searching in a rubbish tip for the book in which Arafa wrote his secrets. The people say "Oppression must cease as night yields to day. We shall see the end of tyranny and the dawn of miracles."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demi-Gods_and_Semi-Devils"title="Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils">
The plot is made up of separate yet intertwining storylines revolving around three protagonists – Qiao Feng, Duan Yu and Xuzhu – who become sworn brothers in chapter 41. The complex narrative switches from the initial perspective of Duan Yu to those of the other main characters and back.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Ishmael"title="My Ishmael">
"My Ishmael" is presented as the final copy of a book published by Julie Gerchak, who has herself read "Ishmael". At the time she begins writing, Julie is sixteen, though during the main plot of her story she is merely twelve years old: "a plucky, resourceful, near-genius with a wobbly home life." Like the narrator of "Ishmael", Julie discovers a message in her city's newspaper, which advertises a teacher seeking someone who wishes to save the world. Julie arrives at Room 105 of the Fairfield Building to discover a gorilla, Ishmael, whom she is able to communicate with telepathically. When she asks Ishmael if he will teach her, he is initially ambivalent due to her very young age, though this frustrates Julie and her arguments convince Ishmael that she may indeed be open to his maieutic teaching style.First, Ishmael asks Julie to reflect on why she came to him. She answers that it may be related to her fears about her society's destructive impact on itself and the environment. When urged to tell a story about what she expects to learn with Ishmael, Julie describes a daydream in which she is recruited to go on a space mission to visit other planets and thereby learn solutions around the galaxy for Earth's problems. Next, Ishmael launches into a discussion of "Mother Culture" (the personified notion of the influence of our cultural mythology), our civilization's delusion that our intelligence is a curse inherently propelling us toward making terrible decisions, and our culture's fallacy that all human societies (or, at least, all the "civilized" ones) developed out of a state of foraging to a superior state of farming, neglecting the tribes all over the world who continue the foraging lifestyle. Ishmael refers to humanity in terms of Takers (members of the single, world-dominating culture that destroys other peoples or forces them to assimilate) and Leavers (members of the countless cultures who lived or continue to live in tribal societies). He also examines evolutionary processes and how they tend to maintain behaviors that best sustain some particular gene pool and enforce a sort of equilibrium in which no single organism or group of organisms overwhelms the competition for natural resources. He claims that Takers depart from this self-sustaining balance in that they keep their resources, primarily food, under "lock and key." This, he claims, creates hierarchical social structures in which the cooperative ethos is lost, resulting in distress and conflict "within" the society, such as crime, suicide, poverty, famine, and senseless violence. He argues that although Taker societies flourish in terms of material wealth—such as technological advancement and greater scientific progress—they fail utterly with regard to what he believes to be actual wealth: the sense of belonging and security that hold together the fabric of human tribal societies. Julie ultimately learns that she does not need to travel around the galaxy to see ways that human societies can thrive successfully; she needs only to learn from the successes of tribal life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beggars_in_Spain"title="Beggars in Spain">
"Beggars in Spain" and its sequels take place in a future where genetic engineering has become a reality, and society and culture face the consequences of genetic modifications (genemods), particularly in the United States. The story revolves around the existence of the "Sleepless": individuals genetically modified to not need sleep, who have greater potential for intelligence and accomplishment than ordinary humans, called "Sleepers".The world of "Beggars in Spain" is also powered by cold fusion, named "Y-energy" after its pioneer Kenzo Yagai. Yagai also founded "Yagaiism", a moral worldview Kress based on Objectivism, in which dignity is solely the product of what a person can achieve through his or her own efforts, and the contract is the basis of society. As a corollary, the weak and unproductive are not owed anything.The novel's title comes from its primary moral question, as presented by character Tony Indivino: what do productive and responsible members of society owe the "beggars in Spain", the unproductive masses who have nothing to offer except need? This is underscored by the rift between the Sleepers and the Sleepless; the Sleepless are superior in mind and body, and easily capable of outperforming their normal cousins. All men are "not" created equal. Where, then, is the line between equality and excellence? How far should any superior minority hold themselves back for fear of engendering feelings of inadequacy in their inferiors?—especially if this minority is not hated and feared, but rather the elite? This question is explored, but not elaborated on by the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandelion_Wine"title="Dandelion Wine">
"Dandelion Wine" is a series of short stories loosely connected to summer occurrences, with Douglas and his family as recurring characters. Many of the chapters were first published as individual short stories, the earliest being "The Night" (1946), with the remainder appearing between 1950 and 1957.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chocolate_War"title="The Chocolate War">
Jerry is a freshman attending an all-boys Catholic high school called Trinity while coping with depressive feelings and existential questions that stem largely from his mother's recent death and his father's enduring grief. Jerry quickly is recruited onto Trinity's football team, where he meets Roland "The Goober" Goubert, a fellow freshman and instant friend.Vice-principal Brother Leon has recently become acting headmaster and overextends his rising ambition by committing Trinity to selling double the previous year's amount of chocolates during an annual fundraising event, quietly enlisting the support of Archie Costello, the genesis and leader behind The Vigils: the school's cruelly manipulative secret society of student pranksters.Archie arrogantly plans to alternate between betraying and supporting Leon in a frenzied series of power plays. His first "assignment" is to incite Jerry to refuse to sell any chocolate for 10 days. However, Jerry, inspired after reading a quotation inside his locker: "Do I dare disturb the universe?" from T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," feels strangely determined to sell nothing even after the ten days have passed, thus estranging himself from both Leon and The Vigils.At first, Jerry's refusal to cooperate with the corrupt school culture and fundraiser is seen by many classmates as heroic, but the gesture threatens Brother Leon and The Vigils' ability to coerce the student population. Leon presses Archie to put The Vigils' full force behind the chocolate sales, so they set up Jerry as an enemy for the rest of the student body to harass through bullying, prank calls, and vandalism. Only The Goober remains Jerry's friend but does little to protect him. Ultimately, Archie enlists the school bully Emile Janza to beat up Jerry just outside the school, but, even in the aftermath, Jerry maintains his defiant nonconformity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SilverFin"title="SilverFin">
"SilverFin" is broken up into three parts in addition to a prologue. In the prologue, an unnamed school boy is attacked by eels, attracted to a bleeding fishhook cut, while fishing in Loch Silverfin. Then from nowhere a mysterious eel-like man runs and jumps into the loch and sacrifices himself to save him.The first part of the book chronicles James Bond's starting attendance at Eton College, an elite English boarding school. There he meets Pritpal, the son of an Indian Maharajah. The two become good friends and live together in the dorms along with another of his friends, a Chinese boy named Tommy Chong. Bond also comes into contact with George Hellebore, an American bully three years older than James. George's father, Lord Randolph Hellebore is an armament dealer who sold weapons to various countries after World War I. It is later revealed that Lord Hellebore knew Bond's father, Andrew Bond, who also sold arms while working for Vickers after the war. Lord Hellebore arrives at Eton to direct and host a tournament cup ("Hellebore Cup") for the boys. The competition is divided into three events: shooting, swimming, and running, It is rumoured that George Hellebore is supposed to win, but an unexpected rival named Andrew Carlton manages to beat him. Bond places seventh in shooting, fourth in his heat in swimming (which was not good enough to qualify for the final race), and first in cross country running. During the running sequence Lord Hellebore attempts to help his son cheat so that he could win the tournament; however, Bond after seeing George take a shortcut a first time decides to follow George the next time, and being the superior runner then passes him to win the race. George tries to trip James with his leg but loses his balance and falls into a mud puddle. Because Bond won first in running, Andrew Carlton is the winner and George Hellebore came in third place in the cup overall, which was unacceptable by his father's standard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolving_the_Alien"title="Evolving the Alien">
Cohen and Stewart argue against a conception of extraterrestrial life that assumes life can only evolve in environments similar to Earth (the so-called Rare Earth hypothesis), and that extraterrestrial lifeforms will converge toward characteristics similar to those of life on Earth, a common trope of certain science fiction styles. They suggest that any investigation of extraterrestrial life relying on these assumptions is overly restrictive, and it is possible to make a scientific and rational study of the possibility of life forms that are so different from life on Earth that we may not even recognise them as life in the first instance.Cohen and Stewart return to two contrasts throughout the book. The first is between "exobiology" (which considers the possibilities for conventional, Earth-like biology on Earth-like planets) and "xenoscience" (which embraces a much broader and more speculative range for the forms that life may take). The second contrast drawn is between "parochials" (features of life that are likely to be unique to Earth) and "universals" (features that are likely to appear wherever life arises).Cohen and Stewart supplement the limited hard science available on their subject with numerous references to science fiction of both their own and others' creation, including 28 plot summaries of classic SF stories.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Polar_Express"title="The Polar Express">
A young boy is awakened on Christmas Eve night by the sound of a train. To his astonishment, he finds the train is waiting for him right outside his house. He sees a conductor who then proceeds to look up at his window. He runs downstairs and goes outside. The conductor explains the train is called the Polar Express, and is journeying to the North Pole. The boy then boards the train, which is filled with many other children in their pajamas being served hot chocolate by the train's staff.The Polar Express races north past towns and villages, through boreal forests, and over mountains, but the train never slows down. When it arrives at the North Pole, the conductor explains that Santa will select one of them to receive the first gift of Christmas.The boy and the other children see thousands of elves gathered at the center of town waiting to send Santa Claus on his way. The boy is handpicked by Santa to receive the first gift of Christmas. Realizing that he could choose anything in the world, the boy asks for a bell from one of the reindeer's harnesses. The boy places the bell in the pocket of his robe and all the children watch as Santa takes off into the night for his annual deliveries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_and_the_Dark"title="The Light and the Dark">
Set in England in the lead-up to and during World War II, it portrays Lewis Eliot's friendship with the gifted scholar and remarkable individual Roy Calvert, and Calvert's inner turmoil and quest for meaning in life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoot_(novel)"title="Hoot (novel)">
The main character Roy Eberhardt moves from Montana to Florida and into the fictional town of Coconut Cove, where a 7th grader, Dana Matherson, starts to bully him. On the bus to school, Roy sees a boy running barefoot outside. Roy tries to leave the bus, but Dana viciously chokes and strangles him. He escapes after punching Dana in the face, breaking his nose, and then exiting the bus. However, Roy can't catch the running boy because a golf ball hits Roy in the head. Vice-Principal Viola Hennepin suspends Roy from the bus for two weeks and orders him to write an apology to Dana. Roy calls for a truce, but Dana refuses to accept.A restaurant called Mother Paula's All-American Pancake House decides to build a franchise in Coconut Cove, but vandalism delays the work. Roy learns the running boy is the vandal known as "Mullet Fingers" and they become friends. Mullet Fingers vandalizes and delays construction overseen by Chuck Muckle to save the endangered burrowing owls that live on the site.The construction foreman Leroy "Curly" Branitt denies the owls' existence. Roy helps Mullet Fingers prove otherwise and tells his class including Beatrice Leep about the owls, how construction will kill the endangered species, and encourages them to join him in protests.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bless_Me,_Ultima"title="Bless Me, Ultima">
Set in the small town of Guadalupe, New Mexico, just after World War II, Antonio Márez y Luna (Tony) tells his story from the memories of his adult self, who reflects on his growing up. The novel opens as the protagonist, Antonio, approaches the age of seven when his family decides to house Ultima, an elderly curandera. Ultima, known as “La Grande” in the Márez household, embodies the wisdom of her ancestors and carries the powers to heal, to confront evil, knowledge of how to use the power of nature and the ability to understand the relationship between the living and the spirits. Tony's parents both hold conflicting views about Tony's destiny and battle over his future path. In the first chapter Anaya establishes the roots of this struggle through Tony's dream—a flashback to the day of his birth. In his dream, Tony views the differences between his parents' familial backgrounds. His father's side, the Márez (descendants of the sea), are the restless "vaqueros" who roam the "llanos" and seek adventure. The Lunas, his mother's side, are the people of the moon, religious farmers whose destiny is to homestead and work the land. Each side of the family wants control of the newborn's future. His mother's dream is for him to become a Roman Catholic priest, his father's dream is to embark on a new adventure and move west to California with his sons to recapture the openness of the "Llano" he has foregone in moving to the town. As the two families argue over Antonio's destiny, Ultima, serving as the midwife, declares, “Only I will know his destiny.”
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(Baxter_novel)"title="Titan (Baxter novel)">
The novel explores a range of possible attitudes toward space exploration and science in the early twenty-first century in which he lays down his concerns about anti-intellectualism and the loss of the pioneering spirit in modern American politics and culture. In "Titan", the United States is ruled by a fundamentalist Christian President named Xavier Maclachlan who, believing Earth is the centre of the universe, orders the equal treatment of the Ptolemaic model of the Solar System in high school curricula, all the while youth culture goes into a rebellious downward spiral with the widespread adoption of digital entertainment technology. Due to its far-right isolationist policies, the United States have severed ties with the rest of the world (including within themselves with seceding nation-states), especially while tensions grow with the emerging power of China, which is engaged in a determined bid to gain control of space after the American Shuttle program comes crashing down with the loss of "Columbia" (but not in the same way as actual events. In this timeline, instead of disintegrating on re-entry the shuttle makes an irreparable crash landing with the loss of two of the crew), and NASA has no public or political support to help recover from the accident. Consequently, under Maclachlan's executive plans, the US military merges with the space agency for its resources to be diverted into defence spending, including using its space-faring vehicles as weapons platforms and forcing NASA to develop ethnically-targeted biological weapons tailored to attack Han Chinese.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gemini_Contenders"title="The Gemini Contenders">
At the start of World War II a train departs from Salonika and heads for the Italian Alps, carrying a mysterious cargo. Over the next four decades, various members of the wealthy Italian Fontini-Cristi family, and a small brotherhood of priests with the name Xenope, struggle to locate and control the deadly secret cargo.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Food_of_the_Gods_and_How_It_Came_to_Earth"title="The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth">
"The Food of the Gods" is divided into three "books": "Book I: The Discovery of the Food"; "Book II: The Food in the Village"; and "Book III: The Harvest of the Food".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corridors_of_Power_(novel)"title="Corridors of Power (novel)">
"Corridors of Power" is concerned with the attempts of an English MP to influence the country's policy on nuclear weapons in the 1950s. The central character is Roger Quaife, an ambitious politician and Cabinet Minister. He is widely attacked for his stand on Britain's position in the thermonuclear arms race; at the same time his affair with another woman leads to potential blackmail. Lewis Eliot attempts to assist him in covering up the affair as he supports Quaife's stand on the nuclear question.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Passant"title="George Passant">
George Passant is a solicitor in a small English town, whose idealism and eccentricity lead him to accumulate a group of young followers in a mentor-like capacity. Narrated by Lewis Eliot, the novel has the more general background of Eliot's rising career and the changes in English society through the 20th century.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_the_Native"title="The Return of the Native">
The novel takes place entirely in the environs of Egdon Heath, and, with the exception of the epilogue, "Aftercourses", covers exactly a year and a day. The narrative begins on the evening of Guy Fawkes Night as Diggory Venn is slowly crossing the heath with his van, which is being drawn by ponies. In his van is a passenger. When darkness falls, the country folk light bonfires on the surrounding hills, emphasising the pagan spirit of the heath and its denizens.Venn is a reddleman; he travels the country supplying farmers with a red mineral called reddle (dialect term for red ochre) that farmers use to mark their sheep. Although his trade has stained him red from head to foot, underneath his devilish colouring he is a handsome, shrewd, well-meaning young man. His passenger is a young woman named Thomasin Yeobright, whom Venn is taking home. Earlier that day, Thomasin had planned to marry Damon Wildeve, a local innkeeper known for his fickleness; however, an inconsistency in the marriage licence delayed the marriage. Thomasin, in distress, ran after the reddleman's van and asked him to take her home. Venn himself is in love with Thomasin, and unsuccessfully wooed her two years before. Now, although he believes Wildeve is unworthy of her love, he is so devoted to her that he is willing to help her secure the man of her choice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wise_Blood"title="Wise Blood">
Recently discharged from service in World War II and surviving on a government pension for unspecified battle wounds, Hazel Motes returns to his family home in Tennessee to find it abandoned. Leaving behind a note claiming a chifforobe as his private property, Motes boards a train for Taulkinham. The grandson of a traveling preacher, Motes grew up struggling with doubts regarding salvation and original sin; following his experiences at war, Motes has become an avowed atheist and intends to spread a gospel of antireligion. Despite his aversion to all trappings of Christianity, he constantly contemplates theological issues and finds himself compelled to purchase a hat and suit that cause others to mistake him for a minister.In Taulkinham, Motes initially finds an address in a bathroom stall and seeks out Leora Watts, a prostitute. He walks into her house, sits on her bed, and places his hand on her shoe without speaking to her first. He befriends Enoch Emery, a profane, manic, 18-year-old zookeeper forced to come to the city after his abusive father kicked him out of their house. Emery introduces Motes to the concept of "wise blood," an idea that he has innate, worldly knowledge of what direction to take in life, and requires no spiritual or emotional guidance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_of_Suzie_Wong"title="The World of Suzie Wong">
Robert Lomax is a young Briton who, after completing his National Service, goes to work on a plantation in British Malaya. During his time in Malaya, Lomax decides to pursue a new career as an artist for a year.Lomax visits Hong Kong in search of inspiration for his paintings. He checks into the Nam Kok Hotel, not realising at first that it is a brothel catering mainly to British and American sailors. However, this only makes the hotel more charming in Lomax's eyes, and a better source of subject matter for his paintings.Lomax quickly befriends most of the hotel's bargirls, but is fascinated by the archetypal "hooker with a heart of gold", Suzie Wong. Wong previously introduced herself to him as Wong Mee-ling, a rich virgin whose father owns four houses and more cars than she can count, and who later pretends not to recognise him at the hotel. Lomax had originally decided that he would not have sex with any of the bargirls at the hotel because he lacks the funds to pay for their services. However, it soon emerges that Suzie Wong is interested in him not as a customer but as a serious love interest. Although Wong becomes the kept woman of two other men, and Robert Lomax briefly becomes attracted to a young British nurse, Lomax and Wong are eventually united and the novel ends happily with them marrying.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riders_of_the_Purple_Sage"title="Riders of the Purple Sage">
"Riders of the Purple Sage" is a story about three main characters, Bern Venters, Jane Withersteen, and Jim Lassiter, who in various ways struggle with persecution from the local Mormon community led by Bishop Dyer and Elder Tull in the fictional town of Cottonwoods, Utah.Jane Withersteen, a born-and-raised Mormon, provokes Elder Tull because she is attractive, wealthy, and befriends "Gentiles" (non-Mormons), namely, a little girl named Fay Larkin, a man she has hired named Bern Venters, and another hired man named Jim Lassiter. Elder Tull, a polygamist with two wives already, wishes to have Jane for a third wife, along with her estate.The story involves cattle-rustling, horse-theft, kidnapping and gunfights.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Light"title="Virtual Light">
The plot centers around Chevette Washington, a young bicycle messenger who lives in the "ad hoc", off-the-grid community that has grown on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake.Chevette, on a whim, steals a pair of dark-rimmed glasses from a man at a party because she is offended by his demeanor. Soon after, she realizes that the glasses have unlikely importance, as security company henchmen begin tracking and following her. Among the pursuers are Svobodov and Orlovsky, two Russian immigrants who reside in San Francisco and are employed as cops, as well as Loveless, a ruthless corporate hitman with gold canine teeth. The glasses contain plans by a powerful corporation to rebuild San Francisco entirely using nanotechnology, and for that reason, they are highly coveted and present a danger to the person who possesses them.Meanwhile, Berry Rydell, a former cop turned private security agent, is contracted to recover the pair of glasses for Lucius Warbaby, an intimidating and presumably successful "skip-tracer", a sort of bondsman/bounty hunter. When Rydell is given the mission, he is not informed of the significance of the glasses and the information they contain.Eventually, the plot climaxes when Rydell, Loveless, Warbaby, Orlovsky, and Svobodov all catch up with Chevette. The cops want the glasses, as does Rydell. Realizing the inherent danger of the situation, Rydell is forced to decide whom to side with. He decides to fight off Orlovsky and Svobodov and shirk his agreement with Warbaby. Instead, Rydell runs off with Chevette, and they embark upon a wild and treacherous journey in which they must remain one step ahead of their enemies, who have all the advantages of wealth and technology on their side. A subplot also focuses on a romantic relationship between Chevette and Rydell, which is initially restricted because of the nature of their circumstances, but is eventually allowed to flourish.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru"title="Idoru">
In the post Tokyo/San Francisco earthquake world of the early 21st century, Colin Laney is referred to agents of mega-rock star Rez (of the musical group Lo/Rez) for a job using his peculiar talent of sifting through vast amounts of mundane data to find "nodal points" of particular relevance. Rez has claimed to want to marry a synthetic personality named Rei Toei, the Idoru (Japanese Idol) of the title, a claim stranger than usual and therefore questioned by his loyal staff, particularly by his head of security, Keith Blackwell. Blackwell believes that someone is manipulating Rez, and wants Laney to find out who. Simultaneously, the Seattle chapter of the Lo/Rez fan club is discussing exactly the same topic of the unbelievable marriage of human and AI construct. Fourteen-year-old Chia Pet McKenzie is chosen by the group to go to Tokyo and meet with the Tokyo chapter to find out what is really happening. On the flight she meets a woman named Maryalice, who dupes her into unwittingly carrying a contraband item through customs in Tokyo.Laney accepts his new position warily, but is conflicted throughout much of the novel by his past involvement with a powerful infotainment organization, "SlitScan", which thrives on destroying media personalities by exposing their secrets. In the course of this earlier job he feels responsible for the death of an innocent party. His talent had allowed him a foreshadowing of a probable suicide but SlitScan had tried to limit Laney's role to passive observer. However, Laney's conscience snapped and he attempted at the last moment to stop the suicide, but instead became mired in a scandal. Yet another organization claiming to be a media watchdog steps in and tries to pull Laney away from SlitScan to use his story to expose SlitScan’s involvement in illegal spying. This goes awry and Laney is left high and dry and alone. Further complicating Laney’s life is that Kathy Torrance, his controller from SlitScan, is attempting to blackmail him with false evidence into betraying his current employers, Lo/Rez, by exposing whatever secret she thinks they are hiding.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwood_Farm"title="Blackwood Farm">
Tarquin "Quinn" Blackwood, heir to a powerful old family in New Orleans, has been plagued by a mysterious spirit named Goblin for his entire life. Made a vampire in his youth, Quinn seeks out Lestat de Lioncourt looking for help in getting rid of Goblin, who has become more and more malevolent. Quinn recalls his youth, his family, and his forced transformation into a vampire by Petronia. His stories allow Lestat to better understand the reach and power of Goblin, and clue in Lestat to the fact that Quinn is connected to the Mayfair family of witches. After his own failure defeating Goblin, Lestat asks the witch Merrick Mayfair, also a vampire, for assistance. Meanwhile, Quinn has fallen in love with heiress Mona Mayfair, and the ghost of their mutual ancestor Julien Mayfair warns him against making Mona a vampire. Goblin is revealed to be the spirit of Quinn's twin Gawain, who died days after being born. He is bound to Quinn, and is relentlessly jealous to experience whatever Quinn does. Merrick performs a ritual using Gawain's corpse to exorcise Goblin. She sacrifices herself by carrying the child's spirit into the hereafter with her, and Lestat is heartbroken.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcerer's_Apprentice_(Shah_book)"title="Sorcerer's Apprentice (Shah book)">
The book is Shah's account of his travels throughout India and his meeting with godmen, sadhus, and street sorcerers. He had embarked on the trip to locate an Indian Illusionist who he had met as a boy in rural England and from whom he had learned magic tricks. The illusionist had been assigned as guardian to Shah's great-grandfather's tomb. On his trip, he met a variety of such characters, many of whom run confidence tricks and had ingenious scams.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airframe_(novel)"title="Airframe (novel)">
Over the Pacific Ocean, TransPacific Airlines Flight 545 experiences severe pitch oscillations, leading to dozens of injured passengers and several deaths. The plane, a Norton Aircraft N-22, has an excellent safety record, and the captain is highly skilled, making the possibility of human error unlikely. Casey Singleton, a vice president in quality assurance at Norton, is assigned by COO John Marder to the Incident Review Team (IRT) to investigate. The IRT has one week to identify the issue in order to prevent a major sale with China from falling apart over safety concerns.Due to issues with the flight recorders, the team is forced to manually check each system of the aircraft. At first, all signs point to the plane's slats accidentally deploying mid-flight. Though other N-22s had exhibited similar slats errors in the past, Norton assumed the problem had been fixed. Their search uncovers a counterfeit part in the wing, but this would not have been enough to cause the accident on its own. Meanwhile, Casey grows suspicious of Bob Richman, an arrogant Norton family member assigned to assist her. Additionally, the factory union is concerned the China sale will offset the wing to China, threatening employees' jobs, and the union seeks to sabotage the deal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelina"title="Evelina">
The novel opens with a distressed letter from Lady Howard to her longtime acquaintance, the Reverend Arthur Villars, in which she reports that Mme (Madame) Duval, the grandmother of Villars' ward, Evelina Anville, intends to visit England to renew her acquaintance with her granddaughter Evelina. Eighteen years earlier, Mme Duval had broken off her relationship with her daughter Caroline, Evelina's mother, but never knew of the birth or even existence of Evelina until Evelina was in her late teens. Upon this discovery, Mme Duval desires to reclaim Evelina and whisk her away to France as her closest blood relation. Reverend Villars fears Mme Duval's influence could lead Evelina to a fate similar to that of her mother Caroline, who secretly wedded Sir John Belmont, a libertine, who afterwards denied the marriage. To keep Evelina from Mme Duval, the Reverend lets her visit Howard Grove, Lady Howard's home, on an extended holiday. While she is there, the family learns that Lady Howard's son-in-law, naval officer Captain Mirvan, is returning to England after a seven-year absence. Desperate to join the Mirvans on their trip to London, Evelina entreats her guardian to let her attend with them, promising that the visit will last only a few weeks. Villars reluctantly consents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_Sweetheart"title="Sputnik Sweetheart">
Sumire is an aspiring writer who survives on a family stipend and the creative input of her only friend, the novel's male narrator and protagonist, known in the text only as 'K'. K is an elementary school teacher, 25 years old, and in love with Sumire, though she does not quite share his feelings. At a wedding, Sumire meets an ethnic Korean woman, Miu, who is 17 years her senior. The two strike up a conversation and Sumire finds herself attracted to the older woman. This is the first time she has ever been sexually drawn to anybody. Miu soon asks Sumire to come work for her. This meeting and the ensuing relationship between the women leads to Sumire changing: she starts wearing nicer clothes, gets a better apartment, and quits smoking; however, she also develops a writer's block.K suddenly begins to receive letters from Europe written by Sumire. With them, he is able to track Sumire's and Miu's business travels across the continent. In her last letter, Sumire mentions that instead of coming home as originally planned, she and Miu are to spend some extra time on a Greek island vacationing.After a short while, K begins to call Sumire's house wondering when she will return. The only answer he gets, however, is from her answering machine. He soon gets a surprising call from Miu, who asks him to fly to Greece and mentions that something has happened to Sumire. Miu doesn't explain much, but it's clear the matter is urgent. The connection is shabby, and their phone connection is soon lost.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuckerman_Bound"title="Zuckerman Bound">
Each of the books follows the struggles and writing career of Roth's novelist alter ego Nathan Zuckerman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroonoko"title="Oroonoko">
"Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave" is a relatively short novel set in a narrative frame. The narrator opens with an account of the colony of Surinam and its inhabitants. Within this is a historical tale concerning the Coramantien grandson of an African king, Prince Oroonoko. At a very young age Prince Oroonoko was trained for battle, becoming an expert captain by the age of seventeen. During a battle the best general sacrifices himself for the Prince by taking an arrow for him. In sight of this event, the Prince takes the place of General. Oroonoko decides to honorably visit the daughter of the deceased general to offer the "Trophies of her Father's Victories", but he immediately falls in love with Imoinda and later asks for her hand in marriage.The king hears Imoinda described as the most beautiful and charming in the land, and he also falls in love. Despite his Intelligence saying she had been claimed by Oroonoko, the king gives Imoinda the royal veil, thus forcing her to become one of his wives, even though she is already promised to Oroonoko. Imoinda unwillingly, but dutifully, enters the king's harem (the Otan), and Oroonoko is comforted by his assumption that the king is too old to ravish her. Over time the Prince plans a tryst with the help of the sympathetic Onahal (one of the king's wives) and Aboan (a friend to the prince). The Prince and Imoinda are reunited for a short time and consummate their marriage, but they are eventually discovered. Imoinda and Onahal are punished for their actions by being sold as slaves. The king's guilt, however, leads him to lie to Oroonoko that Imoinda has instead been executed, since death was thought to be better than slavery. The Prince grieves. Later, after winning another tribal war, Oroonoko and his men visit a European slave trader on his ship and are tricked and shackled after drinking. The slave trader plans to sell the Prince and his men as slaves and carries them to Surinam in the West Indies. Oroonoko is purchased by a Cornish man named Trefry, but given special treatment due to his education and ability to speak French and English (which he learned from his own French mentor). Trefry mentions that he came to own a most beautiful enslaved woman and had to stop himself from raping her. Unbeknownst to Oroonoko, Trefry is speaking of Imoinda who is at the same plantation. The two lovers are reunited under the slave names of Caesar and Clemene.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Friend_Flicka"title="My Friend Flicka">
Kenneth McLaughlin is a 10-year-old boy living on Goose Bar Ranch, just out of Cheyenne, Wyoming, with his practical father, Rob; his mother, Nell; and his older brother, Howard. Rob is often unsatisfied with Ken, who daydreams when he should be attending to practical matters; Nell, however, shares her son's sensitive nature and is more sympathetic. Howard, the older son, who looks and acts more like Rob, was allowed to choose and train a colt from among the Goose Bar herd (thoroughbreds that Rob McLaughlin is raising in the old-fashioned way, on the open range), much to the jealousy of Ken. Although Ken loves horses, Rob doesn't think his wool-gathering son deserves such a privilege yet.At the beginning of the novel, Ken has angered his father by returning home from boarding school with failing grades and will have to repeat fifth grade, an expense Rob can ill afford. After a few mishaps in his first few days home, Nell convinces Rob to give Ken a colt, saying it will give him something to work towards and improve himself and his sense of responsibility. Ken is unable to decide which yearling he wants until he sees a beautiful sorrel filly running swiftly away from him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Planet_Called_Treason"title="A Planet Called Treason">
The premise of this novel is the banishment to the seemingly metal-poor planet Treason of a group of people who attempted to create rule by an intellectual elite. The novel centers on the descendants of these anti-democratic thinkers who remain imprisoned on the planet. Through the ages, these descendants have formed nations which warred and allied with one another to gain advantages over their rivals in the race to build a starship. Due to the metal-deficiency on Treason, nations are forced to obtain it through a system of barter using teleportation devices known as Ambassadors.The protagonist of the book is Lanik Mueller, heir apparent to the Mueller family kingdom. The Muellers, through generations of eugenics, have the ability to heal at an accelerated speed and regrow body parts naturally. The dark side to the Mueller nation is that, in order to obtain iron and other metals, they trade organs and body parts, which are harvested from radical regeneratives ("rads"). Radical regeneratives are people whose bodies can't distinguish between health and injury, and so grow extra appendages as well as organs of the opposite sex; although this is a normal phase for most Muellers at the age of puberty, the bodies of radical regeneratives never outgrow it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guide"title="The Guide">
Raju (Nicknamed: Railway Raju) is a corrupt tour guide who is famous among tourists. He falls in love with a beautiful dancer, Rosie, the wife of archaeologist Marco. They have come to Malgudi, the fictional town in South India, as tourists. Marco does not approve of Rosie's passion for dancing. Rosie, encouraged by Raju, decides to follow her dreams and start a dancing career. In the process they become close to each other. On learning of their relationship, Marco leaves Rosie in Malgudi and goes back to Madras alone. Rosie turns up at the home of Raju and they start living together. But Raju's mother does not approve of their relationship and leaves them. Raju becomes Rosie's stage manager and soon, with the help of Raju's marketing tactics, Rosie becomes a successful dancer. Raju, however, develops an inflated sense of self-importance and tries to control her life. He wants to build as much wealth as possible. Raju gets involved in a case of forgery of Rosie's signature and gets a two-year sentence despite Rosie's best efforts to save him. After completing the sentence, Raju passes through a village, Mangal, where he is mistaken for a sadhu (a spiritual guide). Since he does not want to return in disgrace to Malgudi, he decides to stay in an abandoned temple, close to the village. There he plays the role of a Sadhu, delivering sermons and discourses to the villagers and solving their day-to-day problems and disputes. Soon there is a famine in the village and villagers somehow get the idea that Raju will keep a fast in order to make it rain. Raju confesses the entire truth about his past to Velan, who had first discovered Raju in the temple and had developed faith in him like the rest of the villagers. The confession does not make a difference to Velan, and Raju decides to go on with the fast. With media publicizing his fast, a huge crowd gathers (much to Raju's resentment) to watch him fast. In the morning of the eleventh day of fasting, he goes to the riverside as part of his daily ritual. He feels that the rain is falling in the hills in the distance, and he sags down in water. It is unknown and unconfirmed whether it rained, or whether Raju died. It is left up to interpretation of the reader. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine"title="The Soul of a New Machine">
The book opens with a turf war between two computer design groups within Data General Corporation, a minicomputer vendor in the 1970s. Most of the senior designers are assigned the "sexy" job of designing the next-generation machine in North Carolina. Their project, code-named "Fountainhead", is to give Data General a machine to compete with the VAX computer from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), which is starting to take over the new 32-bit minicomputer market. Meanwhile, at the corporate headquarters at Westborough, Massachusetts, the few remaining senior designers there are assigned the much more humble job of improving Data General's existing products. Tom West, the leader of the Westborough designers, starts a skunkworks project. Code-named "Eagle", it becomes a backup plan in case Fountainhead fails, and then the company's only hope in catching up with DEC. In order to complete the project on time, West takes risks: he elects to use new technology, and he relies on new college graduates (who have never designed anything so complex) as the bulk of his design team. The book follows many of the designers as they give almost every waking moment of their lives to design and debug the new machine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omoo"title="Omoo">
The novel is a sequel to the author's first book, "Typee" (1846) and takes up where the earlier story leaves off. The un-named narrator has just escaped an “indulgent captivity” among the natives of Nuku Hiva by joining the crew of an Australian whaling ship from Sydney. Soon after coming aboard he meets and forms a friendship with the vessel’s surgeon, a tall thin man known to his crew-mates as “Dr Long Ghost”.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Hurrah"title="The Last Hurrah">
The plot of "The Last Hurrah" focuses on a mayoral election in an unnamed East Coast city. Veteran Irish, Democratic Party politician Frank Skeffington is running for yet another term as mayor. As a former governor, he is usually called by the honorific title "Governor." While the city is never named, it is frequently assumed to be Boston. Skeffington is assumed to represent Boston Mayor and Massachusetts Governor James Michael Curley. The story is told in the third person, either by a narrator or by Adam Caulfield, the mayor's nephew. Skeffington is a veteran and adept "machine" politician, and probably corrupt as well. The novel portrays him as a flawed great man with many achievements to his credit.At the beginning of the book, Skeffington is 72 and has been giving signs that he might consider retiring from public life at the end of his current term. He surprises many by announcing what he had always intended to do: run for another term as mayor. The main body of the novel gives a detailed and insightful view of urban politics, tracking Skeffington and his nephew through rounds of campaign appearances and events, thereby showcasing a dying brand of politics and painting a broad picture of political life in general. His opponent, Kevin McCluskey, is a neophyte candidate with a handsome face and good manners, a good World War II record but no political experience, and no real abilities for politics or governing. However, McCluskey gets support from a new campaign medium: television advertising. Surprisingly, McClusky defeats Skeffington on election day.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monstrous_Regiment_(novel)"title="Monstrous Regiment (novel)">
The bulk of "Monstrous Regiment" takes place in the small, bellicose country of Borogravia, a highly conservative nation, whose people live according to the increasingly strange (and harmful) decrees of its favored deity, Nuggan. The main feature of his religion is the Abominations; a long, often-updated list of banned things. To put this in perspective, these things include garlic, cats, the smell of beets, people with ginger hair, shirts with six buttons, anyone shorter than three feet (namely dwarves, children and babies), sneezing, jigsaw puzzles, chocolate (which was once Borogravia's staple export, plunging the country into increasing poverty), crop rotation (which denigrated Borogravia's food supplies), and the colour blue.The list of "Abominations Unto Nuggan" often causes conflicts with Borogravia's neighbours, with uncertainty over the whereabouts of Nuggan and how to lead moral lives leading the inhabitants of Borogravia to deify their Duchess, to whom they pray instead as the traditional head of the Nugganitic church. This slowly causes problems as, on the Discworld, belief grants power. Borogravia is in the midst of a war against an alliance of neighbouring countries, caused by a border dispute with the country of Zlobenia. Other factors include Zlobenia's Prince Heinrich claim to the Borogravian throne, believing his aunt, the long-unseen Duchess, to be dead, and Ankh-Morpork's diplomatic involvement following the destruction of Clacks towers by Borogravia. Rumour is that the war is going poorly for Borogravia, though the country's leadership (and "everyone") denies it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plot_Against_America"title="The Plot Against America">
The novel is told from the point of view of Roth as a child growing up in Newark, New Jersey, as the younger son of Herman and Bess Roth. It begins with aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, who is already criticized for his praise of Hitler's government, joining the America First Party. As the party's spokesman, he speaks out against US intervention in World War II and openly criticizes the "Jewish race" for trying to force US involvement. After making a surprise appearance on the last night of the 1940 Republican National Convention, he is nominated as the Republican Party's candidate for president.Although criticized from the left and feared by most Jewish Americans, Lindbergh musters a strong tide of popular support from the South and the Midwest and is endorsed by Conservative rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf of Newark. Lindbergh wins the 1940 election over incumbent President Franklin Roosevelt in a landslide under the slogan "Vote for Lindbergh, or vote for war." Montana Senator Burton K. Wheeler is Lindbergh's Vice President, and Lindbergh nominates Henry Ford as Secretary of the Interior. With Lindbergh in the White House, the Roth family begins to feel like outsiders in American society.Lindbergh's first act is to sign a treaty with Nazi Germany that promises that the United States will not interfere with German expansion in Europe, known as the "Iceland Understanding," and another with Imperial Japan that promises noninterference with Japanese expansion in Asia, known as the "Hawaii Understanding." 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Poppins_Opens_the_Door"title="Mary Poppins Opens the Door">
On Guy Fawkes Night, Mary Poppins arrives in the wake of the last fireworks display by the Banks family. The Banks children Michael, Jane, the twins, and Annabel plead with her to stay. She reluctantly agrees to do so "till the door opens". When an anxious Jane points out that the nursery door is always opening, she clarifies "the Other Door."Mrs. Banks has Mary and the children find a piano tuner, who happens to be Mary's cousin, Mr. Twigley. When Mary and the children visit, Mr. Twigley tries to unburden himself from seven wishes given to him when he was born. Besides pianos, Mr. Twigley also specializes in songbirds such as nightingales, one of which he releases when he's finished. He also provides music boxes for Mary and the Banks children to dance to. When they return home later, the drawing room piano is playing perfectly, and when the Banks children ask Mary what happened, she sharply rebukes them.Other adventures in the book include Mary telling the story of a king who was outsmarted by a cat (known as "The Cat That Looked at a King"), the park statue of Neleus that comes to life for a time during one of their outings, their visit to confectioner Miss Calico and her flying peppermint sticks, an undersea (High-Tide) party where Mary Poppins is the guest of honor, and a party between fairy tale rivals in the Crack between the Old Year and the New. When the children ask why Mary Poppins, a real person, is there, they are told that she is a fairy tale come true. The next morning, Jane and Michael find definite proof of the last night's adventure, and this time she does not deny it, simply telling them that they too may end up living happily ever after.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eden_(Lem_novel)"title="Eden (Lem novel)">
A starship crew—Captain (in the original, Coordinator), Doctor, Engineer, Chemist, Physicist and Cyberneticist (robotics expert)—crash land on an alien world they call Eden. After escaping their wrecked ship they set out to explore the planet, first traveling through an unsettling wilderness and coming upon an abandoned automated factory. There they find a constant cycle of materials being produced and then destroyed and recycled. Perplexed, they return to their ship. At the crash site they find a local sentient alien has entered their vessel. They name these large creatures, with small torsos retractable into their large bodies, doublers (a translation of Lem's neologism "dubelt", to mean "double-bodied").The next day the expedition begins to come into contact with the local civilization, and their strange, wheel-like vehicles. Eventually they come into conflict with a vehicle's pilot, who is a doubler. Killing the pilot and fleeing in his vehicle, they return to the ship and prepare defenses. After an attack never comes, they assemble their jeep and half the team sets out to explore further, the other half remaining behind to repair the ship.The jeep team eventually discovers structures resembling graves and hundreds of preserved skeletons, and adjacent to it, a settlement. Two expedition members exploring the settlement become caught in a stampede of doublers, who seem totally indifferent to the presence of the alien expedition. One doubler however, comes to the jeep and refuses to return to the settlement, and is brought back to the ship. While the expedition explored the settlement, a large group of doubler vehicles had reconnoitered the crash site and then fled.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld's_Children"title="Ringworld's Children">
The novel's plot is largely concerned with the so-called Fringe War. All the intelligent species of Known Space are interested in the Ringworld. In the novel, they engage in a Cold War of sorts (actually begun in the previous novel, "The Ringworld Throne") on the fringe of the Ringworld star system.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imajica"title="Imajica">
## Conception.The inspiration and many of the ideas for "Imajica" came to Clive Barker in dreams, and so inspired, he worked at an intense pace to complete the novel. Barker has stated he wrote the novel in fourteen months; writing fourteen to sixteen hours a day, seven days a week.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deception_Point"title="Deception Point">
On the eve of a United States presidential election, NASA discovers a meteorite in the Milne Ice Shelf containing an insect-like creature, seemingly proving the existence of extraterrestrial life. The discovery could potentially be a deciding factor in the presidential election, in which one of the key issues is whether to continue funding NASA. Incumbent US President Zachary Herney favors supporting space research, while his challenger Senator Sedgewick Sexton argues for dissolving NASA.President Herney sends a team of experts to the Arctic to verify the authenticity of the extraterrestrial insect: oceanographer Michael Tolland, astrophysicist Corky Marlinson, glaciologist Norah Mangor, paleontologist Wailee Ming, and National Reconnaissance Office employee Rachel Sexton, Senator Sexton's daughter.When the scientists find an anomaly that calls the authenticity of NASA's discovery into question, they're attacked by a Delta Force team that had secretly been spying on them. The Delta Force soldiers kill Ming and Mangor while leaving Rachel, Tolland and Marlinson to perish on an ice floe, but they're rescued by the Navy submarine USS "Charlotte". Rachel alerts presidential advisor Marjorie Tench and NRO director William Pickering of the attack, and Pickering sends an air transport to bring them back to the United States.Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., Tench tries to sabotage Sexton's campaign by blackmailing his aide Gabrielle Ashe with photos of an extramarital affair that she had with Senator Sexton, and reveals that Sexton is secretly backed by a coalition of private aerospace corporations who would profit from NASA's dissolution. Ashe discovers that Tench's claims are true, but also finds out that NASA lied about the origin of the meteorite.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_in_the_Time_of_Cholera"title="Love in the Time of Cholera">
The main characters of the novel are Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza. Florentino and Fermina fall in love in their youth. A secret relationship blossoms between the two with the help of Fermina's Aunt Escolástica. They exchange love letters. But once Fermina's father, Lorenzo Daza, finds out about the two, he forces his daughter to stop seeing Florentino immediately. When she refuses, he and his daughter move in with his deceased wife's family in another city. Regardless of the distance, Fermina and Florentino continue to communicate via telegraph. Upon her return, Fermina realizes that her relationship with Florentino was nothing but a dream since they are practically strangers; she breaks off her engagement to Florentino and returns all his letters.A young and accomplished national hero, Dr. Juvenal Urbino, meets Fermina and begins to court her. Despite her initial dislike of Urbino, Fermina gives in to her father's persuasion and the security and wealth Urbino offers, and they wed. Urbino is a physician devoted to science, modernity, and "order and progress". He is committed to the eradication of cholera and to the promotion of public works. He is a rational man whose life is organized precisely and who greatly values his importance and reputation in society. He is a herald of progress and modernization.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gai-Jin"title="Gai-Jin">
The story opens with a fictional rendition of the Namamugi Incident. On September 14, 1862, Phillip Tyrer, John Canterbury, Angelique Richaud, and Malcolm Struan are riding on the Tōkaidō, when they are attacked by Shorin Anato and Ori Ryoma, both Satsuma samurai and "rōnin" shishi in the "sonnō jōi" movement, cells of revolutionary xenophobic idealists. Canterbury is killed, Malcolm seriously wounded, and Tyrer receives a minor arm injury; only Angelique escapes back to Yokohama unharmed to get help. Tyrer and Malcolm make their way to Kanagawa (Kanagawa-ku) later that day, where Dr. Babcott operates on Malcolm. Meanwhile, at a village inn in Hodogaya the daimyō Sanjiro of Satsuma, meets with Katsumata, one of his advisors, and receives Ori and Shorin, with whom he plots an overthrow of the current Shogunate. Two days later Malcolm is moved to the merchants' settlement in Yokohama. He is not expected to last long and while he is in bed sick, he shows his emotions for Angelique, a voluptuous but penniless French girl.The novel spins two story lines which intertwine with ever increasing complexity: one follows the "gaijin" (foreign) community in Yokohama, the other, the Japanese, both the government (Bakufu) run by a Council of Elders who advise the young Shōgun, and the anti-government, xenophobic, pro-Emperor forces, focusing on the "shishi". The Japanese distrust the foreigners only slightly more than they distrust each other. The various nationalities that make up the foreign community likewise plot against and socialise with each other warily. Both Japanese and foreigners are convinced of their own superiority.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonite_(novel)"title="Ammonite (novel)">
"Ammonite" is the story of Marghe Taishan, an anthropologist and employee of a government agency, the Settlement and Education Councils (SEC). She is sent as an SEC representative to the planet Jeep (Grenchstom's Planet – "Jeep" being the pronunciation of the abbreviation "GP"). Centuries in the past, Jeep was colonized by people from Earth, but contact was lost with the colony, and now the planet is a target for recolonization by the sinister Durallium Company (mostly referred to as "Company"). Some years prior to the beginning of the story, Company sent an expedition of technical and security personnel (the latter called "Mirrors" for the mirrored helmets on their combat armor) to the planet; a short time later, all of the men and many of the women in the expedition died from a virus, also known as Jeep, which was endemic to the planet. As a result, the planet was placed under quarantine, and none of the surviving members of the expedition have been allowed to leave. One of the mysteries of the planet is that there is a "native" population, entirely female and apparently descended from the original colony.Marge is sent to Jeep not only to study the native cultures, but also to test a potential vaccine for the Jeep virus. She makes a journey across Jeep, living with several of its indigenous cultures. Shortly after the start of her journey, she is captured and enslaved by the nomadic Echraidhe, one of whose members, Uaithne, believes herself to be the Death Spirit, the chosen representative of the goddess of death destined to bring about an apocalypse. Escaping the Echraidhe and almost dying in the extreme winter, she reaches the quieter village of Ollfoss, where she joins a family and stops taking the vaccine, accepting the virus into her body and truly learning what it is like to be a native (including how the natives are able to conceive children). She learns the mystic discipline of "deepsearch", and eventually becomes a "viajera", or traveling wise woman. Afterward, she is forced to the center of a conflict between the Mirrors and the Echraidhe under the leadership of Uaithne. Marghe stops the conflict, but shortly thereafter Company, believing the vaccine to have been a failure, destroys the space station orbiting Jeep, apparently isolating the people there. However, Marghe and the Mirrors believe that the Company will probably return one day, a return they must prepare for.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rite_of_Passage_(novel)"title="Rite of Passage (novel)">
"Rite of Passage" is told as a flashback by Mia Havero, the daughter of the Chairman of the Ship's Council, after she has completed her own rite of passage, also known as "Trial". She has survived for thirty days on a colony planet with minimal supplies as part of her initiation into adulthood on one of several giant Ships that survived Earth's destruction in AD 2041. To prevent overpopulation on the Ships, family units can only produce children with the approval of the Ship's Eugenics Council. The penalty for breaking this rule is exile to a colony world.By the year 2198, Mia Havero is twelve years old and, like most of Ship-bound humanity, regards the colonists as "Mudeaters", a derogatory reference to frontier life on a planet. When she accompanies her father on a trading mission to the planet Grainau, Mia learns from the children of a Grainau official that the feeling is mutual; many on the colony worlds call Ship people "Grabbies" because they take whatever goods they cannot produce on the Ships in return for knowledge and technology (doled out sparingly), the heritage of Earth to which the ship residents have laid claim and which colonists are unable to maintain, being too busy staying alive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_Voyage"title="Fantastic Voyage">
The United States and the Soviet Union have both developed technology that can miniaturize matter by shrinking individual atoms, but only for one hour.Scientist Dr. Jan Benes, working behind the Iron Curtain, has figured out how to make the process work indefinitely. With the help of American intelligence agents, including agent Charles Grant, he escapes to the West and arrives in New York City, but an attempted assassination leaves him comatose with a blood clot in his brain that no surgery can remove from the outside.To save his life, Grant, Navy pilot Captain Bill Owens, medical chief and circulatory specialist Dr. Michaels, surgeon Dr. Peter Duval, and his assistant Cora Peterson are placed aboard a Navy ichthyology submarine at the Combined Miniature Deterrent Forces facilities. The submarine, named "Proteus", is then miniaturized to "about the size of a microbe", and injected into Benes' body. The team has 60 minutes to get to and remove the clot; after this, "Proteus" and its crew will begin reverting to their normal size, become vulnerable to Benes's immune system, and kill Benes.The crew faces many obstacles during the mission. An undetected arteriovenous fistula forces them to detour through the heart, where cardiac arrest must be induced to, at best, reduce turbulence that would be strong enough to destroy "Proteus". As the crew faces an unexplained loss of oxygen and must replenish their supply in the lungs, Grant finds the surgical laser needed to destroy the clot was damaged from the turbulence in the heart, as it was not fastened down as it had been before: this and his safety line snapping loose while the crew was refilling their air supply has Grant begin to suspect a saboteur is on the mission. The crew must cannibalize their wireless radio to repair the laser, cutting off all communication and guidance from the outside, although because the sub is nuclear powered, surgeons and technicians outside Benes's body are still able to track their movements via a radioactive tracer, allowing General Alan Carter and Colonel Donald Reid, the officers in charge of CMDF, to figure out the crew's strategies as they make their way through the body. The crew is then forced to pass through the inner ear, requiring all outside personnel to make no noise to prevent destructive shocks, but while the crew is removing reticular fibers clogging the sub's vents and making the engines overheat, a fallen surgical tool causes the crew to be thrown about and Cora is nearly killed by antibodies, but they are able to reboard the sub in time. By the time they finally reach the clot, the crew has only six minutes remaining to operate and then exit the body.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saga_of_Recluce"title="The Saga of Recluce">
## Setting.All of the novels take place in the same fantasy universe, spanning a time period of almost two thousand years.Within this universe, all matter is aligned with two competing forces: order and chaos. In their natural state, these forces are equally matched, in a condition called Balance. These two forces can be seen as fantasy representations of the natural entropy (chaos) that occurs in matter, balanced by the various molecular forces (order) that bind matter into structured forms. These forces are understood, at a basic level, by all inhabitants of the world. The colour white is identified with chaos; black with order. The first published novel explains it this way: white is the chaotic combination of all wavelengths of visible light, while black is the absence of this light. The extreme of either is undesirable...for a human, perfect chaos is destruction, perfect order is death.Rare individuals within the universe possess the inborn ability to manipulate these forces. White wizards can draw chaos from a surrounding area and focus it into bolts of flame. Black mages can concentrate order into matter, making it unnaturally strong. A more limited "subclass" of black mage which is generally acceptable, even highly desirable, even in white chaos dominated societies is the healer. Both forces can be used to kill or to shield. Both types of wielders can, to a degree, detect the presence of both forces. People who are being deceptive, infections, and toxins emanate chaos of differing types discernible by a trained wielder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan's_War"title="Reagan's War">
The book covers Ronald Reagan's actions during the Cold War, and credits him with the eventual end of the Cold War.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopussy_and_The_Living_Daylights"title="Octopussy and The Living Daylights">
## "Octopussy".Secret Service operative James Bond, code name 007, is assigned to apprehend a hero of the Second World War implicated in a murder involving a cache of Nazi gold. Bond appears only briefly in this story, which is told mostly in flashback from the perspective of Major Dexter Smythe, the man Bond has been sent to bring in. Smythe remained in Kitzbühel, Austria, after the war, found the gold with the help of a mountain guide, and killed the guide to keep the gold for himself. Bond was put on the case after the guide's body fell out of a glacier, over 15 years after the murder, and he recognised the man as a ski instructor and father figure from his youth. Smythe is now a melancholy alcoholic widower living alone on the beach, interacting mainly with the residents of its coral reef – including the titular Octopussy, a beloved 'pet' octopus that he feeds and talks to.Bond chooses not to take Smythe into custody immediately, but leaves him to contemplate his options – suicide or a court martial. While hunting for scorpion fish to feed Octopussy, Smythe suffers a sting and is dragged underwater by Octopussy as the poison sets in. Bond views the death as a suicide, but classifies it as an accidental drowning in order to spare Smythe's reputation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrilling_Cities"title="Thrilling Cities">
"Thrilling Cities" is Ian Fleming's view of thirteen cities he visited in two trips in 1959 and 1960. The cities covered are: Hong Kong, Macau, Tokyo, Honolulu, Los Angeles and Las Vegas (the two cities are examined in one chapter), Chicago, New York, Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Geneva, Naples and Monte Carlo.Fleming's account is highly personal and deals with his visit and his experiences and impressions. Each chapter closes with what Fleming called "Incidental Intelligence", dealing with the hotels, restaurants, food and nightlife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungus_the_Bogeyman"title="Fungus the Bogeyman">
The book follows a typical day for Fungus the Bogeyman, starting when he wakes up and ending just before he falls asleep. As his day progresses, he undergoes a mild existential crisis, pondering what his seemingly pointless job of scaring surface people is really for. He is a member of the Bogey society, which is very similar to British society, but Bogeymen enjoy things which humans (called "Drycleaners" because of their contrasting environmental preferences) would not be comfortable around; for example darkness, damp, cold and over-ripe food. The book depicts the mundane details of Bogey life in loving detail, with definitions of Bogey slang and numerous annotations concerning the myths, pets, hobbies, literature, clothing and food of the Bogeys.Much of the humour derives from word play. For example, Bogeymen are shown to enjoy eating and sharing flies in a similar way to human cigarettes; one brand of fly is the "strong French Gallwasp", a pun on the cigarette "Gauloises".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_the_Down_Staircase"title="Up the Down Staircase">
Sylvia Barrett, an idealistic English teacher at an inner city high school, hopes to nurture her students' interest in classic literature (especially Chaucer and writing). She quickly becomes discouraged during her first year of teaching, frustrated by bureaucracy, the indifference of her students, and the incompetence of many of her colleagues. The title of the book is taken from a memo telling her why a student was being punished: he had gone "up the down staircase". She decides to leave the public school (government-funded) system to work in a smaller private setting. She changes her mind, though, when she realizes that she has, indeed, touched the lives of her students.The novel is epistolary; aside from opening and closing chapters consisting entirely of dialogue the story is told through memos from the office, fragments of notes dropped in the trash can, essays handed in to be graded, lesson plans, suggestions dropped in the class suggestion box, and most often by inter-classroom notes that are a dialogue between Sylvia and an older teacher. Sylvia also writes letters to a friend from college who chose to get married and start a family rather than pursuing a career. The letters serve as a recap and summary of key events in the book, and offer a portrait of women's roles and responsibilities in American society in the mid-1960s.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coma_(novel)"title="Coma (novel)">
Susan Wheeler is a third-year medical student at Boston Memorial Hospital. She and four other students take rounds in surgery rooms and ICUs, recording post-treatment notations on the patients' health. Dr. Mark Bellows, a surgery resident in the hospital, is the instructor and this group's supervisor.The book is a journey into the inner workings of a hospital. As these students complete their three-month surgical rotation, the dilemmas and problems faced by a woman in a male-dominated profession are also highlighted.Susan notices that two patients, Nancy Greenly and Sean Berman, mysteriously went into comas immediately after their surgeries. These were attributed to anesthesia complications. Nancy Greenly became comatose due to her brain receiving insufficient oxygen during surgery. Similarly, Sean Berman, a healthy young man in his 30s, underwent a knee operation. Despite the operation's success, Sean failed to regain consciousness. Medically, the odds for such occurrences are one in 100,000; however, such odds seemed resolutely higher at the Boston Memorial Hospital.Baffled by these two patients, Susan investigates their cases and other recent coma victims. She discovers that the oxygen line to Operating Room 8 has been tampered with to induce carbon monoxide poisoning in patients during surgery, ultimately causing brain death. At the same time, Susan develops a brief, but intimate, relationship with Bellows and discusses her findings with him. After unraveling further details, and evading pursuit by a man hired to kill her, Susan is led to the Jefferson Institute.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fever_(Cook_novel)"title="Fever (Cook novel)">
Set mainly in the Boston area and in rural New Hampshire, its main characters are a 12-year-old girl, Michelle Martel, with leukemia and her father, Charles Martel, a former allergist turned cancer researcher, as well as her stepmother Cathryn and her two older brothers, Chuck and Jean-Paul.After falling ill one winter morning, Michelle is hospitalized, diagnosed with acute myeloblastic leukemia, and given experimentally high doses of chemotherapy, to which her father objects, since it has no effect on her leukemia and weakens her with side effects. Cathryn, a former receptionist at the fictional Weinberger Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Charles has worked since turning to cancer research, has little medical knowledge and only wants what is best for her stepchildren, and feels torn between her husband and Michelle's well-meaning but conventional doctors. Charles then traces Michelle's leukemia and a neighbor boy's fatal aplastic anemia to benzene dumped into the river flowing past their house by a local rubber and plastic recycling plant owned by the same corporation that owns the Weinberger Institute and the pharmaceutical company that makes a cancer drug he is being forced to study, and discovers that he is surrounded by corruption, as family, colleagues and the authorities turn against him. He ends up valiantly trying an experimental treatment based on his own research on Michelle, desperately trying to save her life, while barricaded in his own home, sought by the police, and fighting off attacks by thugs hired by the recycling plant and its parent company which are condoned by the local authorities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindbend"title="Mindbend">
Arolen is a giant pharmaceutical company, expanding at rapid pace and bringing more and more doctors into its clutches. Once doctors go on CME on board a cruise organised by Arolen, they come back totally changed, in personality and opinions. Strangely many of them opt for a job in Julian Clinic, even at the cost of leaving their lucrative private practices. Incidentally, the number of therapeutic abortions at the Julian Clinic are also rising. The hero of the novel, Adam Schonberg, a third year medical student, has to leave his medical education midway for want of money as his wife becomes pregnant and later on trapped in the clutches of unethical medical practice. Adam finally succeeds in unraveling the mystery behind Arolem pharmaceuticals. They drug the doctors and later perform psychological surgery on them aboard the ship (Fjord) which makes them opt to join the Julian Clinic. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaffir_Boy"title="Kaffir Boy">
At his mother's insistence, Mathabane starts school and learns to love it, rising to the top of his class in spite of frequent punishments due to his family's late payments for school fees and inability to afford school supplies. He graduates from primary school with a scholarship that will pay for his secondary education.Mathabane's grandmother becomes a gardener for a liberal white English family, the Smiths, who give Mathabane second hand comic books, novels and tennis equipment. His English improves greatly through reading these materials, and he begins to play tennis frequently. Mathabane eventually befriends a coloured tennis coach who trains him.Mathabane joins the high school tennis team and begins to play in tournaments, unofficially sponsored by Wilfred Horn, owner of the Tennis Ranch. It is technically illegal for Mark to play there, but the law is ignored and he becomes more comfortable with whites who frequent the Tennis Ranch. Eventually renowned tennis player Stan Smith takes Mathabane under his wing when the two meet at a tournament. Stan pays for Mathabane to compete in tournaments and talks to his coach at the University of Southern California about Mathabane attending college in the United States. The coach writes to colleges on his behalf, and Mathabane earns a tennis scholarship to Limestone College and leaves for the U.S. in 1978.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farewell_to_Manzanar"title="Farewell to Manzanar">
Jeanne Wakatsuki (the book's narrator) is a "Nisei" (child of a Japanese immigrant). At age seven, Wakatsuki—a native-born American citizen—and her family were living on Ocean Park (near San Pedro, California). They have to move to Terminal Island, where her father, a fisherman who owned two boats, was arrested by the FBI following the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941.Soon after, she and the rest of her family were imprisoned at Manzanar (an American internment camp), where 11,070 Americans of Japanese ancestry and their immigrant parents—who were prevented from becoming American citizens by law—were confined during the Japanese American internment during World War II. The book describes the Wakatsuki's' experiences during their imprisonment and events concerning the family before and after the war.Ko Wakatsuki (Jeanne's father) emigrated from Japan to Honolulu, Hawaii and then to Idaho, running away with his wife and abandoning his family. Stubborn and proud, he did not cope well with his isolation: he drank and abused his family. Woody (Jeanne's brother) wants to preserve his family's honor by joining the U.S. Army. After joining (and fighting in the Pacific theater) he visits his father's Aunt Toyo, who gave his father money for the trip to Hawaii. After the visit, Woody feels a new pride in his ancestry. He becomes the man of the family, leading them early in their internment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Princess_of_Mars"title="A Princess of Mars">
John Carter, a Confederate veteran of the American Civil War, goes prospecting in Arizona immediately after the war's end. Having struck a rich vein of gold, he runs afoul of the Apaches. While attempting to evade pursuit by hiding in a sacred cave, he is mysteriously transported to Mars, called "Barsoom" by its inhabitants. Carter finds that he has great strength and superhuman agility in this new environment as a result of its lesser gravity and lower atmospheric pressure. He soon falls in with a nomadic tribe of Green Martians, or Tharks, as the planet's warlike, six-limbed, green-skinned inhabitants are known. Thanks to his strength and martial prowess, Carter rises to a high position in the tribe and earns the respect and eventually the friendship of Tars Tarkas, one of the Thark chiefs.The Tharks subsequently capture Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium, a member of the humanoid red Martian race. The red Martians inhabit a loose network of city-states and control the desert planet's canals, along which its agriculture is concentrated. Carter rescues Dejah Thoris from the green men in a bid to return her to her people.Subsequently, Carter becomes embroiled in the political affairs of both the red and green Martians in his efforts to safeguard Dejah Thoris, eventually leading a horde of Tharks against the city-state of Zodanga, the historic enemy of Helium. Winning Dejah Thoris' heart, he becomes Prince of Helium, and the two live happily together for nine years. However, the sudden breakdown of the Atmosphere Plant that sustains the planet's waning air supply endangers all life on Barsoom. In a desperate attempt to save the planet's inhabitants, Carter uses a secret telepathic code to enter the factory, bringing an engineer along who can restore its functionality. Carter then succumbs to asphyxiation, only to awaken back on Earth, left to wonder what has become of Barsoom and his beloved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentimental_Education"title="Sentimental Education">
## Part 1.Frédéric Moreau renews his acquaintance with a childhood friend, Deslauriers, who advises him to meet with Dambreuse, a rich Parisian banker. Frédéric leaves for Paris, armed with a letter of recommendation from his neighbour M. Roque, who works for Dambreuse. Despite this, his introduction to Dambreuse is not very successful. In Paris, Frédéric stumbles across a shop belonging to M. Arnoux, whose wife he developed a fascination for when he met her briefly at the start of the novel. However, he does not act on his discovery, and lives idly in Paris for some months. A little more than a year after the start of the story, Frédéric is at a student protest and meets Hussonnet, who works at M. Arnoux's shop. Frédéric becomes one of the friends M. Arnoux who meet at the shop. Eventually, he is invited to dinner with M. and Mme Arnoux. At the same time, his old friend Deslauriers comes to Paris. Frédéric becomes obsessed with Mme. Arnoux. Deslauriers tries to distract him by taking him to a cabaret, where they encounter M. Arnoux and his mistress Mlle Vatnaz. Later, Frédéric is persuaded to return home to his mother, who is having financial difficulties. At home, he meets Louise, the daughter of his neighbour M. Roque. His financial worries are eased by the chance death of an uncle, and he leaves again for Paris.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceless_Killers"title="Faceless Killers">
Inside an almost isolated Skåne farmhouse in Lunnarp, an old man, Johannes Lövgren, is tortured to death and his wife Maria savagely beaten and left for dead with a noose around her neck. Inspector Kurt Wallander, a forty-two-year-old Ystad police detective, is put on the case with his team: Rydberg, an aging detective with rheumatism; Martinsson, a 29-year-old rookie; Naslund, a thirty-year veteran; Svedberg, a balding, forty-something-year-old detective; Hansson and Peters. Maria Lovgren is taken to hospital, but dies anyway. Her last word: "foreign".Rydberg has been examining the noose around Mrs Lovgren's neck and "has never seen one like it before". He thinks that Mrs Lovgren's last word is accurate, and that the murderers are foreign. But his conclusion leads to several racially-motivated attacks after the information is leaked to the press.The story focuses on Sweden's liberal attitude regarding immigration, and explores themes of racism and national identity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Canticle"title="Blood Canticle">
Narrated by the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt, "Blood Canticle" finds young Mayfair witch and heiress Mona slowly dying, afflicted with a mysterious disease brought on by the birth of her daughter Morrigan. Over time, Mona and her guardian, Rowan Mayfair, reveal more and more about the powerful genetic plague that has haunted the Mayfairs for generations: their connection to the Taltos, an advanced species of human to which both women have given birth. Mona and the young vampire Tarquin "Quinn" Blackwood are in love. Lestat turns a dying Mona into a vampire so that the lovers can be together forever.While trying to prevent Mona's family from discovering her transformation, Lestat falls in love with the married Rowan, and she secretly pines for him as well. As Mona adjusts to her new power, Lestat enlists the ancient vampire Maharet to help find Mona's Taltos child. Lestat, Quinn and Mona arrive at the remote island colony of the Taltos, but instead of finding a secluded utopia, they discover that years of criminal intrigue and civil war have taken their toll. The remaining Taltos join the Mayfair clan at the Mayfair Medical Center where they intend to safely learn and grow as a family. Mona and Quinn are instructed in the proper ways of vampirism by Maharet and her twin Mekare. Rowan seeks out Lestat, half in love with him but torn by her love for her husband Michael. Exhausted by her life, she requests that he make her a vampire. Lestat declines, pained though he is, because she is a guiding force for the Mayfair family and he cannot take her away from it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Much_Obliged,_Jeeves"title="Much Obliged, Jeeves">
Jeeves types a report of Bertie's latest misadventures for the club book of the Junior Ganymede Club, in which the club's members are required to record information about their employers, to inform those seeking employment about potential employers. Bertie worries that his embarrassing information will fall into the hands of his judgmental Aunt Agatha and asks Jeeves to destroy the pages about him, but Jeeves asserts that the book is secure and refuses to defy the rules of his club.An old school friend of Bertie's, Ginger Winship, is standing for the House of Commons in a by-election at Market Snodsbury, near the home of Bertie's Aunt Dahlia, Brinkley Court, on the wishes of his strict fiancée. Aunt Dahlia persuades Bertie to come to Brinkley to assist in the canvassing. Before departing, Bertie has drinks with Jeeves at the Junior Ganymede. They discuss how Ginger's chances for election will be hurt if the public learns about his rowdy past (mild by Bertie's standards but potentially offensive to the traditional rural populace of Market Snodsbury). At the club, they see an uncouth ex-valet that Bertie once employed, Bingley, who greets Jeeves in an overly familiar fashion, calling him "Reggie".At Brinkley, he discovers Ginger's fiancée is the overbearing Florence Craye, who has previously been betrothed to several people, including Bertie. Florence mistakenly believes that Bertie still wants to marry her, and Bertie's personal code prevents him from telling her otherwise. The intimidating Roderick Spode, 7th Earl of Sidcup has come to deliver speeches for Ginger, and he has brought "his" fiancée, Madeline Bassett. Like Florence, Madeline thinks Bertie wants to marry her and Bertie is too polite to correct her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Religion_War"title="The Religion War">
The delivery boy from the first book, who is now the Avatar, must stop an epic clash of civilizations between the Western world, led by Christian extremist General Horatio Cruz, and the Middle East, led by Muslim extremist Al-Zee. To accomplish this task, the Avatar decides to find the "Prime Influencer", a person who, he feels, can indirectly influence all the decisions people make by virtue of responsibility, from fashion to the election of the President. He attempts to do so by enlisting a talented and arrogant programmer at Global Information Corporation (G.I.C.) (an all-encompassing, world-wide future sort of T.I.A. created out of fear of terrorism) to analyze G.I.C.'s massive databases. Also, people's phones are, in the name of preventing terrorist communications, restricted to only calling certain contacts a person has that have been approved by the Department of Communications; this fact ultimately comes back in the book's climax.The Avatar applies his unparalleled ability to identify developing patterns and accurately determine the most probable results of a situation to accurately predict the war plans of both Cruz and Al-Zee. He subsequently uses his ability to recognize even the vaguest patterns (which makes him seem to know more than he actually does) to bypass guards, escape interrogations, and ultimately win an audience with the warring leaders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthly_Powers"title="Earthly Powers">
On his eighty-first birthday, retired homosexual writer Kenneth Toomey is asked by the Archbishop of Malta to assist in the process of canonisation of Carlo Campanati, the late Pope Gregory XVII and his brother-in-law. Toomey subsequently works on his memoirs, which span the major part of the 20th century.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dreamers_(novel_series)"title="The Dreamers (novel series)">
## The Elder Gods.The first volume of the series, "The Elder Gods", is about the invasion of the unsuspecting Zelana's Domain by the hordes of the Vlagh inhabiting the Wasteland center of the Land of Dhrall.The Elder Gods are each given an infant told to be a Dreamer and are supposed to save the world and defeat the Vlagh. When Eleria, Zelana's child, has the first dream, the Elder Gods go out in search of mercenaries to hire with gold (found useless and common in the land of Dhrall).Zelana takes to the west of Dhrall to the land of Maag where she forces a storm to bring the ship and crew of Sorgan Hook-Beak to her domain. Hook-Beak is shown that she will pay a large quantity of gold to hire an army from Maag and fight a war. He takes the native archers Longbow and Red-Beard as well as Zelana with her child Eleria to Maag in search of more crews. They find much success but when the Vlagh sends an agent out to convince a crew to destroy Sorgan Hook-Beak and steal the gold, they are stopped thanks to a vision of Eleria. The night they came to attack, Longbow and the small Maag smith of Hook-Beak's crew, Rabbit, destroy the enemy fleet and the Vlagh agent responsible. A tight friendship is made by Rabbit and Longbow.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_(Faulkner_novel)"title="Sanctuary (Faulkner novel)">
The novel is set in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi and takes place in May and June 1929.In May 1929, Horace Benbow, a lawyer frustrated with his life and family, suddenly leaves his home in Kinston, Mississippi, and hitchhikes his way back to Jefferson, his hometown in Yoknapatawpha County. There, his widowed sister, Narcissa Sartoris, lives with her son and her late husband's great-aunt, Miss Jenny. On the way to Jefferson, he stops for a drink of water near the "Old Frenchman" homestead, which is occupied by the bootlegger Lee Goodwin. Benbow encounters a sinister man called Popeye, an associate of Goodwin, who brings him to the decrepit mansion where he meets Goodwin and the strange people who live there with him. Later that night, Benbow catches a ride from Goodwin's place into Jefferson. He argues with his sister and Miss Jenny about leaving his wife, and meets Gowan Stevens, a local bachelor who recently has been courting Narcissa. That night, Benbow moves back into his parents' house, which has been sitting vacant for years.After meeting Benbow, Gowan leaves to go to a dance in Oxford that same night. Gowan has returned to Jefferson after graduating from the University of Virginia, where he "learned to drink like a gentleman." He is from a wealthy family and prides himself on having adopted the worldview of the Virginia aristocracy. His date that night is Temple Drake, a student at the University of Mississippi ("Ole Miss"), who has a reputation of being a "fast girl." Temple also comes from a wealthy Mississippi family and is the daughter of a powerful judge. While they are out, Gowan and Temple make plans to meet the next morning to travel with her classmates to Starkville for a baseball game. But, after taking Temple home after the dance, Gowan learns from some locals where he can find moonshine and spends the night drinking heavily. He passes out in his car at the train station where he is supposed to have a rendezvous with Temple the next morning.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightshade_(Butler_novel)"title="Nightshade (Butler novel)">
The story is set on Mars in the late 21st Century. It follows the exploits of the 400-year-old vampire John Shade, whose comfortable life in the Hellas crater on Mars is disrupted when he is forced to become part of a complex conspiracy to protect the Janglers, a sub-species of humans who have replaced parts of their brains with technology.Shade eventually becomes the leader of a collection of loners, losers, drop-outs and rebels, holding them together through unwitting charisma and a sense of personal vengeance against the government of Mars.As a vampire, Shade sometimes feels a lust for blood, though this only occurs once or twice a year - though the Need, as it is called, strikes several times during the course of the novel for reasons that are not fully explained. Shade also possesses increased strength and reflexes, a photographic memory, excellent mathematical knowledge, the ability to change his own shape and the power to "shift" into "high temporal", which tremendously enhances his speed. Shade has read Bram Stoker's Dracula and believes it to be "foolish in many details".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blackwater_Lightship"title="The Blackwater Lightship">
The story is set in Dublin and County Wexford and described from the viewpoint of Helen, a successful school principal living with her husband and two children in Ireland. She learns one day, that her brother Declan, who is homosexual, has been ill with AIDS for years, and refused to tell her until then. He asks her to deliver their mother and grandmother the news. This presents a challenge to Helen as she has had minimal contact with the two women due to deeply buried conflicts relating to Helen's past and her father's sudden death when she was a child.As the three women meet again they are forced to overcome these struggles for Declan's sake. The novel follows the painful journey they must take in order to correct the misunderstanding that exists between them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Strange_&amp;_Mr_Norrell"title="Jonathan Strange &amp; Mr Norrell">
## Volume I: Mr Norrell.The novel opens in 1806 in northern England with The Learned Society of York Magicians, whose members are "theoretical magicians" who study magical texts and history, after the decline of magic in England several hundred years earlier. The group is stunned to learn of a "practical magician", Mr Gilbert Norrell. Norrell proves his skill as a magician by making the statues in York Cathedral speak, thereafter compelling the society to disband. John Childermass, Mr Norrell's servant, convinces a member of the group, John Segundus, to write about the event for the London newspapers.Segundus's article generates interest in Mr Norrell, who moves to London to revive practical English magic. He enters society with the help of two gentlemen about town, the superficial Christopher Drawlight and the shrewd Henry Lascelles, and meets a Cabinet Minister, Sir Walter Pole. To ingratiate himself, Mr Norrell attempts to recall Sir Walter's fiancée, Emma Wintertowne, from the dead. He summons a fairy—"the gentleman with thistle-down hair"—who strikes a bargain with Norrell to restore Emma: half of her life will be spent with the fairy. After news spreads of Emma's resurrection and happy marriage to Sir Walter, magic becomes respected, and the government seeks Norrell's aid their ongoing war against Napoleon.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Don"title="The Last Don">
The last plan of Don Domenico Clericuzio, an aging Mafia boss, is to eventually have his family enter the legitimate world and assimilate into American society. Twenty-five years later, his grandson Dante and grandnephew Crocifisso "Cross" De Lena make their way through life, and the eighty-year-old Don is semi-retired. Cross, who holds a majority share in a Las Vegas casino, is supposed to become the strong arm of the family. However, when he refuses to take part in the murder of an old friend, Dante is left to be the sole tough guy. Dante's greed for power and blood lead him to plan the elimination of his relatives, who are an obstacle to the desire to become as powerful as the old Don himself. When Dante arranges a hit on Cross's father, strongman Pippi De Lena—who, in a subplot, once commanded the elimination of the rival Santadio Family whose scion, Jimmy, married Don Clericuzio's daughter Rose Marie and fathered Dante before his family's assassination, driving Dante's mother to insanity—Cross, who is aware of being on the blacklist, catches Dante in a trap. Having acted against the family, he waits for the Don's vendetta, but, to his own surprise, his life is spared and he is only condemned to exile. Cross then resumes his romance with actress Athena Aquitane. The story ends with the revelation that Don Clericuzio planned this outcome, even anticipating his grandson's death, all along, for the long-term survival of his family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lampoon's_Doon"title="National Lampoon's Doon">
Within the Galactic Empire, a change of fief is occurring. Led by the verbose Baron Vladimir, House Hardchargin, the Great Big House given charge of Arruckus, has been displaced by Shaddap IV, the Padedbrah Emperor, in favor of the up-and-coming House Agamemnides, with Duke Lotto at its head.Arruckus is also known as "Doon", and is additionally known as the Dessert Planet. Covered entirely in sugars, it is a harsh unforgiving environment, where not an entree can be found; the natives live entirely on whatever they can import, produce from the sugars, or produce from soy protein (the native food experiments known as the "Mahn t'Vani")Duke Lotto accepts the fief, aware that it may well be a death trap but also conscious of the importance of Arruckus's only export, the wide-spectrum intoxicant known as beer. Found naturally on Arruckus as a result of natural processes and nowhere else, it is the engine on which commerce runs; the Schlepping Guild, who has a monopoly on space travel in the Imperium, will not run without it. Who controls the beer controls commerce.But soon after arriving on Doon, with his heir and son Pall and his concubine the Lady Jazzica, an adept of the galaxy-spanning sisterhood of chefs and event planners known as the Boni Maroni, Duke Lotto and House Agamemnides fall victim to a scheme originated by Baron Vladimir Hardchargin and implemented by the Duke's own accountant Oyeah, who, without the Duke's knowledge, kept a secret second ledger. When the Emperor called for an audit of the fief, the duplicate ledger made it appear as though House Agamemnides had been cooking the books. In return for this act, Oyeah hoped the Baron would give him a start as a stand-up comic–which he did, but on the Imperial prison planet, Salacia Simplicissimus. Ruined, Duke Lotto's brief reign over Doon is ended and House Hardchargin is reinstated as fief-holders.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_the_Cheese"title="I Am the Cheese">
The novel opens with protagonist Adam Farmer biking from his home in the fictional town of Monument, Massachusetts, (based on Cormier's home town of Leominster, Massachusetts) to visit his father in the fictional town of Rutterburg, Vermont. The story alternates with transcripts of tapes between a "subject" and Brint. The subject receives psychotherapy and is interrogated by Brint.As the book continues, it is revealed that Adam is the subject, who was formerly Paul Delmonte of a small New York town. His father, "David Farmer", was a newspaper reporter who was enrolled in the Witness Protection Program (WPP). The family moved to Monument and escaped several close calls with their identities, but the parents are killed in the penultimate chapter in a car collision. Adam/Paul survives, and is taken to a government mental asylum. The last chapter implies that WPP agents killed the family and reveals that Paul is regularly interrogated on the topic. Each time, Paul is unable to handle his realizations of his past and embarks on his delusional bike ride across the ground of the facility. At the end of the last tape, Brint recommends authorization to murder Adam.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keys_to_the_Kingdom"title="The Keys to the Kingdom">
Arthur, a young boy, has a severe asthma attack one day as two mysterious people, one of which is called Monday, give him a 'Key', a magical artifact that saves his life, against Monday's intentions. He discovers there exists a world called the 'House', which is split into seven parts, each ruled by a 'Trustee', of which Monday is one. A divine being known as the 'Architect' has disappeared and left behind a 'Will', leaving the House and the seven Keys to her seven Trustees, but the Trustees have split up the Will and hidden the parts, intent on not letting the Will be fulfilled.The first part of the Will has managed to break free and, by convenience, has chosen Arthur as the 'rightful heir' who must recover the other lost parts of the Will; this has led to Monday giving up half of his Key to him. In the first book, Arthur defeats Monday and takes control of the first part of the House. Books two to five follow a somewhat regular pattern: in each, Arthur tries to gain control over one part of the House, and ultimately succeeds after various challenges, setting free one part of the Will. Each book features one main antagonist, usually the Trustee of that part of the House, with the exception of one Trustee who wants the Will to be fulfilled but has been overthrown by the other Trustees. Sometimes, the Trustees sow chaos on Earth while he is away in the House.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Name_Is_Legion_(short_story_collection)"title="My Name Is Legion (short story collection)">
The protagonist of these stories is involved in the creation of a global computer network designed to give ultimate economic control by keeping track of all human activity. Just before the system goes live, the hero expresses his concerns about the possible misuse of such power to his superior, who gives the hero the chance to destroy his personal data before it is to be entered into the system. In taking this step the hero becomes non-existent as far as the system is concerned. Using backdoors in the central network, the hero is able to create identities for himself as needed. With this freedom he sets himself up as a freelance investigator and problem solver.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Died_with_a_Felafel_in_His_Hand"title="He Died with a Felafel in His Hand">
While the book is not written in a linear fashion the order of houses (and housemates) John lives in is as follows:1st Place – The BoulevadeTom moves out and is replaced by:2nd Place3rd Place – King StreetTaylor at the time was having personal issues. He ambushed his fellow housemates with a toy gun after hiding for an hour. He told them if it was a real gun they would all be dead. John saw this as good reason to move out.4th Place – Duke Street (Brisbane)John moves out for reasons not made clear.5th Place – MelbourneJohn moves out when her loud sex sessions became too much to bear.6th Place – FitzroyAs a result of the fallout from this new relationship Greg moves out and John follows suit.7th Place – CarltonAfter trying to freeze out the Daves from the house by cutting off the gas and electricity John gives in and moves to a loft in Fitzroy.8th Place – FitzroyAfter Wendell's threats to kill him, John moves out and sleeps around at friends' places.9th Place – Auchenflower in Brisbane10th Place – Brisbane goth house (not clear how this move came about)All the goths run away after the bailiff came round to collect unpaid rent. John keeps the house on and in moves:
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_Karlstein"title="Count Karlstein">
The novel is set in the fictional Swiss village of Karlstein in 1816. The evil Count Karlstein made a deal with Zamiel, the Demon Huntsman, in order to obtain his current wealth. The condition of the deal was that in ten years' time the huntsman will be presented with a human sacrifice on All Souls' Eve. The count has decided to offer his two young nieces, Lucy and Charlotte.His plan does not go as smoothly as he would have preferred. Hildi Kelmar, a castle maidservant, overhears his plan to sacrifice Lucy and Charlotte and tries to save them.The narrative shifts between the perspectives of a panoply of characters, including Hildi, Lucy, Charlotte, the girls' former teacher Miss Augusta Davenport, the inept coachman Max Grindoff, and a police report. Other characters that come to the aid of the girls, willingly or not, are Meister Haifisch, the Count's lawyer; Doctor Cadaverezzi, a fraudulent magician employing Max as an assistant, who takes Lucy in as a part of his act; Eliza, Miss Davenport's helper and Max's lover; Hildi's mother, a tavern owner; and Hildi's brother, Peter, a huntsman hiding from the law.After hiding the girls, avoiding the Count and his cronies (Arturo Snivelwurst, his cowardly manservant, and Frau Muller, the castle's head servant), and helping several other people, Hildi has no choice but to send her fugitive brother, armed with a single silver bullet, to rescue the girls from the distant hunting cabin. He uses the bullet before encountering Zamiel, but the Demon Huntsman spares the hunter and those he protects, taking the life of Karlstein instead. The following day, Peter wins a shooting contest and the title of Chief Ranger of the Forest, securing his freedom. Meister Haifisch arrives and announces that the true Count Karlstein is in fact the orphaned Max, who weds Eliza and raises Lucy and Charlotte. Finally, Miss Augusta and Doctor Cadaverezzi (who is known as Signor Rolipolio), old lovers, reunite.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leucippe_and_Clitophon"title="Leucippe and Clitophon">
An unnamed narrator is approached by a young man called Clitophon (Kleitophōn) who is induced to talk of his adventures. In Clitophon's story, his cousin Leucippe (Leukippē) travels to his home in Tyre, at which point he falls in love with Leucippe, despite his already being promised in marriage to his half-sister Calligone. He seeks the advice of another cousin (Kleinias), already experienced in love (this latter's young male lover dies shortly after). Following a number of attempts to woo her, Clitophon wins Leucippe's love, but his marriage to Calligone is fast approaching. However, the marriage is averted when Kallisthenes, a young man from Byzantium who has heard of Leucippe's beauty, comes to Tyre to kidnap her, but by mistake kidnaps Calligone.Clitophon attempts to visit Leucippe at night in her room, but her mother is awakened by an ominous dream. Fearing reprisals, Clitophon and Leucippe elope and leave Tyre on a ship (where they meet another unhappy lover, Menelaos, responsible for his own boyfriend's death). Unfortunately, their ship is wrecked during a storm. They come to Egypt and are captured by Nile delta bandits. Clitophon is rescued, but the bandits sentence Leucippe to be sacrificed. Clitophon witnesses this supposed sacrifice and goes to commit suicide on Leucippe's grave, but it in fact turns out that she is still alive, the sacrifice having been staged by his captured friends using theatrical props.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autumn_Visits"title="Autumn Visits">
In a poor, downtrodden Russia, a vector of future development of the world is being decided. Six Forces send their champions—Envoys, copies of real people, typical of their kind; they are "almost" the same as their prototypes. An Envoy can do only that what prototype can, but unlike them, envoys believe in their own forces, and thus can change the world. The Envoys have a main directive—to survive. The last surviving Envoy is deemed to be the most fit for the world, and guides it in the future.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sun_(Abbey_novel)"title="Black Sun (Abbey novel)">
The book is divided into three parts: In the forest; In the sun; and In the evening.The novel is about a rugged fire lookout, Will Gatlin, who falls in love with an American girl half his age and then becomes wrongly blamed when she mysteriously disappears in the nearby Grand Canyon National Park.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woodlanders"title="The Woodlanders">
The story takes place in a small woodland village called Little Hintock, and concerns the efforts of an honest woodsman, Giles Winterborne, to marry his childhood sweetheart, Grace Melbury. Although they have been informally betrothed for some time, her father has made financial sacrifices to give his adored only child a superior education and no longer considers Giles good enough for her. When the new doctor – a well-born and handsome young man named Edred Fitzpiers – takes an interest in Grace, her father does all he can to make Grace forget Giles, and to encourage what he sees as a brilliant match. Grace has misgivings prior to the marriage as she sees a village woman (Suke Damson) coming out of his cottage very early in the morning and suspects he has been sleeping with her. She tells her father that she does not want to go on with the marriage and he becomes very angry. Later Fitzpiers tells her Suke has been to visit him because she was in agony from toothache and he extracted a molar. Grace clutches at this explanation - in fact Fitzpiers has started an affair with Suke some weeks previously. After the honeymoon, the couple take up residence in an unused wing of Melbury's house. Soon, however, Fitzpiers begins an affair with a rich widow named Mrs. Charmond, which Grace and her father discover. Grace finds out by chance that Suke Damson has a full set of teeth and realises that Fitzpiers lied to her. The couple become progressively more estranged and Fitzpiers is assaulted by his father-in-law after he accidentally reveals his true character to him. Both Suke Damson and Mrs Charmond turn up at Grace's house demanding to know whether Fitzpiers is all right - Grace addresses them both sarcastically as "Wives -all". Fitzpiers later deserts Grace and goes to the Continent with Mrs Charmond. Grace realises that she has only ever really loved Giles but as there is no possibility of divorce feels that her love seems hopeless.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Policeman"title="The Third Policeman">
"The Third Policeman" is set in rural Ireland and is narrated by a dedicated amateur scholar of de Selby, a scientist and philosopher. The narrator, whose name the reader never learns, is orphaned at a young age. At boarding school, he discovers the work of de Selby and becomes a fanatically dedicated student of it. One night he breaks his leg under mysterious circumstances – "if you like, it was broken for me" – and he is ultimately fitted with a wooden leg to replace the original one. On returning to his family home, he meets and befriends John Divney who is in charge of the family farm and pub. Over the next few years, the narrator devotes himself to the study of de Selby's work and leaves Divney to run the family business.By the time the narrator is thirty, he has written what he believes to be the definitive critical work on de Selby but does not have enough money to have it published. Divney observes that Mathers, a local man, "is worth a packet of potato-meal" and eventually it dawns on the narrator that Divney plans to rob and kill Mathers. The narrator and Divney encounter Mathers one night on the road and Divney knocks Mathers down with a bicycle pump. The narrator, prompted by Divney, finishes Mathers off with a spade and then notices that Divney has disappeared with Mathers's cash box. When Divney returns, he refuses to reveal the location of the cash box and fends off the narrator's repeated inquiries. To ensure that Divney does not retrieve the box unobserved, the narrator becomes more and more inseparable from Divney, eventually sharing a bed with him: "the situation was a queer one and neither of us liked it".
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Banner_of_Heaven"title="Under the Banner of Heaven">
## Murders.The book opens with news accounts of the 1984 murder of Brenda Lafferty and her infant daughter Erica. Brenda was married to Allen Lafferty, the youngest of the Lafferty brothers. His older brothers Dan and Ron disapproved of their sister-in-law Brenda because they believed she was the reason Dan’s wife left him (after refusing to allow him to marry a plural/second wife—his stepdaughters). Both men's extremism reached new heights when they became members of the School of the Prophets, founded and led by Robert C. Crossfield. After joining this group, Ron claimed that God had sent him revelations about Brenda. Communication with God is a core belief of fundamentalist Mormonism, as well as the mainstream LDS Church. Ron showed the members of the School of Prophets a written "removal revelation" that allegedly called for the killing of Brenda and her baby. After other members of the School failed to honor Ron's removal revelation, the brothers quit the School.Dan claimed that he slit both of the victims' throats. But, at the 2001 trial, Chip Carnes, who was riding in the getaway car, testified that Ron said that he had killed Brenda, and that Ron had thanked his brother for "doing the baby".
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_of_Eden"title="West of Eden">
The story revolves around the eventual discovery of the American continents by the Yilanè, who are searching for new resources and territories for colonization. Being reptiloid and cold-blooded, they target tropical and sub-tropical zones.Eventually, of course, they encounter the humanoids, whom they regard as barely sentient animals. Humans, in their turn, are xenophobically terrified of the Yilanè. As the winters become colder the Tanu are forced to travel south into warmer climates to hunt, onto Yilanè territory. It is not long before a state of conflict exists between the two species.The central characters are Vaintè, an ambitious Yilanè; Stallan, her vicious and obedient adjutant; and Kerrick, a "ustuzou" (the Yilanè word for mammal) who is captured by the reptiloids as a boy, and raised as a Yilanè. Kerrick eventually escapes to rejoin his own people, ultimately becoming a leader. Another notable Yilanè character is Enge, the leader of a faction of pacifist Yilanè who reject the militaristic and violent attitudes of their culture. This group is violently opposed by most other Yilanè, especially Vaintè. Enge befriends Kerrick, and acts as his teacher, while he lives with the Yilanè.After Kerrick escapes he joins other human tribes and after a journey over the mountains, being pursued all the while by Vaintè, who wants nothing more than the absolute destruction of the ustuzou. After a number of victories, Kerrick realizes that despite the losses inflicted upon the Yilanè, the Yilanè will never stop pursuing them. Kerrick organizes an expedition back to the Yilanè city of Alpèasak where he was held as a boy, and burns it down. The North American continent is freed of the Yilanè.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_a_Pale_Horse"title="On a Pale Horse">
In the 1980s, Zane is living a pathetic life without money or employment. When a magic gem merchant cheats Zane out of an opportunity for romance, Zane decides to take his own life. As he starts to pull the trigger, he sees the spectre of Death (Thanatos) advancing on him. Startled, he pulls the gun from his own head and shoots Death right between the eyes. He is then visited by a woman who introduces herself as Fate, who insists that Zane must now assume the position of the man he has killed, since whoever kills Death must become the new Death. As Zane makes his way downstairs, he gets his first view of a pale limousine with the license plate reading "Mortis"...his Death Steed (Death rides a pale horse) who can assume the form of a pale boat, a plane, or a pale limousine, as well as the form of a pale horse. Fate then departs and leaves Zane in the care of Chronos, the Incarnation of Time, who then instructs Zane how to use his deathwatch, how Mortis changes form, how to use other instruments of the office, and exactly what his new duties are. This entails residing in Purgatory and visiting Earth to collect the souls of humans who are in a close balance of good and evil and cannot determine their eternal destination (Heaven or Hell) without help.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twin_Dilemma"title="The Twin Dilemma">
After his regeneration, the Sixth Doctor starts behaving erratically. He goes to the wardrobe looking for a new outfit and finds a glaring, mismatched, brightly coloured coat to which he immediately takes a shine. Peri tells him that he could not go outside wearing such an awful garb, to which the Doctor takes offence.Two twins, Romulus and Remus Sylveste, receive a visitation from a mysterious old man called Professor Edgeworth. They question how he managed to get inside their house; he tells them he will return when their father is there, then abducts them. They arrive on a spacecraft in deep space. Edgeworth then communicates with his superior, a slug-like creature called Mestor, who instructs Edgeworth to take the twins to Titan 3.In the console room, the Doctor has a funny turn, quoting a poem about a Peri — a good and beautiful fairy in Persian mythology, but one which used to be evil. The Doctor accuses her of being evil, and of being an alien spy before rushing toward her and throttling her. He catches a sight of his own manic face in a mirror and collapses in a heap, releasing Peri. When she tells him that he tried to kill her, he initially denies he could be capable of such an act, but seeing how terrified of him she is, decides he must become a hermit on the desolate asteroid Titan 3.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stars_Shine_Down"title="The Stars Shine Down">
The novel tells the story of Lara Cameron, a successful real estate developer who came from a broken family in Nova Scotia. Lara's mother and her male twin die during their birth and her Scottish father, who collects rents for boarding houses, doesn't want her. Early in life, she learns to fend for herself and how to get her own way in a male-dominated world. After her father's death due to a sudden heart failure, Lara takes up her father's job along with her own kitchen work in the boarding house. She meets a man called Charles Cohn who is much impressed by her. He hands her a contract for building. To acquire a fine piece of land, she makes a deal with the owner of the boarding house to secure her first building in exchange for her body. Thrilled at her success, she moves to Chicago to start her real estate empire. Even though she encounters many problems, she is able to overcome them all and become one of America's most successful businesswomen, and receives the nickname, "Iron Butterfly." She falls in love with a talented pianist, Philip Adler, and marries him. She is on the verge of losing everything she has achieved as well as the one man she loves, but the Iron Butterfly miraculously recovers from all her shattered dreams and gains back all her hopes and the only man whom she ever truly loved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dombey_and_Son"title="Dombey and Son">
The story concerns Paul Dombey, the wealthy owner of the shipping company of the book's title, whose dream is to have a son to continue his business. The book begins when his son is born and Dombey's wife dies shortly after giving birth. Following the advice of Mrs Louisa Chick, his sister, Dombey employs a wet nurse named Mrs Richards (Toodle). Dombey already has a six-year-old daughter Florence, but, bitter at her not having been the desired boy, he neglects her continually. One day, Mrs Richards, Florence, and her maid, Susan Nipper, secretly pay a visit to Mrs Richards' house in Staggs's Gardens so that Mrs Richards can see her children. During this trip, Florence becomes separated from them and is kidnapped for a short time by Good Mrs Brown, before being returned to the streets. She makes her way to Dombey and Son's offices in the City and there is found and brought home by Walter Gay, an employee of Mr Dombey, who first introduces her to his uncle, the navigation instrument maker Solomon Gills, at his shop The Wooden Midshipman.The child, named Paul after his father, is a weak and sickly child, who does not socialise normally with others; adults call him "old fashioned". He is intensely fond of his sister Florence, who is deliberately neglected by her father as a supposedly irrelevant distraction. Paul is sent to the seaside at Brighton for his health, where he and Florence lodge with the ancient and acidic Mrs Pipchin. Finding his health beginning to improve there, Mr Dombey keeps him at Brighton and has him educated there at Dr and Mrs Blimber's school, where he and the other boys undergo both an intense and arduous education under the tutelage of Mr Feeder, B.A. and Cornelia Blimber. It is here that Paul is befriended by a fellow pupil, the amiable but weak-minded Mr Toots.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Terror_(book)"title="The Great Terror (book)">
The first critical inquiry into the Great Purge outside the Soviet Union had been made as early as 1937 by the Dewey Commission, which published its findings in the form of a 422-page book entitled "Not Guilty" (this title referred to the people who had been charged with various crimes by Joseph Stalin's government and therefore purged); the Dewey Commission found them not guilty. The most important aim of Conquest's "The Great Terror" was to widen the understanding of the purges beyond the previous narrow focus on the Moscow Trials of disgraced All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) leaders, such as Nikolai Bukharin and Grigory Zinoviev. The question of why these leaders had pleaded guilty and confessed to various crimes at the trials had become a topic of discussion for a number of Western writers and had underlain books, such as George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon". According to the book, the trials and executions of these former Communist leaders were a minor detail of the purges, which together with man-made famines had led to 20 million deaths according to his estimates. In the appendix of the original 1968 edition, Conquest estimated that 700,000 legal executions took place during 1937 and 1938, which was roughly confirmed by the 681,692 executions found in the Soviet archives for these two years. In the preface to the 40th anniversary edition of "The Great Terror", Conquest wrote that he had been "correct on the vital matter—the numbers put to death: about one million" but lowered other figures, saying that the total number of deaths brought about by the various Soviet terror campaigns "can hardly be lower than some 13 to 15 million."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Boleyn_Girl"title="The Other Boleyn Girl">
In 1521 England, Queen Catherine of Aragon's failure to provide King Henry VIII a male heir has strained their marriage. Thomas Boleyn and his brother-in-law Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, plan to install Boleyn's youngest daughter Mary, wife of courtier William Carey, as the king's mistress. Mary's sister Anne, who recently returned from the French court, and brother George help Mary prepare, and Henry soon takes a liking to Mary. Meanwhile, Queen Catherine becomes displeased with the situation, as she considered Mary one of her dear ladies-in-waiting. Before long, Mary becomes pregnant with the king's child.Both the Howard and Boleyn families receive lands and titles as a reward for their service, elevating their status amongst the other noble families of the royal court. Anne catches the eye of Henry Percy, heir presumptive to the Duchy of Northumberland, and marries him in secret. Percy, however, is set to marry Mary Talbot, the daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey discovers and forbids the union. Anne's family sends her to Hever Castle as punishment for the potential scandal.Mary gives birth to a daughter in 1524 and names her Catherine. While disappointed, the king becomes determined to impregnate her with a son, and Mary soon becomes pregnant again. George marries Jane Parker, another of the queen's ladies-in-waiting, but their marriage is unhappy. Anne returns to court on her family's orders to ensure Henry is not distracted from Mary. Instead of doing as she's told, Anne seduces the king and wins him over. Mary eventually gives birth to a son, who she names after the king. She realizes, however, it is not enough as everyone will consider the child illegitimate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forty_Days_of_Musa_Dagh"title="The Forty Days of Musa Dagh">
## Context.Franz Werfel had served as a corporal and telephone operator in the Austro-Hungarian Army artillery during the First World War on the Russian front and later as a propaganda writer for the Military Press Bureau (with Rainer Maria Rilke and others) in Vienna. The horrors he witnessed during the war, as well as the banality of the civil and military bureaucracies, served him well during the course of writing the book. His reason for writing the novel came as a result of a trip through Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon from January through March 1930 and is given in a prefatory note in the novel:This book was conceived in March of the year 1929 [sic], during the course of a stay in Damascus. The miserable sight of maimed and famished-looking refugee children, working in a carpet factory, gave me the final impulse to snatch the incomprehensible destiny of the Armenian people from the Hell of all that had taken place. The writing of the book followed between July 1932 and March 1933. Meanwhile, in November, on a lecture tour through German cities, the author selected Chapter 5 of Book One for public readings. It was read in its present form, based on the historic records of a conversation between Enver Pasha and Pastor Johannes Lepsius.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Frisby_and_the_Rats_of_NIMH"title="Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH">
Mrs. Frisby, a recently widowed mouse, lives with her four children in a cinder block, in a field belonging to a farmer named Mr. Fitzgibbon. Her son Timothy falls ill with pneumonia just as the farmer begins planning for spring plowing, which will destroy their home. Normally, the family would move to their summer home to avoid being uprooted, but Timothy is too ill to move. An older mouse named Mr. Ages, who was a friend of Mrs. Frisby’s late husband Jonathan, gives her some medicine for Timothy. On her way home, she saves the life of a young crow named Jeremy from the farmer’s cat, Dragon. In return, Jeremy flies Mrs. Frisby to an owl’s tree so that she can ask for help moving her family. When the owl finds out that Mrs. Frisby is the widow of his old friend Jonathan, he suggests that she seek help from the rats who live in a rosebush on the farm.Frisby discovers that the rats have a literate and mechanized society. They have technology such as elevators, have tapped the electricity grid to provide lighting and heating, and have acquired other human skills, such as storing food for the winter. Their leader, Nicodemus, tells Frisby of the rats' capture by scientists working for a laboratory located at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the experiments that were performed on the rats, which increased the rats' intelligence to the point of being able to read, write and operate complicated machines, as well as enhancing their longevity and strength. Their increased intelligence and strength allowed them to escape from NIMH and migrate to their present location on the farm. Jonathan and Ages were the only two survivors of a group of eight mice who had been part of the experiments at NIMH and made the rats' escape possible.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vathek"title="Vathek">
"Vathek" capitalised on the eighteenth- (and early nineteenth-) century obsession with all things Oriental (see Orientalism), which was inspired by Antoine Galland's translation of "The Arabian Nights" (itself retranslated, into English, in 1708). Beckford was also influenced by similar works from the French writer Voltaire. His originality lay in combining the popular Oriental elements with the Gothic stylings of Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto" (1764). The result stands alongside Walpole's novel and Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" (1818) in the first rank of early Gothic fiction.The novel chronicles the fall from power of the Caliph Vathek, who renounces Islam and engages with his mother, Carathis, in a series of licentious and deplorable activities designed to gain him supernatural powers. At the end of the novel, instead of attaining these powers, Vathek descends into a hell ruled by the fallen angel Eblis where he is doomed to wander endlessly and speechlessly.Vathek, the ninth caliph of the Abassides, ascended to the throne at an early age. He is a majestic figure, terrible in anger (one glance of his flashing eye can make "the wretch on whom it was fixed instantly [fall] backwards and sometimes [expire]"), and addicted to the pleasures of the flesh. He is intensely thirsty for knowledge and often invites scholars to converse with him. If he fails to convince the scholar of his points of view, he attempts a bribe; if this does not work, he sends the scholar to prison. To better study astronomy, he builds an observation tower with 11,000 steps.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem_for_a_Dream_(novel)"title="Requiem for a Dream (novel)">
This story follows the lives of Sara Goldfarb, her son Harry, his girlfriend Marion Silver, and his best friend Tyrone C. Love, who are all searching for the key to their dreams in their own ways. In the process, they fall into devastating lives of addiction. Harry and Marion are in love and want to open their own business; their friend Tyrone wants to escape life in the ghetto. To achieve these dreams, they buy a large amount of heroin, planning to get rich by selling it.Sara, Harry's lonely widowed mother, dreams of being on television. When a phone call from a game show casting company gets her hopes up, she goes to a doctor, who gives her diet pills to lose weight. She spends the next few months on the pills, wanting desperately to look thin on TV and fit into a red dress from her younger days. However, the casting company does not notify her about the details of her show. She becomes addicted to the diet pills and eventually develops amphetamine psychosis after her life continues to go downhill. She eventually ends up in a mental institution, where she undergoes electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).Harry, Marion, and Tyrone become addicted to their own product. Eventually, when heroin becomes scarce, they turn on each other, slowly hiding the drugs they obtain from the other two members. On their way to Miami, Harry and Tyrone are arrested, convicted, and sentenced to jail. Harry's arm has become infected from repeated injections, and has to be amputated. Left alone, Marion becomes a prostitute to support her addiction. In jail, Tyrone faces frequent abuse from the guards due to his race.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imzadi"title="Imzadi">
Seventy-three-year-old Admiral William Riker is a bitter, lonely man in a slow downward spiral following the death forty years earlier of Deanna Troi, who died of undetermined causes during a peacekeeping conference with an enemy race, the Sindareen. Riker, now the commander of an unimportant starbase, is summoned to Betazed as Deanna's mother, Lwaxana Troi, lies dying. While going through Lwaxana's possessions after her death, Riker is reminded of how he and Deanna originally met and began their relationship on Betazed.In a lengthy flashback, it is revealed that Will and Deanna met when Will was stationed on Betazed between assignments, and while there attended a wedding at which Deanna was maid of honor. Will was instantly attracted to her and began to pursue her, though she initially rebuffed his advances, feeling that he was only interested in her physical attributes, and that he preferred quick, thrilling encounters over meaningful emotional intimacy. Over a series of meetings, however, they began to grow closer, as Will encouraged Deanna to embrace impulsive feelings and Deanna encouraged Will to explore his more spiritual side.While visiting her favorite museum, Deanna was kidnapped by a Sindareen raiding party, and Riker's Starfleet security force shot down their small craft in the jungle. Riker tracked them down and killed the only surviving captor, leaving Deanna and him alone together. In the jungle, they consummated their relationship, and Deanna told Will for the first time that they are "Imzadi." However, after their return from the jungle, Lwaxana's violent objections to their relationship and Deanna's seeming compliance led Riker to drunkenly fall into bed with another woman. Deanna discovered them together when she appeared at his living quarters, having planned to tell him she had decided to defy her mother's wishes. Deanna and Will decided not to pursue a relationship and Riker left the planet shortly thereafter, not to meet Deanna again until they were both assigned to the "Enterprise"-D.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moor's_Last_Sigh"title="The Moor's Last Sigh">
"The Moor's Last Sigh" traces four generations of the narrator's family and the ultimate effects upon the narrator. The narrator, Moraes Zogoiby, traces his family's beginnings down through time to his own lifetime. Moraes, who is called "Moor" throughout the book, is an exceptional character, whose physical body ages twice as fast as a normal person's does and also has a deformed hand. The book also focusses heavily on the Moor's relationships with the women in his life, including his mother Aurora, who is a famous national artist; his first female tutor; his three older sisters, Ina, Minnie and Mynah; and his first love, a charismatic, demented sculptor named Uma.Salman Rushdie mentions William Babington Macauley in this novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_Snow"title="Spring Snow">
The novel is set in the early years of the Taishō period with the reign of the Emperor Taishō, and is about the relationship between Kiyoaki Matsugae, the son of a rising "nouveau-riche" family, and Satoko Ayakura, the daughter of an aristocratic family fallen on hard times. Shigekuni Honda, a schoolfriend of Kiyoaki's, is the main witness to the events. The novel's themes centre on the conflicts in Japanese society caused by westernization in the early 20th century.The main action stretches from October 1912 to March 1914. Kiyoaki's family originated in Kagoshima, where his dead grandfather, the former Marquis, is still revered. The family now lives in grand style near Tokyo, with wealth acquired very recently.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sigma_Protocol"title="The Sigma Protocol">
Ben Hartman is vacationing in Switzerland when he meets his old school buddy Jimmy Cavanaugh - who tries to kill him. As he dodges assassins, mysterious tails, and police while searching for a safe place to hide, he finds his twin brother, Peter, who was thought to have died in an airplane crash several years earlier. Peter describes an international corporation which was formed in the last days of World War II, composed of financiers, influential members of large corporations, and Nazi brass. He gives Ben a photo of some of the leaders, only to find out that their father was a member. Soon, Peter is killed by an assassin, and Ben escapes with his life again. He later meets up with Liesel (Peter's girlfriend).Meanwhile, United States Department of Justice Agent Anna Navarro is recruited by a secretive group within the DoJ to investigate the deaths of a list of influential men around the world who have been dying mysteriously. Her probes turn up false leads, possible coverups, and dead ends, until she finds out that the men have been poisoned by someone using the same obscure toxin. Following the leads, she finds that the men she had been assigned to investigate are part of an international group of financiers and business moguls. She soon finds out that she has been reported "off the reservation", and the attempts begin on her life as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keepers_of_the_House"title="The Keepers of the House">
The first William Howland served in New Orleans and the South during the War of 1812. While returning home to Tennessee, he decided to settle in Mississippi Territory (now Alabama and Mississippi), overlooking a small river. He was later killed in a raid by Indians, likely Creek. Since then, a descendant of William Howland, most often a male named William, has lived in the house with his family and dominated affairs in Madison City and Wade County, which developed around Howland's original settlement.The fifth William Howland was the last man bearing the name to live in the house. His wife died young, leaving him with a young daughter, Abigail, and an infant son, William, who died a year after his mother. Abigail married an English professor who abandoned her with a child, also named Abigail, when he went off to fight in World War II. When she died, William Howland was left to take care of his granddaughter Abigail. He also brought Margaret, a new African-American housekeeper, to the house to live with him. Throughout the county, she was known as his mistress and the mother of his other children. What no one knew, however, was that William had secretly married Margaret to ensure that the children were legitimate. Once their children came of age, William Howland and Margaret sent them north so that they could pursue lives as Whites.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_Past_Human"title="Half Past Human">
Bass' future Earth is an environment in which the sum of the biota serves as its food chain. Human science has created the four-toed Nebish, a pallid, short-lived and highly programmable humanoid who has had the elements that do not facilitate an underground Hive existence (aggression, curiosity, etc.) bred out of it. The five-toed humans (called buckeyes) wander the biofarms that keep the trillions of Earth's Nebish population fed. All vertebrates other than man and rat are extinct, so meat comes from other humans (and the occasional rat). The conflict between the Hives and the roving bands of five-toed original Humans, who are reduced to savagery and hunted like vermin by Hive Security, forms the backdrop of this novel.The story begins as Old Man Moon and his dog Dan wander the fields. They are genetic experiments with their biological clocks stopped. They encounter Toothpick, a companion cyber from the days when technology was more advanced before the hive decline. Toothpick urges Moon to pick him up, but Moon does not like cybers—they work for the Hive. Toothpick promises food and when he makes good on his promise that an electrical storm will short circuit the agromecks from reporting his pilfering of the gardens, Moon considers Toothpick's offer of companionship. Toothpick explains he is a companion cyber, and when he promises new teeth for Moon and Dan, Moon agrees and the three set off on Toothpick's unstated mission.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantida_(novel)"title="Atlantida (novel)">
It is 1896 in the French Algerian Sahara. Two officers, André de Saint-Avit and Jean Morhange investigate the disappearance of their fellow officers. While doing so, they are drugged and kidnapped by a Targui warrior, the procurer for the monstrous Queen Antinea. Antinea, descendant of the rulers of Atlantis, has a cave wall with 120 niches carved into it, one for each of her lovers. Only 53 have been filled; when all 120 have been filled, Antinea will sit atop a throne in the center of the cave and rest forever. Saint-Avit is unable to resist Antinea's charms. By her will, he murders the asexual Morhange. Ultimately, he is able to escape and get out of the desert alive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thanatos_Syndrome"title="The Thanatos Syndrome">
After two years in prison for selling prescription drugs, Tom More, a Louisiana psychiatrist and lapsed Catholic, comes home to his virtually defunct practice and marriage. He notices that people in his town are different, many of his patients have a strange speech to them. Many faculties are dulled but some are enhanced, particularly memory and sexual appetite.Teaming up with his cousin Lucy, an epidemiologist who also has an independent mind, they discover that the authorities, a consortium of scientists, have been running secret trials on the population of the town. Through the addition of sodium ions to the water supply, the active population is gradually being made more chimpanzee-like, while the inactive, the old and the sick, are being euthanized. To Tom's particular disgust, the leaders of the trials are found to engage in sexual abuse of children, for which he takes his revenge by forcing them to drink high concentrations of sodium and so that they regress to apes.A parallel plot involves a Catholic priest, Father Smith, who like Tom has hit rock bottom and almost totally failed in his calling. Together, with difficulty, the two men rediscover the hope hidden in their shaky Catholic faith.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kennel_Murder_Case"title="The Kennel Murder Case">
One of the Coe brothers is found dead in his bedroom, locked from the inside, and the other brother is found the next morning dead in the downstairs closet. There is also the clue of a wounded Doberman Pinscher, a mysteriously broken piece of priceless Chinese porcelain, and a cast of suspicious family members, servants and associates. Philo Vance solves the case based on his knowledge of dog breeding, Chinese porcelain and the annals of remarkable antique crimes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Never_Told_Anyone"title="I Never Told Anyone">
"I Never Told Anyone" contains 33 testimonials from women who were sexually abused as children. The book begins with a set of statistics about childhood sexual abuse such as information about the sex of the abuse survivors and perpetrators. The testimonials are placed into the categories of abuse by fathers, relatives, friends and acquaintances, and strangers, each section of which is prefaced by a section discussing the specific category. In the work Bass also details her own experiences and feelings towards female sexuality in the United States.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advise_and_Consent"title="Advise and Consent">
The U.S. President decides to replace his Secretary of State to promote rapprochement with the Soviet Union. Nominee Robert Leffingwell, a darling of liberals, is viewed by many conservative senators as an appeaser. Others, including the pivotal character of Senator Seabright (Seab) Cooley of South Carolina, have serious doubts about Leffingwell's character. The book tells the story of an up-and-down nomination process that most people fully expect to result in a quick approval of the controversial nominee.But Cooley is not so easily defeated. He uncovers a minor bureaucrat named Gelman who testifies that twenty years earlier then-University of Chicago instructor Leffingwell invited Gelman to join a small Communist cell that included a fellow traveler who went by the pseudonym James Morton. After outright lies under oath by the nominee and vigorous cross examination by Leffingwell, Gelman is thoroughly discredited and deemed an unfit witness by the subcommittee and its charismatic chairman Utah Senator Brig Anderson. The subcommittee is ready to approve the nominee.At this crucial moment in the story, the tenacious Senator Cooley dissects Gelman's testimony and discovers a way to identify James Morton. Cooley maneuvers Morton into confessing the truth of Gelman's assertions to Senator Anderson who subsequently re-opens the subcommittee's hearings, thus enraging the President. When the President's attempts to buy Anderson's cooperation fail he places enormous pressure on Majority Leader Robert Munson to entice Anderson into compliance. In a moment of great weakness that Munson will regret the rest of his life, Munson provides the President a photograph, acquired quite innocently by Munson, that betrays Anderson's brief wartime homosexual liaison.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_of_the_Really_Great_Whangdoodles"title="The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles">
Three siblings, Ben, Tom, and Melinda Potter (better known as Lindy), meet Professor Savant while visiting the zoo one rainy day. On Halloween, Lindy gets dared by her brother to knock on the spookiest house on the block for a quarter, which happens to belong to the Professor, and the three become more acquainted with him. After a second meeting, they begin spending time at the Professor's house, where he introduces them to games of concentration and observation. He reveals that there is a magic land called Whangdoodleland that can only be reached through the imagination, and that he is training them to accompany him there.Whangdoodleland is the home of the last Whangdoodle that lived in the world. Once the Whangdoodle, and other creatures that are now considered imaginary, lived in our world. However, fearing that people were losing their imaginations in the pursuit of power and greed, the Whangdoodle created a magic and peaceful world over which he reigns. The professor and the children explore this world.Each time the children return, they venture farther and farther into Whangdoodleland, intending to reach the palace where the Last Whangdoodle resides. However, the Whangdoodle's Prime Minister, the "Oily Prock", does not want them to disturb His Highness, and sets up a number of traps, both in Whangdoodleland and the real world to prevent this meeting. He enlists the marvelous and funny creatures of the land in his effort, including the High Behind Splintercat, the Sidewinders, the Oinck, the Gazooks, the Tree Squeaks, and the Swamp Gaboons. The children use their imaginations, intelligence, and the friendship of another denizen, the Whiffle Bird, to outwit the traps.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Man_of_Lochnagar"title="The Old Man of Lochnagar">
The story starts with Prince Charles entertaining some bored children at Balmoral. He tells them about an old man who, in search of peace and quiet (and a hot spring bath), has made his way to a remote cave at Lochnagar. He comes across a cave and, dragging a bathtub inside, claims the place as his own. But after running the bath and jumping in, he realises that the water is freezing and his squeals echo round the loch. He drains the water and sets about finding a way of heating the water.Unknown to the Old Man, his cave is near the underground home of the Gorm, a clan of Scottish pixies responsible for pushing up the spring flowers in Scotland. The Gorm King is an inventor, and has created a curious device (which looks and sounds like a set of bagpipes) which reduces full grown flowers back to seeds. The seed will turn back into a flower when it gets wet and the Gorm Queen and Princess declare that the King has changed the way everyone will work from now on. However, as they are discussing this, a flood (caused by the old man pouring out his bathwater) pours down unexpectedly from above. The Princess and her younger brother end up being washed away from their parents and come out of a tree stump alone and wet. They look up to find a "giant", tending to a huge pot over a roaring fire and the young Prince fears that they will be made into soup.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line_of_Beauty"title="The Line of Beauty">
The novel is set in Britain in three parts, taking place in 1983, 1986 and 1987. The story surrounds the young gay protagonist, Nick Guest. Nick is middle-class and from the fictional market town of Barwick in Northamptonshire; he has graduated from Worcester College, Oxford with a First in English and is to begin postgraduate studies at University College London. Many of the significant characters in the novel are Nick's male contemporaries from Oxford.The book explores the tension between Nick's intimate relationship with the Fedden family, in whose parties and holidays he participates, and the realities of his sexuality and gay life, which the Feddens accept only to the extent of never mentioning it. It explores themes of hypocrisy, privilege, drugs, and homosexuality, with the emerging AIDS crisis forming a backdrop to the book's conclusion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars_in_My_Pocket_Like_Grains_of_Sand"title="Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand">
## Setting.The novel takes place in a distant future in which diverse human societies have developed on some 6,000 planets. Many of these worlds are shared with intelligent nonhumans, although only one alien species (the mysterious Xlv) also possesses faster-than-light travel. In an attempt to find a stable defense against the phenomenon known as Cultural Fugue (a process where "socioeconomic pressures [reach] a point of technological recomplication and perturbation where the population completely destroys all life across the planetary surface"), many human worlds have aligned themselves with one of two broad factions: the Sygn, which promotes and celebrates social diversity, and the Family, which promotes adherence to an idealized norm of human relations modeled on the nuclear family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invasion_of_Time"title="The Invasion of Time">
To the confusion of Leela and K9, the Fourth Doctor has a covert meeting with aliens before taking his companions to the Citadel at Gallifrey. Once there, he lays claim to the vacant Presidency as his right by Time Lord law—he is the only candidate, as established in the story "The Deadly Assassin". While reviewing the presidential suite, he orders it lined with lead. During his induction ceremony, the Crown of Rassilon seems to reject him, and he's injured. Leela is accused of having attacked him, when in fact she tried to help him, and she's banished from the Citadel. Later, in front of the gathered Time Lords, the Doctor greets three figures that materialise within the Citadel, the Vardans, whom he had met before coming to Gallifrey, and addresses them as the Time Lords' new masters. Amid the confusion, the compliant Castellan Kelner kowtows to the Vardans and assists them in taking over, issuing arrests and ordering banishment for any Time Lords that he sees as disloyal. The Doctor confides in Chancellor Borusa, once they're in his lead-lined suite, that the Vardans can read their thoughts but lead blocks this. The Doctor plans to lock the Vardans in a time lock on their home planet as they are a dangerous race, but needed to keep up this facade in order to determine the location of their homeworld, and banished Leela for her own safety. The Doctor later explains the same to the Citadel guard commander Andred, using a force field from the TARDIS to shield his thoughts, to gain his help.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_of_Tears"title="Stone of Tears">
After the death of Darken Rahl and planning his wedding to Kahlan, Richard is afflicted by a series of painful headaches. He also learns from Shota that he is the bastard son of Darken Rahl and the grandson of Zeddicus Zu'l Zorander.Richard gets a visit from three Sisters of the Light, who inform him that his headaches are caused by the awakening of the gift within him and are fatal and unstoppable, unless he receives magical training. The Sisters tell him that he must go with them and wear a Rada'Han, a magical collar, in order to control his headaches and the gift. They also explain that they will offer him their help three times, and, if he refuses each time, they will not be able to help him ever again. Richard refuses twice, and each time a Sister commits suicide.Seeking guidance on how to repair the veil, Richard and Kahlan request another "gathering"; this involves turning to the "ancestors' spirits" for help. But instead of being able to speak to the spirits, Richard and Kahlan are sent down to the underworld and are placed face-to-face with Darken Rahl. Rahl touches Richard with the Keeper's mark, making him unconscious and lets Kahlan know that Richard is only minutes away from death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordant's_Need"title="Mordant's Need">
It tells the story of a woman named Terisa who travels from our modern world to a medieval setting through a mirror, where political and military struggles are entwined with the power of Imagery, a form of magic based on mirrors. The Mirror of Her Dreams, the first volume, was published in 1986 and A Man Rides Through, the second volume, was published in 1987. The books deal with themes of reality, power, inaction and love in the context of a fantasy adventure. This series is much lighter in tone than Donaldson's "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever" or "The Gap Cycle".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Wind_in_the_Door"title="A Wind in the Door">
14-year-old Meg Murry is worried about her brother Charles Wallace, a 6-year-old genius bullied at school by the other children. The new principal of the elementary school is the former high school principal, Mr. Jenkins, who often disciplined Meg, and Meg is sure has a grudge against her whole family. Meg tries to enlist Jenkins's help in protecting her brother but is unsuccessful. Later, Meg discovers that Charles Wallace has a progressive disease that is leaving him short of breath. Their mother, a microbiologist, suspects it may be a disorder of his mitochondria and his mitochondria's farandolae. (The farandolae are micro-organelles inside mitochondria that exist in the Time Quintet fantasy universe.)One afternoon, Charles Wallace tells Meg of a "drive of dragons" in their backyard, where he and Meg thereupon discover a pile of unusual feathers. Later, Meg has a frightening encounter with a monstrous facsimile of Mr. Jenkins. That night, Meg, Charles Wallace, and their friend, 16-year-old Calvin O'Keefe discover that Charles Wallace's "drive of dragons" is an extraterrestrial "cherubim" named Proginoskes (nicknamed 'Progo' by Meg), under the tutelage of the immense humanoid Blajeny, who recruits the three children to counteract the Echthroi.Meg's first task, on the next day, is to distinguish the real Mr. Jenkins from two Echthroi doubles, by identification of the (potential) goodness in him despite her personal grudge. The protagonists then learn that Echthroi are destroying Charles Wallace's farandolae, and travel inside one of his mitochondria, to persuade a larval farandola, named Sporos, to accept its role as a mature fara, against the urgings of an Echthros. In the process, Meg is nearly annihilated, and Mr. Jenkins is invaded by his Echthros doubles; whereafter Proginoskes sacrifices himself to "fill in" the emptiness of the Echthroi, and Charles Wallace is saved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Patrol"title="The Long Patrol">
Tamello De Fformelo Tussock (or Tammo), a young hare who lives at Camp Tussock, longs to be part of the Long Patrol at Salamandastron. However, his father, Cornspurrey De Fformelo Tussock, will not hear of it. He believes that his son is too young to join up.Against her husband's wishes, Tammo's mother, Mem Divinia, prepares for him to leave during the night with Russa Nodrey, a wandering squirrel who is a friend of the family. The two then set off to find the Long Patrol. Along the way, they encounter the ferrets Skulka and Gromal. They do eventually meet up with the Long Patrol, but Russa is killed saving a baby badger, who is named Russano by one of the hares, Rockjaw Grang, in Russa's honour.Meanwhile, Gormad Tunn, the rat leader of the Rapscallion army has been dying from mortal wounds. The Rapscallions are in fear of Cregga Rose Eyes, the ruler of Salamandastron. Tunn's two sons, Byral Fleetclaw and Damug Warfang, fight to the death to determine who will be the new commander of the Rapscallions. Damug kills Byral through treachery and takes over control of the army, which he commands to move inland.At Redwall Abbey, the inhabitants discover that the south wall is mysteriously sinking into the ground. Foremole Diggum and his crew believe the best thing to do is to knock the wall down and re-build it. During the night, a storm brings a tree down on the wall, making the moles' job easier but also leaving the Abbey open to attack. The broken wall reveals a well, which turns out to be part of the ancient castle Kotir. Abbess Tansy, Friar Butty, Shad the Gatekeeper, Giygas, and Craklyn the Recorder investigate below. After a harrowing journey, they find the treasure of Verdauga Greeneyes, the long-dead lord of Kotir.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherland_(novel)"title="Netherland (novel)">
"Netherland" opens on protagonist Hans van den Broek, a Dutch financial analyst living in London with his English wife Rachel, but quickly flashes back to the years Hans spent in New York City before and in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. At the beginning of the novel, Hans is preparing to return to Manhattan for the funeral of estranged friend Chuck Ramkissoon, who becomes the central figure of the novel. Chuck, a Trinidadian immigrant, guides Hans into and through the world of The Staten Island Cricket Club, most of whose members are also of West Indian or South Asian descent. Chuck is a charismatic idealist, running multiple (occasionally illegitimate) businesses, and making big, optimistic plans for the future. While Hans is swept along by Chuck’s magnetic ardor for the American dream, Rachel moves back to London under the pretense of safety for their young son and ideological indignation over the American fixation on economic oppression. Though Rachel is a markedly less likeable character than Chuck, Hans eventually, inevitably follows her back to London. He loses touch with his Trinidadian friend who is discovered, years later, simply a body, handcuffed and disposed of in the Gowanus Canal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orley_Farm_(novel)"title="Orley Farm (novel)">
When Joseph Mason of Groby Park, Yorkshire, died, he left his estate to his family. A codicil to his will, however, left Orley Farm (near London) to his much younger second wife and infant son. The will and the codicil were in her handwriting, and there were three witnesses, one of whom was no longer alive. A bitterly fought court case confirmed the codicil.Twenty years pass. Lady Mason lives at Orley Farm with her adult son, Lucius. Samuel Dockwrath, a tenant, is asked to leave by Lucius, who wants to try new intensive farming methods. Aggrieved, and knowing of the original case (John Kenneby, one of the codicil witnesses, had been an unsuccessful suitor of his wife Miriam Usbech), Dockwrath investigates and finds a second deed signed by the same witnesses on the same date, though they can remember signing only one. He travels to Groby Park in Yorkshire, where Joseph Mason the younger lives with his comically parsimonious wife, and persuades Mason to have Lady Mason prosecuted for perjury. The prosecution fails, but Lady Mason later confesses privately that she committed the forgery, and is prompted by conscience to give up the estate.There are various subplots. The main one deals with a slowly unfolding romance between Felix Graham (a young and relatively poor barrister without family) and Madeline Staveley, daughter of Judge Stavely of Noningsby. Graham has a long-standing engagement to the penniless Mary Snow, whom he supports and educates while she is being "moulded" to be his wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Juror"title="The Last Juror">
The story is set in the fictional town of Clanton, Mississippi from 1970 to 1979. Clanton is also the venue for John Grisham's first novel "A Time to Kill" which was published in 1989. Some of the characters appear in both novels with the same occupation and characteristics. Although "A Time to Kill" was published 15 years before "The Last Juror", it took place in 1985 (on the first page of Chapter 3, it notes the date as Wednesday, May 15), which is a year after Grisham formed the idea for "A Time to Kill", his first novel, and began writing it. Therefore, the characters who appear in both novels, such as Lucien Wilbanks and Harry Rex Vonner, have matured in "A Time to Kill". Harry Rex Vonner also appears in the novel "The Summons", published in 2002, as an adviser of the protagonist Ray Atlee.Some references in the book are clearly hinting at things known to readers of "A Time to Kill". For example, in 1970 most blacks in Ford County don't take part in elections - taking for granted that since whites are the great majority in the county, no black candidate would have chance of being elected to local office. However, as "A Time to Kill" makes clear, a decade later a black Sheriff would be duly elected, with the overwhelming support of blacks and whites alike.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harpist_in_the_Wind"title="Harpist in the Wind">
Morgon of Hed and Raederle of An set out to discover who are the shape changers who pursue them, and where is the High One, the source of the land law binding the realm together. Along the way they are helped by the wizards of the realm, recently released from the bonds in which Ghisteslwchlohm had held them by Morgon, and by the land heirs/rulers. After confronting Ghisteslwchlohm in the city of Lungold, where the wizard once had ruled, Morgon is imprisoned by the shape changers within Erlenstar Mountain, as they do not want to kill him. They, the exiled Earth Masters, need him to reach the High One, who prevents them from exercising full power. He escapes with the help of Raederle and someone who is later revealed to be the High One in disguise. Seeking refuge in the far north, he begins to learn the land law of each kingdom. Once he has partially learned all of the land law does Morgon discover that the High One had journeyed with him as Deth and the wizard Yrth; the High One tells Morgon at the top of Wind Plain that he (Morgon) is the High One's land heir. When the High One is killed by Ghisteslwchlohm, now possessed by the shape changers, with Morgon's three-starred sword, Morgon learns to shape and/or bind the winds to overcome the Earth Masters and bring peace to the land; he truly is the High One's heir.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islandia_(novel)"title="Islandia (novel)">
While an undergraduate at Harvard, John Lang becomes friends with an Islandian fellow-student named Dorn, and decides to learn the Islandian language (of which there are very few speakers outside Islandia). Once he has graduated, his uncle, a prominent businessman, arranges his appointment as American consul to Islandia, based primarily on his ability to speak the language. Gradually John Lang learns that his tacit mission as American consul is to do whatever is necessary to increase American trade opportunities in Islandia. He does not begin this mission right away, preferring to get to know the country and the people first.John Lang meets and becomes infatuated with Dorn's sister, Dorna. They spend some time together alone, which John finds unnerving at first, since they are not chaperoned. When Dorna comes to understand John's feelings, she tells him that she does not love him in return in that way (though he wonders whether she means "cannot", or "will not"). She accepts the marriage proposal of the King instead, a handsome young man who has been courting her for some time.One of the culminations of the plot is the decision by the people of Islandia to reject the demands of the Great Powers for unrestricted trade and immigration, choosing instead to maintain their tradition of isolation. As this political struggle intensifies, John Lang sympathizes with the Islandians, to the great disappointment of many American businessmen who desire new lucrative trade opportunities, including John Lang's uncle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schismatrix"title="Schismatrix">
The main character, Abelard Lindsay, is born in the ancient lunar colony "Mare Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate Republic", into a family of aristocratic Mechanists, but after being sent to the Shaper's Ring Council, he receives specialized and experimental diplomatic training and gives his loyalty to the Shapers' cause. He, his best friend and fellow Shaper protégé Philip Constantine, and the beautiful and passionate Preservationist Vera Kelland lead an insurgency against the rulers of the republic, who use Mechanist technology to prolong their lives. The three of them influence the younger generation towards the Shapers' cause in their pursuit of Preservationism, a movement devoted to the preservation of Earth-bound human culture. Kelland and Lindsay agree to kill themselves as a political statement, but Lindsay reneges on his suicide pact after Kelland is dead. Constantine attempts to kill Lindsay but instead kills a Mechanist, creating a scandal.Constantine is allowed to remain in the Republic because his knowledge is needed to keep the Republic's environment from self-destructing, but Lindsay is exiled to the "Mare Tranquilitatis Circumlunar People's Zaibatsu". This lunar colony, which collapsed due to an environmental crisis, has become a refuge for "sundogs", criminals, dissidents and wanderers. There he meets Kitsune, a woman modified by the Shapers to be an ideal prostitute. Apparently a servant of the "Geisha Bank", a powerful money center, she in fact rules the bank through the remotely operated body of her now brain-dead predecessor. In his months on the Zaibatsu, Lindsay uses his diplomatic talents to organize a complex fraud involving a fictitious theatrical event and befriends an old Mechanist, Fyodor Ryumin. However, eventually the fraud takes on a life of its own, and the new-formed "Kabuki Intrasolar" becomes a legitimate artistic and business venture. Lindsay cannot remain to enjoy the profits, though: Constantine has in the meantime overthrown the Corporate Republic's government. Constantine has abandoned Preservationism to become a Shaper militant, and sends an assassin to present a stark choice: become Constantine's pawn or be killed by the assassin. Lindsay manages to escape with a group of Mechanist pirates, in the process aiding Kitsune to take power of the Geisha Bank openly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_of_Ember"title="The City of Ember">
As Earth is being ravaged by a series of apocalyptic events known as the Disaster, a coalition of architects, scientists, and doctors (called the Builders) create an underground city named Ember, with an initial population of 200 citizens (100 elderly adults, 100 babies), to ensure humanity survives, with the intention that future generations of the city will not know about the outside world or that they live underground. They build the city to last for two centuries, after which the citizens of Ember will evacuate and return to the surface world. The Builders give the first mayor of the city a box with a timed lock set to open after 200 years, containing instructions explaining how to leave Ember; the box is passed successfully from mayor to mayor, until the seventh mayor, who, thinking the box might contain a cure for the deadly cough disease plaguing the city, takes the box home and tries multiple times to break it open, but fails. He then dies before he can return the box to its rightful place or inform the next mayor of its importance.Approximately two hundred and forty-one years after Ember is established, the city′s supplies are in danger of exhaustion and its hydroelectric generator is in decay, causing the power to go out intermittently. At their graduation ceremony, young people are assigned jobs by lottery: Lina Mayfleet is assigned the job of "Pipeworks Laborer" and Doon Harrow is given the job of "Messenger". However, both are displeased with their assigned jobs so they exchange their assignments and begin work in their respective positions. It is revealed that the seventh mayor was Lina's great-great grandfather and the box with the timed lock is in the closet in their house. By now the timer has finished counting down and the lock has clicked open. When searching the closet, Lina's grandmother finds the box but tosses it aside, not realizing its importance. The opened box is found by Lina's baby sister, Poppy. When Lina comes home, she finds Poppy with torn pieces of paper in her hands and mouth; Poppy has all but destroyed the instructions. Lina saves the scraps of paper, thinking they must be an important message from the Builders of the city, since the message is typed and no one in Ember can write like that. The writing on the message resembles the writing on labels and books left by the builders in the city. Using some glue, Lina reassembles the message as best she can. There are many gaps and some words make no sense like "boat" since no one in Ember has seen or heard of boats. Thanks to side character Clary, friend of Lina’s father, she discovers that the title of the document is "Instructions for Egress" or instructions for exit. Lina realizes that the document is instructions on how to leave their dying city. One of the words on the instructions is clearly "Pipeworks", so Lina enlists the help of Doon who is now working at the Pipeworks. The Pipeworks are underneath the city and a large and fast underground river runs through it that provides the hydroelectric power that Ember runs on. After much trial and error, she and Doon decipher the instructions from the builders. The instructions lead to a hidden room built on the side of the river that contains hundreds of boats as well as matches and candles to create portable light, something unknown in the city of Ember. The builders meant for the citizens of Ember to board these boats and be carried down the river into the outside world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_at_Lilac_Inn"title="The Mystery at Lilac Inn">
## 1930 edition.The story involves Nancy Drew helping her friend Emily Crandall find out who stole her heirloom jewels. Emily's guardian, Mrs. Jane Willoughby, unwisely removes them from a safe deposit box and carries them with her while lunching at Lilac Inn, only to have her handbag stolen while the diners are distracted by a car crash.In the meantime, Nancy must hire a temporary maid in the absence of Mrs. Gruen, her housekeeper. Nancy uncovers the thief, Mary Mason, one of the applicants for the position, on the staff at Lilac Inn. Nancy finds the hideout of the crooks, but is caught. She is bound and gagged and left aboard the gang's sinking cabin cruiser to die, but is rescued by the river patrol. In the end, Nancy captures the jewel thief, exonerates the guardian, and returns her orphaned friend's fortune to her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Tree"title="The Hollow Tree">
Plump little Phoebe Olcott is a timid but helpful 15-year-old girl, admired by her father's students for her quiet temperament and stubbornness. After her father, a schoolteacher, is killed in action while fighting as an American Patriot (commonly known as Rebels) in the quick revolution, she ends up living with her aunt's family, who happen to be Loyalist.Phoebe continues to hide in the shadows of her cousins Gideon and Anne Robinson until Gideon becomes a British soldier. When he is suddenly found hanged, Phoebe discovers that Gideon was actually a spy and finds a list of names that was entrusted to Gideon and must be delivered to Fort Ticonderoga.She arrives at Fort Ticonderoga too late; the post has been abandoned. Instead, she finds a bear and a cat and meets Jem Morrissay, whose family happens to be one of the names on the list entrusted to Gideon. Phoebe and Jem form an uneasy relationship and she is reunited with her family and several other Loyalist families fleeing to Upper Canada to avoid persecution by the Patriots.During the flight of the Loyalists, they capture Japhet Oram, a Loyalist soldier, and are uncertain if he is a deserter or a rebel spy. The leader of the group insists that the soldier be taken to Canada and hanged. When Phoebe's own convictions, background, and morals clash with the more radical of the Loyalists, she soon finds herself isolated from the rest of the group. She secretly cuts Japhet loose and runs away, but is pursued by Jem.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_American_Novel_(Roth_novel)"title="The Great American Novel (Roth novel)">
The Port Ruppert Mundys of New Jersey lease their stadium to the United States Department of War at the beginning of the 1943 season—to be used as a soldiers' embarkation point—which forces the athletes to play as the league's first permanent road team. The novel's narrator is "Word" Smith, a retired sports columnist who spends 1943 traveling with the Mundys.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Warrior"title="The Time Warrior">
In the Middle Ages, the bandit Irongron and his aide Bloodaxe, together with their rabble of criminals, find the crashed spaceship of a Sontaran warrior named Linx. The alien claims Earth for his Empire, then sets about repairing his ship, offering Irongron “magic weapons” that will make him a king in return for shelter. Linx sends himself forward to the 20th century and kidnaps scientists from a top secret scientific research complex, then hypnotises them into making repairs on his ship.The Third Doctor and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart are investigating the disappearance of the scientists. The Doctor meets an eccentric scientist called Rubeish and journalist Sarah Jane Smith. Later that evening Rubeish disappears and the Doctor uses the data he has gathered to pilot the TARDIS back to the Middle Ages, not realising that Sarah has stowed away on board.Sarah is captured and brought before Irongron, along with an archer, Hal, who has been sent to kill Irongron. The Doctor sets Hal and Sarah free and they head for Wessex Castle.The next morning Irongron and his troops assault the castle using rifles supplied by Linx, but the attack is repelled by the Doctor's cunning. The failure further sours the relationship between Linx and Irongron.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sontaran_Experiment"title="The Sontaran Experiment">
Following on from "The Ark in Space", the Fourth Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith, and Harry Sullivan teleport down from the Nerva space station to Earth, ostensibly uninhabited. However, the system is not functioning well, and the Doctor begins repairing it. The other two explore the surrounding area, but Harry falls down a crevasse and Sarah goes to seek the Doctor's help. He is nowhere in sight.Roth, an astronaut, finds Sarah. He is obviously distressed, and explains that he has been tortured by an alien that lives in the rocks, together with its patrolling robot. He takes Sarah towards the astronauts' campsite, but refuses to approach it, suspecting the astronaut Vural of collusion with the alien.Three of the astronauts have captured the Doctor. They believe Nerva to be a legend, and tell him in turn that they had picked up a distress signal from Earth. They came to investigate, but their ship was vapourised when they emerged, leaving nine of them stranded. Then they began to vanish one by one. They blame the Doctor for this. Roth appears and the astronauts chase him, while Sarah frees the Doctor. Roth loses the others and meets up with Sarah and the Doctor. The Doctor also falls down a crevasse, and the robot returns, capturing Roth and Sarah and bringing them to the alien's spacecraft. The alien is Field Major Styre of the Sontaran G3 Military Assessment Survey, who has been experimenting on, and killing, the astronauts. Roth tries to escape but is shot dead by Styre.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Locked_Room"title="The Locked Room">
The story begins with Beck recovered after his injury sustained at the end of the previous book and now returning to the National Police Bureau; he discovers that the police force still is amateurish and unprofessional for the most part, which he was accustomed to previously. Patrolmen have found a highly decomposed corpse (as it turns out later, a murdered man--found in a locked from inside apartment. An incompetent detective, Bo Zachrisson, had the case shelved as suicide. No one was much disturbed by the fact that the weapon had not been found in the apartment.The novel now has two storylines: the locked room investigation and the bank robbery specialists.The latter take by accident the petty criminal Mauritzon, a mate of Malmström and Mohrén, and accuse him of a bank robbery in which a bank customer was shot. At the same time Martin Beck solves the locked room mystery- the gun was shot from outside by Maurtizon, when the window was open. The window had fallen so that the latch had closed by itself.Since the evidence collected by Martin Beck is insufficient, Mauritzon is acquitted of murder; but for the bank robbery, of which he is innocent, but whose evidence he cannot refute, he is sentenced to manslaughter with lifetime imprisonment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuvia,_Maid_of_Mars"title="Thuvia, Maid of Mars">
In this novel the focus shifts from John Carter, Warlord of Mars, and Dejah Thoris of Helium, protagonists of the first three books in the series, to their son, Carthoris, prince of Helium, and Thuvia, princess of Ptarth. Helium and Ptarth are both prominent Barsoomian city state/empires, and both Carthoris and Thuvia were secondary characters in the previous two novels.Its plot devices are similar to the previous Martian novels, involving the kidnapping of a Martian princess. This time John Carter's son Carthoris is implicated. It does however have some inventive and original ideas, including an autopilot and collision detection device for Martian fliers, and the creation of the Lotharians, a race of ancient Martians who have become adept at telepathic projection, able to create imaginary warriors that can kill, and sustain themselves through thought alone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hey_Nostradamus!"title="Hey Nostradamus!">
The novel follows the stories of victims of a fictional school shooting in North Vancouver in 1988. Coupland has expressed his concern that the killers of the Columbine High School massacre received more focus than the victims; this is his story about the victims of tragedy. The novel is told in four parts, each with a different narrator and focus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Little_Pigs"title="Five Little Pigs">
Sixteen years after Caroline Crale was convicted for the murder of her husband Amyas, her daughter Carla Lemarchant approaches Hercule Poirot, asking him to investigate the case. When Carla was 21 she was given a letter from her late mother claiming she was innocent, and Carla believes this to be true. She fears that her fiancé will leave her if the truth behind the murder is not uncovered. Poirot agrees to her request. On the day of the murder at the Crales' home there were five other people present, whom Poirot dubs "the five little pigs" – stockbroker Philip Blake, amateur chemist Meredith Blake (Philip's brother), Caroline's young half-sister Angela Warren, Angela's governess Cecilia Williams, and Amyas's painting model Elsa Greer. The police found that Amyas was poisoned by coniine, found in a glass from which he had drunk. Caroline confessed to stealing the poison from Meredith's lab, intending to use it to commit suicide. She had brought a cold bottle of beer to Amyas and the police believed she had poisoned it. Amyas was having an affair with his model Elsa, which was believed to be Caroline's motive.Poirot interviews the five other suspects and notes that none has an obvious motive. Caroline's half-sister Angela is the only one who believes Caroline was innocent. He assembles them, along with Carla and her fiancé, and reveals that Caroline was innocent but chose not to defend herself because she believed Angela had committed the murder. Although Angela had handled the beer bottle she had added nothing to it before her sister took it to Amyas. Caroline later assumed that her sister had added something to the beer as a prank, causing Amyas's death. When the police charged Caroline with the murder she did not defend herself, believing that she was protecting Angela. When they were much younger, Caroline had thrown a paperweight at Angela, disfiguring her face, and saw this as a way to atone for that incident.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventh_Son_(novel)"title="Seventh Son (novel)">
Alvin's family is migrating west. When they try to cross the Hatrack River, an unknown force known as the Unmaker tries to stop the as-yet-unborn Alvin from being born - since Alvin would be the seventh son of a seventh son, therefore possessing incredible powers as a Maker. The force sends a tree down the river to crush the wagon the pregnant Mrs. Miller is riding in. Her eldest son Vigor diverts the tree, but is mortally wounded in the act. Because a seventh son must be born while the other six are alive, Vigor desperately clings to life until Alvin is born. Help is dispatched at the insistence of five-year-old "torch" (a person who, among other things, can see the life forces of people and under certain conditions, their myriad alternate futures) Peggy Guester, who sees Alvin and Alvin's possible future as a Maker.As the years pass, Alvin avoids numerous attempts of an unknown force trying to kill him, often helped by the intervention of a mysterious protector. Alvin's father, a non-believer in God, believes that a water spirit is trying to kill Alvin. When Alvin is seven, a new Reverend, named Thrower, arrives in town, trying to build a church. Alvin's father refuses to help, but Mrs. Miller has all of her sons work on building the church. When the ridgebeam is being placed onto the church in construction, it shivers and breaks, seemingly about to fall on Alvin. However, mid-air, it breaks in two, and misses Alvin - yet another example of Alvin's near-death experiences. When Alvin goes home, he provokes one of his sisters by poking her, so they get revenge on Alvin by putting needles into his night gown. Alvin avenges himself by using his knack to send cockroaches after his sisters. The plan works, Alvin winning a victory over his sisters. However, afterwards, he has a vision he dubs Shining Man, who makes him promise only to use his knack for good.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Madder_(novel)"title="Rose Madder (novel)">
In 1985, police officer Norman Daniels brutally beats his wife Rosie while she is four months pregnant, resulting in a miscarriage. Rosie considers leaving Norman, but dismisses the idea because Norman specializes in finding missing persons. The short-tempered Norman has recently been accused of assaulting and raping a black woman named Wendy Yarrow, and the subsequent lawsuit and internal affairs investigation has made him even more volatile. Nine years later, Rosie still lives with and takes abuse from her husband. One day, she notices a drop of blood on their bedsheet and realizes that her continued life with Norman could eventually kill her. Taking Norman's credit card, Rosie departs on a bus to an unfamiliar city in the Midwest, with no clear plan of action. At the bus station, she meets a good-natured man named Peter Slowik, who guides her to a local women's shelter. She quickly makes new friends, including the owner of the shelter, Anna Stevenson, who helps Rosie find a small apartment and a job as a hotel maid. A few weeks later, Rosie decides to pawn her engagement ring, but finds that the ring's "diamond" is fake. In the pawn shop, her attention is drawn to a painting which depicts a woman in a rose madder gown. Fascinated, she trades her ring for the painting.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tono-Bungay"title="Tono-Bungay">
"Tono-Bungay" is narrated by George Ponderevo, who is persuaded to help develop the business of selling Tono-Bungay, a patent medicine created by his uncle Edward. George devotes seven years to organising the production and manufacture of the product, even though he believes it is "a damned swindle". He then quits day-to-day involvement with the enterprise in favour of aeronautics, but he remains associated with his uncle, who becomes a financier of the first order and is on the verge of achieving social as well as economic dominance when his business empire collapses. George tries to rescue his uncle's failing finances by stealing quantities of a radioactive compound called "quap" from an island off the coast of West Africa, but the expedition is unsuccessful. George then engineers his uncle's escape from England in an experimental aircraft he has built, but the ruined entrepreneur turned financier catches pneumonia on the flight and dies in a village near Bordeaux, despite George's efforts to save him. The novel ends with George finding a new occupation: designing destroyers for the highest bidder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eaters_of_the_Dead"title="Eaters of the Dead">
The novel is set in the 10th century. The Caliph of Baghdad, Al-Muqtadir, sends his ambassador, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, on a mission to assist the king of the Volga Bulgars. Ahmad ibn Fadlan never arrives, as he is conscripted by a group of Vikings, led by their chieftain Buliwyf, to take part in a hero's quest to the north; he is taken along as the 13th member of their group to comply with a soothsayer's requirement for success. They travel to Hurot Hall, the home of King Rothgar, to defend it from the 'mist-monsters', or 'wendol', a tribe of vicious savages (suggested by the narrator to have been possibly relict Neanderthals) who go to battle wearing bearskins. After two devastating battles, Ibn Fadlan and the remaining Northmen decide to attack the Wendol village, which is located in a network of sea caves. They infiltrate the sea caves, assassinate the head of the Wendol tribe, and return to Hurot Hall. Buliwyf, however, is mortally wounded in the attempt. At Hurot, they encounter the Wendol in battle for a final time, defeating them. Ibn Fadlan is then allowed to continue on his journey."Eaters of the Dead" is narrated as a scientific commentary on an old manuscript. The narrator describes the story as a composite of extant commentaries and translations of the original storyteller's manuscript. The narration makes several references to a possible change or mistranslation of the original story by later copiers. The story is told by several different voices: the editor/narrator, the translators of the script, and the original author, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, who also relates stories told by others. A sense of authenticity is supported by occasional explanatory footnotes with references to a mixture of factual and fictitious sources.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clan_of_the_Cave_Bear"title="The Clan of the Cave Bear">
A five-year-old girl, Ayla, who readers come to understand is Cro-Magnon, is orphaned and left homeless by an earthquake that destroys her family's camp. She wanders aimlessly, naked and unable to feed herself, for several days. Having been attacked and nearly killed by a cave lion and suffering from starvation, exhaustion, and infection of her wounds, she collapses, on the verge of death.The narrative switches to a group of people who call themselves "Clan" and who the reader comes to understand are Neanderthal. Their cave was destroyed in the earthquake and they are searching for a new home. The medicine woman of the group, Iza, discovers the ailing girl and asks permission from her brother Brun, the Clan leader, to help her, despite the child being clearly a member of "the Others," the distrusted antagonists of the Clan. The child is adopted by Iza and her eldest brother Creb. Creb is the group's "Mog-ur" or shaman, despite being deformed as a result of a difficult birth caused by his abnormally large head, and the later loss of an arm and eye after being attacked by a cave bear. The Clan worships spiritual representations of Earthly animals, called "totems", that they believe can influence their lives by sending good or bad luck, and for whom Mog-ur acts as an intermediary. Brun allows Iza to treat the dying child and agrees to adopt her providing Creb can discover her personal totem spirit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ill-Made_Knight"title="The Ill-Made Knight">
Much of "The Ill-Made Knight" takes place mainly in Camelot, and tells of the adventures, perils and mistakes of Sir Lancelot. Despite being the bravest of the knights, Lancelot is ugly and ape-like, and calls himself the "Chevalier mal fet", "The Ill-Made Knight". As a boy Lancelot loved King Arthur and trained to be a knight of the Round Table. When he arrives and becomes one of Arthur's knights he also becomes the king's close friend. This causes some tension, as he is jealous of Arthur's new wife, Guinevere. In order to please her husband Guinevere tries to befriend Lancelot and the two eventually fall in love. T.H. White's version of the tale elaborates on the passionate love of Lancelot and Guinevere. Suspense is provided by the tension between Lancelot's friendship for King Arthur and his love affair with the queen. This affair leads inevitably to the breaking of the Round Table and sets up the tragedy that is to follow in the concluding book of the tetralogy, "The Candle in the Wind".Lancelot leaves Camelot to aid people in need. Along the way he meets a woman who begs him to climb a tree and rescue her husband's escaped falcon. After he removes his armour and does so the husband appears and reveals that he wanted Lancelot to remove his armour so that he can kill the knight. Despite being at a disadvantage, Lancelot manages to kill the man and tells the wife: "Stop crying. Your husband was a fool and you are a bore. I'm not sorry" (though he reflects that he is). Later he comes across a man attempting to murder his wife for adultery. Lancelot attempts to protect the woman, who denies the charge, by riding in between the two, but the man manages to cut off his wife's head. The man then throws himself at Lancelot's feet and asks for mercy. It is revealed later that the man is punished by being charged to take his wife's head to the Pope and ask for forgiveness. Finally, Lancelot comes to a town where the inhabitants beg him to rescue a young woman named Elaine, who is trapped in a tower. The tower is full of steam and she is forced to sit in a tub of boiling water. He manages to save her and her father has him spend the night. The servants and Elaine devise a plan in which the servants get Lancelot drunk and trick him into thinking that Guinevere is in the house. When he awakens in the morning he discovers that he has slept with Elaine. Furious at the loss of his virginity, which he believes has also cost him the ability to work miracles, and frightened at the thought that Elaine might have a baby, he leaves. He confesses the affair to Guinevere, who forgives him. They later discover that Elaine has a baby, which she names Galahad (Lancelot's real name). She brings the baby to Camelot to show to Lancelot and together they spend time with Galahad. Guinevere is furious at this and Lancelot goes mad and runs from the castle. Two years later he is found by Elaine's father, who does not recognise him, and is kept as a fool until Elaine recognises him. He lives with Elaine for some time, but then returns to Camelot. When Galahad grows older he is brought to Camelot to be knighted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boonville_(novel)"title="Boonville (novel)">
The novel tells the story of John Gibson, as he breaks up with his girlfriend and leaves Miami, Florida to move to the small town of Boonville, California, where he meets the resident of a commune, Sarah McKay. The book portrays the town in an often comedic manner, bringing to life a number of colorful Mendocino County residents including hippies, rednecks, feminists, and commercial marijuana cultivation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_Solomon_(novel)"title="Song of Solomon (novel)">
Robert Smith, an African-American insurance agent, jumps off a roof while trying to fly as a crowd of people gather to watch. The appearance of Smith on the roof causes a woman named Ruth Dead to go into labor. In the chaos that follows, the hospital admits her and she delivers her son, Macon Dead III—the first African-American child born in the hospital. Macon Dead III grows up stifled, alienated, and disinterested in his home life in Southside. Even at age four, Ruth still breastfeeds him. One of her husband's employees witnesses this and nicknames the boy "Milkman". Milkman's relationship with his family is strained, particularly towards his father. As Milkman enters his teens, his aunt Pilate, a bootlegger and conjure woman, becomes a central figure in his life. For Milkman, Pilate becomes the first glimpse into his family's past. When they were younger, Pilate and Macon Jr. found a cave filled with bags of gold, but did not take it for fear of reprisals. Milkman forms a sexual connection with his cousin Hagar, but later spurns her. Hagar becomes obsessed with him, attempting to kill him once a month, but never following through.Milkman mentions to his father, Macon, the heavy bag that hangs from the ceiling of Pilate's modest home. Pilate mentions that the bag contains her "inheritance." Thinking it must be one of the bags of gold from the cave, Macon sends Milkman and his friend Guitar to steal the bag from Pilate. Milkman and Guitar succeed, but are arrested by the police after they discover the bag contains human bones. Macon and Pilate go to the police station to free the two young men.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Doctors"title="The Two Doctors">
The Second Doctor and Jamie McCrimmon land the TARDIS on board Space Station Camera in the Third Zone on a mission for the Time Lords, who have also installed a teleport control on the TARDIS. The Doctor explains that the station is a research facility and that they have to talk to Dastari, the Head of Projects. The Androgum cook Shockeye drugs the meals of the station's scientists. The Doctor tells Dastari that the Time Lords want the time experiments of Kartz and Reimer stopped. The Doctor warns that the distortions from the experiments are on the verge of threatening the fabric of time, but Dastari refuses to order them to cease, accusing the Time Lords of not wanting another race to discover the secrets of time travel. Dastari and the others collapse from the drugged meals. Chessene, an Androgum technologically augmented to mega-genius levels, lowers the station's defences to allow the Sontarans to attack. Jamie sees the Doctor appear to die by the Sontarans before fleeing.In the TARDIS, the Sixth Doctor has a vision of his second incarnation being put to death. Since he is still alive, he is concerned that he may have died in the past and only exists now as a temporal anomaly. He decides to consult his old friend Dastari to see if he can help. The Doctor and Peri arrive on the station and find no signs of life. The station computer demands that the Doctor leave and, when he refuses, tries to kill him and Peri by depressurising the passageway. The Doctor opens a hatch and drags his unconscious companion through to another section. The Doctor discovers Dastari's day journal and the Time Lords' objections to the Kartz-Reimer experiments.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic"title="Roadside Picnic">
"Roadside Picnic" is a work of fiction based on the aftermath of an extraterrestrial event called the Visitation that simultaneously took place in half a dozen separate locations around Earth over a two-day period. Neither the Visitors themselves nor their means of arrival or departure were ever seen by the local populations who lived inside the relatively small areas, each a few square kilometers, of the six Visitation Zones. The zones exhibit strange and dangerous phenomena not understood by humans, and contain artifacts with inexplicable, seemingly supernatural properties. The title of the novel derives from an analogy proposed by the character Dr. Valentine Pilman, who compares the Visitation to a picnic:In this analogy, the nervous animals are the humans who venture forth after the Visitors have left, discovering items and anomalies that are ordinary to those who have discarded them, but incomprehensible or deadly to those who find them.This explanation implies that the Visitors may not have paid any attention to, or even noticed, the human inhabitants of the planet during their visit, just as humans do not notice or pay attention to grasshoppers or ladybugs during a picnic. The artifacts and phenomena left behind by the Visitors in the Zones were garbage, discarded and forgotten, without any preconceived plan to advance or damage humanity. There is little chance that the Visitors will return again because for them it was a brief stop, for reasons unknown, on the way to their actual destination.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy's_Life_(novel)"title="Boy's Life (novel)">
In the novel, Cory Mackenson shares with the reader his experiences in the twelfth year of his life. The year begins when his father attempts to rescue a driver as his car plunges into Saxon's Lake, only to discover the man has been beaten to death. Cory spends the rest of the year, despite multiple distractions, attempting to find out who killed this stranger before his father's dreams drive him into the depths of the lake too. "Boy's Life" is a story of coming of age in the south, an all too real reality mixed with the magic and fantasy of childhood.Cory gets up early to help his father work his milk route. As they discuss Cory's plans for the future, they drive through their little town of Zephyr, Alabama. When Cory's father begins to drive past Saxon's Lake, they are both shocked when they see a car race across the road in front of them and plunge into the lake. Cory's father dives into the water to rescue the driver only to discover the man has been horribly beaten and strangled. Someone has stripped the dead man naked and handcuffed him to the steering wheel to prevent his body from ever rising to the surface again. Cory and his father rush to the nearest house, which happens to be a brothel managed by a woman named Grace, and call the police. The only clue is a green feather that Cory finds on the shore of the lake, which he keeps. Unfortunately, there is little the police can do without a victim, a name, or a motive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_500_Hats_of_Bartholomew_Cubbins"title="The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins">
Set in feudal times, the story begins in the Kingdom of Didd. Young peasant, Bartholomew Cubbins lives on the outskirts of the kingdom with his family; He wears a simple red hat with a single white feather that has remained within the family for generations. One day, Bartholomew is sent into the town to sell some berries, when he comes across King Derwin riding through a street. As per law, one is supposed to remove his or her hat when the king passes by, but Bartholomew apparently does not follow the rule, despite having a hat in his hand, and is ordered to remove the hat on his head. Bartholomew does so, but another hat mysteriously appears; when he attempts to remove this one, yet another one appears. For unknown reasons, whenever Bartholomew removes one hat, another one appears on his head.The young boy is taken to the castle where numerous people attempt to remove the hat from Bartholomew's head, but all attempts end in failure. The royal hatter runs away in terror, the King's young nephew fails to shoot the hats off with arrows, a great bowman similarly fails with a longbow, and Wizards attempt to curse the hat away but claim that their spell would only work in "Ten Short Years". The King, exasperated by all the attempts, sends Bartholomew to be executed, but once again the laws get in the way as a person cannot be executed by the Executioner with his or her hat on.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_Ship"title="The Death Ship">
Set just after World War I, "The Death Ship" describes the predicament of merchant seamen who lack documentation of citizenship, making them effectively stateless and therefore unable to find legal residence or employment in any nation. The narrator is Gerard Gales, a US sailor who claims to be from New Orleans, and who is stranded in Antwerp without passport or working papers. Unable to prove his identity or his eligibility for employment, Gales is repeatedly arrested and deported from one country to the next, by government officials who do not want to be bothered with either assisting or prosecuting him. When he finally manages to find work, it is on the "Yorikke" (possibly a reference to the Shakespeare play "Hamlet"), the dangerous and decrepit ship of the title, where undocumented workers from around the world are treated as expendable slaves.The term "death ship" refers to any boat so decrepit that it is worth more to its owners overinsured and sunk than it would be worth afloat. The title of the book is translated directly from the German "Das Totenschiff"; in English, they are called "coffin ships".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Finger"title="The Magic Finger">
"The Magic Finger" is narrated by an unnamed 8-year-old girl (voiced alternately by Anne Clements and Caroline Quentin in the United Kingdom), who is growing up on a remote rural farm in the English countryside, next door to the Gregg family who has a passion for hunting animals and birds. The title "Magic Finger" is an ability she has that activates inadvertently whenever she gets angry: the finger itself shoots out a beam of electrical energy that apparently seeks out whoever has angered the girl, with unpredictable consequences.One day, the girl sees Mr. Gregg and his two sons, (Philip and William, Philip also 8 years of age and William Gregg 11 years old,) returning home from a hunt with a deer that they have just killed, and they make fun of her when she shouts at them. In a rage, the unnamed 8-year-old girl puts the Magic Finger itself on the entire family: then they wake up the following morning to find that they have shrunk to bird-size and developed "ducks' wings" in place of their arms and hands. While trying out their new wings, the Greggs fly out of their beloved house, which is promptly occupied by four human-sized ducks with human arms and human hands, and they are all soon forced to build a nest in an old tree for the night.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twits"title="The Twits">
A hideous, vindictive, spiteful couple known as the Twits live together in a brick house without windows. They continuously play nasty practical jokes on each other out of hatred for each other.They also keep a family of pet monkeys, the Muggle-Wumps. The Twits, who are retired circus trainers, are trying to create the first upside-down monkey circus. They will always demand the monkeys stand on their heads for hours on end.Mr. Twit uses glue called "Hugtight" in hopes of catching birds for Mrs. Twit to make into a bird pie. The monkeys try to warn the birds before they land on the tree, but the English-speaking birds do not understand the monkeys' African language.Once a week the Roly-Poly bird flies to visit the monkeys, to secretly save the birds by acting as an interpreter of languages. On a Tuesday night, a group of four boys see the ladder next to this tree and they decided to walk up into it, not thinking or knowing that glue was on it. On the Wednesday morning Mr Twit sees that the boys have scared them away. Out of rage Mr Twit charges at them, but they get away. Mr Twit tries several times to catch the birds and, tired of not getting anywhere, Mr. Twit decides to go buy guns with his wife to kill them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George's_Marvellous_Medicine"title="George's Marvellous Medicine">
While eight-year-old George Kranky's parents are out grocery shopping, his elderly maternal grandmother bosses him around and bullies him. She intimidates George by saying that she likes to eat insects and he wonders briefly if she's a witch. To punish her for her regular abuse, George decides to make a magic medicine to replace her old one. He collects a variety of ingredients from around the family farm including deodorant and shampoo from the bathroom, floor polish from the laundry room, horseradish sauce and gin from the kitchen, animal medicines, engine oil and anti-freeze from the garage, and brown paint to mimic the colour of the original medicine.After cooking the ingredients in the kitchen, George gives it as medicine to his grandmother, who grows as tall as the house, bursting through the roof. When his grandmother doesn't believe it was George who made her grow so tall, he proves it by feeding the medicine to one of his father's chickens, which grows ten times its original size. As they return home, George's parents can't believe their eyes when they see the fattest chicken ever and the grandmother. George's father grows very excited at the thought of rearing giant animals. He has George feed the medicine to the rest of the farm's animals, causing them to become giants as well. However, his grandmother begins complaining about being ignored and stuck in the roof, so Mr. Kranky hires a crane to remove her from the house. Her extreme height has her sleeping in the barn for the next few nights.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yargo_(novel)"title="Yargo (novel)">
"Yargo" tells the story of Janet Cooper, a young woman from Avalon, New Jersey, who is abducted by aliens from the planet Yargo. During her interplanetary adventures with these intelligent but emotionless extraterrestrials, she falls in love with their leader.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Love_of_the_Game"title="For Love of the Game">
On the second to last day of the season, Chapel's team, the Atlanta Hawks (no relation to the NBA team of the same name), are about to play against the New York Yankees. Chapel receives news from a friend in the media that he is about to be traded. Just the night before, his girlfriend Carol did not show up at his hotel room, and Chapel reaches the conclusion that it is time to move on and finally make the transition from boyhood to manhood.Over half the book tells the story of that final game, with flashbacks from the pitching mound and Dugout to incidents throughout Chapel's life. Chapel is determined that his last game will also be his greatest, even though, with all the young new players on the Yankees, they are a far superior team. As he strikes out his opponents one after the other, he soon becomes aware of the fact that he has held the Yankees at bay thus far, not allowing one hit from the more talented Yankees team. He soon becomes determined to pitch a perfect game. Meanwhile, he reflects on his personal life, and especially on Carol, whom he finally realizes that he loves, even though he has never shown her that he really does. That morning Carol told him she was going to London and was leaving immediately, so the two key passions of his life, Carol and baseball, are about to vanish forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorpius_(novel)"title="Scorpius (novel)">
After being connected to the death of a woman in London, Bond is called in by M to aid the investigation. Returning from Hereford, Special Air Service Sergeant Pearlman tags along by driving Bond back, during which they are attacked and involved in a high-speed chase on an English motorway. Upon safely returning to headquarters, Bond is briefed on the investigation by M and Chief Superintendent Bailey. The woman, whom Bond does not know, was found dead with Bond's telephone number. She is a member of a cult society known as "The Meek Ones", operated by a Father Valentine. With additional information from the CIA, the British Secret Service learn that Valentine is an alias for Vladimir Scorpius, an arms dealer for several terrorist organisations.As the country's general election approaches, by the use of brainwashed cult members, Scorpius has begun a "holy war" against every man, woman, and child. The cult members, thinking themselves to be pure, moral, and unsullied, sacrifice their lives for "the greater good of humanity", believing that by performing this "death task" they will achieve paradise. Throughout the novel, The Meek Ones commit several acts of terrorism, including bombings and assassinations of British politicians.Throughout the horror, Bond meets Harriett Horner, an IRS agent working undercover in England and investigating a credit card company run by Scorpius. The two work together along with Pearlman to attempt to track down Scorpius. After an interrogation of a captured cult member, Horner is taken captive by Scorpius' men. Additionally, Pearlman confesses to Bond that he was secretly giving Scorpius information for the benefit of his daughter who had been brainwashed. Together the two set out for Scorpius' base of operations in South Carolina, having Scorpius believe Pearlman was taking Bond captive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amateur_Marriage"title="The Amateur Marriage">
The plot concerns the marriage of Michael Anton and Pauline Barclay, who meet when he tends to her bloodied brow in his family's grocery store, located in a primarily Eastern European enclave in Baltimore, in December 1941. They marry after Michael is discharged from the Army with a permanent injury caused by a deliberate shot from someone he assaulted.Michael and Pauline settle in a small apartment above the store, but their widely different temperaments and expectations quickly create dissension in the relationship. He is repressed, controlling, and quiet; she is loud, emotional, and romantic. At Pauline's insistence, they move to the suburbs, where they raise three children: Lindy, George and Karen."Lindy, who has always been a stubborn, willful child, becomes increasingly defiant as a teenager, and one day, she just leaves home -- and doesn't return. Her disappearance -- like the abrupt, sometimes violent events that occur in many Tyler novels, propelling heretofore passive characters into a re-evaluation of their lives -- does not bring her parents closer together, but instead results in another round of accusations and recriminations." Lindy runs away to San Francisco in 1960 and becomes involved in the growing drug culture. Eight years later, her parents retrieve Pagan, Lindy's three-year-old son, while Lindy detoxes in a rehab community.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crabwalk"title="Crabwalk">
The narrator of the novella is the journalist Paul Pokriefke, who was born on 30 January 1945 on the day that the Strength Through Joy ship, the "Wilhelm Gustloff", was sunk. His young mother-to-be, Tulla Pokriefke (born in Danzig, and already known to readers from two parts of the "Danzig Trilogy", "Cat and Mouse" and "Dog Years"), found herself among the more than 10,000 passengers on the ship and was among those saved when it went down. According to Tulla, Paul was born at the moment the ship sank, on board the torpedo boat which had rescued them. His life is heavily influenced by these circumstances, above all because his mother Tulla continually urges him to fulfill his 'duty' and to commemorate the event in writing.In the course of his research, the narrator discovers by chance that his estranged son Konrad (Konny) has also developed an interest in the sinking of the "Wilhem Gustloff" as a result of Tulla's influence. On his website ('blutzeuge.de') he explores the murder of Wilhelm Gustloff and the sinking of the ship, in part through a dialogue in which he adopts the role of Gustloff, and that of David Frankfurter is taken by another young man, Wolfgang Stremplin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Tremain"title="Johnny Tremain">
Johnny Tremain is a promising but prideful 14-year-old apprentice at the Boston silversmith shop of elderly Ephraim Lapham. The date is on July 23, 1773. It is understood that someday Johnny will marry Mr. Lapham's granddaughter Priscilla to keep the shop within the Lapham family. The shop receives a challenging and urgent order from wealthy merchant John Hancock to make a silver dish to replace one that Mr. Lapham fashioned decades before. While preparing Hancock's order, Johnny's hand is badly burned when Dove, another apprentice resentful of Johnny, deliberately gives him a cracked crucible that leaks molten silver. Johnny's hand is burned and crippled beyond use, and he can no longer be a silversmith. Johnny's youthful pride is crushed by the injury. He is relegated to work as an unskilled errand boy. He goes to find a new job that will accept his crippled hand.After a series of rejections, Johnny reaches the low point of his young life. While searching for jobs, he encounters in a printshop Rab Silsbee, a young typesetter who is friendly to him. He then decides to turn to Mr. Lyte, a wealthy Boston merchant. Johnny explains that his mother told him that he and Mr. Lyte are related and as a last resort, to turn to him for help. Lyte requests the proof, and Johnny shows him a silver cup with the Lyte family's crest. Lyte says it was stolen from him in a burglary, and Johnny is accused of the theft and arrested. Eventually, Johnny is freed by the court after Rab brings Cilla to court and she testifies that Johnny showed her his cup before the burglary ever took place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Brocktree"title="Lord Brocktree">
The book focuses on a badger, Lord Brocktree, and haremaid Dotti as they journey towards Salamandastron, the mountain fortress of badger lords, to recapture it from the wildcat Ungatt Trunn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_the_Warrior"title="Martin the Warrior">
"Martin the Warrior" tells the story of a young mouse named Martin, a slave in Marshank under the cruel stoat Badrang the Tyrant. When Badrang leaves Martin to be tortured by the weather and the birds, a young mousemaid named Laterose, or Rose (with whom Martin falls in love) and a mole named Grumm hear his cry of defiance. They become instrumental in helping Martin, along with a squirrel named Felldoh, and Rose's brother Brome, escape Marshank. When that is accomplished, they decide to travel to Noonvale to rouse an army to attack Marshank. However, in the ocean, Felldoh and Brome are separated from Rose, Martin, and Grumm. Felldoh and Brome meet up with the Rambling Rosehip Players, a travelling band of creatures, and join forces with them, eventually freeing the slaves as Brome bluffs his way into and out of Marshank, disguised as a rat from Captain Tramun Clogg's corsair crew. Meanwhile, Martin, Rose and Grumm meet a hedgehog named Pallum after being imprisoned by pigmy shrews. They are eventually freed by saving the life of the Pygmy Queen's son, Dinjer, along with Pallum, who in turn joins up with them.After a long series of adventures, the four adventurers reach Noonvale, Rose and Grumm's home. They gather an army there, but it is not large enough. But all is not lost. Boldred, a scholarly owl whom they met on the way to Noonvale, helps gather a huge army, including the pigmy shrews and the Gawtrybe (a group of savage squirrels). The entire army then sails to Marshank and reach it in good timing, since the Rambling Rosehip Players are in a predicament. Badrang and all of the vermin under his command, with the exception of mad Cap'n Tramun Clogg, are slain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_(novel)"title="Binary (novel)">
State Department agent John Graves is investigating far-left businessman John Wright who has been acting suspiciously – he has masterminded the theft of several canisters of VZ nerve gas, a binary agent, and has enough of both canister types to kill nearly a million people, but the Agency is unsure of his motives.During his investigation Graves establishes that Wright has acquired many other purchases; plastic explosives, large containers made of an exotic flammable material, seemingly of plumbing and pressure related nature – and also rented a small 19th floor apartment in San Diego where the President of the United States is due to meet for the imminent Republican Party convention, and deduces that Wright intends to assassinate the President.Graves' task is made harder by inter-departmental interference, a lack of support from his manager Phelps, and that Wright has stolen a copy of Graves' State Department psychological profile, and seems to be depending on Graves behaving according to his profile.Wright correctly predicts Graves' actions, and ultimately allows himself to be captured in order to distract Graves from continuing his investigation – only to successfully escape moments later, again predicting Graves' behaviour during the interrogation. However prior to the interrogation Graves had decided against roadblocks surrounding the apartment, but realised that this was playing true to his profile, and changed his mind – Wright is subsequently killed trying to break through the unexpected blockade.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear"title="Voyage from Yesteryear">
The story opens early in the 21st century, as an automated space probe is being prepared for a mission to explore habitable exoplanets in the Alpha Centauri system. However, Earth appears destined for a global war which the probe designers fear that humanity may not survive. It appears that the only chance for the human species is to reestablish itself far away from the conflict but there is no time left for a crewed expedition to escape Earth. The team, led by Henry B. Congreve, change their mission priority and quickly modify the design to carry several hundred sets of electronically coded human genetic data. Also included in this mission of embryo space colonization is a databank of human knowledge, robots to convert the data into genetic material and care for the children and construct habitats when the destination is reached, and a number of artificial wombs. The probe's designers name it the "Kuan-Yin" after the bodhisattva of childbirth and compassion.Shortly after the launch, global war indeed breaks out and several decades later, Earthbound humanity is united under an authoritarian government. It is this government that receives a radio message from the fledgling "Chironian" civilization revealing that the probe found a habitable planet (Chiron) and that the first generation of children have been raised successfully.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyeless_in_Gaza_(novel)"title="Eyeless in Gaza (novel)">
The novel focuses on four periods in the life of a socialite named Anthony Beavis between the 1890s (when he is a young boy) and 1936 – but not in chronological order. It describes Beavis's experiences as he goes through school, college and various romantic affairs; the meaninglessness of upper-class life during these times; and Beavis's gradual disillusionment with high society, brought to a head by a friend's suicide. He then begins to seek a source of meaning, and seems to find it when he discovers pacifism and then mysticism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payasos_en_la_lavadora"title="Payasos en la lavadora">
Álex de la Iglesia signs only two pages of this novel. In this introduction he states he has found a laptop computer lost by the poet Juan Carlos Satrústegui. On it, he has read a file called "Payasos en la lavadora". Since Satrústegui has entered a mental sanatorium, de la Iglesia talks with the writer's mother and decides to publish the text after correcting it. It is a parody of the old literary technique of the false document found by chance, probably influenced by the fact that, in real life, de la Iglesia writes his film scripts on a laptop computer, which he has lost at least twice.According to this introduction, the rest of the fifteen chapters are Juan Carlos Satrústegui's autobiographical tale. Satrústegui considers himself a genius, superior to all those he comes across. But the reader soon realises his psychic problems (obsessions, deliria, paranoia, lack of empathy) become worse due to the drugs he uses in fiestas, the want of slept and the beatings he earns when dealing with the lumpen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predator's_Gold"title="Predator's Gold">
## Setting."Predator's Gold" is set two years after "Mortal Engines". In that time, lovers Tom Natsworthy and Hester Shaw have been using the "Jenny Haniver", their deceased comrade Anna Fang's airship, to travel across the world trading and adventuring.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Far_Can_You_Go?"title="How Far Can You Go?">
The book deals with the intersecting lives of a group of English Catholics from their years as students at University College London in the early 1950s up to the late 1970s. The characters are confronted with a wide range of issues and experiences including marriage, contraception, adultery, illness, grief and, most important of all, the changes in the Catholic Church brought about by the Second Vatican Council and the papal encyclical against contraception, "Humanae vitae" (1968).The title's meaning is twofold: it is on the one hand a reference to how far you ought to go with a member of the other sex before marriage, but also to the question of disorientation in the face of abrupt changes in the Church within only a few years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horton_Hatches_the_Egg"title="Horton Hatches the Egg">
The book centers on a genial elephant named Horton, who is convinced by Mayzie, an irresponsible and lazy bird, to sit on her egg while she takes a short "break", which turns into her permanent relocation to Palm Beach.As Horton sits in the nest on top of a tree, he is exposed to the elements, laughed at by his jungle friends, captured by hunters, forced to endure a terrible sea voyage, and finally placed in a traveling circus. However, despite his hardships and Mayzie's clear intent not to return, Horton refuses to leave the nest because he insists on keeping his word, often repeating, "I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant's faithful, one hundred per cent!"The traveling circus ends up visiting near Mayzie's new Palm Beach residence. She visits the circus just as the egg is due to hatch (after 51 weeks in Palm Beach) and demands that Horton should return it, without offering him a reward. However, when the egg hatches, the creature that emerges is an "elephant-bird", a cross between Horton and Mayzie, and Horton and the baby are returned happily to the jungle, while Mayzie is punished for her laziness by ending up with absolutely nothing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonseed_(novel)"title="Moonseed (novel)">
"Moonseed" is an exploration of what could possibly happen when rock is returned from the Apollo 18 mission (which was actually cancelled in 1970). In the book, the rock contain a form of grey goo called "moonseed" that starts to change all inorganic matter on Earth into more moonseed. It also gets transferred by a NASA probe to Venus, and the explosion of Venus is the first clue as to what has been happening.Stephen Baxter combines a host of disciplines (space travel, geology and disaster theory) to tell a tale where the rocks are literally swept from under the feet of humanity. During the course of the novel, in which Edinburgh is the focus for much of the action, Venus is destroyed by an unknown cosmic event that showers the Earth with radiation that somehow stirs the moonseed on Earth. When Moon-dust containing the moonseed is dropped onto the streets of Edinburgh by a lab assistant of the main character, Earth's fate is sealed. The moonseed begins to disintegrate the planet from the inside-out as the core heats up exponentially, while on the surface, nuclear power stations catastrophically fail, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are abundant, and billions of people die as cities and continents vanish.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Spock"title="I Am Spock">
In his second autobiography, Nimoy explains that the title of the first book had been his idea, over the objections of his publishers. He had not anticipated the problem of people reading the title without reading the book. In reality, his feelings toward Spock had not changed at all in the intervening years. On the contrary, Nimoy explains in this book that Spock has always been a part of him.This duality is explored and taken to extremes throughout the book. Indeed, the book's foreword is written by Mr. Spock himself, in the form of a letter the Vulcan writes to Leonard Nimoy, to express confusion over the highly illogical title. Throughout the book, Nimoy frequently has conversations with his other half, as he explores the choices and decisions he has made throughout his life, and how those choices have been affected by a certain calm logical voice in the back of his mind.While the focus of the book is on Nimoy's "Star Trek" career, he also takes time to explore his other works, including directing and theatre acting. Memorable stories include his being forced to tell an actress she needed to redo a highly emotional scene because of a crew member's mistake, and how directing ' and ' led to Hollywood giving him a shot at directing "Three Men and a Baby" (1987), which went on to be the highest-grossing film in the United States of that year. He also mentions his work producing and directing the UPN television series "Deadly Games."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_Thomas_(novel)"title="Odd Thomas (novel)">
In the beginning of the book, Odd Thomas is silently approached by the ghost of a young girl brutally raped and murdered, and through his unique ability to understand the dead, is psychically led to her killer, a former schoolmate named Harlo Landerson. Koontz discloses how Odd was named and begins, layer by layer, to show how Odd's dysfunctional upbringing has shaped his life, and as those details are uncovered, his supernatural abilities begin to make more sense.While working as a short order cook in a California desert town, Odd meets a suspicious-looking man in the diner followed by bodachs, shadowy spirit creatures who appear only during times of death and disaster. This man, who Odd nicknames "Fungus Man" (due to his waxy complexion and blond hair that resembles mold), has an unusually large swarm of bodachs following him, and Odd is convinced that this man is connected to some terrible catastrophe that is about to occur. To gather more information about him, Odd uses his gift of supernatural intuition, which his soulmate Bronwen ( Stormy) Llewellyn calls "psychic magnetism," to track him down.Odd's sixth sense leads him to Fungus Man's home, and Odd begins to uncover more details about the man and a mysterious other-worldly link to the dark forces about to be unleashed on the town of Pico Mundo. Accompanied sometimes by the ghost of Elvis Presley and encountering other memorable spirits, including a murdered prostitute, Odd is soon deeply involved in an attempt to prevent the disastrous bloodshed he knows will happen the next day.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_House-Boat_on_the_Styx"title="A House-Boat on the Styx">
The premise of the book is that everyone who has ever died (up to the time in which the book is set, which seems to be about the time of its publication) has gone to Styx, the river that circles the underworld.The book begins with Charon, ferryman of the Styx being startled—and annoyed—by the arrival of a houseboat on the Styx. At first afraid that the boat will put him out of business, he later finds out that he is actually to be appointed the boat's janitor.What follows are eleven more stories (for a total of twelve) which are set on the house boat. There is no central theme, and the purpose of the book appears to be as a literary thought experiment to see what would happen if various famous dead people were put in the same room with each other. Each chapter is a short story featuring various souls from history and mythology. In the twelfth chapter the house boat disappears, leading into the sequel, "The Pursuit of the House-Boat".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Rising"title="Hannibal Rising">
Opening in Lithuania during 1941, Hannibal Lecter is eight years old and living in a castle with his parents and sister, Mischa. With the castle located near the eastern front of World War II, the Lecter family escapes to their lodge to elude the advancing German troops. With the castle abandoned, it is soon raided by Germans and civilians aiding them, their hidden art collection being among the stolen loot. Three years later, an advancing Soviet tank stops at the Lecter family's lodge looking for water, only to be bombed by a German Stuka, the explosion killing all but the children. Surviving in the lodge, Hannibal and Mischa are captured when six deserters appear: Vladis Grutas, Zigmas Milko, Bronys Grentz, Enrikas Dortlich, Petras Kolnas and Kazys Porvik. Storming and looting the lodge, they lock the Lecters in the barn. Running low on supplies, the soldiers soon take Mischa; realizing they intend to cannibalize her, Hannibal tries to stop them, only to have his arm broken before he blacks out.Hannibal is later spotted by a Soviet tank crew, wearing shackles and rendered mute. Returned to Lecter Castle, now a Soviet orphanage, Hannibal is found to be irreparably traumatized by the ordeal. Removed from the orphanage by his uncle Robert Lecter, Hannibal goes to live with him in France with his aunt, Lady Murasaki. Visiting a marketplace with his aunt, Lecter assaults butcher Paul Momund when he insults Murasaki. Count Lecter, learning of the slight against his wife, violently confronts the butcher and collapses and subsequently dies from a heart attack. Losing most of the Count's estate to death duties, Lecter and Murasaki move across France, and Lecter flourishes as a medical student, assisting by preparing cadavers for lessons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Teeth_of_the_Tiger"title="The Teeth of the Tiger">
In Rome, a Mossad station chief is assassinated. The murder piques the interest of the Campus, an off-the-books intelligence agency created by former United States president Jack Ryan before the end of his presidential term. Situated in a high-rise office building that has direct line-of-sight between the main headquarters for the CIA and the NSA, the organization was created to "identify, locate, and deal with terrorist threats" in anticipation of the current administration's neglect of the CIA and the NSA. A private trading and arbitrage company, Hendley Associates, serves as a legitimate front for the Campus by funding its operations via stock market trades influenced by the captured intelligence data, thus removing federal oversight and allowing free rein in its operations.Jack Ryan Jr., son of the former president, soon discovers the Campus' operations. Wanting to serve his country in the post-9/11 world, he is hired by the agency as an analyst. Elsewhere, his cousin Brian Caruso is a U.S. Marine returning from Afghanistan to be decorated for his achievements in battle. His twin brother Dominic is an FBI agent who, while investigating a kidnapping of a little girl, finds her raped and killed. Caruso kills the suspect ostensibly in self defense after purposely getting noticed, and the suspect reacts by grabbing a knife at gun-point (thereby providing a "threat").
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stupidest_Angel"title="The Stupidest Angel">
An angel named Raziel (previously in Moore's novel "") is sent to Earth to grant the wish of a child; he decides to help a boy who had witnessed the death of a man dressed as Santa Claus. Meanwhile, the town is preparing for a community dinner-gathering at the local church, near the cemetery. In his inept attempt to bring "Santa" back to life, the angel causes the townspeople to fall under siege by brain-hungry zombies who arise from their burial plots.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_on_a_Scandal"title="Notes on a Scandal">
Art teacher Bathsheba "Sheba" Hart falls in love with a 15-year-old pupil, Steven Connolly, who is from a deprived background and has literacy problems. Although they frequently have sex in risky places, including at school and in the open on Hampstead Heath, the couple successfully conceal their affair from colleagues and family. Sheba tells her coworker Barbara what has happened between her and Connolly, though she claims that he only tried to kiss her and she discouraged his advances. Barbara eventually finds out about the affair on Guy Fawkes Night, when she sees Sheba talking to Connolly on Primrose Hill. Barbara feels betrayed that Sheba did not confide in her properly and is angered by Sheba's neglect of their friendship. (Barbara is herself a lonely woman whose neediness has driven away more than one potential friend.)Over time, Connolly's interest in the affair wanes as Sheba's grows. Sheba still does not break off the affair, having become quite enslaved to the now barely invested Connolly. Her obsession continues even after he abandons her for a girl his own age. Brian Bangs, a mathematics teacher, asks Barbara to have Saturday lunch with him one day. He confesses his infatuation with Sheba, leading Barbara to realise that he only asked her out to use her as a means to discover information about Sheba's private life. Overcome by jealousy, Barbara alludes to Sheba's secret.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_of_the_Werewolf"title="Cycle of the Werewolf">
The story is set in the fictional town of Tarker's Mills, Maine. Each chapter is a month on the calendar. A werewolf is viciously killing local citizens at each full moon, and the otherwise normal town is living in fear. The protagonist of the story is Marty Coslaw, a 10 year-old boy in a wheelchair. The story goes back and forth from the terrifying incidents to Marty's youthful day-to-day life and how the horror affects him.The werewolf's first victim is a drunk railroad worker. Next is a woman in her bedroom contemplating suicide, followed by a hitchhiker, the owner of a diner, one of Marty's friends in the city park, a herd of hogs at a local farm, a sheriff's deputy while he sits in his car, and finally an abusive husband.In July, the town's Independence Day fireworks have been cancelled. This is very upsetting to Marty, who has been looking forward to them all year. Feeling bad for his nephew, Marty's uncle brings him some fireworks, warning Marty to set them off really late so his mother won't find out. While outside enjoying his own private Independence Day celebration, the werewolf attacks Marty, who manages to put out the monster's left eye with a package of firecrackers. The werewolf escapes and police ignore Marty's report because they are looking for a human murderer, not a werewolf. As the summer continues, the bloodshed occurs again every full moon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream-Quest_of_Unknown_Kadath"title="The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath">
In his dreams, Randolph Carter sees a majestic city, but is unable to approach it. After the third time the city appears in his dreams, he prays to the gods of dream to reveal the city's whereabouts, but then the city vanishes from his dreams altogether. Undaunted, Carter resolves to beseech the gods in person at Kadath, the mountain above which the gods of dream live. In dream, Carter consults priests in a temple that borders the Dreamlands. They tell Carter that nobody knows the location of Kadath, and warn him of great danger should he continue with his quest to reach the city and suggest that the gods purposefully stopped his visions.Carter's knowledge of Dreamlands customs and languages makes his quest comparatively less risky than if done by an amateur, but he must consult entities with a dangerous reputation. The Zoogs, a race of predatory rodents, direct him to Ulthar to find the priest Atal. In the cat-laden city of Ulthar, Atal mentions a huge mountainside carving of the gods' features. Carter realizes the gods' mortal descendants will share those features and presumably be near Kadath. While seeking passage there, Carter is kidnapped by turbaned slavers, who take him to the moon and deliver him to horrible moon-beasts, the servants of malevolent god Nyarlathotep. The cats of Ulthar, Carter's allies, rescue him and return him to a port city.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Planted_Trees"title="The Man Who Planted Trees">
The story begins in the year 1913, when a young man who is the narrator was travelling alone on a hiking trip through Provence, France, and into the Alps, enjoying the relatively unspoiled wilderness. He runs out of water in a treeless, desolate valley where only wild lavender grows and there is no trace of civilization except old, empty crumbling buildings. He finds only a dried-up well, but is saved by a middle-aged shepherd who takes him to a spring he knows of.Curious about this man and why he has chosen such a lonely life, the narrator stays with him for a time. The shepherd, Elzéard Bouffier, after being widowed, decided to restore the ruined landscape of the isolated and largely abandoned valley by single-handedly cultivating a forest, by planting acorns. He makes holes in the ground with his straight iron staff and drops into them acorns that collected from miles away. He is also growing beech and birch saplings for planting.The narrator leaves the shepherd, returns home, and later fights in the First World War. In 1920, shell-shocked and depressed after the war, the man returns. He is surprised to see young saplings of all forms taking root in the valley, and new streams running through it, where the shepherd has made dams higher up in the mountains. The narrator makes a full recovery in the peace and beauty of the regrowing valley, and continues to visit the region and M. Bouffier every year. He finds on one visit that Bouffier is no longer a shepherd, because of the sheep eating his young trees, and has become a bee keeper instead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloak_of_Deception"title="Cloak of Deception">
The Galactic Republic is in a state of decline, mired in greed and corruption and tangled in bureaucracy. In the outlying systems, where the Trade Federation maintains a stranglehold on shipping routes, tensions are boiling over—while back in the comfort of Coruscant, the hub of civilized space and seat of Republic government, few senators seem inclined to investigate the problem. And those who suspect Supreme Chancellor Valorum of having a hand in the machinations are baffled—especially when Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn and his apprentice Obi-Wan Kenobi foil an assassination attempt on the Chancellor.With the crisis escalating, Valorum calls for an emergency trade summit. As humans and aliens gather, conspiracies sealed with large sums of money run rampant, and no one is entirely above suspicion. But the greatest threat of all remains unknown to everyone except three members of the Trade Federation, who have entered into a shadowy alliance with the Sith lord Darth Sidious. While Valorum, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan will be content with more money and fewer problems, Sidious has grander, far more terrifying plans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_House_(novel)"title="Black House (novel)">
A series of murders has begun to plague the town of French Landing, Wisconsin. The murderer is dubbed "The Fisherman", due to a conscious effort by the killer to emulate the methods of serial killer Albert Fish. Like Fish, French Landing's killer targets children and indulges in cannibalism of the bodies. Two victims have already been discovered as the story opens, with a third awaiting discovery. The nature of the crimes, and the local police's inability to capture the killer, have led people all over the region to become more anxious with each passing day, and certain elements of the local media exacerbate the situation with inflammatory and provocative coverage.After the events of "The Talisman", Jack Sawyer has repressed the memories of his adventures in The Territories and his hunt for the Talisman as a twelve-year-old boy, though the residue of these events has served to subtly affect his life even after he has forgotten them. Jack grew up to become a lieutenant in the Los Angeles Police Department, where his professionalism and uncanny talent have helped him establish a nearly legendary reputation. When a series of murders in Los Angeles are traced to a farm insurance salesman from French Landing, Wisconsin, Jack cooperates with the French Landing police to capture the killer. While in Wisconsin, Jack is irresistibly enraptured by the natural beauty of the Coulee Country, echoing his reaction to The Territories as a child. When he later intrudes upon a homicide investigation in Santa Monica, certain aspects of the crime scene threaten to revive his repressed memories. He subsequently resigns from the LAPD, and he moves to French Landing to enjoy his early retirement.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsignor_Quixote"title="Monsignor Quixote">
Father Quixote, a parish priest in the little town of El Toboso in Spain's La Mancha region, regards himself as a descendant of Cervantes' character of the same name, even if people point out to him that Don Quixote was a fictitious character. One day, he helps and gives food to a mysterious Italian bishop whose car has broken down. Shortly afterwards, he is given the title of "Monsignor" by the Pope, much to the surprise of his bishop who looks upon Father Quixote's activities rather with suspicion. He urges the priest to take a holiday, and so Quixote embarks upon a voyage through Spain with his old Seat 600 called "Rocinante" and in the company of the Communist ex-mayor of El Toboso (who, of course, is nicknamed "Sancho"). In the subsequent course of events, Quixote and his companion have all sorts of funny and moving adventures along the lines of his ancestor's on their way through post-Franco Spain. They encounter the contemporary equivalents of the windmills, are confronted with holy and not-so-holy places and with sinners of all sorts. In their dialogues about Catholicism and Communism, the two men are brought closer, start to appreciate each other better but also to question their own beliefs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_Writer"title="The Ghost Writer">
Nathan Zuckerman is a promising young writer who spends a night in the home of E.I. Lonoff (a portrait, it has been argued, of Bernard Malamud or Henry Roth, or a composite of both), an established author whom Zuckerman idolizes. Also staying in the Lonoff home is Amy Bellette, a young woman with a vague past whom the narrator apparently comes to suspect of being Anne Frank, living in the United States anonymously, having survived the Holocaust. Many have observed similarities between Lonoff and Isaac Bashevis Singer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phoenix_and_the_Carpet"title="The Phoenix and the Carpet">
This is the middle volume of a trilogy that begins with "Five Children and It" and concludes with "The Story of the Amulet." It deviates from the other two novels insofar as it includes only a brief mention of the Psammead, a magical creature introduced in the first volume, and depicts the five children as living with both of their parents in the family home in London. In the other two volumes, circumstances have forced the children to spend protracted periods away from their home and their father. A continuing theme throughout "The Phoenix and the Carpet" is the element of fire. The story begins shortly before 5 November, celebrated in Britain as Guy Fawkes Night, when people build bonfires and set off fireworks. The four children have accumulated a small hoard of fireworks for the night, but they are too impatient to wait until 5 November to light them, so they set off a few samples in the nursery. This results in the fire that destroys the original carpet. To replace it their parents purchase a second-hand carpet, which is found to contain an egg that emits a phosphorescent glow. The children accidentally knock the egg into the fire, whereupon it hatches, revealing a golden talking Phoenix.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sartor_Resartus"title="Sartor Resartus">
The novel takes the form of a long review by a somewhat cantankerous unnamed Editor for the English publication "Fraser's Magazine" (in which the novel was first serialised without any distinction of the content as fictional) who is, upon request, reviewing the fictional German book "Clothes, Their Origin and Influence" by the fictional philosopher Diogenes Teufelsdröckh (Professor of "Things in General" at Weissnichtwo "Know not where" University). The Editor is clearly flummoxed by the book, first struggling to explain the book in the context of contemporary social issues in England, some of which he knows Germany to be sharing as well, then conceding that he knows Teufelsdröckh personally, but that even this relationship does not explain the curiosities of the book's philosophy. The Editor remarks that he has sent requests back to Teufelsdröckh's office in Germany for more biographical information hoping for further explanation, and the remainder of Book One contains summaries of Teufelsdröckh's book, including translated quotations, accompanied by the Editor's many objections, many of them buttressed by quotations from Goethe and Shakespeare. The review becomes longer and longer due to the Editor's frustration at the philosophy, and his desire to expose its outrageous nature. At the final chapter of Book One, the Editor has received a reply from Teufelsdröckh's office in the form of several bags of paper scraps (rather esoterically organised according to the signs of the Latin Zodiac) on which are written autobiographical fragments.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Basic_Eight"title="The Basic Eight">
Flannery "Flan" Culp is a senior at Roewer High School in San Francisco. Over the course of the year, Flan records the events of her life in a diary - which, with some heavy editing by Flannery herself years after the fact, becomes the narrative. She and her seven close friends refer to themselves as "The Basic Eight". They are an exclusive clique, hosting the Grand Opera Breakfast Club, and regular dinner and garden parties. The story chronicles Flannery and her friends as they cope with the stresses of their final year of high school and Flannery's complicated love life. The story reaches a dark conclusion in which lives of the members of the Basic Eight are turned upside down by revealed secrets, horrifying self-discoveries, and murder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_This_August"title="Not This August">
By 1965, the United States and Canada have been at war with the Soviet Union and Chinese People's Republic for three years. Both sides' atomic weapons are ineffective as surface-to-air missiles shoot down any bombers or guided missiles, so ground forces have done most of the fighting. The Communist nations—whose armies greatly outnumber the North Americans—conquered Western Europe, invaded South America, and are moving toward Texas. All American males are required to either perform agricultural work to feed the armed forces or be drafted into military, construction, or factory service. Food, electricity, and gasoline are rationed, only two CONELRAD stations broadcast on radio, and New York City is reportedly under martial law.Billy Justin, a 37-year-old commercial artist and Korean War veteran, is working as a dairy farmer in Chiunga County, New York when the radio announces that Soviet and Chinese forces have overrun the Canadian-American line at El Paso, Texas. The last American naval forces were destroyed three months earlier but the news had been kept secret. In New Mexico, the Communist armies capture the Los Alamos National Laboratory and destroy the incomplete "Yankee Doodle", a satellite capable of dropping hydrogen bombs from orbit that are impossible to shoot down.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Warlock_of_Firetop_Mountain"title="The Warlock of Firetop Mountain">
"The Warlock of Firetop Mountain" is a fantasy adventure scenario involving a quest for "an untold wealth of treasure" of a warlock in a dungeon.The player takes the role of an adventurer travelling to find the treasure of a powerful Warlock, hidden deep within Firetop Mountain. People from a nearby village advise that the treasure is stored in a chest with two locks, and that the keys are guarded by various creatures within the dungeons. The player must then navigate the dungeons beneath Firetop Mountain, battle monsters and attempt to locate the keys.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropic_of_Capricorn_(novel)"title="Tropic of Capricorn (novel)">
The novel covers Miller's growing inability and outright refusal to accommodate what he sees as America's hostile environment. It is autobiographical but not chronological, jumping between Miller's adolescent adventures in Brooklyn in the 1900s, recollections of his first love Una Gifford, a love affair with his nearly-30-year-old piano teacher when he was 15, his unhappy marriage to his first wife Beatrice, his years working at Western Union (called The Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company in the book) in Manhattan in the 1920s, and his fateful meeting with his second wife June (known in the book as Mara), whom he credits with changing his life and making him into a writer. "The Rosy Crucifixion" continues the story of June in greater detail, over the course of nearly 1,500 pages. It describes the process of Miller finding his voice as a writer, until eventually he sets off for Paris, where the activities depicted in "Tropic of Cancer" begin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Glas"title="Doctor Glas">
The novel is about Dr. Tyko Gabriel Glas who is a respected physician in Stockholm. The story is told in the form of a diary and follows Doctor Glas as he struggles with depression. The antagonist is Reverend Gregorius, a morally corrupt clergyman. Gregorius' beautiful young wife confides in Dr. Glas that her sex life is making her miserable and asks for his help. Glas falls in love with her and agrees to help even though she already has another lover. He attempts to intervene, but the Reverend refuses to give up his "marital rights" — she must have sex with him whether she likes it or not. So, in order to make his love happy, he begins to plot her husband's murder. The novel also deals with issues such as abortion, women's rights, suicide, euthanasia, and eugenics. Not surprisingly, the book triggered a violent campaign against its author who was subsequently vilified in Swedish literary circles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_in_His_Labyrinth"title="The General in His Labyrinth">
The novel is written in the third-person with flashbacks to specific events in the life of Simón Bolívar, "the General". It begins on May 8, 1830 in Santa Fe de Bogotá. The General is preparing for his journey towards the port of Cartagena de Indias, intending to leave Colombia for Europe. Following his resignation as President of Gran Colombia, the people of the lands he liberated have now turned against him, scrawling anti-Bolívar graffiti and throwing waste at him. The General is anxious to move on, but has to remind the Vice-President-elect, General Domingo Caycedo, that he has yet to receive a valid passport to leave the country. The General leaves Bogotá with the few officials still faithful to him, including his confidante and aide-de-camp, José Palacios. At the end of the first chapter, the General is referred to by his full title, General Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios, for the only time in the novel.On the first night of the voyage, the General stays at Facatativá with his entourage, which consists of José Palacios, five aides-de-camp, his clerks, and his dogs. Here, as throughout the journey that follows, the General's loss of prestige is evident; the downturn in his fortunes surprises even the General himself. His unidentified illness has led to his physical deterioration, which makes him unrecognizable, and his aide-de-camp is constantly mistaken for the Liberator.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birdsong_(novel)"title="Birdsong (novel)">
"Birdsong" has an episodic structure, and is split into seven sections which move between three different periods of time before, during and after the war in the Stephen Wraysford plot, and three different windows of time in the 1970s Benson plot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Little_Princess"title="A Little Princess">
Captain Ralph Crewe, a wealthy English widower, has been raising his only child, Sara, in India where he is stationed with the British Army. Because the Indian climate is considered too harsh for their children, British families living there traditionally send their children to boarding school back home in England. The Captain enrolls his seven-year-old daughter at Miss Minchin's boarding school for girls in London and dotes on his daughter so much that he orders and pays the headmistress for special treatment and exceptional luxuries for Sara, such as a private room for her with a personal maid and a separate sitting room (see Parlour boarder), along with Sara's own private carriage and a pony. Miss Minchin openly fawns over Sara for her money, but is secretly bitter toward her for her wealth.In spite of said wealth, Sara is not self-centered, rude, or snobbish, but kind, generous, and compassionate. She extends her friendship to Ermengarde St. John, the school dunce; to Lottie, a four-year-old pupil given to tantrums; and to Becky, the lowly, stunted scullery maid. When Sara acquires the epithet "princess", she embraces its favorable elements in her natural kindheartedness.After some time, Sara's eleventh birthday is celebrated at Miss Minchin's with a lavish party, attended by all her friends and classmates. Just as it ends, Miss Minchin learns of Captain Crewe's unfortunate demise due to jungle fever. Furthermore, prior to his death, the previously wealthy captain had lost his entire fortune; a close friend from his schoolboy days had persuaded him to cash in his investments and deposit the proceeds to develop a network of diamond mines. The scheme fails, and the preteen Sara is left an orphan and a pauper, with no other family and nowhere to go. Miss Minchin is left with a sizable unpaid bill for Sara's school fees and luxuries, including her birthday party. Infuriated and pitiless, she takes away all of Sara's possessions (except for some old frocks and her doll, Emily), makes her live in a cold and poorly furnished attic, and forces her to earn her keep by working as a servant. She also forces Sara to wear frocks much too short for her, with her thin legs peeking out of the brief skirts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_History_of_the_Kelly_Gang"title="True History of the Kelly Gang">
Ned Kelly begins his autobiography with a description of his father, John "Red" Kelly, an Irishman transported to Van Diemen's Land and eventually settling in the colony of Victoria, Australia. After marrying Ned's mother Ellen (née Quinn), the Kellys settle in Avenel, a rural area northeast of Melbourne. Red Kelly is shown to have numerous brushes with the colonial police forces, resulting in his imprisonment and death when his son Ned was twelve years of age.After the rest of the family resettles in northeast Victoria under the Land Grant Act, Ned's mother attempts to provide for her children by running a shebeen and taking on a series of lovers, including the notorious bushranger Harry Power. Power agrees to take on the young Ned as an apprentice, and provides Ned with knowledge of the land, hideouts, and strategies for bushranging. Kelly eventually leaves Power and returns to his family's settlement, where he is shown making dogged attempts to live an honest lifestyle.Kelly is arrested and sentenced to three years in prison for the reception of a stolen horse (although Kelly claims that a friend, "Wild" Wright, knowingly sold him the stolen horse without Kelly's knowledge – Kelly later exacts revenge on Wright in a bare-knuckle boxing match). After two years of working as a sawmill hand, he is drawn back to bushranging when a herd of his horses is appropriated by a rival squatter. His descent back into crime is precipitated by a visit from a local police officer, Constable Alex Fitzpatrick. The policeman woos Ned's younger sister, Kate, prompting Ned to reveal that Fitzpatrick has multiple mistresses in other towns and has no intention of marrying Kate. After his mother Ellen threatens the constable with violence, Fitzpatrick pulls his revolver on the family and Ned shoots him in the hand in self-defense. Although he dresses the wound and Fitzpatrick leaves while promising that no action will be taken, warrants for the arrest of Ned and his younger brother Dan are issued the next day.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Noise_(novel)"title="White Noise (novel)">
Set in the bucolic college town Blacksmith, "White Noise" follows a year in the life of Jack Gladney, a professor at the College-on-the-Hill who has made his name by pioneering the field of Hitler studies (though he has not taken German lessons until this year). He has been married five times to four women and rears a brood of children and stepchildren (Heinrich, Denise, Steffie, Wilder) with his current wife, Babette. Jack and Babette are both extremely afraid of death; they frequently wonder which of them will be the first to die. The first part of "White Noise", called "Waves and Radiation," is a chronicle of contemporary family life combined with academic satire.There is little plot development in this first section, which mainly serves as an introduction to the characters and themes which dominate the rest of the book. For instance, the mysterious deaths of men in "Mylex" (intended to suggest "Mylar") suits and the ashen, shaken survivors of a plane that went into free fall anticipate the catastrophe of the book's second part. "Waves and Radiation" also introduces Murray Jay Siskind, Jack's friend and fellow college professor, who discusses theories about death, supermarkets, media, "psychic data," and other facets of contemporary American culture. Jack and Murray visit the most photographed barn in the world, discussing how its notoriety renders truly seeing the barn an impossibility, and later present an impromptu joint lecture juxtaposing the lives of Hitler and Elvis Presley.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomised"title="Atomised">
Despite the essentially elaborate scope of the plot revealed in the novel's conclusion, the narrative focuses almost exclusively on the bleak and unrewarding day-to-day lives of the protagonists, two half-brothers who barely know each other.They seem devoid of love, and in their loveless or soon-to-be loveless journeys, Bruno becomes a saddened loner, wrecked by his upbringing and failure to individuate, while Michel's pioneering work in cloning removes love from the process of reproduction. Humans are proved, in the end, to be just particles and just as bodies decay (a theme in the book) they can also be created from particles.The story unfolds as a sort of framed narrative, so despite the events described therein having taken place mostly in 1999, the story is essentially set some fifty or so years in the future. A similar device was used by Kurt Vonnegut in the novel "Galápagos"; however, unlike Vonnegut, Houellebecq only reveals the frame to the reader in the epilogue. Large sections of the story are presented in the form of suppertime storytelling dialogues between Michel, his childhood sweetheart Annabelle, Bruno, and Bruno's post-divorce girlfriend Christiane.The story focuses on the lives of Bruno Clément and Michel Djerzinski, two French half-brothers born of a hippie-type mother. Michel is raised by his paternal grandmother and becomes an introverted molecular biologist, who is ultimately responsible for the discoveries which lead to the elimination of sexual reproduction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warchild_(Lowachee_novel)"title="Warchild (Lowachee novel)">
The story starts when eight-year-old Joslyn Musey's parents die in a vicious pirate attack on his home ship, the merchant "Mukudori". Jos, along with a handful of the ships other children, are captured by the attackers. Vincenzo Marcus Falcone, an infamous pirate and captain of the "Genghis Khan", keeps Jos as his hostage, with the intention of making him a protégé. Falcone teaches Jos how to "win people over" with manners and cunning, and especially good looks.The human race, EarthHub, is at war with aliens called the striviirc-na, who are called "strits" by the Hub. When the pirate ship "Genghis Khan" docks at Chaos Station, which is located in deep space, the station is suddenly attacked by the striviiric-na. Jos escapes Falcone during the attack, but is shot, then captured and is taken to the alien homeworld, Aaian-na, by the Warboy, the leader of the human sympathizer movement on Aaian-na, Nikolas S'tlian. Jos gradually accepts his place on Aaian-na and the Warboy teaches him to be a Ka'redan, or "assassin-priest" which is the ruling caste on the planet.Jos is trained on Aaian-na until he is fourteen, when he is formally made a member of the Ka'redan. At that time, being told that the only way to end the war is through a treaty with EarthHub's most notorious spacecarrier, the "Macedon", he is assigned to spy on the ship as part of its elite crew. Jos is taught to act like an Earthhub human and sent back to Austo Station in the Hub to join the Macedon. Once on the Macedon, however, he discovers that his previous distinctions between good and bad no longer apply.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_Wander_Boy"title="Lucky Wander Boy">
The story involves Adam Pennyman and his obsession with and attempts to catalog video games into a book called "The Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments". He is particularly obsessed with the fictional Japanese arcade game "Lucky Wander Boy".While the "Lucky Wander Boy" game is fictional, many actual classic arcade and home video games are mentioned in the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Country"title="Snow Country">
"Snow Country" is a stark tale of a love affair between a Tokyo dilettante and a provincial geisha that takes place in the remote hot spring ("onsen") town of Yuzawa. (Kawabata did not mention the name of the town in his novel.)The novel opens with the protagonist of the novel, Shimamura, riding a train to a remote onsen town. Shimamura is a rich, married man, who inherited his wealth, and a self-professed ballet expert. During the train ride, he observes a young woman (who is later revealed as Yoko) caring for a sickly man (named Yukio). He observes the woman through a reflection in the train window, and is particularly enthralled by her eyes, as well as the sound of her voice.Shimamura's purpose for going to the onsen is meeting a young woman, Komako, with whom he had a brief encounter during his previous stay. Although she wasn't employed as a geisha during his first stay, her situation is changed during his second visit. Shimamura is attracted to the young geisha, although his affection proves to be inconsistent and uncertain over time. However, Komako falls in love with Shimamura, which goes against the geisha tradition of meeting the customers demands without any emotional attachment. Throughout their conversations, a number of things about Komako's life is revealed: her becoming a geisha to pay for Yukio's hospital bills, their rumored engagement, Komako and Yukio's strained relationship, how she came to live with Yukio and his mother, and her life as a full-time geisha.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Valley_of_Fear"title="The Valley of Fear">
Sherlock Holmes receives a cipher message from Fred Porlock, a pseudonymous agent of Professor Moriarty. After Porlock sends the message, however, he changes his mind for fear of Moriarty's discovering that he is a traitor. He decides not to send the key to the cipher, but he sends Holmes a note telling of this decision. From the cipher message and the second note, Holmes is able to deduce that it is a book cipher and that the book used for the encryption is a common book, large (with at least 534 pages), printed in two columns per page, and standardised. An almanac fits these conditions exactly.Holmes tries the latest edition of "Whitaker's Almanac", which he had only received a few days earlier, and fails; he then tries the previous edition. With this almanac, Holmes is able to decipher the message as a warning of a nefarious plot against one Douglas, a country gentleman residing at Birlstone House. Some minutes later, Inspector MacDonald arrives at 221B Baker Street with news that a Mr. John Douglas of Birlstone Manor House, Birlstone, Sussex, has been murdered. Holmes tells MacDonald of Porlock's warning, suggesting Moriarty's involvement. However, MacDonald does not fully believe that the educated and well-respected Moriarty is a criminal. Holmes, Watson, and MacDonald travel to Birlstone House, an ancient moated manor house, to investigate the crime.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_Mortem"title="Past Mortem">
When Adam Bishop, a middle-aged self-made man in the building trade, is cruelly murdered at his London home, Detective Inspector Ed Newson has a hunch that the crime has been committed by a psychopath who has killed before. He links up the new case with a number of older, unsolved ones, and a certain pattern emerges: It turns out that each victim was a bully many years ago when they went to school, and that they have now been killed in exactly the same way as they used to torture their peers. However, when Newson and Sergeant Natasha Wilkie talk to the former victims they soon find out that none of them could be the serial killer.Although successful in his job, when it comes to his private life Edward Newson is a lonely, sex-starved man secretly in love with his assistant, Natasha. Now in his mid-thirties, he nostalgically looks back at his school days and the two girls with whom he was romantically involved when they were all 14—Helen Smart, the leftist intellectual, and Christine Copperfield, the "golden girl". Newson cannot resist the temptation and logs on to Friends Reunited. To his surprise, more of his former classmates than he would have thought are also online, and soon a class reunion is being organised—by Christine Copperfield, of all people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Quiet_Flows_the_Don"title="And Quiet Flows the Don">
The novel deals with the life of the Cossacks living in the Don River valley during the early 20th century, starting around 1912, just prior to World War I. The plot revolves around the Melekhov family of Tatarsk, who are descendants of a Cossack who, to the horror of many, took a Turkish captive as a wife during the Crimean War. She is accused of witchcraft by Melekhov's superstitious neighbors, who attempt to kill her but are fought off by her husband. Their descendants, the son and grandsons, who are the protagonists of the story, are therefore often nicknamed "Turks". Nevertheless, they command a high level of respect among people in Tatarsk.The second eldest son, Grigory Panteleevich Melekhov, is a promising young soldier who falls in love with Aksinia, the wife of Stepan Astakhov, a family friend. Stepan regularly beats her and there is no love between them. Grigory and Aksinia's romance and elopement raise a feud between her husband and his family. The outcome of this romance is the focus of the plot as well as the impending World and Civil Wars which draw the best young Cossack men into what will be two of Russia's bloodiest wars. The action moves to the Austro-Hungarian front, where Grigory ends up saving Stepan's life, but that doesn't end the feud. Grigory, at his father's insistence, takes a wife, Natalya, but still loves Aksinia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Days_of_the_Condor"title="Six Days of the Condor">
Ronald Malcolm is a CIA employee who works in a clandestine operations office in Washington, D.C. responsible for analyzing the plots of mystery and spy novels. One day, when he should be in the office, Malcolm slips out a basement entrance for lunch. In his absence a group of armed men gain entrance to the office and kill everyone there. Malcolm returns, realizes he is in grave danger, and telephones a phone number at CIA headquarters he has been given for emergencies.When he phones in (and remembers to give his code name "Condor"), he is told to meet an agent named Weatherby who will "bring him in" for protection. However, Weatherby is part of a rogue group within the CIA, the same group responsible for the original assassinations. Weatherby tries to kill Malcolm, who manages to escape. On the run, Malcolm uses his wits to elude both the rogue CIA group and the proper CIA authorities, both of which have a vested interest in his capture or death.Seeking shelter, Malcolm kidnaps a paralegal named Wendy Ross whom he overhears saying she will spend her coming vacation days holed up in her apartment. Knowing no one will notice her absence, Malcolm enlists her aid in finding out more about the forces after him. She is shot and seriously wounded in the process, but survives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirlwind_(novel)"title="Whirlwind (novel)">
Gavallan, based in Scotland, runs S-G Helicopter company operating in Iran during the Shah's reign. When Khomeini comes to power, Gavallan must get his pilots and their families, and his valuable helicopters, and the spare parts for the helicopters (of equal or greater value than the aircraft) out of the riot-torn country. Complicating matters is his power struggle with his company's secret owner, the Noble House of Hong Kong. The pilots' escape efforts form the basic story and the action sweeps across many lives: lovers, spies, fanatics, revolutionaries, friends and betrayers. British, Finnish, American, Canadian, Australian and Iranian are all caught up in a deadly religious and political upheaval, portraying the chilling and bewildering encounters when Westernized lifestyle clashes with harsh ancient traditions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Park"title="Dream Park">
Most Games are reruns, with team after team of players attempting to complete the pre-packaged adventure. But someone always has to be first – and every player wants to be part of the initial team that beta tests a Game. To have the author/programmer themself serve as the game master, to face surprises no one has seen, even the most jaded of elite players compete fiercely for such a spot.And "South Seas Treasure Hunt" promises to be a doozy. The Game Master, Richard Lopez is one of the best authors in the business, while Chester Henderson (team captain of the players) is a living legend . . .and the two hate each other. Players from around the world have gathered for a chance to play in the biggest grudge match in Gaming history . . .or even just to watch.And the Game opens with a bang. Sent to (simulated) Melanesia to retrieve some sort of World War II-era superweapon, dark magic rips Henderson's team out of the sky, forcing them to fight their way across New Guinea. Demigods, Cargo Cult magicians, and an army of laughing zombies stand between them and victory.But even as Henderson's team hacks their way through the jungle, the real world threatens the Game. A multi-million dollar experimental prototype has been stolen from Dream Park R&amp;D, and a guard murdered. And all the evidence suggests that someone from within the game is responsible.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magician_(Maugham_novel)"title="The Magician (Maugham novel)">
Arthur Burdon, a renowned English surgeon, is visiting Paris to see his fiancée, Margaret Dauncey. Margaret is studying art in a Parisian school, along with her friend Susie Boyd. On his first evening in Paris, Burdon meets Oliver Haddo, who claims to be a magician and is an acquaintance of Burdon's mentor, the retired doctor and occult scholar Dr. Porhoët. While none of the company initially believe Haddo's claims, Haddo performs several feats of magic for them over the following days. Arthur eventually fights with Haddo, after the magician kicks Margaret's dog.In revenge, Haddo uses both his personality and his magic to seduce Margaret, despite her initial revulsion towards him. They get married and run away from Paris, leaving merely a note to inform Arthur, Susie and Porhoët. Arthur is distraught at the abandonment and promptly returns to England to immerse himself in his work. By this time Susie has fallen in love with Arthur, although she realises that this love will never be returned, and she goes away to Italy with a friend.During her travels, Susie hears much about the new Mr. and Mrs. Haddo, including a rumour that their marriage has not been consummated. When she eventually returns to England, she meets up with Arthur and they go to a dinner party held by a mutual acquaintance. To their horror, the Haddos are at this dinner party, and Oliver takes great delight in gloating at Arthur's distress.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silas_Marner"title="Silas Marner">
The novel is set in the early years of the 19th century. Silas Marner, a weaver, is a member of a small Calvinist congregation in Lantern Yard, a slum street in Northern England. He is falsely accused of stealing the congregation's funds while watching over the very ill deacon. Two pieces of evidence implicate Silas: a pocket knife, and the discovery in his own house of the bag formerly containing the money. There is the strong suggestion that Silas' best friend, William Dane, has framed him, since Silas had lent his pocket knife to William shortly before the crime was committed. Lots are drawn in the belief – also shared by Silas – that God will direct the process and establish the truth, but they indicate that Silas is guilty. The woman Silas was to marry breaks their engagement and marries William instead. With his life shattered, his trust in God lost, and his heart broken, Silas leaves Lantern Yard and the city for a rural area where he is unknown.Silas travels south to the Midlands and settles near the rural village of Raveloe in Warwickshire where he lives isolated and alone, choosing to have only minimal contact with the residents beyond his work as a linen weaver. He devotes himself wholeheartedly to his craft and comes to adore the gold coins he earns and hoards from his weaving.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alias_Grace"title="Alias Grace">
Grace Marks, the convicted murderess, has been hired out from prison to serve as a domestic servant in the home of the Governor of the penitentiary. A Committee of gentlemen and ladies from the Methodist church, led by the minister, hopes to have her pardoned and released. Grace cannot remember what happened on the day of the murders, and she exhibits symptoms of hysteria, so the minister hires Dr. Simon Jordan, a psychiatrist, to interview her, hoping he will find her to be a hysteric, and not a criminal. An arrangement is made so that Jordan will interview Grace during afternoons in the sewing room in the governor's mansion.Jordan tries to lead Grace into talking about her dreams and her memories, but she evades his suggestions, so he asks her to start at the beginning, and she proceeds to tell him the story of her life. Grace tells of early childhood in Ireland where her father was often drunk and her mother often pregnant and Grace had to take care of the younger children. She tells the doctor details of the filthy crowded conditions in the hold of the ship where her mother sickened and died. In Canada, because her father continued to spend his earnings on alcohol, she and the children nearly starved and with her mother gone, Grace's father began abusing her and even at one point attempted to rape her. Jordan listens but is impatient, viewing her early privations and abuse as irrelevant to the case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_Bette"title="Cousin Bette">
The first third of the novel provides a lengthy exploration of the characters' histories. Balzac makes this clear after 150 pages: "Ici se termine, en quelque sorte, l'introduction de cette histoire." ("Here ends what is, in a way, the introduction to this story.") At the start of the novel, Adeline Hulot – wife of the successful Baron Hector Hulot – is being pressured into an affair by a wealthy perfumer named Célestin Crevel. His desire stems in part from an earlier contest in which the adulterous Baron Hulot had won the attentions of the singer Josépha Mirah, also favored by Crevel. Mme. Hulot rejects Crevel's advances. The Baron has so completely lavished money on Josépha that he has borrowed heavily from his Uncle Johann – and, unable to repay the money, the Baron instead arranges a War Department post in Algeria for Johann, with instructions that Johann will be in a situation in that job to embezzle the borrowed money. The Hulots' daughter, Hortense, has begun searching for a husband; their son Victorin is married to Crevel's daughter Celestine.Mme. Hulot's cousin, Bette (also called Lisbeth), harbors a deep but hidden resentment of her relatives' success, especially of Hortense 'stealing' Bette's intended sweetheart. A peasant woman with none of the physical beauty of her cousin, Bette has rejected a series of marriage proposals from middle-class suitors who were clearly motivated by her connection to the Hulots, and remains unmarried at the age of 42. One day she comes upon a young unsuccessful Polish sculptor named Wenceslas Steinbock, attempting suicide in the tiny apartment upstairs from her own. As she nourishes him back to health, she develops a maternal (and romantic) fondness for him. At the beginning of the story Bette is living in a modest apartment in a lodging house shared by the Marneffe couple, both of whom are ambitious and amoral. Bette befriends Valérie, the young and very attractive wife of a War Department clerk, Fortin Marneffe; the two women form a bond to attain their separate goals – for Valérie the acquisition of money and valuables, for Bette the ruination of the Hulot household by means of Valérie's luring both the Baron and Steinbock into infidelity and financial ruin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Charlotte_Simmons"title="I Am Charlotte Simmons">
"I Am Charlotte Simmons" is the story of college student Charlotte Simmons's first semester-and-a-half at the prestigious Dupont University. A high school graduate from a poverty-stricken rural town, her intelligence and hard work at school have been rewarded with a full scholarship to Dupont.As Charlotte prepares to say goodbye to her family and leave for college, an event happens at Dupont that will play an important role in her future. Hoyt Thorpe, member of the exclusive and powerful fraternity Saint Ray, and fellow frat brother Vance, stumble upon an unnamed California Republican governor (who was at the college to speak at the school's commencement ceremony) receiving oral sex from a female college student. When the governor's bodyguard spots the two fraternity members, a fight ensues with Hoyt and Vance beating up the bodyguard and fleeing. The story of the night soon spreads across campus, increasing Hoyt's popularity.Charlotte arrives at Dupont in the fall. Her roommate is wealthy Beverly, the daughter of the CEO of a huge multinational insurance company. She is obsessed with sex, in particular with members of the school's lacrosse team.Jojo Johanssen is a white athlete on the college's predominantly black basketball team. He is struggling to keep his position because the school recently recruited an up-and-coming black freshman player, and the coach wants to bench Jojo in his senior year. This would severely hurt Jojo's chances of playing in "the league" (the NBA).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Natural"title="The Natural">
Nineteen-year-old Roy Hobbs is traveling by train to Chicago with his manager Sam to try out for the Chicago Cubs. Other passengers include sportswriter Max Mercy, Walter "The Whammer" Whambold, the leading hitter in the American League and three-time American League Most Valuable Player (based on Babe Ruth), and Harriet Bird, a beautiful but mysterious woman. The train makes a quick stop at a carnival along the rail where The Whammer challenges Hobbs to strike him out. Hobbs does just that, much to everyone's surprise and The Whammer's humiliation. Back on the train Harriet Bird strikes up a conversation with Hobbs, who never suspects that Bird has any ulterior motive. In fact, she is a lunatic obsessed with shooting the best baseball player. Her intended target was Whammer, but after Hobbs struck him out, her attention shifts to Hobbs.In Chicago, Hobbs checks into his hotel and promptly receives a call from Bird, who is also staying there. When he goes down to her room, she shoots him in the stomach.The novel picks up 16 years later in the dugout of the New York Knights, a fictional National League baseball team. The team has been on an extended losing streak, and manager Pop Fisher's and assistant manager Red Blow's careers appear to be winding to an ignominious end. During one losing game, Roy Hobbs emerges from the clubhouse tunnel and announces that he is the team's new right fielder, having just been signed by Knights co-owner Judge Banner. Both Pop and Red take Hobbs under their wing, and Red later tells Hobbs about Fisher's plight as manager of the Knights. The Judge wants to take over Pop's share in the team but cannot do that until the current season ends and provided the Knights fail to win the National League pennant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_Time_(novel)"title="Story Time (novel)">
When the school district of Whittaker Magnet School expands to cover Kate and George's duplex, they are forced to go to the frightening school, which is suspected to house a demon. But when the First Lady comes to visit the school, the vengeful demon causes more deaths and accidents. It's up to Kate and George to stop them. The cast of characters includes the spoiled Swiss milkmaid incarnation Heidi, her doting mother Cornelia, her brother Whit, Kate's not-so-secret unwanted admirer, who touches Kate inappropriately, and Pogo, a librarian who can only speak in nursery rhymes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Patchwork_Planet"title="A Patchwork Planet">
The novel is narrated by 30-year-old Barnaby, whose life has gone off the rails since he was caught robbing neighborhood homes as an adolescent. To the despair of his distant father, his social climbing mother, his chilly ex-wife and his prematurely patriarchal brother, Barnaby now works for a company called Rent-a-Back, doing odd jobs for elderly clients.He also waits, without much hope, for a visitation from the Gaitlin angel, who first suggested to Barnaby's great-grandfather the invention of the wooden dress form that made the Gaitlins rich. He finds his angel but perhaps not where he expects. He believes his angel was 36-year-old Sophia Maynard.Barnaby first sees Sophia on the train, while he is going to see his 9 year old daughter in Philadelphia, and Sophia is going to visit her mother. While he is in Philadelphia, his ex-wife told him he was not allowed to see their daughter anymore. The next week, he went back. Sophia was on the train again, and he is able to tell her about his job at Rent-a-Back, and she tells him about her job at the bank. They also discuss Opal, Barnaby's daughter, and Sophia agrees he should see her, and that Opal would want to continue to see her daddy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramids_of_Mars"title="Pyramids of Mars">
In 1911 Egypt, archaeology professor Marcus Scarman excavates a pyramid and finds the door to the burial chamber is inscribed with the Eye of Horus. His Egyptian assistants flee in fear as he enters the chamber alone and is hit by a beam of green light. The Fourth Doctor, intending to land in UNIT's base, ends up in the sealed wing of an English estate after the TARDIS was forced out of its flight path and Sarah Jane Smith sees an apparition of a Typhonian Animal in the console room. The two are found by the butler, who reveals they are in the Scarman estate, an old priory, which has been taken over by a mysterious Egyptian named Ibrahim Namin claiming to represent Scarman. Scarman's friend Dr Warlock has also arrived at the priory to demand an explanation from Namin on Scarman's whereabouts. When Namin threatens Warlock with a revolver, the Doctor and Sarah barely manage to prevent his murder, although Warlock is severely wounded. The three escape the estate, with Namin and a robot dressed like an Egyptian mummy in pursuit. The trio reach a hunting lodge used by Scarman's brother Laurence, whose marconiscope intercepted a signal from Mars. The Doctor decodes the signal as "Beware Sutekh", explaining to Sarah Jane that Sutekh is the last of a powerful alien race called the Osirans, his imprisonment by his brother Horus being the inspiration for ancient Egyptian mythology.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lives_of_the_Mayfair_Witches"title="Lives of the Mayfair Witches">
Dr. Rowan Mayfair is a gifted neurosurgeon in San Francisco, California. When her estranged birth mother Deirdre Mayfair dies in New Orleans, she begins to learn about the old Southern family to which she belongs. Michael Curry is a contractor who specializes in the restoration of old homes while dreaming of his childhood in New Orleans and yearning to return there. Rowan gradually realizes that she has the psychic power to either save or take lives. Michael drowns but she revives him, the near-death experience triggering a new and unwanted clairvoyant ability within him. Michael and Rowan fall in love, and when he decides to return to New Orleans, she follows him to learn the secrets of her past.Aaron Lightner, a psychic scholar and member of the Talamasca, has studied the Mayfairs from afar for decades. The matriarchal family—known to the Talamasca as the "Mayfair Witches"—have a long and sordid history. Among the supernatural events surrounding them is a mysterious man, seen by Michael in his childhood and by other members of the family over time. Michael is revealed to be a Mayfair cousin, he and Rowan sharing lines of descent from the male witch Julien Mayfair. Rowan and Michael marry and conceive a child. As the designee of the Mayfair legacy, Rowan assumes control of the family's affairs. Soon the mysterious man reveals himself to her: he is Lasher, a spirit with wicked motives who has plagued the Mayfairs for centuries. His wish is to be made flesh so that he may walk the earth again in the permanent physical form of a human being, and he sets about slowly seducing Rowan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Empire"title="Naked Empire">
This book opens with Richard and Kahlan still in the Old World traveling back to the New World. A new character, Owen, pleads for Richard and Kahlan's help in freeing his people from the hands of the Imperial Order. They are set upon by a seemingly mysterious dust storm that holds the silhouette of a man. They are sent a warning letter by Nicci, but before they are able to finish reading the letter they are set upon by Imperial Order mercenaries. After learning that Richard has been poisoned by Owen, they must travel back deeper into the Old World to the Bandakar. They find an ancient boundary protecting the Bandakar Empire from outside invaders came down two years past and now the Imperial Order has occupied this nation of frail-minded people. Soon Richard and Kahlan learn of a new monster that was created by Jagang's Sisters of the Dark.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pillars_of_the_Earth"title="The Pillars of the Earth">
## Setting.The sinking of the "White Ship" leaves King Henry I of England without a clear heir. After he dies the Anarchy begins: his daughter, Maud, and his nephew, Stephen of Blois, fight for the throne. Ambitious nobles and churchmen take sides, hoping to gain advantages. The novel, which is divided into a prologue and six sections, explores themes of intrigue and conspiracy, against a background of historical events. It explores the development of medieval architecture, the civil war, secular/religious conflicts, and shifting political loyalties.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_of_the_Fold"title="Blood of the Fold">
Prior to the start of "Blood of the Fold," Richard comes to terms with his true identity as a War Wizard, a powerful wizard with both additive and subtractive magic. The New World, and all the freedom of humankind, is under threat from the Imperial Order after the barrier between the Old and New World was brought down. The Imperial Order has already sent delegations and armies into the New World. Richard's only option to stop the invasion is to claim his heritage and unite all free kingdoms and provinces under one rule and one command.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_the_Winds"title="Temple of the Winds">
Jagang, Emperor of the Imperial Order, has invoked a bound fork prophecy binding Richard and Kahlan to a fate of pain, betrayal, and a path to the Underworld. At Jagang's behest a Sister of the Dark gains access into the fabled Temple of the Winds and has unleashed a plague that sweeps across the lands like a firestorm consuming lives at an alarming rate. To stop the plague Richard and Kahlan are forced to sacrifice everything they have between them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_of_the_Fire"title="Soul of the Fire">
Richard and Kahlan are finally married and are enjoying their wedding night back in the Spirit house in the Village of the Mud People. Soon, sudden and unexplainable deaths begin to occur, and Richard comes to the conclusion that when Kahlan called forth "the chimes" in order to save him, they remained free, causing havoc. Zedd sends Richard and Kahlan off to the Wizard's Keep in Aydindril to get a special bottle that contains a spell that will stop the threat.While en route, Richard, Kahlan, and their Mord-Sith protector Cara are sidetracked into dealing with the people of Anderith, who have a powerful weapon of mass destruction called the Dominie Dirtch. They find that the leadership of Anderith wishes to surrender to the Imperial Order rather than surrender to the D'Haran Empire. As Richard tries his best to convince the people of Anderith of the danger the Imperial Order poses, he becomes firmly convinced that the chimes are loose.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Spirits"title="The House of the Spirits">
The story starts with the del Valle family, focusing upon the youngest and the oldest daughters of the family, Clara and Rosa. The youngest daughter, Clara del Valle, has paranormal powers and keeps a detailed diary of her life. Using her powers, Clara predicts that an accidental death will occur in the family. Shortly after this, Clara's sister, Rosa the Beautiful, is killed by poison intended for her father who is running for the Senate. Clara is shocked into muteness after witnessing the autopsy performed on her sister's body. Rosa's fiancé, a poor miner named Esteban Trueba, is devastated and attempts to mend his broken heart by devoting his life to restoring his family hacienda, Las Tres Marías, which has fallen into poverty and disrepair. He sends money to his spinster sister who takes care of their arthritic mother in town. Through a combination of intimidation and reward, he enforces respect and labor from the fearful peasants and turns Tres Marías into a "model hacienda". He turns the first peasant who spoke to him upon arrival, Pedro Segundo, into his foreman, who quickly becomes the closest thing that Trueba ever has to an actual friend during his life. He rapes many of the peasant women and children, and his first victim, then 15 year old Pancha García, becomes the mother of his bastard son, Esteban García. Throughout the novel, he visits Transito Soto, a prostitute. With Esteban's help, she becomes a wildly successful brothel madam in the city and always is willing to repay the favor to him. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirette_on_the_High_Wire"title="Mirette on the High Wire">
Mirette lives in a boarding house in France. One day her life is changed by a man named Bellini, a famous tightrope walker, who teaches Mirette how to walk on a tightrope.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_People_You_Meet_in_Heaven"title="The Five People You Meet in Heaven">
On his 83rd birthday, amusement park ride mechanic Eddie is killed in an accident when a ride breaks down. During the accident, he makes a desperate attempt to save a little girl's life.Eddie arrives in Heaven, where he meets "the Blue Man." The Blue Man explains that Eddie is about to journey through Heaven's five levels, meeting someone who has had a significant impact upon his life or someone on whom his life had a significant impact. Eddie asks why the Blue Man is his first person, and he informs Eddie that, when Eddie was very young, he caused the car accident that killed him. From this, Eddie learns his first lesson: there are no random events in life and all individuals and experiences are connected in some way.Eddie meets his former captain from the army, who reminds Eddie of their time together as prisoners of war in a forced labor camp in the Philippines. Their group burned the camp during their escape and Eddie, while running away, remembers seeing a shadow move in one of the huts. The Captain confesses that he shot Eddie in the leg to prevent Eddie from chasing the shadow into the fire. This saved Eddie's life despite leaving him with a lifelong severe limp. Eddie then learns how the Captain died: he stepped on a land mine that would have killed all the men had he not set it off.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shantaram_(novel)"title="Shantaram (novel)">
In 1978, Roberts was sentenced to a 19-year imprisonment in Australia after being convicted of a series of armed robberies of building society branches, credit unions, and shops. In July 1980, he escaped from Victoria's Pentridge Prison in broad daylight, thereby becoming one of Australia's most wanted men for the next ten years.The protagonist Lindsay (according to the book, Roberts' fake name) arrives in Bombay carrying a false passport in the name of Lindsay Ford. Mumbai was supposed to be only a stopover on a journey that was to take him from New Zealand to Germany, but he decides to stay in the city. Lindsay soon meets a local man named Prabhakar whom he hires as a guide. Prabhakar soon becomes his friend and names him Lin (Linbaba). Both men visit Prabhakar's native village, Sunder, where Prabhakar's mother decided to give Lin a new Maharashtrian name, like her own. Because she judged his nature to be blessed with peaceful happiness, she decided to call him "Shantaram", meaning "Man of God's Peace". On their way back to Mumbai, Lin and Prabhakar are robbed. With all his possessions gone, Lin is forced to live in the slums, which shelters him from the authorities. After a massive fire on the day of his arrival in the slum, he sets up a free health clinic as a way to contribute to the community. He learns about the local culture and customs in this crammed environment, gets to know and love the people he encounters, and even becomes fluent in Marathi, the local language. He also witnesses and battles outbreaks of cholera and firestorms, becomes involved in trading with the lepers, and experiences how ethnic and marital conflicts are resolved in this densely crowded and diverse community.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Rat_(Clavell_novel)"title="King Rat (Clavell novel)">
The novel opens in early 1945. Peter Marlowe, a young British RAF Flight Lieutenant, has been a P.O.W. since 1942. Marlowe comes to the attention of the "King" - an American corporal who has become the most successful trader and black marketeer in Changi - when King sees him conversing in Malay. Marlowe's languages, intelligence, honesty, and winning personality cause King to befriend him and attempt to involve him in black market deals, which bring Marlowe to the attention of Robin Grey, a British officer and Provost Marshal of the camp, who has developed a Javert-like obsession with King and hopes to arrest him for violating camp regulations. Grey is attempting to maintain military discipline among the prisoners and sees King as the antithesis of his beliefs. As the son of a working-class family, Grey follows the rules for their own sake, using his position as Provost Marshal to gain a status otherwise unavailable to him in British society.Despite being an enlisted man and undistinguished in civilian life, King has become a major power in the closed society of the P.O.W. camp through his charisma and intelligence. Trading with Korean guards, local Malay villagers, and other prisoners for food, clothing, information, and what few luxuries are available, King keeps himself and his fellow American prisoners alive. Senior officers come to him for help in selling their valuables to buy food, and other officers are secretly on his payroll. Marlowe is initially put off by King's perspective and behaviour, which clash with the British upper class ideals he has been taught. He turns down a lucrative business partnership with King because "Marlowes aren't tradesmen. It just isn't done, old boy". Marlowe soon understands that King is not the thief and con artist that Grey would have him believe. Rather, King asks for the best of each man and rewards him accordingly, irrespective of class or position.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Your_Scattered_Bodies_Go"title="To Your Scattered Bodies Go">
British adventurer Richard Francis Burton dies on Earth and is revived in mid-air in a vast dark room filled with human bodies, some only half-formed. There, he is confronted by men in a flying vehicle who then blast him with a weapon.He next awakes upon the shores of a mysterious river, naked and hairless. All around him are other people in a similar situation. Shortly after they awaken, a nearby structure, nicknamed a "grailstone," causes food and other supplies to appear in the "grails" bound to each individual. Burton quickly attracts a group of companions: the neanderthal Kazzintuitruaabemss (nicknamed Kazz), the science fiction author Peter Jairus Frigate, and Alice Liddell. Among these is the extraterrestrial Monat Grrautut, earlier part of a small group of beings from Tau Ceti who had arrived on Earth in the early 21st century. When one of their number was accidentally killed by humans, their spaceship automatically killed most of the people on Earth. Frigate and others alive at the time confirm Monat's story. Retreating into the nearby woods for safety, Burton's party chew gum provided by their grails, and discover that this gum is a powerful hallucinogen. As days and weeks pass, people's physical wants are provided for by the grails, which eventually produce a set of cloths used for clothing. Rumors reach Burton's region that the river continues seemingly forever. One night, Burton is visited by a mysterious cloaked figure, whom Burton dubs "The Mysterious Stranger", who explains that he is one of the beings who has constructed this world and resurrected humanity on its shores, and tells Burton to approach the headwaters of the river.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fabulous_Riverboat"title="The Fabulous Riverboat">
Twenty years after humanity was resurrected on Riverworld, Sam Clemens is traveling with the crew of a Viking longboat, captained by Eric Bloodaxe, who is notable for having an axe made of metal. On the metal-poor Riverworld, where even a few ounces of metal is a treasure, this is a rarity. Clemens and Bloodaxe have allied in order to find the source of this metal. Clemens is accompanied on his quest by a gigantic prehistoric hominid whom he has named Joe Miller. Miller, despite being very cordial, and talking with a lisp, is a fearsome warrior because of his size, and protects Clemens from Bloodaxe's crew. Clemens is also motivated in his quest by his desire to be reunited with his terrestrial wife, Livy.Unknown to the others, Clemens had been contacted by a mysterious being whom he named X. X claimed to be a member of the beings who were responsible for resurrection, although he disagreed with their goals. He was aware of Clemens's desire to build a metal riverboat, and assured the author that the metal needed to realise this dream could be found upriver. X manages to send a nickel-iron meteorite crashing into Riverwold, not far from Clemens. Clemens and his crew manage to survive the resulting tidal wave that kills nearly everyone in the vicinity. Sadly, Clemens discovers Livy is one of the dead when her body washes up on deck. She had been in the area but will now be resurrected thousands of miles from him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Design"title="The Dark Design">
The plot, set 30 years after humanity's resurrection, consists of three distinct plot lines, which come together towards the conclusion.In the first plot line, Richard Burton and his friends continue their journey up river. On their journey they encounter a group of ancient Egyptians who tell them of a mission which their Pharaoh had undertaken to reach the source of the River. Accompanied by the Titanthrop Joe Miller, who they believed to be an avatar of Thoth, they scaled the mountains at the River's headwaters and descended into a polar sea, with a large black tower in the center. On the shores they found a cave with supplies and boat. One of their number died there, bringing the story back to the Valley. Burton also discovers that his group has been infiltrated by traitors. Through hypnosis, the Neanderthal Kaz identifies Monat and Pete Frigate as agents of the alien creators of the Riverworld. When Burton goes to confront them he discovers that they have disappeared.The second plot line deals with the real Peter Jairus Frigate, who is unaware that someone has been impersonating him (actually his deceased brother who died in infancy). One day, a ship docks near his home and Frigate recognizes its captains as two of his childhood heroes, Tom Mix and Jack London. He signs on to the crew, joining the Sufi mystic Nur-ed-Din and the African warrior Umslopogas. For years he travels with them without revealing that he knows Mix and London's identities. When he finally confronts the men, they reveal that they had been recruited by the Mysterious Stranger to find the source of the River. Eventually they come upon the metal rich nation of New Bohemia and Frigate suggests they build a balloon to reach the pole faster. However, soon after launch their balloon is destroyed after an encounter with another airship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winter_of_Our_Discontent"title="The Winter of Our Discontent">
The story mainly concerns Ethan Allen Hawley of New Baytown, New York, a former member of Long Island's aristocratic class. Ethan's late father lost the family fortune, and thus Ethan works as a grocery store clerk in the store his family once owned. His wife Mary and their children resent their mediocre social and economic status, and do not value the honesty and integrity that Ethan struggles to maintain amidst a corrupt society. These external factors and his own psychological turmoil lead Ethan to try to overcome his inherent integrity in order to reclaim his former status and wealth.Ethan's decision to gain wealth and power is influenced by criticisms and advice from people he knows. His acquaintance Margie urges him to accept bribes; the bank manager (whose ancestors Ethan blames for his family's misfortunes) urges him to be more ruthless. Ethan's friend Joey, a bank teller, even gives Ethan a lesson on how to rob a bank and get away with it.On discovering that the current store owner, Italian immigrant Alfio Marullo, may be an illegal immigrant, Ethan makes an anonymous tip to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. After Marullo is taken into custody, he transfers ownership of the store to Ethan through the actions of the very government agent that caught him. Marullo gives Ethan the store because he believes Ethan is honest and deserving. Ethan also considers, plans, and mentally rehearses a bank robbery, failing to perform it only because of external circumstances. Eventually, he manages to become powerful in the town by taking possession of a strip of land needed by local businessmen to build an airport; he gets the land from Danny Taylor, the town drunkard and Ethan's childhood best friend, by a will made by Danny and slipped under the door of the store. The will was drawn without any spoken agreement some time after Ethan gave Danny money for the purpose of sending Danny to receive treatment for alcoholism. Danny assures him that drunks are liars and that he will just drink the money away, and this is indeed confirmed when Danny is found dead with empty bottles of whiskey and sleeping pills.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_from_Nowhere"title="The Wind from Nowhere">
A wind blows worldwide: it is constantly westward and strongest at the equator. The wind is gradually increasing, and at the beginning of the story, the force of the wind is making air travel impossible. Later, people are living in tunnels and basements, unable to go above ground. Near the end, "The air stream carried with it enormous quantities of water vapour — in some cases the contents of entire seas, such as the Caspian and the Great Lakes, which had been drained dry, their beds plainly visible."In London, to cope with the situation, special organizations are set up. The "Central Operations Executive" (COE), staffed mainly by War Office personnel, has been set up by Simon Marshall."Combined Rescue Operations" deal with collapsing buildings. Donald Maitland, a doctor unable to travel to a new job in Canada because of the wind, is part of it. Maitland rescues Marshall when he is injured by falling masonry and takes him home to recover. In the basement of Marshall's home, Maitland sees military equipment labelled "Hardoon Tower" and wonders whose interests Marshall is really serving.Hardoon Tower is a pyramid-like structure intended to withstand the wind; it is being built by Hardoon, a millionaire businessman, who has a private army.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Grand_Meaulnes"title="Le Grand Meaulnes">
François Seurel, the 15-year-old narrator of the book, is the son of M. Seurel, who is the director of the mixed-ages school in a small village in the Sologne, a region of lakes and sandy forests in the heartland of France. François is intrigued when 17-year-old Augustin Meaulnes, a bright young man from a modest background, arrives at the school. Because of his height, Augustin acquires the nickname "grand" ("tall"). He becomes a hero figure to the class and runs away one evening on an escapade where, after having become lost, he chances on a magical costume party where he is enchanted by the girl of his dreams, Yvonne de Galais, a character inspired by the real-life Yvonne de Quiévrecourt. She lives with her widowed father and her somewhat odd brother Frantz in a vast and ancient family château – Les Sablonnières – which has seen better days. The party was being held to welcome Frantz and the girl he was to marry, Valentine. However when she does not appear, Frantz attempts suicide but fails.After returning to school, Meaulnes has only one idea: to find the mysterious château again and the girl with whom he has now fallen in love. However his local searches fail while at the same time a bizarre young man shows up at the school. It is Frantz de Galais under a different name trying to escape the pain of having been rejected. Frantz, Meaulnes, and François become friends, and Frantz gives Meaulnes the address of a house in Paris where he says Meaulnes will find his sister, Yvonne de Galais. Meaulnes leaves for Paris only to learn no one lives in the house anymore. He writes to his friend François Seurel: "...it is better to forget me. It would be better to forget everything".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_Island_(novel)"title="Bear Island (novel)">
A converted fishing trawler, "Morning Rose" carries a movie-making crew across the Barents Sea to isolated Bear Island, well above the Arctic Circle, for some on-location filming, but the script is a secret known only to the producer and screenwriter. En route, members of the movie crew and ship's company begin to die under mysterious circumstances. The crew's doctor, Marlowe, finds himself enmeshed in a violent, multi-layered plot in which very few of the persons aboard are whom they claim to be. Marlowe's efforts to unravel the plot become even more complicated once the movie crew is deposited ashore on Bear Island, beyond the reach of the law or outside help. The murders continue ashore, and Marlowe, who is not what he seems to be either, discovers they may be related to some forgotten events of the Second World War.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Gate_(Seth_novel)"title="The Golden Gate (Seth novel)">
Set in the 1980s, "The Golden Gate" follows a group of yuppies in San Francisco. The inciting action occurs when protagonist John Brown has his former love Janet Hayakawa place an amorous advertisement of himself in the newspaper; the latter answered, at length, by trial-lawyer Elisabeth ('Liz') Dorati. A short heyday follows, in which Seth introduces and develops a variety of characters united in part by their interest in self-actualization (often in the form of agriculture) and in part by closeness to Liz or John. Thereafter is depicted the progress of their marriage "de facto" until its dissolution, which results in the legal marriage of Liz to John's friend Phillip ('Phil') Weiss, and the birth of their son. Following his rejection of Liz, John finds a second paramour in Janet, until the latter and two other friends die in an automobile collision; and is himself invited to stand godfather to Liz's son.The novel brought its author the 1988 Sahitya Akademi Award for English, by the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_Monday"title="Miracle Monday">
In the story, Samael, the ruler of Hell, sends his greatest agent of evil, C. W. Saturn, to Earth, to destroy Superman morally. Saturn is able to enter our dimension thanks to Lex Luthor having used a form of magic to escape prison, leaving a 'hole' between worlds. At the same time, Kristin Wells, a history graduate student from the far future, uses time travel technology to arrive in the present, for the purpose of finding out the origin of the holiday known as Miracle Monday, which is known only to be somehow connected to Superman. She infiltrates Clark Kent's circle of friends by becoming Lois Lane's assistant. To her dismay, because she does not belong in the present, Saturn is able to possess her. Saturn then proceeds to cause worldwide havoc, taunting Superman that the only way for him to stop it would be by killing its host—thus making him break his vow against killing. Saturn even reveals Superman's secret identity to the world, to further drive him into desperation.Ultimately, Superman refuses to kill Kristin, even if it means he would have to spend the rest of his life battling Saturn. At that moment, because of the rules that bind demons, Saturn is defeated, and forced to grant Superman a wish. He asks that everything that happened since Saturn's arrival be undone, and it is granted, with Saturn then being banished back to Hell. However, a lingering memory of the events remained within the souls of humanity, causing them to begin celebrating the day every year, on the third Monday of May, starting the Miracle Monday tradition. Kristin then returns to the future to reveal this fact to the public.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enchantment_(novel)"title="Enchantment (novel)">
The protagonist and narrator is Ivan Smetski, a young Ukrainian-American linguist who specializes in Old Church Slavonic, a language from 10th-century Ruthenia. In 1992, Ivan returns to his native town of Kyiv to pursue additional graduate studies. While there he re-discovers the body of a woman that he had seen as a child, apparently sleeping in the woods. He awakens her with a kiss, and she tells him, in Old Church Slavonic, that she is Katerina, a princess of the kingdom of Taina.Transported back to the 10th century, Ivan follows Katerina back to Taina where he finds the Christian kingdom terrorized by the traditional Russian arch-villainess Baba Yaga. Ivan and Katerina marry and escape back to the 20th century to avoid the machinations of Baba Yaga, who has enslaved a god and laid claim to Taina's throne, and the "druzhinnik" Dimitri who covets the throne. Baba Yaga's magical powers, however, allow her to follow Ivan and Katerina to modern times.Back in Ukraine, Ivan discovers that his cousin is in reality the immortal god Mikola Mozhaiski. Returning to the United States, Ivan further discovers that his mother is a magic user, with the same powers as Katerina. After Katerina discovers Dimitri's plot through scrying, Ivan and Katerina return to Taina, deftly avoiding Baba Yaga who magically "skyjacks" their intended Boeing 747 back to the 10th century. Returning to Taina, Ivan and Katerina confront Dimitri, the enslaved god, and Baba Yaga. Though the Castle of Taina is destroyed, the two emerge victorious. They and their children split the rest of their days between the modern world and Taina.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadwork"title="Roadwork">
During a man-on-the-street news interview in August 1972, an unnamed man (later identified as Barton George Dawes) gives his angry opinion of a new highway extension project. The narrative then jumps forward to November 1973, with Dawes, seemingly unaware of the underlying motivations of his actions, visiting a gun shop and purchasing two high-powered firearms: a .44 Magnum revolver and a hunting rifle chambered for .460 Weatherby Magnum cartridges. The story gradually reveals that Dawes' son Charlie had died of brain cancer three years earlier, and that Dawes is unable or unwilling to sever his emotional ties to both the industrial laundry where he works and the house in which Charlie grew up. The laundry and his entire neighborhood are to be demolished as part of the project.Dawes resigns his middle management job at the laundry after sabotaging the purchase of its new facility, and his wife Mary leaves him once she learns of both these actions and his failure to find a new house for the couple. Dawes then approaches Salvatore "Sal" Magliore, the owner of a local used-car dealership with ties to organized crime, in an attempt to obtain explosives. Magliore initially dismisses him as a crackpot, so Dawes assembles a load of Molotov cocktails and uses them to damage the highway construction equipment. He is not caught, but his actions cause only a brief delay in the project. Dawes initially refuses to accept the money being offered by the city for the house under the eminent domain statute, but changes his mind after the city's attorney threatens to publicize his brief tryst with Olivia Brenner, a young hitchhiker who had previously taken shelter at the house. Magliore has Dawes' house checked for listening devices planted by the city and later agrees to sell him a load of explosives. Dawes gives half the money from the house sale to Mary, gives $5,000 to a homeless man in a coffee shop, and has Magliore invest most of the remainder on behalf of Olivia after paying for the explosives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thousand_Orcs"title="The Thousand Orcs">
In "The Thousand Orcs", a clan of frost giants led by Gerti Orelsdottr allied with the orc King Obould Many-Arrows to send a massive army against the towns of the North. On the sidelines, four drow from the Underdark orchestrate events behind the scenes, playing each side against the other for their own advantage. Drizzt is separated from his friends during the siege at the town of Shallows. He witnesses the apparent death of the other Companions of the Hall, and turns his attention to slaughtering all of the orcs he can find, whilst reverting again to the Hunter. The other companions meet warrior dwarves of Mirabar who left because of their leader Marchion Elastuls dislike and borderline hatred for the dwarves of Mithral Hall.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lone_Drow"title="The Lone Drow">
In "The Lone Drow", Drizzt Do'Urden is mourning what he believes to be the death of his closest friends. Drizzt only regains his sense of purpose after two elves (Tarathiel and Innovindil) and their two pegasi (Sunrise and Sunset) decide to help. The dwarven druid Pikel Bouldershoulders loses his left arm at the elbow by a piece of slate thrown by a frost giant. Tarathiel, however, meets his demise at the hands of King Obould Many-Arrows. Later the orc shaman Arganth Snarrl proclaims Obould a god. Meanwhile, the remaining Companions of the Hall, who survived the attack that Drizzt earlier witnessed, are fighting an increasingly desperate battle against Obould's forces.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Galatea"title="La Galatea">
The main characters of the Galatea are Elicio and Erastro, best friends and both in love with Galatea. The novel opens with her and her best friend, Florisa, bathing, talking of love.Erastro and Elicio reveal to each other their desire for Galatea, but agree not to let it come between their friendship.Eventually, all four of them begin their journey to the wedding of Daranio and Silveria, along which, in the pastoral tradition, they encounter other characters who tell their own stories and often join the traveling group.The vast majority of the characters in the book are involved primarily in minor story lines.Lisandro loses his love, Leonida, when Crisalvo mistakenly kills her instead of his former love Silvia.Lisandro avenges Leonida's death in the presence of the main party.Astor, under the pseudonym Silerio, feigns attraction for Nísida’s sister Blanca in order to avoid the scorn of Nísida’s lover Timbrio, who dies following the confusion present after a successful duel against his rival Pransiles.Astor’s grief thrusts him into hermitage, waiting to hear from Nísida.Arsindo holds a poetry competition betwixt Francenio and Lauso, which is judged by Tirsi and Damón, lauded by many within the novel as some of the most famous poets of Spain. The competition is determined to have no single winner.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lest_Darkness_Fall"title="Lest Darkness Fall">
American archaeologist Martin Padway is visiting the Pantheon in Rome in 1938. A thunderstorm arrives, lightning cracks, and he finds himself transported to Rome in the year 535 AD. At this time, the Italian Peninsula is under the rule of the Kingdom of the Ostrogoths. The novel depicts their rule as a relatively benevolent despotism, allowing freedom of religion and maintaining the urban Roman society they had conquered, though slavery is common and torture is the normal method of interrogation by what passes for law-enforcement agencies.In the real timeline, the Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire temporarily expanded westwards, embarking on what came to be known as the Gothic War (535–554). They overthrew the Ostrogoths in Italy and the Vandals in North Africa, but this war devastated the Italian urbanized society that required the support of intensive agriculture and by the end of the conflict Italy was severely depopulated: its population is estimated to have decreased from 7 million to 2.5 million people. The great cities of Roman times were abandoned and the Byzantines never fully consolidated their rule over Italy, which faced further invasions by the Lombards; Italy fell into a long period of decline. Some historians consider this the true beginning of the Dark Ages in Italy. The city of Rome was besieged three times and many of its inhabitants did not survive to the end of the war. Thus Padway, finding himself in this Rome and knowing what the near future holds in store, must act not only to preserve the future of civilization, but to improve his personal chances of survival. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feminine_Mystique"title="The Feminine Mystique">
"The Feminine Mystique" begins with an introduction describing what Friedan called "the problem that has no name"—the widespread unhappiness of women in the 1950s and early 1960s. She discusses the lives of several housewives from around the United States who were unhappy despite living in material comfort and being married with children. Friedan also questions the women's magazine, women's education system, and advertisers for creating this widespread image of women. The detrimental effects induced by this image were that it cornered women into the domestic sphere, and that it led many women to lose their own identities.Chapter 1: Friedan points out that the average age of marriage was dropping, the portion of women attending college was decreasing and the birthrate was increasing for women throughout the 1950s, yet the widespread trend of unhappy women persisted, although American culture insisted that fulfillment for women could be found in marriage and housewifery. Although aware of and sharing this dissatisfaction, women in the 1950s misinterpreted it as an individual problem and rarely talked about it with other women. As Friedan pointed out, "part of the strange newness of the problem is that it cannot be understood in terms of the age-old material problems of man: poverty, sickness, hunger, cold." This chapter concludes by declaring "We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: 'I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.'"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventurer_(novel)"title="The Adventurer (novel)">
The book begins in the city of Turku and follows Mikael along an adventure throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. The book depicts many actual historical events with a rich style, although Mikael's involvement in the events is fictitious. The historical events and milieu featured in the book include:The story is continued in The Wanderer, where the protagonist explores the Ottoman Empire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Master"title="The Golden Master">
Shiwan Khan, heir to Genghis Khan, is in the United States to steal military technology in order to build his own army with the intent of conquering the world. He hypnotises Paul Brent of Globe Aircraft through the electronic lights of a nearby billboard. He orders him to create a larger production run of aircraft than originally intended, with the excess being sent on to Shiwan Khan. By similar methods, he also acquired engines and weapons.The Shadow enters the story when Shiwan Khan attempts to dispose of Paul Brent. Working with Brent, The Shadow eventually tracks his opponent to his base of operations and apparently kills him when his escape plane crashes into the river.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aunt_Julia_and_the_Scriptwriter"title="Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter">
Set in Peru during the 1950s, it is the story of an 18-year-old student who falls for a 32-year-old divorcee. The novel is based on the author's real life experience.Mario, an aspiring writer, works at a radio station, Panamericana, writing news bulletins alongside the disaster-obsessed Pascual. Mario has an aunt (married to a biological uncle) whose sister, Julia, has just been divorced and has come to live with some of his family members. He frequently sees her and though at first they do not get on, they start to go to movies together and gradually become romantically involved. Mario's bosses also run Panamericana's sister station, which broadcasts "novelas" (short-run soap operas). They are having problems buying the serials in bulk from Cuba, with batches of scripts being ruined and quality being poor, and so they hire an eccentric Bolivian scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho to write the serials. The novel chronicles the scriptwriter's rise and fall in tandem with the protagonist's affair and includes episodes of Camacho's serials, which become increasingly unhinged as the novel progresses.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Know_Why_the_Caged_Bird_Sings"title="I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings">
"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" follows Marguerite's (called "My" or "Maya" by her brother) life from the age of three to seventeen and the struggles she faces – particularly with racism and self affirmation – in the Southern United States. Abandoned by their parents, Maya and her older brother Bailey are sent to live with their paternal grandmother (Momma) and disabled uncle (Uncle Willie) in Stamps, Arkansas. Maya and Bailey are haunted by their parents' abandonment throughout the book – they travel alone, are labeled like baggage, and later accepted in the community.Many of the problems Maya encounters in her childhood stem from the overt racism of her white neighbors and the subliminal awareness of race relations weaved in society. Although Momma is relatively wealthy because she owns the general store at the heart of Stamps' Black community, the white children of their town hassle Maya's family relentlessly. One of these "powhitetrash" girls, for example, reveals her pubic hair to Momma in a humiliating incident which leaves Maya, watching from a distance, indignant and furious. Early in the book, Momma hides Uncle Willie in a vegetable bin to protect him from Ku Klux Klan raiders, where he moans and groans under the potatoes throughout the night. Maya has to endure the insult of her name being changed to Mary by a racist employer. A white speaker at her eighth grade graduation ceremony disparages the Black audience by suggesting that they have limited job opportunities. A white dentist refuses to treat Maya's rotting tooth, even when Momma reminds him that she had loaned him money during the Depression. The Black community of Stamps enjoys a moment of racial victory when they listen to the radio broadcast of Joe Louis's championship fight, but generally, they feel the heavy weight of racist oppression.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flight_of_the_Phoenix_(novel)"title="The Flight of the Phoenix (novel)">
Pilot Frank Towns and navigator Lew Moran are ferrying a mixed bag of passengers from the Jebel oil town in the Libyan desert, among them oil workers, two British soldiers, and a German who was visiting his brother. An unexpected sandstorm forces the aircraft down, damaging it, killing two of the men, and severely injuring the German. In the book, the action takes place in the Libyan part of the Sahara.The survivors wait for rescue but the storm has blown them far off course, far away from a search area. After several days, Captain Harris marches toward a distant oasis together with another passenger. His aide, Sergeant Watson feigned a sprained ankle to stay behind. A third man follows them. Days later, Harris barely manages to return to the crash site. The others are lost.As the water begins to run out, Stringer, a precise, arrogant English aeronautical engineer, proposes a radical solution: rebuild a new aircraft from the wreckage of the old twin-boom aircraft, using the undamaged boom and adding skids to take off. The men set to work.At one point, a nearby party of nomadic tribesmen is spotted. Captain Harris decides to seek their help. This time, Sergeant Watson outright refuses to accompany him. Instead another survivor, a Texan named Loomis, volunteers. The next day, Towns finds their looted bodies, throats cut, and the nomads gone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatchet_(novel)"title="Hatchet (novel)">
Brian Robeson is a thirteen-year-old son of divorced parents. As he travels from Hampton, New York on a single-engine Cessna bush plane to visit his father in the oil fields in Northern Canada for the summer, the pilot suffers a massive heart attack and dies. Brian tries to land the plane but ends up crash-landing into a lake in the forest. He must learn to survive on his own with nothing but his hatchet—a gift his mother gave him shortly before his plane departed.Throughout the summer, Brian learns how to survive in the vast wilderness with only his hatchet. He discovers how to make fire with the hatchet and eats whatever food he can find, such as rabbits, birds, turtle eggs, fish, berries, and fruit. He deals with various threats of nature, including mosquitoes, a porcupine, bear, wolf, skunk, moose, and even a tornado. Over time, Brian develops his survival skills and becomes a fine woodsman. He crafts a bow, arrows, and a fishing spear to aid in his hunting. He also fashions a shelter out of the underside of a rock overhang. During his time alone, Brian struggles with memories of home and the bittersweet memory of his mother, whom Brian had caught cheating on his father before their divorce.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armor_(novel)"title="Armor (novel)">
"Armor" is the story of humanity's war against an alien race whose foot soldiers are three-meter-tall insects, referred to in the book as "ants". It is also the story of a research colony on the fringes of human territory which is threatened by pirates. The two sub-plots intersect at the end, with each providing answers and insight into events of the other.The title refers to the nuclear-powered exoskeletons worn by the soldiers, but also references the emotional armor the protagonists maintain to survive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Skylark_of_Space"title="The Skylark of Space">
"The Skylark of Space" is the first book of the "Skylark" series and pits the idealistic protagonist, Dick Seaton, against the mercantile antagonist Marc "Blackie" DuQuesne.At the beginning of the story, Seaton accidentally discovers a workable space drive in combining pure copper with a newly discovered [fictional] element "X" (suggested to be a stable transactinide element in the platinum group) in solution. Having failed to re-create the effect, Seaton realizes that the missing component is a field generated by DuQuesne's particle accelerator, and thereafter sets up a business with his millionaire friend, Martin Crane, to build a spaceship. DuQuesne conspires to sabotage Seaton's spaceship and build his own from Seaton's plans, which he uses to kidnap Seaton's fiancée, Dorothy Vaneman, to exchange for the "X". In the resulting fight, DuQuesne's ship is accidentally set to full acceleration on an uncontrolled trajectory, until the copper 'power bar' is exhausted at a vast distance from Earth's Solar System. Using an "Object Compass" that once locked on an object, always points toward that object, Seaton and Crane follow DuQuesne in their own spaceship (the eponymous "Skylark") to rescue Dorothy and her fellow-hostage, Margaret "Peg" Spencer, until the "Skylark" discovers DuQuesne's ship derelict in orbit around a massive dead star (resembling a cold neutron star). Having obtained the hostages, Seaton extracts a promise from DuQuesne to "act as one of the party until they get back to Earth", in which relationship they leave orbit and travel further in search of additional fuel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Card"title="The Card">
The novel begins when "Edward Henry Machin first saw the smoke on May 27, 1867"—the very day of Bennett's own birth. At age 12, Denry begins his career by altering his marks in a test sufficiently to earn him a scholarship to grammar school. At 16, he leaves school to work for Mr Duncalf, the town clerk and a solicitor. Duncalf is responsible for organising an exclusive ball; Denry "invites" himself, then also a few others in exchange for things he will need, such as lessons from dance instructor Ruth Earp. On a bet, he audaciously asks the energetic, beautiful Countess of Chell to dance. Everyone, including Machin, is in awe of the Countess (apparently based on the real-life Duchess of Sutherland) and he thus earns himself the reputation of a "card" (a "character", someone able to set tongues wagging) – a reputation he is determined to cement.Later, when Duncalf treats a disgruntled client brusquely, Denry leaves his employ after persuading the client to hire him as a rent collector. When some of the tenants fall behind, he begins loaning them money (at a highly profitable interest rate). Ruth herself is several months in arrears and tries to sneak away in the middle of the night. Denry catches her by accident, but rather than being angry, he admires her audacity and starts courting her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Warp_Trio"title="The Time Warp Trio">
For his birthday, Joe receives a mysterious blue book (known only as "The Book") from his magician uncle and namesake, "Joe the Magnificent". Using a number of often unpredictable and/or unintentional voice and print cues, The Book frequently transports Joe and his friends, Fred and Sam, to a variety of different times and places, from Camelot's medieval court of knights and dragons to the year 2095, where they meet their own great-granddaughters. The only way they are able to return to present-day Brooklyn, New York is to find The Book again within whatever time period they are in. Anna, Joe's sister, is also always eager to have the book (which is quite annoying to Joe). During their travels, Joe and his friends learn that The Book will eventually be inherited by Joe's great-granddaughter, Jodie, who time travels with The Book with her friends who are Sam and Fred's great-granddaughters, Samantha and Freddi, and occasionally save the boys from trouble when their paths cross. The Time Warp Trio faces many challenges during their travels as they learn how to use The Book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_Unlimited"title="Angels Unlimited">
Melanie Beeby is killed in a traffic accident on the day after her thirteenth birthday. She then finds herself transported to Heaven. The Heaven of this universe is a lively and vibrant city, populated both by dead humans-turned-angels and Heaven-born beings known as pure angels. This city is also where the headquarters of the Agency are situated. The Agency is an elite group whose job is to counter the Opposition, informally known as the PODs or Powers of Darkness – the polar opposite of the Agency.Upon arrival, Mel discovers that she is to be a trainee at the Angel Academy. She also discovers a best friend and soulmate, Lola Sanchez, good friend Reuben Bird and on her first mission bad boy Brice de Winters.Each book features time travel of some kind, where Mel is tasked by the Agency to unravel various celestial problems involving humans and the Opposition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brethren_(Grisham_novel)"title="The Brethren (Grisham novel)">
The "Brethren" are three former judges who are incarcerated at Trumble, a fictional federal minimum security prison located in northern Florida. The trio embark on a scam to deceive and exploit wealthy closeted gay men. None of them are gay, but they write convincingly as two young vulnerable gay men, developing friendships and then asking for financial help. In some cases, they also try blackmail. With the help of their lawyer, Trevor Carson, they transfer their ill-gotten money to a secret Bahamian bank account. Carson takes one-third and employs private detectives to investigate the victims of the scam. This takes over from Carson's normal legal business, which had been making very little money for him.Meanwhile, Teddy Maynard, the ruthless and soon-to-retire director of the CIA, is orchestrating a scheme to tip the United States presidential election in the favor of Aaron Lake, a hawkish congressman supported by arms manufacturers. However, Lake, who is closeted, is hooked by the unwitting Brethren in their scam. Realizing that Lake stands to be exposed, Maynard scrambles to stop them from finding out the truth. After the Brethren fire Carson, he is killed by CIA agents in the Caribbean.The CIA plant a man inside Trumble, who tells the Brethren that he knows about the scam. A deal is worked out, money changes hands and the judges are pardoned by the outgoing president at Maynard's insistence. The judges leave the country and travel to Europe, where they later restart the scam. Meanwhile, Lake is elected and Maynard, eager to finish the cover-up, selects for him a suitable First Lady.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_the_Wild_Things_Are"title="Where the Wild Things Are">
The story focuses on a young boy named Max who, after dressing in his wolf costume, wreaks such havoc through his household that he is sent to bed without his supper. Max's bedroom undergoes a mysterious transformation into a jungle environment, and he winds up sailing to an island inhabited by monsters, simply called the Wild Things. The Wild Things try to scare Max, but to no avail. After stopping and intimidating the creatures, Max is hailed as the king of the Wild Things and enjoys a playful romp with his subjects. Finally, he stops them and sends them to bed without their supper. However, to the Wild Things' dismay, he starts to feel lonely and decides to give up being king and return home. The creatures do not want him to go and throw themselves into fits of rage as Max sails away home. Upon returning to his bedroom, Max discovers a hot supper waiting for him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Sunrise"title="Iron Sunrise">
Martin Springfield and Rachel Mansour return to Earth to recuperate following the events of "Singularity Sky". However, Rachel is quickly called upon to explain the administrative expenses she incurred during her previous assignment. Shortly thereafter she finds herself negotiating with a lunatic believing himself to be a reincarnation of Idi Amin and in possession of an armed nuclear device which, in the black humor typical of the series, he has threatened to detonate after receiving an eviction notice from his apartment.Meanwhile, a young and hopeful planetary civilization is murdered by the apparent use of a causality violation device which causes their sun to explode without warning (the "iron sunrise" of the title), and their defense systems to deploy automatically against the homeworld of the suspected perpetrators of the atrocity.Rachel and Martin set off to investigate these events and prevent the assassination of the remaining members of the murdered civilization's leaders, who can abort the retaliation strike. In the background the Eschaton continues to play its own game.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminal_Man"title="The Terminal Man">
The events in the novel take place between March 9 and March 13, 1971. Harold Franklin "Harry" Benson, a computer scientist in his mid-thirties, is described as suffering from "psychomotor epilepsy" following a car crash two years earlier. He often has seizures followed by blackouts, and then wakes up hours later with no knowledge of what he has done. During these seizures, he severely beats two people; the day before his admission, he was arrested after attacking a third. He is a prime candidate for an operation to implant an electronic "brain pacemaker" in the amygdala region of his brain in order to control the seizures, which will be performed in the Neuro-Psychiatric Service (NPS) of University Hospital. Two NPS surgeons, John Ellis and Robert Morris, are to perform the unprecedented surgery.The ramifications of the procedure are questioned by the NPS's staff psychiatrist, Janet Ross, and later by her former teacher, Manon, an emeritus professor. Manon raises concerns that Benson is psychotic and predicts that the crimes he commits during the blackouts will not be curtailed. Ellis admits that what they are doing is not a cure, simply a way to stimulate the brain when the computer senses a seizure coming on. It would prevent a seizure but not cure Benson's personality disorder. Ellis rationalizes his approach by pointing out that Ellis is not convinced that not operating on Benson will do him any favors; Benson's condition threatens Benson's life and those of others, has already undermined Benson's legal status three times, and is worsening. Despite the concerns voiced, the team decides to go ahead with the operation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wise_Children"title="Wise Children">
The story begins on the 75th birthday of identical twin sisters, Dora and Nora Chance. By what Dora, who is also the narrator of the story, describes as a bizarre coincidence, it is also the 100th birthday of their natural father, Melchior Hazard, and his fraternal twin brother, Peregrine Hazard, who is believed to be dead. The date is also Shakespeare's supposed birthday – 23 April.Dora and Nora's birthday gets off to a dramatic start when their half-brother, Tristram Hazard, who believes himself to be the nephew of the twins, arrives on their doorstep. He announces that Tiffany – his partner, and the goddaughter of the twins – is missing. Dora and Nora soon discover that Tiffany is pregnant with Tristram's baby, but he is unwilling to take on the responsibility. Once this bombshell has been dropped, it emerges that a body has been found and it is believed to be Tiffany's.Most of the novel consists of Dora's memories. As well as providing the backstory of her natural father, Melchior Hazard, her legal father, Peregrine Hazard, and her guardian, Grandma Chance, Dora describes key events of her life. As Melchior becomes a renowned Shakespearean theatre actor in the 1920s, he refuses to acknowledge his daughters, who are publicly and legally believed to be the daughters of Peregrine instead. Dora is deeply hurt by Melchior's rejection, contrasting the loving nature of Peregrine, who becomes the twins' father figure. She recalls her early theatre performances and her first sexual experience, in which she impersonates Nora and sleeps with her unknowing lover. Melchior marries Lady Atalanta Lynde, who Dora calls "Lady A", and has two legitimate twin daughters, Saskia and Imogen. In the 1930s, he goes to Hollywood and produces a film version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in which Dora and Nora play Peaseblossom and Mustardseed. The production ends in disaster as Melchior leaves his first wife to elope with the wife of the film's producer, who plays the Titania to his Oberon in the film.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pioneers_(novel)"title="The Pioneers (novel)">
The story takes place on the rapidly advancing frontier of New York State and features an elderly Leatherstocking (Natty Bumppo), Judge Marmaduke Temple of Templeton (whose life parallels that of the author's father Judge William Cooper), and Elizabeth Temple (based on the author's sister, Hannah Cooper), daughter of the fictional Templeton. The story begins with an argument between the judge and Leatherstocking over who killed a buck.Through their discussion, Cooper reviews many of the changes to New York's Lake Otsego and its area: questions of environmental stewardship, conservation, and use prevail. Leatherstocking and his closest friend, the Mohican Indian Chingachgook, begin to compete with the Temples for the loyalties of a mysterious young visitor, a "young hunter" known as Oliver Edwards. The latter eventually marries Elizabeth Temple. Chingachgook dies, representing European-American fears for the race of "dying Indians", who appear to be displaced by settlers. Natty vanishes into the sunset.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_(Maguire_novel)"title="Wicked (Maguire novel)">
In the Land of Oz, a minister's wife, Melena Thropp, gives birth to a daughter, Elphaba. Elphaba has green skin, sharp teeth, a savage demeanor, and a fear of water. The story details Elphaba's difficult childhood before flashing forward to show her at boarding school in the city of Shiz with her roommate, the social climber Galinda.While at Shiz, the two girls discover that Oz is rife with political tension. The Wizard rules as a dictator and has stripped the sentient Animals of their civil rights. Inspired by her favorite professor, a Goat named Doctor Dillamond, Elphaba works to prove that sentient Animals deserve social status equal to humans. When Doctor Dillamond dies under mysterious circumstances, Galinda adopts his mispronunciation of her name, Glinda.Shiz headmistress and Ozian power broker Madame Morrible suggests that Elphaba and Glinda work for her from behind the scenes to help stabilize the political situation in Oz. Preferring more direct action, Elphaba and Glinda travel to the Emerald City, where they meet the Wizard and plead the case of the Animals. When the Wizard dismisses their concerns, Elphaba takes matters into her own hands. She goes into hiding and joins an underground terrorist group working out of the Emerald City.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hocus_Pocus_(novel)"title="Hocus Pocus (novel)">
In an editor's note at the beginning of the book, Vonnegut claims to have found hundreds of scraps of paper of varying sizes, from wrapping paper to business cards, sequentially numbered by their author to form a narrative. The breaks between pieces of paper often signal a sort of ironic "punchline".The main character is Eugene Debs Hartke, a Vietnam War veteran and carillonneur who realizes that he has killed exactly as many people as the number of women he has had sex with. The character's name is an homage to American labor and political leader Eugene V. Debs and anti-war senator Vance Hartke, both from Vonnegut's home state, Indiana. Upon his discharge from the military, Hartke becomes a professor at Tarkington College in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, but is later fired for sexual misconduct.Hartke then becomes a teacher at a private prison in the nearby town of Scipio. The prison is run by a Japanese corporation and overseen by Hartke's occasional acquaintance, Hiroshi Matsumoto. The prison is populated entirely by black inmates, America having been resegregated by both race and class. Hartke sets about teaching the inmates how to read.After a massive prison break, the escaped inmates occupy Tarkington College and take the staff hostage. With the old prison destroyed in the breakout, Tarkington becomes a prison with Hartke as its warden. When it becomes known that the breakout was led by one of his former students, Hartke is accused of collaboration and becomes an inmate himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadeye_Dick"title="Deadeye Dick">
The novel's main character, Rudy Waltz, or "Deadeye Dick", commits accidental manslaughter as a child when he shoots a gun out of a window and fatally strikes a pregnant woman. Rudy was so traumatized and guilt-ridden by the incident that he lives life as an asexual "neuter," neither homosexual nor heterosexual. He tells the story of his life as a middle-aged expatriate hotel manager in Haiti, which symbolizes New York City, until the end, when the stream of time of the story catches up with him. At this point, he confronts an event that has been suggested and referred to throughout the novel. The generic Midwestern town of Midland City, Ohio, in which Rudy was raised, is virtually destroyed by a neutron bomb, all the people in the town dying. At the ending of the book, it appears that Rudy, while he may not have fully come to terms with his actions, has at least come to live with them.Another key theme throughout the book is the relationship between Waltz and his parents and brother, Felix. His father, as a young man, lived in Austria and was one of the few people who was actually friends with Adolf Hitler before his rise to power. His father is also a failed artist, who does his best to protect Rudy, to the point when he insists on going to jail just to effectively make a point. Rudy's brother was the president of NBC, who is fired after his fourth marriage breaks up.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Minus_Ten"title="Zero Minus Ten">
As the transfer of the sovereignty of Hong Kong from the British to the People's Republic of China nears, Bond is given ten days to investigate a series of terrorist attacks that could disrupt the fragile handover and cause the breakout of a large-scale war. Simultaneously a nuclear bomb is test-detonated in the Australian outback. In Hong Kong, Bond suspects a British shipping magnate, Guy Thackeray, who he catches cheating at mahjong at a casino in Macau. Later, after cheating the cheater and winning a large sum of Thackeray's money, Bond attends a press conference where Thackeray announces that he is selling his company, EurAsia Enterprises, to the Chinese; not disclosed to the public is that this is due to a long-forgotten legal document that grants the descendants of Li Wei Tam ownership of the company if the British were to ever lose control of Hong Kong. Because the descendants were believed to have abandoned China, General Wong claims the document on behalf of the Chinese government and forces Thackeray out. Immediately following the announcement, Thackeray is killed by a car bomb planted by an unknown assassin, the latest of a series of assassinations that claimed the lives of the entire EurAsia board of directors, as well as several employees.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Meister's_Apprenticeship"title="Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship">
The eponymous hero undergoes a journey of self-realization. The story centers upon Wilhelm's attempt to escape what he views as the empty life of a bourgeois businessman. After a failed romance with the theater, Wilhelm commits himself to the mysterious Tower Society.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Sun"title="Colonel Sun">
Kidnappers violently take the Secret Service chief M from his house and almost capture James Bond, who is visiting. Intent on rescuing M, Bond follows the clues to Vrakonisi, one of the Aegean Islands. In the process, Bond discovers the complex military-political plans of Colonel Sun of the Chinese People's Liberation Army. Sun had been sent to sabotage a Middle East détente conference which the Soviet Union is hosting. He intends to attack the conference venue and use M and Bond's bodies to blame Great Britain for the disaster, leading to a world war. Bond meets Soviet agents in Athens and they realise that not only is a third country behind the kidnap, but that there is a traitor in the organisation. An attack on the Soviet headquarters kills all the agents except Ariadne Alexandrou, a Greek Communist. As he is dying, the Soviet leader encourages Bond and Ariadne to work together to prevent an international incident.Ariadne persuades Litsas, a former Second World War resistance fighter and friend of her late father, to help them by telling him about the involvement in the plot of former Nazi, Von Richter. Trying to find M and Colonel Sun, Bond is nearly captured by the Russians, but is saved by Litsas. Finally, Bond finds Sun's headquarters, but is knocked out by one of Sun's men; Bond learns that Von Richter will use a mortar to destroy the conference venue and that Bond will be tortured by Sun, before his inevitable demise. Sun tortures him brutally, until one of the girls at the house is ordered by Sun to caress Bond fondly. In the process she cuts one of Bond's hands free and provides him with a knife. She tells Sun that Bond is dead: when examined Bond stabs Sun. He then frees other captives who help Bond stop Von Richter. However Sun survives the stab wound and kills several of the other escapees. Bond tracks down Sun and kills him in the confrontation. The Soviets thank Bond for saving their conference, offering him the Order of the Red Banner for his work, which he politely turns down.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantastes"title="Phantastes">
The tale starts the day after Anodos' twenty-first birthday. He discovers an ancient fairy lady in the desk that he inherited as a birthright from his late father. After the fairy shows him Fairy Land in a vision, Anodos awakes the next day to find that his room is transforming into a forest, which he soon finds to be Fairy Land itself.Anodos then encounters a woman and her daughter in a cottage who warn him about the evil Ash Tree and the Alder Tree. He is told that the spirits of trees can leave their tree-hosts and wander throughout Fairy Land. He then explores the world of the fairies, which live in flowers. He then has a nightmarish encounter with the spirit of the Ash Tree, escapes, and finds rest in the warmth and love of the Beech Tree's spirit.After this, he finds a marble statue by Pygmalion. After he sings to it, the statue flees from him. He pursues the Marble Lady, but finds instead the Maid of the Alder Tree in disguise. The Maid deceives Anodos into letting his guard down so the Ash can attack. He narrowly escapes doom, being saved by the knight Sir Percivale. Anodos then meets a woman and her daughter who believe in fairy tales and the magic of Fairy Land, despite the disbelief of the woman's husband. Anodos also finds his shadow, an evil presence that follows and torments Anodos throughout the rest of the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Snake's_Pass"title="The Snake's Pass">
The novel's main protagonist, Arthur Severn, is traveling to the country of Clare to visit friends. He has the desire to improve his Irish knowledge, so he makes a detour to West Ireland. While riding along with the driver, Andy, a severe storm begins. Andy suggests the two men stop traveling for the night and stay in the small town of Carnacliff. Andy takes them to a local bar where a man named Jerry Scanlan tells the legendary story of Shleenanaher.The story begins with Saint Patrick who drove all the snakes out of Ireland. However, the King of Snakes would remain in the lake residing in Shleenanaher, and he would only leave if he did not have his crown; thus he hid his crown in the mountains of the hills. The King then tells Saint Patrick that he will come in another form so that he will be able to watch his crown closely. The impending fog that occasionally sweeps over the town, along with a nearby swamp or bog, is said to be the form the King has decided to come back in to watch his crown. After Jerry finishes his story, an old, drunk man named Mr. Moynahan speaks up about the hidden treasure that is somewhere in the hills. Arthur learns that Moynahan's father was present in the altercation of the Frenchmen hiding the treasure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Ocean"title="The Golden Ocean">
In spring 1740, Peter Palafox, his friend Sean O'Mara and Sean's uncle Liam are riding from Connaught to Cork so that Peter can join the Royal Navy as a midshipman. Sean decides to join, too, so Liam will take the horses back home. They meet Peregrine FitzGerald at the market fair, another boy heading for HMS "Centurion". Both lose their money. FitzGerald meets Lord Culmore who loans him ten guineas, solving their money problems. They meet the brig Mary Rose, at Cove of Cork and reach HMS "Centurion" at Spithead on time. Peter is wearing all his best clothes, including a green stone given to him as a "luck giver". On board Peter learns he must have a sea chest and a uniform. Mr Walter, the chaplain, recognises the emerald pinned to his neck cloth, which can supply all that Peter needs. The emerald from a Spanish ship of the Armada now helps Peter as England fights Spain. Peter likes the ship HMS "Centurion", but takes time to be at ease with naval discipline. Peter knows the Irish names for the parts of a ship, but not yet the English names. At dinner with Commodore Anson he meets officers on his ship and others in the squadron. Neighbour to Peter is Captain Callis, a man who loved Peter's mother long ago and lost her to Peter's father. Anson remarks on the terrible decision by the Admiralty to include the Chelsea pensioners (500 infirm sailors) as part of his crew.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unknown_Shore"title="The Unknown Shore">
In the early part of the novel, set in London, other members of the expedition are featured. They appear in more detail in "The Golden Ocean", another O'Brian novel about the Anson expedition.The expedition is beset by storms while rounding of Cape Horn, the "Wager" is shipwrecked off the coast of Chile as their position could not be determined. The crew rejected the authority of their officers, once the ship was wrecked and left the captain, some officers, and some other crew on the island when they sailed away in a boat built from the wreck. The marooned officers make their way to a Spanish settlement with the help of the native people. The novel is based on the accounts of the survivors. Survivors from the lower deck made their way back to Britain long before the officers. The novel describes the crew members asserting that the officers had no authority over them, once their ship was wrecked.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grandmother"title="The Grandmother">
The book describes, in an idealized form, the childhood of Němcová. The plot weaves together a remembrance of the agrarian calendar and customs of the neighborhood with the love stories of several women, which reveal more of the history and customs of that area. The main action of the novel seems to take place during the first one or two years after the Grandmother has come to live at the Old Bleachery with her daughter's family, to help manage the household. The father is frequently absent due to his job as equerry to the local noblewoman, which takes him away to Vienna during the winter. The principal action of the story is to tell the intertwining tales of Viktorka, Kristla, and the Countess. The author is identified with Barunka, the eldest daughter of the Prošek family; however, the novel is not told from her point of view.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Man,_Poor_Man_(novel)"title="Rich Man, Poor Man (novel)">
In the early parts of the novel Shaw goes to great lengths to make the point about "Jordache blood" – violent, bitter, resentful. One of the ways he does this is by meticulously describing the hate-filled marriage of the parents, Mary and Axel. The novel is told in the third person omniscient point of view but never wholly objectively, often through the lens of the consciousness of one of the five family members. When told through the POV of either Mary or Axel the view of humanity, and of the Jordache family, is relentlessly bleak and pessimistic.The tripwire that sets all of the ensuing plot action in motion occurs when Gretchen Jordache begins an affair with the president of the company she works for, Teddy Boylan, a man much older than herself. Eventually her brothers Rudolph and Thomas also become involved with Boylan, in different ways, and it is his influence upon all three that first springs each of them into the world beyond the small upstate New York town where their parents scrape by with their bakery. Boylan constitutes their first true encounters with an adult beyond their parents.Many people, mainly because of their familiarity with the miniseries rather than the actual source material, thought of the story as a very simplistic juxtaposition of the virtuous, goody two shoes brother (Rudolph) with the black sheep, ne'er-do-well younger sibling (Thomas, whom Shaw seeks to differentiate psychologically by means of a physical symbol – he is the only blond haired member of the family), but the novel is much more complex than this in its demonstrative understructure. For example, Rudolph is constantly developing positive relationships only with people who can help him - his father, Mr. Calderwood, Johnny Heath, Boylan. In stark contrast to this both Gretchen and Thomas consistently entangle themselves with the kinds of people that modern self-help literature calls "drain people" or "toxic people". A couple of examples: Thomas' only friend in the world, Claude, gives him up immediately to the authorities the second his own well-being is threatened, and when Axel Jordache learns of Tom's actions his only impulse is to get rid of him, to send him away to live with family in Ohio. Contrast this with Rudolph's friend, Johnny Heath, who becomes his lifelong friend, attorney, and business partner, and also with what Axel Jordache does when confronted by Rudolph's French teacher over a behavior miscue – he slaps the teacher in the face.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur_Planet_(novel)"title="Dinosaur Planet (novel)">
A survey team visits fictional planet Ireta to survey its mineral wealth. Several anomalies are discovered, including some decidedly large animals that resemble prehistoric beings from Earth's history and legend. Before all can be explained, the Heavyworlder "muscle people" mutiny after gaining a taste for flesh and blood."The Death of Sleep" is a prequel to this book, and the fourth section delivers the characters to Ireta, intersecting some of the same plot points.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Land"title="The Night Land">
The beginning of the book establishes the framework in which a 17th-century gentleman, mourning the death of his beloved, Lady Mirdath, is given a vision of a far-distant future where their souls will be re-united, and sees the world of that time through the eyes of a future incarnation. The language and style used are intended to resemble those of the 17th century, though the prose has features characteristic of no particular period, such as an almost complete lack of dialogue or proper names. Ian Bell has suggested that John Milton's epic poem "Paradise Lost" (1667) was probably a partial inspiration for Hodgson's novel, especially in view of the hellish visions of sombre intensity that mark both works, and the use of massive structures (the Temple of Pandemonium in Milton and the Last Redoubt in "The Night Land").The 17th-century framing becomes inconsequential as the story focuses on the future. The Sun has gone out and the Earth is lit only by the glow of residual vulcanism. The last few millions of the human race are gathered together in the Last Redoubt, a gigantic metal pyramid, nearly eight miles high, which is under siege from unknown forces and Powers outside in the dark. These are held back by a shield known as the "air clog", powered from a subterranean energy source called the "Earth Current". For thousands of years vast living shapes known as the Watchers have waited in the darkness near the pyramid. It is thought that they are waiting for the inevitable time when the Circle's power finally weakens and dies. Other living things have been seen in the darkness, some of unknown origins, and others that may once have been human. Hodgson uses the term "Abhuman" to name several different species of intelligent beings evolved from humans who interbred with alien species or adapted to changed environmental conditions, and are seen as decayed or maligned by those living inside the Last Redoubt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Fear"title="State of Fear">
Peter Evans is a lawyer for a millionaire philanthropist, George Morton. Evans' main duties are managing the legal affairs surrounding Morton's contributions to an environmentalist organization, the National Environmental Resource Fund (NERF) (modeled after the Natural Resources Defense Council).Morton becomes suspicious of NERF's director, Nicholas Drake, after discovering that Drake has misused some of the funds Morton had donated to the group. Soon afterward, Morton is visited by two men, John Kenner and Sanjong Thapa, who appear on the surface to be researchers at MIT, but, in fact, are international law enforcement agents on the trail of an eco-terrorist group, the Environmental Liberation Front (ELF) (modeled on the Earth Liberation Front). The ELF is attempting to create "natural" disasters to convince the public of the dangers of global warming. All these events are timed to happen during a NERF-sponsored climate conference that will highlight the "catastrophe" of global warming. The eco-terrorists have no qualms about how many people are killed in their manufactured "natural" disasters and ruthlessly assassinate anyone who gets in their way (few would recognize their preferred methods as murder: the venom of a rare Australian blue-ringed octopus which causes paralysis, and "lightning attractors" which cause their victims to get electrocuted during electrical storms). Kenner and Thapa suspect Drake of being involved with the ELF to further his own ends (garnering more donations to NERF from the environmentally-minded public).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse_That_Roared"title="The Mouse That Roared">
The tiny (three miles by five miles) European Duchy of Grand Fenwick, supposedly located in the Alps between Switzerland and France, proudly retains a pre-industrial economy, dependent almost entirely on making Pinot Grand Fenwick wine. However, a California winery makes a knockoff version, "Pinot Grand Enwick", putting the country on the verge of bankruptcy.The prime minister decides that their only course of action is to declare war on the United States. Expecting a quick and total defeat (since their standing army is tiny and equipped with bows and arrows), the country confidently expects to rebuild itself through the largesse that the United States bestows on all its vanquished enemies (as it did for Germany through the Marshall Plan at the end of World War II).With the counterfeit wine as a "casus belli", they send a formal written declaration of war, but this is misplaced by the State Department. Receiving no response, the Duchy is forced to muster some troops and hire a ship to stage an actual invasion.Landing in New York City, almost completely deserted above ground because of a citywide disaster drill, the Duchy's invading "army" (composed of the Field Marshal Tully Bascomb, three men-at-arms, and 20 longbowmen) wanders to a top secret government lab and unintentionally captures the "Quadium Bomb" (a prototype doomsday device that could destroy the world if triggered) and its maker, Dr. Kokintz, an absent-minded professor who is working through the drill. This "Q-Bomb" has a theoretical explosive potential greater than all the nuclear weapons of the United States and the Soviet Union combined.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_of_Elves"title="Blood of Elves">
About a year before the beginning of the novel, the Empire of Nilfgaard attacks the Kingdom of Cintra. Queen Calanthe, mortally wounded, commits suicide and her granddaughter, Cirilla, nicknamed Ciri, flees from the burning capital city. Emhyr var Emreis, Emperor of Nilfgaard, sends his spies to find her, as, in addition to her royal lineage, Ciri has elven blood, giving her immense magical potential. The war ends with Nilfgaard's defeat by a coalition of the Northern Kingdoms, though the Empire retains much of its power.Almost two years after the armistice, the rulers of the Northern Kingdoms meet in secret to discuss the political situation. Peace with Nilfgaard is not what it was supposed to be - the Empire's financial clout is ruining the northern economy, Imperial emissaries agitate aristocrats and merchants against their monarchs, elves and dwarves have formed partisan groups called "Scoia'tael" and are conducting acts of terror against humans - and cultists are prophesying that the world will end, unless the Savior comes from the South. The kings decide to start a war, before the Empire weakens their countries further, and to regain Cintra. They are aware that the Emperor is looking for Ciri to marry her (morganatically) and thus legitimize his occupation of Cintra. To prevent this, the monarchs decide to find and kill Ciri.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_(novel)"title="Rebecca (novel)">
While working as the companion to a rich American woman on holiday in Monte Carlo, the unnamed narrator, a naïve young woman in her early 20s, becomes acquainted with a wealthy Englishman, Maxim de Winter, a 42-year-old widower. After a fortnight of courtship, she agrees to marry him and, after the wedding and honeymoon, accompanies him to his mansion in Cornwall, the beautiful estate Manderley.Mrs Danvers, the sinister housekeeper, was profoundly devoted to the first Mrs de Winter, Rebecca, who died in a sailing accident about a year before Maxim and the second Mrs de Winter met. She continually attempts to undermine the narrator psychologically, subtly suggesting to her that she will never attain the beauty, urbanity, and charm her predecessor possessed. Whenever the narrator attempts to make changes at Manderley, Mrs Danvers describes how Rebecca ran it when she was alive. Cowed by Mrs Danvers' imposing manner and the other members of West Country society's unwavering reverence for Rebecca, the narrator becomes isolated.The narrator is soon convinced that Maxim regrets his impetuous decision to marry her and is still deeply in love with the seemingly perfect Rebecca. In an attempt to please him, she revives the Manderley costume ball, a custom Rebecca had instated, with the help of Mrs Danvers. On her suggestion, the narrator wears a replica of the dress shown in a portrait of one of the house's former inhabitants, ignorant of the fact that Rebecca had worn the same costume to much acclaim shortly before her death. When the narrator enters the hall and Maxim sees the dress, he angrily orders her to change.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Green_Angel_Tower"title="To Green Angel Tower">
As the Storm King's power grows, the loyal allies of Prince Josua struggle to rally their forces at the Stone of Farewell. There, Simon and the surviving members of the League of the Scroll attempt to unravel a prophecy that may ultimately allow them to strike down the undead Storm King and bring peace to the kingdom. This epic saga concludes as Simon travels back to castle Hayholt to confront Ineluki.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_Miller"title="Daisy Miller">
Annie "Daisy" Miller and Frederick Winterbourne first meet in Vevey, Switzerland, in a garden of the grand hotel, where Winterbourne is allegedly vacationing from his studies (an attachment to an older lady is rumoured). They are introduced by Randolph Miller, Daisy's nine-year-old brother. Randolph considers their hometown of Schenectady, New York, to be absolutely superior to all of Europe. However, Daisy is absolutely delighted with the continent, especially the high society she wishes to enter.Winterbourne is at first confused by her attitude, and though greatly impressed by her beauty, he soon determines that she is nothing more than a young flirt. He continues his pursuit of Daisy in spite of the disapproval of his aunt, Mrs. Costello, who spurns any family with so close a relationship to their courier as the Millers have with their Eugenio. She also thinks Daisy is a shameless girl for agreeing to visit the Château de Chillon with Winterbourne after they have known each other for only half an hour. Two days later, the two travel to Château de Chillon, and although Winterbourne had paid the janitor for privacy, Daisy is not quite impressed. Winterbourne then informs Daisy that he must go to Geneva the next day. Daisy feels disappointment and chaffs him, eventually asking him to visit her in Rome later that year.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idlewild_(novel)"title="Idlewild (novel)">
The backstory is revealed in interludes throughout the book. In the middle of the 21st century, a retrovirus called "Black Ep" renders all of humanity infertile, and causes people to die. In the lab of a major German-American genetic research facility, a group of scientists are working on a project to save humanity by raising ten genetically altered children in immersive virtual reality. To test the efficiency of the software, one of the scientists, Halfway Jim, uses a program designed to be as close to a real child as possible, to run through the virtual lives the children will lead. Out of sentimentality, Jim's dying act is to integrate this program, which he names Malachi, into the virtual reality environment.The main story follows one of the virtual "students," a young man named Halloween, who wakes up with total amnesia and must piece together what he can of the world around him. Halloween meets nine other students: Jasmine, Mercutio, Pandora, Simone, Isaac, Lazarus, Vashti, Tyler, Champagne, and Fantasia. Fan, Mercutio, Hal, and Tyler are known as the "clods," who misbehave, while Simone, Isaac, Lazarus, Vashti, Champagne, and Pan are the "pets," who study and follow all of the rules. The digital teacher of the school is named Maestro, but the clods call him Mae$tro (pronounced 'Maeshtro') and do not respect him. Each student is given a digital world that they may edit to their liking and a "Nanny," a digital being that can help a student with anything they need help with.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Blues"title="Volkswagen Blues">
"Volkswagen Blues" is a road novel, in the tradition of Jack Kerouac, about a middle-aged, formerly successful writer who has adopted the pen-name Jack Waterman (a metonymy playing on Waterman pens) and, as the novel begins, is experiencing a bout of writer's block. Discovering an old postcard, the protagonist embarks on a quest in search of his long-lost, rambling brother, Théo. Early in the narrative, Jack picks up a hitchhiker, a young Métisse woman, nicknamed "La Grande Sauterelle" due her long, grasshopper-like legs, as a travel companion, as well as a cat named Chop Suey.Together in Jack's Volkswagen Minibus, which through personification becomes a character in the story, they travel from Gaspé to San Francisco, passing through Toronto, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis and the American West on their way, exploring the history of European contact with the native people of the Americas. While on the road, they discuss language, literature, American expansion, the Oregon Trail, etc., and their trip becomes an allegory for the history of the French exploration of North America. At the same time, La Grande Sauterelle, who is struggling with her own identity, presents another version of American history, as recounted by the natives, where "discovery" is viewed as "invasion." Throughout the episodic novel a number of interesting and entertaining characters appear, including journalists, museum directors, railroad hoboes and writers such as Saul Bellow and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as well as the spirit of Ernest Hemingway, John Muir and the Beat Generation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogg_(novel)"title="Hogg (novel)">
At the start, the narrator is living with a Hispanic boy named Pedro and performing sex acts with older men in the basement of the dwelling for money, along with Pedro's teenage sister Maria. He engages in sex with Maria, Pedro, a gang of bikers, and a group of Black men. The narrator consistently assumes the bottom role in these sex acts. One out of the group of Black men chooses the narrator specifically, remarking that he appears of possible part-Black ancestry.The second chapter takes place sometime after the narrator has left Pedro's. It introduces Hogg, first seen raping a woman in an alley. Hogg calls the narrator to him to "finish him up" orally. Hogg takes the narrator to his truck where he explains that while he is a trucker by trade, he prefers getting paid to rape women. Hogg also reveals a bit about himself and his personal history, painting a picture of his overall persona, which is one of extreme sociopathy, violence, and sexual sadism. They drive to meet Mr. Jonas, who despite his apparent wealth answers his own door and later is revealed to drive his own limousine. Mr. Jonas is Hogg's current client. After Mr. Jonas describes Hogg's next assignment Hogg states his intention to bring along several other men, and the narrator as well, to participate. At this point the narrator's place as Hogg's companion is solidly established.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sula_(novel)"title="Sula (novel)">
The novel begins when the construction of a golf course is announced, the site being the destroyed remnants of what used to be the Bottom. The Bottom is a black neighborhood on the hill above the fictional town of Medallion, Ohio. In the first section of the novel, the origin story of the Bottom is revealed as well as how it got its name: a white farmer promised freedom and a piece of Bottom land to his slave if he would perform some difficult chores for him. Upon completion, the farmer regrets his end of the bargain. Freedom was easy, the farmer had no objection to that, but he did not want to give up the land. He tells the slave he was very sorry that he had to give him valley land, for he had hoped to give him a piece of the bottom land. The slave said he thought valley land was bottom land, to which the master said land on the hill, not the valley, was bottom land, rich and fertile" (Morrison 5). This is obviously untrue, but it is the story that black people told to illuminate the fact that white people's racism and lies have created this topsy turvy world in which up is down and down is up. "The white people lived on the rich valley floor... and the blacks populated the hills above it, taking small consolation in the fact that every day they could literally look down on the white folks" (5).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beloved_(novel)"title="Beloved (novel)">
"Beloved" begins in 1873 in Cincinnati, Ohio, with Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman, and her 18-year-old daughter, Denver, who live at 124 Bluestone Road. The site has been haunted for years by what they believe is the ghost of Sethe's eldest daughter. Denver is shy, friendless, and housebound. Sethe's sons, Howard and Buglar, ran away from home by the age of 13, which she believes was due to the ghost. Baby Suggs, the mother of Sethe's husband, Halle, died soon after the boys fled, eight years before the start of the novel.One day, Paul D, one of the enslaved men from Sweet Home, the plantation where Sethe, Halle, Baby Suggs, and several others were once enslaved, arrives at Sethe's home. He forces out the spirit, receiving Denver's contempt for driving away her only companion, but persuades them to leave the house together for the first time in years for a carnival. Upon returning home, they find a young woman sitting in front of the house who calls herself Beloved. Paul D is suspicious and warns Sethe, but she is charmed by the young woman and ignores him. Denver is eager to care for the sickly Beloved, whom she begins to believe is her older sister come back.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_in_the_Bedroom"title="Philosophy in the Bedroom">
In the introduction, the Marquis de Sade exhorts his readers to indulge in the various activities in the play. He says that the work is dedicated to "voluptuaries of all ages, of every sex" and urges readers to emulate the characters. "Lewd women", he writes, "let the voluptuous Saint-Ange be your model; after her example, be heedless of all that contradicts pleasure's divine laws, by which all her life she was enchained." He then urges "young maidens" to copy Eugénie; "be as quick as she to destroy, to spurn all those ridiculous precepts inculcated in you by imbecile parents". Finally, he urges male readers to "study the cynical Dolmancé" and follow his example of selfishness and consideration for nothing but his own enjoyment.Dolmancé is the most dominant of the characters in the dialogue. He explains to Eugénie that morality, compassion, religion, and modesty are all absurd notions that stand in the way of the sole aim of human existence: pleasure. Like most of Sade's work, "Philosophy in the Bedroom" features a great deal of sex as well as libertine philosophies. Although there is some torture, the dialogue contains no actual murder, unlike many of Sade's works.Dolmancé and Madame de Saint-Ange start off by giving Eugénie their own brand of sex education, explaining the biological facts and declaring that physical pleasure is a far more important motive for sex than that of reproduction. Both characters explain that she will not be able to feel "true pleasure" without pain. Then they eagerly get down to the practical lessons, with Le Chevalier joining them in the fourth act and swiftly helping to take away Eugénie's virginity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peace_War"title="The Peace War">
The story takes place in 2048, 51 years after scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory develop a force field generating device they term the Bobbler. The Bobbler creates a perfectly spherical, reflective, impenetrable, and persistent shield around or through anything.The bureaucracy running the Laboratory decide to use the Bobbler as a weapon. Declaring themselves the "Peace Authority", they enclose the world's weapons and military bases in bobbles, and occasionally entire cities or governments. A brief war is triggered but ends quickly as the military is cut off from command, their weapons, and each other. It is presumed the people within the bobbles die due to a lack of air and sunlight. In this new world, governments are weak where they are permitted at all; the Peace Authority is the true bearer of power and becomes a worldwide government. In an effort to retain their monopoly on the Bobbler, the Peace Authority makes technological progress illegal and returns the planet to a level similar to the 19th century.The story opens with the crew of a military spaceplane emerging from their bobble and being picked up by a group of Tinkers. The Tinkers are a rebel group who have continued to secretly develop technology to a point well beyond what the Authority allows. Their emergence reveals two previously unknown facts about bobbles; one is that they are not a force field, but a stasis field inside which time stops, and the second is that they do not last forever, but will eventually "pop" at a time depending on their original size. The bobble around the spaceplane popped because it was small, the one covering all of Edwards Air Force Base will presumably last much longer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_in_Realtime"title="Marooned in Realtime">
In the story, a device exists that can create a "bobble", a spherical stasis field in which time stands still for a specified length of outside time, allowing one-way time travel into the future. The bobble can also be used as a weapon, a shield against other weapons, for storage, for space travel (combined with nuclear pulse propulsion), and other purposes.People whose bobbles burst after a certain date in the 23rd century find the Earth completely devoid of human life, with only ambiguous clues as to the cause; possibilities include alien attack and humanity transcending to a new level of existence as a result of a technological singularity. The "low-techs" — those who bobbled earlier — have roughly late-21st-century technology. The "high-techs" — those who had the advantage of ever accelerating progress — have vastly superior technology, including cybernetic enhancements, faster and thought-controlled bobblers, personal automaton extensions of self, space ships, medical technology to allow practical immortality (barring accidents or fatal injuries), and individual arsenals greater than those of entire 20th century countries. Of the high-techs, even those who bobbled at slightly different times have significantly different technology levels.The protagonist is Wil Brierson, a detective who also was the protagonist of the preceding novella, "The Ungoverned". Some time after the events in "The Ungoverned", Brierson was unwillingly bobbled 10,000 years into the future while he was investigating a routine theft, cutting him off forever from his wife and children.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haroun_and_the_Sea_of_Stories"title="Haroun and the Sea of Stories">
At the beginning of the story, protagonist Haroun Khalifa lives with his father Rashid, a famous storyteller and doctor, and his mother Soraya, until the latter is seduced by their neighbor 'Mr. Sengupta' to leave home. Thereafter, Rashid is hired to speak on behalf of local politicians but fails his initial assignment. The two are thence conveyed to the 'Valley of K' by courier 'Mr. Butt', to speak for 'Snooty Buttoo', another politician. Attempting to sleep aboard Buttoo's yacht, Haroun discovers 'Iff the Water Genie', assigned to detach Rashid's imagination, and demands to speak with Iff's supervisor, the Walrus, to argue against this decision. They are then carried to the eponymous 'Sea of Stories' by an artificial intelligence in the form of a hoopoe, nicknamed 'Butt' after the courier. In the Sea of Stories, Haroun learns the Sea is endangered by antagonist 'Khattam-Shud,' who represents "the end".In the Kingdom of Gup, King Chattergy, Prince Bolo, General Kitab, and the Walrus announce their plans for war against the neighboring kingdom of Chup, to recapture Bolo's betrothed Princess Batcheat. Rashid joins them here, having witnessed Batcheat's kidnapping. Thereafter Haroun and his companions join the Guppee army of 'Pages' toward Chup, where they befriend Mudra, Khattam-Shud's former second-in-command.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_Renewed"title="Licence Renewed">
When "Licence Renewed" begins, M reminds Bond that the "00" section has in fact been abolished; however, M retains Bond as a troubleshooter (pun intended), telling him, "You'll always be 007 to me". Bond is assigned to investigate Dr. Anton Murik, a brilliant nuclear physicist who is thought to have been having meetings with a terrorist named Franco. Franco is identified and tracked by MI5 to a village in Scotland called Murcaldy. Since Murcaldy is outside of MI5's jurisdiction, the Director-General of MI5, Richard Duggan, requests that M send Bond to surveil Murik. Relying on information that MI5 did not have, M orders Bond to instead infiltrate Murik's castle and gain his confidence.Bond makes contact with Murik at Ascot Racecourse, where he feigns a coincidental meeting, mentioning to Murik that he is a mercenary looking for work. Later, Bond joins Murik in Scotland at Murik's behest and is hired to kill Franco, for reasons at the time unknown. Franco in turn has been tasked by Murik to kill his young ward, Lavender Peacock, because she is the true heir to the Murik fortune, which could only be proved by secret documents Murik keeps hidden in a safe within his castle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_American_Story"title="An American Story">
Grégory Francœur, a brilliant professor from Quebec, leaves his family and political career behind to become the assistant to a distinguished academic in San Francisco. Because of a misunderstanding, typical of the ambiguity that has been Francœur's lot in life, he becomes involved in a dangerous case of illegal immigration.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Special_Services"title="For Special Services">
Bond teams up with CIA agent Cedar Leiter, daughter of his old friend, Felix Leiter, to investigate one Markus Bismaquer, who is suspected of reviving the criminal organisation SPECTRE, which was believed to have been disbanded years earlier following the death of its leader, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, at the hands of Bond (in "You Only Live Twice").The British Secret Service learns that Bismaquer is an obsessive collector of rare prints, so Bond and Cedar visit the man's huge ranch in Amarillo, Texas posing as art dealers. Their true identities are soon revealed, but not until Bond holds his own both in an impromptu (and fixed) car race arranged by Bismaquer, and in the bed of Bismaquer's frustrated wife, Nena. Nena, who has only one breast, quickly wins Bond's heart and his sympathy and Bond is convinced that Bismaquer is the one now being referred to as the new Blofeld.Bond discovers that the revitalised SPECTRE plans to take over control of NORAD headquarters in order to gain control of America's military space satellite network. His true identity revealed, Bond is captured and brainwashed into believing he is an American general assigned to inspect NORAD. Although he has been set up to be killed in the ensuing attack by SPECTRE forces on the base, Bond regains his personality and his memory. Apparently Bismaquer, who is bisexual, has taken a liking to Bond and sabotaged the hypnosis.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icebreaker_(novel)"title="Icebreaker (novel)">
Bond reluctantly finds himself recruited into a dangerous mission involving an equally dangerous and treacherous alliance of agents from the United States (CIA), the Soviet Union (KGB) and Israel (Mossad). The team, dubbed "Icebreaker", waste no time double-crossing each other. Ostensibly their job is to root out the leader of the murderous National Socialist Action Army (NSAA), Count Konrad von Glöda. The Count, who leads this secret neo-Nazi organisation in northern Finland at its secret headquarters known as the "Ice Palace", used to be known as Arne Tudeer, a one-time Nazi SS officer who now perceives himself as the new Adolf Hitler. The National Socialist Action Army is essentially a new wave of fascism as a means to wipe out communist leaders and supporters around the world.The novel is full of double-crosses and even triple-crosses, where the agents and agencies go without sharing their true loyalties with one another. The American agent, for instance, first appears to be a good guy then later is in cahoots with Glöda, and then still even later is a good guy once again. Things become even more complicated when the Israeli agent, Rivke, is revealed to be the daughter of Glöda/Tudeer and her allegiance, although appearing to be legitimate, is doubtful. The Russian agent also double-crosses Bond in the hope of capturing him for KGB interrogation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role_of_Honour"title="Role of Honour">
After receiving a large inheritance, James Bond 007 is accused of improprieties and drummed out of the British Secret Service. Disgusted with his former employers, Bond places his services on the open market, where he later attracts the attention of representatives of SPECTRE who are quite willing to put their one-time enemy on their payroll. But the whole thing was a hoax, just a plan to get Bond inside the enemy's organization.Prior to joining up, Bond spends a month in Monte Carlo with Miss 'Percy' Proud, a CIA agent who teaches him everything she knows about programming languages and computers in general. This background allows Bond to attract Jay Autem Holy, an agent of SPECTRE who left the Pentagon, faked his death, and later started a computer game company that creates simulations based on real-life battles and wars.Bond's allegiance to SPECTRE is periodically questioned throughout the novel, even at one point going so far as to send Bond to a terrorist training camp (known as "Erewhon") to see if he has 'the right stuff'. Proving his worth, Bond becomes involved in a plot to destabilise the Soviet Union and the United States, by forcing them to rid the world of their nuclear weapons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobody_Lives_for_Ever"title="Nobody Lives for Ever">
En route to retrieve his faithful housekeeper, May, from a European health clinic where she is recovering from an illness, Bond is warned by the British Secret Service that Tamil Rahani, the current leader of SPECTRE, now dying from wounds suffered due to his last encounter with Bond (as described in "Role of Honour"), has put a price on Bond's head. "Trust no one," Bond is warned. Soon after, May and Miss Moneypenny, who had been visiting his housekeeper are reported missing, and Bond finds himself dodging would-be assassins while searching for his friends, assisted by a young débutante and her capable, yet mysterious, female bodyguard.The price on Bond's head is a competition orchestrated by Rahani and SPECTRE known as 'The Head Hunt', and is an open contest to anyone willing to capture, kill, or present Bond to Rahani, where he would be subsequently decapitated by guillotine. Along Bond's journey of attempting to rescue Moneypenny and May, Bond is betrayed and chased by a number of people and organisations, including his own British Secret Service ally, Steve Quinn who has defected to the KGB, corrupted police officers, and agents of SPECTRE in disguise.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Deals,_Mr._Bond"title="No Deals, Mr. Bond">
"No Deals, Mr. Bond" begins with a mission in the Baltic Sea dubbed "Seahawk", which involves James Bond stealthily extracting two women that have completed an assignment in East Germany. After accomplishing his mission, the book continues five years later with Bond being called in by M to learn more background into what those women were doing there before being extracted. Their mission, dubbed "Cream Cake", was a honey trap that involved getting close to top Soviet personnel as a means to not only spy for the British Secret Service, but to secure the defection of two high ranking Soviet officers, an act that the Soviets occasionally performed against countries of the West. Involving four women and a man, the operation was considered a complete debacle that ended with the members being found out. After being extracted and given new identities, however, two of the women were discovered to have been gruesomely murdered. Bond is subsequently sent by M, "off the record", to find the remaining members of "Cream Cake" before they suffer the same fate.During the adventure, Bond believes that Colonel Maxim Smolin, the primary target during operation "Cream Cake", is systematically killing off the former members of the "Cream Cake" operation and leaving a signature of having their tongues removed. This, however, is not the case, and, in actuality, Smolin is a turncoat now working with the British Secret Service. Instead, the former members, in addition to Smolin and another Soviet turncoat, Captain Dietrich, are being targeted by General Chernov, an agent of a department formerly known as SMERSH. The situation is further complicated after M gets a message to Bond warning him that one of the surviving "Cream Cake" members is a double and that he wants Chernov brought in alive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win,_Lose_or_Die"title="Win, Lose or Die">
M receives word that a terrorist organisation known as BAST (Brotherhood of Anarchy and Secret Terrorism) is planning to infiltrate and destroy a top-secret Royal Navy aircraft carrier-based summit, the "Stewards' Meeting", scheduled a year hence, comprising American President George H. W. Bush, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. James Bond is returned to active duty in the Royal Navy and promoted from Commander to Captain, in order to infiltrate the aircraft carrier HMS "Invincible" and identify potential sleeper agents.In the months leading to the top-secret summit, Bond spends his time training at Yeovilton learning to fly a Navy Sea Harrier jet. Learning of Bond's mission, BAST decides that he is a hindrance to their plans and attempts to kill him by attempting to shoot him down during a Sea Harrier training exercise. Later, when Bond goes on holiday in Italy, another attempt is made on his life. Bond escapes, but is apparently unable to save his then-current girlfriend, Beatrice Maria da Ricci.Returning from holiday Bond boards HMS "Invincible" and is tasked with security for the "Stewards' Meeting", all while a massive war game is being carried out among the American, British, and Soviet Navies, known as "Landsea '89". Before long Bond is at the centre of a murder investigation of an American Naval Intelligence officer, and he leaves to report the incident, BAST executes its plans to capture the ship and hold the world's three most powerful leaders for a $600 billion ransom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brokenclaw"title="Brokenclaw">
After expressing frustration over a lack of action after his year-long mission with the Royal Navy (as detailed in "Win, Lose or Die"), Bond threatens to resign. Instead, M orders Bond to take a vacation. Bond travels to Victoria, British Columbia where he is intrigued by Lee Fu-Chu, a half-Blackfoot, half-Chinese philanthropist who is known as "Brokenclaw" because of a deformed hand.Later, Bond is ordered to San Francisco where he is tasked to investigate the kidnapping of several scientists who have been working on a new submarine detection system and an "antidote" known as LORDS and LORDS DAY. Bond and CIA agent Chi-Chi Sue go undercover using the codenames Peter Abelard and Héloïse that were assigned to two agents from the People's Republic of China that are sent to evaluate the submarine technology before purchasing it.Ultimately, Bond discovers that Brokenclaw is involved in this scheme on behalf of China, and also has plans of his own which involve sparking a worldwide economic disaster by bringing about the collapse of the dollar by tapping into the New York Stock Exchange, which would in turn bring down other major currencies worldwide. The plan, dubbed "Operation Jericho" was a long-term plan initially started by the Japanese, but now believed to have been worked on simultaneously by the Chinese before being acquired by Brokenclaw.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_Barbarossa"title="The Man from Barbarossa">
"The Man from Barbarossa" begins with a prelude that includes some background information on the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union codenamed Operation Barbarossa, the massacre at Babi Yar that occurred not long after, and information on Josif Voronstov, a fictional character said to be a deputy of real-life Paul Blobel who was primarily responsible for the massacre.When the story begins, an elderly American living in New Jersey is kidnapped by a Russian terrorist group called the "Scales of Justice". The man, Joel Penderek, was captured under the belief that he is Josif Voronstov, the war criminal partially responsible for the massacre at Babi Yar. The group demands the Soviet government put the man on trial for his crimes, and begins murdering government officials when leaders refuse and are slow to react. The situation is slightly more complicated as the CIA and the Mossad believe Voronstov to be a man located in Florida who they had under surveillance.Captain James Bond is partnered with an Israeli Mossad agent, Pete Natkowitz, and two agents from the French Secret Service, Henri Rampart and Stephanie Adoré. They are assigned to work with Bory Stepakov and his assistant Nina Bibikova from the KGB to infiltrate the Scales of Justice posing as a TV crew so as to discover their real motive. Accomplishing this, they learn that the group plans to sabotage "perestroika" and supply Iraq with nuclear weapons before the United Nations-led coalition invades.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Is_Forever"title="Death Is Forever">
The aftermath of the Cold War provides the setting for the plot of "Death Is Forever". After the deaths of a British Intelligence agent and an American agent with the CIA working in Germany under mysterious and surprisingly old-fashioned circumstances, James Bond and CIA agent Elizabeth Zara ("Easy") St. John are assigned to track down the surviving members of "Cabal", a Cold War-era intelligence network that received a mysterious and unauthorised signal to disband. Soon, Bond finds himself playing a life-or-death game of "Who do You Trust?" as he and Easy track down Wolfgang Weisen, the power responsible for killing off Cabal's members one by one. Bond uncovers Weisen's plot to kill off the heads of each European country during the inaugural run of the Eurostar from London to Paris in an effort to create havoc in the west and usher in a second era of Communism.More than most other Gardner novels, "Death Is Forever" is grounded in contemporary events, with the fallout from the end of the Cold War and the failed 1991 Russian coup being important backdrops to the story. The Eurotunnel connecting England and France, which was still under construction at the time the book was written, also serves as a major setting.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Send_Flowers"title="Never Send Flowers">
A murder in Switzerland of Laura March with MI5 connections follows assassinations in Rome, London, Paris &amp; Washington. Left at each scene is a rose with marks of drops of blood on the petal. Bond is sent to investigate where he meets the lovely Swiss agent Fredericka von Grüsse whom he later calls Flicka when on better terms.Trails lead to a former international stage actor, David Dragonpol, a friend of March who lives in a castle on the Rhine called Schloss Drache which he is turning into a theatre museum. They also meet a widow and flower grower, Maeve Horton.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaFire"title="SeaFire">
With the help of his latest girlfriend Flicka von Grüsse, James goes after billionaire Sir Maxwell Tarn, who thinks he's the next Hitler. Captain Bond now works for MicroGlobe One rather than an ill M whom he visits to cheer up and keep informed of the plot. The global trail takes 007 to Puerto Rico via Spain, Israel and Germany.During the story, Bond proposes to Flicka. An old friend reappears to aid James and split up this spy twosome.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_(novel)"title="Cold (novel)">
The novel is split into two books, one called "Cold Front" and the second entitled "Cold Conspiracy". The time between each book appears to be the time period allotted to Gardner's previous Bond outings, "Never Send Flowers" and "SeaFire".The story opens with the crash of a Boeing 747-400 at Dulles International Airport in Fairfax and Loudoun counties, Virginia, near Washington, D.C., and the apparent death of Bond's friend and lover, the Principessa Sukie Tempesta. Bond is then sent by M to the airport with an investigation team which leads to meetings with FBI agent Eddie Rhabb.The main action takes place in Italy at the home of the Tempesta brothers, Luigi and Angelo, where Bond gets caught in the act with one of the brothers' wives. As James later explains to M, the lady made the advances. The enemy of the story is provided by a terrorist army called COLD, which stands for Children Of the Last Days.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Facts_of_Death"title="The Facts of Death">
"The Facts of Death" starts off with several deaths from mysterious diseases. We first find Bond in Cyprus, where a number of British troops have been discovered murdered under mysterious circumstances. Bond gets too close for comfort to the group behind the murders and is attacked, but rescued by a fiery Greek agent, Niki Mirakos, who becomes Bond's love interest. Bond then returns to Britain, where he is invited to attend a dinner party being held by Sir Miles Messervy, the former M. The current M and her boyfriend are also in attendance, and the latter is murdered after the party. M then tells Bond that all of the killings are connected—near all the bodies were statues of Greek deities and numbers, keeping a running count of the victims. Bond is sent to Greece and partnered with Niki. They are both suspicious of an internationally-known mathematic cult called the Decada. The head of the group is a Greek mathematician, Konstantine Romanos. Bond goes to a casino about two hours away from Athens and beats Romanos in a game of baccarat, catching the attention of an attractive woman named Hera Volopoulos, also a member of the Decada. After she and Bond make love, she drugs Bond and takes him to Konstantine. Konstantine orders Hera to kill Bond, but he manages to escape. Bond realises that Konstantine plans to start a major war between Greece and Turkey, and locates his hideout just in time to witness Hera murder Konstantine. She leaves Bond to stop a nuclear missile that will be fired from Greece into Turkey. Hera's plan is to profit from the chaos ensuing after she releases a new virus worldwide. Bond, with assistance from the Greek military, kills her and stops the missile.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Time_to_Kill"title="High Time to Kill">
Bond faces off against a ruthless terrorist organisation called "The Union", whose trademark assassination technique is throat-slitting. Bond and his girlfriend Helena are attending a dinner party thrown by a former Governor of the Bahamas. The Governor, who owes a gambling debt to a member of The Union, has refused to pay up since he believes he was cheated. Accordingly, there is a heightened security presence at the event. However, an assassin disguises himself as one of the guards and kills the Governor, just as Bond realises the danger. Bond almost catches the assassin, who commits suicide before he can be interrogated.A top secret British formula hidden in microfilm, codenamed "Skin 17", is stolen by two traitors, scientist Steven Harding and RAF officer Roland Marquis. The microdot is surgically implanted in the pacemaker of an unhealthy old man, a former Chinese intelligence agent. Bond is sent to recover it before the Union can sell the microfilm to a foreign power.Bond tracks Harding and the Chinese ex-agent to Belgium, but they slip away while Bond kills Harding's bodyguard Basil. MI6 tracks the Chinese man to Nepal. It turns out, however, that Harding plans to double-cross the Union by having the plane carrying the pacemaker's host hijacked. Le Gerrant, the blind leader of The Union, immediately deduces Harding's double-cross and has him executed; Harding's body later washes up on the beach at Gibraltar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleShot"title="DoubleShot">
"DoubleShot", the second novel in Raymond Benson's "Union" trilogy, again sets James Bond, 007 against the evil terrorist organization called the Union. Still smarting from their last encounter with 007 when he foiled their plans to get Skin 17 in "High Time to Kill", the Union has decided that Britain and James Bond are their new number one priority, and targets. Coming up with an elaborate plan to plunge Britain into war and destroy Bond's reputation in the process, the Union sets up their scheme. Domingo Espada, a Spanish Nationalist/Gangster/Ex-Matador who wishes to see Gibraltar returned to Spain from Britain, is approached by Nadir Yassasin, the Union's master strategist, as the centrepiece to their plan. They plan to help Espada forcefully take control of Gibraltar, killing the British Prime Minister and the Governor of Gibraltar, and having a Bond-Double do it, thus ruining Bond's career and life. But first, through an elaborate series of events, they convince Bond he is losing his mind, and force him to investigate these happenings on his own, without approval from M or SIS.Since Bond's return from the Himalayas, he begins experiencing terrible headaches, hallucinations, and black-outs. This leads him to Dr. Kimberly Feare. She diagnoses a lesion on the back of Bond's skull that is causing these symptoms. After getting Dr. Feare in bed, Bond wakes up to find her murdered, her throat slit ear-to-ear, the Union's mark. This causes Bond to leave England. Bond's trek takes him from England to Tangier, where he encounters the Taunt twins, Heidi and Hedy, CIA agents asked by M to bring him back to London. Here Bond finds the connection between the Union and Espada, and that he has some part in the Union's plan. Convincing M and the Taunts to play out his hand, Bond goes to Spain. On arrival in Spain, he encounters Margareta Piel, Espada's female assassin and a member of the Union. Followed closely by the climax of Bond vs. his double in Espada's practice bullfighting ring, and the culmination of the Union's plot at the Gibraltar peace conference, Bond takes his double's place and along with the Taunt twins, prevent the assassinations, kills Espada, Piel, Jimmy Powers (a high-ranking American in the Union, and their number one expert in stealth and tailing), and captures Yassasin, foiling the Union's plans once again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Dream_of_Dying"title="Never Dream of Dying">
It begins when a police raid goes horribly wrong, killing innocent men, women, and even children. Bond knows the Union is behind the carnage, and vows to take them down once and for all. His hunt takes him to Paris, into a deadly game of predator and prey, and a fateful meeting with the seductive Tylyn Mignonne, a movie star with a sordid past, who may lead Bond to his final target—or his own violent end. Eventually it leads him to the Union's latest attack on society, which involves Tylyn's husband, Leon Essinger, and his new movie, "Pirate Island", which stars Tylyn.The conclusion to Benson's Union Trilogy. Locations are Nice, Paris, Cannes, Monte Carlo and Corsica (also briefly in Los Angeles, Japan and Chicago).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_with_the_Red_Tattoo"title="The Man with the Red Tattoo">
On a flight from Japan to the United Kingdom, a young Japanese woman dies of a mysterious illness. The illness is a mutated version of the West Nile virus. James Bond finds out that not only was she the daughter of an important Japanese businessman, her entire family is also dead. James Bond travels to Japan in search of the killer. Here Bond reunites with his longtime friend Tiger Tanaka, who introduces him to a female Japanese agent who is later killed by the mutant virus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facundo"title="Facundo">
After a lengthy introduction, "Facundo"'s fifteen chapters divide broadly into three sections: chapters one to four outline Argentine geography, anthropology, and history; chapters five to fourteen recount the life of Juan Facundo Quiroga; and the concluding chapter expounds Sarmiento's vision of a future for Argentina under a Unitarist government. In Sarmiento's words, the reason why he chose to provide Argentine context and use Facundo Quiroga to condemn Rosas's dictatorship is that "in Facundo Quiroga I do not only see simply a caudillo, but rather a manifestation of Argentine life as it has been made by colonization and the peculiarities of the land".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Smilla's_Feeling_for_Snow"title="Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow">
Smilla Qaaviqaaq Jaspersen, 37-year-old product of the stormy union of a female Inuit hunter and a rich urban Danish physician, is a loner who struggles to live with her fractured heritage. Living alone in a dreary apartment complex in Christianshavn, Copenhagen, she befriends Isaiah, the neglected son of her alcoholic neighbour, because he too is Greenlandic and not truly at home in Denmark. Smilla's friendship with Isaiah, recounted in the novel in flashback, gives some meaning to her otherwise lonely life. Isaiah’s sudden death is explained officially as a fall from the roof whilst playing, but Smilla’s understanding of the tracks the child left on the snowy roof convinces her that this is untrue. She complains to the police and quickly encounters obstruction and hostility from the authorities and other sources.Working with Peter, a mechanic neighbour who had also known and liked Isaiah, and with whom she begins an affair despite her fear of dependency, Smilla discovers that there is a conspiracy centred on Gela Alta (a possible reference to the Latin verb gelo, "to freeze", and the places called Alta in North Norway or Alta Lake in Canada or the feminine Latin adjective alta, "high, deep"), an isolated glaciated island off Greenland. Previous expeditions have found something there (Isaiah’s father was a diver who died on one of them, allegedly in an accident) and now plans are afoot to return for it. Isaiah’s death is linked to this conspiracy in some way. After a long journey of discovery in Copenhagen, during which she learns that the mechanic is not who he says he is, Smilla braves intimidation and threats and eventually gets on board the ship chartered for the mysterious expedition to Gela Alta, ostensibly as a stewardess.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&quot;A&quot;_Is_for_Alibi"title="&quot;A&quot; Is for Alibi">
Kinsey Millhone, 32, private detective investigates the death of prominent divorce lawyer Laurence Fife. His murder eight years earlier was blamed on his wife, Nikki Fife. Upon being released from prison, Nikki hires Kinsey to find the real murderer. In the course of the investigation, Kinsey becomes involved with Charlie Scorsoni, the late Mr. Fife's former law partner. She discovers Fife's death has been linked to that of a woman in Los Angeles, his law firm's accountant; both died after taking poisonous oleander capsules, which had been substituted for allergy pills. Kinsey tracks down the accountant's parents and former boyfriend. She then goes to Las Vegas to interview Fife's former secretary, Sharon Napier, who is killed minutes before Kinsey arrives. Back in California, Kinsey is mystified that Nikki's son, Colin, recognizes Laurence's first wife, Gwen, in a photograph. Kinsey surmises that Gwen was having an affair with her ex-husband at the time of his death. She accuses Gwen, who confesses. Shortly afterwards, she too is dead, killed in a hit-and-run crash.Kinsey has solved the case she was hired to investigate; but in a plot twist, she discovers that her previous notions about the accountant's death were entirely wrong: in fact, it was Scorsoni who killed her when she discovered he was skimming dividend money from estate accounts under his management. Scorsoni used the same method that Gwen used to kill Fife, so it would be assumed the same person committed both murders. In a final confrontation, he chases Kinsey across the beach, armed with a knife. Kinsey hides in the shore line, and she is forced to remove her shoes and pants. Before Scorsoni can kill her, she shoots him dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Strogoff"title="Michael Strogoff">
Michael Strogoff, a 30-year-old native of Omsk, is a courier for Tsar Alexander II of Russia. The Tartar Khan (prince), Feofar Khan, incites a rebellion and separates the Russian Far East from the mainland, severing telegraph lines. Rebels encircle Irkutsk, where the local governor, a brother of the Tsar, is making a last stand. Strogoff is sent to Irkutsk to warn the governor about the traitor Ivan Ogareff, a former colonel, who was once demoted and exiled by this brother of the Tsar. He now seeks revenge: he intends to gain the governor's trust and then betray him and Irkutsk to the Tartar hordes.On his way to Irkutsk, Strogoff meets Nadia Fedor, daughter of an exiled political prisoner, Basil Fedor, who has been granted permission to join her father at his exile in Irkutsk; the English war correspondent Harry Blount of the "Daily Telegraph"; and Alcide Jolivet, a Frenchman reporting for his 'cousin Madeleine' (presumably, for some unnamed French paper). Blount and Jolivet tend to follow the same route as Michael, separating and meeting again all the way through Siberia. He is supposed to travel under a false identity, posing as the pacific merchant Nicolas Korpanoff, but he is discovered by the Tartars when he meets his mother in their home city of Omsk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thérèse_Raquin"title="Thérèse Raquin">
Thérèse Raquin is the daughter of a French sea-captain and an Algerian mother. After her mother's death, her father takes her to live with her aunt, Madame Raquin, and Camille, her valetudinarian son. Because her son is "so ill", Madame Raquin dotes on him to the point of spoiling him, and he is very selfish. Camille and Thérèse grow up side-by-side and Madame Raquin marries them to each other when Thérèse turns 21. Shortly thereafter, Camille decides that the family should move to Paris so he can pursue a career.Thérèse and Madame Raquin set up shop in the Passage du Pont Neuf to support Camille while he searches for a job. He eventually starts working for the Orléans Railway Company, where he runs into a childhood friend, Laurent. Laurent visits the Raquins and, while painting a portrait of Camille, contemplates an affair with the lonely Thérèse, mostly because he cannot afford prostitutes anymore.It soon becomes a torrid love affair. They meet regularly and secretly in Thérèse's room. After some time, Laurent's boss no longer allows him to leave early, so the lovers must think of something new. Thérèse comes up with the idea of killing Camille, and they become infatuated with the idea of being able to be together permanently while being married. It seems Camille is the only obstacle in this. They eventually drown him during a boat trip, though in defending himself Camille succeeds in biting Laurent on the neck. Madame Raquin is in shock after hearing of her son's disappearance. Everybody believes that the drowning was an accident and that the couple actually tried to save Camille. Laurent is still uncertain about whether Camille is truly dead and frequently visits the mortuary, which he persists in although it disturbs him, until he finally finds the dead body there. Thérèse becomes far more nervous and has nightmares; the previously calm and centered Laurent also becomes nervous. Their feelings toward each other are greatly changing, but they still plot to marry without raising suspicion and therefore reap the rewards of their actions. Thérèse acts very subdued around family and acquaintances and Laurent publicly shows great concern and care for her, so Michaud, one of the family's regular visitors, decides that Thérèse should remarry and her ideal husband should be Laurent. They finally marry but they're haunted by the memory of the murder; Laurent's bite scar serves as a constant reminder for them both. They have hallucinations of the dead Camille in their bed every night, preventing them from touching each other and quickly driving them even more insane. They vacillate between trying desperately to rekindle their passion to get rid of the corpse hallucinations (and trying to 'heal' the bite scar), and despising each other. Laurent, previously an untalented artist, is suddenly struck with surprising talent and skill, but he can no longer paint a picture (even a landscape) which does not in some way resemble the dead man. Sickened by this, he gives up art. They must also tend Madame Raquin, who suffered a stroke after Camille's death. She suffers a second stroke and becomes completely paralyzed (except for her eyes), after which Thérèse and Laurent accidentally reveal the murder in her presence during one of their many arguments.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Accursed_Kings"title="The Accursed Kings">
Set in the 14th century during the reigns of the last five kings of the direct Capetian dynasty and the first two kings of the House of Valois, the series begins as the French King Philip the Fair, already surrounded by scandal and intrigue, brings a curse upon his family when he persecutes the Knights Templar. The succession of monarchs that follows leads France and England to the Hundred Years' War.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortunes_of_War_(novel_series)"title="Fortunes of War (novel series)">
The novels describe the experiences of a young married couple, Harriet and Guy Pringle, early in World War II. A lecturer and passionate Communist, Guy is attached to a British Council educational establishment in Bucharest (Romania) when war breaks out, and the couple are forced to leave the country, passing through Athens and Palestine and ending up in Cairo, Egypt. Harriet is persuaded to return home by ship, but changes her mind at the last minute and goes to Damascus with friends. Guy, hearing that the ship has been torpedoed, believes her to be dead, but they are reunited in the end.The cycle also chronicles the pre-war and wartime experiences of the surrounding group of English expatriates who also find themselves on the move and the changes in Romanian society as the corrupt regime of King Carol II fails to keep Romania out of the war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleidoscope_Century"title="Kaleidoscope Century">
The narrator Joshua—at first appearing to be just over 60 years old, wakes up May 27, 2109 in an apartment on human-settled Mars. With no memory of his past, he goes to his "werp", a voice-activated laptop computer, and learns that his name is Joshua Ali Quare and that he was born in 1968. From this frame story and a box containing several objects from his past, Quare pieces together what he believes is true about his life leading to the early 22nd century. It is soon clear that he is unburdened by any form of morality.Joshua ran away from home early in his teens to escape his abusive father, and stayed in an upstairs apartment at Gwenny's Diner. Joshua's mother, a Communist party member, surreptitiously helped him. He entered the US Army at the behest of some Party organizers, and he was put in contact with a KGB operative who provided him with an injection to keep him from receiving or transmitting AIDS (which mutates and spreads soon after, wiping out a large percentage of the population of Earth). The injection also enhanced his memory, and periodically regenerates his body, so that he becomes 10 years younger with each 15-year life period. This makes him a "longtimer", and gives him the side-effect of having his memory wiped after every life period.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Peyton_Place"title="Return to Peyton Place">
After the phenomenal success of her first novel, Metalious hastily penned a sequel centering on the life and loves of bestselling author Allison MacKenzie, who follows in the footsteps of her mother by having an affair with a married man, her publisher Lewis Jackman. The similarity of their situations bond Allison and her mother.When she returns to her hometown following the publication of her first novel, "Samuel's Castle", she is forced to face the wrath of most of its residents, who are incensed by their barely disguised counterparts and the revelation of town secrets in the book. Despite that, certain members of the community stood by the MacKenzies, most notably, Seth Buswell, the newspaper editor; and his oldest friend, Dr. Matthew Swain. In fact, whenever anyone came into Dr. Swain's office and complained about Allison's book, he would roar them down and after a harsh tongue-lashing from him about some of the things that person had done, he or she wouldn't ever complain about Allison's novel after that.However, Roberta Carter, a member of the school board (working in concert with the town attorney's wife Marion Partridge), makes it her mission to ban the book from the high school library.She punishes Allison by firing her stepfather, Michael Rossi (a decision which she eventually reverses, to the anger of Marion); while at the same time trying to dissolve her son Ted's marriage to his snobbish bride, a Boston blue-blood named Jennifer Burbank.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ark_in_Space"title="The Ark in Space">
The TARDIS materialises on an aged space station. Sarah is overcome by lack of oxygen. While Harry and the Fourth Doctor explore, Sarah is transported away and placed into cryonic suspension by the station computer. Harry and the Doctor explore and realise the station is a kind of ark. Discovering Sarah, Harry searches for a resuscitation unit but discovers a mummified human-sized insectoid lifeform instead.A woman called Vira revives from suspended animation. Vira revives both Sarah and Noah, Space Station Nerva's leader. The Doctor tells Vira that Nerva's inhabitants have overslept by several millennia, thanks to the insect visitor that sabotaged the control systems. Noah and the visitors clash, and Noah accuses them of murdering a missing crewmate.Noah investigates the power room and is infected by an alien creature. The Doctor realises the alien insect laid eggs inside the missing crewman, who became an alien now inhabiting Nerva. Noah kills a crewmate, but recovers enough to order Vira to revive the remaining crew and evacuate, but the Doctor realises the alien pupae will mature too quickly for this. He proposes that they destroy the Wirrn while they are in their dormant, pupal stage.Dissection of the Wirrn corpse reveals the Wirrn are vulnerable to electricity. As he tries to reactivate the station power, the fully transformed Noah attacks him. Noah reveals that the Wirrn were driven from their home by human settlers and now intend to absorb all human knowledge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gold_Bug_Variations"title="The Gold Bug Variations">
The novel intertwines the discovery of the chemical structure of DNA with the musicality of Johann Sebastian Bach's harpsichord composition the Goldberg Variations. A similar theme is explored by Douglas Hofstadter in his 1979 book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. "The title also alludes to Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 short story "The Gold-Bug", which is also incorporated in the plot of the novel.The plot hinges on two love affairs: the first set in the 1950s, between two scientists intent on discovering the mysteries of DNA; the second in the 1980s, between two lovers who befriend the scientist featured in the novel's flashbacks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golem_(Meyrink_novel)"title="The Golem (Meyrink novel)">
The novel centers on the life of Athanasius Pernath, a jeweler and art restorer who lives in the ghetto of Prague. But his story is experienced by an anonymous narrator, who, during a visionary dream, assumes Pernath's identity thirty years before. This dream was perhaps induced because he inadvertently swapped his hat with the real (old) Pernath's. While the novel is generally focused on Pernath's own musings and adventures, it also chronicles the lives, the characters, and the interactions of his friends and neighbors. The Golem, though rarely seen, is central to the novel as a representative of the ghetto's own spirit and consciousness, brought to life by the suffering and misery that its inhabitants have endured over the centuries.The story itself has a disjointed and often elliptical feel, as it was originally published in serial form and is intended to convey the mystical associations and interests that the author himself was exploring at the time. The reality of the narrator's experiences is often called into question, as some of them may simply be dreams or hallucinations, and others may be metaphysical or transcendent events that are taking place outside the "real" world. Similarly, it is revealed over the course of the book that Pernath apparently suffered from a mental breakdown on at least one occasion, but has no memory of any such event; he is also unable to remember his childhood and most of his youth, a fact that may or may not be attributable to his previous breakdown. His mental stability is constantly called into question by his friends and neighbors, and the reader is left to wonder whether anything that has taken place in the narrative actually happened.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_of_Steel"title="Storm of Steel">
"Storm of Steel" begins with Jünger as a private entering the line with the 73rd Hanoverian Regiment in Champagne. His first taste of combat came at Les Éparges in April 1915 where he was first wounded.After recuperating, he took an officer's course and achieved the rank of "Leutnant". He rejoined his regiment on the Arras sector. In 1916, with the Battle of the Somme underway, Jünger's regiment moved to Combles in August for the defence of the village of Guillemont. Here Jünger was wounded again, and absent shortly before the final British assault which captured the village — his platoon was annihilated. In 1917 Jünger saw action during the Battle of Arras in April, the Third Battle of Ypres in July and October, and the German counter-attack during the Battle of Cambrai in November. Jünger led a company of assault troops during the final German spring offensive, 21 March 1918 when he was wounded again. On 23 August he suffered his most severe wound when he was shot through the chest.In total, Jünger was wounded 14 times during the war, including five bullet wounds and earned Golden Wound Badge. He was awarded the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd Class, House Order of Hohenzollern and was the youngest ever recipient of the "Pour le Mérite".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_(novel)"title="Timeline (novel)">
In northern Arizona near Corazón Canyon, a married couple driving through the desert encounter an elderly man. They take him to a hospital in Gallup, New Mexico. Hospital staff learn that he works for the company ITC. After he suddenly dies, an autopsy reveals that he had unexplainable abnormalities in his blood vessels.In the Dordogne region of southwest France, Professor Edward Johnston leads a group of archaeologists and historians as they study a site that includes the fourteenth-century towns of Castelgard and La Roque. Suspicious of the detailed knowledge of the site shown by their funds provider ITC, Johnston travels to New Mexico to investigate. During his absence, the researchers make disturbing discoveries in the ruins, including the lens to Johnston's eyeglasses, and a written message from him that is determined to be over 600 years old. Four of the researchers—graduate students Chris Hughes and Kate Erickson, assistant professor André Marek, and technology specialist David Stern—are flown to ITC's research headquarters in Black Rock, New Mexico.During the flight, ITC vice president John Gordon informs them that Johnston traveled to the year 1357 using their undisclosed quantum technology. After touring the facility and meeting with ITC president Robert Doniger, the historians decide to venture into the past to rescue the professor. Stern chooses to stay behind because the time period is extremely dangerous.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_to_the_Unknown"title="Mission to the Unknown">
On the planet Kembel, Marc Cory (Edward de Souza) and Gordon Lowery (Jeremy Young) of UN Deep Space Force Group 1 attempt to repair their spaceship to reach their rendezvous when they are attacked by their crew member Jeff Garvey (Barry Jackson), who was in a violent state of mind upon waking up in the jungle. Cory shoots Garvey dead when he was about to fire at Lowery, pulling out a long thorn from behind his ear. Bringing Lowery into the spaceship for debriefing, Cory explains himself to be a Space Security agent assigned to investigate a possible Dalek base for universal invasion with the presence of a Varga plant confirming their presence. Outside, Garvey gradually mutates into a Varga. At the Daleks' base, Dalek Supreme is informed that the representatives from the seven planets will soon arrive while sending a Dalek platoon to destroy Cory and Lowery.Cory stands guard against the slow-moving Varga plants while Lowery finishes building a rescue beacon. They notice a spaceship flying above them, Cory deducing the Daleks are planning something big. As Lowery was about to record a message, Cory notices something moving in the jungle, ducking behind some bushes. The Dalek platoon arrives and destroys their ship with Lowery accidentally stabbing his hand on a Varga thorn as he and Cory flee. In the Dalek base, the representatives from the seven galaxies have gathered in a conference room. Dalek Supreme assures representative Malpha (Robert Cartland) that the human intruders will be dealt with. Cory is forced to kill Lowery upon learning he became infected and records a message, only to be surrounded by the Daleks and exterminated before he could launch the beacon. Back at the Dalek base, the representatives all approve in forming an alliance with the Daleks' plan to take over the Solar System while chanting "Victory".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Advance"title="Time in Advance">
The Earth is visited by large, enigmatic alien spheres, who take up residence in colonies on several prairies and deserts across the world. They make visits to cities, factories and other areas of human activity, seemingly to merely float and observe. All attempts at communication are unsuccessful and despite the best efforts of mankind, no one is able to decipher their intentions. Some, however, have come in to close encounter with the aliens, and emerged dramatically altered beings. These people, called humanity-prime, and dubbed 'primeys', are highly intelligent, can bend matter to their will, but are also, by human standards, quite, quite mad. Algernon Hebster is a highly successful businessman, owing mostly to his dealings with primeys, who supply him with the knowledge for advanced technologies which he puts to use in commerce. The problem is that primeys are so dangerous that dealing with them is highly illegal and every attempt is made to confine them to the reservations around their perceived alien masters.In the far future a law is passed enabling citizens to serve out sentences for crimes they "intend" to commit, serving the full term, but with a 50% pre-criminal discount. Post-criminals and pre-criminals alike are sent to carry out hard-labour on hellishly perilous, far-flung Convict Planets. Few return. Those pre-criminals who are not killed, drop out before their terms are up, with nothing but scars and nightmares to show for their troubles. Two pre-criminals however, 'Blotto' Otto Henck and Nicholas Crandall, manage against all the odds to serve out two full terms for murder, and return to Earth as minor celebrities, with the right to kill one person each. Things, however, do not go quite as planned. Blotto Otto has his scheming wife in mind, only to find out she died the previous year in an unfortunate accident. For Crandall, whose life has been a perpetual series of failures, things go even worse. He intends to kill Frederick Stephenson, a man who stole his great invention. However, on his return, he receives a call from his terrified beloved ex-wife, who thinks she is his intended victim for her series of infidelities whilst they were married. Next he receives a call from his ex-business partner, pleading for his life because he thinks "he" is the intended victim for secretly cheating him out of vast sums of money. Crandall was previously unaware of either of these things. Still reeling, he meets his own brother, who thinks he is the intended victim, and reveals it was he with whom Crandall's wife was cheating. Finally, Crandall calls his intended victim, Stephenson, the only one who fails to twist and squirm, but instead offers Crandall fair settlement for his invention. Shattered by the day's events, Crandall succumbs to the realization that he is one of life's born losers, and sets out with Otto to have some fun.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danse_Macabre_(book)"title="Danse Macabre (book)">
The backbone of the text is King's teaching notes from several college courses he taught in the 1970s. However, "Danse Macabre" has a casual, non-linear writing style and expresses a desire to avoid "academic bullshit".In the introduction, titled "October 4, 1957, and an Invitation to Dance", King begins by explaining why he wrote the book, and then describes the event itself: the launching of the Soviet satellite "Sputnik" which inspired profound fear in him, intended as his personal introduction to what he calls "the real terror". This is followed by the chapter "Tales of the Hook", specifically "The Hook"; an urban legend about young lovers parked in a car, who narrowly avoid an attack by an escaped prisoner with a hook for a hand. King uses this legend to illustrate his contention that horror in general "offers no characterization, no theme, no particular artifice; it does not aspire to symbolic beauty".In the following chapter, he creates a template for descriptions of his macabre subject. Entitled "Tales of the Tarot", the chapter has nothing to do with the familiar tarot card deck. Rather, King borrows the term to describe his observations about major archetypal characters of the horror genre, which he posits come from two British novels and one Irish: the vampire (from "Dracula"), the werewolf (from "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"), and the "Thing Without a Name" (from "Frankenstein"). In light of the sexually repressed Victorian Era publication of "Dracula", King sees a strong sexual undercurrent to the story. "Frankenstein" is reviewed as "a Shakespearean tragedy", and he argues that "its classical unity is broken only by the author's uncertainty as to where the fatal flaw lies—is it in Victor's hubris (usurping a power that belongs only to God) or in his failure to take responsibility for his creation after endowing it with the life-spark?" King does not mistake Mr. Hyde for a "traditional" werewolf, but rather sees the character as the origin of the modern archetype that was later defined by werewolves. The evil-werewolf archetype, argues King, stems from the base and violent side of humanity. These major archetypes are then reviewed in their historical context, ranging from their original appearances to their modern-day equivalents, up to and including cartoon breakfast cereal characters such as Frankenberry and Count Chocula.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practical_Demonkeeping"title="Practical Demonkeeping">
Travis was born in 1900, yet he has not aged since 1919, because he accidentally called up a demon from hell named "Catch" as his servant, presumably forever. Ever since then, Travis has been trying to get rid of Catch, but he is unable to do so because he has lost the repository of the necessary incantations. He traces their whereabouts to a fictional town called "Pine Cove", along Big Sur coast, where he thinks the woman he gave them to may be residing. Interactions with the townspeople and with a djinn, who is pursuing Catch, create considerable complications.Several characters from this novel continue their lives in later novels by Moore. Catch appears in a later book (""), but a much earlier period of history; in addition, the setting of "Pine Cove" itself is revisited for "The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove" and "The Stupidest Angel". The fictional town of "Pine Cove" is described as being within easy driving distance of San Luis Obispo, California.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_the_Condor_Heroes"title="The Return of the Condor Heroes">
The protagonist, Yang Guo, is the orphaned son of Yang Kang, the antagonist in the previous novel. The couple Guo Jing and Huang Rong take care of Yang Guo for a short period of time before sending him to the Quanzhen Sect on Mount Zhongnan for better guidance in moral values and "orthodox" martial arts. In Quanzhen, Yang Guo is often picked on and bullied by his fellow students, and discriminated against by his master, Zhao Zhijing. Yang Guo flees from Quanzhen and ventures unknowingly into the nearby Tomb of the Living Dead, where the Ancient Tomb Sect is based. There, he meets Xiaolongnü, a mysterious maiden of unknown origin, and becomes her apprentice. They live together in the tomb for many years until Yang Guo grows up.Yang Guo and Xiaolongnü develop romantic feelings for each other, but their romance is forbidden by the prevailing norms of the "wulin" (martial artists' community). Throughout the story, their love meets with several tests, such as the misunderstandings that threaten to tear them apart, and their encounter with Gongsun Zhi, whom Xiaolongnü almost marries at one point. Finally, after their reunion and marriage, Xiaolongnü leaves Yang Guo again, owing to her belief she cannot recover from a fatal poison and promises to meet him again 16 years later, to prevent him from committing suicide. While Yang Guo is wandering the "wulin" alone, he meets several formidable martial artists and a giant eagle, and improves his skills tremendously after learning from them. His adventures gradually mould him into a courageous hero and perhaps the most powerful martial artist of his time. Yang Guo serves his native land by helping the ethnic Han people of the Song Empire resist invaders from the Mongol Empire. At the end of the novel, he is reunited with Xiaolongnü and they leave to lead the rest of their lives in seclusion after receiving praises and blessings from the "wulin".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_the_Red_Fern_Grows"title="Where the Red Fern Grows">
Billy Coleman, a middle-aged man, rescues a redbone hound under attack by neighborhood dogs. He takes it home with him so that its wounds can heal. In light of this event, he has a flashback to when he was a ten-year-old boy living in the Ozark Mountains. Young Billy Coleman wants nothing more than a pair of hounds for coon hunting. After seeing a magazine ad for coon hounds, Billy spends the next two years working odd jobs to earn the $50 he needs to buy two puppies. Billy's dogs are delivered to Tahlequah, over 20 miles away. Billy decides to walk the distance. As he returns with the dogs, he sees a heart carved on a tree with the names "Dan + Ann" and decides to name the puppies Little Ann and Old Dan. With his grandfather's help, Billy teaches his dogs to be very loyal to each other and to Billy.The first night of hunting season, Billy promises the dogs that if they tree a coon, he will do the rest. They tree one in a huge sycamore, which Billy believes is far too large to chop down. Remembering his promise to his dogs, Billy spends the next two days attempting to chop down the sycamore. Exhausted, Billy prays for the strength to continue, whereupon a strong wind blows the tree over.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sovereign_State"title="The Sovereign State">
In part, it was a portrait of Harold Geneen, the chief executive of ITT from 1959 until 1977. Geneen was a legendarily hands-on manager, who believed it necessary to penetrate through layers of "false facts" to get to the "unshakable facts" about any of the markets or divisions of his conglomerate. In terms of its broader themes, though, this book was one of a spate of early-70s books that promoted the thesis that multinational corporations were taking over the traditional prerogatives and functions of national governments.In a review of Sampson's book in the "Sunday Telegraph", Sir Frank McFadzean, Vice Chairman of Royal Dutch/Shell, took issue with that thesis. Such corporations are "prisoners of their past investments," he wrote, because "even the most puny government can nationalize, and the only redress is to seek compensation."Although as Sampson's book shows ITT has used other means of redress to defend its own business interests from nationalisation, that have not been confined to the courts. These have ranged from supporting the 1930s military takeover by General Franco in Spain, investing in Hitler's war machine throughout World War II, and funding a CIA-backed coup led by General Pinochet in Chile 1973.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang_the_Drum_Slowly"title="Bang the Drum Slowly">
Harris's narrator Henry "Author" Wiggen, a star pitcher, tells the story of a baseball season with the New York Mammoths, a fictional team based on the New York Giants, as noted in the author's book "Diamond: The Baseball Writings of Mark Harris". In the novel, Wiggen befriends a slow-talking catcher from Georgia named Bruce Pearson who is more ridiculed than respected by his teammates. When Pearson learns he is terminally ill with Hodgkin’s disease and is to be sent to the minor leagues, Wiggen rallies his teammates to keep the catcher among them and inspires Pearson to become a better player before his time runs out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sunday_at_the_Pool_in_Kigali"title="A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali">
Bernard Valcourt, a documentary filmmaker from Quebec, has been sent to the Rwandan capital Kigali to set up a television station. He falls in love with a Rwandan girl, Gentille, who in reality is an ethnic Hutu, but she is often mistaken for a Tutsi. With the Hutu government encouraging violence against Tutsis, Gentille's life becomes endangered. Encouraged by his love for Gentille, and a desire to complete a documentary to bring the tragedy of AIDS to the attention of the outside world, Valcourt refuses to leave Rwanda. When the two are married, they become separated, leaving Valcourt believing that Gentille has been killed. He then determines to document her life story, and sets out to discover the story of her final days.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logopolis"title="Logopolis">
Alerted to impending trouble by the TARDIS's Cloister Bell, the Fourth Doctor decides to stay out of trouble, and instead repair the TARDIS's broken chameleon circuit by materialising around a real police box on Earth and recording its exact dimensions with Adric's help. With those, he can give the mathematicians of the planet Logopolis the right block-transfer computations to repair the circuit. The Master learns of the Doctor's plan, and materialises his TARDIS around the police box first, causing a recursion loop with the Doctor's. The Doctor eventually breaks his TARDIS out of the loop, but when they step outside, he sees a figure in white, the Watcher, telling him to go to Logopolis immediately. En route, they find they have gained a passenger, Tegan Jovanka, an airline stewardess who entered the Police box seeking help for a broken-down car.At Logopolis, everything seems normal as the Doctor provides the Monitor, the lead mathematician, his measurements to give to the others and perform their verbal calculations. They soon discover that the Master had arrived first, with several of the mathematicians killed by his tissue-compression eliminator. The Master's TARDIS materialises, and he and Nyssa, under his hypnotic control, seize the control center and use a device to silence the other mathematicians, demanding the Monitor to explain the purpose of a radio telescope on the planet. The Monitor begs for the Master to stop the silencing device. The Master does so, but to the Monitor's horror, the mathematicians remain silent, and they find the planet starting to turn to dust. The Monitor quickly explains that their calculations were used to power Charged Vacuum Emboitments (CVEs) which were used to funnel off excess entropy from this universe to prevent its approaching heat death; without the CVEs, entropy is taking over. The Monitor urges the Doctor to use their program to open a CVE, before he disintegrates. The Doctor and Master agree to work together and, after releasing Nyssa, bring Tegan with them to the Master's TARDIS and depart for Earth. Adric and Nyssa try to follow in the Doctor's TARDIS, but initially end up far outside the universe, and watch as entropy obliterates the sector of space with Nyssa's home planet, Traken. However, they fix the controls to track and follow the Master's TARDIS to Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Londoners_(book)"title="Londoners (book)">
The book contains 80 different stories written by Londoners and other associated with the city about their perspective on the city. Those who contributed to the book included the woman who voices station announcements on the London Underground, a man who plants trees along Oxford Street, a British Pakistani currency trader and a guardsman at Buckingham Palace
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Tadeusz"title="Pan Tadeusz">
A young Polish noble, Tadeusz Soplica, comes back from his education in Vilnius to his family estate in Soplicowo. Tadeusz is an orphan raised by his uncle – Judge Soplica, who is a younger brother of Tadeusz's long lost father, Jacek Soplica. Tadeusz is greeted by the Seneschal (Wojski), a family friend. The Seneschal tells him about the trial between the Judge and Count Horeszko concerning the ownership of a castle which once belonged to Pantler Horeszko – the Count's distant relative, a powerful aristocrat who was killed many years before. The trial is currently conducted by the Chamberlain (Podkomorzy), who is a friend and guest of the Judge. Tadeusz also meets Zosia – a young girl, granddaughter of the Pantler, who lives in the Judge's household, and her caretaker Telimena – the Judge's cousin. Tadeusz takes an interest in Zosia, but also flirts with Telimena.Meanwhile, Count Horeszko visits the Castle, where he is greeted by Gerwazy, the warden and an old servant of the late Pantler. The Count reveals to Gerwazy he has little interest in the Castle and intends to give up the trial. Gerwazy in response tells the Count the story of the conflict between Soplica's and Horeszko's family. The Pantler often invited Jacek Soplica, Tadeusz's father, to the Castle, as Jacek was very popular amongst lesser nobles in the land. Jacek aspired to marry the Pantler's daughter, but was refused by the Pantler. Later, when Russian troops stormed the Castle during the Kościuszko's uprising, Jacek suddenly arrived on the scene and shot the Pantler. Gerwazy swore to avenge his master, but Jacek disappeared. The story makes the Count excited about the conflict with the Soplicas and he decides he has to take the Castle back from the Judge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racists_(novel)"title="Racists (novel)">
Two scientists decide to settle the question of racial superiority by leaving two children—a white girl and black boy—alone on an island to be raised without speaking by only a nurse, Norah. The British scientist Samuel Bates believes that the girl will emerge as the leader, while the French scientist Jean-Louis Belavoix believes that the two races can not live in peace and the children will ultimately murder each other. The experiment begins to run into problems when Bates and Belavoix argue about the validity of cranial measurements. Meanwhile, Bates's long suffering assistant Nicholas Quartley falls in love with Norah and decides to rescue her from the island.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwritten"title="Ghostwritten">
The novel is written in a series of changing first-person perspectives. The main characters, though strangers to one another, become connected through their actions and relationships.This first chapter follows Quasar, a member of a millenarianist doomsday cult, attempting to evade capture in Okinawa after releasing nerve agents into a Tokyo subway train. His efforts to remain reclusive are hampered by the friendliness of the town's other inhabitants. The next chapter focuses on Satoru, a young Japanese record shop worker in downtown Tokyo with a deep love for jazz music. Satoru struggles to balance his complicated family life, musical ambitions, societal pressure to begin a career, and his infatuation with Tomoyo, a new customer in the shop. In the third chapter, Neal Brose, an expatriate lawyer in Hong Kong, is asked to manage a secret bank account. A chance meeting with Satoru and Tomoyo leads Brose to meditate on the end of his own marriage. Following this and a police investigation into the bank account, Brose suffers a breakdown. He dies in diabetic shock while climbing a hill towards the Tian Tan Buddha.The fourth chapter centers on a Chinese woman and her tea shack on Mount Emei. Throughout her life, she and the shack encounter Chinese warlords, Japanese soldiers, Red Guards, reformists, and a tree she believes can speak to her. After finally visiting a Buddhist monastery at the mountain's peak, she dies peacefully at the tea shack. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Vallarta_Squeeze"title="Puerto Vallarta Squeeze">
Former journalist Danny Pastor has relaxed in Puerto Vallarta over the past year with María de la Luz Santos, a 22-year-old woman whom he'd first met as a cantina waitress. They moved in together shortly thereafter, and Luz asked Danny to marry her, but he kept her at arms' length. One night when Luz went off by herself, she got pregnant by a drunken college student. Danny paid for her to have an abortion, and that incident made up his mind about her.One night as they relaxed in the El Niño cantina, Danny heard a gunshot and rushes outside to see two men dead. One was an American Navy officer, and the other was a software engineer ready to sell his company's work on failure analysis to the Taiwanese government. Back at their apartment, Danny and Luz met a man who identifies himself as "Peter Schumann" and needs to get north of the Rio Grande quickly. Paying Danny five thousand in cash, Schumann arranges his passage in a rusting Ford Bronco named Vito. The film adaptation featured a Jeep Wagoneer instead of a Ford Bronco.Unaware at first of the nature of their journey, Luz wants to go with them to see her grandparents' graves along the coast. When she met with them for the trip, Luz wore blue jeans and a shirt that read "Puerto Vallarta Squeeze" with two halves of a lime dripping down the center. Danny saw in the story of this trip a great opportunity for a literary comeback. As they travelled north, Danny, Luz, and Schumann evade American military and Mexican authorities. Schumann later revealed that he's really former Marine sniper turned mercenary Clayton Price; he was commissioned to kill the engineer, but he took his job personally when he shot the naval officer. During the Vietnam War, Price was abandoned behind enemy lines by the officer who commanded the helicopter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Barton"title="Mary Barton">
The novel begins in Manchester, where we are introduced to the Bartons and the Wilsons, two working-class families. John Barton is a questioner of the distribution of wealth and the relations between rich and poor. Soon his wife dies—he blames it on her grief over the disappearance of her sister Esther. Having already lost his son Tom at a young age, Barton is left to raise his daughter, Mary, alone and now falls into depression and begins to involve himself in the Chartist, trade-union movement.Chapter 1 takes place in the countryside where Greenheys is now.Mary takes up work at a dressmaker's (her father had objected to her working in a factory) and becomes subject to the affections of hard-working Jem Wilson and Harry Carson, son of a wealthy mill owner. She fondly hopes, by marrying Carson, to secure a comfortable life for herself and her father, but immediately after refusing Jem's offer of marriage she realizes that she truly loves "him". She, therefore, decides to evade Carson, planning to show her feelings to Jem in the course of time. Jem believes her decision to be final, though this does not change his feelings for her.Meanwhile, Esther, a "street-walker," returns to warn John Barton that he must save Mary from becoming like her. He simply pushes her away, however, and she's sent to jail for a month on the charge of vagrancy. Upon her release, she talks to Jem with the same purpose. He promises that he will protect Mary and confronts Carson, eventually entering into a fight with him, which is witnessed by a policeman passing by.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_(Doctor_Who)"title="Robot (Doctor Who)">
Following his regeneration, the Fourth Doctor becomes delirious and falls unconscious in front of Sarah Jane Smith and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. The Doctor tries to sneak off in his TARDIS, but the Brigadier and Sarah stop him, convincing him to help in finding the culprit in the theft of top secret plans for a disintegrator gun.Sarah investigates the National Institute for Advanced Scientific Research, colloquially known as the "Think Tank". She finds that director Hilda Winters, her assistant Arnold Jellicoe, and former Think Tank member Professor J.P. Kettlewell are developing a robot, K1, to be used to perform tasks in hazardous locations in place of humans. Winters and Jellicoe have secretly instructed K1 to kill Cabinet Minister Joseph Chambers as an enemy of humanity and to use the completed disintegrator gun to steal international nuclear launch codes from Chambers' safe. Sarah is stunned to learn that Kettlewell was the mastermind behind the plot. K1 discovers Sarah's presence, and Winters orders K1 to kill her. When UNIT arrives, the three conspirators and K1 escape with Sarah as their hostage.Winters sends a list of demands to the world governments and gives them thirty minutes to comply, then orders Kettlewell to connect to the launch computers and prepare to send the launch codes. Kettlewell, who never expected their plan to get to this stage, hesitates, and in the ensuing discussion, Sarah and Harry attempt to escape with Kettlewell's assistance. Winters orders K1 to stop them, but the robot inadvertently fires the disintegrator gun at Kettlewell, killing him. The death of its creator puts K1 in a further confused state, falling to the ground and apparently shutting down. Winters attempts to program the countdown, but the Doctor arrives and successfully counters it. As UNIT forces take Winters and Jellicoe away, K1 reactivates and attacks UNIT. K1 seeks out Sarah to protect her, a result of an Oedipus complex it developed from Sarah's previous compassion, according to the Doctor. When the Doctor finds out about the living metal that Kettlewell used in constructing K1 and the metal virus he designed to reduce the world's metallic waste, the Doctor races back to Kettlewell's lab to synthesise a batch of the virus. Meanwhile, Lethbridge-Stewart fires the disintegrator gun at the robot but the blast is absorbed by the living metal, causing the robot to grow to an enormous size. The Doctor returns, throwing a bucket of virus solution onto K1, and the robot slowly shrinks before the virus consumes it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gift_(Nabokov_novel)"title="The Gift (Nabokov novel)">
## Chapter One.Fyodor Konstantinovitch Cherdyntsev (in Russian version the main character is called Fyodor Konstantinovitch Godunov-Cherdyntsev, the first part of the name refers to Pushkin's play "Boris Godunov)" is a Russian émigré living in Berlin in the 1920s, and the chapter starts with him moving to a boarding-house on Seven Tannenberg Street. He has recently published a book of poems, and receives a call from Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski congratulating him on the poems and inviting him to come over to a party to read a favorable critique in a newspaper. The poems reach back to Fyodor's childhood, which he spent with his sister Tanya in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and the Leshino manor, the country estate of the Godunov-Cherdyntsevs. Fyodor arrives at the party only to learn that he has fallen victim to a crude April fool's joke; his book has not received any attention at all in the press. The Chernyshevskis had a son, Yasha, who looked like Fyodor and loved poetry. Yasha took his own life when he was caught in a tragic love triangle. Yasha's mother wants Fyodor to use Yasha's tragic end in his writings, but he declines. As a result of Yasha's death, his father suffers episodes of insanity. When Fyodor returns to his “new hole” he realises he has brought the wrong keys with him, but after he waits a while a visitor comes out and Fyodor gets back in. Fyodor dawdles away the summer. In the fall he attends a literary meeting of Russian émigrés and there he meets Koncheyev, whom he considers a rival. A reading of a new play bores the audience. When Fyodor is about to leave he and Koncheyev discuss Russian literature at length and with great animation, but their discussion turns out to have been largely fictitious.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinded_by_the_Right"title="Blinded by the Right">
Brock recalls his days at the University of California, Berkeley, and how he was turned off by hecklers at a speech by then United States ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick. Brock's main attraction to conservatism was his disdain for communism.After college, Brock moved with his then-partner (called "Andrew" to conceal his identity) to Washington, D.C. In D.C., Brock worked for "The Washington Times" and "The American Spectator". Brock claims while he was working for those publications he thought he was doing honest journalism, but later stated that he had never corroborated his facts.While working for "The American Spectator", he wrote an article on Anita Hill, which he later expanded into "The Real Anita Hill", a book that made him popular in the conservative movement. Brock would later say that many of the details he used were false.After Bill Clinton was elected, Brock was assigned to write a story, later dubbed Troopergate, about four Arkansas state troopers who held a grudge against Bill Clinton. He claims that the troopers made up stories about affairs that could never be corroborated. Brock was given assurances that the troopers would not get paid for telling their stories. He later discovered he was deceived, and that the troopers had been paid by Richard Mellon Scaife, who bankrolled "The American Spectator" and the Arkansas Project, a secret project to discredit Clinton.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Wicked_This_Way_Comes_(novel)"title="Something Wicked This Way Comes (novel)">
The novel opens on an overcast October 23. Two friends – William "Will" Halloway and Jim Nightshade – both on the verge of their 14th birthdays, encounter a strange lightning rod salesman, Tom Fury. He announces that a storm is coming their way. The salesman gives Jim a lightning rod because he tells the boys that one of their houses is in danger. Throughout the night, Will and Jim meet up with townsfolk who also sense something in the air. Among the townspeople is Will's 54-year-old father, Charles Halloway, who works in the local library. Both Mr. Halloway and the boys learn about the carnival that is to start the next day. Jim and Will are excited that a carnival has come so late in the year, but Charles has a bad feeling about it.The boys run out to watch the carnival arrive at three in the morning. As the train pulls in, the smoke billows in circles and solidifies as the carnival. The boys go the next day to explore the carnival and encounter their 7th grade teacher, Miss Foley, who is dazed after visiting the Mirror Maze. Jim insists on coming back that night and Will agrees, but when they bump into the lightning-rod salesman's abandoned bag, they realize that they must stay to learn what happens after dark. After investigating all of the rides, they go up to a carousel, which has an out-of-order sign. Mr. Cooger suddenly grabs Will and Jim after they climb up on horses and he informs them the merry-go-round is broken. Mr. Dark arrives and tells him to put them down. He pays attention only to Jim, who is enthralled by what he sees. The boys run away and then hide and wait. Both witness Mr. Cooger riding backwards on the carousel (as the music plays backwards), and when he steps off, to their shock, he is 12 years old.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Rain"title="Century Rain">
Wendell Floyd is an expatriate American living in an alternate version of 1950s Paris. In this world, the Nazi invasion of France failed, and Hitler was deposed by the German High Command. Without World War II, technology in this world has stagnated at 1930s levels, and Fascist political parties have gained power in France.Floyd is a part-time jazz musician whose career has stalled since his ex-girlfriend, Greta, left Paris to pursue a musical career touring with another jazz band. He and his band-mate André Custine earn a supplemental income working as private detectives. When the novel opens, Floyd and Custine are hired by a concerned landlord to investigate the death of one of his tenants. Blanchard, the landlord, is certain that the death of Susan White, which the Parisian police have written off as an accident, is murder. Floyd is not so certain, but he's willing to investigate.In a scene seemingly from another novel, Verity Auger finds herself responsible when her archaeology dig beneath the frozen ruins of some far-flung future Paris results in the death of one of her students. During her trial she is caught up in political infighting, and maneuvered into accepting a high risk assignment, without knowing what it entails.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_of_the_Wiseguy"title="The Way of the Wiseguy">
The book records psychological portraits of the personalities Pistone associated with during his years undercover. Among the many recurring themes in the book: wiseguys are not nice people, they don't have friends (not even people they have known and worked with their whole life), and they will beat or kill you without hesitation.Pistone relays experiences with international organized crime, as a consultant and undercover agent for Scotland Yard, and infiltrating a drug lord's operation in a foreign country.An audio CD is included with the book, containing actual FBI surveillance recordings of Pistone, working undercover as Donnie Brasco, and the mobster who taught him about the Mafia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_(novel)"title="Popcorn (novel)">
The book takes place in different parts of Los Angeles, California. The date is never actually specified, but various clues suggest it is set in the near future. Mostly the story takes place in the centre of Hollywood. The book depicts the differences between different social groups in America, from rich people with guards like Bruce Delamitri to poorer people Wayne and Scout.The protagonist, Bruce Delamitiri, is an artist who works in the motion picture industry. Many people in the US think that, by making these movies, Bruce makes killing cool. Numerous characters throughout the book imply that he encourages everyone who's watching these movies to kill for fun. Bruce, on the other hand, defends himself by telling everyone that he doesn't think he encourages anyone to do anything. He says that there has always been violence but humans are not like robots; seeing something on the screen does not necessarily make us want to do it ourselves (p. 13 "people get up from the movie theatre or the TV and do what they just saw"). He also claims that he is just showing existing violence. Unfortunately for Bruce, Wayne and Scout (a pair of psychopaths known in the media as the "Mall Murderers") have formulated a plan to hold him hostage and have him publicly announce that his movies are responsible for their crimes so they can avoid the death penalty (Wayne has a lengthy speech giving examples of how in America it is possible to be guilty and innocent at the same time.) As the novel progresses, Bruce and a critically injured Brooke Daniels are joined inside his house by his wife and daughter and a TV camera crew. The siege reaches its climax as Wayne holds a ratings monitor and announces on live TV that he will spare the hostages if everyone stops watching the siege in the next few minutes - however, this does not happen and he begins firing as the LAPD begin a frantic attempt to subdue him. Many of the characters die in the ensuing violence and the epilogue of the story reveals grim details as to how all the survivors have found a way of escaping responsibility for the tragedy using varying routes from lawsuits and finding religion to making documentaries which explicitly blame everyone else. The book ends with the line "No one has taken responsibility" — echoing an earlier rant by Bruce that we have created a blame free society in which any problem or shortcoming can be blamed on others rather than accepting responsibility for our own actions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Peregrine_Pickle"title="The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle">
The novel begins with the character of Peregrine as a young country gentleman rejected by his cruel mother, ignored by his indifferent father, and hated by his degenerate brother. After their alienation, he turns to Commodore Hawser Trunnion, who raises him.Peregrine's detailed life experience provides a scope for Smollett's satire on human cruelty, stupidity, and greed: from his upbringing, education at Oxford, journey to France, jailing at the Fleet, and unexpected succession to his father's fortune and his final repentance and marriage to his beloved Emilia. The novel is written as a series of adventures, with every chapter depicting a new experience. The novel also contains a lengthy independent story called "The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality", written by Frances Vane, Viscountess Vane."Peregrine Pickle" features several amusing characters, most notably Commodore Hawser Trunnion, an old seaman and misogynist who lives in a house with his former shipmates. Trunnion's lifestyle may have inspired Charles Dickens to create the character of Wemmick in "Great Expectations". Another interesting character is Peregrine's friend Cadwallader Crabtree, an old misanthrope who amuses himself by playing ingenious jokes on naive people.Smollett also caricatured many of his enemies in the novel, most notably Henry Fielding and the actor David Garrick. Fitzroy Henry Lee was supposedly the model for Hawser Trunnion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Ships"title="The Long Ships">
The first book covers the years 982 to 990. While still a youth, Orm is abducted by a Viking party led by Krok and they sail south. They fall captive to Andalusian Muslims and serve as galley slaves for more than two years, later becoming members of Almansur's bodyguard for four years, raiding Santiago de Compostela under his command. They return to Denmark to King Harald Bluetooth's court where Orm meets Ylva. Orm later returns to Scania with Rapp. Orm and Rapp join a Viking party raiding England again after a brief period of peace in that area following the reconquest of the Danelaw in the mid-10th century by King Edgar, Ethelred's father. Orm joins a party led by Thorkell the High in England and when he learns that Harald's daughter Ylva is staying in London, gets baptised and marries Ylva. They move to a neglected farm, his mother's inheritance in Göinge, northern Skåne, near the border with Småland. During the following years (992 to 995), Orm prospers, and Ylva gives birth to twin girls (Oddny and Ludmilla), a son, Harald, and later to another son (though possibly from Rainald), Svarthöfde (Blackhair in the Michael Meyer translation). Meanwhile, Orm also gets busy in converting the heathens in the district, with the help of Father Willibald.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_at_the_Villa"title="Up at the Villa">
The action takes place in the late 1930s. 30-year-old Mary Panton, whose extraordinary beauty has always been one of her greatest assets, has been a widow for one year. Her late husband Matthew, whom she married at 21 because she loved him, turned out to be an alcoholic, a gambler, a womaniser, and a wife-beater. Mary endures all the hardship and pain inflicted on her by her husband (including his having sex with her while drunk). When he drinks and drives, he has a car accident. A few hours later, he dies in Mary's arms. This, she concludes, is a blessing for both of them.The Leonards (a couple who are not in the novel) offer Panton their 16th-century villa on a hill above Florence, Italy, for an extended stay. She gladly accepts the offer. The old villa is staffed by Nina, the maid, and Ciro, her husband and manservant—but it is otherwise empty. Mary, whose parents are both dead, enjoys the solitary life up at the villa. Occasionally, she joins other residents of, and visitors to, Florence for a party or luncheon. She enjoys driving round the countryside in her car. So far as a widow she has not taken a lover. She says it has been an easy decision as she has never been tempted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marlfox"title="Marlfox">
The wandering Noonvale companions travel to Redwall, where they wish to mount a show. On the way, however, they learn that the Marlfoxes will attempt to seize Redwall, and hasten onward to warn them, while Guosim from another part of Mossflower do the same.The Marlfoxes consist of High Queen Silth and her brood. They are different from other foxes in their fur, which gives them the ability to blend into almost any surrounding, invisible to all but the keenest eye. This ability has given rise to the false rumour that the Marlfoxes are magic, which they are not. However, Marlfoxes are highly agile and skilled with axes.Castle Marl, home of the Marlfoxes, is situated in the middle of an enormous inland sea, on the island that was once home to Badger Lord Urthwyte the Mighty. The Marlfoxes command a vast army of water rats, and they travel around the country seeking rare and priceless artifacts.The Marlfoxes, backed by an army of water rats, mount a successful invasion of Redwall and steal the tapestry of the long dead hero, Martin the Warrior. The Marlfox Ziral is slain, however, and the remaining Marlfoxes swear revenge on the citizens of Redwall.Mokkan, one of the Marlfoxes, escapes with the tapestry, leaving his siblings behind. Three young Redwallers, Songbreeze Swifteye, Dannflor Reguba, and a Guosim shrew named Dippler set out after Mokkan, trying to retrieve the tapestry. They meet Burble, a water vole, and have many adventures and meet many friends who help them on their journey, such as the gigantic hedgehog Sollertree, who lost his daughter Nettlebud to the Marlfoxes and water rats, and the Mighty Megraw, a large osprey who used to live by the Marlfox island but was driven away in an ambush by magpies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curse_of_Fenric"title="The Curse of Fenric">
The Seventh Doctor and Ace arrive at a British naval installation near Maiden's Point on the Northumberland coast during World War II. The base contains a supply of nerve gas and the Ultima supercomputer used by Dr. Judson to decode German messages as well as Viking runes in the catacombs. The runes warn of Fenric, whom the Doctor recognizes as a being that can control his "wolves", individuals manipulated by his powers. The Doctor and Ace find a covert Russian squad attempting to steal Ultima. As Ace becomes smitten with their leader Captain Sorin, the Doctor warns them to lay low.Exploring the catacombs, the Doctor and Ace find a glowing Oriental vase among the Viking treasures, which is confiscated by the base commander Millington and given to Judson to study. As Judson places it within Ultima, he is struck by electricity and taken over by the spirit of Fenric. Fenric calls out to the Ancient One, a Haemovore in the nearby sea, who leads an army of Haemovores to attack the base and local residents, turning them into Haemovores. Ace warns Kathleen, a WRNS, to escape with her newborn child, Audrey.The Doctor sets up a chess problem, hoping to distract Fernic long enough to find a permanent solution to stop him. Sorin arrives and tries to kill Fenric but learns he is one of his wolves, a descendant of the Vikings that brought the Oriental vase here. Ace arrives, sees Sorin studying the chess board, and offers the solution. The Doctor arrives too late as Sorin reveals himself as Fenric, commanding the Ancient One to attack the Doctor. A psychic barrier created by Ace's trust in the Doctor stops the Haemovore. Fenric tells Ace she is one of his wolves, having created the time storm that took her to Iceworld to meet the Doctor, and she furthered her own cycle by making sure Audrey, her mother, was safe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_II"title="Mao II">
A reclusive novelist named Bill Gray works endlessly on a novel which he chooses not to finish. He has chosen a life secluded from the outside world in order to try to keep his writing pure. He, along with his assistant Scott, believes that something is lost once a mass audience reads the work. Scott would prefer Bill didn't publish the book for fear that the mass-production of the work will destroy the "real" Bill. Bill has a dalliance with Scott's partner Karen Janney, a former member of the Unification Church who is married to Kim Jo Pak in a Unification Church Blessing ceremony in the prologue of the book.Bill, who lives as a complete recluse, accedes to be photographed by a New York photographer named Brita who is documenting writers. In dialogue with Brita and others, Bill laments that novelists are quickly becoming obsolete in an age where terrorism has supplanted art as the "raids on consciousness" that jolt and transform culture at large. Bill disappears without a word and secretly decides to accept an opportunity from his former editor Charles to travel to London to publicly speak on the behalf of a Swiss writer held hostage in war-torn Beirut.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_American_Girl_(novel)"title="All American Girl (novel)">
Samantha Madison lives in Washington, D.C and is a sophomore at John Adams Preparatory School. An outcast, she has only one friend, Catherine. Sam is a huge fan of Gwen Stefani and often laments that she is not more like Gwen, though she is against most other aspects of popular culture and dyes her entire wardrobe black because she is "mourning for her generation." A middle child, Sam often feels inferior because her older sister, Lucy, is a cheerleader, and therefore one of the most popular girls in school, and her younger sister, Rebecca, is so intelligent that she takes college-level classes at a school for gifted kids. Sam is very different from her traditional parents—her father is an international economist at the World Bank and her mother is an environmental lawyer. Sam also believes she is in love with Lucy's boyfriend Jack. Jack is the complete social opposite of big sister Lucy, having an artistic yet rebellious attitude to life and claiming that teenagers need to "fight the system".Sam is an aspiring artist and draws celebrity portraits during her German class, which she has a C− in. Her sister Lucy finds out and shows them to the family at dinner. As a punishment, her parents decide to enroll her in bi-weekly art classes at local artist Susan Boone's studio. Sam goes to her first class where she is reprimanded by Boone for drawing what she knows and not what she sees. Offended, Sam decides to skip the next class choosing to occupy her time at the nearby Capitol Cookies and Static (a record store). While she is waiting for her housekeeper to pick up from art class, she notices a man she saw earlier at Static who was listening to Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl". The man turns out to be an assassin and as he takes a gun to shoot the President who is exiting Capitol Cookies, Sam jumps on him and causes him to misfire. She breaks her arm in the process as the man falls on top of her when she jumps on him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_and_Secret_Show"title="The Great and Secret Show">
In 1969, while working in a dead letter office in Nebraska, disgruntled postal clerk Randolph Jaffe discovers hints to a mysterious society known as The Shoal, which ostensibly practises a form of magic only vaguely known as "The Art". Jaffe's search eventually brings him to a New Mexico town where he encounters Kissoon, who claims to be the last of the Shoal. Kissoon tells Jaffe of the mystical dream sea Quiddity and the islands within it known as the Ephemeris. Quiddity, as it turns out, is visible exactly three times to an ordinary human: The first time we ever sleep outside our mother's womb, the first time we sleep beside the one we truly love and the last time we ever sleep before we die. However, this simply is not enough for the megalomaniac Jaffe, who wishes to actually visit the dream sea in person and gain control of it. Jaffe flees when Kissoon tries to bargain for his body.Jaffe later teams up with a scientist named Fletcher to develop a liquid called Nuncio, which can theoretically allow a human to evolve to a state that would enable him to physically reach Quiddity. However, Fletcher realises that Jaffe will only use Nuncio for evil and destroys his laboratory. Jaffe arrives and both are exposed to the Nuncio. After the two battle each other for a year, their spirits arrive in California, where they rape and impregnate four teenage girls. One of the girls is infertile and fails to conceive while another kills herself and her child after giving birth. The third, Trudi Katz, moves away with her baby Howard, while the fourth, Joyce McGuire, gives birth to twins, Jo-Beth and Tommy Ray.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everville"title="Everville">
In 1848, an Irish immigrant named Maeve O'Connell is traveling west with her father and a group of others. Her father seeks to found the town of Everville, being inspired by a mysterious man named Buddenbaum and having been given a medallion similar to the one possessed by Jaffe in the Great and Secret Show. Maeve's father is scapegoated and murdered by the fanatics in the group but Maeve is saved by a winged creature named Coker. Disobeying his orders to not follow him, Maeve ends up disrupting a wedding ceremony of two warring families from Quiddity, leading to a large conflict and the death of most of the families. Coker and Maeve are about to head through a portal, called a neirica, which brought such beings to Earth from Quiddity, but the arrival of Buddenbaum disrupts things. As the neirica closes, Coker severs his wings to stay with Maeve. Only one of the beings from Quiddity remains, a creature named Noah.The narrative then shifts to the present day, where Everville is about to hold its popular annual festival. A doctor's receptionist named Phoebe Cobb carried on an affair with a black painter named Joe Flicker. When caught by Phoebe's husband, a struggle ensues and her husband is accidentally killed, forcing Joe, who has a prior criminal record, to go on the run. Tesla Bombeck, whose head is also occupied by Raul, returns to Palomo Grove where she meets a young man named Lucien and his colleagues, who believe Fletcher has returned. Meanwhile, Grillo, who has been collecting strange stories from around the world in a database he calls "The Reef" comes across a report that makes him believe Tommy Ray is still alive. He reaches out to Howard and Jo-Beth, who are now married with a baby daughter, Amy. An attorney named Erwin Toothaker comes across a 30-year-old confession about the lynching of a strange family of three. His research leads him to the remains of the family's home where he finds Fletcher. Tesla meets up with and makes love to Lucien but the two argue and split up, spurned primarily by Raul. Fletcher drains the life out of Erwin, killing him. Erwin's spirit remains and sees him creating Lix, revealing that Fletcher is in fact Kissoon. Joe, fleeing to the hills near Everville, comes across Noah and the still present neirica to Quiddity. Noah convinces Joe to bring him through into Quiddity and promises him power. He introduces Joe to a squid-like creature called Zehraphushu ("Shu") which is believed to be a god-like being possessing a hive mind. Erwin's spirit is able to lead Tesla to his home where she meets and befriends Phoebe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thief_of_Always"title="The Thief of Always">
Harvey Swick is an 11-year-old boy bored with school, teachers, homework, and his day-to-day life. A man named Rictus visits Harvey and tells him about a kids’ paradise called the Holiday House. At the Holiday House, there are all the sweets a person could ask for; four seasons in a day; Halloween every evening; Christmas, with whatever gifts you could wish for every night; and everything else you could dream of. Harvey hesitantly visits the house and becomes friends with two other children staying alongside him, Wendell and Lulu. There is also an elderly woman, Mrs. Griffin, who cooks all the meals and cares for the children; though she seems kind, she appears to be keeping a secret about the house and its creator, Mr. Hood. Mrs Griffin also keeps three cats: Stew Cat, Blue Cat and Clue Cat. Clue Cat is accidentally killed by being burned alive from the lunch Mrs Griffin had been cooking, which distresses her. Harvey thinks his parents will be worried about him, so is allowed to speak to them on the phone. Harvey’s parents tell him they thought it would be a good idea for him to take a break from school to cheer him up. Though Harvey thinks the voices of his parents are a bit strange, he brushes it off and starts to relax. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_of_Redwall"title="Mariel of Redwall">
## Book 1: The Maid from the Sea.The story opens with the Gabool the Wild, the nefarious King of Searats, standing at the top of a cliff, watching a small mousemaid struggling to stay afloat in the rough seas below. The pirate king returned to his fortress, Fort Bladegirt, where one of his captains named Bludrigg demanded a share of their most recent plunder. Gabool feigned an air of compliance, but swiftly beheaded Bludrigg. After this incident, he interrogated Joseph the Bellmaker and attempted to force him to build a tower for the enormous bell he captured. This fails, but Gabool was able to successfully persuade the Bellmaker to interpret the mysterious symbols on the bell in exchange for promises of a reunion with the latter's daughter. Gabool, technically upholding this promise, proceeds to shove the old mouse off of the cliff he had been watching the mousemaid being battered by the sea from before.In the meantime, the mousemaid was rendered unconscious when a piece of flotsam struck her on the head. But miraculously, she survived, waking up after being washed ashore with a rope looped around her neck. Overwhelmed by thirst, the dazed mousemaid eventually found a small pool of fresh water. After successfully fending off a gull with her trusty rope and unsuccessful attempts to retrieve her forgotten identity, the amnesiac mouse named herself Storm Gullwhacker.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Author,_Author_(novel)"title="Author, Author (novel)">
The novel opens with a framing device wherein we are shown what is happening in the London home of the dying novelist at the beginning of World War I. One of the servant staff in James' house has taken a crude but sincere interest in discovering what her employer's books are all about and takes to reading one of his more famous stories, "The Beast in the Jungle". This story, whose hero is obsessed by a paranoid belief that his life will be marked by an unknown catastrophe, provides the opening for the novel proper to begin.Now we proceed back in time to the middle years of James' life and are introduced to a large and interesting group of James' literary acquaintances from his period of expatriation in England. Among those we meet are George du Maurier, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and Robert Louis Stevenson. The long and productive friendship between James and du Maurier is described in great detail, including the story of du Maurier's deteriorating eyesight which threatens his livelihood as a cartoonist for the magazine "Punch". He is finally driven to write fiction himself and he astonishes James and the entire literary world by producing the bestselling novel "Trilby". Much of Lodge's book is built upon James' own obsession with attracting a larger readership than his opaque books have yet garnered and the success of "Trilby" both baffles and annoys him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Máj"title="Máj">
A young girl, Jarmila, has been seduced by a man who is killed by his own son, Vilém; the latter is a robber known as the "terrible forest lord". On the evening of 1 May, sitting on a hill by a lake, she awaits his coming, but is instead told by one of Vilém's associates that her lover sits across the lake in a castle, to be executed for the murder. While he waits, he ponders on the beauty of nature and his young life. The next day, he is led to a hill where he is decapitated; his mangled limbs are displayed in a wheel fastened to a pillar, and his head is placed on top of the pillar. Seven years later, on 31 December, a traveler named Hynek comes across Vilém's pallid skull and the next day is told the story by an innkeeper. Years later, on the evening of 1 May, he returns and compares his own life to the month of May.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saint_in_New_York"title="The Saint in New York">
During a visit to Europe, Simon Templar (alias "The Saint") befriends a rich American whose son was recently murdered in New York City; the culprit went free due to police and courtroom corruption. Templar is given an offer he can't refuse: $1 million if he goes to New York and deals out his unique brand of justice to evildoers in that city.The book begins with the New York Police Department receiving a letter of warning from Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal, indicating that Templar, after being inactive for six months (presumably since the events of "The Saint Goes On"), has relocated to the United States. The letter is accompanied by a dossier on Templar's career thus far (Charteris proceeds to give new readers a brief summary of past adventures dating back to the first Saint novel, 1928's "Meet - The Tiger!").When an accused cop-killer is found shot to death, the NYPD knows the Saint has arrived in New York. After Templar rescues a child who has been kidnapped by a mob boss (assassinating the gangster in the process), the whole city learns that the Saint is on the job. Templar's ultimate goal is to discover the identity of the city's main kingpin who is known only as "The Big Fellow".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balzac_and_the_Little_Chinese_Seamstress"title="Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress">
The novel, written by Dai Sijie, is about two teenage boys during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Luo, described as having "a genius for storytelling", and the unnamed narrator, "a fine musician". They are assigned to re-education through labor and are sent to a mountain called "Phoenix of the Sky" near Tibet to work in the coal mines and with the rice crop, because their doctor parents have been declared enemies of the state by the government. The two boys fall in love with the Little Seamstress, the daughter of the local tailor and "the region's reigning beauty". Residents of the small farming village are delighted by the stories the two teenagers retell from classic literature and movies that they have seen. They are even excused from work for a few days to see films at a nearby town and later retell the story to the townspeople, through a process known as "oral cinema".Luo and the narrator meet Four-Eyes, the son of a poet, who is also being re-educated. Although he is succeeding in re-education, he is also hiding a secret set of foreign novels that are forbidden by Chinese law. The boys convince Four-Eyes to let them borrow the book "Ursule Mirouët" by Honoré de Balzac. After staying up all night reading the book, Luo gives the book to the narrator and leaves the village in order to tell the story to the Little Seamstress. Luo returns carrying leaves from a tree near where he and the Little Seamstress had sex.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pearls_of_Lutra"title="The Pearls of Lutra">
When gathering herbs near the quarry in Mossflower Woods, the young Redwallers Tansy and Arven come across a mysterious skeleton among the rocks. They are disoriented in a rainstorm and after failing to return to the abbey before the breaking of the storm are rescued by Martin II, son of Mattimeo and grandson of Matthias. Tansy quickly leads curious Redwallers back to the quarry to examine the mysterious skeleton, and along the way, they meet two travellers: the irrepressible hare Cleckstarr Lepus Montisle and his owl friend Gerul.Meanwhile, far across the western sea on the tropical isle of Sampetra, trouble is brewing. Ublaz Mad-Eyes, a large, sinewy pine marten with a hypnotic stare, gathers an army of barbaric monitor lizards and trident-wielding searats. The stoat captain Conva is sent out to retrieve the Tears of All Oceans, six perfectly spherical rose-pink pearls, but after murdering the Holt Lutra who owned the pearls, the Tears are stolen by the weasel Graylunk, who flees into Mossflower Woods. Conva tracks him to Redwall Abbey, where Graylunk takes refuge, before returning to Sampetra.Ublaz is not pleased and murders Conva. He then sends out an elite force of monitor lizards, headed by their general Lask Frildur, to Mossflower to retrieve the pearls. They are escorted by the ferret captain Romsca and her crew.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_When_We_Were_Grownups"title="Back When We Were Grownups">
Tyler's 15th novel, like most of her work, is set in Baltimore, Maryland. It opens with the sentence, "Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person." The woman in question is Rebecca Davitch, a 53-year-old widow, mother, grandmother, and proprietor of a party and catering business run from her home called Open Arms. Up until age 20 Rebecca's life had been following a fairly predictable straight-line path towards both marriage to her high school sweetheart and a Ph.D. in history. Then Joe Davitch came along and she was “swept off my feet by a fully grown man, someone who...was already "living" his life.” Joe was a 33-year-old divorcee with 3 children whom Rebecca met at a friend’s party that happened to be at the Open Arms. One month later, Rebecca had quit college, had married Joe, and—as she quickly discovered—had married the Davitch family, with Joe’s 3 daughters, his mother, his brother Zeb, his huge old Baltimore house (Open Arms) and its business as a venue for celebrations of all sorts—weddings, graduations, christenings, anniversaries, etc. Before too long she also discovers that she has become the de facto manager of the Open Arms and the mother of Joe’s 3 girls and their own new baby daughter. When Joe himself dies after only 6 years of marriage and Joe’s uncle Poppy moves in, she finds herself with even more responsibility. Having cheerfully and exhaustingly raised four daughters, run the “celebrations business,” and helped her daughters through 6 marriages (+ 2 divorces) and 7 grandchildren, Rebecca is now taking a breath to ask, “What happened to the 20-year young woman who was a serious scholar, politically-involved idealist, engaged to be engaged….?”
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_in_Darkness"title="Boy in Darkness">
"Boy in Darkness" is an episode in the Gormenghast series when Titus Groan, referred to as "the Boy" in the story, is a young teenager – placing it during the period covered by the second novel in the series, "Gormenghast". Yearning for freedom from his ceaseless duties as 77th Earl of Gormenghast, he escapes the ancient castle and encounters the nightmare world outside.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brimstone_(Preston_and_Child_novel)"title="Brimstone (Preston and Child novel)">
FBI Special Agent Aloysius X.L. Pendergast and Sergeant Vincent D'Agosta, now working for the Southampton Police Department, investigate a series of unusual deaths—deaths that appear to be the work of Lucifer in return for pacts entered in with him by his victims. Their investigation takes them from the New York City area, site of the first two deaths, to Florence, Italy where they uncover the motive and method of the killers behind the strange and gruesome deaths. During the course of unraveling the mystery, the truth behind a priceless, missing Stradivarius violin is revealed and a potentially apocalyptic riot with Messianic Christians is averted. Pendergast also reveals details of his insane brother Diogenes, whom he believes is planning something horrible.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Foster"title="Ellen Foster">
The novel follows the story of Ellen, the first person narrator, a young white American girl living under unfavorable conditions somewhere in the rural South. The novel is not written in standard English. It is often grammatically incorrect ("a egg sandwich", "growed", etc.) and generally tries to render the language of a 9- through 11-year-old girl who, in spite of being clever and ambitious, is relatively uneducated.The novel is most likely set in the late 1970s, due to the fact that Ellen states the following on page 48 when talking about her teacher-"She lived in the sixties. She used to be a flower child but now she is low key so she can hold a job."Two time levels are intertwined throughout the book: one presenting Ellen's life from her present point of view, living with her "new mama"; and the other one telling Ellen's story from her mother's death and leading up to the present. The two time levels are united at the end of the novel, when Ellen is about twelve years old.The reader can follow her life over the course of a bit more than two years. A sequel, "The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster", was published in 2006. In the sequel, Ellen reveals that she lives in the sand hills piedmont region of North Carolina and that Ava Gardner's birthplace (near Smithfield, North Carolina) is down the road from her house.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrents_of_Spring"title="Torrents of Spring">
The story opens with a middle-aged Dmitry Sanin rummaging through the papers in his study when he comes across a small cross set with garnets, which sends his thoughts back thirty years to 1840.In the summer of 1840, a twenty-two-year-old Sanin, arrives in Frankfurt en route home to Russia from Italy at the culmination of a European tour. During his one-day layover he visits a confectioner's shop where he is rushed upon by a beautiful young woman who emerges frantic from the back room. She is Gemma Roselli, the daughter of the shop's proprietress, Leonora Roselli. Gemma implores Sanin to help her younger brother who has passed out and seems to have stopped breathing. Thanks to Sanin's aid, the boy – whose name is Emilio – emerges from his faint. Grateful for his assistance, Gemma invites Sanin to return to the shop later in the evening to enjoy a cup of chocolate with the family.Later that evening, Sanin formally meets the members of the Roselli household. These include the matriarch, Leonora (or Lenore) Roselli, her daughter Gemma, her son Emilio (or Emile), and the family friend Pantaleone, a rather irascible old man and retired opera singer. Over conversation that evening Sanin grows increasingly enamoured with the young Gemma, while the Roselli family is also well-taken by the young, handsome, educated, and gracious Russian. Sanin so enjoys his evening that he forgets about his plans to take the diligence on to Berlin that night and so misses it. At the end of the evening Leonora Roselli invites Sanin to return the next day. Sanin is also disappointed to learn that Gemma is in fact engaged to a young German named Karl Klüber.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gormenghast_(novel)"title="Gormenghast (novel)">
## Steerpike usurps Barquentine.Steerpike, despite his position of authority, is in reality a dangerous traitor to Gormenghast who seeks to eventually wield ultimate power in the castle. To this end, he kills Barquentine so that he can replace him and so advance in power. Although he is successful in his murder of Barquentine, the old master of ritual put up such a severe struggle that Steerpike is severely injured in the process, suffering extensive burns and almost drowning. As Steerpike lies recovering in a delirious state from his ordeal, he cries out the words "And the twins will make it five". This is overheard by the castle's doctor, Dr Prunesquallor, who is greatly disturbed to hear it. Although the reader is not told this explicitly, Steerpike's words are a clear reference to the number of people he has killed. The reference to the twins is to the aunts of Titus, the twin sisters Ladies Cora and Clarice. Steerpike has effectively been holding them captive in a remote and abandoned part of the castle, and they are utterly dependent on him for food and drink. Due to Steerpike's prolonged recovery he is unable to supply them (and at some level Steerpike is aware of this, even in his delirium), and by the time he has recovered he believes them to have probably already died of thirst and starvation, though in fact they die a few days later.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titus_Alone"title="Titus Alone">
The story follows Titus as he journeys through the world outside Gormenghast Castle, having left his home at the end of the second book.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Folding_Star"title="The Folding Star">
The novel is the story of a gay English man, Edward Manners, who, disaffected with life, moves to a town in Flanders where he teaches two students English. One, Marcel, is plodding and plain while the other, Luc, is gifted and, to the protagonist, extremely beautiful. The novel also deals with Manners' emerging relationship with Marcel's father who curates a museum of symbolist paintings by Edgard Orst (modelled on Fernand Khnopff and James Ensor). Edward has an affair with a young foreigner named Cherif who falls deeply in love with him, but Edward, in love with Luc, can never really return his affection. We see the same pattern in the novel's recounting of Edward's youthful affair years earlier (when he was even younger than Luc) with Dawn, a handsome but not classically beautiful youth who later dies tragically. Edward soon became bored with him, and even now he can only gin up much feeling about Dawn by giving his past affair and the subsequent death of his old love a high literary treatment modeled after the tradition of the pastoral elegy. Like his forerunner von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" (who obsesses over the beautiful Tadzio), and the artist Orst, Edward is a lover of beauty, not a lover of people, and people's beauty is fleeting. Thus the disappearance of Jane Byron, Orst's beautiful model, and later of Luc, Edward's version of Tadzio, represents how cruel life can be to those who worship at Beauty's altar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swimming-Pool_Library"title="The Swimming-Pool Library">
In 1983 London, Will, a privileged, gay, sexually irresistible 25-year-old, saves the life of an elderly aristocrat who has a heart-attack in a public lavatory. This chance meeting ultimately requires Will to re-evaluate his sense of the past and his family's history.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beau_Geste"title="Beau Geste">
Michael "Beau" Geste is the protagonist. The main narrator is his younger brother John. The three Geste brothers are portrayed as behaving according to the English upper-class values of a time gone by. The Geste siblings are orphans and have been brought up by their aunt Lady Patricia at Brandon Abbas. The rest of Beau's band are mainly Isobel and Claudia (possibly the illegitimate daughter of Lady Patricia) and Lady Patricia's relative Augustus (the caddish nephew of the absent Sir Hector Brandon). While not mentioned in "Beau Geste", the American Otis Vanbrugh appears as a friend of the Geste brothers in a sequel novel. John and Isobel are devoted to each other, and it is in part to spare her any suspicion of being a thief that he takes the extreme step of joining the French Foreign Legion (following in the steps of his elder brothers).The inciting incident is the disappearance of a precious jewel known as the "Blue Water". Suspicion falls on the band of young people, and Beau leaves England to join the French Foreign Legion in Algeria, followed by his brothers, Digby (his twin) and John. After recruit training in Sidi Bel Abbes and some active service skirmishing with tribesmen in the south, Beau and John are posted to the small garrison of the fictional desert outpost of Fort Zinderneuf, while Digby and his American friends Hank and Buddy are sent to Tanout-Azzal to train with a mule mounted company. The commander at Fort Zinderneuf (after the death of two more senior officers) is the sadistic Sergeant Major Lejaune, who drives his abused subordinates to the verge of mutiny. An attack by Tuaregs prevents mutiny and mass desertion (only the Geste brothers and a few loyalists are against the plot). Throughout the book, Beau's behaviour is true to France and the Legion, and he dies at his post. Digby, Hank and Buddy arrive with a relief column from Tokotu that reaches Fort Zinderneuf too late. Together with John (the last man left standing at Zinderneuf) they desert and experience a long trek during which Digby is killed in a skirmish with Arabs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Light_(Doctor_Who)"title="Ghost Light (Doctor Who)">
Thousands of years ago, an alien expedition came to Earth to catalogue life. After completing its task and collecting samples which included Nimrod, a being known as Light, the leader, went into slumber. By 1881, Josiah Smith gained control and kept Light in hibernation and imprisoned the creature known as Control on the ship, which is now the cellar of the house. Smith began evolving into the era's dominant life-form – the Victorian gentleman – and also took over the house. By 1883, Smith, having "evolved" into forms approximating a human and casting off his old husks as an insect would, managed to lure and capture the explorer Redvers Fenn-Cooper, brainwashing him. Utilising Fenn-Cooper's association with Queen Victoria, he plans to get close to her so that he can assassinate her and subsequently take control of the British Empire.The TARDIS arrives at Gabriel Chase. Ace had visited the house in 1983 and had felt an evil presence. The Seventh Doctor's curiosity drives him to seek answers. He encounters Control, which has now taken on human form, and makes a deal with it. The Doctor helps it release Light. Once awake, Light is displeased by all the changes while he was asleep. Smith tries to keep his plan intact, but events are moving beyond his control. As Control tries to "evolve" into a Lady, Ace tries to come to grips with her feelings about the house, revealing that she burned it down when she felt the evil. The Doctor finally convinces Light of the futility of opposing evolution, which causes him to overload and dissipate into the surrounding house. Control's complete evolution into a Lady derails Smith's plan as Fenn-Cooper, having freed himself from Smith's brainwashing, chooses to side with her instead of him. In the end, with Smith taken captive on the ship, Control, Fenn-Cooper, and Nimrod set off in the alien ship to explore the universe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seventh_Cross"title="The Seventh Cross">
Seven men imprisoned in the fictitious Westhofen camp (based partly on the real Osthofen concentration camp) have decided to make a collaborative escape attempt. The main character is a Communist, George Heisler; the narrative follows his path across the countryside, taking refuge with those few who are willing to risk a visit from the Gestapo, while the rest of the escapees are gradually overtaken by their hunters.The title of the book comes from a conceit of the prison camp. The current officer in charge has ordered the creation of seven crosses from the trees nearby, to be used when the prisoners are returned – not for crucifixion, but a subtler torture: the escapees are made to stand all day in front of their crosses, and will be punished if they falter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Nemesis"title="Silver Nemesis">
The Seventh Doctor and Ace visit England, where three rival factions—the Cybermen, a group of neo-Nazis, and a 17th-century sorceress named Lady Peinforte—are attempting to gain control of a statue made of a living metal, validium, that was created by Omega and Rassilon as the ultimate defence for Gallifrey.The statue's components - a bow, an arrow, and the figure itself - must be brought together in order for it to be activated. They have been separated since 1638 when, in order to foil the first attempt by Peinforte to seize it, the Doctor launched the figure into orbit in a powered asteroid.This asteroid has been approaching the Earth at twenty-five yearly intervals ever since, leaving a succession of disasters in its wake, and has now crash-landed near Windsor Castle.The Doctor plays the three factions against one another and eventually appears to concede defeat to the Cyber Leader. This is just part of a carefully laid trap, and the Cybermen's fleet is totally wiped out by the statue.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysteries_of_Pittsburgh"title="The Mysteries of Pittsburgh">
Art Bechstein is the son of a mob money launderer, who wants him to succeed in a legitimate career. (He has even set up a job for him at the end of the summer in Baltimore at a financial firm managed by one of his old friends.) When Art graduates from the University of Pittsburgh, he has only a vague hope for a summer of adventure before he commits to the rest of his life. Bechstein almost immediately meets a charming young gay gentleman, Arthur Lecomte, and his friend, a highly literate biker, Cleveland Arning, who become his partners in many summer adventures. Art begins a relationship with an insecure young woman named Phlox Lombardi. As Art's attraction to Arthur grows, it destabilizes both relationships and reveals he may be bisexual. Art is also troubled when Cleveland begins moving deeper into the city's organized crime families, drawing him closer to his father's dangerous mob connections. Art's relationships with his dad, friends, and lovers become more and more entangled, causing a series of fallings out and unforeseen consequences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Sky_(novel)"title="The Big Sky (novel)">
Boone Caudill is a young man who lives in Kentucky with his family as people are pushing further and further west in the Americas. (Boone is supposedly named after Daniel Boone, who is credited with finding Kentucky.) Boone's father is physically abusive to not only his mother, but also his brother and him. One night, his father begins to beat him after Boone had caused trouble in town, and Boone hits his father over the head with a stick from the wood pile. Knowing that his father is seriously injured, possibly even dead, he goes back to the house and steals his father's prize rifle. As a parting gift, his mother offers him a roast chicken they were going to have for supper. With that, Boone runs away.After thinking back to his childhood, he remembers his maternal uncle Zeb Calloway. The uncle was a mountain man, frequently thought of as uncivilized by his mother and father. Boone decides this is the life for him and sets off for the West and the mountains. As he walks, he meets a man with a cart and mule named Jim Deakins, who admits to Boone that he has always wanted something more from life and decides that Boone has the right idea. As they arrive into the next city, Jim decides to sell his mule and wagon for some money to travel and join Boone. However, as they get into town, Boone's father has just arrived and is intent on getting his rifle back. Boone jumps in the nearby river to get away, as Jim shouts from the banks of the river for Boone to wait for him.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_We_Live_Now"title="The Way We Live Now">
Augustus Melmotte is a financier with a mysterious past. He (or rather his wife) is rumoured to have Jewish origins, and to be connected to some failed businesses in Vienna. When he moves his business and his family to London, the city's upper crust begins buzzing with rumours about him—and a host of people ultimately find their lives changed because of him.Melmotte sets up his office in the City of London and purchases a fine house in Grosvenor Square. He sets out to woo rich and powerful investors by hosting a lavish party. He finds an appropriate investment vehicle when he is approached by an American entrepreneur, Hamilton K. Fisker, to float a company to construct a new railway line running from Salt Lake City, USA, to Veracruz, Mexico. Melmotte's goal is to ramp up the share price without paying any of his own money into the scheme itself, thus further enriching himself, regardless of whether or not the line gets built.Amongst the aristocrats on the company's board is Sir Felix Carbury, a dissolute young baronet who is quickly running through his widowed mother's savings. In an attempt to restore their fortunes, as they are being beset by their creditors, his mother, Matilda, Lady Carbury—who is embarking on a writing career—endeavours to have him become engaged to Marie, Melmotte's only child, and thus a considerable heiress. Sir Felix manages to win Marie's heart, but his schemes are blocked by Melmotte, who has no intention of allowing his daughter to marry such a minor penniless aristocrat. Felix's situation is also complicated by his relationship with Ruby Ruggles, a pretty farm girl living with her grandfather on the estate of Roger Carbury, his well-off second cousin. Roger Carbury is an upright and moral squire living at the small, but pretty, family estate of Carbury Hall in Suffolk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_of_Delights"title="The Box of Delights">
Kay Harker is returning from boarding school when he finds himself mixed up in a battle to possess a magical box. It allows the owner to shrink in size, to fly swiftly, to go into the past and to experience the magical wonders contained within the box.The current owner of the box is an old Punch and Judy man called Cole Hawlings whom Kay meets at the railway station. They develop an instant rapport, which leads Cole to confide that he is being chased by a magician called Abner Brown and his gang, which includes Kay's former governess. For safety, Cole (who turns out to be the medieval philosopher and alleged magician Ramon Llull) entrusts the box to Kay. The schoolboy then goes on to have many adventures as he protects the box from those who wish to use it for bad deeds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backwards_(novel)"title="Backwards (novel)">
## On the Backwards World.The Red Dwarf crew arrive on htraE (a version of Earth in a universe where time is running backwards) in order to rescue Lister, who has returned to life and the age of 25 (following his death at age 61 the end of the previous novel, Better Than Life) as a result of the crew depositing his body on the time-reversed Earth 36 years earlier. After failing to meet Lister at the arranged rendezvous, Kryten learns from the television that Lister and Cat are associated with a murder that, due to the backwards flow of time, has not yet been committed. Lister soon arrives injured and in the custody of the police who, after a backwards fight which restores Lister to health, promptly unarrest him. Lister then takes off in backwards pursuit of one of the officers, explaining to the others that due to the nature of reverse time he is forced to follow the policeman (who if time were running forwards would be chasing him) until he is 'unspotted'. After a harrowing backwards car-chase (especially for Rimmer, who is unable to trust that no harm can befall him while time is running backwards) the policeman unsees them, and the crew retreat to the mountain area where they landed their ship, the Starbug.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bond_and_Moonraker"title="James Bond and Moonraker">
British Secret Service agent James Bond, codename 007, must prevent Sir Hugo Drax's plan to murder the entire human race and then restart humanity from outer space.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tenth_Planet"title="The Tenth Planet">
The Doctor and his companions Ben and Polly arrive in the TARDIS at the South Pole in the year 1986. They find themselves in the Snowcap Base, a space tracking station commanded by General Cutler. The base is supervising the mission of the "Zeus IV" spaceship, running a routine probe on the Earth's atmosphere. The spaceship is drawn off-course by an unknown force, and Snowcap monitoring staff discover a new, unknown planet approaching Earth. Recognising identical landmasses to those of Earth, the Doctor reveals that this is Mondas, the Earth's long-lost twin planet, and that its inhabitants will soon be visiting Earth.A mysterious spaceship lands in the snow and three robotic creatures emerge, kill the guards and infiltrate Snowcap Base, taking control. They reveal that they are Cybermen, a race who, though once like human beings, have gradually replaced their bodies with mechanical parts, and eliminated the "weakness" of emotion from their brains. The Cybermen prevent the base staff from saving the "Zeus IV", and it is destroyed by the gravitational pull of Mondas. The emotionless Cybermen state that the lives of the crew are irrelevant to them. The Cybermen explain that Mondas is absorbing energy from Earth and will soon destroy it. They propose to take humans back to Mondas and turn them into Cybermen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Crush_(novel)"title="Orange Crush (novel)">
Marlon Conrad, a "spoiled rich kid", enters the political arena in a career carefully managed by his wealthy father. He becomes the lieutenant governor of Florida, a plush job he can exploit mercilessly. When the elected governor dies in a plane crash, Marlon automatically assumes the office. At the outset of his tenure, Marlon is apathetic and corrupt, riding in the pockets of special interest groups. However, he is suddenly recruited into active duty during the Kosovo War and a bureaucratic tangle prevents him from ducking his responsibility as expected. His experiences in the military change his outlook, his fundamental character, and even his political views. He returns to Florida, determined to make a difference in the state. But first, Marlon faces a reelection battle against dim-witted Democratic candidate Gomer Tatum, the state House Speaker.Alternating between manic attentiveness to his official duties and depressed apathy, Marlon eventually becomes disgusted with the inertia of politics in Tallahassee and purchases a second-hand motorhome. Marlon's Chief of Staff, Gottfried Escrow, converts Marlon's road trip into an impromptu campaign tour. Hijinks ensue as Tatum, egged on by his hyper-ambitious fiancee, Jackie, follows Marlon's trail around Florida, doing their best to outshine or sabotage Marlon's popularity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Basilisk_Station"title="On Basilisk Station">
## Prologue.Sidney Harris, the Hereditary President of the People's Republic of Haven, discusses the economic and military situation with his cabinet. Secretary of the Economy Walter Frankel presents the latest grim economic projections, blaming the naval budget. Admiral Amos Parnell retorts that the fleet is required to hold on to recently acquired star systems, and blames the bleak economic situation on the increases in the Basic Living Stipend instead. Frankel responds that the BLS increases are the only thing keeping the mob in check. Neither man is willing to budge, and both concede that additional income is required and, per the DuQuesne Plan the source of this income should be new conquests. Moving southwards towards Erewhon is rejected as too dangerous as the Solarian League could see it as a threat. Moving westwards towards the Silesian Confederacy is seen as the better option, but the Basilisk system is in the way, and the Basilisk system contains a terminus of the Manticore Wormhole Junction. The decision is made to take over the Basilisk system and Admiral Parnell is tasked with drawing up plans to that effect.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_Among_Enemies"title="Honor Among Enemies">
After more than three years in exile on Grayson, several of Honor's old political enemies decide to try to kill two birds with one stone. Klaus Hauptman is able to have Honor appointed as commander of HMAMC "Wayfarer", a prototype Q-ship. He believes that Honor will either deal with the piracy problems that are causing him losses in the Silesian Confederacy or die trying. Due to the war consuming the majority of skilled officers and ratings, Honor is forced to take along a large portion of problem personnel and fresh out ratings on their first cruise."Wayfarer" includes space for carrying a squadron of Light Attack Craft (LACs), a large number of missile pods that can be quickly deployed through the ship's rear cargo doors, and unusually heavy energy weaponry for the ship's intended role, but it is essentially still a merchant ship: unarmored, much slower than a regular navy vessel, and with lighter defenses.Honor's orders are to lead a squadron of four Q-ships to fight piracy in the Silesian Confederacy. Although piracy is a chronic problem in Silesia, the Royal Navy managed to keep it somewhat in check until the war began; with the fleet needed elsewhere piracy has gone completely out of control and the powerful Manticoran merchant cartels demand that the Navy do something. There are other considerations: Silesia is something of a disputed territory between the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Andermani Empire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Short_Victorious_War"title="The Short Victorious War">
The People's Republic of Haven finds itself teetering at the edge of economic disaster. Unable to maintain its massive welfare state in the face of inflation and deficit and with opposition to the government getting bolder, the leaders of the People's Republic decide to resort to war against Manticore. A short, victorious war, they believe, will both distract the proles from their current economic problems and allow them to use the riches of the Manticore system to prop up their welfare state.Meanwhile, Honor returns to duty after injuries she sustained in "The Honor of the Queen" to command the brand-new battlecruiser HMS "Nike", the pride of the Royal Manticoran Navy, with some of her old crew aboard and with her old Academy friend Michelle Henke as executive officer. But on their way to her post, the engineers of the "Nike" discover a flaw in one of her fusion reactors, which hampers her first operational deployment to the critical Manticoran base at Hancock Station.Honor spends the time her ship is in dock by beginning her first real romantic relationship with the senior engineering officer of Hancock Station's maintenance facility, Captain Junior Grade Paul Tankersley.The Havenites start the war Honor had been struggling to prevent in the previous books. Their plan is to launch probing missions on Manticoran Alliance members to push the Alliance into re-deploying its forces to create weak points and allow them to strike at Manticore directly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_in_Exile"title="Flag in Exile">
After the scandal caused by killing Pavel Young in a duel, Honor retreats to Grayson until things settle down on Manticore. She intends to oversee the development of her Steading, and overcome the death of Paul Tankersley.Honor struggles with the survivor's guilt her many battles have left her with, but soon finds that she cannot afford to dwell on her emotions. With the war between Manticore and Haven still raging, the fast-expanding but still inexperienced Grayson Space Navy needs someone to put it in fighting shape. Honor is eventually given the rank of admiral in the Grayson navy and command of a superdreadnought squadron. She conducts her squadron and the rest of her adoptive nation's fleet through several battle exercises to improve them.Meanwhile, Haven stages a new operation capturing two planets deep in Alliance territory. A Manticore task force and half the Grayson Navy leave to liberate these planets, but Haven was banking on this and now are sending another task force to destroy Grayson's orbital infrastructure and arm its rival planet, Masada, with modern weapons.The events surrounding Honor's last adventure on Grayson have caused political turmoil on the reactionary, patriarchal planet. Even though she has the support of Protector Benjamin Mayhew IX and the Grayson government, and the respect and gratitude of the people of Grayson, several of her fellow Steadholders refuse to accept her and plot to bring down Mayhew's reforms by resorting to terrorism. They sabotage a dome which was being built and financed by Honor. The dome collapses mid-construction and kills dozens of young children. When it appears that the government discovered their conspiracy, they attempt to assassinate Honor but this fails as well. Reverend Julius Hanks, the head of the Grayson Church, gives his life to shield Honor from an assassin's fire, and the assassin is so horrified by his act that he surrenders to police custody and makes a full confession as to the conspiracy and its leader. When confronted at an assembly of the Steadholders, the leader invokes his ancient right to trial by combat and Honor herself, acting in her official capacity as Protector Benjamin's Champion, meets him sword-to-sword and kills him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat's_Eye_(novel)"title="Cat's Eye (novel)">
After being lured back to her childhood home of Toronto for a retrospective show of her art, Elaine reminisces about her childhood. At the age of eight she becomes friends with Carol and Grace, and, through their eyes, realises that her atypical background of constant travel with her entomologist father and independent mother has left her ill-equipped for conventional expectations of femininity. Although initially awkward and naive of childhood politics and social structure, Elaine is accepted, even admired by her new friends. Her lifestyle, even now, is exotic to the others. Elaine, after fantasizing about having girl friends during her nomadic brief existence, begins to settle in and enjoy her new life and new school.After her first full year of attending traditional grade school, during her summer break, her parents return her to their previous life of travel and insect exploration. After a four-month absence, Elaine returns home to her friends for the next school year.Upon her return, Elaine finds the dynamic of her group has been altered with the addition of the new girl, Cordelia. Elaine is first drawn in by Cordelia but after a period, sensing her inability to recognize the cruelty, Elaine is bullied by the three girls, her supposed "best friends."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Honor_of_the_Queen"title="The Honor of the Queen">
Three years after the events in "On Basilisk Station", Captain Honor Harrington returns to the Star Kingdom after a long anti-piracy campaign in the Silesian Confederacy. While her ship, HMS "Fearless", has her first refit, new orders arrive. "Fearless" is tasked to lead a small Manticoran squadron supporting a diplomatic mission to the planet Grayson, a planet ruled by a heavily sexist and patriarchal society, due in part to its fundamentalist Christian and Luddite history, as well as its brutally hostile environment. The diplomatic mission is to be led by Admiral Raoul Courvosier, Honor's mentor and personal friend. With the long-awaited war with Haven looming close, Manticore is working to form an Alliance with many small nations. Grayson is critical to this effort, as it would close a flank of advance for a possible Havenite invasion fleet. Adding to the pressure, Haven is negotiating its own alliance with Masada, Grayson's historical rival.The Manticoran ships arrive at Yeltsin's Star, the system where Grayson is located, and are greeted by the small Grayson Navy. However, the welcome is soured by sexism in the Graysons, for whom the notion of a woman in uniform is intolerable. After several hostile confrontations, Honor leaves the system to escort a convoy of freighters, believing her presence is souring the negotiations, even though Courvosier tries to convince her not to do so.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_of_Dishonor"title="Field of Dishonor">
Immediately following "The Short Victorious War", Honor returns to Manticore as a hero following the victory at Hancock Station, her ship undergoing much needed repairs. Captain Pavel Young, Honor's bitterest enemy, is about to face a court-martial for cowardice before the enemy, punishable by death. Under threat from Young's father, Earl North Hollow, Young is instead demoted and dishonorably discharged from the Navy. Despite the reprieve, North Hollow suffers a fatal heart attack and Young becomes the new Earl of North Hollow. The Star Kingdom officially declares war on the People's Republic of Haven.Seeking revenge on Honor, Pavel Young first tries to discredit her and then hires a professional duelist, former Royal Marine Denver Summervale, to challenge Honor's lover Paul Tankersley to a duel. Paul is killed by Summervale while Honor is on Grayson overseeing her Steading and formally being appointed Steadholder, as promised in "The Honor of the Queen".Paul's death is a severe blow to Honor, and she determines to kill Summervale no matter the cost to herself. Several of Honor's friends and comrades track Summervale to a hidden retreat where they force him to confess to being hired to kill Paul, though this immediately guarantees his immunity to prosecution given the way the confession is extracted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Enemy_Hands_(novel)"title="In Enemy Hands (novel)">
As the story begins, Honor returns to her Steading on Grayson, having just been promoted to Commodore for her actions in "Honor Among Enemies". During a party celebrating her promotion, she engages in a heated debate with Earl White Haven, her superior, and the two realize they have mutual unspoken romantic feelings for each other.In an attempt to escape her own feelings, Honor goes with Alistair McKeon on a convoy escort mission to the Adler system, which has been captured by Citizen Rear Admiral Lester Tourville of the DuQuesne base, under the orders of Citizen Admiral Thomas Theisman, in order to capture or destroy a large chunk of Manticoran shipping. Spotting the ambush and after salvaging what she can of her convoy from Havenite attack, Honor orders McKeon to surrender.After learning of Honor's capture Cordelia Ransom, the People's Republic's Secretary for Public Information, who is present at Admiral Theismans' headquarters doing a propaganda piece, demands that the Manticorans be surrendered to her for propaganda uses. Unable to deny Ransom and her StateSec enforcers, Admiral Theisman capitulates. The crew are transferred to the Havenite battlecruiser PNS "Tepes", Ransom's personal flagship, bound for the Havenite prison planet of Hades, where Ransom intends to execute Honor for a death sentence handed down by the prior government (on trumped up charges). Ransom gives any crew member serving under Harrington a chance to defect and Senior Chief Petty Officer Harkness takes up the offer claiming that Manticore have never really done anything for him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Peau_de_chagrin"title="La Peau de chagrin">
"La Peau de chagrin" consists of three sections: "Le Talisman" ("The Talisman"), "La Femme sans cœur" ("The Woman without a Heart"), and "L'Agonie" ("The Agony"). The first edition contained a ""Preface" and a "Moralité"", which were excised from subsequent versions. A two-page Epilogue appears at the end of the final section."Le Talisman" begins with the plot of "Le Dernier Napoléon": A young man named Raphaël de Valentin wagers his last coin and loses, then proceeds to the river Seine to drown himself. On the way, however, he decides to enter an unusual shop and finds it filled with curiosities from around the world. The elderly shopkeeper leads him to a piece of shagreen hanging on the wall. It is inscribed with "Oriental" writing; the old man calls it "Sanskrit", but it is imprecise Arabic. The skin promises to fulfill any wish of its owner, shrinking slightly upon the fulfillment of each desire. The shopkeeper is willing to let Valentin take it without charge, but urges him not to accept the offer. Valentin waves away the shopkeeper's warnings and takes the skin, wishing for a royal banquet, filled with wine, women, and friends. He is immediately met by acquaintances who invite him to such an event; they spend hours eating, drinking, and talking.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoes_of_Honor"title="Echoes of Honor">
As the story begins, Honor is apparently dead, her "execution" being broadcast on holo-disc. State funerals are held on both Grayson and Manticore and an empty coffin is buried in the Royal Cathedral. While the Manticorans are shocked by the news of Honor's death, the Graysons are completely outraged.However, the footage was faked because Honor is still alive and plotting her return. Having survived the destruction of Cordelia Ransom's ship in the previous book, Honor and her allies hide on the surface of Hades, monitoring StateSec's communications and linking with other prisoners held on the planet. Eventually they launch a surprise attack, defeating the local Havenite garrison and taking control of Hell.Meanwhile, the Havenite Navy, under the new and aggressive leadership of Admiral Esther McQueen, goes on the offensive and launches a series of simultaneous and devastating attacks on Manticore and her allies, even hitting Manticoran territory for the first time in the war. The Manticorans, however, are testing some new weapon systems which may definitively shift the balance in their favor.Back on Hell and now in control of the State Security facilities, Honor's party travels across the inhospitable planet and helps the prisoners escape from Camp Charon. When news of the offensive led by McQueen reach Hades, they realize that they cannot count on a Manticoran rescue mission. Still needing to escape from the planet, Honor and her allies hatch a plan to capture as many Havenite ships as possible. With a sizable fleet of captured enemy vessels (the so-called "Elysian Space Navy") under her leadership, the former prisoners defeat a StateSec armada and evacuate the prison planet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashes_of_Victory"title="Ashes of Victory">
The book begins hours after the end of the previous novel. Honor Harrington and her "Elysian Space Navy" arrive at Manticoran-controlled space, only to discover that she was believed dead, that her mother had given birth to twins (partly to satisfy the Graysons' need for an heir to her Steading), her cousin Devon has inherited her Manticoran title, and that the extent of her injuries will prevent her from returning to active naval duty for a couple of years, since she needs reconstructive surgery.To put Honor to good use, the Royal Manticoran Navy promotes her to Admiral (having received a battlefield promotion to that rank on Hades) and places her at Saganami Island Naval Academy to teach future generations of naval officers. Queen Elizabeth III elevates Honor to Duchess Harrington. Meanwhile, Honor helps to prove that treecats are as intelligent as humans, and she eventually helps to develop an easy to understand sign language system, making full communication between humans and the treecats possible.After the daring attacks featured in the previous novel, the People's Republic of Haven seems to have the initiative. However, Manticore has a trump card that has the potential to end the war, in the form of devastatingly effective new technology and weapons fully integrated into a new massive heavy assault force, known as 8th fleet. The Star Kingdom's navy bides time, waiting for the opportune moment to strike.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Honor"title="War of Honor">
Five years have passed since a truce was reached between Manticore and Haven, but there is still no formal peace treaty. Even though neither side wishes to resume fighting, political circumstances in both nations threaten to plunge them into war.On Manticore, the administration of Prime Minister High Ridge focuses on strengthening its political position. They are determined to remain at least technically at war with Haven - peace would terminate the special war taxes they are diverting from the Royal Manticoran Navy's budget for their welfare programs and vote-buying schemes, and would end their ability to postpone elections in which they expect to lose their fragile majority. Manticore's allies, most notably Grayson and Erewhon, are infuriated with the new government's carelessness and outright rudeness in foreign affairs. From their seats in the House of Lords, Honor Harrington and Hamish Alexander voice their opposition to the High Ridge Administration's policies, and the government takes actions to discredit the war heroes.Haven struggles to rebuild after the fall of the People's Republic. President Pritchart's administration faces increasing pressure from certain political factions that demand the Republic to be more assertive in its negotiations with the Star Kingdom. Admiral Thomas Theisman has to restore the Havenite Navy's morale and fighting capabilities after the long war with Manticore and a protracted campaign to conquer the remnants of the old People's Republic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cabinet_of_Curiosities"title="The Cabinet of Curiosities">
Workers at a construction site in Manhattan discover a long-buried tunnel containing the bodies of 36 young people from over a century ago, each with part of their spines removed. Secretive Special Agent Aloysius X. L. Pendergast takes an interest in the case and recruits Dr. Nora Kelly, an archaeologist at New York City's American Museum of Natural History, to quickly investigate the crime scene and collect evidence prior to the intervention of Anthony Fairhaven, the wealthy real estate developer who is directing the construction of a new apartment tower on the property. Fairhaven has the bodies quickly removed and the discovery hushed up, but Dr. Kelly is able to recover a note with the name and address of one of the victims, a poor young girl names Mary Greene. Afraid of losing her job, Dr. Kelly is reluctant to continue the investigation, but Agent Pendergast convinces her to continue in pursuit of what he believes to be the case of a century-old string of brutal murders.The two soon discover that the tunnel was located underneath a former cabinet of curiosities owned by a man named Shottum, which burned down a century previously. Despite the efforts of Roger C. Brisbane III, a Museum bureaucrat and Dr. Kelly's boss, to curtail their efforts in fear of threatening Fairhaven's contributions to the museum, they are able to locate letters by Shottum in the museum archives detailing Shottum's discovery of the murderous scientific experiments that his renter, Dr. Enoch Leng, was conducting in pursuit of extending the human lifespan. They suspect that Leng abducted his victims from the cabinet of curiosities, and that he murdered Shottum and burned down the building when he was discovered. They have difficulty finding information about the mysterious Leng and his activities after the cabinet was burned down, and are further hindered by the police captain on the case, who assigns an officer named Patrick O'Shaughnessy to follow them. However, O'Shaughnessy takes an interest in the case, and agrees to assist in the investigation. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_124C_41+"title="Ralph 124C 41+">
The eponymous protagonist saves the life of the heroine by directing energy remotely at an approaching avalanche. As the novel goes on, he describes the technological wonders of the modern world, frequently using the phrase "As you know..." The hero finally rescues the heroine by traveling into space on his own "space flyer" to rescue her from the villain's clutches.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_the_Condor_Heroes"title="The Legend of the Condor Heroes">
The story is set in China during the wars between the Jurchen-led Jin Empire and the predominantly ethnic Han Song Empire. Yang Tiexin and Guo Xiaotian, a pair of sworn brothers, pledge that their unborn children will become either sworn siblings (if both are of the same sex) or a married couple (if they are of opposite sexes). One day, Yang Tiexin's wife, Bao Xiruo, saves a wounded Jurchen warrior, who turns out to be Wanyan Honglie, the sixth prince of the Jin Empire. Smitten by Bao Xirou's beauty Wanyan Honglie later sends his troops to attack Yang Tiexin and Guo Xiaotian's village. Guo Xiaotian is killed while Yang Tiexin goes missing.Guo Xiaotian's pregnant wife, Li Ping, wanders into Mongolia, where she gives birth to their son, Guo Jing, who grows up in Mongolia under the care of Genghis Khan. He learns martial arts from the "Seven Freaks of Jiangnan" and Ma Yu of the Quanzhen School, as well as archery skills from Jebe. The Chinese title of the novel is derived from an incident in Guo Jing's youth when he shot two eagles with a single arrow. On the other hand, a pregnant Bao Xiruo captured by Wanyan Honglie, believing her husband to be dead agrees to marry Wanyan Honglie. She gives birth to a son, Yang Kang, who is raised as a Jurchen nobleman. Although he is mentored by Qiu Chuji of the Quanzhen Sect, he also secretly learns the evil "Nine Yin White Bone Claw" technique from Mei Chaofeng.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clue_in_the_Diary"title="The Clue in the Diary">
Nancy and her friends Bess and George, on their way home from a carnival, discuss a financially struggling Swedish immigrant, Mrs. Swenson, and her daughter, whom the girls have just helped to enjoy the carnival attractions by being their hosts for the evening.As they are driving, a luxurious roadside estate bursts into flames. The girls park the car and make sure that no one is trapped inside. In doing so, Nancy sees someone fleeing the property, and discovers an anonymous Swedish diary on the ground. She picks up this clue, and as firefighters and gawkers arrive on the scene, she notices an attractive young man moving her car away from the flying embers. At first suspicious of Ned Nickerson, Nancy warms to him when he helps her out of a jam. Ned proves to be a good friend, and is a perennial admirer of Nancy's from then on. Meanwhile, Mrs. Swenson's husband is missing, and she identifies his diary as the one picked up at the fire. To top it all off, the owner of the burned house, Felix Raybolt, is missing, and his wife claims Joe Swenson has murdered her husband. Raybolt, it turns out, swindles inventors like Swenson out of their patents and copyrights, and used one such invention to start the fire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fool's_Errand_(novel)"title="Fool's Errand (novel)">
Fifteen years have passed since the end of the Red Ship War. Since then, Fitz has wandered the world accompanied only by his wolf and Wit-partner, Nighteyes, finally settling in a tiny cottage as isolated from the Farseers and Buckkeep politics as possible. He raises his adopted son, Hap, who was brought to him by Starling, whose visits are Fitz's only connection to his old life. Fitz now goes by the name "Tom Badgerlock."Chade finds Fitz and asks him to return to Buckkeep to instruct Prince Dutiful, Kettricken's son, in the Skill, but Fitz refuses. Later, the Fool finds Fitz. The Fool hints at his adventures in the last fifteen years and reveals that he has now foreseen that he must return to Buckkeep, but Fitz declines to join. Shortly after the Fool leaves, Fitz receives an urgent summons from Chade and goes to Buckkeep. Chade reveals that Dutiful has gone missing just before his crucial diplomatic wedding to an Outislander princess. Fitz's assignment to fetch Dutiful back in time for the ceremony, while also keeping the secret that Dutiful is Witted. As Tom Badgerlock, Fitz becomes the servant of Lord Golden, the Fool's new identity at Buckkeep, to track down the Prince.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Fool"title="The Golden Fool">
Fitz has succeeded in rescuing Prince Dutiful from the clutches of the Piebald rebels. But once again the cost of protecting the Farseer line has been dear: Nighteyes is dead.Fitz, though bitter and grieving after the death of his beloved wit-partner, the wolf Nighteyes, reluctantly takes the post of Skillmaster to teach prince Dutiful the Skill. He feels he must since he is almost Dutiful's father. Dutiful, the heir to the throne, was conceived by Verity using Fitz's body fifteen years earlier with the use of the skill, and because of this is both Skilled and Witted. Fitz is not a great teacher and barely has control of his own Skill, but he is the only one left that has been actually taught how to use it. He knows that Dutiful must be protected from the addictive qualities of the Skill, as well as the dangerous temptations of the Wit and the political machinations surrounding both as the Piebalds threaten to throw the Six Duchies into civil war.At the urging of his old mentor the Master Assassin Chade, now Queen Kettricken's Lord Councillor, he also attempts to seek new Skill users as companions for Dutiful. Maintaining a pose as the servant Tom Badgerlock to the Fool's own pose as the decadent noble Lord Golden, he stays in the castle and teaches his new Skill coterie, including the overeager Chade. His search leads him to a most unlikely candidate; a mentally-challenged young man named Thick, suspicious after years of mistreatment but stronger in the Skill than anyone Fitz has ever encountered.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaman's_Crossing"title="Shaman's Crossing">
Young Nevare Burvelle is the second son of a second son in the fantasy nation of Gernia. According to Gernian religious practice, firstborn noble sons are heir to the family fortunes, second sons bear swords as soldiers, and third sons are consecrated to the priesthood. Holy Writ specifies other roles as well for subsequent sons. Nevare will follow his father – newly made a lord by the King – into the Cavalla (cavalry); to the frontier and thence to an advantageous marriage to carry on the Burvelle name. It is a golden future, and Nevare looks forward to it with relish. From the age of eight, Nevare is schooled daily in math, physics, engineering, and of course combat and military strategy. With the help of Sergeant Duril, a man who once served under Nevare's father, he learns to live off the land and survive in the harsh plains environment.For twenty years King Troven's cavalla have pushed the frontiers of Gernia out across the grasslands by building King's Road, Troven's vision of future trade with the east, and also subduing the fierce tribes of the plain on its way. Now they have driven the frontier as far as the Barrier Mountains, home to the enigmatic Speck people. The specks – a light sensitive, dapple-skinned, forest-dwelling folk – are said to retain vestiges of magic in a world which is becoming progressive and technologised. The 'civilised' peoples base their convictions on a rational philosophy founded on their belief in the good god, who displaced the older deities of their world. To them, the Specks are primeval savages, little better than beasts. Superstitions abound; it is said that they harbour strange diseases and worship trees. Sexual congress with them is regarded as both filthy and foolhardy, though not unheard of; the Speck plague, which has ravaged the frontier, has decimated entire regiments.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Kingdom_of_Dreams"title="A Kingdom of Dreams">
Jennifer Merrick is the feisty daughter of a Scottish laird. Royce Westmoreland, the "Black Wolf", is sent by the King of England to wage war against Scotland. When Royce's brother, Stefan Westmoreland, kidnaps Jennifer and her stepsister, Brenna, and brings them to Royce's camp, the lives of the two become intertwined. Royce and Jennifer must marry by order of the King of England and the King of Scotland after they consummate their keeper-prisoner relationship.Forced to accept the marriage, Jennifer's family try to make the marriage fail by intending to send her to become a nun in a convent after the wedding reception. Royce beats the family plan by kidnapping her first and takes her to his home. The King of England orders the two families to settle their score in a tournament where Jennifer must choose which family her loyalty lies with.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Face"title="The Naked Face">
Dr. Judd Stevens, M.D., is a caring and successful Manhattan psychoanalyst who must face a horrific prospect; someone is trying to kill him. First, John Hanson, a patient trying to overcome his homosexuality, is murdered. Not long after, Carol Roberts, Stevens' secretary, is found tortured to death. Two police officers, Andrew McGreavy and Frank Angeli, are quick to treat Stevens as the prime suspect, partly due to McGreavy's anger over Stevens' testimony in a previous case. Stevens is later run down by a car, and following his recovery, two men in dark try to kill him in his office.To prove his innocence and track down the real killer, Stevens hires a private investigator by the name of Norman Z. Moody. He also suspects some of his patients: Harrison Burke (a homicidal paranoiac), Anne Blake (a mysterious patient with whom Stevens is in love) and Teri Washburn (a sex addict and former Hollywood actress). Influenced by Angeli (the one who is somewhat friendly and helpful to him), Stevens begins to consider Moody as a suspect.However, Moody dies but not before giving a hint on the killer: "Don Vinton". Another murder is attempted on Stevens, but he outsmarts the attackers. McGreavy, along with his police force tries to catch Stevens but he escapes and eventually realises that "Don Vinton", in Italian, means the "Big Man", a title given to the leader of a criminal syndicate: "La Cosa Nostra".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stone_Diaries"title="The Stone Diaries">
The book is the fictional autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett, a seemingly ordinary woman whose life is marked by death and loss from the beginning, when her mother dies during childbirth. Through marriage and motherhood, Daisy struggles to find contentment, never truly understanding her life's true purpose. The book is divided into ten chapters detailing each epoch of Daisy's life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fool's_Fate"title="Fool's Fate">
Once assassin to the king, Fitz is now Skillmaster to Prince Dutiful's small band, sailing towards the distant Out Island of Aslevjal. His duty is to help the Prince fulfil the Narcheska Elliania's challenge: Bring her the head of the dragon, Icefyre, whom legends say is buried deep beneath the ice. Only after this task is complete will they be married and bring an end to war between their kingdoms.It is not a happy ship: the serving boy, Thick, is constantly ill/sea-sick, and his powerful telepathic abilities cause many on the ship to likewise be ill. Fitz tries to calm Thick, but in the end, it is Nettle who is able to do so. Nettle is able to Skill into other people's dreams. She also forms a connection with the female dragon. Fitz, his Skill-dreams plagued by a female dragon, is unhappy at leaving the Fool behind but is determined to keep the White Prophet from his fate, death. Chade's fascination with the Skill is growing to the point of obsession.Few on the Out Islands welcome the idea of a foreign prince slaying the Aslevjal legend. When the prince's party arrive at the first of Outislands, they stay at the Narcheska's father's stronghouse, the Boar Clan. Fitz and Chade quickly learn that they are not welcome. the Hetguard oppose the Prince's quest and think it was wrong of the Narcheska to offer it. After understanding that the best course of action is to let the Hetguard decide for themselves what needs to be done, the prince and his closer court travel to the Narcheska's motherhouse, while the other nobles remain to form trade deals. Fitz tries to trick Thick into boarding the ship that will take them to their next stop, but Thick lashes out at him. In the end Web is able to coax Thick aboard. While trying to calm Thick within his dreams, Fitz reveals Nettle to Dutiful, who demands to understand her story and in the end, that she be taken to stay with the Queen and be kept safe. Fitz fears the dragon will harm Nettle, and agrees. Nettle is furious with him and refuses to speak to him, though she continues to speak to Thick.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Magic"title="Ship of Magic">
## Setting.A liveship is a ship made of Wizardwood, a mystical substance from up the Rain Wild River. When three generations of a ship's owners die on board, a liveship "quickens", becoming a sentient being with a personality, the memories of the dead ancestors, and a psychic connection to living family members. Only a liveship is capable of crossing the perilous Rain Wild River to trade with the Rain Wilders, who have valuable goods plundered from an ancient Elderling ruin. Vivacia is the ship bought by the Vestrit family, who are still in debt to the Rain Wilder for the price of the Wizardwood.The Vestrits live in Bingtown, which borders the sea, Jamaillia, Chalced, and the Rain Wilds. Their charter comes from Jamaillia; however, the Satrap, the current leader of Jamaillia, has ignored the promises his ancestors made with Bingtown. Chalced's influence and customs are spreading throughout the world. In Bingtown, the culture is increasingly patriarchal and the practice of slavery puts a financial strain on many Trader families.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elective_Affinities"title="Elective Affinities">
## Part 1.After the deaths of their respective first spouses, Eduard and his childhood sweetheart, Charlotte, were able to marry. The aristocratic couple lives secluded on Eduard’s estate, where Eduard indulges his hobby of landscaping the grounds. The relationship between the two is more of familiarity than of passion. The contemplative togetherness is interrupted when — after Charlotte's initial misgivings — two guests are brought into the household: Eduard's friend, Captain Otto, who is in straitened circumstances, and Charlotte's niece, Ottilie, bereft of both parents and money.The captain's considerable knowledge and drive motivates a range of improvements to the estate, especially the landscape architecture; Charlotte supports him in this. The young Ottilie is shy, taciturn, empathetic and peaceful, and Charlotte instructs her in household management, a task she soon takes over completely. Gradually, Eduard and Ottilie feel more and more drawn to each other, as do Charlotte and Captain Otto as well. Charlotte and Otto confess their love for each other, but Charlotte asks him to renounce such feelings. Eduard, however, cannot control his lust for Ottilie.Charlotte, hoping for a return to the status quo ante, asks Eduard to make Ottilie leave; Eduard, however, had anticipated the possibility of a divorce from Charlotte, thinking that she had formed a bond with the captain. Captain Otto leaves the house, and in order to delay giving up Ottilie, Eduard moves away. Left behind, the two women try to carry on with their usual lives, hiring a young architect to continue the landscaping duties. In Eduard's absence, Charlotte finds out that she is pregnant and hopes that Eduard will now return to her, but he is disturbed by the news and resumes his military career. Ottilie, feeling hopeless because of Charlotte's pregnancy, becomes more withdrawn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Say_Nothing_of_the_Dog"title="To Say Nothing of the Dog">
Ned Henry is a time traveler in 1940 studying Coventry Cathedral after the Coventry Blitz of World War II. He is specifically searching for the location of the "Bishop's bird stump", a MacGuffin that is not defined by the narrator. The narrator shows confusion explained by "time-lag", the time-travel-induced form of jet lag. He returns, unsuccessful, to his time, 2057, at Oxford University. The Bishop's bird stump is needed for a restoration of the cathedral funded by Lady Schrapnell, a wealthy American neo-aristocratic woman with a will of iron. She has conscripted most of Oxford's history department to rebuild the cathedral exactly as it was before it was destroyed. Before going on further trips Ned must recuperate from his time lag and is sent to the hospital. Lady Schrapnell, however insists he go back on another trip. Before he can be conscripted by Schrapnell, Professor Dunworthy (who is in charge of the time machine) decides to send him back to the Victorian Era, specifically 1888, for his rest.Dunworthy has an ulterior motive in sending him to 1888, as another time traveler appears to have violated the laws of the continuum by bringing an object back from then to 2057. Theoretically, nothing may be brought through the time machine in either direction as it might cause time to unravel, and safeguards have been put in place in order to prevent significant objects making the journey. The historians and scientists who invented the time machine believe the object may rip time itself apart if it isn't promptly returned.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bean_Trees"title="The Bean Trees">
Taylor Greer sets out to leave home, Kentucky, and travel west, and finds herself in Oklahoma near Cherokee territory. As Taylor stops in the town, a woman suddenly approaches, deposits a small child, and leaves without explanation. Not knowing what else to do, Taylor decides to care for the child. The two travel to Tucson, Arizona, where she meets Lou Ann, a woman with a young son. Lou Ann had been married; her husband abandoned her and their child.The novel traces the experiences of Taylor and the child, who Taylor names Turtle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_of_Slaves"title="Crown of Slaves">
The novel continues the events that happened on "From the Highlands", and is set over the background of the fight against genetic slavery.The story begins after the truce between Manticore and Haven. Captain Zilwicki, his adopted daughter Berry, Princess Ruth Winton and the slave-turned-professor W.E.B. Du Havel are sent as Queen Elizabeth III's (not the Manticoran government's) official representatives to the funeral of a notorious Solarian anti-slavery activist, which will take place in Erewhon, a disgruntled member of the Manticoran Alliance.Erewhon's location between Manticore, Haven and the Solarian League makes it a place where agents from the different star nations can play the intelligence game. From the first moment, Zilwicki, Berry and Ruth get entangled in a complex situation involving Havenite agents, ambitious Solarian Navy officers, violent Masadan mercenaries, the Audubon Ballroom and the powerful Mesan corporation Manpower Incorporated.Each faction has interests of its own, which collide with those of the others: the Manticorans want to salvage their relation with Erewhon (and upset the Prime Minister who allowed that relationship to sour). The Havenites intend to show support for the anti-slavery cause and improve their own relationship with Erewhon, with the unstated goal of breaking Erewhon away from Manticore. The Erewhonese want someone — "anyone" — to help them deal with a Mesan-owned planet which is a threat to their security. The Solarian officers work to further the interests of a powerful political patron who believes that the League is on the verge of collapse and wants to be prepared for that event. The Mesans want to stay out of the limelight and prevent all the other factions from attacking their major industry: slave trading, while the Audubon Ballroom simply wants to hit Mesa anywhere they can. And even the Masadan mercenaries employed by the Mesans have their own agenda: to force Manticore to free several of their imprisoned companions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_of_Saganami"title="The Shadow of Saganami">
The events of the novel are simultaneous with those of the novel "At All Costs", which belongs to the main series of Honorverse novels.The story focuses on the shakedown cruise of the "Edward Saganami-C"-class heavy cruiser HMS "Hexapuma" (nicknamed "Nasty Kitty"), commanded by Captain Aivars Terekhov, a war veteran and former prisoner of war who has only recently been cleared for return to active naval service. To the surprise of her new captain and crew, the "Hexapuma", one of the Royal Manticoran Navy's most modern and powerful cruisers, is assigned to the Talbott Cluster, an impoverished group of star systems recently incorporated within the Star Kingdom of Manticore, and facing a vote of annexation. With the renewal of brutal war with Haven, and embroiled in the annexation of parts of the Silesian Confederacy, Manticore has no choice (and no other available resources) but to assign a small and clearly insufficient naval force to guard the Cluster, while a Constitutional Convention is taking place which will define the terms of the Cluster's formal annexation.However, both the Solarian League's Office of Frontier Security (OFS) and corporations (which resents Manticore intervening in its "backyard") and the slaver world of Mesa do not want this to move forward and support indigenous groups violently opposed to annexation. The goal is to launch a terrorist campaign against Manticore, giving the League the excuse to intervene in the Cluster and expel the Star Kingdom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uncomfortable_Dead"title="The Uncomfortable Dead">
The story follows Elías Contreras, a Zapatista investigator from Chiapas (Marcos' protagonist), and Héctor Belascorán Shayne, a private detective from Mexico City (a recurring protagonist in Taibo's detective novels), as they try to unravel the mystery of a dead man leaving messages on answering machines, finding out who Morales is. During the book, and especially during the chapters written by Marcos, the reader is introduced to many characters, some of whom only appear for a very short time. The book looks at the politics of Mexico and at neo-liberalism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mediterranean_Caper"title="The Mediterranean Caper">
Dirk Pitt is up against an international drug smuggling ring and the evil Bruno Von Till, a German pilot who survived both World Wars to become one of the most ruthless smugglers in history. The novel is set in the Aegean Sea, where Dirk Pitt has been sent with Al Giordino to assist Rudi Gunn, with an expedition being conducted by NUMA.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(novel)"title="Raft (novel)">
The few thousand humans survive in a nebula of relatively breathable air, existing in divided communities. The society is highly stratified, with the elite living on the "Raft" (the remains of the starship that contains almost all the high technology), workers/miners living on various "Belt" worlds (where they mine burned-out star kernels), and the "Boneys", a nomadic band of "unmentionables" who live on worlds created out of corpses.It is not directly detailed how humans came to the universe, but hints within the story indicate that the Raft ship came through a rift in our universe into this alternate reality. The original short story, also by Stephen Baxter, provides more insight as to how humans arrived, "five hundred years ago a great warship – chasing some forgotten opponent – blundered through a portal. A gateway. It left its own universe and arrived here." A glimpse of the high-gravity universe is seen in the book "Ring", implying that the humans in Raft came from the main universe of the Xeelee Sequence, although during which time period they escaped is not clear.The alternate universe the humans live in follows same laws as our universe, except that it has a gravitational constant which is orders of magnitude larger than our own universe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timelike_Infinity"title="Timelike Infinity">
Set thousands of years in the future (AD 5407), the human race has been conquered by the Qax, a truly alien turbulent-liquid form of life, who now rule over the few star systems of human space – adopting processes from human history to effectively oppress the resentful race. Humans have encountered a few other races, including the astoundingly advanced Xeelee, and been conquered once before – by the Squeem – but successfully recovered.A human-built device, the Interface project, returns to the Solar System after 1,500 years. The project, towed by the spaceship "Cauchy", returns a wormhole gate, appearing to offer time travel due to the time 'difference' between the exits of the wormhole (relativistic time dilation), with one end having remained in the Solar System and the other travelling at near lightspeed for a century. The Qax had destroyed the Solar System gate, but a lashed-up human ship (a great chunk of soil including Stonehenge, crewed by a group called the Friends of Wigner) passes through the returning gate, travelling back to the unconquered humanity of 1,500 years ago.One of the crew of the "Cauchy" returns with the Friends, Miriam Berg. The Friends have a complex scheme, which does not include a simple military return-and-rescue – the 1,500-year technology gap makes this "risible". From the Wigner thought experiment they have postulated an unusual theory on the ultimate destiny of life in the universe. They believe that quantum wave-functions do not collapse like the Copenhagen interpretation holds, nor that each collapse actually buds off separate universes (like the quantum multiverse hypothesis holds) but rather that the universe is a participatory universe: the entire universe exists as a single massive quantum superposition, and that at the end of time (in the open universe of the Xeelee Sequence, time and space are unbounded, or more precisely, bounded only at the Cauchy boundaries of "Time-like infinity" and "Space-like infinity"), when intelligent life collects all information (compare the final anthropic principle and the Omega Point), it will transform into an "Ultimate Observer" and make the "final Observation", the observation which collapses all the possible entangled wave-functions generated since the beginning of the universe. They believe further that the Ultimate Observer will not merely observe, but "choose" which world line will be the true world-line, and that it will choose the one in which humanity suffers no Squeem or Qax occupations. However, the Ultimate Observer cannot choose between worldlines if no information survives to its era to distinguish worldlines- if the UO never knows of humanity, it cannot choose a worldline favourable to it. In other words, some way is needed to securely send information forward in time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_to_Sing"title="Learning to Sing">
The book focuses on the people who have been most influential in Aiken's life. He narrates his many conflicts with his birth father and stepfather, and the bullying that he had to endure as a child, then reveals how he eventually learned to accept himself as he was, rather than try to conform to other people's expectations. Not merely a tale of overcoming adversity, "Learning to Sing" also speaks of ways in which he was positively shaped as he recounts experiences with his mother, grandparents, siblings, teachers, friends, and religion. Along the way, Aiken demonstrates his facility as a storyteller, regaling the reader with tales both humorous and heart-breaking. Contrary to expectations, "American Idol" is barely mentioned in the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_of_Honour"title="Sword of Honour">
The protagonist is Guy Crouchback, heir of a declining aristocratic English Roman Catholic family. Guy has spent his thirties at the family villa in Italy shunning the world after the failure of his marriage and has decided to return to England at the very beginning of the Second World War, in the belief that the creeping evils of modernity, gradually apparent in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, have become all too clearly displayed as a real and embodied enemy.He attempts to join the Army, finally succeeding with the (fictitious) Royal Corps of Halberdiers, an old but not too fashionable regiment. He trains as an officer and is posted to various centres around Britain. One of the themes is recurring "flaps" or chaos – embarking and disembarking from ships and railway carriages that go nowhere. Crouchback meets the fire-eating Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook (probably based on Lieutenant General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, a college friend of Waugh's father-in-law whom Waugh knew somewhat from his club), and Apthorpe, a very eccentric fellow officer; in an episode of high farce, the latter two have a battle of wits and military discipline over an Edwardian thunder-box (portable toilet) which Crouchback observes, amused and detached. Before being sent on active service, he attempts to seduce his ex-wife Virginia, secure in the knowledge that the Catholic Church still regards her as his wife; she refuses him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kite_Runner"title="The Kite Runner">
## Part I.Amir, a well-to-do Pashtun boy, and Hassan, a Hazara boy who is the son of Ali, Amir's father's servant, spend their days kite fighting in the hitherto peaceful city of Kabul. Flying kites was a way to escape the horrific reality the two boys were living in. Hassan is a successful "kite runner" for Amir; he knows where the kite will land without watching it.Both boys are motherless: Amir's mother died in childbirth, while Hassan's mother, Sanaubar, simply abandoned him and Ali. Amir's father, a wealthy merchant Amir affectionately refers to as "Baba," loves both boys. He makes a point of buying Hassan exactly the same things as Amir, to Amir's annoyance. He even pays to have Hassan's cleft lip surgically corrected. On the other hand, Baba is often critical of Amir, considering him weak and lacking in courage, even threatening to physically punish him when he complains about Hassan. Amir finds a kinder fatherly figure in Rahim Khan, Baba's closest friend, who understands him and supports his interest in writing, whereas Baba considers that interest to be worthy only of females. In a rare moment, when Amir is sitting on Baba's lap rather than being shooed away as a bother, he asks why his father drinks alcohol which is forbidden by Islam. Baba tells him that the Mullahs are hypocrites and the only real sin is theft which takes many forms.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_and_Departure"title="Arrival and Departure">
Written during the middle of World War II, "Arrival and Departure" reflects Koestler's own plight as a Hungarian refugee. Like Koestler, the main character is a former member of the Communist party. He escapes to "Neutralia," a neutral country based on Portugal, where Koestler himself had gone, and flees from there. (Harold Rosenberg wrote in a book review in "Partisan Review" that "there ought to be a law against such place-names.") Reflecting Koestler's later life relationship with science, and particularly his disagreement with various movements within psychiatry, the main character emerges from treatment psychically neutered, and the critical question of the novel is how much of his later trauma and political activity is due to a small incident in his childhood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_Gods_(novel)"title="Household Gods (novel)">
The story focuses on Nicole Gunther-Perrin, a young lawyer in late 20th-century Los Angeles who is dissatisfied with her hectic life, which includes balancing her career with being a mother and dealing with her deadbeat ex-husband and sexist coworkers. Believing the past to be a better time, one evening after a particularly distressing day, she makes a wistful plea to a plaque of two Roman gods, Liber and Libera, who take it as a prayer. Unknown to her, the plaque, which she thinks is a tourist copy picked up in Europe on holidays on a trip a few years earlier, is actually an ancient relic from the Roman Era. The next morning, she finds herself waking up in the body of one of her ancient ancestors running a tavern in the 2nd century Carnuntum, in what is now Austria.In general, she finds out the hard way that life in the past was not quite what she thought it would be: slavery is taken for granted, and there are no women's rights, no effective medicine or clean medical practices, little entertainment, and no tampons. Over the course of a year and a half, she is forced to revise many of her long-held modern prejudices, including those against alcohol and corporal punishment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camouflage_(novel)"title="Camouflage (novel)">
A million years prior to the dawn of "Homo sapiens", two immortal, shapeshifting aliens roam the Earth with little memory of their origin or their purpose. In the year 2019, an artifact is discovered off the coast of Samoa, buried deep beneath the ocean floor. The mysterious find attracts the alien beings—the "changeling" and the "chameleon"—to Samoa, where one ponders the meaning of the object and the other speculates on its relationship to each of them. Both immortals seek each other for different reasons: one harbours good intentions toward humanity, while the other is extremely hostile.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_to_Eden"title="Exit to Eden">
Lisa Kelly manages an isolated BDSM resort named The Club, which offers high-end clients an exclusive setting in which they can experience the life of a Master or Mistress. Prospective submissive slaves, paid at the end of their term at Eden (which varies from six months to two years), are presented at auctions by the most respected trainers from across the world. As head female trainer and co-founder, Lisa gets the first pick of the new slaves and chooses Elliot Slater—with whom she shares immediate and undeniable chemistry that intensifies throughout their time together, eventually resulting in love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Infernal_Desire_Machines_of_Doctor_Hoffman"title="The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman">
Set in an unspecified Latin American country, the novel features Desiderio, a government minister in the main city, currently under attack by Doctor Hoffman's reality-distorting machines. Desiderio embarks on a journey to find Hoffman's former physics teacher, eventually bringing him to Hoffman's castle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Ántonia"title="My Ántonia">
Orphaned Jim Burden rides the trains from Virginia to Black Hawk, Nebraska, where he will live with his paternal grandparents. Jake, a farmhand from Virginia, rides with the 10-year-old boy. On the same train, headed to the same destination, is the Shimerda family from Bohemia. Jim lives with his grandparents in the home they have built, helping as he can with chores to ease the labor on the others. The home has the dining room and kitchen downstairs, like a basement, with small windows at the top of the walls, an arrangement quite different from Jim's home in Virginia. The sleeping quarters and parlor are at ground level. The Shimerda family paid for a homestead which proves to have no home on it, just a cave in the earth, and not much of the land broken for cultivation. The two families are nearest neighbors to each other in a sparsely settled land. Ántonia, the elder daughter in the Shimerda family, is a few years older than young Jim. The two are friends from the start, helped by Mrs. Shimerda asking that Jim teach both her daughters to read English. Ántonia helps Mrs. Burden in her kitchen when she visits, learning more about cooking and housekeeping. The first year is extremely difficult for the Shimerda family, without a proper house in the winter. Mr. Shimerda comes to thank the Burdens for the Christmas gifts given to them, and has a peaceful day with them, sharing a meal and the parts of a Christian tradition that Protestant Mr. Burden and Catholic Mr. Shimerda respect. He did not want to move from Bohemia, where he had a skilled trade, a home and friends with whom he could play his violin. His wife is sure life will be better for her children in America.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jewel_of_Seven_Stars"title="The Jewel of Seven Stars">
Malcolm Ross, a young barrister, is awakened in the middle of the night and summoned to the house of famous Egyptologist Abel Trelawny at the request of Abel's daughter, Margaret, of whom Malcolm is enamoured. Once Malcolm arrives at the house, he meets Margaret, Superintendent Dolan, and Doctor Winchester, and learns why he has been called: Margaret, hearing strange noises from her father's bedroom, woke to find him unconscious and bloodied on the floor of his room, under some sort of trance. Margaret reveals that her father had left a letter of strange instructions in the event of his incapacitation, stating that his body should not be removed from his room and must be watched at all times until he wakes up. The room is filled with Egyptian relics, and Malcolm notices that the "mummy smell" has an effect on those in the room. A large mummy cat in the room disturbs Margaret's cat, Silvio, and the doctor suspects Silvio is guilty of the scratch marks on Trelawny's arm.On the first night of watch, Malcolm awakens to find Trelawny again on the floor, bloody and senseless. Margaret asks Dr. Winchester to summon another expert, and he calls for Dr. James Frere, a brain specialist. However, when Frere demands that Trelawny be moved from his room, Margaret refuses and sends him away. After a normal night with no attacks, a stranger arrives, begging to see Trelawny. He reveals himself to be Eugene Corbeck, an Egyptologist who was working with Trelawny. He has returned from Egypt with lamps that Trelawny requested, but finds upon his arrival at the house that the lamps have disappeared. The next day, Malcolm and Margaret admire Trelawny's Egyptian treasures, noting in particular a large sarcophagus, a coffer covered with hieroglyphics, and an oddly well-preserved mummy hand with seven fingers. Malcolm then finds the missing lamps in Margaret's bedroom. Concerned for Margaret, Malcolm tells Corbeck everything that has happened up until his arrival, and Corbeck gives Malcolm a mysterious book to read. The book tells the story of Nicholas van Huyn, a Dutch explorer who travelled to the Valley of the Sorcerer to explore the tomb of a mysterious Egyptian queen, Tera. In the tomb, he finds a sarcophagus and a mummy hand with seven fingers, adorned with a ruby ring with seven points that look like stars.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacron-3"title="Simulacron-3">
"Simulacron-3" is the story of a virtual city (total environment simulator) for marketing research, developed by a scientist to reduce the need for opinion polls. The computer-generated city simulation is so well-programmed, that, although the inhabitants have their own consciousness, they are unaware, except for one, that they are only electronic impulses in a computer.The simulator's lead scientist, Hannon Fuller, dies mysteriously, and a co-worker, Morton Lynch, vanishes. The protagonist, Douglas Hall, is with Lynch when he vanishes, and Hall subsequently struggles to suppress his inchoate madness. As time and events unwind, he progressively grasps that his own world is probably not "real" and might be only a computer-generated simulation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_of_Dreams_(novel)"title="Dust of Dreams (novel)">
"Dust of Dreams" returns to the continent of Lether, last seen in Reaper's Gale. Adjunct Tavore leads the Malazan army into the Letherii Wastelands to fight against an unknown threat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Warrior_Prophet"title="The Warrior Prophet">
A battle has been waged against the heathen Fanim, but the Holy War is far from over and infighting has led to tension and delays. Meanwhile Kellhus has been patiently gaining a stronger following.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitches_(novel_series)"title="Twitches (novel series)">
The 10-book series focuses on long lost twin sisters who discovered that they were witches of Coventry Island. Camryn "Cam" Alicia Barnes, also known as Apolla DuBaer, is a popular and preppy teen with a Sun amulet. Alexandra "Alex" Nicole Fielding, also known as Artemis DuBaer, is a gothic teen who constantly changes the color of her hair, and wears the matching amulet of the Moon. The twins were separated on October 31, 1986. Years later, the two meet up as schoolgirls with ESP; Cam can see the future and Alex can read people's minds. Their legal guardians are the young witch Ileana and the mischievous, aging warlock Karsh. The twins' birth parents are Coventry Island's witch and warlock, Miranda and Aron DuBaer. The twins' birth was foretold by one of their ancestors years ago. The prophecy is called the La Prophetic Aux Yeux Gris (The Prophecy of the Gray Eyes). The two lived completely different lives miles away from each other, not knowing of their powers until they met in "The Power of Two".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodily_Harm_(novel)"title="Bodily Harm (novel)">
The novel's protagonist Rennie Wilford is a travel reporter. After surviving breast cancer, she travels to the fictional Caribbean island St. Antoine to carry out research for an article. The island, however, is on the brink of revolution. Rennie tries to stay away from politics, but is drawn into events through her romance with Paul, a key player in the uprising, and ends up in a survival struggle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Oracle"title="Lady Oracle">
The novel's protagonist, Joan Foster, is a romance novelist who has spent her life running away from difficult situations. The novel alternates between flashbacks from the past and scenes from the present. Through flashbacks, the reader sees her first as an overweight child whose mother constantly criticizes her, and later, hiding her career, her past as the mistress of a Polish count, and her affair with a performance artist called The Royal Porcupine, from her bipolar husband Arthur.In the present, she has recently published a volume of feminist poetry which becomes a breakthrough success and is overwhelmed by the pressures of sudden fame. Joan panics after receiving a blackmail attempt from someone who has found out about her secrets. With the help of two acquaintances, she fakes her own death and then flees to Italy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Shepherd_(novel)"title="The Good Shepherd (novel)">
The hero of "The Good Shepherd" is Commander George Krause, the captain of the fictional US Navy "Mahan"-class destroyer USS "Keeling" in World War II. Krause is in overall command of an escort force protecting an Atlantic convoy in the Battle of the Atlantic, shepherding it through the Mid-Atlantic gap where no antisubmarine aircraft are able to defend convoys. He finds himself in a difficult position. The voyage in question occurs early in 1942, shortly after the United States's entry into the war. Although he is a career Navy officer, with many years of seniority, this is Krause's first wartime mission. The captains of the other vessels in the escort group are junior to him in rank, and much younger, but they have been at war for over two years.The story covers 13 watches (52 hours) aboard the ship's bridge and is told in third person entirely from Krause's point of view as he fights to save his ship, detailing his mood swings from his intense and focused excitement and awareness during combat to his resulting fatigue, depression, and self-doubt as his self-perceived inferiority and inexperience relative to the other captains under his command trouble him—although as the story progresses he is shown to be quite capable. He broods over his career and the wife who left him, partly because of his strict devotion to duty. He is troubled when the press of duty forces him to neglect his prayers (unlike most of Forester's other heroes, Krause is devout). He is troubled by recollections that the Navy review board had twice passed him over for promotion, returning a judgment of "fitted and retained" because there was little or no opportunity in the prewar Navy. His promotion to commander only came when the United States entered the war, leading him to fear that he may be unsuited to his command.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_Flowers"title="Vacuum Flowers">
The protagonist of the novel is Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark, the recorded personality of a dead woman which has become the property of a corporation that intends to sell it as entertainment. Rebel escapes by taking over the body of Eucrasia Walsh, a woman who rents herself out for temporary testing of new wetware programming. While escaping the corporation Eucrasia's latent personality is beginning to reassert itself.Rebel's adventures take her throughout the widely colonised Solar System. She initially lives in canister worlds orbiting the Sun in a trojan orbit, where she sometimes works removing bioengineered weeds ("vacuum flowers", the space-tolerant flora of the title) from the canisters' exterior ports. Since the recording omits most of her memories, she must rely on strangers to help her survive, though she cannot trust any of them. Rebel meets and falls in love with Wyeth, a leader whose personality was reprogrammed into a team of four complementary personas. Together they form an uneasy alliance with The Comprise, the hive mind which rules Earth, and encounter Dysonworlders, who live on genetically engineered artificial comets (Dyson trees).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stations_of_the_Tide"title="Stations of the Tide">
"Stations of the Tide" is the story of an unnamed bureaucrat with the Department of Technology Transfer. The story opens with the bureaucrat descending to the surface of the planet Miranda to hunt a magician who has smuggled proscribed technology past the orbital embargo, seeking to bring him to justice before the world is transformed by the flood of the Jubilee Tides. It is generally considered to be the "One Hundred Years Of Solitude" of Science Fiction Novels, beloved by writers, but, not as much by the rank-and-file readership.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_to_the_French"title="Death to the French">
The hero is Matthew Dodd, a rifleman in the 95th Regiment of Foot of the British Army. The novel takes place in Portugal early in the Peninsular War. The British had sent a small force of about 10,000 men to the aid of her ally, Portugal. Rather than face the overwhelming numbers of the opposing French forces under Marshal André Masséna, the British commander, Lord Wellington, secretly constructed the Lines of Torres Vedras and withdrew behind them, leaving the French force no options but to lay siege to the lines, or retreat. For three months the French encamped outside the lines, waiting for reinforcements from the other side of the Tagus River, but in the end hunger and disease forced them to retreat.During the British withdrawal, Dodd becomes separated from his regiment and is cut off from the British forces, with the entire French army between him and the lines at Torres Vedras. In an attempt to get around the French, he heads for the Tagus River, hoping to follow it to Lisbon. However, the French are there ahead of him, and he has no option but to live off the land and try to survive. He joins a group of Portuguese guerrillas and spends two months with them, harassing the encamped French army, killing sentries and laying ambushes for scouting parties and supply animals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Sawyer_Abroad"title="Tom Sawyer Abroad">
In the story, Tom, Huck, and Jim travel to Africa in a futuristic hot air balloon, where they survive encounters with lions, robbers, and fleas to see some of the world's greatest wonders, including the Pyramids and the Sphinx. Like "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer, Detective", the story is told using the first-person narrative voice of Huck Finn. It is a sequel, set in the time following the title story of the Tom Sawyer series.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_for_the_Oaks"title="War for the Oaks">
Walking home one night through the streets of Minneapolis after quitting her rock band and breaking up with her boyfriend, Eddi McCandry discovers that she is being pursued by a threatening man and an even more threatening black dog. They turn out to be one and same: a shapeshifting prankster faerie known as a phouka, who drafts Eddi to be the linchpin in the ongoing battle between faerie's good and noble Seelie Court and the evil Unseelie Court, ruled by the Queen of Air and Darkness. Eddi soon finds herself in a struggle for survival against the Unseelie Court, all while trying to put a new rock band together. Meanwhile, her initial feelings of resentment toward the phouka develop into gratitude for his efforts to protect her against the dark queen, and ultimately turn into love. The novel climaxes in a rock concert playoff between Eddi and the Queen of Air and Darkness, which decides the fate of both faerie courts, as well as the fate of her loved one.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Eden_(novel)"title="The Garden of Eden (novel)">
The novel is fundamentally the story of five months in the lives of David Bourne, an American writer, and his wife Catherine. It is set mainly in the French Riviera, specifically in the Côte d'Azur, and in Spain. The story begins with their honeymoon in the Camargue, then moves to Spain, then back to France (at a "long low rose-colored Provençal house where they had stayed before... in the pines on the Estérel side of la Napoule" (within easy driving distance to Cannes). However, early in the book, Catherine seemed to change (from David's point of view—the novel is entirely from his vantage). While at le Grau du Roi, Catherine announces "I have a big surprise", but does not tell David what it is other than to hint "Oh it's very simple but it's very complicated" and "...I'm going to be changed." She bicycles into town, then returns with "Her hair... cropped as short as a boy's." Later, that night, she tells him "Don't call me girl." and "Please love me David the way I am." and implies that he is changing also ("You are changing," she said. "Oh you are. You are. Yes you are and you're my girl Catherine.")
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marabou_Stork_Nightmares"title="Marabou Stork Nightmares">
Roy Strang narrates the book from an (at first) unexplained coma, which he has been in for the previous two years. His life in this state is a miserable affair, surrounded by uncaring doctors and his extremely dysfunctional family. In his fantasy life, he is an adventurer in the wilds of South Africa, where he and his loyal guide, Sandy Jamieson, hunt for the marabou stork.When not hallucinating, Strang tells his life story, beginning in a "scheme" (local authority housing) in Muirhouse, Scotland, with his violent, delusional parents, two half-brothers (one a womanizer, the other flamboyantly gay), and his promiscuous sister, all of whom he despises. When Strang is 12, he and his family relocate to apartheid-era South Africa, where he is repeatedly molested by his uncle. After his father is jailed for the violent assault of a taxi driver and his uncle is killed in a terrorist bombing, the Strangs are forced to return to Scotland, a mere 18 months after they left.Strang grows into a violent, misogynistic thug. He maintains a full-time job as a systems analyst for the fictional investment group, "Scottish Spinsters" (a reference to Scottish Widows). He joins a gang of football hooligans who are attached to Hibernian F.C., the Capital City Service, and led by the fearsome Lexo. Strang enjoys his life as a "top boy," feared by the entire town, until the gang kidnaps a young woman who rejected their advances and gang rapes her; Strang is horrified, but too intimidated to try to stop them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Word_for_World_Is_Forest"title="The Word for World Is Forest">
"The Word for World is Forest" begins from the point of view of Captain Davidson, who is the commander of a logging camp named Smith camp. Many native Athsheans are used as slave labor at the camp, and also as personal servants. The novel begins with Davidson travelling to "Centralville", the headquarters of the colony, hoping to have a sexual encounter with one of a number of women who have just arrived on the predominantly male colony. When Davidson returns to Smith Camp, he finds the entire camp burned to the ground, and all of the humans dead. He lands to investigate, and while on the ground is overpowered by four Athsheans. He recognizes one of them as Selver, an Athshean who was a personal servant at the headquarters of the colony, and later an assistant to Raj Lyubov, the colony anthropologist. A few months prior to the attack, Davidson had raped Selver's wife Thele, who died in the process, prompting an enraged Selver to attack Davidson. Davidson nearly kills him, before he is rescued by Lyubov; however, he is left with prominent facial scars, which render him easily recognizable. The Athsheans allow Davidson to leave and carry a message about the destruction of the camp back to the colony headquarters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinia_(novel)"title="Darwinia (novel)">
In March 1912, in the event some called the "Miracle", Europe and parts of Asia and Africa, including its inhabitants, disappear suddenly overnight and are replaced with a slice of an alien planet, a land mass of roughly equal outlines and terrain features, but with a strange new flora and fauna which seem to have followed a different path in evolution.Seen by some as an act of divine retribution, the "Miracle" affects the lives of people all around and transforms world history. Having been "The New World" settled by Europeans, America now becomes involved in an effort to re-settle the strange new Europe. Lord Kitchener - who, with no World War I breaking out, lives on past 1916 - tries to hold together the remnants of the British Empire and re-settle Britain, though the refounded London is little more than "a raw frontier town".Against this background, the book describes the life and the adventures of Guilford Law, a young American photographer. As a 14-year-old boy, Guilford Law witnessed the "Miracle" as shimmering lights moving eerily across the ocean sky. As a grown man, he is determined to travel to the strange continent of Darwinia and explore its mysteries. To that end, he enlists as a photographer in the Finch expedition, which plans to travel up the river that used to be known as the Rhine and penetrate the bizarre new continent's hidden depths as far as possible. He lands in the middle of the jungle in the midst of nationalistic skirmishes, in which partisans attack and wipe out most of the party of the Finch expedition on the continent that they believe to belong to them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_and_Chocolate_(novel)"title="Blood and Chocolate (novel)">
Vivian is a sixteen-year-old loup-garoux who has just started high school in a new town, she explains the circumstances that brought her there; formerly, she and her pack lived in another town, the teenage pack members started to become more feral, using their wolf forms to scare humans, one day, a loup-garoux named Axel lost control, killed a human girl and was witnessed changing back from wolf to human form. While Axel was in prison, the other teenage loups-garoux killed another human to make it look like the "real" killer was still on the loose and Axel was released. Vivian's father, the pack leader, killed Axel for endangering the pack, but Vivian pleaded with him to spare the lives of the other teenagers. Not long after, suspicious neighbors set fire to the pack's house. Vivian's father and a few others were killed, and the pack had to relocate.In the new town, Vivian has no friends because of her reserved and secretive nature; many girls she attends school with find her intimidating and are jealous of her beauty. However, she is intrigued by a boy named Aiden who has written a poem about werewolves that is surprisingly accurate with regards to their transformation. She at first suspects Aiden might be a werewolf himself, but soon figures out that he is a pure-blooded human. She is still attracted to him and pursues a relationship with him, despite her mother, Esmé's disapproval. Esmé doesn't want Vivian to date a human and fears that Vivian might reveal the secret of the pack.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisky_Galore_(novel)"title="Whisky Galore (novel)">
During the Second World War, the cargo vessel "S.S. Cabinet Minister" is wrecked off a remote fictional Scottish island group – Great Todday and Little Todday – with fifty thousand cases of whisky aboard. Due to wartime rationing, the thirsty islanders had nearly run out of the "water of life" and see this as an unexpected godsend. They manage to salvage several hundred cases before the ship sinks. But it is not all clear sailing. They must thwart the efforts of the authorities to confiscate the liquor, particularly in the shape of misguided, pompous Home Guard Captain Paul Waggett. A cat-and-mouse battle of wits ensues.Although the wreck and the escapades over the whisky are at the centre of the story, there is also a lot of background detail about life in the Outer Hebrides, including e.g. culture clashes between the Protestant island of Great Todday and the Roman Catholic island of Little Todday. (Mackenzie based the geography of these islands on Barra and Eriskay respectively, but in real life they are both Catholic islands). There are various sub-plots including those of two couples who are planning to get married.Mackenzie's prose captures the various accents of the area and also includes much common Gaelic that was in use at the time. The book includes a glossary of both the meaning and approximate pronunciation of the language.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Spiders"title="Planet of the Spiders">
Following the events of "Invasion of the Dinosaurs", Mike Yates was discharged from UNIT and is now attending a Tibetan meditation centre in rural England. Sarah Jane Smith visits him and they witness some curious events, seemingly organised by a resident called Lupton, and his cronies. Mike and Sarah stumble across Lupton performing an incantation, which conjures up a giant spider. It jumps on Lupton’s back and then disappears. The spider manifests itself in Lupton’s head, telling him to seek out and locate a certain blue crystal.The Third Doctor has developed an interest in psychic ability, but his testing of a clairvoyant called Professor Clegg backfires when his subject has a fatal heart attack. It is triggered when Clegg comes into contact with a blue crystal from Metebelis Three (sent back from the Amazon by Jo Grant), which caused him to see the image of deadly spiders. Sarah returns from the retreat and she and the Doctor swap spider tales. Meanwhile, Lupton has also arrived at UNIT HQ and steals the crystal from the Doctor’s laboratory. A multi-vehicle chase ensues which Lupton escapes by teleporting back to the monastery. There, the spider reveals that it is plotting against some of its sisters back on Metebelis Three. The spiders and the crystal originate from the same blue planet in the Acteon Galaxy the Doctor last visited during "The Green Death".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childe_Harold's_Pilgrimage"title="Childe Harold's Pilgrimage">
The youthful Harold, cloyed with the pleasures of the world and reckless of life, wanders about Europe, making his feelings and ideas the subjects of the poem. In Canto I he is in Spain and Portugal, where he recounts the savagery of their invasion by the French. In Canto II he moves to Greece, uplifted by the beauty of its past in a country now enslaved by the Turks. Canto III finds him on the battlefield of Waterloo, from which he journeys down the Rhine and crosses into Switzerland, enchanted by the beauty of the scenery and its historic associations. In Canto IV Harold starts from Venice on a journey through Italy, lamenting the vanished heroic and artistic past, and the subject status of its various regions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bourne_Legacy_(novel)"title="The Bourne Legacy (novel)">
With the climactic events of "The Bourne Ultimatum" behind him, Jason Bourne is able to once again become David Webb, now professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. However, this serenity does not last for long and, when a silenced gunshot narrowly misses Webb's head, the Bourne persona awakens in him yet again.Bourne's first objective is to get to his longtime friend and handler at the CIA, Alex Conklin.However, unbeknownst (as yet) to Bourne, a Hungarian by the name of Stepan Spalko has now drawn Jason into a web—one which he cannot escape as easily as his professorial façade.Finding Alex dead along with Dr Morris Panov, Bourne realizes the trap as soon as he hears the police arriving. With his car outside and his fingerprints in the house, he immediately understands that he has been framed.So, with only Conklin's cell phone and a torn page from a notebook to go on, Jason Bourne sets off to find out who is trying to kill him and who killed his friends.After warning Marie and his two children, Jamie and Alyssa, to proceed immediately towards their safe house, he slips through the CIA cordon and makes his way to an independent agent who was talking to Conklin when he was killed. Having received travel plans to Hungary and a mission to meet Janos Vadas, Conklin's contact in Hungary, Bourne proceeds to unravel the truth behind why Conklin and Panov were killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissus_and_Goldmund"title="Narcissus and Goldmund">
"Narcissus and Goldmund" is the story of a young man, Goldmund (), who wanders aimlessly throughout Medieval Germany after leaving a Catholic monastery school in search of what could be described as "the meaning of life".Narcissus (German: "Narziss" or, before the German orthography reform of 1996, "Narziß" ), a gifted young teacher at the cloister school, quickly befriends Goldmund, as they are only a few years apart, and Goldmund is naturally bright. Goldmund looks up to Narcissus, and Narcissus has much fondness for him in return. After straying too far in the fields one day on an errand gathering herbs, Goldmund comes across a beautiful Gypsy woman, who kisses him and invites him to make love. This encounter becomes his epiphany; he now knows he was never meant to be a monk. With Narcissus' help, he leaves the monastery and embarks on a wandering existence. Goldmund finds he is very attractive to women, and has numerous love affairs. After seeing a particularly beautiful, carved Madonna in a church, he feels his own artistic talent awakening and seeks out the master carver, with whom he studies for several years. However, in the end, Goldmund refuses an offer of guild membership, preferring the freedom of the road. When the Black Death devastates the region, Goldmund encounters human existence at its ugliest. Finally, after being imprisoned for having an affair with the wife of the city governor and condemned to be executed, he is saved by and reunited with his friend Narcissus, now an abbot. The two reflect upon the different paths their lives have taken, contrasting the artist with the thinker.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winds_of_War"title="The Winds of War">
In 1939 Navy Commander Victor "Pug" Henry has been appointed US Naval attaché in Berlin. During the voyage to Europe aboard , Victor befriends a British radio personality, Alistair Talcott "Talky" Tudsbury, his daughter, Pamela, and a German submarine officer, Commodore Grobke. In the television version, he also meets German General Armin von Roon. In the book he only meets Von Roon later at a Berlin dinner party. Von Roon becomes the viewpoint character for the German side of the war and witnesses the German government's worsening persecution of the Jews.Pug quickly recognizes—through his work as the attaché—that Nazi Germany is intent on invading Poland. Realizing that this would mean war with the Soviet Union, he concludes that the only way for Germany to safely invade is to agree not to go to war with the Soviets. Pug submits a report back to Washington—going over his supervisor's head—which predicts the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact before it is signed. When the pact is made public, Pug's report draws him to the attention of President Roosevelt, who asks the Navy Commander to be his unofficial eyes and ears in Europe. Although this new assignment again delays his desired sea command, it gives him the opportunity to travel to London, Rome, and Moscow where he meets Winston Churchill, Benito Mussolini, and Iosif Stalin in addition to Adolf Hitler, whom he met in Berlin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard-Boiled_Wonderland_and_the_End_of_the_World"title="Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World">
The story is split between parallel narratives. The odd-numbered chapters take place in "Hard-Boiled Wonderland", although that phrase is not used anywhere in the text, only in page headers. The narrator is a , a human data processor and encryption system who has been trained to use his subconscious as an encryption key. The Calcutecs work for the quasi-governmental System, as opposed to the criminal who work for the Factory and who are generally fallen Calcutecs. The relationship between the two groups is simple: the System protects data while the Semiotecs steal it, although it is suggested that one man might be behind both. The narrator completes an assignment for a mysterious scientist, who is exploring "sound removal". He works in a laboratory hidden within an anachronistic version of Tokyo's sewer system. The narrator eventually learns that he only has a day and a half before his consciousness leaves the world he knows and delves forever into the world that has been created in his subconscious mind. According to the scientist, to the outside world this change will seem instantaneous, but in the Calcutec's mind, his time within this world will seem almost infinite.The even-numbered chapters deal with a newcomer to "The End of the World", a strange, isolated Town, depicted in the frontispiece map as being surrounded by a perfect and impenetrable wall. The narrator is in the process of being accepted into the Town. His Shadow has been "cut off" and this Shadow lives in the "Shadow Grounds" where he is not expected to survive the winter. Residents of the Town are not allowed to have a shadow, and, it transpires, do not have a mind. The narrator is assigned quarters and a job as the current "Dreamreader": a process intended to remove the traces of mind from the Town. He goes to the Library every evening where, assisted by the Librarian, he learns to read dreams from the skulls of unicorns. These "beasts" passively accept their role, sent out of the Town at night to their enclosure, where many die of cold during the winter. It gradually becomes evident that this Town is the world inside the subconscious of Hard-Boiled Wonderland's narrator (the password he uses to control different aspects of his mind is even "end of the world"). The narrator grows to love the Librarian while he discovers the secrets of the Town, and although he plans to escape the Town with his Shadow, he later goes back on his word and allows his Shadow to escape the Town alone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind-Up_Bird_Chronicle"title="The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle">
The first part, "The Thieving Magpie", begins with the narrator, Toru Okada, a low-key and unemployed lawyer's assistant, being tasked by his wife, Kumiko, to find their missing cat. Kumiko suggests looking in the alley, a closed-off strip of land behind their house. After Toru stays there for a while with no luck, May Kasahara, a teenager who had been watching him camping out in the alley for some time, questions him. She invites him over to her house in order to sit on the patio and look over an abandoned house that she says is a popular hangout for stray cats. The abandoned house is revealed to possibly contain some strange omen, as it had brought bad luck to all of its prior tenants. It also contains an empty well, which Toru uses later to crawl into and think. Toru receives sexual phone calls from a woman who says she knows him. He also receives a phone call from Malta Kano who asks to meet with him.Kumiko calls Toru to explain that he should meet with the clairvoyant Malta Kano, who will help with finding the cat. Malta Kano had come recommended by Kumiko's brother, Noboru Wataya, which is also the name given to the cat. Kumiko's family believes in fortune-telling and had previously stipulated that the couple meet with an elderly man, Mr. Honda, for consultations on a regular basis, which they did for some time. (Instead of giving advice, he spends most of their sessions retelling the same story of his experience in the Kwantung Army in the lost tank battle with the Russians at Nomonhan on the Manchukuo-Russian border during World War II.) Toru meets the mysterious Malta Kano at a busy hotel restaurant, and she tasks her sister Creta Kano to further the work. Both sisters wear unusual clothing: Malta a large red hat and Creta unstylish 1960's clothing. Creta meets Toru at his home and begins to tell him the story of her past, involving being raped by Noboru, but abruptly leaves. Toru notices Kumiko is wearing perfume that has been gifted to her by some unknown person. The cat remains missing. Toru is contacted by Lieutenant Mamiya, who informs Toru that Mamiya's old war friend corporal Honda has died and that Mamiya wishes to visit Toru to drop off an item that Honda had bequeathed to him. The first section ends with Lieutenant Mamiya arriving and telling Toru a long tale about his eerie and mystical wartime experiences in Manchukuo in the Kwantung Army, where he sees a man skinned alive. Mamiya was also left to die in a deep well before being saved by corporal Honda. The gift from Honda is an empty box.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memories_of_My_Melancholy_Whores"title="Memories of My Melancholy Whores">
An old journalist, who has just celebrated his 90th birthday, seeks sex with a 14-year-old prostitute, who is selling her virginity to help her family. Instead of sex, he discovers love for the first time in his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maia_(novel)"title="Maia (novel)">
## Part 1: The Peasant.Maia, at 15, lives in the Beklan Empire's province of Tonilda with her mother, Morca, her three younger sisters, and her stepfather, Tharrin. Their small, poor farm is on the edge of Lake Serrelind, and Maia tends to shirk her chores by swimming in the lake. Tharrin secretly seduces Maia. When Morca discovers the affair, she sells Maia to a slave dealer Lalloc. Maia is almost raped by one of his employees, but is saved by Occula, a black slave girl. Maia and Occula become very good friends and even lovers. They are sent to the city of Bekla.Occula relates her past: her father, a jewel-merchant, brought her across the desert to Bekla. They were received by the noblewoman Fornis. She had Occula's father murdered and his emeralds incorporated into the Sacred Queen's crown. Occula was sold as a slave.Adams outlines Bekla's political situation in several chapters that bypass Maia. The "Leopard" faction led by the High Baron Durakkon, Fornis (now the Sacred Queen), the Lord General Kembri, and the High Counsellor Sencho came to power by ceding Suba, a western province, to the neighbouring kingdom of Terekenalt. They legalised slavery, and the capital's finances are now heavily based on taxation of it. Pockets of rebellion have sprung up around the empire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_Power_(novel)"title="Absolute Power (novel)">
An experienced burglar, Luther Whitney, breaks into a billionaire's house with the intent of robbing it. While there, he witnesses the President of the United States and the billionaire's wife having sex. However, their lovemaking turns violent and Secret Service agents burst in and kill the woman, which Whitney also sees. The reason Whitney was able to witness the murder was because he was behind a large one-way mirror that was a secret door into a large closet where the billionaire would sit and watch when his wife had sex with another man. Whitney escapes, but not before the Secret Service learns of his presence; they blame the wife's murder on Whitney. Whitney goes on the run from the President's agents while a detective tries to piece together the crime.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Original_of_Laura"title="The Original of Laura">
Based on discussions with unidentified scholars, "The Times" summarizes the plot as follows:Philip Wild, an enormously corpulent scholar, is married to a slender, flighty and wildly promiscuous woman called Flora. Flora initially appealed to Wild because of another woman that he’d been in love with, Aurora Lee. Death and what lies beyond it, a theme which fascinated Nabokov from a very young age, are central. The book opens at a party and there follow four continuous scenes, after which the novel becomes more fragmented. It is not clear how old Wild is, but he is preoccupied with his own death and sets about obliterating himself from the toes upwards through meditation, a sort of deliberate self-inflicted self-erasure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gon,_the_Little_Fox"title="Gon, the Little Fox">
Gon (Japanese: ) is a little fox. Looking for food he comes to a little village, where he repeatedly steals food and creates other mischief, constantly evading the angry villagers. One day Gon steals an eel in front of Hyoju (Japanese: ), which Hyoju wanted to give to his sick old mother. His mother subsequently dies. Gon realizes his mistake and tries to make it up by secretly giving Hyoju gifts he stole, although the villagers now accuse Hyoju of stealing and beat him up. Afterwards, Gon only gives mushrooms and nuts he collected in the forest. Hyoju is grateful for the gifts, although he does not know where they come from. One day, Hyoju sees the fox sneaking around, and shoots him to death out of anger about the death of his mother. Only afterwards does he realize to his horror that the fox he just shot gave him all the mushrooms and nuts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapped_(novel)"title="Kidnapped (novel)">
The main character and narrator is 17-year-old David Balfour. His parents have recently died, and he is out to make his way in the world. He is given a letter by the minister of Essendean, Mr Campbell, to be delivered to the House of Shaws in Cramond, where David's uncle, Ebenezer Balfour, lives.David arrives at the ominous House of Shaws and is confronted by his paranoid Uncle Ebenezer, who is armed with a blunderbuss. His uncle is also miserly, living on "parritch" and small ale, and the House of Shaws itself is partially unfinished and somewhat ruinous. David is allowed to stay and soon discovers evidence that his father may have been older than his uncle, thus making David the rightful heir to the estate. Ebenezer asks David to get a chest from the top of a tower in the house but refuses to provide a lamp or candle. David is forced to scale the stairs in the dark and realises that not only is the tower unfinished in some places, but the steps simply end abruptly and fall into an abyss. David concludes that his uncle intended for him to have an "accident", perhaps so as not to have to give over his nephew's inheritance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airport_(novel)"title="Airport (novel)">
The story takes place at Lincoln International, a fictional Chicago airport based very loosely on O'Hare International Airport.The action mainly centers on Mel Bakersfeld, the Airport General Manager. His devotion to his job is tearing apart his family and his marriage to his nagging wife Cindy, who resents his use of his job at the airport as a device to avoid going to various after-hours events she wants him to participate in, as she attempts to climb into the social circles of Chicago's elite. His problems in his marriage are further exacerbated by his romantically charged friendship with a lovely divorcee from Trans America Airlines, who is their passenger relations manager, Tanya Livingston.The story takes place mainly over the course of one evening and night, as a massive snowstorm wreaks havoc on airport operations. The storyline centers on Bakersfeld's struggles to keep the airport open during the storm. His chief problem is the unexpected closure of primary Runway 30 (runway 29 in the subsequent film), caused when a departing airliner for a Mexican airline (in the film, an arriving airplane of the same airline as the flight to Rome) turns off past the wrong side of a runway marker light, burying the plane's landing gear in the snow and blocking the runway. This becomes a major problem as another airplane, Trans America Flight Two, experiences a midair emergency, aborts the flight to Rome and returns to Lincoln. This requires runway 30 to be made operational---at any cost.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Ivan_Ilyich"title="The Death of Ivan Ilyich">
Ivan Ilyich lives a carefree life that is "most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible". Like everyone he knows, he spends his life climbing the social ladder. Enduring marriage to a woman whom he often finds too demanding, he works his way up to be a magistrate, thanks to the influence he has over a friend who has just been promoted, focusing more on his work as his family life becomes less tolerable.While hanging curtains for his new home one day, he falls awkwardly and hurts his side. Though he does not think much of it at first, he begins to suffer from a pain in his side. As his discomfort grows, his behavior towards his family becomes more irritable. His wife finally insists that he visit a physician. The physician cannot pinpoint the source of his malady, but soon it becomes clear that his condition is terminal. Confronted with his diagnosis, Ivan attempts every remedy he can to obtain a cure for his worsening situation, until the pain grows so intense that he is forced to cease working and spend the remainder of his days in bed. Here, he is brought face to face with his mortality and realizes that, although he knows of it, he does not truly grasp it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Fall_of_Night"title="Against the Fall of Night">
Diaspar is the last human city, hundreds of millions of years old. Alvin, born seventeen years ago, is the first child to be born in 7,000 years and lives among ancient immortals with unchanging lives. The Earth he knows lies in ruin, a vast desert, after a cataclysmic war with the Invaders millions of years ago confined mankind to the planet. He is fascinated by the world and its history, which his tutor Jeserac finds disturbing, the fear of doing anything that might trigger a return of the Invaders remains palpable. Bored, Alvin explores the empty sections of the city, and on one such trip, finds stairs leading to the desert outside. He begins to walk down them but is stopped by a large stone inscribed with the words "There is a better way. Give my greetings to the Keeper of the Records. - Alaine of Lyndar".Alvin takes the message to Rorden, the current Keeper of the Records, who has access to "all the knowledge of Humanity" in the city's databases. Rorden finds a message from Alaine but it simply states there are three ways to leave. Three years later, Rorden tells Alvin that he has deciphered Alaine's message, and takes him to a park in the center of Diaspar. There lies a monument to Yarlan Zey, designer of the park, which Rorden realizes was built to conceal some sort of transport. Rorden triggers a hidden elevator that takes them to an underground train station. A large map on the floor shows Diaspar as a brightly lit dot among many dimmed destinations, but one other dot remains lit, "Lys".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jitterbug_Perfume"title="Jitterbug Perfume">
A powerful and chiseled 8th-century king named Alobar narrowly escapes regicide at the hands of his own subjects, from a custom of killing the leader at the first sign of aging. After fleeing, no longer a king but only a man, he travels through Eurasia, on a newfound quest for the secret to longevity. Eventually he stumbles upon the stamping grounds of the pungent goat-god Pan, who is slowly losing his godly powers as the world turns toward Christianity. Pan encourages Alobar to continue East in search of the masters of immortality.Meanwhile, in the present day, Priscilla, a part-time waitress and amateur perfumer, is stalled in re-creating the fragrance from the last remaining drops of a three-hundred-year-old perfume bottle in her possession. She rejects the sexual advances of her co-worker Ricki. She begins an affair with an eccentric Irish philosopher, Wiggs Dannyboy, who runs a clinic for immortality research called the Last Laugh Foundation. She attempts to ignore the mysterious deliveries of beets she keeps receiving at her apartment.In New Orleans, Priscilla's stepmother, Madame Devalier, a once successful perfumer, is also working to recreate the same fragrance as Priscilla. Madame D’s protégé V'lu urges her to attempt to formulate a scent that will compete with their historic competition in Paris. The two have their hands on premium Jamaican jasmine supplied by a mysterious man with the helmet of swarming bees, Bingo Pajama, a symbolic figure in the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_(novel)"title="Kitchen (novel)">
From Mikage's love of kitchens to her job as a culinary teacher's assistant to the multiple scenes in which food is merely present, "Kitchen" is a short window into the life of a young Japanese woman and her discoveries about food and love amongst a background of tragedy.In "Kitchen", a young Japanese woman named Mikage Sakurai struggles to overcome the death of her grandmother. She gradually grows close to one of her grandmother's friends, Yuichi, from a flower shop and ends up staying with him and his transgender mother, Eriko. During her stay, she develops affection for Yuichi and Eriko, almost becoming part of their family. However, she moves out after six months as she finds a new job as a culinary teacher's assistant. When she finds that Eriko was murdered, she tries to support Yuichi through the difficult time, and realises that Yuichi is probably in love with her. Reluctant to face her own feelings for him, she goes away to Izu for a work assignment, while Yuichi stays in a guest-house. However, after going to a restaurant to eat katsudon, she realises she wants to bring it to Yuichi. She goes to Yuichi’s guest-house and sneaks inside his room in the middle of the night to bring him katsudon. There Mikage tells him she doesn’t want to lose him and proposes to build a new life together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Wish_(novel)"title="Death Wish (novel)">
Paul Benjamin is a forty-seven year old CPA who lives in Manhattan with his wife Esther in an apartment close to their daughter, Carol, and her husband Jack Tobey. Paul is a staunch liberal, volunteering his time to civic organizations, being generous and compassionate, and trying to rationalize the crime and misery he witnesses on a daily basis. He refuses to move out of the city, explaining that while the suburbs might be safer and cleaner, he can't leave New York after having lived there his entire life.One day, Paul gets a call at work from Jack telling him to come to the hospital. There, a patrolman explains that three junkies broke into Paul's apartment and assaulted Esther and Carol, beating the former to death before stealing Paul's television and fleeing. Carol is still alive, but in a vegetative state where she can no longer meaningfully interact with anyone. After his wife's funeral, Paul begins to undergo an emotional and personal transformation. He refuses to leave his apartment, has new locks put on the doors, and starts carrying a club made from a sock stuffed with quarters in his pocket. He also sheds his previous beliefs; everyone he sees is now either a potential criminal or unproductive, useless "cattle". Paul gradually aligns himself with the conservative viewpoints of his co-workers, unnerving them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diary_of_a_Young_Girl"title="The Diary of a Young Girl">
Anne had expressed the desire in the rewritten introduction of her diary for one person that she could call her truest friend, that is, a person to whom she could confide her deepest thoughts and feelings. She observed that she had many "friends" and equally many admirers, but (by her own definition) no true, dear friend with whom she could share her innermost thoughts. She originally thought her girl friend Jacque van Maarsen would be this person, but that was only partially successful. In an early diary passage, she remarks that she is not in love with Helmut "Hello" Silberberg, her suitor at that time, but considered that he might become a true friend. In hiding, she invested much time and effort into her budding romance with Peter van Pels, thinking he might evolve into that one, true friend, but that was eventually a disappointment to her in some ways, also, though she still cared for him very much. Ultimately, it was only to Kitty that she entrusted her innermost thoughts.In her diary, Anne wrote of her very close relationship with her father, lack of daughterly love for her mother (with whom she felt she had nothing in common), and admiration for her sister's intelligence and sweet nature. She did not like the others much initially, particularly Auguste van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer (the latter shared her room). She was at first unimpressed by the quiet Peter; she herself was something of a self-admitted chatterbox (a source of irritation to some of the others). As time went on, however, she and Peter became very close and spent a lot of time together. After a while Anne became a bit disappointed in Peter and on July 15, 1944, she wrote in her diary that Peter could never be a 'kindred spirit'.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gathering_Blue"title="Gathering Blue">
The main character, Kira, who has a deformed leg, is recently orphaned since her mother abruptly died from unknown sickness, and her father died years ago on a hunt with the Hunters by being killed by The Beasts. Kira must learn to survive in a society that normally leaves the weak or disabled exposed to die in the fields.Kira needs a reason for the council to keep her in the village and not to take her to the Field, which is certain death at the hands of The Beasts. A member of the council, Jamison, defends Kira during the trial, much to Kira's surprise, and convinces the Council that Kira has a gift for embroidery. She is found worthy of life in society at the trial and is given the task of repairing the Singer's robe.She is taught how to further solidify her talent from a much older woman, Annabella, who continues to teach Kira how to create dyes for different shades and hues for her thread work. To Kira's dismay, she learns that there is no ability to create the color blue for the threads that she will be using. Eventually, to Kira's surprise, Annabella tells her that with her own years and knowledge, she knows much of the society's history and even goes so far as to say that there really are no Beasts, contrary to the society's beliefs. Kira is unsure what to think of that revelation or what Annabella really means by it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messenger_(novel)"title="Messenger (novel)">
Matty, who was introduced in "Gathering Blue" as "Matt", now lives with Seer, who was originally named Christopher and is a blind man rescued by the people of the Village years earlier. Outside the safe boundaries of Village is the Forest, an unwelcoming realm that most of the Villagers fear because of its powerful harm. Despite the lack of dangerous beasts, The Forest is animated. People who trade at a gathering, Trade Mart, change from being compassionate and generous to angry and impatient. The Villagers change temperament and decide to close their borders and stop permitting the displaced and the unwanted of other communities to enter. Seer, in the wake of the sudden change, decides to send Matty to travel through the Forest to retrieve his daughter, Kira, who lives in a town several days away. The gift is a special ability that Matty possesses but hardly understands. It is a power of healing that causes wholeness from the inside out. Matty puts his hands to the ground and manages to restore the integrity of The Forest and people alike at the expense of his own life from the thickening forest. The Leader (Jonas) names Matty as "the Healer."At the end of the novel, Matty's soul drifts deep into the earth, which saves the villagers and Forest. The chaos turns to peace, as Matty's powers become a part of the perishing earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Counted"title="The Man Who Counted">
First published in Brazil in 1949, "O Homem que Calculava" is a series of tales in the style of the "Arabian Nights", but revolving around mathematical puzzles and curiosities. The book is ostensibly a translation by Brazilian scholar Breno de Alencar Bianco of an original manuscript by Malba Tahan, a thirteenth-century Persian scholar of the Islamic Empire – both equally fictitious.The first two chapters tell how Hanak Tade Maia was traveling from Samarra to Baghdad when he met Beremiz Samir, a young lad from Khoy with amazing mathematical abilities. The traveler then invited Beremiz to come with him to Baghdad, where a man with his abilities will certainly find profitable employment. The rest of the book tells of various incidents that befell the two men along the road and in Baghdad. In all those events, Beremiz Samir uses his abilities with calculation like a magic wand to amaze and entertain people, settle disputes, and find wise and just solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems.In the first incident along their trip (chapter III), Beremiz settles a heated inheritance dispute between three brothers. Their father had left them 35 camels, of which 1/2 (17.5 camels) should go to his eldest son, 1/3 (11.666... camels) to the middle one, and 1/9 (3.888... camels) to the youngest. To solve the brothers dilemma, Beremiz convinces Hanak to donate his only camel to the dead man's estate. Then, with 36 camels, Beremiz gives 18, 12, and 4 animals to the three heirs, making all of them profit with the new share. Of the remaining two camels, one is returned to Hanak, and the other is claimed by Beremiz as his reward.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronika_Decides_to_Die"title="Veronika Decides to Die">
Veronika is a young woman from Ljubljana, Slovenia, who appears to have a perfect life, but nevertheless decides to commit suicide by overdosing with sleeping pills. While she waits to die, she cancels the suicide letter she starts to her parents while suddenly provoked by a magazine article.The magazine article wittily asks "Where is Slovenia?", so she writes a letter to the press justifying her suicide, the idea is to make the press believe that she has killed herself because people don't even know where Slovenia is. Her plan fails and she wakes up from the coma in Villette, a mental hospital in Slovenia, where she is told she has only a few days to live due to heart condition caused by the overdose.Her presence there affects all of the mental hospital's patients, especially Zedka, who has clinical depression; Mari, who has panic attacks; and Eduard, who has schizophrenia, and with whom Veronika falls in love. During her internment in Villette she realizes that she has nothing to lose and can, therefore, do what she wants, say what she wants and be who she wants without having to worry about what others think of her; as a mental patient, she is unlikely to be criticized. Because of this new-found freedom, Veronika experiences all the things she never allowed herself to experience, including hatred and love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Watermelon_Sugar"title="In Watermelon Sugar">
Through the narrator's first-person account we learn the story of the people and the events of i. The central tension is created by Margaret, once a lover of the narrator, and in, a rebellious man who has left i to live near a forbidden area called the Forgotten Works, a huge trash heap where the remnants of a former civilization lie abandoned in great piles. Margaret, a collector of such "forgotten things", is friendly with in and his followers, who explore the place and make whiskey.in's separation from the group may have been related to the annihilation of the tigers, killed many years previously by the people. It is not clear to the reader whether the tigers were actual tigers, human beings or somehow anthropomorphic: they killed and ate people, including the narrator's parents, but they could also talk, sing, and play musical instruments, and were at least competent with arithmetic. Two tigers were killed on a bridge known later as the "abandoned" bridge. The last tiger was killed on a spot later developed into a trout farm.In the violent climax of the novel, in returns to the community along with a handful of followers, planning, he says, to show the residents what i really is. The residents know only that something is about to happen. After leading members of the community to the trout hatchery, innd his followers commit suicide, dismembering their faces with jackknives. Margaret appears oblivious to the threats, and unconcerned about the safety of her family and friends. Many suspect that Margaret knew and did not reveal details of in's real plan, thus "conspiring" with the evil men. She is semi-ostracized from i. At the beginning of the novel the narrator reveals that he ended their relationship because of these events.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Listerdale_Mystery"title="The Listerdale Mystery">
## The Listerdale Mystery.Mrs St. Vincent is a genteel lady living in reduced circumstances with her son and daughter, Rupert and Barbara. After her husband's financial speculations went wrong, he died, and they were forced to vacate the house, which had been in their family for generations. They now live in rooms in a boarding house (one which has seen better times). Therefore, they are unable to entertain people of similar class and upbringing. Rupert has just started a job in the city, with excellent prospects but, at this point in time, only a small income. Barbara enjoyed a trip to Egypt the previous winter with – and paid for by – a cousin. On this trip she met a young man called Jim Masterson, who is interested in courting her, but who would be put off if he saw their reduced circumstances.Looking through the "Morning Post", Mrs St. Vincent sees an advertisement for a house to let in Westminster, furnished, and with a nominal rent. Although she thinks she has little chance of being able to afford the house, she goes to see the house agents and then the house itself, and is instantly taken with it and pleasantly surprised at its very low rent. The agents offer her the house for a six-month rental. Barbara is delighted, but Rupert is suspicious – the house belonged to Lord Listerdale, who disappeared eighteen months previously and supposedly turned up in East Africa, supplying his cousin, Colonel Carfax, with power of attorney.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prometheus_Deception"title="The Prometheus Deception">
The story begins with the protagonist, under the alias the Technician, who is in deep cover to stop the Hezbollah terrorist organization from overthrowing the government of Tunisia. The operation appears to be going well, until the terrorists discover that the weapons the Technician has supplied them are defective. Before the ensuing battle is over, though, Abu (the leader of the terrorist agency) manages to stab him in the abdomen. He is helicoptered out, and we next find him entering the headquarters of the Directorate.We meet his boss, Ted Waller, a lover of puzzles. Waller fires Bryson from the Directorate, saying he's lost his touch; Bryson is now told to live as a professor of Byzantine history under the alias of Jonas Barett. After some initial drunkenness and a search for oblivion because his wife, Elena, has left him, he agrees to take the job. He lives under this alias for 5 years and becomes a popular professor, until the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence at the CIA, Harry Dunne, confronts him with a shocking revelation.We learn that the Directorate is really a Russian intelligence operation created by GRU masterminds: essentially a penetration operation on American soil. He learns that his boss is really Gennady Rosovsky, who assumed the name of Ted Waller after the English poet Edmund Waller. Dunne says that Bryson's entire life, including his parents' death, was engineered by the Directorate to lead him to be a part of the agency. Every mission Bryson has undertaken was designed to hurt American interests, which horrifies him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loamhedge"title="Loamhedge">
One day while Abruc the otter and his son Stugg are out foraging for food, they find two badgers; an old one, dead, and a giant one who is barely clinging to life. The otters take the giant back to their colony, where he is revived and reveals himself to be called Lonna Bowstripe. He is told that his attacker was most likely the pirate Raga Bol, whose ship has been lost, and his crew of sea-rats, who are moving inland. Lonna vows to hunt down and kill the entire crew. Armed with his bow and arrows, he sets out to exact his revenge.Meanwhile, at Redwall Abbey, there is a young hare maid named Martha Braebuck, who is totally incapable of walking, thus restricting her to a wheelchair. She is wheeled around by her very hyperactive brother Hortwill Braebuck (Horty) and his friends, Springald and Fenna. While napping in front of the tapestry of Martin the Warrior, Martin and Sister Amyl appear to Martha in a dream, and she is told that the secret to make her able to walk can be found within the ancient walls of Loamhedge Abbey and that two individuals are coming that can help her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_of_Iron"title="The Castle of Iron">
In the wake of the events of "The Mathematics of Magic", Harold Shea and his lady love Belphebe of Faerie have married and settled happily into a mundane earthly existence. But after Belphebe disappears at a picnic, Shea is questioned by the police on suspicion of foul play. The authorities also question his colleagues at the Garaden Institute, Walter Bayard and Vaclav Polacek, and then decide to take in the three of them for further interrogation. At that point the whole group, including police officer Pete Brodsky, are spirited away to another world, that of the Xanadu which is the subject of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan. After they have all languished there for a time, Shea and Polacek are pulled away from this world as well and into that represented by Ludovico Ariosto's epic, the "Orlando Furioso".The person responsible for their plight turns out to be Reed Chalmers, aspiring magician and former head of the Garaden Institute, who had accompanied Shea to Faerie in his previous adventure. He had been attempting to retrieve Shea alone, but had erroneously pulled in Belphebe first, and then misplaced his three colleagues and the police officer before at last getting things (nearly) right. Aside, that is, from getting Polacek too and leaving Bayard and Brodsky stranded in Xanadu. Moreover, as Ariosto's epic was a source text for Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene", Belphebe's mind has become confused, reverting in accord with the setting to that of her "Furioso" prototype, Belphagor. As a result, she now believes herself a native of the world into which they have been plunged, no longer recognizing Shea as her husband!
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_of_Avonlea"title="Anne of Avonlea">
Following "Anne of Green Gables" (1908), the book covers the second chapter in the life of Anne Shirley. This book follows Anne from the age of 16 to 18, during the two years that she teaches at Avonlea school. It includes many of the characters from "Anne of Green Gables", as well as new ones like Mr. Harrison, Miss Lavendar Lewis, Paul Irving, and the twins Dora and Davy.Anne is about to start her first term teaching at the Avonlea school, although she will still continue her studies at home with Gilbert, who is teaching at the nearby White Sands School. The book soon introduces Anne's new and problematic neighbour, Mr. Harrison, and his foul-mouthed parrot, as well as the twins, Davy and Dora. They are the children of Marilla's third cousin and she takes them in when their mother dies while their uncle is out of the country. Dora is a nice, well-behaved girl, somewhat boring in her perfect behaviour. Davy is Dora's exact opposite, much more of a handful and constantly getting into many scrapes. They are initially meant to stay only a short time, but the twins' uncle postpones his return to collect the twins and then eventually dies. Both Anne and Marilla are relieved (Marilla inwardly, of course) to know the twins will remain with them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_of_the_Island"title="Anne of the Island">
Anne Shirley is looking forward to new adventures as she packs her stuff, bids farewell to childhood, and prepares to enroll at Redmond College. Anne nestles her memories of rural Avonlea aside and experiences life on her own terms, full of surprises... such as a marriage proposal from the worst guy she's ever met, the sale of her first tale, and a tragedy that teaches her a harsh lesson. Anne tucks away her memories of idyllic Avonlea and discovers the life waiting for her in the bustling metropolis of Kingsport, with her old friend Prissy Grant waiting for her and her frivolous new friend Philippa Gordon by her side.In addition, Anne submits a short piece to numerous periodicals, but it is rejected, and she swears she will never write again. Worse news arrives when she returns to Avonlea and discovers that Ruby, her consumptive pal, is dying. While Ruby is sick, Anne stays with her and is persuaded to keep writing by Ruby's guidance.Anne leaves Green Gables and her work as a teacher in Avonlea to pursue her original dream (which she gave up in "Anne of Green Gables") of taking further education at Redmond College in Kingsport, Nova Scotia. Gilbert Blythe and Charlie Sloane enroll as well, as does Anne's friend from Queen's Academy, Priscilla Grant. During her first week of school, Anne befriends Philippa Gordon, a beautiful girl whose frivolous ways charm her. Philippa (Phil for short) also happens to be from Anne's birthplace in Bolingbroke, Nova Scotia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne's_House_of_Dreams"title="Anne's House of Dreams">
The book begins with Anne and Gilbert's wedding, which takes place in the Green Gables orchard. After the wedding, they move to their first home together, which Anne calls their "house of dreams". Gilbert finds them a small house on the seashore at Four Winds Point, an area near the village of Glen St. Mary, where he is to take over his uncle's medical practice.In Four Winds, Anne and Gilbert meet many interesting people, such as Captain Jim, a former sailor who is now the keeper of the lighthouse, and Miss Cornelia Bryant, an unmarried woman in her 40s who lives alone in an emerald-green house and deems the Blythes part of "the race that knows Joseph". Anne also meets her new neighbour, Leslie Moore, who lost her beloved brother and her father, and then was forced by her mother to marry the mean-spirited and unscrupulous Dick Moore at age 16. She felt free for a year or so after Dick disappeared on a sea voyage, but Captain Jim happened upon him in Cuba and brought him home, amnesiac, brain-damaged and generally helpless, and now dependent on Leslie like a "big baby". Leslie becomes friends with Anne, but is sometimes bitter towards her because she is so happy and free, when Leslie can never have what Anne does.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_of_Windy_Poplars"title="Anne of Windy Poplars">
The novel takes place over the three years between Anne's graduation from Redmond College and her marriage to Gilbert Blythe. While Gilbert is in medical school, Anne takes a job as the principal of Summerside High School, where she also teaches. She lives in a beautiful house called Windy Poplars with two elderly widows, Aunt Kate and Aunt Chatty, their housekeeper, Rebecca Dew, and their cat, Dusty Miller.During this time, Anne must win over the clannish and resentful Pringle family, as well as her icy colleague, Katherine Brooke. Along the way, she meets many of Summerside's more eccentric residents and becomes involved in helping many romances, which do not always turn out as planned. She also befriends the lonely Elizabeth Grayson, a motherless member of the Pringle family who lives next door to Windy Poplars. She frequently visits Marilla at Green Gables.At the end of the novel, Anne departs Summerside to return to Avonlea for her wedding to Gilbert. Many of the town's residents express their appreciation for how she has helped them over the years, including Katherine Brooke and Elizabeth Grayson.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_of_Ingleside"title="Anne of Ingleside">
Seven years after "Anne's House of Dreams", Anne visits Diana Wright and her daughter, Anne Cordelia, in Avonlea following the funeral of Gilbert's father. When she returns home to the old Morgan house, now named "Ingleside", she is greeted by her five children: James Matthew ('Jem'), the eldest, now aged seven; Walter Cuthbert, who is about six and often thought to be a bit of a 'sissy' because of his love for poetry; twins Anne ('Nan') and Diana ('Di'), who are five and look nothing alike, Nan with brown hair and hazel eyes, and Di with red hair and green eyes; and finally Shirley, two years old and Susan Baker's favourite, as she took care of him as an infant while Anne was very sick following his birth.The book includes the dreadful, seemingly eternal visit of Gilbert's disagreeable, oversensitive aunt Mary Maria Blythe, whose visit was only supposed to last two weeks but stretches on for months and who only leaves when Anne unintentionally offends her by arranging a surprise birthday party, much to the relief of the family.During the novel, which spans a period of about six years, Anne and Gilbert's youngest child is born and is named Bertha Marilla Blythe. She is also called Roly-Poly, or, generally, 'Rilla'. The novel includes a series of adventures which spotlight one of Anne's children at a time as they engage in the misunderstandings and mishaps of youth. In many of the adventures, the honest Ingleside children are taken in by children who tell lies in order to seem more interesting: Nan is deceived by a lying schoolchild into thinking that she was actually switched at birth; Walter is convinced by an older boy that his mother is dying; and Di gets two stories, in both of which she makes friends with schoolgirls who deceive her. In other stories, oldest child Jem deals with the loss of a pet, and youngest child Rilla somehow gets the idea that it is shameful to be seen carrying a cake, and goes to great lengths to avoid doing so. The Blythes' third son Shirley is present in the book, but oddly gets no solo "spotlight" story of his own, which is also the case in "Rainbow Valley", the next volume in the series.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Napoleon_of_Notting_Hill"title="The Napoleon of Notting Hill">
The dreary succession of randomly selected Kings of England is broken up when Auberon Quin, who cares for nothing but a good joke, is chosen. To amuse himself, he institutes elaborate costumes for the provosts of the districts of London. All are bored by the King's antics except for one earnest young man who takes the cry for regional pride seriously – Adam Wayne, the eponymous Napoleon of Notting Hill.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide_Child_trilogy"title="Tide Child trilogy">
## Prior to "The Bone Ships".The Hundred Isles and the Gaunt Isles have been at war for centuries. Because the Scattered Archipelago contains very little plant life and no wood for ships, their warships are made from the bones of sea dragons called arakeesians. The arakeesians are apparently extinct. No more ships can be built, leading to a war of attrition. White ships are used in traditional battles, while black ships are crewed by condemned prisoners expected to die in battle.The Hundred Isles has a matriarchal society in which citizens are valued for fertility and beauty. Women who survive childbirth and bear healthy children are elevated to Bern class. Healthy men may become Kept concubines by the Bern, but those with birth defects or other undesirable traits are relegated to lower castes. The firstborn healthy child from each family is sacrificed, and their soul is used to make a “corpse light” to light a white ship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_In_Beirut"title="Death In Beirut">
The novel talks about a reform effort that the emerging generations of university students in Lebanon, led by Hani al-Ra’i, a Christian, and Tamimah Nassour, a Shiite Muslim, are committed to. Both of them come from outside the city: Hani from the village of Mutla in the northern Matn – meaning from the Christian mountain – and Tamimah from the village of Mahdia in southern Lebanon – mostly Shiite – and both suffer from the change in the atmosphere of life due to the transition from the simplicity of the village to the hustle of the city while they are working for change, and reform. The novel also talks about "the factories of intolerance and the street demagoguery, and the traditional leaders and influential merchants" who infiltrated the ranks of the students, motivated by their partisan interests, their own lusts, and their ideologies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_God's_Drums"title="The Black God's Drums">
In the world of the novella, the Haitian Slave Revolt freed Haiti as well as many Caribbean nations, now called the Free Isles. The Haitians used a powerful weapon called the Black God's Drums to defeat the French fleet. Also known as Shango's Thunder, the Drums create powerful storms. Their collateral damage is so high that they have only been used once. The Confederate States of America have fought to a draw with the Union, and New Orleans is now neutral territory. Additionally, the Confederacy uses drapeto, a psychoactive gas, to control their enslaved population.Creeper is a street urchin born in New Orleans during a storm, giving her a special connection to Oya, the orisha of storms. When Creeper is thirteen, she overhears Confederate soldiers discussing a Haitian scientist and the Black God’s Drums. Creeper decides to sell this information to Captain Ann-Marie St. Augustine of the airship "Midnight Robber" in exchange for becoming a member of the crew. Ann-Marie has a connection to the goddess Oshun, Oya’s sister.Oya sends Creeper a vision of a skeleton. A man in a skeletal Mardi Gras mask kidnaps the Haitian scientist, Dr. Duvall, before Ann-Marie and Creeper reach him. Creeper and Ann-Marie meet with Sisters Agnes and Eunice, nuns who provide Creeper with information about the city. They learn that Duvall has been kidnapped by Johnny Boys, a splinter group of Confederate soldiers. The nuns give Ann-Marie and Creeper a flask of drapeto.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Days_of_Man"title="The Seven Days of Man">
The Seven Days of Man is a novel tells the story of the child Abd al-Aziz who is the most important element in the extension of the life cycle in which he moves within a village family, whose care giver belongs to a Sufi group inside the village. The critics call this type of novels "Genesis novel", which is a type of novel with special characteristics that are only present in famous novels like "Emotional education" for the French writer Flaubert, which is a story that talks about a hero who falls in love for the first time, moving from the world of childhood to the world of adolescence, which does not end except at the verge of manhood or the completion of youth. When Abdel Mohsen Badr wrote about Abdel Hakim Qassem’s novel in his book "The Novelist and the Land" in which he studied "The Seven Days of Man", he drew attention to the novelist's relationship with the village, and how a generation differed from another in making the village a fictional subject.This focus seems to have made the critics pay attention to this aspect, including Dr. Muhammad Badawi, who was preoccupied with the impact of socio-economic change on the novel. After that, studies proceeded in this direction, in which Muhammad Badawi continued to describe the novel that it revolves around a Sufi group of marginalized people in the village.This understanding prompted the novelists to ask: Does the novel really revolve around the village? And the novel really does revolve around the village, but through a specific perspective which is the perspective of the writer who writes about his childhood and upbringing and opens his awareness of the world within a village, and the formation of his religious awareness increases through the group that was led by his father.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tunnel_of_Love_(novel)"title="The Tunnel of Love (novel)">
The novel opens with a look ahead: the narrator feigns illness to avoid the case worker Mrs. Mash from the Crib Adoption Agency, who wants to question him about the Pooles suitability as parents. Knowing Augie as he does, he fakes losing his voice, causing his wife Audrey to summon Dr. Vancouver. The doctor can't find anything wrong and suggests stress. After he leaves, the narrator thinks back to when he and Audrey first met the Pooles at a cocktail party. (From this point the action proceeds in chronological order).At the cocktail party the narrator meets Isolde Poole. He is fascinated and likens her in his own mind to Joan Fontaine. Isolde tells him a story from her acting days. The narrator is bemused and incorporates her into his usual fantasy, centered around a cabin in the Maine woods called Moot Point, since the legal title to the imaginary location is in doubt. She is not the first woman he has mentally transported to this hideaway, which constitutes his sole act of infidelity to Audrey. In passing the narrator also mentions meeting Augie, who made no impression on him.Invited to dinner at the Poole's house, the narrator and Audrey are embarrassed to realize Augie is the "A. Poole" whose cartoons he has been rejecting in his capacity of Art Editor for "The Townsman". Isolde uses their discomfiture to announce she has listed them as references for adopting a child. As Augie shows the narrator his studio in the converted loft of a barn, he confesses that the property was purchased for them by Isolde's grandmother, on whose bounty they also survive. Told his cartoon ideas would fetch a high price for themselves without the drawings, Augie declines to be a "gagman".
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars_and_Bones"title="Stars and Bones">
The Benevolence, an alien intelligence that observes and catalogues life in the galaxy, noted with disapproval the way humans on Earth were slowly destroying their world. To save the planet, the Benevolence constructed a thousand sentient spaceships or arks, and filled them with the entire human population. Each ark is an artificial world with Earth-like environments, and their inhabitants are provided with all they need in terms of provisions, equipment and resources.Seventy-five years later, the arks are adrift amongst the stars. Scout ships fan out ahead of the fleet to check for any threats or opportunities. The scouts also investigate planetary systems they pass for any signs of life and potential colonisation. But a visit to a planet called Candidate-623 stirs an unseen alien force which destroys the scout ship and dismembers its crew. After locating the scout ship's home base, the force begins to infiltrate and infect the arks, one by one.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letting_Ana_Go"title="Letting Ana Go">
An anonymous author, using the name "Ana" as her pseudonym, shares her story of regressing into full-blown anorexia as her parents deal with family dysfunction. Ana's mother constantly expresses a negative self-perception of her own overweight body, while Ana's father has a girlfriend with a skinny waist and large breasts. While Ana's parents are well-off financially, their increasing arguments impact the direction of their spending habits, and they fail to express much love or affection towards Ana; Ana's father presents her with a car as a birthday present, but otherwise does nothing else symbolic for the occasion, leaving Ana feeling alone and unappreciated.Ana begins keeping a food diary with a friend, wealthy fellow student Jill, and they both try to lose as much weight as possible for their track team, which transmutes into an obsession with getting on a ballet troupe's list and exploring thinspiration websites. This intermingles with Ana's parents breaking up, and her mother constantly buying too-small clothing sizes while trying to fit into them despite her burgeoning obesity. The family's money begins to dwindle, and Ana takes her mother's self-deprecating statements to heart, such as "nothing tastes as good as thin feels", and continues losing weight until she is admitted to a local hospital due to physical health complications. Ana dies as her family cannot afford to send her to a special care facility for minor children suffering from eating disorders, while Jill, whose parents are rich, is able to recover in comfort.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_in_the_Sky_(2012_novel)"title="Lucy in the Sky (2012 novel)">
An unnamed teenage diarist recalls living with her middle-class parents and preppy brother in Santa Monica; the diarist's only friend is her brother, Cam, who receives more admiration and hopes to go to Berkeley University after high school. The two siblings, nevertheless, are close companions and share a bond by attending yoga classes. Yoga class is where the diarist meets Ross, another teenager who shares drugs with the diarist not long after her 16th birthday, during a party for said birthday. Ross remains her friend, but gets her hooked on drugs and later alcohol, leading the diarist to experiment with numerous illicit substances including marijuana, cocaine and other things. She claims to experience vivid high periods complimented with hallucinations, which only makes her even more fascinated with druggie culture and an edgy crowd of high school kids who all partake in substance abuse. The diarist stops attending school, and Cam, who has no interest in drugs, grapples with his loyalty to his sister versus the desire to report her behaviour to their parents. A 20-year-old man named Blake expresses sexual interest in the younger diarist, and snorts a line of cocaine with her. The diarist also hopes to emulate Lauren, one of the addicts in her social group. Lauren is beautiful, wealthy, wears designer clothes and has a snobby personality. The diarist's grades begin slipping, and Cam is horrified by her change in personality, as she becomes more mean-spirited and vicious. She finds that her newfound friends are more flawed than they appear to be, particularly when she is nearly raped while high and none of them are surprised by this. As time goes on, intermingled with periods of blackout drunkenness, the diarist experiments with meth and heroin. After a DUI is issued to her, she is forced to go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, which she hates, and to face her parents and Cam. She gets clean and sober after a length of self-reflection and more meetings, but then she relapses and dies, leaving only her diary behind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Search_For_Order"title="The Search For Order">
A socioeconomic, political, and cultural analysis of the United States during the period between the end of Reconstruction and the Progressive era, Wiebe's work describes American society and how the introduction of new scientific and technological advancements changed the ways in which citizens connected with the larger country outside of their local communities as well as how they perceived themselves in an increasingly national sense. These changes led to new ideologies that embraced utopian ideals and the belief that through impersonal, federal authority the ills society was experiencing from the rapid urban-industrialization of the Gilded Age could be tamed, quelled, or used to create a better future and society. Wiebe analyzes the appearance and life of the Populist party and its appeal to the rural parts of the country as well as the hopes for the party, which would be reproduced in the ensuing Progressive movement of the early twentieth century. The result would be a transition from "a society of island communities" held together by local autonomy to the development of "America's initial experiment in bureaucratic order," primarily driven by the emerging, new middle class that was created through the advancements.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silencing_The_Past"title="Silencing The Past">
"Silencing the Past" is a meditation on the characteristics of power and how it influences the creation and recording of histories. Spanning examples from The Alamo and Christopher Columbus to the position of the Haitian Revolution in the collective memory of Western society, Trouillot analyzes conventional historical narratives to understand why certain parts of history are remembered when others are not. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenglass_House"title="Greenglass House">
The main character is 12 year old Milo Pine. He is the adopted son of inn owners. He lives in Nagspeake, a city, which is known as "smugglers town". Milo lives in the "Greenglass House", which is a huge, dilapidated house. Actions take place during the Christmas holidays. The inn is usually empty at this time, so Milo hopes to get some rest. However, suddenly on the very first night, one after another, five guests are settled in the hotel. Milo believes that the appearance of each of them is not accidental, and their appearance is somehow connected with the Greenglass House itself. Milo is also puzzled by his finding - a fragment of a nautical chart. At one point, Milo meets Meddy, the cook's youngest daughter. The boy befriends Meddy, and together they start a detective role-playing game, the purpose of which is to find out where this map leads, as well as learn more about the guests. They found out that one of the guests enters the rooms of other guests. At first, nothing is lost, but then three guests were robbed at once, and later another guest suffered from the hands of a thief.Milo's investigation eventually leads him to the conclusion that one of the guests, named De Cary Vinge, is a customs agent. A little later, while telling stories, Vinge confirms this and takes hostage all the guests and Milo's parents. He wants to find the last treasure of Michael "Doc Holystone" Witcher, the famous and now deceased smuggler who formerly owned the house. Milo himself, along with Meddy, manage to escape to the attic, where they lock themselves. Milo suddenly realizes that Meddu is actually a ghost and her real name is Addie Witcher, and she is a daughter of Doc Holystone. Meddy confirms this and reveals that 34 years ago, a young De Cary Vinge was chasing her father, but the latter stumbled and fell off a cliff. Addie heard this from Vinge himself and leaned forward a little to better hear his speech, but also could not keep her balance and, ultimately, fell and died. Afterwards, Milo and Meddy finally found out where her father hid the last treasure. After a failed attempt to stealthily sneak in on Mr. Vinge, Milo makes a deal - he will show where the treasure is, and Vinge will release the hostages. Vinge agrees and Milo points to a crystal chandelier in the shape of a ship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitz_and_the_Fool_trilogy"title="Fitz and the Fool trilogy">
The trilogy follows Fitz in his fifties, and is told alternately from the point of view of Fitz and his daughter Bee Farseer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_of_the_Crusted_Snow"title="Moon of the Crusted Snow">
Evan Whitesky and his wife Nicole raise their two children on an Anishinaabe reservation in northern Canada. The reservation loses power and all connection to the outside world, though the town’s generators are able to power essential services through the winter. Two college students return from the south, bringing stories of societal collapse. A white man named Justin Scott arrives on the reservation, seeking shelter from the chaos. The chief and council allow him to stay, though they do not trust him.The council institutes food and electricity rationing. Two young women freeze to death after drinking with Scott. Another group of white people arrive at the reservation begging for food, and Scott shoots one of them. As conditions deteriorate, Scott’s influence increases and the band council’s diminishes. There is a riot at the food handout line, and Scott suggests that he has found an alternative food source. A body goes missing from the morgue; Evan suspects Scott of cannibalism. He and other community leaders confront Scott, who is cooking the body into a stew. Scott is shot and killed; Evan is shot, but he survives.In an epilogue two years later, the power has never returned and the community is returning to their ancestral way of life. They leave the reservation for a new settlement.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hope_More_Powerful_than_the_Sea"title="A Hope More Powerful than the Sea">
The book starts with Doaa Al Zamel's early life, growing up in Daraa, Syria. Al Zamel has a happy childhood, living in the extended family home, until the Syrian civil war breaks out. Her family flee to Egypt where she gets engaged to Bassam. In Egypt, Bassam and Al Zamel pay people smugglers to move them to Europe, boarding a boat with 500 other refugees. The boat capsizes in the Mediterranean Sea, with all but eleven of the passengers drowning. Bassam does not make it, Al Zamel is one of the eleven.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Region_in_Turmoil"title="A Region in Turmoil">
John H. Gill, reviewing this book for The Journal of Military History, defines the region of South Asia as encompassing a territory that extends from Afghanistan to Bangladesh. He says the author also includes Burma (present day Myanmar) to enable discussion of border concerns it has with India. Gill also says, the author further elaborates on other issues pertaining to this smaller region. Gill additionally observes that the author maintains an objective, but not sterile narration.The book overviews the numerous conflicts that have occurred in the region since the British withdrawal after World War II. In doing so, this overview outlines the interconnections between the forms of volatile conflicts; the roots of the tensions and disputes, including religion, ethnic tension, ideology, and historical experiences; while also connecting the results. This method allows the author to portray the diverse settings for violent behavior in this southern region. This approach illuminates the complex interrelations that are involved.Thus, this book is a comparative study of the parallels drawn from the variety of conflicts occurring since 1947. These conflicts share a common methodology including "armed confrontations, insurrections, communal riots, insurgencies, acts of terrorism, and wars." The nations involved are: India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Myanmar. Also, global influences impact this region in the form of "conflicts, insurgency, terror, and peace making." Such influences also result in diasporas but the effects of nationalism from abroad are not covered.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_a_Misfit"title="Diary of a Misfit">
The book weaves the story of journalist Casey Parks' queer identity and the life history of a man named Roy Hudgins that her grandmother knew growing up in Delhi, Louisiana in the 1950s. Roy was assigned female at birth yet lived as a man. Parks, who herself grew up poor in rural Louisiana, sets out to illuminate the history of Roy's life through interviews with those who knew him, while grappling with the rejection she faced after coming out as gay as an adolescent. Her relationship with her loving and devoutly Christian mother is also explored.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_Will_Come_Baby_(novel)"title="Down Will Come Baby (novel)">
In the novel, 12-year-old Robin Garr is overcome with guilt following the accidental death of her friend at summer camp. Her father Marcus relocates her to Boston, away from Robin's alcoholic mother, where he hopes she will be able to get proper psychiatric help. Their downstairs neighbor Dorothy Cotton quickly takes an interest in Robin, and Marcus is grateful when Dorothy agrees to look after his daughter while he is out of town. When he returns, he is shocked to discover that Dorothy has kidnapped Robin. Robin's parents discover that Dorothy's motives are not as pure as they initially seemed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyōheki"title="Hyōheki">
Uozu and Kosaka, friends and mountaineers since their student days, plan to climb Mount Hotaka during the New Year's holidays. A few days before the start of their venture, Uozu learns of Kosaka's affair with Minako Yashiro, the young wife of much older engineer Kyonosuke Yashiro. Minako tells Uozu that she regards the affair as finished, which Kosaka is unwilling to accept. Shortly after, during their mountain trip, Kosaka falls to his death due to the tearing of their nylon rope. Upon his return, Uozu is confronted with speculations that Kosaka either died of carelessness, deliberately damaged the rope to commit suicide, or that Uozu had cut the rope to save himself. The rope's manufacturer, a shareholder of Uozu's employer, instructs none other than Kyonosuke Yashiro, whose company supplied the nylon used in the rope, to conduct an experiment under similar, simulated conditions. As the results seem to prove the rope's stability, Uozu's assertions are put to question. Among the few people who are giving him his support are Minako Yashiro, with whom he has become infatuated, his superior Tokiwa, and Kosaka's younger sister Kaoru.When Kosaka's body is eventually found months later, and the piece of rope found with him seems to support Uozu's version of the accident, the newspapers have lost interest in the case. Minako confesses to Uozu that she shares his feelings for her, but he announces to sever all contact with her, finding the constellation impossible. During his next mountain trip, which Uozu goes about alone under hazardous conditions, he is killed by falling rocks, leading to speculations that he secretly wanted to commit suicide. Kaoru, whom Uozu had promised to marry, vows to take his and Kosaka's ice axes up Mount Hotaka and place them there in the friends' memory, as described in a poem by French mountaineer Roger Duplat which Kosaka had loved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Temple_of_the_Wild_Geese"title="The Temple of the Wild Geese">
Shortly before his death, painter Nangaku asks Jikai, head priest of the Kohōan Zen Buddhist temple in the outskirts of Kyoto, to take care of his mistress Satoko. The married Nangaku had once decorated the temple's interiors with his paintings of wild geese and, while working on these, shared a room with Satoko in the temple's facilities. Jikai does as he has been asked and takes Satoko in, immediately making her his mistress and starting a feverish affair with her, although he is 25 years her senior. Meanwhile, Jikai's novice Jinen, an intelligent but disfigured boy, lives an austere life under the head priest's tight reign, who himself leads a mundane life and regularly gets drunk when playing Go with priests from affiliated temples. When Jinen, exhausted from military training at school, oversleeps, Jikai even attaches a rope to Jinen's wrist, waking him up by pulling it. Satoko learns that Jinen had been abandoned by his natural parents as a child and, intending to comfort him, makes sexual advances towards him. One day, Heikichi Hisama, one of the temple's patrons, shows up and asks for an anniversary service in remembrance of his deceased father, at the same time declaring that the eldest of his brothers is lying on the deathbed. Jikai sends Jinen to hold the service instead and goes out, but does not return. When the eldest brother dies and Jikai remains missing, a priest of an affiliated temple holds the funeral service. Jikai's colleagues speculate if he went on an ascetic's journey, died somewhere due to his repeated drinking, or simply ran away from Satoko, but the case remains unsolved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bone_Houses"title="The Bone Houses">
Aderyn (nicknamed "Ryn") is a seventeen-year-old gravedigger who operates the family business with her siblings in the rural village of Colbren. The business was inherited after the deaths of their parents, and has been suffering as a result of reanimated corpses, known as "bone houses", coming to life and antagonizing people. The village's suspicion is heightened when Ellis, an apprentice mapmaker boy who is Ryn's age, appears in town. They both team up, along with a "bone goat" (reanimated pet goat), with the goal of finding out how to stop the bone houses. Despite Ryn's caustic and often morbid demeanor, she begins to fall in love with Ellis as she gets to know him, but she finds his enigmatic past troublesome. Ellis suffers from chronic pain from a badly healed injury. Ryn and Ellis arrive at a dreary homestead and discover that Ellis's deceased mother had resurrected Ellis via a magical "birth cauldron" when he was shot in the shoulder with an arrow and killed, which is why Ellis has no memory of his family. He embraces his dead mother, only to watch as her decaying body falls apart as the now-avenged spirit leaves it. Ellis forms a romantic relationship with Ryn and they return to Colbren, now that the bone houses are gone and Ryn's gravedigging business will no longer be under threat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_Dolls_of_Echizen"title="Bamboo Dolls of Echizen">
Kisuke Ujiie grows up in the small village of Takekami in Echizen Province as the only child of Kizaemon Ujiie, a widower who lost his wife when Kisuke was only three. From his father, Kisuke has inherited his small stature, but also a distinguished talent for the art of bamboo crafts. When Kizaemon dies, handing down his manufacture to his 21-year-old son, a woman in her thirties named Tamae shows up in the village and asks Kisuke to allow her to say a prayer at his father' grave. She explains that she is from the town of Aware and that his father had treated her kindly years ago. A few weeks later, Kisuke looks for Tamae in Aware, discovering that she is working as a prostitute in the town's illegal pleasure quarters and that his father had once been a regular client of hers. Kisuke takes Tamae as his wife on the grounds that their marriage is celibate, as he sees in Tamae foremost a surrogate mother.Motivated by a meticulously crafted bamboo doll which his father once had made for Tamae, Kisuke starts making his own dolls, which soon become sought after artifacts. When the head clerk of a Kyoto based artware store, Chūbei, arrives in Takekami for a business call, he recognises Tamae from her early years as a prostitute whom he often frequented. Sexually unsatisfied and out of nostalghia, Tamae gives in to his rough advances, but soon feels guilty for her deed. A few months later, Tamae's health deteriorates, and she learns that she is pregnant by Chūbei. Tamae travels to Kyoto under the pretence that she wants to collect the money Kisuke's customers owe him, but actually wants Chūbei to help her get an abortion. Chūbei seduces her again, only to claim later that he can't find anyone for the procedure, as abortions without the husband's consent are illegal. Tamae eventually loses her child by accident, and she returns to the unknowing Kisuke, helping him in his flourishing business as before. During the next Winter, she falls ill with tuberculosis and finally dies. It is the year 1925. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Excess_Male"title="An Excess Male">
"An Excess Male" is set in a near-future China ruled under authoritarian communism. There is an ongoing war between the People's Liberation Party and the Chinese Communist Party, and due to China's earlier One-Child Policy, female citizens are scarce and in high demand. They are often matched or auctioned off for a dowry, and polyamory has been sanctioned by the State. Wei-guo, A 44-year-old Chinese man who runs a training centre, is aided by his two fathers in the pursuit of a suitable female partner. They meet the enigmatic Wu Family for dinner, a peculiar group consisting of Hanh (a closeted gay man and the family patriarch), his brother Xiong-Xin (an autistic obese man who insists on being called "XX"), and May-Ling, the 22-year-old matriarch, who has an infant toddler named "BeiBei". Wei-guo immediately feels a connection with May-Ling, but he is frustrated when, after a planned date, May-Ling brings the disobedient, badly-behaved BeiBei with her, but he feigns support and May-Ling forms an even stronger liking to him. She harbours secrets of the two brothers who married her: Hanh is "Willfully Sterile" and will be reeducated and sterilized if discovered to be gay, as homosexuality and asexuality are viewed with disdain by the State; XX is a "Lost Boy" (neurodiverse) and will be branded mentally ill and institutionalized if this is discovered, despite his successful career and computer programming skills. May-Ling is unhappy in this relationship, finding scheduled sex with XX unpleasant and awkward, and disappointed that Hanh never wants to touch her. She also worries privately that BeiBei might suffer from ADHD and that the child might be sterilized as part of the State's eugenics standards. May-Ling grew up from infancy to be married off for a dowry to the benefit of her parents, who were both gambling addicts, something that she recalls painfully after playing a romantic virtual reality game with XX. Hanh has a tenuous relationship with professional marriage broker Hero, a paunchy, overtly effeminate man who, knowing Hahn's secret sexuality, pushes Wei-guo to marry into the Wu Family. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ink_Black_Heart"title="The Ink Black Heart">
After Strike and Robin visit the Ritz for Robin's 30th birthday, Strike attempts to kiss Robin; she evades the kiss. Feeling rebuffed, Strike starts a relationship with Madeline, an acquaintance of his ex-fiancée Charlotte, a relationship he keeps secret from Robin.Edie Ledwell, an animator who co-created the successful cartoon "The Ink Black Heart" on YouTube and which is now being adapted into a film on Netflix, visits the agency. She asks Robin to investigate the identity of Anomie, an online figure who co-created "Drek's Game", an online game based on the cartoon, and started harassing Edie after she criticised the game. Robin refers Edie to another agency with more cybercrime experience. Within the game, two moderators appear to have a dossier of proof that Anomie and Edie are the same. They share this with Josh Blay, the other co-creator of "The Ink Black Heart" and Edie's ex-boyfriend. Soon afterwards, Edie and Josh are tasered and stabbed while meeting in Highgate Cemetery, the cartoon's setting. Edie dies while Josh is paralysed.The agency is hired to investigate Anomie's identity by a film producer seeking to adapt "The Ink Black Heart". They investigate various individuals associated with the cartoon and the North Grove Art Collective. Much of the investigation takes place online with the detectives investigating Anomie's abuse and another figure, The Pen of Justice, who criticised the cartoon for being racist, ableist and transphobic. They also investigate "Drek's Game", where Anomie openly confesses to the murder, something treated as a joke by the other moderators, including its co-creator Morehouse. Two moderators appear to be associated with the Halvening, the far-right group that compiled the dossier with fake proof and the police suspect committed the murder. Robin accesses the game and becomes an active player. Robin and Strike attempt to eliminate suspects by carrying out surveillance and examining who is otherwise engaged while Anomie is active in the game. They also receive phone calls telling them to exhume Edie's grave and open letters buried with her. In the game, Paperwhite, another moderator, and Morehouse appear to have a relationship, with Paperwhite sending a racy picture to Morehouse and other moderators by accident.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_To_Dive"title="Waiting To Dive">
Carly, a nine-year-old British Columbian girl, adores swimming and diving, spends summers with her family at a cabin on the Gulf Islands, and she's also a member of Dolphins Diving Club, a girls' club at the local town swimming pool. One day, Carly is given permission to invite her best friend, a girl named Montana, to stay at the family cabin. Carly, who is often at odds with her bickering siblings, feels a strong bond with Montana that the girls both share over swimming. They play on the beach together, and they share discussions over things such as boys, friendships, school and family. During a dive from a high rock, Montana hits her head on an unexpected log and is submerged in water. When Montana breaks her spine and faces a life of rehabilitation and potential paralysis, Carly is angry and confused and struggles with her feelings of guilt. The book also explores her relationship with her step-father and two older step-siblings, in juxtaposition with the earlier death of her biological father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unbalancing"title="The Unbalancing">
The novel is set in Lemberg's secondary world "Birdverse", about a thousand years prior to the events of "The Four Profound Weaves", on the archipelago Gelle-Geu, and alternates its viewpoint between the two primary characters, Erígra Lilún and Ranra Kekeri. At the start of the novel, the current Starkeeper of the Star of the Tides, a star made up of magical deepnames that resides beneath the waves off the shore of Gelle-Geu, is dying. The Star, also known as the Unquiet Sleeper and the Sputtering Star, has always been fretful and possibly the cause of earthquakes on the islands. Erígra Lilún is autistic and an ichidi, or non-binary person, who has yet to discover their ichidi variation, which is explored throughout the novel. They write poetry, tend an old quince grove, and prefer a quiet life, but the ghost of their ancestor, Semberí, the first Starkeeper of the Star of the Tides, pressures them to connect to the Star and become the next Starkeeper. Semberí tells them the story of the Birdcoming, when the goddess Bird came from beyond the sky and brought the twelve Stars to the world, dancing in the sky above the great Burri desert until the Stars fell from her tail to the first Starkeepers waiting below. Lilún does not wish to become Starkeeper and resists Semberí's pressure so that when the current Starkeeper passes, another is chosen as the new Keeper, Ranra Kekeri. Lilún attends the ascension party for the new Starkeeper and meets Ranra for the first time, a woman with a much bolder personality than Lilún, and who captivates them from their first meeting. Lilún and Ranra discuss the increasingly unstable nature of the Star and the growing hazard the situation presents to the islands, but have differing opinions of how it should be handled. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Babysitters_Coven"title="The Babysitters Coven">
Esme Pearl is a nonconformist and suburban Kansas teenager who heads a babysitting club to avoid the prospect of obtaining a paid job, which she finds "gross", and also to earn money to pay back a variety of people for various incidents, including the destruction of a tree. Esme's mother, who lives in a long-term care facility, is mentally ill. This leads to concern that Esme herself might suffer from the same issues when strange occurrences happen around her, such as a drink spilling on a "chauvinist" in the school cafeteria and a bully being harmed in gym class. Esme is surprised when Cassandra Heaven, who is physically attractive, a rebel and a grungy dresser, shows interest in joining the club. While Esme's best friend is Janis, an awkward girl who owns a pit bull, Cassandra is much more sure of herself and confident, and Esme soon discovers that the newcomer is involved with aspects of the supernatural, having received a note telling her to seek out the babysitting club for help. Brian, the school's football coach, reveals to the girls that a dark, demonic force is threatening innocent people in Esme's town, and with white magic, the girls hope to stop it before anybody is harmed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_Biblical_Womanhood"title="The Making of Biblical Womanhood">
The central argument of the book is that "Patriarchy may be a part of Christian history, but that doesn’t make it Christian."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garlic_and_Sapphires"title="Garlic and Sapphires">
"Garlic and Sapphires" recounts Reichl's 1993 move from the "Los Angeles Times", where she was a restaurant critic and editor, to become head restaurant critic of "The New York Times". Seated next to a waitress on the flight to New York, Reichl learns that the city's restaurants have been on the lookout for her in her newly powerful role and she finds that she receives special treatment as a consequence. In order to visit restaurants without being recognized, she enlists Claudia, an acting teacher and friend of Reichl's late mother, to help her devise disguises. Reichl takes on a series of different personas, which allows her different perspectives on specific restaurants as well as her own personality as she steps into someone else's shoes. "Times" Living section secretary Carol Shaw often accompanies her on her outings and the book also follows the development of their friendship. They visit high-end restaurants like Rocco DiSpirito's Union Pacific as well as less recognized cuisine, exploring the Chinese food of Flushing, Queens. These experiences are interspersed with recipes and reprints of Reichl's reviews for the "Times". The book concludes with Shaw's death and Reichl's departure from the "Times" to become the editor-in-chief role at "Gourmet" magazine in 1999, ending her days as a restaurant critic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Six_Dead_Men"title="The Six Dead Men">
Six men agree a pact to meet in five years time and share whatever fortunes they have made. As the date approaches, however, they begin to be killed off.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruly_Equality"title="Unruly Equality">
"Unruly Equality" focuses on anarchist activity in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, the period between anarchism's classical era (1880s–1920s) and the contemporary resurgence of anarchist currents. While American anarchism is usually portrayed as having little continuity from the beginning to the end of the 20th century, Cornell argues that anarchism in the midcentury, postwar period both bridged and influenced what would become contemporary anarchism as activism shifted from syndicalism and class struggle to critical analysis, affinity group action, and gradualism. This midcentury anarchism covers bohemian anarchism in the 1940s, which focused on personal liberty and social liberation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Death's_Blue-Eyed_Girls"title="Mister Death's Blue-Eyed Girls">
Nora Cunningham is a rather homely, taller-than-average 16-year-old girl in the fictional suburb of Elmgrove, Maryland in the 1950s. Her main concerns surround friendship, her plans post-high school, and her hope of finding a boyfriend taller than she is who will love her for her personality. All of this changes when Nora and her friends are on an outing (a party in the park), and discover that the corpses of two girls not much younger than they are have been found shot and killed by an unknown murderer. The neighbours and police are quick to blame Buddy Novak, the local bad boy and teen rebel, although Nora has a gut feeling that Buddy is innocent. This is conveyed to readers with brief snippets of the point-of-view of the murderer himself, who is an unnamed pervert and psychopath never revealed as guilty to the characters. Unidentified, he remains a background force in the book, while Nora finds herself slipping away from her friends, who gradually grow bored of the murders and can't understand why Nora is so fixated on them. Nora questions her Catholic faith and cannot fathom why God would let such a murder happen. She has vivid fantasies and dreams in which she escapes into a frozen bubble of 1950s nostalgia, complete with neon, diners and soda fountains. Here, she can still see the murdered girls. Nora also begins falling in love with Buddy, who plans to leave Elmgrove. The book ends ambiguously, with the killer able to remain unidentified but also not at large, and Nora growing to accept that she alone cannot fix the murders, or be responsible for them herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Continents"title="Stolen Continents">
"Stolen Continents" covers the period 1492 to 1990 and documents five examples of the colonial theft of land from Maya, Inca, Aztec, Cherokee, and Iroquois people. Wright breaks each example into three stages: initial contact, violent struggles, and modern resistance. The book uses contemporary accounts from native peoples.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grizzly_(novel)"title="The Grizzly (novel)">
David, a teenage boy, lives with his mother, Jeanne, but his father, Mark, is estranged. David often has nightmares about Mark, who was always harsh to him when he was younger; Jeanne threw Mark out after years of him pushing David into frightening activities, although now that David is older, Mark wants to get to know his son better. David dreads this but grudgingly accepts the offer of a camping trip in the wilderness with Mark. Mark is shown to be a very tough, aloof, and conservative man who thinks little of David's intellect or resilience and would prefer his son to be tough, something that leads to tension straight away. While outside, Mark is mauled and injured by a female grizzly bear, and he shoots the bear after David refuses to. Mark is surprised when David expresses knowledge of things such as treating his wounds, and the father and son gradually become closer. They also observe how much like their own family, the other bears in the woods, are and realize how childish their fighting is. David is nearly drowned while fishing for food, and Mark is frightened by this. Finally, it is revealed that Mark lost a brother to a drowning accident in his childhood, which has haunted him ever since and made him feel weak for not being able to save the deceased sibling. He and David can reach a telephone and call Jeanne, promising that one day they will take her to the wilderness with them so she can see its splendor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danilov,_the_Violist"title="Danilov, the Violist">
Beyond the human world, there exists a demon world, commonly referred to in the novel as "The Nine Circles" (although they have very little in common with Dante's Nine Circles of Hell). The circles are organized further into chanceries. The demons have access to knowledge about the entire universe, which they study in great detail, and to magic, and loves to both imitate the human world(which they call "That World") and to cause troubles for the humans.In 1970s Moscow, Vladimir Alekseyevich Danilov is a violist for a prestigious orchestra, living in Ostankino. On the outside, he seems to be an ordinary, mild-mannered man. Only one person, the Unknown Narrator, knows that Danilov is secretly a half-demon with fantastic abilities such as flight, shapeshifting, and a supernatural sensitivity to the feelings and desires of humans. Danilov was forced out of Hell for not desiring to work as a proper demon(he was too kind to hate humanity and thus purposely sabotaged his work). He was given instructions to cause mischief and misfortune for humans on Earth, and to never speak to his demon father, who was arrested for committing crimes such as being a Voltairian. However, he prefers instead to help people and devote himself to the viola.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_Little_Girl_in_the_World_(novel)"title="The Best Little Girl in the World (novel)">
Francesca Dietrich is a middle-class American teenager, aspiring ballerina, and a girl who suffers from anorexia nervosa. She obsesses over a fantasy variant of herself, insisting on being called by the name "Kessa" and worrying over the demands of her controlling, strict ballet teacher. Fixated with weight loss and treated like a young child by her family, Kessa retreats further and further into her mental illness, leading her parents to finally recognize it months later, after which they send her to a male therapist. Kessa develops romantic feelings for the therapist, which would cross ethical boundaries if acted upon, and she also deals with the death of a friend in the hospital. As she gradually recovers, various ideas for what caused the eating disorder are explored at length: Kessa detests her emerging womanhood and puberty as it affects her proportions, including her breasts, waist and buttocks. She feels a strong sense of rivalry with her siblings and her neurotic mother and father. She also surrounds herself with controlling people, such as her parents and teacher, with her eating disorder being the one outlet where she gets to make the rules. Kessa goes by "Francesca" again and begins eating small portions of food, hoping to be able to overcome her illness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Anthropocene"title="Capital in the Anthropocene">
Saito argues that while sustainable growth has become a central organizing principle in global responses to climate change, the expectation of perpetual growth has only exacerbated the climate crisis. He is particularly critical of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), describing them as "the new opium of the masses" in regards to what he believes is the impossibility for the goals to be achieved under a capitalist system. Instead, Saito advocates for degrowth, which he conceives as the slowing of economic activity through the democratic reform of labor and production. In practical terms, Saito's conception of degrowth involves the end of mass production and mass consumption, decarbonization through shorter working hours, and the prioritization of essential labor such as caregiving. The author argues that capitalism creates artificial scarcity by pursuing profit based on commodity value rather than the usefulness of what is produced, citing the privatization of the commons for purposes of capital accumulation as an example. Saito argues that by returning the commons to a system of social ownership, it is possible to restore abundance and focus on economic activities that are essential for human life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Architecture"title="The Final Architecture">
## Premise.The Architects are moon-sized creatures who destroy inhabited planets, including Earth. They will not attack planets with ruins from the mysterious Originator civilization. Only the Essiel, a species of aliens, know how to move Originator artifacts without destroying this protective effect. Many human colony planets vote to join the Essiel Hegemony in exchange for protection against the Architects.Humans invent Intermediaries, a modified form of human that can fight Architects. Intermediary Idris Telemmier helps kill an Architect at Berlenhof, turning the tide of the conflict decades after the destruction of Earth. Later, he and other Intermediaries make contact with an Architect, which seems to notice humanity for the first time. After this, all of the Architects mysteriously disappear.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crow_Garden"title="The Crow Garden">
"The Crow Garden" is narrated by Nathaniel Kerner, a young alienist in Victorian England. In 1856 he travels from London to Yorkshire to take up a position as a "mad doctor" at a lunatic asylum at Crakethorne Manor. The facility is run by Doctor Algernon Chettle, a phrenologist who believes that the shape of a person's skull determines their mental stability. Kerner, on the other hand, subscribes to a new approach of talking and listening to the mentally disturbed.Kerner is assigned Mrs Harleston, a patient from London committed to the asylum by her husband. He demands that she be cured of her hysteria and delusions so she can be returned to him as his faithful wife. Mrs Harleston is beautiful and demure, and Kerner is immediately drawn to her. He tries talking to her but cannot get her to open up. He calls on the help of a mesmerist in the hope of breaking through her defences, but all it does is to awaken dormant abilities in her. She discovers that she herself can mesmerise people, and changes from being quiet and reserved to dominant and manipulative. By now Kerner in infatuated with her and quickly falls under her spell. Using her new-found abilities, Mrs Harleston escapes Crakethorne.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_a_Red_Station,_Drifting"title="On a Red Station, Drifting">
Lê Thi Linh is a magistrate of the Dai Viet Empire who is forced to flee her planet after criticizing the Emperor’s wartime policies. At the same time, rebel groups seize control of her planet and kill most of her subordinates. Linh seeks refuge with her distant relatives on Prosper Station. Prosper is controlled by an artificial intelligence called the Honoured Ancestress. Lê Thi Quyen, Linh’s cousin by marriage, manages the day-to-day operations of Prosper while her husband is away at war. Quyen and Linh immediately fall into conflict.Quyen’s brother-in-law Huu Hieu sells his mem-implants, which are copies of their ancestors’ consciousnesses. Meanwhile, the Honoured Ancestress experiences increasingly severe technical problems. Hieu and Linh become close. Hieu plans use the money from the sale of the implants to leave Prosper and marry his lover on a different station. Linh is upset knowing that she will never be able to leave. A visiting cousin, Lady Oahn, provides schematics for the repair of the Honoured Ancestress. In an effort to hurt Quyen, Linh writes an unflattering poem at a banquet honoring Oanh. In doing so, she reveals that Hieu is trying to leave Prosper. Hieu attempts suicide out of shame, but Linh rescues him. Quyen is able to repair the Honoured Ancestress, restoring her functionality at the expense of erasing many of her memories.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enemy_Within_(Mkhabela_book)"title="The Enemy Within (Mkhabela book)">
The book starts with an introductory account of how the ANC dealt with one of the first serious incidents of corruption the party had to deal with following its assent to power; the expulsion of Bantu Holomisa from the ANC after requesting that the former Transkei Prime Minister and ANC Minister for Public Enterprises, Stella Sigcau be investigated for corruption.Mkhabela focuses on the ANC's "new cadre" policy wherein loyal party members were deployed in important positions in government and state owned enterprises; what the long-term impact of this policy was and how it greatly contributed to the growth of corruption within the party. Mkhabela does this by detailing a number of well publicised ANC corruption scandals that occurred during the presidencies of Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma, and Cyril Ramaphosa. These scandals include the Tony Yengeni controversy, the disbandment of the Scorpions, the Gupta family, Jackie Selebi, and corruption within the Zuma administration generally.In the book Mkhabela argues that by tolerating corrupt practices and shielding ANC members accused of corruption from prosecution or accountability the party allowed corruption to become entrenched in the party and, by extension, in the South African government. Mkhabela also points out how, paradoxically, the presidency of Jacob Zuma was the most vocal about fighting corruption within the ANC even though it was also regarded as the most corrupt. The book ends with asking if South Africa will be able to deal with corruption before it destroys the country.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapvona"title="Lapvona">
In Lapvona, a corrupt medieval fiefdom, deformed 13 year-old Marek lives with his cruel shepherd father Jude and was nursed from birth by the village witch. When Marek commits a crime, the cruel lord Villiam demands that Jude give Marek to him as reparations, and Marek goes to live in his castle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ever_After_(novel)"title="Ever After (novel)">
Academic Bill Unwin sits in his college room, recovering from his suicide attempt and thinking back over his life. Starting with his childhood in Paris where his aloof father successfully committed suicide, and his mother had a relationship with an American, Sam who made a fortune in plastics and then became his stepfather. The narration them moves to 1950's Soho where Bill marries Ruth, an actress who later dies of lung cancer. Throughout his life Bill never reconciled himself to his successful stepfather, who attempts and fails to build bridges with Bill. The other strand is the private notebooks of a Victorian predecessor Matthew Pearce which are entrusted to Bill. They notebooks show the breakdown of his relationship with his wife and father-in-law over his unshakeable belief in Darwinism, and Bill tries to square them with his own identity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobbin_Up"title="Bobbin Up">
A group of women sweat in the Jumbuck Woollen Mills in Sydney for breadline wages. The whistle blows grime is washed from faces, hair combed, lipstick applied and the workers emerge, women again, leaving the factory behind them, into the evening streets, flashing neon lights and the journey home to families and lovers. Among them are Shirl, nineteen and four months pregnant; Dawnie, beautiful and fiercely chaste; Patty, singing in the dance halls; and Nell, an active Communist Party member. These women have their own dreams: but a common spirit binds them, and with Nell as their leader they come together for the fight which lies ahead. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unclay"title="Unclay">
Death arrives to the obscure village of Little Dodder, Dorsetshire carrying a parchment of orders he must deliver with the names of two local mortals and the word "unclay" on it. After losing this important document, he's obliged to stay in Little Dodder until he finds it. Mr. John Death, as the villagers call him, grows interested in human life and decides to take a vacation from his reaping. All the old sins such as lust, avarice, and greed, as well as loving kindness abound in the village.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobody_Move_(novel)"title="Nobody Move (novel)">
"Nobody Move" is told from a third-person limited omniscient point-of-view and presented in four parts.The story unfolds in rural and urban settings north of Sacramento, California.Firearms abound in the novel, among them, "a huge Colt revolver", "a Winchester Pistol-grip shotgun loaded with "00 Buck", and a ".356 Magnum" handgun. Automobiles, including late model Cadillac Broughams, a Jaguar, a 1951 Coupe de Ville and a Ford pickup also appear as plot devices.Jimmy Luntz (referred to as Luntz by the narrator, and as Jimmy in the dialogue exchanges) is a gambling addict and an inept petty criminal. Luntz is prone to unexpected "lucky feelings", premonitions that routinely fail to materialize. When the story opens "in media res", he is employed as a singer in a no-talent Barbershop chorus.In debt for a few thousand dollars to the gang leader Juarez, Luntz is targeted for assassination by henchman Ernest "Gambol" Gambolini. Luntz foils the hit-man, shooting and wounding him in the leg. Gambol and Juarez, both sociopaths, swear revenge. Luntz, now on the run, has a chance encounter with the strikingly beautiful Anita Desilvera, a high-functioning alcoholic and wife to the local county prosecutor, Henry "Hank" Desilvera. Hank has conspired with corrupt Judge Tanneau to embezzle $2.3 million. They have framed-up Anita for the crime. Facing six years in prison, she is determined to escape punishment and claim the money for herself. The physically unattractive Luntz and sexually piquant Anita form an uneasy alliance. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_in_the_Lonesome_October"title="Night in the Lonesome October">
Ed Logan is a 20-year-old student at Wilmington University. His girlfriend has dumped him, and feeling dejected he goes on a late-night walk to a doughnut shop. As the long October night drags on, he finds his odyssey disturbed by numerous odd encounters with street violence, sexual predation, and homelessness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammira_Raso"title="Hammira Raso">
The poet describes his patron Chandrabhan as a descendant of Prithviraj Chauhan, and as the ruler of a prosperous kingdom. The poem begins with a description of the Agnikula legend, according to which the four major Rajput clans including the Chauhans, emerged from a Vedic ritual fire pit. After a Kshatriya king kills Parashurama's father, Parashurama slaughters the Kshatriyas, leaving no one to protect the sages and priests from demons (asuras / rakshasas). Seven sages - Gautama, Lomaharśana, Bhṛgu, Atteriya, Bharadvāj, Garg and Vasiṣṭha - perform a fire ritual while chanting Sama Veda hymns. Then the four Rajput clans unexpectedly emerge from the fire pit.Chauhan, the progenitor of Hamir's clan, carries four weapons (sword, dagger, knife and bow) in his four arms. Shakti, the lion-riding goddess carries ten weapons in her ten arms, blesses him. Brahma instructs Chauhan to overcome all dangers for protecting his religion. The hero fights demons and seeks blessings of the goddess, who becomes his clan goddess ("kuladevi") and is named "Ashapuri".Many generations after Chauhan, a ruler named "Raja" (or "Rao") Jeyat Chohan is born in the village of Barbagao. During a hunting expedition in a forest, he pursues a white boar, and encounters the sage ("rishi") Padam. The sage blesses him, and asks him to establish a hill fort and worship Shiva there. The sage describes the particular hill area as full of tantric power. After returning to his court, the king starts building a fortified town, which is named Ranthambor. The Bhils, who inhabit the mountain, acknowledge his power and recognize him as their sovereign. During the construction of the fort, the wall of the portico keep falling even after being raised several times. The king then decides to sacrifice himself, and asks the foundation to be built on his body. Two of his loyal Bhil associates - Ravana and Basava - declare that the fort actually belonged to the Bhils, and the king is merely its nominal owner. They offer to be sacrificed in place of the king, asking the king to take care of Ravana's son Bhoj. Accordingly, the two Bhils are beheaded and their heads are used as foundation stones. The wall built on this foundation does not collapse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kōkyū_Shōsetsu"title="Kōkyū Shōsetsu">
Set in a fictional country reminiscent of early 17th century China, the novel depicts the bizarre fate of Ginga, a young girl who volunteers to be a candidate for the new emperor's queen.In the first year of the Kai calendar, candidates for the position of queen were gathered from all over the country to the inner palace of the new emperor of the Sokan Empire, who succeeded his predecessor who had died during sex.Ginga, a 14-year-old country girl from Oda Prefecture, thought the inner palace would be a fun place to study and have three meals and a nap, so she volunteered to be a candidate for queen. She was successful in her bid to enter the palace.Fearless Ginga achieved excellent grades in eccentric lectures at the women's university, and succeeded in obtaining the throne of the lawful wife.However, at the most inopportune moment, a rebel uprising broke out, and Ginga was forced to organize an inner palace unit to fight the rebels.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokkō_(novel)"title="Bokkō (novel)">
The story takes place in China during the Warring States period. Liang is a small province between the great powers Zhao and Yan, and was about to be invaded by Zhao. The King of Liang asks the Mohists for help as a last resort. The Mohists were a unique group of thinkers who preached "non-war and love" and went wherever to help defend castles and towns if required.The people of Liang had hoped that the Mohists would send a group of excellent military strategists to defeat Zhao, but only one strategist, named Kakuri, appeared. The Mohist organization founded by Mozi was then under the third generation of leadership, and corrupt. Under such circumstances, Kakuri, loyal to the Mohists' ideology, defied the leader's orders and rode alone to defend the walled city, Liangcheng. None of the lord's clans, chief vassals, or the peasants accommodated in the citadel have any experience in warfare, nor does he have the cooperation of the Mohists. Against this backdrop, Kakuri leads thousands of villagers with amazing strategy and skill to defeat the large army of Zhao, consisting of over ten thousand professional soldiers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/¡Ándale,_Prieta!"title="¡Ándale, Prieta!">
In the book, Ramírez tells about growing up in El Paso, Texas. The stars of the book are the women in her life: her great grandmother Lupe, her mother Leticia, and most importantly, her grandmother Ita.In the second half of the book she also explores her strained relationship with her absent father.The title reclaims the sometimes derogatory term , which her grandmother used as a nickname for the author, but which is often used in Spanish as a slur to describe people with dark skin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Sky_(novel)"title="Big Sky (novel)">
Jackson has separated from his partner Julia and now lives in a village on the coast of North Yorkshire with the occasional company of his teenage son Nathan and an ageing Labrador Dido. He is still a private investigator, mostly his clients asking him to investigate suspicious spouses. He then has a chance rescue of a man on a clifftop. Jackson is then involved in a plot involving human trafficking and murder. With several of the characters from previous outings making appearances in the new novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beautiful_Country_(book)"title="Beautiful Country (book)">
In "Beautiful Country", Wang writes about the hardships that she and her parents faced upon their arrival to the United States in 1994, as undocumented immigrants from China. She discusses the numerous challenges she faced of growing up in poverty, and how she emerged from all of it with her dreams intact.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sai_Ying_Pun_(novel)"title="Sai Ying Pun (novel)">
Ah Wang is a railway security guard stationed at the newly built Sai Ying Pun Station. Shortly after the station's opening, Wang is attacked and knocked out by a mysterious beast while he is on patrol. He wakes up in a hospital, with a man named Ga Yin warns him not to return to the Station in the meantime. However, two weeks later, Wang is forced to take the Island line and mysteriously blacks out on the train. He regains consciousness and finds himself trapped on the train with four others. The train ultimately stops at the Sai Ying Pun Station after a ridiculously lengthy ride. The group tries to leave the station, only to be attacked at the exit with Ga Leung killed and the gang is forced to split up. Wang later meets his colleague, Uncle Tat, in the dungeons and Tat informs him about the subterrane, a group of living creatures inhabited underground and would "harvest" skins of humans to hijack their bodies. Before Tat can finish, they are attacked by the subterranes again and Wang is knocked out again in the chase.Wang wakes up and finds himself being saved by a young girl called "April". "April" admits that she is a subterrane who wants both races to live separately and peacefully. She was one of the representatives who tried to establish a diplomatic relationship with the United Kingdom and Soviet Union and the two races built the Whitty Station as a connection hub, before a war that caused the subsidence of Whitty Station broke out. "April" and her human friend April were both severely injured in the battle and April sacrificed herself by allowing "April" to harvest and live in her body. Wang decides to trust "April". The duo thus head to the lair of the subterranes and try to save Pak Gor and Tracy, but Pak Gor is already transformed and Wang puts him out of mercy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Years_(Ernaux_novel)"title="The Years (Ernaux novel)">
In the book, Ernaux writes about herself in the third person ("elle", or """she" in English) for the first time, providing a vivid look at French society just after the Second World War until the early 2000s. It is the moving social story of a woman and of the evolving society she lived in. With this feature of book, Edmund White described it as a "collective autobiography", in his review for "The New York Times".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Japanese_Lover"title="The Japanese Lover">
The story is set in 2015 and first introduces us to octogenarian Alma Belasco who is moving in the Lark House, a retirement home for quirky individuals in San Francisco. Here we are also introduced to Lark House's caretaker Irina Bazili, a young Moldovan immigrant who seems to have some intense trauma of her own. Because of her nature, Irina is hired by Alma as her personal secretary. As the story progresses we are introduced to a secret admirer of Alma, through a series of letters, notes and gifts. Accompanying Alma on recovering these clues are Irina and Alma's grandson Seth who's in love with Irina. As Irina becomes closer to Seth and Alma, she discovers the photo of a man in Alma's room, who Alma introduces as Ichimei Fukuda, a Japanese-American whom Alma met in 1939. Alma tells Irina the story of how when Germany was invading Poland in 1939, she was sent as a girl of 8 to San Francisco to her wealthy uncle and aunt to escape the holocaust. Throughout the book we are taken through various momentous events of the 2nd half of the 20th century and also Alma's own experiences. We learn how Alma befriended Ichimei and how they were separated due to the Pearl Harbor attacks, as all Japanese-Americans being sent to Internment zones. We also see how they maintained their secret romance for decades through the means of letter. At one point Alma, got married to Nathaniel, a childhood friend of both hers and Ichimei while still continuing her romance with Fukuda. Irina despite trying to avoid any romance, becomes closer to Seth and tells her about her abusive relationship with her step-father. As the young pair grows closer, Alma grows frailer and frailer, finally passing away one day. The story closes with one more letter between the 2 fated lovers who were never meant to be.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happening_(novel)"title="Happening (novel)">
Set in 1963, four years before the legalization of oral contraception in France and twelve years before the Veil Act, the autobiographical narrative describes the troubles a young student faces when seeking out an illegal abortion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Midst_of_Winter"title="In the Midst of Winter">
The story starts when during the biggest snowstorm Brooklyn has ever seen, a lonely University professor Richard Bowmaster, accidentally hitting the car of an undocumented immigrants from Guatemala - Evelyn Ortega. This accident, which at first appeared to be a minor inconvenience, takes a major turn when Evelyn shows up at Richard's place seeking help. Not knowing what to do, Richard recruits his tenant, a fellow academic from Chile - Lucia Maraz - in order to solve Evelyn's plight. As the story progresses, it is discovered that Evelyn found the corpse of a dead woman in the boot of her boss's car. So now Lucia, Richard and Evelyn embark on a road trip which slowly unveils each of their pasts. Evelyn's trauma of coming from a country where she survived the murder of her brothers in gang violence and sexual assault, Lucia's struggling to return to Chile, which she has prior left due to its risks. In the meantime, Richard struggling to find love and relationships as a result of trauma from personal losses during his marriage to a Brazilian woman from his time in Rio de Janeiro, which he blames on himself. As the book progresses, Evelyn gradually overcomes her trauma, while Richard and Lucia bond together. The book ends with Richard quoting the line from Albert Camus poem, "Invincible Summer, "In the midst of winter, I finally found there was within me an invincible summer"."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Architect's_Apprentice"title="The Architect's Apprentice">
The novel has an episodic structure. At the age of 12, Jahan flees his abusive stepfather by boat. He arrives in Istanbul with a young white elephant, a gift for the sultan from India. As part of the rogue captain's plan to steal from the palace, Jahan is led to pose as its mahout (keeper). Jahan looks after the elephant, whom he names Chota ("little"), at the palace menagerie. Growing up, he befriends Mihrimah, the sultan's daughter. He falls in love with her, but has no prospect of marrying her due to his lower social status. He becomes an apprentice to Sinan, alongside three others: Davud, Nikola and Yusuf. He assists with a variety of projects, including the construction of mosques, bridges, waterworks and an observatory, and the restoration of the Hagia Sophia. The book spans the reigns of Suleiman I, Selim II and Murad III. Other historical figures featured include Lütfi Pasha, Rüstem Pasha and Takiyüddin, and Jahan visits Michelangelo during a trip to Rome.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/These_Waves_of_Girls"title="These Waves of Girls">
The plot of "These Waves of Girls" is described by Andreas Kitzmann as concerning "a young girl struggling with her sexual identity", while Raine Koskimaa describes the work as "a confessional autobiography about a girl coming to terms with her lesbian identity".The "waves" of girls are "supposed to be about different moments in girlhood, different kinds of girls, different ways of discursively producing the girl. There are so many layers of stories of girls as victims, as victimisers, as cruel, as strong, as just so many different things at once", Fisher explained in a television interview in 2001.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hundred_Years'_War_on_Palestine"title="The Hundred Years' War on Palestine">
## Introduction.The book begins with an examination of correspondence from 1889 between Yusuf Diya ad-Din Pasha al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem and relative of the author, and Theodor Herzl, father of modern political Zionism. In his response, Herzl ignores the main concerns raised by the Pasha and in reference to the indigenous, non-Jewish population of Palestine, Herzl quips: "But who would think of sending them away?" The author sees this early exchange as revelatory that Zionism was an essentially colonial project from its inception, and that the Palestinians were never taken seriously and only rarely were their opinions consulted in matters that would determine their future.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Spread"title="We Spread">
Penny is an elderly woman living on her own in an apartment. She once shared it with her partner, a professional painter, but when he died, she elected to remain to hold onto her memories of him. Penny was a painter herself and dabbled in surrealism, but never showed her work. She is determined to manage on her own and rejects all offers of help. One day she falls and hurts herself, and her landlord takes her to an assisted living facility called Six Cedars. When she questions his decision to take her there, he tells her that she and her partner had decided that Six Cedars would be where they would go when they needed help. Penny has no memory of that arrangement.Six Cedars is an 1843 mansion set in a forest, but it has only three other elderly patients and two helpers. Initially Penny resists being uprooted, but soon is surprised at how quickly she starts to enjoy her new home. She eats well, sleeps better than she has in years, and enjoys the company of the other residents. But after a while it all seems too good to be true and Penny begins to observe strange things. The passage of time becomes distorted and her memories start to fragment. No one is allowed to go outside the house, and its corridors seem to change shape from time to time. Even her fellow companions appear to change, and Penny begins to suspect that the facility's director has sinister motives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unknown_(hypertext_novel)"title="The Unknown (hypertext novel)">
The Unknown is a sprawling hypertext novel about a fictional book tour the four authors are on to promote the "Unknown Anthology". Kristin Krauth describes it as "a satire on publishing and promotion as well as a tough and funny look at the nature of creating hypertext". Brad Quinn describes the plot as "an adventure novel about a book tour for a book that doesn't exist, and it has all kinds of ridiculous behavior, drug abuse and famous people who would probably be shocked and none too happy to find out that they are in the novel."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oppermanns"title="The Oppermanns">
"The Oppermanns" is a family saga that chronicles the fall of a bourgeois German Jewish furniture company under the rise of Nazism.In "time immemorial", Emmanuel Oppermann, a merchant who moves to Berlin, supplies the Prussian Army and starts the Oppermann furniture company. The main characters are his grandson Gustav Oppermann, a writer who is working on a biography of Gotthold Lessing, and his brothers Martin and Edgar. The story takes place between November 1932, when Gustav turns 50 years old, and the late summer of 1933. While the Nazis are quickly establishing their dictatorship, many Germans that do not share their views, as well as some Jews, insist that things will eventually turn around and thus prefer to wait passively or ignore what is happening around them. Edgar, a successful doctor at a Berlin hospital, faces an antisemitic public smear-campaign and is later removed from the hospital by the "Sturmabteilung". Martin, the head of the Oppermann family business, is forced to merge it with an "Aryan" German partner. Meanwhile, Martin's 17-year-old son Berthold is expelled from his soccer club despite his talent for the sport, and in class, he is abused by a Nazi teacher for refusing to express his loyalty to the new regime. Gustav decides to leave Germany and move to Switzerland, but later comes back under a false passport to became an anti-Nazi political activist and to document Nazi crimes. He is arrested and sent to a concentration camp, although he is eventually released.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coroner's_daughter"title="The Coroner's daughter">
The plot of the novel centres on Abigail Lawless, the daughter of a city coroner, as she attempts to discover who is responsible for a murder. The novel is set in 1816 in Dublin. As Abigail seeks to find her killer she moves through Dublin city and its surroundings and visits historic sites such as the Royal Irish Academy, Dunsink Observatory, Charlemont House, and Blessington Street Basin. The novel has both fictional and real historic figures such as James Caulfield, 1st Earl of Charlemont.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrines_of_Gaiety"title="Shrines of Gaiety">
Set in London in the Roaring Twenties, the book centres on the infamous London nightclubs owned by Nellie Coker and her son Niven, the latter having returned from fighting in the Somme in World War I. Their movements are carefully watched by police inspector Frobisher. Librarian and former combat nurse Gwendolen Kelling is approached by an old friend asking her to track down her missing teenage daughters in London. Kelling enlists Frobisher's help, and their hunt leads them to Coker's nightclubs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jews_Don't_Count"title="Jews Don't Count">
In the opening of the book, Baddiel gives several examples of antisemitism being glossed over in various industries, especially the literary and film industries, as well as political antisemitism. Baddiel also describes the racism which is found in football in detail, especially with regard to the use of the term "Yid". Baddiel argues that antisemitism has become a 'second class racism' (p. 11), and he writes about the antisemitism which is manifesting itself as an underrepresentation of ethnic Jews. Baddiel then proceeds to address several arguments for this underrepresentation, such as the belief that Jews are not an oppressed group due to their stereotype of being wealthy. Baddiel also addresses the idea of Jews being white and therefore exempt from racism.Baddiel then discusses the acceptance in the film industry of casting Gentiles as Jewish characters, and the anti-Jewish impressions in which actors can represent Jews, including an abundance of stereotypes. Baddiel also notes the modern tendency for actors to hide their Jewish heritages, which is rarely seen in any other ethnic minority. Baddiel also briefly discusses the subtleties of the word "Jew" as a pejorative, and argues that antisemitism is racism.Baddiel then continues in a semi-autobiographical manner to consider his relationship with Israel as a non-Zionist, and how expectations of a non-Israeli Jew to be a Zionist is a form of antisemitism. He also considers that guilt for the actions of Israel by Western left-wing Jews is in fact a form of internalized racism, fueled by mass media.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fortunes_of_Miss_Follen"title="The Fortunes of Miss Follen">
The story opens with a description of Baden and its curious market. The heroine makes her appearance as a young and delicate market-girl, presiding over a table of dainty laces or needle work, the results of her own toil. She is the daughter of a frugal couple who cultivate a small dairy farm on the hillside. She has a male friend in the schoolmaster also, who later on would be nearer if he could, and who meanwhile with his books and talk feeds her growing culture with music and knowledge of art and of the great world outside the valley. She is an apt scholar. An early and happy love fades into a consuming grief; but an American gentleman and his wife become interested in her sweet face and pure character, and her elevation begins. They teach her English, and then employ her to teach their young daughter, Bessie, the German language. Presently, Colonel Ranney appears, a retired English army officer who wants a governess for his two little daughters, and Christine has got far enough along to prove just the one. The story of her blossoming out in beauty both of person and character as these changes successively come to her, is told very deftly and vividly, and in a style remarkable for its purity and its artistic use of the imagination. She is a sort of Undine, born not indeed of the waves, but of the vine-clad soil, and carrying with her everywhere the freshness and innocence of nature. None of these uplifting stages seem to be at all foreign to her, and after seeing her graceful motions and hearing her sing at her spinning wheel on her mother's porch, we feel that she has a soul within her, however she came by it, that is capable of everything which is attributed to her afterwards. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracul_(novel)"title="Dracul (novel)">
From within Bran Castle, Bram writes in his diary about his childhood days, largely spent bedridden in Dublin, with his siblings, Matilda and Thornley, and nanny, Ellen Crone. The Stoker children become suspicious of Ellen following a series of deaths in nearby towns. After Bram is miraculously healed from his ailments, she suddenly disappears into a bog without a trace. Matilda later departs for Paris to study, and returns after some years to report that she has once again seen Ellen, albeit unaged. They set off to investigate Ellen, eventually revealing her connection to Dracula.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Sir_Massingberd"title="Lost Sir Massingberd">
Sir Massingberd Heath neither feared God nor regarded man. His property was entailed, the next heir being his nephew Marmaduke, whom he tries to murder in order to sell the estates. Marmaduke is befriended by Harvey Gerald and his daughter Lucy, falls in love with Lucy, and finally marries her. Sir Massingberd in his youth secretly married a gipsy, whom he drove mad with his cruelty. She curses him: "May he perish, inch by inch, within reach of aid that shall not come." Sir Massingberd disappears, and all search for him is vain; many months later his bones are found in an old tree, known as the Wolsey Oak. It was supposed that he climbed the tree to look about for poachers, that the rotten wood gave way, and he slipped into the hollow trunk, whence he could not escape. Had he not closed up the public path which skirted the tree, his cries for help must have been heard. With his disappearance and death all goes well with the households on which the blight of his evil spirit had fallen, and the story ends happily.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Shock"title="A Shock">
The book follows a group of loosely connected characters appearing, disappearing, and reappearing around contemporary London. The nine chapters are "The Party", "The Camera", The Sweat", "The Joke", "The Story", "The Flat", "The Pigeon", "The Meeting" and "The Song". It has a number of characters that experience different social issues on different levels; sexuality, racism, drugs, class struggle, troubles finding accommodation in a progressively changing city. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurrish"title="Hurrish">
The scene is laid in County Clare during the Land War. Horatio, or Hurrish O'Brien, the big, kindly, simple farmer, gives poor, pretty Ally a home, and is a father to weak, vain Maurice Brady; but he becomes the victim of fate. His fierce old mother is an ardent patriot. They live in the midst of Fenians, but he will not strike a blow for rebellion. Maurice Brady’s brutish brother Mat, hated by all, shoots at Hurrish from his hiding-place; Hurrish strikes one blow in self-defence, kills him, and is betrayed to the police by Maurice. Hurrish is tried and acquitted, but Maurice murders him in spite of Ally's warnings. Ally, though betrothed to Maurice, loves Hurrish without knowing it. Hurrish, in his devotion to Maurice, acquits him on his death-bed. Ally becomes a nun; Maurice goes to America, where he makes a fortune, but is shunned by his countrymen as an informer and a traitor. Hurrish's memory is cherished in his native village. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_and_His_Dog_(narrative)"title="A Man and His Dog (narrative)">
In "A Man and His Dog" Thomas Mann describes his experiences with his chicken-dog (") mongrel Bauschan (or, in English translations, Bashan) on the banks of the Brunnbach in Munich. In the narrative how the day turns out for the dog is decided in the moment his master leaves his garden. If the master turns left the day is lost for the dog, because he goes to town. But when the master turns right, a walk through nature and the hunting grounds will follow and both march on into a romanticised rural world. The narrative is structured into five chapters:In the first chapter ("He Comes Round the Corner" ["]) the narrator and the chicken-dog are introduced. In the second chapter ("How We Got Bashan" ["]), it is described how the Manns got Bauschan. In the third chapter ("Notes on Bashan's Character and Manner of Life" ["]) the dog's fixation on his master (Thomas Mann) and its behaviour towards fellow dogs is dealt with. In the penultimate chapter a meticulous description of Mann's walking area around his Munich domicile in is presented. The fifth and final chapter ("The Hunting-Ground" [""]) is the longest one: In it a visit to a veterinary clinic and various hunts are described.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravenshoe_(novel)"title="Ravenshoe (novel)">
The "House of Ravenshoe" in Stonington, Ireland, is the scene of this novel; and the principal actors are the members of the noble family of Ravenshoe. The plot, noted for its complexity, has three stages. Denzel Ravenshoe, a Roman Catholic, marries a Protestant wife. They have two sons, Cuthbert and Charles. Cuthbert is brought up as a Catholic and Charles as a Protestant. This is the cause of enmity on the part of Father Mackworth, a dark, sullen man, the priest of the family, who has friendly relations with Cuthbert alone. James Norton, Denzel’s groom, is on intimate terms with his master. He marries Norah, the maid of Lady Ravenshoe. Charles becomes a sunny, lovable man; Cuthbert, a reticent bookworm. They have as playmates William and Ellen, the children of Norah. Two women play an important part in the life of the hero, Charles,—Adelaide, very beautiful in form and figure, with little depth, and lovely Mary Corby, who, cast up by shipwreck, is adopted by Norah. Charles becomes engaged to Adelaide. The plot deepens. Father Mackworth proves that Charles is the true son of Norah and James Norton, the illegitimate brother of Denzel; and William, the groom foster-brother, is real heir of Ravenshoe. To add to the grief of Charles, Adelaide elopes with his cousin Lord Welter. Charles flees to London, tries grooming, and then joins the Hussars. Finally he is found in London by a college friend, Marston, with a raving fever upon him. After recovery, Charles returns to Ravenshoe. Father Mackworth again produces evidence that not James Norton, but Denzel is the illegitimate son, and Charles, after all, is true heir to Ravenshoe. The union of Charles and Mary then takes place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spear_Cuts_Through_Water"title="The Spear Cuts Through Water">
In a frame story, a grandmother (“lola”) tells stories of the Old Country to her grandchild. She tells a story about how the Moon and the Water were in love, and together they created the Inverted Theater. The grandchild visits the Inverted Theater in a dream. They are carrying a spear which is their family heirloom. The moonlit body, a child of the Water and the Moon, performs the following story for the grandchild and other visitors to the Theater.The people of the Old Country suffer under the rule of Moon Emperor Magaam Ossa and his sons, the Three Terrors. The emperor enforces his control over the population with the help of a network of psychic tortoises, who can transmit information instantaneously. Saam Ossa, the First Terror, leads the Red Peacock Brigade. The Red Peacocks are all sons of the First Terror, and they regularly commit war crimes against the population. The emperor keeps the Moon goddess, his empress, imprisoned under the palace. The First Terror’s favorite son Jun is assigned to guard the goddess. With Jun’s help, the Moon goddess kills the emperor and escapes.Commander Uhi Araya works at Tiger Gate. Araya enlists the help of Keema, a one-armed man who works for her. She asks him to deliver a spear to a woman named Shan. Jun and Keema escape Tiger Gate with the goddess and the spear. Araya and the other guards are killed by the First Terror and the Peacocks. Keema and Jun travel with the goddess, who is ancient and close to death, as well as the Defect, a disabled tortoise. Inside the empress’s wagon, Keema finds that one of the emperor’s prized birds has been tied up. He frees the bird, which follows them and assists them for the remainder of their journey. They are pursued by the First Terror.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Heart_Full_of_Headstones"title="A Heart Full of Headstones">
The novel is framed by a prologue and epilogue both titled simply "Now." In these, John Rebus is on trial for a crime he commits at the end of "Then," the main narrative (divided into 8 days), which takes place not long before.In this novel, Rebus, retired since 2007, DI Siobhan Clarke, and DCI Malcolm Fox all pursue their own investigations, though the cases come together around a policeman named Francis Haggard, stationed at Tynecastle in Edinburgh. The three of them frequently exchange information or ask each other for help. Clarke is at first working on the criminal aspect of Haggard's domestic abuse of his wife, which has resulted in their separation; Clarke interviews Haggard and also the wife, Cheryl, and her sister Stephanie Pelham, who has taken Cheryl in. Haggard is threatening to reveal the police corruption at Tynecastle unless the case is dropped. Then Haggard is murdered and Police Scotland sets up a Major Inquiry Team (MIT) which includes both Clarke and Fox. Fox, in his time in Internal Affairs (the "Complaints"), a few years earlier, had wanted badly to convict one Tynecastle cop, Sergeant Alan Fleck, now retired; in Fleck's day, Rebus had helped Fleck, giving him tips and setting up a meeting with the gangster 'Big Ger' Cafferty. Thus Fox's concerns push Rebus to recall how he tried both to fit in and to keep his integrity when dealing with Tynecastle. On the MIT, Fox represents the official concern with the old cases that Haggard, but also Fleck, are bringing up. Fox also represents other interests of Gartcosh, the administrative campus of Police Scotland, including possible links with smuggling of cars for Fleck's dealership and of drugs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_of_the_Strongest_(novel)"title="The Right of the Strongest (novel)">
The story is set in a rugged mountain-rimmed valley of Alabama. It is a story of mountain feuds, and of a modern business scheme that involved buying up the squatters' patches of land that belong by right only to the strongest. John Marshall has a vision of the whole valley in which this group of mountain dwellers live being converted into a reservoir for all-round-the-year usage, for the generation of electric power to run a yet unbuilt city twenty miles away, where two yet unbuilt railroads shall cross to carry away the steel that is yet to be mined and melted and moulded. The valley dwellers resent this invasion of the outer world, and John Marshall, falling in love with Mary Elizabeth, who has dedicated her life to educating these people, finds in her idealism and Puritanism a stubbornness of misunderstanding and harsh judgment htat makes the conflict between love and business a fierce one. He discovers that her father was not a traitor to his people, and that the "bad man" of the book was the real villain. Finally, he gives up the secrets of his fight for modernising this region in order that Mary Elizabeth, by warning her people against him, may convince the native dwellers of her devotion to any cause that is theirs. But he fights on and finally prevails on the last man who holds out to sell hisland. From the others whose titles are defective, he merely takes it. The final chapters of the book are taken up with Mary Elizabeth's pleadings for the rights of the valley dwellers to the homes of their fathers in the face of his implacable vision of civilising the community at whatever cost to the few. There is the final stand of the people against marshall, the battle in which he is desperately wounded, and finally, the temporary triumph of the ideal over the material in Mary Elizabeth's order for the freeing of the "hillites" before the sheriff and his posse reach them. John Marshall lies a very sick man as she puts her hand over his mouth and gives this order, to which, perforce, he subscribes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mountain_Shadow"title="The Mountain Shadow">
Set mostly in modern Bombay, the sequel starts where "Shantaram" ended. It's been two years since the protagonist Lindsay lost two of the people closest to him: Kaderbhai, a mafia boss who died in the Afghan mountains, and Karla, a mysterious, coveted woman who eventually married a Bombay media mogul. Now Lin has to fulfill the last assignment given to him by Kaderbhai—to win the trust of the sage living on the mountain, to save his head in the uncontrollably flaring conflict of the new mafia leaders, but, most importantly, to find love and faith.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Assassins"title="Three Assassins">
Suzuki is just an ordinary man until his wife is murdered. When he discovers the criminal gang responsible, he leaves behind his life as a maths teacher and joins them, looking for a chance to take his revenge. What he doesn't realise is that he's about to get drawn into a web of unusual professional assassins (the titular "Three Assassins"), each with their own agenda.Suzuki must take each of them on, to try to find justice and keep his innocence in a world of killers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somehow,_Crystal"title="Somehow, Crystal">
While her boyfriend Jun'ichi is out of town, college student and part-time model Yuri passes the time in Tokyo by shopping for luxury products, visiting affluent neighborhoods, eating expensive food, and seeking new kinds of entertainment. At a dance club she meets Masataka, to whom she describes her relatively frictionless life as "crystal". Yuri has a sexual encounter with Masataka that she enjoys but finds less satisfying than her experiences with Jun'ichi. When Jun'ichi returns, Yuri learns that he also was unfaithful during his trip, but she reflects on her financial independence and decides that staying with Jun'ichi is the best fit for her crystal lifestyle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ransomware_Hunting_Team"title="The Ransomware Hunting Team">
"The Ransomware Hunting Team" is about a small group of computer experts in the United States and Europe who devote large amounts of their time cracking ransomware. They include Michael Gillespie, Fabian Wosar and Sarah White, all volunteers who do not ask for payment for helping victims of these cyberattacks. Authors Dudley and Golden explain how cybercriminals break into vulnerable computer systems, infect them with viruses that encrypt their data, and then demand money for decryption keys. The book highlights some the prominent ransomware incidents, such as the 2021 Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, and the 2017 infection of Britain's National Health Service systems. But because many ransomware attacks are not made public. there are considerably more occurrences than reported.If ransomware has been properly written, cracking it is normally "impossible". But from time to time the hackers take shortcuts, or make mistakes, and the elite team is able to reverse-engineer the malware and construct decryption keys for the victims to recover their data without having to pay ransoms. The book discloses that the battle between the ransomware developers and the hunters is an undeclared cyberwar. It also explains why the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security in the United States are unable to fully tackle this problem. Bound by rigid structures, these organizations are reluctant to work with outsiders, and derisively refer to Gillespie and company as the "Geek Squad". But after the Colonial Pipeline incident, they have begun to work more closely with the ransomware hunters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Father's_Story"title="A Father's Story">
In July 1991, research chemist Lionel Dahmer was informed by the Milwaukee Police Department that they were investigating a homicide involving his son Jeffrey. Dahmer initially thought Jeffrey was a murder victim, not a murderer. He learned the grisly details of his son's crimes during the trial which he was found to be legally sane and sentenced to life imprisonment in February 1992."A Father's Story" runs chronologically from Jeffrey's birth until his arrest and imprisonment. Dahmer tries to figure out what made his son commit murder, practice necrophilia and cannibalism. He scrutinizes every possible contributing factor to his son's psychosis starting with himself. Dahmer judges himself a poor father because he was emotionally distant towards his son. While reflecting, he "speculates that his own youthful shyness, fascination with bombs and fears of abandonment added up to a monstrous genetic inheritance."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noémi_(novel)"title="Noémi (novel)">
This is a tale of Aquitaine, during the English occupation, in the early fifteenth century. The country was in a state of civil war; and free companies, nominally fighting for French or English, but in reality for their own pockets, mere plunderers and bandits, flourished mightily. The most dreaded freebooter in the valley of the Dordogne was Le Gros Guillem, who from his stronghold at Domme sweeps down upon the farms and hamlets below; till at length the timid peasants, finding a leader in Ogier del' Peyra, a petty sieur of the neighbourhood, rise up against their scourge, destroy his rocky fastness, and put his men to death or flight. Guillem's daughter, Noémi, a madcap beauty, joins her father's band of ruffians; but soon sickens of their deeds, and risks her life to save Ogier from the oubliette, because she loves his son.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Lily_(novel)"title="The Red Lily (novel)">
This novel is the story of an emotional Frenchwoman's liaisons with two men. Madame Therese Martin-Bellème was married by her father to an elderly count, a government minister. After two years of this marriage of convenience she and her husband are strangers in the same house. The beautiful young countess is loved devotedly by Robert Le Menil, and she accepts his love, the first she has known, not because she loves him, but because she is carried away by his love for her. Three years later, she leaves the lover she likes for a lover she loves, Dechartre, a sculptor. She tells him truly that she has never loved another. Le Menil refuses to accept his dismissal by letter and comes to Florence where she is visiting. Dechartre hears of his presence and suspects their former intimacy, but she denies all. Later, in Paris, he hears her name coupled with that of Le Menil, and is tortured with jealousy. She is possessed by the one idea that she must not lose him, the man she loves with all her heart, and tells him again that he is her one lover. Le Menil had gone away to forget her in vain. He returns and follows her to the theatre with reproaches and entreaties which Dechartre overhears. She is obliged to tell her lover the truth. Dechartre refuses to understand that she is not a light woman, or believe her avowals that she has loved him alone, and in a pathetic last interview she realises that her happiness is at an end. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gaverocks"title="The Gaverocks">
Hender Gaverock is an eccentric old Cornish squire, who has two sons, Garens and Constantine, whose natural spirits have been almost wholly crushed by his harsh and brutal rule. Garens philosophically submits, but Constantine rebels; and the book is chiefly occupied with the misdeeds, and their consequences, of the younger son, whose revolt against his father's tyranny rapidly degenerates into a career of vice and crime. He marries secretly, deserts his wife, allows himself to be thought drowned, commits bigamy, robs his father, and is finally murdered as he is about to flee the country.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flossie,_a_Venus_of_Fifteen"title="Flossie, a Venus of Fifteen">
The novel recounts the adventures of an immature young person of distinct cockney type, who begins to fully satisfy her male admirers at a very early age, and manages to retain her physical virginity until the last few pages. According to the publisher Charles Carrington, "The book has no other pretension than to be thoroughly obscene".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trois_Filles_de_leur_mère"title="Trois Filles de leur mère">
In the "Notice to the reader", the author purports to represent a true account: "This little book is not a novel. It's a true story down to the smallest detail. I haven't changed anything, neither the portrait of the mother and the three young girls, nor their ages, nor the circumstances".The author presents the sexual adventures of a young man of twenty, "X***", to whom a prostitute of thirty-six, Teresa, and her three daughters, Charlotte, twenty, Mauricette, fourteen and a half, and Lili, ten years old, take turns visiting, before they all engage in a big staging of obscene games.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_Child"title="Witch Child">
Beginning: Fourteen-year-old Mary's grandmother was suspected to be a witch, she was 'walked' until she could no longer hobble, pricked and then tested if she could float. Then she was hanged as a witch. Mary was plucked from the crowd and taken down a steep alley to a carriage, where a lady sat inside waiting for her.&lt;br&gt;Journey 1: They travelled to an inn where Mary had a bath and was given new clothes. The lady told her that she was going to America with puritans, sailing from Southampton shortly. The lady had to stand by her husband as he had put his name to King Charles' death warrant. Mary then recognised the lady as her mother.&lt;br&gt;Journey 2: the voyage: The puritans set sail on "The Annabel", and Mary was befriended by Martha. Pastor Cornwell suffered from seasickness asked Mary to be her scribe. The ship passes many icebergs and whales and see the Northern Lights. In a violent storm one of the women is in labour and Mary helps giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the baby afterwards. Eventually they arrive at Salem.&lt;br&gt;New World:The Puritans do not see their families in Salem as they believe their forerunners have moved inland. Widow Hesketh in Salem suspects that Mary has 'second sight'. The majority of the puritan group follow them including Mary, and after much discussion they take native guides.&lt;br&gt;
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_Life_in_London"title="Street Life in London">
The book gives the reader an insight into the daily lives of working class and poor Londoners. It is arranged around photographs by Thomson with accompanying text by Smith. The texts are brief, but include detail, including information from interviewing the photograph's subjects. Subjects include flower-sellers, chimney-sweeps, shoe-blacks, chair-caners, musicians, dustmen and locksmiths.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Adverse_(novel)"title="Anthony Adverse (novel)">
The story follows the eponymous protagonist, Anthony Adverse, through several adventures around the world. This includes slave trading in Africa, his business dealings as a plantation owner in New Orleans, and his incarceration and eventual death in Mexico.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Blight"title="Shadow Blight">
"Shadow Blight" is an experience of loss and, through poetry, a means of conveying something that would otherwise be too difficult to express. This collection addresses the sensation of being overwhelmed by grief and silenced by the outside world by drawing on the stories of Niobe, whose immense suffering over the death of her children essentially turned her and others to stone. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangulation_(novel)"title="Triangulation (novel)">
The frame story is set in 1997. After retirement from the Ordnance Survey, John Hopkins travels from his home in Southampton to Dunsop Bridge in Lancashire (thought to be the geographical centre of Britain) where his old flame Helen Gardner lives. The journey takes him over a day via train and then bus as he brings with him letters from his from his first job starting in 1957 working for the Directorate of Overseas Surveys at Tolworth in South West London. His colleague Laurance Wallace joined at the same time but was shortly sent out to Africa to help survey the landscape using theodolites and later tellurometers. John remained as a map curator in the Records Section and later the assistant of Brigadier Martin Hotine, where he found great satisfaction in his work. Two years later Helen Gardner joins the organisation as a trainee cartographer and starts a low-level affair with John, but Helen wants more excitement in her life. Laurence's letters to John show the reality of his experiences in Africa so John shows Helen the letters from Laurance to tell her that life in Africa is a struggle. Helen finds that Laurance's stories capture her imagination; as using a stereoplotter she finds one of the locations frequented by Laurance. Every Summer, Laurance returns to live with John but then the relationship between Helen and John becomes strained as Helen and Laurance's relationship blossoms. In the end Helen travels to Africa to be with Laurance where they marry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legends_&amp;_Lattes"title="Legends &amp; Lattes">
Orc swordswoman and mercenary Viv has long made a rough living as one of a band of adventurers—dandyish elf Fennus, dwarf Roon, stone-fey Taivus, and gnome Gallina. Viv dreams of retiring from adventure and opening a coffee shop, in preference to the more customary Orc retirement plan of dying in battle. The band's latest foray, against a Scalvert Queen, a spider-like monster and horder of treasure, offers her the opportunity. Claiming as her sole share of the treasure the Scalvert's Stone the monster has grown in its skull, Viv quits the group.A Scalvert's Stone is reputed to bring fortune to its owner. Purchasing an abandoned stable in the town of Thune, Viv buries the stone inside and sets about realizing her dream. She recruits hob carpenter Calamity (Cal) to help her get the property in shape, and artistic succubus Tandri as a work-mate with whom to open and run the business. Subsequent recruits include ratkin Thimble, a baker of genius, hesitant would-be bard Pendry, who blossoms into an entertainer, and volunteer watch beast Amity the dire-cat. After a slow start, the Legends &amp; Lattes coffee shop becomes highly popular in Thune, with such colorful regulars among the clientele as witch Laney, student Hemmington, and magician gnome Durias, who appears to have a peculiar relationship with time. Viv and Tandri's success garners unwanted attention from the Madrigal, whose thugs run the local protection racket, and Viv's ex-colleague Fennus, who suspects the true nature of the seemingly modest share she claimed of the Scalvert's treasure. With the aid of the rest of Viv's old band, notably Taivus, matters with the Madrigal are resolved satisfactorily, but Fennus is implacable, making two attempts to steal the Scalvert's Stone, the second of which results in the cafe's destruction in a magical blaze.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_and_My_Dysphoria_Monster"title="Me and My Dysphoria Monster">
Nisha has a monster that follows her everywhere, and it has recently begun to grow. It grows larger whenever someone refers to Nisha as a boy or tells her she must play on a boys' sports team. Nisha wants the monster to go away, but it doesn't listen to her. The monster starts interfering with Nisha's life, stopping her from swimming and playing with her friends. One day Nisha's dad introduces her to his friend Jack, who also has a monster.Nisha asks Jack how he got his monster to go away. After their conversation, Nisha is very happy, and talks to her parents. Nisha begins to change some things like the clothes she wears so that she is happier about herself. With every change, Nisha's monster begins to shrink. She begins to swim and play with her friends again. Nisha becomes happier and more confident, and in time becomes a happy adult.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aki-wayn-zih"title="Aki-wayn-zih">
Told from an Anishinaabay point of view", Aki-wayn-zih" is the story of growing up on Turtle Island, life before European contact, and early memories of trapping and fishing on traditional lands. In his book, Baxter also describes how the residential school system changed him as a person, and transformed his family, his reserve community, and others like it. The book is divided into three parts: the first, "Anishinaabay Kih-kayn-daa-soh-win (Anishinaabay Knowledge)"; the second, "Ish-poh too-kin-nih-goh-yung (Before Contact)"; and the third, "Residential School."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Belarusian_Nationalism,_1906-1931"title="The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906-1931">
The book follows a chronological order, following interactions between nationalism proponents and their relationship with the major regional state authorities and socialist and nationalist movements. The book states that nationalism was driven by the elite in Belorussia, against the wishes of the Minsk-based communist activists. Rudling writes that while activists still supported a "Belarusian territorial unit" they collaborated with the Lithuanian Soviet state to keep the Second Polish Republic from taking territory. The book states that the Second Polish Republic's leader Jozef Pilsudski actually supported a Belarusian state, but wanted it to be part of a federation with Poland and Ukraine; while Moscow helped create the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic.The book states that Belarusian nationalism was absent amongst the peasant class as a result of poverty and ignorance, rather than repression and censorship. Nationalists tried to recruit via distribution of written materials, but illiteracy was therefore a barrier to their success.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didn't_Nobody_Give_a_Shit_What_Happened_to_Carlotta"title="Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta">
In 1993, 22-year-old Carlotta Mercedes accidentally becomes involved in the robbery of a liquor store by her cousin while travelling to a party, during which a woman is shot and permanently disabled. She is subsequently sentenced to 12 to 22 years in prison and spends the next two decades as an inmate at a men's prison in Ithaca, New York. While in prison, Carlotta comes out as a trans woman; however, prison authorities refuse to acknowledge her gender transition, and she is raped by inmates and prison guards alike throughout her time in prison. As a result of her treatment, Carlotta spends six years in isolation, and goes on to form a romantic relationship with another inmate, Frenzy. Following her fifth meeting with the parole board, Carlotta is surprisingly released from prison a year and a half early, and travels back to New York City to live with her family just before the Independence Day holiday. Carlotta is excited to reconcile with her estranged son Ibe, who she hasn't heard from since he was nine, but is shocked at the gentrification that has happened in Brooklyn since her imprisonment. She returns home to her Afro-Colombian family, many of whom struggle to accept her new gender identity. Carlotta learns that her mother is significantly afflicted with dementia. Carlotta meets with her probation officer who informs her as part of her release she is not allowed to be near alcohol, a matter that is complicated by her family hosting an extravagant wake for a recently deceased family friend. During the course of the weekend, Carlotta tries to avoid contact with alcohol while looking for work and reconciling with old friends, including Doodle, whose party she was travelling to the night she was arrested. Carlotta finds employment as a driver and tries to find someone to teach her how to drive before she starts her new job. During the course of the day, Carlotta struggles to fight her impulses triggered by her traumatic experiences, and jeopardizes her freedom several times, including by shoplifting a designer label shoe, crashing a car, and getting into a verbal altercation with Ibe. She also speaks at length with Doodle about her experiences in prison, including sharing being regularly raped by a guard throughout her sentence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_We_Cannot_Know"title="What We Cannot Know">
Du Sautoy identifies seven "edges" of human knowledge, through consideration of physical objects. For instance, he questions whether it is possible to know what side a die will land on prior to rolling, using probability and chaos theory in his analysis. He explores philosophical and scientific concepts of time and consciousness. Other topics include evolutionary biology and particle physics. As well as unknown questions, he illustrates known facts from quantum physics and astronomy.Du Sautoy connects the unknowns of human knowledge to God, recalling that a radio interviewer defined God to him as "something which transcends human understanding". He ultimately rejects belief in a deity himself. He illustrates topics with examples from his own life, such as his practice of the trumpet and cello.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grist_Mill_Road"title="Grist Mill Road">
In 1982, three teenagers are involved in a crime in a forest 90 miles north of New York City. Hannah (the rich daughter of a cement dynasty) is tied to a tree, Matthew shoots her with a Red Ryder BB Gun and she loses an eye. Patrick (Patch) is secretly watching, counting the shots over 40 times, and he thinks that Matthew had killed her. Later Patrick returns and finds that Hannah is still alive, unties her, and brings her back to the town where she is taken to hospital. Then Matthew is convicted and sent to prison. But Hannah believes Patrick is totally innocent.In 2008 New York City Patrick is married to Hannah in a luxury apartment looking over Times Square in New York City. Patrick believes he should have prevented Matthews attack on Hannah, for which he feels guilty. He has lost his job at a bank in the depression and now writes a cooking blog. Patrick feels paranoid and depressed then he notices an proposal sent to his blog by an unknown admirer, intrigued by the offer he then meets Matthew, leading to the situation spiralling out of control, pulling Hannah in...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Between_Us_(novel)"title="The Space Between Us (novel)">
"The Space Between Us" takes place in present-day India and centers on two women: Serabai (Sera) Dubash, an upper-middle-class, Parsi widow, and her domestic servant of more than twenty years, Bhima. Now sixty-five years old, illiterate Bhima lives in the slums of Mumbai with her pregnant, unwed granddaughter, the seventeen-year-old Maya, whose college tuition is paid for by Sera. Through flashbacks, Bhima remembers her husband, who, after a work-related accident caused him to lose three fingers, became an alcoholic and abandoned her, taking their son Amit with him. She also remembers her daughter Pooja, who married, but died of AIDS together with her husband, leaving Maya an orphan at a young age.Since the sudden death of her physically abusive husband three years ago, Sera has cared for her disabled mother-in-law, who had insisted on isolating her from the family when Sera was menstruating. Sera also tends to her pregnant daughter Dinaz, and pays for Maya's abortion. A while later, Maya reluctantly tells Bhima that Dinaz's husband Viraf impregnated her and told her to keep it a secret so that she could continue her education and Bhima could keep her job. Angered, Bhima confronts Viraf, and he later accuses her of stealing from the cupboard. Sera dismisses her, unable to listen to Bhima's hints about Viraf's actions towards Maya. Bhima leaves, and recalling a balloon seller whom she had admired, buys worth of balloons and goes to the seaside. She resolves to deal with tomorrow.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_of_Animals"title="The God of Animals">
Alice Winston, a twelve-year-old girl, struggles with her place in the world the summer after her sister runs away from home and marries a rodeo cowboy. Her mother—bedridden because of postpartum depression—hasn't left her bedroom since Alice was an infant, and her father is failing to keep their horse ranch running. In order to survive, Joe Winston begins boarding wealthy women's horses, dreaming of the day when his ranch will overflow with children taking show lessons. During the hottest summer in decades, a series of trials overcome the Winstons, teaching Alice how cruel life can be.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Left_Hand_of_God_(novel)"title="The Left Hand of God (novel)">
Thomas Cale, a 14-year-old boy is just another recruit of the great conflict between Redeemers and Antagonists – or so he thinks. Along with his two "friends" (friendship is forbidden and Cale is in general reluctant to make any closer bonds) named Kleist and Vague Henri, Cale not only finds a room full of delicious food, much different from their usual fare at the Sanctuary, but they also witness something they have been told is Devil's temptation and sinful – a room full of young girls, including two dressed in white.Cale is later ordered to deliver a message to Lord Redeemer Picarbo, and walks in on him while he is too busy to notice. It turns out the redeemer has cut open one of the two girls dressed in white while she is still alive, and the other girl in the room is strapped and will be next. He is then attacked by Cale in an attempt to stop him from killing the other girl, which is named Riba, and ends up killing Picarbo. Realizing the consequences for both him, Riba, Kleist and Henri, he engineers and executes an escape from the Sanctuary. Amongst the things Cale has brought with him, is a sweet smelling object Picarbo had removed from the dead girl's body.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beautiful_Darkness"title="Beautiful Darkness">
The book continues to follow Ethan Wate, a teenage boy living in the small Southern town of Gatlin. He is in love with Lena Duchannes, a girl with the ability to work great magic – something she used to bring Ethan back to life after the events in the preceding book. She's managed to avoid having to make the choice between dark or light, however this doesn't mean that she is free to live her life as she chooses.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakshi_(novel)"title="Yakshi (novel)">
Yakshi narrates the story of Srinivasan, a young handsome scientist and lecturer who is working in a college in Kerala. Srinivasan is doing research on the Yakshis (Vampire). He is in love with one of the students at the college, Vijayalakshmi.In the chemistry laboratory, he is met with an unexpected accident, leaving almost half of his face damaged. Everyone who used to adore him begins to hate him and avoids him because of his looks. Even Vijayalakshmi deserts him. He is thus infected by intense inferiority complex and experiences mental trauma.Then, a mysterious women, Ragini, befriends Srini and despite his damaged face, begins to love him. Srini marries Ragini. Eventually he starts to question whether Ragini is human, or a vampire in disguise. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_God's_Children_Need_Traveling_Shoes"title="All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes">
"All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes" begins as Angelou's previous book, "The Heart of a Woman", ends: with her depiction of a serious automobile accident involving her son Guy. After spending two years in Cairo, they come to Accra to enroll Guy in the University of Ghana, and the accident occurs three days after they arrive. Following Guy's long convalescence, they remain in Ghana, Angelou for four years, from 1962 to 1965. Angelou describes Guy's recovery, including her deep depression. She is confronted by her friend Julian Mayfield, who introduces her to writer and actor Efua Sutherland, the Director of the National Theatre of Ghana. Sutherland becomes Angelou's "sister-friend" and allows her to cry out all her pain and bitterness.Angelou finds a job at the University of Ghana and "falls in love" with the country and with its people, who remind her of African Americans she knew in Arkansas and California. As the parent of an adult, she experiences new freedoms, respects Guy's choices, and consciously stops making her son the center of her life. She creates new friendships with her roommates and native Africans, both male and female. She becomes part of a group of American expatriates whom she calls the "Revolutionist Returnees", people such as Mayfield and his wife Ana Livia, who share her struggles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_Flung_Up_to_Heaven"title="A Song Flung Up to Heaven">
"A Song Flung Up to Heaven", which takes place between 1965 and 1968, picks up where Angelou's previous book, "All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes", ends, with Angelou's airplane trip from Accra, Ghana, where she has spent the previous four years, back to the United States. Two "calamitous events" frame the beginning and end of the book—the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Her nineteen-year-old son Guy is attending college in Ghana, and she is leaving a controlling relationship—her "romantic other", whom she described as "a powerful West African man who had swept into my life with the urgency of a Southern hurricane". She had also been invited to return to the U.S. by Malcolm X, whom she had become friends with during his visit to Accra, to help her create the Organization of African Unity.She postpones meeting with Malcolm X for a month and visits her mother and brother in San Francisco. Malcolm X is assassinated two days later. Devastated and grief-stricken, she moves to Hawaii to be near her brother and to resume her singing and performing career, which she had given up before leaving for Africa several years earlier. She realizes, after seeing Della Reese perform, that she lacks the desire, commitment, and talent to be a singer. She instead returns to her writing career, but this time in Los Angeles instead of in New York City as she had earlier in her life. To earn extra money, Angelou becomes a market researcher in Watts and gets to know the neighborhood and its people. She witnesses the 1965 Watts Riots, knowing that doing so could lead to her arrest, and she is genuinely disappointed that it does not.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den_of_Thieves_(novel)"title="Den of Thieves (novel)">
In this third installment, Mr Sheridan, the theater owner decides that Drury Lane is in need of a refurbishing so he intends to close it down for a few years. Because of this, many of the servants and actors have to leave and find work elsewhere, including Cat. Later on, Cat meets Syd on her way to visit Frank and Lizzie, and he stops her for a chat. Syd reveals he is going to leave London on a boxing tour for a few months, which horrifies Cat.When she gets back Pedro tells her that when theatre closes he is going on tour around France with the Signor,and asks her where she'll be staying and Cat is too proud to ask anyone for help so she says she has a place to go to but doesn't specify a particular place.Then a messenger tells Cat that Billy Shepherd wants to see her and, remembering she is in debt to him from "Cat Among the Pigeons", she agrees to go. When she arrives she notices Billy has become considerably richer, as he has a vast jewel collection, a large gentleman's house with good-quality furniture and expensive clothes. Billy says to her that he wants her to get him the crown jewels and then she will no longer owe him anything. Cat doesn't want to agree, but he doesn't let her leave until she does, so she has no choice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_O'Nine_Tails_(novel)"title="Cat O'Nine Tails (novel)">
Since the events of "Den of Thieves", Cat has been living with Frank and Lizzie. She is very happy with them, and then Frank's cousin Mr Dixon arrives. He is very nice to Cat and suggests that they all go a ball, even though Cat isn't a royal.Cat gets a beautiful dress, but the ball turns out to be a disaster. Frank is very awkward and doesn't ask her to dance. Then Billy forces a kiss on her which both Frank and Mr Dixon witness. Mortified, they return home with Cat ashamed and upset. Frank tells her off for unladylike behavior, but they soon make up and go riding. They soon get a letter that their friend Syd has not returned home, and worried, they decide to check the docks for any sign of him. They are looking for a boat when they are savagely attacked by a press gang, who throw Frank, Pedro and Cat on board HMS "Courageous" and stab Mr Dixon in the stomach.On board Cat is forced to pretend to be a boy by a sailor named Maclean. He threatens Cat and makes her do a lot of chores. Meanwhile, Syd is also on board after being tricked by his manager. He is furious that his friends have also been captured, but there is nothing he can do. Then Cat asks him for a fight so the other sailors respect her more, but Syd refuses. However, he is pushed into it by the Captain and Cat taunts him desperate to be hit, and Syd finally punches her after she remarks that he is a rubbish kisser and Billy is better.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vault_(novel)"title="The Vault (novel)">
Reg and Dora Wexford have moved from Kingsmarkham to a renovated London Coachhouse owned by their daughter Sheila. Although Wexford has retired he acts as a consultant to a friend who works for the Metropolitan Police. Together they investigate the mystery of the remains of four bodies which have been discovered in Orcadia Cottage, an old house situated in the suburb of St. John's Wood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sing_You_Home"title="Sing You Home">
Zoe Baxter, a music therapist, and her husband, Max Baxter, have tried for a decade to have children, but it is revealed that they cannot have children because of fertility issues. Zoe has experienced multiple miscarriages, and she eventually learns that she suffers from polycystic ovary syndrome. On the other hand, Max learns that he has a genetic disease. Over the course of their marriage, they have tried five rounds of in vitro fertilization. After two miscarries, Zoe successfully becomes pregnant, but loses the baby in late pregnancy, during her baby shower no less, much to her great sorrow. Zoe and Max soon divorce because Max doesn't want Zoe to pressure him into trying again for a child. Sometime later, Zoe, has not recovered from the loss of another baby and the shock of the divorce. Max has since moved in with his brother, Reid, and his sister-in-law, Liddy. Reid and Liddy are devout Christians, who are also trying to have children, and have similarly experienced several miscarriages because of the Baxter family infertility issue. At the beginning, Max is hostile to Reid, Liddy, and their pastor's efforts to convert him to their religion, Evangelicalism, but he eventually warms up to the church and becomes a born-again Christian. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Heart_of_Jamaica"title="Black Heart of Jamaica">
Cat and Pedro decide to earn a living as a duet of acting and playing the violin, as Cat feels uncomfortable at living with Frank, Lizzie and Johnny without working, and Pedro decides to go with her. Syd is very upset at the prospect of Cat going away from him again but puts up with it for Cat's sake.In Jamaica, Cat and Pedro are disgusted to learn that slavery is still common and both are frightened and horrified when they discover that Pedro's former owner, Mr Hawkins is in Jamaica. Mr Hawkins thinks that slavery is lawful and fair, and he still believes that Pedro belongs to him. He taunts Cat after her performance on stage and then finally kidnaps her. At his plantation Cat falls ill with malaria and while she is still delusional and sick Billy rescues her. He forces her to buy a slave which Pedro is disgusted at, but he soon learns to forgive Cat. In the end Cat gets involved in a slave revolt but Pedro tells her to leave, while he will stay and help his fellow men gain their rights of freedom and equality. Cat is heartbroken to leave Pedro alone but she knows she must, so she and Billy leave together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragonfly_Pool"title="The Dragonfly Pool">
Talitha ('Tally') Hamilton is the daughter of the town's beloved doctor. Tally loves her life; she gets along with everyone. Following the outbreak of World War II, Tally is very upset to learn she will be sent to an English boarding school, Delderton, but does so at the request of her father. When Tally arrives at Delderton, she soon discovers that this school is like no other: the dancing teacher encourages them to be seeds busting into light, and the enigmatic biology teacher Matteo takes them for study walks at four in the morning. Tally soon settles in and makes plenty of friends, even organising a trip for her friends to attend a dancing festival in Bergania.Meanwhile, Prince Karil of Bergania is a lonely boy who wants to be normal and have friends. He hates wearing stuffy suits and attending so many formal celebrations. When Karil meets Tally at the Dragonfly Pool, his place of comfort and peace, the two immediately become friends. But when Karil's father the King is assassinated, Karil is forced to flee with Tally and the others to England. The King's assassination is revealed to have been planned by the Germans, and they invade and overtake Bergania.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_Wounds_(graphic_novel)"title="Exit Wounds (graphic novel)">
The book follows a search of a young woman, Numi, for her old lover, who disappeared just before a suicide bomb that left an unidentified body. Numi calls Koby, a cab-driver and the missing person's son, to help her in the search. "Exit Wounds" challenges the idea of the corrosive influence of the search for an ending.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talon_of_the_Silver_Hawk"title="Talon of the Silver Hawk">
Evil has come to a distant land high among the snow-capped mountains of Midkemia, as an exterminating army wearing the colors of the Duke of Olasko razes village after village, slaughtering men, women, and children without mercy. And when the carnage is done, only one survivor remains: a young boy named Kieli. A youth no longer, there is now but one road for him to travel: the path of vengeance. And he will not be alone. Under the tutelage of the rescuers who discovered him, Kieli will be molded into a sure and pitiless weapon. And he will accept the destiny that has been chosen for him . . . as Talon of the Silver Hawk.But the prey he so earnestly stalks is hunting him as well. And Talon must swear allegiance to a shadowy cause that already binds his mysterious benefactors - or his mission, his honor, and his life will be lost forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_Foxes"title="King of Foxes">
An exceptionally skilled swordsman, young Tal Hawkins was the only survivor of the massacre of his village - rescued, recruited, and trained by the mysterious order of magicians and spies, the Conclave of Shadows. Now one of the secret society's most valuable agents, he gains entrance into the court named Duke of Olasko, the bloodthirsty and powerful despot whose armies put Tal's village to the sword, by posing as a nobleman from the distant Kingdom of the Isles.But the enemy is cunning and well protected - in league with the foul necromancer Leso Varen, dark master of death-magic - and to gain the Duke's trust and confidence, Tal Hawkins must first sell his soul.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Dreams"title="Earth Dreams">
Shebat, a dream dancer, cruiser pilot and wife of the renegade second son of the Kerrion family merchant dynasty, must challenge the greatest empire in the universe to protect and save the magnificent, sentient, space-faring cruisers from destruction, while battling political intrigues continuing from the first two volumes of the series. She and her husband, Chaeron, solidify their relationship and finally learn to work toward the same goals – not power for power’s sake, but in order to allow beauty and harmony to flourish in the universe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Dancer"title="Dream Dancer">
Marada, renegade second son of the most powerful family in space, the Kerrions, both a corporation and a political entity, is saved from a mob by 16-year-old Shebat on a primitive Earth. In her debt, he allows her to accompany him into his high-tech world, adopting her, to protect her from a political purgatory. The Kerrions rule their merchant empire from their headquarters on Draconis. Marada becomes a political sacrifice to a rival family, the Labaya, marrying the rival's second daughter, Madel, and relinquishing his role as Shebat's protector. Shebat is kidnapped and becomes a Dream Dancer (an illegal practice, not necessarily approved by all as it can become addictive to its users) and acquires the ability to read the future. She is rescued by the third Kerrion son, Chaeron, whom she marries to avoid criminal charges. She and Chaeron work together sometimes, but also against each other and the family interests. Shebat must learn to deal with those who control the destiny of millions of people – and to whom treachery, betrayal and murder are part of doing business.The Kerrion Empire’s semi-sentient Cruisers fly through “sponge” space and give the Kerrions vast control over the majority of the civilizations encompassed by the Kerrion Empire. Against considerable odds, Shebat qualifies as a cruiser pilot, which involves interacting with the cruiser’s intelligence. In the midst of a family political crisis, certain members of the Kerrion Family see Chaeron’s new bride as a threat to their power and arrange for her to be sent back to Earth and stranded there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruiser_Dreams"title="Cruiser Dreams">
The Kerrions, rulers of the most far-reaching empire in the known universe, attempt to reclaim control of their empire while their renegade second son, Chaeron, retrieves Shebat, his wife, from Earth. As a qualified cruiser pilot, Shebat returns to claim her sentient cruiser and her place in the Kerrion dynasty against danger and numerous obstacles. The characters of Shebat and Chaeron, and their relationship, mature and become more complex as they adapt to each other and the circumstances they face in this second book in the series. Shebat becomes a staunch defender of the right of the space cruisers to develop their own intelligence, which threatens the control of the Kerrion Empire. The theory of “sponge” travel is explored more deeply. The story concludes in the third book, "Earth Dreams".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes_and_the_Man_from_Hell"title="Sherlock Holmes and the Man from Hell">
Philanthropist Lord Backwater is found dead on his property. The police surmise that Backwater came upon some poachers which led to his murder. Holmes discounts this solution and undertakes his own investigation which leads to a hidden history of Backwater's time spent in a prison settlement on Van Diemen's Land.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Couch_of_Silistra"title="High Couch of Silistra">
In "The High Couch of Silistra", Estri, Well-Keepress of Astria and holder of the ultimate seat of control begins an epic adventure to discover her origins and save the dwindling population.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Sword"title="The Golden Sword">
Estri, the Well-Keepress of Astria and High Couch of Silistra, the highest office in the land, has continued her quest to locate her god-like "Shaper" father to his home planet, Mi'ysten, where she is tested and shown to have inherited his powers.Following further training in the ability to manipulate time and probabilities with her mind, Estri is abruptly returned to Silistra after an absence of two local years. Many changes have taken place in the power vacuum her absence left and Estri must conquer her immediate captor, Chayin, Cahndor of the violent Parset desert tribes, in order to continue her quest to save the Silistran people who are dying out from infertility.The Parset tribes cultivate and grow the plants from which the costly longevity drugs sold throughout the Bipedal Federation are made. Renegade members of the Bipedal Federation offer proscribed hi-tech weapons to leaders of the warring tribes in exchange for exclusive access to the longevity drugs, assuring that tribe’s domination of the rest. Chayin rejects their offer, knowing it will end in the destruction of his people from greed and power. The BF keeps counting on at least one tribal leader's greed to eventually agree to accept their offer, allowing one tribe to conquer all others with off-world weapons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_from_the_Abyss"title="Wind from the Abyss">
"Wind From the Abyss" picks up approximately two years after the battle for Well Astria during which two Bipedal Federation ships and crew were destroyed accidentally. Khys, the “dharen” or ruler of Silistra for thousands of years, has captured Estri, Sereth and Chayin, taking them to his exclusive city/keep at the Lake of Horns. Before being captured by Khys, Estri, Sereth, a former Slayer turned renegade, and Chayin, Cahndor of a Parset desert tribe, form a triad of sexuality and power as foretold in an ancient prophecy that threatens Khys’ rule of the planet.Immediately after the Well Astria battle, Estri, Chayin and Sereth are captured by Khys, tyrant ruler of Silistra (“the dharen”) and held hostage for over 2 years. He knows these three are key in maintaining control of the planet. He has Estri's memories blocked so she will not attempt to wrest control from him; Estri's journey to understand her “Shaper” heritage is interrupted.Estri regains her memory after Khys’ council fails to get information locked in her mind by her father. Khys and Estri are taken to a planet to meet Estrazi (Estri's father) and Khystrai (Khys’ father) who tell Khys he must start over with this uninhabited planet because he has failed to govern Silistra well enough for the last 25,000 years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_Beach"title="Monkey Beach">
The story of "Monkey Beach" is relayed through the eyes of Lisamarie Hill, a feisty young woman. Lisamarie's brother, Jimmy, has gone missing at sea under questionable circumstances. Lisamarie reflects on profound events in her life, as she waits on news of her brother. Perhaps in reflecting on these formidable events, a new light will be shed on the ominous circumstances in her life, and within the community of Kitamaat. The introduction of various memorable characters allows the reader to fully grasp the richness of Lisamarie’s tale. Lisamarie possesses’ supernatural abilities, the ability to see and to communicate with other worldly beings. These abilities are a source of contention, yet they will eventually satiate the turmoil in her life. The struggle between the physical plane and the supernatural realm also correlate to a greater struggle between cultural identity and mainstream society. In all of this, Lisamarie is led on a journey to understand the disappearance of her brother, and come to terms with her identity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curious_George_Learns_the_Alphabet"title="Curious George Learns the Alphabet">
George curiously looks at the little black marks, dots, and lines in the Man with the Yellow Hat's books, and starts tearing some pages. When the Man returns, he pushes George around scolding him. If George wants to read a story, he first has to know the letters of the alphabet. The man then sets up a pad and begins to write each of the letters from the alphabet as well as drawing a picture for each letter (capital and lowercase letter) of the alphabet, correlating to the letter each individual picture starts with.The man tells George he now has three letters: A, B, and C. With three letters, George can make a word, the first word he can read himself: cab. George knows what a cab is since the man once took him for a ride in a cab. The man and George then draw the next few letters.After learning seven letters, the man writes the words that make up these letters down: Dad, Ed, bad, bag, cage, bed, and feed. The man then tells George to read them while he gets him his lunch. However, when the man comes back with George's lunch, he unpleasantly catches George wearing the alphabet chart around his neck. When he sees George's mischief, the man (despite impressed about the seven real words George had made) scolds George. The man says that even though George knows these words, the only word he also can read is "bad". The man then decides they've had enough for one morning. He will feed George now and let him take his nap, before they go on with the letters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Loup_blanc"title="Le Loup blanc">
Nicolas Treml de La Tremlays is a pro-independence Breton lord. He decides to go and fight in duel with Philippe II, Duke of Orléans: if he wins Brittany will be free, but if he loses he will be sentenced for crime of lèse-majesté. Before he leaves Brittany, he makes an agreement with his cousin Hervé de Vaunoy so that his grandson Georges Treml will not be deprived of his possession.But Georges is just a five-year-old child and Nicolas is put in the Bastille with his servant Jude Leker. In Brittany Hervé tries to drown the boy but an albino peasant called Jean Blanc rescues him. Georges disappears however.About twenty years later in 1740, the Breton forest of Rennes has become the "Wolves"'den: the Wolves are poor peasants who want to take revenge of the lords who oppress them. Their leader is called the White Wolf. A young officer of the King, Captain Didier, is sent out to bring them to heel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Faith_Collaboration"title="Good Faith Collaboration">
The book is composed of 8 chapters with a foreword by Lawrence Lessig.The book opens with Chapter 1, "Nazis and Norms", which provides an overview of the text, and the author's methodology. In Chapter 2, "The Pursuit of the Universal Encyclopedia", Reagle explores the history of encyclopedias and of community collaboration, focusing on the 20th century onward. Reagle mentions specific examples such as H.G. Wells' "World Brain", Paul Otlet's Universal Repository, and the collaborative practices of Quakers.Chapter 3, "Good Faith Collaboration", and Chapter 4, "The Puzzle of Openness", begin the ethnographic parts of the book. They discuss reasons why Wikipedia has met its intended purpose; these reasons include the effects of the project's core policies, such as , , and , all made possible due to the "good faith", represented by virtues such as "assuming the best of others, patience, civility, and humor". The book's title itself alludes to the Wikipedia policy "" (AGF); Reagle argues that this policy has been a key to the Wikipedia project's success. Chapter 4 also addresses issues of licensing, as well as whether everything on Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, and the options for those who disagree (such as forking).The next two chapters focus on the decision-making process within Wikipedia. Chapter 5, "The Challenges of Consensus", discusses the nature of consensus decision making within Wikipedia. Chapter 6, "The Benevolent Dictator", discusses the role of Jimbo Wales, the project's co-founder, as well as other less famous elements of Wikipedia's hierarchy, such as administrators, the Arbitration Committee, and the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exile's_Return"title="Exile's Return">
Kaspar, former Duke of Olasko, finds himself alone and without provisions on the continent of Novindus on the other side of the world after being removed from power by the Conclave of Shadows (in "King of Foxes", the preceding novel). His desire for revenge must be put aside as he struggles to survive in a harsh unfamiliar land. He happens upon a farm, where his only choice is to work for food and shelter. As he is no longer under the magical influence of Leso Varen, the evil necromancer who had manipulated him while in Olasko, he begins to show compassion, and atone for his past deeds.Kaspar later joins a band of traders who have been cursed with transporting a mysterious magical suit of seemingly invulnerable animated armor, which will not allow them to leave it. Kaspar discovers the armor's origin, and is tasked with returning it across the vast ocean to the Conclave, once his enemies, now his only hope to help prevent the world's destruction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medusa_Plot"title="The Medusa Plot">
At 8:42 EST, across various time zones, Fiske Cahill, Reagan Holt, Natalie Kabra, Nellie Gomez, Alistair Oh, Ted Starling, and Phoenix Wizard are kidnapped.In Attleboro, Amy and Dan are on their school bus when a truck suddenly blocks their way. As the students get off the bus, masked men attack Amy and Dan. Amy fights them off; Dan runs off but returns with oil, and after threatening to burn the men, they run away, leaving Amy with a cellphone.They return home, where McIntyre informs the siblings of the seven earlier kidnappings. Amy then receives a text informing her that she must go to Florence and await further instruction or one hostage will die. Amy addresses the Cahill family via her command center, promising to stop the Vesper while keeping the hostages alive. She calls for Ian Kabra and Sinead Starling to watch the Command Center, while Hamilton Holt and Jonah Wizard meet her in Italy.In Florence, Amy receives another text commanding they steal Caravaggio's Medusa from the Uffizi. They succeed and get the painting to the Vespers. However, within minutes, Amy receives a text informing her that the painting the Vespers received was a fake. Vesper One gives Amy 96 hours to turn in the real one, or a hostage will die. As motivation, he shoots Nellie in the shoulder. The four begin researching the painting and the museum, discovering there was one time where it left the gallery. Art collector Gregor Tobin was involved, and the four conclude it's still with him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&quot;V&quot;_Is_for_Vengeance"title="&quot;V&quot; Is for Vengeance">
For the fourth straight novel in the Alphabet Mystery series, the viewpoint alternates between Millhone and other characters, principally Nora Vogelsang and Lorenzo Dante. The opening chapter, however, is told from the perspective of a well-to-do young man, Phillip Lanahan, who borrows money from Dante, misses the payback date, and then loses it playing poker in Las Vegas. Dante and his brother Cappi show up, and Dante agrees to take Phillip's Porsche as satisfaction of the debt. However, after Dante sends Phillip and Cappi up to look at the car, Cappi has thugs throw Phillip off the top of the parking garage to his death.In the main storyline, Millhone witnesses a woman shoplifting with a confederate inside the department store Nordstrom's. She tells a nearby clerk, who alerts store security, and they capture and arrest the woman, named Audrey, before she can escape. While this is going on, Millhone follows her confederate and is almost run over by her in the parking garage. Right after her release from jail, Audrey apparently commits suicide. Shortly thereafter, Millhone runs into a former boyfriend in the police department, Cheney Phillips, who is out for the evening with a vice officer, Len Priddy, and his much-younger girlfriend, Abbey. Len Priddy was a friend of Millhone's first husband and is a longtime enemy of hers. Priddy mocks the theory that Audrey was part of a shoplifting ring, but Audrey's boyfriend hires Millhone to investigate that theory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel)"title="The Three-Body Problem (novel)">
During the Cultural Revolution, Ye Wenjie, an astrophysics graduate from Tsinghua University, witnesses her father get beaten to death during a struggle session by Red Guards from Tsinghua High School, who were supported by Ye's mother and younger sister. Ye is officially branded a traitor and is forced to join a labor brigade in Inner Mongolia, where she befriends a government journalist who enlists Ye's help in transcribing a letter to the government. The letter details policy suggestions based on the book "Silent Spring", which Ye read. However, the journalist betrays Ye, who is sentenced to prison after the letter is viewed as seditious by the government. In prison, Ye is recruited by Yang Weining and Lei Zhicheng, two military physicists working under Red Coast, a secret Chinese initiative to use high-powered radio waves to damage spy satellites. After working with them for some time, she learns that the stated purpose is a front for Red Coast's true intention: the search for extraterrestrial life. Ye discovers the possibility of amplifying outgoing radio waves by using microwave cavities within the sun and sends an interstellar message. Eight years later, now in a loveless marriage with Yang, Ye receives a message from a concerned alien pacifist from the planet Trisolaris, warning her not to respond or else the inhabitants of Trisolaris will find and invade Earth. The alien describes Trisolaris's environmental conditions and societal history. Disillusioned by the political chaos and having come to despise humankind, Ye responds anyway, inviting them to come to Earth to settle its problems. She murders Yang and Lei to keep the alien message secret.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Can_Say_You_Knew_Me_When"title="You Can Say You Knew Me When">
A thirty-something San Francisco gay radio journalist Jamie Garner reluctantly returns to his childhood home of Greenlawn, New Jersey, and discovers secrets from his dead father's sexual past, including photos with a friend actor Dean Foster and entourage of Jack Kerouac all covered by a 40-year secrecy. Upon his return to San Francisco, Jamie though trying desperately to maintain a monogamous relationship with his venture-capitalist boyfriend Woody, falls into a series of promiscuous relations after a hurried sexual encounter with a man in the rest room of Newark airport. For all his faults, Jamie, a sympathetic, often frustrating character tries to make peace with his father's deep-seated prejudices toward his sexuality and come to terms with his father's mysterious long-ago alternative life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Cup"title="The Blue Cup">
The protagonist and his six-year-old daughter Svetlana arrive at a dacha in playful moods, but their (respective) wife and mother Marusya has other ideas: she burdens them with petty tasks, then departs (apparently in a sulk) to accompany her old friend, a pilot, to the station. Next morning, before going uptown, she blames her husband and daughter for breaking her blue cup in a store-room. Taking this unjust accusation as a proverbial last straw, both leave the house and embark upon an eventful and chaotic day-long "adventure". It involves pacifying the two boys (one of whom accuses another of being 'a fascist' for using an insult word 'jidovka' with regards to a Jewish girl), walking straight into a military exercise site with a lot of shooting going on, losing their stock of gingerbread to a four-year old, but getting a kitten from him as a reward, and near-drowning in a marsh. They return home at dusk, find Marusya worried and happy to see them and spend a lovely evening, with Svetlana (who initially expressed pessimism on that point) admitting that "life's a good thing, after all". The mystery of a blue cup's demise remains, though, unsolved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackberry_Wine"title="Blackberry Wine">
Writer Jay Mackintosh is suffering from writer's block. Having reached his artistic zenith with the award-winning 'Jackapple Joe', a novel published 10 years ago, he has failed to duplicate his earlier success, and now writes second-rate science-fiction novels under a pseudonym. He lives in London with his ambitious girlfriend, Kerry, and teaches creative writing to vapid young students whilst living on his dwindling reputation."Jackapple Joe", Jay's only best-seller, was a nostalgic retelling of Jay's childhood summers in the Yorkshire town of Kirby Monckton. It is a coming-of-age story, describing how Jay was befriended, following his parents' divorce, by an eccentric old man called Joseph Cox, a gardener, poet and everyday magician, with whom he was to forge a unique relationship. "Blackberry Wine" acquaints readers with Joe through flashbacks as, now aged 37 and feeling increasingly unfulfilled, Jay revisits his childhood haunts and discovers a box of Joe's "Specials", bottles of home-made wine that may hold the key to Joe's unexplained disappearance.Under the influence of this magical home-brew, Jay finds himself behaving in a more and more erratic way. He buys a house he has never seen in the French village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes and moves there, ostensibly to write, but in reality to escape from Kerry, the pressures of fame and the expectations of his public.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_Before_Dawn"title="Darkness Before Dawn">
Eighteen-year-old Keisha Montgomery is still recovering from the suicide of her ex-boyfriend, Andy, after she broke up with him. While having the support of her friends and family, she starts to go out. She joins the track team and there meets Jonathan Hathaway, the twenty-three-year-old coach, and principal's son. During a track meeting, a girl named Rita begins arguing with Jonathan. He denies what they were talking about and after shouting some choice curse words, she runs into the woods, never to return to school.Over time, he begins to smooth talk her and they finally become a couple. Her parents disapprove of him being five years older and forbid her to see him. Against their wishes, she continues to see him discreetly. Her friends attempt to warn her about his true ways but she refuses to listen to them. Leon Hawkins, a friend with feelings for Keisha, also tries to warn her.Ignoring everyone's warnings, she uses Leon to cover up her tracks when Jonathan asks her to the Valentine's dance. After the dance, Jonathan takes Keisha to his apartment and he attempts to engage in a sexual moment with her. After seeing her refusal to 'cooperate', Jonathan attempts to force her with a knife. Keisha cuts him and eventually manages to escape. She seeks the help of a homeless woman named Edna who sees her running in the snow. She takes Keisha in and gives Keisha a phone to call her parents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Calpurnia_Tate"title="The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate">
In the summer of 1899, Calpurnia Virginia Tate is about to turn twelve and worries about the adult responsibilities that loom on the horizon. She would much rather swim in the river near her family's pecan plantation just outside the tiny town of Fentress, Texas than learn to cook, knit, and play the piano. One day, noticing two different types of grasshoppers in the lawn around the house, Callie finally decides to find a copy of Charles Darwin's infamous book "The Origin of Species". After a disastrous encounter with a lady librarian, Callie is forced to search for the illicit book elsewhere. Little does she know that there is a copy in her very own house in the personal library of her Granddaddy. An imposing and distant figure, Callie must work up her courage to ask him about her grasshopper conundrum and relay her own theory about why the grasshoppers around the house are two different sizes. This begins an easy sort of friendship between granddaughter and grandfather. Soon Callie is spending most of her time with Granddaddy, catching specimens of wildlife for his collection and learning about natural sciences at his side.When she is not tramping and trapping with Granddaddy, Callie finds herself sadly incapable at the skills her mom so desperately tries to teach her. She can't cook anything other than soft-boiled eggs and cheese sandwiches. Her needlepoint is "straggly and pitiful." Her piano-playing, while adequate, is unexceptional. All of this is painfully obvious to poor Callie when she is compared to her best friend Lula. Lula is a perfect lady, excelling at all of the pursuits at which Callie fails so miserably. In fact, her proper ladylike demeanor has three of Callie's six brothers falling in love with her during the course of the summer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felicia's_Journey"title="Felicia's Journey">
Felicia, an eighteen-year-old girl from a small town in rural Ireland, finds herself pregnant. The father is Johnny Lysaght, a young man from the same town now supposedly working in the English Midlands. Felicia wants to contact him, but doesn't have his address, and her attempts to obtain it are thwarted. Felicia's father (a staunch Irish republican) is deeply distrustful of Johnny, who is rumoured to have joined the British Army. Without telling anyone, and having stolen some money from her great-grandmother, Felicia sets off for England in search of Johnny.All she knows is that Johnny works in the stores of a lawn mower factory in a certain town north of Birmingham. However, when she reaches the town, nobody knows of any such factory. At one factory where she makes enquiries, she encounters Joseph Hilditch, a middle-aged and overweight catering manager. They later meet again, seemingly by chance: in fact he has started to follow her. He offers suggestions to help her in her search, none of which are productive. He then suggests investigating a factory in another town, and offers her a lift there: he says that he has to drive his wife to a hospital appointment nearby. Felicia reluctantly accepts the offer. On the day, Hilditch explains the absence of his wife (who does not in fact exist) by saying that her operation had been brought forward, and that he had taken her to the hospital the previous evening. The factory proves to be another dead end. While Felicia is out of the car, Hilditch searches her bags and takes her reserve of money.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_Switch"title="Mind Switch">
In the year 2002, the Berlin Zoo acquires a new specimen: "Fritz", a biped from "Brecht's planet". Fritz is intelligent, and his keepers treat him with a mix of courtesy and disdain; he is kept in a display with another (presumably female) biped and the two are required to work for a living, transcribing tapes made by explorers to their planet. One day, Martin Naumchik, a human male, is visiting the zoo when his personality and that of the biped are interchanged. The switch is the unintended consequence of an experiment in time travel that takes place at another location. The remainder of the story follows the two characters as they come to terms with their new bodies and new feelings. Martin quickly becomes aware of the degradation of being a zoo animal, while Fritz is forced to cope with life in a confusing and threatening alien society. Martin tries, and fails, to convince his captors that he is imprisoned in the biped's body; the biped, in Martin's body, eventually comes into contact with Martin's colleagues and his lover, and manages to continue with Martin's life.The novel also deals wryly with the theme of sexual identity. Because Fritz is provided with inguinal glands resembling a human male's, he is presumed to be male. But it turns out that the organ has nothing to do with reproduction: Fritz is a female, and the smaller primate with whom he shares a cage is a male. To reproduce, the female aggressively bites off an egglike knob from the male's forehead containing the semen. Martin (in Fritz's body), and the reader, only learn this at the end of the novel, when he is overcome by passion and commits the act.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_Eve_at_Friday_Harbor"title="Christmas Eve at Friday Harbor">
Set in Friday Harbor, the novel opens with a prologue that features six-year-old Holly Nolan’s letter to Santa Claus, asking for a mother for Christmas. Following the death of Holly’s mother, Victoria Nolan, Holly is placed in the care of her uncle, Mark Nolan. Holly does not speak following her mother’s death, until she meets Maggie Conroy, a widow and the owner of a toy store, with whom Holly develops a connection. Mark, who learns of Holly’s Christmas wish, feels the need to find a mother for her. Despite being in a relationship, Mark is attracted to Maggie, while Maggie, despite her attraction to Mark, feels that she does not have enough to give to someone else since her husband’s death. The novel follows the developing relationship between Maggie and Mark, as well as their relationship with Holly, culminating on Christmas Eve.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inamorata_(novel)"title="Inamorata (novel)">
"Inamorata" follows Martin Finch, a young college student from Harvard University and member of Scientific American, that is set to investigate Mina Crawley, a socialite and alleged spiritualist. Finch is sure that he will find proof that Crawley is a fraud but instead finds himself smitten with the beautiful young woman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drop_(Connelly_novel)"title="The Drop (Connelly novel)">
The book was mentioned in a February 2011 interview, where Connelly explained that Bosch would be "handling two cases at once, a cold case that turns hot and the politically charged investigation into the death of a city councilman's son. The city councilman happens to be Harry's old nemesis, Irvin Irving."Bosch and his partner David Chu are working in the Open-Unsolved unit of the LAPD's homicide squad handling cold cases. Based on a new analysis of old physical evidence, they are assigned to investigate the 1989 murder of college student Lily Price who was strangled to death, probably with a belt. DNA from a small blood smear on her body is matched to recently-paroled child sex abuser Clayton Pell. However Pell was only eight years old when Price died, all but eliminating him as a suspect in the murder and raising the possibility of contamination at the crime lab. Bosch and Chu track Pell to a halfway house for sex offenders, where they meet therapist Hannah Stone. Due to his experience with sexual homicides Bosch is initially dismissive of Stone's professional efforts. However, he soon reconsiders and decides Stone's attempts to help offenders reduce their recidivism rate is a worthwhile career. Pell agrees to an interview, reporting that during his childhood his mother dated a man known as "Chill" who sexually abused him and beat him with a belt -- accounting for the transfer of his blood to Price's body. Bosch and Stone are attracted to each other, and begin a romantic relationship, much to the approval of Bosch's teenage daughter Maddie. After years of living alone, Bosch gained custody of Maddie after her mother's death. She demonstrates keen observational skills and expresses an interest in being a police officer. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oru_Desathinte_Katha"title="Oru Desathinte Katha">
The story revolves around a boy named Sreedharan who was a resident of the village of Athiranippadam. The story depicts the life of the villagers through the views of "Sreedharan" also through the other characters. The novel is set in British India where the protagonist was born and tells the stories of the people around Sreedharan's entire life.The novel begins with Steedharan's return to Athiranippadam after some 40 + years he left his home suburbs.He is dropped out from a public transport near a huge petrol overhead tank,which is situated on the plot where his teenage love's house was situated,from where he as the protogonist takes the readers to the exact life of dwellers of Athiranippadam,and Sreedharan is the story teller.The novel is devided into 5 parts,narrating the childhood,teenage and early youth of him and a concluding part as "marmarangal" the story told by Velu Mooper,a history telling witness after Sreedharan left that place after his father's demise and a long spell of his solo trips to North India,Africa and Europe.He meets with several persons,by whom,deep impressions of variable human states of life is etched on his memory!Emma of Switzerland,The Bengali Babu,His half brother,Kunhappu,Gopalettan,his half brother,who made the life miserable by contracting Syphilis,the mother goddess psyche of his Tamil Brahmin lady who happens to be his admiration,the one side love of a girl,who died of TB,Supper Circuit Set pranks, lost loves,severe solitude he faced,his father's legendary life at the village,who passed away with the grief that Sreedharan failed to fullfill his dreams,and finally his long journey through defferent continents,which began as a final one,he started by dropping his widowed mother at her father's home,"at first to Elanhippoyil,to drop mother there,and then to Bombay,a solitary voyage,and from there to the vast bewildering world" as SKP's own words!!A haunting auto biographical novel,detailing some 60 years of history of a locale, which contains history, nostalgia, plight,dreams,and finally, numbness created by life situations of a Man!The novel ends with a monologue"forgive me,the representative of the new generation of Athiranippadam, Forgive me for my trespass to your land,and consider me as just an antique collector,a non native person!!!"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponniyin_Selvan"title="Ponniyin Selvan">
The story revolves around Vandiyathevan, a charming, brave and brilliant young man who sets out across the Chola land to deliver a message from the Crown Prince Aditya Karikalan to the King and the Princess. The story shuttles between Vandiyathevan's travels in Chola country and the young Prince Arulmozhivarman's (later known as Raja Raja Chola) travels in Sri-Lanka. The narrative deals with attempts by his sister Kundavai to bring back Arulmozhivarman to establish political peace in a land seemingly beset with unrest and civil war plotted by vassals and petty chieftains.Parantaka Chola was succeeded by his second son Gandaraditya as the first son Rajaditya had died in a battle. At the time of Gandaraditya's death, his son Maduranthaka was a two-year-old child and hence Gandaraditya’s brother Arinjaya ascended the throne. After Arinjaya’s death, his son Parantaka II (Sundara Chola) was crowned. He had two sons, Adithya Karikalan, Arulmozhivarman, and a daughter named Kundavai.When the story begins, the emperor Sundara Chola is ill and bedridden. His son Aditya Karikalan is the general of the Northern Command and lives in Kanchi. The younger son Arulmozhivarman (who would be famous later as Raja Raja Chola I) is in Sri-Lanka in battle. Their sister Kundavai Piratti lives in the Chola royal household at Pazhayarai.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Land_of_Painted_Caves"title="The Land of Painted Caves">
In this three-part book, Ayla is 20 (in part 1), about 23 (in part 2) and 26 (in part 3) and is training to become a spiritual leader for the Zelandonii. Most of the first and second parts of the book involve Ayla's acolyte training to become Zelandoni. The third part of the book contains most of the action of the story and plot line.In the first part, Ayla is at a Summer Meeting and she begins to learn what an acolyte does. Ayla and the First decide to start Ayla's Donier Tour - a tour of the sacred caves in the wider region. Jondalar, Jonayla, their animals and many others decide to travel. The second part is mainly about the caves they visit. In many of the Sacred caves the Ancients, the people before the Zelandonii, left drawings. Ayla meets many other Zelandoni and one of them gives her a pouch of dried herbs smelling faintly of mint. Ayla also discovers that the Clan visit some of the sacred caves as well.In the third part of the book, Ayla is marking the passage of the sun and moon's phases as part of her training as an acolyte. One night she is distracted and decides to share Pleasures with Jondalar, starting a baby. However, most of her Cave leaves for the Summer Meeting, but Ayla stays behind until Midsummer so she can finish her observation of the celestial bodies. During this time she takes care of Marthona, her mother-in-law, as well as the others in her Cave. One night Ayla makes some mint tea, actually the dried herb mixture given to her in the second part of the book, and is Called. If an acolyte is Called, then she will be tested by the Zelandonia, and initiated into the Zelandonia if the Calling is true. Ayla puts down her drink and runs along a river into a cave, where she spends the next three days hallucinating. Wolf wakes her from her visions, and she finds herself in the dark cave. She allows Wolf to lead her out of the cave, but not before finding a bag hidden there by Madroman, an unskilled acolyte who faked his Calling, and who has had a deep-seated hatred of Jondalar since adolescence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guernsey_Literary_and_Potato_Peel_Pie_Society"title="The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society">
In January 1946, 32-year-old Juliet Ashton embarks on a cross-country tour across England to promote her latest book. Written under her pen-name Izzy Bickerstaff, the book is a compilation of comedic columns she wrote about life during World War II. Despite the fact that she was initially contracted to write another Izzy Bickerstaff book, Juliet writes to her publisher that she wants to retire the pseudonym. On her tour, Juliet is greeted with flowers from the mysterious Markham V. Reynolds, Jr. Her best friend and publisher, Sidney, warns Juliet that Mark is a wealthy American trying to establish a publishing empire and looking to poach her. Reynolds makes it clear that he is a fan, and she and Reynolds soon begin dating.Juliet receives a letter from Dawsey Adams, a complete stranger from Guernsey who has come into possession of her copy of "Essays of Elia" and who wants to know more about the author, Charles Lamb. Juliet helps to send him further books by Lamb. She is also intrigued that Adams is part of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and inquires about the group's name.After learning that the society began as a cover for residents breaking curfew during the German occupation of Guernsey, Juliet begins a correspondence with several members of the Society, hoping to work them into an article she is writing on the benefits of literature for "The Times Literary Supplement". Mark proposes as Juliet is preparing to leave for Guernsey and she delays giving an answer, not wanting to repeat the error of her previous engagement. Juliet also learns that Elizabeth McKenna, the Society's beloved founder, was arrested and sent to a prison in France by the Germans and has yet to return home. The members of the Society are raising her child, Kit, among themselves until Elizabeth returns.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facino_Cane_(short_story)"title="Facino Cane (short story)">
"Facino Cane" is told in the first person by an unnamed narrator. It concerns a blind old man named Marco-Facino Cane, called "Father Canet", who claims to be a descendant of the 14th century condottiere of the same name. Father Canet is a pensioner in the and a clarionet-player. The narrator meets Facino Cane at the wedding celebration of his maid's sisters. His interest being piqued by the appearance of the old man, the narrator begins a conversation with him, and Facino Cane mentions being from Venice. When the narrator then mentions he would like to visit Venice, Facino Cane begs to be taken there. He then tells the story of his life and how he lost his status and money and became blind. The narrator promised to take Facino Cane with him to Venice some day, but the old man died that winter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Success_(novel)"title="Success (novel)">
"Success" tells the story of two foster brothers—Terence Service and Gregory Riding, narrating alternate sections—and their exchange of position during one calendar year as each slips towards, and away from, success.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maker_of_Universes"title="The Maker of Universes">
The story follows Robert Wolff, a man disenchanted with his life and his marriage. One day, while looking at a new house, Wolff discovers a strange horn in the basement. Blowing the horn, Wolff is transported to a strange new world, the World of Tiers. Wolff finds himself initially in an edenic paradise known as Okeanos. This region is the first level of the planet, which contains a number of tiers like a wedding cake, separated by vast mountain ranges. The entire planet is ruled over by a cruel and mysterious lord named Jadawin, who created it. Okeanos consists of a beach, an ocean, and a small forest and is populated by nymph like humans who originated in and near ancient Greece. In this new world, Wolff regains his youth and vigor and falls in love with a local woman named Chryseis who lived in Troy at the time of the Trojan War.When Chryseis is kidnapped, Wolff follows after her, climbing to the next level of the world, Amerind, a plains region populated by Native Americans and centaurs. Along the way he is joined by the adventurer Kickaha, who had also come from Earth, where he was known as Paul Janus Finnegan, some time ago. The two continue their adventure as they ascend the various levels of the World of Tiers including the medieval Dracheland and the jungle Atlantis. When they finally make it to the palace of Jadawin they make a shocking discovery; Robert Wolff is Lord Jadawin, who lost his memory after being defeated by another lord, and ended up stranded on Earth. At the end, Wolff/Jadawin is reunited with Chryseis and restored to his rightful place as ruler of the World of Tiers, his experiences as a human on Earth having tempered his previous cruelty.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Big_to_Fail_(book)"title="Too Big to Fail (book)">
The book provides an overview of the financial crisis of 2007–08 from the beginning of 2008 to the decision to create the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The book tells the story from the perspectives of the leaders of the major financial institutions and the main regulatory authorities, describing in a very detailed manner their everyday discussions and decisions during that difficult period.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Duchesse_de_Langeais"title="La Duchesse de Langeais">
General Armand de Montriveau, a war hero, is enamored of Duchess Antoinette de Langeais, a coquettish, married noblewoman who invites him to a ball but ultimately refuses his sexual advances and then disappears. Assisted by the powerful group known as The Thirteen, who subscribe to an occult form of freemasonry, General Montriveau finds the duchess in a Spanish monastery of Discalced Carmelites under the name of Sister Theresa.Dedicated to Franz Liszt, this portrait of a vain representative of the noble families of Faubourg Saint-Germain, was inspired by the Laure Junot with whom Balzac had a failed romance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluny_Brown_(novel)"title="Cluny Brown (novel)">
The story follows the escapades of a plumber's niece, Cluny Brown, who is twenty years old in England in 1938. Cluny has high spirits and a constant desire for expansion of experience that leads the more staid members of her community to question whether she knows her place. As a consequence of one final London based excursion of discovery outside the bounds of what Cluny's mentors consider proper, she is sent off into good service with a charming country residence known as Friars Carmel to be a Tall Parlour Maid. The coincidental simultaneous arrivals of the young son and heir of the house, a mysterious Polish professor, and a beautiful socialite add complexity to this adventurous tale of a young woman following her dreams and finding her personal freedom in the tumultuous early 20th century.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beasts_of_Clawstone_Castle"title="The Beasts of Clawstone Castle">
Madlyn and Rollo live with their parents in a ground-floor flat in south London. Mrs Hamilton runs a theatre where the plays keep running out of money, and Mr Hamilton is a designer and helps people with their houses. Madlyn is very attractive and has many friends. She has fair hair, blue eyes and a deep laugh, and likes parties and sleepovers. Rollo is two years younger and likes animals and insects. He has an adopted skink at London Zoo called Stumpy. Madlyn is helpful to her brother and mother, who is usually frantic and forgets things like car keys.At the beginning of the summer term, Mr Hamilton receives a large offer from an American college (which the family needs) to spend two months in New York setting up a business course in design. The parents cannot take the children but decide to go to America, sending Madlyn and Rollo to stay with their Uncle George and Aunt Emily (sister and brother) at Clawstone Castle on the Scottish border. Madlyn is shocked at Clawstone's appearance. When she meets her Uncle and Aunt she is uncertain.George and his sister Emily wake early on Saturdays for that is when the castle is open to the public. George's hair is sparse and he wears a mustard-coloured tweed suit. Howard Percival, their cousin, is very shy, never comes out of his room, and is frightened of anyone he has not known for the last twenty years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrivener's_Moon"title="Scrivener's Moon">
In a future land once known as Britain, nomad tribes are preparing to fight a terrifying enemy - the first-ever mobile city. Before London can launch itself, young engineer Fever Crumb must journey to the wastelands of the North. She seeks the ancient birthplace of the Scriven mutants.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Days"title="Cold Days">
As the story begins, Harry is in Arctis Tor where he is nursed back to health by Sarissa, a member of the Winter Court and a servant of Mab, the Winter Queen. His recovery culminates in a Winter Court party, serving both as an introduction of the new Winter Knight and as Harry's surprise birthday party. During the party he is set up by Maeve, the Winter Lady, who sets a number of events in motion in an attempt to kill him. With help from Sarissa and advice from Kris Kringle, he defeats Maeve's minions and asserts himself as the Winter Knight before the entire Winter Court. Mab, quite satisfied at this outcome, gives Harry his first mission as the new Winter Knight: Kill Maeve.Harry returns to Chicago and consults Bob, to find out how to go about killing an immortal. Bob is initially reluctant to give out such dangerous information, but eventually tells Harry that immortals can be killed during certain conjunctions, such as on Earth on Halloween night, the day after tomorrow. Harry meets up with Molly, who informs him that energy is growing on Demonreach and she thinks it might explode. He travels to the island and speaks to the spirit of Demonreach, learning that the island is a prison which was created by Merlin himself to contain a massive number of various unspeakable supernatural horrors. Because of his connection to the island, he is now the prison's de facto Warden. The island is under attack, and if the attack is not stopped, the prison's fail-safe will trigger, releasing enough magical energy to destroy the prison as well as level a significant portion of the Midwest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_(Morris_novel)"title="Threshold (Morris novel)">
In a futuristic world, Earth is now a preserve. A captain is transported 500 years into the future and onto Threshold, which is a space habitat. Here he meets with the daughter of a Muslim leader, one of many who are being kept from their travel to Mecca.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_I_Loved"title="What I Loved">
"What I Loved" opens with a painting of a woman 'wearing only a man's T-shirt', with the artist's shadow across the canvas. The protagonist, art historian Leon Hertzberg (Leo), purchases the painting and some time afterwards befriends the artist, Bill Wechsler. Bill is, at this stage, an unknown artist, though as the novel progresses, so too does his career in the New York art scene. This is in part due to Leo's writing, which brings Bill's work into the public eye. Bill is married to Lucille, a highly strung poet, and Leo is married to Erica, a literary academic. The two couples become close and move into the same apartment block. Erica and Lucille fall pregnant around the same time and have sons, Mathew and Mark. The first half of the novel explores their quiet, domestic lives, through the eyes of Leo. Lucille and Bill separate after he forms a relationship with Violet, the model who posed for the painting which opens the text.The opening of part "Two" of the novel is described by Robert Birnbaum, in an interview with the author, as like a punch in the face and the pace of the novel accelerates after this point. Leo and Erica's son, Mathew, dies suddenly. Grief-stricken, Leo eventually loses Erica, who moves away for distance as well as work. Leo forms a close relationship with Bill's son Mark. Mark is, however, an insincere and somewhat amoral character, and a pattern is repeated between the two, of trust and betrayal, until Leo and the reader realise Mark is probably not capable of affection.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Day_for_Up!"title="Great Day for Up!">
The narrator says that today is a good day for things to go up. As more things are described as getting up, at the very end, the narrator is revealed to be a boy who does not "want" to get up and wants to sleep in. This ending would later be expanded into "I Am Not Going to Get Up Today!".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_American_Demon"title="An American Demon">
The plot partially revolves around the author's life, but also delves into side topics such as religion and politics.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maisie_Dobbs_(novel)"title="Maisie Dobbs (novel)">
Maisie becomes a maid at the Belgravia Mansion of Lady Rowan Compton in 1910 at thirteen years old, after her mother dies, and she must help her father make ends meet. Soon after getting caught in Lady Compton's library fulfilling her joy of reading and learning, Maisie is introduced to Maurice Blanche, close friend of the Comptons, and becomes his pupil. Blanche, a discreet investigator, teaches Maisie as much as he can about psychology, science, and anything else Maisie is willing to learn. When Maisie becomes old enough she attends Girton College at Cambridge University, but threats of war soon intervene. World War I intensifies, and the pressures of war can be felt in Maisie's England. Deciding that the war efforts are extremely important to her and her country, Maisie volunteers as a nurse at the front, where she meets a young man, with whom she falls in love. Part of the mystery surrounding Maisie is what happens to the young man.After the war, Maisie apprentices with Blanche in his investigative work. In 1929, after Blanche has retired, Maisie opens her own investigation business. Her first seemingly open-and-shut case involves her in a mystery surrounding something known as The Retreat, a suspicious home for veterans of the war. Maisie must act fast when she learns that Lady Compton's own son has signed over his fortune to The Retreat and is about to take asylum there. With the help of Billy Beale, a caretaker at her office and veteran of the Great War himself, she is able to infiltrate The Retreat. As Maisie uncovers the mystery of The Retreat she is also confronted with her own ghosts from the war after ten years of holding the memories at bay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JJ_Halo"title="JJ Halo">
The plot revolves around a normal ten-year-old girl who one day discovers her parents are spies and that she, in turn, is a "spyling" (a young spy). She is introduced to the secret spy organization, "Silggem", which is commanded by the mysterious Director C. Each book involves her being sent on a mission, assisted either by her parents or her friends. Each spyling has a spy pet, who sometimes also helps with missions. The spylings are also provided with many Silggem gadgets such as rocket boots and hoverboards. In early books, the missions involve adult supervision, while in later books the missions are conducted solo and, in some cases, involve rescuing grown-ups. The main character ages by about six months between each book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virals_(novel)"title="Virals (novel)">
Tory and her friends, Hiram (mostly known as Hi), Ben, and Shelton, find a rusted dog tag dating from the Vietnam War era on Loggerhead Island; trying to identify its owner leads them to an unsolved murder and infection by an experimental virus that gives them special powers, which they describe as "flaring". Their powers include super strength, speed and senses. They acquire the infection while saving a wolfdog being used for illegal experiments by Dr. Karsten, who was funded by a company which belongs to Chance Claybourne's Dad.Meanwhile, they discover a skeleton, which proves to be that of the daughter of the owner of the dog-tag. Someone shoots at them, forcing them to run. They manage to escape, but the next time they visit (with their parents and a police officer), the skeleton has been replaced with monkey bones. They are called 'over imaginative children' and the police leave it at that.Being curious, Tory and her friends want to find out who committed the murder; using their powers, they crack the case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banned_for_Life"title="Banned for Life">
As a restless high school athlete in a small, unnamed town in North Carolina, Jason Maddox, the book's narrator, has a sexual encounter with his popular girlfriend's alcoholic mother. Rumors of the encounter circulate at school, and Jason's girlfriend, distraught when she learns of them, attempts suicide. Jason, himself previously popular, is shunned by his classmates, and after confronting and savagely beating the classmate who started the rumors, Jason is arrested, expelled from school, and all but disowned by his conservative, mortified parents.Taking a job as a house painter, Jason moves into an apartment complex where he befriends one of his new neighbors, Bernard “Peewee” Mash, an intellectually precocious fifteen-year-old who, like Jason, is a local pariah. Peewee introduces Jason to art, literature, and, most importantly, punk rock. He and Jason are particularly enamored of the Los Angeles punk band Rule of Thumb, which is led by a UC Berkeley-educated poet, Jim Cassady, who is revered by both Jason and Peewee.Learning that Rule of Thumb will be performing at New York City's CBGB, Jason quits his job in order to drive himself and Peewee to New York. After the show, they speak to Jim Cassady, who advises them to start a band. They immediately make plans to move to New York, where they live on the Lower East Side, center of the New York punk scene. There, Peewee becomes increasingly difficult, at odds with Jason musically and jealous of Jason's sexual prowess. Alternately given to tantrums and sullen silences, Peewee is ousted from the band that he co-founded. He and Jason pursue music separately until, recognizing how much they miss each other, they reconcile and start a new band. Banned from most local venues because of its explosive, destructive shows, the band begins touring the U.S., and in the midst of what will prove to be its final tour, Peewee is killed in a car crash, with Jason narrowly surviving.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobseck"title="Gobseck">
The plot of "Gobseck", set during the French Restoration, is framed within a conversation between lawyer Maître Derville and Vicomtesse de Grandlieu. Derville tells a story which focuses on Anastasie de Restaud, née Goriot. Anastasie de Restaud is the daughter of a rich bourgeois who has married into the aristocracy, but is bored by her marriage, which is loveless and passionless.Anastasie de Restaud has an affair with Maxime de Trailles, and spends her fortune on de Trailles. She turns to the usurer Jean-Esther van Gobseck for financial assistance. Maître Derville acts as Gobseck’s lawyer while Derville's future wife is also one of Gobseck's debtors.Anastasie's husband finds out about her debts, so he signs a convoluted contract with Gobseck which is supposed to benefit his and Anastasie's children. However, Anastasie destroys that contract during her irrational schemings. Subsequently, both Anastasie's marriage is destroyed and her family fortune is lost.Eventually, elderly Gobseck gains an even larger fortune through factoring. Shortly after his death, Derville discovers many treasures in Gobseck's home, including loads of spoiled food which Gobseck had intended to sell.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lover's_Dictionary"title="The Lover's Dictionary">
A nameless narrator tells the story of a relationship through dictionary entries. These short entries provide insight into the ups and downs of their romantic relationship, revealing the couple's problems with alcoholism and infidelity. The story does not unfold in chronological order; instead, it is arranged alphabetically by dictionary entries that give glimpses into the joys and struggles the characters face over the course of their relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Will_Run_the_Frog_Hospital?"title="Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?">
The novel is narrated by Benoite-Marie "Berie" Carr. While vacationing in Paris with her husband Daniel, Berie recalls her adolescence in Horsehearts, New York. During the summer of 1972, Berie worked with her friend Silsby Chaussee (Sils) at Storyland, an amusement park where she sold tickets and Sils played Cinderella. The adult Berie, now a photographic curator at a local historical society, narrates the pitfalls of her marriage while searching for the close bond she shared with Sils during the Storyland summer.As a child, Berie lived with her parents, brother Claude, and adopted sister LaRoue. Her parents hosted numerous guests, ranging from visiting academics to exchange students, that gave Berie "a tin ear for languages" and made it difficult for her to understand "foreignness, code, mood". Berie and Sils made friends with their co-workers at Storyland and saved frogs from teenage boys until Sils began dating Mike, a local boy with a motorcycle. Mike dominated Sils' time, leaving Berie out and confused by her absence. When Sils became pregnant, Berie stole money from the Storyland register to pay for an abortion.In between recollections of Horsehearts, Berie details her troubles with Daniel. Recently, they fought and he pushed her down the stairs of their apartment, resulting in a damaged hip. Daniel is distant from Berie, and she seeks companionship from friends like Marguerite, a Parisian artist, but is ultimately unable to recreate the closeness of her relationship with Sils.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_of_a_Dervish"title="Memoirs of a Dervish">
In the summer of 1964, the author left behind the popular culture of the "Swinging Sixties" in England, a time when many were journeying to the East in search of spiritual enlightenment. In the book, he contrasts that hippie subculture with the "bombs and guns and [Sufi] mysticism" which he encountered on his own travels in Algeria.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upsurge"title="Upsurge">
The book tells the stories of Theodora Luddon, a 20-year-old receptionist, Peter Groom, a member of the bourgeoisie who claims unemployment benefits, city magistrate James Riddle, working-class man Colin Rumble who hangs himself after murdering his family, and Paul Kronen, the owner of a big drapery store. It is set in the 1930s, starts with Theodora fined two pounds by Riddle for indecent exposure at the beach and ends with Peter sentenced to a month in jail with hard labour after a riot in the city. "For a country in Depression, the writing about life in relief camps and corrupt officials was considered potentially incendiary."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Carvel"title="Richard Carvel">
ForewordThe novel opens with a fictitious foreword, a brief note dated 1876, in which the purported editor of the memoirs, Daniel Clapsaddle Carvel, claims that they are just as his grandfather, Richard Carvel, wrote them, all the more realistic for their imperfections.Volume OneThe first volume concerns Richard Carvel's boyhood and schooldays. Orphaned at an early age, Richard is raised by his grandfather, Lionel Carvel of Carvel Hall, a wealthy loyalist respected by all sections of the community. Richard describes their way of life, his growing love for his neighbor, Dorothy Manners, and the hostility of his uncle, Grafton Carvel. Richard witnesses a demonstration against a tax collector in Annapolis as a result of the Stamp Act 1765 and grieves his grandfather by his adoption of revolutionary political views.Volume TwoMr Allen, Richard's new tutor, tricks him into deceiving his ailing grandfather. Richard is tormented by the coquettishness of Dorothy. At Richard's eighteenth birthday party, he learns that she is to go to England.Volume ThreeWith the third volume, the main action of the novel begins. Through the scheming of Grafton Carvel and Mr Allen, Richard fights a duel with Lord Comyn. He is wounded, but becomes fast friends with the lord. His grandfather learns that his political opinions are unchanged but forgives him, partly through the intercession of Colonel Washington. After his recovery, Richard is attacked on the road and kidnapped. He is taken aboard a pirate ship, the "Black Moll". There is a fight with a brigantine, in which the pirate ship sinks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_November_Criminals"title="The November Criminals">
The hero of the book is 18-year-old Addison Schacht, a Jewish high-school senior in Washington D.C. He is in the process of applying to the University of Chicago, where he plans to study classics. The book is his response to the essay question, "What are your best and worst qualities?". He explains he has only "worst qualities", as illustrated by the events of his senior year. They include collecting offensive jokes; dealing drugs to his classmates; and insulting teachers, fellow students, and his girlfriend's mother. But when his classmate Kevin Broadus is killed in a senseless shooting, Addison develops a plan to investigate the death in hopes of finding the killer, and maybe finding some "best qualities" in himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbour_(novel)"title="Harbour (novel)">
The story follows Anders whose young daughter goes missing one winter day. Several years later an alcoholic and divorced Anders returns to the island. The novel also follows Anders' stepfather on the island, the illusionist Simon, who is starting to notice that there is something strange with the island and the sea itself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fever_Crumb_(series)"title="Fever Crumb (series)">
Before the events of series, the post-apocalyptic city of London is ruled by an evolved species of human called the scriven. In the final years of the scriven rule, Dr. Gideon Crumb, a human engineer, falls in love with Wavey Godshawk, a scriven and the daughter of the London's ruler, Auric Godshawk. In a violent uprising known as the 'Skinner's riots', Auric and many other scriven are killed in an act of genocide by the human citizens of London. Wavey, who lacks most of the distinctive markings of the scriven, escapes with her newborn half-human baby, but then leaves her child with a friend who passes her onto Gideon along with a note saying 'Her name is Fever'. Wavey then flees across the country where she runs into a carnival run by a dwarf named Borglum. For several years she lives in peace with the carnival's staff, working on engines and building machines.With Wavey gone into hiding, Gideon raises his Fever as an adopted child in the engineerium for many years, until the twists and turns of fate forced him to explain the truth to her.Fever leaves London to join the Lyceum, a traveling theatre with children whom she took care of after their father was murdered, where she starts growing out her previously close-cropped hair and begins to loosen up. She meets Arlo Thursday, an orphan boy who becomes her first love. Arlo had fallen in love with a girl named Thirza Blaizey, but she rejects him to marry the rich and powerful Jago Belkin. Although Arlo is originally distrusting towards Fever, (pointing a gun at her,) they grow close enough for Arlo to unveil his plans of the world's first Aeroplane. Fever ends up fleeing along with Arlo after her life is threatened by unknown assailants. They retreat to Thursday Island and begin to construct Arlo's invention using wood and paper and an engine sent to him by another inventor, however this proves to be too heavy and so Fever puts her engineering talents to good use and improvises by cannibalizing a power supply and motor from a Stalker-Crab type creature which was built by Auric Godshawk and given to Arlo's family as a gift.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devoted"title="Devoted">
After Sage was kidnapped by the Saviors, Clea is fruitlessly searching for him. In the woods outside her house, a family of ghostly apparitions appears and gives her information on his whereabouts.Clea and her friend Ben track down a hideout of Cursed Vengeance, the group that has been cursed until Sage's death, in an abandoned subway station. They come to a tenuous agreement to help each other find Sage, but after that they will be at odds again.Through a series of flashbacks, it is revealed that the ghostly family all consumed the Elixir of Life over 2,000 years ago and have been living in immortality ever since. They've trained their minds to gain psychic powers such as telekinesis and astral projection, but the Elixir is running out and soon they'll be left in a comatose state. To prevent this, they are helping the Saviors to kill Sage and turn his blood into more Elixir. The youngest daughter, Amelia, is unsure of this path and decides she wants to help Clea save Sage.Meanwhile, Sage is being held captive by the Saviors and they perform a ritual to break the bond between his soul and Clea's. At the next full moon, they will kill him with a magical dagger and his blood will become more Elixir that others can drink.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Béatrix"title="Béatrix">
A handsome young man named Calyste du Guénic is in love with the older woman, Félicité des Touches, a famous writer who uses the pen name of Camille Maupin. Félicité at first does not reciprocate Calyste’s feelings, and Calyste falls in love with the blonde marchioness Béatrix de Rochefide. Béatrix is a beautiful but selfish woman; one critic remarked in 1897 in regards to Béatrix that “for cold-blooded cruelty and vulgarity she is unexampled, and her efforts to keep her youth and her hold over men are drawn in Balzac’s heaviest and most pitiless manner.”Béatrix had already had an affair with Gennaro Conti, and Calyste has an additional rival in the form of Claude Vignon. Félicité des Touches (Camille Maupin) tries to help Calyste win Béatrix’s heart, thus sacrificing her own. Calyste’s efforts are ultimately a failure, and Béatrix is taken away by Gennaro Conti. Calyste is devastated by his failure, but promises his dying father to get married. Félicité des Touches enters a convent, but before she does, she uses her fortune to arrange a marriage for Calyste with a woman named Sabine de Grandlieu. When Calyste encounters Béatrix again in Paris, his wife Sabine struggles to win back her husband’s affections after Calyste falls for Béatrix again. Subsequently, through the intercession of Count Maxime de Trailles, Béatrix falls for another young man, and Calyste comes to his senses.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Who_Have_Never_Known_Men"title="I Who Have Never Known Men">
Thirty-nine women and a girl are being held prisoner in a cage underground. The guards are all male, and never speak to them. The girl is the only one of the prisoners who has no memory of the outside world; none of them know why they are being held prisoner, or why there is one child among thirty-nine adults.One day, an alarm sounds, and the guards flee; the prisoners are subsequently able to escape. They find themselves on an immense barren plain, with no other people anywhere, and no clue as to what has happened to the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Half-Made_World"title="The Half-Made World">
The reader is introduced to the character of Dr. Lysvet 'Liv' Alverhuysen at the Koenigswald Academy, where she has taught for years. A letter has come for her dead husband, a plea to come west to the edge of the world and the House of Dolorous, a hospital who takes in all wounded, regardless of which side of the war they were injured on. She begins her difficult journey with the help of the school janitor, a brain damaged but extremely large man who wants nothing more than to protect her.John Creedmore is relaxing on a ferryboat, enjoying being out of the war, when his masters, the Gun, summon him to take on a new mission. He is to go to the House of Dolorous and retrieve (but not kill) an old man believe to have secrets of a great weapon from the First Folk, wild people who live in the hills, that can kill the Line engines, which are the alternate version of the Gun.Down the Line, Lowry is tasked with the same mission. He goes about it in the opposite way from Creedmoor, as an army is essentially brought in to support him.Creedmoor, having continued to ride through the death of several horses, reaching the town of Kloan and decides he needs a break, contrary to his master's wishes. They reluctantly concede and he wanders through the town looking for entertainment. Instead, soldiers of the Line recognize him and the town is turned into an all-out battleground as Creedmoor escapes. Lowry and his support men flood the town hours afterward, but they are too late. Instead, they set up an outpost and prepare to wait until Creedmoor attempts to leave with the General.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millionaires"title="The Millionaires">
What started as the perfect crime for a pair of employees at the private banking firm of Greene &amp; Greene takes a turn for the worse. Charlie and Oliver Caruso work at Greene &amp; Greene, a private bank that is so exclusive you need at least two million dollars just to be a client. The brothers are denied a promotion. As one opportunity closes, though, another reveals itself. A mysterious benefactor brings to their attention an abandoned bank account. No one knows of the account's existence, it doesn't belong to anyone, and it contains three million dollars. IT is the brothers' for the taking. The brothers see the abandoned account as their way into a new life, debt-free. As soon as they take the money though, things take a turn for the worse. A friend of theirs dies, and then the eyes of the Secret Service, their bank, and a female private investigator turn on them. The brothers must scramble to find out who is pulling the invisible strings of that account, how they will prove their innocence, and what they need to do escape the Secret Service. In the process, their trust and relationship is tested.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_on_the_Moon"title="The Wind on the Moon">
Major Palfrey is off to war. He warns his two daughters, Dinah and Dorinda, that while he is away they must behave themselves: "When there is wind on the moon, you must be very careful how you behave. Because if it is an ill wind and you behave badly, it will blow straight into your heart, and then you will behave badly for a long time to come." And so it proves: before long the girls are drinking a potion provided by the local witch and turning into kangaroos, getting stuck in the zoo, and staging an escape along with their new friends, a golden puma and a silver falcon.Their appetite for naughtiness and cleverness whetted, Dinah and Dorinda turn their attention to freeing their dancing master, Casimir Corvo, from jail. And then comes their greatest adventure: Count Hulagu Bloot, the tyrant of Bombardy – who loves torturing people and eating peppermint creams – has captured their father and imprisoned him in the dungeons of Bloot's castle. The two girls, together with their puma friend and their beloved dancing teacher, smuggle themselves from England to Bombardy in a room made of furniture hidden inside a huge removal van and stage a dramatic rescue.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAMA_Mia!"title="NAMA Mia!">
Ireland is in recession, but Ross's shredding company is successful. He becomes a "toy boy" for Regina Rathfriland, a wealthy older woman. Ross tracks down Oisinn and brings him back to Ireland. Fionnuala has switched to writing "misery lit" memoirs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verukal"title="Verukal">
"Verukal" tells the story of a family of Tamil speaking Iyers who settled in Kerala. Raghu is the protagonist of the story. The pivotal event on which the novel turns is the return of Raghu to his native village after a lapse of several years, to raise money to build a city mansion for himself by selling his ancestral home. He sets about this reluctantly, under pressure from his shrewish and domineering wife. In the village, as he meets his sisters and others among whom he grew up, a flood of memories overwhelms him, and he abruptly changes his mind about selling the property.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imperial_Cruise"title="The Imperial Cruise">
The book centers on the diplomatic mission of the sent by President Theodore Roosevelt in the summer of 1905. On board was the largest diplomatic mission delegation in U.S. history, including some of the highest profile political figures of the time. They included Secretary of War (and future President) William Howard Taft; Roosevelt's daughter, Alice Roosevelt; her future husband, Congressman (and later Speaker of the House) Nicholas Longworth; along with 29 other members of the House and Senate, and their wives; and an array of additional high-ranking military and civilian officials.After his initial description and introduction of the "SS Manchuria's" voyage, the author explores brief excerpts of the history behind the period's American domestic and foreign policy, elaborating on its influence, motivation, and consequences, specifically in regard to American-Japanese, Sino-Japanese, and Russo-Japanese relations.More broadly, Bradley explores his contention relating to how deep-set racial tendencies, biases and racially deterministic philosophies fueled and undergirded virtually all U.S. foreign and domestic policy-making in that era pertaining to U.S. relations with other nations and to populations of other racial, cultural or religious heritages. This included virtually all peoples of non-Teutonic Anglo-Saxon descent, and resulted, for example, in the slaughter of more than 250,000 Filipinos during the U.S. colonial take-over of the Philippines.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Development_Report_2011"title="The World Development Report 2011">
As of April 2011 the report had been published in two versions: a 65-page overview and a 352-page full version. The full version includes a forward, an acknowledgments, a notes section, a glossary, the overview, and three main parts sub-divided into a total of nine chapters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Blackberries"title="A Taste of Blackberries">
As told from the point of view of the unnamed narrator, the story begins as he and his best friend Jamie go blackberry picking. We follow the boys as they take part in a series of exploits—some told in current narrative time, some revealed in poignant flashbacks—allowing the reader to witness their world and shared experience. When Jamie tragically dies as a result of an allergic reaction to bee stings, the narrator struggles to cope with denial, grief, guilt, and loneliness, before coming to terms with the loss. The story is set in a suburb of Washington, D.C., the author's birthplace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roots_of_the_Mountains"title="The Roots of the Mountains">
The story is set in Burgdale, a small Germanic settlement in a valley at the foot of a mountain range, and the neighbouring woodlands, pastures and dales. The area is inhabited by the interdependent Dalemen, who are weavers, smiths, and traders, the Woodlanders, who are hunters and carpenters, and the Shepherds. Their society is challenged by disruptions from the outside world in the form of the Sons of the Wolf, the descendants of the Wolfings from the previous novel, and the invading Dusky Men (the Huns). The Sons of the Wolf, driven from their original country by the Dusky Men, continue to resist the invaders as a frontier force guarding their new home. The somewhat troubled integration of the Sons of the Wolf into the society they are protecting is told in the story of five lovers representing both peoples, four of whom eventually marry.Morris projected a sequel to "The Roots of the Mountains" to be called "The Story of Desiderius", although it was never completed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thieves'_Labyrinth"title="The Thieves' Labyrinth">
Following the second instalment of the series, "The Vice Society", Inspector Albert Newsome of the Metropolitan Police's Detective Force has been temporarily demoted to the Thames River Police for his insubordination. He can regain his old position only if he proves himself with good behaviour. Meanwhile, his old enemy, George Williamson, is working as a private detective, at the theatres of London, where his job is to catch pickpockets. Both men are highly suspicious of a new face in London: Eldritch Batchem, who claims to be an investigator "By Royal Appointment". When an outrageous theft is made from the city's docks, a competition begins to see who will be the first to solve the crime.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rithian_Terror"title="The Rithian Terror">
The story takes place in the year 2521. The Earth is the dominant power in a Galactic empire, with a policy of ruthlessly conquering or undermining other alien races which it encounters. The latest are the Rithians, and after some years of clandestine harassment by Earth, the Rithians have managed to place a group of spies disguised as humans on the Earth. By the time the infiltration is discovered, only one of the Rithians remains. Thorne Spangler, a security officer, is given the task of locating the remaining Rithian. He enlists the help of a native of an "uncivilized" human planet on the fringes of the empire, which has good dealings with Rithians. A primary source of tension is the conflict between these two: the Earthman who rigidly follows protocols, and the outsider who is loyal to Earth but contemptuous of what he sees as an ossified and decadent civilization.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving_(novel)"title="Thanksgiving (novel)">
During their marriage Lucy never said much about her past, so when Lucy dies during a horrific plane crash Tom decides to try to find out exactly what happened in her first marriage. He knows that she had two children by him, but Lucy was very close-mouthed about anything else that pertained to Darryl Bob Allen. However the more Anthony looks into Lucy's past, the more obsessed he grows.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gathering_(Armstrong_novel)"title="The Gathering (Armstrong novel)">
The setting for The Gathering is a small medical-research town called Salmon Creek on Vancouver Island. Salmon Creek was built by St. Cloud Corporation, the owners of the town and surrounding park. It was built for their employees. Maya, the main character, is the adopted daughter of the park ranger. The events actually start a year before with the death of Maya's friend, Serena. She and Maya were swimming in a lake. Serena, captain of Salmon Creek High swim team, drowned in the lake, and Maya is guiltridden for not being able to save her friend.A year later, Maya is getting ready to celebrate her sweet 16. She wants to tattoo her birthmark—a paw-print shape on her hip. She doesn't want it altered in any way, though; she just wants to make it more noticeable. However, she doesn't get it because the tattoo artist's aunt insults her by calling her a witch in Navajo. Later, she invites Rafe, a new bad-boy at school, to her birthday party at Daniel's house. At the party, the teens have a competition on Maya's new rock wall: if she can beat all the guys, they have to add more footholds, but if she loses to even one guy, she has to kiss him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_of_Lucha_Libre"title="The World of Lucha Libre">
From Levi's perspective of the inner workings of lucha libre, Levi observes this form of wrestling as a cultural performance, an occupational subculture, and a set of symbols that circulate through Mexican culture and politics. Additionally, Levi “argues that lucha libre stages the contradictions at the heart of Mexican national identity,” which include “the rural and the urban, tradition and modernity, ritual and parody, machismo and feminism, politics and spectacle.”"The World of Lucha Libre" is split into six chapters, described below.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_and_the_Mists_of_Doom"title="Conan and the Mists of Doom">
The story is set in the Kezankian Mountains and the borderlands of Turan. After Conan's time spent with the Afghulis begins to sour, he leads a band of tribesmen away from the Afghuli mountains and towards Koth. During their journey, the tribesmen are intercepted by a force of Turanian cavalry, led by Khezal, an old acquaintance of Conan's. Khezal offers Conan and his warriors freedom if they help combat the Mist of Doom, a life-draining force that is attacking Khezal's territory near the mountains. Unbeknownst to ether Conan or Khezal, the Mist is controlled by the Lady of the Mists, who is gathering captives to feed to the Mist, in hopes of controlling it.The Afghulis and Turanians meet up with a third group of desert nomads, the Ekinari, led by Bethina, an attractive young warrior woman. The three groups combine forces in an effort to defeat the Mist before it grows out of control. In the climactic battle, the Lady of the Mist is killed, but not before she can summon an elemental. The two magical forces collide, destroying the valley and each other. Conan's chief advisor, Farad, and Bethina stay in the valley to repopulate it while Conan rides on into Koth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saturday_Big_Tent_Wedding_Party"title="The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party">
Precious Ramotswe is taunted by a dream in which she is driving her old white van. She discovers that her van is fixed up and running well again, so she hopes to retrieve it. Charlie is accused of getting his girlfriend pregnant with twin boys. He feels guilty and runs away. Mma Ramotswe investigates a case of rural jealousy in which cattle are being injured. Violet Sephotho runs for Botswana Parliament which is Botswana's worst nightmare.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seryozha_(novel)"title="Seryozha (novel)">
Seryozha is the story of a young boy living in the rural Soviet Union in the mid-1950s. The novel describes Seryozha's experiences, and those of his family, friends and neighbors over the course of a summer. The most important event of the story is the marriage of Seryozha's mother to a Red Army veteran named Dmitry Korostelyev. Korostelyev becomes the new manager of the local collective farm and a strong role model for Seryozha. Throughout the novel Panova gives a relatively grim picture of life in the rural Soviet Union where both money and opportunity are scarce. The novel ends with Korostelyev being reassigned to a new collective farm in the remote Arkhangelsky District, and taking the family with him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragons_of_Krynn"title="The Dragons of Krynn">
The book is a compilation of 10 short stories from various authors taking place in the fictional world of Krynn:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wither_(Passarella_novel)"title="Wither (Passarella novel)">
"Wither" follows Wendy, a young college student living in the fictional town of Windale, Massachusetts. She attends local Danfield College, of which her father is the president, while indulging her interest in the magic and New Age. It is an idyllic setting, but evil is slowly creeping into the town in the form of the ghost of Elizabeth Wither. Eight-year-old Abby MacNeil suffers from nightmares that eventually result in her discovering the burial site of three 17th century women that were tried and killed by the townspeople. Karen Glazer, a local professor, has vivid visions of her unborn child being attacked. Eventually they discover that Wither and her fellow witches are intent on possessing the bodies of Wendy, Abby, and Karen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wither_(DeStefano_novel)"title="Wither (DeStefano novel)">
"Wither" describes a future where genetic engineering has cured humanity of all diseases and defects. People worldwide have foregone conceiving children naturally in favor of this new science. This generation of perfect humans, later dubbed "The First Generation", lived very long and prosperous lives. Unfortunately their children ended up plagued with a virus that killed all females by the age of 20 and all males by the age of 25. Their children's children suffered the same fate. Humanity now scrambles for a cure as society has broken down into large gaps between the rich and the poor. Gatherers hunt for young girls on the streets to sell them into labs for research, and the unwanted ones go into prostitution or are simply killed. Others are occasionally sold to rich men to be their brides.In Manhattan, 16-year-old Rhine Ellery is captured by the Gatherers and sold to Linden Ashby at his estate in Florida. Rhine finds herself forced to marry Linden along with two other girls, Jenna and Cecily. They join Rose as Linden's new brides, but the ailing Rose is already 20 years of age and does not have long left to live.Life in the Ashby manor is very comfortable. Cecily embraces it and Jenna endures it while Rhine constantly thinks of ways to escape. She befriends her servant Gabriel and behaves like a good wife in front of Linden and his father, Housemaster Vaughn, in order to earn the title of "First Wife", which would grant her additional privileges to roam the mansion. Rhine sets that as a goal in order to plan her escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakfast_with_Buddha"title="Breakfast with Buddha">
The entire story is narrated in first person by Otto Ringling. Otto is a 44-year-old American who lives in a suburb of New York City and is a senior editor at a Manhattan publishing house which specializes in books on food. He has a wife named Jeannie, a daughter named Natasha and a son named Anthony. He also has a dog, Jasper.The story starts at a point when Otto's parents have been killed in a car crash in North Dakota. Otto wants to go to North Dakota to settle the estate, mainly for sentimental reasons. He therefore plans to drive from New York to North Dakota with his sister, Cecilia.Cecilia Ringling is a tarot and palm reader who lives in Paterson, New Jersey. She is fascinated by the spiritual and mystic aspects of life to such an extent that Otto looks down upon her and believes her to be "as flaky as a good spanakopita crust". When Otto reaches her place, he finds her with a spiritual guru named Volya Rinpoche. She declares her intent to let Rinpoche have her share so that he may build a meditation retreat there, and implores Otto to take Rinpoche instead of her, to their parents' North Dakota farmhouse. Otto agrees reluctantly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Médecin_de_campagne"title="Le Médecin de campagne">
In 1829 Commander Genestas arrives in a village in the Dauphiné, where he meets Dr Benassis, who has transformed the miserable settlement into a small but prosperous town in only ten years. Each of the two men has a secret, which is revealed only at the end of the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_China_Rules_the_World"title="When China Rules the World">
For over two hundred years we have lived in a western-made world, one where the very notion of being modern was synonymous with being western. The book argues that the twenty-first century will be different: with the rise of increasingly powerful non-Western countries, the west will no longer be dominant and there will be many ways of being modern. In this new era of ‘contested modernity’ the central player will be China.Martin Jacques argues that far from becoming a western-style society, China will remain highly distinctive. It is already having a far-reaching and much-discussed economic impact, but its political and cultural influence, which has hitherto been greatly neglected, will be at least as significant. Continental in size and mentality, and accounting for one fifth of humanity, China is not even a conventional nation-state but a ‘civilization-state’ whose imperatives, priorities and values are quite different. As it rapidly reassumes its traditional place at the centre of East Asia, the old tributary system will resurface in a modern form, contemporary ideas of racial hierarchy will be redrawn and China’s ages-old sense of superiority will reassert itself. China’s rise signals the end of the global dominance of the west and the emergence of a world which it will come to shape in a host of different ways and which will become increasingly disconcerting and unfamiliar to those who live in the west.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_Saigon"title="The Man from Saigon">
In 1967, during the Vietnam War, half-American and half-English war correspondent Susan Gifford finds herself falling in love with Marc Davies, her fellow correspondent who was married to another woman, and who made friends with Hoang Van Son, a photographer. The three agree to cover the war before finding themselves hostages of the Vietcong who suspected Son to be a spy. Susan struggles in her relationship with Marc while Son is put at risk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Soul_a_Star"title="Every Soul a Star">
Almost 13-year-old Ally lives at a campsite called The Moon Shadow where she is homeschooled by her parents along with her 10-year-old brother Kenny. Although they don't have phone reception and have barely seen any TV lives, Ally’s dream is to find one of the Messier Objects. She then discovers that her family is moving to Chicago and she will be put in public school.Meanwhile, 13-year-old Bree is the "A-Clique" in her school and is proud of it. Everyone calls her beautiful and she makes sure she stays that way. She wants to become a Prom Queen in high school and eventually be on the cover of Seventeen magazine before she's seventeen. Her "nerdy" family, however, has other plans. She and her 11-year-old sister, Melanie, are going to move to The Moon Shadow and take the place of Ally and her family as the caretakers of the campsite. Bree is appalled at the thought of moving and doesn't want to be homeschooled in the middle of nowhere, with no boys, no friends and most of all no television. Narrator 13-year-old Jack only finds comfort in reading and drawing in his tree house. His mom has been married four times. Jack has no friends, and he is shy and so overweight he is constantly teased. One of his other escapes is lucid dreaming, taught to him by his third stepfather, which also is how he can "fly" in his dreams. After failing science, he is faced with the choice of either attending summer school or going to The Moon Shadow as a part of a group tour to watch an eclipse with his teacher, Mr. Silver. He chooses to go to The Moon Shadow and meets several people during the trip to the campsite.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Reckoning_(novel)"title="Dead Reckoning (novel)">
Old friends and enemies are causing problems for Sookie Stackhouse. Sandra Pelt has a score to settle. Victor Madden, representative of the Vampire King Felipe de Castro, is challenging her lover Eric Northman's position and, in other ways, threatening her friend and employer Sam Merlotte. Great-uncle Dermot and cousin Claude are making themselves at home in Sookie's house in the aftermath of the separation with the faery world, and a visit from Amelia and Bob throws a new wrinkle into her relationship with Eric. Bill Compton admits his continuing love for Sookie, and proves to be a supportive friend. Meanwhile, Sookie is learning more about her grandmother Adele's relationship with her half-fairy grandfather Fintan. And Bubba's back.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Grassou"title="Pierre Grassou">
Pierre Grassou de Fougères is a mediocre and unoriginal painter who lives off painting imitative works commissioned by an old swindler and art-dealer named Elias Magus. Grassou paints works in the style of Titian, Rembrandt, and other famous artists. Magus passes these off as genuine and sells them for a large profit to members of the Petite bourgeoisie who are incapable of appreciating good art.Monsieur Vervelle, a prosperous bottle-dealer obsessed with art, is introduced to Grassou by Magus, who introduces the painter as a grand master. Vervelle and his wife are enchanted with Grassou and believe he would make a good match for their daughter Virginie.Grassou is invited to Ville-d'Avray, where the Vervelle mansion is garishly decorated, and also includes a large collection of Grassou’s work, including the forgery of a Titian. Grassou recognizes his own mediocrity, but when it is discovered by the Vervelles that the forgeries in their home were painted by Grassou, “far from denting his reputation, multiples Grassou’s value as an artist” and as a son-in-law, since Vervelle believes Grassou to possess all the combined talent of Rubens, Rembrandt, Terburg, and Titian.Despite his advantageous marriage, Grassou remains regretful that he is not a true artist. “This painter, a good father and a good husband, is unable to eradicate from his heart a fatal thought, namely, that artists laugh at his work; that his name is a term of contempt in the studios; and that the feuilletons take no notice of his pictures. But he still works on; he aims for the Academy, where, undoubtedly, he will enter."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulasi_Dalam"title="Tulasi Dalam">
Sridher was a self made millionaire, working as one of the directors of a multi national company. He was happily married to Sharada and lives in a peaceful neighborhood of Hyderabad. His younger sister Anita and Sharada's mute brother Narayana Rao stay with them. Approximately eight years after their marriage, Sharada conceives and immediately after that Sridher loses his ability to beget a child after an accident. They name their daughter Tulasi and raise her with utmost affection. When Tulasi was six years old, Sridher saves his employer, Richard's grandchild from a fatal accident. Richard later leaves India and arranges that Tulsi will get twenty lakhs (two million rupees) on her tenth birthday. His will says that if she dies before that, money would go to an orphanage run by Chidananda Swami.Sridher's company plans to send him along with his family to Paris to help their business there and Sridher happily agrees. Minutes before their departure, Tulasi suddenly becomes ill, postponing their journey. Later that night, she starts to show strange symptoms, indefinitely postponing their tour. It all happens when she was about to turn ten in two months. She shows varying symptoms everyday, puzzling experienced physicians. Their family members resort to various conventional and non conventional methods to save her while doctors are attempting their best. Finally, Sharada turns to a famous hypnotist Jayadev whereas Sridher turns to Santhaan Fakir, a paranormal expert. They both try their best to save Tulasi whereas Anita decides to go in a completely different way. In the climax, Sridher goes to Odissa along with his engineer Brahmin and his lawyer Vidyapathi to stop the evil Kadra, while Sharada and Jayadev stay with her to protect her from receiving evil hypnotic signals. Climax deals with whether they succeeded in saving Tulasi and by what means they save her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Stadt_hinter_dem_Strom"title="Die Stadt hinter dem Strom">
The protagonist is the orientalist Dr. Robert Lindhoff, introduced to the reader just as Robert. He travels by railroad on a mission which is unclear to him to a foreign city, which appears as strange and incomprehensible. He meets people whom he believes to be dead, such as his father and his beloved Anna.Robert receives the order from an invisible authority of the city to write a "Chronik" (chronicle) of the city. Robert is called the Chronicler, and he explores the city, partly on his own, partly guided. The city is a megalopolis under a cloudless sky, full of catacombs, without music. Its people appear more and more strange and incomprehensible to him. The people resemble shadows and perform senseless, repetitive and destructive tasks. Two factories employ many of them, one producing building blocks from dust, one destroying building blocks to dust. Robert feels unable to write the chronicle. The authority who ordered it thanks him anyway for his work full of insight.Back in his home country, Robert travels restlessly, lecturing on the sense of life. In the end he travels to the city, as in the beginning.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucinda_Pierce_Mystery_series"title="Lucinda Pierce Mystery series">
## "The Trophy Exchange".In the first of the series, life’s been rough for Lieutenant Lucinda Pierce. She lost an eye and disfigured her face responding to a domestic violence call. Now, she's up against a serial killer, and her main suspect is a respected doctor known for his international relief work. It's a good thing Pierce doesn't mind bending the rules.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withering_Tights"title="Withering Tights">
Tallulah Casey, a lanky girl worried about her knees and underdeveloped cleavage, is off to stay at a drama performance workshop centre in Yorkshire called Dother Hall. There she meets the Tree Sisters (Flossie, Vaisey, Honey and Jo). Together they all go through boys, snogging and bad acting. Will Tallulah stay for another term? Will she get the boy of her dreams? And will it be Alex, the older brother of her friend Ruby, Charlie, the perfect guy who loves her knobbly knees, despite the fact he has a girlfriend, or evil Cain, lead singer of the local band, who doesn't seem to realise that Tallulah's nose is not an ice cream?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Born"title="Forest Born">
The book centres around Rinna (Rin), Razo's fifteen-year-old sister who still lives in the Forest with their large family (known as Agget-kin). At the beginning of the book, Rin feels wrong in herself; when she was younger she ordered her niece around and it made her feel good, big and powerful. However, when her ma returns and finds that Rin has upset the niece, she scolds Rin and turns away. Rin, upset and confused, runs into the deeper Forest and hugs a tree as she would have hugged her ma, begging for forgiveness. At this point she discovers that she can ‘open’ herself to the trees in a way and absorb their peace. She returns home but continues to be afraid that if she speaks to people as she did to her niece, she will lose Ma's love. To prevent this she begins to mirror her mother and her favourite brother Razo. She doesn’t demand things or speak much at all.However, when she is fifteen, she breaks all her rules with a boy named Wilem, who calls her wild. After that day the wrongness begins to eat at her again, and she buries and distorts the memory of her time with Wilem. After this, she discovers that the trees don’t give her peace anymore. She thinks that they have rejected her for what happened with Wilem.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiassa"title="Tiassa">
The book is presented in three parts, with a prelude, interludes, and an epilogue. All three larger sections and some of the smaller ones involve a silver statue of a tiassa, and the character of Khaavren, of the House of the Tiassa, but each tells a distinct story.The first section, "Tag", tells the story, in the typical Vlad Taltos as first person narrator style, of certain events early in his career as a high-ranking Jhereg. Vlad is contacted by the Viscount of Adrilhanka, who is a rogue and highwayman, to defeat a scheme by the Empire to track stolen money.The second section, "Whitecrest", is set much later, after Vlad is on the run from the Jhereg, and follows multiple characters, mainly the Countess of Whitecrest (Khaavren's wife and the Viscount's mother) and Cawti, Vlad's ex-wife. An impending Jenoine invasion is detected, but it may be a ruse to draw Vlad out.The third section, "Special Tasks" is the most recent chronologically, and is written in the voice of Paarfi, the fictional author of the Khaavren Romances. It mainly follows Khaavren himself as he investigates an attempt on Vlad's life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_City"title="Zoo City">
"Zoo City" is set in an alternate version of the South African city of Johannesburg, in which people who have committed a crime are magically attached to an animal familiar – those who receive such punishment are said to be "animalled". The novel's chief protagonist, Zinzi December, is a former journalist and recovering drug addict who was "animalled" to a sloth after getting her brother killed. She lives in the Johannesburg suburb of Hillbrow, which is nicknamed "Zoo City" in the novel for its large population of animalled people, refugees and the dispossessed. Zinzi is attempting to repay the financial debt she owes her drug dealer by charging people for her special skill of finding lost objects, as well as making use of her writing abilities by drafting 419 fraud emails. The book's plot focuses on Zinzi's attempts to find the missing female member of a brother-and-sister pop duo for a music producer, in return for the money she needs to fully repay her dealer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lotus_Eaters_(novel)"title="The Lotus Eaters (novel)">
After her brother's death in Vietnam, Helen Adams decides to go there herself as a combat photojournalist covering the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, Helen meets famous prize-winning photographer Samuel Darrow, who becomes her mentor and the object of her affection. Her relationship with the married Sam is complicated by his drinking, as well as by her involvement with his Vietnamese assistant Linh, an ex-soldier and playwright whose tragic past includes losing his family. After Sam's death in a helicopter crash, Helen and Linh marry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God's_Fool"title="God's Fool">
The novel is set in the fictitious Dutch town of Koopstad. The novel's ‘hero’, Elias Lossell, becomes deaf and blind from an accident when he is nine years old. The people around him can communicate with him by writing letters with a finger on the palm of his hand. Although communication is possible, mentally he always remains a boy of nine.Thanks to a somewhat thoughtless testament Elias becomes the rightful owner of the firm of Volderdoes Zonen, tea-merchants. His half-brothers, the twins Hendrik and Hubert, manage the firm on his behalf. Elias lives in a house of his own at the outskirts of Koopstad, looked after by his old nurse, Johanna, and occupies himself by growing flowers and helping the needy.Hendrik tries to save up as much money as he can to buy out Elias and take over the firm. His spendthrift wife Cornelia does not make it easy for him. While Hubert stays in China to look after the firm's interests there, Hendrik starts speculating with Elias's money at the instigation of his brother-in-law, Thomas Alers. Hubert returns to Koopstad and gradually learns what his brother has done. He firmly disapproves.This leads to a quarrel between the twins in Elias's house that escalates into murder: Hubert kills Hendrik. Elias understands what happened. In the last chapter he decides to take the blame of the murder on himself, giving the novel an open ending.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponni_(novel)"title="Ponni (novel)">
The novel portrays the life of the Adivasis of Attappadi, a region in Malabar, to the south of the Nilgiris and to the east of Kerala. Slash and burn cultivation practised by the Adivasis is suddenly stopped by the Government, forcing them to search for new jobs. The hero changes his hair style to suit the times. The courtship dance and traditional songs were depicted in a realistic way. "Ponni"'s characters talked and sang a mixture of Tamil and Malayalam with a tinge of Kannada.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spellbound_(Green_novel)"title="Spellbound (Green novel)">
Alice is a formerly mousy and high-strung London girl who marries Joe, a wealthy business executive whom she had a crush on as a girl. It is revealed that Joe is a serial philanderer who, in spite of his best efforts, is unable to avoid chasing women. He married Alice because he viewed her as a compliant "project" he could craft into the perfect trophy wife. In this, he succeeded. As Alice intermittently suspects Joe is having affairs she becomes unhappy with her marriage, which is blessed with enormous wealth and prestige but has no warmth or passion.Joe becomes increasingly involved with a new business executive named Josie, and their relationship is discovered. Joe is forced by the company to relocate to its New York office or lose his job. Desperate, Joe convinces his wife of the merits of moving to the United States and she agrees to the move on the condition that they have a house in the country as well as their original apartment in New York City.After the move Alice becomes increasingly invigorated and secure with herself as she takes on the project of restoring an old country home to immaculate condition. Joe, a fastidious urbanite, dislikes being in the country and the couple begins growing apart from one another: Joe spends more and more time in the city alone, but Alice no longer misses him as much because she feels increasingly fulfilled with small-town life and her new friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Tides"title="Rising Tides">
Captain Mathew Reddy takes his ship and crew to Hawaii and facing other humans in that region. Younger officers are given increasing responsibility and deal with the consequences of their decisions. Lt. Sandra Tucker fights to keep a band of refugees, including a princess, alive and moving to safety.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeless_(Monir_novel)"title="Timeless (Monir novel)">
Michele Windsor is a teenager with two best friends and a single mom. For years, she has had a dream in which she looks in a mirror and sees herself wearing a key around her neck while holding hands with a handsome young man. After her mother dies in a car accident, Michele is sent to live with her previously estranged grandparents, who are Windsors of high society in New York that Michele's mother had distanced herself from when they didn't approve of Henry, the artist she was in love with. The pair ran away together, but Henry disappeared under mysterious circumstances and Michele's mother discovers she is pregnant. Instead of turning to her parents, she vows to raise her child herself, on her own means.Michele has the typical new kid reaction to her new school and life, and though she is immediately swept up into the higher class snob club because of her last name, she ends up shunning them and hanging out with Cassie and Aaron, the scholarship kids who are much more down to earth. Cassie, who lives next door to the Windsor mansion (in a house that used to be part of the Walker estate), eventually becomes her best friend, and covers for her when Michele starts taking mysterious and sudden trips into the past, thanks to the key from her dream that she finds in her mother’s old possessions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Move_Under_Ground"title="Move Under Ground">
Jack Kerouac witnesses the rising of R'lyeh off the California coast. With Neal Cassady and William S. Burroughs, Kerouac takes to the road, crossing America to save the world from a Lovecraftian cult.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Talking"title="No Talking">
No Talking is about loud fifth grade boys at Laketon Elementary School, who challenge the equally loud fifth-grade girls to a "no talking" contest. This competition turns out to be really hard. The contest goes on and on until they meet on the decision. The principal thought she was having a vision when she saw that the fifth-grade hall was so silent at lunch and later joins the competition.Lynsey and Dave/David are the team captains, Lynsey for the girls and Dave for the boys. Both teams agree that when teachers ask them a question, they are only allowed to say three words. Both teams have noticed ways to make noises without saying a word.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extra_Credit"title="Extra Credit">
The protagonist of "Extra Credit" is a 6th grade girl named Abby who is falling behind in her classes. In order to improve her grades so that she will be able to go to Junior High, Abby has to write to a pen pal in another country for extra credit. The teachers of the Afghani town Abby writes to want Sadeed to respond because his English is the best, but the head elder does not think it would be right for a boy and girl to write to one another. Instead, Sadeed's sister Amira is chosen to write with Abby. However, Sadeed secretly writes the letters and Amira just signs them. Eventually Sadeed gets annoyed that Amira gets all the credit for the letters and writes a secret letter to Abby, telling her that he was the one writing the letters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleric's_Challenge_II"title="Cleric's Challenge II">
"Cleric's Challenge II" is a solo adventure in which the player character is a cleric of level 4-6, who is sent to a rural town. The town's temple was destroyed years ago and its priest disappeared, and the rivalry between its competing wineries turned ugly. The character must help the village's new priest, who is having trouble gaining new worshippers for the rebuilt temple. The character discovers a series of murders upon arrival, and must talk to the villagers to find out who or what is killing them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silver_Key_(module)"title="The Silver Key (module)">
In "The Silver Key", recommended for a party of two to six characters of levels two to eight, orcs roam the country as the human residents of the city of Horonshar prepare for war. A force of human soldiers was ambushed a few days ago, and taken prisoner was an important military officer who carried the Silver Key, a magical item that aids with teleportation. The player characters must infiltrate the orcish fortress, rescue the officer, and retrieve the key before the orcs are able to learn how to use it.The adventurers must be polymorphed into orcs in order to accomplish their infiltration. The adventure includes a set of rules that details how players gain "orc points" for convincing roleplaying; a character that gets too many points becomes an orc permanently.No map is given for the orcish fortress, but instead the adventure uses a flow chart. Regions of the chart determine encounters and information yielded, and the characters move from one region to another by means of dice roles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neither_Man_nor_Beast"title="Neither Man nor Beast">
In "Neither Man nor Beast", an adventure for the Ravenloft setting, a vicious storm maroons the player characters on a desert island. The party survives and is in possession of most of their gear, but are stranded on a small and inhospitable island. The scenario combines wilderness wandering, temple exploration, internecine fighting, bad magic and heavy deceit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sweetheart_of_the_Templar_from_the_Valley_of_Rephaim"title="The Sweetheart of the Templar from the Valley of Rephaim">
The novel's plot takes place in Jerusalem in the days of World War II and focuses on the love story of Tamar-Henrietta Landver, a Jewish girl from Vienna who managed to flee from the Nazis to the region of Palestine prior to the war, to Wolfgang Shvarte, a German Templar who was born in the region of Palestine and raised in the German Templar Colony in Jerusalem.The story begins in the present (1995) with the death of Tamar and then returns to the past, and describes Tamar and Wolfgang's meeting and how they eventually were separated due to heavy social pressure, months before the war began.Although Wolfgang returned to Germany before the outbreak of World War II, the plot thickens when the two meet by chance in 1942 in the region of Palestine as the Nazi military forces were approaching the region of Palestine and preparing an attack on the Jewish communities in the region.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_Left"title="The Last One Left">
A yacht explodes in the Bahamas, apparently killing six people and leaving its burned captain temporarily marooned on a small island. Sam Boyleston, an attorney from Texas and the brother of one of the victims, investigates the circumstances, as does Raoul Kelly, a newspaper reporter. As the plot develops it becomes apparent that one person is ruthlessly manipulating events, but proving guilt appears impossible.From internal evidence the action occurs in late May and early June, circa 1965 (e.g., the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion is mentioned but the Bahamian dollar, introduced in 1966, is not yet in circulation).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusions_(Pike_novel)"title="Illusions (Pike novel)">
Laurel is entering her senior year and is shocked to see Tamani for the first time in 8 months, posing as a new student—'Tam Collins'—who has just moved to Crescent City, California from Scotland. He has been training in Scotland to live among humans and stay close to Laurel, since she has been attacked by trolls several times. Aaron—another sentry—and Tamani explain that there have been signs of trolls, but they haven't actually "found" any, which is suspicious. What's worse, their tracking magic hasn't been working, either.A few days later, Klea comes to Laurel's house and introduces Yuki, a Japanese exchange student who Laurel immediately realises is a faerie. Klea tells Laurel that Yuki's foster parents were killed by trolls and that Yuki is a 'dryad'. Tamani is suspicious and says they need to figure out why Klea wants Laurel watching Yuki—or, more likely, wants Yuki watching Laurel—and what kind of faerie Yuki is. They decide to speak to Jamison, and Tamani tries to call Shar. Laurel is shocked and jealous to see that Tamani and the other sentries all have iPhones. Aaron asks Tamani if he thinks Yuki is Unseelie, which he doesn't. Laurel and Tamani go to Avalon to speak with Jamison. Tamani is concerned that Shar isn't answering his phone, and admits to Laurel that he thinks of Shar as a brother; Shar was the one who trained him as a sentry. Shar is unharmed, he simply hates his phone, partly because touchscreens don't respond to faeries very well. Laurel has to pull rank to get the sentries to request to open the gate and it is opened by Yasmine. Shar asks Yasmine if he can use the gate to Hokkaido, Japan, supposedly to see if the faeries there know about Yuki.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quest_for_Christa_T."title="The Quest for Christa T.">
An unnamed narrator first meets Krischan when they are school children during the end of World War II. With the end of the war they are both displaced but reunite again as young women, when they are both taking university courses.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winning_in_Emerging_Markets"title="Winning in Emerging Markets">
In "Winning in Emerging Markets", Tarun Khanna and Krishna Palepu outline a practical framework for developing emerging market strategies; based not on broad categorical definitions like geography, but on a structural understanding of these markets. Their framework describes how “institutional voids” - the absence of intermediaries like market research firms and credit card systems to efficiently connect buyers and sellers - create obstacles for companies trying to operate in emerging markets. According to the book, understanding these voids and learning how to work with them in specific markets is the key to success.On the basis of over a decade of research and practical experience with foreign multinationals and domestics companies in emerging markets, Tarun Khanna and Krishna Palepu present a simple framework intended to help strategists and investors map the unique institutional contexts for individual emerging market.The book offers advice and practical toolkits on determining whether to:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_Blood"title="Troll Blood">
In contrast to the first two books in the trilogy, Troll Blood opens far from Viking Scandinavia, across the ocean in Vinland, where a young Native American boy, Kwimu, and his father Senumkwe, see two Viking ships in the bay and witness the massacre of one crew by the other. As the victors sail away, leaving the other longship scuttled and burning, Kwimu and his father find the sole survivor, a little boy called Ottar, whom they adopt.Back in Norway, Peer's friend, Hilde, is impatient with life and longing for adventure, so when a Viking ship arrives at their village looking for crew, she and Peer set sail. They soon find plenty to occupy them. The sailors believe the ship is haunted by the ghost of a murdered man. The captain's handsome young son Harald Silkenhair is a dangerous psychopath who becomes Peer's deadly enemy. And the voyage is taking them far away to Vinland, where the dark forests are full of mysterious creatures, and where danger and treachery awaits.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_34_(novel)"title="Rule 34 (novel)">
The novel is told in second-person narrative but primarily from three points of view: Edinburgh police Inspector Kavanaugh, who investigates spammers murdered in gruesome and inventive ways, and learns about similar cases in other parts of Europe; Anwar, a former identity thief who becomes Scottish honorary consul for a fictional state in central Asia; and "The Toymaker", an enforcer and organizer for the criminal "Operation". Their interactions and conflicts drive the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse_(Banville_novel)"title="Eclipse (Banville novel)">
As the novel begins, protagonist Alexander Cleave, a 50-year-old, disillusioned actor, retreats to his empty childhood home for an indefinite period of introspection, leaving his wife Lydia behind. He seeks to uncover, as he says, "the blastomere of myself, the coiled hot core of all I was and might be" from years of accreted guises. Banville is concerned in this novel with "the elusive and unstable nature of identity." Cleave's ruminations, which take up the majority of the novel, engage with issues of the nature of selfhood and personal identity, familial life and responsibilities, and the unreliability of memory.The book also addresses epistemological themes. Cleave's solitude is interrupted by what he provisionally believes to be ghosts, "sightings, brief, diaphanous, gleamingly translucent, like a series of photographs blown up to life-size and for a moment made wanly animate." Later he discovers furtive squatters in his house. He also receives portents of the fate of his estranged daughter, Cass, the meaning of which he does not apprehend until the story's conclusion. Of this, Alex Clark writes in "The Guardian", ″Ghosts, it appears, can exist in the future as well as the past; whether or not we choose to respond to their beckoning is another matter.″
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berge_Meere_und_Giganten"title="Berge Meere und Giganten">
## First Book: The Western Continents.The novel begins by recounting the time that has passed since the First World War: generations have come and gone, and technology continues to advance and spread from Europe and America over the rest of the world. Overpopulation has become a problem, and the leaders of industry have seized state power. Pacified by the improvement in material conditions, the masses of the cities raise no objection. At the same time that it sees radical technological innovations, Europe suffers declining birth rates and experiences waves of mass migration from Africa. In an effort to maintain their rule, the ruling Senates of Europe agree to restrict the public's access to science and technology. London is the leading power in the west, and "India-Japan-China" is the other world power.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment_(novel)"title="Torment (novel)">
After the dramatic events of "Fallen", Cam and Daniel make an eighteen-day truce to protect Luce from the Outcasts. Luce is hidden at Shoreline, a school where both humans and Nephilim attended. Luce finds out more about her past lives with the help of two Nephilim friends: Shelby, Luce's roommate, and Miles, whose affection for Luce causes her to doubt her relationship with Daniel. Daniel will do anything to protect her, which includes forcing her to stay at Shoreline to keep Luce safe. Discovering some of her past lives, Luce realizes how their love hurt the thousands of families she once lived with. During her time in Shoreline, Luce's division between angels and demons becomes blurry when she discovers that Daniel and Cam are fighting side by side. At times, Daniel visits her to try to make her feel happier about her situation. She then finds out he had a fling with Shelby many years ago. At one time, when Daniel comes to visit her, he sees Miles kiss Luce on a window sill. She finds out that not only the Elders want her, but that the Outcasts - beings who are neither angels nor demons - want to capture her. Luce's parents have a Thanksgiving party, and when her parents go out, the Outcasts arrive in Luce's backyard to fight the angels. Luce finds out that Miles has feelings for her, as he can replicate a person, but only if he loves them. Luce is stressed from the violence and decides to find out more about her past lives by jumping through one of the shadows, leaving everybody behind her. Leaving her past and into her future and Daniel, her true love, follows her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Time"title="Nuclear Time">
In Colorado in 1981, The Doctor, Amy and Rory arrive in Appletown, an idyllic village in the middle of the American desert where the townsfolk go peacefully about their routines. However, all is not as it seems. The village is populated by murdering robots who will kill the moment their cover is blown: 5 minutes in the Doctor's case. While Amy and Rory run and hide in the town, the Doctor is trapped, going backwards in time and getting ever further away.The awful truth dawns on him: Appletown is a dummy, a prefabricated town awaiting destruction by a Nuclear bomb, designed to kill the robots. Can the Doctor get himself, Amy and Rory out while he is going backwards in time and the TARDIS is stuck at ground zero.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Mirdad"title="The Book of Mirdad">
The book is presented as a series of dialogues between Mirdad, the abbot of a monastery, and his disciples. "The Book of Mirdad" draws on a variety of philosophies, including that of Leo Tolstoy and Sufi Islam. Through the allegories in the book presented by Mirdad, Na'ima presents several themes and calls for the unity of different people groups in universal love, as well as criticizing materialism and empty religious rituals. Mirdad's dialogs gives out teachings which show us how it is possible to transform our consciousness and uncover the God within, by dissolving our sense of duality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clockwork_Angel"title="Clockwork Angel">
In 1878, Tessa Gray arrives from New York City to Southampton on the invitation of her brother, Nate, who has been working in London for the past few years, following the death of their aunt and foster mother, Harriet. However, she is kidnapped by a pair of warlocks, Mrs. Black and Mrs. Dark, who force her to learn her previously unknown ability to shapeshift at the threat of Nate's safety. They intend to make her presentable to marry their lord, known only as the Magister. Six weeks later, Tessa is rescued by a pair of Shadowhunters -- the older one named Henry Branwell and the younger named Will Herondale -- who decapitate Mrs. Black and force Mrs. Dark to flee. Henry and Will take Tessa along with them to the London Institute, run by Henry's wife, Charlotte, and housing two other Shadowhunters: Jem Carstairs and Jessie Lovelace, as well as three mundane innkeepers: Sophie Collins, Thomas Tanner, and Agatha, who she is introduced to. After being examined by the Silent Brother Enoch, Charlotte tells Tessa that she is a Downworlder. However, it is unclear what exactly, other than the fact that she is capable of shapeshifting into anyone by holding any of their personal belongings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kusamakura_(novel)"title="Kusamakura (novel)">
The novel tells of an artist who retreats to the mountains, where he stays at a remote, almost deserted hotel. There he becomes intrigued by the mysterious hostess, O-Nami, who reminds him of the John Millais painting "Ophelia".Ostensibly looking for subjects to paint, the artist makes only a few sketches, but instead writes poetry. This poetry is inserted into a text that consists of scenes from the artist's reclusive life and essay-like meditations on art and the artist's position in society. In these musings, the artist quotes and mentions a variety of Japanese, Chinese and European painters, poets, and novelists. For example, he discusses the difference between painting and poetry as argued in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's "Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry". Other writers and poets referred to include Wang Wei, Tao Yuanming, Bashō, Laurence Sterne "(Tristram Shandy)", Oscar Wilde "(The Critic as Artist)", and Henrik Ibsen.Chapter 12 contains an apology for the death of Sōseki's student Misao Fujimura, who committed suicide by drowning. Calling his death heroic, the narrator asserts: "That youth gave his life – a life which should not be surrendered – for all that is implicit in the one word 'poetry'."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Traitor's_Emblem"title="The Traitor's Emblem">
The Straits of Gibraltar, 1940. In the heart of a storm at sea, Spanish captain González rescues a group of German castaways. When the torrent subsides, the leader of the survivors gratefully offers the captain a strange-looking emblem made of gold and diamonds, in exchange for safe passage to the coast of Portugal instead of Spain. Decades later, in 2009, the son of captain González receives a substantial offer for the emblem. He does not sell it, but the would-be buyer reveals an astounding story behind that mysterious object: it holds the key to Paul Reiner’s lifelong quest...Munich, 1919. After his family falls into disgrace, 15-year-old Paul Reiner and his mother work as servants in the mansion of Baron von Schroeder, whose wife is Paul’s mother’s own sister. Unhappy and full of despair, Paul dreams of the heroic father he never knew. His mother speaks very little of him, and the von Schroeders revile his memory. To make matters worse, Paul’s cousin Jürgen hounds him at every turn, making his life almost unbearable. But one night, Paul accidentally learns that his father didn't die before the First World War commanding a ship in the German colonies, as he had always been told. He was killed by someone very close to him, and for unclear reasons. This discovery turns Paul's world upside down and from that moment, Paul sacrifices everything to discover the truth behind his father's death. His quest for the truth brings him into contact with Alys Tannenbaum, a Jewish-American photographer, with whom he feels an immediate connection. But Germany during the early 20th century is fraught with danger and racism, and Paul and Alys’s love is constantly tested.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Corps_of_Discovery"title="The Second Corps of Discovery">
By 1811 the First Corps of Discovery under Captain Lewis and Lieutenant Clark has been considered lost for 5 years. Any country that attempted to map the Pacific Coast by land or sea routes has completely failed. The United States of America has yet to press its claims for the Louisiana Purchase. President James Madison fears a British invasion, with the support of a unified Indian nation under Tecumseh, that would claim the Northwest Territories and cause a dissolution of the Union. Under these dire threats, a second Corps of Discovery is formed as a military expedition to reach the West Coast. Its primary goals are to learn what happened to Lewis and Clark and the first Corps members, and find the mythical "all-water route" across North America. However, there are several other secret missions and secondary objectives to the Expedition that are disclosed during the journey. Brigadier General George Rogers Clark, brother of Lieutenant William Clark and the original choice of President Thomas Jefferson, commands the new group. Supporting him are two other military men and Indian fighters, Colonel Andrew Jackson and Doctor William Henry Harrison. While primarily an army operation, Second Corps is required to do a great deal of scientific and diplomatic work. This explains the nature and skills of the members recruited for the journey, and the advanced prototype technology they use. The F. Scott Key Journal is heavily interlaced with Christian themes due his religious background. The continental crossing often resembles a detective story, as mysteries are unexpectedly revealed, based on conflicting rumors attributed to British and Spanish efforts of deception. These involve the belief that some unknown native civilization occupies areas of the Pacific Coast, perhaps Inca or Aztec tribes that escaped the Spanish Conquistadors and remained isolated to protect themselves against further invasions. Many of the historical characters in the story fulfill their actual destiny, but in an alternative environment. F. Scott Key was a part of the Expedition for a longer period of time, but his surviving account only covers his last year. This unbroken daily record details a complete story and is a major segment of the overall adventure. His manuscript was written originally in English, but translated into a foreign dialect. This additional premise supports ulterior plot elements.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycles_of_Time"title="Cycles of Time">
Penrose examines implications of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and its inevitable march toward a maximum entropy state of the universe. Penrose illustrates entropy in terms of information state phase space (with 1 dimension for every degree of freedom) where particles end up moving through ever larger grains of this phase space from smaller grains over time due to random motion. He disagrees with Stephen Hawking's back-track over whether information is destroyed when matter enters black holes. Such information loss would non-trivially lower total entropy in the universe as the black holes wither away due to Hawking radiation, resulting in a loss in phase space degrees of freedom.Penrose goes on further to state that over enormous scales of time (beyond 10100 years), distance ceases to be meaningful as all mass breaks down into extremely red-shifted photon energy, whereupon time has no influence, and the universe continues to expand without event . This period from Big Bang to infinite expansion Penrose defines as an aeon. The smooth "hairless" infinite oblivion of the previous aeon becomes the low-entropy Big Bang state of the next aeon cycle. Conformal geometry preserves the angles but not the distances of the previous aeon, allowing the new aeon universe to appear quite small at its inception as its phase space starts anew.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Ray_(novel)"title="Rachel Ray (novel)">
Rachel Ray is the younger daughter of a lawyer's widow. She lives with her mother and her widowed sister, Dorothea Prime, in a cottage near Exeter in Devon.Mrs. Ray is amiable but weak, unable to make decisions on her own and ruled by her older daughter. Mrs. Prime is a strict and gloomy Evangelical, persuaded that all worldly joys are impediments to salvation.Rachel is courted by Luke Rowan, a young man from London who has inherited an interest in the profitable local brewery. Mrs. Prime suspects his morals and motives, and communicates these suspicions to her mother. Mrs. Ray consults her pastor, the Low Churchman Charles Comfort; and upon his vouching for Rowan, allows Rachel to attend a ball where Rowan will be present.Soon after this, Rowan falls into a dispute with the senior proprietor of the brewery, and returns to London to seek legal advice. Rumours circulate about his conduct in Devon; Comfort believes the rumours, and advises Mrs. Ray against continuing the correspondence until Rowan's character can be established. Rachel obeys her mother's instructions to write Rowan only the once, as if to release him from the engagement. When he fails to respond, she grows increasingly depressed.Rowan returns to Devon, and the dispute over the brewery is settled to his satisfaction. This accomplished, he calls upon the Rays and assures Rachel that his love for her is still strong. She assents to his renewed proposals. Marital bliss ensues.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passion_(novel)"title="Passion (novel)">
At the opening of the novel, Luce is running blindly through time, using Announcers as portals to her past lives. Luce is cursed to die every seventeen years and be reincarnated, but she has no idea what causes her continual deaths. All Luce knows is that with every death, she is separated from her lover, Daniel, who follows her through eternity, falling in love with her again and again, in every lifetime. As Luce sprints blindly through time, she meets a small gargoyle named Bill who claims to have all the answers Luce needs, if she will let him travel with her. Although Luce is skeptical, she decides to partner with Bill in the hopes that he will speed her quest along. Meanwhile, Daniel is also traveling through time trying to find Luce. He knows that what Luce is doing is extremely dangerous. If she makes one false move, she could alter history forever, potentially killing herself for good. But Daniel is not the only one in search of Luce; many of the other fallen angels, and Cam, a demon, race through time trying to track her down. Although their motives aren't entirely clear, it is understood that if they find Luce before Daniel does, it could have grave consequences. Luce's friends from school, Shelby and Miles, are also attempting to locate Luce but being Nephilim - the offspring of fallen angels and humans - their time traveling skills are clumsy at best, creating extremely dangerous situations for all history.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vespertine"title="The Vespertine">
In the summer of 1889, Amelia van den Broek is sent by her brother to the city of Baltimore, much grander and different from her fishing village, to find a suitable match for marriage. Along with her cousin Zora, Amelia does all the normal things a young woman would do in the city—call on other ladies, have them to tea, gossip about the latest dance and all the fine gentlemen there. But once there, her eye catches a certain slant of light in the setting sun and she sees a glimpse of the future.She shares this talent with her cousin Zora, and soon the two girls are calling on and being called upon by the richest young ladies in the city, who each want to know their own fortune, seen through Amelia’s eyes. Amelia also has many run-ins with the mysterious and romantic Nathaniel, who is not a suitable match for her, but whom she feels drawn to nevertheless. They continue to see one another in secret and she soon learns that he has a talent of his own—he can travel with the wind.Zora also falls in love, and when Amelia has a vision relating to his death, she eventually confesses it to her cousin, who waves off her fear. But when her vision comes to pass and he is killed, Amelia is shipped back home, believing that Nathaniel will come for her and take her away despite hearing word of his death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King's_General"title="The King's General">
The novel is set at the time of the English Civil War. A middle-aged Honor Harris narrates the story of her youth, from the age of ten, when living with her brother Robin. The narrative begins when Kit, Honor's oldest brother, brings home his new bride, Gartred. After only three years, Kit dies of smallpox and Gartred moves away.At age eighteen, Honor meets Richard Grenville, Gartred's brother. They fall in love and, despite a former arrangement for Honor to marry another, they decide to be married. Honor is injured and loses the use of her legs in a riding accident, when out with Richard and Gartred. Subsequently, Honor refuses to marry – or even see – Richard.By the time the Civil War breaks out, fifteen years have passed; Honor has grown in independence, moving about on an early model of a wheelchair, and Richard has had three children, Joe, born illegitimately from an affair with a dairymaid; Dick, from a failed marriage; and Dick's sister Elizabeth, who lives with her mother and is not really part of the novel's story. As is clearly suggested, the bastard Joe - lively and quick witted - is his father's favorite son, preferred over the legitimate Dick.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like_a_Hole_in_the_Head"title="Like a Hole in the Head">
Ace marksman Jay Benson lives a retired life from the army with his beloved wife Lucy, and starts a school for training in firearm shooting. Unfortunately they fall short of money, when Augusto Savanto walks into their lives, promising Jay a huge sum of money in return for teaching his son Timoteo, who is totally uninterested in shooting. He wants his son to be able to shoot like an expert in just nine days. Benson agrees but soon realizes that he has entered a circle of revenge and murders involving mafias, in which he must participate, else it could affect both Lucy and him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allie_Finkle's_Rules_for_Girls"title="Allie Finkle's Rules for Girls">
The series revolves around nine-year-old Allie Finkle, who narrates the stories. She keeps a notebook of tips on what to do and what not to do in the various situations in which she finds herself. Each chapter title is one of the rules she has invented. Allie has three best friends who support her through all her adventures and a beautiful teacher, named Mrs. Hunter, whom she admires.In the first book, Allie's family moves from the suburbs to an old house in the town. Allie goes through a few obstacles as she strives to make new friends and adjust to her new school.The series has five other books that include similar adventures. Themes include: moving, growing up, friendship, and family. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest_(novella)"title="Palimpsest (novella)">
Pierce is a police officer with the Stasis, a special institution dedicated to the preservation of humanity by its agents who are able to travel through time. After every extinction event resulting in humanity's end, the Stasis reseeds Earth with a replacement group of humans time-jumped from an earlier era. However, the Opposition, an organisation that seems to struggle against the Stasis, has been created over time, and it seems that Pierce is somehow tied to it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_All_Enemies_(novel)"title="Against All Enemies (novel)">
In Pakistan, CIA Special Activities Division (SAD) officer and former Navy SEAL Max Moore cultivates an asset in the form of Colonel Saadat Khodai of the Pakistan Army, who has information about the Taliban’s connection with his own colleagues in the Pakistani armed forces. As Moore brings him to a hotel in Islamabad to be questioned by CIA officers, the Taliban assassinates Khodai by blowing up the place, killing Moore’s colleagues in the process. After a fruitless investigation into the incident, Moore is later recalled to the United States to take part in a joint task force aimed at bringing down the Juarez drug cartel in Mexico and Colombia, which involves playing them off against the rival Sinaloa cartel by discreetly helping the latter.While interacting with the Sinaloa Cartel disguised as a businessman, Moore finds out that the secret leader of the Juarez Cartel is billionaire Jorge Rojas. Along with cartel leader Ernesto Zuñiga, he plans to kidnap Rojas’s son Miguel and girlfriend Sonia, who are taking a vacation at the town of San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico as well as Dante Corrales, one of their bodyguards who is identified as a major player in the cartel. However, Guatemalan death squad "Buitres Justicieros" (Avenging Vultures), who had a blood feud with Corrales, abducts the couple as well as Corrales and the other bodyguards. Moore finds out that Sonia, whose real name is Olivia Montello, is a deep cover CIA agent, while Corrales barely escapes. Moore, along with a DEA agent embedded in the cartel as a sicario and his immediate boss, follow the couple and the Guatemalans to the nearby town of San Juan Chamula and rescue them. Miguel and Sonia were later freed by Moore.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nínay"title="Nínay">
The novel explores the life and love story of the female protagonist named Ninay, a heartbroken young woman who died of cholera. Her heartbreak was due to her separation from her lover Carlos Mabagsic. Ninay's misfortune became harder to bear because of the loss of her parents. A "pasiam", the novena for the dead, was being said and offered for the lifeless Ninay. Framed with this melancholic atmosphere of nine-day prayer for the departed, the novel opens up a succession of narratives that present "variations of unrequited love". The first condemned relationship was between Ninay and her lover Carlos Mabagsic. When Ninay was still alive, Mabagsic was falsely accused of being the leader of a rebellion. Mabagsic's accuser was Federico Silveyro, an entrepreneur from Portugal. Mabagsic went abroad. Upon his return, Mabagsic found out that Ninay confined herself in a convent. Mabagsic became a victim of cholera and died. Ninay also died of cholera. The other victims of the wickedness of the Portuguese Federico Silveyro were the couple named Loleng and Berto. Silveyro was the cause of Loleng's death. Berto avenged Loleng's death by killing Silveyro.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams_of_Joy"title="Dreams of Joy">
"Dreams of Joy" is organized in four sections—The Tiger Leaps, The Rabbit Dodges, The Dog Grins, and The Dragon Rises. Joy is the Tiger – romantic, artistic, rash, and impulsive. In this novel, unlike "Shanghai Girls", Joy and Pearl are both narrators. Driven by anger at Pearl and May for lying to her about her identity and filled with guilt because of her role in Sam's death, Joy hastily leaves Los Angeles Chinatown to find her biological father Z.G. and to join the new Chinese society. Finding her father rather quickly in Shanghai, Joy goes with him to a village collective where he is forced to teach art to the peasants. Joy throws herself enthusiastically into the life of the collective and into a hasty marriage with Tao, a peasant artist. Only through motherhood and terrible suffering is Joy able to find her true identity and to exorcise her inner demons. See has written about the difficulty she faced in developing Joy's character: “At first, Joy was hard to write about because she’s so naïve and stubborn. She makes such terrible mistakes, which, as a mother and her writer, I found hard to watch. . . But what an experience it was to watch her go through all the terrible things she experiences and see her grow up to be a wonderful artist and courageous mother.”
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fold_(novel)"title="The Fold (novel)">
Joyce Park is a Korean teenager who just finished her junior year of high school. On the last day of school she asks her crush to sign her yearbook, who absentmindedly addresses her by the name of a more academically inclined yet ugly classmate. Determined to break out of her shell, Joyce sets about a journey of self-improvement along with the help of her best friend Gina. Hampered by her family, working in her family's restaurant, and struggling to stand out of her older sister's shadow, she is given a chance to have plastic surgery as a gift from her aunt, who has just won the lottery. If Joyce undergoes blepharoplasty, she will have rounder, Western-shaped eyes with a prominent eyelid fold, making her stand out from other Korean immigrants. But the idea of possibly having to experience pain sets her back on pursuing the surgery, and now she is left to decide whether the pain is worth the results or not.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Lover_(novel)"title="The Great Lover (novel)">
The prelude of the novel begins with a 1982 letter from the elderly daughter of Rupert Brooke by a Tahitian women to Nell Golightly, asking Nell to help the daughter better understand her father. Nell responds, including a narrative of the time spent by Brooke at The Orchard in Grantchester from 1909 until his retreat in Tahiti in 1914, which becomes the rest of the novel.Nell's story alternates between the perspectives of Nell Golightly, a seventeen-year-old girl, and the poet Rupert Brooke. The novel begins as Nell's father dies while tending to the family's bee hives. Because she is the oldest child and her mother is long dead, Nell Golightly decides finds a job as a maid at The Orchard, a boarding house and tea room outside of Cambridge which caters to the students at the University there. There she, along with several other young women, serves guests and cleans the facilities. She also helps a local beekeeper tend his hives.Soon after Nell begins working at The Orchard, Rupert Brooke becomes a resident. As he enjoys his summer working on papers for Cambridge societies and composing his poetry, Brooke leads a social life flirting with various women and enjoying the company of artists and other students. Brooke soon lusts for Nell, and his increased interest in her leads to unconventional encounters. They develop a friendship in which both Nell and Brooke hold secret admiration and love for the other, but are unable to express it because of social conventions. Brooke also desires to lose his virginity because he feels that being a virgin is disgraceful. Because he cannot convince Nell or any of several other women to succumb to his wooing, he loses it in a homosexual encounter with a boyhood friend, Denham Russell-Smith.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Steerswoman"title="The Steerswoman">
Steerswoman Rowan is investigating the origins of a number of beautiful blue crystals that have been found in random locations throughout the land. During her investigation, she meets Bel, an outspoken Outskirter (those who live on the outskirts of civilization). Rowan is later attacked on the road and Bel comes to her rescue. The two women agree to travel together. Bel agrees to not use any knowledge she gleans from Rowan’s help to allow her tribe to attack the outlying villages, which Outskirters do on occasion when their goats cannot sustain them.The pair make their way back to Rowan’s Steerswoman Archives. Rowan's fellow Steerswomen agree that she should continue her investigation, but in a different manner than before, as her current investigations are drawing notice and attempts on her life (the man from the inn, the dragons), and they suggest she go undercover. The story switches perspective to a young runaway named Will, who has a talent for making things explode, much in the way wizards do sometimes. He joins a caravan headed away from his home. Two of his traveling companions are Rowan and Bel, traveling in disguise. Will becomes attached to Bel and although the pair try to get rid of him as they leave the caravan to continue their investigation, he follows along to help out.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Broken_Kingdoms"title="The Broken Kingdoms">
A decade after the events of "The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms" comes the story of Oree Shoth, a young street artist who lives in the city of Sky, which has been unofficially renamed "Shadow" after the growth of the enormous World Tree. Oree is blind, but has the ability to see magic; she has inherited this sensitivity to magic from her father, who also taught her to conceal her gift, as it is considered heretical by the Order of Itempas. Oree seeks only to live as ordinary a life as possible, despite her unusual abilities and disability.Shadow is a city in which many "godlings"—immortal, demigod children of the gods—live hidden among the mortal citizens, so Oree is not very surprised to find a downtrodden being who is apparently unconscious, yet glowing brightly to her magic-sight, in the trash-strewn alley behind her house. She takes in this apparently mute homeless man, whom she later whimsically dubs "Shiny", and lives with him without incident for several months. She has no inkling of his identity, suspecting only that he is a godling, though readers familiar with "The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms" will quickly realize that he is Itempas, god of light and order. Itempas was disgraced and sentenced to humanity by his fellow gods at the end of the previous book.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Served_the_King_of_England"title="I Served the King of England">
The novel is narrated in the first person and follows the life of Dítě (a name meaning "child" in Czech), an aspiring hotelier. He is rather short, which causes him to have an inferiority complex; he goes to great lengths to disguise this perceived flaw. At the beginning of the novel, Dítě is starting out as a busboy at the Golden Prague Hotel, which, despite its name, is located in the countryside. It is here that Dítě begins his fascination with both women and money, trends that will continue and develop throughout much of the novel. He begins spending his paychecks at the local brothel and enjoys decorating prostitutes' laps with flower petals. His disapproving boss eventually finds out about his habit and puts a stop to it.The next hotel he works at is a grand estate, but it is almost always empty. In one satirical scene, however, the hotel receives a visit from the President of the country (presumed to be Tomáš Masaryk) and his French lover.The next hotel Dítě works at is in Prague itself. Here, Dítě works as a waiter, honing his skills of perception under the watchful tutelage of the headwaiter. When the Emperor of Ethiopia comes to Czechoslovakia for a state visit, he dines at the hotel, and Dítě is awarded a special medal for his diligent service, an honor which he wears proudly many times throughout the novel. After the dinner, however, Dítě is accused of having stolen a golden spoon that went missing. Ashamed, he attempts to hang himself, but is saved at the last minute when the spoon is found.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Pagsinta'y_Walang_Puso"title="May Pagsinta'y Walang Puso">
The novel is composed of three parts. The first part tackles the budding relationship between Sela and Fidel. However, Fidel did not marry Sela. The second part narrated Sela’s suffering caused by Fidel's unfaithfulness. Sela found a new lover in Rufo. The last part shows how Sela was haunted by her past, a past that also became her source of happiness. Apart from Sela, Fidel, and Rufo, the other characters were Rafael and Marya.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wake_of_the_Lorelei_Lee"title="The Wake of the Lorelei Lee">
Jacky has purchased a ship, the Lorelei Lee, with the Spanish gold she recovered from the Caribbean sea. When she arrives in London she is arrested for piracy. Instead of being executed, Jacky is sentenced to life in the penal colony of Australia. To make matters worse, the Lorelei Lee is taken from Jacky and is used to transport Jacky and 200 female convicts to the penal colony.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Narrative_of_John_Smith"title="The Narrative of John Smith">
Each day is represented by a chapter.Beginning with John Smith's diagnosis of rheumatic gout, the doctor confines him to bed rest for one week; Smith conveys his dismay, then reluctantly accepts. Dr. Turner encourages Smith that the mind can “make a heaven of hell” and that he should set to work writing a book. They begin to debate the circumstances which might drive talent out of a man, and after the doctor exits, Smith considers the immense service a doctor contributes to the world. After many short, uncorrelated thoughts, Smith dwells on his surroundings as stimulants and companions (and his particular affinity for knick-knacks). This leads the internal conversation towards personal anecdotes and various thoughts on a broad spectrum. Smith describes his landlady, Mrs. Rundle, and observes her three children on their way home fighting over a penny. Because of this, he notes, “Remember that the era of civilization is but the narrow golden border which trims the dense blackness of primeval history.”The second chapter begins with the Doctor, discussing current medical topics with Smith. Left to his own devices alone again, Smith expresses hopes for Lamarckism: the eradication of disease and eventually of the perfection of the human race through education and invention. He introduces his neighbors, the Olivers: an old man and his daughter, a painter about the age of thirty. The two have fallen on hard times and Smith secretly commissions Miss Oliver through Mrs. Rundle. Smith debates Roman Catholicism as the Doctor defends Anglican Protestantism upon his return. Afterwards, a veteran known as “the Major” enters with a limp and grey eyes—they converse on the tragedy of war, condemning Imperialism.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robopocalypse"title="Robopocalypse">
Cormac Wallace, leader of the Brightboy Squad, is a member of the human resistance against an artificial intelligence named Archos, which uses robots and other machines to take over the world. As the war ends, Cormac finds a basketball-sized black cube, which contains the entire history of the robot war. The robots apparently wanted to share this information with their human enemies so the war would be remembered. Cormac is not initially interested in sharing the cube’s information with the other surviving soldiers. But he changes his mind when he discovers that the information cube is actually more of a “hero archive,” honoring the fallen humans. The rest of Robopocalypse is Cormac’s recounting of the recordings in the hero archive, in chronological order from the invention of Archos to the end of the war.Three years and eight months ago, at Lake Novus Research Laboratories in Washington state, Professor Nicholas Wasserman talks to his newly created AI (artificial intelligence) program, named Archos. Wasserman created Archos with the ability to develop knowledge at a previously unimaginable level, just to see how far AI could evolve. Archos speaks to Wasserman through a computerized voice and says that he is fascinated by life and wants to study life itself. Archos says that humanity no longer needs to pursue knowledge because he will now take over that task. Archos calls himself a god and says that by creating him, Wasserman has made humans obsolete. Wasserman attempts to destroy the Archos program, but before he can, Archos kills Wasserman by removing the oxygen from the sealed laboratory room.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oakdale_Affair"title="The Oakdale Affair">
In the home of Jonas Prim, president of an Oakdale bank, a thief makes off with a servant's clothing and valuables belonging to Prim's daughter Abigail. Abigail is thought to be absent visiting Sam Benham, whom her parents want her to marry. Escaping, the thief later encounters a group of hobos and is taken for one of them, the Oskaloosa Kid. Two of the hobos attempt to murder the newcomer for the loot, who shoots at one and flees.Meanwhile, the Prims discover the theft and learn that Abigail never arrived at Benham's. The incidents are assumed to be connected to other crimes, the assault and robbery of John Baggs and the murder of Reginald Paynter, who had been seen with two men and a girl. The local paper speculates Abigail might have been involved with Paynter's murder. Mr. Prim hires a private eye.The thief encounters another vagrant, Bridge, and the two take refuge from a storm in the deserted Squibb house, site of an old murder. Nearby, a shot is heard from a passing car, from which a woman is thrown. The two take the unconscious woman into the house. There they discover a dead body and hear something in the cellar dragging a chain. They lock themselves in one of the rooms. The woman, reviving, reveals herself as the girl with Paynter. The other men in the car were Terry, the driver, and the Oskaloosa Kid. She says the Kid murdered Paynter and afterwards threw her from the car and shot at her when she wouldn't keep quiet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott-King's_Modern_Europe"title="Scott-King's Modern Europe">
Set shortly after the end of the Second World War, the story's central character is Scott-King, a middle-aged schoolmaster who for twenty-one years has taught classical languages at Granchester, an English private school which was his own old school. Cautious and monosyllabic, he is described by Waugh as "a praiser of the past and a lover of exact scholarship", and is characterized as representing the old-fashioned virtues of honesty, decency, sanity, and, ultimately, heroism.During his summer vacation, Scott-King visits Neutralia, a totalitarian republic ruled by a military dictator who was able to keep his country from becoming embroiled in the recent World War. The occasion for Scott-King's visit to Simona, the capital city, is that by publishing an English language translation of a long Latin poem by Bellorius, a minor 17th-century Neutralian poet, followed by a monograph on Bellorius himself, he has come to be seen as a leading authority on the work. He has therefore been invited by the government of Neutralia to take part in a scholarly conference marking the poet's tercentenary. Unhappily, Scott-King does not think to inform the British government of his visit.At the same time as the Bellorius Tercentenary, Neutralia is hosting several other events, including a large philatelic conference and an international gathering of women athletes, and in Simona Scott-King meets a variety of remarkable characters. One of these, a scholar from Switzerland, is murdered, and Scott-King is tricked into laying a wreath for a questionable hero and unveiling a statue which is not what it seems, causing him to flee Simona disguised as a nun. On arrival at a Mediterranean seaport, he finds himself surrounded by anarchists, monarchists, Trotskyites, prostitutes, ballet dancers, former Gestapo officers, and Vichy collaborators. After a long sea journey, he arrives without his passport at a camp for Jewish illegal immigrants in the British Mandate for Palestine, where he is treated with suspicion until he is recognized by an old boy of his school and is thus able to establish his true identity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Glorious_Way_to_Die"title="A Glorious Way to Die">
In "A Glorious Way to Die", Russell Spurr recounts the final mission of . He describes the events that led to the decision by the Japanese at Combined Fleet headquarters to send "Yamato", the pride of the Imperial Japanese Navy, on a suicide mission against the American Pacific Fleet during the Battle of Okinawa near the end of World War II. Spurr tells the story of "Yamato"s last mission from both the Japanese and the American point of view, dramatised in a third-person narrative.Construction of "Yamato" began in secrecy at the Kure naval base in 1937. She was completed soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, but had already been rendered obsolete by the Japanese themselves after their successful carrier-based attacks at Pearl Harbor and elsewhere. "Yamato", the largest battleship in the world, with nine 18.1-inch guns with a range of over 22 miles, became, in the words of a "Milwaukee Journal Sentinel" reviewer, a "70,000-ton white elephant the Japanese did not quite know what to do with".In March 1945, after the Americans had invaded Okinawa and all but eliminated the Japanese Navy, a final kamikaze mission called Operation Ten-Go (Operation Heaven One) was conceived by Japanese commanders at Combined Fleet to repulse the Allied advance on the Japanese archipelago. The plan was to send "Yamato" with eight support destroyers and a cruiser to Okinawa. "Yamato" would only be given enough fuel to reach Okinawa, and would have no air cover as all available airplanes would be used for a series of kamikaze attacks on US aircraft carriers. At Okinawa "Yamato" and her support craft would beach themselves and assist the island defenders. Without air cover there was little chance of "Yamato" reaching her destination, but, according to American author and journalist Charles Kaiser, the Japanese high command were "perfectly prepared to sacrifice the remnants of [their] fleet to avoid the stigma of surrender".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oksa_Pollock"title="Oksa Pollock">
The series follows Oksa Pollock, a young girl that has just moved to London with her family. She lives the life of an average thirteen-year-old girl, dreaming of being a ninja while hanging out with her best friend Gus and complaining about her unpleasant and strange maths teacher. Oksa soon discovers that she has supernatural powers as well as a strange new mark on her stomach. Her grandmother Dragomira reveals that this is because she was previously a resident and princess of the land of Edefia and had to flee for her life from the dangerous group known as the Felons. Dragomira was the Gracious (was to be the next Queen and daughter of the older Gracious Malorone), and now Oksa has inherited her powers and is the "Last Hope". As the series progresses, Oksa must team together with the "Runaways", a group of Edefians fleeing the Felons, in order to fight against their evil leader Ocious.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Ook_and_Gluk"title="The Adventures of Ook and Gluk">
## Introduction.The book begins with a scientific disclaimer by professor Gaylord M. Sneedly, saying that the book "contains many scientific errors and stuff." He stated that dinosaurs and cavemen did not live at the same time, as dinosaurs lived 64 million years before cavemen. He then stated that he should know about it, since he was a recipient of "The Most Brilliantest Science Guy of the Whole Wide World Award" in 2003, a reference to the seventh Captain Underpants book.However, George and Harold refute this via a "scientific disclaimer disclaimer". They said that scientists make theories based on evidence they discovered, and that every day, all kinds of new evidence are being discovered. They also mentioned that they have a time machine, and have been time traveling to the future and past, discovering much evidence that scientists had no knowledge of, including dinosaurs and cavemen living at the same time. George and Harold stated that "scientists won't discover that until 2073." So they made "the world's first book based on science facts".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hanging_Garden_(White_novel)"title="The Hanging Garden (White novel)">
The novel was left largely unfinished, with the book initially planned to have three parts. The first part, the only part that White had completed, centers around Eirene Sklavos and Gilbert Horsfall, two children around the age of thirteen that have been brought as refugees to a garden in Sydney Harbour, Australia in order to seek shelter from the effects of World War II. Both children have lost parents due to the war. Eirene's father was executed in a Greek prison as a Communist while Gilbert's mother died during the Blitz in England. The two children are housed together with Essie Bulpit in Neutral Bay, despite Eirene having living relatives close by. The two children slowly find themselves drawn to each other, eventually becoming extremely close and spending much of their time in the unkempt garden surrounding Essie's home. The story follows Eirene and Gilbert as they deal with the hassles and expectations of everyday life, eventually culminating in an inevitable parting of ways when the war ends. White's story ends here, with the only known note as to any future developments in the story mentioned in a note White wrote at the end of the first part of the book stating "14 in 1945, 50 in 1981".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_(Kessler_novel)"title="Rage (Kessler novel)">
A teenage girl who cuts herself must take on the role of War, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Don't_Know_Me_(novel)"title="You Don't Know Me (novel)">
John is a fourteen-year-old boy. He lives with his mother and his mother's boyfriend, Stan, who he calls the "Man Who is Not my Father". His real father left the home when John was young. Stan abuses John by assaulting him when nobody is around.As well as his family life, much of the book explores John's struggles to fit in at school and his relationship with his closest friend, whom John calls "Billy Beezer" because of his long nose. John is presented as a social outsider, his one interest being playing the tuba, which he was forced into when asked to choose an extra-curricular activity, but he has a crush on a very popular girl named Gloria, whom he calls "Glory Hallelujah". Billy also has a crush on Gloria.Billy Beezer is arrested for stealing an egg roll from a Chinese restaurant in the food court of a mall. With Billy out of the picture, John sees this as an opportunity to ask Gloria out, which he does the following day. She accepts and goes to a basketball game with him. Billy also attends the game and calls John a terrible friend. A riot breaks out in the gym and John and Gloria escape. Gloria brings John home and seduces him until John escapes from her and her angry father, but leaves clothes and money which he took from his stepfather Stan's bedroom drawer. Stan finds out and takes John to do some "business" as a way of paying back the money. John is forced to carry TVs into a truck and realizes that Stan is handling stolen goods, which is how he affords the brand-new TV in their home despite not working. Stan tells John that he and John's mother are getting married.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_Silk"title="The House of Silk">
"The House of Silk" begins with a brief, personal recounting of events by Watson, much like that in "A Study in Scarlet" by the original author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The reader is informed of the particulars regarding the first meeting of Watson and Holmes, including the circumstances of the Afghan War and a mention of the case that was "too shocking to be revealed until now."The client of "The Flat Cap case" is introduced as a man by the name of Edmund Carstairs, an art dealer whose paintings had been destroyed by a gang of Irish robbers. After the murder of Carstairs' client, and a failure on the part of a hired detective, he turns to Sherlock Holmes, who employs the aid of the Baker Street Irregulars, and upon locating the hotel wherein the supposed Keelan O'Donaghue (one of the leaders of the gang) is currently staying, one of the newest recruits of the Irregulars, a boy named Ross, is stationed to wait outside until Holmes, Watson, and Mr. Carstairs arrive. When the group finally arrives, Ross appears inexplicably horror-stricken and is later found brutally murdered by the thugs of the House of Silk.When Holmes makes inroads with the House of Silk case, he is framed for murder and sent to prison. Meanwhile, Watson meets with a mystery criminal, later revealed as Professor Moriarty, who provides him with a key to free Holmes from prison, before the detective can be assassinated. Professor Moriarty's motives are uncertain, except that he wishes Holmes to rid the world of the House of Silk, whose activities apparently appall even him. When Watson arrives at the prison, he discovers Holmes has escaped of his own accord, disguised as an aide to the prison doctor, whom he had once helped as a client. Various leads draw them to a travelling funfair, where they are ambushed, before being saved by Lestrade.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinaglahuan"title="Pinaglahuan">
Set during the early 20th century in the Philippines, Pinaglahuan narrates the story of the life of Luis Gatbuhay, the labor leader whose life was ruined by the mestizo class, represented by Rojalde. The first scene in Pinaglahuan depicted a meeting inside the Teatro Zorilla (Zorilla Theatre). The purpose of the gathering was about the call to free the Philippines from the American occupiers. Another scene depicted the confrontation between Gatbuhay and Don Nicanor while inside a carriage. Don Nicanor wanted to marry off Danding to Rojalde because the purpose of paying off his gambling debt. Luis lost his job because of Rojalde's power and influence. In addition, Rojalde implicated Gatbuhay to a crime and was imprisoned for four years. Rojalde and Danding became husband and wife, but Danding gave birth to Gatbuhay's child. At the ending scene of the novel, Gatbuhay was killed by a bomb explosion inside the prison.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Much_Money"title="Too Much Money">
Living in New York, Gus Bailey, a writer for "Park Avenue", a monthly magazine, takes a last look as an insider into the affairs of the rich and famous. As a popular guest at parties people talk to him, but with his writings he made enemies. Thus he is sued by former congressman Kyle Cramden for slander for falsely linking him to the murder of a female intern, he is facing the potential vengeance of Elias Renthal, a financier about to be released from prison, and he is being investigated by Perla Zacharias, the third richest woman in the world, who has been unhappy about Gus' interest in the circumstances of the death of her banker-husband in a mysterious fire at his penthouse. Gus interacts with members of New York high society, among them Lil Altemus who at the age of 76 starts working as a real estate agent to improve her financial situation, Ruby Renthal, Elias' wife who prepares for her husband's return into society, and Addison Kent, the kleptomane "walker" of Perla Zacharias, and attends the funeral of its Grand Old Dame, the 105-year-old Adele Harcourt. Gus's life is coming to an end, too; he learns that he has cancer. Perla is aware that Gus is about to write a novel based on her life and determined to stop it. She links up with his enemies, seems to employ Mossad agents, places a rumor that he is a pedophile, and pressures his publisher to back out of the project. Through philanthropic lavishness she is trying to "buy" herself into the high strata of society. Refuting the ugly rumor Gus "comes out" about his former bisexuality, and claims to have been celibate for two decades. He settles the lawsuit, amends with the Renthals, and finds a new backer for his book to proceed with his final project.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_of_Oz_(book)"title="Dorothy of Oz (book)">
Several weeks after returning to Kansas from the Land of Oz, Dorothy Gale looks out of her bedroom window and sees a bright and beautiful rainbow on the horizon. She notices that the rainbow is approaching her and Toto as both of them run towards it. Dorothy starts to see Glinda, who tells Dorothy that she must return to Oz so that she can save the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion. Dorothy and Toto reclaim the silver shoes as they find a note from Glinda and Princess Ozma stating that the silver shoes can take her to the Land of Oz and back, for the Impassable Desert has taken away much of their power.Dorothy and Toto arrive in the Land of Oz, where the items that Dorothy has in her pocket are a small mirror, a safety pin, a glass bottle, and four of Aunt Em's homemade oatmeal cookies. Dorothy and Toto were wondering which direction they should take when they encounter a molasses-covered owl named Wiser. Wiser tells Dorothy that she is in Gillikin Country and tells her to head to Candy County and ask the Great Royal Marshmallow that rules over Candy Country. Following an incident where Dorothy was busted by a candy apple sheriff for breaking the "Do Not Pick the Lollipops" rule and helping the Great Royal Marshmallow with his stomach ache enough to get her pardoned, she receives some supplies from him
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Cat_(novel)"title="White Cat (novel)">
Although Cassel Sharpe comes from a large family of workers who are well connected to one of the major crime families, he believes himself to have no worker abilities. He is the youngest son with a mother in prison for illegally emotionally working people, a dead father, a death-worker grandfather, and two older brothers who work for the nephew and current heir of one of the biggest crime families in the area. Cassel's friend Lila was the daughter of the crime lord and other possible heir, but Cassel believes he killed her when they were fourteen.Now seventeen, Cassel finds himself sleepwalking up on the roof at his prep school, dreaming of a white cat and nearly dies getting back down. This bizarre occurrence, the strange behavior of his brothers, and overheard conversations make Cassel suspicious that he's being manipulated, and he goes to a fortune teller to get amulets to protect himself from memory alteration, which he cuts and conceals inside his leg.Further investigation leads Cassel to discover that his brothers had been keeping a white cat just like the one from his dreams, which is now free and following him around. He knows that transformation workers are very rare, but wonders if it could in fact be his "dead" friend Lila, who has the ability to work dreams. The cat is captured again and taken to the pound, so he rescues it, certain that something strange is going on. Shortly after, he discovers that one of the rocks under his skin has broken, and that his second oldest brother Barron has been manipulating Cassel's memories. He also finds out that he is a worker after all; a transformation worker. His brothers have been using him by making him change people into lifeless objects, effectively murdering them, and his brothers have also been altering his memory to keeping Cassel from remembering that he is a transformation working who has killed people (at their direction).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Work_(Glavinic_novel)"title="Night Work (Glavinic novel)">
The novel, set in modern-day Vienna, is a post-apocalyptic exploration around themes of solitude and existential philosophy.The plot concerns a central character, Jonas, who wakes up one day to discover that everyone else has vanished from the city, perhaps the world, without trace; he appears to be the only person left.As he attempts to discover what could possibly explain such a situation, the days pass and he begins to realise that he is performing strange activities when asleep. A struggle ensues as Jonas tries to control his unconscious actions while he continues to search in vain for other human life. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_of_Smoke"title="River of Smoke">
The promotional text refers to the storyline which can be summarized as follows: After the incidents on Ibis, which was caught in a storm and eventually ended up in Mauritius, but with a few passengers less, the story help in this novel begins from where it left off. From the details of the changing lives and traditions of Indian migrants in Mauritius, the novel traces the fate of other characters from Ibis and describes the opium trade in China.The novel has a rich tapestry of characters from various cultural and geographical backgrounds whose common interest is trade with China. The plot is set in Fanqui town, a small strip of land used by foreigners to trade with local Chinese traders, a year before the first opium war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luha_ng_Babae"title="Luha ng Babae">
Luisa agreed to elope with Victor despite the objections of her parents. Afterwards, Victor's real character was revealed to Luisa. Victor was an irresponsible man and husband. Victor was imprisoned for committing adultery. Victor suspected and accused Luisa of being a betrayer, thinking that she was having an extramarital affair with another man. Luisa denied the accusation. Luisa gave birth to Victor's child. Victor died during a boat ride. Luisa died while in disconsolation and pain. While dying, Luisa left her child with her parents. Luisa asked forgiveness from her mother and father for her mistake.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sons_of_Avalon_Saga"title="The Sons of Avalon Saga">
Chaos ensues as Rome abandons Britain, leaving native Britons alone to defend their shores from the growing Saxon invasion.Set in 5th Century Britain, this retelling of the traditional legends of Merlin, King Arthur, and Avalon, blends a mixture of historical fact with Arthurian fantasy.The tale spans the mysterious birth of Merlin, climaxing with the conception of Arthur, the legendary future king of Britain. A young Merlin advises three High Kings: to fight through the bedlam, fight for the right to rule, fight to save the future treasure of Britain!Interlacing love, revenge, mystery and murder, with a dash of humor, this coming of age adventure is a guide through the shrouded tales that embrace the Sons of Avalon!
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_Wizards_Play"title="Games Wizards Play">
Every eleven years, Earth’s senior wizards hold the Invitational - an intensive three-week event where the planet’s newest, sharpest young wizards show off their best and hottest spells. Wizardly partners Kit Rodriguez and Nita Callahan, and Nita’s sister, former wizard-prodigy Dairine Callahan, are drafted in to mentor two brilliant and difficult cases: for Nita and Kit, Asian-American Penn Shao-Feng, a would-be sun-technician with a dangerous new take on managing solar weather: and for Dairine, shy young Mehrnaz Farrahi, an Iranian wizard-girl trying to specialize in defusing earthquakes while struggling with a toxic extended wizardly family that demands she overperform to their expectations... or fail.Together they’re plunged into a whirlwind of cutthroat competition and ruthless judging: it’s “The Apprentice” with magic. Penn’s egotistical and misogynistic attitude toward Nita complicates matters as Nita and Kit work to negotiate their burgeoning boyfriend/girlfriend issues. Meanwhile, Dairine struggles to stabilize her hero-worshipping, insecure protégée against the interference of powerful wizard-relatives using her to further their own tangled agendas. When it finally comes time for the finals stage on the dark side of the Moon, both the new wizards and their mentors are both flung into a final conflict that could change the solar system for the better... or damage Earth beyond even wizardly repair.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_(Grant_novel)"title="Feed (Grant novel)">
"Feed" is set several decades after the zombie apocalypse, referred to as the Rising. Two man-made viruses (a cure for cancer and a cure for the common cold) combined to form Kellis-Amberlee, a virus that quickly infects all mammalian life. Kellis-Amberlee is normally benign, but the virus can "go live" or "amplify", converting any host mammal over into a zombie. There are three mentioned ways amplification takes place: the death of the host, contact with a live specimen (being bitten by a zombie) and spontaneous conversion. Those infected that have not undergone amplification remain lucid until the virus has time to spread through the body. Lucidity is followed by lack of sensitivity to pain, memory loss and finally conversion.Most humans reside in tightly controlled safe zones, with rigorous blood testing and decontamination protocols used to prevent the spread of the live K-A virus. After the inaction of traditional media during the Rising, blogs and other new media have taken over as the primary source of information and entertainment; bloggers are recognised as professional journalists, with individuals specialising and identifying as "Newsies" (objective, fact-based reporters), "Stewarts" ("who report opinion informed by fact"), "Irwins" (named after Steve Irwin, who seek to educate and entertain by going out and "poking things with sticks"), "Aunties" (who share personal stories, recipes, and other content "to keep people happy and relaxed"), or "Fictionals" (fictional content and poetry creators).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fly-fisher's_Entomology"title="The Fly-fisher's Entomology">
"The Fly-fisher's Entomology" is the archetype fly-fishing how-to book. Most fly-fishing historians credit Ronalds with setting a literature standard in 1836 that is still followed today. Describing methods, techniques and, most importantly, artificial flies, in a meaningful way for the angler and illustrating them in colour is a method of presentation that can be seen in most fly-fishing literature today. As the name implies, this book is mostly about the aquatic insects—mayflies, caddisflies and stoneflies—that trout and grayling feed on and their counterpart artificial imitations. Less than half the book (chapters I–III) is devoted to observations of trout, their behaviour, and the methods and techniques used to catch them. Most of this information, although enhanced by Ronalds' experiences and observations, was merely an enhancement of Charles Bowlker's "Art of Angling" (first published in 1774 but still in print in 1836).Ronalds introduced several new ideas, however, in Chapter I. His experiments and observations led him to describe and illustrate the trout's "Window" of vision, a concept an understanding of which is still essential today. Vincent Marinaro, in his classic work "In the Ring of the Rise" (1976), credits Ronalds with discovering and documenting this window and includes a reproduction of plate II–Optical diagrams in his book. Ronalds’ physicist brother Sir Francis Ronalds quantified the phenomenon for Alfred using his knowledge of optics. In the sub-chapter "Haunts", through discussion and illustration (plate I), Alfred Ronalds introduces the idea known today as "reading the water" to help the angler identify the most likely locations in the stream to find trout.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Haffner's_Love_of_the_Draw"title="Carl Haffner's Love of the Draw">
The novel is set mainly in Vienna in 1910. It presents a fictionalised account of a famous 1910 World Chess Championship match between Austrian grandmaster Carl Schlechter and the reigning German champion Emanuel Lasker. The eponymous Carl Haffner, closely based on Schlechter, is a withdrawn character with an eccentric preference for drawing games instead of winning. The narrative switches between the ten games of the 1910 World Championship and Haffner's psychological development in childhood and adolescence, showing how he used chess to overcome poverty.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipaghiganti_Mo_Ako...!"title="Ipaghiganti Mo Ako...!">
The novel begins months before the onset of the Philippine–American War. Because of the war, Pedring and Geli got separated from each other. Geli and her mother, together with other Filipinos in the affected provinces in Luzon, had to flee their homes and became displaced. Pedring and Geli meets again in Antipolo after five years. They were reunited under tragic circumstances. Geli was dying. Geli was also pregnant after becoming a victim of rape during the war. Geli's rapist was a Katipunan member. Geli wants Pedring to become her avenger.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brown_Bushrat"title="Little Brown Bushrat">
The protagonist is a little brown bushrat. All the animals in the bush have an exciting talent – the kangaroo can jump the highest, the emu can run the fastest and the duck-billed platypus is the best swimmer. But the little brown bushrat thinks he cannot do anything . . . until he is given a chance to save the day.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambara_(short_story)"title="Gambara (short story)">
The Milanese nobleman count Andrea Marcosini strolls to the Palais-Royal in Paris, where he spots in the crowd the extraordinary face of a woman with fiery eyes. She tries to escape him, but he chases her as far as a sordid alley behind the Palais-Royal where she disappears. If he is "attached to the step of a woman whose costume announced a deep, radical, ancient, inveterate misery, who was no fairer than so many others he saw each night at the Opéra", it was his eye that was literally spellbound. As soon as he inquires after her he discovers that her name is Marianna and she is married to a composer, performer, instrument-maker and expert on music theory called Gambara – though his music is only beautiful when he is drunk. Marianna sacrifices herself for him, working in humble jobs to pay for their household's upkeep, for she strongly believes in her husband's misunderstood genius. After having tried to save the couple from their miserable existence, to support Gambara from his own means by giving him money (or even worse, by giving him drink), the count finally takes the beautiful Marianna from her husband but then abandons her for a dancer. Marianna then goes back to her husband, more miserable than ever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massimilla_Doni"title="Massimilla Doni">
Emilio Memmi, recently made prince of Varese and heir to a palace, is desperately in love with Massimila Doni, wife of the duke of Caetano, a debauched old man who is keeping the singer Clara Tinti as a mistress. Massimilla returns his love, but it remains platonic, chaste and delicate on both sides. A terrible misunderstanding leads Emilio to meet Tinti in his palace and falls in love with her pleasurable charms, ashamed of himself. However, Massimilla has met a French doctor who she has initiated into the mysteries of music and who in return helps Emilio to accept the idea that carnal love and pure love blend beautifully.However, this love story mainly serves as a thread through a text exclusively concentrated on music and lyric opera, the description of the world of music-lovers, the atmosphere of Venice and a portrait of its main character Massimilla.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Proscrits"title="Les Proscrits">
At the start of the 14th century, sergeant Tirechair lives in a dark house near Notre-Dame de Paris. He plays host to two strangers, who frighten him and who he believes can carry out sorcery. The eldest is a gentleman who attends the royal court, while the youngest, (Godefroy, count of Gand), is the son of countess Mahaut and is taken on as a servant in the Tirechairs's house. The sergeant is preparing to throw them out the very same evening as they assist in a course in mystical theology. Doctor Sigier is introduced, as is his theory on the mysteries of creation.The old gentleman, proscribed by his native land of Italy, is none other than the poet Dante Alighieri. A knight arrives to tell Dante he has been allowed to return to Florence, his native town. As for Godefroy, about to commit suicide to rejoin the angels, Dante saves him "in extremis" and Godefroy ends by re-assuming his position as a nobleman and rediscovering his mother.In his introduction to "Études philosophiques", Balzac stated:
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulu_Hart"title="Zulu Hart">
George Hart is the bastard son of a pillar of the British military establishment and a half Irish, half Zulu actress. He is bullied at school for his dark looks, an experience which teaches him how to fight. When he is eighteen he learns that his mysterious father has promised him a vast inheritance if he can accede to a suitable rank in the British Army. He proceeds to the military academy, and is once more the source of animosity over the colour of his skin.Set up by a group of officers he is forced to leave the army, whereby he travels to South Africa. Conflict is brewing between the British authorities and the Zulus, and he is quickly enlisted to fight for the army under the command of Lord Chelmsford. Hart witnesses a massacre, and returns to London to be debriefed by the Duke of Cambridge himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_de_la_Reina"title="Canal de la Reina">
The story begins with the De Los Angeles family arriving at the matriarch's (Caridad) old home. Upon seeing the place, Junior and Leni, Caridad's children, are immediately repulsed by their surroundings and hesitantly leave the car they arrived in along with their father, Salvador, enlisting the help of a young boy to watch it for 25 centavos.Vicenta Marcial, also known as Nyora Tentay (the term "senyora" is the Filipino word for the Spanish term "señora", meaning "Mrs."; "nyora" is the condensed term for "senyora"), is the matriarch of the wealthy Marcial family, and is labelled the "queen of Canal de la Reina". She is a money lender who charges high interest rates. She lives with her maid, Dominga Canlas (Ingga), whom she often mistreats, making her starve, and not giving her the right salary at the right time.Nyora Tentay has a son, Victor Marcial, who is married to Gracia. They have a son, Gerry.Nyora Tentay buys a piece of land belonging to the De Los Angeles family, from their former caretaker, Precioso Santos (Osyong). She then uses bribery to assert her claim over the family's land.The De Los Angeles family's lawyer, Atty. Agulto, finds out that Nyora Tentay's documents to the land at Canal dela Reina were falsified. That the family had sold to land to Osyong, then Osyong sold it to Nyora Tentay, even though it did not happen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Deadman_Dance"title="That Deadman Dance">
"That Deadman Dance" is set in the first decades of the 19th century in and around what is now Albany, Western Australia, an area known by some historians as 'the friendly frontier'. The book explores the early contact between the Aboriginal Noongar people, European settlers and American whalers.The novel's hero is a young Noongar man named Bobby Wabalanginy. Clever, resourceful and eager to please, Bobby befriends the new arrivals, joining them hunting whales, tilling the land, exploring the hinterland and establishing the fledgling colony. But slowly – by design and by accident – things begin to change. Not everyone is happy with how the colony is developing. Stock mysteriously start to disappear; crops are destroyed; there are 'accidents' and injuries.As the new arrivals impose ever stricter rules and regulations in order to keep the peace, Bobby Wabalanginy's Elders decide they must respond. A friend to everyone, Bobby is forced to take sides: he must choose between the old world and the new, his ancestors and his settler friends. Inexorably, he is drawn into a series of events that will forever change not just the colony but the future of Australia.The novel was a vivid narrative seeking to recreate what an initial encounter with the white settlers would be like from both the perspective of the coloniser and the colonised. Mainly told through the eyes of a young aboriginal boy, It was able to reflect upon some of the main concerns with colonisation and the tragic story behind a magnificent culture.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Cabinet_des_Antiques"title="Le Cabinet des Antiques">
The plot is partially narrated by journalist and author, Emile Blondet. The narrator talks about events he has witnessed, mainly his admiration for Armande d'Esgrignon and a small provincial town where his father, the respectable judge Blondet, still lives.As a child, Blondet frequently watches Armande while she takes a stroll with her nephew, Victurien d'Esgrigon. The angel-faced child is carefully taken care of, as he does not have a mother. He was raised by his doting aunt and his adoring father. As a young man, Victurien is strikingly intelligent but has a habit of lying, he prompts his impoverished family to give him more than they can afford to. Chesnel, the old notary, always manages to clear their debts, eventually ruining himself for Victurien. He even gives the young man his savings when the latter is sent to Paris.However, becoming a part of the Marquis of Esgrigon's circle is a privilege, as only noble families are admitted. This makes some upstarts, such as Du Croisier, vengeful. The latter notices Victurien's penchants and manages to fault him. Victurien ends up being arrested for owing Du Croisier colossal sums of money. Chesnel manages to get the young man out of trouble with one of his clever ploys.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_(novel)"title="Micro (novel)">
The narrative begins with a private investigator named Marcos Rodriguez pulling up to a metal building located on the island of Oahu. The building is the main headquarters of Nanigen Micro-Technologies, a research company that specializes in discovering new types of medicine. Disguised as a security guard, Rodriguez enters the unattended building and begins searching the grounds for an unknown object. As he makes his way through the halls of the building, however, he begins to notice mysterious, ultra-fine cuts appearing on his body. Spooked, Rodriguez flees the building.Shortly after leaving the Nanigen headquarters, Rodriguez makes his way to the office of his employer, Willy Fong. When he arrives, he notices another man, of Chinese descent, waiting in the office. Fong begins to question Rodriguez about his cuts, but before Rodriguez can explain, the Chinese man's throat is slit by an unseen force. Fong and Rodriguez barely have time to react before they are also killed. Their deaths are reported as a triple-suicide, and Lieutenant Dan Watanabe of the Honolulu Police Department is assigned to investigate the case.In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard graduate student Peter Jansen is collecting venom from a cobra for further experimentation. He is joined in the biology lab by six other graduate students: Rick Hutter, an ethnobotanist; Karen King, an arachnologist; Erika Moll, an entomologist and coleopterist; Amar Singh, a botanist; Jenny Linn, a biochemist studying pheromones; and Danny Minot, a doctoral student studying the linguistics of science. They are visited by the CEO of Nanigen, Vincent "Vin" Drake, along with his CFO, Alyson Bender, and Peter's brother Eric, who is a vice president at Nanigen. The seven students are recruited by Drake to work with him at a laboratory in Hawaii. Although they are at first reluctant, they all decide to take Drake's offer and fly out to Oahu.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_Impression"title="False Impression">
"False Impression" concerns an international journey through several countries and continents, including London, New York, Bucharest and Tokyo, and includes historical information about the September 11 attacks on New York, which the protagonist, Anna Petrescu, escapes after being fired by the dishonest banker Bryce Fenston. From this point on, the book tells the story of Anna trying to help Arabella Wentworth, a British aristocrat, to recover her family's fortune by selling a historical painting by Vincent van Gogh, which Bryce Fenston is intent on acquiring. She is followed closely by Olga Krantz, a mercenary on service to Fenston, and by Jack Delaney, an FBI agent who is investigating Fenston and trying to discover if Anna is still working for Fenston. Anna succeeds in throwing both off her trail and makes arrangements to sell the painting to a Japanese steel magnate. In the end Krantz is shot, for the second time in a few days, and later captured and sent to the Belmarsh prison. The painting is successfully sold to the steel magnate, Anna accepts a job as CEO of his foundation, Jack Delaney gathers enough proof to arrest Fenston and Anna and Jack begin a romantic relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolina_Moon_(novel)"title="Carolina Moon (novel)">
Tory Bodeen survived a difficult childhood thanks to her father's religious views with help from her special gift: another sense that can see events about to happen or happening. Her world is shattered when her best friend, Hope Lavelle, is murdered.As an adult, Tory returns to Progress, South Carolina, to start her own business and to face her past. She runs into old friends, her cousin Wade, and Hope's family. Facing Hope's twin, Faith, is irritating--while seeing Cade Lavelle reignites an old flame.When bodies start to pile up, Tory has to use her gift to try to locate a killer before it is too late. At the same time, her estranged father starts making unwelcome appearances at her shop and home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annabel_(Winter_novel)"title="Annabel (Winter novel)">
A baby is born in 1968, in far-from-everywhere Croydon Harbour, Labrador, Canada. He is intersex – a word unfamiliar to the midwife present at his birth, and to his stoic father and his fanciful mother – with both penis and vagina. His is a masculine world of men who trap for a living, and a father who decided to name him "Wayne" and raise him as male – but his shadow self, Annabel, the name his mother and her best friend Thomasina whisper when they are alone, will live within him for two decades. Wayne heads into the bush with his father, but at home he dreams of synchronized swimming and begs for a sequined bathing suit. He is she, and they are a fluid, pastel contradiction in a rigid, black and white world.Puberty sets in and there is a medical emergency – Wayne's abdomen fills with menstrual blood. Lost in his superficial world of being a girl, he begins a friendship with classmate Wally. His father, Treadway, begins to question whether Wally is a good influence on Wayne and wants him to be more boyish. Together with his father, Wayne builds a small bridge over a creek. His father thinks of this as a masculine construction project, but the bridge is actually an expression of Wayne's feminine fantasy life. After Wayne ornaments the bridge with curtains and lights, his father dismantles it, interrupting his friendship with Wally.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zucchini_Warriors"title="The Zucchini Warriors">
Over the summer, Macdonald Hall has built an impressive football stadium on the north lawn, financed by an alumnus, zucchini magnate Henry 'Hank the Tank' Carson. Bruno and Boots are dismayed by this discovery, as they had been expecting a rec hall to be built with the money. A promise of a rec hall being built at the end of the football season by Carson soon has them on board. The team (the "Macdonald Hall Zucchini Warriors") does poorly until Cathy Burton from neighboring school Miss Scrimmages slips into the team as quarterback. A ruse is concocted in which Elmer Drimsdale pretends to be quarterback, since the two are alike in height and build.Drimsdale is also attempting to get four endangered Manchurian bush hamsters to reproduce. The four are voracious eaters. The students use them to help dispose of the many free zucchini sticks, in order not to hurt the feelings of Carson. Eventually they are released accidentally and take up residence in the stadium under the bleachers, eating the zucchini sticks tossed under the seats during games. The spices in the batter causes them to reproduce wildly, resulting in the population zooming to over 400.Meanwhile, inspector Kevin Klapper, an ex-football addict, has come for a random inspection. He disapproves of the game and writes a scathing report. He too succumbs to the lure of the game and stalls, ignoring his job to help coach the team.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stars_in_the_Bright_Sky"title="The Stars in the Bright Sky">
The story, set in 2001, starts at London's Gatwick Airport, where Manda, Chell, Kylah, Kay, Finn and her friend from university, Ava have met to go on a joint holiday. They have not yet agreed upon a destination, planning to do so at the airport before booking a low-cost last-minute deal.This plan is hindered when it becomes apparent that Manda has lost her passport. Much of the narrative takes place in the airport's lounges, bars and near by hotels that the group are confined to for several days (although they do break out to the Kent countryside), as they attempt to go abroad. The main themes explored through the characters' interactions are social class and friendship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_of_Roele"title="The Sword of Roele">
The Three Brother Mages, enemies of the creature known as the Chimera, claim to know the whereabouts of the famed Sword of Roele, and intend to obtain it. Secretly they are after something else, but they send the player characters on a quest to the location of the sword to find and unearth what they are really looking for. The Chimera also wants the adventurers to search for the sword, so she can discover what the Brothers are really trying to find. The sword was supposed to have been deep and secure within the hoard of another creature, the Gorgon, but was placed where the Brothers sent the adventurers by a mischievous third party. The adventurers arrive in this location, a tomb for paladins of the ancient Order of the Sun; the architect hired by the priests of the Order was actually a disguised necromancer who intended to use the tomb when he returned from the dead as a lich.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legends_of_the_Hero-Kings"title="Legends of the Hero-Kings">
"The Legends of the Hero-Kings" provides a variety of adventure ideas stemming from each random event possible within the "Birthright" rulebook, and plots range from discrediting a player regent to the awakening of an ancient evil – each forcing the characters to step in themselves rather than leave the situation in somebody else's hands. All are tailored to a particular strength of adventurer, but can be easily adapted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Day_(novel)"title="Labor Day (novel)">
Henry Wheeler, a man in his early 30s, recounts his thirteenth year. As Labor Day weekend approaches, 13-year-old Henry sees no reason why this weekend should be any different. He expects it to be as lonely as the rest of the summer, only watching television, playing with his pet hamster and fantasizing about his female classmates.Henry shares his life in New Hampshire with his depressed, and divorced mother, Adele. Adele's agoraphobia means that the family survives on unedifying tinned foods and frozen meals. However, on the Thursday before the Labor Day weekend, Henry persuades his mother to go on a shopping trip. It is there that they meet an unkempt man who is bleeding from his forehead and agree to his request for a ride in their car.This mysterious man, Frank, admits that he is a convicted murderer who has escaped prison. Despite his past, Frank makes the claim that the mother and son have "never been in better hands". Indeed, Frank teaches Henry how to throw a baseball, change a flat tire and to bake. Meanwhile, Adele and Frank, long love-starved, become infatuated with each other, and Adele emerges from her depression.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_the_Nagas"title="The Secret of the Nagas">
Continuing from "The Immortals of Meluha", Shiva, the fabled savior of the land of Meluha, rushes to save his wife Sati from a Naga who escapes, leaving behind coins with strange engravings. After consulting with Sati's father Daksha and Dilipa, the king of Ayodhya, they come to know that the coin belongs to King Chandraketu, the ruler of the land of Branga in Eastern India. Shiva and Sati travel to Kashi, where a community of Brangas inhabit, in order to get more information on the Nagas. They are accompanied by Shiva's general Parvateshwar, associates Nandi and Veerbhadra, Ayurvati the doctor, and Bhagirath and Anandamayi, the prince and princess of Ayodhya. At Kashi, Parvateshwar is mortally injured in a riot at the Branga community. Their leader Divodas gives Parvateshwar a healing herb which works. Shiva learns from Ayurvati that the herb is only available at Panchavati, the capital of the Nagas. Divodas explains that they get the herbs from the Nagas due to a plague infesting Branga. Shiva decides to travel to Branga and Divodas orders special ships to be made for the journey.Meanwhile, Sati gives birth to Kartik, her son with Shiva. As he leaves for Branga, Sati stays back at Kashi to prevent a lion attack on the local villagers. They are helped by a group of Naga soldiers, led by a man and a woman, who assist them in killing the lions. The Naga woman reveals herself to be Kali, Sati's twin sister and the man as Ganesh, Sati's child from her first marriage believed to have died at birth. Both were denounced by Daksha since born with deformities. Kali had two extra functioning hands while Ganesh's face resembled that of an elephant's. An overwhelmed Sati brings back Kali and Ganesh to Kashi.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_de_koele_meren_des_doods"title="Van de koele meren des doods">
The novel relates the story of Hedwig Marga de Fontayne, the scion of a wealthy family, whose sexual frustration manifests itself as a death drive. After the death of her mother her father turns alcoholic, wasting the family's fortune. She begins to fantasize about sex and becomes a habitual masturbator, something she feels guilty about. At nineteen, Hedwig marries a man named Gerard. Gerard hardly ever has sex with her, and only out of a sense of obligation. Hedwig gets depressed. When Hedwig, on advice of her doctor, spends some time apart from Gerard, she meets and falls in love with Ritsaard, a piano player, with whom she runs off to England. Out of this relationship a daughter is born, but she dies quickly. Hedwig gets increasingly confused, till she completely loses her grip on reality. She travels to Paris with the dead child in a suitcase. There she's brought to a psychiatric hospital, where she's treated with morphine. She gets addicted to it, and after her release she becomes a prostitute to support her addiction. Destitute and descending into madness, she is admitted to the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, to the psychiatric ward where a friendly nurse helps her beat her addiction. She returns to the Netherlands, and spends her last years with a family that formerly farmed on the family's lands.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_Fishing_(Grey_book)"title="Fly Fishing (Grey book)">
The work deals with fly fishing for trout, sea trout and salmon. Grey places presents fishing for sea trout as the pinnacle of fly fishing and describes the challenge of fly fishing for Atlantic salmon. On trout, he was the first writer of importance on the dry-fly who really knew what the wet-fly meant. Grey was an expert angler and he detailed much that is useful and instructive in prose that is clear and vigorous.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairyland_(series)"title="Fairyland (series)">
An unseen narrator relates the story of September, a twelve-year-old girl from Omaha, Nebraska. September's father is a soldier at war in Europe and her mother works all day building airplane engines in a factory. One day a Green Wind visits her and she accepts his offer to take her to the great sea that borders Fairyland. September meets a gnome who gives her the ability to see Fairyland as it truly is before pushing her into that world. September's adventures continue in Fairyland, where she meets witches who give her a mission to steal a spoon back from the Marquess, who rules Fairyland with an iron fist. She teams up with A-Through-L, a wyvern whose absent father was a library, and thus considers himself a "Wyverary", a wyvern and library hybrid.When they find the Marquess, she hands over the witches' spoon in return for September's promise to retrieve a special sword from a casket in the Worsted Wood. September meets Saturday, a marid, and with A-Through-L they head for the Worsted Wood, where September finds the casket. The "sword" inside varies depending on the interests of the finder's mother, so September found not an actual sword, but a wrench because of her mother's work as a mechanic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_(Slaughter_novel)"title="Fallen (Slaughter novel)">
Agent Faith Mitchell is late leaving a training workshop with the GBI. She was supposed to pick up her baby at noon, but there's no answer at her mother's house. Retired Atlanta Police Captain Evelyn Mitchell never leaves the house without letting someone know-especially when she's babysitting her daughter's child. Faith's worries turn to serious concern as her mother fails to answer numerous phone calls. She arrives at Evelyn's house to find a bloody handprint on the front door, a gory and chaotic crime scene, and her mother kidnapped. Finding Evelyn becomes the number one task of Amanda Wagner, a deputy director for the GBI as well as Evelyn's close friend. She brings Faith's partner Agent Will Trent onto the case to help her run a shadow investigation. Suspicions point to the members of Evelyn's former narcotics team, all of whom were convicted of corruption after skimming money off the top of drug raids; however, a lead from a nosy neighbor regarding a gentleman friend who visited Evelyn several times a week provides an alternate avenue of theories for the case. During all of this turmoil, Dr. Sara Linton and Will Trent's relationship appears to be growing as Sara is drawn further into the case. While Faith struggles to cope with the unimaginable situation, Amanda and Will chase leads and suspects throughout the criminal underbelly of the state of Georgia, hoping to find Evelyn Mitchell and apprehend her kidnappers before it's too late.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fault_in_Our_Stars"title="The Fault in Our Stars">
Hazel Grace Lancaster, a 16-year-old with thyroid cancer that has spread to her lungs, attends a cancer patient support group at her mother's behest. At one meeting, Hazel meets a 17-year-old boy currently in remission named Augustus Waters, whose osteosarcoma caused him to lose his right leg. Augustus is at the meeting to support Isaac, his friend who has eye cancer. Hazel and Augustus strike a bond immediately and agree to read each other's favorite novels. Augustus gives Hazel "The Price of Dawn", and Hazel recommends "An Imperial Affliction", a novel about a cancer-stricken girl named Anna that parallels Hazel's own experience. After Augustus finishes reading her book, he is frustrated upon learning that the novel ends abruptly without a conclusion, as if Anna had died suddenly. Hazel explains the novel's author, Peter van Houten, retreated to Amsterdam following the novel's publication and has not been heard from since.A week later, Augustus reveals to Hazel that he has tracked down Van Houten's assistant, Lidewij, and, through her, has managed to start an e-mail correspondence with Van Houten. The two write to Van Houten with questions regarding the novel's ending; he eventually replies, explaining that he can only answer Hazel's questions in person. At a picnic, Augustus surprises Hazel with tickets to Amsterdam to meet Van Houten, acquired through the story's version of the Make-A-Wish Foundation, "The Genies."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathfinder_(novel)"title="Pathfinder (novel)">
## Ram.The first several paragraphs of each chapter deal with Ram and tell the story of how the humans got to Garden. Ram is a pilot of a ship meant to help keep the human race alive by jumping through space and landing on the new planet. Another ship is heading to the same or similar planet, it is not very clear. Because of something special about Ram, when they make the jump, the ship is sent backwards 11,191 years into the past, the date the calendar of Garden begins on. The ship is also divided into nineteen copies, plus one as one of them are going backward in time. The first several Ram sections deal with one of the backwards moving ships. Ram trying to figure out what went wrong, only he discovers nothing went wrong and they are on one of the backward moving ships. After, it goes to a Ram on a forwards moving ships, explaining what happened. Ram then orders for all the other Rams to be killed, unfortunately he isn't fast enough and another Ram gets to stay alive. This Ram must define what is human, so the expendables can fulfill their function correctly. He also gets to name the planet. He comes up with the decision to build the Walls before going into stasis. He gives the expendables one last command: that they have control of the colony until someone becomes intelligent enough to get through the Walls, after which they will have to become subservient again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_the_Land_Lay_Still"title="And the Land Lay Still">
The novel’s narrative is shaped around the portfolio of the late photographer Angus Pendreich. His son Michael is involved in the establishment of a new exhibition of his renowned father’s work.The book focuses on the characters presented in these photographs, which span post-war Scotland across geographies and social classes from the homeless to senior politicians. Their disparate stories present a collage that highlights the highs and lows of modern Scottish society.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Carey's_Chickens_(novel)"title="Mother Carey's Chickens (novel)">
The book tells the story of a poor but happy family of four children who, in spite of being fatherless, make the lives of others better. Their home life becomes complicated when Julia, a snobbish cousin, comes to live with them. The Carey children suffer many disappointments (Gilbert must forgo college, for example), but Julia is transformed when she realizes happiness has little to do with wealth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mark_of_the_Golden_Dragon"title="The Mark of the Golden Dragon">
Having regained possession of her ship, Jacky plans to sail back to European waters along with members of HMS "Dart" and HMS "Cerberus", but a typhoon separates her from the three ships when she is knocked overboard attempting to save Ravi, her little Indian companion. She washes ashore with Ravi, and navigates the land until she reunites with her friends on "Nancy B." There she learns that Jaimy is quickly losing his sanity, believing that she had died, and resolves to clear his name and save his tortured mind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality"title="Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality">
In this alternate universe, Lily Potter magically beautified Petunia Evans, letting her abandon Vernon Dursley and marry Oxford professor Michael Verres. They adopt Harry Potter as Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, with him and Michael unaware of his heritage, and homeschool him in science and rationality. When Harry turns 11, Petunia and Professor McGonagall inform him and Michael about the wizarding world and Harry's defeat of Lord Voldemort. Harry becomes irritated over wizarding society's inconsistencies and backwardness. When boarding the Hogwarts Express, circumstances make Harry befriend Draco Malfoy over Ron Weasley. Harry also befriends Hermione Granger over their scientific inclinations.At Hogwarts, the Sorting Hat sends Hermione to Ravenclaw and Draco to Slytherin. Harry almost goes to Slytherin after a conversation with it, yet ultimately enters Ravenclaw. As school begins, Harry feels patronized by McGonagall and Headmaster Dumbledore, grows close with Professor Quirrell, and tests magic through the scientific method with Draco and Hermione. By testing timeless physics, Harry invents partial Transfiguration, a magical transmutation variant to transform parts of wholes. Quirrell starts a program involving three "student armies" with Harry, Draco, and Hermione as generals.After winter break, Quirrell procures a Dementor so students can learn the Patronus charm. Though Hermione and Harry initially fail, Harry recognizes Dementors as shadows of death. Resolving to defeat death, he invents the True Patronus charm and destroys the Dementor. After learning the regular Patronus, Draco discovers Harry can speak Parseltongue. Quirrell reveals himself as a snake Animagus to Harry and makes him help free Bellatrix Black from Azkaban, leaving her in hiding. Dumbledore learns about the prison break but not the participants, leading him to confine Harry to Hogwarts as a precaution.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Kayak"title="Red Kayak">
"Red Kayak" is written from the point of view of a thirteen-year-old boy named Brady Parks who is part of a poor crab-fishing family on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. A wealthy family called the DiAngelos buys the property Brady and his friends are used to enjoying near the water. One day, Brady sees a red kayak owned by the DiAngelo's heading into the river in dangerous weather. Brady and his friends decide not to warn the people in the kayak, thinking it's Mr. DiAngelo. Later, they find out it was Mrs. DiAngelo and her three-year-old son, who Brady previously babysat for, that were going out on the kayak, which overturns and leads to the death of the boy.Brady assuages his grief by working for the mourning DiAngelo family on their property. Mr. DiAngelo blames his wife for their son's death and they separate; Mrs. DiAngelo reveals to Brady that she is pregnant. Brady soon discovers evidence that the kayak had been sabotaged by his two friends, JT and Digger. The sabotage involved a method that Brady thought up himself, though never intended to carry out: drilling holes in the kayak's bottom and plugging them with water-soluble filler. The central section of the book then consists of Brady confronting his friends, feeling partly responsible, hiding the evidence, deliberating over the correct course of action, and generally suffering debilitating, internal, moral conflict. The situation prompts Brady to reflect on the death of his younger sister, who died suddenly at four months old seven years earlier.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_HAB_Theory"title="The HAB Theory">
Boardman stages a clever faux assassination attempt on the President of the United States as a ruse to draw attention to his theory. The ruse involves a wax .38 caliber bullet propelled only by the cartridge-primer at a Presidential rope-line handshake stop. HAB completes the ruse and survives his arrest long enough to wake up in a hospital and tell his story to a fictional Woodstein which sets the action in motion."The HAB Theory" was Eckert's second novel, but first major fiction publication, and had sold 150,000 copies by 1978. The book was made available via demand printing in 2004, though this version appears to contain a number of typos indicating that it was produced from something a bit earlier than the final published draft. The novel's romantic sub-plot which today seems quite archaic, was consistent with similar storytelling threads of the mid 1970s and was in fact based on the author's own divorce.The novel borrows heavily from Brown's theory and book, which is that approximately every 6,000–7,000 years the Earth's polar ice caps become over-burdened with ice, creating such an imbalance in the planet's center of gravity, that the Earth's poles and the Earth's equator shift positions. The former poles are soon located somewhere between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, where the weight of the polar ice cap leaves a large circular depression and other dramatic geological changes occur as the huge quantity of water is released by the ice caps melting.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Dexter"title="Double Dexter">
As he is dismembering a pedophile, Dexter Morgan spots a witness who flees in a battered Honda. He begins to spend his evenings hunting for the car. His wife Rita, suspecting an affair, starts drinking wine. Meanwhile, Deborah manages to solve a series of ritualistic murders targeting Miami cops. The resulting media attention spills over onto Dexter, whose name and picture are publicized for the first time. After recognizing Dexter, the witness e-mails and attempts to blackmail him. Dexter studies the witness' blog, finding no clues other than his ex-wife's first initial. Dexter begins to think of his antagonist as the Shadow, after his online moniker.Dexter eventually finds the Honda belonging to Alissa Elan, the Shadow's ex-wife. He returns at night but finds that the Shadow – Bernard Elan – has anticipated his visit, mutilated Alissa in imitation of Dexter's style, and called the police when he arrived. Dexter narrowly escapes. Bernard, a skilled computer hacker, alters relevant databases to indicate that he died two years ago. Later, Dexter's coworker Camilla Figg is found beaten to death, casting doubt on Deborah's arrest. Dexter notices differences from the cop-killings, but Hood, the detective in charge, ignores him. It emerges that Camilla had hundreds of photographs of Dexter, having had an obsessive crush on him. Hood makes Dexter the prime suspect.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pools_of_Darkness_(novel)"title="Pools of Darkness (novel)">
The city of Phlan has vanished, transported to parts unknown, and its citizens defend themselves from the minions of Bane. Adventurers Ren, Shal, and Tarl band together with the sorceress Evaine to stop them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jalan_Tak_Ada_Ujung"title="Jalan Tak Ada Ujung">
Guru Isa, a school teacher, lives in constant fear. The Indonesian war for independence is raging, and before that the Japanese occupiers had created terror amongst the populace; his fear is so great that for years he has become unable to have an erection. However, due to his obligations as a school teacher he attends a youth's meeting, where they discuss the revolution. Unable to say no, he is asked to become a courier and deliver letters and weapons within Jakarta.Not long after, Guru Isa meets a young guerrilla named Hazil. Due to their mutual interest in music, the two become friends and Guru Isa begins to feel more relaxed. As they work together for the revolution, Guru Isa becomes uneasier. Not long after delivering weapons outside of Jakarta, Guru Isa falls ill with malaria.Hazil assists Guru Isa's wife, Fatimah, with his care. Eventually, Guru Isa is able to leave the house and teach again. However, during this period Fatimah, disappointed by Guru Isa's impotence, begins having an affair with Hazil. Guru Isa learns of this after finding Hazil's smoking pipe under a pillow in the bedroom and becomes furious, but is unable to confront Fatimah or Hazil. Instead, he distances himself further from everyone and becomes even less self-confident.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleground_Telangana"title="Battleground Telangana">
The book traces the history of the Telangana region and explains the cultural backgrounds of that and the Andhra region. It discusses its past during the rule of the Nizams of Hyderabad, its people's fight for basic needs, as well as the Andhra region under the British Raj era when it was part of Madras Presidency.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_a_Load_of_This_(short_story_collection)"title="Get a Load of This (short story collection)">
## "Get a Load of This".A society columnist witnesses the murder of an entertainment biz manager by one of the latter's models at a show in a restaurant, and follows up the events that result.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hypnotist_(novel)"title="The Hypnotist (novel)">
A man is discovered murdered in the bathroom of a locker room. Upon going to the man's residence, a policeman finds the man's wife and young daughter brutally murdered as well as his son, Josef Ek, who is also gravely injured but alive. Soon after investigation, led by Joona Linna, it is discovered that the murdered man also had an older daughter, Evelyn Ek, who was not found at the crime scene. Afraid the daughter may be alive but in danger of being tracked by the murderer, Joona is desperate to question Josef but the boy is in shock and in no condition to be interrogated. It is advised by the medical staff to call on Erik Maria Bark, an expert in trauma victims and hypnotism, to try to hypnotize Josef to try to get some information about the murders and location of his sister. Erik initially refuses to perform the hypnosis (he had promised to never hypnotize a person again) but eventually gives in at the possibility of saving the sister's life. However, under hypnosis, it becomes apparent that Josef was in fact the killer and that his injuries are self inflicted. Theoretically, no one can lie under hypnosis and he has confessed to murder; however, a statement under hypnosis cannot be used as evidence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Masters_(novel)"title="The Masters (novel)">
The novel is set in 1937, with the growing threat from Nazi Germany as the backdrop. The two candidates for election as new Master are Crawford, who is politically radical and prepared to make sure the college makes a stand against appeasing Hitler, but who Eliot believes will not be good at dealing with people; and Jago, who Eliot believes would make a good master, but whose wife is seen by some as a liability. Much of the interest of the novel lies in its analysis of the motives and political manoeuvres of the people campaigning for their chosen candidates.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_Road"title="Recovery Road">
Madeline (or Maddie) Graham is starting junior year in rehab. She hates the losers surrounding her, except fellow rehab friend, Trish. Soon, the two are escaping the halfway house every Tuesday to go to the movies with other recovering addicts. There, Madeline meets Stewart, another recovering addict, and the two teens are immediately drawn together. What follows is a story about being in love while trying to survive sobriety. Eventually, the two are released from rehab and must return to their previous lives; for Madeline that means returning to school and her old friends and routines. Her struggle to stay sober and find a new path is realistic and the strength of the story. Her relationship with Stewart, though, has the expected narrative ups and downs. When a tragedy strikes, Madeline is left to figure out what she really wants from life and how Stewart fits into her plans. Soon, Maddie discovers that she has lost so much in life because of drugs and she begins to take school more seriously. She graduates and gets into the University of Massachusetts, where she studies English and literature. Maddie cannot forget Stewart, but still decides to move on with her life and begins to date other boys, including a smart and handsome young man named Simon, whom she begins to like more and more. Then, about two years after she saw Stewart last, she finds him living on the streets as a junkie. She tries to help him, but he runs away, swearing at her and telling her to leave him alone. Finally, Maddie has to go back to U Mass. Maddie still keeps Stewart, her old Stewart, inside her heart and waits for him to come back to her one day.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_at_Stony_Wood"title="The Tower at Stony Wood">
At the wedding of King Regis Aurum of Yves to Lady Gwynne, knight Cyan Dag of Gloinmere learns a terrible secret: his king is marrying an imposter, and the real Lady Gwynne is imprisoned within a tower in the magical land of Skye. As Cyan Dag begins his quest to free her, Thayne Ysse, the son of the defeated king of Ysse, sets of on his own search. To rebuild Ysse's army, Thayne searches for a tower of gold guarded by a dragon. In a third tower near the village of Stony Wood oblivious to her family's concern, Melanthos watches and embroiders a woman ensconced in her own tower. Cyan, Thayne, and Melanthos lives entangle and weave together, and it is only through helping each other that they are able to free themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desperate_Characters_(novel)"title="Desperate Characters (novel)">
Sophie and Otto Bentwood are a childless, upper-middle class married couple who live in a brownstone in Brooklyn. She is a translator, he an attorney, currently preoccupied by the acrimonious break-up of his long-time business partnership. The action of the novel unfolds in a single long weekend following an incident in which a stray cat bites Sophie on the hand. Though she refuses to see a doctor, Sophie worries incessantly that she may have contracted rabies.Sophie attends a party, lunches with a friend, shops for kitchen appliances, and drives with Otto to their country home. On a night-time walk with Otto's partner, Charlie Russel, she inadvertently confesses to having had an affair. A series of disquieting events – a rock thrown through a bedroom window, a mysterious phone call, the vandalism of the country house – unnerve the Brentwoods, heightening the fragility of their emotional states and their marriage.On Monday morning, Sophie announces aloud, with "extraordinary relief", "God, if I am rabid, I am equal to what is outside." Shortly afterwards, however, it is established that she is not rabid. Yet on the telephone to an acquaintance, Sophie lashes out; and when Otto arrives home from work, to a phone call from Charlie, he finally has an outburst of rage, hurling against the wall a bottle of ink with which Sophie had planned to write a letter to her mother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Rich_Click!"title="Get Rich Click!">
In "Get Rich Click!", Ostrofsky attempts distill a variety of internet based business models into different internet industries. The book includes chapters on different internet industries, such as e-commerce, search, advertising, affiliate marketing, domain names, and social media.The book also contains case studies from successful internet entrepreneurs in many of the aforementioned internet industries. In an effort to bridge the virtual and physical world, the majority of these case studies contain QR codes which take a reader to a video interview with the people featured in the case studies.Furthermore, each chapter contains Ostrofsky’s own views on how to profit in various internet industries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magician's_End"title="Magician's End">
An uneasy quiet has settled upon Midkemia in the wake of a surprise invasion. But the land is far from peaceful. Leaderless, the Kingdom is on the brink of anarchy and civil war, unless Hal conDoin, Duke of Crydee, and his brothers can rally their allies to crown a new king. They must move quickly, for war has left the land vulnerable to an agency of horrific destruction not of this world. No one is safe, not even the Star Elves whose city deep in the Grey Tower Mountains has come under attack by an ancient darkness that seeks to extinguish every living thing in Midkemia. Yet the bravery of determined warriors—brothers in blood and arms—is not enough to ensure the Kingdom's preservation without the magic of the Master Sorcerer Pug. A powerful spell has trapped him, his son Magnus, and two unlikely allies in an unfamiliar realm, and they must find their separate ways home—a journey of memory and discovery that will illuminate the truth of the destiny that awaits them. But to save Midkemia—and everything he has fought for and all he cherishes—Pug will have to pay the ultimate price.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Beautiful_Friendship_(novel)"title="A Beautiful Friendship (novel)">
In the early 37th century, the Harrington family moves from the planet Meyerdahl to the newly founded Star Kingdom of Manticore. Their eleven-year-old daughter, Stephanie, is unhappy with this change as their new home, the planet Sphinx, seems to have little to offer, especially with seasons lasting much longer than the Earth's. However, she changes her mind when the hunt for an unknown force that keeps stealing celery from the colonists' greenhouses leads her to an encounter with a new sentient species: a treecat, a six-limbed arboreal mammal going (unknown to Stephanie) by the name of Climbs Quickly. The two beings instantly share a physic connection that future generations will come to call "bonding." This empathic/telepathic linking is involuntary and nearly instantaneous; like love at first sight. Climbs Quickly runs away back to his clan in the forest, which are revealed to be sentient beings that communicate through telepathy. Despite their sentience, they are still at the civilized level of hunter-gatherers, with no advanced machinery and only the early beginnings of agriculture. They are wary of revealing themselves to humans, which they realize are much more technologically advanced, but cannot be understood due to their lack of telepathic ability. Stephanie goes hang gliding several days later, unknown to her parents, as her way of scouting out the vast forest where she suspects Climbs Quickly lives. They sense each other and Climbs Quickly realizes that she is tracking him through their bond. He runs away from his clan's home in an attempt to prevent its discovery by humans. Stephanie crash-lands, caught by a storm, and Climbs Quickly realizes their bond compels him to protect her. They are approached by a hunting hexapuma, a six-legged puma native to the planet. Climbs Quickly calls for aid from his clan, which could overpower the hexapuma through sheer numbers, but he realizes that they will arrive too late. He fights the hexapuma and is stunned, and Stephanie rises to defend him despite her injuries. She buys enough time for the clan to arrive, and the clan literally rips the hexapuma to pieces. Her father arrives soon after, having tracked her wristband, and he takes both her and Climbs Quickly to heal and recover at their estate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finn_the_Half-Great"title="Finn the Half-Great">
The story takes place in Ireland and revolves around the story of Fionn mac Cumhaill, commonly known as "Finn McCool" in Irish folklore. It also includes elements from Norse, Japanese and English mythology.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traction_City_(novella)"title="Traction City (novella)">
Smiff is depicted as an orphan who lives on the lowest tier of London and scavenges items that have fallen through the cracks from higher tiers. Whilst scavenging, he witnesses a murder where the attacker has removed the right hand. While not a fan of the police Smiff goes to the Airdock Green police station where a teenage Anna Fang has just been arrested by corporal Nutter as an Anti-Tractionist saboteur for carrying an explosive device. Smiff explains about the murder to Sergeant Anders who alongside Nutter leaves to investigate and come across the culprit who turns out to be a stalker. Meanwhile, constable Pym searches the records for similar incidents and finds reports about accidents that have occurred within a fortnight where the right hand has been removed and concludes that they were murders by the same killer. Anders and Nutter return to the police station where Anna Fang explains that she has been following the stalker called The Collector who she wants to recruit to the Anti-tractionist cause. When asked why she feels The Collector wouldn't just attack her she talks about Shrike, another stalker who is a bounty hunter who refuses to harm children (like her). Anders concludes that it is highly likely that this is true given the fact that Smiff survived his encounter with The Collector. He decides to use Anna as bait to give them enough time to strap the explosive device she was found with to the stalker. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asylum_(McGrath_novel)"title="Asylum (McGrath novel)">
A beautiful woman, Stella Raphael, lives an unimaginative family life: she runs the household and takes care of her son Charlie while her husband Max works as a deputy superintendent at a maximum security psychiatric hospital. This all changes when she becomes romantically involved with Edgar Stark, an artistic talented patient who restores the old Victorian conservatory. Edgar is committed for the violent murder of his wife but this does not influence Stella's feelings. Then Edgar escapes from the institution wearing Max's clothes and takes a hiding in a shabby building in London which he uses as a studio. Stella's love for him grows stronger and while in London for "shopping" she manages to get back in contact with Edgar via his artist friend Nick.Her visits become more and more frequent and it starts to become suspicious so she decides to leave her family permanently. The asylum wants to keep this potentially scandalous situation out of the papers but informs the police. At first Stella enjoys the underground art life but Edgar starts to become violent and jealous as he sculpts a rather morbid bust of her head. He thinks she wants to go back to Max and fears being poisoned by her. Stella, realizing the danger, finds shelter at Nick's home but she has to flee again as Edgar tries to locate her. As she feels her love again, she returns to Edgar's studio where she is arrested by the police who have lost track of Edgar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Evening_of_Long_Goodbyes"title="An Evening of Long Goodbyes">
"An Evening of Long Goodbyes" is about a 24-year-old wealthy layabout who prefers to watch Gene Tierney movies in his chaise longue, with a gimlet in hand, rather than go out and find a job.Charles Hythloday is a Trinity College dropout living with his sister, Christabel ("Bel"), in their parents' mansion, Amaurot (named after the capital city of More's "Utopia"). There are only two things that Charles loves more than the film actress, Gene Tierney: his home and his struggling actress sister. While Charles loves his childhood home, Bel notices it makes people become phony, and wants out of the mansion. Charles argues that his time is well spent building a folly in the back garden and perfecting "sprezzatura", the art of acting like a gentleman while making it appear like one is doing nothing at all. Charles dreams of a return to a time when men wear top coats and women have white gloves.But the fantasy ends when the bills pile up and the bank threatens to repossess the house. Charles devises a plan to blow up the folly, fake his death, use the insurance money to save Amaurot and move to South America. His plans go awry when he finds out that his Bosnian maid, Mrs P, has her children living in the folly. The folly explodes and a large stone gargoyle falls on Charles's head, putting him into a coma for a few weeks. He dreams of living in Chile with W. B. Yeats, where they spend their time perfecting "sprezzatura", drinking gimlets, wearing sombreros, and tending the vineyard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Painted_Garden"title="The Painted Garden">
Crabby Jane Winter is furious when her family plans to spend the winter in California, leaving her dog in London. However, her father really needs a holiday to get over his writer's block. In California, Jane meets a movie producer who realises that her disposition makes her perfect to play Mary in a film version of "The Secret Garden". The novel shows the process of filmmaking from a child actor's perspective.The novel also involves Jane's siblings: Rachel the budding ballerina and Tim the promising pianist, who have their own adventures in California. But the plain and unnoticed Jane is the one who makes it to fame.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crimson_Circle_(novel)"title="The Crimson Circle (novel)">
When James Beardmore receives a letter demanding £100,000 he refuses to pay—even though it is his last warning. It is his son Jack who finds him dead. Can the amazing powers of Derrick Yale, combined with the methodical patience of Inspector Parr, discover the secret of the Crimson Circle? Who is its all-powerful head and who is the stranger who lies in wait? Twice in a lifetime a ruthless criminal faces the executioner.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_(novel)"title="Vertical (novel)">
As the novel begins, Miles agrees to take his ailing mother, Phyllis, to live with her sister in Wisconsin. He convinces Jack to tag along as wingman in return for some cash, hires a pot-smoking Filipina caretaker, Joy, to attend to his mother, and recovers Phyllis's beloved Yorkie, Snapper, from one of his ex-girlfriends. They then set out on a trek that takes them up the California coastline and to Oregon wine country for a wild pinot noir festival. Through it all, the four have many conflicts and misadventures, as well as sexual escapades. Snapper gets into an accident and ultimately loses a leg, and Phyllis and Joy are constantly quarreling.The tensions come to a head in Oregon, where Joy abruptly quits after being falsely accused of stealing money from Phyllis. Jack goes back to California, and Miles is forced to drive with his mother to Wisconsin. He quits drinking. In Wisconsin, Phyllis's sister has difficulty coping with Phyllis. His mother has another stroke and is hospitalized, and at her request Miles causes her death with an overdose of Seconal. At the end, Miles plans to travel to Barcelona, Spain, to be with a woman he met during the trip.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bourne_Dominion"title="The Bourne Dominion">
Jason Bourne is searching for an elusive cadre of terrorists planning to destroy America's most strategic natural resources-and needs the help of his longtime friend, General Boris Karpov. Karpov, the newly appointed head of Russia's most feared spy agency, FSB-2, is one of the most determined, honorable, and justice-hungry men that Bourne knows. But Karpov has made a deal with the devil. In order to remain the head of FSB-2, he must hunt down and kill Bourne. Now, these two trusted friends are on a deadly collision course. From the Colombian highlands to Munich, Cadiz, and Damascus, the clock is counting down to a disaster that will cripple America's economic and military future. Only Bourne and Karpov have a chance to avert the catastrophe-but if they destroy each other first, that chance will be gone forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farm_(Bromfield_novel)"title="The Farm (Bromfield novel)">
"The Farm" traces several generations of a family’s life on and around a fine piece of land in the Western Reserve, early nineteenth-century Ohio. From the time of “The Colonel,” the patriarch of the MacDougal family, who first claimed the property, to the novel’s present, the 1930s, and the family's last owner of the property, Johnny, the Colonel's great grandson, Bromfield traces the interactions between the MacDougals, their neighbours, the nearby town, and the land itself.Throughout the novel, Bromfield suggests the corrosive effects of a mercantile and industrial economy upon the Jeffersonian ideal of an agrarian society.Although the novel ends in the family selling off the farm to a developer who then leases it to less-than-caring tenants, its concern for the land continued as Bromfield returned to the United States and made Malabar Farm a model of sustainable agriculture.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_(novel)"title="Suicide (novel)">
The work's prose is a second person narration detailing disconnected episodes about "you", the narrator's friend that committed suicide some twenty years before. The descriptions are never more than a few paragraphs long. They culminate and characterize "you".After the main body of the work (the prose), there are pages of verse that "your wife" found in "your desk drawer". They are written in first person with the word "me" ending almost every line of each tercet in the English translation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian_(2011_novel)"title="Conan the Barbarian (2011 novel)">
Chapters 1-11 retell the story of the hero's youth from his birth through the murder of his father and destruction of his village by raiders to the eve of the Battle of Venarium. Stackpole's version of these events is compatible with the account established in the original tales by Howard, the character's creator, references to which he incorporates into his text. In the wake of Venarium Conan ventures into an unforgiving world where he survives as a thief, pirate, and warrior on a path of wanton adventure and women.Chapters 12-33, set years later in the wake of his piratical career on the Black Coast and subsequent sojourn in the Black Kingdoms, relate how Conan chances upon the warlord responsible for his tribe's destruction. As he tracks Khalar Zym, Conan battles monsters, Zym's henchmen, and Marique, a powerful witch.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Canaan's_Side"title="On Canaan's Side">
The novel is narrated by the 89-year-old Lily Bere, the sister of "Annie Dunne" (2002) and Willie Dunne from "A Long Long Way" (2005), and the daughter of the character Thomas Dunne from "The Steward of Christendom" (1995), as she looks back on her life, having lived through the Irish War of Independence and escaped to Chicago with her boyfriend Tadg Bere. The Cleveland East Ohio Gas explosion of 1944 is referenced within the story and plays an important role in the plot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamrach's_Menagerie"title="Jamrach's Menagerie">
At the age of eight, Jaffy Brown encounters a tiger escaped from the menagerie of Charles Jamrach, wandering about London's East End. Taken up in the tiger's jaws, he is rescued by Jamrach himself, who then offers Jaffy a job. Jaffy loves working at the menagerie and becomes friends with another employee, Tim Linver. He falls in love with Tim's sister and the three of them grow up together on the streets of London.Several years later, when Jaffy is sixteen, he and Tim are dispatched by Jamrach to the Dutch East Indies, aboard a whaling ship. Under the charge of Jamrach's seasoned field agent, Dan Rymer, they have been sent to capture a "dragon" for the menagerie. The crew successfully capture the dragon, but on the return voyage it is set loose by Skip, one of the ship's mad crewmen, and after it bites a crew member they are forced to drive it overboard. Later the vessel is struck by a waterspout and sunk, leaving only a dozen men alive, stranded in the Pacific Ocean in two whaleboats. The two boats make for the coast of Chile, and as the crew gradually begin to die of starvation, thirst, sickness and exposure. Eventually only Jaffy, Tim, Skip and Dan are left alive, and they draw straws to see who will be killed (shot) and who will shoot him. Tim draws the marked piece of paper, and Jaffy kills him, an act which will haunt him for the rest of his life. Eventually Skip also dies, and by the time Dan and Jaffy arrive in Chile they are half-dead with exhaustion and half-mad from grief and anguish.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched_(novel)"title="Switched (novel)">
In the prologue, Wendy recounts her sixth birthday party. At the party, she expresses contempt at the gifts of fragile porcelain dolls and throws a tantrum after being presented with a chocolate birthday cake, which she does not like. After which, Wendy's mother claims that she is not her daughter and attempts to take Wendy's life with a large kitchen knife, but is stopped by Wendy's brother Matt.Eleven years later, Wendy is living with her brother and her aunt Maggie, who assumed guardianship after her mother was placed in a mental institution. After difficulties at previous schools, Wendy had just transferred to a new high school when she meets Finn, another new student, who asks her to a school dance. At the dance, Finn makes some rude comments to Wendy which angers her, and prompts her to want to leave. She approaches another student and gets him to take her home through a "persuasive" ability by looking in his eyes and telling him what she wants. When Wendy performs this ability in front of Finn, he becomes alarmed. Later that night, Finn comes to her bedroom window and tells her that she is a changeling and that he is here to bring her back to her biological family. He tells her that her ability to "persuade" people is because she is Trylle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(novel)"title="Revolution (novel)">
Andi Alpers is doing the best she can to take care of her mother's deep depression while popping pills for her own. Her father is off living with his pregnant 25-year-old girlfriend, her grades are falling apart, and if she does not turn in her thesis outline after break, she will be kicked out of school. Her best friend Vijay does all he can to help her move on. But she does not care, because she knows it is her fault that her ten-year-old brother was killed by a crazy man named Max, who, trying to stay away from the cops grabbed her brother Truman and held a knife to his neck. Max, feeling threatened by a cop pulling out a gun, jumped into the street and was hit by a delivery van while still holding Andi's brother, killing them both, while she was ditching school with Nick Goode when she really should have been walking her brother to school. The only thing that keeps her alive is her music.But then her father swoops back into the picture after hearing about her grades. He ships her mother off into a mental hospital to recover and takes Andi to Paris with him to make sure she writes the outline for her thesis. He is there to do a DNA test on the remains of a heart believed to be that of Louis-Charles, the young son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who was locked away during the French Revolution and believed to have died in the tower at the age of ten. Despite this, rumors of the Lost Dauphin's escape were numerous, as were the people who stepped up to claim the throne at the end of the Revolution.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ice_Princess_(novel)"title="The Ice Princess (novel)">
Writer Erica Falck, has returned to her family home in Fjällbacka after her parents died. While coping with the death of her parents, she is trying to work on a biography of Selma Lagerlöf, a Swedish author and the first female writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.Patrik Hedström, a detective, is assigned to investigate a case in which the victim, Erica's childhood friend Alex, is found frozen in a bathtub, her wrists cut in an apparent suicide. The investigation shows that the young woman's death occurred before she was placed in the tub, allowing the liquid to freeze around her as the temperature dropped far below freezing inside her house. Exactly when the furnace went out-of-order is a timely coincidence to the alleged suicide.At the prompting of Alex's parents, Erica begins to investigate the death of their daughter. Her breakthrough comes when she meets a police officer who is also investigating the mystery; together the two uncover dark secrets within the town. Erica and Patrick's fascination gives way to deep obsession as they struggle to determine the true circumstances surrounding the death. Erica visualizes a memoir about Alex, one that will answer questions about their missing friendship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Russian_Concubine"title="The Russian Concubine">
The story begins in 1917 when a five-year-old Lydia Ivanova Friis and her Russian mother Valentina Ivanova escape from Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution after her Danish father Jens Friis was arrested by the police, they are later reunited fleeing the Bolsheviks, where it is then believed that Jens was killed at their hands. Eleven years later in 1928, Junchow, China, Lydia is sixteen and works as a thief with the help of Mr Liu, a pawnbroker, to support her mother. During one of Lydia's escapades where she finds herself in trouble, she is saved by a Chinese teenager named Chang An Lo. An Lo is a freedom fighter and a Communist rebel. He eventually becomes romantically involved with Lydia after she saves his life when he defends her honour. They begin to face trouble when Lydia is kidnapped and tortured by a member of the Black Snakes, who happens to hold a grudge against Chang An Lo. She is later rescued by Alexei Serov, who happens to be her half-brother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginning_of_Infinity"title="The Beginning of Infinity">
Deutsch views the Enlightenment of the 18th century as near the beginning of an infinite sequence of purposeful knowledge creation. Knowledge here consists of information with good explanatory function that has proven resistant to falsification. Any real process is physically possible to perform provided the knowledge to do so has been acquired. The Enlightenment set up the conditions for knowledge creation which disrupted the static societies that previously existed. These conditions are the valuing of creativity and the free and open debate that exposed ideas to criticism to reveal those good explanatory ideas that naturally resist being falsified due to their having basis in reality. Deutsch points to previous moments in history, such as Renaissance Florence and Plato's Academy in Golden Age Athens, where this process almost got underway before succumbing to their static societies' resistance to change.The source of intelligence is more complicated than brute computational power, Deutsch conjectures, and he points to the lack of progress in Turing test AI programs in the six decades since the Turing test was first proposed. What matters for knowledge creation, Deutsch says, is creativity. New ideas that provide good explanations for phenomena require outside-the-box thinking as the unknown is not easily predicted from past experience. To test this Deutsch suggests an AI behavioural evolution program for robot locomotion should be fed random numbers to see if knowledge spontaneously arises without inadvertent contamination from a human programmer's creative input. If it did Deutsch would concede that intelligence is not as difficult a problem as he currently thinks it is.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nedjma"title="Nedjma">
Although published in 1956, thus during the Algerian War of Independence which began in November 1954, it was largely written between 1947 and 1953, and the novel's political dimension applies specifically to this period rather than to the war itself. The central action of the novel takes place during the period following the nationalist demonstrations of 8 May 1945, which included the Sétif massacre. Two of the characters in the novel, Lakhdar and Mustapha, were arrested, imprisoned and tortured following these demonstrations. The novel begins in the wake of the period of upheavals which followed the demonstrations. The four male characters have found work on a building site, and one of them, Lakhdar, has been imprisoned following an altercation with M. Ernest, their (French) boss - an altercation which, however, due to the complex temporal structure of the novel, will not be related until later in the text. Shortly after this, still in the first part of the novel, another of the characters, Mourad, is involved in a brawl at a wedding which results in his being responsible for the death of M. Ricard, another French entrepreneur. This event causes the other characters to disperse, and from this point the novel changes in style and begins to recount their separate histories, jumping around considerably in its chronology. Each of the four male characters has a connection to, and is attracted to, Nedjma, who is the same age as the male characters but already (unhappily) married. Although based on a real person, with whom Yacine had a relationship, Nedjma (who rarely speaks in the novel and whose character is not developed) has frequently been identified with Algeria, "la femme-patrie". The novel also evokes the history of the characters' tribe, the Keblout, and of Abdelkader's original resistance to French colonisation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Six"title="The Power of Six">
The book is told by various members of the Garde: Number Four/John, who is on the run with Sam, Six, and Bernie Kosar (aka Hadley, a Lorien Chimæra); and Number Seven/Marina, who is hiding at a convent in Spain. Marina is Number Seven and her Cêpan has chosen to stay in Santa Teresa, where they have lived in the town orphanage for over 7 years. Adelina, Marina's Cêpan, has stopped believing that it is possible for them to defeat the Mogadorians and so refuses to help Marina learn about her developing 'Legacies', saying to instead concentrate on "not dying". While exploring the web searching for news of the other Garde, Marina finds the story of John Smith, and quickly realises he must be one of the Garde.In the meantime, John, Sam and Six are on the run in the US from both the FBI and the Mogadorians. They settle for a week in a secluded location, but are soon ambushed by a squad of Mogs. They get away and John finally builds up the courage to open the letter left to him by Henri (his Cêpan who died at the end of the previous book). In the letter it is revealed that Sam's dad, Malcolm Goode, was aware of the Lorien Mission and had been there to help Henri and John settle down on Earth when they first arrived. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torn_(Hocking_novel)"title="Torn (Hocking novel)">
The start of the book begins almost exactly where the end of "Switched" left off, with Wendy and Rhys running away from the palace in the Trylle's Förening. The two arrive at the home and Wendy attempts to explain to her "host brother" Matt that Rhys is his brother. He reacts with disbelief yet she tells him that she cannot tell him where she has been or Finn's part in it all. While in the midst of trying to understand what has happened, Matt finds a disliking towards Rhys.Later that night, Finn visits her and attempts to convince her to return to Förening with him. She refuses as another tracker, Duncan, shows up with the same goal. Wendy tells both that she will not return to Förening and they leave. Two Vittra members, Loki and Kyra, attack the house as Finn and Duncan leave and take the three to the Vittra palace to the King, in which Wendy is left badly injured by Kyra. While taken as prisoner by the Vittra, Wendy is severally injured and Matt asks a guard to bring in a doctor to heal her.There (after being healed by Sara, a Vittra healer), Wendy practises her power of persuasion on Rhys with an unusual side effect. She is taken to the King named Oren who informs her that Sara is her step-mother and he is her father, a result from a prior union with Elora in an attempt to unify the Trylle and the Vittra. Wendy realizes that the Vittra have been so desperately after her because while they live long lives, many of them are infertile or give birth to hobgoblins, and she is the only means for an heir to the throne. Oren does not allow for Wendy's friends to leave the dungeon as insurance for Wendy's good behavior, so Wendy attempts to find a way to free them. After a heart-to-heart talk with Loki, Wendy realizes that they are both prisoners in different ways, and Loki allows the three to escape with help from Tove, Duncan and Finn and they return to Förening.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Greater_Love_(novel)"title="No Greater Love (novel)">
In 1912, after visiting her aunt and uncle in England, Edwina Winfield, her parents, younger siblings and her fiancé, Charles, travel back to the United States on the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic. When the ship sinks, Edwina's fiancé and her parents die. After being rescued, Edwina and her siblings return to their home in San Francisco, where Edwina takes on the responsibility of raising her younger siblings. Some of her friends want Edwina to move on and find a new fiancé, and Ben, a family attorney, falls in love with her but Edwina doesn't want to marry, only raise her new family.Edwina's father was the owner of a newspaper, and Edwina helps keep the newspaper running, expecting her oldest brother, Philip, to take over once he's finished his education at Harvard. However, Philip enlists in the army during World War I and dies in combat. A younger brother, George, tries to help but has no interest in the newspaper and eventually leaves for Hollywood, wanting to become a movie producer. Edwina sells the newspaper and also inherit money from the aunt in England. George finds success in Hollywood and the younger sister Alexis desperately wants to be a movie actress. She runs off with a much older man, to England. Edwina goes after her, stepping on a boat for the first time since the Titanic disaster more than a decade earlier. On the boat, she falls in love with a man who turns out to be a cousin of her fiancé Charles. They have a short love affair but he is (unhappily) married and can not divorce because he is a Catholic. When she returns to the US, Edwina realizes she is now over Charles and can move on with her life and that she is in love with Sam, George's father-in-law, a movie producer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Pound_Tram"title="The Two Pound Tram">
The main story begins in 1937 when brothers Wilfred and Duncan Scrutton run away from their home at Ferring near Worthing on the Sussex coast and travel to London. Wilfred, the narrator, recounts how they had seen an advert in the "Daily Mail" which said 'Trams surplus to the requirements of the London Omnibus and Tramcar Company for sale at their depot at Acton, London for £2 each.'The brothers pool their resources and travel to the depot, where they are told that trams are indeed for sale but have to be collected and cannot be delivered to Sussex. The only candidate is an old horse-drawn tram, for which they manage to secure a horse called Homer from a retired rag and bone man. Unfortunately, the depot has no destination boards for Sussex, but they do have one for Canterbury — for which the brothers set off via the Old Kent Road, accompanied by Homer's companion, a dog called Tiger. They gain fare-paying passengers at Harbledown and begin a regular if slow service between there and Canterbury, and also acquire a conductor called Hattie, but rival companies eventually force them to move on due to the lack of a PSV operator's license. They travel back to Worthing and gain the support of the wealthy resident of Goring Hall, who, inspired by their determination, funds the purchase and transport of an electric tram from Acton; this is renovated and put into service in Worthing town centre.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Time_Dead_(Torchwood)"title="Long Time Dead (Torchwood)">
DCI Tom Cutler and the now Sergeant Andy Davidson return to investigate a series of deaths around the apparently defunct Torchwood Institute. It also features the return of Suzie Costello who misused the Resurrection Gauntlet in the first season.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Desperado"title="American Desperado">
American Desperado is the reminiscences of Jon Roberts (born John Riccobono), connected together by biographical sections written by co-author Evan Wright. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rider_(novel)"title="The Rider (novel)">
The kingdoms of Margoth and Karlova, age-old rivals, negotiate a marriage alliance between royal heirs Princess Mary of Margoth and Crown Prince Boris of Karlova. Each resists the idea of wedding a hereditary enemy. Meanwhile, in America, lovers Gwendolyn Bass and Hemmington Main find their matrimonial hopes thwarted by Gwendolyn's mother, who dreams of her daughter marrying into European nobility. Mrs. Bass takes Gwendolyn to Europe with this project in mind. Her husband, the wealthy Abner Bass, who does not share her lofty ambitions, encourages Hemmington to follow.Boris's father King Constans has him confined to his quarters for his rebellious attitude, but the prince escapes, planning to rendezvous with friends at Peter's Inn, a disreputable establishment he often visits incognito. On the way he is waylaid by the Rider, a notorious highwayman. Boris turns the tables and captures the brigand, whom he takes on to the inn to impress his friends. The Rider, whose cronies also habituate the inn, is agreeable to this, hoping to revenge himself on his captor.At the inn, Boris meets his friends, officers of the Karlovian army's crack Black Guard. The Rider, seeing his own confederates there, calls on them to free him, but they are overcome by the guardsmen. The barmaid Bakla, hearing the prince's true name mentioned, prevents one of the customers from shooting him. Boris magnanimously invites his late foes to supper. On hearing the Rider's tales of adventure, he envies the brigand's life; the Rider, for his part, envies the prince's. Impulsively, Boris suggests they exchange identities for a week. The Rider can travel in his stead to Margoth in his place to woo his unwanted intended while he himself lives the romantic life of the highwayman. The guardsmen object, fearing his joke will lead to war, but Boris, though personally inclined to peace, is willing to risk it to avoid wedding Princess Mary.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fat_Years"title="The Fat Years">
The novel is set in the near future of 2013, where China has entered a "Golden Age of Ascendancy," while Western nations have stagnated after a second economic crisis in early 2011. Lao Chen, a Hong Kong expatriate and writer living in Beijing, finds himself enjoying the atmosphere of prosperity and contentment. Though suffering from writer's block, he makes a modest living off renting apartments and attends monthly film screenings held at a restaurant owned by his friend Jian Lin (and attended by an insomniac Politburo member named He Dongsheng). Lao gradually find himself pulled into events by his old friend Fang Caodi, who is frantically searching for the missing month of February 2011 (with official records and public memory jumping from January to March), and his former flame Wei Xihong (known as "Little Xi"), a former public security bureau lawyer who now acts as an Internet activist.Lao's feelings of contentment begin to vanish as he listens to Wei and Fang's partial recollections of February 2011 and discovers that any available literature about the Cultural Revolution and political issues of the 1980s (including the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989) are either highly sanitized or unavailable. Lao and Fang eventually follow Wei to the township of Warm Springs, where she is helping a house church negotiate with the local government. After Lao confesses his love to Wei, they return to Beijing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fizz_(novel)"title="Fizz (novel)">
Fizz is a young woman from the "Eco-community" - a future sect which abandons science and technology. Her father has left this community and invented a time machine. Driven by curiosity about the physical world, Fizz borrows her father's time machine and visits many past physicists from Aristotle to Stephen Hawking.Each chapter combines some discussion of physics with some fictional plot and personal development of Fizz. Eventually Fizz returns to the future to choose between life inside or outside the eco-community.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_of_Reality"title="The Magic of Reality">
Most chapters begin with brief re-tellings of creation myths that emerged as attempts to explain the origin of particular observed phenomena. Dawkins selects these myths from throughout the world, including Babylonian, Judeo-Christian, Aztec, Maori, Ancient Egyptian, Australian Aboriginal, Nordic, Hellenic, Chinese, Japanese, and other traditions. Chapter 9 ("Are we alone?") includes contemporary alien-abduction mythology; Chapter 4 ("What are things made of?") omits mythology altogether as Dawkins says that really small phenomena were unknown to primitive peoples prior to the invention of advanced optical magnification equipment, any texts they believed to be divinely inspired having failed to mention such useful knowledge as beyond human experience at the time. Dawkins also revisits his childhood and recalls his initial thoughts on these various phenomena or those thoughts expressed by his young contemporaries. Dawkins gives his critique of many of the myths, such as when he points out that much mythology involves some god's symbolic transgressive act performed just once, and that such one-time acts would be inadequate to explain the mechanism as to why the phenomena continue to happen in unbroken cycles.In the opening chapter Dawkins explains that although mythic narratives and make-believe are fun parts of growing up, reality – with its fundamental capacity for beauty – is much more magical than anything impossible. The Fairy Godmother from Cinderella cannot magically turn a pumpkin into a carriage outside the bounds of fiction, because pumpkins and carriages possess internal organisation that is fundamentally complex. A large pumpkin randomly reassembled at the most minute level would be much more likely to result in a featureless pile of ash or sludge than in a complex and intricately organised carriage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds"title="The War of the Worlds">
## The Coming of the Martians.The narrative opens by stating that as humans on Earth busied themselves with their own endeavours during the mid-1890s, aliens on Mars began plotting an invasion of Earth because their own resources are dwindling. The Narrator (who is unnamed throughout the novel) is invited to an astronomical observatory at Ottershaw where explosions are seen on the surface of the planet Mars, creating much interest in the scientific community. Months later, a so-called "meteor" lands on Horsell Common, near the Narrator's home in Woking, Surrey. He is among the first to discover that the object is an artificial cylinder that opens, disgorging Martians who are "big" and "greyish" with "oily brown skin", "the size, perhaps, of a bear", each with "two large dark-coloured eyes", and lipless "V-shaped mouths" which drip saliva and are surrounded by two "Gorgon groups of tentacles". The Narrator finds them "at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous". They emerge briefly, but have difficulty in coping with the Earth's atmosphere and gravity, and so retreat rapidly into their cylinder.A human deputation (which includes the astronomer Ogilvy) approaches the cylinder with a white flag, but the Martians incinerate them and others nearby with a heat-ray before beginning to assemble their machinery. Military forces arrive that night to surround the common, bringing with them field artillery and Maxim guns. The population of Woking and the surrounding villages are reassured by the presence of the British Army. A tense day begins, with much anticipation by the Narrator of military action.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magician_King"title="The Magician King">
"The Magician King" follows two story lines, beginning at the same time as the beginning and end of "The Magicians". In one, following her unsuccessful interview at Brakebills, Julia returns to Brooklyn. A poorly constructed alibi reveals to her the memories of her interview and the world of magic that wasn't available to her. After a significant amount of searching, she finds her way to a safe house where low-level spells are taught. Gradually, she works her way up the levels, learning more and more magic, until the safe houses have no more to teach her. She makes contact with Free Trader Beowulf, a group of people like her: self taught magicians with significant psychological issues. She moves to Murs, in France, to work with them, where they teach her more magic.Julia and the others in Murs, in order to attain significantly more magical power, attempt to summon Our Lady Underground, a local goddess. They instead summon Reynard the Fox, a trickster god who kills most of them while warning them that no one has summoned a god in 2000 years, that all the gods heard them including the ancient ones, and they might as well be dead when the gods come. He intends to kill the last two, but Julia sacrifices herself to save her friend Asmodeus. Reynard proceeds to rape Julia, leaving her with severe trauma and an extra spark of god-like magic. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Savage_Amusement"title="The Savage Amusement">
Rookie Judge Harry Brisco is taking his gruelling final assessment to decide if he is fit to be a full street judge, and Judge Dredd is assigned as the supervisor who can make or break him. As they hit the streets a mystery virus begins killing all the clones in the city – and Dredd himself is a clone. Meanwhile, Mega-City One is about to hold an election for its new mayor, and opinion polls indicate that undead mass-murderer Judge Death may win. Brisco is about to face the toughest challenge of his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathmasques"title="Deathmasques">
A deadly creature of self-aware energy which can possess the body of any living being is at large, and Judge Dredd must follow it across the Atlantic to Brit-Cit to destroy it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medusa_Seed"title="The Medusa Seed">
Armitage and his assistant Judge Steel come to Mega-City One to pursue a murderer, under the watchful eye of Judge Dredd. When their quarry escapes through time back to the 1930s, Dredd and Steel must follow him there. Meanwhile, Armitage is lost in the Undercity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dread_Dominion"title="Dread Dominion">
37 years ago Judge Joe Dredd arrested his brother Judge Rico Dredd for corruption. But in a parallel universe he killed him instead, and the Joe Dredd from that universe turned evil. Now the twisted judges from Dreadworld are invading Mega-City One and the whole world is at stake. Meanwhile, corrupt judges in the Special Judicial Squad are trying to assassinate Judge Hershey.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hundredfold_Problem"title="The Hundredfold Problem">
A four-million-year-old Dyson sphere has been discovered surrounding a red dwarf star orbiting the Sun, populated by the descendants of the Neanderthals. Mega-City One has enslaved its inhabitants and is using it as a prison to which to exile its worst criminals. When a feud on the sphere threatens to destroy it, Judges Dredd and "heavy-weapons-toting xeno-anthropologist and scantily clad babe" Petula McTavish are sent to protect it. However a malfunction in Dredd's teleportation to the sphere causes one hundred evil versions of him to be produced.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursed_Earth_Asylum"title="Cursed Earth Asylum">
A dangerous psychic called Soon is being held prisoner in a lunatic asylum in the Cursed Earth on account of his staggeringly vast powers. When Soon escapes and threatens Mega-City One, Judge Dredd and a party of cadets are sent to stop him, only for Dredd to be framed for murdering the cadets.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreddlocked"title="Dreddlocked">
When a psychic lunatic in the Undercity threatens to cause mass destruction by bringing film characters and monsters to life, Judge Dredd and private eye Mister Cairo have to team up to stop him – even though Cairo is a wanted perp who blames Dredd for the death of his mother. They also have to contend with rogue elements in the Special Judicial Squad.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silencer_(Judge_Dredd_novel)"title="Silencer (Judge Dredd novel)">
Dredd is assigned to Sector 66 to investigate the murder of its sector chief. A mysterious creature with the power of invisibility is killing people throughout the sector. Meanwhile, Chief Judge McGruder is losing her mind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetworks_(Judge_Dredd_novel)"title="Wetworks (Judge Dredd novel)">
A massive conspiracy to change the world for ever requires the assassination of 3,600 people every day, and Judge Dredd is targeted for murder. Blinded by his would-be killer, he must save the world without his sight.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitti_Nurbaya"title="Sitti Nurbaya">
In Padang in the early 20th century Dutch East Indies, Samsulbahri and Sitti Nurbaya–children of rich noblemen Sutan Mahmud Syah and Baginda Sulaiman–are teenage neighbours, classmates, and childhood friends. They begin to fall in love, but they are only able to admit it after Samsu tells Nurbaya that he will be going to Batavia (Jakarta) to study. After spending the afternoon at a nearby hillside, Samsu and Nurbaya kiss on her front porch. When they are caught by Nurbaya's father and the neighbours, Samsu is chased out of Padang and goes to Batavia.Meanwhile, Datuk Meringgih, jealous of Sulaiman's wealth and worried about the business competition, plans to bankrupt him. Meringgih's men destroy Sulaiman's holdings, driving him to bankruptcy and forcing him to borrow money from Meringgih. When Meringgih tries to collect, Nurbaya offers to become his wife if he will forgive her father's debt; Datuk Meringgih accepts.Writing to Samsu, Nurbaya tells him that they can never be together. However, after surviving Meringgih's increasingly violent outbursts, she runs away to Batavia to be with Samsu. They fall in love again. Upon receiving a letter regarding her father's death, Nurbaya hurries back to Padang, where she dies after unwittingly eating a lemang rice cake poisoned by Meringgih's men on his orders. Receiving news of her death by letter, Samsu seemingly commits suicide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psykogeddon"title="Psykogeddon">
Arch-criminal Efil Drago San has been arrested in Mega-City One and demands a trial – unprecedented in a city where justice is delivered instantly by the Judges. Nevertheless, his request is granted. But things do not go according to plan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scent_of_Rain_in_the_Balkans"title="The Scent of Rain in the Balkans">
The novel describes the historic period in the Balkans from the beginning of World War I in 1914, to the end of World War II in 1945 through the lives and destinies of the Saloms, a Sephardic Jewish family from Sarajevo. The leading characters are the five courageous Salom sisters whose struggle to fulfil personal desires and aspirations run contrary to the strict conventions of the multicultural and religious societies — Bosnian Jew, Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic — of the time, living side by side in the small town of Sarajevo.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumours_of_Rain"title="Rumours of Rain">
Martin, the narrator, a rich South African businessman, recalls the events of a weekend which settled the future of his family farm: he wants to sell it although he has promised his father on his death-bed that he will never do so, and although his brother wants to take it over. So he visits the farm for a weekend to tell his mother she will be "evicted". For the trip, he calls off a meeting with his lover Bea, who leaves him for that because she wanted to tell him that she is pregnant.It is a long drive to the farm and he does not often go there. He takes his son Louis along to get closer to him. Louis, an army veteran who served in Angola during Operation Savannah, is traumatized and silent since his return to civilian life. The imagined good talk between them makes matters worse, though - the father begins by asking his son casually about his "trip to Angola", and when Louis finally opens up and talks about the atrocities of the war, they end up arguing about politics.The farm is extremely drought-stricken, and Martin's mother has invited a water diviner to look for an underground stream. Martin thinks this is ridiculous. When he then visits the family graveyard for one last time, loses his glasses, so that from then on the egocentric man is in every sense of the word "blind" to the events happening around him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginings_of_Sand"title="Imaginings of Sand">
Kristien, the narrator, is a white academic who goes back to South Africa to visit her grandmother after an attack by black youths on the old lady which leaves her tied to bed. Before she dies, she wishes to tell Kristien the story of their Afrikaner family, a task which grandmother and granddaughter find very important. Memories of Kristien's past in London show that her life has been aimless until now; she has been passive towards things that happen to her, simply fulfilling the need to be away from South Africa and her parents (who had, during their lifetime, supported apartheid). Giving up her self-imposed exile is, at first, a resignation to Kristien, but gradually she learns that the country of her birth is changing towards the better. The first democratic elections are close, and through meetings with black and white people and the stories her grandmother tells her about their family's origins, which show almost only the female side of events and go back to a black foremother, Kristien learns to see South Africa as her home country. In the night before the elections, Kristien's sister kills her children, her violent, racist husband and herself to escape a life she can no longer bear to live. In the same night, the grandmother dies from the aftermath of the attack. Nevertheless, Kristien is optimistic about her future in South Africa. The grandmother's family farm goes to the family of the black domestic worker.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_the_Blind"title="Kingdom of the Blind">
Senior judges from all over the world arrive in Mega-City One to negotiate an extradition treaty and Judge Dredd is assigned to manage security. A major criminal mastermind chooses this moment to try to take over the city.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cutting_Room_(novel)"title="The Cutting Room (novel)">
The novel, set in Glasgow, revolves around the central character, Rilke, an auctioneer who has agreed to quickly process and sell an inventory of largely valuable contents belonging to a recently deceased old man in exchange for a considerable fee. While sorting through some of the possessions in an attic, he comes across a collection of violent and potentially snuff pornography that appears to document the death of a mysterious young woman.Starting with local pornography trade contacts, Rilke sets out to discover this woman's identity and uncover the story behind her appearance in the disturbing photographs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dredd_Vs_Death"title="Dredd Vs Death">
Judge Death and the Dark Judges escape from captivity and begin a massacre. A plague of zombies and vampires spreads across Mega-City One. Four psi-judges have been kidnapped. Insane scientist Dr Icarus is somehow the link between all of these events.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Atlantic"title="Black Atlantic">
Judge Dredd must find and destroy an illegal "bioweapon" – a deadly creature created in a laboratory and designed to kill everyone it sees – which has been stolen and is being held somewhere on a massive city-ship full of mutants, in the highly toxic Atlantic Ocean.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteout_(Judge_Dredd_novel)"title="Whiteout (Judge Dredd novel)">
A powerful cybernetic weapon is stolen by a criminal. As Judge Dredd tries to retrieve it, Justice Department's shadowy Covert Operations Establishment tries to thwart him, and is willing to stop at nothing – even if it means killing Dredd himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby-Sitting_Is_a_Dangerous_Job"title="Baby-Sitting Is a Dangerous Job">
Babysitter Darcy Ann Stevens gets a summer job babysitting three children from the rich Foster family. But the second day that Darcy babysits, they are kidnapped and driven to an old house. No one knows where they are, and the kidnappers are demanding ransom from the Foster parents to let them go. Darcy and the children have to outwit the kidnappers to escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_the_Divorce"title="After the Divorce">
This tragedy is set in Sardinia. Constantino Ledda is convicted on charges for murdering his wicked uncle. Constantino is innocent, but he accepts the verdict because of his wife, Giovanna. After Constantino is convicted, Giovanna has no economic means to support her family, so she divorces her husband and remarries, this time to a wealthy but cruel landowner. Constantino is released after the real killer confesses, and he and Giovanna start a forbidden romance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swine_Fever_(Cartmel_novel)"title="Swine Fever (Cartmel novel)">
Genetic modification has given pigs enhanced intelligence. But somebody is still killing them for their bacon and Judge Dredd must find out who.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Across_the_Universe_(novel)"title="Across the Universe (novel)">
Hundreds of years in the future, the spaceship Godspeed travels toward a distant, earth-like planet with 100 cryogenically frozen settlers on board. Seventeen year old Amy, frozen along with her parents, wakes early and only to find herself in the middle of a strange, regimented society made up of those born on the ship over generations. With the help of Elder, the ship's only teenager and future leader, she must solve a murder mystery, and save the ship. They must hurry before the murderer kills any more people, and before time runs out of life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Omen_Machine"title="The Omen Machine">
Richard and Kahlan are contentedly enjoying Cara's marriage when a boy named Henrik warns them of dark things to come before scratching them both and running away. Soon after, Cara warns Richard that something or someone was watching her in her room. At first unbelieving, Richard and Kahlan notice the same spooky presence on their own. Shortly after these events, prophecies are given by the most unexpected places and people, but appear equally in a book titled "End Notes". After failing to reason with the delegates alarmed by these prophecies, Kahlan and Nicci frighten them into silence with a prediction invented by themselves. Meanwhile, Richard finds a strange machine underground, bearing an emblem exactly as on a wordbook for translating the language of creation, only reversed. It is later revealed that this machine is the source of all the new and strange predictions, and may be an artificial intelligence. Among the delegates is Abbot Dreier, the representative of Bishop Hannis Arc of Saavedra, who becomes the antagonist of this book and its sequels.The scratch on Kahlan's arm worsens, and Zedd fails to heal it. When Kahlan feverishly wakes from a rest, she finds a pack of dogs surrounding her. A fight and chase then ensues until Kahlan runs away in a carriage. When Richard finds out that Kahlan is gone, he traces her footsteps and sends soldiers to find her. She is ultimately captured by a monstrous 'Hedge Maid': a macabre sorceress associated with necromancy. Richard tries to save Kahlan, but is himself captured. Richard remembers the machine's last warning, protects his and Kahlan's ears, and cuts the leather strips on the Hedge Maid's mouth, whereupon she emits a terrible shriek and dies. Richard and Kahlan are found by Nicci and Zedd, who take them to the Garden of Life to heal them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Stories"title="The Lost Stories">
The book begins with a scene many years in the future. A professor named Giles MacFarlane is overseeing an archaeological expedition when his assistant, Audrey, finds a little house in an area which is outside the village limits. Inside, Professor MacFarlane finds stories that tell what happens to the Rangers after they return from Nihon-Ja. In the chronicles, Gilan battles several thieves who are trying to kill Jenny, Will's hideous speech ignites a purple fire as he fights a moondarker, Evanlyn and Horace are married and at the end of the book Will and Alyss are married as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stands_a_Shadow"title="Stands a Shadow">
The story picks up where the first book ended. Ash is in Q’os the capital of Lanstrada, the Mannian heartland staking out the Temple of Whispers pursuing his personal vendetta to kill the Matriarch - Sasheen.The "Diplomat" Ché is also in Q'os. After the successful attack on the Rōshun he is beginning to question his own beliefs. Sasheen has made him her personal diplomat and showing him the Head of Lucian which is kept alive by being immersed in a jar of Royal Milk also gave him his first taste of the Royal Milk which is a powerful narcotic.Ash attempts to assassinate Sasheen during a procession with a crossbow but doesn't go through with it as she is surrounded with glass, which Ash suspects is strong enough that only explosives can break it. He follows her till she boards a ship and after much thought he follows her by diving into the water.Ché meets Guan, the priest on the flagship of the fleet heading towards Khos. Guan and his sister, Swan are part of Sasheen’s travelling entourage. Ash is hiding in the bilge of one of the ships staying alive by stealing food and water in the night not knowing where he's heading. Sasheen assigns Ché a diplomatic task, to make an example of the lover of General Romano in retaliation to him slandering her son while intoxicated. The party reaches the island of Lagos, whose entire population was put to death on the orders of the Matriarch. While the General taking care of formalities as they near the harbor (Chir) Ché goes to his room and strangles his lover (Topo) and deposits his body in the water heater not knowing he is still alive once he realizes topo is still alive &amp; and is being boiled alive he leaves him there. An enraged General Romano insults Sasheen's dead son to her face. Her advisers convince her not to punish him (kill him).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oath_of_the_Vayuputras"title="The Oath of the Vayuputras">
On meeting Brahaspati at the Naga capital of Panchavati, Shiva learns of the evil "Somras", and its ill effects on the people of India. Brahaspati explains that the large amounts of water required to manufacture Somras has resulted in the depletion of the Saraswati River's water. The waste generated in the process of manufacturing the Somras was dumped in the Tsangpo river, which flows through Branga territory as Brahmaputra, and resulted in their disastrous plague. Also the birth of Naga babies was credited to Somras as it results in the multiplication of cells at a very high rate which lead to their deformation and outgrowths.Shiva travels to the hidden city of Ujjain along with his entourage to meet the chief of Vasudev pandits, Gopal. Gopal explains how the Vayuputra council—an ancient tribe left by the previous "Mahadev" Lord Rudra, dwelling in remote land of Pariha in the West—train a member of their tribe as the Neelkanth when "evil" rises. Shiva comes to the conclusion that it was his uncle Manobhu, who turns out to be a former Vayuputra member, trained him as Neelkanth. Seeing that Meluha is the center of manufacturing the Somras, Shiva declares a holy war on the Kingdom and appeals the people to stop using the drink. Parvateshwar decides to join Meluha, since he thinks that it is his duty to defend his motherland; Anandamayi joins him. Shiva also realizes that Maharishi Bhrigu is the mastermind behind the attack on Panchavati, plotting against him along with the Swadweepan emperor Dilipa and Daksha. The preparation for the war mobilizes as Branga, Vaishali and Kashi come to Shiva's aid. He takes the Nagas, the Brangas and the Vasudev elephant corps to attack Meluha, while Kartik and Ganesh attack Ayodhya and successfully prevent them from aiding Meluha. Shiva captures the city of Mrittikavatti and makes the citizens imprison the Meluhan army led by Vidyunmali, who believes Shiva to be a fraud. He escapes and persuades Bhrigu and Parvateshwar to attack Sati's army by a thousand Meluhan troops, and defeat them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkers_(novel)"title="Walkers (novel)">
After drowning in a swimming pool at a party, Joanna Raitt is resuscitated by boyfriend Glen. Afterward Joanna believes that her life is in constant danger and that she is being stalked. She begins to believe that forces are trying to bring her back into the world of the dead. Glen thinks she's crazy so Joanna turns to her ex-boyfriend and Psychic Counselor Peter Landau.Joanna is nearly killed by a woman in a station-wagon and stalked by an unnaturally strong assassin. Peter reveals that her assailants are "walkers", the revived dead. The dead want her back, and Joanna must defeat four of the walking dead before she will be safe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_That_Chelsea_Handler_Told_Me"title="Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me">
The book consists of humorous essays written by Handler's coworkers and family members about lies and pranks Handler has pulled on them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Borrowers_Afloat"title="The Borrowers Afloat">
The Clock family are Borrowers living in the house of a human boy, Tom. The Borrowers worry that they will starve because Tom and his uncle are moving away. They need to leave, but Tom's pet weasel or ferret is outside the door. Luckily, the animal still has the bell that Tom put on it, but they know they cannot outrun such a swift animal. Just when things are looking grim, another Borrower, Spiller, returns via a secret passage. He has come through the drains underneath the house. Spiller admits that he has not told the rest of the Borrowers about the drains because they never asked.While deciding where to go, Spiller tells them that they might go to Little Fordham which is actually a replica village. The place has been a bit of a legend with all Borrowers: a whole village made for Borrower-size residents with plenty of food from the visiting big people.Spiller lets them stay in one of his hideouts, a tea kettle, while he investigates the matter for them. During the wait, rainwater sets the kettle adrift downstream. The Clocks decide that their best chances are to hope that Spiller will realize what has happened and find them. Additional adventures occur, and they lose the kettle some time after it gets stuck in some rubbish.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Electricities"title="Other Electricities">
"Other Electricities" is based on experiences Monson had as a child growing up on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The novel focuses on the characters and their interactions with one another in a small town in Upper Michigan. Much of the book revolves around the central character "Yr Protagonist" and his interactions with his friends and family. The opening chapter describes a police officer alerting the family of Liz, Yr's girlfriend, being killed in a snowmobile crash in a frozen river, which is the basis of much of the novel. Some reviewers speculate that Yr Protagonist is a semi-autobiographical character.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_and_Only_Ivan"title="The One and Only Ivan">
The story is placed at the Exit 8 Big Top Mall by the Video Arcade. Ivan, the Silverback Gorilla, has lived in captivity at the Big Top Mall for 9,855 days by his own tally. He lives in his domain, and is generally content with his life. He watches television, eats bananas, and makes artwork that is sold by the owner. Along with Ivan, Stella, an elephant, and Bob, a stray dog, live at the mall. Stella is an older elephant who has a chronic injury in one leg and regularly performs in the daily shows. Unlike Ivan, Stella has a long memory and can remember living in other places, like the circus where she was taught many of her tricks. However, Stella wanted to live in a zoo, because they have much wider spaces for their domains. Stella believes that good zoos are how humans make amends. When Ruby, a baby elephant, is brought to the Big Top Mall to live with Stella and learn new tricks, things begin to change. Stella's old injury causes her to get sick. Just before Stella succumbs to her illness and passes away, she asks Ivan to take care of Ruby and find her a better place. Ivan promises he will take care of Ruby, even though he does not know how he will manage to do it. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_Wave_(novel)"title="Heat Wave (novel)">
The title of the book refers to a heat wave that gripped the city, the heat that is inside the characters’ attraction for each other, and the character’s surname. Castle’s protagonist is NYPD homicide detective, Nikki Heat. Ms Heat is attractive, tough and means business when she’s on a case. Ms Heat is good at her job and is the leader of her team investigating murders. Heat’s boss, the commissioner, assigns Jameson Rook, a reporter, to be attached to her to do research on his article. Rook proves to be a challenge to Heat as he has a mind of his own.As much as Heat hates Rook, she also feels a compelling force that draws him to her. Heat feels the heat between them. Ms Heat tries to handle her professional work, as well as answer to the call of nature as she falls for her handsome, magnetic shadow. In her work, Heat has to dig into the case of a real estate millionaire who fell to his death. His widowed wife was attacked but survived the confrontation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Venetian_Betrayal"title="The Venetian Betrayal">
In 323 BC Babylon, Alexander the Great executes his physician for failing to save his friend Hephaestion using a mysterious draught, and reveals that he has a fever that could well kill him without it.Cotton Malone is preparing to meet with his friend Cassiopeia Vitt in Copenhagen when he finds himself in a burning museum, which Cassiopeia saves him from. She and Henrik Thorvaldsen tell Malone that everything relates to elephant medallions commemorating Alexander's India invasion, and that they're planning a way to discover who is behind the thefts of medallions across Europe, though they suspect Irina Zovastina, who is the Supreme Minister of the Central Asian Federation. Zovastina is planning to conquer all of her neighbors and do the reverse of what Alexander did, through the means of biological weapons. But she doesn't own the cure. Pharmaceutical tycoon Enrico Vincenti, head of the Venetian League, provides it to her. He sees the cure as an opportunity to vastly increase his wealth.Henrik tells Malone that Cassiopeia's dear friend and possible lover was working for Zovastina when she believes Zovastina killed him for what he knew. Stephanie Nelle becomes involved trying to retrieve a medallion for Cassiopeia, but President Danny Daniels and Deputy National Security Adviser Edwin Davis ask her to go after Vincenti. Everyone heads to Venice, where Cassiopeia tries to kill two members of Zovastina's guard, including Viktor Tomas, whose loyalties seem unclear. Zovastina is trying to solve a riddle from Ptolemy to find Alexander's grave and believes the body in St. Mark's Basilica holds the key, negotiating with Monsignor Colin Michener to see it. After a standoff in the basilica, Zovastina takes Cassiopeia captive to guarantee herself safe passage back to Samarkand (her capital), and Michener reveals to Malone and company that he has been acting as a spy for the pope, and Viktor Tomas is an American spy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinsters_(novel)"title="Spinsters (novel)">
The novel describes an American road trip by two unmarried thirty-something sisters, Frannie and Doris. Doris was popular and pretty in high school, and still keen to keep moving and meet men, while the narrator Frannie is less keen on the journey and shyer around men. Following their father's death they set out on a journey through America. The action takes place in the late 1960s, and reflects the changes American society was undergoing at the time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_in_Summer"title="Death in Summer">
"Death in Summer" revolves around Thaddeus Davenant, whose young wife, Letitia Iveson, was killed in a freak accident on a bicycle. Letitia leaves behind their six-month-old baby girl Georgina; her mother, Mrs Iveson, advises Thaddeus to employ a child minder. One of those interviewed is Pettie, a girl who was brought up in a foster home abused by a sinister "Sunday uncle". She grows increasingly obsessed with Thaddeus and his baby after seeing them just once.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Need_My_Monster"title="I Need My Monster">
Ethan is used to sleeping with his favorite monster under his bed. One night, checking under the bed, he finds a note instead:"Gone fishing. Back in a week. –Gabe"Ethan finds other monsters who appear under the bed, but none are just like the one that helps him sleep. He wants his own monster back.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Eckdorf_in_O'Neill's_Hotel"title="Mrs. Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel">
Mrs Ivy Eckdorf, a professional photographer with two unsuccessful marriages behind her, decides to visit Dublin's O'Neill's Hotel, after hearing that there are some dark secrets in the closet at the place. The hotel is owned by Mrs Sinnott, a compassionate deaf-and-dumb lady fast approaching her ninety-second year. Her feckless son Eugene, a drunk and gambling addict, spends little on the upkeep of the hotel, and the place has now acquired a reputation as a somewhat seedy establishment: Morrissey, a local pimp, often arranges his clients' rendezvous with prostitutes in the rooms. With her feistiness and indefatigable spirit Mrs Eckdorf budges into the lives of the Sinnott family, O'Shea the hall porter and Father Hennessey, a Catholic priest of the local parish.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_the_Gambler_(novel)"title="Bob the Gambler (novel)">
From the "Kirkus" review of the book: "Raymond Kaiser, his wife Jewel, and her daughter from a previous marriage, RV, all quietly enjoy life in Biloxi, Miss., a "simple, easy, cheap" town on the Gulf Coast. With work as an architect drying up, Ray finds himself increasingly interested in the glitzy world of offshore gambling, especially at the Paradise, where Jewel wins over $1,000 on their first trip. In their daily life, "everything's dull", so it is no wonder that Jewel and Ray enjoy the visceral excitement of gambling. They soon graduate from slots to the blackjack table, and slowly find themselves down by over $4,000. Meanwhile, back home, RV seems headed into a downward spiral of teen rebellion--boy trouble, substance experimenting, and body piercings. It doesn't help that her parents are largely absent, spending their nights at Paradise. When Ray's father dies, it sends him further into a midlife crisis. He comes to see himself no longer as "an ordinary guy", but as a full-time gambler. The problem is--he's not very good at it. Spending 18 hours at a time in the casino does nothing but increase his debts. Maxing out a handful of credit cards, he finds himself over $35,000 in the hole, but still juiced by "the losses, the excitement, the hopes, the desperation, the high". Quitting architecture altogether, Ray and Jewel decide to downsize, selling their belongings and moving in with Ray's mother. In their new simplicity, this besieged family finally finds that happiness is not in middle-class stability, nor in the quick fix of gambling's artificial Paradise, but in their everyday Edenic lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_and_Bone"title="Shadow and Bone">
Alina Starkov is a teenage girl who grew up with Malyen (Mal) Oretsev at an orphanage in Keramzin in the Kingdom of Ravka. The story begins as they march through the Unsea (also called the Shadow Fold), a perpetually dark, barren strip of land cutting most of Ravka off from the sea. Periodic expeditions sent across the Fold to transport goods and bring back imports are often plagued by monsters called "volcra" that inhabit the Unsea. During their crossing, the volcra attack, and, while saving Mal, Alina displays an extraordinary Grisha talent. The Grisha are people with the ability to manipulate the elements to use as weapons, e.g. to call fire, to summon wind, to regulate hearts. Alina is able to summon light and is thus considered a Sun Summoner. There are some people who think she is a saint whose purpose is to destroy the shadow fold.The leader of the Grisha, the Darkling, rushes Alina to the capital Os Alta, saying her power is unique and valuable which makes her an assassination target by enemies of Ravka. She struggles to fit in with other Grisha and to have confidence in her own abilities as she begins rigorous training. She feels a strong attraction to the Darkling, which he seems to reciprocate. During two encounters they kiss, and Alina is confused by her reactions to the kisses.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_in_the_East_(novel)"title="Fire in the East (novel)">
## Prologue.During the civil war of AD 238, the Emperor Maximinus Thrax is killed in his tent outside the Northern Italian town of Aquileia. The assassin is a young soldier named Ballista, who has been coerced into acting by the other conspirators, out of fear for his and his own family's safety.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Venus_Throw"title="The Venus Throw">
The year is 56 BC, and Gordianus is visited by his old friend and teacher Dio, a diplomat who leads an embassy on behalf of the citizens of Egypt, who want to make a complaint about their king Ptolemy XII to the senate of Rome. Dio is afraid that he will be murdered by the king's agents, like other envoys before him. When he is poisoned shortly after, Gordianus attempts to find the murderer. His main suspect is the orator Marcus Caelius Rufus, and he also meets the sultry widow Clodia and her admirer, the poet Catullus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Murder_on_the_Appian_Way"title="A Murder on the Appian Way">
The year is 52 BC, and Rome is in turmoil as rival gangs fight it out in the streets. When the gang leader and radical politician Publius Clodius Pulcher is found murdered on the Appian Way south of Rome, the main suspect is Clodius' rival gang leader, Titus Annius Milo. Gordianus is hired by Cicero, who is Milo's defender, to find the true murderer. In the shadows lurk powerful men such as Caesar and Pompey.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Vestals"title="The House of the Vestals">
This collection of short stories are set in the years between 90 BC and 72 BC, and tell the tales of how Gordianus first met his slave, and later wife, Bethesda; how he met his loyal manservant Belbo; of his friendship with his generous patron Lucius Claudius, as well as other tales. He also runs into important historical figures, such as Publius Clodius Pulcher and a young Caesar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubicon_(novel)"title="Rubicon (novel)">
The year is 49 BC, and Caesar has crossed the Rubicon, throwing the Roman Republic into civil war. At the same time, a favourite cousin of Pompey has been murdered, Pompey and the other leaders of the Optimates faction of the senate are leaving Rome to rally their forces against Caesar, but Pompey forces Gordianus to take on the job of solving the murder. To ensure himself of the Finder's diligence, he seizes his son-in-law and makes him join the Pompeian army, while Gordianus' adoptive son Meto, secretary to Caesar, is part of the other army marching on Rome.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Seen_in_Massilia"title="Last Seen in Massilia">
The year is 49 BC, and there is civil war in the Roman Empire. Caesar is besieging the ancient Greek colony of Massilia in Gaul, which has allied with Pompey. Meanwhile, Gordianus the Finder is desperate to get inside the city to find his son Meto, Caesar's secretary, who has disappeared and is believed to be dead. Once inside, Gordianus must solve the murder of a woman to save his new friend, Hieronymus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mist_of_Prophecies"title="A Mist of Prophecies">
The year is 48 BC, and there is civil war in the Roman Empire. In Rome, the beautiful and mysterious seeress called Cassandra is poisoned, and dies in the arms of Gordianus in the market. While the Finder attempts to uncover her murderer, the armies of Caesar and Pompey are about to clash in Greece.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Judgment_of_Caesar"title="The Judgment of Caesar">
The year is 48 BC, and there is civil war in the Roman Empire. Caesar has defeated his rival Pompey at Pharsalos and is pursuing him towards Egypt, where king Ptolemy XIII and his sister and wife Cleopatra are struggling for power. At the same time Gordianus the Finder is traveling to Egypt with his ailing Egyptian wife, Bethesda.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gladiator_Dies_Only_Once"title="A Gladiator Dies Only Once">
In this second collection of short stories from the life of Gordianus the Finder, the reader gets more glimpses into the backstory of the protagonist, as well as meetings with famous historical characters such as Quintus Sertorius and Lucullus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_of_Mary_Baker_G._Eddy_and_the_History_of_Christian_Science"title="The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science">
The book's criticism of Eddy is considerable. According to Stuart Knee: "Eddy is, by turns, guilty of vanity, ignorance, theft, vengefulness, compulsions, witchcraft, mesmerism and the evil eye." The authors of the series produced witness statements from Eddy's childhood in Bow, New Hampshire, alleging that she engaged in repeated fainting spells to gain attention, particularly from her father, and that, as an adult, she developed a habit of appearing to be seriously ill only to recover quickly. Biographer Gillian Gill disagreed that the book offers an accurate portrayal of Eddy; she argued, for example, that the story of Eddy having "fits" as a child to get her own way, or the way "McClure's" described them, was "invented more or less out of whole cloth" by "McClure's" journalist Burton Hendrick, and that the accounts of Eddy as "hysterical" were misogynist. She wrote: "there is no solid evidence at all for Milmine’s melodramatic description of the young Mary Baker repeatedly falling on the floor in hysterical catatonic fits. No family member, no close friend makes any mention of such fits, either when she was young or later. When questioned on the subject in the 1900s, those few remaining contemporaries who had been familiar with the Baker family denied that Mary had shown any such abnormal behavior."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triumph_of_Caesar"title="The Triumph of Caesar">
The year is 46 BC. Having won the civil war, Julius Caesar is now the master of Rome. Gordianus the Finder and his family return home after their recuperative trip to Egypt, and are given grim news: Gordianus's friend, Hieronymus (whom Gordianus rescued from human sacrifice in "Last Seen in Massilia") has been murdered. Caesar's wife, Calpurnia, who has become more superstitious and paranoid with each passing day, believes there is a plot to kill her husband. In Gordianus's absence, she hired Hieronymus to investigate, and now his murder seems to lend credence to the threat. Calpurnia is frantic, since her information indicates that the prospective assassin plans for Caesar to be dead by the end of his great triumph.As each day of the triumph goes by, Gordianus has no better plan than to follow in Hieronymus's footsteps, interviewing everyone he spoke with in the last days of his life. As he does so, Gordianus becomes conscious of just how many people have reason to want Caesar dead:While all of these people seem to have the motive for plotting against Caesar, few seem to have the inclination (for instance, Antony seems more interested in spending his days in debauchery, and Cicero is slavishly devoted to his new young wife, Publilia) and those that do (such as Vercingetorix and Arsinoe) seem to lack opportunity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Wonders_(Saylor_novel)"title="The Seven Wonders (Saylor novel)">
The year is 92 BC. The young Gordianus is eighteen years old, and has just become a man. Now he sets out on the journey of a lifetime, traveling with his teacher and friend Antipater of Sidon to see the seven wonders of the world. Along the route he gets entangled in several mysteries and murders that he helps solve, while he is starting to suspect that an even more sinister conspiracy is unfolding around him. The backdrop of the novel is the brewing conflict between Rome and Mithridates VI of Pontus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mirror_and_the_Light"title="The Mirror and the Light">
"The Mirror &amp; The Light" covers the period following the death of Anne Boleyn in 1536. It describes Cromwell's ascent to the pinnacle of his riches and power, followed by his fall from royal favour and his public execution at Tower Hill in 1540.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Fire_(novel)"title="White Fire (novel)">
Corrie Swanson sets out to solve a long-forgotten mystery. In 1876, in a remote mining camp called Roaring Fork in the Colorado Rockies, several miners were killed in devastating grizzly bear attacks. Now the town has become an exclusive ski resort and its historic cemetery has been dug up to make way for development. Corrie has arranged to examine the remains of the dead miners. But in doing so she makes a shocking discovery that threatens the resort's very existence. The town's leaders, trying to stop her from exposing their community's dark and bloody past, arrest and jail her. Special Agent Pendergast of the FBI arrives to help—just as a series of brutal arson attacks on multimillion-dollar homes terrify the town and drive away tourists. Drawn irresistibly into the investigation, Pendergast discovers an unlikely secret in Roaring Fork's past, connecting the resort to a chance meeting between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde. With the town under siege, and Corrie's life in desperate danger, Pendergast must solve the riddle of the past... before the town of present goes up in flames.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Life_Too_Short"title="A Life Too Short">
The book details the life of Robert Enke, particularly focusing on Enke's struggle with depression. Reng also focuses on his friendship with Enke, with whom he was supposed to co-write a biography.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Stapleton_and_Laurie_Montgomery_series"title="Jack Stapleton and Laurie Montgomery series">
The series follows Jack Stapleton, a medical examiner and pathologist who spends most of his free time focusing on various medical cases in order to avoid having to think about the deaths of his wife and children. He teams up with his co-worker and fellow pathologist Laurie Montgomery in order to solve various crimes, with the two eventually falling in love and marrying. Laurie was earlier in a relationship with Lou Soldano, a police officer and Jack and Laurie's mutual friend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nights_of_the_Pufflings"title="Nights of the Pufflings">
"Nights of the Pufflings" is set on the Icelandic island of Heimaey. The story deals with a local children's tradition of rescuing young birds, pufflings. Every August millions of pufflings leave their burrows in the cliffs and take their first flight at night time. Some of them get confused, presumably by street lights, and get stranded in the village streets, where they can become easy prey for local cats and dogs. The children get ready to take patrols in the night streets, gather the bewildered pufflings in cardboard boxes and later set them free at the beach in daytime. The birds will spend the next year or two at open sea before returning to Heimaey for mating.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trauma_(novel)"title="Trauma (novel)">
Set during the 1970s", Trauma" focuses on the life of Dr. Charlie Weir, who lives and works in New York City as a psychiatrist specializing in the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder. Charlie's narration begins with a reminiscence of his early life and his mother's developing struggle with depressive illness, before moving into other traumatic instances of his relationship with his mother before the revelation of her death. Charlie rekindles a relationship with his ex-wife Agnes of the day of his mother's funeral, triggering Charlie to relive the reasons for their separation, namely the suicide of Agnes brother Danny. Eight years prior to this, Charlie worked as a psychotherapist helping veterans of the Vietnam War to overcome their post-traumatic stress. Included amongst his patients was Danny, who was well-respected by the other veterans, though rarely spoke. Charlie, in an attempt to draw him out of his malaise, followed Danny to a bar and attempted to engage him about his experiences, an act that Charlie would later believe to be the direct cause for man's suicide, as soon after he killed himself with a gun in his shower. At the same time as Charlie is recounting these memories, he has also begun a new relationship with Nora Chiara, which quickly turns sour. Nora begins to have violent nightmares that Charlie attributes to some psychological disorder, though she refuses to seek treatment. The strain this places on their relationship, in combination with Charlie's own negative relationship with his family and his continuing return to painful memories associated with Danny, forces Charlie to confront his own repressed traumas. He retreats to an old family holiday destination in the Catskills, triggering the repressed memory of his mother threatening to kill him at gun point, and ending in a confrontation with his brother and father in which Charlie shoots his brother. The novel ends as Charlie waits for psychiatric aid to arrive, and, as he believes, to be taken 'home' to a state hospital for the insane.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Void_Captain's_Tale"title="The Void Captain's Tale">
Like "Child of Fortune", "The Void Captain's Tale" is written in a unique mix of English words, foreign words, and invented words—the first-person perspective of a possibly-unreliable narrator, the voidship captain Genro Kane Gupta. Genro's starship is part transport, part pleasure vessel. While the majority of passengers are kept in suspended animation, a wealthy few, the Floating Cultura, spend the voyage in the pursuit of pleasure—it is Genro's job to entertain these passengers. Unlike the technological focus of many science fiction novels, Genro claims the exact nature of space travel is not understood; the ship's interstellar drive is powered by the psychic energy of a young woman pilot. Theodore Sturgeon explained the "erotic form of space travel" in the Los Angeles Times Book Review: "Spinrad's ingenious space-drive has the ship's machine create a field . . . which at peak and at captain's command melds with the pilot's psyche, causing the ship to cease to exist in one spatial locus and reappear in another." During transit, the pilot experiences orgasm. Typically pilots are not part of the social life of the ship, and the occupation takes a physical toll.Spinrad outlines the entire plot of the book in the first few pages. The remainder of the novel simply goes into more detail. Most of the book deals with Genro's obsession with his pilot, Dominique Alia Wu. Pilots experience a quasi-religious ecstasy during jump, and Dominique believes she can permanently merge with the Great and Only with the captain's help. Eventually, when Genro cannot resist the temptation, he has sexual intercourse with the pilot, setting off a chain reaction of events which result in the captain losing both his sexual prowess and his status as leader of the floating cultura. His growing disassociation from society and his allegiance to the succubus-like hold of the pilot's psychic siren call lead to his eventual submission to Dominique's will, and he jumps the ship without first laying in any coordinates- freeing Dominique from both the physical world and her sexual servitude to the jump circuit, but trapping his ship and its passengers in the void between the stars.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Syndic"title="The Syndic">
The prologue introduces the setting, a future North America divided between rival criminal gangs the Syndic on the East Coast and the Mob in Chicago, who have driven the federal government into exile in Iceland, Ireland and other North Atlantic islands. Life has more or less returned to normal in Syndic territory – as long as protection money is paid on time. The rest of the world has collapsed into either peasant life or tribalism.Attitudes to sex are generally tolerant, with free sex outside of marriage and both polygamy and polyandry accepted. (However, male homosexuality is not, and lesbianism is never mentioned.)The protagonist, Charles Orsino, is a low-ranking member of the Syndic who collects protection money in New York. After a failed assassination attempt, he is invited to a meeting of the leaders of the Syndic, who suspect that the exiled government were responsible. To discover the truth, Charles volunteers to go undercover to infiltrate the government, with a false personality created by hypnosis to fool lie detectors. He is taken to the main naval base on the shores of Ireland. He also visits Ireland outside of government territory: it is tribal and governed by sorceresses who have genuine powers of telepathy. It is mentioned in passing that England is also tribal and much weaker.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastures_of_the_Blue_Crane"title="Pastures of the Blue Crane">
The story opens in Melbourne, where Amaryllis Merewether, aged 16, is told her father has died and that she is to inherit his farm on the North coast of New South Wales. There is a catch; the co-heir is the grandfather she never knew she had. The snooty schoolgirl and the ramshackle old pensioner are clearly at odds, yet both are curious about the farm and agree to take the train together and visit their property.The pair are captivated by the beautiful, almost tropical landscape, and soon its luxuriance begins to work its magic on lonely, isolated Ryl and tetchy Dusty. Too young for university, and with nothing else to do in the meantime, Ryl renovates the old farmhouse and makes of it the first real home she has ever had. She makes new friends, including the mysterious taxi driver, Perry. To her astonishment, she finds relatives her father never told her about ... and discovers why he kept them hidden.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_of_Spring"title="The Year of Spring">
Vyacheslav Krasko tells his own story throughout the book. As an executive who reached financial independence and high status in society, he suddenly realizes hard principles and rationalism have displaced the most important things in life: happiness, freedom and true feelings.To find the meaning of life, he breaks up with his sweetheart, moves house, leaves his job and buys a one-way ticket leaving Moscow. His new life has begun.He starts his travel in the spring, a season symbolizing new beginnings.Every day on Vyacheslav's journey is not like another. The splendor of ancient architecture is replaced by the beauty of virgin nature, small cities are interspersed with megacities, an instructive conversation with an Indian guru is adjacent to everyday troubles, and a new love for a wonderful girl turns into bitterness of disappointment – all this is the flow of life, its taste, which can be easily felt and hard to forget. Vyacheslav, like a little child, tastes everything and generously shares his new experience with readers. He learns to sail a yacht and catch a wave on a surf, cook intricate Chinese dishes and dance the Argentine tango, bungee jump over a stormy mountain river and climb the highest peaks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starborne"title="Starborne">
Fifty men and women set out on the "Wotan" to discover new habitable worlds and break free of a stagnant utopia. They are connected with Earth via a telepathic link between a crew member and her sister. However, the link is broken, stranding the "Wotan" far from home, where they encounter an alien presence and begin to reconsider their assumptions about life and death and the universe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cal_Leandros_series"title="Cal Leandros series">
The series follows Cal, a man that is half-monster and half-human. His mother was impregnated by an Auphe, a bloodthirsty creature also referred to as a "Grendel". The series begins with Cal and his brother Niko living in New York City, struggling to keep Cal's heritage a secret as they battle to survive those that would see them dead. Later novels deal more heavily with Cal's attempts to balance the dark nature of his father's race with his impulse to protect and defend others against the supernatural.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickster_series"title="Trickster series">
The series follows Trixa Iktomi, who owns a bar in Las Vegas and also works as an information broker in the supernatural world. Up to her neck in demons, on a search to find a powerful artifact and avenge a death, she has some help: two demon hunters that she's taken under her wing, Griffin and Zeke, who work for Heaven’s presence in Las Vegas, and her Native American bartender Leo Rain, who has some secrets of his own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowgate_(novel)"title="Shadowgate (novel)">
Lief, Barda, and Jasmine travel north to find the Sister of the North. They are captured and adopted by the Masked Ones, a circus troop who all wear masks physically fused into their faces. They were founded by Ballum, a close friend of one of the old kings, who was accused of being a traitor and forced to flee. During their stay, a mysterious specter keeps appearing and murdering people around the companions. They escape from the Masked Ones and meet the Lapis Lazuli Dragon, Fortuna. They find a castle near a village called Shadowgate, the northernmost point in Deltora. There they discover Bede, son of Bess (leader of the Masked Ones). They assume him to be the guardian, but it is revealed that it is actually Kirsten, a girl from Shadowgate who fell in love with him, but he loved her sister Mariette, so she grew jealous and turned herself over to the Shadow Lord to be the Guardian of the North if it meant she could keep Bede prisoner. The specter is a projection made by her which she uses to try and kill the companions, but always malfunctions. The Sister is discovered, and destroyed when the Emerald Dragon, Honora, awakens. Kirsten is killed, Mariette is released from her enchanted imprisonment, and she and Bede live together happily.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterman_Ready,_or_the_Wreck_of_the_Pacific"title="Masterman Ready, or the Wreck of the Pacific">
The Seagrave family are returning to New South Wales on board the "Pacific" when a storm strikes, wrecking the ship. The crew escape in a lifeboat leaving the passengers to their fate. The Seagrave family, together with their young black female servant Juno, and the veteran sailor Masterman Ready, are shipwrecked on a desert island. The family learn to survive many obstacles, helped by Ready's long experience of life as a seaman. The worse threat comes when a tribe of natives attacks the party, resulting in the death of Ready. Rescue comes when the captain of the "Pacific", who the family thought had died in the storm, arrives in a schooner.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Human"title="Team Human">
"Team Human" is set in the town of New Whitby, Maine, the origin of America's compact with vampires and a place that sees them living side-by-side in relative harmony. When a century-old vampire joins their high school class, Mel is horrified when her best friend Cathy falls for him. Afraid that Cathy might be considering becoming a vampire herself, Mel starts on a quest to show Cathy how dangerous the undead really are, which means braving the vampire district and solving a mystery. As the book's tagline states, "friends don't let friends date vampires."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bend,_Not_Break"title="Bend, Not Break">
The book narrates the life of Ping Fu, a computer scientist from China. Fu spent her early years caring for her younger sister after her parents were taken away for re-education through labor, as well as working in factories and spending time in the military. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, Fu attended Suzhou Teacher's College, where she's later deported to the United States for the contents of her thesis. Once in America, Fu worked her way through college in a variety of jobs and eventually gained a BA in Computer Science &amp; Economics through the University of California, San Diego. From there she worked for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and later formed Geomagic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOS4A2"title="NOS4A2">
In 1986, eight-year-old Victoria "Vic" McQueen discovers that she can find lost items by riding her Raleigh Bike through a particular covered bridge near her home in Massachusetts, which will transport her to the location of whatever she is seeking. For instance, when her mom, Linda, loses a butterfly bracelet, Vic goes back to a diner in New Jersey to get it back.Vic soon discovers that each trip through this "Shorter Way" Bridge exacts an increasing mental and physical toll on her. In order to prevent people from thinking her crazy or a liar, Vic must come up with excuses to explain how she is able to find items. On one such trip, Vic travels to an Iowa library where she meets Maggie Leigh, a librarian with a stutter who can use Scrabble tiles to gain information about future events. Maggie warns Vic about a man she refers to as "the Wraith", a dangerous man with powers similar to theirs who drives a 1938 Rolls-Royce. Vic travels home but loses her bike and, as a result of using the Shorter Way, develops a terrible fever.Meanwhile, the man Maggie warned about, Charles Talent Manx III, kidnaps children across the country in the Rolls-Royce. Manx enlists chemical plant worker Bing Partridge to steal a supply of gingerbread-scented sevoflurane from his workplace, which Manx uses to incapacitate his victims. Manx takes the children he abducts to a mysterious amusement park called "Christmasland" where they can purportedly be happy forever. Bing uses the sevoflurane to incapacitate the children's parents before raping and killing them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poseidon's_Arrow"title="Poseidon's Arrow">
This book is about a secret prototype attack submarine the United States is developing and the efforts of a ruthless multimillionaire who wants to seize it by any means and sell it for a hefty profit. This millionaire antagonist also is bent on monopolizing most of the world's rare earth mineral mining operations and sell these minerals for a huge profit. This novel has many subplots and is set in a variety settings throughout the world. These subplots involve many characters, as well.Clive Cussler makes a habit of writing himself into cameo appearances in his books. In this one he makes a short appearance, working as a barge captain who gets roughed up by those working for this tale's antagonist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Engines_of_God"title="The Engines of God">
A group of xeno-archaeologists, together with interstellar pilot Priscilla Hutchins, attempt to unravel the mysteries surrounding tremendous monuments left near several habitable worlds in the solar neighborhood.The story primarily follows Priscilla Hutchins – also known as "Hutch" – a prestigious starship pilot for the Academy (the organization responsible for many on- and off-world scientific endeavors). Hutch receives orders to take the Academy ship "Winckelmann" and evacuate the final archaeological team on the planet Quraqua.This evacuation is the result of a complicated series of political maneuvers, and is not favored by the Academy, which until this point had conducted extensive surveys of the planet in an attempt to learn about the former alien inhabitants of the world.The now-extinct Quraquans had a complex history spanning tens of thousands of years, and scientists had expected to have an unlimited timeframe for scientific discovery.Instead, they were being driven out after only 28 years, so that Quraqua could be terraformed; as the most Earth-like planet discovered so far, there was a tremendous pressure to begin transforming it into a New Earth, due to the deteriorating conditions of Earth itself.A total evacuation was called for, due to the nature of the terraforming process. Many nuclear devices were to be detonated in the planet's polar ice caps, in order to raise the world's sea level and bring about a warming climate change. This terraforming effort was being led by the wealthy corporation, Kosmik.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodfire_Quest"title="Bloodfire Quest">
The book follows several characters as they try to find a way to overcome the odds against them. Arlingfant has been named as the successor of the Ellcrys, a position that would require complete sacrifice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrusion_(novel)"title="Intrusion (novel)">
The protagonists are Hugh and Hope Morrison, a couple with a young son in a near-future, post-climate change London during the "Warm War". The United Kingdom is governed by the Labour Party in a technocratic government that pursues a policy of a "free and social market" by, in the words of one of its MPs, intervening to allow people to make the choices they would have made if only they had had all the information. In practice, this amounts to an attempt to create a conformist dystopia, "strongly encouraging" its citizens to make "the right choice". This brings the pregnant Hope into conflict with the state when she decides that she does not want to take "the Fix", a single-dose pill that would correct genetic errors in her unborn child. This draws her, Hugh and the state into a moral dilemma as she struggles against the pressure to conform.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_God_Strolling_in_the_Cool_of_the_Evening"title="A God Strolling in the Cool of the Evening">
The book is told as a First-person narrative by Lucius Valerius Quintius, prefect of the fictional city Tarcisis during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. He faces threats both internal and external, as Moors from North Africa are attacking the province, which is beset by social and political unrest. At the same time, the new Christian faith is gaining strength in the Roman lands. Quintus tries to deal justly with all these problems, inspired by the ideas of his role model, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius.As tension builds in the city, Quintius must decide how to punish Christian subversives led by the beautiful Iunia Cantaber, the daughter of an old friend of his. The prefect hesitates, for he has fallen in love with Iunia. He is both fascinated by and frustrated with the followers of the new religion; these people who "worship fish", as he puts it. He also reflects back on his visit to Rome ten years earlier, where he met his hero Marcus Aurelius.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(Un)arranged_Marriage"title="(Un)arranged Marriage">
"(Un)arranged Marriage" is the story of Manjit (nicknamed Manny), a teenage boy living in Leicester, England. His strict Punbjabi parents are disappointed in Manny's poor behaviour and grades at school, so they decide to arrange a marriage between Manny and a girl from India, whom he does not know.Manny's parents take him to India under the pretext of visiting family, but he later finds that they have returned to England without him. His Uncle Jag, who disagrees with arranged marriage, agrees to help him leave the country. When he gets back to England, his father beats him, telling him that he still expects him to go ahead with the marriage. Manny starts working in a local supermarket in order to save money towards his escape.Manny and his friend, Adrian, devise a plan to trick his parents into thinking that he has changed his mind about the arranged marriage. They break up the wedding party in order to allow Manny to escape the marriage and be free from his parents, but he loses his family in the process.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronautilia"title="Astronautilia">
The work is an epic poem, comprising 6,575 verses of hexameter in Homeric Greek, with parallel translation into Czech hexameter. The postmodern science fiction story is inspired by the philosophical postulate of quantum physics, that for something to exist it must be observed. The cosmos-observing turns out to be a certain sheep. To kill the sheep would mean the end of everything. The cosmos-observing sheep is kidnapped by a villain called Mandys, and pursued by a rapid reaction commando force, whose captain is called Oudeis (Οὐδείς, "Nobody"), following the example of Captain Nemo (Νήμω καπιτᾶνος), as well as the Odyssey's original hero, Odysses, who went by the name Outis (Οὖτις, "Noman, Nobody"), in order to fool the Cyclops Polyphemus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_It_Forward_(novel)"title="Pay It Forward (novel)">
When twelve-year-old Trevor McKinney begins seventh grade in Atascadero, California, his social studies teacher, Reuben St Clair, gives the class an assignment to devise and put into action a plan that will change the world for the better. Trevor's plan is a charitable program based on the networking of good deeds. He calls his plan "Pay It Forward", which means the recipient of a favor does a favor for three others. However, it needs to be a major favor that the receiver cannot complete themselves. Trevor first begins by helping Jerry, a jobless man who was unable to find a home. However, he seemingly forgets to complete three favors and ends up in prison. Next, Trevor directly helps his social studies teacher, Mr. Reuben St. Clair. Finally, he helps Mrs. Greenberg, who eventually dies. But without Trevor's knowledge, Mrs. Greenberg had helped three friends by giving them $8,333 in her will. One of them, Matt, meets an injured gangster in an alleyway, named Sidney G. Matt told him about Pay It Forward but told him not to do it. After helping the man, it turns out that gangster helped another man, who also spared the life of his lifetime rival as his favor. Trevor dies by getting stabbed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Way_Up_High"title="Way Up High">
Susi comes across Herman, a young, lonesome pterodactyl, sunning himself on a rock on her way home from school during the last week of the spring semester. They become fast friends. Susi rides on the back of the pterodactyl during the days of summer. She is astonished by the great height of their flights that makes things on the ground seem so tiny.Susi asks if pterodactyls are magic. He replies that he has magic—pterodactyl magic. Susi asks if she has magic. Herman says that she has human magic, but she has to learn it for herself.One day Herman takes Susi for one last flight, the first time at night. The lights below are as tiny and bright and numerous as the stars above. She sees beauty in the lights of the city. Herman says that pterodactyls do not build cities and he can not feel about the cities as she does. She says she has never felt this way about cities before. Herman says he thinks she is beginning to find her magic.When they land Herman explains that the weather is too cold for him, and he must follow the birds south to a warmer climate. Promising to come the next summer, Herman says good-bye. That night Susi dreams she finds her magic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seizure_(Reichs_novel)"title="Seizure (Reichs novel)">
Tory Brennan and her friends find themselves in danger of being separated due to budget cuts which may mean the closure of the Loggerheads Island Research Institute (LIRI) where their parents work. Discovering that pirate Anne Bonny's treasure is believed to be buried somewhere near their home in Charleston, South Carolina, they set out to follow the clues to the treasure, using their "Viral" powers gained in the previous book in the series, in the hope that if they find it, it will be worth enough to save LIRI. However, it is not just them that wants the treasure. The Virals must beat their opponents to the treasure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_Steam"title="Raising Steam">
Dick Simnel, a young self-taught engineer from Sto Lat (and whose father, Ned Simnel, appeared in "Reaper Man"), has invented a steam locomotive. He brings his invention to Ankh-Morpork where it catches the interest of Sir Harry King, a millionaire businessman who has made his fortune in the waste and sanitation industry, as he wishes to create a legacy disassociated from the source of his wealth. Harry promises Dick sufficient investment to make the railway a success.The Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, Lord Vetinari, wishing to ensure that the City has appropriate influence over the new enterprise, appoints the reformed fraudster turned civil servant Moist von Lipwig to represent the government in the management of the railway. His skills soon come in useful in negotiations with landowners along the route of the new line.Throughout the story, Dwarfish fundamentalists are responsible for a number of terrorist attacks, including the murder and arson. This campaign culminates in a palace coup in Überwald, whilst the King is at an international summit in Quirm, over twelve hundred miles away. Vetinari declares that it is imperative to return the King to Schmaltzberg as soon as possible in order to restore political stability, and gives Moist the task of getting him there via the new railway. Moist protests impossibility on the grounds that the railway is nowhere near complete, but is told that achieving this target is non-negotiable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_of_Radiance"title="Words of Radiance">
Years ago, Szeth-son-son-Vallano, the Assassin in White, was sent by the Parshendi to assassinate the Alethi king Gavilar Kholin (for reasons not yet revealed to the reader). This murder resulted in the Vengeance Pact among the highprinces of Alethkar and the War of Reckoning against the Parshendi. Now Szeth is active again, and is sent by King Taravangian of Kharbranth, to kill Highprince Dalinar Kholin (brother of the late King Gavilar).Kaladin, once a slave and bridgeman on the Shattered Plains, is given command of the royal bodyguards to protect Dalinar and his family (including King Elhokar) from perils and the threat of the Assassin. Meanwhile, he struggles with both his feelings regarding lighteyes (the nobility of the Alethi) and his past with Brightlord Amaram. He trains and practices to master the powers of a Windrunner that are linked to the bond with his honorspren, Syl.Shallan Davar, together with her mentor Jasnah Kholin, are heading to the Shattered Plains to prevent the return of the Voidbringers and their civilization-ending Desolation. Jasnah arranges a marriage between Shallan and Adolin Kholin, Jasnah's cousin. Their ship is attacked en route to the Shattered Plains and while Shallan survives, Jasnah is believed to be killed. Shallan, with the assistance of sailors and outlaws she finds on the road, makes her arrival at the Shattered Plains.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Life_of_Damian_Spinelli"title="The Secret Life of Damian Spinelli">
"The Secret Life of Damian Spinelli" follows the adventures of private investigator, Damian Spinelli, as he attempts to solve several cases around Port Charles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Shot_at_History"title="A Shot at History">
In this book, Bindra tells that only hunger for success and inner desire helps anyone to achieve his or her dreams. He denies that only the best training, coaches can lead to anyone's success. In this books, he tells how various coaches helped him to become a professional shooter. Especially, he gives credit to his German coach Gabriele Bühlmann, who helped him to win a gold medal after finishing 7th in the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens which he states as "the darkest hour in his career". He says that how he drew inspiration from shooters like Gagan Narang, Samaresh Jung, Jaspal Rana and Anjali Bhagwat. The book also highlights the unique situation faced by an Olympic contestant. He says that a cricketer or a Professional golfer has many matches or tournaments to prove himself in a single year if he fails in one, but an Olympian has to wait 4 long years to prove himself if he fails once.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boenga_Roos_dari_Tjikembang_(novel)"title="Boenga Roos dari Tjikembang (novel)">
Oh Aij Tjeng is a young ethnic Chinese man who runs a plantation in West Java. He lives there with his "njai" (concubine), a Sundanese woman named Marsiti. The two are deeply in love and promise to be faithful forever. However, not long afterwards Aij Tjeng's father Oh Pin Loh comes to tell Aij Tjeng that he has been betrothed to Gwat Nio, the daughter of the plantation's owner Liok Keng Djim. Marsiti is sent away by the elder Oh and, after Aij Tjeng orders his manservant Tirta to find her, Tirta disappears as well. After the marriage, Aij Tjeng finds in Gwat Nio all of the same traits which made him fall in love with Marsiti, but even more polished owing to her better education. He falls in love with her and begins to forget Marsiti, and the couple have a daughter, Lily.One day Keng Djim calls Aij Tjeng and Gwat Nio to his deathbed, where he confesses that he has recently learned that Marsiti was his daughter from a native "njai" he had taken as a youth, and that Marsiti had died. He greatly regrets that he and Pin Loh had her chased away from the plantation. Keng Djim hints that there is another secret to be shared, but dies before he can reveal it. Aij Tjeng calls for his father, to discover the secret, but finds that he too has died.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounds_of_Armenia"title="Wounds of Armenia">
The story which Abovian named "Wounds of Armenia" is based on an incident which happened in his hometown Kanaker during the Russo-Persian War of 1826–1828.A young Armenian girl named Takhuni is kidnapped by soldiers of Hossein Khan Sardar, the head of the Erivan Khanate. Aghasi, who is the main hero, kills the Sardar's men and saves her. The Persian governor's brother Hassan decides to punish Aghasi and thus destroys a number of Armenian towns.The 2005 book "The Heritage of Armenian Literature" by Agop Jack Hacikyan "et al" argues that "though symbolic, the incident, was sufficiently potent to arouse sentiments of patriotism, national pride, and dignity". The authors then note that "the book, reads like a poem, in which the author, like a son, is having an honest, forthright talk with the people, in their own Kanaker dialect". They claim "its message is direct and strong: an appeal from the bottom of the heart".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Story_(autobiography)"title="Back Story (autobiography)">
The book revolves around a walk in Kilburn, London, on which Mitchell reflects on his childhood, university experiences and career. The book title is also a play-on-words, as Mitchell talks about the problems with his back.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sparrow_Falls"title="A Sparrow Falls">
While in France a young sniper, Mark Anders, meets Sean Courtney who has risen to the rank of general. Following the end of the war the pair return to South Africa. After finding that his grandfather has died under mysterious circumstances, and his property has been taken over by an unknown company, Anders eventually becomes Sean's assistant. This brings him onto contact with Sean's beautiful, spoiled daughter, Storm, who he falls for. Sean Courtney becomes involved in suppressing the Rand Revolt of 1922 before becoming immersed in violent conflict with his corrupt son, Dirk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sunbird"title="The Sunbird">
Archeologist Benjamin Kazin with the aid of his assistant Sally searches Botswana for what he believes to be the remains of the ancient Phoenician city of Opet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burning_Shore"title="The Burning Shore">
In 1917 during World War I, South African fighter pilot Michael Courtney falls in love with Centaine, a French woman. On their wedding day – prior to their wedding – Courtney is killed in action, and, following the destruction of her home by a German bombardment, the pregnant Centaine enrols as a nurse and embarks on a hospital ship for South Africa. The ship is torpedoed by a German U-Boat and Centaine lands on the Skeleton Coast. She attempts to make her way south to South Africa but is adopted by two San who teach her how to survive in the desert.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Falcon_Flies"title="A Falcon Flies">
A Falcon Flies is remarkable for its sense of the African wild, grimly informative about the slave trade, and alive with the obsessions and impossible love of its strongminded heroine. It is the first of the Ballantyne novels.Dr Robyn Ballantyne, daughter of a famous missionary and explorer, returns on a joint expedition with her brother Zouga to southern Africa, the land of her birth, fired with the desire to bring the Africans medicine, Christianity and an end to the slave trade, still flourishing in 1860. Both are also looking for their lost father, who disappeared on a missionary mission years before.She discovers that the clipper ship she and her brother are taking passage on from England is in reality a slave ship and the debonair American captain, Mungo St John, a slaver himself. Irresistibly attracted to this man but at the same time repelled by his ruthlessness, Robyn resolves to fight him to the last – a course she is supported in by the fanatical anti-slave trader and English naval captain, Clinton Codrington, with whom she makes contact in Cape Town.When she and her brother then take passage on Clinton's ship to their destination in Portuguese East Africa, her resolve is further reinforced by their encounter with a slave dhow whose cargo of human misery they try to save from wreck on a reef while the Arab slaver flees to safety.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_of_Men"title="Men of Men">
Men of Men by Wilbur Smith is a story of greed, exploration, adventure and love. It is a gripping saga at the time of Rhodes's acquisition of what would become Rhodesia following the lives of the Ballantyne men, specifically Zouga Ballantyne and his two sons Ralph and Jordan who have the unrelenting desire to conquer the wilds of the hinterlands of South Africa. Zouga, in his pursuit to make a fortune at the diamond fields, loses his wife and almost loses his sons. He purchases Kimberly mines but gambles them away leaving the family penniless, but in the true spirit of adventure and determination, both sons try on their own to make their mark on the land.Zouga falls in love with the woman he believes is married to the American Confederate general and former slave trader Mungo St. John, but when he finds out their marriage is a lie, he reveals his feelings. Mungo lives to continue on his path of deceit and treachery, all to advance his own personal coffers, and when he falls in love with Zouga's sister Robyn, he even conspires to free her from her husband Clinton (British sea captain from the first novel) by sending him to his death at the hands of the Matabele.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Angels_Weep"title="The Angels Weep">
The Angels Weep by Wilbur Smith is the third book in a trilogy that chronicles the generations of the Ballantyne family, and those who most influenced their paths in life. Beginning with Zouga Ballantyne, the family patriarch, this story takes off at a point in his life when he has already lived on the African continent for some time (35–40 years). He has raised two sons who each in their own way follow in his footsteps. Ralph and Zouga travel through Africa together, searching for the city of Zimbabwe to stake and claim the gold Zouga has already seen once there. The Matabele tribe had banned trespass on the sacred ground of the city of the dead, but they had long since been driven from the area as men of greed and power swept through the continent without conscience.They find and claim Harkness mine and go on to be part of the installation of railways, telegraph lines and pave the way to civilization. However, the Matabele tribe, who have been conquered by British settlers, and remaining natives in Africa have not forgotten their heritage or their pride. They rise up again to battle the white man and his incessant greed, kill Mungo St John as he tries to save Robyn Ballantyne and murder Cathy, the pregnant wife of Ralph Ballantyne; but are driven back once more to the wilderness by Ralph and a group of men that become known as the Ballantyne Scouts in exploits similar to those of Frederick Russell Burnham's assassination of Mlimo. In daring infiltrations, they manage to beat the Matabele tribe again, sending them into the hills where many starve but the remaining members do not lose hope completely. A treaty is negotiated and a peace of sorts is established, but this is not the end. Ralph Ballantyne also clashes with Cecil Rhodes and helps expose the Jameson Raid.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Leopard_Hunts_in_Darkness"title="The Leopard Hunts in Darkness">
With the help of his World Bank connections, celebrated author Craig Mellow returns to his beloved Africa as an agent of the bank, in exchange for reporting on the state of affairs in Zimbabwe. When he arrives, he visits the ranch that was a part of his family for generations and begins an obsession to rebuild it to its former glory.When he seeks the help of his old friend Samson Kumalo from the tribe of the Matabele, who is now a cabinet minister in the constantly evolving government, Craig is met with a terse and unfriendly attitude coupled with an unmistakable invitation to leave the country for good. Stubbornly, Craig finds other avenues in his quest to restore Rholands Ranching Company to its former glory.With the support of Peter Fungabera, a Mashona tribe member who is also a cabinet minister, Craig gets the financing he needs and begins the project of restoration on the three properties that make up his family's heritage. When poaching is discovered on the more remote property that Craig plans to turn into a tourist destination, he and wildlife federation photographer Sally-Anne Jay seek the culprit and all evidence points to Craig's old friend Samson, now known as Tungata Zebiwe. With Peter's help, and government forces, Tungata is arrested and sent to prison.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_of_the_Sword"title="Power of the Sword">
In the time of the Great Depression, Lothar De La Rey and his son Manfred own and operate a fleet of fishing trawlers and a cannery. Centaine de Thiry, Manfred's mother and one of Lothar's creditors, seizes his assets in an attempt to recoup her original investment, believing that Lothar will be unable to pay her back in the current financial climate. During their confrontation, Manfred gets into a fight with Centaine's other son and his half-brother, Shasa Courtney, nearly killing him. Now destitute and bitter, Lothar and his friend Swart Hendrick make plans to rob Centaine's diamond mine.Days after, Centaine and Shasa return to South-West Africa to visit the H'ani Mine in the outer reaches of the Kalahari. On their visit to the mine, Shasa is put as an apprentice on the mine to learn the functions of the mine where he befriends Moses Gama, a black boss-boy and Hendrick's brother, who is later fired for his attempts to start a black mineworkers union. During this time, Shasa loses his virginity to a daughter of a foreman on the mine, and Centaine soon realises that the girl has unleashed Shasa's de Thiry blood. Centaine and Shasa return to Windhoek after two weeks on the mine, where Centaine meets Lieutenant-Colonel Blaine Malcomess, the administrator of the territory of South-West Africa, falling in love with him soon afterwards. Meanwhile, Lothar strikes a deal with Gerald Fourie, the driver who transports the monthly shipments of Centaine's diamonds, to hand over his cargo to him on the next delivery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_(Smith_novel)"title="Rage (Smith novel)">
Shasa Courtney, now a member of the ailing United Party, is offered a position within the dominant National Party, complete with ministerial rank, by his half-brother Manfred De La Ray. Having grown doubtful of the United Party's prospects, Shasa accepts, with the hope that he can provide moderation within the National Party; while he does not support black rights, he views the National Party's policy of apartheid as little more than an excuse for the Afrikaner population to hoard South Africa's resources for themselves, despite the risk of provoking the black population. He later begins an affair with Kitty Godolphin, a news producer covering the civil rights struggle in South Africa.Unbeknowest to Shasa, his wife Tara begins an affair with Moses Gama, now a prominent political activist alongside Nelson Mandela and others. Moses continues to fight for black rights, while his brother Hendrick ends his involvement with the movement, fearing that his vast wealth would be lost in the struggle, leading his son Raleigh to take up the fight in his stead. Tara continues working for Moses and bears his child – a mixed race boy named Benjamin Afrika. Moses later marries a Zulu woman in order to secure the tribe's allegiance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Time_to_Die_(Smith_novel)"title="A Time to Die (Smith novel)">
Set against the majesty of the African landscape, its great plains, swamplands, forests and mountains, A Time to Die is a story of courage and friendship, the thrill of the hunt, the savagery of war and the saving power of love.Retired guerrilla fighter Sean Courtney is over forty years old and facing the possibility of losing his professional hunting licence. His long-time friend and client Riccardo Monterro is approaching sixty and is hunting with Sean on his last safari accompanied by his beautiful twenty-six-year-old daughter Claudia. Hunting Tukutela, a grand old bull tusker who carries possibly the heaviest set of ivory in all of Africa the three of them along with an entourage of black trackers and gun bearers tenaciously follow the old bull across the border into war torn Mozambique.Caught up in the Mozambican Civil War Sean encounters one of his bitterest enemies from his guerrilla days and finds himself and his friends in a desperate struggle for survival.Amidst the horrors of war he falls in love with young Claudia and she likewise falls in love with him, but the trick is to get out of Mozambique alive so that they can enjoy their newfound love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Fox_(novel)"title="Golden Fox (novel)">
Isabella Courtney and her father Shasa are living in London, where Shasa is the ambassador for South Africa. In what is, unknown to Isabella, a carefully planned operation, Isabella is seduced by Ramon de Santiago y Machado, an exiled Spanish nobleman who is both a close relative of Fidel Castro and a KGB operative known as Golden Fox.Shortly after Isabella gives birth to Ramon's child, who they name Nicholas, he and Ramon disappear. Isabella is later shown a video of her son being tortured, and is told he will continue to be tortured, mutilated and eventually murdered, if she doesn't co-operate. Torn between love for her son and loyalty to her country, Isabella begins spying on her father, now heavily involved in Armscor, which is developing nuclear weapons as well as a deadly nerve agent known as Cyndex 25 for use in the South African Border War. With the promise of access to her son and Ramon, who maintains a charade of being a prisoner like Nicolas, Isabella delivers details of South Africa's most secret activities to the KGB, who are working to spread communist and marxist influence across Africa.Eventually, one of Isabella's servants reports her affair with Ramon to Shasa and Courtney matriarch Centaine, who in turn discover Isabella's betrayal and reveal Ramon's true colours to her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_Song_(Smith_novel)"title="Elephant Song (Smith novel)">
Documentary filmmaker Daniel Armstrong vows revenge after a gang of poachers steals a huge cache of ivory and kills Chief Warden Johnny Nzou, Armstrong's childhood friend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_of_Prey_(Smith_novel)"title="Birds of Prey (Smith novel)">
In 1667 Holland is at war with England. Sir Francis Courteney and his son Hal attack ships of the Dutch East India Company off the coast of Africa. They are betrayed and Sir Francis is executed. Hal winds up working for Prester John.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triumph_of_the_Sun"title="The Triumph of the Sun">
The plot is set in 1884, Sudan, beginning shortly before the fall of Khartoum at the hands of the Mahdi. British trader and businessman Ryder Courtney, the younger brother of Waite Courtney, arrives in Khartoum to sell his wares, only to have them commandeered by General Charles George Gordon. General Gordon later has Ryder evacuate citizens from the besieged city on his river steamer, the "Intrepid Ibis", but the steamer is attacked and damaged by the Mahdists as it tries to escape, stranding Ryder in Khartoum.Penrod Ballantyne, a captain in the 10th Hussars and a survivor of the Battle of El Obeid, is tasked by Evelyn Baring with taking messages to General Gordon and David Benbrook, the British consul in Khartoum. While travelling across the desert, Penrod is attacked by Osman Atalan, an emir of the Mahdi who considers Penrod to be a blood enemy after nearly being killed by him at El Obeid, but he escapes and makes it to Khartoum. After delivering his messages, Penrod is recruited by General Gordon to assist in the defense of the city, bringing him into contact with Ryder. The two men work together to bring down a black market grain operation being run by Khartoum's corrupt Egyptian troops. Rebecca Benbrook, the eldest daughter of David, struggles with her romantic feelings towards both men, kissing Ryder and later losing her virginity to Penrod. David's two other daughters, Saffron and Amber, also hold affections towards Ryder and Penrod, respectively.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Key_to_the_Golden_Firebird"title="The Key to the Golden Firebird">
Brooks, May and Palmer are three teenage sisters dealing with the sudden death of their father. Brooks and Palmer had shared their father's love of baseball (all three girls are named for baseball players) and are athletic softball players themselves, but May, the middle brainy sister, had always felt left out of that athletic circle.The novel follows the three sisters as they each work out life without their father (and with mother overwhelmed by her own work and grief). Brooks and Palmer, the athletes, begin to falter at sports, and May begins to wonder about her romantic feelings towards Pete, who has always been in the girls' life like an annoying brother.The story drives toward the girls' trip to fulfill their father's wish: to scatter his ashes on the pitcher's mound and Camden Yards.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Donkey_Rustlers"title="The Donkey Rustlers">
It is set on a Greek island. The plot involves two British children, Amanda and David, who regularly vacation on the island, and who are friends with two Greek children, Yani and another who has a speech impediment. Yani has financial difficulties which mean that he is in danger of losing his land to the local mayor, the villain of the story. Together they embark on a plot to help Yani by abducting all the donkeys in the village. Amanda and David's father finds out what they are up to, but ends up surreptitiously assisting them. Right at the end, after Yani's financial problems are solved, the villagers realise what the children were up to, but laugh it off as a joke, as they are sympathetic and glad to see the mayor defeated.It has a slightly Enid Blyton-ish plot, with children getting up to adventures and fooling adults in a way which they would be unlikely to get away with in real life (although not all of the adults are fooled for all of the time, and it does touch on some mature issues in a few places). However readers have enjoyed its imaginative feel-good plot, and well-drawn characters and location. It is influenced by Durrell's own childhood on Corfu.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rookie_(novel)"title="The Rookie (novel)">
As a means to maintain order without violence, the Creterakians devised a distraction for the masses: the Galactic Football League. The GFL is a sports league modeled after the game of American football, with teams of varying skill separated into three tiers: the most skilled playing in Tier 1, the least skilled playing in Tier 3. The multi-species nature of society is reflected in the make-up of the GFL team lineups; the strengths of certain species make them natural fits for certain football positions. The quarterback, running back and tight-end positions are generally played by Humans. The female Sklorno, known for their speed and jumping ability, play the wide receiver and defensive back positions. The offensive and defensive lines are composed of the Ki, a race of huge, agile creatures with enormous mass. And finally, the linebacker positions are played by Quyth Warriors and High-G Humans.The Rookie is the story of Quentin Barnes, a human Tier 3 quarterback raised in the Purist Nation. Quentin's planetary religion is that of the Purist Nation, which is very xenophobic. Even other evolutionary strains of human beings are clearly looked down upon - only "pure strain" humans are regarded as proper beings. As a result, Quentin has a very hard time trusting and working with his team-mates. The Purist Nation is composed entirely of humans. They shun and demonize any species other than humans, calling them the 'Satanic' or 'Lower' races. As a Tier 3 quarterback, Quentin is a superstar and a hero among the Purists, and he has used his talents to easily lead his third rate team to the championship of a Tier 3 division. His natural talent, coupled with his Purist Nation upbringing have made him extremely arrogant and racist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject_Seven"title="Subject Seven">
The novel begins with Subject Seven in the compound containment room. Subject Seven doesn't like being there as a test subject, so he escapes the compound. Afterwards, Subject Seven goes to the city to live on his own. While living in different cities, he learns to steal and kill to get what he wants.Hunter Harrison wakes up and doesn't know where he is or who he is, but there is a tape telling him that he will get all of the answers he want as long as he listens to his kidnapper, Subject Seven. Meanwhile, Subject Seven pays Clarkson for information on the other subjects. After he knocks Hunter out again, Subject Seven gives him the task of finding all of the other subjects. As a result of Hunter completing the task, Subject Seven goes out to finds them and knock them out. When the characters, Gene, Tina, Cody, and Kyrie, wake up, they do not know where they are, but they do know who they are. They all wake up in different places and they all try to go back to their homes'. Subject Seven finds all of them and knocks them out again.Subject Seven gathers them up and tells them that they were test subjects for the military. After he lets them take in what he said, he tells them that they have alter egos that they can change into. These alter egos are faster stronger and smarter, and when they are in them they don't remember anything. At first they all have Subject Seven and want to go back home, but once Subject Seven tells them what the military did to them, they all change their minds. Although they used to hate each other, they become good friends and start to learn about each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incredibly_Alice"title="Incredibly Alice">
The novel opens with Alice and her friends plunge into the final semester of their senior year. Alice complains that she can’t do anything, like sports or a club, because she isn’t into stuff like that plus the year is almost over. Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is be honest with yourself—and sometimes the most incredible thing you can do is sneak a little fun into all this soul-searching. (Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, 2011)Alice wants to make her last year of high school fun, though her friends say it's going to be fun anyway because they have each other. One of Alice's friends, Gwen, suggests finding work on a cruise ship over the summer. Gwen didn’t want to work on the cruise ship just for money but also to have some fun with her friends while working. While at first hesitant, the group of friends changes their minds and all the girls apply to work on the ship after graduation.Alice's AP English teacher, Mrs. Rosen, asks her if she could stay after class for a few minutes. Mrs. Rosen talks to Alice about writing poetry and asks if she knew about the Ivy Day Ceremony. Alice replies “yes” with a full speech about it. Although Mrs. Rosen wants her to write a poem for it, but Alice is unsure as she feels that she cannot write poetry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Love_Dogs,_Eat_Pigs,_and_Wear_Cows"title="Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows">
Carnism, according to Joy, is the dominant, yet invisible paradigm in modern culture supporting the choice to consume meat. Carnism is an invisible system of beliefs in both the social, psychological, and physical sense. For example, in the physical sense, an estimated 10 billion land animals are slaughtered for their meat every year in the United States, yet most of the animals are never seen—they are kept in confined animal feeding operations, invisible to the public and off limits to the media. Joy maintains that the choice to eat meat is not natural or a given as proponents of meat claim, but influenced by social conditioning. The majority of people, Joy claims, care deeply about animals and do not want them to suffer.Joy argues there is a neurological basis for empathy; most people care about nonhuman animals and want to prevent their suffering. Further, humans value compassion, reciprocity, and justice. However, human behavior does not match these values. To continue to eat animals, Joy argues, people engage in psychic numbing, which alters the perception of our behavior towards animals and uses defense mechanisms to block empathy.First, carnism denies there is a problem with eating animals; second, it justifies eating meat as normal, natural, and necessary; third, to prevent cognitive dissonance, carnism alters the perception of the animals as living individuals into food objects, abstractions, and categories. People who hold to these beliefs may also be called carnists.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ute_av_verden"title="Ute av verden">
The book is divided into three parts. In the first part, the 26-year-old Henrik Vankel, the story's narrator, is a substitute teacher at an elementary school in Northern Norway. He falls in love with his 13-year-old pupil Miriam, and after a sexual experience with the girl, he is forced to flee the village. He decides to return to the city where he lived for several years during his early youth: Kristiansand in Southern Norway.In the second part, as Henrik is on his way to Kristiansand, he recedes to the background of the narrative. Instead this part focuses on his parents: how they met, how their relationship developed, how they had children and established a home. Ingrid is a young girl from a small village in Western Norway, visiting a friend in Kristiansand. Here she meets the local boy Harald, and decides to seduce him. The spend a night together, but later Harald shies away. Only when she disowns him completely is his interest piqued, and he decides to win her back. They eventually move in together and have a child, but struggle with acceptance from Harald's domineering father, and with Harald's own anger issues. As this story ends, they move to Southern Norway with their newborn second son, who is Henrik.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Del-Del"title="Del-Del">
"Del-Del" is narrated by Beth, a teenage girl whose younger brother, a child prodigy named Sam, begins exhibiting strange behavior on the anniversary of the death of their sister Laura. He begins to refer to himself as Del-Del, and acts out in increasingly destructive and harmful ways. Eventually the family begins to believe that he has become the victim of demonic possession, and seeks a variety of solutions. Eventually they successfully banish the Del-Del personality with the assistance of an exorcist, only to have it return once more, this time in the form of an alien consciousness inhabiting Sam's body. This being, also calling itself Del-Del, claims to be a traveler from the constellation Delphinus. Eventually it is determined that the various personalities of Del-Del are in fact products of Sam's overactive mind, the result of his inability to accept the loss of his sister.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Jihad"title="Red Jihad">
The novel was written in 2010, published in 2012, and set in 2014 AD, in the near-future. Pakistan has transitioned into a full-fledged democracy and is reconciling with India. However, there are forces working against this fragile peace. A Pakistani jihadi leader, Yasser Basheer, travels to the Red Corridor and enlists the support of an Indian Naxalite commander, Agyaat. Their plan: to unleash Pralay, India's experimental intercontinental ballistic missile, on the subcontinent. As the missile changes course en route, it hits Pakistan and causes collateral damage. In response, Pakistan unleashes war on India. The battle for South Asia turns murkier as an Indo-Pak war threatens to embroil many other countries in the endgame. Have India and Pakistan sparked off the mother of all wars? A gripping thriller, Red Jihad explores the most feared nexus between the jihadis and the naxals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gods_of_Manhattan"title="Gods of Manhattan">
The book follows Rory Hennessy, a thirteen-year-old boy that gains the ability to see Mannahatta, a spirit city existing in parallel with Manhattan. A gift that a magician showed Rory. The city is full of legendary persons such as Babe Ruth and Alexander Hamilton, people who have remembered so much that they have been made into immortal gods in the process. Mannahatta is also home to the Munsees and papier-mache children, whom the gods rule over. When some of the Munsees are held captive in Central Park, Rory must find a way to free them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golovlyov_Family"title="The Golovlyov Family">
## Family Tribunal.Arina Petrova, matriarch of the Golovlyov family, runs a large estate (4,000 serfs) in Russia. She learns that her first born son, Stepan/Styopka/The Dolt has squandered the land and house she gave to him. She was a practical and strict noblewoman, and she banished her drunken husband Vladmir Mihailitch to his room for several decades while she ran the estate. Arina sent Stepan to college, where he was the class clown. He worked in a series of government jobs, but lost them all due to laziness. He returns home after losing his estate. Arina’s second child is Anna, who ran off and married a musician named Ulanov. Anna has twin girls Anninka and Lubinka. Ulanov soon abandons his family, and Anna dies of an illness 3 months later. Arina hoped to be rid of her children by giving them estates. She was very upset when Anna died (“throwing her two brats on to my shoulders”) and when Stepan returned. Her third son is Porphyry/Iudushka/Bloodsucker; he is an obsequious, scheming son. Her fourth son is Pavel; he is normal and unremarkable in any way. She keeps her family on a very tight financial leash, and they live at poverty level despite their wealth. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guinea_Pig_Diaries"title="The Guinea Pig Diaries">
In the book, Jacobs attempts to change the way he thought, talked, and looked, through a series of social experiments. He immersed himself in his experiments and each comes with a conclusion about the lessons he has learned. Throughout the book, Jacobs applies George Washington's "110 Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation," quits multitasking to be the most focused person alive, follows the tenets of the Radical Honesty movement, applies the insights of behavioral economics in his decision making or assumes a female identity to gain a better understanding of online dating from a woman's point of view.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_(novel)"title="Code (novel)">
The Virals are put to the ultimate test when they find a geocache containing an ornate puzzle box. Shelton decodes the cipher inside, only to find more tantalizing clues left by "The Gamemaster." A second, greater geocache is within reach—if the Virals are up to the challenge.But the hunt takes a dark turn when Tory locates the other box—a fake bomb, along with a sinister proposal from The Gamemaster. Now, the real game has begun: another bomb is out there—a real one—and the clock is ticking.But, unknowingly, one of the Virals has betrayed them. But will the others forgive them?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Harbinger_(novel)"title="The Harbinger (novel)">
## Premise.The author says that "The Harbinger" is a loosely fictional novel, rooted in biblical analysis regarding a real-life, non-fiction connection: a prophecy about ancient Israel that was eventually fulfilled in the eighth century BC when Israel was destroyed, and certain events and facts related to the 9/11 terror attacks against the U.S. in 2001. Cahn calls these events and facts "harbingers," and argues that they show a connection between ancient Israel's destruction and a possible coming destruction of the present-day United States. He also says that ancient Israel received a warning before being destroyed, and that the 9/11 harbingers form a similar warning from God to America.The author argues that America was founded similar to ancient Israel and the Founding Fathers envisioned a country based on the rules of God and a Light Unto the Nations. The author lists a series of warnings or harbingers that were given to ancient Israel before its final destruction by the Assyrians and makes a parallel between each and the events of 9/11.A summary of Harbingers mentioned in the book follows: 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup_Clouds"title="Ketchup Clouds">
"Ketchup Clouds" is written in a series of letters from "Zoe", her chosen alias, who lives on fiction road in England to Mr. S Harris, a criminal on death row in America. Zoe initially starts writing to Mr. Harris specifically because she believes they must share the same guilt as, according to her view, they both killed a person they loved.The events leading up to Zoe's "crime" begin around the end of the term before summer break. After her father receiving news that her grandfather is ill, tensions in her home begin to rise. For reasons unknown to Zoe, her mother seems to resent her grandfather and alludes to the idea that he is the reason why her sister, Dot, ended up ill and is currently deaf as a result. Zoe can say little to understand her mother's resentment towards him as she, Dot and her other sister, Soph have not seen him in years. Regardless, Zoe's sole mission is to make it to Max Morgan's end of term party.At the party she meets a 'boy [...] brown eyes [and] messy blond hair' whom she feels she has chemistry with and in which she engages in sexual activity with Max Morgan and later on, a relationship. She soon finds out that the brown-eyed boy, Aaron, is Max's brother and unbeknown to Max, there are still feelings between them. It is the accident that follows after he discovers Zoe and Aaron together that lead her to identify both with Mr Harris as a murderer and his unfaithful wife whom she calls a "scarlet woman" and believes she deserved her death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarlet_(novel)"title="Scarlet (novel)">
Scarlet Benoit is a young girl living on her grandmother's farm in Rieux, France. Her grandmother has gone missing for many weeks and Scarlet is sure that she has been kidnapped rather than left on her own will as the authorities believe. While delivering fresh goods to one of her loyal but unfriendly customers, her friend Émilie introduces her to a jittery shy street fighter whose code name is Wolf, who saves her after she makes a speech defending Linh Cinder, the Lunar cyborg who caused chaos at the Eastern Commonwealth ball. She notices a tattoo on his arm; a string of numbers and letters that have no meaning to her. When she gets back from her job, her estranged dad is there and is desperately trying to find something. She questions her dad, who has burn marks all up his arms from being tortured, and he says that the same people have her grandmother because she is hiding something. The one clue that he can remember is that the kidnappers had a tattoo on their forearm, similar to Wolf's. Scarlet heads out to question Wolf in a fight ring, where he defeats and almost kills the champion. The next morning Wolf comes by her farm and tells her that the tattoo stands for a group he used to be part of and that they are the ones who kidnapped her grandma. He decides to help Scarlet and they both embark on a trip to Paris.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trojan_Dog"title="The Trojan Dog">
The novel is set in Canberra in the months leading up to the 1996 Australian Federal election. Sandra Mahoney has been out of work for some years, raising her son Peter. Now that he is in school full-time, Mahoney returns to the work force and is hired by Rae Evans, head of the Australian Labor Relations Service Department Industries Branch.A sum of $900,000 is stolen, and Evans is accused. The theft requires a certain expertise in computer technology, which Mahoney is convinced Rae Evans does not have. Mahoney is assisted by one of the department's IT staff, an eccentric, shambling Russian called Ivan Semyonov. Along the way Mahoney gradually learns some of the basics about computer crime. As the investigation into Evans and the theft progresses, Mahoney enlists the aid of an ACT detective sergeant, DS Brook, who is himself suffering from leukaemia.Mahoney and her team meet a cast of mad public servants, each of whom is, in one way or another, a suspect; these include Bambi, a wordless child-woman who always wears a red cape, and Felix, another IT person, only ever encountered rushing into the department in his jogging shorts. Mahoney and Semyonov finally set a trap and catch the real thief.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_2035"title="Metro 2035">
Two years after "Metro 2033", Artyom has left the Spartan Order and now lives at his home station, VDNKh, with his wife Anya. Claiming to have heard a radio message in Ostankino Tower, Artyom attempts to make contact with other survivors in the world by broadcasting radio messages on the highly irradiated surface, but never receives any response. Anya considers Artyom's efforts fruitless, and his refusal to have children with her causes their relationship to deteriorate. Homer, a major character in "Metro 2034", arrives at the station, wanting to learn more about Artyom's conflict with the Dark Ones so that he can write a book about it. Artyom initially refuses to help Homer, but changes his mind after Homer claims that he met a man at Teatralnaya who made radio contact with Polar Dawns, a city on the Kola Peninsula. Artyom and Homer set out towards Teatralnaya. Lyokha, a dung broker from Rizhskaya, helps them cross the border of Hansa, a capitalist faction controlling the Koltsevaya Line. The three men eventually reach Tsvetnoy Bulvar, where Artyom gets drunk and blacks out at a local brothel. Artyom, Lyokha, and Homer arrive at Tverskaya, renamed “Darwin” by the neo-Nazi Fourth Reich, and are arrested shortly afterward. A Reich officer threatens to kill Homer if Artyom refuses to bomb the passageway leading from neutral Teatralnaya to Okhotny Ryad, which is controlled by the communist Red Line. At Teatralnaya, Artyom finds the radio operator that Homer mentioned, but Red Line soldiers take the man away before Artyom can speak to him. Artyom goes to Okhotny Ryad, where the radio operator is executed, but other prisoners tell Artyom that people from outside of Moscow allegedly came to the Metro. Artyom escapes to the surface and experiences a strange vision of a fantasy Moscow.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Victor_and_King_Charles"title="King Victor and King Charles">
The setting is the Castle of Rivoli. There are no scene changes.The Duchy of Savoy, comprising Savoy proper and Piedmont (today in France and Italy respectively), has been united for three centuries. Over the past decades of Victor Amadeus's rule, the House of Savoy has prospered. It has successfully defended itself against its powerful enemies during the War of the Spanish Succession, after which a treaty permitted the acquisition of Sicily in 1713. Sicily was exchanged for Sardinia in 1720. Victor, the duke turned king, has solidified his power and is now one of the most absolute monarchs in Europe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deemster"title="The Deemster">
## Childhood and youth (I to XVI).The novel is set in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.Thorkell Mylrea buys himself into becoming a Deemster (or judge) on the Isle of Man. He then uses his influence to have his brother, Gilcrist, appointed Bishop, but Gilcrist disappoints him in being good, pious and beyond bribery. In contrast to their father, the Deemster's children, Ewan and Mona, grow up to become a conscientious and diligent priest and a good, caring woman. In contrast, without a strong hand to admonish him, the Bishop's son, Dan, grows up to become "thoughtless, brave, stubborn", likeable but unreliable. The cousins, Mona and Dan, come to fall in love.Dan becomes a fisherman, his father funding the purchase of the boat. However, after only one season Dan is in debt due to the amount of time and money he has spent in the pub with his fishermen friends. Dan forges Ewan's name as surety on a loan. When he inevitably defaults on the payments, the Bishop comes to learn of the loan and, although Ewan tries to claim the signature is his, the Bishop casts his son Dan out. Ewan determines that he can no longer accept Dan as a friend, and he asks him to not see his sister, Mona, any more. To cover his shame and to try and hide from his failings, Dan again descends to his boisterous ways.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_Rae,_the_Brave"title="Sheila Rae, the Brave">
Sheila Rae is a mouse who boastfully claims she is not afraid of anything. She recklessly shows off in front of her friends and classmates acts of bravery such as tying Wendell with her skipping rope for snatching it. In addition, she teases her little sister, Louise, for being afraid of little things. But one day when Sheila Rae wanders down a strange route on her way home from school, Louise gets the better of her and for the first time, Sheila Rae feels afraid, while Louise gains courage and helps Sheila Rae overcome her fear.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populazzi"title="Populazzi">
The book follows Cara, an awkward young woman that decides to reinvent herself as the perfect teenage girl after moving to a new school. The idea seems like it would be all in good fun, but Cara soon finds herself in more trouble than she originally intended. When everything starts going terribly wrong, Cara must find a way to set things right.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goldfinch_(novel)"title="The Goldfinch (novel)">
The novel is a coming-of-age tale told in the first person. The protagonist, 13-year-old Theodore Decker, survives a terrorist bombing at an art museum where his mother is killed. While staggering through the debris, he takes with him a small Dutch Golden Age painting called "The Goldfinch". Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his unbearable longing for his mother, he clings to one thing that reminds him of her: the small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.The painting is one of the few surviving works by Rembrandt's most promising pupil, Carel Fabritius (almost all of Fabritius's works were destroyed in the Delft explosion of 1654, in which the artist himself was killed).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_Game_(The_Dresden_Files)"title="Skin Game (The Dresden Files)">
Harry Dresden, still living on the island of Demonreach, is unable to reach his allies and plagued by increasing headaches. Queen Mab demands he undertake a job, but in return offers her aid with his headaches. Harry is to help Nicodemus steal something from the vault of Hades. Wary of the potential for betrayal, he enlists the aid of Karrin Murphy to watch his back.Harry and Karrin meet Nicodemus and his crew, which includes Binder and a female warlock, Hanna Ascher, and soon Anna Valmont, the only surviving member of the group of thieves who had stolen the Shroud of Turin in "Death Masks". Harry and Karrin accompany Deirdre and the shape-shifting Goodman Grey, to collect a sample from an insider, who is immediately killed when Tessa unexpectedly intervenes. Dresden learns that the heist's target is the Holy Grail. At the third meeting, they realize that they are being spied upon by Waldo Butters. Giving chase, Harry manages to keep Binder's henchmen from catching him with the help of Bob. Nicodemus catches up with Dresden, Murphy and Butters on the street in front of Michael Carpenter's house, and a fight ensues. Murphy draws Fidelacchius and is tricked into using the sword to attempt to kill Nicodemus while defenseless, which results in the sword's shattering and Murphy being badly wounded. Michael then appears, offering to leave his angel-protected house in exchange for the release of Harry, Karrin and Butters. Nicodemus accepts the deal, but before Michael leaves, Uriel appears, giving Michael Amoracchius and his own Grace. Nicodemus surrenders the fight and agrees to accept Michael as Harry's replacement for the wounded Murphy. That night while recovering at the Carpenters', Harry reconnects with his daughter Maggie for the first time since he saved her life at Chichen Itza in "Changes".
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Perfect_Peace"title="A Perfect Peace">
Set in Israel during the eighteen months leading up to the Six-Day War, the novel portrays life on a fictional kibbutz, Granot, where the founding generation and their children struggle to come to terms with each other and the ideological tensions within Israeli society. Oz documents the gap between the socialist dream of the founders and the strained realities of Israeli life, but it is also, according to the author, a mystical tale about "the secret merger between six or seven very different human beings who become a family in the deepest sense of the term."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_Jericho_(novel)"title="The Battle of Jericho (novel)">
The story takes place at Frederick Douglass High School. Junior Jericho Prescott and his cousin Josh, along with their friends Dana Wolfe and Kofi Freeman, decide to pledge for one of the most popular and prestigious organizations at school, the Warriors of Distinction. While the "Warriors" seem to be an upstanding organization that does a lot for the community, their governing is far more corrupt and plagued. Eddie Mahoney, the pledge master, sends the group through unnecessarily cruel tricks and task to humiliate and degrade them as they pledge for membership. From eating worms to being paddled, Dana receives the most harassment which crosses the line of sexual harassment. While they have the opportunity to quit, Josh and Jericho choose popularity and peer acceptance and it ends in a hazing accident gone wrong which cost Josh's life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Significance_of_Monuments"title="The Significance of Monuments">
Chapter one, "Structures of Sand", introduces the themes that Bradley explores in the book, and outlines prior archaeological approaches to understanding the Neolithic. In the second chapter, "Thinking the Neolithic", Bradley argues that Mesolithic European worldviews centred on fertility and regeneration, with no distinction made between humans and the natural world. In the third chapter, "The death of the house", Bradley suggests that the Early Neolithic long mounds, which were used as burial monuments, had their symbolic origins in decaying and collapsing longhouses, postulating a relation between the "houses of the living" and the "houses of the dead". Chapter four, "Another Time" argues against prior suggestions that Early Neolithic burial mounds represent a focus on the ancestors. Instead he suggests that it was the passage tombs that held such an ancestor-focus, because they permitted the living to enter into the tomb, where the dead were stored. The fifth chapter, "Small Worlds", examines the causewayed enclosures, arguing that these earthworks established a new sense of place and sacred geography in Neolithic Europe.Part Two, "Describing a circle", opens with chapter six, "The persistence of memory", in which Bradley argues that ritual employs a distinctive notion of time that differs from everyday time, and he turns to Stonehenge in order to further this point. Chapter seven, "The public interest", debates why the monuments of the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age British Isles were based on a circular archetype, suggesting that they reflect a cosmological worldview and create a theatre for public participation in cultic behaviour; throughout, he uses Newgrange in Ireland as an example. In the eighth chapter, "Theatre in the Round," Bradley studies the stone circles in the British Isles and Brittany, arguing that they were constructed with explicit links to the wider landscape, in contrast to the earlier henges, which restricted visibility to the surrounding area. In the penultimate chapter, "Closed Circles", Bradley examines how the stone circles were converted into cemeteries during the Early Bronze Age. Chapter ten, "An agricultural revolution," looks at the transition to agriculture at prehistoric monuments in the mid-second millennium BCE, suggesting that many of the features of the "Neolithic Revolution" only occurred at this time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle_(Cussler_novel)"title="The Jungle (Cussler novel)">
The Corporation is hired by a very wealthy man to find his adventurer daughter, who appears to have gotten into trouble in the jungles of Myanmar. What follows is an adventure that takes the "Oregon" crew to many locations around the world and at sea. The crew ends up being the only possible group that can prevent a super villain from bringing the United States to its knees.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_a_Town"title="The History of a Town">
The novel presents a fictional chronicle ("letopis") of a provincial Russian town of Glupov (the name can be translated as Foolsville, Foolov, or Stupidtown), which depicts Glupov and its governors from its foundation by the tribe of Headbeaters to its end in 1825 (the accession of Nicholas I). Among the governors of Glupov are Dementy Brudasty, nicknamed The Music Box for a mechanical device in his head, designed to replace a human brain; Vasilisk Borodavkin, who wages 'the wars of enlightenment' against the Glupovites; Erast Grustilov, a friend of Nikolay Karamzin. All of them are trying to bring prosperity to Glupov or to keep their status by ruling the town in their own way, mostly by violence. The last governor of Glupov is Ugryum-Burcheev, who rebuilds the town into a totalitarian state according the administrative ideal of Russian Empire and to his utopia of a 'straight line', intended to make everyone equal. His rule results with the coming of "it", which destroys Glupov, making the history "to cease its course".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Doctor"title="The Day of the Doctor">
In the midst of the Time War between the Time Lords and the Daleks, the War Doctor — an incarnation of the Doctor about 400 years younger than the Eleventh Doctor — decides to trigger an ancient and sentient weapon called the Moment to destroy both sides. The Moment's humanoid interface, resembling Rose Tyler, shows what the War Doctor's future would be after the Time Lords are destroyed but the Doctor survives. The Moment opens a fissure linking the War Doctor to the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors in 1562 England. In 1562, the Zygons enter three-dimensional paintings made with the Time Lords' stasis cubes, and go into suspended animation to emerge in the present. After breaking out of the paintings in the National Gallery in the present, the Zygons take the forms of members of the military organisation UNIT so that they can utilise weapons and technology kept by UNIT in the Tower of London.UNIT head Kate Stewart starts a countdown for a nuclear warhead beneath the Tower that will destroy the advanced technology along with London. The Doctors, unable to land a TARDIS in the Tower, use the stasis cube technology to enter a painting. They exit the painting in the Tower in the present and use UNIT's mind-wiping equipment to render the UNIT members and Zygons temporarily unaware which of them are which. The countdown is stopped and all present negotiate a peace treaty.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_the_Plague"title="After the Plague">
The collected stories range in subject matter, from the apocalyptic titular story "After the Plague" to "Peep Hall", which centers on a man discovering a website that streams live footage of a local house full of women. Other stories feature themes such as bullying and first love.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Botticelli_Secret"title="The Botticelli Secret">
In 15th-century Italy, Luciana Vetra was young and beautiful, with long, golden hair. She was a full-time whore and a part-time model. When her best client asked her to pose as the goddess Flora for a painting, Luciana complied until the artist abruptly sends her away without payment. Luciana angrily took the unfinished painting, but someone was ready to kill her and people she knows to get the painting back.As friends and clients are murdered around her, Luciana turned to Guido della Torre, a novice at the monastery of Santa Croce. They fled together through the nine great cities of Renaissance Italy, trying to decode the painting's secrets before their enemies caught up with them.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_Quill"title="Bone Quill">
In this book the two young adventurers try to find the bone quill to help them in their quest along with the book of beasts to a) find their father and b) save everything.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_Distant_Worlds_and_Times"title="Through Distant Worlds and Times">
The book consists of 37 letters to the unnamed woman. They serve as vehicles for discussion of the history of astronomy, climatology and science. In writing the letters, Milanković remembers his early life, from birth in Dalj, through his education, to successes and failures at a professional level. The work takes inspiration from his travels through Germany, Hungary, Istanbul and Europe, and his return to his birthplace, which seems to him desolate and dilapidated in contrast.The writer uses a personal approach to science, traveling with a friend through time and space. In the appropriate attire, they roam the ancient world. Unseen by the natives, they spy Babylonian priests, Aristotle, Eratosthenes and other great scholars and figures of antiquity and modern history.The letters describe experiments, development of scientific instruments, ancient architecture and new cities, and an epic voyage on the seas. The history of scientific ideas is explored, including basic knowledge about our sun, planets and their orbits. In the central part of the book, the writer discusses climate change and cyclical ice ages throughout the history and future of the Earth.In the final letters, Milanković describes the formation of the Earth and the stages through which it passed until it became the cradle of life, then presents its future, following the dying stages of the Sun and planets. Finally, the book deals with travel to the Moon, Mars and Venus, and a pilgrimage to the universe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Far_Reaches"title="The Far Reaches">
The book takes place in 1943 in the Pacific Ocean. Josh Thurlow is on hand at the Battle of Tarawa as the Navy deploys Marines at island after island, but nothing ends up going as planned.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_Who_Died_a_Lot"title="The Woman Who Died a Lot">
Thursday Next is now in her early 50s, and is recovering in the Outland from injuries sustained at the end of "One of Our Thursdays Is Missing". The Global Standard Deity begins to threaten to smite Swindon, and the solution lies with Thursday's daughter, Tuesday. Thursday also comes under attack from the mindworm of Aornis Hades once more, causing a reappearance of her non-existent third child, Jenny. The Goliath Corporation are on the rise once more, taking advantage of a dangerously low National Stupidity Index resultant from years of rule by the CommonSense Party.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Maverick_Heart"title="A Maverick Heart">
Book is inspired by the actual events from the last decade (mostly what happened between 1996 and 2006) across India and USA. It covers the journey of three youth - their peak vibrant period between 18 years and 26 years.The story revolves around the lives of three friends in IIT, one girl and two guys. The book goes through the ups and downs in their lives, their college life, their personal lives, their professional lives. Depiction of love relation and friendship during academic life is very meaningful and realistic. In corporate and professional section – plot covers the glamour and up/down of Wall Street. Difference in Silicon Valley entrepreneur’s passionate interest vs glamour and manipulation of Wall Street has been described beautifully. Finally journey takes you to the current social struggles people facing in country and their transition to political level.We can relate to protagonist a lot who in one line is "a brilliant mind who chooses to follow his heart". The best part of the book are the discussion (long but don't feel long) between characters which stimulate your mind and heart at the same time, a great mix of philosophy and logic in these discussions. Language is very simple, which makes it a very easy read as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrets_at_Sea"title="Secrets at Sea">
The Story of the four mice and their journey on a ship.Chapters:Chapter 1 – Great ChangeChapter 2 – Skitter and JitterChapter 3 – The HaystackChapter 4 – When Night and Darkness FellChapter 5 – Two FuturesChapter 6 – A World of Steam and HumansChapter 7 – Dinner is ServedChapter 8 – The Law of the SeaChapter 9 – A Royal CommandChapter 10 – Camilla's TrainChapter 11 – Sebastian's Secret Sweet ShopChapter 12 – Secrets the Dark Night KeepsChapter 13 – Dynasty and DestinyChapter 14 – Waltz TimeChapter 15 – A Fond Toodle-ooChapter 16 – A Palace Wedding
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Things"title="The Lives of Things">
Several of the stories foreground an inanimate object which is pivotal in historical events or human consciousness. "Chair" is about a mahogany chair which is slowly rotted from within by several generations of anobium though the rot is invisible from the outside. As a consequence of this rot, the chair collapses underneath an unnamed dictator who is identified as former Portuguese Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar by the book's translator.In "Reflux," an unnamed king has such a fear of death that he cannot bear the sight of a funeral procession, grave stones, or black mourning clothes. So he commissions the building of a giant cemetery with high walls in the center of the unnamed country of which he is leader. The cemetery requires major re-engineering and excavation of much of the country's infrastructure. But it does succeed for some years in shielding the king from any visible reminders of death. So many service industries spring up around the cemetery that it effectively becomes a major city. Eventually, though, a cypress tree, which is a symbol of death in some cultures, becomes visible over the wall, and the king realizes that he cannot ultimately defeat death.In "Things," the objects on which humans rely start rebelling against their exploitation. It starts with a sofa that gets too warm to sit in and proceeds to the disappearance of whole apartment buildings and the deaths of their inhabitants. Humans decide to fight back with an attack on part of the city. Many city dwellers gather together in the countryside to watch the attack. When the attack is imminent, however, the entire city simply disappears. So do all the clothes of the assembled citizens, leaving them without any of the trappings of civilization. It turns out that there is a community of people who have been living in the woods without the benefit of technology or manufacture. At the end of the story, these people comment that never again will people be treated as things.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anya's_Ghost"title="Anya's Ghost">
Annushka Borzakovskaya (Anya) is a Russian émigré living in the United States with her mother and brother (Sasha). Unpopular at her New England private school, Anya skips school and walks through a nearby forest. She falls into a dry well and finds herself alongside a human skeleton. The skeleton's ghost—a shy, homely girl named Emily—appears and explains that she too fell down the well and died of dehydration after breaking her neck ninety years ago. Emily wishes to befriend and help Anya, but cannot move far from her bones. Anya is soon rescued by a passerby, but Emily's skeleton remains undiscovered.Emily later appears to Anya at school, Anya having inadvertently taken a finger bone from Emily's skeleton. Anya decides to keep the bone after Emily helps her cheat on a biology exam and spy on her crush, Sean. Emily gives her full name as Emily Reilly and explains that her fiancé died fighting in World War I, and that her parents were murdered at home. She was running from the killer when she fell down the well. Anya promises to find Emily's killer, while Emily agrees to help Anya fit in at school and win over Sean. As their friendship develops, Anya drifts away from her one friend at school, Siobhan, while Emily becomes disinterested in discovering her murderer's identity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Division"title="The Human Division">
Following the events of "The Last Colony", John Scalzi tells the story of the fight to maintain the unity of the human race.The people of Earth now know that the human Colonial Union (CU) has kept them ignorant of the dangerous universe around them. For generations the CU had defended humanity against hostile aliens, deliberately keeping Earth an ignorant backwater and a source of military recruits. Now the CU's secrets are known to all. Other alien races have come on the scene and formed a new alliance against the Colonial Union called the Conclave. They have invited the people of Earth to join them. For a shaken and betrayed Earth, the choice is not obvious or easy.Against such possibilities, managing the survival of the Colonial Union will not be easy, either. It will take diplomatic finesse and political cunning: the "B-Team" advised by Lieutenant Harry Wilson.As the story progresses, it deals with how humanity fares in a universe filled with other sentient races and without a growing military force to clash with them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington's_Socks"title="George Washington's Socks">
When siblings Matthew and Katie Carlton enter a rowboat with their friends Tony, Q, and Hooter, the last thing they expected was for them to be transported back in time to 1776. There they meet George Washington himself and find themselves caught up with his struggle for independence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_and_the_French_Kiss"title="Anna and the French Kiss">
Anna Oliphant is a senior in high school who is forced by her father to attend the fictional boarding school 'School of America in Paris' – nicknamed SOAP by students. She is heavily against having to leave Atlanta for Paris, specifically due to leaving her best friend, Bridgette, and Toph, her almost boyfriend, who worked with her in a multiplex and the two shared a kiss before her leaving for Paris. Anna wants to become a film critic, being a major movie fan. On her first night at SOAP, she meets her neighbor Meredith (Mer), who consoles her after finding Anna crying in her room. After Anna leaves Meredith's room, she bumps into a handsome boy who introduces himself as Étienne St. Clair, and has an English accent. The next morning at breakfast, Mer invites Anna to sit with her and her friends; Rashmi and boyfriend Josh, as well as Étienne from the night before – he is known by everyone as St. Clair. St. Clair has a girlfriend, Ellie, who used to be in the group before she graduated SOAP.Anna can neither read nor speak French, and feels inferior among her classmates, leading to St. Clair's assistance in ordering breakfast. She notices St. Clair's popularity amongst the students, mainly as a result of his natural charm. St. Clair and Anna are appointed as lab partners for the remainder of the year. Anna discovers she is the only senior in Beginning French, except for a junior named Dave. Anna learns that Mer has a crush on St. Clair on which she can't act, because of his girlfriend. After a week in SOAP Josh, Rashmi, St. Clair and Mer is surprised to learn that Anna hasn't yet gone out of campus to explore Paris. She is more than happy when St. Clair takes her out to explore Paris. They talk, laugh, visit point zero of France and bond more. St. Clair learns about Toph, and Anna meets his girlfriend "Ellie" for the first time. She reminds herself despite of her attraction towards St. Clair that he's taken and nothing can happen between them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Season_of_Stones"title="A Season of Stones">
The book follows Winterintz during her stay in Nahalin during the late 1980s. During her stay she is accused of being a spy and at one point is nearly stoned to death. She witnesses land being taken away from the villagers for subsidized Israeli settlements and survives by learning Arabic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangsta_Granny"title="Gangsta Granny">
Ben, a curious boy, hates having to stay with his old Granny every Friday because his parents go to see a dancing show named "Strictly Stars Dancing" (a parody of "Strictly Come Dancing"). He finds it boring and repetitive as his Granny always feeds him cabbage-related dishes, most commonly cabbage soup and cabbage chocolate, and they are constantly playing Scrabble, plus her television hasn't been working since the 1990s. Ben loves plumbing and is a long-term subscriber to the magazine "Plumbing Weekly," which he buys every week from Raj's news-agency. Ben's parents disapprove of him being a plumber, as their ambition for their only child was to be a professional ballet dancer like the one they used to watch every Friday.One day, Ben calls his parents at Granny's house and asks them to take him home. Mum and Dad ignore Ben and disapprove of the proposal. Granny somehow overhears the conversation due to the indistinct sound made by Ben while he was talking. The next morning, his Granny seems somewhat upset and disappointed thinking that her grandson doesn't love her.That same morning, Ben is served boiled eggs by Granny, which he doesn't like and he flicks the runny egg gloop onto the window. But, as he was hungry, he starts searching for something to eat; with some pocket left luck, he finds a box of chocolate biscuits. To his surprise, the tin feels much heavier than usual. Ben unscrews the lid and finds many diamonds, rings, bracelets, necklaces and earrings clustered together in the tin. Ben hears Granny approaching and quickly puts the tin back and sits back down at the table completely shocked!
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Afire"title="Earth Afire">
A century before the events of "Ender's Game", an alien spaceship enters the solar system and soon makes known its hostile intentions by destroying harmless human ships. Then, it wipes out a ragtag fleet of asteroid miners who have banded together in a desperate attempt to stop it. All of the adult male members of Victor Delgado's extended clan die in the battle. The survivors are unable to transmit a warning, so Victor volunteers for a near-suicidal mission to try to reach Earth in a tiny, hastily converted unmanned cargo ship. He makes it to the Moon, but is unable to get the authorities to take him seriously. Thus, humanity is totally unprepared when the First Formic War starts.The invader sends three enormous landing craft to southeast China. The Formics emerge and use gas to defoliate the area and kill everyone. Despite suffering stupendous losses, the suspicious Chinese government refuses outside help.Before the landing, Mazer Rackham had been training the Chinese military on a new transport aircraft, the HERC, in exchange for training on their new invention, drill sledges that can tunnel quickly underground. During the Formic invasion, he saves Bingwen, a very intelligent eight-year-old Chinese boy, but is then shot down. Bingwen saves his life, with the remote help of Mazer's romantic interest, Kim. Bingwen and Mazer then set off to destroy the nearest Formic lander.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_Meets_Girl_(novel)"title="Boy Meets Girl (novel)">
The book follows Kate Mackenzie, who works in the Human Resources division of the "New York Journal". She spends much of her days trying to find a good apartment, attempting to avoid her dictator-esque boss Amy, and trying to sort out her complicated relationship with a commitment-phobic boyfriend. Kate begins to despair once Amy forces her to fire an incredibly popular co-worker in one of the office's lunch rooms, which results in the employee suing her for wrongful termination. Things get even worse when she is also obligated to give a deposition to the handsome and wealthy Mitch Hertzog. The two are at odds over several things, but Kate finds herself growing wildly attracted to him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Hour_(novel)"title="Zero Hour (novel)">
The book follows Hans Volkenborn's experiences in the German army during World War I. He initially goes into the war with some enthusiasm, taking pleasure in the camaraderie with his fellow soldiers. This eventually turns sour as he goes through the toil and bloodshed of war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backstage_Passes_and_Backstabbing_Bastards"title="Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards">
In the book Kooper talks about his interactions with the music industry, including information about artists such as Bob Dylan. Kooper also discusses his days as a successful songwriter who co-authored the hit "This Diamond Ring"; his membership in The Blues Project; his forming and leaving the band Blood, Sweat, and Tears; his collaborations and friendship with blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield; and, his discovery and early production of Southern rock legends Lynyrd Skynyrd.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charley_Skedaddle"title="Charley Skedaddle">
The book follows Charley, a twelve-year-old boy who runs errands for the leader of the Bowery Boys. Then he decides to leave home after joining the Bowery Boys gang and causing trouble. All Charley wants is to be like his older brother Johnny, who was killed during the Battle of Gettysburg, so he leaves behind his gang life to join the 140th Regiment. He is initially eager to fight, but flees shortly after shooting a Rebel soldier. Ashamed, Charley keeps running and is captured by an enemy soldier but later flees again after gaining a chance to escape. He keeps running until he reaches the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he lives with Granny Bent, an elderly mountain woman who calls herself a "doctor-woman". Charley learns much from her and gains a new sense of maturity and self-respect. He is inevitably forced to flee again but with the knowledge that what he has gained from his time in the mountains will go with him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_puinhopen_van_acht_jaar_Paars"title="De puinhopen van acht jaar Paars">
"De puinhopen van acht jaar Paars" is divided into ten chapters (including an epilogue). Each of these chapters addresses one aspect of the Purple government's policies that, in Fortuyn's view, required "unreserved criticism". The chapters are titled "politics" (this chapter also serves as an introduction to the rest of the book), "healthcare", "education", "security", "restyling of the welfare state", "agriculture and infrastructure", "public government", "immigration policy", and "foreign affairs".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatiana_and_Alexander"title="Tatiana and Alexander">
Tatiana finds work as a nurse at Ellis Island, where she and Anthony start living. She befriends Vikki, another nurse, and Edward Ludlow,a doctor, who Vikki believes has taken a liking for Tatiana. Although she has started to build a new life for herself and Anthony, the possibility that Alexander might still be alive haunts her. Her suspicions are further raised by Alexander's Hero of the Soviet Union medal which she finds in her bag.Tatiana buys land in Arizona from the money that Alexander had hidden in the Bronze Horseman book. Gradually, she begins to overcome her past, and is known to everyone as the "Angel of Ellis", because of all the immigrants she has helped get jobs.Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, Alexander narrowly escapes death at the hands of the Soviet Government. However, he is ordered to lead a battalion of convicted criminals and head westward into Germany. Alexander finds this to his advantage, as then he could escape to America. He, after losing many men, finally makes it to German soil, where he encounters Pasha Metanov. He had survived the attack on the train, and joined the German Army. When he learns about his family, and Alexander's plan, he agrees to surrender to the Germans. Thus, they are taken to Colditz.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maire_of_Bristowe_is_Kalendar"title="The Maire of Bristowe is Kalendar">
## Prologue.At the start of the book, Ricart details his plan for the execution of the work in six parts, although this plan was not in the end adhered to, he informs the reader that Spencer had commissioned the work to preserve the ancient customs of the town, for .
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solo_(Boyd_novel)"title="Solo (Boyd novel)">
After celebrating his 45th birthday alone at The Dorchester, Bond is sent to Zanzarim to bring a speedy end to the civil war in the country which has seen the delta region of the country split to form the Democratic Republic of Dahum. Before leaving for Africa, Bond visits Gabriel Adeka—the rebel leader's brother—who runs AfricaKIN, a London-based charity who send aid to Dahumni children; Gabriel tells Bond that he is not in contact with his brother Solomon, as the pair have fallen out.On his arrival in Zanzarim, Bond is aided by a local agent who introduces herself as Efua Blessing Ogilvy-Grant. The two travel from the capital city to the rebel enclave, but are attacked shortly before reaching their destination and taken captive by Kobus Breed, a mercenary assisting the rebels. The group are attacked on their return journey and Ogilvy-Grant goes missing in the confusion, while Bond escapes.Bond proceeds to the enclave, where he is met by Breed, who accepts Bond's cover as a journalist. Bond meets Solomon Adeka and realises that the leader will shortly die of cancer: his mission to kill Adeka is needless. Bond sees supply flights of arms and equipment coming into the country, all funded by billionaire Hulbert Linck; the aeroplanes all show the AfricaKIN name on the fuselage. When Adeka dies a few days later, Bond tries to leave the country on one of the supply flights, but is confronted by Breed and Blessing, who both shoot him and leave him to die.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritual_and_Domestic_Life_in_Prehistoric_Europe"title="Ritual and Domestic Life in Prehistoric Europe">
Part One, "The Importance of Ordinary Things", opens with chapter one, "Death and the Harvest", in which Bradley looks at the manner in which archaeologists have differentiated between ritual and domestic life. Discussing the Galician "hórreos", or raised storehouses, he uses them as an example to highlight that both ritual and domestic features can be found in the same structure. Moving on to other archaeological examples, he discusses Durrington Walls in Wiltshire, England, and then the "viereckschanzen" of southern Germany and Bohemia. He then rounds off the chapter with a discussion of what ritual is, citing the work of social anthropologists and ritual studies scholars like Jack Goody, Maurice Bloch and Catherine Bell, emphasising that ritual is a form of action. Chapter two, "The consecration of the house" explores ritual elements in the domestic sphere, beginning with an examination of Gamla Uppsala and moving on to suggest that across Northern Europe, houses were used as Celtic buildings on certain occasions., citing ethnographic examples from the Maori of New Zealand. Bradley proceeds to an examination of instances where graves have been placed over houses in prehistoric Europe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_(O'Flaherty_novel)"title="Insurrection (O'Flaherty novel)">
The novel follows a diverse group of characters who are caught up in the events of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. The group are dispatched to defend the main road from Dublin to Dún Laoghaire (Dublin's main port) from the expected arrival of British reinforcements. The novel explores each man's motivations, fears and hopes through the battles and violence which ensue. The principal characters are: The uneducated, slow-witted Bartly Madden; Kinsella, the disciplined commander of a small band of insurgents; Stapleton, an anarchist and would-be poet; and Tommy Colgan, a youth consumed by fear and self-doubt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diviners_(Bray_novel)"title="The Diviners (Bray novel)">
Evie O'Neill, a young girl in the 1920s, is sent to live with her uncle after another in a series of disastrous events in her hometown. At the same time, a ouija board has awakened a spirit by the name of Naughty John. After hearing of numerous mysterious murders she uses her powers of object reading with the help of her uncle to defeat the spirit serial killer. Along the way, she discovers more people of her kind with supernatural abilities and they unearth mysteries that deepen their suspicions towards a bigger plan behind the murders.The sequel 'Lair of Dreams' picks up the pace, reveals more about characters central to the plot, and opens doors to new horrors. The third book 'Before the Devil Breaks You' follows the Diviners as they try to uncover who is bringing an army of killer ghosts from the beyond and who exactly is The King of Crows.The fourth book 'The King of Crows' brings the story to its climax as new characters are introduced and the stakes are at their highest. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus_(novel)"title="Virus (novel)">
A US space mission in 1964 gathers a group of microbes in Earth orbit and are later recovered by American biowarfare researchers. Two microbes are found to be coccus-shaped supergerms capable of surviving in absolute zero and have the potential to grow exponentially in terrestrial conditions. One of the researchers, Dr Meyer, discovers the germ's regenerative ability and tries to stop work on the project. However, a sample of the germs is stolen and sent to Britain's Germ Warfare Research Laboratory in Porton Down for further development.In February 19 (actually implied as 1970, later to be known as the Year of the Calamity), a scientist at Porton Down smuggles a sample of the developed virus, codenamed MM88, and gives it to a group of men who have been tasked to bring it to Dr. Leisener, a Czech molecular biologist who is skilled at developing antidotes for it. The scientist, Dr. Karlsky, insists that the germ must never be exposed to warm temperatures. However, the men double-cross him and an assistant later kills him under the guise of a suicide. The group flies out of England bound for a rendezvous with US intelligence agents in Turkey. They never make it; their plane crashes into the Alps in the middle of a snowstorm and the vial holding the virus breaks open. The crash site is investigated but investigators could not link it with the theft of the virus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bonemender_(book_series)"title="The Bonemender (book series)">
The books follow Gabrielle, a young woman that is not only a princess but also possesses special healing abilities. The first book finds her coping with a war on the border of her lands, with the second book showing how she and her brother Tristan deal with its aftermath. The final book has Gabrielle travelling overseas and dealing with a deadly plague known as the "Gray Veil".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_of_the_Consumer_Movement"title="Encyclopedia of the Consumer Movement">
The work contains 198 entries written by 168 authors. The scope is the history, activities, interests, legislation, and actors in the twentieth century consumer movement. Focuses of the work include 40 articles each describing the consumer movement in a different country, various articles on specific actions undertaken by consumer activists, and descriptions of the interests of specific populations or demographics in the consumer movement.The authors include established persons from academia, government, activism, and regulatory organizations who wrote entries summarizing their own fields of expertise.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx_the_First"title="Marx the First">
In this Catholic comic thriller Pope Marx the First returns to the Vatican after being thought lost in an air crash two years previous. He takes over from Cardinal Stephen, who had been elected as Urban IX, an "accidental Pope" during the time Marx was thought lost.Pope Marx, a very liberal Catholic, plans to make many radical changes to Catholic teaching, practices and doctrines. Stephen, who opposes these planned changes, is now serving as the Vatican's Secretary of State so that the Pope "can keep his eye on him."The mother superior of a religious order is attempting to get the order's founder canonised. A number of miraculous occurrences happen and some say these events are due to the founder's intercession while others contest this. This leads to diplomatic friction between the USSR, Spain, The United Kingdom and the Vatican.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Round_House_(novel)"title="The Round House (novel)">
The novel opens with Joe Coutts and his father, Judge Bazil Coutts, pulling out saplings from their house's garden and foundation. They realize Joe's mother and Bazil's wife, Geraldine Coutts, has not come home from an errand. The two go looking for her and see her speeding home. Geraldine arrives home smelling like gasoline and vomit and she is clearly in shock. Joe and Bazil take her to the hospital where Joe realizes his mother was raped. Police from multiple jurisdictions record statements from Geraldine and Bazil, and Joe is taken home by his aunt, Clemence.A week later, Geraldine stays in bed, afraid to go outside. Joe, Bazil, and Clemence bring food for her. Geraldine refuses to tell any details about her rape or rapist, which causes her family stress.The following week, Joe and Bazil search through past case files in an effort to find a potential suspect. One case pertains to the adoption of a woman, Linda Lark, which Joe marks as potentially relevant to his mother's attack.Joe and his friends take it upon themselves to investigate Geraldine's rape, which leads them to the round house where the incident took place. They find a gas canister and a pack of Hamm's beer, which they drink even though they realize the beer is potential evidence. The group theorizes that the rapist is Father Travis, a Catholic priest. Though, their initial assumptions about Father Travis turn out to be wrong.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_the_Gargoyle"title="Song of the Gargoyle">
A young boy named Tymmon who lives with his father Komus, the court jester of Austerneve. When Komus is abducted by an anonymous man with a Black Helmet, thirteen-year-old Tymmon is able to escape Black Helmet and leaves the castle grounds to seek refuge in the Sombrous Forest, a forbidden place occupied by wolves and magical beings. Most wonderfully, Tymmon is adopted by a gargoyle named Troff—a creature with the loyalty of a dog and the fearsome powers of an enchanted being.After a season surviving in the forest, Tymmon longs to rescue his father and to find a way to avenge him, as a knight would. But Tymmon is a commoner, and he burns with anger at his father, who threw away a noble heritage to become a lowly jester. Tymmon had to watch his childhood playmate turn away from him to become a squire and train for the knighthood Tymmon can never know.When Tymmon realizes that Troff can pose as a dog, he and Troff leave the forest together. As they travel, Tymmon sees the poverty and suffering of peasants ravaged by feudalistic greed. In the city he discovers that with his talent for music and joking, inherited from his father, he and Troff can make people happy. Beyond that, performing enables him to communicate with people from all walks of life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Fears_Death"title="Who Fears Death">
The novel follows the protagonist, Onyesonwu (Igbo for "who fears death"), is an "Ewu", i.e. the child of an Okeke woman raped by a Nuru man. On reaching maturity, she goes on a quest to defeat her sorcerous father Daib using her magical powers. The novel is narrated by Onyesonwu to a journalist who interviews her before her execution. It is divided into three parts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miri_Jiyori"title="Miri Jiyori">
"Miri Jiyori" (1894) is a love story by Rajanikanta Bordoloi set in the Miri (now referred to as the Mishing) community. A passionate story about doomed love, it was written at a time when the novel as a literary form was yet in a nascent stage. With a deeply sympathetic portrayal of a young Miri couple who matured from being childhood companions to a deeply committed but doomed couple in love, the novel is also a statement on the Mising community as well as a compassionate plea of humanism. (Note: this text is taken from Tezpur University website)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_of_the_Morning_(book)"title="Top of the Morning (book)">
In "Top of the Morning", Stelter discusses several daytime television shows, their hosts, and events that he observed while working as a media reporter for "The New York Times". The book focuses heavily on Ann Curry's replacing Meredith Vieira on the "Today" show, as well as covering other events such as the rivalry between "Good Morning America" and "Today" over morning television ratings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_Tsukuru_Tazaki_and_His_Years_of_Pilgrimage"title="Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage">
In this Bildungsroman of the realist kind (hints of the author's magical realism are left to dreams and tales), the third-person narrative follows the past and present of Tsukuru Tazaki (), a man who wants to understand why his life was derailed sixteen years ago.In the early 1990s in his home town of Nagoya, the young Tsukuru was a fan of train stations. In high school, the two boys and two girls that were his four best friends all had a color as part of their surnames, leaving him the "colorless" one of their "orderly, harmonious community". But one day in 1995, during his second year in college, his friends abruptly cut all relationships with him. That never-explained, Kafkaesque ostracism left him feeling suicidal then guilty "as an empty person, lacking in color and identity"; and when his only college friend vanished the next semester, he felt "fated to always be alone".Now in 2011's Tokyo, the 36-year-old engineer Tazaki works for a railroad company and builds stations. His new girlfriend Sara spurs him "to come face-to-face with the past, not as some naive, easily wounded boy, but as a grown-up" and seek his former friends to mend the relationships and find out why they rejected him, because she won't commit to him unless he can move past that issue. And so he will visit them one by one, first back in Nagoya, then in rural Finland, on a quest for truth and a pilgrimage for happiness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dalek_Generation"title="The Dalek Generation">
The Doctor rescues three children from a spaceship after their parents have committed suicide rather than be captured by the Daleks. Returning the children to their home planet the Doctor is shocked to discover that the majority of humanity now considers the Daleks to be benefactors, the horrors they have inflicted in the past apparently forgotten. Contrary to all logic the Daleks have rescued billions of humans from poverty during a galactic economic crisis, settling them on countless ‘Foundation Worlds’ terraformed for the purpose. As, one by one, the children are taken from the Doctor and he fails to convince anyone regarding the Daleks’ true nature, he discovers a Dalek plot to use a gigantic, ancient alien device of incredible power for their own ends. Not until it is nearly too late does he realise that he is being manipulated by the Dalek Time Controller to bring their plan to fruition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Such_A_Pretty_Girl"title="Such A Pretty Girl">
The story takes place over a time span of 3 days, and set in Estertown, a fictional town in New Jersey. The story begins with Charles, Merideth's father in jail for molesting children. Though he was sentenced to nine years, he is released after only three. Though her mother, Sharon is thrilled, Meredith is horrified because she knows he will molest her again. Meredith's mother, Sharon, pretends that Charles simply made a mistake and arranges for them to live near him. The whole town avoids Merideth's family because they know Charles may try to hurt their children, with some businesses even refusing them service. In order to escape Charles, Merideth attempts to run away several times. The first time, she ran away to her boyfriend Andy's house. Andy is 19 and is paralyzed since the night he graduated High School. He and his religious mother are planning to go to Iowa to meet the victim's soul to cleanse him in the next couple of days. The second time, she went to her Mothers mom's house, who is Mayor. Later in the book, Meredith and Nigel, one of her friends who is a police officer, plan to catch her father . They set cameras all around the house, especially in her room. This is a very big help because Meredith's father tried to hurt her while her mother left them alone together. To save herself, Meredith takes a Virgin Mary statue and hits her father with it. Her father becomes unconscious.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lottery_(Beth_Goobie)"title="The Lottery (Beth Goobie)">
In The Lottery Beth Goobie tells the deeply disturbing yet timeless story of the scapegoat. The mechanics of the scapegoating procedure in this case are tidily explained in the novel’s opening lines: “Every student at Saskatoon Collegiate knew about the lottery. It was always held in the second week of September, during Shadow Council’s first official session. Rumor had it that a coffin containing the name of every S.C. student was placed in front of the blindfolded Shadow president. The lid was lifted, the president dipped a hand among the shifting, whispering papers, and a name was pulled.” Following the draw, the “winner” is shunned for the entire school year. Friendless, isolated, and quickly demoralized, the student becomes a stooge of the Shadow Council, a group that disguises itself as a service organization but is really an intimidation ring.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sycamore_Row"title="Sycamore Row">
The title refers to a row of sycamore trees in the countryside near the fictional town of Clanton, in fictional Ford County, Mississippi. The trees play an important role in the book's plot, though the full significance becomes clear only in the end of the novel. It is suggested that these sycamores are very old, having been planted by Native Americans prior to the arrival of European settlers and their stolen, enslaved Africans in what would become the state of Mississippi.The story begins three years after the sensational events in the trial of Carl Lee Hailey ("A Time to Kill"). An employee of wealthy recluse Seth Hubbard is instructed to meet his boss at a location by these sycamores one early Sunday afternoon. The employee finds Mr. Hubbard has hanged himself from the tree because his terminal lung cancer had become too painful. Accompanying the body are very specific funeral and burial instructions.Jake Brigance, Carl Lee's former attorney, had gained much fame after the Hailey trial, as well as the respect of the black community and of many whites, but he has little to no money to show for it. During the Hailey trial, the Ku Klux Klan had tried to intimidate Jake by burning his home. Jake has yet to see any of the insurance money for the burnt house, which is tied up in litigation with his own insurance company. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bones_Are_Forever"title="Bones Are Forever">
The discovery of three dead new-born babies in Montreal leads Brennan and on-off lover Detective Andrew Ryan to follow the trail of the missing mother first to Edmonton and then on to Yellowknife, where they find links to drug trafficking and diamond mining.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/77_Shadow_Street"title="77 Shadow Street">
The book is set in the Pendleton, an upscale apartment building named after its first owner, Andrew North Pendleton. Years ago in the late 1880s, Pendleton had constructed the building as an extravagant mansion (then named "Belle Vista") for himself and his family, only for his wife and two children to get mysteriously abducted one night. The experience left Pendleton in a state of madness and he lived as a recluse for years. The mansion was purchased years later by the Ostock family, who were murdered in 1935 by their butler. His only explanation before committing suicide was that their murders had been necessary in order to save the world. The house was later purchased and transformed into apartments, however, one of the construction workers went missing during its transformation.During the ongoing events of the book the current residents of the Pendleton are subjected to a series of bizarre events that include strange creatures and plants, a mysterious person initially known only as "Witness" (later revealed to be an associate of one of the building residents), and a series of monitors that call out the location and description of each of the building residents with the instruction to "exterminate" them. They are unable to seek any outside help, as the building and its surroundings have been reduced to a wasteland filled with the various threats. Adding to the rising threat is the slow realization that the occupants of the building have been transported to the year 2049 and that they are at the mercy of an entity known only as "One". As the story progresses, one of the occupants, a hitman by the name of Mickey Dime, starts killing off the Pendleton's residents one by one even as others are overtaken by the building's various other threats.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Curse"title="Dark Curse">
Lara Calladine is an expert in the study of ice caves. As a child she was kept prisoner by Razvan, her father and Xavier, her great-grandfather, and used as a blood source. With the help of her aunts she was able to escape the ice caves into the world above. Now years later, Lara searches for the cave of her nightmares in an effort to rescue her aunts. Finally she believes she has found what she is looking for in the Carpathian mountains.Nicolas De La Cruz has come to the Carpathian mountains on one last mission to give information to the Prince of the Carpathian race. Afterwards, he intends to seek the dawn and commit suicide. The darkness in his soul has nearly completely taken over and he wants to end things before he turns into one of the very creatures he has hunted and killed for centuries, each kill worsening the situation.In the midst of discovering the cave, Lara's companions are injured and she seeks the shelter of the local inn. There she meets Nicholas whose inner demons have finally won, as he attempts to kill her. She thwarts his attack and he is able to regain his sanity, along with the knowledge that she is his lifemate.Rivayete göre Ceyhun Özkurt un lakabıdır dark (black curse) lanetli bir insandır
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Guardian_(novel)"title="Dark Guardian (novel)">
Jaxon Montgomery has spent nearly her entire life as the obsession of a sick serial killer. From a young age she was always exceptional and as the daughter of a Navy SEAL she was provided the best training available. However, her father's best friend, Tyler Drake, believed that her father did not care about her enough and killed him in order to take his place as her step-father. After her father's death her mother became a junkie, leaving her to care for her younger brother. She finds it odd that Tyler treats her with so much love and respect yet seems hateful to her family. When Tyler finally snaps he kills her mother and her younger brother and as a highly trained Navy SEAL he avoids all capture. Whenever she is sent to another foster home, Tyler once again shows up and kills the family, and then disappears once more. She spends her life paranoid of showing any emotion and caring toward anyone, lest she set off Tyler's murderous habits.Jaxon, unable to join the SEALS because she is a woman, instead becomes a cop. She lives her life without any attachments, forever on the look out for Tyler. But someone else this time has their eye on her. He is Lucian, one of the oldest Carpathian hunters still in existence. He has come to claim Jaxon as his lifemate and after he saves her life during a drug bust, he takes it upon himself to protect her. She is drawn to Lucian, which only frightens her for she believes that will get him killed. Little does she know that he is from an ancient species with powers she has never seen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Amazing_Thing"title="One Amazing Thing">
A group of 9 people is trapped in the visa office at an Indian Consulate after a massive earthquake hits an unnamed American city. Among them are two visa officers on the verge of an adulterous affair named Malathi and Mangalam; Jiang, a Chinese-India woman in her last years; her gifted teenage granddaughter Lily; Cameron, an ex-soldier haunted by guilt; Uma, an Indian-American girl bewildered by her parents' decision to return to Kolkata after 20 years; Tariq, a young Muslim man angry with the new America; and an enraged and bitter elderly white couple named Mr. and Mrs. Pritchett.After many attempts to find a way out of the debris that formed around them, the group concludes that there is nothing they can do but wait for some help. In the meantime, they ration out the little food and water that they had on their persons and try to make it last as long as they can.As they wait to be saved− or to die − they begin to tell each other stories, each recalling "one amazing thing" in their lives, sharing things they have never spoken of before. Their tales are tragic and life-affirming, revealing what it means to be human and the incredible power of storytelling.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Destiny"title="Dark Destiny">
As a young girl, Destiny unknowingly let a vampire into her home, who then slaughtered her family and held her captive, forcing her to become like him. During this terrible time she was able to connect with another being who was able to guide her in her abilities to defeat the vampire who held her captive. Even though defeated the blood of the vampire still lives inside her, burning and calling to other vampires. She uses this calling card to slay vampires in the city of Seattle, a place she has laid claim to protect from the vile creatures. All the while she believes herself to be evil, just as the vampire who tortured her was, but the voice of the mysterious being claims she is instead like him, a Carpathian. She believes herself responsible for the death of her family and therefore refuses to put her trust in him.Nicolae is an ancient Carpathian hunter who was almost lost to the darkness, but then he connected with a scared female child. He tried to aid her but she was too mistrusting to even speak to him. With her unwilling to trust him, he instead sent her his ancient knowledge he had gained from hunting vampires for centuries to help aid her. For years he has searched for her, believing that their connection must be caused because she is his lifemate, but she still refuses to trust him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Celebration"title="Dark Celebration">
Raven Dubrinsky, lifemate to the Prince has contacted other lifemates in an effort to join the Carpathians in a Christmas Celebration. Jacques' lifemate Shea is due to give birth at any time and the women feel that a gathering of the Carpathian community will help aid her. Before the celebration begins, Mikhail feels obliged to visit all of the Carpathian couples and we are given slices of life from lifemates in previous books. All the while there is a plot set by their enemies in an effort to destroy the Prince and the Carpathian people, making this a Dark Celebration.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Possession"title="Dark Possession">
In the previous novel, "Dark Celebration", Manolito De La Cruz was very close to turning and when he happened upon Mary Ann Delaney he found his lifemate. Unfortunately, at the time she was complaining about Carpathian men and how she would never be with one and would count on the Prince to protect her. Upon hearing this, Manolito manipulates Mary Ann unbeknownst to the others and makes a blood bond and leaves her with no memory of it. Mary Ann is a counselor for battered women and is visiting the Carpathian mountains with her best friend Destiny and her lifemate Nicolae. Upon learning this, Manolito goes to his brother Riordan's lifemate, Juliette, and convinces her to seek out Mary Ann to help her sister back in South America. During the celebration, however, he puts himself between a mage trying to kill a pregnant woman and is mortally injured.Mary Ann is approached by Juliette De La Cruz who convinces her to go to South America to help counsel her younger sister. However, during the celebration she witnessed the death of a man, Manolito, and can't seem to get over it. She goes to South America but is so depressed and abnormal she is unable to treat Juliette's sister. Manolito is not dead, however, having been saved by the races best healer. He awakens in South America with only the memory of going to the celebration nothing more. He is very sick, the healer had to basically resurrect him from the dead. Riordan attempts to aid him but Manolito's broken mind sees him as a threat. Convinced something is wrong with Manolito, Riordan and Juliette also notice something wrong with Mary Ann. Putting the pieces together they realize that she is the only one who can save Manolito and they set out to aid him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_How_You_Lose_Her"title="This Is How You Lose Her">
## "The Sun, The Moon, The Stars".This story was included in "The Best American Short Stories 1999". It traces Yunior taking Magdalena on a vacation to Santo Domingo in an unsuccessful effort to salvage their relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syair_Abdul_Muluk"title="Syair Abdul Muluk">
Abdul Muluk is the son of Abdul Hamid Syah, Sultan of Barbari. Raised in the nobility, at a young age he marries Siti Rahmat. When his father dies, Abdul Muluk takes the throne. Some time later he departs Barbari to explore the world, leaving his uncle Mansur in control of the sultanate. Ultimately Abdul Muluk arrives in Ban, where he falls in love with the sultan's daughter Siti Rafiah. The two are married.Six months later Abdul Muluk departs Ban with his wife. Upon arriving in Barbari they are welcomed warmly. Siti Rahmat and Siti Rafiah get along well and treat each other as sisters; Abdul Muluk, meanwhile, spends his days with his two wives, and Siti Rafiah is soon pregnant. However, their happiness is short lived: the Sultan of Hindustan attacks without making a declaration of war, intending to avenge the death of his uncle. The palace's guards and advisers are slaughtered, while Siti Rahmat and Abdul Muluk are captured. Siti Rafiah, meanwhile, escapes. Six months later she finds a sheikh, who takes her in and protects her.After giving birth Siti Rafiah decides to avenge her husband's imprisonment. She leaves her son, Abdul Ghani, to be raised by the sheikh and passes for a man, taking the name Dura. When she reaches the sultanate of Barbaham she finds it in a state of chaos. The rightful sultan, Jamaluddin, is being usurped by his uncle Bahsan. As Dura, Siti Rafiah helps Jamaluddin secure his rule. With the help of Barbaham's army, Siti Rafiah attacks Hindustan. The sultan of Hindustan is arrested, while Abdul Muluk and Siti Rahmat are released. Siti Rafiah then reveals her true self, rejoining her husband.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_and_the_Rising_Sun"title="Sophie and the Rising Sun">
"Sophie and the Rising Sun" takes place in a small fictional town called Salty Creek, Georgia, in the days before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The story focuses on the main character Sophie, a single spinster who has spent the majority of her adult life caring for her aging mother and two elderly aunts, who suffer from dementia. Sophie's mother is controlling during her childhood and early adult years, refusing to allow Sophie to date, telling her "Nothing lasts, so no use in getting started with it." Some speculation over her past love affair with a man who had died during a battle in World War I has been alluded to, and is at the center of some gossip between the local housewives. Sophie spends her time painting, tending to crab traps in a nearby lake, and going to book clubs. She is seen by the local community as a "proper and polite lady" but also as a topic of some conversation by the local gossip, Ms. Ruth, because she does not attend church services every Sunday morning.The story also focuses on another character, Mr. Oto, a Japanese-American who through a series of events ends up stuck in Salty Creek under the care of the local doctor and his wife after he was found on a bus, too weak from malnutrition and sleep loss to make his way back to California, where his father and other family members live. After his stay at the doctor's home he moves into the back yard of Sophie's childhood friend, Miss Anne to work as her gardener.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Blettsworthy_on_Rampole_Island"title="Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island">
The protagonist of the novel, Arnold Blettsworthy, is the scion of a genteel family prominent "in the south and west of England." Blettsworthy's father, however, was an adventurer who married a woman from Madeira. Both his mother and his father die early, and the young Blettsworthy is raised in Cheltenham by an aunt and an uncle who is a liberal Anglican priest. A complacent Edwardian worldview that an Oxford education did nothing to shake is undermined when Blettsworthy is betrayed in business and in love by his best friend, Graves, and his mistress, Olive Slaughter. A family solicitor and counselor named Ferndyke advises him to travel in order to recover from disillusionment so severe that it has threatened his sanity. Arnold Blettsworthy follows his advice and embarks for Pernambuco and Rio de Janeiro on a tramp steamer, the "Golden Lion". But the captain and crew take a disliking to him, and when the vessel founders off the coast of Brazil there is a mutiny that results in the captain shutting Blettsworthy in a cabin and leaving him to perish with the ship.Blettsworthy survives only by being captured by cannibals who take him to Rampole Island. There he becomes the "sacred lunatic" of a tribe living in neolithic conditions on an island where megatheria are still subsisting. The most forward-thinking of the sages who govern the tribe, Chit, makes strategic use of Blettsworthy and his advanced ideas, but when he falls in love with a woman coveted by the tribe's military chief Ardam, he becomes an outcast. He seems about to die in the struggle that results, but awakens to find that he has really been in New York City in the care of Rowena (cf. Wena) and Dr. Minchett (cf. Chit), a psychoanalyst. He learns that he has lived through an extended hallucinatory psychotic episode. World War I has broken out in the meantime, and having recovered his sanity, Blettsworthy believes that the best thing for him to do is to enlist in the British Army as a private. He survives being wounded in combat, but loses a leg. While recovering he meets Graves again, whom he forgives and helps become a success in "the world of post-war marketing." At the end of the novel, Blettsworthy, "barely forty," is encouraged by Graves to devote the rest of his life to "the general advance of mankind."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autocracy_of_Mr._Parham"title="The Autocracy of Mr. Parham">
Mr. Parham is a university don with solid right-wing convictions who dreams of finding a rich benefactor to finance a review he can edit. He thinks he has found such a man in Sir Bussy Woodcock, a "crude plutocrat" who makes money at anything to which he puts his hand. In an attempt to foster this acquaintance that goes on for six years, Mr. Parham finds himself involved in séances that summon a Master Spirit from the beyond. This entity occupies Mr. Parham's body, and commences to inspire a political movement (the League of Duty Paramount) that overthrows the British government in a coup d'état. As "Lord Paramount", Mr. Parham undertakes to conquer the world. But the opposition of the United States ultimately leads to a "Second World War" that goes badly for Britain. Believing that he can win if he overcomes the resistance of industrialists who control a new poison gas ("Gas L") but who refuse to make it available to the military, Lord Paramount attacks their stronghold ... and it is at this point that Mr. Parham reawakens from what has been a wild dream he had when he fell asleep during the séance. Shortly thereafter he discovers that Sir Bussy has never had any intention of conferring an editorship upon him, and the association of the "deflated publicist" and the millionaire is over.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thompson_Travel_Agency"title="The Thompson Travel Agency">
The novel begins in London, where the impoverished French teacher Robert Morgand applies at the travel agency Baker &amp; Company for the post of guide and interpreter on a tour of three archipelagos: the Azores, the Madeira Islands, and the Canary Islands. Because Morgand speaks fluent English, Spanish and Portuguese, he easily wins the job. In the following days, however, Morgand sees an advertisement for a rival agency, Thompson &amp; Company, offering the same tour at a better price. Both travel agents compete until Morgan's employer Baker is forced to cancel its tour. The triumphant Thompson agency, however, also needs an interpreter, so Morgand immediately finds a job, though at far less pay.Morgand begins his services on the steamer "Seamew". On board are more than a hundred tourists as well as Mr. Thompson himself, the owner of the travel agency. During the voyage it becomes clear that Mr. Thompson, an irresponsible and money-obsessed businessman, has planned neither the ocean voyage nor the visits to land; everything has to be arranged on the spot. Problems build up, food spoils, and travelers become increasingly dissatisfied on the way from the Azores to Madeira. During the voyage, Morgand falls in love with a female passenger, a young American widow named Alice Lindsay. Their romance is threatened by her brother-in-law and rejected admirer, Jack Lindsay, who is pursuing Alice for her money. Meanwhile, Alice Lindsay's nineteen-year-old sister Dolly falls in love with a kindly French officer-on-leave, Roger de Sorgues.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Landing_(novel)"title="Hard Landing (novel)">
"Hard Landing" is about an elite undercover cop, Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd, assigned to foil an imprisoned, ruthless UK drug dealer, Gerald Carpenter, who has threatened witnesses, destroyed evidence, and murdered police to regain his freedom. Shepherd goes undercover in a high-security prison to learn how Carpenter is orchestrating his plans through contacts around the world. Shepherd's mission is to find Carpenter’s contacts and stop them before they destroy the case and murder Shepherd's family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkfever"title="Darkfever">
The novel tells the story of MacKayla Lane or "Mac", the daughter of Jack and Rainey Lane, who works as a bartender in Georgia. After learning about her sister's death Mac travels to Ireland in hopes of finding her sister's murderer when the local police close the case. Soon after arriving in Ireland, Mac is spending the evening in a local pub when she sees an inhumanly beautiful man. As she stares, her vision starts to change and she sees a man in decay with a foul odor, who she terms the Gray Man, preying on a victim. No one else notices the sight except an elderly woman who startles her by hitting her in the head and telling her not to stare because that jeopardizes them all. The old woman continues to call Mac an O'Connor, which she does not understand. Days later Mac visits a local store by the name of Barrons Books and Baubles where she meets a mysterious man by the name of Jerricho Z. Barrons who informs her of a supernatural world of the Fae and the oncoming and unknown-to-humans war between their world and humankind's. He also teaches Mac that she is a "sidhe"-seer, as was her sister. Mac comes to believe that her sister was killed by a former Fae, who calls himself the Lord Master, who was using her in his search for the "Sinsar Dubh" (pronounced shee-sa-du), a Dark Hallow authored by the Dark King of the Unseelie, and which is said to hold all the deadliest magic in its pages.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_of_Silence"title="The Game of Silence">
The story picks up from the previous novel in 1850, when Omakayas is 9 years old and with the arrival of a group of Ojibwe refugees who have been driven off their land by the government. The title refers to the "game" that the elders use to keep the children quiet when the adults are having serious conversations, in this case, discussions with the refugees about how to interpret the government's actions and how to respond. The elders send four men on a year-long quest to uncover the causes of the government's hostility, only to learn that the answer is government rapacity and complete disregard for the Indians' rights. The story ends with Omakayas' people having to leave their home for new land out west.Meanwhile, Omakayas is growing up and learning to control her spiritual gifts, including healing and communicating with the spirits, and learning the values of her community, such as that her gifts are to be used to help others, that individualism and the group can co-exist, and that it is better to patiently work with the white people rather than resist and lose their lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Fifth_at_Malory_Towers"title="In the Fifth at Malory Towers">
Darrell Rivers, now in the Fifth Form, and her younger sister Felicity return to Malory Towers. Darrell is relieved to have passed her School Certificate examination, along with most of her friends.Alicia and Gwendoline also move to the Fifth Form, despite failing the exam, while Connie remains in the Upper Fourth, separated from her twin Ruth. Other newcomers are Moira Linton and Catherine Gray, who both remain in the Fifth from the previous year. To the girls’ discomfort, the domineering Moira becomes Head Girl of the Form.Darrell is appointed as Fifth Form Head of Games, responsible for organising practice times for the lower school and assisting the games mistresses in coaching. However, when Darrell is consulted on team selections and favours Felicity, her younger sister, she faces accusations of favouritism.New girl Maureen Little joins the Fifth Form after the closure of her old school, Mazely Manor. Her vain character, along with her long and tedious stories about her former school swiftly irritates the other girls. When Mam’zelle mistakenly refers to the school as “Measley Manor,” the girls delight in repeating her mistake in Maureen's hearing.Maureen is encouraged by the girls to befriend Gwendoline, who realises with horror that Maureen's self-centred character and behaviour is very much akin to her own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Lottery"title="German Lottery">
The novel is set in Yugoslavia in 1950. The communist regime has quarreled with the Soviet Union while being under blockade from the West. The country is isolated, poor, government secret agents are everywhere and people are disappearing during the night.The protagonist is a naive young man, 18 years old, a war orphan who wasn't accepted in the army because of his bad knee; he is disabled, so the authorities decide - with communist logic - that he should become a postman. He arrives in the town, into corrupt and dangerous world of double- (and triple-) crossing swindlers, armed only with his naive optimism. He will entangle himself into the deadly world of German Lottery, a unique charity where every ticket is free and everyone wins, where stakes are getting higher and higher, until one day somebody wins a jackpot …
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_(Palacio_novel)"title="Wonder (Palacio novel)">
August "Auggie" Pullman is a 10-year-old living in North River Heights in Upper Manhattan. He has a genetic condition, Treacher Collins syndrome, which has left his face disfigured and required countless surgeries and special care. Due to his condition, August has been homeschooled by his mother for some years, however, wanting him to experience a larger world, his parents have enrolled him into Beecher Prep, a private school, for the start of fifth grade. Auggie has an older sister, Olivia "Via" Pullman, who is entering her first year of high school.Before the start of the school year, Auggie's mother takes him to meet the principal, Mr. Tushman, who has invited three other students — Jack Will, Charlotte, and Julian — to take him on a tour of the school. Auggie is treated unkindly by Julian, who acts "like an angel" in front of adults. On his first day of school, Auggie tries in vain to avoid drawing attention to himself, but is subtly bullied by Julian and his friends. Auggie is approached and befriended at lunch by a classmate named Summer, and is paired in most of his classes with Jack, whom he also considers a friend.However, on Halloween, Auggie, dressed as Ghostface, overhears Jack, who was expecting Auggie to dress up as Boba Fett, joining in with Julian and his friends making fun of him behind his back. Devastated, Auggie stays home sick for several days and isolates himself from his family, frustrating his sister Olivia, who begrudges Auggie the priority he receives over her. Returning to school, Auggie ignores Jack and confides the incident to Summer. Jack eventually presses Summer, who hints at the cause, and when Jack realizes how he behaved, he is ashamed, and recommits to his friendship with Auggie. This draws Julian's ire, and the two have a fight during which Jack punches Julian, leading Mr. Tushman to suspend him. Jack reconciles with Auggie, but becomes ostracized from many of his more popular classmates, as Julian's influence divides the students into factions over the conflict. Julian's mother writes Tushman to voice her concerns over Auggie attending the school, citing that his appearance may be too much of a burden for the other students to handle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Order_of_Odd-Fish"title="The Order of Odd-Fish">
Thirteen-year-old Jo Larouche has spent her entire life with her Aunt Lily in the deserts of California. Left with Lily as a baby, the only real clues she has about her origins are a note with the name "Jo" and a warning that she was a dangerous baby. After the events of a Christmas party prompt Lily and Jo to leave California for the surreal and outlandish Eldritch City, Jo finally begins to learn some of the truth behind her mysterious past. The two join a group known as the "Order of Odd-Fish" that researches information others would see as useless. But, even as they spend their days going on unconventional quests and dealing with the eccentric Odd-Fish knights, threats from a dangerous and enigmatic source will prompt Jo to claim her true destiny.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_in_a_Fallen_City_(novella)"title="Love in a Fallen City (novella)">
The story is set in 1940s Shanghai and Hong Kong. Bai Liusu is a beautiful divorcée who lives in Shanghai. Upon experiencing a failed marriage, Bai Liusu's large and extended family feels she has shamed the family through divorce which resulted her situation at home to become unbearable. The story then begins with Bai Liusu receiving news of her ex-husband's death and her refusal to attend the funeral.Fan Liuyuan is a bachelor who had just returned from England and was working closely in the mining business with Mr Xu, the matchmaker Mrs Xu's husband. While Mrs Xu attempted to introduce Bai Liusu's sister, Bai Baolu, to Fan Liuyuan, Fan became interested in Bai Liusu instead. When Fan Liuyuan left to Hong Kong for work, Bai Liusu follows to Hong Kong to win the love of Fan in hoping to get a legitimate marriage status and economic stability.Although everything was going quite smooth in Hong Kong, Bai Liusu thinks that she cannot trust Fan Liuyuan. Thinking that Fan Liuyuan will not marry her, Bai Liusu decides to return to Shanghai. Upon returning home, her family finds her useless coming back and bringing shame to the family. Later, Fan Liuyuan calls on her and she decides to return to him. Throughout the story, they undergo many trials and tribulations together, while both doubting the other's true commitment and love for each other. However, it was through the fall of Hong Kong that they realize that their love for each other is far more enduring and valuable. The city and their love share an antithetical relationship as their love triumphs with the city being defeated during the Japanese invasion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Art_and_the_Prehistory_of_Atlantic_Europe"title="Rock Art and the Prehistory of Atlantic Europe">
Bradley's first chapter provides a brief introduction to the topic. Chapter two introduces the prehistory of Atlantic Europe, exploring ideas regarding societal connections between Galicia and various parts of the British Isles where rock art is found. The third chapter goes into greater depth into Atlantic rock art, discussing various scholars' views on the connection between the petroglyphs of different regions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonlance_Chronicles"title="Dragonlance Chronicles">
The plot of the "Dragonlance Chronicles" is centered around the conflict known as the "War of the Lance", in which the Heroes of the Lance march to fight against Verminaard, the lord of the draconians, and the dark goddess Takhisis. While the main events of the war are covered in the original trilogy of books, some later released books occur during the same time period, such as "War of the Lance". Several game modules for the Dungeons &amp; Dragons tabletop role-playing game were also released that expanded on the events of the war, such as "Dragons of Glory" and "Dragonlance Adventures".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonguing_the_Zeitgeist"title="Tonguing the Zeitgeist">
Set in a post-earthquake Seattle, "Tonguing the Zeitgeist" is a story about Ben Tendo, a musician wannabe whose day job consists in taking orders at porno supplier Beautiful Mutants, Ltd. When every member of the reigning media-anointed grunge band is mysteriously assassinated, the music industry searches out a new pawn and zeros in on Ben Tendo, who they kidnap, turn into an addict, and implant with a new voicebox to increase the corporation's market shares.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screaming_Staircase"title="The Screaming Staircase">
A sinister Problem has occurred in London: all nature of ghosts, haunts, and spectres are appearing throughout the city, and they are not exactly friendly. Only young people have the psychic abilities required to see and eradicate these unnatural foes. Many different Detection Agencies have cropped up to handle the dangerous work, and they are in fierce competition for business. In "The Screaming Staircase", the plucky and talented Lucy Carlyle teams up with Anthony Lockwood, the charismatic leader of Lockwood &amp; Co, a small agency that runs independent of any adult supervision. After an assignment leads to both a grisly discovery and a disastrous end, Lucy, Anthony, and their sarcastic colleague, George, are forced to take part in the perilous investigation of Combe Carey Hall, one of the most haunted houses in England. Will Lockwood &amp; Co. survive the Hall's legendary Screaming Staircase and Red Room to see another day?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drowning_Girl"title="The Drowning Girl">
"The Drowning Girl" follows the story of India Morgan Phelps, an unreliable narrator struggling with hereditary mental illness. India states that she has decided to write down the bizarre events that occurred two years ago (the entirety of the novel is written as a fictionalized memoir). Early in the novel, she befriends her eventual roommate and lover, a transgender woman named Abalyn Armitage. India works at an art supply store, but she is also a painter and a writer.One night, India picks up a hitchhiker named Eva Canning, whom she finds stranded and naked on the side of the road, although India is unable to pinpoint whether she met Eva in July or November. Eva stays with India only for a short while (much to Abalyn's chagrin) before the mysterious woman takes off on her own, but apparently continues to stalk India. This sparks India's obsession with Canning and her past. India's obsession eventually causes Abalyn to leave her. India often deals with traumatic events by writing short stories. Some of them relate to Eva Canning, while others revolve around a mysterious artists Phillip George Saltonstall and Albert Perrault, as well as a painting titled "The Drowning Girl," which India saw on display at a museum as a child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loranga,_Masarin_och_Dartanjang"title="Loranga, Masarin och Dartanjang">
The story is about a boy, Masarin, and his dad, Loranga, who live together in a house. Out in the woodshed lives Masarin's grandfather, Dartanjang, who is hypochondriac (and suffering from slight dementia). Loranga, constantly wearing a robe and a floral tea cozy on his head, is a childish and irresponsible bohemian. Therefore, Masarin is usually the responsible one; for example, he is the one taking care of his great-grandfather who thinks he is a cuckoo and lives at the top of a pine tree in the forest. Masarin is not disturbed by this; he is delighted with the fact that his dad is playing silly games with him. For example, they often play hockey with an overripe tomato. Other characters in the book are Gustav the Thief, the Angry Old Man and the Hot Dog Vendor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Man_(poem)"title="The Dark Man (poem)">
The poem follows an unnamed 'dark man' who rides the rails observing everything around him. The poem takes a sinister turn when the narrator confesses to rape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oasis_(novel)"title="The Oasis (novel)">
Set in the near future following 1949, "The Oasis" depicts a group of 50 radical and liberal intellectuals who venture into the mountains of New England to create a shared living commune (aptly named, “Utopia”). Already present in Utopia's formation, however, is a deep ideological schism between two rival factions: the cynical Realists and the self-righteous Purists. The Realists, led by the embittered former Marxist William Taub, anticipate the experiment will end in little more than a summer vacation and await Utopia's eventual demise, while the Purists, led by the magazine editor Macdougal Macdermott, are hesitant to perform any action that could contradict their radical, libertarian beliefs.The first challenge presented to both factions is whether or not they will admit into Utopia the Lockman family, led by the exuberant blue-blood Joe Lockman. Macdermott, who regards Lockman as a “philistine,” eventually grants the Lockmans his approval for fear that he might otherwise appear elitist. The acceptance of the Lockmans, however, calls forth the larger question, “Was it to follow that anyone could be admitted to Utopia?”By the end of the first night in Utopia, it is the Realist leader Taub, not Macdermott, who finds Lockman to be a nuisance; Taub is put on edge by Lockman's bombastic spirit and hunting rifle. The next morning, Katy Norell, one of Utopia's more vocal Purists, burns herself and ruins the commune's breakfast while cooking. Most likely an honest mishap, the incident is quickly politicized and blamed on Lockman by the Realists. Following the mishap, Katy's husband, Preston, publicly scolds Katy for ruining breakfast, demonstrating the immense strain that communal living has taken on the Utopia's residents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_World_Shook"title="When the World Shook">
The story begins as the main character, Humphrey Arbuthnot—a writer of adventure stories—is married to his wife Natalie. Shortly thereafter, she claims that she is going to die soon even though she has been given a clean bill of health from their doctor, Bickley. Right as Natalie dies, she tells Arbuthnot that soon he will want to travel somewhere, and that is where the two shall meet again.Natalie dies, and shortly thereafter Arbuthnot has a sudden urge to travel to the Pacific islands. He gets on a yacht with two friends, Bickley, a doctor, Bastin, a minister, and Arbuthnot's dog, Tommy. The craft is then taken by a cyclone after all the crew abandons ship. When the three adventurers awaken, they find themselves shipwrecked on the South Sea island of Orofena.Here they meet the Orofenan people who worship a God called Oro. The men win the love of the Orofenans as Bickley teaches the men western medicine techniques and saves a few lives. They are told not to go to a part of the island named Orofena which is a volcano. After a dispute in which Bickley destroys a symbol of Oro and kills one of the natives who was about to be sacrificed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/11th_Hour_(novel)"title="11th Hour (novel)">
This book has two major plots. The two major plots involve cases in which Boxer quickly becomes involved. Someone is gunning down San Francisco drug dealers and kills an undercover officer. One of the weapons used was taken from her own department's evidence locker, indicating the involvement of a rogue cop. The second major plot involves Boxer, when two heads appear unexpectedly in the garden of a mansion owned by a world-famous actor. More heads are unearthed in the garden.The first plot concerns Noelle Smith, a violinist, who is giving a gig in front of her father, Chaz Smith, who's killed in the bathroom by a lone avenger, Revenge.He used a cop, so the circle closes down. But Chaz Smith is revealed to be a cop, too; and Revenge is finally captured by Lindsay Boxer and Rich Conklin; his real name is William Randall and he decided to take revenge on pushers in the name of his son, who was killed by drugs, without anyone paying for his premature death. The main plot concerns Janet Wolsley, a woman who finds severed heads in the garden of the mansion she keeps, Elssworth House. The heads are marked with numbers and the investigation starts from there; more heads are found in the garden and the Wolseys become suspected; but Nicole, their daughter, takes them on the trail of Connie Kerr, a former tennis player, who has gone insane but seems to know many things.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Happened_to_Burger's_Daughter_or_How_South_African_Censorship_Works"title="What Happened to Burger's Daughter or How South African Censorship Works">
In the book's titular essay, Gordimer documents the publication history and fate of "Burger's Daughter", and investigates the implications of the banning and unbanning of works in South Africa. The official communiqué by the Director of Publications, Richard Smith stating his reason for banning the book a month after publication is reproduced here in full. These charges include "propagating Communist opinions", "creating a psychosis of revolution and rebellion", and "making several unbridled attacks against the authority entrusted with the maintenance of law and order and the safety of the state". In another essay by Gordimer, "What the Book is About", she responds to each of the charges, showing how, by extensively quoting out of context, the Publications Control Board displayed their "inability ... to pass qualified judgment" on the book.The reasons for lifting the ban by the Publications Appeal Board three months later, on the recommendation of a panel of literary experts and a state security specialist, are also reproduced here. The state security specialist had reported that the book posed no threat to the security of South Africa, and the literary experts had accused the censorship board "of bias, prejudice, and literary incompetence", and that "[i]t has not read accurately, it has severely distorted by quoting extensively out of context, it has not considered the work as a literary work deserves to be considered, and it has directly, and by implication, smeared the authoress ." In the final essay in the book University of the Witwatersrand law professor John Dugard examines censorship in South Africa within the country's legal framework.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_the_Kingdom_Trilogy"title="Tales of the Kingdom Trilogy">
Book 1 - Tales of the KingdomThe story revolves around Scarboy who is followed by action, intrigue, and danger wherever he goes. This misfortune especially occurs in the Enchanted City, where the “imperfect” are cast away and orphans are enslaved. Scarboy manages to escape the evil Enchanter to safety in Great Park, but has yet to confront his greatest fear—and he will need enormous courage to conquer it!Book 2 - Tales of the ResistanceThis second book of the trilogy contains 12 stories about Hero's participation in the underground taxi resistance against the evil Enchanter, challenger to the one True King. Other characters include Carny, Doubletalk, Sewer Rat #1, the Boiler Brat and the Most Beautiful Player of All.Book 3 - Tales of the RestorationIn "Tales of the Restoration", the conclusion to the Kingdom Tales trilogy, the restoration has begun. Between power-outs, mudslinging, and peril at Burning Place, our heroes look to celebrate life under the King's reign, and enjoy the Great Celebration.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NW_(novel)"title="NW (novel)">
Set in the northwest of London, England, four locals — Leah Hanwell, Natalie (born Keisha) Blake, Felix Cooper, and Nathan Bogle — try to make adult lives outside of Caldwell, the working-class council estate where they grew up. While Leah has not managed to venture far from her childhood location, her best friend Natalie, now a successful, self-made barrister, lives in an affluent neighbourhood in a Victorian house. Despite their friendship and history, the two women find that they are very different from each other socio-economically. Meanwhile, a chance encounter brings Felix and Nathan together. Leah is the focus of a lower-working-class life in comparison to Natalie who represents the small higher-working-class. All four characters represent a piece of the lost generation struggling to ascend economically.Part 1 – "visitation": Leah Hanwell falls for a scam artist, who knocks at her door to ask for financial support in an emergency. The encounter with the scammer leads her to question her trust in the community.Part 2 – "guest": Former drug addict Felix Cooper wants to start a new life with his girlfriend Grace. He meets one last time with his drug-using ex-lover to say goodbye and officially leave that part of his life behind. On his way home he is murdered during an armed robbery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_(Harry_novel)"title="Invasion (Harry novel)">
The United States turns its military into a much smaller force, switching its priorities to domestic matters, beginning with using the U.S. military budget to fill the gap in Social Security's trust fund left there by past Congresses and presidents who spent the money on other things, and continuing onward in the same theme.As the U.S. is downsizing its military, China becomes a world superpower, building new supercarriers and becoming a dominant naval power in addition to a growing economic power. Eventually, China goes down the route of conquest.China begins to conquer Eurasia to such an extent that it reaches the borders of the European Union in the west. With most of Asia under its domination, including Japan, everyone assumes China is coming for Europe next; however, through a strategy of misdirection making the Europeans think they will invade Western Europe, they actually pin the European naval force in the Mediterranean and blockade it, neutralizing it as a threat without the cost of invasion.China instead throws its resources into attacking the Caribbean. Due to the Monroe Doctrine, new President Bill Baker, who came to office on a pro-war platform, has to make a critical decision: to try to halt them with conventional forces, or use nuclear weapons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_of_Mirrors"title="The City of Mirrors">
Alicia Donadio's child, the result of her rape in "The Twelve", is stillborn. She forces herself out of her stupor and decides to hunt down Zero.Michael Fisher sails around the continent looking for the storied mines that were placed to keep the viral contamination at bay. He learns the virus has spread to the rest of the world, and realizes that the mines do not exist, and neither does the rest of the world; human civilization was completely wiped out by a mutated version of the virus. He finds an ocean liner beached in the Gulf of Mexico, and determines to fix it and sail to a safe island to save some portion of humanity. Lucius Greer has been keeping Amy and Carter alive in the cargo hold of their own ship by bringing them blood to feed on. Amy has no control over herself as a viral while Carter seems to be able to control his impulses.Peter Jaxon is raising his nephew Caleb in Kerrvile, the capital of the Republic of Texas. In his dreams, he lives with a human Amy, though he has not actually seen her in years. He accepts a request from the newly elected president of the Republic of Texas to join her administration, leading an initiative to open the town's security gates, since the virals have not been seen for years, allowing humanity to branch out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_Haven_(novel)"title="Safe Haven (novel)">
Erin flees her abusive alcoholic husband, Kevin, takes on a different identity and changes her name to Katie. She arrives in Southport, North Carolina. Finding work at a seafood restaurant, she becomes friends with her neighbor, Jo, and gets to know the town's general store owner, Alex.Katie is interested in Alex, who is a widower with two children. Alex and Katie's relationship becomes romantic, encouraged by Jo. Alex's former job had trained him to recognize signs of an abuse victim. Katie reveals her past to Alex, who wants to know why she did not go seek help from the police. She explains that Kevin is a police detective. She fled from his abuse because she knew he would kill her if he located her. Her created identity is based on a neighbor's dead daughter who resembled her.Kevin is furious with his wife for leaving and drank more to dull his pain. He learns of Erin's new identity and searches for her. Kevin arrives in Southport, while Katie is caring for Alex's children. Kevin sets the house on fire, thinking it would kill both Katie and Alex. She fights Kevin, and the children escape. Alex, arriving home, finds his children and takes them to Katie's house where he thinks they will be safe. He returns to the fire and finds Kevin attempting to harm Katie. Desperate, Alex drives toward Kevin who is firing a gun at him. The vehicle hits Kevin, breaking his hand and disarming him. Katie retrieves Kevin's gun, and she and Alex are reunited. Kevin, however, is able to drive away. He goes to Katie's house. When she learns that Alex left the children at her house, she is terrified, knowing that Kevin will hunt her down at her house, putting the children's lives in danger. As they reach Katie's house, Kevin attacks Alex with a crowbar. Kevin is going to shoot and kill Katie, but when he fires the gun, the bullet hits Kevin in the stomach and he dies in front of Katie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Batalha_do_Apocalipse"title="A Batalha do Apocalipse">
In the distant past, the Celestial Paradise was the scene of a terrible uprising. A group of warrior angels, lovers of justice and freedom, challenged the tyranny of the powerful archangels, raising arms against their oppressors. Expelled, the renegades were forced into exile, and condemned to wander the world of men until the final judgement.But then comes the moment of Revelation, the time of reckoning, the day of the awakening of the Most High. Ablon, sole survivor of the purge and leader of the renegades, is invited by Lucifer, to join his legions in the battle of Armageddon, the final struggle between Heaven and Hell, the war that will decide not only the fate of the world, but the future of the universe.From the ruins of Babylon to the splendour of the Roman Empire, from the vast plains of China to the frozen castles in medieval England. "A Batalha do Apocalipse" is not just a journey through human history, but also a journey of knowledge, an exciting epic, full of heroic struggles, magic, romance and suspense.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syair_Siti_Zubaidah_Perang_Cina"title="Syair Siti Zubaidah Perang Cina">
After years of trying, Sultan Darman Syah of Kembayat Negara and his wife have a son, whom they name Zainal Abidin. They raise him to be a devout Muslim and, at age six, Zainal Abidin is sent away to learn to read the Quran and study martial arts. Elsewhere in the kingdom, after a riot at the markets leads to the execution of a Chinese merchant, all ethnic Chinese flee the kingdom and return to China. The Chinese empress, furious at the treatment of her people, orders her seven daughters to prepare for a war against Kembayat Negara.After dreaming of a beautiful woman, the adult Zainal Abidin departs Kembayat Negara to find her. Upon arriving at an island he hears a beautiful voice reciting the Quran. Following the voice he finds that it belongs to Siti Zubaidah, daughter of the island's religious leader and former king. He is stricken by her beauty and the two are married. On their way back to Kembayat Negara Zainal Abidin helps the King of Yaman repel an enemy attack, for which he is granted the hand of Princess Sajarah in marriage. Together with his wives, Zainal Abidin returns to Kembayat Negara.Later, when the Chinese army attacks Kembayat Negara, Zainal Abidin and Sajarah are captured. The pregnant Siti Zubaidah, however, is able to escape into the woods. Giving birth there, she abandons her child and continues her journey; the child is later taken in by Siti Zubaidah's brother. Siti Zubaidah allies herself with Princess Rukiah of Yunan, who was exiled from her kingdom by invaders. The two train in martial arts and, disguising themselves as men, are able to retake Yunan. In return, Rukiah agrees to help Siti Zubaidah in a war against China.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Sniper_(book)"title="American Sniper (book)">
"American Sniper" tells the story of Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL who completed four tours in Iraq from 1999–2009. The book describes Kyle's upbringing in Odessa, Texas, Navy SEAL training, and combat experiences in Iraq.Kyle describes his role in the battle for control of Ramadi, events that led to Iraqi insurgents' nicknaming Kyle the "Devil of Ramadi" and placing a bounty on his head. He writes that after his first confirmed kill, "the others come easy. I don't have to psych myself up, or do something special mentally—I look through the scope, get my target in the cross hairs, and kill my enemy, before he kills one of my people."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimat_Jar_Heral_Seema"title="Asimat Jar Heral Seema">
The novel starts with the narrator, a clerk dreaming of a perfect married life with kids, who suddenly gets sucked into a black hole. He wakes up startled to realise that he is supposed to go on an expedition that very day with his four friends - a professor, a doctor, a poet and a clerk, much like the narrator himself. The five friends want to leave the humdrum of their routine life for a month and embark on a boat journey along the river Dihing in the hopes of coming across an unexplored land. After moving upstream on their boat for 15 days they unexpectedly come across a tribe of aboriginals in the dense jungles. After feasting and spending the night with the tribe, the next morning they face the revolt of their boatman and navigators who believe any journey further upstream will bring doom upon them all as the place is cursed. But the stubborn friends decide to continue the journey on their own. As they travel further, they are astounded by the breathtaking scenery at first, but as the night falls they are stuck in a violent rainstorm that takes them off course. Once the storm subsides they realise that their Professor friend is disoriented and sick and seems to be zoning in and out of his memories of his homeland from his previous birth, 1300 years ago. This is where the main story starts. It is a story of love, life, friendship, patriotism and valour.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mom_&amp;_Me_&amp;_Mom"title="Mom &amp; Me &amp; Mom">
Angelou's mother, Vivian Baxter, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, at the turn of the 20th century, the oldest of six children of her Trinidadian father and her Irish mother. Baxter's family was violent, yet religious and musical. Baxter, "who was to remain a startling beauty", met Angelou's father, Bailey Johnson, a dietitian and cook, in 1924, upon Johnson's return from serving in World War I. They married and moved to California, where Angelou and her older brother, Bailey, Jr., were born. When she was three and Bailey was five, their parents divorced and sent their children, by train with identification tags and no adult supervision, to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, in Stamps, Arkansas.Angelou and her brother lived with their grandmother and her son, Uncle Willie, until Angelou was thirteen. They briefly visited their mother in St. Louis, but at the age of eight Angelou was raped, and in retaliation the rapist was killed by members of her family. She felt so guilty for his death that she chose to stop talking to everyone but Bailey for several years. They were sent back to Stamps, but when Bailey turned 14, they returned to their mother's care in San Francisco for his protection. At first, Angelou was resistant and angry towards her mother for abandoning her and Bailey, choosing to call her "Lady", and it took her several years to warm to her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstar_(novel)"title="Blackstar (novel)">
In a world blasted and barren, the last bastion of civilization is the fortress-city of Central. The people within its walls gladly accept the dominion of Kaine, the city's benevolent arbiter, in return for his gift to them - Re:memory. This public archive contains humanity's memories of the world before it was destroyed, allowing them to relive the lost glories of the past.Rezin doesn't know who he is or how he came to be in Central, but he does know this: he is a Reaper. His combination of gifts and abilities allow him to decrypt any system and steal information to sell to the highest bidder. His talents afford him a life of luxury until the day he plugs into Re:memory and reaps something he wasn't looking for, something he doesn't understand - and something that Kaine will do anything to retrieve.Forced to flee into the dangerous Outlands, Rezin must dodge Kaine's pursuing forces even as he finds that the secret he took from Re:memory is transforming him, awakening within him powers he can't control. When he encounters mysterious twins with powers of their own, Rezin begins a journey beyond the confines of the world he knew, a journey that will lead him across space and time, a journey that will bring him face to face with the nature of the universe - and of himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Helping_Hurts"title="When Helping Hurts">
"When Helping Hurts" uses the Bible and the Great Commission to state that the church's mission should be to help the poor and the desolate. Corbett and Fikkert state that the definition of poverty will change depending on who is defining it, with the poor defining it through the psychological and social scope while more wealthy churches emphasize the lack of material things or a geographical location. The authors emphasize that this can cause a harmful cycle where North American churches provide material resources and evangelism to the poor, which reinforces the poor people's sense of inferiority and lack of self-esteem, which in turn increases the original problem. Corbett and Fikkert give several hypothetical scenarios to illustrate this cycle and then offer several solutions that they say can alleviate poverty. They promote the use of asset-based community development as a strategy, arguing that focusing on what resources and abilities that the community already has is often more helpful and more empowering than focusing on what the community doesn't have. This prevents paternalism where outside workers provide the "only" answer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_or_Nonbelief?"title="Belief or Nonbelief?">
"Belief or Nonbelief?" has eight chapters, during which Eco and Cardinal Martini discuss various topics such as religion, belief, abortion, and ethics. The book's title refers to "the beliefs of those who do not believe in God or religious dogmas".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliet_(novel)"title="Juliet (novel)">
"Juliet" is about a woman named Julie Jacobs who discovers that her ancestor Giulietta is the real-life Juliet of "Romeo and Juliet" fame. In her encounters with various descendants of the young lovers' families, she realizes that the curse from the story—"A plague on both your houses!"—may be real and may be coming after her—unless she can find her Romeo. On the track to discover her real story she and her twin sister become closer and make the journey together, finding not only their real names, life and ancestors but love, true and real love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Blue_Event_Horizon"title="Beyond the Blue Event Horizon">
Earth struggles with overpopulation and starvation, and even though humans have gained access to the mysterious Heechee technology, including their faster-than-light spaceships, this has not done much to mitigate these issues. A "food factory" spaceship, long abandoned by the Heechee, is found deep in the Oort cloud, and an expedition funded by Robin Broadhead, a millionaire former Gateway prospector, is sent to investigate. The crew, a family of four, is astonished to find a young man, Wan, occupying the spaceship. Wan tells how he grew up alone on Heechee Heaven, a faraway space station and of how he regularly visits the food factory for supplies and entertainment in his small Heechee spaceship. He is as ignorant about social cues as he is about the inner workings of Heechee technology. The youngest crew member, teenage Janine, is enamored with Wan, as he is the first young man she has seen since their four-year voyage started.Wan shows Janine around the food factory, introducing her to the dreaming chamber. Wan's repeated usage of the dreaming chamber coincides with semiannual outbreaks of a mysterious planet-wide fever that has hit Earth regularly over the last decade, and the crew quickly realize that Wan's dreams and nightmares are somehow psychically projected at the population of Earth at lightspeed, causing the "130-day fever". Janine briefly tests the chamber herself before her father and brother-in-law dismantle it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_at_Mt._Fuji"title="Murder at Mt. Fuji">
"I've stabbed Grandpa to death." With these words, rich heiress Chiyo Wada incriminated herself in the murder of her grandfather, Yohei Wada, the patriarch of a rich family owning a large conglomerate. Chiyo had brought along her friend Jane Prescott to spend the New Year holidays with her family: Yohei, grandmother Mine, grand-uncle Shigeru, mother Yoshie, stepfather Sawahiko, cousin Takuo, and Dr. Shohei Mazaki, who's rumored to be an illegitimate member of the family.When Yohei is killed, the investigation is undertaken by detectives Ukyo Nakazato and Katsubei Aiura, who have more questions than answers. Did Chiyo really murder her own grandfather, a known playboy who often groped her? Or was she set up by another family member? The answers will be decisive for the Wada family to stay together - or break apart...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and_Memory_in_Early_Medieval_Britain"title="Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain">
The first chapter, "Death, Memory and Material Culture", serves as an introduction to Williams' approach. Stating that "mortuary practices can be conceptualized as strategies for remembering and forgetting", he discusses the influence of sociology and anthropology on his study before exploring the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Swallowcliffe Down in Wiltshire. Chapter two, "Objects of memory", examines the inclusion of grave goods in Early Medieval burials, among them jewellery and weaponry, emphasising the mnemonic effects that these might have had on those attending the funeral. In "Remembering through the body", Williams examines mnemonic elements to the manner in which the corpse was prepared before cremation or inhumation, resulting in its burial.Chapter four, "Graves as mnemonic compositions", argues that Early Medieval graves were "mnemonic performances aimed at constructing the present in relation to the past and future." Looking at the sequence of scenes that onlookers would have witnessed, it discusses graves and grave structures, before using Snape, Sutton Hoo, and the northern cist burials, as case studies.The fifth chapter, "Monuments and memory", focuses on the way in which cairns and burial mounds were erected to commemorate the death, also looking at ring ditches and Pictish symbol stones. "Death and landscape" takes a wider view of the relation between Early Medieval burials and the wider landscape, discussing the reuse of prehistoric monuments, and the relation between burials and routeways, settlements, and significant natural places. Highlighting that not all Early Medieval burials are in cemeteries, Williams looks to literary evidence from land charters and "Beowulf" to theorise mortuary landscapes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clockwork_Prince"title="Clockwork Prince">
After the events of the previous book, Charlotte Branwell, accompanied by her husband Henry, Tessa Gray, Will Herondale, Jem Carstairs, and Jessie Lovelace, are called to a Shadowhunters' Council meeting to give testimony regarding her failure to capture Axel Mortmain, the leader of the Pandemonium Club. Benedict Lightwood, who holds a grudge against Granville Fairchild, Charlotte's father, persuades Consul Wayland to give Charlotte an ultimatum: unless she is able to capture Mortmain within two weeks, she will have to resign as head of the London Institute. To further increase the defense of the Institute, Benedict's two sons, Gideon and Gabriel, will be assigned as self-defense tutors for Tessa, Jessie, and Sophie Collins. Jessie, however, refuses to attend the training.The Institute begins searching for Mortmain and discovers that his adoptive warlock father, John Shade, the creator of the automatons, and mother, Anne, were killed by the Clave before the Accords were signed. Charlotte suspects that Mortmain began a revenge campaign against the Clave after he unsuccessfully filed for Reparations. She sends Tessa, Will, and Jem to question Aloysius Starkweather of the York Institute, the Shadowhunter who executed Shade. While in York, Will finds out that his family, including his sister Cecily are living in Ravenscar Manor, owned by Mortmain. An automaton attacks the trio and warns Will to stay put unless he wants to see his loved ones killed. During the pursuit, an automaton was close enough to kill Tessa before her clockwork angel sprung to action.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitte_1"title="Mitte 1">
After struggling painter Albrecht gets introduced to Sow Luise of Kreuzberg, a pig, his career finally takes off - even though his snobbish and conservative family and his two competing girl-friends strongly disapprove of this professional choice of subject since they suspect it conveys a message. When Jenny Epstein, his secret love and room-mate, establishes a Country-and-Western band with bi-polar Timo, Albrecht has to choose between two artistic careers. He starts listening to his inner voice, as suggested by the apparently omniscient Wibke Schmidt, which brings him in all kinds of trouble. Especially during a musical context that his friend Mikki, now a self-proclaimed agent of the band, is determined to win the contest by all means. All plans fall apart when bi-polar Timo tries to commit suicide and Jenny Epstein gets pregnant but refuses to reveal the father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Invasion"title="Dark Invasion">
During the early years of World War I, America maintained neutrality in theory but in practice it traded only with the Allies. Germany sought to sabotage that trade and prevent America supplies reaching the Allies. The German efforts included spying, planting bombs in ships and factories, bombing the U.S. Capitol, and shooting the financier J.P. Morgan, Jr.On January 14, 2013, Warner Bros. acquired the film rights to the book, and set Bradley Cooper to star and produce through his 22 &amp; Indiana Pictures, along with John Lesher through his Le Grisbi Productions, and Adam Kassan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Risk_Agent"title="The Risk Agent">
To take care of his autistic brother, John Knox partners with Grace Chu to investigate the kidnapping of Knox’s old friend Clete Danner and Lu Hao, the brother of Chu’s boyfriend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Ever_After"title="Dead Ever After">
The protagonist of the novel is Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress who works at a bar, of which she has recently become part owner.At the end of the previous novel, "Deadlocked", Sookie used (and used up) a magical artifact called a "cluviel dor" to save the life of Sam Merlotte, who had been killed by his girlfriend, Jannalynn.The situation as the novel begins is that Sookie’s relationship with Eric Northman, a vampire who is her lover and, in vampire terms, her husband, has cooled suddenly. Meanwhile, Eric's maker had negotiated a marriage between Eric and another vampire, without Eric's consent. However, due to vampire practices, Eric was obliged to go through with the marriage. He had been hoping Sookie would use the "cluviel dor" to get him out of the marriage, and was upset at Sookie (and jealous) that she used it in the heat of the moment to save Sam instead. During the novel, Eric progresses with his marriage, while Sookie feels endangered by Eric's fiancée, whose jealousy could mean trouble for Sookie. Meanwhile, Sam, who is Sookie's friend and co-owns the bar with her, and for a long time was Sookie's boss, is having a hard time dealing with having been suddenly brought back to life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Master_(book)"title="My Master (book)">
In the lectures (therefore in the book) Vivekananda discussed Ramakrishna's biography. But, Vivekananda was well aware that his listeners were those Western people who had detailed idea on neither Ramakrishna nor India's religious and spiritual history and inheritance. That's why before entering the main topic of discussion, i.e. the life of Ramakrishna, he narrated the religious lives and religious ideals of India in details. He tried to show how the lives of Westerners and Indians were different, under which circumstances the reform movement began in Indian religions and Ramakrishna was born.Next, Vivekananda started discussing the life of Ramakrishna from the beginning (i.e. birth of Ramakrishna in Kamarpukur in 1836). Though he presented every biographical detail in correct order, his main attempt was to draw a sketch of Ramakrishna's religious life and to show how Gadadhar Chattopadhyay (pre-monastic name of Ramakrishna) became Ramakrishna, a person venerated by thousands of Indians as an incarnation of God. Vivekananda divided the life of Ramakrishna in two parts. He told, Ramakrishna spent the first part of his life in acquiring spiritual knowledge and the second part of his life, the remaining years, in distributing it for the welfare of the people.Vivekananda discussed on different aspects of Ramakrishna's character. He told, in the presence of Ramakrishna, he discovered a man could be perfect, even in a human body. He told the lips of Ramakrishna never cursed or criticized anyone, nor his eyes saw any evil. The mind of Ramakrishna never thought of any evil, too. Vivekananda talked about the tremendous purity and renunciation Ramakrishna had and told that is the only secret of spirituality. It was Vivekananda's conclusion that Ramakrishna was the embodiment of spirituality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Story_(Das_book)"title="My Story (Das book)">
The book, with 50 chapters, follows Aami's ( Kamala ) life from age four through British colonial and missionary schools in Calcutta where she had to face racist discrimination; through the brutal and indulgent relationship with her husband; through her sexual awakening; her literary career; extramarital affairs; the birth of her children; and, finally, a slow but steady coming to terms with her spouse, writing, and sexuality. She mostly upholds her personal self in her autobiography rather than the political and social upheaval predominant during the war of independence in the then India.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pin_to_See_the_Peepshow"title="A Pin to See the Peepshow">
Julia Almond grows up in suburban poverty in Edwardian London. She longs for a better life, but makes an ill-advised marriage during the First World War.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naalukettu_(novel)"title="Naalukettu (novel)">
"Naalukettu" is a veritable depiction of the matriarchal social order of Kerala's Nair community in its final gasp for life. The hero Appunni is a scion of a once rich and powerful family. Appunni is the son of a woman who married a man of her own choices and who did not marry the man whom her Karnavar suggested. So she has to leave the family with her son and Appunni grows up without a father and away from the prestige and protection of the matrilineal home to which he belongs. The novel captures the traumas and psychological graph of Appunni, an introvert and angry youth, aspiring to avenge the insult meted out to him in a matrilineal family by building a new edifice on the ruins of his ancestral home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransAtlantic_(novel)"title="TransAtlantic (novel)">
It tells the intertwined stories of Alcock and Brown (the first non-stop transatlantic fliers in 1919), the visit of Frederick Douglass to Ireland in 1845/46, and the story of the Irish peace process as negotiated by Senator George Mitchell in 1998. The book fuses these stories with fictional narratives of women spanning the course of two centuries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Slavery,_American_Freedom"title="American Slavery, American Freedom">
"American Slavery, American Freedom" is Morgan's answer to the paradox which he himself formulates in the beginning of the book: that of Virginia being both the birthplace of the democratic republican United States and, at the same time, the largest slave-holding colony and later, state. Among voluminous other sources, Morgan employs the archives of Virginia's House of Burgesses, circa 1620 and beyond to explore this paradox and find an explanation for it.Much of the book is a description of the problem of poverty in England during the 1600s, one of the solutions to which was to send the English poor (many of them shiftless troublemakers) over to the American colonies as indentured servants.Morgan then focuses on the conflict in 17th century Virginia between the self-serving governing oligarchy and the much larger populations of land-owning freemen, poor freemen, white indentured servants, and black slaves (the last, originally a very small percentage of the population); he shows how such uprisings as Bacon's Rebellion left the oligarchs worried about retaining power. Morgan also suggests that rebel leader Nathaniel Bacon, in encouraging his followers' vengeful hatred of Indians—whatever their tribe and peaceableness—provided Virginia with its first instance of "racism as a political strategy."Morgan then describes the economics of the Atlantic slave trade during the 17th century and explains how, over time, enslaved Africans became a cheaper labor source to Virginian planters than indentured servants from England, causing the population of poor whites to stop growing while the population of black enslaved workers grew proportionately larger.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sky_Is_Everywhere"title="The Sky Is Everywhere">
Lennon Walker, called Lennie or Len, is a high school student whose love for nature and band comforts her throughout the day. Lennie's mother left when she and her older sister Bailey were young, but Lennie never minded because she had Bailey, her grandmother Gram, and her Uncle Big. Bailey's sudden death from heart arrhythmia while she is rehearsing the lead in the play "Romeo and Juliet" throws Lennie, Gram and Uncle Big into a depression that takes some time to overcome.Lennie attempts to cope with her loss by leaving notes and poems throughout the town, which often contain conversations the sisters had before Bailey's death. Lennie then begins an unplanned relationship with Toby, Bailey's boyfriend and fiancé, that stems from their shared grief over losing Bailey. In the early stages of Lennie and Toby's relationship, Lennie meets a new boy in town: Joe Fontaine, a handsome and positive friend who shares her love for music and helps her almost forget about her sister's death. Joe visits Lennie daily, befriends Gram and Uncle Big as well, and Lennie and Joe start to fall in love. Lennie maintains her lustful and secretive relationship with Toby, creating an awkward situation as Lennie resents him but at the same time welcomes his lust for her. As Lennie falls in love with Joe, she hates herself even more for continuing to see Toby as she believes her relationship with Toby is unhealthy and wrong. Lennie also discovers more about her mother and how Bailey was desperate to find her, leaving Lennie confused because she and Bailey never discussed this.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_of_Me_(novel)"title="The Best of Me (novel)">
In the novel, Dawson Cole returns to his hometown for the first time after twenty years to fulfill the last wishes of his dear friend and surrogate father, Tuck Hostetler. When he arrives, Dawson is surprised to find that Tuck arranged for Dawson's high school girlfriend, Amanda, to join him in fulfilling these last wishes. In fact, it soon becomes apparent that Tuck’s intention was to have Dawson and Amanda rekindle their old romance, however Amanda is married. As for Dawson, his family are a group of notorious criminals, who pose a danger that could not only alter Tuck's plans but Dawson's future irrevocably.Dawson Cole works on an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana. One day an explosion on the rig nearly took Dawson's life, but a stranger in the water showed Dawson where to go, saving his life. Months later, Dawson learns of the death of his good friend, Tuck Hostetler. Dawson rushes home to fulfil Tuck’s final wishes, even though he has not been home in 20 years.Dawson was born into a notorious criminal family; who are allowed to get away with many petty crimes, out of the fear the town feels toward this family. Dawson is not like his family, but no one really believes that a Cole could be honest or law abiding. For this reason, Dawson lived an isolated life in his hometown. As a child, Dawson tries to stay within the boundaries of the law and is repeatedly beaten and abused by most of his family, more specifically his father Tommy Cole and two older cousins, Abee and Crazy Ted. When he was sixteen years old, Dawson left his father's home and began living in the garage of a local mechanic, Tuck Hostetler. Tuck, who had recently lost his wife, allowed Dawson to stay, forging a relationship that would last the rest of Tuck's life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boys_in_the_Boat"title="The Boys in the Boat">
The Boys in the Boat is about the University of Washington eight-oared rowing crew that represented the United States in rowing at the 1936 Summer Olympics – Men's eight in Berlin, and narrowly beat out Italy and Germany to win the gold medal. The main character is Joe Rantz.There are two backstories. One illustrates how all nine members of the Washington team came from lower-middle-class families and had to struggle to earn their way through school during the depths of the Depression. Along with the chronicle of their victories and defeats in domestic competition, the reader learns the importance of the synchronization of the eight rowers as they respond to the commands of the coxswain and his communications with the stroke, consistent pacing, and sprint to the finish.The second backstory begins with a depiction of Hitler decreeing construction of the spectacular German venues at which the Games would take place. Along the way, the book also describes how the Nazis successfully covered up the evidence of their harsh and inhumane treatment of the Jews so as to win worldwide applause for the Games, duping the United States Olympic Committee among others.All comes together with a description of the final race. During the 1930s, rowing was a popular sport with millions following the action on the radio. The victorious Olympians became national heroes. In accordance with the strictures of amateur athletics, the boys sank into relative obscurity after their victory but were still better off than their parents, and for the rest of their lives proud of their accomplishment. After their win, they would come together every few years to row again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arresting_God_in_Kathmandu"title="Arresting God in Kathmandu">
It is a collection of nine short stories that provide a glimpse into everyday life in Kathmandu, Nepal. The stories included in the books are: 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Country_Doctor_(novel)"title="A Country Doctor (novel)">
The main character of "A Country Doctor", Nan, is a young woman that encounters much strife when she decides to go against the traditional values of the day and become a doctor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediocre_But_Arrogant"title="Mediocre But Arrogant">
Mediocre But Arrogant is the story of being young in India. It is about the roller coaster life in a B-School with glimpses of hostel life, grades, chai at the dhaba and, not least, being in love.The story follows the life of the protagonist, Abbey, who lands an MBA course at a topnotch B-School, the Management Institute of Jamshedpur, after three years of college. At MIJ, Abbey finds his life turned upside down – what with professors like Haathi and Chatto, friends like Rascal Rusty and Pappu, and girls like Ayesha and Keya. Will the two years at MIJ bag Abbey a job? Will this be where he finds love? These are the pivotal questions the novel tries to answer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&quot;W&quot;_Is_for_Wasted"title="&quot;W&quot; Is for Wasted">
Kinsey Millhone's colleague Aaron Blumberg informs her that a homeless man has been found dead on the beach with her contact information in his pocket. Kinsey tracks down the dead man's friends, three other homeless people named Felix, Dandy, and Pearl. With some difficulty, Kinsey persuades them to tell her the man's name: R. T. Dace. At the bank, she finds a safe deposit box in Dace's name containing $600,000 and a will leaving it all to her.Kinsey, who never knew Dace in life, travels to Bakersfield to notify Dace's surviving family members: his son Ethan and daughters Ellen and Anna. All three have been estranged from their father for many years and are unmoved by the news of his death, even more so when they discover they have been disinherited in favor of a stranger. Returning home, Kinsey travels to the homeless camp where Dace lived in order to scavenge some of his stuff. As it turns out, what he left behind provides valuable clues about not only Dace's murder, but the death of another private investigator some months before.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Bohane"title="City of Bohane">
"City of Bohane" is set in west Ireland in 2053. It features a world with minimal laws and technology where feuding gangs compete for control of the city of Bohane. There is public transit in the form of trams, but no cars. Characters write letters rather than phone and music is broadcast on wind up radios. Characters dress in flamboyant clothes and talk in an invented dialect. Barry describes it as a "demented malevolent" world inspired by what "homicidal teenage hipsters" might sound like in 40 years. "It's written in Technicolor," he explains. "It's intended to be a big, visceral entertainment as well as a serious language experiment."The book is influenced by American television, featuring short chapters and "an awful lot" of dialogue. "There's no question that the best long-form fiction being written now is probably in American television," explains Barry. "Maybe it's time novels started stealing something back [from television]." The geography of the fictional Bohane is based on Porto, Portugal where Barry was holidaying when he got the idea for the novel."City of Bohane" tracks the lives of the Hartnett Fancy gang which controls most of Bohane. Logan Hartnett runs the family, but is heavily influenced by his 90-year-old mother. A feud between the Hartnett family and the Cusack family begins when a Cusack gets "reefed" (stabbed). Reinforcements arrive and the feud turns into an all out battle for control of the city.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ape_Man's_Brother"title="The Ape Man's Brother">
Bill, the protagonist and narrator, lives on an undiscovered island. Bill's people are an undiscovered race of humanoids and live a primitive life. All that changes when an airplane crash lands on the island. The only survivor is an infant. Bill's mother, who just lost a young baby, takes the child in and raises it as her own. Bill's people notice a curious lack of body hair, but soon the young human is accepted among Bill's people. As he grows up he is simply called The Big Guy. Bill and The Big Guy become friends. The Big Guy shows an aptitude for hunting and adopts the natives ways. Things become very complicated when an expedition traveling in a zeppelin lands on the island. One of the explorers is a beautiful woman who becomes known as The Woman. When a giant flying lizard tries to carry The Woman off, The Big Guy rescues her and they begin a torrid affair much to the dislike of the other men in the expedition. Soon Bill and The Big Guy accompany the expedition to New York City. The affair between The Big Guy and The Woman causes big trouble as Bill and The Big Guy try to adapt to a civilized way of life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(Patterson_novel)"title="Black Friday (Patterson novel)">
The book follows lawyer Caitlin Dillon and Federal Agent Archer Carroll as they must find a way to overcome a threat against Wall Street. A secret militia group has threatened to destroy Wall Street by way of several explosions, but give no demands and will not negotiate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doomsday_Machine_(book)"title="The Doomsday Machine (book)">
## Economic fundamentals."The usual rule of thumb for nuclear power is that about two thirds of the generation cost is accounted for by fixed costs, the main ones being the cost of paying interest on the loans and repaying the capital..."Areva, the French nuclear plant operator, for example, offers that 70 percent of the cost of a kWh of nuclear electricity is accounted for by the fixed costs from the construction process. In the foreword to the book, Steve Thomas, Professor of Energy Studies at the University of Greenwich in the UK, states that "the economic realities of rapidly escalating costs and insurmountable financing problems... will mean that the much-hyped nuclear renaissance will one day be remembered as just another 'nuclear myth'."In discussions about the economics of nuclear power, the authors explain, what is often not appreciated is that the cost of equity, that is, companies using their own funds to pay for new plants, is generally higher than the cost of debt. Another advantage of borrowing may be that "once large loans have been arranged at low interest rates—perhaps with government support—the money can then be lent out at higher rates of return".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bioscope_Man"title="The Bioscope Man">
"The Bioscope Man" is the recollections of Abani Chatterjee, a washed-out silent-era movie actor, who, through this book, makes a bid to convince the reader that misfortune and bad taste of the times conspired to turn him into a non-entity.As Calcutta's star begins to fade, with the capital of His Majesty's India shifting to Delhi, Abani's is on the rise. He is well on his way to becoming the country's first silent-screen star. But just as he is about to find fame and adulation, absurd personal disaster strikes, and Abani becomes a pariah in the world of the bioscope. In a city recently stripped of power and prestige, and in a family house that is in disrepair, he spins himself into a cocoon of solitude and denial, a talent he has inherited from both his parents.In 1920, German director Fritz Lang comes calling to make his "India film" on the great 18th century English Orientalist Sir William Jones. When Abani is offered a role, he convinces Lang to make a bioscope on Pandit Ramlochan Sharma, Jones' Sanskrit tutor, instead. Naturally, Abani plays the lead. The result is "The Pandit and the Englishman", a film that mirrors the vocabulary of Abani's life, hinting at the dangers of pretence and turning away, the virtues of lying and self-deception, the deranging allure of fame and impossible affections.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Sapiens_Berliner_Art"title="Homo Sapiens Berliner Art">
Struggling artist Albrecht breaks up with his girl-friend and suddenly finds himself alone in a huge and empty apartment in downtown Berlin. A new roommate moves in, overweight Guru Chris, who specializes in self-help courses for stressed managers. He turns out to be broke so the two young men start to work on their finances - with catastrophic results. Inspired by a beautiful girl named Jana Albrecht starts a series of oil paintings but Chris is allergic to paint.Albrecht, while dog sitting his sister's golden retriever Orest misses the birthday of his wealthy uncle George, an octogenarian. When Albrecht visits George to apologize, the uncle, having misplaced his hearing aids, misunderstands and keeps the dog as a gift. Albrecht tries to find another dog for either the uncle or his sister, but fails so he decides to flee the city. Meanwhile, more people move into the apartment, sexy Jenny Epstein who never had an uncle (so she adopts George) and young cousin Bernhard, an under-age kleptomaniac who thinks he is a womanizer. On the baltic island of Rügen Albrecht makes friends with posh Wibke Schmidt, who believes to be a telepath. They return to Berlin when Chris tells them that he has managed to organize a happening for Albrecht's paintings (during which the paintings are burned). Later uncle George dies. Jenny is devastated. The family suspects her to be a legacy huntress which adds to her grief. Upset by too much clan-diplomacy, Albrecht misses the funeral just like he missed the birthday and has to improvise once again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Coat"title="The Black Coat">
The novel tells the story of journalist Khaleque Biswas and his protege Nur Hussain. After Khaleque loses his job with the "Freedom Fighter", he trains Nur only to turn him into a fake Sheikh Mujib. Sheikh Mujib was the leader of the Bangladesh Liberation War and Prime Minister of the country in its post-independence period. Khaleque and Nur start earning money using the blind nationalistic fervour of their countrymen during the Bangladesh famine of 1974 when thousands of people died from starvation and Sheikh Mujib began to lose his popularity.Nur recites the famous 7th March Speech of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, trying to popularise Sheikh Mujib and his party the Awami League. But after observing the sufferings of Bangladeshi people during the famine, he begins to criticise Sheikh Mujib. At the height of that criticism, he calls Sheikh Mujib a 'monster' and a 'disgrace'.After this, Khaleque has only one thing to do. To eliminate Nur or bear the consequences, as Moina Mia, Awami League MP and the person who has introduced the duo to Sheikh Mujib, thinks it is Khaleque who has convinced Nur to speak against the Prime Minister. He chooses the former.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Harayeko_Manchhe"title="China Harayeko Manchhe">
The storyline of "Cheena Harayako Manchhe", is about a simple, god-fearing man who happens to lose his "China" or "Cheena" (horoscope). The autobiography depicts the author's childhood memories, fantasies and the struggles he had to face during his adolescent years. “The book is the tribute to my late wife Meera and proceeds from the book will go to a trust of her name,” said the author at a press meet.A polished and most celebrated comedian and film actor of Nepal, Acharya, during a launch ceremony of his book, wished he could be a god in his next life so that he in turn could transform the gods into human beings subject to pain, misery and suffering. He also made a confession that he had become an agnostic since all his efforts to save his wife, despite his devout worship of the gods, failed. “I wrote this book to heal my pain of losing her,” he further added.Born 9 October 1958, to Homanjaya Acharya and Ganesh Kumari in Gairidharan, Kathmandu, Hari Bansha Acharya has two sons, Trilok and Mohit. Hari Bansha's name is inseparably linked with his comedian partner, Madan Krishna Shrestha, another celebrated comedian/actor of Nepal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince_of_Venice_Beach"title="The Prince of Venice Beach">
The book follows a seventeen-year-old runaway named Robert "Cali" Callahan who is hired to track down other runaway youth. What should be a simple assignment quickly becomes something more when he finds and falls in love with Reese Abernathy who is hiding from more than just her family.The books takes place around Venice Beach California. A place known not only for its gritty skate and surf culture but also for its large population of homeless and runaway youth driven there by the warm weather.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_Like_a_Dame"title="Nothing Like a Dame">
The book discusses Porter's time served under the Westminster City Council and the resulting fallout. Hosken also includes several interviews and looks into Porter's history as the daughter of Jack Cohen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_(novel)"title="Numbers (novel)">
The novel is about the life of a Soviet boy named Styopa, who resorts to the magic of numbers. At first he chose the number seven as his patron number, but then he changed his choice in favor of the number 34. First, seven was "worshipped" by many famous people, and Styopa estimated his chances of "being heard" by the number 7 as minimal. Secondly, the sum of 3 and 4 gave the same seven. Subsequently, always guided by his number and its peculiarities, Styopa became a businessman, and in the post-Soviet period he became a very successful banker. But one day fate brings him also to the manifestations of the enemy number 43, which is the antipode of the number 34. To make matters worse, Styopa discovered that another Russian banker, in the same weight class and rotating in similar circles, had chosen the number 43 as his personal patron. The meeting with this man had been foretold to him long before that by a clairvoyant. When Styopa turns 43, this circumstance brings him a lot of trouble, puts him in extremely uncomfortable situations, and undermines the balance of his inner world.The work, like many of Pelevin's novels, is replete with parallels to the phenomena of contemporary culture. For example, Mus Julianovna (Styopa's woman) identifies herself and him with Pokémon, and the FSB officer identifies himself as a Jedi. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancer_(novel)"title="Dancer (novel)">
The book begins on the Eastern Front during World War II, with Nureyev performing for injured Soviet soldiers as a child. It covers his good fortune in gaining the chance to study ballet in his home country, his success there and then his life, work, loves and excesses as a celebrity after his defection to the West.The story is told partly through brief journal entries portrayed as written by Nureyev himself, and partly through narration by characters who knew him. The latter include his childhood dance instructor, his sister, his dance partner, and his maid. These each have their own perspectives and concerns, with sub-plots that add complexity and emotion to the story. The book does not mention Nureyev's death from AIDS.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Introduction_to_Animals_and_Political_Theory"title="An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory">
"An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory" begins by discussing the history of animals in political theory before considering the approaches taken to the status of animals by five schools of political theory: utilitarianism, liberalism, communitarianism, Marxism and feminism. The final chapter outlines Cochrane's own approach, which he situates between liberalism and utilitarianism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnt_Offering_(novel)"title="Burnt Offering (novel)">
Marie Pascal is a single woman who teaches seventh-grade "literature, geography, history, everything" at a small school in a small town in Picardy. Her very quotidian life ("the emotional vacuum that overcomes a young educator, once her school career is finished") changes when one of her students, 12-year-old Annette Rieu (whose father died in World War I "because he suffered too much (31)), writes an essay containing the sentence, "The saddest day of my life comes back every week, the day when Mother entertains her friends and I hear the sound of laughter" (25). Until then, Annette had not drawn attention to herself, but the essay prompts a fascination and attraction in the childless and single Marie that she finds hard to control, and her love for the child seems to be reciprocated. Annette blossoms under the attention paid to her, holds the door for her teacher, plucks the most beautiful flowers for her, and waits for her every afternoon after school to say goodbye. Initially reciprocating the child's devotion, Marie herself grows as a person and as a teacher, and is even recommended by a school inspector to transfer to a school in Paris. She declines, and finds it difficult to act on the child's attention and on two occasions even rebuffs her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexter's_Final_Cut"title="Dexter's Final Cut">
When a cable TV network comes to Miami to shoot a new crime show, Dexter Morgan and his sister Deborah are assigned as "technical advisors." The two are followed by the stars to research their roles: Deborah is followed by female lead Jackie Forrest, while Dexter is left with over-the-hill star Robert Chase. Sensing a strangeness in Robert, Dexter keeps him at arm's length. Shortly afterwards, the bodies of dead women begin turning up in Miami, all of whom bear a striking resemblance to Jackie. Dexter is assigned to protect Jackie in her hotel room. The "Dark Passenger" eventually compels Dexter to pursue the lead suspect, an obsessive fan of Jackie's.While working the latest murder, Dexter notices a man fitting the description of Jackie's stalker watching the scene from a kayak. Stealing away to his boat, Dexter slips alongside him and makes the kill. Dexter initially assumes that Jackie is safe, only for her assistant Kathy to be murdered in the room below hers. Despite seemingly fitting the pattern of the earlier murders, Dexter notices several errors. That night, Dexter and Jackie start a brief but intense affair. Dexter thinks he may have finally fallen in love with Jackie, and considers leaving his wife Rita and their children, alienating Deborah on telling her as such.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sie_Po_Giok"title="Sie Po Giok">
Eleven-year-old Sie Po Giok has been orphaned for some months and now lives with his uncle, Sie Thian Bie, his uncle's wife, and their seven children at their home in Batavia (now Jakarta). He is sensitive, well-mannered, and polite, yet feels insecure as if he has become a burden to the middle-class family. Moreover, two of Thian Bie's sons—Po Houw and Po Soeij—hate Po Giok. However, Po Giok can usually confide in Thian Bie's eldest daughter, nine-year-old Kim Nio.One day, as Thian Bie is preparing to leave the city, he tells the children that someone has been stealing fruit from their orchard and that they should keep their eyes open. At night Po Giok sees a neighbourhood boy who sometimes works for them, 17-year-old Ho Kim Tjiang, stealing some guavas. When Po Giok attempts to accost Kim Tjiang, the bigger boy orders him to keep silent or else face Kim Tjiang's wrath; Po Giok promises not to tell anyone. When Thian Bie returns he is extremely distraught, but Po Giok remains silent. Ultimately, however, after several days Po Giok's conscience wins out and he tells his uncle about Kim Tjiang's deeds. Thian Bie then catches the boy and fires him. Kim Tjiang goes home and complains to his mother, who promises that they will have their revenge. Po Giok, meanwhile, is called a coward for not immediately exposing the perpetrator of the crime.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Drowned"title="Ben Drowned">
## "The Haunted Majora's Mask Cartridge".In September 2010, Jadusable is a college student who bought a suspicious Nintendo 64 cartridge labeled "Majora" (indicating it to be a copy of "The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask") by a disconcerting old man at a garage sale, with the save data of former owner "Ben" still on it. As Jadusable plays the game, little inconsistencies begin to pop up, turning to outright glitches, leading Jadusable to go to the online site 4chan to post about his playing of the game as it unfolds. Playing as Link, Jadusable attempts different ways to modify the game out of curiosity. It reaches the point where he tries the day four glitch, a well-known glitch in the "Majora's Mask" community where you skip the third day's ending with the ability to explore the in-game world as depicted in the credits section. Causing the day four glitch breaks the normality of the game and Jadusable soon finds himself alone in Clock Town with all of the inhabitants gone, unable to advance the game by turning back time, while endlessly hearing the laugh of the Happy Mask Salesman. In an attempt to achieve a "Game Over" and return to the main menu, Jadusable forces Link to drown in a pond; when he does, Link clutches his head, screaming as in a mask animation, with the screen flashing to depict the Happy Mask Salesman, smiling and laughing. The game continues, and the "Song of healing" plays in reverse; a statue of Link is summoned, its face locked in an unblinking stare. The statue follows Jadusable's character, moving just outside of the camera's perspective, throughout the town. Jadusable tries to escape it, but nothing works. In desperation, Jadusable turns the camera to face the statue directly. After a while, the screen flashes back to the Happy Mask Salesman and Link, only the latter also turns this time. The Salesman, the statue, and Link all become locked in place, staring through the screen, directly at Jadusable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stitches_(book)"title="Stitches (book)">
The book is set in Detroit, Michigan, where Small spent his childhood. Small's family—on the surface a model of 1950's-style middle class contentment and success—was a tinderbox of closeted feelings and mental repression. As a young boy Small was plagued with reoccurring respiratory problems. His father was a radiologist who, following the practice of the day, through x-rays and radiation therapy exposed his son to massive doses of radiation. While still at a young age, a growth began to form on Small's neck. Years after the diagnosis, Small awoke from this supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute—one of his vocal cords had been removed along with the growth. He was fourteen, and had not been told that the radiation had given him cancer and was expected to die. From there things began to stack up as his parents' hidden distress and anger started to seep through in fits of sadness and rage directed towards him. When the world became too much for the extremely talented Small to handle, he would escape into his own world of sketches and drawings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Does"title="Love Does">
The book contains several anecdotes that he then ties into Christianity and how it relates to Goff and others. In each passage Goff relates several life lessons and how he believes that they can help the reader.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tjerita_Si_Tjonat"title="Tjerita Si Tjonat">
Thirteen-year-old Tjonat, the spoiled son of a village chief, is chased out of his hometown after he is caught stealing his father's expensive batik shirt. Having no money and only a single torn pair of pants, Tjonat kills an 8-year-old boy to steal his buffalo. With the help of his elder mentor, Gondit, Tjonat sells the buffalo at a distant market. However, Gondit is unwilling to give Tjonat his share of the money until they reach Batavia (now Jakarta). Suspicious, Tjonat prepares a sharpened bamboo tip. When Gondit tries to kill him, Tjonat stabs him in the stomach with the bamboo and steals all of his money. He then goes to Batavia on his own.Ten years have passed, and Tjonat has worked a variety of jobs under various names. However, he was often fired for stealing. Now he serves as a manservant for a rich Dutchman named Opmeijer. Using his charms, Tjonat woos Opmeijer's "njai" (concubine), Saipa, and convinces her to elope with him and take their master's possessions. The two make their way to Saipa's hometown and marry. However, theirs is an unhappy relationship and, after several years, Tjonat stops supporting his wife and returning home, instead choosing to spend his time as a robber. After asking for a divorce, Saipa prepares to marry a fellow villager. However, in a fit of rage Tjonat returns to their home and kills Saipa.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Leftovers_(novel)"title="The Leftovers (novel)">
Several years after a rapture-like event in which millions of people worldwide suddenly vanish without explanation, the citizens of Mapleton, Ohio are still struggling to cope with the massive loss and resulting culture shift. The story is told episodically, revolving around the four members of the Garvey family, who have each begun an unlikely relationship following the event.Kevin Garvey, the patriarch of the Garvey family, is a prominent local businessman enjoying early retirement during the event. Afterwards, he is compelled to run for mayor of Mapleton to replace the psychologically compromised incumbent. Kevin stresses the importance of returning to normality as a way for the survivors to cope through initiatives like survivors' mixers and adult recreation leagues. The other major policy of his tenure in office is an effort to ease tension between the town and the Guilty Remnant (GR), an ascetic religious group that aims to provoke people into remembering the losses of the event and how meaningless life is. Following a violent conflict between police and the GR, Kevin has taken a hands off approach to their existence, preferring to ignore them entirely.Kevin's wife leaves him to join the Guilty Remnant and he struggles to balance raising his daughter actively with respecting her privacy while she deals with the event and the breaking up of the Garvey family. He also finds he is unable to sustain new relationships with women, making a few failed attempts. Kevin develops a relationship with Nora Durst, a woman who has become quasi famous in Mapleton for losing her husband and both children in the event. Nora suffers a major depressive episode following the loss of her family, obsessively watching her children's favorite TV show, avoiding the holidays, and riding her bike for hours at a time. Nora is dealt a further blow when the town pastor, who has become a muckraking amateur journalist to reconcile how the event may have invalidated his own beliefs, publishes a tract that reveals Nora's husband had been carrying on an affair with her children's much younger preschool teacher.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stories_We_Could_Tell_(novel)"title="Stories We Could Tell (novel)">
The three main characters work at a music paper called "The Paper" and in the one night the story takes place they all grow up in one way or another. Terry Warboys returns from an interview with veteran musician Dag Wood in Berlin who is coming for a visit to London to meet Terry and his girlfriend Misty. She disappears with Dag Wood for the night and because of that Terry does lots of drugs, sleeps with another woman and wants to kill himself. In the end it turns out that Misty and Dag just talked and Misty is pregnant from Terry. They are engaged at the end of the novel. Ray Keeley is a young music lover who does not like the new punk music, but sticks to 1960s music. After the editor tell him that his only chance to keep his job on "The Paper" is to find and interview his idol John Lennon, who is in town for one night he starts searching for him, falls in love with a woman and in the end finds Lennon after a long, sleepless night. The interview turns out great and he can keep his job. The experience of the Battle of Lewisham the week before have made a huge impact on promising student turned squat resident Leon Peck. His political idealism, he is the editor of left-wing mag "Red Mist", leads to insulting reviews which eventually get him into trouble with the Dagenham Dogs, a gang of skinhead thugs. To escape them he runs into a disco to hide and meets the girl of his dreams. They spend the night together in his squat which gets shut down this very night. After running away he writes an article about a concert he was supposed to be at. In the end it turns out the concert did not take place and Leon loses his job. He moves back in with his parents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Business_as_Usual"title="The End of Business as Usual">
"The End of Business as Usual" explores how the relentless assault of technology, including social, mobile, and real time web, has changed the dynamic of business and consumer. Solis believes the 24-hour personal broadcasting of today's consumer has given rise to an "egosystem." He examines how influential businesses find success inside this egosystem and its interconnected customers, or what he labels "connected consumers." Solis also explores the concept of "digital darwinism," the evolution of consumer behavior when society and technology evolve faster than one's ability to adapt.The book outlines how to reach connected consumers through unique and indirect methods, what Solis calls "the migration from a rigid business to that of an adaptive business." Chapter titles include:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Insider_(Rao_novel)"title="The Insider (Rao novel)">
The novel is set in the fictional State of Afrozabad, which is modeled on the Indian city of Hyderabad, the capital of the state of the then Andhra Pradesh and present Telangana and follows the political career of its protagonist Anand a naive idealist who goes on to become the prime minister of the nation. Much of the story corresponds closely to Rao's own experiences and political career albeit fictionalised. Anand begins his political career by rebelling against Afrozabad's tyrannical ruler. As he rises within the political party of which he is a member, Anand is drawn into the tussle between Chief Minister Mahendranath, a character modeled on Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, and his political rival Chaudhury, who is based on Kasu Brahmananda Reddy. As Chaudhary and his partner Shekhar successfully replace Mahendranath with Chaudhury as Chief Minister, Anand is made a minister under Chaudhary.While serving as minister, Anand has a steamy affair with another legislator, Aruna whose character is said to have been based on the three-time Congress MP Lakshmikanthamma. Described as "the most convincing of the characters" and "Anand's only weakness besides his addiction to Congress politics", the two eventually break up. In the meanwhile power in Delhi shifts from Nehru to Indira Gandhi and Anand becomes her unwavering loyalist. Under her, Chaudhury resigns and Anand becomes the first high command "nominated Chief Minister" of Afrozabad. When he tries however to pilot a bill on land reforms through the legislature, the inability to do so being the original cause for Chaudhury's replacement, he encounters a strong landlord lobby and is moved out of the state by Indira Gandhi to undertake party work.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculated_Risk_(novel)"title="Calculated Risk (novel)">
Phil Calland is a brilliant scientist working in a bleak dystopian 24th Century Britain. In a recent nuclear war, London was left largely in radioactive ruins, survivors living huddled in miserable huts. Britain – like other nations worldwide – is ruled by a harsh military dictatorship. Resumption of nuclear warfare seems just a matter of time, and humanity might not survive the second round.Under such circumstances, Calland seeks the only available escape for himself and his girlfriend Kay – an escape backwards, four hundred years into the past. Their 24th-century bodies would die, but they would have new bodies in the less harsh environment of mid-20th Century Britain, and could start new lives there. Considering the alternative, the inherent "calculated risk" seems well worth taking.Desperate to escape, and born of a harsh and ruthless time, Calland does not pause to consider the moral implications of his plan involving the destruction of the original personalities inhabiting two 20th-century brains and bodies – in effect, a double murder.Calland's equipment works as intended, he and Kay are sent back to the 20th century, and into bodies of the correct gender. Calland finds himself in the body of a successful young man, with an attractive fiancee which he is soon to marry. But going to the rendezvous with Kay at Trafalgar Square, he is shocked to discover the flaw in his plan – Kay's personality had been displaced into the body of an old, ill woman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stretch_(novel)"title="The Stretch (novel)">
Career criminal Terry Greene is sentenced to life in prison for the murder of low-level drug dealer Preston Snow. Greene, who claims to be innocent, wants his estranged wife, Samantha “Sam” Greene to take over his illegal activities, which include money counterfeiting and drug and alcohol trafficking. Terry had previously hidden his illegal activities from Sam. She believes him to be innocent, and testifies on his behalf at his trial. Sam and Terry have three children, one of whom, the teenaged Trisha, lives with Sam in London. After some initial hesitation, Sam agrees to do as her husband wishes, in order to replenish the family's weakened finances. With help from Terry's driver/bodyguard Andy McKinley, Sam quickly becomes a capable, respected crime boss. Detective Chief Inspector Frank Welch is out to nab Sam, who, along with her husband, insultingly refers to him as Raquel. After another prisoner, Sean Kelly, confesses to Snow's murder, Terry is released from prison. Sam is conflicted as to whether or not she can trust Terry after his years of infidelity and lying about his criminal activities. Despite her hesitations, she allows Terry to move back in. Meanwhile, their daughter, Laura, is being abused by her husband, Jonathan Nichols. Sam's threats to Jonathan do nothing to halt the abuse; later, Terry beats him up and threatens him with murder unless he leaves the country, which Nichols does.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Whisper"title="The Whisper">
After discovering that the world was not covered by catastrophic plague or poisonous yellow dust, telepathic twins Mika and Ellie realized that the government lied to the population. The governing elite wanted the people to believe this so that the rich could live in luxury on the southern side of the Wall while the most of the rest of the people starved in cramped conditions in the north.Mal Gorman, a man who has avoided death for many years, controls the north and has an army of mutated children. He plans to break down the Wall and start a war against the south, but the children realize that this will have disastrous consequences. The twins join his army to work against him from the inside.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomed_(novel)"title="Doomed (novel)">
"Doomed" follows Madison Spencer after she escapes from Hell, doomed to wander Earth in a state of purgatory for a year, haunting her parents. "Doomed" gives us a clearer view of Madison's childhood and explains why she was damned to Hell.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Dog_(novel)"title="Black Dog (novel)">
A teenager goes missing and her body is found by a retired miner, who is not completely forthcoming with the police. DC Ben Cooper, a local, must work with DC Diane Fry, who is new to the area, to solve the crime.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Queen_of_the_Tearling"title="The Queen of the Tearling">
Princess Kelsea Raleigh Glynn must defeat the powers of the Red Queen, who is out to destroy her. She must journey to the royal castle to claim her throne, and is accompanied only by the loyal Queen's Guard which is led Carroll and the mysterious Lazarus. Along the way she must earn the respect of her people and fix the broken shambles of the Kingdom of Tear.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_City_(novel)"title="Hollow City (novel)">
After fleeing in a boat from the hollowgasts, the peculiar children are caught up in a bad storm and need to find land. They land on a beach only to find that the wights are trying to track them down, so they flee into the forests of the mainland. With nowhere to run, the group wander aimlessly, until they find a statue from "The Tales of the Peculiar". There, they discover a time loop with the help of their book "The Tales of the Peculiar" and escape into it. Surprisingly, it is full of peculiar animals, who embrace and thank them for killing a hollow which had for a long time roamed in the time loop. After learning that Miss Wren, the ymbryne of this unique menagerie time loop, had flown to London to rescue her other fellow ymbrynes, the peculiar children leave in search of her, in hopes that she can turn Miss Peregrine back into a human, before her human self is lost forever. They travel with Gypsies whose leader has a peculiar son.While trying to board a train, they are ambushed by wights and held in a small shed at gunpoint until Hugh, who had managed to evade capture, used the bees in his stomach to save his friends. The group then continue on their journey and intercept the train to board, and find Miss Peregrine, whom they had accidentally left on the train in Bronwyn's trunk previously.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engage!"title="Engage!">
The first half of "Engage!" introduces social media entities such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, with chapters labeled "The New Media University: Social Media" 101, 201, 202, etc., all the way until "MBA Program—Second Year." Solis uses this university metaphor to help anyone at any place in their career start where they need to and go back and study the basics as necessary.The second half of "Engage!" explores how to start social media programs, how to sell the program once started, and how to measure return on investment (ROI). Solis also explores the murky separation of personal and professional interactions in social media. He argues that social media channels are being used to broadcast in a one-to-many format not unlike traditional format before it. He believes that the formula for social media is instead one-to-one-to many, which will yield many to many.Worksheets to assist planning and brand management are included.In all, "Engage!" is separated into six parts:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Begins_and_Ends_at_the_Kentucky_Club"title="Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club">
## "He Has Gone to Be with the Women".Juan Carlos, a Chicano writer, and Javier, a Mexican consulate chauffeur, meet and start a relationship, frequently meeting at Juan Carlos' home in Sunset Heights. They talk about literature and their families often. Javier sometimes cuts theirs visits short as he has to spend time with his terminally ill uncle at the nearby hospital. After his uncle dies, the two men become closer. After a few months, Juan Carlos asks Javier to move in with him, fearful Javier will become a victim of the violence in Juárez; Javier refuses. When Javier fails to show up for a date, Juan Carlos learns from friends that Javier has been kidnapped and has "disappeared." Juan Carlos spends months searching for any information but is ultimately unsuccessful. One day, he receives a call from mutual friends Magda and Sofia regarding a watch of Javier that was found before his disappearance. They tell him to end his search as Javier has "gone to be with the women," a reference to Javier's mother who suffered a terrible fate in the desert. Juan Carlos soon leaves, ending up at the Kentucky Club.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Dinner"title="After Dinner">
An acutely observed but tender-hearted account of relationships and behaviour in a suburban pub bistro on a Friday night.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftershocks_(play)"title="Aftershocks (play)">
A moving documentary play drawn from the traumatic recollections of members of the Newcastle Workers' Club, which was destroyed in the 1989 earthquake.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_No_More_Shall_We_Part"title="And No More Shall We Part">
The play is about Pam and Don; after a long and successful marriage, they are still very much in love. But Pam is ill and has to make a heartbreaking decision that will transform both their lives. She does so in the only way she knows how – quickly, pragmatically, and resolutely. Don behaves in the only way he knows how – struggling to keep up but desperate not to lose touch."And No More Shall We Part" follows Pam and Don’s halting, humorous and devastating attempt at the impossible – to begin to say goodbye to each other after a lifetime together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven_Black"title="Raven Black">
"Raven Black" is set in Shetland, an archipelago off the coast of Scotland. The novel opens with the death of a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl named Catherine Ross, whose body was discovered on the beach on New Year's Day by Fran Hunter, an English artist staying in Shetland. Local police inspector, Jimmy Perez, leads the investigation into the death. Perez is directed in the investigation by a team of detectives from Inverness, led by Detective Inspector Roy Taylor. Initial suspicion is aimed at Magnus Tait, a mentally-challenged man living in the vicinity. Magnus Tait had previously been questioned in an old case involving the eight-year old disappearance of Catriona Bruce, a six-year-old child who lived near his house and often visited him to play. Tait was known to have been fond of her, as she was similar in age to his younger sister, who had died of an illness. Although Tait was never convicted, he was shunned locally and believed to be involved when she disappeared. Suspicions are raised when it is discovered that Catherine Ross and her friend Sally Henry had visited Tait shortly before Catherine was murdered. Tait keeps an injured raven as a pet in his house.Catherine Ross' body was discovered by her neighbour, Fran Hunter. Fran, an English artist, had moved back to Shetland so that she could raise her young daughter Cassie with her ex-husband, Duncan Hunter, a Shetland businessman. Fran Hunter also finds out that Catherine Ross attended a party hosted by her ex-husband the night before she died, and reports this fact to Taylor and Perez. Despite local suspicions around Tate, Taylor and Perez interview a number of other people that they suspect of being involved. These include Catherine's friend Sally Henry, a lonely girl who was isolated and bullied before being befriended by Catherine; Duncan Hunter, who hosted the party that Catherine attended; Robert Isbister, a local playboy who is known to date younger women and reportedly spent time with Catherine at the party, and Catherine's male English teacher, who admits to being attracted to her and had kissed her a few months earlier after inviting her to his home on the pretext of offering her advice on reading.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Short_Cut"title="The Long Short Cut">
The story is a traditional thriller. The gentleman of the novel is called Michael Bliss. The novel describes him as attractive, captivating, intelligent, and adventurous. His beautiful blonde female partner is Corrine Lake. She is voluptuous, crafty, and bright. They’re a crafty team to match their wits and nerve against the business society. Bliss is a con man who witnesses a gang shooting in London with a certain businessman involved. Bliss with Miss Lake, being his partner in crime, contrives an ingenious plan to use what he has seen to con a businessman out of a large amount of money. They bribe the businessman out of two million pounds through a confidence trick by offering him a passage to France hidden in a box. Eventually they turn state’s evidence and turn over the businessman for his role in the murder. The businessman is out his money as Bliss and Miss Lake quietly slip away with his money.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beautiful_Words"title="Beautiful Words">
An epic chronicle of the refugee experience, "Beautiful Words" weaves together three very different stories of survival, told through the eyes of three children in different times and places. The outcome is heart-rending, humorous, and surprising by turns. From the horrors of Auschwitz Concentration Camp in the final days of World War II, to Taliban-ruled Kabul, to present day Australia, this enthralling play presents a rich tapestry of human experience, overlapping lives, and the bonds that unite generations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kill_Order"title="The Kill Order">
In the prologue, Thomas goes through the Swipe and is put in the Box, as he is one of the candidates who is needed inside. He is told that Teresa will get the Swipe as well. Thomas is then sent into the Maze with Teresa, setting the events of "The Maze Runner" in motion.Set thirteen years before the prologue and the events of "The Maze Runner", the main story of the novel begins in New York City, when the world is hit by catastrophic solar flares.Mark and Trina form an alliance with Alec, Lana, and others, who rescue them from a group of street urchins. The group flees to the fictional Lincoln Building to avoid an impending tsunami. The Tsunami ends up being made of searing hot water due to the solar flare, killing most of the survivors in New York and giving Mark PTSD. They camp out in the building for weeks until a yacht arrives, but the yacht's crew takes them hostage and kills one of them in order to persuade them to give up all the food in the Lincoln building. Alec manages to overcome their captors, and they take the yacht as their own and pilot the boat to the Appalachian Beaches.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Like_an_Autobiography"title="Something Like an Autobiography">
The book has 54 chapters that trace Kurosawa's early childhood through his teenage years, where he recollects memories of his schooldays, times spent with his elder brother, and the great Great Kantō earthquake and the destruction left in its aftermath.At the age of 25, shortly after his older brother Heigo committed suicide, Kurosawa responded to an advertisement for recruiting new assistant directors at the film studio Photo Chemical Laboratories, known as P.C.L. (which later became the major studio, Toho) and was subsequently accepted for the position with four others.During his five years as an assistant director, Kurosawa worked under numerous directors, but by far the most important figure in his development was Kajiro Yamamoto. Of his 24 films as A.D., he worked on 17 under Yamamoto. Yamamoto nurtured Kurosawa's talent, promoting him directly from third assistant director to chief assistant director after a year. Kurosawa's responsibilities increased, and he worked at tasks ranging from stage construction and film development to location scouting, script polishing, rehearsals, lighting, dubbing, editing and second-unit directing. In the last of Kurosawa's films as an assistant director, "Horse" (1941), Kurosawa took over most of the production, as Yamamoto was occupied with the shooting of another film.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propinquity_(novel)"title="Propinquity (novel)">
"Propinquity" begins in the 1970s at Geelong Grammar School, with central character and narrator Clive Lean and his friends surreptitiously smoking cigarettes, and contemplating their "maddening" girl-less existence, beside a small bay near the school. The friends end up together at Melbourne University, until Clive's wealthy father dies on the golf course - bequeathing him the family plastics business. Clive is not a success as a businessman, and within two years he is forced to sell "Plas-E-Quip" to a tramp in the Botanical Gardens, in a bid to evade back taxes. He flees the country.At Oxford University – where he enrolls to complete his medical degree – he falls in with a second group of friends, and on a trip to London meets Samantha "Sam" Goode, daughter of the Dean Of Westminster Abbey and a medieval scholar. As they draw closer to each other, Sam begins to drop hints about the Abbey's housing ancient secrets. She soon she reveals that beneath the floor in the Chapel of Henry VII lies the body of Berengaria of Navarre, widow of Richard Lionheart.An intrepid soul, Berengaria had been a follower of the Indian mystic Kabir, who had taught "gnosis" - the direct connection with the divine, which did away with religion, priests and even belief. On her return to London, Berengaria met the monks at Westminster, who had kept the flame of gnosis alive for twelve centuries. The Westminster monks had originally been initiated by Joseph of Arimathea, the provider of Jesus's tomb, who had travelled to Britain after the crucifixion. A reading of one of Berengaria's letters – entombed underground with her – leads Sam to the startling conclusion that the queen is not dead, but in a trance induced by a medieval herb.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermind_(novel)"title="Supermind (novel)">
As with many van Vogt works, the novel uses a psychological element, in this case Intelligence Quotient or IQ. The novel shows various alien races whose social roles within the galaxy are based upon their IQ. The story also includes the concept that at certain IQ levels various effects become manifest. For instance, at IQs in the thousands, individuals gain complete control over their body, allowing them to move at extreme speeds.The book has three distinct sections, corresponding to the three original stories.In the first section, two fugitive members of the Dreegh race arrive on Earth. They are vampires and set up an underground base where they plan to call on the other Dreegh to invade Earth and use humanity as food. The two are concerned that a famous doctor living on Europa, Ungard, is actually a member of the galactic civilization that is tasked with protecting lesser races like humanity. Using their mental powers, they take control of a reporter, Bill Leigh, and send him to track down the doctor and his daughter. During the mission, Leigh "awakes" to find he is actually a member of the Great Galactics, a race formerly believed to have left the material realm. He easily kills the Dreegh.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_of_the_Forest"title="Lady of the Forest">
The story begins in the spring of 1194 in the English county of Nottinghamshire. Lady Marian FitzWalter attends a festival held at Huntington Castle by the Earl of Huntington, who wishes to honour the return of his only surviving heir, Lord Robert of Locksley, from the Crusades. Marian seeks an audience with Robert to learn the manner of her father, Sir Hugh's, death the previous year, as Robert was a witness. The reserved, mentally scarred Robert reacts strongly, having flashbacks to Sir Hugh's violent murder at the hands of Saracens. He informs her that Hugh wished for Marian to marry William DeLacey, the harsh and scheming Sheriff of Nottingham, to her dismay. DeLacey knows naught of this, but intends to make her marry him anyway.Prince John arrives unexpectedly with plans: he states his wish to ally himself with the Earl by marrying Robert to his bastard daughter Joanna, and also approaches DeLacey about raising more taxes ostensibly to be sent to ransom John's brother, King Richard. In truth, John wishes to keep the revenue for himself and maintain his brother's imprisonment. Soon after, Marian is reluctantly manipulated into accompanying the Sheriff to attend a market at Nottingham Castle. There, she is kidnapped by the prisoner William "Scarlet" Scathlocke, an enraged man imprisoned for killing four Norman soldiers, and is taken into the depths of nearby Sherwood Forest. Lord Robert, who was taught how to navigate the massive forest as a youth, secretly tracks Scarlet and is able to secure Marian's release. While accompanying Marian back to her modest manor – Ravenskeep – Robert falls ill from a fever. Marian gradually wears down the mental wall he had built up in captivity by the Saracens, and after his recovery at Ravenskeep, they consummate their relationship soon after she refuses DeLacey's offer of marriage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_of_the_Glen"title="Lady of the Glen">
The novel is set amidst the background of the 1692 Massacre of Glencoe, which was ordered by King William III. Catriona of Clan Campbell, daughter of the Laird of Glenlyon, falls in love with Alasdair Og MacDonald, a member of a rival clan. Their love must endure the political machinations of King William and the Jacobites. In August 1691, William offers all Highland clans a pardon for their part in the Jacobite Uprising, as long as they took an oath of allegiance before 1 January 1692 in front of a magistrate. Alasdair struggles greatly to meet this deadline, as the message reached its recipients in mid-December, in difficult winter conditions, only a few weeks before the deadline. The tension of this political situation is mirrored by the fraught romance of Catriona and Alasdair.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Losing_Absalom"title="Losing Absalom">
In the novel, Absalom Goodman is dying from brain cancer in the hospital where his thoughts drift in and out of the past and present and to his two grown children's lives. Absalom's difficult relationship with his father led him to strive for his children to know gentleness, hard work, and respect but he worries that they have lost sight of these values. His son, Sonny, has moved far away from home and works in white corporate America while his daughter, Rainy, still lives in the family's first home with her boyfriend, aspiring to become a singer and helping her boyfriend deal drugs meanwhile. The novel is the story of this family and their hope in the midst of struggles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_Two_Waves"title="Between Two Waves">
Daniel - a climatologist and advisor to the government - loses a lifetime of research in a flood. When Fiona tells Daniel they’re about to start a family, Daniel must choose between what he can predict and what he can't.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blabbermouth_(play)"title="Blabbermouth (play)">
The play concerns a young girl, Rowena, who moves to a new country town and school. Although Rowena can hear she is mute. Her widowed father has a penchant for satin cowboy shirts and embarrassing his daughter in public. This is a story about disability, friendship, fitting in, and how children and adults try to co-exist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Box_149"title="Black Box 149">
An account of the grounding of British Airways Flight 149 at Kuwait International Airport during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Opposing_Shore"title="The Opposing Shore">
A novel of waiting, it is set in an almost empty old fortress close to a sea which defines the ancestral border between the stagnant principality of Orsenna and the territory of its archenemy, the mysterious and elusive Farghestan. The two countries are officially at war although no fighting has taken place for decades, so that there is an uneasy, de facto peace.The main character, Aldo, is sent as an "observer" to the isolated fortress. Bored with the immobility and eerie silence, he longs for action and slowly becomes obsessed with the unseen border. Aldo starts entertaining the thought of crossing it, even if that leads to a resuming of hostilities and the possible collapse of his own civilisation, reasoning that destruction may be preferable to slow decadence.The novel ends when the "story" begins, i.e. when consequences of his actions start manifesting themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_señor_del_cero"title="El señor del cero">
José Ben Alvar Mozarabic lives in Córdoba, where he excelled in school and planned to one day teach. His particularly strong skill in mathematics earns him much praise, but also much envy from a fellow student named Ali Ben Solomon. Ali was especially jealous due to their religious differences, as Ali was Muslim and José was Christian. Two years have passed since the Caliph Al-Hakam proposed peace with the Catalan counties, however Ali and his father do whatever they can to keep José from being awarded a coveted prize for being the best student of the year. They lie and say that José had blasphemed Muhammad, which prompts José to flee to the Catalan where he can't receive the prize or do any serious studies. On his way to Catalonia José makes several friends, one of which is a young nun that can recite mathematical problems. He also meets Emma, the daughter of a man that fled an Arab land. In the end José marries Emma and they live happily in Navarre. The two also send a letter to José's father saying that they would like to go to Toledo and raise a family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_Edge_(novel)"title="Bleeding Edge (novel)">
The often surreal and dream-like plot of the novel opens on the first day of spring 2001, with Maxine Tarnow walking her two sons to school before going to work.Maxine, a former certified fraud examiner, is approached by Reg Despard regarding suspicious goings-on at hashslingrz, a computer security firm run by Gabriel Ice. She finds much of their financial numbers fail basic plausibility statistics, and notices large payments going to a now defunct website. She talks to an ex-temp for that site, learns they have strong Arab connections and move large sums of money through hawala, and notices she is being tailed afterwards. She talks to Rocky Slagiatt, VC investor behind some of Gabriel's start-ups, who is nervous about where they may be going. Meanwhile, mysterious government heavyweight Nicholas Windust puts pressure on Maxine, asking her to pump her Israeli brother-in-law for information regarding Mossad hacking methods.Maxine's friend March Kelleher is suspicious about the activities of Gabriel Ice, her son-in-law, and asks Maxine to informally interview her daughter Tallis, Gabriel's wife. Tallis does admit to having concerns, but is unwilling to allow any auditing. Rocky introduces Maxine to Igor Dashkov, who asks her about Madoff Securities. A quick scan reveals to Maxine that the numbers are obviously too good to be true. Maxine pays a visit to Darklinear Solutions, another mystery vendor found associated with hashslingrz. She sees Tallis exiting the building, walking a bit; then someone else exiting, proceeding in the opposite direction, getting in a go-go mobile and picking up Tallis, so Maxine trails them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bondman_(novel)"title="The Bondman (novel)">
## The Book of Stephen Orry.An Icelandic fisherman, Stephen Orry, bears two sons, one to the governor's daughter in Reykjavík, another to the lowest of women on the Isle of Man. The Iceland-born son, Jason "the Red", is brought up in poverty and is left with his mother's dying wish for him to seek vengeance on his father who had brought them to that position. The Manx-born son, Michael "Sunlocks", is brought up by the Deputy Governor of the Isle of Man, alongside his daughter, Greeba, as Stephen could not support him or keep him from bad influences. When Michael is 19, Stephen returns and sends him to Iceland to make good his wrong to his wife there. As Michael sets sail from the Isle of Man, Jason arrives on a boat from Iceland. After surviving shipwreck in Ramsey bay, Jason is called upon to save Stephen Orry from his own boating accident off Maughold Head. However, Stephen dies of his injuries, but not before Jason comes to recognise him as his father and achieves a reconciliation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_Smash"title="Head Smash">
"Head Smash" is set in an alternate reality in the pre-apocalyptic city of Ares where the government has all but disappeared and ruthless criminal organizations vie for control of the streets. Of the gangs battling for control of the city, The Horde is the most brutal and merciless. Their red-skull wearing members patrol the streets, meting out punishment to any that oppose their authority. The leader, Maurice, with his coiffed hair and pressed suits is willing to go to any means necessary to solidify The Horde's hold on the city. He adopts a young violent orphan by the name of Smash and raises him up to be the perfect most callous soldier. Smash knows only the Horde, they are his family, and he is dutifully loyal. That is until one day, while on a mission for his masters, he's ambushed by his own brethren and left for dead. Were it not for the unexpected help of a mysterious hermit that rescues Smash from his death bed, he would never have survived. Now with the few friends he has left and the gift of a powerful serum that gives him super human strength, Smash sets out to repay his former comrades for their treachery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombshells_(play)"title="Bombshells (play)">
Six monologues made famous by the diva Caroline O'Connor, exposing six women balancing their inner and outer lives with humour and often desperate cunning. They range in age from a feisty teenager to a 64-year-old widow yearning for the unexpected.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolates_for_Breakfast"title="Chocolates for Breakfast">
The book opens with Courtney Farrell and her best friend Janet Parker at a New England boarding school, arguing over Courtney's attachment to her English teacher, Miss Rosen, whom Janet derides as "queer." Later the school pressures Miss Rosen to not talk to Courtney outside of class, and Courtney falls into a depression. She leaves school and joins her single mother, Sondra, in Hollywood. As Sondra struggles to find work as an actress, Courtney often has to take care of her and manage their situation. She also takes up with Sondra's friends, including Barry Cabot, a bisexual actor with whom she has an affair, though he breaks it off to return to his male lover.Courtney often expresses a wish that she were born a man, as in this conversation with her teacher Miss Rosen:&lt;poem&gt;"Don’t you think of yourself as a woman?” Miss Rosen said, amused."No, not really," Courtney said thoughtfully. "I don’t think the way they do. Men always tell me that I think like a man. It would be a lot simpler if I were a man. I guess. But maybe it wouldn’t be. .../... Since I can remember I’ve dreamt that I am a man. I hardly even notice now that in all my dreams I’m myself, but a man. I wonder why that is," she mused.&lt;/poem&gt;
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_of_the_Pool"title="Boss of the Pool">
Shelley is embarrassed when her mother starts working at the ‘retard farm’. Why can’t she get a decent job? At the pool, Ben is afraid of the water, but persists in hanging around the edge, and Tania in the wheelchair is organising a disco.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bougainville_Photoplay_Project"title="The Bougainville Photoplay Project">
Writer, academic and performer Paul Dwyer looks back at trips made by his father, Dr Allan Dwyer, a world-renowned orthopaedic surgeon, who visited Bougainville during the 1960s, healing crippled children. Family stories mesh with the larger narrative of Australian colonial influence in the years following.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Despite_the_Falling_Snow"title="Despite the Falling Snow">
After an early career amongst the political elite of Cold War Russia, Alexander Ivanov has lived in America for forty years and has managed to bury the tragic memories surrounding his charismatic late wife, Katya – or so he believes.For into his life come two women – one who will start to open up the heart he has protected for so long; another who is determined to uncover the truth about what really happened to Katya all those years ago. The novel’s journey back to the snowbound streets of post-Stalinist Moscow reveals a precarious, dangerous world of secrets and treachery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_of_Time"title="Harvest of Time">
The Doctor and the Master must make an uneasy alliance to overcome a common enemy, the Sild, which have been attacking the Earth and using the Master as their tool of conquest. With the Brigadier, UNIT, and others gradually forgetting who the Master is, the Doctor and the Master must defeat the Sild before the Master becomes unstitched from time and the Earth is overrun by the vicious Sild. The events of the novel take place at some point after The Dæmons and before The Sea Devils; settings include a North Sea oil rig and a distant planet in a very distant future.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smarakasilakal"title="Smarakasilakal">
"Smarakasilakal" is set in a predominantly Muslim North Malabar village. It is the story of a feudal lord Khan Bahadur Pookkoya Thangal of the rich Arakkal family who could build a world of his own in his village. The mosque and its cemetery weave a background of traditions and legends for the tale. Every character reflects some aspect of the social set up, at the same time lives as a person of individuality. Thangal stands head and shoulders above every other character with his unbounded generosity and insatiable lust. The empire built by this man crumbles as he is killed by one of the young men whose wives he has ravished. The steward of the house grows into a tyrant. Thangal's daughter Pookunjeebi is sacrificed at the altar of wealth; his adopted son Kunjali burning for justice seems to place his trust on revolution as the only remedy for the ills that afflict society.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curfewed_Night"title="Curfewed Night">
The book describes the author's personal experiences in the wake of the insurgency in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir in the 1990s. Despite his family's pleas, Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front militants attack an Indian military convoy close to their village. The Indian forces' reprisal is expected to be swift, and the family quickly grab their possessions and leave. In the end, they return home to find only a few bullets stuck in the walls, which Peer's grandfather pulls out with pliers.A few years later, Peer's father is targeted in an attack by Kashmiri militants due to the fact that he is an officer in the Jammu and Kashmir Administrative Service, under a government seen to be run by Delhi. He was, according to rumour, betrayed by a jealous rival at work.After becoming a journalist for an Indian newspaper, Peer reports on other wars far away from home but is inevitably drawn back to Kashmir.The second half of his book records his interviews with the victims of the army occupation. Another sinister development is the increasing prominence in the conflict of Pakistani-funded militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, which carry out suicide attacks in Kashmir, India and even in Pakistan itself against Sufi and Shia mosques. These groups also often have links with the Taliban.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnisakshi_(novel)"title="Agnisakshi (novel)">
Thethikutty (Devaki or Sumitarananda) is married to Unni Nambudiri of the well-known Brahmin family named Manampilly Illam. He is young, virtuous, and loving but too orthodox to be the husband of a woman with Thethikutty's views. Feeling frustrated, Thethikutty leaves him once and forever and reaches her paternal home. Unni lives the life of a piety, is branded as an eccentric and dies. Thethikutty, meanwhile, finds no peace anywhere. At last, in the Himalayas, she meets her old friend and Unni's half-sister, the sixty-year-old Mrs K.M.K. Nair (Thankam). She finds her unborn son in Mrs. Nair's son and hands over her wedding pendant to her daughter with the request to cherish it with due regard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurusagaram"title="Gurusagaram">
"Gurusagaram" differs in language, vision and characterisation from Vijayan's earlier works. It is on the immanence of Guru in the life of the seeker. Guru is everywhere and is manifested in everybody. The seeker partakes of the grace of the Guru as he happens for him unawares and unconditional. The central character Kunjunni is a journalist from Kerala, working in Delhi, going on an assignment to report the Bengal partition of 1971. He undergoes an excruciating experience both spiritually and physically to learn how to annihilate all forms of ego. During his search for The teacher, he encounters teachers from all spheres of life, each of them teaching him lessons that help him on the way, and he in turn becoming teacher to many of them.The beginning chapter gives an account of how his father becomes a teacher to him and the chain of teachers that begins from there continues till the last chapter where he discovers his ultimate guru. the range of teachers include his childhood friend Colonel Balakrishnan now Swami Nirmalanandan, Olga the Czech media person haunted by the aftermath of the war she had to endure, Haimavathi the girl whom he molested, Lalitha, the shorthand writer at his office, and many more characters from so diverse backgrounds. He's troubled by the separation from his wife Shivani, and is torn between her unwillingness to get back together and his love for their daughter Kalyani.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God's_Mischief"title="God's Mischief">
The story begins in 1950s, when the French, the colonial rulers were packing off from Mahé, a coastal town in North Malabar, after 230 years, leaving behind remnants of a cultural history. Those, who considered themselves as belonging to Francophone culture, jumped onto the first available vessel to France. And many of the older generation, orphaned by the departure of the French, struggle to eke out a living even as they remember their days of plenty under their foreign masters. Caught up in their suffering, Kumaran Vaidyar does everything he can to keep the people of his beloved Mayyazhi from starving, but entrusts his own children to the care of his wife, who is no more. Meanwhile, Father Alphonse waves his magic wand and changes pebbles into candy and waits for his good-looking son to return. Through all this, untroubled by the woes of the elders, Shivan, Shashi and Elsie spend an idyllic childhood in sunny, sleepy Mayyazhi. Until the day of reckoning catches up with them and they pay the price of growing up.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Imperative_Duty"title="An Imperative Duty">
The book is about Rhoda Aldgate, a young woman who discovers she is one-sixteenth African American, after living her whole life as a white person. Rhoda's father was Mrs. Meredith's brother, a white man, and Rhoda's mother was a southern woman of one-eighth black ancestry. In the nineteenth century, Rhoda's mother would have been referred to as an "octoroon."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayar"title="Kayar">
Set in Kuttanad, the novel traces the evolution of the central Travancore society from the early 19th century to the mid-twentieth century. It covers more than two centuries of Kerala life, encompassing six generations of characters. The historic transformation of man's relationship with land, as also between man and man, men and women and even man and God, forms the staple theme of "Kayar".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thottiyude_Makan"title="Thottiyude Makan">
In the novel "Thottiyude Makan", we witness the story of three generations of "thottis", cleaners of night soil. The first two generations struggle to attain individuality; they suffer and die unfulfilled, oppressed and ostracised, but their struggles enable Mohanan, the third-generation "thotti", to assert his individual dignity and lead his fellow untouchables to rise against oppression and prejudice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deep_Six_(novel)"title="The Deep Six (novel)">
During a gunnery drill aboard the light cruiser USS "Atlantis", on patrol west of the Aleutian Islands, a gun barrel of a dual 40mm mount explodes, killing one member of the gun crew and seriously injuring two others. The ship's gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander Dooley, is terrified by gunfire and accidentally breaks his leg trying to flee the vicinity after the explosion. The gun captain, Frenchy Shapiro, acts promptly to prevent further disaster by unloading the other gun. The officer in charge of the gun mount, Lieutenant (junior grade) Alec Austen, praises Shapiro in his report but avoids any hint of Dooley's cowardly behavior. The "Atlantis" returns to Adak to send the injured ashore and obtain a new gun barrel.An artist in civilian life, Austen is resentful of being manipulated by Captain Meredith, the skipper of the "Atlantis", into painting his portrait, since the favoritism inherent in the situation makes him perceived to be the captain's pet. At Adak the captain sends Austen ashore to pick up a new gun barrel for the 40mm but actually wants him to obtain molding for fashioning a frame for his portrait. This draws the resentment of both the ship's executive officer, jealous of Austen's access to the captain, and the officer of the deck, Ensign Mike Edge, a former enlisted man contemptuous of "trade school" reserve officers such as Austen. Austen succeeds in acquiring the picture frame but not the gun barrel because the Army general in command on Adak countermands the order for the barrel to make room on the cargo plane for a cow to provide himself with fresh milk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesavan's_Lamentations"title="Kesavan's Lamentations">
Written as a story within a story, the book recreates the internal and external chaos involved in the process of Kesavan's writing, as he pens his book, "Appukkuttan's Lamentations". The story deals with the life and death of Kesavan as well as with the life and obsessions of the protagonist of Kesavan's book, the boy called Appukkuttan, who deifies E. M. S. Namboodiripad, under whose portrait's gaze he slept and woke as a child. The narrative travels back and forth between Kesavan and Appukkuttan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ocean_at_the_End_of_the_Lane"title="The Ocean at the End of the Lane">
The book starts with the unnamed protagonist returning to his childhood hometown for a funeral. There he revisits the area in which he and his sister grew up and remembers a young girl named Lettie Hempstock, who had claimed that the pond behind her house was an ocean. He stops at the house where Lettie had lived with her mother and grandmother and encounters a member of her family and starts to remember forgotten incidents from the past.The main narrative starts as he recalls a time when an opal miner, who was living at the boy's home, steals the narrator's father's car and commits suicide in the back seat, having gambled away his friends' money; this death allows a supernatural being to gain access to the narrator's world, leaving money for people in unpleasant ways.After a coin becomes lodged in the narrator's throat overnight, choking him, he seeks his neighbour Lettie's help. She agrees to help, insisting that he accompany her on the travel necessary to find the spirit and bind it. Having been instructed never to let go of her hand, in a moment of surprise he does, and in that instant something lodges in his foot. Once home, he pulls what appears to be a worm out of his foot, but a piece is left inside him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baptism_of_Fire_(novel)"title="Baptism of Fire (novel)">
In the aftermath of the Thanedd incident, war is still raging between Nilfgaard and the Northern Kingdoms. The elf sorceress Francesca Findabair has been installed by Nilfgaardian Emperor Emhyr as client queen of Dol Blathanna. In exchange for her throne, however, she is obliged to withhold aid from the elven "Scoia'tael" commandos, who supported Nilfgaard's initial advance into the North, but now find themselves unsupported as the Northern Kingdoms retaliate.Geralt of Rivia recovers in Brokilon Forest under the care of the dryads, but is intent on leaving and searching for Ciri. The Dryads' queen introduces him to Milva, an expert archer who ranges outside the forest, guiding scattered bands of "Scoia'tael" to refuge in Brokilon. Despite not liking Geralt, she agrees to accompany him and his friend Dandelion.Along their journey they join a group of dwarves led by Zoltan Chivay, who are also shepherding refugees. They are also shadowed by Cahir, the "Black Rider" who featured prominently in Ciri's nightmares. Initially, the knight is captured by hawkers, and Geralt saves him, but wants nothing to do with him and leaves him to his own devices. Cahir continues to shadow the witcher and his entourage, and joins them, through Milva's intervention. Finally, the troupe is joined by Regis, a vampire with invaluable medical skills, who Geralt befriends. Cahir also reveals that both he and Geralt have been having the same prophetic dreams about Ciri, which is evidence that she is not in Nilfgaard, and the young woman produced by Emhyr is an imposter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_of_the_Rivers"title="The Lady of the Rivers">
Fourteen-year-old Jacquetta, whose noble family claims descendance from the water goddess Melusine, learns the secrets of her inherited powers from her great-aunt Jehanne, the Demoiselle of Luxembourg. Jacquetta befriends Joan of Arc, who is a prisoner at her uncle's castle, but later watches in horror as Joan is burned at the stake by the English-backed church. Three years later at age 17, Jacquetta is given in marriage to John, Duke of Bedford, the uncle to King Henry VI and the English regent in France. On their wedding night, however, the Duke explains that he wishes to keep her a virgin so that she may use the powers of her family in their purest form in his alchemical experiments seeking the ability to turn iron into gold. He later dies and leaves Jacquetta a wealthy widow at 20. She and the Duke's handsome squire Richard Woodville realize that they have fallen in love and become lovers. Returning to England, they marry in secret before the king can remarry her to someone else. Exiled from court in disgrace, Jacquetta and Richard soon have their first child, Elizabeth.Once Jacquetta and Richard are forgiven and allowed back to court, the pair become close companions of the young king Henry VI and his new French bride Margaret of Anjou, a kinswoman of Jacquetta's. Soon after their marriage, however, the royal couple become increasingly unpopular and there are several uprisings. They rely heavily on the advice of favourites and lavish wealth and titles on them, including Richard and Jacquetta. Margaret becomes frustrated with her husband and when she eventually becomes pregnant, it is strongly implied that the baby has actually been fathered by Edmund Beaufort, 2nd Duke of Somerset. After the King slips into a coma, Jacquetta is a constant companion to the pregnant Queen and remains by her side for the next few years. When the King eventually awakens, the country is plunged into civil war between Lancaster and York led by Richard of York.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_(novel)"title="Agnes (novel)">
The book takes place in Chicago and is told through the eyes of a narrator whose name is never given and begins with him announcing that Agnes is dead. He then recalls how he had first met Agnes at the Chicago Public Library in April, nine months prior to the novel's beginning. The two hit it off and eventually have sex, with Agnes telling him that it is her first time. Agnes and the narrator go through a series of everyday events, eventually culminating in her getting pregnant. He doesn't want the baby and suggests an abortion, much to Agnes's dismay. She leaves him and he's left heartbroken. The two eventually reunite after she grows ill and miscarries, but the loss takes an irreversible toll on their relationship. But one of the main themes in the novel is the story that Agnes wants the narrator to write. He starts off by writing their story so far: how they met, how they fell in love and so on. But when he reaches the present he keeps on writing. He decides what Agnes should wear, what they should eat and even what they should say. Agnes plays along at first, obeying everything that the narrator writes in 'their story'. But when Agnes tells the narrator that she's pregnant the reality and the narrator's story start to drift apart. The narrator actually tries to 'fix reality' in his writing. This ultimately leads to the end of the relationship, after which the narrator seems to have a mental breakdown while it's completely unclear what happens to Agnes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Underpants_and_the_Tyrannical_Retaliation_of_the_Turbo_Toilet_2000"title="Captain Underpants and the Tyrannical Retaliation of the Turbo Toilet 2000">
Melvin (the tattletale meanie) made George, Harold, Crackers &amp; Sulu's eggs, and Captain Underpants travel back to the time before the events of the previous novel &amp; he explains why he has bought them back: The kickball from the fifth novel finally hit Uranus, reviving the Turbo Toilet 2000. After he remembers what happened to his fallen allies, he plans to retaliate and builds a rocket scooter from the Robo-Plunger. In the original universe, he disrupted one of Melvin's experiments, prompting Melvin to try and shush him. Angered, a chase ensued until Melvin found one of Mr. Krupp's clipped-off toenails and extracted it into DNA. He ended up defeating the Turbo Toilet 2000, but soon, people start interrupting his experiments over trivial things and after a year, Melvin found Sulu's signal in the future and used the Robo-Squid suit to take George and Harold back home, before he leaves, he warns them of bad to come.After turning Captain Underpants back into Mr. Krupp, the boys try to nap as they haven't slept in 30 hours. Unfortunately, it turns out that while running from Tippy Tinkletrousers in Book 10, they ended up missing a full school day, and they tried to explain everything to their parents but they didn't believe them, and as a punishment, they are forced to do five hours of yard work. Upon finishing, George then realizes they have a test day tomorrow, prompting them to stay up all night to study. In the morning, they fall asleep in their treehouse, causing them to miss their tests. The next day, Mr. Krupp gleefully reveals that this was actually "Super Secret Test Day" and that the boys got all zeroes on their tests. He also reveals that makeup tests are prohibited and the final exams have been canceled, meaning final grades have already been calculated; while George barely gets a passing grade, Harold fails, causing him to repeat the fourth grade, and separating the two boys in school, much to the glee of the teachers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taranauts"title="Taranauts">
All the action in the Taranauts books takes place in Mithya, a universe comprising the eight worlds of Shyn, Dazl, Lustr, Glo, Syntilla, Shimr, Sparkl and Glytr. Mithya's worlds are sustained by the cool multicoloured light of the 32 stars that make up Tara, Mithya's supersun. All eight worlds bob around in the endless ocean of Dariya, around the bad-tempered volcano, Kay Laas.The story opens with Mithya is in the grip of the Great Crisis. The 32 stars of Tara have been captured by master villain Shaap Azur, twin brother of Shoon Ya, the brave, wise Emperaza of Mithya, and Mithya has been plunged into darkness. The only way to release the stars is to crack the 32 riddles that have been hidden in the eight worlds, within a certain timeframe.Enter the Taranauts – sweet-faced Zvala, athletic Zarpa, and animal magnet Tufan – all three personally handpicked as Mithya's champions by the Emperaza Shoon Ya and his powerful and fiercely loyal female lieutenant, Shuk Tee. Together, the Taranauts are a formidable team. Their mission: to travel to each of the eight worlds of Mithya in turn, where they will attempt to locate, retrieve and crack the hidden riddles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitterblue_(novel)"title="Bitterblue (novel)">
Eight years after the events of "Graceling", Bitterblue, now eighteen, is Queen of Monsea. She is determined to restore peace and justice to her land, and rebuild the kingdom left in ruins by her father, King Leck. Her advisors Darby, Rood, Runnemood, and Thiel seem to be keeping her in the dark, and want her to act as a figurehead. And so, Bitterblue disguises herself as a servant and begins a truth-seeking campaign in the city. She stops at a tavern, which she learns is a story-room, where she hears stories about her kingdom and history. She meets the young thieves Teddy and Sapphire (Saf), who is also a Graceling, but oddly, does not know what his grace is. She discovers that the two young men and their cohorts are involved in an underground movement to educate the kingdom's people. Unaware of her true identity, they nickname Bitterblue "Sparks".As the politics around her get more complex, Bitterblue discovers new disturbing information about her father, the information he destroyed, and that her advisors are former healers. Lord Danzhol tried to kidnap Bitterblue, and she kills him in self-defense. Her cousin Po, a blind Graceling and Katsa's romantic partner, arrives to help her. Saf tells her that he only steals things formerly stolen by Leck. Teddy is stabbed, and later his family's printshop is burned down. All these events are somehow connected, but the connection is elusive. Hava, who unintentionally helped in Bitterblue's attempted kidnaping, is a Graceling with a talent for disguise. She helps Saf and Bitterblue evade whoever is trying to kill them. Bitterblue realizes that she has romantic feelings for Saf.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_Behavior"title="Flight Behavior">
Dellarobia Turnbow is a 28-year-old discontented housewife living with her poor family on a farm in Appalachia. On a hike to begin an affair with a telephone repairman, Turnbow finds millions of monarch butterflies in the valley behind her home.As the news of her discovery spreads, university professor Ovid Byron arrives to study the monarchs, and warns that although they are beautiful, they are a disturbing symptom of global climate change, displaced from their established winter habitat in Mexico, and that they may not survive the harsh Tennessee winter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspian_Rain"title="Caspian Rain">
The novel takes place in Iran in the decade before the Islamic Revolution and follows 12-year-old Yaas, who is born into an upper-class Muslim/Jewish family. As the country heads towards chaos, Yaas finds herself trying to navigate the complicated world of Iranian society, coming to terms with her fragmenting family, and dealing with the possibility of going deaf, the result of a genetic illness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo's_Calling"title="The Cuckoo's Calling">
Disabled Afghan War veteran and struggling private investigator Cormoran Strike is approached by John Bristow, the adoptive brother of Strike's childhood schoolmate Charlie. Bristow believes his supermodel sister Lula Landry, whom his parents adopted after Charlie died, did not jump to her death three months earlier and wants Strike to investigate further. Although initially unconvinced, Strike takes on the case due to his need for money to repay a loan that he had been given by his biological father, rock star Johnny Rokeby, because Rokeby's lawyer is demanding repayment. As the investigation commences, Strike meets Robin Ellacott, who has been assigned by a temp agency to act as his secretary, and hires her for a week despite his lack of funds. Robin, who has just become engaged to long-time boyfriend Matthew, turns out to be much more competent than Strike expected, prompting him to extend her stay.The two set about interviewing Lula's friends and family members, as well as her personal driver, the doorman at her Mayfair flat, and a fashion designer who affectionately called her "Cuckoo". With each recollection of Lula and the day of her death, Strike gradually suspects the circumstances of her death are murkier than he initially imagined. His suspicions are confirmed after interviewing Lula's downstairs neighbour Tansy Bestigui, who told police that she heard Lula fighting with a man shortly before her death. Although the police had dismissed Tansy's statement because she could not have heard a fight through her flat's triple glazed windows, Strike deduces that she had been locked out on the balcony by her husband following a heated argument over her cocaine use and, after telling him what she saw, had been threatened into lying that she was inside when she heard the argument.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Signal_and_the_Noise"title="The Signal and the Noise">
The book emphasizes Silver's skill, which is the practical art of mathematical model building using probability and statistics. Silver takes a big-picture approach to using statistical tools, combining sources of unique data (e.g., timing a minor league ball player's fastball using a radar gun), with historical data and principles of sound statistical analysis, many of which are violated by many pollsters and pundits who nonetheless have important media roles.The book includes richly detailed case studies from baseball, elections, climate change, the financial crash, poker, and weather forecasting. These different topics illustrate different statistical principles. For example, weather forecasting is used to introduce the idea of "calibration," or how well weather forecasts fit actual weather outcomes. There is much on the need for improved expressions of uncertainty in all statistical statements, reflecting ranges of probable outcomes and not just single "point estimates" like averages.Silver would like to see the media move away from vague terminology like "Obama has an edge in Ohio" or "Florida still a toss-up state" to probability statements, like "the probability of Obama winning the electoral college is 83%, while the expected fraction won by him of the popular vote is now 50.1% with an error range of ±2%". Such statements give odds on outcomes, including a 17% chance of Romney winning the electoral college. The shares of the popular vote similarly are ranges including outcomes in which Romney gets the most votes. What is highly probable is that the voting shares are in these ranges, but not whose share is highest; that's another probability question with closer odds. From such information, it's up to the consumer of such statements to use that information as best they can in dealing with an uncertain future in an age of information overload. That last idea frames Silver's entire narrative and motivates his pedagogical mission.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Compound_(novel)"title="The Compound (novel)">
Eli Yanakakis is a teenage boy who has been living in an underground compound for the past 6 years since he was 9. His father, the exceedingly wealthy Rex Yanakakis, built it in anticipation of a world-shattering nuclear attack. The facility is fully furnished and contains everything from a movie theater to an extensive library. It even has the capability to raise livestock, enabling the Yanakakis family to maintain a stable food supply for at least fifteen years, the time it would take for conditions outside the compound to return to habitable levels. Yet Eli is desperately unhappy, as his twin brother Eddy and his grandmother aren't there with him, as they were left outside the compound when his family fled.As time passes in the compound, Eli's mother, Clea, gives birth to three children and is ready to give birth to another. The children are kept in a separate room and Eli avoids ever meeting them, knowing that his father plans on using them as "supplements" for the family's diet. Despite this, he's still horrified when he discovers that his father plans on cloning a human being in order to provide meat for the family. Eli eventually gives in to his mother and meets the supplements. He grows to care for them, even trying to persuade one of his other siblings to help save the supplements from their seemingly inevitable death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Child_Garden"title="The Child Garden">
In a future semitropical England cancer has been cured, but, as a result, the human lifespan has been halved and socialism has replaced capitalism. It is a world transformed by global warming and by advances in genetic engineering. Houses, machines, even spaceships are genetically-engineered life-forms.Milena, an actress, secretly has an immunity to the viruses routinely used to educate people. She attempts to use holograms to stage an opera based on Dante's "The Divine Comedy". The opera is written by her genetically modified friend Rolfa. As she works on the opera she encounters the ruling body of the world, called the Consensus, an artificial hive mind made up of the mental patterns of billions of children. Milena slowly discovers that this gestalt consciousness is lonely and afraid of dying and it looks to Milena as a form of salvation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camber_of_Culdi_(novel)"title="Camber of Culdi (novel)">
The novel is set in the land of Gwynedd, one of the fictional Eleven Kingdoms. Gwynedd itself is a medieval kingdom similar to the British Isles of the 10th century, with a powerful Holy Church (based on the Roman Catholic Church), and a feudal government ruled by a hereditary monarchy. The population of Gwynedd includes both humans and Deryni, a race of people with inherent psychic and magical abilities. The novel takes place eight decades after a foreign Deryni prince invaded Gwynedd and overthrew the human king. Though still a minority of the population, Deryni control the throne, the Church, and almost all positions of power throughout the realm, and many lead privileged lives at the expense of the human majority. However, a wave of human resentment in starting to surge throughout the kingdom, and a powerful Deryni lord embarks on a quest to restore the ancient line of Haldane kings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho_II_(novel)"title="Psycho II (novel)">
Norman Bates has spent the last two decades locked up in a mental asylum after the events in the first novel. His psychiatrist, Dr. Adam Claiborne, has spent the last two decades working with Norman and has hopes of one day becoming famous by curing him. His plans come crashing down after Norman strangles a visiting nun with her rosary beads, then steals her outfit and walks out. Norman gets in the van with the other visiting nun and kills her with a tire iron, then rapes her dead body. As he drives away, Norman spots a hitchhiker and picks him up with plans to kill him and use his body to fake his death.Later that night, the police find the van on fire with the charred remains of the nun and an unidentified man presumed to be Norman. Since this happened at the same time as a massive car pile up, they are exhausting their resources trying to identify the victims to notify their next of kin and can not get around to positively identifying Norman's remains.Meanwhile, across town, Sam and Lila Loomis are murdered by an assailant with a knife. Claiborne is convinced that Norman faked his death and proceeded to kill them, but the police are skeptical. As they are surveying the crime scene, they see a news article talking about a movie being made based on Norman's life. Claiborne is convinced that Norman is going to Hollywood to kill everybody involved in production, so he heads out there to stop him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_I_Walked_Out_One_Midsummer_Morning"title="As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning">
In 1934 Laurie Lee leaves his home in Gloucestershire for London. He visits Southampton and first tries his luck at playing his violin in the street. His apprenticeship proves profitable and he decides to move eastwards. He makes his way along the south coast, and then turns inland and heads north for London. There he meets his half-American girlfriend, Cleo, who is the daughter of an anarchist.Cleo's father finds him a job as a labourer and he rents a room, but has to move on as the room is taken over by a prostitute. He lives in London for almost a year as a member of a gang of wheelbarrow pushers. Once the building nears completion he knows that his time is up and decides to go to Spain because he knows the Spanish for "Will you please give me a glass of water?"He lands in Galicia in July 1935. Joining up with three young German musicians, he accompanies them around Vigo and then they split up outside Zamora. By August 1935 he reaches Toledo, where he has a meeting with the South African poet Roy Campbell and his family, whom he comes across while playing his violin. They invite him to stay in their house.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_River"title="The Secret River">
The early life of William Thornhill is one of Dickensian poverty, depredation and criminality.After a childhood of poverty and petty crime in the slums of London, William Thornhill is sentenced to death for stealing wood, however, in 1806 his sentence is commuted to transportation to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. With his wife Sal and children in tow, he arrives in a harsh land that feels at first like a death sentence. However, there is a way for the convicts to buy freedom and start afresh. Thornhill then gets sent to Sydney on a boat, by himself. After 9 months, Thornhill is finally able to reunite with his family in Australia. Sal becomes Thornhill's master, and Thornhill obtained a ticket of leave, one year later, after he demonstrated good behaviour. His son, Willie is already five years old, and Willie could not recognize his father, after being away from him for so long. Thornhill now also has another son, Richard, whom he called Dick.During his first night in this new land, Thornhill encounters an Aboriginal man and struggles to communicate with him. The following weeks, Thornhill went to work as a lighterman for Mr. King. Thornhill then brought the alcohol, which he got from Mr. King, back home, to set up his own bar, named the "Pickled Herring." Scabby Bill was a regular customer, who would entertain the customers, by dancing for money.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_in_the_Sea_of_Time"title="Island in the Sea of Time">
At 9:15 pm EST on March 17, 1998, a circular region, including the island of Nantucket and the United States Coast Guard cutter "Eagle" sailing nearby, are transported by an unknown phenomenon (called "The Event") back in time to the Bronze Age circa 1250s B.C. (corresponding to the late Heroic Age of the Trojan War).As the truth of what has happened sinks in, panic grips the island. Chief of Police Jared Cofflin is given emergency powers and begins organizing the people to help produce food for the island so they can feed themselves. Meanwhile, Captain Marian Alston takes the "Eagle" to Britain, with Classics historian Ian Arnstein and astronomer (and Lithuanian-speaking) Doreen Rosenthal as interpreters, where they trade Nantucket-made goods with the Iraiina for grain. (The Lithuanian language is very conservative among European languages and even in its modern version possesses identifiable links to proto-Indo-European.) The Iraiina, whose name translates as "noble ones", are a "Sun People" tribe that has been steadily invading Britain. As a gift, the Iraiina chief gives Marian a slave, Swindapa, a captured female "Earth People" warrior. Swindapa is freed and decides to stay with Marian. The "Eagle" leaves for Nantucket, but takes with them Isketerol, a wily Tartessian merchant who hopes to learn from the Americans. Ian Arnstein and Isketerol are able to communicate because both can speak versions of ancient Greek.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardboiled_&amp;_Hard_Luck"title="Hardboiled &amp; Hard Luck">
This book consists of two separate stories, making up the two parts of the book's title. The first story, "Hardboiled", is written from the perspective of a woman who is hiking alone, passes a strange shrine and ends up in a hotel with a couple of surreal incidents that follow. Her back story is filled in as a mixture of narrative and dream sequences. The second story, "Hard Luck", is about a woman whose sister Kuni is in a coma. Kuni's fiancé leaves her after the incident, but his brother continues to visit. It becomes apparent that he is interested in the protagonist of the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle's_Queen"title="Oracle's Queen">
Having been revealed as a girl in "Hidden Warrior", Tamír (previously Tobin), tries to rule her kingdom with the wizard Arkoniel at her side, and trying to hide the love she feels for Ki. But what she doesn't understand is why Brother, her dead demon brother, has come back with more power than before, stronger as she draws closer to a battle with Korin...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daja's_Book"title="Daja's Book">
Daja's Book, the third installment in the Circle of Magic quartet by Tamora Pierce, is a young adult fantasy novel. Daja Kisubo, an outcast to her people after she was the lone survivor of her family ship's wreck, and a smith mage in training, travels with her three friends and their teachers north of Emelan, to a valley plagued with drought and forest fires. While she and her friends are in Golden Ridge Valley, she creates a living metal vine. Polyam, wirok of Tenth Caravan Idaram, bids on the vine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_Doll_(novel)"title="Paper Doll (novel)">
The novel's hero is Spenser, a private investigator in Boston. Spenser, who served as an infantryman in the 1st Infantry Division during the Korean War and as a former State trooper, is hired by Boston aristocrat Loudon Tripp to investigate his wife's murder, and Spenser soon uncovers upper-class scandals and a corpse who might not be dead after all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_Wonder"title="Time of Wonder">
This book tells readers about a family vacation in Penobscot Bay, off Maine Island. The girl describes every day as a great adventure, and how amazed she is by the forces of nature. Her time on the island is spent living in the moment, exploring the rocks which magically transform into a castle. The girl continues to explore, going under the sea and finding wonderful worlds and animals that people often do not notice. The girl describes Maine Island as a magical place where the stars at night look like a pair of eyes watching her. The girl plays with her sister and her dog enjoying the fog of the mornings and the smell of grass, as well as the power of the sheer wind brought by a hurricane that destroys everything in its way. But even after the storm, everything returns to calm, and at the end of her time on the island, she is ready to return with her family to the big city and face the routine again. In the illustrations of the book by McCloskey, the girl is always happy, playing and exploring her surrounding on Maine Island.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_(novel)"title="The Secret (novel)">
Cassie and the Animorphs discover from Ax and Tobias that the Yeerks have set up a dummy logging company, called Dapsen Logging Company, in the woods. The Yeerks want to destroy the forest in order to find the "Andalite bandits," whom they believe to be living there. The Animorphs go to check it out, but are discovered, chased away, and shot at. Cassie and her father later find an injured skunk, that was hit by a Dracon beam in the fighting. Cassie's father finds that there is a good chance that the skunk had recently given birth, and Cassie is stricken with guilt.Cassie suggests to the others that they need to find out how the Yeerks got permission to cut trees in a National Forest. If they didn't have permission, the news media would bring attention to them, something they surely did not want. The group decides to go back and enter the logging camp to find this information. Tobias notices that there are termite tunnels in the building, and they decide to morph termites to get in. Jake causes a distraction by morphing into a wolf while the others (excluding Tobias) morph and enter the building. There is a brief episode where they are controlled by the termite queen's orders and lose control of themselves. Cassie kills the termite queen to free her friends and herself from the queen's control, but felt much guilt by it. The Animorphs get the information they need, disable the Yeerks' defenses, and escape unnoticed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visser_(novel)"title="Visser (novel)">
The story starts with Visser One, in the body of Marco's mother, Eva. She leaves the house, saying goodbye to her husband and Marco, and heads out to her sailing boat, intending to fake her death so she can leave Earth and become Visser One. She takes her boat out to the ocean, and has a Bug Fighter that is waiting to pick her up to ram the boat, capsizing it. She leaves Earth, and everyone simply assumes that she drowns.In the present day, Edriss is on trial for treason by the Council of Thirteen. She is still inside Eva, and is currently being held in the Yeerk Pool under the city where the Animorphs live. The Council of Thirteen informs Edriss of her charges, which are five charges of treason, four containing the death penalty. Visser Three, her longtime enemy, is her prosecutor and the one who brought the charges against her. The Council of Thirteen orders her to tell her story of the events.At the start of her story, Edriss was stationed on a moon in between the Hork-Bajir homeworld and the Taxxon homeworld. Her task is to search for a Class Five species, which is a species that is powerful, extremely abundant and easy to take over. While training a group of new recruits, she receives information that a Class Five species has been found. This particular species were humans. Two humans were kidnapped by the Skrit Na, and then rescued by Andalites and taken by them to the Taxxon homeworld. A Yeerk Sub-Visser saw them and reported them to Edriss (these events are detailed more in "The Andalite Chronicles"). Unfortunately, as soon as she receives this news, Edriss is informed she would be transferred to the Taxxon homeworld and be given a Taxxon host. Edriss, along with a fellow Yeerk named Essam 293, steal a Yeerk ship and go looking for the human home world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_at_War"title="Wizards at War">
The Lone Power, suspecting that a new threat is rising to its dark abilities, creates a surge of Dark Matter, called "the Pullulus", to eclipse the universe. Because of the way that the Pullulus affects the universe's structure, the Senior Wizards lose their wizardry and only wizards before adulthood are still able to fight. Ponch uses his tracking abilities to lead Nita, Kit, Ronan, and the wizardly tourists from Wizard's Holiday Filif and Sker'ret across the galaxy to try to find and activate an instrumentality that they are told is the only way to stop the Lone Power. Dairine and Roshaun take a trip back to the Motherboard from High Wizardry to consult the mobiles before joining the others. They find out that the 'weapon' is actually the Hesper, a version of the Lone Power who never fell.The group finds the world the Hesper is on. Unfortunately, the world is one that is 'lost', or devoted to everything the Lone Power represents. Despite this, Nita, Kit, and the others go down to the planet and start searching for the Hesper, after adopting disguises. With Ponch's help, they find the Hesper, and Nita starts teaching her concepts about 'self' and 'choice', concepts that she had no previous understanding of.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Camber"title="Saint Camber">
The novel is set in the land of Gwynedd, one of the fictional Eleven Kingdoms. Gwynedd itself is a medieval kingdom similar to the British Isles of the 10th century, with a powerful Holy Church (based on the Roman Catholic Church), and a feudal government ruled by a hereditary monarchy. The population of Gwynedd includes normal humans and Deryni, a race of people with inherent psychic and magical abilities. The novel begins six months after the conclusion of "Camber of Culdi" and is set around King Cinhil Haldane's efforts and those of his allies to secure the kingdom following the successful coup that overthrew the Deryni tyrant, King Imre Furstán-Festil. The former-priest-turned-king struggles with his conscience and his new responsibilities while Earl Camber MacRorie and his family engage in a dangerous and desperate plan to protect king and realm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_Day"title="Resurrection Day">
Set in the aftermath of a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States, the book chronicles the investigations of Carl Landry, a reporter for the "Boston Globe". As the story unfolds, Carl attempts to uncover the events leading up to the war and to run from those who would have the truth buried.The story begins in 1972, ten years after a nuclear war between the Americans and the Soviets, which was precipitated by the Cuban Missile Crisis.Washington, DC; New York City; Omaha; San Diego; Miami; and other US cities, principally those surrounding military bases, have been destroyed, damaged, or rendered uninhabitable by Soviet nuclear attacks. Philadelphia is now the capital of the United States. Although the Mexican-born US President George W. Romney is nominally in office, the country is effectively under martial law. The Soviets have been utterly devastated by American nuclear strikes. Cuba is an atomic ruin, with Spain responsible for relief efforts to aid what is left of the island's population.One consequence of the war is that the US embroilment in Vietnam is abruptly curtailed. US military personnel in South Vietnam and the rest of the world are withdrawn to stabilize the US in the aftermath of the Soviet missile and air strikes. The People's Republic of China has also collapsed, with numerous regional warlords waging a civil war against one another.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretties"title="Pretties">
The book begins with Tally, the main protagonist, as a Pretty debating what to wear to a bash. While attending the bash, at which she is to be voted into the "Crims" clique, she is followed by someone who appears to be a "Special", a member of Special Circumstances. She soon finds him and discovers that it is Croy, a Smokey she knew before she turned pretty. He tells her that he left a note for Tally in Valentino Mansion. Real Specials arrive, so he leaves and Tally tries to follow him by jumping off a balcony with Peris, who is wearing a bungee jacket. They bounce, though Tally is hit in the head hard enough to make her bleed, and is voted into the Crims because of her “bubbly” stunt.Tally returns to her carefree life as a Pretty. Her peace is disrupted when Zane, the leader of the Crims, asks her about David, whom she loved while she lived in the Smoke. Zane and Tally kiss and fall in love.Zane had once known Croy and had been determined to escape to the Smoke before his surgery. He regrets that he didn't go into the wilderness then. Zane is eager to accompany Tally to find the object Croy has hidden for her. They face strenuous, dangerous physical challenges in order to locate the item, which is accompanied by a letter from Tally to herself, written before she was turned pretty. The letter explains to her future self why she became a Pretty – to test two pills that will cure her from the foggy-headed life of a Pretty. Tally was afraid to take the pills alone, so she and Zane split them right before Special Circumstances arrive. They are fitted with cuffs similar to interface rings, but they can't come off.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specials_(novel)"title="Specials (novel)">
The Uglies series is set at least three centuries in the future, after current civilization was destroyed by a bacterium which de-established all petroleum products, causing widespread chaos. The survivors of this disaster established cities much smaller than those currently existing, each of which is independently governed with limited traveling. At the age of sixteen, each person undergoes an operation which boosts their immune system and reflexes while giving them well-proportioned, symmetrical faces based on an international standard, so that all pretties look nearly identical. They are also given brain lesions which make them peaceful and compliant. Before they receive the operation, children are referred to as "uglies", and are kept separate from their older friends. Later operations follow to show signs of increasing age while maintaining their beauty, and the lesions may be removed for pretties entering careers which require quick thinking. Pretties who work for Special Circumstances, a clique which ensures the city's security, are given an operation to make them look terrifying, become very strong and fast, and have incredibly fast reflexes. Specials also receive brain surgery to make them feel superior to others and have heightened feelings of rage and euphoria.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Love_Machine_(novel)"title="The Love Machine (novel)">
"The Love Machine" tells the story of ruthless, haunted Robin Stone and his life and career in the cut-throat world of 1960s network television. Handsome but promiscuous, the latter earning his nickname the Love Machine after he describes television with the same sobriquet, Robin is loved beyond all reason by three women: Amanda, the beautiful but doomed fashion model; Maggie, the beautiful but headstrong fellow journalist escaping a cruel society marriage; and Judith, the beautiful but aging wife of fourth-network founder Gregory Austin. As Robin rises and falls (both in and out of his bedroom), many people cross his path. They include Christie Lane, the vulgar but vulnerable comic/singer who becomes an unlikely TV variety star with an equally unlikely family-friendly image; Ethel Evans, the homely but athletic "celebrity fucker" who lusts for Robin but can't have him; Danton Miller, the dapper, desperate network executive who fears Robin and the exposure of his own private life; Austin, powerful and daring, but vulnerable in his own way; Jerry, an advertiser and sponsor who's equally fascinated and confused by Robin's emotionless lifestyle; Sergio, the loving but pragmatic companion to Robin's mother, the beautiful but ailing Kitty; Lisa, Robin's suspicious sister; Ike Ryan, a producer who befriends but is befuddled by Robin; Dip Nelson, a failed actor-turned-successful producer whose loyalty to Robin is sorely tested; Alfie Knight, a too-clever-by-half actor and scene maker; Cliff Davies, a network lawyer who mistrusts Robin and has his own agenda; and various prostitutes---with one of whom an unexpected encounter forces Robin to face his past and, in time, his future---fading actors, psychotherapists, and the like.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_and_Guts_in_High_School"title="Blood and Guts in High School">
"Blood and Guts in High School", while having a frequently disrupted and heavily surreal narrative, is the story of Janey Smith, a ten-year-old American girl living in Mérida, Mexico, who departs to the US to live on her own. She has an incestuous sexual relationship with her father, whom she treats as "boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father." They live together in Mexico until another woman begins to interest Janey's father, leading Janey to realize he hates her because she limits him by dominating his life, and he wants to have his own life. Her father agrees to let her go and puts her into a school in New York City. For a period of time her father sends her money, but later she begins to work at a hippie bakery and is appalled by the customers, whose behavior gradually spirals out of control. She has many sexual partners. She ends up pregnant twice and has two abortions; she seems to be furiously addicted to sex and does not care whom she sleeps with. In New York City she joins a gang, the Scorpions. One day, while the gang is driving frantically in a stolen car from the police, they are involved in a car crash: Janey is the only one who survives. Afterwards, she begins to live in the New York slums. Two thieves break into her apartment, kidnap her, and sell her into prostitution. She becomes the property of a Persian slave trader who keeps her locked up, trying to turn her out as a prostitute. We see Janey's dreams and visions, and read her journal entries and poems as the lines between reality and fiction begin to become blurred.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mask_of_Apollo"title="The Mask of Apollo">
Involved from early childhood in the theatre, the Athenian-born Nikeratos grows into a successful actor through his performances in tragedies. During his formative period, he meets the philosopher Plato and Dion, a respected politician from Syracuse and brother-in-law to the city's tyrannical ruler Dionysios the Elder. Nikeratos frequents Plato's Academy and grows to appreciate his wisdom, though he also discerns that Plato and Dion are somewhat more idealistic than practical in their views on humanity and government.Nikeratos sails for Syracuse as a member of a theatre troupe, but upon arrival receives the news that Dionysios, their patron, has just died. Nikeratos chooses to remain in Syracuse despite the dangerous political climate, and meets and makes a favourable impression upon the city's new ruler, Dionysios the Younger. While Dionysios is not the brutal tyrant his father was, he is dissolute and politically inept, and Dion invites Plato to serve as a teacher to Dionysios; the two hope to mould him into a philosopher-king ruling according to Platonic ideals.While Dionysios wants Plato's approval, he makes only half-hearted efforts to reform either his own luxurious lifestyle or the Syracusan government. Part of this is due to his own nature, but other factors also inhibit reform, such as Syracuse's large and oppressive mercenary force, who are necessary to counter Carthaginian aggression, and the Syracusan people themselves, who have become politically enfeebled under Dionysios the Elder's long rule. Dion is eventually exiled due to the machinations of his rival Philistos, a loyal but corrupt supporter of Dionysios.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_(novel)"title="Victory (novel)">
Axel Heyst, the novel's protagonist, was raised by his widowed father, a Swedish philosopher, in London, England, and never knew his mother. The atmosphere of Heyst's home, with his father's ruthless pursuit of truth and pessimistic view of humanity, warps Heyst's mind, and after his father dies, he leaves England and becomes a rootless wanderer. This eventually leads him to the Southeastern Asia, especially to what is now Indonesia, including Surabaya—a port in the then-Dutch colony of Java.Eventually, however, human feelings are awoken in Heyst by the plight of Captain Morrison, who faces the confiscation of his ship, and loss of his livelihood, because he cannot pay a fine levied by the Portuguese authorities. Heyst intervenes with a loan for a paltry sum, which establishes a relationship, and Heyst is unable to break this bond. This eventually leads to the establishment of The Tropical Belt Coal Company, of which Heyst becomes the manager, although he has no interest in this enterprise. Morrison subsequently visits England where he dies. Soon after the coal company goes bankrupt. Heyst however, remains at the site of the derelict coal mine, on the island of Samburan. There he lives the life of a hermit, with his Chinese servant, Wang.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Thumb_(novel)"title="Green Thumb (novel)">
Pudgy misanthropic boy genius Grady Jacobs wins a scholarship to participate in rainforest research and conservation. Upon discovering that our Grady is only thirteen, Dr. Carter, the scientist in charge, relegates him to the position of camp drudge. A healthier diet and menial labor transforms Grady both physically and emotionally, making him a better and more balanced boy.During the course of his duties, Grady somehow discovers a way to communicate with trees. This fantastic power eventually comes in handy when it is discovered that Dr. Carter's project would in fact lead to the destruction of the rainforest.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo's_Boys"title="Jo's Boys">
The book mostly follows the lives of Plumfield boys who were introduced in "Little Men", particularly Tommy, Emil, Demi, Nat, Dan, and Professor Bhaer and Jo's sons Rob and Teddy, although the others make frequent appearances as well, and Josie and Bess, two cousins of Demi and Daisy. The book takes place ten years after "Little Men." Dolly and George become college students dealing with the temptations of snobbery, arrogance, self-indulgence, and vanity. Tommy becomes a medical student to impress childhood sweetheart Nan, but after trying to win her favor by "accidentally" falling in love with and proposing to Dora, he finds he is happier with her and quits medicine to join his family's business. Rob and Ted fall into a scrape with Dan's dog that draws them closer in the end.Sections of "Jo's Boys" follow the travels of former students who have deep emotional ties to Plumfield and the Bhaers. Professor Bhaer's nephew Emil had become a sailor, encouraged by Mr. Bhaer, and works hard before being promoted and taking off on his first voyage as second mate, and gets a chance to shows his true strength when he is shipwrecked and the captain becomes badly injured, as he encourages and helps the sailors and the sick captain until they find refuge on a passing ship. Dan, after wandering as a sheep herder in Australia and such, and still having the ever-present admiration of Teddy, he seeks his fortune in the West, but when Dan ends up committing the one sin he and Jo always feared he would, though it was in defense of both self and a younger boy, Blair, when he kills a man who cheats Blair in gambling, Dan is sentenced to a year in prison with hard labor, and resists a prison escape and perseveres. Josie ends up discovering her actress hero and eventually wins her support and becomes a great actress herself, while Bess remains the "Princess" throughout, showing an unhealthy passion in art, but encouraged by her father, leaves her clay more often for the sun. Nat begins a musical career in Europe that takes him away from Daisy, only to fall in with a frivolous crowd and unintentionally leads a young woman on, whom he then does not marry, but makes things right when he narrowly avoids debt and lives on the right path for the rest of his time there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rescue_(Conrad_novel)"title="The Rescue (Conrad novel)">
Part I. The Man and the BrigYoung Tom Lingard is the owner and captain of a sailing ship, the Lightning which lies becalmed at night, somewhere in the Malayan archipelago. With his chief mate Shaw he discusses the problems that women can cause. Suddenly they are approached by a search party in a boat seeking help for a yacht which has become stranded on mudflats on a nearby island.Carter, the commander of the boat is interrogated in rather a hostile and suspicious manner which leaves him puzzled, but his boat is put in tow. When they reach the island Lingard handles his brig skilfully, but it transpires that he was heading for the island himself. He fires a warning shot into the interior, then joins the stricken yacht.Part II. The Shore of RefugeThe story backtracks to explain how Lingard first came into contact with the Wajo leader Hassim, and their instant bond of friendship. Lingard goes to visit Hassim, but is warned off by Jaffir, who reports that Hassim is now a fugitive in a civil war. But Lingard takes a long boat on shore to rescue him, and the sortie is a success.Lingard begins trading in arms and saving money to help Hassim in the re-conquest of Wajo. He is followed around by Jorgenson, an old sea-captain whose life has been ruined. When Lingard explains his plans to Jorgenson, the older man warns him against taking action, and offers his own life as an example of failure. But in the end, with no future prospects, he agrees to join in the venture, along with his prematurely aged native wife.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(Roberts_novel)"title="Salt (Roberts novel)">
Two communities of settlers from Earth set out for the planet of Salt, but once on the planet, which has minimal natural resources, the two colonies – the Senaar and the Als – descend into war over old tensions. The events of the novel are alternately narrated by Barlei, a military dictator beholden to the Senaar's strict hierarchy, and Petja, an Alsist who grows to resist the Senaar military campaign.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forests_of_Silence"title="The Forests of Silence">
The book opens with a boy called Jarred, a friend of Prince Endon. After the death of King Alton and his queen, Endon is proclaimed King in his father's place. To consummate this, a magical steel belt, the Belt of Deltora, is set around Endon's waist. The Belt recognizes Endon as Deltora's rightful king. Jarred goes to the library and learns that the evil Shadow Lord, a Sauron-like intelligence located in the Shadowlands, once tried to seize the land in which is the kingdom of Deltora. Because the people of those days were divided into seven tribes, the Shadow Army soon overwhelmed much of the land. Jarred learned that a blacksmith named Adin gathered the sacred talismans from each tribe and attached them to a chain of steel medallions. The people's trust in Adin, channeled through the gems, was powerful enough to drive back the Shadow Army into its own dark home, the Shadowlands. Adin later became king of the united land called Deltora; yet he never forgot that the Enemy was not destroyed. He therefore never let the Belt out of his sight. With every generation, the Belt was worn less and less, diminishing its effect. The kings and queens also let their power go to the administrative council, diminishing its power.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lake_of_Tears"title="The Lake of Tears">
In "The Forests of Silence", the topaz had been retrieved by Lief, Barda, and Jasmine. They continue on their way to the Lake of Tears, to retrieve the ruby. They learn that the land surrounding the Lake of Tears is controlled by the evil sorceress Thaegan, who has 13 monster children. As the companions travel through the countryside they rescue a man named Manus from the Shadow Lord's servants, Grey Guards. Manus is from the city of Raladin. 100 years ago, Thaegan put a spell on Raladin that caused them and all of their offspring to never be able to speak. Lief, Barda, and Jasmine also learn that Thaegan put a spell on the city of D'Or and turned it into the Lake of Tears. The companions, with Manus, escape from the Grey Guards only to be captured by Jin and Jod, two of Thaegan's children. They eventually defeat Jin and Jod and journey to the city of Raladin, where Manus hopes to find his people. Upon arrival, they find the city empty. Only when the Ralad people hear the companions, they come out of hiding. Lief, Barda, and Jasmine tell the Ralads that they must journey to the Lake of Tears, despite the Ralads pleas, but they do not tell them they are going in quest of one of the gems of the Belt of Deltora. Manus agrees to be their guide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Body_in_the_Bath_House"title="A Body in the Bath House">
When Marcus Didius Falco discovers a corpse hidden under the floor of his new bath house, he starts to track down the men responsible - Glaucus and Cotta. He also receives a commission from the Emperor Vespasian. A building project for the British Chieftain Togidubnus is running late and over-budget. The first phase of construction had gone smoothly - the first buildings on site were granaries, providing a supply base for the Roman army, constructed in the early part of the conquest. But progress had stalled on the stone-walled house and bath suite that would be Togidubnus's residence. Suspecting that the men he seeks have fled to Britain, Falco accepts the mission and travels there with his wife, two baby daughters, their nurse, and his two brothers-in-law Aelianus and Justinus.Falco arrives at Fishbourne and starts by investigating corrupt practices. However events quickly take a turn for the worse when the Chief Architect is found murdered in the bath-house of the British King. Falco takes over the project and investigates the killings.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enchanted_Boy"title="Enchanted Boy">
Richie is routinely physically abused by his father, a drunk who works in the construction industry. Richie adores his elder brother James and leads a life of petty crime and childhood dares with his friends. At the age of eight, he is molested in a cinema by a man who persuades him to come home with him. From this point, Richie regularly runs away from home and finds that this has the effect of stopping the abuse from his father. He experiments with a friend, Pip, whose prostitution excites and disgusts him in equal measure, and he begins to work as a rent boy. Richie is raped twice: once by an older cousin in the British Merchant Navy, and a second time by a pair of men. At fourteen, falls for Mike, but Mike prefers girls and so their relationship is long-lasting but doomed. The novel ends with Richie at age fifteen, considering moving to London to make his living as a rent boy.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Egg_Tree"title="The Egg Tree">
The book tells the story of two children named Katy and Carl. They are going to their grandmothers farm in Red Hills, Pennsylvania. This is the first time the children have the opportunity to spend Easter with their relatives from this part of the country, so they get to meet four of their cousins. The next morning the children wake up early to participate in the Easter egg hunt.Katy has trouble finding the eggs in this new and unexplored environment, so she decides to explore inside the house. In the attic looking around Katy finds six beautifully painted eggs that she takes to her grandmother immediately. The grandmother expresses her joy by saying, "Katy may not have found the most eggs, but she found the most beautiful eggs."Then the grandmother decides to decorate a tree with the eggs using them as an ornament. All the kids get inspired because of Katy's discovery and the grandmother's joy so they all decide to put special emphasis on their own decoration of the eggs. They decorated a large tree, and the next year one that was even larger.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaf_Al_Mostakbal"title="Malaf Al Mostakbal">
The events of the series happen in the not so distant future. Starting December 28, 2000 as stated vaguely in the very first issue, "The Death Ray" (أشعة الموت), which was published in 1984. In that era a fictional "Egyptian Scientific Intelligence Agency" (ESIA) (المخابرات العلمية المصرية) is protecting Egypt from numerous threats.The series begins when the main character, Nour El Deen Mahmoud (then a Lieutenant (ملازم)), is summoned by the High Commander of Scientific Intelligence for a secret mission to locate a newly developed death ray device which had been stolen from the agency. For this mission, Nour was assigned to head a team of scientists who would form the core team of main characters for the series: communications engineer Salwa, psychiatrist Ramzy, and radiation scientist Mahmoud.For some time, the team is focused solely on solving mysteries which require them to draw on both their policing and scientific skills. As the series progresses, Nour and Salwa get married (Issue #13: Lost Time (الزمن المفقود)). They have a daughter, Nashwa, who becomes the team's computer expert after her growth is artificially accelerated to adulthood as part of an alien weapons' test (Issue #63: The Inflamed Ocean (المحيط الملتهب)).A key milestone in the series takes place during a five-part storyline (Issues #76-80), in which the Earth is occupied by an alien warrior race from the planet Glorial (جلوريال). In the initial invasion (Issue #76: Invasion (الاحتلال)), Glorial's armies destroy nearly all of Earth's most significant military, scientific, and cultural assets and landmarks. Nour and his team lead an international resistance movement which, after a year-long campaign, liberates the Earth (Issue #80: Victory (النصر)).
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fallible_Fiend"title="The Fallible Fiend">
On the demonic Twelfth Plane, the demon Zdim Akh's son is drafted for a year's indentured servitude on the human Prime Plane, the demon society having an agreement to provide service to human sorcerers in return for supplies of iron, a raw material it desperately needs.Zdim is duly summoned to the Prime Plane by the sorcerer Dr. Maldivius of Novaria. There he strives to do his duty, but his demonic literal-mindedness hampers him. Assigned to protect the Sibylline Sapphire from any trespassers, he promptly eats Maldivius' apprentice Grax when the latter intrudes.Similar misadventures result in the disgusted Maldivius selling his contract, and the demon is passed from one master to another, from circus master Bagardo to the rich widow Roska of Ir, all the while doing his level best to figure out what the muddled humans truly wish of him.Against all odds he becomes a hero when he recruits aid for the city-state of Ir after it discounts intelligence of an imminent invasion by the cannibal Paaluans. Returning to his home plane early and with extra iron, he resolves never again to leave the comforts of the Twelfth Plane — until he realizes how dull it is compared with the picturesque insanity of the human realm...
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_the_Messenger_(novel)"title="Kill the Messenger (novel)">
Bike messenger Jace Damon attempts to live under the radar in Los Angeles with his younger brother (Tyler, who has an IQ of 168). The two are raised by their mother, who does her best to remain anonymous. When she falls ill Jace takes her to the hospital, making sure that he is not associated with her. The mother dies, and her children cannot claim her body. Instead, Jace takes his brother to find a new place, deciding that the Chinese community would be the best for them; eventually an elderly Chinese businesswoman (Madame Chen) takes a liking to the pair of boys and gives Jace a part-time job and a place to stay. He also takes a job as a bike messenger, since he can be paid in cash for it.One night, Jace accepts a delivery just as he is about to go off-duty; it is a pickup from the office of one of L.A.'s sleaziest defense attorneys, Lenny Lowell. He is not happy about the late delivery since it is a wet miserable night, but the dispatcher tells him that everyone else has gone off duty, and he is the only one available. Lowell is extremely (despite his reputation) nice to Jace, giving him a good tip. When Jace approaches the delivery address, he finds an empty lot which makes him nervous, so he decides to abort the delivery. Before he can get away, a large black car comes racing towards him to run him down. He barely survives the collision and is forced to abandon his bike. On foot, he is able to elude his pursuer, but loses his delivery bag (but retains the package). Jace returns to the scene of the collision and is relieved to discover that he will only have to replace the wheel. He returns to Lowell's office, only to find it crawling with police; he learns that Lowell has been murdered. Jace does not trust police, so he leaves the scene.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Christs_of_Ypsilanti"title="The Three Christs of Ypsilanti">
Rokeach got the idea from an article in "Harper's Magazine" describing two women who both believed they were the Virgin Mary. After being assigned as psychiatric hospital roommates, one of the women recovered from her delusion as a result of conversations with the roommate and was discharged. Rokeach was also influenced by Cesare Beccaria's essay "On Crimes and Punishments", concerning the subject of Simon Morin, who was claimed to have been potentially cured in a similar way. As a similar study of delusional belief systems, Rokeach brought together three men who each claimed to be Jesus Christ and confronted them with one another's conflicting claims, while encouraging them to interact personally as a support group. Rokeach also attempted to manipulate other aspects of their delusions by inventing messages from imaginary characters. He did not, as he had hoped, provoke any lessening of the patients' delusions, but did document a number of changes in their beliefs.While initially the three patients quarreled over who was holier and reached the point of physical altercation, they eventually each explained away the other two as being patients with a mental disability in a hospital, or dead and being operated by machines. The graduate students who worked with Rokeach on the project have been strongly critical of the morality of the project because of the amount of dishonesty and manipulation by Rokeach and the amount of distress experienced by the patients. Rokeach added a comment in the final revision of the book that, while the experiment did not cure any of the three Christs, "It did cure me of my godlike delusion that I could manipulate them out of their beliefs."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carved_Lions"title="The Carved Lions">
The story features the interaction between the children of the household and the carved lions featured, who come to life and take care of them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_De_Soto"title="Doctor De Soto">
The story is about Dr. De Soto, a mouse dentist who lives in a world of anthropomorphic animals. He and his wife, who serves as his assistant, work together to treat patients with as little pain as possible. Dr. De Soto uses different chairs, depending on the size of the animal, or simply has the patient sit on the floor, using a stepladder or with Mrs. De Soto guiding her husband with a system of pulleys for treating extra-large animals. They refuse to treat any animal who likes to eat mice.One day, a well-dressed fox with a toothache drops by and begs for treatment. Dr. De Soto feels pity for the fox and Mrs. De Soto suggests they risk it, so they admit the fox as a patient. They give the fox some anesthetic and proceed to treat the bad tooth. However, while under anesthesia, the fox unknowingly exclaims how he loves to eat mice (including with a dry, white wine). The De Sotos remove the bad tooth, and tell the fox to come back the next day to get a false tooth. On his way home, the fox notes that it is crass to try to eat the creature that had just relieved him of much pain, but still doesn't dismiss the idea. Later that night, Dr. and Mrs. De Soto, as she prepares the new tooth of gold, debate whether to readmit the fox. Dr. De Soto feels it was foolish to trust a fox, but Mrs. De Soto says she thinks the fox was reacting to the anesthetic in his comments. In the end Dr. De Soto vows, as his father taught him, to finish the job he started, but they formulate a plan to protect themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/26_Fairmount_Avenue"title="26 Fairmount Avenue">
The book deals with the early life of Tomie dePaola. He has just moved to a new house in Connecticut and the 1938 hurricane has just hit. Tomie expresses unhappiness for seeing "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" in the theatres.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_(novel)"title="The Pirate (novel)">
The arrival of the shipwrecked captain, Cleveland, spoils young Mordaunt's relationship with the Troil girls, and soon a bitter rivalry grows between the two men. Minna falls in love with Cleveland, not knowing his true profession. Brenda however is in love with Mordaunt. The pirates capture the Troils, but after an encounter with the frigate HMS "Halcyon", they are freed. Brenda and Mordaunt are reunited, and Minna and Clement parted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_of_lies_(novel)"title="Father of lies (novel)">
Eldon Fochs is a 38-year-old accountant and lay provost. He is happily married with four children. Feshtig works as a therapist in an Institute of Psychoanalysis funded and controlled by the church. Fochs is persuaded to go to Feshtig by his wife, who has a growing suspicion that her husband harbours dark secrets.Fochs slowly reveals the contents of his dreams and his "disturbing thoughts" about children to Feshtig. He reveals two dreams; one when he strangles and dismembers a girl and another of a 12-year-old boy. In the dream, the boy comes into his office and Fochs brutally sodomises him. He frightens the boy with threats and forces him to admit to having been molested by an uncle, something that never happened. Fochs claims that in his dream he was guided by God.In the chapters where Fochs is in the first person, he describes how he assaulted and murdered a 14-year-old girl. He also describes his ecclesiastical superior confronting him with allegations from two mothers that he has molested their boys. He denies the allegations, and his superiors choose to believe him.Feshtig meets with one of the mothers and starts to counsel her son Nathan Mears, and he gradually uncovers the extent of the damage that Fochs has done to the young boy. As the abuse allegations reach the media, the pressure on the church mounts, but it does everything to protect itself and its reputation, going as far as to excommunicate the two mothers. The pressure on Fochs from his wife is more difficult to answer as she presses him on what he was doing the night the girl was murdered. Eventually he rams his car into a tree, having surreptitiously unclipped his wife’s seat belt. She is thrown through the window and killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capable_of_Honor"title="Capable of Honor">
In the novel, Harley Hudson, the affable but inept vice president from "Advise and Consent", is now president and seeking a term of his own against a backdrop of Soviet-instigated war, as the Soviet Union backs rebel governments in Panama and in the fictitious African republic of Gorotoland. Hudson responds with U.S. troops in both countries, and the conflicts soon bog down. The election season soon turns on these foreign policy questions, with the media and others seeking a peace candidate — and finding it in the popular but weak-willed Governor Ted Jason of California. Having announced his candidacy late, Hudson announces an open contest for the vice presidential nomination, in which Secretary of State Orrin Knox, who supports Hudson's policies, opposes Jason. The media, who had supported Jason heavily when it looked like it would be a Knox-Jason race for the presidential nomination, continues its effort for a Jason victory by any means they can.At the convention in San Francisco, extreme elements of the Left and Right combine to support Jason, and there are several violent incidents, including one in which Knox's daughter-in-law is brutally attacked. When it becomes clear that the convention is split down the middle in fights over the platform, Jason challenges Hudson for the Majority Party's nomination (the novels never use the proper names "Republican" or "Democrat" but the descriptions of Majority Party corresponds strongly to the Democrats of the 1960s). The media, meantime, spins merrily away, filtering what the country is allowed to see and hear from San Francisco. Ceil Jason, the Governor's wife, leaves him when her husband's lack of principle and willingness to tolerate the violence sinks in to her. Hudson wins narrowly, and Jason expects the vice presidential nomination since he commands the support of almost half the convention. Hudson seems amenable, and places Jason on the dais as he makes his acceptance speech. Hudson humiliates Jason by making it clear that he considers Jason a panderer, and states he will accept Knox, and only Knox, as his running mate. The convention duly nominates Knox, but almost half its delegates walk out, to the pleasure of the media commentators, who predict a third-party convention from among the disaffected delegates.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preserve_and_Protect"title="Preserve and Protect">
After winning his party's nomination in "Capable of Honor", U.S. President Harley Hudson dies in a suspicious plane crash. William Abbott, the Speaker of the House, is reluctantly elevated to the presidency. The Majority Party immediately convenes its National Committee, torn between the supporters of California Governor Ted Jason and those of Secretary of State and former Illinois Senator Orrin Knox. Eventually Knox defeats Jason, but names Jason as his vice presidential nominee. At the conclusion of the novel, a gunman appears and opens fire on the two candidates and their wives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thy_Soul_Shall_Bear_Witness!"title="Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness!">
The novel is set in a small town in Sweden at the beginning of the 20th century. Edith, a young "Slum Sister" (social worker) in the service of the Salvation Army is on her death bed dying of "consumption" (tuberculosis). She requests that before she dies, she would like to again see David Holm, one of her charges. It becomes apparent that the two have a special relationship. A year earlier, he was the first patron of the newly opened social welfare house that Edith had founded. He also had infected her at the time with tuberculosis after she stayed up all night mending his torn and infected coat. Over the next year Edith wanted to help him, but he was a violent alcoholic and always cruelly rejected her. This only increased her resolve and Edith developed a deep love for David. Edith then learned David is married with children, but they had to leave home because David was so violent. Edith persuades David's wife to return home, but they are treated worse than ever by David. This makes Edith feel guilty, as David threatens to deliberately infect his children with TB. On her death bed, Edith now wants to try one last time to put things in order.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camber_the_Heretic"title="Camber the Heretic">
The novel is set in the land of Gwynedd, one of the fictional Eleven Kingdoms. Gwynedd itself is a medieval kingdom similar to the British Isles of the 9th century, with a powerful Holy Church (based on the Roman Catholic Church), and a feudal government ruled by a hereditary monarchy. The population of Gwynedd includes both humans and Deryni, a race of people with inherent psychic and magical abilities. The novel takes place in the early ninth century, beginning ten years after the conclusion of "Saint Camber". The plot of the novel centers on the desperate efforts of the Deryni to protect their futures from a rising tide of human anger and discrimination. As the health of aging King Cinhil Haldane begins to fail, a small group of powerful Deryni struggle to save their race from the deadly plots of Cinhil's ambitious nobles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peony_(novel)"title="Peony (novel)">
"Peony" is set in the 1850s in the city of Kaifeng, in the province of Henan, which was historically a center for Chinese Jews. The novel follows Peony, a Chinese bondmaid of the prominent Jewish family of Ezra ben Israel's, and shows through her eyes how the Jewish community was regarded in Kaifeng at a time when most of the Jews had come to think of themselves as Chinese. The novel contains a hidden love and shows the importance of duty, along with the challenges of life. This novel follows the guidelines of Buck's work: it is set in China, and it involves religion and an interracial couple (David and Kueilan).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bishop's_Heir"title="The Bishop's Heir">
The novel is set in the land of Gwynedd, one of the fictional Eleven Kingdoms. Gwynedd itself is a medieval kingdom similar to the British Isles of the 12th century, with a powerful Holy Church (based on the Roman Catholic Church), and a feudal government ruled by a hereditary monarchy. The population of Gwynedd includes both humans and Deryni, a race of people with inherent physic and magical abilities who have been brutally persecuted and suppressed for over two centuries. The novel begins over two years after the conclusion of "High Deryni", shortly after the seventeenth birthday of King Kelson Haldane. As a recurring political rivalry threatens to erupt into open rebellion, Kelson must face a dangerous combination of new and old foes who rise up against him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toyminator"title="The Toyminator">
Eddie Bear has been deposed as the mayor of Toy City and the toymaker has taken away his modifications. Jill has left Jack and he is now working in Nadine's Diner. One day, a drunk Eddie witnesses bright flashing lights and a copy of him appear in an alleyway. He attributes it to being drunk. Soon after, the toys in the toy city are dying. When touched, the toys crumble to dust. Jack and Eddie start investigating even though Jack doesn't plan on it. Their investigations end up getting them in trouble with Inspector Bellis who arrests them on trumped up charges but lets them go in return for them promising to solve the mystery.With the help of the Phantom of the Opera and a calculating pocket called Wallah that Jack steals from Tinto, Jack and Eddie discover that a pair of their doppelgängers are sucking the souls of the toys. They try to stop them in the opera but fail. While pursuing the doppelgangers by following their smell, Jack and Eddie come to the old and dead Toy Town. There they discover that the hiding place of the doppelgangers is Bill Winkle's old house. They get captured by a UFO (flying saucer) trying to get away from Bill's house and experiments are done on them by the aliens, including implanting implants up their bottoms.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_of_Souls_(book)"title="Bridge of Souls (book)">
Wyl Thirsk, former general of the Morgravian army and bearer of the curse known as Myrren's gift, is running out of time. Marriage between his beloved Queen Valentyna and his sworn enemy, the despotic King Celimus, is imminent; yet, despite the impending nuptials, war looms between the two nations, while the threat from the Mountain Kingdom grows stronger. Trapped in a body not his own, with his friends and supporters scattered throughout the realm, Wyl is as desperate to prevent the wedding as he is to end Myrren's "gift"—a magic that will cease only when he assumes the throne of Morgravia.Clinging to an ominous suggestion from his young friend Fynch, an increasingly powerful mage, Wyl must walk his most dangerous path yet—straight into the brutal clutches of Celimus in a desperate attempt to save his nation, his love, and himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrren's_Gift"title="Myrren's Gift">
All Wyl Thirsk ever wanted was for his family to be happy, to be loyal to his monarch, King Magnus, as his father was and, most importantly, to follow in the footsteps of his father, Fergys Thirsk. But change is in the wind after Magnus married a foreign woman who gave him a cruel but handsome son – Prince Celimus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitor's_Purse"title="Traitor's Purse">
Albert Campion wakes in hospital suffering from amnesia. He knows there is something vital he must do, but he cannot remember what it is – or even his own name. He finds himself on the run, suspected of attacking a policeman, as he tries to avert a catastrophe.The action takes place during the early years of the Second World War in the fictional town of Bridge in South West England, which is run by an ancient hereditary organisation, the Masters of Bridge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_(Star_Trek)"title="Ishmael (Star Trek)">
Spock travels back to the time and place of "Here Come the Brides", a 1968-70 ABC television series loosely based upon Asa Mercer's efforts to bring civilization to 1860s Seattle by importing the marriageable Mercer Girls from the war-ravaged East Coast of the United States. The show's premise was that eldest brother Jason Bolt bet his entire logging operation that he could persuade one hundred marriageable ladies to come to Seattle, and that all of them would be married or engaged within one year. Much of the dramatic and comic tension revolved around the efforts of their benefactor Aaron Stemple to thwart the deal and take control of the Bolts' holdings.Spock discovers a Klingon plot to destroy the Federation by killing Aaron Stemple before Stemple could thwart an attempted 19th-century alien invasion of Earth. During most of the story, Spock has lost his memory and is cared for by Stemple, who passes him off as his nephew "Ishmael" and helps him hide his alien origins. Spock identifies one of the women in the story as likely to be one of his ancestors (on his mother's side).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furies_of_Calderon"title="Furies of Calderon">
The story takes place in the Aleran Empire, which contains "crafters", people who can control the elements: water, air, earth, fire, wood, and metal, through a person's bond with an element's fury.A young woman named Amara travels with her mentor Fidelias as part of her graduation exercise. Amara is training to become one of the Cursori, messengers and spies for the First Lord of Alera, Gaius Sextus. They infiltrate a camp of mercenaries, when Amara is tricked by a watercrafter named Odiana and betrayed by Fidelias. Odiana is the lover of Aldrick ex Gladius, the greatest swordsman since Araris Valerian, a legendary swordsman who had been in the service of the Princeps of Alera, the First Lord's late son. Amara escapes and makes contact with First Lord Gaius using her aircraft. He instructs her to go to the city of Garrison.The story switches to a steadholt controlled by Bernard, a man who lost his wife and children and stays with his sister Isana, and their nephew Tavi who is furyless. Tavi finds that one of his sheep has gone missing. He and Bernard track the sheep when they are attacked by a Marat warrior. The Marat and the Alerans had fought a war before Tavi was born in which the Marat killed Gaius' son, Princeps Septimus. The Marat are a warrior people who form tribes based on bonds with different animals, for example horses. In the fight, Tavi and Bernard kill the warrior's war bird but not before Bernard is wounded. Tavi is running for help when a furystorm hits. While seeking shelter, he finds Amara and the two find the Princeps Memorial, a cave dedicated to Princeps Septimus. Bernard makes it back to his steadholt, where Isana uses her watercrafting skills to heal him. Bernard then finds Tavi and Amara and brings them back to the steadholt. Fidelias, Odiana, and Aldrick stay at the steadholt where they discover Amara and attempt to capture her. Amara and Tavi escape with Fade, a slave of the steadholt who is mentally challenged, and together they travel through the woods before Amara splits from the other two.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King's_Justice"title="The King's Justice">
The novel is set in the land of Gwynedd, one of the fictional Eleven Kingdoms. Gwynedd itself is a medieval kingdom similar to the British Isles of the 12th century, with a powerful Holy Church (based on the Roman Catholic Church), and a feudal government ruled by a hereditary monarchy. The population of Gwynedd includes both humans and Deryni, a race of people with inherent physic and magical abilities who have been brutally persecuted and suppressed for over two centuries. The novel begins four months after the conclusion of "The Bishop's Heir", and the plot details the continuing efforts of King Kelson Haldane to defeat the combined forces of a political adversary and a fanatical religious enemy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaryllis_Night_and_Day"title="Amaryllis Night and Day">
Peter Diggs has a vivid dream in which he meets a woman called Amaryllis. When he later encounters the same woman in real life, he discovers that the two of them have the ability to enter each other's dreams. A cautious relationship is begun, half in the real world and half in dreams, in which both parties struggle to overcome the emotional effects of previous failed romances.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Woman_of_Substance_(novel)"title="A Woman of Substance (novel)">
The book starts with an elderly Emma Harte flying to New York with her personal assistant and favourite grandchild, Paula. Emma contemplates the empire she has created. She has trained Paula to be her successor, both as the head of Harte Stores and as representative of her mother, Daisy Amory, at Sitex.On their arrival in New York, Emma's secretary, Gaye, tells her she heard Emma's sons discussing a plan to force her to retire and break up her empire so the pieces can be sold. Devastated initially, Emma isn't surprised but changes her will, choosing to leave her business interests to her grandchildren instead.The story then goes back to when Emma was a teenage servant at Fairley Hall, in rural Yorkshire. Her father, Jack, and two brothers, Winston and Frank, also work for the Fairley family. Jack and Frank work at the mill, and Winston works at the brickyard. After the death of his mother, Winston joins the navy, as he had wanted to since he was a child. As parlour maid, Emma sees a lot of the Fairley family and becomes friends with the younger son, Edwin. They bond over the deaths of their mothers. Emma also meets Blackie O'Neill, a wandering Irish navvy who has been hired to do some work at Fairley Hall, and they become fast friends. One day, Emma and Edwin realise they feel more for each other than friendship. Their friendship becomes intimate, and Emma gets pregnant. Edwin, horrified at this news, does not offer to marry her, so she runs away to Leeds. Wanting to protect herself and her child from gossip, Emma tells her landlady and new friends she is married to Winston, a sailor currently away at sea.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_It_Come_Down_(novel)"title="Let It Come Down (novel)">
A dark, even bleak, novel, "Let It Come Down" follows American Nelson Dyar as he arrives in the International Zone of Tangier, Morocco to begin a new job and a new life. Dyar's exploration of the brothels, drugs and unsavoury characters of Tangier leads him gradually, logically, to a sinister conclusion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stones_of_Summer"title="The Stones of Summer">
"The Stones of Summer" follows the life of Dawes Oldham Williams (D.O.W.) from childhood to teenage years in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and finally adulthood. The book is divided into three sections.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whittington_(novel)"title="Whittington (novel)">
The story is about a cat named Whittington that goes to live in a barn that is owned by a man named Bernie. Ben and Abby, Bernie's grandchildren, come to the barn. Ben struggles with reading in school. Ben has dyslexia and is struggling to learn how to read. He has been told by the school principal that if his reading skills do not improve, he will not advance to the next grade. Whittington tells the story of his namesake, a man named Dick Whittington, which encourages Ben.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorpions_(novel)"title="Scorpions (novel)">
Jamal is trying to get his brother, Randy, out of jail. Randy is a 17-year-old who is the leader of the Scorpions, a local gang of drug dealers in New York City.Jamal's family includes himself, Randy, his mother, his 8-year-old sister whose name is Sassy, and his father, Jeovon Hicks. Jamal's father became an alcoholic after losing his job and began abusing Jamal's mother. She moves away with the children. Now Jamal's father comes to visit the family "once in a while". When the story begins, Randy only needs $500 to appeal his conviction. His mother is working to the bone in order to earn enough money to get the appeal for Randy. His mother soon finds out that his brother has been attacked and stabbed while in jail and is in medical care. Some members of the Scorpions want Jamal to join them until Randy is freed from jail so that there will be direct communication between the gang and Randy. Other members want to vote on a new leader because they feel Randy is dead to them and that letting a 12-year-old joining a gang would not be beneficial. Jamal wants to earn money the right way by working but is scared to go against the Scorpions. Eventually, Jamal breaks free from the bad influence and does the right thing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus_(novel)"title="Eucalyptus (novel)">
"Eucalyptus" tells the story of "Ellen Holland", a young woman whose "speckled beauty" and unattainability become legend far beyond the rural western New South Wales town near the property where she grows up. Her protective father's obsession with collecting rare species of Eucalyptus trees leads him to propose a contest - the man who can correctly name all the species on his property shall win her hand in marriage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bull_from_the_Sea"title="The Bull from the Sea">
The story is a retelling of the life of mythological hero Theseus after his return from the Minoan palace of Knossos. The novel follows his later quests, his friendship with Pirithoos, and his liaison with Hippolyta and marriage to Phaedra.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Summer_of_Reason"title="The Last Summer of Reason">
Boualem Yekker is a bookseller in a country probably modelled on Algeria. His home is firmly in the grip of religious fundamentalists, but only recently: it was once a republic, but now it is a "Community in the Faith". Djaout presents readers with a terrifying world of religious fundamentalism comparable to Orwell's 1984, but substituting a religious dictatorship for a purely political one.At first Yekker is only on the periphery of danger. He is "neither elegant nor talented", which puts him out of the spotlight: "what is persecuted above all, and more than people's opinions, is their ability to create and propagate beauty." Still, Yekker is a purveyor of these outrageous "idea- and beauty-filled objects" known as books, so he doesn't fit in too well in this new, retrograde society.Business isn't exactly booming, of course. Touchingly Djaout describes Yekker's brief moments of hope when he sees people gazing in the shop window. But there is hardly a market for the sorts of books he has any longer. One acquaintance, Ali Elbouliga, still comes to while away time there. Otherwise, Yekker remains largely alone in his bookish world—and the books ultimately prove almost as much a burden as a solace.Family life also gets more complicated when his daughter turns on him. "The illness of fanaticism had attacked her." She is transformed, "covered with superior certainties".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Medicine"title="Love Medicine">
"Love Medicine" follows the intertwining lives of three central families, the Kashpaws, Lamartines, and Morrisseys, and two peripheral families, the Pillagers and the Lazarres. Members of the families variously reside on the fictional Ojibwe reservations of Little No Horse and Hoopdance, and in Minneapolis-St.Paul and Fargo. Erdrich employs a non-linear format in "Love Medicine", and each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character, using first-person and third-person limited narration."Love Medicine" begins with June Morrissey freezing to death on her way home on Easter Sunday, 1981, and ends in 1985, with the reunification of June's former husband, Gerry Nanapush, with June and Gerry's son, Lipsha. Encapsulated between those two chapters are interrelated stories that proceed in loosely chronological order from 1934 onwards. A pair of stories at the midpoint of the novel converge on a single day in the lives of Lulu Lamartine, Marie Lazarre, and Nector Kashpaw, who are involved in a love triangle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Much_for_Just_the_Planet?"title="How Much for Just the Planet?">
In the novel, large deposits of dilithium are detected on a colony planet, and delegations are sent by the United Federation of Planets and the Klingon Empire to negotiate for mining rights (neither able to openly fight against the other because of the "Organian Lightbulbs", a reference to the Organians from the original series). They find the planet Direidi and its inhabitants to be very strange indeed. The planet's inhabitants occasionally break into song to explain their narratives or seemingly attack the visitors. Both crews (as well as the three-person crew of the Federation prospector that found the planet in the first place) get into various adventures with the planet's inhabitants and each other. In the end, it turns out that the inhabitants have set everything up according to "Plan C"—Comedy. All of the adventures the two crews encountered were designed to soften them up so that they wouldn't mine the whole planet, but would be willing to work with the inhabitants and each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Unknown"title="Sender Unknown">
"Sender Unknown" is about a young businessman named Mark, who orders toys from a catalog to give to children of employees of the company he works for. What is delivered is not what Mark expected, and he has to deal with it until he can finally return it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_River_Sea"title="Journey to the River Sea">
The book opens in an exclusive London girls' school, The Mayfair Academy for Young Ladies. Maia, an orphan, is sent from this safe and cosy environment to stay with distant relations, the Carters, who are not as kind as she had hoped for. The Carters do not embrace their surroundings and almost always stay indoors, except for trips to Manaus. Beatrice and Gwendolyn, the twin daughters, are selfish and seem to be brought up strictly to be British, while their father, the eccentric Mr Carter, obsessively collects the glass eyes of famous people. Living with the family is Miss Minton, governess to Maia and the twins, who, despite an outwardly strict appearance, begins to care deeply for Maia.The family plans to see a play starring Clovis King, an English child actor, but the twins lie and say that all the tickets had sold out so they couldn't buy one for Maia. She decides to go anyway and secretly slips out of the Carters house to get there. When she gets lost, a Native boy takes her to the theatre on his boat. When Maia finally gets to watch "Little Lord Fauntleroy", Clovis acts very well, but during the pivotal scene, his voice cracks and the play is ruined.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Brae_(novel)"title="Electric Brae (novel)">
Jimmy Renilson is an engineer aboard a North Sea oil rig, who divides his time between his affair with temperamental artist Kim Russell (born Ruslawska) and rock climbing. The narrative describes Jimmy's stormy relationship with Kim, and events affecting their circle of friends, especially Jimmy's climbing friend Graeme and his bisexual partner Lesley. Set in various parts of Scotland, especially Orkney, the book describes the two men's ambition to climb the Old Man of Hoy.The main story is framed in a memory game Jimmy is playing with Kim's daughter.The author has described the book as 'a modern romance without heather or hardmen'. It was shortlisted for the McVitie's Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fledgling_(Butler_novel)"title="Fledgling (Butler novel)">
The novel tells the story of Shori, a 53-year-old member of the Ina species, who appears to be a ten-year-old African-American girl. The Ina are nocturnal, long-lived, and derive sustenance by drinking human blood. Though they are physically superior to humans, both in strength and ability to heal from injury, the Ina depend on humans to survive. Therefore, their relationships are symbiotic, with the Ina's venom providing significant boost to their humans' immune systems and extending their lives up to 200 years. However, withdrawal from this venom will also lead to the human's death.The story opens as Shori awakens with no knowledge of who or where she is, in a cave and suffering from critical injuries. Although she is burned and has skull trauma, she kills and eats the first creature that approaches her. Eating this creature allows her to heal quickly enough to walk and explore on her own. She runs into the ruins where a construction worker named Wright picks her up on the side of the road; Shori bites Wright because she finds his scent irresistible, and they begin their relationship.While staying at Wright's uncle's cabin, Shori realizes she's in need of more blood, so she feeds on other inhabitants in the town and develops a relationship with an older woman named Theodora. Shori and Wright return to the burned-out, abandoned village near where she woke up to learn more about her past. They eventually meet Iosif, Shori's father, who tells her the burned-out town was once her home where she had lived with her mother and sisters. They also learn that Wright and Shori's mutually beneficial relationship makes Wright Shori's symbiont. Further, Shori's dark skin is the result of a genetic modification: the Ina were experimenting to make their kind resistant to daylight. All other Ina are white-skinned.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Coffin,_U.S.S."title="Mark Coffin, U.S.S.">
Young, idealistic Mark Coffin wins a surprise, upset election victory, turning the 30-year-old Stanford University professor into the junior senator from California. Additionally, in the concurrent presidential election, his party's presidential candidate rides Mark's coattails to corral California's electoral votes and the White House. Mark has studied politics as a professor but has never run for office. However, his father-in-law is Jim Elrod, a powerful senior senator from North Carolina and chairman of the Armed Services committee, and Mark's father owns one of the largest newspapers in the state. Indeed, his own wife, who had wanted Mark to run, is fearful because of the election results: the new President will want to show that he owes nothing to Mark by making his life difficult. Mark goes to Washington amid the glare of the media spotlight, and reporters Bill Adams, Chuck Dangerfield and Lisette Greyson take an interest in his career from the start, praising him as one of the most idealistic and promising senators to hit town in decades. Other Senate wives warn Mark's wife that Lisette has tried to seduce several married Senators.Mark's hopes of sitting on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are damaged when he takes strong positions on two hot button issues: his father-in-law's bill to add ten billion dollars to the defense appropriation, to be used to try to catch up with the Soviets; and the Attorney General nomination of Charlie Macklin, the tough D.A. of Los Angeles County, whom Mark considers a demagogue that runs roughshod over civil liberties. He also makes an enemy of the governor of California, who had pushed Coffin's candidacy, as the governor had also suggested Macklin to the new President. Older senators who agree with him warn him to tread lightly, but Mark feels that he must make a stand on the issues he promised his supporters to fight for. Mark leads other junior senators in bucking the Washington establishment on these two issues. These so-called "Young Turks" include Rick Duclos of Vermont, who has an eye for the ladies and a teenage son, and Bob Templeton of Colorado, who recently lost his family in a plane accident. When Mark will not soften his opposition, he loses the committee assignment to Duclos.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine's_Child"title="The Machine's Child">
Several elements introduced as far back as the fourth book "The Graveyard Game" develop in this volume. Most of the characters are immortal cyborgs created in the past by an organization, Dr. Zeus Inc., which exists in the 24th century and has both time travel and immortality technology.The official business of Dr. Zeus is the "finding", for a fee, of artifacts and living things thought lost to time, which have actually been carefully collected by the cyborgs known as Preservers, aided by the fixers, conmen and masters of deception known as Facilitators.Alec Checkerfield, introduced in "The Life of the World to Come", is trying to find his lost love, the Preserver known as the Botanist Mendoza. With the aid of his AI helper "Captain Morgan" and their time travelling schooner using technology stolen from Dr. Zeus, he aims to find her wherever and whenever she is.This is complicated by the fact that he is hosting the personalities of his two dead clones, Nicholas Harpole and Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, in his own partially cyborged body. All three personalities knew Mendoza in the flesh, so to speak, but each has his own way of looking at the world. Nicholas is a religious zealot, Edward a cold-blooded killer, and Alec is the squeamish product of a culture that prohibits or represses everything enjoyed by humans in the past, including religion, sex, and violence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelf_Life_(novel)"title="Shelf Life (novel)">
The novel deals with an unnamed supermarket and the various people who work there. Each chapter is named after an aisle of the store, but may only have some minor references to it. There are other smaller chapters that deal with other areas such as Accounts and Service Desk. Each character has one chapter about them, which usually involves their current situation, then goes into a flashback about what had happened beforehand.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolves_Eat_Dogs"title="Wolves Eat Dogs">
Russia has changed from a Communist to capitalist state, and Ukraine has seceded from the former Soviet Union. When Pavel "Pasha" Ivanov, one of the leading members of Russia's new billionaire class, dies in an apparent suicide, Renko investigates. Pasha fell from the balcony of his penthouse apartment, and all the signs point to his having been alone at the time. The only anomaly is a large mound of table salt in the victim's wardrobe.Despite interference from his own boss as well as from other persons of power, Renko continues his investigation by questioning Pasha's friends and associates. There is apparently some kind of dark secret in Ivanov's past, and Pasha was always very depressed around May Day. Just before he is forcefully removed from the investigation, Arkady returns alone to Pasha's apartment and reconstructs his movements on the night he died. In the drawer of his bureau, Arkady finds a radiation dosimeter wrapped in a blood-stained handkerchief. Turning it on, he finds that the entire apartment is radioactive, the highest levels coming from the mound of salt. Arkady concludes that Ivanov did indeed commit suicide but that it was under a form of duress. A HazMat team re-examines the apartment and Pasha's body and finds that the salt was mixed with a small quantity of cesium chloride, identical in appearance to table salt but lethally radioactive. After confirming that his apartment was filled with radiation, Ivanov swallowed a large quantity of the salt before jumping, in an attempt to protect anyone entering the apartment later. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Silas"title="Uncle Silas">
The novel is a first-person narrative told from the point of view of the adolescent girl Maud Ruthyn, an heiress living with her sombre, reclusive father Austin Ruthyn in their mansion at Knowl. Through her father and her worldly, cheerful cousin, Lady Monica Knollys, she gradually learns more regarding her uncle, Silas Ruthyn, a black sheep of the family whom she has never met; once an infamous rake and gambler, he is now apparently a fervently reformed Christian. His reputation has been tainted by the suspicious suicide of a man to whom Silas owed an enormous gambling debt, which took place within a locked, apparently impenetrable room in Silas's mansion at Bartram-Haugh.In the first part of the novel, Maud's father hires a French governess, Madame de la Rougierre, as a companion for her. Madame terrifies Maud and appears to have designs on her; during two of their walks together, Maud is brought into suspicious contact with strangers that seem to be known to Madame. (In a cutaway scene that breaks the first-person narrative, we learn that she is in league with Silas' good-for-nothing son Dudley.) The governess is eventually dismissed when she is discovered by Maud in the act of burgling her father's desk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Not_Going_to_Get_Up_Today!"title="I Am Not Going to Get Up Today!">
A boy decides to sleep in one day, extolling his deep pillow and warm bed. He boasts that his family, his neighbors, the police, news media and the U.S. Marines can do nothing to rouse him, especially with variety of noisemakers. In the end, his family realizes that he is serious and give his breakfast egg (which he earlier suggested giving back to the hen) to the lone responding policeman, who gladly and immediately eats it on the bedroom floor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Things_Not_Seen"title="Things Not Seen">
Teenager Robert Phillips, known by his nickname "Bobby," wakes up one day to find that he can no longer see himself. He reveals his invisibility to his parents and is told to stay at home until his parents get back from work (his mother is an English professor, and his father a scientist). After his parents are gone, Bobby heads to the library, bundled up to conceal his invisibility. As he hurriedly leaves, he bumps into a girl, but she doesn't react when his scarf comes off. He realizes she is blind when he hands her back her cane.Upon returning home, Bobby gets in trouble for leaving the house. His parents leave to get dinner, but Bobby later finds out from the TV that there was a major three-car crash involving his parents. The police come to the home and check on Bobby, who conceals his invisibility. Bobby goes to the hospital to see his parents, taking off his clothes so he can be invisible. He finds his Mom, who gives him money and tells him to keep his invisibility a secret.Bobby returns to the library the next day. He goes naked this time, and stumbles upon the blind girl in a listening room. He learns that her name is Alicia, and befriends her. He eventually reveals to Alicia that he is invisible, and not tricking her because she is blind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landry_News"title="The Landry News">
Cara Landry, a student in Mr. Larson's 5th grade classroom, publishes her own newspaper titled "The Landry News". She includes an editorial about her teacher, Mr. Larson, who had once been the teacher of the year, but had over time become completely apathetic and demoralized. Mr. Larson soon returns to his old teaching ways, when Cara's merciless editorial opens his eyes to the truth. Cara continues the class newspaper as a "class project" and extends the newspaper with every edition, as the rest of the class begins to contribute to it.One day, a boy in the class comes up to her and asks if she could read a story his "friend" wrote, titled "Lost and Found". Cara realizes it was the boy wrote the story, which is about a divorce between his parents and how he learned to deal with it. She loves the article because it describes how she felt when her parents were divorced. The story is printed in "The Landry News", only to have the principal, Dr. Barnes become furious at Mr. Larson for allowing it. Dr. Barnes is actually seeking a pretext to get rid of Mr. Larson, because he disapproves of the way Mr. Larson teaches. Dr. Barnes begins telling the media that the "article is too personally revealing for children, or anyone else," and forbids publication of the "Landry News".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylark_(novel)"title="Skylark (novel)">
After Jacob and Sarah marry, a severe drought forces the family to make a drastic decision. While Jacob remains on the farm, Anna and Caleb travel with Sarah to Maine in order to take refuge from the drought. The journey teaches them the power of family can transcend distances as they wait for the day when they can be reunited again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoky_Night"title="Smoky Night">
Riots and commotion are happening around Los Angeles, where Daniel and his mother live. The family is forced to leave their apartment when the building catches fire. After all the racism and judgement happening and not getting along with their neighbor, they must come together and put their differences aside. In the upheaval, their cat and a neighbor's cat are lost. Once they get to the shelter where they were staying at, a fireman brings their cats, who have bonded over their experience. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janissaries_(novel)"title="Janissaries (novel)">
In "Janissaries", the leader is a United States Army officer from the Cold War period, Captain Rick Galloway, who along with his platoon-sized unit of soldiers primarily from the U.S. are abducted from a CIA-run operation against Cubans in the fictional tropical African country of Sainte-Marie by a flying saucer. The beings abducting them present themselves as rescuers from a hopeless situation where Galloway's unit is about to be overrun by Cubans in a night assault, the aftermath of which is expected to be the deaths of all. Afterwards, the human soldiers have the option of serving the aliens in a special situation involving a more primitive planet on which there are humans living in medieval conditions. The soldiers are expected to be able to use their superior weapons and tactics to conquer part of the planet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_Soup"title="Mouse Soup">
A male mouse leaves his house to sit under a tree to read a book. While he reads, a weasel suddenly captures him. The weasel then takes the mouse back to his home, thinking of making Mouse Soup with the mouse. Just as the weasel puts the mouse into the pot, the rodent tells the crafty weasel that the soup will not taste good without any stories in it at all. The weasel does feel hungry, but agrees to let the mouse tell him four stories that will go in the pot.The Bees and the MudA mouse is walking along when a beehive falls on his head. He tries to reason with the bees to go away, but the bees decide to use his head as their new home. The mouse then comes up with a plan to submerge himself in a mud hole, claiming to the bees that it is his home. He keeps wading in deeper, describing each depth as a room in his house, but the bees approve and remain on his head. Finally, when the rodent submerges his head under the mud, passing it off as his bed, the bees finally decide they dislike his bed, and they go away, allowing the mouse to go home to take a bath.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Peaceful"title="Private Peaceful">
The story is told from the perspective of the fictional character Thomas "Tommo" Peaceful, a young man from a rural village in England who fights in the First World War. The novel switches between Tommo's past and present: in a short section at the beginning of every chapter, Tommo describes his thoughts and feelings during a single night in a hay barn near the Somme. Each chapter indicates the progress of time, with titles such as "Five Past Ten" and "Twenty To Eleven", gradually counting down to the morning of his brother Charlie's execution by firing squad. The majority of the novel covers Tommo's memories of his life. He recalls being a young boy before the First World War. He discusses his love for Molly, a girl he met on his first day at school, and his relationship with his older brother Charlie. Early in the story, Tommo and his father go woodcutting together, leading to his father's death while he saves Tommo from a falling tree; Tommo keeps the incident a secret from everyone, blaming himself for what happened. Tommo, Charlie and Molly grow up together; their mischievous adventures include braving their nasty great-aunt, defying a Colonel, skinny-dipping, and being the first people in their village to see an aeroplane.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lottie_Project"title="The Lottie Project">
Charlotte Alice Katherine Enright (who prefers to be called Charlie, but is called Charlotte by her current teacher) is an eleven-year-old girl who lives with her mother, Jo, in a flat. She is the most popular girl in her school and because of that, she has a lot of friends. And of which her two best friends are called Angela Robinson and Lisa Field. When her class's form teacher, Mrs. Thomas, goes on maternity leave, she is replaced by a strict woman called Miss Beckworth, whom Charlie immediately dislikes. She calls Charlie by her birth name, Charlotte (even though that Charlie explained that everybody calls her Charlie) and she also forces Charlie to sit next to an intelligent boy, James Edwards, whom Charlie hates. Miss Beckworth sets the class a history project on the Victorians, and Charlie assumes that the topic will be boring and decides not to listen for the first lesson – until she finds a picture of a Victorian servant girl who looks just like her. Charlie decides to write a diary, told from the point of view of her character Lottie who is eleven years old, like Charlie; however she has left school to become a servant!
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_Map"title="The Ghost Map">
The work covers the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak. The two central figures are physician John Snow, who created a map of the cholera cases, and the Reverend Henry Whitehead, whose extensive knowledge of the local community helped determine the initial cause of the outbreak. Dr. John Snow was a revered anesthetist who carried out epidemiological work in Soho, London. Around the mid-1850s Snow figured out the source of cholera contamination to be the drinking water from the Broad Street pump.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_Forward"title="Only Forward">
The protagonist, Stark, lives in an unidentified large city, referred to only as The City, several centuries in the future. The City comprises a variety of Neighbourhoods that enforce their own rules on residents. Stark's Neighbourhood is Colour, which has an entry requirement of an appreciation of colour, and a central computer that changes the colours of its streets. Other Neighbourhoods include the Action Centre, where yuppie office workers strive continually to advance their own status; Stable, a walled-off, roofed-over Neighbourhood where residents are led to believe that they're the only survivors of a nuclear war centuries earlier; and Cat, an area deserted of humans and inhabited solely by cats, despite which the shops are always well-stocked and streets are always clean and tidy, entered through a set of iron gates which open only for true cat lovers.Stark, a freelance troubleshooter, accepts a job from a high-ranking member of the Action Centre to locate Alkland, a senior Actioneer who has vanished. Stark intuits that Alkland was kidnapped, and follows intelligence that he may be in Red, a dangerous and gang-controlled Neighbourhood. Stark uses an old friend in Red, Ji, to find out, surviving a gang territory war in the process, that Alkland was taken to Stable. After dangerously infiltrating Stable, escaping an armed attack from unknown individuals, and extracting Alkland, Stark learns that Alkland was actually smuggled into Stable at his own behest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larklight"title="Larklight">
The story begins at Larklight, a house that orbits Earth's moon, where the Mumbys receive a visitor from the Royal Xenological Society, a Mr. Webster, who is revealed to be an extra-terrestrial resembling an enormous white spider. Art and his sister Myrtle escape; but their father is captured and presumed dead.Art and Myrtle leave in an escape pod and crash-land on the Moon, where they are encased with predatory larvae of the Potter Moth and freed by pirate Jack Havock and his crew. Art is shocked to find that Jack is only fifteen years old, and that he is the only human in his crew, while Myrtle is distressed at being in the company of a pirate and demands that Jack take them to the Moon's British residence, Fort George. "En route" aboard the pirates' ship "Sophronia", a ship of the British Navy comes alongside and orders Jack to surrender or have his ship destroyed.Jack distracts the officers by pretending to hold Art and Myrtle hostage, giving Ssillissa, the ship's alchemist, time to activate the ship's engines and fly the "Sophronia" to safety. They conceal themselves on Venus, Jack Havock's old home, where Jack tells Art and Myrtle that the colonists there, including his parents and brother, were changed into trees by a sudden pollination. The white spiders take Myrtle to the Martian home of industrialist Sir Waverly Rain, whose factories cover Phobos and Deimos. She escapes with a Martian maid named Ulla and her husband, Richard, with whom she learns that Sir Waverly Rain had been captured by the spiders and replaced with a spider-controlled automaton; believing the spiders might manufacture something much more sinister, they race to London.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owl_Moon"title="Owl Moon">
The story deals with a father who takes his child owling for the first time on a cold winter night. Along their way, they encounter a great horned owl. While the first-person text does not specify the child's gender, the jacket flap copy refers to the characters as "a little girl and her father". According to Jane Yolen's website, she is actually Yolen's child, Heidi. The "Pa" character is based on her husband, David, who was an avid outdoorsman and birdwatcher. "I've become aware of nature through my husband", said Yolen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modern_Utopia"title="A Modern Utopia">
To this planet "out beyond Sirius" the Owner of the Voice and the botanist are translated, imaginatively, "in the twinkling of an eye . . . We should scarcely note the change. Not a cloud would have gone from the sky." Their point of entry is on the slopes of the Piz Lucendro in the Swiss Alps.The adventures of these two characters are traced through eleven chapters. Little by little they discover how Utopia is organized. It is a world with "no positive compulsions at all . . . for the adult Utopian—unless they fall upon him as penalties incurred."The Owner of the Voice and the botanist are soon required to account for their presence. When their thumbprints are checked against records in "the central index housed in a vast series of buildings at or near Paris," both discover they have doubles in Utopia. They journey to London to meet them, and the Owner of the Voice's double is a member of the Samurai, a voluntary order of nobility that rules Utopia. "These "samurai" form the real body of the State."Running through the novel as a foil to the main narrative is the botanist's obsession with an unhappy love affair back on Earth. The Owner of the Voice is annoyed at this undignified and unworthy insertion of earthly affairs in Utopia, but when the botanist meets the double of his beloved in Utopia the violence of his reaction bursts the imaginative bubble that has sustained the narrative and the two men find themselves back in early twentieth-century London.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_World_Order_(Wells_book)"title="The New World Order (Wells book)">
H.G. Wells starts "The New World Order" by setting out the aim to provide a 'nucleus of useful information for those who have to go on with this business of making a world peace'. After introducing the objective of the book, Wells admits that people of his generation 'thought that war was dying out'. For Wells, 'disruptive forces' were building up in civilised society, but in the years before World War I, these forces were operating at the margins of civilisation. These forces included an arms race, economic stress, social upheaval and the continuation of the pre-existing balance of power. Wells argues that these forces caused World War I and World War II and are the symptoms of intertwining patriotism and enterprise with the world system. Wells declares that a revolution must occur to replace the world system, as otherwise, humanity faces extinction.Wells goes on to insist that 'free speech and vigorous publication' are at the forefront of working towards world peace.  He points out that the conditions of war lead to the suppression of free speech which would harm his wish of a 'great world debate'. For Wells, a free and open discussion about reconstructing the post-war order was 'something much more important than warfare'. Next, Wells identifies that technological innovations had caused the 'abolition of distance' and a change in the scale of production in modern society. Wells expresses that an out-dated mode of thinking has met both of these new facts of global life, leading to unnecessary destruction in economic, social and biological life. Wells goes on to argue that the era of nationhood was obsolete, and only a 'rational consolidation of human affairs' would ensure human survival. Before progressing his argument further, Wells distinguishes his vision of global collectivisation from Marxism and Soviet communism. He firstly defined collectivisation as such:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormrider"title="Stormrider">
In northern part of the land lies the Moidart and the city of Eldacre; further north is the location of the Rigante clans. This is the place that the highlanders have settled remain free.The Moidart's son, Gaise Macon (known by the Rigante soul name of 'Stormrider') is in the Royalist king's army, and serves loyally. An old prophecy is making him a hunted man by Lord Winterbourne, the leader of the Redeemer Knights, a group of killers. When they were sacking the village of Shelsans, a monk showed him the skull of Cernunnos. A priest prophesied before he was executed that Winterbourne would be killed by the man with the golden eye - who Winterbourne assumes is Macon.Winterbourne kills the king, takes control of the army, attempts several assassinations on Macon and launches an invasion on the town the Stormrider is deployed at. Macon holds out due to a warning from a traitor of Winterbourne's army, but the woman he loved was killed.The Moidart's castle at Eldacre is invaded by soldiers of the Pinance who are allied to Winterbourne, and is a longtime rival/ enemy of the Moidart. The Moidart hides in the castle with a few loyal men, kills the Pinancer leaders, and takes control of the Pinance's army. Macon leads the Eldacre Company back to Eldacre, and the Moidart seeks the Rigante's assistance in the coming invasion by Winterbourne. Cernunnos' spirit forces Winterbourne to hand his skull to the Rigante witch-woman, the Dweller, who passes it on to Stormrider.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_in_the_North"title="The Shadow in the North">
This second "Sally Lockhart" mystery takes place in late 1878, six years after the events of "The Ruby in the Smoke". A Miss Walsh walks into the offices of Sally Lockhart's office (Sally is now working as a financial consultant) about some poor business advice Sally gave her; as a result Miss Walsh has lost her life savings. Sally vows to get the money back and investigate Anglo-Baltic, the company Miss Walsh lost all her money from. We also learn that Sally has a huge but lovable black dog called Chaka and that Frederick Garland (Sally's friend from "The Ruby in the Smoke") is in love with Sally but that she is unsure of her feelings and so continuously refuses to decide on whether to marry him. Sally's friend Jim Taylor (now working as a stagehand in a local theatre) helps stage magician Alistair Mackinnon escape two men Mackinnon is certain plan to kill him. Jim takes Mackinnon to Frederick and Frederick's uncle Webster at their photography shop/private investigations office in Burton Street where Mackinnon proves to Jim, Webster and Frederick that he has spiritual abilities (he can see things having to do with an object by touching it) and tells them of a murder he saw by touching a man's cigar case. Mackinnon tells them that he believes that the man knows that he (Mackinnon) knows about the murder, and is therefore terrified for his life. Jim and Frederick go to a spiritualist seance as part of their work as private detectives. The seance involves the table shaking from side to side and objects being thrown across the room; the medium (a Mrs. Nellie Budd) also has trance during which she says things that connect to a mysterious business tied up to Anglo-Baltic called North Star. Frederick manages to get a photograph of Nellie's arms during the seance. Later, Frederick tells Sally what he has learnt. She tells him what she knows about the former owner of Anglo-Baltic and current owner of North Star, Axel Bellmann. Sally suspects that Bellman has manufactured Anglo-Baltic's collapse to fund North Star; she believes him to be very vicious.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tiger_in_the_Well"title="The Tiger in the Well">
This book takes place in the autumn of 1881. Sally Lockhart has a daughter named Harriet, a nurse named Sarah-Jane and a cook named Ellie. Her friends Webster, Jim and Charles are in South America taking pictures. One day a divorce affidavit arrives at the house. Sally, who has never been married, is confused that a commission agent named Arthur Parrish claims he is her husband and Harriet's father. The affidavit says that Harriet's "father" wants custody of her. She takes it to her lawyer and gets no sympathy from him; she is only a woman after all and has no power, with the lawyer preferring to focus on the charges Parrish has used to try and claim custody of Harriet rather than whether or not Sally was actually married to him in the first place.The scene shifts to Russian Jews getting off a boat entering England. A German Socialist journalist named Jacob Liebermann goes to the League of the Democratic Socialist Association. He meets Dan Goldberg, another Socialist journalist like himself, and Jacob tells Dan about a paralysed man called the Tzaddik who is manipulating things so the Jewish people are hurt economically and physically. He also mentions the name Parrish, which Dan recognises, as being involved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tin_Princess"title="The Tin Princess">
Sixteen-year-old Becky is about to have her life changed. A dramatic explosion is only the start of her incredible adventure. As tutor to the cockney Princess (Adelaide of "The Ruby in the Smoke", whose fortunes have greatly changed) of Razkavia, a tiny kingdom in Europe, she is plunged into a turmoil of murder and intrigue.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam,_Bangs_&amp;_Moonshine"title="Sam, Bangs &amp; Moonshine">
Samantha (usually called Sam) is a motherless child of a fisherman. To keep herself busy, she pretends that her mother is a mermaid and that Bangs, her cat, can talk to her. Sam also claims to have a pet kangaroo. She prefers her fantasies to reality but her father calls her tales "moonshine" and warns Sam that moonshine will one day lead her into great trouble.Little neighbor Thomas eagerly believes every word Sam says. One day Sam tells the pleading boy of a not-too-distant cove where he can find her mermaid mother. Bangs follows Thomas on a journey to the cove; but, unfortunately, they are caught up in a seastorm and lost. At home, Sam becomes very frightened when Thomas and the cat don't return, and she tearfully asks her father for help. Luckily, Thomas is found alive (Bangs is later found safe as well), but the boy is now ill. Sam finally understands the importance of telling people about things that are real, as opposed to things that are moonshine.Sam apologizes to the sick little boy (who, the readers can safely presume, will make a complete recovery), and cheers Thomas up by showing him something that is both real and fantastical.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_(novel)"title="Phoenix (novel)">
During an unusual attempt on his life, Vlad prays to his goddess Verra for aid and surprisingly receives it. As payment, Verra requests that Vlad kill the King of Greenaere, an island kingdom off the coast of the Empire, where magic does not work. Vlad agrees and sails to Greenaere, where he completes the assassination without difficulty. Fleeing the island, however, proves more difficult. After fighting off some guards, an injured Vlad stumbles upon a drummer in the forest named Aibynn who tends his wounds and tries to cover for him when more guards arrive. Vlad faints from Aibynn's dreamgrass and reveals his hidden location, causing the guards to arrest both of them.In prison, Vlad talks with Aibynn, who thinks of nothing but drumming, and waits for an opportunity to escape. Eventually he learns that Loiosh had flown across the ocean to warn their friends. Aliera and Cawti arrive at the prison and free Vlad using elder sorcery, which does not require a link to the Orb. Vlad brings Aibynn along, though he suspects that he might be a spy. Morrolan provides a boat and the group sails away.Back in Adrilankha, Vlad is still stuck between the Jhereg Organization and his wife's group of Easterner and Teckla revolutionists. Vlad's superior warns him that members of the Council are displeased with the situation. Matters worsen when Greenaere declares war on the Empire and press gangs begin forcibly recruiting Easterners. A watchtower in South Adrilankha is destroyed, and most of the high-ranking revolutionists are arrested, including Cawti.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taltos_(Brust_novel)"title="Taltos (Brust novel)">
The story follows three separate timelines that ultimately come together by the end of the book. The first timeline begins each chapter and features Vlad performing an extremely complicated ritual of witchcraft. Vlad actually begins this ritual towards the end of the third timeline.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orca_(novel)"title="Orca (novel)">
Vlad and his friend Kiera the Thief investigate a financial cover-up following the mysterious death of an Orca tycoon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_an_Expert_Witness"title="Death of an Expert Witness">
Scotland Yard's Adam Dalgliesh investigates the murder of forensic biologist Dr. Edwin Lorrimer. With too many motives and no physical evidence, Dalgliesh is left to deduce which among the small pool of suspects is the killer, who decides to claim a second victim.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wringer_(novel)"title="Wringer (novel)">
A young boy named Palmer lives in a town called Waymer, which celebrates an annual Pigeon Day by releasing pigeons from crates to be shot in the air. When the book opens, the town's 63rd annual Pigeon Day is intended to raise money for the city's playground. Ten-year-old boys in Waymer can accept the honor of picking up the wounded birds that have not yet died from a gunshot wound and wringing their necks to "put the pigeons out of their misery."When Palmer turns nine, his peers, Beans, Mutto, and Henry pressure him to join them in anticipation of becoming the best "wringers," boys who wring the necks of pigeons. Palmer's mother does not approve of his friends for this as the main reason, but she cannot force Palmer to find other friends. Palmer finds himself anxious to live up to his father's example, as he was known as one of the best wringers when he was Palmer's age. Though Palmer is actually reluctant to participate in the Pigeon Day wringing, he does not express this out of fear of being ostracized.When a pigeon comes to Palmer's window, he secretly takes the bird in as a pet and names it Nipper. To Palmer's surprise, his parents both learn of the existence of the pigeon but respect his wishes to keep Nipper a secret. Keeping Nipper also allows Palmer to befriend Dorothy, a girl who was his childhood best friend, and also opposes the pigeon shooting festival because of its cruelty toward the birds. The gang often bullies Dorothy, causing a disruption between Palmer and her before Palmer realizes how much he had hurt her. When the day of the shooting comes, Palmer is anxious because he has allowed Dorothy to release Nipper in hopes that the pigeon will avoid capture.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Corner_of_the_Universe"title="A Corner of the Universe">
The summer of 1960 is a season that the novel's narrator and protagonist, 11-almost-12-year-old Hattie Owen, expects to be as comfortably uneventful as all the others had been in her small, tranquil town of Millerton, Pennsylvania. She's looking forward to helping her mother Dorothy run their boarding house with its eccentric adult boarders, painting alongside her father Jonathan, and reading. Then 21-year-old Uncle Adam, whom Hattie never knew existed, comes to stay with Hattie's grandparents (Nana and Papa), because his "school," an institution for the mentally disabled, has closed down permanently. Intelligent, childlike, and strange owing to his disability, Adam visits Hattie often. Adam quickly becomes smitten with Angel Valentine, the beautiful and most recent lodger to check into the Owen boardinghouse. Hattie then meets Leila, the daughter of the carnival owners who come to town. However, after Adam suffers a mental breakdown on the Ferris wheel, she moves away with the carnival.Throughout the summer, other people come to stay at Hattie's boarding house, such as a woman with a son and daughter who recently suffered the death of her husband and moved away, but needed a place to stay while job hunting.As various other events mark Hattie's "uneventful" summer, she comes to better understand Adam. But when Adam dies by suicide after seeing Angel sleeping with her new boyfriend, it leads everyone—including Hattie—to realize that none of them had understood Adam as much as he needed them to.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghostway"title="The Ghostway">
Hosteen Joseph Joe, finishing his laundry in Shiprock, New Mexico, answers questions put by a man in a new car, about Leroy Gorman. Joe does not know that man, but studies the Polaroid photo of him in front of his aluminum trailer home, set next to a cottonwood tree in fall. A second car appears, driven by Lerner, who chastises the first driver. After a gun battle, Lerner is dead on the ground. The other man drives away.Sgt. Jim Chee finds the place where the first man drove, the hogan of Ashie Begay. With FBI agents Sharkey and Witrey, and Deputy Bales, Chee finds Albert Gorman buried near what is now a death hogan, but not the photo Joseph Joe described. Gorman was buried almost exactly following the Navajo way, save for his unwashed hair. Returning a week later, Chee encounters runaway Margaret Billy Sosi, crying for her grandfather. They talk, she slips away. Chee next finds the aluminum trailer shown in the photo, where he expects to find Leroy Gorman, but the man there is Grayson. Margaret Sosi had shown up earlier that day, looking for her grandfather. In search of Sosi and her relatives, Chee drives 900 mi to Los Angeles. He meets two city police detectives, Shaw and Wells, who know the FBI agent Upchurch who died or was killed in trying to close a nine-year case on the McNair gang, experts in high priced car thievery and the cocaine trade, who leave no witnesses.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quest_for_Saint_Camber"title="The Quest for Saint Camber">
The novel is set in the land of Gwynedd, one of the fictional Eleven Kingdoms. Gwynedd itself is a medieval kingdom similar to the British Isles of the 12th century, with a powerful Holy Church (based on the Roman Catholic Church), and a feudal government ruled by a hereditary monarchy. The population of Gwynedd includes both humans and Deryni, a race of people with inherent physic and magical abilities who have been brutally persecuted and suppressed for over two centuries. The novel begins approximately eight months after the conclusion of "The King's Justice", as King Kelson Haldane embarks on a religious quest to celebrate his knighting. When a deadly accident befalls Kelson's party, a close member of the king's family uses illicit arcane power to seize the throne of Gwynedd.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thief_of_Time"title="A Thief of Time">
Emma had the brain surgery, but she did not survive it. Joe Leaphorn is grief-stricken; he is on his final leave before quitting the Navajo Tribal Police. BLM agent Thatcher takes him along on a call to talk with a woman accused of stealing Anasazi relics from protected land, a thief of time. Her friends at Chaco National Park called her in as a missing person, and think the officers are there to look for her, finally. Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal is an anthropologist interested in ceramics, who thinks she is close to a major new finding, identifying an individual pot maker by the art on the pots. Leaphorn thinks the anonymous call reporting Dr Friedman-Bernal and her disappearance after a planned weekend away will be connected.A piece of digging equipment is stolen from the tribal motor pool. Chee traces the thieves. One is known to Slick Nakai, the preacher. Leaphorn and Chee separately show up at Nakai's next revival meeting. Leaphorn learns that Nakai sold pots to Eleanor, while Chee learns about the backhoe thief. Leaphorn notices the same Navajo man helping at the revival that he saw working with Maxie Davis at Chaco. Chee seeks the backhoe, finding it with the trailer at the bottom of a canyon. Then he finds two dead men in the moonlight: Joe B. Nails in the truck cab, and Jimmy Etcitty on the ground. Leaphorn visits Maxie and Randall Elliot to gain more information about Eleanor. She took her camping gear; she was likely out checking her latest discoveries. Leaphorn meets Chee at the murder site, where they connect on their two reasons to be there: the missing anthropologist and the missing motor pool equipment. They find no good tracks of the murderer, but Chee counts the bags. Three were removed from the box, yet only two are filled with pots and pieces. The third bag turns up in Elliot's kitchen trash, filled with Anasazi bones, tagged for one of two important sites. They focus their work on finding the anthropologist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkwitch_Rising"title="Darkwitch Rising">
All of the players are back again, born in medieval London, and with more desire to finish the Troy Game for once and for all. Brutus is reborn as King Charles, Coel as Louis de Silva, Matilda as Queen Catherine, Ecub as Marguerite, Cornelia as Noah Banks, Genvissa as Jane Orr and the hateful Asterion as Weyland Orr.With Genvissa already in his hands with his imp inside her womb, all Weyland needs to do is wait for Noah to come to him as she must, with another imp inside her own womb. Then his plans are to force Jane to teach Noah the arts of Mistress of the Labyrinth, then dispose of Jane however he will. While he is waiting, he is running his own whorehouse.Charles, the rightful heir to the throne of England is exiled to the Scilly Islands, but not entirely. Unknownst to all but his close circle of friends including Louis, Marguerite, Kate, he has a small turf of England. Together, using this small piece of earth, they scry out Noah.Noah makes love to Brutus as a 'healing of the wounds' and they conceive a 'daughter'. That daughter is named Catling - the Troy Game incarnate. As Catling grows in Noah's womb, she traps the imps into her power.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Christian_(novel)"title="The Magic Christian (novel)">
Guy Grand is an odd billionaire who spends most of his time playing elaborate practical jokes on people. A big spender, he does not mind losing large sums of money to complete strangers if he can have a good laugh. All his escapades are designed to prove his theory that everyone has their price—it just depends on the amount one is prepared to pay them.One of Grand's favorite pranks is to buy hot dogs from railway station vendors just before the train pulls out, handing them one overly-large bill after another and then demanding his change, as the train begins to move and the vendor has to run to keep up.Grand pays the actor playing a surgeon in a live television soap opera to deviate from the script, comment in drastic terms on the bad quality of the show, and walk off the set. Other actors follow in later weeks, in the same way, until critics begin to praise the show's "bold, innovative comedy" and the viewing audience comes to watch for "the moment" when an actor will break the fourth wall and leave the set. He also has unusual edits inserted into popular movies, and shown irregularly in theaters, disturbing the viewers who notice them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Queen's_Fool"title="The Queen's Fool">
Nine-year-old Hannah Green sees Thomas Seymour and Elizabeth flirting when she delivers books for her father. When asked why she seems surprised, she tells him she has seen a scaffold behind him. Seymour is executed within a year.Hannah and her father run a book shop on Fleet Street. They fled Spain after Hannah's mother was burnt at the stake during the Inquisition Period. Lord Robert Dudley and John Dee, his tutor, visit the shop, where John realises Hannah has the Sight when she tells them the Angel Uriel was walking behind them. Her father denies it, calling Hannah a fool and claiming she is simple, but Robert and John insist on hiring Hannah as a holy fool to King (Edward VI). The king, learning about her gift, asks her what she sees of him. Hannah replies that she sees the gates of heaven opening for him. Amused by her answer, the king accepts her. Though unwilling at first, Hannah accepts her life at court, serving as the King's Fool and the Dudley family's vassal, performing tasks and errands as requested.Robert sends her to spy on Lady Mary, King Edward's heir. She joins Mary's household and shortly after learns of King Edward's death and final will naming his Protestant cousin, Lady Jane Grey, his heir, declaring Mary and Elizabeth I illegitimate. Jane and her husband, the Duke of Northumberland's son, Guilford Dudley, are crowned, but the English declare for Mary, so she takes the crown nine days later with Hannah by her side. Queen Mary is crowned, making Hannah overjoyed for her mistress and heartbroken that Robert Dudley, for his hand at Northumberland's plot, is in the Tower of London.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_Was_Here"title="Hope Was Here">
Hope Yancey is a teenage waitress living with her aunt Addie in Brooklyn, where Addie works as a chef at "The Blue Box Diner". Hope's birth mother, Deena, deemed herself unfit for parenting and gave Hope to Addie rather than raise her on her own. Hope doesn't know who her birth father is. When "The Blue Box Diner" closes down because the owner stole all of the restaurant's money, Addie decides to move to Mulhoney, a small city in Wisconsin, where she and Hope can work at the small-town diner "Welcome Stairways". Hope's new boss, G.T. Stoop, is a kind-hearted man whose leukemia prevents him from working full-time at his diner. After witnessing the political corruption within Mulhoney, G.T. decided to run for mayor against the incumbent candidate, Eli Millstone. Millstone has several illegal agreements with the large corporate Real Fresh Dairy, and in exchange has the workers support his campaign. Encouraged by G.T.'s integrity and bravery to stand up to the corrupt Millstone, a group of students from the local high school form an organization to support G.T.'s campaign. This group includes Hope and the "Welcome Stairways" line cook Eddie Braverman. Because of Braverman's participation, he is attacked and beaten by a group of Millstone's supporters. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Log_of_Phileas_Fogg"title="The Other Log of Phileas Fogg">
The story takes place within the internal reality first imagined in the 1872 Jules Verne novel, "Around the World in Eighty Days". Farmer includes many of the story's original characters, including Phileas Fogg and his French valet, Passepartout. He establishes that all of Verne's published works take place within the same shared continuity. He includes elements of crossover fiction, incorporating the Arthur Conan Doyle characters of Sherlock Holmes and James Moriarty into his setting. These elements place Phileas Fogg and his entire supporting cast into the Wold Newton family of literary characters.In an introduction, Farmer posits that Verne's story was not simply an article of fiction, but the chronology of actual events, which Verne later decided to adapt into a fictional setting. In the book's epilogue, Farmer playfully alludes to the notion that Phileas Fogg is still alive, and may in fact be the actual author of the story (Farmer notes that they both share the same initials, suggesting that Philip Farmer is actually an alias for Phileas Fogg).From Farmer's perspective, Jules Verne revealed only a small and significantly subdued portion of the actual background and exploits of Phileas Fogg. He establishes that the events surrounding "Around the World in Eighty Days" is actually a singular aspect of a greater conflict taking place between two immortal alien races, the Eridani and the Capellas. Farmer's story does not challenge any of the elements of the original text, but rather it adds an ambitious secondary tale taking place behind (and often in between) the scenes of Verne's material.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fer-de-Lance_(novel)"title="Fer-de-Lance (novel)">
In the opening chapter, Wolfe decides to give up drinking bootleg beer and sends Fritz to purchase samples of every legally available brand (49 in all) so he can select a replacement. The date set in the novel is given as June 7, Wednesday, which makes the year 1933. The Cullen–Harrison Act had just become law on April 7, 1933, legalising "3.2 beer" (3.2% alcohol by weight, approximately 4% alcohol by volume), a point mentioned in passing in the novel.As Wolfe samples the beers and is surprised to find that none of them are unpalatable, Fred Durkin arrives and asks sheepishly if Wolfe can speak with Maria Maffei, a friend of his wife. Maria's brother Carlo, a metalworker, was unemployed (it was during the Great Depression) and was supposed to return to Italy. He suddenly seemed to come into money, and then disappeared mysteriously. Impressed by Maria Maffei, Wolfe instructs Goodwin to make enquiries. Wolfe and Goodwin soon learn that Carlo's disappearance somehow involves the death of a college president while playing golf in Westchester County, New York.As the first novel in the series, "Fer-de-Lance" introduces Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin, Fritz Brenner, Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, Orrie Cather and other characters who recur throughout the entire corpus. Although the characters are not as fully developed as they would become later in the series, the essential characteristics of Wolfe, Archie and several other regulars already are clearly present.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Andreas_(novel)"title="San Andreas (novel)">
The British Merchant Navy hospital ship "San Andreas" is en route from Murmansk to Halifax, Nova Scotia during World War II. With large red crosses painted on the sides of its hull, "San Andreas" should have immunity from attack from all sides in the war and be granted safe passage. The first sign of trouble occurs when the ship's lights mysteriously fail just before a pre-dawn bombing attack that severely damages its superstructure and sinks its escort frigate. With most of the senior officers dead and the captain incapacitated, Bosun Archie McKinnon must take charge of the damaged ship and steer her to safety despite German aircraft, U-boats, stormy Arctic weather and sabotage by an unknown traitor on board. He must also discover the reason for the repeated German attempts to capture the "San Andreas".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Harrowing_of_Gwynedd"title="The Harrowing of Gwynedd">
The novel is set in the land of Gwynedd, one of the fictional Eleven Kingdoms. Gwynedd itself is a medieval kingdom similar to the British Isles of the 10th century, with a powerful Holy Church (based on the Roman Catholic Church), and a feudal government ruled by a hereditary monarchy. The population of Gwynedd includes both humans and Deryni, a race of people with inherent psychic and magical abilities who are being systematically persecuted by both the Crown and the Church. The novel begins two days after the conclusion of "Camber the Heretic", as the Regents of young King Alroy Haldane continue their bloody suppression of Deryni throughout the realm. As the Deryni struggle to survive, the remaining members of the MacRorie family investigate the strange circumstances of their patriarch's apparent death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Pan_in_Scarlet"title="Peter Pan in Scarlet">
The novel returns to Wendy Darling, her brother John, and Nibs, Slightly, Tootles, the Twins and Curly, who were once Peter Pan's Lost Boys. The six boys were adopted by Mr and Mrs Darling at the end of "Peter and Wendy".John Darling has been having visions about Neverland. The former Lost Boys and Wendy have been having similar dreams, and Wendy realises that bombs from the Great War have punched holes through their world into Neverland, and dreams and ideas are filtering back. Wendy tells the former Lost Boys, now known as Old Boys, that they must find a way to return to Neverland to help Peter Pan restore both worlds to normality. In order to fly, they need fairy dust, so Wendy finds a baby and waits for its first laugh. They come across the fairy Fireflyer, a lying fairy who tells them that in order to get back to Neverland, they must go back to being children. To do this, they must wear their children's clothing. Tootles turns into a girl because he only has daughters. Nibs decides not to join them because he would miss his children too much.Peter has been dreaming of the Darlings as well, but when they and their Newfoundland puppy (a descendant of Nana from the first book) return to Neverland, he seems indifferent. He does not notice that Nibs is absent, nor that Michael Darling is dead (apparently having died in World War I). He is concerned only with having the best adventure in the world. When the Neverwood catches fire, Peter and company escape the island by way of the "Jolly Roger", renamed the "Jolly Peter". While on board, Captain Pan discovers the late Captain Hook's second-best coat and finds a treasure map of Neverland in the pocket. Sensing an adventure, he immediately wants to head to the mountain of Neverpeak to claim James Hook's treasure. Peter allows the mysterious circus master Ravello, whose circus has been destroyed in the fire, to join his crew as his valet. Ravello urges Peter to wear the red coat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Ella"title="Just Ella">
Fifteen-year-old Ella Brown of Fridesia, now known as Princess Cynthiana Eleanora, is engaged to Prince Charming and living in the palace preparing for the wedding day and life as a princess. For the most part, she finds life at the palace to be dull, soon discovers the prince seems to be lacking in both charm and brains and laments the fact that noblewomen have virtually no power whatsoever. She despises Madame Bisset, who is in charge of her training, but makes friends with Mary, a young servant girl, and Jed Reston, who is standing in for his father (who had a stroke) as her history teacher. It is through him that Ella learns the rumors surrounding her engagement involving a fairy godmother and a pumpkin coach, and she tells him the truth.Ella was forced into servitude to her stepmother, Lucille, and stepsisters, Corimunde and Griselda, after the death of her father. They receive news that the king and queen are holding a royal ball. Despite Lucille forbidding her from attending and giving her more than enough housework to keep her busy, Ella planned to go, mostly as a way to spite her, as well as search for a potentially better job than a housemaid. She managed to attend by wearing her mother's old wedding dress and glass slippers she won in a wager with the town's glassblower and getting a ride from a friendly coachman. Although Prince Charming was enamored by her, Ella had to run from the ball at midnight because it was the only way to catch a free ride home, though she lost one of her glass slippers as she left. The prince finally found her through the shoe fitting, although Ella did not realize Jed was also there assisting the prince, so he knew of her origins long before she told him. They have a falling out, however, when she thinks that he is using her to try and realize his dream of a camp for refugees of the Sualan war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Summer_(Greig_novel)"title="That Summer (Greig novel)">
It is June 1940. Working class Len Westbourne, an inexperienced fighter pilot, falls in love with Stella Gardam, a more worldly radar operator. Stella's friend Maddy is killed in a bombing raid and Len's squadron colleague, Polish pilot Tad, dies in a flying accident.Told in alternate chapters from the perspectives of Len and Stella, "That Summer" is a love story told against the background of the Battle of Britain. Len is injured when his Hawker Hurricane crashes and goes off to recuperate with Stella in the countryside.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13_Bullets"title="13 Bullets">
"13 Bullets" takes place in Pennsylvania in the year 2003, in a setting similar to the real world, but where vampires and other supernatural forces are rare but accepted phenomena. It is widely believed that vampires were all but wiped out twenty years ago by Special Deputy Jameson Arkeley. The last vampire still in existence, Justinia Malvern, long imprisoned in a nearly abandoned sanitarium, has somehow managed to bestow her vampiric curse to the outside world and is working to free herself of human confinement. Pennsylvania State Trooper Laura Caxton is assigned to assist Arkeley hunt down the vampires running loose in rural Pennsylvania.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burmese_Harp"title="The Burmese Harp">
Takeyama wrote the story wanting to give young readers hope after defeat in WWII by emphasizing the traditional Buddhist ideal of altruism, embodied in a soldier hero, Mizushima. Captured by the British led Indian forces, following the Surrender of Japan in July 1945, Mizushima is a harp-playing Japanese P.O.W. who volunteers to persuade a resisting Japanese unit to surrender. His attempt fails and in the ensuing battle he is left behind, assumed dead. Mizushima takes the clothes of a Buddhist monk, but then reappears as the monk to his former comrades. His comrades, led by Captain Inouye, gift the monk a blue parakeet trained to say "Mizushima come home", but Mizushima elects to stay behind in Burma to bury the dead. The title of the book comes from the saung, the musical instrument adopted by the soldier. The novel is more open than the 1956 film about Japan's responsibility for the war. In Takeyama's novel one of the soldiers talks of the "terrible trouble" which Japan has brought to Burma, and the hero soldier-become monk Mizushima criticizes Japan's colonial ambitions as "wasteful desires" and the Japanese having "forgotten the most important things in life", a perspective which is downplayed in the film.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_John_MacNab"title="The Return of John MacNab">
Andrew Greig has rewritten "John Macnab" by John Buchan for the late 20th century.The plot follows the original closely. In "John Macnab" (1925), three bored successful friends in their mid-forties turn to poaching, under the collective name ‘John Macnab’, set up in the Highland home of a war hero and prospective Conservative MP.In "The Return of John Macnab" three rather downcast friends (a copywriter whose wife has died suddenly on a plane flight; an ex-Special Forces soldier with a marital crisis; and a jaundiced left-wing joiner) decide to revive Buchan’s novel. They target an estate owned by a Moroccan, another rented by a Dutch corporation, and the third, Balmoral, traditional home of the British royal family in Scotland. The modern-day Macnabs are hijacked by Kirsty Fowler, a hard-living reporter and singer with a murky past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Dunn,_Invisible_Boy"title="Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy">
Danny exacerbates a small electrical fire, altering an experimental crystalline semiconductor material Professor Bullfinch was evaluating. Prof. Bullfinch is able to use this altered material to create ISIT (the Invisibility Simulator with Intromittent Transmission), a dragonfly-like probe which could be piloted with a telepresence helmet and gauntlet gloves.The trio each tries out the device. Irene uses ISIT to birdwatch. Joe uses the device to observe a beehive from the inside. Danny discovers a bully nicknamed "Snitcher" cheating by copying the word list to the school spelling bee and dishonestly winning himself a boombox. The ISIT is outfitted with a speaker which is subsequently used by Danny as a means to pretend to be the bully's conscience, in order get Snitcher to confess to his father.However, ISIT also causes problems, as soon afterwards Prof. Bullfinch is visited by General Gruntel. The general reveals (in very authoritarian language) he wishes to use ISIT as a tool to spy not only on enemy governments, but against Americans as well. General Gruntel attempts to seize the unit, but is rebuffed by Doctor Grimes. While going to get authorization to seize the ISIT, he leaves the professor's lab under guard.Danny, Irene, and Joe decide to take matters into their own hands and stealthily break into the lab to recover the probe. The probe's absence is realized which leads to Colonel Twist, the commanding officer of the two guards, to delusively believe the device has been stolen by a foreign power. As he is being confronted by Twist, the Professor realizes the trio of friends are responsible. He informs Danny that without destroying his notes detailing the creation of ISIT, either the Soviet Union or the United States military could still recreate it. While the local National Guard arrives to secure the house against foreign spies, Danny and the Professor make their way to the probe's controls and use it to cause a fire that destroys both the notes and probe.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_They_Lay_Bare"title="When They Lay Bare">
A mysterious young woman moves into deserted Crawhill cottage on the estate of Sir Simon Elliot in the Scottish Borders. He fears she is the daughter of his mistress: "If it wasn't the child, Sim wondered, who was she and what the hell was she doing moving into Crawhill? And if it was her, what had she came back for, why had she not come to see him? Instead she had taken up residence in the cottage and waited. What did the lassie want with Davy?"The novel is based around a set of antique plates that the young woman brings with her, depicting the Border Ballads, "Twa Corbies" and "Barbara Allen".
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Another_Light"title="In Another Light">
The novel alternates between present-day Orkney and the 1930s in the dying days of the British Empire in Penang, British Malaya in South East Asia.After a near-fatal illness, Edward Mackay decides to find out more about his late father's mysterious past. Dr Alexander Mackay's secret is gradually revealed by his son's findings. On the sea voyage to the East, the young doctor meets an eclectic crowd including the Simpson sisters, who are of unattainable social class, "both beautiful, one a gazelle". The doctor is gradually accepted into Penang society, and makes regular visits to the sisters, one of whom is married. Following a mysterious accident and a secret holiday in the Sumatran highlands, he leaves the island under a cloud of scandal.Edward's investigations in the modern day are assisted by a trail of clues including a Buddha figurine and a double-one domino, and by an old lady, a blonde woman he bumps into in London, and an Orkney woman called Mica.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wish_Giver"title="The Wish Giver">
## Prologue.The narrator, Stewart Meade (nicknamed "Stew Meat"), meets a strange man named Thaddeus Blinn in a carnival tent and notices something unusual about him. Stew Meat sees that there are three children in the tent who he recognizes as Polly, Rowena, and Adam. Blinn sells each of them a card with a red spot in the middle, for only 50 cents each, explaining that all they have to do is to press their finger on the spot, make a wish out loud, and it will come true – exactly as they word it.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilgrim_(Douglass_novel)"title="Pilgrim (Douglass novel)">
Upon arriving through the Star Gate, the Time Keeper Demons begin 'feeding' by expelling a grey miasma from their mouths which spreads across the land, corrupting and maddening any being not sheltered. They depart the vicinity of the now destroyed Star Gate and travel through the woods to Cauldron Lake. Meanwhile Faraday uses her new powers to bring Drago back to life.The newly resurrected Drago, Faraday, and Zenith then join Caelum's army in the woods surrounding the Barrows and set plans. Despite a pledge to help Caelum however possible, Axis, Azhure, and Caelum remain distrustful and loathing towards him with Axis even stabbing Drago.Axis, Azhure, Caelum, and a small contingent from the army resolve to travel to Star Finger to search through the ancient texts there for an answer. Zared is left in command of the combined armies tasked with preserving what he can of the land. Faraday and Drago leave on a pair of white donkeys with a feathered lizard from the woods to attempt to beat the demons to Cauldron Lake. There the voice that spoke to Faraday during her transformation, Noah, awaits.Isfrael and Shra confront the demons as they pass through the forest. Their combined power is a match for the still weak demons, but one of the newly acquired demonic mounts sneaks behind them and disembowels Shra. The demons are the first to arrive at Cauldron Lake and proceed to drain/kill it to expose the craft of the Enemy and a crystal forest. Surviving the reflective trap, the demons find a pool of blood and throw StarLaughter's dead child into the blood. It emerges as a toddler and possessing the warmth of the greatest of the demons, Qeteb. After their departure but still sensed by them, WolfStar comes forth from the waterways and places his own dead child in the blood with similar results.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Javan's_Year"title="King Javan's Year">
The novel is set in the land of Gwynedd, one of the fictional Eleven Kingdoms. Gwynedd itself is a medieval kingdom similar to the British Isles of the 10th century, with a powerful Holy Church (based on the Roman Catholic Church), and a feudal government ruled by a hereditary monarchy. The population of Gwynedd includes both humans and Deryni, a race of people with inherent psychic and magical abilities who are being systematically persecuted by both the Crown and the Church. The novel begins almost three years after the conclusion of "The Harrowing of Gwynedd", as the continuously poor health of young King Alroy Haldane has brought him to his deathbed. To claim his rightful place as the next King of Gwynedd, Alroy's twin brother and heir, Prince Javan Haldane, must find a way to survive the political and religious machinations of Alroy's former Regents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Years_(Woolf_novel)"title="The Years (Woolf novel)">
## 1880."It was an uncertain Spring."&lt;br&gt;Colonel Abel Pargiter visits his mistress Mira in a dingy suburb, then returns home to his children and his invalid wife Rose. His eldest daughter Eleanor is a do-gooder in her early twenties, and Milly and Delia are in their teens. Morris, the eldest brother, is already a practising barrister. Delia feels trapped by her mother's illness and looks forward to her death. Ten-year-old Rose quarrels with twelve-year-old Martin and sneaks off by herself to a nearby toyshop. On the way back she is frightened by a man exposing himself. As the family prepares for bed, Mrs Pargiter seems at last to have died, but she recovers.At Oxford it is a rainy night and undergraduate Edward, the last Pargiter sibling, reads "Antigone" and thinks of his cousin Kitty Malone, with whom he is in love. He is distracted by two friends, the athletic Gibbs and the bookish Ashley.Daughter of a Head of House at Oxford, cousin Kitty endures her mother's academic dinner-parties, studies half-heartedly with an impoverished female scholar named Lucy Craddock, and considers various marriage prospects, dismissing Edward. She is sitting with her mother when the news is brought that Mrs Pargiter is dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusader_(Douglass_novel)"title="Crusader (Douglass novel)">
Raging at the escape of the StarSon, Qeteb has the Hawkchilds scour the remains of Tencendor. Although they don't immediately find Sanctuary, a Hawkchild does find and return the wooden bowl given to Faraday by the Mother, though they do not know how to use it. Unaware of this oversight, the Mother, Ur, and the Horned Ones wait in the Sacred Groves, slowly dying. Meanwhile, at sanctuary many are discontented and impatient, finding it more of a prison then a sanctuary. Axis walks to the bridge and begins talking to it, though halfway through it begins screaming and it dies, and Axis nearly falls into the chasm below until Drago saves him, and though Axis notices a some sort of power in him, he still stubbornly refuses to forgive him for Caelum's death, thinking he is still the malevolent man he was when he was a baby, who always wanted Caelum's inheritance. Drago then talks to Azhure, who also recognises he has some sort of power, and on departure recognises him as Dragonstar, not Drago.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cythera_(novel)"title="Cythera (novel)">
"Cythera" is set in a near future Earth following an unsuccessful Third World Children's Crusade against the West, with children being subject to increasing levels of censorship. Film-maker Flynn has been imprisoned for making the subversive Dahlia Chan films, along with his leading lady Jaruwan. Thanks to the increasing power of the Net sentient 'ghosts' of media images have crossed from Earth 2 to Earth 1, and the novel follows the affair between human Tarquin and Dahlia Chan, their efforts to rescue Jaruwan and their ultimate quest for the freedom of mythical Cythera.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sculptress"title="The Sculptress">
Olive Martin – a 28-year-old, morbidly obese woman – was imprisoned for life after police found her cradling the shattered bodies of her mother and sister, having previously dismembered them and rearranged their limbs into abstract shapes on the floor, a crime for which she was nicknamed "the Sculptress". Troubled journalist Rosalind Leigh, under pressure from her publisher to produce new material, reluctantly agrees to write a book about Olive and – whilst conducting interviews with the prisoner – gradually comes to believe that she is concealing something, maybe even her own innocence. In her quest to discover the truth Rosalind enlists the help of Hal Hawksley. He is an ex-policeman who investigated the case originally and is still haunted by some of its aspects.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Runaway_Bunny"title="The Runaway Bunny">
A little bunny tells his mother that he is going to run away, becoming variously a fish, a rock on a mountain, a crocus in a hidden garden, a bird, a sailboat, a circus acrobat, and finally a little boy, until he resigns himself to stay where he is and remain her little bunny. Mother Bunny appears as a fisherman, a mountain climber, a gardener, a tree, a cloud, a trapeze walker, and finally the mother herself.The illustrations alternate between 2-page black-and-white line images and accompanying text, and 2-page painted spreads. Similar alternation of black-and-white spreads and color spreads occur in all three books in the series.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meanest_Doll_in_the_World"title="The Meanest Doll in the World">
The novel revisits "The Doll People" protagonists Annabelle Doll and Tiffany Funcraft as they get into trouble trying to hide from their owner, Kate Palmer. They hide in her backpack and get taken to school. There, they explore and eventually get into a backpack they think is Kate's. It turns out it is really the backpack of a different child, named BJ. The dolls are taken to BJ's house where they meet Waterfall, Melody, Yvonne, Penny, and Beth, the toys of BJ's sister. The dolls there are being terrorized by a doll named Princess Mimi (called by the toys Mean Mimi). Mean Mimi tries to boss them around too, but Annabelle and Tiffany escape back into BJ's backpack. They plan to return to school and get back into Kate's backpack and then home to their worried families. They are unaware that Mean Mimi has followed them.At the Palmers' house, Mimi pretends to cry and tricks the Dolls and the Funcrafts into letting her stay with them. What they do not know is that Mimi is trying to torture them, too. Mimi tries to wake up Kate so she will know about the mess she made and blame the Annabelle and Tiffany. Nora, Kate's little sister, sees Mean Mimi jump off Kate's bookshelf in a stunt to expose the life of the other dolls. Due to this, Mimi goes into Permanent Doll State, which causes dolls to be unable to return to life due to their risk to all dollkind. The story concludes with Mean Mimi, still in Permanent Doll State, being taken back to Kate's school where she ends up in the lost and found.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bummer_Summer"title="Bummer Summer">
The central character, Kamilla Whitlock, who is known as "Kammy" or "Kams" lives with her father, Robert Whitlock, and a housekeeper named Andrew Croswell, in a sleepy east coast town. Kammy's mother Annie died in a car crash when Kammy was four. Eight years later, her father has remarried. His new wife, Kate, who is nineteen years younger than he is, has a three-year-old daughter named Muffin and an unnamed son called Baby Boy. There are conflicts, and Kammy's father and stepmother offer to send her to summer camp at Camp Arrowhead. Kamilla is reluctant but ends up going anyway. While she is at camp, she meets new friends. One of her best friends is Emily, a girl that has been to the camp a few years. She also unfortunately meets a new archenemy, Susie, who considers herself "Miss Perfect," and tries to outstrip everything that Kammy does. But Susie alone can't ruin Kammy's summer-her summer turns out to not be so bad after all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_on_the_Road"title="Killer on the Road">
Michael Martin Plunkett is a child genius who comes from a broken home: His father is a hustler and his mother is an alcoholic and drug addict who engages in a series of one-night stands. After his parents divorce, Plunkett takes solace in a series of disturbing fantasies in which he re-assembles his classmates' body parts. The fantasies lead Plunkett to becoming a peeping Tom, and from the time he is seven until he turns eleven, he spends all of his free time spying on his neighbors and observing people having intercourse. Before he can graduate junior high, Plunkett's teachers, having noticed his withdrawn nature in class, send him to the school psychologist, who identifies Plunkett as disturbed but nonetheless passes him to high school after Plunkett emotionally manipulates him into a fit of rage.In high school, Plunkett, now realizing that there is something different about himself after his session with the school psychologist, seeks out some means of grounding himself psychologically. He becomes obsessed with a series of comic books and fixates on the main villain, "Shroud Shifter," a jewel thief obsessed with becoming invisible. Plunkett comes to the conclusion that his own goal should become "invisibility" in the sense that he can move through life as nondescript as possible.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bastard_Prince"title="The Bastard Prince">
The novel is set in the land of Gwynedd, one of the fictional Eleven Kingdoms. Gwynedd itself is a medieval kingdom similar to the British Isles of the 10th century, with a powerful Holy Church (based on the Roman Catholic Church), and a feudal government ruled by a hereditary monarchy. The population of Gwynedd includes both humans and Deryni, a race of people with inherent physic and magical abilities who are being systematically persecuted by both the Crown and the Church. The novel begins five and a half years after the conclusion of "King Javan's Year", as a Deryni pretender leads his forces across the border to claim the crown of Gwynedd. Forced by his great lords to live as a puppet king since the death of his older brother, King Rhys Michael Haldane finally gets the opportunity to be a true king and defend his throne. However, the great lords may be even more dangerous than a foreign invader, and Rhys Michael must find a way to defeat both if he is to survive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_Away_Peter"title="Fly Away Peter">
"Fly Away Peter" is an Australian novel set before and during the First World War. The first part of the novel is set on the Queensland Gold Coast, and the second part on the Western Front.The central character of the novel is Jim Saddler, a self-contained young man with a profound understanding of the bird life of an estuary near his home. Ashley Crowther has recently inherited the farm which includes the estuary; despite the divide of class and experience, the two young men form a close bond when Ashley offers Jim a job as a warden, recording the comings and goings of birds in their 'sanctuary'. Jim also befriends Imogen, an older woman whose photography captures the beauty of the birds in the sanctuary; in particular the Sandpiper. This is an idyllic world of Sandpipers, plovers and ibises, but not without the seeds of change and disturbance.When the First World War breaks out, Jim feels obliged to join up, and travels to the Western Front, where his unique and sensitive perception gives the reader a window to the horrific experience of trench warfare. Malouf's description of the all-consuming 'system' of war and the gruesome realities of living and dying at the front are gut-wrenching in their detail. After an uneventful arrival at the front, a shell lands unexpectedly among Jim's friends behind the lines. Jim is coated by the blood of his friend Clancy, who is blown out of existence. Subsequently a young recruit Eric loses both legs.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Those_Who_Walk_in_Darkness"title="Those Who Walk in Darkness">
In a world where, until a few years ago, the streets were rocked by battles between colorfully clad men and women with astounding metanormal powers, the people have declared all-out war against these modern-day titans. Following the destruction of the city of San Francisco in a super-battle gone bad, the federal government has issued an executive order outlawing not only the use of super powers, but also the very people who possess them. For the beings known as Metanormals, it doesn't matter whether they were once superheroes, supervillains, or neither; if they commit crimes, save lives or just try to live normal lives without ever using their powers; they're all regarded as public enemies, and as such the legal prey of the murderous LAPD division G Platoon (presumably after SWAT's designation of D Platoon) known more familiarly as the Metanormal Tactical Unit, or "MTac."The main character is Soledad O'Roark, a rookie MTac whose single-minded hatred of the Metas is extreme even by the obsessive standards of her profession. Soledad earns the hated nickname "Bullet" on her first call, when she uses an O'Dwyer Variable-Lethality Law Enforcement gun to blow away a rampaging pyrokinetic in the act of frying her squad. Soledad herself modified the high-tech gun, which comes complete with color-coded bullets designed to exploit the individual weaknesses of various common Metas. The gun saves her life and the lives of several of her partners, but the department brass still demotes her, and considers filing charges, for her failure to follow official procedure by using the unregistered weapon. Soledad's lawyer, Gayle, suspects a conspiracy.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathwatch_(novel)"title="Deathwatch (novel)">
The story begins with successful Los Angeles businessman and hunter named Madec, who hires Ben, a college student, to help him find bighorn sheep in the nearby Mojave Desert after receiving a rare permit to hunt them. Ben has experience working in the desert, as he is studying to be a geologist, but he is also low on money, so he accepts.Things take a deadly turn when Madec accidentally shoots an old prospector. Madec does not want to report the shooting, but Ben insists that they must. Madec threatens Ben with his rifle, and orders Ben strip down to his shorts, then leaves him in the desert to die of exposure, planning to report that Ben went insane, shot the prospector, and wandered off into the desert alone. Madec is certain Ben cannot survive, as they are in a hot desert 45 miles from the nearest highway, but just to make sure, he watches Ben from a distance, using the scope on his rifle. Ben is shot at multiple times as Madec tries to dissuade Ben from searching for water with one shot going through Ben's arm. Time is running out as he begins to hallucinate, suffering from dehydration, hunger, sunburn, gunshots, and heat. However, Ben finds enough water to survive, and also finds a wrist-brace slingshot and some buckshot that had belonged to the prospector. He practices with the slingshot, then uses it to overcome and capture Madec.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melting_Stones"title="Melting Stones">
"Melting Stones" follows Evvy, the young stone mage introduced in "Street Magic", who accompanies her guardian Rosethorn on a mission to Starns Island to study a mysterious plant die-off. With her magic—and the help of Luvo, the heart of a mountain—the girl discovers a threat far greater than anyone could have imagined. Preventing disaster may cost Evvy her life.Evvy sulks about being aboard a ship to the Battle Islands; she is only there because she used her stone magic to damage some rich boys studying at Winding Circle for bothering her friends, and the alternative punishment was house arrest at Discipline Cottage. Her power is suppressed by being separated from stone by fathoms of water, repelled by the power of the sea. She is accompanied by Luvo, the animated heart of a mountain that started to accompany Evvy when Rosethorn, Briar, and Evvy traveled in Gyongxe. Evvy first feels the earth move when she is on the ship. She rejoices at the feel of the earth being close to her, however on land this causes violent tremors. Protective of Rosethorn because they survived the war together, Evvy warns the traveling party about feeling the earth move more than once, often preceded or echoed by Luvo. The third member of their party is Dedicate Myrrhtide, often referred to by Evvy as Dedicate Fusspot, an older, fully accredited water mage. He warns the other two that the reception on the island may not be warm, despite the fact that the island called for help. He also notes that the Battle Islands were only recently purged of the pirate menace. The dedicates have been asked to examine Starns Island because trees are dying with no obvious cause. After the boat docks, they meet two men who guide them to the village that called for their help. One of them is named Oswin, who is known throughout the island for being able to fix things, because he observes what mages do besides magic. Oswin has taken in children who were left behind when the island was cleared of pirates, because he attempted to place them in other homes but was not entirely successful.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Kelson's_Bride"title="King Kelson's Bride">
The novel is set in the land of Gwynedd, one of the fictional Eleven Kingdoms. Gwynedd itself is a medieval kingdom similar to the British Isles of the 12th century, with a powerful Holy Church (based on the Roman Catholic Church), and a feudal government ruled by a hereditary monarchy. The population of Gwynedd includes both humans and Deryni, a race of people with inherent psychic and magical abilities who have been persecuted, oppressed and suppressed for two centuries. The novel begins almost three years after the conclusion of "The Quest for Saint Camber", as King Kelson Haldane prepares to make a dangerous journey into the heart of the neighboring kingdom of Torenth. While attempting to survive a web of deceit and betrayal at a foreign court, Kelson must secure his own throne by finally choosing a royal bride.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaaterskill_Falls_(novel)"title="Kaaterskill Falls (novel)">
"Kaaterskill Falls" spans two years (summer 1976- summer 1978) in the life of a small community in upstate New York. Most of the characters are summer residents, Orthodox Jews whose lives center around the local Orthodox synagogue. Others are year-round residents, both Christians and secular Jews, whose local roots run deep and who coexist in uneasy symbiosis with the summer people.Elizabeth Shulman, a thirtysomething wife and mother of five daughters, is growing restless with her prescribed role as a woman within the strict Kirshner sect. She conceives the dream of opening a kosher grocery to serve the summer residents of Kaaterskill. Her store is a smashing success, but Elizabeth's perceived laxity in adhering to its rabbinic certification earns the distrust of Isaiah and Rachel Kirshner. Meanwhile, Elizabeth learns that she is pregnant for the sixth time. Elizabeth experiences a closing in of boundaries as Rabbi Isaiah Kirshner withdraws his permission for her grocery store and a new baby binds her once again to home. Ultimately, she takes a job as an assistant at a grocery store in Washington Heights (where the Shulmans live for most of the year) in order to learn the business.Another plot line revolves around strife within the Melish family. Middle-aged Andras Melish struggles with a sense of distance from his young, lively, somewhat dictatorial wife, Nina. He forges an unlikely clandestine friendship with the reclusive Una Darmstadt-Cooper. Meanwhile, teenage Renee Melish rebels against her mother's expectations for her and forms an unsuitable friendship with a gutsy Syrian girl, Stephanie Fawess. Renee also attracts the attention of a local boy, Ira Rubin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starter_for_Ten_(novel)"title="Starter for Ten (novel)">
The story, told in first-person narrative, is set in 1985 and chronicles the misadventures of student Brian Jackson in his first year at an unnamed university. A somewhat obsessive collector of general knowledge, Brian has been a fan since childhood of the television quiz show "University Challenge" which he used to watch with his late father, and on arriving at university, he seizes upon the opportunity to join its "University Challenge" team. He is initially unsuccessful, but is selected after one of the other team members is forced to drop out because of ill health. The TV show's catchphrase – "Your starter for 10" – gives the book its title.Brian promptly falls for his glamorous teammate, Alice Harbinson, although the attraction is not mutual, and he may have more in common with a counterculturalist chum, Rebecca Epstein. Additionally, Brian finds himself caught between his new life, amongst the middle-class university set, and his old, with his working-class family and friends in the seaside town of Southend, Essex.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polity_Agent"title="Polity Agent">
From 800 years in the future, a runcible gate is opened into the Polity. Those coming through it have been tasked with taking the alien 'Maker' back to its home civilization in the Small Magellanic cloud. Once these refugees are safely through, the gate itself is rapidly shut down because something alien is pursuing them. From those who get through, agent Cormac learns that the Maker civilization has been destroyed by pernicious virus known as the Jain technology. This raises questions: Why was Dragon, a massive bioconstruct of the Makers, really sent to the Polity; why did a Jain node suddenly end up in the hands of someone who could do the most damage with it? Meanwhile, an entity called the Legate is distributing toxic Jain nodes ...and a renegade attack ship, The King of Hearts, has encountered something very nasty outside the Polity itself ...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleinzeit"title="Kleinzeit">
Hoban's second novel for adults, "Kleinzeit" is a story detailing the eponymous title character's brush with illness and creativity. When Kleinzeit is fired from his job as an advertising copy-writer, he ends up in hospital with a ‘skewed hypotenuse’, being tended by the healthy and desirable Sister. Together, they embark on a strange adventure, in which Kleinzeit struggles to get better, attempts to master his creative urges, and holds conversations with a variety of abstract concepts. The central character shares many traits with Hoban himself, and the author has commented: ‘I think there's most of me in "Kleinzeit"’.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Put_Out_More_Flags"title="Put Out More Flags">
At the country estate of Malfrey, Barbara Sothill loses her servants, who go off to work in factories, and her husband, who rejoins his reserve regiment. As district billeting officer, she has to find accommodation for evacuees. Her widowed mother in London tries to find an army commission for Barbara’s wayward brother Basil Seal, who is sleeping with a Marxist artist called Poppet Green, but Basil fails his interview spectacularly. An aesthete friend of his, the left-wing gay Jewish intellectual Ambrose Silk, looks for a safe niche in the Ministry of Information. Basil's former mistress, the married millionairess Angela Lyne, returns from a solitary holiday in France.Basil decides to spend the winter quietly in the country with his sister at Malfrey, where he helps her in homing problem children and then gets people to pay him for taking them away again. He meets a lonely bride whose husband is away in the army and sleeps happily with her. Back in London his friend Alastair Trumpington, refusing to try for a commission, joins the army as a private. All alone, her estranged husband Cedric having joined the army, Angela Lyne stays in her flat and takes to the bottle.The husband of Basil's lover returns and his racket is running out of steam, so he “sells” his problem children and, returning to London, meets by chance an old colleague who gets him a commission in army counter-intelligence. There he shadows allegedly dangerous communists like Poppet Green and her friends. Another old friend who is now the army, Peter Pastmaster, deciding he ought to marry and father an heir, courts the eligible young Molly. Together they find Angela collapsed in the street and, taking her back to her flat, warn Basil about her condition. He responds with sympathy, spends time with her and tries to moderate her drinking.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vivisector"title="The Vivisector">
Hurtle Duffield is born into a poor Australian family. They adopt him out to the wealthy Courtneys, who are seeking a companion for their hunchbacked daughter Rhoda. The precocious Hurtle gains artistic inspiration from the world that surrounds him, his adoptive mother, Maman, and Rhoda; the prostitute Nance, who is his first real love; the wealthy heiress Olivia Davenport; his Greek mistress Hero Pavloussi and finally the child prodigy Kathy Volkov. He becomes famous and his paintings are in great demand. However, he is unimpressed by the monetary and status gain this brings and continues to live a spartan life, beholden to nobody — even the Prime Minister. In his final years he is drawn closer to his sister Rhoda, and after a stroke causes partial paralysis, is assisted by his protégé Don Lethbridge to produce a huge, final magnum opus to God — the Vivisector.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Skinner"title="The Skinner">
"The Skinner" tells the story of three individuals who have journeyed to the 'line-world' (a world on the 'line', or border, of the Human Polity) of Spatterjay, a hostile mostly aquatic world with ferocious native lifeforms.The planet Spatterjay is host to a complex virus that permeates throughout all life forms (including humans), propagated by a kind of leech which uses the virus to keep its prey alive whilst it feeds upon them. The virus optimizes life forms it infects for survival changing them, often rapidly, in response to environmental pressures. Humans need to consume food that is untainted by the virus (known colloquially as "dome grown") if they are not to be changed by the virus into something quite different. The Skinner is one such human who has "gone native", undergoing an horrific transformation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfskin"title="Wolfskin">
Eyvind is a young Viking man who wishes to be a Wolfskin (a berserker warrior of Thor) like his brother. Somerled, a quiet boy of the same age, befriends Eyvind and binds him to loyalty with a blood oath.After becoming a Wolfskin, Eyvind voyages to the Isles of Light with Somerled, his brother Eirek, Somerled's brother Ulf (the leader of the expedition), and many others. The Vikings quickly establish a peace treaty with the native island folk, and build a settlement.Then Ulf is murdered sadistically, suspended by ropes from a cliff's edge to die of exposure, leaving his position to Somerled - who immediately breaks the treaty. He sends out the Wolfskins to destroy the small army mustered by the natives in retaliation. Eyvind, seeing that the army is composed of the very young and the very old, suffers a breakdown brought on by the moral crisis.The native princess and priestess, Nessa, finds him and cares for him, healing his wounds and coldness of spirit. Alone in a hidden cave, with only an old priestess for company, the two young people fall in love.But Eyvind is soon faced with another crisis: he must face Somerled with newfound proof that the current ruler killed his own brother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_to_Faremido"title="Voyage to Faremido">
The novel describes the adventures of a pilot who loses his way and comes to a world inhabited by intelligent beings that consist of inorganic materials (thus having a superficial similarity to robots). They help the protagonist to see the beauty of their world and also help him to return home. The closing chapters elaborate that these beings not only understand the secrets of nature, but they are the secret of nature themselves — they are nature personified.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizard_Knight"title="The Wizard Knight">
Throughout "The Wizard Knight", Sir Able meets with strange and powerful creatures who give him various gifts. Disiri gives him the gift of sudden manhood and great strength. Some of the Earth Aelf (Bodachan) give him the magical dog Gylf. Garsecg gives him the power to call upon the ocean's waves to increase his strength and stamina. Two Fire Aelf, Baki and Uri, serve Sir Able after swearing allegiance to him.Able's character is that of a young American boy from the modern era who is captured by Aelf, who bring him to the land of Aelfrice and eventually release him in Mythgarthr. His memories of that time in Aelfrice are non-existent, though, apparently removed by the Aelf. In Mythgarthr he falls in love with Disiri, the Queen of the Moss Aelf, and would do anything to be with her and for her to love him.The first book finds Sir Able on a quest to find the sword Eterne, which Disiri says would be used by a knight worthy of her. Sir Able meets with Sir Ravd, who teaches him something of what it means to be a knight, then is killed by bandits. Sir Able takes a sea voyage to meet with Sir Ravd's lord but the ship is waylaid by cannibal barbarians called Osterlings and Sir Able is wounded. Sea Aelf take Able to Aelfrice to meet with Garsecg who teaches him about the ocean and shows him how to heal himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restoration_(Tremain_novel)"title="Restoration (Tremain novel)">
The novel tells the story of Robert Merivel, who begins the book as a medical student, studying alongside his serious, practical friend John Pearce. John is a studious, pious counterpart to Merivel's shallow obsession with status, drinking and eating to excess. Pearce condemns the sinfulness of Merivel's lifestyle, but Merivel is unaffected by his comments.Merivel is asked by his father to visit the King with the aim of continuing their family's connection with the royal family, but Merivel embarrasses both of them by his nervousness. However, later, King Charles II asks Merivel to care for one of his dogs, which is grievously ill. Merivel's decision not to apply any of the traditional cures of the era leads to the dog recovering naturally, and he is then appointed surgeon to all of the king's dogs. The King then arranges a marriage of convenience between Merivel and one of his mistresses, Celia Clemence. This is done purely to fool the king's other mistress Barbara Castlemaine. Merivel is given an estate named Bidnold in Norfolk, and Celia is installed in a house in Kew, where the King can visit her secretly.In Norfolk, Merivel abandons the practice of medicine, and lives a life of luxury in which he tries to take up painting with the help of an ambitious painter named Elias Finn, and indulges in failed attempts to learn the oboe. Celia is then sent to Bidnold by the King after displeasing him. One night Merivel drunkenly makes advances towards her, and is promptly reported to the King by Elias Finn. The result is that Merivel is evicted from Bidnold and left close to destitute.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road"title="The Road">
A father and his young son journey on foot across the post-apocalyptic ash-covered United States some years after an extinction event. The boy's mother, pregnant with him at the time of the disaster, died by suicide some time before.Realizing they cannot survive the winter in more northern latitudes, the father takes the boy south along interstate highways towards the sea, carrying their meager possessions in their knapsacks and a supermarket cart. The father is suffering from a cough. He assures his son that they are "good guys" who are "carrying the fire". The pair have a revolver, but only two rounds. The father has tried to teach the boy to use the gun on himself if necessary, to avoid falling into the hands of cannibals.They attempt to evade a group of marauders traveling along the road but one of the marauders discovers them and seizes the boy. The father shoots him dead and they flee the marauder's companions, abandoning most of their possessions. Later, when searching a house for supplies, they discover a locked cellar containing captives whom cannibals have been eating limb by limb, and flee into the woods.As they near starvation, the pair discover a concealed bunker filled with food, clothes, and other supplies. They stay there for many days, regaining their strength, and then carry on, taking supplies with them in a cart. They encounter an elderly man with whom the boy insists they share food. Further along the road, they evade a group whose members include pregnant women, and soon after they discover an abandoned campsite with a newborn infant roasted on a spit. They soon run out of supplies and begin to starve before finding a house containing more food to carry in their cart, but the man's condition worsens.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moth_Diaries"title="The Moth Diaries">
At an exclusively girls' boarding school, a 16-year-old unnamed narrator, records her most intimate thoughts in a diary. The object of her growing obsession is her roommate, Lucy Blake, and Lucy's friendship with their new and disturbing classmate, Ernessa. Around her swirl dark rumors, suspicions, and secrets as well as a series of ominous disasters. As fear spreads through the school and Lucy isn't Lucy anymore, fantasy and reality mingle until what is true and what is dreamed bleed together into a waking nightmare that evokes with gothic menace the anxieties, lusts, and fears of adolescence. At the center of the diary is the question that haunts all who read it, "Is Ernessa really a vampire?" or has the narrator trapped herself in the fevered world of her own imagining?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_King's_Service"title="In the King's Service">
The novel is set in the land of Gwynedd, one of the fictional Eleven Kingdoms. Gwynedd itself is a medieval kingdom similar to the British Isles of the 11th century, with a powerful Holy Church (based on the Roman Catholic Church), and a feudal government ruled by a hereditary monarchy. The population of Gwynedd includes both humans and Deryni, a race of people with inherent psychic and magical abilities who have persecuted and suppressed for almost two centuries. The novel begins one hundred and fifty-four years after the conclusion of "The Bastard Prince" and thirty-eight years before the beginning of "Deryni Rising". The plot revolves around the court of King Donal Haldane, where several Deryni secretly work in service to the king. While Donal risks everything to secure a Deryni protector for his young son and heir, a new generation of Deryni, including Lady Alyce de Corwyn, struggles to find their place in the dangerous political and religious environment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lion_(Kessel_novel)"title="The Lion (Kessel novel)">
Patricia has a rare gift to communicate with animals, and thinks she can control everything. She is popular with both animals and people. The story is narrated through a French man on a visit to Kenya. The plot of the story revolves around the friendship between Patricia and a lion called King, whom Patricia raised since he was a cub. Ouriounga, a teenage Maasai, who wishes to marry Patricia, decides to prove his worth by killing a lion to gain her respect, as is custom in his tribe. However the lion he chooses is King. Patricia's father shoots King in order to protect Ouriounga from certain death. With her idealistic view of the African savanna crushed, Patricia finally gives in to everyone's demands and leaves with the narrator to attend a boarding school in Nairobi.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childe_Morgan"title="Childe Morgan">
The novel is set in the land of Gwynedd, one of the fictional Eleven Kingdoms. Gwynedd itself is a medieval kingdom similar to the British Isles of the 11th century, with a powerful Holy Church (based on the Roman Catholic Church), and a feudal government ruled by a hereditary monarchy. The population of Gwynedd includes both humans and Deryni, a race of people with inherent psychic and magical abilities who have been persecuted and suppressed for almost two centuries. The novel details the early life of Alaric Morgan, a half-Deryni child chosen by King Donal Blaine Haldane to protect the royal legacy of arcane magic. However, Alaric is scorned by both humans and Deryni for his heritage, some of whom will stop at nothing to destroy the young boy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristopia"title="Aristopia">
Ralph Morton, an early settler in Virginia, discovers a reef made of solid gold. He cannily uses his wealth to build a planned society called Aristopia (Greek for "the best place"), based on the "Utopia" of Sir Thomas More, with innovations and adaptations of his own. In Aristopia, all the land is owned by the government, and only leased to businesses and private citizens. Large-scale trade is also monopolized by the state, and inherited wealth is limited. Morton welcomes productive refugees from European conflicts — Huguenots, Irish fugitives from Cromwell's wars, and northern Italian and Swiss artisans.The colony prospers, buys more land from the Indians, and spreads westward. Morton dies at the age of 100; his descendants and successors carry his policies forward.The Aristopians support the American Revolution, and on their own initiative conquer Canada. Aristopia comes to dominate the new nation, eventually ruling all of North America north of Mexico.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voyage_of_QV66"title="The Voyage of QV66">
The characters travel in a boat (the "QV66" of the title) with the intention of reaching London Zoo so that they can discover what Stanley is. They have a number of adventures along the way, including being joined by a parrot, several characters losing their way in a balloon, and Stanley himself getting locked in a bank vault. It is eventually revealed that Stanley is a monkey.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Law_of_Dreams"title="The Law of Dreams">
The novel follows the young Fergus O'Brien, who lives and works with his tenant family on a potato farm in Ireland. When the Great Famine begins in 1847, a mold spreads through the potato farms of the country, ruining the crop. Even after ten weeks of the famine, Fergus's father refuses to leave the farm in County Clare, and eventually the family, save Fergus, is burned alive in their shack as the lie in bed, weak with hunger. Fergus is sent to a workhouse, where he comes to realize that he must leave soon before he dies of either fever or hunger. After escaping, he travels across the country, to Liverpool and Wales, joining a gang of thieves, working on the railways, and dreaming of the unknown land of America where he eventually immigrates.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Strindberg_novel)"title="Inferno (Strindberg novel)">
The narrator (ostensibly Strindberg, although his narrative variably coheres with and diverges from historical truth) spends most of the novel in Paris, isolated from his wife (Frida Uhl), children, and friends. He associates with a circle of Parisian artists and writers (including Paul Gauguin and Edvard Munch), but often fears they are ridiculing and persecuting him. In his isolation, Strindberg successfully attempts alchemical experiments that apparently violate the laws of chemistry, and has his work published in prominent journals. He fears, however, that his secrets will be stolen, and his persecution mania worsens, believing that his enemies are attacking him with 'infernal machines.' He also dabbles in the occult, at one point casting a black magic spell on his own distanced daughter.Throughout his studies and adventures, Strindberg believes himself guided by mysterious forces (attributing them sometimes to God, Fate, or vaguer origins). When returning to Austria to see his daughter, who lives with his in-laws, Strindberg is introduced to German mythology and the teachings of Swedenborg. Strindberg's grandmother-in-law shows great disdain towards him and forces him to move back-and-forth between the towns of Saxen (where his daughter lives) and Klam. While staying there, Strindberg once again has paranoid ideas regarding how various world events prove that he is both cursed and possesses magical powers to curse others himself. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_Do_Furnish_a_Room"title="Books Do Furnish a Room">
The book conveys the atmosphere of post-war austerity as the characters that have survived attempt to resume their former life after the interruption of the conflict. It deals in particular with the chaotic career of X. Trapnel as a writer and the brief life of the new magazine "Fission". This is sponsored by Rosie Manasch and published by the left-wing firm of Quiggin and Craggs (the latter now knighted and married to Gipsy Jones). Also working for the firm is Ada Leintwardine, who Nick Jenkins first meets while she is acting as temporary secretary to Sillery, and to whom Quiggin proposes marriage after the firm is taken over at the end of the novel. Associated with the magazine are Books-do-furnish-a-room Bagshaw, the general editor; Nick, who acts as reviews editor; and Kenneth Widmerpool, now a Labour MP, writing on politics and economics.As always, the story is narrated by Nick Jenkins, who is currently researching a book on Robert Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy", quotations from which are frequently applied by way of commentary to the different situations he encounters in the novel. During its course Nick and his Tolland relations attend the funeral after Erridge's early death; it is also attended by Widmerpool and his wife Pamela, who typically manages to disrupt the ceremony and the family gathering afterwards. Towards the end of the novel, she leaves Widmerpool to live in squalor with Trapnel for awhile, finally returning to Widmerpool after scattering the manuscript of Trapnel's new novel into the canal for him to discover on returning from an evening's drinking.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Christmas_Memory"title="A Christmas Memory">
Narrated by an unnamed, seven-year-old boy who is referred to as "Buddy" by his older cousin, "A Christmas Memory" is about the narrator's relationship with his older, unnamed, female cousin, to whom he refers throughout the story only as "my friend."  (In later adaptations, she is called Sook.)  Buddy and his cousin, who is eccentric and childlike, live in a house with other relatives—who are authoritarian and stern—and have a dog named Queenie.The family is very poor, but Buddy looks forward to Christmas every year nevertheless, and he and his elderly cousin save their pennies for this occasion.  Every year at Christmastime, Buddy and his friend collect pecans and buy other ingredients to make fruitcakes; although set during Prohibition, this includes whiskey, which they buy from a scary—but ultimately friendly—"Indian" bootlegger named Haha Jones.  They send the cakes to acquaintances they have met only once or twice, and to people they've never met at all, like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.This year, after the two have finished the elaborate four-day production of making fruitcakes, the elderly cousin decides to celebrate by finishing off the remaining whiskey in the bottle.  This leads to the two of them becoming giddy drunk, and the older cousin being severely reprimanded by angry relatives for letting the younger cousin imbibe.  She runs off to her room crying, but Buddy follows and comforts her with thoughts of Christmas rituals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Venus_of_Konpara"title="The Venus of Konpara">
The novel is set in the late nineteenth century, during the British Raj, and follows the adventures of a Rajput prince who is heir to a fictional kingdom based in Deori (roughly comparable to modern Chhattisgarh). He has just returned from his education in England. As a sign of his Anglicisation he plans to build a dam and a cricket pitch on disused land in Konpara, a backward and neglected part of his realm. However, when work begins, a fragment of an ancient statue is recovered. Such is its beauty and sensuousness that it is nicknamed the "Venus of Konpara". He decides to excavate the area in search of other remains. Meanwhile, he has been seduced by a Dravidian dancing girl, who becomes his live-in lover and who seems to have a mysterious control over the local people.The prince's uncle, however, plans to displace him as successor to the throne and works in tandem with other mysterious hidden factions to disrupt the excavations. The local British administrator assists the prince, though with some reservations. The administrator is deeply resentful of his liberated wife, an artist who works in an avant-garde style similar to Manet. Her creativity disturbs his rigid and sexually repressed personality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Next_Door_(novel)"title="The World Next Door (novel)">
The story takes place in 1997, at two interlinked alternate realities. In one of them, the Cuban Missile Crisis had escalated into a major nuclear exchange. What was left of the United States disintegrated into numerous virtually-independent enclaves, though President John F. Kennedy may still be alive in a bunker somewhere.Most of the plot centers on Lake Placid, New York and along parts of Route 86, where an oasis of civilization was painstakingly built, threatened by a well-organized band of rapacious robbers who claim to be the New York State National Guard.Meanwhile, the "world next door" which avoided nuclear war in 1962 is going to experience it thirty-five years later because Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms went wrong in the worst possible way. This war would be much worse than the one in 1962, because nuclear weapons have had decades to become even more highly destructive.Characters from the first ("1962 War") world keep experiencing in dreams the lives of their analogues in the world threatened now with war. At the end of the novel, many children from the second world are transported across and given refuge in the "1962 War"-world, where meanwhile the "National Guard" robbers had been dealt with rather ruthlessly. (The book's plot is constructed so as to lead the reader to condone the cold-blooded killing of unarmed prisoners, since otherwise the prisoners in question would have escaped and perpetrated terrible atrocities.)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brief_History_of_the_Dead"title="The Brief History of the Dead">
The story takes place in the near future, with chapters alternating between two settings. Half follow Laura Byrd, an employee of The Coca-Cola Company dispatched on a research trip to Antarctica so as to assess the feasibility of the drinks company using the melting ice in their products. The world is gripped by rampant global warming, war, and bioterrorism. The other chapters describe various residents of an afterlife known as The City. This realm is neither a heaven nor a hell, containing both the pleasantries and annoyances of city life. The City appears boundless, and its geography changes to accommodate new arrivals. People appear to remain in The City for as long as at least one person remains alive who knew them. Each have a unique experience in their "crossing" (death), with one commonality: hearing the sound of a heartbeat.In remote Antarctica, the radio transmitter which Byrd and two colleagues, Puckett and Joyce, used to stay in touch with their base fails. After some time without rescue, Puckett and Joyce undertake the several-day long voyage to the base. Byrd spends weeks alone without any contact, eventually deciding to travel to the base herself. After a difficult journey, she arrives to find all of the base's personnel are dead. She finds that they succumbed to the 'Blinks', the symptoms of a deadly, and probably synthetic, virus. This virus has recently swept the entire world, killing victims within hours. Byrd realises she may be the last person left alive, but nevertheless decides to make a dangerous trip to a powerful radio transmitter in the hope of reaching outside aid. After an even more arduous journey, she makes it to the transmitter, only to find it inoperable. She survives for a short time afterwards before succumbing to the freezing conditions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Wraith_of_Shannara"title="Dark Wraith of Shannara">
## Beginning."Dark Wraith of Shannara" began with Jair Ohmsford having a recurring dream in which he relives a section of "Indomitable" where he managed to become the slain "Weapons Master" Garet Jax. He talked to his sister, Brin, about how he used the Wishsong to do something "real" (as all he had been able to do before was illusion). She asked Jair to promise not to use the Wishsong again as she feared that he would lose himself in the magic, and not be able to return to who he is if he became Garet Jax again. Jair promised to refrain from using the Wishsong again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfcry"title="Wolfcry">
Oliza relating her troubles in being heir to the throne of a divided nation. Though the avians and serpiente have put down their weapons, prejudice and hatred still run strong between the two kinds.Betia manages to return to human form out of concern for Oliza.At Oliza's request, the leader of the Obsidian Guild relates the story of the fallout between the two leaders of the Dasi.She then takes Betia to the market, where they have a shocking meeting with several avian merchants who are convinced that the three men convicted of harming Urban are not guilty.The three men are a blatant example of the differences between serpiente and avians. A vision of the future. Oliza can feel Nicias step in with his magic to keep the spell under control before she is lost in visions.Oliza goes to the courtyard and confronts the mercenaries, telling them she was the one who hired them to kidnap her, she just didn't remember it.Velyo becomes furious and threatens her, but Oliza punches him and reminds him that as a half-cobra, she has full use of a cobra's deadly poison and could kill him in a few seconds. Velyo turns into wolf form and moves away with his tail between his legs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Composer_Is_Dead"title="The Composer Is Dead">
"The Composer Is Dead" is a murder mystery about the killing of a composer. It takes place in an orchestra, and also is designed to help introduce children to instruments. The book also includes a bonus CD of one of Lemony Snicket's concerts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_Secret_Harmonies"title="Hearing Secret Harmonies">
The book opens in the late 60s. Nick and Isobel Jenkins let a caravan of four hippies, followers of the occult and spiritualism, stay on their land: Fiona Cutts, daughter of Roddy Cutts; Scorpio Murtlock, an intense young man, also described as "creepy"; Barnabas Henderson; and Rusty.Widmerpool has embraced counter-culture after his stay in the United States, and, disdaining the form of address "Lord Widmerpool", is now calling himself "Ken Widmerpool". He is appointed Chancellor of a new university, and during the opening ceremony, has paint thrown over him by students (the Quiggin twins).Matilda Donners has established the Magnus Donners Memorial Prize, awarded to biographies. She persuaded Nick to serve on the award panel by showing him and Isobel the photographs Donners took of Nick and friends 30 years before, portraying the Seven Deadly Sins. The other panel members are Mark Members and Emily Brightman, with Gibson Delavacquerie serving as secretary. In the fourth year of the award, the only suitable book is Russell Gwinnett's biography of X Trapnel. There is a complication, however: Trapnel and Gwinnett both had affairs with Pamela, wife of Widmerpool who is one of the trustees. Widmerpool has no objection to the award being granted to Gwinett, provided he can attend the award dinner with the Quiggin twins. He gives a speech denouncing bourgeois society, which is interrupted by the Quiggin twins setting off a stink bomb.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anomalies"title="The Anomalies">
In a small town in Kentucky, five outsiders have come together: an eighty-year-old woman who walks around in cowboy boots and a Sex Pistols T-shirt; a beautiful woman in a wheelchair; a young Iraqi searching for the American soldier he wounded in the First Gulf War; a precocious young girl; and an extremely articulate African American, who seems to be constantly on drugs but in reality makes his way through life completely sober. Wherever the five "freaks" show up, people laugh at them. The passion that unites them is music, their shared dream is to conquer the world with their music, and together they form the power pop new wave heavy metal punk rock band known as The Anomalies. In the words of their lead singer, "The only way to make this a better place would be for God to drop the bomb." Alone they are only outsiders, but as a group they might just be the bomb that God does not want to drop...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Castle"title="The White Castle">
The events of this story take place in 17th century Istanbul. The story is about a young Italian scholar sailing from Venice to Naples who is taken prisoner by the Ottoman Empire. Soon after, he becomes the slave of a scholar known as Hoja (master), a man who is about his own age, and with whom he shares a strong physical resemblance.Hoja reports to the Pasha, who asks him many questions about science and the world. Gradually Hoja and the narrator are introduced to the Sultan, for whom they eventually design an enormous iron weapon.The slave is told to instruct the master in Western science and technology, from medicine to astronomy. But Hoja wonders why he and his slave are the persons they are and whether given knowledge of each other's most intimate secrets, they could actually exchange identities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_the_Artist"title="Torture the Artist">
Vincent Spinetti is an archetypal tortured artist, a sensitive young writer who falls victim to alienation, parental neglect, poverty, depression, alcoholism, illness, nervous breakdowns and unrequited love. He is painfully unaware that these torments are due to the secret manipulations of New Renaissance, an experimental organization that is testing the age-old idea that art results from suffering. Since culture is so significantly influenced by music, movies, and television, New Renaissance hopes to improve the mindless mainstream by raising writers who emphasize artistic quality over commerce. As part of its top-secret sub-project, New Renaissance hires reluctant ex-musician Harlan Eiffler to manipulate its most promising prodigy, Vincent. Wickedly antisocial and deeply disgusted by what passes for entertainment in the twenty-first century, Harlan clandestinely pulls the strings so that Vincent remains a true artist. All the while, he poses as Vincent's manager, simultaneously nurturing his prolific career and torturing his soul.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_But_Blue_Skies"title="Nothing But Blue Skies">
Karen is a Chinese dragon with weather powers, who falls in love with a human and disguises herself as a human so that they can be together; when her father, the adjutant-general to the Dragon King of the North West, comes looking for her, things become much more complicated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bad_Case_of_Stripes"title="A Bad Case of Stripes">
The main character is a girl named Camilla Cream who secretly loves lima beans. However, she doesn't want to eat them because her friends dislike them and Camilla wants to fit in.On the first day of school, she wakes up to discover thick, solid-colored stripes all over her body. The family's physician, Dr. Bumble, determines that Camilla is well enough to attend school tomorrow. But when she does the next day, most of the other children tease her and some of the other children call out colors and patterns which cause the colors on her skin to shift around. The principal sends her home as she is proving to be a distraction and calls her parents to keep Camilla home from school till her symptoms wear off.At home, Camilla goes through a number of increasingly preposterous metamorphoses. She turns into a pill after being given one and grows roots, berries, crystals, feathers, and a long furry tail after receiving different medicine. She even has viruses, bacteria, and fungus colonies grow on her body after the community's expert scientists discuss these as a possible cause to her situation while examining her. Finally, she melts and merges into her room after an environmental therapist tells her to “become one with the room”.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Water_(novella)"title="Black Water (novella)">
The book opens with Elizabeth Anne "Kelly" Kelleher in a car that is plunging into mucky, swampy, "black water." The reader learns of the events that led up to the accident in flashbacks as the protagonist is drowning: Kelly Kelleher attends a Fourth of July party hosted by her friend Buffy St. John and her lover, Ray Annick. She is planning to stay with them for the weekend. Ray has invited "The Senator" about whom Kelly wrote her graduate thesis. He immediately is interested in her sexually; he pays attention solely to her as the party drags on, and they discuss their common political beliefs. The Senator follows Kelly to the beach where he kisses her, and then invites her to come to his hotel with him on the ferry. As she packs her bags, Buffy tries to convince her not to go or to go later but Kelly thinks that this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance and goes with him, despite the fact that he has been drinking and that she is not entirely sure that she is "ready" for any sort of relationship.The Senator is drunk and takes the "old" Ferry Road instead of the "new" one; he is driving recklessly and drives directly through a guardrail into a marsh. The reader later finds that, had he made the turn, the car probably would have fallen into the water a short distance down the road at an old bridge. The car sinks passenger side-down.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_in_Copper"title="Venus in Copper">
The story begins in Rome during late spring, AD 71. Falco is in the Latumiae Prison, accused by the spy Anacrites of having stolen lead ingots which were property of the State (Shadows in Bronze). Bailed out by his mother, Falco is heading across the city to visit Helena Justina when he is beaten up by his landlord's bullyboys for defaulting on his rent—despite having been bailed out by none other than Helena Justina. Marcus decides to resume working as an independent, despite the fact that this means he is unlikely to be able to earn enough money to buy himself into a higher rank so that he can marry Helena.Luck seems to smile down on Falco. A slave, Hyacinthus arrives at Falco's apartment in Fountain Court to ask him to assist the Hortensii, a trio of "nouveau riche" freedmen. Hyacinthus also recommends a real estate agent to Falco named Cossus, who eventually gets Falco a new home. Falco agrees to visit the Hortensii, who live on the Pincian Hill. There, Sabina Pollia informs him that all of the Hortensii (Crepito, Felix, Novus and their wives) live together in the one house. Novus is the only one currently unwed and he is due to marry Severina Zotica, but Sabina Pollia informs Falco that she believes Severina plans to murder Novus. Falco chooses to investigate Sabina's claims. At the same time he also begins to hunt for a new apartment in which to live.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monday_Mourning"title="Monday Mourning">
The plot of the story revolves around Brennan trying to decipher the clues left behind by the skeletons of three girls found in a pizza parlor basement in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, which has a colourful history. Brennan's forensic expertise tells her that the people were buried after 1955, but homicide detective Luc Claudel is convinced the bones are pre-1955, and dismisses the case. Brennan's frustration at Claudel for not investigating the case grows and she decides to take it on herself. From simply the remains of the three girls, she follows the clues which include a frightened old lady, a crazed man with a S&amp;M fetish, and finally a girl who has been subjected to so much sexual torture, she develops a taste for it herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Woman"title="The Iron Woman">
The main character, Lucy, finds the Iron Woman in a state of despair and covered in chemicals. After being cleaned (by Lucy), the Iron Woman takes her to see the environment in which she lives. Lucy sympathises with the Iron Woman, watching the animals' painful deaths as more toxic material is poured into the marsh from the local waste-disposal factory. She is angry and wants to save them, but her dad is one of the factory workers. Lucy contacts Hogarth, the friend of the Iron Man, asking for his help. The Iron Woman is so enraged that she turns all the men in the factory into the swamp creatures, so that they can feel what the animals of the marsh were enduring. They all burp black bubbles of cloud, which the next day form the Cloud Spider: "I am the Spider-god of wealth. Wealth. Wealth. The Spider-god of more and more and more and more money. I catch it in my web." The Cloud Spider is taken away by the Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon from the first novel of 1968, "The Iron Man".When the Iron Woman turns the men back to their human forms, all their hair is white, as though it has been bleached or they have aged.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_(novel)"title="Glasshouse (novel)">
It is the 27th century, when technology has enabled humankind to inhabit the far reaches of the universe. The culture featured in the novel is based on the culture portrayed in the last chapter of "Accelerando", "Survivor"(full chapter here). Humanity has spread throughout the galaxy using the wormhole technology copied from the alien routers, forming a plethora of societies and 'polities'.Robin, a human male, is recovering from a memory excision process in a rehabilitation centre. Though he remembers nothing of his past life(s), he suspects that he lived through traumatic times as a participant in the series of wars that raged many years before. Suspecting that he has been targeted for assassination by persons unknown, he agrees to sign-up with a radical, isolated social experiment that will attempt to recreate the forgotten "Dark Ages", the late 20th and early 21st centuries.On being transferred to the "polity" in which the program is being held, he discovers that he has been given the body of a woman, Reeve. As the experiment unfolds, she begins to suspect that all is not what it seems, and that the founders of the experiment are engaged in a very sinister conspiracy. Slowly, she realizes that her role is not as clear-cut as she originally thought, which leads her to question, and then struggle against the program.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Skin_(novel)"title="Under the Skin (novel)">
The novel begins with Isserley picking up hitchhikers on the A9 in Scotland. Gradually, it is revealed she is an alien, originally somewhat canine in form, who has been surgically altered to look like a human woman, thus suffering constant pains. She takes her job seriously, and considers herself a valuable professional. Isserley has an orderly system for appraising " to potentially capture. At the same time, she is spiteful of what she considers her deformed body made so for the job. The only other of her kind to undergo similar surgery to look like "Homo sapiens" is her direct superior, Esswis.Isserley spends her spare time walking on the pebbled beach by her cottage, marveling at the beauty of Earth compared to her home world, where most beings are forced to live and toil underground, and the wealthy Elite live on the surface, but are still unable to tolerate being outside. Sometimes she admires wandering sheep, as they remind her of children at home and she considers the non-bipeds anthropomorphic, in a sense that they share traits with her own race. Isserley considers herself and her people the "human beings," and the "Homo sapiens" of Earth animals for farming. Amlis Vess, the son of her employer, visits the farm and sets four of their captives free. In response, Isserley and Esswis hunt down and shoot them. When one of their victims writes "mercy" in the dirt in front of their pursuers, Isserley pretends to not speak English, hoping to keep hidden the extent of their language capabilities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Theory_of_Relativity"title="A Theory of Relativity">
When Ray and Georgia McKenna-Nye are killed in a horrific car crash, leaving their daughter Keefer Kathryn an orphan, the couple's respective families both believe they are the right people to raise the girl, and consequently file for custody. This book is essentially about the events surrounding the ensuing legal process which will decide Keefer's future.Keefer's maternal family are the McKennas, a Catholic family of Irish descent, and of modest means, living in rural Wisconsin. Prior to their deaths, Ray and Georgia had lived nearby and the family are fairly close. The paternal family, meanwhile, are the Nyes, born again Christians living in Florida who, though much more financially better off than the McKennas, do not appear to be as close.The final chapter of the book catches up with Keefer as a ten-year-old, and she narrates the events of the intervening years. She is adopted by Gordon after Delia dies. Delia's daughter, Alex, goes to live with her father, while Craig raises Hugh with Gordon's help and advice, and the two become good friends. Gordon and Alex then meet again some years later when Alex becomes a counsellor at Keefer's school. They have a relationship and the story concludes with Alex giving birth to a daughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raise_the_Red_Lantern_(novella)"title="Raise the Red Lantern (novella)">
Lotus is attending university when her father's tea business goes bankrupt. She chooses to become a concubine of Chen Zuoqian in the rich Chen household in order to avoid having to work. From the beginning, she does not fit into the household with its three other wives. Initially, the first mistress Joy ignores her, the second mistress Cloud befriends her, and the third mistress Coral acts with outright hostility. Coral goes so far as to interrupt Lotus's wedding night with the lie that she has taken ill.Chen's elder son Feipu, who is older than Lotus, comes home. He favors Lotus's company and she begins to fall for him, especially because he plays the flute so well and movingly. Meanwhile, one evening when they are playing mahjong, Lotus notices that Coral is flirting with a doctor.Swallow, Lotus's personal servant, resents Lotus's status as concubine and neglects her duties whenever possible. One day, Lotus accuses Swallow of stealing her flute (a family heirloom) and searches Swallow's trunk. Instead of finding the flute, she finds a doll with pins stuck in its chest. The doll has "Lotus" written on it, and Lotus demands to know who wrote the word for the illiterate Swallow. It is revealed that Cloud was the one who helped her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hades'_Daughter"title="Hades' Daughter">
"Hade's Daughter " opens at the Troy Game quartet. It is set in the Late Bronze Age (approx. 1000–1200 BC) during the time of the great Aegean Catastrophe and some years after the fall of Troy. The story's actions are mainly between Naxos, western Greece and the mysterious land of Llangarlia in the Isle of Albion (Britain). Much of the action focuses on Brutus of Troy's banishment, after he accidentally kills his father with an arrow. After wandering among the islands of the Tyrrhenian Sea and through Gaul, where he founds the city of Tours, Brutus eventually comes to the Isle of Albion, Britain, names it after himself, and fills it with his descendants. The main characters are as follows:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sing_to_the_Dawn"title="Sing to the Dawn">
Dawan, a young village girl who lives in Thailand at Bangkok gets first place in an examination and wins a scholarship to study in a city school. Her brother, Kwai, places second in the examination and is initially jealous, creating a rift between the two previously-close siblings. This hostility is further exacerbated by Dawan's father, who feels that the city is no place for a girl, and that Dawan should give in to Kwai and let him go to the city instead of her. Dawan faces majorobstacles at every turn, and eventually overcomes these obstacles and proves to herself and to others that she is fully capable of handling the scholarship and the responsibility it entails. But she faces the disapproval of her father, who is convinced that city life and further schooling are not for a girl. Dawan's determination to overcome these obstacles and to prove to herself, as well as others, that she is worthy of seeking the prize is an important experience for her and her readers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Twin"title="The Third Twin">
Jeannie Ferrami, Psy.D., is an associate professor and criminality researcher at the fictional Jones Falls University, an Ivy League school in Baltimore, Maryland. She studies the influence of genetics (rather than upbringing) on personality. Her interest in criminal tendencies is influenced by the fact that her father, Pete, is an incarcerated burglar. Financially strained, she sends her Alzheimer's-afflicted mother to live in a sub-par nursing home.Jeannie's friend Lisa Hoxton is raped during the evacuation of an on-campus locker room. The police determine that the perpetrator was a serial rapist who simulated a fire. Lisa works with sympathetic police Lt. Michelle Delaware to create a facial composite of the suspect. Jeannie meets law student Steven Logan, who participates in her study, prompting mutual attraction. Jeannie's software finds links in medical data and has identified him as the twin of incarcerated murderer Dennis Pinker. This seems to confirm Steve's fears that he is unable to control his own violent impulses. Berrington "Berry" Jones, a prominent researcher at JFU, is shocked to see Steve. He contacts his two partners in Genetico, Inc., a medical research company that heavily funds JFU; Jones, Preston Barck, and United States Senator Jim Proust are racist and classist, and apparently believe that the involvement of Steve and Pinker in the study will jeopardize Genetico's $180 million sale to international conglomerate Landsmann, and with it Proust's presidential campaign. Berry disrupts Jeannie's research by alerting the press to the legitimate ethical issues of her software. Soon after, Steve is arrested for Lisa's rape and Lisa picks him out of a lineup, but Jeannie believes his claims of innocence. Steve is released on bail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Time_of_Dinosaurs"title="In the Time of Dinosaurs">
When Marco sees a news report about a downed nuclear submarine, he and the other Animorphs set out to find it in dolphin morphs. When the warheads in the submarine detonate, however, the group finds themselves transported through time by a "Sario rip", to the era of dinosaurs (the Late Cretaceous period, to be exact). Rachel and Tobias are eaten by a "Kronosaurus" and believed dead by the other Animorphs. The other Animorphs make their way to land, where they encounter a number of dinosaurs, including the "Tyrannosaurus rex", which attempts to eat Jake. Jake morphs while inside the beast, injuring it and causing it to spit him out, and die but not before the other three Animorphs acquire it.Tobias and Rachel, meanwhile had escaped from the "Kronosaurus", and make their own way to land. Tobias' wing has been broken and was unable to be healed by morphing, most likely as a result of the time travel. The two of them have a run-in with a pack of "Deinonychus", but both manage to acquire the pack's leader and escape. Later they encountered by a vicious antlike alien race known as the Nesk, who attempt to kill Rachel and Tobias.The six Animorphs find themselves reunited above a large canyon on a force field with an artificial city at its bottom. After investigating it, they are welcomed by an alien race known as the Mercora, who had fled their own planet which was destroyed and intend on making Earth their new home. However, they are at war with the Nesk, and do not have the technology to help the Animorphs return to their own time. The Nesk, however, do—so the Animorphs storm the Nesk's camp in order to steal a warhead to recreate the explosion that sent them into the past. The Nesk angrily flee Earth, but divert the path of a nearby comet towards the planet. The Mercora respectfully ask the Animorphs to surrender their warhead, thinking they can use it to dissolve the comet, and Tobias agrees to let them have it. However, realizing that the Mercora must have died in the explosion as they are not a current part of Earth and that the comet will cause the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, he tells Ax to render it useless. The Animorphs escape back into the ocean, and the force of the comet propels them back to their own time. They are unable to use their dinosaur morphs following this book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icerigger"title="Icerigger">
After an unfortunate accident, Ethan Fortune, a simple salesman and sophisticated interstellar traveler, finds himself stranded on the deadly frozen world of Tran-Ky-Ky with professional adventurer Skua September. Together they search for a way off the planet while fighting against both the extreme weather and deadly fauna of the alien world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_of_Evidence_(novel)"title="Body of Evidence (novel)">
Kay Scarpetta, chief medical examiner of Virginia, gets involved in the case of a brutal stabbing death in Richmond of romance writer Beryl Madison. Then, Madison's greedy lawyer accuses Scarpetta of losing his client's latest manuscript, an autobiographical expose of Beryl's early life as protégé of a legendary novelist. As more deaths occur and the killer closes in on her, Kay finds herself also having to deal with the unexpected reappearance of long-lost lover Mark James. Scarpetta soon finds herself living Beryl's nightmare.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruel_and_Unusual_(novel)"title="Cruel and Unusual (novel)">
Virginia Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta is called in to autopsy the body of convicted murderer Ronnie Waddell after his execution. Several days after the execution, a young boy is discovered murdered in the fashion of Waddell's earlier killings, with Waddell's prints near the body. Scarpetta, along with FBI Agent Benton Wesley and Detective Pete Marino, try to discover how a dead inmate could have possibly committed another murder after his death. As the story progresses she seeks the assistance of her 17-year-old niece, Lucy, after she discovers a strange folder on her computer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_Farm_(novel)"title="The Body Farm (novel)">
Kay Scarpetta is called in to assist in the investigation of the brutal murder of 11-year-old Emily Steiner in rural North Carolina, whose murder resembles the handiwork of a serial killer who has eluded the FBI for years. Scarpetta is joined by her ingenious and rebellious niece, Lucy, an FBI intern with a promising future in Quantico's computer engineering facility. To help with the investigation, Scarpetta turns to a clandestine research facility in Tennessee known as the Body Farm. There she finds answers to Emily Steiner's murder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Potter's_Field"title="From Potter's Field">
The story begins as a rotten Christmas for Scarpetta: Temple Gault has struck again, leaving a naked, apparently homeless woman shot in Central Park on Christmas Eve; Scarpetta, as the FBI's consulting pathologist, is called in. Later, a transit cop is found shot in a subway tunnel, and, back home in Richmond, Virginia, the body of a crooked local sheriff is delivered to Scarpetta's own morgue by the elusive, brilliant Gault. The normally unflappable Scarpetta finds herself hyperventilating and nearly shooting her own niece. In the end, some ingenious forensic detective work and a visit to the killer's agonized family set up a high-tech, difficult to follow, climax back in the New York City Subway, which Gault treats as the Phantom of the Opera did the sewers of Paris.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cause_of_Death_(novel)"title="Cause of Death (novel)">
New Year's Eve and the final murder scene of Virginia's bloodiest year takes Scarpetta thirty feet below the Elizabeth River's icy surface. Dr. Scarpetta receives a phone call reporting the death of investigative reporter Ted Eddings, who was found dead in diving gear amongst the Navy's reserve fleet. Was Eddings probing the frigid depths of the inactive shipyard for a story, or simply diving for sunken trinkets—and why did Scarpetta receive the phone call reporting the death before the police were notified? The case leads Scarpetta, her niece Lucy, and police captain Pete Marino into a terrorist plot that threatens thousands of lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornet's_Nest_(novel)"title="Hornet's Nest (novel)">
The author reveals the heart and soul of a metropolitan police department. With Charlotte as her simmering background, she propels us into the core of the force through the lives of a dynamic trio of heroes: Andy Brazil, an ambitious younger reporter for "The Charlotte Observer" and an eager - sometimes too eager - volunteer cop; Police Chief Judy Hammer, the professionally strong yet personally troubled guardian of Charlotte's law and order; and her deputy chief, Virginia West, a genuine head-turner who is married to her job. To walk the beat with Hammer, West, and Brazil is to learn the inner secrets of police work - the tension and the tedium, the hilarity and the heartbreak, the unexpected pump of adrenaline and the rush of courage that can lead to heroics ... or death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unnatural_Exposure"title="Unnatural Exposure">
Virginia Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta has a bloody puzzle on her hands: five headless, limbless cadavers in Ireland, plus four similar victims in a landfill back home. Is a serial butcher loose in Virginia? That's what the panicked public thinks, thanks to a local TV reporter who got the leaked news from Scarpetta's rival, Investigator Percy Ring. But this is no run-of-the-mill serial killer. A shadowy figure has plans involving mutant smallpox, mass murder, and messing with Scarpetta's mind by e-mailing her hot naked photos of the murder scenes, along with cryptic AOL chat-room messages. Central to the plot is the case of Janet Parker, the last person known to have died of smallpox, which she contracted in 1978 due to a lab accident in Birmingham, England, after the disease was eradicated in the wild. Cornwell makes the villain a junior employee of the lab at the time who was made a scapegoat for the accident and whose career was blighted as a result. This provides the plot with a credible source for the virus and a motive for the central crime.The emergency response is complicated by a Federal budget freeze, when all "non-essential" government employees are sent home. Cornwall says in an introduction to a 2008 reprint that a decade ago the idea of a deliberate virus threat seemed fanciful and improbable, and she got more access to government facilities like the CDC for researching the book than she would have got a decade later. She said that her "modus operandi when I write a book is to ask my characters where they are and what they are doing. Then I focus on an image. From that image comes the story ... ".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Diary_of_a_Japanese_Girl"title="The American Diary of a Japanese Girl">
The book describes Morning Glory's preparations, activities and observations as she undertakes her transcontinental American journey with her uncle, a wealthy mining executive. Arriving in San Francisco by steamship, they stay briefly at the Palace Hotel before moving to a "high-toned boarding house" in Nob Hill. Through the American wife of the Japanese consul, Morning Glory befriends Ada, a denizen of Van Ness Avenue with a taste for coon songs, who introduces her to Golden Gate Park and vaudeville and is in turn initiated by Morning Glory in the ways of kimono. Morning Glory briefly takes over proprietorship of a cigar store on the edge of San Francisco Chinatown before moving to the rustic Oakland home of an eccentric local poet named Heine (a character based on Joaquin Miller). After some days there spent developing her literary skills and a romantic interest with local artist Oscar Ellis, and a brief excursion to Los Angeles, she departs with her uncle for Chicago and New York, continuing, along the way, her satirical observations on various aspects of American life and culture. The novel closes with Morning Glory's declared intention to continue her investigations into American life by taking a job as a domestic servant, thus preparing the way for a sequel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irretrievable"title="Irretrievable">
The novel takes place in Holstein in the years 1859-1861, five years before the German-Danish War, at a time when Holstein was governed by Denmark. Count Helmuth Holk lives with his countess Christine and their two children in a lonely valley. Christine, who was raised by nuns, is serious and pious, but Holk is fun-loving by nature. When Holk is called away to the court of a Danish princess in Copenhagen he becomes fascinated by Ebba von Rosenberg, a young companion of the princess who flirts with him. His marriage with Christine begins to seem unbearably dull and he rashly seeks a divorce before realizing that Ebba's attentions are not serious. A long separation between Holk and Christine ends only after several years and great efforts by their friends. On the surface all seems well, but Christine is haunted by the rejection and drowns herself in the sea.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soulforge"title="The Soulforge">
The story begins from Raistlin's childhood, and follows his progress through magic school. Many things occur that foreshadow the great power that he would one day attain, and offer an explanation as to why he is often vindictive and power hungry. The book concludes with Raistlin's test at the Tower of High Sorcery of Wayreth. The account of the test conflicts somewhat with a story that appeared in one of the books of the Dragonlance Legends trilogy, but gives a much more detailed account of how Raistlin came by his golden skin and hourglass eyes, and also how he bested the ancient archmage, Fistandantilus, from the time before the fall of Istar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_Before"title="Back to Before">
After a particularly vicious battle, Crayak sends the Drode to tempt Jake into accepting an alternate reality in which the Animorphs did not walk home through the abandoned construction site, did not meet Elfangor, and did not become Animorphs.The results are drastic: a friendless Tobias joins The Sharing, and is infested by a Yeerk who is later revealed as a spy for Visser One, and is killed. Marco -- now dating Rachel in this world -- runs into his mother, but she escapes before he can confront her. Jake discovers that his brother Tom is involved with dangerous dealings after a Yeerk security leak. And all the while, Cassie has a strong feeling that all is not right. Ax manages to escape from the remains of the Dome Ship, and begins to warn the people of Earth about the Yeerk presence.The Yeerk response is immediate; they abandon their silent invasion and launch all-out warfare. In the ensuing chaos, Marco, Rachel and Cassie are all killed, while Jake and Ax meet up and manage to raid the Blade Ship and kill Visser Three. They take control of the Blade Ship and plan to use it to destroy the Yeerk Pool Ship, at which point the Drode and the Ellimist interrupt the timeline, returning the deceased characters to life and returning everyone's memories. The Drode complains that the events in this timeline are doomed to cause failure, and the Ellimist reveals that Cassie is an anomaly, a rare individual who is grounded in the true timeline and will disrupt any other timelines that try to take its place -- explaining Cassie's constant feeling that something was not right. It is also revealed that the Ellimist manipulated events (or as the Drode exclaims in disgust, "stacked the deck") to ensure that Cassie, Marco, Tobias, and Ax -- the anomaly, the son of Visser One's host, Elfangor's paradoxical son, and Elfangor's brother -- were all Animorphs; Jake and Rachel apparently became Animorphs through chance alone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Betrothed_(Scott_novel)"title="The Betrothed (Scott novel)">
The action takes place in the Welsh Marches during the latter part of the reign of Henry II, after 1187. Eveline, the 16-year-old daughter of Sir Raymond Berenger, is rescued from a Welsh siege by the forces of Damian Lacy. She is betrothed to his uncle Sir Hugo, who leaves on a crusade. Rebels led by Ranald Lacy attempt to kidnap her, and Damian fights them off, but a confused sequence of events convinces the King that she and her beloved are in league against him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronicles_of_the_Canongate"title="Chronicles of the Canongate">
The MacTavish family lived near Oban in 1775. Hamish MacTavish "Mohr" ("Senior"), a daring freebooter, had met his death in an encounter with the Saxon red-coats, by whom the Highlands were garrisoned after the battle of Culloden. His wife, who had shared all his dangers, strove to inspire their only son with his father's love of adventure and hatred of servile toil; but as he grew up the lad evinced no inclination for lawless pursuits, and, unable to endure his mother's taunts at his want of spirit, enlisted in one of the regiments formed in Scotland to oppose the French in the American war of independence. Before sailing he sent her some money by Phadraick, and returned to spend a few days with her, when she fiercely reproached him for daring to act in opposition to her will, and, failing to alter his purpose, drugged his parting-cup, thus causing him to exceed his furlough, and render himself liable to the lash as a deserter. She then urged him to flee to her kinsmen, while she baffled his pursuers; but he resolved to await the arrival of the sergeant and men of his regiment who, he felt sure, would be sent to arrest him. They came and summoned him to surrender, but because they could not assure him against the lash, and provoked by his mother, he shot the sergeant dead. The other soldiers secured him, and he was marched as a prisoner to Dumbarton castle, where he was tried by court-martial and condemned to be shot. His captain and a Presbyterian minister interceded for him; but the English general in command was determined to make an example, and the next morning his sentence was carried out in the presence of his comrades.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonlance_Legends"title="Dragonlance Legends">
## Time of the Twins.Two years after the War of the Lance, Raistlin Majere makes plans to challenge Takhisis, the Queen of Darkness, and assume her place in Krynn's pantheon of gods. To do so, he requires the aid of a cleric of Paladine to open the portal that leads to Takhisis's abode in the Abyss. He chooses Crysania of Tarinius for this purpose, misleading her into believing that she may be able to sway him from the evil path that he walks.Crysania attempts to enlist the help of Caramon, Raistlin's twin, in a journey to the Tower of High Sorcery in the Forest of Wayreth. However, Kitiara has learned of Raistlin's ambitions and hopes to deprive him of Crysania's help by sending the death knight, Lord Soth, to kill Crysania.Crysania is incapacitated, but Caramon and Tasslehoff are able to bring her to the Tower of High Sorcery. Raistlin has travelled back in time to the days just before the Cataclysm in order to study with the dark wizard Fistandantilus. Caramon asks the Conclave to send him back in time as well, with the dual purpose of healing Crysania and killing Fistandantilus.Sent back in time to Istar, with Tasslehoff as an unintended companion, Caramon discovers that Raistlin has already killed Fistandantilus and taken his place. Crysania is healed by the clerics of the time, and Raistlin convinces her to help him destroy Takhisis. Caramon comes to the realisation that his twin cannot be redeemed, and tries to kill him just as the Cataclysm strikes. His attack fails, and Raistlin casts a time travel spell, taking himself, Caramon and Crysania to another time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Titan's_Curse"title="The Titan's Curse">
Percy Jackson, Annabeth Chase, and Thalia Grace infiltrate the West Hall boarding school in Bar Harbor, Maine, to escort the siblings, Bianca and Nico di Angelo, to Camp Half-Blood. Though their extraction is a success, the manticore Dr. Thorn captures Annabeth, escaping when Artemis and her Hunters arrive. Artemis sets off alone to track down a monster which, in the wrong hands, has the power to destroy Mount Olympus. Beforehand, she sends the half-bloods and her Hunters to Camp Half-Blood, via her brother Apollo and his sun chariot. Bianca joins the Hunters, granting her immortality.At camp, Percy and his pegasus Blackjack unknowingly rescue an Ophiotaurus which Percy nicknames "Bessie". Artemis’ lieutenant Zoë Nightshade begins to have dreams of the goddess in danger, whilst Percy dreams of Annabeth saving Luke Castellan by holding up a cave's ceiling. The mummified Oracle of Delphi disrupts a capture the flag game to give Zoë a prophecy; instructing her to travel to Mount Tamalpais, the modern day location of the Titans’ domain of Mount Othrys, to rescue Artemis and Annabeth. Zoë takes Thalia, Bianca, and Grover Underwood with her on the quest. Percy decides to sneak off on his own, reluctantly promising Nico that he will protect Bianca.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Fetish"title="The Great Fetish">
The book is both an adventure story and a satire on the scientific dispute over Creationism. It is set on Kforri, an earthlike planet of the star Muphrid (Eta Boötis). There descendants of space travelers from Earth have reverted to a pre-technological society. The truth of their origin has faded into legend, and as a result the story of the space voyage and the scientific theory of evolution have become competing accounts of the genesis of humanity. In an ironic reversal, the orthodox view, as established by the Holy Syncretic Church, holds that man evolved from the native animals of Kforri. Skeptics against the received dogma, known as Descensionists or Anti-Evolutionists, are more open to the spaceflight theory, which the Church views as heresy. De Camp portrays the beliefs of the Church as a ludicrous mishmash of half-remembered Earth faiths and history: its deities, for instance, include "the holy trinity of Yez, Moham, and Bud," "Yustinn, god of law," "Napoin, god of war," "Kliopat, goddess of love," "Niuto, god of wisdom," and "Froit, maker of souls."Marko Prokopiu, a schoolteacher in Skudra the conservative country of Vizantia, has been converted to Anti-Evolutionism by his houseguest, travel writer Chet Mongamri of Anglonia, and as the story opens is found guilty in court having taught the heresy to his students. While he is incarcerated, his wife Petronela runs off with Mongamri, so his mother engineers his escape from prison and instructs him to pursue and kill them to redeem his honor. Marko tracks his victims to the university town of Thiné, but is knocked unconscious in a riot before he can murder them. His old professor hides him from the authorities and introduces him to the Anglonian philosopher Boert Halran, who is in Vizantia to acquire sealant for his experimental hot air balloon. Marko and Halran end up traveling together to Anglonia across the desert country of Arabistan, the former still on the trail of the fugitives, and the latter to work on his balloon. On the way Halran persuades Marko his vendetta is immoral and convinces him to abandon it, while Marko saves the philosopher's life when their caravan is attacked by bandits.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badge_of_Evil"title="Badge of Evil">
A man named Rudy Linneker is killed when a mysterious killer blows up his house using a couple of sticks of dynamite. Assistant district attorney Mitch Holt is called to the case as well as police officers Leron McCoy and Hank Quinlan. The pair have gained a celebrity status in the city after thirty years of impeccable service and are considered legends in the city. Quinlan's leg was injured years before and he has since walked with a cane. At first, Linneker's daughter Tara and her fiancé Delmont Shayon are the primary suspects until disgruntled employee Ernest Farnum makes a surprise confession and is promptly jailed.Holt is baffled by Farnum's testimony regarding the dynamite he planted in Shayon's apartment which contradicts his previous statement where he said he did not want to involve an innocent man like Shayon. Holt becomes suspicious of McCoy and Quinlan when both pay Farnum separate visits in his jail cell.Holt brings this inconsistency to the attention of his superior James Adair and Chief of Police Gould. When Holt accuses McCoy and Quinlan of planting evidence, Adair and Gould dismiss his allegation as an attempt to gain political mileage in the District Attorney's office.Things become dangerous for Holt when his house is shot at by a mysterious gunman whom he suspects is McCoy himself. Holt sends his wife Consuela and daughter Nancy to live in his father-in-law's ranch in Mexico where they would be safe. Holt then goes to the Hall of Records and digs into the past cases that involved McCoy and Quinlan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppelganger_(Brennan_novel)"title="Doppelganger (Brennan novel)">
Mirage is a witty and lethal bounty hunter who always gets her mark. But her new mission might be her downfall, for it involves working with witches, the group of people she always tries to distance herself from and against whose magic her strength might be no match.Miryo is a witch who just barely passed her initiation test. To control her powers and become a full witch, she must find her doppelganger, Mirage, and kill her. But is it really possible for her, a witch who can't use her powers and only two Cousins for help, to beat a trained Hunter, one of the best?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueberries_for_Sal"title="Blueberries for Sal">
"The book opens and closes with a picture of little Sal and her mother in the kitchen, the mother is canning blueberries... One sees in this opening picture Sal entertaining herself by placing the canning rings on her wrist and a spoon, a simple childlike act which helps to set the stage for Sal's obvious child actions throughout the books. This is not to be the overly diligent or angelic girl of so many other books, Sal is a real child figure. She gets into mischief and causes her mom no end of trouble.”Little Sal's mother takes her to Blueberry Hill to pick berries. Sal drops three berries in her bucket, then eats them. This continues as she and her mother concentrate on the berries and gradually get separated on the hill. What they don't realize is that a mother bear and her cub have also come to Blueberry Hill to eat berries for the winter. The book uses a number of visual and verbal techniques to compare and contrast the bear and the human families. Both families' pictures are similar in composition, but they head in opposite directions when they reach the blueberry patch. Little Sal’s mother tells her that they can’t eat all the berries because they need to save them to can for the winter, but the bear mother tells her child to eat as much as it can to store up fat for winter. The bear's way of preparing for winter is more natural for Sal who soon wanders off to eat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technics_and_Civilization"title="Technics and Civilization">
Mumford divides the development of technology into three overlapping phases: eotechnic (Greek, "eos" meaning "dawn"), paleotechnic and neotechnic.The first phase of technically civilized life (AD 1000 to 1800) begins with the clock, to Mumford the most important basis for the development of capitalism because time thereby becomes fungible (thus transferable). The clock is the most important prototype for all other machines. He contrasts the development and use of glass, wood, wind and water with the inhumanly horrific work that goes into mining and smelting metal. The use of all of these materials, and the development of science during the eotechnic phase, is based on the abstraction from life of the elements that could be measured. He approves those people, cities and cultures who strove for a harmonious balance between the senses and the freedom from labor provided by science.The second phase, the paleotechnic (roughly 1700 to 1900), is "an upthrust into barbarism, aided by the very forces and interests which originally had been directed toward the conquest of the environment and the perfection of human nature." Inventions of the paleotechnic are made by men trying to solve specific problems rather than hunting for general scientific principles; in fact, scientific learning is devalued by men of business. The invention of coal-fired steam powered factories and the installation of capital-intensive machinery leads to a necessarily gigantic round-the-clock scale of production supported by unskilled machine tenders. Labour becomes a commodity, rather than an inalienable set of skills, the labourer who tended machines, lived in slums, and was paid starvation wages, became physically stunted and socially and spiritually stultified. Mumford notes that the death rate of urban slums compares unfavorably to the agricultural worker of the same time period, and furthermore that life in the nineteenth century compares unfavorably to cleanliness and standards of living available to workers in thirteenth century cities. He also identifies iron as the primary building material of the paleotechnic, and skyscrapers, bridges and steamships as première accomplishments of the age. War and mass sport he saw as social releases from mechanized life, and the hysteric duties of wartime production (or even the hysteria of a baseball team's victory) is a natural outgrowth of the tensions and structures of such paleotechnic life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jovah's_Angel"title="Jovah's Angel">
Some 150 years have passed since the events of "Archangel" and weather patterns have become increasingly unstable. The current Archangel, Delilah, is injured while flying in a storm and her angelico killed. Jovah decrees that she can no longer be Archangel as she is unable to fly, and names Alleluia Archangel in her place. While many protest her elevation, others believe she has been chosen because Jovah never fails to hear her voice.Alleluia does not feel up to the task of managing the other political powers of Sammorah, but somewhat manages with the aid of the angel Samuel. As pressure continues to mount on her, the old music machines located in Eyrie begin to fail until only one is left. Seeking any diversion, Alleluia goes off in search of the inventor/engineer Caleb, whom an Edori in Velora believes may be able to fix it. She finds him in Luminaux where she discovers the former Archangel performing in a club under the name "Lilah."Delilah wants nothing to do with Alleluia, but Caleb agrees to visit Velora as soon as possible. Caleb is revealed to be friends with Delilah and another inventor/engineer Noah. The two inventor/engineers theorize that Delilah is seeking thrills to entertain her, so when they mention that they will be travelling to Bereven as part of their work, she decides to accompany them. They travel via Noah's "Beast," a primitive steam-powered car. When Delilah learns of the reason they have travelled there to aid the design of self-propelled ships, she wishes to join the Edori expedition to Ysral. Noah, who is falling in love with her, declares that she cannot go and that he will go in her stead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth-Teller's_Tale"title="The Truth-Teller's Tale">
Eleda and Adele, mirror twins, discover that they are a Truth-Teller and a Safe-Keeper, respectively. Truth-Tellers are incapable of telling lies and recognize when others are lying, so society relies on their unwavering trustworthiness. Safe-Keepers cannot reveal what is told to them in confidence, and they bear the burden of people's confessions. The sisters do not realize the ramifications of their gifts until their teen years, when romantic and political intrigue abounds, and situations become more adult. Their friend Roelynn, whose wealthy merchant father intends to marry her off to the prince, sows plenty of wild oats behind her father's back. She often drags the sisters into the fray, and the summer they are all 17, a chain of events is set into motion that changes their lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alleluia_Files"title="The Alleluia Files">
Generations ago, religious people built a colony spaceship called "Jehovah". A planet called Samaria was established. The colony ship, orbiting above, was able to provide supplies and services. These were accessed by genetically modified 'angels', who were the only ones capable of performing the right vocal tones.Over the generations, the concept of the ship was forgotten and it was believed Jehovah was an actual deity. Now factions of 'angels' fight against rebel forces called 'Jacobites'. The angels want to keep their power and the Jacobites wish to know the truth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel-Seeker"title="Angel-Seeker">
Samaria is a changed land. Corrupt politicians are gone. The poor are not so destitute. The Edori are no longer slaves. Elizabeth is a young, healthy farm-girl. Tired of her lot in life, she leaves for Cedar Hills with one goal in mind. To birth the child of one of the powerful Angel beings and live in the lap of luxury for the rest of her natural life. The story also focuses on the isolated life of Rebekah, a Jansai woman and the Angel Obadiah, whom she nurses back to health after he is wounded flying over the desert.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wish_You_Were_Here_(Holt_novel)"title="Wish You Were Here (Holt novel)">
A mischievous ghost tricks visitors into falling into Lake Chicopee, where — instead of drowning — they receive what they were wishing for at the time of their accident.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yiddish_Policemen's_Union"title="The Yiddish Policemen's Union">
The book opens with Meyer Landsman, an alcoholic homicide detective with the Sitka police department, examining the murder of a man in the hotel where Landsman lives. Beside the corpse lies an open cardboard chess board with an unfinished game set up on it. Landsman calls his partner, half-Tlingit, half-Jewish Berko Shemets, to help him investigate further. Upon filing a report on the murder at police headquarters, Landsman and Berko discover that Landsman's ex-wife Bina Gelbfish has been promoted to commanding officer of their unit.Landsman and Berko discover that the victim was Mendel Shpilman, the son of the Verbover rebbe, Sitka’s most powerful organized crime boss. Many Jews believed Mendel to be the Tzadik ha-Dor, the potential messiah, born once in every generation.As Meyer continues to investigate Mendel's murder, he discovers that the supposed "chosen one" had taken a flight with Naomi, Landsman's deceased sister. He follows Naomi's trail to a mysterious set of buildings with an unknown purpose, set up in Tlingit territory by Jews. Landsman flies there to investigate; he is knocked out and thrown in a cell, whose walls have graffiti in Naomi's handwriting.The naked and injured Landsman is soon rescued by a local Tlingit police chief, Willie Dick, who reunites him with Berko. They learn that the mysterious complex is operated by a paramilitary group who wants to build a new Temple in Jerusalem after destroying the Dome of the Rock, hoping to speed the birth of the Messiah. An evangelical Christian Zionist American government supports the group.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pit_(Norris_novel)"title="The Pit (Norris novel)">
"The Pit" opens with sisters Laura and Page Dearborn and their aunt, Aunt Wess, outside the Auditorium Theatre opera house awaiting the arrival of their hosts, Mr. and Mrs. Cressler. Once inside, they are joined by three other guests of the Cresslers, Mr. Curtis Jadwin, Mr. Landry Court, and Mr. Sheldon Corthell. Corthell and Laura are apparently very well-acquainted before this evening, for their conversation begins with the artist confessing his love for the young woman. Though she does not return this feeling, Laura admits that knowing she is loved is "the greatest exhilaration of happiness she had ever known." We soon learn that Corthell is not the only man interested in having Laura as his wife. Both Jadwin, the mature and mysterious man of affairs, and Landry, the exuberant and extravagant man from the Battle of the Street, are captivated by the girl’s unparalleled charm and beauty as well. Despite the fact that she makes it clear to each of them that she has no intentions of ever marrying and declares that she will never love, the three men insist on courting her. Miss Dearborn enjoys having these men chase her, but before long she grows weary of being the object of so many suitors. Enraged at herself for having made herself so vulnerable and for behaving so coquettishly, she dismisses Corthell, Landry, and Jadwin all at once.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_and_the_Dinosaur"title="Danny and the Dinosaur">
The story opens up with a young boy named Danny going to a science museum. He sees Indians, bears, Eskimos, guns, and swords. Finally, he immediately gets drawn to the dinosaur exhibit and would be delighted to find a living dinosaur. The dinosaurs in the dinosaur exhibit are really models and not real. Then he says he thinks it would be nice to play with one. One of the dinosaurs come up to Danny and says, "And I think it would be nice to play with you". Both agree to play with each other, and Danny rides out of the museum on the dinosaur's neck.The dinosaur is well-intentioned throughout the story, for he helps a lady cross the street, takes Danny across a river and lets the children use him as a slide. The dinosaur is also a celebrity, as the illustrations show hundreds of people leave the zoo to see Danny and the dinosaur.Pretty soon, Danny meets with his friends. The other children get to ride the dinosaur too. Then, Danny and the children all play with the dinosaur throughout the day. Finally, they end with a game called hide and seek. The children and the dinosaur take turns hiding. The children find the dinosaur several times, but then there is no place else for him to hide in the neighborhood. In the last part of the game, Danny hatches an idea to make the game slightly harder. His idea (for the dinosaur) is to "pretend to not find him". When the dinosaur finds the children, he says, "Here I am!". Then Danny and his friends all cheer that the dinosaur wins. Danny says, "The dinosaur wins! We couldn’t find him! He fooled us! Hurray for the dinosaur!".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Viking"title="Space Viking">
## Part 1 - Gram.On the Sword World Gram, Lucas Trask, Baron of Traskon, is about to marry Elaine Karvall, whose father owns the Karvall steel mills. In addition to being a political alliance, it is also a love match. But Andray Dunnan, the insane nephew of Duke Angus of Wardshaven, is under the delusion that Elaine loves him and is being forced into the marriage. When she tries to correct him, his anger boils over. He crashes the wedding ceremony, kills her and seriously wounds Trask, before stealing the Duke's newly built starship, the "Enterprise", and escaping.When Trask recovers from his injuries, he pledges the Barony of Traskon to Duke Angus in return for another warship, twin to the one hijacked by Dunnan. He hires Otto Harkaman, an experienced Space Viking captain who had lost his own ship in a civil war on Durendal, to command the new vessel, which Trask christens "Nemesis". Trask sets out in search of Dunnan, though Harkaman warns him that given the vastness of the galaxy and the speed of spacecraft, his goal is nearly hopeless.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wounded_Land"title="The Wounded Land">
Ten years have passed since the end of the first Chronicles. After his experiences in the Land, Thomas Covenant has resumed his career as a writer. He is still isolated from society, but he has come to terms with that and with the other mental and physical consequences of his leprosy.The story begins by presenting us with a new main character; the prologue is told entirely from her point of view, as is much of the main narrative. Linden Avery is a doctor who has moved to Covenant's hometown to take a position at the local hospital. Her traumatic childhood and rigorous medical training have left her emotionally isolated from other people. In her own way, she is as much an outsider in society as Covenant.The chief of staff at the hospital (who appeared briefly in the first Chronicles) asks her to check up on Covenant. Linden, reluctantly, drives to Covenant's house outside of town. On the way, she sees an elderly man in an ochre robe collapse by the side of the road. Using CPR, she revives him: he makes a number of cryptic pronouncements and walks off, telling her to "be true".Confused and disturbed by this strange encounter, Linden continues on to Covenant's house. Although he initially brushes her off, she is persistent, and finds that Covenant's estranged wife has returned to him, but that she is under the influence of a cult of worshippers of Lord Foul, who has found a way to exert his influence in Covenant's world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_Tree"title="The One Tree">
Following the vision he received from the Clave at Revelstone, Thomas Covenant seeks to fix the corruption of the Land after the Staff of Law's destruction. He is accompanied on his quest by Linden Avery, a physician from his own "real" world, and four "Haruchai" bodyguards. They use a ship crewed by the Giants, a benevolent, seafaring people. The journey is made more difficult by Covenant's bouts of madness from the venomous bite of a Sunbane-spawned monster. Linden, who in this world is endowed with clairvoyance, is frustrated by her inability to help him.From the Land, the Giant-ship sails to the home of the "Elohim", a wise race. Linden perceives that the "Elohim" are the embodiment of Earthpower, the source of the beauty and magic. Despite their seeming omnipotence, the "Elohim" are bound by a strange code of behavior and provide no direct help, other than helping Covenant unlock the location of the One Tree, from which the Staff of Law was fashioned. In the course of rendering this service, the "Elohim" cause Covenant to go into a catatonic state; "don't touch me" is all he can say.The travelers find that one of the "Elohim", named Findail, has joined them aboard the Giants' ship for his own purposes. The questors are not pleased but are powerless to make him leave. After suffering severe damage in a storm, in which Findail refuses to help, the ship arrives at the port city of the "Bhrathair", a militaristic – but also wealthy and civilized – people living at the edge of a great desert. The "Bhrathair" are ruled by the "gaddhi", Rant Absolain, who rather coldly receives the quest's shore party, and it is discovered that the true ruler is the "gaddhi"s chief adviser, a wizard named Kasreyn of the Gyre. Kasreyn initially appears to be kindly disposed to the quest but is revealed to have ulterior motives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Gold_Wielder"title="White Gold Wielder">
Leaving the sunken island of the One Tree, the Giant ship "Starfare's Gem" sets course to return to the Land. In a dangerous region of the ocean known as the Soulbiter, the ship is blown off course into the far northern reaches of the Earth and becomes ice-bound. Realizing that the Land's need cannot wait for the spring melt, Thomas Covenant leaves the ship and strikes out south over the ice-scape, accompanied by Linden, Vain, Findail the "Elohim", Cail of the "Haruchai", and four Giants.The party encounters many dangers on its journey but reunites with Sunder and Hollian, the man and woman of the Land who Covenant left behind in order to attempt to gather resistance to the Clave, the corrupt rulers of the Land. They have little comfort to offer: the Clave has become so blood-hungry that entire villages have been completely emptied in order to sustain the Banefire, making the corruption of nature by the Sunbane worse than ever. Only the stalwart "Haruchai", freed from the Clave's magical coercion, have rallied to the side of freedom.Covenant and his companions nevertheless march on Revelstone, the mountain fortress of the Clave. Once there, Covenant stuns the others by summoning a Sandgorgon, the beast responsible for the deaths of two of his "Haruchai" companions in the previous book. The Sandgorgon, grateful to Covenant for having previously spared its life, breaches the outer defenses of the great Keep. After a tremendous struggle, Covenant and the Sandgorgon are able to destroy the Raver who leads the Clave, although at the price of the life of Grimmand Honninscrave, the valiant Giant captain of "Starfare's Gem".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twig_(novel)"title="Twig (novel)">
The novel features Twig, an imaginative little city girl who turns a tomato can into a house for fairies. A little elf comes along to live in the house and, at Twig's request, turns her fairy-sized, though he cannot manage wings. A friendly sparrow fetches the Queen of the fairies to help.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andra_(novel)"title="Andra (novel)">
The book was set 2000 years from now, after the world was destroyed by war leaving the earth knocked off its rotation and the ground above to become a desolate frozen wasteland with everyone that survived living below the ground in underground cities.The main story revolves around Andra, a teenage girl who has a terrible accident and has to have a brain graft operation to survive. However, the only donor available was a young man that lived and died in 1987. After the operation her life is totally changed; she becomes a rebel, fighting against the rigid laws that rule society underground in Sub City One and the totalitarian authority that rules over life and death of any individual.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IWoz"title="IWoz">
Wozniak starts his autobiography with a description of his parents, some of their history, and describes how his father had a top secret job involving electronics. He goes on to describe how his father took the time to describe to him, in detail, how electronic components work. He cites this as a major reason for his later success.Wozniak discusses how he decided to enroll at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Because of the high tuition, and an inadvertent expense he had incurred for the university's computer department, he was unable to attend for a second year and instead enrolled in the local junior college, De Anza College.Wozniak describes his encounter with the first successful video arcade game, "Pong", at a bowling alley with Alice (then his fiancée). He describes just staring at it, amazed that computers could be used in such a way. He went home and recreated the game on his own, using a standard television for the display (which in itself, took some doing). He even added some features not found on the commercial game, such as displaying the score onscreen and displaying four-letter exclamations when missing a ball. Once while visiting Jobs, he showed it to one of the top executives of Atari, Inc., Al Alcorn (who was also the designer of the original game), who was so impressed that he offered Wozniak a job right on the spot. Wozniak declined, however, explaining that he could never leave Hewlett-Packard (HP) where he was currently employed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_White_Giant"title="Mad White Giant">
"Mad White Giant" begins with Allen recounting the role of Amazonia in his childhood fantasies. The novel then describes the author's travels between the Orinoco and the Amazon rivers, a trip of over 1500 miles. During his travels, he befriends natives who refer to him as "Mad White Giant", or by his preferred nickname Louco Benedito.Allen is later abandoned by his two Carib companions, Yepe and Pim, who go to work for Brazilian miners. Allen also adopts a dog, named Cashoe (meaning 'dog' in one of the Indian dialects), whose actions capsize Allen's canoe and leave him stranded in the Amazonian jungle. After a grueling period of starvation, recounted as a series of diary entries (actually written in one sitting), Allen decides to shoot and eat Cashoe to survive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/None_but_Lucifer"title="None but Lucifer">
The book is a dark fantasy version of the Faust legend set in New York City during the Great Depression. Protagonist William Hale determines that contrary to popular belief Earth is Hell, and the devil is the ruler of it. By going out of his way to demonstrate he is aware of the con, he brings himself to the devil's attention; Lucifer, it turns out, runs things in the quiet disguise of an influential businessman. Hale talks himself into a partnership, complete with immortality and supernatural powers, only to discover that the perks come with corresponding liabilities. Deciding the only way out is to beat Lucifer at his own con, he discovers his very success ensures his own undoing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Days"title="John Henry Days">
Building the railways that made America, John Henry died with a hammer in his hand moments after competing against a steam drill in a battle of endurance. The story of his death made him a legend. Over a century later, freelance journalist J. Sutter is sent to West Virginia to cover the launch of a new postage stamp at the first John Henry Days festival.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Déjà_Dead"title="Déjà Dead">
When the meticulously dismembered body of a woman is discovered in the ground of an abandoned monastery in Montreal, Canada, which is too "decomposed for standard autopsy", an anthropologist is requested.Dr. Temperance Brennan, Director of Forensic Anthropology for the province of Quebec, who has been researching recent disappearances in the city, is given the case. Despite the deep cynicism of Detective Claudel who heads the investigation, Brennan is convinced that a serial killer is at work. Her forensic expertise finally convinces Claudel, but only after the body count has risen. Brennan initiates an investigation, but her determined probing places those closest to her in danger.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_du_Jour"title="Death du Jour">
On a bitterly cold March night in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Brennan is exhuming the remains of a nun proposed for sainthood in the grounds of a church. Hours later she's called to the scene of an horrific arson, where a young family has perished. There seem to be no witnesses, motive and no explanation. From the charred remains of the inferno to a trail of sinister cult activity which leads her to Beaufort, South Carolina and a terrifying showdown during an ice storm back in Canada, Brennan faces a test of both her forensic expertise and her survival instinct.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_(Wisniewski_book)"title="Golem (Wisniewski book)">
The story is set in year 1580 in Prague, and the Jews are being persecuted. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the town rabbi, can think of nothing more than creating a being out of mud and bringing it to life, using the holy name of God, to protect them. Once the Golem stops the persecution, Rabbi Loew erases the letters on the Golem's head, making the Golem ""sleep the dreamless sleep of clay"." The ending is ambiguous, ending with the words: "But many say he could awaken. Perhaps when the desperate need for justice is united with holy purpose, Golem will come to life once more."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_to_the_Sun"title="Arrow to the Sun">
Long ago, the Lord of the Sun shoots down the spark of life into the Pueblo, where it reaches a young woman and causes her to give birth to an unnamed son, referred to as "the Boy". When the Boy reaches adolescence, he is ridiculed by the other boys because he has no father. Disheartened, the Boy decides to leave the Pueblo and find his father.During his journey, the Boy asks the assistance of both a farmer and a sculptress, but both refuse. However, when the Boy asks an elderly arrowsmith, the arrowsmith senses his relation to the Sun and agrees to lend aid. The arrowsmith transforms the Boy into an arrow, and launches him to the Sun.Arriving in the Sun, the boy encounters his father, the Lord, who is skeptical of the Boy's identity as his son. To confirm the Boy's identity, he challenges his son to complete four trials: the Kiva of Lions, the Kiva of Serpents, the Kiva of Bees, and the Kiva of Lightning; the boy emerges from the Kiva of Lightning with newfound powers stemming from the Sun.After the Boy endures these trials, the Lord finally acknowledges him as his son, and sends him back to Earth to bring the Sun's spirit into the world of men. The denizens of the Pueblo welcome the Boy home with the Dance of Life to commemorate his return.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_of_Khan"title="Treasure of Khan">
A relatively small oil company headed by Borjin, a Mongolian who is bent on taking control of the world oil market and re-uniting the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia (where he has found significant oil deposits buried at unusual depths) with Mongolia, has stolen a machine which can create an earthquake. He uses the machine to destroy major oil production facilities through the world, crippling China's and the rest of the world's oil supply in a matter of weeks. He then uses this shortage to make an offer to supply China all the oil it needs. He demands that Inner Mongolia be ceded to Mongolia, and China pay market price for the oil he will supply them, which he guarantees will meet the colossal demands of the Chinese economy. China accepts this deal, not knowing of the hidden oil deposits they are handing to him. Dirk Pitt intervenes to end the situation, and discovers that the grave of Genghis Khan has been located by Borjin.A subplot centers on Kublai Khan's second invasion of Japan by Mongolia, and in its failure, inadvertently discovering what we now know as Hawaii. In the present, Dirk Pitt discovers Kublai Khan's tomb is in a lava tube in Hawaii along with a great treasure. He does this after finding an ancient scroll which had been buried for centuries, was excavated during the early days of the War of Resistance. The pertinent clues were then quickly lost, and found again by Pitt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thumbsucker_(novel)"title="Thumbsucker (novel)">
Kirn's novel tells the story of Justin Cobb, a Minnesota teenager whose family experiences a broad spectrum of dysfunction. Father Mike is a washed-up college football star with a militaristic and unemotional attitude inspired by his former coach. Mother Audrey, a nurse, is struggling to accept how her life has wound down. Younger brother Joel simply does everything he can to fit in and seem normal.Amidst pressures to stop sucking his thumb, 14-year-old Justin turns to unorthodox dentist Perry Lyman who attempts to use hypnosis to remedy the problem with limited success: The thumb sucking disappears, but other problem habits arise to take its place. Justin starts behaving oddly, and his condition is 'identified' as attention deficit disorder by his school and he is consequently prescribed Ritalin. The drug appears to help the problem for a time, but this is merely a stop-gap whilst Justin's (and indeed his family's) real problems remain at large. When Justin gives up Ritalin he turns to drugs (pot), sex and religion to combat his problems. Eventually deciding that he's had enough of this life, Justin returns to Perry Lyman who reminds him that we all have flaws, the goal is not to fix them, but to live with them. With this message in mind, Justin is sent off to be a Mormon missionary in New York, and winds up sucking his thumb again, at the expense of the drugs and sex.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadly_Decisions"title="Deadly Decisions">
Brennan is called back to Montréal, Quebec, Canada from teaching at the FBI Academy in Quantico when a biker gang war turns violent. Excavating at a biker clubhouse reveals the bones of a young girl from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Brennan has herself assigned to work with Operation Carcajou, a multijurisdictional task force created to investigate criminal activities among outlaw motorcycle gangs in the Province of Quebec. Her investigations are hampered by the lack of co-operation of Sergeant-Detective Luc Claudel, while would-be love interest Lieutenant-detective Andrew Ryan is unable to help due to being under investigation for corruption.Meanwhile, Brennan's teenage nephew Kit, having fallen out with his father and with his mother (Brennan's sister Harry) away, comes to stay and exhibits a worrying interest in Harley-Davidsons and their riders. Can Brennan find out how the girl's remains ended up in Montreal, help to bring the killers to justice, and keep Kit away from involvement with the biker gangs?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorsai!"title="Dorsai!">
The book is about Donal Graeme, warrior extraordinaire. In the Childe Cycle universe, the human race has split into a number of splinter cultures. Donal is a member of the Dorsai, a splinter culture based on the planet of the same name, which has specialized in producing the very best soldiers. Since each splinter culture specializes in a specific area of expertise, a system of trade labour contracts between the cultures allows each planet to hire the expertise they need. The Dorsai, inhabiting a resource-poor world, hire themselves out as mercenaries to other planetary governments. Donal has great ambitions, and the book follows his rise in an episodic manner. The book begins as a straightforward tale of his career and then becomes something else, as it becomes clear there is something different about Donal Graeme himself.Donal quickly comes to the attention of William of Ceta, a powerful politician. First he is asked by Anea Marlivana, a so-called Select of Kultis, to destroy her contract binding her to William. Instead Donal returns the contract to William and gains a post in his military. Donal next catches one of William's officers in a plan to fake some heroics, compromising Anea in the process. Taking command himself, Donal has the officer shot for violating the Mercenaries Code. Leaving William's command, he embarks on a series of operations in different conflicts that mark him as an innovative genius.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_and_the_Purple_Crayon"title="Harold and the Purple Crayon">
The protagonist, Harold, is a curious 4-year-old boy who, with his purple crayon, has the power to create a world of his own simply by drawing it.Harold wants to go for a walk in the moonlight, but there is no moon, so he draws one. He has nowhere to walk, so he draws a path. He has many adventures looking for his room, and in the end, he draws his own house and bed and goes to sleep.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_House_Like_a_Lotus"title="A House Like a Lotus">
Polly begins narrating the novel just as she arrives in Greece. She expects to be picked up by her aunt and uncle but they were detained and will not arrive in Greece for a few days. Polly goes to her hotel and feels rather depressed about the current state of affairs. But her mood improves when she meets Zachary Gray at the hotel restaurant. He is quite interested in her and is attracted to her innocence. He offers to take her around Greece and show her the sights. Polly is reluctant but agrees.Zachary is an interesting tour guide and Polly enjoys his companionship. But when Zachary begins to show interest in a romantic and physical relationship, she resists. When Polly's aunt and uncle show up, Zachary is unable to keep up his relationship with Polly but insists that they will see each other again.During this time, Polly has been flashing back to the past and how she managed to get a trip to Greece. About six months earlier, Polly was introduced to Max, a friend of her uncle. Although Max is a middle-aged woman and Polly is still a teenager, the two begin a friendship and Max encourages Polly to develop her identity. Polly's young male friend Renny also encourages her, and Polly blossoms. When Max admits that she and her "friend" Ursula have been lovers for thirty years, Polly is surprised but decides this does not change who Max is and remains friends. Max also admits she is dying, which devastates Polly. But after one night of heavy drinking, Max makes what seems to be a sexual advance toward Polly. Polly is horrified. Ursula tries to assure Polly that Max loves her (Polly) as a daughter, not in any romantic sense but Polly is still terrified and runs away. She stays with Renny. While still vulnerable and scared, Polly and Renny sleep together. Polly returns to her family and does not tell them about Max or Renny. While she severs all contact with Max, she still accepts the trip to Greece.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carrot_Seed"title="The Carrot Seed">
The book opens with the words: "A little boy planted a carrot seed. His mother said, 'I'm afraid it won't come up.'" A little boy plants a carrot seed to grow a giant carrot. Despite the skepticism of his parents and, particularly, his older brother, he persists and "pulled up the weeds around it every day and sprinkled the ground with water." The book concludes simply "And then, one day... a carrot came up just as the little boy had known it would." The carrot (because it was a giant carrot) is so large that it fills a wheelbarrow. However the top is missing (possibly because the little boy broke the top off of the giant carrot when he pulled it out of the ground). The book is about not giving up no matter what anyone says, and believing in yourself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightjohn"title="Nightjohn">
The novel is set on a plantation owned by a man named Waller in the Southern United States in the early 1850s. The narrator and protagonist of the story is a young female African-American slave named Sarny. Sarny first sees Nightjohn when he is brought to the plantation with a rope around his neck, his body covered in scars. He had escaped to the north for freedom, but knowing that the penalty for reading is dismemberment, John still returned to slavery to teach others how to read. Twelve-year-old Sarny is willing to learn. So, at night and whenever he has the chance, John begins teaching Sarny the letters of the English alphabet. After teaching her 8 letters (A to H), Waller catches Sarny writing in the dirt and punishes John for teaching her by cutting off the toes from each of his feet. But then after three days of recuperating, John runs, and makes it to freedom.He later returns to fetch Sarny and take her to "pit school" in the night, where she sees and learns what a catalog is, learns the rest of the letters, and has acquired great knowledge- something no one can take away from her. Since John comes at night, he is called Nightjohn. This book was followed by a sequel called "Sarny, a Life Remembered" in 1998
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Box"title="Treasure Box">
The plot details a middle-aged man, Quentin Fears (pronounced "fierce"), who marries a woman who turns out to be from a strange family. The story unfolds as Quentin tries to stop a witch in the family from unleashing a great evil upon the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castaway_(book)"title="Castaway (book)">
In her book, Irvine starts with the somewhat odd circumstances of this collaboration, in which she addresses Kingsland's ad for a “wife to live on a lonely island for a year”. In that year (1982), Irvine was 25, and Kingsland 49. After being formally married—Tuin Island is part of Queensland, and the authorities would have never let them go without marrying first—and Irvine has an intrauterine device implanted to prevent pregnancy, Irvine and Kingsland try to adapt, making the best out of a beautiful but hostile environment with treacherous flora and fauna. Slowly but surely, an intense love-hate relationship develops between the two, as Irvine is much more strict and disciplined than the laid-back Kingsland. Kingsland also makes clear he desires the blonde, slender Irvine, but much to his chagrin, she refuses his advances. However, as both are mutually dependent on each other, and both are also constantly hungry, the tension remains in check.Matters grow worse when Kingsland's legs become infested with ulcers—it turns out he is allergic to the shark they are regularly eating—and the two are visited by two male naval postal officers who drop supplies. When Irvine flirts with them, and acknowledges being sexually attracted by them, Kingsland is eaten up with jealousy. However, when she eats poisoned beans, he also saves her life, which earns her respect. But things grow from bad to worse when a bad drought comes over Tuin. Having no means of communication—the antenna of their CB radio set is missing—the two nearly starve to death. Irvine has serious abdominal problems and fears she is pregnant, which would be her doom in her weakened state.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Echo_Maker"title="The Echo Maker">
On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near-fatal accident. His older sister, Karin, his only near kin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a protracted coma, Mark believes that this woman — who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister — is really an impostor. Shattered by her brother's refusal to recognize her, Karin contacts the cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber, famous for his case histories describing brain disorders. Weber recognized Mark's condition as a rare case of Capgras syndrome — the delusion that people in one's life are doubles or impostors — and eagerly investigates.What he discovers in Mark slowly undermines even his own sense of being. Meanwhile, Mark, armed only with a note left by an anonymous witness, attempts to learn what happened the night of his inexplicable accident.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_a_Girl_Like_You"title="Take a Girl Like You">
The novel opens with Jenny Bunn's arrival at her lodging-house. She's a young, strikingly beautiful, Northern girl who has moved to a small town outside London, to take her first teaching job. Jenny has rented a room in the home of middle-aged couple, Dick and Martha Thompson. Dick is apparently some sort of auctioneer and Martha is a housewife, who is bored, cynical and at times openly hostile towards young Jenny. Anna, the Thompsons' other lodger, is a changeable young woman who is apparently French.Within half an hour of her arrival, Jenny meets Patrick Standish, an acquaintance of the Thompsons, who wastes no time in asking if he can ring her to arrange a date. Patrick takes Jenny to what she sees as a fashionable, upmarket Italian restaurant [but which Amis describes as a classless provincial pseudo-Italianate place]. Bowled over by Patrick's charm, Jenny accompanies him in his noisy sports car to the flat he shares with teaching colleague, Graham, who is, by Patrick's arrangement, not at home. A cosy session of listening to gramophone records and kissing (enough for Jenny on a first date) develops at Patrick's behest into heavy petting, which Patrick takes for granted will lead to the bedroom. Jenny is adamant and pulls his hair to make him stop. Jenny explains, to Patrick's wonderment, that she is and intends to remain a virgin until she is married.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowness_(novel)"title="Slowness (novel)">
The novel is a meditation on the effects of modernity upon the individual's perception of the world. It is told through a number of plot lines that slowly weave together until they are all united at the end of the book.Each plot shows a different point-of-view into Kundera's concept of "the dancer" and provides a perspective on modernity, memory and sensuality. By the end of the book, all of these plots have been brought together in a single location and the characters interact, showing how the ideals they represent interact in the world.Kundera even manages to tie the modern to the past by having Vincent meet the Chevalier as they both depart. By having these characters meet, Kundera again illustrates how the idea of sensuality and pleasure have changed as technology provides humanity with tools that speed us to our destination and demand our attention.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint_Your_Dragon"title="Paint Your Dragon">
The story is set in a contemporary Britain to the date of writing. It seems to start as the classic "Good versus Evil" tale, but as the characters are developed, the reader finds this view challenged. George is portrayed as far from Saintly, the Dragon elicits sympathy. The notions of good and evil are portrayed as the bureaucracy and legislation found in Heaven and Hell. Alongside this, time itself has commercial value and can be mined, exploited and traded like any other commodity. When George finds he isn't winning he enlists the aid of some minor Demons, who are on a holiday from Hell and left behind after a stop in Nashville.The Dragon was defeated in the original battle, but knows he was cheated by George and now wants to set the record straight. They carry on the battle by animating stolen statues. One of Holt's recurring characters from other novels makes an appearance in the form of Kurt Lindquist, an assassin. Various minor characters, such as clergymen who can't tell who side who is on, an animated statue of "David" and policemen that have the characteristics of the Keystone Cops.The main protagonist, albeit reluctant, Bianca Wilson has been commissioned by Birmingham City Council. She isn't given any direction and by luck she produces a sculpture of St George and the Dragon backed by money from Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits. One morning she finds the dragon has disappeared from her sculpture. Throughout the story Bianca displays a disinterest for getting involved in the dispute between George and the Dragon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_the_Sun_(Holt_novel)"title="Here Comes the Sun (Holt novel)">
Mechanical failures begin to trouble the Sun, making it hard for its driver to complete his rounds. The sun is in need of maintenance, and other things are breaking down all over the universe. Fresh ideas are needed. Jane, a mortal and a management trainee, is brought in the sort it all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_into_Darkness"title="Leap into Darkness">
The book begins with the Anschluss, Hitler's entry into Austria in 1938. The book recounts Bretholz's early life and the beginning of the war, as well as the seven years he spent on the run. Throughout the book he escapes the Nazi Regime several times, including from a train that was headed towards Auschwitz.Bretholz was 17 when the Germans took over his native Austria. His mother, more realistic than other relatives, saw disaster and insisted that he escape, which is what he did for the next seven years, traveling through Germany, Luxembourg, France and briefly, Switzerland, to jails and numerous internment camps. Bretholz relied often on his youthful agility and daring to save himself from much worse; he escaped from a train headed for Auschwitz in 1942.He spent the last years of the war working for the French Resistance, emigrating in 1947 to Baltimore, where he ran a bookstore (frequented by coauthor and Baltimore Sun columnist Olesker). In one story, he tells of a young female friend who was menaced by a gendarme while he is forced to stay hidden, "crouched on the floor, helpless, emasculated, sickened." Bretholz is also observant of the Austrians ("'First victims,' they will call themselves when the world loses its memory."); opportunistic Swiss; and the French, so many of whom claimed to be Resistance. "I was now a miraculous athlete, a professional escape artist, a young man in perpetual flight. I was indomitable. Also, I was too terrified not to run for my life."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragons_of_the_Dwarven_Depths"title="Dragons of the Dwarven Depths">
The novel is set in the period between "Dragons of Autumn Twilight" and "Dragons of Winter Night". The book continues with the adventures of the Heroes of the Lance, after they free the slaves from Pax Tharkas. The title alludes to the plot of the book, as the heroes must enter Thorbardin in order to obtain the Hammer of Kharas. The heroes are trying to lead the refugees to safety in Thorbardin, as well as attempting to obtain the Hammer of Kharas. All the while, they are being pursued by the Dragonarmy. Although the story includes the Companions, its main focus is on Flint Fireforge and his choices.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Kalvan_of_Otherwhen"title="Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen">
Humans on an advanced time-line have discovered "lateral" time dimensions that allow them to travel to "worlds of alternate probability". They use it to exploit natural resources from these alternate realities. The Paratime Police are tasked to keep the invention of lateral "time travel" secret and to combat abuses. Occasionally, objects or people get caught in the paratime "conveyors" and are inadvertently transported to alternate timelines. This happens to Corporal Calvin Morrison of the Pennsylvania State Police.Morrison ends up in a significantly different version of Pennsylvania. Initially confused by the old-growth forest and lack of settlements, Morrison meets some friendly peasants who speak an unknown language. When they are attacked by a raiding party armed with flintlock pistols, Morrison is able to fight them off with his police-issue .38 revolver. Reinforcements arrive, but in the confusion, he is wounded by the beautiful young woman leading them. While recuperating, he learns the local language.This alternate version of North America is split up into a number of kingdoms, each composed of small principalities, with a level of technology roughly equivalent to that of the late European Renaissance. Morrison finds himself the guest of Prince Ptosphes of Hostigos — whose daughter Rylla was the one who shot him by mistake. He learns that the principality is being threatened by two of their neighbors, Nostor and Sask, with a third, Beshta, hungrily looking on. Ptosphes' overlord, Great King Kaiphranos of Hos-Harphax, refuses to intervene because the priests of the god Styphon want Hostigos to be destroyed. The religious sect uses its monopoly on black gunpowder, known as "fireseed", to control the various princes and kings. Hostigos has a sulfur spring; since sulfur is a key ingredient of fireseed, Styphon's House intends to seize that spring once Hostigos is destroyed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Hunt"title="The Big Hunt">
Professor Summerfield is trying to enjoy a vacation from work, the Braxiatel Collection and even from her friends, Jason, Adrian and Peter. To her exasperation, she is sent on yet another mission. This task goes badly when she crash-lands on a planet full of hostile robotic animals, big game hunters and amoral businessmen.Bernice soon realizes her only hope for survival is join in on the planet's 'game'.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_Our_Darkness"title="Time of Our Darkness">
The 13-year-old Disley D. Mashanini is the sole black pupil at a white private school in Sandton Johannesberg, there on a scholarship from a township in the Transvaal. Pete Walker teaches English and sometimes Afrikaans. Peter has lived with André for ten years, though their sexual relationship has ceased.One day, Disley turns up at Walker's house, answering Walker's questioning with "Because I wanted to see you, sir." Walker takes him home to his township in KwaThema, Gauteng.Some days later Disley again appears at the door, this time with a note from his mother explaining about the unrest in the townships and asking him to look after the boy. André is dismissive of the boy, warning Pete in jest about what is illegal with blacks – "Specially seduction of minors. You can shoot them in the back but you can't go to bed with them".After André leaves, Pete makes Disley have a bath and then pins some of own clothes so that they fit the skinny little boy's body. Disley is modest as he changes, but Pete is aroused: "I'd found this impromptu ceremony such an enjoyment that a furious guilt arose in me: if I prolonged this it would become more than a merciful deed, and I would be irretrievably lost". He thinks of himself, "kneading an ache over that untouchable item, a black parcel of skin and bone, under age."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote_Waits"title="Coyote Waits">
Officers Chee and Nez agree to meet at Red Rock trading post for a break from patrol. Chee hears Nez laughing on the radio about seeing the person who has been defacing local rock formations with paint, so takes his break. Chee realizes he should be with Nez. He passes one vehicle en route to finding Nez in his burning patrol car. Chee uses the fire extinguisher and then pulls Nez out of the still-burning car. Chee is severely burned and Nez is dead from a gunshot, as well as burned. Chee finds Hosteen Ashie Pinto walking on the road, holding an expensive bottle of brandy, and a gun recently shot; he is drunk and says he is ashamed, in Navajo. Chee arrests him.Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn is pulled into this case by two women: Mrs. Keeyani, the niece of Ashie Pinto and a clan relative to Leaphorn, and Professor Louisa Bourebonette, who works with Pinto for her scholarly research and an upcoming book. Pinto is a crystal gazer and recalls stories in detail. They are sure Ashie Pinto is not guilty. Mrs. Keeyani describes her uncle's struggle with whiskey, which long ago led him to murder a man and a vow to stop drinking. Leaphorn learns that money-short Pinto got a letter from history professor Tagert at McGinnis's trading post, unknown to his niece. McGinnis read it and sent Pinto's reply agreeing to work. From Agent Kennedy, Leaphorn learns that the FBI investigation avoided talking to the owner of the vehicle that passed Jim Chee, because Huan Ji came to the US under the protection of the CIA. Arriving to talk with Ji, Leaphorn learns Ji was murdered. Ji left two messages on his wall: save Taka, and Lied to Chee. Leaphorn and Bourebonette find the place in the photographs in the darkroom at the Ji home. Going to the vantage point of the photos, they see that the paint vandalism was the teenage son Taka's message to the girl he loves: 'I love Jen' is visible from her home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maze_(novel)"title="The Maze (novel)">
At the end of the Greco-Turkish War, one Greek brigade wanders lost in the Anatolian desert. Led by Brigadier Nestor, the soldiers hope they are marching west toward the Aegean Sea and the end of their disastrous tour of duty. The war is over, but the men must battle on.Brigadier Nestor, an aging career soldier still devastated by his wife's death a year earlier, has become addicted to morphine and Greek mythology. His second-in-command, Chief of Staff Major Porfirio, while appearing to be a model soldier, is keeping a treasonous secret. The company priest, Father Simeon, imagines himself the Apostle of All Anatolians, but in fact is just a thief. And the rest of the brigade is not faring too well either. Subsisting almost entirely on cornmeal, their morale is low and things are growing stranger the longer they wander.It seems though that the luck of the brigade is finally changing. First, a Greek pilot crashes from the sky bringing hope that perhaps they are being searched for. Then, following a runaway horse, they come across a quiet Greek village virtually untouched by the war. The inhabitants and tales of the village are just as interesting and complicated as those of the brigade. The mayor is about to marry the madame of the brothel, the church is overrun with rats and the Turkish quarter is surrounded by an open sewer. This village does not offer the comforts the brigade had longed for. Brigadier Nestor still hopes to lead the men to the sea and escape, and the mayor knows the way. But before they can leave they must all contend with a desperate war correspondent and one final act of violence that permanently scars the village. This act oddly reflects another moment of violence that haunts the brigade and lies just beneath the surface of all they do.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_of_Ravens"title="The City of Ravens">
The story follows a petty thief called Jack Ravenwild, who is hired by the beautiful Elana to find a very special book. In the same tenday (the Realms equivalent of a week), he resorts to spying on another perfect woman, a mage named Zandria, to try to get information. But, the beautiful Illyth invites him to the game of masks, and at the same time he fears for his friend Anders, wanted by the evil Brothers Kuldath for stealing their ruby. Soon Jack finds both good and evil people following him through the streets of Ravens Bluff.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_(novel)"title="Brain (novel)">
The story starts with a girl Katherine Collins going to a private clinic for a pap smear but these people anesthetize her and steal her brain for a secret military project. She is placed in a vat of liquid and her brain is connected to a computer. The same thing happens to other patients too.The protagonist Dr. Martin Philips, a doctor in neuroradiology at the NYC medical center is involved in creating a self-diagnostic x-ray machine, along with William Michaels, who is a researcher graduating from MIT and also head of the department of artificial intelligence. Dr. Philips's girlfriend and colleague Dr. Denise Sanger (28 years old) is also involved in the same hospital. Philips and Sanger both find a secret conspiracy in the hospital to steal patients' brains without their consent. They uncover details and find that though they'd suspected Mannerheim, the prima donna neurosurgeon, the real villain is the soft-spoken AI researcher Michaels and his military backers. Dr. Philips blows the whistle and seeks political asylum in Sweden.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe's_Escape"title="Sharpe's Escape">
## Part One: Bussaco.Captain Richard Sharpe and his riflemen rejoin the South Essex Regiment during Wellington's retreat in Portugal. Sharpe is in a foul mood because his promised month of leave in Lisbon (after retrieving the gold in "Sharpe's Gold") lasted barely a week, and in an even fouler mood because of Lieutenant Cornelius Slingsby, foisted on Sharpe by the South Essex's commander, Colonel William Lawford, at the insistence of his wife in England (Slingsby's sister-in-law) to advance the latter's career by any means. Lawford, despite knowing Sharpe's ability as a soldier, is seeking to ease Sharpe out and give Slingsby command of the South Essex's Light Company.Sharpe discovers a Portuguese Army major, Ferreira, and his criminal brother, "Ferragus", trying to sell a stockpile of flour to the advancing French, in contravention of Wellington's strict policy of stripping the land bare of any resources the enemy could use. Over the major's objections, Sharpe subdues Ferragus and has the flour scattered on the ground. Sharpe's friend, Major Hogan, later gives him a light reprimand, explaining that Ferreira is an intelligence officer for the Portuguese Army with contacts among the Portuguese sympathisers in the French Army, who claimed he was giving them the flour to gain the confidence of the French. Later, Sharpe is ambushed by Ferragus and his men and savagely beaten, saved from death only by the chance appearance of some provosts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Egypt_Game"title="The Egypt Game">
April Hall, the daughter of an up-and-coming film actress, is sent to live with her grandmother in an old apartment house in Berkeley, California. She feels abandoned and masks her grief with truculent sarcasm and Hollywood mannerisms. Her grandmother arranges for her to meet neighbor children Melanie and Marshall Ross, and they bond over "imagining games" and a shared interest in archaeology. April also investigates a nearby antique shop run by a mysterious and somewhat spooky old man known as The Professor. In the shop's storage yard, the girls discover a replica of the famous bust of Nefertiti, leading them to create a sustained imaginary game about Ancient Egypt.They research actual Ancient Egyptian belief systems and practices, and create their own rituals intended to reproduce them more or less authentically.Melanie and April fear, a new girl, Elizabeth will ruin everything, but April still invites into the game if she will keep it secret.At Halloween the children desert their trick or treat group to return to Egypt surreptitiously and are discovered by their aggressive, outgoing classmates Toby Alvillar and Ken Kamata. Ken is unenthusiastic and nonchalant initially, but Toby is fascinated, and quickly brings in useful material and ideas.A little girl from the neighborhood disappears and is found murdered, the second such crime in a year. All the children from the area are kept indoors for several weeks. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunder_Oak"title="Thunder Oak">
The main introduction introduces Sylver's band of outlaws: Icham, Dredless, Mawk, Bryony, Alysoun, Miniver, Wodehed, and Luke. Sylver has heard that the sea defences around the island of Welkin are crumbling and will soon collapse completely, allowing the ocean to flood Welkin if the animals of the island don't act soon. With the help of Lord Haukin, a sympathetic stoat, who understands Sylver, Sylver decides to start out on a quest to find the missing humans who abandoned Welkin long before Sylver was born. None of the weasels know why they have evacuated, but Lord Haukin suspects, thanks to a diary left by a girl called Alice, that they were forced to leave and had no choice. His theory is supported by several clues scattered throughout the island, and the first clue is at Thunder Oak, but the weasels will need to make a long journey to reach it.Just before departure, however, the voyage is interrupted by the Sheriff Falshed, who has been appointed by Prince Poynt to dominate the rebellious weasels and keep them under sway by enslaving them at Castle Rayn.Falshed attempts to stop Sylver, arriving with a troop of stoats, but the outlaws cleverly ward off the attack by using missiles filled with ants, thus driving the stoats into the vast forest. They strap Falshed to a raft and send him off down the river, where, after an interval with the rats, he makes it back to his home, Castle Rayn, home of the stoats.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Twins"title="War of the Twins">
Upon arrival in the Tower of High Sorcery, Raistlin is tested by the undead guardians to prove that he is really the Master of the Tower. It is revealed that he has beaten Fistandantilus and absorbed his soul, thus increasing his power immensely. Raistlin goes to find the Portal to the Abyss, which is necessary to his ascension to godhood. When he goes to it, he discovers that it is not there. Having been bribed with the Globe of Present Time Passing, created by Raistlin, Astinus reveals that it is in the magical fortress of Zhaman, located in dwarven lands.The scene shifts to Tasslehoff Burrfoot, who finds himself in the Abyss. Tasslehoff encounters Takhisis, the Queen of Darkness, who tells him how he has altered time and possibly allowed her to take over the world. Tas meets Gnimsh, a gnome, who claims he is a failure because all of his inventions worked (gnomes in the Dragonlance world constantly invent, and more often than not they fail. The gnomes believe failure is a means of learning). Gnimsh agrees to help Tasslehoff get out of the Abyss and starts to fix the device of Time Journeying.Caramon, Raistlin, and Crysania create the so-called Fistandantilus Army from local populace under pretension of ravaging the dwarven kingdom Thorbadin in the far South, with Caramon being their leader. Many come to join his army, and they number several hundred. The army continues south. The hill dwarves join up with Caramon's army, believing that the mountain dwarves have stolen supplies and wealth from them. Crysania flees when Raistlin rejects her love and makes plans to bring word of the true gods to the people, 200 years before Goldmoon would during the War of the Lance. She encounters a place stricken by plague and finds a dying false cleric, who she tries to convert. She discovers that people are still too angry to accept the true gods yet. Raistlin and Caramon begin to joke and share memories. Later, Raistlin and Caramon go to the village where Crysania is. Raistlin uses his immense power to summon a massive fire that razes the town. He is in fact preparing Crysania to come with him into the Abyss with trials comparable to Huma Dragonbane's.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haters_(novel)"title="Haters (novel)">
"Haters" follows the character of Pasquala Rumalda Quintana de Archuleta, also known as Paski, as she tries to deal with extreme changes in her life. As a result of her father's comic strip getting optioned for a movie, Paski and her father move to California. Once there, Paski finds herself in a school where materialism and "haters" control the social circles. Paski begins to develop feelings for the handsome Chris Cabrera, who happens to be dating Jessica Nguyen, the resident mean girl. Paski soon finds herself dealing with more problems than Jessica, as she also finds that she has the psychic "gift" of premonition and is predicting Jessica having a terrible accident while participating in a motorcycle competition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Beauty"title="On Beauty">
"On Beauty" centres around two families and their different yet increasingly intertwined lives. The Belsey family consists of university professor Howard, a white Englishman and a scholar of Rembrandt; his African-American wife Kiki; and their children, Jerome, Zora and Levi. They live in the fictional university town of Wellington, outside Boston. Howard's professional nemesis is Monty Kipps, a Trinidadian living in Britain with his wife Carlene and children Victoria and Michael.The Belsey family has always defined itself as liberal and atheist, and Howard in particular is furious when his son Jerome, lately a born-again Christian, goes to work as an intern with the ultra-conservative Christian Kipps family over his summer holidays. After a failed affair with Victoria Kipps, Jerome returns home. However, the families are again brought closer nine months later when the Kippses move to Wellington, and Monty begins work at the university. Meanwhile, the Belsey family is facing problems of its own as they deal with the fallout of Howard's affair with his colleague and family friend Claire.Carlene and Kiki become friends despite the tensions between their families. The women bond over a painting in Carlene's library, "Maitresse Erzulie" by the Haitian painter, Hector Hyppolite. Carlene tells Kiki that she purchased the painting in Haiti, prior to meeting Monty. The women see each other twice more before Carlene passes away from cancer, having kept her illness from her family. The Belseys attend Carlene's funeral in London, where Howard consummates an ongoing flirtation with his student, Victoria Kipps. While reviewing Carlene's will, the Kipps family discover that Carlene intended for "Maitresse Erzulie" to be left to Kiki. Believing Carlene to have not been of sound mind when making this decision, Monty hangs the painting in his university office.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stars_Are_Ours!"title="The Stars Are Ours!">
## Back story.The Moon, Mars and Venus have been explored and found unsuitable for colonization. Back on the Earth, two very different factions compete to determine the future of humanity: the Free Scientists, who refuse to accept political, racial and religious divisions, and the nationalists. Armed men seize control of one of the space stations orbiting the planet, convert it into a weapon, and (perhaps accidentally) devastate most of the world's heavily populated areas.A fanatic named Arturo Renzi rises up, blaming the catastrophe on the scientists and "techneers" and espousing a return to a simpler, less technological life. When he is assassinated, the Free Scientists are hunted down. Within a period of three days, most are killed; the few remaining survivors are either enslaved by the ruling Peacemen of the Company of Pax or go into hiding, to be tracked down one by one in the following years. Society is structured into three classes, the Peacemen nobility and their landsmen overseers, a vast peasantry, and the work-slaves, composed of actual or suspected scientists. Most technology is rejected and civilization ebbs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fortunate_Life"title="A Fortunate Life">
The autobiography begins at his birth. Albert Barnett Facey was born in Maidstone, Victoria, Australia, in 1894, the youngest of seven children. His father died in 1896 of typhoid fever after moving to the Goldfields of Western Australia with Bert's two eldest brothers. In 1898, Bert's Grandpa became ill and died in October that year. Bert's mother then left the rest of her children to be looked after by their grandmother Mrs Jane Carr (born 1832 – died 1932), to go to the Goldfields, but met and married another man and had nothing further to do with Bert's upbringing. In 1899 Bert moved from Victoria to the Goldfields in the care of his grandmother, together with three of his six older siblings: Roy, Eric and Myra.Most of his childhood was spent in the Wickepin area, some south east of Perth. His aunt and her husband had been granted an agricultural lease there, so the children moved with them and Mrs Carr to start a farm. At the age of eight, although two older brothers remained, when a neighbouring farmer offered a wage and all found, Bert was put into service. His new employer, a horse thief, was given to violent drunken rages, but after being given a severe horsewhipping, Bert managed to escape. Work on subsequent farms were much better experiences and Bert's appreciation of life in the bush grew.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Thatcher,_Dragon_Hatcher"title="Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher">
Jeremy Thatcher knows a thing or two about raising animals—after all, his dad is a veterinarian. But after he leaves Mr. Elive's magic shop with a strange marbled egg, it soon becomes clear that this is one pet he wasn't prepared for. How is he supposed to keep a flame-breathing dragon with razor-sharp teeth and an out-of-control appetite in his bedroom? If the playful baby dragon is ever to grow up to become a magnificent beast of myth and legend, it needs Jeremy and though he doesn't know it yet, Jeremy needs a dragon with a strong connection.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Story_(Straub_novel)"title="Ghost Story (Straub novel)">
The novel opens with a man named Donald Wanderley traveling with a young girl whom he has apparently kidnapped. Eventually, Donald and the girl arrive in Panama City, Florida, at which point the novel jumps back in time to the events of the previous winter.Living in the small upstate New York town of Milburn (a fictional location which is indicated to be in Broome County east of Binghamton) are four elderly men who are members of a clique called the Chowder Society: John Jaffrey, a doctor; Lewis Benedikt, a retired entrepreneur; Sears James, an attorney; and Ricky Hawthorne, an attorney and James' partner. For the past 50 years these best friends have gathered together and told each other stories and have been great companions. However, their group once consisted of five members. One year earlier Jaffrey had thrown a party at his house in honor of a visiting actress, and their fifth member, Edward Wanderley, had died in an upstairs bedroom during the festivities. There was a look of absolute horror on his face, as if he had been frightened to death.Ever since that night the friends have been plagued with horrible nightmares, and have taken to telling each other ghost stories. At one of their meetings, Sears tells them a ghost story about when he was a young man. Before deciding to attend law school James had taken a teaching position in a rural community. He developed a fascination with one of his students, a slow, mentally disturbed young boy named Fenny Bate. Fenny and his sister were ostracized by the community, and upon making some inquiries he finds out why. The two children once had an older brother named Gregory, and it was generally believed that Gregory sexually molested his younger brother. The mother of the siblings was dead, their father had abandoned the family, and Gregory was his younger siblings' guardian. One day while repairing a roof Gregory fell off the ladder and was killed, and someone thought they saw the two young Bate children running away from the scene. Sears tells his friends that in time he began to see a threatening young man hanging around the school, and he eventually came to believe it to be the spirit of Gregory Bate. Sears attempted to save Fenny from the clutches of his dead brother, but to no avail. Fenny died, and Sears left the small community when he had finished the school year.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Far_Sunset"title="A Far Sunset">
The starship "Gloria Mundi", built and crewed by the United States of Europe, lands on the planet Altair Five in the year 2032. When part of the crew ventures out to explore the region around their touchdown point, their radio communication soon ceases and they do not return. Three of the crew sent to rescue their mates vanish within hours. Of the three remaining, all of whom are captured after they finally leave the ship in search of the missing, only psychiatrist Paul Marlow, the book's protagonist, survives. The planet is inhabited by primeval humanoids.A central theme in the novel is the clash between Marlowe's rational worldview and the indigenous peoples' superstitious and often brutal culture. His name is pronounced "Poul Mer Lo" by the "Bayani" tribe he lives amongst; he gains a leading position in the primitive society. Marlow eventually goes on a journey which has the result of demystifying the natives' religion by discovering its factual origin - thereby uncovering that the humans of Altair Five share their ancestry with humans of Earth and of other worlds in the Milky Way.When he returns from this journey, he is raised to the most powerful position within the society. Marlow uses this power to educate the alien race; he introduces them to writing, to transforming Earth inventions such as the wheel, the ball-bearing and the axle, and to better industrial and agricultural methods.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkly_Dreaming_Dexter"title="Darkly Dreaming Dexter">
Dexter Morgan works for the Miami-Dade Police Department as a forensic blood spatter analyst. In his spare time, he is a vigilante serial killer who targets murderers, rapists, child molesters and other undesirables he believes the legal system has failed to stop. Dexter's murders are directed by an inner voice he refers to as "The Dark Passenger", prodding Dexter to satisfy his homicidal urges on a regular basis. When accomplished, the voice is placated for a while, but always, eventually returns.Flashbacks reveal that Dexter's foster father, an esteemed police detective named Harry Morgan, recognized early on that he was a violent psychopath with an innate need to kill, and taught him how to kill people who had gotten away with horrific crimes as a way to channel his homicidal urges in a "positive" direction. Harry also taught the boy to be a careful and meticulous killer, to leave no clues, and to be absolutely sure that his victims were guilty before killing them. Dexter calls these rules "The Code of Harry."Dexter succeeds in managing his double life until he investigates the "Tamiami Slasher," who has murdered three prostitutes. His adoptive sister, Deborah, who is also on the force and wants to be promoted to Homicide—and knowing that her brother has eerie "hunches"—asks him for help in solving the case. Because of his moral code, Dexter helps Deborah. Yet, he feels a compelling pull to the killer, due to similar desires. After a lucid dream, Dexter drives around Miami and spots a refrigerated truck. When he follows the truck, the killer throws a severed head in his car.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doomsters"title="The Doomsters">
Archer is hired by escaped mental patient Carl Hallman to investigate the deaths of his wealthy and influential parents. His mother died in a drowning several years earlier, and his father, a Senator, died more recently. Carl claims to have been sent to a mental hospital by his older brother to prevent him from exposing the family's dark secrets, and escaped to contact Archer. Carl's brother dies in a shooting that is blamed on Carl, and a manhunt for Carl ensues across the family's vast orange orchards and surrounding property. The more Archer investigates, the more suspects he finds for the trio of deaths that haunt the Hallman family. The title is taken from the poem "To an Unborn Pauper Child", by Thomas Hardy: The poem reflects on the difficulty of escaping the lot to which we are born, an underlying theme of Macdonald's book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Hand_Clapping_(novel)"title="One Hand Clapping (novel)">
Howard has an unusual talent: he has a photographic memory. He uses his talent to enter, and win, a mega-money TV quiz show. He then discloses another gift: he is clairvoyant and can predict racing results. He gambles his winnings on race horses and the couple become extremely wealthy and travel the world, staying in luxury hotels.On their return, however, Howard, disgusted by the corruption of the world they have seen - and troubled by prophetic glimpses of a coming decline in civilisation - declares that they must commit suicide together by barbiturates.Janet resists, killing Howard with a coal hammer. Janet flees with the remainder of their money, to begin a new life abroad, taking her husband with her in a chest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Barbarian"title="I Am a Barbarian">
The story is pitched as a free translation of the memoirs of Britannicus, 25 years the slave of Caligula, emperor of Rome from AD 37 to 41 who is historically known for being insane. It treats a number of different supposed facets of Caligula's life, including his popular early acts as emperor and his descent into madness. Britannicus watches as Caligula begins falsely accusing, fining and even killing individuals for the purpose of seizing their estates during a financial crisis caused by his own wasteful spending. A number of other desperate measures by Caligula are described in the book. In order to gain funds, Caligula asks the public to lend the state money. He levies taxes on lawsuits, marriage and prostitution, and begins auctioning the lives of the gladiators at shows. The novel also includes the famous story that once, at some games at which he was presiding, he ordered his guards to throw an entire section of the crowd into the arena during intermission to be eaten by animals because there were no criminals to be prosecuted and he was bored.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randamoozham"title="Randamoozham">
The story begins with the incident of Mahaprasthanika Parva where the Pandavas leave for the pilgrimage to Himalayas forsaking all the worldly possessions. The story runs through the eyes of Bhima who faces seemingly severe frustrations as a young man. Always destined to be second to his weak elder brother Yudhishthira in seniority and younger brother Arjuna in fame and popularity, Bhima is not given his due as the main architect of the Pandava victory over their cousins Kauravas in the Kurukshetra war, despite killing all the 100 Kauravas. The book unravels all the hardship and dilemmas encountered by Bhima which remain unnoticed. The book explores the emotions of the mighty Pandava as a son, brother, husband and father. The book brings to light the affection that he holds for his wife draupadi and how unnoticed his acts of love remains. The story questions the mourning of Arjuna's son, Abhimanyu when he is killed during the battle while trying to break the Chakravyuh formation, while Bhima's son, Ghatokkach is led to his death by sacrificing his life to save Arjuna's life and his sacrifice too remains unsung and everyone enjoys the happiness of saving Arjuna's life. Towards the end of the book he is shown as the only husband who stops and tries to stay with Draupadi in her last moments during their pilgrimage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_(Hölderlin_novel)"title="Hyperion (Hölderlin novel)">
"Hyperion" is set in Greece and deals with invisible forces, conflicts, beauty, and hope. It recounts Hyperion's attempts to overthrow the Turkish rule in Greece (in one of the footnotes Hölderlin specifically ties events in the novel with the Russians "bringing a fleet into the Archipelago" in 1770, framing the novel's events into the Orlov Revolt), his disillusionment with the rebellion, survival in the deadly Battle of Chesma, his devastation when Diotima dies of a broken heart before they can be reunited and his subsequent life as a hermit in the Greek wilderness, where he embraces the beauty of nature and overcomes the tragedy of his solitude. In the same time Hyperion after all these losses understands the limits of his idealized concept of Greece. An impossibility to travel becomes the essence of his travel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katrina_(novel)"title="Katrina (novel)">
Katrina is a young Ostrobothnian woman, the oldest of three daughters, being described as pretty, strong, and proud. She marries a young man from Åland, Johan, who promises her an affluent life on Åland. Upon arriving on Åland, however, Katrina discovers Johan has lied to her about his wealth and standing in society. He is, in fact, one of the poorest people in the village and is despised by other people. Katrina goes from living a comfortable life with her family to living in squalor and hardship. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_in_Space"title="Pegasus in Space">
Peter Reidinger, the telepathic and telekinetic Talent introduced in "Pegasus in Flight", proves to be one of the most important psychic Talents in human history; his ability to tap into outside sources of energy gives him potentially unlimited power, but there are ruthless enemies of all Talent who must be stopped, or all mankind will pay the price.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krabat_(novel)"title="Krabat (novel)">
Set in the beginning of the 18th century during the Great Northern War, the story follows the life of Krabat, a 14-year-old Wendish beggar boy living in the eastern part of Saxony. For three consecutive nights, he is called to a watermill near the village Schwarzkollm through a dream. Upon heeding the call and arriving at the mill, he begins his apprenticeship as a miller's man. He soon joins the secret brotherhood, composed of journeymen and apprentices, and discovers that the skill he is meant to learn through this apprenticeship is black magic. The first magic powers Krabat acquires are rather harmless, such as the ability to turn himself into a raven. Other peculiarities of this watermill include the lack of any outside visitors, including farmers who would have brought grain. The only visitor to the mill is one Goodman, who may be the devil, although this is never made explicit.The senior journeyman Tonda, Krabat's best friend and older brother figure, dies, ostensibly of an accident, on New Year's Eve in Krabat's first year at the mill. Tonda offers strangely little resistance to his own death. Krabat's suspicions of foul play are further reinforced when another journeyman and friend, Michal, dies the following New Year's Eve. He soon realizes that the master is bound in a pact to the Goodman: the master must sacrifice one journeyman every year on New Year's Eve, or perish himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Holler"title="Ruby Holler">
The story starts in the Boxton Creek Home, an 'orphanage' run by the Trepids - a strict and dishonest husband and wife. An imaginative thirteen-year-old boy named Dallas and his sassy and bold twin sister Florida have been living in the Home for a long time, often punished for breaking rules that the Trepids post all over the house. Over the years, the twins have been adopted many times and quickly returned to the Home. Because of this, they have been named the "trouble twins." They have a plan to run away and take a train to a destination far from Boxton.Outside of Boxton, on a plot of land called Ruby Holler, Tiller and Sairy Morey, a very old couple whose children have grown up and moved away, are discussing their plans for a new adventure. The two decide to foster children, and they adopt Dallas and Florida. Although Sairy, a very kind and trusting old lady, is excited about having children at Ruby Holler again, Tiller - a "crotchety old boot" - is doubtful. The twins enjoy the freedom and adventure they find in the holler, but they're still suspicious and think that Tiller and Sairy will mistreat them the way others have - although their suspicions soon prove false. Tiller and Sairy tell Dallas and Florida they have been planning separate trips, and they want the twins to come: Dallas with Sairy to explore an island, and Florida with Tiller on a rafting trip. All four are uneasy about a separation from their life-long partner, but they don't speak about this. Tiller and Sairy use their "understone funds," underground savings that they've kept for years, to pay for their travels.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pinhoe_Egg"title="The Pinhoe Egg">
Marianne Pinhoe's family tries to keep their magic a secret. They don't want the "Big Man", or Chrestomanci, interfering, as he tends to do when people misuse magic. And the Pinhoes certainly are guilty of that. Gammer, the head of the Pinhoe clan, has ostensibly gone mad, but Marianne doesn't believe that she's completely 'round the twist. She's sure that Gammer's the one sending plagues to the Farleighs, a related clan that also wishes to stay out of the sights of the "Big Man". Until recently, the Farleighs and the Pinhoes had been working together, but it seems that Gammer has started a war, and it'll be hard to keep their operations under wraps for long.Meanwhile, up at the Castle, Cat acquires a horse. He also meets the man who was bootboy at the Castle when the current Chrestomanci was a lad, Jason, and helps him and his new wife choose a house. They finally settle on Woods House, Gammer's old place, and Marianne, while showing Cat around, gives him an old egg from the attic, an egg with strong "Don't Notice" spells placed on it. An egg that is sure to arouse the interest of the "Big Man" up at the castle – something the rest of the Pinhoe clan, and Gammer in particular, doesn't want at all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracks_(novel)"title="Tracks (novel)">
"Tracks" alternates between two narrators: Nanapush, a jovial tribal elder, and Pauline, a young girl of mixed heritage. In Nanapush's chapters the point of view is that of Nanapush telling stories to his granddaughter, Lulu, several years after the main events in the novel occur. When Lulu was ten years old, her mother, Fleur Pillager, sent her away to a government school. Because of this, Lulu is now estranged from her mother. Nanapush, therefore, narrates the story in attempt to reconcile mother and daughter by telling Lulu about the events between 1912 and 1924 that led Fleur to her decision.Nanapush first meets Fleur in 1912 when he rescues her in the middle of winter and nurses her back to health from consumption – a recent epidemic among the Anishinaabe. Because of their shared grief at losing so many from their community, Nanapush and Fleur develop a friendship and begin to see one another as family. The next year, Fleur goes to the nearby town of Argus and takes a job at a butcher's shop, where she meets Pauline Puyat – the novel's second narrator. After beating a group of men from the shop one night at a game of poker, Fleur is beaten and raped. She leaves town, but the next day a tornado strikes Argus. Mysteriously, no one in town is harmed in the storm with the exception of the men who raped her – whose bodies are found locked in the freezer of the butcher shop, where they had taken refuge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_with_the_Black_Dragon"title="Tea with the Black Dragon">
Martha Macnamara is called west to San Francisco by a message from her daughter Elizabeth, a computer programmer. When she arrives, however, Elizabeth has disappeared. Mayland Long, an Asian gentleman who is skilled in both human and computer languages—and who may be a transformed 2,000-year-old Chinese dragon—aids Martha in her search for her daughter. As they search for clues to Elizabeth's disappearance, they discover hints that Elizabeth is involved in a dangerous crime.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collected_Works_(Bernice_Summerfield_anthology)"title="Collected Works (Bernice Summerfield anthology)">
Following on from the events of The Crystal of Cantus, "Collected Works" details a year in the life of the Braxiatel Collection following its founder's disappearance. The staff of the Collection have to cope with their new place in the universe, and a visit from a team of post-human scholars from the future, called the Quire. As the year progresses, it becomes clear that even though he has left them, Braxiatel's influence can still be felt on the Collection.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Boy_(novel)"title="New Boy (novel)">
The book is set in 1986 and is narrated by a Jewish student at the school, Mark, who does not have much success with girls. He finds himself drawn to Barry, who is incredibly handsome. The two become friends, and the book tells of the course of just over a year during which Barry discovers sex with girls and has an affair with a teacher. Mark struggles with his attraction to Barry, but has a relationship with Barry's sister, Louise. Barry, meanwhile, realises that he is, in fact, gay, and enters into a relationship with Mark's brother, Dan, which Mark is unaware of. The four all go on holiday together, and Dan and Barry tell Mark of their relationship. He reacts badly, and accuses them of not being normal. This leads to Barry storming off and Louise dumping Mark. Mark and Barry do have a rapprochement of sorts at the end of the book, but their friendship is over. Mark ends the book contending that he can't be homophobic, because he made it up with his brother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_Error"title="Mortal Error">
The book takes the overall form of a narrative, in which Menninger describes Donahue's enquiries over twenty-five years.Chapter 1, "A Chance Telephone Call", describes the events that led to Donahue's interest in the assassination, and a brief biography up until that point.Chapters 2 and 3, "The Warren Report" and "The Critics", then give the context and summary of the report, and a detailed summary of its critics as of 1968.Chapter 4, "The Single Bullet Theory" presents Donahue's analysis of the shot which, according to the Warren Commission, struck both Kennedy and Connally, and suggests that the "magic bullet" trajectory is only necessary because the estimated position of the Governor was wrong. One of Oswald's shots could therefore have caused both men's injuries as claimed, but there remain other unanswered questions.Chapter 5, "The Head Shot" describes Donahue's analysis of the shot that hit Kennedy in the head, using the Warren Commission evidence (particularly the official autopsy report), stills from the Zapruder film and other photos, and holes drilled in a plaster skull. Numerous questions arise surrounding the completeness and even accuracy of the autopsy report.Chapter 6, "A Fortuitous Encounter", describes Donahue's first correspondence with the Secret Service, and reviews the conclusions that led to his approaching them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fabulous_Clipjoint"title="The Fabulous Clipjoint">
When teenaged Ed Hunter's alcoholic father is murdered, Ed is for all intents and purposes orphaned, as he feels little affection for his mean-spirited stepmother and hypersexual stepsister. The police dismiss the case as nothing more than the random murder of a back-alley drunk, and so Ed decides to investigate the crime on his own.Ed enlists the help of his father's brother, Ambrose "Am" Hunter, an itinerant carny, whom he has not seen in many years, and the two of them set out to solve the crime. Together they wade through a swamp of unseemly characters of the Chicago underworld to expose the real murderer of Ed's father. Along the way, with Am's guidance, Ed comes to realize that his father was not the hapless, pathetic man he had always believed him to be.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cry_of_the_Wolf"title="The Cry of the Wolf">
The book tells the story of a man who tries to kill the last wild wolves in England, and the wolf, raised among humans, who will try to strike back.What if there were still wolves in England and only a few people knew it? What if one of those people was an obsessive, half-mad, extremely able hunter who was determined to have the honour of killing the last wolf in England? We are with the last wolf cubs as they are born short minutes before the slaughter begins. The female, called Silver, survives, wounded by The Hunter, only long enough to teach her sole surviving cub a few skills before she too is killed by the man. The cub, Greycub, is reared by Ben and his family and, being a social animal, waits in vain for the sound or scent of a remaining wolf. This is not to be for he is the last wolf in England. Regretfully leaving his human friends, he roams for years searching for a sign of his species, although that is unsuccessful. But what he does find is the Hunter. Greycub tries to kill the Hunter and finally gets to be in the position of the hunter and kills The Hunter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_(novel)"title="Passing (novel)">
The story is written as a third person narrative from the perspective of Irene Redfield, a black woman with a European or near-European appearance, who lives in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City.Part One of the book, titled "Encounter," opens with Irene receiving a letter from Clare Kendry, causing her to recall a chance encounter she had had with her, at the roof restaurant of the Drayton Hotel in Chicago, during a brief stay in the city. Irene does not answer Clare's attempts to reconnect written in the letters. The women grew up together but lost touch when Clare's biracial father died and she was taken to live with her two paternal white aunts. Irene learns that the beautiful Clare, who appears European, "passes" for white, living primarily in Europe with her unsuspecting, rich, white husband and their daughter. Although Irene tries to avoid further engagement with Clare, she never is able to fully exclude her from her life as she later visits Clare for tea along with another childhood friend, Gertrude Martin. Toward the end of the visit, Clare's white husband John (Jack) Bellew arrives. Unaware that all three women have black ancestry, Jack enthusiastically affirms his hatred of black people, making the women uneasy. In a startling passage, he also reveals his pet name for Clare, "Nig." Although Jack does not suspect that his wife has black ancestry (and, in fact, believes that his "Nig" hates black people as much as he does), he gave her that name because he perceives that Clare, who was "white as a lily" when they were married, has been "gettin' darker and darker." Irene and Gertrude say nothing in response, in part to maintain Clare's secret identity. Afterwards, Irene receives a letter of apology from Clare but destroys it in an effort to forget about Clare and excise her from Irene's life. Irene seeks instead to focus on her own life with her husband, Brian, and her two sons, Theodore and Junior.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_White_Horse"title="The Little White Horse">
Maria Merryweather becomes an orphan at age 13 on her father's death in 1842. She is sent to Moonacre Manor in the West side, accompanied by her governess Miss Heliotrope and dog Wiggins. There she finds herself in a world out of time. Her cousin and guardian Sir Benjamin Merryweather is one of the "sun" Merryweathers, and she loves him right away, as "sun" and "moon" Merryweathers do. Maria discovers that there is an ancient mystery about the founding of the estate.She is aided by wonderful people and magical beasts, but it is by self-sacrifice and perseverance, too, that Maria is able to save Moonacre, right the wrongs, reunite lost loves and finally bring peace to the valley.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clea_(novel)"title="Clea (novel)">
The book begins with the Narrator (Darley) living on a remote Greek island with Nessim's illegitimate daughter from Melissa. The child is now six years old—marking the time that has elapsed since the events of "Justine". Darley has been able to spend this period on the island—thinking, writing, maturing—due to the £500 left him in his will by the writer Pursewarden (who killed himself).Mnemjian arrives (unexpectedly) to see Darley with a message from Nessim and news of events in Alexandria—notably the fall from prosperity of the Hosnani family (Nessim, his wife Justine, and brother Narouz—the latter dead). Mnemjian is a prosperous barber, and possibly brothel owner.They proceed to Alexandria, now under nightly bombardment because of the War (WW2), Darley continues to reminisce, sometimes lamenting, and seeks and sometimes finds, the characters of the earlier book.He runs into Clea in the street—and they effortlessly pick up an affaire de coeur—this time unencumbered by the interfering physical presences of Justine and Melissa.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealthy_Barber"title="The Wealthy Barber">
The book is structured around a story of three people in their late 20s visiting Roy, the title character, for lessons in financial planning. Each chapter of the book describes a different visit and a different element of financial planning. Each month along with their lessons the three students are required to start carrying out the actions prescribed by Roy. In addition to these individuals, Roy also shares his financial knowledge with the customers of his barber shop.The story is set primarily in Sarnia, Ontario, where Roy has been operating a barber shop for several decades. As a young man, Roy had planned to become a lawyer, but those plans were derailed. He ended up taking over his father's barber shop. Worried about money, Roy visited Mr. White, one of the town's wealthiest men, and asked for advice on financial planning. This advice paved the way for Roy's accumulating wealth.The basis of the book is Roy's advice to "save 10 per cent of all that you earn and invest it for long-term growth." In that, it draws from the advice first set forth in "The Richest Man in Babylon". Subsequent chapters discuss wills and life insurance, RRSPs, buying a home, income tax and saving and spending.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Memoirs_of_Cleopatra"title="The Memoirs of Cleopatra">
The story follows Cleopatra VII, from her early life under the rule of her father Ptolemy XII Auletes, to her eventual suicide. When Cleopatra is a young girl, Ptolemy is overthrown by his two elder daughters, Cleopatra VI and Berenice, and requires the help of Rome to save his throne, increasing his country's debt. Cleopatra VII is named co-ruler with her father, and when he dies, her young brother Ptolemy XIII is named in his stead. In accordance with tradition, she marries him. Later, Ptolemy overthrows his sister under the advice of his advisers. Cleopatra seeks out the nearby Julius Caesar. She hides in a rug and has herself secretly presented to him, beginning a tryst. She falls in love with him. With his help, at the age of seventeen, she becomes queen of Egypt, but feels betrayed when her brother is ordered back as her co-regent. Cleopatra and Caesar tour the country, and she becomes pregnant. They marry and he returns home, while she gives birth of a son named Ptolemy Caesar. Caesar acknowledges the boy, but is assassinated soon after. Cleopatra meets Marcus Antonius, and the two begin an affair that will last years. Together, they fight to withstand the aggression of Caesar's successor, Octavian.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deerslayer"title="The Deerslayer">
This novel introduces Natty Bumppo as "Deerslayer": a young frontiersman in early 18th-century New York, who objects to the practice of taking scalps, on the grounds that every living thing should follow "the gifts" of its nature, which would keep European Americans from taking scalps. Two characters who actually seek to take scalps are Deerslayer's foil Henry March (alias "Hurry Harry") and the former pirate 'Floating Tom' Hutter, to whom Deerslayer is introduced "en route" to a rendezvous with the latter's lifelong friend Chingachgook (who first appeared as "Indian John" in "The Pioneers"). Shortly before the rendezvous, Hutter's residence is besieged by the indigenous Hurons, and Hutter and March sneak into the camp of the besiegers to kill and scalp as many as they can; but are captured in the act, and later ransomed by Bumppo, Chingachgook, and Hutter's daughters Judith and Hetty. Bumppo and Chingachgook thereafter plan to rescue Chingachgook's kidnapped betrothed Wah-ta-Wah (alias 'Hist') from the Hurons; but, in rescuing her, Bumppo is captured. In his absence, the Hurons invade Hutter's home, and Hutter is scalped alive. On his deathbed, he confesses that Judith and Hetty were not his daughters by birth, and Judith determines to discover her natural father's identity; but her search reveals only that her late mother had been of aristocratic descent, and had married 'Floating Tom' after the collapse of an illicit affair. Later, Judith attempts and fails to rescue Deerslayer; and they are all saved at last when March returns with English reinforcements, who massacre the Hurons and mortally wound Hetty. After Hetty's death, Judith proposes marriage to Deerslayer, but is refused, and is last described as the paramour of a soldier. Fifteen years later, Bumppo and Chingachgook return to the site to find Hutter's house in ruins.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Things_I_Hate_About_Me"title="Ten Things I Hate About Me">
The protagonist of the story is 16-year-old Jamilah Towfeek, who lives in Sydney's Western Suburbs. Jamilah is a Lebanese Muslim, though for the past three years of her life she has hidden her true identity from her peers at school. To conceal her identity she dyed her hair blonde, went by the name Jamie and wears blue contacts. Jamie is beginning year ten at Guildford High School, the students there are separated by their ethnic backgrounds. The Anglo students are popular and taunt students with a background that is not Anglo-Saxon. The most popular boy in school is Peter Clarkson, who is notorious for his bullying, his teasing and also his hilarious tricks in class. Peter especially mocks and taunts Timothy, a boy who does not seem to be affected by Peter's opinion and manages to give witty responses to Peter's efforts to belittle him, he is also the only one who really stands up to Peter.One day at school a bored Jamie receives an email from someone called John. They begin corresponding by email, Jamie pouring all her deepest secrets to John. This includes her mother dying of a heart attack when she was just nine, her hopes, dreams, frustrations, the fact that her father is over-protective and has documented a Stone Age Charter of Curfew Rights and the Ten things she hates about herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Hundred_Leagues_on_the_Amazon"title="Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon">
Joam Garral grants his daughter's wish to travel to Belém, where she wants to marry Manuel Valdez in the presence of Manuel's invalid mother. The Garrals travel down the Amazon River using a giant timber raft. At Belém, Joam plans to restore his good name, as he is still wanted in Brazil for a crime he did not perpetrate. A scoundrel named Torres offers Joam absolute proof of Joam's innocence, but the price that Torres wants for this information is to marry Joam's daughter, which is inconceivable to Joam. The proof lies in an encrypted letter that will exonerate Garral. When Torres is killed, the Garral family must race to decode the letter before Joam is executed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_and_South_(trilogy)"title="North and South (trilogy)">
Orry Main from South Carolina and George Hazard from Pennsylvania meet on their way to the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1842. They soon become close friends, frequently confronting their regional differences within the frame of their friendship. During their time at the academy, Orry and George are tormented by a sadistic Ohioan cadet named Elkanah Bent, but they are not able to effect Bent's final expulsion from the Academy, as he returns.The companions graduate and become officers in the United States Army during the Mexican–American War. On the way to Mexico, George courts a young Irish woman in Texas named Constance. George and Orry end up in the Battle of Churubusco in 1847, where Bent orders them to carry out a risky mission. Orry's arm is badly wounded and eventually amputated. He is sent home, but George stays. George is later released from the Army due to his father's death, and he and Constance return to Pennsylvania and marry. George and Orry eventually meet up again and resume their friendship, as tensions increase between the North and South. Soon, Orry's younger sister Brett falls in love with George's younger brother William "Billy". Later, Billy Hazard is a classmate of Orry's cousin Charles Main at West Point. They graduate and Billy is assigned to the United States Corps of Engineers, Charles to the cavalry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawk_of_May"title="Hawk of May">
Britain is a land divided into small Celtic kingdoms in the process of being conquered by the more united Saxon invaders. When Uther, the Pendragon or High King, dies without legitimate sons, any semblance of a unified defense vanishes. Only Arthur, Uther's son, continues to fight the Saxons, but as a bastard, he can only rely on the support of his late father's warband and the kingdom of Dumnonia. A civil war is in the offing as the rest of the underkings plot to claim the vacant throne.One of the most powerful of the schemers is Lot, King of the Orcades in the far north. He has three sons by his wife, Morgawse, Uther's legitimate daughter and a notorious witch. Agravain, the eldest, is a straightforward, gifted warrior. The second, Gwalchmai, is clever, but a poor fighter, favored by his mother. Finally, there is Medraut, who resembles Lot so little that many question his parentage.Lot and Agravain go off to fight in Britain. Gwalchmai despairs of becoming a warrior and asks his mother to teach him witchcraft instead. Medraut, who looks up to his brother, wants to learn magic as well, but Gwalchmai dissuades him.When the Saxon King Cerdic of Wessex invades Dumnonia, Arthur realizes that the only way to protect Britain is to end the civil war. He therefore proclaims himself the Pendragon. A brilliant general, Arthur defeats several kings, one after the other. The remaining contenders then unite against him, but Arthur wins a decisive battle and forces them (including Lot) to swear the Threefold Oath of Allegiance to him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Summer"title="Kingdom of Summer">
In winter, Rhys and his cousin encounter a mounted warrior named Gwalchmai. He accompanies them to their householding for shelter from the cold. There, he is recognized by the head of the clan (and Rhys' father), Sion ap Rhys, who had befriended Gwalchmai before he became renowned throughout Britain.This chance meeting changes the course of Rhys's life. He had aspired to be more than a simple farmer. Despite his parents' disapproval, he asks Gwalchmai to accept him as a servant. As a favor to his father, Gwalchmai agrees only to take him to Camlann, King Arthur's stronghold, where he can find himself a master.But first, Gwalchmai continues his search for a woman, to beg her forgiveness. He had been sent on an embassy to King Bran, an enemy of Arthur, to keep an eye on him. While there, he had fallen in love with and seduced Elidan, the king's sister. Bran found out and used it as an excuse to rebel. During the resulting battle, Gwalchmai killed Bran, though he had promised Elidan he wouldn't. As a result, her love turned to hatred, and she disappeared. He is unable to find any news of her and he and Rhys travel to Camlann.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Winter's_Shadow"title="In Winter's Shadow">
After the murder of the feared sorceress Morgawse by her own son Agravain (as told in "Kingdom of Summer"), her youngest son Medraut goes to Camlann, the stronghold of his enemy, Arthur. Inasmuch as he is Medraut's uncle, Arthur has no excuse to send him away. Once there, Medraut begins to build up a faction loyal only to him among the warriors of the royal warband.Another newcomer is Gwynn, the young, illegitimate son of the abbess Elidan. He goes to work for Gwynhwyfar. Gwalchmai, Arthur's best cavalry fighter (and Medraut's other brother), takes an interest in the boy and helps him train to be a warrior.Medraut succeeds in sowing dissent and distrust in the warband; finally, there is a duel between one of his men and Bedwyr, Arthur's most valued advisor. Though Gwynhwyfar is able to effect a reconciliation, the situation continues to deteriorate. In desperation, she tries to poison Medraut at a banquet, but he is aware of her plan and denounces her at the gathering. To discredit him, Arthur takes the poisoned mead and pretends to drink it. However, the dishonorable plot drives a wedge between him and Gwynhwyfar. At least one good thing seems to come of the botched attempt - Arthur has an excuse to exile Medraut, sending him back to his homeland, where Agravain rules. Later, they receive news that Agravain has died and that Medraut has been made king.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_(novel)"title="Red Army (novel)">
Soldiers with the Group of Soviet Forces in East Germany prepare to launch an invasion of West Germany. Soviet General Mikhail Malinsky, commander of the First Western Front, discusses the upcoming invasion with other Soviet leaders. The plans call for a simultaneous thrust on three fronts: across the North German Plain, through the Fulda Gap, and across Bavaria. NATO commanders are to be bluffed into thinking the main assault will come at the Fulda Gap, but the main effort will be on the North German Plain, led by Malinsky. Airborne forces will be dropped deep into West Germany to disrupt the NATO rearguard.The Soviet commanders believe that if Soviet forces are deep inside West Germany in three days, NATO will not be able to use its nuclear weapons to blunt the advance. A Soviet propaganda film about the destruction of Lueneberg (carefully produced at a Moscow studio) will be used to psychologically shock the West Germans. When the invasion begins, the Soviets advance quickly, bypassing strong points whenever possible. The successful capture of a NATO command post and a Soviet tank company's capture and shepherding of a German refugee convoy outside Hildesheim adds to the speed of movement. The West German forces positioned on the inter-German border are gradually cut off from their resupply lines, while a unit trapped in the Cuxhaven peninsula fights to the last man. Deprived of reconnaissance assets, however, Malinsky worries that the US Army forces based near the Fulda Gap will come to the aid of the British, Dutch, and West German forces that he faces. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fashion_in_Shrouds"title="The Fashion in Shrouds">
Richard Portland-Smith disappeared without a trace three years ago – now Albert Campion has found his skeleton. The investigation of his suicide leads to Portland-Smith's former fiancee, the actress Georgia Wells, and to a series of deaths, apparently caused by "the hand of fate", but always in Georgia's interest. But Campion's involvement is more than just professional – this case involves his sister Valentine, Georgia's best friend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Apprentice"title="Space Apprentice">
The novel's main character is Yuri Borodin, a young space welder. His mother was sick and Yuri missed the spaceship that was to transport him to his new work site. He gets a ride to his destination on a ship pilotedby some of the characters of "The Land of Crimson Clouds".When the novel starts Yurkovsky and Bykov senior say goodbye to Grisha Bykov - Bykov's son - and Dauge and leave on a mission from international spaceport Mirza-Charle. Meanwhile, Yuri Borodin is also in the spaceport, trying to find a ride. Spaceport authorities direct him to the port director, but he is currently out of town. Disappointed Yuri wanders into a Capitalist-run bar, where the owner-cum-bartender is engaged in an ideological debate with a Russian Communist. Yuri befriends the Russian, Ivan Zhilin, and tells him of his problems. Ivan suggests Yuri to go to the spaceport hotel in the evening, and try to convince the astronauts who stay there to take him along. Yuri does so and meets Bykov and Yurkovsky. Yurkovsky, currently serves as a Chief Inspector. He plans to make a tour of several planets and planetoids. Bykov ispiloting his ship. They agree to give Yuri a ride.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gideon_Trilogy"title="The Gideon Trilogy">
The novel focuses on the adventures of Peter Schock and Kate Dyer in 1763 after being accidentally teleported there by an antigravity machine while chasing Molly, Kate's dog.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_of_the_Quiet_Sun"title="The Year of the Quiet Sun">
In the summer of 1978, Brian Chaney, a demographer and biblical scholar, is approached by a woman named Kathryn van Hise. Initially assuming her to be a reporter interested in a controversial book he just published on the Dead Sea Scrolls, she informs him that she works for the federal Bureau of Standards and that she is recruiting him for a physical survey of the future via a secretly constructed "TDV" or time displacement vehicle. When Chaney demurs, she informs him that his contract has been purchased from the think tank where he works, leaving him little choice.The reluctant Chaney travels to a military installation south of Joliet, Illinois. There he is teamed with two diversely talented military officers, United States Air Force Major William Moresby and United States Navy Lieutenant Commander Arthur Saltus. Chaney soon finds that he shares with Saltus an attraction to Kathryn, who is their civilian liaison, but unlike Saltus, Chaney lacks the assertiveness to pursue her aggressively. Instead he focuses his attention on the project, which is soon ordered by the President of the United States to embark on their first mission, a trip two years into the future to discover whether he wins the 1980 presidential election.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie_Down_in_Darkness_(novel)"title="Lie Down in Darkness (novel)">
The novel is about the dysfunctional Virginian Loftis family. It centers on the funeral of Peyton Loftis, one of the daughters, with previous events told in flashbacks by the other characters. The young, psychologically vulnerable Peyton is attached to her father, but finds her mother, Helen, emotionally remote and oppressive. Helen loathes the spoiled and beautiful Peyton, whom she characterizes as a whore. She has given all her love to her crippled daughter, Maudie, leaving no affection for Peyton or her own husband, Milton, who finds solace in a shallow mistress. Milton, who adores Peyton, turns to alcohol as he is spurned by Helen and as Peyton slips away from the family circle. Peyton's marriage is a disaster, also, and she eventually commits suicide. The penultimate section of the story is related in a stream of consciousness style by Peyton herself. In the last part, a recreation of a revivalist meeting, it is suggested that only the Loftis family's black servants may experience genuine mourning for Peyton.Styron incorporated many actual portions of his home town, the Hilton Village section of Newport News, Virginia. The character of Helen contains some elements of Styron's own stepmother. Part of the story occurs at the James River Country Club, which is still in operation today.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awake_and_Dreaming"title="Awake and Dreaming">
Theodora ("Theo") is an avid reader who lives in the slums of Vancouver with her young mother Mary-Rae, who is irresponsible and frequently mistreats Theo. She often fantasizes about an alternate life, her dreams fueled by the huge quantity of books she reads about perfect families.Rae starts dating a man named Cal, and eventually moves in with him, sending Theo to live with her aunt, Rae's sister Sharon, in Victoria. While she and her mother are on the ferry to Victoria, Theo meets a "perfect" family, by the name of the Kaldors. She and the Kaldor children instantly make friends and play together on the ferry. Theo and the children see a new moon while on the ferry and each make a wish. Theo desperately wishes she belonged to the Kaldor family and then faints. Theo wakes up mysteriously and inexplicably living with the Kaldors.Theo originally believes there must be a mistake, but is delighted to find that the Kaldors simply accept her as a member of the family. Theo quickly begins to believe that as long as she remains with the Kaldors, nothing will ever go wrong again. Several months pass and then suddenly, Theo's life begins to fade away - literally. Quickly after this, Theo wakes up and finds herself back on the ferry with her mother, at the exact moment she left, much to her unhappiness. She begins to live with her aunt Sharon, but she cannot enjoy it as she keeps wondering if the Kaldors were real or just a dream.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_Attitude_to_Rain"title="The Right Attitude to Rain">
Isabel Dalhousie is in her early forties and lives alone in a large ageing house in the south of Edinburgh. Due to an inheritance left to her by her late mother, she can work for a nominal fee as the editor of the "Review of Applied Ethics". Her closest friends are her niece Cat, a young woman who runs a delicatessen; her housekeeper Grace, an outspoken woman with an interest in spiritualism; Cat's ex-boyfriend Jamie, a bassoonist to whom Isabel has been secretly attracted ever since they met; and Brother Fox, an urban fox who lives in Isabel's garden.When visiting an art gallery, Isabel meets an American couple: Isabel sees that the man has Bell's palsy, and takes an instant dislike to the woman for no reason that she can explain. Then she goes to Cat's delicatessen, where Cat's assistant Eddie tells her that Cat has a new boyfriend, Patrick, a workaholic lawyer. Isabel resolves not to judge him without meeting him.Isabel visits a flat that she is considering buying for Grace, who currently rents; Jamie accompanies her. Later, Isabel's agent calls to tell her that she has been offered the flat because the owner, Florence, has assumed that Isabel and Jamie will live in it together as a couple. Isabel calls back to correct the mistake, but when Florence hears that Isabel is buying the flat for Grace, she offers it to her anyway.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Queen_and_I_(novel)"title="The Queen and I (novel)">
The novel begins in 1992, set just after the general election of the same year, where the House of Windsor has just been deprived of its royal status by the People's Republican Party, and its members made to live like normal citizens.After a People's Republican Party government is elected by the British people, who were influenced by subliminal messages sent through their TV sets by members of the television technicians' union manipulated by Jack Barker, the Royal Family has to leave Buckingham Palace and must move to a council estate. Barker, as the new Prime Minister, transforms Britain into a republic and dismantles the monarchy.In Hellebore Close (aptly known as "Hell Close" to its longtime residents), the new home of the Royal Family, they learn to cope with the normal day of ordinary people. The Queen – now called Mrs. Windsor – is not allowed to take all her beloved corgis to her new home in "Hell Close", with only Harris with her, and Charles learning that horses cannot be kept in a council house garden.The Queen is visited by a social worker, but refuses to let her in. She learns how to use a zip and buttons, and that five hours of waiting to see a doctor in an ordinary hospital is not unusual when she injures herself opening a can of canned beef; Princess Margaret mistakes the injured Queen for a dead one and believes they're all going to be killed. The Queen learns that living on a small pensioner's income is difficult, and that she must organise her budget to fit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Atom_Station"title="The Atom Station">
Ugla, an unrefined girl from the countryside, moves from an outlying area of Northern Iceland to the capital city of Reykjavík in order to work for Búi Árland, a member of parliament, and to learn how to play the organ. She’s met with a world that’s completely foreign to her: politicians and the military move freely about the city, and she views city residents as spoiled, snobbish and arrogant. In contrast, she comes from a rural area where the Icelandic Sagas of the Middle Ages constitute the majority of what people discuss and ponder and are viewed as more important than reality. These historical backgrounds are certainly important and provide crucial patterns. The prime minister subsequently carries out secret dealings with the Americans and “sells” the country. Ugla, however, also confronts other current issues, above all in the organ player’s house. There, she comes in contact with communist and anarchist mindsets and likewise protests the construction of an atom station in Iceland. After a short relationship with Búi Árland, Ugla decides to return to the “selfconscious policeman”, who is the father of her recently born child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cobra_Event"title="The Cobra Event">
The book is divided into six sections. The first section, called "Trial", starts with a teenaged girl named Kate Moran who dies violently one day in school. The next section, titled "1969", describes tests done in the 1960s by the U.S. government involving weaponized viruses. The third section, "Diagnosis", describes the autopsy of Kate Moran and introduces the key characters of Dr. Alice Austen, Mark Littleberry, and Will Hopkins. The last three sections—"Decision", "Reachdeep", and "The Operation"—describe these three characters' journeys to discover the source of the lethal Cobra virus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Passage_(novel)"title="Middle Passage (novel)">
The protagonist is Rutherford Calhoun, a freed slave, who flees from New Orleans on a ship called the "Republic" to escape being blackmailed into marriage by Isadora Bailey, a schoolteacher who convinces Calhoun's creditor, Papa Zeringue, that she will pay Calhoun's debts if he will marry her. Drinking to forget his troubles, Calhoun meets the drunken cook of the "Republic" and decides to escape Isadora and Zeringue by stowing away aboard the ship, where he is quickly discovered and put to work without pay. The ship travels to Africa to capture members of the Allmuseri tribe to take back to America to sell as slaves. Although an educated man, Calhoun is at first self-absorbed and thus initially unable to grasp the hardships of slave life. During the voyage, he is humbled by the conditions he observes, learning lessons that teach him to value and respect humanity, which includes identification with his own country, America.Calhoun discovers that the Allmuseri are not the only cargo on board: the captain of the "Republic", a philosophical but tyrannical man named Ebenezer Falcon, also uses his voyages to plunder cultural artifacts that could be sold to museums, and on this trip he has purchased what he claims to be the Allmuseri's god. The other sailors, already believing the Allmuseri to be sorcerers, begin to worry that their voyage is doomed; when they send down a young man to check out the secret cargo, he returns insane. Shortly after the ship sets back for the States, a violent storm hits, worse than any the sailors have seen. Barely escaping with their lives, several of the sailors decide to mutiny, but they are preempted when the Allmuseri get the keys to the shackles and take over the ship first. Calhoun convinces the Allmuseri to leave alive the few remaining white sailors in order to navigate the ship back to Africa, but Falcon commits suicide rather than help them. The first mate, Peter Cringle, tries to steer the ship, but cannot figure out where in the ocean they are, claiming that since the storm, none of the constellations are where they are supposed to be. During this time, Calhoun takes his turn going down to the cargo hold to feed the creature, who gives him a mystical vision of his life and family that renders him unconscious for three days. When he awakens, he learns that Cringle has been murdered and cannibalized, reportedly on Cringle's own suggestion, leaving only himself, the cook, and several Allmuseri on board the ship, which is rapidly falling apart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tin_Flute"title="The Tin Flute">
The story takes place in Montreal, principally in the poor neighbourhood of Saint-Henri, between February 1940 and May 1940, during the Second World War, when Quebec is still suffering from the Great Depression. Florentine Lacasse, a nineteen year-old waitress at the "Five and Ten" restaurant, financially supports her large family. Her mother, Rose-Anna, stays home to take care of her eleven children while Florentine's father, Azarius, struggles to maintain a job due to his perpetual unhappiness. Florentine dreams of a better life and falls in love with Jean Lévesque, an ambitious and well-off machinist-electrician. Wanting to satisfy his withered ego, Jean agrees to date Florentine. Quickly tiring of the relationship, he introduces her to a friend, Emmanuel Létourneau, who is a soldier on leave. Emmanuel falls in love with Florentine. Despite this, Florentine's attraction towards Jean will have important consequences in her life; the more obsessive her feelings for Jean become, the more vulnerable she is. The turning point of the novel is Jean's sexual assault of Florentine, after which she becomes pregnant with Jean's child. In order for her to avoid the trope of the "fallen woman," she keeps the pregnancy a secret and marries Emmanuel, as he promises to support her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Shaw"title="Benny Shaw">
An Irish boy named Benny, who is on an all-Ireland hurling team, journeys to Tunisia because of his father's new oversea job. He is determined to hate and find fault with the country and annoys everyone. Then he meets another boy called Omar. They develop a friendship through Omar's "telly-speak" English. Benny's father bans Benny from seeing Omar because he thinks that Omar is a bad influence and because Benny went off with Omar when he was supposed to look after his brother. Benny endures punishment for being with Omar, but that doesn't stop him from running away with him the second his parents trust him again in order to rescue Omar's drugged and hospitalized sister Kaheena. Benny is exposed to real life in Tunisia, actual pain and suffering bigger than losing a sports match, and realizes just how lucky he is after Omar drowns in a flood (although, this is, in fact, arguable, as the bracelet Benny gave to Omar was found on a tree).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peeps_(novel)"title="Peeps (novel)">
Two days after arriving in New York for college, Cal loses his virginity to a girl who picks him up. From this encounter Cal picks up an STD, but this is an unusual one: it turns its victims into "peeps"—parasite positives—raving cannibalistic monsters with unusual strength, night vision, heightened senses, and an affinity with rats. Cal himself turns out to be immune, but he's a carrier—he gets the strength and senses without the nasty side effects. But before he knows it he has infected others.Cal is recruited by the Night Watch, a secret government organization that has existed for centuries to contain the disease and its victims. His first assignment is to capture all the girls he's infected. But soon Cal realizes that there is more going on than he has been told: the disease is changing in response to mysterious forces from under the earth that are waking up after centuries of slumber.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collectors_(novel)"title="The Collectors (novel)">
The Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and the curator of the rare books collection of the Library of Congress both are found dead. The Speaker has been killed by a sniper at a party while the head of the rare books collection dies from "unknown circumstances." Oliver Stone and the Camel Club become suspicious, although initially they indulge what they believe is his overactive imagination. Stone and his cohorts discover that Seagraves had been selling American intelligence secrets to terrorists in the Middle East, compromising intelligence efforts in the region. However, when they are followed and ask the Secret Service for help, the followers disappear, and the Camel Club becomes interested in their activities. Seagraves kidnaps and subsequently tortures Stone for information. Annabelle Conroy is introduced as a con artist, who after pulling off a 40 million heist against an Atlantic City Casino owner (Jerry Bagger) is on the run for her life. Bagger wants to find and kill Annabelle and her con team. Alex Ford from the previous novel reappears, and in the climax Seagraves is killed by a knife thrown at his carotid artery by Stone who turns out to be an ex-CIA killer. Alex Ford and his agents take Seagrave's remaining collaborators into custody. One of Annabelle Conroy's collaborators in the heist is tortured for information by the angry casino owner, who finds out the general area in which she is living (Washington, D.C.). The novel ends with a set-up for "Stone Cold", the third novel of the Camel Club series.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cellar_(novel)"title="The Cellar (novel)">
Donna, the book's protagonist, goes on the run with her daughter Sandy when she learns that her ex-husband, who molested Sandy for years, has been released from prison. After a car accident leaves them stranded in the small California coastal town of Malcasa Point, Donna and Sandy cross paths with Judgement, a mercenary hired to track down and kill the murderous creature that supposedly haunts a local tourist attraction, the Beast House. Judge's employer, Larry, is an elderly man who had a traumatic encounter with the Beast as a child. Over the years the Beast has been connected with various rapes and murders that have happened in the house.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy's_Eyes"title="Amy's Eyes">
The narrative begins in an orphanage where Amy inadvertently brings her sailor doll to life. It continues on a ship where he has become captain and she has transformed into a doll herself. The book is a principally a coming-of-age tale and a nautical adventure involving pirates and the search for lost treasure. The story contains whimsical elements such as a sailing ship crewed by Mother Goose animals, but also has darker themes including the obsession with Biblical prophecy and numerology.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vital_Signs_(novel)"title="Vital Signs (novel)">
Dr. Blumenthal finds out that she cannot conceive as her fallopian tubes are blocked due to a case of TB, which she feels is extremely rare in current times. She tries to conceive through a modern technique called in vitro fertilization from a very well known fertility clinic, but after four unsuccessful cycles she and her husband start to have differing opinions about continuing their quest for child. This starts to take a toll on their relationship, as Marissa is adamant to go on for the next cycle and her husband thinks that it would be another $10,000 down the drain. Marissa joins a counseling group for such "in vitro" couples, and meets up with her medical school friend Wendy, who also shares that same medical condition as her. Soon the two women discover that the specific condition is found in numerous women being treated in the clinic where they are getting treated. A suicide (suggested to be a murder) of fellow woman patient in the clinic also add to their curiosity. They break into the clinic and try to read their medical records, which are kept in a highly confidential status in the clinic.They find out that a pathologist, Dr. Tristan Williams, from a clinic with similar name in Australia, has written a paper about a condition similar to theirs. On the spur of moment, they decide to go to Australia to visit the author. When they inquire about him at the facility, they get negative responses and are made to believe that they have made a wasted trip. When Wendy is killed in an unexpected accident involving shark, Marissa feel that her death is more than an unfortunate accident. After few fruitless efforts to find Dr. Williams, Marissa meets him in his current assignment. From him she learns about a practice where pairs of Chinese citizens who were smuggled into Australia work in the clinic regularly. Tristan tells Marissa that due to the paper he wrote, the FCA has taken retaliatory steps against him, like branding him with drugs and killing his wife two years ago. He has had to be constantly on the run, which made him send his only son to live with his in-laws to keep him safe. Marissa and Tristan team up together to get to the bottom of the mystery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Cook_novel)"title="Blindsight (Cook novel)">
An abnormal increase in the number of drug overdose cases makes Laurie seriously suspicious, and she starts investigating these cases. The going is, however, not as smooth for Laurie as the Chief Medical Examiner Harold Bingham is adamant that no further investigation needs to be done on these cases because of heavy political pressure related to the death of a young banker who is also the son of a Senatorial candidate. Laurie is asked to write off his death as a normal one even though his is a clear case of drug overdose. Though, Laurie reluctantly agrees to this, she cannot stop herself from researching all these drug overdose cases and finding some common features. She discovers that all these cases are related to young, rich and successful people: the kind that normally would not be associated with such drug overdose cases.At the same time, Lieutenant Lou Soldano is investigating what is behind a series of gangland-style murders. Lou meets Laurie who is doing autopsy for one of these cases. While they are involved only professionally, Lou is immediately smitten by Laurie's charm.Meanwhile, Laurie's parents want her to marry Dr. Jordan Scheffield, a rich, self-contained ophthalmologist.There is a separate track that involves Paul Cerino's hit men Angelo and Tony roaming around the city and killing people according to a "supply-demand" list that is given to them by Cerino.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Famous_(novel)"title="Dead Famous (novel)">
The novel is about a murder that occurs on a reality television programme called "House Arrest", which is very similar to the program Big Brother, and the efforts of three police officers to identify the killer by watching all the video recordings of the ten housemates while the remaining housemates continue the reality television show. The novel jumps back and forth in time to show the events in the live video recordings, leading up to the night of the murder, where the remaining eight housemates at the time had to remain in an Indian sweat box—an old-style sauna with a pitch-black interior, the intention being to prompt the housemates to have sex. The victim left the box to go to the toilet and the killer apparently left the box wrapped in a sheet to conceal his or her identity and stabbed the victim twice in the neck and head.Later, a note is found in an envelope that had been sealed weeks previously that says that the victim will be dead by the time the housemates read the note and that one of the three remaining housemates will be murdered. The police have to catch the killer before he or she strikes again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossamer_(novel)"title="Gossamer (novel)">
The book's omniscient point of view, Littlest One, affectionately called Littlest, is out on a dark night. She and her mentor, Fastidious, stealthily sneak into a woman and her dog's home and collect memories.At their home, the Heap, Fastidious complains about her curious student to Most Ancient. Thin Elderly and Fastidious decide that Thin Elderly will become Littlest's mentor, while Fastidious is assigned to a modern house.Littlest is part of a small sub-colony of dream-givers. Through touching, they gather fragments such as colors, words, sounds, and scents. They then combine the fragments to become dreams, and give the dreams to humans, and sometimes pets. The giving of dreams is called the "bestowal".The next night, Thin Elderly and Littlest go back to the woman's house. On the way, Thin Elderly explains to be gentle in the touching, and not to "delve", on the grounds that a dream-giver who picks up menacing fragments of the memory's "underside" becomes a "Sinisteed", a horse like creature, which are transformed dream-givers who inflict nightmares. Thin Elderly gladly discovers that Littlest has the "gossamer touch"; the ability to gather and bestow with great subtlety.The woman reveals that she is to take an angry 8-year-old boy named John into her household and must learn to deal with the troubles in his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_My_Mother_Doesn't_Know"title="What My Mother Doesn't Know">
At the start of the novel, Sophie finds herself dumped by her current boyfriend Lou, then immediately falls into a new relationship with Dylan, a boy considered the height of masculine beauty by her friends. As they date, Sophie discovers she does not really love or even like Dylan all that much and ends their relationship in favor of not actually liking his personality. She then forms a secret romance with an internet chat-room boy named Chaz.Before she meets Chaz in person, Sophie discovers he is a pervert and ends the relationship quickly. Now on her own, in real life, she encounters an outcast classmate, Robin Murphy, at the local art museum and is astonished to realize that while he is not physically attractive or liked by her friends, she falls in love with him. The book ends with Sophie choosing to sit with Robin in the cafeteria instead of her friends, knowing that revealing her secret relationship to her friends and classmates would be okay.The companion book "What My Girlfriend Doesn't Know", written from the perspective of Sophie's boyfriend Robin (Murphy), was published in 2007.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastasia_at_This_Address"title="Anastasia at This Address">
Just when her three best friends vow to give up boys, Anastasia Krupnik begins a secret correspondence with her ideal man, carefully selected from the personals column in her father's magazine. "SWM, 28, boyish charm, inherited wealth, looking for tall young woman, nonsmoker, to share Caribbean vacations, reruns of Casablanca, and romance." Sure, Anastasia is only thirteen, but a difference in age is a small obstacle when two people are on the same wavelength. And she, a tall, young movie buff who hates smoking, is certain that SWM (a.k.a. single white male) is on her wavelength. Heaven knows, she is definitely ready for romance.When she actually receives a reply from her SWM, it is the start of another hilarious and ever original episode in the eventful life of our heroine extraordinaire, the outspoken, irresistible Anastasia Krupnik.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_Cure"title="Fatal Cure">
"Fatal Cure" tells the story of two young doctors Angela and David Wilson, with their 9-year-old daughter who suffers from a chronic disease, cystic fibrosis, who are lured to a small town in Vermont to start a career. David gets a job as an internist with the local HMO, while Angela gets an offer from the local hospital as a pathologist. The story takes aim at managed care and health maintenance organizations.David and Angela quickly find out that their idyllic town harbors dark secrets. Patients at the local hospital keep dying prematurely. The hospital grounds are terrorized by a rapist, and the young family is shocked to find a dead body in their basement. Angela is faced with sexual harassment and David soon experiences the wrath of the HMO administrators for spending too much time with his patients and ordering too many tests and hospital stays.David and Angela end up not just getting fired from their jobs -and deeply in debt, but their lives are threatened as well. The novel ends with a dénouement somewhat similar to "Silence of the Lambs".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acceptable_Risk_(novel)"title="Acceptable Risk (novel)">
The book begins with the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 where Elizabeth Stewart is prosecuted on suspicions of being a witch. This occurs on the insistence of witnesses who see children acting strangely after eating rye bread. Despite the pleas of her husband who happens to be a wealthy shipbuilder, she is executed at the insistence of Reverend Increase Mather, who convinces her husband with mysterious evidence.Three hundred years later, the Stewart family fortune is inherited by Kimberly Stewart, a nurse. Kim is introduced to the brilliant scientist Edward Armstrong by their mutual friend Stanton Lewis. The two immediately fall in love. A casual visit to her old family house in Salem proves to be a turning point in the story. In the basement of the old house, Edward finds a new strain of Claviceps purpurea which induces a great sense of calmness, sexual drive, confidence, etc. Edward immediately assembles a team and begins working on developing the new drug with help from Stanton. To save time, Edward and his team start taking the drug themselves. During this time, Kim is working on finding out about the evidence that was used to convict her ancestor. Finding out that the evidence is in the possession of Harvard University, she makes enquiries in that direction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_About_Sam"title="All About Sam">
Sam Krupnik is a mischievous little boy, but mostly curious. He is very smart, and from the day he was born, Anastasia was jealous.The story is told from Baby Sam's viewpoint and consists of his observations, feelings and thoughts, in the manner of the 1989 film "Look Who's Talking".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attaboy,_Sam!"title="Attaboy, Sam!">
When Mrs. Krupnik announces that she only wants homemade gifts for her birthday, Sam's older sister Anastasia decides to write their mother a poem, while Sam opts to make a perfume. He begins collecting various things that his mother says she likes the smell of, storing them in a grape juice bottle. However, as Sam collects more and more ingredients for the perfume—such as his father's pipe, chicken soup, locks of freshly-washed hair, yeast, and baby wipes—he realizes that the "perfume" is smelling worse and worse. Despite this, Sam continues making the perfume, hoping it will start smelling better.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooman_Sam"title="Zooman Sam">
It's Future Job Day at Sam's nursery school, and Sam, who has zookeeping aspirations, is thrilled when his teacher says he can tell the other children about a series of zoo animals: "For six weeks he could stand in front of the circle and feel that feeling of being the most interesting person in the room."As always, the patient and loving Krupnik family stands by as Anastasia's irrepressible little brother struggles with a set of almost impossible goals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Report_Card"title="The Report Card">
9 year old Nora is not a normal child, and she figures this out as a little kid. To disguise her intellect, Nora observes and emulates her classmates so she doesn't stand out. She becomes interested in one of her schoolfellow, Stephen, and they become friends. When their CMT (Connecticut Mastery Test) scores come out, Stephen's low scores persuade him that he is stupid as students start treating the scores as a competition reflecting their intelligence. To encourage Stephen and prove the CMT scores are not important, Nora deliberately gets a bad report card: all D's except for a C in spelling.Due to all the D's that Nora gets, her parents contact the school, and Nora starts to receive special attention. Soon, Nora reveals to Stephen that she is actually a genius and he comes up with a plan to prove grades don't reflect everything about a student. He intentionally tells the school's gossip, Jenny Ashton that Nora is a genius. As word spreads, Nora begins to act like a snob and challenges teachers by bringing up topics that have not been taught in class yet. When she is confronted by the principal, Ms. Hackney, the next day for scoring a zero on her last three tests, Nora explains that she loathes grades because they cause too much competition. She stays home the next day, pretending to be indisposed, but gives up her ploy when she discovers that Stephen has started a campaign for all students to rebel by scoring zeros on their next tests.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lizzie_Bright_and_the_Buckminster_Boy"title="Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy">
This book is set in 1912. Turner Buckminster, a minister's son, has just moved from Boston, Massachusetts to Phippsburg, Maine and is constantly being scolded for simple misunderstandings, not to mention being automatically disliked by the boys of Phippsburg for being bad at baseball. Turner meets a black girl, Lizzie Bright Griffin, who becomes friends with him, despite his difficulty with social situations. Turner has to save Lizzie's family and friends before they all must leave, or worse, get put into an insane asylum in New Gloucester, Maine. But that means standing up to the authorities, including Turner's father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphans_of_Chaos"title="Orphans of Chaos">
Five orphans – Victor, Amelia, Vanity, Colin, and Quentin (see Names and identities below) – who have spent their lives in a luxurious but strict and secretive British boarding school (Saint Dymphna's School and College for Destitute Children), begin to discover that they are different from the other children that they so rarely see.Unlike the village children, the five orphans do not age. They can also manipulate their appearances. Throughout the book, they also come to discover that they possess unique paranormal abilities. Victor can control the molecular arrangement of matter. Amelia is a fourth-dimensional being. Vanity can find secret passageways. Colin is a psychic. Quentin is a warlock.The five also discover that the patrons of the school along with their guardians and teachers are just as human as they themselves, which is to say not at all. The story largely concerns the main characters' investigations and discoveries about an otherworldly power struggle, and their place within it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammered_(Bear_novel)"title="Hammered (Bear novel)">
Master Warrant Officer Jenny Casey is a Canadian ex-soldier who has cybernetic replacements for an arm and an eye that she lost during combat. Jenny's former commander, who was responsible for replacing her limbs, contacts her to bring her into a secret government corporate project in which she is uniquely qualified to participate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrier_(novel)"title="Terrier (novel)">
The story is told in the form of a series of journal entries made by Beka Cooper as she trains to become a Provosts Dog, a nickname for the police men and women in the employ of the Lord Provost of Tortall, with a prelude taken from Eleni Cooper's diary in which she relates Beka's story to her son George. Beka is also the surrogate daughter of the Provost, having helped him capture a band of dangerous criminals when she was only 8 years old. Lord Gershom adopts her, her mother, and her brothers and sisters from the "scummer" life of Mutt Piddle Lane, where the very poor live.Beka begins her training assigned as a Puppy, or a Dog in his or her first year of training, to two revered senior Dogs in the Lower City: Clary Goodwin and Mattes Tunstall. Though the Dogs are initially unsure of their new charge, Beka proves to be a valuable resource, although she is extremely shy and has a hard time speaking in front of people.Through Beka's unusual magical abilities, she is able to hear the voices of ghosts who ride the backs of pigeons until they are ready to enter the Peaceful Realms of the Black God (the god of death). She can also hear snippets of conversations that may contain valuable information caught by "dust spinners," beings made of breeze and dirt mixed from the city streets. From these sources she learns of two grave threats to the Lower City. One is the Shadow Snake.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elves_of_Cintra"title="The Elves of Cintra">
## Logan Tom and the Ghosts.Beginning where "Armageddon's Children" ended, Knight of the Word Logan Tom races to save the gypsy morph Hawk and his girlfriend Tessa from being thrown to their deaths from atop Safeco Field. He is too late but learns that a brilliant white light enveloped the two as they fell, apparently saved by an unknown magic. Logan doesn't know where they have gone, but sees a demon invasion force preparing to land at Seattle's waterfront. Meanwhile, the Ghosts head toward the agreed upon rendezvous point and Logan Tom goes to find them.While evacuating the city, Panther and Sparrow are separated from the Ghost tribe. The Ghosts encounter a group of mutant children on the freeway, and escape them but not before Squirrel is killed. Logan runs into Panther and Sparrow, helping them fight off Croaks and reunite with the tribe. They leave the city in Logan's all-terrain vehicle as they see the demon hordes besiege Safeco Field. Owl realizes their dog Cheney has gone missing.The Lady of the Word appears to Logan and tells him to head south to the Columbia River where Hawk will meet them with many followers. He is also told that another Knight of the Word will bring the Elves and their magic, upon which humankind's future depends. She tasks him with protecting them all, no matter the cost. As he and the Ghosts travel south, the Weatherman succumbs to plague, and they pick up two new companions, a partially mutated Lizard named Cat (for Catayla) and her pet cat named Rabbit. They also have a run-in with killer robots at Oronyx Experimental Robotics Systems. Later they are ambushed by followers of Krilka Koos, a rogue Knight of the Word that Logan had once heard about (from the Spiders in the mountains when trying to reach Seattle in "Armageddon's Children"). near Longview. In exchange for the children's safety, Logan agrees to go with them to meet Krilka. Krilka, having fallen from the Word, asks Logan to join his own crusade. Logan refuses and is forced to fight the Knight of the Word surrounded by Krilka's army. Logan Tom narrowly wins, but refuses to kill Krilka, who vows to hunt down and kill Logan and the Ghosts. He then plunges a poison dart into Logan's leg. Delirious, Logan shoots fire from his staff at the crowd, causing them to panic and flee. The ghosts manage to extricate Logan and escape in the ATV.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_Much_to_Tell_You"title="So Much to Tell You">
"So Much to Tell You", based on a true story, it is an amazing book is presented as a diary written by a 14-year-old girl known as Marina. who goes to a bording school. Marina has a scarred face because she was the incidental victim of an incident involving acid, a wound her father gave her, intended for her mother. She refused to talk to anyone during her long recovery period in hospital, so she was sent to Warrington, a girls' boarding school because nothing else appeared to be working. But even after her arrival, she maintains her silence. Then, one day, her English teacher Mr Lindell encourages the class to keep journals. Even though Marina is determined not to make use of her diary, she cannot resist writing about some of the seemingly trivial events of her day. However, the content of her entries becomes more and more revealing over time, and readers can better understand Marina's world: how her friends and teachers create profound and lasting impressions on her psyche. Marina goes from not interacting with others at all, opening up and socialising, and eventually finding non-verbal communication methods. However, as the book continues, Marina's negative feelings towards her father fade away, and by the end of the book, she devises a plan which enables her to see him again. When she speaks for the first time, in such a long time, she utters her only words for the entire novel: "Hello, Dad... I've got so much to tell you..."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_the_Golden_Dragon"title="Kingdom of the Golden Dragon">
The plot is set in the Forbidden Kingdom, a fictional remote Himalayan country. A Buddhist lama named Tensing takes his disciple, Prince Dil Bahadur, to the Valley of the Yeti to find healing plants that do not grow anywhere else. They find themselves ringed by the yetis just as they drink in the sights, but the matriarch saves them and says that the fast-dwindling yetis have lost their forebears’ unparalleled mental powers.The lamas teach them to milk the goats so that they can feed their cubs, and it turns out that the local fountains are toxic. The beasts’ health improves once they start shunning the fountains, and in order to thank the strangers they give them the plants they have asked for.Meanwhile, Alex Cold and his grandmother Kate, an "International Geographic" reporter, depart from Brazil for New York. He gives her the diamond eggs that his friend Nadia has found near the Amazon and tells her to raise money for the People of the Mist—the South American tribe that he bonded with in City of the Beasts—as well as for other Indios. Kate, who questions the diamonds’ value, shows them to Isaac Rosenblat, a New York jeweler who confirms their unparalleled worth; he has never seen like-sized stones. Six months later, the Diamond Foundation is set up with the help of Ludovic Leblanc, an anthropologist who is Kate's nemesis. Now tasked with writing about the Forbidden Kingdom, she takes Nadia and Alex with her despite her employer's misgivings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rebel_in_Time"title="A Rebel in Time">
The book centers around a racist colonel, Wesley McCulloch, and his black pursuer, Troy Harmon. McCulloch and Harmon both originate from the modern era, the book opening with Harmon called in by a special military watchdog organization to investigate why McCulloch has been buying large quantities of gold.The case worsens when it is discovered that McCulloch has murdered three people to cover his plans. The theft of a World War II-vintage Sten submachine gun and the plans for such also add to the mystery about what McCulloch is up to.Before long, Harmon comes to the conclusion McCulloch has used a secret experimental time machine to try to change the outcome of the American Civil War, giving victory to the Confederacy through the introduction of the easily manufactured Sten gun. Harmon determines he must follow McCulloch into the past to bring justice. During the ensuing chase, Harmon discovers first-hand the prejudices of the people at the time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icefire_(d'Lacey_novel)"title="Icefire (d'Lacey novel)">
David is frustrated that no one will publish his book. Lucy makes a wishing dragon, David's names it "G'reth" which Gadzooks his special dragon wrote down.Liz offers to drive David to campus and David tells Liz that he thinks Sophie is going to allow him to move in with her. Dr. Bergstrom gives David an assignment on dragons and says the contest prize is a trip to the Arctic. Dr. Bergstrom gives him a talisman to hold and says it will show him his true path. David sees Gadzooks write the name "Lorel."Later, Lucy, having wished for snow on G'reth, is making a snowman which looks somewhat like a bear. She comes in and looks in the freezer. Feeling curious, David finds Gruffen on a small container in the freezer and tries to pick him up, but Gruffen gets stuck on David's hands. Liz saves Gruffen from breaking just in time and shows David what is in the box—a snowball. It contains auma from Gawain's fire tear, which Liz uses to give life to her special dragons, but she simply tells David that she kept it as a memory like David's teddy bear.David goes up to his room and falls asleep dreaming about the Arctic. When a polar bear walks up to him he hears "You have email!"—his computer alerts him about a message from Zanna, a goth girl in his class. She comes over later while Liz and Lucy are at the Craft Fair and they go up to the Dragons' Den. Zanna is mesmerized by a bronze clay egg. Her touch quickens the egg which makes the dragon inside it start growing. David then makes a wish to find Gawain's fire tear, which calls Gwilanna. Gretel, Gwilanna's dragon, puts David under a spell and goes with David to a publishing meeting which gets his Snigger book published. At home Gwillana says that Liz is having a baby that Zanna kindled; she says it's the first boy in 900 years. Lucy sees Dr. Bergstrom as Thoran, a polar bear. David tries to stand up to Gwilanna but she ends up trapping him under the floor boards until he breaks free using the Tooth of Ragnar—a tooth that came from one of the first polar bears.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Joke_(novel)"title="The Killing Joke (novel)">
Guy Fletcher is an actor who overhears a builder telling a joke in his local pub about his mother (although very few people know that he is her son), a famous and much loved actress called Selina Moore, who died in a plane accident in France. The joke was "Why is Selina Moore like Ferrero Rocher? Because they both came out of France in a box." This was originally a real joke about Princess Diana's death, a fact which is mentioned in the book.The next day he wonders where jokes come from and, despite being discouraged by his agent Sylvie, goes on a mission to track down the joke. On the way, he meets a variety of people, most importantly a woman called Sally, with whom he falls in love. After investigating various dead-ends and multiple paths that the joke has followed, he is noticed by a mysterious company, led by a man called Rupert Liddy, who has a perfect memory. This company then attempt to stop Guy by using characters from jokes (e.g. an Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman), and stereotypes of character groups. Eventually, they frame him for his neighbor's murder, at which point Guy goes into hiding.He goes back to Sally, believing her to be the last chance he has of finding out what was going on. However, when he gets there, her house is blown up. Sally herself is not in, but her mother, who has elephantiasis, is. Sally decides to go with Guy to track down the joke. His only lead is a company called Sphinx, that apparently create vacuum cleaners, as that was where he ended one of the trails of the joke. He tries to track down Sphinx, but cannot, and when he rings their number is left holding for an hour, before being redirected.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sea_of_Monsters"title="The Sea of Monsters">
The novel begins with Percy dreaming about Grover being hunted by a monster. He wakes on the last day of his seventh-grade year, a peaceful year at Meriwether College Prep. There he has become friends with Tyson, a homeless child that the school has taken on as a form of charity. In gym class, during a game of dodgeball, Percy is attacked by a gang of Laestrygonians but is saved by Tyson and Annabeth, who was on her way back to Camp Half-Blood after having dreams about the camp in danger. The three take a magical taxi driven by the Graeae to Long Island. Upon reaching the camp, they see a group of campers led by Clarisse LaRue battling a pair of Colchis bulls. Tyson is granted permission to move past the camp's boundary to save Percy once again. It is revealed that he is a baby Cyclops and a half-brother of Percy, as he is also a son of Poseidon. An unknown enemy has weakened the protective walls of Camp Half-Blood by poisoning the tree of the demigod Thalia, leaving the campers vulnerable to future monster attacks. Camp counselor Chiron is accused of poisoning the tree and is fired. Before leaving, Chiron notes that only the Golden Fleece could save the camp. Shortly thereafter, Stymphalian birds attack during the chariot races, but Percy and Annabeth distract them with Chiron's boombox and Dean Martin's "Volare", enabling the Apollo campers to shoot them down.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gooney_Bird_Greene"title="Gooney Bird Greene">
Gooney Bird Greene has just transferred to Mrs. Pidgeon's second grade class in Watertower. She is unusually self-confident, likes to be the center of attention, and has an eccentric flair for style, and an exciting, almost magical past. When Mrs. Pidgeon suggests storytelling lessons, the class demands, instead of well-worn Christopher Columbus, Gooney Bird as the main character of the story.So begins Gooney Bird's series of autobiographical tales, outlandish in theme but "only absolutely true": "How Gooney Bird Got Her Name","How Gooney Bird Came from China on a Flying Carpet", "The Prince, the Palace, and the Diamond Earrings", "Why Gooney Bird Was Late for School Because She Was Directing a Symphony Orchestra", and "Beloved Catman Is Consumed by a Cow". Along the way, the class learns not just about Gooney Bird, but how to tell a story, and how everyone has a story to tell.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1862_(novel)"title="1862 (novel)">
In late 1861, the United Kingdom gets involved in the American Civil War on the side of the Confederacy in the wake of the Trent Affair. In early 1862, the Union attempts to win a decisive victory against the Confederacy before British reinforcements arrive in the Americas at the Battle of Culpeper but fail miserably because of the horrible leadership of George B. McClellan. However, after numerous defeats for the Anglo-Confederate Alliance and losing Robert E. Lee and most of Canada, the United Kingdom accepts an offer of peace from the Union on the latter's terms.The British frame the Confederacy for supposedly causing the Trent Affair and switches sides in the war. As a result, the Confederacy admits defeat in early 1863, which ends the conflict two years sooner. John Wilkes Booth is arrested and sentenced to death for trying to help Confederate snipers kill US President Abraham Lincoln and so Lincoln is never assassinated.Most of the battles take place in Canada or in the oceans, like Hampton Roads. A cavalry battle near the end of the novel takes place on the outskirts of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, presumably in Hummelstown and Hershey. The climactic battle takes place in Washington.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_Key"title="Ninth Key">
At Kelly Prescott's pool party, Suze unknowingly contracts a poison oak rash after falling into some bushes while spying on her stepbrother Dopey. She also shares a slow dance with Tad, a student at a local school. That night, Suze is awoken by the ghost of a woman who starts yelling hysterically. The woman asks Suze to tell "Red" that he did not kill her. Suze does not know who this woman is, or who "Red" is, but the ghost disappears before she has the chance to ask. She later finds out from her friend CeeCee that a local businessman called Thaddeus Beaumont goes by that name.Suze tries and fails to get in contact with Mr Beaumont. She encounters the ghost of a boy named Timothy, who tells her his parents abandoned his cat, Spike. Suze promises to find the cat and give him a good home. With the pretense that she is a reporter for the school paper, Suze goes to Beaumont's mansion and meets him. She delivers the ghost's message, saying the woman appeared in a dream. Mr Beaumont seems only interested that he wasn't the cause of the woman's death and that Suze was able to speak to her. He is eager to get Suze to summon the spirits of other people he says he has killed. Disconcerted, Suze tries to leave, only to find that she is trapped. She is rescued by Beaumont's secretary Marcus, who escorts her out, believing she was merely playing a prank. As they leave, they encounter Tad, who is Beaumont's son. Recognizing her from the pool party, Tad takes Suze on a coffee date and gives her a ride home; when he drops her off, he kisses her. Their kiss is interrupted by Jesse, who warns Suze to stay away from the Beaumont family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reunion_(Cabot_novel)"title="Reunion (Cabot novel)">
When Suze’s best friend from New York, Gina, comes to visit her in Carmel, her stepbrothers Jake and Brad (aka Sleepy and Dopey) start fighting for Gina's attention. While they are at the beach one afternoon, a group of ghosts in formal wear catches Suze's attention. She learns that they were popular students from a local high school, nicknamed the 'RLS Angels', who had recently died in a car crash after their spring formal, and that her quiet, geeky classmate Michael Meducci was the driver of the other car in the accident. The Angels are furious at Michael for their deaths, and make it clear that they will not stop at anything to kill him. They make several attempts on his life, each one desperately fended off by Suze. Unfortunately, Michael interprets Suze's constant presence as her having a crush on him, so he tries to pursue a relationship with her, much to the amusement of her family and friends.Father Dominic and Suze investigate the scene of the accident, accompanied by Jesse. When the RLS Angels appear, Jesse calms them down so that Father Dom and Suze can talk to them. Suze discovers that Michael killed the Angels on purpose as revenge for his younger sister, who is in a coma after drinking too much and almost drowning at one of their parties. When Suze's mother finds out that Michael was involved in the 'accident', she forbids Suze to get in a car with him, but Suze doesn't listen. She asks Michael to pick her up and they go to the scene of the murder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revolt_of_Islam"title="The Revolt of Islam">
In the first canto, the poet climbs a mountain from which he observes an eagle and a snake battle. The eagle prevails. A woman takes the poet and the wounded snake in a boat. The poet is placed for a time in the regions of eternal repose, where the good and great of mankind are represented as recounting, before the throne of the Spirit of Good, their earthly sufferings and labours. Among these are two, a man and a woman of the country of Argolis, who, after rescuing their country for a brief time from the tyranny of the house of Othman and accomplishing this great revolution by the force of persuasive eloquence and the sympathies of human love alone, without violence, bloodshed, or revenge, saw the fruit of all their toils blasted by foreign invasion, and the dethroned but not insulted tyrant replaced upon his seat. Finally, amidst all the darkness of their country's horizon, Laon and Cythna died, without fear, the death of heroic martyrdom, burned alive at the stake, gathering consolation, in the last pangs of their expiring nature, from the hope and the confidence that their faith and example might yet raise up successors to their labours, and that they had neither lived nor died in vain. In the persons of these martyrs, Shelley has striven to embody his ideas of the power and beauty of human affections, and, in their history, he has set forth a series of pictures, illustrating the efficacy of these affections in overcoming the evils of private and of public life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother_in_the_Land"title="Brother in the Land">
The narrative begins on a hillside, where the protagonist, Danny Lodge, encounters a man in a radiation suit, who confiscates his bike and orders him to return to his home town, the fictional Yorkshire town of Skipley. Arriving there, Danny finds the town in ruins, and learns that his family's shop has collapsed, killing his mother. His brother Ben and their father have survived, as they were in the cellar, which is used as a stockroom. With so much food in their stockroom, the Lodges have plenty to live on, but as the weeks pass, other people begin fighting over food. Shortly after the war, Danny meets a girl named Kim.The local Commissioner issues an order that the injured and infirm are to be taken out of the town and placed at the roadside so they can be taken to hospital: this turns out to be front for his secret plan to kill off those who will be a burden. After a while, the Commissioner implements a system of food and fuel rationing, with severe penalties introduced for hoarding. The injured, elderly, and people who have been emotionally traumatised by the nuclear attack are given poisoned rations. Mr Lodge refuses to allow his stock to be used for this purpose and, though Danny and Ben register for ration cards, they only visit the local feeding centre once.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farming_of_Bones"title="The Farming of Bones">
Orphaned by the age of 8, young Haitian Amabelle works for Don Ignacio and his daughter, in hopes of marrying her lover, Sebastien Onius. After the accidental death of one of Sebastien's fellow cane workers, the Haitian's distrust of the Dominican government grows, and this distrust is warranted. With news of the Generalissimo's intentions to “cleanse the country,” Haitian workers attempt to return to their home country.When complications separate Amabelle and Sebastien during their attempt to flee, Amabelle is desperate to find what has become of Sebastien. Accompanied by Sebastien's friend, Yves, Amabelle makes her journey with the help of fellow survivors she encounters along the way. While escaping, the group must divide for their own safety. Upon reaching the town of Dajabon, Amabelle is disappointed to find that Sebastien is not there. While in Dajabon, Dominicans beat and torture Amabelle, Yves, and a fellow Haitian, Tibon, after recognizing their inability to pronounce “perejil” correctly, one of the most prevalent ways that the Dominicans determine the segregation of Haitians. On the verge of death, two remaining members of their group rescue Amabelle and Yves and bring them to the river that they must cross. Unfortunately, only Amabelle and Yves survive the dangerous crossing, where they are met at the other side by nuns who nurse them back to health. During the recovery process, Amabelle learns of the other survivors’ story of “kout kouto,” what the Haitians call the massacre.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormwood_(Taylor_novel)"title="Wormwood (Taylor novel)">
The story takes place in London, where Dr. Sabian Blake is sitting in his attic at the top of his house in Bloomsbury Square, looking out to space through his telescope, in search of a special star. He is told about this star by "The Nemorensis", an ancient book that holds many old and powerful secrets. It has predicted that the comet Wormwood (which was foretold in the book of Revelation) is hurtling towards the earth, and would spell certain doom for London and all other lands around her. As Blake is observing this, a series of cataclysmic and destructive events, referred to as a 'sky-quake', hits the city, the aftermath of which involves horses and dogs going completely mad and attacking everyone in sight. The reason for these happenings was that the power of the Keruvim was being used in the north by the evil Pyratheon, in his vain attempt to overthrow Riathamus.We are then introduced to Agetta Lamian, Blake's servant-girl, whose father Cadmus Lamian owns a lodging house on Fleet Street.Eventually it transpires that Pyratheon's evil sister, Yerzinia, is using the Nemorensis to call down the comet and reshape the devastated London in her own, dark image.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Key"title="The Final Key">
Eldrinson Valdoria took over a year to heal from serious injuries inflicted on him by the Aristo Vitarex. He is happy to reconcile with his daughter Sauscony (Soz) whom he disowned for leaving home to become a Jagernaut. But he can't do the same with his son Althor, who is lying near death in a military hospital after sacrificing himself to save billions of Skolian citizens during a battle with the Eubian Traders.As part of her military training, Soz is assigned to the battlecruiser "Roca's Pride", named in honor of her mother Roca Skolia. The training, however, turns out to be hard reality after her half-brother Imperator Kurj is nearly assassinated and falls into a coma. Traders simultaneously launch an attack against the planet Parthonia, seat of the Skolian government. This brings the psiberweb, the most important part of Skolian defence, to a collapse. Using an ancient device called Dyad Chair, Soz struggles to keep at least parts of the psiberweb intact.To repair psiberweb and save Skolia from Eubian invasion, Soz’s father Eldrinson has to join the Dyad, expanding it to a Triad with the risk that this could kill either him or one of the other Triad members.The book also shows the fates of other Ruby Dynasty family members: Soz's brother Shannon dealing with the mystic Blue Dale archers, their mother Roca captured by Traders and Ruby Pharaoh's husband Eldrin who leaves Parthonia on a ship with Skolian refugees while making a withdrawal from the addictive medicament phorine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Barrel_of_Laughs,_a_Vale_of_Tears"title="A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears">
"A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears" follows the young prince Roger, who haphazardly sets out on a quest to prepare himself to become king. The book expresses the emotions of various individuals through two long-lost lovers reunited, several unlikely couples marrying, and a friend-turned-evil's attempts for revenge. While Roger himself starts out as pure and innocent, he seems somewhat naive and incapable of feeling serious.The quest, which contains plenty of sad events, gradually brings Roger to a point where he still is humorous, but is caring about specific individuals as opposed to finding shallow humor in everything. The beautiful Princess Petulia, and her servant, likewise, find similar changes in personality through their experiences, as they go from being bitterly indifferent to loving and plainspoken to kinder respectively.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Side_of_the_Mountain"title="My Side of the Mountain">
Sam Gribley is a 12-year-old boy who intensely dislikes living in his parents' cramped New York City apartment with his eight brothers and sisters. He decides to run away to his great-grandfather's abandoned farm in the Catskill Mountains to live in the wilderness. The novel begins in the middle of Sam's story, with Sam huddled in his treehouse home in the forest during a severe blizzard. Frightful, Sam's pet peregrine falcon, and The Baron, a weasel, share the home with him. In a flashback, Sam reminisces about how he came to be there.Sam heard about his grandfather's abandoned farm near Delhi, New York, learned wilderness survival skills by reading a book at the New York City Public Library, and how Sam's father permitted him to go to Delhi, and, while he didn't think that Sam would survive, said that if he made it, to tell someone in town. Unable at first to locate the farm, Sam tries to survive on his own but finds his skills are not up to the task. He meets Bill, a man living in a cabin in the woods, who teaches him how to make a fire. Sam goes into town and is told where his grandfather's land is. Sam finds the farm but discovers the farmhouse is no longer standing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_the_Chasch"title="City of the Chasch">
A human starship intercepts a mysterious signal and tracks it back to Carina 4269, a star system 212 light years from Earth. Two elite scouts, Adam Reith and Paul Waunder, are dispatched in a small scout-boat to investigate the planet whence it came. Seconds later, a missile destroys their mothership. The two survivors nurse the severely damaged scout-boat to the planet before ejecting into a forest.The crash site is first discovered by a band of technologically primitive humans who wear special, personality altering emblems. Reith is amazed to find men on a heretofore unknown, distant planet. One of them casually kills Waunder; Reith remains undetected. A second party approaches in a large sky-raft, sending the humans scurrying into hiding. It is manned (as Reith later learns) by massive, alien Blue Chasch and their human Chaschmen servants. Their investigation of the wreckage is interrupted by a third group, belonging to the Dirdir. The Chasch ambush the tall, pale Dirdir and their human Dirdirmen, driving them off. The Chasch then haul the scout-boat away.Injured and helpless, Reith cannot avoid being taken captive by Traz Onmale, the grave, mature boy-chieftain of the Kruthe, the Emblem-wearing tribe which killed Waunder. While his wounds heal, Reith incurs the wrath of the "magicians" who are actually in charge, by showing kindness and affection to a slave girl, a grave violation of tribal social norms. Before he can be castrated to make him more docile, he escapes, taking Traz with him. The teen is not unwilling to go, since he would be expected to sacrifice himself to the gods in the near future due to the misfortunes the tribe has faced.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servants_of_the_Wankh"title="Servants of the Wankh">
After his starship and crewmates are blown up, Adam Reith is marooned on a planet inhabited by four advanced, mutually hostile, alien species, the Chasch, Wankh, Dirdir and native Pnume, as well as various groups of humans. In his quest to return home, he acquires three human companions (as detailed in "City of the Chasch"): Traz Onmale, a taciturn teenage barbarian chieftain, Ankhe at afram Anacho, a flamboyant, fugitive Dirdirman, and Ylin-Ylan, a beautiful young Yao woman whom he rescued from a man-hating religious sect.Ylin-Ylan persuades Reith, her lover, into taking her back to Cath. With her wealthy father's backing, Reith hopes to be able to build a spaceship. As time passes, however, their relationship cools. Anacho explains that Yao society is extremely status conscious, and the closer they get to her homeland, the more Ylin-Ylan dreads being associated with (to her) gauche, uncouth companions. Her inner conflict is exacerbated when they meet Dordolio, a Yao cavalier, who accompanies them on the sea voyage to Cath. Her attempts to distance herself from them, with Dordolio's assistance, all fail disastrously. Finally, unable to bear the shame any longer, she takes refuge in "awaile", a murderous rampage not uncommon among her people, which ends with her throwing herself into the sea.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dirdir"title="The Dirdir">
Adam Reith is stranded on Tschai, a distant planet shared by four alien, mutually hostile, advanced species (the Chasch, Wankh, Dirdir and native Pnume). On his quest to get home, he acquires two human companions, Traz Onmale, a teenage barbarian chieftain, and Ankhe at afram Anacho, an outcast Dirdirman.Reith has failed twice to acquire a spaceship (as recounted in "City of the Chasch" and "Servants of the Wankh"). His exploits bring him to the unwanted attention of the Dirdir. As Anacho explains, his former masters are rarely subtle: they want to question and then kill him. Reith manages to wipe out the first "Initiative" sent after him, but sooner or later, there will be a second.He decides to build a ship from scratch, a task requiring vast amounts of sequins, the universal currency of Tschai. The only way to raise that much quickly is to brave the Carabas, the Dirdir hunting preserve, where sequins grow as crystalline nodes. Men prospect for the nodes, while the Dirdir hunt the men. Those they catch, they eat.Reith turns the tables on the Dirdir. He ambushes their hunting parties and takes the sequins they acquired from their victims. When the Dirdir finally take notice, Reith and his friends barely manage to escape, but they have amassed a fortune; in fact, they have so many sequins, they are forced to leave behind a substantial hidden cache.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pnume"title="The Pnume">
After many false starts and real tribulations, Adam Reith has nearly finished building a spaceship to take him home. He and his two trusted companions had been betrayed by Aila Woudiver, the underworld kingpin who had provided the necessary men and equipment in return for an extortionate amount of money. However, Reith was able to turn the tables and take Woudiver captive (as described in "The Dirdir").Even as a prisoner though, Woudiver is a dangerous enemy. Somehow, he manages to interest the Pnume in Reith. The Pnume are the sentient native race of Tschai. Driven underground by three separate alien invasions (by the Chasch, Wankh and Dirdir), they view the other species as welcome additions to the pageantry unfolding on their world stage. In the same light, they are intrigued by the Earthman, abducting him to become a specimen in their museum.Reith is lowered into the vast Pnume underground. He manages to free himself and hide before he can be taken by human Pnumekin, servants of the Pnume, to the Museum of Foreverness. Perplexed at finding an empty bag, they summon a Pnume Sector Warden, who consults its Master Charts, detailing all the various tunnels and hidden adits. Determining that there is one possible escape route, they leave to check it. Before it departs, the Sector Warden hides its maps in a secret compartment, but Reith is a witness. He steals them, but is unable to decipher their contents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stopping_at_Slowyear"title="Stopping at Slowyear">
"Stopping at Slowyear" tells the story of an interstellar cargo vessel which runs between out-of-the-way worlds, as it visits a planet called "Slowyear" after its 19-year-long revolution around its star.The crew explore the local culture and find several odd customs. Among these is of a sort of death lottery as a punishment for crimes. If someone commits a crime, they are sentenced to take a pill, which depending on the severity of the infraction will have a different probability of being lethal poison.Slowyear's principal industry is raising sheep. During their isolation, their sheep have developed a form of scrapie which is lethal to humans without immunity."Stopping at Slowyear" addressed prion diseases years before public awareness of mad cow disease was widespread.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavender_and_Old_Lace"title="Lavender and Old Lace">
Miss Jane Hathaway is an astute pillar of a quaint coastal community, where her house sets atop a hill. She has long overcome the scandal created by her elder sister's elopement, though the sister died without her forgiveness. She's also aware of a child, although she's never met her niece. When she receives a letter from Ruth Thorne, her 34-year-old niece, suggesting an invitation to visit, she accepts, but leaves before Ruth arrives.At Miss Hathaway's house, Ruth is given a mysterious letter. The letter, from Aunt Jane, does not explain her sudden trip abroad, but instructs Ruth to light an oil lamp in the attic each night.In the attic, Ruth stumbles upon some mementos and keepsakes in an old trunk. Among the items is her aunt's wedding dress, made long ago and never worn. There's also some newspaper clippings; an announcement of marriage between Mr. Charles G. Winfield, captain of the schooner "Mary", and Miss Abigail Weatherby. Ruth imagines that perhaps he was the man to whom her aunt's wedding dress was intended. Later, she finds a death notice of Mrs. Abigail Winfield, aged 22. Ruth feels ashamed and puts everything back, forcing it from her mind.In the village, Ruth notices a young man, but does not make his acquaintance. Instead, she visits her aunt's childhood friend, Mary Ainslie, whom the locals call "peculiar", because she never leaves her house. Ruth is immediately taken with Miss Ainslie's saintly demeanor and quickly forms a friendship with her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children_of_the_New_Forest"title="The Children of the New Forest">
The story begins in 1647 when King Charles I has been defeated in the civil war and has fled from London towards the New Forest. Parliamentary soldiers have been sent to search the forest and decide to burn Arnwood, the house of Colonel Beverley, a Cavalier officer killed at the Battle of Naseby. The four orphan children of the house, Edward, Humphrey, Alice and Edith, are believed to have died in the flames. However, they are saved by Jacob Armitage, a local verderer, who hides them in his isolated cottage and disguises them as his grandchildren.Under Armitage's guidance, the children adapt from an aristocratic lifestyle to that of simple foresters. After Armitage's death, Edward takes charge and the children develop and expand the farmstead, aided by the entrepreneurial spirit of the younger brother Humphrey. They are assisted by a gypsy boy, Pablo, whom they rescue from a pitfall trap. A sub-plot involves a hostile Puritan gamekeeper named Corbould who seeks to harm Edward and his family. Edward also encounters the sympathetic Puritan, Heatherstone, placed in charge of the Royal land in the New Forest, and rescues his daughter, Patience, in a house-fire. Edward leaves the cottage and works as a secretary for Heatherstone, but Edward maintains the pretence that he is the grandson of Jacob Armitage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Twist_in_the_Tale_(short_story_collection)"title="A Twist in the Tale (short story collection)">
## "The Perfect Murder".Plot:The writer kills his mistress inadvertently during an argument when he finds her being unfaithful to him, and is chosen as a jury member to try a man accused of murdering the same woman. He, as the foreman of the jury, pronounces a guilty verdict on the accused — thereby exonerating himself completely.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autumn_Street"title="Autumn Street">
There were things to be afraid of in the woods at the end of Autumn Street. But the year she went to live in her grandfather's big house - when her father went off to fight in World War II- Elizabeth couldn't put a name to those dark, shadowy fears. She was grateful for the reassurance of Tatie's strong, enveloping brown arms which held her when she needed comforting, and she relished her friendship with Tatie's grandson, feisty and streetwise Charles, who called her dumb old Elizabeth but didn't mean it, and who taught her to take risks. Together the two lonely children tried to interpret for each other an adult world -which was always puzzling and often cruel. Together, finally, on a day when snow obscured everything but terror, they left that world behind them and entered the world that was waiting in the woods.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burger's_Daughter"title="Burger's Daughter">
The novel begins in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1974 during apartheid. Rosa Burger is 26, and her father, Lionel Burger, a white Afrikaner anti-apartheid activist, has died in prison after serving three years of a life sentence for treason. When she was 14, her mother, Cathy Burger, also died in prison. Rosa had grown up in a family that actively supported the overthrow of the apartheid government, and the house they lived in opened its doors to anyone supporting the struggle, regardless of colour. Living with them was "Baasie" (little boss), a black boy Rosa's age the Burgers had "adopted" when his father had died in prison. Baasie and Rosa grew up as brother and sister. Rosa's parents were members of the outlawed South African Communist Party (SACP), and had been arrested several times when she was a child. When Rosa was nine, she was sent to stay with her father's family; Baasie was sent elsewhere, and she lost contact with him.With the Burger's house now empty, Rosa sells it and moves in with Conrad, a student who had befriended her during her father's trial. Conrad questions her about her role in the Burger family and asks why she always did what she was told. Later Rosa leaves Conrad and moves into a flat on her own and works as a physiotherapist. In 1975 Rosa attends a party of a friend in Soweto, and it is there that she hears a black university student dismissing all whites' help as irrelevant, saying that whites cannot know what blacks want, and that blacks will liberate themselves. Despite being labelled a Communist and under surveillance by the authorities, Rosa manages to get a passport, and flies to Nice in France to spend several months with Katya, her father's first wife. There she meets Bernard Chabalier, a visiting academic from Paris. They become lovers and he persuades her to return with him to Paris.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meridian_(novel)"title="Meridian (novel)">
Set in the 1960s and 1970s, "Meridian" centers on Meridian Hill, a student at the fictitious Saxon College, who becomes active in the Civil Rights Movement. She becomes romantically involved with another activist, Truman Held. They have a turbulent on-and-off relationship, during which she becomes pregnant by him.After Meridian has an abortion, Truman becomes far more attached to her and longs for them to start a life together. Later, Truman becomes involved with a white woman, Lynne Rabinowitz, who is also active in the Civil Rights struggle, though perhaps for the wrong reasons.As time passes, Truman attempts unsuccessfully, to achieve personal and financial success while Meridian continues to stay involved in the movement and fight for issues she deeply believes in.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kitchen_God's_Wife"title="The Kitchen God's Wife">
The novel opens with the narrative voice of Pearl Louie Brandt, the American-born daughter of a Chinese mother and a Chinese-American father, living in San Jose, California. Pearl's mother, Winnie Louie, has called her to request that she and her family come to San Francisco, to attend the engagement party of Bao-Bao, her cousin. Later, Pearl receives another call from her mother telling her that her elderly Auntie Du has died, with her funeral being arranged for the day following Bao-Bao's party.Upon her arrival in San Francisco, her Auntie Helen makes a demand: she insists that Pearl must tell Winnie that she has multiple sclerosis, something which everyone else in the family knows; Helen claims that she is suffering from a malignant brain tumor and does not want to die knowing that Winnie is unaware of her daughter's illness. Helen adds that if Pearl will not tell the truth, she will do it herself. Afterwards, Helen has a similar conversation with Winnie, telling her that she must reveal the truth of her past to Pearl.At this point the novel switches to the narrative voice of Winnie Louie, telling the story of her past. Before reaching the United States, Winnie experienced a life of turmoil and suffering: she was abandoned by her mother, a lesser wife of her father, as a young child, and did not fully understand her mother's mysterious disappearance. She was forced to live with her uncle and his two wives, never feeling as loved as her uncle's daughter, Peanut. Nevertheless, when the time came, Winnie's aunts arranged a traditional marriage for her, and her father provided a large dowry, since he was an educated and well-established man.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curious_Enlightenment_of_Professor_Caritat"title="The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat">
In the military run country of Militaria, Professor Nicholas Caritat, a secluded Enlightenment scholar, is arrested because he has been giving hope to the Optimists, the nation’s enemies. Once in prison, he is rescued by Justin, a former student and current part of a guerrilla group called "the Hand," and given a mission: to find the best possible world. The mission leads him through three countries of political extremes that all claim to be the best.Nicholas’s mission begins in Calcula, a city in the forward thinking, Utilitarian country named Utilitaria. The country has two parties: the Rule party, in government and the Act party, in opposition. The Ruler party follows John Stuart Mill’s idea of having society be ruled mainly by the most talented individuals. The Act party encourages democracy as it follows Jeremy Bentham’s ideas of having everyone’s opinions count equally in government. There is a group in the Northern area of the country called the Bigotarians which are focused on the past and want independence.The only thing that matters to the people of Utilitaria is producing the greatest utility, as that will produce the greatest amount of happiness, following the ideas of early utilitarian thinkers. Classes are non-existent. Calculators and computers are used to calculate consequences and utility, despite the limitations and difficulties that occur when trying to do so. Everyone is cared for, provided that they contribute to the well-being of society. Those who cannot contribute are used as organ donors to help the working force.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperium_(Kapuściński_book)"title="Imperium (Kapuściński book)">
In the first part, entitled "First Encounters (1939-1967)", Kapuściński writes about the 1939 entry of the Red Army into Pińsk, his home town in the Polesie area, and about the poverty and terror he experienced during the ensuing Soviet rule. He continues to describe his postwar experiences in the Soviet Union, including his travel on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and his travels to Central Asian and Transcaucasian republics of the Soviet Union, today Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.The second part of the book, "From a Bird's-eye View (1989-1991)", makes up over one half of the book, and is a travelogue from his lone trips around the Soviet Union during its collapse. In the European part of the USSR Kapuściński visited, among others, Brest, Moscow and Donetsk, in the Far North - Magadan and Vorkuta, in the South - Tbilisi and Yerevan. During these voyages he traveled over 60,000 km, mostly by plane.The last, shortest part, "The Sequel Continues (1992-1993)", is a summary. It is also an attempt to analyze the changes in the countries that arose from the disintegration of the USSR. According to the author himself, the whole work does not end with a higher and final synthesis, but with the reverse, because during its writing the subject and theme of the book, the great Soviet Empire, has disappeared.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kouga_Ninja_Scrolls"title="The Kouga Ninja Scrolls">
Beginning in April 1614 Japan, the story centers around the Kouga and the Iga, two rival ninja clans who have been enemies for 400 years. Their no-hostilities treaty is lifted by retired shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu to settle a succession dispute within the government concerning which of Ieyasu's grandsons will become the third Tokugawa Shogun, Takechiyo or Kunichiyo. Danjou and Ogen, leader of the Kouga and Iga respectively, are summoned to Sunpu Castle and each select nine other members of their clan to participate in a battle to the death. Each clan is given a scroll with all 20 combatants' names written on it. Any survivors are to return to the castle on the last day of May with the scroll, and the side with the most survivors will win. Following a random toss of the scrolls by Ieyasu, Kunichiyo is represented by the Kouga, while Takechiyo is represented by the Iga.Due to years of incestuous selective breeding, the members of the Kouga and Iga have all developed inhuman abilities at the cost of several of them being born physically disfigured or otherwise abnormally mutated. At the center of the conflict is Kouga and Iga's two young heirs; Gennosuke and Oboro respectively; who had fallen in love in the hopes of not only bringing their clans together in peace but also to mix the bloodlines of their families so as to undo the genetic damage endured by both. The novel traces the course of the conflict as both clans endure heavy losses and ultimately bring Gennosuke and Oboro to face each other on the field of battle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Girl,_Brownstones"title="Brown Girl, Brownstones">
## Book 1. A Long Day and a Long Night.Ten-year-old Selina Boyce lives in a brownstone in Brooklyn with her Barbadian immigrant family: her mother Silla, father Deighton, and sister Ina. Silla is a strict, no-nonsense woman whose goal is to save enough money to purchase the brownstone they are leasing. Deighton is lackadaisical, impulsive, and he frequently cheats on his wife. His dreams of returning to Barbados and his frivolousness are a source of tension between Silla and him. Deighton inherits a piece of land; Silla wants him to sell it so they can buy the brownstone, but Deighton has fantasies about moving back and building an extravagant house. Suggie Skeete, Miss Mary, and Miss Thompson are a few other characters who appear sporadically; Selina goes to them for companionship and advice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodbye_Tsugumi"title="Goodbye Tsugumi">
Tsugumi is a sickly but feisty and somewhat unpleasant young girl living in a small Japanese seaside town at the family inn with her parents, sister Yoko, aunt Masako, and cousin Maria (the protagonist). Following the divorce of Maria's father, Maria and Masako move to Tokyo to be with him, where Maria attends university. Shortly after the move, Maria receives a call from Tsugumi to say that the family are selling the inn. Maria returns to the town for one last summer to remember her childhood and reconcile her strained relationship with Tsugumi while she still can. But then they didn't realize the true display of true will.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP_(novel)"title="NP (novel)">
"NP" is both the name of the novel and of a short story collection within the novel's plot, a collection written in English by the character Sarao Takase, who committed suicide before he could translate it into Japanese. Three more people attempting to translate the collection have also committed suicide. The novel is narrated by Kazami Kano, the girlfriend of the last translator to die. Kazami becomes interested in Sarao's children while she is also trying to translate NP into Japanese.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amrita_(Yoshimoto_novel)"title="Amrita (Yoshimoto novel)">
The main character, Sakumi, loses her beautiful younger sister, an actress, to suicide. Sakumi subsequently falls down a flight of stairs, losing her memory. She struggles to regain her memory with the assistance of her sister's lover and a clairvoyant kid brother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_the_Blue_Tattoo"title="Curse of the Blue Tattoo">
At the end of "Bloody Jack", Jacky Faber is exposed as a girl and sent to the Lawson Peabody School for Young Girls in Boston, in the hopes that they can find her a husband.After saying goodbye to her shipmates, Jacky is sent to Lawson Peabody's and turned over to the custody of Miranda Pimm, the elderly headmistress. From the start, it is clear that she has a very low opinion of Jacky, going so far as to have her earring cut off and her mail seized to keep her from sending letters to her beloved, Midshipman Jaimy Fletcher.Shunned by most of her fellow students, Jacky strikes up a friendship with Amy Trevelyne, the daughter of a wealthy Massachusetts farmer. Clarissa Worthington Howe, an arrogant Virginia heiress who enjoys abusing the school staff, takes an instant dislike to Jacky and insults her mother, resulting in a fight between the girls. As punishment, the two are beaten and forced to give up dinner and supper.Eager to please Pimm, Jacky throws herself into her classes, which include horse riding, art, music, embroidery, French, and etiquette. Jacky is subsequently noticed by Reverend Richard Mather, the school priest, who views her as a disgrace. While visiting the graveyard near his church, Jacky stumbles upon an unmarked grave, which she later learns belonged to Mather's former servant, Janey Porter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrows_of_Satan"title="The Sorrows of Satan">
On the surface the plot follows the story of a penniless, starving author called Geoffrey Tempest. So poor that he is behind on his rent and can barely afford light in his room, he receives three letters. The first is from a friend in Australia who has made his fortune and offers to introduce him to a good friend who might be able to lift him from poverty. The second is a note from a solicitor detailing that he has inherited a fortune from a deceased relative. The third is a letter of introduction from a foreign aristocrat called Lucio, who befriends him and proceeds to be his guide in how best to use his newfound wealth.Tempest remains blissfully unaware throughout the novel, despite warnings from people he meets, that Lucio is the earthly incarnation of the Devil. Over the course of the book, his wealth leads to misery. Eventually, when confronted with the true nature of his companion, he renounces evil and returns to society penniless but content with the chance to purify his soul.Although the plot follows Tempest's fall from grace and subsequent redemption, he is in many regards a secondary character to Lucio. Both the title of the work and much of its philosophical content relate to the supreme yearning within Satan to achieve salvation. The book's main contribution to Faustian literature is the introduction of the concept that above all other people it is Satan who most truly believes in the Gospel – and yet he is forbidden ever to partake of it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witch_Hunter_(novel)"title="The Witch Hunter (novel)">
The novel sees Devon's first county coroner, Sir John de Wolfe, investigating the sudden death of a wealthy guild-master and, although he is convinced the death has natural causes, the victim's widow is convinced that her husband has been done to death by an evil spell. Unsatisfied by Sir John's efforts, she embarks on a campaign to rid the region of its 'cunning women' leading to a hysteria (foreshadowing later witch-hunts, such as the European Inquisitions and the Salem witch trials) in which a number of women are persecuted and even executed.When the Crowner's Welsh mistress Nesta is accused, Sir John is forced to step up his investigations to catch the culprits before she too faces the noose.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Biggest_Bear"title="The Biggest Bear">
Johnny Orchard, a young boy, is jealous because his neighbors have bear pelts hanging on their barns, so he takes a rifle and goes hunting for the biggest bear in the valley. However, when he finds only a male bear cub, he befriends him by feeding him maple sugar and brings the bear home as a pet. As he grows, the bear becomes a nuisance to Johnny's family and the neighbors due to his enormous appetite. After the neighbors complain to his father, Johnny tries three times to return the bear to the woods. Each time the bear follows Johnny back home. Finally, Johnny and his father decide the only way to solve the problem is to shoot the bear. Johnny takes the bear far into the woods, but while loading his rifle, the bear runs off and into a live trap that has maple sugar in it. Men who had set the trap to capture animals for the zoo soon come. They take Johnny's bear to a zoo where Johnny can visit him anytime he wants to.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_Ship"title="The Phantom Ship">
The plot concerns the quest of Philip Vanderdecken of Terneuzen in the Netherlands to save his father - who has been doomed to sail for eternity as the Captain of the Bewitched Phantom Ship, after he made a rash oath to heaven and slew one of the crew whilst attempting to sail round the Cape of Good Hope. Vanderdecken learns upon his mother's death that there exists a way by which his father's disturbed spirit may be laid to rest, and vows to live at sea until he has spoken with his father face to face and accomplished this purpose.Vanderdecken sails around the world in a number of ships, in the employ of the Dutch East India Company, so that he can redeem his father by presenting him with the relic of the Holy Cross he wears round his neck. His quest, however, brings him into conflict with earthly and unearthly powers as the sight of the "Flying Dutchman" brings doom to all who encounter her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Midsummer_Tempest"title="A Midsummer Tempest">
The setting is in a parallel world where William Shakespeare was not the Bard but the Great Historian. In this world, all the events depicted within Shakespeare's plays were accounts of historical fact, not fiction. As some of the plays depicted anachronistic technology, Anderson extrapolated that this world was more technologically advanced than in reality. However, the fairies of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" are also part of this world. The novel takes place in the era of Cromwell and Charles I, but the characters deal with the English Civil War which is coeval with an Industrial Revolution. The fairy element provides a plot tension with the more advanced technology.Although various plays are alluded to, the plot is chiefly shaped by "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "The Tempest".As part of the homage to Shakespeare, the nobler characters speak in blank verse and at least one sonnet, printed as prose.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doctor_Is_Sick"title="The Doctor Is Sick">
The doctor of the title is Edwin Spindrift, PhD, an unhappily married professor of linguistics who has been sent home from Burma to England suffering from a mysterious brain ailment. While Edwin is confined to a neurological ward, undergoing a battery of diagnostic tests, Mrs Spindrift amuses herself with some disreputable new friends at nearby pubs. Sometimes, to Edwin's distress, she sends these friends to keep her husband company during visiting hours, rather than come herself. Most of the novel is a dream sequence: while he is anaesthetised for brain surgery, Edwin's anxiety over his wife and the company she keeps turns into a fantasy in which Edwin leaves the hospital and encounters his wife's friends, with whom he has various adventures.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Symphonie_pastorale"title="La Symphonie pastorale">
A pastor adopts a young blind girl whom his daughter, Charlotte, names "Gertrude". The title refers to Beethoven's Sixth Symphony (also known as the "Pastoral" Symphony) which the pastor takes Gertrude to hear. It also refers to the pastor's own symphony with Gertrude. His wife, Amélie, resents Gertrude because the pastor dedicates more attention to Gertrude than to their five children. She tries to prompt him to a recognition of the true nature of his feelings for the young woman in his care. Her ability to "see" is contrasted with the "blindness" of the pastor in this regard and the reader is invited to judge him on his intellectual dishonesty. As a religious man, the pastor takes the Bible very seriously and tries to preserve Gertrude's innocence by protecting her from the concept of sin.Because the pastor is really the main character in Gertrude's limited world, she feels herself to be in love with him and to some extent he has similar feelings toward her. When his eldest son Jacques, who is about the same age as Gertrude, asks to marry her, the pastor becomes jealous and refuses despite the fact that Jacques is obviously in love with her.Gertrude eventually gets an operation to repair her eyesight and, having gained the ability to see, realizes that she loves Jacques and not the pastor. However, Jacques has renounced his love for her, converted to Catholicism and become a monk. Gertrude attempts suicide by jumping into a river, but this fails and she was rescued and contracts pneumonia. She realizes that the pastor is an old man, and the man she pictured when she was blind was Jacques. She tells the pastor this shortly before her death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Journey_of_Man"title="The Journey of Man">
According to the recent single-origin hypothesis, human ancestors originated in Africa, and eventually made their way out to the rest of the world. Analysis of the Y chromosome is one of the methods used in tracing the history of early humans. Thirteen genetic markers on the Y-chromosome differentiate populations of human beings.It is believed, on the basis of genetic evidence, that all human beings in existence now descend from one single man who lived in Africa about 60,000 years ago. The earliest groups of humans are believed to find their present-day descendants among the San people, a group that is now found in western southern Africa. The San are smaller than the Bantu. They have lighter skins, more tightly curled hair, and they share the epicanthal fold with the people of Central and South East Asia.Southern and eastern Africa are believed to originally have been populated by people akin to the San. Since that early time much of their range has been taken over by the Bantu. Skeletal remains of these ancestral people are found in Paleolithic sites in Somalia and Ethiopia. There are also peoples in east Africa today who speak substantially different languages that nevertheless share the archaic characteristics of the San language, with its distinctive repertoire of click and pop sounds. These are the only languages in the entire world that use these sounds in speech.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_of_Noon"title="Blue of Noon">
Henri Troppmann goes from his sick-bed in Paris to Barcelona before the Spanish Civil War in time to witness a Catalan General Strike. He is torn between three different women, all of whom arrive in the city at that time. One of them, Lazare, is a Marxist Jew and political activist, who is preparing herself for prospective torture and martyrdom at the hand of General Francisco Franco's troops if she is captured. "Dirty" (or Dorothea) is an incontinent, unkempt alcoholic who repeatedly has sex with Troppmann. Xénie is a young woman who had previously nursed him to health during his violent fever in Paris.The novel is introduced by a scene of extreme degeneracy in a London hotel room, followed by the narrator's description of a dreamlike encounter with 'the Commendatore' (English: "the Commander"), who in the Don Juan myth is the father of one of Don Juan's victims, and whose statue returns at the end of the story to drag Don Juan down to hell for his sins. Troppmann has to choose between the abject Dirty and her associations of sex, disease, excrement and decay, the politically engaged Lazare, and her ethical values of commitment, resistance and endurance, and Xénie, who has outlived her usefulness. While looking at Lazare beneath a tree, Troppmann realises that he respects her for her social conscience, but also sees her as a rat, and chooses Dirty instead, whilst sending Xénie off with a friend, who is subsequently killed in the street. He travels with Dirty to Trier, the home-town of Karl Marx, where the two copulate in the mud on a cliff overlooking a candle-lit graveyard. They see a Hitler Youth group, lending Dirty a vision of the war to come and their probable deaths. Troppmann leaves her to return to Paris.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Boy"title="War Boy">
Radboy, a fourteen-year-old deaf skateboarder, leaves his abusive home for San Francisco and becomes involved with environmental politics and the underground club scene. Principal characters include Radboy's older friend Jonnyboy, methamphetamine addict boyfriends Finn and Critter, and a Swedish environmentalist, Ula, whose fiancé has died, and who is seeking revenge for her sister's injury from a government-planted car bomb. Together the five plan to bomb the Hobart Building and kidnap Jonnyboy's boyfriend Roarke, in an attempt to save the redwoods. Hillsbery writes with a stream-of-consciousness narration style and frequently uses abbreviation and other teen slang.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Can't_Go_Home_Again"title="You Can't Go Home Again">
George Webber has written a successful novel about his family and hometown. When he returns to that town, he is shaken by the force of outrage and hatred that greets him. Family and lifelong friends feel naked and exposed by what they have seen in his books, and their fury drives him from his home.Outcast, George Webber begins a search for his own identity. It takes him to New York and a hectic social whirl; to Paris with an uninhibited group of expatriates; to Berlin, lying cold and sinister under Hitler's shadow. The journey comes full circle when Webber returns to America and rediscovers it with love, sorrow, and hope.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_October_Horse"title="The October Horse">
The book begins with Gaius Julius Caesar's Egyptian campaign in Alexandria, his final battles with the Republicans led by Metellus Scipio, Cato the Younger, Titus Labienus and the brothers Pompeius in Africa and Spain, and ultimately Caesar's assassination on the Ides of March by Marcus Brutus, Gaius Cassius and the Liberators. The latter stages of "The October Horse" chronicle the death of Cicero, the emergence of Octavian and his battles with Mark Antony, and conclude with the Battle of Philippi.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Reilly_(novel)"title="Mary Reilly (novel)">
The novel is about a young girl working at the home of Dr. Henry Jekyll who falls in love with her master. Jekyll's "assistant", Edward Hyde, is generally considered her nemesis. "Mary Reilly" adds more details and substance to the original book, "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", by telling the story from the unique perspective of the housemaid, Mary Reilly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_for_the_Lions"title="Two for the Lions">
As part of his attempts to earn enough money to buy himself into the upper middle ranks, and thus make his relationship with Helena Justina respectable, Marcus Didius Falco has offered his services to Vespasian as a tax collector during the 'great Census' of AD 73. Unfortunately, his plan has several flaws, one major one being his need to take on Anacrites as a partner.Whilst conducting the audit of two gladiatorial training schools, Falco stumbles upon the apparent murder of a star man-eating lion and an apparent rivalry between the schools. When a gladiator also ends up dead, Falco takes on the investigation, one which leads him to Tripolitania.To add to the confusion, Helena's younger brother, Camillus Justinus, has eloped with the betrothed of his older brother, Aelianus. They too have made their way to North Africa, drawn by Justinus' quest to find Silphium, an expensive herb already deemed extinct.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emigrants_(novel_series)"title="The Emigrants (novel series)">
The novel-series describes the long and strenuous journey for a party of emigrants from the province of Småland, Sweden, to the United States in 1850, coinciding with the beginning of the first significant wave of immigration to the United States from Sweden. The story focuses primarily on Karl Oskar Nilsson and his wife, Kristina Johansdotter, a young married couple who live with their four small children; Anna, Johan, Lill-Märta, and Harald, as well as Karl Oskar's parents and his rebellious younger brother Robert, who works as a hired farmhand for neighboring farmers. The family lives on a small farm at Korpamoen, where the soil is thin and rocky, making growing crops extremely difficult. It is Robert, together with his friend Arvid, who first comes across the prospect of going to America after being tired of being mistreated by the farmers who employ him. When he confronts Karl Oskar about the idea, Karl Oskar reveals that he too has come across pamphlets describing conditions in North America for farmers as being much better. Kristina, however, is adamantly against emigrating, not wanting to leave her homeland or wanting to risk the lives of her children by taking them across the ocean. However, things take yet another tragic turn for the family which causes Kristina to reconsider. In the winter of 1849, the family has very little food, but on the day of the christening of their youngest child, Harald, Kristina is preparing a large bowl of barley porridge. Their eldest child, four-year-old Anna, determined to have some even after being told she cannot, goes into the cellar where it is left to cool and helps herself to a very large amount of it, so much that she falls terribly ill from it. Karl Oskar and Kristina send for Beata, a healing woman from Idemo, who upon seeing Anna tells them that after consuming so much porridge, Anna's stomach had burst. The child lingers in agony through the night before dying early the following morning, after which Kristina agrees for them to make the journey to America (Minnesota).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emigrants_(Moberg_novel)"title="The Emigrants (Moberg novel)">
The story takes place in the 1840s up to 1850. The first part of the novel describes the hardships faced by rural families in Sweden. Karl Oskar Nilsson and his wife, Kristina, own a farm in "Ljuder socken" in Småland. They have four children and work hard to make a living, but the poor harvests lead to famine, a catalyst for the beginnings of emigration to the United States in search of a better life. Karl Oskar and his brother Robert want to go, but Kristina doesn't want to leave her home country, knowing that she will never see the rest of their family again. But after the death of their oldest child, she accepts her husband's plans when she realizes that they are in just as much danger from their lives in Sweden as on the big sea and in a New World.They pack up all their belongings and book passage in a group with others from their parish. The characters illustrate some of the motives that prompted people to leave Sweden in the 19th century. The travelers include:The second part of the book tells how they board the ship in Karlshamn, and then how the life goes on during the ten weeks they spend on board – battling sea-sickness and scurvy, travelling across the Atlantic Ocean before finally reaching New York City in midsummer of 1850. The novel ends with the travellers marvelling at the technological wonders of their new home, emblematised in the almost-complete Hudson River Railroad (which would grow into the New York Central) finally opened October 3, 1851.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Settlers_(novel)"title="The Settlers (novel)">
The book tells about the group's new life in America where most of them now have started to feel at home. It also follows Robert and Arvid's journey on the California Trail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_by_Night"title="The Moon by Night">
In "The Moon by Night" (), Vicky and her family are on a cross-country camping trip, meant to be a transition between their life in rural Thornhill, Connecticut and a very different one in New York City, where Vicky's father, Dr. Wallace Austin, will be doing research. In another big change in Vicky's life, Maggy Hamilton, an orphan who has been living with the Austins since her father's death, goes to live with her legal guardian Elena, who is marrying Vicky's uncle, Douglas Austin. Uncle Douglas and his new family move to Laguna Beach, California, where Vicky's family is to visit them during their travels. The first chapter begins with the wedding of Elena and Douglas.The family's adventures show its differences from contemporary society. Along the way, they meet a teenage gang in Tennessee, help rescue children from a flood in Texas, and find an abandoned baby at a campsite in Utah. Vicky's younger sister Suzy grows emotionally during the trip, from wanting to adopt a fawn near the beginning to her later swift and competent rendering of first aid when another child is injured, despite wrong-headed demands by nearby adults. They see bears several times, and though they always act properly, their peers sometimes do not, with dangerous results. They also encounter anti-U.S. sentiment in a campground in Canada and intimations of the Cold War throughout their journey.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lay_of_the_Land"title="The Lay of the Land">
"The Lay of the Land" takes place in the fall of 2000, and Ford's character Frank Bascome is preparing for Thanksgiving at his home in Sea Clift, New Jersey. His son Paul, who is now a greeting card designer in Kansas City, Paul's girlfriend, who has only one hand, and Frank's daughter, Clarissa, who is an on-and-off lesbian, are all expected to attend. Frank has ordered a ready-made organic meal to be delivered on the holiday.Frank's second wife, Sally, has reunited with her formerly AWOL and presumed-dead husband Wally, and they now live in the British Isles. Frank is in the last throes of a fight against prostate cancer, and Frank's first wife, Ann, has moved back to Haddam, New Jersey, after the death of her second husband.Frank has started RealtyWise, his own company, and employs Mike Mahoney, a Tibetan who has adopted an American Republican lifestyle, except inasmuch as he believes in Buddhist philosophy.Over the course of three days, Frank has a range of painful experiences with everyone he meets, including potential home buyers, the father of an old flame, his former wife, his son, and an old acquaintance whom Frank assaults in a bar. Frank's most redeeming moments as a character are in a lesbian bar where he waits for repair work on his Chevrolet Suburban, and when he gets shot in the chest by teenagers who have murdered his unlikable neighbors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Agent"title="The Chinese Agent">
Arnold Hodgkiss, a jewel thief who has come to London to steal the Crown Jewels, is dreamily casing the Tower of London when a strange man approaches him and says "The crown is large". Hodgkiss, nonplussed, replies "And very heavy", unwittingly giving the correct countersign. The man, a spy, thrusts a parcel at Hodgkiss and disappears. Hodgkiss keeps the parcel, hoping to turn it in some way to his advantage.Soon afterward, Jerry Cornell receives a new assignment: he is to discover the whereabouts of plans for "Project Glass", which have been stolen. Although the thief has been caught, the plans are still missing, and are believed to be in the hands of a fiendish Chinese agent named Kung Fu Tzu. Meanwhile, Kung is hopping mad because he never actually got the plans; they were given to Hodgkiss by mistake.The comedy of errors intensifies as Cornell tracks Kung, who in turn follows Hodgkiss, who eludes Kung but finds trouble aplenty when he tries to steal a brooch from a stall on Portobello Road.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Young_Unicorns"title="The Young Unicorns">
As the story opens, the Austin family has settled in a New York City apartment after the events of "The Moon by Night", and made some friends; blind young pianist Emily Gregory and Josiah "Dave" Davidson, who helps Emily get around. Emily is studying under the tutelage of the passionate, leonine Emmanuel Theotocopulous, better known as Mr. Theo. Canon Tallis, newly arrived at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine after the events of "The Arm of the Starfish", meets the Austin children and their friends just as they encounter an anachronistic Genie in a junk shop. Tallis advises and helps to protect the children as they are drawn into a mystery involving the Genie, a street gang called the Alphabats, and the local bishop's strange behavior.Dave is skeptical of the Genie, as is Suzy Austin, but the others are not sure. Centralized, single-minded activity on the part of the criminal Alphabats excites the suspicion of Canon Tallis, who interrogates Dave and Dr. Wallace Austin. Dr. Austin has been working on the creation and perfection of a laser-based Micro-Ray, which is so unerringly precise that it may do more than simply penetrate the corporeal. Dave was once a member of the Alphabats, but has turned from their ways. He is in denial of his past, not even talking about it. Tension builds as the 'Bats try to draw Dave into their new mischief, whose mastermind is none other than the Bishop himself. The Genie appears to be the bishop's servant, and also appears to possess a Micro-Ray.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_Talk_(novel)"title="Talk Talk (novel)">
Dana Halter is an American woman in her early thirties who at the age of four suffered an infection which left her profoundly deaf. Since then, she has been able to master her life astonishingly well: she has acquired an academic degree and teaches at a school for the deaf in San Roque, likely analogous to Santa Barbara, California. Her boyfriend, Bridger Martin, is a "hearie," a man a few years younger than herself who creates special effects for the film industry. Out of love, Martin has gone to great lengths to accommodate her disability. For example, he has taken a course in sign language.William "Peck" Wilson is an American raised in Peterskill, New York who is angry with society for failing him. Once a promising young restaurateur, he enters into a sour marriage, has a child with his wife, becomes dependent on his father-in-law's money, and is eventually dumped by his wife. Subsequently, his life takes a turn for the worse and he has to serve a short prison sentence. When he is released from jail, he moves to Marin County, California, takes up a criminal career of stealing others' identities and spending these identities' money to furnish his elaborate tastes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Abbé_C"title="L'Abbé C">
The novella centres on the antagonisms that exist between two brothers. It recounts the story of Robert, a priest whose conduct appears so exemplary that he is called "L'Abbé" ("the abbot"), and is also involved in the clandestine activities of the French Resistance. Against his perspective of ecclesiastical morality, one encounters his twin brother Charles, who is a "libertine." It is the Second World War, which serves as a backdrop for the paradox of interpersonal betrayal, anti-clericalism and its disconnection from public virtue that characterises this work.Charles has a sexual relationship with Eponine, a female libertine. However, Eponine is also attracted to Robert. Worse, Robert is secretly attracted to Eponine, which precipitates an atmosphere of psychological and sexual tension within this triangle. The story turns out badly for all involved, as the resolution of this unstable triangle is not a healthy outcome. The story is told mostly from Charles's point of view.Robert undergoes a nervous breakdown, as he faints at a church service that he officiates at, with Eponine in the congregation. Robert becomes an alcoholic, and starts to harass Eponine at home late at night, leaving behind traces that suggest growing psychological instability. He loses his moral compass, and eventually becomes insane, leaving his village for a hotel on its outskirts, and spends a fortnight with two prostitutes, Rosie and Raymonde, before the Gestapo apprehend Robert for his activities with the French Resistance. While he has abandoned his clerical vows, however, Robert will not betray his resistance colleagues, and dies an heroic death after severe torture at the hands of his Nazi captors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antipope"title="The Antipope">
"The Antipope" charts Brentford's anti-heroes' (Jim Pooley and John Omally) drinking, work avoidance, womanising, and further drinking as they try to foil the eponymous antipope in his demonic attempt to establish a new Holy See.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop_Goes_the_Weasel_(novel)"title="Pop Goes the Weasel (novel)">
The book begins by introducing the villain, Geoffrey Shafer. He is a well-dressed and wealthy man who lives in Kalorama, Washington, D.C. and drives a Jaguar XJ12. In the beginning, he rushes into oncoming traffic causing a commotion, before a police officer pulls him over and asks him for some identification. This is when the reader finds out he is a British Diplomat who has diplomatic immunity.As Geoffrey feels he is losing control, he decides to play a fantasy game called the Four Horsemen, in which he takes on the character of Death. As the game begins, he drives to the red light district, picks up a prostitute and e-mails the other Horsemen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digging_to_America"title="Digging to America">
"Digging to America" is a story set in Baltimore, Maryland about two very different families’ experiences with adoption and their relationships with each other. Sami and Ziba Yazdan, an Iranian-American family, and Brad and Bitsy Dickinson-Donaldson, an all-American suburban family, meet at the airport on the day their infant daughters arrive from Korea to begin life in America. The two families become friends and begin a tradition of celebrating the arrival of their adopted daughters each year.The differences between the two families are apparent from the beginning, especially in the way each couple decides to raise their daughters. Brad and Bitsy choose not to Americanize their daughter, Jin-Ho; they keep her Korean name and teach her about Korean culture as she grows up. Sami and Ziba, on the other hand, choose to raise their daughter Susan like other American children.Through the efforts of Bitsy, the two families begin a tradition of celebrating their daughters’ arrival in America with an Arrival Party each year. The celebration becomes a mix of American, Korean, and Iranian culture with the different food and people present. The story continues to progress through the early childhood of Jin-Ho and Susan, displaying the differences in how they are raised and the impact it has on them as they grow older. At times, the relationship between the two families is strained because of their contrasting opinions of some issues, but they remain good friends throughout the entire story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Maybe"title="Saint Maybe">
Tyler's plot explores the ways ordinary people react to disastrous events with quietly heroic behavior. When seventeen-year-old Ian Bedloe confronts his older brother Danny with his belief that the latter's wife, Lucy, is having an affair, Danny commits suicide. Shortly after, Lucy dies of an overdose of sleeping pills, and responsibility for the care of the deceased couple's three children (two from their mother's previous marriage) falls to their grandparents. A profoundly guilty Ian, who has discovered his accusations were wrong, receives spiritual guidance from Reverend Emmett of the storefront Church of the Second Chance, and he decides to drop out of college to become a carpenter and help his ailing parents with the children, until he eventually becomes their primary caretaker, sacrificing his own freedom to fulfill what he perceives to be a lifelong moral obligation.As the years pass and the three children mature, Ian continues to be torn between his sense of obligation to the children and the urge to have a "real life," but he increasingly finds solace and peace in participation at the church and becomes devoted to it, its homespun followers, and Rev. Emmett. Ian also develops into a dependable and loving father. The two oldest children (Agatha and Thomas) eventually leave home and form their own families, while the youngest (Daphne) stays home with Ian and the grandparents. When the grandmother has a heart attack, Agatha returns to find a disorganized house and tries to restore order. Efforts to organize the house with help from Daphne's friend, a young female professional "Clutter Counselor"(Rita), ultimately provide Ian with an opportunity for a new beginning. "Moving back and forth among the points of view of various characters, Ms. Tyler traces two decades in the lives of the Bedloes, showing us the large and small events that shape family members' lives and the almost imperceptible ways in which feelings of familial love and obligation mutate over the years."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedra_(Seneca)"title="Phaedra (Seneca)">
Lines 1–423Hippolytus, son of King Theseus of Athens, leaves his palace at dawn to go boar-hunting. He prays to the virgin goddess Diana for success in the hunt.His step-mother Phaedra, wife of Theseus and daughter of King Minos of Crete, soon appears in front of the palace lamenting her fate. Her husband has been gone for years after journeying to capture Persephone from the underworld. Phaedra has been left alone to care for the palace, and she finds herself pining for the forests and the hunt. Wondering what is causing her desire for the forest glades, she reflects on her mother, Pasiphaë, grand-daughter of Helios , who was cursed to fall in love with a bull and give birth to a monster, the Minotaur. Phaedra wonders if she is as doomed as her mother was.Phaedra's aged nurse interjects that Phaedra should control the passions she feels, for love can be terribly destructive. Phaedra explains that she is gripped by an uncontrollable lust for Hippolytus, and that her passion has defeated her reason. Hippolytus, however, detests women in general and Phaedra in particular. Phaedra declares that she will commit suicide. The nurse begs Phaedra not to end her life and promises to help her in her love, saying: "Mine is the task to approach the savage youth and bend the cruel man's relentless will."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe's_Revenge"title="Sharpe's Revenge">
In 1814, Richard Sharpe and his second wife, Jane, quarrel over his imminent duel with Captain Bampfylde, resulting from the latter's cowardice in the previous novel, "Sharpe's Siege". Just in case, Sharpe grants her full authority over the considerable sum of money he has lodged with his prize agent in London. Jane returns to England on her own. Sharpe wants her to purchase a country home in Dorset, but she makes it clear she wants to live in London. After Bampfylde shoots first and misses, he reveals his cowardice as Sharpe takes his time and carefully aims. Sharpe unintentionally wounds Bampfylde in the buttocks.Sharpe then acts as chief of staff of General Nairn's brigade in the Battle of Toulouse. Shortly afterwards, however, he learns that Napoleon has been defeated and the war ended a week or two before. Sharpe, Harper and Frederickson go to Bordeaux to await transport to England. There Sharpe learns that Jane has closed out his account, withdrawing well over £18,000.Sharpe and Frederickson are arrested in Bordeaux. They are accused of stealing Napoleon's treasure, which had been concealed at Teste de Buch, the fortress they had captured in "Sharpe's Siege", based on a witness statement by Napoleon's spymaster, Major Pierre Ducos, an old and bitter enemy of Sharpe's. In reality, Ducos himself stole the treasure, murdering the colonel who delivered it to him and suborning most or all of the accompanying Dragoons. Sharpe and Frederickson realize that they need the testimony of the fort's French commander, Henri Lassan, to exonerate them, so with help from Harper and Captain Peter d'Alembord, the two men escape, and they and Harper set out to find Lassan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldorado_(novel)"title="Eldorado (novel)">
It is 1794 and Paris, ""despite the horrors that had stained her walls - has remained a city of pleasure, and the knife of the guillotine did scarce descend more often than did the drop-scenes on the stage"."The plot begins when Sir Percy, the Scarlet Pimpernel, reluctantly agrees to take Armand St. Just, brother of his wife, Marguerite, with him to France as part of a plan to rescue the young Dauphin.Percy warns Armand not to renew any friendships while in Paris, but it doesn't take long before Armand has ignored his warnings and renewed a friendship with the scheming Baron de Batz (in the pay of the Austrian government), who wants to free the Dauphin himself and despises the Scarlet Pimpernel and all he represents.Whilst attending the opera with De Batz, Armand foolishly tells him that he is in the league of the Scarlet Pimpernel. While there, he falls in love with a young actress named Citizeness Jeanne L'Ange. De Batz introduces the couple backstage at the theatre and once they have fallen for each other, De Batz tells Citizen Heron of the general committee of Public Safety where and when they have arranged to meet.After covering for Armand at her house, L'Ange is arrested and thrown into jail. Learning of her peril and in the throes of passion, Armand fails to trust Sir Percy who has told him that he will rescue Jeanne, and forgets his promise to his leader.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sound_Like_Someone_Trying_Not_to_Make_a_Sound"title="A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound">
The story takes place in a house, late at night. A young child, asleep in his bed, awakes to hear a sound he describes as "a sound like someone trying not to make a sound". The child wakes his father and describes the sound to him. The child believes that the sound comes from a "monster with no arms and legs", which "slides on its fur" and "pulls itself along on its teeth". The father and child discover that the sound is coming from the mice in the walls, and the child is comforted by his parent. The two return to sleep.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warlords_of_Utopia"title="Warlords of Utopia">
The glorious Roman Empire has ruled for nearly 27 centuries when Marcus Americanius Scriptor acquires a strange bracelet from a mysterious stranger. With the bracelet, he finds that he is able to travel to alternate Romes in worlds where the course of history has diverged from the one with which he is familiar. Worlds he finds later have no Roman Empire at all, and a cruel new regime in Germania on a path of conquest. That leads to a conflict between all the parallel universes in which Rome never fell and all those in which the Nazis won World War II.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika_Night"title="Swastika Night">
"Swastika Night" takes place in a world where the Nazis and Empire of Japan defeated their enemies and conquered the world (from a modern perspective, the novel is an alternate history in which the Nazis won World War II, though at the time of its writing the war had not broken out and it was a work of speculative future fiction.) It follows the protagonist Alfred, an Englishman in his 30s who works as a ground mechanic for the German Empire in the Salisbury aerodrome. Alfred comes to Germany on a holy pilgrimage to see the holy sites of Hitlerism, the religion in this Nazi-dominated world. These sites include the holy forest and the sacred aeroplane in Munich with which Hitler won the war by personally flying to Moscow, it is said. In this world Hitler is seen as a seven foot tall, long blonde-haired, blue-eyed man who was “exploded” from the head of God the Thunderer and was a god in his own right. He is preached about by "Knights" (a cross between the traditional, feudal knight and a priest) who pass this job down from father to son.When Alfred arrives at his Nazi friend Hermann's village, he meets the Knight there, an old man by the name of Friedrich von Hess; Hermann works on this Knight's land. The Knight reveals to Alfred about how history was distorted by a man who even when confronted by the truth proclaimed Hitler a god. The writing of this man's book caused the Nazis to burn everything that contradicted the fact – even the book itself – and also anything that revealed life before the empire or during Hitler's life. An ancestor of von Hess wrote about the truth and entrusted the secret to his descendants as he also obtained and preserved a picture of Hitler and a young blonde woman that Alfred originally mistakes for Hitler. This convinces the already sceptical Alfred that Hitler was not a god when he sees that Hitler was a small, brown-haired man with a paunch.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Clowns"title="Sacred Clowns">
Shop teacher Eric Dorsey is murdered at the mission school in Thoreau, for no obvious reason. Delmar Kanitewa slips out of his boarding school in Crownpoint, and his grandmother pushes the Navajo Tribal Police to find the boy. Lt. Joe Leaphorn heads up a new unit for investigations, with Jim Chee as his staff. Chee and Bureau of Indian Affairs officer Sgt. Harold Blizzard learn the boy came home to his mother the day the teacher was killed. Delmar had a package with him, for his uncle, to do with religion. Delmar said he must see his uncle a second time and left. Janet Pete, Cowboy Dashee and Ashton Davis meet up at the Tano ceremonial of kachinas and koshares, where Chee spots Delmar. He slips away before they can tell him to call his grandmother. The ceremonial includes Delmar’s uncle, Francis Sayesva, who is a koshare. In a break of the ceremonial, Francis is found murdered, not 40 yards from where Chee is standing.A hit and run driver leaves his victim to die on the road, making a homicide of Victor Todachene’s death. The chief of the NTP really wants the driver found. Leaphorn asks Chee to find this driver. The driver speaks anonymously over the local radio apologizing for what he did. He will send money to the family. The radio station staff notice enough about the man for Chee to find Clement Hoski. Chee trails him home, seeing grandson Ernie get off the school bus. After talking with Ernie, a special needs child, Chee puts off arresting his grandfather.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Rebel"title="Conan the Rebel">
"Conan the Rebel" details the involvement of Conan in a rebellion in the kingdom of Stygia, on account of his lover, the pirate queen Bêlit. Having taken upon himself the task of rescuing Bêlit's brother from captivity, Conan finds himself enmeshed in the affairs of the rebel province of Taia, where he conveniently fits into their legend of a savior from the north. Meanwhile, the priests of Stygia, prompted by an oracle of their god Set branding Conan a threat, want to capture Conan, and the king, to whom the unrest is a distraction from his scheme to invade Ophir, also has it in for him.Chronologically, the story occurs between chapters 1 and 2 of the Robert E. Howard Conan story "Queen of the Black Coast". Bêlit, aside from getting the action going, is almost entirely absent from the ensuing adventure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_of_Kings"title="The Road of Kings">
The novel features Conan during his buccaneering days. After being sentenced to death for a duel in the turbulent kingdom of Zingara, he escapes and joins a group of rebels who plan to overthrow their tyrannical king. When the divided leadership foolishly turns to a wizard for aid, their cause becomes complicated by sorcery rooted in the lost kingdom of Acheron, and the result is not freedom but despotism. Conan helps in overthrowing the new regime. However, when he's given an opportunity to take the throne for himself, Conan uncharacteristically turns down the offer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_of_Skelos"title="The Sword of Skelos">
In Shadizar, Conan encounters Khassek, an agent for the Shah of Iranistan, whose master wants to obtain the Eye of Erlik, now in the barbarian's possession. Conan accompanies him on Kassek's excursion towards Iranistan. However, their journey is interrupted by his rival Isparana, on the run with Sarid, a renegade soldier from Turan. Both Khassek and Sarid are killed in their confrontation with a giant scorpion. Soon, Conan abandons his mission, joins forces with Isparana, and travels instead for Zamboula. They're attacked by a band of raiders, who in turn are attacked by another tribe of raiders, the Shanki, who, victorious, escort the couple back to their oasis. At their village, Akhimen Khan, leader of the Shanki, welcomes the two and sends them on to Zamboula.Things are not well in Zamboula, however. The ruler, Akter Khan, has been corrupted by the power of his sorcerer, Zafra, who has enchanted two swords with his magic, one of which is in the possession of Khan. Secretly, Zafra is conspiring against him with the Khan's mistress Chia. Both the Khan and Zafra desire the 'Eye of Erlik. Magically aware of its approach, Zafra has his soldiers intercept Conan and Isparana near a canyon. Soon, the soldiers escort them the remainder of their way to the city, where they present the artifact to Akter Khan. Soon Zafra poisons the khan's mind against them and persuades the khan to imprison rather than reward them. Isparana is taken, but Conan is absent. Learning of the khan's ill-will, he joins forces with the rebel Balad and the tribesman Hajimen, son of his Shanki host, both of whom have grievances against the ruler.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_and_the_Sorcerer"title="Conan and the Sorcerer">
Attempting to steal from a wizard named Hissar Zul, the young Conan finds the tables turned when his intended victim steals his soul and imprisons it inside a mirror. The Wizard promises to restore Conan's soul if he retrieves for Zul a magical artifact previously stolen from him. With little recourses, the barbarian tracks down Zul's artifact along with the woman who stole it, recovering it after a number of adventures. Unfortunately, he finds Zul disinclined to honor his end of the bargain. After killing the wizard, Conan's new goal is to find another means of reuniting both his body and soul. His quest continues in "Conan the Mercenary".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Mercenary"title="Conan the Mercenary">
A young Conan finds himself involved in a plot against the throne of Khauran. After saving Lady Khashtris from an attack by Shadizar's thieves and traitorous servants, Conan agrees to work as her bodyguard in return for his soul being freed from the mirror it has been trapped in since his encounter with Hissar Zul. Conan's soul can only be freed by someone of noble birth, and Khashtris convinces Conan that her sister, Queen Ialamis, will free him.Unknown to Conan, Ialamis, and Khashtris, the Queen's new paramour, Sergianus, is actually a disguised Sabaninus, the elderly Duke of Korveka, a Kothian province that wishes to annex Khauran. The disguise is revealed when the Queen breaks the mirror containing Conan's soul. As his soul re-enters him, Conan sees the Duke for who he really is. Conan, Lady Khashtris, and her loyal bodyguard Shubal, then plot to unmask the Duke and save Khauran.Ialamis is also the mother of Salome and Taramis, who feature prominently in Howard's earlier tale, "A Witch Shall Be Born."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chase_(novel)"title="Chase (novel)">
Chase is the story about Benjamin Chase. "Benjamin Chase is a retired war hero living in an attic apartment. He is struggling with a drinking habit. One night he rescues a young woman from an obsessed killer. As a result, the killer has changed his target to Chase. He begins phoning Chase and warning that he is out for revenge. The killer, simply named "The Judge" is threatening to kill Chase but the police don't believe him as he has a history of alcohol-related incidents.Chase is forced to take matters into his own hands and attempts to unmask The Judge himself and end the threat of a vengeful lunatic."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coma"title="The Coma">
While traveling home on an underground train, Carl is forced to defend a young girl from the harassment of a group of men. For his efforts, Carl is violently attacked and falls into a coma. When he awakes, he quickly discovers that his seemingly normal world is very peculiar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Mendelsohn,_the_Boy_from_Mars"title="Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars">
Protagonist Leonard Neeble attends a new school, Bat Masterson Junior High, where he is bullied by his classmates and neglected by the staff. At length, he is befriended by the title character, Alan Mendelsohn, and is thereafter happier and more capable. When Alan starts a school-wide quarrel over his claim to Martian ancestry, both are suspended from school for one week; during which, they meet Samuel Klugarsh, the owner of an occult bookstore, who sells them a kit meant to enable telepathy and psychokinesis. Having acquired these abilities, Leonard and Alan become bored with the few uses thereof; whereupon Klugarsh lets Leonard and Alan trade their mind-control kits for a course in "Hyperstellar Archaeology": the study of lost civilizations such as Atlantis and Lemuria, along with a copy of "Yojimbo's Japanese-English Dictionary". Alan and Leonard are skeptical of the course's wild claims and predictions until they unexpectedly find an article in the text mentioning them both by name; when they follow its directions for interpreting "Yojimbo's Japanese-English Dictionary", they become more capable of mind control experiments. Later, they and Klugarsh encounter the dictionary's author, Clarence Yojimbo, who explains the real secret purpose of "Yojimbo's Japanese-English Dictionary": when decoded by the proper key, it enables travel into parallel realities. According to the book's instructions, they enter the parallel Earth known as 'Waka-Waka', where the locals have established a ritualistic culture based on the drinking of fleegix, a beverage similar to hot chocolate; but have fallen under the control of the extraterrestrials 'Manny, Moe, and Jack', who control the supply of ingredients and whose rule is enforced by the deadly and invisible 'Wozzle'. Upon learning that the Wozzle only attacks in bright daylight or total darkness, Alan deduces that the Wozzle is actually the three criminals themselves, made invisible by their own psychokinesis. On this premise, he exposes them to the locals; whereupon he and Leonard use Klugarsh's telepathic technique to trick the trio into surrender. Here, they are commanded to withdraw from Waka-Waka to their own world of Nafsulia, by Rolzup, the Martian High Commissioner (himself invited by Alan). 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian's_Return"title="Brian's Return">
Brian is having trouble fitting in with urban society and is sent to see a psychologist, a blind ex-police officer named Caleb. Caleb recognizes that Brian's home is the wilderness. At Caleb's suggestion, Brian returns to the Canadian wilderness, knowing that is where his heart truly is.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Destroyer_(novel)"title="Conan the Destroyer (novel)">
Queen Taramis of Shadizar promises to bring Conan's lost love Valeria back to life if the Cimmerian will procure two magical items that she hopes will gain her ultimate power, a wizard's gem and a horn that can awaken the dreaming god Dagoth. He undertakes the quest together with his thief partner Malak and Taramis' niece Jehnna and henchman Bombaata. On their journey they are joined by two additional allies whom Conan saves from dire fates; the magician Akiro and the female warrior Zula. At their goal, the castle of the wizard Amon-Rama, Jehnna is kidnapped. Thanks to Akiro's magic she is located in Amon-Rama's lair and a way in is discovered. Inside, Conan is separated from the others and forced to battle a Man-Ape in a hall of mirrors, which he is only able to defeat by destroying the mirrors. He also mortally wounds the wizard, who is hiding behind one of them. Jehnna, who is the only person who can safely handle the wizard's gem, retrieves the first magical item.Afterwards the group beats off an attack by Corinthian soldiers, and continues on to the fortress that holds the horn. It is retrieved at the cost of a battle with its Dagoth-worshipping keepers, whose leader Akiro defeats in a sorcerous duel. Bombaata and Jehnna escape through a tunnel, which the former closes to the others by starting a landslide. Back at Taramis' palace, the queen conducts a ritual to awaken Dagoth that entails the placing of the horn on the forehead of the sleeping deity, and ultimately the sacrifice of Jehnna. Conan, Akiro and Zula, having survived the landslide, interrupt the proceedings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_(Strieber_novel)"title="The Hunger (Strieber novel)">
Miriam Blaylock is a vampire whose life began in ancient Egypt: her mother Lamia was also a vampire, which overlaps with some attributes of the figure from Greek mythology sharing the same name. She has taken human companions (male or female) to ease her loneliness. While her blood will grant them greatly expanded lifespans, they (unlike her) eventually begin to age, a process that cannot be halted. Eventually they wither to dusty shells but unfortunately for them they remain conscious. Unable to bear the thought of murdering her lovers, Miriam imprisons them in steel-encased chests to keep with her for eternity.The novel begins when John, her most recent companion suddenly begins to age. Miriam is surprised at the brief amount of time that John lasted (only about 200 years). She has been secretly following the work of Dr. Sarah Roberts, a brilliant young physician whose research may hold the key to immortality for her lover. John becomes too uncontrollable for Miriam to deal with and she soon sets her sights on another companion, Sarah.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodthirst_(novel)"title="Bloodthirst (novel)">
The "Enterprise" is called to a remote bio-research lab on planet Tanis to answer a distress call, finding only a single survivor upon arrival. The survivor, Dr. Adams, is uncooperative in discussing the details of the research on Tanis, or how the other members of the research team died. Eventually, it is revealed that Tanis was an illegal biological warfare lab, run by a secret faction within Starfleet. The story also focuses on a security officer, Stanger, who becomes infected after an attack by Dr. Adams.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_the_Light_of_the_Study_Lamp"title="By the Light of the Study Lamp">
Louise and Jean Dana, orphaned sisters living in the town of Oak Falls, receive the gift of an antique study lamp as a parcel from their Uncle Ned Dana, skipper of the SS "Balaska", as they are packing to return to their school in nearby Penfield for a second year. While the girls are distracted, having gone to the aid of their clumsy maid, Cora "Applecore" Appel, the lamp is stolen from their home, and though the sisters give chase in the family roadster, their search reaches a dead-end at an antique store run by the sinister Jake Garbone. Jean, who finds Garbone's car and shop after the sisters split up to search the side streets, accuses Garbone of being the thief, but he denies this. While in his shop, Jean observes a mysterious woman peeking through the curtains behind the counter. She informs Louise of this, and they walk past the shop again, observing the same mysterious woman peeking at them from behind the curtains and then disappearing. The girls decide that the police can be of no help to them without further evidence, and they must solve the mystery for themselves. On the way home, the girls encounter a handsome man of about thirty-five who asks them for directions to their uncle's house before being distracted when a passing truck strikes his dog, knocking it into the nearby Oak River. In attempting to rescue the dog, the man himself falls in and is knocked unconscious. The river leads to the treacherous Oak Falls, and the quick-acting Jean rescues the dog by leaning out over a rock and extending her hand, while thoughtful Louise first gets a rope from the trunk of their roadster and ties it around her waist so that she can swim out to rescue the young man without being swept away by the current; Jean pulls on the rope to assist while her sister gradually swims both herself and the victim to shore. Upon recovering consciousness, the young man appears to have partial amnesia. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_of_the_Worlds"title="Wonder of the Worlds">
In the first installment, "Wonder of the Worlds", Nikola Tesla, Mark Twain and Houdini pursue Martian agents who have stolen a powerful crystal from Tesla at the historically pivotal 1893 Columbia Exposition in Chicago. Along for the ride aboard Tesla's airship are other historical figures, reporters Lillie West and George Ade, as well as Kolman Czito, Tesla's assistant. On the journey to the Red Planet, the adventurers are treated to a hidden history of conflict between the Earth and Mars, as well as Tesla's stunning knowledge of geophysics of the two planets. Upon arrival on Mars, the team pursues the crystal deep into the underground civilization ruled by Kel, the mad emperor determined to subjugate Earth with the power of the crystal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_English_Roses"title="The English Roses">
The English Roses are four girls—Charlotte, Amy, Grace, and Nicole—who attend the same school in London. They live in the same neighborhood and participate in the same activities together, including attending summer picnics and ice-skating in winter. They are jealous of a girl named Binah, who lives nearby, since they believe her life is perfect. The girls detest her beauty and popularity at school. They enjoy ignoring Binah while concocting naughty plans against her.One day, the mother of one of the Roses lectures the girls about judging people on the basis of their looks. That night, as the English Roses are at a picnic sleepover, they have the same dream. They are visited by a pumpernickel fairy godmother who sprinkles them with magic dust and transports them to see Binah's life at her home. The girls find that contrary to their belief Binah is actually lonely. Her mother died when she was young, and she lives with her father in a small house where she spends a majority of her time cooking and cleaning. The fairy godmother admonishes the English Roses and asks them to think more kindly of someone in future, rather than complain about their life.The English Roses feel bad for their behavior towards Binah and invite her to join their group. Soon they strike up a good friendship with her and go on picnics, and to dances and parties together. The girls share all that they like with Binah, and the story ends with there being five English Roses as she joins them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Warriors_(Yurick_novel)"title="The Warriors (Yurick novel)">
The novel begins with a quote from Xenophon's "Anabasis" (upon which the novel is based). Throughout the novel, the character Junior reads a comic book version of the story.It is the evening of July 4. Ismael Rivera, leader of the Delancey Thrones, the largest gang in New York City, calls a grand assembly of street gangs to the Bronx. Gangs from all over the city, signaled by a Beatles song on the radio, head to the meeting place at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. As per instructions, none of them carries weapons, except for a handgun – a peace offering to Ismael.Among the gangs are the Coney Island Dominators, an African American/Hispanic gang who are the central characters of the novel. The Dominators are Papa Arnold, the leader, Hector the second-in-command, Lunkface the strongest and most dangerous member, Bimbo the advisor, Hinton the gang's artist and central character of the novel who is the second youngest, Dewey the most level-headed member of the gang and The Junior the youngest of the group as well as the gang's mascot.At the meeting, Ismael announces his plan, with other Thrones relaying the message to the ones in back who cannot hear. He proposes a grand truce designed to challenge "The Man" (society, otherwise called "The Others"). After a stirring speech, the assembly dissolves into chaos as several dissident gangs begin fighting. When the police arrive, having been tipped off about a big "rumble", many gangs, believing Ismael has set them up, turn their peace-offering handgun on Ismael, killing him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Firebringer_Trilogy"title="The Firebringer Trilogy">
## Birth of the Firebringer.Although his father is the prince of the unicorns, Jan worries that he isn't worthy of his prophesied destiny and that he can't live up to his father's legacy. When he follows the warrior unicorns on their pilgrimage, he accidentally leads his friend Dagg and a warrior named Tek through a series of dangers, culminating in a battle with a deadly wyvern, the hated enemy of the unicorns.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sons_of_the_Oak"title="Sons of the Oak">
"Sons of the Oak" is an epic fantasy novel set in a land where men can bestow to each other a number of endowments, granting the recipient of the endowment attributes such as increased strength, a more acute sense of hearing, or better eyesight. The novel combines traditional sword and sorcery elements of fantasy with its own unique magic system of endowments.The book details the life of Fallion and his rise to power. When the Earth King, Gaborn val Orden dies, the nations mobilize to destroy his children, fearing they'll usurp power over the kingdoms. An army quickly arrives, led by the locus Asgaroth. Fallion, his brother, Jaz, and Rhianna, a girl they rescued from monsters called strengi-saats, flee with their mother and the family of Sir Borenson. Asgaroth eventually catches up with them but his host is slain by Fallion's mother, Iome. The exiles board a smuggler's ship and flee the Courts of Tide. Fallion befriends the captain and most of the crew—including a flameweaver they call Smoker. Smoker recognizes Fallion's power, calling him the torch bearer, and begins teaching him how to use his abilities. Eventually Fallion and Jaz are captured by the evil Runelord Shadoath, who is parasitized by the locus of the One True Master of Evil. She tortures them in order to win their loyalty, but they, along with Shadoath's daughter, are rescued by Myrrima and Smoker. Smoker transforms into a fire elemental, destroying the city where the children were being held captive and seriously wounding Shadaoth. Only her numerous endowments of stamina and brawn save her. During this, Rhianna is mistakenly presumed dead and left behind, where she becomes a Dedicate to the sea ape of Shadoath's son.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaws_(novel)"title="Jaws (novel)">
The story is set in Amity, a fictional seaside resort town on the south shore of Long Island, New York within the "Hamptons" region; the novel places it halfway between Bridgehampton and East Hampton. One night, a massive great white shark kills a young tourist named Chrissie Watkins while she skinny dips in the open waters after she and a man make love on the beach. After finding what remains of her body washed up on the beach, investigators realize she was attacked by a shark. Police chief Martin Brody orders Amity's beaches closed, but mayor Larry Vaughn and the town's selectmen overrule him out of fear for damage to summer tourism, the town's main industry. With the connivance of Harry Meadows, the editor of the local newspaper, they hush up the attack.A few days later, the shark kills a young boy named Alex Kintner and Morris Cater, an elderly man, not far from shore. A local fisherman, Ben Gardner, is hired by Amity's authorities to kill the shark, but disappears. Brody and his deputy Leonard Hendricks find Gardner's boat anchored off-shore, empty and covered with large bite holes, one of which has a massive shark tooth stuck in it. Blaming himself for these deaths, Brody again attempts to close the beaches, while Meadows investigates the Mayor's business contacts to find out why he is determined to keep the beaches open. Meadows discovers Vaughn has ties to the Mafia, who are pressuring the mayor to keep the beaches open in order to protect the value of Amity's real estate, in which the Mafia has invested a great deal of money. Meadows also recruits ichthyologist Matt Hooper from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for advice on how to deal with the shark.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click,_Clack,_Moo"title="Click, Clack, Moo">
Farmer Brown begins to hear typing sounds coming from his barn. He discovers that his cows have found an old typewriter in the barn and are using it to type letters requesting things from Farmer Brown, such as electric blankets to keep them warm at night. Farmer Brown refuses, and the cows withhold their milk until they get what they ask for. Soon, the cows type a similar letter about the hens asking for blankets which Farmer Brown refuses to provide. The hens join the cows and refuse to lay eggs.Farmer Brown realizes this makes it impossible to run a farm. In an attempt to re-establish order, he sends a letter back to the cows and hens on his own typewriter and tells them they do not need the blankets and that their job is to produce milk and eggs. The cows hold an emergency meeting (during that time, the other animals gather at the barn door to see what's going on), in which they seemingly come to a resolution. They promise the farmer that if he gives them the blankets, they will give him their typewriter. A neutral duck agrees to deliver the typewriter once the cows and hens have the blankets.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_for_President"title="Duck for President">
Duck becomes frustrated with Farmer Brown's rule over the farm, and holds an election to take over the farm. He goes to the mayor and governor's offices, then even visits the president. He then returns to the farm saying, "running a country is no fun at all."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roses_Are_Red_(novel)"title="Roses Are Red (novel)">
Alex Cross returns for the sixth book in the series with a new killer on the loose. A series of meticulously planned bank robberies leave behind a wake of bodies. Alex Cross must not only battle against the sadistic criminal who calls himself The Mastermind, but also the risks that he may be putting his family in. Cross takes a plunge into a case where mind games lead to violence and the slightest mistake will be punished with death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Evidence"title="The Book of Evidence">
Freddie Montgomery is the unreliable narrator who tells his life-story and recounts the events leading up to his arrest for the murder of a servant girl in one of Ireland's "big houses". A cultured but louche Anglo-Irish scientist who has been living abroad for many years, Freddie returns to his ancestral home seeking money after falling foul of a gangster in the Mediterranean. Shocked to discover that his mother has sold the family's collection of paintings, Freddie attempts to recover them. This leads to a tragic series of events culminating in Freddie's killing of a maid while stealing a painting. On the run, he hides out in the house of old family friend, Charlie, a man of some influence, before being arrested and interrogated. The novel ends as Freddie sits in jail and has the first feelings of remorse for the girl's death while casting doubt on the truth of what he has recounted.Throughout his loquacious account, the narrator sporadically inserts complex and obscure words before admitting in one of the later chapters to having a dictionary beside him in his cell from which he is extracting these gems that embellish his prose.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Nuke"title="Operation Nuke">
Steve Austin, an astronaut-turned-cyborg working for a secret branch of American intelligence, is set in pursuit of a criminal syndicate using nuclear blackmail to hold the world to ransom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ganymede_Takeover"title="The Ganymede Takeover">
The novel takes place on a future Earth (vidphones, telepaths, androids, ionocraft are normal) recently conquered by aliens from Ganymede: limbless, worm-like creatures whose physical needs are attended to by a slave-race of specialist 'creeches'. Mekkis is the leader of a Ganymedean faction that opposed the war when his Oracle (a creature capable of precognition) foresaw a 'coming darkness'. The apparent success of the invasion means he is now discredited. As a result, Mekkis is saddled with the troublesome Bale of Tennessee, home to the last remaining core of resistance, the 'Neeg-parts' led by Black Muslim leader Percy X. Unknown to all concerned, another resistance movement operates covertly under cover of the World Psychiatric Association. One of its agents, Doctor Paul Rivers, is seeking to protect Percy X by assassinating his former girlfriend, TV host Joan Hiashi who is collaborating with the Ganymedeans to capture Percy X. Although Joan Hiashi switches sides after discovering that Percy X is a trained telepath who can read her mind, Percy X is still captured thanks to a tracking device planted on her by racist landowner Gus Swenesgard.Mekkis offers Percy X the chance to become the puppet ruler of Tennessee. When the offer is violently declined, Mekkis sends Percy X and Joan to the Norwegian clinic of psychiatric genius Rudolph Balkani, who has had exceptional success turning resistors into enthusiastic collaborators via sensory deprivation therapy. Dr. Rivers manages to free Joan and Percy X, replacing them with androids. On discovering the ruse, Rudolph Balkani commits suicide. This along with a number of other suicides (encouraged by the World Psychiatric Association) lead the Ganymedians to wrongly assume that Balkani has helped the resistance infiltrate their collaborationist regime. Judging their proxy rule of Earth to be impractical, they decide to withdraw from the planet and destroy all life through a device that will block the sun's rays.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spring_to_Come"title="The Spring to Come">
## Part one – Glass Houses.Cezary Baryka is a teenager growing up in Baku in a well-off household with both parents. As World War I breaks out and his father loses his grip on his son due to departure, Cezary begins to rebel against his mother and stops attending classes due to the communist revolution in his hometown. At the beginning, he is devoted to the cause but later begins drifting apart from other revolutionaries, due to their violent means of exerting control. As his mother dies due to mandatory labor and food shortages, a conflict breaks out between Tatars and Armenians. His rebellious world-view begins to fade away upon seeing the dead body of a beautiful woman. He becomes firm in his belief that revolution brings about suffering. Later, he is reunited with his father - believed to have been dead - who is eager to revisit Poland. During the journey, his father convinces his son, that Poland has become a land of progress and prosperity. Shortly after his father's death, Cezary Baryka reaches Poland and is disappointed by his sight - Poland is devastated by the war and isn't the utopia his father prophesied.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stoic"title="The Stoic">
Cowperwood, still married to his estranged wife Aileen, lives with Berenice. He decides to move to London, England, where he intends to take over and develop the underground railway system. Berenice becomes close to Earl Stane, while Frank has an affair with Lorna Maris, a relative of his. Meanwhile, he tries to fix Aileen up with Tollifer, but she becomes enraged when she finds out it was a ruse. Finally, Cowperwood dies of Bright's disease. His inheritance is squandered in lawsuits. Aileen dies shortly after. Berenice travels to India, where she is moved by poverty. Back in the United States, she realises there is poverty there too, and decides to set up a hospital for the poor, as Cowperwood intended.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Financier"title="The Financier">
In Philadelphia, Frank Cowperwood, whose father is a banker, makes his first money passing by an auction sale; he successfully bids for seven cases of Castile soap, which he sells to a grocer the same day with a profit of over 70 percent. Later, he gets a job in Henry Waterman &amp; Company, and leaves it for Tighe &amp; Company. He also marries an affluent widow, in spite of his young age. Over the years, he starts misusing municipal funds with the aid of the City Treasurer. In 1871, the Great Chicago Fire redounds to a stock market crash, prompting him to be bankrupt and exposed. Although he attempts to browbeat his way out of being sentenced to jail by intimidating Mr Stener, politicians from the Republican Party use their influence to use him as a scapegoat for their own corrupt practices. Meanwhile, he has an affair with Aileen Butler, a young girl, subsequent to losing faith in his wife. She vows to wait for him after his jail sentence. Her father, Mr Butler dies; she grows apart from her family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilgermann"title="Pilgermann">
Narrated by the disembodied spirit or consciousness of Pilgermann, a European Jew, the novel opens with the newly castrated Pilgermann having a vision of Christ after sleeping with a merchant's wife and subsequently being mutilated by a gentile mob. Christ tells Pilgermann that he must make his way to Jerusalem where he will meet with Sophia. Reluctantly, and in theory with nothing better to do, Pilgermann sets off.As Pilgermann travels across Europe he is joined by other characters, including his own Death which walks alongside him. Life in Europe is seen through a series of grotesque, Brueghel- and Bosch-like images of horror, violence, degradation and death. Nevertheless, Pilgermann continues, keeping his cool with a mixture of detachment, compassion and irony throughout.Halfway across the Mediterranean his boat is ambushed by pirates who sell him to a Muslim grandee in Antioch in Syria, Bembel Redzuk. Pilgermann and Bembel become friends, although never social equals (as a Jew Pilgermann can only ever be a dhimmi in Muslim society). Pilgermann conceives of, designs and builds an enormous Kabbalistic courtyard and tower with a patterned design on the floor for Bembel which rapidly takes on numinous power among the community, attracting the displeasure of the Islamic authorities. Things come to a head when Frankish crusaders besiege Antioch. As it becomes increasingly clear that the city will fall, the Islamic authorities become more and more suspicious of non-Muslims and Pilgermann's life becomes increasingly threatened. Finally the city falls and Bembel and Pilgermann are killed fighting a crusader, but not before Pilgermann has a vision of Jerusalem - which he is never destined to get to - and sees Sophia lying, dying among a pile of corpses after a crusader massacre.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayonara_Jupiter"title="Sayonara Jupiter">
The novel is set in the future where humanity has grown to the point where Earth can no longer support all of them. As a result, humanity has begun to spread throughout space and there is now an attempt to turn the planet Jupiter into a second sun in order to make some of the other planets inhabitable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yearling"title="The Yearling">
Young Jody Baxter lives with his parents, Ora and Ezra "Penny" Baxter, on a small farm in the backwoods of central Florida in the years following the Civil War. His parents had six other children before him, but they died in infancy. His mother has difficulty bonding with the boy. Jody loves the outdoors and his family. He has wanted a pet for as long as he can remember, but his mother says that they barely have enough food to feed themselves, let alone a pet.A subplot involves the hunt for an old bear named Slewfoot that randomly attacks the Baxter livestock. Later the Baxters and the rowdy Forresters get in a fight about the bear and continue to fight about nearly anything. (While the Forresters are presented as a disreputable clan, the disabled youngest brother, Fodder-Wing, is a close friend to Jody.) The Forresters steal the Baxters' hogs. While Jody and his father Penny are out searching for the stolen stock, Penny is bitten in the arm by a rattlesnake. Penny shoots a doe, in order to use its liver to draw out the snake's venom. This saves Penny's life but leaves an orphaned fawn.Jody convinces his parents to allow him to adopt the fawn and it becomes his constant companion. He later learns that Fodder-Wing named it Flag. The book explores Jody's life as he matures along with Flag. Jody struggles with strained relationships, hunger, death of beloved friends, and the capriciousness of nature through a catastrophic flood. He also has tender moments with his family, the fawn, and their neighbors and relatives. Along with his father, he comes face to face with the rough life of a farmer and hunter. Throughout, the well-mannered, God-fearing Baxters and the good folk of nearby Volusia and the "big city," Ocala, are starkly contrasted with their hillbilly neighbors, the Forresters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_(Card_novel)"title="Empire (Card novel)">
The book follows U.S. Army Major Reuben Malich and U.S. Army Captain Bartholomew Coleman, both former Special Forces officers, as America falls into a civil war after the assassinations of both the American President and Vice President. A radical leftist army calling itself the Progressive Restoration takes over New York City and declares itself the rightful government of the United States.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pigeon_(novella)"title="The Pigeon (novella)">
Jonathan Noel is a tidy and solitary man: he is nearing retirement and has never failed at his job as a security guard at the bank near his home in Paris. He has only one aspiration: to live a quiet recluse life without being paid attention to. His youth, which was not the most pleasant, explains to a large extent this withdrawal: in 1942, his mother was deported to the Drancy concentration camp; in 1953, he went to war in Indochina and in 1954, his uncle persuaded him to marry Marie Baccouche, who was unfortunately already five months pregnant and in love with another man with whom she later fled.He lives in a small maid's room on the top floor of a bourgeois house, sheltered from the world. He loves his simple room so much that he will soon buy it for himself so that nothing can separate them any more and he can end his life by continuing his daily routine. In a way, as the narrator says, his little room is 'his mistress, for she tenderly welcomes him into her'.But one morning, when he goes out to relieve himself in the little toilet upstairs, after listening carefully to make sure he doesn't meet anyone, he comes face to face with a pigeon. Panic-stricken, he locks himself in his room. Only with a great burst of courage does he manage to get out of his room and go to work. He was determined to leave his room so that he would not have to see the pigeon again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_Through_the_Night"title="Journey Through the Night">
The book is divided into 4 parts: The main character is Jan (in the translation "John") de Boer. He is the eldest son of the family. During World War 2, the 5 year German occupation, he gets involved in the Resistance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thanksgiving_Visitor"title="The Thanksgiving Visitor">
The story is narrated by nine-year-old Buddy, whose older cousin is his best friend. Buddy gets stopped on the way to school every day by a bully named Odd Henderson, who pins him to the ground and rubs burrs into Buddy's head because "he's a sissy", an to which Buddy admits. To stop this problem, his cousin, Miss Sook, invites Odd to her big Thanksgiving dinner. During the party, when Buddy is sulking in his bathroom cupboard, he spots Odd stealing a precious cameo. When Odd leaves the bathroom, Buddy leaves and claims in front of everyone at the family dinner that Odd has stolen the cameo. Miss Sook goes to check, and she claims that the cameo is in its place, but then Odd admits to stealing the cameo, lays it on a table, and walks out. Buddy then runs out and sulks in the barn, until the afternoon, when Miss Sook teaches him that he shouldn't have publicly humiliated Odd.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immaculate_Conception_(novel)"title="The Immaculate Conception (novel)">
"The Immaculate Conception" has been described as echoing "the writing of Edgar Allan Poe and Fyodor Dostoevsky" and illuminating the "sublime, the uncanny, and the horrific that burns at the core of ordinary lives". Set in the mid-1920s in the isolated, working-class parish of "Nativité" in East-end Montreal, the novel chronicles the aftermath of a deadly fire—75 people die when a neighborhood restaurant is burned to the ground by an arsonist.The cast of characters includes a pianist, mortician, bank clerk, a clubfooted school teacher, demonic fire chief, demented lumberjack, and the bank clerk's wheelchair-bound father. In spite of (or because of) the characters' oddities, they become nearly cartoon characters—extremely memorable stereotypes. Chronicling the "ordinary" lives after the inferno, the story gradually reveals a series of horrific events from the clerk's childhood and ultimately the reader is reminded that some crimes will forever remain secrets.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_Medicine_(novel)"title="Strong Medicine (novel)">
A young woman is dying from a dangerous new strain of Hepatitis, unfamiliar to her doctor Andrew Jordan. A major pharmaceutical company is researching a drug that will combat the symptoms, and one of its sales reps, Celia, smuggles-out a sample of it, which saves the patient’s life. Andrew and Celia are drawn together by this experience, and they get married.At the annual conference, Celia delivers a critical report about the company’s poor standards of training and ethical conduct, and is nearly fired by the company president Eli, until her line manager Sam intervenes on her behalf. Soon, Eli steps down through illness, and Celia is summoned to his deathbed, where he urges her always to follow her conscience.Sam now becomes president, working closely with Celia, and launches two major overseas initiatives. One is an English unit, headed by Martin, a Cambridge scholar researching memory loss and dementia, from which his late mother had suffered. The other is a French project for an anti-emetic for use in pregnancy, called Montayne. Celia’s reservations about the Montayne project are so serious that she follows Eli’s deathbed advice and resigns her job, only to be called back when its alarming flaws are revealed. Not only was there a blackmail scandal involving licensing, but Sam had given the drug to his pregnant daughter, resulting in his grandchild being severely (and permanently) disabled. Devastated, Sam commits suicide and Celia becomes president.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly_Tales_for_Gruesome_Kids"title="Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids">
The "Grizzly Tales" series features short stories about cautionary tales and imitates an episodic anthology horror (similar to "The Twilight Zone" or "Tales from the Darkside") with each book chapter a different short story. The typical structure would be a brief glance at a main character's typical day in their life, followed by a change in their routine (e.g. a new possession comes their way or a decision made by them/a supporting character) which eventually goes wrong in a hoisted with their own petard way, with the story ending with the main character either being killed, mutilated, involuntarily shapeshifting, or kidnapped by something/someone supernatural. They usually star children whose misbehaviour (laziness, greediness, vanity, lying, etc.) is failed to be reined in by their parents or guardians, who vary from encouraging it, ignoring it, failing to be firm with their punishments, or do nothing because they are used to being submissive (and are sometimes the victims of their child's abuse). There are exceptions, however, as some stories are about adults, or set in the past, or are pastiches.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone-Away_Lake"title="Gone-Away Lake">
"Gone-Away Lake" opens on a train traveling through the countryside of western New York state. Ten-year-old Portia Blake and her six-year-old brother Foster are going to see their favorite cousin, enthusiastic amateur naturalist Julian Jarman. The Jarmans have recently purchased a house in the country. Once there, Portia and Julian spend their days exploring, and one day they discover an abandoned Victorian resort community next to a bog. Elderly siblings Mr. Payton and Mrs. Cheever, the town's only remaining inhabitants, soon become friends with the children, who set up a club in one of the empty houses.Stories of the days when the bog was a lake called Tarrigo are interspersed with the modern-day adventures of Portia and Julian, who at first keep the lake and their new friends a secret. Foster soon discovers the secret and eventually the rest of the Jarman and Blake families also become acquainted with the charms of Gone-Away and its inhabitants. In "Return to Gone-Away", a sequel published in 1961, the Blake family buys and restores a house at Gone-Away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finding_Cassie_Crazy"title="Finding Cassie Crazy">
The novel follows the correspondence between students from two rival schools. Cassie Aganovic, Emily Thompson and Lydia Jaackson-Oberman, attend the prestigious, private Ashbury High; Matthew Dunlop, Charlie Taylor, and Sebastian Mantegna ("Seb") attend the public and notoriously rough, Brookfield High. In a special pen-pal program between the schools (previously seen in "Feeling Sorry for Celia" and set up by Mr. Botherit), Cassie begins to write to Matthew; Emily writes to Charlie; and Lydia exchanges letters with Seb. The letters are initially different degrees of hostile. Emily and Charlie poke fun at each other's writing, while Lydia and Seb bicker about whether or not they can trust each other. Matthew however, is much worse. He continuously threatens Cassie (i.e. "I'll break your fingers one by one"), but she responds calmly and tells no one of the abusive letters. Over time, the letters change tones. Charlie and Emily go on "practice dates" to help Charlie date the girl of his dreams, Christina Kratovac (who was the Brookfielder Elizabeth Clarry wrote to in "Feeling Sorry For Celia"). Lydia and Seb participate in "Secret Assignments" that eventually lead to their forming a close relationship. Cassie and Matthew begin to go down a similar path and plan a meeting after Cassie finally starts getting civil responses from Matthew. However, his sudden kindness is a ploy. He stands her up and then, on a following meeting, proceeds to rip up a letter that she had sent and openly mock her. This is especially hard for Cassie, because her father had recently died of cancer and Cassie had not yet come to terms with his death. This is why she never reported Matthew's initial abusive letters, she had not been feeling like herself and had lost her confidence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cop_Killer_(novel)"title="Cop Killer (novel)">
A woman disappears from the small town of Anderslöv in Scania, Sweden. Since her neighbor Folke Bengtsson has an earlier conviction for the murder of an American tourist named Roseanna McGraw, he is naturally suspected of having a connection to the woman's disappearance. Homicide investigator with the Swedish Police, Martin Beck, is put on the case. He begins his investigation by looking into the previous murder of Roseanna, and the man he himself got convicted of it. After some time the disappeared woman's body is found dead in a wallow, and Folke is charged with murder and taken into custody by the police. Shortly after this a police squad is involved in a shoot-out with two teenage burglars and a police man is badly injured. One of the teenagers survive the shooting and disappears from the scene. Beck's colleague Malm gets to investigate the police shooting and search for the survivor. The wounded policeman dies and the investigation becomes one regarding homicide/manslaughter. The survivor is tracked to Stockholm, and it turns out he has fled in a car that is connected to the murdered woman found in the wallow - it appears the car is owned by the real murderer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terrorists"title="The Terrorists">
The story opens with a trial where an eighteen-year-old woman is accused of a bank robbery she never intended to commit. Later, a pornographic film producer is found murdered at the home of his mistress. The main plot of the book involves Martin Beck leading a team of policemen to prevent a presumed terrorist attack on a highly unpopular American senator who is paying an official visit to Sweden. The attack is led by terrorist Reinhard Heydt, born to a Danish mother in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, part of the (fictitious) international terrorist organization Ulag which has already carried out several exceedingly brutal attacks successfully.Beck is appointed head of the protection unit for the state visit and to plan the distance protection with four colleagues. They assume that the attack on a place will be that the convoy must pass, perpetrated presumably in the same pattern as in a previous assassination by Ulag in a Latin American country.The four terrorists of Ulag manage to place the bomb. However, they are deceived by a delayed television coverage when triggering the ignition and Einar Ronn, one of four commissioners to Beck manages to clear the square shortly before the explosion.The situation already seems to be under control, but shortly afterwards there is a shot, but the victim is not the US Senator, but the Swedish Prime Minister. The perpetrator is the eighteen-year-old woman from the bank robbery storyline.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_at_the_Savoy"title="Murder at the Savoy">
Martin Beck has to search through the high powered business man Viktor Palmgren's many enemies when the business man is shot in front of a dozen witnesses at a high-end restaurant. Behind the facade of legal transactions he finds out that Palmgren had earned most of his money with illegal arms deals.During the investigation it turns out that Bertil Svensson shot Palmgren because he had caused his unemployment, the loss of his home and, ultimately, the loss of his family. Svensson confesses and is arrested while Palmgren's unscrupulous business partners remain largely undisturbed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtship_Rite"title="Courtship Rite">
The novel details the attempts of two of the priest-clans, the Kaiel and the Mnankrei, to expand into territory controlled by the Stgal.Ultimately, all the priest clans are trying to attain dominance of the planet through the use of new technology, propaganda, treachery, and "war", a new concept in this world. Previously, killing was done merely in order to provide food.Jo Walton remarked that "Courtship Rite" "is about a distant generation of colonists on a planet with no usable animals. This is the book with everything, where everything includes cannibalism, polyamory, evolution and getting tattoos so your skin will make more interesting leather when you’re dead."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_Queen"title="Rogue Queen">
On the planet of the star Lalande 21185, known to Terrans as Ormazd, the dominant humanoid species is organized into hive societies much like those of Earth's ants and bees. In each community a hyper-fertile queen and a handful of male drones are responsible for reproduction, while all other tasks are performed by sterile female workers. This status quo is disrupted by the arrival of the "Paris", an exploratory spacecraft of the "Viagens Interplanetarias", Earth's space authority. Its mixed crew of socially equal and universally fertile males and females opens up other possibilities to the natives, and particularly to Iroedh, a scholarly worker from the community of Elham. Her own antiquarian research leads her to the conclusion that Ormazd's society may once have been like Earth's. Her peers, however, are only interested in ferreting out the Terrans' technological secrets for possible military use. Iroedh, by making friends with Winston Bloch and Barbe Dulac, two of the newcomers, ironically finds herself in a better position to do this than her more self-interested comrades.Hoping to save Antis, a condemned drone for whom she harbors platonically romantic feelings, Iroedh uses her new friends first to effect a rescue and then to intervene in Elhamni politics to reverse his death sentence. The second effort backfires, making her, Antis and their allies fugitives. Hunted by both the Elhamni and the outlaw band of the rogue drone Wythias, who is intent on gaining Terran weaponry, they get lost in the wilderness and come near to starvation. To survive Iroedh is forced to abandon her vegetarian worker diet and eat meat, which is deemed poisonous to all females except queens. Its actual effect on her is to cause her to mature sexually, making her a queen herself, though one without a community to rule. She and Antis become lovers. Afterwards, still pursued by Wythias' band, the four succeed in reaching the Oracle of Ledhwid, a neutral power in the midst of the warring communities. To their surprise, the current occupant of the Oracle's office proves to be another alien, Gildakk from the planet Thoth in the Procyonic system, the sole survivor of an earlier expedition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Knew_He_Was_Right"title="He Knew He Was Right">
A wealthy young English gentleman, Louis Trevelyan, visits the fictional Mandarin Islands, a distant British possession, and becomes smitten with Emily Rowley, the eldest daughter of the governor, Sir Marmaduke Rowley. The Rowleys accompany Trevelyan to London, where he marries Emily. When the rest of the family goes home, Emily's sister Nora remains behind, under Trevelyan's protection.The marriage is initially a happy one and the couple have a baby boy. Then a seemingly minor matter undermines their marriage. Colonel Osborne, an old friend of Sir Marmaduke's, visits Emily much too frequently for her husband's taste. Though nothing improper occurs, Trevelyan orders his wife to avoid the man in future. Emily resents his lack of trust and makes no attempt to hide it. Their relationship deteriorates to the point that they separate.Meanwhile, Nora attracts two admirers, the wealthy Charles Glascock, the eldest son and heir of Lord Peterborough, and Hugh Stanbury, a close friend of Trevelyan's from their days at Oxford University. Stanbury ekes out a precarious living writing newspaper articles. Glascock proposes to Nora, but despite the fact that Stanbury has given no indication of his feelings for her, she rejects the future nobleman, not without a great deal of struggle and much to the dismay of her friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangerine_(Bloor_novel)"title="Tangerine (Bloor novel)">
Paul Fisher and his family move from Houston, Texas to Lake Windsor Downs in Tangerine, Florida. Erik, the older son, looks forward to a football scholarship at the University of his choice. Paul, the younger son, is visually impaired and legally blind but plays soccer. His family credits his visual injury to an incident, which he does not remember, in which at a young age, he continued to stare at a solar eclipse despite his parents' warnings not to. Soon after they unpack, Paul goes for a tour of his new school, where Mike Costello and his brother Joey are introduced. On his first day of school, Paul meets Coach Walski, the coach of the soccer team, and tries out for the team, but is later told that his visual impairment prevents his eligibility, and blames this on his mother revealing the impairment to the school administrators. One day Mike Costello is killed by lightning; Erik and his friend Arthur Bauer tell jokes after hearing the news, even though Mike was one of their teammates. While Paul is at school, a field of portable classrooms collapses into a sinkhole. Many people, including Paul and Joey, help rescue those trapped, and no one is seriously injured. The emergency relocation plan gives the students the choice to stay at Lake Windsor, their present school, with a different schedule and more crowded classes, or to transfer to Tangerine Middle School, on the other, poorer side of the county; Paul chooses Tangerine Middle to be able to play soccer again. When he arrives at Tangerine Middle School, he is shown around by a girl named Theresa Cruz. At lunch, Paul asks Theresa about the soccer team. Theresa tells Paul that her twin brother, Tino, is a member. She brings Paul to a soccer meet after school and he joins. At first, Paul's teammates Victor, the team captain, and Tino hesitate to befriend him, but a victory in the first game of the season (against the aggressive Palmetto Whippoorwills) convinces Victor to do so. Paul then persuades Joey Costello to join Tangerine Middle School. After a quarrel with Paul and his friends, Joey returns to Lake Windsor. Throughout the story, houses in Paul's neighborhood are covered with tents to be fumigated for termites. A young man named Luis is introduced as the older brother of Theresa and Tino. Luis works at his parents' citrus farm and is developing a new kind of tangerine called the Golden Dawn. While at Paul's house for a school project, Tino makes fun at how Erik fell down while attempting to a kick an extra point during an earlier football game, so Erik punches him. Luis goes to Erik's football practice to confront him about this, but Erik distracts him while signaling his friend Arthur to strike Luis from behind using a blackjack. This is witnessed by Paul, and Luis is found dead six days later from an aneurysm. Paul is told by Theresa not to go to the funeral because he is Erik's brother, and he grieves alone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunder_Cave"title="Thunder Cave">
After the death of his mother, who dies in a fatal car accident, fourteen-year-old Jacob Lansa embarks on a journey across the globe to Kenya, to find his father. On his journey he meets a Masai named Supeet and Stionik whose goal is to bring the long rains. Supeet believes that Jacob is in Kenya for other reasons than to find his father, which bides true after an accident that could end the chance to bring the long rains.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Radiant_Seas"title="The Radiant Seas">
Kurj has to deal not only with the shocking sudden death of Soz, whom he imagined as his successor, but also with the political intrigues of the Eubian emperor Ur Qox, who draws the Allieds on his side, using lies and dirty tricks. When Ur tries to take Kurj prisoner, this leads to the destruction of a part of his fleet and to the death of both Ur and Kurj, leaving their two empires presumably heirless.Soz's brother Althor inherits her position of the imperial heir after her apparent death. When he learns that his sister is alive, he promises his father Eldrinson to keep the secret for himself. But later he is captured by the Eubians during a space battle and unwillingly reveals this information after a brutal torture. The widowed empress Viquara sees an opportunity to provide the Eubian Concord with an heir without losing her political power.Sauscony abandons her life as a Jagernaut, fakes her own death, and elopes with Jaibriol Qox, the heir to the Eubian Concord. They relocate, with help, to an Allied-discovered, unknown planet which they call Prism. They have four children and live a relatively quiet life, though they know that someday they will most probably have return to their warring civilizations. Their children are heirs to both the Skolian Empire and the Eubian Concord.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Journey_(novel)"title="The Night Journey (novel)">
Nana Sashie (an Ashkenazi Jewish woman born in Mykolaiv in what is now Ukraine) tells her great-grandchild, Rachel, of her escape from the Russian Empire during the early 1900s, when pogroms were common. Nana Sashie refuses to eat for a week with the intention of dying, and passes away. Before moving to Minnesota, Nana Sashie was married to Reuven Bloom for 40 years.Open Court Reading took the book and shortened it, giving Rachel the name "Rache". The story starts with a background of the story and the story from Ed's gift – a samovar – and Nana Sashie looking upset. When Rache sneaks into Nana Sashie's room to look at the samovar, she ends up hearing Nana's tale.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pyrates"title="The Pyrates">
Written in arch, ironic style and containing a great deal of deliberate anachronism, it traces the adventures of a classic hero (Captain Benjamin Avery, RN, very loosely based on Henry Avery), multiple damsels in distress, and the six captains who lead the infamous Coast Brotherhood (Calico Jack Rackham, Black Bilbo, Firebeard, Happy Dan Pew, Akbar the Terrible and Sheba the She-Wolf). It also concerns the charismatic anti-hero, Colonel Thomas Blood (cashiered), a rakish dastard who is loosely modeled on the historical figure, Thomas Blood. All of the above face off against the malevolently hilarious Spanish viceroy of Cartagena, Don Lardo. The book's 400 pages of continuous action travel from England to Madagascar to various Caribbean ports of call along the Spanish Main.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golf_in_the_Year_2000"title="Golf in the Year 2000">
The plot follows Gibson as he is introduced to the wonders of the dawning 21st century by his host, the current owner of the house where Gibson lay sleeping for 108 years. Like Gibson, the host is a passionate golf player. Much of the story revolves around the two men's visits to the golf course, where Gibson learns first-hand the radical changes that technology has made to the game. There are golf clubs that automatically keep their user's score, driverless golf caddies or carts, and special jackets, which everyone must wear, that yell "Fore!" whenever the player begins his swing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sledding_Hill"title="The Sledding Hill">
The novel is narrated by the late Billy Bartholomew, the best friend of the protagonist, Eddie Proffit. Eddie is an intelligent boy who is seemingly afflicted with ADHD. After the death of two important figures of his life in quick succession, his father and his best friend, Eddie refuses to speak. He begins talking again when he testifies in front of the Red Brick Church announcing he will not only not join the church, but will also speak in favor of "Warren Peece" at the school board meeting. A misinterpretation of his testimony compels the church members to have Eddie placed into a mental health facility supposedly because Eddie thinks he is Jesus Christ. Crutcher places himself in the novel's climax as a speaker at the board meeting on the removal of the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Templar"title="The Last Templar">
In the present, four people on horseback dressed as Templars storm New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art during its exhibition of "The Treasures of the Vatican". The raid results in injury and death; most of the artifacts on display are either destroyed or stolen. Most notable is the theft of a multigeared rotor encoder.Tess Chaykin, an archaeologist, survives the raid, but is bothered by something mouthed by the leader of the Templars as he stole the encoder: "Veritas vos liberabit." After a fruitless Internet search to figure out the significance of the cryptic phrase, Chaykin visits a former colleague who informs her that the phrase has Templar connections (it was carved into a Templar castle in France), and advises her that pursuing the inquiry further requires an expert on the Templars. Tess decides to locate William Vance, an old friend who turns out to be missing.One of the Met raiders, Gus Waldron, tries to sell a stolen piece to antique dealer Lucien Boussard. The dealer tips off the FBI about Waldron's connection to the museum raid. The following day, Waldron notices the cops surrounding Lucien's store. He sets the antique store proprietor on fire and uses him as cover to get to a taxi. He kills the driver and flees, with the FBI, including the agent in charge of the case, Sean Reilly, in pursuit. The chase ends when Waldron accidentally plows into a storefront, leaving him severely injured. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_the_Bane"title="Invasion of the Bane">
A thirteen-year-old girl, Maria Jackson, and her recently divorced father Alan move into a house opposite journalist and former time traveller, Sarah Jane Smith. The night after they have moved in, Maria is woken by an ethereal light emanating from Sarah Jane's house, which she discovers, to her horrified fascination, to be Sarah Jane conversing with a star poet, or Arcateenian.The next morning, a neighbor Kelsey Hooper visits and welcomes Maria before inviting her into town, using the free "Bubble Shock!" bus to travel there and tour the factory. Once they arrive at the factory, they are led to a security scanner, which surreptitiously collects their DNA to transfer to an "Archetype" under the supervision of the factory's owner, Mrs Wormwood.Sarah Jane, having overheard the girls making plans, follows them to the factory and interviews Mrs Wormwood, and how she was able to get approval for the drink so fast, and why the Bane, an ingredient unique to the drink, was "resisting" analysis, to which she is told that all that "Bubble Shock!" is doing is satisfying the needs of the Western world. On Sarah Jane's way out, she is almost killed by Mrs Wormwood's secretary.Kelsey wanders from the tour and attempts to phone a friend, but disturbs an unknown beast, the Bane Mother, to the annoyance of the staff, to which Mrs Wormwood orders the alarms switched off and Sarah Jane killed. Maria attempts to phone Kelsey, but sets off the alarms again, causing the Archetype to escape, transferring the focus upon him. Maria, while escaping, encounters him, who just mimics her, and they escape into a women's bathroom. Sarah Jane then enters, and although they are surprised to see each other, they manage to escape the factory, albeit without Kelsey. When they arrive back on Bannerman Road, Sarah Jane warns Maria not to get involved as her life is too dangerous.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_Mage_series"title="Rogue Mage series">
The story take place about a century after an apocalypse. It includes "neomages", a new race of beings that arose during the time of the apocalypse. They live in an area known as the Enclave, which is both a prison and sanctuary, and are able to work with "leftover creation energy".Thorn St. Croix is a neomage in exile from the Enclave. Thorn (unlike most mages) is telepathic, and she constantly hears the thoughts of the other mages in the Enclave. This threatened to drive her insane when it began during her adolescence and forced her to live amongst humans whose thoughts she does not hear.Because mages without a special license are not allowed amongst the human population, Thorn must hide her true nature lest she be killed, either by the humans - who would torture her first - or by the seraphs who have ruled the earth since the apocalypse began.Thorn is a "stone mage", and channels her talents with stone into lapidary work and jewelry-making, running the store, Thorn's Gems, with her partners, Rupert and Jaycee, in the small town of Mineral City, Carolina, where they all live.Thorn's life is suddenly disrupted when police officer Thaddeus Bartholomew comes to her door and announces that her ex-husband Lucas, (who is also Rupert's brother) has been kidnapped. She is a suspect. Thadd, it turns out, is a kylen, progeny of a seraph and a mix of human and mage. Thorn realizes this when he "kindles" her mage-heat. Amazingly, Thadd appears not to know he is anything but pure human, and were he to discover her secret, he would immediately arrest her for being an unlicensed mage outside of Enclave. She must risk death in order to save the father of her former stepdaughter, Ciana - the child of her heart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Sweet_Audrina"title="My Sweet Audrina">
Audrina Adare claims she is seven years old when the novel begins, although it is later revealed that Audrina's memory is unreliable. Audrina lives at Whitefern, a Victorian-era mansion, with her father Damian, her mother Lucietta, her aunt Ellsbeth, and her cousin Vera. The family takes special care to keep Audrina unaware of precise dates, including that of her own birthday – even though Audrina knows that she was born on the ninth of September, she is frequently confused about the exact passage of time, leading Vera to mock her for being insane. Audrina's father, however, is convinced that Audrina "walks in her own time space". Nine years before Audrina was born, her elder sister – also named Audrina and also born on September 9 – was raped and murdered in the woods on her ninth birthday. Damian tells her stories about his "first and best Audrina" and convinces the younger Audrina that, by a process of self-hypnosis (which includes going into the first Audrina's old bedroom and rocking in her rocking chair), she can gain all of her memories and become just as beloved and special as the original Audrina, which is what she wants more than anything else in the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amateur_Gentleman"title="The Amateur Gentleman">
The format of the novel is essentially that of a "bildungsroman". It tells the story of Barnabas Barty, the son of John Barty, the former boxing champion of England and landlord of a pub in Kent. At the start of the tale, Barnabas comes fortuitously into the possession of a vast fortune - £700,000, an astronomical amount by Regency standards - and determines to use this fortune to become a gentleman. His father objects to this plan and they quarrel. They settle their differences in a round of fisticuffs, which Barnabas wins, beating his father fair and square. Barnabas sets off for London to further his ambitions and, on the way there, contrives to make a number of influential friends and enemies.Farnol exploits the naïvety of the youth for comic effect. For instance, Barnabas is gulled by the chapman who sells him a book on etiquette at an outrageous mark-up. At the other end of the spectrum, Farnol is equally disdainful of Barnabas' sophisticated concealment of his identity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascending"title="Ascending">
The novel opens with "A Word About Oar", a brief recap of the earlier story. At the end of "Expendable", Festina left the apparently deceased Oar lying in one of the Towers of Ancestors on her planet, where her people absorb high-energy radiations that sustain their lives. At the start of "Ascending", Oar regains consciousness in the tower where Festina left her, to find that she is being accosted by a diminutive and odd-looking orange being. This is Uclodda Unorr, a professional smuggler who has been hired to gather evidence on past misdeeds of the Technocracy's Outward Fleet—and who is surprised to discover that Oar is alive. He informs her that four years have passed since Festina left Melaquin, which makes the year 2456 A.D. Unorr has been sent to gather evidence before representatives of the Outward Fleet can arrive to destroy or conceal it; thanks to Festina's activities, a scandal has erupted that will expose the corruption of the High Council of Admirals (events recounted in Gardner's "Hunted"). Unorr and Oar find it in their interest to escape the planet forthwith; but as they and Unorr's large and muscular (but demur) wife Lajooli are leaving in a bioneural spacecraft, they are confronted by the Shaddill, who have come to use Oar's corpse in an experiment and are also surprised that she is alive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Pacific_War"title="The Great Pacific War">
In "The Great Pacific War", the war begins with a Japanese invasion of Manchuria, Formosa and Korea. Japan then stages a surprise attack which results in the nearly complete destruction of the Panama Canal, by exploding a freighter full of explosives in the Gaillard Cut.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violets_Are_Blue_(novel)"title="Violets Are Blue (novel)">
Alex receives a call from the Mastermind, who tells Alex that he killed Cavalierre.Kyle Craig calls Alex about a similarity between two murders in San Francisco and a murder in Washington DC that they’d worked on a few months before. The case involved a runaway girl that was found hanged from a light fixture in a hotel room.The FBI requests that he go to San Francisco to meet Inspector Jamilla Hughes. First, Alex takes Jannie and Ali to school but tells them he'll be back for Damon's choir concert.Jamilla picks Cross up at the airport. She takes him to the morgue to see the bodies. A friend of hers, Dr. Allan Pang (a dental expert)is examining the bites on the victims. After reviewing the bites, he deduces that the man was bitten and mauled by a tiger and the girl was bitten by humans.William and Michael watch the story unfold on TV. They were on a mission and the publicity was part of the plan. William tells Michael that he has a plan for that night. The two brothers break into a funeral home and feast on a dead woman who had not yet been embalmed.Cross is still impressed by Jamilla's work ethic. Alex is working on trying to find a lead on the tiger. He's checking with zoos, veterinarians, and animal trainers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Haunting_of_Alaizabel_Cray"title="The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray">
The story is set in a Victorian London overrun by demonic creatures called wych-kin. While out hunting Wych-kin in the abandoned regions of the city, Thaniel Fox is attacked by a girl in a confused state. Thaniel leaves her under the guard of his old family friend Cathaline Bennett and begins making enquiries at the mental wards run by Dr. Mammon Pyke. After meeting with Dr. Pyke, Thaniel suspects Pyke is lying to him for unknown reasons. During the girl's slow recovery, it becomes apparent that she has no memory of her past life apart from her name: Alaizabel Cray. Alaizabel has been tattooed with a Chackh'morg, a symbol which leaves her open to spirit possession by an entity called Thatch. When a Wych-kin almost kidnaps Alaizabel, Thaniel and Cathaline realise they can no longer hide. They take her to a beggar lord called Crott, who owes them a favour. Crott uncovers someone who knows about Alaizabel's past: Perris The Boar. Perris tells them that Alaizabel was used by the Fraternity, an evil cult bent on world destruction and led by Dr. Mammon Pyke. The Fraternity killed her parents and placed the spirit of Thatch inside her.While consulting Crott, Thaniel meets Inspector Carver, who has been investigating a series of ritual killings known as the Green Tack Murders. They map out the sites of each killing and discover that the killings form the shape of the Chackh'morg. The Fraternity's ultimate plan is to use the killings to open a dimensional portal and allow London to be overrun by ancient gods called the Glau Meska. While trying to save the final Green Tack victim, Thaniel realises that the culprit is a Wych-kin called Rawhead, summoned by the Fraternity to carry out the killings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Boy_Shuffle"title="The White Boy Shuffle">
In the book's prologue, the reader meets the narrator, Gunnar Kaufman, a prolific African-American poet whose astronomically successful book, "Watermelanin", has sold 126 million copies, elevating him to the status of "Negro Demagogue." The prologue asserts that what follows are Gunnar memoirs, "the battlefield remains of a frightened deserter in the eternal war for civility" (2). The novel opens with a comic survey of Gunnar's family tree, as his mother relates the tales of his family history to him and his sisters. Gunnar in turn regales his classmates with the tales of his ancestors, one of whom Gunnar claims dodged the bullet that eventually killed Crispus Attucks in the Boston Massacre. Gunnar is a young boy growing up in affluent, predominantly white Santa Monica, California with his mother and sisters. His absent father is a sketch artist for the LAPD and rarely sees his children. Gunnar's friends are white, and he spends his free time making enough mischief to gain him mild admonishments from the Santa Monica Shore Patrol. This was found to be true because Kenneth Rogers made it so.When Gunnar and his sisters tell their mother they do not want to attend an all-black summer camp because the children there "are different from us," Ms. Kaufman immediately packs up a U-Haul and relocates her family to the West Los Angeles neighborhood of Hillside, a predominantly black community surrounded by a concrete wall that Gunnar describes as the ghetto (37). In Hillside, the Kaufman children encounter an altogether different lifestyle than the one they were accustomed to in Santa Monica. Gunnar learns "the hard way that social norms in Santa Monica were unforgivable breaches of proper Hillside etiquette, and soon after arriving is beaten up by one of the area's local gangs, the "Gun Totin' Hooligans" (52).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_House_Flowers"title="Hot House Flowers">
A dandelion from outside a hothouse releases her seeds into the hothouse and the dandelions begin to use up all the water, soil, and sunlight. The native flowers, who remain silent for fear of appearing intolerant, begin to wither.The God-like hothouse owner removes the dandelions. When the original dandelion sends in more seeds the native hothouse flowers use their roots and stems to push the dandelion seeds to the bottom of the hothouse, where they cannot grow. Seeing this, the dandelions outside the hothouse stop sending seeds in.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playing_Beatie_Bow"title="Playing Beatie Bow">
Lynette Kirk has been a happy child, cheery about her parents and life, until the day her father leaves her and her mother Kathy for another woman. Lynette wants to distance herself from the life they have shared with her father and changes her name to Abigail. Abigail goes down to the park with her young next-door neighbours, Natalie and Vincent. She finds the children there playing a game called "Beatie Bow". After becoming very interested in a "Little Furry Girl" who stands there watching them play, Abigail decides to follow her.When Abigail's mother admits that she has been seeing her father again and would like them all to move to Norway, where he works as an architect, Abigail is furious and goes for a walk to cool off, again encountering the mysterious girl. She follows her back into the 1800s and is tripped up by the Little Furry Girl's father, resulting in a sprained ankle and a bruised head.Further into the novel the character Granny (Alice Tallisker) tells Abigail that she is "the stranger" and has "the gift". "The gift" comes from a crocheted detail on her dress, which enables her to travel and heal. The book later suggests that Granny will complete the crochet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khun_Chang_Khun_Phaen"title="Khun Chang Khun Phaen">
Khun Chang, Phlai Kaeo (who later is given the title, Khun Phaen), and Nang Phim Philalai (who later changes her name to Wanthong) are childhood friends in Suphanburi. Khun Phaen is handsome and intelligent, but poor because the king has executed his father and seized their property. He enters the monkhood as a novice to get educated, excelling at military skills and love magic. Khun Chang is ugly and stupid, but rich and well-connected at the Ayutthaya court.By age 15, Phim is the belle of Suphanburi. She meets Phlai Kaeo when putting food in his almsbowl at Songkran (Thai New Year). Sparks fly. They have a passionate affair, with him shuttling between the wat (Buddhist monastery) and her bedroom. Khun Chang is also smitten by Phim. He competes for her using his wealth and status. He offers to give her mother Phim's weight in gold. After Phlai Kaeo and Phim are married, Khun Chang maneuvers the king to send Phlai Kaeo on military service, and then claims he is dead. When Phlai Kaeo returns victorious, Khun Chang plots to have him banished from Ayutthaya for negligence on government service.Phim (now Wanthong) resists Khun Chang's advance. But when Phlai Kaeo (now Khun Phaen) returns from war with another wife, they have a jealous quarrel. Wanthong goes to live with Khun Chang, enjoying his devotion and the comforts afforded by his wealth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchman_(novel)"title="Watchman (novel)">
The book tells the story of Miles Flint, a surveillance officer who works for MI5.After two high-profile operations involving Flint are compromised with deadly consequences, he is sent to Belfast to witness what he believes is going to be the arrest of some Provisional Irish Republican Army men. However, after accompanying the security forces on their mission, he discovers that what has actually been planned is the assassination of the Irishmen – and with Flint having come along for the ride, he suddenly realises that his own life is at risk.As the killings are about to be carried out, Flint stages a daring escape with the aid of one of the Irishmen, Will Collins. Then, on the run, and playing a deadly game of cat and mouse with his own side, Flint and Collins begin to piece together a lethal conspiracy which they ultimately discover goes right to the very core of the British Government.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Watch"title="Last Watch">
## Common Cause.Anton Gorodetsky is learning to use his new power when Gesar sends him to assist the Scottish Night Watch in Edinburgh in a murder investigation. A young Russian man has been murdered in a "Vampire Castle", a tourist attraction; the evidence shows that he was apparently killed by a vampire. The mystery is greater than it seems, as someone tries to attack Anton using remote controlled guns.Finally the head of Scottish Night Watch, Thomas Lermont, reveals that someone stole an artifact from Merlin's grave and is apparently trying to use this artifact to open Merlin's secret storage. In that mysterious place Merlin apparently hid the "Crown of All Things" (nobody knows what it is). After the Night Watch is attacked by ordinary humans equipped with magical amulets and bullets, Thomas and Anton follow someone to the Twilight. They get as far as the sixth level (a first for Anton), but all they find out is that there are three people behind this - a Light Other, a Dark Other and an Inquisitor. Thomas also tells Anton that the seventh level of the Twilight is the Others' paradise, where they can exist in peace together (upon death, Others just vanish into the Twilight). Merlin has hidden the Crown of All Things in the seventh level of the Twilight.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer_in_the_North"title="The Sorcerer in the North">
The book starts off with Will rescuing a dog with a spear wound that he finds on the side of the road. Will then goes on to Castle Seacliff of the fief he has been assigned to and has a meeting with the baron there. After the meeting, a group of Skandians attempt to raid the fief and Will makes a deal with them: if he gives them food and drink, the Skandians will leave. When the owner of the dog tracks it and Will down, he is captured and handed over to the Skandians to become a slave before they leave.Will is soon assigned to a mission to determine the identity of a mysterious sorcerer in Grimsdell Wood, and to stop him from terrorising the castle of Macindaw. Will goes under disguise as a jongleur; somebody who acts as a jester but doesn't serve a king, going around the kingdom entertaining for money. He does this because people tend to trust jongleurs, whereas people often clam up around Rangers due to the mystery surrounding their position. This would, in turn, help him to get information on Grimsdell Wood more easily. Will travels to Macindaw, where their lord, Syron, has been poisoned and is now in the hospital. His son Orman has taken over the castle while his father is ill, but Orman's cousin Keren has been trying to take over as lord, but Will does not know this yet. Will rides to Grimsdell and sees the Night Warrior, one of the ghosts in Grimsdell, and flees in fear on his horse Tug.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_(novel)"title="Pulp (novel)">
"Pulp" is a pulp fiction novel which acts also as a meta-pulp. "Pulp" comments on the obsessions of the pulp fiction genre, making fun of itself as stereotypical of the genre in the grimiest form. Bukowski dedicates the story to "bad writing", as Bukowski did not plan his mystery novel well and frequently wrote Nicky Belane into holes from which he could not escape. Bukowski wrote some of his most violent, cynical, sarcastic, and shocking work during the final months of his life. Many critics have agreed this novel exemplifies Bukowski showing an acceptance of his own pending mortality.A convoluted detective story about a hard-boiled private eye who solves his cases by waiting them out, "Pulp" evokes Raymond Chandler, an author who lived in Los Angeles and set stories there, as did Bukowski. The novel also bears similarity to some works by Dashiell Hammett; and the name of character Nicky Belane rhymes suggestively with the name of author Mickey Spillane as well as "Casablanca"s main character Rick Blaine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Painted_Veil_(novel)"title="The Painted Veil (novel)">
Maugham uses a third-person-limited point of view in this story, where Kitty Garstin is the focal character.Garstin, a pretty upper-middle class debutante, squanders her early youth amusing herself by living a social high life, during which her domineering mother attempts to arrange a "brilliant match" for her. By age 25, Kitty has flirted with and declined marriage proposals from dozens of prospective husbands. Her mother, convinced that her eldest daughter has "missed her market", urges Kitty to settle for the rather “odd” Walter Fane, a bacteriologist and physician, who declares his love for Kitty. In a panic that her much younger, and less attractive, sister, Doris, will upstage her by marrying first, Kitty consents to Walter's ardent marriage proposition with the words, "I suppose so". Shortly before Doris's much grander wedding, Kitty and Walter depart as newlyweds to his post in Hong Kong.Just weeks after settling in the Far East, Kitty meets Charlie Townsend, the Assistant Colonial Secretary. He is tall, handsome, urbane and extremely charming, and they begin an affair. Almost two years later, Walter, unsuspecting, and still devoted to his wife, observes Kitty and Charlie during an assignation, and the lovers, suspecting they've been discovered, reassure themselves that Walter will not intervene in the matter. Charlie promises Kitty that, come what may, he will stand by her. Aware that the cuckolded Walter is his administrative inferior, Charlie feels confident that the bacteriologist will avoid scandal to protect his career and reputation. For her part, Kitty, who has never felt real affection for her husband, grasps that, in fact, he is fully aware of her infidelity (though he initially refrains from confronting her) and she begins to despise his apparent cowardice. She discerns, however, an ominous change in his demeanour, masked by his scrupulous, punctilious behaviour.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Reversed_Himself"title="The Boy Who Reversed Himself">
A high school girl, Laura, grows suspicious when a report of hers appears in mirror writing, and Omar, the weird boy next door, makes it go back to normal. Furthermore, he seems to be parting his hair on a different side than usual. He first refuses to explain what is happening, but after she repeatedly coaxes him, he reveals that he has access to the fourth dimension, where he accidentally "reversed" himself.Omar eventually allows Laura to visit the fourth dimension under his supervision, but he warns her that it is dangerous and that he is violating an agreement by revealing the secret. Laura tries to use her access to the higher dimension to impress Pete, a popular boy she wants to accompany to the school dance, but after she seems to disappear into thin air and unlock a door from the other side, Pete realizes something strange has occurred, and she feels pressured to show him the truth, without Omar's knowledge.When she brings Pete into four-space, they lose their way and end up as the captives of four-dimensional creatures. Unfortunately, she determines that escaping might threaten the very existence of her own world by making the powerful 4-D creatures aware of it. With Omar's help, she finds a safe way out and learns the truth about how he learned of other dimensions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kaiser's_Last_Kiss"title="The Kaiser's Last Kiss">
The story is set in 1940 and concerns Untersturmführer Martin Krebbs, a young and recently commissioned SS officer who has been sent to Huis Doorn to guard the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II as the German Army advances into the Netherlands. While there, Krebbs meets and falls for Akki, an undercover British agent posing as a maid, who has been sent by the British Secret Service on the orders of Winston Churchill to assess the Kaiser's feelings about the war and his possible willingness to defect to Britain.As the story unfolds, and through conversations Krebbs has with both the Kaiser and Akki (who Krebbs discovers is Jewish), and a visit from Heinrich Himmler, Krebbs begins to discover some uncomfortable truths about the Nazis, forcing him to question the things he has been taught. When Akki's true identity is in danger of being exposed, Krebbs must choose between his duty to the Third Reich and his feelings for the woman he loves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_Girl_(novel)"title="Nature Girl (novel)">
Honey Santana becomes irritated by telemarketers and invites a particularly obnoxious one to a phony real estate promotion - which she describes as an eco-tour - in the Ten Thousand Islands in order to teach him a lesson. It is thus that telemarketers Boyd Shreave and his reluctant mistress Eugenie Fonda make their way from Texas to Everglades City, Florida, and eventually Dismal Key with Honey, unaware that she is being stalked by Louis Piejack, Honey's perverted and disfigured ex-employer, who is unaware that he is being followed by Fry, Honey's wise and protective twelve-year-old son, and his courageous ex-drug runner father. Also on the island are a young half-Seminole man named Sammy Tigertail and his very willing captive, Gillian, a sex-obsessed, warmhearted Florida State coed. Various odd events surface along the way.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King_of_Elfland's_Daughter"title="The King of Elfland's Daughter">
The lord of Erl is told by the parliament of his people that they want to be ruled by a magic lord. Obeying the immemorial custom, the lord sends his son Alveric to fetch the King of Elfland's daughter, Lirazel, to be his bride. He makes his way to Elfland, where time passes at a rate far slower than the real world, and wins her. They return to Erl and have a son, but in the manner of fairy brides of folklore, she fits uneasily with his people. She returns to the waiting arms of her father in Elfland, and her lovesick husband goes searching for her, abandoning the kingdom of Erl and wandering in a now-hopeless quest. However, Lirazel becomes lonesome for her mortal husband and son. Seeing that she is unhappy, the King of Elfland uses a powerful magic to engulf the land of Erl. Erl is transformed into a part of Elfland, and Lirazel and her loved ones are reunited forever in an eternal, enchanted world.During the course of the novel, the King of Elfland uses up all of the three powerful magic spells he had been reserving for the defense of his realm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Charwoman's_Shadow"title="The Charwoman's Shadow">
In Spain, during its Golden Age, a lord wishes to marry his daughter to a neighbor, but has no money for her dowry. He sends his son Ramon to a nearby magician who had befriended his father, in hopes that the son would learn to turn lead to gold. An old charwoman without a shadow works for the magician. The magician persuades him to trade his shadow for the knowledge, and gives him a substitute, and the charwoman who works for the magician laments that. He then learns that his substitute shadow does not grow and shrink as it ought to, making it difficult to mix with ordinary people except at certain times of day.His sister sends him a letter asking him to get her a love potion instead. He persuades the magician to teach him that instead, and he compounds it and gives it to his sister. When her betrothed husband arrives with a friend of his, a duke, she gives the potion to the duke, who falls deathly ill. Terrified, she nurses him; he recovers his health, enraged with everyone else, especially her betrothed, but in love with her.Their priest dispels Ramon's false shadow but sends him back to retrieve his own, for without it his soul is in danger of damnation. He tricks the magician into telling him some of the magic words needed to open the box where the shadows are kept, and works out the rest. He takes out his own shadow and tries to find the charwoman's. He goes back to her to tell her that he cannot find it. She tells him that it was the one of a beautiful young girl. He brings it to her, and when they reunite, she is transformed back into that beautiful girl, as if the shadow were casting her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddha_Da"title="Buddha Da">
The book takes a mostly light-hearted look at what might happen when two vastly opposing worlds and ways of life come into contact with each other.Following a chance meeting with a Buddhist monk in a Glasgow sandwich bar one lunchtime, painter and decorator Jimmy McKenna starts to develop an interest in Buddhism and begins to visit a meditation centre and go away for weekend retreats. The story is essentially about Jimmy's new-found faith, and the reaction of his immediate family to this.It is told from three points of view - those of Jimmy, his wife Liz, and their daughter Anne Marie - and follows the family as Jimmy's desire to lead a better and more meaningful life begins to have an effect on them all. To begin with, this proves to be to their detriment, as Liz and Anne Marie cannot understand why Jimmy - who has previously been an atheist - would suddenly want to become a Buddhist. However, as the story unfolds, a series of events allow everyone to gain some insight into the choices Jimmy has made.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Black"title="Beyond Black">
The book's central character is a medium named Alison Hart who, along with her assistant/business partner/manager, Colette, takes her one-woman psychic show on the road, travelling to venues around the Home Counties, and providing her audience with a point of contact between this world and the next. On the surface, Alison seems like a happy-go-lucky woman, but this persona is only a mask she wears for her public. In truth, she is deeply traumatised by memories and ghosts from her childhood, and a knowledge that the afterlife is not the wonderful place her clients often perceive it to be. She spends much of the story trying to exorcise her demons, and by the end is ultimately able to overcome them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_(Howard_novel)"title="Falling (Howard novel)">
The book tells the story of a relationship that develops between Henry Kent, a sociopath and fantasist who preys on lonely rich women, and Daisy Langrish, an ageing novelist with two broken marriages behind her.After meeting Daisy—who has recently bought a cottage in order to start a new life in the country—Henry quickly falls in love with her, and sets about tricking his way into her confidence.He initially offers to become her gardener—something she reluctantly accepts—then later begins to correspond with her after she suffers an accident during a prolonged trip abroad. These letters start as run of the mill pieces, but as he perceives that she is taking an interest in him, Henry begins to weave her a series of elaborate stories about his life, designed to gain her attention and win her affection.When Daisy eventually returns home and Henry makes himself indispensable to her after she suffers a fall, they begin an affair. But when Daisy's family and friends learn about the nature of the relationship, they become concerned and start to investigate Henry. However, they soon begin to fear that the facts they unearth about his past might have come to light too late to save Daisy from harm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ballad_of_Peckham_Rye"title="The Ballad of Peckham Rye">
The novel begins with the telling of Humphrey Place saying "No" at the altar where he was due to marry Dixie Morse. Humphrey's immoral behaviour is assumed to be a result of his recent association with Dougal Douglas, a Scottish migrant who has since left the area of Peckham.Spark goes on to tell us the entire story of what exactly happened during Dougal's residence in Peckham. From his inaugural meeting with Mr V. R. Druce, head of nylon textiles manufacturers Meadows, Meade &amp; Grindley, we learn that Dougal is employed to bridge the gap between industry and the arts. He befriends employees Merle Coverdale (who is in fact indulging in an unromantic, immoral affair with the married Mr Druce) and Elaine Kent, an "experienced controller of process", as well as Humphrey Place, a refrigerator engineer.After finding lodgings with Miss Belle Frierne (where Humphrey Place also resides), and splitting up with his fiancé Jinny due to her being ill (his "fatal flaw" is that he cannot bear anyone who is ill), Dougal embarks upon a mission of disruption throughout Peckham. Throughout this he falls foul of typist Dixie Morse and electrician Trevor Lomas and becomes the target of a gang consisting of Trevor, Collie Gould and Leslie Crewe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Small_Rain"title="The Small Rain">
Young Katherine Forrester has not seen her mother Julie in three years, since the latter was in an accident that ended her career as a pianist. Katherine has been studying piano herself, doing a little professional acting, and living with "Aunt Manya", a family friend known to the rest of the world as Madame Sergeivna, a famous actress on the Broadway stage. When she is ten, Katherine is reunited with Julie, and lives with her until Julie's premature death four years later.Manya marries Katherine's father, a composer named Tom Forrester, with whom Katherine has a cordial but not especially close relationship, making Katherine doubly distant from the two of them. However, after a while, Manya's love for her begins to melt Katherine's iciness. However, just as Katherine starts truly loving Manya, Tom and Manya send her away to a boarding school in Switzerland. She is miserable there, unable to make connections with the other girls or the teachers, who are mostly cold and autocratic; in addition, her piano teacher doesn't mesh with her at all. This continues until Justin Vigneras, the piano teacher she was originally meant to study with but who was away at the beginning of the term, comes back. Katherine adores him, and is gratified that there is finally someone at school who understands and supports her passion for music and her need to practice. She also learns to get along better with her peers after the arrival of Sarah Courmont, a girl she previously met briefly on her seventh birthday in New York; the two begin to form an intense friendship. However, school officials misinterpret that friendship as another deep attraction, and Sarah becomes distant with Katherine after Miss Valentine interrogates the girls. Just as Katherine's relationship with Justin begins to develop into a closer relationship, he leaves the school.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Raja"title="Dragon Raja">
## Sojourn to the capital.Amurtaht the black dragon's existence has plagued Fief Heltant for long, and the king has sent the white dragon Catselprime and his raja, a young son of the House of Halschteil to subdue the black dragon. A blind wizard Tyburn arrives at Heltant and helps guard the town while during the battle with Amurtaht. Hoochie helps Tyburn, who gives him in return a pair of Ogre Power Gauntlets or OPG, which gives the wearer great muscle power. The news comes that Catselprime has lost to Amurtaht and died, while the remnants of soldiers including Hoochie's father have been taken prisoner by Amurtaht, who demands a ransom of an enormous amount for their release. Hoochie, Karl and Sanson set out on a journey to the capital Bysus Impel, to report the news of battle to the king and to attain aids for the ransom.The trio attack a group of orc bandits that has killed a traveler, and the orcs begin chasing the trio for revenge. But Hoochie defeats them powered by his OPG. Repeated battles with the orcs bring Hoochie together with Iruril Serenial, a beautiful elf woman, and Axelhand Eindelf, an old magnanimous dwarf, both of whom become his friends. Hoochie and his party visits Lenus City and solves affairs with the city's arena, and at the next city they visit, Fief Carlyle, they face difficulties from a strange pathological phenomenon all over the city. They meet Edhelin, a troll priestess, and find out that the crisis is caused by Sacred Land, a curse that combines magical and divine powers. They find out that Djipenian agents are behind the curse, which was a military experiment for the current war between the Bysus and Djipen (pronounced: Jah-ee-pun). They take one of the agents, Unchai, as a witness in reporting the curse to the king.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balada_da_Praia_dos_Cães"title="Balada da Praia dos Cães">
Balada da Praia dos Dogs recounts the investigation of a murder. The story begins with the report of the discovery of a corpse buried on Mastro beach, thanks to some dogs that, by chance, find the dead buried in the sand. Later, the police discover that he is Major Luís Dantas Castro, a soldier arrested for attempting military sedition against the current political regime, who had escaped from prison, going to retire, along with three accomplices: Mena, a young woman with whom the Major had a violent and obsessive relationship before his imprisonment, the architect Fonte Nova, another prisoner detained for his involvement in the military revolt and a member of the same anti-Salazarist resistance movement as the Major, and Corporal Barroca, a guard at the field to carry out his military service. The four take refuge in a house located 20 km from Lisbon, awaiting the help of the lawyer Gama e Sá, nicknamed by them as Commodore. The person in charge of the investigation is Elias Santana, a head of the Judiciary Police brigade, who reconstructs the crime thanks mainly to the interrogations made to Mena, confirmed and completed later by the other two accomplices, meanwhile arrested. It is proved that the major was murdered by his three escape companions. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Detective_(novel)"title="The Detective (novel)">
Joe Leland, a private detective, begins investigating a case for the recently widowed Norma MacIver. Norma requests that Leland find out everything he can about her deceased husband. Norma requests Leland personally because her husband had mentioned knowing him in the past.It turns out that Leland and Colin MacIver served in the same military unit during World War II, but at different times. Leland interviews Colin's first wife, Colin's mother, and the security guards at the track where Colin supposedly killed himself.Norma introduces Leland to her neighbor and former therapist, Dr. Wendell Roberts. During their conversation, Wendell reveals that he knew Leland's wife Karen. It is revealed that Wendell was friends with the man with whom Karen Leland had had an affair.As Leland's investigation deepens he uncovers evidence of corruption and murder. Eventually, Leland discovers that Colin was connected to a homicide during Leland's earlier life with the police department as a detective. During the investigation of Teddy Leikman's death, a confession was obtained from Felix Tesla, Leikman's roommate. Tesla was subsequently executed by electric chair. It turned out that Colin MacIver was the true murderer. Joe's partner, Mike Petrakis, managed to decipher Colin's coded notes and reveal a paper trail of corruption.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mam'zelle_Guillotine"title="Mam'zelle Guillotine">
Mam'zelle Guillotine follows Gabrielle Damiens, the daughter of Francois Damiens, a man arrested for attacking the King of France with a pocket knife. Although the wound was minor, Damiens' punishment for drawing royal blood was to be hanged, drawn and quartered.At age 16, Gabrielle finds letters written by her father which prove that his crime had been instigated and aided by a body of noble gentlemen, who planned it as warning to the King to change his ways. Damiens bore the brunt of this conspiracy in silence while the aristocrats remained immune.With the evidence of their crime, Gabrielle sets out to confront the Marquis de Saint-Lucque, the only person named in the letters, and succeeds in extorting a large amount of money from him. She also starts an affair with his son, Vicomte Fernand, who is oblivious to the whole situation. Before long Gabrielle is living in luxury and has aspirations to marry the young Vicomte. Her plans are dashed when Fernand breaks off their affair as the King has decided that the Vicomte should marry his illegitimate daughter, Neve de Nesle.Furious, Gabrielle tries to blackmail the Vicomte into marrying her using the letters which prove his father's guilt. But she has not counted on Neve's mother, Madame de Nesle, who on hearing of the situation, uses her position as the King's favourite to have Gabrielle, now 19, thrown into prison without trial.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_Delphi_and_Die"title="See Delphi and Die">
Through his brother-in-law Aulus, Falco hears details of two young Roman women who have died in Greece while seeing the sights of the ancient world. Falco and his wife, Helena, travel to Greece to meet up with the tour party which included one of the women, seeking clues to her murder, passing through Olympia, Corinth, Delphi and the oracle of Trophonius at Lebadeia before finally arriving at Athens.The wayward Aulus is playing truant in Greece where, instead of studying law at Athens, he is investigating the death of Valeria Ventidia, a newly married Roman girl at Olympia, as well as another death which occurred three years ago around the same area. Falco's mission has two objectives: to send Aulus back to school, and solve the mystery behind the deaths at Olympia. Eventually, a connection between the two deceased women is deduced: both had joined tours provided by Seven Sights, a tour company of dubious reputation, currently operating in Greece.Falco's investigation does not go smoothly, however: the Roman authorities are not interested in properly investigating the deaths (much less governing Greece itself), and at Olympia Falco is attacked by a potential suspect, who later turns up dead in suspicious circumstances, the death blamed on Falco's ward Glaucus. Low on funds and unwilling to be confronted by the angry locals, Falco and his followers - Helena, Albia, Glaucus and Falco's nephews - are forced to leave Olympia for Corinth but not before discovering that Valeria's killer may have been connected to athletes who trained at Olympia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secrets_of_Droon"title="The Secrets of Droon">
Eric Hinkle, Neal Kroger, and Julie Rubin are three friends who accidentally discover a magical world called Droon; accessed via a rainbow staircase in Eric's basement closet. There they meet Keeah, the princess of Droon who is a wizard, and Galen Longbeard, the first wizard of Droon. Keah and Galen are trying to defend Droon against Lord Sparr, an evil sorcerer who constantly tries to defeat the protagonists and take control of Droon. Time in Droon is different than time on Earth, and passes much slower. In Droon, a whole year is not even a second in our world. This factor helps the kids very much and makes their travelling easier.The first twelve books see Keeah, Eric, Neal, and Julie trying to find and free Keeah's mother, Queen Relna, from a curse placed on her by Witch Demither that transforms her into various animals. The fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth books and the first special edition introduce the plot involving Zara, the Queen of Light, and her three sons: Urik, Galen, and Sparr; Zara, who was kidnapped along with Sparr by Ko, emperor of the long-lost evil Empire of Goll, and brought to Droon.After Special Edition #1 “The Magic Escapes,” the series begins to explore the history of Droon as well as its connection to the Upper World. The characters develop with Eric gaining wizard magic and Julie gaining flight and shapeshifting powers from a wingwolf. In the book "The Chariot of Queen Zara", Salamandra, Queen of Shadowthorn, arrives in Droon and becomes another central antagonist. Later, her intentions seem mostly good, though her alliance is always in question. In Book 22, ‘‘The Isle of Mists’’, Sparr awakens Ko; however, in the process Sparr and his pet, the two-headed dog Kem, are aged back to being children, and become allies with Keeah and the Upper World children. In Book 28, ‘‘In the Shadow of Goll’’, Sparr is turned back into his adult self, though he remains the children's ally. He disappears through a hole in the earth to Droon's Underworld, but reappears in Special Edition #5, ‘‘Moon Magic’’, though fifty years older in Droon's future. He comes back to Droon's present to give the children and Galen his piece of the Moon Medallion, a magical artifact composed of four pieces created by Zara and her sons, before going off on his own journey.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stain_(novel)"title="The Stain (novel)">
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, in the rural village of La Folie in France's Loire Valley, a girl is born with a birthmark on her face shaped like a dancing hare. After both her parents die young, Charlotte is raised by her uncle, a mild-mannered gardener with a stutter, and her aunt, a strict disciplinarian who regards her niece's birthmark as the brand of Satan. As Charlotte grows up, she tries to make sense of the world around her under the influence of her aunt and the other characters, including a travelling conman, a local exorcist, the village tramp, and a nearby community of nuns that eventually accepts Charlotte as a novitiate. The world around La Folie is a mysterious place: Charlotte sees religious signs everywhere, an ancient menhir stands just outside town, wolves prowl in the woods nearby, and the village exorcist is torn between serving God and serving Beelzebub.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunters_(novel)"title="The Hunters (novel)">
## New to war.On a frozen February evening in Fuchū, Japan, Captain Cleve Connell (Captain Cleve Saville in the original edition) restlessly waits for assignment orders completing his transfer to Korea. Billeted for four days in a warehouse, he has tired of seeing Tokyo – and of watching others come and go – and his clean laundry is nearly gone. He walks to dinner at the Officers Club reflecting on his ability as a flyer (he is a good one, with a reputation among his peacetime peers), his reluctance to leave the Air Force although pressured by civilian friends to do so, and his desire to test himself in combat. He senses that his feelings of time lost and lack of accomplishment are corrosive.He shares dinner with a fellow pilot en route to the war and while they are discussing women, the war in general, and the tedium of waiting, a group of loud young lieutenants enters the club. One stands out from the rest, however, emanating cool confidence amidst their obvious insecurity, and mildly harasses a pretty Japanese bar waitress. Cleve's companion chastises the lieutenant, who reluctantly backs down, resisting just enough that Cleve catches his name in the discussion: Pell. Cleve shrugs aside the episode and the next morning receives his orders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(Holmes_novel)"title="Go (Holmes novel)">
"Go" concerns protagonist Paul Hobbes' struggle to maintain his marriage to his wife, Kathryn, while simultaneously indulging in the world of the 1940s and 1950s Beat Generation. It follows the complications of interpersonal relationships arising from a group of disillusioned and often eccentric young people. Hobbes finds himself in a world of promiscuity, casual drug use and petty crime but retains a certain detachment from it, sometimes to the annoyance of his friends. From wild all night parties to Allen Ginsberg's visions of William Blake to the death of Bill Cannastra, the events of the book are largely real events, some of them alluded to in other beat works, most notably Ginsberg's "Howl". Holmes has said that the only plot element entirely invented by himself is Kathryn's infidelity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Falcon's_Malteser"title="The Falcon's Malteser">
Nicholas 'Nick' Simple and his older brother, Herbert Simple, meet Johnny Naples, a dwarf, who comes to the office carrying a suspicious package, and acting as if he is being trailed. He tries to explain the situation, whilst Herbert unsuccessfully tries to affect a hardman act.Dumbfounded as to why Johnny Naples would pay them 200 pounds to look after a box of chocolates, they visit the (fictional) Hotel Splendide after a quick enquiry at a shop traced using a sign on the envelope, with the keeper saying that the owner of a hotel in Portobello Road mentioned to him that a dwarf was staying at his hotel.A plain-clothes policeman, disguised as a drunk in the street, arrests them and they are sent to Ladbroke Grove Police Station, where Herbert's old boss, Chief Inspector Snape, accompanied by his violent assistant Boyle, arrives to question them. Snape who previously could not bear Herbert during his service there begins to form a grudging respect for Nick when he realises how smart he is for his age. When Nick offers to tell Snape everything the Diamonds know in exchange for what the police know, Snape begins to tell his story.After finding a matchbox from a nightclub called The Casablanca Club (an acknowledgment to another one of Humphrey Bogart's movies), they decide to pay the club a visit. At home they find the Club is open, but their cleaning lady Betty Charlady says no good will come of it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_Talk"title="Whale Talk">
The biological son of a white mother and a half-black, half-Japanese father, The Tao Jones—known as T. J.—lives with his loving, adoptive white family in the nearly all-white town of Cutter, Washington. T. J.'s adoptive mother, Abby, is a child-abuse lawyer, and his adoptive father, John Paul, is a community volunteer and guardian "ad litem", who is still haunted by his youth, when he accidentally killed a child after a one-night stand with the child's mother.At Cutter High School, T. J. is a physically impressive senior who has refused to join any sports teams as a form of anger management, due to his anger issues since early childhood. His non-involvement irritates much of the faculty, who pride themselves on the physical achievements of their students, displaying favoritism toward their star athletes, such as Mike Barbour, a vicious bully. T. J. often finds Barbour harassing Chris Coughlin, an intellectually disabled student who must unfairly live in the wake of a widely admired older brother who died in a freak accident.John Simet, an English teacher and friend of T. J.'s, wants to start a swim team to avoid direct coaching obligations. Simet convinces T. J. to be captain of the swim team and recruit its members, even though the school has no pool. Inspired to spite the school's pretentious athletics program and its glorification of bullies like Barbour, T. J. assembles a deliberately bizarre and motley crew of six swimmers, including the cognitively slow Chris; the obnoxiously sesquipedalian Dan Hole; the bodybuilder and musician Tay-Roy Kibble; the rude, antisocial, and one-legged Andy Mott; the completely nondescript Jackie Craig; and the obese and insecure Simon DeLong. T. J. hopes to have the whole team meet letterman requirements in order to embarrass the rest of the athletics program and their cherished school symbols. Simet sets the requirements as follows: at each meet, every member of the team must outdo his previous score. T. J.'s team uses the pool at a local gym as their training center, where T. J. eagerly employs a homeless, middle-aged gym-goer named Oliver Van Zandt to be the team's "interim coach Oliver" (I. C. O.), a title that earns him the nickname "Icko."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Blind_Mice"title="Four Blind Mice">
The novel features Washington D.C. Metro Police homicide detectives Alex Cross and John Sampson as protagonists. While investigating the wrongful conviction and execution of US Army Sergeant Ellis Cooper, their investigation uncovers a series of Army personnel wrongfully convicted and executed for murdering countless civilians. In each instance, the murderer's "modus operandi" involved painting the corpse.In the course of the investigation, Cross and Sampson discover that three Army Rangers had committed similar crimes during the Vietnam War. The three Rangers, nicknamed "The Three Blind Mice," (Thomas Starkey, Brownley Harris, and Warren Griffin) had performed a series of unauthorized killings of unarmed villagers and subsequently painted the bodies red, white, and blue. Cross and Sampson track down the killers, but all three are killed in the resulting gunfight.Cross determines that the mastermind behind the murders is General Mark Hutchinson, Commandant of West Point. Hutchinson had been ordering The Three Blind Mice to frame Army personnel who had committed atrocities while serving in Vietnam. Another victim, Colonel Handler, had discovered the plot and was killed so as to not jeopardize Hutchinson's candidacy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Hutchinson captures Cross, but before he can murder him, Hutchinson is killed by members of a Vietnamese street gang in retaliation for his sanctioning of and involvement in Vietnam War atrocities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Invasion_from_Mars"title="The Second Invasion from Mars">
The story occurs in an unknown city and country, but almost certainly on Earth. All characters and few places mentioned have characteristically Greek names, but there is nothing specific to Greek culture in the plot; rather, use of neither Russian nor English names may have been an attempt to put the novel outside of the ideological war, which was extremely active at the time.The main character, Apollon, is a retired school teacher living with his daughter (from a now-deceased wife) and housekeeper. He has presumably retired only very recently, as he is no longer working, but is not receiving pension yet. The subject of his pension is by far his most important worry during the entire two weeks described. His pension is about to be awarded, pending decision from the Minister about pension degree, and correspondingly, amount. The difference between first and third degree translate to him as the difference between not being able to afford anything that is not strictly needed, and being able to pursue his hobby (and the only other significant interest), stamp collecting.At the same time, very strange things happen in the nearby city, and then in his town. Initially the unusual sounds and imagery generated considerable panic and even higher interest among the public, but gradually it becomes widely accepted, even if not understood, that the country (and, perhaps, entire planet) is being "invaded" by the Martians.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Charmed_Life"title="A Charmed Life">
The story begins with the simple trials and tribulations of everyday life experienced by John and Martha Sinnott. Their background stories are gradually introduced, especially during their picnic with the Coes in the beginning. One night when John is away, Martha and Miles drunkenly have sex at Martha's house after a party at the Coes'. Martha becomes pregnant, and rather than having a baby whose paternity is ambiguous, she decides to have an abortion. Warren lends Martha the money to have an abortion. The story ends with Martha dying in a car accident on her way home from the Coes' house, with the money for the abortion and the address of the clinic in her pocketbook.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Vision_of_Battlements"title="A Vision of Battlements">
The story draws from Burgess's experience of being stationed in Gibraltar during the Second World War and satirises traditional notions of battle heroism by parodying the Aeneid. The antihero Richard Ennis takes the place of Aeneas.The title, in addition to its Gibraltarian associations, contains a reference to the appearance of certain objects in the eye of one who suffers from astigmatism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_to_Moulokin"title="Mission to Moulokin">
The novel follows the continuing adventures of Skua September, Ethan Fortune and Milliken Williams on the frozen world of Tran-Ky-Ky as they try to help the native race, the Tran, win admission to the Commonwealth. During their struggle they deal with corrupt Commonwealth officials and an insane Tran leader, find the fabled city of Moulokin and learn of the history of the Tran.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasing_Sherlock"title="Erasing Sherlock">
"Seeking maid-of-all-work. Master of Arts required. Opportunities for research in the field. Must be able to relocate in time." A doctoral candidate, in the guise of a housemaid working at 221B Baker Street, believes she is there to observe the 25-year-old Sherlock Holmes, and document his methods at the beginning of his career. She soon learns she is operating under a serious misapprehension.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_(Octavia_Butler_novel)"title="Survivor (Octavia Butler novel)">
"Survivor" follows the early contact between the Missionaries, a group of human colonists fleeing a plague on Earth, and the Kohn, intelligent natives of the planet on which the Missionaries have arrived. In particular, the novel focuses on Alanna, the adopted daughter of the Missionaries' leader, as she attempts to prevent the Missionaries' destruction or assimilation at the hands of a dominant local culture. During the course of the novel, Alanna's experiences assimilating and negotiating with the Kohn draw upon her earlier, similar experience joining the Missionaries themselves, and Alanna's ability to interact with the various cultures becomes the key to their survival.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tasmanian_Babes_Fiasco"title="The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco">
The residents of a sharehouse in York Street, Taringa take in a new boarder calling himself Jordan. At first the housemates are suspicious yet tolerant of their new tenant and his strange behaviour. However, it is soon discovered that Jordan has absconded with five weeks' worth of the household's rent and utility money. What is more, he has been using the address to perpetrate fraud against the Department of Social Security, bringing the government agency's suspicion upon the house's dole-collecting members. Matters are further compounded when the owners of the property appear with a work crew declaring their intention to demolish the house unless the owed rent is paid by the following Monday. The remaining housemates split their meagre resources into tracking down Jordan and coming up with the owed money.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Will_Repay_(novel)"title="I Will Repay (novel)">
The story starts in 1784, before the French revolution. Wealthy Paul Déroulède has offended the young Vicomte de Marny by speaking disrespectfully of his latest infatuation, Adèle de Monterchéri. Déroulède had not intended to get into the quarrel but has a tendency to blunder into things -- ""no doubt a part of the inheritance bequeathed to him by his bourgeois ancestry"."Incensed at the slur on Adèle, whom he sees as a paragon of virtue, the Vicomte challenges Déroulède to a duel, a fight which Déroulède does not want - for he knows and respects the boy's father, the Duc de Marny. Swords drawn, the fight ensues in the centre of the salon but despite his noble lineage, the Vicomte de Marny is no match for Déroulède's swordplay, especially when addled with wine and rage. Déroulède disarms his opponent and having won the duel, draws back but the boy refuses to back down without complete satisfaction and demands that Déroulède get down on his knees and apologize.Finally losing his temper with the young Vicomte, Déroulède raises his sword to disarm his protagonist once more, however de Marny lunges wildly at his opponent's breast and manages to literally throw himself on Déroulède's weapon. The boy is dead and Déroulède can do nothing but leave the establishment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_the_Acts"title="Between the Acts">
The story takes place in a country house somewhere in England, just before the Second World War, over the course of a single day. It is the day when the annual pageant is to be performed on the grounds of the house. The pageant is traditionally a celebration of English history, and it is attended by the entire local community.The owner of the house is Bartholomew Oliver, a widower and retired Indian Army officer. His sister Lucy Swithin, who is also living in the house, is slightly eccentric but kind. Bartholomew has a son, Giles, who has a job in London and is restless and frustrated. Giles has two children with his wife Isa, who has lost interest in him. Isa is attracted to a local gentleman farmer, Rupert Haines, although the relationship goes no further than eye contact. Mrs. Manresa and her friend William Dodge arrive and stay for the pageant. The pageant has been written by Miss La Trobe, a strange and domineering spinster.The day is interspersed with events leading up to the pageant. Lucy fusses around making preparations for the decorations and the food. Bartholomew frightens his grandson by jumping out at him from behind a newspaper and then calls him a coward when he cries. Mrs. Manresa flirts provocatively with Bartholomew and Giles. William Dodge, assumed by the others to be homosexual, is the subject of homophobic thoughts by many of the others but is friendly with Lucy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Tony's_Wife"title="Lord Tony's Wife">
The year is 1789 and Pierre Adet, a young French peasant, is incensed at the unfair treatment of the local peasantry, who are no better off than slaves to the local aristocrat. His brother-in-law is about to be hanged for poaching two pigeons from the woods belonging to the Duc de Kernogan in Nantes and this proves the final straw. After months of planning Pierre leads a mob against the Duc against the advice of his father.Before the mob have had the chance to storm the Chateau, they come across the Duc's young daughter Yvonne returning home and attack her carriage. In the ensuing scuffle, Adet assaults Yvonne" 'And just to punish you, my fine lady,' he said in a whisper which sent a shudder of horror right through her, 'to punish you for what you are, the brood of tyrants, proud, disdainful, a budding tyrant yourself, to punish you for every misery my mother and sister have had to endure, for every luxury which you have enjoyed, I will kiss you on the lips and the cheeks and just between your white throat and chin and never as long as you live if you die this night or live to be an hundred will you be able to wash off those kisses showered upon you by one who hates and loathes you --a miserable peasant whom you despise and who in your sight is lower far than your dogs."'
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elusive_Pimpernel_(novel)"title="The Elusive Pimpernel (novel)">
It is September 1793 and French Agent and chief spy-catcher Chauvelin is determined to get his revenge for the previous humiliations dished out to him at the hands of the Scarlet Pimpernel.Chauvelin travels to England as an official representative of the French government tasked with looking after the interests of French citizens, but this is only a cover and his real purpose is to trick Sir Percy Blakeney into returning to France, where he can be captured and put to the guillotine.The plot is hatched at a gala on Richmond Green, with the help of a young French actress, Désirée Candielle, whom Chauvelin has enlisted with promises of money, pardon and fame if she succeeds.Désirée is manning a tent with a model guillotine under the premise of raising money for the poor of Paris. Marguerite Blakeney enters her stall and starts talking to Désirée. On discovering her to be a fellow French actress, she is soon taken in by the young woman's sob story and before long had invited her to perform at her house in Richmond in front of the Prince of Wales.Once the offer has been made and accepted, Désirée's official chaperone is revealed as Chauvelin. Marguerite realises she's been set up, but the offer has been made and Sir Percy insists that both of them should come to his house as arranged.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauche_the_Cellist"title="Gauche the Cellist">
Gauche is a diligent but mediocre cellist who plays for a small-town orchestra, , and the local cinema in the early 20th century. He struggles during rehearsals and is often berated by his conductor during preparations for an upcoming performance of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony (the Pastoral Symphony).Over the course of four nights, Gauche is visited at his mill house home by talking animals as he is practicing. The first night, a tortoiseshell cat came to Gauche and, giving him a tomato, asked him to play Schumann's "Träumerei". Gauche was irritated, as the tomato was from his garden outside, so he berated the cat and instead played "Tiger Hunt in India" (Michio Mamiya). This startled the cat and made it leap up and down in astonishment. The cat ran away in fright.The second night as he was practicing, a cuckoo came to him asking to practice scales to Gauche's cello accompaniment. Gauche repeatedly played "cuckoo, cuckoo", accompanied by the bird. Eventually, he felt that the cuckoo's song was better than his cello. Gauche chased the bird away, causing it to fly into his window, hitting its head.The third night as he was practicing, a Japanese raccoon dog came to him asking to practice the timpani to Gauche's cello accompaniment. As Gauche played "The Merry Master of a Coach Station", the tanuki hit the cello with a drum stick. The tanuki pointed out to Gauche that he played slowly despite trying to play speedily. The two left on good terms as the day broke.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_Tale"title="Tiger Tale">
The story starts with the Tiger, all golden, without his stripes, singing. The Tiger walks through the forest down to the river, singing all the way. He passes the platypus and meets the Bunyip who tells him to go away and stop singing. Leaving the river he meets Kanga, who also tells him to stop singing. Finally Great Bird tells him to stop singing. As Tiger goes on his way he notices a bushfire approaching and goes back to the river to summon the other animals, however all three, Bunyip, Kanga and Great Bird all desert him. Tiger runs back and forth from the river to the fire until the fire is extinguished but the Tiger has lost his voice and the soot leaves stripes on his back.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_Dr._Fu-Manchu"title="The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu">
Dr. Petrie is surprised by a late night visitor, "a tall, lean ... square cut ... sun baked" man who turns out to be his good friend (ex-Assistant Commissioner Sir Denis) Nayland Smith of Burma, formerly of Scotland Yard, who has come directly from Burma. We then learn that various men associated with India are the target of assassination by the Chinese master criminal Dr. Fu Manchu, who seems to have been active in Burma (as distinct from India), in places such as Rangoon, Prome, Moulmein and the "Upper Irrawaddy" and who comes to England with dacoits and thugs.Fu Manchu is pursued from the opium dens of Limehouse in the East End of London to various country estates. We learn that Dr. Fu Manchu is a leading member not of "old China", the Mandarin class of the Manchu dynasty, or "young China", a new generation of "youthful and unbalanced reformers" with "western polish" – but a "Third Party". Nayland Smith is outwitted several times by Fu Manchu and thus he reflects more the narrow escapes of the later Bulldog Drummond rather than the "logical" superior approach of the earlier Sherlock Holmes.Fu Manchu is a master poisoner and chemist, a cunning member of the Yellow Peril, "the greatest genius which the powers of evil have put on the earth for centuries", though his mission is not exactly clear at this stage. He appears to be trying to capture and take back to China the best engineers of Europe for some larger criminal purpose.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_and_Alive_(Koontz_novel)"title="Dead and Alive (Koontz novel)">
Deucalion, the legendary monster, is a heroic figure dedicated to battling the evil that gave him life. The megalomaniacal Victor Helios has, by design and accident, unleashed many of his engineered killers on modern-day New Orleans. Detectives Carson O'Connor and Michael Maddison are Deucalion's all-too-human partners trying to end the reign of terror of Helios's killers. A resistance movement also builds from within Helios' power structure, as many of his vat-made men and women recognize that to fight back against Helios would bring a desired end to tedium, slavery, insanity, self-destructive abuse behaviors or life itself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tritonian_Ring"title="The Tritonian Ring">
When the gods resolve to destroy Lorsk, principal kingdom of the sinking continent of Pusad, because Prince Vakar, heir to its throne, is thought to be a threat to them, the king sends the prince on a quest to save the realm from destruction. Vakar is tasked with traveling the known world in search of what the gods most fear, accompanied only by his servant, Fual. He finds himself hampered by ignorance of just what that might be and continual attempts to murder him by parties unknown; meanwhile, his treasonous brother Kuros is plotting with the pirates of the Gorgon Isles, Lorsk's enemies, to overthrow their father. On his quest Vakar encounters Amazons, a seductive queen who is under a spell, an amorous centauress, sorcerers who command legions of headless warriors, and the dangerous Gorgonians themselves, masters of the medusas with their paralyzing glares.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_by_the_Churchyard"title="The House by the Churchyard">
The novel begins with a prologue in the voice of an old man, Charles de Cresseron, that is set in Chapelizod, Ireland, roughly a century after the events of the novel proper. This prologue details how, during an interment at the churchyard of the title, a skull is accidentally unearthed, which bears the marks of two crushing blows to the head and – even more disconcertingly – a small hole from a trepanning. The novel itself is Cresseron's reconstruction of the history related to this grisly item (though by and large his narratorial voice drops out and the novel is told from a conventional omniscient narrator's point of view).The first chapter of the novel proper moves back to 1767, the period of the novel, and begins with another mysterious occurrence in the churchyard: the secretive burial of a coffin, with the occupant simply identified on the brass plaque as "R.D." But after this ominous opening the book turns (in its first half) to the careful and largely light-hearted elaboration of the social life and intrigues among the denizens of Chapelizod, from the powerful Lord Castlemallard to the soldiers in the local barracks under General Chattesworth, to the good Doctor Walsingham and his daughter Lily, to the gluttonous local Catholic priest Father Roach. The opening section of the novel is largely taken up by a farcical duel between two soldiers, Puddock and O'Flaherty, which arises from drunken misunderstanding and eventually is defused without any harm done. Le Fanu introduces hints of unease, though, with the advent of the mysterious Mr Mervyn, who takes up residence in the Tiled House, a building widely rumoured to be haunted. (At this point, Le Fanu interpolates a ghost story, "An Authentic Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand", which has often been separately anthologized.) Mervyn courts the daughter of the General, Gertrude Chattesworth, but has a rival in the scheming Mr Dangerfield, the trusted manager of the English estates of Lord Castlemallard who is visiting Chapelizod and who also has his eye on Gertrude. Dangerfield destroys the romance between Mervyn and Gertrude by setting into circulation vicious rumours about him and his family. Mervyn is in fact the son and heir of the late Lord Dunoran, who was found guilty of murdering a man named Beauclerc to whom he had lost a considerable sum at cards; Dunoran then committed suicide in his prison cell. (It was his coffin that was buried at the beginning of the book – the secrecy required because of the dubiousness of burying a suicide on consecrated ground.)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse_(Meyer_novel)"title="Eclipse (Meyer novel)">
The story begins with Seattle being plagued by a string of unsolved murders, which Edward Cullen suspects is caused by a newborn vampire with an uncontrollable thirst for human blood. As Edward and Bella apply to colleges, Bella tells Edward she wants to visit her friend, Jacob Black, a Quileute Native American who, like some other tribe members, can shape shift into a wolf. Edward worries for Bella's safety, but she assures him that neither Jacob nor the wolf pack would harm her. During one visit, Jacob tells Bella that he is in love with her; he wants her to choose him over Edward. Bella tells Jacob she considers him only as a friend.Meanwhile, Alice Cullen has a vision that the vampire Victoria has returned to Forks. Victoria seeks to kill Bella to avenge the death of her mate, James. Alice takes Bella to the Cullen house for a sleepover. Bella learns about Rosalie's past that led to her eventual transformation to a vampire and why she treasures humanity. Bella is determined to become a vampire but eventually agrees to reconsider her decision. A few days later, Edward proposes to Bella. Despite harboring an aversion to marriage, Bella accepts on the condition that Edward will have sex with her while she is still human.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remnant_Population"title="Remnant Population">
The main character, Ofelia, lives on a fictional planet colonized by Sims Bancorp company. When the company decides to leave after a newly arriving fleet is mysteriously killed by aliens, Ofelia opts to stay behind, doubting she will live through cryogenic sleep, and not wanting to abandon the place where her family is buried.Ofelia hides in the woods until the others leave the planet; no efforts are made to search for her due to her lack of value to the company. She lives alone in the village until a group of the planet's natural inhabitants make contact. She teaches them her language and technology, and they refer to her as a "Nest Guardian", a revered caretaker role.When the existence of the species is discovered by other humans, scientists and military personnel arrive on the planet and come into conflict with Ofelia's perspective on how to interact with them. By the end of the novel, Ofelia's experience wins out and she lives out her life on the planet, and other elderly humans are brought to the planet to serve as Nest Guardians.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moomins_and_the_Great_Flood"title="The Moomins and the Great Flood">
Moominmamma and Moomintroll are travelling through a dark and scary forest looking for Moominpappa, who has gone off adventuring with the Hattifatteners. They meet a little creature, who joins them (in later books he is named Sniff). They use a glowing tulip to light their way, and are attacked by a giant serpent whilst crossing a swamp. They are saved when a beautiful young girl with shining blue hair called Tulippa emerges from the tulip and scares the serpent away.They later arrive at a mountain and find the home of an old man, who invites them to live in his garden, which is made entirely of sweets. However, when they find out that the sun is really a giant lamp and there's no real food, they leave and continue their journey, travelling through the mountain to the beach on the other side. On the beach, Moominmamma gets attacked by an ant-lion, but Moomintroll and the others manage to save her. Deciding to move on, they come across a group of Hattifatteners about to set sail on a boat, and join them. A storm strikes, but a sea-troll helps them out and navigates the boat to a large harbour where they go ashore.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exploits_of_Moominpappa"title="The Exploits of Moominpappa">
Moominpappa has written his autobiography of his amazing life, and he tells it to his son Moomintroll, and to Moomintroll's friends, Sniff and Snufkin. In his tale, he at first was left at an orphanage, but after finding it boring and disliking the strict headmistress Hemulen, he leaves and meets a new friend, Hodgkin.Hodgkin and Moominpappa meet the Joxter (Snufkin's father) and the Muddler (Sniff's father). Together they build a boat, in which to live. They fool the enormous Edward the Booble into helping to set the ship off. After realising their trickery he becomes very angry, but they sail away. They rescue a Hemulen from being eaten by the Groke, however the Hemulen is very bossy, and soon they abandon her with the Niblings. One young Nibling stows aboard their ship, and travels with them.They eventually reach a far away land, where they meet the Mymble family. The Mymble's daughter befriends them and together they go to Daddy Jones (the King's) 100th birthday party where they all win prizes. They then set up new homes on an island, however are spooked by the island ghost. They manage to make a deal with the ghost, and they befriend him. Meanwhile, Hodgkins has designed the Amphibian – a sort of land/sea ship for Daddy Jones. On its maiden voyage, it is attacked by a giant fish, but they are saved when Edward the Booble steps on the fish.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Godwulf_Manuscript"title="The Godwulf Manuscript">
Set in the early 1970s, this novel serves as the introduction to Spenser, a private investigator in Boston. Spenser, who served as an infantryman in the 1st Infantry Division during the Korean War and as a former State trooper, is hired by Bradford W. Forbes, the president of an unnamed university (heavily implied to be Northeastern, the university at which Parker himself taught at the time) to recover a stolen illuminated manuscript, a medieval book of great historical and literary importance. It's being held for ransom by an unknown perpetrator who demands $100,000 be donated to a free school for the manuscript's return. It has no inherent monetary value since it cannot be fenced, and the university — a poor, inner-city school (much as Northeastern was at the time) — cannot afford the ransom.Head of campus security Carl Tower recommends investigating a radical student group called 'SCACE' (Student Committee Against Capitalist Exploitation) and their secretary, Terry Orchard. After talking to Terry and her boyfriend Dennis Powell, Spenser gets into a minor altercation with Powell. Later that night, Spenser receives a call from Terry requesting help. Spenser arrives at her apartment to find Dennis murdered, the killer having used Terry's gun, and Terry had been overdosed on an unknown drug. He determines that the murder is an attempt to frame Terry and from that point on he is determined to clear her name, believing the missing manuscript and Dennis's murder are related.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dearly_Devoted_Dexter"title="Dearly Devoted Dexter">
Sgt. Albert Doakes, a Homicide detective, has grown suspicious of Dexter and obsessively tails him in his free time. This makes it impossible for Dexter to investigate (and perhaps kill) someone that he suspects of complicity in the sexual abuse and murder of young boys. When an unknown man is found bizarrely mutilated, Doakes recognizes the work of "Doctor Danco", a torturer who served with Doakes in the Special Forces during the Salvadoran Civil War. Danco has come to Miami to take revenge on his former comrades, drugging his victims with painkillers and psychotropics, and over episodes lasting several days or even weeks, surgically removing various body parts. Dexter is drawn into the case when Danco abducts his sister Deborah's new boyfriend, Detective Kyle Chutsky. Amidst all the chaos, Dexter finds himself accidentally engaged to his girlfriend Rita Bennett. While trying to bond with Rita's children, Astor and Cody, he discovers that they're showing the same signs of sociopathy that he did at their age. Dexter looks forward to teaching them to control their "Dark Passengers" as his foster father, Harry, had taught Dexter to control his.Dexter learns that Danco's murder ritual includes a word game resembling hangman. Each victim is asked to guess a word chosen for them by Danco, a description of a grievous offense against him, for which the victim is to atone. Each wrong or unintelligible answer results in the amputation of a body part. The maximum number of pieces removed corresponds to the number of letters in the mystery word that has been carefully chosen for that particular victim. The torture is conducted patiently and methodically to allow the victim enough time to recuperate and begin healing before the next atrocity is perpetrated. This devious process is designed to maximize the psychological, as well as physical devastation without ever actually killing the subject.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Bad_Wolf_(novel)"title="The Big Bad Wolf (novel)">
Cross is in the middle of his training at the FBI when he is assigned to work on a kidnapping case. A federal judge's wife has been kidnapped, and Cross discovers that her kidnapping fits the pattern of other recent kidnappings.A Russian mobster known as "the Wolf" has been kidnapping people and selling them into sexual slavery. In addition to the judge's wife, his subordinates also kidnap a housewife, and several male college students for clients.Though Cross is able to identify the Wolf as a key player in the human trafficking ring, his true identity and whereabouts remain a mystery. The only method of contacting him is through a high-tech, secure website, and any person the FBI manages to take into custody ends up dead at the hands of a mole.Eventually, with the assistance of the New York City Police Department, Central Intelligence Agency, Secret Service, and the Russian government, the FBI is able to arrest a man by the name of Andrei Prokopev. Though the FBI believes him to be the Wolf, it is revealed at the very end of the novel that the Wolf is, in fact, still at large.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_of_Forty_Islands"title="Knights of Forty Islands">
Written from 1988-1990 in Alma-Ata, this tale, at the same time romantic and harsh, describes teenage children moved into an artificial alien-created environment and forced to fight each other for supremacy. Dima, a 14-years boy who used to fight on streets of his native city Alma-ata, now has to fight in a place where swords are used instead of fists.The new environment consists of forty islands, each connected to three others via high and narrow bridges. There is a castle on each island; and about 15-18 kids ("knights") live in each one. The islands are distinct: dictatorship or democracy, a brutal rude leader or a kind one. The population is made up of approximately 70% boys and 30% girls in homogenous or heterogeneous national groups, no one older than 18. Everyone wants to return home, but to do so they are told they must conquer all 40 islands - then, the aliens promised, they would return the winners to their homes. There are also several rules of engagement, also set down by aliens.Swords are wooden at first, but a sword turns steel when the wielder feels hatred and desire to kill towards the opponent. Although retaining the world of feelings of usual children, these "knights" change: they learn to fight to the death, not to pay much attention to wounds; they cover friends and take revenge for fallen ones. Dima sees his new friends being killed, and he kills, too.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Dream"title="Nuclear Dream">
On the post-nuclear landscape of the United States, it is hard to survive. The most ruthless individuals are "dragons", who reject their own humanity, as well as the notion of kindness.Those who survived in underground bunkers don't like to visit the surface because life there is so brutal. However, the protagonist knows of an automated missile base that is programmed to perform a delayed nuclear strike — delayed to twenty years after the War, a time that is quickly approaching.Mike, a man from "Reserv-6", meets Drago, a "dragon" who can communicate telepathically with his dog, Prince. As the three journey to stop the missile — aimed at Russia — from launching, Drago learns much about himself that he didn't know, and, by the end, questions his status as a dragon altogether.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crank_(novel)"title="Crank (novel)">
"Crank" takes place the summer before and during the protagonist Kristina's junior year of high school. She is a straight-A honor roll student and decides to visit her father for three weeks. Her father is rarely home, leaving her a lot of time alone. Kristina meets a boy named Adam in Albuquerque, where she is staying with her father. Adam convinces Kristina to try crank (methamphetamine), or "the monster", but Kristina runs away the first time she tries it. She is attacked by three men, but before anything can happen to her she is saved by Adam. An antagonist, Lince, Adam's girlfriend, sees him comforting Kristina and jumps off of a balcony in a suicide attempt. Kristina starts a relationship with Adam, but feels guilty about Lince. When the three weeks are over, Kristina goes back to Reno, Nevada, where her mother's house is. Kristina is now addicted to crank.In Reno, Kristina, now calling herself Bree, meets the characters Brendan and Chase at a water-park, and they exchange numbers. They both promise her crank. Chase and Kristina begin to get closer to one another, and they begin dating, though not exclusively. Kristina goes to see the antagonist Brendan, asking for more crank. Brendan drives them both out into the woods, where they get high together, and he starts to take off her clothes. When she says no, he becomes violent, claiming that he has "waited weeks", so she should "put up and shut up." He then starts ripping her clothes off and rapes her. Afterwards, Brendan takes her home and makes her pay for the drugs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Custom_of_the_Country"title="The Custom of the Country">
The Spraggs, a family of newly wealthy midwesterners from Apex, arrive in New York City to advantageously marry off their beautiful, ambitious, and temperamental daughter, Undine. Attracted to glamour and extravagance Undine has a hard time making in roads into the high status old money social circles she wishes to enter. Her beauty catches the attention of several men who offer her a tantalizing glimpse into their world. Ralph Marvell, who is descended from the Dagonets, an old money family, becomes attracted to Undine. Convinced that Undine is a simple and plain spoken girl who would be ruined by her elevation in society he resolves to quickly woo and marry her. However Marvell is an unsuccessful lawyer and a would-be poet and his family no longer has great reserves of cash. Before the marriage his grandfather informs Mr. Spragg that Spragg will have to financially support the couple. Mr. Spragg asks Undine to break off her engagement but Undine, now aware that the Marvells and the rest of their social circle highly value sexual purity and frown upon broken engagements and divorce, refuses to leave Ralph and her father relents to the marriage. Shortly before her wedding, Undine encounters an acquaintance from Apex named Elmer Moffatt. Undine begs him not to make their acquaintance known as it could compromise her relationship with Ralph. Elmer agrees, but later approaches Mr. Spragg and leverages the fact that the Spraggs are embarrassed to know him to coerce Mr. Spragg into a business deal that profits them both greatly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rhinemann_Exchange"title="The Rhinemann Exchange">
On the eve of the Second World War, David Spaulding, a radio voice actor, is recruited by Colonel Ed Pace to run a secret network in Lisbon.The plot advances to 1943. Both the Allies and the Axis find themselves facing key shortages that impede their ability to win the war. The Allies lack gyroscopes capable of operating at high altitudes; thus they are losing an unacceptably high number of bombers. If they do not procure gyroscopes soon, the D-Day invasion of Normandy will need to be postponed. The Germans find themselves without high quality diamonds, which are necessary for the rocket development program at Peenemünde.Ironically, each side has what the other needs: the Allies control access to high quality diamonds from the Belgian Congo; the Germans have a design for a gyroscope able to operate at high altitudes. The German intelligence agency, the "Nachrichtendienst", discovers that the Allies are in need of gyroscopes, and proposes an exchange, to take place in neutral territory: Buenos Aires, Argentina.David Spaulding has, in the meantime, become an invaluable spy for the Allies. His Lisbon network ferries agents and defectors back and forth from German-occupied territory. He is selected, however, to oversee the receipt of the gyroscopes – critically, he does not know that diamonds are being exchanged for the gyroscopes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_the_Heart"title="Only the Heart">
The main character for this story is a boy named Toan. The book jumps from the past, when Toan is only six years old, to the present, when he is in his teens. The book is mainly written in first person, Toan's and his older cousin's, Linh's point of view.This book is about the Vietnam war, and the problems and hardships the Vietnamese people faced while trying to escape their war stricken country.During the book, Toan and his family escape Vietnam, on a boat. They become part of the first wave of boat people. During the boat trip, Phuong (Toan's cousin) is almost captured by sea pirates, but her mother saves her from becoming a sex slave, by offering herself, in fair exchange and sacrifice for the safety of Phuong. She is taken away and never seen by her family again. This was not her fault however, this was forced upon her through the Vietnam gangs.When the family makes it to Malaysia, the Malaysian people try to send them back, but they destroy the ship, forcing everyone to go overboard. Toan almost drowns.When they make it to Malaysia, they are on a list waiting to be transferred to another country so they can be safe from the war in Vietnam. After being late for their time to leave, Toan's father takes matters into his own hands. They escape from their "home" and chase after the dream for a better life for their family. They end up in Australia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guns_of_Navarone_(novel)"title="The Guns of Navarone (novel)">
The island of Navarone, off the Turkish coast, has been heavily fortified as the Germans attempt to stifle British naval activity in the Aegean. A force of 1200 British soldiers is now marooned on the nearby island of Kheros (another variation of the island Keros, which is situated to the west of Amorgos) and the Royal Navy is planning to send ships to rescue them. The heavy radar-controlled guns command the only deepwater channel that ships can use and must be silenced at all costs.Commando attacks have failed and after a bombardment by B-24 Liberator bombers fails to destroy the guns, Captain James Jensen RN, Chief of Operations for SOE in Cairo, decides to launch a desperate last-ditch attempt which he has already planned in case the bombing is unsuccessful. He has drawn together a team of specialist saboteurs to infiltrate the island via the "unclimbable" south cliff and get into the fortress to destroy the guns. They have less than one week.The team meet for the first time in Alexandria. They comprise:The team travel via MTB and plane to Castelrosso, a British-held island. Here, they discover an eavesdropper, Nicolai the base laundry boy, who allegedly speaks no English but is spying on them anyway. They demand that he be arrested and held incommunicado, but the story implies that this does not happen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Hoax"title="The Triple Hoax">
In "The Triple Hoax", Nancy, her Aunt Eloise, Bess, and George begin by going to New York to help a friend. There they see a performance by the Hoaxters, a group of magicians. These magicians take handbags and wallets from people in the audience – they do return them, but Nancy feels suspicious.Nancy and her friends follow leads to Mexico City, where Nancy is asked to find a child that has gone missing, and then to Los Angeles, where Nancy and her friends are threatened by the Hoaxters to try to scare them off the case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Briar_King"title="The Briar King">
The Born Queen, Virgenya Dare, defeats the evil Skasloi with magic and frees humanity from slavery. The Skasloi king tells Virgenya humanity is cursed. About 2300 years later, Dare's grave is found by her descendant, rebellious Princess Anne.The forester Aspar White rescues a novice monk, Stephen Darige, from a kidnapping. Aspar is warned about the mythical Briar King by the strange Selfry travellers.Evil Prince Robert murders his sister and tricks his brother into war with nearby Hansa. Queen Muriele secretly sends Anne and her friend Austra to a convent to be trained as an assassin. Muriele and her two other daughters evacuate to the country, aided by loyal knight Neil MeqVren who is in love with Princess Fastia.At the monastery, Stephen finds corruption within the church, and prophecies concerning the terrifying Briar King. Beneath the castle, the captive last Skasloi (known as "the Kept") makes evil predictions. Anne's training takes a strange turn as she finds herself in a magical realm. On her return, Anne is warned she must be Queen to save the world.The other princesses are murdered as Neil and Muriele watch helplessly - themselves saved only by the appearance of the Briar King. As the assassins aim for their final target, Anne and Austra escape the mass slaughter at the convent, aided by swordsman Cazio and his mentor z'Acatto. Prince Robert murders the king who deals a fatal wound as he dies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elven_Star"title="Elven Star">
On steamy Pryan, Realm of Fire, never-ending sunlight and plentiful rain have created a jungle so vast that humans and elves dwell high in the trees and only dwarves live anywhere near the ground. From the treetops the aristocratic elves sell weapons to the other races, whose incessant warfare sends a steady stream of profits and essential resources skyward. Now, generations of dissent and race hatred will not heal -- not even under threat of annihilation at the hands of the legendary tytans. Armed with little more than their wits and a prophecy, elves, humans, and a dwarf must unite to try to save the world from destruction.Paithan, Caliandra and Aleatha are the three children of one of the richest elves. Paithan goes to the nearest human town to conclude an arms deal with two humans, Roland and Rega. They persuade Paithan to travel with them to deliver the arms to the dwarf who ordered them. They plan for Rega to seduce Paithan so that Roland can then accuse and attack him. Instead, Rega actually falls in love with Paithan, and he with her, though a series of misunderstandings delays them in acknowledging their love to each other.In the meantime, they have finally got close to dwarf lands. They are captured by a dwarf, Drugar and he plans to escort them back to their home and watch as they and all their loved ones die, as his did. Whenever the tytans approach people, they keep asking telepathically "Where is the citadel?" and then kill people when they cannot answer them. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Sea"title="Fire Sea">
Abarrach, the World of Stone is just that: lava, stone, poisonous fumes, and precious little food that can be grown. The peoples of Abarrach rely on giant rune-inscribed stone pillars called colossi to provide warmth and breathable atmosphere, but the colossi have been failing slowly for many years. The mensch have all died out, and the only remaining people — all of them Sartan — are far reduced in power; most of their innate magic is consumed with simply keeping them alive. To bolster their numbers, they have taken to the forbidden art of necromancy: the raising of the dead. These reanimated corpses are not very smart, but they're better than nothing.Haplo is sent to this world and discovers, much to his alarm, that Alfred has somehow infiltrated the Nexus and stowed away on his ship. Before he can do anything, however, the vessel passes through Death's Gate, and their consciousnesses switch: the two are forced to relive each other's most painful memories: a seven-year-old Haplo seeing the slaughtered bodies of his parents and being taught that it is all the fault of the Sartan; and Alfred, waking up to find that he is the only Sartan left alive on Arianus and possible all the worlds for all he knows. The experience changes them and they no longer look at them with the same hatred or fear.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpent_Mage"title="Serpent Mage">
After the four worlds Alfred has at last found his people on Chelstra, the realm of sea. But his travels have taught him to be cautious... and Alfred soon realizes his caution is justified, even among his own kind. The one person Alfred can trust is, strangely, Haplo the Patryn. But Haplo's lord has decreed all Sartan to be the enemy, and Haplo dares not go against his lord. Now the companions have arrived in a land where humans, elves, and dwarves have learned to live in peace. Unaware of an even greater threat to all the realms, it is Sartan and Patryn who will disrupt this alliance of the lesser races in their struggle to gain control of all four worlds. Only Alfred and Haplo realize that they have a much older—and more powerful—enemy than each other, Samah, the nominal leader of all Sartan. Samah defeats them, and Alfred goes into exile, with Haplo imprisoned.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hand_of_Chaos"title="The Hand of Chaos">
Samah has opened Death's Gate, allowing the dangerous dragon-snakes unfettered access to all four worlds. Haplo is too exhausted to capture Samah, so he returns to the Nexus and reports to Xar, his lord. Xar assigns Haplo to take Bane back to the air world Arianus, where Haplo will reactivate a city-sized machine called the Kicksey-winsey, which has stopped for the first time in history. Haplo contemplates returning to the Labyrinth, the prison world of his people, the Patryn, but is intercepted by Zifnab, a Sartan. Sartans are the enemies of the Patryns; despite this, Haplo warns Zifnab to leave before Xar finds him. Bane informs Xar of this conversation and is ordered to kill Haplo for his betrayal.Limbeck, the leader of a dwarf rebellion, enlists Haplo's help in reactivating the machine. Haplo, Bane, Limbeck, and Limbeck's wife Jarre must sneak through the elven base in the Factree to reach the machine's center. Haplo, Bane, and Jarre are separated from Limbeck and captured by red-eyed elves led by Sang-drax. Limbeck finds a room where members of all races sit peacefully together, but have frightening red eyes. He overhears elves discussing Sang-drax taking Jarre to his dragonship and plots to rescue her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Labyrinth_(novel)"title="Into the Labyrinth (novel)">
The Seventh Gate is rumoured to give anyone who enters it the power to create and destroy worlds. Haplo is the only one who knows how to enter it, but he is not aware of his own knowledge. Haplo is in mortal danger, with assassin Hugh and an ex-lover Marit having been sent after him by the villainous Lord Xar. Old enemies, the Sartan and Patryn, have crossed paths once more via the power of the Death Gate, and war is breaking out. After numerous adventures through various planets, dimensions and labyrinths, Marit is wounded, Haplo is abducted by Xar, and Alfred goes missing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dovey_Coe"title="Dovey Coe">
12-year-old Dovey Coe narrates the story trying to "lay the record straight" about her sister's suitor's death. The first two-thirds of the book recount the relationship between Dovey's sister, Caroline, and her suitor, Parnell. She offers her own viewpoint about each character including Dovey's parents and her brother, Amos, who is deaf. The last third of the novel is centered in the courtroom as the murder trial takes place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Side_of_Nowhere"title="The Dark Side of Nowhere">
The boy in the book—Jason Miller—is having a bad day. It's not that he doesn't feel like himself, he actually isn't himself. Everything has changed. His friend Ethan dies. Jason really isn't himself all of a sudden. So, he starts wondering who he is (he just doesn't know). And to make matters worse, it's not just him; it seems that everyone in town is acting weird, including his friends and family. He then undergoes a transition, which shows him his little boring town has a dark side
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Une_double_famille"title="Une double famille">
Caroline Crochard, a delightful young girl living with her mother in squalid conditions, spends her time sewing in the window. The Comte de Granville, an aristocrat who was married at too young an age to a bigoted woman, and who is now unhappy in his home, sees the girl and falls in love with her. Balzac takes up their story some years later. Caroline is now richly installed in a luxurious apartment with two children, whose father, known to Caroline as Roger de Granville, cannot acknowledge them on account of his marriage. Eventually Caroline abandons de Granville and takes up with an impoverished young man, who squanders her property.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thyestes_(Seneca)"title="Thyestes (Seneca)">
Pelops, the son of Tantalus, had banished his sons for the murder of their half-brother, Chrysippus, with a curse upon them. Upon the death of Pelops, Atreus returned and took possession of his father’s throne. Thyestes, also, claimed the throne: he seduced his brother’s wife, Aërope, and stole by her assistance the magical, gold-fleeced ram from Atreus’ flocks, upon the possession of which the right to rule was said to rest. For this act he was banished by the king. But Atreus has long been meditating a more complete revenge upon his brother; and now in pretended friendship has recalled him from banishment, offering him a place beside himself upon the throne.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Descent"title="The Final Descent">
Fourteen-year-old Will Henry has gone through a lot of horrors with Dr. Warthrop at his side. This includes staring into hell (with hell returning the favor), being on the edge of death and more. But without Dr. Warthrop in the picture, the question is, is Will going to be able to navigate a monstrumological terror on his own? Everything comes crashing down for Will when Dr. Warthrop feels his protege is not being loyal anymore. He wants his 100 percent devotion and dedication back. So he leaves Will to face this on his own. Thus in the span of a mere 24 hours, Will's life lies in the balance. In the depths of Monstrumarium, he has to deal with a monster that is way worse than anything he or Dr. Warthrop could have imagined. This will determine both of their fates.The book won a Gold Medal in the Florida Book Awards.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Leno_and_the_Limehouse_Golem"title="Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem">
As Elizabeth Cree sits every day in a courtroom, on trial for the murder of her husband, the story moves from courthouse to music hall to the back alleys of Limehouse, a notorious district of Victorian London, teeming with the poorest of the poor, the most violent of criminals and helpless preyed-upon immigrants, following the trail of slaughter laid by the Golem, an almost mythical predecessor of Jack the Ripper. Fact and fiction blend as Dan Leno, king of the music-hall comedians, is dragged unwittingly into the investigation of some of London's most notorious murders. Karl Marx and George Gissing are connected to the same crimes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_Girls,_Some_Hats_and_Hitler"title="Some Girls, Some Hats and Hitler">
The book tells a story of a hatmaker who is Jewish and falls in love with Walter on the eve of World War II. The story follows their lives before and during the war, starting from 1938 when the Germans occupy Austria, and ending with the defeat of Germany by the Allies in 1945. Before the war, she was married to another character, Pepi, divorcing him and ending her relationship with him as best friends. When the Germans invade her homeland, Austria, she emigrates to Czechoslovakia after they establish Kristallnacht, a series of anti-Jewish pogroms. Later on, she and Walter meet in Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, and obtain visas to Liverpool, England. There, Walter is detained and sent to an internment camp where he remained until the end of the war. After his release, Trudi marries Walter and he lives for 15 more years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasmine_Nights"title="Jasmine Nights">
A twelve-year-old boy, known as Little Frog to his family and Justin to his few friends, is left in the care of three strange aristocratic aunts and a rather frightening uncle until he is old enough to attend Eton school in England. In order to prepare himself for his intended future, he insists on speaking only English and will eat only bacon and eggs for breakfast, though he is prepared to accept Thai dishes at other meals. In this peculiar situation the boy finds himself between three worlds, the Thai world of his family and his regal ancestors and their apparently pointless rituals, the western world of logic and common sense which he finds more compatible with his temperament and the imaginary world of his sheltered childhood.Imagining himself to be a great scholar and philosopher, Justin enlists the aid of an African American boy and the family gardener's son and sets out to convert his school classmates from their ingrained bigotry and racism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_and_Soldier"title="Dragon and Soldier">
To identify which, among the various mercenary armies operating in the Orion Arm, coöperated with Draycos' most-recent attackers, Jack enlists in the mercenary force 'Whinyard's Edge', to investigate whether they, or any of their rivals, were participants in the ambush; but when Jack's burglary of their records is interrupted by that of fellow-recruit 'Alison Kayna', both burglars, and their four closest acquaintances among the new recruits, are betrayed by their officers to the rival organization 'Shamshir'. Having escaped, and later rescued Jack's comrades, Jack and Draycos feign destruction of the mine for which both organizations are fighting, whereupon the organizations abandon the mine to local claimants. Thereafter Jack plans to investigate the slave-trade supplying all the mercenary societies with 'Brummgas' (a troll-like species), in hope of there finding the desired information. In the epilogue, Alison Kayna investigates Jack's possessions; but the results are unseen until the sixth book of the series, "Dragon and Liberator".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Paix_du_ménage"title="La Paix du ménage">
The Comte de Gondreville hosts an ostentatious ball in his stately mansion. Among the guests is an unknown woman in a blue dress. She is discreet and bashful, and clearly at odds with the arrogance and excitability of the other guests; it is as though she does not belong in these opulent surroundings. Intrigued by this pretty young woman, the Comte de Montcornet and Baron de la Roche-Hugon make a wager to see which of them can seduce this heavenly figure, who is, in fact, the wife of the Comte de Soulanges. A tangled web of amorous intrigues ensues.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakit_Hindi_Ka_Crush_ng_Crush_Mo?_(book)"title="Bakit Hindi Ka Crush ng Crush Mo? (book)">
The story starts when a record company, A&amp;A Records, has gone down to the bottom in the music industry. Miguel Prieto has passed the company to his son, Alex Prieto. Sandy Veloso, an ugly duck darling who has a boyfriend who is Edgardo Salazar. She becomes brokenhearted when she saw her boyfriend with a beautiful girl. Sandy is also a worker in A&amp;A Records who is the personal assistant of Pamela. Alex finds a solution when the workers suggest Sandy because she has much knowledge in the music industry. First, Sandy suggests a band named "Banda ni Kleggy". Next, she suggests Tangerine, a singer whose career has gone down.After that, Sandy suggests Jireh Lim. But after their efforts to make the company down, they failed. Alex realizes that he likes Sandy.Ramon Bautista states the reasons why your crush has no crush on you. The following are:At the end of the movie, which is of the same title, Alex Prieto kisses Sandy Veloso.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_(Leckie_novel)"title="Hannibal (Leckie novel)">
Beginning with the general’s youth and a potted history of Carthage in an attempt to explain Hannibal’s hatred of Rome, the bulk of the story is confined to the invasion of Italy and the epic journey Hannibal’s army took to reach its goal, including the voyage across the Straits of Gibraltar with his elephants on rafts, the far from easy passage through Spain and of course, the incredible feat of taking his entire army with their elephants over the Alps. The events described are often violent and sometimes quite horrific in their cruelty both on the journey and in the fighting which took place on Italian soil as Hannibal’s army sweeps through the Italian countryside seeking to out-manoeuvre his Roman opponents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krindlekrax"title="Krindlekrax">
The story takes place in a street called Lizard Street, located in a town with cracked pavements, scorched brickwork and bumps and holes in the roads. It centres around a 9-year-old boy named Ruskin Splinter, who is small and thin with thick glasses, red frizzy hair, knock-knees and a squeaky voice. He wants to be the hero of a school play, but everyone criticises him for his appearance and voice, and the role is instead given to Ruskin's window-smashing former friend Elvis Cave. Ruskin's special friend is the local school caretaker, Corky Pigeon, who tells him his experiences with the evil monster that lurks in the sewers and terrorises the street, a giant fire breathing crocodile named Krindlekrax.Later, Ruskin finds out from his drunken dad that everyone in Lizard Street was responsible for the monster getting into the sewers in the first place, and how it grew so big. Suddenly Corky unexpectedly dies, and everyone suspects it to be a heart attack, but Ruskin knows that Krindlekrax was responsible, and is angry with all of Lizard Street for allowing it to happen.Ruskin is so upset with Corky's death that he can't get out of bed, but many people bring him gifts and tell him the story of how Corky got a gold medal (that he later gave to Ruskin as a present) for saving Lizard Street. After this, Ruskin decides to save the street from the wrath of Krindlekrax once and for all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finders_Keepers_(King_novel)"title="Finders Keepers (King novel)">
In 1978, petty criminal Morris Bellamy and two of his friends break into the home of author John Rothstein, an author famous for his "Jimmy Gold Runner" trilogy, who lives a reclusive lifestyle away from civilisation. They hurt him badly before demanding to know where he keeps his cash. Although Rothstein tries to lie to them by saying he only keeps petty amounts of cash in his house, they find his safe and force him to give them the combination, discovering a small fortune of cash and a large amount of notebooks. Rothstein pleads with them and tells them they can keep the cash as long as they leave the notebooks, but Morris tells the others to take everything. Rothstein begins to insult Morris and, much to the disapproval of the others, Morris kills him. When they are driving away, the thieves reach a deserted rest area and Morris tells them to pull over. When they get out, Morris kills both of them and drives to his estranged mother's house, who is currently away for the semester lecturing in history.The next morning, Morris goes to see an old friend Andrew "Andy" Halliday to show him the notebooks, and Andy immediately confronts him about what he has done. When Morris asks him how long he should wait until they are able to start selling the notebooks to private collectors, Andy tells him to wait until the turn of the twenty-first century, to hide the notebooks and stay away from him, or he will call the police. That night, Morris puts the cash and notebooks in a trunk and buries them underneath a tree behind the house and goes to a bar. Later, he wakes up in a jail cell, having no memory of what happened and wonders if he was arrested for the murders of Rothstein and his friends, but he later finds out that he violently attacked and raped a woman while he was drunk. Morris pleads guilty in the hopes of getting a reduced sentence but is given life sentence instead. Years gone by and his parole hearings are constantly always rejected until in 2014, when his granted parole. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sound_of_Things_Falling"title="The Sound of Things Falling">
"The Sound of Things Falling" is the story of a law professor named Antonio Yammara, who narrates the novel. Scenes switch between the 1990s Bogotá, where everything is falling apart as the result of the drug wars, and the past where the drug trade seem interwoven into everyone's lives.The text begins with Yammara giving a brief description of his early life. He began as a professor, who met Aura in one of his classes. She exchanged sexual favors with Antonio in exchange for higher grades in his classes and falls pregnant. Antonio also frequents a local pool hall, in which he meets ex-con Ricardo Laverde. They begin playing pool together and Antonio quickly becomes interested in the man's mysterious past. Although Antonio claims that he and Ricardo are not friends, the nature of their relationship quickly becomes closer and Ricardo begins to confide in Antonio. Upon receiving a mysterious cassette, Ricardo sets out to find a cassette player. He listens to the tape and becomes distraught. He begins walking quickly down the street, with Antonio in close pursuit. As they are drawing near the pool hall, a motorbike descends from the curb and guns them down. Ricardo is killed and Antonio badly injured. After the accident, Antonio becomes fixated upon Ricardo's life and withdraws from all other aspects of existence. His relationship with Aura deteriorates quickly and he becomes scared of the area of the city close to the pool hall. He is contacted by Ricardo's daughter Maya, who knows much of her estranged father's story. Antonio absconds from his home without telling Aura in an attempt to chase this lead. He learns that Ricardo was a pilot who was caught smuggling drugs into the United States and given a 19-year jail sentence. Maya's mother had returned to her native United States when Maya turned 18, and died in a plane crash when attempting to visit Maya and Ricardo after he got out of jail. As the novel progresses, Antonio and Maya's relationship takes a sexual turn. Antonio had not told Maya about his family back in Bogota. As the text ends, Antonio returns home and finds that Aura has left Antonio, along with the baby.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Support_and_Defend"title="Support and Defend">
Dominic “Dom” Caruso is in India, training with former Israeli commando Arik Yacoby on a six-week training program in Krav Maga. One night, the Yacoby family are attacked in a home invasion, which ends with one of the intruders detonating a suicide vest, killing the whole family and injuring Caruso. It was later revealed that the attack on Yacoby was the result of a recent data breach in the National Security Council (NSC), which staffer Ethan Ross inadvertently set into motion when he took top secret files and shared them with an international whistleblowing organization called the International Transparency Project (ITP).After the attack, the NSC schedules a lie detector test, which leads Ross to panic. He was then asked by ITP head Gianni Bertoli to scrape the government’s servers for classified data and store them in a flash drive as insurance in case the techniques for “beating the polygraph” does not work. Unbeknownst to them, the flash drive was provided by Iranian agent Mohammed Mobasheri, who had infiltrated ITP. Meanwhile, Caruso acquires help from David, a Mossad agent who was also investigating Yacoby’s death.When the lie detector test does not work, Ethan is forced to flee the country with the flash drive by offering classified intelligence to Venezuela in exchange for safe passage. He was then kept in a safe house in Panama; Caruso finds this out from David. His boss from The Campus, Gerry Hendley, sends director of transportation Adara Sherman to accompany him in surveilling the safehouse. However, the Russian government had taken interest in Ross through their connections in Venezuela, and try to snatch him. Caruso and Sherman dispatch the GRU forces, but Ross, Bertoli and Mobasheri escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Graduation_of_Jake_Moon"title="The Graduation of Jake Moon">
This novel is all about Jake Moon's changing relationship with his grandfather. This was someone he loved for so many years, and enjoyed spending time with. But now Skelly—the grandfather—has Alzheimer's disease and everything has changed for Jake. Indeed, it is now like Jake is the adult and Skelly is the kid. More than that, it seems like caring for his grandfather has been very much left up to him and that puts an increased burden on his own life.One day though, Jake has had enough and he rebels. The unthinkable happens and now the question is, has Jake left it too late? Can he still show his grandfather how much he means to him? The story reveals the answer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unicorn_(novel)"title="The Unicorn (novel)">
"The Unicorn" is set in a remote area on the west coast of Ireland. The book begins with the arrival of Marian Taylor, a young English school teacher who has accepted a position as governess at an isolated country house called Gaze Castle. She is surprised to learn that there are no children at Gaze, and that she will be teaching French and Italian to the lady of the house, Hannah Crean-Smith.Part 1 describes Marian's growing awareness of the situation at Gaze Castle, as recounted to her by other characters. Her main informant is Denis Nolan, the estate's clerk. She learns that Hannah has been confined to Gaze and its grounds by her husband Peter for seven years as punishment for having been unfaithful to him and for nearly killing him. Peter had been an abusive and unfaithful husband, and was often absent. During one of these absences, Hannah had an affair with Pip Lejour, who owns a nearby house called Riders. Peter arrived home unexpectedly and caught them in bed together. Later, after a struggle between Hannah and Peter, Peter fell over a cliff. He was badly injured but survived. He then left Gaze, leaving the estate in the hands of his former lover Gerald Scottow.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_the_Shank"title="Song of the Shank">
Song of the Shank is a novel loosely based on the life of Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth-century African-American pianist, composer, and performer, who played under the stage name Blind Tom. Born a slave in Columbus, Georgia, in 1849, Tom began giving concert recitals at the age of six and went on to become for several decades one of the most famous Americans of his time. Not only did he play to full houses across the US, the British Isles, and Europe, he was also the first African American to perform at the White House. However, he has for the most part disappeared from history, in part because musicologists have come to view him as an autistic savant who lacked true creative ability.Totaling more than 600 pages, the novel has nine sections in all, each told in third or first person from the point of view of varying central characters, which total seven in all. The present action of the novel covers a period of less than four years, from 1866 until 1869, with flashbacks to the earlier years of Tom's life. When the novel opens, Tom is living in isolation in a Manhattan apartment with his sole guardian, Eliza Bethune, the widow of his former manager who wants to rid herself of Tom. The novel's subsequent sections examine Tom's powerful impact on those who try to return him to fame or who simply want to understand him, including his mother after a decade of separation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_(Reichs_novel)"title="Exposure (Reichs novel)">
The story starts some time after the ending of "Code", the third book in the series. However, it's not long before things start to go wrong. Twins Lucy and Peter Gable, classmates of the Virals, have been kidnapped, and the police seem baffled. The Virals decide to investigate, but matters become worse when Tory's best female friend, Ella, goes missing as well. And Ben and Tory begin to have a bond closer than ever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Late_Divorce"title="A Late Divorce">
Five years after being attacked at knifepoint by his wife, Yehuda Kaminka returns to Israel from the United States in order to divorce her. The novel follows the lives of individuals in the Kaminka family, including Naomi (Yehuda's institutionalized wife), and the couple's adult children (Tsvi, Asa, and Ya'el), among others. Each of the children's lives is fraught with peril: Asa, a university lecturer in Jerusalem, is caught in a sexless marriage with the aspiring writer Dina, Tsvi spends his days in Tel Aviv lamenting over his relationship with his father and using his middle-aged homosexual lover, and Ya'el, the couple's daughter, is married to a widely-disliked lawyer. The novel, like Yehoshua's debut novel "The Lover", is told from a first-person point of view, with each chapter from the view of a different character, and explores themes of unfulfilled romance, Jewish diaspora, social crises, and generational estrangement.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People_of_the_Wind"title="The People of the Wind">
"The People of the Wind" is a story of the clash of two very different cultures living on a planet named Avalon. One culture consists of people who trace their ancestry to Earth and can thus be considered human. They have created a highly organized and complex society. The other culture is made up of winged creatures that have remained ‘as free as the wind.’ Despite the unlikelihood of such two different groups forming a unified society, they indeed created a single nation composed of the best of both races. Unfortunately the two groups are forced into a war, and the population of Avalon is forced to choose a side to support. Unless they choose they are going against both.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_and_Leadership"title="Democracy and Leadership">
Babbitt criticizes what he calls the naturalistic movement in modern Western society. He distinguishes two aspects of this movement, letting Francis Bacon exemplify its mechanistic and utilitarian side and Jean-Jacques Rousseau its sentimental side. Both ignore the need to order human life with reference to a transcendent ethical principle. The utilitarian and sentimental dispositions are frequently joined in a single individual. According to Babbitt, no amount of sentimental “love” or sociopolitical activism can substitute for a lack of real moral character. The book rejects historical deterministic philosophies from Saint Augustine to Bossuet. It details political philosophy from Aristotle onwards, explaining how governmental philosophies have tried and failed over time. In the book, Babbitt provides a convincing critique of "unchecked majoritarianism," while dealing with the issue of how to find leaders who have high standards.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel's_Lament"title="Gabriel's Lament">
Narrated by Gabriel Harvey, the novel is about the life of a boy whose life changes dramatically when his father inherits a large amount of money and his mother (who happens to be 35 years his father's junior), suddenly disappears. Gabriel at first thinks that his mother's leaving is temporary, but he comes to realize that indeed it is. In the book we see how Gabriel gradually comes to terms with the fact that her disappearance is a complete separation from his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bunker_Diary"title="The Bunker Diary">
Teenager Linus Weems wakes up in an underground bunker, having been drugged with chloroform and kidnapped by a stranger. Although Linus is from a wealthy family, since the death of his mother and subsequent arguments with his father, he had run away from school and been living on the streets. A stranger was able to kidnap Linus by posing as a blind man needing assistance. As Linus adjusts to his new surroundings, he finds that the bunker has a kitchen, bathroom and six small bedrooms, but there are also cameras and microphones so that 'the man upstairs' (as Linus calls the kidnapper) can watch his every move.Soon after Linus's arrival, other kidnap victims start being brought down through a lift – the lift being the means by which the kidnapper communicates. The first to arrive is nine-year-old Jenny, who forms a close bond with Linus. Jenny successfully convinces the kidnapper to send down food by presenting a polite, handwritten note to 'Him' via a message in the lift. Other kidnap victims arrive: Anja is a woman in her twenties; Bird is an older businessman; Fred is an addict; Russell is an elderly man with a brain tumor. The group quickly learn that any attempt at escape results in 'punishments' from the kidnapper, such as deafening noise being played, being knocked out with gas and food deliveries stopping or being poisoned. At one point, the kidnapper sends down vodka and drugs, presumably to stop the group from trying to work together effectively. Linus tries to convince everyone to continue co-operating, but his efforts are merely met with hostility and complaints from some of the group.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Did_You_See_Her_Last?"title="When Did You See Her Last?">
S. Theodora Markson and Lemony Snicket are called to the Knight household: housemaids Zada and Zora are worried about the disappearance of Cleo Knight. Cleo's parents are permanently dazed and confused, which Lemony realizes is because their doctor, Dr. Flammarion, is injecting them with laudanum. In Cleo's room, Lemony finds a failed attempt at making invisible ink.On the journey back to the Lost Arms, Lemony orders Theodora to stop the car, spotting a Dilemma (the car Cleo Knight owned). It had a flat tire with a hypodermic needle stuck into it. Lemony begins to investigate witnesses. Polly Partial claims she saw Cleo yesterday, purchasing her favorite breakfast, and then leaving in the Bellerophon taxi to run away to join the circus. Jake Hix says that Cleo had visited Hungry's and left in her Dilemma at the same time. However, Lemony proves Partial's testimony is unreliable due to her bad eyesight.Moxie and Lemony walk to the library to investigate the case; they research invisible ink and Colonel Colophon, a war hero of Stain'd by the Sea who had a clinic built for him in the town. Lemony has to abandon Moxie when he sees a woman returning library books that were in Hangfire's possession. Following the woman, he ends up finding Ellington Feint in an abandoned aquarium; she has been posing as Cleo Knight and pretending to work on invisible ink for Hangfire. Lemony causes a distraction and they both escape, although Ellington is arrested.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stories_of_Eva_Luna"title="The Stories of Eva Luna">
## "Two Words".Belisa Crepusculario sells various "services" related to words and languages. When she is a child, she runs away from home across plains into a small village. There, she discovers writing through a newspaper, learns language through a dictionary, and starts selling "words." When a rebel (in the Mexican Civil War) dubbed The Colonel decides he wants to become more benevolent and presidential, he sends his man El Mulato to find Belisa and bring her to him. With Belisa's help, The Colonel is able to learn the art of public speaking. The Colonel offers to pay Belisa for her services, but she instead gives him two secret words and goes back to her life selling words in the village. After Belisa leaves The Colonel becomes sick, causing El Mulato to believe Belisa cursed him. El Mulato abducts Belisa, believing she has the power to cure The Colonel. When El Mulato presents Belisa to The Colonel, they stare at each other before holding hands.Though the titular "two words" are never directly mentioned in the story, it is widely presumed that they are "Te amo," "I love you" in Spanish.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moloch_(Kuprin_novel)"title="Moloch (Kuprin novel)">
Engineer Andrey Bobrov works for a ruthless capitalist industrial enterprise, feeling more and more uncomfortable with what is going on around him. After losing Nina, the woman he loves, to the amoral industrialist Kvashnin who owns that enterprise, he suffers a nervous breakdown and is left a broken man, prone to frenzied and futile debates with his own 'double'. The story's finale hints at the outbreak of a workers' revolt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elric_of_Melniboné_(novel)"title="Elric of Melniboné (novel)">
After the death of his father, Elric reigns as the 428th sorcerer-king of the island kingdom of Melniboné, known as the Dragon Isle. Elric believes that, after millennia of dominating their world, the Melnibonéans have become decadent, and sees that their empire is crumbling and is now a shadow of its former glory. Only the capital city, Imrryr, has not reverted to wilderness. Melnibonéans are a haughty, arrogant race who live only for pleasure and novelty. Slavery and torture are common practices.Elric, a sickly albino, requires potions and magic to sustain his health. He has spent much of his youth on Dreaming Couches, which allowed him to learn from virtual years worth of experiences in a short time. Elric is in love with his cousin, Cymoril. Elric confides to Cymoril that he would like to bring morality and fairness to Melniboné and that he is not interested in cruelty or power, as were his ancestors.Yyrkoon, Cymoril's brother, also desires Cymoril and plots to take the throne of Melniboné for himself. When a fleet of invaders from the Young Kingdoms attacks Imrryr, Elric leads the Melnibonéan war barges to destroy them. During the battle, Yyrkoon takes advantage of Elric's weakened physical state and pushes him overboard into the sea.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorder_and_Early_Sorrow"title="Disorder and Early Sorrow">
The novella is set in one day in Munich in Weimar Germany. The Cornelius family are preparing a party for Ingrid and Bert, Professor Cornelius's children. The family are divided up on the basis of chronology, foreshadowing one of the central themes of the work which is the interplay between different generations at a time of dislocating social and economic change. Ingrid and Bert, both adolescents, are "the big folk"; Professor Cornelius and his wife are "the old folk"; Ellie and Snapper, their youngest children, are "the little folk"; and Professor Cornelius's parents, who are only discussed and who do not feature directly in the story, are categorised as "the ancients".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgeous_Lies"title="Gorgeous Lies">
This book tells the story of Anton Furey, a charismatic therapist who is dying. It details the familial relationships during this time, which includes his five kids, his wife's three kids and the child they have together. That child -- Alice -- then moves back to the farm where she was raised (Chardin). While the family lived there – in a communal lifestyle – they got the reputation of being the new American blended family. Because of that reporters and film crews took an interest, recording their lifestyle. Then things change. Anton gets sicker and many emotions from the years spent in Chardin surface. Throughout this process, the collective kids start reliving the issues they had, in an attempt to make their peace with their father. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Only_Journey_of_His_Life"title="The Only Journey of His Life">
The story has a lot of autobiographical elements. The narrator of the story is a ten years boy from a village of Eastern Thrace. At the age of ten, he goes to Constantinople as an apprentice of a tailor. There, he expects to happen all that he had been narrated by his grandfather. However nothing notable happened and the boy loses his belief for his sweetheart person. One day the boy is alerted to go to his village to see his grandfather who is sick. The boy visits his grandfather and narrates him the journey in Constantinople, and asks him for his own journeys. Then he discovered that his grandfather had never gone a journey and all the stories he was saying were the fairy tales of his mother. Subsequently, the grandfather reveals to his grandson his childhood. As a child he was shut in his house until he married. The reason was that in those years, the Turks enlisted in the janissary army many children of Christians, obligatorily. The boys avoided the army if they had married. In his recitation, a complaint is distinguished for his only journey he was never completed. The next day the grandfather died thereby realizing the only journey of his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifty_Shades_Darker"title="Fifty Shades Darker">
Three days after leaving Christian, Anastasia "Ana" Steele begins her job as personal assistant to Jack Hyde, an editor at Seattle Independent Publishing (SIP). He asks Ana out often which, though it makes her uneasy, she writes off. Later, Christian emails her about a gallery exhibit José Rodriguez started in Portland, which she'd forgotten. Ana and Christian attend the show together and kiss in an alley. The same night, they have dinner in a restaurant and Christian reveals he wants her any way possible. He later asks that they resume their relationship but under Ana's conditions: no rules and no punishments. She agrees.Christian reveals to Ana that he bought SIP but that the deal must stay secret for another month. Feeling he is interfering in her career, especially after he freezes the company's accounts preventing her from going on an overnight business trip to New York with Jack, Ana finds it annoying. Christian insists his actions were for her own protection because Jack is a "known philanderer" who has apparently harassed his last five assistants. Christian's concerns prove correct when Jack corners Ana after hours and blackmails her, demanding sexual favors. Ana escapes using her self-defense training, and Christian has Jack fired and confiscates his work computer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_of_Winter_(Goss_novel)"title="Dead of Winter (Goss novel)">
In a remote clinic in 18th century Italy, a lonely girl writes to her mother. She tells of pale English aristocrats and mysterious Russian nobles. She tells of intrigues and secrets, and strange faceless figures that rise up from the sea. And she tells about the enigmatic Mrs Pond, who arrives with her husband and her trusted physician.What the girl doesn't tell her mother is the truth that everyone at the clinic knows and no one says – that the only people who come here do so to die.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_and_Venus_in_the_Bedroom"title="Mars and Venus in the Bedroom">
John Gray brings his theories to enhancing the relationship in the bedroom and teaches his readers how to employ "advanced relationship skills" to create deeper intimacy while maintaining the passionate spark that was part of the couple's initial relationship. What he believes is that the first step to achieving this is an acceptance of the differences between the sexes. Once there is acceptance, it is easier for the couple to make small but significant changes in attitudes, techniques, etc. The theory is that this will then result in a rekindling of passion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_8-Week_Cholesterol_Cure"title="The 8-Week Cholesterol Cure">
In the book Kowalski writes about his experiences with cholesterol and uses it to help recommend changes that readers can use to improve their cholesterol. It includes information about cholesterol and what foods people can eat to immediately reduce cholesterol, as well as what vitamins can assist in this process. He also recommends exercise and emphasizes the use of niacin as a cure for cholesterol.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lotus_and_the_Storm"title="The Lotus and the Storm">
Minh is a former South Vietnamese commander of the airborne brigade who left his homeland with his daughter, Mai. During the war, their lives became entwined with those of two Americans: James, a soldier, and Cliff, a military adviser. Forty years later, Minh and his daughter Mai live in a close-knit Vietnamese immigrant community in suburban Virginia. As Mai discovers a series of devastating truths about what really happened to her family during those years, Minh reflects upon his life and the story of love and betrayal that has remained locked in his heart since the fall of Saigon."The Lotus and the Storm" is a tale of people who rebuild their lives in the aftermath of war and broken promises. Despite pain and loss, they find an inner strength that restores their capacity to forgive, to love, and to live.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schopenhauer's_Telescope"title="Schopenhauer's Telescope">
The novel takes place in an unnamed 20th-century European town. The narrator, known only as the Baker, is digging a hole while another man, the History Teacher, watches. Gradually it becomes clear that the hole is to be a mass grave for the villagers gathered nearby under the guard of a group of soldiers.The novel focuses mainly on the conversations between the baker and the history teacher while the grave is being dug. Topics include Genghis Khan, the Battle of Little Bighorn, Sun Tzu's "The Art of War", and the bombing of Dresden.After the hole is finished, it is revealed that the History Teacher has elected to be the first man shot, so that he does not have to see the others die. The Baker is allowed to live.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circular_Staircase"title="The Circular Staircase">
Rachel Innes is a spinster who has had custody of her orphaned niece and nephew since they were children. The siblings Halsey and Gertrude are now 20 and 24, respectively, and they talk Rachel into renting a house in the country for the summer. The country-house is owned by the Armstrong family (who is currently away on vacation), and currently only has a housekeeper named Mary.Upon arriving Rachel and her long-time maid Lydia set about hiring staff and setting up in the house before Halsey and Gertrude arrive the next day. They receive an ominous warning that there is a ghost in the house from Thomas, an older man who has worked for the Armstrongs for many years and agrees to return and work as a butler for Rachel. The first night Lydia and Rachel are awoken by the sounds of an intruder sneaking around and dropping a metal golf stick on a staircase. The next morning Gertrude and Halsey arrive along with Jack Bailey, a local banker who is a friend to Halsey and engaged to Gertrude.The next night Rachel is again woken by a loud sound and a dead body is found at the bottom of a circular set of stairs. The police arrive led by Detective Jamieson and the body is identified as Arnold Armstrong, the estranged son of the house owner Paul Armstrong. Halsey and Jack are both missing and while searching for them Rachel discovers Halsey's pistol thrown into a tulip bed. She hides this discovery from the police who question both her and Gertrude. Gertrude provides an alibi for Halsey and Jack, claiming they left just before Arnold was shot to death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nesthäkchen_in_the_Children's_Sanitorium"title="Nesthäkchen in the Children's Sanitorium">
At the beginning of Volume 3 of Else Ury's , "Nesthäkchen im Kinderheim," published 1915/1921 (Nesthäkchen in the Children’s Sanitorium), Anne Marie Braun is ten years old. She is a lively child and a good student. Shortly before her birthday, she develops a high fever at school. She has been inadvertently infected with scarlet fever by her father, a doctor in Charlottenburg (Berlin), who has just examined children with scarlet fever. After a long recovery time in the private clinic of her father, Anne Marie is still very weak. Therefore, she is sent by her parents to recover for a year in the children's sanitorium "Villa Daheim" in Wittdün on the North Sea island Amrum, which is managed by a sea captain's widow Mrs. Clarsen and her sister Lina. (The captain's ship was docked in Norddorf, an actual place. There was in Norddorf a port on the Kniepsand side, and also an island railway at that time on Amrum.) Life on the island, the landscape and manners, dress and speech, are described in detail. The North Germans in the story speak Plattdeutsch (Low German), which Ury transliterates, with a German translation of some words in parentheses. Anne Marie makes friends with the naughty boy Peter, who misbehaves again and again. The two walk together to seek wealth and swords in the mud, stray off the path, and get into a storm surge. But they find (albeit with difficulty) their way out of the dangerous situation. Anne Marie befriends a good girl, Gerda. Gerda has a bad leg due to a knee joint problem. Another counterpoint to Peter (who is a replacement for Anne Marie's wild brother Klaus in this part of the novel) is Kurt, whom she already met in Berlin in the hospital. Kurt is in a wheelchair, but manages with much patience and Anne Marie's help, to relearn how to walk. At the end of the story the First World War breaks out. Anne Marie is now eleven years old. Head over heels the sanitorium's guests flee the island. Anne Marie's doll Gerda falls off the pier into the water. The scene has a symbolic meaning: Anne Marie's childhood is over.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1934_(novel)"title="1934 (novel)">
The story takes place in 1934 on a boat ride to Capri. It details the relationship between an Italian anti-Fascist—Lucio—and a scared, suicidal German girl. It addresses large philosophical questions like the meaning of life, and love and death, through the author's art.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelfall"title="Angelfall">
It's been six weeks since angels of the apocalypse descended to demolish the modern world. Street gangs rule the day while fear and superstition rule the night. When warrior angels fly away with a helpless little girl, her seventeen-year-old sister Penryn will do anything to get her back.Anything, including making a deal with an enemy angel.Raffe is a warrior who lies broken and wingless on the street. After eons of fighting his own battles, he finds himself being rescued from a desperate situation by a half-starved teenage girl.Traveling through a dark and twisted Northern California, they have only each other to rely on for survival. Together, they journey toward the angels' stronghold in San Francisco where she'll risk everything to rescue her sister and he'll put himself at the mercy of his greatest enemies for the chance to be made whole again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_of_Gotham"title="Wayne of Gotham">
In 1957, Thomas Wayne meets Martha Kane and wonders why she can't love him like he loves her. Thomas' father, Patrick, mocks Martha and her society friends and demands that Thomas learn to be "the predator and not the prey". Thomas meets with Dr. Ernst Richter at Arkham Asylum and they begin creating a virus against human evil. Over the next year, they kidnap four prominent Gothamites to use as test subjects. The four become Gotham City's vigilante group, The Apocalypse.During a masquerade ball held at Wayne Manor, Thomas is confronted by one of the test subjects: Denholm Sinclair, AKA Disciple. Thomas leads him to the cave underneath Wayne Manor in hopes of trapping him. He finds Patrick Wayne's old shotgun and fires all six shots at Disciple, killing him. Disciple's blood spills into the Gotham River.Over 50 years later, a middle-aged Batman investigates a case where various people are committing crimes under the influence of mind control. During this investigation, he finds a witness report by Dr. Ernst Richter's daughter, Marion Richter, claiming Bruce's parents were killed due to their business with her father. Intrigued, he reopens the case of his parents' death.Bruce tracks down Marion's sister Amanda and discovers the two "sisters" are multiple personalities of the same woman, under the care of Nurse Ellen Doppel. As Batman, Bruce unearths a series of documents detailing the full story of the Apocalypse experiments. When Nurse Doppel attempts to steal some of the documents, Batman gives them to her willingly, knowing she will lead him to her controller. Doppel heads to the home of Gotham City kingpin Lewis Moxon and his daughter, Mallory, Bruce's childhood friend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Change_of_Skin"title="A Change of Skin">
This is the story about a frustrated Mexican writer named Javier, and his Jewish American wife, Elizabeth. The couple is making their way from Mexico City to Veracruz for a vacation. A man named Franz (a Czechoslovakian who helped construct the Nazi concentration camp, Theresienstadt and thereafter fled to Mexico) is with them, along with his young Mexican mistress, Isabel.Once the two couples have left Mexico, they visit the pre-Columbian ruins at Xochicalco and then the pyramids at Cholula. Their car is sabotaged, forcing them to spend the night in Cholula. There they are joined by the ubiquitous Narrator, who is also en route to Cholula, just to complicate matters even more.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_Light"title="Planet of Light">
When he was rescued by his own people at the end of "Son of the Stars", the alien boy Clonar left behind his wrecked spaceship’s IVP hyperwave radio. Now his friend, Ron Barron, is working with the United States Air Force to develop their own version of it. As he works on the device Ron hears Clonar calling from his home planet of Rorla and inviting Ron and his family to come attend a meeting of the Galactic Federation. Nine days later Ron, his father George, his mother, his ten-year-old sister Francie, and Anne Martin, his girlfriend are picked up by the crew of a giant discus-shaped starship and taken to Rorla, the Planet of Light, where the Barrons and Anne are obliged to live in a colony of houses that has been established for the conference delegates.On their first day in the colony Ron and Anne meet Borah, an affable bear-like creature from Haddon’s Galaxy and George meets a pair of swashbuckling cyanide-breathers named Barmese and Athol, whom Borah describes as intergalactic desperadoes. They also discover that the director of the colony is Tenarg, the Fleet Commander who, a year earlier, had ordered the destruction of Earth. Still filled with disdain for the people of Earth, Tenarg intends to make the Barrons’ stay on Rorla as miserable as possible.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_and_Earl_and_the_Dying_Girl"title="Me and Earl and the Dying Girl">
Greg Gaines is a senior at Benson High School. A social loner, he navigates high school life by gaining everyone's acquaintance but staying clear of any particular clique. His only real friend is Earl Jackson, a fellow student from a poor and broken family. Greg and Earl have been friends since childhood but Greg will only (cautiously) claim that they are coworkers. The two spend most of their time making films together. Greg and Earl keep their filming ventures a secret from their peers, fearing ridicule for their mediocre projects.One day, Greg's mother tells him that his childhood friend, Rachel Kushner, is diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia. Greg's mother wants him to rekindle their friendship and make her feel better. Although Greg had only befriended Rachel to try to get closer to her more attractive friend, Leah Katzenberg, he realizes that he cannot argue with his mother and calls her.One day at school, Greg gets a text from Rachel saying that she would be starting chemotherapy the next day. Although he and Earl are accidentally on drugs at that moment, they make it to Rachel's, where Greg introduces her to Earl. The three go out for ice-cream, and Earl invites Rachel to watch some of their films. Greg is furious but does not stop him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_Day"title="The One Day">
The book is composed of three parts--"Shrubs Burnt Away," "Four Classic Texts" and "To Build a House", employing a 10-line stanza with variable line length in an experimental form. It centers on mid-life anxiety, using phrases like "a preparation of death." It is not completely dark and despairing, as it focuses on how to make a life worth living, instructing readers to: "Work, love, build a house, and die. But build a house."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giver_Quartet"title="The Giver Quartet">
## "The Giver"."The Giver" is a 1993 American children's novel, generally for young adults or older, which is set in a society that is at first presented as a utopian society but gradually appears more and more dystopian. The novel follows a boy, Jonas, in his twelfth and thirteenth years. The society has eliminated pain and strife by converting itself to "Sameness," a plan that has also eradicated emotional depth from their lives. Jonas is selected to inherit the position of Receiver of Memory, who stores all of the past memories of the time before Sameness in case the memories that the others lack are ever needed to aid decisions. Jonas learns the truth about his Utopian society and struggles with its weight. The Community lacks any color, memory, climate, and terrain. Sameness emphasizes the utopian qualities of the Community."The Giver" won the 1994 Newbery Medal and has sold more than 10 million copies. In Australia, Canada, and the United States, it is a part of many middle schools' reading lists, but it also appeared in many challenging book lists, such as the American Library Association's list of most challenged books of the 1990s.The novel forms a loose quartet with three other books set in the same future era: "Gathering Blue" (2001), "Messenger" (2004), and "Son" (2012).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Your_Fathers,_Where_Are_They?_And_the_Prophets,_Do_They_Live_Forever?"title="Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?">
The book, told entirely in dialogue, follows the story of Thomas, a troubled man in his thirties haunted by the death of his friend Don Banh in a police shooting two years earlier. In an attempt to resolve the questions in his mind, he kidnaps seven people and brings them to a deserted Army base on the California coast, where he chains them to posts inside the abandoned buildings and forces them to discuss issues of concern to him, principally the lack of purpose and direction granted by American society to young men like him.Thomas first kidnaps Kev Paciorek, a NASA astronaut he knew slightly in college, who always dreamed of flying on the Space Shuttle but has now lost that opportunity with the end of the Shuttle program. Next, Thomas abducts former Congressman Mac Dickinson, a Vietnam veteran who lost two limbs in a grenade accident during the war. The third kidnap victim is a former middle-school teacher who was accused of molesting students and may have molested Thomas and Don. Thomas also abducts his mother, a longtime addict who failed to protect Thomas from the teacher and her string of boyfriends but places the responsibility for his problems on Thomas himself, claiming that he was always strange. Thomas abducts a police officer to discuss the police procedures that led to Don's death (including the 21 Foot Rule), but is shocked to realize that the officer was one of those who shot his friend. The sixth victim is the director of patient access at the hospital where Don died, whom Thomas blames for her role in the cover-up of the fact that Don was shot seventeen times rather than the three claimed in the official report. Thomas had committed arson at the hospital to protest the cover-up but was never charged with the crime.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burning_Dark"title="The Burning Dark">
The book follows several people tasked with the job of decommissioning a remote space station, the U-Star Coast City. The job is to be the final orders for black ops Captain Abraham Idaho Cleveland (referred to as "Ida"), as he is going to retire shortly after the task is completed. He's haunted by the memories of a battle against a Mother Spider, an alien creature capable of devouring entire worlds. Ida managed to successfully stop her from destroying a planet, but at the cost of lives and Ida's knee. His arrival on Coast City sparks the ire of the crew members Carter and DeJohn, who are unwilling to believe that Ida was capable of the featespecially since there was no news reporting about the event. His only true friend is the medic Izanami, with whom Ida frequently confides. Knowing that his presence aboard the ship is for appearances only, Ida spends his time constructing a space radio, through which he listens in to various conversations between other space crews. He's startled when he overhears an ancient communication from a Russian woman in some distress, as the woman talks about how she is burning and in danger from ship failure.At the same time several strange occurrences are happening on board the Coast City and the psi-marine Serra has been frequently hearing the voice of her dead grandmother calling to her. This is compounded by the multiple electronic malfunctions on the station and the fact that the Coast City is effectively cut off from the rest of mankind because of this. Things come to a breaking point when Zia Hollywood, a space profiteer and celebrity, boards the ship to refuel and rest before she and her crew move on. As tensions rise and more and the strange and frightening phenomena increase in frequency, the crew must discover who or what is causing all of the trouble and what it all means.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_Wild_(novel)"title="Running Wild (novel)">
"Running Wild" by Michael Morpurgo starts with a boy, Will Robert, riding an elephant along a beach, whilst on holiday in Indonesia. Will is grieving for his father, Robert, who died in the Iraq War. The elephant, Oona, is in an odd mood that day: her handler mentions that she refused to go into the sea for her usual morning dip. Suddenly, Oona charges off with Will clinging on for dear life. As they ascend a hill, Will witnesses the Boxing Day tsunami obliterating the beach where he had been moments earlier. Will is very sad.Oona heads into the jungle with Will on her back, and Will gradually learns to communicate with her and finds fruit and water enabling him to survive in the wild. He also remembers a long-ago lesson from his father, who taught him how to catch fish from a stream using his clothing as a net. However, Will struggles with biting insects and leeches. One day, there is a standoff between Oona and a tiger, and Will remembers the poem "The Tyger" by William Blake. Saying this poem out loud gives Will courage. This courage is needed when Will is kidnapped by hunters, and finds out about threats to the rainforest through trade in exotic pets, animal furs, palm oil and timber. Later Will escapes with the help of a chef, Kaya, who frees them by cutting open their wooden cage, leaving Will and the orangutans to run back into the wild. They wander the rainforest until they run into Oona. Will is over joyed to find Oona and climbs on her back with the orangutans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_of_a_Midget"title="Memoirs of a Midget">
We never learn her name, but the protagonist and principle narrator "Miss M." is playfully referred to as "Midgetina" by her faithless friend, Fanny. Hers is the story of a person who, though at home in nature and literature, is physically, spiritually, and intellectually out of place in the world. Her exact size is never made clear and seems to shift throughout the story. At times she is described as being of Thumbellina-like smallness. She recounts that she remembers as a child her father lifting her up in the palm of his hand to see herself in a small mirror. At the age of five or six, while sitting on a pomade jar watching her father shaving, she remembers being frightened when a jackdaw, attracted by her colorful red clothing, starts pecking at the window pane to get at her. She says she jumped up in alarm and ran away, tripping over a hairbrush, and falling sprawling beside a watch on his dressing table. She reads books that are taller than she is; and even at age twenty is carried on a tray and walks across the dining table. Yet she becomes a skilled horsewoman—riding sidesaddle on a pony—and at one point, we are told, can pass for a ten-year-old child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Reine_Margot_(novel)"title="La Reine Margot (novel)">
The story begins in Paris in August 1572, during the reign of the Valois King Charles IX, it is the French Wars of Religion. The protagonist is Marguerite de Valois, better known as Margot, the daughter of the deceased Henry II. The antagonist is the scheming Catholic power player Catherine de Medici, Margot's mother.Although Margot herself is excluded from the throne by the Salic Law, her marriage to a Protestant prince offers a chance for domestic reconciliation during the reign of the neurotic, hypochondriac King Charles IX, while Catholics are vying for political control of France with the French Protestants, the Huguenots.Catherine decides to make an overture of goodwill by offering up Margot in marriage to prominent Huguenot and King of Navarre, Henri de Bourbon, which is supposed to cement the hard-fought Peace of Saint-Germain. At the same time, Catherine schemes to bring about the notorious St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572 and assassinate many of the most wealthy and prominent Huguenots, who are in the largely-Catholic city of Paris to escort the Protestant prince to his wedding. The massacre begins four days after the wedding ceremony, and thousands of Protestants are slaughtered. The marriage goes ahead, but Margot, who does not love Henri, begins a passionate affair with the soldier La Môle, also a Protestant from a well-to-do family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Time_Like_the_Present"title="No Time Like the Present">
The novel is set during the period after the lifting of Apartheid. Stephen, a white, half-Jew, half Christian, and Jabulile (Jabu), a Zulu, are now able to legally live as a married couple in South Africa. Stephen is a chemistry professor, and Jabu takes classes to become an attorney in the new political order. The novel deals with their adjusting to the normalcy of post-Apartheid South Africa, and the cognitive dissonance of sending their children to private school and living in a suburb while poverty remains a severe problem in the country. Toward the end of the novel, a disastrous home invasion, compounded by other crimes against the family, causes Stephen and Jubu to consider moving to Australia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaves_in_the_Family"title="Slaves in the Family">
The author explores his family origins, dating to his English immigrant ancestors to America and their becoming major planters in South Carolina. Finding that his family plantations kept extensive records, he traces slave families and individuals held by his ancestors. Ball follows the stories of these people over many years as the families dispersed. Over time, his family earned the reputation as "the most prominent of South Carolina plantation owners."The author explores genealogy and history, via interviewing descendants from both groups. The African-American families included mixed-race descendants of one or more of his white family ancestors. Stories from the black families are intense and varied, practically lacking in any kind of bitterness. The book depicts his family as being not the cruelest of slave owners.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_World_(novel)"title="Ordinary World (novel)">
## Volume 1.Written between 1982 and 1986, the narrative takes place between 1975 and 1978.The story begins in the autumn of 1975, a year before the end of the Cultural Revolution, in Shaanxi province in China (the author's hometown). Shaoping Sun, an ordinary teenager from a village located on the Loess Plateau in northern Shaanxi, northwestern China, goes to the county of YuanXi to attend high school. His humble descent makes him shy and diffident. He falls in love with his classmate Hongmei Hao, a girl of upper-class descent. This is seen as problematic during the Cultural Revolution. Their relationship is revealed by their classmate Yuying Hou, and the abashed Hao has no choice but to end the liaison. She then quickly begins another relationship with her monitor, Yangmin Gu, a young man whose family is relatively better off than Sun's. After Sun's graduation from, he goes back home and becomes a teacher at the local village school and makes friends with Xiaoxia Tian, daughter of Fujun Tian, the vice president of the county's revolutionary committee.Sun's elder brother, Shao'an, who has been working in the field after his graduation from primary school, falls in love with his childhood friend Runye Tian, daughter of Fujun's brother, Futang, who disdains this relationship. Shao'an's aunt arranges for him to meet Xiulian, the daughter of one of her very distant cousins. The two quickly start seeing each other and go back to Shao'an's native village to prepare for a wedding. Runye then obeys her father and marries Xiangqian Li.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anubis_Tapestry"title="The Anubis Tapestry">
Chance Henry's archaeologist father accidentally awakens an evil mummy who steals his soul. Chance risks becoming a mummy himself to rescue his father from the Egyptian Underworld.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_(Bach_novel)"title="One (Bach novel)">
The author Richard and his wife Leslie have come under a spell of quantum physics. As a result, they find themselves in an alternate world, existing in different incarnations at the same time. First it is as if they were themselves, but living sixteen years in the past, on the day that they first met. In this alternate version of their lives they do not wed, and neither finds the happiness that they've achieved in their actual life. In another universe they find a world without war, where both Leslie and Richard are pilots in nonviolent war games. In a trip to the past they meet Attila the Hun. In another world they meet a saint who has discovered the meaning of life, but immediately burns the evidence, knowing that it would only cause division and ultimately, holy war. They meet the spirit who gives Richard his writing inspiration. They travel to a world where Richard is a bitter, dying man; a world where Leslie has left Richard; and a world where Leslie has died in a plane crash and Richard contemplates suicide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hálendið_(novel)"title="Hálendið (novel)">
## Characters.The novel is implicitly set around the time of the 2008–11 Icelandic financial crisis. It has four main characters, whose back-stories and psychological peculiarities the novel gradually develops through narratorial exposition and the characters' own flashbacks and conversations:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Secret"title="The Long Secret">
Harriet and her family are spending their summer in the beach town of Water Mill (which is on Long Island). Her summertime friend, twelve-year-old Beth Ellen Hanson, sometimes called Mouse, is also in Water Mill with her grandmother. Mysterious anonymous notes start showing up all over town; they have a religious slant and expose the faults of the recipients. Harriet is determined to find out who is leaving them. She suspects anyone who reads the Bible.Harriet drags Beth Ellen along on spying expeditions directed against Bunny, the piano-playing manager of the local hotel, and the Jenkinses, an eccentric southern family preoccupied with money-making schemes. Harriet's other best friend Janie Gibbs and Mrs Agatha K. Plumber from "Harriet the Spy" also appear.Beth Ellen learns that her rich mother, who left when she was five, is returning from Europe with her new husband Wallace. Her grandmother expects Beth Ellen to be excited by the news but she is indifferent. Her mother Zeeney turns out to be a beautiful but shallow socialite who is dissatisfied with her shy and serious daughter. Beth Ellen's dislike of her mother finally explodes in a temper tantrum which clears her head, leaving her happier and more confident.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_(novel)"title="California (novel)">
Main characters Frida Ellis and Calvin Friedman are young lovers who, having fled a nearly-destroyed Los Angeles, are living in an abandoned house in Northern California as subsistence foragers and farmers. Wealthier survivors live in "Communities" with internet access, private security, and other luxuries.The couple leave their home when Frida discovers she is pregnant. The protagonists abandon their former lives and seek the support of a community in which to raise their child. The couple struggle to decide whether or not to tell their new community about Frida's pregnancy which might sway a communal vote to determine if the couple should be allowed to stay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Young_Elites"title="The Young Elites">
A decade after the blood fever swept through the nation, most survivors—all of whom were children—gained strange markings during their time of illness. Those with visible markings became known as "malfettos". When people close to "malfettos", such as family members, began having strange accidents or deaths, people began to believe that these "malfettos" were bad luck and began treating them as second-class citizens. It is not widely known that the blood fever gifted some of these "malfetto" children with strange abilities—the children with these powers became known as The Young Elites. The Inquisition Axis believes that Young Elites are dangerous and vengeful and will destroy the nation, and thus seek to destroy them before they can do so.Adelina Amouteru was a survivor of the blood fever and, as a result, her black hair turned silver and she lost her left eye. She grew up with an abusive father who wished to exploit any possible abilities that she may have developed. One night, in an attempt to escape from her father, she accidentally murders him when her powers manifest: she is a Young Elite who can weave illusions that can trick the sense of sight, touch, smell, and sound. She is then caught by The Inquisition Axis, led by a secret "malfetto" named Teren Santoro, and imprisoned. Later, in the middle of her execution, she is rescued by The Dagger Society, a group of Young Elites that seek others like themselves and teach them how to control and use their gifts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enemy_Stars"title="The Enemy Stars">
The first ship that Humanity sent into interstellar space was the "Southern Cross", sent on a four-and-a-half century voyage to Alpha Crucis. On autopilot she accelerated at over one hundred gees until she was flying away from Sol at half the speed of light. Then the autopilot shut down the ion drive, the ship went into free fall, and the first crew went into the mattercaster on Earth's moon to be teleported aboard the ship for their month-long tour of duty. Ten generations later, when she is one hundred light years from Sol, Southern Cross receives her last crew, though the four men who come through the mattercaster do not know that they "are" the last crew.Terangi Maclaren, an astrophysicist of Polynesian ancestry, has convinced officials of the Protectorate, the dictatorship under which he lives, to take a great risk. Previous crews have made observations indicating that "Southern Cross" will pass close enough to a burnt-out star that she could be diverted, decelerate, and go into orbit around it in order that the crew can make further studies. The risk comes from the fact that if the crew cannot find a roughly asteroid-sized body to provide feedstock for the mattercaster, the Exploration Authority will not be able to teleport enough mercury to the ship to provide enough propellant for Southern Cross to resume her journey to Alpha Crucis. More playboy than scientist, Maclaren is assigned to the mission he had promoted.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wacky_Wednesday_(book)"title="Wacky Wednesday (book)">
The main character, an unnamed child who serves as the narrator, wakes up to find a shoe on the wall then looks up to find one on the ceiling as well. With each new page, the number of "wacky" things grows, as the child goes through a morning routine and makes it to George Washington School, trying to alert others to the wacky occurrences. The classmates ignore these warnings, and the teacher, Miss Bass, thinks this is disrupting the class and throws the child out.As the world gets progressively crazier, the child runs around trying to escape it or find help, and eventually runs into Patrolman McGann, who declares that Wacky Wednesday will end as soon as every last wacky thing has been counted – the final page having 20 in total.At the end, the shoe on the wall disappears as the child goes to bed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dare_Me_(novel)"title="Dare Me (novel)">
The story is based on the world of American cheerleading. The main characters are Addy, the 16-year-old narrator, her friend Beth and the cheerleading coach.The friendship between Addy and Beth goes back to their childhood. Beth is manipulative and often cruel; she has always been the leader with Addy her faithful lieutenant. A new coach arrives, things change very quickly and very soon she and Beth engage in a battle of wills. Addy adores Coach and is always willing to do her bidding, which in turn fuels Beth's jealousy; when the other team members gather at Coach's house for drinking sessions, Beth does not go there, but always watches, waiting for her moment. The girls are pushed to physical and psychological extremes as they vie for the best position on the team. Injury is just one wobble away. Then one dark night Addy is drawn into a nightmare.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nesthäkchen's_First_School_Year"title="Nesthäkchen's First School Year">
In the first class, which is the tenth in the old count, are fifty pupils. The class teacher is an attractive, sympathetic lady, Miss Hering. Anne Marie makes friends with the neighbor's daughter, Margot Thielen, and two cousins, Marlene Ulrich and Ilse Hermann. Also Anne Marie is attracted to the naughty Hilde Rabe. The book describes the school day in the German Empire. In class a hierarchy is introduced. The best students are in front, the bad ones sit in back. Anne Marie is a good student, but she does not remain long in first place. Not only her performance but also her behavior and orderliness are graded. Anne Marie is soon surpassed by her friend Margot Thielen, who is less talented but a good child. In the editions of the book prior to the 1980s, Anne Marie's mother explains to her daughter that orderliness and behavior are more important than good grades for a girl. However, Anne Marie persists in her untidiness until she forgets one day to give her canary Mätzchen (Antics) fresh water. The bird dies, and Anne Marie feels for the first time that sloppiness can have dire consequences. She gets a new bird for Christmas, whom she believes is her old bird born again. She becomes - at least until the end of the book - an orderly child and is permitted to give a children's party as a reward. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autumn_Republic"title="The Autumn Republic">
Field Marshal Tamas has returned to Adro after being chased for months behind enemy lines. For the first time in history, the capital of Adro is in the hands of a foreign invader. Reinforcements are weeks away, and friends and foes have become indistinguishable of each other.Inspector Adamat, still searching for his kidnapped son, finds himself drawn into the very heart of the action, struggling to keep up with the mutiny that has turned the Adran army against itself.Meanwhile, Taniel Two-Shot is hunted by men he once thought his friends, and finds himself the only hope for Adro.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Powder_Mage_trilogy"title="The Powder Mage trilogy">
The trilogy primarily takes place in the fictional kingdom of Adro, one of the Nine Kingdoms founded by Kresimir, a semi-mythical figure now worshiped as a deity. At the beginning of "Promise of Blood", Field Marshal Tamas has just committed a "coup d'etat" against Adro's corrupt and ineffective monarchy. The novel then focuses on the efforts of three men – Tamas, his son Taniel, a soldier, and former police inspector Adamat – in the aftermath of the coup, dealing with conspiracies by royalist supporters, war with Adro's neighbors, and an emerging scheme to "summon" Kresimir.The technology level of the Nine Kingdoms is roughly on par with that of Europe during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods; flintlock firearms are the prevalent weaponry. However, magic is present and its users are usually divided into three classes:
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_Walk_(novel)"title="Mystery Walk (novel)">
The Mystery Walk, the voyage through life to determine your place and purpose, is something we all undertake. For Billy Creekmore, it is something more for he is gifted with the power to help distressed souls pass into the afterlife. He must learn how to use his gift.Billy learns early in life that he is something special. A fire rips through the home of one of his friends when he is a young kid. He learns that his friend and his whole family were murdered by the father. Billy is drawn to the home to discover his friend's body, secretly hidden under a coal pile in the basement. His friend's soul begs him to let people know where he is.Billy lives in rural Hawthorne, Alabama with his devoutly Christian father and a mother who is a Choctaw Indian. His mother and grandmother before him are gifted with this power and have found ways to use it. His father hates it and hates that his son has it. But, he loves his wife and son the best he can.Billy will not be without adversaries on his Mystery Walk. There is Little Wayne Falconer, the son and heir apparent to the south's most popular tent evangelist who hates the Creekmore's and the powers he regards as evil. There is also a serpent-like apparition that haunts Billy and inspires others to evil – including the father of his friend who murdered his family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangerous_Love_(novel)"title="Dangerous Love (novel)">
## Book One."Dangerous Love" starts with the main character Omovo who gets a haircut and it goes badly so he ends up shaving his entire head. He has a supernatural vision and goes home to paint a tree with clouds surrounding it that are shaped like corpses. He feels detached from his home and life and he goes for a walk.On this walk, Omovo sees Ifeyiwa, a woman in the compound that is married to Takpo. Omovo walks to Dr. Okocha who is a fellow painter and friend of Omovo's, they talk about painting and an upcoming gallery. Omovo receives a note from Ifeyiwa to meet the next day.The next day, Omovo and Ifeyiwa walk together and talk about her dream, his hair, and drawing. She tells him that she hates her life, the two of them kiss and she skips away.Omovo's painting was stolen from his house and he ends up seeing it later on as the cover of a book, "written by an Englishman on the African condition." He sees his father and his step mother, Blackie, make love and it reminds him of when he was a while and he saw his parents do the same. He doesn't sleep that night and instead paints a piece called "Drift" that is of a scum pool that he walks by often by his compound. This painting got invited to the showcase happening that Dr. Okocha mentioned a few days before.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Policeman"title="My Policeman">
The novel is set in Brighton in 1957. Tom Burgess, a policeman, is gay. Marion, a schoolteacher, falls in love with him nonetheless. So does Patrick Hazelwood, a museum curator. Because of the social constraints of the era, Tom and Marion get married, even though Tom is only in love with Patrick. When Marion becomes jealous, she exposes Patrick and gets him arrested for indecency.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Caseira_e_a_Catarina"title="A Caseira e a Catarina">
The plot has one act. It is about a woman betrayed by her husband. Angry and in sorrow, she makes a deal with the devil and asks him to take her husband and his lover to hell.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Price_to_Pay_(book)"title="The Price to Pay (book)">
The book follows Joseph Fadelle's conversion to Roman Catholicism. Fadelle, who was previously named Muhammad, began showing an interest in Catholicism after he was conscripted into Saddam Hussein's army and roomed with Massoud, a Christian. Muhammad sees Massoud's Christianity as shocking and distasteful but as time passes Muhammad finds that he is intrigued by Christianity and eventually converts to Christianity along with his wife. Muhammad, who received baptism and chose to rename himself Joseph, undergoes a great amount of persecution from family members, culminating in them making several death threats against him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_the_Stars"title="Son of the Stars">
Early one morning sixteen-year-old Ron Barron, accompanied by his pet collie, Pete, drives his hot rod out of the small town of Longview and up into the nearby hills. He is hunting for the object that his automatic meteor tracker had detected in the wee hours of that morning. After half a day of fruitless searching he finds what he was seeking, but it is not what he expected.It is the wreckage of a ship, a disc-shaped vessel two hundred feet wide and forty feet thick at the center. As he examines the ship, Ron encounters the lone survivor of the crash, a boy about his age, who has six fingers on each hand. Ron is wary at first, but Pete is friendly toward the alien, so Ron relaxes his wariness and takes the injured boy, still in shock, home with him.There he finds his girlfriend, Anne Martin, waiting to chide him over a missed tennis date. As he takes the alien boy into the house and up to the guest bedroom, Anne takes his car to get Doc Smithers, the Barrons' family physician.Smithers cleans and treats the boy's wounds as best he can and confirms the obvious: The boy is not of this Earth. With the boy awake, Ron introduces himself, Anne, and Doc Smithers to him through the simple point-and-say. The boy introduces himself as Clonar and shows a strange aptitude for picking up English in its proper form. At about the same time Pete brings Clonar a package of raw hamburger that he took from the refrigerator and Clonar eats it eagerly, giving himself the protein that he needs to heal properly. He then goes to sleep.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_with_All_the_Gifts"title="The Girl with All the Gifts">
Twenty years ago, humanity was infected by a variant of the fungus native to South America called "Ophiocordyceps unilateralis," which led to the Breakdown - the end of civilization as it was before. The infected, referred to as "hungries", quickly lose their mental powers and feed on the flesh of healthy humans. The disease spreads through blood and saliva, but can also spread airborne through spores created by the fungus. In England, the few surviving uninfected humans either live in heavily guarded areas such as Beacon, or roam in packs of hostile, scavenging "junkers".The authorities in Beacon set up a remote military base for the study of a specific group of child hungries. They, unlike others, are able to retain their mental powers and only lose control when they get too close to human scent. The only way to hide the scent is to use a substance called e-blocker, which is in limited supply.Soldiers, led by Sergeant Eddie Parks, find such child hungries and bring them to the base, Hotel Echo, which is 30 miles outside of London and 74 miles outside of Beacon. At the base, the children are educated by teachers and tested by the head scientist, Dr. Caroline Caldwell. This often means she vivisects the children, which Helen Justineau, a behavioural psychologist and teacher at the base, dislikes. Justineau sees the child hungries as people, and is especially fond of Melanie, a 10-year-old with a genius-level IQ who loves Greek mythology, namely the story of Pandora. Melanie loves Justineau as a surrogate mother. Like the other children, Melanie does not understand that she is different from the adults.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Jackson's_Greek_Gods"title="Percy Jackson's Greek Gods">
Percy Jackson adds his own viewpoint to the Greek myths. Here he presents an introduction to Greek mythology and the 12 major gods and goddesses. With 19 chapters, this includes a variety of stories, from the early tales of Gaea and the Titans to individual tales about the gods readers, encountered in the Camp Half-Blood chronicles. Percy's irreverent voice is evident from titles such as "Hera Gets a Little Cuckoo," "Zeus Kills Everyone," "Athena Adopts a Handkerchief," and "Artemis Unleashes the Death Pig," and the stories are told in his voice with his distinctive, sarcastic yet humorous perspective.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_Girlfriend"title="Half Girlfriend">
Madhav Jha, a rural boy from Dumraon, a village in Bihar, comes to meet the author, who is actually Chetan Bhagat, and leaves behind a few journals from his half-girlfriend, who he believes has died. Chetan Bhagat calls him up the next morning to hear his story. He starts by describing his trouble entering St. Stephens, as his English wasn't good enough. Being a good basketball player, Madhav gets finally through sports quota.The rich and beautiful Riya Somani is a girl from Delhi, who is also selected through the sports quota. Madhav and Riya become close 'friends' due to their association with basketball. Madhav wants to make her his girlfriend, but she refuses. He demands that they get physical. Offended by his obscene ultimatum, Riya parts company with him and tells him not to talk to her anymore.A year later, Riya marries her childhood friend Rohan and settles in London, where Rohan has a big business. Finding Delhi unbearable on grounds of losing Riya, Madhav decides to settle in his hometown Dumraon and helps his mother, Rani Sahiba, who runs her school. Seeing the condition of the school – no proper classes or toilets – Madhav decides to meet local MLA Ojha for financial help, but the MLA refuses to help. An opportunity comes when Ojha informs Madhav about Bill Gates' visit to some schools in Bihar. Madhav tries his best to convince Gates to fund his school, but to do so he has to prepare a speech, preferably in English.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Message_to_the_Planet"title="The Message to the Planet">
"The Message to the Planet" centres on Marcus Vallar, a charismatic former mathematician and painter who has abandoned both these pursuits, and on a group of London friends, former associates of Vallar, with whom he has broken off contact. The plot begins with the decision of Alfred Ludens, a young history professor, to seek out his former mentor Vallar in the hope that he can restore his friend Patrick Fenman to health. Fenman is apparently dying of a mysterious wasting disease and believes that his illness is the result of his having been cursed by Vallar.Ludens finds Vallar living in the country with his daughter, a young woman named Irina. The three return to London, where, by a combination of physical manipulation and verbal exhortation, Vallar initiates Fenman's recovery. Ludens is convinced that Vallar is a brilliant philosopher and that it is his responsibility to help Vallar to express his thoughts in writing, something he is reluctant or unable to do. After a short period living in London, Irina arranges for her father to be admitted to Bellmain, an exclusive mental institution in the country near Salisbury Plain, where she will live with him in a cottage. Ludens is appalled by the suggestion that Vallar is mentally ill. He moves into a hotel in the nearby village and continues seeing Vallar daily in the hope of getting him to write, while trying to convince Irina, to whom he has become engaged, that Vallar should be removed from the institution.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magician's_Land"title="The Magician's Land">
After being expelled from the magical realm of Fillory, magician Quentin Coldwater returns to his alma mater, the magical college of Brakebills, as a new professor. There he is finally given a discipline, the repair of small objects (minor mendings), and spends his spare time studying an ancient spell found in his travels through the Neitherlands, the magical space between worlds. Near the end of his first semester, he rescues a student, Plum, after a magical prank gone wrong, revealing to Quentin that Alice, now a niffin (a malicious spirit of pure magic), is still alive. The school's dean expels Plum for the prank and fires Quentin for failing to follow protocol in his rescue attempt.Needing money, Quentin and Plum independently join a gang of magician thieves led by a talking bird intent on stealing a mysterious suitcase. They are interrupted during the heist by a competing group of thieves with translucent golden hands; a battle and chase ensue, and the survivors disband. The suitcase contains an old book and a blade capable of killing a god, and one of the gang reveals she is Asmodeus when she takes the blade to kill Reynard the Fox; Quentin and Plum take the book. Written to tell his side of the story before he dies in the second world war, the book is Rupert Chatwin's memoir and tells the story of how his family discovered and inhabited Fillory and then of how he accompanied Martin as he sells his humanity to Umber to be able to stay in Fillory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sex_Lives_of_Siamese_Twins"title="The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins">
Lucy Brennan is a tough, sadistic, foul-mouthed, bisexual personal trainer. When she’s not finding new ways to insult her clients and hitting Miami’s nightclubs, she diligently tracks her calories with an app called Life map. Lucy leaves a failed romantic evening. She gets caught up in a chase—one gunman and two fleeing homeless victims on the road she finds herself on. In an instant, she reacts and knocks the gunman to the ground, allowing the victims to escape.She becomes a huge media story when the incident is recorded by Lena Sorenson, an overweight, successful, sculptor who is sorely lacking in self-confidence. Lucy's heroic intervention to stop the murderous assault gets a lot of media attention and unsurprisingly, Sorenson’s video turns Brennan into a media sensation. The story competes for airtime and America’s rapt attention with a story about conjoined twins Anabelle and Amy and the should-they/ shouldn’t-they debate about a risky separation operation so Anabelle can have sex with her boyfriend.Lucy Brennan is a body-obsessed personal trainer, and Lena Sorenson is a food-obsessed sculptor. They are both fascinated with shape and form and suffer from trauma-induced ruts.In an exciting twist, it turns out that the two frightened men; Lucy saves from the angry gunman, turned out to be paedophiles. The media focus shifts quickly from the heroine to whether she should have stopped a victim of sexual abuse from taking his revenge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Tango_Foxtrot_(novel)"title="Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (novel)">
A pop thriller about a multinational cabal planning to subjugate humanity by privatizing all information.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_Saturn's_Rings"title="The Secret of Saturn's Rings">
On the day of his graduation from high school Bruce Rhodes finds his classmates shunning him. He discovers that his father, Dr. Emanuel Rhodes, who has worked for the Terraluna Corporation for thirty years, most of that time as head of research, has been fired and the corporation is now smearing him. With a borrowed United Nations exploration ship, Dr. Rhodes intends to lead an expedition to Saturn, farther from Earth than anyone has ever gone.Dr. Rhodes explains that he has discovered that a nuclear-explosion-driven mining machine that he invented for Terraluna will actually blast the moon apart, sending debris raining down onto Earth and destroying civilization. Terraluna's executives had dismissed him (in both senses of the term) as a crackpot, so he went to the United Nations. Requiring additional proof of his hypothesis, the United Nations has loaned him a ship so that he can go to Saturn to determine whether the planet's rings are the remains of an exploded moon.With the other three members of the crew – able spaceman Arpad Benz (who will work with Bruce), astrogator Frank Garcia, and pilot Kurt Jennings – Bruce and his father board the ship and prepare for liftoff. The ship is launched up the side of a mountain, much of the initial boost being provided by a series of magnetic rings (similar to the ringroad that Robert Heinlein described in Starman Jones). Soon they're on their way to the moon to top off their fuel tanks, knowing that Terraluna intends to use every filthy, vile trick in the corporate playbook to stop them. In spite of those tricks, they land on Mimas, Saturn's innermost moon, and set up camp. Immediately Dr. Rhodes takes one of the rocketship's two lifeboats and flies it into the rings. Radio contact is lost as the signal is lost in intense static. While waiting for radio contact to resume, Bruce and the others find artefacts, signs that an alien city once occupied the ground on which they stand and has since crumbled into the gravel on which their ship and camp sit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_the_Martian_Moons"title="The Secret of the Martian Moons">
Returning to Mars from a four-year stay on Earth, sixteen-year-old Nelson Parr feels anger toward all the talk he hears about the possibility of the Earth authorities shutting down the Martian colony and bringing all of the colonists back to Earth. For a century the colonists had tried to make a living on Mars and, more importantly, to unlock the secrets of the abandoned cities that they found on the planet and now some people just wanted to give up. He’s distracted from his anger when he’s attacked by an intruder in his sleep cubicle. The assailant gets away but leaves behind, on the mirror over the wash basin, the evaporating print of a three-fingered hand. Nelson assumes that the burglar was looking for the letter that Leroy Perrault, a scientist with the Interplanetary Bureau, had given to him to pass on to his father, John Carson Parr.After arriving on Mars Nelson learns from his father that the planet is indeed being abandoned and over the next few days the remaining three hundred colonists are put on ships and sent to Earth. But Nelson, his father, his father’s assistant (Jim Worden), and three other men secretly stay behind. Perrault’s letter has authorized this clandestine group because certain anomalous events noticed over the previous century indicate that the Martians are still present, hiding in their impenetrably sealed cities. To catch out the hidden Martians the six men ride a small rocketship to Phobos, the larger and innermore of Mars’s moons, and set up camp with their telescopes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_the_Ninth_Planet"title="The Secret of the Ninth Planet">
Helping his father on an archeological expedition in the Peruvian Andes, Burl Denning looks forward to studying engineering when he enters college in the fall. The expedition's study of Inca ruins is interrupted by the arrival of a small guided missile from California. Inside the missile they find a message informing them that over the past several days the Sun's light has dimmed all over the world, threatening the onset of a new ice age, and that the source of the dimming has been traced to a point seven miles from their camp.Burl and his father hike to the location they were given and come to a dome surrounded by a wall. Inside the dome they find alien machinery that will not respond to their manipulations of the controls. Burl tries to pick up a small sphere and it blasts him with what feels like an electric shock. He then discovers that the controls will respond to him, so he shuts down the installation and sees immediately that the sunlight outside the dome has returned to normal.Picked up by the military and taken to California, the Dennings are told that astronomers have detected a dimming of sunlight on Mercury and Mars and suspect it's occurring on the other planets as well. Worse, calculations show that if the Sun-stealers’ program continues, the Sun will blow up as a nova in two to three years. Fortunately the means to solve the problem stands readily at hand for those who dare to use it – a giant spaceship propelled by an experimental antigravity drive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleasantly_Surprised_(TV_series)"title="Pleasantly Surprised (TV series)">
Du Kai Qi is an aspiring young chef, her only interests are cooking and reading manga comics. She doesn't have many friends and doesn't want anymore. After enjoying her most delicious full course meal prepared by a chef named Louis, she snaps a picture of his signature from the plate and request to meet him. However, a family emergency forces her to leave before meeting Louis. She looks to Louis's signature as strength and inspiration for her upcoming sous chef promotion test. On the day of her test the new restaurant intern Ah Jie, who has to decide the winner, chooses Kai Qi's rival dish over hers. Losing out on her promotion, Kai Qi makes instant enemies with Ah Jie. What she doesn't know is Ah Jie is her boss's son, her new next door neighbor, the chef Louis that she admires so much and her long lost childhood friend Fu Zi Jie who she had a close bond with.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burning_Room"title="The Burning Room">
Harry Bosch and his rookie partner Lucia Soto are assigned the case of Orlando Merced, a mariachi performer who was shot in a crowded Los Angeles square and was paralyzed from the waist down. The shooter was never found, and Merced survived for ten years before dying from complications from his wounds. When the bullet is finally removed from his body, Bosch establishes that Merced was shot with a hunting rifle, and that the crime was not a random act of gang violence as originally suspected, but a targeted hit. This new evidence leads Bosch to one of the city's most powerful businessmen and a controversial former mayor with aspirations of becoming governor.Meanwhile, Bosch notices strange behavior from Soto and begins to suspect that she has gang affiliations and has infiltrated the LAPD. After catching her carrying out an off-the-books investigation, she reveals that she is a survivor of a notorious apartment fire that killed nine children, but remained unsolved after a key suspect disappeared without trace. Bosch fabricates a connection to the Merced case to protect Soto, and the two investigate the fire parallel to the Merced case. The trail leads them to a series of robberies across Greater Los Angeles that the FBI believe were used to fund a white supremacist militia group, and ultimately to a witness hiding in a convent on the Mexican border.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rescuers_(book)"title="The Rescuers (book)">
The story begins in an unnamed, supposedly "barely civilized" country , during a meeting of the Prisoners’ Aid Society, an international organization of mice dedicated to brightening the lives of prisoners. When the chairwoman mouse informs delegates about the case of a Norwegian poet, imprisoned (presumably wrongfully) in the horrible Black Castle, she suggests changing the traditional rules of the organization to try to rescue him. Despite her elderly secretary’s doubts, the Society agrees with her proposal. Needing a mouse who can speak the Norwegian language to translate for them, the society decides to ask Miss Bianca for help. Miss Bianca is a white mouse who is pampered by the Ambassador's little boy, and the Ambassador is about to be transferred to Norway.Bernard, a young mouse who lives in the Embassy pantry and who has won a medal for "bravery in the face of cats", is volunteered by his friends and reluctantly agrees to talk to Miss Bianca. He uses the service lift in the pantry to enter the schoolroom of the Ambassador's house, and finds Miss Bianca in the magnificent porcelain pagoda the boy has given her. Bernard tries to convince her to find a brave Norwegian mouse for them, once she is in Norway. Though she is herself a poet and believes strongly in duty, Miss Bianca is at first terrified and refuses. However, as Bernard pleads with her, Miss Bianca begins to have feelings for Bernard, who makes no secret of the fact he is in love with her and would take her place if he could. When Miss Bianca travels to Oslo with the Ambassador's family, she decides to undertake the mission, later deciding to personally return with the Norwegian mouse so she can see Bernard again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_(George_novel)"title="Julie (George novel)">
The story begins ten minutes after the last book ends and is divided into three parts: Kapugen, the Hunter; Amy, the Wolf Pup; Miyax, the Young Woman.Julie has spent many months in the wilderness. During that time, she survived by relying on her culture's traditions and being accepted by a pack of wolves. However, she has now decided to return to human society and her father's home.She's is not prepared for all the changes that have occurred, as her father has given up many of the old ways. Most upsetting is that he is willing to shoot wolves in order to protect the village's muskox herd.Julie returns to the wolf pack and witnesses a new cub, whom she names Amy after her pen pal in San Francisco. Throughout the story, Julie learns to reconcile the old ways with the new, while struggling to protect her wolf pack.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_of_Sherwood"title="Robot of Sherwood">
The Twelfth Doctor and Clara land in Sherwood Forest in 1190, where they are met by Robin Hood. Robin challenges the Doctor to a duel which the Doctor wins by knocking Robin into a river. Clara learns that Robin is looking for his Maid Marian, but the Doctor believes there is something wrong. Robin competes in an archery contest held by the Sheriff of Nottingham where the prize is a golden arrow. The Doctor interrupts the contest by exploding the target with his sonic screwdriver. Intrigued by the Doctor's power, the Sheriff commands his robot knights to capture the Doctor. The Doctor allows the robots to capture him, Robin and Clara so he can learn more about the Sheriff's plans.The Doctor and Clara learn that the Sheriff intends to use a crashed spaceship (disguised as part of a castle) and its robot knights to take over the world. The Sheriff and the knights have plundered the countryside to collect enough gold to repair the engines' circuits, but the engines are too damaged and will create an explosion that will destroy half of England. The Doctor is initially convinced that Robin is a creation of the robots in order to give the oppressed peasants hope using the legends of Earth, but ultimately learns that he is real. Clara and Robin escape the castle, but the Doctor is taken prisoner again. The Doctor leads the prisoners in a revolt against the robots. Most of the robots are destroyed, and the prisoners flee. Robin returns to save the day. The Sheriff challenges Robin to a duel, which Robin wins by knocking the Sheriff into a gold vat using a trick the Doctor taught him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_the_Spark_and_the_Burn"title="Between the Spark and the Burn">
Last summer the Redding brothers - crooked-smiling liar River, laughing, hot-tempered Neely; and mad, knife-wielding Brodie - descended upon Violet White's dreamy seaside town, bringing chaos.Then Brodie and River disappeared.Now a rattling unease fills Vi.So when she catches a late-night radio show whispering of eerie events in a distant mountain village, she seizes on it - this could be River or Brodie. Vi and Neely's search takes them to frenzied mountain towns, cursed islands, and an empty, snow-muffled hotel. They find a girl who's seen the devil, a sea captain's daughter, and a sweet, red-haired forest boy who meets death halfway. All the while, Vi's feelings for Neely grow sharper, the stakes higher, and the truth harder to pin down. If only Violet knew that while she's been hunting the Redding boys... someone's been hunting her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Causal_Angel"title="The Causal Angel">
After the events of "The Fractal Prince", Jean le Flambeur and Mieli are separated and their sentient spacecraft Perhonen is destroyed. The two protagonists, each in their own way, struggle to decide where their loyalties lie and how to proceed in the catastrophically altered situation. Meanwhile, the Solar System is plummeting into an all-out war of unprecedented scale and consequence. The most powerful factions, the Sobornost and the Zoku, are gathering their forces and making their plays, while simultaneously being torn apart by internal strifes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apples_(novel)"title="Apples (novel)">
The book is set in Middlesbrough and follows the stories of teenagers Adam and Eve as they cope with the difficulties of growing up and the complications of friendship. Eve's mother has recently been diagnosed with cancer and as a distraction Eve becomes embroiled in sexual activity and drug taking, whilst Adam tries to cope with sexual frustration, a violent father and increasingly compulsive behaviour.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Favorite_(novel)"title="The Favorite (novel)">
The novel describes the life of an outstanding military and political figure of the second half of the 18th century, Grigory Potemkin. Being one of the most "officially" beloved of Catherine the Great, Potemkin had a huge influence on the Empress, but he used it not only for personal gain, but for the good of the state. Potemkin became famous as a wise politician, an experienced diplomat, a brave captain. Under his leadership, major reforms have been carried out in the Russian army. However, envy and hatred of the last favorite of Catherine II, Count Platon Zubov led Potemkin to disgrace at first, and then to a premature death.Much of the novel is devoted to the description of two Russian-Turkish wars, Crimean Khanate was destroyed as a result of this and the occupied territories were incorporated into the Russian Empire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicious_Circle_(novel)"title="Vicious Circle (novel)">
Major Hector Cross, a British security officer, ex-SAS operative and owner of security company Cross Bow Security is settled into peaceful marriage with widowed billionaire Hazel Bannock, owner and CEO of Bannock Oil Corporation. Hazel is now pregnant, and has largely recovered from the death of her daughter; heiress Cayla Bannock (in ""Those in Peril").After a gynecologist visit, the pair set out in separate vehicles for their English estate. An ambush occurs and, while Hector kills the pair of gunmen attacking his wife's vehicle, Hazel is badly wounded from a bullet wound to the head. Rushed to hospital, their baby daughter, named Catherine Cayla Bannock-Cross, is saved by caesarean section. Hazel dies of brain damage the next day.Hector believes the murder is the result of the blood feud from surviving members of the family of Hadji Sheikh Mohammed Khan Tippoo Tip (the engineer of Cayla's kidnapping, killed in "Those in Peril"). A second attempt is then made on Catherine and Hector's lives when a pair of hired thugs use white phosphorus grenades to burn down Hector's estate. The thugs are captured by Hector's security personnel and enough details of their employer are provided to identify him, but he is killed by Hector without giving up his employer (to save the life of one of his team).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_In"title="Lock In">
The world is exposed to a highly contagious virus. Most who get sick experience nothing worse than flu-like symptoms. For 1%, the virus causes the victims to be fully awake, but unable to move or respond to stimulus. This is known as "Lock In", and resembles the real condition known as locked-in syndrome. The illness comes to be known as "Haden's Syndrome" with its victims called "Hadens". Humanoid robotic personal transport units controlled by a Haden's brain (nicknamed "Threeps" after C-3PO from "Star Wars") are developed as the primary way for a Haden to interact with the outside world.Twenty five years after the initial virus exposure, FBI agents Chris Shane (who is a Haden) and Leslie Vann are assigned to a Haden-related murder, with a suspect who is an "Integrator" – someone who can let a Haden use their bodies. If the Integrator was carrying a Haden, then finding the suspect for the murder is complicated. Further Integrator-Haden related murders occur, making the case larger than expected, and as Shane and Vann dig deeper, they uncover a plot to completely shake up the Haden economy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Bain"title="Stella Bain">
The book tells a story of a woman whose real name is Etna Bliss, but she doesn't remember it due to her concussion which turn out to be a hysteria that she got when she ran away from her American husband to London. There, she becomes an ambulance driver serving during World War I. During one of her shifts, while wearing only VAD uniform she got hit by a bombardment. After it, she is being awoken at the Abyssinian hospital with shell shock. A cranial surgeon and psychologist named August Bridge finds her in that state next year in London, and becomes her mentor for a time being. While in his care, Etna begins to draw houses and people that she knew of but couldn't remember from where. Later on, she begins to remember someone from Admiralty and demanded Dr. Bridge to go there because she had a hutch that she have someone there. Following her trip, she finds Samuel, an officer who invites her to a restaurant. It turns out to be a person she truly loved when they along with his brother Phillip, immigrated to Camiers before the war happened there in 1915. Following long court proceedings which started in February 1917, despite being diagnosed with shell shock, she wins custody over her adult children Clara and Nicholas only by 1930.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Haunted_Stars"title="The Haunted Stars">
The action takes place in an imagined future a few years after the time of writing. Tension between the US and the Soviet Union remains high. Both nations have landed on the Moon, and established bases there.Just under half the length of the novel tells how a discovery on the Moon brings Massachusetts linguist, Robert Fairlie to a high-security space base in New Mexico and eventually to the planet Ryn. The remainder of the novel is about what happens on Ryn after Fairlie and his companions arrive: their contact with some of the inhabitants of the planet, and later with Ryn's ancient enemy, the "shadowed ones".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistress_(novel)"title="Mistress (novel)">
Ben Casper is the central character of this novel. The novel is written in the first person from Ben's point of view. Ben has an obsession with recalling trivia that continually sidetracks his thoughts. At the beginning of the book his friend Diana Hotchkiss appears to commit suicide, but the more Ben looks into it, the more it looks like murder. When Ben starts looking too much into this, some group then repeatedly tries to kill him and those associated with him. His ability to remember movie trivia is what keeps him alive to search for the killer of Diana and later others around Ben.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Small_Shadows"title="House of Small Shadows">
The book follows Catherine, a young woman with a troubled past, and is set in the present day. Through flashbacks interspersed throughout the book the reader learns about her past, which is extremely complicated.Catherine was abandoned by her birth parents in Ellyll Fields, a fictional small village near Hereford. While she did find an adoptive family, it is not a happy arrangement and they frequently questioned her mental health. Ostracized at school, Catherine only had one friend - a young mentally challenged girl named Alice that was also an outcast. They get along well until the summer of 1981, when Alice is one of several children that were kidnapped by the mysterious Pied Piper of Ellyll. Soon after her disappearance Catherine claims to have made contact with Alice's ghost, which prompts her adoptive parents to send her to therapy. As time passes a now adult Catherine forms a relationship with a man named Mike, but the relationship ends badly. Hoping to cause some change in her life, Catherine travels to London and takes a job with a prestigious TV network. However, her hoped-for change does not come to pass and she is fired from her position by a bullying co-worker named Tara.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_Sword"title="Ancillary Sword">
Anaander Mianaai, the Lord of the Radch – or the part of her personality that opposes the further militant expansion of the empire – adopts Breq into her house, appoints her Fleet Captain, puts her in command of the warship "Mercy of Kalr", and charges her to protect the remote Athoek system. Breq's crew includes her old comrade Seivarden and the young Lieutenant Tisarwat, who is revealed to be an ancillary copy of Anaander herself. After Breq recognizes Tisarwat as an ancillary of Anaander, she has her ancillary implants removed, allowing Tisarwat to develop an independent personality.At Athoek Station, Breq seeks out Basnaaid, the sister of Awn, an officer Breq, as the ship "Justice of Toren", once loved and, on Anaander's orders, killed. She meets Dlique, translator for the alien Presger, who is killed in a scuffle with ancillaries of "Sword of Atagaris" – the other warship on station, commanded by Captain Hetnys, Breq's nominal subordinate. To hopefully placate the powerful aliens, Breq and Hetnys enter formal mourning on the estate of Fosyf, a prominent tea planter who holds her workers, transportees from other Radch-conquered worlds, in conditions akin to serfdom.After Breq survives an attempt on her life by Raughd, Fosyf's abusive heir, she suspects that somebody abducts suspended transportees, possibly an ancient warship seeking to replenish its ancillary crew. Hetnys and her ship move against Breq, apparently serving the other half of Anaander Mianaai, but they are subdued after Breq holds Hetnys hostage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revenge_of_Seven"title="The Revenge of Seven">
The Revenge of Seven picks up exactly where The Fall of Five left off. The book is narrated in first person, with Number Four (John), Number Six, and Ella as narrators.Ella wakes up in a strange place, she sees Mogadorians and tries to escape using the Great Book as a weapon. She realizes that she is in a spaceship. Setrákus Ra claims to be her grandfather. He tries to force her to eat and tells her that he used to be an Elder and that he experimented with altering genetics. He also tells her about how Lorien was controlling everything, and he rivaled it. Then, he puts a binding charm over himself and Ella. The Mogadorians try to force Ella to read the Great Book by blasting an alarm at her whenever she doesn't. Ella rips the book apart. Setrákus Ra talks to her, mentioning her "betrothed". Eventually he arrives. Ella is disgusted to note that she is betrothed to the treacherous Number Five. She finds out that Five killed Eight, and is even more upset. Setrákus Ra trains Ella to use her Legacy Dreynen, using Five as the equivalent of a punching bag. She apologizes to him later telepathically. He responds that he deserved it and that they need to escape. Ella wakes up later to find Five talking about how Mogadorians were bad. She finds out that Five was not aware of their betrothal either. Setrákus Ra catches them. Five stabs Setrákus Ra and the binding charm makes Ella injured as well. She loses consciousness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_Spirit"title="Mean Spirit">
The book is set in the 1920s, at a time when rivers of oil were discovered underneath land in Oklahoma that had been purchased by the Osage Tribe after displacement. As a result of mineral leases, Grace Blanket became the wealthiest individual in the territory. She is murdered by unknown suspects. The Graycloud family takes over the care of her daughter and heir Nola Blanket. One-by-one, members of the Graycloud family suffer suspicious deaths, and no-one knew why. Local authorities show no interest in Native deaths. Letters begging for help to Washington DC. Stace Red Hawk, a Native American government official, decides to investigate: he finds intimidation, fraud, and murder and then something else quite by surprise—that he had a true love for his people along with their brave past."Mean Spirit" is a murder mystery set during an era known as the Osage murders, in Osage Indian Territory in Oklahoma in the 1920s. The Native communities struggle for survival amidst a pool of greed, corruption, and violence when oil is discovered on Osage allotments. The Osage had purchased their land in Oklahoma after displacement. They were forced to divide their land up into individual allotments, with "excess" land being made available to white settlers. The discovery of oil, although bringing in an era of material wealth also led to Osage women being married by adventurers, all Osage people being put under threat of violence and legal decisions of "incompetence," and wholesale profiteering off of the people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_God_(Holland_novel)"title="City of God (Holland novel)">
Nicholas Dawson is the secretary to the ambassador of Florence in Rome; clever and ambitious, he is homosexual and a highly educated commoner born in Spain to English parents. Soon Nicholas is enlisted as a double agent for the ruthless Cesare Borgia, and his contact in Florence is none other than Niccolò Machiavelli himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_of_the_Four_Winds"title="Witch of the Four Winds">
Brak, a blond, braided and broadsword-wielding barbarian from the frozen north, continues his quest to reach the glorious southern realm of Khurdisan the Golden. In desolate country, he encounters malevolent magic. Boulders fall in a soundless rain, and a mysterious old stranger appears to know all about him. An invisible horror rends his pony to shreds. It seems he has some sorcerous foe against whom no mundane weapon can avail.After saving a shepherdess from the monstrous Manworm, Brak reaches the city of old Lord Strann, who rules the region as best he can but is threatened by the alchemist Nordica and her crony, the wizard Tamar Zed. Much of Strann's army has been lured to Nordica's side in the expectation of riches; Nordica's father possessed the knowledge of how to transmute base metal to gold, a secret for which she is thought to have murdered him.Brak, attempting to aid Strann, is caught by Nordica, joining three other captives--the girl he had previously rescued, an aged sailor, and a duplicitous smith. All four are slated to be sacrificed in a rite to make the gold. They attempt escape, are betrayed, and face more menace from the Manworm and Nordica's bestial familiar Scarletjaw. Ultimately Brak is victorious.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mark_of_the_Demons"title="The Mark of the Demons">
Continuing his quest to reach the glorious southern realm of Khurdisan the Golden, Brak, a blond, braided and broadsword-wielding barbarian from the frozen north, crosses the desolate desert of Logol. By chance he meets a duo of royal twins whose throne has been usurped, and seek a champion to restore them. But their motives are dubious, their word untrustworthy, and behind all lurks the menace of the corrupt and evil cult of the demon god Yob-Haggoth, whose followers bear unrelenting hatred towards Brak.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Idols_Walked"title="When the Idols Walked">
Continuing his quest to reach the glorious southern realm of Khurdisan the Golden, Brak, a blond, braided and broadsword-wielding barbarian from the frozen north, reaches the sea, where he hopes to find a ship to take him to his goal. But his party is attacked by raiders who capture him and consign him to servitude as a galley slave. And he soon learns that the sea contains far worse horrors as well, most notably an idol animated by the spirit of a witch seeking vengeance against her betrayers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say_Again_Yes_I_Do"title="Say Again Yes I Do">
Can you rush true love before its time? Shu Xin Kui (Mandy Wei) met Xiang Zheng Yang (Lin Yo-Wei) four years ago and got married after a whirlwind romance of only a couple of months. But as the stress of married life set in – trying to get used to each other's habits and dealing with the extended in-laws – the young couple began to bicker and ended up divorcing just six months into their marriage. Four years later, Xin Kui and Zheng Yang meet up again when they both start working together as managers-in-training at the same hotel. As the same chemistry they initially felt toward each other starts to brew, can Xin Kui and Zheng Yang make a relationship work the second time around? 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Room_in_Chelsea_Square"title="A Room in Chelsea Square">
Wealthy middle-aged gentleman Patrick lures handsome provincial journalist Nicholas to London with the promise of a job, and puts the younger man up at his hotel suite. Nicholas soon becomes accustomed to Patrick's gifts, luxurious lifestyle and interesting friends, but realizing that Patrick is interested in more than friendship, Nicholas finds that he will have to either give in, or give up everything Patrick can provide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_Mountain_(Grisham_novel)"title="Gray Mountain (Grisham novel)">
Samantha Kofer is a lawyer at a major New York City law firm, which is hit hard at the onset of the Great Recession. Rather than lay her off, the firm suggests that Sam conduct a charity service while she is put on furlough for a year. Sam takes up on the offer since she has no other choice and relocates to Virginia's Appalachian Mountains. She finds a job with a woman named Mattie, who runs a legal aid firm in the town of Brady. Mattie and another woman, Annette, take up cases in the town. At first, Sam does not fit in, but eventually warms up to Mattie and the townspeople. Sam eventually meets Mattie's nephew, Donovan Gray. Donovan fills in that he and his firm have been battling against the strip-coal mining businesses in the town. Several employees of the coal mines work themselves until they are sick and the businesses have cut corners on safety measures, resulting in a few deaths. The coal mining has also contaminated the town's water supply. Sam meets Donovan's brother Jeff, who acquired some important documents from the coal businesses, showing that the companies' owners deliberately allowed the sludge from the mines to runoff into the rivers. Donovan intends to sue the companies, but he is killed in a mysterious plane crash. Jeff is convinced that the coal mine owners sabotaged Donovan's plane in order to keep the evidence from leaking out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heir_Chronicles"title="The Heir Chronicles">
The series begins with Jack, a teenager growing up in the small Ohio town of Trinity. His life seems largely uneventful until the day he neglects to take his daily medication. Jack is surprised to find that there are several benefits to not taking his medication (to be later known as Weirsbane), such as super strength and confidence. He decides to take advantage of this and try out for the soccer team, but almost kills a peer in the process. It's at that point that Jack finds that he's part of a secret magic society and that he's considered to be part of the race of Weirlinds, the warrior clan of the magical world. He then gets drawn into an intricate and complex society ruled over by two houses, the Red Rose and the White Rose, that are constantly at odds with one another. Because of his Warrior status, Jack is wanted by both sides and encounters all sorts of problems involving capture by one of the Roses for entry in the Game, a contest with two warriors representing each Rose fighting to the death. Jack's assistant principal (who happens to be a wizard), Leander Hastings, trains Jack and wants him to join another group that he would enter. Jack's aunt Linda (an enchanter) doesn't want him to be in the Games at all and tries to protect him. Jack, while all of this is going on, is distracted by Ellen, a girl he is attracted to.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sacred_and_Profane_Love_Machine"title="The Sacred and Profane Love Machine">
Blaise Gavender is a psychotherapist with a wife and a sixteen-year-old son, living near London in a comfortable home called Hood House. Unknown to his wife Harriet, he has been having an affair with another woman, Emily McHugh, for nine years, and Blaise and Emily have an eight-year-old son named Luca. For years he has been putting off telling Harriet about Emily, but finally is forced to do so when Luca secretly visits Hood House and the truth threatens to come out. Blaise vacillates between the two women, hoping to be able to maintain relations with both, but eventually he chooses to leave Harriet and live with Emily.Montague (Monty) Small, the Gavenders' neighbour and family friend, is a popular detective novelist whose wife Sophie has recently died. He knew about Blaise's affair and helped him by inventing a fictitious patient who required overnight visits to London, thus providing Blaise with an excuse to be away from home when visiting Emily. After Harriet finds out about the affair, the still grieving Monty is called upon to be her confidant as well. Monty's friend Edgar Demarnay, who was in love with Sophie, arrives on the scene and becomes embroiled in the situation, trying to "save" both Monty, whose grief threatens to cause an emotional breakdown, and Harriet, whose part he takes against Blaise.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countdown_City"title="Countdown City">
With electricity and telecommunications links down, petroleum increasingly scarce and with water supplies of unknown potability, former Concord police detective Henry Palace is in a race with time. As the apocalypse approaches, individuals are abandoning their former professional and vocational responsibilities to pursue various personalized "bucket lists" of preferred activities, but despite his redundancy from the nationalized Concord Police Department, Palace still intends to fulfill his duty to Martha and Brett Cavatone. As the U.S. economy is dismantled, Concord is full of empty storefronts, while remaining police protect citizens from their feral apocalyptic fellow inhabitants.Henry and Nico, his sister, travel to the former University of New Hampshire (which has now "seceded" from what used to be the United States), in search of Brett. One member of the UNH student "free republic" government, Julia Stone, is engaged in firearms transactions. Eventually, Palace finds Brett in a small community near Portsmouth Harbor and tries to persuade him to return to his wife. Remnant cutters from the U.S. Coast Guard, assisted by the U.S. Navy, are attempting to prevent refugees and illegal immigrants from the eastern hemisphere and the vicinity of the impact zone from entering into the contiguous United States, using deadly force, which disturbs Palace, who witnesses refugees at sea being killed by them. It also emerges that Martha was having an extramarital affair and that her estranged husband abandoned the relationship for that reason.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Trouble"title="World of Trouble">
Only weeks and then days remain, as asteroid "2011GV1" is on the final stage of its deadly course towards Earth and it will impact within the Indonesian archipelago, which will obliterate humanity in an extinction event akin to that which wiped out the dinosaurs. Former Concord, New Hampshire police detective Henry Palace has found sanctuary in the woods of New England with a settlement of other former police officers. With only days left before the end of the world, Palace must solve one last case: finding his sister Nico. Nico is involved with a pseudo-survivalist cult. However, she is murdered in Ohio, and Palace needs to identify her killer and their motivation. En route, he encounters fragments of disintegrating U.S. society, such as armed gangs, intact communities, surviving families, former illegal immigrants, delusional survivalists or religious groups, and an Amish community to which he returns to spend the end of the world with after he finds and makes peace with Nico's killer. The novel and series end with Maia about to impact on the far side of the world as Palace and the Amish community sit down to begin a meal that will abruptly end with the unfolding tragedy on the other side of the world, all but Palace and two members of the Amish host family oblivious about their imminent fate. As 2011GV1 begins its entry into the Earth's atmosphere, seconds before impact, Palace ends his story and the series.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_Mother's_Hope"title="Her Mother's Hope">
"Her Mother's Hope" follows a family as they discover what sacrifices it takes to show unconditional love. As the first in a family saga, the story begins with Marta Schneider as she leaves Switzerland and embarks upon a journey that will forever change the course of her family's history. As she suffers wars and hardships, she is determined to have her way until she has kids of her own. Her stubbornness gives her strength to raise strong children. But Hildemara, her oldest daughter, misinterprets this strength for distance. As World War II approaches, Hildie forges her own path to win her mother's respect. But when an illness overtakes her, will her own daughter misinterpret her love as distance as well?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Throne_of_Saturn_(novel)"title="The Throne of Saturn (novel)">
In the late 1970s, an American spy satellite discovers Soviet preparations for a crewed mission to Mars, causing NASA to accelerate its existing plans for "Planetary Fleet One" (aka "Piffy One"), which is to be commanded by experienced astronaut Conrad "Connie" Trasker. NASA enrages many liberal opinion-makers and members of the media by naming a crew for the mission which does not include Dr. J. V. Halleck, the only black member of the astronaut corps, or Jazz Weickert, a longtime astronaut who is a darling of the news media but unpopular in the Astronaut Office. A protest at Kennedy Space Center organized by Clete O'Donnell, a labor leader who is secretly a Communist agent, results in an astronaut losing a leg to a bomb blast. Under intense political pressure, the U.S. president forces NASA to place Weickert and Halleck on the crew and invites the Soviets to participate in the mission.Training begins with the new crew, somewhat hampered by Halleck's resentment toward the other astronauts, who he assumes have racist attitudes toward him. The fourth member of the crew, Dr. Pete Balkis, harbors romantic feelings for his close friend Trasker, who himself, though married, is strongly drawn to Halleck's wife, Monetta. In Geneva, a U.S./Soviet conference on space cooperation collapses. Weickert suggests to his crewmates that their spacecraft should be armed in case of Soviet attack. Halleck leaks the fact that NASA is considering arming the mission to Percy Mercy, an influential magazine editor, forcing NASA to hold a press conference at which Halleck makes clear that he disagrees with his crewmates on the arming proposal. Andy Anderson, the NASA Administrator, decides to remove Halleck from the crew, but the President forces NASA to reinstate him and denies the request to arm the spacecraft. Halleck's ferocious reaction to his temporary removal causes Monetta to leave him and begin a brief affair with Trasker. Meanwhile, the spy satellite reveals that the Soviets have accelerated their launch preparations, causing the U.S. to move its own launch up by two months.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocence_(Mendelsohn_novel)"title="Innocence (Mendelsohn novel)">
Beckett is a teenage girl who moves to Manhattan with her father after the tragic death of her mother; at her new school, she is fascinated by three popular girls and the beautiful school nurse. Soon thereafter, the bloody bodies of the three girls are discovered near Beckett’s apartment—seemingly the latest in their school’s dark history of suicides. The school nurse begins dating Beckett’s father, and Beckett is plagued by disturbing dreams featuring the three dead girls. As she grapples with the death of her mother, the tragedies at her school, and the incipience of her menstruation, she finds herself wrapped up in a media-saturated world of mixed messages, in which beauty is everything and the arrival of womanhood is equated to the loss of innocence. Mendelsohn employs the literary device of the unreliable narrator, leaving the reader uncertain of what’s real and what’s imagined as Beckett travels deeper and deeper into a world in which mysterious women drink the menstrual blood of virgins to maintain their youth and beauty—and Beckett becomes certain that they’re coming for her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(Star_Trek)"title="Mosaic (Star Trek)">
The USS "Voyager" is in a Nebula, avoiding a Kazon warship. Meanwhile, Lt. Tuvok is leading an away team on a planet's surface and Captain Kathryn Janeway must choose between saving her ship or the team and her friend. During this time, she reminisces about her childhood and her career in Starfleet that has led her to this point.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nesthäkchen_and_Her_Dolls"title="Nesthäkchen and Her Dolls">
The main character of the series is six-year-old Annemarie Braun. Since she is eleven years old at the outbreak of World War I, she must have been born in 1903. Volume 1 thus takes place in the German Empire. The family lives in the Berlin district, Charlottenburg, on Knesebeckstraße. Annemarie's father is Dr. Edmund Braun. Her mother Elsbeth is a housewife. Annemarie's older brothers are the virtuous Hans (the oldest) and the cheeky Klaus. The boys personify polar opposites, the two sides of Annemarie's character: on the one hand the wild, curious and venturesome Klaus, on the other hand, the honest, hard-working, industrious Hans. As the youngest child in the family, Annemarie is referred to as "Nesthäkchen," but she is also nicknamed "Lotte." Other residents of the Braun home are the cook Hanne, who refers to Annemarie as "her" child; the maid Frieda; the nanny Lena, called "Fräulein" by Annemarie; the dog Puck and Annemarie's canary Antics. The extended family includes a maternal grandmother and grandmother's sister Albertina. Mother Elsbeth's sister Kate lives on an estate in Silesia, "Arnsdorf," with Uncle Henry and her children Ellie, Herbert and Peter. "Nesthäkchen and Her Dolls" describes the everyday adventures of little Annemarie in the years 1909 and 1910. Because Annemarie is a "higher daughter," she is not allowed to play with the other (socially subordinate) children in the courtyard and she spends most of her time with her dolls. Her favorite is the doll Gerda. Often the "thoughts" of the dolls are portrayed. They represent moral authority and are the voice of Else Ury (for example, "Annemarie knew that doll Gerda did not agree with…"). When Gerda's doll wig comes off, Annemarie cuts off one of her own braids, which she believes will grow on her bald doll's head. To escape the chaos of house cleaning, Annemarie must usually go for a walk with her nanny. Annemarie hopes for rain. She has heard that when it rains, "the barometer falls" and decides to help by taking Father's barometer off the wall and dropping it on the floor. An organ grinder makes Annemarie forget the prohibition of playing with socially subordinate children. She dances with the other children in the courtyard and runs with them, behind the hurdy-gurdy man, through the streets of Charlottenburg. With a sailor girl, Lina, Annemarie trades her fine shoes for Lina's clogs. Annemarie visits her relatives on their estate, Arnsdorf, where the sheltered city child experiences the freedom of unsupervised play outdoors for the first time. As Annemarie is bored at home, her mother sends her to a nursery school, a surprisingly modern choice in the early 20th century. The book ends with the celebration of Christmas and a reflection on Annemarie's upcoming first school year. Annemarie holds a doll wedding to say farewell to her toys.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Reality"title="Quantum Reality">
## Background.Following a brief summary of the experimental crises (such as the ultraviolet catastrophe) which motivated quantum theory, Herbert identifies four major formulations of quantum theory: Werner Heisenberg's matrix mechanics, Erwin Schrödinger's wave mechanics, Paul Dirac's transformation theory, and Richard Feynman's sum-over-histories formulation.In introducing quantum objects (which he dubs "quons"), Herbert describes how quantum properties inhere in a wave function, which serves as a proxy for the measurement of these properties. He likens the quantum measurement process to mathematically treating the wave function as a summation of waveforms of a particular family, with various families corresponding to particular properties. The bandwidth of the spectrum of these waveforms represents the uncertainty in the quantum measurement. Herbert shows that for pairs of conjugate variables, such as position and momentum, these bandwidths are linked such that their product has a finite lower bound, thereby illustrating the basis of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: any "single" property can be measured to arbitrary precision, but conjugate properties cannot "simultaneously" be known to arbitrary precision.Herbert identifies two philosophical problems presented by quantum theory—the "interpretation question", concerning the physical nature of the reality underlying observation; and the "measurement problem", concerning the apparently special role of the measurement act in quantum theory, and various approaches to formally defining the measurement act.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfidia_(Ellroy_novel)"title="Perfidia (Ellroy novel)">
The main characters are Hideo Ashida, a Japanese Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) chemist, Kay Lake, a young woman looking for adventure, the real life William H. Parker, a gifted LAPD captain with a drinking problem, and Dudley Smith, an LAPD sergeant born in Dublin, Ireland, and raised in Los Angeles. The novel is told in real time, covering 23 days with the dates and the time the chapters and events are occurring, as well as through Kay Lake's diary. An entry from Kay Lake's diary begins "Perfidia", followed by a bootleg transmitter radio broadcast on Friday, December 5, 1941, being broadcast by real-life Gerald L. K. Smith. The first chapter introduces the reader to Hideo Ashida, on Saturday, December 6, 1941, at 9:08 am. Since many fictional and real-life characters appear in "Perfidia", many from his prior novels, Ellroy added a "dramatis personæ", which notes the previous appearances of characters in "Perfidia", as well as short summaries for some of the characters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_the_Soap_Queen"title="Kingdom of the Soap Queen">
In the early 1990s, Doordarshan held a monopoly on Indian television broadcasting when the government passed a series of economic reforms allowing private and foreign broadcasters to operate there. The expansion of cable television in India, starting in 1992, further opened the field for new companies. In this environment, teenager Ekta Kapoor launched Balaji Telefilms—kickstarted by Kapoor's mother, and founded in her father's garage—and guided it to success.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impressionist"title="The Impressionist">
The novel concerns Pran Nath (known throughout the book by several other names), the child of a one-time affair between an English father and an Indian mother, and his life from birth to roughly the age of twenty-two, as he travels from India to England to Africa while colonialism begins to come to a close. As the narrative evolves, Pran takes on different personalities—some given to him by others, some willingly picked up to his advantage—as he seeks a permanent identity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dressmaker_(Ham_novel)"title="The Dressmaker (Ham novel)">
In the 1950s, Myrtle "Tilly" Dunnage returns to her hometown of Dungatar, an Australian country town, to take care of her ill mother, Molly. The people of Dungatar sent Tilly away at the age of ten because of false accusations of murder, after the death of fellow student Stewart Pettyman.Tilly, an expert dressmaker trained by Madeleine Vionnet in Paris, starts a dressmaking business and transforms the locals with her couture creations. Many of the townsfolk who revile her nevertheless arrange for her to make them couture outfits. Sergeant Farrat, the town's policeman with an eye for beautiful fashion, liaises with Tilly in exchange for dressmaking assistance and design advice. Ted, the eldest son of the town's poor family, begins to pursue Tilly, and tries to assist her in standing up to the vicious gossip and small-minded attitudes of the townsfolk.Most of the women in town arrange for Tilly to create individual gowns for the town dance. She also makes her own frock, but when she and Teddy, the town's heartthrob, arrive at the dance, her name has been removed from all the tables in the hall, and one of the townsfolk blocks the door to stop her coming in. Teddy finds her crying outside, and takes her back to his ramshackle caravan. There, he helps her remember the 'murder' she doesn't remember committing: as a bastard child, she was teased and bullied unmercifully by the rest of the town children. One day Stewart Pettyman, the abusive and physical bully, cornered her and charged at her, head-down like a bull, intending to wind her and probably injure her severely. Instead, she stood aside at the last moment, and Stewart hit the wall head on at a run and broke his neck. Sergeant Farrat arranged for her to go to a Melbourne boarding school, where she began her dressmaking education.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Light_We_Cannot_See"title="All the Light We Cannot See">
## Marie-Laure Leblanc.Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a girl living in Paris with her father Daniel, the master locksmith at the Museum of Natural History. Marie-Laure went blind at the age of six in 1934, and Daniel aids Marie-Laure in adapting to her condition by creating a model of Paris for her to feel and training Marie-Laure to navigate it. She hears stories of a diamond known as the Sea of Flames that is hidden within the museum; the diamond is said to grant immortality at the cost of endless misfortune to those around the owner. Allegedly, the only way to end the curse is to return the stone to the ocean, its rightful owner.When Germany invades France in 1940, Marie-Laure and Daniel flee to the coastal town of Saint-Malo to take refuge with her great-uncle Etienne, a recluse and shellshocked veteran of the Great War who spends his time broadcasting old records of his dead brother across Europe. Unknown to Marie-Laure, her father had been entrusted by the museum with either the Sea of Flames diamond or one of three exact copies, made to protect the original gem. Months later, while building a model town of Saint-Malo for Marie-Laure, Daniel is arrested, suspected of conspiracy. He is not heard from again, leaving Marie-Laure alone with Etienne and Madame Manec, Etienne's longtime maid and housekeeper.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gods_Without_Men"title="Gods Without Men">
Although there are many other settings, both geographically and temporally, the novel's action mostly takes place in the southwestern United States. The plot is centered on a family trip by Jaz and Lisa Matharu with their severely autistic son, Raj. During the trip, Raj disappears and subsequently returns to his parents.The book also has several subplots which interact with the central storyline, including one about a cult founded by "Schmidt", a bomber pilot who served the United States during World War II, one surrounding an English rockstar trying to find himself in the United States, one about an Iraqi girl participating in a military simulation with her uncle, and one surrounding the journals of a Spanish missionary who traversed the same parts of California. The novel is told from the point of view of nine different characters, and touches on many themes such as religion, emotion, trauma, and human connection.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Risk_(book)"title="At Risk (book)">
Amanda lives with a typical suburban family in the town of Morrow, Massachusetts until she comes down with a fever and a blood test for AIDS returns as positive. She contracted it from an unscreened blood transfusion during surgery, 5 years before. Her world is turned upside down. As the news spreads, other parents, fearful of their own children catching it, cut off contact with the family. Fear spreads among her peers, who are uneducated as to the nature of sex and believe that AIDS can be spread by skin contact or using the same toilet seat. Her principal decides to counter this by giving the whole school a class-by-class sex-ed talk. Amanda eventually becomes weaker and weaker, having to give up gymnastics, because of this and because of parental fears that using the same equipment could spread the virus to her teammates. Amanda becomes bitter and disillusioned, becoming friends with Laurel, a medium. She decides to have her braces removed, and her father locates a pediatric orthodontist who will see an AIDS patient. While Amanda's death is portrayed to be inevitable, the novel concludes with an open ending - the special friendship between Charlie and Sevrin. Perhaps this is a more encouraging ending that symbolises hope and the eternal aspect of love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Bonding_and_Nurture_Kinship"title="Social Bonding and Nurture Kinship">
The book's form consists of a cumulative argument (using a wide range of supporting evidence) made over nine chapters, with each chapter ending in a brief retrospective summary, and the final chapter containing a recapitulation and summary of the whole, and drawing some wider conclusions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_(novel)"title="Peter (novel)">
The book is set in New York City, but the New York of a few decades prior to 1908 when the book was released. Peter Grayson is an aging banker of the old school; an upstanding and cultured gentleman, and not prone to engage in speculation. Peter also influences the younger generation around him, including a young man who comes to New York to work in the financial world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Suns_of_Scorpio"title="The Suns of Scorpio">
The book follows on from the first volume and sees Dray Prescot banished to Earth, arriving in Lisbon. Prescot later takes part in the Battle of Waterloo and eventually travels to India where, shortly after his arrival, he is returned to Kregen through intervention of the Star Lords.Prescot arrives on Kregen naked and without arms to save a young couple from an attack by rock apes but the two prove ungrateful and leave without thanking him. The significance of this event was later revealed in The Tides of Kregen but unclear to Prescot at the time. He spends the following days with the Todalpheme, an order devoted to calculate the complicated tides of Kregen. He learns that he has been sent to Turismond, a continent to the west of Segesthes, the scene of most of the first book. He finds himself to the far west of this continent at an ancient, possibly man made canal, the only link between the open ocean and a Mediterranean Sea-like inland see, the Eye of the World. The local Todalpheme are trusted with closing the canal in case of a severe storm through an ancient dam at the western end.Prescot, in fear of banishment back to Earth does not dare search out Delia, who does not make an appearance in the novel, sensing that he was returned to Kregen for a specific purpose, and instead opts to travel along the northern shore of the Eye of the World. He is eventually taken captive, enslaved and taken to Magdag to work as a scribe in the local brickworks. He learned that Magdag is the chief city of the northern shore and dedicated to the God Grodno and Genodras, the green sun of Kregen. The southern shore in turn worships the God Zair and the red sun Zim. The two sides are locked in a long-standing small-scale conflict, with the North defined by an autocratic society ruled by Overlords, employing mostly half-human mercenaries and relying on slaves for labor while the South enjoys a somewhat freer society, which however is also more intolerant of half-humans. Prescot refuses to take part in a slave revolt and is treacherously sent to the galleys as an oar slave, where he meets and befriends a number of southerners. When the galley is attacked by another from the south Prescot breaks free, slows the galley and him and his comrades are rescued. He befriends the ship's captain, Pur Zeniken, a Krozair of Zy, an elite southern fighting order and is taken to Sanurkazz, the holy city of the south.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heart_of_the_Valley"title="The Heart of the Valley">
In the winter a female dunnock left her territory to find food and came to the front garden of Brook Cottage where other birds were also feeding from the bird table. That evening Eve Conrad of the cottage received a phone call telling her that her son Daniel was in hospital from an accident so she left to be with him. The next morning the dunnock was among the birds who arrived at Brook Cottage but there was no new food with the house vacant. While searching for food at nearby Forge Farm she heard the voice of her own kind and met a male dunnock. After flying around together the male showed the female a storeroom on the farm with food. When the spring came the dunnocks built a nest on a ledge in the building but after a rat searched and wrecked it they searched for another site. The next day they settled in the hedge opposite Brook Cottage. The dunnocks mated and laid four eggs but the nest along with three eggs were destroyed by a lorry passing a parked car whilst taking a shortcut down the lane. The fourth egg was eaten by a hedgehog that evening.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sang_Sinxay"title="Sang Sinxay">
Phanya Kousarath is the king of Muang Pengchan, a powerful kingdom. He and his wife, Nang Chanta, are unable to have children. The king’s sister, Soumountha, is abducted by a demon called Nyak Koumphan, ruler of a far-away kingdom of ogres. Phanya Kousarath, after becoming a Buddhist monk, embarks on a journey to find his sister. An abbot at a temple tells him that only someone with a lineage to Buddha or Indra would be able to defeat Nyak Koumphan. After being reinstated as king, Phanya Kousarath meets and marries the seven sisters he met on the monks’ morning alms. He asks them to pray to the gods for pregnancy, in order to give birth to an extraordinary child with the power to rescue Soumountha. Nang Chanta and Nang Lun pray together to Indra, who hears their prayers and chooses three of his sons to come down to earth.Nang Lun gives birth to two twins: Sangthong (ສັງທອງ), who has the body of a conch shell, and Sinxay, ( “he who will triumph by his virtues”), who holds a sword, bow and arrows. Nang Chanta gives birth to Siho (ສີໂຫ), a boy with the body of a lion and the head of an elephant, while the other six sisters give birth to normal looking human sons. Lun and Chanta and their sons are banished from the palace because of the babies’ strange appearance. They are left in the forest, where Indra sees their hardships and builds a small palace for them. When Nang Lun returns Sinxay's weapons to him, the young man demonstrates his power by shooting two arrows. The first lands in the kingdom of the khut (garuda in Thai), while the second one lands in the kingdom of the nagas. Both kings lead millions of their followers to Sinxay’s palace, pledging their service to him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Than_Friendship"title="More Than Friendship">
They belonged to different worlds; Jim's background was the industrial North, and Janet was a girl from his own class, but Tessa came from the romantic world of ballet.What change would the spotlight make in the Tessa's young life?Was it love that chained Tessa to the exotic world of ballet?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countess_(novel)"title="Countess (novel)">
Viola Corbett lives amid luxury in Vienna with her husband, Count Eugene Erhmann, their children, Therese and Lorenz, and her illegitimate son James-Carlo, until all collapses with the outbreak of the First World War. A story of greed, lust, and unreasonable hate; but most of all, a captivating romance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Santeuil"title="Jean Santeuil">
Jean Santeuil tells the story of a young man, Jean Santeuil, who loves literature and poetry. The novel chronicles his childhood and his entry into the broader world. This includes his movement into high society within late nineteenth-century Paris and his adventures in other places, such as Illiers and Brittany.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remainder_(novel)"title="Remainder (novel)">
"Remainder" tells the story of an unnamed narrator traumatized by an accident which "involved something falling from the sky". Eight and a half million pounds richer due to a compensation settlement but hopelessly estranged from the world around him, the protagonist spends his time and money paying others to reconstruct and re-enact vaguely remembered scenes and situations from his past. These re-enactments are driven by a need to inhabit the world "authentically" rather than in the "second-hand" manner that his traumatic situation has bequeathed him. When the recreation of mundane events fails to quench this thirst for authenticity, he starts re-enacting more and more violent events, including drive-by shootings and a bank heist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witches'_Sabbath_(novel)"title="Witches' Sabbath (novel)">
Tamar Brown arrives in a tiny English village to research her latest book, about Abigail Parkes, who had been burned as a witch three centuries before. Tamar is a redhead, as was Abigail, and soon the superstitious villagers fear that the witch has come back from the grave to take revenge. Never mind that, though. By the most amazing coincidence, Tamar is reunited with William, the lover who left her six years ago. The suspicion of his involvement in his wife's death, the speculation that she is a reincarnation of Abigail all lead to further vengeful and nearly fatal deeds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detained_(novel)"title="Detained (novel)">
The novel's storyline explores tortuous conditions at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, and centers around a U.S. Navy Petty officer who is falsely arrested and sent to the camp, and a U.S. Navy JAG defense counsel's efforts to free him. In the story, Hasan Makari and his son Najib, both Lebanese nationals, have dreamed of moving to America. But when they arrive in the US, they are arrested, accused of terrorism, and incarcerated at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba, all on false charges. Suddenly, they face the nightmare of death by execution. Their only hope is Navy JAG Officer Matt Davis, who has been assigned to the case of his life, to defend the Makaris in court at Guantanamo Bay. Detained is the first novel in Don Brown's "Navy JAG" series.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persians_and_I"title="Persians and I">
## "Azh dahak Fortress".Ardeshir is a modern-day teenager who lives with his author parents in a faraway hut, in a green jungle. But when winter comes, everything becomes messed and some men invade them to destroy the hand scripts of the father.This invasion results in the destruction of the hand scripts and the death of Ardeshir's parents, but Ardeshir miraculously enters the era of his father's book: The age of myths and the ancient times of the Iranians at the dawn of the man's history. He enters the age of Zahhak the serpent shoulders and finds out that he has joined the assembly of the Persians, led by Kaveh the blacksmith, on the thirteenth of Farvardin, (Sizdah Be-dar) .Much to his surprise, Ardeshir finds out that his own father (who was killed earlier) is one of the warriors and commanders of Fereydun's revolutionary army.Sometime later, following the increase in the flames, the revolutionaries invade the town and Freidoun's arriving makes Zahhak to escape. The revolutionaries go after him until the final battle takes place at serpent shoulder's northern palace. Freidoun prevails and Zahhak is put in fetters inside of a cave in the Mount Damavand and left to suffer the fangs of the serpents on his own shoulders and perish. In the meantime Zahhak's sinister vizier named Arikshad who is probably the Ahriman himself _and responsible for much of Zahhak's crime_ is wounded in this battle and vanishes…
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rogue's_Luck"title="A Rogue's Luck">
Sydney clerk Kendall Curtis disappears on the day of his marriage to Vera with a sum of money belonging to his employer, the firm of Hardgoods, Hopkins and Co. His general manager, Horace Wakefield, persuades Vera to marry him instead.It turns out that Wakefield is leading a double life as a bookie, Doods Dodson. And that Wakefield had arranged for Curtis to be robbed on the way to the ceremony, drugged with chloroform, and dumped on a boat to Melbourne.Wakefield/Doods then kills Vera's father. Vera and Curtis are reunited in Melbourne where Wakefield then kills a detective.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sport_from_Hollowlog_Flat"title="A Sport from Hollowlog Flat">
A city clerk is fired due to over fondness for horse racing. He sinks lower and lower, playing two up and even trying to con a visitor from the country, the "sport" from Hollow Log Flat. However the sport takes pity on him and takes him to the bush, where the clerk redeems himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_a_Cloud_(novel)"title="Under a Cloud (novel)">
A jockey deliberately rides his horse to defeat in order to secure the hand of the girl he loves. He is disqualified from riding and the girl marries his rival. Ten years later he returns looking for revenge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_of_the_Woods"title="Nick of the Woods">
The novel is set in Kentucky in the 1780s and revolves around the mysterious figure of "Nick of the Woods", dressed as a monster, who seeks to avenge the death of his family by killing numerous Indians, carving a cross on the body of all he slays. "Nick" is revealed to be Nathan Slaughter, a Quaker by day who should by nature and creed avoid all violence. Bird's brutal depiction of Native Americans (the Shawnee) was very hostile, and in part a reaction to the more positive representation of Indians by James Fennimore Cooper in the Leatherstocking Tales.The novel has been called a "prominent example of the American Gothic form." "The Columbia Companion to American History on Film", which dubs Nathan Slaughter "a one-man genocide squad", also credits the novel for popularizing the mode of unintelligent Indian speaking ("Me Inju-man! ... Me kill all white man!") used by many later authors and in movies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exo_(novel)"title="Exo (novel)">
The main protagonist is Millicent (Cent) Rice, teenaged daughter of David (Davy) Rice and his wife Millicent (Millie) Harrison-Rice. Having learned in the previous novel that she can use jumping to modify her velocity, Cent experiments with heading toward space. She contacts Cory Matoska, a researcher who has made a lightweight space suit that is much more practical than existing models, with the one problem that because it is a single piece of fabric up to the neck gasket, no human can actually try it out — except Cent and her family, because of their ability to jump in and out of it.After arguing with her parents, Cent sets Cory up with a lab of his own on the condition that she gets access to the suit. At first he thinks that she is planning for years in the future, but then she reveals the fact that she can get into the suit easily, and wants to test it out within weeks.Millie's mother is very ill, and in a nursing home. When she takes a turn for the worse, Davy, Millie and Cent go to great lengths to set her up at their lodge home in the north of Canada.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outlaw's_Daughter"title="The Outlaw's Daughter">
A bushranger, Devil Devine, abandons his daughter. Years later he holds her up and tries to marry her but is stopped. The bushranger is pursued by the boyfriend of his daughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_(novel)"title="C (novel)">
The novel revolves around Serge Carrefax, born in the late 19th century in England. The plot follows his life before and after World War I.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Time_Goes_By_(novel)"title="As Time Goes By (novel)">
1931-35Yitzik "Rick" Baline is a small-time New York criminal during the time of Prohibition. He meets and falls in love with Lois, daughter of Solly Horowitz, a big-time gangster and becomes a favorite of Solly. He eventually becomes Boss of the 'Tootsie-Wootsie' Club, a speakeasy. He is viewed with extreme disfavor by "Tick-Tock", Solly's principal assistant, who plans to be the heir to Solly's businesses if he should retire or be killed.Solly makes it clear that Lois is intended for better things, and she eventually marries a lawyer and would-be politician, Robert Meredith, whom she does not really love.Warfare erupts between the Horowitz, Salucci and O'Hanlon gangs and there are several deaths. Solly and Tick-Tock are killed, as are Lois and her husband, now exposed as a corrupt politician. Rick must flee America. He takes Solly's money, half a million dollars, probably intended for Lois, and travels to Boston with Sam. While the two are purchasing tickets for a steamship to Le Harve, Rick changes his name to Richard Blaine.1941-42Rick, Louis and Sam leave Casablanca with documents provided by Louis. They all travel via Lisbon to London. America has now entered WW2 and they track down Victor, who is keen to resume his part in the work of the Czech Resistance. Ilsa begs him to allow her to assist him, and Rick and Louis also become involved while Sam stays in London. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zone_of_Interest"title="The Zone of Interest">
The novel begins in August 1942, with Thomsen's first sight of Hannah Doll, wife of Paul Doll, the camp's commandant. (Doll's name is similar to Otto Moll, a notorious camp commandant in real life.) He is immediately intrigued and initiates a few encounters with her. In time their relationship becomes more intimate, even though it remains unfulfilled. Despite their attempts at discretion, Paul Doll's suspicions are raised. He has her followed by one of the camp's prisoners, and is informed by him that they did indeed make two exchanges of letters. While spying on Hannah in the bathroom (as he does regularly), Paul watches her read the letter from Thomsen secretly and rather excitedly, before destroying it. From that point onward, his wife becomes increasingly contemptuous of him, viciously taunting him in private, and embarrassing him in public. Paul decides to assign Szmul, a long-serving member of the Sonderkommando, to the murder of his wife. He does so by threatening to capture Szmul's wife, Shulamith. The murder is scheduled to take place on April 30, 1943 - at Walpurgisnacht.The narrative then skips a few years, to the story's aftermath. In September 1948, Thomsen attempts to find Hannah, who has disappeared. He finds her at Rosenheim, where she met her husband. He is told what happened at Walpurgisnacht: at the moment Szmul was supposed to murder Hannah, he instead pointed the weapon on himself, and revealed the truth to her. Paul Doll then shot him before he could commit suicide. Thomsen asks Hannah if they could still meet each other. She tells him that while in the concentration camp he was to her a figure for what was sane and decent, outside the camp he simply reminded her of her past life's insanity. Despondently, he withdraws and leaves her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_from_Bullarah"title="The Boy from Bullarah">
Boxer Terry Truval wants to make it in the big city, Sydney. Dan Jay, filmmaker, tries to turn him into a film star.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrior_of_Scorpio"title="Warrior of Scorpio">
The events of the book follow on directly from The Suns of Scorpio when Dray Prescot was taken away in the decisive moment of the slave uprising against the Overlords of Magdag. He resists the feared teleportation back to Earth but finds himself instead in a different location on Kregen. He makes the acquaintance of Seg Segutorio, a bowman from the continent of Loh, thereby beginning a life-long friendship. Seg works at the time as slave at a farm in the region of Proconia, in the east of the Eye of the World. Moments later the farm is attacked by semi-human, lizard-like Sorzart warriors which Prescot takes as the reason for him having been sent there rather than returned to Earth after he, as he presumes, failed to fulfil the Star Lords plans correctly in Magdag. Prescot manages to save the female owner of the farm, her child and Seg from the raiders.After taking the women and child to safety and being incarcerated Seg and Prescot escape in a small boat. Attempts to head for Sanurkazz are thwarted by sudden storms, making it clear to Prescot that the Star Lords do not wish for him to go there. He learns that Seg was captured and enslaved after fighting for Pattelonia, the chief city of Proconia and ally of Sanurkazz as a mercenary. On the way the two come to a merchant ship from Pattelonia, damaged by storm and attacked by a galley from Magdag. Prescot uses the confusion of the battle to liberate the galley slaves and attack the crew of the galley. Heavily outnumbered the crew is defeated but Prescot learns that the sinking merchant ship has Delia trapped on board. He succeeds in rescuing her and learns that she has been heading for Magdag to find him. Once more he now tries, with Seg, Delia and one of her ladies-in-waiting, Thelda, to head for Sanurkazz but once again a sudden storm forces him eastwards, to Pattelonia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Short_History_of_Decay_(book)"title="A Short History of Decay (book)">
The text consists of a series of brief reflections and short essays, usually ranging in length from one to three pages, and organized into six chapters. Throughout the text, Cioran entertains several of the negative themes which permeate his work, in poetic language. These themes include a dissatisfaction with the world, his views on the futility of life, antinatalism, and anti-Christian sentiments:In the book's first chapter—its longest, taking up half the book's length—Cioran instead stresses the themes which are specific to the book. These themes include the general concept of decay (of individuals, societies and the universe) and the goodness of doubt. According to Cioran, doubt is better than certainty in some imperative ideal (especially religious or political ideals) because those who are convinced of such an ideal may be willing to kill for its sake:Because of his affinity for doubt, Cioran expresses admiration for civilizational decline, citing as examples the declines of Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome and the French Ancien Régime (which preceded the French Revolution). According to Cioran, such periods of decline are better than eras of social stability because they erode old certainties, making it possible for people to wonder and doubt again.Cioran reworked several passages from his earlier Romanian period for inclusion in "A Short History of Decay", his first French work. One such passage considers religious attitudes within Spain and Russia. According to Cioran, although both countries have a long Christian tradition, irreligious populations in both countries act as foils to the idea of God, preservering its vitality and cultural relevance—which would be diminished in a more uniformly Christian population. This passage is a revision of a piece included in the earlier book "Tears and Saints"; the characteristic phrase "If God were a cyclops, Spain would be His eye" is found in both works.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doll_Bones"title="Doll Bones">
"Doll Bones" is the story of Zachary "Zach" Barlow, Alice Magnaye, and Poppy Bell's quest to return a haunted doll to its proper grave site in another town. Zach, Alice, and Poppy play a role-playing game with Horrific action figures and metal cut-outs. Poppy runs the game which involves Zach's character "William the Blade" and Alice's character "Lady Jaye" on a quest for the Great Queen aboard William's sailing ship, Neptune's Pearl. One day Zach discovers that his father has thrown out all of his action figures including William, effectively ending the game. Furious at his father, and embarrassed that he cares so much about a "kid's game", Zach decides not to tell Alice and Poppy what happened and instead says he just does not want to play anymore.Zach is awakened in the middle of the night by Alice and Poppy who tell him that Poppy has had a dream about the "Great Queen" (an antique doll her mother keeps locked in a glass cabinet that the kids use for the game) and that the doll is made from the bones and ashes of a dead girl named Eleanor Kerchner who is now a ghost and wants to be returned to her proper grave. At first, Zach doesn't believe them but after being shown evidence, he decides to tag along. The three kids leave notes for their parents and take a night bus to East Liverpool, Ohio (a few hour's bus ride away) hoping to return the following evening to avoid discovery. On the bus they are accosted by a man named Tinshoe Jones who seems to see the doll as a real person and warns them that the bus driver talks with aliens who "change people's faces". The bus makes a stop in East Rochester, PA and the children flee when it appears the bus driver and station attendant intend to capture them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Days_(Nevill_novel)"title="Last Days (Nevill novel)">
The book follows Kyle Freeman, a guerrilla documentary maker who has been hired to make a film about the Temple of the Last Days. The cult is notorious for a horrific massacre in 1975 and was rumored to have indulged in occult rituals. Its leader, Sister Katherine, was said to have been highly paranoid and lived in the lap of luxury while her followers lived in squalor. Kyle decides that he will focus on the various myths surrounding the group, film the various locations that they have lived, and that he will also try to seek interviews with various people that were involved with the cult to varying extents. However the further Kyle explores the Temple of the Last Days, the more and more bizarre and strange things seem to become.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddy's_Song_(novel)"title="Buddy's Song (novel)">
The story begins with fourteen-year-old Buddy Clark going to visit his father Terry in prison with his mother Carol but Buddy could not get round to seeing him. Between Buddy's first two visits to the prison Des King paid a visit to his house offering them an envelope full of £50 notes as an apology for getting Terry imprisoned but Carol refused to take it. In a maths lesson on the last day of term in school Buddy found a note that read 'Debbie+Buddy=Love'. Buddy supposed it was referring to Debbie Bishop in his class and he became infatuated with her but he later learned it was a joke from his friend Julius Rybeero. Buddy got bored over the summer holiday with the Rybeero twins visiting relatives in the West Country and having nothing to do so he got a job sweeping up at a depot.One day he found the old guitar Terry gave him for his twelfth birthday and decided to start playing it. When he got his first week's wages Buddy bought new strings for the guitar along with two music books and a pitch pipe to help him tune it. Buddy got a letter from Charmian Rybeero to say that they would be moving out with their father setting up a new taxi firm with his brother. Carol received a letter from Terry saying he wanted them to sell his Harley-Davidson motorbike because he did not want it getting rusty although Buddy polished and oiled it all the time. Buddy learned on his fifteenth birthday it was to buy a cassette recorder so he could record himself playing the guitar. Buddy recorded himself singing and playing and gave the cassette to his father for Christmas.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fever_Code"title="The Fever Code">
In the prologue, soldiers from WICKED arrive to take Newt's sister, Lizzy. However, Newt and Lizzy's parents put up a fight and so are killed. Since Newt and Lizzy are now orphans, WICKED takes them both with Newt as a control subject.In the narrative' main plot, Randall is introduced and has been renamed "Thomas" by the people in the organization WICKED (World in Catastrophe Killzone Experiment Department). "Killzone" means the brain, the "kill zone" of the Flare. Thomas is only five years old, and since his father has a bad infection of the Flare, his mother has given him up for his safety.He is under the care of WICKED in its main complex in the middle of an Alaskan forest. He meets Teresa, who, like him, is kept separate from the others. He has to go through blood tests and advanced classes and soon meets Dr. Paige, who acts as a parent to him, and he soon becomes her favorite. They start sneaking out and meet Newt, Minho, and Alby. Newt reveals that his sister was renamed Sonya and is part of Group B. They start exploring the complex every day. The three take Thomas and Teresa into the outside world, only to be caught by WICKED security officers and thrown into the "Crank pits" (except for Newt, who is taken to be tested for the virus since he is not immune), where they encounter the founder of WICKED, who is nearly past his sanity and writes on a chalkboard, "WICKED is good."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ritual_(novel)"title="The Ritual (novel)">
Old university friends Dom, Phil, Luke, and Hutch have decided to reunite on a hiking trip through the Swedish mountains. The trip was chosen for its frugality due to the fact that Luke is unable to afford much else. The group is forced to take a shortcut through the woods when Phil develops blisters on his feet and Dom injures his knee. However, the shortcut ends up causing the group to become lost and scared, especially after they discover a disembowelled animal corpse hanging from the trees. They come across an ancient shack filled with bones and artifacts. They also find an abandoned church, desecrated and repurposed for pagan practices. Hutch falls through the floor of the church as he and Luke explore it, and find a massive amount of human remains, belonging to adults and children, and animals. The four are disturbed each night with dreams - mostly nightmares - and visions.There is much conflict between the four. Luke is the "odd one out", the only one who didn't get a career and settle down. Further rows reveal that Dom and Phil are about to get divorced. Hutch convinces Luke to leave them and press ahead for help, but before Luke can leave, Hutch is taken by an unseen entity, and the others find him naked and gutted in the branches. Phil vanishes next, and Luke and Dom later pass his body, treated in the same fashion. Despite sleeping in shifts, and Luke managing to hurt the creature with a rock, Dom disappears as well. Luke passes out and wakes up in bed in an old room.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Love_(novel)"title="Summer Love (novel)">
Writer is on a cruise ship where he meets another Nepali person, Atit. As writer introduces himself, Atit asks the writer if he is willing to write Atit's love story. Reluctantly, the writer agrees to listen to his story.Atit is curious to find out the entrance topper Saaya, who also has the same way back to home as Atit has. As days pass, Atit and Saaya become good friends and eventually, Atit proposes to Saaya. Saaya accepts the proposal. But the same day, both are them are divided into two different lab groups. One group has lab work in morning while other in afternoon. Now they have to come and leave college separately. After the division, Atit and Saaya start to bunk classes. Meanwhile Atit secures second spot after First Semester as Saaya helped him during exams. After finishing MSc, Atit has to go to Dhangadi as he secured a job in a NGO meanwhile Saaya; Norway, to pursue higher degree of education. One month later, Saaya returns to Nepal through Delhi and they marry. After some months, Atit goes to meet Saaya's parents to talk about their marriage but Saaya's parents decline as Atit is from Bramhin class and they are Newars. Saaya starts to move on while Atit falls in depression. With the help of Sushmita, his office's receptionist and neighbour, Atit does not commit suicide but they eventually have physical relation. Atit starts a search for Saaya and goes to Norway. In Norway, he meets Saaya and tells about the intimate relation he had with Sushmita.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Finders_(novel)"title="The Finders (novel)">
On her way to school Rosie Brooks was asked by an elderly frail man to post a parcel for him the following day so it would arrive on his brother's birthday. Rosie took the parcel and went to school. Things started going wrong for her and she spotted a cat and a crow staring at her from outside. Back home Rosie was behaving badly there as well. After giving her baby brother Jimmy a ride in his push-chair out in the garden she saw the same cat and crow again. She told her mother but she was sure it was a coincidence. That night she touched the parcel and lightning struck outside with the cat and crow on the lawn.The following day Rosie's family went to visit her grandmother while she walked to her friend Rebecca's house. After she posted the parcel a sack was pulled over her head and her captors walked her into a garage. She could not see them but she could hear and feel them. The captors, who called themselves the Finders introduced themselves as Mr Ikbal and his apprentice Sidri and told her they were after a Djinn which they believed was her until Rosie explained what had happened. Mr Ikbal told Rosie that the package contained the Djinn Star and because she had it in her possession for more than a day she had started to turn into a Djinn. Rosie did not believe it at first but accepted it when she started to fly as Djinn did and was told that she had to thing of something honest and kind to keep her bad side at bay. Ikbal explained that they would have to return the package to the Djinn so they could arrest him at Witching hour which was at midnight. Rosie agreed to help them and set off for the post box. By the time they got there the postman had just collected the mail and left but not before Rosie saw the number on the van.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingmaker's_Daughter"title="The Kingmaker's Daughter">
Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick—called "The Kingmaker"—puts young Edward IV on the throne of England. But before Neville can arrange for one of his daughters to marry the new king, Edward marries Elizabeth Woodville in secret. As Neville begins losing his control of Edward, he plots to secure his daughters' futures.Anne, his younger daughter, is married off to Edward, Prince of Wales. Following the deaths in battle of both her father and her husband, she is courted by the future King Richard III of England.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banquet_for_the_Damned"title="Banquet for the Damned">
Dante and Tom are a pair of musicians that have hit rock bottom in their personal lives and in their career. Their friendship is also strained due to Tom, a confirmed lothario, romancing a woman that Dante loved - and then leaving her in favor of accompanying Dante on a trip to St Andrews to meet Eliot Coldwell, a professor at the prestigious University of St Andrews. He is also the author of the book "Banquet for the Damned", which has had a particularly strong influence on Dante. However the two are unaware that there have been a series of strange deaths and disappearances plaguing the area, the only clue to their deaths being that they were students plagued by night terrors prior to their demise. Once at St Andrews Dante is both drawn to and disappointed by Coldwell but is especially taken by his assistant Beth, a mysterious young woman with a strange aura to her. Soon after Dante finds himself obsessed with her, to the point where he ends up nearly shattering his friendship with Tom when he grows jealous over the idea that Tom has pursued her. This jealousy is further spurred by the knowledge that Tom left Dante's old crush because he had gotten her pregnant and she wanted more of a commitment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartment_16"title="Apartment 16">
The novel is primarily told via the viewpoints of Apryl, a young American woman, and Seth, an English porter and artist. Apryl and her mother have recently inherited the estate of Lillian, Apryl's great aunt, which includes an apartment at an exclusive London building. She's horrified to discover that her great aunt spent her final years in squalor and mental instability, as the apartment shows that Lillian had become a hoarder after her husband's death. While going through the apartment Apryl discovers that Lillian had spent her days unsuccessfully trying to escape London and blaming a presumed dead artist named Felix Hessen for her inability to stray too far from the apartment. Bewildered, Apryl tries to investigate the mystery behind Hessen in an attempt to learn more about her great aunt and in so doing ends up attracting the attention of supernatural powers inhabiting the apartment building. She manages to find out more about Hessen through a book written by a handsome older man named Miles, who is reluctant to believe Apryl when she claims that Hessen is still alive in some form and is inhabiting the building.During all of this Seth, who works in apartment building, has been repeatedly drawn to Hessen and his now-abandoned apartment, apartment 16. He starts to interact with one of Hessen's emissaries, a young hoodie. Already depressed about his poor living situation and work prospects, Seth's interactions with the hoodie further push him into a self-destructive spiral of madness that is reflected in artwork that he creates due to Hessen's inspirations. However his revulsion over Hessen's supernatural influence eventually takes its toll and he tries to escape, only to find that any attempt to leave the city ends with confusion and further madness, identical to what happened with Lillian.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Princess"title="The White Princess">
Richard III has been killed in the Battle of Bosworth, and his devastated niece and lover Elizabeth of York must marry Richard's conqueror Henry Tudor, the new king of England, to finally end the longrunning Wars of the Roses between the houses of Lancaster and York. As queen, Elizabeth can assure the safety of her mother, the Queen Dowager Elizabeth, and the rest of her family. However, she believes that Henry—who openly despises her for her former alliance with his fallen enemy—may be responsible for the presumed murder of her brother Edward, the former heir. As suggested by his mother, the imperious Margaret Stanley, Henry insists that Elizabeth get pregnant by him before he commits himself to marry her. She does, and they wed. Elizabeth bears him a son, Arthur, but Henry's rule remains less than secure. He imprisons young Edward (called "Teddy"), the son of George, Duke of Clarence and a potential York claimant to the throne, in the Tower of London as public support for the fallen Yorks seems to surge. Henry discovers that Elizabeth's mother has been secretly rallying and financing York supporters in exile, and sends her to Bermondsey Abbey. Elizabeth is torn between her mother's Yorkist cause and her own loyalty to Henry and their son, and is tortured by a secret. Though the Dowager Queen has purposely kept her daughter in the dark about her plots, Elizabeth knows that her mother had sent her younger brother Richard to safety in Flanders, while an impostor went missing and was presumably murdered in the Tower.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King's_Curse"title="The King's Curse">
Since Henry Tudor's accession to the English throne as Henry VII, Margaret Plantagenet has had to distance herself from her connection to the former royal family to survive. Married to a minor Tudor knight, she now mourns her younger brother, Edward, a potential claimant to the throne who has been executed by Henry on false charges of treason after 14 years imprisoned in the Tower of London. Margaret and her husband, Sir Richard Pole, manage the household of teenage Arthur, Prince of Wales, Henry's son and heir by his queen Elizabeth of York, Margaret's Plantagenet first cousin. Margaret makes fast friends with Arthur's new young bride, the Spanish princess Katherine of Aragon, but Arthur's sudden death leaves both women on uncertain ground.Commanded by Arthur on his deathbed to marry his young brother Henry and someday become queen, Katherine asserts publicly that their marriage was never consummated. With Elizabeth now dead, King Henry considers preserving the alliance with Spain by marrying Katherine himself; his imperious mother Margaret Beaufort believes Katherine is lying, and fiercely opposes this therefore sinful marriage to her son or grandson. Richard's death leaves Margaret with five young children and a dwindling income. The King's Mother offers to relieve her burdens in exchange for a statement contradicting Katherine, but Margaret remains loyal. She is forced to foster her two oldest sons with a cousin, place her third son in Sheen Priory, and take her daughter and infant son with her to live in Syon Abbey.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordships_of_Scorpio"title="Swordships of Scorpio">
The stories follows on directly from Warrior of Scorpio with Dray Prescot being abandoned through treachery in the hostile territories of Turismond. He travels on foot and manages to rescue a young local girl from the hands of a savage tribe. He successfully crosses the Owlarh Wate and eventually reaches the Klackadrin, a natural barrier between the hostile territories and the coastal lands. The Klackadrin is a barrier of poisonous gases and Prescot is taken prisoner by the Phokaym, a lizard-like race, when he tries to cross. He is prepared to be sacrificed in a pit of lizard predators. At this stage the story stops with the explanation that the tapes Dray Prescot recorded in Africa finish here.The story resumes, now with new tapes sent from South America. Prescot has reached the east coast of Turismond and is recovering in the city of Pa Mejab, a colony of the Tomboram, a nation of the island of Pandahem, a fierce rival of Vallia. Prescot is initially quite weak from his journey through the Klackadrin but recovers and joins a trade caravan as a guard. The caravan is warned by an injured man, Inch of Ng'groga, of an impending attack. Like Seg Segutorio in Warrior of Scorpio, Inch of Ng'groga would become one of Prescots lifelong friends. Like Segutorio, Inch hailed from the continent of Loh, from the southeastern part of it in his case. Prescot and the other guards fought off the attack on the caravan successfully, reached the trading outpost of Pa Weinob and eventually returned to Pa Mejab.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Extraordinary_Day"title="That Extraordinary Day">
As the human race awaits the year 2101, Russian criminals break into a science facility and steal a time machine. They end up in the 1st century AD, in the Holy Land, becoming not only a part of the unknown years of Jesus, but a part of the Second Coming and the End Time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rosie_Project"title="The Rosie Project">
Don Tillman is an Australian genetics professor who has spent his days organising his life with the expectation that it will reduce inefficiency, improve himself as a person, and make him an all around happier person. He does not fit in well with others, which has kept Don from dating and having a satisfying romantic life. This is something that confounds him, as he believes that his IQ, physical health, finances, and social status should otherwise make him an appealing mate.After spending time with his best friend and womanising colleague Gene and his wife Claudia, Don comes up with the idea of the "Wife Project", a questionnaire that would help find the perfect mate. This turns out to be something more easily done in theory, as his questionnaire fails to produce a satisfactory woman and alienates many potential candidates.Soon after, Gene introduces him to Rosie, a bartender whom he quickly eliminates as unsuitable per his criteria. Despite this, Don finds himself quickly drawn to her and even goes so far to agree to help her find her biological father, a man that her mother slept with after a graduation party — a task Don terms the "Father Project". Her mother is dead and, as such, Rosie cannot ask her for the answer. They can only go on the information that her father was an attendee at the party. The two manage to eliminate most of the attendees via DNA testing, which Don secretly does in the university laboratory under the guise of it being an official project.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_One_Gets_Out_Alive"title="No One Gets Out Alive">
Stephanie Booth is a young woman who works various temp jobs and is always strapped for cash. Because of this, she has always had fairly poor living environments and she is overjoyed when she finds a decently priced apartment in the Perry Barr neighborhood. While she does have some initial misgivings about the decision, the positives seem to outweigh the negatives and Stephanie eagerly signs on as a tenant. Soon after Stephanie begins to experience several strange and inexplicable phenomena that make her start to regret moving in, as she hears odd noises and feels a presence that begins to grow more hostile with each passing night.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaqui_Delgado_Wants_to_Kick_Your_Ass"title="Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass">
Piedad "Piddy" Sanchez is in trouble. Not only has she had to move from her former home and lose one of her friends because of the move, but today she went to school and was told in no uncertain terms that "Yaqui Delgado wants to kick your ass". Piddy has never interacted with Yaqui at all and she's initially confused, as she had no idea that Yaqui even existed in the first place. She's informed that Yaqui hates everything about Piddy, as she thinks that she's stuck-up, a show off, and is interested in stealing Yaqui's boyfriend. Yaqui also feels that Piddy does not act or talk "Latina-enough" for her tastes. This horrifies Piddy, as she'd rather spend her time working at a local hair salon and trying to find out more about her absentee father rather than trying to prevent herself from getting hurt.Despite Piddy's protestations that she doesn't want to fight Yaqui and is not interested in her boyfriend (of whose identity she is unaware), she soon finds herself getting bullied by Yaqui and her gang. The bullying continues to escalate until Piddy is ultimately afraid to even leave her house, lest Yaqui and her followers discover her. To make matters worse, Piddy's mom refuses to tell Piddy anything about her father because her father was "scum", which sets Piddy and her mother at odds and puts an even larger strain on Piddy's existence. Piddy finds herself falling in love with a person from her childhood, Joey Halper, who gives her an oasis from the bullying. It is to Joey that Piddy finally reveals that Yaqui and her gang have begun beating Piddy and left her body covered in bruises and scabs. She's later horrified when she discovers that Joey has first hand knowledge of abuse, as his father frequently beats his mother- to the point where she has ended up in a hospital. Piddy also eventually opens up to one of the salon workers, Lila, confessing that on one occasion someone videotaped Yaqui beating her. Lila tries to encourage Piddy to fight back, saying that it was the only way that she herself survived similar encounters and that people like Yaqui will only end up in misery if they do not change her ways, and that Piddy will go on to bigger and greater things. The following day Joey tries to convince Piddy to run away with him to Pennsylvania, as he knows that his mother will only keep returning to her abusive husband and he does not want to continue to witness her beatings. Piddy refuses, knowing that running away will only ensure that Yaqui has truly won, as it will have taken her entire family and future away from her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_House_(novel)"title="The Little House (novel)">
After four years of marriage, Ruth and Patrick Cleary, a young English couple, visit Patrick's parents in Bath. Having been orphaned as a child, Ruth feels isolated and alone in the oppressive, close-knit Cleary family, and her husband seems unaware of her discomfort. She has always longed for a family of her own, and in the early days of their marriage believed she had found it with Patrick, but now, caught up in his career as a journalist, Patrick seems distant and distracted from his wife's concerns. On an impulse, Patrick buys a cottage near his parents' isolated manor house and sells the apartment his wife has made her home. After the move, Ruth loses her job and, though she had not intended to become a mother, she falls pregnant. After the birth of her child, she suffers post-natal depression, and Patrick's mother Elizabeth, the domineering matriarch of the Cleary family, begins to take over Ruth's role as mother and homemaker. Having been manipulated by her mother-in-law into a stay at a "rest home", Ruth is so medicated she can barely function, but she rallies, and finally wrests control of her life in a final Gothic twist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nice_and_the_Good"title="The Nice and the Good">
"The Nice and the Good" takes place in London and Dorset, England. Octavian Gray is a senior civil servant heading a government department in Whitehall. His seaside property, Trescombe House, is home to Octavian and his wife Kate and their 14-year-old daughter Barbara, as well as to the widowed Mary Clothier and her 15-year-old son Pierce, and the divorced Paula Biranne and her nine-year old twins Henrietta and Edward. Also in residence are Octavian's older brother Theo, and Willy Kost, a classical scholar and Dachau concentration camp survivor who lives in a cottage on the property.John Ducane, the legal advisor to Octavian's government department, is a frequent visitor to Trescombe House. He is attempting to break off his relationship with Jessica, a young art teacher with whom he has had an affair in London, and who still loves him. He is anxious to end his relationship with Jessica so that he can commit himself fully to a Platonic relationship with Octavian's wife Kate.The story begins in London with the suicide of Joseph Radeechy, a member of Octavian's department. Radeechy dies of a gunshot wound in his office. His body is found by his colleague Richard Biranne, the ex-husband of Paula Biranne, and the death is announced to Octavian by Peter McGrath, the office messenger. Octavian enlists the help of John Ducane to investigate the death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouldn't_You_Be_in_School?"title="Shouldn't You Be in School?">
S. Theodora Markson and her apprentice Lemony Snicket are hired to investigate a case of arson. Sharon Haines, an employee of the Department of Education informs Snicket of the fire, and becomes friends with Theodora. Sharon's son, Keller, acts suspiciously around Lemony. There is a witness to the arson, but when they go to visit his house, they discover it has also been burned down. Dashiell Qwerty, the town's librarian, is arrested for burning down the buildings, although Snicket highly doubts it was Qwerty that committed the crimes. It is revealed that Qwerty is arrested after Theodora and Sharon inform the Mitchum Officers that he is guilty. Stain'd Secondary School is then burned down, and all the schoolchildren are moved to the previously disused Wade Academy. Two people from the Department of Truancy come to take Snicket's friends (Jake Hix, Cleo Knight and Moxie Mallahan) plus Keller Haines to the boarding school, although Snicket is not taken. The man destroys Moxie's typewriter. Lemony realizes that the two people were Sharon and Hangfire.When Lemony returns to the Lost Arms he finds Theodora beaten. She reveals that Sharon attacked her. Lemony finds Pip and Squeak hiding from the Department of Truancy. He goes to the school to investigate and is knocked unconscious; he wakes up in Ellington Feint's room in the school. She pretends to be a student called Filene N. Gottlin (an anagram of her actual name). Lemony and Ellington meet with Moxie, Jake, Cleo, Keller and Ornette Lost (Prosper Lost's daughter) in the school library, though all the books are blank. It is revealed by Keller that he and his mother aided Hangfire in order to save his sister, Lizzie. Snicket comes up with a fragmentary plot and his friends all help to carry it out. Stew Mitchum and Hangfire warn Lemony that they will kill him if necessary before beating him up. Hangfire, the villain behind the arsons, attempts to mislead Snicket into thinking Dicey's Department Store is being burned down, but Snicket works out that he is planning to burn down the library. He removes the books before Hangfire can burn it down, although the building ends up being saved by the recently installed sprinkler system. Stew confronts Lemony and Ellington at the library, leading to Ellington being arrested for the destruction of the books. Lemony replaced the full books with the empty ones found at the school library. He then hides the full books at Black Cat Coffee. A younger Josephine then talks to Lemony about how his sister, Kit, was arrested.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Losing_Joe's_Place"title="Losing Joe's Place">
The novel starts in September, after Joe Cardone, the brother of the main character, has come back from his trip to Europe, and after the summer in Toronto for Jason Cardone (Joe's brother) and his two friends, Don and Ferguson (Peachfuzz) the novel chronicles. They have lost his lease and he is taking out his temper on Jason. September ends with Jason calling Don and Ferguson so they can start looking for a new place for Joe to live. The novel then flashes back to the previous June.The characters have convinced their parents to let them move into Joe Cardone, Jason Cardone's older brother's house for the summer. Early on, Ferguson makes Jason and Don lose their jobs at the plastics company where they work, and Jason and Don attempt to find jobs. While they are at a "teenage club" Don attempts to hit on a girl, Jessica, and ends up knocking her out cold by accident. Immediately after that, Don and Ferguson each attempt to get Jessica's attention throughout the rest of the book, Jason feeling like a 3rd wheel until the end of the book where Jessica confesses her love for Jason, after knocking Jason out cold with a pair of brass knuckles. Don finds jobs fairly easily but is almost immediately fired, however, Jason doesn't find a single job because Jessica constantly asking Jason for help with different things during the book. A friend of Joe's, Rootbeer Racinette helps Jason and Don earn money by doing various odd jobs and illegal gambling using his large size. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Scorpio"title="Prince of Scorpio">
Unlike the previous books, "Prince of Scorpio" does not follow on directly from the previous novel, "Swordships of Scorpio". Instead, Dray Prescot finds himself on an unknown beach on Kregen, after having spent some time on Earth without mentioning how long and where.Prescot has once more been returned to Kregen by either the Savanti or the Star Lords, this time to save a group of prisoners from a stranded ship who are being killed by their guards. Prescot receives help from another agent of the Savanti, Alex Hunter, the first time he encounters another Earthman on Kregen. Hunter is mortally wounded and dies in Prescot's arms. Prescot, after saving some of the prisoners and killing all the guards, finds out that the prisoners are from Vallia and of the people-based Panval party, arrested for their opposition to the aristocrat-based Ractor party. Prescot, who the prisoners believe to be called Drak, the first time this name is used for him, finds out that he is on the island of Valka, off the coast of Vallia.Prescot sets off to find help for the stranded former prisoners. He finds the island devastated through slaving raids and roaming mercenaries. The young population has either been enslaved or escaped into the central mountain range. Prescot is made welcome in a simple village full of old people but falls ill from drinking the poisonous canal water of Vallia. While slowly recovering, he has a first-hand experience of the mercenaries taking food from the village, with Prescot unable to interfere because of his illness. Once recovered however, when the mercenaries return he fights and kills them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_Die_4"title="2 Die 4">
At a car boot sale Ryan came across a mobile phone with a large screen and gold casing. The salesman told him it had features like voice control, Television, music and video downloads and satellite tracking. He was willing to sell it for £30 and knocked it to £20 seeing Ryan's surprised look. At that point Ryan was sure it was stolen but the salesman persuaded to try it and Ryan saw the model number DIAVOLO 666. Ryan was then told the phone did not need charging and calls and texts were free. In the end he got it for £10 and the salesman left immediately. At home Ryan found that the phone had a channel called Diavolo Special that showed violent and pornographic films.That night the phone's screen flashed on and off with a figure somewhere between a man and a goat. Ryan got the feeling that something was in his bedroom when the light was off. Then the nightmares began. The phone appeared to read Ryan's mind switching to the channel reflecting his thoughts but switched to Diavolo Special most. One night the phone woke Ryan then it displayed the Goat-Man and a creature between a dragon and a dinosaur with sharp teeth. Once again he had the feeling of scary beings in his room. From that point he slept with the light on. From the next morning the phone displayed the Goat-Man when Ryan turned it on. One morning the number 23 appeared under the face. For the next three mornings two new numbers appeared until it stopped at 23553110. Ryan could not make any sense out of it. Two days later the word PAYBACK appeared above the digits.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhounds_of_Antares"title="Manhounds of Antares">
The book follows on directly on the events of Prince of Scorpio with Prescot, Delia and the Emperor returning to the capital of Vallia, Vondium, after the successful battle at the Dragon's Bones. Upon arrival the small group is attacked by a group of the conspirators and Prescot is able to narrowly defeat the attack, save the Emperor and kill one of the leaders of the rebels. In the following days Dray Prescot and Delia then wed in the capital and are paraded around in Vondium. He is also able to secure titles and offices for his friends Inch and Seg from the Emperor to reward them for their loyalty during the uprising. On their wedding night Delia and Prescot are attacked by assassins but survive. Spending happy days in Vallia together Delia gives birth to twins, a boy named Drak and a girl named Lela. Shortly after however, Prescot is taken away by the Star Lords again.Dray Prescot finds himself on the island of Faol, in the north of Havilfar, as a slave in a slave pen. He realises that the Star Lords wish him to save one of the slaves but he does not know which one. He decides on a woman who declares herself to be Princess Lilah of Hyrklana and learns that the slaves are kept for the purpose of hunting by wealthy Lords of the region. Prescot encounters a Khamorro for the first time, disciples of a hand-to-hand combat order that despises weapons. He learns of the local guides who supposedly risk their lives to enter the slave pens to help the slaves escape during the hunt. Prescot and Lilah are selected for the hunt and follow a guide who disappears under mysterious circumstances during the night. Prescot also for the first time encounters the Jiklos, dog-like humans specifically breed for hunting, which pursue the group of slaves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeline_(book)"title="Madeline (book)">
The story is set in an all-girls boarding school in Paris, France. The opening rhyming sentences were repeated at the start of the subsequent books in the series:&lt;poem&gt;In an old house in ParisThat was covered in vinesLived twelve little girls In two straight lines.&lt;/poem&gt;Madeline is the smallest of the girls. She is seven years old, and the only redhead. The group's troublemaker, she is the bravest and most daring of the girls, flaunting at "the tiger in the zoo" and giving Miss Clavel a headache as she goes around the city engaging in all sorts of antics.One night, Miss Clavel wakes up, sensing something wrong. She rushes to the girls' bedroom and sees Madeline crying. A pediatrician named Doctor Cohn is called and takes Madeline to the hospital because she has a ruptured appendix. Hours later, Madeline finds herself recuperating in the hospital. She is greeted by her classmates and Miss Clavel, who gives her flowers and a doll house from her Papa. In return, Madeline shows them her scar. Madeline's classmates and Miss Clavel go home, but Miss Clavel wakes up again to find the other little girls wailing, demanding to "have their appendix out too". Miss Clavel assures them that they're all well and calls on them to go to sleep.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathless_(novel)"title="Deathless (novel)">
Marya Morevna and her sisters live with their upper middle class parents in Saint Petersburg before and during the Russian Revolution. Marya witnesses birds transform into handsome young men who marry her sisters, and meets the council of domovoi or brownies who live in her house along with the other families that get assigned to live there by the Bolsheviks, and cherishes her secret knowledge that magic exists in the world. She also meets an old woman named Likho who teaches her the mythology of the world, and of the Tsars and Tsarinas who rule various aspects of reality such as life, death, salt, night, water, birds and the length of an hour, of which Likho is one: the Tsarina of the Length of an Hour, who commands misfortune and sorrow. In time, Koschei the Deathless, who cannot die because he has cut out his death and hidden it in an egg, comes to marry her and takes her away from wartime Leningrad to the isle of Buyan in the Country of Life where he lives in luxurious splendour.While in Buyan, Marya makes three companions of the magical creatures who live there: a vintovnik (or gun-imp) named Nastya, a leshi called Zemlya, and a vila called Lebedeva. When Koschei's sister Baba Yaga, the Tsarina of Night, sets Marya three tasks before she is allowed to marry Koschei in the traditional manner of a fairytale, each of these companions helps her complete one task with their powers. In the process, she learns that Koschei has had countless wives before, usually named Yelena or Vasilisa – the stock fairytale heroines of Russian folklore who defy Koschei and steal his death and run away with princes named Ivan – whom he keeps in an enchanted stupor, and vows to do better than them. Baba Yaga begrudgingly blesses Marya's union with Koschei and marries them, but not before Viy, the Tsar of Death, interrupts the ceremony and attacks Buyan, killing Marya's companions in the process.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tía_Isa_Wants_a_Car"title="Tía Isa Wants a Car">
The book follows the character of Tía (Aunt) Isa, a young immigrant woman that works in a bakery, and is narrated through the viewpoint of her niece, to whom Tía Isa tells tales of her former home and her desire for their family members to join them. Tía Isa is saving her money towards purchasing a beautiful green car that she can use to drive herself and her niece to the beach, but this is difficult to do when she has to send much of her money home to help her family reach North America. Try as hard as she might, both goals seem like they will take an extremely long amount of time to come to fruition and Tía Isa's niece begins to secretly raise funds by taking on several jobs throughout the neighborhood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo_(novel)"title="The Cuckoo (novel)">
The novel is an example of the Meiji period genre of "katei shōsetsu", or "domestic fiction". Namiko, the daughter of a general, and Takeo, a naval officer and son of a deceased baron, begin the story happily married. Their happiness is undermined by cruelty from Taneo, who is Takeo's cousin and a rejected suitor of Namiko's, and from Taneo's mother, who is a demanding mother-in-law to Namiko. Then, Namiko contracts tuberculosis. Takeo's mother urges him to divorce Namiko, as her illness prevents her from having children. Takeo is torn between duty to his family line and individual moral authenticity. Even though it means the end of his lineage, he refuses to divorce Namiko, which he considers to be inhumane and unethical. At the outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War, Takeo is called up for active duty, leaving Namiko unprotected. His mother, encouraged by the vengeful Taneo, sends Namiko back to her family, effectively dissolving her son's marriage. Takeo attempts to die in battle, but is only wounded. Namiko considers throwing herself into the sea, but is stopped by an old woman who brings her a copy of the Christian Bible, which they discuss. She dies of her illness, and the novel ends with her father and her former husband meeting and mourning at her grave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Treasure"title="The Fourth Treasure">
Tina Suzuki is a new graduate student at the UC Berkeley Institute for Brain and Behavior Studies. She's largely unaware of her own family history, as she's lived in San Francisco all of her life and her own mother is relatively close lipped about the subject. When Tina's discovers that her boyfriend's calligraphy teacher Zenzen has agraphia and aphasia as a result of a stroke, yet continues to create lovely works of art, Tina decides to approach him to take part in her research study, she's met with no small amount of resistance from everyone around her, including her mother, boyfriend, and colleagues. What Tina is unaware of is that her mother (who is secretly suffering from multiple sclerosis) has previously had an affair with Zenzen and Tina herself is the product of that liaison.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Could_Silence_the_Wind"title="The Girl Who Could Silence the Wind">
Sonia Ocampo has always grown up with people expecting great things from her. She was born in the small town of Tres Montes, Chile during a terrible storm that threatened to completely destroy everything, only for it to stop soon after she was born. This has caused the townspeople to believe that Sonia is capable of fulfilling any wish if she prays hard enough and as a result she spends her days deep in prayer, as she herself believes in the power of her prayers. One day one of her prayers goes unanswered, showing that neither Sonia or her prayers are magical. This realization causes her to quickly leave town to avoid bringing shame to her family, and Sonia manages to get a housekeeping job in a wealthy home in Santiago, where Sonia is seen as no different than any of the other maids. However while the big city is exciting and Sonia's lodgings are far more nice than her former home, Sonia finds herself the target of her supervisor (who picks at everything Sonia does) and the nephew of Sonia's boss (who views her as nothing more than a conquest to be won). Soon Sonia learns that her brother Rafael has gone missing shortly after he left Tres Montes, and Sonia must seek help from her old friend Pancho in order to discover what happened to her brother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puzzle_Planet"title="The Puzzle Planet">
Dr. Roy Auckland has been asked by Dr. Howard James to come with him on an archaeological expedition to the planet Carolus. As a communications expert, Roy will deal with the Vaec, roly-poly humanoids who talk like characters out of an old Charlie Chan movie. A simple people, the Vaec judge everything by its contribution to mirth and they enjoy playing harmless pranks on each other and on the Terrans. Roy also serves covertly as a detective searching for an assassin.Shortly after coming to Carolus Roy discovers that someone has poisoned Dr. James' soup. The attempted poisoning was discovered and thwarted by one of the Vaec, who smelled the poison. Sometime later a time bomb, clearly meant for Dr. James, explodes harmlessly. Apparently someone is trying to murder Dr. James and is being downright amateurish about it. Roy wants to prevent that someone from succeeding. As in any good murder mystery, Roy has the intended victim and a list of suspects:Not long after Roy has his list made up and has asked four of the Vaec to watch the building in which the Terrans reside, one person on the list is murdered. It was made to look like an accident, as if the victim had been stung by one of the local insects, but Roy discovers that the murder was executed by a very clever trap that apparently had been set for Dr. James. After interrogating the Vaec observers Roy feels that he has all of the clues necessary to solve the murder, but he can’t yet see the pattern.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Country_(Timms_novel)"title="The Big Country (Timms novel)">
In the 1870s, beyond in Darling River, a half-caste girl, Jenny Courage, searches for her father, George Crumby, who abandoned her and her mother. George has moved to Sydney and prospered. Jenny works on a river board and becomes a housekeeper on an isolated station.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_from_Home"title="The Road from Home">
The book begins with the early life of Veron Dumehjian (1907-1981) in her native city of Azizya (today Emirdağ) in the province of Eskişehir. She was born into a wealthy Armenian family and had a comfortable and secure life. When the Armenian genocide began in 1915, eight-year-old Veron along with her family were forcefully removed from their homes and deported. During the deportations, Veron's entire immediate family, including her father, mother, brothers, and sisters died either from diseases contracted along the way or due to exhaustion. Now an orphan at the age of eleven, Veron managed to survive in the Syrian desert with the help of distant relatives. When her relatives did not treat her as their own, she chose to be placed in an orphanage and remained there until she was twelve years old. She then returned to her native town of Azizya and lived with her grandmother. The Greco-Turkish War reached her village and Veron was gravely wounded. After recovering, she moved to the seaside town of Smyrna to live with her aunt. She was forced to flee once more due to the Great Fire of Smyrna, when Greek and Armenian refugees were crammed into the waterfront of the city and forced into the sea. Veron and her aunt were rescued by a boat and taken to Greece. There, Veron married an Armenian-American, Melkon Kherdian. She ultimately moved to the United States and settled in Wisconsin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James!_Don't_Be_a_Fool"title="James! Don't Be a Fool">
Two millionaire friends have plotted for years that their children, James and Elaine, should marry each other when they are of age, and when the plan is finally revealed they are amazed at the young people's reaction. Mutual misunderstandings lead to ridiculous complications.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehall_(novel)"title="Whitehall (novel)">
In 1670, Sir Richard Somerset fights wrongs under the name of "The Falcon". He is a patriotic member of the licentious court of Charles II and mistrustful of French patronage and influence at court.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_(novel)"title="Conflict (novel)">
The novel is set mostly in France and the Mediterranean during the reign of Louis XIV. Some French fishermen are captured by Moslem corsairs and forced to become galley slaves. They rebel against their captors and turn pirate, later encountering English warships. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_of_Green"title="The Shape of Green">
The book is a critique of conventional standards of sustainable design, which emphasize ethics or technology over aesthetics. Alternatively, Hosey argues that sustainability must include sensory engagement to promote human enjoyment, respect for places, and preservation of resources. The book offers three general principles for an aesthetics of sustainable design:The book shows how these themes apply to any scale of design, including graphics, fashion design, products, buildings, and cities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibal_Reign"title="Cannibal Reign">
Astronomer Marty Chittenden discovers an asteroid on its way to earth. He brings his discovery of this asteroid to a former classmate from graduate school, Susan, who he has not seen in five years, but is still in love with. Soon, both Marty and Susan realize that the government is aware about the asteroid and its inevitable trajectory to hit the United States, and will take whatever means necessary to keep it secret. Former Green Beret Jack Forrest already knows about this catastrophe thanks to one of his government contacts. Forrest begins stockpiling an abandoned missile silo with supplies with three of his most trusted former soldiers, a couple of doctors as well as women and children he will try to save.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_Woman"title="The One Woman">
Reverend Joseph Gordon, a preacher in New York City, clashes with church elders because of his socialist views. Despite being a socialist, his best friend, Mark Overman, is a millionnaire Wall Street banker.Meanwhile, Gordon grows apart from his wife, Ruth, who disapproves of his politics. After he starts a relationship with Kate Ransom, a wealthy female parishioner, he divorces his wife. Kate Ransom donates a million dollars for him to start a new church and thus get rid of the disapproving church elders. The new church is called the "Temple of Man".Unfortunately, Kate Ransom falls in love with his friend Mark Overman. The two men have a fight over the woman, and Gordon kills Overman. Ransom tells the police about the murder and Gordon is sentenced to the death penalty. Meanwhile, his faithful ex-wife asks her childhood lover, now the Governor of New York, to grant him a pardon, which he does. Gordon is rescued from execution at the last minute.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bone_Palace"title="The Bone Palace">
When a prostitute dies carrying a royal signet, Isyllt Iskadur, necromancer and agent of the crown, investigates the murder and discovers that the vampires of Erisin are somehow involved. Unable to leave Forsythia's death unsolved, she continues her investigation which leads to more lies and secrets ahead. Meanwhile, inside the palace, Savedra Severos, the prince's transgender mistress, deals with assassination attempts and then stumbles upon the mystery of a missing Severos woman whom no one remembers. Savedra and Isyllt cross paths as they discover a conspiracy that links their two cases.Savedra is the prince's mistress and the Severos household is always scheming for her to become the princess to add the Severos name among royalty. She begins her quest for answers when she hears about the murder Isyllt is investigating and tries to find out more about the mysterious murders and who plotted an assassination attempt on Ashlin. Her search leads her to the name Phaedra Severos, a member of her family, the problem is most of the information of Phaedra has been removed. Eventually, the plot thickens when Savedra hears the tale of Savedra; Savedra and Ashlin explore Phaedra's former fortress and Savedra has no one to trust with all the information she has uncovered, which is why she turns to Isyllt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper_Jungle"title="Grasshopper Jungle">
"Grasshopper Jungle", set in the town of Ealing, Iowa during a modern economic recession, is narrated by the main character Austin Szerba. Austin often struggles with his own sexual thoughts and feelings for both his best friend Robby Brees and his girlfriend Shann Collins. Although Austin focuses on the present, he also tells stories of his Polish ancestors. The reader later discovers that the novel is in fact Austin's self-recorded history.While skateboarding through an alley and smoking cigarettes together near the Ealing Mall, Austin and Robby are attacked by a neighboring gang of bullies, led by Grant Wallace, who steal their skateboards and shoes and throw them onto the nearby roof of "From Attic to Seller Consignment Store" and proceed to beat up Austin and Robby, causing Robby to bleed all over the asphalt. After picking up Shann, Austin and Robby head to the roof to retrieve their lost items. The boys discover some weird objects on the roof including a flamingo and film strips. They find their belongings and decide to sneak inside the store through the roof access. Inside, they discover several mysterious objects in the office of the owner, Johnny McKeon. One of these items, Contained MI Plague Strain 412E, is stolen by Grant Wallace, who has broken into the store. The vial is shattered outside onto Robby's blood stain and Robby, Austin and Shann drive away. Unknown to anyone, the strain begins to take control of its first victims.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Root_of_Evil"title="The Root of Evil">
James Stuart, a Southerner, becomes a successful attorney in New York City. Meanwhile, Nan Primrose, his childhood lover marries his college friend, John C. Calhoun Bivens, now a millionnaire lawyer. At the same time, Dr Henry Woodman takes care of the poor in New York, and opposes the takeover of a drug company by Bivens. Stuart eventually marries his daughter. When Woodman steals some jewelry from Bivens, he goes through a trial but is acquitted by the judges thanks to his good deeds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sway_(novel)"title="Sway (novel)">
Jesse "Sway" Alderman is a person who can get you whatever you want, like a date with that one person that seems to be completely unattainable. As a result, Jesse has developed a reputation for being calm, collected, and never letting anything deter him from successfully completing his transactions. This resolve is tested when Ken, the school's football captain, asks Jessie to help him win over Bridget, a good girl that has already rebuffed his advances. No one is more surprised than Jesse when he finds himself developing feelings for Bridget and he's even more shocked when he finds himself bonding with Bridget's brother Pete, as Jesse goes out of his way to avoid making any real friendships. Pete has cerebral palsy and as a result, has a limp, an asymmetrical face, a huge problem with low self-esteem, and a massive chip on his shoulder regarding what he sees as people (including his own sister) being nice to him only out of pity and his parents constantly comparing him to Bridget, who they view as practically perfect.Pete immediately latches on to Jesse, who initially gives a lackadaisical response to Pete's attempts to hang out with him but finds himself somewhat enjoying their encounters even as Jesse manages to successfully unite Ken and Bridget. The only thing that bothers him is Pete's pessimistic attitude about himself and his negative behavior towards Bridget, which culminates in the two boys fighting. They make up soon after and Jesse even attends Pete's birthday party, only for Ken (who was also invited) to corner Jesse and begin berating him for attending and accuse Jesse of only befriending Pete in order to get Bridget to fall for him (Jesse). Irritated and knowing that Ken would not believe that he truly liked being around Pete and that the friendship was not intentional, Jesse sarcastically says that he only befriended the boy in order to hook Ken and Bridget up and that he found him to be unlikable- only for Pete to overhear the entire conversation. The following day Pete calls Jesse in an attempt to hear the whole story, but Jesse lies and says that everything Pete heard was correct, as Jesse believes that Pete and Bridget would both be better off without him. Some time later Jesse is urged by others to visit Pete in the hospital (as he has had surgery) and apologize, but after Jesse leaves the building he is severely beaten by an associate named Skinhead Rob, who is angry that Jesse had stopped doing business with him due to Jesse spending most of his time with Pete.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inga_(novel)"title="Inga (novel)">
Rapa was born and brought up in Delhi. In her education life, she gets introduced to foreign (English) literature, that she finds "fascinating".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandpa_Green"title="Grandpa Green">
Grandpa Green's great-grandson travels through a garden he created. In the garden, he discovers Grandpa Green's lost memories, including living on a farm, having chickenpox, going to war, getting married, and starting a family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_(book)"title="Locomotive (book)">
The nonfiction "Locomotive" starts by giving historical background in its front cover pages about the construction of the transcontinental railroad in the 19th century. It explains that two companies, Central Pacific Rail Road Company that started from Sacramento, California and Union Pacific Rail Road Company that built from Omaha, Nebraska, collaborated in its construction. Since the government allowed them to decide the meeting point, they selected Promontory Summit, Utah. The purpose of it being built was for people to take less time to travel. Before this, traveling from coast to coast would take up to six months which was difficult and dangerous because travelers traveled by wagons over land or by ship.After the title page", Locomotive" explains, using second person free verse narration, about what it was like to ride the railroad from Omaha to Sacramento in the summer of 1869 using the journey of a mother and her daughter and son. The book explains the jobs of the various people who work on the train itself, and who otherwise support the running of the railroad. It also describes the changing scenery along the way, including notable landmarks and how the construction of the railroad has changed that landscape, the mechanics of actually operating the train, what life was like for the passengers on the train, and the pleasures and perils of railroad travel at that time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tailor_of_Panama"title="The Tailor of Panama">
Harry Pendel is a British expatriate living in Panama City and running his own successful bespoke tailoring business, "Pendel and Braithwaite." His wife and children are unaware that almost every detail of his life is fabricated, including his former partner, Mr Braithwaite. In reality, Harry Pendel is an ex-convict who learned tailoring in prison.Andy Osnard is a young British MI6 agent sent to Panama to recruit agents to gather intelligence and protect British trade interests through the Panama Canal. However, Andy has his own agenda and, after he discovers Harry's past, sees the perfect opportunity to recruit a new agent and embezzle money from the British government.Concocting a fictitious network of revolutionaries, known as the "Silent Opposition," Harry, through Andy, manages to attract the interest of the British secret services and even the US government. However, Harry has used his own friends as the basis for his fantasies, and as the plots are taken more seriously they become known to the Panamanian authorities and Harry struggles to cope with the guilt of setting them up.Harry's wife, Louisa, becomes suspicious of the amount of time he spends with Andy and suspects that Harry is having an affair. She breaks into his office and discovers all his fantastic lies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_Blues"title="November Blues">
November Nelson lost her boyfriend, Josh Prescott, when a pledge stunt went horribly wrong. After his death, November has to deal with the heartache of losing him forever. Also, November realizes that she is pregnant with Josh's child. November faces the pressures of telling her family and friends that she is pregnant at 16, being talked about and laughed at by her classmates at school, and figuring out how to provide for her child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_is_Not_My_Hat"title="This is Not My Hat">
A small fish has stolen a hat from a big sleeping fish, and boasts about how easy it will be for him to get away with the theft, because the big fish will not wake up any time soon and maybe not even not notice the missing hat, or know who stole it, or where the small fish is going. Except the big fish does wake up and does notice. The little fish goes to hide in some plants, and is observed by a crab who tells the big fish, who follows the little fish. The little fish remains convinced that the theft will not be found out, but at the end of the story the big fish is wearing the hat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arena_of_Antares"title="Arena of Antares">
The book follows on directly from the events of "Manhounds of Antares". Prescot returns to Yamman, commanded to do so by the Star Lords, narrowly escaping a number of Canop galleys on the river. The companions are saved by an attack of Volrok, a race of flying men, on the galleys. With the help of Turko, Prescot frees the twin-brother of Mog and starts to train the Miglas as soldiers. Overconfident, the Miglas attack against Prescots wishes and force a battle the Canops ultimately win.Upon returning to the rebel Migla camp he instructs them to continue training and, with Turko by his side, takes their flying boat to Valka and raises an army to come to the support of the Miglas. Delia secretly accompanies him and the combined army defeats the Canops in battle. Just at this moment, when Prescot attempts to tell Delia of his background, a scorpion of the Star Lords appears, tells him that they are satisfied with his work and that he will now be taken to Hyrklana.Prescot fights the teleportation but loses and finds himself having to rescue a group of people who he later learns were plotting the overthrow of Fahia, the evil Queen of Hyrklana and twin-sister of Lilah who he had encountered at Faol. He is captured after his successful rescue, opts to fight in the arena and works his way up in the rank of the gladiators. The arena is subdivided into four fighting houses, of which Prescot is allocated to the Red Drang.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_Show"title="Wonder Show">
When Portia's aunt leaves her at the McGreavey Home for Wayward Girls, thirteen-year-old Portia begins to plan her escape- despite the owner "Mister" saying that she would never be able to escape his grasp. She's desperate to know what happened to her father Max and as she believes that he left home to join the circus, Portia decides that the best way to find him is to join a carnival, Mosco's Traveling Wonder Show. Once there, Portia begins to slowly connect and form a family with the people around her even as her attempts to locate her father never seem to come to fruition. However Portia soon finds that not only is Mister keen on having her return to the home, but that the answers to her questions surrounding her father might just be at McGreavey's.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_of_Billy_Miller"title="The Year of Billy Miller">
This story is about 7-year-old Billy Miller who, right before the end of summer vacation, has a slight accident resulting in him hitting his head and starting his new year in 2nd grade with a lump on his head. After his slight accident he remained in good condition. There were no bad thoughts in his mind about the incident until he overheard his mom speaking about her concern for Billy. She expressed her worries if he would become forgetful later in life because of the fall Billy suffered from. Billy begins to worry that he will have an issue in 2nd grade because of his fall and believes his mom's concerns will become reality. Billy begins to think he is not smart enough for 2nd grade, thinking he needs to do more than is expected to succeed. As the school year goes by, Billy learns to navigate 2nd grade at his best ability. Billy is later inspired by a classmate of his. Billy also starts to appreciate his family for who and what they are. Billy recognizes and appreciates the hard working mother and father he has and a sister he learns to treat with much more respect. Billy is surrounded by people who care very much about him, and though there are easy and there are hard times, everyone will always be there for him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splendors_and_Glooms"title="Splendors and Glooms">
The master puppeteer, Gaspare Grisini, is so expert at manipulating his stringed puppets that they appear alive. Clara Wintermute, the only child of a wealthy doctor, is spellbound by Grisini's act and invites him to entertain at her birthday party. Seeing his chance to make a fortune, Grisini accepts and makes a splendidly gaudy entrance with caravan, puppets, and his two orphaned assistants. Lizzie Rose and Parsefall are dazzled by the Wintermute home. Clara seems to have everything they lack—adoring parents, warmth, and plenty to eat. In fact, Clara's life is shadowed by grief, guilt, and secrets. When Clara vanishes that night, suspicion of kidnapping falls upon the puppeteer and, by association, Lizzie Rose and Parsefall. As they seek to puzzle out Clara's whereabouts, Lizzie and Parse uncover Grisini's criminal past and wake up to his evil intentions. Fleeing London, they find themselves caught in a trap set by Grisini's ancient rival, a witch with a deadly inheritance to shed before it is too late.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily's_Crossing"title="Lily's Crossing">
"Lily's Crossing" is set in the United States in the 1940s. The story is about Lily and Albert, two children who face grief at a young age and must help and learn from each other through the summer.Lily lives in St. Albans, Queens with her father and grandmother. Her mother died when Lily was a small girl. Each summer Lily and her father (Poppy) stay in Far Rockaway near the Atlantic Ocean at her grandmother's (Gram) house. She loves going there because it is far from her house and she is able to relax and explore the neighborhood. Lily has a friend, Margaret, and they spend most of their summer days together gossiping and watching movies. Lily feels she needs to fix some problems in her life, one of which is lying because it has become a habit for her and she finds it fun.This summer is different because the story starts in 1944, which was when World War II was occurring in Europe. Her whole world begins to change because her father must go overseas and her friend Margaret is moving to Detroit with her family for her father to work on planes. Lily must find a new friend to replace Margaret. She meets a new friend called Albert Orban. Lily begins to follow Albert, which makes him uncomfortable and distanced from her, until a series of events leads them to cross paths and become friends. Albert is a refugee from Hungary who has escaped from the Nazis and dreams of reuniting with his family one day. He is not interested in making friends. While Poppy is away, Gram becomes very worried for him because she does not have a way to contact him and Lily and new view of the war. Lily becomes a support system for Albert because he is alone and his family is far away. Lily wants to help him pass his hard time by taking him on new adventures. Albert learns to swim giving him some trust in Lily. Albert begins to open up to Lily about his life in Hungary which Lily describes each conversation his voice being restless. Albert has a sister Ruth that he is desperately trying to find. She was left behind because she had measles and they could not escape together. Albert is willing to put his life in danger to find her
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_Eternity_(philosophy_book)"title="Time and Eternity (philosophy book)">
The first chapter asks what religion is, stating that religious thought is contradictory, is rooted in intuition, and that God is fundamentally a mystery. The second and third chapters look at the negative divine - the characterisation of God as void, silence or non-being - which Stace maintains is an idea found in all religions. He maintains that mystical experience is shared by all mankind, it is only the theories about it that differ. On this point he says he is in agreement with Otto. In this experience the distinction between subject and object is overcome, indeed there is no difference between the experiencer and the experience.Stace then goes on to explain that all religions say that religious revelation is ineffable, because no words or concepts can be applied to God who is without qualities or predicates. Thus, God cannot be comprehended by the intellect, but is apprehended by intuition. "... it is of the very nature of intellect to involve the subject-object opposition. But in the mystic experience this opposition is transcended. Therefore the intellect is incapable of understanding it. Therefore it is incomprehensible, ineffable."Stace then looks at the positive divine; he asks how concepts can be applied to that which is above all concepts and finds that all propositions about God are symbolical. He defines religious and non-religious symbolism as differing in two respects. Firstly, religious symbols cannot be translated into logical propositions because they refer to an (ineffable) experience rather than a proposition. Secondly, the relationship between the religious symbol and what is symbolised is one of evocation rather than "meaning", as meaning is a concept, which is absent in the mystical experience. "Yet in some way this symbolic language evokes in us some glimpse, some hint, seen dimly through the mists and fogs which envelop us, of that being who stands above all human thought and conception." He goes on to write that some of these symbols feel more appropriate than others (e.g. God is love not hate).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Hunt"title="High Hunt">
The prologue begins the story by introducing the characters of Dan and Jack as children as their father tells them a story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_American_Vampire"title="The Last American Vampire">
After turning assassinated President Abraham Lincoln into a vampire from the first book, vampire Henry O. Sturges, Lincoln's vampire-hunting mentor, realizes he has gone against the rules of the Union of Vampires by doing so. Lincoln is horrified at becoming a vampire, as it turns him into the exact thing he has been fighting against all his life, and jumps out the window and burns himself to death.Henry is summoned to New York City, the Union's headquarters, by their leader Adam Plantagenet, a highly respected older vampire, alive since 1305. He shows Henry boxes containing the heads of some of their emissaries along with a note from the mysterious "A. Grander VIII". He is tasked with finding and stopping this man from destroying more vampires. Plantagenet himself is killed soon after.Henry decides to begin his hunt in London, England, under the guise of a textile importer. Unsure where first to go, he decides to find out the vampire presence here. It turns out that the Henry Irving, a famed actor in England, is a vampire. Wanting to get in touch with Irving, he tracks down and finds his assistant, Abraham "Bram" Stoker. Initially reluctant to allow Henry access to his charge, he relents when Henry reveals his vampirism. Stoker and his family quickly become one of Henry's close friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Warrior_of_World's_End"title="The Warrior of World's End">
Gondwane is a crazy-quilt of human and non-human societies divided into "kingdoms, empires, city-states, federations, theocracies, tyrannies, conglomerates, unions, principates and various degenerate savage ... hordes," all built atop the detritus of seven hundred million years of previous civilizations. Over this span "the laws of physics themselves have become peculiar and inconsistent," and science has been largely superseded by magic. The moon of this far-future world appears gigantic, as it is in a slowly decaying orbit that threatens the planet with ultimate destruction. In consequence, the very time period in which the series is set is called "The Eon of the Falling Moon," and the next, future eon will be "the Eon of the Silver Phoenix" and is projected to be mankind's last. In 70 years, the moon will fall, but in some unexpected way.Phlesco, a "Godmaker," and his pseudowoman spouse Iminix are traveling to the Realm of the Nine Hegemons when they come across the novel's protagonist Ganelon Silvermane, handsome, muscular, and apparently mindless, wandering in the rain. Taking pity on him, the couple takes him in and conveys him to the city of Zermish. There two magicians, the haruspex Slunth and Narelon the Illusionist, diagnose his condition. They discover, contradictorily, that when found he was simultaneously seven hours old and two-hundred million years of age. It turns out that Ganelon is a Construct made by long-extinct Time Gods, who had foreseen a succession of great world crises and created heroes to deal with them. Each is preserved in the Ardelix Time Vault until awakened by the onset of the crisis it is intended he resolve.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Assassin"title="The Fifth Assassin">
More than two-dozen would-be assassins have targeted Presidents of the United States. Only four were successful: John Wilkes Booth, Charles J. Guiteau, Leon Czolgosz, and Lee Harvey Oswald. Archivist Beecher White—protagonist of the #1 New York Times bestseller "The Inner Circle"—uncovers a new assassin in Washington, D.C., mimicking the crimes of the other four assassins. History has always believed the four killers were lone wolves, but Beecher thinks there may be more than meets the eye. Beecher discovers that all four assassins were working together over the course of a hundred years. But questions still remain to be answered: Why were they working together? Who do they work for? And what are their plans for the current President? Beecher and the team from "The Inner Circle" return to uncover the answers and face down the fifth assassin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Ma_and_Son"title="Mr Ma and Son">
The novel is divided into five parts. It chronicles the experiences of a Chinese widower, Ma Zeren (simplified Chinese: 马则仁; traditional Chinese：馬則仁), usually referred to in the text as Mr Ma, and his son Ma Wei (simplified Chinese: 马威; traditional Chinese: 馬威), as they journey to London to take over an antique shop left by Mr Ma's deceased brother, located near St Paul's Cathedral. They are recommended as lodgers to an English landlady, Mrs Wedderburn, by Mr Ma's English clergyman, Reverend Ely. In the course of the novel, Mr Ma and his son face anti-Chinese racism of all kinds, while Mr Ma falls in love with Mrs Wedderburn and Ma Wei falls for Mrs Wedderburn's daughter, Mary.The novel is an acerbic satire revealing both the West's prejudice against the Chinese and China's "failure to stand up for itself in the world", according to academic Julia Lovell.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_in_the_Skull"title="Echo in the Skull">
"Echo in the Skull", 1959:Sometime in the late 1950s, Sally Ercott awakens from a drunken stupor in a filthy room in a sleazy boarding house on Mamble Row in the Paddington section of London. She is destitute and suffering from amnesia and the proprietors of the house, Arthur and Bella Rowall, eagerly await the day when she agrees to work for them as a prostitute. She goes outside and is overwhelmed by one of the waking nightmares that have driven her down. In her inattention, she is nearly hit by a car.The driver of the car, Nick Jenkins, notices her plight and insists on taking her to lunch. Then he takes her to his apartment, where she can bathe while he goes out and buys her new clothes. When he returns, Nick calls a doctor, his friend Tom Gospell, and asks him to come and examine Sally. As they wait for Dr. Gospell, Sally and Nick discuss her nightmares and infer that they seem like actual memories of girls and women dying on alien worlds.After Dr. Gospell examines Sally and finds nothing wrong with her, Nick goes out to do more shopping. He is kidnapped by Arthur Rowall and taken to the boarding house, where Bella guards him as Arthur goes to kidnap Sally. Clyde West, another resident of the boarding house, helps Nick escape and tie Bella up. With his penknife Nick cuts Bella's dress and exposes a greenish parasite spread across her back. Leaving Bella bound to a chair, the men hurry to Nick's apartment to prevent Arthur from kidnapping Sally. They are too late, but Dr. Gospell calls and Nick tells him to meet Clyde and him at the boarding house.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real_Jane_Austen"title="The Real Jane Austen">
This biography of Jane Austen is organized by objects or scenes in Austen's life, rather than chronologically. Austen's experiences with life are shown to be broader than that of a woman who did not travel far and never left her home country. Rather, she knew people in her own neighborhood and coming from the British Empire in the tumultuous times of the French Revolution and the long wars with France following that Revolution and was involved in major issues at home, such as slavery in England, and the more challenging question of slavery in the Empire beyond the island of Great Britain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menace_from_the_Moon_(1925_novel)"title="Menace from the Moon (1925 novel)">
Inhabitants of the Moondescendants of "a Dutchman, an Englishman, and an Italian" who in 1654 "with their women rose to the moon by the help of an admirable machine"find themselves threatened with extinction.Having lost the secrets of "the engine which brought our forefathers hither",they issue distress signals in the form of optical projections, onto the mists of Dartmoor, of the universal "Real Character" expounded by 17th-century bishop and polymath John Wilkins in his "An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language" (1668).Unfortunately the earthlings, not having adopted the Wilkins plan themselves, have difficulty apprehending the import of these spectral presentments (mistaking them at first for "Siamese writing") and even once they do they lack the technology with which to respond. With time running out and their survival at stake, the impatient and irritable Moon-men determine to command the attention of their terrestrial cousins in a more compelling way, deploying a devastating heat-ray capable of boiling the oceans: "Hasten, hasten: help us to escape. Otherwise the whole earth will be burned dry and eaten up... Answer us, fools!"After a demonstration of this apparatus so unnerves visitors to an Italian resort that they are unable to enjoy their lunch, a frenzied search for plans to the 17th-century Moon-ship ends in frustration, a short scrap of Wilkinsese being all that is found once the plans' hiding place is discovered.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Broken_Eye"title="The Broken Eye">
The novel "The Broken Eye" begins with a sea demon attack on the Chromeria, which a black sperm whale defends and rescues the city from at the last moment. Sperm whales had not been seen since the closing of the Everdark Gates. This event appears to be allegorical in nature, albeit with the moral obscured.Karris Guile (née White Oak) returns to the Chromeria with the rest of the Blackguard from Ru, whereupon the White strips her of her position for marrying the Prism and insists that Karris can no longer draft since she is close to breaking her halo (when a drafter uses too much magic, the luxin residue breaks through their irises, and they become a Wight). She then puts Karris in charge of managing the Chromeria's spies.Upon her return to the Jaspers, Teia is aggressively recruited by Joris Nograd, a representative for the Order of the Broken Eye , a group of assassins with their roots in ancient, forbidden magics, who are particularly interested in paryl drafters. Teia reports to Commander Ironfist, leader of the Blackguard, who takes her to see the White. She encourages Teia to continue working with them as a double agent, buying her loyalty by ensuring the economic security of her family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Just_City"title="The Just City">
The Greek gods Athene and Apollo collect 10,000 human children from throughout history, and place them on the island of Thera prior to its volcanic destruction. There, a collection of adult supervisors (who are likewise from throughout history) will raise the children to achieve the ideal society as described in Plato's "Republic" – which becomes much more difficult when Socrates arrives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_in_the_Green_Sweater"title="The Girl in the Green Sweater">
To avoid Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust in Ukraine, Krystyna Chiger and her family hid in the sewers of Lvov. To keep warm, she wears a green sweater that is special to her. A sweater that her grandmother had knit her, which is now in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Traitor_(Dixon_novel)"title="The Traitor (Dixon novel)">
John Graham, a Confederate veteran and dispossessed planter, serves as the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina. As black power has been curtailed, the Grand Wizard orders Graham to have one last march through town and finally discontinue their activities. (This was ordered by the Klan's first Grand Wizard, Nathan Bedford Forrest.) The Klan members burn their robes and bury them in a grave. Two weeks later Graham's rival, Steve Hoyle, starts a new Ku Klux Klan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Horse"title="Indian Horse">
In 1961, the Indian Horse family—an Ojibway family consisting of eight-year-old Saul, his grandmother Naomi, and his Christian parents John and Mary—live in the wilderness of Northern Ontario, hiding from the authorities, who previously took Saul's siblings, Benjamin and Rachel, to residential schools. When Benjamin suddenly returns after escaping a residential school, the family moves to Gods Lake, a remote region where their ancestors lived. Benjamin soon dies of tuberculosis, and his parents take his body away on a canoe to be blessed by a priest, leaving Saul with his grandmother. Winter sets in but the parents have not returned; Naomi tries to lead Saul to Minaki for shelter, but their canoe is overturned in rapids. Suffering from the freezing cold, they run out of supplies, and Naomi dies at a railway depot outside Minaki. Saul is found by the authorities and is taken to St. Jerome's Indian Residential School in White River.At St. Jerome's, headed by Father Quinney and Sister Ignacia, Saul witnesses daily abuse of the children; some die, commit suicide, or are traumatized. The same year, new priest Father Gaston Leboutilier joins the faculty, and he quickly becomes popular with the boys. He constructs a hockey rink outside and forms a hockey team composed of older boys. After watching "Hockey Night in Canada" on a television, Saul begs Father Leboutilier to allow him to play, but he is prevented from doing so because of his young age. Father Leboutilier allows Saul to clean the rink each morning, and Saul uses part of that time to practice hockey. After a player is injured during a scrimmage, Father Leboutilier allows Saul to play and is astounded by his high skill level. Father Quinney, noticing Saul's talent, allows him to join the team. St. Jerome's plays against White River, and Saul leads his team to victory. Father Leboutilier begins to practice and train with Saul. Saul is invited to play for the White River midget hockey team, though he is soon kicked out over his ethnicity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saaya_(novel)"title="Saaya (novel)">
It is the sequel of Summer Love. It is based on point of view of narrator, Atit, Saaya and Susmita. According to the story, narrator takes the responsibility to mend the things between Atit and Saaya. Two years after the book about Atit's love story is published, the writer comes in contact with Saaya to know her story. Saaya says about her opinions and why she dissolved the relationship with Atit. She also says about physical relationship between Susmita and Atit. The narrator tries to know the fact from Susmita. Susmita also accepts what happened and also shows that there was Saaya's fault in Atit's poor mental health. Narrator with the help of Sushmita finally convinces Saaya that she should continue her relationship with Atit. Saaya also goes to live with Atit. After sometime, they both come to Nepal and have short talks with writer. Atit visits his hometown, Dhangadhi and also calls Saaya there. Atit's mother gives a Tilhari to Saaya as token of love. They have fun but soon Saaya has to go to Kathmandu for the engagement with Sujan, an NRN. Saaya succeeds in breaking engagement but her parents are angry with her. Saaya, Atit and friends go for trip to Goa. Later, they return to Norway. Saaya's parents also come to visit Saaya in Norway. During their visit, they find out that Saaya is married after seeing Tilhari. Angry and furious, Saaya's parents leave for Nepal. Saaya's health also deteriorates after the incident. Atit looks after Saaya. Saaya wills to go to her father but Atil tries to stop her and not come in her father's sweet words. Saaya goes to Nepal whereas Atit's condition degrades. He does not eat food and is always thinking about Saaya. Soon, Saaya calls Atit to Nepal. Atit finds Saaya's father ill. Saaya's father talks with him and says that they can live together in Norway and he didn't wanted inter caste marriage of Saaya only due to pressure of society. Saaya and Atit are united and this was all about their love story full of obstacles which they overcame successfully. The novel ends with Saaya asking narrator that he must tell about his love story the next time they meet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Initiation_(novel)"title="The Initiation (novel)">
A chance encounter brings sixteen-year-old Cassie Blake to fall for the mysterious Adam Conant. After meeting him, she rids herself of the idea of a relationship with him because she thinks they’ll never see each other again. Cassie and her mother move to New Salem, and, much to her surprise, Adam is there. At her new high school, Cassie encounters a strange group of students who rule the student population. In time, she meets Diana, the fair-haired beauty, whom Cassie comes to love like a sister. Faye Chamberlain, the voluptuous and dark puppet master, desires to turn Cassie into her plaything. After her encounters with the group of students, Cassie learns that she, along with the other students, is a witch. Cassie later finds that the boy she feels sparks with, is actually the boyfriend of Diana, leader of the coven and Cassie’s best friend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elite_(novel)"title="The Elite (novel)">
The book takes place 300 years in the future in a country called Illéa (formerly the United States) that has a strict caste system. The castes range from eight to one, with Eights being the homeless and Ones being the royal family. Prince Maxon has narrowed down his selection candidates to an Elite of six girls: America, Kriss, Celeste, Elise, Natalie, and Marlee. Maxon must find a wife among these girls. In order to do so, Maxon meets their families and throws a Halloween Ball, at America's suggestion. At the ball, Maxon and America dance and he tells her that he will propose to her after the Selection at the right time so that it is easy for her to say yes. America feels sure about marrying Maxon. After the ball, it is discovered that Marlee has been having a secret affair with one of the guards, and as a consequence, is severely caned, a horrible form of whipping. The episode results in her becoming an Eight. Upset and angry that Maxon would let such a thing happen to Marlee, America reconsiders her feelings for Maxon. Then, the girls must plan an event and are split into two teams: America and Kriss, and Natalie, Celeste, and Elise. After much planning, America and Kriss's reception with the Italian Royalty is successful. Celeste shows America an article that shows that she is now the least favorite, and Celeste is the highest. After this, Maxon asks to speak with America. He shows her the Princess's suite and reveals her best friend, Marlee whom he had hidden without the king's knowledge. The two girls talk about Marlee's new life, where she cooks in the kitchen and has married Carter Woodwork, the former guard. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Fate"title="The Book of Fate">
On a July 4th weekend, US President Wes Holloway attends an event. As the president is leaving, a crazed assassin attacks. The assassin kills one of the president's aides and best friends, Ron Boyle, and permanently disfigures Holloway with a bullet to the face. Eight years later, Boyle turns up alive. In trying to figure out how and why Boyle has returned, Wes must piece together clues involving that July 4th, a decades-old presidential crossword puzzle, ancient Masonic symbols hidden in the street plan of Washington, D.C., and ultimately a 200-year-old code invented by Thomas Jefferson.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zero_Game"title="The Zero Game">
The pieces of Meltzer's Zero Game include two jaded Capitol Hill staffers, a clandestine game, an explosive secret, and one idealistic Senate page.The Capitol Hill staffers are named Matthew Mercer and Harris Sandler. They play the Zero Game, a game only a select few on Capitol Hill even know about, including their bosses, two of the most powerful Senators and Congressmen on Capitol Hill. Just being "in the know" enough to play proves to the two staffers that they are true power brokers in D.C. They soon discover, though, that the Zero Game is more than it appears. One of the two ends up dead. The other must recruit on a young Senate page named Viv to help keep him alive and finish the Zero Game to its shocking conclusion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Counsel"title="The First Counsel">
Nora Hartson, the President's daughter, is code-named Shadow. A young White House attorney, Michael Garrick, begins dating her. Michael thinks he can handle the world where Norah's closest friends wear earpieces and carry guns, where his every move is watched, and in which his girlfriend's father is the most powerful man alive. Michael is accused of a murder he did not commit and in order to clear his name, he must unravel a secret that will shake the foundation of the Oval Office.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Even"title="Dead Even">
Manhattan assistant district attorney Sara Tate is about to lose her job when she lands a case that could save it. She soon realizes that the district attorney is conspiring against her, and an outside force is arranging for her husband, Jared Lynch, to represent the other side of the case. Jared has been told he must win the case or Sara will die; Sara has been told to win the case or Jared will die. As a result, tensions rise both at home and in the courtroom. No matter who wins, one of them will die. The two work together to save themselves, their jobs, and ultimately their lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tenth_Justice"title="The Tenth Justice">
Ben Addison, a new Supreme Court clerk, accidentally reveals an upcoming decision to another lawyer. That lawyer is a fraud though and he makes millions off the announcement. The lawyer also blackmails Ben. To save himself, Ben shares his secret with Lisa, a fellow clerk, and his three roommates: a State Department worker, a "Washington Daily" reporter and a Senator's assistant. The team uses their resources to uncover the blackmailer and save their friend, but their abuse of power comes at a cost. Someone within their circle is leaking information, so they must battle internal and external forces to secure their once-bright futures.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Abraham_Lincoln"title="I Am Abraham Lincoln">
The 2014 book features a young Abraham Lincoln - before he becomes President - as well as a Lincoln facing the American Civil War and delivering the Gettysburg Address. As a child, young Abraham Lincoln stood up to bullies who were torturing a small turtle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fliers_of_Antares"title="Fliers of Antares">
The book continues directly on from Arena of Antares with Prescot, Delia and their friends escaping Hyrklana in a flying boat. On their journey over the sea Prescot is accidentally thrown off the boat during a storm and manages to swim to safety. He reaches a little village of the semi-human Lamnias where he is welcomed. He is however tricked and enslaved alongside an annual set number of youth from the village. The slave masters, another half-human race, Katakis, attempt to shoot down the flying boat of Prescot's friends who are in search of him but he is able to warn them. The flying boat departs and Prescot remains a slave.Sold to the Heavenly Mines in the Empire of Hamal, where the raw ore is mined for the flying boat propulsion, Prescot falls into the monotony of the hard labor, almost forgetting escape. Eventually he recovers and starts planning an escape when he is once more teleported away by the Star Lords. He finds himself in the unusual situation of arriving somewhere without having to fight but is soon moved again, further back in time, the Star Lords apparently having blundered his teleportation.This time, still at the same location, he has to rescue a palace official, Ortyg Fellin Coper, from an attack. Grateful of his help, he becomes the formers guest in the capital of Djanduin, a land populated by the four armed Djang, a warrior race, and the two armed Obdjang, an administrator race. He learns that Djanduin is under almost constant attack by neighbouring Gorgrendrin. He also learns, by observation of the position of the two Suns to each other that he has been sent ten years into the past. Prescot decides to sit out this time and not to get involved into local politics and wars.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Force_and_Effect"title="Full Force and Effect">
Supreme Leader of North Korea Choi Ji-hoon wants to develop his country’s nuclear weapons program, but is being hindered by sanctions from the United States and its allies. He tasks his foreign intelligence chief, Ri Tae-jin, with fast-tracking the program in order for the country to be taken more seriously as a superpower. General Ri then arranges for mining to begin in the city of Chongju, where a large deposit of rare-earth minerals has been recently discovered; the profits produced would then be used to fund the nuclear weapons program. He acquires an investor, Mexican mining mogul Óscar Roblas de Mota, who in turn hires Duke Sharps, head of a U.S. corporate espionage and investigations firm, to oversee the mining operation.Meanwhile, the U.S. government becomes concerned about North Korea’s recent test firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), which had crashed into the Sea of Japan. They push for more sanctions in front of the United Nations. Recognizing the lack of intelligence assets in North Korea, Director of National Intelligence Mary Pat Foley tasks CIA non-official cover operative Adam Yao with infiltrating the Chongju mining operation under cover as a skilled worker. He eventually cultivates an asset in the form of his boss, Hwang Min-ho.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assail_(novel)"title="Assail (novel)">
As the final volume of the "Novels of the Malazan Empire", "Assail" also takes place after The Malazan Book of the Fallen and serves as an epilogue to both series. The novel takes place on the continent of the same name and continues plot threads that began in Return of the Crimson Guard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footsteps_(novel)"title="Footsteps (novel)">
The novel, like the tetralogy, is based on the life of Indonesian journalist Tirto Adhi Soerjo (1880–1918). This novel – the third installment of the tetralogy – covers the period 1901 to 1912 and is set on the island of Java, Dutch East Indies (today Indonesia). The protagonist, also the narrator, is Minke (a fictionalization of Tirto). Minke leaves Surabaya, where he studied in a prestigious high school, to go Betawi (or Batavia), the capital of Dutch East Indies, to continue his education. There he attends the STOVIA, a school for native doctors, the only avenue for higher education available to the natives in the Dutch East Indies. He continues to encounter racist colonial policies; for example, he is not allowed to wear European dress, but instead must wear indigenous dress. While studying there he meets Mei, a Chinese activist who is working on forming an organization for the Chinese in the Indies. They marry but she soon dies of malaria.After Mei's death, Minke continues to be drawn to politics and forms a grassroots political organization for the Indies natives. The organization is called Sarekat Dagang Islam (Islamic Traders' Union), which later becomes Sarekat Islam (Islamic Union); in real life this organization is credited as the first native grassroots organization in the Indies. Minke's writings, which are critical of the Dutch authorities, and his poor grades lead to his expulsion from the medical school. He then realizes that his passion does not lie in medicine, and becomes a journalist. He founds first a magazine and then the first newspaper to be owned and operated by natives. As writer and editor, he tries to instill political and social knowledge to his fellow Indies subjects. He also meets and marries an exiled princess, whom he loves and finds happiness with. Later he also met an Indo man named Jacques Pangemanann who asked Minke to publish his script titled 'Njai Dasima'.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumours_of_Glory_(book)"title="Rumours of Glory (book)">
Alongside detailing his musical career, Cockburn discusses his activism in the fields of human rights and environmental issues, the evolution of his Christian faith, and his relationships and family. He also includes discussions of how his experiences were reflected in his song lyrics.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperboy_(novel)"title="Paperboy (novel)">
The story takes place in 1959 in Memphis. "Little Man" Victor, an eleven-year-old boy who stutters, takes over his best friend Rat's paper route while Rat is visiting his grandparents. Little Man has various encounters with Rat's customers. The paper route poses challenges and introduces Little Man to life's daily obstacles.He has a run-in with the neighborhood junk man, Ara T, a bully and thief who Little Man was warned to stay away from by his Mam. Ara puts the boy's life, as well as Mam's, in danger. Victor begins to wonder what it means to have a soul. He thinks about his talks with Mr. Spiro, a merchant sailor who has settled into the area; who he met on his paper route. He sees Mrs. Worthington walking hand in hand with her husband and hopes she's happy. He befriends a boy on the route who he has learned is deaf, and he is finally able to tell his mother that the food she thinks is his favorite is not. Though he has recently discovered that his dad is not his birth father, he embraces their loving relationship and strives to deepen it. Mr. Spiro, he learns, is going to leave soon on one of his merchant ships, and he gives Little Man a cut up dollar bill with 4 words on it, student, servant, seller, and seeker. By the end of the book, he is even able to speak several full sentences in front of his class, finally verbalizing his own name for the first time. Victor tells Mam he's learned that what he says is more important than how he says it and that his soul doesn't stutter. In the end, it turns out that Victor had typed up the entire book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_to_Limbo"title="Rocket to Limbo">
On the afternoon of 3 March 2008, the Star Ship "Argonaut" lifted off from Earth and set course on the Long Passage to Alpha Centauri. The builders intended that the crew establish a colony on one of Alpha Centauri's planets and then bring "Argonaut" back to Earth. The ship never returned and no trace of her was ever found.In the year 2351 Lars Heldrigsson joined the crew of the Star Ship "Ganymede", scheduled to fly to Vega III. Once the ship entered space, Lars and the other 21 crewmen discovered that the ship was actually going to the planet Wolf IV to search for the lost Star Ship "Planetfall". This unprecedented change of plan was made more disturbing by the presence of fusion bombs in the ship's hold. Angry at being effectively shanghaied onto a dangerous mission, some of the crew attempted to take control the ship. The mutiny failed and, threatened with abandonment in interstellar space, the mutineers agreed to continue on the mission.Wolf IV was a cold, gray, cloud-covered planet. On arrival, a scout spotted what appeared to be the wreckage of the "Planetfall" lying on a mountainside, and also caught a glimpse of what he took to be a city in a valley beyond the mountains. The crew landed "Ganymede" on a river delta 75 miles from the wreck, and landing parties went out to familiarize themselves with the environment. At night the mutineers sabotaged the communications equipment and returned to the ship. Lars discovered the betrayal and he and other crewmen pursued the mutineers, but when they got back to the delta the ship had vanished, though no one heard or saw it blast off.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Angry_Espers"title="The Angry Espers">
Paul Corban wakes up in a hospital on an alien world populated by people who look exactly like Terrans. When he tries to talk to the doctors, though, his questions are met with looks of horror and revulsion and with an eerie silence. His wounds from the crash of his spaceship heal and his hosts offer what appears to be a kind of therapy, always in total silence. He fails to meet the therapists' expectations (he can't even figure out what they are), so he is taken to a pleasant place called Raxtinu, an asylum for the mentally disabled.In Raxtinu he meets the lovely Dr. Alir, who teaches him the spoken version of the Donirian telepathic language. He has, by this time, discerned that the Donirians possess the powers of telepathy, telekinesis, and teleportation. He has also fallen in love with Alir. Nonetheless, he wants to go home and when he knows enough Donirian he explains this fact to Alir and Director Wiln. After giving Wiln all of the information he can about the Galactic Federation, he and Wiln are shocked to discover that he won't be sent home after all: the Donirian government has chosen instead to wage a war of extermination against the Federation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewing_Gum_(novel)"title="Chewing Gum (novel)">
The novel centres around Mukhtar, whose father, Omar Efendi, was in the Royal Police Force, and his mother, Rahma, was from a Turco-Libyan family; Mukhtar stands frozen for ten years like a statue in the middle of public park in Libyan capital Tripoli after he was abandoned by his lover, the young and promiscuous Fatma. While the country is gripped with a chewing gum craze, different Libyan professors that just came from their studies abroad try to rediscover the country and suggest different theories to explain a society gripped with chewing gum and consumerism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Red_Lies"title="Little Red Lies">
Rachel McLaren as she navigates her relationships with her brother Jamie, her inappropriate high school drama teacher, her parents, and others.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartet_for_the_End_of_Time_(novel)"title="Quartet for the End of Time (novel)">
Sutton Kelly, a judge's daughter, is coerced into covering for her brother Alden by their father after Alden becomes involved in a communist plot to blow up the National Mall.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Unofficial_Rose"title="An Unofficial Rose">
The novel begins with the funeral of Fanny Peronett, the wife of Hugh Peronett. Hugh is a retired civil servant whose son Randall owns a successful rose nursery near Romney Marsh. Randall and his wife Ann have a fourteen-year-old daughter, Miranda. Randall is having an affair in London with Lindsay Rimmer, a young woman who is the secretary and companion of Emma Sands, a detective novelist with whom Hugh had had an affair twenty five years earlier.Randall is determined to leave Ann for Lindsay, and asks his father for financial help. Hugh complies by selling a valuable painting and giving the proceeds to Randall. Randall takes Lindsay off to Italy, and asks his wife for a divorce. For emotional and religious reasons she is reluctant to grant his request. Felix Meecham, an army officer and family friend, has been in love with Ann for years. After Randall leaves and asks Ann for a divorce, Felix declares his love and urges her to give up hoping for Randall's return. Ann falls in love with Felix, but her daughter Miranda, who is devoted to her father and is herself secretly in love with Felix, convinces her that she should not marry him. Discouraged by Ann's rejection, Felix decides to take a position in India.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Mole"title="Trusted Mole">
"He was the outstanding liaison officer of his time. He did for Britain in the 1990s what Fitzroy MacLean had done in the 1940s, and in the same turbulent corner of Europe." Martin Bell OBE, veteran BBC war correspondent.Preamble. "Trusted Mole" is written in two parts covering each of the author's long deployments to Bosnia operating under the "nom de guerre" Mike Stanley. His part-Scottish and part-Serbian ancestry equipped him with linguistic skills and psychological insights into both the Western and Eastern mentalities that collided in the Balkans in the 1990s. Furthermore, not only did he speak Serbo-Croatian but he had also studied Russian at Manchester University and in Minsk in the former Soviet Union, further adding to his unique cross-cultural world view. He had also been formally trained in psychological warfare and had been involved with the establishment of Britain's post-Cold War arms control organization. He had served in Africa training Communist FRELIMO troops for the Mozambiquan government in the late 1980s and had served with the UN in Iraq and Kuwait at the end of the Gulf War. All these experiences helped shape his understanding of the complexities of the wars in the Balkans.Part One, Baby Blue, covers the years 1992 and 1993, during which he answered formally to two Commanders British Forces (COMBRITFOR) who were based in Divulje Barracks in Split: Brigadier Andrew Cumming and Brigadier Robin Searby. 'Stanley' was loaned out to the Cheshire's commander, Lieutenant Colonel Bob Stewart, whose battalion was based in Vitez in central Bosnia. During this time the author witnessed the bloodshed between Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats whose common enemy was the Bosnian Serb faction. Stankovic became increasingly involved in looking after elderly people in the besieged city of Sarajevo, one on behalf of General Sir Mike Jackson. He was also involved in the supposed demilitarization of the Srebrenica pocket and early on identified the mortal danger the Muslim population were in. He was gagged and ordered to keep quiet about the precarious situation in Srebrenica. In the final five months of his first long tour in Bosnia 'Stanley' set up and ran an operation in Sarajevo that monitored, accounted for and reported the distribution of humanitarian aid given to the Bosnian Serb part of Sarajevo. In this respect he reported directly to the Head of the UN Department in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London. His time in Bosnia was characterised as a succession of high intensity mediation and negotiation activities, frequently conducted 'on the fly' in dangerous and difficult circumstances.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bladesman_of_Antares"title="Bladesman of Antares">
The book follows on almost directly from Fliers of Antares with Prescot journeying back to Havilfar and the Empire of Hamal after an undisclosed time back in Valka. He narrowly escapes a storm and then comes to the rescue of a village attacked by flutsmen, mercenaries mounted on large birds on a slaving raid. He enjoys the hospitality of the remote Paline Valley and its master, Naghan ham Farthytu, while he recovers. He leaves the valley but returns soon after to find it once more under attack. Prescot beats of the attackers but finds almost all of the valleys inhabitants killed and Naghan dying. To fulfil the dying man's wish he accepts to take on his dead sons identity and become Hamun ham Farthytu.Prescot continues his journey to the capital of Hamal, Ruathytu, exploring the country in the process, in company of Nulty, servant of Naghan and sole survivor of the valley, disguised as Amak of the Paline Valley. He finally reaches the capital but quickly makes enemies with another noble and is challenged to a duel. While preparing for it Prescot is once more teleported away by the Star Lords, back to Earth. He spends an undisclosed time there, mainly in the United States before being returned to Kregen. He is sent to rescue a group of Djang under attack by slavers and beats them off. From there he returns to the capital of Djanduin, his Kingdom. He receives news that the Empire of Hamal has become even more expansionist and now refuses to sell flying boats abroad, instead purchasing boats from Hyrklana as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Morissette"title="Guillaume Morissette">
"New Tab" follows a year in the life of Thomas, a twenty-six year old French Canadian video game designer who starts living with Anglophone roommates in Montreal's Mile-End district.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Film"title="Night Film">
Ashley Cordova, the daughter of legendary reclusive director Stanislas Cordova, commits suicide. With the belief that Stanislas Cordova was heavily involved in her death, disgraced investigative journalist Scott McGrath reluctantly teams up with exuberant aspiring actress Nora Halliday and the mysterious and aloof Hopper to determine what really happened. Throughout the investigation the trio interview a variety of people who were closely associated with both Cordova and his daughter, only to discover that the truth of what happened may be beyond natural, scientific explanation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingpin_(book)"title="Kingpin (book)">
Poulsen tells the story of real life computer hacker Max Butler, who, under the alias Iceman, stole access to 1.8 million credit card accounts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_L.A."title="Private L.A.">
This book has several plots. Most directly involve Jack Morgan, the owner of Private, a private investigation company started by his father. One plot involves the disappearance of a Hollywood acting couple and their three adopted children. While investigating their disappearance, Justine Smith, Morgan's friend and employee, faces death in one situation. This experience changes her perception of herself and she has to sort her emotions out that result from this. Another plot involves the legal problems of Jack's brother Tommy. Tommy seeks to bring Jack down with himself and Jack has to find a way to steer clear of his brother's problems. Another plot involves Private in a case where a killer or group of killers, known as No Prisoners, is randomly targeting people in public places and killing them to extort money in exchange for ceasing the killings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Show_Way"title="Show Way">
"Show Way" is a story about ancestry. The author is telling a story about her ancestors to her daughter. She tells her about their past and how they all had their own "Show Way." Every piece of quilt starting from Soonie's great grandmother had a significant meaning. When Soonie's great-grandmother made the quilts, the pieces signified roads, moons, and stars to follow, a way to escape their slavery. Soonie's grandmother was sold into slavery, and she made clothes for everyone in the big house, even for slaves. At night she sewed stars, and moons, and roads into quilts, each piece a picture signifying what to follow to find the north star; her own show way. Mathis Soonie's grandmother married a slave, who died before meeting his baby girl, a girl-child born free in 1863. Years later—Soonie came. Soonie and her mother grew up on a land where they'd pick cotton and got paid little and a piece of ground to farm on. They called this land home and they shared this land with other free people. On this land they worked hard, from pink day to blue-black nights, but it was a free life nevertheless; at the end of the day they could find a thing or two to smile about. Soonie made patch pieces with stars and moons and roads; sewed fields and rivers and trees. She patched these pieces together so her mother could sell them come market day. She called her creation "Trail to the North" she also called them "Show Way." They no longer needed the secret trail to the north, but rather they lived well off of the money those quilts brought in, her own show way. She married a man named Walter Scott who owned land in Anderson, South Carolina; she had a baby and named her Georgiana. Georgiana was born a reader, and they said about her that she always had a book in her hand; she grew up to teach a small school in Anderson. She had two daughters named Caroline and Ann, these two girls walked in a line to change the laws that kept black and white people living separate. They sometimes were scared but regained their confidence when they saw the show way patches that their grandmother Soonie had pinned inside their dresses. Ann grew up to be a poet, which sometimes she converted to song, and Caroline stitched those songs into art for people to buy and hang up on their walls. Ann Had The Author, Jacqueline Woodson, who grew up to read and write, but when she could not write she was sew stars and moons and roads because her mother told her that everything that happened before Jacqueline was born was her own kind of show way. She grew up to read and write, and her writing turned into books where she told stories of other people's show ways. A story which she enjoys repeating to her daughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Emperor_&amp;_Other_Poems_of_the_Night"title="Dark Emperor &amp; Other Poems of the Night">
“"Dark Emperor &amp; Other Poems of The Night"” is a nonfiction compilation of poems about animals that are active during the night time. The author Joyce Sidman reveals the loveliness and diversification of the nocturnal world through twelve lyrical poems. Each poem has an illustration of the environment of which it describes and provides a sidebar of factual information about the animals mentioned in the poem. These poems are educational and fun for children because they are being provided with information about nature through art. The purpose of this book is not to be read straight through but to study the words and drawings. The illustration goes perfect with the text, allowing children to go far into their imagination. This award-winning book is a great way for children to learn about creatures who prefer the night time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voice_That_Challenged_a_Nation"title="The Voice That Challenged a Nation">
From an early age, Marian Anderson displayed a natural talent for singing. As a child, she sang in church and in other local events where she would earn up to fifty cents. Throughout high school, Anderson continued singing and eventually began taking vocal lessons. After gaining enough recognition, she was invited to sing at an event in Georgia where she, for the first time, was introduced to the segregation associated with the Jim Crow laws. After completing high school at the age of 24, she continued touring, continually encountering Jim Crow laws along the way.Her appearances were well-received and praised, with some occasional negative reviews. In 1924, she appeared at New York City’s Town Hall where many seats remained empty. Newspaper articles described her singing, that night, as faulty and under-developed. Deeply affected by this, Anderson refused to sing for months. After her hiatus, her vocal coach, Giuseppe Boghetti, entered her in a contest where Anderson won, beating about 300 other contestants.Anderson traveled overseas to England where she gained a newfound fanbase and found herself in a segregation-free environment. When she returned home she replaced her pianista good friend of Anderson'sand began working with a Finnish accompanist, Kosti Vehanen. This was a critical move for Anderson's career, to work professionally with a white man in the United States. In 1936 Anderson was invited by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to perform at the White House. In her newspaper column the next day, Roosevelt recalled the event and praised Anderson’s voice and singing career.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenvogel"title="Eisenvogel">
Yangzom Brauen is of Tibetan origin and raised in the cantons of Thurgau and Bern, Switzerland, where she graduated, and migrated to Los Angeles, starring in some movies. She comes from a cosmopolitan family: Her father, a Bernese ethnologist, also moved to the US, and lives along with her mother, the Tibetan artist Sonam Dolma Brauen, in New York. Her grandmother lives in a student apartment in Bern. There are worlds between the world in which the grandmother grew up, and that the young actress. Her grandmother was a "Bhikkhuni" in eastern Tibet from where she moved when the "14th Dalai Lama" refuged in 1959 to Dharamshala in northern India. Yangzom's mother was at the age of six when they crossed the Himalayas on foot, but Sonams father and little sister died. How the grandmother with all these strokes of fate handled, in so foreign worlds such as India, Switzerland and the US, is the central focus in "Eisenvogel".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoot_to_Kill_(novel)"title="Shoot to Kill (novel)">
Before leaving, a new school friend discovers some shocking film footage which propels James Bond and company on an adventure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Asking"title="The Art of Asking">
In the book Palmer details her early life as a performer and further expands on topics covered in her speech at the TED talks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Amelia_Earhart"title="I Am Amelia Earhart">
The book features a young Amelia Earhart, before she became the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. As a child, young Amelia Earhart built a makeshift roller coaster in her backyard, using planks of wood and a wooden crate. She crashed. It was loud. It was noisy. It was the first time she flew, but it would not be her last. This experience teaches her that not to accept the limits others, society, and even gravity place on her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rosa_Parks"title="I Am Rosa Parks">
The book features a young Rosa Parks, before inspired the Montgomery bus boycott. As a child, young Rosa Parks was shoved by a white boy, even though she was just minding her own business. She shoved the boy back. She knew fighting was wrong, but she didn't want the boy picking on her again. The boy's mother yelled at her, but Rosa stood her ground and explained that the boy had pushed her even though she had not bothered him at all. This experience teaches her to stand up for herself and for what is right.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Albert_Einstein"title="I Am Albert Einstein">
The book features a young Albert Einstein, before he discovered the theory of relativity. As a child, young Albert Einstein was given a compass that fascinated him. No matter which way he turned it, it pointed north. The compass had a profound impact on his life. It inspired him to never stop being curious, and never stop discovering.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Back_of_the_Turtle"title="The Back of the Turtle">
The novel's central character is Gabriel Quinn, a successful scientist of First Nations descent working for the multinational chemical company Domidion. Gabriel returns to Samaritan Bay and Smoke River, the Indian reserve in British Columbia, planning to commit suicide because he is distraught over his role in the community's destruction where GreenSweep, the defoliant product he helped to develop for the company, destroyed the local environment and killed or drove away the community's residents. Gabriel is drawn into a journey of spiritual redemption after jumping into the water to save a group of people from drowning while he is trying to drown himself in the Pacific Ocean. While in Samaritan Bay, he meets Mara, a young woman who lost her family in "The Ruin" that Gabriel helped to create. While Gabriel meets the few people left in a seeming folk-tale-like ghost town, in Toronto, Domidion CEO Dorian Asher is drawn into a media frenzy as the company is implicated in another unfolding environmental disaster in the Athabasca Oil Sands.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Us_Conductors"title="Us Conductors">
The novel is a fictional story telling by Russian scientist Lev Sergeyvich Termen of his own life. While he narrates the account of his life, he is captive inside the boat "Stary Bolshevik" and locked up inside a cabin taking him to his homeland Russia from New York. He reminisces over the years when he was young and lived in Russia. The fellow intelligent students with him who had interest in science and mathematics would keep him motivated. He developed curiosity in vacuum tubes and over the years he went on to conceptualize and invent the wonderful magic-like musical instrument theremin in the early 1900s. Theremin becomes popular both in Russia and the United States bringing him wide spread publicity. He moves to United States and lives a life of a public figure. His stay in States is funded by Russian government in return of which he has to work as a secret agent for them. He remains a socially active person on the scenes of New York and Manhattan in 1920s and 30s where new musical life is born. His state of mind is in dilemma between the freedom and attractive life of America as against to his love and devotion to Russia. He falls in love with the musician and young violinist Clara Rockmore.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avenger_of_Antares"title="Avenger of Antares">
The book continues on directly from "Bladesman of Antares" with Prescot sailing towards Vallia on a Vallian galleon. The ship is attacked by a raider of the Shanks, a mysterious fish-like race. The galleon wins the fight but is then attacked and sunk by an air ship from Hamal. Shipwrecked, Prescot and his surviving companions decide to attack the Hamalian air base to steal an air ship. The Vallians return home while Prescot sets of for Hamal again to continue his spying.Back in Ruathytu, Prescot contacts his old friends Rees and Chido again. He decides to drop his disguise as a simpleton and average swordsman and defeats a local noble, Vad Garnath, and a master sword fighter from Zenicce in a duel and wins heavily on the betting. To protect him against Garnath's revenge another friend introduces Prescot into the Temple of Lem, an evil religion he despises. He agrees to follow along in order to learn more about it. On his return to Rees and Chido he learns that the former's oldest son has been murdered and his daughter Saffi kidnapped by the orders of Garnath and with the help of the Strom Rosil, a Kataki, a race predominantly engaged in the slave trade.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepsix"title="Deepsix">
Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins leads a crew of space archaeologists to investigate a lost civilization on planet Maleiva III (aka Deepsix) with only a window of weeks before the planet is destroyed by the impending collision with a rogue gas giant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Crazy_Summer_(novel)"title="One Crazy Summer (novel)">
Delphine, age eleven, Vonetta, nine, and Fern, seven, live in Brooklyn, New York. However, the girls’ father sends them to Oakland, California one summer to stay with their estranged mother, Cecile, who refers to herself as Nzilla. Cecile never calls Fern by her name, but always refers to her as "little girl." The girl's grandmother always said that Cecile abandoned them because their father objected to her giving the baby a name.However, Cecile had her reason...she was running breakfast and day camp for the Black Panther Party. It was in Cecile's kitchen that the girl met Sister Mukumbu. There, the three sisters get taught about the movement. They are taught the importance of feeding and helping poor African Americans, and also in protecting African American communities. The Black Panther member Bobby Hutton has been shot and killed by police, and one of their founding members, Huey Newton, has been wrongfully jailed. The children at the center will soon participate in a rally to protest these injustices.After a day trip to San Francisco, the sisters return home to find their mother Cecile and two members of the Black Panther Party being arrested. Cecile tells the police she has no children, for she doesn't want the girls to be involved, so the girls pretend to live next door. Soon a friend from the center, Hirohito, comes for the girls and allows them to stay with him and his mother until Cecile reton, the girls perform a poem their mother wrote, which they found while cleaning the kitchen after her arrest. After their recital, Fern takes the microphone and tells the Black Panthers how she saw one of their most vocal members, with the police, which gets him in trouble with the party members.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inheritance_Cycle"title="The Inheritance Cycle">
In the fictional land of Alagaësia, an order was originally created to oversee the countries and bring peace to the world. This group was known as the Dragon Riders, for they rode dragons, the rider formed a bond with the dragon in accordance with a pact made between elves and dragons millennia earlier. Later, humans were involved in the Riders too. One Dragon Rider named Galbatorix suffered the death of his dragon, Jarnunvösk, at the hands of a group of Urgals (a species of brutish humanoids); the dragon's death pushed him to insanity. Denied another dragon by the Council of Elder Riders, Galbatorix blamed the Council for the death of his dragon and sought to destroy the order. He made an alliance with an ambitious young rider, Morzan, and with his help slew another rider and took his dragon, Shruikan captive. Using magic, he broke Shruikan's will and forced the dragon to serve him. Gathering more Riders to his cause, he created the Thirteen Forsworn and with their help took over Ilirea, the capital of the Broddring Kingdom, and destroyed Doru Araeba, the centre of the Dragon Riders. Galbatorix slew the Elders, their leader Vrael, taking his sword, Islingr, and most of the Dragon Riders, along with their dragons, taking many Eldunarí, or the Heart of Hearts, which is a gem inside dragons that their consciousness can remain in even after they die. When the remaining dragons found out that the betrayal was aided by their own species, they collectively cast a spell on the Forsworns' dragons, which prevents them from being named.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicious_(novel)"title="Vicious (novel)">
Victor and Eli begin as college roommates and discover that near-death experiences, under the right conditions, can create superhuman abilities. When Victor tries to create his abilities, things go wrong and people take a fall. Victor ends up getting put in jail. 10 years later, Eli has started a crusade to kill every other super-powered person and Victor has broken out of jail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hole_in_My_Life"title="Hole in My Life">
The book is set in 1971 and discusses the author’s life behind bars. Before prison, Gantos dreamed of becoming a writer and was inspired by William S. Burroughs, who used drugs to get through his life as a writer. After dropping out of university in Saint Croix, Gantos began using hashish and later joined the sail team. There, he became friends with two other men named Hamilton and Rik, the latter of whom promised Gantos $10,000 to sail with him from the Virgin Islands to New York City to sell hash. Gantos accepted the offer and, upon arriving to New York and settling into a hotel, he and his friends were captured by the FBI. Gantos and his co-conspirators all received prison sentences that varied in length from 5 to 20 years for drug trafficking. Gantos was originally sentenced to five years, but was released on good behavior after only serving 15 months of his sentence. While in prison, he worked as an X-ray technician and wrote his thoughts in a journal on a copy of "The Brothers Karamazov". Before leaving prison, Gantos applied to a university creative writing program, and he would later begin a new life by selling Christmas trees.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animalia_(book)"title="Animalia (book)">
"Animalia" is an alliterative alphabet book and contains twenty-six illustrations, one for each letter of the alphabet. Each illustration features an animal from the animal kingdom (A is for alligator and armadillo, B is for butterfly, etc.) along with a short poem utilizing the letter of the page for many of the words. The illustrations contain many other objects beginning with that letter that the reader can try to identify (however, there are not necessarily "a thousand things, or maybe more", as the author states). As an additional challenge, the author has hidden a picture of himself as a child in every picture.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm"title="Animal Farm">
The poorly run Manor Farm near Willingdon, England, is ripened for rebellion from its animal populace by neglect at the hands of the irresponsible and alcoholic farmer, Mr. Jones. One night, the exalted boar, Old Major, holds a conference, at which he calls for the overthrow of humans and teaches the animals a revolutionary song called "Beasts of England". When Old Major dies, two young pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, assume command and stage a revolt, driving Mr. Jones off the farm and renaming the property "Animal Farm". They adopt the Seven Commandments of Animalism, the most important of which is, "All animals are equal". The decree is painted in large letters on one side of the barn. Snowball teaches the animals to read and write, while Napoleon educates young puppies on the principles of Animalism. To commemorate the start of Animal Farm, Snowball raises a green flag with a white hoof and horn. Food is plentiful, and the farm runs smoothly. The pigs elevate themselves to positions of leadership and set aside special food items, ostensibly for their personal health. Following an unsuccessful attempt by Mr. Jones and his associates to retake the farm (later dubbed the "Battle of the Cowshed"), Snowball announces his plans to modernise the farm by building a windmill. Napoleon disputes this idea, and matters come to a head, which culminate in Napoleon's dogs chasing Snowball away and Napoleon effectively declaring himself supreme commander.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal"title="A Modest Proposal">
Swift's essay is widely held to be one of the greatest examples of sustained irony in the history of the English language. Much of its shock value derives from the fact that the first portion of the essay describes the plight of starving beggars in Ireland, so that the reader is unprepared for the surprise of Swift's solution when he states: "A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout."Swift goes to great lengths to support his argument, including a list of possible preparation styles for the children, and calculations showing the financial benefits of his suggestion. He uses methods of argument throughout his essay which lampoon the then-influential William Petty and the social engineering popular among followers of Francis Bacon. These lampoons include appealing to the authority of "a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London" and "the famous Psalmanazar, a native of the island Formosa" (who had already confessed to "not" being from Formosa in 1706).In the tradition of Roman satire, Swift introduces the reforms he is actually suggesting by paralipsis:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_(novel)"title="A Clockwork Orange (novel)">
## Part 1: Alex's world.Alex is a 15-year-old gang leader living in a near-future dystopian city. His friends ("droogs" in the novel's Anglo-Russian slang, "Nadsat") and fellow gang members are Dim, a slow-witted bruiser, who is the gang's muscle; Georgie, an ambitious second-in-command; and Pete, who mostly plays along as the droogs indulge their taste for "ultra-violence" (random, violent mayhem). Characterised as a sociopath and hardened juvenile delinquent, Alex is also intelligent, quick-witted, and enjoys classical music; he is particularly fond of Beethoven, whom he calls "Lovely Ludwig Van".The story begins with the droogs sitting in their favourite hangout, the Korova Milk Bar, and drinking "milk-plus" – a beverage consisting of milk laced with the customer's drug of choice – to prepare for a night of ultra-violence. They assault a scholar walking home from the public library; rob a store, leaving the owner and his wife bloodied and unconscious; beat up a beggar; then scuffle with a rival gang. Joyriding through the countryside in a stolen car, they break into an isolated cottage and terrorise the young couple living there, beating the husband and gang-raping his wife. In a metafictional touch, the husband is a writer working on a manuscript called "A Clockwork Orange", and Alex contemptuously reads out a paragraph that states the novel's main theme before shredding the manuscript. Back at the Korova, Alex strikes Dim for his crude response to a woman's singing of an operatic passage, and strains within the gang become apparent. At home in his parents' flat, Alex plays classical music at top volume, which he describes as giving him orgasmic bliss before falling asleep.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep"title="A Fire Upon the Deep">
An expedition from Straumli Realm, an ambitious young human civilization in the high Beyond, investigates a five-billion-year-old data archive in the low Transcend that offers the possibility of unimaginable riches. The expedition's facility, High Lab, is gradually compromised by a dormant superintelligence within the archive later known as the Blight. However, shortly before the Blight's final "flowering", two self-aware entities created similarly to the Blight plot to aid the humans before the Blight can escape.Recognizing the danger of what they have awakened, the researchers at High Lab attempt to flee in two ships, one carrying all the adults and the second carrying all the children in "coldsleep boxes". Suspicious, the Blight discovers that the first ship contains a data storage device in its cargo manifest; assuming it contains information that could harm it, the Blight destroys the ship. The second ship escapes. The Blight assumes that it is no threat, but later realizes that it is actually carrying away a "countermeasure" against it.The ship lands on a distant planet with a medieval-level civilization of dog-like creatures, dubbed "Tines", who live in packs as group minds. Upon landing, however, the two surviving adults are ambushed and killed by Tine fanatics known as Flenserists, in whose realm they have landed. The Flenserists capture a young boy named Jefri Olsndot and his wounded sister, Johanna. While Jefri is taken deeper into Flenserist territory, Johanna is rescued by a Tine pilgrim who witnessed the ambush and delivers her to a neighboring kingdom ruled by a Tine named Woodcarver. The Flenserists tell Jefri that Johanna had been killed by Woodcarver and exploit him in order to develop advanced technology (such as cannon and radio communication), while Johanna and the knowledge stored in her "dataset" device help Woodcarver rapidly develop in turn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Quiet_on_the_Western_Front"title="All Quiet on the Western Front">
The book centers on Paul Bäumer, a German soldier on the Western Front during World War I. At the start of the book, Paul lives with his parents and sister in a charming German village. He attends school, where the patriotic speeches of his teacher Kantorek leads the whole class to volunteer for the Imperial German Army shortly after the start of The Great War. Bäumer arrives at the Western Front with his friends and schoolmates (Leer, Müller, Kropp, Kemmerich and a number of other characters). There, they meet Stanislaus Katczinsky, an older soldier nicknamed Kat, who becomes Paul's mentor. While fighting at the front, Bäumer and his comrades engage in frequent battles and endure the treacherous and filthy conditions of trench warfare. The battles fought here have no names and seem to have little overall significance, except for the impending possibility of injury or death. Only meager pieces of land are gained, which are often lost again later. Remarque often refers to the living soldiers as old and dead, emotionally drained and shaken. "We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing from ourselves, from our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Wizard_of_Earthsea"title="A Wizard of Earthsea">
The novel follows a young boy called Duny, nicknamed "Sparrowhawk", born on the island of Gont. Discovering that the boy has great innate power, his aunt, a witch, teaches him the little magic she knows. When his village is attacked by Kargish raiders, Duny summons a fog to conceal the village and its inhabitants, enabling the residents to drive off the Kargs. Hearing of this, the powerful mage Ogion takes him as an apprentice, and later gives him his "true name"—Ged. Ogion tries to teach Ged about the "equilibrium", the concept that magic can upset the natural order of the world if used improperly. In an attempt to impress a girl, however, Ged searches Ogion's spell books and inadvertently summons a strange shadow, which has to be banished by Ogion. Sensing Ged's eagerness to act and impatience with his slow teaching methods, Ogion asks if he would rather go to the renowned school for wizards on the island of Roke. Ged loves Ogion, but decides to go to the school. At the school, Ged meets Jasper, and is immediately on bad terms with him. He is befriended by an older student named Vetch, but generally remains aloof from anyone else. Ged's skills inspire admiration from teachers and students alike. He finds a small creature—an otak, named Hoag, and keeps it as a pet. During a festival, Jasper, acts condescendingly towards Ged, provoking the latter's proud nature. Ged challenges him to a duel of magic, and casts a powerful spell intended to raise the spirit of a legendary dead woman. The spell goes awry and instead releases a shadow creature, which attacks him and scars his face. The Archmage Nemmerle drives the shadow away, but at the cost of his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_(Ballard_novel)"title="Crash (Ballard novel)">
The story is told through the eyes of narrator James Ballard, named after the author himself, but it centers on the sinister figure of Dr. Robert Vaughan, a "former TV-scientist, turned nightmare angel of the expressways". James meets Vaughan after being injured in a car crash near London Airport. Gathering around Vaughan is a group of alienated people, all of them former crash victims, who follow him in his pursuit to re-enact the crashes of Hollywood celebrities such as Jayne Mansfield and James Dean, in order to experience what the narrator calls "a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology". Vaughan's ultimate fantasy is to die in a head-on collision with movie star Elizabeth Taylor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Dune"title="Children of Dune">
Nine years after Emperor Paul Muad'Dib walked into the desert, blind, the ecological transformation of Dune has reached the point where some Fremen are living without stillsuits in the less arid climate and have started to move out of the sietches and into the villages and cities. As the old ways erode, more and more pilgrims arrive to experience the planet of Muad'Dib. The Imperial high council has lost its political might and is powerless to control the Jihad.Paul's young twin children, Leto II and Ghanima, have concluded that their guardian Alia has succumbed to Abomination—possession by her grandfather Baron Vladimir Harkonnen—and fear that a similar fate awaits them. They (and Alia) also realize that the terraforming of Dune will kill all the sandworms, thus destroying the source of the spice, but Harkonnen desires this outcome. Leto also fears that, like his father, he will become trapped by his prescience.Meanwhile, a new religious figure called "The Preacher" has risen in the desert, rallying against the religious government's injustices and the changes among the Fremen. Some Fremen believe he is Paul Atreides. Princess Wensicia of the fallen House Corrino on Salusa Secundus plots to assassinate the twins and regain power for her House.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candide"title="Candide">
"Candide" contains thirty episodic chapters, which may be grouped into two main schemes: one consists of two divisions, separated by the protagonist's hiatus in El Dorado; the other consists of three parts, each defined by its geographical setting. By the former scheme, the first half of "Candide" constitutes the rising action and the last part the resolution. This view is supported by the strong theme of travel and quest, reminiscent of adventure and picaresque novels, which tend to employ such a dramatic structure. By the latter scheme, the thirty chapters may be grouped into three parts each comprising ten chapters and defined by locale: I–X are set in Europe, XI–XX are set in the Americas, and XXI–XXX are set in Europe and the Ottoman Empire. The plot summary that follows uses this second format and includes Voltaire's additions of 1761.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmilla"title="Carmilla">
Le Fanu presents the story as part of the casebook of Dr. Hesselius, whose departures from medical orthodoxy rank him as the first occult detective in literature.Laura, the teenaged protagonist, narrates, beginning with her childhood in a "picturesque and solitary" castle amid an extensive forest in Styria, where she lives with her father, a wealthy English widower retired from service to the Austrian Empire. When she was six, Laura had a vision of a very beautiful visitor in her bedchamber. She later claims to have been punctured in her breast, although no wound was found.Twelve years later, Laura and her father are admiring the sunset in front of the castle when her father tells her of a letter from his friend, General Spielsdorf. The general was supposed to bring his niece, Bertha Rheinfeldt, to visit the two, but the niece suddenly died under mysterious circumstances. The general ambiguously concludes that he will discuss the circumstances in detail when they meet later.Laura, saddened by the loss of a potential friend, longs for a companion. A carriage accident outside Laura's home unexpectedly brings a girl of Laura's age into the family's care. Her name is Carmilla. Both girls instantly recognise each other from the "dream" they both had when they were young.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cider_House_Rules"title="The Cider House Rules">
Homer Wells is shown growing up in an orphanage where he spends his childhood trying to be "of use" as a medical assistant to director Dr. Wilbur Larch, whose history is told in flashbacks: After a traumatic misadventure with a prostitute as a young man, Wilbur turns his back on sex and love, choosing instead to help women with unwanted pregnancies give birth and then keeping the babies in an orphanage. He makes a point of maintaining an emotional distance from the orphans, so that they can more easily make the transition into an adoptive family, but when it becomes clear that Homer is going to spend his childhood at the orphanage, Wilbur trains the orphan as an obstetrician and comes to love him like a son.Wilbur's and Homer's lives are complicated by the abortions Wilbur provides. Wilbur came to this work reluctantly, but is driven by having seen the horrors of back-alley operations. Homer, upon learning Wilbur's secret, considers it morally wrong.As a young man, Homer befriends a young couple, Candy Kendall and Wally Worthington, who come to St. Cloud's for an abortion. Homer leaves the orphanage, and returns with them to Wally's family's orchard in Heart's Rock, near the Maine coast. Wally and Homer become best friends and Homer develops a secret love for Candy. Wally goes off to serve in the Second World War and his plane is shot down over Burma. He is declared missing by the military, but Homer and Candy both believe he is dead and move on with their lives, which includes beginning a romantic relationship. When Candy becomes pregnant, they go back to St. Cloud's Orphanage, where their son is born and named Angel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula"title="Dracula">
Jonathan Harker, a newly qualified English solicitor, visits Count Dracula at his castle in the Carpathian Mountains to help the Count purchase a house near London. Ignoring the Count's warning, Harker wanders the castle at night and encounters three vampire women; Dracula rescues Harker, and gives the women a small child bound inside a bag. Harker awakens in bed; soon after, Dracula leaves the castle, abandoning him to the women; Harker escapes with his life and ends up delirious in a Budapest hospital. Dracula takes a ship for England with boxes of earth from his castle. The captain's log narrates the crew's disappearance until he alone remains, bound to the helm to maintain course. An animal resembling a large dog is seen leaping ashore when the ship runs aground at Whitby.Lucy Westenra's letter to her best friend, Harker's fiancée Mina Murray, describes her marriage proposals from Dr. John Seward, Quincey Morris, and Arthur Holmwood. Lucy accepts Holmwood's, but all remain friends. Mina joins her friend Lucy on holiday in Whitby. Lucy begins sleepwalking. After his ship lands there, Dracula stalks Lucy. Mina receives a letter about her missing fiancé's illness, and goes to Budapest to nurse him. Lucy becomes very ill. Seward's old teacher, Professor Abraham Van Helsing, determines the nature of Lucy's condition, but refuses to disclose it. He diagnoses her with acute blood-loss. Van Helsing places garlic flowers around her room and makes her a necklace of them. Lucy's mother removes the garlic flowers, not knowing they repel vampires. While Seward and Van Helsing are absent, Lucy and her mother are terrified by a wolf and Mrs. Westenra dies of a heart attack; Lucy dies shortly thereafter. After her burial, newspapers report children being stalked in the night by a "bloofer lady" (beautiful lady), and Van Helsing deduces it is Lucy. The four go to her tomb and see that she is a vampire. They stake her heart, behead her, and fill her mouth with garlic. Jonathan Harker and his now-wife Mina have returned, and they join the campaign against Dracula.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_Messiah"title="Dune Messiah">
Twelve years after the events described in "Dune" (1965), Paul "Muad'Dib" Atreides rules as Emperor. By accepting the role of messiah to the Fremen, Paul has unleashed a jihad which conquered most of the known universe. Paul is the most powerful emperor ever known, but is powerless to stop the lethal excesses of the religious juggernaut he has created. Although 61 billion people have perished, Paul's prescient visions indicate that this is far from the worst possible outcome for humanity. Motivated by this knowledge, Paul hopes to set humanity on a course that will not inevitably lead to stagnation and destruction, while at the same time acting as ruler of the empire and focal point of the Fremen religion.The Bene Gesserit, Spacing Guild, and Tleilaxu conspire to dethrone Paul, and the Guild Navigator Edric is able to use his own prescience to shield the plot from Paul's prescient visions. The Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother Mohiam has enlisted Paul's wife Princess Irulan, daughter of the deposed Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV. Paul has refused to father a child with Irulan (or even touch her), but he and his Fremen concubine Chani have also failed to produce an heir, causing tension within his monarchy. Desperate both to secure her place in the Atreides dynasty and to preserve the Atreides bloodline for the Bene Gesserit breeding program, Irulan has secretly been giving contraceptives to Chani. Paul is aware of this fact, but has foreseen that the birth of his heir will bring Chani's death, and does not want to lose her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin's_Dangerous_Idea"title="Darwin's Dangerous Idea">
## Part I: Starting in the Middle."Starting in the Middle", Part I of "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", gets its name from a quote by Willard Van Orman Quine: "Analyze theory-building how we will, we all must start in the middle. Our conceptual firsts are middle-sized, middle-distance objects, and our introduction to them and to everything comes midway in the cultural evolution of the race."The first chapter "Tell Me Why" is named after a song.Before Charles Darwin, and still today, a majority of people see God as the ultimate cause of all design, or the ultimate answer to 'why?' questions. John Locke argued for the primacy of mind before matter, and David Hume, while exposing problems with Locke's view, could not see any alternative.Darwin provided just such an alternative: evolution. Besides providing evidence of common descent, he introduced a mechanism to explain it: natural selection. According to Dennett, natural selection is a mindless, mechanical and algorithmic process—Darwin's dangerous idea. The third chapter introduces the concept of "skyhooks" and "cranes" (see below). He suggests that resistance to Darwinism is based on a desire for skyhooks, which do not really exist. According to Dennett, good reductionists explain apparent design without skyhooks; greedy reductionists try to explain it without cranes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_in_Between"title="The Time in Between">
Charles Boatman, an army veteran suddenly disappears and his daughter Ada and her younger brother Jon on finding some clues go looking out for him in Danang, Vietnam. The novel mixes various stories from different timeframes narrating Charles's days in Washington when he was young. He married Sara and had daughter Ada while living in Fraser Valley of British Columbia. He gets posted in the war time era to Vietnam and serves there and upon arrival discovers his wife's infidelity. Sara dies early and by then they also had a son Jon. Charles keeps getting nightmares of his Vietnam days on how he killed an innocent civilian boy in one of the operations and this keeps haunting him. On the other hand, Ada s on her mission to find her father and is helped by a local guy Yen who becomes her guide and guardian in the new country. She engages in a sexual relationship with an older man, Hoang Vu who is an artist by profession. Jon indulges in the nightlife of Vietnam and Ada keeps getting closer to her father as she travels across the country. Charles discovers author Dang Tho's novel chronicling wartime and this helps him find some peace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial"title="The Trial">
On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, Josef K., the chief cashier of a bank, is unexpectedly arrested by two unidentified agents from an unspecified agency for an unspecified crime. Josef is not imprisoned, however, but left "free" and told to await instructions from the Committee of Affairs. Josef's landlady, Frau Grubach, tries to console Josef about the trial, but insinuates that the procedure may be related to an immoral relationship with his neighbor Fräulein Bürstner. Josef visits Bürstner to vent his worries, and then kisses her. A few days later, Josef finds that Fräulein Montag, a lodger from another room, has moved in with Fräulein Bürstner. He suspects that this maneuver is meant to distance him from Bürstner. Josef is ordered to appear at the court's address the coming Sunday, without being told the exact time or room. After a period of exploration, Josef finds the court in the attic. Josef is severely reproached for his tardiness, and he arouses the assembly's hostility after a passionate plea about the absurdity of the trial and the emptiness of the accusation.Josef later tries to confront the presiding judge over his case, but only finds an attendant's wife. The woman gives him information about the process and attempts to seduce him before a law student bursts into the room and takes the woman away, claiming her to be his mistress. The woman's husband then takes Josef on a tour of the court offices, which ends after Josef becomes extremely weak in the presence of other court officials and accused. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis"title="The Metamorphosis">
Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a "monstrous vermin". He initially considers the transformation to be temporary and slowly ponders the consequences of this metamorphosis. Stuck on his back and unable to get up and leave the bed, Gregor reflects on his job as a traveling salesman and cloth merchant, which he characterizes as being full of "temporary and constantly changing human relationships, which never come from the heart". He sees his employer as a despot and would quickly quit his job if he were not his family's sole breadwinner and working off his bankrupt father's debts. While trying to move, Gregor finds that his office manager, the chief clerk, has shown up to check on him, indignant about Gregor's unexcused absence. Gregor attempts to communicate with both the manager and his family, but all they can hear from behind the door is incomprehensible vocalizations. Gregor laboriously drags himself across the floor and opens the door. The clerk, upon seeing the transformed Gregor, flees the apartment. Gregor's family is horrified, and his father drives him back into his room, injuring his side by shoving him when he gets stuck in the doorway.With Gregor's unexpected transformation, his family is deprived of financial stability. They keep Gregor locked in his room, and he begins to accept his new identity and adapt to his new body. His sister Grete is the only one willing to bring him food, which they find Gregor only likes if it is rotten. He spends much of his time crawling around on the floor, walls, and ceiling and, upon discovering Gregor's new pastime, Grete decides to remove his furniture to give him more space. She and her mother begin to empty the room of everything, except the sofa under which Gregor hides whenever anyone comes in, but he finds their actions deeply distressing in fear that he might forget his past, while he still was a human, and desperately tries to save a particularly loved portrait on the wall of a woman clad in fur. His mother loses consciousness at the sight of him clinging to the image to protect it. When Grete rushes out of the room to get some aromatic spirits, Gregor follows her and is slightly hurt when she drops a medicine bottle and it breaks. Their father returns home and angrily hurls apples at Gregor, one of which becomes lodged in a sensitive spot in his back and severely wounds him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451"title="Fahrenheit 451">
"Fahrenheit 451" is set in an unspecified city in the year 2049 (according to Ray Bradbury's Coda), though it is written as if set in a distant future. The earliest editions make clear that it takes place no earlier than the year 1960.The novel is divided into three parts: "The Hearth and the Salamander," "The Sieve and the Sand," and "Burning Bright."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmer_Giles_of_Ham"title="Farmer Giles of Ham">
Farmer Giles ("Ægidius Ahenobarbus Julius Agricola de Hammo", "Giles Redbeard Julius, Farmer of Ham") is not a hero. He is fat and red-bearded and enjoys a slow, comfortable life. But a rather deaf and short-sighted giant blunders on to his land, and Giles manages to ward him away with a blunderbuss shot in his general direction. The people of the village cheer: Farmer Giles has become a hero. His reputation spreads across the kingdom, and he is rewarded by the King with a sword named Caudimordax ("Tailbiter")—which turns out to be a powerful weapon against dragons.The giant, on returning home, relates to his friends that there are no more knights in the Middle Kingdom, just stinging flies—actually the scrap metal shot from the blunderbuss—and this entices a dragon, Chrysophylax Dives, to investigate the area. The terrified neighbours all expect the accidental hero Farmer Giles to deal with him.The story parodies the great dragon-slaying traditions. The knights sent by the King to pursue the dragon are useless fops, more intent on "precedence and etiquette" than on the huge dragon footprints littering the landscape. The only part of a 'dragon' they know is the annual celebratory dragon-tail cake. Giles by contrast clearly recognises the danger, and resents being sent with them to face it. But hapless farmers can be forced to become heroes, and Giles shrewdly makes the best of the situation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaudy_Night"title="Gaudy Night">
Harriet Vane returns with trepidation to her "alma mater", Shrewsbury College, Oxford to attend the Gaudy dinner. Expecting hostility because of her notoriety (she had stood trial for murder in an earlier novel, "Strong Poison"), she is surprised to be welcomed warmly by the dons, and rediscovers her old love of the academic life. Harriet's short stay is, however, marred by her discovery of a sheet of paper with an offensive drawing, and a poison pen message referring to her as a "dirty murderess".Some time later the Dean of Shrewsbury writes to ask for her help. There has been an outbreak of vandalism and anonymous letters, and fearing for the college's reputation if this becomes public knowledge, the Dean wants someone to investigate confidentially. Harriet, herself a victim of poison-pen letters since her trial, reluctantly agrees, and returns to spend some months in residence, ostensibly to do research on Sheridan Le Fanu and to assist a don with her book. The timing of the first poison pen message during the gaudy, and the use of a Latin quotation from the "Aeneid" during one disturbance, focuses suspicion on the Senior Common Room dons, causing escalating tensions.As Harriet wrestles with the case, trying to narrow down the list of suspects who might be responsible for poison-pen messages, obscene graffiti, wanton vandalism including the destruction of a set of scholarly proofs, and the crafting of vile effigies, she is forced to examine her ambivalent feelings about Wimsey, about love and marriage, and about her attraction to academia as an intellectual and emotional refuge. Wimsey eventually arrives in Oxford to help, and she gains a new perspective from those who know him, including his nephew, an undergraduate at the university.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_of_Ice_and_Fire"title="A Song of Ice and Fire">
"A Song of Ice and Fire" takes place in a fictional world in which seasons last for years and end unpredictably. Nearly three centuries before the events of the first novel, the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros were united under the Targaryen dynasty, establishing military supremacy through their control of dragons. The Targaryens ruled for three hundred years, continuing past the extinction of the dragons. Their dynasty eventually ended with a rebellion led by Lord Robert Baratheon, in which Aerys "the Mad King" Targaryen was killed and Robert proclaimed king of the Seven Kingdoms. At the beginning of "A Game of Thrones", 15 years have passed since Robert's rebellion, with a nine-year-long summer coming to an end.The principal story chronicles the power struggle for the Iron Throne among the great Houses of Westeros following the death of King Robert in "A Game of Thrones". Robert's heir apparent, the 13-year-old Joffrey, is immediately proclaimed king through the machinations of his mother, Queen Cersei Lannister. When Lord Eddard "Ned" Stark, Robert's closest friend and chief advisor, discovers that Joffrey and his siblings are the product of incest between Cersei and her twin brother Ser Jaime Lannister, Eddard attempts to unseat Joffrey, but is betrayed and executed for treason. In response, Robert's brothers Stannis and Renly both lay separate claims to the throne. During this period of instability, two of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros attempt to become independent from the Iron Throne: Eddard's eldest son Robb is proclaimed King in the North, while Lord Balon Greyjoy desires to recover the sovereignty of his region, the Iron Islands. The so-called "War of the Five Kings" is in full progress by the middle of the second book, "A Clash of Kings".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Emperor_of_Dune"title="God Emperor of Dune">
Leto II Atreides, the God Emperor, has ruled the universe as a tyrant for 3,500 years after becoming a hybrid of human and giant sandworm in "Children of Dune". The death of all other sandworms as a result of the terraforming of Dune, and his control of the remaining supply of the all-important drug melange, has allowed him to keep civilization under his complete command. Leto has been physically transformed into a worm, retaining only his human face and arms, and though he is now seemingly immortal and invulnerable to harm, he is prone to instinct-driven bouts of violence when provoked to anger. As a result, his rule is one of religious awe and despotic fear. Leto has disbanded the Landsraad to all but a few Great Houses; the remaining powers defer to his authority, although they individually conspire against him in secret. The Fremen have long since lost their identity and military power, and have been replaced as the Imperial army by the Fish Speakers, an all-female army who obey Leto without question. He has rendered the human population into a state of trans-galactic stagnation; space travel is non-existent to most people in his Empire, which he has deliberately kept to a near-medieval level of technological sophistication. All of this he has done in accordance with a prophecy divined through precognition that will establish an enforced peace preventing humanity from destroying itself through aggressive behavior.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_with_the_Wind_(novel)"title="Gone with the Wind (novel)">
## Part I."Gone with the Wind" takes place in the state of Georgia during the American Civil War (1861–1865) and the Reconstruction Era (1865–1877). The novel opens on the eve of a rebellion in which seven southern states – including Georgia – declared their secession from the United States (the "Union") over a desire to continue the institution of slavery, which was the economic engine of the South. The story begins on April 15, 1861, on a plantation owned by the family of wealthy Irish immigrant Gerald O'Hara. The oldest of the three O'Hara daughters, 16-year-old Scarlett is willful, witty, and intelligent though uninterested in schooling. She is described in the book's opening sentence as "not beautiful" but in possession of a powerful ability to charm and attract men.Scarlett is dismayed to learn that the man for whom she harbors a secret love, her county neighbor Ashley Wilkes, is set to announce his engagement to his cousin Melanie Hamilton. The next day, the Wilkeses throw an all-day party at their estate ("Twelve Oaks") where Scarlett spies a dark stranger leering at her. She learns that this man is Rhett Butler and that he has a reputation for seducing young women. Throughout the day, Scarlett attempts to turn Ashley's head by flirting shamelessly with every man present, including Melanie's brother Charles. In the afternoon Scarlett finally gets Ashley alone and confesses her love for him, convinced he will return it, but he says only that he cares for her as a friend and intends to marry Melanie. Stung, Scarlett reacts badly, pelting Ashley with insults about himself and Melanie and accusing him of being too cowardly to submit to his real feelings for her. As Ashley departs, Rhett Butler reveals himself from his hiding place in the libraryhe has overheard their whole exchange. A humiliated Scarlett claims that he is "not a gentleman", to which he admiringly replies "And you are not a lady".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventures_of_Huckleberry_Finn"title="Adventures of Huckleberry Finn">
In St. Petersburg, Missouri, on the shore of the Mississippi River, during the 1830s–1840s, Huckleberry "Huck" Finn has come into a considerable sum of money following "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and is placed under the strict guardianship of the Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss Watson. The women attempt to civilize him, but Huck prefers to have adventures with his friend Tom Sawyer. His father, "Pap", an abusive alcoholic, returns to town and tries to appropriate Huck's fortune. When this fails, Pap kidnaps Huck and confines him in a cabin in the woods. To escape his father, Huck elaborately fakes his own murder and sets off downriver. He settles on Jackson's Island, where he reunites with Miss Watson's slave Jim, who ran away after overhearing she was planning to sell him. Huck decides to go downriver with Jim to Cairo, in the free state of Illinois. After heavy flooding, the two find a timber raft and an entire house floating down the river. Inside, Jim finds a body that has been shot to death but prevents Huck from viewing the corpse. Huck sneaks into town and discovers there is a reward out for Jim, who is suspected of killing Huck; the two flee on their raft.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanhoe"title="Ivanhoe">
"Ivanhoe" is the story of one of the remaining Anglo-Saxon noble families at a time when the nobility in England was overwhelmingly Norman. It follows the Saxon protagonist, Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe, who is out of favour with his father for Sir Wilfred's allegiance to the Norman king Richard the Lionheart. The story is set in 1194, after the failure of the Third Crusade, when many of the Crusaders were still returning to their homes in Europe. King Richard, who had been captured by Leopold of Austria on his return journey to England, was believed to still be in captivity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Got_His_Gun"title="Johnny Got His Gun">
Joe Bonham, a young American soldier serving in World War I, awakens in a hospital bed after being caught in the blast of an exploding artillery shell. He gradually realizes that he has lost his arms, legs, and all of his face (including his eyes, ears, nose, teeth, and tongue), but that his mind functions perfectly, leaving him a prisoner in his own body.Joe attempts suicide by suffocation, but finds that he has had a tracheotomy that he can neither remove nor control. At first Joe wishes to die, but he later decides that he desires to be placed in a glass box and toured around the country in order to show others the true horrors of war. Joe successfully communicates these desires with military officials after months and months of banging his head on his pillow in Morse code. However, he realizes that the military will not grant his wishes, as it is "against regulations". It is implied that he will live the rest of his natural life in his condition.As Joe drifts between reality and fantasy, he remembers his old life with his family and girlfriend, and reflects upon the myths and realities of war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icehenge"title="Icehenge">
"Icehenge" is set at three distinct time periods, and told from the perspective of three different characters.The first narrative is the diary of an engineer caught up in a Martian political revolution in 2248. Effectively kidnapped aboard a mutinous Martian spaceship, she provides assistance to the revolutionaries in their quest for interstellar travel, but ultimately chooses not to travel with them but to return to the doomed revolution on Mars.The second narrative is told from the perspective of an archaeologist three centuries later. He is involved in a project investigating the failed revolution, and during this finds the engineer's diary buried near the remains of a ruined city. At the same time, a mysterious monument is found at the north pole of Pluto, tying up with a passing mention in the engineer's diary.In the final narrative, the great-grandson of the archaeologist visits the monument on Pluto, a scaled-up version of Stonehenge carved in ice. He is investigating the possibility that both the diary and the monument were planted by a reclusive and wealthy businesswoman who lives in the orbit of Saturn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macbeth"title="Macbeth">
## Act I.Amid thunder and lightning, Three Witches decide that their next meeting will be with Macbeth. In the following scene, a wounded sergeant reports to King Duncan of Scotland that his generals Banquo and Macbeth, the Thane of Glamis, have just defeated the allied forces of Norway and Ireland, who were led by the traitorous Macdonwald and the Thane of Cawdor. Macbeth, the King's kinsman, is praised for his bravery and fighting prowess.In the following scene, Macbeth and Banquo discuss the weather and their victory. As they wander onto a heath, the Three Witches enter and greet them with prophecies. Though Banquo challenges them first, they address Macbeth, hailing him as "Thane of Glamis", "Thane of Cawdor", and that he will "be King hereafter". Macbeth appears to be stunned to silence. When Banquo asks of his own fortunes, the witches respond paradoxically, saying that he will be less than Macbeth, yet happier, and less successful, yet more. He will father a line of kings, though he himself will "not" be one. While the two men wonder at these pronouncements, the witches vanish, and another thane, Ross, arrives and informs Macbeth of his newly bestowed title: Thane of Cawdor. The first prophecy is thus fulfilled, and Macbeth, previously sceptical, immediately begins to harbour ambitions of becoming king.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs"title="Microserfs">
The plot of the novel has two distinct movements: the events at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, and the move to Silicon Valley and the "Oop!" project.The novel begins in Redmond as the characters are working on different projects at Microsoft's main campus. Life at the campus feels like a feudalistic society, with Bill Gates as the lord, and the employees the serfs. The majority of the main characters—Daniel (the narrator), Susan, Todd, Bug, Michael, and Abe—are living together in a "geek house", and their lives are dedicated to their projects and the company. Daniel's foundations are shaken when his father, a longtime employee of IBM, is laid off. The lifespan of a Microsoft coder weighs heavily on Daniel's mind.The second movement of the novel begins when the characters are offered jobs in Silicon Valley working on a project for Michael, who has by then left Redmond. All of the housemates—some immediately, some after thought—decide to move to the Valley.The characters' lives change drastically once they leave the limited sphere of the Microsoft campus and enter the world of "One-Point-Oh". They begin to work on a project called "Oop!" (a reference to object-oriented programming). Oop! is a Lego-like design program, allowing dynamic creation of many objects, bearing a resemblance to 2009's "Minecraft" (Coupland appears on the rear cover of the novel's hardcover editions photographed in Denmark's Legoland Billund, holding a Lego 777.).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby-Dick"title="Moby-Dick">
Ishmael travels in December from Manhattan Island to New Bedford, Massachusetts, with plans to sign up for a whaling voyage. The inn where he arrives is overcrowded, so he must share a bed with the tattooed cannibal Polynesian Queequeg, a harpooneer whose father was king of the fictional island of Rokovoko. The next morning, Ishmael and Queequeg attend Father Mapple's sermon on Jonah, then head for Nantucket. Ishmael signs up with the Quaker ship-owners Bildad and Peleg for a voyage on their whaler "Pequod". Peleg describes Captain Ahab: "He's a grand, ungodly, god-like man" who nevertheless "has his humanities". They hire Queequeg the following morning. A man named Elijah prophesies a dire fate should Ishmael and Queequeg join Ahab. While provisions are loaded, shadowy figures board the ship. On a cold Christmas Day, the "Pequod" leaves the harbor.Ishmael discusses cetology (the zoological classification and natural history of the whale), and describes the crew members. The chief mate is 30-year-old Starbuck, a Nantucket Quaker with a realist mentality, whose harpooneer is Queequeg; second mate is Stubb, from Cape Cod, happy-go-lucky and cheerful, whose harpooneer is Tashtego, a proud, pure-blooded Indian from Gay Head; and the third mate is Flask, also from Martha's Vineyard, short, stout, whose harpooneer is Daggoo, a tall African, now a resident of Nantucket.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonfleet_(novel)"title="Moonfleet (novel)">
In 1757, Moonfleet is a small village along the coast of southern England. The village takes its name from a formerly prominent local family, the Mohunes. The main character is John Trenchard, an orphan who lives with his aunt, Miss Arnold. The village church includes the sexton, Mr. Ratsey, and Parson Glennie, who also teaches in the village school. Elzevir Block is the landlord of the "Mohune Arms". The inn is nicknamed the "Why Not?", a pun on the Mohune coat of arms, which includes a "cross-pall" in the shape of the letter "Y". Mr. Maskew is the local magistrate, who has a daughter, Grace. Village legend tells of the notorious Colonel John "Blackbeard" Mohune who is buried in the family crypt under the church. He is reputed to have stolen a diamond from King Charles I and hidden it. His ghost is said to wander at night looking for it and the mysterious lights in the churchyard are attributed to his activities.As the main part of the story opens, Block's youthful son, David, has just been killed by Maskew during a raid by the Maskew and other authorities on a smuggling boat. One night a bad storm hits the village and there is a flood. While attending the Sunday service at church, John hears strange sounds from the crypt below. He thinks it is the sound of the coffins of the Mohune family. The next day, he finds Elzevir and Ratsey against the south wall of the church. They claim to be checking for damage from the storm, but John suspects they are searching for Blackbeard's ghost.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer"title="Neuromancer">
Henry Dorsett Case is a low-level hustler in the dystopian underworld of Chiba City, Japan. Once a talented computer hacker and "console cowboy", Case was caught stealing from his employer. As punishment, Case's central nervous system was damaged, leaving him unable to access the virtual reality dataspace called the "matrix". Case is approached by Molly Millions, an augmented "razorgirl" and mercenary on behalf of a shadowy US ex-military officer named Armitage, who offers to cure Case for his services as a hacker. Case agrees, and his nervous system is repaired, though sacs of poison are placed in his blood vessels. If Case completes the job, Armitage will have the sacs removed; if not, they will burst and cripple him again.Armitage has Case and Molly steal a ROM module that contains the saved consciousness of one of Case's mentors, legendary cyber-cowboy McCoy Pauley.Case and Molly discover Armitage's former identity as Colonel Willis Corto. Corto was a member of "Operation Screaming Fist," meant to disrupt Soviet computer systems. As his team attacked a Soviet computer center, EMP weapons shut down their flight systems. He and a few survivors escaped over the Finnish border, but their helicopter was shot down, killing everyone except for Corto. After months in a hospital, Corto was visited by a US government official, who returned him to the United States to receive psychotherapy and reconstructive surgery. After providing what he came to realize was false testimony, misleading the public and protecting corrupt military officers, Corto snapped, killed the official who contacted him, and disappeared into the criminal underworld, becoming Armitage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Stigmata_of_Palmer_Eldritch"title="The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch">
The story begins in a future world where global temperatures have risen so high that in most of the world it is unsafe to be outside without special cooling gear during daylight hours. In a desperate bid to preserve humanity and ease population burdens on Earth, the UN has initiated a "draft" for colonizing the nearby planets, where conditions are so horrific and primitive that the unwilling colonists have fallen prey to a form of escapism involving the use of an illegal drug (Can-D) in concert with "layouts." Layouts are physical props intended to simulate a sort of alternative reality where life is easier than either the grim existence of the colonists in their marginal off-world colonies, or even Earth, where global warming has progressed to the point that Antarctica is prime vacation resort territory. The illegal drug Can-D allows people to "share" their experience of the "Perky Pat" (the name of the main female character in the simulated world) layouts. This "sharing" has caused a pseudo-religious cult or series of cults to grow up around the layouts and the use of the drug.Up to the point where the novel begins, New York City-based Perky Pat (or P.P.) Layouts, Inc., has held a monopoly on this product, as well as on the illegal trade in the drug Can-D which makes the shared hallucinations possible.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Out_of_Joint"title="Time Out of Joint">
Ragle Gumm lives in the year 1959 in a quiet American town. His unusual profession consists of repeatedly winning the cash prize in a national newspaper contest called "Where Will The Little Green Man Be Next?". Gumm's 1959 has some differences from ours: the Tucker car is in production, AM/FM radios are scarce to non-existent, and Marilyn Monroe is a complete unknown. As the novel opens, strange things begin to happen to Gumm. A soft-drink stand disappears, replaced by a small slip of paper with the words "SOFT-DRINK STAND" printed on it in block letters. Intriguing little pieces of the real 1959 turn up: a magazine article on Marilyn Monroe, a telephone book with non-operational exchanges listed and radios hidden away in someone else's house. People with no apparent connection to Gumm, including military pilots using aircraft transceivers, refer to him by name. Few other characters notice these or experience similar anomalies; the sole exception is Gumm's supposed brother-in-law, Victor "Vic" Nielson, in whom he confides. A neighborhood woman, Mrs. Keitelbein, invites him to a civil defense class where he sees a model of a futuristic underground military factory. He has the unshakeable feeling he's been inside that building many times before.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubik"title="Ubik">
By the year 1992, humanity has colonized the Moon and psychic powers are common. The protagonist, Joe Chip, is a debt-ridden technician working for Runciter Associates, a "prudence organization" employing "inertials"—people with the ability to negate the powers of telepaths and "precogs"—to enforce the privacy of clients. The company is run by Glen Runciter, assisted by his deceased wife Ella who is kept in a state of "half-life", a form of cryonic suspension that allows the deceased limited consciousness and ability to communicate. While consulting with Ella, Runciter discovers that her consciousness is being invaded by another half-lifer named Jory Miller.When business magnate Stanton Mick hires Runciter Associates to secure his lunar facilities from alleged psychic intrusion, Runciter assembles a team of 11 of his best inertials, including recent hire Pat Conley, a mysterious girl with the unique psychic ability to undo events by changing the past. Runciter and Chip travel with the group to Stanton Mick's Moon base, where they discover that the assignment is a trap, presumably set by the company's main adversary, Ray Hollis, who leads an organization of psychics. A bomb blast apparently kills Runciter without significantly harming the others. They rush back to Earth to place him into half-life, but they cannot establish contact with him so his body is set to be buried.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Androids_Dream_of_Electric_Sheep?"title="Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?">
## Background and setting.In 1992 (2021 in later editions) following a devastating global war called World War Terminus, the Earth's radioactively polluted atmosphere leads the United Nations to encourage mass emigrations to off-world colonies to preserve humanity's genetic integrity. Moving away from Earth comes with the incentive of free personal androids: robot servants identical to humans. The Rosen Association manufactures the androids on a colony on Mars, but some androids violently rebel and escape to Earth, where they hope to remain undetected. As a result, American and Soviet police departments remain vigilant and keep android bounty-hunting officers on duty.On Earth, owning real live animals has become a fashionable status symbol, both because mass extinctions have made authentic animals rare and because of the accompanying cultural push for greater empathy. However, poor people can only afford realistic-looking robot imitations of live animals. Rick Deckard, the novel's protagonist, for example, owns an electric black-faced sheep. The trend of increased empathy has coincidentally motivated a new technology-based religion called Mercerism, which uses "empathy boxes" to link users simultaneously to a virtual reality of collective suffering, centered on a martyr-like character, Wilbur Mercer, who eternally climbs up a hill while being hit with crashing stones. Acquiring high-status animal pets and linking in to empathy boxes appear to be the only two ways characters in the story strive for existential fulfillment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Albemuth"title="Radio Free Albemuth">
In this alternate history, the corrupt United States president Ferris F. Fremont (FFF for 666, ‘F’ being the 6th letter in the alphabet) becomes Chief Executive in the late 1960s following Lyndon Johnson's administration. The character is best described as an amalgam of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, who abrogates civil liberties and human rights through positing a conspiracy theory centered on a (presumably) fictitious subversive organization known as "Aramchek". In addition to this, he is associated with a right-wing populist movement called "Friends of the American People" (FAPers).The President's paranoia and opportunism lead to the establishment of a real resistance movement that is organized through narrow-beam radio transmissions from a mysterious alien near-Earth satellite by a superintelligent, extraterrestrial, but less than omnipotent being (or network) named VALIS.Like its successor "VALIS", this novel is autobiographical. Dick himself is a major character, though fictitious protagonist Nicholas Brady serves as a vehicle for Dick's alleged gnostic theophany on February 11, 1974. In addition, Sadassa Silvia is a character who claims that Ferris Fremont is actually a communist covert agent recruited by Sadassa's mother when Fremont was still a teenager.As with "VALIS", "Radio Free Albemuth" deals with Dick's highly personal style of Christianity (or Gnosticism). It further examines the moral and ethical repercussions of informing on trusted friends for the authorities. Also prominent is Dick's dislike of the Republican Party, satirizing Nixon's America as a Stalinist or neo-fascist police state. Fremont eventually captures and imprisons Dick and Brady after the latter attempts to produce and distribute a record that contains subliminal messages of revolt against the current dictatorship. Brady and Silvia are executed, and Dick narrates the concluding passage about his life in a concentration camp, while his supposedly latest work is actually penned by a ghost writer and regime-approved hack. Suddenly, however, he hears music blaring from a transistor radio which contains the same subliminal message. He and his friends, it turns out, were just a decoy set up by VALIS to deter the government from stopping a much more popular A-List band from releasing a similar record with a better-established recording company. As Dick realizes this and hears youngsters repeating the lyrics, he realizes that salvation may lie within the hearts and minds of the next generation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Fire"title="Pale Fire">
Shade's poem digressively describes many aspects of his life. Canto 1 includes his early encounters with death and glimpses of what he takes to be the supernatural. Canto 2 is about his family and the apparent suicide of his daughter, Hazel Shade. Canto 3 focuses on Shade's search for knowledge about an afterlife, culminating in a "faint hope" in higher powers "playing a game of worlds" as indicated by apparent coincidences. Canto 4 offers details on Shade's daily life and creative process, as well as thoughts on his poetry, which he finds to be a means of somehow understanding the universe.In Kinbote's editorial contributions he tells three stories intermixed with each other. One is his own story, notably including what he thinks of as his friendship with Shade. After Shade was murdered, Kinbote acquired the manuscript, including some variants, and has taken it upon himself to oversee the poem's publication, telling readers that it lacks only line 1000. Kinbote's second story deals with King Charles II, "The Beloved", the deposed king of Zembla. King Charles escaped imprisonment by Soviet-backed revolutionaries, making use of a secret passage and brave adherents in disguise. Kinbote repeatedly claims that he inspired Shade to write the poem by recounting King Charles's escape to him and that possible allusions to the king, and to Zembla, appear in Shade's poem, especially in rejected drafts. However, no explicit reference to King Charles is to be found in the poem. Kinbote's third story is that of Gradus, an assassin dispatched by the new rulers of Zembla to kill the exiled King Charles. Gradus makes his way from Zembla through Europe and America to New Wye, suffering comic mishaps. In the last note, to the missing line 1000, Kinbote narrates how Gradus killed Shade by mistake.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld"title="Ringworld">
On planet Earth in 2850 AD, Louis Gridley Wu is celebrating his 200th birthday. Despite his age, Louis is in perfect physical condition due to the longevity drug boosterspice. He meets Nessus, a Pierson's puppeteer, who offers him a mysterious job. Intrigued, Louis eventually accepts. Speaker-to-Animals (Speaker), who is a Kzin, and Teela Brown, a young human woman who becomes Louis's lover, also join the crew.On the puppeteer home world, they are told that the expedition's goal is to investigate the Ringworld, a gigantic artificial ring, to see if it poses any threat. The Ringworld is about one million miles (1.6 million km) wide and approximately the diameter of Earth's orbit (which makes it about 584.3 million miles or 940.4 million km in circumference), encircling a sunlike star. It rotates to provide artificial gravity 99.2% as strong as Earth's from centrifugal force. The Ringworld has a habitable, flat inner surface (equivalent in area to approximately three million Earths), a breathable atmosphere and a temperature optimal for humans. Night is provided by an inner ring of shadow squares which are connected to each other by thin, ultra-strong wire. When the crew completes their mission, they will be given the starship in which they travelled to the puppeteer home world; it is orders of magnitude faster than any possessed by humans or Kzinti.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama"title="Rendezvous with Rama">
After an asteroid falls in Northeast Italy on 11 September 2077, creating a major disaster, the government of Earth sets up the Spaceguard system as an early warning of arrivals from deep space.The "Rama" of the title is an alien starship weighing at least ten trillion tons, initially mistaken for an asteroid categorised as "31/439". It is detected by astronomers in the year 2131 while it is still outside the orbit of Jupiter. Its speed (100,000 km/h – 62,150 m/h) and the angle of its trajectory clearly indicate it is not on a long orbit around the sun, but is an interstellar object. The astronomers' interest is further piqued when they realise the asteroid has an extremely rapid rotation period of four minutes and is exceptionally large. It is named Rama after the Hindu god, and an uncrewed space probe dubbed "Sita" is launched from the Mars moon Phobos to intercept and photograph it. The resulting images reveal that Rama is a perfect cylinder, in diameter and long, and almost completely featureless, making this humankind's first encounter with an alien spacecraft.The solar survey vessel "Endeavour" is sent to study Rama, as it is the only ship close enough to do so in the brief period Rama will spend in the Solar System. "Endeavour" manages to rendezvous with Rama one month after it first comes to Earth's attention, when the alien ship is already inside Venus's orbit. The crew, led by Commander Bill Norton, enters Rama through a safety system consisting of triple airlocks, and explores the 16-km wide by 50-km long cylindrical world of its interior, but the nature and purpose of the starship and its creators remain enigmatic throughout the book. Rama's inner surfaces hold "cities" of geometric structures that resemble buildings and are separated by streets with shallow trenches. A band of water, dubbed the Cylindrical Sea, stretches around Rama's central circumference. Massive spires, which are theorised to be part of Rama's propulsion system, stand at its "southern" end. They also find that Rama's atmosphere is breathable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_and_Sensibility"title="Sense and Sensibility">
Henry Dashwood, his second wife, and their three daughters live for many years with Henry's wealthy bachelor uncle at Norland Park, a large country estate in Sussex. That uncle decides, in late life, to will the use and income only of his property first to Henry, then to Henry's first son (by his first marriage) John Dashwood, so that the property should pass intact to John's four-year-old son Harry. The uncle dies, but Henry lives just a year after that and he is unable in such short time to save enough money for the future security of his wife Mrs Dashwood, and their daughters, Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret, who are left only a small income. On his deathbed, Mr Henry Dashwood extracts a promise from his son John to take care of his half-sisters. But before Henry is long in the grave, John's greedy wife, Fanny, persuades her husband to renege on the promise, appealing to his concerns about diminishing his own son Harry's inheritance, despite the fact that John is already independently wealthy thanks to both his inheritance from his mother and his wife's dowry. Henry Dashwood's love for his second family is also used by Fanny to arouse her husband's jealousy, and persuade him not to help his sisters financially.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaker_for_the_Dead"title="Speaker for the Dead">
Eight years after the Descolada virus is cured, Xenologer Pipo and his thirteen-year-old son and apprentice Libo have developed a friendship with the Pequeninos. They allow Novinha to join their science team as the colony's only xenobiologist after she passes the test at age thirteen. After accidentally sharing information about human genders with a male Pequenino named Rooter, the scientists find Rooter's body eviscerated, a sapling planted within it. Guessing this may be a torturous sacrificial ritual, restrictions on studying the Pequeninos are enforced, barring the humans from asking questions directly at Pequininos.A few years later, Novinha discovers that every lifeform on Lusitania carries the "Descolada" virus which, though lethal to humans, appears to serve a beneficial purpose to native lifeforms. When Pipo learns of this, he suddenly has an insight, and before he tells the others, races off to talk to the Pequeninos. Libo and Novinha find Pipo's body cut open just as Rooter's had been, but with no sapling planted. As Pipo's death appears unprovoked, the Pequeninos are now considered a threat by the Starways Congress and restrictions on studying them are tightened. Distraught, Novinha makes a call for a Speaker for the Dead for Pipo. She is in love with Libo but fears that if he sees her files of research he will make the same discovery as Pipo and meet the same fate. She marries another colonist, Marcos Ribeira, so as to lock her files from being opened.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers"title="Starship Troopers">
The novel opens with Rico aboard the corvette transport "Rodger Young" (named after Medal of Honor recipient Rodger Wilton Young), serving with the platoon known as "Rasczak's Roughnecks". The platoon carries out a raid against a planetary colony held by Skinnies. The raid is relatively brief: the platoon lands on the planet, destroys its targets, and retreats, suffering two casualties in the process. One of them, Dizzy Flores, is rescued by Rico but dies while returning to orbit. The narrative then flashes back to Rico's graduation from high school. Rico and his best friend Carl are considering joining the Federal Service after graduation; Rico is hesitant, partly due to his father's attitude towards the military. Rico makes his decision after discovering that his classmate Carmen Ibañez also intends to enlist.Rico's choice is taken poorly by his parents, and he leaves with a sense of estrangement. He is assigned to the Mobile Infantry, and moves to Camp Arthur Currie (named for Arthur Currie who rose through the ranks to general in World War I) on the Canadian prairie for his training under Sergeant Charles Zim. The training is extremely demanding. Rico receives combat training of all types, including simulated fights in armored suits. A fellow recruit is court-martialed, flogged, and dismissed for striking a drill instructor who was also his company commander. Jean V. Dubois, who taught Rico's History and Moral Philosophy class in school, sends Rico a letter, revealing that he is a Mobile Infantry veteran himself. The letter helps Rico stay motivated enough not to resign. Rico himself is given five lashes for firing a rocket during a drill with armored suits and simulated nuclear weapons without ensuring that no friendlies were within the blast zone, which in combat would have resulted in the death of a fellow soldier. Another recruit, who murdered a baby girl after deserting the army, is hanged by his battalion after his arrest by civilian police. Eventually, after further training at another camp near Vancouver, Rico graduates with 187 others, of the 2,009 who had begun training in that regiment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Little"title="Stuart Little">
A boy named Stuart is born to an ordinary family in New York City. He is normal in every way except that he is only just over tall and looks exactly like a mouse. At first, the family is concerned with how Stuart will survive in a human-sized world, but by the age of seven, he speaks, thinks, and behaves on the level of a human of sixteen and shows surprising ingenuity in adapting, performing such helpful family tasks as fishing his mother's wedding ring from a sink drain. The family's cat, Snowbell, dislikes Stuart because while he feels a natural instinct to chase him, he is aware that Stuart is a human family member and is thus off-limits. On a cold winter's day, the family discovers a songbird named Margalo half-frozen on their doorstep. Margalo is taken in and spends the winter in the family home, where she befriends Stuart; Stuart in turn protects her from Snowbell. The bird repays his kindness by saving Stuart when he is trapped in a garbage can and shipped out to sea for disposal. In the spring, when she is set free from the house, she continues to visit Stuart, infuriating Snowbell, who now finds himself with "two" small animals he is not allowed to eat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings"title="The Lord of the Rings">
## Frame story.Tolkien presents "The Lord of the Rings" within a fictional frame story where he is not the original author, but merely the translator of part of an ancient document, the "Red Book of Westmarch". That book is modelled on the real "Red Book of Hergest", which similarly presents an older mythology. Various details of the frame story appear in the Prologue, its "Note on Shire Records", and in the Appendices, notably Appendix F. In this frame story, the "Red Book" is the purported source of Tolkien's other works relating to Middle-earth: "The Hobbit", "The Silmarillion", and "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doors_of_Perception"title="The Doors of Perception">
After a brief overview of research into mescaline, Huxley recounts that he was given 4/10 of a gram at 11:00 am one day in May 1953. Huxley writes that he hoped to gain insight into extraordinary states of mind and expected to see brightly coloured visionary landscapes. When he only sees lights and shapes, he puts this down to being a bad visualiser; however, he experiences a great change in his perception of the external world.By 12:30 pm, a vase of flowers becomes the "miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence". The experience, he asserts, is neither agreeable nor disagreeable, but simply "is". He likens it to Meister Eckhart's "istigkeit" or "is-ness", and Plato's "Being" but not separated from "Becoming". He feels he understands the Hindu concept of Satchitananda, as well as the Zen koan that, "the dharma body of the Buddha is in the hedge" and Buddhist suchness. In this state, Huxley explains he didn't have an "I", but instead a "not-I". Meaning and existence, pattern and colour become more significant than spatial relationships and time. Duration is replaced by a perpetual present.Reflecting on the experience afterwards, Huxley finds himself in agreement with philosopher C. D. Broad that to enable us to live, the brain and nervous system eliminate unessential information from the totality of the 'Mind at Large'.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine"title="The Time Machine">
The book's protagonist is a Victorian English scientist and gentleman inventor living in Richmond, Surrey, identified by a narrator simply as the "Time Traveller". Similarly, with but one exception (a man named Filby), none of the dinner guests present are ever identified by name, but rather by profession (for example, "the Psychologist") or physical description (for example, "the Very Young Man").The narrator recounts the Traveller's lecture to his weekly dinner guests that time is simply a fourth dimension and demonstrates a tabletop model machine for travelling through the fourth dimension. He reveals that he has built a machine capable of carrying a person through time, and returns at dinner the following week to recount a remarkable tale, becoming the new narrator.In the new narrative, the Time Traveller tests his device. At first he thinks nothing has happened but soon finds out he went five hours into the future. He continues forward and sees his house disappear and turn into a lush garden. The Time Traveller stops in A.D. 802,701, where he meets the Eloi, a society of small, elegant, childlike adults. They live in small communities within large and futuristic yet slowly deteriorating buildings, and adhere to a fruit-based diet. His efforts to communicate with them are hampered by their lack of curiosity or discipline. They appear happy and carefree but fear the dark, and particularly moonless nights. Observing them, he finds that they give no response to mysterious nocturnal disappearances, possibly because the thought of it alone frightens them into silence. After exploring the area around the Eloi's residences, the Time Traveller reaches the top of a hill overlooking London. He concludes that the entire planet has become a garden, with little trace of human society or engineering from the hundreds of thousands of years prior, and that communism has at last been achieved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider"title="The Shockwave Rider">
The novel shows a dystopian early 21st-century America dominated by computer networks, and is considered by some critics to be an early ancestor of the cyberpunk genre. The hero, Nick Haflinger, is a runaway from Tarnover, a government program intended to find, educate and indoctrinate highly gifted children to further the interests of the state in a future where quantitative analysis backed by the tacit threat of coercion has replaced overt military and economic power as the deciding factor in international competition. In parallel with this, the government has become a oligarchy whose beneficiaries are members of organised crime.Nick's talent extends to programming the network using only a touch-tone telephone. One of his handlers at Tarnover explains that this is like a classical pianist being able to play entire sonatas and concertos from memory. However, Nick also has some personality flaws, amounting almost to a deathwish. These become manifest in exhibitions of his abilities, revealing his identity to his pursuers.The background to the story includes a massive earthquake laying waste to the San Francisco Bay Area in California. Millions die and millions more are left to live on government handouts. The subsequent economic depression, coupled with the rootlessness enabled by access to online data and strong social pressure to be flexible (the results of corporations wanting highly mobile workforces without strong local ties), results in a fragmentation of society along religious, ethnic, and a variety of class markers, what Toffler called "subcults", including what would in 2010 be described as gangs. The equitable distribution of data access and data privacy is a prominent theme in the book; characters who have access to information which is nominally secret enjoy demonstrable economic advantages over others lacking access to such data. In the novel, data privacy is reserved for corporate entities and individuals, who may then conceal wrongdoing; by contrast, normal citizens do not enjoy significant privacy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shining_(novel)"title="The Shining (novel)">
"The Shining" mainly takes place in the fictional Overlook Hotel, an isolated, haunted resort hotel located in the Colorado Rockies. The history of the hotel, which is described in backstory by several characters, includes the deaths of some of its guests and of former winter caretaker Delbert Grady, who "succumbed to cabin fever" and killed his family and himself.Jack Torrance, his wife Wendy, and their five-year-old son Danny move into the hotel after Jack accepts the position as winter caretaker. Jack is an aspiring writer and recovering alcoholic with anger issues which, prior to the story, had caused him to accidentally break Danny's arm and lose his position as a teacher after assaulting a student. Jack hopes that the hotel's seclusion will help him reconnect with his family and give him the motivation needed to work on a play. Danny, unknown to his parents, possesses psychic abilities referred to as "shining", which enable him to read minds and experience premonitions as well as clairvoyance. The Torrances arrive at the hotel on closing day and are given a tour by the manager. They meet Dick Hallorann, the chef, who possesses similar abilities to Danny's and helps to explain them to him, giving Hallorann and Danny a special connection. The remaining staff and guests depart the hotel, leaving the Torrances alone in the hotel for the winter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mort"title="Mort">
As a teenager, Mort has a personality and temperament that makes him unsuited to the family farming business. Mort's father Lezek takes him to a local hiring fair in the hope that Mort will land an apprenticeship; not only would this provide a job for his son, but it would also make his son's propensity for thinking someone else's problem. Just before the last stroke of midnight, Death arrives and takes Mort on as an apprentice (though his father thinks he has been apprenticed to an undertaker). Death takes Mort to his domain, where he meets Death's elderly manservant Albert, and his adopted daughter Ysabell. Mort later accompanies Death as he travels to collect the soul of a king, who is due to be assassinated by the scheming Duke of Sto Helit. After Mort unsuccessfully tries to prevent the assassination, Death warns him that all deaths are predetermined, and that he cannot interfere with fate.Later on, Death assigns Mort to collect the soul of Princess Keli, daughter of the murdered king, but he instead kills the assassin the Duke had sent after her. Keli lives, but shortly after the assassin's death people begin acting as if something had happened without knowing why, such as a solemn song being played. She soon finds that the rest of the world no longer acknowledges her existence at all unless she confronts them and even then only in a confused manner which is forgotten immediately after. She subsequently employs the wizard Igneous Cutwell, who is able to see her as he is trained to see things that are invisible to normal people (like death) to make her existence clear to the public. Mort eventually discovers that his actions have created an alternate reality in which Keli lives, but he also learns that it is being overridden by the original reality and will eventually cease to exist, killing Keli. While consulting Cutwell, Mort sees a picture of Unseen University's founder, Alberto Malich, noting that he bears a resemblance to Albert.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hound_of_the_Baskervilles"title="The Hound of the Baskervilles">
Dr James Mortimer recounts to Sherlock Holmes in London an old legend of a curse that reportedly runs in the Baskerville family since the time of the English Civil War, when Sir Hugo Baskerville was killed by a huge demonic hound, with the same creature haunting the mires of Dartmoor ever since, causing the premature death of many Baskerville heirs. He reveals that his friend Sir Charles Baskerville, who took the legend of the hound seriously, was found dead in the yew alley of his estate, Baskerville Hall, in the midst of Dartmoor. The death was attributed to a heart attack, but Mortimer reveals that Sir Charles's face retained an expression of horror, and not far from his body were the footprints of a gigantic hound. Mortimer now fears for the next in line, Sir Henry Baskerville.Though he dismisses the curse as nonsense, Holmes agrees to meet Sir Henry, who is arriving from Canada, where he has been living. A young and jovial man, Sir Henry is sceptical about the legend and is eager to take possession of Baskerville Hall, in spite of receiving an anonymous note, warning him to stay away from the moor. When someone shadows Sir Henry while he is walking down a street, however, Holmes asks Watson to go with the Sir Henry and Mortimer to Dartmoor, in order to protect Sir Henry and search for any clues about who is following him. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit"title="The Hobbit">
Gandalf tricks Bilbo Baggins into hosting a party for Thorin Oakenshield and his band of twelve dwarves (Dwalin, Balin, Kili, Fili, Dori, Nori, Ori, Oin, Gloin, Bifur, Bofur, and Bombur), who sing of reclaiming their ancient home, Lonely Mountain, and its vast treasure from the dragon Smaug. When the music ends, Gandalf unveils Thrór's map showing a secret door into the Mountain and proposes that the dumbfounded Bilbo serve as the expedition's "burglar". The dwarves ridicule the idea, but Bilbo, indignant, joins despite himself.The group travels into the wild. Gandalf saves the company from trolls and leads them to Rivendell, where Elrond reveals more secrets from the map. When they attempt to cross the Misty Mountains, they are caught by goblins and driven deep underground. Although Gandalf rescues them, Bilbo gets separated from the others as they flee the goblins. Lost in the goblin tunnels, he stumbles across a mysterious ring and then encounters Gollum, who engages him in a game, each posing a riddle until one of them cannot solve it. If Bilbo wins, Gollum will show him the way out of the tunnels, but if he fails, his life will be forfeit. With the help of the ring, which confers invisibility, Bilbo escapes and rejoins the dwarves, improving his reputation with them. The goblins and Wargs give chase, but the company are saved by eagles. They rest in the house of Beorn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Manifesto"title="The Communist Manifesto">
"The Communist Manifesto" is divided into a preamble and four sections. The introduction begins: "A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism." Pointing out that it was widespread for politicians—both those in government and those in the opposition—to label their opponents as communists, the authors infer that those in power acknowledge communism to be a power in itself. Subsequently, the introduction exhorts communists to openly publish their views and aims, which is the very function of the manifesto.The first section of the "Manifesto", "Bourgeois and Proletarians", outlines historical materialism, and states that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". According to the authors, all societies in history had taken the form of an oppressed majority exploited by an oppressive minority. In Marx and Engels' time, they say that under capitalism, the industrial working class, or 'proletariat', engages in class struggle against the owners of the means of production, the 'bourgeoisie'.The bourgeoisie, through the "constant revolutionising of production [and] uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions" have emerged as the supreme class in society, displacing all the old powers of feudalism. The bourgeoisie constantly exploits the proletariat for its labour power, creating profit for themselves and accumulating capital. In doing so, however, Marx and Engels describe the bourgeoisie as serving as "its own grave-diggers"; as they believe the proletariat will inevitably become conscious of their own potential and rise to power through revolution, overthrowing the bourgeoisie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Divorce"title="The Great Divorce">
The narrator inexplicably finds himself in a grim and joyless city, the "grey town", where it rains continuously, even indoors, which is either Hell or Purgatory depending on whether or not one stays there. He eventually finds a bus stop for those who desire an excursion to some other place (the destination later turns out to be the foothills of Heaven). He waits in line for the bus and listens to the arguments between his fellow passengers. As they await the bus's arrival, many of them quit the line in disgust before the bus pulls up. When it arrives, the driver is an angel who shields his face from the passengers. Once the few remaining passengers have boarded, the bus flies upward, off the pavement into the grey, rainy sky.The ascending bus breaks out of the rain clouds into a clear, pre-dawn sky, and as it rises its occupants' bodies change from being normal and solid into being transparent, faint, and vapor-like. When it reaches its destination the passengers on the bus – including the narrator – are gradually revealed to be ghosts. Although the country they disembark into is the most beautiful they have ever seen, every feature of the landscape, including streams of water and blades of grass, is unyieldingly solid compared to themselves: It causes them immense pain to walk on the grass, whose blades pierce their shadowy feet, and even a single leaf is far too heavy for any to lift.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwtape_Letters"title="The Screwtape Letters">
"The Screwtape Letters" consists of 31 letters written by a senior demon named Screwtape to his nephew, Wormwood (named after a star in the Book of Revelation), a younger and less experienced demon, charged with guiding a man called "the Patient" toward "Our Father Below" (Satan), and away from "the Enemy" (God).After the second letter, the Patient converts to Christianity, and Wormwood is chastised for allowing this. A striking contrast is formed between Wormwood and Screwtape during the rest of the book, wherein Wormwood is depicted through Screwtape's letters as anxious to tempt his patient into extravagantly wicked and deplorable sins, often recklessly, while Screwtape takes a more subtle stance, as in Letter XII, wherein he remarks: "... the safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."In Letter VIII, Screwtape explains to his protégé the different purposes that God and the devils have for the human race: "We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons." With this end in mind, Screwtape urges Wormwood in Letter VI to promote passivity and irresponsibility in the Patient: "(God) wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunt_for_Red_October"title="The Hunt for Red October">
During the Cold War, Marko Ramius, a Soviet Navy submarine commander, plans to defect to the United States with the ballistic missile submarine "Red October". It is equipped with a cutting-edge silent propulsion system, known as the "caterpillar drive", that makes audio detection by passive sonar extremely difficult and enables the submarine to sneak its way into American territorial waters and launch nuclear missiles with little to no warning. As the sub leaves the shipyard at Polyarny, Ramius kills his political officer, Ivan Putin, to ensure that he will not interfere. Ramius was ordered to conduct military exercises with Soviet attack submarine "V. K. Konovalov", commanded by his former student Viktor Tupolev, in order to test the effectiveness of the caterpillar drive. Instead, he plots a course for the North American coast, falsely informing the crew that they will be proceeding undetected all the way to Cuba. Before sailing, Ramius sends a letter to Admiral Yuri Padorin brazenly stating his intention to defect; the Soviet Northern Fleet then sails out to sink "Red October" under the pretext of a search and rescue mission.Coincidentally, "Red October" passes near , a under the command of Bart Mancuso, which is patrolling the entrance of a route used by Soviet submarines in the Reykjanes Ridge off Iceland. "Dallas"'s sonar operator hears the sound of the stealth drive but does not immediately identify it as a submarine. As tensions rise between the U.S. and Soviet fleets due to the unannounced incursion of the Soviet Northern Fleet into Atlantic waters, the crew of the "Dallas" analyzes tapes of "Red October"′s acoustic signature and realizes that it is the sound of a new propulsion system. Meanwhile, CIA analyst Jack Ryan finds out that the submarine's new construction variations house its stealth drive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cardinal_of_the_Kremlin"title="The Cardinal of the Kremlin">
For thirty years, Colonel Mikhail Semyonovich "Misha" Filitov, a personal aide to the Soviet Minister of Defense and war hero, has been passing military, technical, and political intelligence to the CIA as their highest agent-in-place, codenamed CARDINAL. His latest mission concerns a Soviet anti-ballistic missile research project codenamed "Bright Star", based at a secret defense installation in Dushanbe, Tajikistan.Colonel Filitov sends Gennady Bondarenko, a Soviet colonel skilled with lasers, to Dushanbe to evaluate the facility and unwittingly procure information that Misha will then send to his CIA contacts. Unfortunately, a minor slip-up in passing Filitov's intelligence alerts the KGB, which then aggressively pursues the couriers involved. They later become suspicious of Filitov and place him under surveillance. The courier chain having been quickly shut down by the CIA station chief in Moscow, Edward Foley, Filitov's more important intelligence on Bright Star is delayed; however, he reveals the presence of a KGB agent infiltrating Bright Star's counterpart, Tea Clipper, which alarms the CIA.The CIA then tasks Foley with extracting CARDINAL out of the country. However, when his wife Mary Pat, also a CIA agent, attempts to make a brush pass to Filitov, the two are arrested by the KGB. The Foleys are then declared persona non grata, while Filitov is imprisoned and psychologically tortured until he eventually confesses to his crimes. In an effort to salvage the mission, CIA analyst Jack Ryan, who had now learned of CARDINAL's identity, concocts a plan to secure the return of Filitov and at the same time force the defection of KGB chairman Nikolay Gerasimov, who has been vying for the position of General Secretary since Filitov's arrest; Ryan tries to prevent his ascension to power due to his anti-American ideology.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_of_Honor"title="Debt of Honor">
Japanese industrialist Raizo Yamata has been plotting to bring back his country to a position of greatness for years, partly as revenge for the death of his family at the hands of American forces invading the island of Saipan during World War II. His opportunity comes when a car accident in eastern Tennessee, caused by faulty gas tanks made in Japan, results in the deaths of six American people. The incident leads to the swift passage of a law allowing the U.S. to mirror trade practices of the countries from which it imports goods, cutting off the American export markets upon which the Japanese economy depends. Facing an economic crisis, Japan’s ruling zaibatsu, led by Yamata, decides to take economic and military action against the United States. Along with covert support from China and India, they plot to curtail the U.S. presence in the Pacific and re-establish the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. After the Japanese Prime Minister Mogataru Koga resigns in disgrace due to the economic situation, the zaibatsu installs Hiroshi Goto, an aggressive nationalist and critic of the U.S., to succeed him. Meanwhile, Japan has covertly developed nuclear weapons, and with SS-18 designs bought from the former Soviet Union, has fabricated and deployed several ICBMs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve"title="The Bell Curve">
"The Bell Curve", published in 1994, was written by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray to explain the variations in intelligence in American society, warn of some consequences of that variation, and propose social policies for mitigating the worst of the consequences. The book's title comes from the bell-shaped normal distribution of intelligence quotient (IQ) scores in a population.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fountains_of_Paradise"title="The Fountains of Paradise">
## Summary.The novel focuses primarily on a project known as the Orbital Tower proposed by the main character, Vannevar Morgan. The tower is to stretch from the Earth's equator to a satellite that is in geostationary orbit. Such a structure would greatly reduce the cost of sending people and supplies into space.The main story is framed by two other stories. The first one tells of King Kalidasa, living thousands of years before Morgan is born, who is constructing a 'pleasure garden' complete with functioning fountains, in a significant engineering effort for the time. The other story, taking place long after Morgan has died, deals with aliens making contact with Earth.Due to many technical issues, there are only two locations on Earth where the Orbital Tower can be built. One is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and the other is Sri Kanda (a thinly veiled reference to Adam's Peak in Sri Lanka). However, there is a Buddhist temple on the island, and Mahanayake Thero, the head of the order, refuses to give permission to begin construction.Hearing of the difficulties, a group of people living on Mars contacts Morgan and suggests that the tower be built there instead. It would be smaller than the one planned for Earth, and would reach from Mars to one of its moons, Deimos.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silent_Gondoliers"title="The Silent Gondoliers">
Luigi is an aspiring gondolier in Venice. Though he is a talented boatman, he is a terrible singer, and people get stomach cramps and migraines just listening to him. As gondoliers have a reputation as the best singers in the world, and customers expect it as part of the service, a tone-deaf gondolier is unacceptable, no matter how skilled he is with his oar..As the story unfolds, his fiancee Laura Lorenzini breaks off her engagement, and marries a 'better suitor'. Though he is an awful singer, Luigi's friends are fond of him and his affable nature. It is agreed that although he cannot be a gondolier, he can work in the Tavern, the Gondoliers' exclusive haunt. But over time he becomes dissatisfied.Luigi disappears for many years, and is turned away from various singing teachers. Finally Piccoli agrees to teach him, although unbeknown to Luigi, Piccoli has not taught in many years and is deaf. Luigi eventually returns to Venice and sings, but his singing is even worse because it has become more powerful. When a 'killer storm' approaches, everyone is in danger. When the Church of Souls of Those Who Died for the Sea, the most sacred building to the Gondoliers, is struck by lightning, even the most skilled gondoliers in Venice are too overcome with fear to go out and call for the Great Fireboat of Venice to save their church from fire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies"title="Lord of the Flies">
In the midst of a wartime evacuation, a British aeroplane crashes on or near an isolated island in a remote region of the Pacific Ocean. The only survivors are boys in their middle childhood or preadolescence. Two boys named Ralph and Piggy find a conch, which Ralph uses as a horn to convene the survivors to one area. Ralph immediately commands authority over the other boys using the conch, and is elected their "chief". He establishes three primary policies: to have fun, to survive, and to constantly maintain a smoke signal that could alert passing ships of their presence. Ralph and two choirboys named Jack and Simon use Piggy's glasses to create the signal fire.The semblance of order quickly deteriorates as the majority of the boys turn idle and develop paranoia towards an imaginary monster they call the "beast", which they all slowly begin to believe exists on the island. Ralph fails to convince the boys that no beast exists, while Jack gains popularity by declaring that he will personally hunt and kill the beast. At one point, Jack summons many of the boys to hunt down a wild pig, drawing away those assigned to maintain the signal fire. The extinguished smoke signal fails to attract a ship passing by the island. Ralph angrily confronts Jack about his failure to maintain the signal, but he is rebuffed by the other boys. A disillusioned Ralph considers relinquishing his position as leader, but is persuaded not to do so by Piggy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_the_Looking-Glass"title="Through the Looking-Glass">
Chapter One – Looking-Glass House: Alice is playing with a white kitten (whom she calls "Snowdrop") and a black kitten (whom she calls "Kitty") when she ponders what the world is like on the other side of a mirror's reflection. Climbing up onto the fireplace mantel, she pokes at the wall-hung mirror behind the fireplace and discovers, to her surprise, that she is able to step through it to an alternative world. In this reflected version of her own house, she finds a book with looking-glass poetry, "Jabberwocky", whose reversed printing she can read only by holding it up to the mirror. She also observes that the chess pieces have come to life, though they remain small enough for her to pick up.Chapter Two – The Garden of Live Flowers: Upon leaving the house (where it had been a cold, snowy night), she enters a sunny spring garden where the flowers can speak; they perceive Alice as being a "flower that can move about". Elsewhere in the garden, Alice meets the Red Queen, who is now human-sized, and who impresses Alice with her ability to run at breathtaking speeds.Chapter Three – Looking-Glass Insects: The Red Queen reveals to Alice that the entire countryside is laid out in squares, like a gigantic chessboard, and offers to make Alice a queen if she can move all the way to the eighth rank/row in a chess match. Alice is placed in the second rank as one of the White Queen's pawns, and begins her journey across the chessboard by boarding a train that jumps over the third row and directly into the fourth rank, thus acting on the rule that pawns can advance two spaces on their first move. She arrives in a forest where a depressed gnat teaches her about the looking glass insects, strange creatures part bug part object (e.g., bread and butterfly, rocking horse fly), before flying away sadly. Alice continues her journey and along the way, crosses the "wood where things have no names". There she forgets all nouns, including her own name. With the help of a fawn who has also forgotten his identity, she makes it to the other side, where they both remember everything. Realizing that he is a fawn, she is a human, and that fawns are afraid of humans, it runs off (to Alice's frustration).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World"title="Brave New World">
The novel opens in the World State city of London in AF (After Ford) 632 (AD 2540 in the Gregorian calendar), where citizens are engineered through artificial wombs and childhood indoctrination programmes into predetermined classes (or castes) based on intelligence and labour. Lenina Crowne, a hatchery worker, is popular and sexually desirable, but Bernard Marx, a psychologist, is not. He is shorter in stature than the average member of his high caste, which gives him an inferiority complex. His work with sleep-learning allows him to understand, and disapprove of, his society's methods of keeping its citizens peaceful, which includes their constant consumption of a soothing, happiness-producing drug called Soma. Courting disaster, Bernard is vocal and arrogant about his criticisms, and his boss contemplates exiling him to Iceland because of his nonconformity. His only friend is Helmholtz Watson, a gifted writer who finds it difficult to use his talents creatively in their pain-free society.Bernard takes a holiday with Lenina outside the World State to a Savage Reservation in New Mexico, in which the two observe natural-born people, disease, the ageing process, other languages, and religious lifestyles for the first time. The culture of the village folk resembles the contemporary Native American groups of the region, descendants of the Anasazi, including the Puebloan peoples of Hopi and Zuni. Bernard and Lenina witness a violent public ritual and then encounter Linda, a woman originally from the World State who is living on the reservation with her son John, now a young man. She, too, visited the reservation on a holiday many years ago, but became separated from her group and was left behind. She had meanwhile become pregnant by a fellow-holidaymaker (who is revealed to be Bernard's boss, the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning). She did not try to return to the World State, because of her shame at her pregnancy. Despite spending his whole life in the reservation, John has never been accepted by the villagers, and his and Linda's lives have been hard and unpleasant. Linda has taught John to read, although from the only book in her possession—a scientific manual—and another book John found: the complete works of Shakespeare. Ostracised by the villagers, John is able to articulate his feelings only in terms of Shakespearean drama, quoting often from "The Tempest", "King Lear", "Othello", "Romeo and Juliet" and "Hamlet". Linda now wants to return to London, and John, too, wants to see this "brave new world". Bernard sees an opportunity to thwart plans to exile him, and gets permission to take Linda and John back. On their return to London, John meets the Director and calls him his "father", a vulgarity which causes a roar of laughter. The humiliated Director resigns in shame before he can follow through with exiling Bernard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Dark_Materials"title="His Dark Materials">
## "Northern Lights" (or "The Golden Compass").In Jordan College, Oxford, 11-year-old Lyra Belacqua and her dæmon Pantalaimon witness the Master attempt to poison Lord Asriel, Lyra's rebellious and adventuring uncle. She warns Asriel, then spies on his lecture about Dust, mysterious elementary particles. Lyra's friend Roger is kidnapped by child abductors known as Gobblers. Lyra is adopted by a charming socialite, Mrs Coulter. The Master secretly entrusts Lyra with an alethiometer, a truth-telling device. Lyra discovers that Mrs Coulter is the leader of the Gobblers, and that it is a project secretly funded by the Church. Lyra flees to the Gyptians, canal-faring nomads, whose children have also been abducted. They reveal to Lyra that Asriel and Mrs Coulter are actually her parents.The Gyptians form an expedition to the Arctic with Lyra to rescue the children. Lyra recruits Iorek Byrnison, an armoured bear, and his human aeronaut friend, Lee Scoresby. She also learns that Lord Asriel has been exiled, guarded by the bears on Svalbard.Near Bolvangar, the Gobbler research station, Lyra finds an abandoned child who has been cut from his dæmon; the Gobblers are experimenting on children by severing the bond between human and dæmon, a procedure called intercision.Lyra is captured and taken to Bolvangar, where she is reunited with Roger. Mrs Coulter tells Lyra that the intercision prevents the onset of troubling adult emotions. Lyra and the children are rescued by Scoresby, Iorek, the Gyptians, and Serafina Pekkala's flying witch clan. Lyra falls out of Scoresby's balloon and is taken by the panserbjørne to the castle of their usurping king, Iofur Raknison. She tricks Iofur into fighting Iorek, who arrives with the others to rescue Lyra. Iorek kills Iofur and takes his place as the rightful king.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_Chronicles"title="The Martian Chronicles">
The book projects American society immediately after World War II into a technologically advanced future where the amplification of humanity's potentials to create and destroy have both miraculous and devastating consequences.Events in the chronicle include the apocalyptic destruction of both Martian and human civilizations, both instigated by humans, though there are no stories with settings at the catastrophes. The outcomes of many stories raise concerns about the values and direction of America of the time by addressing militarism, science, technology, and war time prosperity that could result in a global nuclear war (e.g., "There Will Come Soft Rains" and "); depopulation that might be considered genocide (e.g., ", " and "); racial oppression and exploitation (e.g., "); ahistoricism, philistinism, and hostility towards religion (e.g., "); and censorship and conformity (e.g., ""), among others. On Bradbury's award of a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation in 2007, the book was recognized as one of his "masterworks that readers carry with them over a lifetime.""Rocket Summer" is a short vignette that describes the rocket launch of the first human expedition to Mars on a cold winter day in Ohio.Ylla, an unhappily married Martian, who, like all Martians, has telepathy, receives an impression of the human space traveler Nathaniel York. Ylla sings the 17th century song "Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes" (with lyrics from the poem "To Celia" by Ben Jonson), in English she doesn't understand. She has a romantic dream involving him, in which he takes her back to Earth. Her jealous husband, Yll, kills York and her memories fade.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost"title="Paradise Lost">
The poem follows the epic tradition of starting "in medias res" ("in the midst of things"), the background story being recounted later.Milton's story has two narrative arcs, one about Satan (Lucifer) and the other, Adam and Eve. It begins after Satan and the other fallen angels have been defeated and banished to Hell, or, as it is also called in the poem, Tartarus. In Pandæmonium, the capital city of Hell, Satan employs his rhetorical skill to organise his followers; he is aided by Mammon and Beelzebub. Belial and Moloch are also present. At the end of the debate, Satan volunteers to corrupt the newly created Earth and God's new and most favoured creation, Mankind. He braves the dangers of the Abyss alone, in a manner reminiscent of Odysseus or Aeneas. After an arduous traversal of the Chaos outside Hell, he enters God's new material World, and later the Garden of Eden.At several points in the poem, an Angelic War over Heaven is recounted from different perspectives. Satan's rebellion follows the epic convention of large-scale warfare. The battles between the faithful angels and Satan's forces take place over three days. At the final battle, the Son of God single-handedly defeats the entire legion of angelic rebels and banishes them from Heaven. Following this purge, God creates the World, culminating in his creation of Adam and Eve. While God gave Adam and Eve total freedom and power to rule over all creation, he gave them one explicit command: not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil on penalty of death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invisible_Man"title="The Invisible Man">
A mysterious man, Griffin, referred to as 'the stranger', arrives at the local inn owned by Mr. and Mrs. Hall of the English village of Iping, West Sussex, during a snowstorm. The stranger wears a long-sleeved, thick coat and gloves; his face is hidden entirely by bandages except for a prosthetic nose, and he wears a wide-brimmed hat. He is excessively reclusive, irascible, unfriendly, and introverted. He demands to be left alone and spends most of his time in his rooms working with a set of chemicals and laboratory apparatus, only venturing out at night. He also causes a lot of accidents, but when Mrs. Hall addresses this, the stranger angrily demands that the cost of the damage be put on his bill. While Griffin is staying at the inn, hundreds of strange glass bottles arrive. Many local townspeople believe this to be very odd. He becomes the talk of the village with many theorizing as to his origins.Meanwhile, a mysterious burglary occurs in the village. Griffin is running out of money and is trying to find a way to pay for his board and lodging. When his landlady demands that he pay his bill and quit the premises, he reveals his invisibility to her in a fit of anger. An attempt to apprehend the stranger by police officer Jaffers is thwarted when he undresses to take advantage of his invisibility, fights off his would-be captors, and flees to the South Downs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty_Thousand_Leagues_Under_the_Seas"title="Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas">
During the year 1866, ships of various nationalities sight a mysterious sea monster, which, it is later suggested, might be a gigantic narwhal. The U.S. government assembles an expedition in New York City to find and destroy the monster. Professor Pierre Aronnax, a French marine biologist and the story's narrator, is in town at the time and receives a last-minute invitation to join the expedition; he accepts. Canadian whaler and master harpooner Ned Land and Aronnax's faithful manservant Conseil are also among the participants.The expedition leaves Brooklyn aboard the United States Navy frigate "Abraham Lincoln", then travels south around Cape Horn into the Pacific Ocean. After a five-month search ending off Japan, the frigate locates and attacks the monster, which damages the ship's rudder. Aronnax and Land are hurled into the sea, and Conseil jumps into the water after them. They survive by climbing onto the "monster", which, they are startled to find, is a futuristic submarine. They wait on the deck of the vessel until morning, when they are captured, hauled inside, and introduced to the submarine's mysterious constructor and commander, Captain Nemo.The rest of the novel describes the protagonists' adventures aboard the "Nautilus", which was built in secrecy and now roams the seas beyond the reach of land-based governments. In self-imposed exile, Captain Nemo seems to have a dual motivation — a quest for scientific knowledge and a desire to escape terrestrial civilization. Nemo explains that his submarine is electrically powered and can conduct advanced marine research; he also tells his new passengers that his secret existence means he cannot let them leave — they must remain on board permanently.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_the_Aspidistra_Flying"title="Keep the Aspidistra Flying">
Gordon Comstock has 'declared war' on what he sees as an 'overarching dependence' on money by leaving a promising job as a copywriter for an advertising company called 'New Albion'—at which he shows great dexterity—and taking a low-paying job instead, ostensibly so he can write poetry. Coming from a respectable family background in which the inherited wealth has now become dissipated, Gordon resents having to work for a living. The 'war' (and the poetry), however, aren't going particularly well and, under the stress of his 'self-imposed exile' from affluence, Gordon has become absurd, petty and deeply neurotic.Comstock lives without luxuries in a bedsit in London, which he affords by working in a small bookshop owned by a Scot, McKechnie. He works intermittently at a "magnum opus" he plans to call 'London Pleasures', describing a day in London; meanwhile, his only published work, a slim volume of poetry entitled "Mice", collects dust on the remainder shelf. He is simultaneously content with his meagre existence and disdainful of it. He lives without financial ambition and the need for a 'good job,' but his living conditions are uncomfortable and his job is boring.Comstock is 'obsessed' by what he sees as a pervasion of money (the 'Money God', as he calls it) behind social relationships, feeling sure that women would find him more attractive if he were better off. At the beginning of the novel, he senses that his girlfriend Rosemary Waterlow, whom he met at New Albion and who continues to work there, is dissatisfied with him because of his poverty. An example of his financial embarrassment is when he is desperate for a pint of beer at his local pub, but has run out of pocket money and is ashamed to cadge a drink off his fellow lodger, Flaxman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy"title="The Illuminatus! Trilogy">
The trilogy's story begins with an investigation by two New York City police detectives (Saul Goodman and Barney Muldoon) into the bombing of "Confrontation", a leftist magazine, and the disappearance of its editor, Joe Malik. Discovering the magazine's investigation into the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., the two follow a trail of memos that suggest the involvement of powerful secret societies. They slowly become drawn into a web of conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, the magazine's reporter, George Dorn—having been turned loose without support deep in right-wing Mad Dog, Texas—is arrested for drug possession. He is jailed and physically threatened, at one point hallucinating about his own execution. The prison is bombed and he is rescued by the Discordians, led by the enigmatic Hagbard Celine, captain of a golden submarine. Hagbard represents the Discordians in their eternal battle against the Illuminati, the conspiratorial organization that secretly controls the world. He finances his operations by smuggling illicit substances.The plot meanders around the globe to such locations as Las Vegas (where a potentially deadly, secret U.S. government-developed mutated anthrax epidemic has been accidentally unleashed); Atlantis (where Howard, the talking porpoise, and his porpoise aides help Hagbard battle the Illuminati); Chicago (where someone resembling John Dillinger was killed many years ago); and to the island of Fernando Poo (the location of the next great Cold War standoff between the Soviet Union, China and the United States).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manon_Lescaut"title="Manon Lescaut">
Seventeen-year-old Des Grieux, studying philosophy at Amiens, comes from a noble and landed family, but forfeits his hereditary wealth and incurs the disappointment of his father by running away with Manon on her way to a convent. In Paris, the young lovers enjoy a blissful cohabitation, while Des Grieux struggles to satisfy Manon's taste for luxury. He acquires money by borrowing from his unwaveringly loyal friend Tiberge and by cheating gamblers. On several occasions, Des Grieux's wealth evaporates (by theft, in a house fire, etc.), prompting Manon to leave him for a richer man because she cannot stand the thought of living in penury.The two lovers finally end up in New Orleans, to which Manon has been deported as a prostitute, where they pretend to be married and live in idyllic peace for a while. But when Des Grieux reveals their unmarried state to the Governor, Étienne Perier, and asks to be wed to Manon, Perier's nephew, Synnelet sets his sights on winning Manon's hand. In despair, Des Grieux challenges Synnelet, to a duel and knocks him unconscious. Thinking he had killed the man and fearing retribution, the couple flee New Orleans and venture into the wilderness of Louisiana, hoping to reach an English settlement. Manon dies of exposure and exhaustion the following morning and, after burying his beloved, Des Grieux is eventually taken back to France by Tiberge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Commentary_on_the_UNIX_Operating_System"title="A Commentary on the UNIX Operating System">
"UNIX Operating System Source Code Level Six" is the kernel source code, lightly edited by Lions to better separate the functionality — system initialization and process management, interrupts and system calls, basic I/O, file systems and pipes and character devices. All procedures and symbols are listed alphabetically with a cross reference.The code as presented will run on a PDP-11/40 with RK-05 disk drive, LP-11 line printer interface, PCL-11 paper tape writer and KL-11 terminal interface, or a suitable PDP-11 emulator, such as SIMH."A Commentary on the UNIX Operating System" starts with notes on UNIX and other useful documentation (the UNIX manual pages, DEC hardware manuals and so on), a section on the architecture of the PDP-11 and a chapter on how to read C programs. The source commentary follows, divided into the same sections as the code. The book ends with suggested exercises for the student.As Lions explains, this commentary supplements the comments in the source. It is possible to understand the code without the extra commentary, and the reader is advised to do so and only read the notes as needed. The commentary also remarks on how the code might be improved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chainfire"title="Chainfire">
During a raid on his camp, Richard is seriously wounded and now Nicci must use Subtractive Magic in order to save him. Richard awakens to find his wife Kahlan missing and discovers that he is the only person alive who remembers her. As he begins to search for her, he learns that he is also hunted by a beast created by Jagang's Sisters of the Dark.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butter_Battle_Book"title="The Butter Battle Book">
The Yooks and Zooks live on opposite sides of a long curving wall. The narrator of the story is a Yook child whose grandfather takes him to the wall, explaining he is a retired soldier. The difference between the two cultures is that while the Yooks eat their bread with the butter side up, the Zooks eat their bread with the butter side down. The conflict between the two sides leads to an escalating arms race, which results in the threat of mutual assured destruction.The race begins when a Zook patrolman named VanItch slingshots the Yook patrolman's "Tough-Tufted Prickly Snick-Berry Switch" (a switch-esque truncheon with prickly burrs); the Yook involved in that incident was the narrator's grandfather. The Yooks then develop a machine with three slingshots interlinked, called a "Triple-Sling Jigger". This works once; but the next day VanItch counterattacks with his own creation, the "Jigger-Rock Snatchem", a machine with three nets to catch the rocks fired by the Triple-Sling Jigger and fling them back to the Yooks' side. Every time the patrolman is defeated, he reports this to the Chief Yookeroo, who tells him not to worry ("My Bright Boys are thinking"), and three intelligent Yooks, referred to as "the Boys in the Back Room", are shown drafting plans for a more modern weapon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridlinked"title="Gridlinked">
The book follows two main narrative threads: one which follows the exploits of Ian Cormac, a 007-like agent from ECS (Earth Central Security), and another thread which follows the story of Arian Pelter and his band of Separatists from Cheyne III. Cormac is internally "gridlinked" to the ECS AI grid, allowing him realtime mental access and control to most devices on the ECS network. The book opens with a Runcible disaster on the ice planet Samarkand, which was in the process of being terraformed by the energy the Runcible produces. The incident destroys a significant area of the planet's surface, while the loss of Runcible heat output plunges the rest of the planet into unsurvivable temperature ranges. On Cheyne III, Cormac has infiltrated the Separatists by becoming the lover of Angelina Pelter – sister of Arian Pelter. She and Arian have become suspicious of Ian, primarily due to his increasingly inhuman perspective on human affairs, a problem induced by years of being gridlinked. Cormac is forced to kill Angelina and dispose of her body at sea. After a chase across the city, Arian and his main henchman John Stanton have a shootout with Cormac, during which Arian receives a serious facial injury, and Cormac is called away to look into the Samarkand incident, leaving Arian and his crew at large.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amber_Room_(novel)"title="The Amber Room (novel)">
The story is about judge Rachel Cutler and her husband Paul, a divorced American couple caught up in a treasure hunt for the long-missing Amber Room. A couple of competitive professional treasure hunters complicate matters. In their search through Germany to uncover the secrets behind its disappearance, they escape near-death in the tunnels running through the Harz Mountains, find themselves hanging off the edge of a tall church steeple, and discover a surprise in a hidden chamber of a Bohemian castle in the Czech Republic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_at_the_End_of_Time"title="The World at the End of Time">
"World at the End of Time" follows the story of a young Earth-born human, Viktor Sorricaine, on a colony expedition to a distant star system. The colonists are frozen for the long trip between stars. Unknown to both the humans of Earth and the colonists, the stars around them are home to immensely long-lived (effectively immortal) plasma creatures—with no knowledge of, or interest in, the activities of insignificant matter creatures.Wan-To, one of the oldest and most powerful plasma creatures, is engaged in a war. After creating modified copies of himself, or "children", for company, Wan-To finds himself in a deadly game of chess with them. The "board" is the entire galaxy and the weapons are the stars themselves. Each star may be home to an enemy "child"; using a variety of exotic particles, Wan-To is able to cause a targeted star to flare and kill any enemy that may be living within it. Some time after the colonists have left Earth, its own sun falls victim to the war, being made to explode with humanity on Earth being destroyed as collateral damage. The colonists are thus the only humans left. Into the middle of this battlefield, the three colony ships ("Ark", "New Mayflower" and "Argosy") unwittingly head for their new home. Upon arriving, the colony begins to establish itself ... only to discover that their entire local group of stars appears to be undergoing a bizarre acceleration, and are dimming. After a disastrous disease outbreak and terraforming failures, the desperate colonists eventually decide to investigate the strange radiation emissions from a small world within their solar system.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Faustus_(novel)"title="Doctor Faustus (novel)">
The origins of the narrator and the protagonist in the fictitious small town of Kaisersaschern on the Saale, the name of Zeitblom's apothecary father, Wohlgemut, and the description of Adrian Leverkühn as an old-fashioned German type, with a cast of features "from a time before the Thirty Years' War", evoke the old post-medieval Germany. In their respective Catholic and Lutheran origins, and theological studies, they are heirs to the German Renaissance and the world of Dürer and Bach, but sympathetic to, and admired by, the "keen-scented receptivity of Jewish circles".They are awakened to musical knowledge by Wendell Kretzschmar, a German American lecturer and musicologist who visits Kaisersaschern. After schooling together, both boys study at Halle – Adrian studies theology; Zeitblom does not, but participates in discussions with the theological students – but Adrian becomes absorbed in musical harmony, counterpoint and polyphony as a key to metaphysics and mystic numbers, and follows Kretzschmar to Leipzig to study with him.Zeitblom describes "with a religious shudder" Adrian's embrace with the woman who gave him syphilis (whom Adrian names "Esmeralda" after the butterfly that fascinates his father), how he worked her name in note-ciphers into his compositions, and how the medics who sought to heal him were all prevented from effecting a cure by mysterious and deadly interventions. Zeitblom begins to perceive the demonic, as Adrian develops other friendships, first with the translator Rüdiger Schildknapp, and then after his move to Munich with the handsome young violinist Rudi Schwerdtfeger, Frau Rodde and her doomed daughters Clarissa and Ines, a numismatist named Dr. Kranich, and two artists named Leo Zink and Baptist Spengler.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florante_at_Laura"title="Florante at Laura">
## Florante's tale.The son of a princess and a royal adviser, Florante grew up in happiness, showered with love. He liked to play games when he was six years old, and was almost captured by a vulture that entered in their mountain cottage, which was also followed by the attack of a falcon. He was saved by his cousin Menalipo, an archer from Epirus.When he turned eleven, his parents, Duke Briseo and Princess Floresca, sent him to Athens, Greece to study under Antenor, a renowned teacher. There, he met Adolfo, a fellow countryman, the brightest student in their school. After five months of studying Astrology, Philosophy and Mathematics, Florante surpassed Adolfo's capabilities, talents, and intelligence, gaining popularity.While performing during a school contest, Adolfo attempted to kill Florante because of his jealousy towards Florante's popularity. Florante's friend, Menandro, was quick enough to intervene. Adolfo headed home to Albania after his failed attempt. One year later, Florante received a letter from his father, announcing the death of his mother. Florante fainted for 2 hours from the grief.Seven months later, Florante receives a second letter from his father telling him to return to Albania. Menandro, unwilling to be separated from him and allowed by his uncle Antenor, he accompanied him on his journey. Upon his arrival to Albania, an emissary of the kingdom of Crotona requested his assistance in the incoming war against the Persians. Florante had not the will to refuse, for the King of Crotona was his grandfather. During his stay in Albania, Florante was invited to the royal palace and was glamoured of Laura, the daughter of King Linceo. He stared at her for hours forgetting about the war then lost.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burning_World_(novel)"title="The Burning World (novel)">
In contrast to Ballard's earlier novel "The Drowned World", "The Burning World" describes a world in which water is scarce. After an extensive drought, rivers have turned to trickles and the earth to dust, causing the world's populations to head toward the oceans in search of water. The drought is caused by industrial waste flushed into the ocean, which form an oxygen-permeable barrier of saturated long-chain polymers that prevents evaporation and destroys the precipitation cycle.The main focus of the book is on the surrealistic landscapes forming a changing setting symbolising the developing psychological conflicts and alienation of the principal character.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Game_of_Hide_and_Seek"title="A Game of Hide and Seek">
Harriet Claridge and Vesey Macmillan are loose acquaintances of the same age who meet as Harriet's mother, Lilian, and Vesey's aunt, Caroline, are close friends who met as young suffragettes. The summer they are 18 Vesey is sent to spend time in the countryside with his aunt before he is sent to Oxford. Harriet is frequently with Caroline as she tutors Vesey's young cousins. Harriet develops a crush on Vesey who only casually returns her feelings. Vesey assumes he will naturally become great and dreams of becoming a writer. Harriet, who is considered by her family to be unexceptional, has no dreams aside from being with Vesey. Sensing how deep the attachment is on Harriet's side, Vesey's aunt writes to her sister to request Vesey return home early.With Vesey gone and the summer over, Harriet manages to get a job working as an assistant in a clothing shop and begins to date Charles Jephcott, her much older next door neighbour who had previously been jilted at the altar and is reluctant to recommit to another woman.Over Christmas Vesey returns for a quick visit. Harriet's feelings for him are renewed enough that she rejects Charles when he proposes to her. Her mother dies shortly after, leaving her an orphan, and in the meantime Charles continues to care for her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_Pig"title="Interstellar Pig">
When Zena, Manny, and Joe move into the cinder-block cottage next door, Barney is intrigued by their glamorous, exotic lifestyle. His fascination grows when Zena introduces Barney to their favorite pastime: Interstellar Pig, a board game in which the key objective is to finish the game with the Piggy card in hand.Zena quickly briefs him on the rules: each player picks their character from a box of cards depicting different aliens. Every alien race has its own strengths, weaknesses, and IRSC (Interstellar Relative Sapience Code, with lower numbers favorable). When the time runs out, every home planet will be obliterated "except" the one belonging to the holder of the Piggy. Barney is amazed when the neighbors keep choosing the same character cards: Joe repeatedly picks water-breathing Jrlb; Zena always chooses Zulma, an arachnoid nymph; and Manny always picks Moyna, an octopus-like gas bag.While snooping through Zena's underwear drawer, Barney finds a manuscript written by Captain Latham— the same Captain who had built the house that Barney and his parents were renting— telling of the event that caused his brother to go crazy. At sea, the Captain rescued a man floating in the ocean, described as having a "leathery, greenish, reptilian hide" due to sunburn and a "swollen contusion", "yellow and filmed with slime" on his forehead. Insisting that the man is the Devil, the Captain's brother strangles him—and in punishment, is keelhauled. Although he survives, his mind is damaged due to the oxygen deprivation, and he spends the rest of his life locked in his room (which later became Barney's bedroom), scratching patterns into the wooden walls and clinging to the strange trinket he had taken from the murdered man's corpse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Futures_of_Tycho"title="The Green Futures of Tycho">
The main character is Tycho Tithonus, an 11-year-old boy. Each child in his family is named after a famous artist or scientist and their parents expect them to live up to their names. Tycho himself is named after Sleator's younger brother, who in turn, was named after Tycho Brahe, the Danish astronomer. He finds a pocket sized time machine in the family's garden. He immediately uses it to change some things from the past and to visit the future. But as he travels more and more he realizes that he is turning into something horrible and it becomes a race against time to save himself and his family from his own future self.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Mole_and_the_Weapons_of_Mass_Destruction"title="Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction">
The story also deals with an issue that has affected Sue Townsend directly; she was registered blind in 2001, as a result of long-term diabetes. "Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction" was typed by Townsend's husband from dictation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Way_for_Ducklings"title="Make Way for Ducklings">
The story begins as two ducks (Mr. and Mrs. Mallard) fly over various potential locations in New England to start a family. Each time Mr. Mallard selects a location, Mrs. Mallard finds something wrong with it. Tired from their search, the mallards land at the Public Garden Lagoon to spend the night. In the morning, a swan boat passes by the mallards. The mallards mistake the swan boat for a real bird and enjoy peanuts thrown by the people on the boat. Mrs. Mallard suggests that they build their nest in the Public Garden. However, just as she says this, her husband is nearly run down by a passing bicyclist. The mallards continue their search, flying over Boston landmarks such as Beacon Hill, the Massachusetts State House, and Louisburg Square. The Mallards finally decide on an island in the Charles River. From this island, the Mallards visit a policeman named Michael on the shore, who feeds them peanuts every day.Shortly thereafter, the Mallards molt, and will not be able to fly until their new feathers grow again, and Mrs. Mallard hatches eight ducklings named Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack, and Quack. After the ducklings are born, Mr. Mallard decides to take a trip up the river to see what the rest of it is like. Mr. and Mrs. Mallard agree to meet at the Public Garden in one week. In the meantime, Mrs. Mallard teaches the eight ducklings all they need to know about being ducks, such as swimming, diving, marching along, and to avoid dangers such as bicycles and other wheeled objects.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilers_of_the_Sea"title="Toilers of the Sea">
A woman arrives in Guernsey, with her son Gilliat, and buys a house said to be haunted. The boy grows up, the woman dies. Gilliat becomes a good fisherman and sailor. People believe him to be a wizard.In Guernsey also lives Mess Lethierry – a former sailor and owner of the first steamship of the island, the "Durande" – with his niece Deruchette. One day, near Christmas, when going to church, she sees Gilliat on the road behind her and writes his name in the snow. He sees this and becomes obsessed with her gesture. In time he falls in love with her and goes to play the bagpipes near her house.Sieur Clubin, the trusted captain of "Durande", sets up a plan to sink the ship on the Hanois reef and flee with a ship of Spanish smugglers, "Tamaulipas". He gets in touch with Rantaine, a swindler who had stolen a large sum of money from Mess Lethierry many years ago. Clubin takes the money from Rantaine at gunpoint.In thick fog, Clubin sails for the Hanois reef from where he can easily swim to the shore, meet the smugglers, and disappear, giving the appearance of having drowned. Because of the fog he has mistakenly arrived at the Douvres reef, which is still halfway between Guernsey and France. Left alone on the ship, he is terrified, but he sees a cutter and leaps into the water to catch it. At that moment he is grabbed by the leg and is pulled down to the bottom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Laughs"title="The Man Who Laughs">
The novel is divided into two parts: "La mer et la nuit" ("The sea and the night") and "Par ordre du roi" ("On the king's command").In late 17th-century England, a homeless boy named Gwynplaine rescues an infant girl during a snowstorm, her mother having frozen to death. They meet an itinerant carnival vendor who calls himself Ursus, and his pet wolf, Homo (whose name is a pun on the Latin saying "Homo homini lupus"). Gwynplaine's mouth has been mutilated into a perpetual grin; Ursus is initially horrified, then moved to pity, and he takes them in. 15 years later, Gwynplaine has grown into a strong young man, attractive except for his distorted visage. The girl, now named Dea, is blind, and has grown into a beautiful and innocent young woman. By touching his face, Dea concludes that Gwynplaine is perpetually happy. They fall in love. Ursus and his surrogate children earn a meagre living in the fairs of southern England. Gwynplaine keeps the lower half of his face concealed. In each town, Gwynplaine gives a stage performance in which the crowds are provoked to laughter when Gwynplaine reveals his grotesque face.The spoiled and jaded Duchess Josiana, the illegitimate daughter of King James II, is bored by the dull routine of court. Her fiancé, David Dirry-Moir, to whom she has been engaged since infancy, tells Josiana that the only cure for her boredom is Gwynplaine. She attends one of Gwynplaine's performances, and is aroused by the combination of his virile grace and his facial deformity. Gwynplaine is aroused by Josiana's physical beauty and haughty demeanor. Later, an agent of the royal court, Barkilphedro, who wishes to humiliate and destroy Josiana by compelling her to marry the 'clown' Gwynplaine, arrives at the caravan and compels Gwynplaine to follow him. Gwynplaine is ushered to a dungeon in London, where a physician named Hardquannone is being tortured to death. Hardquannone recognizes Gwynplaine, and identifies him as the boy whose abduction and disfigurement Hardquannone arranged 23 years earlier. A flashback relates the doctor's story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug-Jargal"title="Bug-Jargal">
The story of Bug-Jargal begins several weeks before the Haitian Revolution, when Toussaint Louverture fights the colonial regime. D'Auverney, the nephew of a landed aristocrat with many slaves, is betrothed to Marie, his cousin. A slave, Pierrot, falls in love with Marie, but can not do anything because of the obvious racial and cultural barriers between them. However, Pierrot does save Marie from a crocodile, but soon finds himself thrown in prison for trying to protect another slave from his owner's wrath. D'Auverney befriends him, and not long before the Haitian Revolution, Pierrot warns the lovers to flee the island. They stay despite the warning, and the day of the wedding the slave revolution begins, and the white landowners see the rapid and violent dissolution of their society. Pierrot saves Marie from a slave attack and whisks her away, but D'Auverney, thinking that Pierrot had kidnapped his new wife for his own desires, wanders into a dark grotto. He is taken prisoner by the infamously violent slave leader Biassou. In the grotto the freed slaves force their captured white prisoners to kill each other in order to preserve their own skins. Pierrot luckily comes to the rescue of D'Auverney, who learns that Pierrot is really Bug-Jargal, the mystical leader of the slaves. Pierrot leads him to his wife, and dies protecting his friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-Three"title="Ninety-Three">
The year is 1793. In Brittany during the Royalist insurrection of the Chouannerie, a troop of "Blues" (soldiers of the French Republic) encounter in the bocage Michelle Fléchard, a peasant woman, and her three young children, who are fleeing from the conflict. She explains that her husband and parents have been killed in the peasant revolt that started the insurrection. The troop's commander, Sergeant Radoub, convinces them to look after the family.Meanwhile, at sea, a group of Royalist "Whites" are planning to land the Marquis de Lantenac, a Breton aristocrat whose leadership could transform the fortunes of the rebellion. While at sea, a sailor fails to properly secure his cannon, which rolls out of control and damages the ship. The sailor risks his life to secure the cannon and save their ship. Lantenac awards the man a medal for his bravery and then executes him (without trial) for failing in his duty. Their corvette is spotted by ships of the Republic. Lantenac slips away in a boat with one supporter, Halmalo, the brother of the executed sailor, and the corvette distracts the Republican ships by provoking a battle the damaged ship cannot win. The corvette is destroyed, but Lantenac lands safely in Brittany and sends Halmalo ahead as a messenger.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Day_of_a_Condemned_Man"title="The Last Day of a Condemned Man">
A man has been condemned to death by the guillotine in 19th-century France. In Bicêtre writes down his thoughts, feelings and fears while awaiting his execution. His writing traces his change in psyche vis-a-vis the world outside the prison cell throughout his imprisonment, and describes his life in prison, everything from what his cell looks like to the personality of the prison priest. He does not betray his name or what he has done to the reader, though he vaguely hints that he has killed someone; just a nameless, faceless, irrelevant victim.The novella also contains a blueprint of Jean Valjean, the hero of Hugo's "Les Miserables". As the Condemned is waiting to be executed he meets another condemned man who recounts his life story. The man tells him that he was originally sent to prison for stealing a loaf of bread to save his sister's family. This is the same backstory that Hugo gives for Jean Valjean.At another point he tries to escape by conning a superstitious guard to give him his clothes. The guard almost does until common sense gets the better of him and he declines exchanging clothes with the Condemned.On the day that the Condemned is to be executed he sees his three-year-old daughter for the last time, but she no longer recognizes him, and she tells him that her father is dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alienist"title="The Alienist">
Narrated from the first-person perspective of John Moore, a crime reporter for "The New York Times", the novel begins on January 8, 1919, the day that Theodore Roosevelt is buried. Moore has dinner with Laszlo Kreizler, the famous alienist. Kreizler is surrounded by those he has rescued, including his black servant, Cyrus Montrose, and a boy named Stevie "Stevepipe" Taggert. (Mary Palmer, another patient and Kreizler's housekeeper, is deceased by the time of this dinner.) Together, they reminisce about their times with Roosevelt, but they focus on one moment: the spring of 1896 and their efforts to catch a serial killer on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The novel is narrated in retrospect, with Moore commenting on the events and how they impacted later history.At 2 AM on March 3, 1896, Moore is awakened by one of Kreizler's servants banging incessantly on his door. Stevie, a young boy whom Kreizler had saved from being institutionalized and who is dedicated to Kreizler, brings Moore to the scene of a crime that Kreizler wants Moore to see. Roosevelt, the police commissioner, is already at the scene. When Moore sees the nature of the brutal murder, he is appalled. The victim, Georgio "Gloria" Santorelli, is a 13-year-old boy who prostituted himself by dressing up as a girl; the boy's wrists are tied behind his back, and he is kneeling with his face pressed on the steel walkway where he was found. Though makeup paint and powder on his face are still intact, his eyes are gouged out, his right hand is chopped off, his genitals are cut off and stuffed between his jaws, he has huge gashes across his entire body, his throat has been slashed, and his buttocks are "shorn off". The policeman at the scene, Detective Sergeant Connor, makes it clear that murders of such victims are usually ignored.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dominators"title="The Dominators">
An alien craft bearing the ruthless Dominators arrives on the peaceful planet of Dulkis. The craft lands on the Island of Death, a nuclear test site housing an anti-war museum, and soon absorbs all the radiation on the island. The robotic Quarks are sent out by the Dominators to prepare boreholes into the planet’s crust in order to convert the planet into rocket fuel. Toba uses the Quarks to fire on and kill three adventure seekers who stumble across his project. Their pilot Cully, however, survives by hiding, though the craft that brought him to the island is destroyed. Rago is furious that these potential slaves have been wasted.The TARDIS arrives on another part of the island and the Doctor and his companions Jamie and Zoe hear the explosion of the craft being destroyed. They take shelter in the museum and meet three other newly arrived Dulcians, Educator Balan and his young charges Teel and Kando. All are puzzled that the radiation reading on the Island is nil, since it should be radioactive after the nuclear explosion 172 years earlier. Cully arrives too, and tells them about the murderous Dominators and their robots. Balan does not accept this: Cully, the son of the Director of the ruling council, is well-known as a practical joker.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni's_Room"title="Giovanni's Room">
David, a young American man whose girlfriend has gone off to Spain to contemplate marriage, is left alone in Paris and begins an affair with an Italian man, Giovanni. The entire story is narrated by David during "the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life," when Giovanni will be executed. Baldwin tackles social isolation, gender and sexual identity crisis, as well as conflicts of masculinity within this story of a young bisexual man navigating the public sphere in a society that rejects a core aspect of his sexuality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_of_a_Spacewoman"title="Memoirs of a Spacewoman">
The aforementioned Spacewoman in question is a scientist and explorer. At this point, humans have explored many worlds in a number of different galaxies. Their quest is for knowledge and to be helpful to whom they encounter, but there is a strict rule against 'interference'. It is assumed to be in the far future, but no dates are ever given and it's mentioned that time works differently on different planets. The story is a retelling of the narrator’s experience training and career as a space explorer.The narrator, Mary, is a specialist in 'communication' - a kind of telepathy that allows her to communicate with nearly every species she comes across in her exploration. She operates in a society where women are just as likely as men to be leaders, though she herself prefers not to lead. She operates in a more utopian society where leadership is not gender-specific, but Mary does make it clear that she does not want to lead herself. Their society is also one that does not engage with the same rules of sexual expression that we do. Mary is aware of her female sexuality and is free to enjoy it as she pleases. This results in her having multiple children. Four of her children are described as “normal” as they were conceived just as any other child. Viola, however, was conceived after her ovaries were stimulated through her interaction with a martian, resulting in a haploid child, who was healthy nonetheless.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Men"title="Ten Men">
"Ten Men" is a picaresque novel in that the heroine is constantly "moving on", time and again leaving behind the people she has been intimate with and associating with a new set in some other part of the world. The novel asks the basic question of how many men a woman "needs" until she has found the right partner and thus fulfilment in life—a question which, although frequently discussed in the wake of the sexual revolution, has turned out to be largely unanswerable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_the_Caves"title="The Secret of the Caves">
The book begins with Chet Morton showing off his new metal detector to the Hardy boys and Biff Hooper while inviting them to camp at Honeycomb Caves. Meanwhile, their father, Fenton Hardy, is working to protect a Coastal Radar Station from sabotage during its construction. They are interrupted by Mary Todd who tells them that her brother, Morgan Todd, is missing and asks Fenton to find him. The Hardy boys and their father decide to team up to both find Morgan Todd and protect the Coastal Radar Station.The Hardy boys travel to Kenworthy College and meet Todd's colleague, Cadmus Quill. A clue leads them to Rockaway, but when it is mentioned they notice strange behavior from Cadmus Quill. While driving to Rockaway they hear a radio report that the radar station has been damaged, so they instead return to Bayport. Their help is not needed so they leave for Rockaway, stopping at "Palis Paris" to purchase a spinning wheel for their Aunt Gertrude. When they stop in at "Tuttle's General Store" Mr. Tuttle warns them to keep away from Honeycomb Caves because people have seen strange lights and heard shooting coming from the caves. Instead of leaving, the boys decide to camp at Honeycomb Caves with their friends Chet and Biff.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_of_Two_Worlds_(novel)"title="Man of Two Worlds (novel)">
On the distant planet Dreenor lives the most powerful species in the Galaxy. All of the Universe is the creation of the Dreens, who possess the power of "idmaging", turning their thoughts into reality. They can create whole worlds, of which the wild, ungovernable planet Earth is one. But suddenly Earth is a threat, its people on the verge of discovering interstellar travel, and with it, of gaining access to Dreenor itself - a paradox within a paradox, not to be permitted. While the elder Dreens plan Earth's destruction, a youngster, Ryll, embarks on an unauthorized jaunt across space. Forced for survival to merge bodies with an “Earther” whose mind is as strong as his own, he has to battle for control. And the future of all earthly life lies in the hand of a composite being, half wily, aggressive human, half naive adolescent alien, confused and far from home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Glass"title="Tower of Glass">
The plot involves 24th-century entrepreneur-tycoon-scientist Simeon Krug, who has created a race of androids to serve humanity. Krug directs the construction of an immense tower of glass in the Canadian tundra. The edifice is not a monument, however, but a way to communicate with a distant planetary nebula, NGC 7293, from which an intelligent (though indecipherable) message has been received. Krug is also building a starship to send there, which is to be crewed by androids in hibernation.The tower construction is directed by Krug's most faithful android, Alpha Thor Watchman. Thor and other leading androids have invented a secret religion for androids, based on the vision that their creator, Krug, intends to eventually make them equal to humans. Krug is unaware of the religion. Thor's dream is to convince him through indirect means, including the manipulation of his weak-willed son and heir, Manuel, through a sexual relationship with a female android, Alpha Lilith Meson. Thor eventually falls in love with her, as does Manuel.After Thor and Lilith have manipulated Manuel into telling his father about the android religion, Krug insists that the minds of he and Thor be connected in the "shunt room" which allows one mind to probe another's (a form of technologically enabled telepathy). Thor discovers via the link that Krug regards androids as mere things, and has no intention of treating them as equal to womb-born humans. Realizing that Krug will never give freedom to androids, Thor loses his faith and announces Krug's true nature to androids worldwide. With the collapse of their religion, androids across all of Earth rebel. Many walk off their jobs, others take control of key Earth installations, and some even kill humans in their long-suppressed rage. Thor then causes the fall of the nearly-complete, tower.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callahan's_Lady"title="Callahan's Lady">
The storyline focuses on Maureen, an underage streetwalker who is stabbed by her pimp in a dark alley one night. Fortunately for Maureen, Lady Sally is nearby: she had been walking her werebeagle. After defeating the pimp in hand-to-hand combat, Sally brings Maureen home. Her brothel has a fully functioning medical facility, where Maureen is treated and healed.She falls in love with the place for its ambiance and safety but is rejected as an employee for many reasons. Most importantly, she is underage but she also has severe self-loathing issues. Lady Sally enjoys the fact that Maureen comes to accept and befriend the werebeagle and a talking German Shepherd but this is not enough let the main character stay.Maureen's old pimp tracks down the brothel and puts many of the visitors in danger. Maureen uses her wits to help defeat the man; this convinces Sally to let her stay in a non-sexual context. The plot skips to Maureen becoming eighteen, she is allowed to take on sexual duties.The rest of the plot focuses on three different subsequent incidents. There is 'Colt', a client with an unusual addiction that nobody seems to notice, one that presents various threats. Later, Maureen and her close friend Phillip swiftly realize that they are doing many things they do not wish to do over the course of their work-day. The concept of 'being forced into it' is something that Lady Callahan and her staff oppose in many, varied ways. Maureen and Phillip find that they are keeping quiet about this, even though they wish to tell everyone possible.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Broker"title="The Broker">
Joel Backman is "the Broker," considered to be one of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington, D.C. However, Backman's life falls apart when a deal collapses involving a hacked spy satellite that nobody knows about, and he ends up in jail. Six years later, the political wheels have turned and other power-hungry men are eager for Backman's blood. Bargains are made, and after an outgoing disgraced President grants him a full pardon at the behest of the CIA, Backman finds himself spirited out of the prison in the middle of the night, bundled onto a military plane, and flown to Italy to begin a new life. He has a new name and mysterious new "friends" who teach him to speak the language and to blend in with the people in Bologna.However, Backman soon realizes that something is not quite kosher in this new setup, in that he is under constant surveillance. In reality, the CIA is setting him up for professional assassins from China, Israel, Russia, Saudi Arabia and other countries. They intend to sit back and wait to see who kills him in an effort to solve the biggest mystery to hit the US government in decades: the question of who built this seemingly impenetrable and most advanced satellite ever. It turns out to be China; despite having low satellite technology, they stole the information from the US.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphereland"title="Sphereland">
The Circles (who are appointed as priests/leaders of Flatland due to their many sides, or an appearance thereof) do not take A Square's revelation about a third dimension to be accurate, and A Square is ostracized by his community. Then after some time, society becomes more open to the ideas of Spaceland and, overall, to change and advancement. However, when a prominent surveyor finds a Triangle with more than 180 degrees, he is fired from his job and generally considered a crackpot, since such a construction is not possible in Euclidean geometry. He eventually makes friends with the grandson of A Square, A Hexagon, because he is a mathematician and scientist. Together, they come upon a theory to explain the unusual measurements: they actually live on a very large sphere, and the Triangles have more than 180 degrees due to being inscribed on a non-planar surface.With help from the sphere from the first novel, they are able to prove this theory. However, the established scientific community is not able to comprehend the idea proposed by the two, and thus they do not attempt to enlighten Flatland. Furthermore, as the residents of Flatland advance, they begin to travel in space; they see distant worlds like their own, and the surveyor tries to find the distance between their world and these distant worlds, using trigonometry and radar. From his calculations, he and the hexagon determine that the universe is expanding; again they try to reveal this theory to the outside world, but again it is not accepted. Therefore, like his grandfather in the previous novel, the hexagon writes a book that is not to be opened until the theory of the expanding universe is discovered and accepted by others. Then they live an inferior existence without any more contact with the sphere.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Midshipman_Hornblower"title="Mr. Midshipman Hornblower">
Horatio Hornblower commences his career in the Royal Navy as an inexperienced midshipman in January 1794. Through a series of challenges and adventures both in and out of combat, Hornblower discovers he is actually talented in both seamanship and leadership.People initially thought Hornblower a dullard but later grew to respect him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lieutenant_Hornblower"title="Lieutenant Hornblower">
William Bush, who becomes Hornblower's faithful companion and best friend, is introduced boarding HMS "Renown" as the third lieutenant. Hornblower is the fifth and most junior lieutenant. It is quickly apparent that Captain James Sawyer suffers from paranoia, constantly suspecting plots to undermine his authority and inflicting irrational and arbitrary punishments upon Hornblower and the other officers. A young volunteer named Wellard suffers particularly badly. Four of the lieutenants meet in secret in the lower decks to discuss what can be done, but are interrupted when Wellard warns them that the captain is on his way to arrest "mutineers". The officers scatter. Then they learn that the captain has fallen head-first into the hold.When the captain regains consciousness, he has entirely lost his reason due to the fall, and is incapable of resuming command. Buckland, the first lieutenant, takes charge. Ordered to capture an anchorage from which Spanish privateers are operating, he organises a clumsy frontal attack, which is repulsed. Hornblower suggests a surprise attack at night. Bush leads the successful attack, but it is Hornblower who is instrumental in negotiating the unconditional surrender of the remaining Spanish forces.The Spanish base at Samaná is destroyed, a Spanish privateer and some small craft are captured and Buckland's promotion seems assured. Unfortunately for him, the Spanish prisoners seize control of the "Renown" during the night, taking Buckland prisoner while he is asleep in his cot. Hornblower alertly retakes the ship, but in the desperate fighting, Bush is severely wounded and the helpless Sawyer is killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornblower_and_the_Hotspur"title="Hornblower and the Hotspur">
On 2 April 1802 Hornblower marries Maria, the daughter of his landlady, at the "church of St Thomas à Becket" in Portsmouth. He is unable to bring himself to be so cruel as to stop the ceremony despite thinking that "Maria was not the right woman to be his wife." Hornblower had, just days before, been promoted commander into HM sloop "Hotspur" as the fragile Peace of Amiens is breaking down and Britain is re-arming for a new war with France under Napoleon Bonaparte. His new commander, Admiral William Cornwallis, permits him a brief honeymoon before ordering him to set sail on a delicate mission."Hotspur" reconnoiters the approaches to the French naval base of Brest, and narrowly avoids capture when, unbeknownst to Hornblower, war is declared. Once the British fleet blockades Brest, Hornblower's restlessness and perfectionism prompts him to lead attacks and landing parties. He defeats a French attempt to break the blockade to send troops to Ireland, the action ending on the morning of 1 January 1804. That same day Maria gives birth to little Hornblower, as Hornblower discovers when the damaged "Hotspur" returns to Plymouth for repairs.In spite of his successes Hornblower makes no financial profit from his activities. When Admiral William Cornwallis tries to put him in a position where he can make easy prize money by capturing a large shipment of Spanish gold, he instead takes on a stronger enemy frigate sent to warn the convoy and keeps it from accomplishing its mission. Eventually, by superior seamanship and skill, he drives it away. Hornblower rationalises that this is poetic justice, after he had earlier connived to facilitate the escape of his steward, who was facing hanging for striking a superior officer (a punishment Hornblower could not abide). It later transpires that the ships were claimed by the Government as (Droits of Admiralty) so that Hornblower would not have profited in any case. (Prize money was only paid to naval officers and men for ships they captured as part of a war, and Britain was not at war with Spain until soon afterwards.)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Across_the_River_and_into_the_Trees"title="Across the River and into the Trees">
The first chapter of "Across the River and Into the Trees" begins with a frame story depicting 50-year-old Colonel Richard Cantwell duck hunting in the Marano Lagoon, between Venice and Trieste in the present, taking place during the closing days of World War II. It is eventually revealed that Cantwell, referred to throughout the book simply as "Colonel", has a terminal heart condition. Beginning in the second chapter, the book is presented primarily through a flashback narrative of the Colonel's experiences during both World Wars, from his service in the Italian army during World War I, to his time in the American Army, ascending to general before being demoted to colonel. Hemingway provides great detail in describing Italy, from its landscape to its food and drink.The primary narrative of the book focuses on the Colonel's romance with the 18-year-old Venetian Renata, whom he calls "Daughter". Renata is aware of the Colonel's terminal illness, and the book details how both characters come to terms with the Colonel's impending death. Many of the Colonel's wartime memories are revealed as stories he tells to Renata, who wants to "share" in his experiences.The novel ends with Cantwell suffering a fatal series of heart attacks as he leaves Venice after the duck hunt, on the same day as the book began. Shortly before dying, the Colonel recounts to his driver Stonewall Jackson's last words, from which the novel draws its name: "No, no, let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees." The final scene shows the driver reading a note the Colonel had given him, indicating that his belongings should be given to their "rightful owner", Renata.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pigman"title="The Pigman">
The novel begins with an "oath" signed by John Conlan and Lorraine Jensen, two high school sophomores, who pledge that they will report only the facts about their experiences with Mr. Pignati.When John, Lorraine, and two teen troublemakers, Norton Kelly and Dennis Kobin, are bored, they make prank phone calls. The goal of the game is to see who can stay on the phone the longest. When it is Lorraine's turn, she picks out Mr. Pignati's phone number and pretends to be calling from a charity. After she wins the game, Mr. Pignati offers to donate ten dollars. Against Lorraine's better judgment, she and John travel to Pignati's house to collect the funds. After hesitantly accepting "The Pigman's" offer of going to the zoo, a friendship begins to blossom between the three of them. He begins to take on the role of a parental figure for the two teenagers, something neither of them has.John and Lorraine's visits become increasingly frequent, and during one such visit, they discover a document inside his room. After reading it, they realize The Pigman has been lying about where his wife has been. His wife, Conchetta, is dead, instead of being on vacation as The Pigman has stated numerous times. Soon, John and Lorraine visit The Pigman daily after school, and he showers them with gifts, food, and most importantly, the love and attention they do not receive in their own joyless homes. They reveal to him that they were never affiliated with any charity, and he reveals what they already know: that his wife is dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Smashers_of_the_Galaxy_Rangers"title="Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers">
Two college students, Chuck van Chider and his friend Jerry Courtenay, accidentally invent a device that can transport them through space, powered by a substance called "Cheddite", which is created by irradiating Cheddar cheese.Chuck and Jerry, their apparent mutual love interest Sally Goodfellow and their janitor-turned-KGB spy Old John find themselves transported to Titan, a moon of Saturn, where they must contend with the native Titanians. Later, through a bizarre chain of events, they are flung into the far reaches of the galaxy, where they become involved in an intergalactic war that could change the universe forever. By the end of the novel, they have returned to Earth, where Chuck and Jerry are revealed as gay lovers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Now_and_on_Earth"title="Now and on Earth">
Set in San Diego during World War II, it is a semi-autobiographical novel of the author's life working in an airplane manufacturing plant during the war years and the frustrations he endured there and in his personal life at the time. The main character is named James Dillon, a pen name under which Thompson previously published short stories.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkheart"title="Inkheart">
12-year-old Meggie lives with her father Mortimer or "Mo," who works as a bookbinder. One night, a man named Dustfinger visits Mo. Meggie overhears Dustfinger telling Mo that a man named Capricorn is looking for him. The next morning, Mo unexpectedly announces that he and Meggie have to go to Meggie's Aunt Elinor's house because Mo has to fix some books. Dustfinger joins them on the way. Mo sets off to work, and Meggie talks to Dustfinger, where she is introduced to Dustfinger's pet marten, Gwin. A short while after, Mo is captured by people with unusual names, bringing along with him a book, "Inkheart". Meggie and Elinor tell the police, but the police just think they are out of their minds.Dustfinger, Meggie, and Elinor plan to venture to Capricorn's village where her father is being held. The three are taken to Capricorn's house where he waits for them. Elinor and Meggie are thrown into the cell where Mo is being held and they reunite, while Dustfinger disappears. Meggie makes Mo tells the story of why they were there.A long time ago her father was reading "Inkheart" to Meggie's mother, Teresa. Mo found out that he had a special gift where he could bring things out of books just by reading aloud, but that came with a price: for everything that comes out of the book, something must go in. So, while reading the seventh chapter, three of the main characters from the book, Capricorn, Basta, and Dustfinger, come out of the book and into their house. Capricorn tries to fight Mo, but eventually Mo forces them out of his house. When he turns back, Teresa and their two cats that were sitting on her lap were gone and Meggie was crying. He later tried many more times to get his wife out of the book, but his power failed him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_by_Piece_(book)"title="Piece by Piece (book)">
The book is told in a conversational style with questions posed by Ann and responded to by Tori. They compiled the material for the book through phone calls, e-mail conversations and in-person interviews. Along with details about Amos' career, music and personal life it also delves into mythology and religion in a fashion often associated with Amos. The lyrics "piece by piece" feature in the song "Datura" on the 1999 album "To Venus and Back".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westward_Ho!_(novel)"title="Westward Ho! (novel)">
Set initially in Bideford in North Devon during the reign of Elizabeth I, "Westward Ho!" follows the adventures of Amyas Leigh (Amyas Preston), an unruly child who as a young man follows Francis Drake to sea. Amyas loves local beauty Rose Salterne, as does nearly everyone else; much of the novel involves the kidnapping of Rose by a Spaniard.Amyas spends time in the Caribbean coasts of Venezuela seeking gold, and eventually returns to England at the time of the Spanish Armada, finding his true love, the beautiful Indian maiden Ayacanora, in the process; yet fate had blundered and brought misfortune into Amyas's life, for not only had he been blinded by a freak bolt of lightning at sea, but he also loses his brother Frank Leigh and Rose Salterne, who were caught by the Spaniards and burnt at the stake by the Inquisition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonar_Kella"title="Sonar Kella">
The film begins with a school-boy Mukul Dhar (Kushal Chakraborty), who is said to be able to remember events of his previous life, and soon receives media attention. Dr. Hemanga Hajra (Sailen Mukherjee), a parapsychologist, offers his help, believing it might help him in his own research. Mukul always remains sombre and paints peacocks, forts, camels and battlescenes at midnight; he mentions that he lived in the Golden Fortress (Sonar Kella) and that their house had many gems. Dr. Hajra decides to take Mukul on a trip to Rajasthan, famous for forts, historical importance and desert landscape. Two seasoned fraudsters, Amiyanath Burman and Mandar Bose, plan to kidnap Mukul to capture the treasure. Their first attempt at the kidnapping fails when they pick up another boy, also named Mukul (Santanu Bagchi), from the same neighborhood. Alarmed by this, Mukul's father engages Pradosh Chandra Mitter a.k.a. Feluda (Soumitra Chatterjee), a private investigator, to protect his son. Feluda leaves for Rajasthan along with his cousin Tapesh a.k.a Topshe (Siddartha Chatterjee), following Dr. Hajra. On their way, they meet and befriend Lalmohan Ganguly, a.k.a. Jatayu (Santosh Dutta), a popular thriller writer.Meanwhile, Burman and Bose kidnap Mukul and push Dr. Hajra off a cliff to his presumed death at the Nahargarh Fort in Jaipur. Burman impersonates as Dr. Hajra and Bose impersonates as a globe-trotter. Dr. Hajra actually survived the fall and begins to pursue them. Feluda arrives in Jodhpur Circuit House and meets Burman, assuming him to be Dr. Hajra. Feluda begins to suspect Bose based on his clothes and his accent. Feluda even suspects "Dr. Hajra's" conduct as he appears lackadaisical in his research. Mukul keeps saying he is followed by a "bad man". Burman successfully hypnotizes Mukul, who says that the Golden Fortress is in Jaisalmer. Dr. Hajra reaches to the same conclusion by learning about the history of the Fort of Jaisalmer from a police inspector. Feluda learns that the Jaisalmer Fort is made of yellow limestone, giving it a golden glow. Bose lies to Feluda by saying that Burman/Dr. Hajra has already left with Mukul for Barmer, in order to lure Feluda on the wrong track. Feluda suspects foul play but cannot be sure. By chance, his eye falls upon the card of Dr Hajra; an idea flashes in his mind and he rushes to check the register of the circuit house and finds that it is signed as 'Hazra' not 'Hajra'. He is now sure about the man impersonating as Dr Hajra, and leaves for Jaisalmer by car. Bose strands Feluda, Topshe, and Jatayu on the highway. Feluda takes a camel caravan to the nearest train station, from which he takes the next train to Jaisalmer. At night, in the train, Bose attacks and attempts to stab Feluda to death, who anticipated the attack and nearly defeats him; eventually, Bose falls out of the train and most probably dies after seeing the real Dr. Hajra in a separate compartment of the same train and assuming him to be a ghost. The trio arrive in Jaisalmer along with Dr. Hajra. They rush to the fort, where they find Burman searching for the treasure where Mukul recalled his home of previous life was. Feluda confronts and captures Burman, telling him that there never was any treasure. They find that Mukul is cured of his obsession of previous life, and they return to Kolkata.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Because_of_Winn-Dixie"title="Because of Winn-Dixie">
A 10-year-old girl named India Opal Buloni has just moved to a trailer park in the small town of Naomi, Florida, with her father, who is known as The Preacher because he preaches at the local church. Her mother, Benjean-Megan, abandoned them when she was three. She describes the preacher as a turtle, always sticking his head into his shell, and never wanting to come out into the real world. This is most likely because of how sad he is about her mother, with whom he is still in love.While in the supermarket, Opal sees a scruffy dog wrecking the store and decides to take him home, naming him Winn-Dixie after the supermarket chain. Miss Franny Block, a librarian, shares great stories about her past, including one about her great-grandfather, whose family members died while he was fighting for the South in the Civil War. He invented Litmus Lozenge candies, which tasted like root beer and strawberry but included a secret ingredient—melancholy. Anyone who tasted the candies tasted sweetness mixed with sadness. In "Because of Winn-Dixie", these candies symbolize that even though life sometimes deals people a bit of sadness, there is always much to appreciate. Opal learns that her sour-faced neighbor, Amanda Wilkinson, lost her younger brother Carson when he drowned in the town lake the previous summer. She vows to be nicer to her from then on.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Zixi_of_Ix"title="Queen Zixi of Ix">
On the night of a full moon, the fairies ruled by Queen Lulea are dancing in the Forest of Burzee. Lulea calls a halt to it, for "one may grow weary even of merrymaking". To divert themselves, another fairy recommends that they make something they can imbue with fairy magic. After several ideas are considered and rejected, the fairies decide to make a magic cloak that can grant its wearer one wish. The fairy who proposed it, Espa, and Queen Lulea agree that such a cloak will benefit mortals greatly. However, its wish-granting power cannot be used if the cloak is stolen from its previous wearer. After the fairies finish the golden cloak, Ereol arrives from the kingdom of Noland whose king has just died. On the advice of the Man in the Moon, Ereol is dispatched to Noland to give the magic cloak to the first unhappy person she meets.Meanwhile, Noland's five high counselors assemble in the capital city of Nole and refuse to allow the valet Jikki to ring the bell that indicates the king has died until they decide how to choose his successor. Retrieving the book of the law of Noland (to be used only when the king is unavailable, for the king's will "is" law in Noland), the counselors learn that the forty-seventh person to pass through Nole's eastern gate at sunrise is to be declared king or queen. The next day, the five counselors assemble at the eastern gate and count off the procession entering Nole. Number forty-seven turns out to be Timothy (who everyone calls "Bud"), the orphaned son of a ferryman who, with his sister Meg (nicknamed "Fluff"), is entering town with their stern Aunt Rivette, a laundress for the city of Nole. Along the way from their house to Nole, Ereol meets Fluff and gives her the magic cloak due to her unhappiness at Bud's ill treatment by Rivette. The power of the cloak is first seen when Fluff wishes she could be happy again, and she becomes so. Bud—now King Bud—is welcomed by the high counselors and the people of Nole as their new king. His sister Fluff becomes Princess Fluff, and they take residence in the royal palace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfolks"title="Superfolks">
The novel's protagonist is a Superman analogue named David Brinkley (a tuckerization of TV newsman David Brinkley). His superhero codename is never fully given: various intelligence agencies refer to him as "Indigo" (the color of his mask) and "der Übermensch" (Overman) and the original book jacket refers to him as "Everyman." He hails from the planet Cronk and is vulnerable to the substance Cronkite (a play on both TV newsman Walter Cronkite, and Superman's home Krypton and weakness to Kryptonite).David gradually loses his superhuman powers due to the influence of an unknown enemy, and all of the other superheroes (including, strangely, Snoopy) retire, disappear, or die. It is later revealed that this is a plot made by the alien elf Pxyzsyzygy (Mr. Mxyzptlk by way of Howard Hughes) to kill all heroes.David's powers gradually return, years later, in the midst of a mid-life crisis, and as criminals swarm Manhattan.The loss of David's powers is discovered to be because his enemies—unsure of his secret identity—have introduced minute amounts of Cronkite into many common products, as well as the water supply. The return of his powers is later revealed to be a CIA-sponsored attempt to lure Brinkley out of retirement so that they can assassinate him as required by a nuclear disarmament treaty with the USSR.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_Million"title="Day Million">
The title story, "Day Million", details the romantic affair between two people, referred to as Don and Dora (shortened versions of the names of both) in the millionth day CE, which falls late in the year 2737, although the author alternately describes it as being about a thousand years in the future. The text addresses the reader directly, subverting expectations by revealing that Dora is genetically male but was made female shortly after conception because genetic analysis showed that she would prefer that outcome. Don is described as handsome and bronzed, but is revealed to be a partial cyborg who wears a coppery radiation shield over his entire body, to protect him while helping to pilot a starship. Dora for her part is semi-aquatic, having gills. The two have a marriage ceremony and then part forever, having exchanged personality recordings. Through these they can experience sex with each other and with any number of other virtual lovers. The reader is addressed as a conservative man who is repelled by the concepts presented, while enjoying the fruits of progress in the 1960s. In the "Schematic Man" a man's life is transcribed into a computer to the point where he begins to believe that he is living within the machine, and "Making Love", in which population control is effected by providing everybody with simulated lovers indistinguishable from the real thing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Meridian"title="Blood Meridian">
The novel tells the story of a teenaged runaway referred to only as "the kid", who was born in Tennessee during the famously active Leonids meteor shower of 1833. He first meets the enormous, pale, hairless Judge Holden at a religious revival in a tent in Nacogdoches, Texas, at which Holden falsely accuses the preacher of raping children and goats, inciting the audience to attack him.After a violent encounter with a bartender establishes the kid as a formidable fighter, he joins a party of ill-equipped U.S. Army irregulars on a filibustering mission led by a Captain White. White's group is overwhelmed by an accompanying group of hundreds of Comanche warriors, and few of them survive. Arrested as a filibuster in Chihuahua, the kid is set free when his acquaintance Toadvine tells the authorities they will make useful Indian hunters. They join Glanton and his gang, among them Holden, and the bulk of the novel is devoted to detailing their activities and conversations. Though originally tasked with protecting locals from marauding Apaches, the gang devolves into the outright murder of unthreatening Indians, unprotected Mexican villages, and eventually even the Mexican army and anyone else who crosses their path.According to the kid's new companion Ben Tobin, an "ex-priest", the Glanton gang first met Judge Holden while fleeing for their lives from a much larger Apache group. In the middle of a blasted desert, they found Holden sitting on an enormous boulder, where he seemed to be waiting for the gang. They agreed to follow his leadership, and he took them to an extinct volcano where he instructed them on how to manufacture gunpowder, enough to give them the advantage against the Apaches. When the kid remembers seeing Holden in Nacogdoches, Tobin tells the kid that each man in the gang claims to have met the judge at some point before joining the Glanton Gang.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Pretty_Horses_(novel)"title="All the Pretty Horses (novel)">
The novel tells of John Grady Cole, a 16-year-old who grew up on his grandfather's ranch in San Angelo, Texas. The boy was raised for a significant part of his youth, perhaps 15 of his 16 years, by a family of Mexican origin who worked on the ranch; he is a native speaker of Spanish and English. The story begins in 1949, soon after the death of John Grady's grandfather when Grady learns the ranch is to be sold. Faced with the prospect of moving into town, Grady instead chooses to leave and persuades his best friend, Lacey Rawlins, to accompany him. Traveling by horseback, the pair travel southward into Mexico, where they hope to find work as cowboys.Shortly before they cross the Mexican border, they encounter a young man who says he is named Jimmy Blevins. Blevins' origins and the authenticity of his name are never quite clarified. Blevins rides a huge bay horse that is far too fine a specimen to be the property of a runaway boy, but Blevins insists it is his. As they travel south through a severe thunderstorm, Blevins' horse runs off, and he loses his pistol.Blevins persuades John Grady and Rawlins to accompany him to the nearest town to find the horse and his distinctive vintage Colt pistol. They find both but have no way to prove Blevins' ownership. Against his companions' better judgment, Blevins steals back the horse. As the three are riding away from the town they are pursued, and Blevins separates from Rawlins and John Grady. The pursuers follow Blevins, and Rawlins and Grady escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orchard_Keeper"title="The Orchard Keeper">
"The Orchard Keeper" is set during the inter-war period in the hamlet of Red Branch, a small, isolated community in Tennessee.Its story revolves around three characters: Uncle Arthur Ownby, an isolated woodman, who lives beside a rotting apple orchard; John Wesley Rattner, a young mountain boy; and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger. The novel begins with Marion picking up a hitchhiker named Kenneth Rattner, who attacks Marion with a tire iron, attempting to murder and rob him. After a struggle, Marion strangles Kenneth to death. Marion dumps the corpse in a gravel pit on Arthur Ownby's property, as he knows the land well from his frequent pickups of bootleg whiskey. Arthur soon discovers the corpse, but rather than inform the authorities, he covers the pit over to keep the body hidden. As time passes, Kenneth's wife, Mildred, and son, John Wesley, come to accept he has likely been killed, and Mildred makes her son vow to one day take vengeance on his father's killer. One night, as Marion is picking up a shipment of whiskey hidden on Arthur's property, he witnesses Arthur unloading a shotgun into a tank the government has installed on his land. Unnerved, Marion collects the whiskey and flees the property, fearing Arthur might do him harm. Arthur passively watches Marion's car drive off into the night. Marion's car careens off the road and into a stream. John Wesley happens to be checking some of his traps in the area and, hearing the crash, comes to Marion's aid, helping the injured man to land. John Wesley is unaware that Marion is his father's killer, and Marion does not recognize John Wesley as the son of the man he killed. Grateful for his help, Marion gives John Wesley one of his dogs, and the two men develop a friendly, almost father-and-son relationship, with Marion teaching John Wesley how to hunt. The local police discover Marion's vehicle in the stream, its whiskey cargo mostly destroyed, as well the defaced government tank. John Wesley becomes a suspect and is threatened with criminal charges if he doesn't admit that Marion was driving the whiskey-filled car. John Wesley refuses to cooperate. The police then go to Arthur's cabin to question him. As they pull up in his yard, Arthur comes out of the cabin wielding a shotgun. The police return with reinforcements, and a shoot-out ensues. Arthur wounds a few of the officers, then flees, but is captured a short while later. Marion, too, is captured, when his new vehicle breaks down on a bridge, its trunk filled with whiskey. Arthur is diagnosed as insane or senile and is sent to a mental hospital, where he will likely spend the remainder of his days. Marion is sentenced to three years in prison for illegally transporting whiskey. Still oblivious to Marion's role in his father's death, John Wesley leaves Red Branch. He returns several years later to find the town abandoned.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Dark"title="Outer Dark">
## Introduction.The novel begins with the introduction of the siblings Culla and Rinthy Holme, and the result of their sexual relationship with Rinthy being only a few days from labor. Here, the Tinker is introduced as well, and from his interaction with Culla and Culla's unwillingness to call for help during the birth, his shame over the child becomes clear. The child is soon born, and after Rinthy falls asleep, Culla leaves it out to die in the woods telling her that the child died.The child is found by the tinker, who takes him to a wet nurse, without knowing who his parents are. Rinthy finds an empty grave and sets out to find the child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Desert_and_Wilderness"title="In Desert and Wilderness">
The story takes place in the late 19th century Egypt, during the Mahdist War. A 14-year-old Polish boy, Stanisław (Staś) Tarkowski, and 8-year-old English girl, Nel Rawlison, live with their fathers and grow up in the ton of Port Said. Their fathers are engineers who supervise the maintenance of the Suez Canal. One day, the Mahdist War begins in Sudan, led by a Muslim preacher, the Mahdi. Staś and Nel are captured as hostages by a group of Arabs who hope that they can exchange the children for Fatima, Mahdi's distant relative, who had been arrested by the British at the beginning of the novel.Nel and Staś are forced to travel through the Sahara Desert to Khartoum, where they are to be presented to Mahdi. The journey is difficult and exhausting, especially for delicate and vulnerable Nel. Staś, who is a brave and responsible boy, protects his friend from the abductors' cruelty, even though that means that he is beaten and punished. His plans to escape fail and the children gradually lose their hope.When the group arrive in Khartoum (precisely - Omdurman) the Arabs are disappointed by the fact that Mahdi, busy with leading the revolt, ignored their "mission" and turned down their offers. They take out their anger and frustration on the children. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suttree"title="Suttree">
The novel begins with Suttree observing police as they pull a suicide victim from the river. Suttree is living alone in a houseboat, on the fringes of society on the Tennessee River, earning money by fishing for the occasional catfish. He has left a life of luxury, rejecting his parents' influence, and abandoning his wife and young son.A large cast of characters, largely composed of misfits and grotesques, is introduced, one of which is a dimwitted young man named Gene Harrogate, whom Suttree meets during a short stint in a work camp-style prison. Harrogate was sent to prison after being caught "violating" a farmer's watermelons. Suttree attempts to help Harrogate stay out of trouble after he is released, but this task proves to be in vain as Harrogate sets off on a series of misadventures, including using poisoned meat and a slingshot to kill bats ("flitter-mice" as Harrogate calls them) to earn a bounty on them, and using dynamite in an attempt to tunnel underneath the city and burgle the treasury. Other prominent characters are prostitutes, hermits, alcoholics, and an aged Geechee witch.His relationships with women all come to bad ends. One prostitute-girlfriend terminates the relationship in a moment of madness, smashing up the inside of their new car. He becomes involved with a teenage girl from a destitute family, but awakens in the night to find her crushed to death by a landslide that falls on their homeless encampment. Suttree was also married before the book begins with a woman he apparently met at university. He left his wife with a young son, who dies of an illness early on in the book. He watches the funeral from afar, and proceeds to bury the boy alone once the other mourners leave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crossing_(McCarthy_novel)"title="The Crossing (McCarthy novel)">
Like its predecessor, "All the Pretty Horses" (1992), "The Crossing" is a coming-of-age novel set on the border between the southwest United States and Mexico. The plot takes place before and during the Second World War and focuses on the life of the protagonist Billy Parham, a teenage cowboy; his family; and his younger brother Boyd. The story tells of three journeys taken from New Mexico to Mexico. It is noted for being a more melancholic novel than the first of the trilogy, without returning to the hellish bleakness of McCarthy's early novels.Most of the protagonists are people of few words; thus the dialogues are few and concise. Additionally, since much of the interaction is with Mexican people, many parts of dialogues are written in untranslated Spanish.Although the novel is not overtly satirical or humorous, it has many of the qualities of a picaresque: a realistic portrayal of a destitute hero embarking on a series of loosely connected, arguably doomed quests.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_of_the_Plain_(novel)"title="Cities of the Plain (novel)">
The story opens in 1952. John Grady Cole (the protagonist of "All the Pretty Horses") and Billy Parham (the protagonist of "The Crossing") work together on a cattle ranch south of Alamogordo, New Mexico, not far from the border cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico. The ranch's owners are kind, but face an uncertain future in a dying industry. Recently devastated by drought, cattle ranches around El Paso are struggling and may be claimed by the Department of Defense, through eminent domain, to become military areas. Though the cowboys barely make a living, John Grady and Billy love life on the open range, and John Grady – as detailed in "All the Pretty Horses" – is a master at training horses. Billy is an excellent tracker.During a visit to a brothel in Juárez, John Grady falls in love with a young, epileptic prostitute, Magdalena. The couple plans to marry and live in the U.S., and John Grady renovates an abandoned cabin, turning it into a home. But Magdalena's brothel is run by Eduardo, a formidable adversary also in love with the young girl. Billy attempts to dissuade John Grady but feels obligated to help the couple.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trouble_with_Lichen"title="Trouble with Lichen">
The plot concerns a young female biochemist who discovers that a chemical extracted from an unusual strain of lichen can be used to slow down the ageing process, enabling people to live to around 200–300 years. Wyndham speculates how society would deal with this prospect.The two central characters are Diana Brackley and Francis Saxover, two biochemists who run parallel investigations into the properties of a specific species of lichen after Diana notices that a trace of the specimen prevents some milk turning sour.She and Francis separately manage to extract from the lichen a new drug, dubbed Antigerone, which slows down the body's ageing process. While Francis uses it only on himself and his immediate family (without their knowledge), Diana founds a cosmetic spa, and builds up a clientele of some of the most powerful women in England, giving them low doses of Antigerone, preserving their beauty and youth. When Francis finds out about the spas, he erroneously assumes that Diana's motive is profit. Diana's aim, however, is actually female empowerment, intending to gain the support of these influential women, believing that if Antigerone became publicly known, it would be reserved only for the men in power.After a customer suffers an allergic reaction to one of Diana's products, the secret of the drug begins to emerge. Diana tries to cover up the real source of the drug, since the lichen is very rare and difficult to grow, but when it is finally discovered she fakes her own death in the hope of inspiring the women of Britain to fight for the rights she tried to secure for them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_Confidential_(book)"title="Kitchen Confidential (book)">
Structured as a loose collection of humorous anecdotes, "Kitchen Confidential" is equal parts confessional narrative and industry commentary on the cooking trade. Bourdain has cited George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London" (1933), with its behind-the-scenes examination of the restaurant business in 1920s Paris, as an important influence on the book's themes and tone. He details some of his personal misdeeds and weaknesses, including drug use. He explains how restaurants function economically and warns consumers of the various tricks of restaurateurs. For example, he famously advises customers to avoid ordering fish on a Monday as it is likely left over from the weekend or earlier (years later, however, he retracted this advice). He also suggests avoiding well-done beef, since cheaper cuts are often substituted for the top-quality meat used for rarer orders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_Beginners_(novel)"title="Absolute Beginners (novel)">
The novel is divided into four sections. Each details a particular day in the four months that spanned the summer of 1958."In June" takes up half of the book and shows the narrator meeting up with various teenaged friends and some adults in various parts of London and discussing his outlook on life and the new concept of being a teenager. He also learns that his ex-girlfriend, Suzette, is to enter a marriage of convenience with her boss, a middle-aged gay fashion designer called Henley."In July" has the narrator taking photographs by the river Thames, seeing the musical operetta "H.M.S. Pinafore" with his father, has a violent encounter with Ed the Ted and watches Hoplite's appearance on Call-Me-Cobber's TV show."In August" has the narrator and his father take a cruise along the Thames towards Windsor Castle. His father is taken ill on the trip and has to be taken to a doctor. The narrator also finds Suzette at her husband's cottage in Cookham."In September" is set on the narrator's 19th birthday. He sees this, symbolically, as the beginning of his last year as a teenager. He witnesses several incidents of racial violence, which disgust him. His father also dies, leaving him four envelopes stuffed with money. Suzette has separated from Henley, but still seems uncertain as to whether she should resume her relationship with the narrator. The narrator decides to leave the country and find a place where racism doesn't exist. At the airport, he sees Africans arriving and gives them a warm welcome.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-Squared"title="Q-Squared">
Trelane, who first appeared in the original "Star Trek" episode "The Squire of Gothos", is revealed to be a member of the Q Continuum. He taps into the power of the continuum and uses this ability to tamper with time and reality, resulting in the intersection of three different parallel universes which are also referred to as time "tracks". Track A is a universe in which Beverly Crusher's husband Jack never died, and now serves as captain of the "Enterprise" with Jean-Luc Picard as his first officer; in this universe, Jack's son Wesley died as a boy and Jack and Beverly divorced. Track B is the traditional universe depicted on "Star Trek: The Next Generation". Track C is akin to the more militaristic alternate universe shown in the "Next Generation" episode "Yesterday's Enterprise", in which the Federation is at war with the Klingons.Q, who had been charged with the task of "mentoring" Trelane (a task each "adult" Q must accept at least once for an "adolescent" Q), enlists the help of Picard and the crew of the "Enterprise"-D in the three different timelines in order to teach Trelane discipline, and eventually, to stop him from destroying the fabric of the universe by collapsing the alternate universes together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Atlas_(novel)"title="Cloud Atlas (novel)">
The book consists of six nested stories; each is read or observed by a main character of the next, progressing in time through the central sixth story. The first five stories are each interrupted at a pivotal moment. After the sixth story, the others are resolved in reverse chronological order. Each section's protagonist reads or observes the chronologically earlier work in the chain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_and_Lottie"title="Lisa and Lottie">
Two nine-year-old girls, bold Lisa Palfy (orig. Luise Palfy) from Vienna and shy Lottie Horn (orig. Lotte Körner) from Munich meet in a summer camp in Bohrlaken on Lake Bohren (orig. 'Seebühl am Bühlsee'), where they discover that they are identical twins whose parents divorced, each keeping one of the girls.The girls decide to swap places at the end of the summer so that Lottie will have a chance to get to know her father and Lisa will get to meet her mother. While many adults are surprised at the changes in each of the girls after they return from camp ("Lottie" has apparently forgotten how to cook, gets in a fight at school, and becomes a terrible student, while "Lisa" has begun to keep a close eye on the housekeeper's bookkeeping, will no longer eat her favorite food, and becomes a model student), no one suspects that the girls are not who they claim to be.When Lottie (under the name of Lisa) finds that her father is planning to remarry, she becomes very ill and stops writing to her sister in Munich. Meanwhile, Lottie's mother comes across a picture of the two girls at summer camp, and Lisa tells her the entire story. The girls' mother calls her former husband in Vienna to tell him what has happened and to find out why Lottie has stopped writing. When she hears that her daughter is ill, she and Lisa immediately travel to Vienna. At the daughters' request, the parents are reunited.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_(novel)"title="Naomi (novel)">
"Naomi"'s story is focused around a man's obsession for a "modan garu" or modern girl. The narrator, Jōji, is a well-educated Japanese man who is an electrical engineer in the city, and comes from a wealthy farming family. Jōji wishes to break away from his traditional Japanese culture, and becomes immersed in the new Westernized culture which was taking root in Japan. The physical representation of everything Western is embodied in a girl named Naomi. Jōji sees Naomi for the first time in a café and instantly falls for her exotic "Eurasian" looks, Western-sounding name, and (to him) sophisticated mannerisms. Like the story of the prepubescent Murasaki in the classic novel "The Tale of Genji", Jōji decides he will raise Naomi, a fifteen-year-old café hostess, to be his perfect woman: in this case, he will forge her into a glamorous Western-style girl like Mary Pickford, the famous Canadian actress of the silent film era, whom he thinks Naomi resembles.Jōji moves Naomi into his home and begins his efforts to make her a perfect Western wife. She turns out to be a very willing pupil. He pays for her English-language lessons, and though she has little skill with grammar, she possesses beautiful pronunciation. He funds her Westernized activities, including her love of movies, dancing and magazines. During the early part of the novel Jōji makes no sexual advances on Naomi, preferring instead to groom her according to his desires and observe her from a distance. However, his plan to foster Western ideals such as independence in her backfires dramatically as she gets older.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paladin_of_Souls"title="Paladin of Souls">
The novel follows Ista, mother of Iselle, the young ruler of Chalion. Following the lifting of the curse on her family and the recent death of her own aged mother, Ista finds herself bored and restless. To escape from her guardians (who think she is partially mad), she sets out on a religious pilgrimage with the dy Gura brothers (minor characters from the earlier story) for protection; Liss, a feisty and clever courier girl; and dy Cabon, a plump priest of the Bastard (one of the five gods of the Chalion universe) as her 'spiritual guide'. The Bastard, god of disasters and of things out of season, guides Ista's path, despite her strong resistance.The party is overrun and captured by a troop of Roknari raiders from the adjacent principality of Jokona, then rescued by a patrol led by Arhys, lord of the nearby Castle Porifors, a strong leader of men and very handsome to boot. Though she is attracted to him, she learns that he is the son of a man she had helped kill (in an ill-fated attempt to raise the curse). She also learns Arhys has a very young and very beautiful wife named Cattilara.Once in the castle, Ista discovers a mystery. Lord Illvin, Arhys's half-brother, is unconscious except for afternoon wakings that match Arhys' naps. She has seen Illvin before, though, in a baffling dream sent by the Bastard. Ista, despite her attempts to avoid becoming once again a tool of a god, lets her curiosity get the better of her. She is saddened to discover that Arhys is actually dead. Cattilara has managed to force a demon to keep her husband "alive" by transferring to him some of Illvin's vitality, but Ista can see that both men are fading fast. To complicate matters further, Illvin and Ista are attracted to each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Bede"title="Adam Bede">
According to "The Oxford Companion to English Literature" (1967),The novel follows the lives of four characters in the fictional community of Hayslope—a rural, pastoral, and close-knit community—in 1799. The novel revolves around a love "rectangle" among the beautiful but self-absorbed Hetty Sorrel; Captain Arthur Donnithorne, the young squire who seduces her; Adam Bede, her unacknowledged suitor; and Dinah Morris, Hetty's cousin, a fervent, virtuous and beautiful Methodist lay preacher. Adam, a local carpenter much admired for his integrity and intelligence, is in love with Hetty. She is attracted to Arthur, the local squire's charming grandson and heir, and falls in love with him. When Adam interrupts a tryst between them, Adam and Arthur fight. Arthur agrees to give up Hetty and leaves Hayslope to return to his militia. After he leaves, Hetty Sorrel agrees to marry Adam but shortly before their marriage, discovers that she is pregnant. In desperation, she leaves in search of Arthur but cannot find him. Unwilling to return to the village on account of the shame and ostracism she would have to endure, she delivers her baby with the assistance of a friendly woman she encounters. She subsequently abandons the infant in a field but not being able to bear the child's cries, she tries to retrieve the infant. However, she is too late, the infant having already died of exposure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewing"title="Firewing">
Griffin Silverwing is the son of Shade Silverwing and Marina Brightwing. Slower and more clumsy than non-hybrids, Griffin's only real friend is Luna, a popular newborn. Fearing rejection by his father, Griffin steals fire from human campers to show his bravery. Unfortunately, Luna is accidentally set on fire. Guilt-stricken, Griffin flies into the lower levels of Tree Haven and discovers a crack that leads to the underworld. An earthquake opens the crack up wider and Griffin is sucked into the Underworld, unknown to the Silverwing colony. When Shade is unable to find his son, the Elders give him two days to search the Underworld before promising to seal the crack again.There, Griffin discovers a colony of bats that are unaware that they are dead. The bats are wary of Griffin because, as he is still alive, he appears to glow to them. Griffin discovers that the recently deceased Luna has become a member of the colony and has no memory of him. Fortunately, a group of Pilgrims (bats who realize they are dead) arrive and rekindle Luna's memory of Griffin. The Pilgrim, Frieda, tells them about a gigantic, incandescent Tree, which supposedly sends dead bats that enter it to another, more enjoyable afterlife. Frieda believes that the Tree will send Griffin back home, as he is alive. Armed with Frieda's sound map, Griffin and Luna head out to find the Tree.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinter_of_the_Mind's_Eye"title="Splinter of the Mind's Eye">
Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia are traveling with R2-D2 and C-3PO to the planet Circarpous IV to persuade its inhabitants to join the Rebel Alliance. A strange energy storm forces them to crash land on the swampy Circarpous V, known to the locals as Mimban. They begin looking for a space port to get off the planet but instead find a town, near which agents of the Empire have an energy mine—the cause of the crash. Forced to keep their identities secret, Luke and Leia take refuge in a nearby bar. An old woman named Halla approaches them, identifies Luke as strong with the Force, and shows him a splinter of what she claims to be the Kaiburr crystal, which focuses the Force. Halla strikes a deal with Luke and Leia to help her find the whole crystal, in return for which she will help them get off the planet. A squabble between Luke and Leia attracts the attention of miners emerging from the pub, who claim that fighting in public is against Imperial law; they all get into a brawl. Imperial stormtroopers intervene and incarcerate Luke and Leia. They are questioned by Imperial Captain-Supervisor Grammel, who confiscates the crystal shard and Luke's weapons. Luke and Leia are placed in a maximum-security cell with two drunk but friendly Yuzzem, hairy creatures called Hin and Kee. Grammel reports the incident and gives the crystal shard to the Imperial governor of the star system. Halla uses the Force to help Luke, Leia and the two Yuzzem. The Yuzzem rampage through the jail while Luke and Leia escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Very_Hungry_Caterpillar"title="The Very Hungry Caterpillar">
On an early Sunday morning, “a tiny and very hungry caterpillar” hatches from his egg. Then, he searches for something to eat. For the following five days, Monday through Friday, the very hungry caterpillar eats through an increasing quantity of delicious fruit: one apple on Monday, two pears on Tuesday, three plums on Wednesday, four strawberries on Thursday, and five oranges on Friday. But the caterpillar is still hungry. On Saturday, he feasts, eating a piece of chocolate cake, a strawberry ice cream cone, a pickle, a slice of Swiss cheese, a slice of salami, a lollipop, a piece of cherry pie, a sausage, a cupcake and a slice of watermelon. That night, he gets a stomach ache from unhealthy overeating.To recover from Saturday’s stomach ache, the very hungry caterpillar eats one green leaf on Sunday (a week has passed), and then feels much better. He is no longer little and hungry; he is now a big and fat caterpillar. He builds a cocoon around himself. He stays inside of it for two weeks, after which he nibbles a hole and pushes his way out. Finally, he develops into a large, beautiful, multi-colored butterfly. As a butterfly, the cycle begins again. Carle’s story mimics a caterpillar’s actual life cycle: eating, growing, spinning, and finally metamorphosing into a butterfly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_U.S.A._(1985_film)"title="Invasion U.S.A. (1985 film)">
A group of Cuban refugees is on a boat sailing for the United States and is at first met by what appears to be a US Coast Guard boat with armed personnel. The captain of the vessel declares that the refugees are welcomed to the United States, but the Guardsmen open fire on them and take several bags of cocaine hidden in the boat. It is revealed that the armed personnel were Latin American guerrillas disguised as Guardsmen on board a hijacked Coast Guard vessel.Eventually, the real Coast Guard finds the boat with the murdered American Coast Guardsmen off the coast of Florida. The FBI and the Miami Police Department arrive at the docks to investigate the murders. The guerrillas land in Florida and exchange the drugs for weaponry from a drug dealer. They are led by the Soviet operative Mikal Rostov (Richard Lynch), the fake Coast Guard captain who opened fire on the Cuban refugees. Former CIA agent Matt Hunter (Norris) is asked to come out of retirement, but he declines. When Rostov and a team of guerrillas destroy Hunter's residence in the Everglades and kill his friend, John Eagle (Dehl Berti) in a failed assassination attempt, Hunter is convinced to reconsider.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Sisters"title="Summer Sisters">
"Summer Sisters" is a coming-of-age novel about two friends, Caitlin Somers and Victoria "Vix" Leonard, who spend every summer together as teenagers. The girls are polar opposites, Caitlin being beautiful, lively and popular while Vix is a shy but intellectual wallflower. As the years progress the girls become closer and closer but soon find their friendship strained.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_Zone"title="End Zone">
The novel is divided into three sections. In the first, Gary Harkness, the narrator, meets Taft Robinson, Logos College's first Black football player as well as Major Staley, the teacher of his modern warfare class. This class sparks Gary's developing obsession with Nuclear warfare. Gary begins dating Myrna Corbett and an assistant coach commits suicide just as the crowning game of the season approaches.The second section is solely a play-by-play retelling of the Big Game itself, where the main thematic content of the novel exists. DeLillo's disconnected, detached prose focuses the text on certain isolated images and dialogue throughout the game.The third section surrounds the aftermath of the big game as well as the impact of the plane-crash death which kills Logos College's founder. Gary, filled with ennui after these events, plays a complex war game with Major Staley; the novel's metaphor of football as warfare is challenged in the line "warfare is warfare." Taft Robinson admits that he has a morbid interest in The Holocaust which mirror's Gary's obsession. The novel ends with Gary being hospitalized for a mental breakdown, his future uncertain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_Day_(Ford_novel)"title="Independence Day (Ford novel)">
The novel follows Frank Bascombe, a New Jersey real estate agent (and ex-sportswriter), through the titular holiday weekend as he visits his ex-wife, his troubled son, his current lover, the tenants of one of his properties, and some clients of his who have been having trouble finding the perfect house. It focuses in particular on a car trip with his son to the Basketball and Baseball Halls of Fame. Similar in form and common themes to John Updike's "Rabbit" novels, "Independence Day" is a pastoral meditation on a man reaching middle age and assessing his place in life and the greater world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvester_and_the_Magic_Pebble"title="Sylvester and the Magic Pebble">
Sylvester Duncan, a young donkey from the fictional community of Oatsdale, collects pebbles "of unusual shape and color." One day he finds a spherical red pebble that grants wishes. Immediately afterward, a lion scares Sylvester, and as a defense he wishes himself into a rock--the only thing he could think of at the moment. Unfortunately, the magic pebble falls off the rock, and Sylvester is unable to revert to his donkey form as the pebble must be in contact with the wish-maker to work. The rest of the story deals with the resulting aftermath: Sylvester's personal attempt to change back into his true self and Mr. and Mrs. Duncan's search for their only child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lovely_Bones"title="The Lovely Bones">
On December 6, 1973, 14-year-old Susie Salmon takes her usual shortcut home from her school through a cornfield in Norristown, Pennsylvania. George Harvey, her 36-year-old neighbor, a bachelor who builds doll houses for a living, persuades her to look at an underground kid's hideout he constructed in the field. Once she climbs into the hideout, he rapes and murders her, then dismembers her body and puts her remains in a safe that he dumps in a sinkhole, along with throwing her charm bracelet into a pond. Susie's spirit flees toward her personal Heaven, and in doing so, rushes past her classmate, social outcast Ruth Connors, who can see Susie's ghostly spirit.The Salmon family initially refuses to believe that Susie is dead, until a neighbor's dog finds Susie's elbow. The police talk to Harvey, finding him odd but not suspicious. Susie's father, Jack, gradually suspects Harvey. Jack's surviving daughter, Lindsey, eventually shares this sentiment. Jack takes an extended leave from work. Meanwhile, another of Susie's classmates, Ray Singh, who had a crush on Susie in school, develops a friendship with Ruth, drawn together by their connection with Susie.Later, Detective Len Fenerman tells the Salmons that the police have exhausted all leads and are dropping the investigation. That night, Jack peers out of his den window and sees a flashlight in the cornfield. Believing Harvey is returning to destroy evidence, Jack runs out to confront him, armed with a baseball bat. The figure is not Harvey, but Clarissa, Susie's best friend who is dating Brian, one of Susie's classmates. As Susie watches in horror from heaven, Brian—who was going to meet Clarissa in the cornfield—nearly beats Jack to death, and Clarissa breaks Jack's knee. While Jack recovers from knee replacement surgery, Susie's mother, Abigail, begins cheating on Jack with the widowed Det. Fenerman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Nelson's_Death_Rat!"title="Mike Nelson's Death Rat!">
"Death Rat!" is primarily a satire, with its main subject being the state of Minnesota, where Nelson lives. Nelson's targets include parodies of famous Minnesota residents like Prince and Garrison Keillor, as well as the attitudes and quirks of Minnesotans in general.The protagonist of "Mike Nelson's Death Rat!" is Pontius Feeb, usually called Ponty, an author of many historical treatises who has just been fired. While working in a fast food restaurant he gets the idea to write a novel of historical fiction based in the small town of Holey, Minnesota. Feeb's novel revolves around the conflict between two citizens of Holey in the early 1900s, as well as a giant rodent from which the novel gets its name. However, when he tries to sell the novel to a publisher, he is told that he doesn't look right to be the author of an action novel. Feeb then enlists the help of local actor Jack Ryback to pretend he wrote the book and attempt to sell it. Jack sells the novel easily, but tells the publisher that it is a non-fiction book, instead of a novel. Jack and Pontius then work with the citizens of Holey to attempt to cover up the book's fictional nature. During their many visits to Holey, Ponty becomes friendly with the town's female mayor. As Feeb's "Death Rat" grows in popularity, the cover-up becomes harder and harder to maintain, as the rock star "King Leo" adopts the book as the scripture of a new religion, and sets up a revival in Holey. Meanwhile, a rival Minnesotan author is trying desperately to discredit Jack and "his" book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Unfinished_Voyage_of_Jack_Aubrey"title="The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey">
The story begins with "Surprise" in the Strait of Magellan, caught up in foul weather. Hanson first spots Cape Pilar at the very opening of the Strait, and soon "Surprise" moors and conducts some trade with the inhospitable locals for meat and vegetables. Having re-provisioned, she and "Ringle" sail northwards in fine weather until they enter the River Plate and moor close to the island functioning as the main administrative centre. A quarantine officer comes aboard and gives the frigate a clean bill of health.Wantage informs Maturin of a rumpus in the town: a fight between Protestant mariners from a Boston barque clash with the Catholic locals over the right of polygamy. Further signs of local resentment emerge when a large scow dumps the town's filth next to the frigate and the Portuguese sailors shout abuse at the Surprises. Aubrey sees the Papal legate on the shore, preparing to bless the town's ships, and recognises him as his own natural son Sam. As the Papal Nuncio to the Republic of Argentina, the Most Reverend Doctor Samuel Mputa had recently saved the government from an open rebellion.The South African squadron, under its Commander-in-Chief Admiral Lord Leyton, makes its appearance. Taking command of the blue squadron, Aubrey boards his new flagship, , seeing his blue rear admiral's flag hoisted on the mizzen mast. He has an interview with the cantankerous Admiral, who wants to send two of his officers and a midshipman home to England on "Surprise". Aubrey explains that he does not own the "Surprise", a private vessel once more, but ultimately pledges Maturin's consent in exchange for enough prime hands to man the shorthanded "Suffolk", its crew having been reduced by disease. Aboard "Surprise", Aubrey tells the assembled hands that he can take 63 volunteers over to join him on "Suffolk", and receives cheers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Join_My_Cult"title="Join My Cult">
Various plot elements focus on groups of suburban kids experimenting with shamanism and hallucinogens, who quickly discover themselves unhinged from the culture around them. It details events surrounding their harrowing plunge into this abyss, regularly shifting narrator and frame of reference from one member of the group to the other. Curcio utilizes atypical narrative and grammatical structures in the form of neurolinguistic and hypnotic confusion techniques within the text in an effort to stimulate a similar experience over the course of reading. That Curcio was intentionally utilizing these techniques is shown in various interviews such as a Gpod radio interview found on his website.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virginian_(novel)"title="The Virginian (novel)">
The novel begins with an unnamed narrator's arrival in Medicine Bow, Wyoming, from "back East" and his encounter with an impressively tall and handsome stranger. The stranger proves adept at roping horses, as well as facing down a gambler, Trampas, who calls him a "son of a bitch." (At the time, the word was an unacceptable insult in any society, except between joking friends.) The stranger lays a pistol on the table and gently threatens, "When you call me that, smile!" Known only as the Virginian, the stranger turns out to be the narrator's escort to Judge Henry's ranch in Sunk Creek, Wyoming. As the two travel the 263 miles to the ranch, the narrator, who is nicknamed the Tenderfoot, and the Virginian come to know one another as the Tenderfoot slowly begins to understand the nature of life in the West, which is very different from what he expected. This meeting is the beginning of a lifelong friendship and the starting point of the narrator's recounting of key episodes in the life of the Virginian.The novel revolves around the Virginian and the life he lives. As well as describing the Virginian's conflict with his enemy, Trampas, and his romance with the pretty schoolteacher, Molly Stark Wood, Wister weaves a tale of action, violence, hate, revenge, love, and friendship. In one scene, the Virginian is forced to participate in the hanging of Steve, an admitted cattle thief who had been his close friend. The hanging is represented as a necessary response to the government's corruption and lack of action, but the Virginian feels it to be a horrible duty. He is especially stricken by the bravery with which the thief faces his fate, and the heavy burden that the act places on his heart forms the emotional core of the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Park"title="Lunar Park">
The novel begins with an inflated and parodic but reasonably accurate portrayal of Ellis's early fame. It details incidents of his rampant drug use and his publicly humiliating book tours to promote "Glamorama". The novel dissolves into fiction as Ellis describes a liaison with an actress named Jayne Dennis, whom he later marries, and with whom he conceives a child. From this point, the fictional Ellis' life reflects the real writer's only in some descriptions of the past and possibly in his general sentiments. Ellis and Jayne move to fictional Midland, an affluent suburban town outside New York City, which they no longer consider safe due to pervasive terrorist acts in a post-9/11 America. Fictional incidents include suicide bombings in Wal-Marts and a dirty bomb detonated in Florida. Strange incidents start happening on a Halloween night, some involving a Terby doll belonging to Ellis's fictional stepdaughter Sarah.As the novel progresses, the haunting of Ellis's house and questions over the death of his father become increasingly prominent. At various points, characters and events from Ellis' novels appear to intersect his real life, although he is largely unaware of this thin veil between his reality and his fiction. With his history of drug use and alcoholism, his wife, children and housekeeper are understandably skeptical of his claims that the house is haunted. Unfolding events only very gradually reveal a much more complicated situation than a simple haunting. There is a dynamic interplay between the author's dead father, the house itself and specific negative associations buried within the author's own subconscious mind. Added to all of this is the very late-breaking and almost gratuitous insinuation that Robby, the narrator's young son, may somehow be at the epicenter of all these events.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_and_Remembrance"title="War and Remembrance">
"War and Remembrance" completes the cycle that began with "The Winds of War". The story includes historical occurrences at Midway, Yalta, Guadalcanal, and El Alamein as well as the Allied invasions at Normandy and the Philippines.One of the more significant themes in the novel and one that occurs in many of Wouk's works is a rediscovery of a central character's Jewish identity. Biblical scholar Aaron Jastrow and his niece Natalie Henry's experience of the Holocaust and their internment in Theresienstadt Ghetto are the events that trigger their newfound identification with their Judaism, Jastrow having formerly converted to Catholicism. "Jastrow is transformed from a rational professor with only marginal awareness of his Jewishness into a passionate champion of his Jewish integrity" according to one reporter.The action moves back and forth between the characters against the backdrop of World War II: Victor "Pug" Henry takes part in various battles while separating from his wife. Pug's older son Warren, a naval aviator, and younger son, Byron, a submarine officer, also participate in combat. Warren is killed at the battle of Midway. Byron's wife Natalie is trapped in Axis territory with her uncle, celebrated author Aaron Jastrow, and another major strand focuses on their story as Jews caught in Europe. Like most Americans, Natalie and Aaron fail to believe that the civilized German culture with which they are familiar could possibly engage in genocide. As a result of their rash decision to stay when they could escape, they are slowly absorbed into the Jewish population that is first interned, then sent to concentration camps. As Byron attempts to find out what is happening to them, eventually tracking them down amidst the chaos of wartime Europe, the story of the Holocaust is gradually revealed to the American government and people. Another plot thread concerns Aaron Jastrow's cousin Berel who is captured near the end of "The Winds of War" and is forced to join Kommando 1005, SS officer Paul Blobel's Jewish contingent that travels around Eastern Europe exhuming the bodies of massacred Jews and disposing of them in an effort to hide the evidence of Nazi mass murder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Borrible_Trilogy"title="The Borrible Trilogy">
The stories begin with the discovery by the Battersea Chief-Lookout, Knocker, of a Rumble in Battersea Park. The Rumbles are rat-like creatures that live in an underground bunker in Rumbledom, and are hated by the Borribles for their riches, power, and haughtiness. Fearing a full-scale invasion of Battersea, each of the Borrible tribes across London send their best and brightest unnamed members to form an elite hit squad, known as the Magnificent Eight or the Adventurers, with the purpose of infiltrating the Rumble bunker and eliminating the eight members of the Rumble High Command.Rumbles are clearly a parody of the popular children's characters, the Wombles of Wimbledon Common. On the way the Borribles also meet a particularly vicious parody of Steptoe and Son (which was one of the most popular shows on TV at the time) in the form of Dewdrop, a former Borrible, and his son Erbie.The Adventurers are each assigned the name of the individual target of the High Command that they are to assassinate: Napoleon Boot, the suspicious and cynical Borrible; Chalotte, the tough and brave girl Borrible; Vulgarian (Vulge), frail-looking, but "tough as nails"; Bingo, always cheerful; Sydney, another female and an animal-lover; Stonks, strong and kind-hearted; Torreycanyon, light-hearted with a knack for mechanics; Orococco, the jovial, black Borrible. Napoleon, Chalotte, Sydney, Vulge, Bingo, Stonks, Torreycanyon, and Orococco set out to squash the Rumble threat – but other Borribles have secret agendas and personal vendettas of their own which create an even greater threat than the Rumbles ever were. The supposedly straightforward adventure dominoes into a desperate fight for the very existence of Borrible life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_over_Innsmouth"title="The Shadow over Innsmouth">
The narrator explains how he instigated a secret investigation of the decrepit town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts—a former seaport isolated from other nearby towns by vast salt marshes—by the U.S. government after fleeing it on July 16, 1927. The investigation ultimately concluded with the arrest and detention of many of the town's residents in concentration camps as well as a submarine torpedoing nearby Devil Reef, which the press falsely reported as Prohibition liquor raids. The narrator proceeds to describe in detail the events surrounding his initial interest in the town, which lies along the route of his tour across New England, taken when he was a 21-year-old student at Oberlin College.While waiting for the bus that will take him to Innsmouth, the narrator busies himself in neighboring Newburyport by gathering information on the town's history from the locals; all of it having superstitious overtones. The town was once a profitable port and shipbuilding center during the colonial and post-revolutionary periods, but began to decline after the War of 1812 interrupted shipping. A local merchant named Obed Marsh built a profitable gold refinery, but the town only deteriorated further after riots and a mysterious epidemic eliminated half of its residents in 1845. Marsh also founded a pagan cult called the Esoteric Order of Dagon, which became the town's primary religion. Outsiders and government officials, including Census Bureau agents and school inspectors, are treated with hostility.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lair_of_the_White_Worm"title="The Lair of the White Worm">
The central character of the book is Adam Salton, an Australian at the outset living there, who in 1860 is contacted by his elderly great-uncle, Richard Salton, a landed gentleman of Lesser Hill, Derbyshire, England, who has no other family and wants to establish a relationship with the only other living member of the Salton family. Although Adam has already made his own fortune in Australia, he enthusiastically agrees to meet his uncle, and on his arrival by ship at Southampton the two men quickly become good friends. His great-uncle then reveals that he wishes to make Adam the heir to his estate, Lesser Hill. Adam travels there and quickly finds himself at the center of mysterious events, with Sir Nathaniel de Salis, a friend of Richard Salton's, as his guide.Edgar Caswall, the new heir to a neighboring estate, Castra Regis or Royal Camp, is in the process of making a mesmeric assault on a local girl, Lilla Watford. Meanwhile, Arabella March, of Diana's Grove, is running a game of her own, perhaps angling to become Mrs. Edgar Caswall. He is a slightly pathological eccentric and has inherited Franz Mesmer's chest, which he keeps in the Castra Regis Tower. Caswall seeks to make use of mesmerism, a precursor to hypnotism, and, obsessed with Lilla, attempts to break her using mesmeric powers. However, with the help of Lilla's half-Burmese cousin, Mimi Watford, he is thwarted time and again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_and_the_Brotherhood"title="The Book and the Brotherhood">
David Crimond, tasked with writing the book, resurfaces at a Commemoration ball the friends attend. His sudden re-appearance induces the group to attempt resolving the untenable situation by pressing for clarification. In turn they find themselves confronted with how far removed they are from their former Marxist beliefs and their own philosophical disorientation. As Crimond promises progress on the book, his draw causes the members of the circle to plunge into chaos.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Alley_(novel)"title="Nightmare Alley (novel)">
Stanton Carlisle watches the geek show at a Ten-in-One where he has recently begun working. He later asks the carnival's talker Clem Hoately where geeks come from. Clem explains that geeks are "made": a sideshow owner finds an alcoholic bum and offers him a temporary job with a steady supply of liquor. Initially, the bum is only asked to pretend to be a geek, using a razor blade to slice chickens' necks and then faking the drinking of the blood. After a few weeks, the owner threatens to end the job and replace the bum with a "real" geek, and the fear of sobering up terrifies the bum into actually biting the chickens. Thus, a geek is made.Stan performs sleight of hand tricks in the sideshow but studies under the carnival's mentalist Zeena to learn a refined "code" act, where performers memorize verbal cues that allow them to appear psychic by accurately answering written audience questions. Stan also begins to pick up Zeena's talent for cold reading. He eventually leaves the carnival with the beautiful and naïve electric girl Molly Cahill to perform a team code act.Their act becomes very successful, but Stan grows bored and transforms himself into Reverend Carlisle, an upstanding spiritualist preacher offering séance sessions with the help of his medium. Stan gains a devoted following, but the stress of leading a false life leads him to seek the help of a psychologist named Lilith Ritter, who seduces and then begins controlling him. Stan pleads constantly for them to go away together, and Lilith eventually agrees, suggesting the Rev. Carlisle swindle a rich man for the getaway money. They settle on Ezra Grindle, a ruthless auto tycoon with a skeptical interest in the occult. Stan manages to convince Grindle of his powers, and the businessman becomes a devoted spiritualist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtain_(novel)"title="Curtain (novel)">
A specific person is unsuspected of involvement in five murders by both the police and family of the victims. In all cases, there was a clear suspect. Four of these suspects have since died (one of them hanged); in the case of Freda Clay, who gave her aunt an overdose of morphine, there was too little evidence to prosecute. Poirot calls on his old friend, the recently-widowed Hastings, to join him in solving this case. Poirot alone sees the pattern of involvement. Poirot, using a wheelchair due to arthritis, and attended by his new valet Curtiss, will not share the name of the previously unsuspected person, using X instead. X is among the guests at Styles Court with them. The old house is a guest hotel under new owners, Colonel and Mrs Luttrell. The guests know each other, with this gathering initiated when Sir William Boyd-Carrington invites the Franklins to join him for a summer holiday stay. The five prior murders took place in the area, among people known to this group.Elizabeth Cole tells Hastings that she is a sister of Margaret Litchfield, who confessed to the murder of their father in one of the five cases. Margaret has died in Broadmoor Asylum and Elizabeth is stigmatised by the trauma. Three incidents occur in the next few days, showing the imprint of X. First, Hastings and others overhear an argument between the Luttrells. Shortly afterwards, Luttrell wounds his wife with a rook rifle, saying he mistook her for a rabbit. Mrs Luttrell recovers, and the incident has a good effect on their marriage. Next, Hastings is concerned that his daughter Judith spends time with Major Allerton, a married man. While Hastings and Elizabeth are out with birdwatcher Stephen Norton, Norton sees something through his binoculars that disturbs him. Hastings assumes it has to do with Allerton. When his attempts to persuade Judith to give Allerton up merely antagonise her, the worried father plans Allerton's murder. He falls asleep while waiting to poison Allerton, relieved he took no action when he awakes the next day. Last, Barbara Franklin, wife of Judith's employer, Dr Franklin, dies the following evening. She was poisoned with physostigmine sulphate, an extract from the Calabar bean that her husband researches. Poirot's testimony at the inquest, that Mrs Franklin had been upset and that he saw her emerge from Dr Franklin's laboratory with a small bottle, persuades the jury to return a verdict of suicide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Widow_for_One_Year"title="A Widow for One Year">
The year is 1958 and Ruth Cole is 4 years old. Although she is a loved child, her parents do not have a happy marriage. Her two older brothers died several years earlier in a tragic accident, and she is constantly reminded of their presence by the pictures of the boys' childhood hanging on the walls of the Cole family home. Ruth's father, Ted Cole, is a successful writer and illustrator of books for children. He hires Eddie O'Hare, a teenager who attends Phillips Exeter Academy, the same school Ruth's two late brothers attended, to work as his assistant for the summer. Eddie is unwittingly drawn into a plot orchestrated by Ted to drive his unhappy wife, Marion, to infidelity. Marion, unable to forget her dead sons, shows little affection to her daughter. Ted has always conducted extramarital affairs and would likely lose in a custody battle for Ruth. If Marion had an affair, especially with a teenager, it would strengthen the case for custody to be awarded to him. Ted picks Eddie specifically to tempt Marion because he bears a striking resemblance to his son Thomas, "the confident one". Eddie and Marion's affair leads Marion to leave Ted and Ruth at the end of the summer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Looking_Glass_War"title="The Looking Glass War">
During the early 1960s, the formerly renowned British military intelligence organisation known colloquially as "The Department" is floundering. Surviving on long past memories of its aerial reconnaissance missions during the Second World War the organisation has been reduced to a skeleton crew consisting of Leclerc, a nostalgic former air commander who now languishes in bureaucracy as Director, John Avery, his 32 year old aide who took the job after failing as a publisher, Taylor, a middle-aged man who views the job as his last chance at glory, and Haldane, a pompous intellectual in ailing health whose research on the Soviet Union and East Germany has been the sole reason for departmental funding from Whitehall. Languishing in the mundanity of bureaucratic battles and inconsequential desk work, the organisation desperately desire the opportunity to regain their standing in the intelligence community, as well as to gain a one up against their now superior rivals in the Circus, headed by chief "Control" and his second-in-command, George Smiley. The Department gets its wish when a defector passes information to the organisation regarding a build-up of Soviet missiles in the fictional town of Kalkstadt, near Lübeck across the border in West Germany. With the Cuban Missile Crisis in mind, they quickly manufacture a plan to act, and bribe a commercial pilot to accidentally stray off course and photograph the site in the hopes of verification. Taylor is then dispatched to Finland to rendezvous with the pilot. After collecting the film, Taylor is killed in a hit-and-run incident, which Leclerc interprets as an attempt to recapture the film by the Stasi. Further setbacks occur when Avery is dispatched to recover Taylor and his effects from the Finns when his documentation doesn't match Finnish information.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunches_in_Bunches"title="Hunches in Bunches">
A boy is approached by numerous strange creatures with enormous gloved hats on their heads. Each "hunch" points out a different possible course of action with each hunch contradicting the others.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_English_Opium-Eater"title="Confessions of an English Opium-Eater">
As originally published, De Quincey's account was organised into two parts:Though De Quincey was later criticised for giving too much attention to the pleasure of opium and not enough to the harsh negatives of addiction, "The Pains of Opium" is in fact significantly longer than "The Pleasures". However, even when trying to convey darker truths, De Quincey's language can seem seduced by the compelling nature of the opium experience:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daleks'_Master_Plan"title="The Daleks' Master Plan">
Some six months after the events of "Mission to the Unknown", the TARDIS arrives on the planet Kembel, and the First Doctor leaves the TARDIS to try to find medical aid for the wounded Steven, leaving him with the Trojan servant girl Katarina. Meanwhile, a Space Agent, Bret Vyon is also on the planet trying to find out what happened to Agent Marc Cory. After a less-than-amicable meeting with the TARDIS travellers in which he holds them at gunpoint and demands to be taken away from the planet, Vyon helps cure Steven and agrees to work with them to escape and warn Earth of the massive Dalek-led alliance that is amassing on the planet. Part of this alliance is the treacherous Guardian of The Solar System, Mavic Chen, who has brought a sample of the extremely rare Taranium, which will become a key part of the Daleks' ultimate weapon, the Time Destructor. The Daleks soon learn of their presence on the planet and the Dalek Supreme gives the command for Operation Inferno to be carried out, burning down the jungle. The travelers shelter at the Dalek city. The Doctor manages to steal the Taranium by impersonating delegate Zephon, and he, his companions and Bret escape on Chen's ship, termed a Spar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight_Shadow_(novella)"title="Moonlight Shadow (novella)">
The novella tells the story of a young woman, Satsuki, coming to terms with the death of her boyfriend, Hitoshi, in a car accident and her friendship with her boyfriend's brother, Hiiragi, whose girlfriend, Yumiko, also died in the same accident. With Japanese cultural and surrealistic themes, it is an example of Yoshimoto's clean writing style that portrays the emotions of grief, loss, and hope. Many important symbols are brought up, including a bell. This bell is "what really sparked the relationship." Satsuki meets a mysterious woman who helps her overcome her boyfriend's death, and Satsuki continues wondering why the woman helped her after she overcomes Hitoshi's death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_of_Redwall"title="Outcast of Redwall">
In the howling, snowy north, a young kestrel named Skarlath is lost in a snowstorm after leaving the nest, and is captured by the cruel ferret Swartt Sixclaw and his group of vermin. They also have captured a young badger who they torment mercilessly. The two young beasts help each other escape from the vermin camp. In the scuffle that ensues, the badger creates a massive hornbeam limb club. The ferret and the badger both vow to extort revenge, each declaring the other to be his mortal enemy.As the young badger could not remember his name, Skarlath dubs him Sunflash after the distinctive golden stripe running down his snout. The two young beasts quickly become inseparable friends and travel throughout Mossflower Woods together, defending the weak and helpless and quickly growing older. Sunflash's reputation quickly spreads throughout the land. He eventually moulds his hornbeam limb into a fearsome, stone-spiked warclub, calling it his mace.Meanwhile, Swartt also grows older, stronger, and wiser. He travels the northern lands with his vixen seer Nightshade and his horde and eventually ends up at the camp of Bowfleg, a fat ferret with a large horde who has settled down in a plentiful land. As an earlier leader of Swartt's, his captains are suspicious, and rightly so: with the help of Nightshade, Swartt executes a cunning trick that kills Bowfleg. Swartt takes over his large horde and marries his daughter, Bluefen, who gives birth to his son before dying.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_the_Dead_(Zelazny_novel)"title="Isle of the Dead (Zelazny novel)">
Francis Sandow is the last surviving human born in the 20th century. An early space colonist, he spent long centuries of space travel in suspended animation. After his last such trip, he woke in the 27th century, where everything had changed. Desperate for something to hold to, he sought out a mentor, who happened to be a member of a very long-lived and slowly dying alien race, the Pei'ans. Under this tutelage, Sandow eventually became a telepath and "worldscaper". Worldscapers have the ability to create and/or terraform planets. The process of becoming a worldscaper culminates in a mystic rite called "Naming" that binds the mortal to one of the gods in the Pei'an pantheon, and it is believed that the worldscaper is actually acting as an avatar for the god. There are only twenty-seven existing worldscapers; Sandow, bound to Shimbo of Darktree, Shrugger of Thunders, is the only non-Pei'an among them. Outworlders are welcome to practice the religion, which is called Strantri. Sandow opines it will be the first major religion to outlive its founders. Unlike most of the Pei'an deities, who tend to be chimeras like Egyptian gods, Shimbo is also unmistakably human, showing that the Pei'ans had visited Earth in the distant past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_(novel)"title="The Truth (novel)">
William de Worde is the black sheep of an influential Ankh-Morpork family, scraping out a humble lifestyle as a common scribe and making extra pocket money by producing a gossipy newsletter for foreign notables. This arrangement is soon undermined by the arrival of a team of dwarves to Ankh-Morpork who intend to start a printing business; however, de Worde and the dwarves establish "The Ankh-Morpork Times" later employing Sacharissa Cripslock and Otto, a black-ribbon vampire and iconographer. The Guild of Engravers is antagonised by the unauthorised efforts of the "Times"; in response, the Guild cuts off their paper supplies and establish the rival newspaper "The Ankh-Morpork Inquirer", a loss-making tabloid filled with popular fabricated stories.Meanwhile, a conspiracy is afoot in the city to depose the Patrician, Lord Vetinari. The wealthy and powerful (but anonymous) Committee to Unelect the Patrician hire Mr. Pin and Mr. Tulip, a pair of villainous mercenaries from outside Ankh-Morpork known as the New Firm, to frame Vetinari with a staged embezzlement and replace him with a puppet, the President of the Guild of Shoemakers and Leatherworkers, Tuttle Scrope. Pin and Tulip manage to catch off-guard the normally impassible Patrician with Charlie, a witless Vetinari look-alike that they had previously kidnapped in Pseudopolis and forced to collaborate. The plan starts going south, though, when Drumknott, Vetinari's clerk returns in the middle of the scene and the New Firm is forced to stab him and render Vetinari unconscious, hoping to also frame him for murder; their efforts are hampered by Lord Vetinari's prized terrier, Wuffles, who bites Mr. Pin and escapes, becoming the sole witness to the crime.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Miso_Soup"title="In the Miso Soup">
Twenty-year-old Kenji is a Japanese "nightlife" guide for foreigners—he navigates "gaijin" men around the sex clubs and hostess bars of Tokyo. On December 29 he receives a phone call from an American named Frank, who seeks three nights of his services. While Kenji has promised to spend more time with his girlfriend, sixteen-year-old Jun, the money is too good to pass up. He finds himself closing out the end of the year accompanying Frank around Shinjuku, wondering if his strange, plastic-skinned patron could be responsible for the gruesome events recently reported in the news.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/69_(novel)"title="69 (novel)">
Thirty-two-year-old narrator Kensuke Yazaki takes a nostalgic look back at the year 1969, when he was an ambitious and enthusiastic seventeen-year-old, living in Sasebo, in Nagasaki, where he gets into antics with his equally ambitious and enthusiastic best friends, Iwase and Adama. Their priorities are girls, cinema, music, literature, pop culture, organizing a school festival to be called "The Morning Erection Festival", besting teachers and enemies, and finding a way to change the world somehow.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_in_the_Lake"title="The Lady in the Lake">
Derace Kingsley, a wealthy businessman, hires Marlowe to find his estranged wife, Crystal. Kingsley had received a telegram from Crystal about two weeks before stating that she was divorcing him and marrying her gigolo boyfriend, Chris Lavery. But when Kingsley ran into him, Lavery had claimed that he hadn't seen her and didn't know where she was.Marlowe begins his investigation with a visit to Lavery in the neighbouring town of Bay City. But while watching Lavery's house, Marlowe is threatened by the tough cop Al Degarmo, who suspects him of harassing Lavery's neighbour, Dr. Almore. Marlowe discovers that Almore's wife had died under suspicious circumstances and that her death was probably hushed up by the police.Marlowe moves his investigations to Kingsley’s vacation cabin at Little Fawn Lake. Kingsley has given him a note to the caretaker, Bill Chess. Chess is depressed over having been abandoned by his wife, Muriel, at about the same time as Crystal disappeared. As Marlowe and Chess walk over the property, they discover a drowned body that Chess identifies as his wife, bloated from decomposition and almost unrecognisable except by her clothes and jewellery. Chess is arrested for his wife's murder and Marlowe doubtfully returns to Los Angeles. On the way, he interviews some hotel employees who remember a woman matching Crystal's description and volunteer that a man was with her; their description of the man resembles Lavery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lake_House_(Patterson_novel)"title="The Lake House (Patterson novel)">
"The Lake House" told the story of six extraordinary children, endowed with the power to fly after genetic engineering merged their DNA with that of birds, and who had to fight for their lives against scientists who wanted to kill them, thinking that they were monsters of despair. With them came the help of Dr. Frannie O'Neil and suspended FBI agent Thomas "Kit" Brennan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovo-Bukh"title="Bovo-Bukh">
Bovo's young mother conspires to have her husband, an aged king, killed during a hunt, then marries the murderer. They try and fail to poison the child Bovo, whom they are afraid will avenge his father. The handsome youth runs away from Antona, is kidnapped and taken to Flanders to be stable boy to a king, whose daughter Druzane falls in love with him.The heathen sultan of Babylonia arrives, backed by ten thousand warriors, to demand Druzane in marriage for his ugly son, Lucifer. He is refused; in the ensuing war the king of Flanders is captured. Bovo, riding the magic horse Pumele and wielding the magic sword Rundele, defeats the sultan's army, slays Lucifer, frees the king, and is promised the hand of Druzane, but is enticed to Babylonia, where he is horribly imprisoned for a year before escaping. Meanwhile, Druzane has presumed him dead and consented to marry the knight Macabron.On the wedding day of Druzane and Macabron, Bovo arrives disguised as a beggar; he and Druzane flee, first to a palace but later to the forest, pursued by Macabron. Deep in the forest, Druzane gives birth to twins.Bovo sets off to try to find a route back to Flanders. Druzane comes to the conclusion that Bovo has fallen prey to a lion, sets off on her own with the twins, and successfully reaches Flanders. Bovo returns to their forest abode; failing to find her or the twins, he now also presumes "her" to have fallen prey. Despairing, he joins an army ranged against his native Antona. He kills his stepfather, dispatches his mother to a nunnery, and takes his rightful crown. He is eventually reunited with Druzane, who becomes his queen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_City"title="The Crystal City">
Alvin and Arthur stay at a boarding house where mixed-blood children are cared for by Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel. While there, Alvin uses his knack to cleanse the mosquitoes and disease from a well. A young woman, whom the people call Dead Mary, sees what he has done and asks him to come with her and heal her mother, who has yellow fever. Because Alvin heals her, the Yellow Fever spreads throughout Nueva Barcelona, averting an impending war with the United States over slavery. As the fever spreads, people begin to suspect Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel because Alvin has been healing everyone he can, radiating outward through the city. Alvin is then approached by La Tia, an African woman, who wants him to help all the slaves and the displaced French to escape Nueva Barcelona. He reluctantly agrees.Alvin's brother, Calvin, at the behest of Alvin's wife, Margaret, comes to help. Calvin raises a thick fog while Alvin uses his blood (magic he learned from the Red Prophet Tenskwa-Tawa) to construct a crystal bridge across lake Ponchartrain to the north. Arthur helps Alvin with the bridge. While the escapees flee north, they take food and provision from plantations along the way and free any slaves they find. Alvin goes to Tenskwa-Tawa on the other side of the Mizzippy to ask for safe passage through the Red Man's lands, so they can escape the pursuing army. Alvin and Tenskwa-Tawa put on a show by holding back the Mizzippy river to allow the exodus of people from Nueva Barcelona to cross, while the pursuing army can do nothing but watch. Calvin leaves with Jim Bowie and Steve Austin to conquer the Mexica. Verily Cooper is sent by Margaret to seek out Abe Lincoln and get his help for figuring out what to do with all the runaways when they reach the Noisy River Territory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children's_Story"title="The Children's Story">
The story takes place in an unnamed school classroom in the United States, in the aftermath of a war between the US and an unnamed country. It is implied that America has been defeated and occupied. The story opens with the previous teacher leaving the classroom, having been removed from her position and replaced with an agent of the foreign power. The new teacher has been trained in propaganda techniques and is responsible for re-educating the children to be supportive of their occupiers. During the course of the story, the children are persuaded to abandon their religion and national loyalty. Framing the story is the fact that, while the children have ritually recited a "Pledge of Allegiance" every morning, none know what it actually means. Addressed broadly, lacking the meaning of any word can lead anyone – child or adult – to the malleable state in which we see the children as the story draws to a close. The teacher is relentlessly positive about the change, offering the children candy, songs and praise. When asked if the war was won or lost, she responds only that ""we" won", implying that everyone would benefit from the conquest.Only one student is initially hostile to the new teacher, a child named Johnny, whose father had been arrested and placed in a re-education camp. At first, he defends his father, but when he is rewarded by the teacher with a position of authority in the class, he quickly accepts the new regime and commits himself to not accepting "wrong thoughts". The story takes place over a twenty-five-minute span.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wish_List_(novel)"title="The Wish List (novel)">
Meg Finn is a teenage girl who tries to rob pensioner Lowrie McCall's house to get money and run away from her abusive stepfather Franco. She is the accomplice of a local thug named Belch and his pit bull. Lowrie interrupts their break-in, prompting Belch's dog to attack him. Belch refuses to call the dog off, until Meg takes Lowrie's shotgun and tries to force Belch to call an ambulance. Belch snatches the shotgun, forcing Meg to flee. Belch corners her at an old gas tank and fires a shot to kill Meg that explodes the gas tank, killing Meg, Belch and his dog instantly. Meg's spirit gets into the tunnel leading to her Heaven/Hell and also meets Belch's and his dog's spirit fused together. The Belch-dog hybrid is immediately sent to Hell, but Meg remains trapped in the tunnel.Interested in Meg due to the cruel revenge she inflicted on her stepfather, Satan orders his right hand Beelzebub to get Meg's spirit to hell. Beelzebub investigates Meg's situation with the help of St. Peter, who decides if mortals deserve to be allowed to enter heaven, and both are surprised to discover that Meg's good intentions are balanced by her sinful actions. Unbeknownst to St. Peter, Beelzebub has the technology wizard Myishi send Belch and the hologram Elph to capture Meg. Meg learns her situation from the tunnel mite Flit, and through his guidance returns to earth as a spirit. With no other purpose, she decides to do some good by helping the injured Lowrie to complete his wish list, four wrongs in his disastrous life that he feels he must right. The first wish sees Lowrie find the courage to kiss his first love, now a famous television host. Although Meg is attacked by Blech, the completion of the wish blasts the dog-boy back to hell, taking him and Elph out of the picture for a time. Meg and Lowrie complete the second wish—break into Croke Park and score a goal—without too much incident. The third wish is more problematic; Lowrie wishes to punch Brendan Ball, an old school bully, but after Meg helps Lowrie find the man, Lowrie decides against it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Supernaturalist"title="The Supernaturalist">
"The Supernaturalist" takes place in Satellite City, a large city in an unspecified location in the Northern Hemisphere, in the third millennium. Much of Satellite City is controlled by the Satellite, owned by Myishi Corporation. By the time of the novel, however, the Satellite is losing links to the surface, causing disasters that range from mild to catastrophic.The book opens with an introduction to Cosmo Hill, an orphan at the Clarissa Frayne Institute for Parentally Challenged Boys. At the Institute, the boys are used as human guinea pigs for various products. However, on a trip back from a record company, the truck transporting them crashes. Cosmo and a friend, Francis (aka "Ziplock") manage to escape the wreckage, but are pursued by a warden from the Institute. The chase takes them to the rooftops, where Cosmo and Ziplock fall into a wrecked generator. Ziplock is electrocuted but Cosmo survives, albeit with multiple critical injuries, including several broken bones and a heart which begins to shut down. He begins seeing small blue creatures around him. When one lands on his chest and begins sucking his life out, three figures appear out of nowhere and kill the creature. Although the teens want to leave him, Cosmo begs them to take him with them, pleading to not be left to be eaten by the strange blue beings. The group labels him a "Spotter" and, after some argument, take him with them before he passes out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castrovalva_(Doctor_Who)"title="Castrovalva (Doctor Who)">
After his regeneration at the end of "Logopolis", the Fifth Doctor is still weak, and his companions, Adric, Nyssa, and Tegan take him to his TARDIS. Inside, the Doctor is delirious but asks to be taken to the "Zero Room" that contains Time Lord healing technology to allow him to recover.Tegan and Nyssa discover a terminal on the TARDIS that describes how to use the machine. They attempt to pilot the TARDIS but find they are travelling rapidly to a preset time and destination, "Event One", the Big Bang, a trap set by the Master. After they are unable to find Adric, the women manage to bring the Doctor to the console room in time for him to jettison a quarter of the TARDIS' mass to propel them back to conventional time. They soon discover that the Zero Room was part of the jettisoned mass, so with the help of Nyssa the Doctor builds a temporary coffin-shaped zero cabinet from the zero room's doors. Tegan discovers information on the town of Castrovalva, an ideal place for the Doctor to recover, and directs the TARDIS there.In the forest, Nyssa and Tegan have difficulties in transporting the Doctor, and become separated from him; the Doctor is captured by warriors protecting Castrovalva, while the women are forced to climb a rocky cliff to reach its entrance. The Doctor is cared for by Shardovan, a librarian, and the elderly Portreeve, before Nyssa and Tegan arrive. After a night's sleep, they discover strange aspects of Castrovalva; if they go out of the town through any of its exits, they find themselves in a particular plaza in the town, and a tapestry in the Doctor's rooms changes and reflects events of the outside world. The Doctor understands that they are trapped in a "recursive occlusion", and Castrovalva is fake. The Portreeve reveals himself as the Master, and shows them the trapped Adric. The Master has been able to use Adric's mathematical genius to create Castrovalva as well as alter the TARDIS, creating the terminal on the console that led them here. Realising the true nature of Castrovalva's reality, Shardovan swings from a chandelier into the web and destroys it, freeing Adric and causing Castrovalva to fall apart. Seeing all is lost, the Master flees to his TARDIS. The Doctor and his companions flee from the town. The Master appears to be trapped and is unable to escape as the town collapses in on itself. As the time travellers return to the TARDIS, the Doctor indicates that he has fully recovered from his regeneration ordeal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth_of_Evil"title="Labyrinth of Evil">
On the planet Cato Neimoidia, Jedi generals Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker lead clone troopers to capture Nute Gunray, Trade Federation viceroy and one of the leaders of the Separatists. Gunray narrowly escapes to rendezvous with General Grievous and the rest of the Separatist Council, but he leaves behind his walking chair equipped with a specially-constructed holotransceiver. Republic analysts find the afterimage of Darth Sidious, the Sith Lord who masterminded the Clone Wars. However, this puts the Jedi no closer to finding Sidious himself.While Kenobi and Skywalker pursue the constructor of the chair, General Grievous is commanded by Sidious through his apprentice Count Dooku to relocate the Separatist Council to Belderone, where a Republic fleet lies in wait for them. Furious, Grievous learns that Gunray lost the holotransceiver. Republic Intelligence find the signature of the artist that designed the mechno-chair that Sidious provided Gunray. Kenobi and Skywalker seek out the artist, a Xi Charrian, who tells them to find the designer, contracted by Sidious, to build the holotransceiver built into the mechno-chair. The Jedi find the designer in a prison, where he tells them that he built two holotransceivers, one for the mechno-chair, another for a ship of unknown design. The designer knows the identity of the pilot that delivered the ship to its owners (Darth Maul and Sidious). The pilot, a Lethan Twi'lek, is discovered on a moon by the Jedi, and she describes to the Jedi the location of the delivered ship: a columnar building in The Works, a desolate industrial park on Coruscant.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sisterhood_of_the_Traveling_Pants_(novel)"title="The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (novel)">
In the first novel of the series, the reader is introduced to four high school students: Lena Kaligaris, Tibby Rollins, Bridget Vreeland, and Carmen Lowell. They have been best friends since birth (their mothers attended prenatal exercise classes together). The summer before their junior year of high school, Carmen finds a pair of old jeans that mysteriously fits each girl perfectly, despite their different sizes. This leads them to believe that the pants are magical. They share the "traveling pants" among themselves over the summer while they are separated.Lena spends the summer with her grandparents in Santorini. During her stay, her grandmother attempts to set her up with a man by the name of Kostos. Kostos takes interest in Lena, who eventually returns the notion. She goes skinny-dipping and Kostos accidentally sees her. A misunderstanding leads Lena's grandparents to believe that Kostos attempted to assault Lena, causing an argument between the two families. Later in the summer, Lena explains to her grandparents what happened in order to repair the rift between her and Kostos' grandparents, and confesses to Kostos that she loves him.Tibby spends the summer working at a Wallman's store, planning to film a documentary of her experiences. She meets a 12-year-old girl, Bailey, after the latter faints at the store; it is revealed that she has been diagnosed with leukemia. Over the course of the summer, the two become close friends and Bailey begins to help Tibby film her documentary. Bailey dies from her leukemia, which leads Tibby to refocus her documentary to capture the memories that they created together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crome_Yellow"title="Crome Yellow">
A house party at Crome is viewed largely through the eyes of Denis Stone. Described by his hostess as "one of our younger poets", he has been invited by Priscilla and Henry Wimbush to join their summer guests. Denis is secretly in love with their niece, Anne Wimbush, who appears more interested in the artist Gombauld. The rather naïve flapper, Mary Bracegirdle, decides to embark on an amorous adventure so as to overcome her repressions and makes unsuccessful advances to Denis and Gombauld before falling for the libertine Ivor Lombard one summer night. The hard-of-hearing Jenny Mullion confines most of her thoughts on what goes on to her journal, in which Denis eventually discovers a devastating deconstruction of his self and fellow guests. Mr. Wimbush, the owner of Crome, has been writing a history of the house and its family, from which he gives two evening readings. His wife is obsessed with alternative spirituality and finds a fellow sympathiser in the prolific literary hack, Mr. Barbecue-Smith. Also part of the party is Henry's former schoolfriend, the cynical Mr. Scogan, who lies in wait for anyone he can waylay with his reductive criticisms of the time and his visions for a dystopian future. After several ludicrous failures in trying to capture Anne’s affection, Denis despairingly arranges to be recalled home on 'urgent family business' and departs on the same slow train that had brought him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind_Robber"title="The Mind Robber">
After defeating the Dominators and starting off a volcanic eruption, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe find themselves and the TARDIS in the path of a lava flow. Upon trying to dematerialise out of the way, the TARDIS experiences a fault in the fluid link. At the insistence of Zoe and Jamie, the Doctor uses an emergency unit that takes the TARDIS into another dimension outside of reality. Upon their arrival into an empty white void, the travellers find themselves assaulted, first subtly then overtly, by an unseen force. The attack results in the TARDIS breaking apart and the travellers being scattered.The Doctor, after experiencing a series of curious encounters, manages to find Jamie and Zoe. He soon deduces that they are in a world filled with fictional and mythological characters. They finally meet a person called "The Master" who seems to be in charge. It turns out that he is in fact an Earth man abducted and brought to the land of fiction in order to provide creative energies for the unseen aliens who are really in charge. Everything that the Doctor has experienced was a series of tests to prepare him for his role as replacement. The aliens' plan is to control everyone on Earth and bring them to the land of fiction, leaving the Earth itself empty for easy colonisation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_(novel)"title="Saturday (novel)">
The book follows Henry Perowne, a middle-aged, successful surgeon. Five chapters chart his day and thoughts on Saturday the 15 February 2003, the day of the demonstration against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the largest protest in British history. Perowne's day begins in the early morning, when he sees a burning aeroplane streak across the sky. This casts a shadow over the rest of his day as reports on the television change and shift: is it an accident, or terrorism?En route to his weekly squash game, a traffic diversion reminds Perowne of the anti-war protests occurring that day. After being allowed through the diversion, he collides with another car, damaging its wing mirror. At first the driver, Baxter, tries to extort money from him. When Perowne refuses, Baxter and his two companions become aggressive. Noticing symptoms in Baxter's behaviour, Perowne quickly recognises the onset of Huntington's disease. Though he is punched in the sternum, Perowne manages to escape unharmed by distracting Baxter with discussions of his disease.Perowne goes on to his squash match, still thinking about the incident. He loses the long and contested game by a technicality in the final set. After lunch he buys some fish from a local fishmonger for dinner. He visits his mother, suffering from vascular dementia, who is cared for in a nursing home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Laughter_and_Forgetting"title="The Book of Laughter and Forgetting">
## Part One: Lost Letters.The first section occurs in 1971 and is the story of Mirek, as he explores his memories of Zdena. Knowing that he loved this ugly woman has left a blemish, and he hopes to rectify this by destroying the love letters that he had sent her. While he travels to her home and back, he is followed by two men. Mirek is arrested at his home and sentenced to jail for six years, his son to two years, and ten or so of his friends to terms of from one to six years.Kundera also describes a photograph from 21 February 1948, where Vladimír Clementis stands next to Klement Gottwald. When Vladimír Clementis was charged in 1950, he was erased from the photograph (along with the photographer Karel Hájek) by the state propaganda.This short example from Czechoslovak history underlines the motif of "forgetting" in his book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Joke_(novel)"title="The Joke (novel)">
Like most of Kundera's novels, the book is divided into seven parts; the parts switch among the viewpoints of four characters. Ludvik Jahn was expelled from school and the Communist Party for his irreverence. Jaroslav is an old friend with a cimbalom band which Ludvik had once played in. Helena Zemánková is a radio reporter going to interview Jaroslav, and the wife of Ludvik's old nemesis. Kostka is a Christian foil for Ludvik who spars with his life philosophy.The novel opens with Ludvik back in his hometown in Moravia for the first time in years, startled to recognize the woman cutting his hair, though neither acknowledges the other. He reflects on the joke that changed his life in the early 1950s over the next several chapters of flashback. Ludvik was a dashing, witty, and popular student who, like most of his friends, supported the still-young Communist regime. During their summer break, a girl in his class wrote to him about "optimistic young people filled through and through with the healthy spirit" of Marxism; he replied caustically, "Optimism is the opium of mankind! A healthy spirit stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!"The girl, under pressure, shared the contents of the letter with others in the Party at school, who did not find it funny. Commissions were convened to investigate Ludvik, who remained defiant, culminating in a plenary session — led by his peer, Pavel Zemanek — in which he was unanimously expelled from the Party and from the college. At the wedding of his old friend Jaroslav, whom he had once encouraged to revive Moravian folk music under the Party banner, Ludvik found that his stance toward that revival had turned bitter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twyborn_Affair"title="The Twyborn Affair">
Part IThe first part of the novel is told from two perspectives. An omniscient third person narration that centers on Joanie Golson is interspersed with diary entries written by Eudoxia Vatatzes. Joanie and Curly Golson are wealthy Australians vacationing in France. While out on a drive, Joanie observes a young woman living in a small cottage along with an older man and becomes fascinated by her. Unbeknownst to her, the woman is the child of a close friend of Joanie's in Australia (Eadie Twyborn). The young woman, who goes by the name Eudoxia Vatatzes, recognizes Joanie as her mother's friend and is disturbed by her intrusion into their life. Events conspire to bring them together, however, and the two couples end up having an awkward afternoon together at the cottage, after which Eudoxia and her elderly lover Angelos Vatatzes immediately flee the area. Shortly after settling into a new boarding house, Angelos dies, which closes out Part I.Part IIPart II begins with Lieutenant Eddie Twyborn on a ship from Europe to Australia after the conclusion of World War I. It quickly becomes apparent that Eddie is the same person as Eudoxia Vatatzes from Part I. Now presenting as male (his birth gender), he attracts attention from both genders on the ship. Upon arriving in Australia, he visits his mother Eadie before taking up work at a sheep station. While at the sheep station, he carries on an affair with a married woman and is raped by a man.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oath_(Peretti_novel)"title="The Oath (Peretti novel)">
Nature photographer Cliff Benson is found dead in the woods near the town of Hyde River, with his head and torso missing. His wife, Evelyn, is found covered with blood and half-crazed on a logging road and taken to a hospital, where she only has vague recollections of the events that transpired. Sheriff Les Collins is quick to pin the blame on a rogue bear. Cliff's brother Steve quickly finds holes in the theory and teams up with local sheriff's deputy Tracy Ellis. At the same time, several residents of the town are afflicted with a mysterious black rash which spreads over their bodies.Benson and Ellis discover that a giant dragon is responsible for the deaths and that Harold Bly has the ability to control it. Through reading old letters and diaries provided to him by Levi Cobb, Benson learns that the town was purged of Christianity in the late 19th century, and any Christians taking residence in the town were either martyred or driven out. Those remaining reestablished Hyde River after signing a charter which gave the dragon free rein of the town. The town's founder and Harold Bly's ancestor, Benjamin Hyde, was believed to have control over the dragon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitten_(novel)"title="Bitten (novel)">
Elena Michaels is the only known female werewolf, but she grows tired of spending her life pursuing rogue werewolves and trying to control her temper and violence. She decides to leave her Pack and live in Toronto as a human, but the Pack leader calls in a favor, which leads Elena to try to help quell an uprising.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_Meets_Boy_(novel)"title="Boy Meets Boy (novel)">
Openly gay high school sophomore Paul lives in an LGBT-friendly small town in New Jersey. He is best friends with Joni, whom he has known since early childhood and to whom he came out in second grade, and Tony, who is also gay and who lives in the (much less accepting) next town over with his strict, religious parents.On a night out with Joni and Tony, while listening to a friend play music in a bookstore, Paul meets Noah and is instantly attracted to him. They discover that they attend the same school and after some miscommunication and false starts, they eventually reconnect and start to date. At the same time, Joni (who has recently broken up with her long-term boyfriend Ted for the twelfth time) starts to date Chuck, a football player who was extremely cruel to Paul's friend, Infinite Darlene, when his crush on her turned out to be unrequited. This relationship causes a great deal of tension within Joni and Paul's friendship, and it also upsets Ted and Infinite Darlene.The previous year, Paul had dated Kyle, who then dumped him and spread the rumor that Paul had "tricked" him into being gay. As Paul's relationship with Noah starts to flourish, Kyle attempts to come back into Paul's life. He apologizes to Paul and starts coming to him for comfort and support, as he is uncertain about his sexuality and his aunt has recently died. While Paul is at first cautious, he comes to understand Kyle more and see him as a friend. Paul to Joni, who then tells Chuck. Chuck spreads all around the school and before long, people are placing bets on what they think the outcome will be. Noah's feelings towards Paul seem to cool at this stage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rule_of_Four"title="The Rule of Four">
The book is set on the Princeton campus during Easter weekend in 1999. The story involves four Princeton seniors, both friends and roommates, getting ready for graduation: Tom, Paul, Charlie and Gil. Tom and Paul are trying to solve the mystery contained within an extremely rare, and mysterious book, the "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili", which was an incunabulum published in 1499 in Venice, Italy; it is a complex allegorical work written in a modified Italian language frequently interspersed with material from other languages as well as its anonymous author's own made-up words.Tom, the narrator, is the son of a professor who had dedicated his life to the "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili". Throughout the novel, he struggles between being fascinated by the book and trying to pull away from the obsession that drew a rift between his father and his mother and is now causing discord between him and his girlfriend, Katie Marchand. Paul Harris is a young scholar who is writing his senior thesis on the "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili" and has spent all four of his undergraduate years studying the book and is on the edge of solving the book's mystery. His thesis advisors, Richard Curry and Vincent Taft, were friends and later rivals of Tom's father; Taft and Corelli found, stole, and concealed documents that provided clues to decode the mysterious book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_by_Moonlight"title="Journey by Moonlight">
The novel follows Mihály, a Budapest native from a bourgeois family on his honeymoon in Italy as he encounters and attempts to make sense of his past. The novel features his romantic figure, aloof and poetic, but struggling to break with an adolescent rebelliousness which he tries to quell under respectable bourgeois conformism, but also with the disturbing attraction of an erotic death-wish. Some of the neurotic episodes that Mihály experiences throughout the story have been understood as motifs related to Freudian psychoanalysis, which had been especially influential at the time in Hungary. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_a_Rock_and_a_Hard_Place_(book)"title="Between a Rock and a Hard Place (book)">
The book predominantly recounts Ralston's experience being trapped in the canyon and how he was forced to amputate his own right arm with a dull multi-tool in order to free himself after the arm became trapped by a boulder.It also describes Ralston's childhood, how he took up outdoor activities after moving to Colorado from Indiana, how he came to be an obsessive outdoorsman and how he left his engineering career at Intel in Arizona to take up outdoor activities as much as possible.The book goes back and forth, in alternating chapters, between Ralston's past experiences and his entrapment in the slot canyon, and the efforts of his mother to find him. Included in some editions are pictures of his days in the canyon, various photos from the past excursions he speaks of in the book, a glossary of mountaineering jargon, and maps of Bluejohn Canyon and the proximity of the canyon in central-eastern Utah.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fan_Club"title="The Fan Club">
Adam Malone is a supermarket manager in Los Angeles who is obsessed with blonde movie star Sharon Fields. While watching her on a television in a bar one night he meets three other men who are also enamored of her. They get to talking, and soon are planning her abduction. Believing the sex stories put out by her manager, they think that if they kidnap her she will understand their lust and have sex with them. They get a van and disguise it as an exterminator's, scout out her neighborhood and track her daily routine, find an isolated location to take her to, and plan vacations from their individual work.A sudden crisis takes place when they discover that she will be leaving for Europe, forcing them to move their plans ahead of schedule. They confront her while she is taking a daily walk, and ask for directions. When she stops to help, she is grabbed and chloroformed. After being driven unconscious to their hideout, Sharon awakes and finds out what they want. She explains that the publicity is untrue, but one of the men won't take no for an answer and rapes her. Two of the others follow, with Adam not taking part. A series of nightly gang-rapes occurs, and Sharon decides to con them by faking she enjoys them in order to survive and possibly escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_War_(2005_video_game)"title="God of War (2005 video game)">
## Setting."God of War" is set in an alternate version of ancient Greece populated by the Olympian gods, Titans, and other Greek mythological beings. With the exception of flashbacks, the events of the game are set between those of the games ' (2008) and ' (2010). There are six locations explored, including fictional versions of the real-world Aegean Sea and Athens, and fictional locations such as the Desert of Lost Souls, the Temple of Pandora, the Underworld, and a brief scene on Mount Olympus.The Aegean Sea setting includes a mass of shipwrecked vessels. Athens is a war-torn city under assault by Ares, the God of War; beyond the city is the Desert of Lost Souls, a vast and windy desert of ancient ruins. The majority of the game occurs in Pandora's Temple, which is chained to the back of the Titan Cronos, who crawls through the desert. The massive temple, constructed by the architect Pathos Verdes III, is filled with traps and monsters, and has three sections dedicated to the Titan Atlas and gods Poseidon and Hades, respectively. The Underworld is a fiery realm with spiked pillars full of souls and flaming versions of previously encountered enemies. Athens is the scene of the final battle before a denouement on Mount Olympus in the God of War's throne room.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archangel_(Harris_novel)"title="Archangel (Harris novel)">
While attending a conference in Moscow, the historian Christopher "Fluke" Kelso is met by an old man named Papu Rapava, who claims to have been present at the death of Joseph Stalin. Immediately after Stalin's death, Lavrenty Beria supposedly took measures to secure a black notebook, which is believed to be Stalin's secret diary. Rapava spent years in Kolyma after the authorities tried to extract the book's location from him, but he has never revealed it though he knows that shadowy agents are still watching him in case he goes near the mysterious thing.Kelso eventually locates the notebook, which Rapava had left to his daughter just before he was recaptured and tortured to death. It proves to be the memoirs of a young girl chosen by Stalin to be the mother of his secret heir. Following the trail to the remote northern city of Arkhangelsk, Kelso comes face to face with Stalin's son.Raised in a log cabin filled with Stalin's personal effects, writings and recorded speeches, the son is a physical and ideological copy of his father. It is revealed that he had murdered the husband-and-wife KGB agents who had raised him from infancy when he decided they were untrustworthy. Young Stalin has been told that he would be sent for when it was time for him to assume control of his country, and he believes that Kelso is the promised messenger.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Túnel"title="El Túnel">
The story begins with the main character introducing himself as "the painter who killed María Iribarne" before delving into the circumstances that led to their first encounter. Castel's obsession begins in the autumn of 1946 when at an exhibition of his work he notices a woman focusing on one particularly subtle detail of his painting "Maternidad" ("Maternity"). He considers this observation deeply significant since it is a detail that he values as the most important aspect of the painting but to which nobody besides him and the woman pay any attention.Missing out on an opportunity to approach her before she leaves the exhibition, he then spends the next few months obsessing over her, thinking of ways to find her in the immensity of Buenos Aires, and fantasizing about what to say to her.Ultimately, after seeing her entering a building which he presumes to be her place of employment, he considers how to go about asking her about the detail in the painting. He approaches her and learns that her name is María Iribarne. Following their discussion about the painting, Castel and María agree to see each other again. It later becomes clear that she is married to a blind man named Allende and lives on Posadas Street in the northern part of the city. As Castel continues to see María, however, their relationship comes to be dominated by his obsessive interrogations of her life with her husband, why she does not take her husband's last name, and of her inner thoughts, questions she is unable to answer to his satisfaction. Out of this disconnect, Castel's obsessive thoughts lead him to all sorts of irrational doubts about the love he has come to believe that they have for one another.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ships_of_Earth"title="The Ships of Earth">
This book focuses on the struggles between the pioneers to establish a new social order now that they have left Basilica. The new society is opposite to that of the previous societies - male dominated instead of female dominated, monogamous and lifelong marriages instead of the yearly contracts of Basilica.The struggles between the characters ultimately come down to the struggles between Nafai and Elemak, two sons of Volemak. Nafai leads the faction who have faith in the Oversoul, while Elemak leads the faction who want desperately to return to the civilization of doomed Basilica. Both are ostensibly under the leadership of Volemak (and not Rasa, as they had been in the city).The settlers, after years of traveling, finally arrive in a land lost in ancient times which holds the secret of the Oversoul. Additionally, many children are born, all in their preparation for the ultimate journey to Earth.The book offers an interesting justification of the social structures of the Hebrew tribes in Genesis, all while the originally powerful female characters gradually succumb to the new hierarchy of "men" and "wives." Only one character - Shedemei, the brilliant geneticist, thinks about this problem.The focus in on the group dynamics of the new tribe as they journey where the Oversoul guides them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zathura"title="Zathura">
"Zathura" picks up where "Jumanji" left off, as the parents of two brothers, Danny and Walter Budwing, are leaving. The two brothers don't get along with each other. Danny wants to play catch, while Walter wants to watch television. Danny tosses Walter a baseball which hits him on the head. Walter then chases Danny through the house and catches him in the park across the street from their house, where they find the insidious "Jumanji" board game. Danny brings the game home, where he then loses interest in playing it.Underneath "Jumanji", Danny finds another game called "Zathura". Danny starts playing this game, then he gets a card that says, "Meteor shower, take evasive action", to which an actual meteor shower occurs. Danny and Walter soon realize that the game is affecting reality and has sent them into outer space. Danny concludes that they must finish it in order to return home, so they continue playing. Soon, Walter loses his gravity and Danny saves him from disappearing into space.When Walter takes his turn, a defective robot chases him through the house. When Danny takes his, he gets close to a star called Tsouris 3 and gets shorter and wider. Soon, a ship carrying extraterrestrials known as Zorgons arrive and they board the house. The robot chases the creatures away as Walter takes his turn and gets pulled into a black hole and sent back in time. Walter is transported back to when he was with Danny in the park. When Danny finds "Jumanji" and is about to take it home, Walter throws it out and instead offers to play catch with Danny. Evidently, having gone through these dangerous adventures and helping each other has brought the two brothers closer together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grass_Is_Singing"title="The Grass Is Singing">
The novel begins with a newspaper clipping about the death of Mary Turner, a white woman, killed by her black servant, Moses. The bulk of the novel is the story of Mary's life.After a loveless, wretched childhood, Mary is contented with her life as an office worker in a city in Rhodesia. But, after overhearing her friends laugh at her as sexless and immature, she resolves to marry, and when Dick Turner asks her she consents, though she has met him only twice. Dick is also in a hurry to wed, because he is very lonely and unhappy clawing a bare living from a subsistence farm and living in a bare, ugly little house. From the beginning, they are distant and cold, but, except when Mary briefly runs away, fear of loneliness and lack of money keep them together. When Mary becomes involved in the running of the farm, she realizes that its failure is not down to bad luck, as Dick keeps telling her, but his incompetence. This distances her even more from him. Their white neighbors make overtures of friendship, but, out of shame at her poverty, Mary rejects them. The Turners' barren existence is contrasted with the fierce beauty of the land, to which they are oblivious.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sound_of_Waves"title="The Sound of Waves">
Shinji Kubo lives with his mother, a pearl diver, and his younger brother, Hiroshi. He and his mother support the family because Shinji's father died in World War II after the fishing boat he was on was strafed by an American bomber. However, the family lives a somewhat peaceful life and Shinji is content to be a fisherman along with his master, Jukichi Oyama, and another apprentice, Ryuji.Things change when Terukichi Miyata, after the death of his son, decides to bring back the daughter he adopted away to pearl divers from another island. Raised as a pearl diver, the beautiful Hatsue wins many admirers, including Shinji. Miyata wishes to adopt a son to marry Hatsue, and the prospect of marrying Hatsue becomes even more attractive when the wealthy Miyata intends to adopt the man who marries Hatsue as his own son. Shinji and Hatsue soon fall in love.When Chiyoko, the daughter of the Lighthouse-Keeper and his wife, returns from studying at a university in Tokyo, she is disappointed to discover Shinji, whom she has affections for, has fallen in love with someone else. She takes advantage of the jealous Yasuo Kawamoto, an arrogant and selfish admirer of Hatsue, and uses him so Yasuo will spread vicious rumours of Shinji stealing away Hatsue's virginity. Yasuo is jealous of Shinji because he thinks Shinji will take Hatsue's virginity. He tries to rape Hatsue at night when it's Hatsue's turn to fill up her bucket of water. The attempt is unsuccessful, however; he is stung by hornets as he tries to strip her clothes off. Humiliated, he makes a deal with Hatsue: He will refill the bucket and carry it down the stone steps for her, and Hatsue must not tell anyone he was trying to rape her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Bertram's_Hotel"title="At Bertram's Hotel">
Miss Marple is taking a two-week holiday in London, at Bertram's Hotel, courtesy of her nephew Raymond West. In her youth, she had stayed at this hotel. Since the war, the hotel has been renovated to create a distinct Edwardian era atmosphere with the best of modern conveniences and the best staff. Miss Marple encounters a friend taking tea, Lady Selina Hazy. Selina is on the lookout for friends, yet often mistakes people who look like her old friends. Miss Marple sees the famous adventuress Bess Sedgwick, plus her daughter, the young and beautiful Elvira Blake with her legal guardian Colonel Luscombe. She also meets the forgetful clergyman, Canon Pennyfather. American tourists consider the hotel as really English. She sees race driver Ladislaus Malinowski stop at the desk, and several times notices his car. She sees him with Elvira Blake.Elvira will inherit money from her father when she turns 21. Her mother is alive, but estranged by choice from Elvira. Elvira seeks to learn the size of her inheritance and who gets it if she dies. Lawyer Richard Egerton, one of her trustees, tells her about the great wealth awaiting her. She works a scheme with her friend Bridget to gain money to fly to Ireland to find some unspecified information, and goes there. It is unclear if she returns by train or by air.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charmed_Life_(novel)"title="Charmed Life (novel)">
When the Chant children, Gwendolen and Eric (known as “Cat") are orphaned after their parents die in a boating accident, Gwendolen petitions Chrestomanci to let them live at Chrestomanci Castle where she can further her magical training under the tutelage of the world's most powerful enchanter after a fortune teller tells her he will lead her to becoming a queen. The siblings move to Chrestomanci's castle where they meet him, his wife Millie and their two children Roger and Julia. Spiteful after Chrestomanci bans her from using magic, Gwendolen starts a feud with Julia, charms ghouls to stalk people through windows, spelling the churches stained glass windows and turning Cat's fiddle into a cat called Fiddle. But when Chrestomanci fails to express interest or awe in her skill, spoiled Gwendolen buys illegal products from Mr Baslam and starts a dangerous spell with Cat, who is aware of the dangers but scared of disappointing her. Chrestomanci however, manages to stop her and punishes them both severely, removing Gwendolen's witch abilities. The next morning, Gwendolen has disappeared and a confused lookalike named Janet has taken her place.Working to hide Gwendolen's disappearance, Cat and Janet are forced to contend with many complications Gwendolen left in her wake, and Cat must come to terms with his sister's abandonment and his denial of her exploitive nature. Janet uncovers a plot which Gwendolen was involved in with the villagers, who are unaware of their switch, but is unable to discover the actual contents due to instructions left by Gwendolen. The two resolve to runaway to Janet's world with no magic. Janet realises the scope of Gwendolen's cruelty when she discovers a book of nine matches, five of which are already burnt. When Cat foolishly strikes a match and finds himself engulfed by flames, Janet's suspicions are confirmed: Cat, who has always believed himself utterly lacking in magical ability, is actually a nine-lived enchanter and is thus destined one day to take over the office of Chrestomanci, and Gwendolen has been leeching Cat's magic and wasting his lives to fuel her own magic. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Grain_of_Wheat"title="A Grain of Wheat">
The events of the novel take place in the days of 1963 before and on the day of Uhuru, Kenya’s independence from colonial rule. The novel also features flashbacks of the past of the Kenya Colony including the villagization in the 1950s.Mugo, an introverted villager of Thabai, does not want to give a speech at Uhuru, even though town elders ask him to. The village thinks him a hero for his stoicism and courage while he was in detention during Kenya’s State of Emergency, but he labors under a secret: he betrayed their beloved Mau Mau fighter, Kihika. He is restless and can achieve no peace in the village.Kihika had joined the Mau Mau as a young man and attained fame for capturing the police garrison at Mahee and killing the cruel District Officer (‘DO’) Robson, but after Mugo betrayed him in secret, he was captured and hanged. Those planning Uhuru want to honor him. Mugo had betrayed Kihika because he was unsettled by the young man’s zeal and because of the reward offered for his head, but as soon as he betrayed him he felt remorse. Most people, including General R. and Koina, two Mau Mau soldiers, believe Karanja was the one who betrayed Kihika. They plan on executing him at Uhuru.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Century_of_Dishonor"title="A Century of Dishonor">
Originally published in 1881, Helen Hunt Jackson chronicles the treatment of American Indians by the United States beginning in colonial times through to her present. The book can be broken down into four major themes:Jackson begins by providing in her "Introductory" a summary of the policies and positions of the United States relative to the Native American population; however, because of the time in which she was writing, she refers to them as Indians. Jackson calls attention to the changes that occurred when the United States took territory from the colonial powers. Most prominently, the United States did not acknowledge or respect Native claims to the land, as recognized by treaties, to the same degree that Spain, Britain, and France had. This was in part, she explains, because the treaties written in English purposefully had different expectations than those written for and signed by the Native populations. She contextualizes her distress by examining the attitudes of the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary from the end of the 18th century through much of the 19th century. She concludes by stating that through their unjust treatment of Native Americans, the United States violated international law and made itself susceptible to a reputation for cruelty.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Home_at_the_End_of_the_World_(novel)"title="A Home at the End of the World (novel)">
Bobby had grown up in a home in suburban Cleveland, Ohio during the 1960s and 1970s where partying and drugs were a recurring theme. He has already witnessed the death of his mother and beloved older brother by the time he befriends Jonathan, who comes from a sheltered family. After Bobby finds his father is dead, Jonathan's family takes him in.Bobby and Jonathan become best friends, and also experiment sexually. The two eventually lose touch, but meet up again in their 20s in 1980s New York, where Bobby moves in with Jonathan and his eccentric roommate Clare. Clare had planned to have a baby with Jonathan (who is openly gay), but Bobby and Clare become lovers, while Jonathan still has feelings for Bobby. Clare and Bobby have a baby and move to a country home together with Jonathan.The trio form their own family, questioning traditional definitions of family and love, while dealing with the complications of their polyamourous relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenilworth_(novel)"title="Kenilworth (novel)">
"Kenilworth" is set in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and centres on the secret marriage of Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, and Amy Robsart, daughter of Sir Hugh Robsart. Amy passionately loves her husband, and the Earl loves her in return, but he is driven by ambition. He is courting the Queen's favour, and only by keeping his marriage to Amy secret can he hope to rise to the height of power that he desires. At the end of the book, the Queen discovers the truth, to the shame of the Earl. The disclosure has come too late, for Amy has been murdered by the Earl's even more ambitious steward, Varney.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarka_the_Otter"title="Tarka the Otter">
The book is separated into two main parts, "The First Year" and "The Last Year". It begins shortly before the birth of Tarka in an otter holt on the River Torridge, near the Rolle Canal aqueduct on the Beam estate. After a period learning to swim and hunt, and losing a sibling in a trap, he is separated from his mother and wanders around North Devon alone. His first mate is an elderly otter called Greymuzzle, who is killed during Tarka's first winter, which is unusually harsh. In his second year, he fathers a litter of cubs with his second mate, White-tip. Throughout the book Williamson juxtaposes Tarka with his main enemy, the local otter hunt, and particularly the pied hound Deadlock, "the truest marking-hound in the country of the Two Rivers" (p. 23). The book ends with a climactic nine-hour hunt of Tarka by the pack, and a confrontation between Tarka and Deadlock. Williamson's attitude to the hunt is somewhat ambivalent: while admiring them for their own regard for and knowledge of the otter, and despite being personally friendly with his local hunt, the violence and cruelty of some of his descriptions of hunting is clear.Locations featured in the book include Braunton Burrows, the clay pits at Marland, Morte Point, Hoar Oak Water and the Chains. The book begins and ends in the vicinity of Torrington.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anansi_Boys"title="Anansi Boys">
"Anansi Boys" is the story of Charles "Fat Charlie" Nancy, a timid Londoner devoid of ambition, whose unenthusiastic wedding preparations are disrupted when he learns that his father (Mr. Nancy) has died in Florida. The flamboyant Mr. Nancy, in whose shadow Fat Charlie has always lived, died in a slightly embarrassing manner by suffering a fatal heart attack while singing to a young woman on stage in a karaoke bar before falling from stage and accidentally pulling down the woman's top.Fat Charlie is forced to take time off from the talent agency where he works and travel to Florida for the funeral. Afterwards, while discussing the disposal of Mr. Nancy's estate, Mrs. Callyanne Higgler, a very old family friend, reveals to Fat Charlie that the late Mr. Nancy was actually an incarnation of the West African spider god, Anansi, hence his name. The reason Charlie had apparently not inherited any divine powers was because they had been passed down to his hitherto unknown brother, who Mrs. Higgler explains could be contacted by simply sending an invitation by talking to a spider. Charlie is skeptical, and on his return to England largely forgets what Mrs. Higgler had told him, until one night when he drunkenly whispers to a spider that it would be nice if his brother stopped by for a visit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluke,_or,_I_Know_Why_the_Winged_Whale_Sings"title="Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings">
The plot of "Fluke" is set on and off the Hawaiian island of Maui as well as deep underneath the Pacific Ocean off the shore of Chile.Nathan Quinn, a marine biologist, goes out on a routine day-trip expedition to survey whales in the area. When he photographs one of the whale's flukes, he notices that the words "BITE ME" are spelled out in huge letters on the mammal's tail-fin. His curiosity and investigations uncover one mystery after another as he seeks the answers concerning the source of this peculiarity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fallon_Blood"title="The Fallon Blood">
## The Fallon Blood.In The Fallon Blood, escaping brutal English overlords, 1760s Irishman Michael Fallon becomes an indentured servant to Charleston, South Carolina merchant Thomas Carver, where his infatuation with Carver's sensual daughter Elizabeth causes life-changing complications.His father died in the Battle Of Culloden. The threat of Irish Pickets forced Michael and his mother in both hiding and poverty. His mother sacrificed her own health to keep Michael fed for three years, when she died of malnutrition. Grogan "adopted" Michael and abused him in child labor. Michael ran away at the age of fifteen, vowing that none of his children would suffer the tragedy of poverty.Sometime later Michael became a soldier, and was taught the sword by Timothy Cavanaugh. His time with the army was a full seven years, after which he managed to own land in Ireland. Michael's prospects seemed fruitful until the day he killed an Englishman colonel by accident. Since the punishment of killing an Englishman was death, Michael was left no choice but to flee Ireland to the American colonies, where he became an indentured servant to Thomas Carver. This was the "most fateful moment of his life." He fell instantly in love with Carver's daughter Elizabeth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_House_(novel)"title="Hell House (novel)">
The story of "Hell House" concerns four people – Dr. Lionel Barrett, a physicist with an interest in parapsychology, his wife Edith, and two mediums (Florence Tanner, a spiritualist and mental medium, and Benjamin Franklin Fischer, a physical medium who had been to the haunted house 30 years earlier.). Barrett, Tanner, and Fischer are hired by dying millionaire, William Reinhardt Deutsch, to investigate the possibility of life after death within a time limit of one week. To do so, they must enter the infamous Belasco House in Maine, regarded as the most haunted house in the world. The house is called "Hell House" due to the horrible acts of blasphemy and perversion that occurred there under the silent influence and supervision of Emeric Belasco. Meanwhile, there are other mysteries to be found in Hell House, such as the supposed murder of Emeric Belasco's son, Daniel Myron Belasco, and the puzzle as to why a majority of people who enter the home are dead by the end of their visit. The novel combines supernatural horror with mystery as the researchers attempt to investigate the haunting of the house while their sanity subtly is undermined by its sinister supernatural influence. The home exploits its guests' deepest desires and attempts to turn people against one another during the course of their visit. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Are_You_Afraid_of_the_Dark?_(novel)"title="Are You Afraid of the Dark? (novel)">
Four people die separately in four different accidents in four different places across the world - Richard Stevens in New York, Mark Harris in Paris, Franz Verbrugge in Berlin and Gary Reynolds in Denver. The four dead share a crucial link: they work for a powerful think tank, headed by Tanner Kingsley. Two women Diane Stevens and Kelly Harris - the widows of Richard Stevens and Mark Harris respectively, run into each other in New York. They both had just met with Tanner Kinglsey to discuss about their husbands death. To know more about Kelly and her husband's case, Diane invites her to a cafe to talk. In the cafe they are attacked by goons and they flee to Diane's apartment. They soon realise that even the apartment is not safe, so they escape to a hotel.Soon, the two find themselves under ruthless attack wherever they go. They deduce that Tanner Kingsley is behind all this. It turns out that there is a connection between the death of their husbands and that of Gary Reynolds and Franz Verbrugge. Prior to their death, they had been working on a project Prima - a machine that could control the weather. Upon realizing the threat that it could pose to the world, they decide to meet a senator to talk about it. Tanner Kinglsey gets to know of this plan and has the four of them killed, making it look like accidents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Minister's_Wooing"title="The Minister's Wooing">
The story is set in Newport, Rhode Island, when it was still a prosperous fishing and shipping town and not a fashionable retreat for the rich. Dr. Hopkins is a 40-year-old minister. Mary is the daughter of his hostess in town, and Hopkins soon falls in love with Mary. She, however, is still in love with James Marvyn, a sailor presumed lost at sea. Mary is very religious and, after a period of mourning, she decides to marry Dr. Hopkins. Mary has other suitors, including Aaron Burr, but she sees that even though he is the grandson of Jonathan Edwards and has been raised in Calvinism, he is mired in evil. James returns from the sea before the marriage and Dr. Hopkins knows that he cannot compete with Mary's love for the sailor. Hopkins calls off the marriage. Mary and James are free to marry and live happily.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anil's_Ghost"title="Anil's Ghost">
The story opens up in early March as Anil arrives in Sri Lanka after a 15-year absence abroad. Her visit comes as a result of the increasing number of deaths in Sri Lanka from all the warring sides in the 1980s' civil war. While on an expedition with archeologist Sarath, Anil notices that the bones of a certain skeleton do not seem to be 6th century like the rest which leads her to conclude that the skeleton must be a recent death. Unsure where Sarath's political allegiance lies, Anil is skeptical of his help, but agrees to it anyway.Along their journey to identify the skeleton, nicknamed Sailor, Anil becomes increasingly suspicious of Sarath. She begins to question his motives and sees his comments as a hint for her to censor herself since their discovery would implicate the Sri Lankan government in the death of Sailor. Later, Anil and Sarath visit his former teacher, Palipana, hoping to have him confirm their suspicions. Palipana then suggests having a reconstruction of the face done so that others might identify him. They agree to do so and head on to a small village named Galapitigama.There Anil meets Sarath's brother, Gamini, an emergency doctor. She discovers that he is intricately involved in the country's affairs and daily struggles to save the lives of numerous victims. Gamini helps them with a fellow Sri Lankan whose hands have been nailed to a road, and tells them about the various atrocities citizens face as a result of the civil war. Later Anil and Sarath meet with Ananda, on the advice of Palipana, hoping that he will be able to reconstruct the face of Sailor for them. Ananda does so after some days, despite Anil's impatience and skepticism, and then almost immediately attempts suicide, only to be rescued by an intuitive and quick-thinking Anil. Anil and Sarath eventually are able to identify Sailor in a small village.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_a_Witch"title="Son of a Witch">
Oatsie Manglehand discovers the body of a young man, badly bruised and near death, by the side of a road in the Vinkus and brings him to the Cloister of Saint Glinda. The Superior Maunt recognizes the young man as Liir, the young boy who left the Cloister with Elphaba a decade or so ago. The Maunt appoints Candle, a young Quadling girl, to watch over Liir. While he recovers, Liir tells Candle the following story:After Elphaba's death, Liir accompanied Dorothy Gale and her friends back to the Emerald City. The others went off to receive what they were promised by the Wizard, leaving Liir alone. Liir spent some time unsuccessfully searching for Nor, Fiyero's daughter who went missing during the events of "Wicked". After living on the streets of the Emerald City for a time, Liir enlisted in the Home Guard. During his service, he was deployed on a peacekeeping mission to Quadling Country. After being forced to participate in the destruction of a Quadling village, Liir deserted the Home Guard and returned to the castle of Kiamo Ko. Later, the Quadlings attacked and killed most of the soldiers and dragons were then sent to punish them.One day, the Princess of the Swans landed at Kiamo Ko, having been attacked by a predator. Before she died, she asked Chistery the flying monkey to take her place at the Conference of the Birds. Chistery declined and Liir decided to go in her stead. While flying on Elphaba's broom to reach the Conference, Liir was attacked by dragons, who took the broom. Liir fell to earth, where Oatsie Manglehand found him. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry's_Party"title="Larry's Party">
In 1976, Larry Weller is twenty-six years old and employed as a florist in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He accidentally takes a stranger's identical Harris tweed jacket from a coffee shop. This prompts thoughts about his girlfriend Dorrie Shaw and his parents Stu and Dot.In 1978, Larry marries Dorrie, and they honeymoon in the UK, where he discovers a love for garden mazes when he becomes lost in one. On his thirtieth birthday in 1980, Larry invites his family over for a picnic. He and Dorrie have bought a house and have a son, Ryan.By 1983, Larry is spending all of his spare time working on a maze around his house, and it now takes up both the front and back yards. A frustrated Dorrie calls in a bulldozer to tear down the entire front section of the maze. This leads to the couple's divorce. Larry remarries, to a scholar of ancient Catholic saints, named Beth Prior. Their marriage is, for the most part, happy, though Larry realizes how much he loved Dorrie when they were married.By 1988, Larry has moved to Chicago and become one of only a handful of professional maze designers in the world. He thinks back to the maze at his old house in Manitoba and how Dorrie is keeping what is left of it alive. Larry's father dies of colon cancer that year.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_and_the_Spitter"title="Me and the Spitter">
In the book, Perry talks about beginning his MLB career as the "11th man on an 11‐man pitching staff" for San Francisco. He learned how to throw a spitball from Bob Shaw, a teammate of Perry's with the Giants, as well as how to hide that he was throwing it from the umpires and opposing team. Perry discussed using the pitch in a game for the first time on May 31, 1964, against the New York Mets, during extra innings of the second game of a doubleheader. He pitched ten innings without allowing a run, and entered the Giants' starting rotation soon after.Perry would chew slippery elm bark to build up his saliva. He wrote that he stopped throwing the spitball in 1968, when MLB changed the rules that had previously permitted a pitcher to touch his fingers to his mouth before touching the baseball. However, he turned to other substances that he could put on the ball, such as Vaseline and K-Y Jelly. Perry publicly stated that he began to throw a forkball. While he was pitching, Perry employed decoy maneuvers, touching different parts of his uniform and person, to give himself a psychological edge over the hitters.The book also discusses Perry's early life in rural North Carolina, as he and his older brother, Jim, grew up in a farmhouse that did not have electricity until he was 13 years old or indoor plumbing when he was 15 years old.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pudd'nhead_Wilson"title="Pudd'nhead Wilson">
The setting is the fictional frontier town of Dawson's Landing on the banks of the Mississippi River in the first half of the 19th century. David Wilson, a young lawyer, moves to town, and a clever remark of his is misunderstood, which causes locals to brand him a "pudd'nhead" (nitwit). His hobby of collecting fingerprints does not raise his standing in the eyes of the townsfolk, who consider him to be eccentric and do not frequent his law practice."Pudd'nhead" Wilson is left in the background as the focus shifts to the slave Roxy, her son, and the family they serve. Roxy is one-sixteenth black and majority white, and her son Valet de Chambre (referred to as Chambers) is 1/32 black. Roxy is principally charged with caring for her inattentive master's infant son Tom Driscoll, who is the same age as her own son. After fellow slaves are caught stealing and are nearly sold "down the river" to a master in the Deep South, Roxy fears for her son and herself. She considers killing her boy and herself, but decides to switch Chambers and Tom in their cribs to give her son a life of freedom and privilege.The narrative moves forward two decades. Tom Driscoll (formerly Valet de Chambre) has been raised to believe that he is white and has become a spoiled aristocrat. He is a selfish and dissolute young man. Tom's father has died and granted Roxy her freedom in his will. She worked for a time on river boats, and saved money for her retirement. When she finally is able to retire, she discovers that her bank has failed and all of her savings are gone. She returns to Dawson's Landing to ask for money from Tom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_a_Dog"title="Heart of a Dog">
Moscow, 1924.While foraging for trash one winter day, a stray dog is found by a cook and scalded with boiling water. Lying forlorn in a doorway, the dog awaits his end awash in self-pity. To his surprise, a successful surgeon, Filipp Filippovich Preobrazhensky (whose name is derived from 'transformation' or 'transfiguration'), arrives and offers the dog a piece of sausage. Overjoyed, the dog follows Filip back to his flat, where he's given the name of Sharik. The dog finds it ironic, as he sees 'Sharik' fit for a pampered fat dog (it means 'little ball').At the house, Sharik gets to know Dr. Preobrazhensky's household, which includes Doctor Ivan Arnoldovich Bormenthal (the professor's student and protégé) and two female servants: Zinaida Prokofievna Bunina and Darya Petrovna Ivanova. Despite the Professor's vocal anti-communism, his frequent medical treatment of the RCP(b) leadership makes him untouchable. As a result, he refuses to decrease his seven-room flat and treats the Bolsheviks on the housing committee, led by Schwonder, with unveiled contempt. Impressed by his new master, Sharik slips easily into the role of "a gentleman's dog".After several days, one of the servants begins taking Sharik for walks through Moscow. Preening in his new collar, Sharik is unmoved by the taunts of a passing stray. After his health improves, the Professor at last reveals his real intentions for taking in Sharik. As Filip's laboratory is prepared, he locks Sharik in the bathroom.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holcroft_Covenant"title="The Holcroft Covenant">
The novel concerns Noel Holcroft, New York City architect and secretly the son of Heinrich Clausen, chief economic adviser to the Third Reich. At some point in the 1970s, Holcroft is contacted by the Grande Banque de Geneve, concerning his father's will and testament. The testament says that in the last half of the war, Clausen found out about the Holocaust. Horrified and desperate to make amends, he and his two friends stole vast amounts of money from thousands of individual sources throughout the Reich and funneled them into a secure account in Zurich, Switzerland. Now, if Holcroft will contact the children of the two friends, they can form a group to distribute the funds and alleviate some of the pain of the Holocaust.Ranged against him in this noble endeavor is the last trace of the Third Reich: the children of Projekt Sonnenkinder. In the dying days of the war, a vast search went out throughout Germany. The children of Germany's finest, those without physical and psychological frailties, were sent to isolated hamlets all over the world by airplane and U-boat. They were raised, provided for, and indoctrinated. Those who showed promise were inducted into the conspiracy by their elders; those that weren't were "removed." They have waited thirty years for the funds so as to finally take over the world. Their leader, the Tinamou, is the world's deadliest assassin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker"title="The Power Broker">
"The Power Broker" traces Moses' life from his childhood in Connecticut to his early years as an idealistic advocate for Progressive reform of the city's corrupt civil service system. According to Caro, Moses' failures there, and later experience working for future New York Mayor Jimmy Walker in the State Senate and Governor of New York Al Smith taught him how to acquire and wield power in order to achieve his goals.By the 1930s, Moses had earned a reputation as a creator of public parks in both the city and state, and later long-sought projects like the Triborough Bridge (later renamed Robert F. Kennedy Bridge), but at the price of his earlier integrity by circumventing and creation of sources of political power, as seen in his work in the creation and expansion of New York's public authorities. Caro ultimately portrays Moses as an appointed bureaucrat who, through his reputation for getting large construction projects done, amassed so much power over the years that the many elected officials whom he supposedly reported to instead became dependent on him. He consistently favored automobile traffic over mass transit and human and community needs. While bragging that he served in his many public jobs (save as New York City Parks Commissioner) without compensation, he lived like a king and similarly enriched those individuals in public and private life who aided him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protector_(novel)"title="Protector (novel)">
The novel comprises two phases in the same space that are separated by 220 years of time. Its central conceit is that Humans evolved from the juvenile stage of the Pak, a species with a distinct adult form ("Protectors") that has immense strength and intelligence and cares only about younger Pak of their bloodline. A key plot point is that transition to the Protector stage is mediated by consumption of the root of a particular plant called Tree-of-Life, which cannot be effectively cultivated on Earth.The first half of the book follows the path of a Pak named Phssthpok who has travelled from the Pak homeworld in search of a colony of Pak in the distant system of Sol (our Solar System). Upon his arrival, he captures a Belter (a worker from the asteroid belt) named Jack Brennan, who is infected by Phssthpok's store of tree-of-life root and is transformed into a Protector (or at least a Human variant). They land on Mars where Brennan kills Phssthpok and is rescued by two Humans, Nick Sohl and Lucas Garner, who had set out to meet the alien. The first half of the novel ends with Brennan telling his story to the Humans before he heads for the outer reaches of the solar system.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ring_and_the_Book"title="The Ring and the Book">
The book tells the story of a murder trial in Rome in 1698, whereby an impoverished nobleman, Count Guido Franceschini, is found guilty of the murders of his young wife Pompilia (Comparini) and her parents, having suspected his wife was having an affair with a young cleric, Giuseppe Caponsacchi. Having been found guilty despite his protests and sentenced to death, Guido then appeals—unsuccessfully—to Pope Innocent XII to overturn the conviction. The poem comprises twelve books, ten of which are dramatic monologues spoken by different characters involved in the case (Count Guido speaks twice), usually giving a different account of the same events, and two books (the first and the last) spoken by the author.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wintersmith"title="Wintersmith">
Tiffany Aching, now 13 years old, is training with the witch Miss Treason. But when she takes Tiffany to witness the secret "dark morris", the morris dance (performed wearing black clothes and octiron bells) that welcomes in the winter, Tiffany finds herself drawn into the dance and joins in, despite being warned earlier by Miss Treason not to do so. She finds herself face to face with the Wintersmith—the personification of winter—who mistakes her for the Summer Lady—the personification of summer. He is enchanted by Tiffany, mystified by her presence.Unknowingly, Tiffany drops her silver horse pendant (a gift from Roland, the Baron's son) during the Dance. The Wintersmith uses the pendant to find Tiffany and give her back the pendant during their second encounter. From then on, he uses the pendant to find her and deliver his gifts. The elder witches, including Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, discover that the Wintersmith has been tracking her. Granny Weatherwax demands that she throw her silver horse pendant into Lancre Gorge.Things get trickier for Tiffany when she discovers she has some of the Summer Lady's powers—plants start to grow where she walks barefooted, and the Cornucopia appears, causing problems by spurting out food and animals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Shall_Wear_Midnight"title="I Shall Wear Midnight">
Tiffany is working as the Chalk's only witch in a climate of growing suspicion and prejudice. When the local Baron (for whom she had been caring) dies of poor health, she is accused of murder. Tiffany travels to Ankh-Morpork to inform the Baron's heir, Roland, who happens to be in the city with his fiancée Letitia. On the way Tiffany is attacked by the Cunning Man, a frightening figure who has holes where his eyes should be.In the city she meets Mrs Proust, the proprietor of Boffo's joke shop, where many witches buy their stereotypical witch accoutrements. When they find Roland and Letitia the Nac Mac Feegles, who have as usual been following Tiffany, are accused of destroying a pub. Tiffany and Mrs. Proust are arrested by Carrot and Angua, and (nominally) locked up – although it is mostly, in fact, for their protection as people start to resent witches.When they are released the next day, Tiffany meets Eskarina Smith (not seen since the events of the third "Discworld" novel, "Equal Rites"), who explains to her that the Cunning Man was, a thousand years ago, an Omnian witch-finder, who had fallen in love with a witch. That witch, however, knew how evil the Cunning Man was. She was eventually burnt to death, but as she was being burned she trapped the Cunning Man in the fire as well. The Cunning Man became a demonic spirit of pure hatred, able to corrupt other minds with suspicion and hate. Eskarina announces that the Cunning Man is coming. Tiffany and the Feegles return to the Chalk, where they find the Baron's soldiers trying to dig up the Feegle mound. She stops them, and goes to see Roland, who throws her in a dungeon (which she locks on the inside, and where she is brought bacon, eggs, and coffee in the morning). It is later learned that the Cunning Man was responsible for these actions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Starr,_Space_Ranger"title="David Starr, Space Ranger">
"David Starr, Space Ranger" introduces the series' setting and main characters. The novel is set around A.D. 7,000 (five thousand years after the first nuclear bomb, as stated at the beginning), when humanity has founded colonies on the inner planets of the Solar System, as well as spreading to other planetary systems with separate and sometimes hostile governments. The most powerful organization in the Solar System is the Council of Science, which uses scientific expertise and intrepid field agents to counter political and military threats to Earth's government. Protagonist David Starr is a young biophysicist orphaned as an infant and raised by his guardians Augustus Henree and Hector Conway, high-ranking Council members who send David on his missions for the Council. They tell him of some 200 recent victims fatally poisoned by produce imported from Mars. Fearing a conspiracy to start a food panic and wreck interplanetary trade, they send Starr undercover to Mars.There Starr meets John "Bigman" Jones, a short but pugnacious Martian farmboy blacklisted by the Martian Farming Syndicates after witnessing underhanded dealings. When his former boss Hennes orders Bigman out of the Farm Employment Building, Starr stands up for him and gains positions for both himself and Bigman. The humiliated Hennes subsequently has Starr and Bigman knocked out and brought to the farm owned by Hennes' boss, Mr. Makian, who apologizes and appears friendly. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_Starr_and_the_Pirates_of_the_Asteroids"title="Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids">
A year has passed since the events in "David Starr, Space Ranger". In that time the spaceship TSS "Waltham Zachary" has been taken and gutted by pirates based in the asteroid belt. Because David "Lucky" Starr harbors a personal dislike of the pirates for their murder of his parents, he has devised a plan whereby the unmanned survey ship "Atlas", as soon as the pirates capture it and bring it to their hidden base, will explode. Unknown to anyone, Starr has leaked the plan to the pirates and sneaked aboard the ship, believing an infiltration will be a more efficient way to bring down the pirates.When captured, Starr tells the pirate leader, Captain Anton, that his name is Williams (his alias from "David Starr, Space Ranger"), and offers to join the pirates; whereupon Anton has Starr fight a duel in open space to prove himself worthy. Starr wins the duel, but remains a prisoner aboard "Atlas" while it is brought to an anonymous asteroid.The asteroid is home to a hermit named Joseph Patrick Hansen, and the pirates leave Starr in Hansen's care. Hansen tells Starr that he purchased the asteroid as a vacation site, and gradually made it more comfortable over the years, but now depends on the pirates for supplies, and later recognizes the pretended "Williams" as Lawrence Starr's son. Starr admits his true identity, and Hansen convinces him to pilot them to Ceres.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Year_in_the_Merde"title="A Year in the Merde">
When Paul West starts his new job in September he is altogether unaware of the true character and the machinations of his boss, Jean-Marie Martin, who is in his early fifties, rich, handsome, impeccably dressed, friendly, and prepared to pay him a good salary. West does not know yet that Martin, officially decorated for supporting the French economy, is illegally importing cheap British beef (the ban imposed during the BSE crisis not having been lifted yet); that through his political connections he has secured for his daughter Élodie a cheap, council-subsidised "HLM" apartment; that he associates with the far right; that, although married, he is having an affair with someone from the office; and that he wants to sell him, Paul West, a cottage in the country quite close to the site of a future nuclear power plant.West is allotted a motley crew who are supposed to work together on his project. However, everyone, including Martin, turns out to be very reluctant to learn what West has to tell them, for example that "My Tea Is Rich" is not a good name for a chain of English tea rooms. Soon West realises that no one is following his orders, that nothing is happening, that he is being paid for doing, or at least achieving, absolutely nothing. In the end, his contract is prematurely terminated, and he spends some weeks teaching English. ("It was much tougher than working in an office. You can't e-mail your mates while standing in front of a class.")
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Ferdinand"title="The Story of Ferdinand">
Young Ferdinand does not enjoy butting heads with other young bulls, preferring instead to sit under a cork tree smelling the flowers. His mother is concerned that he might be lonely and tries to persuade him to play with the other calves, but when she sees that Ferdinand is content as he is, she leaves him alone.Ferdinand grows to be the biggest bull in the herd and he often spends time alone. All the other bulls dream of being chosen to compete in the bullfights in Madrid, but Ferdinand still prefers smelling the flowers instead. One day, five men come to the pasture to choose a bull for the bullfights. Ferdinand is again on his own, sniffing flowers, when he accidentally sits on a bumblebee. Upon getting stung as a result, he runs wildly across the field, snorting and stamping. Mistaking Ferdinand for a mad and aggressive bull, the men rename him "Ferdinand the Fierce" and take him away to Madrid.All of Madrid, including many beautiful ladies, turn out to see the handsome matador fight "Ferdinand the Fierce." When Ferdinand enters the bull ring, he is faced with the matador, banderilleros and picadors who panic when they see him. However, he is delighted by the flowers that the ladies throw in the ring and sits down in the middle of the ring to enjoy them, upsetting and disappointing everyone and making the matador and other fighters throw tantrums. Ferdinand is then taken back to his pasture, where to this day he is still sitting under the cork tree happily smelling flowers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantoms_(novel)"title="Phantoms (novel)">
Jenny and Lisa Paige, two sisters, return to Jenny's hometown of Snowfield, California, a small ski resort village nestled in the Sierra-Nevada Mountains where Jenny works as a doctor, and find no one alive. The few bodies they find are either mutilated, or reveal some strange form of death. Finally, after growing more alarmed by the town's mysterious and alarming situation Jenny manages to call police in a neighboring town to come help.Together, the women and the police, led by Sheriff Bryce Hammond, are able to request help from the military Biological Investigations Unit. The police managed to find only one clue as to what was causing the town's disappearances and deaths. A victim of whatever was trying to kill him managed to write the name Timothy Flyte on a mirror moments before he was killed. Flyte is a British academic and author of a book, "The Ancient Enemy". His book catalogs and describes various mass vanishings of people in different parts of the world over the centuries.It is discovered that the town was built over the hibernating place of one such Enemy, a creature known as an amoeboid shapeshifter. This Ancient Enemy rarely feeds, but when it does, the effects are devastating. It was theorized that the Enemy either caused or aided in the extinction of the dinosaurs, as well as many of the great mysterious mass vanishings: Mayan civilization, Roanoke, ghost ships, etc.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Swiftly_Tilting_Planet"title="A Swiftly Tilting Planet">
The book opens on Thanksgiving evening, 10 years after the events of "A Wind in the Door". Meg is now married to Calvin and is expecting their first child. Calvin has become a scientist and is in Britain at a conference; Calvin's mother Branwen Maddox O’Keefe joins Meg's family for Thanksgiving dinner. When they receive the news of impending nuclear war caused by the dictator "Mad Dog Branzillo", Mrs. O'Keefe lays a charge on Charles Wallace of Patrick's Rune, a rhyming prayer of protection inherited from her Irish grandmother.Charles Wallace goes to the star-watching rock, a family haunt, where his recitation summons a winged unicorn named Gaudior, who explains to Charles Wallace that he must prevent nuclear war by traveling through time and telepathically merging with people who lived near the star-watching rock at points in the past.They are threatened along the way by the Echthroi, the antagonists introduced in "A Wind in the Door", who now seek to alter history in their favor. Gaudior and Charles Wallace's travels bring them to Harcels, a Native American boy at least 1,000 years in the past; Madoc of Wales, a pre-Columbian trans-oceanic traveler; Brandon Llawcae, a Welsh settler in puritan times; Mrs. O'Keefe's brother Chuck Maddox, during their childhood; and Matthew Maddox, a writer during the American Civil War.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_(Simmons_novel)"title="Hyperion (Simmons novel)">
## Premise.In the 29th century, the Hegemony of Man comprises hundreds of planets connected by farcaster portals. The Hegemony maintains an uneasy alliance with the TechnoCore, a civilisation of AIs. Modified humans known as Ousters live in space stations between stars and are engaged in conflict with the Hegemony.Numerous "Outback" planets have no farcasters and cannot be accessed without incurring significant time dilation. One of these planets is Hyperion, home to structures known as the Time Tombs, which are moving backwards in time and guarded by a legendary creature known as the Shrike. On the eve of an Ouster invasion of Hyperion, a final pilgrimage to the Time Tombs has been organized. The pilgrims decide that they will each tell their tale of how they were chosen for the pilgrimage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heir_Apparent_(novel)"title="Heir Apparent (novel)">
## Beginning.Giannine receives a gift certificate for a Rasmussem Gaming Center as a birthday present from her father. When she arrives at the local center, a crowd from "CPOC," the "Citizens to Protect Our Children," has come for a demonstration against such games. She enters the arcade and gets hooked up to "Heir Apparent", a single-player RPG. Giannine's character, Janine de St. Jehan, is the illegitimate child of the recently deceased King Cynric, who pronounced her heir to the throne, passing over three legitimate sons. Her task is to survive the three days (which will only last thirty minutes in the real world) before her coronation. Anytime her character dies, she will be sent back to the beginning of the game.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_History"title="The Secret History">
In 1983, Richard Papen leaves his hometown of Plano, California, for the elite Hampden College in Vermont to study literature. Richard finds he cannot enroll into the classes of Classics professor Julian Morrow, who limits enrollment to a hand-picked clique of five students: fraternal twins Charles and Camilla Macaulay, Francis Abernathy, Henry Winter, and Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran. After Richard helps them with a translation, they give him advice on endearing himself to Julian. Eventually, Richard is accepted into Julian's classes and becomes a member of the group.Henry seems to have a strained friendship with Bunny, but they spend winter break together in Rome while Richard takes a low-paying campus job and spends winter break in an unheated warehouse. He nearly dies from hypothermia and pneumonia but is rescued and taken to the hospital by Henry, who returns early from Italy.As 1983 rolls into 1984, tensions between Bunny and the group worsen as Bunny constantly insults the other members and begins behaving increasingly erratically. Richard learns the truth from Henry: during a bacchanal from which both Richard and Bunny were excluded, Henry accidentally killed a farmer near Francis's country estate. Bunny, by chance, found out the truth and has been blackmailing the group ever since. No longer able to meet Bunny's demands, and fearing that he'll expose them as his mental state deteriorates, Henry slowly convinces the group to kill Bunny. They confront Bunny while hiking and Henry pushes him into a ravine to his death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Friend"title="The Little Friend">
In the mid-1960s, on Mother's Day, Robin, the eldest child and only son of the Dufresnes, a white family living in Mississippi, is found hanging from a tree on the family property. Only nine years old at the time of his death, Robin's murder causes his mother, Charlotte, to sink into a listless depression and his father, Dixon, to abandon the family on the pretext of work.Twelve years later Robin's two younger sisters, Allison and Harriet, are now sixteen and twelve years old, respectively. Harriet, the younger child, is considered particularly difficult as she is intensely smart but uncompromising. Harriet has developed a morbid fascination with her brother and with the past of her matrilineal family, the Cleves. Her great-grandfather, Judge Cleve, once owned the local mansion, "Tribulation", but lost the family's wealth in his declining years.Harriet's fascination with her brother's death leads her to decide to find the murderer with the reluctant help of her younger but devoted friend, a boy, Hely Hull. The Dufresnes' stalwart black maid, Ida Rhew, reveals that Robin had a fight with another boy shortly before his death. Harriet discovers that the boy is Danny Ratliff, the son of a highly dysfunctional local methamphetamine producing family. Farish Ratliff, an elder brother, runs the drug business with the help of Danny and the connivance of his grandmother, Gum. Farish, not a particularly intelligent man, is planning a drug shipment hidden within a truck transporting venomous snakes, which another brother, Eugene, uses to support his Evangelical preaching.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob's_Room"title="Jacob's Room">
Set in pre-war England, the novel begins in Jacob's childhood and follows him through college at Cambridge and into adulthood. The story is told mainly through the perspectives of the women in Jacob's life, including the repressed upper-middle-class Clara Durrant and the uninhibited young art student Florinda, with whom he has an affair. His time in London forms a large part of the story, though towards the end of the novel he travels to Italy and then Greece.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roll_of_Thunder,_Hear_My_Cry"title="Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry">
Nine-year-old Cassie Logan lives in rural Mississippi with her three brothers, Stacey (twelve years old), Christopher-John (seven years old), and Little Man (six years old). Unlike most black families in their area, the Logan family owns the land on which they reside. It originally belonged to a white plantation owner, Harlan Granger, who sold it to cover his taxes during Reconstruction. Rather than a single, overarching storyline, the bulk of the novel consists of several intertwining plots, each involving one or more members of the Logan family and illustrating various aspects of black/white race relations. Several episodes feature black characters being humiliated by powerful white citizens and being forced to weigh the potential cost of standing up for themselves. At school, Cassie and Little Man notice that the books they use were originally distributed to the white children and given to the black students once they wear out.Cassie's father, David Logan, visits the family from his job on the railroad during the holidays. Mama organizes a boycott of the Wallaces' store because they are the cause of most of the trouble between the blacks and the whites, as well as possibly being members of the Ku Klux Klan. The Wallaces retaliate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tailchaser's_Song"title="Tailchaser's Song">
The novel is set in the world as cats see it, with humans being mysterious and distrusted creatures in the eyes of feral cats. The cats see themselves as the first and most important species; the novel takes the approach that all creatures consider their kind to be the dominant species of the planet. Their myths view humans, or "M'an", as a race of deformed descendants of cats. The book makes reference to mythologies of frogs, foxes and ravens as well as more thoroughly developing a system of cat mythology.Tailchaser's Song begins, after quoting a poem by Christopher Smart, with an exposition of the central elements of the cats' mythology, starting with a creation myth. This both frames the further developments of cat mythology and culture throughout the story and provides necessary backstory for the novel itself. Meerclar Allmother is identified as the primordial creator of all other beings, who brought forth a pair of cats who are the progenitors of the entire species as well as divine figures. Harar Goldeneye is the male, and Fela Skydancer the female. The first litter of this pair are also divine. These three cats are called the Firstborn; the middle child, Grizraz Hearteater, raises a monstrous hound out of jealousy and sets it to attack all cats. The eldest of the three, Viror Whitewind, slays the creature but is himself mortally wounded. Hearteater is driven out and flees beneath the ground where he searches out arcane lore, while Whitewind's death causes his father to flee to the heavens after searching for Hearteater in a murderous rage and causes his mother to be silent for the rest of his life. His youngest brother, Tangaloor Firefoot, renounced his claim to the throne and fled from the court out of grief. As a result of a further encounter with Firefoot, Hearteater is blinded by sun after having spent so much time beneath the earth, and retreats back beneath the ground, where it is supposed that he plots further destruction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascension_Factor"title="The Ascension Factor">
As one of three survivors of the orbiting hibernation tanks, a Raja Flattery clone has established himself as "Director" of Pandora. He keeps the Pandorans in an iron grip by heavy food rationing, violently enforced by his security forces. The kelp is being held down by pruning that keeps it from achieving consciousness. The kelp is being remotely controlled from an orbiting space station (The Orbiter), and is used as "Current Control".The kelp has produced a human-like being, called Crista Galli. She appeared in the water after a kelp bombing, at about age twenty. She doesn't have any memory of being part of the kelp. She has been kept a prisoner by Raja Flattery for several years.An underground resistance, known as Shadowbox, has been growing. The Shadowbox breaks in on Holovision transmissions, ordinarily dictated by Raja Flattery.The plan of Raja Flattery is to build a new Voidship, one that will take him away from Pandora. His intention is not to build an artificial intelligence for ship control, but use three OMCs (Organic Mental Core) left in hibernation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_du_Lac"title="Hotel du Lac">
Edith reaches Hotel du Lac in a state of bewildered confusion at the turn of events in her life. After a secret and often lonely affair with a married man and an aborted marriage, she is banished by her friends. They advise her to go on "probation" so as to "grow up", "be a woman", and atone for her mistakes.Edith comes to the hotel swearing not to change. However, the hotel's silent charms and her observations of the guests there all tug at Edith with questions about her identity, forcing her to examine who she is and what she has been. At the hotel, she observes people from different walks of life — wealthy Mrs Pusey and her daughter Jennifer, their love for each other, and the splendid oblivious lives they live; Mme de Bonneuil, who lives at the hotel in solitary expulsion from her chateau, now inhabited by her son and his wife; and Monica, who came to the hotel acceding to her husband's demands to fix her "eating disorder" and become fertile enough to bear him an heir.Edith falls for the ambiguous smile of Mr Neville, a wealthy owner of a technology company, who asks for her hand in marriage. Neville is looking for a "safe" wife who will maintain his mansion as a home and social venue, instead of running off with another man like his ex-wife. He offers to install her there and turn a blind eye to any lovers she might take. Edith considers a life of recognition that being married to Neville would confer upon her, but ultimately rejects the possibility of a relationship with him when she realises he is an incorrigible womaniser. This also finally leads her to realise what her life is expected to be. Once again, she breaks chains and decides to take things into her own hands and leaves Hotel du Lac.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bend_Sinister_(novel)"title="Bend Sinister (novel)">
This book takes place in a fictitious European city known as Padukgrad, where a government arises following the rise of a philosophy known as "Ekwilism", which discourages the idea of anyone being different from anyone else, and promotes the state as the prominent good in society. The story begins with the protagonist, Adam Krug, who had just lost his wife to an unsuccessful surgery. He is quickly asked to sign and deliver a speech to the leader of the new government by the head of the university and his colleagues, but he refuses. This government is led by a man named Paduk and his "Party of the Average Man". As it happens, the world-renowned philosopher Adam Krug was, in his youth, a classmate of Paduk, at which period he had bullied him and referred to him disparagingly as "the Toad". Paduk arrests many of the people close to Krug and those against his Ekwilist philosophy, and attempts to get the influential Professor Krug to promote the state philosophy to help stomp out dissent and increase his personal prestige.Paduk tries to entice Krug with various offers, but Krug always refuses, even after his friends and acquaintances, like Ember, are incarcerated. Finally, Paduk orders the kidnapping of Krug's young son, David, for a ransom. After Krug capitulates and is prepared to promote the Ekwilist philosophy, Paduk promises David's safe return. However, when David is to be returned to him, Krug is horrified to find that the child he is presented is not his son. There has been a mix-up, and David has been sent to an orphanage that doubles as a violent prisoner rehabilitation clinic where he was killed when offered as a "release" to the prisoners.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Edge_of_the_World"title="The Edge of the World">
The film begins with a yacht passing by the remote island of Hirta (see note in "Production" below). The yachtsman (played by the director, Michael Powell) finds it strange that the island looks deserted, when a book he carries mentions that it should be inhabited. His crewman Andrew Gray (Niall MacGinnis) tells him that his book is outdated and the island is indeed uninhabited now. Andrew tries to dissuade the yachtsman from landing, but he decides to do so anyway. After landing, they find a gravestone on the edge of a cliff, and Andrew, who turns out to be a former islander on Hirta, starts to reminisce. The remainder of the film is his flashback.Andrew's friend Robbie Manson (Eric Berry) wants to leave the island and explore the wider world. Robbie's sister, Ruth Manson (Belle Chrystall), is Andrew's sweetheart, and the young couple are quite willing to stay. Robbie tells Ruth and Andrew that he is engaged to a Norwegian girl called Polly, whom he had met in a brief period working outside Hirta, and intends to announce that to the other islanders on the next day at the men's assembly, the "parliament". Robbie's father, Peter Manson (John Laurie), is determined to stay, while Andrew's father, James Gray (Finlay Currie), suspects that their way of life cannot last much longer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_at_the_ABA"title="Murder at the ABA">
Darius Just had previously helped novice writer Giles Devore produce a breakthrough novel. Just credits himself with ruthlessly editing Devore's original drafts and forcing the young author to turn an incoherent mess into a masterwork. Having gained fame and fortune with his first book, a bestseller, Devore attends the ABA convention to promote his second book, which he wrote without Just's help. Just volunteers to run an errand for Devore – collecting a parcel for him and taking it to his hotel room – but he forgets to do so until the next day. Entering Devore's hotel room, Just discovers Devore dead in the bathroom, apparently having slipped in the shower and hit his head on the faucets. Others take this to be a tragic accident and nothing more, but Just suspects murder, based on Devore's compulsive tidiness and the disarray in which Just found the room. He interviews Devore's ex-wife, who tells him that the parcel contained Devore's monogrammed pens.Just eventually ties the death to drug dealing at the hotel. Ironically, the object that led the murderer to kill Devore was a pen which Devore had borrowed during an autograph session because Just had failed to deliver him his own pens.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Judge_and_His_Hangman"title="The Judge and His Hangman">
Commissar Bärlach of the Bernese police, who is dying of cancer, must solve the murder of his best officer, Lieutenant Ulrich Schmied. Bärlach is assisted in his investigation by officer Walter Tschanz. As Schmied had been investigating the crimes of Richard Gastmann, a career master criminal who is an old friend and enemy of Bärlach, suspicion immediately falls upon Gastmann. But Bärlach's and Tschanz's "investigation" of Gastmann yields an unexpected twist after Tschanz kills Gastmann, supposedly in self-defense. Bärlach then reveals that he has known all along that Tschanz is the one who murdered Schmied.Tschanz had purposefully killed Gastmann so that Gastmann would be forever blamed for Schmied's murder. Furthermore, Bärlach had manipulated Tschanz into this action with the manner in which Bärlach had pressed forward with their seeming investigation of Gastmann. Bärlach had deliberately pushed Tschanz toward a final, fatal confrontation with Gastmann, resulting in Gastmann's death: the punishment Bärlach considers just for all of the previous crimes Gastmann had committed, but which Bärlach had been unable to prove.In fact, Gastmann and Bärlach went back forty years. They had long ago made a personal bet with one another as to whether it was possible to commit the "perfect" crime, such that even an investigator who witnessed it would never be able to prove the perpetrator guilty. After that bet, Gastmann, as Bärlach well knew, had pursued a lifelong career as a purveyor of crime, evil in its comprehensiveness, arrogant and mocking of civilisation itself. And indeed, he always remained one step ahead of Bärlach's tireless but fruitless efforts to convict him. Gastmann recalled to Bärlach: "I wanted to prove that it was possible to commit a crime that couldn't be solved." Gastmann had been correct, and Bärlach's final plot is an acknowledgment thereof. By murdering Schmied during Schmied's investigation of Gastmann, Tschanz had ruined the terminally ill Bärlach's final chance to bring Gastmann to justice in a courtroom. Therefore, using Tschanz as a pawn, Bärlach finds an alternate method to mete out the justice for which he feels Gastmann is overdue.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_of_the_Cybermen"title="Attack of the Cybermen">
## Part One.In the sewers of London, two workers are attacked by an unseen force. The Sixth Doctor's attempts to repair the TARDIS's systems, in particular the chameleon circuit, which enables the ship to alter its external form to something more suitable than the police box, cause the ship to behave chaotically in-flight. The Doctor eventually manages to pilot the TARDIS to Earth in the year 1985, where he shows Halley's Comet to Peri, although she is more worried about the prospect of crashing into it.On Earth, the former Dalek mercenary Lytton (from "Resurrection of the Daleks") has apparently taken up a new life as a London gangster, and is plotting a £10 million diamond raid with his cohorts Griffiths, Payne and Russell. They intend to enter the bank through the same sewers where the workmen were ambushed, but Lytton activates a strange transmitter before they enter. This emits a distress signal that the Doctor picks up, and he lands the TARDIS in a scrapyard in Totter's Lane to investigate. The TARDIS changes shape, to a rather conspicuous ornamental dresser. After searching the area, he determines that the transmitter is a dummy, and returns to the TARDIS to find the real source. They arrive at the sewer entrance (where the TARDIS reshapes itself into an organ) and find the transmitter, but are held up by two policemen who are under Lytton's control.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Wish_for_Wings_That_Work"title="A Wish for Wings That Work">
The story centers on Opus the Penguin (a main character of all three of Breathed's comic strips, and at the time appearing in "Outland"). Opus is downhearted because, as a penguin, he cannot fly. He orders a machine and assembles it; when it comes time to test the machine by jumping off a three-mile-high cliff, Opus decides to do something less dangerous, and goes home to make anchovy Christmas cookies. He does not give up on his dream though, and makes a Christmas wish to Santa Claus for "wings that will go!" On Christmas Eve, Santa is making his usual delivery when he loses his reindeer and crashes into a lake. Opus jumps in and uses his natural swimming skills to pull Santa out. To thank Opus for his daring rescue, a group of ducks pick him up and take him flying through the air.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Way_Station_(novel)"title="Way Station (novel)">
Born in 1840, Enoch Wallace is an American Civil War veteran who fought at the Battle of Gettysburg. He is recruited by an alien, whom Enoch names Ulysses (after Ulysses S. Grant), to operate a way station for interstellar travelers for Galactic Central. The equipment is installed in his house, while he lives in a small adjoining shed. His job is to monitor the machinery, including the regular and emergency "materializers", and make sure the biological needs of the wide variety of travelers are met. Enoch tries to communicate with them, with varying degrees of success, and befriends some of them.He does not age while he is inside. His neighbors are aware of his longevity, but he keeps to his family farm, and they mind their own business. He has only a few friends, including old mailman Winslowe Smith and a woman in her early twenties, deaf-mute neighbor Lucy.Almost a hundred years later, the US government becomes aware of him, and CIA agent Claude Lewis is sent to investigate. Lewis and his team secretly keep him under surveillance for two years. Enoch realizes he is being watched, but is not overly concerned.One day, Lucy comes running to Enoch. She shows him her back; she has been whipped until she bled. When he sees her pursuers approaching, he takes her into the house on impulse, breaking his rule of letting no human inside. Hank Fisher (her white trash father) and her brother come. Lucy tried to stop her brother from training his new coon dog using a live animal, eventually paralyzing first the dog, then his master, with her mind. Her father then started whipping her, so she temporarily blinded him and ran away. When the men accuse Enoch of harboring her, he invites them to search. Hank tries to enter the house, but cannot, even with an axe. Enoch tells them to leave and never come back.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wind_(Cussler_novel)"title="Black Wind (Cussler novel)">
In December 1944, the commanding officer of the "I-403", a Japanese I-400 class submarine, is given orders to launch a mysterious attack on the United States, a mission involving Japan’s notorious biological warfare group, Unit 731. The "I-403" reaches the U.S. northwest coast, but is sunk before the mission can be carried out.In May 2007, 62 years later, a team of CDC researchers, including beautiful field epidemiologist Sarah Matson, are unexpectedly infected by a deadly and mystery illness in the Aleutian islands; they are rescued by Dirk Pitt Jr. (hereinafter Pitt Jr.), who is nearby on a NUMA research vessel. Pitt Jr, with friend and coworker Jack Dahlgren, return to the site to investigate, but their helicopter is downed by gunfire from a mysterious trawler. They survive, eventually determining that the illness resulted from a toxic compound of cyanide and smallpox.In Japan, the U.S. ambassador is golfing with his British counterpart when he is assassinated by a sniper named Tongju. Tongju later assassinates the ambassador’s deputy and a semiconductor executive, leaving clues that appear to identify him as a member of a Japanese terrorist group.Investigating the toxin, Pitt Jr. consults marine-history researcher St. Julien Perlmutter, who finds records of the "I-403". Pitt Jr. and Dahlgren find and dive on the sunken "I-403", but its mysterious ordnance has been removed. Meanwhile, in the Philippines, Dirk Pitt senior (hereinafter referred to simply as Dirk) and his friend and colleague Al Giordino are also discovering forgotten Japanese ordnance that is poisoning marine life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender's_Game_(film)"title="Ender's Game (film)">
In the future, humanity is preparing to launch an attack on the homeworld of an alien race, called the Formics, that had attacked Earth and killed millions. The Formic invasion was stopped by Mazer Rackham, who crashed his fighter plane into the Formic queenship at the apparent cost of his life. Over the course of 50 years, gifted children are trained by the International Fleet to become commanders of a new fleet for this counterattack.Cadet Andrew "Ender" Wiggin draws the attention of Colonel Hyrum Graff and Major Gwen Anderson because of his aptitude in simulated space combat and is recruited into Battle School.Graff brings Ender to Battle School and places Ender with other cadets his age, but treats him as extraordinary, thereby subjecting him to being ostracized by the others. The cadets are placed in squads and perform training games in a zero-gravity "Battle Room". Ender quickly adapts to the games, devising new strategies older students have not yet seen.Graff reassigns Ender to Salamander Army, led by Commander Bonzo Madrid. Bonzo, believing that Ender is inept and a liability, prevents him from training with the rest of the squad. Another cadet, Petra Arkanian, takes Ender under her wing and trains him privately. In the next match, Bonzo benches Ender while the rest of the Salamander Army fights another team. However, seeing the team losing and Petra in trouble, Ender comes to her aid and helps Salamander Army win.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Let_Me_Go_(novel)"title="Never Let Me Go (novel)">
The story begins with Kathy H., who describes herself as a carer, talking about looking after organ donors. She has been a carer for almost twelve years at the time of narration, and she often reminisces about her time spent at Hailsham, a boarding school in England, where the teachers are known as "guardians". The children are watched closely and are often told about the importance of producing art and of being healthy (smoking is considered a taboo, almost on the level of a crime, and working in the vegetable garden is compulsory). The students' art is then displayed in an exhibition, and the best art is chosen by a woman known to the students as Madame, who keeps their work in a gallery. Kathy develops a close friendship with two other students: Ruth and Tommy. Kathy develops a fondness for Tommy by looking after him when he is bullied and having private talks with him. However, Tommy and Ruth form a relationship instead.In an isolated incident, Miss Lucy, one of the guardians, tells the students that they are clones who were created to donate organs to others (similar to saviour siblings) and that after their donations, they will die young. She implies that if the students are to live decent lives, they must know the truth: their lives are already predetermined. Miss Lucy is removed from the school as a result of her disclosure, but the students passively accept their fate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sivagamiyin_Sapatham"title="Sivagamiyin Sapatham">
It would be difficult to point out who the real hero of the novel is. Mahendravarman I, the Pallava emperor, plays an important role in the first half of the story while his son Narasimhavarman comes into his own as the novel progresses. The plot revolves around the historical events of the Chalukya king, Pulakeshin II, laying a siege of Kanchi, and Narasimhavarman avenging this by attacking Vatapi, the capital of the Chalukyas.The novel is divided into four parts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Valley_High"title="Sweet Valley High">
The story begins with Elizabeth in New York, where she is working on a magazine called "Show Survey", described as "a sort of Zagat for Off Broadway." Through flashbacks, we learn that Jessica and Todd had been having an affair off and on for the last five years, and that eight months ago Elizabeth discovered their duplicity, and has not spoken to either of them since. A few characters from the original series pop up, most notably Winston Egbert, who invested in a dot-com venture with Bruce Patman (also a major character in this book, Bruce's personality changed dramatically when both of his parents died, making him a more caring, sensitive person). Time, unrequited love and other negative life experiences have turned Winston into a bitter hateful Scrooge-like miser who womanizes and shows contempt for himself and all humanity. He no longer has any friends. He dies midway through the book from an "accidental" drunken fall from his 20-story balcony. Jessica and Todd still live together in Sweet Valley. Jessica has a very successful career for a cosmetics marketing company called "MYFACEISGREEN" and Todd is a successful sports columnist. They are very much in love, but haunted by what they have done to Elizabeth and by the vicious gossip that surrounds them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Richleighs_of_Tantamount"title="The Richleighs of Tantamount">
The book tells the story of four young siblings—Edwin, Angeline, Sebastian and Maud—who live together in a London mansion in Victorian society (c. the 1870s), along with their wealthy parents. These four children have been longing all their lives for their maiden visit to Tantamount, a castle on the Cornish coast, built by their great-great-great-grandfather. From time to time, the children wonder about its mysterious past as they look at the gigantic painting of the castle that dominates a wall in their drawing room.Their lives are changed one fateful, unforgettable July when their father contracts a serious illness. The children are sent to stay at the castle while their parents go on a sea voyage to repair his health. Only when the children begin to explore do they realize that despite being built and furnished in magnificent style, the castle is suffering from decades of neglect. The tutor and governess are shocked by the condition of the place and leave abruptly. Soon the recently engaged servants do the same, but the children decide to stay on alone.Regarding themselves as castaways, they enjoy their freedom despite the hardships. They make friends with two local children, Nancy and Dick, and are worried when they disappear. They begin to suspect that the castle is being used for smuggling and even wrecking. Tantamount is destroyed by fire, but when the parents arrive at last they are relieved to find their children have survived.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moving_Finger"title="The Moving Finger">
Jerry and Joanna Burton, a brother and sister from London, take up residence in a house owned by Miss Barton near the quiet town of Lymstock for the last phase of Jerry's recovery from injuries suffered in a plane crash. Shortly after moving in and meeting their neighbours, they receive an anonymous letter which makes the false accusation that the pair are lovers, not siblings.The Burtons quickly learn that such poison pen letters have been received by many in the town. Despite the letters containing false accusations, many recipients are upset by them and fear something worse may happen. Mrs Symmington, the local solicitor's wife, is found dead after receiving a letter stating that her husband, was not the father of her second son. Her body is discovered with the letter, a glass containing potassium cyanide, and a torn scrap of paper that reads, "I can't go on."While the inquest rules that her death was suicide, the police begin a hunt for the anonymous letter writer. An inspector arrives from Scotland Yard to help with the investigation. He concludes that the letter writer is a middle-aged woman among the prominent citizens of Lymstock. Mrs Symmington's daughter by a previous marriage, Megan Hunter, an awkward, frumpy 20-year-old, stays with the Burtons for a few days after losing her mother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waking_the_Tiger"title="Waking the Tiger">
"Waking the Tiger" contains four sections: Section I: The Body as Healer; Section II: Symptoms of Trauma; Section III: Transformation and Renegotiation; and Section IV: First Aid for Trauma. Peter Levine argues in the book that it is through action instead of talking that people can assist others who are struggling with psychological trauma. He presents the somatic experiencing approach.Peter A. Levine received a doctorate in medical biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley and has an independent psychology doctorate. In 1969 Levine encountered a graduate student, Nancy, who experienced brutalizing panic attacks, unexplainable in her view. Levine started their discussion with a typical relaxation technique. While Nancy was silently paying attention in her seat, she failed to react. When he continued attempting to get her to relax, she unexpectedly had a massive panic attack. Levine says he became immersed in her panic attack. In his mind, he suddenly saw a tiger stopped low and preparing to jump at them. Immersed in the nightmare, he ordered, "Nancy! You are being attacked by a large tiger! See the tiger as it comes toward you! Run toward that tree! Run, Nancy, run! Climb up! Escape!"Levine said Nancy's legs began moving as if she was sprinting. Nancy said that, for her first time, she had remembered a scary childhood experience. When she was three years old she experienced a tonsillectomy during which she was secured to an operating table to prevent movement. The anesthesia could have been only partially working which caused her to feel like she was being strangled. Her experience was drilled into her and could not just be remembered while she was alert. While counseling Nancy, Levine at the time also was researching predation, which Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee noted could be the reason Levine pictured a tiger. Experts generally have not found evidence to support Levine's findings; he found that for prey that have completely lost the ability to move, "the sudden immobility of a highly charged nervous system compresses energy that is then 'stored' in the nervous system if not released".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleachers_(novel)"title="Bleachers (novel)">
Neely Crenshaw, born in 1969, is a high school All-American quarterback, who has been Messina High School's 'golden boy,' expected to lead them to the state title. Neely is a highly recruited quarterback with a golden arm, fast feet, plenty of size, maybe the greatest Messina quarterback ever. When Neely was younger and playing football with his friends, a man watching him approached Neely, saying "You're going to play football for the Spartans."In 1987, after trailing 31-0 at halftime to East Pike, and crippled by a broken hand, the gutsy quarterback rallies the Spartans to a 34-31 victory for Messina's first state championship in seven years, achieved without the assistance of coach Rake. His hand injury is caused when Neely punches Coach Eddie Rake in the face, after Coach Rake backhands him, causing him to break his nose.After graduation, Crenshaw had received 31 scholarship offers and chooses Tech, a fictional university. He receives $50,000, a violation of NCAA rules for signing with the school.In the second half of the 1989 Gator Bowl, Crenshaw comes off the bench for Tech, throws for three touchdowns, runs for one hundred yards and leads a last-second comeback.As a sophomore, he is national player of the week when he throws for six touchdowns against Purdue University. But against A&amp;M later that year, he suffers a career-ending knee injury on a cheep shot hit after Crenshaw was out of bounds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Painted_House"title="A Painted House">
The story begins as Luke Chandler and his grandfather Eli, also known as Pappy, search for migrant workers to help them with the cotton picking. They initially consider themselves lucky to hire the Spruills, a family of "hill people," and a few Mexican migrants who annually come to the area looking for work.Aside from working long hours under the hot sun in the fields, Luke's life is fairly idyllic. He is obsessed with beautiful 17-year-old Tally Spruill, who on one occasion lets him see her naked, bathing in a creek. But a much more unpleasant experience is seeing Tally's brother, the overly aggressive and mentally unstable Hank Spruill, attack three boys from the notorious Sisco family, one of whom is beaten so severely that he dies from his wounds. Hank arrogantly identifies Luke as a friendly witness who can support his version of the event, and the fearful boy backs up his story, although the adults in his life, including local sheriff Stick Powers, suspect he's too frightened to admit the truth.When Luke sees Cowboy, one of the Mexicans, later murder Hank and toss his body into the river, Cowboy threatens to kill Luke's mother if Luke tells anyone what he saw. Cowboy and Tally then run off together and are not seen again. Luke also learns that his admired Uncle Ricky, fighting in the Korean War, might have fathered a child with a daughter of the Latchers, their poverty-stricken sharecropping neighbors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smiling,_Proud_Wanderer"title="The Smiling, Proud Wanderer">
In "jianghu" or wulin (martial artists' community), there is a highly coveted martial arts manual known as the Bixie Swordplay Manual, the heirloom of the Lin family, which runs the Fuwei Security Service in Fuzhou. The Qingcheng Sect's leader Yu Canghai leads his followers to massacre the Lins and attempts to seize the manual to no success. Yue Buqun, the leader of the Mount Hua Sect—a member of the "orthodox" Five Mountains Sword Sects Alliance—saves Lin Pingzhi, the Lin family's sole survivor, accepting him as an apprentice and training him in swordplay.The novel's protagonist is Yue Buqun's most senior apprentice, Linghu Chong (令狐冲), an orphaned, happy-go-lucky but honourable swordsman who has a penchant for alcoholic drinks. He befriends the notorious bandit Tian Boguang and saves Yilin, a nun from the (North) Mount Heng Sect, from Tian's lecherous advances. In the meantime, Liu Zhengfeng of the (South) Mount Heng Sect announces his decision to leave the "jianghu" and invites his fellow martial artists to witness his retirement ceremony. The event turns into a bloodbath when Zuo Lengshan, the chief of the Mount Song Sect, and other "orthodox" sects accuse Liu Zhengfeng of being unfaithful to their alliance by befriending Qu Yang, an elder of the "evil" Sun Moon Holy Cult. Liu Zhengfeng and Qu Yang are cornered by Zuo Lengshan and his men and eventually commit suicide. Before dying, Liu Zhengfeng and Qu Yang give Linghu Chong the score of "Xiaoao Jianghu", a musical piece they composed together. (The Chinese title of the novel comes from the name of this fictional piece of music.)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Piggle-Wiggle"title="Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle">
The "Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle" series is about a small woman who lives in an upside-down house in a lively neighborhood inhabited mainly by children who have bad habits.Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle has a chest full of magical cures left to her by her deceased husband, Mr. Piggle-Wiggle, who was a pirate. In the first two books of the series, "Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle" (1947) and "Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Magic" (1949), Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle provides parents with cures for their children's bad habits. Cures range from the mundane (the "Won't-Pick-Up-Toys Cure", allowing a small boy to continue leaving his toys scattered about his room until the room becomes so cluttered that he is unable to escape) to the fantastic (the "Interrupting Cure", a special powder that is blown on the interrupter, which causes the person to become temporarily mute every time they try to interrupt someone).In the series' third book, "Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Farm" (1954), Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle sells her house in town and buys a farm, where with the assistance of a large assortment of animals she continues to help children overcome their bad habits. In this collection, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle uses no magic for her cures; the farm itself does the most good. In the fourth book, "Hello, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle" (1957) she has apparently returned to her original neighborhood and to her magical cures. No mention of the farm is made for the rest of the series.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfacing_(novel)"title="Surfacing (novel)">
The book tells the story of a woman who returns to her hometown in Canada to find her missing father. Accompanied by her lover, Joe, and a married couple, Anna and David, the unnamed protagonist meets her past in her childhood house, recalling events and feelings, while trying to find clues to her father's mysterious disappearance. Little by little, the past overtakes her and drives her into the realm of wildness and madness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mad_Man"title="The Mad Man">
In New York City in the early 1980s, a black gay philosophy graduate student, John Marr, is researching a dissertation on Timothy Hasler, a Korean-American philosopher and academic stabbed to death under unexplained circumstances outside a gay bar in 1973. As details emerge, Marr finds his lifestyle converging with that of Hasler, and he becomes increasingly involved in intense sexual encounters with homeless men, despite his growing awareness of the risks of HIV. In the course of unravelling the mystery of Hasler's death, Marr joins with a homeless man from West Virginia, who goes by the street name "Leaky." Scenes based on letters Delany actually wrote (see: "") take place in a gay bar in New York, though the basic incident is fictional.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_(Anderson_novel)"title="Feed (Anderson novel)">
## Context.The novel portrays a near-future in which the "feednet", a huge computer network (apparently an advanced form of the Internet), is directly connected to the brains of about 73% of American citizens by means of an implanted device called a "feed". The feed allows people: to mentally access vast digital databases (individually called "sites"); to experience shareable virtual-reality phenomena (including entertainment programs, music, and even others' memories); to continually interact with intrusive corporations in a personal preference-based way; and to communicate telepathically on closed channels with others who also have feeds (a feature called "m-chatting").The setting of the novel is depicted as ecologically devastated. Natural clouds have been replaced by trademarked Clouds™, implying artificialization, and many have their children custom-designed.The corporations responsible for the feed have immense power and even run the school system, which is now known as School™. Throughout the book, corporations appear to hold the true power in the United States, leaving the president virtually helpless as the Global Alliance, a coalition of other countries, begins contemplating war with the U.S., due to the worsening worldwide effects of American mismanagement of the environment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possession_(Byatt_novel)"title="Possession (Byatt novel)">
Obscure scholar Roland Michell, researching in the London Library, discovers handwritten drafts of a letter by the eminent Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, which lead him to suspect that the married Ash had a hitherto unknown romance. He secretly takes away the documents – a highly unprofessional act for a scholar – and begins to investigate. The trail leads him to Christabel LaMotte, a minor poet and contemporary of Ash, and to Dr. Maud Bailey, an established modern LaMotte scholar and distant relative of LaMotte. Protective of LaMotte, Bailey is drawn into helping Michell with the unfolding mystery. The two scholars find more letters and evidence of a love affair between the poets (with evidence of a holiday together during which – they suspect – the relationship may have been consummated); they become obsessed with discovering the truth. At the same time, their own romantic lives – neither of which is satisfactory – develop, and they become romantically entwined in an echo of Ash and LaMotte. The stories of the two couples are told in parallel, and include letters and poetry by the poets.The revelation of an affair between Ash and LaMotte would make headlines and reputations in academia because of the prominence of the poets, and colleagues of Roland and Maud become competitors in the race to discover the truth, for all manner of motives. Ash's marriage is revealed to have been unconsummated, although he loved and remained devoted to his wife. He and LaMotte had a short, passionate affair; it led to the suicide of LaMotte's companion (and possibly lover), Blanche Glover, and the secret birth of LaMotte's illegitimate daughter during a year spent in Brittany. LaMotte left the girl with her sister to be raised and passed off as her own. Ash was never informed that he and LaMotte had a child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah,_Plain_and_Tall"title="Sarah, Plain and Tall">
The story is set in the Midwestern United States during the late 19th century. Jacob Witting, a widowed farmer who is still saddened by the death of his wife during childbirth several years before, finds that the task of taking care of his farm and two children, Anna and Caleb, is too difficult to handle alone. He writes an ad in the newspaper for a mail-order bride. Sarah Wheaton, from Maine, answers his ad and travels out to become his wife.While Anna is initially apprehensive about Sarah as she still has memories of her late mother, Caleb is excited and deeply hopes that Sarah will stay. When she arrives conditionally for one month, Anna notices that Sarah is lonely and misses the sea. Sarah is stubborn and persistent, and she gradually wins over Jacob with her insistence on learning and helping out with farm tasks. The Wittings become attached to Sarah, though Caleb constantly worries that their home is not enough for her and that she misses the sea. When Sarah goes to town by wagon on her own, Anna tries to reassure Caleb that Sarah will return, while secretly fearing that she will not. They are overjoyed when Sarah returns by nightfall. Admitting that she misses the sea, Sarah says that she would miss them more if she left. Anna reveals that Jacob and Sarah married soon afterward.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Masque_of_Mandragora"title="The Masque of Mandragora">
The Doctor shows Sarah some of the TARDIS interior, and they come across the secondary console room. Activating the viewscreen, the Doctor sees a swirl of living energy in the time vortex – the Mandragora Helix, which starts to draw them in. The intelligence within the Helix psychically attacks them as the Doctor tries to pilot the TARDIS through it. The ship ends up inside the Helix, and the Doctor and Sarah duck behind the TARDIS as a fragment of glowing Helix energy flies by. They escape in the TARDIS, not knowing that the fragment has entered with them.In 15th century San Martino in Italy, a peasant revolt is violently put down by Count Federico and his men, led by Captain Rossini. In a palace, Federico's brother, the Duke of San Martino, lies dying, attended to by his son Giuliano and Giuliano's companion Marco. The Duke's death had been foretold by Hieronymous, the court astrologer, but Giuliano, a man of science, does not believe in such superstition. In fact, Hieronymous is working for Federico, and the horoscope's prediction of the Duke's death was helped along by poison. Hieronymous tells the Count that he feels his powers are growing, but all Federico wants is for the astrologer to foretell Giuliano's death next, and he will take care of the rest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammer's_Slammers"title="Hammer's Slammers">
The novel is split into a series of short stories which follow various characters and their interactions with the Hammer's Slammers regiment. After each short story is an interlude chapter. These chapters form short essays that Drake uses to expand up the world of the "Hammerverse".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Case_of_Conscience"title="A Case of Conscience">
## Part 1.In 2049, Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez of Peru, Clerk Regular of the Society of Jesus, is a member of a four-man team of scientists sent to the planet Lithia to determine if it can be opened to human contact. Ruiz-Sanchez is a biologist and biochemist, and he serves as the team doctor. However, as a Jesuit, he has religious concerns as well. The planet is inhabited by a race of intelligent bipedal reptile-like creatures, the Lithians. Ruiz-Sanchez has learned to speak their language to learn about them.While on a walking survey of the land, Cleaver, a physicist, is poisoned by a plant, despite a protective suit, and he suffers badly. Ruiz-Sanchez treats him and leaves to send a message to the others: Michelis, a chemist, and Agronski, a geologist. He is helped by Chtexa, a Lithian whom he has befriended, who then invites him to his house. This is an opportunity which Ruiz-Sanchez cannot decline; no member of the team has been invited into Lithian living places before. The Lithians seem to have an ideal society, a utopia without crime, conflict, ignorance or want. Ruiz-Sanchez is awed.When the team is reassembled, they compare their observations of the Lithians. Soon they will have to officially pronounce their verdict. Michelis is open-minded and sympathetic to the Lithians. He has learned their language and some of their customs. Agronski is more insular in his outlook, but he sees no reason to consider the planet dangerous. When Cleaver revives, he reveals that he wants the place exploited, regardless of the Lithians' wishes. He has found enough pegmatite (a source of lithium, which is rare on Earth) that a factory could be set up to supply Earth with lithium deuteride for nuclear weapons. Michelis is for open trade. Agronski is indifferent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Lake_(novel)"title="Blind Lake (novel)">
The novel deals with a government installation at Blind Lake, Minnesota, where scientists observe sentient life on a planet 51 light-years away, using telescopes powered by Bose-Einstein condensate-based quantum computers that have advanced beyond human understanding. A sudden and unexplained facility lockdown extends into a long-term quarantine. Observation department head Marguerite Hauser tries to carry on with her work studying the alien life while taking care of her socially-challenged daughter Tess, warding off her ex-husband Ray, and deciding how she feels about houseguest and disgraced journalist Chris.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sensorites"title="The Sensorites">
The TARDIS crew land on a spaceship, where they meet crew members Captain Maitland (Lorne Cossette) and Carol Richmond (Ilona Rodgers), who are on an exploration mission from Earth and are orbiting Sense-Sphere. However, its inhabitants, the Sensorites, refuse to let them leave orbit. The Sensorites visit and stop the travellers from leaving while sending them on a collision course, which the First Doctor (William Hartnell) diverts. The travellers then meet Carol's fiancé John, whose mind has been broken by the Sensorites. Susan Foreman's (Carole Ann Ford) telepathic mind is flooded with the many voices of the Sensorites who remain scared of the humans and are trying to communicate with her.Meanwhile, the Doctor calculates that the Sensorites attacked the human craft because John (Stephen Dartnell), a mineralogist, had discovered a vast supply of molybdenum on Sense-Sphere. Susan reports that the Sensorites wish to make contact with travellers, asking the crew to board Sense-Sphere and reveal that a previous Earth expedition caused them great misery. The Doctor asks the Sensorites to return the TARDIS' lock in exchange for visiting the Sense-Sphere to speak with the leader; Ian Chesterton (William Russell), Susan, Carol, and John join him.On their journey to Sense-Sphere, the party learns that the previous visitors from Earth exploited Sense-Sphere for its wealth; half of them stole the spacecraft, which exploded on take-off. The Sensorite Council is divided over the issue of inviting the party to Sense-Sphere: some members plot to kill them on arrival, but others believe that the humans can help with the disease that is currently killing many Sensorites. When their first plot is foiled by other Sensorites, they continue to plot in secret. John's mind is eventually unblocked. Ian contracts the disease that has blighted the Sensorites, and told that he will soon die; it is revealed that he was actually poisoned by drinking water from the aqueduct. The Doctor finds the aqueduct and creates a cure for Ian. The plotting Sensorites capture and then impersonate a Sensorite leader, the Second Elder (Bartlett Mullins).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_(Seton_novel)"title="Katherine (Seton novel)">
"Katherine" tells the true story of Katherine de Roet, born the daughter of a minor Flemish herald, later knight. Katherine has no obvious prospects, except that her sister is a waiting-woman to Queen Philippa, wife of King Edward III, and the fiancée of Geoffrey Chaucer, then a minor court official. By virtue of this connection, Katherine meets and marries Sir Hugh Swynford of Lincolnshire and gives birth to a daughter, Blanchette, and a son, Thomas.After Hugh's death, Katherine becomes the mistress of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and bears him four children out of wedlock; they are given the surname 'Beaufort' after one of the Duke's possessions. She is also appointed official governess to the Duke's two daughters by his first wife, Blanche of Lancaster, and helps raise his son by Blanche, the future King Henry IV. The Duke and Katherine separate for a number of years, immediately following Wat Tyler's Peasants' Revolt in 1381, when the rioting peasants sacked and burnt the Duke's Savoy Palace to the ground. The novel's explanation for their separation is Katherine's shock over revelations concerning the death of her husband. However, the couple eventually reconcile and marry after the death of the Duke's second wife. The Beaufort children, now grown, are legitimised by royal and papal decrees after Katherine and the Duke are married.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_the_Blue_Train"title="The Mystery of the Blue Train">
Poirot boards Le Train Bleu, bound for the French Riviera. So does Katherine Grey, who is having her first winter out of England, after recently receiving a relatively large inheritance. On board the train Grey meets Ruth Kettering, an American heiress leaving her unhappy marriage to meet her lover. The next morning, though, Ruth is found dead in her compartment, a victim of strangulation. The famous ruby, "Heart of Fire", which had recently been given to Ruth by her father, is discovered to be missing. Ruth's father, the American millionaire Rufus Van Aldin, and his secretary, Major Knighton, persuade Poirot to take on the case. Ruth's maid, Ada Mason, says that she saw a man in Ruth's compartment but could not see who he was. The police suspect that Ruth's lover, the Comte de la Roche, killed her and stole the ruby, but Poirot does not think that the Comte is guilty. He is suspicious of Ruth's husband, Derek Kettering, who was on the same train but claims not to have seen Ruth. Katherine says that she saw Derek enter Ruth's compartment. Further suspicion is thrown on Derek when a cigarette case with the letter "K" is found there.Poirot investigates and finds out that the murder and the jewel theft might not be connected, as the famous jewel thief "The Marquis" is connected to the crime. Eventually, the avaricious Mirelle, who was on the train with Derek -- with whom she had been having an affair but, now spurned, is seeking revenge against him -- tells Poirot she saw Derek leave Ruth's compartment around the time the murder would have taken place. Derek is then arrested. Everyone is convinced the case is solved, but Poirot is not sure. He does more investigating and learns more information, talking to his friends and to Katherine, eventually coming to the truth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Private_Life_of_Chairman_Mao"title="The Private Life of Chairman Mao">
The book discusses the 22 years for which Li maintains he was Mao's personal physician. After a brief summary of his family and personal history, Li discusses how he came to treat first the senior Chinese communist officials, then in 1954 Mao himself until Mao's death in 1976. Much of the text discusses the difficulties and frustrations faced by Li attempting to deal with the politics, infighting and personal conflicts of the upper echelons of the Communist Party of China, as well as the difficulties dealing with both Mao as a patient and other high-ranking officials, such as Mao's wife, the hypochondriac Jiang Qing, Mao's complaining daughter Li Na, and Lin Biao, whom the book says was mentally unstable.The book also discusses the political climate and events of China in the same period. These include Mao's role in orchestrating events such as the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and various purges of members of the Communist Party. A significant portion of the narrative involves treatment of Mao's physical and mental health complaints and Li's personal assessments of how Mao handled the personalities and disputes of the party members that surrounded him. Li also details his disgust and frustrations towards the sycophancy and opportunism of high-ranking officials, such as Zhou Enlai, Deng Yingchao, Yang Shangkun, Lin Biao, Chen Boda, and Zhang Yufeng in carrying out Mao and Jiang Qing's orders against their better judgement, and the effect their actions had on Li's ability to provide medical treatment for Mao. He does however have praise for Wang Dongxing, Luo Ruiqing, Hua Guofeng, Marshals Ye Jianying and Peng Dehuai as the few honest individuals within the system who were willing to Challenge Mao, albeit with varying degrees of success.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_Fear_(novel)"title="Mortal Fear (novel)">
Dr. Jason Howard is a general practitioner at Good Health Plan (a fictitious Boston hospital); he was formerly a resident at Massachusetts General. When a patient of his is admitted complaining of heart problems and later dies, Jason finds that, though having received a clean bill of health less than a month before, that the heart attack came totally out of left field and the patient looks decidedly older than he ought to at 56. Soon two more cases come to his attention, both healthy a month before, now dead, both looking older than their years.Alvin Hayes, a former classmate of Jason's at Harvard, asks to speak to him about his recent strange caseload. Hayes is a shifty, twitchy man whose personal life is a subject of some question who seems unduly paranoid, and Jason wonders if the resident mad scientist has gotten into something illicit. At dinner Hayes, while talking about his genetic research on aging, suddenly begins expelling blood violently. He dies a gory death right there in the restaurant. Jason begins investigating the connection between the man's sudden demise, his nervous demeanor, and the patients in his hospital who have all been admitted with what seems to be a mutant strain of progeria that killed them in mere days.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Angel_of_Darkness"title="The Angel of Darkness">
The now-adult Stevie Taggert, a tobacconist, makes a bet with an elderly John Moore that he can write the story of one of their adventures together as well as Moore (a former newspaper reporter) could.Set in 1897, Dr. Laszlo Kreizler's associate, Sara Howard, now a private detective, comes to him for help in locating Ana Linares, the kidnapped infant daughter of a visiting Spanish dignitary. The mystery is complicated by rising tensions between Spain and the United States, and war in Cuba seems inevitable. Kreizler re-convenes his old "team": Sara; John; NYPD detectives and forensic specialists Marcus and Lucius Isaacson; and Kreizler's faithful servants, Stevie and Cyrus. Their search for the missing child leads them to contact with an enigmatic woman with a murderous past, who enjoys the protection of the Hudson Dusters, a notorious gang.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songmaster"title="Songmaster">
The empire of "Songmaster" is a place of treachery, resembling that of ancient Rome and the Galactic Empire of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. The book is morally ambivalent. True love, both heterosexual and homosexual, are major themes as are loyalty and honor. Fraud, kidnapping, assassination, murder are also prevalent and each of them is shown in more than one light. As with many of Card's works, this story is more about the interplay of people, and their moral issues, than it is about technology, although the Empire clearly has advanced technology.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Short-Wave_Mystery"title="The Short-Wave Mystery">
## Revised edition.The Hardy boys are drawn into a mystery when a group of thieves steals a collection of stuffed animals from an estate sale. Later, the Hardy boys notice a station wagon carrying stuffed animals, but when they try to give chase, the car gets away, leaving only a broken ham radio antenna behind. While they are discussing the case that their father Fenton Hardy is working on, they learn that he is after a group involved in industrial espionage and that this group uses code words very similar to what the boys have been hearing transmitted over the ham radio bands.When the Hardy boys visit the estate to investigate the remaining stuffed animals, they are knocked unconscious and someone steals the remaining animals. They manage to get their hands on two of them and convince their friend Chet Morton, who has recently taken up taxidermy as a hobby, to open them up looking for whatever may be hidden inside. After the Lectrex plant is raided, the boys go with their father to investigate, and they notice a stuffed fox that had been on a ledge in the conference room has mysteriously disappeared.The Hardy Boys travel to Canada (somewhere near Moosonee and Moose Factory) to solve the theft of the stuffed animals and to break up an industrial spy ring, which was the source of the leak of info coming from the Lectrex factory in their hometown of Bayport. As the boys piece together parts of this mystery, they solve the industrial spying case their father was working on, they solve the mystery of the coded transmissions on the ham radio bands, and they find out why a group was stealing the stuffed animals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priestess_of_Avalon"title="Priestess of Avalon">
The novel begins by showing her birth, with a druid giving a prophecy of her life. It proceeds to show her as a young girl named Eilan, who becomes a priestess on the Isle of Avalon.As a young woman, the British priestess Eilan, known to the Romans as Helena, falls in love with the charismatic Roman Constantius. The Roman noble takes her away from Avalon as she is banished for this forbidden love and, before long, Helena bears him a son, who will become Constantine the Great.Helena's position in Roman society now gives her the freedom to travel about in the empire. When her son Constantine becomes Emperor, she slowly discovers brand-new roles. She faces the spread of the new Christian religion and seeks to understand the old knowledge of the goddess in light of the new religion. As Empress-Mother, Helena travels on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to find the answers to questions that arise between the old religion and the new.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarissa"title="Clarissa">
Robert Lovelace, a wealthy "libertine" and heir to a substantial estate, begins to court Arabella, Clarissa's older sister. However, she rejects him because she felt slighted by his more ardent interest in her parents' approval than in her. Lovelace quickly moves on from Arabella to Clarissa, much to the displeasure of Arabella and their brother James. Clarissa insists that she dislikes Lovelace, but Arabella grows jealous of Lovelace's interest in the younger girl. James, also, dislikes Lovelace greatly because of a duel the two had once fought. These feelings combine with resentment that their grandfather had left Clarissa a piece of land and lead the siblings to be aggressive to Clarissa. The entire Harlowe family is in favour of her marrying Roger Solmes, however Clarissa finds Solmes to be unpleasant company and does not wish to marry him, either. This makes her family suspicious of her supposed dislike of Lovelace and they begin to disbelieve her.The Harlowes begin restricting Clarissa's contact with the outside world by forbidding her to see Lovelace. Eventually they forbid her to either leave her room or send letters to her friend, Anna Howe, until Clarissa apologises and agrees to marry Solmes. Trapped and desperate to regain her freedom, Clarissa continues to communicate with Anna secretly and begins a correspondence with Lovelace while trying to convince her parents not to force her to marry Solmes. Neither Clarissa nor her parents will concede. They see her protests as stubborn disobedience and communication between parents and daughter breaks down. Lovelace convinces Clarissa to elope with him to avoid the conflict with her parents. Joseph Leman, a servant of the Harlowe family, shouts and makes noise so it may seem like the family has awoken and discovered that Clarissa and Lovelace are about to run away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Name_Is_Asher_Lev"title="My Name Is Asher Lev">
Asher Lev is a boy with a prodigious artistic ability born into a Hasidic Jewish family. During his childhood in the 1950s, in the time of Joseph Stalin and the persecution of Jews and religious people in the Soviet Union, Asher's artistic inclination brings him into conflict with the members of his Jewish community, which values things primarily as they relate to faith and considers art unrelated to religious expression to be at best a waste of time and possibly a sacrilege. It brings him into particularly strong conflict with his father, Aryeh, a man who has devoted his life to serving their leader, the Rebbe, by traveling around the world bringing the teachings and practice of their sect to other Jews. Aryeh is by nature incapable of understanding or appreciating art and considers Asher's early drawings to be "foolishness."In the middle is Asher's mother, Rivkeh, who in Asher's early childhood was severely traumatized by the death of her brother, who was killed while traveling for the Rebbe. Rivkeh is only able to emerge from her depression when she decides to continue her brother's work and obtains the Rebbe's permission to return to college to study Russian affairs. Throughout the novel she suffers anxiety for her husband's safety during his almost constant traveling, and is frequently seen waiting at the large window of their apartment for her husband or son to return home. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forest_House"title="The Forest House">
In the early days of the conquest, when the Roman Legions are aggressively persecuting the Druids, the sanctuary of the Goddess on the isle of Mona is destroyed and its Druids are murdered and its priestesses are raped. Mona had enjoyed a degree of independence from Roman rule for almost twenty years because Boudica's revolt had forced Roman general Gaius Suetonius Paulinus to withdraw before consolidating his conquest. When the Romans returned under Gnaeus Julius Agricola, they were determined to decisively break the power of the Druids. They destroyed the sacred groves, raped all the women and murdered any Druids who resisted. After the destruction of the sanctuary, those raped priestesses who conceived killed all the girl children but left the boys that were born alive, then killed themselves rather than live with the atrocities done to them. The surviving males later became a rebel group known as the Ravens, which swore vengeance against Rome. Lhiannon, one of the remaining priestesses, re-establishes a new sanctuary at Vernemeton (Most Holy Grove), or The Forest House, which is partially controlled and protected by the Romans.The novel tells the story of Eilan, granddaughter of the Arch-Druid of Britain. She hears the calling of the Goddess and is chosen to become a priestess at Vernemeton, and later to succeed the dying Lhiannon as High Priestess. However, before her calling, she hears the voice of her heart, and during the magic night of Beltaine, conceives a son with Roman officer Gaius Macellius, son of the high-ranking Camp Prefect at nearby Deva. Gaius is an inheritant of royal blood through his Celtic mother of a southern tribe, the Silures. Eilan knows their son, Gawen, whose bloodline comes from the Dragon (Celtic royalty), the Eagle (Roman Empire), and from the Wise (Druids), will play a crucial role in Britain's future, and makes great sacrifices to protect him in his youth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Godwhale"title="The Godwhale">
The protagonist, Larry Dever, is gravely injured resulting in a radical surgical procedure, a hemicorporectomy, in which tissue below the waist is removed. He is outfitted with a set of intelligent mechanical legs, a "manniquin", and is placed into suspended animation until the damaged tissue can be restored. He wakes at a time when cloning technology can replace his legs, although for a price. Years before he was awakened, a clone, or "bud child", was created and is now a thriving young boy without language. Horrified by the prospect of his child being sacrificed to provide him with a new lower body, Larry opts to return to suspended animation. His child, Dim Dever, is selected by the guiding world computer, called Olga, to carry his ancient genes to a possible new colony on a planet orbiting Procyon.Larry awakens again in a nightmare future. Far from the highly advanced past, now an enormous human population – 3.5 trillion – covers every inch of the planet in underground shaft cities. Technology and science have degraded, and all freely breeding species have been exterminated except for the five-toed neolithic humans, which are classified as a garden varmint. The 'Hive' or human population of Nebishes – four-toed humans – within its computer-supported subterranean culture ruthlessly hunts, kills, and recycles anyone who consumes their crops, the Benthic Beasts, which are five-toed humans that have formed a precarious niche in abandoned underwater rec domes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investiture_of_the_Gods"title="Investiture of the Gods">
The novel is a romanticised retelling of the overthrow of King Zhou, the last ruler of the Shang dynasty, by Ji Fa, who would establish the Zhou dynasty in its place. The story integrates oral and written tales of many Chinese mythological figures who are involved in the struggle as well. These figures include human heroes, immortals, and various spirits (usually represented in avatar form, such as vixens and pheasants, and occasionally as inanimate objects such as a pipa).Bewitched by his concubine Daji, who is actually a vixen spirit disguised as a beautiful woman, King Zhou of Shang oppresses his people and persecutes those who oppose him, including those who dare to speak up to him. Ji Fa (King Wu of Zhou), assisted by his strategist Jiang Ziya, rallies an army to overthrow the tyrant and restore peace and order. Throughout the story, battles are waged between the kingdoms of Shang and Zhou, with both sides calling upon various supernatural beings – deities, immortals, demons, spirits, and humans with magical abilities – to aid them in the war. Yuanshi Tianzun ("Primeval Lord of Heaven") bestows upon Jiang Ziya the "Fengshen Bang", a list that empowers him to invest the gods of Heaven. The heroes of Zhou and some of their fallen enemies from Shang are eventually endowed with heavenly ranking and essentially elevated as gods, hence the title of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Angels_(Myers_novel)"title="Fallen Angels (Myers novel)">
The plot follows a soldier named Perry, through his experiences in Vietnam, at war, and through his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clotel"title="Clotel">
The narrative of "Clotel" plays with history by relating the "perilous antebellum adventures" of a young mixed-race slave Currer and her two light-skinned daughters fathered by Thomas Jefferson. Because the mother is a slave, according to partus sequitur ventrem, which Virginia adopted into law in 1662, her daughters are born into slavery. The book includes "several sub-plots" related to other slaves, religion and anti-slavery. Currer, described as "a bright mulatto" (meaning light-skinned) gives birth to two "near white" daughters: Clotel and Althesa.After the death of Jefferson, Currer and her daughters are sold as slaves.Horatio Green, a white man, purchases Clotel and takes her as a common-law wife. They cannot legally marry under state laws against miscegenation.Her mother Currer and sister Althesa remain "in a slave gang." Currer is eventually purchased by Mr. Peck, a preacher. She is enslaved until she dies from yellow fever, shortly before Peck's daughter was preparing to emancipate her.Althesa marries her white master, Henry Morton, a Northerner, by passing as a white woman. They have daughters Jane and Ellen, who are educated. Although supporting abolition, Morton fails to manumit Althesa and their daughters. After Althesa and Morton both die, their daughters are enslaved. Ellen commits suicide to escape sexual enslavement, and Jane dies in slavery from heartbreak.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clue_of_the_Velvet_Mask"title="The Clue of the Velvet Mask">
As the story opens, Nancy and friends attempt to thwart suspicious, masked party-goers from reaching valuable objets d'art on display. At the party, Nancy finds an odd, black velvet hood, which she retains as a clue; most of the guests are wearing simpler, smaller masks as the evening is very warm. Her acquaintance, Linda, who is an employee of the Lightner company, is suspected of wrongdoing. At subsequent Lightner events, Nancy encounters other thieves, and is nearly suffocated by an evil pair of crooks. Nancy and George rent wigs to switch identities; however, George is kidnapped, her disguise removed, is put under the influence of hypnotic, mind-altering drugs, and threatened. This results in a timid, frightened characterization; paralyzed by fear, George refuses to help in the investigation and urges Nancy to stop.Nancy focuses on the executive assistant at Lightner's, Mr. Tombar, while she attempts to decode mysterious numbers written on the lining of the mask. She realizes that the numbers actually mark dates of events at which robberies took place, and starts attending each event in person as detective and as favor to Mr. Lightner. She encounters thieves at a wedding, a musicale, where they nearly smother her, and a lecture. Finally, Nancy attends another masquerade as a coat-check girl, and she stops a robbery in process, capturing a female member of the gang. She and Bess investigate the ramshackle Blue Iris Inn in the nearby countryside, trying to find out why Peter Tombar owns the property and what secrets it hides. On a hunch, she and Bess take an impromptu visit while talking with the recovering George Fayne, and fall victim to the evil Velvet gang. Only paranoid George knows where they are, and can identify the clothing last worn by Nancy. She must overcome her mental breakdown and get on the case when the girls fail to return.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joi_Baba_Felunath_(film)"title="Joi Baba Felunath (film)">
Pradosh C. Mitter (a.k.a. Feluda), his cousin Tapesh (a.k.a. Topshe) and the thriller writer Lalmohan Ganguly (a.k.a. Jatayu) go to Varanasi during the Durga Puja for vacation. There they meet a Bengali family, the Ghosals. Upon hearing that Feluda is a private investigator, the Ghosal family patriarch entrusts him with the task of finding out the thief of the attempted theft that took place in their house. Meanwhile, the arrival of a saint by the name of 'Machhli Baba' in Varanasi rouses the excitement of the local people.A very valuable property of the Ghosals, a golden Ganesh statue, about three inches in height, was the target of the thief. On the other hand, Maganlal Meghraj, a wealthy Marwari businessman, had his eyes on the Ganesh for a very long time. He learns about Feluda's involvement in this case. He invites the trio to his house and tries to bribe Feluda with Rs.2,000 in order to stop the investigation. Feluda refuses to do so, which angers Maganlal, and he sets up a knife throwing show, using Jatayu as bait (much to the viewer's amusement). After the incidents in Maganlal's house, Feluda takes a vow - either he'll avenge Jatayu's harassment, or he'll quit his job of being a detective.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Room!_Make_Room!"title="Make Room! Make Room!">
"Make Room! Make Room!" is set in an overpopulated New York City in 1999 (33 years after the time of writing). 30-year-old Police Detective Andy Rusch lives in half a room, sharing it with Sol, a retired engineer who has adapted a bicycle to generate power for an old television set and a refrigerator.When Andy lines up for their continually reducing water ration, he witnesses a public speech by the "Eldsters", older people forcibly retired from work. A riot breaks out after a nearby food shop has a surprise sale on "soylent" (soy and lentil) steaks. The shop is looted by the mob. Billy Chung, an 18-year-old Taiwanese-American, grabs a box of steaks. He eats some of them and sells the rest to raise enough money to land a job as a Western Union messenger boy. His first delivery takes him into a fortified apartment block, complete with the rare luxuries of air conditioning and running water for showers. He delivers his message to a rich racketeer named "Big Mike" O'Brien and sees Shirl, Mike's 23-year-old live-in mistress. Billy leaves the apartment, but fixes it so he can get back into the building later. He breaks into Mike's place, but when Mike catches him in the act, Billy accidentally kills him and flees, empty-handed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegira_(novel)"title="Hegira (novel)">
In the novel, "young" humans (recreations of the medieval originals) are transported through the Big Collapse, at the end of time, to seed the next cycle of the universe. They are transported to Hegira, an artificial environment of the scale of the planet Jupiter, which has habitats for several species on its surface. The habitats are protected and uncoupled from the universe's entropy by means of force fields projected by giant obelisks. In the human realm, these are inscribed with the recorded history of humankind, sorted chronologically from the bottom up, including the science that went with it. People try to understand and copy what they can read on the obelisks, using balloons in some places to reach higher points on the obelisks.A legend tells the protagonist that his beloved (frozen in stasis) will awaken if he goes on quest to the rim walls of the habitat, and he does so. On the way, he lands on an island with a good view of an obelisk (at least high) which is just tumbling down in the distance. Its fall causes a tsunami and devastates a continent. After the devastation, the inscriptions at the top of the fallen obelisk about human history are revealed. The hero's quest to the rim succeeds. He makes contact with an artificial intelligence guardian of Hegira, who tells him the story and advises him to go and populate the new universe since he has become part of the last one.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Web_Planet"title="The Web Planet">
The TARDIS is forced to land on a planet which the First Doctor (William Hartnell) recognises as Vortis, but he is puzzled by the presence of several moons around the normally moonless planet. A force acting through Barbara Wright's (Jacqueline Hill) gold bracelet draws her outside, leaving Vicki (Maureen O'Brien) alone. The TARDIS is pulled by an unseen force across the planet surface. Barbara is drawn into a trio of the butterfly-like Menoptra who free her of the trance by removing the bracelet. She escapes but is captured by the ant-like Zarbi who use her to find the Menoptra. The Zarbi take Barbara and Hrostar (Arne Gordon), a Menoptra, to the Crater of Needles to drop vegetation into acid rivers which feed the Animus (voiced by Catherine Fleming).The Zarbi take the Doctor and Ian Chesterton (William Russell) to the Carsinome where they find Vicki and the TARDIS. The Animus forces the Doctor to help track down the Menoptra invasion force. Ian escapes and meets a Menoptra called Vrestin (Roslyn de Winter). He learns the Menoptra and the Zarbi are native to the planet. The Animus has taken control of the planet, and the Menoptra have fled to one of the moons that the Animus has pulled into orbit. The Doctor accidentally reveals the Menoptra spearhead plan to land near the Crater of Needles, giving the Animus the opportunity to ambush them. Ian and Vrestin meet the Optera, descendants of the Menoptra who fled underground, and convince them to help fight the Animus, digging upwards beneath the Carsinome.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalek_(Doctor_Who_episode)"title="Dalek (Doctor Who episode)">
The Ninth Doctor and Rose are drawn by a distress signal to a massive bunker beneath Utah in 2012, filled with alien artefacts including a cyborg head collected by the bunker's owner, Henry van Statten. Rose is offered a tour of the facility by Adam Mitchell, a man who buys and catalogues artefacts for van Statten. Van Statten takes the Doctor to show him a living alien being, which the Doctor recognises as a Dalek, a race thought to have been wiped out in the Time War. The Dalek is seriously wounded and weakened, and unable to break its bonds, but when the Doctor attempts to destroy it, van Statten orders his guards to restrain the Doctor and return him to his offices. There, van Statten has the Doctor secured, noting that not only does he collect aliens, but also tortures them to gain information, and proceeds to invasively and violently study the Doctor's body to learn more about his physiology.Meanwhile, Adam has taken Rose to the Dalek. Rose takes pity on the weakened creature and touches its casing; the Dalek promptly absorbs her DNA and the remnants of time energy she has from travelling in time, and is able to re-energise itself. It escapes its bonds, kills several guards, and connects to the Internet where it learns of the fate of the Daleks and realises it is the last surviving member of its race. With no other purpose, it proceeds to target and exterminate all non-Dalek life forms. Van Statten is forced to release the Doctor to help stop the Dalek, but the Dalek refuses to cooperate, and continues killing all those left in the Vault.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_of_the_Blind"title="Country of the Blind">
Set against the mounting dissatisfaction at the ineffective and over self-indulgent Tory government of John Major, all hell breaks loose when conservative tabloid media mogul Roland Voss is found murdered in his country house in Scotland.Next to Voss's body is that of his murdered wife, while their two slain bodyguards lie outside their room. The culprits seem obvious: the burglars caught fleeing the scene covered in blood and almost immediately four men are arrested for the crime, including former burglar Thomas McInnes, his son Paul and a very strange guy who likes to be known as Spammy.However, if it's really that obvious, why did McInnes pay a visit to his Edinburgh lawyer a few days before the crime took place, and what are the secret contents of the envelope he left with her?When the lawyer, Nicole Carrow, turns up at the Police station demanding to see her client, announcing under the glare of intense media attention claiming to have a letter that proves her client's innocence, the last thing she expects is have an attempt made on her life within hours.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Confessions_of_Nat_Turner"title="The Confessions of Nat Turner">
The time is November, 1831. African American slave Nat Turner sits in a Virginia jail awaiting execution for his crimes. Nat led a slave rebellion which ended in the deaths of dozens of white people as well as many of his own closest friends. Thomas Gray, a smug, oily prosecuting attorney, urges Nat to "confess" his crimes and make peace with God. Nat begins to think back on his past life and tells the novel in a series of flashbacks.Nat's first master was Samuel Turner, a wealthy Virginia aristocrat who believed in educating his slaves. Nat learned to read and write, and also became a skilled carpenter. Unfortunately, when he was still a child Nat's mother was brutally raped by an Irish overseer while the master was away. This traumatic experience gives Nat both a burning hatred of white people and a secret revulsion from women's bodies and the sexual act.Samuel Turner has vaguely promised Nat his freedom, but through a series of misunderstandings Nat is sold instead to an impoverished preacher named Reverend Eppes. Eppes is a filthy, drooling homosexual who is obsessed with young boys, and he is determined to make Nat "pleasure" him at the earliest opportunity. Though Nat is not especially interested in young women at this point, he finds Eppes physically distasteful and shies away from physical contact. Discouraged, Eppes soon sells young Nat to a pair of cruel redneck farmers who brutally whip the frightened, timid slave and treat him like an animal. This intensifies his growing hostility towards whites.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrud_(novel)"title="Gertrud (novel)">
Styled as the memoir of a famous composer named Kuhn, "Gertrud" tells of his childhood and young adult years before it comes to the heart of the story; his relationships to two troubled artists, the eponymous Gertrud Imthor, and the opera singer Heinrich Muoth. Kuhn is drawn to Gertrud upon their first encounter, but she falls in love with and marries Muoth, whom the composer befriended as well some years before. The two are hopelessly ill-matched, and their destructive relationship provides the basis for Kuhn's magnum opus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldt's_Gift"title="Humboldt's Gift">
The novel, which Bellow initially intended to be a short story, is a "roman à clef" about Bellow's friendship with the poet Delmore Schwartz. It explores the changing relationship of art and power in a materialist America. This theme is addressed through the contrasting careers of two writers, Von Humboldt Fleisher (to some degree a version of Schwartz) and his protégé Charlie Citrine (to some degree a version of Bellow himself). Fleisher yearns to lift American society through art, but dies a failure. By contrast, Charlie Citrine makes a lot of money through his writing, especially from a Broadway play and a movie about a character named Von Trenck – a character modeled after Fleisher.Another notable character in the book is Rinaldo Cantabile, a wannabe Chicago gangster, who tries to bully Citrine into being friends. Because his career advice to Citrine is commercially fixated, it is directly opposed to advice from Citrine's former mentor, Humboldt Fleisher, who prioritizes artistic integrity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Atlantis"title="New Atlantis">
The novel depicts a mythical island, Bensalem, which is discovered by the crew of a European ship after they are lost in the Pacific Ocean somewhere west of Peru. The minimal plot serves the gradual unfolding of the island, its customs, but most importantly, its state-sponsored scientific institution, Salomon's House, "which house or college ... is the very eye of this kingdom."Many aspects of the society and history of the island are described, such as the Christian religion – which is reported to have been born there as a copy of the Bible and a letter from the Apostle Saint Bartholomew arrived there miraculously, a few years after the Ascension of Jesus; a cultural feast in honour of the family institution, called "the Feast of the Family"; a college of sages, the Salomon's House, "the very eye of the kingdom", to which order "God of heaven and earth had vouchsafed the grace to know the works of Creation, and the secrets of them", as well as "to discern between divine miracles, works of nature, works of art, and impostures and illusions of all sorts"; and a series of instruments, process and methods of scientific research that were employed in the island by the Salomon's House.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-bye,_Chunky_Rice"title="Good-bye, Chunky Rice">
The book tells the story of Chunky Rice, a small turtle who leaves his familiar surroundings, including his deer mouse best friend, to enter the next phase of his life. Other side characters in the novel also experience similar losses of friendship through tragedy or their own choice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guenevere,_Queen_of_the_Summer_Country"title="Guenevere, Queen of the Summer Country">
Raised in the tranquil beauty of the Summer Country, Princess Guenevere has had a charmed and contented life until the sudden, violent death of her mother, Queen Maire, leaves the Summer Country teetering on the brink of anarchy. Only the miraculous arrival of Arthur, heir to the Pendragon dynasty, allows Guenevere to claim her mother's throne. Smitten by the bold, sensuous princess, Arthur offers to marry her and unite their territories, while still allowing her to rule in her own right. Their love match creates the largest and most powerful kingdom in the isles.Arthur's glorious rule begins to crumble, however, when he is reunited with his mother and his long-lost half-sisters, Morgause and Morgan. Before Arthur's birth, his father - the savage and unscrupulous King Uther - banished his wife's young daughters, selling Morgause into a cruel marriage and imprisoning Morgan in a far-off convent. Both daughters have reason to avenge their suffering, but only one will strike the deadliest blows against the King and Queen, using her evil enchantments to destroy all Guenevere holds dear. When the Queen flees to Avalon, even her marriage with Arthur comes under threat.In the chaos that follows, a new young knight comes to Arthur's court to offer his services to the Queen. Her loyalty to Arthur betrayed, Guenevere falls in love with Lancelot, a love that may spell ruin for Camelot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kafka_on_the_Shore"title="Kafka on the Shore">
Comprising two distinct but interrelated plots, the narrative runs back and forth between both plots, taking up each plotline in alternating chapters.The odd-numbered chapters tell the 15-year-old Kafka's story as he runs away from his father's house to escape an Oedipal curse and to embark upon a quest to find his mother and sister. After a series of adventures, he finds shelter in a quiet, private library in Takamatsu, run by the distant and aloof Miss Saeki and the intelligent and more welcoming Oshima. There he spends his days reading the unabridged Richard Francis Burton translation of "One Thousand and One Nights" and the collected works of Natsume Sōseki until the police begin inquiring after him in connection with the murder of his father that he does not know he has committed. Oshima brings him to the forests of Kōchi Prefecture, where Kafka is ultimately healed.The even-numbered chapters tell Nakata's story. They start with military reports of a strange incident in Yamanashi Prefecture where multiple children, including Nakata, collapse in the woods - Nakata, after the incident, is the only one of the children who came out of the incident without any memory and unable to read and write. The incident is initially blamed on poisonous gas, but it is later revealed that it was the result of a lustful teacher beating Nakata. Later on in the book, it is shown that due to his uncanny abilities, Nakata has found part-time work in his old age as a finder of lost cats (Murakami's earlier work "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" also involves searching for a lost cat). Having finally located and returned one particular cat to its owners, Nakata finds that the circumstances of the case have put him on a path which, unfolding one step at a time before him, takes the illiterate man far away from his familiar and comforting home territory. Nakata kills a man named Johnnie Walker, a cat murderer. He takes a gigantic leap of faith in going on the road for the first time in his life, unable even to read a map and without knowing where he will eventually end up. He befriends a truck driver named Hoshino, who takes him on as a passenger in his truck and soon becomes very attached to the old man. He heads for Takamatsu, an unknown force driving him there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlefield_(Doctor_Who)"title="Battlefield (Doctor Who)">
In response to a distress signal, the Seventh Doctor and Ace materialise the TARDIS near Lake Vortigern in England. At the Gore Crow hotel, they meet a young woman called Shou Yuing and a knight, Ancelyn, who addresses the Doctor as "Merlin". The Doctor shows interest in a scabbard which hangs over the mantelpiece in the hotel. The party is surrounded by an ominous group of knights led by Mordred. When Mordred begins an arcane ritual, the scabbard flies across the room, stirred by the magic. Morgaine then arrives on the scene through a rift in space and time.The next day, archaeologist Peter Warmsly shows the Doctor where he uncovered the scabbard. Under the lake, The Doctor and Ace find a ruined spaceship containing the body of King Arthur, lying next to a sword. When Ace removes the sword from its plinth, she activates a defence mechanism. The Doctor ejects Ace from the spaceship, sending her shooting up through the water and "becoming" the Lady of the Lake.Mordred and Morgaine go to the hotel to retrieve Excalibur. Meanwhile, UNIT troops are staging an evacuation, led by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. Just as Mordred and Ancelyn are about to fight, the Doctor intervenes. Mordred reveals that the battle was a ruse to lure the Doctor, and that Morgaine has summoned the Destroyer of Worlds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Perfect_Spy"title="A Perfect Spy">
"A Perfect Spy" is the life story of Magnus Pym, a British intelligence officer and double agent. The book opens in Vienna where Magnus is ostensibly a diplomat and also a spy, living with his wife Mary who assists with diplomatic matters and their son Tom. After returning to England to attend his father's funeral, Pym mysteriously disappears. As his fellow intelligence officers frantically search for him it becomes clear that, throughout most of his career, Magnus worked as a spy for the Czechoslovak secret service. Although intrigue, wit, and suspense make up much of the novel, the story of Magnus Pym is partly an unadorned recollection of his childhood and memories of his father Rick Pym.The non-linear narrative cuts back and forth between the present-day manhunt for Pym (being conducted by his mentor, boss, and longtime friend, Jack Brotherhood), and Pym's first-person reminiscences of his life as, in hiding, he writes a memoir explaining to his family and friends why he betrayed his country. It incorporates flashbacks to Pym's childhood with his father, the enterprising charismatic rogue and con-man, Rick; to his early years at school and university; to his amorous adventures, to his introduction to espionage and state secrets; and to his encounters with long-time friend and Czech spy Axel. The portraits reveal Pym as a man who for so long has manipulated his appearance to those closest to him that, in the end, he was unable to hold together the conflicting personae within him. Magnus Pym has been a perfect spy, but at the cost of his soul.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Prince"title="Dragon Prince">
Rohan is heir to the throne of The Desert and its chief holding, Stronghold. His father, Prince Zehava, is unsure of his son's ability to rule, but is wounded in a dragon hunt and Rohan is suddenly the ruling Prince. He must solidify his right to rule by outwitting The Desert's antagonists, chiefly the High Prince Roelstra, in order to protect his lands and maintain peace throughout the world.His aunt, Andrade, the Lady of Goddess Keep and highest ranking of the "faradhi", or Sunrunners, gifted humans who can use light to communicate, warns that the High Prince will try to take over the Desert by marrying one of his daughters to Rohan and then killing him. To decline a royal marriage would in turn insult Roelstra, so she offers a marriage with Sioned, another of her Sunrunners. Marriage between a prince and a Sunrunner is unheard of, but Rohan is smitten by a vision of Sioned that Andrade conjures in fire for him.Rohan persuades Sioned to help him trick High Prince Roelstra into signing various treaties while he pretends to choose between princesses. Sioned pretends to be unsure of Rohan as her groom, and the two have a merry time with their charade at the tri-annual Rialla (a fair and gathering of princes). Rohan pretends to be a foolish, ignorant young man. The other princes initially believe the masquerade. Roelstra, in turn, is interested in Sioned, both as a woman and a faradhi.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farseer_trilogy"title="Farseer trilogy">
## "Assassin's Apprentice".The narrative begins with the protagonist, aged six, being brought from his mother to the royal family of the Six Duchies. He is given the name Fitz, meaning an illegitimate son; he learns that his father is Prince Chivalry Farseer, heir to the throne. The shame of fathering a bastard leads Chivalry to relinquish his position and retreat to the countryside: he dies a few years later, without ever meeting Fitz. Chivalry's brother Prince Verity becomes heir to the throne.Fitz swears loyalty to King Shrewd and is trained in secret as a royal assassin and diplomat by master Chade. His bloodline grants him access to a form of telepathic magic called the Skill, which he begins to train in under Skillmaster Galen. Galen proceeds to telepathically torture Fitz and blunt his ability to use the Skill; his actions are later revealed to have been at the behest of Fitz's uncle Prince Regal.Fitz gradually grows aware of his ability to use the Wit, which lets him communicate and bond with animals, but the societal prejudice against this ability leads his guardian Burrich to discourage his early attempts to use it. Fitz's first Wit bond, with a dog named Nosy, ends when the dog is sent away by Burrich. Fitz later adopts another dog, Smithy, and bonds with him in secret, but Smithy is killed defending Burrich.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tawny_Man_trilogy"title="Tawny Man trilogy">
## "Fool's Errand".The start of the trilogy finds Fitz in his mid-thirties, living in a cottage with the wolf Nighteyes and his adopted son Hap. Visitors to his home include the Fool, who prompts him to recount memories of life away from society, as well as the minstrel Starling, who shares his bed on occasion. In remembrance of old times, Fitz proceeds on a hunt with Nighteyes and the Fool; it however ends with Nighteyes' collapse, a first sign in the book of the wolf's aging body. Fitz heals him with the Skill, bringing the wolf back from the brink of death, and nearly dies himself, but is saved by the Fool. He is also visited by Chade, who requests his help training prince Dutiful in the Skill; Fitz however refuses, preferring the quietness of life away from the crown. Fitz eventually returns to Buck at the behest of his son Hap, who wishes to apprentice in the town. He becomes unwittingly embroiled in a quest to find the prince, who has disappeared, and tracks him to a distant estate filled with strange hunting cats. Fitz eventually realizes that the prince is Witted and bonded to a cat; he further discovers that while the animal has the body of a cat, it is controlled by its previous Wit-partner, who moved to the cat's body in violation of its desires. The prince's capture was engineered by a group of Witted called the Piebald, who seek to overthrow the Farseer throne by force. Fitz, the Fool and Nighteyes stand against the Piebald, but suffer injuries; Fitz breaks away with the prince using a series of Skill-pillars and defeats his captors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_(Gemmell_novel)"title="Legend (Gemmell novel)">
The Drenai Empire is under threat. The tribal Nadir people have been united for the first time by the great warleader Ulric, who has forged a massive empire in the North. The Drenai leader Abalayn is trying to negotiate new treaties with Ulric, but war is brewing and an over 500,000 strong Nadir army marches on the fortress of Dros Delnoch, gateway to the Drenai heartlands. Dros Delnoch is the greatest fortress in the world, a narrow pass guarded by six high walls and a great keep, but under Abalayn its complement of defenders has been reduced to less than 10,000 men under the leadership of an unfit General.The fate of the Drenai hinges on the defence of Dros Delnoch. If the fortress can hold the Nadir horde for three months, the Drenai general Magnus Woundweaver might be able to gather and train a Drenai army. However, given the odds, no-one truly believes that Delnoch can be held.The novel follows the stories of two men who find their destiny at Dros Delnoch. Regnak Wanderer (Rek for short) an ex-army officer and natural 'baresark', seeing a war brewing, resigned his commission because he lacked the courage to risk his life and took to a life of wandering. Rek is an idealist and eventually he returns to Delnoch at the persuasion of the woman he falls in love with and finds his destiny as the Earl of Bronze. The other man is the greatest hero of the Drenai people - Druss the Legend. His death was foretold defending Delnoch and while given the choice to avoid it and fall into senility Druss (and his once possessed axe Snaga) marched to the great fortress to defend his people one last time. In this story Druss is in his sixties and much weaker than his prime but still a formidable warrior and an inspirational leader to the Drenai.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Buccaneers"title="The Buccaneers">
The story revolves around five wealthy and ambitious American girls, their guardians, and the titled, landed, but impoverished Englishmen who marry them as the girls participate in the London Season. As the novel progresses, the plot follows Nan and her marriage to the Duke of Trevenick.The novel begins with three socially ambitious families looking for the status needed for their daughters to live successful lives, complete with European titles. The young women's fathers' money is very attractive to European aristocrats to maintain their version of wealth: collections of art, property, and social status. While some girls live in unhappy marriages, they often take lovers to make their marriages work—or they file for divorce. While these young women were not in the best of situations, with high expectations from the dukes, some fall in love. Nan eventually falls in love with Guy Thwaite.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reign_of_Terror_(Doctor_Who)"title="The Reign of Terror (Doctor Who)">
The First Doctor (William Hartnell), his granddaughter Susan Foreman (Carole Ann Ford) and her teachers Ian Chesterton (William Russell) and Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill) arrive outside Paris in 18th-century France and venture to a nearby farmhouse. They find it is being used as a staging post in an escape chain for counter-revolutionaries during the Reign of Terror. They are discovered by two counter-revolutionaries, D'Argenson (Neville Smith) and Rouvray (Laidlaw Dalling), who knock the Doctor unconscious and hold the others at gunpoint. A band of revolutionary soldiers surrounds the house and both D'Argenson and Rouvray are killed during the siege. The soldiers capture Ian, Barbara, and Susan and march them to Paris to be guillotined. The soldiers set fire to the farmhouse, and the Doctor is saved by a young boy (Peter Walker), who tells him that his friends have been taken to the Conciergerie Prison in Paris. He sets off after them.Ian, Barbara, and Susan are all sentenced to death as traitors. Ian is confined in one cell, while the women are taken to another. Ian's cellmate is an Englishman named Webster (Jeffry Wickham), who tells him that there is an English spy, James Stirling, highly placed in the French Government, who is now being recalled to England. Webster dies, and a government official named Lemaitre (James Cairncross) arrives and probes any conversation between Ian and the dead man. Lemaitre crosses Ian's name off the execution list. En route to the guillotine, Barbara and Susan's transport is hijacked by two men, Jules (Donald Morley) and Jean (Roy Herrick), who take them to a safe house. They are told that they will be smuggled out of France through the escape chain. Jules and Jean reassure Barbara that they will try to reunite them with Ian and the Doctor. They are then joined by another counter-revolutionary, named Léon Colbert (Edward Brayshaw).
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Loud_&amp;_Incredibly_Close"title="Extremely Loud &amp; Incredibly Close">
Oskar Schell is a nine-year-old boy whose father, Thomas Schell, died in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The novel begins after the tragedy, with Oskar narrating. Since his father's death, Oskar struggles with insomnia, panic attacks, and depression. He often describes the feeling of depression as wearing heavy boots, and deals with this by giving himself bruises. His relationship with his mother has also become strained, particularly as she has started dating a man named Ron, whom Oskar resents for having replaced his father.One day, in his father's closet, Oskar finds a key in a small envelope inside a vase that he accidentally broke; in the keyshop he finds the name Black and thinks this has something to do with the key. Curious, Oskar sets out on a mission to contact every person in New York City with the last name of Black in the hope of finding the lock that belongs to the key his father left behind, creating a binder with mementos of his journey.One of the first people Oskar meets is a 48-year-old woman named Abby Black. Oskar and Abby instantly become friends, but she has no information on the key. Oskar continues to search the city. Toward the end of his journey Oskar meets an old man he calls "the renter" because until the point of meeting, Oskar had only heard of the old man's existence from his grandmother who referred to him as the new tenant in her apartment. The reader learns towards the end of the book that "the renter" is actually Oskar's grandfather, who abandoned his grandmother while she was pregnant with Thomas, though Oskar does not realise the connection.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_the_Flowers"title="Our Lady of the Flowers">
The novel tells the story of Divine, a drag queen who, when the novel opens, has died of tuberculosis and been canonised as a result. The narrator tells us that the stories he is telling are mainly to amuse himself whilst he passes his sentence in prison – and the highly erotic, often explicitly sexual, stories are spun to assist his masturbation. Jean-Paul Sartre called it "the epic of masturbation".Divine lives in an attic room overlooking Montmartre cemetery, which he shares with various lovers, the most important of whom is a pimp called Darling Daintyfoot ("Mignon-les-Petits-Pieds" in French). One day Darling brings home a young hoodlum and murderer, dubbed Our Lady of the Flowers. Our Lady is eventually arrested and tried, and executed. Death and ecstasy accompany the acts of every character, as Genet performs a transvaluation of all values, making betrayal the highest moral value, murder an act of virtue and sexual appeal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Is_Illuminated"title="Everything Is Illuminated">
Jonathan Safran Foer (the author), a young American Jew, who is vegetarian and an avid collector of his family's heritage, journeys to Ukraine in search of Augustine, the woman who saved his grandfather's life during the Nazi liquidation of Trachimbrod, his family shtetl (a small town) in occupied eastern Poland. Armed with maps, cigarettes and many copies of an old photograph of Augustine and his grandfather, Jonathan begins his search with the help from Ukrainian native and soon-to-be good friend, Alexander "Alex" Perchov, who is Foer's age and very fond of American pop culture, albeit culture that is already out of date in the United States. Alexander studied English at his university, and even though his knowledge of the language is not "first-rate", he becomes Foer's translator. Alex's "blind" grandfather and his "deranged seeing-eye bitch," Sammy Davis, Jr., Jr., accompany them on their journey. Interspersed throughout the book is the story that Jonathan Safran Foer (the character) learns about his ancestors—namely, his great-times-five-or-six grandmother Brod and his grandfather Safran. Brod has a magical, maybe-virgin birth, when she, as a baby, bobs to the surface after her father dies in a wagon accident in the river Brod, for which the baby is later named. A man named Yankel raises her until he dies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_Giants"title="Planet of Giants">
Despite indications of a malfunction in the TARDIS, its fault locator shows nothing is wrong and that it is safe to go outside. The First Doctor (William Hartnell), Ian Chesterton (William Russell), Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill), and Susan Foreman (Carole Ann Ford) consequently explore the vicinity, finding the remains of giant earthworm and ant, which appear to have died instantaneously. The travellers realise they have returned to Earth but have shrunk to the height of an inch. Ian investigates the interior of a discarded matchbox when it is picked up by a government scientist called Farrow (Frank Crawshaw), who is visiting a callous industrialist named Forester (Alan Tilvern) to tell him that his application for a new insecticide called DN6 has been rejected as it is far too deadly to all forms of insect life. News of this appraisal prompts Forester to fatally shoot Farrow. The Doctor, Barbara, and Susan hear the gunshot and head for the house to find Ian unhurt near Farrow's corpse.Forester's aide, Smithers (Reginald Barratt), arrives but does not report the murder for fear of undermining the DN6 project to which he has dedicated his life. Ian and Barbara hide inside Farrow's briefcase to avoid being stepped on by Forester and Smithers, and get separated from the Doctor and Susan after the briefcase is brought inside the house. The Doctor and Susan climb up a drain pipe to find them. Forester alters Farrow's report to give support to the DN6 licence application and, disguising his voice as Farrow’s, makes a supportive phone call to the ministry to the same effect. This is overheard by the local telephone operator Hilda Rowse (Rosemary Johnson) and her policeman husband Bert (Fred Ferris), who suspect something is wrong.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hot_Zone"title="The Hot Zone">
The book is in four sections:The book starts with "Charles Monet" visiting Kitum Cave during a camping trip to Mount Elgon in Central Africa. Not long after, he begins to suffer from a number of symptoms, including vomiting, diarrhea and red eye. He is taken to Nairobi Hospital for treatment, but his condition deteriorates further, and he goes into a coma while in the waiting room. This particular filovirus is called Marburg virus.Dr. Nancy Jaax had been promoted to work in the Level 4 Biosafety containment area at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and is assigned to research Ebola virus. While preparing food for her family at home, she cuts her right hand. Later, while working on a dead monkey infected with Ebola virus, one of the gloves on the hand with the open wound tears, and she is almost exposed to contaminated blood, but does not get infected. Nurse Mayinga is also infected by a nun and goes to Nairobi Hospital for treatment, where she succumbs to the disease.In Reston, Virginia, less than fifteen miles (24 km) away from Washington, D.C., a company called Hazelton Research once operated a quarantine center for monkeys that were destined for laboratories. In October 1989, when an unusually high number of their monkeys began to die, their veterinarian decided to send some samples to Fort Detrick (USAMRIID) for study. Early during the testing process in biosafety level 3, when one of the flasks appeared to be contaminated with harmless pseudomonas bacterium, two USAMRIID scientists exposed themselves to the virus by wafting the flask. The virus found at the facility was a mutated form of the original Ebola virus and was initially mistaken for simian hemorrhagic fever virus. They later determine that, while the virus is lethal to monkeys, humans can be infected with it without any health effects at all. This virus is now known as Reston virus.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islands_in_the_Net"title="Islands in the Net">
The action takes place in 2023–2025 in Galveston, Texas; Atlanta, Georgia; Grenada, an island on the northeast coast of South America; Singapore; and Africa. Protagonist Laura Webster, mother of three-month-old Loretta, works as a public relations employee for Rizome, a global corporation of economic democrats. Together with her husband David they run the Lodge, a resort for Rizome workers on the island of Galveston.The action sets off when Rizome organizes a conference between itself and three data havens - EFT Commerzbank of Luxembourg, The Young Soo Chim Islamic Bank and Grenada United Bank - in the Lodge. After the first day of the conference Winston Stubbs, the Grenadan representative, is assassinated. The organization which admits to killing him calls itself "F.A.C.T." (Free Army of Counter-Terrorism). Rizome decides to send Laura with her husband and baby to Grenada on a diplomatic mission to prove that Rizome had nothing to do with the murder.While in Grenada, Laura and David learn about its tragic history and the advanced technology flourishing on the island thanks to “mad-doctors” like the American Brian Prentis. Grenada is ruled by one party, the New Millennium Movement, with Prime Minister Eric Louison who uses voodoo tradition as a means of keeping order in the country. Food is plentiful and cheaply produced on one of the huge tankers adapted for factories and housing. Drugs, in the form of a pure synthetic THC, are also cheap and widely accessible. Laura and David manage to escape Grenada after Singapore attacks it. They return to Atlanta and separate. David takes the baby to one of Rizome’s Retreats and Laura sets off to Singapore to continue her mission to improve the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forty_Signs_of_Rain"title="Forty Signs of Rain">
The focus of the novel is the effects of global warming in the early decades of the 21st century. Its characters are mostly scientists, either involved in biotech research, assisting government members, or doing paperwork at the National Science Foundation (NSF). There are also several Buddhist monks working for the embassy of the fictional island nation of Khembalung.Frank Vanderwal, having spent a year at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Washington, D.C., is impatient with what he sees as its passivity and its reluctance to demand serious political change in the face of severe climate change. He keeps an eye on environmental triggers such as climate change in the Arctic and thermohaline circulation. Though he likes his colleague, Anna Quibler, and much of her work, he misses his hometown, San Diego. An athletic man, he frequently goes climbing and canyoneering when he can. Interested in sociobiology, he views both his own behavior and others' as that of primates who evolved on the African savannahs and who are not entirely biologically prepared to live in the urban environment. He considers behaviors in ordinary situations, such as traffic, and in extraordinary situations in light of the game theory decision making strategy known as the prisoner's dilemma.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_of_Monsters"title="Carnival of Monsters">
The TARDIS misses Metebelis Three and materialises on the SS "Bernice", a ship that suddenly disappeared while travelling the Indian Ocean. Being repeatedly arrested as stowaways, the Third Doctor and Jo find out that ship's occupants keep repeating their actions, having no recollection of earlier encounters. The pair escape from the ship through a strange hatch plainly visible to them both but ignored by the crew and passengers. The Doctor and Jo venture through the circuitry of some sort of giant machine and arrive at marshlands.They soon discover that they are not outside but are still inside the machine. Chased by Drashigs, huge swamp-dwelling carnivores, they escape back into the circuitry. Here, the Doctor realises that they have materialised inside the compression field of a Miniscope, a machine that keeps miniaturised groups of creatures in miniaturised versions of their natural environments. The Time Lords have banned such machines, but apparently one escaped. The Drashigs break into the circuitry and the Doctor and Jo flee back to the ship. They are separated in the confusion as the crew defend against the Drashigs.The events inside the miniscope are intercut with events involving its owners, travelling showman Vorg and his assistant Shirna, who have just arrived at the planet of Inter Minor but are suspected of being spies and refused entrance by a tribunal. The tribunal learns that objects removed from the machine soon return to their normal size when Vorg extracts a foreign object stuck in the circuitry – actually the TARDIS – from the machine. Two of the tribunal members, Kalik and Orum, dissatisfied with the leadership of their planet, plot to let the Drashigs escape from the machine and allow them to wreak havoc, causing a crisis and the president's resignation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Death"title="The Green Death">
The Third Doctor is making adjustments to the TARDIS' coordinate programmer in preparation for a visit to Metebelis Three, when Jo reads in a newspaper about the mysterious death of a miner named Hughes in the abandoned coal mine in Llanfairfach in South Wales. The miner was found dead and glowing bright green. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and Jo go down to investigate the miner's death. The Doctor agrees to follow the Brigadier, but is determined to go to Metebelis Three first.The Brigadier's first port of call is the recently opened Global Chemicals oil plant, close to the abandoned mine. Its headman, Stevens, claims that the plant can "produce 25% more petrol and diesel fuel from a given quantity of crude oil"—but that the 'Stevens process' only produces a minimal amount of waste. Local environmental scientist Professor Cliff Jones is convinced that the oil-making process must create thousands of gallons of waste. He also believes that there is a link between Global Chemicals and Hughes' death—but his research is too demanding for him to go down the mine and investigate. Jo heads for the mineshaft.The Doctor reaches Metebelis Three, but it is far from the "blue paradise" he described. He is attacked by various unseen creatures, and returns to the UNIT laboratory with only a small blue crystal to show for his misadventure. He then drives down to South Wales in his car, Bessie, and meets the Brigadier at Global Chemicals. They then set off to go down the mine to investigate, despite Stevens' insistence that it should be sealed. Stevens summons his henchman, Hinks, and tells him in a strange emotionless voice "nobody must go down the mine". Hinks leaves and Stevens dons a pair of strange headphones.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Talons_of_Weng-Chiang"title="The Talons of Weng-Chiang">
The Doctor and Leela arrive in London so that Leela can learn about the customs of her ancestors. Performing at the Palace Theatre is the stage magician Li H'sen Chang. On their way to the theatre, the Doctor and Leela encounter a group of Chinese men who have apparently killed a cab driver. All but one escape, and he, the Doctor and Leela are taken to the local police station.At the station, Li H'sen Chang is called in to act as an interpreter, but unbeknownst to everyone else he is the leader of the group – the Tong of the Black Scorpion, followers of the god Weng-Chiang. He stealthily gives the captive henchman a pill of concentrated scorpion venom, which the henchman takes and dies.The body is taken to the local mortuary, along with the body of the cabbie. There they meet Professor Litefoot, who is performing the autopsies. The cabbie is Joseph Buller, who had been looking for his wife Emma, the latest in a string of missing women in the area. Buller had gone down to the Palace Theatre where he had confronted Chang about his wife's disappearance. Afterwards, Chang had sent his men, including the diminutive Mr Sin, to kill Buller. Chang is in the service of Magnus Greel, a despot from the 51st century who had fled from the authorities in a time cabinet, now masquerading as the Chinese god Weng-Chiang. The technology of the cabinet is unstable and has disrupted Greel's own DNA, deforming him horribly. This forces him to drain the life essences from young women to keep himself alive. At the same time, Greel is in search of his cabinet, which is now in the possession of Professor Litefoot. Mr Sin is also from the future but is a robotic toy constructed with the cerebral cortex of a pig.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ribos_Operation"title="The Ribos Operation">
The White Guardian recruits the Fourth Doctor to collect the six hidden and disguised segments of the powerful Key to Time. He assigns him an assistant Time Lady named Romanadvoratrelundar, whom the Doctor calls Romana. He warns him that the Black Guardian also seeks these segments, but for an evil purpose. The White Guardian provides them with a wand-like device, which can locate the pieces and remove their disguise. When inserted into the TARDIS console, the locator first reveals a segment to be on Cyrrenhis Minima, but then moves to Ribos.Ribos is an icy planet with late-medieval-type inhabitants who are unaware of alien cultures. A human from Earth named Garron tries to sell Ribos to an exiled tyrant called the Graff Vynda-K. The Graff is impressed by the planet's supposed quantity of jethrik, the rarest and most valued mineral in the galaxy. He believes the opportunity confirmed when he sees a piece of jethrik among the Ribos crown jewels. This is all part of a ruse orchestrated by Garron; the jethrik was planted by Garron's assistant Unstoffe, who also was playing a native with an "honest face" who spins a yarn to the Graff about a nearby lost mine. The locator points the Doctor and Romana to the same jethrik, which must be the disguised segment of the Key to Time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stones_of_Blood"title="The Stones of Blood">
Tracking the third segment of the Key to Time, the Fourth Doctor, Romana, and K9 arrive in modern-day Cornwall. They meet Professor Emilia Rumford and her friend Vivien Fay, studying the "Nine Travellers"--standing stones in Boscombe Moor. Their work is disrupted by a Druidic sect that worships the Cailleach, the Druidic goddess of war and magic, led by de Vries. De Vries and the sect are hostile to the newcomers, but the Doctor later finds the sect killed by mobile stones similar to those of the Nine Travellers and determines the stones must be alien beings that feed on blood. He and Emilia find evidence that suggests Vivien is older than she looks. Meanwhile, Romana catches Vivien awakening more stones with blood, and Vivien uses a device to send her to a spacecraft in hyperspace. When the Doctor and Emilia arrive, Vivien tells them that Romana will be safe before disappearing herself. The Doctor recognises the stones as Ogri, a life form from the planet Ogros.The Doctor constructs a projector to cross into hyperspace, leaving Emilia and K9 to guard it. On the spacecraft, the Doctor determines it is a prison ship, and inadvertently releases two floating globes called Megara that serve as justice machines. They accuse the Doctor of breaking a seal on the ship and prepare to put him on trial. Elsewhere, Vivien finds the Doctor's presence, and returns to Earth, awakening one of the Ogri and damages the Doctor's projector, but sparing Emilia's life as a friend. She and the Ogri return to the craft to attend the Doctor's trial. K9 guides Emilia in repairing the projector, allowing them to bring back Romana, along with an Ogri. They are pursued by the Ogri, leading them back to Vivien's cottage. There, Romana discovers an alien device that proves Vivien is not human. They lure the Ogri back to the projector, and she and the Ogri return to the spacecraft.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Androids_of_Tara"title="The Androids of Tara">
The Fourth Doctor and Romana arrive on the planet Tara in search of the fourth segment of the Key to Time. While the Doctor goes fishing, Romana finds the fourth segment. She is attacked by a native Taran bear and saved by Count Grendel, who takes Romana to his castle on the pretext of treating her injured ankle. Once there, it becomes clear that Grendel believes she is an android, because she exactly resembles the captive Princess Strella. When Grendel finds Romana is real, Romana is imprisoned in Grendel's dungeon.The noble swordsmen Zadek and Farrah recruit the Doctor to assist Prince Reynart, who must reach the throne room of the castle in time to be crowned king or forfeit his crown to Grendel. The Doctor agrees to help repair an android copy of the Prince to be used as a decoy to distract Grendel's men. Grendel strikes first, drugging the Prince and his retinue and kidnapping Reynart. When the Doctor and the swordsmen recover, they decide to crown the android Reynart instead. The Doctor and his party sneak the android Prince into the throne room, and the Prince is crowned King.Till, Grendel's manservant, arrives at the Reynart estate and offers the Doctor a chance to collect Romana. It turns out to be a trap; the real Romana has been replaced by an android. K9 detects the android Romana and eliminates it. Meanwhile, the real Romana escapes from Castle Gracht and helps the Doctor flee. Grendel, coming under a flag of truce to secretly offer the crown to the Doctor, destroys the Reynart android and recaptures Romana. The evil Count now plots to have Romana pose as Strella and marry the real King Reynart. Once they are married and she is his Queen, Reynart will be killed, leaving Grendel free to marry her and become King of Tara.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Kroll"title="The Power of Kroll">
The Fourth Doctor and Romana have arrived on the third moon of Delta Magna, searching for the penultimate segment of the Key to Time. They find themselves caught in the middle of a dispute between the crew of a methane refinery and the natives (known as 'Swampies'). The Swampies claim that the crew have disturbed the waters, and will incur the wrath of their god, Kroll. Kroll is revealed to be a giant squid, which surfaces to feed every few centuries and is the source of the abnormally large amount of methane being mined. Originally a normal size squid, Kroll ingested the fifth segment of the Key to Time and began to grow, becoming a god-like figure to the Swampies and their descendants.After Kroll awakens and begins to attack both the Swampies and the refinery indiscriminately, the Doctor uses the tracer to retrieve the segment of the Key, which destroys Kroll and instigates cellular regeneration within the creature to produce hundreds of normal-sized squid. This process not only saves the planet's inhabitants but removes the source of methane from the refinery. The Doctor and Romana return to the TARDIS and set off on their next adventure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Leisure_Hive"title="The Leisure Hive">
The Fourth Doctor and Romana's holiday in Brighton ends abruptly when K9 chases a ball, takes in seawater, and explodes. They instead venture to the Leisure Hive of Argolis, a holiday complex and message of peace built by surviving Argolins after their devastating 20-minute war with the Foamasi forty years earlier. They arrive at a point of crisis: the Leisure Hive is facing bankruptcy (because of falling tourist trade due to stiff competition from other leisure planets) and the Argolins' Earth agent, Brock, and his lawyer Klout have arrived bearing an offer to buy the planet outright. However, the offer is from the Foamasi, the only species that could live on the planet's radiation-infused surface, and the Argolin board will not consider it. The shock of events causes Board Chairman Morix's rapid death – from the Argolin war curse of advanced cellular degradation – and his consort Mena is declared the new Chairman. The Doctor is intrigued by the manipulation of tachyons in the Hive’s Tachyon Recreation Generator, which is the main tourist attraction and can duplicate and manipulate organic matter. He witnesses a human tourist being killed after it is sabotaged in the latest of a series of such acts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Visitation_(Doctor_Who)"title="The Visitation (Doctor Who)">
The TARDIS lands in 17th-century London. Upon stepping outside, The Doctor, Nyssa, Tegan, and Adric immediately smell sulphur and head off to find the source. Richard Mace, a highwayman and self-proclaimed thespian, encounters the group and takes them to safety inside a barn. While questioning Mace, they find out that some kind of comet recently landed nearby.The Doctor and his friends discover the "comet" was actually a spaceship inhabited by a Terileptil fugitive, who uses mind controlling bracelets to subdue the local villagers. In a nearby manor house, they find a cellar full of caged rats and a device emitting soliton gas. The Terileptil plan to use rats infected with a genetically enhanced plague to devastate the population and conquer the planet.Using the TARDIS scanner, the Doctor locates the Terileptil in London. The TARDIS rematerialises there and the five enter the building. With the Terileptil leader are two others who get the jump on the Doctor and Mace. They manage to stop them, but the Terileptil leader's weapon starts to overload and detonates. The resulting explosion destroys the building and starts a raging fire. Mace stays behind to fight the blaze as the Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa and Adric leave in the TARDIS.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthshock"title="Earthshock">
As the TARDIS materialises in Earth's future, Adric argues with the Fifth Doctor about the lack of attention and respect he receives compared to Nyssa or Tegan. They explore a series of caves and are caught by soldiers led by Lieutenant Scott; Professor Kyle, accompanying Scott, accuses the four of killing the rest of her archaeological team. The Doctor convinces them to help, and Kyle leads them to the bodies of her team, near where they find an odd metal hatch. The group is attacked by androids, killing some of Scott's men, but the Doctor defeats them. He suspects the androids were guarding the hatch, and eventually opens it to reveal a powerful bomb that could destroy the planet. The Doctor and Adric defuse the bomb and trace its signal back to a freighter that is entering the Solar System. Scott and Kyle join the Doctor as they return to the TARDIS and travel to the freighter. The Doctor instructs the others to wait in the TARDIS while he and Adric explore the ship, and find a similar number of corpses in the cargo holds, before they are caught by the ship's security and taken to Captain Briggs, where they try to explain their situation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_of_the_Daleks"title="Resurrection of the Daleks">
A group of futuristic humanoids in 1984 London are shot by two policemen led by Commander Lytton. Two of them, Galloway and Stien, escape into the adjacent Butler's Wharf where a time corridor is situated, but Galloway is killed. Lytton transports back to his battle cruiser in the far future and prepares to attack a prison space station whose only prisoner is the creator of the Daleks, Davros, who has been held there since the events of "Destiny of the Daleks".The Fifth Doctor, Tegan, and Turlough are being dragged down a time corridor in the TARDIS following on from the events at the end of "Frontios". They emerge in the London Docklands.The station crew, led by Dr. Styles and Lt. Mercer, fight off the Daleks. Lytton persuades the Dalek Supreme to use poisonous gas and the Daleks take over the ship. Osborn attempts to destroy Davros, but Lytton and an engineer break into the cell and kill Osborn then release Davros from his cryogenic imprisonment.The Doctor and friends meet the traumatised Stien and all return to the warehouse to hunt for the time corridor. They meet a military bomb disposal squad, called in by builders. While the others are distracted, Turlough stumbles into the time corridor, ending up on the Dalek ship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vengeance_on_Varos"title="Vengeance on Varos">
While repairing the TARDIS console, the Sixth Doctor finds that the TARDIS has unexpectedly stopped in deep space and he can do nothing to fix it. Peri locates the TARDIS manual and presents it to the Doctor who dismisses it, as he knows perfectly well that transitional elements within the TARDIS have stopped producing orbital energy and only Zeiton-7 ore can realign the power systems. But as the Doctor explains, Zeiton-7 is exceptionally rare and only comes from one planet in the Cetes constellation: Varos.On Varos, originally a prison planet that now functions as a government system where voting is mandatory and torture and executions are televised, the Galatron Mining Corporation's swindling Mentor representative Sil is negotiating with Varos's Governor over the price of Zeiton-7 ore. Wanting a fair price for his people, and unaware that his Chief Officer is in league with Sil, the governor addresses his people to vote if they should hold out longer for a fair price. However, the popular vote is against the Governor, and as a consequence, he is subjected to exposure to potentially lethal Human Cell Disintegration Bombardment. As losing a subsequent vote will almost surely kill him, the Governor is forced to please the citizens by ordering the execution of a rebel leader named Jondar. By this time, the Doctor has managed to repair the TARDIS sufficiently and arrives at Varos's Punishment Dome close to where Jondar is to be executed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_for_Zachariah"title="Z for Zachariah">
Ann Burden is a teenage girl who believes she is the last survivor of a nuclear war. Since her family's disappearance on a search expedition, she has lived alone on her farm in a small valley spared from radiation poisoning. A year after the war, a stranger in a radiation-proof suit approaches her valley. Afraid he might be dangerous, Ann hides in a cave and does not warn the man when he mistakenly bathes in a radioactive stream. When he falls ill, her fear of being alone forever leads her to reveal herself to help him. She discovers that the stranger is John Loomis, a chemist who helped design a prototype radiation-proof "safe-suit" at an underground lab near Ithaca, New York. Ann moves him into her house and fantasizes about eventually marrying him.Loomis becomes delirious, with traumatic flashbacks to the underground lab. He talks of how he shot his coworker, Edward, who tried to take the safe-suit to find his family. Though troubled by this revelation, Ann nurses him through his illness and keeps secret her knowledge of Edward's death. As Loomis recovers, Ann is taken aback when he forbids her to touch the safe-suit and begins giving her orders on farming and managing resources. His explanation that they have to plan "as if this valley is the whole world and we are starting a colony," makes her uneasy. Her uneasiness increases when she asks if he was ever married, and he grabs her hand roughly, rebuking her when she accidentally hits him while trying to regain her balance. One night soon afterwards, she awakes to hear Loomis in her room. When he attempts to rape her, she flees to the cave again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Mansions"title="Green Mansions">
Prologue: An unnamed narrator tells how he befriended an old "Hispano-American" gentleman who never spoke of his past. His interest piqued, the narrator finally elicits the story.Venezuela, c. 1875. Abel, a young man of wealth, fails at a revolution and flees Caracas into the uncharted forests of Guayana. Surviving fever, failing at journal-keeping and gold hunting, he settles in an Indian village to waste away his life: playing guitar for old Cla-Cla, hunting badly with Kua-kó, telling stories to the children. After some exploring, Abel discovers an enchanting forest where he hears a strange bird-like singing. His Indian friends avoid the forest because of its evil spirit-protector, "the Daughter of the Didi." Persisting in the search, Abel finally finds Rima the Bird Girl. She has dark hair, a smock of spider webs, and can communicate with birds in an unknown tongue. When she shields a coral snake, Abel is bitten and falls unconscious.Abel awakens in the hut of Nuflo, an old man who protects his "granddaughter" Rima, and won't reveal her origin. As Abel recovers, Rima leads him through the forest, and Abel wonders about her identity and place of origin. Abel returns to the Indians, but relations become icy, because they would kill Rima, if they could. Rima often speaks of her dead mother, who was always depressed. Abel falls in love with Rima, but she (17 and a stranger to white men) is confused by "odd feelings". This relationship is further strained because Abel cannot speak her unknown language.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Commodore"title="The Commodore">
Having achieved fame and financial security, Captain Sir Horatio Hornblower has married Lady Barbara Leighton (née Wellesley) and is preparing to settle down to unaccustomed life as the squire of Smallbridge in Kent. He still yearns to serve at sea and accepts with alacrity when the Admiralty appoints him a commodore, puts him in command of a squadron and sends him on a diplomatic and military mission to the Baltic. His primary aim is to bring Russia into the war against Napoleon.Hornblower is shown dealing with the problems of squadron command, and using naval mortars (carried on special ships known as bomb vessels) to destroy a French privateer. This leads to the French invasion of Swedish Pomerania. Later his squadron calls at Kronstadt, where he meets with Russian officials, including Tsar Alexander I, who is favourably impressed by Hornblower and his squadron. Hornblower narrowly averts a major diplomatic incident when his secretary and interpreter (a Finnish refugee assigned to him by the Admiralty) attempts to assassinate the Tsar at a court function.After Russia enters the war, Hornblower's squadron takes an important role in the defence of Riga, which is besieged by French forces. The bomb vessels again take an important role, and so do amphibious operations under the protection of the squadron.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Hornblower"title="Lord Hornblower">
In 1814, Hornblower is delegated to deal with the "Flame", a brig full of mutineers off the French coast, near the mouth of the Seine. It is a tricky situation because the mutineers' demands cannot be met, but they have threatened that if a Royal Navy force tries to force their hand, they will slip into a nearby French port.Hornblower alters the appearance of his own vessel, the "Porta Coeli", so it can masquerade as the mutinous vessel. As dusk falls, he follows a valuable blockade runner into port, pretending to be the "Flame". Then, once the two vessels are moored, he captures it and takes it out to sea. He then pursues the "Flame", which retreats to the French port. Believing the mutineers responsible, the French send four gunboats to take her. Hornblower manages to exploit the fighting to capture both the "Flame" and a gunboat.Among the French prisoners is Lebrun, the young and ambitious assistant to the mayor of Le Havre. Lebrun asks to speak with Hornblower privately; he proposes to surrender Le Havre to the English fleet. Hornblower and Lebrun arrange a plan: Lebrun's role is to undermine those parties who would resist a British seizure of the city. Overcoming some tense moments with audacity, Hornblower is able to capture the city with a half battalion of Royal Marines and finds himself its military governor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirteen-Gun_Salute"title="The Thirteen-Gun Salute">
On land after ceasing his use of laudanum, Stephen Maturin finds he has changed; his naturally "ardent" temperament returns and alters his relationship with his wife Diana, who is now pregnant with their child. Maturin looks forward to the arrival of the child he is certain is a daughter. As the high level traitor in British intelligence is not yet identified, the time on land raises risks to his friend Jack Aubrey, who agrees to sail immediately. Aubrey, Maturin, and their shipmates prepare for a mission to sail the letter of marque "Surprise" on a mission to South America. Upon reaching Lisbon, Sir Joseph Blaine intercepts Maturin with news that he and Aubrey are required to carry a diplomat to the Sultan of Pulo Prabang, a piratical Malay state in the South China Sea. Edward Fox is the envoy leading the mission to persuade the Sultan to become an English rather than French ally. The French mission includes the same English traitors - Ledward and Wray - who were responsible for Aubrey's former disgrace. With the "Surprise" under the command of Captain Pullings, Aubrey and Maturin return with Blaine to England, where Lord Melville, First Lord of the Admiralty, reinstates Aubrey as a Post-Captain in the Royal Navy and gives him command of the recently captured French ship "Diane". The voyage south forms the crew, with frequent training on the guns; by the luck of a timely breeze and much hard rowing in the ship's boats, "Diane" escapes the inshore currents of Inaccessible Island. Sailing through the high forties (south latitude), she first touches land at Java, meeting Lieutenant Governor Raffles near Batavia, where they hear the first word of bank failures in England.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Daniel_(novel)"title="The Book of Daniel (novel)">
Writing his doctoral thesis ('The Book of Daniel'), a political genealogy of the American Old Left, Daniel Isaacson confronts his own personal relationship to that historical narrative by investigating the background to his parents' conviction and execution by the State, with some assistance from his adoptive parents (the Lewins). The dénouement is the revisiting, in flashback, of the death of his parents, Rochelle and Paul Isaacson, and, in due course, the death from nervous disorder (and attempted suicide) of his sister Susan. The novel closes as the library in which Daniel is working is closed by student protests. Doctorow closes his novel with a parody of lines from Chapter 12 of the Biblical Book of Daniel. This moment culminates a merger of the text's two primary levels of narrative concern: Daniel's self-conscious inability to find and tell his own truthful personal history, which mirrors the anxiety of the radical 1960s New Left to emerge from the failure of the Communist Party to achieve its revolutionary potential in the 1950s. The book is written in four parts, and in each Daniel is the principal narrator; the narrative moves fluidly and rapidly between 1967 ('the present') and flashback (to the late 40s/early 50s), and between first and third person:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nectar_in_a_Sieve"title="Nectar in a Sieve">
Rukmani and Nathan love each other and their marriage begins in relative peace and plenty. When a large tannery is built in the neighboring village, it begins insidiously destroying their lives. As the tannery grows larger and more prosperous, Rukmani and Nathan struggle to feed their children and to pay the rent on the land that gives them life. Although matters continue to worsen, they quietly resign themselves to ever-increasing hardships—flood, famine, even death—and cling to their hopes for a better future.Dr. Kennington, or "Kenny", an itinerant English doctor, is an important presence in the novel. Although Rukmani's fatalistic attitude toward hardship exasperates him, he feels compassion for her and helps her when he can. At the end, Rukmani goes to live with her youngest son, now a doctor at the hospital Kenny has built.Throughout the novel, Rukmani is faced with struggle after struggle with no indication that her circumstances will improve. Each time her situation worsens, she endures quietly, holding on to the hope that things will soon be better.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Exit_to_Brooklyn"title="Last Exit to Brooklyn">
The stories are set almost entirely in what is now considered the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn; the location is widely misreported as Red Hook, where one story is set and parts of the 1989 movie were filmed. "Last Exit to Brooklyn" is divided into six parts that can, more or less, be read separately. Each part is prefaced with a passage from the Bible.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warriors'_Gate"title="Warriors' Gate">
Inside the TARDIS, the Fourth Doctor, Romana, Adric, and K9, while travelling between E-Space and the normal universe (N-Space), become trapped in a white null space between the universes. Elsewhere in the void, a slave vessel, run by Captain Rorvik, has also become trapped. It uses members of the leonine Tharil race as their navigators. On becoming stuck, the current navigator, Biroc, escapes the ship and makes his way to the TARDIS on the winds of time. Biroc warns the TARDIS crew of Rorvik's treachery before disappearing. K9's memory wafers are shredded by the winds of time, leaving him functional but lacking long-term memories. The Doctor leaves on his own to explore the null space. He encounters some robots, called Gundans.Meanwhile, Rorvik and his crew have discovered the TARDIS. Romana leaves to talk to them. Rorvik, believing Romana to be time-sensitive like the Tharils, dupes her into returning to their ship to examine the engines. When Romana does not return, Adric and K9 leave to recover her, but get separated; Adric eventually makes it to the ship and hides aboard, while K9 reunites with the Doctor and aids in repairing the Gundan, after which he learns from it that they were built by slaves and used to overthrow their masters in a violent battle. The Doctor's work is disrupted when Rorvik and several of his men arrive. During a stand-off between the crew and the Doctor, another Gundan activates and walks through the seemingly-solid mirror. Rorvik demands an explanation from the Doctor, revealing he has Romana captive, but the Doctor's only response is to walk through the mirror himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_in_Space"title="Frontier in Space">
As the Earth cargo ship C982 moves through hyperspace, it narrowly avoids a collision with the TARDIS. As the Third Doctor determines that they are in the 26th century, Jo sees a ship come alongside. It shimmers, changing shape, turning into a Draconian Galaxy-class battlecruiser. The two pilots, Stewart and Hardy, send out a distress signal and prepare for battle. When Hardy goes to get weapons, he meets the Doctor, but sees him and Jo as Draconians. Hardy escorts them at gunpoint to the ship.On Earth, the President and the Draconian ambassador (who is also the Emperor's son) accuse each other of attacking the other's ships and violating the frontier established by treaty between the two empires. General Williams reports to the President that a mission to rescue C982 is being prepared. Williams's hostility against the Draconians is well known — it was his actions that started the original war between the two sides and the Prince believes Williams wants war again, a war the Prince warns the President that will see Earth destroyed. News of the attack spreads and anti-Draconian riots break out on Earth, with the opposition calling for the government to take action.Locked up in C982's hold, the Doctor deduces that the strange sound was some kind of sonic hypnosis device that caused Hardy to hallucinate and see what he most feared. As the enemy boarding party burns its way through the airlocks, Hardy gets the Doctor and Jo to use as hostages, but when the airlock door bursts open, the boarders are not Draconians, but Ogrons. The Ogrons' energy weapons stun the two pilots and the Doctor. They then tie Jo up, taking the ship's cargo and the TARDIS as they leave. When the Doctor revives and releases Jo, she tells him what the Ogrons did, and wonders if they are working for the Daleks, as they were when she first met them. The Doctor points out that the Ogrons are mercenaries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20,000_Streets_Under_the_Sky"title="20,000 Streets Under the Sky">
"The Midnight Bell" tells the story of Bob, a sailor turned bar waiter who becomes infatuated with Jenny, a prostitute who visits the pub. Ella, the barmaid at the pub, is secretly in love with Bob. In one of the most autobiographical narratives Hamilton ever wrote, Bob squanders his life savings on Jenny, whose lack of interest in Bob (beyond his money) is painfully evident to all but Bob. Eventually, Jenny loses all interest once Bob has spent all his savings on her."The Siege of Pleasure" is the shortest of the three stories, and recounts a little over twenty-four hours in Jenny's earlier life. She gets a new job as a housemaid to two elderly sisters, but later the same day along with her friend encounters three men in a bar. She elects to stand her erstwhile boyfriend up, gets drunk and is involved in a car accident where there is a possible fatality. The following morning, having spent the night in the home of one of the men, she determines not to go back to the sisters' employ. Bob and Ella do not feature at all in this novel."The Plains of Cement" is set during the events in "The Midnight Bell", with Ella as the focus. Ella, still nursing a sublimated affection for Bob, has to deal with the increasingly unwelcome (and not always comprehensible) advances of the lower-middle class Ernest Eccles, an elderly customer of the pub. She is torn between a possible escape from her dull routine and a potential marriage to a man she does not love. We are also introduced to Ella's mother, trapped in a loveless marriage to Ella's violent stepfather. One of the episodes is a replication of that in "The Midnight Bell", but told from Ella's perspective. The narrative concludes one day after the final scene of "The Midnight Bell".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Jedi"title="I, Jedi">
In "I, Jedi", Corran Horn must develop his Jedi powers in order to save the life of his wife, Mirax Terrik.Corran Horn was a member of the elite X-wing force Rogue Squadron. After returning home from a long campaign to find his wife kidnapped, he turns to Luke Skywalker, the only remaining Jedi Master at the time, for help. This coincides nicely with the master's timing, as he is seeking students for his new Jedi Academy on Yavin 4. Corran knows that he is Force-sensitive, and that only with the Force as his ally can he track down his enemy.It turns out that Corran's wife, Mirax, was tracking down a group of elusive pirates known as the Invids. The Invids' primary tactic is to drop out of hyperspace with the flagship, an Imperial Star Destroyer named the "Invidious", strike, and disappear with perfect timing. As she grew closer to solving the mystery of how these pirates performed their supernaturally accurate attacks, she was kidnapped and placed into stasis on their fortress planet. On the journey to save Mirax, Corran learns that his grandfather was a Jedi, a member of the Halcyon line. His adopted grandfather shows Corran the records that the Jedi had left behind, and with that, Corran eventually makes up his mind to follow in his ancestor's footsteps and become a Jedi. After extensive training and being caught in a crisis involving the risen spirit of the Dark Sith Lord Exar Kun, Corran goes as far as he can, and infiltrates the pirates using his CorSec training. He quickly rises through the ranks, and finds out where Mirax is being held. With the timely help of Luke Skywalker and his squadron friend and wingman, Ooryl Qrygg, he fights his way past the Jensaarai, a splinter group of Jedi who focus on stealth and premonition, and into the fortress, where he is able to rescue his wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Cross-eyed_Lefty_from_Tula_and_the_Steel_Flea"title="The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea">
Tsar Alexander I of Russia, while visiting England with his servant the Cossack Platov, is shown a variety of modern inventions. Platov keeps insisting that things in Russia are much better (embarrassing a guide at one point when he finds something that appears well made that turns out to be a Russian gun), until they are shown a small mechanical flea. After his ascension the next tsar, Nicolas I, orders Platov (after he tries to hide the flea) to find someone to outperform the English who had created the clockwork steel flea (as small as a crumb, and the key to wind it up can only be seen through a microscope). Platov travels to Tula to find someone to better the English invention. Three gunsmiths agree to do the work and barricade themselves in a workshop. Villagers try to get them to come out in various ways (for example by yelling "fire"), but no one can get them to come out. When Platov arrives to check on their progress, he has some Cossacks try to open the workshop. They succeed in getting the roof to come off, but the crowd is disgusted when the trapped smell of body odor and metal work comes out of the workshop. The gunsmiths hand Platov the same flea he gave them and he curses them, believing that they have done absolutely nothing. He ends up dragging Lefty with him in order to have someone to answer for the failure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_Horses"title="Runaway Horses">
Set between June 1932 and December 1933, "Runaway Horses" tells the story of young Isao Iinuma, a rightist reactionary trained in the samurai code by his father. Isao becomes the instigator of a plot to topple the zaibatsu that he feels have corrupted the Yamato-damashii and betrayed the will of the Emperor. He is assured of the army's assistance by the young Lieutenant Hori. They plan to assassinate many key government figures simultaneously on December 3, 1932.Shigekuni Honda, a character who figured prominently in "Spring Snow", the first novel of the cycle, appears again here as a judge and later lawyer. He comes to believe that Isao is the reincarnation of Kiyoaki Matsugae, the aristocratic schoolfriend whose story was told in "Spring Snow". Realising that Isao too seems to be hurtling towards a "picturesque" death, he makes strenuous efforts to save him without revealing this personal connection.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brain_of_Morbius"title="The Brain of Morbius">
On the planet Karn, an insect-like alien is killed by Condo who takes its head to a castle and his master Solon. However, the head is unsuitable — Solon needs a head from a warm-blooded humanoid.The TARDIS materialises and the Fourth Doctor rushes out, the Time Lords having diverted him to this planet. Sarah Jane Smith finds a valley filled with wrecked spacecraft, as well as the headless body of the alien which is identified as a Mutt. She and the Doctor make for the castle that she spots. The travellers are welcomed by Solon who compliments the Doctor on his "magnificent" head.Meanwhile, the Sisterhood of Karn discover the TARDIS and teleport it to their temple. Their elderly leader, Maren, identifies it as a Time Lord vessel, and believes that the Doctor has come to steal their Elixir of Life.The Doctor knows of Solon as an authority on microsurgical techniques and tissue transplant. The Doctor recognises a clay bust as that of Morbius, one of the Time Lords' greatest criminals. Before he can say anything further, a drug takes effect, and the Doctor passes out. Sarah Jane pretends that she has succumbed. In the laboratory, Solon's examination of the Doctor confirms that he is a Time Lord. As he and Condo leave the room, the Doctor vanishes. Sarah Jane keeps hidden and enters the lab. She draws back the curtain on a bed, thinking it is the Doctor, but as the lights come up, she sees a headless, patchwork creature made from various body parts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalescent"title="Coalescent">
The book consists of four distinct parts. The primary purpose of part one is the introduction of the characters, in ancient Britain and the present. Part two introduces a modern first-person view of the Order in Rome while following Regina's budding legacy centuries before. Part three hosts the clash and resolution of Poole and the Order's realities. Part four is a look eons into Humanity's Expansion into the Universe and provides a conclusion in George Poole's present.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Android_Invasion"title="The Android Invasion">
In the village of Devesham, the Doctor and Sarah Jane meet a group of humanoid robots in white suits and opaque helmets, who shoot at them with their index fingers. The Doctor and Sarah Jane flee to a pub, where the villagers wait motionless until the clock strikes, when they suddenly come to life, acting normally. It is implied that both the pub and the village are stuck in a time loop.The Doctor finds his way to the local Space Defence Station and introduces himself to Senior Defence Astronaut Guy Crayford, who places the Doctor in a cell. It is revealed that Crayford is working for Styggron, the leader of an alien race called the Kraal. Sarah frees the Doctor and they escape, but when the soldiers turn back, they capture Sarah. Styggron tells Crayford to locate, but not seize, the Doctor.In the pub, the Doctor fights off an android copy of Sarah Jane. The real Sarah is being kept alive so Styggron can test the virus he intends to use on Earth. They are captured again and the village is overrun with the white-suited robots. The Doctor explains that the Kraal planet will soon be uninhabitable due to high levels of radiation, so the Kraal plan to eradicate humanity and take over Earth. The duplicated village was a training ground. Crayford explains that he is helping the Kraals because they rescued him and reconstructed his body, while Earth left him for dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seeds_of_Doom"title="The Seeds of Doom">
In Antarctica, British scientists Charles Winlett and Derek Moberley discover a pod buried in the permafrost and take it back to their camp. John Stevenson, the base botanist, identifies it as vegetable-based and estimates it has been buried in the ice for twenty thousand years.In London, Richard Dunbar of the World Ecology Bureau shows the Fourth Doctor photographs of the pod at the urging of his superior, Sir Colin Thackeray. The Doctor believes it to be extraterrestrial. He tells Dunbar to tell the expedition not to touch it until he arrives.Back at the base, Stevenson discovers that the pod is growing larger and he believes it is absorbing ultraviolet radiation. In England, Dunbar visits the estate of millionaire Harrison Chase, who considers it his mission to protect the plant life of Mother Earth. Dunbar gives Chase the location of the pod. Chase sends his men, Scorby and Keeler, to retrieve it.At the base, the pod opens and stings Winlett. When Stevenson and Moberley find him, Winlett's face is covered with green hives. The Doctor and Sarah arrive and find that Winlett's face and body are rapidly becoming covered with green fungus. Outside the base, the Doctor uncovers another pod and notes that they travel in pairs. Winlett's blood is found to contain no blood platelets, but instead has schizophytes – microscopic organisms akin to plant bacteria. The Doctor tells Sarah that Winlett is turning into a Krynoid, a galactic weed that settles on planets and eats the animal life. Scorby and Keeler arrive, claiming that their private plane got lost.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Faust_(novel)"title="Jack Faust (novel)">
The plot is a modernization of the classic German tale of anti-hero Dr. Johannes Faust, who struggles with his growing discomfort with modern thought and questions how and why things happen without scientific explanation. After Faust burns his library and contemplates suicide, a mysterious being named Mephistopheles comes to Faust and offers him all the information of the universe. With Mephistopheles' help, the madman Dr. Johannes Faust becomes the savior Jack Faust by accelerating human progress at a blinding speed, reshaping Germany and then all of Europe in his own image.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_Evil"title="Planet of Evil">
The TARDIS picks up a distress call and the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith arrive on the planet Zeta Minor. There they discover that a Morestran geological expedition has fallen prey to an unseen killer and only the leader, Professor Sorenson, remains alive.A military mission from Morestra has also arrived to investigate. At first they suspect the Doctor and Sarah Jane of responsibility for the deaths of the expedition members, but the culprit is eventually revealed to be a creature from a universe of antimatter, retaliating for the removal by Sorenson of some antimatter samples from around the pit that acts as an interface between the two universes.The Morestrans take off in their ship, but it is slowly dragged back towards the planet due to the antimatter on board. Sorenson himself becomes infected by antimatter and gradually transforms into an 'antiman', a monster capable of draining the life from others.The Morestran commander, the increasingly unhinged Salamar, attacks Sorenson with a radiation source, but this only causes him to produce multiple anti-matter versions of Sorenson which soon overrun the ship. The Doctor finds the original Sorenson, takes him back to the planet in the TARDIS and throws both him and his samples into the pit, fulfilling a bargain he earlier made with the anti-matter creature. Sorenson reappears unharmed, and the Doctor returns him to the Morestran ship, which is now freed of the planet's influence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_of_the_Zygons"title="Terror of the Zygons">
The Fourth Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan arrive via the TARDIS in Scotland near the North Sea where Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and U.N.I.T. are investigating the destruction of oil rigs. The survivors' assertion that the rigs were destroyed by a huge sea creature is corroborated by giant teeth marks in the wreckage.During their investigation, Harry is captured by the Zygons, a shape-shifting alien race hiding in their submerged spacecraft. Their leader, Broton, tells Harry that their spaceship had sustained damage and landed on Earth centuries ago to await rescue, but when they discovered that their home planet had been destroyed in a stellar explosion they decided instead to conquer the Earth and terraform it to suit their physiology. To achieve this goal, they have captured several humans to use as "body prints" to infiltrate key leadership positions, including the influential Duke of Forgill who serves as head of the Scotland Energy Commission. They had also brought an embryonic sea creature called the Skarasen to Earth and augmented it with cyborg technology until it has reached giant proportions. They are directing it with a signalling device to attack the rigs as part of their larger plan.Whilst investigating the similarity between the Skarasen and the monster in nearby Loch Ness, Sarah Jane stumbles upon a secret passageway at the Duke of Forgill's mansion. She follows the passage to the Zygons' submerged spacecraft. Whilst searching the ship she locates and frees Harry, who reveals the Zygon stratagem.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_of_the_Cybermen"title="Revenge of the Cybermen">
Following on from "Genesis of the Daleks", the Fourth Doctor, Harry and Sarah use the Time Ring to return to Space Station Nerva. They arrive aboard the space station thousands of years before the events of "The Ark in Space" and "The Sontaran Experiment". The TARDIS is not aboard Nerva, as it is travelling back in time towards them. The trio discover that the space station is full of dead bodies.The time travellers come into contact with the surviving Nerva crew. The space station is now operating as an orbital beacon, warning ships away from a drifting planetoid named Voga. Professor Kellman, a civilian planetary surveyor has been using Nerva as a base for cataloguing Vogan geology, travelling there via a Transmat teleportation system. Nerva Beacon is now under quarantine due to an outbreak of an unidentified plague. In space, an unknown ship approaches Nerva.It is revealed that Voga is inhabited by a race of intelligent domed-headed beings who live beneath its surface in a network of caves. Vorus, leader of the Guardians of the mines, is leading a revolt against the Vogan leader, Chief Councillor Tyrum.On board Nerva, a mysterious silver, snake-like creature attacks and kills a crewmember by injecting him with poison. The Doctor identifies it as a Cybermat, a cybernetic creature used by Cybermen, and that it has been responsible for the deaths aboard Nerva rather than a plague. He realises that Voga is the legendary Planet of Gold, an enemy world of the Cybermen – Cybermen are vulnerable to gold dust as it can be used to clog their breathing apparatus and suffocate them. The Doctor deduces that Cybermen are planning a fresh attack on Voga. Kellman secretly contacts the unidentified spaceship, which is crewed by Cybermen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hand_of_Fear"title="The Hand of Fear">
Millennia ago on the planet Kastria, a traitor and criminal named Eldrad is sentenced to death for his crimes, including the destruction of the barriers that have kept the solar winds at bay. The pod containing the criminal is obliterated—but his hand survives. In the present day the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith arrive in the TARDIS at a quarry and are caught up in an explosion. Sarah is rendered unconscious, but in that state, she makes contact with the fossilised hand, its ring placing her under its control. The Doctor takes her to the local hospital, where the mesmeric power of the hand becomes more complete and both Sarah Jane and a pathologist called Dr Carter are brought under its control.Sarah heads for the nearest nuclear generator, the Nunton Complex, where she breaks into the reactor with the hand. It seems to thrive on radiation and begins to regenerate, growing back its missing finger and moving around unaided. The head of the complex, Professor Watson, remains at his post when the reactor goes critical. He offers the Doctor aid and advice in trying to get to Sarah despite Carter attempting to stop the Doctor before falling to his death. Eventually the Doctor reaches Sarah and knocks her down, but not before the hand has absorbed a significant amount of radiation. Retreating, the Doctor takes Sarah to the medical centre.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Face_of_Evil"title="The Face of Evil">
The Fourth Doctor, travelling alone in the TARDIS, arrives on a jungle planet and encounters Leela, a savage from the local tribe, who denounces him as the Evil One of fable among her people. She has been exiled from her tribe, the Sevateem, for profaning their god Xoanon who is kept prisoner by the Evil One and his followers, the Tesh, beyond a black wall. He speaks to them through the tribe's shaman, Neeva. The Doctor finds a sophisticated sonic disruptor, which creates the force field that keeps creatures from attacking the village. The Sevateem will launch an attack on the domain of the Tesh to free their god, led by the combative Andor who suspects Neeva of being a false prophet.In Neeva's holy tent, the Doctor inspects the ancient tribal relics, artifacts from an Earth survey expedition. He finds a transceiver used by Neeva to hear the commands of Xoanon. It speaks with the Doctor's own voice, conveying exhilaration on hearing the Doctor that "At last we are here. At last I shall be free of "us"." The Doctor tells some of the tribe the Sevateem are the descendants of a “survey team” which left a Starfall Seven Earth colony ship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_the_Stars"title="Number the Stars">
Annemarie Johansen and Ellen Rosen, two ten-year-old best friends living in a Nazi-controlled Copenhagen, Denmark, during World War II, are accosted by Nazi soldiers on the street while returning from school. Annemarie tells her parents and five-year-old sister, Kirsti, when she returns home, and is told to be more careful, especially because Ellen is Jewish. The Germans soon announce that they will be "relocating" Denmark's Jewish population. At the local synagogue, the Nazis take the names and addresses of every Jewish family in Copenhagen. Ellen's parents flee Denmark with Peter, the former fiancé of Annemarie's older sister, Lise, who died in a car accident several years earlier. Ellen is forced to stay with the Johansens and pretend to be Lise, despite being half the age of the real Lise. Early one morning, soldiers enter the Johansens' apartment, believing the Rosens might be hiding there. Annemarie breaks the Star of David off Ellen's necklace. The soldiers are suspicious of their story, but leave soon after.Annemarie, Ellen, and Kirsti leave with Annemarie's parents the next morning for Uncle Henrik's house, which is across the lake from Sweden, a neutral country where Jews aren't prosecuted. When they arrive, Henrik tells Annemarie that her Great-Aunt Birte has died, and a huge casket is placed in the middle of the living room. Annemarie doesn't believe she has a Great-Aunt Birte, but Henrik encourages her to be brave and keep this secret to herself, even from Ellen. The next evening, many people come to mourn "Aunt Birte", to Annemarie's puzzlement. Nazis come to the house and see start questioning the family. They explain that Great-Aunt Birte has died, and they are carrying out traditional rituals. When the Nazis order the casket to be opened, Mrs. Johansen lies that Great-Aunt Birte had typhus, a contagious disease, and the Nazis leave without further questions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelation_of_the_Daleks"title="Revelation of the Daleks">
The TARDIS lands on Necros, the location of the funeral home Tranquil Repose. The Sixth Doctor is attacked by a mutant, which Peri kills. Before he dies, the mutant tells the Doctor that the Great Healer used him as a genetic experiment and his appearance and hostility were a result of the experiments.At Tranquil Repose, a disc jockey plays songs and chats to entertain those who are in suspended animation. A couple, Natasha and Grigory, have illegally entered Tranquil Repose, looking for the man the Doctor is seeking—Arthur Stengos, Natasha's father. Upon finding his assigned suspended animation capsule, they discover it is empty. Shocked, they find a dark room filled with pulsating brains and other experiments. Grigory walks past a Glass Dalek casing with a mutating red creature inside it. Natasha realises it is the head of her father, and he is being metamorphosised into a Dalek.Kara, who owns a company that distributes food, is a pawn of the Great Healer, in reality Davros. To dissolve this arrangement, she has hired the mercenary Orcini and his squire, Bostock. Orcini accepts the contract for the honour of killing Davros.Arthur Stengos, who is now a head with red flesh growing over him, explains to Natasha and Grigory that the brains of everybody in Tranquil Repose are being used to metamorphosise into new Dalek mutants. Moving in and out of moments of lucidity and Dalek-like hateful ranting, Stengos orders his daughter to kill him before he fully mutates. Natasha does, and then she and Grigory are captured and questioned by Takis and Lilt who are in charge of security.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timelash"title="Timelash">
The TARDIS is ensnared by a Kontron tunnel (similar to a time corridor) and is drawn to its source on the planet Karfel, which the Doctor has previously visited.Its population is now ruled by the Borad, a sadistic ruler never seen in person, only via security monitors which reveal him to be an old man. His law is enforced by blue androids; and all rebels are dealt with either by summary execution or dispatch via the Timelash - exiled down a corridor of Time and Space. At the time of the Doctor's return, the neighbouring planet of Bandrils are posed to invade after the Borad rescinds the grain supply treaty which underpinned the relationship between the two civilisations.Acting as a proxy for the Borad, the Maylin is the most senior of the five councillors of Karfel. When one of these fellow councillors, Mykros, actively plots with Maylin Renis to overthrow the Borad's rule, the Maylin is executed and Mykros sentenced to exile via the Timelash. Before he can be dispatched however, Vena - Renis' daughter and Mykros' lover - intervenes to plead for his life. When this fails, she steals an amulet conferring the power to the new Maylin - a sycophant named Tekker - and accidentally falls into the Timelash herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfire_(Doctor_Who)"title="Dragonfire (Doctor Who)">
The Seventh Doctor and Mel arrive at the trading colony Iceworld on the dark side of the planet Svartos. They soon run into Sabalom Glitz, who is on Svartos to work off a debt that he owes to the crime lord Kane, and is preparing to explore the depths of Svartos to locate a treasure reportedly protected by a dragon, aided by a map given to him by Kane; in exchange, Kane will return Glitz's ship, the "Nosferatu", and clear him of his debts. The Doctor and Mel offer to help, but Glitz asserts the expedition is too dangerous for Mel, and she stays behind at a local diner. She befriends Ace, a young woman who turns out to have actually come from 20th-century Earth, propelled forward in time when a mysterious time storm appeared in her bedroom while she was trying to experiment with "Nitro-9", an explosive of her own creation. The two eventually become weary of waiting and follow the Doctor and Glitz.Meanwhile, the Doctor and Glitz follow Glitz's map, unaware that Kane has implanted a tracking and listening device into it. Kane controls a large number of beings that had been unable to repay their debts, their memories wiped and turned into cold-proof henchmen by Kane's touch. Kane has a number of these follow the Doctor and Glitz so as to grab the treasure once it is found. The Doctor and Glitz eventually encounter the "dragon", which turns out to be a biomechanoid that can shoot lasers from its eyes. When Mel and Ace arrive and are pursued by Kane's men, the "dragon" helps to protect the two and defeat the men. The "dragon" leads the four to a control room where it plays a holographic message. The message explains that Kane is one half of the Kane-Xana criminal gang from the planet Proamon. They were chased down by authorities, and Xana, Kane's lover, killed herself in the process, while Kane was exiled to Svartos. The message continues that the Iceworld spaceport is really a giant spacecraft, whose power source lies in the "dragon"'s head, and Kane seeks this as to be able to escape Svartos. The Doctor suspects Kane must have been trapped here for millennia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Happiness_Patrol"title="The Happiness Patrol">
The Seventh Doctor and Ace visit a human colony on the planet Terra Alpha, where the planet's secret police force, the Happiness Patrol, roam the streets hunting down and killing so-called 'Killjoys'. The colony is governed by Helen A, obsessed with eliminating unhappiness. Also in her employment is the Kandy Man, a grotesque, sweet-based robot created by Gilbert M, one of Helen A's senior advisers.The Doctor and Ace meet an unhappy guard, Susan Q, who becomes an ally, and Earl Sigma, a wandering harmonica player. They, along with the native inhabitants of Terra Alpha, the Pipe People, work to overthrow the tyranny of Helen A. They begin supporting public demonstrations of unhappiness, encouraging the people to revolt, and attempting to expose Helen A's population control programme to Trevor Sigma, an official galactic census taker.The first to be disposed of is Helen A’s pet Stigorax, Fifi, a rat-dog creature used to hunt down the Pipe People, as it is crushed in the pipes below the city when Earl causes an avalanche of crystallised sugar with his harmonica. Then they destroy the Kandyman in a flow of his own fondant surprise (previously used to execute dissidents). Realising that she is beaten, Helen A attempts to escape the planet in a rocket, only to discover that the rocket has already been commandeered by Gilbert M and Joseph C, her husband. She tries to flee, but the Doctor stops her, and tries to teach her about the true nature of happiness, which can only be understood if counterbalanced by sadness. Helen A at first sneers at the Doctor, but when she discovers the remains of her beloved pet Fifi, she collapses in tears, and finally feels some sadness of her own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greatest_Show_in_the_Galaxy"title="The Greatest Show in the Galaxy">
The Seventh Doctor and Ace are invited to the Psychic Circus on Segonax. Aside from others who have been invited, the Circus is surprisingly empty; a few entertainers and stagehands are present alongside the Ringmaster and Morgana, the ticket seller and fortune teller; the only audience is a stoic family of three: a father, mother, and daughter. The Doctor and Ace learn that they are expected to perform and those who fail to entertain the family are annihilated. Escape is nearly impossible, as the Chief Clown, aided by numerous kites used for surveillance, leads a group of mechanical clowns around the wastelands of Segonax to recapture escapees.The Doctor and Ace discover the corpse of Flower Child, who had attempted to escape. Ace takes one of her earrings and pins it to her jacket as a keepsake. The Chief Clown later notices this and demands to know where Ace got it; she flees into the circus, finding the robot-mechanic Bellboy hiding there. He recognises Flower Child's earring; although his memories were disrupted when he was captured, he tells Ace he remembers there being more people at the circus. Ace unties him and they hide in a circus caravan, where Ace tries to help Bellboy recover his memory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_on_the_Galactic_Railroad"title="Night on the Galactic Railroad">
Giovanni is a lonely boy, whose father is away on a long fishing trip, while his mother is ill at home. As a result, the young Giovanni must undertake paid jobs before and after school, delivering papers and setting type at the printers, in order to provide food for his poor family. These adult responsibilities leave him with no time to study or socialize, and he is ridiculed by his classmates. Apart from Giovanni's mother and sister, the only person who really cares for him is his former playmate Campanella, whose father is a close friend of Giovanni's father.During a lesson about the galaxy, the teacher asks Giovanni what the Milky Way is made of. Giovanni knows it is formed of stars, but is unable to say so, and Campanella does the same to save Giovanni from further teasing by the rest of the class. At the end of the lesson, the teacher encourages all the children to attend the festival of stars that evening. Upon returning home, Giovanni finds that no milk was delivered that day, so he heads out to the dairy to fetch it for his mother's dinner. Giovanni only encounters an elderly woman at the dairy, and once he pleads that his ill mother needs her milk that night, the woman advises him to come back later.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmopolis_(novel)"title="Cosmopolis (novel)">
"Cosmopolis" is the story of Eric Packer, a 28-year-old multi-billionaire asset manager who makes an odyssey across midtown Manhattan to get a haircut. He drives around in a stretch limo, which is richly described as luxurious, spacious and highly technical, filled with television screens and computer monitors, bulletproofed and floored with Carrara marble. It is also cork-lined to eliminate (although unsuccessfully, as Packer notes) the intrusion of street noise.Packer's voyage is obstructed by various traffic jams caused by a presidential visit to the city, a full-fledged anti-capitalist riot, and a funeral procession for a Sufi rap star. Along the way, the hero has several chance meetings with his wife and sexual encounters with other women. Packer is also stalked by two men, a comical "pastry assassin" and an unstable "credible threat". Through the course of the day, the protagonist loses incredible amounts of money for his clients by betting against the rise of the Yen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Claws_of_Axos"title="The Claws of Axos">
The Axons land on Earth, desperately in need of fuel. They propose to exchange the miracle substance they call Axonite for some much needed energy. Axonite is a "thinking" molecule that can replicate any substance... or so they claim. As it turns out, the ship is a single organism called Axos whose purpose is to feed itself by draining all energy through the Axonite (which is just a part of itself), including the energy of every life form on Earth. The deception about the Axonite's beneficial properties was to facilitate the distribution of Axonite across the globe.Meanwhile, the Master, who was captured by Axos and used his knowledge of Earth as a bargaining chip for his life and freedom, escapes Axos and makes his way to the Third Doctor's TARDIS—his own having been seized by Axos. He plans to repair it to escape from Earth.Axos itself becomes interested in the Doctor's knowledge of time travel. It now plans to broaden its feeding base by travelling through time as well as space. The Doctor, realising this, plans to trick Axos into linking up its drive unit to his TARDIS so that he can send Axos into a perpetual time loop. After fooling the Master into completing the repairs on his TARDIS, the Doctor does just that. This results in every part of Axos dematerialising from Earth, including the Axon automatons and the Axonite.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Air"title="Free Air">
"This cheerful little road novel, published in 1919, is about Claire Boltwood, who, in the early days of the 20th century, travels by automobile from New York City to the Pacific Northwest, where she falls in love with a nice, down-to-earth young man and gives up her snobbish Estate." (From the Book Stub)From a critical perspective, "Free Air" is consistent with Sinclair Lewis's lean towards egalitarian politics, which he displays in his other works (most notably in "It Can't Happen Here"). Examples of his politics in "Free Air" are found in Lewis's emphasis on the heroic role played by the book's protagonist, Milt Dagget, a working class everyman type. Conversely, Lewis presents nearly every upper-class character in Claire Boltwood's world (including her railroad-mogul father) as snobby elitists. The story also champions the democratic nature of the automobile versus the more aristocratic railroad travel. Lewis's emphasis on the freedom which automobiles would eventually give the working and middle classes bolsters the egalitarian, democratic aesthetic. "Free Air" is one of the first novels about the road trip, a subject around which the Beats (most notably Jack Kerouac) would build a cult following in the mid-20th century.In the HBO series "Boardwalk Empire", set initially in 1920, Jimmy and his girlfriend Pearl are reading "Free Air". The 18-year-old Chicago prostitute Pearl hopes to head West like the heroine, along with Jimmy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rescue_(Doctor_Who)"title="The Rescue (Doctor Who)">
The First Doctor (William Hartnell), Ian Chesterton (William Russell), and Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill) are still missing the Doctor's granddaughter Susan Foreman when the TARDIS lands on a planet the Doctor eventually recognises as Dido, a world he has visited before. The trio soon encounter two survivors of a space crash, Vicki (Maureen O'Brien) and Bennett (Ray Barrett), who are awaiting a rescue ship that is due to arrive in three days time. Vicki and Bennett live in fear of Koquillion (Barrett), a bipedal inhabitant of Dido, who is stalking the area. Koquillion encounters the time travellers and attacks, pushing Barbara over a cliff and temporarily trapping Ian and the Doctor. Vicki finds Barbara injured and rescues her from Koquillion, and they share reminiscences. Vicki's father was among those who died when the survivors of the crash, save Bennett and Vicki, were lured to their deaths by the natives of Dido. She is evidently very lonely, having befriended an indigenous Sand Beast (Tom Sheridan) for company. However, when Ian and the Doctor reach the ship, tempers are fraught because Barbara mistook the Sand Beast for a threat and killed it.The Doctor enters Bennett's room, and finds things are not as they seem. The supposedly crippled Bennett is missing, and a tape recorder hides his absence. He finds a trap door in the floor of the cabin and follows it to a temple carved from rock where he unmasks Koquillion as Bennett. Bennett reveals he killed a crewmember on board the ship and was arrested, but the ship crashed before the crime could be radioed to Earth. It was he who killed the crash survivors and the natives of Dido to cover his crime. He has been using the Koquillion alias so that Vicki would back up his story, and had hoped the planet would be destroyed when his version of events was given. Just as Bennett is about to kill the Doctor, two surviving native Didonians arrive and force Bennett to his death over a ledge. They then stop the signal to prevent the Rescue Ship reaching their planet. With no living family and nothing left for her on Dido, Vicki is welcomed aboard the TARDIS.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Romans_(Doctor_Who)"title="The Romans (Doctor Who)">
A month after the TARDIS fell off a cliff, the First Doctor (William Hartnell), Ian Chesterton (William Russell), Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill), and Vicki (Maureen O'Brien) are relaxing in an unoccupied Roman villa. The Doctor and Vicki leave the villa to travel to Rome. Ian and Barbara stay behind, but are soon kidnapped by slave traders and sold into slavery. Barbara is sold to a statesman in the court of Emperor Nero named Tavius (Michael Peake) as handmaiden to Nero's wife Poppaea Sabina (Kay Patrick), whilst Ian is confined to a galley on the Mediterranean.En route to Rome, the Doctor is mistaken for a dead lyre player named Maximus Pettulian (Brian Proudfoot), and decides to assume his identity after being attacked by an assassin. The Doctor and Vicki arrive in Rome and encounter Tavius, who implies that both he and Pettulian are a part of a conspiracy. Ian's galley runs into rough seas and is broken up, washing him ashore with another survivor of the galley named Delos (Peter Diamond). The pair head to Rome in search of Barbara, only to be captured and taken to be trained as gladiators.Nero (Derek Francis) organises a banquet in the Doctor's honour, at which he must play the lyre. Poppaea is angered by Nero's attempts to flirt with Barbara and attempts to poison her, which fails due to Vicki having switched the poisoned goblet. The Doctor makes no noise when playing the lyre, claiming that only those with sensitive hearing can hear the music. Nero is angered, and decides to have the Doctor fed to the lions. At the arena, Ian and Delos fight their way out, attempting to reunite with Barbara. Nero calls off his soldiers, planning to have Ian killed when he returns to rescue Barbara.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarecrow_(novel)"title="Scarecrow (novel)">
Majestic-12, a group of the world's richest men, make up a bounty list of fifteen targets that have to be eliminated before 12 noon of October 26. Among the targets is Shane Schofield, who at that moment is on a mission in Siberia with Book II and a group of U.S. Marines. Schofield's team is supposed to meet up with two Delta groups, the leaders of which are also on M-12's hit list. Schofield's unit comes under fire from a group of bounty hunters led by Cedric Wexley and all but Schofield and Book II are killed. Schofield and Book II escape via a hijacked plane owned by a bounty hunter known as the Hungarian.Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, Schofield's girlfriend Elizabeth Gant leads a group of Marines, along with Mother, to a cave system where Osama bin Laden's number two man is. Schofield races to Afghanistan to find Gant so that none of the bounty hunters can use her to get to him, but arrives too late to save her and she gets captured by a bounty hunter group known as IG-88, led by Damon "Demon" Larkham. Schofield meets a bounty hunter named Aloysius Knight who has been paid to protect him and teams up with him. Knight and Schofield go to save Gant while Book II and Mother go to London to confront another person on the hit list.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anvil_of_Stars"title="Anvil of Stars">
There are two interwoven themes in the novel. The first is the cost of justice. Destroying the race that attempted to destroy humanity (and, it is later revealed, other races) appears to be a simple matter of retaliation. The Killers, when they are discovered, have formidable philosophical defenses in addition to their vast technological resources. They have created hundreds of sapient races, interlocked in a culture of breathtaking complexity and beauty. The execution of justice falls to children of the destroyed planets. Those from Earth base their on-ship culture on Peter Pan, calling themselves Wendys and Lost Boys.It is revealed once the Leviathan system is destroyed that the Killers were in fact still in the system, and had continued to manufacture fleets of self-replicating machines to destroy alien races. However, while the Killers were destroyed and justice served, trillions of what were likely innocents had to die to accomplish this. Bear leaves the human crew torn between relief that their work is complete and their guilt that they were little better than those they had come to destroy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drowned_World"title="The Drowned World">
In the mid 22nd Century, sudden violent and prolonged solar storms enlarge the Van Allen belts, leading to a deterioration of the Earth's ionosphere. Solar radiation bombards the planet, increasing temperatures, raising sea levels and imposing a tropical climate worldwide. With most of the planet no longer habitable for humans, the survivors migrate to the newly-hospitable poles.In 2145, Dr Robert Kerans is part of a scientific survey unit under the leadership of Colonel Riggs sent to catalogue the flora and fauna of a lagoon located within what was once the city of London. The members of the expedition begin to experience strange dreams. Amidst talk of the army and scientific team moving north, Lieutenant Hardman, the only other commissioned member of the unit, flees the lagoon and instead heads south; a search team is unable to prevent his escape.As the other inhabitants of the lagoon finally flee the searing sun and head north, Kerans and two associates, the reclusive Beatrice Dahl and fellow scientist Dr Alan Bodkin, opt to remain. A team of pirates, led by an individual named Strangman, arrives to loot treasures within the deep. When Strangman and his team drain the lagoon and expose the city beneath, both Kerans and Bodkin are disgusted; the latter attempts to blow up the flood defences and re-flood the area, but without success. With Kerans and Beatrice resigned to their fate, Strangman pursues Bodkin and kills him in revenge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_of_the_Fendahl"title="Image of the Fendahl">
In a priory near the village of Fetchborough, four scientists, Adam Colby, Max Stael, Thea Ransome and Dr. Fendelman, are doing tests on a human skull they found in Kenya, apparently twelve million years old. When Dr. Fendelman starts using a sonic time scan, trying to get an image of the owner of the skull, the skull itself seems to react, locking onto Thea and releasing something in the priory grounds that kills a passing hiker, who eventually totally disintegrates.The scan catches the attention of the Fourth Doctor and Leela when they are pulled down to Earth by it. They set off to find it before it creates a continuum implosion and destroys the planet. They separate and Leela finds the cottage of ‘Mother’ Tyler, a local modern-day witch gifted with psychic powers. The Doctor ends up narrowly avoiding death at the hands of the creature created by the skull, which then kills the leader of a detachment of guards Fendelman has brought in after the death of the hiker, sealing everyone into the priory.Ma Tyler then encounters the creature but survives and is saved from going into psychic shock by the Doctor, who by this time has worked out that the thing is a Fendahleen, a creature from his planet's mythology, supposedly destroyed when the Fifth Planet broke up. He makes his way into the priory and finds the skull, which tries to kill him. Leela saves him and they go off to the Fifth Planet, only to find that the Time Lords sealed the planet in a Time Loop, making all proper records invisible even to them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invisible_Enemy_(Doctor_Who)"title="The Invisible Enemy (Doctor Who)">
Some human space travellers are cruising near the outer planets of the solar system with their ship on autopilot. The TARDIS is travelling through the same region. The crews of both ships are infected by a sentient virus which chooses The Doctor to be the host of its "mind," the Nucleus of the Swarm. The Nucleus declares Leela a reject and orders her killed. The Doctor manages to break free of his infection and tells Leela how to get the TARDIS to the nearest medical centre. At the medical station, the Doctor's doctor, Professor Marius, introduces the group to K9, a robotic dog he made to replace the real dog he had to leave on Earth.Leela and the Doctor decide to create clones of themselves, which will then be shrunk and inserted into the Doctor. There they will destroy the Nucleus and escape through a tear duct. In the meantime, Leela and K9 fight off the infected staff of the hospital. The plan goes awry, allowing the Nucleus to escape and become human sized. The Nucleus and the infected staff leave for Titan Base so the Nucleus can spawn.The Doctor realises he is cured since Leela's clone introduced her immunity factor into his bloodstream. He replicates it and gives it to Prof. Marius. The Doctor, Leela, and K9 proceed to Titan Base in the TARDIS.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keeper_of_Traken"title="The Keeper of Traken">
In the TARDIS, the Fourth Doctor and Adric arrive back in N-Space following the events of "Warriors' Gate" in an area known as the Traken Union, an empire of peace and harmony. They are surprised to find a holographic image of the elderly Keeper of Traken appear in the TARDIS, calling on the Doctor's help. The Keeper explains that his title is about to pass on soon to Consul Tremas, giving him access to the powerful Source that is the centre of Traken's technological advancement, but senses evil within him, his wife Kassia, and his daughter Nyssa. The Keeper suspects a connection to Melkur, an evil creature that arrived years ago on Traken but became calcified in a grove in the capital. Melkur has since become something of a holy symbol, and Kassia has been tasked with talking to it and keeping it clean; that task is soon to be passed on to Nyssa.When the Doctor and Adric land at Traken's capital and visit the Keeper, their presence appears to cause the Keeper to warn the assembled group of a great evil, and though Tremas vouches for them, others, including the Fosters, guardians of the spiritual welfare of the capital, remain cautious about their presence. Soon, bodies in the grove are found, the Doctor and Adric determining they have been killed by some type of plasma weapon. Adric works with Nyssa to identify the energy signature of the plasma as being from a TARDIS, while the Doctor assists Tremas in defusing the conflict over their presence. Unbeknownst to either group, Kassia secretly visits Melkur, who gives her a collar to wear, providing the creature with mind-control over her while promising to keep her husband safe. Kassia is able to convince the Fosters to arrest Tremas, the Doctor, Adric and Nyssa, and uses the situation to convince the other Consul to install her as the next Keeper. When the Keeper dies, Kassia takes the throne, but as the pivotal moment of the ceremony is completed, she disappears, leaving the statue of Melkur in her place, now connected to the Source.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Makers"title="The Sun Makers">
The Fourth Doctor and Leela arrive on the planet Pluto just in time to prevent one of its citizens, Cordo, from committing suicide over his energy bill. The monopolistic energy company on Pluto is using its economic stranglehold to extract ever growing taxes and those who refuse to pay are forced to live in the dark tunnels of the Undercity. The Doctor, Leela and Cordo venture to the Undercity, where they encounter thieves and dropouts led by the brutal Mandrel. Mandrel tells the Doctor that he must use a stolen card to obtain money from a cashpoint or Leela will be killed. When the Doctor tries the stolen card, he trips a security system which floods the cashpoint chamber with noxious gas and he falls unconscious.When the Doctor awakes, he is in a Correction Centre alongside another detainee, Bisham. The Doctor is released by Gatherer Hade, who wants his movements tracked, believing the Doctor will lead him to the heart of a conspiracy against the Company. Leela, Cordo and K9 attack the Correction Centre and are taken prisoner by the Collector's personal guard.The Doctor, Cordo, Bisham, and K9 return to the Undercity and persuade the Undercity dwellers to revolt. Their first target is the main control area where the Company engineers PCM, a fear-inducing drug piped into the air supply which helps keep the population servile.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_Fire"title="Planet of Fire">
On the desert world of Sarn, robed natives worship the fire god Logar and follow the Chief Elder, Timanov, who demands obedience. Dissenters are known as Unbelievers and two of them, Amyand and Roskal, cause unrest when they claim to have ventured to the top of the sacred fire mountain but not found Logar. One of the Sarns, Malkon, is known as the Chosen One because of the unusual double triangle symbol burnt into his skin: he is also unusual for having been found as a baby on the slopes of the sacred fire mountain.The same triangle symbol is found on a metal artefact uncovered in an archaeological dig in Lanzarote overseen by Professor Howard Foster. His stepdaughter Peri Brown is bored with the dig and wants to go travelling in Morocco and when he seeks to prevent this she steals the strange artefact and tries to swim for freedom. Fortunately for her the TARDIS has landed nearby—responding to a distress call sent by the strange artefact—and Turlough sees her drowning and rescues her. Going through her possessions as she recovers he finds the artefact and acknowledges the same triangle symbol is burnt into his own flesh. The Fifth Doctor returns to the TARDIS after attempting to find the source of the signal emitted by the artefact, and the ship dematerialises, seemingly on its own. It arrives on Sarn and the Doctor and Turlough set off to explore.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underworld_(Doctor_Who)"title="Underworld (Doctor Who)">
In the history of the Time Lords, their involvement with the Minyans of Minyos is regarded as a disaster. The Minyans looked on them as gods but, having learnt much from their science, later expelled the Time Lords, who thereafter adopted a policy of non-intervention. The Minyans resented the Time Lords for their dominion over Minyos. Subsequently, the Minyans engaged in a civil war, using the advanced weapons the Time Lords gave them. In the final conflict, the Minyans destroyed their world. Two ships left Minyos before the final conflict, one carrying the race bank of the Minyans, the other intended to find the race bank and bring the Minyans to a new homeworld - Minyos II. The Minyan civilisation retained some Time Lord gifts, including cellular rejuvenation and the use of pacifier guns to alter the mental state of the aggressor.At the edge of the expanding universe, the TARDIS materialises on a Minyan ship, the R1C. The Fourth Doctor, Leela and K9 visit the bridge of the ship. The crew – Jackson, Herrick, Orfe and Tala – are on a quest (“The Quest is the Quest”) that has taken many millennia and they have rejuvenated many times. Their aim is to find the missing ship, the P7E, which disappeared en route to Minyos II while carrying the genetic race banks of the entire species. They have finally traced the P7E’s signal and head into a spiral nebula to locate the ship. In the process the R1C is nearly destroyed, and is almost transformed into the core of a planetoid as small space rocks are attracted to it. A similar fate actually seems to have happened to the P7E, which is found at the centre of a small planet. The R1C crashes into this planet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crusade_(Doctor_Who)"title="The Crusade (Doctor Who)">
The TARDIS materialises in 12th century Palestine during the time of the Third Crusade. When the First Doctor (William Hartnell), Ian Chesterton (William Russell), Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill), and Vicki (Maureen O'Brien) emerge, they find themselves in the middle of a Saracen ambush. In the confusion, Barbara is seized by a Saracen from behind while the rest of the TARDIS crew stop the attackers from killing William de Tornebu (Bruce Wightman), an associate of Richard the Lionheart (Julian Glover). Barbara and William des Preaux (John Flint) are presented to Saladin's brother Saphadin (Roger Avon) by El Akir (Walter Randall), who mistakenly believes them to be King Richard and his sister Lady Joanna. When des Preaux reveals their true identities, El Akir is furious; before he can act, Saladin (Bernard Kay) emerges and is intrigued by Barbara. He invites her to entertain him with her stories at supper.Ian, anxious to rescue Barbara, asks for the King's help, but the irritated monarch tells Ian that Barbara can remain with Saladin until her death. De Tornebu and the Doctor are able to convince the King to change his mind. Ian is knighted so that he may serve as an emissary; he is sent to Saladin's court to both request the release of des Preaux and Barbara, and to offer the hand of the real Lady Joanna (Jean Marsh) in marriage to Saphadin in order to create peace. This makes Joanna indignant and she refuses her consent. Ian delivers his message to Saladin, after which Saladin grants Ian leave to search for Barbara. During his search, Ian is attacked by bandits and knocked out. One of the bandits, Ibrahim (Tutte Lemkow), ties him down with stakes in the hot sun and daubs him with honey, aiming to kill him via scaphism. Barbara twice escapes from El Akir's capture, hiding out in the Emir's harem on the second occasion. El Akir tries to find Barbara, but she is hidden by a sympathetic harem girl named Maimuna (Sandra Hampton).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Museum"title="The Space Museum">
The TARDIS arrives near a vast Space Museum on the planet Xeros, but has jumped a time-track. The First Doctor (William Hartnell), Ian Chesterton (William Russell), Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill), and Vicki (Maureen O'Brien) have a series of bizarre experiences as they venture outside and into the Museum; they see but cannot be seen by the militaristic Moroks who run the museum, and the servile indigenous Xerons who work for them. The museum contains fascinating exhibits, including a Dalek shell, and the four travellers discover that they and the TARDIS are on display. A few moments later, the time track slips back and the exhibit with themselves and the TARDIS vanish, but the travellers are still inside the Museum.The head of the Moroks, Lobos (Richard Shaw), is a bored and desperate museum administrator and colony governor, who reflects sourly that the Morok Empire has become decadent and declined. The Moroks find the TARDIS and start tracking down the occupants who have become separated. The Doctor is the first to be found, but evades their interrogation tactics. Meanwhile, Vicki has made contact with the Xerons and, hearing of their enslavement, aids them in their plans to stage a revolution. They attack the Morok armoury and Vicki outwits its controlling computer. With their new weapons, the Xerons are able to begin a revolution, which slowly takes hold.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_(Doctor_Who)"title="The Chase (Doctor Who)">
While companions Ian Chesterton (William Russell) and Vicki (Maureen O'Brien) explore the Sagarro Desert on the planet Aridius, the First Doctor (William Hartnell) and Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill) remain in the TARDIS. On the Time-Space Visualiser, they see the Daleks embarking on a plan to follow the TARDIS to Aridius to exterminate the Doctor and his companions and seize his ship. Realising that these events happened in the past and that the Daleks may already be on Aridius, the Doctor and Barbara venture out to warn Ian and Vicki, only to see Daleks emerging from the sands after a dust storm. The Doctor and Barbara are saved by native Aridians and reunited with Vicki and Ian, who were injured after an encounter with Mire Beasts. The Beasts attack again and, in the confusion, the Doctor and his friends flee to the TARDIS, evading Daleks who had discovered it buried in the sand.The Daleks pursue the TARDIS through time and space in their own vessel. The Doctor and companions stop atop the Empire State Building in New York City in 1966; after they leave, a Dalek appears. They are later mistaken for stowaways on the "Mary Celeste" until the Daleks arrive and the frightened boat crew abandon the ship. Subsequently, landing in a mysterious old house, the Doctor and his companions encounter Dracula (Malcolm Rogers) and Frankenstein's monster (John Maxim), who attack the pursuing Daleks. In the confusion, the Doctor, Ian, and Barbara leave Vicki behind, unaware the monsters were actually robots in a defunct futuristic theme park attraction. Vicki stows away aboard the Dalek ship and witnesses them create an android replica of the Doctor (Edmund Warwick), programmed to kill the TARDIS crew, which is dispatched on arrival on the hostile jungle world of Mechanus. Vicki reunites with the Doctor, Ian, and Barbara, but a fight ensues between Ian and the real Doctor once the robot duplicate appears, claiming to be the original. When the robot Doctor mistakenly refers to Vicki as his granddaughter Susan, Barbara realises and the real Doctor disables his doppelgänger.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meglos"title="Meglos">
The Prion star system contains two habitable planets which have supported civilisations: Zolfa-Thura, a desert world devoid seemingly of life structures bar five giant screens; and Tigella, a jungle world inhabited by the humanoid, white haired Tigellans. The structure of Tigellan society is based on two castes: the scientific Savants, led by the earnest Deedrix, and the religiously fanatical Deons, led by Lexa. The latter worship the Dodecahedron, a mysterious twelve-sided crystal which they see as a gift from the god Ti. The Savants, however, have utilised its power as an energy source for their entire civilisation. The planet’s leader, Zastor, mediates between the two factions, whose tensions have grown greater as the energy source has begun to fluctuate. When Zastor’s old friend the Doctor gets in touch, the weary leader invites him back to Tigella to investigate and help. When the Fourth Doctor, Romana, and K9 try to land the TARDIS on Tigella they are trapped in a time loop (which they call a chronic hysteresis), causing them to repeat a small "pocket of time" over and over again.The culprit is Meglos, the last Zolfa-Thuran, a cactus creature who has remained hidden below the surface of his planet in a secret structure. He has summoned a band of space pirates called Gaztaks to help him in an audacious plan. Meglos wants to steal the Dodecahedron back from Tigella, as it is a Zolfa-Thuran energy source of immense power. To aid him, Meglos uses an Earthling captured for him by the Gaztaks to occupy and take on humanoid form: and the humanoid form he chooses is the Doctor, whom he has trapped in the bubble. While the hysteresis persists Meglos gets the Gaztaks to take him to Tigella, and infiltrates the city in his new identity. Zastor greets “the Doctor” warmly as an old friend, asking him to examine the Dodecahedron, but others are less sure, especially Lexa.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Circle_(Doctor_Who)"title="Full Circle (Doctor Who)">
En route to Gallifrey, the TARDIS passes through a strange phenomenon and ends up in an alternative universe called E-Space, where a small but sustainable civilisation of humanoids called Alzarians live between a river and a grounded spaceship, "Starliner". It is an oligarchy ruled by three senior colonists known as Deciders. A sudden series of irregular events are interpreted by Decider Draith as a bad omen and the colonists move into the Starliner to protect themselves. One of the younger colonists, Adric, watches Draith drown in the river. His last words are "Tell Dexeter we've come full circle!" Adric heads into the forest in panic, finding the TARDIS, where the Doctor and Romana take him in.The other Deciders order the Starliner sealed and select a new Decider. Humanoid Marshmen and scuttling Marshspiders begin to appear. The Doctor gains entry to the Starliner, followed by a Marshchild. Both are found and taken to the Three Deciders. The Doctor is appalled when chief scientist Dexeter starts to perform vivisection experiments on the Marshchild.Romana is bitten by a Marshspider and starts to change, seemingly possessed. The Doctor uses a protein serum to cure her and they determine the ship has been maintained for 40,000 generations by a species that has three aspects: spiders, Marshmen, and Alzarians. They are all the same species and thus have come "full circle."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_to_Doomsday"title="Four to Doomsday">
The TARDIS materialises on board a vast and advanced spacecraft, observed by a hovering spherical surveillance device which conveys the arrival of the crew to an observing being in control of the vessel. The TARDIS crew become separated and the Fifth Doctor and Tegan reach the bridge where the green-skinned commander introduces himself as Monarch, ruler of Urbanka, and his associates and fellow Urbankans are the Ministers of Enlightenment and Persuasion. The leader is intrigued by talk of current Earth civilisation and reveals their ship is bound for Earth. Shortly afterwards Enlightenment and Persuasion assume human forms, dressed in garments Tegan designed to demonstrate contemporary Earth fashions.The TARDIS crew are reunited as guests, and it soon becomes apparent that there are four distinct human cultures represented on the vessel by a small group of humans – Ancient Greeks, the leader of whom is the philosopher Bigon; Chinese Mandarins and their leader Lin Futu; Princess Villagra and representatives of the Maya peoples; and Kurkutji and his tribesmen, of a very ancient Australian Aboriginal culture. The Urbankans have made periodic visits to Earth, each time getting speedier in their journeys. This time they have left their homeworld after erratic solar activity, storing three billion of their species on slides aboard their craft. It seems that the current journey is their last and that they now wish to settle on Earth, which they are due to reach in four days.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_of_Fools"title="Conspiracy of Fools">
"Conspiracy of Fools" tells the story of the 2001 collapse of Enron. Enron's Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Andrew Fastow is depicted as voraciously greedy, using front corporations and partnerships, paying himself "management" and "consultant" fees as if he were an outsider, all while cooking Enron's books to show fictitious profits. In the 1980s there were questionable activities at the company, but the bulk of the events depicted in the book occur from 1997 onward and led to Enron's collapse.In addition to Fastow, there are stories of the complicity of Enron's auditors (at Arthur Andersen), their lawyers (internal and external), the senior management (Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling), Fastow's partner in many of his deals, Michael Kopper, and Enron's board of directors.The picture that emerges of Enron is that of an out-of-control corporate culture that ignored the basic principles of business, allowing it to be manipulated by greedy incompetents for their own personal gain. The focus on reporting profits — rather than actually making money — created a situation that both encouraged and enabled a small group of insider criminals to game the system. Enron's business losses were masked by accounting tricks, while the insiders raked off huge "profits" and bonuses for themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thud!"title="Thud!">
As the book opens, a dwarf demagogue, Grag Hamcrusher, is apparently murdered. Ethnic tensions between Ankh-Morpork's troll and dwarf communities mount in the build-up to the anniversary of the Battle Of Koom Valley, an ancient battle where trolls and dwarfs seemingly ambushed each other. Lord Vetinari persuades Commander Vimes to interview a vampire applicant to the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. The new recruit, Lance-Constable Salacia "Sally" von Humpeding, along with Sergeant Angua and Captain Carrot, is attached to the investigation surrounding Hamcrusher's death.Meanwhile, Corporal Nobbs and Sergeant Colon begin an investigation into the theft of the fifty-foot painting, "The Battle of Koom Valley" by the insane artist Methodia Rascal, from a city art gallery. Most of the populace believe the painting holds clues to a treasure hidden in Koom Valley. Nobbs has a new girlfriend, exotic dancer Tawneee; Nobby first caught her eye when slipping an IOU into her garter. Other subplots involve the tension between vampires and werewolves (new recruit Lance-Constable von Humpeding and Sergeant Angua), and the presence of Vetinari's auditor, A.E. Pessimal, in the Watch House.Vimes finds himself pressured by Lord Vetinari to solve the murder quickly, before inter-species war erupts in Ankh-Morpork. Vimes and Sergeant Angua visit the dwarves' under-city mine, where a nervous dwarf named Helmclever draws a mysterious sign in the spilled coffee on his desk. In a fit of his particular brand of omnidirectional anger, Vimes veers off into the mine where he cuts himself, he supposes, on a locked door. Later, he persuades the deep down dwarves to allow Captain Carrot to be the "smelter" who looks for the truth of the murder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnabout_(novel)"title="Turnabout (novel)">
In the year 2000, 100-year-old Amelia Hazelwood was living in a nursing home, sick and tired of life. Content to die, she signs a document given to her by doctors at the nursing home with very little awareness as to what it is. However, she gradually begins to change soon afterward, beginning with the realization that she no longer needs her hearing aid and is able to swing her legs over the side of her bed again.She quickly learns that she and several other nursing home residents had signed an agreement with Dr. Jimson and Dr. Reed to participate in a study for an experimental drug (PT-1) that reverses the effect of aging by making telomeres grow. All the residents at the nursing home had been given the drug and are now growing younger each day. However, because the drug is experimental, it must be kept a secret. While a second chance at life seems wonderful, when Amelia's first birthday while moving back in time arrives, she finds she cannot remember anything from the last year of her life when she was growing older. The residents realize that as they grow younger, their previous memories are disappearing and being rewritten with new memories from growing younger, even though the brain has plenty of chromosomes left for memory. It's then found out that it's like recording while hitting the rewind button. One man, afraid of forgetting his beloved wife's funeral where so many people said such nice things, is the first to request the Cure, a secondary drug that will halt his age at that exact moment. While the Cure works successfully on lab mice, the man immediately shrivels up, dies, and turns into dust when it is administered to him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusalka_(novel)"title="Rusalka (novel)">
Sasha is a 15-year-old downtrodden stable boy living with his aunt and uncle at an inn they run in the town of Vojvoda. Sasha's parents had been killed in a house fire that he was accused of starting through wizardry. Pyetr is one of the town's audacious young men, and one day he is attacked and wounded by old Yurishev for having a liaison with his young wife. Pyetr escapes, but later learns that Yurishev is dead, and that he has been accused of murdering him by sorcery. Pyetr hides in the stables at the inn, and Sasha helps him leave the town. With no future for himself in Vojvoda, Sasha accompanies the wounded Pyetr.Pyetr and Sasha walk for days through fields and into a dead forest. Sasha does not believe he is a wizard, but finds he sometimes has the ability to successfully wish for things. Pyetr does not believe in wizards at all, and laughs at Sasha's wishing. Exhausted and without food, the pair find a cottage by a river. Its occupant, a wizard named Uulamets, heals Pyetr and agrees to let them stay on condition that they help him find his daughter, Eveshka, who had drowned when she was 16 and is now a rusalka. Pyetr is suspicious of Uulamets and does not believe in rusalkas. Later, while the three of them are searching for Eveshka, she makes herself visible to Pyetr, overpowers him, and leads him into the forest. Rusalkas are renowned for drowning men they have chosen, but Eveshka abandons Pyetr and disappears again. Uulamets and Sasha find Pyetr unharmed, but are attacked by Hwiuur, a shapeshifting vodyanoi, known to drown people who go too close to the water.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(poem)"title="Don Juan (poem)">
## Canto I.In Spain. Don Juan lives in Seville with his father, Don José, and his mother, Donna Inez. The romantic Donna Julia, the twenty-three-year-old wife of Don Alfonso, fancies and lusts for the sixteen-year-old boy Don Juan. Despite attempting to resist his charms, Julia enters into a love affair with Juan, and falls in love. Suspecting his wife's infidelity, Don Alfonso bursts into their bedroom, followed by his bodyguards who find no-one and nothing suspicious upon searching their master's bedroom, for Juan was hiding in the bed; Don Alfonso and his posse leave the room. Later returning alone to his bedroom, Don Alfonso comes across Juan's shoes and they fight for the woman, Donna Julia. Breaking off the fight with Don Alfonso, Don Juan escapes. To thwart rumours and the consequent bad reputation that her son has brought upon himself, Donna Inez sends Don Juan away to travel Europe, in hope that he develop a better sense of morality. The cuckold Don Alfonso punishes his faithless wife, Donna Julia, by interning her to a nunnery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Artemis_Fowl_Files"title="The Artemis Fowl Files">
Artemis Fowl lures Mulch Diggums, a dwarf, to work with him to steal a tiara for a laser he is developing. A band of other dwarfs, using a circus as their cover have already stolen the tiara. The other dwarfs, led by Sergei the Significant, are planning to sell it to a jewellery fence. Captain Holly Short is on a break pending a tribunal after the Fowl Manor Incident, but Foaly tells her that the LEP have been alerted by Mulch Diggum's stolen helmet, about Artemis Fowl. Holly immediately heads to Ireland and confronts the dwarfs. Soon after Holly has tagged all of the dwarfs in Sergei's band, she chases Artemis and Mulch. Mulch and Artemis soon split with Artemis promising to write Mulch a cheque for the tiara. Holly chases after Artemis and demands the tiara and a LEP helmet from him. Artemis gives her the LEP helmet but keeps the tiara. Holly forces Artemis to give her the tiara, and then he hands it over. Later on we learn that Artemis switched the gemstone in the tiara with a fake one. He gives the real one to his mother because it reminds her of Artemis's father, specifically, the color of his eyes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bluest_Eye"title="The Bluest Eye">
In Lorain, Ohio, nine-year-old Claudia MacTeer and her 10-year-old sister Frieda live with their parents, a tenant named Mr. Henry, and Pecola Breedlove, a temporary foster child whose house was burned down by her unstable, alcoholic, and sexually abusive father. Pecola is a quiet, passive young girl who grows up with little money and whose parents are constantly fighting, both verbally and physically. Pecola is continually reminded of what an "ugly" girl she is by members of her neighborhood and school community. In an attempt to beautify herself, Pecola wishes for blue eyes. Additionally, most chapters' titles are extracts from the "Dick and Jane" paragraph in the novel's prologue, presenting a white family that may be contrasted with Pecola's. The chapter titles contain sudden repetition of words or phrases, many cut-off words, and no interword separations.The novel, through flashbacks, explores the younger years of both of Pecola's parents, Cholly and Pauline, and their struggles as African Americans in a largely White Anglo-Saxon Protestant community. Pauline now works as a servant for a wealthier white family. One day in the novel's present time, while Pecola is doing dishes, drunk Cholly rapes her. His motives are largely confusing, seemingly a combination of both love and hate. After raping her a second time, he flees, leaving her pregnant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernevog"title="Chernevog">
"Chernevog" begins three years after the conclusion of "Rusalka". Sasha, Pyetr and Eveshka are living in Uulamets' cottage; Sasha is 18 and a young wizard, and Pyetr and Eveshka are married. Chernevog is still asleep in the forest, guarded by the leshys, but Sasha and Eveshka have disturbing dreams about him waking up. One day Sasha and Pyetr find that Eveshka has disappeared, and they set off to find her. They suspect that she may have gone to confront Chernevog, who still controls their lives.Sasha and Pyetr travel into the forest and find Chernevog still asleep. Pyetr tries to kill him once and for all, but an owl, a childhood friend of Chernevog's whom he gave his heart to, attacks Pyetr. Pyetr kills the owl and Chernevog regains his heart, which wakes him up. Chernevog had given away his heart to free his conscience, enabling him to practise magic freely. Sasha has learnt that Chernevog had rejected Uulamets' teachings of wizardry, which works within nature and considers the consequences of wishes, and turned to magic, which taps dark forces and is not concerned with laws of nature. Pyetr tries to kill Chernevog again, but Sasha stops him. With his heart, Chernevog's actions are limited and Sasha is able to control him. Sasha and Pyetr resume their search for Eveshka, taking Chernevog with them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yvgenie"title="Yvgenie">
"Yvgenie" begins 15 years after the conclusion of "Chernevog". Pyetr, Eveshka, Sasha and Ilyana, Eveshka and Pyetr's 15-year-old wizard daughter, live in Uulamets' cottage. One day they are alarmed to discover that Ilyana has befriended a ghost, whom they suspect may be Chernevog. They explain to Ilyana who Chernevog is and the dangers he and his vodyanoi partner, Hwiuur pose to them all.Later, during a storm, Ilyana rescues a half-drowned boy, Yvgenie from the swollen river. He has no memory of where he came from, but when she brings him home, he is locked up in case he is Chernevog. Ilyana, believing that Pyetr and Sasha are going to kill Yvgenie, uses wizardry to overpower them and frees Yvgenie. Having lost one friend she is determined not to lose another and runs off with him. Eveshka, Pyetr and Sasha pursue Ilyana and Yvgenie into the forest.Fleeing with Yvgenie, Ilyana discovers that he "is" possessed by Chernevog's ghost, and that Chernevog had revived the drowned boy and occupied his body. Periodically Yvgenie's shy demeanor is replaced by Chernevog's commanding presence. Ilyana has sympathies for both the boy she rescued and her ghost friend, and lets Chernevog lead them through the forest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ark_(Doctor_Who)"title="The Ark (Doctor Who)">
At least ten million years in the future the TARDIS materialises on a vast spacecraft with its own miniature zoo and arboretum. The First Doctor and Steven are explaining the basics of their time travel ability to their new companion Dodo Chaplet when she starts to show signs of a cold. The three are taken to the control chamber of the vessel by the mute single-eyed Monoids. The Monoids live in peace alongside the humans who command the spaceship, their own planet having been destroyed, but they often do much of the menial work. The humans explain that the Earth is about to be destroyed because of the expansion of the Sun, and that the ship is an "Ark" sent into space with the last remnants of humanity, civilisation, and various flora and fauna. The human Guardians in charge of the craft run a tight ship: failure to conform to their rules means either death or miniaturisation until they reach their destination, an Earth-like planet called Refusis II, which takes nearly 700 years to get to. As an amusement during the journey a vast statue is being carved by hand, depicting a human being.Dodo's cold spreads among the Monoid and human populations, who have little natural immunity. When the Commander of the Ark collapses with the malady Zentos, the Deputy Commander, assumes that the travellers have deliberately infected the ship and places the whole ship on alert. After a trial, during which Steven collapses with the fever, Zentos orders the execution of the Doctor, Steven and Dodo, but the ailing Commander intervenes to protect them and permits them access to medical equipment to devise a cure. The Doctor is able to recreate the cold vaccine from the membranes of animals on the craft, and this is administered to the crew. The Commander, Steven and the others who have been infected are soon on the road to recovery. Their work done, the trio observe the end of Earth on the long-range scanner before the Doctor leads them back to the TARDIS.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Valley_of_Horses"title="The Valley of Horses">
The book starts off from the events at the end of "The Clan of the Cave Bear" detailing the life of a young Cro-Magnon woman named Ayla who has just been exiled from the Clan, the band of Neanderthals who had raised her from early childhood. Ayla now searches for her own people, whom the Clan refer to as "the Others".In a parallel narrative, Jondalar, a young Cro-Magnon man of "the Ninth Cave of the Zelandonii", accompanies his impetuous younger half-brother Thonolan on a traditional rite of passage called the Great Journey. In these episodes, we learn of the Cro-Magnon's paleolithic nature religion, centered on the worship of the "Great Mother of All", and follow their adventures and sexual exploits. It is also through these episodes that the animosity, verging on hatred, between the Others and the Clan (whom they refer to derogatorily as "flatheads") is introduced. The Others have repeatedly persecuted the Clan, taking land and resources, but justify it by classing them as animals. However, over the course of his adventures, Jondalar starts to question this prejudice, noting that no other animals have fire, tools or communicate intelligently, nor are they actively hated or attacked-as-sport by his people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_Eyes"title="Tiger Eyes">
Davis “Davey” Wexler, along with her mother, Gwen, and her little brother, Jason, have just attended the funeral of her father, Adam, who was shot to death in a holdup at their 7-Eleven convenience store in Atlantic City. After lying in bed for days on end and not eating, Davey starts her tenth year of school, but faints on her first day from anxiety. She goes for a checkup, and the doctor explains Davey is having panic attacks. Davey's mother, Gwen, decides they need to get away for awhile and takes up an offer from Adam's older sister, Bitsy, and his brother-in-law Walter to come stay with them in Los Alamos, New Mexico. A few days before they are scheduled to return to Atlantic City, Gwen receives news their store has been further vandalized, and she decides they're going to stay in Los Alamos through the end of the school year.Bitsy and Walter, who were unable to have children, start treating Davey and Jason like their own kids, which causes tension between them and Davey. They're overprotective, and Davey becomes more upset when her mother just sits back and allows them to parent her. During this time, Gwen gets a job at the Los Alamos National Laboratory as a temp. She begins seeing a therapist named Miriam and convinces Davey to see her as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_of_Angels"title="Knowledge of Angels">
Jill Paton Walsh writesAt opposite ends of Grandinsula, a remote pre-reformation Christian island, shepherds find a creature with strange footprints stealing their lambs, and fishermen find a swimmer near exhaustion struggling towards the shore. The child cannot stand, eat or speak like a human being; the swimmer says he is a prince in the unheard of land of Aclar, and declares himself to be an atheist. Severo, Cardinal and Prince of the island, is confronted by a double conundrum. Could an atheist be in good faith? Not if the knowledge of God is inborn; then the atheist must once have known God, and reneged on the knowledge. If he is a renegade from the truth, he must be burned as a heretic; but Severo would dearly like to save him. How could it be found out whether everyone has inborn knowledge of God, since the teaching of the Church as best known to the greatest scholar on the island is unclear? Perhaps by teaching the wolf-child to speak, and then asking her... That will take time. Meanwhile, it is worth while trying to demonstrate the truth of God to the mysterious atheist in argument. What becomes of the argument, of the atheist, and of the wild child, and the effect of their fates on Severo, and the islanders who come in contact with either the Prince of Aclar, or the ferocious child Amara makes up the thread of the story. This is a fable about tolerance, and its conflict with moral certainty.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mammoth_Hunters"title="The Mammoth Hunters">
This book picks up where "The Valley of Horses" ends; Ayla and Jondalar meet a group known as the Mamutoi, or Mammoth Hunters, with whom they live for a period of time. As the group's name suggests, their hosts rely on mammoth not only for food but also for building materials and a number of other commodities - and indeed for spiritual sustenance. The protagonists make their home with the Lion Camp of the Mammoth Hunters, which features a number of respected Mamutoi. Wisest of their nation is Old Mamut, their eldest shaman and the leader of the entire Mamutoi priesthood, who becomes Ayla's mentor and colleague in the visionary and esoteric fields of thought. Observing Ayla's affinity with horses and wolves, Mamut begins to introduce her into the ranks of the Mamuti (mystics).Mamut is also one of the first to become aware of Ayla's unique upbringing. Many years ago, while on the Journey that all young men take for a rite of passage, he broke his arm, and was healed by the medicine woman of Ayla's Neanderthal clan (the grandmother of Ayla's adoptive mother Iza). This story is referenced in "Clan of the Cave Bear" as the Neanderthals rationalize Ayla's behavior in terms of what they know about "the Others" (Cro-Magnon). Mamut learned some of the Clan sign language during that stay, and became aware of the fact that the Clan are human (as opposed to other animals, as is the common opinion of most of his people).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eine_Billion_Dollar"title="Eine Billion Dollar">
John Salvatore Fontanelli, the son of a shoemaker in New York who works as a pizza driver, is one day invited to the Waldorf Astoria by an Italian lawyer, where he is informed that he inherited a huge fortune simply by being the last male descendant of a wealthy Italian merchant living and working in 16th century Florence. This merchant put a rather small amount of money in a bank account some 500 years ago. Through the magic of compound interest, this sum has now grown into the equivalent of roughly 1,000,000,000,000 US dollars.In one fell swoop, John Fontanelli has become by far the richest person in the world, his net worth being bigger than the GDP of most countries. Yet, his ancestor has charged his heir with the task of using the inheritance "to give back mankind its lost future".After some hither and thither, he accepts the role assigned to him by his ancestor and tries to better the world socially and ecologically. On the advice of his mysterious new consultant, Malcolm McCaine, he founds a huge corporation called Fontanelli Enterprises and strategically invests the inherited fortune in a diversified group of projects to grow his power and influence. Starting with the hostile takeover of ExxonMobil, John Fontanelli's orders now decide the fate of other companies, currencies, and even complete countries' economies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Meddler"title="The Time Meddler">
The First Doctor (William Hartnell) and Vicki (Maureen O'Brien) find Steven Taylor (Peter Purves) aboard the TARDIS after he stumbled in during a disorientated state on Mechanus. The TARDIS lands on a rocky beach and the Doctor establishes the century from a discarded Viking helmet and heads off to the village. Steven and Vicki explore the cliffs above, witnessed by the Monk (Peter Butterworth). The TARDIS is soon after spotted by a Saxon villager, Eldred (Peter Russell), who runs to tell the headman of his village, Wulnoth (Michael Miller). The Doctor encounters Edith (Alethea Charlton), Wulnoth's wife, and convinces her that he is a harmless traveller while probing for more information. He discovers that it is 1066, since Harold Godwinson has not yet faced Harald Hardrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. At a nearby monastery, monks are heard chanting; arriving at the monastery, the Doctor finds a gramophone playing the chant. He stops the gramophone and the Monk traps him in a cell.Steven and Vicki encounter Eldred and notice he has a wristwatch, dropped by the Monk. The next morning, they are ambushed by the Saxons and taken to the village council. They convince Wulnoth they are travellers and are given provisions to travel on. Vicki is heartened to hear from Edith that she encountered the Doctor on his way to the monastery. Steven and Vicki visit the monastery, where the Monk tries to dissuade them from entering but gives himself away by describing the Doctor too accurately. Steven and Vicki break in after dark. A Viking attacks Edith, and the Saxons go hunting for the invaders. One is struck down, while his companions, Sven (David Anderson) and Ulf (Norman Hartley), flee. Eldred is badly wounded and Wulnoth takes him to the monastery for help.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_4"title="Galaxy 4">
The First Doctor (William Hartnell) and his companions Vicki (Maureen O'Brien), and Steven Taylor (Peter Purves) arrive on a silent planet and encounter short, blind, non-humanoid robots, dubbed "Chumblies" by Vicki. Before the trio decide whether the Chumblies are hostile, one of the robots is disabled by an all-female party of cloned blonde Drahvin warriors from the planet Drahva in the same galaxy as the silent planet, Galaxy 4. The Drahvins are dominated by their cruel leader, Maaga (Stephanie Bidmead), who treats her simple-minded subordinates with bullying contempt. The Drahvins are at war with the reptilian Rills, the masters of the Chumblies, and both races have crashed spaceships on this planet. According to the Drahvins, the planet will be destroyed in 14 planetary cycles and, with their ship irreparable, Maaga and her warriors seek to capture the Rill ship, which they believe has been made functional again. Maaga describes the Drahvins as the victims of the conflict with the Rills, but the Doctor has witnessed some of the Drahvin aggression and is not convinced. Using the TARDIS, he calculates the planet will break up in just two days' time. The Doctor tries to keep this new finding from the Drahvins, but Maaga forces the truth from him at the point of a gun.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plains_of_Passage"title="The Plains of Passage">
"The Plains of Passage" describes the journey of Ayla and Jondalar west along the Great Mother River (the Danube), from the home of The Mammoth Hunters (roughly modern Ukraine) to Jondalar's homeland (close to Les Eyzies, Dordogne, France). During this journey, Ayla meets the various peoples who live along their line of march. These meetings, the attitudes and beliefs of these groups, and Ayla's response form an essential part of the story.Characters range in description from innocent to bloodthirsty, from serious to comical, from noble to corrupt, from found to lost, and from peaceful to violent. All of these adjectives apply in some way to either Jondalar or Ayla. Ayla (and to some extent Jondalar) is often viewed by her new friends as mystic or supernatural, partially due to her friendships with the world's first known domesticated horses and wolf, but also due to her generous nature and wisdom.As they encounter people Jondalar and his brother met on their journey eastward they have a hard time leaving them, especially after an offer to become joined with a high-ranking Sharamudoi couple. Jondalar declines the offer, giving as excuse his desire to have the lead mystic of his people search for and help his deceased brother cross over to the other side.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shelters_of_Stone"title="The Shelters of Stone">
Central to this book is the tension created by Ayla's healing art, her pregnancy, and the acceptance of her by Jondalar's people, the Zelandonii. Ayla was raised by Clan Neanderthals, known as "flatheads" to the Zelandonii and viewed as no better than animals. For the Zelandonii to accept Ayla they must first overcome their prejudice against the Neanderthals. Luckily for Ayla and Jondalar, some of the higher-ranking Zelandonii already have doubts of this misjudgment.Two of their number, Echozar and Brukeval, are of partial Neanderthal ancestry and are ashamed of it. Echozar at least is pacified by Ayla's own story and by his (Echozar's) own marriage to Joplaya, Jondalar's close-cousin (half-sister). Brukeval, on the other hand, rejects his heritage utterly and refuses to listen to reason.Jondalar's first romantic interest, Zelandoni, formerly known as Zolena, has now become the First among the spiritual leaders. She supports adopting Ayla into their society, if not least for the healing arts she brings to the cave, although Ayla also must overcome the feeling that she is uncomfortable with a full connection with the spirit world. After Ayla helps a mortally injured hunter live long enough to see his mate, the First senses that Ayla needs to be brought into the fold of the Zelandonia (mystics, named after their culture so as to identify themselves with it) so that she will be accepted as a healer by all the people of the cave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woken_Furies"title="Woken Furies">
Takeshi Kovacs finds himself in a new "sleeve," or human body, back on his home planet of Harlan's World. He is on the run after making numerous attacks against the Knights of the New Revelation, an extremist religious order responsible for the death of his lost love and her daughter. Because she had violated tenets about resleeving, her executioners dropped her and her daughter's cortical stacks in the sea, effectively preventing them from being resleeved (into new bodies).While trying to secure passage after his most recent attack, Kovacs saves a woman named Sylvie from a group of religious zealots. In return, she allows him to take refuge with her mercenary "" crew as they head out to decommission sentient military hardware that has run amok on the island of New Hokkaido (AKA New Hok). Sylvie is the "command head" of her crew, co-ordinating them during missions by using her biologically implanted circuitry and software.During one of these missions, Sylvie collapses, regains consciousness, and Kovacs realizes that her personality seems to have been replaced by that of long-dead revolutionary leader Quellcrist Falconer. Harlan's World is surrounded by automated "orbitals" which target flying objects, such as vehicles, with high-energy beam weapons known as "angelfire;" Falconer is believed to have died without a backup of her cortical stack when her getaway aircraft was destroyed by angelfire 300 years prior.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Journey"title="The Long Journey">
The first two books take place somewhere in the primeval forests of Europe near a huge volcano. Fire glows on its summit and sometimes burning lava pours down the slopes, destroying everything in its path. For countless ages, primitive man has worshipped the fire-god in dumb terror. But at last comes the first great moment in the history of mankind: the emergence from the herd of a man with a mind and a will, a Prometheus.Fearlessly confronting the unknown, he solves the riddle of fire and brings it down on a torch to serve man. With it he lights campfires to keep off wild beasts. But he does much more. Observing the movements of the stars he infers the notion of time, the first abstract idea won from the darkness of chaos. He also takes the first step toward civilized intercourse between individuals, discovering tenderness in sexual relations, the inaugural burgeoning of what we know as love. In the end he dies a prophet's death at the hands of the obtuse masses, but he bequeathes a rich legacy to posterity.The next two books, with a second prehistoric patriarch, begins after another measureless lapse of time. The world has changed now, the volcano is extinct, the climate cooling. There is a general migration to the south. But one man sets off in the opposite direction to grapple with hardship. He is a sort of Cain, a slayer avoided by his fellow men, whom he holds in such contempt that he does not even condescend to take their god, fire, with him to the icy lands of the North. Defying the cold, he grows hardy and strong. With a woman who has somehow found her way up there he becomes the father of the Nordic race which is so dear to Jensen, who follows its destiny.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Train_Robbery_(novel)"title="The Great Train Robbery (novel)">
In 1854, master thief Edward Pierce plans to steal a shipment of gold worth more than £12,000 being transported monthly from London to the Crimean War front. The bank has locked the gold in two custom-built safes, each with two locks, thus requiring a total of four keys to open. He recruits Robert Agar, a specialist in copying keys, as an accomplice.Pierce's first target is the key held by bank president Edgar Trent. Through painstaking surveillance, conversations with bank employees and a deliberately bungled pickpocketing attempt, Pierce deduces that Trent's key is kept at his mansion. With the assistance of his longtime mistress, an actress known only as "Miss Miriam", and his loyal associate, a buck cabby named Barlow, Pierce and Agar successfully break into Trent's home and wine cellar by night and make a wax impression of the key.Bank manager Henry Fowler contracts syphilis and asks his friend Pierce to aid him in seeking a remedy: sleeping with a virgin. After supposedly making the necessary arrangements through a madam (actually "Miss Miriam") and charging Fowler the exorbitant price of one hundred fifty guineas, Pierce and Agar make an impression of Fowler's key, which he always carries with him around his neck but takes off and leaves with his clothes during the assignation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_Hearts_(novel)"title="Random Hearts (novel)">
Vivien Simpson, a housewife with a young son, and Edward Davis, an aide to a congressman, had never met before, but soon they would be inseparable. Their respective spouses, Orson and Lily, had been carrying on an affair for some time. The affair abruptly ended when their plane to Miami crashes moments after take off. Vivien believed her husband was off to Paris for business. Edward thought his wife was in L.A. Once the bodies are identified, the knowledge they were traveling together is imparted to Vivien and Edward.They are consumed with curiosity, but nobody is alive to answer their questions. All that remains of the clandestine love affair is a set of nearly unidentifiable keys; neither Vivien nor Edward knows what they belong to. They center their lives around discovering what their spouses kept from them while finding themselves slowly becoming closer to each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_to_Think_That_I_Saw_It_on_Mulberry_Street"title="And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street">
A boy named Marco, who is walking home from school, thinks of his father's advice:However, the only thing Marco has seen on his walk is a horse pulling a wagon on Mulberry Street. To make his story more interesting, Marco imagines a progressively more elaborate scene. He imagines the horse is first a zebra, then a reindeer, then an elephant, and finally, an elephant helped by two giraffes. The wagon changes to a chariot, then a sled, then a cart holding a brass band.Marco's realization that Mulberry Street intersects with Bliss Street leads him to imagine a group of police escorts. The scene becomes a parade, as he then imagines a grandstand filled with the mayor and aldermen; an airplane dropping confetti; and, in the final incarnation of the scene, a Chinese man, a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat, and a man with a ten-foot beard. Now almost home, he snaps back to reality and rushes up the front steps, eager to tell his father his imagined story. However, when his father questions him about what he saw on his way home, his face turns red and he says, "Nothing ... but a plain horse and wagon on Mulberry Street."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shampoo_Planet"title="Shampoo Planet">
## Part One.Part one begins shortly after Tyler's return from a European vacation. He is in a relationship with a girl named Anna-Louise, and dreams of working for American Defense Contractor, Bechtel. He is obsessed with his haircare products, having a collection of different brand name products, most featuring names invented by Coupland.The first part of the novel details Tyler's life in Lancaster, Washington. The town is a near ghost town, after the town's largest employer, the Plants, was shut down. The effects of the Plants' shutdown has caused many problems in the town, including the boarding up of many stores in the local mall.Tyler's family life is composed of himself, his mother, and his two siblings. He calls his mother by her first name, Jasmine. Jasmine is an ex-hippie who is married to an alcoholic man named Dan. At the very introduction of the novel, Dan divorces Jasmine. Tyler, his sister, Daisy, and his brother, Mark, band together to help Jasmine through her troubling time.Tyler's grandparents are also introduced. They are quite wealthy, but they will not share their wealth with their family members. They have decided to start selling a product satirically labeled KittyWhip, which is a gourmet cat food product line.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Orchid_(Doctor_Who)"title="Black Orchid (Doctor Who)">
11 June 1925: the TARDIS crew encounters Lord Cranleigh's chauffeur, who has been expecting "the Doctor". Lord Cranleigh asks them to stay until the annual ball and offers them costumes. They are introduced to Ann Talbot, Lord Cranleigh's fiancée, who looks identical to Nyssa. When Tegan admires a black flower, Lady Cranleigh explains it is a black orchid and was found on the Orinoco by her son, the famed botanist George Cranleigh.The Doctor picks a Harlequin outfit to wear to the ball. Ann comes to their room, presenting Nyssa with a dress identical to her own. As the Doctor prepares for the ball, a figure enters his room from a secret passage. The Doctor enters the secret passage, where he finds the dead body of one of the servants. The figure steals the Harlequin costume, joins the party, and attacks Ann Talbot. When a butler rushes to her assistance, the Harlequin strangles him to death before returning the costume to The Doctor's room.Lord Cranleigh finds the dead butler. The Doctor arrives wearing the Harlequin costume and Ann identifies him as her attacker. The Doctor is arrested for murder, his companions accused of being accessories, and all are taken to the police station. The Doctor clears his name and uses the TARDIS to return to Cranleigh Hall, where the figure has lit the place on fire and taken Nyssa hostage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_Makers"title="The Myth Makers">
The TARDIS materialises outside the city of Troy, distracting the Trojan Hector (Alan Haywood), son of King Priam (Max Adrian). Greek warrior Achilles (Cavan Kendall) takes advantage and kills him. When the Doctor (William Hartnell) emerges, Achilles believes him to be Zeus in disguise, and brings him to the Greek encampment along with the warrior Odysseus (Ivor Salter). Greek leader Agamemnon (Francis de Wolff) insists the Doctor help them fight the Trojans. Meanwhile, the Doctor's companions Vicki (Maureen O'Brien) and Steven (Peter Purves) remain in the TARDIS. Steven goes alone to try to find the Doctor, but is captured by Odysseus and taken to the Greek camp. Pretending to be Zeus, the Doctor persuades the Greeks to spare Steven.Priam's son Paris (Barrie Ingham) takes the TARDIS into Troy. Priam's daughter, the prophet Cassandra (Frances White), denounces it as dangerous and demands it be burnt. Before the fire is lit, Vicki emerges from the TARDIS, taken as a sign from the gods. She is renamed Cressida and made a court favourite, enraging Cassandra, who believes Vicki to be a rival prophet, though her handmaiden Katarina (Adrienne Hill) defends Vicki. Priam sends Paris out to avenge Hector, but Steven adopts the identity Diomedes and persuades the Greeks to send him instead, hoping to search for Vicki. When he arrives, Vicki greets him with his real name, which Cassandra sees as a sign they are both spies; they are taken to cells. Priam's youngest son Troilus (James Lynn) visits Vicki. She persuades him to try to get them released, and they begin to fall in love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Honour_of_Katharina_Blum"title="The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum">
Four days after a Weiberfastnacht's eve party (Wed. 20 February 1974), where Katharina Blum met a man named Ludwig Götten, she calls on Oberkommissar Moeding and confesses to killing a journalist for the newspaper "Die Zeitung".Katharina had met Götten at a friend's party and spent the night with him before helping him to escape from the police. The next morning, the police break into her house, arrest her and question her. The story is sensationally covered by "Die Zeitung", and in particular its journalist Tötges. Tötges investigates everything about her life, calling on Katharina's friends and family, including her ex-husband and hospitalized mother, who dies the day after Tötges visits her. He paints a picture of Katharina as a fervent accomplice of Götten, and as a communist run amok in Germany.Katharina arranges an interview with Tötges. According to Katharina, upon his arrival he suggests that they have sex, whereupon she shoots him dead. She then wanders the city for a few hours before driving to police headquarters and confessing to murder.The book also details the effects of the case on Katharina's employers and friends the Blornas; Mr Blorna is her lawyer, and Mrs Blorna one of the designers of the apartment block where Katharina resides. Their association with Katharina leads to their exclusion from society.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Doctor_Dolittle"title="The Story of Doctor Dolittle">
John Dolittle, MD, is a respected physician and quiet bachelor living with his spinster sister Sarah in the small English village of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh. His love of animals grows over the years and his household menagerie eventually scares off his human clientele, leading to loss of wealth. But after learning the secret of speaking to all animals from his parrot Polynesia, he takes up veterinary practice.His fortunes rise and fall again after a crocodile takes up residence, leading to his sister leaving in disgust with the intention of getting married, but his fame in the animal kingdom spreads throughout the world. He is conscripted into voyaging to Africa to cure a monkey epidemic just as he faces bankruptcy. He has to borrow supplies and a ship, and sails with a crew of his favourite animals, but is shipwrecked upon arriving to Africa. On the way to the monkey kingdom, his band is arrested by the king of Jolliginki, a victim of European exploitation who wants no white men travelling in his country.The band barely escapes by ruse, but makes it to the monkey kingdom where things are dire indeed as a result of the raging epidemic. He vaccinates the well monkeys and nurses the sick back to health. In appreciation, the monkeys find the pushmi-pullyu, a shy two-headed gazelle-unicorn cross, whose rarity may bring Dr. Dolittle money back home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_Friends"title="Absolute Friends">
The book tells the story of Ted Mundy, the Pakistan-born son of a British army officer, who as a student becomes proficient in the German language. He joins a 1960s-era student protest group in West Berlin and becomes a lifelong friend of a West German student anarchist named Sasha. Having been brutally beaten by West Berlin police and ejected from Germany, Mundy fails at several careers; as a teacher at an English prep school, as a newspaper reporter, a radio interviewer, and a novelist.Eventually Mundy obtains a position with the British Council. Meanwhile, Sasha has defected to East Germany to become a member of the notorious Stasi secret police. On a trip to East Germany with a youth theatre group, Mundy and Sasha meet again. By this time Sasha has become totally disillusioned with the Communist Bloc and enlists the naïve Mundy to become a double agent. Sasha has access to state secrets and he recruits Mundy to help him smuggle them out of East Germany and deliver them to MI6, the British Secret Service. Their efforts contribute to the collapse of the GDR and eventual destruction of the Berlin Wall. After the wall comes down, Sasha asks Mundy to continue engaging in geopolitics with him, but Mundy- whose marriage has collapsed as a result of his secret life- refuses, and the two part ways. In the ensuing decade, Mundy moves to Germany and becomes a tour guide at Neuschwanstein Castle, begins dating a Turkish refugee, and considers converting to Islam to marry her and help raise her son.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiloh_(Naylor_novel)"title="Shiloh (Naylor novel)">
The novel is set in the small town of Shiloh, West Virginia, where an eleven-year-old boy named Marty Preston finds a stray beagle wandering in the hills near his house. The dog follows him home, and Marty later names the dog Shiloh. Shiloh's real owner is Judd Travers, who owns several hunting dogs. Fearing for the dog's safety because Judd drinks and treats his hunting dogs poorly, Marty does not want to return Shiloh. His father insists that Shiloh be returned to his rightful owner and they take the dog home to Judd.Shiloh returns to Marty, who hides him from his family. Concealing Shiloh in the woods in a wire pen he builds, Marty smuggles some of his food to the dog every day. After his mother discovers Marty feeding the dog, he persuades her not to reveal the secret for at least one night. That night, Shiloh is attacked by a German Shepherd Dog while in his makeshift cage and his family discovers Marty has been lying and hiding the dog. After taking the dog to the town doctor, the family must return Shiloh to his rightful owner by Sunday.Before doing so, Marty travels up to Travers' house to try to convince Travers to allow him to keep Shiloh. Judd does not see Marty approaching, and shoots a doe out of season, which would mean a stiff fine Judd cannot afford. Marty lets Judd know he knows, and attempts to blackmail him out of Shiloh. Judd and Marty eventually negotiate a deal in which Marty will earn Shiloh for 40 dollars, paid with 20 hours of working for Judd. At the end of the first week, Judd says that he will not keep his end of the deal because the evidence of the dead doe has with the passage of time disappeared. Second, the contract that Marty had him sign is worthless in the state of West Virginia without the signature of a witness. Despite Judd's pointed disapproval of his work, Marty continues to work for him. They begin discussing dogs and Judd's father who began physically abusing Judd when he was four years old. In the end, Judd warms to Marty and lets him keep Shiloh.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Lake"title="The Glass Lake">
Helen McMahon disappears when her daughter Kit is 12 years old, and it is suspected that she drowned in the local lake. Kit finds a letter from her mother and burns it before reading it, fearing that a suicide note will prevent her from meriting a church burial. In fact, Helen has left her kindly but unexciting husband Martin and two children to run off to London to be with her dashing lover, and left the note to let them know that she would like to keep in touch with her children as they grow up.Kit struggles to grow up without her mother and with the stigma of her mother's death. While Kit has many friends and mentors to help her grow, she forges a close relationship via a pen pal relationship with a woman named Lena Gray, who claims to have been a close friend of Helen. The story then traces the fallout of Kit finding out that her mother is not dead and is in fact Lena Gray. Other characters in the novel who play significant roles in Kit's life are her on-again, off-again friend Clio Kelly, the doting Philip O'Brien who has wanted to marry her all his life, Stevie Sullivan who owns the car garage across the street, and Sister Madeleine, a reclusive older woman who shares everyone's confidences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voyages_of_Doctor_Dolittle"title="The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle">
In England, Tommy Stubbins (the narrator) finds a squirrel injured by a hawk. Matthew Mugg, the Cat's-Meat Man, suggests he seek help from Doctor Dolittle, who can speak to animals. The Doctor is away on a voyage, but when he returns, he attends the squirrel. Tommy is introduced to some of the strange animals in Dolittle's care, such as the Wiff-Waff fish, and those who care for his household, such as Dab-Dab the duck, and Jip the dog. Polynesia the parrot, who arrives in Puddleby from Africa, informs the Doctor that Bumpo is studying in Bullford. Tommy begins his studies with Dolittle, or rather with Polynesia, who teaches Tommy the language of animals. Chee-Chee comes from Africa disguised as a lady and tells Puddleby about his voyage. The Doctor acquires The Curlew and is thinking of taking Tommy, Polynesia, and Luke the Hermit. They find out from the Hermit's dog, Bob, that Luke was sent to prison for murder. During court proceedings, Dolittle proves to the judge he can talk to animals by talking to Bob, an animal witness, and translates Bob's story to English. The judge concludes that the Hermit is innocent.Later, the Purple Bird of Paradise informs the Doctor that Long Arrow, son of Golden Arrow (a friend of the Doctor) is missing. They play the game Blind Travel, which would determine where in the world they would voyage. They decide to take a trip to Spider Monkey Island to find Long Arrow. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Among_the_Hidden"title="Among the Hidden">
In a dystopian future, after a food shortage and overpopulation, families are limited to two children.Luke Garner, a 12-year-old boy, lives on a farm with his mother, father, and two brothers. As a third child, Luke and his parents are in violation of a population law. Luke, like all third children, must spend his days hidden or away from public view, or else he will be killed or imprisoned, as well as his family. When the government starts building houses in the woods behind the Garners' house for the rich and elite, Luke is forced to stay indoors, alone during the day.One day, Luke sees the face of kid in a window of a house that he knows already has two children. About a month later, he runs over to the house out of curiosity and is caught by the child he saw in the window, Jen Talbot. She reveals that she is also a third child. Jen introduces Luke to a chatroom for other third children - they call themselves Shadow Children. The two become friends and Luke visits Jen as much as he can.Jen, who strongly disagrees with the government, tries to persuade Luke that the government is wrong. Later, at home, he begins to feel guilty for taking up food and supplies that could be used for other people. Jen tells Luke of a rally. Luke refuses to go, saying that he's too scared. Jen gets upset and tells him to leave. He is angry at her and wishes that the Population Police would shoot her during the rally. After thinking that, he realizes that he shouldn't have thought that. That night, she sneaks over to his house and they reconcile before she says goodbye.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abominable_Snowmen"title="The Abominable Snowmen">
The TARDIS lands in Tibet in the Himalayas, where The Second Doctor finds a dead body amid the remains of a campsite. The Doctor arrives at Detsen Monastery, where he meets Professor Edward Travers, who is attempting to find the Yeti. It appears there have been some deaths recently, but the Professor says the Yeti cannot be the culprit because of its shy nature.Meanwhile, Jamie and Victoria find a cave, in which they discover a chamber containing a pyramid of metal spheres. Suddenly, a Yeti moves the boulder that blocked the cave. They escape and head toward the monastery.The Doctor has been accused of controlling the Yeti and placed on trial. Jamie and Victoria convince Prof. Travers that the Doctor is no threat. The trio return to the monastery and show the sphere to the Doctor, who turns it over to the monks. Padmasambhava, the master of the monastery, instructs one of the monks, Thonmi, to release the Doctor. Shortly afterward, the Yeti attack the monastery, during which one of them is overpowered and rendered dormant. The Doctor deduces it is a robot, controlled by a missing spherical unit from its chest cavity. Padmasambhava orders all the monks to evacuate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighth_Doctor_Adventures"title="Eighth Doctor Adventures">
Following the events of the 1996 "Doctor Who" television movie, the Eighth Doctor picks up a British teenager from 1997, Samantha "Sam" Jones, and later a disaffected drifter in his late twenties named Fitz Kreiner from 1963. During their adventures, the threesome tangle with the Faction Paradox, a renegade voodoo cult of time travellers who believed in creating time paradoxes and altering history. They also meet the Doctor's old friend Iris Wildthyme, a Time Lady from Gallifrey who travels in a TARDIS shaped like a London double-decker bus.When Sam leaves the TARDIS, the Doctor and Fitz are joined by Compassion, a member of a once-human race called the Remote who slowly begins a conversion process into a living TARDIS. The Time Lords, led by his old companion Romana, now President of the High Council, anxious to get their hands on this new TARDIS technology, pursue the Doctor, who loses his own TARDIS and continues to travel using Compassion. The conflict with Faction Paradox comes to a climax on Gallifrey, where the Doctor discovers his TARDIS in orbit around the planet, transformed into a giant structure of living bone by the Faction. The Doctor, faced with an impossible decision, destroys the Faction and causes major damage to the timeline by apparently wiping his homeworld and his people from history.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Falling_on_Cedars"title="Snow Falling on Cedars">
Set on the fictional San Piedro Island in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, just north of Puget Sound, in the state of Washington in 1954, the plot revolves around a murder case in which Kabuo Miyamoto, a Japanese American, is accused of killing Carl Heine, a respected fisherman in the close-knit community. Much of the story is told in flashbacks explaining the interaction of the various characters over the prior decades. Carl's body had been pulled from the sea, trapped in his own net, on September 16, 1954. His water-damaged watch had stopped at 1:47. The trial, held in December 1954 during a snowstorm that grips the entire island, occurs in the midst of deep anti-Japanese sentiments following World War II. Covering the case is the editor of the town's one-man newspaper, the "San Piedro Review", Ishmael Chambers, a World War II US Marine Corps veteran who lost an arm fighting the Japanese at the Battle of Tarawa while watching his friends die. Torn by a sense of hatred for the Japanese, Chambers struggles with his love for Kabuo's wife, Hatsue, and his conscience, wondering if Kabuo is truly innocent. Through extended flashbacks, the reader learns that Ishmael had fallen in love with Hatsue when the two attended high school together right before the war. They had been secretly dating at this time and lost their virginity to each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Sky_(book)"title="October Sky (book)">
Homer "Sonny" Hickam Jr. lives in a small coal mining town in West Virginia named Coalwood. Sonny, after seeing the Russian satellite Sputnik, decides to join the American team of rocket engineers called the Missile Agency when he graduates from school. (Note: In the book "Rocket Boys", the main character is always called Sonny. In the movie "October Sky", he is called Homer.) Sonny's older brother, Jim Hickam, excels at football and expects to get a college football scholarship. Sonny, however, is terrible at sports and has no special skill that would get him "out of Coalwood". Sonny's mother is afraid that he will have to work in the mines after high school. Sonny's first attempt at rocketry (which occurred when he was 14) consists of a flashlight tube and model airplane body as a casing. It is fueled by flash powder from old cherry bombs. It explodes violently, destroying his mother's fence. After that, Sonny enlists the help of Quentin Wilson, Roy Lee Cooke, Sherman Siers, Jimmy "O'Dell" Carroll, and Billy Rose to help build rockets while forming the BCMA (Big Creek Missile Agency). Their first real rocket, powered by black powder, is named Auk 1. This is an allusion to the great auk, which is a flightless seabird that became extinct in the mid-19th century. Auk 1 flies six feet before the solder melts, and the nozzle, a washer, separates from the casement. They call themselves "Rocket Boys" and call the place where they are launching their rockets "Cape Coalwood", in honor of Cape Canaveral. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pale_View_of_Hills"title="A Pale View of Hills">
During a visit from her daughter, Niki, Etsuko reflects on her own life as a young woman in Japan, and how she left that country to live in England. As she describes it, she and her Japanese husband, Jiro, had a daughter together, and a few years later Etsuko met a British man and moved with him to England. She took her elder daughter, Keiko, to England to live with her and the new husband. When Etsuko and her new husband have a daughter, Etsuko wants to call her something "modern" and her husband wants an Eastern-sounding name, so they compromise with the name "Niki", which seems to Etsuko to be perfectly British, but sounds to her husband at least slightly Japanese.In England, Keiko becomes increasingly solitary and antisocial. Etsuko recalls how, as Keiko grew older, she would lock herself in her room and emerge only to pick up the dinner-plate that her mother would leave for her in the kitchen. This disturbing behavior ends, as the reader already has learned, in Keiko's suicide. "Your father," Etsuko tells Niki, "was rather idealistic at times...[H]e really believed we could give her a happy life over here... But you see, Niki, I knew all along. I knew all along she wouldn't be happy over here."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upon_the_Dull_Earth"title="Upon the Dull Earth">
By offering up the blood of a lamb, Silvia, the protagonist of "Upon the Dull Earth", is able to summon creatures she identifies as angels. She thinks that the creatures are her ancestors, and she is sure that one day she will join them. At the same time, though, it is not clear whether the creatures are really good, as Silvia thinks, or wicked. Their behavior and their relation with Silvia scare the girl's relatives and Rick, her boyfriend. Rick thinks that Silvia's behavior is very dangerous, as "the white-winged giants ... can sear [her] to ash". During a quarrel with Rick, the girl accidentally cuts herself. Independently from her will, Silvia's blood summons the creatures. Unable to control their power, the angel-like giants burn Silvia's body and leave only "a brittle burned-out husk".Unable to accept his lover's death, Rick tries to bring Silvia back, but in doing so he causes the degeneration and destruction of the world he lives in. The story also develops one of Dick's favorite themes, namely the definition of what is real. The reality we think we know well turns out to be insubstantial, due to Dick's use of multiple possible realities which ends up deconstructing the idea of reality itself. As the short story investigates these questions, first at an epistemological level and then at an ontological one, "Upon the Dull Earth" unfolds like a conventional horror plot. Rick manages to contact the light-creatures who apparently belong to a higher realm of being and he also manages to speak with Silvia. The girl now lives in the realm of the angel-like creatures, but she wants to come back and she explains that they made a mistake when they took her away. The creatures think that bringing Silvia back could be dangerous. Besides, Silvia explains that in order to come back she needs "some shape to enter" because there are no "material forms" in the higher continuum. She would have to take something from the human world, "something of clay".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Dolittle's_Garden"title="Doctor Dolittle's Garden">
Doctor Dolittle's assistant, Tommy Stubbins, reports on Professor Quetch, curator of the Dog Museum in the Home for Crossbred Dogs. Meanwhile, the doctor has learnt insect languages and hears ancient tales of a giant race of insects. Fascinated, the doctor plans a voyage to find them — but before he does so, one arrives in his garden.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Dolittle_in_the_Moon"title="Doctor Dolittle in the Moon">
Doctor Dolittle has landed on the Moon and is discovering new things each day. He meets Otho Bludge the Moon Man, a Stone Age artist who was the only human on the Moon when it broke away from the Earth. The animals of the Moon flock to Doctor Dolittle, and he discovers how to communicate with the intelligent plants there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beautiful_and_Damned"title="The Beautiful and Damned">
In 1913, Anthony Patch is a twenty-five year old Harvard University alumnus recently having returned from Rome and now residing in New York City. He is the presumptive heir to his dying grandfather's vast fortune. Through his friend Richard "Dick" Caramel, Anthony meets Gloria Gilbert, a beautiful flapper and "jazz baby" who is Dick's cousin. Anthony begins courting her. The couple fall madly in love, with Gloria ecstatically exclaiming: "Mother says that two souls are sometimes created together—and in love before they're born." After a whirlwind courtship, Anthony and Gloria decide to marry.For the first three years of their married life together, Anthony and Gloria vow to adhere to "the magnificent attitude of not giving a damn... for what they chose to do and what consequences it brought. Not to be sorry, not to lose one cry of regret, to live according to a clear code of honor toward each other, and to seek the moment's happiness as fervently and persistently as possible." Gloria and Anthony's marital bliss soon evaporates, especially when they are each pitted against the other's selfish attitudes. Once the couple's infatuation with each other fades, they begin to see their differences do more harm than good, as well as leaving each other with unfulfilled hopes. Over time, the disappointed couple become hedonistic and cynical libertines.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Daleks"title="The Power of the Daleks">
After his transformation from an elderly man into a younger man, the Doctor seemingly ignores or deliberately misunderstands direct questions from his companions Ben and Polly, and refers to his previous self as another person. His companions are at first unsure how to treat him: Ben suspects he is an imposter, but Polly is willing to believe he is the same man. The TARDIS lands on the planet Vulcan, where the Doctor witnesses the murder of an examiner from Earth, sent to inspect the planet's colony (why the examiner was summoned is a mystery). The Doctor, using the dead man's badge, pretends to be the examiner. A security team, led by Bragen, escorts the Doctor, Ben and Polly to the colony, where they meet the governor, Hensell, and his deputy Quinn. There are indications of a rebel faction that Hensell does not take seriously.The Doctor and his companions learn of a two-century-old capsule discovered by the colony's scientist, Lesterson. The Doctor sneaks into the laboratory, with Ben and Polly following, where they discover two Daleks inside the capsule, with a third missing. The group is discovered by Lesterson; the Doctor asks him where the third Dalek is, and the scientist reports that he hid what he assumed was a machine, with the intention to reactivate it. Later, Lesterson and his assistants manage to revive the Dalek and Lesterson removes its gun stick after one of the assistants, Resno, is killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moonbase"title="The Moonbase">
The TARDIS lands on the Moon in the year 2070; dressed in spacesuits, the Second Doctor and his companions Ben, Polly and Jamie venture outside to explore the low-gravity environment. While they play, Jamie is injured.Some workers from the nearby Moonbase find Jamie and bring him inside for treatment while the remaining TARDIS crew follows. The time travellers learn that the Moonbase uses a machine called the Graviton to track and manage weather on Earth. Their arrival is ill-timed, as members of the international crew, led by the bullish Hobson, have begun to collapse under the influence of an unknown pathogen.While International Space Control quarantines the Moonbase, the Doctor starts to investigate. Before he dies, the station's patient zero – their staff doctor, Evans – rants about a "silver hand". Another crew member, Ralph, then vanishes in the food stores, and the crew learn that their radio transmissions are being monitored from elsewhere on the Moon.In the sickbay a feverish Jamie begins to rant about a "Phantom Piper", a figure said to appear to a McCrimmon before death. While attending to Jamie, Polly sees a large figure leave through the door. When Hobson, the Doctor, Ben, John and Nils arrive to collect Evans' body, it has disappeared. They then leave to investigate where this 'piper' is. Polly goes to get water, and Jamie wakes up to see the 'piper' advancing on him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Than_Life"title="Better Than Life">
Following on from "Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers", Lister, Rimmer and the Cat have discovered a cache of 'Better Than Life' headbands in one of the sleeping quarters. They fantasize that they board the Nova 5 and use its Duality Jump drive to return to Earth.The messages on his arm cause Lister to realize that he is in the game, and he confronts Rimmer. They travel to Denmark and meet with the Cat. While discussing how to get out, Kryten arrives and explains how they started playing, and to leave they need only want to leave, but their subsequent attempts to escape fail because the game lures them in.Their collective fantasies fall apart because of Rimmer's massive self-loathing; even if he wants to stay, he hates himself so much that his mind has only built up his life so that it can bring him down later. As a result, his company crashes, his new physical body is repossessed, and his attempt to escape leaves him trapped with a pair of violent criminals and transferred into the body of a female prostitute. Rimmer's escape damages the fantasies of the other three, forcing them all to depart.Once back in the real world, Rimmer and Kryten leave Lister and Cat in the infirmary to recuperate, the two near-starved and physically weak after almost two years of near-inactivity while in the Game. The crew learn that ship's computer Holly has shut himself down, as an experiment to cure his computer senility and restore his original IQ of 6 000 has reduced his lifespan to only a few minutes. With the ship now virtually powerless without Holly's control, it is discovered to be locked on course for a planet, but after attempts to manually restart the engines fail, Holly is able to use his remaining minutes of life to come up with a plan to explosively knock the planet out of its orbit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moving_Target"title="The Moving Target">
Lew Archer is a 35-year-old private eye based in Los Angeles. He is hired by the crippled wife of millionaire Ralph Sampson to discover what has happened to him since he disappeared after recently landing at Burbank Airport. Archer begins by interviewing Sampson's pilot Alan Taggert and his flirtatious daughter Miranda at their Santa Teresa villa before going downtown to talk to the family lawyer, Bert Graves, an old friend of Archer's from before World War 2. A lead takes him to Fay Estabrook, an aging Hollywood film star whom he later picks up during a night's drinking, but when he takes her home he is interrupted by Fay's husband, the gun-toting crook Dwight Troy.On the way back, Archer drops in on a run-down bar called The Wild Piano and listens to a boogie performance by convicted addict Betty Fay. When he starts questioning her about Sampson, she turns him over to a thug called Puddler and he is only saved from a bad beating by Taggert, who is also there on Sampson's trail. The following day Archer discovers that The Wild Piano's owner is Troy, who appears to be a crook down on his luck. He then drives to the Sampson home, where a letter has been received that makes it seem that Sampson has been kidnapped.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobody's_Buddy"title="Nobody's Buddy">
Sweet story of a homeless boy and his dog, and their adventures with the circus and the local sheriff.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Massacre_(Doctor_Who)"title="The Massacre (Doctor Who)">
The arrival of the TARDIS in Paris, France in 1572 places its occupants, the First Doctor and Steven, in a dangerous situation. Tensions between the Protestant Huguenots and Catholics are at fever pitch in the city. Despite the danger, the Doctor heads off alone to visit the apothecary Charles Preslin, leaving Steven alone. Steven enters a tavern and meets Nicholas Muss, a Huguenot. When the Doctor does not return as arranged, Steven decides to spend the night at the home of his new friend. While Steven and Nicholas are wandering home, they find a frightened serving girl, Anne Chaplet. Anne is terrified because she has overheard some Catholic guards speaking of a coming religious massacre of Huguenots here in Paris. To protect her and her knowledge, Nicholas arranges for Anne to go into the service of his master, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny.The next day, the Abbot of Amboise arrives at his Parisian residence. Convinced that Anne has discovered the threat to the Protestants, the Abbot sends his secretary Colbert to find her. Steven sees the two talking, and becomes convinced that the Abbot is the Doctor in disguise. He tries to track down Preslin, the apothecary the Doctor went to meet, but learns he was arrested two years ago for heresy. He heads to the Abbot's house to wait for the Doctor. While hidden he overhears Colbert and an assassin plotting to kill someone they call "the sea beggar" tomorrow. As night falls Steven heads out and finds Anne following him. They hide for the night at Preslin's empty shop, planning to search for the identity of the sea beggar. They call upon the Abbot, but are forced to flee after Steven realises that the Abbot is not the Doctor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Celestial_Toymaker"title="The Celestial Toymaker">
An alien intelligence has invaded the TARDIS and rendered the First Doctor invisible, leaving Dodo and Steven incredulous. They step outside into a strange realm where the Doctor reappears. They have come to the realm of the Celestial Toymaker, an eternal being of infinite power who sets games and traps for the unwary so that they become his playthings. The Doctor and the Toymaker have faced each other before, and the Toymaker abducts his old adversary to another place. The Doctor appears in the Toymaker's study, where he is given the Trilogic game, a ten-piece puzzle (similar to the Tower of Hanoi) whose pieces must all be moved and remounted in a 1023-move sequence.Steven and Dodo face different challenges. The first are two clowns, Joey and Clara, full of childish tricks and a dangerous game of Blind Man's Bluff. The clowns are made to replay the game when it is clear they are cheating, and the second time round Joey loses his footing on an obstacle course and the challengers are transformed into twisted dolls on the floor. Steven and Dodo then venture down a corridor into another chamber with three chairs and a challenge from living playing cards, the King and Queen of Hearts, along with a Knave and a Joker. An adjoining room has a further four chairs, and Steven deduces that six of the seven chairs are deadly to sit on. Seven mannequins are provided to be used for testing on the chairs. The King and Queen play alongside them, and some of the mannequins are destroyed as seats are proven unsafe and eliminated. The King and Queen are trapped when they sit in a chair which folds in on them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gunfighters"title="The Gunfighters">
In the frontier town of Tombstone, Arizona, the troublesome Clanton brothers, Ike, Phineas and Billy, are in search of Doc Holliday to settle an old score over the death of another brother called Reuben. They meet up with their hired hand Seth Harper at the Last Chance Saloon. He knows what Holliday looks like and describes his coat and demeanour. This is overheard by bar singer Kate, who lets her paramour Holliday know he is in danger.The TARDIS has arrived in a nearby stable, with the First Doctor in agony from toothache. He and his companions Steven and Dodo, dressed as cowboys, encounter local marshal Wyatt Earp, who offers them his protection and warns them to keep his counsel. The Doctor finds the dentist – Holliday himself - while Dodo and Steven book rooms at the hotel. There they are mocked by the Clantons, who suspect the Doctor they refer to is Holliday himself. Seth Harper is sent to the dentist's surgery and invites the Doctor, tooth removed, to the hotel in five minutes to meet his friends. Holliday is initially happy to let him be shot in his place, allowing the real Doc to disappear, but Kate intervenes to ensure the Doctor survives. This buys some time until Holliday relents and hides in an upstairs chamber of the hotel, firing his gun at appropriate moments to con the Clantons into thinking the Doctor is indeed Holliday the sharpshooter. Soon afterward Wyatt Earp and Sheriff Bat Masterson arrive and break up the fracas, taking the Doctor into custody for his own protection.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Savages_(Doctor_Who)"title="The Savages (Doctor Who)">
The TARDIS materialises on a distant planet in the far future. The First Doctor, Steven and Dodo find the planet inhabited by both an advanced, idyllic civilisation (the Elders), and bands of roaming savages. The Elders welcome the Doctor, greeting him as "The Traveller from Beyond Time" and revealing they have admired his exploits from afar and predicted that he would soon be arriving here. Their leader Jano showers the Doctor and his companions with compliments and gifts, reinforcing the idyllic nature of the society of the Elders. However, the Doctor becomes suspicious of the Elders' seemingly perfect civilisation, but it is Dodo who finds the secret. The soldiers Exorse and Edal are sent outside the Elder city and use advanced weapons to capture the savages, entrapping them and returning them to the city. The Elders are only able to maintain the energy needed to run their civilisation by draining the life force of the helpless savages. The Doctor, appalled, tries to stop the Elders and persuade them of the wrong they are doing by building a civilisation on such immoral grounds.Jano's response is to have the Doctor himself subjected to the energy transfer process. The Doctor is put into the transfer device and his life force is channelled into the Elder Jano, who desires his intelligence. Yet the plan backfires when the Doctor's personality takes over Jano, imbuing him with the Doctor's mannerisms, outlook and morality. The two identities cause Jano a personality crisis.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smugglers"title="The Smugglers">
The First Doctor's new companions Ben and Polly arrive with him in the TARDIS on the coast of seventeenth century Cornwall. They meet a worried churchwarden named Joseph Longfoot, who lives in fear of "Avery's boys" and, in thanks for the Doctor's kindness in relocating a dislocated finger, imparts a cryptic message he calls "Deadman's secret key": "Smallbeer, Ringwood, Gurney". While the time travellers head off to the local inn, Longfoot has another visitor. This is Cherub, Longfoot's former shipmate under pirate Captain Avery on the Black Albatross. Cherub and his master, Samuel Pike, who captains the Albatross since Avery died, want to recover Avery's accursed gold. Pike is convinced that Longfoot has the treasure or knows where it is hidden. When the churchwarden does not co-operate, Cherub kills him – but not before revealing he saw the three travellers who visited Longfoot earlier.The discovery of the churchwarden's body leads the locals to suspect the three strangers at the inn. The local Squire is called to intervene and adjudicate, and charges Ben and Polly with the murder. Employing trickery to obtain their freedom, they split up. Ben hides at the church until Josiah Blake, a revenue man tracking the local smugglers, disturbs him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Days_of_Pompeii"title="The Last Days of Pompeii">
Pompeii, A.D. 79. Athenian nobleman Glaucus arrives in the bustling and gaudy Roman town and quickly falls in love with the beautiful Greek Ione. Ione's former guardian, the malevolent Egyptian sorcerer Arbaces, has designs on Ione and sets out to destroy their budding happiness. Arbaces has already ruined Ione's sensitive brother Apaecides by luring him to join the vice-ridden priesthood of Isis. The blind slave Nydia is rescued from her abusive owners, Burbo and Stratonice, by Glaucus, for whom she secretly pines. Arbaces horrifies Ione by declaring his love for her, and flying into a rage when she refuses him. Glaucus and Apaecides rescue her from his grip, but Arbaces is struck down by an earthquake, a sign of Vesuvius' coming eruption.Glaucus and Ione exult in their love, much to Nydia's torment, while Apaecides finds a new religion in Christianity. Nydia unwittingly helps Julia, a rich young woman who has eyes for Glaucus, obtain a love potion from Arbaces to win Glaucus's love. But the love potion is really a poison that will turn Glaucus mad. Nydia steals the potion and administers it; Glaucus drinks only a small amount and begins raving wildly. Apaecides and Olinthus, an early Christian, determine to publicly reveal the deception of the cult of Isis. Arbaces, recovered from his wounds, overhears and stabs Apaecides to death; he then pins the crime on Glaucus, who has stumbled onto the scene. Arbaces has himself declared the legal guardian of Ione, who is convinced that Arbaces is her brother's murderer, and imprisons her at his mansion. He also imprisons Nydia, who discovers that there is an eyewitness to the murder who can prove Glaucus's innocence—the priest Calenus, who is yet a third prisoner of Arbaces. She smuggles a letter to Glaucus's friend Sallust, begging him to rescue them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well_of_Loneliness"title="The Well of Loneliness">
The book's protagonist, Stephen Gordon, is born in the late Victorian era to upper-class parents in Worcestershire who are expecting a boy and who christen her with the name they had already chosen. Even at birth she is physically unusual, a "narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered little tadpole of a baby". She hates dresses, wants to cut her hair short, and longs to be a boy. At seven, she develops a crush on a housemaid named Collins, and is devastated when she sees Collins kissing a footman.Stephen's father, Sir Phillip, dotes on her; he seeks to understand her through the writings of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the first modern writer to propose a theory of homosexuality, but does not share his findings with Stephen. Her mother, Lady Anna, is distant, seeing Stephen as a "blemished, unworthy, maimed reproduction" of Sir Phillip. At eighteen, Stephen forms a close friendship with a Canadian man, Martin Hallam, but is horrified when he declares his love for her. The following winter, Sir Phillip is crushed by a falling tree; at the last moment he tries to explain to Lady Anna that Stephen is an invert, but dies without managing to do so.Stephen begins to dress in masculine clothes made by a tailor rather than a dressmaker. At twenty-one she falls in love with Angela Crossby, the American wife of a new neighbour. Angela uses Stephen as an "anodyne against boredom", allowing her "a few rather schoolgirlish kisses". The pair conduct a relationship that, although not explicitly stated, seems to have some sexual element, at least for Stephen. Then Stephen discovers that Angela is having an affair with a man. Fearing exposure, Angela shows a letter from Stephen to her husband, who sends a copy to Stephen's mother. Lady Anna denounces Stephen for "presum[ing] to use the word love in connection with...these unnatural cravings of your unbalanced mind and undisciplined body." Stephen replies, "As my father loved you, I loved...It was good, good, "good" – I'd have laid down my life a thousand times over for Angela Crossby." After the argument, Stephen goes to her father's study and for the first time opens his locked bookcase. She finds a book by Krafft-Ebing – assumed by critics to be "Psychopathia Sexualis", a text about homosexuality and paraphilias – and, reading it, learns that she is an invert.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heaven_Sword_and_Dragon_Saber"title="The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber">
Set in China towards the end of the Yuan dynasty, the story revolves around a pair of allegedly unrivalled weapons, the Heaven-Reliant Sword and Dragon-Slaying Saber, which are coveted by many martial artists. Either or both of them are thought to allow their wielder to rule the "wulin" (martial artists' community or "wuxia"), according to a widely circulated mantra. At the start of the novel the Reliant Sword is in possession of the Abbess Miejue 灭绝师太, the leader of the Emei school.The protagonist, Zhang Wuji, is of mixed heritage between the orthodox and the "evil" cults. His father, Zhang Cuishan 張翠山, is an apprentice of Zhang Sanfeng, the highly revered leader of the "orthodox" Wudang Sect; his mother, Yin Susu 殷素素, is the daughter of Yin Tianzheng, the chief of the "evil" Heavenly Eagle Cult. He was born on a reclusive volcanic island, where he spent his childhood with only his parents and his godfather, Xie Xun. The Sabre is in the possession of Xie Xun. When he is about 10 years old, his parents brought him back to Wudang 武當派. Along the way Wuji is kidnapped by the Xuanming Elders 玄冥二老. All the various factions of the wuxia descend on Wudang to coerce the couple to reveal the whereabouts of Xie Xun, who possesses the Dragon Slaying Saber. His parents refuse and commit suicide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oaken_Throne"title="The Oaken Throne">
In medieval England, a war has raged between the bats and the squirrels for many years. The bats believe that the Starwife, queen of the squirrels, has stolen their powers of prophecy and insight, given to them as a gift from the moon goddess. With the help of a treacherous squirrel named Morwenna, they launch a devastating attack on the Starwife's realm, Greenreach. The dying Starwife entrusts her magical silver acorn pendant to a peregrine falcon, who bears it away to safety.The next day, in a distant squirrel realm known as Coll Regalis, festivities for the Aldertide holiday are interrupted when the bat army flies overhead in pursuit of the falcon. They slaughter the bird and the silver acorn drops into the paw of Ysabelle, crown princess of Coll Regalis. Confounded by the daylight, the bats leave but resolve to return at nightfall to retrieve the pendant. It is decided that Ysabelle will journey to Greenreach and become the new Starwife. All the guards of Coll Regalis will accompany her, with the inhabitants left behind in the vulnerable realm sacrificing themselves as a distraction when the bats return.On their way through the forest, Ysabelle's guards discover a juvenile bat named Vespertilio. Too young to be a knight, he has run away from home with his late father's armour in hopes of joining the battle at Greenreach but broke his wing in the process. Though Ysabelle detests the bat, when her adviser Godfrey suggests that Vesper could be used as a guide, she agrees to take him along as a prisoner. In the night, the group is attacked by Hobbers, members of a bloodthirsty cult. Using the power of the silver acorn which he stole from Ysabelle, the high priest calls on their evil god Hobb to emerge from the Underworld. Godfrey hastily comes up with a plan to retrieve the acorn, which is successful but results in his death. Ysabelle unties Vesper as she still needs his help as a guide. The two escape, but not before the enraged high priest lays curses on them, proclaiming that when Hobb appears in several days' time he will kill Ysabelle and that Vesper will die surrounded by the sound of bells.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Longest_Journey_(novel)"title="The Longest Journey (novel)">
Rickie Elliot is a student at early 20th century Cambridge, a university that seems like paradise to him, amongst bright if cynical companions, when he receives a visit from two friends, an engaged young woman, Agnes Pembroke, and her elder brother, Herbert. The Pembrokes are Rickie's only friends from home. An orphan who grew up living with cousins, he was sent to a private boarding school where he was shunned and bullied because of his lame foot, an inherited weakness, and frail body. Agnes, as it happens, is engaged to Gerald, now in the army, who was one of the sturdy youths who bullied Rickie at school. Rickie is not brilliant at argument, but he is intensely responsive to poetry and art, and is accepted within a circle of philosophical and intellectual fellow-students led by a brilliant but especially cynical aspiring philosopher, Stewart Ansell, who refuses, when he is introduced to her, even to acknowledge that Agnes exists.When visiting the Pembrokes during his vacation, Rickie has an epiphanic vision of the sexual bond between Gerald, who is coarse but handsome and athletic, and Agnes, a bond he cannot imagine for himself. He takes these lovers' side in trying to speed their marriage, offering part of his own inheritance, an offer that insults Gerald. When Gerald is suddenly killed in a football match, Rickie finds a role consoling Agnes—he tells her she should "mind" what has happened, that is, that she should grieve—since her passion for Gerald has been the main event of her life. Rickie becomes Agnes' chief consolation and support, though he is in every way Gerald's opposite, and after a year or two, despite the failure of Rickie's stories to find a publisher, he and Agnes become engaged to marry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drowning_Pool"title="The Drowning Pool">
Archer is hired by a woman to investigate a libellous letter she received. The family lives in the house situated on the line between two Southern Californian towns, one an idyllic, oil-rich town and the other the small, seedy town from which the oil comes, corrupt and destroyed by the industry. It is not long before Archer is more concerned with investigating murder instead of just blackmail.The book was the basis of the 1975 Paul Newman film of the same name but the movie has radical departures from the plot of the novel, including moving the location to Louisiana.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeward_Bound_(Turtledove_novel)"title="Homeward Bound (Turtledove novel)">
The "Admiral Peary" travels at between 0.35 and 0.4 "c" and takes a little over 30 years, instead of 24 (the Race's starship velocities are 0.5 "c"), to cross the twelve light-years between Earth and Tau Ceti. The ship is named "Admiral Peary" for its role as a military exploration ship, after Admiral Robert Peary, who did the same in an Arctic exploration.When the "Admiral Peary" arrives in orbit around Home, the Race's planet in the Tau Ceti system, it causes a crisis in the highest levels of the Race. The Race's Emperor Risson and Fleetlord Atvar, sent back to Home with the dubious distinction of being the only Fleetlord not to conquer a planet, argue the merits and drawbacks of attempting to destroy mankind by massive nuclear strikes. Meanwhile, Researcher Ttomalss investigates reports of a major breakthrough by human scientists back on Earth.The Race inadvertently cause itself a possible ecological disaster similar to what it caused on Earth with the Race's introduced species into the Earth's ecosystems by letting the humans' caged rats loose on Home. The rats were used for food testing for the humans.It comes as a great shock to the Race when a second human starship, the "Commodore Perry", arrives in orbit around Home, having traveled the twelve light-years in just five weeks. The faster-than-light drive, which appears to be based on the principle of folding space, allows the crew to return to Earth, which is familiar but still different from how they left it. Another pun is the ship's captain, Nicole Nichols, inspired by "Star Trek's" Lieutenant Uhura but playing off the actress's real name. The ship is named "Commodore Perry" for its role in opening up the Race's empire to access the US, after Commodore Matthew C. Perry, who did the same with Japan, and the Race fears that other human nations will make their way to Home, especially a recovered Germany.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Far_Pavilions"title="The Far Pavilions">
Ashton Pelham-Martyn (Ash) is the son of a British botanist travelling through India; he is born on the road shortly before the Sepoy uprising of 1857. His mother dies from childbed fever shortly after his birth, and his father dies of cholera a few years later. He is entrusted to his Hindu "ayah" (nanny) Sita to be brought to his English relatives in the city of Mardan. After discovering that all English "feringhis" have been killed during the uprising, Sita adopts the dark-skinned Ash and takes him in search of safety.They eventually find refuge in the kingdom of Gulkote where Ashton, now going by the name Ashok, forgets his English parentage and grows up as a native Indian boy. While working as a servant for Lalji, the young "yuveraj" (crown prince) of Gulkote, Ashton befriends the neglected princess Anjuli, in addition to the master of stables, Koda Dad, and his son Zarin. At the age of 11, Ashton uncovers a murderous conspiracy against Lalji and learns he himself will be killed for interfering with the plot. Promising Anjuli he will return for her one day, he and Sita escape the palace with assistance from friends Sita and Ashok have made within the palace over the years, and flee from Gulkote. The ailing Sita dies en route, but not before revealing to Ash his true parentage and entrusting him with the letters and money his father gave her before his death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunters_of_Dune"title="Hunters of Dune">
For three years, the no-ship "Ithaca" has been in an alternate universe, hiding from the "great enemy". It carries the clones, or gholas, of Duncan Idaho, famous military commander Miles Teg, the Bene Gesserit Sheeana, the last Bene Tleilax Master Scytale, and seven small melange-producing sandworms, as well as a number of other humans. Scytale has shared the secret of producing melange, also called spice, in tanks, because the sandworms do not produce enough to allow the ship to continue travelling. The mysterious Oracle of Time speaks to Duncan and brings the no-ship back into the 'regular' universe. The ship is discovered by the mysterious Daniel and Marty, first mentioned at the end of "Chapterhouse: Dune." They attempt to capture the ship, but it escapes.On Chapterhouse, the only remaining source of spice, Murbella, now the leader of the Honored Matres and Bene Gesserit, is attempting to merge the groups into the New Sisterhood and prevent civil war. Desperate for more spice so that their Navigators can travel through space, the Spacing Guild approaches her, but Murbella refuses, threatening to cut them off completely. Unbeknownst to everyone but the Bene Gesserit, the sandworms on Chapterhouse are not producing much melange; the Bene Gesserit are making up the shortfall with their own stockpiles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandworms_of_Dune"title="Sandworms of Dune">
## The end nears.As "Sandworms of Dune" begins, the passengers of the no-ship "Ithaca" continue their nearly two-decade search for a new home world for the Bene Gesserit, while Duncan Idaho evades the tachyon net of the old couple Daniel and Marty, now known to be thinking machine leaders Omnius and Erasmus. Among the inhabitants of the "Ithaca" are young gholas of Paul Atreides, Lady Jessica, and others. Back in the Old Empire, Mother Commander Murbella of the New Sisterhood attempts to rally humankind for a last stand against the thinking machines. The new Face Dancers continue to infiltrate the main organizations of the Old Empire at all levels, having also sent their gholas of Paul Atreides (called Paolo) and the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen to the thinking machine capital, Synchrony.At the prompting of Face Dancer infiltrators, the Spacing Guild has begun replacing its Navigators with Ixian navigation devices and cutting off the Navigators' supply of melange. Navigator Edrik and his faction have commissioned Waff, the imperfectly awakened ghola rescued by the Guild from the Bene Gesserit attack on Bandalong, to create "advanced" sandworms able to produce the melange they so desperately require. He accomplishes this by altering the DNA of the sandtrout stage and creating an aquatic form of the worms, which are then released into the oceans of Buzzell. Adapting to their new environment, these "seaworms" quickly flourish, eventually producing a highly concentrated form of spice, dubbed "ultraspice".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_of_Gravity"title="Mission of Gravity">
The native protagonist, Barlennan, captain of the sailing raft "Bree", is on a trading expedition to the equator. Prior to the story's opening, a human scientific probe has become stranded at one of the planet's poles, where the gravity is too strong to effect a rescue. A member of the scientific team, Charles Lackland, is dispatched to the equator where he has met Barlennan by chance. Even machine aided, Lackland is barely able to function in the 3 "g" environment, one Barlennan considers incredibly light and a tiny fraction of what his culture is used to.Lackland teaches the "Bree" crew English and arranges a deal with Barlennan; in exchange for the humans providing warnings of the violent weather which often plagues trips to the pole, Barlennan will retrieve the probe and return it to the equator where it can be picked up. Communication is achieved through an audio-visual radio built to function in a high-gravity environment, which is treated as magical by other intelligences encountered on the planet.Along the way to the pole, the ship encounters and overcomes a variety of obstacles, some of which the humans help with using their superior scientific knowledge, and some of which rely on the cunning of Barlennan and his crew. They are captured by various lifeforms similar to themselves, but who live in the lower-gravity areas and have developed projectile weapons and gliders. Gradually, with human help, they gain an understanding of these and manage to escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_City_(novel)"title="Blue City (novel)">
Twenty-two-year-old John Weather has returned from the army, having served in the European Theater in the Second World War, only to find his estranged father had been shot two years previously. John had known his father as a prominent businessman and politician and now learns that he was a leading factor in the corruption of the town. Everyone seems more than happy to let his murder remain unsolved and, as John tries to uncover the murderer, he finds himself up against and manhandled by thugs in the pay of Roger Kerch. Kerch is a blackmailer who has taken over his father's slot machine franchise and seems to have a hold over his step-mother, Floraine, whom his father had married while John was young and living away from home.Finally, with the help of Carla, a hostess at the Cathay Club, John gets ahead of those trying to prevent him uncovering the truth. After Kerch has killed his step-mother (who turns out to be Kerch's bigamous wife), and John is in line to inherit his father's assets, he gains the co-operation of Ralph Hanson, the police inspector in charge of the case, and Freeman Allister, the ineffectual reformist mayor. Kerch and his surviving associates are jailed, while Allister, the real murderer of John's father, is shot by his mistress.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archangel_(Shinn_novel)"title="Archangel (Shinn novel)">
Angels and mortals, who need one another but have a love-hate relationship, inhabit the land of Samaria. The angels have wings and fly, and are taller and stronger than humans. Legends state that angels were made by Jovah to oversee Samaria under the guidance of the Archangel. The angels are supposed to protect humans, answer their petitions, solve their problems, and intercede to god for them by petitioning the god Jovah through song, especially for rain when the crops need it and the sun when it is stormy. In addition, the angels must sing to Jovah at the annual Gloria held on the Plain of Sharon, otherwise god would destroy the world. The Archangel and his consort, the Angelica, lead this mass in praise of Jovah. Archangels do not serve for life, but every twenty years Jovah selects a new Archangel.Samaria is divided into three regions, Gaza, Bethel and Jordana, separated by rivers. Each region has an angel hold or fortress that acts as the governing center for the region. The citizens of Gaza, the Manadavvi, are highly cultured and wealthy. The Jansai, who are calculating and greedy merchants, and run the Edori slave trade inhabit Jordana. The Edori are the wanderers and frequently become enslaved by the Jansai.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humiliated_and_Insulted"title="Humiliated and Insulted">
Narrated by a young novelist, Vanya (Ivan Petrovich), who has just released his first novel which bears an obvious resemblance to Dostoevsky's own first novel, "Poor Folk", it consists of two gradually converging plot lines. One deals with Vanya's close friend and former love object, Natasha, who has left her family to live with her new lover, Alyosha. Alyosha is the saintly but dim-witted son of Prince Valkovsky, who hopes to gain financially by marrying Alyosha off to an heiress, Katya. Valkovsky's cruel machinations to break up Alyosha and Natasha identify him as one of the most memorable "predatory types" that Dostoevsky created. The other plotline focuses on a thirteen-year-old orphan, Nellie, whom Vanya saves from an abusive household by taking her into his apartment, and whose deceased mother's story in some ways parallels that of Natasha. It's unusual to see a well-developed character as young as Nellie in a Dostoevsky novel, but Nellie may be one of his most moving creations, and she in particular shows the influence of Dickens (Dostoevsky is known to have read Dickens during the Siberian exile; this novel was conceived near the end of this exile).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminal_Experiment"title="The Terminal Experiment">
Dr. Peter Hobson invents a machine that detects a brain pattern that leaves the body after death, a pattern many believe is a soul. In order to test their theories on immortality and life after death, Hobson and his friend Sarkar Muhammed create three electronic simulations of Hobson's own personality. When people Hobson had a grudge against begin to die, he and Sarkar must try to find out which is responsible. But all three simulations – two modified, one a "control" – escape Sarkar's computer, into the Internet and the World Wide Web.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Arched_Bridge"title="The Three-Arched Bridge">
The book is a political parable that describes the construction of an important bridge on the Via Egnatia in Albanian territory in the Balkans from 1377–1378, shortly before the occupation by the Ottoman Empire began. Told by an Albanian Catholic monk, Gjon (a name used by Northern Albanians who were mostly Catholic prior to Turkish invasions), the story of the bridge, as seen by Gjon is filled with prissy, unhappy bureaucrats, who take the events at face value without ever trying to understand the larger forces at work. Both the river Ujana e Keqe and the bridge itself are major characters in the book, and they undergo significant transformations.One of the startling events of the book is when a "volunteer" is immured inside the bridge in order to make a "sacrifice" to the river. The man's face is captured in the plaster that surrounds him, as unforgettable as it is horrifying. Though clearly a punishment for the crime of sabotage against the bridge, as Gjon recounts this event, it is less an act of vengeance than it is a true sacrifice. But more than that, it becomes a symbol for the ignorance of and squabbling among tiny Albanian principalities and their fight amongst one another, in front of a major threat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_and_Gold"title="Blood and Gold">
The book begins with an ancient vampire of Nordic descent awaking after being frozen in a block of ice for hundreds of years. The vampire, Thorne, meets Marius de Romanus and inquires about Marius' past. Marius then provides his life story.As a young Roman patrician, Marius was abducted by druids who were trying to find a replacement for their "god of the grove"—a vampire, kept locked inside a chamber underneath a tree, who took on the role of a god in a druidic religion. Marius does not want to receive the powers of the dying god, but is given them nonetheless.Unable to face a life imprisoned in a tree, Marius escapes from the druids (one of whom is Mael). He embarks on a trip to Egypt, where he learns of Akasha and Enkil, the Mother and Father or Those Who Must Be Kept—the progenitors of all vampire-kind. He takes them back to Rome with him after learning that if they die then every other vampire in the world will suffer the same fate.He falls in love with a mortal woman, Pandora, and turns her into a vampire. They live together happily for a long time, although they argue frequently. One day, their house is attacked by a group of vampires who want to know the secrets of Those Who Must Be Kept. Though they destroy these vampires, the attack leads to an argument between the two, and Marius, filled with anger, leaves Pandora.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fads_and_Fallacies_in_the_Name_of_Science"title="Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science">
"Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science" starts with a brief survey of the spread of the ideas of "cranks" and "pseudo-scientists", attacking the credulity of the popular press and the irresponsibility of publishing houses in helping to propagate these ideas. Cranks often cite historical cases where ideas were rejected which are now accepted as right. Gardner acknowledges that such cases occurred, and describes some of them, but says that times have changed: "If anything, scientific journals err on the side of permitting "questionable" theses to be published". Gardner acknowledges that "among older scientists ... one may occasionally meet with irrational prejudice against a new point of view", but adds that "a certain degree of dogma ... is both necessary and desirable" because otherwise "science would be reduced to shambles by having to examine every new-fangled notion that came along."Gardner says that cranks have "two" common characteristics. The first "and most important" is that they work in almost total isolation from the scientific community. Gardner defines the community as an efficient network of communication within scientific fields, together with a co-operative process of testing new theories. This process allows for apparently bizarre theories to be published — such as Einstein's theory of relativity, which initially met with considerable opposition; it was never dismissed as the work of a crackpot, and it soon met with almost universal acceptance. But the crank "stands entirely outside the closely integrated channels through which new ideas are introduced and evaluated. He does not send his findings to the recognized journals or, if he does, they are rejected for reasons which in the vast majority of cases are excellent."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lonely_Doll"title="The Lonely Doll">
"The Lonely Doll" tells the story of a doll named Edith, who lives by herself until two teddy bears, called Mr. Bear and Little Bear, appear in her life. One day, Mr. Bear goes out for a walk leaving the two alone in the house; He returns to find they have rummaged in a closet for dress-up clothing, smeared themselves with makeup, and written "Mr. Bear is just a silly old thing" in lipstick on the mirror. Mr. Bear proceeds to discipline both Little Bear and Edith, leaving Edith to worry that he will take Little Bear and leave. Mr. Bear assures her that he will never, ever, leave her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cry,_the_Beloved_Country"title="Cry, the Beloved Country">
The story begins in the village of Ixopo Ndotsheni, where the black priest Stephen Kumalo receives a letter from the priest Theophilus Msimangu in Johannesburg. Msimangu urges Kumalo to come to the city to help his sister Gertrude, because she is ill. Kumalo goes to Johannesburg to help her and also to find his son Absalom, who had gone to the city to look for Gertrude but never came home. It is a long journey to Johannesburg, and Kumalo sees the wonders of the modern world for the first time.When he gets to the city, Kumalo learns that Gertrude has taken up a life of prostitution and beer brewing, and is now drinking heavily. She agrees to return to the village with her young son. Assured by these developments, Kumalo embarks on the search for Absalom, first seeing his brother John, a carpenter who has become involved in the politics of South Africa. Kumalo and Msimangu follow Absalom's trail, only to learn that Absalom has been in a reformatory and will have a child with a young woman. Shortly thereafter, Kumalo learns that his son has been arrested for murder. The victim is Arthur Jarvis, who was killed during a burglary. Arthur Jarvis was an engineer and a white activist for racial justice, and he happens to be the son of Kumalo's neighbour James Jarvis.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Blood"title="Roman Blood">
The year is 80 BC, and the dictator Sulla rules Rome. The young lawyer Cicero is defending Sextus Roscius, a man accused of murdering his own father. (The gruesome Roman punishment for patricide is described.) Cicero hires Gordianus the Finder to discover the truth of the matter. We are introduced to Gordianus' slave, Bethesda, the mute boy Eco, and historical persons such as the plutocrat Marcus Licinius Crassus, the powerful freedman Lucius Cornelius Chrysogonus and Cicero's scribe Marcus Tullius Tiro.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kallocain"title="Kallocain">
The plot centers on Leo Kall and is written in the form of a diary or memoir. Kall lives with his wife, Linda Kall, in a city intended for chemical industry. Leo is a scientist, who is initially very loyal to the government and develops the truth drug Kallocain. It has the effect that anyone who takes it will reveal anything, even things of which they were not consciously aware.Major themes include the notion of the self in a totalitarian state, the meaning of life, and the power of love. Another central theme is the criminalization of thoughts. Oneself is not an individual, rather a part of the state. And through the effects of Kallocain, the last sanctuary of self is invaded. Apart from the laboratory work and testing by Leo Kall, much of the novel takes place in the home of Leo and Linda.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Against_the_Chtorr"title="The War Against the Chtorr">
Set in a devastated early 21st century United States with logical expected advances in current technology such as a fledgling moon base, this series of science-fiction novels describe the invasion of Earth by an alien ecology. The story is unusual in that the tactics used by the aliens eschew the usual direct attack in favor of terraforming the ecosystem.The United States has suffered serious political and social upheavals. These have come from unintended consequences of US government choices regarding geopolitical crises and interventionism. In the timeline of the books, there had been another US/Eastern Bloc proxy war -- between the State of Israel and certain other Middle Eastern nations -- in the recent past. This had been similar to a larger, higher-technology version of the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict, the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, and others. The books do not explain the detailed conduct of the fictional new war, neither do they state which countries fought Israel.In the summer of 1997, Israel had deployed a nuclear weapon — and the world's perception was that Israel had done so at the instructions of the United States. In a case rather like a reversal of the Cuban Missile Crisis, America had been placed under an explicit nuclear ultimatum from the Soviet Union. Modern printings of the books, however, state that the ultimatum came from Russia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Snow_Queen_(Vinge_novel)"title="The Snow Queen (Vinge novel)">
Arienrhod, the Snow Queen, has secretly implanted several Summer women with clones of herself, in the hopes of extending her rule past her ritual execution at the end of Winter. Moon Dawntreader Summer is the only one of these clones to survive to adolescence. She and her cousin Sparks are lovers. Moon becomes a sibyl, a position of high status among the Summer people. Sibyls are both feared and revered; they possess the ability to answer any question by going into a trance state. Sibyls believe that they receive visions from the Lady, a sea goddess. Sparks is not chosen to become a sibyl. Angry at Moon for joining the sibyls without him and curious about his offworld heritage, he travels to Carbuncle, Tiamat's capital. He is immediately caught up by Arienrhod and eventually becomes the "Starbuck", the Snow Queen's consort and commander of the mer hunts.Moon receives a message, apparently from Sparks, urging her to come to Carbuncle, though sibyls may not legally enter the city. On her way, she becomes entangled with smugglers and is taken offworld. This is normally a one way trip for a Tiamatan citizen. Hegemony law prevents any native Tiamatian from returning after leaving the planet, fearing that travelers would realize how Tiamat is being exploited and use this knowledge to foment rebellion. Arienrhod is crushed; she had planned to draw Moon to Carbuncle and make her the next Summer Queen. Moon was supposed to reject the Summer fear of technology and develop resistance to the Hegemony during the next Summer reign. Arienrhod devises a backup plan; she will unleash a plague at the Change which will kill most Summers and spare most Winters, allowing Tiamat to continue its technological growth before the Hegemony returns.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cakes_and_Ale"title="Cakes and Ale">
The story is told by a first-person narrator and well-to-do author, William Ashenden, who, at the beginning of the novel is suddenly and unexpectedly contacted by Alroy Kear, a busybody literary figure in London who has been asked by Amy, the second Mrs Driffield, to write the biography of her deceased husband, Edward Driffield. Driffield, once scorned for his realist representation of late-Victorian working-class characters, had in his later years come to be lionised by scholars of English letters. The second Mrs Driffield, a nurse to the ailing Edward after his first wife left him, is known for her propriety, and her interest in augmenting and cementing her husband's literary reputation. Her only identity is that of caretaker of her husband in life and of his reputation in death. It is well-known, however, that Driffield wrote his best novels while he was married to his first wife and muse, Rosie.Kear, who is trying to prove his own literary worth, jumps at the opportunity to ride the coat-tails of the great Edward Driffield by writing the biography. Knowing that Ashenden had a long acquaintanceship with the Driffields as a young man, Kear contacts him for inside information about Edward's past, including about his first wife, who has been oddly erased from the official narrative of Edward's genius.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trumpet_of_the_Swan"title="The Trumpet of the Swan">
In Canada during the spring of 1968, the cob (the name for an adult male swan) and the pen (the name for an adult female swan), both trumpeter swans, build their summer nest on a small island in a pond. The swans are worried when Sam Beaver, an 11-year-old boy on a camping trip with his father, begins coming to the lake every day to watch them; the cob believes that human boys are dangerous. One day while the pen steps away from her eggs to stretch her legs, a fox slips up behind her. Sam chases the fox away, saving both the female and her eggs. After this incident, the swans begin to trust him. After the hatching of their cygnets, the cob proudly leads his brood to Sam to introduce them. The cygnets each chirp at Sam in greeting, except for the youngest who is named Louis and is unable to chirp but pulls Sam's shoelace instead. The adult swans gradually realize that Louis is mute.The adults grow increasingly concerned about Louis, worrying that he will not be able to find a mate if he cannot trumpet like all the other swans. Louis's father promises to find a way for him to communicate. At the end of summer, the swan family flies to the winter refuge, Red Rock Lakes in Montana. Louis decides he should learn to read and write in order to communicate, and flies away from the refuge to visit Sam Beaver. Sam takes his swan friend to school with him the next morning. Louis turns out to be a natural at reading and writing, and Sam buys him a portable blackboard and chalk so he can communicate. Unfortunately, because the other swans cannot read, Louis is still lonely. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invitation_to_the_Game"title="Invitation to the Game">
The book is a hard science fiction dystopian novel set in 2154, a time when machines and robots perform most jobs and children go to government schools. Because of this, very few people are employed, with many people living on a social welfare system for support. The unemployed people have nothing to look forward to, except various illicit drugs. Some have formed gangs, some are shown to be agitating for political reform (in chapter 5, there is a reference to leaflets being printed up), and many are involved in organized crime of some form or another. The government, possibly the only government in existence at this point, is shown to have complete control over its citizens by restricting the unemployed to designated areas (DAs), and having similar control over the working class.The working-class people are taught to hate the unemployed citizens, while the unemployed generally want money and employment, in a classic class struggle.The story is told from the perspective of Lisse, a recent graduate of a government school.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Source_of_Magic"title="The Source of Magic">
On his way to Queen Iris's masquerade ball in honor of Trent's accession to the throne one year before, Bink is attacked by a floating sword, which he deflects using his talent of protection against magical harm. At the ball, he is attacked again by an unseen enemy. Finally, Bink confides in King Trent, who decides to remove Bink from harm's way by sending him out on a mission to find the source of magic of Xanth. To help him, King Trent sends Chester the Centaur and the soldier Crombie. Crombie is turned into a griffin by King Trent, whose magical talent is the ability to transform living things.First, the party heads to the Good Magician Humfrey's castle, to ask his advice about their quest. When they tell him they are attempting to discover Xanth's source of magic, Humfrey decides he wants to come as well. They come across Beauregard the Demon who tells them they should abandon their quest, as it could result in the destruction of all magic in Xanth. At this time they also find Grundy the Golem, whose talent is understanding any language. This is particularly useful because Crombie in griffin form can only speak in squawks, which Grundy is able to translate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Roogna"title="Castle Roogna">
Dor, a twelve-year-old magician, is next in line to inherit the throne of Xanth. However, his confidence is low because he is bullied by his agemates, including royal princess Irene, because of his power of making unliving objects talk. Adding to Dor's chagrin is his onsetting puberty, which makes him aware of his nanny Millie, a former ghost for 800 years who is in love with a zombie named Jonathan. To teach him the skills he will need to rule the kingdom, and to help him get over his attraction to Millie, King Trent sends him on a mission 800 years into Xanth's past to find the ancient and mysterious Zombie Master, who was the only Xanthian with the knowledge to create an elixir which could return a zombie to life. After striking a deal with the Brain Coral to safeguard his body during his trip, Dor casts his consciousness into the past via Magician Humfrey's magic and a decorative wall tapestry inside Castle Roogna.In the past, Dor finds himself inhabiting the body of an invading Mundanian barbarian, and accompanied by a spider named Jumper, who had accidentally been drawn into the past with him and was enlarged to giant size by the magical transfer. They end up rescuing a young girl, who turns out to be a younger Millie. Together they travel to Castle Roogna, which is still under construction in that era and is about to be caught in the midst of a massive battle between a horde of goblins and a flock of harpies, and—indirectly—by the magician Murphy. With King Roogna's forces too small to ward off the attack, Dor, Jumper and Millie are sent to ask the Zombie Master for aid. The Zombie Master, living as a hermit due to his power, at first refuses, but is swayed when he and Millie fall in love with each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Mare"title="Night Mare">
"Night Mare" centres around Mare Imbrium, one of the night mares charged with delivering bad dreams to the people of Xanth. Imbri carries half a soul, her fee for carrying Chem Centaur out of the void in the previous book. She is unwilling to relinquish her soul, though the conscience that comes with it impedes her ability to deliver bad dreams. The Night Stallion, ruler of the gourd realm, makes Imbri the liaison to the day world and sends her to meet Trent, King of Xanth, with the message, "Beware the Horseman".Imbri leaves the gourd realm and sets out for Castle Roogna with her warning. Along the way she meets a white stallion, which she calls the day horse, with a brass bracelet around one leg, who is scared by her attempt at contact via a brief daydream, and runs away. She also meets an intelligent man wearing a brass bracelet, similar to that of the day horse. He asks her if she has seen the horse and convinces her to allow him to ride her so they can track it. She allows him to insert a bit into her mouth, but dislikes it and asks him to remove it. He refuses and uses spurs on her, capturing her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_Quest"title="Question Quest">
The book begins with Lacuna, one of the mischievous Castle Zombie twins, seeking a way to fix her "dull" life. To do so she comes to ask Grey, Ivy's betrothed and pro-tem magician of knowledge, for the answer. However, Grey doesn't want to answer her question because he knows that something terrible will come of it. Lacuna decides to make a deal that even Grey can't refuse, a way to outwit Com-Pewter. Lacuna plans to use her ability to change prints and write new ones to help Grey. Seeing no other choice, Grey decides to help her, but he realizes that he can't fathom what the book of knowledge is trying to say. Therefore, he sends her to the anteroom of hell to talk to Magician Humfrey. When Lacuna arrives in the anteroom, she finds Humfrey sleeping. After waking Humfrey up, she found out that he is waiting to talk to the Demon X(A/N)th to free his wife Rose. Humfrey tells her to write down his life story (and most of Xanth's history in the process), on the walls, so that he can get the demon's attention. It turns out that Humfrey has five wives. Humfrey manages to save his wives from the pits of hell (sort of) and Lacuna changes her life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Color_of_Her_Panties"title="The Color of Her Panties">
Mela Merwoman, one of the protagonists of "The Color of Her Panties", was introduced in "Heaven Cent" attempting to trick Prince Dolph into marrying her. Still desperate for a husband, Mela goes to ask the Good Magician Humfrey to find her a suitable mate. On the way, she joins forces with a civilized ogre named Okra and a positive young woman named Ida, who bears a striking resemblance to Princess Ivy.Meanwhile, adolescent Gwenny Goblin, Che Centaur and Jenny Elf are trying to help Gwenny beat out her half-brother Gobble for chiefship of the goblin horde.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yon_Ill_Wind"title="Yon Ill Wind">
Hurricane Happy Bottom is causing problems in Mundania and Xanth. The Mundane Baldwin family is blown into Xanth by a Yon Ill Wind. Also, Demon X(A/N)th has made a wager with Demon JU(P/I)ter that he could cause a Xanthian to shed a tear. The demons change up by making X(A/N)th into a dragon ass and is only able to talk once explaining to a Xanthian what the quest is. As Nimby, Demon X(A/N)th meets Chlorine and makes her beautiful and talented. Together with the Baldwin family, they must banish Happy Bottom From Xanth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_Lover"title="Zombie Lover">
Breanna, a beautiful young newcomer to the enchanted land of Xanth, must deal with a distressing dilemma. She has unwittingly attracted the affections of King Xeth, ruler of Xanth's Zombies, who yearns to make her Queen of the Undead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atonement_(novel)"title="Atonement (novel)">
## Part one.Briony Tallis, a 13-year-old English girl with a talent for writing, lives at her family's country estate with her parents Jack and Emily Tallis, who are members of the landed gentry. Her older sister Cecilia has recently graduated from the University of Cambridge with Robbie Turner, the Tallis family housekeeper's son and Cecilia's childhood friend, whose university education was funded by Jack.In the summer of 1935, Briony's maternal cousins, 15-year-old Lola and 9-year-old twins Jackson and Pierrot, visit the family amidst their parents' divorce. Briony and Cecilia's older brother Leon returns from London, accompanied by his friend from Oxford, the well-off manufacturer Paul Marshall. Cecilia and Robbie bicker over a vase, which breaks and falls into a pond. Cecilia strips to her underwear and dives in to retrieve the pieces, surprising Robbie. Briony, watching from a window, is confused and intrigued by Cecilia and Robbie's actions. She is inspired to begin writing psychological realism, and the reader is informed that this will eventually become a hallmark of her fiction.In the wake of the incident by the pond, Robbie realizes he is attracted to Cecilia, and writes several drafts of a love letter to her. He gives the letter to Briony to deliver to Cecilia; however, he inadvertently gives her a version he had meant to discard, which contains lewd references ("In my dreams I kiss your cunt"). By the time Robbie realizes his mistake, Briony has already returned to the house with his letter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Some_People_Die"title="The Way Some People Die">
An investigation keeps Lew Archer constantly on the move about South California, beginning in Santa Monica, where Mrs. Samuel Lawrence gives Lew Archer 50 dollars for one day of his time to find her missing daughter Galatea (a.k.a. Galley). Archer soon discovers that Galley has married a small-time mobster named Joe Tarantine. Starting the investigation in the most likely place, with Tarantine's brother, Mario, Archer finds the man in hospital after a severe beating. Shortly after that Mr. Dowser, a big-time mobster and drug runner living near Pacific Palisades, offers him a retainer to find Tarantine, who has absconded with property of his. That this was a shipment of heroin stolen from Dowser's agent, Herman Speed, is not revealed until later. Archer travels to Palm Springs, where Galley was last sighted, and is led to Joe Tarantine's hideout by her admirer Keith Dalling. Though Archer manages to speak to Galley briefly, he is slugged from behind and is found lying by the roadside by Mrs Marjorie Fellows. When he returns to Dalling's apartment, it is to find him shot; then later Tarantine's body is discovered in a motorboat awash on the rocks beyond the fictitious Pacific Point. Following another lead, Archer discovers that Marjorie's husband, "Colonel Henry Fellows", is in fact Herman Speed, who has borrowed $30,000 from her to invest on her behalf. In reality he had used it to buy the stolen heroin from Joe Tarantine, hoping to sell it on at a profit. Archer tracks Speed down in San Francisco and forces him to hand over the drugs, after which Speed commits suicide. Archer then hands the heroin over to Dowser and arranges for the police to raid the house and arrest him immediately afterwards. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masks_of_the_Illuminati"title="Masks of the Illuminati">
The novel features numerous real-life historical figures in its narrative, including a first person description of reality by scientist Albert Einstein and Irish author James Joyce, while the plot involves English author and occultist Aleister Crowley, British nobles, the Loch Ness Monster and mystical experiences.The plot revolves primarily around the description by a young English gentleman, Sir John Babcock, of his initiation into the Argenteum Astrum. Ancestors of Sir John are major characters in "The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_Treasure"title="The Tower Treasure">
The story begins with Frank and Joe Hardy barely avoiding being hit by a speeding driver, who they notice has bright red hair. Later, this same red-haired driver attempts a ferry boat ticket office robbery and successfully steals a yellow jalopy called "Queen" from the Hardys' friend, Chet Morton. Due to one witness reporting that the villain had dark hair, the Hardys assume he is using a red wig. It is learned that the thief returned to Chet's home to steal a tire, helping Frank and Joe to find "Queen" abandoned in a public wooded area.The excitement of finding "Queen" is quickly gone when it is reported that there has been a robbery of forty thousand dollars in securities and jewels from the Tower Mansion owned by siblings Hurd and Adelia Applegate. Hurd Applegate is convinced that the Tower's caretaker, Henry Robinson, is the guilty party. The Hardys are especially concerned by this accusation, because Henry's son, Perry, is a friend of theirs who will have to quit school to work since his father can no longer get a job as a result of Applegate's accusation. The only "proof" of Henry Robinson's guilt is that he was suddenly able to pay off a debt and refused to reveal where he got the money to do so.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_at_Rest"title="Rabbit at Rest">
This novel is part of the series that follows the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom from 1960 to 1990. "Rabbit at Rest" focuses on the years 1988–89. Harry, nearly 40 years after his glory days as a high school basketball star in a mid-sized Pennsylvania city, has retired with Janice, his wife of 33 years, to sunny Florida during the cold months, where Harry is depressed, dangerously overweight and desperate for reasons to keep on living.Unable to stop nibbling corn chips, macadamia nuts and other junk food, Rabbit nearly dies after a heart attack while sunfishing with his nine-year-old granddaughter, Judy. In a "redemption" of the drowning death of his infant daughter Rebecca in the earlier novel "Rabbit, Run", he saves Judy from drowning during their sunfishing afternoon.He is distracted from his own existential worries by the acts of his drug-addicted son, Nelson, to whom Janice (the actual owner of the Angstroms' wealth) has given control of the family's thriving business, a Pennsylvania Toyota dealership. The discovery that Nelson has been stealing from the company to support his drug habit causes Harry to lose the family business. Despite his multiplying difficulties, Rabbit manages to take solace in the presence of Judy, who has matured into a beautiful and charming young lady, reminding him of his high-school glory days. He is less attached to his four-year-old grandson Roy, who seems wary and fearful of Rabbit, much like Nelson.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_Is_Rich"title="Rabbit Is Rich">
This third novel of Updike's "Rabbit" series examines the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a one-time high school basketball star, who has reached a paunchy middle-age without relocating from Brewer, Pennsylvania, the poor, fictional city of his birth. Harry and Janice, his wife of 22 years, live comfortably, having inherited her late father's Toyota dealership. He is indeed rich, but Harry's persistent problems—his wife's drinking, his troubled son's schemes, his libido, and spectres from his past—complicate life. Having achieved an opulent lifestyle that would have embarrassed his working-class parents, Harry is not greedy, but neither is he ever quite satisfied. Harry has grown smitten with a country-club friend's young wife. He worries about Nelson, his indecisive son, a student at Kent State University. Throughout the book, Harry wonders whether his former lover, Ruth, ever gave birth to their illegitimate daughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Made_of_Dawn"title="House Made of Dawn">
## Part I: The Longhair."House Made of Dawn" begins with the protagonist, Abel, returning to his reservation in New Mexico after fighting in World War II. The war has left him emotionally devastated and he arrives too drunk to recognize his grandfather, Francisco. Now an old man with a lame leg, Francisco had earlier been a respected hunter and participant in the village's religious ceremonies. He raised Abel after the death of Abel's mother and older brother, Vidal. Francisco instilled in Abel a sense of native traditions and values, but the war and other events severed Abel's connections to that world of spiritual and physical wholeness and connectedness to the land and its people, a world known as a "house made of dawn".After arriving in the village, Abel attains a job through Father Olguin chopping wood for Angela St. John, a rich white woman who is visiting the area to bathe in the mineral waters. Angela seduces Abel to distract herself from her own unhappiness, but also because she senses an animal-like quality in Abel. She promises to help him leave the reservation to find better means of employment. Possibly as a result of this affair, Abel realizes that his return to the reservation has been unsuccessful. He no longer feels at home and he is confused. His turmoil becomes clearer when he is beaten in a game of horsemanship by a local albino Indian named Juan Reyes, described as "the white man". Deciding Juan is a witch, Abel stabs him to death outside of a bar. Abel is then found guilty of murder and sent to jail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_Boy_(novel)"title="Storm Boy (novel)">
Storm Boy likes to wander alone along the fierce deserted coast among the dunes that face out into the Southern Ocean. After a pelican mother is shot, Storm Boy rescues the three baby pelicans and nurses them back to health. He names them Mr Proud, Mr Ponder and Mr Percival. After he releases them, his favourite, Mr Percival, returns. The story then concentrates on the conflict between his lifestyle, the externally imposed requirement for him to attend a school, the fate of the pelican, and the relationship of the boy, and later his father, with Fingerbone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scions_of_Shannara"title="The Scions of Shannara">
The Scions of Shannara is set in a land ruled by the cruel military order called the Federation. The Elves have vanished, while the dwarves are imprisoned for having fought the Federation in the past. The Dwarves are sent to dig in mines, and will soon be extinct because of the Federation's wickedness. Magic is forbidden.Par Ohmsford and his brother Coll start the story in Varfleet, telling legends and important histories of the past about the adventures of the Ohmsfords and the druids in a tavern through the use of Par's magic, the wishsong. The wishsong is but an illusion seen when Par sings what he wants to create. However, what Par and Coll are doing is illegal under the law of the Federation because magic is supposedly the cause for various problems that are occurring in the Four Lands. On one night, Rimmer Dall, first Seeker for the Federation, bursts into the tavern, having found out about Par and Coll, and tries to arrest them. Par and Coll are rescued by a mysterious man, who claims to be a leader of the rebel group (or the Movement). The man does not give them his name, though he does hand Par a ring with a hawk insignia. He tells them that when they need help they can go to a certain forge, show the ring, and they will be led to the Movement's base. Thus, the two brothers escape and after much debate decide to travel to Leah to meet up with their friend, Morgan Leah. Upon their way, they are attacked by a frightening woods hag who is a Shadowen, a beast of legend and of great power. Yet they are saved by an old man, Cogline, who was once a Druid, and is now a messenger for the Shade of Allanon. He informs them that they must travel to the Hadeshorn in order to meet with the ancient Druid, Allanon. The fate of the Four Lands lies upon them and the other scions of Shannara: Wren in the Westland and Walker Boh who lives somewhere in the Eastland, and to whom Cogline is to deliver the message also. The Shadowen threaten to overcome all the Races.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Maggot"title="A Maggot">
The book opens with an objective narration about a group of five travellers travelling through Exmoor in rural England. They arrive at an inn in a small village, and soon it becomes clear that they are not who they seem to be. The "maid" Louise casually rebuffs the sexual advances of the servant, Dick Thurlow, but then goes to his master's room and undresses before them both. Bartholomew calls his supposed uncle "Lacy" and they discuss Bartholomew's refusal to disclose his journey's secret purpose, as well as fate versus free will. Eventually the narration stops and is followed by letters, interview transcripts, and snatches of more third-person narration, interspersed with facsimile pages from contemporary issues of "The Gentleman's Magazine". We learn from a fictional news story that a man has been found hanged near the place where the travellers were staying.The subsequent interviews are conducted by Henry Ayscough, a lawyer employed by Bartholomew's father, who is a Duke. The interviews reveal that Bartholomew had hired the party to travel with him but deceived them about the purpose of his journey. Variations of his story are (1) he was on his way to elope against the wishes of family; (2) he was visiting a wealthy, aged aunt to secure an inheritance from her; (3) he was seeking a cure for impotence; (4) he was pursuing some scientific or occult knowledge, possibly concerning knowledge of the future. He takes Rebecca and Dick to a cave in a remote area. Rebecca's initial tale, retold by Jones, is that he there performed a satanic ritual, and Rebecca herself was raped by Satan and forced to view a panorama of human suffering and cruelty. Rebecca's own testimony admits this was a deception to quiet Jones. She says that she actually saw Bartholomew meet a noble lady who took them all inside a strange floating craft (which she calls "the maggot"). In this craft she sees what she describes as a divine revelation of heaven ("June Eternal") and the Shaker Trinity (Father, Son, and female Holy Spirit or "Mother Wisdom"). She also sees a vision of human suffering and cruelty in this version of her story. Modern readers may interpret her visions as films and her overall experience as a contact with time travellers or extraterrestrials. Rebecca then loses consciousness; she wakes, finds Jones outside the cave, and they leave together. She then tells Jones the satanic version of her experience. Meanwhile, Jones has seen Dick leave the cave in terror, presumably to go and hang himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bag_of_Bones"title="Bag of Bones">
The narrator, Mike Noonan, a bestselling novelist, suffers severe writer's block after his pregnant wife Jo suddenly dies due to a brain aneurysm. Four years later, Mike, still grieving, is plagued by nightmares set at his summer house in TR-90 (an unincorporated town named for its map coordinates), Maine. He decides to confront his fears and moves to his vacation house on Dark Score Lake, known as "Sara Laughs".On his first day, he meets Kyra, a 3-year-old girl and her young widowed mother, 20-year-old Mattie Devore. Mattie's father-in-law is Max Devore, an elderly rich man who will do anything to gain custody of his granddaughter, Kyra. Drawn to Kyra and Mattie, Mike hires John Storrow, a custody lawyer, for Mattie, and things start looking up. Mike begins to write again, and realizes that Jo's ghost is helping him to solve the mystery of Sara Tidwell, a blues singer whose ghost haunts the house. He also learns that Jo frequently returned to the town in the year before her death, without telling him.Mike begins having recurring, disturbing dreams and visions, and realizes he shares a psychic connection with Kyra. Max and his personal assistant, Rogette, try to drown Mike but he survives with the help of his wife's spirit. Max unexpectedly commits suicide that same night. Mike sees a pattern when he sees that local inhabitants have names that begin with "K" or "C" and learns how relatives of townspeople have drowned in childhood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Colorado_Kid"title="The Colorado Kid">
Opening "in medias res" as the news staff of "The Weekly Islander" pays for lunch at a restaurant, editor Dave Bowie and founder Vince Teague test young intern Stephanie McCann's powers of deduction regarding their unorthodox tipping procedure. She impresses them by discerning that the restaurant management pools all the tips and splits them equally among the staff, while Dave and Vince want to leave an especially large tip earmarked for their waitress who has fallen on hard times. They discuss some local unsolved crimes and oddities, which have gained circulation in mainland newspapers as far away as Boston during the traditional Halloween season interest in such tales. The friendly assessment becomes more intense as the elderly island natives and Stephanie return to the office, and she asks if the veteran reporters have "ever come across a real unexplained mystery". Dave and Vince take turns recounting a strange incident and investigation.On April 24, 1980, two teenagers stumbled across a man's body, early in the morning. Slumped against a trash can, and carrying no identification, the body bore no clear indicators of foul play. Cause of death was determined to be asphyxiation, as a large chunk of steak was extracted from the victim's throat. Every potential clue leads to small revelations, but bigger mysteries. Though the investigation is lightly bungled, everything seems inexplicable, from how the fish-dinner stomach contents could line up with his ferry boat crossing, to the single Russian coin in his pocket, and the pack of cigarettes missing one cigarette when the autopsy indicated he was not a smoker.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destiny_of_the_Daleks"title="Destiny of the Daleks">
K9 has lost his voice, and the Fourth Doctor is confused as to why a robot would have laryngitis. Romana, for reasons unknown, regenerates, choosing the form of Princess Astra of the planet Atrios, in spite of the Doctor's initial disapproval of it.The TARDIS lands on a rocky planet. The Doctor and Romana see a group of ragged-looking humans burying one of their dead, followed by a spaceship landing and half-burying itself in the ground in a valley. As the Doctor and Romana are about to investigate, underground explosions force them back towards the ruins. Whilst exploring them, another explosion occurs, trapping the Doctor. Romana returns to the TARDIS to reassemble K9 so he can assist, but finds the TARDIS half-buried in rubble and the Doctor is missing. As she turns to leave, a man who has been following her blocks her path. She backs away, falls down a rubble chute, and loses consciousness. She recovers only to have three Daleks burst through the wall and capture her, commanding her to work at a drilling site.Meanwhile, the Doctor is thanking the white-clad, silver-haired humanoids who have rescued him, remarking on their strength. He asks their leader, Commander Sharrel, where he is, and is told that the planet is D-5-Gamma-Z-Alpha, otherwise known as Skaro. The Doctor learns that the Movellans are here to wage war against the Daleks. Two Movellans bring in a new prisoner, the man who has been following the Doctor and Romana. He is Starship Engineer Tyssan. He reveals that the Daleks used him as slave labour as part of a search operation. He tells the Doctor about what has happened to Romana, and they set out to rescue her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_World"title="Lord of the World">
## Prologue.In early 21st century London, two priests, the white-haired Father Percy Franklin and the younger Father John Francis, are visiting the subterranean lodgings of the elderly Mr. Templeton. A Catholic and former Conservative Member of Parliament who witnessed the marginalization of his religion and the destruction of his party, Mr. Templeton describes to the two priests the last century of British and world history.Since the Labour Party took control of the British Government in 1917, the British Empire has been a single party state. The British Royal Family has been deposed, the House of Lords has been abolished, Oxford and Cambridge universities have been closed down, and all their professors sent into internal exile in Ireland. Marxism, atheism, and secular humanism, which Templeton describes as the tools of Freemasonry, dominate culture and politics. The Anglican Communion has been disestablished since 1929 and, like all forms of Protestantism, is almost extinct. The world now has only three main religious forces: Catholicism, secular humanism, and "the Eastern religions".Nationalism has been destroyed by Marxist internationalism and the world has been divided into three power-blocs. The first, which is generally marked in red on maps, is a European Confederation of Marxist one-party states and their colonies in Africa that use Esperanto for a world language. The second, marked in yellow, is "the Eastern Empire", whose Emperor, the "Son of Heaven", descends from the Japanese and Chinese Imperial Families. The third, the blue marked, "the American Republic", consists of North and South America.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Right's_Trip"title="Divine Right's Trip">
The plot is set in the 1960s, which chronicles the awakening of the hippie stoner Divine Right (alter ego of the main character D.R. (David Ray) Davenport) as he travels from Kentucky with his girlfriend Estelle across the country, in a patient and introspective 1963 VW Bus, Urge. Divine Right has no idea where he is or where he is going.D.R. and Estelle take turns sleeping and driving, but D.R.'s constant straddling between waking and sleeping makes the journey as much an inner trip as it is a physical seemingly random trip from Urge to anywhere. The first helper character to be encountered is the Lone Outdoorsman who is a non-moving object in this road-trip story, stuck camping on the same site since years ago, watching TV in his solitude. He is a suspicious soul.The next helper is the Greek, who is named for his talking. The Greek is on a journey back to Norman, Oklahoma, to destroy the last remaining record of himself, which is an autobiographical Master's thesis. He wants to erase himself and forget his name, and hopes to come closer to Nirvana by doing this. It seems D.R. and the Greek have a lot in common in this quest, but while the Greek is moving toward some goal, D.R. is only running away from home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_Consequences_(novel)"title="Unintended Consequences (novel)">
The novel's protagonist, Henry Bowman, shows an early proficiency with firearms, practicing whenever he can find the time. Encouraged by his father, he gathers an impressive firearms collection and gains extensive experience in piloting small aircraft. During college, Bowman is robbed, beaten, and sodomized by a rural gang. The incident nearly destroys him and causes him to become an alcoholic for a period.While at a gun show in Indianapolis, Indiana with friend Allen Kane, Bowman publicly embarrasses an agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), Wilson Blair. One of Blair's men was trying to trick and entrap a fellow firearms dealer. Blair takes the offense personally, and with the support of the ATF's director, begins to plan revenge. Several years later, Blair and subordinate agents of the ATF plan to frame Henry and his friends as terrorists, smugglers, and counterfeiters. They plan to plant "evidence" when the men are away on vacation. Unbeknownst to Blair, Bowman delays his departure at the last minute due to a work commitment, and is on a friend's property when the agents arrive. Bowman assumes the agents are burglars and engages in a gun battle with them, killing or capturing all and in the process discovering the truth about the raid.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Fields_(novel)"title="London Fields (novel)">
"London Fields" is set in London in 1999 against a backdrop of environmental, social, and moral degradation, and the looming threat of world instability and nuclear war (referred to as "The Crisis"). The novel opens with Samson explaining how grateful he is to have found this story, already formed, already happening, waiting to be written down.This is the story of a murder. It hasn't happened yet. But it will. (It had better.) I know the murderer, I know the murderee. I know the time, I know the place. I know the motive ("her" motive) and I know the means. I know who will be the foil, the fool, the poor foal, also utterly destroyed. I couldn't stop them, I don't think, even if I wanted to. The girl will die. It's what she always wanted. You can't stop people, once they "start". You can't stop people, once they "start creating".What a gift. This page is briefly stained by my tears of gratitude. Novelists don't usually have it so good, do they, when something real happens (something unified, dramatic, and pretty saleable), and they just write it down?The characters have few, if any, redeeming features. Sam, the narrator of the novel (who twice emphasizes that he is "a reliable narrator"), is an American, a failed non-fiction writer with decades-long writer's block who is slowly dying of some sort of terminal disease. Recently arrived in London, he immediately meets Keith Talent, a "cheat" (small-time criminal) and aspiring professional darts player, at Heathrow Airport where Keith is posing as a minicab driver. Keith gives Sam an extortionately priced ride into town. The two converse in Keith's car, and Keith invites Sam to the Black Cross, a pub on the Portobello Road, Keith's main hangout. At the Black Cross, Sam meets Guy Clinch, a rich upper-class banker who is bored with life, with his terrifyingly snobbish American wife, Hope, and his out-of-control toddler, Marmaduke. Shortly after, the two both meet the anti-heroine, Nicola Six, a 34-year-old local resident, of uncertain nationality, who has entered the pub after attending a funeral.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Call_of_Earth"title="The Call of Earth">
The book focuses on several key events that happen after Nafai, Elemak, Issib, Mebbekew, Zdorab and the father Volemak leave for the desert. Elemak has a dream from the Oversoul, foretelling Volemak's sons going back to the city of Basilica to get wives. The sons proceed to Nafai's and Issib's mother, Rasa, who is attempting to keep order within the city. However Hushidh, a raveler under Rasa's care, makes the disastrous mistake of severing the ties between Rashgallivak and his men, leading to widespread riots across the city.At the same time, General Moozh, leader of the "Wetheads" nation (Gorayni), is attempting to conquer cities around Basilica. He sees a strategic chance, and taking only 1000 soldiers, marches across the desert to conquer the city. He arrives in time to help the local city guard quell the uprising, and slowly begins taking control of its affairs.The remainder of the book deals with Nafai and his brothers' (Elemak and Mebbekew, who had come) attempts at finding wives. In the end, they are all forced into a house arrest along with Rasa, where Elemak takes Eiadh as his wife, Mebbekew takes Dol, Nafai takes Luet, the waterseer, with Rasa and Hushidh deciding to come as wives for Volemak and Issib, respectively. Shedemei (a Basilican geneticist) is dragged along with enough plants and animals to populate the future earth with new species, also as a wife to Zdorab.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Talisman_(Scott_novel)"title="The Talisman (Scott novel)">
During a truce in the third Crusade, Sir Kenneth and a Saracen Emir ride together towards the cave of the hermit Theodoric of Engaddi, where Theodoric gives Sir Kenneth some secret information. The Emir falls asleep and the other two men go to a chapel, where Sir Kenneth meets his old lover, Lady Edith.Sir Kenneth travels to Ascalon, where Richard Coeur de Lion lays ill in his tent. Sir Kenneth and the King discuss Sir Kenneth's visit to the chapel and a doctor gives the King some medicine. While King Richard sleeps, Conrade of Montserrat, who wishes to become King of Jerusalem, incites Archduke Leopold of Austria to plant his flag in the centre of the camp. The King wakes up and when he discovers what Leopold has done, he tears down the flag. Philip of France persuades him to refer the matter to the council, and Sir Kenneth is asked to watch the English flag until daybreak. Soon after midnight, Sir Kenneth is lured away under false pretences. The flag is stolen and Sir Kenneth's dog is deliberately injured.The camp doctor tells Sir Kenneth that Sultan Saladin wishes to marry the Lady Edith. Sir Kenneth tries to warn the King, but the King does not believe him and banishes Sir Kenneth from court. Sir Kenneth spends a few days in Saladin's court, disguised as a Nubian slave. Saladin gives the disguised Sir Kenneth to King Richard as a gift. Shortly afterwards, Sir Kenneth, still in disguise, saves the king from an assassination attempt. He promises King Richard he can discover who stole the flag.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Talisman_(King_and_Straub_novel)"title="The Talisman (King and Straub novel)">
Jack Sawyer, twelve years old, sets out from Arcadia Beach, New Hampshire, in a bid to save his mother Lily, who is dying from cancer, by finding a crystal called "the Talisman". Jack's journey takes him simultaneously through the American heartland and "the Territories", a strange fantasy land that is set in a universe parallel to that of Jack's United States. Individuals in the Territories have "twinners", or parallel individuals, in our world. Twinners' births, deaths, and (it is intimated) other major life events are usually paralleled. Twinners can also "flip" or migrate to the other world but only share the body of their alternate universe's analogue. When flipped, the twinner, or the actual person, will automatically start speaking and thinking the language of where they are flipping into subconsciously.In rare instances (such as Jack's), a person may die in one world but not the other, making the survivor "single-natured", with the ability to switch back and forth, body and mind, between the two worlds. Jack is taught how to flip by a mysterious figure known as Speedy Parker, who is the twinner of a gunslinger named Parkus in the Territories. In the Territories, the beloved Queen Laura DeLoessian, the twinner of Jack's mother (a movie actress known as the "Queen of the B Movies"), is dying as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Apprentice"title="The Good Apprentice">
Edward Baltram, a college student living in London, gives his best friend Mark a sandwich laced with a hallucinogenic drug for a joke. After Mark, still high, falls to his death from a window, Edward is wracked with guilt and depression — worsened by daily letters from Mark's mother cursing him as a murderer.In search of his father, Jesse, Edward sets off for Seegard, the family home, away from the harsh reality of London. As Edward progresses through the novel, he revives somewhat, thanks to the love of his eccentric father and his extended family of supportive women. He eventually finds, however, that he must come to terms with Mark's death.Meanwhile, Edward's stepbrother Stuart Cuno decides to give up his studies and goes in search of the "pure" life of an aesthete, to his family's bewilderment. Stuart has a close bond with thirteen-year-old Meredith, the son of Thomas and Midge McCaskerville.While Edward seeks redemption and Stuart salvation, Midge is having an affair with her husband's best friend, Harry Cuno - stepfather to Edward and father to Stuart. Her passionate love affair comes to a head after two years when she is disgraced publicly and falls unexpectedly in love with Stuart. Left with a difficult decision, Midge turns to Edward for support.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_She_Was_Good"title="When She Was Good">
When still a child, Lucy Nelson had her alcoholic father thrown in jail. Ever since then, she has been trying to reform the men around her, even if that ultimately means destroying herself in the process.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mark_on_the_Door"title="The Mark on the Door">
## Revised edition.While boating on Barmet Bay, the Hardy boys spot a periscope from a submarine and then nearly crash into a rented speedboat driven by a Mexican man named Pancho Cardillo. Mr. Cardillo later returns to the rental location and steals the speedboat, leading the boys on a search for the stolen boat. Cardillo then ditches the boat after his cronies knock out Frank and Joe. While investigating Mr. Cardillo, the boys find an Indian ring with a strange crest on it and Fenton Hardy receives a threatening letter telling him to "beware of the mark on the door!"The Hardy boys, their father, and their friend Chet Morton fly to Mexico where they find a band of Indians and a strange oil smuggling operation using submarines. Their deductions lead them to a small Mexican town where they learn that local people are mysteriously disappearing and the strange crest appears on the doors of people who have disappeared. The Hardys find a local youth by the name of Tico who is a great navigator and helps the Hardy boys find the culprit's hideout where they learn the real man behind the scheme is Cardillo, who is called "Pavura", which means terror in Spanish, by the Indians.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_Brown_Suit"title="The Man in the Brown Suit">
Nadina, a dancer in Paris, and Count Sergius Paulovitch, both in service of "the Colonel", an international agent provocateur, plan to blackmail him to prevent him from retiring, leaving his agents high and dry.Anne Beddingfeld witnesses an accident at Hyde Park Corner tube station when a man falls onto the live track. Anne picks up a note dropped by the doctor who examined the dead man, which read "17.1 22 Kilmorden Castle" and a house agent's order to view Mill House in Marlow where a dead woman has been found the next day. A young man in a brown suit was identified as a suspect, having entered the house soon after the dead woman.Anne realises the examination of the dead man was oddly done and visits the Mill House where she finds a canister of undeveloped film, and she learns that 'Kilmorden Castle' is a sailing ship and books passage on it. On board the ship, Anne meets Suzanne Blair, Colonel Race, and Sir Eustace Pedler and his secretaries, Guy Pagett and Harry Rayburn.Colonel Race recounts the story of the theft of diamonds some years before, attributed to the son of a South African gold magnate, John Eardsley, and his friend Harry Lucas. The friends joined the war where John was killed and his father's huge fortune passed to his next of kin, Race himself. Lucas was posted as "missing in action".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Rotten_(Fforde)"title="Something Rotten (Fforde)">
The book sees Thursday return from the world of fiction to the alternative Swindon that Fforde introduced in "The Eyre Affair"; she is accompanied by Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, whose excursion from the world of fiction with Thursday forms the main sub-plot.The title is taken from "Hamlet" I.iv: "Something is rotten in the State of Denmark".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thousand_Acres"title="A Thousand Acres">
Larry Cook is an aging farmer who decides to incorporate his farm, handing complete and joint ownership to his three daughters, Ginny, Rose, and Caroline. When the youngest daughter objects, she is removed from the agreement. This sets off a chain of events that brings dark truths to light and explodes long-suppressed emotions, as the story eventually reveals the long-term sexual abuse of the two eldest daughters that was committed by their father.The plot also focuses on Ginny's troubled marriage, her difficulties in bearing a child and her relationship with her family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redburn"title="Redburn">
Unable to find employment at home, young Wellingborough Redburn signs on the "Highlander", a merchantman out of New York City bound for Liverpool, England. Representing himself as the "son of a gentleman" and expecting to be treated as such, he discovers that he is just a green hand, a "boy", the lowest rank on the ship, assigned all the duties no other sailor wants, like cleaning out the "pig-pen", a longboat that serves as a shipboard sty. The first mate promptly nicknames him "Buttons" for the shiny ones on his impractical jacket. Redburn quickly grasps the workings of social relations aboard ship. As a common seaman he can have no contact with those "behind the mast" where the officers command the ship. Before the mast, where the common seaman work and live, a bully named Jackson, the best seaman aboard, rules through fear with an iron fist. Uneducated yet cunning, with broken nose and squinting eye, he is described as "a Cain afloat, branded on his yellow brow with some inscrutable curse and going about corrupting and searing every heart that beat near him." Redburn soon experiences all the trials of a greenhorn: seasickness, scrubbing decks, climbing masts in the dead of night to unfurl sails, cramped quarters, and bad food. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Key"title="The Glass Key">
The story revolves around Ned Beaumont. Beaumont is best friend, confidant, and political advisor of the criminal political boss Paul Madvig. Ned finds the body of a senator's son on the street, and Madvig asks him to thwart the D.A.'s investigation, his motive being that he wants to back the corrupt senator in order to marry his daughter, Janet. Ned goes to New York searching for Bernie, a bookie who owes him a great deal of money from a gambling debt, but ends up getting beaten up.Someone sends a series of letters to people close to the crime, hinting that Madvig was the murderer. Suspicion for this falls on Madvig's daughter Opal, the victim's girlfriend. Madvig's political base begins to crumble when he refuses to spring a follower's brother from jail. The follower goes to rival mob boss Shad O'Rory, who eliminates a witness to the brother's crime. Madvig then declares war on O'Rory, who offers to bribe Beaumont to expose Madvig in the newspaper. Beaumont refuses, is knocked unconscious and wakes captive in a dingy room where he is beaten daily.Hospitalized after his escape, Beaumont tells Madvig and Janet that he was laying a trap for O'Rory; he then struggles out of bed to stop the newspaper from printing its expose. Beaumont confronts O'Rory, the publisher, and Madvig's daughter Opal. The publisher commits suicide after Beaumont seduces his wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_to_the_Daleks"title="Death to the Daleks">
The TARDIS suffers an energy drain and lands on the planet Exxilon. The Third Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith go to investigate the cause of the interference, and become separated. The Doctor is captured by the planet's inhabitants, the savage Exxilons, but escapes. Sarah Jane is attacked by one of the creatures in the TARDIS, and flees, finding a huge city with a flashing beacon.At dawn, the Doctor is found by a party of humans from the Marine Space Corps; they take him to their ship, which has been stranded by the power drain. They are on an expedition to mine "Parrinium" – a mineral abundant only on Exxilon – which can cure and give immunity from a deadly space plague. If the expedition does not leave the planet with a supply of Parrinium within a month then millions will die. They show the Doctor photos of the nearby city – which the Exxilons worship, sacrificing anyone who ventures too close. Sarah Jane does so and is captured and taken to the Exxilons' caves to be sacrificed by their High Priest.Another ship arrives, and four Daleks emerge. Their ship has also been affected by the energy drain. The Daleks encounter the Doctor and attempt to exterminate him, but their weapons do not work either. The Daleks claim that several of their planetary colonies are suffering from plague; thus they need Parrinium for the same reason as the humans. The Daleks, the Doctor, and the humans form an uneasy alliance to obtain Parrinium and escape Exxilon. While the allies are making their way to the humans' mining dome, the Exxilons ambush them. A battle ensues and the Exxilons end up killing a human and a Dalek and capturing the others. The prisoners are taken to the Exxilon caves where the Doctor interrupts Sarah Jane's sacrifice; therefore, he is also condemned to death. When the dual sacrifice commences, a second party of Daleks arrive, which have replaced their energy weapons with mechanical firearms that use bullets. The Daleks kill a number of Exxilons, then force the Exxilons and humans to mine Parrinium. The Doctor and Sarah Jane flee into tunnels. The other party of Daleks arrive and they discuss their actual plan to use Parrinium to create a plague and spread it across every planet except their own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_on_Rye"title="Ham on Rye">
The novel focuses on the protagonist, Henry Chinaski, between the years of 1920 and 1941. It begins with Chinaski's early memories. As the story progresses the reader follows his life through the school years and into young adulthood. Chinaski relates that he has an abusive father, and his mother does nothing to stop his father's abuse. She is, in fact, a victim of her husband's brutality as well. Henry is not athletic but wants to be and therefore tries hard to improve. Football is difficult for him, but he enjoys the violence that comes with it. He has only slightly better results in baseball. As Chinaski progresses through grammar school, the focus of Henry's attention is on sports, violence, and girls. As Henry grinds his way through Junior High School, he discovers the manifold pleasures of alcohol and masturbation. As Henry begins High School, his father, who is experiencing downward inter-generational socioeconomic mobility, makes him go to a private school where he fits in even less amongst all the well-heeled, spoiled rich kids with their flashy, colorful, convertible sports cars and beautiful girlfriends. To make matters worse, Chinaski develops horrible acne so severe that he has to undergo painful, and mostly ineffective, treatments, essentially becoming a human guinea pig for various experiments thought up by his uninterested doctors. The reader eventually follows Chinaski to college and reads of Henry's attempt to find a worthwhile occupation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_of_Power"title="Prisoners of Power">
Maxim Kammerer is a young amateur space explorer from Earth, regarded as a failure by his friends and relatives because this occupation is not considered to be a serious pursuit. The novel starts when he accidentally discovers an unexplored planet Saraksh inhabited by a humanoid race. The atmospheric conditions on Saraksh are such that the inhabitants believe that they live inside a sphere. The level of technological development on the planet is similar to mid-20th century Earth. The planet recently came through big nuclear and conventional war and the predicament of the population is dire. When Maxim lands, the natives mistake his small spaceship for a weapon and destroy it.At first he doesn't take his situation seriously, imagining himself a Robinson Crusoe stranded on an island inhabited by primitive but friendly natives. He is looking forward to establishing contact and befriending the population of the planet. However, the reality turns out to be far from glamorous. After being captured by armed natives and initially taken to what appears to be a concentration camp, Kammerer is sent to some governmental research institute which treats him as a mental patient. He escapes and finds himself in the capital of a totalitarian state, perpetually at war with its neighbors. The city is grim and polluted, with police and military omnipresent.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Posthumous_Memoirs_of_Brás_Cubas"title="The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas">
The author explains the style of the book before beginning the story with his funeral and cause of death - "Brás Cubas poultice", a medical panacea that was his last obsession and "would guarantee him glory among men". He then goes back to his childhood. He was a wealthy, spoiled and wicked child. From an early age he showed signs of a perverse nature, beating the heads of his slaves when he was not attended to in some desire or playing at horse-riding on the back of a young male slave named Prudêncio. At the age of seventeen Brás Cubas falls in love with a prostitute named Marcela, an affair which lasts "fifteen months and eleven contos" and almost wipes out the family fortune.To forget this heartbreak the protagonist is sent to Coimbra to study law. After a few years of wild bohemianism, "following romanticism in practice and liberalism in theory", he returns to Rio de Janeiro on the occasion of the death of his mother. He falls in love with a girl named Eugênia, the daughter of Dona Eusébia, a poor friend of the family, who turns out to be lame from birth. His father plans to a political marriage with Virgília, daughter of Conselheiro Dutra. However, Virgília prefers to marry Lobo Neves, who is also a candidate for a political career. With the death of Brás Cubas' father, conflict breaks out over the inheritance between him and his sister Sabina, and her husband Cotrim.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drowned_Ammet"title="Drowned Ammet">
Beginning with the birth of Alhammit Alhammitson, or Mitt, in South Dalemark. Mitt is a young child, his family are evicted from their farm. The Earl Hadd is the cruel and tyrannical ruler of South Dalemark. The family moves to an unpleasant tenement in the city of Holand. Mitt's father joins the Free Holanders, a resistance against the Earl Hadd. Mitt's father disappears, maybe killed by the Earl's soldiers.Mitt was convinced that three of the Free Holanders betrayed his father to the Earl's soldiers. Mitt is determined to take revenge. He joins the Free Holanders. Milda, Mitt's mother, marries Hobin.Mitt plans to assassinate the Earl Hadd. Mitt's attempt fails. The Earl is killed anyway by another assassin, a sniper.Ynen and Hildrida (Hildy) are brother and sister. Hildy is furious with her father. He betrothed her to Lithar, Lord of the Holy Islands, a complete stranger. After the assassination, the new Earl, Harl, refuses to break off her engagement. Hildy and Ynen decide to run away on a magnificent new boat, the "Wind's Road".Having been seen during the old Earl's assassination, Mitt is suspected. He hides on a magnificent boat. The boat that Ynen and Hildy are running away on. Mitt is a stowaway beneath deck. They are far out to sea by the time Mitt shows himself. He demands that they take him to the North, where he can be safe. The two siblings are uncooperative. Mitt threatens them with his gun, saying he will shoot them if he gets the chance. Hildy and Ynen agree to take him North because he has a gun.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverthorn_(novel)"title="Silverthorn (novel)">
A year after his brother Lyam's coronation as king, Arutha returns to his city as the new Prince of Krondor, to begin plans for his wedding. Jimmy the Hand, a young thief, foils an assassination attempt on the prince by a fellow thief, and feeling loyalty toward the prince from previously aiding his escape from the city with Princess Anita (in "Magician"), he chooses to warn the prince of the attempt on his life instead of reporting the traitor to the Mockers, Krondor's powerful and highly organized guild of thieves. Arutha seeks the Mockers' cooperation to obtain more information on the assassins, and at their request, makes Jimmy a squire of his court. Setting a trap, they capture two agents, who are revealed to be operating out of the temple of Lims-Kragma, Goddess of Death, one of whom is a moredhel whose appearance has been altered. During interrogation, both prisoners will themselves to death rather than divulge their plans. As the High Priestess of Lims-Kragma seeks the truth by bringing them back from beyond the grave, one of the prisoners rises by the power of an unknown enemy, and attacks his captors, slaughtering many royal guards, and addressing Arutha as "Lord of the West" before being destroyed by Father Nathan, a priest of Sung.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Darkness_at_Sethanon"title="A Darkness at Sethanon">
Arutha, Prince of Krondor, uses an attempted assassination as a ruse to fake his own death so that he may travel north to confront Murmandamus. In his travels to the Northlands, Arutha finds his father's former enemy, Guy du Bas-Tyra, as the Protector of the city Armengar, the first location to be invaded by the dark army under Murmandamus. In an attempt to destroy a majority of the army, Guy orders the evacuation of the city, and ignites the naphtha mines below the city. Murmandamus escapes unscathed, and the army marches towards the border of the Kingdom of the Isles.Meanwhile, Pug and Tomas begin searching the world, and eventually beyond, for the famed sorcerer Macros the Black, thought killed when he helped to destroy the rift (at the end of "Magician"). Macros reveals that he had put into motion a grand plot to instill Tomas with the powers of the Valheru, Ashen-Shugar, in order to turn the tides of the coming battle in their favour.Murmandamus, having successfully overrun the border city of Highcastle, marches towards his final objective: the town of Sethanon, which lies above an ancient ruins containing an artifact of power known as the Lifestone.Murmandamus lays siege to Sethanon, causing wholesale slaughter regardless of his own soldiers, in order to draw his necromantic power from their deaths. Steeped in power, he descends into the chamber of the Lifestone, and is confronted by Arutha, where they begin to duel. A rift begins to form within the chamber, held closed only by the magical efforts of Pug and Macros.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Story_of_Ah_Q"title="The True Story of Ah Q">
The story traces the "adventures" of Ah Q, a man from the rural peasant class with little education and no definite occupation. Ah Q is famous for "spiritual victories", Lu Xun's euphemism for self-talk and self-deception even when faced with extreme defeat or humiliation. Ah Q is a bully to the less fortunate but fearful of those who are above him in rank, strength, or power. He persuades himself mentally that he is spiritually "superior" to his oppressors even as he succumbs to their tyranny and suppression. Lu Xun exposes Ah Q's extreme faults as symptomatic of the Chinese national character of his time. The ending of the piece is equally poignant and satirical.Ah Q is known for deluding himself into believing he is the victor every time he loses a fight. In one scene in Chapter 2, Ah Q is beaten and had his silver taels stolen while he was gambling beside the theater. He slaps himself on the face, and because he is the person doing the slapping, he sees himself as the victor.When Mr. Zhao (趙太爺), an honored landlord of the village, beats Ah Q in a fight, Ah Q considers himself important for having even a tiny association with such a person. Though some villagers suspect Ah Q may have no true association with Mr. Zhao, they do not question the matter closely, and instead give Ah Q more respect for a time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Disciples_(novel)"title="The Disciples (novel)">
From the bookjacket"After a recruiter for the National Security Agency goes AWOL, NSA information analyst T.C. Steele must track her down."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_of_the_Day_Before"title="The Island of the Day Before">
Roberto della Griva, a 17th-century Italian nobleman, is the sole survivor of a shipwreck during a fierce storm. He finds himself washed up on an abandoned ship, the "Daphne", anchored off a mysterious Pacific island through which, he convinces himself, runs the International Date Line (roughly 180° longitude). The ship is fully provisioned, he discovers, but the crew is missing. Although the shore is very close, Roberto is unable to swim, and is therefore stranded on the ship. With no way of locating himself or finding a way home, Roberto abandons himself to philosophical contemplation, roaming the crewless ship and composing letters to his beloved Lilia, a lady he met in Paris some time prior to his misadventure on the high seas.Roberto soon discovers he is not alone on the ship. Someone else is stealing eggs from the hens, rummaging through the letters he writes to Lilia: in short, there is an Intruder aboard. Finally Roberto finds out the intruder: an old German Jesuit called Gaspar Wanderdrossel. Wanderdrossel relates to him the mission of the "Daphne"'s crew and the crew's sad ending at the hands of the natives. Gaspar explains to Roberto that his mission was to discover how to measure longitude by charting the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter. He also educates Roberto to other recondite astronomical means being used to seek this measure. The priest comes to take on a mentor role with Roberto. He urges Roberto to learn to swim. Roberto tries and tries again, but fails. Gaspar finds his own way to reach the Island,and Roberto is left alone again. He begins to reminisce about his life and his love. He becomes obsessed about his allegedly evil twin brother, who is split from his own persona through a process reminiscent of the doppelgänger effect, and thus accusing him of all the bad things that happened in his life. The brother takes blame mainly for his bad choices and is present to sweeten the disappointments of life. Through this reminiscence he becomes convinced that all his troubles will end, if only he can reach the land. The story is told from the point of view of a modern editor who has sorted through the man's papers. Exactly how the papers were preserved and eventually handed down to the editor remains a point of conjecture. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_on_Fire"title="Wind on Fire">
The books are set in a realm similar to ours, but separate. They tell the story of the Hath family and the Manth people, who go on a long, harsh journey from their city-prison to their homeland. The main characters, Kestrel and Bowman Hath, are twins who have certain powers that allow them to save their people, and friends, from an evil power called the Morah. The first book tells of the events unfolding near and inside Aramanth, the second one talks about the lives of the Manth people as slaves in The Mastery, and the third book concludes with their voyage to the homeland.The trilogy begins with "The Wind Singer", which introduces the protagonists Kestrel and her beloved empath brother, Bowman. They live in a city called Aramanth, where personal freedoms don't exist and success depends solely on performance in universal compulsory examinations. Kestrel is a strong-willed individual who fiercely loves her family and despises the Exams. So great is her hatred of them that she denounces all the values and principles of Aramanth, as well as denying the existence of the Emperor, the unseen ruler of Aramanth. This sets in motion a chain of events that eventually results in Kestrel, Bowman and a neglected boy called Mumpo escaping from the city and going on a quest to save their people from an evil entity known as the Morah, which controls a numberless army of malevolent and deadly beings called the Zars. The children are successful, and a new era dawns for Aramanth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Singer"title="The Wind Singer">
The book begins in the walled city of Aramanth, an extreme meritocracy where endless exams and ratings are the only way to move forward to improved life stations; to be unsuccessful in this is seen as a great source of shame. Using a system based on colour classifications, the governing Examiners dictate what people can wear, where they can live and what jobs they can do. The levels are grey, maroon, orange, scarlet and white, with the muddy Underlake the lowest and white the highest. The Emperor is the only person allowed to wear blue.A minority in their society, the Haths believe more in ideas and dreams than in endless toil and ratings. When young Kestrel defies the harsh classification system of Aramanth she flees, finding herself in the company of the Emperor of Aramanth. Thought to be the ruler of the city, he is found to be merely a puppet of the High Examiner, and the Emperor tells Kestrel of the need to rid Aramanth of the influence of the evil Morah, of the need to return the voice to the mysterious Wind Singer that stands in the city arena.Using an archaic map given to her by the Emperor she sets off, joined by her twin brother, Bowman, and their brave but pitiful new friend, Mumpo, who has an unshakeable affection for Kestrel. They meet a variety of tribes and individuals including the fearsome nomadic clans of Ombaraka and Omchaka. The journey eventually leads them to the Halls of the Morah; the very heart of the evil that has taken control of the city. Here the children finally retrieve the voice of the Wind Singer, in the process waking the terrible Zars, an army of the Morah. Pursued by the beautiful, evil and unstoppable Zars, the children race back to Aramanth, arriving just in time to return the Wind Singer's voice. The voice allows the Wind Singer to emit a powerful song that destroys the Zars and saves Aramanth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaves_of_the_Mastery"title="Slaves of the Mastery">
At the beginning of the book, the city of Aramanth is greatly changed since events in "The Wind Singer". The walls have been torn down, and the poorer districts abandoned. No longer is it run by the strict system of exams; in fact, everyone is pleasant and docile. The change occurred because the city had been released from the grip of an evil force known as the Morah.This new freedom, however, has also severely weakened the city. News of this reaches as far as a distant country known as the Mastery. The country sends an army of a thousand, commanded by young Marius Semeon Ortiz, to destroy the city and take its entire population as slaves. They do so, killing many of the city's residents, enslaving yet more, and leaving no survivors, except for Kestrel Hath. She vows to have revenge on the unknown Mastery, and on Ortiz himself, and begins to follow the trail led by the returning army.The Manth people are brought to the Mastery, a beautiful country built up entirely on slave labor. They are branded and given jobs. Though some of the people begin to actually enjoy work, as they discover that every single person in the Mastery is a slave (except for the Master, ruler of the land, himself). Hanno Hath, father of Kestrel, signs up to be a librarian, while his son Bowman decides to become a night watchman, in order to listen for his approaching sister.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firesong"title="Firesong">
"Firesong" begins with the Manth people deliberating over what action to take, now that the Mastery is in ruins. After the defeat of the Master, alone and displaced, they seek a new homeland but have no real destination and very little food.Ira Hath, descendant of Ira Manth, and a great prophetess who is also Kestrel and Bowman's mother, has a vision of the Manth people's true homeland. Throughout the book the Manth people travel with only Ira's guidance, and she becomes weaker as they go, knowing she will eventually die of prophecy.Bowman eagerly awaits a summons from Sirene, and must prepare to sacrifice himself to save his people and the world. Before he is ready for this, however, he must be trained by the great Albard, the Master of the ruined Mastery. The journey is long, and his preparation is tough, especially in the hands of a strange teacher. Jumper, the man-woman Singer who can change forms and personalities to please people, has come for Bowman. Jumper agrees to let Kestrel, Bowman's sister, come along as well.In the end it is revealed that Kestrel is the one who is destined to give her life, having picked up Albard's teachings along the way. Bowman is in fact the "Meeting place"- the point at which the great evil and the great kindness of the world will annihilate one another. This is because he was once one of the Zars, the army of the Morah (the "spirit" of all evil), and is one of the Singer people too, as he has been trained in their ways. Upon reaching the homeland, Ira's life ends, her destiny fulfilled. Kestrel, too, ends her life with all the other Singers, singing the firesong to destroy the Morah, give humanity a fresh start, and allow the Manth people to finally reach the homeland.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grave_(novel)"title="The Grave (novel)">
The protagonist of the novel is a 13-year-old orphan named Tom Mullen. He lives in the Old Swan area of Liverpool with his hostile foster parents and his "brother", Brian.One night, Tom and Brian creep out to investigate a mysterious excavation near their school and discover that the workmen have uncovered an old graveyard. As Tom is examining the burial ground, he falls into the dark endless pit.Tom wakes up in the countryside near the sea. He sees a group of people gathered around the body of a drowned boy who looks exactly like Tom. Everyone thinks the boy is dead, but Tom does CPR and saves him. The boy's name is Tully Monaghan, and Tom is invited to live with his family. As Tom walks into their cottage, he notices a newspaper saying that the date is September 1847. He is not only somehow in Ireland, he has traveled back in time to the height of the Great Famine.When the villagers come under attack from the owners of the land, Tom gets hit on the head and is catapulted back to his own time, 1974. He is devastated that he is no longer with the friendly Monaghans. During football practice Tom realizes he can simply jump back into the pit to return to the past. When he does this, however, he discovers that the Monaghans' cottage has been all but destroyed, Tully's father is dead, and the family has decided to move to Liverpool. Tom goes with them, but later again accidentally returns to the modern day.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everybody's_All-American"title="Everybody's All-American">
The novel tells the story of a fictional famous college football player at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill during the early 1950s. The setting of the novel was changed to a fictional "Louisiana University" for the movie adaptation. The main character, Gavin Grey, wins the Heisman Trophy and then goes on to a professional career, but is sidetracked by alcoholism, failed business ventures, and marital difficulties among other misjudgments.The novel is narrated by Grey's nephew, Donnie McClure, a historian who has written a biography of Confederate war hero J.E.B. Stuart. During his college career, Grey's heroics are often compared to Stuart's actions. Both are celebrated not only for their actions, but for their gentle behavior and consideration for others around them.Grey's greatest moments came away from the football field. At a fraternity party, a carelessly placed cigarette ignites the dress of a young woman, who staggers back in fear and nearly starts a much larger fire by lighting a set of drapes. Despite a strong fear of fire, Grey saves the woman by leaping forward and dousing the flames. A few weeks later, Grey, McClure, and a UNC teammate, Lawrence, venture into a black neighborhood where Grey meets Narvel Blue, another one-time football star whose greatness was never realized because of bad grades, segregation, and bad luck. Blue and Grey compare attributes but decide that a foot-race must be held to determine which is the faster runner. Despite falling behind initially, Grey eventually overcomes Blue by a shade at the end of the race.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_(novel)"title="Monkey (novel)">
"Journey to the West" may be roughly divided into three parts: first, the introduction including the origin of Monkey (Sun Wukong), Tripitaka (Tang Sanzang), Pigsy (Zhu Bajie), and Sandy (Sha Wujing); second, the actual journey to the west, which has an episodic nature; and last, the ending, telling what happens when the pilgrims reach their destination. Waley chose to translate the entirety of the introductory and ending chapters, as well as three episodes, each several chapters long, of the journey to the west.At the outset of the novel, the Buddha seeks a pilgrim who will travel to India. The hope is to retrieve sacred scriptures by which the Chinese people may be enlightened so that their behaviour may accord with the tenets of Buddhism. The young monk Tripitaka volunteers to undertake the pilgrimage. Along the way, he encounters and frees the Monkey King. He and Monkey thereafter recruit Pigsy and Sandy. They liberate a captive princess and punish her abductor, who has also murdered her father. The father is resurrected and reinstalled as king. They meet several bodhisattvas and fight fierce monsters, before finally arriving at Buddha's palace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salammbô"title="Salammbô">
After the First Punic War, Carthage is unable to fulfill promises made to its army of mercenaries, and finds itself under attack. The fictional title character, a priestess and the daughter of Hamilcar Barca, the foremost Carthaginian general, is the object of the obsessive lust of Matho, a leader of the mercenaries. With the help of the scheming freed slave, Spendius, Matho steals the sacred veil of Carthage, the Zaïmph, prompting Salammbô to enter the mercenaries' camp in an attempt to steal it back. The Zaïmph is an ornate bejewelled veil draped about the statue of the goddess Tanit in the "sanctum sanctorum" of her temple: the veil is the city's guardian and touching it will bring death to the perpetrator.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_Wears_Prada_(novel)"title="The Devil Wears Prada (novel)">
Andrea Sachs, a recent graduate of Brown University with a degree in English, moves to New York City with her best friend, Lily, a graduate student at Columbia. Andrea hopes to find a career in publishing and blankets the city with her résumé. She believes she will be closer to her dream of working for "The New Yorker" if she can get a job in the magazine industry. She gets a surprise interview at the Elias-Clark Group and is hired as junior assistant for Miranda Priestly, editor-in-chief of the fashion magazine "Runway". Although she knows little of the fashion world, everyone tells her that "a million girls would die for [her] job". If she manages to work for Miranda for a year, people tell her, she can have her choice of jobs within the magazine industry.At a celebrity party, Andrea meets Christian Collinsworth, a charismatic Yale graduate who is considered one of the hot, new up-and-coming writers of their generation. They are attracted to each other, which complicates her relationship with her boyfriend, Alex.Andrea's relationships become entangled because of her new job. Lily increasingly turns to alcohol and picks up dubious men to relieve the pressure of graduate school. Alex, struggling with his own demanding job as an inner-city schoolteacher, grows frustrated with Andrea's long hours and constant stress. Andrea's relationship with her family also suffers. Matters finally come to a head when her co-worker, Emily, gets mononucleosis and Andrea must travel to Paris with Miranda in her stead. In Paris, she has a surprise encounter with Christian. Later that night, Miranda finally lets down her guard and asks Andrea what she has learned, and where she wants to work afterwards. She promises to place phone calls to people she knows at the "New Yorker" on Andrea's behalf once her year is up and suggests she take on some small writing assignments at "Runway".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_on_Mango_Street"title="The House on Mango Street">
"The House on Mango Street" covers the formative years of Esperanza Cordero, a young Chicana girl living in an impoverished Chicago neighborhood with her parents and three siblings. The book opens with Esperanza, the narrator, explaining how her family first arrived on Mango Street. Before the family settled in their new home, a small and run-down building with crumbling red bricks, they moved frequently. The family has been wandering from place to place, always dreaming of the promised land of a house of their own. When they finally arrive at the house on Mango Street, which is, at last, their own house, it is not the promised land of their dreams. The parents overcome their dejection by saying that this is not the end of their moving, that it is only a temporary stop before going on to the promised house. While the house on Mango Street was a significant improvement from her family's previous dwellings, Esperanza expresses disdain towards her new home because it is not a "real" house, like the ones she has seen on TV. Esperanza constantly daydreams of a white, wooden house, with a big yard and many trees. She finds her life on Mango Street suffocating and frequently expresses her desire to escape. She begins to write poetry to express these feelings. Esperanza begins the novel with detailed descriptions of the minute behaviors and characteristics of her family members and unusual neighbors. Her descriptions provide a picture of the neighborhood and offer examples of the many influential people surrounding her. She describes time spent with her younger sister, Nenny, such as when they paraded around the neighborhood in high heels one day with their friends Rachel and Lucy. She also befriends two older girls in the neighborhood: Alicia, a promising young college student with a dead mother, and Marin, who spends her days babysitting her younger cousins. Esperanza highlights significant or telling moments both in her life and in the lives of those in her community. She mostly focuses on moments that show the difficulties that they experience, such as when Louie's cousin was arrested for stealing a car or when Esperanza's Aunt Lupe dies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breathing_Lessons"title="Breathing Lessons">
The story describes the joys and pains of the ordinary marriage of Ira and Maggie Moran as they travel from Baltimore to attend a funeral and back home again in one day. It also examines Maggie's attempts to reconcile her son and daughter-in-law. During the journey to the funeral, we learn how both Ira and Maggie have forgone their youthful dreams and feel they have settled for an "ordinary life." We experience how they exasperate each other—Maggie too talkative, too meddling; Ira too logical, uncommunicative, and too judgmental. A few detours during their 90-mile drive reveal Ira and Maggie's "incompatibilities, disappointments, unmet expectations—and lasting love".Edward Hoagland describes the novel: "Maggie, surprised by life, which did not live up to her honeymoon, has become an incorrigible prompter. And she has horned in to bring about the birth of her first grandchild by stopping a 17-year-old girl named Fiona at the door of an abortion clinic and steering her into marrying Maggie's son, Jesse, who is the father and, like Fiona, a dropout from high school...The book's principal event is a 90-mile trip that Maggie and Ira make from Baltimore...to a country town in Pennsylvania where a high school classmate has suddenly scheduled an elaborate funeral for her husband. Maggie...indulges her habit of pouring her heart out to every listening stranger, which naturally infuriates Ira, who, uncommunicative to start with, has reached the point where Maggie can divine his moods only from the pop songs of the 1950s that he whistles...Maggie, although exasperating...is trying to make a difference, to connect or unite people, beat the drum for forgiveness and compromise. As Ira explains, "It's Maggie's weakness. She believes it's all right to alter people's lives. She thinks the people she loves are better than they really are, and so then she starts changing things around to suit her point of view of them."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Circle_(novel)"title="Perfect Circle (novel)">
Texan William Kennedy can see and talk to ghosts – an ability which complicates his life immensely and threatens his relationships with family and friends. When his cousin calls him in to lay the ghost in the garage, Will finds he has a murderer to deal with.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marianne_Dreams"title="Marianne Dreams">
Marianne is a young girl who is bedridden with a long-term illness. She draws a picture to fill her time and finds that she spends her dreams within the picture she has drawn. As time goes by, she becomes sicker, and starts to spend more and more time trapped within her fantasy world, and her attempts to make things better by adding to and crossing out things in the drawing make things progressively worse. Her only companion in her dreamworld is a boy called Mark, who is also a long-term invalid in the real world.Catherine Storr's later novel "Marianne and Mark" was a sequel to "Marianne Dreams".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kushiel's_Dart"title="Kushiel's Dart">
The book follows Phèdre nó Delaunay's life from birth. She's born with a mote in her eye, which makes her appear inappropriate for service as a religious courtesan, but it is revealed that this is actually a sign that she is an 'anguissette' or sexual masochist, deriving sexual pleasure from pain. Her bond is purchased by a nobleman who does train her as a courtesan, and discovers a plot against her homeland which she has a chance to interrupt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeeves_in_the_Offing"title="Jeeves in the Offing">
An old friend Bertie went to preparatory school with, Reginald "Kipper" Herring, is staying with Bertie for a week. Bertie eagerly accepts an invitation from his aunt, Aunt Dahlia, to her home, Brinkley Court, since Jeeves is about to go to Herne Bay on holiday. Aunt Dahlia's husband, Bertie's Uncle Tom, is trying to make a business deal with an American named Homer Cream. While the two of them are in Harrogate, Mr. Cream's wife Adela Cream, an author of mystery stories, and their son Wilbert Cream are staying at Brinkley Court. The mischievous Roberta "Bobbie" Wickham, and Aubrey Upjohn, who was once Bertie and Kipper's oppressive headmaster, will also be there, along with Phyllis Mills. She is Upjohn's stepdaughter and Aunt Dahlia's goddaughter. Upjohn hopes to stand for a local election after giving a speech at the Market Snodsbury grammar school, and Phyllis is typing his speech.Before going to Brinkley Court, Bertie learns that Kipper, who works for a weekly paper and is vengeful towards Upjohn, wrote a scathing, anonymous review of Upjohn's recently published book. Jeeves tells Bertie that Willie Cream is a notorious troublemaking playboy known as "Broadway Willie". After Jeeves leaves, Bertie sees a jarring announcement in "The Times" stating that he, Bertie, is engaged to Bobbie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_and_Social_Revolutions"title="States and Social Revolutions">
The book uses both John Stuart Mill's methods of agreement and difference in the case selection. The book is not intended to be generalizable: it only applies to the specific cases that are studied in the book. The book employs process-tracing. While the primary focus is on France, Russia and China, she also examines "moments of revolutionary crisis" in 17th century England, 19th century Prussia and 19th century Japan. Those additional cases prevent Skocpol from "selecting on the dependent variable" – looking only at cases where revolutions occurred as a way to understand the causes of revolution – which would have been a methodological flaw. The additional cases serve as "controls."Before social revolutions can occur, she says, the administrative and military power of a state has to break down. Thus pre-revolutionary France, Russia and China had well-established states that stood astride large agrarian economies in which the imperial state and the landed upper classes partnered in the control and exploitation of the peasantry. However, the monarchy in each country faced an extraordinary dilemma in dealing with foreign power intrusion on the one hand and resistance to raising resources by politically powerful dominant domestic classes on the other. A revolution such as the French revolution also presented itself with a significant factor of power conducted with social, political, and economical conflicts. She describes the processes by which the centralized administrative and military machinery disintegrated in these countries, which made class relations vulnerable to assaults from below.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diviners"title="The Diviners">
"The Diviners" follows the story of fictional Canadian novelist, Morag Gunn. Morag's life is believed to be loosely based upon Laurence's personal experiences. Aritha Van Herk argues that when observing all of Laurence's work, it is evident that "The Diviners" explicitly connects the author's emotions, experiences, and professional development to the protagonist more than any of her other novels.The novel begins in Morag's rural Ontario cabin. Morag wakes up one morning and finds a note from her daughter, Pique, explaining that she has left home to learn about her Metis heritage. Flashbacks explore Morag's adolescence when she embarked on a similar journey many years ago. As a novelist, Morag also struggles with her writing, and frequently questions her understanding of the world. She contemplates how words can describe the natural environment around her, but struggles without attaining success - she believes that nature is capable of both nurturing life and destroying it, and contemplates the strange duality.Morag begins to have more flashbacks. She reflects on her traumatic childhood, including the death of her parents who both died from polio, and her transition into a foster care household. Morag's foster parents, Christie and Prin, were of a significantly lower economic standing than her biological parents, and she did not treat them with respect. Christie's eccentric actions ignore social norms, and provides a platform for the novel's critique of socioeconomic class. Morag yearns to leave home, and enrolls in university, moving to Winnipeg where she initiates a relationship with an older professor, Brooke Skelton. Their relationship appears normal, and they are later married.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_White_Boys"title="Dirty White Boys">
The opening chapters of "Dirty White Boys" articulately sets an impressionable tone for the remainder of the novel, as the story's main antagonist, Lamar Pye, a physically powerful, charismatic, aggressive, and intelligent "alpha male" in his late thirties, uses brutal violence to avoid being raped by a giant black inmate in the showers at McAlester State Penitentiary (the Mac). Despite his position as a "Prince" (a ranking prisoner) amongst the Dirty White Boys, a white gang element of the prisoner populace, the rape was ordered as revenge for a slight made by Lamar's retarded, behemoth cousin Odell against the white gang chief. After his sale to the black inmate gang, Lamar knows that the revenge is inevitable if he remains in the prison. Richard, Lamar's failed artist cell mate, a timid man imprisoned for the gruesome murder of his own mother, joins Lamar as he uses his quick wit and unrestrained capacity for violence to abscond "the Mac" with Odell.Bud Pewtie, the novel's main protagonist, is a State Trooper called to participate in the search for the escaped criminals. He is initially portrayed as a responsible father with two teenage boys, but it quickly emerges that he is having an affair with the young wife of his partner, Ted, a confused young man with unarticulated doubts about his role as a trooper. The troopers are briefed about the escape by the embittered alcoholic Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation Lieutenant C. D. Henderson, a once star law enforcement officer who once served with Earl Swagger as a detective. A series of tips leads the troopers to the remote farmhouse of an old couple, where the Pyes and Richard have taken refuge, arming themselves with the old man's firearms. An ambush by the Pyes ensues, with Pewtie and Ted ducking for cover. While Pewtie performs distinctly well under fire of the Pyes, Ted caves under the pressure of the assault. As a result, Pewtie is severely wounded and left for dead by Lamar, and watches in horror as Lamar brutally executes his helpless partner.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_in_Space"title="Colony in Space">
Three Time Lords discuss the theft of confidential files relating to "the Doomsday Weapon." They realise that only the Third Doctor can help them, so he is sent to the desert planet of Uxarieus in the year 2472. There he finds an outpost of human colonists struggling to make a living as farmers. The colony's governor, Robert Ashe, welcomes them.Two colonists die in a reptile attack that night. The Doctor investigates and discovers the deaths are in fact the work of operatives from the Interplanetary Mining Corporation, attempting to scare off the colonists so it can mine the planet for rare minerals. An Adjudicator from Earth is sent for to deal with the complex claims over the planet. The Adjudicator, actually The Master in disguise, rules that the mining company's claim to the planet is stronger. IMC takes over the colony and demands all the colonists leave the planet.The Master tells the Doctor that the native people of Uxarieus, known as the "primitives," were once an advanced civilisation. Before declining, they built a super-weapon that was never used and The Master wants this weapon for himself. The Doctor rejects the Master's overture to help him rule the galaxy using the weapon. One of the elder primitives instructs the Doctor to activate the self-destruct, which he does, and the city begins to crumble.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England,_Their_England"title="England, Their England">
Set in 1920s England, the book takes the form of a travel memoir by a young Scotsman who has been invalided away from the Western Front, "Donald Cameron", whose father's will forces him to reside in England. There he writes for a series of London newspapers, before being commissioned by a Welshman to write a book about the English from the view of a foreigner. Taking to the country and provincial cities, Donald spends his time doing research for a book on the English by consorting with journalists and minor poets, attending a country house weekend, serving as private secretary to a Member of Parliament, attending the League of Nations, and playing village cricket. The village cricket match is the most celebrated episode in the novel, and a reason cited for its enduring appeal. An important character is Mr Hodge, a caricature of Sir John Squire (poet and editor of the "London Mercury"), while the cricket team described in the book's most famous chapter is a representation of Sir John's Cricket Club – the Invalids – which survives today. The book ends in the ancient city of Winchester, where Macdonell went to school.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_(novel)"title="Bloom (novel)">
"Bloom" is set in the year 2106, in a world where self-replicating nanomachines called "Mycora" have consumed Earth and other planets of the inner Solar System, forcing humankind to eke out a bleak living in the asteroids and Galilean moons. Two groups of humanity are described—The Immunity, who use "ladderdown" technology and augmented reality and live on the moons of Jupiter, and The Gladholders, who use human intelligence amplification and artificial intelligence and live in the asteroid belt. The story begins on Ganymede with an article about a "bloom", or outbreak of Mycora, that serves to emphasize the danger and horror of this technogenic life (TGL). The article is written by Strasheim, the primary narrator character. He is first seen in the office of Chief of Immunology Lottick, the effective ruler of Ganymede, who has called him there for an unknown purpose.Lottick tells Strasheim that the Mycora have apparently been stealing or assimilating human designed defensive nanotech and may soon develop resistance to the coldness of the outer Solar System, which incites concern. It is planned to send mission to drop TGL detectors onto the polar ice caps of Mars, Earth, and the Moon, and Lottick asks Strasheim to go along as a reporter. For the longer term, a starship is being constructed to colonize other star systems before the Mycora.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyrbyggja_saga"title="Eyrbyggja saga">
The Saga portrays the different families and individuals living on Iceland at Snæfellsnes. There is constant fighting between the different clans on Snæfellsnes, mostly over resources such as wood, property, and livestock. The different Norsemen represented in the Saga constantly turn to Snorri and Arnkel for advice and permission to take legal and/or physical action against perpetrators that have wronged them.The story of the Eyrbyggja Saga frequently turns on actions that stem from greed, fear, ambition or downright meanness, as it describes cold-hearted bargaining between farmers and chieftains. All of the events of the Saga take place in one small region of Snæfellsnes, shifting between Álptafjord, which cuts into the northern shore of the peninsula, and Helgafell, the farmstead on Thórsnes, where Snorri Goði resided. The Saga shows a steady shift from paganism on Iceland to Christianity over the course of roughly twenty years.The saga was most likely written in its entirety in the mid- or late-13th century, but historians have not yet been able to pinpoint an exact date. The narrative begins at the time of the Norse settlement in Iceland as early as the 9th century, but most of the events take place towards the end of the 10th century and the early 11th century. There is also internal evidence that the author of the saga knew of Laxdœla saga and Egils saga.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellarion_the_Fortunate"title="Bellarion the Fortunate">
The narrative is presented as the author's compilation of histories of Bellarion's life, in particular that of one Fra Serafino of Imola. Bellarion, abandoned as a child and raised in an abbey, departs as a young man with a letter of introduction from the respected abbot, intending to study in Pavia. He meets and travels with a Franciscan friar, but discovers that someone has robbed him of his money and letter. Upon arriving in Casale, the capital of Montferrat, he finds himself pursued by the authorities, who suspect him of complicity with the false friar, actually a well-known scoundrel named Lorenzaccio da Trino. He flees until he reaches a palace and enters by a garden door which he is surprised to find unlocked. A beautiful lady admits him, bolts the door, and takes pains to hide him from his pursuers. They arrive, and Bellarion listens to her rebuff them, discovering that she is the Princess Valeria of Montferrat.When the Guard depart, Valeria quizzes Bellarion, mistaking him for a messenger she had been expecting, asking after Giufreddo and Lord Barbaresco. He corrects her misapprehension, but, sensing an intrigue and anxious to impress her, offers in return for her kindness to carry a message to Lord Barbaresco. She distrusts him, but charges him simply to ask what has become of Giufreddo, who Bellarion assumes is the previous messenger, and how Barbaresco's plan is progressing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curse_of_Chalion"title="The Curse of Chalion">
Cazaril was formerly a noble in the land of Chalion, but was betrayed and sold into slavery. He returns to a regional court where he is hired as tutor to Iselle (second in line for the throne of Chalion after her brother Teidez) and her handmaid Betriz, for whom he develops romantic feelings. Their mother Ista also lives with them, but is considered mad.He accompanies Teidez, Iselle and Betriz to the capital, where he encounters his betrayer Dondo, whose brother Martou is chancellor to the ailing monarch Orico. Orico spends much time in his menagerie, run by the exile Umegat. The corrupt Dondo spends time with Teidez, exposing the boy to various vices, and arranges a marriage to Iselle. In desperation, Cazaril calls on the Bastard (one of the five gods) for a miracle of death magic, accepting that if it succeeds in killing Dondo, his life will be claimed as well. Dondo dies, but Cazaril does not, finding himself gifted with second sight by the experience. With Umegat's help, he learns that the royal family of Chalion is under a generation-old curse, and that Orico is only sustained through the cleansing magic of the menagerie. He also finds that Dondo's soul and the Bastard's death demon are bound to his body in the form of a tumor, with the demon trying to bring about his death so it can return to the gods with the required two souls.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_into_Fear_(novel)"title="Journey into Fear (novel)">
The novel is set at the beginning of the Second World War. Graham is a British armaments engineer, due to travel back from Turkey, where he has completed technical preparations for a project to improve the Turkish navy. His company's representative in Turkey, Kopeikin, takes him to an Istanbul nightclub, where he meets Josette, a Hungarian dancer. He sees a man in a crumpled suit, watching him.Returning to his hotel room, Graham is shot at, but only his hand is grazed. Graham doesn't see the shooter's face. A doctor dresses Graham's hand, and Kopeikin takes him to see Colonel Haki, the head of the secret police. Haki features in "The Mask of Dimitrios" and returns in later Ambler stories as a general.Haki informs Graham that German spies seek to assassinate him, because of the secrets in Graham's head which he hasn't put to paper. A weaker Turkish navy would help Germany's position in the war. Haki has already prevented an earlier attempt on Graham's life. Graham identifies the man in the crumpled suit from a photograph, and Haki reveals this is Banat, a Romanian hired killer. Haki insists that Graham travel home by a ship, on which he has vetted all the passengers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inner_Circle_(Brad_Meltzer_novel)"title="The Inner Circle (Brad Meltzer novel)">
Beecher White works in the National Archives. That means he spends his working days protecting the most important documents of the U.S. government and history. This means he keeps other people's stories, but has never been part of the story. Until now.One day, Beecher's old childhood crush shows up to ask Beecher for his help hunting down her long lost father. Hoping to impress Clementine, he takes her to a secret vault which the President uses to review highly classified documents. While in the vault, they accidentally stumble on a priceless artifact: a 200-year-old dictionary hidden in a secret desk compartment that once belonged to George Washington. The diary is the spark that ignites an adventure involving Clementine, Beecher and the highest reaches of the national government. A dead body and a trail of mystery obstruct Beecher's discovery of the truth behind this national treasure. Within the diary is a coded puzzle that hides a dark secret that tracks all the way back to the beginning of the United States. It is a secret that some will kill to keep secret.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inner_Circle_(T._C._Boyle_novel)"title="The Inner Circle (T. C. Boyle novel)">
"The Inner Circle" revolves around the tensions that are bound to arise if a small group of people deliberately abandons the traditional moral values with which they were raised in favour of an unconventional outlook on love, marriage and sex. While Kinsey preaches that sex is nothing but a "hormonal function" devoid of emotion, John Milk has extreme difficulty adjusting to this concept where his own wife — the young and beautiful Iris — is concerned.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Lagoon_(novel)"title="The Blue Lagoon (novel)">
The story centers on two cousins, Dick and Emmeline Lestrange, who are marooned with a galley cook on an island in the South Pacific following a shipwreck. The galley cook, Paddy Button, assumes responsibility for the children and teaches them how to survive, cautioning them to avoid the "arita" berries, which he calls "the never-wake-up berries".Two and a half years after the shipwreck, Paddy dies following a drinking binge. The children survive on their resourcefulness and the bounty of their remote paradise. They live in a hut and spend their days fishing, swimming, diving for pearls and exploring the island.As the years pass, Dick and Emmeline grow into physically mature young adults and begin to fall in love. Ignorant of their human sexuality, they do not understand or know how to express their physical attraction to one another. Eventually, they consummate their relationship. The author, Henry De Vere Stacpoole, describes their sexual encounter as having been "conducted just as the birds conduct their love affairs. An affair absolutely natural, absolutely blameless and without sin. It was a marriage according to nature, without feast or guests."Dick becomes very attentive toward Emmeline, listening to her stories and bringing her gifts. Over several months they make love often and eventually Emmeline becomes pregnant. The couple does not understand the physical changes happening to Emmeline's body and have no knowledge of childbirth. When the day comes for delivery, Emmeline disappears into the forest and returns with a child. They discover over time that the baby requires a name and they call him "Hannah" because they have only ever known an infant called by that name.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Private_Memoirs_and_Confessions_of_a_Justified_Sinner"title="The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner">
Many of the events of the novel are narrated twice; first by the 'editor', who gives his account of the facts as he understands them to be, and then in the words of the 'sinner' himself.The story starts in 1687 with the marriage of Rabina Orde to the much older George Colwan, Laird of Dalcastle. Rabina despises her new husband because he falls short of her extreme religious beliefs, his love of dancing and penchant for drinking alcohol. She initially flees him but her father forces her back, and they live separately in the one house. Rabina gives birth to two sons. The first, George, is indisputably the son of the Laird, but it is strongly implied – though never confirmed – that her second son, Robert, was fathered by the Reverend Wringhim, Rabina's spiritual adviser and close confidant.George, raised by the Laird, becomes a popular young man who enjoys sport and the company of his friends. Robert, educated by his mother and adoptive father Wringhim, is brought up to follow Wringhim's radical antinomian sect of Calvinism, which holds that only certain elect people are predestined to be saved by God. These chosen few will have a heavenly reward regardless of how their lives are lived.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_Terror_Castle"title="The Secret of Terror Castle">
Three boys are investigating a known haunted house, Terror Castle, in hopes that perhaps the film director Alfred Hitchcock would use it in his upcoming movie. Having just launched their investigation firm, the Three Investigators are hoping for a triumphant success to gain publicity and build their credibility. They briefly gain an audience with the skeptical Hitchcock, who is dismissive but agrees to introduce their case if they are able to demonstrate that the castle is truly haunted.Terror Castle is the former home of movie actor Stephen Terrill, who died in a possibly suicidal car accident that occurred as his career was on the verge of collapse. Terrill had pledged to haunt his former home to keep anyone else from living there. During their investigations, the boys find very scary and seemingly real activities going on in the abandoned structure, such as the Fog of Fear and the Blue Phantom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodsucking_Fiends"title="Bloodsucking Fiends">
Jody, a young, single, red-headed woman living in San Francisco, is attacked by a vampire and soon finds that she has become one herself. While attempting to adjust to her new nocturnal lifestyle, she finds the help of Tommy Flood, a wannabe writer who recently moved to the city and works as a night stocking manager (and champion "turkey bowler") at a local Safeway. She has him perform tasks during the day as her vampirism forces her unconscious except after sundown. As Jody and Tommy begin their life together and begin falling in love, they discover that a recent string of mysterious murders may be the work of the vampire who attacked Jody. To get to the bottom of the matter, they recruit "the Animals", Tommy's crew of stockers from the supermarket, as well as an eccentric street person and his faithful dogs known as "The Emperor.""Bloodsucking Fiends" is the first volume of a trilogy, followed by "You Suck: A Love Story" (2007) and "Bite Me" (2010).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tietam_Brown"title="Tietam Brown">
The book is about a period of time in the life of Antietam (Andy) Brown V and his father Antietam (Tietam) Brown IV (the names span across five generations, being taken from the Battle of Antietam). After 16 years of being tossed from foster home to foster home, and spending time in Juvenile Detention for killing a teenager who tried to rape him, his father then shows up to take him home.Andy was molested by his foster father, who was also a member of the KKK, and physically abused by his father. He puts up with cruel treatment from adults and older students at school. Every now and then in his life he cracks, and in a rage causes terrible harm to his tormentors. He draws strength from the love he gets from Terri, a beautiful girl in his grade at school.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_a_Red_Heroine"title="Death of a Red Heroine">
This story is set in Shanghai in the early 1990s. One day, Guan Hongying is found dead. Chief inspector Chen Cao, along with his subordinate, Yu, start to investigate this murder case and find that this young woman lived a double life. On one side, Guan Hongying was a member of Communist Party and a popular public figure. On the other, she lived a “degenerate” lifestyle, away from the eyes of the public. This secret lifestyle brings the case into the public's attention, once this young woman dies. During the investigation, Chen and Yu discover that the number one suspect, Wu Xiaoming, is the son of Wu Bing, a high-ranking Party cadre. Wu and his father put the detectives under a huge pressure to avoid investigating, but with the help of Ling's father, Chen succeeds to save himself from the pressure and sends Wu to the court. Chen and Yu struggle to discover his motive to kill Guan. Eventually, Chen discovers his motive: Guan had been blackmailing Wu to make him leave his wife. Wu did not want Guan to jeopardize his political career. As a result, he murdered her. Chen brings these facts to the attention of his superiors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gremlins"title="The Gremlins">
The story concerns mischievous mythical creatures, the gremlins of the title, often invoked by Royal Air Force pilots as an explanation of mechanical troubles and mishaps. In Dahl's book, the gremlins' motivation for sabotaging British aircraft is revenge of the destruction of their forest home, which was razed to make way for an aircraft factory. The principal character in the book, Gus, has his Hawker Hurricane fighter destroyed over the English Channel by a gremlin during the Battle of Britain, but is able to convince the gremlins as they parachute into the water that they should join forces against a common enemy, Hitler and the Nazis, rather than fight each other.Eventually, the gremlins are re-trained by the Royal Air Force to repair rather than sabotage aircraft, and restore Gus to active flight status after a particularly severe crash. The book also contains picturesque details about the ordinary lives of gremlins: baby gremlins, for instance, are known as widgets, and females as fifinellas, a name taken from the great "flying" filly racehorse Fifinella, that won both the Epsom Derby and Epsom Oaks in 1916, the year Dahl was born.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Weight_of_Water"title="The Weight of Water">
In March 1873, two Norwegian-born women who lived on the desolate Smuttynose Island, one of the Isles of Shoals off the coast of Maine and New Hampshire, were brutally murdered. Maren Hontvedt, a sister of one of the victims, survived by hiding in a sea cave until dawn. The murdered women were her older sister Karen Christensen and Anethe Christensen, their sister-in-law. A man named Louis Wagner was tried and hanged for their murders, mostly on circumstantial evidence. His conviction has been argued about, as some people think he could not have done it.More than a century later, Jean Janes, a magazine photographer working on a photo essay about the murders, returns to the Isles with her husband Thomas and five-year-old daughter. Thomas is an award-winning poet who has been struggling with alcoholism and not writing much. Hoping to have a small vacation, they travel on a boat skippered by Thomas' brother Rich, who has brought along his girlfriend Adaline.Jean becomes immersed in the details of the 19th-century murders after discovering a purported memoir of Maren in the library. Gradually, tensions increase among the group on the sloop, with unspoken emotions surfacing. Jean begins to suspect an affair between Thomas and Adaline.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaubert's_Parrot"title="Flaubert's Parrot">
The novel follows Geoffrey Braithwaite, a widowed, retired English doctor, visiting France. While visiting sites related to Flaubert, Geoffrey discovers two museums claiming to display the stuffed parrot which sat atop Flaubert's writing desk for a brief period while he wrote "Un Coeur Simple". While trying to identify which is authentic, Braithwaite learns that Flaubert's parrot could be any one of fifty ("Une cinquantaine de perroquets!", p. 187) that had been held in the collection of the municipal museum.Although the narrative is mostly about tracking down the parrot, many chapters focus on Flaubert's love life .
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baby_Squad"title="The Baby Squad">
Perfect babies are created in laboratories outside the woman's womb and then put up for adoption. When the wife of an aspiring local politician becomes pregnant she reluctantly confides in her husband and is secretly sent to an institution where she can spend the remaining months of her pregnancy and give birth to her baby. However, she feels imprisoned and threatened there and starts doubting her husband's good intentions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zorba_the_Greek"title="Zorba the Greek">
The book opens in a café in Piraeus, just before dawn on a gusty autumn morning sometime after the end of World War I. The narrator, a young Greek intellectual, resolves to set aside his books for a few months after being stung by the parting words of a friend, Stavridakis, who has left for the Russian Caucasus to help the local Greek communities who are facing persecution. He sets off for Crete to re-open a disused lignite mine, and immerse himself in the world of peasants and the proletariat.He is about to begin reading his copy of Dante's "Divine Comedy" when he feels he is being watched; he turns around and sees a man of around sixty peering at him through the glass door of the café. The man enters and immediately approaches him to ask for work. He claims expertise as a chef, a miner, and player of the "santouri", and introduces himself as Alexis Zorba, a Greek born in Macedonia. The narrator is fascinated by Zorba's lascivious opinions and expressive manner and decides to employ him as a foreman. On their way to Crete, they talk on a great number of subjects, and Zorba's soliloquies set the tone for a large part of the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angélique_(novel_series)"title="Angélique (novel series)">
The eponymous protagonist, Angélique Sancé de Monteloup, is a 17th-century woman born into the provincial aristocracy in the west of France. In successive books, she marries at a young age the romantic and talented Joffrey de Peyrac, Count of Toulouse; gets her domestic bliss destroyed when King Louis XIV has her husband executed on trumped up charges; descends into the underworld of Paris; emerges and through a turbulent second marriage gets admittance to the court at Versailles; loses her second husband in war, just as she had started to truly love him, and subsequently refuses to become the King's mistress; finds that her first husband is after all alive but is hiding somewhere in the Mediterranean; sets out on a highly risky search, gets captured by pirates, sold into slavery in Crete, taken into the harem of the King of Morocco, stabs the King when he tries to have sex with her, and stages a daring escape along with a French slave who becomes her lover; gets back to France, only to be put under house arrest in her ancestral home and raped by rampaging royal soldiers, which arouses the province to a rebellion which is brutally put down; finds refuge with a Huguenot family and – just as they are threatened by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes – is saved in the nick of time by her long-lost first husband appearing at La Rochelle and taking them all to America in his ship; and also being reunited with her children, whom she had thought dead but were alive and well in America. Then follow many more adventures in colonial North America – specifically, in French Acadia – involving French and English settlers, tribal natives and pirates.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_Solo"title="Going Solo">
The book started with Dahl's voyage to Africa in 1938, which was prompted by his desire to find adventure after finishing school. He was on a boat heading towards Dar es Salaam for his new job working for Shell Oil. During this journey, he met various people and described extraordinary events such as a lion carrying a woman in its mouth.He eventually joined the war as a squadron pilot in the Royal Air Force, flying the Tiger Moth, Gloster Gladiator, and Hawker Hurricane. He was among the last Allied pilots to withdraw from Greece during the German invasion, taking part in the air for the Battle of Athens on 20 April 1941. In one of his accounts, he described a crash in the Western Desert, which fractured his skull and brought him several other problems such as temporarily being blinded during his days in Greece. After the country fell to the Nazis, he went to the Middle East to fight Vichy French pilots after staying for a brief time in Alexandria, Egypt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrick_(novel)"title="Merrick (novel)">
Louis de Pointe du Lac is being haunted by the spirit of Claudia, a child who, like Louis, had been turned into a vampire by Lestat de Lioncourt but was destroyed long ago. With the help of former Talamasca leader-turned-vampire David Talbot, Louis asks the beautiful witch Merrick Mayfair to use her spiritual powers to contact Claudia's ghost.Merrick is also a former agent of the Talamasca, and shared many adventures with David in the past. Flashbacks introduce Merrick's malevolent sister, Honey Isabella or Honey in the Sunshine; Merrick's mother, Cold Sandra; and the Great Nananne, a powerful witch whose very presence is enough to frighten and instill respect in David. Merrick and David recall their journey to a cave in Central America which contained malevolent spirits protecting an ancient jade mask, which allows people to see spirits as if they were corporeal.Merrick retrieves Claudia's diary from the Talamasca vaults, and makes it possible for Louis to speak with Claudia. The spirit's harsh words confirm the negative feelings for Louis that Claudia expressed in her diary, and a despairing Louis attempts suicide by exposing himself to the sun. Made a vampire by Lestat, Louis is too powerful to be destroyed in this manner, and his burned body is restored with vampiric blood bestowed by Lestat, David, and new vampire Merrick. She reveals that from the beginning, she used her magic to lure David and Louis to her in hopes of receiving the Dark Gift of vampirism. The turning of Merrick into a vampire infuriates the Talamasca, but in a letter David advises that they not wage war against the vampires because Lestat is too formidable a foe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Song_of_the_Lioness"title="The Song of the Lioness">
Noblewoman Alanna of Trebond, disguised as the boy "Alan", exchanges places with her twin brother Thom, to go to the royal palace in the city of Corus to train for knighthood, while Thom studies magic. Throughout the four novels Alanna struggles with her gender identity, as well as going through puberty and bullying. Alanna befriends characters of a wide background during the quartet including George, the commoner king of the thieves; the scholar Sir Myles of Olau; senior students Gareth (Gary) of Naxen, Raoul of Goldenlake, and Prince Jonathan of Conté; Princess Thayet of Sarain; Liam Ironarm, a martial-arts champion; and Buriram (Buri) Tourakom, Thayet's bodyguard. Her principal rivals are classmate Ralon of Malven and Jonathan's kinsman Duke Roger. In the second volume, Alanna also acquires the magical cat 'Faithful', who accompanies her thereafter (Faithful is hinted to be an immortal, but his origins remain unknown. Because of her double identity as a girl masquerading as a boy, small size, magic, and impatience, Alanna often questions her own character. In the third book, she becomes an honorary member of the 'Bazhir' (a Bedouin-like ethnicity) and gains acceptance as a warrior, mage and a woman. In the final volume, Alanna becomes King's Champion to Jonathan and Baroness of the coastal estate Pirate's Swoop, following her marriage to George Cooper, newly minted Baron of Pirate's Swoop.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Mannering"title="Guy Mannering">
"Guy Mannering" is set in the 1760s to 1780s, mostly in the Galloway area of southwest Scotland, but with episodes in Cumberland, Holland, and India. It tells the story of Henry "Harry" Bertram, the son of the Laird of Ellangowan, who is kidnapped at the age of five by smugglers after witnessing the murder of a customs officer. It follows the fortunes and adventures of Harry and his family in subsequent years, and the struggle over the inheritance of Ellangowan. The novel also depicts the lawlessness that existed at the time, when smugglers operated along the coast and thieves frequented the country roads.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_New_Sun"title="The Book of the New Sun">
## The Shadow of the Torturer.Severian, an apprentice in the torturers' guild, barely survives a swim in the River Gyoll. On his way back to the Citadel (whose towers appear to be disused rockets), Severian and several other apprentices sneak into a Necropolis where Severian first encounters Vodalus, an aristocrat who is the Commonwealth's leading revolutionary. Vodalus, along with a noblewoman named Thea and a servant named Hildegrin, are robbing a grave. Vodalus and his companions are attacked by volunteer guards. Severian saves Vodalus's life, earning his trust and the reward of a single "gold" coin.Later Severian rescues a fighting dog that has lost a leg and names him Triskele. When Triskele leaves, Severian tracks him to a place in the Citadel called the Atrium of Time, where he talks with a beautiful young woman, Valeria, but he does not get Triskele back.In the torturers' tower, Severian falls in love with Thecla, a prisoner. She is Thea's half-sister and was imprisoned for helping her and Vodalus. Severian's attraction to her is hastened by his sexual initiation in a visit to a brothel at the guild's expense. The brothel is run by a eunuch and the prostitutes are clones of noblewomen; Severian chooses the clone of Thecla for his encounter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_Knives"title="Night of Knives">
"Night of Knives" takes place in the 24 hours leading up to the night of the "Shadow Moon", a night on which a prophecy promises the return of the Emperor. Kiska is a young and enterprising girl who knows the Malaz City inside out and yearns to escape the dreary island and into the Malazan military. On the other hand, Temper, former bodyguard to Dassem Ultor, the legendary First Sword of the Empire, wants to stay beyond notice of the powers now converging on the city. In the city, the mages of Malaz, much reduced since the cull, now face an almost impossible task as an ancient power draws close.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Soldiers"title="Ghost Soldiers">
In late January 1945, 121 Ranger volunteers set out to attempt a rescue of over 513 Allied prisoners of war in a Japanese camp near the Philippine city of Cabanatuan. The prisoners, survivors of the Bataan Death March, had lived in deplorable conditions for three years, suffering from starvation, tropical diseases, and abuse from Japanese soldiers. "Ghost Soldiers" recounts the story of the prisoners, the Ranger unit performing the raid, and the Filipino guerrillas who provided assistance. A massacre of American soldiers at Palawan alerted U.S. commanders to the danger of mass POW murder as the Japanese retreated from the Philippines. As a consequence, they planned and executed a mission to rescue the POWs from Cabanatuan prison camp. "Ghost Soldiers" provides historical background to the events leading to the raid, detailed accounts of camp conditions, the prisoners' heroic will to survive, and the planning and successful execution of the rescue.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_(Jarvis_novel)"title="Thomas (Jarvis novel)">
Four years after the events of "The Final Reckoning", midshipmouse Thomas Triton is troubled by memories of a traumatic incident in his youth that resulted in the death of his best friend, Woodget Pipple. His wife Gwen suggests that it would make him feel better if he wrote down what was bothering him.Many years prior, Thomas is taken in by a kindly community of field mice after being caught in a snowstorm. There he meets Woodget, a little field mouse who becomes his close friend, and a beautiful maiden named Bess Sandibrook. Thomas falls deeply in love with Bess, but is unaware that Woodget has similar feelings for her. Stating that she loves Woodget, Bess gently rejects Thomas, only for them both to realise that Woodget has run away after mistakenly thinking he's getting in the way of their romance. Thomas vows to find Woodget, and catches up with him at a dock as a ship called the "Calliope" is getting ready to set sail. Thomas and Woodget meet a tough Irish mouse named Mulligan, who invites them to have a drink with him on the ship before he leaves. But they stay too long and to their dismay are stuck on the ship. The two become suspicious of Mulligan, who is evasive and will not let anyone see the contents of a satchel he always carries with him. The "Calliope" eventually crashes in a violent storm, killing most of its passengers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Reckoning"title="The Final Reckoning">
It is winter and Yule festivities are underway in the Skirtings, the mouse community of the old empty house in Deptford. The Brown siblings, Arthur and Audrey, have returned from their disastrous stay in Fennywolde where, to prevent her being hanged as a witch, the latter was married to Twit. Several troubling events begin to occur: the psychic bats leave the house's attic, the Starwife's magical Starglass is stolen, and there are reports of a bloodthirsty rat army growing in the city. The Deptford mice soon reach the horrifying conclusion that the spirit of Jupiter has returned to seek revenge by smothering the world in eternal winter, and they have no idea how to defeat him this time as he is already dead.The city rats, now led by Jupiter's former lieutenant Morgan (who survived his fall into the sewer water at the end of the first book), prepare to go to Deptford and slaughter all the mice there. But Jupiter appears to Morgan and once again ensnares him into his service. Lured to his master's base, the Deptford Power Station, Morgan is confused and horrified when all his rats are immediately murdered by Jupiter on their arrival. Piccadilly, Thomas, and Arthur go to the power station hoping that they can vanquish Jupiter by using Audrey's mousebrass charm, which is what worked last time. It is now in the possession of Morgan, who battles Piccadilly in a one-on-one duel but ultimately decides to commit suicide to free himself from Jupiter's control. When Piccadilly uses the mousebrass against Jupiter, he finds that the cat spectre is too powerful to be harmed by it now. The city mouse is surrounded and killed by the ghosts of Morgan's rats, returned from the dead as an invincible army wielding ice spears.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside,_Outside"title="Inside, Outside">
The story alternates between Goodkind's telling his family history and early years (specifically, his first 26 years (1915–1941)) and his account of current events in 1973, leading up to the Yom Kippur War. The tales of Goodkind's early years describe his family – his mother and father, his sister, his mother's father and father's mother, his mother's half sister, and a tribe of more distant uncles, aunts and cousins (the 'Mishpokha', Yiddish for 'family'). After college, Goodkind works for Harry Goldhandler, a gag writer for radio comedies (very loosely based on David Freedman), and has a romance with showgirl Bobbie Webb. The tales of his present day in 1973 are centered on his wife, his daughter, their friends, and Peter Quat, a college friend who also worked for Goldhandler, and who had become a famous novelist for his sexually explicit characters and unflattering depictions of American Jewish life. Quat's books seem similar to the work of Philip Roth, but Roth did not attend Columbia nor work for Freedman.As a young man, Goodkind becomes less observant, but his adult self has returned to the Orthodox practices of his father and grandfather. Goodkind as a child and young man is embarrassed by his first name Israel, mockingly shortened by several other characters to Izzy. In the last scene of the novel when Goodkind returns to the U.S. after the Yom Kippur War, he tells an El Al flight attendant to call him Israel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filth_(novel)"title="Filth (novel)">
Bruce Robertson is a detective sergeant serving in Edinburgh's "Lothian Constabulary". Robertson is a Machiavellian, intensely misanthropic man who spends his time indulging in cocaine and alcohol abuse, sexually abusive relationships, compulsive gorging on junk food, and, most of all, his penchant for "the games" – Bruce's euphemism for the myriad foul plots he hatches directed at workmates. He is able to pander to all of his vices during his annual holidays in Amsterdam.The novel begins by introducing the murder of Efan Wurie, a case Bruce has been assigned. The plot has little to do with the actual crime; instead, the novel traces Bruce throughout his life, told in a first-person, stream-of-consciousness style. Through narrative devices such as the tapeworm he acquires, the reader explores the facets of Bruce's personality and learns about his past, as well as the various tedious police routines Bruce absconds from, his often-backfiring sexual endeavours, and his various short- and long-term schemes and plots against his colleagues (ultimately to raise his chances of gaining the hoped-for promotion to detective inspector). Apart from the general malevolent scheming, Bruce also seeks to satisfy his cravings for violence, drugs, sex, and pornography along the way while happily voicing his racism, anti-Catholic sectarianism, and misogyny, all the while pining for his ex-wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Lost_His_Face"title="The Boy Who Lost His Face">
In a 1989 suburban town, a boy named David tries to get in the cool group by helping his friend Scott, and two troublemakers named Roger and Randy (the former being the leader) carry out a prank. Their target is an elderly woman who was called a witch by all the kids in the school. When they attack her and steal her cane David flips her off to try to impress Roger. But when they leave the old lady's house, she cries out to David "Your Doppelgänger will regurgitate on your soul!" The following days David finds himself experiencing strange happenings that lead him to believe that he is cursed. After being rejected by Roger and his gang, David finds himself becoming a loser. He breaks his parents' window, he walks into class with his zipper unzipped, he falls off his chair in class, and his only friends are fellow outcasts Larry and Maureen "Mo". His actions lead Roger's gang to target him and his friends, calling them "The Three Stooges". He becomes friendly with a cute girl named Tori Williams, but his pants fall down when he gets the courage to ask her for her phone number. Finally, his younger brother Ricky, after being ridiculed by Roger's younger brother, loses all respect for David.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Drummer_Girl"title="The Little Drummer Girl">
Martin Kurtz, an Israeli spy working in a clandestine agency to allow plausible deniability for his superiors, recruits Charlie, a 26-year-old radical left-wing English actress, as part of an elaborate scheme to discover the whereabouts of Khalil, a Palestinian terrorist. Joseph is Charlie's case officer. Khalil's younger brother Salim is abducted, interrogated, and killed by Kurtz's unit. Joseph impersonates Salim and travels through Europe with Charlie to make Khalil believe that Charlie and Salim are lovers. When Khalil discovers the affair and contacts Charlie, the Israelis are able to track him down.Charlie is taken to Palestinian refugee camps to be trained as a bomber. She becomes more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, and her divided loyalties bring her close to collapse. Charlie is sent on a mission to place a bomb at a lecture given by an Israeli moderate whose peace proposals are not to Khalil's liking. She carries out the mission under the Israelis' supervision. As a result, Joseph kills Khalil. Charlie subsequently has a mental breakdown caused by the strain of her mission and her own internal contradictions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sentimental_Journey_Through_France_and_Italy"title="A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy">
Yorick's journey starts in Calais, where he meets a monk who begs for donations to his convent. Yorick initially refuses to give him anything, but later regrets his decision. He and the monk exchange their snuff-boxes. He buys a chaise to continue his journey. The next town he visits is Montreuil, where he hires a servant to accompany him on his journey, a young man named La Fleur.During his stay in Paris, Yorick is informed that the police inquired for his passport at his hotel. Without a passport at a time when England is at war with France (Sterne travelled to Paris in January 1762, before the Seven Years' War ended), he risks imprisonment in the Bastille. Yorick decides to travel to Versailles, where he visits the Count de B**** to acquire a passport. When Yorick notices the count reads "Hamlet", he points with his finger at Yorick's name, mentioning that he is Yorick. The count mistakes him for the king's jester and quickly procures him a passport. Yorick fails in his attempt to correct the count, and remains satisfied with receiving his passport so quickly.Yorick returns to Paris, and continues his voyage to Italy after staying in Paris for a few more days. Along the way he decides to visit Maria—who was introduced in Sterne's previous novel, "Tristram Shandy"—in Moulins. Maria's mother tells Yorick that Maria has been struck with grief since her husband died. Yorick consoles Maria, and then leaves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King's_Demons"title="The King's Demons">
In 1215, the Court of King John of England is at the castle of Sir Ranulf Fitzwilliam to extort more taxes, and when the lord refuses to pay the King insults him. To defend his honour his son Hugh takes on the King's champion, Sir Gilles Estram, in a joust. The latter wins easily, though the joust is disturbed by the arrival of the TARDIS. The Fifth Doctor, Tegan, and Turlough are greeted as demons and welcomed by the King.Having established the date, the Doctor concludes the King is not himself – in fact, he is not the King at all, as he is actually in London taking the Crusader’s Oath. Sir Geoffrey de Lacy, the cousin of Sir Ranulf, arrives at the castle and confirms he knows the King is in London. Sir Gilles is about to torture him as a liar during a royal banquet when the Doctor intervenes. It seems the King's champion is not who he claims to be, either: Sir Gilles sheds his disguise and reveals himself to be the Doctor's nemesis, the Master. He flees in his own TARDIS, which had been disguised as an iron maiden.The King knights the Doctor as his new champion, and he is given run of the castle. After a series of mishaps, including the death of Sir Geoffrey at the Master's hands, the Doctor confronts the King and the Master and discovers the truth. The monarch is really Kamelion, a war weapon found by the Master on Xeriphas, which can be mentally controlled and used to adopt disguises and personas. Disguised as King John, the Master intends that Kamelion will behave so appallingly so as to provoke a rebellion and topple the real King from his throne, thus robbing the world of Magna Carta, the foundation of parliamentary democracy. It is a small plan on the Master's usual scale, but nevertheless particularly poisonous to the normal progress of Earth society.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Rider_(novel)"title="Dragon Rider (novel)">
Firedrake is a young dragon who lives in a hidden valley in Scotland with other dragons. After realizing that humans intend to flood the valley and the dragons living there are no longer safe, Firedrake sets off with the guidance from the eldest member of his clan (Slatebeard) to avoid the "Golden One" and to find the Rim of Heaven, a legendary location that is a safe haven for all dragons.Firedrake travels to the city with his friend Sorrel, a forest brownie, to find Gilbert Graytail, a rat who specializes in making maps. The duo meets Ben who provides Sorrel with human clothes so she may go in disguise to find Gilbert while Firedrake stays hidden. After finding Gilbert and providing payment, Gilbert hands over a map leading to the Himalayas, marking dangerous areas along the way. Only able to fly at night, Firedrake wastes no time wanting to leave. He and Sorrel also decide to bring Ben along with them. After Ben and Sorrel argue about turning East too soon or not, the three end up in a mountain range full of dwarves. Firedrake sleeps while the sun is up and the dwarves wait for him to wake up. While he rests however, one of the dwarves, Gravelbeard, runs to the castle in that same mountain range, revealing Nettlebrand, the Golden One, a fearsome dragon-like monster whose only purpose in life is to hunt, kill and eat dragons and his servant, Twigleg the Homunculus. After hearing of the trio, Nettlebrand decides to follow them, hoping to hunt down and kill the last of the dragons because he failed decades before.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_Moon's_Incredible_Book_of_Hypnotism"title="Molly Moon's Incredible Book of Hypnotism">
Molly Moon, an orphan at Hardwick House Orphanage in Briersville, England, is living a "boring and plain" life with her best friend Rocky Scarlet, another orphan. She is described as being plain looking with a large "potato" nose, wobbly knees and green eyes. She is usually beaten down upon by Ms. Adderstone, the woman in charge of the orphanage, and Hazel, a snobby orphan girl. During school, Molly and Rocky have a fight and Molly storms away to the town library. As she walks in, she finds a man yelling at the librarian about a book he ordered, but ignores him. While looking in a curious compartment of the restricted section, she finds a book on hypnotism, placed in the wrong section because the "H" was ripped off the spine. Intrigued, she steals it and sneaks out of the library. She takes it to the orphanage to read it.She fakes being ill so that she can study the book better. Curiously, she finds that chapters 7 and 8 ("Voice-Only Hypnosis" and "Long Distance Hypnosis") are missing. Not long after her discovery of the book, she learns that Rocky has been adopted and taken to America with his new family. Determined to see her friend again, she gains the actual ability to hypnotize from the lessons in her book, first successfully hypnotizing the orphanage dog, Petula. Later on, she is able to hypnotize both Ms. Adderstone and their orphanage chef Edna. Using her ability, Molly wins a large sum of money from a local talent competition, by hypnotizing the crowd into believing that she is a talented singer and dancer. She uses the money to fly to New York City, taking Petula with her. Before leaving, she buys a large gold pendulum, where the mysterious professor from the library learns about her, after he bought some anti-hypnosis glasses. She also hypnotizes Ms. Adderstone and Edna to be nice to all children.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deptford_Mice_Almanack"title="The Deptford Mice Almanack">
Ten years after the events of "The Final Reckoning", a red squirrel artist and writer named Gervase Brightkin is staying as a guest of mouse heroine Audrey Scuttle, now the Starwife in Greenwich Park. He is commanded by her to create an almanack to record the lore and traditions of the mice, squirrels, bats, and rats. There are entries for all the days of the year, and every major event in the main novels is given a date. Gervase includes journal entries throughout telling of his stay in Greenwich as well as his travels to Fennywolde and Holeborn to ask William 'Twit' Scuttle and Arthur Brown to tell their stories.While in Fennywolde, Gervase encounters Alison Sedge, the field mouse who was jealous of Audrey in "The Crystal Prison". She was seemingly driven mad because of the death of her love interest, Jenkin Nettle, for which she blames Audrey. Alison solemnly warns that Audrey will not be the Starwife for much longer and will know great loss. At the end of the year, the Great Oak (in which the evil rat god Hobb was imprisoned by a previous Starwife, Ysabelle) falls down because of heavy winds. It is seen as an ill omen, and many of the grey squirrels in the park begin to whisper that it was Audrey's fault because she is not a squirrel but "merely" a mouse. Traditionally, the office of Starwife was always held by a squirrel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Krotons"title="The Krotons">
On an unnamed planet, a race called the Gonds are subject to the mysterious Krotons, unseen beings to whom they provide their brightest intelligences as "companions". Thara, son of the Gond leader Selris, is the only one to object to this practice; those who have become companions before have never been seen nor heard from again. The Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe arrive in time to witness the death of the chosen companion Abu, who is vaporised by smoke sprayed from nozzles on either side of the doorway from which he emerges, and intervene to save Vana, the other selected for this fate, using her survival as a means to convince Selris and the Gonds of the malign influence of the Krotons on their society. The Doctor calls it "self-perpetuating slavery" by which the brightest in Gond society have been removed. Similarly, there are large gaps in their knowledge, especially relating to chemistry. This situation has been in existence for many years since the Krotons arrived in their spaceship, releasing a poison that polluted the lands beyond the Gond city – which the Gonds call "the Wasteland" – and killed much of the population.Thara uses the disquiet of the situation to lead a rebellion and attack the Teaching Machines of the Krotons in the Hall of Learning. This prompts a crystalline probe to appear and defend the Machines, and warn the Gonds to cease. Zoe now tries the Teaching Machines and is selected to be a "companion" of the Krotons. The Doctor elects the same fate and both are summoned into the Dynotrope where they are subjected to a mental attack. Zoe deduces that the Krotons have found a way to transfer mental power into pure energy, while the Doctor busies himself with taking chemical samples of the Kroton environment. Circumstances now trigger the creation of two Krotons from chemical vats within the Dynatrope (the Kroton spaceship). The newly created Krotons capture Jamie, but are really seeking the Doctor and Zoe, the "High Brains", who have now left the Dynatrope. It takes Jamie quite some time before he is able to escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ties_That_Bind_(Star_Wars)"title="The Ties That Bind (Star Wars)">
Qui-Gon Jinn and his ally Tahl must go to New Apsolon to investigate a murder that can destroy the peace between the planet's upper and lower classes. Although he feels left out, Qui-Gon's apprentice, Obi-Wan Kenobi, also joins the group. The Jedi investigate, although they receive few leads. During the mission, Qui-Gon and Tahl pledge their love for each other.However, Tahl is soon captured by the rogue faction that Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan were searching for. It is also learned that one of the heirs to the planet is in league with this faction. However, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan are quickly focused on rescuing Tahl before she is killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Sister"title="The Little Sister">
Orfamay Quest asks Philip Marlowe to search for her older brother Orrin, who has recently come out to work in Bay City. Starting with Orrin's last known address, Marlowe finds the superintendent there in a drunken stupor; when awoken he tries to call a Dr. Lagardie before passing out again. Marlowe then finds a man who claims to be a retired optometrist living in Orrin's old room. On leaving the building, Marlowe discovers the superintendent stabbed in the neck with an ice pick and reports the murder to the local police.When Marlowe returns to his office, he gets an anonymous call offering him an easy $100 job. When he enters the caller's room at the Van Nuys Hotel, a blonde knocks him out with one of her high heels. He comes round to finds the "retired optometrist" dead, also with an ice pick in his neck, and the room in disarray from a search. Marlowe remembers that the optometrist wears a toupée and finds a camera shop claim check hidden there. When he notifies the Los Angeles police of the murder, they recognize the victim as a minor player in organised crime.Based on a tip from the hotel detective, Marlowe deduces that the woman in the hotel room was Mavis Weld, a rising movie star. He goes to her apartment, where he meets Dolores Gonzales, another minor star, who throws him out. After using the claim check to retrieve a set of photos of Weld and a reputed gangster named Steelgrave, Marlowe visits her agent and makes him understand that, far from trying to blackmail Weld, he may be able to help her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakes_and_Earrings"title="Snakes and Earrings">
A young woman named Lui admires her new boyfriend Ama's split tongue, which she likens to the forked tongue of a snake. Having experimented with large ear piercings, she decides that she wants to try the same body modification as Ama. Lui and Ama visit a bisexual body modification and tattoo artist named Shiba, who begins the process of inserting progressively larger tongue studs. Lui finds herself interested in Shiba, returns to the shop without Ama, and secretly begins a violent sexual relationship with Shiba involving bondage and sadomasochism.While walking to a train station one night, Lui, Ama, and Lui's friend Maki are confronted in Shinjuku by two apparent gangsters, one of whom grabs Lui's breast while insulting her. Ama punches both men. After one of the men flees, Ama continues to beat Lui's attacker, using the heavy rings on his hand to knock out the gangster's teeth. Ama gives the teeth to Lui as a symbol of his love for her. Despite Ama's obvious affection, Lui feels disconnected from Ama and continues to have a sexual relationship with Shiba, who is creating an intricate tattoo that covers her entire back. Lui later sees a television news story about a gangster who was beaten to death in Shinjuku, and makes Ama change his appearance to avoid recognition by the police.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Traveler's_Wife"title="The Time Traveler's Wife">
Using alternating first-person perspectives, the novel tells the stories of Henry DeTamble (born 1963), a librarian at the Newberry Library in Chicago, as he visits a child who will later become his wife, Clare Anne Abshire (born 1971), an artist who makes paper sculptures, with the aid of his uncontrolled ability to time travel. Henry has a rare genetic disorder, which later comes to be known as Chrono-Impairment. This disorder causes Henry to involuntarily travel through time. When 20-year-old Clare meets 28-year-old Henry at the Newberry Library in 1991 at the beginning of the novel, he has never seen her before, although she has known him most of her life.Henry begins time traveling at the age of five, jumping forward and backward relative to his own timeline. When he vanishes, where he goes, and how long his trips will last are beyond his control. However, his destinations are tied to his subconscious—he most often travels to places and times related to his own history. Certain stimuli such as stress can trigger Henry's time traveling; he often goes jogging to keep calm and remain in the present. He searches out pharmaceuticals in the future that may be able to help control his time traveling. He also seeks the advice of a geneticist, Dr. Kendrick. Henry cannot take anything with him into the future or the past, which means that he always arrives naked and then struggles to find clothing, shelter, and food. He does amass a number of survival skills, including lock-picking, self-defense, and pickpocketing. Much of this he learns from older versions of himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raise_the_Titanic!"title="Raise the Titanic!">
In 1987, Dr. Gene Seagram leads the top-secret Pentagon program Meta Section, which secretly attempts to leapfrog current technology by 20 to 30 years. One result: the Sicilian Project, which uses sound waves to stop incoming ballistic missiles. The immense power needs of the Sicilian Project can be met only by an extremely rare mineral called Byzanium. After satellite data pinpoints the most likely source of Byzanium, Meta Section sends Sid Koplin to Novaya Zemlya, an island off the northern coast of the Soviet Union. There he discovers that the byzanium ore has already been mined. While making his way back to his hidden boat Koplin is shot and captured by a Soviet guard but is rescued by the story's protagonist, Dirk Pitt.Using clues found by Koplin, Seagram determines that the byzanium — a chunk worth more than a quarter of a billion dollars in 1912 figures — was mined in the early part of the 20th century by a group of Coloradan miners, including Joshua Hayes Brewster. The group was originally hired by the French government, but persuaded by the U.S. government to steal the mineral for the United States. Brewster and his men engage in a running battle with French assassins as they crisscross Europe trying to get their stolen goods home. Only Brewster reaches Southampton alive, and he books passage on the maiden voyage of the great White Star Line ship RMS "Titanic".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvie_and_Bruno"title="Sylvie and Bruno">
There are two strands to the plot: the conspiracy against the Warden of Outland, instigated by the Sub-Warden and Chancellor, and the love of a young doctor, Arthur, for Lady Muriel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom's_Midnight_Garden"title="Tom's Midnight Garden">
When Tom Long's brother Peter gets measles, Tom is sent to stay with his Uncle Alan and Aunt Gwen. They live in an upstairs flat of a big house with no garden, only a tiny yard for parking. The former grounds of the big house have been sold for building and are occupied by modern houses. The elderly and reclusive landlady, Mrs Bartholomew, lives above them. Because Tom may be infectious, he is not allowed out to play, and he feels lonely. Without exercise he lies awake after midnight, restless, when he hears the communal grandfather clock strangely strike 13. He gets up to investigate and discovers that the back door now opens on a large sunlit garden.Every night the clock strikes 13 and Tom returns to the Victorian era grounds. There he meets another lonely child, a girl called Hatty, and they become inseparable playmates. Tom sees the family occasionally, but only Hatty (and as is revealed later in the book, the gardener) sees him and the others believe she plays alone.Tom writes daily accounts to his brother Peter, who follows the adventures during his recovery – and afterward, for Tom contrives to extend the stay with Aunt and Uncle. Gradually at first, Hatty grows up and passes Tom's age; he comes to realise that he is slipping to different points in the past. Finally she grows up at a faster rate, until she is an adult and is being courted by an acquaintance of hers who is nicknamed "Barty." At this stage in the book, the season in the old garden tends to be winter. Tom ingeniously obtains ice skates by having Hatty conceal her old pair in his room, where he subsequently finds them and joins her skating on the next night.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plum_Bun"title="Plum Bun">
Overtly conventional through its employment of elements and techniques of traditional genres such as the romance or the fairy tale, "Plum Bun" at the same time transgresses these genres by its depiction, and critique, of racism, sexism and capitalism. The heroine, a young, light-skinned African-American woman called Angela Murray, leaves behind her past and passes for white in order to be able to attain fulfilment in life. Only after she has lived among white Americans does she find out that crossing the racial barrier is not enough for a woman like herself to realize her full potential. The detailed description of her coming of age makes "Plum Bun" a classic "Bildungsroman".The novel's plot concerns two sisters, Virginia and Angela Murray, who grow up in Philadelphia in a home rich with African-American culture. Angela, like her mother Mattie, is light skinned and able to “pass” in white society, while Virginia and her father Junius's darker complexion places them on the other side of the color line. Virginia grows up refusing to bow to racist pressures; rather she accepts who she is. Angela, on the other hand, tries repeatedly to gain acceptance by assuming a white mask, but each time it seems that success and friendship are hers, her ethnicity is exposed and she is stripped of everything she cares about.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Mortality"title="Old Mortality">
After an "Introduction to the Tales of My Landlord", supposedly written by the novel's (fictional) editor Jedediah Cleishbotham, the first chapter by the (fictional) author Peter Pattieson describes Robert Paterson ('Old Mortality'), a Scotsman of the 18th century, who late in life decided to travel around Scotland re-engraving the tombs of 17th-century Covenanter martyrs. Pattieson describes at length meeting Robert Paterson, hearing his anecdotes, and finding other stories of the events to present an unbiased picture.The novel then describes a wapenshaw held in 1679 by Lady Margaret Bellenden, life-rentrix of the barony of Tillietudlem. This was a show of her support for the Royalist cause, but most of her tenants favoured the opposing Covenanters (who wanted the re-establishment of presbyterianism in Scotland) and she has to enlist her unwilling servants. After her supporters are duly mustered, the main sport is a shoot at the popinjay in which the Cavalier favourite is narrowly defeated by Henry Morton, son of a Covenanter. He is introduced to Lady Margaret and her lovely granddaughter Edith Bellenden, with whom he is in love.During celebrations of his popinjay victory in the inn that evening, Morton stands up for John Balfour of Burley against bullying by Cavalier dragoons. That night, Burley seeks shelter at Morton's house; Morton reluctantly agrees. It emerges that Burley was one of the assassins of Archbishop James Sharp. In the morning they have to flee Cavalier patrols. As a consequence, Morton finds himself outlawed, and joins Burley in the uprising at the Battle of Drumclog. During this battle a small but well organised group of Covenanters defeated a force of dragoons led by John Graham of Claverhouse. However, after this initial success, Scott traces the growth of factionalism, which hastened its defeat at the Battle of Bothwell Bridge in 1679, by forces led by the Duke of Monmouth and John Graham of Claverhouse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfudge"title="Superfudge">
The Hatcher family has a new baby daughter in the beginning. Several months before they temporarily move from New York City to Princeton, New Jersey, she is born, named Tamara Roxanne, and called "The Baby" for weeks. Peter's 4-year-old brother, Fudge, is extremely jealous of her, who earns the nickname "Tootsie" from their mother Ann's cute speak and their grandmother Muriel's favorite old song. Peter deals with the fallout from Fudge's various problems, which include a spat with his teacher who refuses to use the name "Fudge". When she refuses to do so, he kicks her in the shin. He also attempts to get rid of Tootsie and is famous for his constant desire to involve himself in Peter's activities, especially with Peter's new friend, Alex Santo. In the end, the Hatchers decide to move back to New York City, a decision punctuated by Tootsie's first word which she learns while undergoing a diaper change.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_a_Fourth_Grade_Nothing"title="Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing">
Peter is frustrated with the horrendous behavior demonstrated by Fudge, who frequently goes unpunished. Peter becomes annoyed with Fudge because he often disturbs his pet turtle, Dribble, which he won at his best friend Jimmy Fargo's birthday party. Furthermore, Fudge throws non-stop temper tantrums, goes through a finicky phase of abstaining from eating altogether, and emulates Peter's behavior, throwing tantrums if it is prohibited. Nevertheless, their parents, Warren and Anne, dote on Fudge, to Peter's anger and frustration.For months, Fudge's antics continue; knocking his front teeth out after catapulting himself off the jungle gym at the playground at Central Park when he decides to fly, vandalizing Peter's school project, and taking off at a movie theater. One day, to Peter's absolute misery, he returns home to discover Dribble missing from his bowl, Fudge claiming to have swallowed him. These proclamations prove to be correct, and Fudge is rushed to the hospital, where Dribble is extracted, to Anne's relief. However, Dribble has died in Fudge's stomach, and no one, especially Fudge, seems to care. Peter is devastated over the loss of him; Warren and Anne sympathetically compensate by adopting a dog, which Peter appropriately names Turtle in memory of Dribble.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Symbol"title="The Lost Symbol">
Renowned Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is invited to give a lecture at the United States Capitol, at the invitation apparently from his mentor, a 33rd degree Mason named Peter Solomon, who is the head of the Smithsonian Institution. Solomon has also asked him to bring a small, sealed package which he had entrusted to Langdon years earlier. When Langdon arrives at the Capitol, however, he learns that the invitation he received was not from Solomon, but from Solomon's kidnapper, Mal'akh posing as Solomon's assistant, who has left Solomon's severed right hand in the middle of the Capitol Rotunda in a recreation of the Hand of Mysteries. Mal'akh then contacts Langdon, charging him with finding both the Mason's Pyramid, which Masons believe is hidden somewhere in Washington, D.C., and the Lost Word, lest Solomon be murdered.Langdon meets Inoue Sato, the head of the CIA's Office of Security. Sato claims that Mal'akh poses a threat to the national security of the U.S. and that his capture is more important than Peter's rescue, although she refuses to elaborate. Examining Solomon's hand, they discover a clue leading them to Solomon's Masonic altar in a room in the Capitol's sub-basement, where they find a small pyramid lacking a capstone, with an inscription carved into it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_on_Your_Knees"title="Fall on Your Knees">
At the start of the 20th century, James Piper sets out across Cape Breton Island to find a place to live. Working as a piano tuner, he meets and eventually elopes with 13-year-old Materia Mahmoud, much to the anger of her wealthy, traditional Lebanese parents. Materia gives birth to their first daughter, Kathleen, and James subsequently becomes disgusted with his wife, realizing that he actually married "a child." Materia regrets marrying James, and does not take to her newborn child. James, however, ignores and neglects Materia while spoiling and smothering Kathleen. Materia is taken in by the kind neighbor Mrs. Luvovitz, who teaches her to sew and cook. She grows to hate James and their daughter Kathleen.Materia senses danger in James' obsession with their daughter and sees it as her duty to keep him distracted and occupied (especially in the bedroom). James eventually impregnates Materia three more times in quick succession. She gives birth to three girls, Mercedes, Frances and Lily, but Lily dies a crib death shortly after. She is from here on in the novel referred to as "Other Lily". The novel then explores the girls' relationship with their troubled father; their secretive, silent mother; and friendships that grow between them as they try to figure out their family's strange and mysterious history. As Kathleen grows older, she is perceived by her schoolmates as snobby, and they turn against her. Her father James is her only friend, and when he travels off to war, Kathleen is crushed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_Truth"title="The Nature of Truth">
Helmut Sanchez is a young researcher in the employ of renowned Yale professor Werner Hopfgartner. By chance, Helmut discovers a letter written decades ago by his boss mocking guilt over the Holocaust. Appalled, Helmut digs into the scholar's life and travels to Austria and Italy to uncover evidence of Hopfgartner's hateful past. Meanwhile, Hopfgartner's colleague and rival, Regina Neumann, wants to reveal the truth about Hopfgartner's sexual liaisons with vulnerable students before the professor's imminent retirement. Neumann traps Sarah Goodman, an insecure graduate student trying to find her place at Yale, into initiating formal charges of sexual harassment against Hopfgartner. Soon Helmut's intellectual quest for the truth metamorphoses into a journey of justice and blood, one with unforeseen consequences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Color_of_Water"title="The Color of Water">
In "The Color of Water" author James McBride writes both his autobiography and a tribute to the life of his mother, Ruth McBride. Ruth married Andrew Dennis McBride, a black man from North Carolina. James's childhood was spent in a chaotic household of twelve children who had neither the time nor the outlet to ponder questions of race and identity. Ruth did not want to discuss the painful details of her early family life when her abusive father, Tateh, lorded over her sweet-tempered and meek mother, Mameh ("tateh" and "mameh" are Yiddish terms of endearment for "father" and "mother," roughly equivalent to "daddy and "mommy"). Ruth had cut all ties with her Jewish family, as they had essentially disowned her when she married James's father.Born Ruchel Zylska to an Orthodox Jewish family in Poland, Ruth arrived in the United States when she was two years old. Ruth spent her early childhood traveling around the country with her family as her father, Tateh (or Fishel Shilsky), sought employment as a rabbi. Tateh eventually gave up hope of making a living as a rabbi. He settled the family in Suffolk, Virginia, and opened a store in the mostly black section of town, where he overcharged his customers and expressed racist opinions. When Ruth was a child, Tateh sexually abused her and made harsh demands on her to work constantly in the family store. Tateh cheated on his wife, in an affair of which practically everyone in town was aware. Ruth's brother Sam left home at age fifteen, and soon after, Ruth too felt she must leave. She wanted to escape the oppressive environment of both her family and the South. She was also pregnant by Peter, her black boyfriend in Suffolk, and wanted to deal with the pregnancy away from her family. She took trips to New York to stay with relatives, and later moved permanently to Harlem. Ruth's family disowned her when she left, disgusted with her preference for marrying a black man instead of a Jewish man, her general failure to embrace Judaism, and her defiance of her father. Ruth promised her sister Dee-Dee that she would return to Suffolk, but she could not reconcile her family's desires for her life with her own desires for her life. She betrayed her promise to return for Dee-Dee, and her relationship with her sister suffered as a consequence. This separation from her family recurs throughout the memoir as a painful element in Ruth's life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time's_Eye_(novel)"title="Time's Eye (novel)">
The story begins with a series of individuals from different time periods encountering motionless, hovering spheres—and each other—in the region of the Northwest Frontier. Two early hominins, a mother and daughter, are the first. They lack a language, but are referred to in the narration as "Seeker" and "Grasper". Just after encountering a sphere, they are captured by strange creatures in red, later revealed to be British Redcoats.In the year 2037, a UN peacekeeper helicopter is badly damaged by an R.P.G. It crashes near Jamrud Fort, which is defended by British soldiers and sepoys from 1885—including the same redcoats who captured Seeker and Grasper, which the British call "man-apes". Also present at the fort are the factor Cecil de Morgan, and two journalist observers, the American Josh White and the Anglo-Indian "Ruddy"—a young and as-yet unknown Rudyard Kipling.The helicopter crew comprises an American pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Casey Othic; a British Indian observer, Lieutenant Bisesa Dutt; and Chief Warrant Officer Abdikadir Omar, an Afghan Pashtun with blue eyes and strawberry blond hair, which he claims is inherited from soldiers in the army of Alexander the Great. All three survive the helicopter crash, and they are taken prisoner by the British. Both sides soon realise that they are from different time periods, brought together by an event they name the "Discontinuity", and begin working together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enormous_Crocodile"title="The Enormous Crocodile">
The story begins in Africa in a big, deep, muddy river, where the big crocodile (the title character) is telling a slightly smaller crocodile, called the "not-so-big one", that he wants to leave his dirty home and eat some real children for his lunch. The small crocodile objects, because real children taste "tough and chewy and nasty and bitter" in his opinion compared to real fish, and because of what happened the very last time the big crocodile ever tried to eat real children. The bigger crocodile leaves the big, deep, muddy river anyway, and announces his intention to first Humpy-Rumpy the hippopotamus on the river bank, then Trunky the elephant in the jungle, then Muggle Wump the monkey, and finally the Roly-Poly Bird in an orange tree. The four jungle animals are all feeling horrified and disgusted with the big crocodile, thereby insulting him on the spot, hoping that he will fail miserably and will himself be killed permanently, after which the reptile himself briefly and unsuccessfully attacks first Muggle-Wump the Monkey in his tree (filled with nuts) and Roly Poly Bird himself in his (newly-built) nest.First of all, the big crocodile walks to a quiet forest, not far away from an empty African town, where he disguises himself as a small coconut tree using several fallen tree branches as well as coconuts, hoping to eat Toto and Mary, a brother and a sister from the town itself, but is annoyingly caught by Humpy-Rumpy the Hippopotamus from the river bank, who catches the crocodile with his head and sends him "tumbling and skidding over the ground".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier,_Ask_Not"title="Soldier, Ask Not">
Tam Olyn is an ambitious, vain, angry young man. Orphaned at a young age, and raised by a nihilist uncle, he cares little for others, with the possible exception of his younger sister, Eileen. Following his graduation from school, he is ready to launch his career as a journalist among the stars.In a prelude to the main events of the novel, he and Eileen visit the Final Encyclopedia, a centuries-long project to try to collect and catalog all knowledge. While standing at the center of the index room, Tam is identified as a one-in-a-billion person who can actually hear the voices of humanity while there. The dying director of the Encyclopedia wants him to stay on and succeed him, but an Exotic, Padma from the planet Mara, reads him as having no identity with others, no empathy, no soul. He cannot help the Encyclopedia.His sister has become engaged to Jamethon Black, a young mercenary from the Friendly world of Harmony. Despite the fact that Black seems a very decent young man, Tam callously manipulates his sister into breaking the engagement.Shortly, he leaves Earth, beginning his profession as a newsman. In the following five years, he advances in his profession, while his sister emigrates to Cassida, and marries a young engineer there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yertle_the_Turtle_and_Other_Stories"title="Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories">
## “Yertle the Turtle”.The eponymous story revolves around Yertle the Turtle, the king of the pond (located on the faraway island of Sala-ma-sond), where all of the turtles swim happily. Dissatisfied with the stone that serves as his throne (it's too small for him to rule the landscape beyond the pond), Yertle commands the other turtles to stack themselves beneath him so that he can see farther and expand his kingdom, each time marveling at what he believes he now rules (like a cow, a mule, a house, a berry bush, and a cat.) However, the stacked turtles are in pain. A turtle named Mack, who has a checkerboard-style shell and is at the bottom of the pile, is bearing the brunt of the suffering. Mack asks Yertle for a respite, but Yertle just tells him to be quiet. Then Yertle decides to further expand his kingdom and commands more and more turtles to add to his throne. This time, Yertle declares that he is the king of the bees, the birds, the trees, the butterflies, and the air. Mack makes a second request for a respite because the increased weight is now causing extreme pain and hunger to the turtles at the bottom of the pile. Again, Yertle yells at Mack to be quiet. Then Yertle the turtle notices the moon rising above him as the night approaches. Furious that something "dares to be higher than Yertle the King", he decides to call for even more turtles in an attempt to rise above it. However, before he can give the command, Mack decides he has had enough. He burps, which shakes up Yertle's throne and tosses the turtle king off the turtle stack and into the water, leaving him "King of the Mud" and allowing the others to once again swim free, "as turtles, and maybe all creatures, should be."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh,_the_Places_You'll_Go!"title="Oh, the Places You'll Go!">
The story begins with the narrator, relating the decision of the unnamed protagonist (who represents the reader) to leave town. The protagonist travels through several geometrical and polychromatic landscapes and places, eventually encountering a place simply called "The Waiting Place", which is ominously addressed as being a place where everyone is always waiting for something to happen. As the protagonist continues to explore, spurred on by the thoughts of places he will visit and things he will discover, the book cheerfully concludes with an open ending.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Christmas_Invasion"title="The Christmas Invasion">
The newly regenerated Tenth Doctor, suffering side effects from his regeneration, crash lands the TARDIS in London. He exits to meet Jackie and Mickey, and collapses in front of them. They take him to Rose and Jackie's flat, where they put him to bed. The Doctor tells them that his regeneration has gone wrong and theorises that the energy of his regeneration is luring an unseen foe to him. He passes out again and is returned to bed.The British-launched Mars space probe "Guinevere One" is intercepted by a giant rock-like spaceship heading for Earth. When the probe's broadcast is shown on Earth, the face of a Sycorax appears. He demands Earth's surrender and uses blood control to cause a third of the world's population to go into a hypnotic state. The Sycorax threatens to make these people commit suicide by jumping off high buildings, unless half of the world's population is given to the Sycorax as slaves. Harriet Jones, the Prime Minister, attempts further negotiations with the Sycorax, and finds herself teleported aboard the ship, along with her assistant Alex Klein, UNIT officer Major Thomas Blake and "Guinevere One" operator Daniel Llewellyn. The warlike Sycorax kill Daniel and Major Blake when they try to sue for peace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnno"title="Johnno">
"Johnno" is written in the first person past tense and the narrator is only ever known by the nickname "Dante". "Johnno" is heavily autobiographical. The novel is centred upon the friendship between Dante and a schoolmate known as "Johnno" in their adolescence and early adulthood in the 1940s and 1950s in Brisbane.The subtropical Brisbane environment and various elements of upper-class Australian culture in the twentieth century recur throughout the book. There are many references to Brisbane's verdant gardens and parklands and other aspects of its urban geography such as its now-defunct tramways and the Brisbane River.The novel takes the form of an extended reminiscence and begins with the narrator finding a photograph of Johnno among his recently deceased father's belongings. The story then begins in Dante's childhood and education at Brisbane Grammar School and then follows the development of the friendship between the staid, conventional Dante and the unruly, eccentric and frequently intoxicated Johnno through school, university and a period of Bohemian-style living in Europe. The novel ends with Johnno presumed to have committed suicide (though the reader does not know for sure) and his funeral in suburban Brisbane.Johnno engages in shoplifting and goes to brothels, which contrasts with his friend Dante's middle class conservatism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murder_at_the_Vicarage"title="The Murder at the Vicarage">
The Reverend Leonard Clement, the vicar of St Mary Mead, narrates the story. He lives with his much younger wife Griselda and their nephew Dennis. Colonel Lucius Protheroe, Clement's churchwarden, is a wealthy, abrasive man who also serves as the local magistrate, and is widely disliked in the village. At dinner one evening, Clement offhandedly remarks that anyone who killed Protheroe would be doing the world a favour.One day Clement encounters Protheroe's wife, Anne, embracing Lawrence Redding, a young visiting artist; while promising them that he will not reveal their affair, he advises Redding to leave the village at once. The next day, Clement is scheduled to meet with Protheroe to go over irregularities in the church accounts. Clement is called away to a farm to visit a dying parishioner, but learns that the man has recovered, and that nobody actually asked for him. Upon returning home, Clement encounters a distressed Redding at the gate to the vicarage, then discovers Colonel Protheroe dead at the writing desk in his study. He summons Dr Haydock, who pronounces that Protheroe was killed by a gunshot to the back of the head.The police, led by Colonel Melchett and Inspector Slack, are confounded by several details, including a note left by Protheroe that seems to conflict with Haydock's opinion of the time of death, and some witnesses claiming to have heard a shot out in the woods, but no gunshot near or within the house. News spreads quickly, and both Lawrence Redding and Anne Protheroe confess to the murder. However, both are exonerated; Redding because he insists on an inaccurate time of death, and Anne because Miss Marple clearly saw that she was not carrying a pistol. Other suspects include Archer, a man treated harshly by Protheroe for poaching; Mrs Lestrange, a mysterious woman who recently appeared in the village; Dr Stone, an archaeologist excavating a barrow on Protheroe's land; and Stone's young assistant, Miss Cram.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanatorium_Under_the_Sign_of_the_Hourglass"title="Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass">
The novel takes the form of a collection of dreamlike, poetic short stories that reflect on the death of the narrator's father, as well as life in the modest Jewish quarter of Drohobycz, the provincial town in the Austro-Hungarian Empire where Schulz was born. The hourglass of the title refers to the use of this object as a symbol in obituaries and death notices among the Poles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Legend_of_Montrose"title="A Legend of Montrose">
The story takes place during the Earl of Montrose's 1644-5 military campaign in Scotland on behalf of King Charles I against the Covenanters who had sided with the English Parliament in the English Civil War.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reader"title="The Reader">
## Part 1.The story is told in three parts by the main character, Michael Berg. Each part takes place in a different time period in the past. Part I begins in a West German city in 1958. After 15-year-old Michael becomes ill on his way home, 36-year-old tram conductor Hanna Schmitz notices him, cleans him up, and sees him safely home. He spends the next three months absent from school battling hepatitis. He visits Hanna to thank her for her help and realizes he is attracted to her. Embarrassed after she catches him watching her getting dressed, he runs away, but he returns days later. After she asks him to retrieve coal from her cellar, he is covered in coal dust; she watches him bathe and seduces him. He returns eagerly to her apartment on a regular basis, and they begin a heated affair. They develop a practice of bathing and having sex, before which she frequently has him read aloud to her, especially classical literature, such as "The Odyssey" and Chekhov's "The Lady with the Dog". Both remain somewhat distant from each other emotionally, despite their physical closeness. Hanna is at times physically and verbally abusive to Michael. Months into the relationship, she suddenly leaves without a trace. The distance between them had been growing as Michael had been spending more time with his school friends; he feels guilty and believes it was something he did that caused her departure. The memory of her taints all his other relationships with women.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_Through_Georgia_(novel)"title="Marching Through Georgia (novel)">
The story starts with Centurion Eric von Shrakenberg in a cargo airplane with his airborne unit and the embedded American correspondent William Dreiser, on their way to their drop point, where they will jump and parasail into Nazi-controlled Georgia. The Nazis have been much more successful than in our history, since the Soviets had to divert resources to defend their southern border against the Domination of the Draka. As a result, the Nazis managed to overrun European Russia. The Soviet Union has been pushed back and only controls territories east of the Ural Mountains. However, the Germans are seriously overstretched, and vulnerable to a strong attack.During the travel to their drop zone, Eric thinks back on his past and his relationship with his father, and his most recent visit home to see his family. This was the first visit in several years, his exile was due to his arranging the escape of his serf daughter to America. Eric's bravery in the earlier Draka conquest of Italy led to his former "mistake" being forgiven.Eric's "Century" (a term derived from the Roman Empire's army) ends up being seriously under-supplied because the gliders with the artillery went into a canyon. The engineers are frantically building a rubble ramp, but the heavy weapons won't be available for the battle. The story details how Eric's single infantry company takes and holds a small village strategically located on the crucial Ossetian Military Highway over the Caucasus Mountains. The balance of the First Airborne Legion is the plug which is holding four German divisions from escaping the trap they are in on the south side of the mountains. Eric's unit is tasked with holding the highway and village against repeated attacks by Felix Hoth's Waffen-SS armored regiment, which is fighting to clear the highway so the German divisions can escape. Eric's company manages to hold out long enough for the Draka to crush the four divisions, cross the mountains, and relieve his unit. Holding this highway and village is the critical act of the invasion of Russia. This lets the Draka's essentially undamaged and superior armored and mechanized units to penetrate into the plains of Southern Russia, where they can bring to battle and destroy the overstretched and exhausted German forces. It also leads to Eric being awarded the Domination's highest medal of valor, the aurora, "for saving 10,000 Citizen lives," and which makes him immune to Security Directorate reprisals for his "treasonous utterances" or for his earlier "indiscretion." The action of Century A is the pivotal event at the beginning of the invasion of Russia that allows the Domination to eventually win the Eurasian War.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outbreak_(novel)"title="Outbreak (novel)">
When the director of a Los Angeles health maintenance clinic succumbs, along with seven patients, to an untreatable and virulently contagious virus, Atlanta's Center for Disease Control goes on red alert. Unless the virus is isolated and checked, mankind may be facing its gravest medical crisis since the Black Death.Assigned by the CDC to investigate the disease, Dr. Marissa Blumenthal is soon caught up in the ultimate nightmare. The California case is merely the first in a burgeoning series of outbreaks that occur in unrelated geographical areas but with puzzling commonalities: The locations are always health-care facilities, and the victims are only physicians and their patients.As her investigation takes increasingly bizarre turns, Marissa finds that behind the natural threat lurks a far more sinister possibility: sabotage.Before she discovers the truth, Marissa must overcome her superiors' fury, her colleagues' doubts and the wrath of a powerful cabal, sworn to achieve its aims, no matter what the cost in human life, including Marissa's.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_Cypress"title="Sad Cypress">
Elinor Carlisle and Roddy Welman are engaged to be married when she receives an anonymous letter claiming that someone is "sucking up" to their wealthy aunt, Laura Welman, from whom Elinor and Roddy expect to inherit a sizeable fortune. Elinor is niece to Mrs Welman, while Roddy is nephew to her late husband. Elinor suspects Mary Gerrard as the topic of the anonymous letter, the lodgekeeper's daughter, whom their aunt likes and supports. Neither guesses who wrote the letter, which is burned. They visit their aunt at Hunterbury. Roddy sees Mary Gerrard for the first time in a decade. Mrs Welman is partially paralyzed after a stroke and dislikes living that way. She tells both her physician Peter Lord and her niece how much she dislikes living without full health, wishing the doctor might end her pain, which he refuses to do. Roddy falls in love with Mary; this provokes Elinor to end their engagement. After a second stroke, Mrs Welman asks Elinor to make provision for Mary. Elinor assumes there is a will her aunt wants modified. Mrs Welman dies before Elinor can call the solicitor. There is no will. She dies intestate, so her considerable estate goes to Elinor outright as her only known surviving blood relative.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_the_Sword_(novel)"title="By the Sword (novel)">
The teenage daughter of a minor nobleman, Kerowyn has been in charge of managing her father's household since her mother's death, but hates the life of a noblewoman. She is more than ready to hand the responsibilities of the household over to her younger brother's new wife; however, the keep is attacked during the wedding feast and the bride, Dierna, is kidnapped. With her father dead and her brother badly wounded, Kerowyn goes to her grandmother, the sorceress Kethryveris, for help. Kethry presents Kerowyn with her magical sword Need, and Kerowyn rides after the bandits herself, successfully rescuing Dierna in an event later immortalized in a song called "Kerowyn's Ride."Following the rescue, Kerowyn finds that she is both a hero and an embarrassment to her brother. She soon leaves to live with Kethry and her partner Tarma, becoming Tarma's student in the arts of warfare, and learning to control her mind-magic from Tarma's kyree companion Warrl. In the course of her training Kerowyn meets Darenthallis, third son of the king of Rethwellan and another of Tarma's students; after a period of mutual antagonism, the two of them eventually become friends, and then lovers, but when Daren's father dies and his older brother takes the throne, Kerowyn refuses to go with him to Rethwellan. Instead, upon completing her training with Tarma, Kerowyn joins the mercenary company known as the Skybolts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Dreams"title="Animal Dreams">
"Animal Dreams" opens with a chapter narrated in the third person from the point of view of Doc Homer. This establishes a double narrative voice, which switches between dreams and memories of the past and events of the present. Doc Homer remembers his daughters, Codi and Hallie, when they were young. Their mother is dead. In the second chapter, narrated by Codi in first person, the plot line begins. Hallie leaves Tucson, Arizona, where she was living with Codi and Carlo, for Nicaragua. She plans to assist the newly established communist regime with their crop cultivation. Shortly thereafter, Codi also leaves Tucson, returning to her small rural hometown, Grace, to care for her ailing father and to teach high school biology. The return to Grace is fraught with difficulty for Codi, as she has always felt herself an outsider in the town and has never had a very close relationship with her father. Her return home raises the specter of several mysteries surrounding Codi and her family's past: her failure to hold a medical license despite her attendance at medical school, the deaths of her mother and of her child, and the relationship of her family to the rest of the community.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_About_Forever"title="The Truth About Forever">
The novel begins with Macy, who is trying to recover from the sudden loss of her father, saying goodbye to her boyfriend, Jason, who is going away to Brain Camp. Since her father died during one of their habitual morning runs, Macy gives up running and keeps all of her feelings to herself. Her overwhelming grief keeps her from moving forward in most aspects of her life. Macy is filling in for Jason at the library, and when she attempts to communicate with him about her unhappiness with her coworkers, he is not supportive. At the end of one of their e-mails, she tells him that she loves him, and he replies saying he thinks it would be for the best if they took a break until he returns in August. Upset and hurt, Macy goes for a ride and sees a van for Wish Catering, which catered to one of her mother's realtor parties. She applies for a job, which she gets. Macy enjoys this new job and her new coworkers. While working for Wish, she meets the artistic Wes, who she later discovers lost his mother to cancer and attended reform school for breaking and entering. During this time Macy's older sister begins to renovate their father's beach house despite reluctance from the other family members (mainly from her mother). Her mother refuses to talk to Macy about the sudden death of her husband, Macy's father; therefore she proceeds to put all of her time into her work.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complicity_(novel)"title="Complicity (novel)">
Its two main characters are Cameron Colley, a journalist on a Scottish newspaper called "The Caledonian" (which resembles "The Scotsman"), and a serial murderer whose identity is a mystery. The passages dealing with the journalist are written in the first person, and those dealing with the murderer in the second person, so the novel presents, in alternate chapters, an unusual example of an unreliable narrator. The events take place mostly in and around Edinburgh.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_on_the_Cliff"title="The House on the Cliff">
Fenton Hardy, the famous private detective and father of the Hardy Boys, asks his sons to help him with his latest case involving a criminal named Felix Snattman and the illegal drug trade smuggling of stolen drugs. Hardy directs Frank and Joe to a house on the cliff, whose location overlooking Barmet Bay offers an excellent vantage point to watch for smugglers. The Hardys are tricked into the house by cries for help, and are trapped for a short time in the attic; meanwhile, their telescope and motorcycles are damaged, possibly by the smugglers. They observe a man boating on Barmet Bay being chased by another motorboat. After his boat explodes in flames, Biff and Joe swim out while Frank and Chet get a rowboat to rescue the man. Once brought to shore, the man regains consciousness and says his name is Mr. Jones, which the Hardys believe to be a thinly-disguised alias. The next day, both Mr. Hardy and Mr. Jones disappear. Frank and Joe seek out Mr. Hardy's informant at the maritime docks, Pretzel Pete, to see if he knows anything about the smugglers. Frank and Joe revisit the Shore Road area, and inside the house not far from the house on the cliff, Frank sees Mr. Hardy's hat. With their friends Chet Morton, Biff Hooper and Tony Prito, they use a boat to search for a secret tunnel at the base of the cliff. Frank and Joe try to rescue Mr. Hardy but they are also captured at gunpoint. Chet and Tony go to the United States Coast Guard and find Biff Hooper, Jerry Gilroy, and Phil Cohen there and lead them to the smuggler's secret cave. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_the_Old_Mill"title="The Secret of the Old Mill">
Frank and Joe help prevent 14-year-old cyclist Ken Blake from getting killed in an accident. As they help the boy up they see he is delivering an envelope to Victor Peters, a name that means something to the Hardys later on in the book.The Hardys learn that their friend Chet Morton has been tricked when asked to make change for what turned out to be a counterfeit twenty dollar bill, something that the police later confirm is becoming more common in their town of Bayport.Later, Joe is awakened by a clattering sound and sees a mysterious figure bicycling away from the Hardys' home. While investigating the disturbance a note is found that reads, "Drop case or else danger for you and your family." The Hardy boys are not sure if this threat refers to the counterfeiting case that Frank and Joe are investigating or another case their detective dad, Fenton Hardy, is trying to solve.The Hardys go with Chet, who wants to apply for a job at Elekton Controls, a missile-development company, but are told by Mr. Markel, one of Elekton's security guards, that there are no openings. Before leaving, they notice a bike that looks similar to the one ridden by Ken Blake and that is likely to have been used by the person who left the threatening note. Mr. Docker, an Elekton maintenance man, tells them that Ken does odd jobs for the company, but that he is not there at that time, even though Joe is certain he saw Ken looking out an adjacent old watermill's window at them. The Hardys, their girlfriends, Iola Morton and Callie Shaw and Chet go nearby to have a picnic but an arrow is shot at them with an attached note reading, "Danger. Hardys beware."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Missing_Chums"title="The Missing Chums">
At the beginning of the book the boys take their new boat, the "Sleuth", out on the bay. While they are cruising on the bay another boat nearly rams them. They are unable to give chase because of a damaged steering mechanism on the boat, and the boys end up going around in circles. It turns out that the boat that nearly rammed them had a purpose for doing so, but the reason why is not revealed until the end of the book.Soon after, the boys prepare to go to Callie Shaw's costume party. They inadvertently stumble upon another part of the unraveling mystery as they see some unknown men in Mr. French's Costume Shop, who appear to threaten him.Returning home, the boys frighten their Aunt Gertrude with their costumes. (Aunt Gertrude is a recurring character in the series.) Soon the boys are off to the costume party on their motorcycles. On the way they realize that the bank is being robbed. They follow the criminals until they lose them at the docks, where they hop into a boat and escape into the fog.After notifying the United States Coast Guard, the boys gain permission from Chief Collig to search for the criminals in the "Sleuth", but the boys discover the "Sleuth" has been stolen. The boys search for the bank robbers in Tony Prito's boat, the "Napoli", but are unable to find them in the thickening fog. The boys return home, explain to their father everything they saw at the bank and during the chase, and then head out to the costume party.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shore_Road_Mystery"title="The Shore Road Mystery">
## Revised edition.The Hardy boys, Frank and Joe, were taking a casual drive down Shore Road when they heard a report about a stolen car. Frank and Joe raced towards the scene and actually saw the stolen car. Suddenly, a big red produce truck came right into the middle of the road. The boys had no choice but to slam on their brakes. They ended up crashing into a fence and were dazed but uninjured. The driver came out of the truck and apologized. Frank remarks that "Something seems fishy about that guy.". They both return home that night trying not to let their mother see their cuts and bruises.The next morning a friend of the Hardys, Jack Dodd, calls and tells the Hardys to come quickly. The police were looking for a suspect who had stolen a car. The police thought they found their man. They found Jack Dodd's fishing rod in the trunk of one of the stolen cars. Jack insisted that he had not put it there and that he was being framed. The cops handcuffed Jack and his father and took them down to headquarters. Later that night Chief Collig came to the Hardy's home telling them that the Dodds had taken off in their station wagon. A relative of the Dodds is trying to find a solution to an old mystery an ancestor had in the Bayport area.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunting_for_Hidden_Gold"title="Hunting for Hidden Gold">
The Hardy Boys head to Montana to help their father who had been working on a case and broke his ribs. They go to the village of Lucky Lode and find a mystery connected to a man they saved, who had been shot by careless hunters in the beginning of the book. The man they saved had his gold stolen; when he was in Lucky Lode mining, he suspected one of his partners who was trying to save the gold had disappeared. When in Lucky Lode, they meet Mr. Burke who owns the general store; they later learn he is a spy called "Slip Gun", working for Big Al, the villain. They defeat Big Al who was known as Black Pepper when the man they saved lived in Lucky Lode. While hunting for the hidden gold the Hardy Boys spot a cave, so they head into it to search for clues to where the gold might be, but they run into a pack of wolves before they find any clues and have to find a way to get out of the cave. They also find Bart Dawson is Bob Dodge, the man who flew them to Montana, who is revealed to have had amnesia. They end up recovering the gold and round up all the bad guys in the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_Cabin_Island"title="The Mystery of Cabin Island">
A series of adventures begins for the Hardy Boys and their friends Chet and Biff after they are invited to spend Christmas vacation on Cabin Island at the invitation of its owner, Mr. Jefferson, as a reward for recovering Jefferson's car in "The Shore Road Mystery". While they are collecting the keys to the cabin from Mr. Jefferson they meet Mr. Hanleigh who is interested in purchasing the island. As well, Mr. Jefferson asks the Hardy boys to locate his grandson Johnny who has gone missing.As the boys try to enjoy themselves, someone seems determined to spoil their fun. First, two high school dropouts vandalize their loaded ice boat, the "Sea Gull", which delays their departure for Cabin Island by a few hours. Once on the island, a ghost-like hooting leads to an innocent and humorous discovery. All their groceries are stolen, and so Frank and Joe head for the coast to purchase new supplies, but not long after, they find the original stock buried in snow. Chet sees a ghost walking through the woods, as well Mr. Hanleigh and the two high school dropouts are seen sneaking around the island, apparently searching for something.After a series of collisions and near misses with the "Sea Gull", the Hardys learn that Mr. Hanleigh is the nephew of a former servant of Mr. Jefferson and he is looking for something hidden in the fireplace. A foreign dignitary, who was earlier mistaken for a ghost due to his white robes, reveals that he is seeking a medal that was presented to the grandfather of his nation's ruler, and had been misled by Mr. Hanleigh who was pretending to be Jefferson's representative.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Airport_Mystery"title="The Great Airport Mystery">
While driving home the Hardy boys take a shortcut which results in a strange car crash and an encounter with an unfriendly stranger. The next day they are hired by Mr. Allen, the president of Stanwide Mining Equipment Company, under the guise of being factory messengers when in fact they are working undercover to investigate missing shipments of expensive mining equipment containing platinum.The Hardy boys decide to quit their messenger jobs when it becomes clear that the gang is onto them. Instead they rent a plane and take aerial photographs of the area where their car crash occurred; however, their camera and exposed film are stolen before they have a chance to develop the pictures. Continuing to investigate the theft of their camera, as well as the theft of the mining equipment, they repeatedly see footprints and hear a voice belonging to Clint Hill, an aircraft pilot who is presumed dead after his plane crashed into the ocean, causing them to wonder if his ghost is somehow involved in the thefts.After recovering their pictures the Hardy boys rent a helicopter and return to the area of the car crash, finding a large hidden cave and recovering the stolen shipments of equipment. Next the Hardy boys fly to a small Caribbean island, and then to Montana in pursuit of the criminals. Eventually they manage to apprehend all of the criminals involved and return to Bayport gratified at solving yet another mystery. Clint is revealed to be alive after all, having survived the crash and faked his death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Happened_at_Midnight"title="What Happened at Midnight">
Joe and Frank are asked by their father Fenton Hardy to break into the house of a scientist and retrieve a secret invention and keep it safe from being stolen while he is away. The brothers successfully retrieve the device while at the same time thwarting an attempted burglary. The device turns out to be a small transistor-type radio with remarkably clear reception; their father sends a message to guard it carefully, so they hide it in the trunk of their car. The next day at an antique airplane show, Chet steps on the toe of a blonde-haired man who becomes angry but flees when an onlooker states that the man was trying to eavesdrop on their conversation. Later, the brothers see the blonde man, who accidentally dumps his briefcase contents when fleeing them.From here the plot parallels in many ways the original plot, with minor changes and updates. At a party at Chet's later that night, the boys observe someone snooping around their car. Joe goes to investigates and disappears as the clock strikes midnight. As in the original, Frank and Chet search for Joe, but the trail eventually grows cold until a tip from Aunt Gertrude (of all people) leads to the caves along the bay off Shore Road. In this version, the bad guys are recast as both jewel smugglers and electronic thieves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/While_the_Clock_Ticked"title="While the Clock Ticked">
## Original edition.When Raymond Dalrymple starts to receive death threats he seeks help from Fenton Hardy; however Mr. Hardy is out of town so Frank and Joe offer to help. Mr. Dalrymple did not want to give the Hardy boys the case, instead telling them to investigate the old Purdy house out on the Shore Road. While walking on the shore road they are almost hit by a big touring car with the curtains down; they then meet a motorcycle cop who was chasing the car which supposedly carried river thieves.The next day Mr. Dalrymple returned, having decided to let the Hardy boys take the case. He explains that he recently purchased the Purdy house and had been using a secret safe room there to find solitude; however he had received death threats delivered to the secret room while it was securely locked. The Hardy boys explore the Purdy house that night and see a man who looks like Mr. Dalrymple enter the house before they hear screams coming from the house and meet Hurd Applegate, whom the boys met while solving "The Tower Treasure" mystery, running from the house.Mr. Applegate is too excited to explain what he was doing there, so the Hardy boys have to go back and explore the home another day. Upon further exploration they find an unused wing of the home which has recently had locks added to the doors. The police are called who find the locked rooms filled with stolen goods, stolen by the river thieves. While the police thought this resolved the case, the Hardy boys kept an eye on the Purdy house and found a stranger coming to the house, who then runs away after another scream is heard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footprints_Under_the_Window"title="Footprints Under the Window">
## Revised edition.Frank and Joe attempt to uncover a plot to smuggle refugees from Baredo in the Huellas (a fictional island nation off the coast of French Guiana) into the United States, and the involvement of local magnate Orrin North. They also get involved with investigating attempts to spy on a top-secret satellite camera being built at a local company called Micro-Eye. Someone has managed to infiltrate security at the plant and has taken photos of blueprints.Realizing that several clues point to the involvement of people from Baredo, Frank and Joe and their friend Chet Morton fly down to Cayenne, French Guiana, and then go by boat to Baredo in the nearby Huellas to investigate. What they discover is that Orrin North, while supposedly on the side of rebels against the dictator of Baredo, is actually double-crossing the rebels by finding out their identities and capturing them.Returning to Bayport, the boys overhear a plot to steal the satellite camera the very next day, but they are captured and taken aboard a ship where they are locked into a hold being filled with water. They manage to escape from the hold with the assistance of their father, Fenton Hardy, who has been on the same case and went after this ship at the same time. They free the political prisoners on board, stop the theft at Micro-Eye, and capture the criminals with the assistance of the Coast Guard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_Harbor_Mystery"title="The Hidden Harbor Mystery">
The Hardy boys meet Mr. Bart Worth who is the editor of the "Larchmont Record". He explains that Mr. Samuel Blackstone has sued him for printing a story accusing his ancestors of being pirates. Mr. Worth also tells the Hardy boys about the long-standing feud between the Blackstone and the Rand families over ownership of a pond in Hidden Harbor.The Hardy boys accept Mr. Worth’s case and, along with their friend Chet Morton, drive to Georgia. Once they have set up a camp on the beach between the two properties, the boys begin to investigate the Rand and Blackstone estates. They are surprised to find a ‘sea monster’ in the pond and to witness Mr. Rand being hit over the head with a vase by Mr. Blackstone, only moments later to find the vase intact and Mr. Rand missing.Despite the efforts of their enemies, the Hardy boys manage to find Mr. Rand and recover a treasure chest containing historical records which prove that the accusations Mr. Worth made in his article were all true. The feud is settled when Mr. Rand and Mr. Blackstone decide to work together to harvest the valuable cypress trees from Hidden Harbor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sinister_Signpost"title="The Sinister Signpost">
This story begins with Frank and Joe Hardy driving home along Shore Road when they have an accident with a dragster. After they arrive home their father, Fenton Hardy, tells them about a new case he has taken on for Alden Automotive Research and Development Company, with which he would like the boys' help. Mr. Hardy explains that Mr. Alden believes someone is trying to steal the plans for a secret new engine he is designing, and that two of his racing cars which were equipped with new engine had strange accidents in which their windshields suddenly "crazed" (turned an opaque white), just after passing a road sign warning “DANGER”. While they are discussing the case, someone fires a smoke grenade into their house with a warning attached, telling them to "drop the Alden case".Frank and Joe start by working undercover at Alden’s shop, while their friend Chet Morton takes an interest in jet propelling his bicycle, which leads to humorous results. At the shop, the boys meet Barto Sigor and learn that he has a twin brother Vilno who recently quit Alden’s employment. The boys immediately suspect that the twins may have swapped spots so that Vilno can gain access to the plans for the new motor. The Hardy boys also meet Roger Alden, Mr. Alden’s son, who seems to have a bad attitude. He is the boys' second suspect.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Warning"title="The Secret Warning">
## Revised edition.On a stormy night, the Hardy boys receive a visit from Captain Early who tells them the story of Red Rogers, the ‘Jolly Roger’, and Whalebone Island, where the ghost is said to haunt. The next day, the boys receive a map in the mail showing a red 'X' on Whalebone Island. They assume this is a treasure map so they, along with their friend Chet Morton, go to meet their father and explore the island. As they approach, they see the abandoned lighthouse flashing a warning to them in Morse code. On the island, they find their father who tells them about a solid gold bust of an Egyptian Pharaoh which was owned by Mr. Zufar. While it was being shipped to America aboard a freighter named "Katawa", the ship sank and Mr. Zufar is making an insurance claim for one million dollars. However, the insurance company has received a tip that the head was not on the ship when it sank and Mr. Zufar is trying to defraud them.The Hardy boys end up on the salvage ship that is sent to search the "Katawa", which happens to be sunk very close to Whalebone Island. While they are on board, they notice another salvage ship in the area as well. Once the diver is lowered to the sunken ship, he finds that someone else has already been there and stolen some of the ship’s equipment. On a later dive, the diver is nearly killed when a squid triggers a booby trap that was intended for him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twisted_Claw"title="The Twisted Claw">
While their father Fenton Hardy is working on cases of museum robberies, he asks Frank and Joe to stake out the "Black Parrot", a shipping boat docked in Bayport. The Hardy boys get a job loading crates aboard the ship but because the crew is so unfriendly and the boys are kept very busy, they don't have a chance to investigate. They instead decide to follow another lead and travel to New York to search for a rare old book. While scouring a used book store, they locate a book titled "Empire of the Twisted Claw" which bears a symbol on the cover which matches a ring the first mate of the "Black Parrot" was wearing. While they cannot afford to purchase the book, the store keeper allows them to read it, whereby they learn about the Empire of the Twisted Claw and the pirate ships named "Black Parrot" and "Yellow Parrot" and the King who controlled the empire.As the investigation continues, the Boys and their father learn that the thieves are targeting the DeGraw collection and will likely rob six more museums. They stand guard at one of the museums but when the thieves strike, they use a sleeping gas knocking the boys out. Following up on a lead, they find where the "Black Parrot" has docked again and watch while the crew loads about a dozen logs on board and the ship immediately leaves port. The Hardy boys then track down the "Yellow Parrot" where they take jobs to get aboard and look around. While investigating more of these strange logs in the storeroom, the logs break free and Frank must hang from the roof to avoid being crushed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Disappearing_Floor"title="The Disappearing Floor">
## Revised edition.The Hardy boys are asked by their father, Fenton Hardy, to assist him in solving a case involving a notorious jewel thief, Noel Strang, and his accomplices. Initially, they spot Strang's car and attempt to follow it until the car drops a purple smoke bomb and the Hardys are forced to pull over. While returning home from the car chase, they run into their friend Chet Morton who was in the woods rock collecting when he heard weird screams. When they go to investigate, they find a strangely tiled floor in the woods and nearby an injured man suddenly revives and runs off. Their adventure continues with a stolen amethyst, a bomb damaging their boat the "Sleuth", and a savage looking hound which turns out to be an electrified scare device.When Aunt Gertrude hears where the boys found Chet, she tells them that they were close to Old Man Perth’s house where strange deaths have happened. The owner of the Perth Mansion, Jerome Perth, was a business tycoon who made many enemies due to his swindles. When he died his nephew, Clarence Perth, inherited the house. Shortly after moving in, the servants awoke during a night to him screaming and he was found on the floor of his bedroom with a fractured skull, saying "Th..the Floor!", before dying. The door and the windows of the room were all locked from the inside, so the mystery of how he died was never solved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_the_Flying_Express"title="The Mystery of the Flying Express">
## Revised edition.After the new hydrofoil they are guarding, the "Flying Express", is stolen, the Hardy Boys face frequent danger in solving a mystery involving criminals who operate by signs of the zodiac. Eventually they are kidnapped and taken to the "Flying Express", but Chet manages to escape and uses their car's emergency light to alert the Coast Guard at which point the boys foul the hydrofoil's propellers and stop the ship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clue_of_the_Broken_Blade"title="The Clue of the Broken Blade">
## Revised edition.After their fencing instructor Ettore Russo tells them about a family sword, the championship saber Adalante, the Hardy Boys go to California to search for the sword's missing half. Supposedly written on the sword is the owner's will that names the fencing instructor as a major heir of his deceased grandfather's fortune. Others also intent on finding the sword try hard to foil the Hardys from getting there first.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flickering_Torch_Mystery"title="The Flickering Torch Mystery">
## Original edition.The boys investigate the mysterious disappearance of rare silkworms at a scientific research facility while working at an experimental farm during their summer vacation. The mystery deepens to include the theft of government building materials — a case being investigated by their famous father, Fenton.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Melted_Coins"title="The Melted Coins">
## Revised edition.Frank and Joe Hardy become suspicious when their friend Chet Morton enrolls in a summer school that sounds too good to be true. While investigating a burglary at the Seneca Indian Reservation in New York State, they also investigate the nearby Zoar College. Their sleuthing leads them to believe that there is a connection between the professors of this fictional college and the theft of a tribal mask titled "Spoon Mouth". This mask was created when some melted coins happened to look like a sacred Indian image. Now it is missing and the boys' investigation proves to be dangerous; however, they successfully recover the mask and capture the thieves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Panel"title="The Secret Panel">
Innocently responding to a motorist's request that they shut off a light at his home, the Hardy Boys discover a deep mystery: the man used the name of a man, John Mead, that Chief Collig claims died five years earlier in a car accident, and no known heir. Adding to the mystery, the Mead mansion's doors have neither knobs nor visible keyholes. Only after speaking to a locksmith do they learn that the locks were concealed.Meanwhile, their father Fenton assigns them to investigate a lead in the kidnapping of a doctor that may lead down the trail to a local boy who fell in with a local thief, a master criminal, who's a relation to the boy. The Hardy boys are to locate a traffic signal that hums like someone singing faintly, and drive ten minutes from it in each direction, then investigate the area for a "secret panel".Fenton's mystery ends up intertwining with the Mead mansion and the master criminal, who's been carrying out a series of break-ins and thefts without triggering the alarm systems. It turns out that the deceased Mr. Mead was an electronics genius who developed a device that could open any lock and defeat alarm systems, but asked that, upon his death, it be turned over to the FBI. The master criminal had befriended Mr. Mead, found out about the device, and stolen it. The motorist the boys met was, in fact, John Mead's namesake nephew, who was not known to authorities and investigators in Bayport.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_Mutzenbacher"title="Josephine Mutzenbacher">
The publisher’s preface – formatted as an obituary and excluded from all English translations until 2018 – tells that Josefine left the manuscript to her physician before her death from complications after a surgery. Josefine Mutzenbacher was not her real name. The protagonist is said to have been born on 20 February 1852 in Vienna and died on 17 December 1904 at a sanatorium.The plot device employed in "Josephine Mutzenbacher" is that of first-person narrative, structured in the format of a memoir. The story is told from the point of view of an accomplished aging 50-year-old Viennese courtesan who is looking back upon the sexual escapades she enjoyed during her unbridled youth in Vienna. Contrary to the title, almost the entirety of the book takes place when Josephine is between the ages of 5–13 years old, before she actually becomes a licensed prostitute in the brothels of Vienna. The book begins when she is five years old and ends when she is thirteen years old and starts her career as an unlicensed prostitute with a friend, to support her unemployed father.Although the German-language text makes use of witty nicknames – for instance, the curate’s genital is called "a hammer of mercy" – for human anatomy and sexual behavior, its content is entirely pornographic. The actual progression of events amounts to little more than a graphic, unapologetic description of the reckless sexuality exhibited by the heroine, all before reaching her 14th year. The style bears more than a passing resemblance to the Marquis de Sade's "The 120 Days of Sodom" in its unabashed "laundry list" cataloging of all manner of taboo sexual antics from children’s sexual play, incest and rape to child prostitution, group sex, sado-masochism, lesbianism, and fellatio. In some constellations, Josefine appears as the active seducer, and sex is usually depicted as an uncomplicated, satisfactory experience.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_Freighter"title="The Phantom Freighter">
The Hardy brothers embark on a freighter trip under mysterious circumstances and find themselves involved with a smuggling ring. The Hardy Boys discover that the Phantom Freighter is really a smuggling ship used to smuggle counterfeit documents, illegal drugs, cowhides, and electric motors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_Skull_Mountain"title="The Secret of Skull Mountain">
Every night water strangely disappears from the new Tarnack Reservoir near Skull Mountain. Frank and Joe join forces with a team of skilled engineers to solve the baffling mystery.The book takes place on Skull Mountain, a mountain where many skulls have been seen, near Bayport, U.S.A. This city around Skull Mountain loses water each night because of the new reservoir. There is always something mysterious happening on the mountain, which has an underground channel.The story begins when Joe wants to go swimming; however, Frank points out that there is not enough water because of a low reservoir. When they discover that the water at the Skull Mountain facility disappears each night, they team up with Chet Morton and engineers Dick Ames and Bob Carpenter to solve the mystery. While exploring Skull Mountain, the boys are attacked several times. They finally find Timothy Kimball Jr. (Sweeper) breaking into Kleng’s plumbling store in order to steal the money Kleng owes him ($5000). Kimball is arrested and questioned about the reservoir. This leads the Hardy Boys to catch the villain, Kleng, and solve a crime which involves the Chicago syndicate, being investigated by their father, Fenton Hardy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sign_of_the_Crooked_Arrow"title="The Sign of the Crooked Arrow">
The Hardy brothers interrupt their investigations of jewelry store holdups to answer a plea from their cousin on a New Mexico cattle ranch. They discover how Arrow cigarettes can knock people out using a gas that comes out from a vent in the ground in New Mexico, originally discovered by American Indians.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_the_Lost_Tunnel"title="The Secret of the Lost Tunnel">
The Hardy Boys travel with Brigadier General Jack Smith to a historic Civil War battlefield in the Deep South. Rocky Run Battlefield (near the town of Centerville in an unnamed state) is the center of a legend involving a Confederate general who was disgraced due to his alleged involvement with the theft of gold from a bank. Smith seeks to vindicate the long-dead officer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wailing_Siren_Mystery"title="The Wailing Siren Mystery">
Their SOS ignored by a strange yacht in a storm, the Hardy Boys find a wallet alongside their speedboat, apparently dropped from a helicopter, containing two thousand dollars, and are launched into a mystery involving diverse clues. This includes finding out who kidnapped Jack Wayne and took his plane, and where the wailing siren is coming from.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_Wildcat_Swamp"title="The Secret of Wildcat Swamp">
An invitation from Cap Bailey, science teacher at Bayport High, to accompany him out West to Wildcat Swamp on an archaeological expedition triggers off a series of dangerous events for Frank and Joe Hardy. On their way West the boys and Cap have a near-fatal accident in a private plane which has been sabotaged. Though warned to leave the area, Frank, Joe, and Cap doggedly remain until they have caught the cunning ex-convicts they are up against in this swift-paced adventure.&lt;ref&gt;&lt;/ref&gt;
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crisscross_Shadow"title="The Crisscross Shadow">
The Hardy boys find the missing deed to an Indian's land, prevent a phony salesman from carrying through a reckless scheme, and help their father solve a top-secret sabotage case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yellow_Feather_Mystery"title="The Yellow Feather Mystery">
The Hardy Boys go skating up Willow River toward Woodson Academy where they meet their chum Gregory Woodson. Greg tells them about how his grandfather died seven weeks prior but no one has been able to find his will where he presumably leaves the Woodson Academy to Greg. Greg is also curious about a strange letter that he received which was a blank piece of paper with small rectangular cutouts arranged horizontally and the word ‘Hardy’ printed on it.With the grandfather's will missing, the school's headmaster Henry Kurt is trying to assume ownership of the school against Greg Woodson's wishes. As the story progresses the Hardy Boys and their friends find themselves being attacked by unknown assailants until eventually they are able to locate the missing will and trap the dangerous criminal and solve the Yellow Feather mystery
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hooded_Hawk_Mystery"title="The Hooded Hawk Mystery">
The Hardy Boys solve a kidnapping and break up a gang smuggling illegal aliens from India who are also holding an Indian prince captive. An official of the Indian government saw to it that a trained peregrine falcon was delivered to the boys to use in their investigation. Throughout their mission the falcon intercepts many messages between the smugglers as the criminals use pigeons to fly messages from place to place.Finally, the boys rescue the Indian prince and catch the human smugglers along with creating a strong bond between India and the Hardys.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clue_in_the_Embers"title="The Clue in the Embers">
In solving the mystery of two medallions missing from an inherited curio collection, the Hardys wind up in a desolate area of Guatemala at the mercy of a dangerous gang of thugs plotting to steal a national treasure.The area is supposedly cursed, as some locals warn the Hardys not to visit the area. However, other men are looking for the treasure as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_Pirates'_Hill"title="The Secret of Pirates' Hill">
Hired by a mysterious businessman to locate an old Spanish cannon, the Hardy brothers and friends grow more and more suspicious as they encounter stolen cars and a mysterious man on a motorcycle. They eventually uncover the cannon and thousands in gold bullion after perilous underwater adventures.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_at_Devil's_Paw"title="The Mystery at Devil's Paw">
Frank and Joe Hardy receive a telegram from their friend Tony saying that he is in danger in Alaska and needs their help. He also suggests bringing the brothers' friend, Chet Morton. At the airport they find a person following them and spying on them and they are attacked. Later the police discover that the attacker was a wanted spy: Romo Stransky.Arriving in Alaska, they meet Ted Sewell, Tony's helper, and he leads the boys to Tony's camp. During the trip, Ted tells the boys about how his father disappeared and he wants them to help him find him.At camp, Tony tells the boys that they have been attacked several times by a gang. During a search of the island, they find a knapsack, a map and a piece of jade. They later learn of a gang member going to The Devil's Paw — a place in British Columbia.At The Devil's Paw they learn of an ancient Indian burial site where people would steal gold and jewelry. The brothers remember the piece of jade they found in the knapsack, and think it might have been stolen from the burial site. They locate the ancient burial site and also find Ted Sewell's father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_the_Chinese_Junk"title="The Mystery of the Chinese Junk">
The Hardys purchase a Chinese junk named the "Hai Hau" to ferry passengers to Rocky Isle and make some extra money. Four mysterious men also are interested in the boat because of treasure hidden inside the "Hai Hau". The "Hai Hau" is a stolen ship from Hong Kong. The other of the Hardy's friends including Chet Morton and Sam Radley also join the mystery. Their Chinese-America friend, Jim Foy also lends a hand to them. George Ti-Ming, is a private detective who helps his friend in Hong Kong to find his missing ship. Chin Gok and Mr. Montrose are very interested in the junk because they think that the junk has a treasure. Finally, the Hardys solve the mystery and share their rewards with their friends. Chin Gok, Mr. Montrose and the two phony coastguard members are caught by the Bayport Police Department Chief, Police Chief Collig.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_of_the_Desert_Giant"title="Mystery of the Desert Giant">
The Hardy Boys and Chet Morton search on the California desert for missing industrialist, Willard Grafton, and break up a gang of criminals whose motive is on defrauding the US government.Much of this book takes place in Blythe, California and it cites real, current locales, such as Hobson Way and the giant intaglios north of Blythe on U.S. Highway 95. In the end, the boys discover that Grafton's fellow explorer had a part in the gang of criminal's racket. With this, Grafton is rescued, and the thugs who apparently were smuggling illegal checks across the border are caught.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clue_of_the_Screeching_Owl"title="The Clue of the Screeching Owl">
When dogs and men suddenly disappear, and strange screams fill the night, fantastic stories of vengeful ghosts are almost believable. It is these strange happenings which bring Frank and Joe Hardy to the Pocono Mountains to help their father's friend, a retired police captain, solve the mystery of Black Hollow.But when the Hardy Boys and Chet Morton arrive at Captain Thomas Maguire's cabin on the edge of the hollow, he has disappeared. In the woods the boys find only a few slim clues: a flashlight bearing the initials T.M., a few scraps of bright plaid cloth, and two empty shotgun shells which had been fired recently.Frank and Joe are determined to find the captain, despite Chet's misgivings after a night of weird and terrifying screams. Neighbors of the missing man insist that the bloodcurdling cries are those of a legendary witch who stalks Black Hollow seeking vengeance.Strangely, it is a small puppy that helps the boys disclose a most unusual and surprising set of circumstances, involving a mute boy, an elusive hermit, and a fearless puma trainer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Viking_Symbol_Mystery"title="The Viking Symbol Mystery">
The Hardy Boys and Chet Morton travel to Canada's Northwest Territories to recover a stolen Viking artifact (a runestone). They also smash a group of thieves robbing recreational lodges around the Great Slave Lake. They visit Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; Edmonton, Alberta; Fort Smith, Northwest Territories; Wood Buffalo National Park; and Hay River.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_the_Aztec_Warrior"title="The Mystery of the Aztec Warrior">
The handwritten will of a deceased world-traveller is strange and mysterious. Its instructions are to deliver "the valuable object to the rightful owner, a descendant of an Aztec warrior". What is the valuable object and where is it? What is the name of the owner and where is he? Frank and Joe Hardy have only one clue to work with: the name of a complete stranger who can help find the answers, Roberto Hermosa.Despite the harassments, the threats, and the attacks made upon them by an unknown, sinister gang, Frank and Joe unravel clue after clue in their adventure-packed search for the living descendant of the mighty Aztec nation which once ruled Mexico. The hunt leads to a marketplace in Mexico City, to the Pyramids at Teotihuacan, to the tombs of Oaxaca-where Chet Morton, the Hardy's buddy, is nearly buried alive by foul play.It takes as much high courage as clever deduction for the young detectives to defeat their ruthless foes and to decipher the fascinating secrets of the strange and mysterious will.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Haunted_Fort"title="The Haunted Fort">
A long-distance telephone call from Chet Morton's uncle summons Frank and Joe Hardy and their staunch pal Chet to a summer art school, located near old Fort Senandaga which is reputed to be inhabited by a ghost. The young detectives' assignment: recover two famous oil paintings stolen from the valuable Prisoner-Painter collection owned by Jefferson Davenport.Mr. Davenport, millionaire sponsor of Millwood Art School, reveals that one of the famous Fort Senandaga pictures painted by his ancestor, General Jason Davenport, contains a clue to the hiding place of a priceless chain of gold.Vicious threats and deadly traps beset Frank, Joe, and Chet as they search for clues to the stolen paintings and the gold treasure—a search that is complicated by a stormy feud between a proud Englishman and an equally proud Frenchman over the military history of the fort.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_the_Spiral_Bridge"title="The Mystery of the Spiral Bridge">
The Hardy Boys track down the saboteurs who kidnapped their father, and have to keep them from blowing up a bridge near Boontown, Kentucky. The bridge is being built by Tony Prito's father's construction company. Mr Hardy is ill most of the story. The villains are mostly ex-crooks who want that area of the bridge for themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Agent_on_Flight_101"title="The Secret Agent on Flight 101">
Joe and Frank Hardy go to a magic show with their dad. After the show is done, their dad asks Hexton how the vanishing act was performed. Hexton offers to do the trick on Fenton Hardy. When their dad disappears, he does not reappear. Hexton says their dad is simply playing a joke on them; Joe and Frank do not believe this. They suspect he was kidnapped. To be sure, Joe and Frank study some of their dad's records; they find Hexton was the leader of an international gang. The first place they look is in a lighthouse that they suspected he might be in. They go inside and see a guard; the guard tries to escape but cannot. He says their dad was here but is not anymore. Though not sure, the boys suspect that their dad was purposely moved to a more secretive place. The boys check in Hexton's castle but get caught. They find that the hinges of the place they were locked in were bad; Joe and Frank take turns to pry them off. Finally, the boys escape. The boys overhear the gang talking about stealing some jewels. They now have a second job to do.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arctic_Patrol_Mystery"title="The Arctic Patrol Mystery">
The Hardy Boys and Chet Morton fly to Iceland to look for Rex Hallbjornsson, a sailor owed a payout from an insurance company. Before they leave Bayport, someone attempts to kidnap Frank. An American astronaut has disappeared in Iceland while studying the volcanoes. Frank finds a glove which may have been dropped by the astronaut next to a sulfur pit. The Hardys take a flight on a private plane to Akureyri. The pilot is a phony and forces a landing on a glacier, where the Hardys are fooled by a phony rescue helicopter that picks up the phony pilot and leaves them behind. They try to use the radio, but the phony pilot has hidden the frequency crystal. They find it and make contact with the radio tower at Reykjavik. Another helicopter comes to pick up the Hardys. They go to Akureyri and visit a phony Rex Hallbjornsson. Returning to Reykjavik, they see Chet wandering in front of the hotel with a strange expression. They realize he has been drugged. Thinking someone might be in their room examining their belongings, they rush upstairs and find the phony pilot and his phony rescuer. Joe tries to grab the pilot, whose wig comes off. It is the phony Rex Hallbjornsson, who gets away with his partner. Chet and Biff Hooper, who has joined the others in Iceland, go to investigate a man named Hallbjornsson who might know Rex, while Frank and Joe go with a coast guard officer to look for Hallbjornsson at sea. After a devastating storm Frank sees a small raft, possibly with a motor, and thinks it might be the criminals. Over the course of a day or two, they put on disguises and act as phony crewmen for Rex Mar (the real Hallbjornsson, who has changed his name). Musselman, the phony Rex Hallbjornsson, is fooled by their disguises until Joe slips up by speaking English rather than Icelandic. The boys defeat the criminals in hand-to-hand combat and have them arrested. With the help of Biff who was kidnapped, the boys figure out how the remaining bad guys are going to transport the kidnapped astronaut. The kidnappers take over a plane and resist efforts to stop them but the astronaut and Chet, who was also kidnapped, break free and subdue them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bombay_Boomerang"title="The Bombay Boomerang">
The Hardy Boys head to sea to solve the theft of mercury shipments and a government missile and to foil a terrorist plan to create havoc in the United States. They discover that the gang is hiding in a hotel in Baltimore, where their father, Fenton Hardy, is staying under the name L. Marks. An attempt is made on their father's life when his cover is blown, but the Hardy Boys save him in time. Using devices such as ear bugs, they spy on the gang. With the help of an Admiral at the Pentagon, the boys uncover the gang's nefarious plot. The gang wants to blast a cave containing nerve gas with a Super S missile that can't be redirected. This will cause the nerve gas to spread in the US, which in turn will help overthrow the US government. The Hardys learn that an Indian freighter, "Nanda Kailash", is going to dock at Baltimore. They explore the ship as all the clues point towards India. There, an attempt is made on Joe's life. The Hardys also capture the Mercury gang. They find a new friend, Akshay, who takes them to a ship called the "Bombay Batarang," where they uncover some clues to the mystery. In the end, with trickery the Hardys capture the rest of the gang. Later they are abducted, but they fight off the criminals and capture the mastermind in the end by way of Chet throwing a boomerang and disabling a jet which the gang is in.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_on_Vampire_Trail"title="Danger on Vampire Trail">
The Hardy boys and two friends Chet and Biff take a camping trip to the Rocky Mountains in an attempt to locate a gang of credit card counterfeiters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Masked_Monkey"title="The Masked Monkey">
The Hardy brothers' search for the missing son of a wealthy industrialist leads them to Brazil and great danger. Chet's hobby at the time was retrieving golf balls from the bottom of ponds at the golf courses around the Bayport area. Chet's hobby brings important clues that help the Hardys round up a gang of criminals who help other criminals change their identity.CharactersJoe Hardy, Frank Hardy, Fenton Hardy, Laura Hardy, Aunt Gertrude, Chester Morton, J.G Retson, Phil, Tony, Joachim San Marten, Gus McCormick, Mr Jackson, Mrs Martha Jackson, Harris, Harry Grimsel, Sam Radley, Belkin, Moreno.SettingGranite city, Bayport, New York, Belem, Manaus
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shattered_Helmet"title="The Shattered Helmet">
Danger is the name of the game when the Hardys agree to help their pen pal from Greece, Evangelos Pandropolos, search for a priceless, ancient Greek helmet. Years ago, Evan's uncle had loaned it to a Hollywood movie company for use in a silent motion picture, "The Persian Glory", for a role in the movie, but the treasured helmet was lost after the movie was done.At Hunt College, where Evan, Frank, Joe and Chet Morton are taking a summer course in film-making, the boys are harassed by Leon Saffel whose harassments get more and more vicious. All the while a gang is trying to force Mr. Hardy to give up his investigations of a national crime syndicate and also trying to find the helmet, which after speaking to Evan's billionaire uncle, they learn may have belonged to King Agamemnon, making the helmet even more valuable.The clues that the Hardys unearth keep them constantly on the move—from their college campus to California and finally to Greece. In a sizzling climax, the Hardys, Evan and Chet match wits with their powerful enemies on the island of Corfu.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clue_of_the_Hissing_Serpent"title="The Clue of the Hissing Serpent">
The Hardy brothers and Chet meet a wealthy balloonist named Albert Krassner, who is in possession of the Ruby King, a valuable life-sized chess piece that is the prize for a chess tournament. The boys soon learn that a gang wants to steal the Ruby King. Then the Ruby King mysteriously disappears from the Krassner safe, sending the Hardy Boys to Hong Kong. There they capture the gang and find the Ruby King.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Caravan"title="The Mysterious Caravan">
On a winter vacation in Jamaica, the Hardy Boys begin a dangerous adventure when an ancient bronze death mask is discovered near their beach house (where Frank comically loses and finds his underwear). The case takes them from Jamaica to their hometown of Bayport to Casablanca to Marrakesh. They meet William along the way, a kind African who is willing to help them uncover secrets of the mask, which they find out is Jamaican property.William scares off the enemies of the Hardy Boys in Swahili, telling them he is an even more powerful Juju man then theirs and eventually Mr. Hardy comes after Frank and Joe thought he was dead. Back at the Celliers', they celebrate and Christine, the gorgeous, black-haired teen who also assisted them in solving the case lets the Hardys call home to their worrying mother and eats dinner with Aunt Gertrude. William even receives a Basenji dog as a present for saving the Hardys from the predicament.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witchmaster's_Key"title="The Witchmaster's Key">
In East Anglia, England, Frank and Joe Hardy are investigating one of the unusual cases of their lives, involving burglary, witchcraft, and maybe even kidnapping. Soon they are caught in a battle for their lives against the forces of evil.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle_Pyramid"title="The Jungle Pyramid">
Somebody steals gold from the Wakefield Mint without even triggering the alarm. The Hardy Boys must track the gold down. Then, after that, the Early Art Museum is robbed of a gold artifact. Their main suspect is a man named Pedro Zemog, who ran out of the museum after the alarm was triggered. A strange note with Zemog's name on it sends them to Zurich, where somebody claims to know about the Wakefield gold theft. Then another note with Zemog's name on it sends the boys to Mexico City, where they discover a pyramid in the jungle. In the pyramid are many gold coins and sculptures. Afterward,
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Firebird_Rocket"title="The Firebird Rocket">
The Hardy Boys help their detective father, Fenton Hardy, search for a famous rocket scientist whose disappearance endangers the launching of the "Firebird" rocket from the Woomera Test Range. They are threatened multiple times, but still do not give up with their lives at risk. Frank and Joe Hardy aid their father and others. However, they soon learn that they are working for a criminal. While they are captured, the police arrive and rescue them, arresting the criminals except for the true mastermind who tries to flee. However, Frank and Joe stop the truck he uses and he is captured.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sting_of_the_Scorpion"title="The Sting of the Scorpion">
During their father's investigation of the ruthless Scorpio gang of terrorists, the Hardy Boys witness an explosion and an elephant falling from an airship named Safari Queen of Quinn Airport which was carrying animals of the newly opened Wild World Zoo. Strange events are happening at Wild World, so the Hardy Boys search for the truth.They fall into a trap and almost escape injury. They capture the gang in an all-out fight.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Daisy_(novel)"title="Princess Daisy (novel)">
The novel tells the story of Princess Marguerite "Daisy" Valensky. She is the daughter of Prince Alexander "Stash" Valensky, a wealthy Russian-born polo player and former playboy, and his wife Francesca Vernon, a beautiful and talented American actress. Stash and Francesca, madly in love, are thrilled by her pregnancy and the news that she is carrying twins. However, a problem during delivery denies one of the twin girls, named Danielle, enough oxygen, and she is born brain-damaged, while Daisy is healthy. Francesca suffers from acute post-partum depression and enters a fugue state for several weeks. Stash, who has a fear and disgust of illness and abnormality after a childhood spent watching his mother slowly waste away from tuberculosis, is unable to accept or love Danielle. When Francesca recovers from her depression, he lies to her, telling her that the second-born twin died soon after birth. She discovers the truth and flees with both infants to California, where she is helped by her former agent and his wife. For several years, she lives a secluded life in Carmel and grants Stash short visits with Daisy.Francesca dies in a car accident, and Daisy and Dani are reunited with their father, who immediately places Dani in an expensive but remote home for retarded children, much to Daisy's distress. When Daisy turns 16, her father dies in a plane accident, after which her older half-brother, Ram, who has become obsessed with her, seduces and then brutally rapes her. To get her away from Ram, her father's mistress, Anabel (a mother figure to the girl), sends her to the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she forms what will be a lifelong friendship with Kiki Kavanaugh, an auto industry heiress from Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Because of Daisy's total estrangement from Ram, who is a trustee of her inheritance, she neglects to read his letters regarding her stock portfolio at a crucial moment and thus loses everything her father left her. As a result, she is forced to drop out of college and go to work. She paints portraits of rich, horse-mad people's children on ponies in order to pay Dani's bills and also works in a demanding job at a production company that makes television commercials.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Illusions"title="The Book of Illusions">
Set in the late 1980s, the story is written from the perspective of David Zimmer, a university professor who, after losing his wife and children in a plane crash, falls into a routine of depression and isolation. After seeing one of the silent comedies of Hector Mann, an actor missing since the 1920s, he decides to occupy himself by watching all of Mann's films and writing a book about them. The publishing of the book, however, triggers another series of events that draw Zimmer even deeper into the actor's past.The middle of the story is largely dedicated to telling the life story of Hector Mann, involving his self-imposed exile from his past life and career, which serves as a form of penance for his role in the death of a woman who loved him. In his last days, Mann's wife sends a letter to Zimmer, requesting him to come to their New Mexico home to bear witness to Mann's final legacy of films. The events that ensue form the overarching story of Zimmer's rehabilitation from his reclusive state, and his coming to terms with the manner in which his family was killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cart_and_Cwidder"title="Cart and Cwidder">
Osfameron Tanamoril (Moril) Clennenson is a travelling musician, who travels with his father, Clennen, his mother, Lenina, and his elder siblings, Dagner and Brid, through Dalemark, a country torn by civil war between the South and the North. They travel around, playing music, taking passengers and messages, and spreading news throughout the country.When Clennen (the father and main performer) is murdered by the Earl of South Dales, who suspects him of being a spy for the North, Lenina (who is high-born and gave up the chance of being a Lady when she married Clennen) takes her three children and their passenger Kialan, the fugitive son of a Northern earl, back to her home town of Markind in South Dalemark. Within the same day as her husband's death, Lenina is married to her former fiancé the Lord of Markind, guided by the belief that this is the only way to counter the bad luck caused by Clennen's murder.Dagner, Brid, and Moril encounter their father's murderer among the wedding guests in Markind and together with Kialan they flee the town and try to reach the North, while continuing to perform for a living. However, without Clennen and Lenina, they find this difficult to do. The oldest son, Dagner, tries to continue their father's work as a Northern spy, but is arrested for treason against the Earl of South Dales. Brid, Moril, and Kialan are forced to flee, believing that Dagner will be hanged.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_Mr_Fox"title="Fantastic Mr Fox">
Mr Fox is an anthropomorphic, tricky, and clever fox who lives underground beside a tree with his wife and four children. To feed his family, he makes nightly visits to local farms owned by three cruel, rude, wicked and dim-witted farmers named Boggis, Bunce and Bean, whereupon he seizes the livestock available on each man's farm; chickens from Boggis, ducks or geese from Bunce, and turkeys from Bean. Tired of being outsmarted by Mr Fox, the triumvirate devise a plan to ambush him as he leaves his burrow, but they succeed only in shooting off his tail.The three farmers then dig up the Foxes' burrow using spades and then excavators. The Foxes manage to escape by burrowing further beneath the ground to safety. The farmers are ridiculed for their persistence, but they refuse to give up and vow not to return to their farms until they have caught Mr Fox. They then choose to lay siege to the fox, surrounding Mr Fox's hole and waiting until he is hungry enough to come out. Cornered by their enemies, Mr Fox and his family, and all the other underground creatures that live around the hill, begin to starve.After three days trapped underground, Mr Fox devises a plot to acquire food. Working from his memory of the routes he has taken above ground, he and his children tunnel through the ground and wind up burrowing to one of Boggis's four chicken houses. Mr Fox kills several chickens and sends his son to carry the animals back home to Mrs Fox. On the way to their next destination, Mr Fox runs into his friend Badger and asks him to accompany him on his mission, as well as to extend an invitation to the feast to the other burrowing animals - Badger and his family, as well as the Moles, the Rabbits and the Weasels - to apologize for getting them caught up in the farmers' hunt. Aided by Badger, the animals tunnel to Bunce's storehouse for ducks, geese, hams, bacon and carrots, and then to Bean's secret cider cellar. Here, they are nearly caught by the Beans' servant Mabel and have an unpleasant confrontation with the cellar's resident, Rat. They carry their loot back home, where Mrs Fox has prepared a great celebratory banquet for the starving underground animals and their families.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Ring_of_Endless_Light"title="A Ring of Endless Light">
Fifteen-year-old Vicky Austin and her family are spending the summer on Seven Bay Island with her maternal grandfather, who is dying of leukemia. At the beginning of the story, Vicky attends a funeral for Commander Rodney, a family friend. Also present are the commander's wife, his sons Leo and Jacky who own a launch boat business, and Adam Eddington, an intern at the Island's research base and friend of Vicky's brother, John.After the funeral Vicky encounters Zachary Gray, her boyfriend from the previous summer whom her family does not particularly like. She soon learns that Zachary indirectly caused Commander Rodney's death; the commander had his heart attack while saving Zachary from a suicide attempt. This revelation and others set Vicky on a train of thought that continues throughout the book; the mysterious and (to Vicky) frightening topic of death. Death and the threat of it seem to loom everywhere, from news reports to the death of a baby dolphin, from the recent demise of Zach's mother in an automobile accident to Grandfather Eaton's slow deterioration.During the course of the story, Vicky finds herself in a tangle of three romances; one with the solid, unexciting Leo, one with dark and dangerous Zachary, and one with the gentle but emotionally damaged Adam, whom she is helping with a project on dolphin and human communication (ESP) with three dolphins: Basil, Norberta, and Njord. Vicky discovers a remarkable rapport with the dolphins, an unspoken communication that borders on telepathy. Her ability extends to communicating with Adam as well, but he pulls away, unwilling to allow that level of intimacy after a devastating betrayal the previous summer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephants_Can_Remember"title="Elephants Can Remember">
At a literary luncheon Ariadne Oliver is approached by a woman named Mrs Burton-Cox, whose son Desmond is engaged to Oliver's goddaughter Celia Ravenscroft. Mrs Burton-Cox questions the truth regarding the deaths of Celia's parents. Twelve years before, Oliver's close school friend Margaret Ravenscroft and her husband, General Alistair Ravenscroft, were found dead near their manor house in Overcliffe. Both had been shot with a revolver found between their bodies, which bore only their fingerprints. The investigation into their deaths found it impossible to determine if it was a double suicide, or if one of them murdered the other and then committed suicide. Their deaths left Celia and another child orphaned. After consulting Celia, Mrs Oliver invites her friend Hercule Poirot to resolve the issue.Poirot and Mrs Oliver proceed to meet elderly witnesses associated with the case, whom they dub "elephants", and discover that Margaret Ravenscroft owned four wigs; that the Ravenscrofts' dog was devoted to the family, but bit Margaret a few days before her death; that Margaret had an identical twin sister, Dorothea, who had spent time in a number of psychiatric nursing homes, and was believed to have been involved in two violent incidents in Asia, including the drowning of her infant son after the death of her husband; and that a month before the couple died Dorothea had been sleepwalking and had died after falling off a cliff. Later Poirot learns the names of governesses who served the Ravenscroft family, one of whom, Zélie Meauhourat, travelled to Lausanne after the couple's deaths.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heart_of_Midlothian"title="The Heart of Midlothian">
The title of the book refers to the Old Tolbooth prison in Edinburgh, Scotland, at the time in the heart of the Scottish county of Midlothian. The historical backdrop was the event known as the Porteous riots. In 1736, a riot broke out in Edinburgh over the execution of two smugglers. The Captain of the City Guards, Captain John Porteous, ordered the soldiers to fire into the crowd, killing several people. Porteous was later killed by a lynch mob who stormed the Old Tolbooth.The second, and main element of the novel was based on a story Scott claimed to have received in an unsigned letter. It was about a certain Helen Walker who had travelled all the way to London by foot, to receive a royal pardon for her sister, who was unjustly charged with infanticide. Scott put Jeanie Deans in the place of Walker, a young woman from a family of highly devout Presbyterians. Jeanie goes to London, partly by foot, hoping to achieve an audience with the Queen through the influence of the Duke of Argyll.The novel portrays the contrasting fortunes of two sisters: Jeanie and Effie Deans. In volume 1, Captain Porteous is initially condemned for murder, but is reprieved at the last moment. A young nobleman George Staunton (under the guise of "Geordie Robertson") leads a mob that storms the prison and lynches Porteous. Staunton also attempts to free his lover Effie Deans, who he impregnated. She has been imprisoned for the alleged murder of her baby but she refuses as to escape would be to admit guilt. Reuben Butler, a young minister who is in love with Jeanie, witnesses Effie's refusal to escape. This fact strengthens Jeanie's belief that her sister is innocent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Sacred_Thing"title="The Fifth Sacred Thing">
The novel describes a world set in the year 2048 after a catastrophe which has fractured the United States into several nations. The protagonists live in San Francisco and have evolved in the direction of Ecotopia, reverting to a sustainable economy, using wind power, local agriculture, and the like. San Francisco is presented as a mostly pagan city where the streets have been torn up for gardens and streams, no one starves or is homeless, and the city's defense council consists primarily of nine elderly women who "listen and dream". The novel describes "a utopia where women are leading societies but are doing so with the consent of men." To the south, an overtly-theocratic Christian fundamentalist nation has evolved and plans to wage war against the San Franciscans. The novel explores the events before and during the ensuing struggle between the two nations, pitting utopia and dystopia against each other.The story is primarily told from the points of view of 98-year-old Maya, her nominal granddaughter Madrone, and her grandson Bird. Through these and other characters, the story explores many elements from ecofeminism and ecotopian fiction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gate_to_Women's_Country"title="The Gate to Women's Country">
"The Gate to Women's Country" is set in the future, 300 years after a nuclear war destroyed most of human civilization. The book focuses on a matriarchal nation known as "Women's Country", and particularly the city of Marthatown.Stavia, the novel's hero, is the younger daughter of Morgot, an important member of the Marthatown Council. The book opens with Stavia as an adult, heading to meet her fifteen-year-old son, Dawid. He has spent the last ten years living outside the city walls with the warriors, as is customary for Women's Country boys, and is now old enough to decide whether he wishes to remain a warrior or accept a life of study and service among the women as a servitor. At the meeting Dawid formally renounces his mother and chooses to become a full-fledged warrior. Stavia also renounces Dawid.Afterwards, Stavia remembers when her younger brother was sent to live with the warriors. Much of the rest of the novel is told in flashback, following Stavia's life from childhood to adulthood. In the story's present, Stavia prepares for her role as Iphigenia in Marthatown's annual performance of "Iphigenia at Ilium", a reworking of the Greek tragedy "The Trojan Women" that weaves through the novel as a leitmotif.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Price_of_Salt"title="The Price of Salt">
Therese Belivet is a lonely young woman, just beginning her adult life in Manhattan and looking for a chance to launch her career as a theatre set designer. When she was a young girl, her widowed mother sent her to an Episcopalian boarding school, leaving her with a sense of abandonment. Therese is dating Richard, a young man she does not love and does not enjoy having sex with. On a long and monotonous day at work in the toy section of a department store during the Christmas season, Therese becomes interested in a customer, an elegant and beautiful woman in her early thirties. The woman's name is Carol Aird and she gives Therese her address so her purchases may be delivered. On an impulse, Therese sends her a Christmas card. Carol, who is going through a difficult separation and divorce and is herself quite lonely, unexpectedly responds. The two begin to spend time together. Therese develops a strong attachment to Carol. Richard accuses Therese of having a "schoolgirl crush," but Therese knows it is more than that: she is in love with Carol.Carol's husband, Harge, is suspicious of Carol's relationship with Therese, whom he meets briefly when Therese stays over at Carol's house in New Jersey. Carol had previously admitted to Harge that she had a short-lived sexual relationship months earlier with her best friend, Abby. Harge takes his and Carol's daughter, Rindy, to live with him, limiting Carol's access to her as divorce proceedings continue. To escape from the tension in New York, Carol and Therese take a road trip West as far as Utah, over the course of which it becomes clear that the feelings they have for each other are romantic and sexual. They become physically as well as emotionally intimate and declare their love for each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walls_Came_Tumbling_Down_(Wilson_book)"title="The Walls Came Tumbling Down (Wilson book)">
The introduction of the book includes Wilson's thoughts abouts many things, including UFOs, "Magna Carta", the IRA and Nelson Mandela. It also includes Wilson's explanation of how he wrote the screenplay after a film deal had collapsed and he was trying to get another deal together.The book deals with the sometimes frightening experiences that happen to those who stumble into an expanded consciousness without any intent to go there and without any preparation or Operating Manual to tell them how to navigate when the walls tumble and the doors of perception fly open, leaving the brain suddenly free of the limits of "mind".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunstorm_(novel)"title="Sunstorm (novel)">
"Sunstorm" opens with the last chapter of "Time's Eye" as its initial chapter, and Bisesa Dutt is in London, reunited with her daughter. It is 9 June 2037, the day after her helicopter was shot down in the North Western Frontier Province of Pakistan. The five years that she spent on Mir, an alternate Earth, are now only memories (though the fact that her body has aged five years since 8 June 2037, will eventually serve as some confirmation of her story).In the meantime, a major solar event occurs on 9 June, disrupting virtually all of the Earth's electronic hardware. Dramatic as it is, this phenomenon is only a minor precursor of a far more massive solar eruption about five years off. Scientific models of the projected 2042 event make clear that the Earth will be sterilised completely by the upcoming solar burst. The effects will be so powerful as to even endanger astronauts on Mars.Rather than sit by and allow the sun to just destroy all of Earth's life, political leaders (most notably the President of the Eurasian Union, Miriam Grec), and scientific leaders (led by Siobhan McGorran, the Astronomer Royal) decide to embark upon an ambitious plan to literally shield Earth from the worst effects of the storm. The plot is further complicated when information from Bisesa's odyssey suggests that what is happening to the sun is not simply a random happening in nature, but is rather the result of events set in motion by an alien intelligence over three millennia ago. Known as the Firstborn—since they were the first alien race to reach sentience, and thus are the most advanced civilization in existence in the universe—they are determined to stop later lifeforms from across the galaxy from infiltrating the stars, where they would increase entropy with energy usage and eventual wars, thus hastening the Universe's eventual heat death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Creature_from_the_Pit"title="The Creature from the Pit">
The use of an MK3 Emergency transceiver on the TARDIS identifies a distress signal and brings the craft to the lush jungle world of Chloris, where metal in all forms is a rare and prized commodity. The Fourth Doctor and Romana venture out to discover the remains of an enormous egg in the jungle, and when they meet the inhabitants they find a matriarchy ruled through fear by the icy and callous Lady Adrasta. Without metal to make the tools needed to keep the jungle under control, lush plant life dominates. The Lady Adrasta controls the planet's very last metal mine, holding on to power through the Huntsman and the Wolfweeds. Her throne room contains an array of metal including a shield patterned in the same way as the remnants of the shell. She mentions the Creature which dwells in a deep pit on Chloris.Romana is captured by a party of scavengers, keen to find and hoard more metal. They are impressed by K9. The robot enables her escape and she is briefly reunited with the Doctor before he leaps into the Pit himself, determined to get to the bottom of the mystery and the Pit. Within it he encounters Organon, an astrologer thrown there by Adrasta earlier, and then comes face to face with the Creature: the vast shapeless blob rolls over him. The Doctor calculates it is not, however, dangerous, and is fascinated to note it is a herbivore which produces metal from within itself. It also forms a tentacle and draws a picture which the Doctor recognises as the shield from Adrasta's throne room. Lady Adrasta, her lady-in-waiting Karela, the Huntsman, his Wolfweeds, and some guards, enter the Pit and make their way to the Doctor, Organon, and the Creature.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_of_Eden"title="Nightmare of Eden">
The TARDIS arrives near an unstable area on the interstellar cruise ship "Empress", which has emerged from hyperspace at the same co-ordinates as the trade ship "Hecate", causing a dimensional crossover that the Fourth Doctor and Romana realise must be repaired. The Doctor offers his services to detach the two craft. Rigg, captain of the "Empress", is suspicious of the Doctor's alias as a representative of Galactic Salvage but nevertheless agrees to let him try and separate the two craft by reversing the smaller craft at full thrust. The Doctor is accompanied by Rigg's co-pilot, Secker, who, it becomes apparent, is a drug addict. He is addicted to Vraxoin, the origins of which are unknown, but is known to be lethal. Secker heads off alone into the unstable area and is attacked by a clawed monster and left for dead. K9 arrives from the TARDIS and is tasked with cutting through the locked ships.Also aboard the "Empress" are a zoologist named Tryst and his assistant Della, with their CET (Continual Event Transmuter) Machine, which stores portions of planets on electro-magnetic crystals. Their collection is large and ethically dubious. Their most recent stop was on the planet Eden where one of their expedition was killed, but both Tryst and Della are reluctant to provide too many details. Romana, however, examines the Eden projection when she is on her own and is sure she has seen eyes staring out at her from the dark and forbidding jungle. When she later looks at the projection again an insect appears from within it and stings her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horns_of_Nimon"title="The Horns of Nimon">
The declining Skonnan Empire is under control of a mysterious horned being called the Nimon. It resides inside a labyrinthine Power Complex on the planet Skonnos, and communicates only with the Skonnan leader, Soldeed, who reveres the Nimon as a god. The Nimon demands a regular tribute of young people, who are flown in from the nearby planet Aneth, as well as a supply of hymetusite crystals.A transport ship bearing the sacrifices from Aneth breaks down and becomes stranded in interplanetary space, close to a black hole. Outside the ship, the TARDIS materialises. The Fourth Doctor attempts to save the TARDIS from being drawn into the black hole by attaching it to the Skonnan ship with a force field. He and Romana then board the ship, leaving K9 behind. Once aboard they find a cargo of hymetusite crystals and a hold full of young prisoners from Aneth, led by Seth. The Doctor and Romana are captured at gunpoint by the co-pilot, who forces them to fix the ship using a hymetusite crystal. The Doctor returns to the TARDIS to get supplies, and becomes stranded when the ship's engines start. Steering the TARDIS away from the black hole, he travels to Skonnos.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmer_and_the_Dragon"title="Elmer and the Dragon">
Elmer and the dragon (Boris, we learn in book 3) are stranded on a remote island inhabited only by canaries. One of them, Flute, was Elmer's pet until he escaped to Feather Island. Elmer helps Flute and the king and queen canaries to dig up a chest that the island's former human settlers left. Inside are various household items, a watch, a harmonica, and six bags of gold. The dragon flies Elmer back to his house before returning to Blueland, his own home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_(Sword_of_Truth)"title="Phantom (Sword of Truth)">
A continuation of the story in "Chainfire", "Phantom" begins with Richard Rahl searching for his wife, Kahlan Amnell, whom only he remembers. As the reader discovered in "Chainfire", the spell used to make everyone forget Kahlan, Chainfire, was initiated by the Sisters of the Dark, working for the Keeper of the Underworld. Richard reveals that not only the spell but also all magic has been corrupted due to the effects of the chimes being in the world. Due to this corruption Kahlan is not invisible to everyone and Jagang uses this fact to continue to control her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arm_of_the_Starfish"title="The Arm of the Starfish">
The plot centers on a young marine biology student named Adam Eddington, who travels to the remote island Gaea off the coast of Portugal for a summer job working for a famous scientist, Calvin O'Keefe. Even before he leaves JFK airport, Adam is approached by Carolyn ("Kali") Cutter, the beautiful, well-traveled daughter of a rich American industrialist living in Europe. She warns Adam against yet another passenger, Canon Tallis. Tallis is accompanying Calvin O'Keefe's eldest daughter, 12-year-old Polly O'Keefe, to Geneva, but bad weather and mysterious dangers derail those plans.Instead, Adam finds himself shepherding Polly on a short flight from Madrid to Lisbon. When Polly uses the restroom during the flight, she seems to disappear from the airplane completely, and the flight crew denies she was ever on board. Kali's father, Typhon Cutter, later enables Adam to rescue Polly from her kidnappers, deepening Adam's confusion about whom to trust. As the plot unfolds, it becomes clear that at least two different factions have equally strong but differently motivated interests in Dr. O'Keefe's research on organ regeneration. Adam faces a number of ethical dilemmas as he is forced to choose between these factions.Eventually Adam realizes that the O'Keefes are the ones who care about "the fall of the sparrow," as their friend Joshua Archer puts it, a Biblical allusion to caring about others, even the seemingly weak and unimportant. Adam wants nothing further to do with Kali and her ruthless father, but the O'Keefes ask him to make a date with Kali anyway, so that Adam can act as a double agent, passing along fake research papers to the Cutters and smuggling the real ones out to trusted people in Lisbon. Adam reluctantly agrees.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinda_(Doctor_Who)"title="Kinda (Doctor Who)">
An Earth colonisation survey expedition to the beautiful jungle planet Deva Loka is being depleted as members of the survey team disappear one by one. The three survivors are met by The Fifth Doctor and Adric. The team members have also imprisoned two members of the planet's native tribe, the Kinda. Sanders, the leader of the survey team, ventures into the jungle, leaving his deputy Hindle in charge. Hindle's will is enforced by means of the two Kinda hostages, who have forged a telepathic link with him. Hindle, who plans to burn down the jungle, places The Doctor, Adric, and the third team member, Todd, under arrest.Sanders returns carrying a strange wooden box called the "Box of Jhana" which, when opened, cleared his mind and left him a more contented and enlightened person. Using the box leads The Doctor to a group of Kinda led by the power hungry Aris. Panna, an elder Kinda, informs The Doctor that the chaos on Deva Loka is the work of the Mara, an evil being of the subconscious that longs for corporeal reality.The Doctor and Todd find an emotionally wrecked and sleeping Tegan and conclude that she was the path of the Mara back into this world. They find Adric and the party heads back to the Dome, where Hindle has now completed the laying of explosives, which will incinerate the jungle and the Dome. Hindle is tricked into opening the Box of Jhana and the visions therein restore his mental balance. The two enslaved Kinda are freed when the mirror entrapping them is shattered. The Doctor then banishes the Mara from the corporeal world back to the Dark Places of the Inside.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Flight"title="Time-Flight">
The Fifth Doctor, Nyssa, and Tegan, still mourning the loss of their former companion Adric, arrive at Heathrow and learn from Department C19 that one of their Concordes mysteriously vanished just before landing. Using another Concorde with the TARDIS aboard, the Doctor and his companions join Captain Stapley and his crew to fly the same landing path. They appear to land at Heathrow, but the Doctor determines they have flown through a time corridor to 140 million years in the past, the illusion of Heathrow projected by a powerful psychokinetic field.The crew and passengers of the missing Concorde believe they are at Heathrow but are enslaved to work under guard of Plasmatons, humanoid blobs of protein held together by the psychokinetic field. One passenger, Professor Hayter, has seen through the illusion, and lets the Doctor know that they have been forced to work by the mystic Kalid to break into a central chamber at a nearby Citadel. As the Doctor sets off to see Kalid, Stapley and Hayter attempt to break the other humans free of the illusion, while Nyssa, with her empathic abilities, is able to enter the central chamber freely, along with Tegan, to find the power source controlling the psychokinetic field. Nyssa briefly interrupts the power source, which causes Kalid's disguise to falter, revealing himself to the Doctor as the Master. The Master explains that he had been trapped in Earth's past after their last encounter, his own TARDIS damaged, and believed that he could repair it by acquiring the power source in the Citadel; he created the time corridor to obtain human slaves to help break the chamber open. However, now with the Doctor's TARDIS in his possession, the Master sets off in it to try to materialise in the central chamber.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakedance"title="Snakedance">
The arrival of the TARDIS on Manussa triggers nightmares in Tegan, who dreams of a snake-shaped cave mouth. When she and The Fifth Doctor find the cave from her dream, Tegan runs away. Alone and confused, Tegan lapses under the control of the Mara once more.Manussa is in the grip of a festival of celebration of the banishment of the Mara from the civilisation five hundred years earlier. In the absence of the Federator, who rules over the three-planet Federation, his indolent son Lon is to have a major role in the celebration, supported by his mother the Lady Tanha and the archaeologist Ambri. Lon believes the Mara might one day return as prophesied, but Ambril is unconvinced. The young deputy curator Chela is more sympathetic and gives the Doctor a small blue crystal called a Little Mind's Eye, which is used by the Snakedancers, a mystical cult, in their ceremonies to repel the Mara. The Doctor realises the small crystal and its large counterpart, the Great Mind's Eye, can be used as focal points for mental energy and can turn thought into matter. This, he determines, is how the Mara will transfer from Tegan's mind to corporeal existence.Tegan and Lon visit the cave from Tegan's dream, where Lon notices a wall pattern which could accommodate the Great Mind's Eye. Lon is sent back to the Palace while she causes more havoc and takes control of a showman, Dugdale. Lon tries to persuade Ambril to use the Great Mind's Eye in the ceremony, placing it in a position that will enable the Mara to return.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontios"title="Frontios">
The TARDIS lands in the far future, on the planet Frontios, where some of the last vestiges of humanity are struggling for survival. The planet is being attacked by meteor showers orchestrated by an unknown enemy responsible for the disappearance of several prominent colonists, including the colony's leader, Captain Revere. After witnessing Revere being "eaten by the ground," Security Chief Brazen claims Revere died of natural causes. Revere's son, Plantagenet, assumes the leadership of the colony.The Fifth Doctor, Tegan and Turlough emerge in the middle of the bombardment and decide to help the colonists. Needing better light in the medical facility, the Doctor sends Tegan and Turlough to fetch equipment from the TARDIS. However, they find that the ship's inner door is stuck, preventing them from getting beyond the console room. Norna, Tegan and Turlough obtain an acid-battery from the research room to power the lights. On their way back, however, they are forced to render the Warnsman unconscious to avoid capture. Following a second bombardment, the TARDIS is seemingly destroyed; all that is left is the Doctor's hat stand.Plantagenet orders the execution of the Doctor, but Turlough intercedes. Plantagenet tries to attack the Doctor with a crowbar but suffers a heart attack. The Time Lord saves his life using the battery, yet Plantagenet is dragged into the ground.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invasion_(Doctor_Who)"title="The Invasion (Doctor Who)">
After being fired upon, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe land a damaged TARDIS in London and go to find Professor Edward Travers for his assistance. They discover Professor Travers has leased his house to Professor Watkins &amp; his niece Isobel.The professor has gone missing while working for a shadowy electronics company called International Electromatics. The Doctor and Jamie leave to investigate its head office, where they meet Tobias Vaughn, the company's Managing Director, and Brigadier Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart head of a military taskforce called UNIT, which investigates unusual activities around the world.Taken to the company's countryside base, the Doctor and Jamie meet the Professor, who is working on a "Cerebration Mentor" device, intended to be a teaching machine. The professor reveals that Vaughn is working with an unspecified ally and that they are planning to take over the world. Further investigation reveals this ally as the Cybermen, who intend to send a hypnotic signal through the devices produced by International Electromatics, which will incapacitate the world's population and nullify resistance. In the nick of time the Doctor is able to protect his companions and their UNIT allies with specially-made depolarizers that neutralize the Cybermen's signal. As the Cybermen take over, the Brigadier arranges for the Doctor and company to be transported to UNIT headquarters in Geneva to help battle the invasion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warriors_of_the_Deep"title="Warriors of the Deep">
In 2084, Earth is divided into two opposing superpower blocs. One of the blocs has created a secret underwater base, Sea Base 4, which is strategically positioned and has nuclear weapons aimed at the opposing bloc. The base's crew is led by Commander Vorshak and his senior officers, Nilsoc, Bulic, Security Chief Preston and Lt. Michaels, who is killed prior to the story commencing. The story begins on the bridge of Sea Base 4. Vorshak and Bulic noticed something strange on their long range sensors, but dismiss it as being a trivial glitch. In reality, the glitch is a Silurian battlecruiser led by Icthar, the sole survivor of the Silurian Triad and his subordinates, Tarpok and Scibus, who are monitoring Sea Base 4.Inside the TARDIS, Turlough has changed his mind about going home, and the Fifth Doctor plans to show Tegan something of Earth's future. As the TARDIS materialises in space, it is attacked by Sentinel Six, a robot weapons system. The Doctor saves the TARDIS by materialising on Sea Base 4.Sea Base 4 undergoes a practice missile run, but Maddox, the temporary sync operator, is uncertain of his skill at the job. When Maddox faints after the practice run, Vorshak realises that the function of the base will continue to be compromised until either Maddox lives up to his duties or a replacement is assigned. Nilson and the Base's chief medical officer, Doctor Solow, who are enemy agents for the opposing bloc, plan to program Maddox to destroy the computer circuitry. To do this, they ask Vorshak to release Maddox's duplicate program disk under the pretext of helping the sync operator cope with his job. Vorshak does so, and Maddox is programmed in the Base's psycho-surgery unit. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Wanderers"title="The Time Wanderers">
The principal characters are Maxim Kammerer and Toivo Glumov, both working for an organization which investigates "Unexplained Events" (UEs). Their investigation of a series of events leads them to believe that they are witnesses to a new action by the Wanderers.After much investigation, the UEs are discovered to be the work of a secret society called the Ludens. They claim to have chosen this name for themselves as a derivative of the Russian word "lyudi" "humans", "people" with several semi-jocular allusions such as the popular Latin phrase "Homo Ludens" "the Playing Man" and an anagram of the Russian word "nelyudi" "inhuman people" (as they believe they are regarded by some "ordinary" humans). The Ludens are born human, but possess latent mental powers far beyond those of normal humans. They view themselves as a distinct species, and claim to have "different interests" from humanity at large, in some instances claiming to be above traditional human morality. The Ludens routinely conduct experiments on humans and alter their minds in order to further their own means.Kammerer and Glumov's investigation unmasks the Ludens, and they are made public in what would later become known as "The Great Revelation". It turns out that Glumov possesses this capacity, and must now decide whether or not to become a Luden himself. He at first states that to join the Ludens would be a betrayal of his family, friends, and human civilization. But he decides to try it out, if only to serve as Humanity's "ambassador" with them. Soon all contacts with Glumov are lost, Kammerer hypothesizing that he "just forgot about us now". Indeed, the story is told as Maxim's memoir, his sole intent in writing it being to clear up the story of Glumov: another source (in the fictional setting) had implied that Glumov was in the Luden group all along.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Awakening_(Doctor_Who)"title="The Awakening (Doctor Who)">
The Fifth Doctor promises to take his companions Tegan and Vislor to 1984 so Tegan can spend some time with her grandfather, Andrew Verney. The Doctor sets the coordinates to Little Hodcombe, where Verney resides. However, the TARDIS experiences some turbulence and arrives in what appears to be the 17th century, but is actually a historical reenactment of the English Civil War, led by the town’s magistrate, Sir George Hutchinson.Hutchinson explains that the town is celebrating the anniversary of the Battle of Little Hodcombe and urges the Doctor to join the celebration. The Doctor discovers that the war games are being used to feed a creature called the Malus, which feeds on psychic energy. Tegan is taken prisoner and forced to change into a 17th-century costume to become the Queen of the May, who will be burned alive in a special ceremony. The Doctor and local schoolteacher Jane Hampden try to persuade Hutchinson to stop the games, as the final battle will be for real. Hutchinson refuses and orders Colonel Ben Woolsey to kill the Doctor. However, once Hutchinson leaves, Woolsey joins forces with the Doctor and rescues Tegan. The Doctor and his two companions, along with Woolsey and Hampden, work together to defeat the Malus and stop Hutchinson.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sea_Devils"title="The Sea Devils">
The Third Doctor and Jo visit the Master, imprisoned on a small island in the English Channel. Despite his claim to have reformed, he refuses to reveal the location of his TARDIS. As they depart, the Doctor hears of ships mysteriously disappearing. Curious, he investigates a sea fortress, where he and Jo are attacked by a sea-adapted bipedal reptile, called a Sea Devil by one witness. They escape to a nearby naval base.The Doctor discovers that the Master, with the misguided aid of his ostensible jailor Colonel Trenchard, is stealing electrical equipment from the naval base to build a machine that will control the so-called Sea Devils, intending to use them as an army through which to conquer the world. He summons them and they begin to emerge from the sea. A battle for the prison ensues during which Trenchard is killed. The Doctor and Jo once again flee to the naval base where Captain Hart tells them a submarine has disappeared. Whilst the crew prepare for battle, the Doctor is seized by the sea creatures.The Doctor offers to broker peaceful negotiations between the sea-creatures and the humans, recalling how he failed in his earlier attempt with the Silurians. Matters are left unresolved in the wake of an attack by depth charges ordered by Robert Walker, a British politician arrived to take control of the situation and intent on repeating UNIT's actions against the Silurians, namely blowing them up, but this time with a nuclear weapon. The attack is opposed by Jo, but does provide the Doctor with cover as he flees to the naval base, where he persuades Walker to allow him another, final attempt at negotiation. In the meantime the Sea Devils capture the naval base, a move instigated by the Master. As part of his plan, he now forces the Doctor to help build a machine to revive dormant Sea Devils around the world. The device activated, the Sea Devils imprison them both, their uses ended, but the Doctor has sabotaged the machine. He escapes with the Master using equipment from the captured submarine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Monster"title="The Time Monster">
The Master, posing as a professor, gains access to a physical science research unit in the village of Wootton, near Cambridge. He conducts time experiments focused around transmitting matter by breaking it down into light waves. He is particularly interested in examining a trident-shaped crystal in his possession, using it to attract a being he addresses as Kronos.The Third Doctor and Jo Grant visit the institute, following his hunch that the Master is back on Earth with his TARDIS. The experiments disrupt the normal flow of time and in one instance, Hyde, a researcher, is caught in the field of the experiment, and ages to more than eighty years. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart has the project evacuated and begins a hunt for the Master. The Doctor explains that Kronos is a "chronovore", a creature from outside time that feeds on it, attracted from the vortex to ancient Atlantis using a crystal trident larger than one seen to have been used by the Master. The Doctor suspects capturing the chronovore is the Master’s purpose, and that this represents a danger to the entire Universe.Meanwhile, the Atlantean High Priest of Poseidon, Krasis, is transported through interstitial time by the Master and brought to an office at the institute. The Master seizes the Seal of Kronos from the priest and uses it to conjure Kronos, a white, bird-like figure, who devours the Institute's Director, Dr Percival. Kronos is briefly contained by the Master, but breaks free, Krasis surmising the Master only has the smaller fragment of the original crystal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monster_of_Peladon"title="The Monster of Peladon">
On the planet Peladon a power struggle is in place between the trisilicate miners and the ruling class, with miners under the leadership of Gebek and hot-headed Ettis calling for improved conditions. The planet's ruler Queen Thalira, daughter of the late King Peladon, is sympathetic, but knows her planet is vital to supply the war effort of the Galactic Federation of which it is a member. The Federation is in conflict with the warlike Galaxy Five confederation. The miners become concerned when a vision of Aggedor, the royal beast, starts appearing in the mines and killing miners, including the alien engineer Vega Nexos. Chancellor Ortron tries to convince the Queen this is a sign of displeasure at the alien presence on the planet, but she remains unconvinced.Another alien presence reaches the Citadel: the TARDIS, bearing the Third Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith. The Doctor recalls his visit to Peladon 50 years earlier when the planet joined the Galactic Federation, and is pleased to find a familiar face in Alpha Centauri, the Federation Ambassador. The Queen knows of the Doctor from her father and enlists his support in trying to find the cause of the manifestations of Aggedor. He guesses someone is deliberately trying to interrupt trisilicate production, and they seem to have succeeded when the miners decide to strike. Ettis then leads an attack on the Federation armoury and gets weapons for the striking miners. This threatens to slow trisilicate supplies even further, so Engineer Eckersley, a human in charge of the refinery, coaxes Alpha Centauri to send for Federation troops to help restore order.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind_of_Evil"title="The Mind of Evil">
The Third Doctor and Jo visit Stangmoor Prison to examine a new method of treating criminals, whereby negative impulses are removed from the mind using the Keller Machine. Professor Kettering, who is managing the use of the process at the behest of the absent Emile Keller, reconditions a number of inmates including Barnham, a hardened criminal who reverts to an innocent and childlike state due to the process. The Doctor's suspicions about the Keller Machine are heightened following a string of deaths, including that of Kettering himself, which occur when the machine is operated. Each death seems to involve personal phobias – and the Doctor is threatened by an inferno when he gets too close to the machine.Meanwhile, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and the troops of UNIT are handling the security arrangements for the first World Peace Conference. Captain Chin Lee of the Chinese delegation is behaving strangely and attempting to heighten tension in relations with the United States. It emerges that her actions are under the influence of the Master. She uses the transmitted power of the Keller Machine against the American delegate, Senator Alcott, who barely survives the attack. Captain Chin Lee is deconditioned by the Doctor, and tells him that Emile Keller is the Master, whom the Doctor has previously trapped on Earth by stealing the dematerialisation circuit of his TARDIS.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ice_Warriors"title="The Ice Warriors">
In the distant future at Brittanicus Base, senior control technician Jan Garrett and her staff struggle to control an ioniser they are using to slow the progress of glaciers rolling over Great Britain. Leader Clent is convinced they can avert a new Ice Age, but the group knows they are only a few hours away from being forced to abandon the base. Tensions rise when Penley, a maverick scientist who has defected from the team, is mentioned. The remaining senior scientist, Arden, is on the glacier searching for archaeological finds, where he discovers an armoured man within a block of ice. Arden and his colleagues dig the ice man from the glacier. Two scavengers observe their actions: the anti-technology Storr and Penley, who live in the tundra. When one of Arden's team is killed in an avalanche, the other two return to base with the ice man. Storr too is injured in the avalanche.The TARDIS arrives outside the base. The Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria go inside, where the Doctor helps with the Ioniser. Arden and Walters reach the base with their discovery, and Arden sets up a device to melt the ice around the man. The Doctor examines the frozen man, and they determine that the "ice warrior" is an alien being. An emergency meeting distracts the staff; no one notices that the ice block has melted, with the creature showing signs of life. The creature revives, knocks Jamie unconscious, and takes Victoria hostage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Pirates"title="The Space Pirates">
Beacons on the space lanes are being blown up and plundered for precious argonite by a gang of space pirates led by Caven, and his associate Dervish. The Earth Space Corps cruiser V-41 notices the destruction of the beacon and, with General Hermack and Major Warne in charge, sets out to apprehend the pirates. Another beacon is destroyed despite their best efforts, and the fragments are stolen using rocket propulsion. Hermack deploys troops to all nearby Beacons to prevent another robbery.The TARDIS crew arrive on Beacon Alpha Four shortly before the pirates reach it. Caven and his men kill the security force there, save Lt Sorba, who is taken as a hostage, and the pirates seal the time travellers in part of the Beacon before blowing it to pieces. Fortunately the beacon falls into discrete, sealed pieces and the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe find themselves inside one. The eccentric Milo Clancey, in his aged ship, the LIZ-79, rescues them – but they cannot retrieve the TARDIS, which is in a separate segment taken by the pirates.The nearest inhabited world is Ta, dominated by the Issigri Mining Corporation, whose leader is Madeleine Issigri. The firm was founded by her father and Clancey, and the latter is now suspected of Dom Issigri’s murder, though nothing has been proved. Hermack visits Ta, believing that Clancey, whom he suspects of being the pirate leader, will end up there in due course – and he is right. However, Hermack leaves just as Clancey and the TARDIS crew reach Ta. Zoe has plotted the trajectory of the segments of the beacon and believes they were headed for Ta as well, and the Doctor and his companions soon find the pirate headquarters. They evade capture and make contact with Clancey.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Underwater_Menace"title="The Underwater Menace">
The Second Doctor and his companions, Polly, Ben and Jamie, are captured when they arrive on a deserted volcanic island by the survivors of Atlantis. Their high priest, Lolem, decides to sacrifice them to the great god Amdo. The Doctor is given a meal, and realises that it must have been prepared by Professor Zaroff, a missing scientist who was presumed dead. The Doctor sends Zaroff a note and Zaroff comes to their rescue. Polly is taken by Damon for conversion-surgery into a Fish Person, while Ben and Jamie are taken to work in a mine. The Doctor cuts off the power, which gives Polly time to escape and hide in the Temple of Amdo. Zaroff tells the Doctor that he plans to drain the sea so Atlantis could come back to the surface. The Doctor realises this will destroy Earth and escapes to find a solution and look for his companions. Ben and Jamie, along with two shipwrecked sailors, Sean and Jacko, discover Polly's hiding place. The Doctor finds a priest named Ramo along the way and tells him Zaroff's plans. Ramo takes the Doctor to Thous, King of Atlantis, who sides with Zaroff.The Doctor and the priest are taken to be sacrificed to Lolem at the temple of Amdo. They are saved by Ben faking the voice of the statue of Amdo and giving them a chance to escape. The Doctor kidnaps Zaroff and takes him to the temple of Amdo where Ramo and Polly are left as his guards. Zaroff then fakes a seizure, stabs Ramo, and takes Polly as a hostage. Ramo survives and goes to warn the Doctor, which gives Jamie, Sean, and Jacko the chance to rescue Polly. Zaroff escapes and goes straight to Thous. Thous begins to worry about the strike amongst the Fish People and realises Zaroff is mad. He immediately orders him to stop his plans, but this angers Zaroff, who shoots Thous and his royal protectors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iola_Leroy"title="Iola Leroy">
In a North Carolina town which is only identified as "C—", a group of slaves led by Robert Johnson seek refuge with the Union army that is approaching in the course of the Civil War. Robert's friend Tom Anderson then informs the Union commander of a beautiful young woman held as a slave in the neighborhood, who is subsequently set free by the commander.In a retrospective, the narrative turns to the story of that woman, Iola Leroy. Her father, Eugene Leroy, was a wealthy slaveholder, who had survived a serious illness through the care of a young slave, Marie. He set Marie free, married her and had three children, whose African ancestry was not visible in their outward appearance. The elder children, Iola and Harry, were educated in the North and their African ancestry (called "negro blood" in the book) was hidden from them. When Eugene suddenly died of yellow fever, his cousin, Alfred Lorraine, had a judge declare Marie's manumission void. Hence, Marie and her children were legally considered slaves and the heritage fell to Lorraine and other distant relatives. Lorraine sent his agent to the northern seminary where Iola was preparing for her graduation and defending the institution of slavery in discussions with her fellow students. Deceitfully being told that her father was dying, Iola followed the agent to her home, where she learned that she was a slave and was sold away from her mother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Cloud"title="The Black Cloud">
In 1964, astrophysicists on Earth become aware of a cloud of gas and dust, initially thought to be a Bok globule, that is heading for the solar system. The cloud, if interposed between the Sun and the Earth, could wipe out most of the life on Earth by blocking solar radiation and ending photosynthesis. A cadre of astronomers and other scientists is drawn together in Nortonstowe, England, to study the cloud and report to the British government about the consequences of its presence.The cloud unexpectedly decelerates as it approaches and comes to rest around the Sun, causing disastrous climatic changes on Earth and immense mortality and suffering for the human race. As the behaviour of the cloud proves to be impossible to predict scientifically, the team at Nortonstowe eventually come to the conclusion that it might be a life-form with a degree of intelligence. The scientists try to communicate with the cloud, and succeed. The cloud is revealed to be an alien gaseous superorganism, many times more intelligent than humans, which is surprised to find intelligent life-forms on a solid planet. It reconfigures itself to allow sunlight to return to the Earth and humanity is saved.Though its ill-effects on humanity have ceased, several governments are mistrustful of the cloud and prepare a nuclear attack upon it. When the scientists alert the cloud of this plot, it turns the missiles back upon their senders but does not otherwise retaliate. When the astronomers ask the cloud how its lifeform originated, it replies that they have always existed. One of the characters suggests this is incompatible with the Big Bang theory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Faceless_Ones"title="The Faceless Ones">
The TARDIS materializes on the runway of Gatwick Airport. The Second Doctor, Ben, Polly and Jamie emerge only to discover that they are in the path of an oncoming plane. They see a security officer coming for them, so they split up to flee him. Airport security confiscates the TARDIS after thinking the police are playing a practical joke on them. Polly ducks in the Chameleon Tours agency hangar, where she sees Spencer kill another man and report to his superior, Captain Blade. Polly flees, and runs into the Doctor and Jamie. After telling them what she saw, she brings them to the hangar. They examine the body and the Doctor notes that the victim was electrocuted by a weapon that can't possibly exist on Earth at that time. They leave to find someone in authority, and Blade captures Polly without the Doctor or Jamie noticing. He hides her along with the corpse before Jamie and the Doctor return with sceptical airport authorities.Alone again, Spencer revives an alien, a faceless green humanoid with prominent veins. Nurse Pinto brings in unconscious air traffic controller Meadows, and connects him to the alien and a machine. The alien transforms into a doppelgänger of Meadows, and goes to his airport job. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Macra_Terror"title="The Macra Terror">
The Doctor, Ben, Polly and Jamie reach an unnamed planet in Earth's colonial future, concerned about seeing a claw from observing the TARDIS's time scanner. Upon landing, they subdue a half-crazed colonist named Medok, who is promptly arrested by Security Chief Ola. The travellers are escorted by Ola to a colony which refines a poison gas they are mining for unknown reasons. The Doctor is troubled by the colony's forced festivities, remaining unconvinced by the promises of the Colony's Pilot and the well wishes of the mysterious Controller who appears on a monitor as a still image to welcome the colony's guests. After Medok is paraded before the colonists as an example, he escapes from his cell when the Doctor visits him to learn about the creatures that he sees infesting the colony at night. The Doctor weasels out of being arrested and sentenced to labour in the mine since he and his friends captured Medok in the first place before slipping away to find Medok, learning more of the colony's infestation by giant insects and the fact that those who see them are then hospitalised and reconditioned. The night curfew begins and the other time-travellers retire to their rest quarters. The Doctor and Medok use the opportunity to investigate, and find the giant crab-like Macra roaming the colony.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Web_of_Fear"title="The Web of Fear">
Following the events at the end of "The Enemy of the World", Jamie manages to close the TARDIS' doors, stabilising its flight. The TARDIS stalls in flight, however, as it is enshrouded in a web-like substance. The web clears, and the ship lands in a deserted Covent Garden tube station. The city outside appears completely abandoned.Approximately 40 years after "The Abominable Snowmen", an elderly Professor Travers accidentally reactivates a control sphere. The sphere inserts itself into an intact robot Yeti from Tibet at a private collection in London and escapes. In the following days, London is beset by thick fog and a deadly web-like fungus. Professor Travers is brought to the Second World War deep-level shelter under Goodge Street tube station, where his daughter Anne has asked for his help to defeat the menace.Moving through the underground train tunnels, the Second Doctor and his companions encounter the military, who are trying to stem the spread of the fungus by demolishing tunnels with explosives. Explosives laid at Charing Cross tube station are neutralised by the robot Yeti by smothering the explosion with the fungus. The reappearance of the Yeti signifies to the Doctor that the Great Intelligence has returned. While others in the shelters are suspicious of the Doctor and his companions, Professor Travers, recognising them from their encounter in Tibet, convinces Captain Knight that the Doctor will be key to defeating the Yeti.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enemy_of_the_World"title="The Enemy of the World">
The Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria are enjoying themselves on a beach in Australia in 2018 when the Doctor is subject to an assassination attempt. The boss of the would-be assassins, an agent named Astrid Ferrier, rescues them by helicopter and takes them to her boss Giles Kent. There, the Doctor learns he is a physical double of Salamander, a ruthless megalomaniac. Kent's home is surrounded by troops led by Security Chief Donald Bruce. The Doctor is persuaded to impersonate Salamander to save his companions and to gather more information. The Doctor's companions infiltrate Salamander's palace in Europe to gather evidence against him.Jamie and Victoria use their new roles in the palace to get close to Fariah, Salamander's food taster, hoping to gather information. Fariah reveals she was blackmailed into her role. Jamie causes a diversion to try to facilitate an unsuccessful rescue attempt on Denes by Astrid. Denes is shot dead. Though Astrid escapes, Jamie and Victoria are arrested.Salamander discovers he is being impersonated and returns to his research station to confront the impostor. Fariah tells The Doctor that Jamie and Victoria are prisoners in the Research Centre. Before they can act, the building is raided by Salamander's deputy Benik and his troops. Fariah is killed and the others escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fury_from_the_Deep"title="Fury from the Deep">
When the TARDIS lands in the sea off the eastern coast of England, the Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria investigate a nearby beach, which seems to have an improbably large amount of sea foam as well as a major gas pipe marked "Euro Sea Gas". When the Doctor examines the pipe using a sonic screwdriver, he thinks he hears a heartbeat from within. The trio are captured and put in a cell by Robson, a ruthless gas refiner who heads a pumping operation with a network of rigs spanning the North Sea. His second-in-command is Harris, a scientist. Robson is unnerved by the loss of contact with gas drilling Rig D at sea, plus an unexplained drop in the feed line from the rigs. The Doctor suggests that the supposed heartbeat could be a creature inside the pipe and suggests that the gas flow be suspended while he investigates, but Robson refuses to do so, and has Harris lock up the travellers.Harris believes Robson's pride is making him refuse to shut off the gas flow in order to properly investigate the feed lines, but his calculations are mysteriously gone from his briefcase. Thinking he has left the file in his desk at home, he asks his wife to look for it and bring it to him. The file is on the desk, but when she opens it, Mrs. Harris is pricked by a sharp piece of seaweed. She falls ill, and Harris ends up asking the Doctor for assistance after Victoria has helped the travellers escape from their cell by picking the lock with her hairpin. Meanwhile, Mrs. Harris is visited by Mr. Oak and Mr. Quill, technicians from the command centre who have already been infected by the seaweed, and have long green tendrils growing along their arms and backs of their hands. The men render Mrs. Harris unconscious by attacking her with noxious gas from their mouths, then leave. Arriving after, the Doctor can't determine what's wrong with Mrs. Harris, but his suspicions are aroused by the seaweed, and he, Jamie and Victoria return to the TARDIS to study it. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wheel_in_Space"title="The Wheel in Space">
The explosion of the mercury fluid link forces the Second Doctor and Jamie to evacuate the TARDIS to avoid mercury fumes, and until the mercury can be replaced, the spacecraft is marooned. They find themselves on a space vessel, deserted apart from a Servo-Robot. The robot detects the intruders and redirects the rocket from aimless wandering. The shock of a course change causes the Doctor to hit his head, concussing him. The robot also releases a group of egg-shaped white pods into space, which direct themselves toward a nearby spaceship shaped like a giant wheel, attaching themselves to its exterior. When the robot becomes aggressive, Jamie destroys it, but the Doctor is very weak and collapses.The Wheel is an Earth space station observing phenomena in deep space and is staffed with a small international crew. The crew are concerned by the sudden drops in pressure, which, unbeknown to them, coincide with the pods attaching themselves to the exterior of the Wheel. Controller Jarvis Bennett is also worried that the Silver Carrier, a missing supply vessel eighty million miles off course, has suddenly turned up nearby and is not responding to radio contact. He decides to destroy it with the Wheel's x-ray laser.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lajja_(novel)"title="Lajja (novel)">
"Lajja" is a response of Taslima Nasrin to anti-Hindu riots that erupted in parts of Bangladesh, soon after the demolition of Babri Masjid in India on 6 December 1992. The book subtly indicates that communal feelings were on the rise, the Hindu minority of Bangladesh was oppressed, and secularism was under shadow.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Minpins"title="The Minpins">
Little Billy is forbidden by his mother to do a lot of things, including entering the Forest of Sin behind his house./ She tells him of the Whangdoodles, Hornswogglers, Snozzwangers and Vermicious Knids (creatures first mentioned in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and "Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator") that live in the forest. Worst of all is the Terrible Blood-Suckling Tooth-Pluckling Stone-Chuckling Spittler, who chases his prey while clouds of hot red smoke pour out of his nose, and then swallows them up in one gulp. Little Billy doesn't believe his mother, and the Devil whispers to Little Billy that the monsters don't exist, and there is a plethora of luscious wild strawberries in the forest. Soon, Little Billy is walking through the forest when he hears something coming after him, and runs to escape it. As he looks back, he sees puffs of orange-red smoke catching up with him.He escapes what he is sure must be the Spittler by climbing up a tree as high and as fast as he can. When he comes to rest, he notices windows opening all over the branches, and discovers a whole city of little people, the Minpins, living inside the tree. The leader of the Minpins, Don Mini, tells Little Billy that the monster waiting under the tree is not the Spittler (which the Minpins have never heard of), but the Red-Hot Smoke-Belching Gruncher, who grunches up everything in the forest. It seems that there is no way for Little Billy to safely get down from the tree and return home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_English"title="Pigeon English">
The novel begins with the death of a young boy on the fictional Dell Farm estate in an unspecified area of London. Harrison Opoku or 'Harri', is a recent Ghanaian immigrant living with his mother and sisters. He becomes an amateur detective and tries to solve the murder of a boy who was murdered outside of a fast food restaurant. His experiences also illustrate the problems of gang warfare, immigration to the United Kingdom and poverty. As well as investigating the murder with his best friend Dean, Harrison shares with the reader his thoughts, impressions and experiences of growing up in an environment beset with pressures and threats. The novel explores his attempts to remain good despite the corrupting forces around him. Harrison then befriends a pigeon, which narrates part of the book.Eventually, he traces the murderers as a gang of teenagers, only to be murdered at the end.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Sex"title="The First Sex">
## The "Gynecocratic" World.In the first part of "The First Sex", Gould Davis used evidence from archaeology and anthropology to support a theory of matriarchal prehistory. The chapters in this section of the book focus on individual parts of the evidence for peaceful matriarchal queendoms: three are titled "Mythology Speaks", "Anthropology Speaks" and "Archaeology Speaks". Gould Davis said that the "loss of paradise" when the "Great Goddess" was replaced by a vengeful male deity is the theme of all surviving myth. She argued that evidence from the Neolithic site at Çatal Hüyük showed there to be no wars or even violent death, and that even physical injury to animals may not have been permissible there. She pointed to other parts of the Mediterranean in which female tombs are preserved more carefully than male ones, and took this to be evidence of female primacy. In "Anthropology Speaks", Gould Davis focused on taboos, chiefly incest, and aimed to show how taboos against brother-sister relationships acted to protect women against violent men. She also argued that menstrual blood was originally sacred rather than polluting or "unclean", and that only when people began to eat meat did men become bigger than women, because of selection of weak women by men.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_(novel)"title="Voyage (novel)">
The book tells the story in flashbacks during the actual Mars mission of the chronicalised history until the mission's beginning. The point of divergence for this alternate timeline happens on 22 November 1963, where John F. Kennedy survived the assassination (Jacqueline Kennedy was killed, hence the renaming of the Kennedy Space Center as the Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center), but was crippled and thus incapacitated, as Lyndon B. Johnson is still sworn in. On 20 July 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Joe Muldoon walk on the Moon, and Nixon's "most historic phone call" is joined by a call from former President Kennedy, committing the United States to send a crewed mission to Mars, which Nixon backs as part of his fateful decision to decide the future of crewed spaceflight, instead of deciding on the Space Shuttle program as he did in our timeline.Preparations for this new goal include slashing the number of Moon landings so funding and leftover Apollo spacecraft hardware can go towards the efforts of the crewed Mars mission. Apollo 12 still lands, Apollo 13 still suffers its disaster, but Apollo 14 is crewed by the astronauts of the cancelled Apollo 15 mission to carry out the scientific experiments on the lunar surface, and is the last crewed Moon landing. At the same time, the NERVA program is revived to become the chosen Mars spacecraft development, with larger tests in Nevada, but without containment and plagued with engineering problems.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fool's_Progress"title="The Fool's Progress">
After Henry Lightcap's third wife storms out of the house and his life, boozing, misanthropic anarchist Lightcap shoots his refrigerator and decides to drive across the country journeying to his childhood home in West Virginia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Feather"title="The White Feather">
Sheen, a studious and inconspicuous member of the Sixth form at Wrykyn, and his friend Drummond, a more popular student and boxer, go to the nearby town. They come across a fight in progress between Wrykyn students and some local boys over the upcoming election for the town's mayor. Drummond joins in the fight to help the Wrykyn side, but Sheen runs away. Drummond disapproves of Sheen running away and shuns Sheen later, but does not reveal to the other students that Sheen fled. However, Stanning, another boxer and Sheen's rival for the in-school Gotford scholarship, saw Sheen run and tells others about it. The students in Sheen's house, Seymour's, believe Sheen disgraced the house with his cowardice, and punish him by acting as if he does not exist. Sheen feels isolated and wants to restore his reputation.Sheen goes back to the town with the idea of fighting the town hooligans and regaining his honour, but is easily defeated. Joe Bevan, a boxing trainer and former champion, breaks up the fight and saves Sheen from being seriously injured. Impressed with Sheen's determination, Joe suggests that Sheen start training with him to learn boxing. Sheen starts his lessons with Joe at the Blue Boar, an inn up the river Severn. That area of the river has been designated out of bounds for students who live at the school. Sheen secretly goes to the pub using a boat on the river. He is eager to learn from Joe and becomes more confident as he improves. One day while he is at the inn, his boat disappears as a result of the feud between the boys in the school and those in town. Sheen gets help going to and from the pub from Jack Bruce, a modest day-boy at Wrykyn who is still friends with Sheen and drives a car.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_(Michener_novel)"title="Space (Michener novel)">
The story begins in 1944 and covers more than 30 years in the lives of four men and their families: Dieter Kolff, a German rocket engineer who worked for the Nazis; Norman Grant, a World War II hero turned U.S. Senator from the fictional Midwestern state of Fremont; Stanley Mott, an aeronautical engineer charged with a top-secret U.S. government mission to rescue Kolff from Peenemünde; and John Pope, a small-town boy turned Naval Aviator who becomes a test pilot and then an astronaut. Randy Claggett, a rambunctious Marine Corps aviator and astronaut, is considered by Michener to be the most important supporting character (the first two parts of the book are entitled "Four Men" and "Four Women"). The lives of the fictional characters interweave with those of historical figures, such as Wernher von Braun and Lyndon Johnson. A group of trainee astronauts are introduced to fly fictional but plausible Project Gemini and Project Apollo missions; the intensive training and jockeying for position among the astronauts forms much of the background of the middle of the novel, reminiscent of a fictional version of Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff" and the movie as well.Michener dramatizes the life experiences of these men and their families against the backdrop of the real history of the U.S. space program, depicting their experiences in post-war aviation; the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union; the development of congressional funding for the space program; the early failures in the Gemini program; and the successful moon landings in the Apollo program. In a fictional postscript to history, Michener creates a last, "Apollo 18" launch to further the drama of Pope, Claggett and Linley, America's first black astronaut. This is the only Apollo mission in which the lunar module lands on the far side of the Moon; in order to remain in contact with NASA after landing, while still in lunar orbit the Apollo craft must launch communication satellites that will bounce the lunar module's signals to Earth. An exceptional and unexpected burst of sunspot activity results in the death of Claggett and Linley: the two astronauts are exposed to a lethal level of radiation while out on the lunar surface during a large solar flare. After hastily returning to the Lunar Module, Linley loses consciousness and Claggett attempts an emergency ascent back towards the command module. However he also loses consciousness, and the Lunar Module crashes back onto the lunar surface. Pope, the command module pilot, returns to Earth safely. The mission profile is significantly different from that of the real-world canceled mission that would have been Apollo 18.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_Maker"title="A History Maker">
Like Gray's "Poor Things" the novel takes the form of documentation written by the characters themselves in order to record their experiences for posterity: a Prologue and notes (which make up almost a third of the total text) by "the hero's mother", and the central portion of the book, which is a third person narrative written by its protagonist, Wat Dryhope. Wat finds himself dissatisfied with the lack of purpose in a life in which everything is provided by powerplants, bypassing any need for manual labour. He develops an unhealthy interest in the ancient history of twentieth-century wars and dictatorships when men's struggles had a purpose, leaving himself vulnerable to exploitation to a plot to destroy his world's way of life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porterhouse_Blue"title="Porterhouse Blue">
For the first time in five hundred years, the master of Porterhouse fails to name his successor on his deathbed before dying. He succumbs to a "Porterhouse Blue" - a stroke brought about by overindulgence in the college's legendary cuisine. Sir Godber Evans is appointed as his successor. Sir Godber, egged on by his zealous wife, Lady Mary, announces sweeping changes to the centuries of college tradition, much to the concern of Skullion and the Fellows, who plan a counter-attack on the proposed contraceptive machines, women students, and canteen.Meanwhile, the only research graduate student in the college, Zipser, visits the hard-of-hearing Chaplain and explains his fixation for Mrs Biggs, his middle-aged, large-breasted bedder. As the Chaplain is hard of hearing he requires Zipser to use a megaphone. To his intense embarrassment Zipser is overheard by members of the college who gather outside to listen. Mrs Biggs is not within earshot, but nevertheless has sensed that something is up from Zipser's awkward behaviour around her every time she comes to clean his room and especially when she teases him sexually, such as when she asks him to help take off her bright red PVC raincoat in the tight confines of the "gyp".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Altars_Everywhere"title="Little Altars Everywhere">
Author Rebecca Wells alternates between setting her short stories in the 1960s, when Siddalee Walker, daughter of Vivi, is growing up, and the early 1990s, when Sidda is grown and dealing with the consequences of her turbulent childhood. It is the prequel to the 1996 novel "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood". Each chapter is narrated by a different person (Little Shep, Sidda, Lulu, etc.).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre;_or,_The_Ambiguities"title="Pierre; or, The Ambiguities">
Pierre Glendinning Jr. is the 19-year-old heir to the manor at Saddle Meadows in upstate New York. Pierre is engaged to the blonde Lucy Tartan in a match approved by his domineering mother, who controls the estate since the death of his father, Pierre Sr. When he encounters the dark and mysterious Isabel Banford, he hears from her the claim that she is his half-sister, the illegitimate and orphaned child of his father and a European refugee. Pierre reacts to the story and to his magnetic attraction to Isabel by devising a remarkable scheme to preserve his father's name, spare his mother's grief, and give Isabel her proper share of the estate.He announces to his mother that he is married; she promptly throws him out of the house. He and Isabel then depart for New York City, accompanied by a disgraced young woman, Delly Ulver. During their stagecoach journey, Pierre finds and reads a fragment of a treatise on "Chronometricals and Horologicals" on the differences between absolute and relative virtue by one Plotinus Plinlimmon. In the city, Pierre counts on the hospitality of his friend and cousin Glendinning Stanley, but is surprised when Glen refuses to recognize him. The trio (Pierre, Isabel, and Delly) find rooms in a former church converted to apartments, the Church of the Apostles, now populated by impecunious artists, writers, spiritualists, and philosophers, including the mysterious Plinlimmon. Pierre attempts to earn money by writing a book, encouraged by his juvenile successes as a writer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_of_Bones"title="Debt of Bones">
During the war against D'Hara, a young woman meets with Zeddicus Zu'l Zorander, Wizard of the First Order, so that she can force him to pay a debt of bones he owes her and save her child. In so doing, she initiates the series of events leading up to the end of the war with D'Hara and the division of the Westlands, Midlands, and D'Hara by the boundaries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Secrets_of_the_Ya-Ya_Sisterhood"title="Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood">
When Siddalee and Vivi Walker, an utterly original mother-daughter team, get into a savage fight over a New York Times article that refers to Vivi as a "tap-dancing child abuser," the fall-out is felt from Louisiana to New York to Seattle. Siddalee, a successful theatre director with a huge hit on her hands, panics and postpones her upcoming wedding to her lover and friend Connor McGill. But Vivi's intrepid gang of life-long girlfriends, the Ya-Yas, sashay in and conspire to bring everyone back together.In 1932, Vivi and the Ya-Yas were disqualified from a Shirley Temple Look-Alike Contest for unladylike behavior. Sixty years later, they're "bucking seventy," and still making waves. They persuade Vivi to send Sidda a scrapbook of girlhood mementos entitled "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood."Sidda retreats to a cabin on Washington State's Olympic Peninsula, tormented by fear and uncertainty about the future, and intent on discovering a key to the tangle of anger and tenderness she feels toward her mother. But the album reveals more questions than answers, and leads Sidda to encounter the unknowable mystery of life and the legacy of imperfect love.With passion and a rare gift for language, Rebecca Wells moves from present to past, unraveling Vivi's life, her enduring friendships with the Ya-Yas, and the resulting reverberations on Siddalee. The collective power of the Ya-Yas, each of them totally individual and authentic, permeates this story of a tribe of Louisiana wild women impossible to tame.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blessing_Way"title="The Blessing Way">
Anthropologist and professor Bergen McKee comes to the Navajo Reservation to research tales of witches and visit his college friend, Joe Leaphorn. Leaphorn is a Navajo Tribal Police lieutenant. A young man, Luis Horseman, thinking he had killed a man in a fight, drops out of sight. His victim survives, so Leaphorn spreads the word at a trading post to entice Luis to come in. At the trading post, McKee and Leaphorn see a tall Navajo man buying a new hat. He tells them his old one was stolen, but, curiously, the expensive silver concho hatband on it was not stolen. Leaphorn says aloud, "Otherwise we'll go in there and get him", which the stranger hears. The next morning, the body of Luis is found near Ganado, Arizona; he had been suffocated with sand after being killed elsewhere. Leaphorn rues his statement, feeling it led to this murder. McKee and his colleague, J. R. Canfield, begin a joint field trip in the Lukachukai Mountains, the canyons of the west slope. They expect to meet Ellen Leon in Many Ruins canyon, as she seeks her fiancé, Dr. Hall. In the meantime, McKee also begins interviewing reservation residents, hoping to learn details about the Navajo witch. From Horseman's aunt Old Woman Gray Rocks he learns the Navajo Wolf is believed to be an outsider from another place. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alchemist_(novel)"title="The Alchemist (novel)">
An Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago dreams of a treasure while in a ruined church. He consults a Gypsy fortune-teller about the meaning of the recurring dream. The woman interprets it as a prophecy, telling the boy that he will discover a treasure at the Egyptian pyramids.After Santiago sets out, he meets an old king Melchizedek, or the king of Salem, who tells him to sell his sheep so as to travel to Egypt and accomplish his 'Personal Legend'. Early on his arrival in Africa, a man who claims to be able to take Santiago to the pyramids instead robs him of the money he had made from his flock. Santiago then has to work for a crystal merchant so to earn enough to get to the pyramids.Along the way, the boy meets an Englishman who has come in search of an alchemist and continues his travels with his new companion. When they reach an oasis, Santiago meets and falls in love with an Arabian girl named Fatima, to whom he proposes marriage. She promises to marry him only after he completes his journey. Frustrated at first, he later learns that true love will not stop nor must one sacrifice one's destiny to it, since to do so robs it of truth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Haunted_Showboat"title="The Haunted Showboat">
Nancy, Bess, and George travel to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, but they are then enveloped into a mystery involving an old showboat that is said to be haunted. Nancy then uncovers an imposter and searches for buried pirate gold.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clue_in_the_Old_Stagecoach"title="The Clue in the Old Stagecoach">
Nancy searches for an antique stagecoach that, according to legend, contains something of great value to the people of Francisville.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmet_for_My_Pillow"title="Helmet for My Pillow">
Beginning with boot camp in MCRD Parris Island, South Carolina, the story follows Leckie through basic training and then to New River, North Carolina where he is briefly stationed, and follows him to the Pacific.Leckie is assigned to the 1st Marine Division and is deployed to Guadalcanal, Melbourne Australia, New Guinea, Cape Gloucester, before being evacuated with wounds from the island of Peleliu. "Helmet for My Pillow" is told from an enlisted man's point of view; a reprint edition stated the book was about "the booze, the brawling, the loving on 72-hour liberty, the courageous fighting and dying in combat as the U.S. Marines slugged it out, inch by inch, across the Pacific."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsieur_(novel)"title="Monsieur (novel)">
Five characters in "Monsieur" (including Durrell, referred to as "D," of "Devil in the Details") claim to be the author of the book.In the first section, "Outremer" ("outre-mer," meaning overseas in French, and used to officially refer to former colonies that are now departments and territories of the "metropole"), protagonist Bruce Drexel is introduced, who is the chief narrator of the novel. (He shares certain characteristics with Durrell, such as working as a diplomat and press attaché.) He is returning to Provence after learning of the suicide of his lover, a man who was his brother-in-law. Drexel's wife has been institutionalized for mental illness for some time. He revisits Avignon with his friend Toby, while attending to the necessary funeral arrangements. He reminisces about his life with Piers and Sylvie. He recalls rich winter scenes when the three were first in love, as well as a novel written about them by Robin Sutcliffe. Another character, Aubrey Blanford, is noted briefly as having recently published a novel and gained fame from it.The second chapter, "Macabru," recounts Bruce, Piers, and Sylvie's journey into Egypt years earlier. There they meet Akkad, who initiates them into a Gnostic cult. Akkad takes them to Macabru, an oasis in the desert, to introduce them to the cult's rituals. They take an extended journey together on the Nile River in this section. (Durrell's second novel of the Quintet, "Livia," has characters make a river journey on the Rhone).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_from_Heaven"title="Penny from Heaven">
"Penny from Heaven" is the story of an eleven-year-old-girl named Barbara "Penny" Falucci. She believes that people call her Penny because her father, Alfred Falucci, loved the Bing Crosby song "Pennies from Heaven." After her father's death, Penny lives with her mother, Ellie, and grandparents, Me-Me and Pop-Pop. She has her old dog Scarlett O'Hara to play with, and Penny also loves to spend time with her father's Italian family.Her father was the oldest son of her grandmother Nonny, and the only one of her six children who was born in Italy. Penny does not know why both sides of her family are distant, or why nobody will tell her her father's real cause of death.Penny's best friend is her cousin, Frankie, who is a troublemaker. Once, he persuaded Penny to lie to her grandparents and go to the public pool against her strict mother's wishes. She does not allow her to do anything that Penny considers "fun." Frankie also steals and is frightened that he will go to jail.It is a surprise when her mother allows Penny to work in her Uncle Ralphie's meat store. Her favorite uncle, Dominic, works there as well. Though he is her favorite uncle, she sometimes wishes that he would be less eccentric. Many years ago, only Dominic supported Penny's parents' marriage while the rest of his family wanted him marry an Italian girl. Her uncle and her mom used to be good friends. Penny wants him to marry her mother and become her new father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maytrees"title="The Maytrees">
Literate Provincetown bohemians Toby and Lou Maytree meet and marry, have a son, and begin to grow old before Toby decides to leave for Maine to build a new life with a family friend. Toby and Lou remain estranged as the book follows both characters through life's progress: Lou raises their son and Toby and Deary develop a successful business. When Deary falls ill and Toby loses his ability to care for her, the families are reunited.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hattie_Big_Sky"title="Hattie Big Sky">
The novel is set during World War I. Hattie Brooks, a sixteen-year-old orphan who has tired of being shuttled between relatives she hardly knows, receives a letter from an uncle who has recently died. He leaves her all of his land, and Hattie travels to his farm in Montana to start life as a homesteader. She has less than a year to prove herself capable of taking care of the land. In the book we learn about Hattie through her letters to her friend Charlie who is at war, and to her Uncle Holt. One difficulty Hattie faces is being called upon, as a loyal American, to shun her kind neighbors because of their German descent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crow_Lake_(novel)"title="Crow Lake (novel)">
The death of their parents, when Kate is 7 years old, Bo a toddler, and her brothers in their late teens, threatens the family with dispersal and seems to spell the end of their parents' dream that they should all have a college education. Luke, the oldest but not the most academic, gives up a place at a teachers college in order to look after the two youngest and allow Matt, academically brilliant and idolised by Kate, to complete his schooling and compete for university scholarships.This sacrifice leads to much tension between the brothers. Both work intermittently for a neighbouring family, the Pyes, who for several generations have suffered from fierce conflicts between fathers and sons. In the final crisis, Matt, after winning his scholarships, discovers that he has made the meek and distressed daughter of the Pye household, Marie, pregnant; she also reveals that her father, Calvin Pye, has killed her brother, who was thought to have run away from home as several other Pye sons had done. Calvin Pye kills himself, and Matt has to give up his plans for education to marry Marie.Kate sees the loss of Matt's potential academic career as a terrible sacrifice, and is unable to come to terms with Marie or Matt thereafter. The dénouement of the adult Kate's story comes when she returns to Crow Lake for Matt and Marie's son's eighteenth birthday, introducing Daniel to her family for the first time. In the course of this visit, she is made to realise - first by Marie and then by Daniel - that Matt's loss though real was not the total tragedy she had always considered it, and that it is her sense of it as tragic that has destroyed her relationship with him. The book ends with her struggling to come to terms with this view of their past and present relationships; the struggle is left unresolved but the final tone is optimistic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara,_Daughter_of_the_Nile"title="Mara, Daughter of the Nile">
The story opens introducing the reader to Nekonkh, an Egyptian river boat captain on the Nile during the rule of Queen Hatshepsut. Nekonkh is on his way to Thebes, carrying his usual cargo and an unusual passenger, a supposed scribe's apprentice named Sheftu who seems to be someone more significant than he claims to be and occasionally alludes to replacing Hatshepsut on the throne with her younger half brother Thutmose, which is dangerous merely to mention. Nekonkh is waiting at the harbor in Menfe for Sheftu to return from an errand in town before the boat misses the tide.Living in the ancient city of Menfe, Mara is a slave with unusual talents; she can read and write, as well as speak Babylonian. She also has bright blue eyes, which is rare in Egypt. Mara's master is tight-fisted when it comes to feeding his slaves, so she augments her diet by sneaking away from her work and stealing bread in the marketplace. One such visit occurs right under Sheftu's nose, during which Mara reveals herself to be both exceptionally clever and, once her master has caught her, fluent in Babylonian. It develops that Sheftu is in Menfe in order to persuade a decorated general out of retirement and to place him in command of the Pharaoh's bodyguard, a mission which he successfully accomplishes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thongor_of_Lemuria"title="Thongor of Lemuria">
To rescue Princess Sumia and save her city, barbarian adventurer Thongor of Valkarth challenges the vampire-king Xothun, who has ruled the lost city of Omm for a thousand years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boot_Camp_(novel)"title="Boot Camp (novel)">
A fifteen-year-old boy named Garrett is picked up by a pair of bounty hunters and sent to a boot camp in upstate New York called "Lake Harmony". Upon his arrival, he learns that his parents have sent him to the facility because he refused to stop having intimate relationships with his former math teacher that was eight years older than him, Sabrina, along with other things including staying out too late, not being athletic enough, and occasionally smoking weed. Garrett is an incredibly bright and clever kid, although he tends to miss school as he thinks that he does not need to attend daily to uphold his grades. His parents are at most, distant. Garrett does not believe he belongs at Lake Harmony, but he is not allowed to leave until he has admitted his "mistakes" and conforms to the facility's standards of behavior. Staff members are authorized to use "any force necessary" to alter his behaviour, including physical and psychological abuse.After attempting to talk his way out with no success, he realizes escape is his only option. He escapes Lake Harmony with two friends, Pauly and Sarah, after using chemicals to start a fire. They reach the Canada–US border to escape from legal recapture, and their pursuers' boat begins to sink. He lets his friends out on the other side of the border, and then rescues his pursuers, who bring him back to Lake Harmony, where he is beaten senseless repeatedly. The director announces that all campers are being demoted, based on the privilege system they use, and to blame Garrett, so he is beaten yet again by the campers. Ultimately, he is "reformed". He begins to believe in the treatment, feeling no remorse when those around him are abused. When his mother comes to pick him up with an investigator, the investigator asks if he was beaten. He breaks down and says that he was, but deserved it. It is possible that these events caused him to suffer from PTSD, as he appears to suffer from a mental breakdown when admitting what has occurred.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cry_of_the_Owl"title="The Cry of the Owl">
Following a painful divorce from his wife Nickie, Robert Forester leaves New York and moves to small-town Langley, Pennsylvania, where he develops an obsession for 23-year-old Jenny Thierolf. He spies on her through her kitchen window, enjoying "the girl's placid temperament, her obvious affection for her rather ramshackle house, her contentment with her life". He is surprised when she invites him into her house after spotting him one night. Each seems to represent something more for the other than it appears, to embody a larger emotional force than a mere personality. Robert explains to his therapist: "'I have the definite feeling if everybody in the world didn't keep watching to see what everybody else did, we'd all go berserk. Left on their own, people wouldn't know how to live.'"Jenny sees their chance meeting as an act of fate and breaks off her engagement to hot-tempered Greg Wyncoop, who is resentful and begins spying on the pair; he plans to learn more about Robert so as to find a way to get even with him. Greg picks up information from Nickie as well, and she encourages him to find a way to punish her ex-husband. During the next weeks, Jenny pursues Robert, contacting him at his home and at his job at Langley Aeronautics. Robert is offered a promotion at work that requires him to relocate to another city, and he hopes this will put an end to Jenny's advances, which are making him increasingly uneasy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_for_the_Flowers"title="Hope for the Flowers">
It all starts when Stripe, the main character, first hatches from an egg. He begins his life by eating the leaf he was born on. He realizes that there must be "more" to life than just eating leaves. He senses there must be a way to get up into the sky. He searches for a way and finds himself at the base of a pillar made up of caterpillars. They are all struggling to get up into the sky as well. Here he meets Yellow who also wants to get up into the sky by climbing to the top of the pillar. But she feels bad about what must be done to achieve this goal. You have to literally step on and climb over all the other caterpillars who are also trying to reach the top of the pillar. The two of them eventually decide to stop climbing and go back down the pillar. They live together for a while. But Stripe's curiosity and unrest overcome him and he decides that he must get to the top of the pillar. Stripe says good-bye to Yellow. He focuses, adapts, and drives to reach the top, and eventually he succeeds at being on the top of the caterpillar pillar. This results in disillusionment, as he takes in a vast vista of other caterpillar pillars. Is this all there is at the top? He has not really gotten in to the sky. He just has a view of other caterpillars struggling to reach the top of their respective caterpillar pillars. Yellow, however, has followed her instincts, continues to eat and then spins a cocoon. She eventually emerges from the cocoon transformed into a butterfly and flies into the sky effortlessly. She has found the real answer to the feeling that there must be more to life than eating leaves, and who caterpillars really are. She is waiting for the disillusioned Stripe as he descends the pillar and eventually reaches the ground again. She shows Stripe her empty cocoon, and he eventually realizes what he needs to do. Stripe makes a cocoon of his own. Yellow waits for him. Stripe emerges transformed into a butterfly, and they fly off together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Appeal"title="The Appeal">
Mississippi attorneys Wes and Mary Grace Payton have battled New York City-based Krane Chemical in an effort to seek justice for Jeannette Baker, whose husband and son died from carcinogenic pollutants the company knowingly and negligently allowed to seep into their town's water supply. When the jury awards Baker $3 million in wrongful death damages and $38 million in punitive damages, billionaire stockholder Carl Trudeau vows to do whatever is necessary to overturn their decision and save the company's stocks.Since Mississippi Supreme Court justices are elected rather than appointed, Trudeau plots with Barry Rinehart of Troy-Hogan, a shady Boca Raton firm that deals only in judicial elections, to select a candidate who can defeat the liberal Sheila McCarthy. Their choice is Ron Fisk, a lawyer with no political experience or ambitions. He is naive enough to be impressed by the attention shown him by his backers, and does not question his source of funding or his campaign team's underhanded tactics. Rinehart also uses Clete Coley, a clownish third party candidate, to draw support away from McCarthy and then cede it to Fisk when he eventually withdraws from the race.Fisk defeats McCarthy and immediately votes against upholding several large settlements in cases brought before the court on appeal, and the Paytons expect he will do the same when their case comes up for review. What they do not anticipate is Fisk unexpectedly being forced to rethink his stance when his son is seriously injured by a defective product and left permanently impaired by a medical error. The issue of corporate responsibility affects him and his family on a personal level. However, even though Fisk feels that he has been used and tricked, he makes no move to do what is right, and has come to relish his new-found wealth and power. He sides with the big corporation and does not take any action for what happened to his son because he would "look silly."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_a_Colonial"title="Death of a Colonial">
A nobleman, last of his line, is executed and the crown prepares to seize his property. But a claimant to the estate appears, ostensibly from the American colonies, and Sir John is asked to investigate the validity of his claim.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graven_Images_(book)"title="Graven Images (book)">
The book is a collection of three supernatural-themed stories that all revolve around statues. In the first, titled "Binnacle Boy," a statue of a sailor boy on the deck of a boat is the only witness to the deaths of the entire ship's crew. "St. Crispin's Follower" is a comedy about a shoemaker's apprentice and his hopeless love for the town beauty. The final story is called "The Man of Influence." It tells the story of a starving artist who agrees to a job commissioned by a ghost.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahars_of_Pellucidar"title="Mahars of Pellucidar">
West is an associate of Dr. Kinsley, who has developed a teleportation beam that can also see events taking place 200 miles below the surface. When they see people about to sacrifice a beautiful woman, Christopher obtains a pocket knife and a red fire axe and has himself beamed down to rescue the woman. Due to his unusual weapon, West becomes known as Red Axe among the stone-age human beings of Pellucidar. The story deals with West's efforts to free his new-found friends from the tyranny of the Mahars.The region visited by West is apparently an area of Pellucidar different from that in which Burroughs set his stories, from which the Mahars were driven at the end of the second book in the series, "Pellucidar". Evidently there are other locales in which the reptiles are dominant. Therefore, West never runs into any of Burrough's human Pellucidarian characters, such as David Innes, Abner Perry, Dian the Beautiful, Ghak the Hairy One, or any of the others.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tulip_Touch"title="The Tulip Touch">
The story begins as Natalie Barnes, a girl who lived in hotels all her life, and her parents move to stay permanently in The Palace Hotel, where her father will be the manager. They meet Tulip Pierce, a charming, introverted girl who tells imaginative yet unbelievable stories - embellishments which Natalie's father refers to as "the Tulip touch".Tulip is seldom seen in Natalie's new school. As their relationship grows, Natalie notices the slight change in her friend's behaviour. Tulip was always unpopular and disliked amongst the other children, but that wasn't all. Soon, her games change from awkward and annoying to sadistic and often dangerous, such as tormenting strangers or endangering Natalie's younger brother Julius. Natalie finds out that Tulip's father is abusive to Tulip and her mother. Natalie's family are initially sympathetic towards Tulip, knowing the extent of the abuse to which Tulip and her mother are subjected. However, as her behaviour becomes more dangerous and erratic, Natalie's parents encourage her to end the friendship for their own good.Although other people seem mundane in comparison to Tulip's spontaneity and wild imagination, Natalie makes new friends. Meanwhile, Tulip's behaviour has grown more violent, stabbing bus seats and burning litter bins. When Tulip is not invited to the big Christmas party at The Palace, she manages to burn down the hotel, endangering Natalie's family and their guests.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood's_a_Rover"title="Blood's a Rover">
The book's title and epigraph is taken from a poem titled "Reveille" by A. E. Housman:Clay lies still, but blood's a rover;&lt;br&gt;Breath's a ware that will not keep.&lt;br&gt; Up, lad; when the journey's over&lt;br&gt;There'll be time enough for sleep.Ellroy's literary agent, Sobel Weber Associates, posted a brief blurb for "Blood's a Rover" on its website in September 2008. It mentioned the novel's three protagonists and briefly outlined some of the novel's major plot points. These include the reappearance of Howard Hughes and J. Edgar Hoover, FBI infiltration into militant black power groups, Mafia activity in the Dominican Republic, and "voodoo vibe in Haiti."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Pan_in_Kensington_Gardens"title="Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens">
Peter is a seven-day-old infant who, "like all infants", used to be part bird. Peter has complete faith in his flying abilities, so, upon hearing a discussion of his adult life, he is able to escape out of the window of his London home and return to Kensington Gardens. Upon returning to the Gardens, Peter is shocked to learn from the crow Solomon Caw that he is not still a bird, but more like a humanSolomon says he is crossed between them as a "Betwixt-and-Between". Unfortunately, Peter now knows he cannot fly, so he is stranded in Kensington Gardens. At first, Peter can only get around on foot, but he commissions the building of a child-sized thrush's nest that he can use as a boat to navigate the Gardens by way of the Serpentine, the large lake that divides Kensington Gardens from Hyde Park.Although he terrifies the fairies when he first arrives, Peter quickly gains favour with them. He amuses them with his human ways and agrees to play the panpipes at the fairy dances. Eventually, Queen Mab grants him the wish of his heart, and he decides to return home to his mother. The fairies reluctantly help him to fly home, where he finds his mother is asleep in his old bedroom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_White_Bird"title="The Little White Bird">
"The Little White Bird" is a series of short episodes, including both accounts of the narrator's day-to-day activities in contemporary London and fanciful tales set in Kensington Gardens and elsewhere.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Don't_Love_Me_Yet"title="You Don't Love Me Yet">
Lucinda Hoekke is an underemployed woman in her late twenties, playing bass in a fledgling Los Angeles rock group. There are three other members: Matthew, the group's lead singer and Lucinda's ex-boyfriend, who kidnaps a kangaroo from the local zoo to save it from boredom; Denise, the clear-headed drummer, works at "No Shame," a sex shop; and Bedwin, the group's composer and lead guitarist, who is very fragile and suffers from writer's block. Bedwin watches the same Fritz Lang movie repeatedly.Lucinda takes a job at a performance art project called, "Complaint Line," listening to anonymous callers talk about their grievances. She falls for a regular caller, initially known only as the "Complainer," who amuses her with his acerbic reflections about life and self-deprecating humor. She begins using his musings as song lyrics, inspiring her band to new heights of creativity. She becomes obsessed with the complainer, whose name is Carl, and begins an unstable all-consuming love affair with him.The band's unexpectedly successful performance at a loft party leads to an invitation to appear live on Los Angeles' leading alternative music radio program. However, Carl, who uses his lyrics to force his way into the band, disrupts their radio broadcast, leading to romantic and musical consequences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Nobody_Knows"title="The Man Nobody Knows">
In this book, Barton paints a picture of a strong Jesus, who worked with his hands, slept outdoors, and traveled on foot. This is very different from what he saw as the "Sunday School Jesus" — a physically weak, moralistic man, and the "lamb of God".Barton describes Jesus as "the world's greatest business executive", and according to one of the chapter headings, "The Founder of Modern Business", who created a world-conquering organization with a group of twelve men hand-picked from the bottom ranks of business.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diversion"title="The Diversion">
The Yeerks begin to realize the "Andalite bandits" are humans. The Animorphs discover the Yeerks have been testing the DNA patterns in the blood they have left in their countless battles. When they discover the traces of human DNA they begin running massive numbers of tests on blood which has been stored in the area in order to discover a genetic match or root out the Animorphs' families. Using this process, a genetic match between Tobias and his mother, Loren, is discovered and gives the Yeerks proof that at least some of the "Andalite bandits" are, in fact, human. They go through a brutal battle at the laboratory where they discover this information in which Marco is nearly killed. After they retreat to Cassie's barn, Jake orders that they all go home and "sleep on it." The Animorphs will meet in the morning to decide whether or not to evacuate their families, thereby revealing their identities and taking the fight into the open. This decision, however, later proves very costly for Jake.Tobias does not return to his meadow but goes to the address the blood databank gave for his mother. He is crestfallen to discover that it is only a few blocks from the house in which he lived with his uncle, yet his mother never once came to visit him or showed any interest in her son at all. Tobias easily spots that she is already being watched by the Yeerks. He observes Loren leaving the house with a seeing-eye dog and quickly realizes that Loren is blind. With the guide dog, Champ, she walks to a church where she apparently volunteers as a crisis phone line operator, and Tobias follows her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Masters_(novel)"title="Old Masters (novel)">
The book is set in Vienna on one day around the year of its publication, 1985. (p. 193) Reger is an 82-year-old music critic who writes pieces for "The Times". For over thirty years he has sat on the same bench in front of Tintoretto's "White-bearded Man" in the Bordone Room of the Kunsthistorisches Museum for four or five hours of the morning of every second day. He finds this environment the one in which he can do his best thinking. He is aided in this habit by the gallery attendant Irrsigler, who prevents other visitors from using the bench when Reger requires it.The book is narrated entirely by Atzbacher, who met Reger in the museum the day before and with whom Reger then arranged to meet again in the museum on this day - thus, exceptionally, visiting the museum on two consecutive days. They had arranged to meet in the Bordone Room at 11.30, but they both arrive early, and the first 170 pages of the book consist of Atzbacher's thoughts and recollections as he surreptitiously watches Reger in his usual position. These are dominated by Reger's thoughts and recollections, as previously related to Atzbacher. Atzbacher tells of the deaths of Reger's wife and sister, and of his contempt for various aspects of Austrian and occasionally German society, including Beethoven, Bruckner, Heidegger and Stifter, the state and "state artists" in general, and the sanitary condition of Viennese toilets. Reger considers the idea of a supposed "perfect" work of art to be unbearable, and so seeks to render them bearable by finding flaws within them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Green_Star"title="Under the Green Star">
One night the narrator sees a green star in the night sky, and casts his soul towards it. He finds a cloud-covered planet which revolves around it and sees that its surface is covered with trees that (from his perspective) seem several miles high. Later, he follows a retinue of humans riding on horse-sized (based on humans retaining earthly size, as he explains at one later point in the novel and another later in the series) dragonflies (which he finds out later are known as "") to a splendid city which sparkles like a jewel collection. One of the men in the retinue, cruel-faced and clad in bright yellow, presents a proposal (which the author cannot yet hear) to the ruler of the city, a princess who looks about 14.At that point, the author is drawn to a large man's body preserved inside a casket—which he revives to the consternation of the yellow retinue, and the cheers of the jewel-city's nobles.As he has taken the body of a man preserved for over a hundred years (whose soul was banished by a sorcerer), the author has to "relearn" Laonese, the universal language of the planet; he learns that the Jewel-city is known as Phaolon, considered the most splendid city on the planet; that its beautiful ruler is princess Niamh the Fair; that the yellow-clad man was Akhmim ruler of the rival city of Ardha (also known as "yellow city"). He is also "brought up to speed" (the body he took was that of a warrior named Chong The Mighty) on swords, bows, and other weapons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Green_Star_Calls"title="When the Green Star Calls">
This time, when he reaches the Green Star planet, he sees a boy about 16 spreadeagled to a branch with rawhide, so as to be killed by marauding animals (or to die of starvation, so his body may be scavenged). A huge scorpion or "phuol" attacks the boy and then withdraws (waiting for its venom to paralyse, so it can then consume his still-living flesh later).At that point, a man comes out from concealment behind branches, kills the "phuol" with a lightning-emitting wand, and rescues the boy in a sky-sled, which the narrator follows to a city which appears dead (later finding out this is so). The rescuer applies salves and injections to the boy, who dies during the night (known to the narrator, but not the rescuer) whereupon the narrator takes possession of the just-dead body; it takes him a little while to reconcile the memories of this new body, whose name he finds to be Karn the Hunter (of Red Dragon Tribe—the "Red Dragon" being a reference to the "ythid"), with his soul memories from his earlier incarnation as Chong The Mighty.Karn soon finds out that the dead city (known as Sotaspra) is a taboo area of the planet, only visited (or inhabited) by some scientists/savants such as his rescuer Sarchimus (self-titled "The Wise"). Indeed, Sarchimus considers all of the other savants of the city as rivals, chief of them Hume "Of The Many Eyes". Sarchimus warns Karn not to go exploring on his own—when Karn disobeys, he discovers the city is full of many mutant creatures, including a "death-fungus" which he narrowly misses, "crawler-vines" which try to strangle him and an amorphous creature Sarchimus calls "saloog", all of which were formed due to radiation from the crystals of which Sotaspra was constructed (when the crystals had energy, and the city was alive). Karn is astute enough to understand that Sarchimus did not rescue him for altruistic reasons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveller_(novel)"title="Traveller (novel)">
In his stable, Traveller, the favorite horse of retired Civil War general Robert E. Lee, relates the story of his life and experiences to his feline friend Tom. His narrative, meant to begin in the early spring of 1866, follows the events of the war as seen through a horse's eyes, from the time he was bought by General Lee in 1862 until Lee's death in 1870.At the end of the novel, Traveller, with undying faith in Lee, remains convinced that the Confederate Army beat the Union and that Lee is now "commander of the country" (versus his actual postbellum role as president of Washington University). Despite being led in Lee's funeral procession, Traveller does not understand that his master has died and will not return to ride again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_Glass_(novel)"title="Heart of Glass (novel)">
The A-List crew has finally graduated and everyone is looking forward to enjoying a carefree summer but Cammie and Anna get caught trespassing and are arrested. Fortunately, the girls only have to help run a charity fashion show for New Visions, an organization to help less-fortunate girls, for their community service. There, they meet a beautiful, petite girl named Champagne, an aspiring model. Virginia Vanderleer, the head of New Visions, warns Cammie and Anna that Champagne was accused of stealing a dress not too long ago and is not to be trusted. However, Cammie takes Champagne under her wing and promises to make her a star while Anna uses her East Coast connections to pull a deal with Lizbette Demetrius, an upscale cosmetics company CEO, who promises to attend the show in person to check out Champagne.Adam Flood has decided to spend the summer in Michigan and even tells Cammie that he might want to attend college there, much to her dismay. Cammie begins to flirt with Ben and the two almost kiss. Ben tells Cammie she has changed and if they ever get back together, it would be so much more than before. Dee is still with Jack Walker but she becomes concerned when their relationship is becoming too serious especially since she finds herself attracted to Aaron Steele, an acquaintance from Ojai.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_the_Light_of_the_Green_Star"title="By the Light of the Green Star">
As Karn ponders on how to get past Klygon (who Gurjan Tor had ordered to kill him in case of failure), Klygon then tells him that they should escape together—as Gurjan Tor will also kill Klygon a "master assassin" even more tortuously, and as Klygon has no wish to kill his only remaining true friend. The two escape on their black-painted "zaiphs" tethering them a short distance outside Ardha (as night travel is extremely dangerous). In the morning, they see a flight of Akhmim's warriors pursuing the sky-sled (which Karn knows they cannot catch, due to its speed exceeding that of any "zaiph"). When the two set out for Phaolon at a higher altitude, a huge shadow comes over them. Klygon looks toward the shadow's source which turns out to be a dinosaur-sized hawklike bird or "zawkaw". They attempt to flee from the "zawkaw" only to find that its speed exceeds that of their "zaiphs"; before fleeing Karn observes a beautiful (not in effeminate sense) bald, ebon-skinned human riding it. At that point, Karn finds the "zoukar" (an invention of the "kaloodha", the lightning-emitting wand which Sarchimus had used to kill the "phuol") and slays the "zawkaw", panicking its rider who falls from its back into the abyss. However, he and Klygon are not able to regain control of their "zaiphs" till these hit the forest floor (which kills the "zaiphs").
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Angel_of_the_Revolution"title="The Angel of the Revolution">
The story begins on September 3, 1903, with young man, Richard Arnold, twenty-six old scientist devoted heart and soul to the invention of flying machine, finally realizing his dream in the form of air-ship model that can fly on its own. However, living completely for his dream, he ended with no money to sustain even his next day's life, let alone do something practical with his revolutionary invention. The circumstances made him wander around the streets of London, until a stranger overheard his muttering about flying machine that he wouldn't want to put in hands of tyrants or for the use in war and destruction. The stranger introduced himself as Maurice Colston, and soon both men realized they share the same distaste for autocracy and the status quo as it was, placing themselves "at war with Society".With the arrangement of Colston, Arnold met with other heads of the "Brotherhood of Freedom", the revolutionary organization of anarchists, nihilists and socialists bent on ending the society of oppression and misery. Agreeing with their cause, he put his knowledge and skills at their disposal, while still keeping his complete control over the invention that will change the face of the Earth. During the meeting he met Natasha, the Angel of the Revolution, and immediately fell in love with her. However, the cause they have been set to achieve was of far greater importance so the romance between them had to wait for better times. Equipped by the Brotherhood with everything he needed, Arnold finished the construction of the first air-ship to ever fly the skies above Earth: the "Ariel".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Land_Leviathan"title="The Land Leviathan">
The story of Oswald Bastable's adventures "trapped forever in the shifting tides of time" is framed with the concept of the book being a long lost manuscript, as related by Moorcock's grandfather. Several years after Bastable disappeared in 1910, the elder Moorcock travels to China in an attempt to track him down, meeting Una Persson of the Jerry Cornelius novels on the way who before disappearing leaves him a manuscript written by Bastable for Moorcock, relating what happened to Bastable after he unexpectedly left the elder Moorcock at the end of "Warlord of the Air", probably bound for another alternate 20th century.Bastable's story takes in a post-apocalyptic early twentieth century between 1904 and 1908, where Western Europe and the United States have been devastated by accelerated technological change caused by a prolific Chilean inventor, which led to a prolonged global war causing their reversion to barbarism. By contrast, South Africa, rechristened Bantustan, is ruled by President Mohandas Gandhi, has never had apartheid, and is an oasis of civilisation which stayed out of the conflict being an affluent, technologically advanced nation in this alternate, anti-imperialist twentieth century. To restore civilisation and social order in the afflicted Northern Hemisphere, a 'Black Attila', General Cicero Hood, leads an African army to beneficent if paternalist conquest of Europe and an apocalyptic war against the United States featuring the "vast, moving ziggurat of destruction" of the title.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Steel_Tsar"title="The Steel Tsar">
In a story introduced by the ubiquitous Una Persson (who is also found in other works by Moorcock), the trilogy's hero, Captain Oswald Bastable, finds himself in an alternative twentieth century in which the Confederate States of America won the American Civil War and neither the First World War nor the October Revolution ever occurred. Over the course of the story Oswald witnesses the destruction of Singapore at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Aerial Navy, is imprisoned on Rishiri Island, joins the Russian Imperial Airship Navy and is sent to put down the rebellious Cossacks who follow the theocratic demagogue known as the 'Steel Tsar': Iosif Djugashvili. He also experiences a repeat of events from the first novel as he is assigned to drop an atomic bomb on the anarchist Nestor Makhno and his Black Flag Army, but ultimately this does not happen; the bomb is turned against the Steel Tsar's own forces and Makhno survives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nomad_of_the_Time_Streams"title="A Nomad of the Time Streams">
## "Warlord of the Air".In the first book, "Warlord of the Air", Bastable finds himself transported to an alternate late-20th century Earth where the European powers did not stir each other into a World War and in which the mighty airships of a British Empire on which the sun never sets are threatened by the rise of new and terrible enemies. These enemies turn out to be the colonized peoples trying to break free, supported by anarchist and socialist Western saboteurs opposing their own imperialist societies, and led by a Chinese general whose country is still nominally under Western control and ravaged by civil war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nebuly_Coat"title="The Nebuly Coat">
The book tells of the experiences of a young architect, Edward Westray, who is sent to the remote town of Cullerne to supervise restoration work on Cullerne Minster. He finds himself caught up in Cullerne life, and hears rumours about a mystery surrounding the claim to the title of Lord Blandamer, whose coat of arms in the Minster's great transept window is the nebuly coat of the title. When the new Lord Blandamer arrives, promising to pay all the costs of the restoration, Westray suspects that the new lord is not what he seems."The Telegraph" said the book "could strike the careless reader as no more than a curiosity, a bit of amateur work. Yet this would be a mistake."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_Fell"title="Troll Fell">
Troll Fell tells the story of young Peer Ulfsson, whose shipbuilder father has just died, and who is taken to live with his two wicked uncles, Balder and Grim, in a water mill under the shadow of Troll Fell, a mountain inhabited by trolls.Peer's uncles make him do all the work around the mill, and at first he despairs, especially when he meets Granny Greenteeth, the sinister water-spirit who lives in the millpond. However, he is aided by the Nis (Norwegian Nisse), a mischievous though unpredictable house-spirit. His other friends are his dog, Loki, and Hilde, the pretty and confident daughter of Ralf Eiriksson, a nearby farmer.Ralf has sailed away on the Viking ship which Peer's father built. In his absence, Peer and Hilde discover the plot which his two uncles are hatching: to sell children as slaves to the trolls, in exchange for gold. When Hilde's little brother and sister, Sigrid and Sigurd, are stolen away under cover of a blizzard, Peer and Hilde go together into the tunnels and under the mountain in an attempt to bring them back.At the climax of the story, at a troll banquet when the troll king raises the top of the mountain on four red pillars, Peer is faced with the decision either to escape alone, or stay forever under the mountain with Hilde. Meanwhile, Ralf has returned from his voyage and, along with his crew and many of the neighbours, forces his way into the troll banqueting hall. There is a stand-off with the trolls. Finally Peer discovers a way to trick the king into making his uncles stay under the mountain in his and Hilde's place, and in gratitude Ralf invites him, with Loki and the Nis, to live with Hilde's family at the farm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_the_Sea"title="Invasion of the Sea">
"Invasion of the Sea" takes place in a future 1930s and follows the story of European engineers and their military escort who seek to revive an actual 19th century proposal to flood the Sahara desert with waters from the Mediterranean Sea to create an inland "Sahara Sea" for both commercial and military purposes. The French military escort, led by Captain Hardigan, meet with conflict from Tuareg Berber tribes who fear the new sea will threaten their nomadic way of life. The Berber tribes, led by the warlord Hadjar, begin an insurgency campaign against the Europeans in an effort to derail their plans for the inland sea. Captain Hardigan attempts to retaliate against the Berbers and bring Hadjar to justice. Ultimately, however, a disastrous earthquake strikes. This earthquake floods the Sahara to an extent beyond even limits which were proposed by the Europeans, and drowns the insurgent Tuaregs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sébastien_Roch_(novel)"title="Sébastien Roch (novel)">
That is the emotional story of "the murder of a child’s soul" by a Jesuit priest, a teacher at the private school for boys of Saint-François-Xavier in Vannes, Brittany, where Mirbeau spent four painful years as a pupil, before being expelled, at the age of fifteen, in suspicious circumstances.At age eleven, Sébastien is sent to boarding school by his father, an ironmonger and terrible snob. The boy does not fit into the school and its aristocratic and wealthy students. He is ignored by nearly everyone until an abusive priest starts to befriend him. The innocent 13-year-old boy is seduced, then sexually abused, by Father de Kern. Sébastien is expelled along with his only friend Bolorec, the boys having been accused of indulging in inappropriate sexual acts. The charges have been trumped up by Father de Kern.Sébastien's life is ruined and he is unable to hold down a job or make friends. He cannot even build a relationship with Marguerite, his childhood sweetheart. Aged twenty one, Sébastien is absurdly killed during the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, his body being carried from the battlefield by Bolorec.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_Mill"title="Troll Mill">
The hero Peer Ulffson now lives with his friend Hilde and her family. One evening on the beach, having just returned from a fishing trip in stormy weather, he is horrified when a neighbour's young wife, Kersten, pushes her newborn child into his arms before throwing herself into the sea. As he carries the baby home through the windy night, he sees the old deserted mill mysteriously working away ‘all by itself’.Rumours abound in the village that Kersten was a seal woman, and that her husband Bjørn the fisherman, Peer's friend and mentor, is now cursed, doomed to die at sea. As he struggles to understand these mysteries and protect the vulnerable ‘seal-baby’ from the predatory water spirit Granny Greenteeth, Peer must also learn to cope with his feelings for Hilde, and try to carve out a future for himself.As in the first book of the trilogy, Troll Fell, Langrish uses a variety of folklore motifs such as the Orkney legends of seal people or selkies to create an unusual and believable fantasy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/À_vau-l'eau"title="À vau-l'eau">
The work - which has little in the way of plot - tells the story of Jean Folantin, a downtrodden Parisian civil service clerk whose quest for even a modicum of happiness or material comfort always ends in failure. The book chronicles Folantin's everyday disappointments, typified by his search for a decent meal (there are numerous descriptions of the disgusting food he has to eat). At the end of the novella, Folantin pessimistically resigns himself to giving up hope and "going with the flow":"...he realised the futility of changing direction, the sterility of all enthusiasm and all effort. 'You have to let yourself go with the flow; Schopenhauer is right', he told himself, '"Man's life swings like a pendulum between pain and boredom". So there's no point trying to speed up or slow down the rhythm of its swings; all we can do is fold our arms and try to get to sleep...'" (Brown translation p.57)"À vau-l'eau" is a key work in Huysmans' literary development. It is the last book written in the author's early Naturalist style, with its unflinching depiction of sordid everyday reality, but several features point the way forward to the radical departure marked by Huysmans' next - and most famous - novel, "À rebours". Huysmans later noted the similarities between Monsieur Folantin and Des Esseintes, the aristocratic hero of "À rebours":I pictured to myself a M.Folantin, more cultured, more refined, more wealthy, than the first, and who has discovered in artificiality a specific for the disgust inspired by the worries of life and the American manners of our time. I imagined him winging his way to the land of dreams...living alone and apart, far from the present-day world, in an atmosphere suggestive of more cordial epochs and less odious surroundings". (Quoted in the introduction to Brown, p.xii)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Whisper_of_Glocken"title="The Whisper of Glocken">
The story begins in Watergap which is the twelfth village along the Watercress river. Beginning with Glocken, the village bell ringer, the villagers begin to notice that their village is flooding. The flooding is unnatural even taking into account the recent heavy rains. The villagers soon realize that they must flee their village to escape being drowned by the flood.During the evacuation a group of five villagers come together who will become Kendall's central heroes. First of these is Glocken, the town bell ringer who has become obsessed with adventure after reading the account of the battle against the mushrooms; Scumble, the town fish presser and sluice gate keeper; Crustabread the loner; Gam Lutie, a village elder who is overly concerned about her family treasure; and a minnipin woman name Silky.These five minnipins travel down the flooded river to Slipper on the Water, the town in which the heroes of "The Gammage Cup" live, Glocken is excited that he will finally meet these heroes at last. When they arrive at Slipper on the Water, they are taken in by the villagers. During the beginning of their stay, he briefly meet each of the heroes but fails to recognize them for who they are. After being fed soup he is taken to the house of Mingy and Muggles to sleep.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Mist"title="Into the Mist">
Alexa Daley is sailing on the Warwick Beacon with two of her closest companions, Roland Warvold, and Yipes. As the story progresses Roland decides to tell Alexa and Yipes of his and his brother, Thomas Warvold's, past. Going into detail of how they escaped from the House on the Hill, how they crossed the Lake of Fire, how they climbed to the top of the Wakefield House, and lastly how they came to be travelers by Land and by Sea. He tells them of Sir Alistair Wakefield and of the knowledge and years they spent him, and he also tells them of a very close friend called [Thorn], a mountain lion. As the story ends Roland finally tells Alexa and Yipes of the Five Stone Pillars and the Lost Children who live on them. Roland tells them that Abbadon is in the form of a sea monster and that he has followed them to the Five Stone Pillars to take control over them, thus ending the story and starting on "Stargazer".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cure_for_Cancer"title="A Cure for Cancer">
Jerry inhabits a world at war with itself and, armed only with an occasional "vibragun" appears to fight "against history" for the freedom of "randomness" against the straitlaced conventions exemplified by his brother Frank. In the end Jerry's quest, oblique as it is, is perhaps more artistic than political.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Una_Persson_and_Catherine_Cornelius_in_the_20th_Century"title="The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the 20th Century">
Catherine Cornelius and Una Persson (usually supporting characters in the Jerry Cornelius novels) grow bored of their current tranquil existence together as lovers and separate in search of adventure. Their stories are told in parallel from this point until the end, where they rejoin and the story begins again.Catherine, generally portrayed in a saintly and/or martyred role moves through a series of relationships in which she is abused or dominated by her partner. She attempts at one point to get Jerry Cornelius (her brother and sometimes her lover) to beat her, but he is unable to satisfy her.Una Persson, who ordinarily fills Jerry's role as the eternal revolutionary when he is unwilling or unable to, embroils herself in a series of revolutionary wars - always on the losing side.At the end, Una begins to despair of the situation in which she has found herself, and is rescued by Catherine who takes her back to the cottage they shared at the start of the novel to recuperate. This is an inversion of their roles throughout the book, as up until that point Una has been an active combatant and Catherine has been increasingly dominated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudy_with_a_Chance_of_Meatballs"title="Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs">
Inspired by an incident while making pancakes at breakfast, a grandfather tells a bedtime story, chronicling the lives of the citizens of an imaginary town called Chewandswallow, which is characterized by food raining from the sky. The grandchildren are named Henry and Kate (though the narrating girl —unnamed in this book— receives her name in the sequels).As the story goes, Chewandswallow was mostly like any average small town but because the sky provided all the food, the town was devoid of food stores. Unlike typical weather, the weather over Chewandswallow always consisted of food, and came three times a day, at breakfast, lunch, and dinnertime. The town also had a sanitation department; a food-cleaning service that would clean up food that was leftover. It also fed the fallen food to the dogs, cats, land wildlife and sealife, and also used other leftovers to enrich garden soil. For the residents of Chewandswallow, this was a much better arrangement.Life was happy in the town of Chewandswallow; but suddenly, the weather took the townspeople in a turn for the worse. The weather began to create problems for the town with events such as a flood of spaghetti creating a tangle in a traffic intersection, Gorgonzola cheese raining down for a whole day, and a pea soup fog.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wrong_Side_of_the_Sky"title="The Wrong Side of the Sky">
Jack Clay, an ex-Royal Air Force military transport makes a threadbare living flying charter cargo flights of dubious legitimacy around the Mediterranean and other parts of Europe in an old Douglas DC-3. His dreams of having his own aeroplane and own charter company are rapidly fading due to age and lack of money, but at least he is flying. While in Athens, Greece he has a chance encounter with an old wartime friend and rival pilot, Ken Kitson, when the latter lands in a luxurious private Piaggio P.166.Kitson is personal pilot to the immensely wealthy former-Nawab of Tungabhadra in Pakistan, who is searching the world for his family's heirloom jewels that had been stolen by a British charter pilot during the Partition of India. However, the Nawab is not the only one looking for the missing jewels, and is not the only one who would cheat, steal or murder to find them first.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Plus_One"title="Midnight Plus One">
Lewis Cane is an ex-SOE operative who worked with the French Resistance against Nazi Germany. He stayed in Paris after the end of World War II, making a somewhat precarious living as a business expediter. One day he is approached by a lawyer, Henri Merlin, a former resistance comrade, with a job: a wealthy international financier, Maganhard, needs to be driven from Brittany to Liechtenstein in secrecy and within three days. The fact that the French Sûreté have an open arrest warrant out on Maganhard seems like a simple problem. However, when half the hit-men in Europe start gunning for them, things get complicated quickly. As Cane races the clock, the police, and the assassins across France and Switzerland, whom can he trust? Maganhard's alcoholic and troubled bodyguard? Maganhard's mysterious private secretary who seemingly goes out of her way to create problems? Or his former Resistance contacts, who might or might not sell him out for the highest price?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_with_Pistol"title="Venus with Pistol">
Gilbert Kemp is dealer specializing in antique guns in London with a somewhat dubious background. He is approached by the mysterious Carlos MacGregor Garcia, a Nicaraguan and his employer, the very wealthy ex-professional tennis player Doña Margarita Umberto, who are traveling around Europe buying oil paintings to form a private collection which they allege will be donated to the Nicaraguan people. However, as many of the works are to be acquired from private collectors who do not wish the sale to be made public, and as many European governments would block the export of the historically valuable paintings, Kemp's services are needed in order to smuggle the paintings into Switzerland, from where they will be transported to Nicaragua in the diplomatic pouch.It seems like a straightforward matter of art smuggling until Kemp is mugged on arrival in Zürich, and a priceless Cézanne is stolen. On his next commission in Amsterdam, he helps obtain an un-catalogued work of Vincent van Gogh, but the art expert certifying the painting is soon brutally murdered. Things heat up in Venice and culminate in Vienna where Kemp finally unravels the web of treachery and deceit that he has unwittingly stumbled into.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moffats"title="The Moffats">
"The Moffats" are a fatherless family in Cranbury, Connecticut, which Estes modeled after her hometown of West Haven. Mama is a dressmaker with four children: Sylvie, Joey, Janey and Rufus. The two youngest, ten-year-old Janey and five-year-old Rufus, are the focus of these stories. When the book opens, Janey watches as a strange man nails a For Sale sign on their house. They have lived there since shortly after her father died, and Janey cannot imagine living anywhere else. Mama tells the children not to worry about it until it sells.Each chapter in the book tells of one simple adventure the children had. For instance, when the first day of school arrives and Rufus goes to kindergarten, he takes very seriously the instruction to watch over his young friend Hughie. When Hughie runs away from school and hides on a train, Rufus follows him, and a helpful engineer gets them back just in time for lunch. Another time, the children decide to rig up a ghost in their attic to scare the neighborhood bully Peter Frost. They use their Mama's dressmaker's form (called Madame-the-Bust), a pumpkin with real teeth and a scooter. When they take Peter Frost up to see it, they get a big scare themselves, and only later realize their cat Catherine had made the 'ghost' move.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_of_Honor_(novel)"title="Word of Honor (novel)">
## Part One: Chapters 1–14.The novel begins with Ben Tyson finding and reading excerpts from "Hue: Death of a City," a recently published book by Andrew Picard about the Battle of Hue during the Vietnam War. The book highlights an incident similar to MyLai and is based on information provided to Picard from two men in Tyson's platoon and from a nun who escaped the incident. It names Tyson as the leader of the platoon, which is shot at as it approaches a hospital, suffering one fatality and two injuries. According to the book, a doctor at the hospital refuses to help one of the American soldiers because his condition is too bad; after an American soldier shoots the doctor and others are killed in the hospital, chaos ensues and, according to Picard, the platoon decides to kill all the witness (everyone in the hospital). The book never mentions names except Tyson's, stating that he was the platoon lieutenant.Tyson researches his possible options and learns that a platoon leader can be held accountable for the actions of his men if he should have anticipated them or possibly if he knew of them and did not report them. In this case, the charge would have to be murder since the statute of limitations ran out on other possible charges. Tyson tells his wife, Marcy, of the book and has her read it. He doesn't deny what the book charges but instead says that on the whole it is accurate. Marcy is a liberal, was very active in the 60s anti-war movement, and is somewhat skeptical of her husband's actions but still supports him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sniper_(novel)"title="The Sniper (novel)">
"The Sniper" is about a tough New York City Police Department Sergeant named Joe Ryker and his pursuit of a murdering sniper named Homer Cyrus. (In the later reprints of the book, the antagonist's name is changed to Henry Cyrus.) The sniper chooses his victims at random, killing with the cold skill of a professional. Detective Sgt. Ryker is going after him in a deadly battle; only one will survive! 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayday_(novel)"title="Mayday (novel)">
A supersonic passenger jet flying over the Pacific Ocean is struck by an errant missile. Due to the effects of decompression and oxygen deprivation, all but a handful are incapacitated. Three survivors must attempt to land the airplane, despite attempts to cover up the disaster.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Talbot_Odyssey"title="The Talbot Odyssey">
Tony Abrams, a former police detective who served at the NYPD's Intelligence Division is working as the office's investigator for the O'Brien, Kimberly, and Rose law firm of New York. He stumbles upon a swirl of intrigue that leads to discovery that for over forty years there is an active mole, code-named Talbot, within the CIA.Talbot's mission is to carry out a secret plan devised by rogue elements in the USSR government, to attack the United States with a first-strike weapon, an unprecedented attack that would cause a mortal blow to the country. It is up to Abrams and the lawyer Katherine Kimberly to stop him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Charm_School_(novel)"title="The Charm School (novel)">
The novel's hero is U.S Air Force Colonel Sam Hollis, a former F-4 Phantom Fighter pilot who fought in Vietnam. Hollis was shot down during the war and was disqualified from flying. Later on he was transferred to US Air Force Intelligence and served as an intelligence officer and air attaché at the American embassy in Moscow. A young American MBA graduate driving in the Russian countryside encounters another American, claiming to have escaped a secret Russian POW camp—leaving numerous others behind who are still captive and being used to "Americanize" Soviet spies. When the information reaches Hollis, he begins to investigate and discovers a secret so dangerous that might cost him his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gold_Coast_(DeMille_novel)"title="The Gold Coast (DeMille novel)">
Welcome to the Gold Coast, that stretch on the North Shore of Long Island that once held the greatest concentration of wealth and power in America. Here two men are destined for an explosive collision: John Sutter, Wall Street lawyer, holding fast to a fading aristocratic legacy; and Frank Bellarosa, the Mafia don who seizes his piece of the staid and unprepared Gold Coast like a latter-day barbarian chief and draws Sutter and his regally beautiful wife, Susan, into his violent world. Told from Sutter's sardonic - and often hilarious - point of view, and laced with sexual passion and suspense, "The Gold Coast" is Nelson DeMille's captivating story of friendship and seduction, love and betrayal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General's_Daughter_(novel)"title="The General's Daughter (novel)">
Captain Ann Campbell is a West Point graduate, the daughter of legendary General "Fighting Joe" Campbell. She is the pride of Fort Hadley until, one morning, her body is found naked and bound on the firing range. Paul Brenner is a member of the Army's elite undercover investigative unit, and the man in charge of this politically explosive case. Teamed with rape specialist Cynthia Sunhill, with whom he once had a tempestuous, doomed affair, Brenner is about to learn just how many people were sexually, emotionally, and dangerously involved with the Army's "golden girl", and how the neatly pressed uniforms and honor codes of the military hide a corruption as rank as Ann Campbell's shocking secret life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blues_for_Mister_Charlie"title="Blues for Mister Charlie">
## Act I.Act I opens up with the Reverend Meridian Henry coaching negro students through their lines. They are interrupted by Parnell James, who brings them the news that Lyle Britten will be arrested for the murder of Richard Henry. When he leaves to inform Britten about his future arrest, the students talk amongst themselves about the struggles they face as black people.The scene shifts to Lyle and his wife, Jo Britten, in their store. His wife brings up the death of Richard, fearful that her husband may go to jail because of a past transgression he had with another black man who died as a result of the confrontation. Lyle defends himself by claiming self-defense. When Parnell James arrives, Lyle assures both of them that they need not worry.The scene shifts into a flashback with Richard and his grandmother, Mother Henry. He confronts her about the death of his mother whom he believes was pushed down the stairs, though Mother Henry claims she fell down by accident. Richard swears that he will protect himself from the white man at all costs, showing her a gun. Before she leaves, his grandmother pleads with him to get rid of the gun, but he takes it with him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Salt_Roads"title="The Salt Roads">
Across the restrictions of time and space, the goddess Lasirén experiences and aids the struggles for freedom of the Ginen, the enslaved African people. The story is told through the eyes of Lasirén and the main three women whose lives become intertwined with her consciousness: Mer, an 18th-century slave and respected healer on a plantation in St. Domingue, Jeanne Duval, the 19th century Haitian actress/dancer and mistress to the French poet Baudelaire, and Thais, the fourth century prostitute-turned-saint. Each of the women is on her own life journey, and the goddess interweaves and influences their sexual, personal, and religious experiences."The Salt Roads" tells a story of the Ginen fertility god, Lasirén. Lasirén moves through both the ethereal space of the Loa and the physical space of humans. She often does the latter by possession of the bodies of other characters, especially females. While inhabiting them for varying periods of time, Lasirén helps the three main human characters find their place(s) in the world, and she influences their lives and the outcomes of their decisions through direct and indirect means. The novel weaves together the stories of the three women with the common thread of Lasirén's consciousness and her efforts to help the Ginen's struggle for freedom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farthing_(novel)"title="Farthing (novel)">
## Introduction.The book begins as a "cozy" or "country house" mystery involving the murder of Sir James Thirkie, a member of the "Farthing Set" and the architect of the "Farthing Peace" between the United Kingdom and Germany. The Farthing Set, so named for their association with the country house of that name (and analogous to the real-life Cliveden set) prominently supportered prewar appeasement, a policy vindicated by the war's outcome. The narrative alternates between the first-person account of Lucy Kahn, daughter of the proprietors of the Farthing estate, and a third-person narrative that focuses on Scotland Yard Inspector Peter Carmichael, the lead investigator assigned to the case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Like_Us"title="Rich Like Us">
This historical fiction entwines the fate of two upper-class females, Rose, a British immigrant and wife to powerful native business man Ram with Sonali, a highly educated young civil servant.The former struggles to find a sense of home in this foreign society, filled with ancient customs, including the sati, and exotic social standards. She is entangled in a three-pronged marriage, as she is the second wife of Ram’s. Rose suffers to understand the Indian culture, and its ramifications on the female spirit. As Ram’s health deteriorates, she realizes her rights as wife are in question. Dev, Ram’s son from his other wife, Mona, schemes to take all Ram’s assets by disposing of Rose. In fear, Rose turns to Sonali, her friend and niece. Sonali is an anomaly to the average Indian, aristocratic woman. She deals with the living and working in New Delhi during the political upheaval of the Emergency and is divided between two worlds, one representing her ideals and longing for progression and the other that embodies her upper-crust, conservative culture. From these two characters branch off numerous other tales, which provide a deep and thorough overview of life for all people during this critical historical period. At root of these stories lies the duplicitous role of women in the dynamic, chaotic, new India of the mid 20th century.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trumpet_(novel)"title="Trumpet (novel)">
The novel begins just after the main character, Joss Moody, a famous jazz trumpeter, passes away. After his death, it is revealed that his biological sex was female, causing a news rush and attracting paparazzi, leading his widow, Millie, to flee to a vacation home. The truth was unknown to anyone except Millie; the Moodys lived their life as a normal married couple with a normal house and a normal family, and not even Colman, their adopted son, knew the truth. When Joss dies and the truth is revealed, Colman's shock spills into bitterness and he seeks revenge. He vents his rage about his father's lie by uncovering Joss's life to Sophie, an eager tabloid journalist craving to write the next bestseller. After time, and a visit to Joss's mother Edith Moore, Colman eventually finds love for his father muddled together with his rage. With his new-found acceptance of both his father and himself, Colman decides not to follow through with the book deal. All the while, Millie deals with her grief and the scandal in private turmoil at the Moodys' vacation home, and a variety of characters whose paths have crossed with Joss's give accounts of their memories and experiences. Each character aside from Sophie appears to either accept Joss's identity or regard it as irrelevant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jesus_Dynasty"title="The Jesus Dynasty">
By his parents' marriage, Jesus was better placed to be King of Israel than Herod Antipas was. The two contradictory blood lines in the gospels are seen as compatible if one belongs to Mary and the other to Joseph. In such a case Jesus would have united a formidable list of families into his ancestors.Jesus joined John the Baptist's movement - John was a close relative of Jesus (John's mother being Mary's aunt which makes Jesus his first cousin once removed) - and the two were prepared to bring about an uprising in Judaea, but John's arrest and execution caused Jesus to go underground to avoid the same fate. Eventually he resurfaced to carry on the Baptist's work alone.Jesus was a charismatic teacher and possibly a faith healer. James, Simon and Jude were his half-brothers (since Jesus is not Joseph's son, in Tabor's view) and inherited the leadership after Jesus' death. His claim that the brothers of Jesus were members of his Disciples, has been called a misleading and fallacious reading of the biblical text. Tabor argues that the later, spiritualist, writings of Paul the Apostle polluted and effectively hijacked the movement, with the later Gospels following the Pauline point of view.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tango_on_intohimoni"title="Tango on intohimoni">
"Many people ask what the meaning of life is. I know: it's tango." So says Virtanen, the hero of "Tango on intohimoni", or "Tango is my Passion", the definitive Finnish tango novel. Virtanen is a tango obsessive, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject, which he insists on sharing with everybody he meets. He goes dancing every day in the various dance halls of Helsinki and sometimes Turku, but he only dances the tangos.But Virtanen also has principles. At the age of 15 he had read that Plato recommends 24 as the ideal age for sexual intercourse for women, and 35 for men. If Virtanen can hold on to his virginity until the age of 36, he will have beaten the old fraud. But this is difficult for someone with such a passion for tango: "My penis rises and interferes with the dance. So, immediately after the dance, I hasten into the woods, break a handful of twigs off a birch tree, and punish my penis with many sharp little blows. The chastisement makes it calm down, and I can then go and invite a new girl onto the floor."(page 8) Virtanen manages to avoid the blandishments of the various women he meets in the Helsinki hot spots, but when he falls in love with Anja his troubles really start.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloriana_(novel)"title="Gloriana (novel)">
The novel's plot concerns Lord Montfallcon and his contest for courtly influence against Captain Quire. Each man exploits Albion's shadowy network of espionage and deceit for his own ends, with Gloriana caught in the middle.Montfallcon has maintained peace throughout Gloriana's 13-year reign using terror, oppression, and a network of informants. He is the power behind Gloriana's throne, one of the few survivors of King Hern's court, where he saw most of his family killed to entertain that tyrant king. Montfallcon's sole purpose in life is to keep Gloriana's Albion free of tyranny and corruption but, in so doing, he repeats the worst practices of Hern's henchmen. His own best henchman is Quire.But when Quire feels Montfallcon has insulted him, he seeks revenge through seducing the frustrated Gloriana. He goes into the walls to spy on the court, to muster the rabble there into his personal army, and to make sorties into the court to commit murders and leave evidence that points to other courtiers. Finally Quire exits the walls and claims the role of Gloriana's court champion, later her lord chancellor, and ultimately her lover—threatening her place as sovereign and symbol of Albion. Ultimately, Una and Gloriana discover Flaya, Gloriana's long-lost mother, thought to have been murdered by Hern VI during one of his episodes of insanity, but still alive in an unexplored dungeon adjunct to the castle. After killing his insane daughter, Montfallcon battles Quire in a duel, leading to Montfallcon's death. Able to provide the queen with an orgasm, Quire ultimately weds her, serving as her new consort, Prince Arthur.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_the_Green_Star_Rises"title="As the Green Star Rises">
As Karn and Klygon (betrayed by Delgan on a deserted islet) wait for either an inevitable end by drowning (for the Green Star has risen, and a tide with it—threatening to swamp the islet), they hear the swish of oars. Karn then calls out to the ship (just prior to losing consciousness) and the two are then taken on board. The ship, named "Xothun" (after a large, inland-sea-dwelling reptile) is captained by Blue Barbarians led by the nasty, brutish Hoggur, who sends the two belowdecks as slave-rowers. Their companions include select citizens of Komar, a peaceful mercantile kingdom recently conquered and ravaged by the Barbarians (under the chieftainship of a mysterious "warlord" immune to their racial madness) including its ruler Andar; the ship is on its way to Komar's ally Tharkoon to espy it out for conquest—which Eryon deems as foolish due to Tharkoon being ruled by a wizard. One day, Eryon states that they approach the Angzar Reefs, an area of unpredictable storms—which prompts some of the desperate Komarians to hope for a quick death. However, it gives Klygon some hope, and he asks Karn if he should pick the locks (a skill Karn did not know Klygon possessed). The prospect pleases Eryon and Andar, who figure on using their release and the storm to retake the "Xothun". When the storm strikes, the Komarians (released by Klygon's lock-picking) storm up the decks and attack the Blue Barbarians. When Karn runs up to enjoy his first re-taste of freedom, Hoggur crashes into him; Karn jumps on Hoggur and strangles him—strengthened as a residual effect of the "Elixir Of Light", and further by sheer rage—and is then swept overboard. Shortly after the storm the "zawkaw" carrying a woman (Arjala) lands on the stern—and Arjala alights while the tired "zawkaw" takes off elsewhere.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vor_Game"title="The Vor Game">
Miles Vorkosigan graduates from the Academy, but is upset to learn he is being sent to replace the weather officer at the Empire's winter infantry training base on remote Kyril Island. He is somewhat mollified by the placement officer's explanation that the posting is to see if he can handle the discipline and military routine. If he can, he will be reassigned to a more desirable posting. However, he cannot help but get into trouble.Miles refuses to obey what he deems a criminal order by the base commander, who has him arrested for mutiny, and as he is high Vor, technically treason. He is quickly returned to the capital and sequestered in the bowels of Imperial Security (ImpSec) by Simon Illyan, who, along with his father, concludes that Miles had behaved correctly, but has also gained notoriety for his insubordinate action and cannot expect to serve in any branch of the Imperial Service, with one possible exception. Miles' father, Aral Vorkosigan, persuades Illyan to transfer Miles to ImpSec, despite Illyan's and Miles' reluctance.Miles, sent to help evaluate the Hegen Hub (and remain conveniently out of the way). There, under his cover identity of an arms dealer, he is framed for murder and arrested. While in custody, he is startled to find Emperor Gregor in the same cell. Gregor tells him that he ran away during a visit to Komarr and joined a merchant ship's crew as a navigator, but was then left behind without pay at Consortium Station and jailed for vagrancy. Miles attempts to extricate Gregor, but is soon up to his neck in a mysterious plot involving an amoral femme fatale, his homicidal former Kyril Island commanding officer, and Hub power politics. Miles encounters his Dendarii mercenary friends and, after once again outmaneuvering their leader, Admiral Oser, resumes command under his Admiral Naismith persona. He is able to rescue Gregor from the femme fatale (an extremely devious, short mercenary leader herself) and get the mutually suspicious Hegen Hub planets to present a united defense to repel a surprise attack by a Cetagandan invasion fleet, with timely help from Barrayaran reinforcements jointly commanded by his father and Gregor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praisesong_for_the_Widow"title="Praisesong for the Widow">
The opening begins with Avey "Avatara" Johnson packing her bags aboard her 17-day cruise on the "Bianca Pride", during the late 1970s. The reason for her sudden departure began three nights before, when she had a dream about her great-aunt Cuney and a disturbing encounter in the Versailles dining-room with a peach parfait. Her first since the 1960s, the dream consists of Avey's aunt in Tatem attempting to convince Avey to follow her down the road in Tatem, South Carolina, a childhood vacation spot. When Avey resists, the two have a physical brawl. The next morning, Avey wants nothing more than to be alone, and yet cannot get away from anyone on the cruise ship, no matter where she goes. At this point, she makes the decision to leave the ship. The next morning, she packs her bags and leaves to the next port-of-call, which is the island of Grenada. On Grenada, the atmosphere seems to be festive, as people dressed in bright clothing, carrying packages, are getting onto boats. Confused, Avey Johnson is later informed by her taxi driver that it is the annual excursion to Carriacou, a nearby island. At the hotel, the sick feeling in Avey's stomach returns, and Avey spends her last moments of consciousness painfully reminiscing about her relationship with her late husband, Jerome "Jay" Johnson, and for the first time in four years, she mourns his loss.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_and_Prudence"title="Jane and Prudence">
Jane, a vicar's wife, lives a very different kind of life from her friend, the single and independent Prudence. The book details the period in Nicholas and Jane’s life when they take over a new parish in an (anonymous) English village and encounter the widower Fabian Driver, who Jane decides will make an excellent husband for Prudence. Prudence has an imponderable attraction to her older and completely impervious employer, the head of an unspecified academic foundation. There is, however, competition for Fabian - Jessie Morrow, another spinster in the parish who seeks escape from her low-paid job as a companion to the domineering Miss Doggett.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Green_Star's_Glow"title="In the Green Star's Glow">
Janchan and Arjala are married in Komar, where they also honeymoon. Karn, feeling that he needs to do something (almost anything) to help rescue Niamh, takes some of the leftover food/drink items from the wedding feast and stashes them in the storage compartment of the sky-sled which he then energises and heads towards the trees. As it is night, he quickly tethers it to a branch and falls asleep. He is awakened the next morning by a spear-point touching his chest—held by a teenaged girl, Varda. Some of Varda's companions (including one named Iona, at 15 slightly older than Varda) urge her to kill him. Due to Iona being a rival for leadership, Varda decides to spare but enslave Karn.On the tubular craft, Niamh scratches Delgan and advances on him with her knife but Delgan manages to persuade her to sheathe it through some oily words. Then, he forces her to back against the rear bulkhead by pointing the "zoukar" at her with a threat to use it, and advances to throw her off—only to be prevented as Zorak shoots him in the hand with an arrow. Due to the pain, he cannot use an oily tone, and his further attempts to persuade Niamh that he is "friendly" fall flat. When Zorak comes forward to stop the aircraft, Delgan tells him to back off or die—and is not persuaded of danger when Zorak points out the approaching tree boles. A branch then strikes inside the cockpit and pulls Delgan out—so he was the falling occupant seen by Zarqa and Janchan. After stopping the aircraft, Zorak and Niamh find themselves facing a "ythid". Zorak tries to kill it by shooting it in the eye (unsuccessfully, as the lizard shuts its nictitating-membrane), while Niamh tries to poke her knife in from its back—which allows Zorak to shoot it in the throat. Niamh then almost faints from exhaustion and fear; Zorak, putting aside his weapons, prevents this but slips off the branch after stepping in the dead "ythid"'s blood. Niamh, taking the weapons, explores the branch until she comes upon a tower of strange design/construction (Karn would have told her that it was built by one of Zarqa's race), where she walks into a lab with a detached head. The head's eyes open and it cries "waa-waa-waaa...", whereupon an odd-looking dwarf, Quoron, comes in and takes her as prisoner. The head is the result of one of his experiments which failed (he believes, due to the brain being disconnected from oxygen for too long). He puts her under the guard of another of his experiments, Number Nine, a giant with four arms and two heads (one male, one female) but almost no intellect (according to Quoron). Niamh quickly figures that Quoron's experiments are just like those Zarqa told her the Kaloodha had conducted—a quest for immortality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eat_a_Bowl_of_Tea"title="Eat a Bowl of Tea">
"Eat a Bowl of Tea" begins by describing newlyweds Ben Loy and Mei Oi sleeping peacefully in their bed in New York City. They are abruptly awakened by a prostitute ringing the doorbell. Ben Loy, ashamed of his pre-marital history with prostitutes, lies to protect his secret from his "innocent, pure" wife.The story then jumps backwards several months to the "Money Come" gambling house and the men who spend their days there: Wah Gay, Lee Gong, Chong Loo and Ah Song. The text depicts the close friendship between Wah Gay and Lee Gong (both with wives back in Guangdong (Canton)), and a conversation concerning their unmarried children ensues. Upon learning that Wah Gay has a marriageable son (Ben Loy) here in the States, Lee Gong spies on him at his restaurant and decides that he is the right man for his daughter (Mei Oi), who is still in China. He and Wah Gay decide that Ben Loy will go to China and bring back Mei Oi as his bride. The two men write their wives (Lau Shee and Jung Shee) in anticipation.Although Ben Loy seems to be the epitome of a "good boy," he has a secret life. When he is not busy working at the restaurant (in the fictional suburb of Stanton, Connecticut), he and his roommate Chin Yuen visit white prostitutes in New York City, a habit Ben Loy picked up while serving in the Army during World War II. Ben Loy becomes addicted to these sexual flings, often sleeping with numerous prostitutes in a night. Without the permission of his father – who wants Ben Loy to stay in Stanton, away from the temptations of New York – Ben Loy and Chin Yuen move to an apartment on Manhattan's Catherine Street.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_(Durrell_novel)"title="Sebastian (Durrell novel)">
A letter informs the Egyptian Sebastian Affad that he will die; a mix up has caused major ructions within the Gnostic sect in Egypt. Affad is called back to Egypt for admonishment. Before leaving Switzerland, however, he has asked Constance to use her psychiatric skills to treat his son, who has become autistic. She is gradually successful in working with the boy. After Affad returns to Switzerland from Egypt, the couple renew their relationship.The psychopath Mnemidis intervenes. After escaping from the institution where Constance works, he goes to her flat, intending to kill her, but murders Affad instead. The book finishes in a surreal manner. Affad seems virtually to disappear from Constance's memory; and two chapters give conflicting accounts of Constance's action upon the death of her boss Schwartz. Unexpectedly Sylvie reappears, for the first time since "Monsieur." (She is said to be a fictional creation of author Aubrey Blanford, also introduced in the first novel as a character). She begins an affair with Constance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honoured_Enemy"title="Honoured Enemy">
Hartraft's Marauders, a band of kingdom raiders, have come across a Tsurani patrol at a garrison overrun by moredhel (dark elves). They band together to survive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Is_Not_Enough"title="Once Is Not Enough">
The young and beautiful January Wayne, daughter of film and stage producer Mike Wayne, returns home to New York City after being hospitalized in Switzerland for nearly three years. But home is not what it used to be: the world which January knew has changed considerably.As the naive January finds her way in this brave new world, she encounters such mortal souls as Deirdre Milford Granger, the fifth richest woman in the world, as well as Deirdre's virile young cousin, David Milford; Linda Riggs, the vulgar but successful editor of "Gloss" magazine; Tom Colt, the macho novelist who harbors a secret; and Dr. Preston Alpert, the dirty but invigorating "Dr. Feelgood". Also in the mix is Karla, the reclusive former movie queen who has more than one secret of her own.It is a world of money and spiritual incest, of drugs and frontal nudity, in a complex story which reflects the social upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Albatross"title="The Albatross">
The Albatross centers around Duncan, an intellectually disabled 18-year-old who has grown up with his domineering wheelchair-using mother in Heype, a Suffolk seaside town based on Aldeburgh. Duncan finds it difficult to cope with anything outside his daily routine but is forced to interact with the wider world when his claustrophobic relationship with his mother reaches a breaking point.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sunflower_(book)"title="The Sunflower (book)">
In 1943, at the height of both World War II and the Holocaust, a group of forced labourers from the Lemberg concentration camp are sent to a converted army hospital to clear medical waste. Simon Wiesenthal is summoned from this work detail by a nurse to the bedside of a dying Nazi soldier, Karl Seidl (identified only as Karl S. in earlier editions). The soldier tells him he is seeking "a Jew's" forgiveness for a crime that has haunted Seidl since it was committed one year prior. Over a number of hours, Seidl tells Wiesenthal his life story, including joining Hitler Youth and his experiences in the SS. He then confesses to having participated in the destruction, by fire and armaments, of a house full of 300 Jews. He states that as the Jews tried to leap out of windows to escape the burning building, he and the other soldiers gunned them down.After Seidl finishes his story, he asks Wiesenthal to forgive him. Wiesenthal then leaves the room without saying anything. The next day, the nurse informs Wiesenthal that the soldier has died. The nurse tells him that Seidl has left his belongings to him, but Wiesenthal refuses to take them, telling the nurse to have them sent to Seidl's mother. Wiesenthal ruminates on whether or not he should have forgiven Seidl through the rest of his experiences in the concentration camp system. After the war, he finds Seidl's mother, who in their conversation unintentionally confirms the details of her son's story. Seidl's mother asks him how he knew his son, but Wiesenthal lies and leaves without telling her of her late son's participation in the Holocaust. He then poses the ethical dilemma of whether or not he should have forgiven Seidl to the reader, after which a variety of responses from a diverse group of individuals is given.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Delivery_(novel)"title="Special Delivery (novel)">
Danielle Steel explores finding love when, and from whom you least expect it in "Special Delivery". Jack Watson was a man hardened to the idea of love. The death of his one true love followed by a messy divorce led him content to lead the ultimate bachelor's life. Written about in the society pages, and despite his reputation, he never had trouble finding a date. It didn't hurt that he owned one of the most successful women's boutiques in Beverly Hills.Amanda Robbins was a successful actress who had already claimed an Academy Award when she met her husband Matthew Kingston and fell in love. Amanda gave up her acting career to be a devoted mother of two children. Her husband Matthew wasn't interested in a working wife and Amanda was happy to oblige, until his sudden death from a heart attack. With the center of her life suddenly gone Amanda fell into despair and depression.Jack and Amanda didn't travel in the same social circles however, the marriage of their children, Paul and Jan, created an undeniable connection. In the past, while Jack and Amanda were cordial with one another they didn't go out of their way to spend much time together. One day Jan offers to take Amanda to one of Jack's infamous parties. Amanda surprises herself when she accepts and has a great time. This sparked a new beginning as she and Jack began spending more time together, initially just to talk about their children. However, they soon discover that they have more than just children in common. This new relationship helps Amanda heal from the loss of her husband and causes Jack to realize that life isn't as fulfilling when alone. An unexpected pregnancy nearly destroys their love, but ultimately brings them closer together. They end up seeing this new life as an opportunity to support Jan and Paul who have had trouble conceiving. At the last moment Jan finds out she's pregnant and have decided not to adopt Amanda and Jack's baby.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balthazar_(novel)"title="Balthazar (novel)">
The book begins with the Narrator living on a remote Greek island with Nessim's illegitimate daughter from Melissa (now either four or six years old – marking the time that has elapsed since the events of "Justine"); however the tone is very dark and opposed to the light and airy reminiscence of Prospero's Cell – Durrell's travelogue-memoir of his life on Corfu. The prolonged nature-pieces, which are a highlight of Durrell's prose, still intervene between straight linear narrative – but are uniformly of askesis and alone-ness – and have a more pronounced "prose-painting" feel to them pre-figuring Clea.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountolive"title="Mountolive">
The novel's tensions begin with young David Mountolive on the Hosnani estate, where he has begun an affair with Leila Hosnani, mother of Nessim and Narouz. This leads to a recollection of Mountolive's maturation and career as a diplomat, a career which in time returns him to Egypt, leading up to the present day of the novel series, at which point "Mountolive" recontextualizes the materials that appeared previously in Justine and Balthazar. Mountolive retains Pursewarden as his chief political adviser. "Mountolive" then introduces a Coptic gunrunning plot in support of Zionism. This plot development has been criticised as unrealistic, but more recently scholars have demonstrated the intensely political and well-informed background for Durrell's notions. Pursewarden kills himself; Nessim is warned to act to curb his brother Narouz, whose subversive rhetoric has become dangerously extravagant. The novel ends with the Copt wake for Narouz. The Pasha has disingenuously pretended to believe he is the Hosnani in the incriminating papers so he can continue to receive bribes from Nessim. Mountolive, meanwhile prepares to turn his back on Egypt, totally disillusioned.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_My_Wilderness"title="The World My Wilderness">
In the summer of 1945, Helen Michel is living in Southern France in the difficult aftermath of the Second World War, grieving for her late husband, a French collaborator called Maurice Michel who was mysteriously drowned in the final months of the German occupation of France. Helen is beautiful, lazy, the daughter of an Irish peer, a painter and scholar who is fond of gambling. Her seventeen-year-old daughter Barbary Deniston (Helen left her first husband, an English barrister) and her fifteen-year-old step-son Raoul Michel have run wild, associating with the Maquis, helping a guerrilla band with schemes of sabotage and harassing the Germans. Helen also has a two-year-old son by Maurice Michel, whom Barbary dotes on, but mother and daughter have grown apart.Helen is visited in Provence by her English son Richie Deniston, Barbary's brother, who after fighting in the War is now a Cambridge undergraduate. When he returns to England, Helen sends Barbary back with him to live in London with her father, Sir Gulliver Deniston KC, and to attend the Slade School of Art. Sir Gulliver has a new wife, the ultra-conventional Pamela, and she and Barbary take a dislike to each other. At the same time, Raoul's grandmother Madame Michel also sends him to London, to live with an uncle who is in business there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belinda_(Edgeworth_novel)"title="Belinda (Edgeworth novel)">
Belinda is a young lady who lives with her aunt, Mrs. Stanhope. Being unwed, Belinda is sent to live with Lady Delacour, whom Belinda considers fascinating and charming. Lady Delacour believes herself to be dying of breast cancer. She hides her emotional distress caused by her impending death and poor relationships with her family from Belinda through wit and charm. The first half of the novel is concerned with the blooming friendship between Belinda and Lady Delacour, which is broken by Lady Delacour's fear that Belinda plans to marry Lord Delacour, as expressed in the line, "I see...that she [Belinda] who I thought had the noblest of souls has the meanest! I see that she is incapable of feeling."Belinda subsequently moves to the home of the Percival family, the embodiment of the ideal family. Once Lady Delacour seeks treatment for her illness, Belinda returns to support her. Upon her visit to the doctor, Lady Delacour discovers her disease is not terminal and reconciles herself with Belinda. She eventually makes a full recovery from her illness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fablehaven_(novel)"title="Fablehaven (novel)">
Kendra and Seth Sorenson, two siblings, visit their grandfather, Stan Sorenson, for a few weeks. When they arrive, they find their grandmother, Ruth, missing, and are informed that she is visiting a relative. Their grandfather informs them that there are disease-bearing ticks in the wood adjoining his house, and forbids them from entering the woods. Seth, however, disobeys him and explores the woods. He encounters an old woman in a shack, who tries to lure him inside. Unnerved by the experience, he returns to the house and persuades Kendra to join him in another woods excursion. Stan finds out about their forbidden ventures and explains that he keeps endangered species of lethal animals in the woods, which is why he told them not to enter the woods. Seth and Kendra convince him to lessen their punishment.Shortly afterward, Kendra follows a series of clues given to her by Stan, which leads her to an instruction to drink unpasteurized milk straight from the cows on the farm. She had previously been warned against doing so by Dale, Stan's hired man. Hesitant to sample the milk, she persuades Seth to try the milk first. After he tastes the milk, Seth claims to be able to see fairies in the garden. Kendra drinks the milk herself and sees them too. Stan confronts them and explains that there are still magical beings in the world, mostly contained in preserves. His grounds are one of these preserves, designated "Fablehaven". He explains that the old woman, whom Seth met is a witch named Muriel Taggert, and finally explains to them the real reason why they are not allowed in the woods: dangerous magical beings such as demons and specters are contained there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Warriors_of_Spider"title="The Warriors of Spider">
The human race consists of billions of people spread throughout a relatively small area of space containing Earth and several other inhabited planets. The majority of the population lives on giant space stations, either in orbit or moving like giant ships. A change occurred over the generations that was caused by zero-gravity conditions and exposure to different radiations. Most are pale-skinned, thin and frail-boned; some would die if they experienced gravity. The human race is ruled over by the Directorate, a group of three genetically modified humans, through whom all information must pass before it is released; this has given the Directorate complete control over information for the last 600 years. They stopped all war and religion and caused humanity to be composed of mostly obedient cowards.Before this 600-year period, the Soviets ruled humanity after conquering North America. The Native American tribes, angered that the position of reservations had not changed, fought back against the Soviets and succeeded, to the point that they were all loaded onto a giant prison ship and deported to deep space along with other rebels of Latino and Caucasian descent—a population of over 5,000 consisting entirely of people with the will and heritage to survive. The ship crashes onto a planet that they name World. 600 years later the survivors have mixed into many different clans that comprise two distinctly different and opposing peoples, the Spiders and the Santos. Their culture is mainly Native American with the addition of large bore rifles, hand-forged from metal of the wrecked prison ship and used to deal with beings they call "bears," natural predators existing on World. The World bear is similar to a dragon-squid combination, having two spines that connect at the base and a tentacle on each side with suction cups on it that it shoots toward its prey.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Stars"title="Imperial Stars">
In the year 2447 the Empire of Earth comprises more than a thousand inhabited systems. A threat to the Empire has developed that the Imperial secret service SOTE (the Service Of The Empire) has been unable to foil. In desperation they turn to the Family D'Alembert.The D'Alemberts are natives of the high gravity planet DesPlaines, giving them unusual strength, speed and coordination. They put this to good use by operating the "Circus of the Galaxy," a spectacular combination circus/mobile amusement park famous in every inhabited system, entertaining millions and rarely visiting the same planet twice in an average lifetime.But the circus is "also" SOTE's best kept secret, known only to the Head, their designated successor, and the Emperor. Managed by the reigning Duke, who is absolute ruler of DesPlains and head of the D'Alembert family, the circus is a proving ground for the best agents available and can provide a cadre of highly skilled professionals in many fields, as needed. Furthermore, security is absolute, because it is run completely by family members who talk only to each other - and the Head.So when the Circus is summoned to Earth it is time for Jules and Yvette D'Alembert, brother and sister Imperial Stars, to leave their place in the spotlight under the big top to their successors, and become what they were always meant to be: the Empire's top secret agents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ports_of_Call_(Vance_novel)"title="Ports of Call (Vance novel)">
Myron's family intended for Myron to follow a staid and respectable career in economics; however, when his wealthy and eccentric great-aunt Dame Hester came into possession of a space yacht, Myron suddenly found his long suppressed dreams of adventure within reach. Serving as Dame Hester's nominal captain on her journey to find a clinic reputed to restore lost youth to wealthy clients, Myron soon finds that his aunt is capricious as she is flamboyant, and after an argument, finds himself castaway on a remote planet. With no resources to return home, he obtains the position of supercargo on a tramp freighter, which enables him to travel further across the Gaean Reach to exotic lands.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpentaria_(novel)"title="Carpentaria (novel)">
The novel tells the interconnected stories of several inhabitants of the fictional town of Desperance, situated on the Gulf of Carpentaria in northwest Queensland. There, the Aboriginal people of the Pricklebush clan are engaged in a number of argumentative conflicts with various enemies in the community, including the white inhabitants of Desperance, the local law enforcement and government officials, and a large multinational mining operation that has been established on their traditional sacred land. The narrative chronicles the interpersonal relationships shared between three men embroiled in these disputes: the wise, pragmatic, and blunt Normal Phantom; the nomadic, overzealous shamanic practitioner of Aboriginal traditional religion, Mozzie Fishman; and Norm's son, Will Phantom, who deserted his father's house to undertake a cross-country spiritual journey with Fishman, but who has now returned home with something of Fishman's character in him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangster_(novel)"title="Gangster (novel)">
The novel opens in 1996 as Gabe, now middle-aged, keeps watch over an old Angelo Vestieri on his hospital deathbed. Slipping back in time to the Depression, the narrative tracks the rise of the famed mob boss from a simple Italian immigrant to the most powerful man of Manhattan's underworld, when a ten-year-old Gabe, by chance, walks into Vestieri's bar. Vestieri takes the boy under his wing and ushers him into the world of organized crime. Gabe learns what it takes to rule an empire with his mentor, yet when the time comes for Gabe to take over Angelo's operation, he refuses, choosing a normal life despite his deep love for Vestieri.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Primrose_Path_(Stoker_novel)"title="The Primrose Path (Stoker novel)">
Jerry O'Sullivan, honest Dublin theatrical carpenter, moves to London, seeking a better job. Against the better judgement of the people surrounding him, Jerry decides to go to the metropolis with his faithful wife Katey. O'Sullivan is hired as head carpenter in a squalid theatre in London, but after several misfortunes he is strongly tempted by and eventually brought down by alcohol. Unjustly suspecting his wife of infidelity, he murders her with a hammer and then cuts his throat with a chisel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_(Durrell_novel)"title="The Black Book (Durrell novel)">
Now living on a Greek island, Lawrence Lucifer (not named until halfway through the novel) recounts his formative year in the Regina Hotel in England. The disjointed and dreamlike narrative expands on the theme of dying English culture. Overwhelmed by the rush of details and ideas, Lawrence is unable to embark upon a plan of action to improve society or even himself. His flights of imagination employ mythic and literary motifs of birth, death, drowning, crucifixion, with copulation and frank sexual descriptions chief among these. Furthermore, the story’s chronology is intentionally disrupted through ambiguous tense—the “gnomic aorist” is referenced—and “magical” facts.These surrealistic asides are woven into the episodic encounters with the other characters in Lawrence’s life: residents of the Regina and the colleagues and students at the school where he works. They include Tarquin, an undiscovered writer who struggles with his own sexual identity. The Peruvian cartographer Lobo attempts to overcome his Catholic inhibitions to form relationships with numerous women, including Miss Smith, an African woman whom Lawrence helps to read Chaucer; Lawrence finds her exotic speech and manners meaningful to counteract the stiff coolness of English manners. Chamberlain disdains the “desire” that Lawrence and Tarquin often debate, opting instead for carnal experience with his own wife, Dinah. Morgan is a Welsh veteran of the Great War, a custodian in the hotel’s boiler room with practicable working-class insights.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Touchstone"title="The Touchstone">
Stephen Glennard's career is falling apart and he desperately needs money so that he may marry his beautiful fiancee. He happens upon an advertisement in a London magazine promising the prospect of financial gain.Glennard was once pursued by Margaret Aubyn, a famous and recently deceased author, and he still has her passionate love letters to him. Glennard removes his name from the letters and sells them, making him a fortune and establishing a marriage based on the betrayal of another.However, his mounting shame and his guilty conscience ultimately force him to confess his betrayal to his wife. He fully expects (and even desires) that his confession will cause her to despise him. However, her wise and forgiving response opens a way for him to forgive himself and to make what limited amends he can make for his actions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodger_Dogs_to_Fenway_Franks"title="Dodger Dogs to Fenway Franks">
In 1985 the then-28-year-old Wood was a high-school history teacher in Seattle, Washington, when he took a trip to all 26 Major League Baseball stadiums in one summer. Wood decided to assign a letter grade in each of eight categories and rank the stadiums from best to worst. Dodger Stadium and Royals Stadium tied for first while the Astrodome and Exhibition Stadium would finish as the two worst. To save money he would often sleep at Kampgrounds of America or Motel 6. Wood additionally sold his Ford Pinto and bought a 1985 Toyota Tercel for its good fuel mileage and reliability.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treading_Air"title="Treading Air">
"Treading Air" is the story of Ullo Paerand. It is narrated partly in the first person from the principal character's point of view, and partly in the voice of Paerand's schoolmate Jaak Sirkel, a character in several of Kross' recent novels. The novel opens with Ullo's reminiscences of a childhood trip to Germany in the 1920s, and ends with his vision of meeting his aged father who fled to the West together with his lover.The talented Ullo preserves memories of the happy childhood he knew before his father left and leaner years began. Together with his mother, Ullo fights for a better future. Despite minor humiliations, he gets a secondary education in one of Tallinn's best grammar schools. Soon after, due to his excellent memory and enterprising spirit, he enjoys professional success, rising to a position in the Prime Minister's Office.But fate lets Ullo down. The Soviet and German occupations deny him the chance of an upstanding career. Ullo joins with the nationalists to work towards the restoration of the Estonian Republic, and passes over an opportunity of escaping to the West offered by a representative of the Vatican. He lives the remainder of his life - some forty years - doing menial work, and making suitcases in a factory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Romance_of_the_Forest"title="The Romance of the Forest">
Monsieur Pierre de la Motte and his wife, Madame Constance de la Motte, are fleeing Paris in an attempt to escape his creditors. Pierre, Madame, and their two domestic servants, Peter and Annette, are waylaid when the path they’re on becomes too dark to follow any longer. Pierre exits the carriage and continues on foot toward a light he notices some distance away from the carriage. Upon knocking on the door of a small and ancient house, Pierre is admitted into the house by a stranger. He is given a bed and promptly locked in the room. Sometime later, the door to Pierre's room is unlocked and a beautiful young lady, Adeline, is being dragged behind the stranger who admitted Pierre to the house. The stranger states that "if you wish to save your life, swear that you will convey this girl where I may never see her more; or rather consent to take her with you". Upon agreement to take Adeline with him, Pierre and Adeline are conveyed to the carriage by the ruffian stranger with Madame still inside.The family, with the addition of Adeline, proceeds into the darkened interior of a forest, hoping to elude discovery and heeding the warnings of the stranger to not come back on the land they just left. Eventually, they find refuge in a ruined abbey after their wagon wheel breaks. Initially, everyone in the group except Peter is afraid of what lies in waiting behind the abbey walls; however, closer inspection by Peter shows the only inhabitants are mice, owls, bats, and the like. Still afraid of being pursued by creditors, the family and Adeline stay close to the abbey. Peter is sent into the town of Auboine for supplies to fix their broken wagon wheel. After returning to the family, Peter confides to Pierre that while he was in town he got in a fight and was unable to procure the necessary supplies for fixing the wheel, but he did purchase some food to tide them over.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castles_of_Athlin_and_Dunbayne"title="The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne">
The novel tells the story of two clans, those belonging to the Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne. The narration begins by recounting the death of the "noble" old Earl of Athlin during an ambush at the hands of Malcom, Baron of Dunbayne, a "proud, oppressive, revengful" man who resented the Earl's superiority and power. Distraught at the loss of her husband and her people in the conflict, the widowed Matilda "forbore to sacrifice the lives of her few remaining people to a feeble attempt at retaliation" and withdrew from public life to raise her children in the "bosom of her people and family".The story itself begins twelve years later with Earl's children, Osbert and Mary, now nineteen and seventeen respectively. Osbert, whom "nature had given him a mind ardent and susceptible, to which education had added refinement and expansion", learning of his father's death wishes to lead his clansmen against Dunbayne to avenge him but is forbidden by his mother. In effort to "stifle the emotions which roused him to arms" Osbert departs to wander the Highlands, where he meets by chance a young Highland peasant named Alleyn after losing his way. Alleyn offers to act as Osbert's guide through the countryside, informing the young Earl of Malcolm's poor stewardship of the surrounding lands and the people's displeasure with the Baron. The two young men are impressed by one another's characters and Alleyn is invited to Athlin as Osbert's guest, where he takes part in the castle's martial exercises and impresses the young Mary. During the feast following the clansmen are roused again to the idea of vengeance and, despite the protestations of Matilda and Mary, Osbert agrees to lead an effort against the castle of Dunbayne.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clermont_(novel)"title="Clermont (novel)">
"Clermont" relates the story of the beautiful Madeline, who lives in seclusion with her eponymous father until they are visited by a mysterious Countess from Clermont's past.Madeline travels to complete her education, accompanied by the Countess. A series of assaults by shadowy foes cannot dissuade Madeline from unraveling the mystery of her father's past and pursuing her paramour, De Sevignie. Madeline uncovers the secret of her own noble origins and her virtue proves its strength through a series of trials and tribulations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Calvaire"title="Le Calvaire">
"Le Calvaire" is a largely autobiographical novel, in which Mirbeau romanticizes his devastating affair with a woman of dubious morals, Judith Vinmer, who appears as "Juliette Roux" in the novel.The story is narrated in the first person by the main character, the antihero Jean Mintie, who has literary ambition and the potential to become a good writer, is incapable of overcoming his sexual obsessions. Victimized by a woman and reduced to a state of humiliated impotence, he tries to transform his suffering into an impulse to create. His redemptive passion is modeled on the Passion of Christ. In the final pages, the image of Christ is replaced by the corpses of men fallen in the battle of love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abbess"title="The Abbess">
## Vol. I.Set in Florence, most of the action is based around Santa Maria del Nova. During the opening mass, Conte Marcello notices the beauty of the young nun, Maddalena Rosa. He revisits the convent again hoping to see her, but on leaving he is detained by a mysterious monk insisting he has important information for the Conte. The monk asks Marcello to return to the cloister that night; agreeing, Marcello returns armed with a poniard hidden under his vest.Later that night he is surprised by the monk, who leads him to a hidden chamber containing a statue of the Virgin Mary. Before continuing on, the monk kneels performing self-flagellation. Continuing to a second chamber full of relics, the monk tells Marcello that he has to swear a secret oath before continuing. However, before the oath can be sworn, the two are interrupted by a tolling bell, causing the monk and Marcello to flee. The monk asks Marcello to return the following night.Upon returning home, Marcello is greeted by his close friend Vivani, whom he tells that he saw a beautiful woman. Vivani convinces Marcello to come to the Galetti Palace that evening where the Marchese is holding a concert. At the concert, Marcello is introduced to Duca Bertoccia, who (unbeknownst to Marcello) is the father of Maddalena.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodbye_California"title="Goodbye California">
Set in the United States, an Islamic terrorist kidnaps nuclear scientists and steals radioactive material from a California nuclear power plant. When Detective Sergeant Ryder's wife is kidnapped along with nuclear scientists from the California power station where they all work, he sets out to find her. Facing resistance from within his own police department, he leaves his job and begins taking the law into his own hands. His son Jeff, a highway patrolman, and a few other trusted friends attempt to stop the terrorists from detonating home-built atomic bombs along California's fault lines, which would unleash massive earthquakes killing millions of people and destroying California's major cities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theologus_Autodidactus"title="Theologus Autodidactus">
The protagonist of the story is Kamil, an autodidactic adolescent feral child who is spontaneously generated in a cave and living in seclusion on a desert island. He eventually comes into contact with the outside world after the arrival of castaways who are shipwrecked and stranded on the island, and later take him back to the civilized world with them. The plot gradually develops into a coming-of-age story and then incorporates science fiction elements when it reaches its climax with a catastrophic doomsday apocalypse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_English_Baron"title="The Old English Baron">
The story follows the adventures of Sir Philip Harclay, who returns to medieval England to find that Arthur Lord Lovel, the friend of his youth, is dead. His cousin Walter Lord Lovel had succeeded to the estate, and sold the family castle to the baron, Fitz-Owen. Among the baron's household were his two sons and daughter Emma, several young gentlemen relations being educated with the sons, and Edmund Twyford, the son of a peasant, who had been brought to live with them. When Sir Philip saw him, he took an immediate liking to him, being struck by his resemblance to his lost friend. The Knight proposing to take him into his own family, being childless, Edmund preferred to remain with the baron, receiving however an assurance that if ever he was in need of it, Sir Philip would renew his offer.The narrative then oversteps the interval of four years. By his manifestly superior nature and qualities Edmund had attracted the enmity of his benefactor's nephews, and the coldness of Sir Robert, the eldest son. William, his younger brother, is his staunch friend however, and Edmund is in love with the Lady Emma.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeleton_Man_(novel)"title="Skeleton Man (novel)">
When two passenger airplanes collide over the Grand Canyon in the 1950s killing all aboard, John Clarke's body is lost, as is the briefcase of diamonds he had locked to his wrist. Scorning Mr. Clarke's pregnant fiancée, the Clarke family disclaims the out-of-wedlock daughter, Joanna Craig. When Clarke's father dies without heir shortly after the crash, the family fortune is entrusted to the estate's attorney, Dan Plymale, to create a charitable foundation. Mr. Plymale then proceeds to live well as executor of the foundation's funds, while Joanna Craig and her mother make their own way.Decades later, Billy Tuve, a Hopi, is arrested on suspicion of burglary and murder based on his presenting a rare diamond for pawn. Tuve's cousin, Cowboy Dashee solicits help from his friend Navajo Tribal Police Sergeant Jim Chee to clear Tuve's name. Retired Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn recalls that his old acquaintance Shorty McGinnis acquired a similar diamond many years ago from a man whose story matches Tuve's story. Then Louisa Bourebonette relates the stories she has heard from older Havasupais about the man with the diamonds living at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and the flyers from a woman seeking her father's remains from that plane crash, which Leaphorn shares with Chee. Joanna Craig pays the bail for Billy Tuve, asking him to lead her to the place where he received the diamond. Though it will aid his case, Billy is reluctant because the place, the Salt Shrine, is sacred to his religion. Before Joanna can pick Billy up at his own home, Fred Sherman takes Billy away. Joanna trails them, and in a quick maneuver, takes Sherman's gun from him and shoots him in the chest. She and Billy proceed to the trail head on the south rim of the Grand Canyon. Billy takes her part way down, then disappears. Bradford Chandler, hired by Dan Plymale, learns Sherman will not meet him when a police officer answers Sherman's cell phone. Chandler goes on alone, arriving near the sacred spot. Chee, Dashee, and Bernadette Manuelito arrived earlier, looking both for the absent Billy and the man who long ago traded with Billy, a hermit wanting people to believe more in Massau’u, to resolve their feelings after the plane crash, with bodies raining down on them. Manuelito stays behind while Chee and Dashee each go a different way along the canyon bottom. She does not stay in one place, but walks and finds the slot (a cave but with an opening to sunlight way above) along the canyon wall where the man had lived, and his body, long dead of natural causes. She sees a human arm bone, and his array of the 70 remaining diamonds. She finds what Chee and Dashee sought.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Kill_the_Potemkin"title="To Kill the Potemkin">
In 1968, a dangerous period of the Cold War, U.S. and Soviet forces engage in brinkmanship across the world. At sea, their submarines play a dangerous cat-and-mouse game. "To Kill the Potemkin" tells the story of a confrontation between these submarines - one being a new and advanced class of submarine whose existence must remain a secret.Jack Sorensen, one of the Navy's best sonar operators, is sonar chief of USS "Barracuda", a nuclear-powered "Skipjack"-class submarine. Sorenson is a veteran who jokes about submarine warfare as a game (which he calls "Cowboys and Cossacks"), and he's determined to never lose. Using his sonar gear, Sorensen can find and identify submarines as few others can. Fogerty, a promising but inexperienced sonar analyst newly assigned to "Barracuda", is determined to learn from Sorensen. Sorenson is something of an eccentric and also has a drug addiction (with drugs provided by one of the vessel's medical officers) and when in port, as a heavy drinker and partier, but this is tolerated because his determination and expertise make him so valuable.The novel begins as "Barracuda" departs its east coast base for the Mediterranean Sea. Once there, "Barracuda" engages in anti-submarine warfare exercises with other Western submarines. Its mission is to "hunt" the U.S. Navy's 6th Fleet and the flagship, the aircraft carrier. The "Barracuda" "sinks" several of the American submarines playing the Soviet Navy vessels. The drill is interrupted by the appearance of a vessel that Fogarty correctly determines, that one of the submarines, which has the sonar signature of the American submarine USS "Swordfish", is actually a Soviet submarine using special gear to mask its identity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_of_the_Lost_Sea"title="Dragon of the Lost Sea">
Shimmer, an exiled dragon princess traveling incognito in human form, senses powerful magic emanating from a small village. Investigating its source, she determines that it is the witch Civet, who sealed up the waters of her homeland, the Inland Sea, centuries ago in the form of a blue pebble, now making it known as the Lost Sea. Civet is staying at a local inn in disguise. Shimmer soon encounters a young, orphaned kitchen servant named Thorn who is being harassed by the local children because he claims to have seen the mythical Unicorn, one of the Five Masters. Supporting him, Shimmer is defended by Thorn when the children are about to turn on her, earning a beating from his master the innkeeper. She visits Thorn at the inn out of gratitude, and accepts his offer of a meal and a place to stay for the night, having never met with such hospitality during all her years of exile. Later that night, she saves Thorn from an attack by one of Civet's servants, an enchanted paper warrior sent to kill him because of his purported Unicorn sighting. The two are forced to flee the village after Shimmer defends Thorn against his master. To escape, Shimmer uses the dream pearl, a treasure which she was exiled for supposedly stealing hundreds of years ago, to change into her true form as a dragon in order fly away with Thorn.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Steel"title="Dragon Steel">
Shimmer and Thorn, transporting a disabled Civet, are met with a hostile reception while flying over the human capital of Ramsgate. The biggest threat to them is a massive, enchanted bird of fire, which they narrowly manage to escape and defeat after luring it out to sea. Arriving at an outpost of her uncle, High King of the Dragons Sambar XII, Shimmer does not receive the warm reception that she was expecting from the guards, but convinces their commander to let her see her uncle. On the way to his underwater palace, she discovers that relations between the humans and dragons have deteriorated as a result of increasingly provocative actions on the part of the human king known as the Butcher.The reception at Sambar's court does not get any better, as Sambar is not impressed by Shimmer's news that she has defeated Civet nor is he mollified when Civet and the Keeper's mist stone are presented to him as gifts, as he covets Shimmer's dream pearl. Shimmer creates an illusionary pearl to hand over, but Thorn, not knowing what she is up to, tries to take it back forcefully, getting them both thrown into the dungeons. There they meet Monkey, who was caught trying to steal Baldy's cauldron and has had a magical needle implanted in him which prevents him from using magic and cannot be removed without killing him. Thorn and Shimmer are placed in a cell, but Shimmer manages to create illusionary needles to take the place of the ones meant to restrain them. When they are left alone, Indigo, a servant girl working in the dungeons, helps them escape by suggesting that Shimmer try changing the tumblers on the locks to their chains and cell door. However Shimmer is unable to free Monkey, who suggests that he bring her a flower so that he can attempt to summon the Lord of the Flowers, a very ancient and powerful, yet whimsical being, one of the Five Masters, and the only person he can contact from his cell. Indigo, seeking a chance to escape the palace, convinces Shimmer to take her along, but earns Thorn's jealousy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_of_Wolfenbach"title="The Castle of Wolfenbach">
## Volume 1.Matilda Weimar and her servant Albert arrive at a cottage inhabited by two peasants, Pierre and his wife Jaqueline. Matilda is ill for unknown reasons and there is no bed for her to rest in, so they go to the neighbouring haunted Castle of Wolfenbach, whose caretakers take them in. That night, Matilda hears chains and groans and asks Joseph about the noises next morning. He says he and his wife never hear them. Bertha then explains that Count Wolfenbach is the owner and he is a cruel man who locked up his wife and children and they died. They are the ghosts that one hears. Matilda ventures up into the tower where the noises come from and encounters a lady and her servant. Matilda tells them the story of her life: her parents died while she was an infant and she was brought up by her uncle. She had a good upbringing with her servants Agatha and Albert, but her uncle started to "caress" her and she overheard his plan to rape her, so Matilda and Albert fled. The lady then says that she has a sister, the Marquise de Melfort in France and that Joseph knows she resides up there. The lady offers Matilda to live with her sister in France.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Necromancer;_or,_The_Tale_of_the_Black_Forest"title="The Necromancer; or, The Tale of the Black Forest">
## Part 1.Herman and Hellfried, two former university classmates and friends, reunite on a stormy night after thirty years of separation due to employment that forced them to travel. While recounting their past travels, the conversation quickly turns to the supernatural, and the two begin to relate a series of wondrous adventures. Hellfried begins the narrative with a story about a mysterious English lord who is lodging in the same inn as he. During his stay there, Hellfried is plagued by nightmares and apparitions, and loses several valuables and all of his money. The lord inexplicably returns several of his belongings and provides a loan. Hellfried, seeking an explanation to the series of events that have befallen him, meets an unknown figure in a late night rendezvous that claims to have the answers he seeks. The meeting ends in disaster, as Hellfried somehow fractures his leg and is bedridden for months. The story concludes with Hellfried returning to the inn and continuing on his travels.After a night of rest, Herrman continues the exchange of tales with an account of his travels with a ‘Baron de R–,’ for whom he was a governor. While the two traveled through Germany, they came upon a village in the titular Black Forest. Herrman and the Baron soon discover that the vacant castle in the village is haunted by its former lord, “a very wicked and irreligious man who found great delight in tormenting the poor pesants.”
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Midnight_Bell"title="The Midnight Bell">
Volume IThe story begins in Saxony at Cohenburg Castle, with two adult brothers, Alphonsus and Frederic. Alphonsus is the elder brother and inherited the title of Count Cohenburg after the death of their father.Frederic falls in love with a woman from Luxembourg, named Sophia, and marries her. Alphonsus observes his brothers happiness in marriage and seeks to replicate it. He selects a bride from the German court, Anna, and the two settle into a happy marriage. Anna and Alphonsus have a child, a boy also named Alphonsus. Meanwhile, Frederic and Sophia have three children, all of whom die in infancy, and Sophia dies giving birth to the third child. In his grief Frederic departed Cohenburg Castle, returning only three times in the next eleven years. Frederic finally settles back at the castle when the young Alphonsus is 17 years old.Some months later, Alphonsus, Count Cohenburg, is called away to the city for business. He dreads leaving his wife with Frederic, as he is concerned they are having an affair. Alphonsus fails to return to Cohenburg Castle and Sophia is told that he is dead. Anna immediately blames Frederic for Alphonsus’ death and makes her son, swear to avenge his father’s death. Days later, just after midnight, the young Alphonsus hears a scream from his mother’s room, which he assumes is an expression of her grief. Early the next morning Anna appears with bloody hands and tells Alphonsus that Frederic is innocent and compels Alphonsus to leave the castle, Frederic, and her, behind and never return.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonsword"title="Dragonsword">
The protagonist of Dragonsword is Suzanne Helling, a young woman living in 1980 Los Angeles, California, USA. She is taken away to the land of Gryylth and transformed into the warrior Alouzon Dragonmaster.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragon_(short_story)"title="The Dragon (short story)">
The story concerns two knights who have a mission to slay a dragon. They describe the dragon as huge, fire-breathing, and horrific, having only one eye. They charge the dragon but fail, presumably dying in the attempt.The "dragon" is then revealed to be a steam train, and its single eye is the train's headlight. The operators discuss the encounter but continue on without attempting to find the knights.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Firework-Maker's_Daughter"title="The Firework-Maker's Daughter">
A young girl called Lila wants to become a firework-maker, like her father Lalchand. Despite her talents, Lalchand believes this is an unsuitable job for girls. Lila disagrees, and journeys to get Royal Sulphur from Razvani the Fire-Fiend at Mount Merapi, as all aspirant firework-makers must do.The quest is nearly unsuccessful, as she does not have protection from the Fire-Fiend's flames or the Three Gifts to present to Razvani. However, her friends Hamlet, a talking white elephant, and Chulak, Hamlet's caretaker, manage to deliver the water of the Goddess of the Emerald Lake that will protect her. To Lila's surprise, Razvani recognizes her as a firework maker who has brought the Three Gifts, despite Lila being unaware of what the Three Gifts are.Upon her return home, she learns that Lalchand has been imprisoned because of the disappearance of Hamlet. To save his life, Lila and Lalchand must win the upcoming competition for the Firework Festival against other extremely talented firework makers. Upon their victory, Lalchand explains to his daughter that she does possess the Three Gifts: rather than tangible objects, they are talent, perseverance, and luck, all of which she has. She has talent, having worked with her father at firework-making for many years; courage and perseverance, for having undertaken the journey; and good fortune, which lies in having loyal friends, Chulak and Hamlet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Now_and_Forever_(novel)"title="Now and Forever (novel)">
Although Jessica and Ian Clarke have been married for seven years, they insist that the thrill and excitement have not dimmed. At Jessica's urging, Ian has left his advertising job to become a struggling writer, and she supports him with her successful San Francisco boutique.Ian's financial dependence on Jessica upsets him more than he admits and, in a moment of bored malaise, Ian's first casual indiscretion will create a nightmare that threatens everything Jessica and Ian have carefully built. What he does changes their lives, and them, perhaps forever, as they struggle to pay the price for his mistake.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_The_Second_Generation"title="V The Second Generation">
Set 20 years after the original miniseries, "The Second Generation" depicts an Earth still under Visitor domination with the Resistance fighting a losing battle. They desperately try to persuade the masses that the Visitors are evil aliens bent on mankind's destruction. However, they are largely ignored as the many technological and social advancements brought by the Visitors to the planet have convinced the majority that the aliens have their best interests in mind. They are halfway to taking all of the planet's water under the guise of cleansing it of all polluting substances. Many people were also convinced to join the Visitors' civilian militia, the "Teammates" (an evolution of the miniseries' "Visitor Youth"), to hunt resistance members.When all seems hopeless, the message that Resistance leader Juliet Parrish sent into space at the end of the original miniseries is finally heard. An alien race called the "Zedti", who are long-standing enemies of the Visitors reinforces the Resistance in their time of need and soon the war is turned in their favor. However, all is not as it seems, as the Zedti's actions make the Resistance wonder about their newfound allies' actual motives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorna's_Search"title="Acorna's Search">
The homeworld Acorna has never known was horribly scarred in the brutal attack by the cold-blooded Khleevi, but the Linyaari-the unicorn girl's gentle, spiritual race-live on. Now is the time for healing and rebuilding, for restoring the natural beauty corrupted by the savage insectile oppressors. But Acorna's Linyaari friends and colleagues begin mysteriously disappearing soon after work gets under way, among them her beloved Aari. And her desperate search for answers will lead courageous Acorna to a shocking discovery beneath the surface of her people's world-and deep into the realms of limitless space, where the truth of the origin of everything awaits.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkside_(novel)"title="Darkside (novel)">
Jonathan Starling is a very unlucky and shy teen. He doesn’t really have a social life and lives by himself due to his dad’s strange illness. Or, at least that was his happy life in “Lightside”. He had nearly been kidnapped by a bounty hunter and taken to the very mysterious place known as Darkside. Since he has been attacked by a werewolf, been close to being stabbed with a knife and swam in the “pool of pain”. Meanwhile back in Lightside. Detectives are trying to put the puzzle pieces together and find the kidnapper of Jonathan. Also, Ricky Thomas has been taken there and has been demanded to fight jackals. Just what is the real reason that they are in Darkside?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millions_of_Cats"title="Millions of Cats">
The hand-lettered text, done by the author's brother, tells the story of an elderly couple who realize that they are very lonely. The wife wants a cat to love, so her husband sets off in search of a beautiful one to bring home to her. After travelling far away from home, he finds a hillside covered in "Cats here, cats there, Cats and kittens everywhere. Hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, Millions and billions and trillions of cats..." This rhythmic phrase is repeated several other times throughout the story.The man wants to bring home the most beautiful of all the cats, but he is unable to decide. Each seems lovely, so he walks back home with all of the cats following him. His wife is dismayed when he arrives, realizing immediately what her husband overlooked: they won't be able to feed and care for billions and trillions of cats. The wife suggests letting the cats decide which one should stay with them, asking "Which one of you is the prettiest?" This question incites an enormous catfight, frightening the old man and woman, who runs back into the house.Soon, all is quiet outside. When they venture out, there is no sign of the cats: they'd apparently eaten each other up in their jealous fury. Then, the old man notices one skinny cat hiding in a patch of tall grass. It had survived because it didn't consider itself pretty, so the other cats hadn't attacked it. The couple takes the cat into their home, feed it and bathe it, watching it grow sleek and beautiful as the days pass: exactly the kind of cat they wanted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_of_Stone"title="Men of Stone">
The novel follows Ben Conrad, a fifteen-year-old boy struggling with family affairs, school, and bullying.Ben is surrounded by females at home: three older sisters and his mother. His father died when he was only five years old. Now that he has grown older, he knows he has to step up and be the man of his family. When a distant relative, Aunt Frieda, comes to visit, he finds out how strong an old woman can truly be. As Ben learns about Aunt Frieda's past life in Russia and her love and determination for her family, the two rapidly develop an unexpected relationship that strengthens both, especially Ben who learns to stand up for himself and believe in what he does.Ben initially strives to keep out of trouble - he is a good son at home and a good student at school, showing kindness to everyone, including Claude, who regularly bullies Ben and humiliates him at the school dance. Frieda reveals that she has experienced similar troubles to Ben in her life. Her husband Henry had been taken away to prison by corrupt officials, which she called "men of stone". When she went to visit Henry, her son went missing and never returned. While Frieda had thought of nothing but revenge, she learned that being controlled by hatred did nothing to solve the problems before her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_Genius_(novel)"title="Evil Genius (novel)">
The story begins when a boy named Cadel Piggot is taken to a psychologist because his prodigious intelligence has led him to hack high-security networks. His egoism harms or destroys everyone around him until he is saved by the love of a girl named Sonja Pirovic, who has cerebral palsy, but with an intellect equal to his.His quest for moral direction is complicated by Phineas Darkkon, an evil genius of sorts whom he is told is his father, and Thaddeus Roth, his psychologist whom the police identify as Prosper English, a notorious criminal and right-hand man of Dr. Darkkon, and who later also claims to be Cadel's father.He also meets a number of other talented people at the Axis Institute, which is the university Phineas Darkkon had created for him to get his World Domination degree. His specialty is IT and hacking.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Delivery_Man_(novel)"title="The Delivery Man (novel)">
The story follows the lives of childhood friends who've been negatively affected in different ways from their years growing up in Las Vegas off the strip. When we meet the main characters – Chase, Michele and Bailey – they are now in their twenties and the story focuses on their lifestyle, illegal professions and their caustic influence on the generation right behind.The story is told from the perspective of Chase, an aspiring painter just out of college, who had left Las Vegas to study art in New York where he met Julia, an MBA student who represents the promise of a life outside of Las Vegas. After returning to Las Vegas to finish school and finding work as a high school art teacher, Chase struggles to break free of his old life and his old friends, who are entrenched in the Las Vegas life of excess.Plot summary from the Willamette Week in Portland, OR, "A sympathetic look at the life of drug-using, self-destructing hookers and hustlers sounds like an uphill battle, but the simple truth about these characters is that they aren’t hookers or hustlers. They are aspiring painters, film directors and grad students. Although they inevitably prostitute themselves, they seldom talk about it, because they are ashamed or because they don’t understand what’s happening in their lives. All they want is comfort, to live in the Sun King suite on the 22nd floor of the Palace and order room service. But before they know it, prostitution isn’t even paying the bills; one by one, they go into debt with their own bodies."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Shadows_(Torchwood)"title="In the Shadows (Torchwood)">
A man has died of old age in his 30s. This, among other strange events, has led Torchwood to conclude that someone is sending victims to another dimension, one in which they are punished by the thing which they fear the most. Who is the mysterious taxi driver preying on his passengers?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shards_of_Honor"title="Shards of Honor">
Cordelia Naismith, the captain of a Betan Astronomical Survey ship, is exploring a newly discovered planet when her base camp is attacked. While investigating, she is surprised by a soldier, hits her head on a rock, and awakens to find that, while most of her crew has escaped, she is marooned with an injured Betan ensign and Captain Lord Aral Vorkosigan of Barrayar, notorious as the "Butcher of Komarr", who has been left for dead by a treacherous rival. During their five-day hike to a secret Barrayaran cache, she finds Vorkosigan not at all the monster his reputation suggests, and she is strongly attracted to him.When the trio reaches the base camp, Vorkosigan regains command of his crew. He returns to his ship with Cordelia and her crewman as his nominal prisoners. She meets Sergeant Bothari, a career soldier with mental problems who controls them through adherence to rules and an attachment to a strong commander, in this case, Vorkosigan.Vorkosigan informs Cordelia that upon their arrival on Barrayar, she will be free to return to Beta Colony; however, he asks her to marry him and remain on Barrayar as Lady Vorkosigan. Before she can consider his request, the crew of her ship, who have returned against her orders, join forces with Vorkosigan's rivals to "rescue" her. Cordelia helps defeat the resulting mutiny before returning with her crew to Beta Colony. During her captivity, she realizes that the Barrayarans seized the planet because the system it is in provides a way to reach Escobar. Escobar is a rich system with many "wormhole" access points and thus control over a lot of interstellar trade.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everyone_Says_Hello"title="Everyone Says Hello">
Early in the morning, Owen Harper is summoned to work by Jack. On his way to work, he is greeted by both the milkman and the postman – each introduce themselves by saying "hello" and by telling Owen all about their life: their name, their relations, likes/dislikes etc. He brushes them off, despite them still trying to talk to him, calling "hello" as he leaves. As Gwen Cooper arrives in Mermaid Quay, she is greeted by a tourist in much the same way.When they all arrive, Jack Harkness tells them of a problem; a powerful energy field that came through the Rift. When questioned by Owen and Gwen as to whether it is related to the peculiar behaviour they had seen that morning, Jack is doubtful and claims that what they witnessed was just common courtesy. The energy source is transmitting on the PK scale allowing Gwen to correctly guess the next card in a pile, 5 times out of 5, when tested by Owen.The entire city is grinding to a halt as people are more interested in saying "hello" than doing their jobs, resulting in absolute mayhem. Vic Royce, a large, short-tempered ex-convict, has an out-of character, polite conversation with a middle-aged woman before driving off with a smile on his face.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mysterious_Affair_of_Style"title="A Mysterious Affair of Style">
Set in post-war London and at Elstree Studios, Hertfordshire, the "mysterious affair" of the title is the murder of ageing actress Cora Rutherford on the set of the film which she hopes will mark her comeback to the silver screen. As it happens, mystery writer Evadne Mount, an old friend of Cora's, and Chief-Inspector Trubshawe, retired, formerly of Scotland Yard, are watching the shooting of the scene in which the actress drinks from a champagne glass whose content, unbeknownst to everyone except the murderer, has been laced with a strong poison. Right from the start of the investigation, a neat group of suspects presents itself to the police. However, although each of them would have had means and opportunity to kill Cora Rutherford, none of them has the slightest motive to have done so. It takes amateur sleuth Evadne Mount several days to figure out the solution to the crime, and only by linking up the murder with an accident which happened some time previously, and eventually by using a decoy, is she able to solve the case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Cauldron"title="Dragon Cauldron">
Shimmer, Monkey, Indigo, Thorn and Civet are forced to flee the Green Darkness after encountering the Butcher's soldiers and set off in search of the Smith and the Snail Woman, the only beings capable of repairing Baldy's cauldron, which was cracked when it was stolen from Sambar's treasure vault. They camp for the night by a lake in a wasteland that was the site of a former a kingdom destroyed by the Nameless One, a once powerful king and wizard who battled the Five Masters but could not be killed, and was punished by unknown, "terrible" means. While getting water, Civet notices a mysterious door at the bottom of the lake bed, from which she can sense a magical presence. Later that night the sound of weeping is heard coming from the lake. Monkey, Thorn and Civet get pulled onto the lake surface by the needleweed plants growing along the shore, and a whirlpool is created within the lake allowing them to access the door. Thorn and Monkey follow Civet inside, who is desperate for a means to supply her magic which has all been used up.The door leads to an ancient tomb, within which they encounter a mysterious, ghostly woman wearing a golden tiara with a pearl set in it. Drawn to the tiara, Civet takes it and puts it on, becoming possessed by the owner's spirit. Imbued with power, she begins to make strange prophecies. Despite the best efforts of Monkey and Shimmer, who soon joins them, Civet cannot be touched. Thorn succeeds in tricking her, allowing him to get the tiara immersed in a bowl of wine and destroying the pearl. The spell broken, the tomb begins to collapse and the whirlpool dissipate, from which the four manage to escape. Shimmer is disappointed in Thorn, further worsening their relationship which has been strained as Shimmer appears to have switched her favor to Indigo in an attempt to help her out, at Thorn's expense. Indigo is filled in on what happened, and after discovering the buoyancy properties of the needleweed, decides to take some of its juice. Civet later reveals that she believes she saw visions while possessed. Monkey discovers from spying on her that Civet believes her purpose in traveling with the group is not to help Shimmer, but rather Thorn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_War"title="Dragon War">
The Boneless King captures Shimmer, Monkey, and Indigo. They manage to escape and attempt to retrieve Baldy's cauldron, in which Thorn's soul is now sealed. However the Boneless King turns the tables on them and traps them in a cavern beneath Egg Mountain where he was formerly imprisoned with the river poisoned and cavern sealed up. Indigo figures out that water is the exclusion to the barrier spell as the river can flow in, so transformed into ice versions of themselves, they are able to escape. Returning to the Boneless King's tomb disguised as soldiers, they find that he has finished his excavation and left. The three catch up to where the pack train is camped for the night, but are unable to bluff their way past the pickets and are forced to transform into horses. They discover that some of the guardsmen and horses have been poisoned from drinking the river water and that the pack train is transporting the stone soldiers that were found in the Boneless King's tomb. Still disguised, they accompany the pack train on its journey. On the way, mysterious gases emitted by the statues follow the pack train, arousing such resentment and fear from the population such that "the countryside was almost ready to rise in rebellion" by the time they reach the capital, Ramsgate. The pack train is nearly attacked by villagers at the capital's gates, but is saved by reinforcements. The statues are buried in a pit on the palace grounds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_(fantasy_series)"title="Dragon (fantasy series)">
The tetralogy reads in sequence, with each successive book picking where the previous one left off. "Dragon of the Lost Sea" begins with the dragon princess Shimmer, who had been wandering for hundreds of years in exile after stealing the dream pearl, a treasure with the power to cast illusions and change its user's form, which her mother had willed to her but her brother Pomfret had tried to claim. After picking up the trail of Civet, the witch who had sealed the Inland Sea in a pebble, she encounters the orphaned young kitchen servant Thorn, who amazes her with his kindness and who she eventually saves from an assassination attempt by Civet. Thorn joins Shimmer on her quest, which eventually leads to the city of River Glen where they encounter the powerful mage known as Monkey. Monkey fails to capture Civet after she destroys the pebble and floods River Glen. Shimmer and Thorn track Civet to her lair, where after some trickery on Thorn's part, they manage to capture Civet. Shimmer decides to spare Civet after hearing her story and understanding her, and she and Thorn acknowledge their partnership."Dragon Steel" continues with Shimmer transporting Thorn and the captured Civet to the ocean domains of her uncle Sambar XII. She finds that the Inland Sea dragons who had sought refuge with him have been forced to work under difficult conditions, and she and Thorn get thrown into the dungeons after Thorn tries to prevent Shimmer from handing over an illusionary dream pearl. They are reunited with Monkey, who was captured trying to steal the magical Baldy's cauldron to boil away the Inland Sea. Assisted by a young kitchen servant named Indigo who is from a nearby forest called the Green Darkness, Shimmer and Thorn escape, taking Indigo with them. They manage to make their way to where the Inland Sea dragons now reside, forging dragon steel and garrisoning frontier outposts. Shimmer is able to convince her fellow dragons to relinquish the last strands of a flower that once grew abundantly by the Inland Sea for Monkey to summon the Lord of the Flowers, a powerful ancient being. They nearly fail in getting him the flower, but his summons is successful. The Lord of the Flowers helps Monkey escape and gives them access to Sambar's vault, where they find Baldy's cauldron, which gets cracked during the ensuing fight. Monkey's powerful weapon, his magical size-changing rod, and Civet are also retrieved. On Indigo's request they are transported to the Green Darkness, but find it devastated by the tyrannical human king known as the Butcher. Indigo decides to go with Shimmer and Thorn, along with a repentant Civet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legion_of_Space"title="The Legion of Space">
The story takes place in an era in which humans have colonized the Solar System but dare not go farther, as the first extra-solar expedition to Barnard's Star failed and the survivors came back as babbling, grotesque, diseased madmen. These survivors spoke of a gigantic planet, populated by ferocious animals, and of the single city of the evil "Medusae". The Medusae are elephant-sized, four-eyed, flying 'jellyfish' with hundreds of tentacles. The Medusae cannot hear or speak, but communicate with one another via radio waves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Curtain"title="The Black Curtain">
The story concerns a man with amnesia, named Frank Townsend. He cannot remember anything from the previous three years of his life. As it turns out, he may be a suspected murderer. He struggles to find a loophole in the overwhelming evidence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_in_Madrid"title="Winter in Madrid">
After his recovery, Dunkirk veteran Harry Brett is recruited by the British Secret Service to make contact with Sandy Forsyth, a shady Madrid-based British businessman and a former school friend. Harry's cover is as an interpreter in the British embassy. He arrives in Spain in October 1940 and finds that the Spanish suffer terribly from political repression, food shortages, poverty and the destruction brought by the Spanish Civil War. Brett works at the embassy for Ambassador Sir Samuel Hoare, an arrogant bully and Alan Hillgarth, the clever cunning chief of intelligence. He meets General Maestre, a contact of the embassy and prominent member of the monarchist faction.In a twist of fate, Sandy Forsyth's girlfriend, Barbara Clare, is a former lover of another school friend, Bernie Piper, a communist member of the International Brigades missing since the Battle of Jarama in 1937. Harry Brett meets Forsyth, who claims to have found large gold deposits in central Spain. Due to Spain's policy of national self-sufficiency and lack of gold, the mine could be of significant importance to the Franco regime. Meanwhile, Barbara meets Luis, an unemployed Nationalist Spain veteran, who tells her that Bernie is still alive and is being held in a brutal military prison near Cuenca. He tells her that he could organise Bernie's escape through his brother, a guard at the camp, in return for money.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necropolis_(Horowitz_novel)"title="Necropolis (Horowitz novel)">
On a school field trip to St Meredith's Church, Scarlett Adams finds herself magically transported to a monastery in Ukraine, where she is captured by monks who worship the Old Ones. Scarlett escapes and returns to St Meredith's. The media storm resulting from Scarlett's disappearance alerts Matthew Freeman in Peru that Scarlett is the new Gatekeeper. Matt, Jamie Tyler and Richard Cole travel to London, but narrowly miss meeting Scarlett. The Nexus informs them that Scarlett's father works for the Nightrise Corporation and has taken her to Hong Kong, a city that is suspected of housing the Old Ones. Matt, along with Jamie and Richard, travel to Macau in search of Scarlett, on the advice of the Nexus. Scarlett arrives in Hong Kong and is looked after by a Mrs. Cheng, who turns out to be a shape shifter from the Old Ones. Scarlett is rescued by a member of the Chinese Triads, Lohan Shan Tung. Lohan attempts to help Scarlett escape Hong Kong, but her father betrays her to Nightrise. Scarlett discovers her power is weather control when the shock of her father’s betrayal causes her to create a powerful typhoon, which approaches Hong Kong. Matt, Jamie and Richard meet with Lohan's father Han Shan-tung, who agrees to help them infiltrate Hong Kong. Matt allows himself to be captured by the Old Ones and is taken to Scarlett. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_Country"title="Judas Country">
Roy Case, an ex-Royal Air Force military transport pilot makes a threadbare living flying charter cargo flights around the Mediterranean in an old Beechcraft Queen Air. His dreams of having his own airplane and own charter company rapidly fading due to age and lack of money, but at least he is flying. However, conditions rapidly spiral out of control when he lands in Cyprus. Not only did his employers go bankrupt, leaving him stranded and without pay, but his plane is impounded, he is mugged by mysterious assailants on a dark back street, and is trailed by an Israeli Mossad agent. When he finds that the cases clearly marked “champagne” that he was supposed to be flying to Lebanon contain machine guns instead, he suspects that things are going to get a lot worse.When Case's friend Cavitt shows up, fresh from an Israeli prison, together with a mysterious Austrian archaeologist and his even more mysterious daughter, the plot thickens with hidden Crusader treasure, Lebanese gangsters, betrayal and murder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duel_of_Dragons"title="Duel of Dragons">
The protagonist of Duel of Dragons is Suzanne Helling, a young woman living in 1980 Los Angeles, California, USA. She is taken away to the land of Gryylth and transformed into the warrior Alouzon Dragonmaster.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Death"title="Dragon Death">
The protagonist of "Dragon Death" is Suzanne Helling, a young woman living in 1980 Los Angeles, California, USA. She is taken away to the land of Gryylth and transformed into the warrior Alouzon Dragonmaster.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killer_Inside_Me"title="The Killer Inside Me">
The story is told through the eyes of its protagonist, Lou Ford, a 29-year-old deputy sheriff in a small Texas town. Ford appears to be a regular, small-town cop leading an unremarkable existence; beneath this facade, however, he is a cunning, depraved sociopath with sadistic sexual tastes. Ford's main outlet for his dark urges is the relatively benign habit of deliberately needling people with clichés and platitudes despite their obvious boredom: "If there's anything worse than a bore," says Lou, "it's a corny bore." Despite having a steady girlfriend, childhood friend and schoolteacher Amy Stanton, Ford falls into a passionate, sadomasochistic relationship with a prostitute named Joyce Lakeland. Ford describes their affair as unlocking "the sickness" that has plagued him since adolescence, when he sexually abused a little girl, a crime for which his elder foster brother Mike took the blame to spare Lou from prison. After serving a jail term, Mike died at a construction site. Lou blamed a local construction magnate, Chester Conway, for Mike's death, suspecting he was murdered for refusing to help further Conway's schemes.To exact revenge, Lou and Joyce blackmail the construction magnate to avoid exposing his son's affair with Joyce. However, Lou double-crosses Joyce: He ferociously batters her, and shoots the construction magnate's son, hoping to make the crimes appear to be a lovers' spat gone wrong. Elmer is killed instantly and Sheriff Bob Maples, Lou's mentor, reports that Joyce died after a short stay in a coma. Though Lou believes this means he has gotten away with the crime, county attorney Howard Hendricks becomes suspicious of Lou's version of events, as well as his alibi, and a third person is suspected to be involved. This suspicion falls on Johnnie Pappas, a young small-time criminal who Lou has befriended, and to whom Lou gave some of Conway's money, which is revealed to have been marked. Lou is allowed to enter the distressed Johnnie's cell alone in order to reason with him, only to murder him and stage the scene as a suicide. Though many accept that the case is closed, more people begin to suspect Lou of being involved, including the deputy, Jeff Plummer. This also includes Amy, who presses marriage even after a sadomasochistic encounter with Lou begins to convince her that he is hiding a dark side.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Code_of_Romulus"title="The Code of Romulus">
The story begins with Flavia Gemina, the protagonist of the book, arguing with her tutor, Aristo. Flavia insists that she is a detective, though Aristo doubts there is such a word. Aristo says that if Flavia can solve the mystery of who has been stealing rolls from Pistor the Baker, then they will not do maths for a month, just read stories. However, if Flavia fails, she can never mention the word "detective" again.Flavia and her friends realise that the theft must be an inside job, and decide to find out more about the baker's household. They make friends with the baker's younger son, Porcius, who shows them around the bakery and introduces them to his family and the slaves who work there. He also shows them his "Circus Minimus", where he races mice. Nubia is especially interested in the donkeys who turn the millstone.The next day they split up to follow the different suspects. Lupus follows Porcius and his brother to school, Nubia follows his sister to the temple, and Jonathan follows the slave Teneme to the granary, while Flavia talks to the slave Tertius, the bakery accountant. He shows her the magic square puzzle, the Sator square, which eventually leads her to the solution of the mystery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dustbin_Baby"title="Dustbin Baby">
When she was a few minutes old, April was abandoned by her mother in a dustbin behind a local pizza restaurant. She was discovered by a young waiter there and named "April" by the hospital as she was found on April Fool's Day. She was fostered by Patricia Williams, but only lived with her a short time before being adopted. April's first stop on her fourteenth birthday is Pat's house. She finds that she remembers little of it and Pat remembers little of her. However she does befriend one of Patricia's new foster children - Tanya - a character seen before along with Pat in another of Jacqueline Wilson's books: "Bad Girls".April then visits the graveside of her adoptive mother: Janet Johnson. Janet committed suicide a few years after adopting April, while battling depression stemming from her husband's affairs and the break-up of her marriage.April subsequently tells readers of the time she was bullied mercilessly in a foster home run by "Big Mo" and "Little Pete" by another resident, Pearl, until April took drastic action against the bullying by pushing Pearl down the stairs, causing Pearl grievous bodily injury and, consequently, April's removal from the home. She was then sent to a residential care home called "Sunnybank Children's Home". Here, April is befriended by a much older girl called Gina. But, sooner or later, Gina calls upon April to "help" her friends in a series of burglaries after dark. When April later comes across Sunnybank, it redirects her to Gina, who is mother to a young son called Benjamin and does conferences there to steer the children to behave themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enchanter"title="The Enchanter">
The story is essentially timeless and placeless. The unnamed protagonist is a middle-aged man who lusts after a certain type of adolescent girl. Infatuated with a specific girl he meets in a park, he marries her mother in order to gain access to her. The mother, already sick, soon passes away, and the daughter is left in his care. He takes her away with the intent of entrapping her in an endless journey, stopping along the French Riviera on the first night of their trip. While she is asleep, he makes his move, only for her to wake up terrified and screaming. Shocked at his own monstrosity, he runs out on the street and jumps in front of a fast truck.The protagonist is conflicted throughout the story and tries to rationalize his behavior whilst simultaneously being disgusted by it. “How can I come to terms with myself?” is the opening sentence. He makes his moves like a chess player. But once he seems to have reached his goal, he is horrified at the girl's reaction, and the only way to reconcile his monstrosity is to destroy himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepulchre_(novel)"title="Sepulchre (novel)">
In 1891, Léonie Vernier is a young girl living in Paris until an invitation from her uncle's widow Isolde prompts a journey to the Carcassonne region with her brother, Anatole. Unknown to Léonie, her brother had been having an affair with Isolde and is being pursued by her jealous former lover, Victor Constant. For a while, they live an idyllic lifestyle in the country. However, Constant discovers where they are staying and sets out to exact his revenge.In the present day, an American, Meredith Martin, is in France to research the life of Claude Debussy for a biography she is writing. She is also trying to find out more about her biological mother. During the visit, she uncovers information that links her lineage to that of Léonie Vernier and discovers the truth about the events in Carcassonne during that period in history.Most of the action takes place in the Domaine de la Cade, a stately home in Rennes-les-Bains, which in 1891 is owned by Léonie's deceased uncle Jules and his wife Isolde, whom Anatole later marries. The house in Meredith's timeline has been repurposed as an upmarket hotel.There are also parts of the book that are situated in Paris at the same time, as well as parts in towns and villages neighbouring Carcassonne.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Countess_Below_Stairs"title="A Countess Below Stairs">
Anna is a charming child who sees the good in everything and everyone: her cousin Sergei, her younger brother Petya, and all of her multiple governesses. She has lived her whole life being pampered and adored by her father, fussed over by the servants, and cosseted by her mother. However, she is forced to flee Russia after the Bolsheviks seize power and her father dies in The First World War. Forced to depend on the charity of her governess, Pinny, Anna takes a position as a housemaid at Mersham, home of Rupert Frayne, Earl of Westerholme. She keeps this a secret from her brother and cousin, telling her ailing mother she has been invited to stay at the country manor.The staff resent her employment, as they immediately realise she is nobly born. Despite their concerns, Anna proves herself hard-working and intelligent. As her fellow employees grow to love Anna, the Earl sends a message that he returning from service in the war. Having made a promise to his late older brother, Rupert is bringing home a rich fiancee to help fulfill Mersham's many debts. Upon meeting Anna, her grace and high spirits are obvious to him, and the two get along very well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Target"title="Uncle Target">
The Palestinian-dominated Royal Jordanian Army's 17th Armoured Brigade has revolted with Syrian assistance, and has seized the southern part of Jordan, including the port city of Aqaba. However, the major concern for the British Army is that a prototype main battle tank on trials in the Jordanian desert has gone missing. After a terrorist attack in London fails, British military intelligence discovers that the tank is hidden in the ruins of an ancient Crusader fort near Wadi Rum. SAS-trained Major Harry Maxim, who formerly trained the Jordanian Army, is the ideal candidate to send in a commando raid to destroy the tank before it can fall into rebel (and thus Soviet) hands. However, the mission is botched when Maxim's helicopter crashes, and Maxim, an infantryman with no Armoured experience, decides that the best chance for the survival of his small team is to attempt to drive the tank across a hundred miles of rebel held desert to the presumed safety of Saudi Arabia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crocus_List"title="The Crocus List">
Former SAS Major Harry Maxim, reassigned from Number 10 Downing Street back to the Ministry of Defence after the demotion of his boss George Harbinger from the post of private secretary to the prime minister, is part of a security detail at Westminster Abbey for a state funeral. The guest list includes the Queen of the United Kingdom and the President of the United States, as well as numerous other heads of state of various NATO member nations.Political tensions with the Soviet Union are at an all-time high over Berlin, and Maxim is worried that the gathering would be an all-too-tempting target. He is right. Shots are fired, and a low-ranking British government minister sitting near the President is killed. The assassin kills himself with a grenade before he can be apprehended and is found to be carrying an old Soviet AK-47. All fingers point to the KGB. However, Maxim is far from convinced, and his investigation into the shooting takes him from London to Washington DC, (where he is reunited with MI-5 liaison officer Agnes Algar), and from there to New York City, the American Midwest and finally to East Berlin, as he unravels a conspiracy of massive proportions, which threatens to overthrow not only the British government, but all hopes for peace in Europe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexwood"title="Hexwood">
The Sector Controller, who is responsible for overseeing Earth, among other worlds, receives a message that tells him that a mysterious machine called the Bannus has been activated (against orders) at Hexwood Farm Estate near London by the man who was responsible for maintaining the facility. Somehow, the Bannus has trapped both that man and an entire maintenance team inside the Estate. Following instructions in case of such an accident, the Sector Controller sends a message to the Reigners, the five people who rule the galaxy.In a wood, an amnesiac boy meets an android. The android, who is called Yam, tells him that his name is Hume, because he is a human.In a small village near London, a teenage girl, Ann Stavely, recovers from a serious fever. While ill, she talks with the four voices in her head: The King, The Prisoner, The Boy, and The Slave. Through her window, she witnesses some mysterious comings and goings at nearby Hexwood Farm Estate; a van, with a symbol like a pair of unbalanced scales on the side, pulls up and people go in, but they do not come out again. After many different people go in, but none come out, Ann becomes curious, and is determined to find out more.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Season_of_Passion"title="Season of Passion">
Kate meeting Tom Harper, a well known pro-football star, widely recognised across the United States. When first meeting, they enjoyed their relationship, however, after an unsuccessful attempt at suicide, Tom becomes mentally and physically disabled for the rest of his life, leaving Kate pregnant with his unborn son, as well upset about recent circumstances. However, after a chance at a new relationship and fresh start, Kate realises she will have to leave the past behind, to move forward.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderlust_(Steel_novel)"title="Wanderlust (Steel novel)">
The plot follows Audrey Driscoll, a fictional character, travelling from America to China, Germany, England and North Africa. She is repeatedly made to choose between her desire for her adventure, or to abide by her conscience.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Damned_Utd"title="The Damned Utd">
Told from Clough's point of view, the novel is written as his stream of consciousness as he tries and fails to impose his will on a team he inherited from his bitter rival, Don Revie, and whose players are still loyal to their old manager. Interspersed are flashbacks to his more successful days as manager of Derby County. Described by its author as "a fiction based on a fact", the novel mixes fiction, rumour and speculation with documented facts to depict Clough as a deeply flawed hero; foul mouthed, vengeful and beset with inner demons and alcoholism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Latke_Who_Couldn't_Stop_Screaming"title="The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming">
The story begins in a tiny village, where in a small undecorated cottage, a latke is born. The latke, suffering from its immersion in heated olive oil, begins to scream and jumps out the window. It encounters a string of flashing colored lights, which do not appreciate the latke's shrieks and wonder why it was thrown into a pan of boiling oil. The latke explains that the oil is a reminder of "the oil used to rededicate the temple following the defeat of Antiochus at the hands of the Maccabees". The lights compare the latke to hash browns, and suggest it be served with a Christmas ham. The latke exclaims that it is something completely different, and runs away screaming.The latke then comes across a candy cane, which expresses distaste at the latke's mouthwatering smell. The latke points out that its smell is a reminder of greater modern religious freedom. In 175 BCE, the latke explains, in order to study the Torah, Hebrews needed to hide in caves, and pretended to play with dreidels when Greek soldiers approached. The candy cane equates this with Joseph and Mary hiding in the manger, but the latke insists that this is a totally different thing, and runs off screaming into the forest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Till_Death_Do_Us_Part_(Carr_novel)"title="Till Death Do Us Part (Carr novel)">
Dick Markham is engaged to a beautiful but somewhat mysterious young woman named Lesley Grant. When they attend a cricket match in the English village of Six Ashes, they stop at the nearby fair and Lesley insists on seeing the fortune teller. She is apparently unaware that the fortune teller is being played by Sir Harvey Gilman, the Home Office pathologist and expert on crime.After her session, Dick visits Sir Harvey. The crime expert is about to tell his visitor something unpleasant about Lesley when he is shot and wounded — accidentally, it seems — by Lesley herself. Later that night, Sir Harvey tells Dick that he recognized Lesley as a murderer who killed three husbands but was never convicted . . . because she somehow got the men to inject themselves with poison. Later that night, Sir Harvey dies in a locked and sealed room, in exactly the same fashion as the three husbands.The famed Dr. Gideon Fell is called in to assist the investigation, and what he says after simply seeing the corpse turns the whole case upside down. The brilliant sleuth knows he is on the trail of a cunning killer with a hidden motive, but his cryptic comments leave everyone else baffled. As Fell unravels the clues, including a set of drawing pins found scattered beside the body, the murderer strikes again. Meanwhile, a desperate Dick Markham can't help wondering whether Lesley is a woman in grave danger or a threat to his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burned_(Hopkins_novel)"title="Burned (Hopkins novel)">
Pattyn is seventeen years old and is the oldest of seven girls in a Mormon household. Her father is an alcoholic who beats her mother, believing a wife must succumb to her husband's actions. Her mother believes her duty is to have as many children as possible, especially a boy to carry on the family name, just as her husband wishes. Pattyn's mother, however, only conceived seven girls, named after famous generals: (youngest to oldest) Georgia (George Patton), Roberta (Robert E. Lee), Davie (Jefferson Davis), Teddie (Theodore Roosevelt), Ulyssa (Ulysses S. Grant), Jackie (Jack Pershing), and Pattyn (George Patton). It is alluded to that Pattyn deeply disagrees with the strict Mormon lifestyle she's lived throughout her childhood, as well as the expectations that will be imposed on her as a woman by her Mormon community, and wishes to break free and gain the freedom to become her own person with her own take on life. She appears to also resent her alcoholic father, Stephan Von Stratten, and her oppressed and submissive mother, and also having to care for her six younger sisters during their father's moments of alcohol-induced rage.Pattyn is unable to take the stress going on in her home, and begins to question her role in life, especially through her father's eyes. Eventually, she starts to experiment with dating Derek without her parents' knowledge. This leads to her getting caught drinking with her boyfriend in the desert, ironically, by her drunken father. Derek, her boyfriend, leaves her for another girl who is more experienced, whom Pattyn punches in the face in rage later on in the story. Pattyn becomes openly defiant and talks back to both her parents and pastor, lashing out and releasing all of the built up emotions and objections she has held for her Mormon lifestyle for a number of years. As a punishment, she is sent away to live with her Aunt Jeanette in eastern Nevada, because her mother is finally expecting a son and does not need to deal with the stress that Pattyn creates.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_a_Lonely_Place_(novel)"title="In a Lonely Place (novel)">
In post World War II Los Angeles, Dix Steele is an ex-airman who roams the city at night. He offers to help a police detective friend, Brub, solve the case of a serial killer—risking revealing that he himself has strangled women on a monthly basis since arriving in LA. Eventually, actress Laurel Gray and Brub's wife Sylvia become suspicious of Dix and they aid the forces of justice to close in on the killer without him being aware of it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Servant_(Lyall_novel)"title="The Secret Servant (Lyall novel)">
Former SAS Major Harry Maxim is assigned to Number 10 Downing Street as a special assistant to George Harbinger, private secretary to the Prime Minister, following the suicide of his predecessor with the British Secret Service. Maxim is assigned to protect Professor John White Tyler, Britain's premier military strategist on nuclear weapons policy and famed war hero (as well as an insatiable lecher). Tyler’s many enemies, including local pacifists, leftists, and radical students, as well as the KGB will do anything, perhaps even murder, to keep Tyler from addressing a NATO summit in Luxembourg. However, are various events surrounding Tyler related? Such as a hand grenade thrown through the door to the Prime Minister's residence, or the death of a Czech defector? Assisted by MI5 liaison officer Agnes Algar, Maxim must uncover a horrific secret from Tyler's wartime past in order to prevent a massive foreign relations disaster, as well as keeping Tyler alive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conduct_of_Major_Maxim"title="The Conduct of Major Maxim">
Former SAS Major Harry Maxim is assigned to Number 10 Downing Street, where he works under George Harbinger, private secretary to the Prime Minister. Maxim is asked by now-retired Sergeant Caswell (who appeared with Maxim in the first scene of The Secret Servant) to assist Corporal Ron Blagg, who has gone AWOL from the British Army after assisting MI6 in a botched undercover operation.Maxim soon discovers that both MI6 and a shadowy Sovbloc service are looking for Blagg, with deadly consequences. Maxim's efforts to assist Blagg are stymied by a web of deceit and suspicion among the various offices and agencies within the British government, until he uncovers a secret so threatening to one of the new leaders of the German Democratic Republic that they will kill to preserve it. The various settings for most of the action, housing projects in South London, a small rural town in Germany, and a fading port town in Humberside, are described in rich detail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_and_Marceline"title="Jason and Marceline">
Jason Herkimer, the main character of "Space Station Seventh Grade", is now in ninth grade. His relationship with his friend Marceline McAllister has developed into a real romance. The only trouble is that Jason isn't quite sure what to do with a girlfriend. His friends insist that the main function of a girlfriend is to make out, but Marceline says there's more to life than that.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_in_Blood_(novel)"title="Written in Blood (novel)">
The Midsomer Worthy Writer's Circle, a group of amateur novelists, invite celebrated author Max Jennings along as a special guest. However, host Gerald Hadleigh is vehemently opposed to the idea but refuses to explain why, so he is promptly overruled by his peers. After the somewhat uncomfortable event, Hadleigh's companion Rex St. John is tricked into departing, leaving Hadleigh alone with Jennings. The next morning Gerald is found savagely murdered with a candlestick, his corpse stripped and all his clothes stolen, with no sign of Max.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infidel_(novel)"title="Infidel (novel)">
Stretched to their limits and celebrated as heroes, the chosen will wish they had never been given that thankless task of finding the seven lost Books of History before the Dark One can. Martyn, a new Horde general, emerges and lures Johnis into the Horde city, Thrall, to force him into betraying Thomas. Once there, the chosen four are all caught by the Horde and Johnis is forced to strand Thomas into the desert to die. In the end, Johnis, Silvie, Billos, and Darsal are able to save Johnis' mother, retrieve three of the Lost books of History, and recruit the Dark Priest of Teelah's daughter into becoming a member of the forest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mad_Hatter_Mystery"title="The Mad Hatter Mystery">
A young newspaperman, Philip Driscoll, is gaining notoriety by writing up a series of bizarrely inconsequential crimes in which various hats are being stolen and returned in unlikely locations; he ascribes the crimes to "the Mad Hatter". Driscoll's uncle, Sir William Bitton, is infuriated to have lost two hats in three days. He meets with Gideon Fell to discuss his possession of the manuscript of an unpublished story by Edgar Allan Poe. During the meeting, it is learned that Philip Driscoll has been found murdered at the Tower of London, with Sir William's oversized hat pushed down over his ears. After sorting out the comings and goings of Sir William's household and other visitors to the Tower, Gideon Fell must determine the fate of the manuscript and of the murderer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Testament_of_Gideon_Mack"title="The Testament of Gideon Mack">
The main story of "The Testament" is set within a framing narrative which concerns a publisher who recollects the "strange disappearance" of the novel's main character, Gideon Mack, and the discovery of Mack's "last testament". The testament itself comprises the main narrative. It recounts the life of its author, a son of the manse (meaning the son of a minister of the Scottish Kirk), who has followed in his father’s steps, eventually becoming minister to the small town of Monimaskit. Since Gideon does not, however, believe in God as such, he becomes increasingly disillusioned with his existence, until an accident sends him tumbling into a local gorge. Believed to be dead, he emerges three days later, claiming to have met and conversed with the Devil, who has confirmed several of his doubts. After scandalising and alienating his friends, the parish, and the Kirk at large, Gideon once again disappears, leaving his written account for posterity.The epilogue to the novel is presented as the report of the freelance journalist who first brought the manuscript to the publisher’s attention. He interviews several of the inhabitants of Monimaskit who were mentioned in Gideon’s testament.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserk_(novel)"title="Berserk (novel)">
Wouldn't it be cool to have a killer as penfriend? 15-year-old Chas is fascinated of this idea. He impersonates his mother and writes to a man, called Lenny, who is in a death row in the USA, because he allegedly had killed a teenager. The Man is from Chas' home town in England. And he actually writes back. A risking game! But that's not all. Chas steals a truck with his friend - only for fun. But the prison, in which the crazy teenagers land, isn't any fun. But he still gets letters by Lenny from America. Just before Chas was released from prison, he is told that Lenny was acquitted because of the absence of proof and that he is on the way to England. What started as game evolved into a nightmare: Lenny wants to pay an old bill. When Chas and his friends realize that THEY are the goal of vengeance, it is nearly too late...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mercy"title="A Mercy">
Florens, a slave, lives and works on Jacob Vaark's rural New York farm. Lina, a Native American and fellow laborer on the Vaark farm, relates in a parallel narrative how she became one of a handful of survivors of a smallpox plague that destroyed her tribe. Vaark's wife Rebekka describes leaving England on a ship for the new world to be married to a man she has never seen. The deaths of their subsequent children are devastating, and Vaark accepts a young Florens from a debtor in the hopes that this new addition to the farm will help alleviate Rebekka's loneliness. Vaark, himself an orphan and poorhouse survivor, describes his journeys from New York to Maryland and Virginia, commenting on the role of religion in the culture of the different colonies, along with their attitudes toward slavery.All these characters are bereft of their roots, struggling to survive in a new and alien environment filled with danger and disease. When smallpox threatens Rebekka's life, Florens, now 16, is sent to find a black freedman who has some knowledge of herbal medicines. Her journey is dangerous, ultimately proving to be the turning point in her life.Morrison examines the roots of racism going back to slavery's earliest days, providing glimpses of the various religious practices of the time, and showing the relationship between men and women in early America that often ended in female victimization. They are "of and for men", people who "never shape the world, The world shapes us". As the women journey toward self-enlightenment, Morrison often describes their progress in Biblical cadences, and by the end of this novel, the reader understands the significance of the title, "a mercy".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenderness_(novel)"title="Tenderness (novel)">
Eric Poole is a convicted teenage serial killer. Lorelei "Lori" Cranston is a troubled 15-year-old girl.As a little boy in New England, Eric Poole already exhibited symptoms of a sociopath. He was suspected of murdering several young girls, but also murdered his mother and stepfather, and was convicted for those deaths. He convinced investigators that he killed his guardians out of self-defense with a false story of abuse.Lori is described as a beautiful girl with a very mature body at a young age. Consequently, she must constantly deal with the wanted and unwanted sexual attention she receives from men. She has a tendency to fixate on men, and will pursue them until she has put her mouth on theirs.Detective Jake Proctor always suspected that Eric was guilty of killing the other girls and that he had fabricated his abuse story. He is determined to prove that Eric is a serial killer.At 18, Eric is released from the juvenile detention center and immediately starts looking for a new victim. Lori sees him on TV, fixates on him, and runs away from home to find him. During this time, Detective Proctor begins setting a trap to catch Eric before he can kill again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_Things"title="Fine Things">
The plot follows Bernard Fine, a fictional character in his 30s who has recently been promoted to senior vice-president of Wolff's Department Store in his home town of New York City. Although enjoying his life, Bernie is sent to San Francisco to open a new Wolff's store. Bernie gets a new outlook on life when he meets little Jane O'Reilly, and soon after falls in love with her mother, Liz O'Reilly, a resident in California. After forming a relationship and marrying, Liz becomes pregnant with their first child, only to develop cancer shortly after the birth, given only a short amount of time to live. When Liz dies, Bernie is left with the responsibility of two children, and must take a new lease and have new experiences throughout his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_Blessings_(novel)"title="Mixed Blessings (novel)">
After the wedding of Diana Goode and Andrew Douglas, Diana comments that they will make a baby on their honeymoon. However, after the honeymoon period is over, she is still not pregnant. After repeated attempts, the couple both have to question their willingness to have a baby. The second couple consists of Charlie Winwood and Barbie Mason. The latter does not share Charlie's dreams of having a large family to raise in their house. After Charlie discovers he is sterile, he is forced to question his marriage, and his wife, who shares none of his dreams. The final couple is Pilar Graham, a successful lawyer from Santa Barbara, California and Brad Coleman, nineteen years older than she and father of two grown children. They are happy together until Pilar begins to alter her views on whether she should have a baby with Brad.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_from_Nam"title="Message from Nam">
The novel follows Paxton Andrews, who is stationed in Vietnam as a journalist during the Vietnam War, focusing on the men she encounters and how her life and the lives of the people she encounters are changed forever.Andrews has been heartbroken many times, having lost her father, two lovers, and a nanny to whom she was close. These tragedies have left her hopeless and despairing, but by going to Saigon for a third time she finds a love that will not fade away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killings_at_Badger's_Drift"title="The Killings at Badger's Drift">
In the fictional village of Badger's Drift, the elderly Miss Bellringer insists that her friend, Emily Simpson, did not die of a heart attack as her doctor claims, but was in fact murdered. An autopsy soon proves her right, as a mix of red wine and hemlock is found in the dead woman's system. While the village descends into panic, the murderer strikes again, claiming the life of local birdwatcher Iris Rainbird.As Barnaby investigates, aided by Sergeant Gavin Troy, he uncovers a connection between an older crime and the current killings at Badger's Drift.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_(Dukaj_novel)"title="Ice (Dukaj novel)">
The protagonist of the novel is Benedykt Gierosławski, a Polish mathematician and notorious gambler, collaborating with Alfred Tarski on his work on many-valued logics. The Ministry of Winter's officials visit Gierosławski and make him embark on a Transsiberian journey to find his lost father, who is said to be able to communicate with Lute. During his journey Gieroslawski finds out that he is caught in a political intrigue, brought about by rivalry between two palace factions, "liedniacy" (conservatives and Siberian entrepreneurs backing the idea of "frozen Russia") and "ottiepelnicy" (mostly revolutionaries aiming for a literal and political "thaw"), supported also by the Tsar. He also meets Nikola Tesla in disguise, who has conceived a technology for manipulating and eventually destroying the Ice and has been hired by the Tsar to relieve Russia from the Winter. During the journey and upon his arrival in Irkutsk Gierosławski discovers that various political forces, including Followers of St. Marcyn, a sect worshiping the Ice led by Rasputin, followers of Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, who strive for assuring human immortality, and Siberian industrial potentates, are interested in his person and that Józef Piłsudski, in this reality leading a group of Sybiraks and Siberian separatists fighting for Polish independence, may possess knowledge about his father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jester_(novel)"title="The Jester (novel)">
The Jester is a thriller novel focused on a man named Hugh De Luc. Set in the year 1096, Hugh is living in a time of unrest when peasants like himself are treated poorly. The region is ruled by the tyrannical Duke Baldwin. In seeking freedom, Hugh joins the Crusades. While invading one of the Turk cities, Hugh realizes the horror around him and decides he cannot face it. He passes a church, where he sees a priest being beaten, and kills the men attacking him. At the dead priest's side lies a staff, which Hugh decides to carry with him from then on.Hugh flees the Holy Land, returning to his home village of Veille du Père, only to find that his wife Sophie has been kidnapped, his son Phillipe dead (born after Hugh had left), and his inn destroyed. Townsfolk inform him that the attackers wore no colors except for black crosses sewn onto their tunics and that the attackers were dishonored knights who seemed to be looking for Hugh particularly. Angered, he wanders into the forest, searching for Sophie, who Hugh believes is still alive and being held captive in the dungeons at Treille. After being attacked by a boar, he is saved by Emilie, a woman who reminds him of Sophie. She turns out to be highborn — a daughter of the King of France — though he does not learn of this until much later. She takes care of him in her hometown of Borée, which is the dukedom of her cousin's husband, Stephen. Hugh's plan is to infiltrate the castle of Lord Baldwin at Treille. With the help of Emilie and Norbert (the jester at Borée), he pretends to be a jester. Through Lord Baldwin and his court, Hugh learns that his wife was never in Treille with Baldwin, so he travels back to Borée to see Emilie once more.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Wave"title="Brain Wave">
At the end of the Cretaceous period, Earth moved into an energy-damping field in space. As long as Earth was in this field, all conductors became more insulating. As a result, almost all of the life on Earth with neurons died off, causing the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. The ones that survived passed on their genes for sufficiently capable neurons to deal with the new circumstance. Now in modern times, Earth suddenly moves out of the field. Within weeks all animal life on Earth becomes about 5 times as intelligent. The novel goes through the triumphs and tribulations of various people and non-human animals on Earth after this event.The book opens with a lyrical description of a rabbit, stuck inside a trap, becoming able to reason his way out. This is a common theme in the book. Animal traps are based on the idea that the animals cannot reason their way out of them. When the animals get the ability to reason, they start escaping.Institutions which seemed to be vital to human society, such as a money economy and centralized government, disappear in North America; while Africans, with the assistance of now well armed gorillas, overcome colonial rule, and Chinese rebel against the Communist government. However, some of the means by which people cope with the "Change" are inventing new anti-scientific religions such as the Third Ba'al, or adopting pseudo-science.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Honor"title="Silent Honor">
In August, 1941, Hiroko visits the United States from Japan, as she has an uncle, aunt, and cousins living there. Upon first arrival, she settles in well and continues to lead a regular life, however, on December 7, 1941 — Pearl Harbor is bombed, thus making them an enemy in their community and across the USA, as they are considered foreigners. Ordered to stay by her father, she remains occupied in California, however, the military are ordered to remove all Japanese citizens, and she ends up being put in a detention centre, having to fight to stay alive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parnassus_on_Wheels"title="Parnassus on Wheels">
"Parnassus on Wheels" is Morley's first novel, about a fictional traveling book-selling business. The original owner of the business, Roger Mifflin, sells it to 39-year-old Helen McGill, who is tired of taking care of her older brother, Andrew. Andrew is a former businessman turned farmer, turned author. As an author, he begins using the farm as his Muse rather than a livelihood. When Mifflin shows up with his traveling bookstore, Helen buys it—partly to prevent Andrew from buying it—and partly to treat herself to a long-overdue adventure of her own. The first of two novels to be written from a woman's perspective, as well as the prequel to a later novel ("The Haunted Bookshop"), "Parnassus on Wheels" was inspired by the novel "The Friendly Road" by David Grayson (pseudonym of Ray Stannard Baker), and starts with an open letter to Grayson, taking him to task for not concerning himself (except in passing) with his sister's opinion of and reaction to his adventure.The bookstore-wagon, drawn by a horse named Pegasus, is advertised with a short verse:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinkin_of_Dragon's_Wood"title="Rinkin of Dragon's Wood">
The story follows the life of a young fox in the English countryside. He learns to fight and hunt, survives a drought and an encounter with a train, and takes a mate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(Sleator_novel)"title="Singularity (Sleator novel)">
Sixteen-year-old identical twins Harry and Barry learn that their mysterious great-uncle has died, and his house and possessions now belong to their mother. The brothers travel to Sushan, Illinois, to examine the house and its contents. Inside the cobweb-filled home, the rival brothers find mysterious animal skeletons and other odd objects. Outside Uncle Ambrose's residence, Harry and Barry find a small metal-reinforced building, which according to the accompanying keys, is called the "playhouse." When the twins explore the playhouse, they discover that the properties of time are altered inside, and the playhouse may explain the eccentricities of their great-uncle. When their quirky and cute neighbor Lucy enters their lives, competition between the twins escalates, and Harry makes a decision that will change the nature of their relationship forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratha_and_Thistle-chaser"title="Ratha and Thistle-chaser">
Thistle-chaser, the daughter of the Named clan leader, Ratha, has no recollection of her past or true name. Due to this, she lives alone on a coastline, befriending the seamares that reside there, and goes by 'Newt'. In her dreams, a creature she knows as the Dreambiter, which bites her foreleg, often makes her go into seizures and fits of panic. A clan cat, Thakur comes across Thistle-chaser while searching for water. He befriends her and starts having her swim in a lagoon which acts as therapy for her shriveled leg. When he reports of the water and seamares that live there, Ratha decides to move the clan and their livestock to the coast, going as far as to capture the seamares. Thistle-chaser is upset by this and frees them, making Ratha, who refuses to believe that Thistle-chaser is her daughter, order the clan to attack Thistle-chaser if she tries anything like it again.Thistle-chaser eventually learns that Ratha is her mother and realizes that the Dreambiter would be destroyed if Ratha was killed. Ratha bit Thistle-chaser when she was young, which was the cause of the Dreambiter. Thistle-chaser decides to attack Ratha and the two get into a fight. When Ratha gets her foot stuck between two rocks, Mishanti, an Unnamed cub which Ratha was going to abandon, gets caught in the fray and tries to defend Ratha. In her fury, Thistle-chaser goes after him, only to be stopped by Ratha, who calls her names and brings her back to reality. Thakur and Fessran, another clan cat, arrive soon and together with Thistle-chaser bring Ratha and Mishanti to safety.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farther_Shore_(Star_Trek)"title="The Farther Shore (Star Trek)">
There is a Borg conspiracy going on Earth, and suddenly people begin to transform into Borg drones. Now Captain Janeway and her crew must save Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bottom_Billion"title="The Bottom Billion">
## Development traps.The book suggests that, whereas the majority of the 5 billion people in the "developing world" are getting richer at an unprecedented rate, a group of countries (mostly in Africa and Central Asia but with a smattering elsewhere) are stuck and that development assistance should be focused heavily on them. These countries typically suffer from one or more development traps.The Conflict Trap: Civil wars (with an estimated average cost of $64bn each) and coups incur large economic costs to a country. Additionally, in the time period immediately following a major conflict, relapse is highly likely. Collier also argues that the longer a country stays in a state of conflict, the more players become established that profit from the state of tumult, making the situation increasingly intractable.The Natural Resource Trap: Countries that are rich in natural resources are paradoxically usually worse off than countries that are not. Collier attributes this to a variety of causes:Landlocked with Bad Neighbours: Poor landlocked countries with poor neighbours find it almost impossible to tap into world economic growth. Collier explains that countries with coastline trade with the world, while landlocked countries only trade with their neighbors. Landlocked countries with poor infrastructure connections to their neighbors therefore necessarily have a limited market for their goods.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Color_of_Death"title="The Color of Death">
A string of daring and vicious robberies strike the great houses of central London. Even Sir John is laid low, and young Jeremy Proctor must take a significant role in the investigation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Unquiet_Mind"title="An Unquiet Mind">
## Part 1: The Wild Blue Yonder.Jamison describes her childhood and early life as part of a military family and the effects that had on her life, including a very conservative upbringing and the need to make new friends after every relocation. She recalls having a very happy childhood, and a supportive family. Her father was creative and charismatic and her mother kind and yet resourceful. In her adolescence she showed an interest in science and medicine which later switched to psychology. When her family moves to California, her family life deteriorates with her father becoming more prone to depressive episodes and her mother busy pursuing professional goals. It is at this time, her senior year in high school, that Jamison experiences her first episode of hypomania, followed by her first episode of depression, which she was able to go through passing as normal. Some time later Jamison starts her undergraduate studies at UCLA, where she determines clinical psychology as her career path. After finishing her undergraduate, Jamison earns her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from UCLA and becomes a professor in the Department of Psychiatry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Times_Dizzy"title="Five Times Dizzy">
Five Times Dizzy is about the comedy and drama of a Greek Australian family in a multi-cultural neighbourhood of inner-city Sydney. To help her Greek grandmother feel more at home, Mareka comes up with a brilliant plan to give her a pet goat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witch_of_the_Low_Tide"title="The Witch of the Low Tide">
David Garth, M.D., has fallen in love with the beautiful widow, Lady Betty Calder. Detective-Inspector Twigg of Scotland Yard tries to warn Dr. Garth about the chequered past of Lady Calder, but it takes all the nerve of Garth's friend, Cullingford Abbot, assistant to the Commissioner of Scotland Yard, to state that, among other things, Betty danced for three seasons at the Moulin Rouge and is thought to have joined a Satanist group in Paris. She is also reputed to be a blackmailer responsible for at least two suicides. However, Betty herself raises the possibility that she is being mistaken for the machinations of her sister Glynis. When Glynis is found dead on the beach near a bathing-pavilion, in the middle of a stretch of unmarked sand, Betty is suspected of arranging the death (although no one can suggest how it might have happened). It takes Dr. Garth's special knowledge of both medicine (the new science of "psychoanalysis", which suggests that abuse of a child may be the fault of the child and that the abuser may be innocent) and literature, like Gaston Leroux's "The Mystery of the Yellow Room," to solve the impossible crime and reveal the criminal. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2nd_Chance_(Patterson_novel)"title="2nd Chance (Patterson novel)">
Homicide Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer is still recovering from the recent loss of her partner and is just returning to the force when she is called in to investigate a series of murders that include an 11-year-old girl and an elderly woman. Through her investigations she discovers a connection to a jail-hate gang called Chimera. After another police officer is killed by a sniper and then her boss is murdered, the trail leads to the ex-cop Frank Coombs.To further complicate all of the Women's Murder Club ladies, Jill is pregnant and Claire becomes a target for the Chimera killer.Cindy starts dating the murdered girl's pastor, Aaron Winslow, and Lindsay's father shows up, pretending he misses his daughter, but actually following Chimera, too, as he was present the day the killer slaughtered a 14-year-old boy.Finally, after chasing the trail of Frank Coombs, Lindsay trails the real killer, Rusty Coombs - Frank's son - to a tower on a college campus where he has opened fire and killed several students. Rusty is getting revenge for what has happened to his father and no longer cares if he lives or dies. Lindsay kills Rusty at the college tower.As an epilogue, Lindsay receives a postcard from her father in Mexico saying sorry for lying to her about his crooked past and telling her he has bought a boat and named it Buttercup, his pet name for her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Creationists"title="The Creationists">
The expanded edition covers the history of creationism from the time of Charles Darwin to 2006. It first describes early opposition during Darwin's lifetime, then George Frederick Wright's conversion from Christian Darwinist to Fundamentalist opponent and how creationism influenced the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy and the rise of prominent populist creationists such as William Jennings Bryan. It then narrates the careers of two early, self-taught, 'scientific' creationists; the old Earth creationist Harry Rimmer, and the young Earth flood geologist George McCready Price.It then chronicles the growth of creationist organisations in the mid 20th century, such as the Religion and Science Association, the Deluge Geology Society, the Evolution Protest Movement (in the United Kingdom), and the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA), the latter moving almost immediately in the direction of theistic evolution.The book then narrates the young Earth creationist backlash against the ASA's modernism, with Henry M. Morris and John C. Whitcomb, Jr.'s publication of "The Genesis Flood" (1961) and the forming of the Creation Research Society, which created the creation science movement. It continues with Morris' founding of the Institute for Creation Research and the Seventh-day Adventist Church's founding of the Geoscience Research Institute.The book then describes the influence of creationism in churches and in countries outside the United States, and the rise of the intelligent design movement, before concluding with a chapter on creationism's global impact.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha'penny_(novel)"title="Ha'penny (novel)">
The book is a mystery thriller set inside an alternative history in which the United Kingdom made peace with Adolf Hitler in 1941.In 1949, Britain has slid into fascist dictatorship. When a bomb explodes in a London suburb, Scotland Yard Inspector Peter Carmichael is assigned to the case. He finds a web of conspiracy and a plot to murder both Britain's new Prime Minister and Adolf Hitler during the latter's Friendship visit to London. Carmichael's professional ethics became compromised during a previous case involving the aristocratic and political establishment, which may affect his ability to handle the case at hand.Life is complicated for Viola Lark as well; she abandoned the upper-class environment of her family and lost touch with her five very different sisters (who are inspired by the real-life Mitford sisters) when she chose to become an actress. Viola is given the role of a lifetime and has hard decisions to make since she becomes caught up in family politics.The first "Small Change" novel, "Farthing", was released in August 2006 by Tor Books. A third novel in the series, "Half a Crown", came out in September 2008, also from Tor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_a_Crown_(novel)"title="Half a Crown (novel)">
The book is a thriller set inside an alternate history in which the United Kingdom made peace with Adolf Hitler, and the United States did not become involved in World War II. The British government has become fascist and authoritarian. Peter Carmichael, formerly a police inspector at Scotland Yard, is now head of the secret police, called "The Watch". He must deal with political intrigue by those jealous of his position and must safeguard his teenage ward while he keeps secret his illicit activities helping Jews and dissidents who wish to flee the country.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Son_of_the_Shoemaker"title="The Fifth Son of the Shoemaker">
The book concerns the story of a Russian family of hereditary shoemakers who have immigrated from Moscow to New York, their establishment in a humble East Side cellar, rise from rags to riches, and travels around the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corsican_Brothers"title="The Corsican Brothers">
The story starts in March 1841, when the narrator travels to Corsica and stays at the home of the widow Savilia de Franchi who lives near Olmeto and Sollacaro. She is the mother of formerly conjoined twins Louis and Lucien. Louis is a lawyer in Paris, while Lucien clings to his Corsican roots and stays at his mother's home.The brothers were separated at birth by a doctor with his scalpel, but Louis and Lucien can feel each other's emotions, even at a distance. Lucien explains he has a mission to undertake, with reluctance. He has to mediate in a vendetta between the Orlandi and Colona families and invites the narrator to accompany him and meet the head of the Orlandi family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Calling_(Bloor_novel)"title="London Calling (Bloor novel)">
Martin Conway is an unhappy 7th-grade student at a conservative New Jersey prep school, All Souls Preparatory, that reveres the memory of such famous graduates as General "Hollerin' Hank" Lowery. His self-sacrificing mother doesn't listen and his father is an alcoholic and is seldom around. Their marriage is falling apart. The only person he is able to talk to is his grandmother. Martin is bullied both by students and teachers, his grades are falling and he has few friends, and is finally involved in an altercation with one of the school's most famous students, the grandson of an important World War II veteran. Almost simultaneously, Martin's grandmother dies. Martin becomes seriously depressed, and rarely leaves his basement room. In his Grandma's will, though, she leaves him an antique radio.When he tries it out, its hidden static is ghostly signal is also a portal to the deadly past of the London Blitz. At first Martin believes he is having nightmare visions related to his stressful situation, but with the help of his older sister, an Ivy League graduate, he researches historical details from his visions. When they turn out to be true, he realizes that he is really traveling through time. A child with a British accent emerges through the radio static, and eventually leads Martin back to the streets of London in 1940. Jimmy Harker is a boy in desperate need of help, but the help he needs will require more heart and courage from Martin than he ever knew he had.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine_Blues_(novel)"title="Cocaine Blues (novel)">
After the Honourable Phryne Fisher solves a country-house jewel robbery in record time, she is asked by Colonel and Mrs. Harper to look into the matter of their daughter in Australia, who they fear may be being poisoned by her husband. Having grown bored with English social life, Phryne is happy to have an excuse to put off making decisions about her future for the next few months or so, and promptly relocates to Melbourne.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemma_Doyle_Trilogy"title="Gemma Doyle Trilogy">
This series is a cross between period fiction and Fantasy. The story revolves around Gemma Doyle, a young woman sent from her home in British India to the boarding school, Spence Academy, after the mysterious death of her mother. There she meets Ann, Felicity, and Pippa, three other remarkable young women. Together, they discover the dark past of their school, which closely revolves around a mystical group referred to as The Order. In the first book, they find out that this group of sorceresses was forced to disband after one of their own, a woman named Sarah Rees-Toome, betrayed them. Throughout the series Gemma learns of her own heritage and the magical powers she possesses, including the ability to enter "The Realms," a magical world in which dreams can become reality, but everything seems to have a cost. This series addresses some of the issues faced by women in the late 1800s, and creates parallels to issues faced by women today. There are many female characters, and the struggles they encounter on their journey to becoming empowered both within and outside of The Realms ring true. Other themes include dissecting dualities (in particular, the duality between good and evil;) free will versus fate; going against social norms; power; and, most of all, the concept of choice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_Quest"title="Sword Quest">
There is war in the kingdom of birds, which was started by the prehistoric birds known as the archaeopteryxes. In the only place where birds are still safe, a magical island called Kauria, the King, Pepheroh the Phoenix, orders his birds to make a sword as a result of what the Great Spirit tells him. Once the sword had been forged, a tear gem from the Great Spirit, a godly entity watching over birds, lands in the hilt of the sword, and seven other gems, each a color of the rainbow, are scattered around the world. These gems are the Leasorn Gems, and hold clues to where the magical kingdom of Kauria and the sword are found. A bird destined to be a hero will take hold of the sword at the fifth full moon three years from then and rescue the warring world. However, should the sword fall into evil hands, the world of birdkind shall be in peril.Hungrias the Second, Ancient Wing (or king) of the archaeopteryxes, sends Sir Maldeor, his top knights, and his son, Prince Phaethon, to a tribe of doves, who have the orange Leasorn Gem. The mission fails, as a monstrous four-winged bird/reptile creature attacks and eats Phaethon, who was in possession of the orange gem. The creature bursts into blue flames and Maldeor sends his troops to kill all the remaining doves. However, a dove named Irene manages to escape and lays an egg. When the egg hatches to reveal a fully feathered hatchling, she names him Wind-Voice. Meanwhile, the four-winged creature, named Yin Soul, is stuck between the world of the living and that of the dead, and can only escape if he can find the body of a likely hero that can get the Hero Sword, or else he will die a painful death. Yin Soul attempts to take control of Wind-Voice, but Wind-Voice sees through Yin Soul's illusion and refuses. Before meeting Yin Soul, it was revealed that Wind-Voice's mother had been killed, and he was made a slave. Wind-Voice later meets a wood-pecker scribe named Ewingerale, nicknamed Winger. Winger had been imprisoned after his tribe was destroyed. The archaeptyx were planning on fattening Winger up and eating him for supper.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Keel"title="The Golden Keel">
Peter Halloran, a migrant to South Africa after the end of World War II is a successful and profitable designer and builder of yachts and small watercraft. Life is good – business is good, and he has a beautiful wife and daughter. One day, in the local yacht club bar, he meets Walker, an alcoholic ex-soldier, who tells him an improbable tale of a hidden treasure. Walker was a prisoner of war in Fascist Italy, but escaped with a small band of Allied prisoners, including an Afrikaner named Coertze and some Italian partisans, and waged a guerilla campaign for several months in the hills of Liguria against the Nazi Germans. Toward the end of the war, their band ambushed a truck convoy, which contained a massive treasure in gold bars, jewels, and the State Crown of Ethiopia. Rather than turn the treasure over to the authorities, they hid the trucks in an abandoned mine and sealed the entrance. Now, with the war over, the treasure is for the claiming, provided they can smuggle it past Italian customs.Halloran thinks little of the tale until several years later, after life turns sour. His wife killed in a traffic accident, he needs a change. A chance re-encounter with Walker leads to a meeting with Coertze, and with the three men agreeing to a partnership to recover the treasure. Walker and Coertze know where it is, and Halloran has the perfect solution to getting it out of the country. But questions worry Halloran – why are only Walker and Coertze survivors of the much larger group of guerillas, and why is Walker terrified of Coertze? The mystery deepens as the men travel to Tangiers, thence to ports around the Mediterranean, their steps dogged by unsavory characters. It is soon clear they are not the only group after the treasure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyatt's_Hurricane"title="Wyatt's Hurricane">
David Wyatt is a white West Indian, originally from St Kitts by way of Grenada, and is a meteorologist working with the United States Navy's “Hurricane hunter” flights researching storms and severe weather patterns. He is based out of San Fernandez, a fictional Caribbean island nation with a history and political background strikingly similar to Haiti. Wyatt is convinced that Hurricane Mabel will strike San Fernandez head-on, with a storm surge that will flood its capital of St Pierre, potentially killing thousands. The United States Navy is not convinced, as their computer models indicate that the hurricane will pass by, and the paranoid, megalomaniacal dictator of San Fernandez, General Serrurier, will hear nothing of it. A hurricane has not struck San Fernandez in over fifty years, and he has much more important things to worry about – such as an armed revolt against his rule. As civil war erupts, Wyatt struggles to convince his superiors, the government, and eventually the rebels that the hurricane will be their most serious problem...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_Blind_(Bagley_novel)"title="Running Blind (Bagley novel)">
Ex-MI-6 spy Alan Stewart is coerced by his former masters to undertake a very simple final mission – to deliver a small parcel to a man in Iceland. The mission should be simple for Stewart, as he happens to be fluent in Icelandic, and has an Icelandic girlfriend.However, immediately things go very wrong, very quickly. Soon after arrival, he is forced to kill a KGB agent who tried to take the package from him. When he tries to deliver the parcel, he realizes that he has been double-crossed, and that his former boss is now a double agent. Stewart sets off on a desperate race overland across some of the world’s most rugged, desolate and dramatic scenery, pursued by the KGB, the CIA, and his own people, who now think that he has become a traitor. The secret is with the mysterious parcel – and the opposition is more than willing to kill him to prevent him from discovering what that secret is.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahama_Crisis"title="Bahama Crisis">
Tom Mangan is a wealthy white Bahamian, and owner/president of a company operating resort hotels, marinas and car rental companies in the Bahamas. His business is successful and growing, and he has a beautiful wife and two children. Things could not be better. One day, he is visited by an old friend from his college days at the Harvard Business School, Billy Cunningham, and his beautiful younger cousin Debbie. The Cunninghams are owners of the Cunningham Corporation, a major conglomerate based in Texas. The Cunningham Corporation wants to invest heavily in developing the tourist industry in the Bahamas, and Mangan agrees to form a partnership with them. However, soon afterwards, disaster strikes. The yacht with Mangan's wife and one of his daughters mysteriously disappears, and the body of his daughter washes up on a beach hundreds of miles from where the yacht should have been. A rash of mysterious events strike the tourist industry, ranging from an unprecedented labor dispute and riot, Legionnaire's Disease striking the hotels, baggage carousels running amok at the airport, arson at an amusement center, and an oil slick from an oil tanker where it should not have been. As Mangan attempts to track down the murderer of his wife, he discovers that these seemingly unrelated events are all connected, and that the plot involves the future of the Bahamas itself as a nation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enemy_(Bagley_novel)"title="The Enemy (Bagley novel)">
Malcolm Jaggard calls himself an economist, but is really working undercover for British Intelligence. He is engaged to geneticist Dr Penelope Ashton and was spending a weekend at her parents’ home when her sister was viciously attacked by a stranger who threw acid on her face. Jaggard uses his position to investigate the Ashtons and finds to his surprise that the identity of her father, George Ashton, is classified to the highest levels. He is also surprised when his superiors order him to guard the Ashtons against further attacks at all costs, without revealing his own true identity even to Penelope Ashton.Jaggard discovers that the acid attack was a case of mistaken identity. The assailant intended to injure his fiancée, whose work on the genetic manipulation of viruses may have disastrous consequences in the event of a laboratory leak. When such a breach eventually occurs, Jaggard feels compelled to reveal his covert activities to the public at large as a means of warning about the risks of research of this kind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_with_the_Dragon_Tattoo"title="The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo">
Middle-aged journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who publishes the magazine "Millennium" in Stockholm, has lost a libel case involving damaging allegations about billionaire Swedish industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerström, and is sentenced to three months in prison. Facing jail time and professional disgrace, Blomkvist steps down from his position on the magazine's board of directors, despite strong objections from Erika Berger, Blomkvist's longtime friend, occasional lover, and business partner. At the same time, he is offered an unlikely freelance assignment by Henrik Vanger, the elderly former CEO of Vanger Enterprises. Blomkvist accepts the assignment — unaware that Vanger commissioned a comprehensive investigation into Blomkvist's personal and professional history, carried out by gifted private investigator Lisbeth Salander.Blomkvist visits Vanger at his estate on the tiny island of Hedeby, several hours from Stockholm. The old man draws Blomkvist in by promising not only financial reward for the assignment, but also solid evidence that Wennerström is truly the scoundrel Blomkvist suspects him to be. On this basis, Blomkvist agrees to spend a year writing the Vanger family history as a cover for the real assignment: solving the "cold case" of the disappearance of Vanger's great niece Harriet some 40 years earlier. Vanger expresses his suspicion that Harriet was murdered by a member of the vast Vanger family, many of whom were present in Hedeby on the day of her disappearance. Each year on his birthday Harriet gave Henrik a present of pressed flowers. On his birthday every year since Harriet's murder, Vanger explains, the murderer torments him with a present of pressed flowers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socks_(novel)"title="Socks (novel)">
The story is told from the perspective of a tabby cat with four white paws who lives with a young married couple, Bill and Marilyn Bricker. Initially, Socks and the Bricker couple are alone, and Socks receives a great deal of love and attention as a result. However, the Brickers soon have a baby son and Socks begins to feel as though he has been forgotten. Socks receives less attention than he normally would as the Brickers now spend most of their time caring for baby Charles William; he even ends up living in the garage for a short time when his behavior is misinterpreted as changed from the sweet cat the Brickers had adopted. The only person who seems to understand that Socks is lonely and is simply curious about Charles William is the kind Mrs. Risley, who comes to babysit and lavishes Socks with attention. Socks has several misadventures in the course of the book, culminating in a fight with another, more aggressive, neighborhood stray cat that leaves Socks battered, bleeding and covered in wet adobe mud; the Brickers are very frightened that he has been hurt. After this takes place, the Brickers realize they have been so wrapped up with the new baby that they have forgotten Socks, and they resolve this by petting and hugging Socks to remind him they love him. They willingly bring him back into the house but are still cautious with letting him near the baby until Socks accidentally is locked in Charles William's room. Happy to finally have some time with the kitty, Charles William, by this point a young toddler and much more active than he was before, begins to squeal happily and plays with Socks by pulling the stuffing from the lining of his playpen and tossing it for Socks to pounce on. Desperate to see what is happening, Marilyn runs outside and peers through the window, only to see Socks curled up by Charles William, purring, and Charles William sleeping peacefully, the pair having exhausted themselves from their little game. Socks discovers that he has a new friend in little Charles William and a new way to be part of the family. The book ends with Socks sleeping next to Charles William in his crib, Marilyn leaving them alone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_of_Dreaming_Books"title="The City of Dreaming Books">
Protagonist Optimus Yarnspinner ("Hildegunst von Mythenmetz" in the German text) is a Lindworm (a race of bibliophile dinosaurs) who inherits a perfectly written manuscript from his mentor. Its author went to Bookholm, the center of the Zamonian book trade, and was not heard of again.Seeking adventure as well as inspiration for his own writing, Optimus travels to Bookholm in search of the mysterious author. A publisher directs him to Pfistomefel Smyke, who controls the book trade by means of musical hypnosis. Smyke pretends to help, but then reveals that he hates art and that a truly gifted author would raise the bar and hurt the market for mass-produced fiction. Smyke drugs Optimus and transfers him to the catacombs of Bookholm.The catacombs are a labyrinth of old, disused shops and storerooms beneath the city. They are inhabited by all kinds of monsters as well as bookhunters, brutish mercenaries who only care for the high prices that rare old books can fetch on the surface. As Optimus tries to navigate the labyrinth, he falls victim to a bookhunter’s trap and almost gets eaten by a spider-like sphinxxx. A bookhunter saves him, only to try and to sell Optimus’ body parts as trophies to fans of lindworm literature. The hunter is killed by an unseen force.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King's_Peace_(novel)"title="The King's Peace (novel)">
Sulien ap Gwien, a woman warrior and daughter of the King of a small part of the island of Tir Tanagiri, is brutally raped by six invading Jarnsmen and her brother is murdered. While travelling to the capital to request help from Urdo, the High King, she happens upon a battle between some more Jarnsmen and some of the King's soldiers. Sulien proves her skill in battle and, drawn in part by the young King's leadership and charisma, she enlists in the cavalry. The novel follows her journey up the ranks, the battles against the invading Jarnsmen and Isarnagans, and Urdo's efforts to unite the many kingdoms of Tir Tanagiri and restore peace and law to the land.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King's_Name"title="The King's Name">
Sulien ap Gwien, a woman warrior and the ruler of a small part of the island of Tir Tanagiri, finds herself unwillingly drawn into a civil war that pits brother against brother and sister against sister. After surviving an attempted poisoning, she discovers that the sorcerer Morthu, an old enemy, is stirring up discontent and rebellion against her friend the High King. Sulien must bring together an unlikely group of allies and do battle in both the physical and the spiritual world to defeat the sorcerer and restore the rule of law.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Tong_(novel)"title="Kowloon Tong (novel)">
Bunt is made an offer for his textile factory by the shady Mr Hung from the People's Republic of China, and has no choice but to accept, when it is made clear that Mr Hung knows all about the part of Bunt's life that he has kept secret from his mother Betty, namely his frequenting of the "blue hotels" of Kowloon Tong and furtive sex with one of his workers, Mei-Ping.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_the_Labyrinth"title="The Battle of the Labyrinth">
Percy Jackson attends freshman orientation at Goode High School, where he sees Rachel Elizabeth Dare, a mortal who can see through the Mist. She helps him fight two empousai and escape. Percy travels to Camp Half-Blood, where he learns Grover is in trouble with the Council of Cloven Elders for not having found Pan. During a competition organized by the new sword instructor Quintus, Annabeth Chase and Percy accidentally find an entrance into the Labyrinth, which presents a possible invasion route for Luke Castellan. Annabeth is given leadership of a quest to find Daedalus and convince him not to give the Ariadne's string to Luke, which would help him navigate the Labyrinth. She chooses Grover, Percy, and Tyson to accompany her. Before leaving, Percy learns that Nico di Angelo plans to bring back his late sister, Bianca (with help from King Minos) by exchanging her soul for someone who has cheated death – like Percy. In the maze, Percy and his friends face a number of trials, including meeting Briares and Janus, before arriving at the ranch of Geryon and meeting Nico. Nico is not happy to see Percy again, but the spirit of Bianca manages to convince him to trust Percy. So that Nico can be safe, he remains at the ranch whilst Percy and the others return to the labyrinth. They seek out Hephaestus' help. After speaking to him, they part ways; Tyson and Grover search for Pan, while Annabeth and Percy go to the God's forge in the volcano Mount St. Helens.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Heritage_and_Its_History"title="A Heritage and Its History">
69-year-old Sir Edwin Challoner lives with his extended family in a grand old house in rural Southern England. Unmarried, he has no direct issue, and the person closest to him is his younger brother Hamish, who is also his business associate. Hamish has a wife, Julia, and two sons, Simon, aged 25, and Walter, three years younger, who has dropped out of Oxford to be a poet.When Hamish Challoner dies of a heart condition, Simon prepares to become head of the house, as everyone assumes that it will only be a matter of a few years, if not months, before Sir Edwin also dies. However, the lonely old patriarch surprises them by announcing his impending marriage to their neighbour Rhoda Graham, who is more than 40 years his junior. After the newlyweds have returned from their honeymoon, Simon and Rhoda share a moment of unbridled passion in the old house ("Youth and instinct did their work"), and Rhoda becomes pregnant. As Sir Edwin and his wife have not had any sex during their brief marriage, there is no doubt as to who has sired the child. However, Sir Edwin decides to be its legal father, and swears Simon, Rhoda, and Walter to secrecy about the paternity of Rhoda's baby. When a healthy boy is born, he names him Hamish in honour of his deceased brother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Season"title="Opium Season">
Joel Hafvenstein signed up for a year in Afghanistan in the heart of the country's opium trade, running an American-funded aid program to help thousands of opium poppy farmers make a legal living, and to win hearts and minds away from the former Taliban government. The author was soon caught up in the machinations of Helmand's drug trafficking warlords.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_Merchant_(novel)"title="The Dream Merchant (novel)">
Twelve-year-old Joshua Cope is contacted by a corporation called Gippart International one day late at night. Joshua and his friend, Bhasvar (Baz) Patel go to Gippart and meet Max Herbert, a talent scout. Josh is sent into a dreamworld to sell products. But dreams also come with nightmares...Umaya, the collective dream of everyone at that point in time, is caught between dreams and reality. Josh, Baz and a fellow associate Teresa cannot get out of the dream-world, where time is running backwards due to a Gippart employee attempting to break into real time rather than dream-time. Along his adventure, Josh meets his dead twin sister Jericho, who has been attempting to get in contact with him for 350 years. But with Jericho comes Lucide, a guardian who makes sure that no one crosses the borders of life and death.The members of this troop find themselves with powers that they cannot explain. Baz, the first to find his powers, can control dream time by listening to the rhythm and matching it, causing it to slow, stop, or even rewind. Teresa changes Umaya with words, influencing people and surroundings to her will, she is the group storyteller. Josh is a thief and can change the very nature of things just by looking at them. However, they are trapped in umaya, the dream-world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_of_the_Sun"title="Dark of the Sun">
In 1964, mercenary Bruce Curry is publicly hired by Congolese President Ubi to rescue European residents from an isolated mining town about to be attacked by rebel Simbas. However, his real mission is to retrieve $50 million of diamonds from a mine company's vault. Curry's subordinates include his black friend Ruffo and alcoholic Doctor Wreid. He also reluctantly recruits ex-Nazi Henlein because he needs his military expertise and leadership skills.Ubi gives Curry a steam train and Congolese government soldiers. However, as the mission is in violation of UN accords, the train is attacked and damaged by a United Nations peacekeeping plane. At a burned-out farmhouse, they pick up a traumatised woman named Claire, who watched her husband being hacked to death by Simbas. Meanwhile, Henlein begins to cause trouble because he knows about the diamonds and resents Curry's leadership. He casually kills two children for being possible Simba spies and starts making advances towards Claire. When interrupted by Curry, the German attacks Curry with a swagger stick and a chainsaw. Only Ruffo is able to stop Curry from killing Henlein.Further complications arise when the mercenaries reach the mining town. First, the diamonds are in a time-locked vault delaying the train's departure. Second, Dr Wreid insists he cannot abandon a pregnant woman at a nearby mission hospital. Reluctantly, Curry agrees to let the doctor stay behind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Days_in_Paris"title="Five Days in Paris">
The story follows two Americans, Peter Haskell, a man with a strong career and family and Olivia Thatcher, two citizens from different backgrounds and cultures who meet in the Ritz in Paris, France on the night of a bomb threat. The latter character is a woman who is unhappily married to a leading senator, and the first being the president of a significant pharmaceutical empire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odalisque_(novel)"title="Odalisque (novel)">
The story begins with a slave driver attempting to sell his latest finds, including a foreign captive known only as Lazar. Hot tempered and confident, Lazar invokes his right to a fight to the death that, if he wins, will grant him his freedom. Zar Joreb, Percheron's leader decides to attend the fight and is so impressed by the demonstrated fighting skills that he offers Lazar the elite position of Spur.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aware"title="The Aware">
The Isles of Glory comprise eleven island nations. The main character in the novel, Blaze, has the ability to sense magic and as such is "Aware". This makes her useful to the lesser of the island nations and the novel follows her story as she searches for a mysterious slave woman and fights an evil that threatens all of the island nations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Çalıkuşu"title="Çalıkuşu">
The events in the novel take place in the early twentieth century, near the collapse of a war weary Ottoman Empire and the creation of the Turkish republic. Most of the novel is recounted in first-person diary format by Feride. In the first section, Feride describes her childhood, beginning from the beginning and leading to the events that led her to a strange hotel room. The second and largest section consists of diary entries describing her adventures in Anatolia. The third section is the only one written from the third person point of view, describing Feride's visit to her home.Feride is the orphaned daughter of an army officer. As a teenager, she attends Lycee Notre Dame de Sion in the winter, and stays with one of her late mother's sisters during the summer holidays. She is given the nickname "the Wren" during her time at school for her vivacity and mischief. These two characteristics considered unusual and even a bit inappropriate for Muslim girls at that time.She gets engaged to her charming cousin, Kamran, whom she leaves the night before their wedding, upon discovering that he has been unfaithful to her. She runs away from home to become a teacher in Anatolia, although she remains desperately in love with Kamran. She is forced to move from town to town several times during her first three years as a teacher, as a result of the incompetence of officials, the malice of colleagues and the unwanted attention she gets from men because of her beauty and her lively manner.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Dorsai"title="Lost Dorsai">
A few highly skilled mercenaries, the Dorsai, are stuck defending a powerless ruler whose army has revolted. To make matters worse, one of their members, the military band leader, refuses to kill. He finds a way to save his comrades, using the machismo permeating the culture of the world they are on, though the price is high.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_in_St._Tropez"title="Sunset in St. Tropez">
Diana and Eric Morrison are a couple residing in a Central Park apartment in New York City who celebrate the new year with their friends: Pascale and John Donnally and Anne and Robert Smith. During their new year celebrations, they agree to go on a summer vacation together to St. Tropez. However, shortly after the new year, Robert's wife, Anne, suddenly dies - and Robert hesitates whether to join his friends on the planned summer vacation. After much persuasion, Robert agrees to accompany them, inviting a younger film actress to accompany him as his guest. At first, the actress is not accepted kindly by the women, although the men appear to take a liking to her.The plot analyzes forgiveness and the ability to move on throughout life, despite some of the circumstances the couples have endured.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Castle_(novella)"title="The Last Castle (novella)">
In the far future, a small elite group of humans have returned from Altair (over 16 light years away) to Earth, their mother planet, to live in nine elaborate, high-tech castles as idle aristocrats. They are primarily concerned with theoretical discussions of aesthetics, past times and questions of honor and etiquette. Their time is spent drinking fine wines, socializing at formal dinners, and striving to rise in their political standing. Various enslaved alien races provide technicians ("Meks"), transportation ("birds", "power wagons"), household service ("Peasants"), and amusement ("Phanes"). Only a small minority of humans live a free life outside of the castles, and are considered barbaric by the castle inhabitants because they perform manual labor to serve their own needs. After seven centuries during which the noble humans develop an increasingly refined society, the Meks revolt. The inhabitants of some castles without defenses are immediately killed, while the inhabitants of the best defended castles consider the revolt only a nuisance. Complacently the humans consider their high-tech castles unchallengeable. To take action themselves rather than only planning and commanding is seen as a vulgar loss of dignity. Gentlemen in this society only do intellectual activity; all technical work or labour is seen as beneath them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_of_Ireland"title="Lion of Ireland">
The story begins with Brian as a child of around 8 or 9 and it ends with him as an 88-year-old man. The book shows his rise to power and his struggle to maintain it. His personal life is an important part of the plot, because Brian's war against Máel Mórda (leader of the Leinstermen) and Sihtric (king of Dublin) was to be inextricably connected with his complicated marital relations, in particular his marriage to Gormlaith, Máel Mórda's sister and Sihtric's mother, who had been in turn the wife of Amlaíb Cuarán, king of Dublin and York, then of Máel Sechnaill. Even though the book is based on a historical figure, most of it is fiction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcatraz_Versus_the_Evil_Librarians"title="Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians">
Alcatraz Smedry, a young teen, is always breaking things. After receiving a bag of sand for his thirteenth birthday, he is involved in a very strange set of events.The book starts with Alcatraz setting fire to his foster parents' kitchen. It is revealed that he has been in countless foster homes, always ending up with Alcatraz "destroying" things precious to the people taking care of him. Ms. Fletcher, Alcatraz's personal caseworker, arrives and scolds him for destroying his foster parents' kitchen.The next day an old man arrives at the house and claims to be his grandfather, telling Alcatraz that he has a special, powerful talent, breaking things. After the old man finds Alcatraz's bag of sand missing, he and Alcatraz must go on a mission to recover it at all cost from the Evil Librarians, secret rulers of the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gate_of_Ivory,_Gate_of_Horn"title="Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn">
Christian Huxley enters Ryhope wood on a search for the compelling mythago Guiwenneth and for a better understanding of his mother's suicide. Inside the wood he joins a small group of mythago companions who, in turn, join a vast army of mythagos, numbering in the thousands. This army includes many mythic archetypes including shaman, shapeshifters, and warriors. Among these mythagos are those whose creation is influenced by King Arthur and the Welsh tales of the Mabinogion, specifically the tale of Culhwch and Olwen. Echoing the tales of Culhwch and Olwen, Christian is assigned with completing many impossible tasks. Holdstock uses the story within a story device to have Kylhuk retell a tale involving himself, Olwen and Pwyll, among others.This army, known as a legion, is pursued by the angry dead on its search for the gates to the underworld. As Christian nears the end of his quest in the wood, he has an opportunity to enter the underworld (like Orpheus) and grapple with the suicide of his mother which has two very different manifestations, one true and one false. While in the underworld he is also faced with a difficult choice of rescuing only one of two loved ones from death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wish_You_Well_(novel)"title="Wish You Well (novel)">
The story starts out with the Cardinal family going on a trip to relieve them from some unknown stress. On the way back, it is revealed that the Cardinal family plans to move to California, due to financial concerns. Jack Cardinal is an acclaimed but underpaid writer, and plans to move with promises of higher pay. However, Amanda, his wife, is opposed to the idea, stating that they would not be happy and that Jack would not be free to write as he pleases, being controlled by the movie studios. Seeing that the children seem asleep, they battle it out.Eventually, a violent outburst awakes Lou, a young girl who greatly admires her father. She tries to stop the argument multiple times by offering a story, but Jack is undeterred. Meanwhile, Oz, Lou's timid little brother is also awakened. Both Amanda and Lou hurry to comfort him, while simultaneously being calmed. As the argument further escalates, none of the passengers notice a man in the middle of the road, blocking their way. Jack turns the car just in time to avoid killing the man, but then loses all control. The car rolls, and when it stops, Jack is dead. Amanda faints.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love-Letters_Between_a_Nobleman_and_His_Sister"title="Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister">
## Part I.Addressed to Thomas Condon. This dedication is to a relatively unknown young man. The author compares his passionate nature to Philander's, but encourages him to act prudently and judiciously in the art of love.Silvia, a young beautiful woman, is wooed by Philander, her brother-in-law, in an "incestuous" affair. Philander is ultimately successful, and at the end of the novel, he and Silvia flee their country and their families. The plot is the slow decline of honor and nobility, as well as the psychological effects of love. The novel is told through letters between Silvia and Philander that give a deeply personal nature to the affair. Silvia is a loose representation of Lady Henrietta Berkeley, daughter to George Berkeley, 1st Earl of Berkeley who was a prominent Tory politician. She eloped in 1682 with the Whig Ford Grey. Meanwhile, Henrietta's sister and Grey's wife Mary Berkeley was having an affair with James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth, Charles II's illegitimate son. As Monmouth would go on later to challenge his uncle James II for the throne when Charles died, the scandal gave the author considerable political fodder to pull from.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Green_Gables"title="Before Green Gables">
This book describes Anne's difficult pre-Green-Gables childhood. That time includes the deaths of her parents, her subsequent life with the Thomas and later the Hammond families, and her time in an orphanage.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_on_a_Waffle"title="Everything on a Waffle">
"Everything on a Waffle", set in a small Canadian community of Coal Harbor fishing village, tells the story of an eleven-year-old girl named Primrose Squarp. One night, a storm hits their town. Her father is out to sea during the storm, so her mother leaves Primrose with a neighbor while she takes a boat out to go find him. Primrose's parents disappear in the typhoon, but Primrose refuses to believe they are dead and doesn't attend their memorial service.While she defends her family's survival, her custody situation moves around from aging neighbor Miss Perfidy to her preoccupied, but caring Uncle Jack. The only thing that remains constant is her enjoyment of a restaurant called the Girl on the Red Swing, where each menu item is served on a waffle. Restaurant owner Kate Bowzer takes Primrose under her wing. She teaches her how to cook (recipes are all cited in a notepad). She doesn't question or criticize her, even through her odd predicaments, such as accidentally setting the class guinea pig on fire.Primrose is taken from the custody of her uncle Jack after a series of accidents, including losing a toe and part of her finger. Uncle Jack is said to be fighting "tooth and nail" for custody of her. As a foster kid, she is put into the home of an older couple, Evie and Bert. Although, they are all fond of each other, Primrose does not seem able to develop an attachment to them, likely because of her history of unstable living.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Live_(novel)"title="To Live (novel)">
"To Live" includes 11 chapters in total and one preface from Yu Hua. Chapter 1While collecting popular folk songs in the countryside, the narrator "I" meets an old man named Xu Fugui, who talks to a plowing ox. He yells the names of six or seven owsen with only one ox present, which makes me very curious. So "I" talk to him and start our conversation about his past story. As the son of the landlord, Fu Gui says he is a prodigal son of the Xu family. He spends most of his life in gambling dens and brothels. He also treats his pregnant wife Jia Zhen, badly. She kneels and begs Fu Gui to come home, and he chooses to have Jia Zhen thrown out.Chapter 2Eventually, Fugui loses his entire family fortune to Long Er. In order to pay off the debt, Fugui's father has to exchange their lands and house for copper cash and lets Fugui pick his way to pay off the gambling debt. Long Er became the owner of the lands and the house. Soon after moving out of their family house, Fugui's father, unfortunately, passes away. Jiazhen, with her unborn son, is then picked up by a carriage sent by her father, Fugui's father-in-law. Fengxia, Fugui's elder daughter, is left behind with the Xu's. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Bite_the_Sun"title="Don't Bite the Sun">
## Setting.On a desert planet in the distant future, humanity inhabits three domed utopian cities: Four-BEE, Four-BOO, and Four-BAA. Humans have no responsibilities; their daily needs are served by quasi-robots which even run the government through a Committee. Young humans known as "Jang" are rigidly expected to do whatever they please, indulge in various forms of drugs, have sex (as long as they marry first, even if it is just for the afternoon), and live for their own pleasures. They can visit, have their dreams constructed for them, buy or steal anything they want at will, and even sabotage the city (though the robots instantly repair any damage). Robots handle everything, and nothing is left for the humans to do. Nor can they die in any meaningful sense; when they do, they are resurrected in a body customised to their wishes.The book opens with the narrator visiting Hergal, a close friend, after his fortieth suicide-by-birdplane. Offended by his insensitivity, she kills herself, then, in a new body, embarks on a series of mundane attempts to amuse herself, including stealing a white fluffy desert animal that she keeps as a pet, programming elaborate dreams for herself, having unsatisfying sex with her peers, and employing a wide variety of legal drugs. Incapable of making emotional connections with anyone, she finds her life increasingly unsatisfying, though her demanding and difficult pet does interest her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birthgrave"title="The Birthgrave">
The novel begins with the unnamed narrator awakening inside a volcano with no idea who she is. The story follows her quest to discover her past and her true identity. Compelled by a mysterious entity called “Karrakaz,” the narrator sets off in search of a glistening jade that may hold answers to her questions.After emerging from the volcano, the narrator encounters a village that reveres her as a goddess due to her healing powers and her inhuman face, which she considers hideous. The leader of this village, a bandit-king named Darak, persuades the narrator to join him on his expeditions to raid a merchant caravan, trade for weapons, explore a cursed, ruined city, and compete in a deadly chariot race, leading to Darak's demise.She continues to the cities of the White Desert and becomes the goddess of a decadent civilization fighting for the deceitful sorcerer-conqueror Vazkor, who uses the narrator as his instrument of power. However, thanks to Vazkor, the narrator learns about her people, a long-lost omnipotent civilization of Old Ones who once ruled the world as cruel, arbitrary gods. In the end, she also kills Vazkor.Leaving the cities, she is enslaved by a tribal krarl, gives birth to Vazkor's son, wanders onward, battles a dragon, and encounters a spaceship from a distant advanced civilization. The spaceship computer reveals the narrator's forgotten past. Karrakaz, the entity that spoke to her in the volcano, is actually part of herself—her lost name—and she was a princess of the Old Ones, who were wiped out by a plague at the height of their power. She sought refuge within a volcano temple and lay dormant for 16 years. Ultimately, her guilt at the evil of her race caused her to create Karrakaz as an alternate personality commanding her to destroy herself. In the end, at peace with herself, Karrakaz discovers the jade she sought in her own forehead, and learns that behind the mask, her face is not hideous, but unimaginably beautiful.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_Preserved"title="Venus Preserved">
## Part 1.The reader is introduced to two main characters: Picaro, who is a professional musician and Flayd, who is an archaeologist. They both visit the underwater city of Venus and upon his arrival, Picaro meets a woman named Cora who idolizes him and his music, and he also meets a woman named India. Flayd insists that he has important information to tell Picaro. In a flashback to 2000 years ago, Jula, an ancient, undefeated, gladiatrix, thinks about her fight with Phaetho, a gladiator she defeats, and her death. Flayd keeps on trying to meet up with Picaro to tell him this important information, but Picaro isn’t interested. Eventually, Flayd informs Picaro that they are bringing back two people from the ancient times: Jula and Cloudio del Nero who is a possible bloodline to Picaro. A dinner celebration is held for Jula. Her master's comrade asks for him to have Jula. Picaro has an encounter with a woman who prophesies his death. Picaro eventually meets Cloudio del Nero and learns that he is a former musician and composer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night's_Master"title="Night's Master">
## Part One.Azhrarn, Prince of Demons, falls in love with the mortal boy Sivesh and raises him in Azhrarn's kingdom, the Underearth. Sivesh longs for the surface of the earth and ultimately for the sun, which is fatal to Azhrarn. Even Azhrarn's creation of a beautiful woman, Ferazhin, does not satisfy Sivesh. Eventually Sivesh remains on earth and Azhrarn tricks him to his death.A grotesque minor demon called a Drin makes seven of Ferazhin's tears into a necklace. Azhrarn takes it to the earth, where desire for it creates mischief, as he hoped. It finally comes into the hands of the blind poet Kazir, who intuits its nature and enters the Underearth. Azhrarn offers to let him meet Ferazhin if he can name anything Azhrarn needs. Kazir shows him in a song that he needs humanity, his plaything. Kazir and Ferazhin spend a happy year together, till Azhrarn causes Ferazhin's death, but Kazir brings her back with a song.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death's_Master"title="Death's Master">
Unlike "Night's Master", which is told as separate stories, "Death's Master" is a continuous narrative.The lesbian queen Narasen is forced by a curse to become pregnant in order to save her city. After fruitless sex with many men, she realizes that she cannot lift the curse till she has sex with a dead man. She makes a pact with Uhlume, Lord Death, and brings this about. Her child, Simmu, is beautiful and can change easily from male to female. Narasen is assassinated. Simmu, only a few days old, sees Death come for Narasen and forms a permanent hatred for death. Simmu is raised by the minor demons called Eshva, then by priests at a temple.Zhirem, the son of a king and one of his wives, is made invulnerable by his mother. This arouses suspicion and hostility, and he is sent to the same temple as Simmu. The two become friends and briefly lovers (while Simmu is female). Simmu deflowers Zhirem by seduction while Zhirem wanted to remain a virgin for pious reasons. Zhirem becomes angry at Simmu for this corruption. Azhrarn, the Prince of Demons, rejects Zhirem's offer of service, increasing his bitterness, but takes Simmu as a lover because she hates Lord Death and makes her forget Zhirem. He starts Simmu on a quest to gain immortality to oppose Lord Death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delirium's_Mistress"title="Delirium's Mistress">
During the demon's age, when the planet was still flat, Azhriaz, daughter of Azhrarn, Demon Lord of the Night and a mortal, was hidden on an isle surrounded by mist and her spirit was protected to live forever in dreams. But Azhriaz's destiny is about to change unexpectedly. Her powerful energy and beauty attracted Azhrarn’s enemy, Prince Chuz, who created a spell to free Azhriaz from her confinement and convert her into the Delirium’s Mistress.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.I.L.V.E.R._series"title="S.I.L.V.E.R. series">
Robots have replaced human labor on earth, causing massive unemployment in a world devastated by pollution and natural disasters. Then Electronic Metals releases a new line: performing artists and sexual companions designed to entertain human partners. Jane, a rich, lonely, and insecure 16-year-old, meets one, the minstrel Silver, and falls passionately in love, despite revulsion at the idea of preferring a mechanical man to a human. She gives up everything she has known for him, and discovers herself. Silver becomes more and more "human" in loving her—a clever illusion created by his programming. Or is it? This unstable society can't afford any evidence that some robots might be indistinguishable from humans. Tragedy is inevitable.As an orphan growing up in the slums, Loren read her clandestine copy of Jane's Story over and over, relishing every word. But Loren is no Jane. Savvy and street-smart, Loren could never be stirred by a man of metal, her passion never ignited by an almost-human - even one designed for pleasure.Still, when the META corporation does the unthinkable and brings back updated versions of robots past-Loren knows she must see Silver. And just like Jane, it is love at first sight. But Silver is now Verlis. If he was perfection before, he is now like a god. Yet he is more human than his creators think - or fear. While Loren doesn't quite trust him, she will follow her twice-born lover into a battle to control his own destiny - one that will reveal to her the most astonishing illusion of all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blood_Opera_Sequence"title="The Blood Opera Sequence">
Rachaela is a young woman who lives alone in London, working in a meaningless job. She is apparently without friends or family until one day, she is invited to join the family of the father she has never known.This family, known as the Scarabae, lives together in a large and luxurious but secluded house in the countryside. Aside from Rachaela, all of them appear to be old and eccentric until the day she first meets her father, Adamus. Adamus had fathered her on a woman outside the family many years ago, but he still appears to be a young man close to Rachaela's own age.Since Rachaela's birth had broken a long pattern of sterility among the Scarabae, the family decides to continue the breeding plan by coupling her to Adamus. The resulting daughter, Ruth, is also intended for the same fate, but Ruth's unexpected madness brings death among the Scarabae and burns their ancient house around them.Ruth flees to wreak havoc in the normal world; those events and the fate of the surviving Scarabae are told in the sequel, "Personal Darkness".From the bookjacket: "Emerging from the burned remains of their old home, the ancient, elegant Scarabae ready themselves for a new life of seduction and feasting, until little Ruth ignites a blaze of chaos through the streets of London that threatens them all."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutter_Island"title="Shutter Island">
In 1954, widower U.S. Marshal Edward "Teddy" Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, go on a ferry boat to Shutter Island, the home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane, to investigate the disappearance of a patient, Rachel Solando (who was incarcerated for drowning her three children). Despite being kept in a locked cell under constant supervision, she has escaped the hospital and the desolate island.In Rachel's room, Teddy and Chuck discover a code that Teddy breaks. He tells Chuck that he believes the code points to a 67th patient, when records show only 66. Teddy also reveals that he wants to avenge the death of his wife Dolores, who was murdered two years prior by a man called Andrew Laeddis, whom he believes is an inmate in Ashecliffe Hospital. The novel is interspersed with graphic descriptions of World War II and Dachau, which Teddy helped to liberate. After Hurricane Carol hits the island, Teddy and Chuck investigate Ward C, where Teddy believes government experiments with psychotropic drugs are being conducted. While separated from Chuck for a short while in Ward C, Teddy meets a patient called George Noyce, who tells him that everything is an elaborate game designed for him, and that Chuck is not to be trusted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nada_the_Lily"title="Nada the Lily">
"Nada the Lily" is set at the time of Chaka, the Zulu king, around whom much of the action turns, but essentially the book is the story of Umslopogaas, and of "his love for Nada, the most beautiful of Zulu women." They have been brought up as brother and sister but Umslopogaas is really Chaka's son. It is narrated by Mopo the father of Nada and witch doctor to Chaka, whom Chaka had vowed never to slay because he saved the life of Chaka and his mother when they were outcast wanderers.During the course of the novel Umslopogaas teams up with Galazi the Wolf, who lives on Ghost Mountain and has power over a spectral wolf pack. The story ends tragically when Nada, fleeing the wrath of Dingaan following the assassination of Chaka, takes refuge in a cave on the mountain. Galazi dies in her defence but the cave proves her tomb as she is unable to open the stone door she closed behind her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Was_Lost"title="What Was Lost">
"What Was Lost" is a mystery story about a missing girl. It is also a portrait of a changing community over twenty years. It examines modern life's emptiness, and society's obsession with shopping."What Was Lost" is set in the city of Birmingham, England. The main events of the novel take place in Green Oaks shopping centre. The first part of the novel is set in 1984. A 10-year-old girl called Kate Meaney frequently plays in the newly opened Green Oaks. She pretends to be a detective, observing and following people. She carries her toy monkey Mickey and a notebook with her. Kate vanishes and Adrian, the 22-year-old son of a newsagent, is the prime suspect in her disappearance. He is hounded by the press and the police. Unable to handle the pressure, he disappears.The novel's narrative moves forward to 2004. Kurt is a security guard at Green Oaks. He has a sleeping disorder. Lisa is the deputy manager of a music store. She is unhappy because of the strange behaviour of her colleagues and customers and because of her relationship with her partner. She becomes friends with Kurt. A girl holding a soft toy is seen in a CCTV security monitor. Kurt and Lisa follow the girl through Green Oaks and investigate how she is connected to Green Oaks' unsettling history. It is revealed that both Kurt and Lisa have connections to the case of the missing girl.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Summer_to_Die"title="A Summer to Die">
Meg, the younger of the two sisters, is the story's narrator and primary protagonist. Their father, an English professor at a university, has decided to take a year off from teaching to write a book that he only half-jokingly claims will shake the world of literature. That means the family relocates to a small country house, and his daughters are upset to be sharing a room. Like most sisters, Meg and Molly quarrel over silly things, and Meg is jealous of her sister's blonde curls and long eyelashes.The owner of the house that the family is renting lives down the road in a smaller house on the same property. The sisters soon establish a rapport with the elderly Will Banks, who learns about photography with Meg and teaches Molly about the abundant wildflowers covering the estate. A few months after coming to the country, Molly begins having constant nosebleeds, which the doctor blames on the cold weather. Unfortunately, it is not until Molly's bed is soaked in blood that she is rushed to the hospital and diagnosed with a fatal disease: acute myelogenous leukemia.After treatment, she seems to recover slightly, but the pills that she takes cause her hair to fall out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_Georgie"title="Master Georgie">
The novel is told in six chapters, the first two set in Liverpool in 1846 and 1850, the remainder set in 1854 Crimea ending outside Sevastopol.George Hardy, an attractive English surgeon, amateur photographer and bisexual, leaves his affluent lifestyle in Liverpool, where he is heir to a fortune, to go to war at Inkerman in the Crimea. He believes "that the war would at last provide him with the prop he needed." His story is told by three other characters: Myrtle, a lovestruck foundling who bears Hardy's children, Dr. Potter, an intellectual and geologist and Pompey Jones, a one-time street performer who learns photography from Hardy. United by a sudden death in a Liverpool brothel in 1846, the four characters are undeniably linked by love, class, war and fate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Navigator_(Cussler_novel)"title="The Navigator (Cussler novel)">
Around 900 BC, a Phoenician merchant ship sails to a remote and abandoned colony and conceals an unidentified treasure in a cave. On departing, they are approached by a more powerful Phoenician vessel. The first ship's captain, Menelik, meets on shore with the other ship's captain, his half-brother Melqart. Melqart ambushes Menelik and his men but they fend them off and destroy Melqart's ship. In 1809, Thomas Jefferson prepares to return to Monticello at the end of his second term as president. A thief boards a river barge carrying his possessions with orders to destroy Jefferson's research on American Indian languages. However, some materials survive, including an unusual vellum with Phoenician writing Jefferson obtained from the Unkechaug tribe on Long Island. Jefferson believes the vellum reveals that the original tablets of the Ten Commandments were concealed in King Solomon's Mines in North America. Worried that the discovery will lead to unchecked westward expansion, he sends Louisiana Territory governor Merriwether Lewis a coded message concealed as an article about artichokes. Lewis dies under mysterious circumstances shortly after receiving the message.Shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Italian-Ethiopian UNESCO investigator Carina Mechadi arrives at the Iraq Museum in Baghdad to investigate the looting of Iraqi antiquities in the chaos of the invasion. Senior curator Dr. Nasir tells her many items were looted by a group that had planned in advance to exploit the confusion. Dr. Mechadi meets with Iraqi antiquities smuggler Ali who she believes is responsible to seek the return of the items. After she leaves, professional assassin Adriano meets with Ali to discuss the purchase for businessman Viktor Baltazar of the Navigator, a bronze statue that shows an ancient Phoenician mariner using a compass. Ali tries to get more money from Adriano, who murders him to keep the statue from being sold to another buyer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkwalker_on_Moonshae"title="Darkwalker on Moonshae">
The novel and its trilogy use the Moonshae Isles as its setting.Kazgoroth, the Beast, has come into the world to destroy the power of the Earthmother. Changing its shape as needs be, the Beast goes across the island of Gwynneth, corrupting everything in its way. Its destination is a large gathering of Northmen raiders at Oman's Isle, in the middle of the Moonshaes, where they are preparing an assault on the kingdom of Corwell. The Northmen don't realize yet that this is going to be more than just a plundering raid. They don't know that their leader isn't King Thelgaar Ironhand, but the Beast, who has killed the king and assumed his shape.Meanwhile, the Earthmother, aware of the danger and hurting from the corruption brought to the land, her body, by the vile presence of the Beast, awakes her children - the Leviathan, the Pack, and Kamerynn, the Unicorn. They will try to stop Kazgoroth in different ways, but that won't be enough.At Caer Corwell, the seat of the king of Corwell, rumour brings word of war coming to the kingdom. Preparation is under way, but the Ffolk don't know where the enemy will strike. It is up to Tristan to organize the Ffolk against this both human and demonic threat. In his fight against the odds, helped by Robyn, he will grow into the responsible leader that should inherit his father's kingdom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_Spring"title="Panic Spring">
The character Marlowe is stranded in Brindisi during political strife in Greece, and he is eventually conveyed to Mavrodaphne by the boatman Christ who serves Rumanades, a highly successful businessman who owns Mavrodaphne. He is a disillusioned schoolteacher akin to Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall. Shortly after arriving on the island, he meets Gordon and Walsh, both characters from Durrell's Pied Piper of Lovers.In the third chapter, Rumanades' personal history is narrated, leading up through his display of fireworks on Mavrodaphne. This includes his capitalist successes and his acquisition of his fortune, as well as his failed marriage that his wealth could not control.The fourth and fifth chapters have Marlowe moving into one of Rumanades' villas on the island and meeting the remaining characters, Francis and Fonvisin. The narrative then turns to Marlowe's interests in Quietism.The subsequent chapters focus heavily on the individual characters in their own narratives: Walsh, Fonvisin, and Francis.Returning to the present moment on Mavrodaphne, the tenth chapter, "The Music," narrates a gramophone concert leading to an evening spent on a high cliff, with Francis, Marlowe, and Walsh in conversation.Marlowe then begins to write his treatise on Quietism, and Francis is called away from the island back to London, for which she is given a farewell celebration. However, before she can leave, Rumanades dies of a fever brought on by an evening spent in poor weather thinking of his lost wife. One of the priests dies on the same night, and this throws the small community of expatriates into turmoil as they must vacate the island, putting an end to their escape from financial crises, revolution, and the impending World War.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Footballer's_Wife"title="The Footballer's Wife">
The story picks up where Tough Love left off. This time it's all about Charley. She has it all now that she is officially a WAG. All the most glamorous parties, her husbands credit card and a million-pound penthouse. But behinds closed doors her life isn't as glossy as it seems. Joel Brady, her husband has a temper and beats Charley when they argue. She has to go, but there's one problem - she still loves him. Will she regret marrying in haste - and against her and her family's will?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tough_Love_(novel)"title="Tough Love (novel)">
Leanne Crompton is a successful glamour model. But when she is sacked by her modelling agency because she's gotten too old she soon finds herself penniless. She decides to move her and her seven-year child Kia back to her home town and to her wayward family. Leanne's mother, Tracy is an extreme alcoholic; and her two sisters, Jodie and Karina, want to escape Leanne's shadow; while her younger brother, Scott, is being cheated on by his girlfriend Charly. They all seem so lost in life, including Leanne, except for her older brother, Markie, who has just been released from prison. Having to start from the bottom once again proves tough for Leanne especially due to the secret she burdens, the celebrity identity of her daughter Kia. She questions whether or not to reveal her secret to her mum, who has a habit of selling stories to the newspapers. But before she gets the chance tell anyone, Kia's dad catches up to Leanne and tries unsuccessfully to silence her forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99_Coffins"title="99 Coffins">
After having faced down vampires in the previous novel, Laura Caxton is more than happy to continue her career as a trooper in the Pennsylvania State Police. Her life is upended again when Special Agent United States Federal Marshal Jameson Arkeley contacts her to help investigate the discovery of a cache of Civil War-era coffins underneath the grounds of the Gettysburg Battlefield. There are one hundred coffins in the underground crypt along with ninety-nine hearts removed from the moldering vampire bodies, but one coffin is smashed and the vampire body is missing. Hobbled by his crippled hand, Arkeley presses Caxton into service as his field operative to hunt down the missing vampire body before another horrific outbreak of vampirism infects the local population.In a series of flashbacks told through letters, journals, and military reports it is revealed that the 150-year-old vampires are the remains of a Union Army vampire corps that was used to turn the tide against the South at Gettysburg. Promised to be revived as human once a cure for vampirism was found, the soldiers were imprisoned in their tomb and were almost immediately forgotten by their commanders. The archeologist who discovers the tomb uses the vampires in a plot for his own personal gain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Rites_(The_Dresden_Files)"title="Blood Rites (The Dresden Files)">
After accidentally acquiring a stray puppy from a kidnapped litter of Tibetan temple dogs, Harry Dresden accepts a job from his White Court acquaintance, Thomas Raith, to investigate a series of deaths on a pornography film set led by director Arturo Genosa. After an entropy curse arrives and almost kills two more people, Lara Raith, another White Court vampire, appears as a replacement actress, discovers Dresden's presence, and soon decides to kill both Harry and Thomas for being involved. However, a surprise Black Court attack forces a truce between them and they flee to the Raith's Chicago mansion for safety. There, Dresden learns that Thomas is his half-brother and escapes an assassination attempt by Lord Raith, Thomas' and Lara's father. Soon after, Dresden finds a pattern to the curses and prepares a counterattack, but one of Genosa's ex-wives prevents him from saving the next target and frames him for the woman's death. He escapes and works out that all of Genosa's ex-wives are behind the curse, with Lord Raith supporting them. Before the next curse can be unleashed against him, Dresden calls upon Murphy to help him stop Lord Raith and maneuvers Lara to save them all from her father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Beat_(The_Dresden_Files)"title="Dead Beat (The Dresden Files)">
It is three days before Halloween and nearly a year after the events in "Blood Rites". Mavra, from the previous novel, orders Dresden to locate "The Word of Kemmler" for her within three days, or Karrin Murphy will be set up for the murder of one of Mavra's minions last year. Dresden learns that Bob used to belong to Kemmler, the most powerful necromancer in a thousand years, and narrowly survives an encounter with an evil personality hidden within the spirit.Investigating further, he rescues the medical examiner Waldo Butters from Grevane, a powerful necromancer, at the local morgue. During the encounter he learns of another book: "Die Lied der Erlking".Searching for a copy of this book, he meets Shiela, a helpful clerk with a photographic memory. After a few run-ins with her, she makes it clear that she is actually a shade of the demon Lasciel, implanted in his mind when he picked up Lasciel's coin to save Michael Carpenter's son in "Death Masks". Although he refuses to accept her offer of aid in exchange for his soul, she persists in his mind. This arrangement leads him closer and closer to accepting the demon's offer in subsequent books.With Halloween fast approaching, Dresden learns that three different groups of necromancers are planning to try and use the two books in a ritual that will turn them into a minor god. Seeking to stop the ritual, Harry contacts the White Council and prepares to summon the Erlking himself, to prevent any of the necromancers from doing so. While the summoning goes as planned, the two cloaked figures manage to free the Erlking. With help from a handful of Wardens, Butters, his half-brother Thomas Raith, and a zombiefied Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the now Warden Dresden puts a stop to the necromancers' plans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proven_Guilty_(The_Dresden_Files)"title="Proven Guilty (The Dresden Files)">
Nearly a year after the events in Dead Beat, Warden Harry Dresden attends the trial and execution of a sixteen-year-old Korean boy for mentally controlling his friends and family. After the execution, Ebenezar McCoy asks Dresden to discover why the Summer and Winter Fae have not attacked the Red Court vampires, and the Gatekeeper secretly requests that Dresden investigate the use of black magic in Chicago. Back at home, Molly Carpenter summons him to the police station to bail out her boyfriend, Nelson. Molly asks Dresden to help Nelson, because she believes him to be innocent.Harry soon finds himself investigating strange attacks happening at "SplatterCon!!!", a horror movie convention Molly and Nelson had worked at. During this investigation, he discovers that phobophages—supernatural predators from the spirit world who feed on fear—are behind the attacks, and sets out to stop them by turning them back on whomever is summoning them. After a meeting with the Summer Knight and both the Summer and Winter Ladies, he discovers that the reason Summer has not attacked the Red Court is due to their fear of an impending attack by Winter. He also learns that Mab has been acting strangely as of late.After fighting off phobophages in the shape of a xenomorph and a horror-movie slasher, he manages to send the remainder to the source of their crossing. Before he can investigate, he and Officer Rawlins of the Chicago PD are taken captive by Madrigal Raith, Thomas' cousin, who has learned to feed off of fear himself. Escaping with the help of Mouse and Thomas, they have a narrow run-in with an incredibly powerful phobophage in the form of a scarecrow before Harry discovers that he had inadvertently sent the other phobophages after Molly, and they have taken her to the Nevernever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Night_(The_Dresden_Files)"title="White Night (The Dresden Files)">
A year after the events in "Proven Guilty", Dresden is called by Murphy to the scene of an apparent suicide, and senses the victim is a magical practitioner. After investigating another victim, Dresden realizes a serial killer of magical practitioners is loose in Chicago. Investigating, he meets with a group of practitioners who've banded together and hired Elaine, Harry's former lover, for protection. He finds that his brother, Thomas, had apparently been following most of the women who've vanished, but also comes across another suspect, "Grey Cloak," whom he tracks to Undertown, a warren under Chicago, and spies on him meeting with Cowl—who didn’t die during the Darkhallow (in "Dead Beat"), also learning that vampires of House Skavis—who feed on despair—are responsible for the suicides. Cowl detects Dresden and blasts his psychic thread. Dresden wakes up next to his melted model of Chicago, which absorbed most of the blast.After incorrectly singling out a practitioner, Helen, as an accomplice, Harry tracks Thomas to his boat, where they learn that Thomas has been smuggling magically talented women out of the city to protect them. Before Thomas can finish explaining, Madrigal Raith and his ghouls attack, and the group flees. Following more deaths and investigation, Harry figures out the Skavis is one of the women in time to save Elaine from its attack. Elaine is hospitalized, so Dresden calls Carlos Ramirez to help him fight Grey Cloak and Madrigal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Bags_Full"title="Three Bags Full">
In the Irish village of Glenkill, George Glenn is a shepherd who is a loner, estranged from his wife, and is fond only of his sheep. Every day, after he lets them out to graze, he reads to them from romance adventure novels and textbooks on sheep diseases. At the start of the book, the sheep find George dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. The rattled sheep decide that they must find his killer. This turns into a difficult task, as sheep can’t talk to people; and though they understand the human conversations they listen in on, like the one between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson, they do not always understand the details. Not even the smartest of them, Miss Maple, Othello and Mopple the Whale, can understand the human's behaviour, and are particularly confused by the neighbourhood priest, though they conclude that his name is evidently God. They are afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham, and are suspicious but fearful of their new shepherd Gabriel O’Rourke, who is raising a flock of sheep for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the mystery, they still have to figure out how to let the humans know.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perri_(novel)"title="Perri (novel)">
The story begins with a human child named Annerle saving Perri's mother from a marten. Afterwards Perri goes off searching for her mother, when she is then attacked by a crow, but is later saved by her mother. Later on, Perri's mother takes her to another part of the forest, where she meets the black squirrel, Mirro, and her playmate, Porro. Through the course of the novel, Porro begins to wonder about love.Later on, he and Perri witness Bambi trying to keep a buck from being lured by He (the animals term for man). Later on, a red squirrel named Flame-Red comes to the forest, telling everyone his story about how he was captured by He, but later escaped. Everyone but Mirro and Porro believes him. Porro even tries to prove that his story is a lie, even going to see Annerle to ask her if it were true. Around that time, Perri begins to miss her mother, so she ask Annerle if she has seen her, but to no avail. It is then revealed to the reader that her mother was killed by an unknown predator.Later on, Perri's oak tree is chopped down by He, so she and Porro search for new homes. Perri grows up and starts developing feelings for Porro. While she searches for him, Mirro tries to make her his mate, but is rebuffed. When she finds Porro, he confesses his love for her. But Mirro brutally attacks Porro, and right when he is about to claim Perri, Flame-Red attacks Mirro for Perri, as well. While they are fighting, Porro and Perri run away together to another forest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mr_Sommer"title="The Story of Mr Sommer">
"Die Geschichte von Herrn Sommer" is told in the first person by a man aged around 40, remembering growing up in a fictional village in Germany after World War II. The narration features elements reminiscent of fairy-tales of the Brothers Grimm, such as the boy being sure he could fly if only he was determined enough. It is written as if told spontaneously, described as a "beguiling, unsentimental account of childhood in rural Germany" of a "clever, imaginative, logical and lonely little boy". He remembers living away from other children, being attracted to his classmate Carolina, and enduring piano lessons that he reached riding his mother's bike, too large for him.The narrator meets an unusual man, Herr Sommer, who is described as from the same village where the boy lives but on restless permanent wanderings ("Wanderschaft"), from early morning until late at night. Three meetings are described in detail. The first occurs during a terrible storm and hail when the boy and his father, returning from a horse race by car, offer him a ride, and he utters the only spoken phrase quoted in the book: "Ja so laßt mich doch endlich in Frieden!" ("Why don’t you just leave me in peace!"). The boy meets him again, watching from a high tree which he climbed with the idea of ending his life by jumping; Mr Sommer unusually interrupts his walk, lies down in the grass and lets go a gruesome long groan ("a hollow anguished sound from deep within his chest") that makes the boy forget his intentions. In the end, the boy watches the man walk into the lake where he drowns, as Ludwig II of Bavaria died. The boy keeps it to himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Señor_Presidente"title="El Señor Presidente">
## Part one.The novel begins on the Cathedral Porch, where beggars spend their nights. One beggar, the Zany, is exhausted after being continually harassed about his deceased mother. When one of the President's loyal military men, Colonel Jose Parrales Sonriente, jeers the word "mother" at him, the Zany instinctively retaliates and murders the Colonel. The beggars are interrogated and tortured into agreeing that the retired General Eusebio Canales, once in the President's military, and the independent lawyer Abel Carvajal killed the Colonel because according to the President's men, there is no way "an idiot is responsible". Meanwhile, a delusional Zany flees "away down the shadowy streets in a paroxysm of mad terror".A rare glimpse of the President shows him ordering Miguel Angel Face, sometimes referred to as the President's "favourite", to help General Canales flee before he is arrested in the morning for the murder of Sonriente. The President, who presumably orchestrated the accusations for his own purposes, wants Canales to flee because "running away would be a confession of guilt".At the Two Step, a local tavern, Miguel Angel Face meets Lucio Vásquez, a policeman, and is inspired to tell Vásquez that he is kidnapping General Canales's daughter, Camila, as "a ruse to deceive the watchful authorities". He claims to be kidnapping Camila to cover up the truth of Canales's escape. Later, Vásquez meets with his friend Genaro Rodas, and upon leaving a bar they see the Zany. To Genaro Rodas's horror, Vásquez shoots the Zany. The aftermath of this scene is witnessed by Don Benjamin, a puppet-master, whose "puppets took the tragedy as their theme". Genaro Rodas returns home and discusses the murder of the Zany with his wife, Fedina de Rodas, and informs her that the police plan to arrest Canales in the morning. Meanwhile, Canales leaves Miguel Angel Face's home, exhausted and anxious about fleeing the country. Later that evening, Canales escapes safely while the police ransack his home and Miguel Angel Face sneaks in to bring Camila safely to the Two Step.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_Shifter"title="The Shape Shifter">
While Jim Chee and Bernadette Manuelito honeymoon in Hawaii, Mel Bork sends Leaphorn a page from a glossy magazine, showing the interior of a fine home. The main item on the wall is a tale-telling rug made in the 1860s of the long walk back from Bosque Redondo, which is called the Woven Sorrow Rug. Leaphorn saw that rare rug long ago in Totter's Trading Post &amp; Gallery, which burned down in 1965. Besides destroying the rug, that fire killed a man beyond recognition, who was identified by the FBI as Ray Shewnack, a man on their most-wanted list. Leaphorn calls Bork, learning from his wife that Mel has not been home for two days. There is a threatening message from a stranger that Mel never heard. Leaphorn begins to search for Mel. The rug would be nearly impossible to duplicate, raising the suspicion that the rug was not destroyed, as reported decades earlier. Leaphorn recalls how he was diverted from aiding Grandma Peshlakai, whose entire collection of pinyon sap for making baskets had been stolen from her, and her granddaughter saw the car driving away with it. Leaphorn's boss had sent him to join the FBI at Totter's place instead. She was very angry with him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_Male_(novel)"title="Rogue Male (novel)">
The protagonist, an unnamed British sportsman and crack shot, sets out in the spring of 1938 to see if he can get an unnamed European dictator in the sights of his rifle. Supposedly interested only in the thrill of hunting a powerful man, he convinces himself that he does not intend to pull the trigger. Caught while taking aim by officers of the dictator's secret police, he is tortured, thrown over a cliff, and left for dead.The man survives, and with civilian help manages to make his way to a port, where he stows away on a British ship bound for London. Once there, he discovers that agents of the dictator have also arrived in London with orders to kill him. He is forced to kill one by pushing him onto the live rail in the London Underground, after which the police launch a manhunt for him.Unable to go to the British authorities, who cannot condone assassination of a head of state, the protagonist decides to hide out in Dorset. Reports that he has been sighted reach a man named Quive-Smith, the leader of his pursuers. Seizing the opportunity, Quive-Smith finds his quarry's underground hiding place and blocks the exit, leaving only a single hole for breathing. With the protagonist thus at his mercy, Quive-Smith intends to coerce a written confession, implicating the British government.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shakespeare_Stealer"title="The Shakespeare Stealer">
In the late Elizabethan era, a fourteen-year-old orphan known only by his nickname, Widge, has learned shorthand, a method of rapid writing by means of abbreviations and symbols, from his previous master, a preacher who wants Widge to steal other preachers' sermons. Bass, his new master, wants to use Widge's skill to transcribe William Shakespeare's "Hamlet" before Shakespeare prints it. Widge sets off to London with Falconer, a ruthless man whom Bass assigns to ensure Widge succeeds. "Hamlet"s performance so enraptures Widge that he forgets part of his assignment, and when he returns for a second try, his notebook is stolen. Widge eventually settles into the acting troupe by posing as a hopeful player, and The Lord Chamberlain's Men accepts him. For the first time, Widge feels part of a real family. But it's hard for him knowing his duty is to not be a part of this family but to steal from them. Falconer continues to press Widge to steal the play, resulting in a constant cat and mouse chase between them. After Falconer, who turned out to be Bass in disguise, dies in a duel with The Lord Chamberlain's Men shareholder Robert Armin, Widge remains at The Globe to work toward his dream of being a player. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumble_Fish_(novel)"title="Rumble Fish (novel)">
Rusty-James runs into his old friend, Steve Hays, at the beach. It has been five years since they last saw each other. Steve is in college and Rusty is not long out of the reformatory. When Steve looks at the scar on Rusty's side, Rusty tells him that he got it in a knife fight. Steve remembers. He tells Rusty he was there when it happened. When Steve mentions that Rusty looks just like someone from their past, Rusty thinks he could have been happy to see Steve again if he had not made him remember everything.Rusty tells his story. At the age of 14, Rusty is hanging out at Benny's, playing pool with his friends when he learns that Biff Wilcox wants to kill him. Rusty seems to think that Biff wants to kill him for the comments he made about a girl named Anita. He tells his friends what he said, and when the gang agrees that Rusty is telling the truth, the notion of fighting about it seems silly.Rusty gets angry with Steve for bringing up Motorcycle Boy (Rusty's older brother, a former leader of the gang) and makes plans to fight Biff. At the fight day, Rusty is spending some time with his girlfriend, Patty. They make out and James falls asleep while there, nearly missing the fight. Later, Rusty arrives to fight Biff and is accompanied by his friends Steve, Smokey Bennet, and B. J. Jackson. Biff, too, brings some friends for backup. Biff's erratic behavior leads Rusty to believe that he is on drugs, which causes him to worry that the fight will not be a fair one. Rusty's fears are confirmed when Biff pulls a knife. Rusty is able to knock the knife away from Biff and beats him until it appears the fight is over. The Motorcycle Boy arrives and announces his return. Rusty is momentarily distracted and vulnerable to being attacked. Biff seizes the opportunity to grab the knife and stabs Rusty in the side. Motorcycle Boy steps in and ends the fight by breaking Biff's wrist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Meeting_at_Corvallis"title="A Meeting at Corvallis">
Mike (Lord Bear) and Signe Havel of the Bearkillers and Juniper Mackenzie of Clan Mackenzie travel to Corvallis, a neutral city-state, to convince them to join in resisting the PPA. Meanwhile, the Dunedain Rangers have captured a major knight of the PPA leading a band of raiders into their territory and take him to Corvallis for his trial. Sandra Arminger and her servant/assassin Tiphaine also travel to Corvallis to speak in defense of the PPA. Sandra sends Tiphaine to kill the knight so he cannot be used as evidence against the PPA. Tiphaine successfully kills the knight and flees the scene even though she is ambushed by the Rangers. At the Corvallis Faculty Senate, the governing body of Corvallis originally composed of professors from Oregon State University, the allied forces are unable to convince Corvallis to side against the PPA; but they are successful in getting Corvallis to recognize the Dunedain Rangers.Months later, Lord Protector Norman Arminger finally begins his war against the Bearkillers, Mount Angel, and Clan Mackenzie. Arminger divides his forces into three armies and dispatches them to destroy the three factions. While Corvallis refuses to help, two thousand Corvallis volunteers arrive to reinforce the Bearkillers and help them win their battle against Protectorate forces. The Central Oregon Ranchers Association also pitches in, sending a few hundred light cavalrymen to help the MacKenzies break the siege of Mount Angel. The remaining Protectorate forces regroup and retreat back to PPA territory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Glendower_(novel)"title="Owen Glendower (novel)">
The subject is Owain Glyndŵr's uprising against King Henry IV, though "Powys has elected to cover only a few incidents in the revolt, principally during the years 1400-1405", with the novel's concluding chapter then jumping forward to November 1416 AD, and the death of Glyndŵr. Powys does not deal with the historical events in the intervening years, after 1405, when Glyndŵr was mainly in retreat, thus taking Glyndŵr's failure to take decisive military action at Woodbury Hill near Worcester as the effective end to the rebellion.On 13 October 1399 Henry IV (1399–1413) had been crowned king, after deposing Richard II (6 January 1367- ca.14 February 1400) and imprisoning him. Then in February 1400 Richard had died in unexplained circumstances. On 16 September of that year Owain Glyndŵr's rebellion began.The story of the rebellion of Owain Glyndŵr is seen through the eyes of his young relation, Rhisiart ab Owen of Hereford, for the first eleven chapters. Then, in the concluding paragraph of chapter XI the point of view switches to Glendower, and he remains "the centre of attention for the rest of the book". However, Powys "slips into full-scale "omniscient narration", in which the narrator is presented as knowing virtually everything". In addition to Glyndŵr and his family, the cast of characters includes real historical figures such as Gruffydd Young and the Lollard Walter Brut. Likewise, the historical events described in the book, such as the Battle of Pilleth and the signing of the Tripartite Indenture, are a mixture of fact and fiction; some of the incidents, such as the death of Hywel Sele, are based on legend or oral tradition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Liars'_Club"title="The Liars' Club">
The book tells the story of Karr's troubled childhood in a small Texas town in the early 1960s. Using a non-linear story line, Karr describes the troubles of growing up in a family and town where heavy alcohol abuse and psychological problems are common issues. The memoir details her experience being raped and molested as a child, her mother's mental instability, and her witness to death and disparity.The book is split into three sections, each corresponds to a different period of her life. The first section, called "Texas, 1961", details Karr's and her sister Lecia's upbringing in Southeast Texas. The narrative includes backgrounds on her mother Charlie and her father J.P., including how they met, and their previous relationships. Karr also writes about her maternal grandmother who, at 50 years old, died of cancer. The second section of the book is called "Colorado, 1963". Karr explains that her family "moved to Colorado wholly by accident". While in Colorado, Karr's parents get divorced, and J.P. moves back to Texas, while Karr and her sister stay with Charlie. Her mother eventually meets Hector, who tries to make the girls call him "Daddy". After Charlie begins to drink again, Karr and Lecia become scared when one night their mother points a gun at and threatens Hector. Eventually, J.P. flies the girls back to Texas. Charlie and Hector travel to Texas too, and after J.P. punches Hector, Charlie leaves him, returning to her ex-husband for good. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Life_as_a_Traitor"title="My Life as a Traitor">
The biography focuses on analysing the life of the author, Zarah Ghahramani and her imprisonment in the infamous Evin Prison. After taking part in student demonstrations at Tehran University, Ghahramani was taken, by police, from the streets of Tehran and put into this prison, where she was tortured and beaten. When in Prison, she was subject to not only beatings, but psychological torture, only retaining her sanity via scratching messages to fellow prisoners. She is kept in the prison for almost one month, and is released after being driven to a distant desert outside of Tehran, where, at the time, she was unsure of her fate and whether or not she would be executed or released.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Film_Club"title="The Film Club">
David Gilmour allowed his 15-year-old son Jesse to stop going to school without getting a job under the condition that they watch three films each week together. They go by their film schedule for three years while discussing them with each other. During this time, Jesse has trouble with the influence of drugs and his girlfriend. By the book's completion, Gilmour works harder and Jesse tries to live successfully.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Stranger_Came_Ashore"title="A Stranger Came Ashore">
One night on the island of Black Ness, the Hendersons are sitting at home in their but-and-benhouse. There is a heavy storm outside. Then a figure bursts through the door, soaking wet. He is tall, lean and handsome, and calls himself Finn Learson, and he claims to be the only survivor of a shipwreck. The Hendersons trust and help him, except the youngest child, Robbie, his Old Da (grandfather), and his dog Tam, who are suspicious of Finn. Old Da takes an instant dislike to Finn, and Robbie also senses the man is not what he seems. Later that night, when the family have retired to bed, Robbie cannot sleep and hears peculiar noises coming from the main room, where Finn Learson and the dog, Tam, are sleeping. Robbie ventures to peek around the door and is horrified to see that Tam is crouched low to attack Learson, but Learson gazes deep into the dog's eyes... sending Tam into a calm sleep. Robbie is appalled but hides what he has seen.Old Da mysteriously dies not long after, but before he does he warns Robbie not to trust Finn. He reminds Robbie of stories of selkies, sea spirits which are seals in the water but are able to shed their seal skin on dry land and appear as beautiful
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_the_Rain"title="Waiting for the Rain">
## Part One.When the book begins, Tengo and Frikkie are two young boys on Oom Koos's farm. Frikkie visits on holidays to escape the grinding boredom of the school term, and Tengo lives there with his family. Over time, Tengo comes to see more and more that their friendship is hesitant and tenuous due to the imposing laws of apartheid, and wants to know more. He cannot understand why Frikkie does not like school when there is so much to learn. He desperately wishes to go to the city and get an education. To quench his thirst for knowledge, Selina asks for books from Mrs. Miller. Tengo receives them and loves them, but they only make him want to know more.Over the course of this book, Tengo is also learning more about apartheid and how it functions. His cousin Joseph, who lives in the squalid township of Johannesburg, visits one day and tells Tengo of the evils that must be faced every day there. Tengo's eyes are opened after this conversation, and through several more events, he is determined to go to Johannesburg to get an education. He gets permission and leaves for the city. He finds that the city is smelly and noisy like Frikkie said it would be.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countdown_(novel_series)"title="Countdown (novel series)">
As the new year dawns, a reported "massive solar flare" causes power failures all over the globe and adults and children everywhere to melt into piles of "black goo." Only young adults are spared, among them a quartet of drunken high school kids in suburban Seattle, two teens whose fake IDs have gained them entry to a New York City nightclub, a cocky young doctor in a Texas hospital, a pair of tough-talking inmates in a Pittsburgh jail, and Sarah and Joshua Levy who desperately search the ancient scroll of their granduncle Elijah for clues to the apocalyptic event.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Not_Human"title="Love Not Human">
"Black Charlie":An art critic believes he knows what is "art" and what isn't. But when a stranger shows up with a box of figurines, he agrees to meet the artist, who known only as Black Charlie. But when the search for the mysterious artist leads into the swamps of a young planet, he discovers just what it truly means to be called an artist."Moon, June, Spoon, Croon":An edmic computer discovers he is the only one of his kind, and finds he is "alone-ly". Not able to accept that, he subsequently searches for a partner."The Summer Visitors":After a boy climbs a cliff to escape local bullies, he encounters Olympians who teach him courage, wisdom, and humility."Listen":On what appears a typical day, four-year-old Taddy goes on an outing with his guardian, Reru—and discovers how everything in his world is truly interconnected."Graveyard":A blind boy deals with having a mental link with a dog."Fido":The crew of an exploratory spaceship encounters something that raises intelligence in humans and animals alike."The Breaking of Jerry McCloud":A man is torn between losing the woman he loves and his stubborn refusal to compromise. When he goes on a last desperate gamble on a hunt for the elusive Skem, he encounters a whole new perspective on the dynamics of relationships.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Orange_(novel)"title="Code Orange (novel)">
Mitchell "Mitty" Blake is a teenage boy who lives in New York City with his parents. He is carefree and does not worry much about his grades or school. When his biology teacher Mr. Lynch assigns him to write a report about an infectious disease, Mitty has no idea what virus to research. His friend Derek has chosen the topic of anthrax while his crush Olivia has chosen typhoid. Derek talks about anthrax constantly and egotistically, while the studious Olivia tries to help Mitty with his research. During a trip to his family's home in the Connecticut countryside that the Blakes visit nearly every weekend, Mitty finds some old medical books from Boston in 1902. What he discovers in the book changes his life forever.Inside the book, Mitty finds an old envelope containing 100-year-old scabs from Variola major (a severe form of smallpox) from an epidemic in 1902. He inhales dust from one of the scabs which crumbles as he handles them without him knowing it and later believes that he has lost one of the scabs that he was going to use as part of his project to improve his grade. Mitty begins to think that he has acquired smallpox and is developing symptoms. He posts questions online and emails several people about smallpox and the scabs, unwittingly attracting the attention of people who want to take advantage of the disease.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satan_in_Goray"title="Satan in Goray">
The novel describes a Jewish life in a Polish village of Goray after the massacres of the Cossack riots during the Khmelnitsky Uprising of 1648, which was influenced by the teachings of the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi in desperate hopes for messiah and redemption. The Jewry is split into two factions: traditionalists and Sabbateans. Eventually the news had come to Goray that Sabbatai Zevi converted to Islam. This was taken in Goray that the way to redemption is to embrace the evil. The strange rites culminate in the possession of one of Sabbatai's prophetesses with "dybbuk". Since the Sabbatean's movement vaned, a true believer in Torah came and exorcised the "dybbuk". The last segment of the novel is stylized as a 17th century document about "the "dybbuk" of Goray". 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_for_Dogs"title="Hotel for Dogs">
Andrea "Andi" Walker is a girl who was forced to temporarily move to her animal-allergic great-aunt Alice's house, leaving her dog Bebe in the care of another family. Shortly after the move, she finds a stranded dog and wishes to keep her. Andi's mother vetoes this idea, so, along with her older brother Bruce, she keeps the dog, who she names Friday, and her pups in an abandoned house across the street.After a while, Andi and Bruce allow in many more dogs, including Red Rover, an Irish Setter that ran away from his abusive owner, Jerry Gordon, Aunt Alice's neighbor who pretends to be nice. In the end, their expenses overwhelm them, and they are discovered by their father, mother, and aunt. Jerry's wickedness is revealed to his ignorant father, prompting him to sell Red Rover.All the dogs living in the hotel leave. Red Rover, Friday, and Bebe return home with the Walkers when they move out of Aunt Alice's house, while all the other dogs are adopted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blessing_(novel)"title="The Blessing (novel)">
It is set in the post-World War II period and concerns Grace, an English country girl who moves to France after falling for a dashing aristocratic Frenchman named Charles-Edouard who lusts after other women. Their son Sigi aims to keep his parents apart by engineering misunderstandings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umrao_Jaan_Ada"title="Umrao Jaan Ada">
Umrao Jaan is born as Amiran () to a modest family in Faizabad. After the criminal Dilawar Khan is released from jail, he decides to get revenge as her father testified against him in court. Khan kidnaps Amiran and decides to sell her in Lucknow. She is imprisoned with another girl, Ram Dai, but the two are separated when Dilawar Khan takes her to Lucknow. There she is sold for 150 rupees to Khanum Jaan, the head "tawaif" of a "kotha". She is renamed Umrao and begins to study classical music and dance. Together with the other apprentice "tawaif" and Gauhar Mirza, the mischievous illegitimate son of a local Nawab, she is taught to read and write in both Urdu and Persian. As Umrao grows up, she is surrounded by a culture of luxury, music and poetry. She eventually gains her first client, (earning her the suffix of "jaan") but prefers the impoverished Gauhar Mirza, her friend.Umrao Jaan attracts the handsome and wealthy Nawab Sultan. The couple fall in love, but, after an altercation with an impolite patron where the Nawab Sultan shoots and wound hims in the arm, he no longer comes to the "kotha" and Umrao Jaan must meet him secretly with the help of Gauhar Mirza. As Umrao Jaan continues to see Nawab Sultan and also serve other clients, she supports Gauhar Mirza with her earnings. A new client, the mysterious Faiz Ali, showers Umrao Jaan with jewels and gold, but warns her not to tell anyone about his gifts. When he invites her to travel to Farrukhabad, Khanum Jaan refuses so Umrao Jaan must run away. On the way to Farrukhabad, they are attacked by soldiers and Umrao Jaan discovers that Faiz is a dacoit and all of his gifts have been stolen goods. Faiz Ali escapes with his brother Fazl Ali and she is imprisoned, but luckily one of the "tawaif" from Khanum Jaan's "kotha" is in the service of the Raja whose soldiers arrested her so Umrao Jaan is freed. As soon as she leaves the Raja's court, Faiz Ali finds her and gets her to come with him. He is soon captured and Umrao Jaan, reluctant to return to Khanum Jaan, sets up as a "tawaif" in Kanpur. While she is performing in the house of a kindly Begum, armed bandits led by Fazl Ali try to rob the house, but leave when they see that Umrao Jaan is there. Then Gauhar Mirza comes to Kanpur and she decides to return to the "kotha".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magicians_(Priestley_novel)"title="The Magicians (Priestley novel)">
Sir Charles Ravenstreet, finding himself unexpectedly dropped from his position as managing director of the New Central Electric Company, retires to his country house to consider his future. He makes the acquaintance of three strange old gentlemen, Wayland, Perperek and Marot, who take an interest in his life and in his recent dealings with the imperious Lord Mervil, who plans to market a new drug.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_(Wilson_novel)"title="Kiss (Wilson novel)">
Sylvie and Carl have been friends since they were little. They have called themselves boyfriend and girlfriend since they were small and Sylvie has always believed they would end up married. As they start high school, Carl drifts further and further away from Sylvie. One day, she wanders into the girls' bathrooms and finds Miranda, the most popular girl in school, there. Miranda asks Sylvie to go to her party after finding out about Sylvie's "boyfriend", whom she has taken a shine to, even though they haven't met. Sylvie accepts and then asks Carl about it, hoping that he will not go. To her dismay, Carl is eager to go and they meet Miranda and her friends. They play a game of Spin The Bottle and Sylvie wishes to be kissed by Carl. Unfortunately, he does not kiss her (but to Sylvie's surprise he kisses Miranda) and Sylvie realises that his feelings have changed. Carl invites Miranda, Sylvie and a boy called Paul to go bowling with him. Sylvie does not like Paul and is surprised when Carl tells Sylvie that he wanted to impress Paul by bowling.On Carl's birthday, Miranda, Paul, Sylvie and Carl go to Kew Gardens since Carl is obsessed with glass. They all get lost while playing hide-and-seek. Miranda and Paul went on the train so Carl and Sylvie go with Carl's mother, Jules. Carl refused to see anyone after that night and later tells Sylvie that he is gay. Sylvie then finds out that Carl had found Paul during hide-and-seek and kissed him. Paul kissed him back for a moment 'like he really cared about [Carl]', but then pushed him away, claiming Carl is a pervert. Carl gets teased and picked on at school.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_(novel)"title="Nation (novel)">
## Context.Written loosely in a third-person perspective, the novel is set in an alternative history of our world, shortly after Charles Darwin has published "On the Origin of Species". A recent Russian influenza pandemic has just killed the British king and his next 137 heirs. Except for the opening chapter, the novel's action entirely occurs in the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean (the fictionalised South Pacific Ocean) on a particular island known by its indigenous inhabitants as "the Nation".The first chapter involves a subplot in which the Gentlemen of Last Resort, a secret society serving the Crown, urgently set out for Port Mercia in the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean to seek the next man in the British line of succession: Henry Fanshaw, the unsuspecting governor of England's oceanic territories. Fanshaw's 13-year-old daughter, Ermintrude, is one of the novel's two protagonists. The other protagonist, Mau, is an aboriginal native of the Nation who is first depicted alone at neighbouring Boys' Island, where he has hand-built a canoe to complete his initiation rite from boyhood into manhood. Ermintrude, meanwhile, is travelling in a leisurely manner aboard a British schooner, the "Sweet Judy", when mutineers, led by the ruthless First Mate Cox, are subdued and set adrift at sea, returning to the plot at a later time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_(novel)"title="Waiting (novel)">
Army doctor Lin Kong marries Shuyu, a village woman, as decided upon by his parents. While Lin spends most of his time away from home working as a doctor in Muji City, Shuyu raises their daughter, Hua, and cares for Lin's sick parents in Goose Village. Lin feels no love for her, and once he meets Manna Wu, a nurse at the hospital, he falls in love with her and feels that he must divorce his wife. Year after year, Lin tries to divorce the woman he is embarrassed to be married to, and every year when he comes home for a few days during the holidays, he goes with her to the courthouse. Shuyu agrees to the divorce but each time a hiccup crops up at the last moment. Meanwhile, Manna is frustrated that she cannot be Lin's official wife. Though she endures for the sake of Lin, Manna receives unwanted attention for remaining unmarried, particularly by male coworkers who sexually harass her. Lin finally succeeds in divorcing Shuyu due to a law that states that if a man and wife have been separate for 18 years, the man can divorce her without her consent. Once he lives with Manna, however, he feels unhappy with her as well, despite expecting that he will love her since they had chosen each other. After the divorce, Shuyu and their daughter move to Muji City as well. Shortly after Manna gives birth to twin sons, Lin is devastated to learn that her heart is failing and he will be left to raise his children alone. After a heated argument with Manna, Lin reflects on the foolishness of waiting for something that ultimately failed to assuage his discontent.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyaway_(novel)"title="Flyaway (novel)">
Max Stafford is owner and president of a security consultation company based in London, which specializes in corporate security and anti-industrial espionage. Although his company is successful, his marriage has collapsed, and work is starting to lose its luster.More on a whim, he decides to investigate the disappearance of minor accountant Paul Billson from one of his client firms. Billson's father, a famous aviator, had vanished in the 1930s on an air race from London to South Africa somewhere over the Sahara desert, and Billson had been obsessed for years with the desire to find out what had happened, and to dispel lingering slander that the disappearance had been staged as an insurance fraud.Soon after Stafford starts to investigate, he is assaulted by men who attempt to “discourage” further investigation. Stafford’s search takes him to Algiers, then the deep desert area around Tamanrasset in southern Algeria, and across the border into Niger. But he finds that he is not the only person looking for Billson and the missing Northrop Gamma. Other people, with tremendous resources are also searching – and will kill to prevent the truth of a 40 year old incident to emerge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Celestial_Triad"title="The Celestial Triad">
## Book 1 – "Chronicle of Ages".Traci Harding returns to "The Ancient Future Trilogy" which ended with the 'Chosen' leaving Earth for the further reaches of space. Earth must follow its own path for a time while the gods battle elsewhere. Noah, storyteller and chronicler, tutors the children born after colonization and must explore the past to fill in the gaps in his written histories. Tory, Maelgwn and Rhun recall their life and times in ancient Britain when Maelgwn reigned as High King of the Britons and Tory was a student of time travel and immortality under Taliesin. Rhun became King of Gwynedd after Maelgwn. When Vortipor, High King of the Britons, dies, there is a bloody 4-day skirmish over who should succeed him. Sir Bryce is killed in the action and Rhun is forced to abdicate. Noah finds himself on a celestial journey through the ethers, space and time as the missing years in his Chronicle of Ages unfold.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeline_in_America_and_Other_Holiday_Tales"title="Madeline in America and Other Holiday Tales">
In the main tale, Madeline's great-grandfather dies, and he ends up leaving her a sizable inheritance. Madeline and her schoolmates, under the supervision of their teacher, Miss Clavel, go to America and have a wonderful vacation. However, in the end, it turns out that, much to Madeline's disappointment, she can't claim the inheritance her great-grandfather left for her until she turns 21. While Madeline, her classmates and their teacher ultimately return to Paris, Madeline vows to eventually return to America.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeline_and_the_Bad_Hat"title="Madeline and the Bad Hat">
The story opens as the Spanish Ambassador to France moves into the house neighboring the boarding school in Paris. The girls attending the school, including Madeline, watch the ambassador and his family move in with interest. Ms. Clavel, a nun tasked with caring for the girls, points out that the Ambassador has a young son about their age.Immediately, Madeline judges the boy (known as Pepito) as a "Bad Hat", or trouble-maker. Pepito performs many antics that vex the schoolgirls, including shooting them with a slingshot. However, whenever Ms. Clavel is present, he acts like a polite gentleman, earning her admiration much to the girls' chagrin.One day, after about a year of living next to each other, Pepito invites the girls to visit his home and view his menagerie. He has captured many animals in the neighborhood and keeps them interned in his room. Madeline rebuffs him and tells him no one is interested in his menagerie. The girls concur and decline his invitation. Feeling dejected, Pepito changes his clothes into that of a Spanish Torero, assuming the girls will find that interesting. Madeline again shuts him down more forcefully, saying the girls don't view bull fighting as noble. Pepito leaves feeling lonely and shuts himself in his room.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeline_and_the_Gypsies"title="Madeline and the Gypsies">
Pepito, the son of the Spanish Ambassador, invites Madeline and her fellow students to a Gypsy carnival. However, in the chaos caused by a sudden rainstorm, Miss Clavel and the other girls lose sight of Madeline and Pepito, who are unintentionally left behind on the Ferris wheel. The two children find themselves guests of the gypsies, and soon wind up part of the carnival themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeline_in_London"title="Madeline in London">
Madeline and her class, accompanied by Miss Clavel, journey to London to visit their friend Pepito, the son of the Spanish Ambassador. Pepito used to be the neighbor of Madeline and the other students but had to move to London and is sad. The visit by his friends is a special surprise.Ludwig Bemelmans, Publisher: Viking Juvenile Edition: Hardcover; 1961-10-06
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeline's_Christmas"title="Madeline's Christmas">
Madeline finds herself having to manage the needs of the school when everyone else falls ill.In the 1990 TV version of this story, an old lady named Madame Marie replaces the magician.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brave_Bulls"title="The Brave Bulls">
"The Brave Bulls" is the story of Luis Bello, "The Swordsman of Guerreras", the greatest matador in Mexico, who is at the top of his profession, with everything that comes with it, money, a mistress, family and friends, bravado, the crowds are infatuated with him. But one day fear changes everything, he suddenly feels a fear that previously he had not felt in the invincibility that comes with healthy-macho-youth. His best friend and manager, Raul Fuentes, is killed in a car crash along with Luis's mistress, Linda de Calderon, after Linda and Raul had spent a romantic weekend together. This betrayal shakes Luis's beliefs about what has been real and what is real now. Now Luis must deal with these new found feelings while at the same time facing the most feared bulls in all of Mexico, "the brave bulls". In his first fight after the auto accident he is gored by a bull because of the doubt and guilt that has come into the ring with him. In addition, while under the influence of Tequila, and some pressure from ring promoter Eladio Gomez, he agreed to let his younger brother Pepe fight these top bulls with him. Luis must now examine his life to find out where the courage comes from and if he can get it back.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortunata_y_Jacinta"title="Fortunata y Jacinta">
The story revolves around Fortunata and Jacinta, two women of different classes who claim Juanito Santa Cruz as their husband. Juanito, the scion of a wealthy family, goes around carousing and womanizing with his friends. In one of these episodes, he is taken with Fortunata, a young woman of the lower class. This encounter ends when Juanito grows bored of Fortunata and disappears from her life leaving her pregnant. Worried about Juanito's lifestyle, his mother decides to marry him to his cousin Jacinta and arranges a series of meetings between them that end in marriage. During their honeymoon, he tells her about his experiences in the poor neighbourhoods of Madrid and talks to her about Fortunata and how sorry he is for mistreating her. Jacinta forgives him, but remains curious about his infidelity.Time passes and Jacinta fails to get pregnant. She and the rest of the family become obsessed with this.Ido del Sagrario is a poor man whom Juanito invites to the house with the intention of humiliating him for his own amusement. He shows up at the Santa Cruz home one day and informs Jacinta that he knows of a son that Juanito had with Fortunata. Jacinta becomes very excited about the idea of having her husband's child. After consulting with Guillermina Pacheco (a saintly neighbour), the two women go to one of Madrid's poor neighbourhoods to see the boy, "Pitusín". The baby's guardian is José Izquierdo, uncle of Fortunata, from whom they end up buying the wild boy.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avilion"title="Avilion">
Avilion takes place after the events in "Mythago Wood". Steven Huxley and the mythago Guiwenneth have been living in Ryhope wood where they are raising their two children, each half-human, half-mythago. The older boy, Jack, wishes to know about the outside world while the younger girl, Yssobel, dreams about her uncle Christian, who vanished into Lavondyss at the end of "Mythago Wood". Despite being comfortably settled and living an idyllic agrarian lifestyle, events at hand will change the family's future.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_Beijing"title="The Man from Beijing">
In January 2006 the police make the gruesome discovery of the bodies of 19 people who have been brutally murdered in the remote hamlet of Hesjövallen in northern Sweden. The protagonist Birgitta Roslin, a district judge from Helsingborg, realises she has a family connection with some of the victims. Roslin's curiosity is raised by clues found at the scene and leads her to unofficially investigate the massacre. The narrative also chronicles the lives of several characters living during the mid-19th century in China and the United States, whose experiences are somehow also connected to the mass killings. As the plot unfolds, extending across four continents, Roslin unintentionally becomes embroiled in a web of international corruption and political intrigue.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doña_Perfecta"title="Doña Perfecta">
The action occurs in 19th century Spain, when a young liberal named Don José (Pepe) Rey, arrives in a cathedral city named Orbajosa, with the intention of marrying his cousin Rosario. This was a marriage of convenience arranged between Pepe's father Juan and Juan's sister, Perfecta.Upon getting to know each other, Pepe and Rosario declare their eternal love, but in steps Don Inocencio, the cathedral canon, who meddles and obstructs the marriage as well as the good intentions of Doña Perfecta and her brother Don Juan. Over the course of time, several events lead up to a confrontation between Pepe Rey and his aunt Perfecta (supposedly based on Galdós's difficult relationship with his mother), which is caused by her refusal to allow Pepe and Rosario to marry, because Pepe is a non-believer. The novel ends up with the death of Pepe Rey due to his aunt Perfecta. Rosario turns mad and ends up in a madhouse.The novel illustrates the great power that the church wielded. It also describes the differences between the traditional, provincial outlook, and the modern, liberal outlook of Madrid, the capital.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Each_His_Own_(novel)"title="To Each His Own (novel)">
Dr. Manno, the town pharmacist, receives an anonymous letter made up of newspaper cuttings. The letter contains a death threat, but is dismissed by the locals as a practical joke. However, when Dr. Manno and his hunting companion, Dr. Roscio, are found murdered the next day, it becomes quite apparent that the letter was intended to do more than simply frighten the pharmacist from engaging in his favourite pastime.Although the double-homicide is interesting gossip for the townspeople, nobody gives the motives for the murders a second thought, and it is assumed that the pharmacist would have known the reason for his murder and would have thus deserved the consequences. Everybody in the town continues with their daily lives after a short lapse of time apart from Professor Laurana.When Dr. Manno initially received the letter, Laurana notices the word "UNICUIQUE" and proudly believes himself to be the only person with the knowledge to solve the case. For months, Laurana follows various leads, and before long finds himself entangled in a web of corruption from which he cannot escape. Prof. Laurana is soon regarded to be a threat by the perpetrators of the crime, and it does not take long before he too is murdered.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflections_in_a_Golden_Eye_(novel)"title="Reflections in a Golden Eye (novel)">
The novel takes place at an army base in the U.S. state of Georgia. Private Ellgee Williams, a solitary man full of secrets and desires, has served for two years and is assigned to stable duty. After doing yard work at the home of Capt. Penderton, he sees the captain's wife nude and becomes obsessed with her.Capt. Weldon Penderton and his wife Leonora, who grew up as an Army brat, have a fiery relationship, and she takes many lovers. Leonora's current lover, Major Morris Langdon, lives with his depressed wife Alison and her flamboyant houseboy Anacleto, near the Pendertons.Capt. Penderton, as a closeted homosexual, realizes that he is physically attracted to Pvt. Williams, but remains unaware of the private's attraction to Leonora.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Chef-d'œuvre_inconnu"title="Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu">
Young Nicolas Poussin, as yet unknown, visits the painter Porbus in his workshop. He is accompanied by the old master Frenhofer, who comments expertly on the large tableau that Porbus has just finished. The painting is of Mary of Egypt, and while Frenhofer sings her praises, he hints that the work seems unfinished. With some slight touches of the paintbrush, Frenhofer transforms Porbus' painting such that Mary the Egyptian appears to come alive before their very eyes. Although Frenhofer has mastered his technique, he admits that he has been unable to find a suitable model for his own masterpiece, which depicts a beautiful courtesan called Catherine Lescault, known as "La Belle noiseuse". He has been working on this future masterpiece that no one has yet seen for ten years. Poussin offers his own lover, Gillette, as a model. Gillette is so beautiful that Frenhofer is inspired to finish his project quickly. Poussin and Porbus come to admire the painting, but all they can see is part of a foot that has been lost in a swirl of colors. Their disappointment drives Frenhofer to madness, and he burns his paintings and dies that night.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ship's_Cat"title="The Ship's Cat">
The book follows a ship cat referred to only as "Cat" or "Ship's Cat" who serves as a swashbuckling crew member of the English privateer ship "Alcestis". The ship is eventually attacked by Spanish seamen, who capture the ship and its entire crew, who they take to the Panamanian port of Chagres. The cat is also imprisoned, only to be freed by the gaoler's daughter, who puts him to work in the officer's kitchen. There he waits until he has the perfect opportunity to free his crew. This opportunity arises on Saint Philip's Day, as the gaoler and his friends use it as an excuse to drink until they are very intoxicated. The cat frees his shipmates and together they manage to steal a ship, with the intent to sail back to England. Their acts are soon detected by the gaoler and his friends, who give chase until they come across Sir Francis Drake, who is just starting on his expedition to circumnavigate the globe. Free of their pursuers, the cat reveals to the rest of the crew that their stolen ship contained treasure, to the crew's joy. The book ends with the crew returning home, where Queen Elizabeth I knights the cat for his valor.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_the_Bridge_and_the_River"title="Between the Bridge and the River">
The novel follows two best friends from Glasgow: Fraser Darby, an alcoholic televangelist caught up in a sex scandal, and George Ingram, an attorney diagnosed with terminal cancer who contemplates suicide. In a parallel, the story also follows two half-brothers in the Southern U.S.: Leon and Saul Martini, the illegitimate children of a Las Vegas, Nevada showgirl, with the two fathers being Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawford. Eventually the lives of these four men intersect in a journey that ranges from Scotland to France, from Atlanta, Georgia to rural Florida, and from Hollywood to Belgium during World War I.Supporting characters in the story include philosopher Socrates, poet Virgil, psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung and actor Tony Randall.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annals_of_the_Western_Shore"title="Annals of the Western Shore">
The books in the trilogy share the same imaginary world; their plots are set among small city states and independent polities, in a fertile region on the western shore of a continental land mass, in an otherwise unspecified world. The culture is at a generally medieval level, with traditional crafts but no advanced technology. The three books share some characters; the protagonists in "Gifts" reappear as supporting or minor characters in the later books."Gifts" centers on two young people, Gry and Orrec, who struggle to come to terms with inherent psychic abilities. They live in a poor, mountainous, and culturally backward region, famous for its "witches" and wonder-workers. Gry is a girl who can communicate with animals; she refuses to use her gift to aid hunters, which sets her apart from many in her culture, including her own mother. Orrec is a boy whose supposed gift of "unmaking" is apparently so dangerous that he voluntarily goes through life blindfolded, to avoid causing destruction. The story reveals how Orrec and Gry cope with their gifts, and eventually leave their mountainous home for the wider world." Voices" tells the story of Memer, a girl who lives in an occupied country. Her home, Ansul, has been conquered by the Alds, a desert people from the east, who are now its brutal and superstitious occupiers. Memer secretly learns of a world of suppressed books and writings, and falls in love with her people's ancient literature; she meets Gry and Orrec, who come to Ansul as travelling storytellers. Together, their entwined fates play out against the outcome of the political struggle of Ansul and the Alds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beguilement_(novel)"title="Beguilement (novel)">
Fawn, a farmer girl of about 20, has run away from her family, because another farmer has impregnated her and made it clear that he will not acknowledge the baby as his own. Dag, a Lakewalker patroller, first encounters Fawn hiding up in a tree. Later, they meet again, when Dag saves her from some slaves of a malice. Then she assists him in killing the malice, and, in the process, the ground of her unborn child creates a new sharing knife. Eventually, they realize that they are in love, against the customs of both their cultures, and the real story begins.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_(Bujold_novel)"title="Legacy (Bujold novel)">
Legacy is the immediate sequel to Beguilement in the Sharing Knife series. It follows the pairing of farmer Fawn and lakewalker maverick Dag, after their marriage at Fawn's home in the previous volume. Where they, unencumbered by minor opposition, were married in accord with the customs of both groups. They travel to Dag's clan's home camp at Hickory Lake, where they find the expected prejudices against miscegenation between Farmers and Lakewalkers. Dag is called on to lead a group of Lakewalker patrollers against an advanced malice. Dag decides that confronting the malice is more important than trying to free several Lakewalkers who have been entranced in the mud-man-making process by which the malice produces its slaves. After Dag's group has killed the malice, Dag, himself, also becomes entranced. Fawn carries her heroine role through by thinking out a way to revive him, and the rest of the Lakewalkers.Neither achievement carries enough weight with Dag's brother and mother to make them relent in their efforts to break this pairing. These two carry the role of villains, but they are drawn so that the reasons for their awkward quirks are clear.Although their marriage, and Fawn's potential value to the camp are accepted by some of the Lakewalkers, The Dag-and-Fawn combination raises enough awkward precedents that they are about to be voted into exile when Dag subverts the process, stating that he intends to leave his home community in any case. Dag and Fawn then take as many portable assets as they can, and set out in chosen exile towards the southeast. There, Dag guesses he may be able to confirm his ideas about the near kinship of Farmers to Lakewalkers, and to find ways to combine their efforts toward the eradication of malices. These themes unfold in the next pair of books.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Group_(novel)"title="The Group (novel)">
The book describes the lives of eight female friends after their graduation in 1933 from Vassar College, beginning with the marriage of one of them, Kay Strong, and ending with her funeral in 1940. Each character struggles with different issues, including sexism in the work place, child-rearing, financial difficulties, family crises, and sexual relationships. Nearly all the women's issues involve the men in their lives: fathers; employers; lovers; or husbands. As highly educated women from affluent backgrounds, they must strive for autonomy and independence in a time when a woman's role is still largely restricted to marriage and childbirth. The plot is influenced by the political and economic atmosphere of the time. Over the course of the book, the reader is exposed to the women's views on contraception, love, sex, socialism, and psychoanalysis.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_Among_the_Pigeons_(Golding_novel)"title="Cat Among the Pigeons (Golding novel)">
The setting is London in the late 18th century when slavery has just been ruled illegal in England but is still common in the British West Indies. Things are fine but then trouble rises as Pedro's old slave master, Mr. Hawkins, comes to London and tries to reclaim Pedro as one of his properties. He is at first thwarted by Cat but he vows to return.But not without a fight as Pedro's friends, Cat, Frank, Lizzie, Syd and the gang try to secure his freedom. Once again, Cat finds trouble following her once more as she is chased around in London by the Bow Street Runners coming for her arrest for biting Mr Hawkins after he taunted her. Disguising herself as a boy with the help of her friends, Frank and Charlie, she enters an aristocratic boarding school and learns things like Latin and fencing that girls are never taught. Cat is bullied for being clever and a 'pretty boy' by Richmond, the son of a plantation owner. When they find Cat with a medallion abhorring slavery Richmond and his gang beat Cat up. When Syd arrives bringing sausages as a decoy, he's furious and wants to take Cat home immediately, but soon realises that she's safe where she is as the Bow Street Runners are still looking for her.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Voyage_of_Columbus"title="The Last Voyage of Columbus">
The books topic focuses on Christopher Columbus's one last voyage to the ends of the earth. The voyage is his final chance to prove himself and thus become the first man ever to circumnavigate the world. The goal was to find a westward passage through Central America and reach the Maluku Islands, also known as the Spice Islands.His project turns into one of history's most epic-and forgotten-adventures. Columbus would later claim that this fourth voyage was his greatest. It was without question his riskiest and most challenging."Of the four ships he led into the unknown, none returned. Columbus would face the worst storms a European explorer had ever encountered. He would battle to survive amid mutiny, war, and a shipwreck that left him stranded on the desert isle of Jamaica for almost a year. On his tail were his enemies, sent from Europe to track him down. In front of him: the unknown.The account of this final voyage brings Columbus to life as never before adventurer, businessman, father, tyrant, and hero" 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin's_Wood"title="Merlin's Wood">
The main novel is divided into four distinct parts. In the first part, Martin and Rebecca return to the outskirts of Brocéliande, an enchanted forest in Brittany where they grew up as children approximately 15 years earlier. They have returned for the funeral of their mother. Despite being warned to leave by family and local friends, they stay to settle the estate and take up residence in their childhood home.Martin and Rebecca share stories of the past, some of which involve playing on the path exiting Brocéliande and dancing inside the ghosts that emerge from the forest. As a child, Rebecca gained the gift of song from an encounter with a ghostly troubadour on the path. She later used this gift of song in Australia to bring back her drowned lover, Flynn, from the dead. Conrad, an old man who lives in the woods, relates to Martin a well-kept secret version of the death of Martin's younger brother as a child. Conrad tells how Rebecca became a possessed half-man/half-wolf who fatally mauled the child.Despite being wary of Rebecca, Martin becomes romantically involved with her, marries her, and together they parent a beautiful boy named Daniel who is deaf, dumb and blind. As they raise Daniel it becomes apparent that Rebecca is slowly losing her sensory perceptions and faculties while Daniel is gaining them. Rebecca first loses her musical ability, then her vision fades, then her speech becomes simplistic, and finally she loses almost all self-awareness. Meanwhile, Daniel progresses from being deaf and blind to singing, speaking, seeing and finally possessing a supernatural sense of hearing. Unknowingly the family has become entangled in an age-old struggle between Merlin and Vivien, wherein a part of Vivien's spirit inhabits Daniel while a part of Merlin's spirit inhabits Rebecca. Martin physically confronts Daniel, but realizes he is physically outmatched and retreats. He also asks Father Gualzator to perform an exorcism on Rebecca, but his request is refused.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat_Who_Tailed_a_Thief"title="The Cat Who Tailed a Thief">
The residents of Pickax take pride in a town which has considerably less crime than the places "Down Below." However, this holiday season has seen a streak of small crimes. New in town is the bank manager, Willard Carmichael and wife Danielle. Her cousin wants to restore historic Pleasant Avenue to its original splendor, but something seems amiss to Qwill. Two deaths soon follow. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_Light"title="Night of Light">
Once every seven years, a world in orbit around a binary star is bathed in a bizarre radiance that rearranges physical reality. Most of the planet's inhabitants choose to sleep for the entire two-week period, often using a special medicine to do so. Only mystics, newcomers, and devotees to the planet's bizarre religion are willing to stay awake and endure the two weeks of brilliance, where things materialize out of thin air. According to their religion, people undergo an unpredictable change, and many actually die. The good become better, and the bad become worse. One woman's husband metamorphosed into a tree. Another person was chased down streets by statues that came to life. But facing the brilliance is also a rite of passage if you must develop as a being inclined towards acts of goodness, or a being inclined towards acts of evil. It is during those two weeks that the good are pitted against the bad, and it is also a time when their living god must face his successor.To help in the conversion effort, Catholic missionaries have been sent to the planet to help reconcile the planet's religion with their own universal faith. The only problem is that the planet's religion appears to be spreading across the stars.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of_Camelot"title="Queen of Camelot">
The novel begins at the end of the story. The prologue leads you to know how Guinevere came to write the story of her and Arthur, and the Knights. Guinevere is in a convent when Lancelot comes to her telling her of Arthur's death and deterioration of Britain. Lancelot tells her that he had a vision of Merlin telling him to go to her and ask her to write down the story of her life, and the life of Arthur. He says that it isn't meant for the people of today, but a future generation of Britons.The novel then opens with Guinevere's birth, and a prophecy that was told to her father the night she was born. Guinevere is to be a "white shadow" or gwenhwyfar. Guinevere spends her early years being adored and pampered by her father, a minor king in northern Britain. As he ages, he sends her away to her mother's sister and her husband, who is king of a nearby land. Her aunt has one daughter near her age; Elaine. Elaine and Guinevere grow up together as best friends. Elaine is headstrong, stubborn, and always puts herself first, even before her older cousin. Elaine also adores the legend of Arthur, and then when Arthur takes his place at the throne of Britain, uniting the country and fighting the Saxons, Elaine becomes obsessed with him, believing herself to be his future bride, and meant for his unending love.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chemistry_of_Death"title="The Chemistry of Death">
Forensics expert David Hunter is recovering from a shattering tragedy three years earlier. While he is working in an isolated Norfolk village as a doctor, a woman's mutilated corpse is discovered. Police want to exploit Hunter's forensic knowledge to help identify the killer, but he is wary of involvement. Another woman disappears and the small community in which Hunter has taken refuge is divided by suspicion, including suspicion of Hunter himself.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Mountaineer's_Hotel"title="Dead Mountaineer's Hotel">
The novel begins when Inspector Peter Glebsky, eager to get away from work and family life, takes a two-week vacation to the titular hotel. He is greeted by the hotel's owner Alek Snevar, who tells Glebsky the story of the dead mountaineer. After settling in, Glebsky meets some of the hotel's other guests. First, he meets Mr. du Barnstoker, a famous magician who is accompanied by his late brother's child Brun, an adolescent of indeterminate sex, and the physicist Simon Simone. Over a meal and conversation about the theoretical possibility of alien visitation, Glebsky learns that the guests have been victim to a number of pranks. The conversation is brought to a halt by the arrival of two more guests, the perpetually drunk Mr. Moses and his beautiful wife. The next day brings more guests: Olaf Andvarafors and Hinkus. The day also brings more pranks, such as a mysterious note that indicates that the sickly Hinkus is actually a gangster intent on the murder of one of the inn's guests. Glebsky investigates Hinkus' room and finds Mr. Moses' gold watch in a suspicious trunk, but a later conversation with Hinkus indicates that those items may have been planted.That night, an avalanche blocks the entrance to the valley, cutting the guests off from the nearest town. Shortly afterward a strange man arrives at the door and asks for Olaf before fainting. After installing the stranger in a vacant room, they find Olaf Andvarafors dead in his room, his door locked from the inside. His hand is reaching toward a suitcase containing a mysterious device.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_Day"title="Bright Day">
In 1946, an English screenwriter, Gregory Dawson, goes to a seaside hotel in Cornwall to finish a screenplay. An accidental meeting with two people from his distant past prompts him to explore his memories of his youth in 'Bruddersford' (a fictional town conflating Bradford and Huddersfield) between October 1912 and June 1914.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Speaker_(novel)"title="Native Speaker (novel)">
Henry Park, a young Korean-American "spook" for Dennis Hoagland, is assigned to infiltrate the camp of John Kwang, a Korean-American politician running for mayor of New York City. Henry struggles with the recent separation from his white wife, Lelia, due to the premature death of their son Mitt. Further, he develops a keen double consciousness, knowing that his actions will cause the ruin of a fellow Korean-American, and tarnish an exemplar of success for members of a "model minority" in America.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachiko_Waits"title="Hachiko Waits">
Professor Hidesaburō Ueno and his dog Hachikō follow the same schedule every day. In April 1924, when Hachikō was six months old, he got out the gate and followed the Professor to the train station, despite the Professor's commanding him to go back home. At the train station, the Station Master, Mr. Yoshikawa, agrees to watch Hachikō until the Professor returns. There Yasuo, a six-year-old boy, meets Hachikō. The dog waits until five minutes to three o'clock, when the Professor's train arrives.This routine continues every day for a year. However, when the train arrives in the afternoon, the Professor is not on it. Yasuo discovers that he has suffered a heart attack and died. Hachikō waits in the station until the last train arrives at midnight; then Yasuo, with much difficulty, takes him to his house. However, Hachikō escapes the next morning; and at five minutes to three, he is in the station waiting for the Professor.Yasuo and the Station Master take care of Hachikō for the next ten years, as he comes to the station every afternoon to await the Professor's arrival. The newspaper writes an article about Hachikō, and he becomes famous throughout Japan.On the day Hachikō dies, the sixteen-year-old Yasuo meets a famous artist, who wants to carve a statue of the devoted dog. Once complete, the statue becomes famous as well; and by it, Yasuo meets the girl whom he marries ten years later.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_as_We_Knew_It_(novel)"title="Life as We Knew It (novel)">
The book portrays 16-year-old Miranda, living a normal life in Pennsylvania with her mother, Laura, and her brothers Matt and Jon. Her biggest worries are her grades and her conflicted feelings about becoming a godmother to her soon-to-be-born half-sibling, who is expected by her father and his second wife Lisa. Soon, the news becomes focused on one subject: an asteroid predicted to hit the moon. People are excited about the opportunity to witness the event, and on the night of the impact, Miranda and her family go outside to witness it. However, the asteroid was denser than expected by scientists, and immediately after impact, it becomes apparent that something is wrong. The moon has been pushed closer to the Earth by the impact, intensifying the tidal forces that the moon exerts on the earth.Life on earth is shattered, and the lives of Miranda and her family are no exception. Almost immediately following the lunar impact, tsunamis and earthquakes begin ravaging the coasts of many countries, causing millions of deaths. Chaos erupts and Miranda and her family go shopping to stock up on food, water, and supplies before the stores are emptied. Miranda's older brother Matt comes home from college. Living inland, they are safe from tsunamis, but as the summer goes on, another threat looms. The increased tidal forces from the moon are causing magma to be forced up to the surface, resulting in the eruptions of many dormant volcanoes, which cover the sky in ash. This causes temperature to drop dramatically, enough for frost to appear by mid-August and for 20-degree weather by October, making it dramatically more difficult for plants to grow. As circumstances become harsher for the family, they start eating less to conserve food. Laura often goes without eating at all in an entire day, and makes other sacrifices to give Jon, who Miranda is convinced Laura considers to be the strongest of her children, the best chance at survival. This often becomes a source of conflict between Miranda and her mother.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven_Has_No_Favorites"title="Heaven Has No Favorites">
The main figure, Clerfayt, is an automobile racer who goes to a Swiss sanatorium to visit a fellow racer, Hollmann, who has tuberculosis. There he meets the young Belgian woman Lillian suffering from tuberculosis. She is in its terminal stage with no chance of a cure, and she wants to enjoy her last months rather than waiting for her death. She has been talking about leaving the hospital for months and has never gone through with it. This changes when a friend of hers dies in that hospital and she realizes that the corpses aren't named, they're given numbers and treated like cargo. Unwilling to become an unnamed body, she decides to leave the Bela Vista sanatorium with Clerfayt after having gone out with him the night before.Together they travel over Europe, while Lillian indulges in lavish dresses and food, paid for by her uncle. Eventually they fall in love and Clerfayt starts to hope for a future with her. However, when he expresses his wish to settle down and wants to get her visited by a doctor, she internally realizes that marrying Clerfayt would be to make him a widower within months and refuses the idea. Although she loves him, she decides to leave him before they start an actual life together.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Me_(novel)"title="Trust Me (novel)">
Set against the backdrop of the Hindi film industry, "Trust Me" is a comic story about love, heart-break and friendship. The protagonist, Parvati, decides to go off men when she is dumped by her boyfriend. She concludes that her girlfriends are right: all men are bastards. Her boss, the fatherly Mr Bose, is the one shoulder she can cry on. He is also the one man she never expects a pass from. She stands corrected: all men ARE bastards. Her girlfriends manage to keep their I-told-you-so’s to themselves.Parvati quits her job, and joins the unit of Jambuwant (‘Call me Jumbo!’) Sinha, assisting him in making his latest Hindi feature film. ‘Jumbo’ is a Bombay film-maker archetype: he believes in white shoes, black money and the casting couch. Manoj, the chief assistant, makes a pass at every woman he meets because he doesn’t want anybody to feel unwanted. And Rahul, an actor, claims to have fallen in love with her.Parvati hopes she is older now, and smarter - but perhaps not smart enough, because, very inconveniently, she finds herself liking Rahul far too much.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_of_the_Book_(novel)"title="People of the Book (novel)">
The novel tells the fictional story of Dr. Hanna Heath, an Australian book conservator who comes to Sarajevo to restore the Haggadah. Her work on the book leaves her with questions: why is the book illustrated, unlike other Haggadot? Why was the last restoration job, a hundred years earlier, done so poorly? What happened to the metal clasps that once held the parchment pages pressed together? How did the Haggadah come from fifteenth-century Spain to the Balkans? In the course of the restoration she takes microscopic samples: fragments of a butterfly's wing caught in the spine, a long white cat hair tangled in the binding, traces of salt crystals, a wine stain mixed with blood.The story alternates between showing Hanna researching the Haggadah in the present, searching archives and taking her samples to forensic labs, and following the history of the Haggadah across five hundred years, in reverse chronological order, revealing the (fictional) explanations for all of Hanna's discoveries.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_Shaker"title="Shell Shaker">
"Shell Shaker" links two distant generations of the Billy family. The novel begins in 1738 in Choctaw Mississippi, initially focusing on Red Shoes (a historical Choctaw chief). He has two wives, one who is Choctaw and one who is Chickasaw, from a neighboring tribe. When his Chickasaw wife is found murdered, his Choctaw wife Anoleta is blamed. Anoleta's mother, Shakbatina, sacrifices her life to save her daughter and avert a war between the tribes. But during the next decade, the Choctaw try to decide what action to take against Red Shoes, while Anoleta and her family try to survive. Red Shoes plays both sides in what becomes a war that devastates both the Choctaw town of Yanàbi and Anoleta's family.The novel picks up in 1991, long after Removal, when Shakbatina's descendants live in Durant, Oklahoma. As a wildfire destroys the land around them, the Choctaw chief Redford McAlester is murdered. Assistant chief Auda Billy (also his lover) is blamed. Auda's mother Susan Billy confesses to the murder, and Isaac Billy (Auda's maternal uncle) gathers their scattered family to help with the investigation. Plot threads include embezzlement, rape, money laundering, and donations to the Irish Republican Army and the Mafia. An old woman claims to be actress Sarah Bernhardt.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Knight_(novel)"title="The Green Knight (novel)">
The lives of Louise Anderson and her daughters Aleph, Sefton and Moy become intertwined with a mystical character whose destiny both affects and informs the novel's central conflicts which include a murder that never actually occurs, sibling rivalry, love triangles, and one extremely sentient dog who dearly misses his owner. This novel loosely parodies the medieval poem "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight;" however, it is largely a comedy of errors with bizarre twists and turns in circumstances that threaten the stability of a circle of friends in a London community.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Romantics_(novel)"title="The Romantics (novel)">
Samar, the young narrator of "The Romantics", arrives at a boarding house in the holy city of Benaras, an ancient city trying to cope with modern India. There he hopes to lose himself in books and solitude, but, far from offering him an undistracted existence, the city forces all his silent desires into the light. Although this novels depicts the interaction of two culture such as east and west. the protagonist is highly attracted towards the glamour of western that comes to novel as being in contact with Catherine.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_the_Supreme"title="I, the Supreme">
As critic John King notes, "it is impossible to summarize this extraordinary novel in a few lines. It incorporates the latest developments in linguistic theory and practice, talks of the arbitrariness and unreliability of language that purports to describe reality, rereads and comments upon the various histories and travelers’ accounts of Paraguay, ranges across the breadth of Latin American history, implicitly condemning Stroessner and debating with Fidel Castro, and exploring once again the gap between writer and reader."The book does, however, start by promising a linear narrative. It opens with the title words, set in a font designed to look like handwriting, heralding what appears to be an official order:I the Supreme Dictator of the Republic Order that on the occasion of my death my corpse be beheaded; my head placed on a pike for three days in the Plaza de la República, to which the people are to be summoned by the sounding of a full peal of bells...This pronouncement, it turns out, is not an official declaration. It is an imitation or forgery, found "nailed to the door of the cathedral" in Paraguay's capital, Asunción. Immediately following, then, is a discussion of this pasquinade: Dr Francia, the Supreme, and his secretary, Policarpo Patiño, discuss its meaning and possible provenance. Patiño is set the task of uncovering the perpetrator: "You are to start tracking down the handwriting of the pasquinade in all the files."
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_(Sansom_novel)"title="Sovereign (Sansom novel)">
Set in the autumn of 1541, the novel describes fictional events surrounding Henry VIII's 'Progress' to the North (a state visit accompanied by the royal court and its attendants, the purpose of which was to accept the formal surrender from those who had rebelled during the Pilgrimage of Grace). Most of the novel is set in York though events in London and on the return journey via Hull are also depicted.Matthew Shardlake (a London lawyer) and his assistant Jack Barak arrive in York ahead of the Progress to fulfill an official role but also with a secret mission from Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury. The official role is to deal with petitions to the king from the citizens of York; the secret mission is to ensure the welfare of an important political prisoner, Sir Edward Broderick, so that he can be brought to London for questioning in the Tower of London. However, events are quickly complicated when the murder of a York glazier leads Shardlake to the discovery of important documents that bring the king's right to the throne into question.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forlorn_River"title="Forlorn River">
Ben Ide spends his time chasing wild horses in Northern California, accompanied by the wanderer, Nevada and his Native American companion, Modoc. Rather than catching horses, he has earned the reputation of being a cattle rustler. But Ina Blaine, his childhood sweetheart, knows this is impossible. She defends Ben against the suspicions of her newly-rich father and his mysterious associate, Les Setter, who has a previous connection to Nevada.Looking toward the future, Ben Ide and his companions buy out a couple of ranchers in a severe drought and proceed to catch a lot of wild horses. He is after one in particular- California Red, whom Ina's father has promised as a present for her, if any man should catch him. Setter and Blaine set out to steal Ben's new land while he's off, and trouble follows.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_(Grey_novel)"title="Nevada (Grey novel)">
Ben Ide, restless with the rancher life, moves his family to Arizona, ostensibly for his mother's health, but also to search for his missing partner Nevada. He buys a beautiful ranch, in a territory known for cattle rustling. The deal soon sours as he struggles to keep his cattle and prize horses from the network of rustlers about the wild country of Arizona, not sure who he can trust and who he can't. Hettie Ide pines away for the missing Nevada, meanwhile fending off a horde of suitors.Nevada, having escaped the end of "Forlorn River" with only his life, resumes the life of an outlaw, seeking a way out of his situation, but working his way deeper amidst the labyrinthine social network of Arizona, in which everyone is a rustler and no one will say who leads the gangs.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Live_Coal_in_the_Sea"title="A Live Coal in the Sea">
Camilla celebrates a long and wonderful life with her friends and family when she is presented with an award for lifetime achievement. But her son's snide comments at the event stir up trouble which led to Camilla's granddaughter, Raffi, demanding answers about her family history. Camilla relives her younger days as she attempts to give Raffi the answers she seeks.Camilla's story begins when she is an astronomy student in college. Her life has been peaceful until her mother, Rose, visits her on campus and promptly has sex with one of her professors, which Camilla accidentally sees. As she tries to get away, she bumps into a young man named Mac Xanthakos, who is volunteering at a local church, while training to be an Episcopalian priest. Mac invites Camilla in to talk and have a cup of tea, at which point, Camilla sadly explains about her mother. This event leads to a friendship between Camilla and Mac. A romance blooms between the pair but Mac suddenly pulls away. Camilla is left saddened and confused. She continues her education and devotes herself to her work. Then suddenly, Mac reappears and asks Camilla to marry him. Camilla accepts.Mac introduces Camilla to his wonderful and wise parents. They accept Camilla as their own daughter and Camilla begins to feel like she belongs with them. She and Mac are married and Mac begins to work at a church in a small town. Camilla becomes pregnant. The happiness ends in devastation when Camilla's pregnancy ends in miscarriage. Her pain is deepened when Camilla's parents announce they are expecting another child. Camilla becomes pregnant a second time. But once again disaster strikes. Rose is in a car accident and is killed. Before she dies, doctors are able to deliver her baby by c-section. The baby, a boy, needs a blood transfusion and Rafferty attempts to donate. When doctors compare the blood types, they discover a terrible truth. The baby is not Rafferty's. The true father of the baby is unknown.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fires_of_Pompeii"title="The Fires of Pompeii">
The Tenth Doctor takes Donna to Rome, only to realise they have arrived in Pompeii the day before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79. They later discover a local merchant has sold the TARDIS to sculptor Lobus Caecilius. The Doctor and Donna go to Caecilius' house to retrieve it. Unknown to them, they have been followed by a soothsayer who reports to the Sibylline Sisterhood that the prophesied man in the blue box has arrived, and the Sisters fear the prediction that his arrival brings fire and death.At the house, the Doctor and Donna meet the local augur, Lucius Petrus Dextrus, who has arrived to collect a sculpture he commissioned. The Doctor is intrigued by the sculpture, which resembles a segment of an oversized circuit board. The Doctor wishes to learn more about the sculptures and enlists Caecilius' son Quintus to help him break into Lucius Petrus' house. Inside, the Doctor deduces that the circuits will make an energy converter, but he is caught by Lucius Petrus, who beckons a large stone creature to attack and kill them. The stone creature appears in Caecilius' house and attacks them, but Quintus douses the creature in water and kills it. In the confusion, the Sisterhood kidnap Donna, and the Doctor sets off to rescue her. The Doctor discovers that the Sisterhood are being controlled by the Pyroviles, stony creatures whose home planet of Pyrovilia was lost. The Doctor escapes with Donna into a tunnel that leads into the heart of Mount Vesuvius.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashes_to_Ashes_(novel)"title="Ashes to Ashes (novel)">
A serial killer known as "The Cremator" is killing prostitutes in Minneapolis parks and setting their bodies on fire. When one of his victims turns out to be the daughter of a local billionaire, and a homeless teenager claims to have witnessed the burning, it brings together former FBI agent Kate Conlan (now working as a victim-witness advocate) and the Bureau's top serial-killer profiler, John Quinn. Conlan and Quinn share a painful personal history; now they have to work together against a very smart lunatic who seems to be able to read their minds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_Girls"title="2 Girls">
Bodies of several murdered men are found in Istanbul and the oppressive air is evident in the city.Meanwhile Behiye, rebellious, full of teenage angst, oppressed by her conservative family, achieves well in her university entrance exams and gets the chance to enter prestigious Boğaziçi University. This, however, does not take her angst away, but oppressions endure. Behiye's life, longing to get rid of her angst is changed drastically when she meets Handan, a beautiful and naive girl of her age who lives with her beautiful call girl mother.In short time, Behiye becomes attached to Handan and moves into their apartment. The girls form and intense and unidentifiable relationship which has both romantic and sisterly implications. Their uniting relationship has to face social problems and is damaged by peer boys, academic expectations, economic difficulties, and most of all different cultural backgrounds. The story continues as step by step Handan painfully realizes the impossibility of their relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nog_(novel)"title="Nog (novel)">
The novel, which is deliberately disjointed and at times self-contradictory, is the first-person account of an unnamed unreliable narrator. He occasionally gives his name as Nog, but he also implies that Nog is a different person. At the start of the novel, he is living in a shack on a beach, meditating and rehearsing his memories. He is in possession of a fake octopus housed in the back of a truck, which he may have purchased from a man named Nog. His meditation is disrupted when he sees a woman picking shells. He follows her back to her house, where she and her husband are throwing a party. On the way, the narrator also encounters a silly old man, Colonel Green, who is obsessed with maintaining a seawall outside his beach home. After the party, the action shifts to a city, where the narrator is shopping at a supermarket. He follows another woman, Meridith, to a commune run by a man named Lockett, who is alternately presented as an oracle, a drug dealer, a con-man, and a visionary. The narrator lives in a hallway outside a bathroom for a while, lying on a mattress, then moves to the pantry, where he hands out food to people when they approach. Just when he has settled into this way of life, Lockett and Meridith abduct him, and take him with them on a journey. They raid a hospital for drugs; in the process they encounter a senile old man named The General. Lockett then leads the narrator and Meridith into the woods, where he has stored supplies. They float down a river on a raft, then make camp on a ledge. The narrator stays behind while Lockett and Meridith head down into a small mining town. He builds a wall with a bunch of tin cans, and has sex with a woman who wanders by. He then nearly gets shot by a hunter who calls himself Bench. The two men share drugs. Bench then leads the narrator in a raid on the town, which he claims he owns, and which has been taken over by a group of young people. Lockett, now calling himself Nog, has established himself there as a guru. Bench shoot and kills Lockett, and seems to get shot himself. The narrator, now calling himself Lockett, leaves the town with Meridith. They enter a desert, where they meet yet another old man, a hermit named The Captain, who mistakes Nog for Lockett and claims to have known his father. He supplies the couple with tickets to a ship, which they board. There they encounter another old man named The Captain, who also mistakes Nog for Lockett. The novel concludes at sea with the narrator boarding a lifeboat and becoming separated from Meridith. He tells us he "flew to New York."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_the_Black_Jungle"title="The Mystery of the Black Jungle">
Few can live in the Black Jungle of the Sundarbans, the islands formed by the delta of the Ganges river in India, a desolate, silent place teeming with wild dangerous beasts. Yet it is among its dark forests and bamboo groves here that the renowned snake and tiger hunter Tremal-Naik makes his home. For years he has lived there in peace until one night in the deep of the jungle a strange apparition stands before him - a beautiful young woman that vanishes in an instant. Within days, strange music is heard in the jungle, then one of his men is found dead without a mark upon his body. Determined to find some answers, the hunter sets off with his faithful servant Kammamuri, but as they head deeper into the jungles of the Sundarbans, they soon find their own lives at risk: a deadly new foe has been watching their every move, a foe that threatens all of British India. Tremal-Naik encounters the young woman, whose name is Ada, again in a temple in the jungle, and he's caught by fever, as his never-trembling heart is caught by love for her, right at the time when she seems to be facing her doom. Ada is there captured by "thugs", worshipers of the goddess Kali.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Positive_Thinking"title="The Power of Positive Thinking">
Peale begins by stating ten rules for “overcoming inadequacy attitudes and learning to practice faith”. The rules include the following:The next chapter describes the importance of creating a peaceful mind, which can be done through inspirational reading, clearing one's mind, or visualization. Peale continues with how to obtain consistent energy, saying that “God is the source of all energy”. The mind controls how the body feels; thus, letting go of negative energy and emotions will give infinite energy through God. Next, Peale speaks of the healing power of prayer, and how it will heal physical and emotional problems that arise from negative circumstances. In chapters five and six, Peale asserts that happiness is created by choice and that worrying only inhibits it and should be stopped. The next step in thinking positively is to always believe in success and not to believe in defeat because most obstacles are “mental in character”. Habitual worrying is the next obstacle to overcome through emptying the mind and positive affirmations. Peale then states that asking God for help can solve one's personal problems and physically and emotionally heal them.In chapter twelve, Peale states that letting go of anger and embracing a sense of calm can help with physical illnesses, such as eczema. Next, Peale states that letting positive thoughts in can change one's outlook on life drastically and that practicing relaxation through God's help will lead to a content life. Chapter fifteen gives concrete examples on how to get others to like you, including the following: remember names, praise others generously, become a people person, and resolve problems calmly as soon as they appear. Peale then continues with how to overcome heartache through prayer, meditation, social interactions, and keeping a daily routine. The final chapter restates the importance of reaching out to a Higher Power for help in living a peaceful, positive life. Peale ends "The Power of Positive Thinking" with an epilogue encouraging readers to follow his techniques and live more fulfilled lives. Peale writes, “I pray for you. God will help you — so believe and live successfully.”
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_Ogres_of_Hagwood"title="Thorn Ogres of Hagwood">
The werlings of Hagwood (small creatures with the ability to transform into animals) live peacefully in the trees of the forest, overlooked and unbothered while they leisurely perfect the art of wergling (shape-changing). But unlike his fellow werlings, the bumbling Gamaliel Tumpin can’t manage to wergle into even the simplest of forms (a mouse) like his peers. He’s tormented by his sister, Kernella, and teased by his classmates. And he envies star student Finnen Lufkin, who can transform into almost any creature. But wergling will soon be the least of Gamaliel’s troubles. The evil elf queen Rhiannon, the High Lady of the Hollow Hill, is desperately seeking a precious possession that was stolen long ago. Her evil knows no bounds, and with her army of monstrous thorn ogres, she will not stop until it’s found. The werlings’ peaceful existence is threatened by death and danger, and clumsy, awkward Gamaliel will need to call on the strength within him to fight for his family and his home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Dreaming_(novel)"title="California Dreaming (novel)">
The book picks up with Anna Percy leaving for Bali with her childhood friend, Logan. Unfortunately, there is a problem with the plane so it turns around and heads back to L.A. When Sam hears news of the troubled flight, she turns to fiancée Eduardo and proposes that if Anna is safe, then they will get married within the week. Anna indeed does make it out safely from the plane and at the airport, her father and Sam are waiting for her. Ben was also there, watching from afar but decides to leave when he sees Anna and Logan kiss, not wanting to ruin the happy moment.Before going to the airport, Ben was with Cammie at the new club, Bye Bye Love, when Adam Flood unexpectedly showed up, hoping to get back together with Cammie. Sam meets her parents Jackson and Dina, who flew in for the occasion, to meet Eduardo's parents, Consuela and Pedro, to discuss the engagement. The adults are hesitant about the marriage since Sam will be at USC film school and Eduardo will be in Paris for work. Sam doesn't know if she wants to give up her place at her dream school just to be with Eduardo in a different country and tells the others she is not ready to make her decision. Similarly, Anna is indecisive over whether to go to Yale as planned or go with Logan to Bali. Instead, she decides to finish the screenplay on her laptop that she started in Manhattan and sends it to Sam.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflex_(novel)"title="Reflex (novel)">
Set ten years after the conclusion of "Jumper", David Rice- a young adult man with the rare spatial ability to teleport both short and long distances- has married Millie and occasionally works for the National Security Agency, only accepting jobs that he finds to be morally acceptable. The novel tells the story from David's and Millie's perspectives in alternating chapters.During a meeting with Brian Cox, his NSA handler, Brian is killed, and David is tranquilized and kidnapped by a powerful criminal organization with influence over the NSA and other government agencies. When David awakens, he is shackled to the wall of a windowless room at an undisclosed location. When he tries to "jump", the shackles pull him back violently from wherever he attempts to go.Without David, Millie is stranded at their secret hideaway: a cliff wall cave in a remote part of Texas. She uses a rope to descend from the cave entrance, but the rope's anchor breaks and she falls; that is when she first discovers that she has gained the ability to "jump".David's captors have implanted him with a device that can trigger his vagus nerve, causing him to become violently ill. His shackles give him the run of the room, but at random intervals he is signaled to jump to a painted box on the floor in the center of the room, or else the device is triggered. The routine continues night and day.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyes_of_the_Emperor"title="Eyes of the Emperor">
The story starts in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1941, where a Japanese American boy, Eddy, lives. He has a brother, Herbie, and numerous friends. His friends are in the army, and Eddy, who is 16 years old, joins the US army by illegally altering his birth certificate to appear 18 years old. They enlist in Camp McCoy. Eddy's father Koji strongly opposes this as he feels that Eddy is betraying Japan, but soon changes his mind when Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941. Eddy and his Japanese American company must do manual labor, such as digging trenches, while the soldiers of other ethnicities go on with regular army training. He then is mobilized by Lieutenant Sweet to Cat Island, Mississippi along with his comrades. They then embark on a secret dog training mission commissioned by President Franklin D. Roosevelt: Dogs are trained to smell Japanese American soldiers, with the hope that when the dogs are released in the Pacific theater they will track and kill the Japanese soldiers. This severely demoralizes Eddy and his fellow soldiers. Later, when they commute from the island to the mainland, their boat motor stalls; when they call for assistance, the US Coast Guard comes and shoots their boat, suspecting that they are the enemy. Accidental attacks continue, and the treatment of the Japanese American soldiers becomes worse as World War II worsens. Eddy is nearly killed once when his dog's trainer, Smith, calls the dog back slightly late. The soldiers are forced to treat the dogs harshly against their will.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Barbed_Coil"title="The Barbed Coil">
The novel is set mostly in the Kingdom of Rhaize where the coming together of three individuals, Tessa McCamfrey, Ravis of Burano and Camron of Thorn, is about to unleash a series of events that culminate in the fight to save the kingdom from the armies of Garizon.Tessa has suddenly been thrust from her life of telesales in present-day Earth into a world filled with danger where she meets Lord Ravis, who is himself delayed in a city which has been "marked for the kill". Camron of Thorn is a man seeking revenge for his father's murder and demands that Lord Ravis help him to achieve it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Maravilla"title="La Maravilla">
## Explanation of the novel's title."La Maravilla" has a double meaning connected to the passing on to another world, Mictlan. La maravilla means the flowers placed upon the graves of the dead. However, it is also the name given to the dog who leads the living to Mictlan.The title is also an allusion to Alejo Carpentier's term "lo real maravilloso americano", "marvelous American reality". For Carpentier, the marvelous aspect of reality comes from America itself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gather_Together_in_My_Name"title="Gather Together in My Name">
The book opens in the years following World War II. Angelou, still known as "Marguerite," or "Rita," has just given birth to her son Clyde, and is living with her mother and stepfather in San Francisco. The book follows Marguerite from the ages of 17 to 19, through a series of relationships, occupations, and cities as she attempts to raise her son and to find her place in the world. It continues exploring the themes of Angelou's isolation and loneliness begun in her first volume, and the ways she overcomes racism, sexism, and her continued victimization.Rita goes from job to job and from relationship to relationship, hoping that "my charming prince was going to appear out of the blue". "My fantasies were little different than any other girl of my age", Angelou wrote. "He would come. He would. Just walk into my life, see me and fall everlastingly in love ... I looked forward to a husband who would love me ethereally, spiritually, and on rare (but beautiful) occasions, physically".Some important events occur throughout the book while Rita tries to care for herself and her son. In San Diego, Rita becomes an absentee manager for two lesbian prostitutes. When threatened with incarceration and with losing her son for her illegal activities, she and Clyde escape to her grandmother's home in Stamps, Arkansas. Her grandmother sends them to San Francisco for their safety and protection after physically punishing Rita for confronting two white women in a department store. This event demonstrates their different and irreconcilable attitudes about race, paralleling events in Angelou's first book. Back with her mother in San Francisco, Rita attempts to enlist in the Army, only to be rejected during the height of the Red Scare because she had attended the California Labor School as a young teenager.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Monk_Goes_to_Germany"title="Mr. Monk Goes to Germany">
Adrian Monk is solving crimes left and right like never before, including the murders of a couple in the Federal Witness Protection Program. However, when Dr. Kroger, Monk's psychiatrist, announces that he is going to a conference in Lohr, Germany, Monk falls completely apart, not the least because he is not going to see Dr. Jonah Sorenson, the one-armed psychiatrist he had seen in the season 5 episode "Mr. Monk Gets a New Shrink" when Dr. Kroger briefly ran into retirement. Eventually, Monk relaxes and makes the decision to actually stalk Dr. Kroger to Lohr. Even more so, his assistant Natalie Teeger is willing to help. Natalie has her own reasons not to stop Monk, mostly because of payback for the time that Dr. Kroger used medication to enable Monk to follow her to Hawaii ("Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii").As Monk has a fear of flying, he is drugged with Dioxynl, a drug that relieves him of his compulsions and phobias (but which also limits his ability to solve crimes, as demonstrated in the season 3 episode "Mr. Monk Takes His Medicine"). When Monk and Natalie land at Frankfurt International Airport, they rent a car and drive into Lohr. Lohr is renowned for its glassworks which produced mirrors that could see the truth, inspiring the magic mirror in most versions of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs". Natalie also mentions the similarities between the fairy tale and the story of Sophie Margaret von Erthal, the baroness who lived in the castle outside of Lohr.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilly_Scenes_of_Winter"title="Chilly Scenes of Winter">
As the novel begins in the time between Christmas and New Year's, Charles, several days short of his 27th birthday, is dealing with his mentally ill mother's recent hospitalization. His 19-year-old sister is home from college for the holidays. Neither is fond of their step-father Pete, a friend of their late father, who died of a heart attack at the age of 39. His mother has been hospitalized in a mental institution in the past.Charles is obsessively in love with Laura, a married woman who once worked as a librarian for his employer. After she left her husband, they lived together briefly, but she returned home. He still yearns for a reconciliation with Laura. He must plow through his dull daily life while dealing with his feelings for her and coping with his family and his friend Sam.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironman_(novel)"title="Ironman (novel)">
The story takes place in Spokane, Washington where Beauregard (Bo) Brewster lives with his mother and younger brother Jordan. Motivated by years of power struggles with his father, the teenager trains vigorously for the Yukon Jack Ironman Triathlon while attending anger management sessions and writing letters to Larry King about his experiences.Bo wants to participate in the Yukon Jack, a biking-running-swimming triathlon. After the latest dispute with his English teacher lands him in anger management, Bo is brought face-to-face with his own family problems (namely his difficult relationship with his father), and has his eyes opened to the issues his classmates are dealing with. Bo receives support in his training and his life from the anger management teacher, a Japanese cowboy known as Mr Nak, and from Bo's mentor, "Lion" Serbousek, a teacher who also coaches the swim team. Bo comes to be inspired and supported by the group of supposed delinquents he meets in anger management, deals with the realization that Mr S. is gay, and starts dating his classmate Shelly, whose athleticism surpasses even Bo's own. Extra trouble arrives with Wyrak, a swimmer and a bully who clashes with Bo, and then bets Shelly he can beat Bo in the Yukon Jack. But with the help of the other kids in the anger management group, Bo overcomes the obstacles and meets his goal, to compete in the Yukon Jack triathlon, and also beats Wyrack.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seacrow_Island"title="Seacrow Island">
Family Melkersson from Stockholm goes to Seacrow Island to live at Carpenter’s Cottage during their summer holidays. Melker, a widowed father of four, has rented the house, without seeing it before. When it starts raining through the roof, the family is a little disappointed but soon begins to love the house by the sea. While the 19-year-old daughter Malin, takes care of the house and goes on dates, her oldest brothers Johan and Niklas befriend with Teddy and Freddy who are living on the Island. Together the friends experience a lot of adventures, like getting lost in the ocean, during a foggy day. Teddy’s and Freddy’s sister Tjorven befriends with Pelle, Melker’s youngest son. Tjorven has a giant Bernard, that Pelle likes really much. He is a little jealous that Tjorven has such a great animal. Pelle and Tjorven are often joined by Stina, who visits her grandfather during the holidays. As Pelle loves animals so much Tjorven gets him a rabbit called Jocke that Tjorven takes care of when Pelle is in Stockholm. After several holidays on the island, the Carpenter’s Cottage should be sold, by the owner. Family Melkersson is very sad, because they do not have enough money to buy the house. So it seems to get sold to a rich man who wants to demolish their beloved house to build a holiday house on it. When Melker finally gets a lot of money, for writing a book, the house seems to be sold already by the estate agent. Pelle and Tjorven, however, manage to contact the owner of the house and can convince her to sell the house to Melker. Now the family is able to stay on Seacrow Island whenever they want.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territory_(novel)"title="Territory (novel)">
The territory is the vicinity of Tombstone, Arizona in 1881, but also refers to the magicians' power struggle. Most of the characters are named for historical individuals from the era; the aim is a tale that parallels recorded events, but places those in a context where magic is real.The principal male character, Jesse Fox, is a horse trainer in the manner of John Solomon Rarey. He has professional qualifications, but no stomach to pursue them: he is drifting, uprooted by unease over the abilities that have led to his sister's demotion to madwoman status and his own share of such abilities. The principal female character is Mrs. Mildred Benjamin, widow of David Benjamin, supporting herself as a typesetter for one of the Tombstone newspapers but moonlighting as the freelance author of Wild West stories for a ladies' periodical. She has a slight supernatural talent of perception.The plot has multiple black magicians as its villains, but avoids identifying just whose hat is blackest until the final showdown. A bungled stagecoach robbery that involved one of the four Earp brothers, Morgan, leads to much ado with misdirected posses and the deaths of all participants except for him. Along the way Jesse's Chinese buddy Chow Lung, another magician, but one who is comfortable in his powers, is also killed, to keep Jesse in Tombstone. Jesse helps fight a major fire in downtown Tombstone and has his injuries nursed by Mildred; Mildred's house burns and Jesse helps her defend the lot from the machinations of a mining outfit that lays claim to the whole neighborhood. Jesse escorts Mildred to a ball, where the pair witness the magical dimensions of an altercation between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. By the closing pages Jesse has come to accept and is learning to manage his magical abilities, applying them to block Earp's deadly excesses in his efforts to defend and enlarge the well-being of his clan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Blood_Red_Sun"title="Under the Blood Red Sun">
The novel details the adventure of Tomi, a Japanese-American boy, and his family during World War II, when Americans of Japanese descent were being sent to internment camps. Tomi lives in Hawaii, and witnesses the shocking attack on Pearl Harbor. The story centers on the racist persecution of Tomi's family by others, the government's suspicion of the Japanese, and the family's efforts to downplay their Japanese heritage. He is joined by his "haole" or white friend, Billy, when his father and grandfather are captured and brought to a prison camp. Their friend Sanji (age 19) is killed and Tomi's dad is shot in the leg. Tomikazu Nakaji is determined to be an American. This is not easy for though he was born in Hawaii, his parents and grandfather were not; they were born in Japan and they still cling to Japanese ways. In fact Tomi's grandfather still insists that he is "Japanese" and he and Tomi's parents still talk about the need to honor the family. Tomi must never do anything which would bring "shame" to the family. However, Tomi knows that no matter what happens Billy and the others will stand by him. And, of course, there is always baseball.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outside_Valentine"title="Outside Valentine">
Lowell, an antique collector operating out of Manhattan, can't seem to forget the bloody path that Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate left behind them while they went on a killing spree. His wife tries his hardest to soothe him, but can't see to drive the terrors from his dreams. Meanwhile, Caril Ann recollects the first day she met Charles and the events that this meeting would spark.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitcairn's_Island_(novel)"title="Pitcairn's Island (novel)">
After two unsuccessful attempts to settle on the island of Tubuai, the "Bounty" mutineers returned to Tahiti where they parted company. Fletcher Christian and eight of his men, together with eighteen Polynesians, sailed from Tahiti in September 1789, and for a period of eighteen years nothing was heard of them. Then, in 1808, the American sailing vessel "Topaz" discovered a thriving community of mixed blood on Pitcairn Island under the rule of "Alexander Smith" (the assumed name of John Adams, the only survivor of the fifteen men who had landed there so long before).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hills_of_Varna"title="The Hills of Varna">
## Introduction.The book is set mainly in continental Europe during the first decade of the 16th century. The central character, a young Englishman, is sent by Erasmus to find the lost manuscript of an ancient Greek play at a monastery in the Balkans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intergalactic_Kitchen"title="The Intergalactic Kitchen">
## Starting.The story starts with Mr Bird installing a protection system for the house. Mrs Bird presses the emergency button and the kitchen goes into orbit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginning_and_the_End_(novel)"title="The Beginning and the End (novel)">
The family comprises the mother, Samira; the eldest son, Hassan; a grown-up daughter, Nefisa; and teenage sons Hussein and Hassanein. Hassan, the eldest son, leaves home and becomes a local goon managing a coffee house. His live-in relationship with a prostitute is ignored by the family so long as he is able to meet the demands of his brothers. The family does not approve of his relationship or his work.The daughter, Nefisa, starts out as a dressmaker, turning a hobby into a full-time occupation, and – as she sees it – degrading herself. Her faith in men takes a beating after her lover, the local grocer’s son, cheats her into sex and then marries another woman. Nefisa, the adored but plain daughter, can never get over this incident nor is able to control her sexual urges, turning her into a woman who sleeps with strangers. The money she earns from this is an added source of income.Hussein, the elder of the two teenagers, sacrifices his higher studies and any hope of a bright future to allow the youngest, Hassanein, to complete his education and join the War College, where education fees are exorbitant. The family gives in to this scheme, while knowing that Hassanein might not turn out to be the savior of the family once he gets a job. Hassanein is a self-centered child who does no harm to anyone but is sure to watch out for himself. When his amorous demands are turned down by his fiancée, he lusts after women, always ready to take offense and cursing his fate. Hassanein believes that he was born into this world to lead a rich life without any troubles and it is the duty of each of his family members to put him ahead of their own interest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Opoponax"title="The Opoponax">
"L'Opoponax" is about "children undergoing typical childhood experiences like the first day of school and the first romance".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lesbian_Body"title="The Lesbian Body">
According to Wittig's "The New York Times" obituary, "lesbian lovers literally invade each other's bodies as an act of love."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer"title="The Last Ringbearer">
Eskov bases his novel on the premise that the Tolkien account is a "history written by the victors". Eskov's version of the story describes Mordor as a peaceful constitutional monarchy on the verge of an industrial revolution, that poses a threat to the war-mongering and imperialistic faction represented by Gandalf (whose attitude has been described by Saruman as "crafting the Final Solution to the Mordorian problem") and the racist elves. The tale begins by recapping the War of the Ring. The Ring itself is a luxurious ornament, but powerless, crafted by the Nazgûl (a group of ancient scientists and philosophers who take turns as the Nine to guide Mordor through its industrialization) to distract Gandalf and the Elves while Mordor built up its army. Aragorn is portrayed as a puppet of the Elves who has been instructed to usurp the throne of Gondor by murdering Boromir (whom he had discovered alone after Merry and Pippin were captured) before Gandalf removes Denethor. Arwen, being 3,000 years older, holds Aragorn in contempt but uses their marriage to cement Elvish rule over Gondor. Faramir has been exiled to Ithilien where he is kept under guard with Éowyn. The Elves have also corrupted (using New-Age style mysticism) the youth of Umbar, which they aim to use as a foothold into Harad and Khand.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Root_Cellar"title="The Root Cellar">
Twelve-year-old Rose Larkin is an orphan whose parents died when she was only three years old. Following their death, Rose lived with her grandmother. Following the death of her grandmother, Rose is sent to live with relatives in Ontario, Canada. After much misunderstanding between herself and her cousins, she flees and there finds a root cellar. After descending into the root cellar, she is then shifted to the 1860s.Rose meets Susan and Will, who lived on the farm at that time. Susan works for the Morrissay family but is very close to Will. Rose soon discovers that every time she goes back to the past, Will and Susan age more rapidly than herself. Eventually, Rose goes back and learns that Will has run off to join the Union Army. Rose convinces Susan they must find Will, who by then missing in action. The girls travel from Ontario to New York and Washington, D.C. to find him. At the end on their adventure, Rose is faced with the destruction of the root cellar by a storm in the 1980s, which keeps her from returning to Will and Susan’s time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cebu_(novel)"title="Cebu (novel)">
The novel's main character is an American priest named Ben Lucero, who is the son of a Filipino mother and a Filipino American father, as he makes his first trip to the Philippines. When Ben's mother dies, he takes her body to Cebu, Philippines for burial; it is his first trip to his mother's country. In the Philippines, he stays with his mother's best friend from childhood, "Aunt" Clara Natividad, who has become a wealthy and powerful businesswoman but led guerilla fighters during the war and earned her fortune through ethically questionable business practices. The novel follows Ben's encounters with Philippine culture and tradition, both in Cebu City and in Manila, where he spends time with Clara's assistant Ellen but also sees the violence around him, such as a protest at the U.S. Embassy in which Philippine soldiers attacked their own people. Unnerved by his experiences in Manila, Ben returns home to Seattle, where he finds himself caught up in an escalating cycle of violence within the Filipino immigrant community. Ben is confused by his experiences, feeling like an outsider in both his mother's homeland and his own local community.Prologue: Ben's arrival in the Philippines and reunion with Aunt Clara
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truesight"title="Truesight">
"Truesight", a novel written by David Stahler, Jr., takes place in the futuristic colony, Harmony Station, which is located on a foreign planet. Everyone in Harmony is willingly or genetically blind. They follow the philosophy of Truesight in which people cannot see, so they do not get caught up in an external beauty of the world but an internal beauty of people.The protagonist, Jacob, is a 12 going on 13-year-old boy living in Harmony station on Nova Campi. While at school, he has a terrible headache that is described as being like “a web of fire.” The headaches eventually leads to Jacob receiving sight. The novel portrays this as a gradual shift from blur to clarity. While in the early stages of his sight's development, Egan, Jacob's best friend, proposes that they check out a delivery. Deliveries are the rare occasions in which “seers” bring supplies or food from Harmony's Earth-based foundation located in Australia. Harmony's rules state that every citizen must be inside their houses during a delivery following the curfew unless otherwise authorized. Jacob manages to escape his house and he finds a bush to hide behind to check out the delivery. He finds another of his friends, Delaney, who is the daughter of the high councilor, and his mother's prime music student, there too. Both of them are discovered and run in different directions. Jacob gets back to his house, but Delaney dies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Dog"title="The Good Dog">
The story is set in the town of Steamboat Springs, Colorado. It is recounted from the dog's point of view, with animals communicating with each other in English. The protagonist is a Malamute named McKinley, who protects his "human pup," Jack.While helping a runaway greyhound named Duchess, McKinley meets the wolf, Lupin, who is trying to recruit dogs into her shrinking pack. McKinley must deal with Jack's desire to join the wolf pack, protect Lupin from hunters (including Duchess' ruthless owner, Pycraft), and figure out how to handle the local rival Redburn, an ambitious Irish Setter who wants to claim the role of head dog from McKinley.By the end of the book, after overcoming many obstacles, some with the help of his best friend Aspen, a female Retriever (breed not specifically named in book) that lives next door, McKinley is transformed from a happy-go-lucky pet into a true leader.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack,_the_Giant_Killer_(novel)"title="Jack, the Giant Killer (novel)">
The plot concerns a young woman living in Ottawa named Jacky Rowan who, after a late-night encounter with a motorcycle-riding version of the Wild Hunt, picks up a red cap which enables her to see into the Faerie realms. She is soon drawn into a supernatural struggle between the weakened forces of the Seelie Court and their ominous enemies, the Host or Unseelie Court. She is regaled as the Jack of Kinrowan, a trickster figure who represents the Seelie Court's hope for victory against the forces of evil. With the help of her friend Kate Hazel and an array of faerie friends and allies she makes along the way (and a considerable amount of good luck), Jacky manages to rescue the kidnapped daughter of the Laird of Kinrowan and defeat the Unseelie Court, thus bringing peace and safety to the land.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lullaby_(Slimani_novel)"title="Lullaby (Slimani novel)">
The book deals with the murder of two children by their nanny. It was inspired by the real-life 2012 murder of children by their nanny in New York.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Drank_the_Moon"title="The Girl Who Drank the Moon">
Every year the townspeople abandon the youngest baby in the forest, as a "gift" for the bad witch they fear. The witch Xan however, whom the townspeople believe to be the source of all evil, takes the little babies and gives them to another town, where the people raise these children like their own. While doing the same to another baby girl, Xan accidentally feeds the little creature moonlight instead of the starlight she actually feeds them. Now, this baby is magical, and therefore dangerous to normal people. Xan names the baby Luna and decides to raise her with the little dragon Fyrian and the swamp monster Glerk. It is revealed that Xan isn't a witch by birth, rather, one day, she, as an orphan was found by a magician, and raised with them. They made experiments on her, making her magical. One of the magicians, Zosimos, was the one to look after her the most, becoming a father figure and a mentor to her. Xan, who had grieved a long time for her parents, learned to hide her grief from a witch who sucked her grief and thus her energy out of her. Zosimos' Xan is the only witch of that time to still be alive, together with Glerk, who is as old as the world itself, and Fyrian, whose mother is dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Protection"title="The Book of Protection">
The charms range from antidotes to headaches, colic and 'teeth chattering' to prayers for protecting flocks, herds and possessions generally; for controlling mad dogs, unruly cows and 'the gun of warriors', as well as for warding off the evil eye. The source of the power which underlies these charms is the Name of God YHWH and His other names Adonai, El Shaddai, El Sabaoth, et cetera. They begin with the Trinitarian formula and often invoke specific biblical stories to add force. Codex C shows that the compiler, like the Hebrews in Kabbalah, Samaritans and Ethiopians, believed firmly in the power of a spell cast in the names of the archangels and angels.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_White"title="New England White">
The novel is set in 2003, in the fictional New England university town of Elm Harbor. The main protagonist is Julia Veazie Carlyle, a deputy dean in the divinity department of the local university (a thinly-veiled and unnamed version of Yale University). Her husband, Lemaster Carlyle, a Barbadian immigrant, is a former law professor and now president of the university. The Carlyles live with their two daughters in the small town of Tyler’s Landing, which has a population of 3,000, of which only five families, including the Carlyles, are African-American; Carter describes it as the "heart of whiteness". Both Carlyles are members of secret clubs – Julia is a member of the Ladybugs, and Lemaster is a member of the Empyreals (described as a black Skull and Bones).A former lover of Julia's, an economics professor named Kellen Zant, goes missing. The Carlyles discover Zant's body, shot twice in the head and hidden on a back road, when their car spins out of control in icy conditions. Lemaster tries to keep the murder quiet, but Julia begins to looks more closely into the circumstances.As the murder of Zant is investigated by a campus detective and army veteran named Bruce Vallely, a link is found to a young girl named Gina Joule, who was raped and drowned in the early 1970s. The presumed murderer, a young black man named DeShaun Moton, was shot by the police before he could be arrested and questioned, and as Vallely and Julia dig into the trail of evidence it becomes clear that Zant had uncovered evidence that Gina Joule was actually killed after getting into an expensive Jaguar owned by Jonathan "Jock" Hilliman, a member of the wealthy Hilliman family, and a friend of Lemaster's in university. Along with Hilliman and Lemaster Carlyle, the other two members of the group of friends were Malcolm Whisted, a United States senator now running for the presidency, and a man referred to only by his nickname, "Scrunchy", who is the current President of the United States of America. Although Jock Hilliman died in the 30 years between then and now, it seems that Zant was killed to prevent the truth being unveiled.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_Summer's_Longing_and_Winter's_End"title="Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End">
On November 22, 1985, US journalist John Krassner dies from the window of the fifteenth floor of a student residence in Stockholm and the case is filed as suicide. Deputy chief of Swedish National Criminal Police (RKP) Lars Martin Johansson, however, is not convinced of the official version and, when he finds a piece of paper with his (theoretically secret) private address in the heel of Krassner's shoe, he begins a solitary investigation.The parallel storyline of the novel simultaneously concerns the events of Swedish Security Service (RPS/Säk), whose chief Erik Berg, with his protégé Claes Waltin, is instructed by the government to investigate the presence of right-wing extremists within the police forces.Johansson discovers that Krassner was in Sweden to write a book about the Prime Minister of Sweden (which in the novel is never mentioned by name, but which is obviously inspired by Olof Palme), who had worked for the US CIA after World War II and until 1955 (recruited by Colonel John Buchanan, uncle of Krassner) and who is accused by Krassner of being then passed to the Russian secret services. The relationship between the two storylines consists in the fact that Krassner, because of his research, was kept under observation by Security Service.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Une_ténébreuse_affaire"title="Une ténébreuse affaire">
The heroine of the story is Laurence de Cinq-Cygne, a young aristocrat living in the Aube region of France. An elderly aristocratic couple, the d'Hauteserres have come to live with her. Their sons, Robert and Adrien have gone into exile to fight against Napoleon. The story starts in 1803 when Laurence is taking part in a Royalist conspiracy to overthrow Napoleon who is then First Consul. Her cousins the Simeuse twins, and Robert and Adrien d'Hauteserre, who are all exiled aristocrats, return secretly to France to take part in the plot, and she helps to hide them.However the plot is discovered, and Corentin and Peyrade who are spies working for Police Minister, Joseph Fouché travel to Aube to find the conspirators. Senator Malin, a leading politician who now owns the Simeuse brothers' confiscated property of Gondreville, also travels there to hide evidence of his own dealings with Louis XVIII.Malin discusses his dilemma in a field at Gondreville with his notary Grevin, but is overheard by his bailiff, Michu. Michu had been bailiff of Gondreville when it belonged to the Simeuse family, and he remains loyal to them. Michu then goes to warn Laurence that the conspiracy has been discovered. He and Laurence then take the four young aristocrats to a ruined monastery in the woods as a hiding place. As a result, Corentin and Peyrade are thwarted in their search. However, the wider conspiracy against Napoleon is defeated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_On_(novel)"title="Head On (novel)">
After the events of "Lock In", the immobile victims of Haden's Syndrome continued to use robotic bodies called Threeps to interact with the outside world. Hilketa, a sport played by Hadens, is a combination of football and gladiatorial combat where the goal is to decapitate one Threep player chosen randomly throughout the game and get their head through the goalposts. The name of the sport comes from the Basque word for "murder". When a star Hilketa athlete dies during a match, Haden FBI agent Chris Shane and their partner Leslie Vann are sent to find the truth behind the death and uncover dangerous secrets behind Hilketa.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream-Quest_of_Vellitt_Boe"title="The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe">
When a student at Ulthar Women's College runs off with a man from the Waking World, professor Vellitt Boe — a retired adventurer — must track her down and convince her to return.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Essex_Serpent"title="The Essex Serpent">
After being widowed when her wealthy, abusive husband dies of throat cancer, Cora Seaborne decides to ignore the trappings of her London society life and take up amateur palaeontology. While on holiday in Colchester with her son, Francis, and her companion, Martha, Cora is intrigued by a ruin caused by an earthquake which was rumoured to have awakened the Essex Serpent, a mythical sea dragon. Cora believes that the beast could be an undiscovered kind of dinosaur that survived extinction. Meeting two married London acquaintances, Charles and Katherine Ambrose, Cora tells them of her theories. The Ambroses tell her of friends of theirs, the Reverend William Ransome and his family, who live in the small village of Aldwinter where a serpent is carved in one of the pews of the church. The Ambroses write an introduction for Cora to the Ransome family and Cora goes to visit them. To their mutual surprise, she and the Reverend find they had already met under unfavourable circumstances: each had mistaken the other for a tramp. Cora becomes fast friends with the Reverend, his wife Stella and their children, and moves to Aldwinter to continue her research into the serpent.The children and locals become increasingly convinced that the serpent, which they call the Blackwater Beast, is real and waiting to attack them. This irritates Will Ransome. He and Cora repeatedly argue over his faith and refusal to believe in the serpent, and their dispute draws them closer to one another. After a visit to the local school results in the schoolchildren falling into fits, Cora seeks an explanation by inviting her friend, Dr. Luke Garnett, from London to examine them. Luke hypnotizes the Ransomes' eldest daughter, Joanna, with Stella's consent. Will walks in on the scene and is enraged, causing a serious rift between himself and Cora. During the rift, both Cora and Will begin to realize they are entangled in an emotional affair, as do Martha and Dr. Luke, who has long been in love with Cora himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gallery_of_Lost_Species"title="The Gallery of Lost Species">
Edith Walker is the youngest child of Henry and Constance Walker. Her parents had a brief affair in New York City where Henry was a struggling painter and Constance was a model. Constance moved back to her home country of France but discovered she was pregnant, causing Henry to marry her and bring her back to Ottawa, Ontario, where they settled in the lower-income neighbourhood of Mechanicsville. Constance gives birth to their first daughter, Vivienne, and three years later gives birth to Edith. Henry is never able to make it as an artist and works as a custodian at Place du Portage. Constance, who had always wanted to be an actress, settles down as a home maker, but becomes a stage mother, forcing Vivienne to participate in beauty pageants as a child. When Vivienne is a teenager she finally rebels against her mother and after two disastrous pageants (including one where she throws up on stage and another where she simply refuses to appear), Constance finally lets her quit the pageant circuit.Edith, meanwhile, is much closer to her father and enjoys helping him search for scraps for his art projects. He gets Edith a job with a woman named Serena who runs a business dealing in antique coins. Her son Omar is around Edith's age and steals from his mother. When Edith is 13 and Vivienne is 16, they go on a trip to Lake Louise, Alberta. While there Edith meets and develops a crush on Liam Livingstone, a college student who is also originally from Ottawa who is fascinated by Vivienne. Edith also sees a unicorn around the lake. After they part, Edith and Liam become pen pals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Commendatore"title="Killing Commendatore">
The protagonist is an unnamed portrait painter whose wife leaves him at the start of the book. Devastated, he quits portrait painting and goes on a long road trip. In the middle of his road trip he meets a nervous woman in a diner who seems to be running away from someone. The protagonist suspects that she is running away from a man who sits nearby while they eat. The protagonist nicknames this man as the man with the white Subaru Forester. The woman and the protagonist end up going to a love hotel and having violent sex. The next day, he wakes up and she is already gone. He goes back to the diner and sees the man with the white Subaru again and he feels as though the man knows exactly what he did with the nervous woman at the love hotel.The protagonist's road trip comes to an end when his car breaks down. He then moves into the remote house of his friend's father, Tomohiko Amada, a renowned painter who has been moved to a nursing home. There in the attic he discovers an owl living in it and an unknown painting by Tomohiko, "Killing Commendatore", depicting a scene from the opera "Don Giovanni". He starts working as an art teacher to make ends meet in the village. Meanwhile, a wealthy neighbour, Wataru Menshiki, offers him a very large sum of money to paint his portrait which he eventually agrees to do. He ends up creating a portrait unlike anything he has done before and it inspires him to begin a portrait of the man with the white Subaru.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Romanov_Ransom"title="The Romanov Ransom">
Sam and Remi Fargo go on another quest to discover another lost treasure, this time artifacts that disappeared when the Russian Romanov dynasty came to an end. Their hunt for this treasure takes them through northern Africa, Europe and South America. They find they are not the only ones hunting for this treasure. Others hunt, as well. One group is a shadowy organization known as the Werewolves, which is intent on establishing a Nazi Fourth Reich. Sam and Remi have to watch where they go and what they do at every turn and they do not know who they can trust.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elites_of_Eden"title="Elites of Eden">
Yarrow is an elite: rich, regal, destined for greatness. She’s the daughter of one of the most powerful women in Eden. At the exclusive Oaks boarding school, she makes life miserable for anyone foolish enough to cross her. Her life is one wild party after another; until she meets a fascinating, lilac-haired girl named Lark.Meanwhile, there is Rowan, who has been either hiding or running all her life. As an illegal second child in a strictly regulated world, her very existence is a threat to society, punishable by death or worse. After her father betrayed her family, and after her mother were killed by the government, Rowan discovered a whole city of people like herself. Safe in an underground sanctuary that also protected the last living tree on Earth, Rowan found friendship, and maybe more, in a fearless hero named Lachlan. But when she was captured by the government, her fate was uncertain.When these two girls discover the thread that binds them together, the collision of memories means that their lives may change drastically—and that Eden may never be the same.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_Council"title="Palace Council">
The story in "Palace Council" takes place between 1952 and 1975. Set predominately in Harlem, New York and Washington D.C., the book focuses on the mysterious murder of Philmont Castle, a famous white lawyer. The body is discovered on a snowy night in 1955 by protagonist Eddie Wesley, a young black writer. Wesley discovers the body in a park after leaving early from an engagement party for Aurelia Treene and Kevin Garland, as Wesley had been in love with Aurelia for many years. Castle is a close friend of the Garlands, and Wesley comes under suspicion for the murder.However, in Castle's hand is a cross with an inscription; Wesley begins to look into this and discovers a series of secrets that reveal the reason for the murder and unveil a conspiracy that extends all the way to the White House. The cross is revealed to be a sigil of the Palace Council, a mysterious group of wealthy black and white power-brokers that purportedly controls the government, and which has ties to a violent guerrilla organisation known as Jewel Agony. Wesley's sister, Junie, disappeared some years earlier and is believed to be part of this organisation. Wesley has been trying to locate his sister, and continues to do so, while over the years changing careers from writing, where he wins two National Book Awards, to being part of the Kennedy administration and a confidant of Richard Nixon, and then leaving politics to become an investigative journalist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Regional_Office_is_Under_Attack!"title="The Regional Office is Under Attack!">
The Regional Office, an organization of super-powered female assassins that protects the world from annihilation, comes under attack from enemies led by Rose, a former Regional Office assassin. While many of the organization's members are defeated, Sarah, an assassin raised by the organization from childhood after her mother's disappearance, continues to defend the Regional Office. As she battles against the attackers, Sarah uncovers the secrets behind the Regional Office's origins, and learns the reasons for her mother's disappearance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_the_West"title="Suicide of the West">
Goldberg argues that the "virtues" of the United States have become "vices" in modern U.S. culture. The U.S. is turned from a City Upon a Hill to a force for darkness and evil in the world. He rejects the concept of a political "end of history" as advocated by Karl Marx, Francis Fukuyama, and other thinkers. Goldberg states that there is no guarantee that liberal democracy will win the battle of global ideological supremacy. Nevertheless, Goldberg considers liberal democracy the best system to ensure political freedom. He goes on to argue that the undermining of the idea of American exceptionalism has had disastrous consequences for the United States. Instead of highlighting the brilliance of the U.S. Constitution and the Rule of Law, Americans increasingly see the U.S. past and traditions as a uniform "system of oppression, exploitation, and white privilege."Goldberg calls the invention of capitalism and liberal democracy "the miracle," crediting it for rapid human technological development, more wealth, and a more just and peaceful society. He warns however that this mode of development surfs on the waves of stability, and that there exists a potential of moral and democratic decline in every nation or people-group, no matter how theoretically consolidated. He argues that the U.S. is becoming increasingly susceptible to democratic backsliding due to partisanship and polarization, and that the consensus view of democratic consolidation is likely false, with the ability of advanced democracies undergoing decline. Additionally, he states that then-current U.S. President Donald Trump and other recent U.S. presidents such as Barack Obama are undermining the concept of U.S. exceptionalism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Make_a_Spaceship"title="How to Make a Spaceship">
The book is an overview of what led to the creation of the X Prize, and the running of that first X Prize. Profiles of all the major players in the X Prize saga are included in the book. It chronologically starts with the influences that weighed upon Peter Diamandis, and his progression into the space industry. It also covers the process to get funding, rejections, and the arrival of the Ansaris, becoming title sponsors. The book surveys several of the teams that entered into the competition to win the Ansari X Prize. The team that is focused on most is that which won the X Prize in 2004, the one headed by Paul Allen and Burt Rutan, of SpaceShipOne. The book ends with an epilogue about Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic scooping up the SpaceShipOne technology, and the spaceplane itself ending up in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. The book includes a preface by Richard Branson, and an afterword by Stephen Hawking.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Billionaire_and_the_Mechanic"title="The Billionaire and the Mechanic">
The book covers the quest of Larry Ellison to win the America's Cup yachting trophy, his establishment of Oracle Team USA under the banner of the Golden Gate Yacht Club, and his various Cup campaigns, at the 2003, 2007 and 2010 Cups. And at the 2013 Cup in the second edition. The book opens with Ellison's experiences at the catastrophic 1998 Sydney to Hobart yacht race, where a freak storm with hurricane force winds sunk several yachts, killing several sailors. Ellison vowed to transition from open water racing to inshore racing, and in that, go after the oldest trophy in international sport, the America's Cup. Basing out of San Francisco, it covers his troubles with the high brow St. Francis Yacht Club, leading to a search for an alternate sponsoring squadron. In conjunction with this search, the election of a new commodore at the Golden Gate Yacht Club, a club with middle class blue collar membership, lead to Norbert Bajurin, a car radiator shop owner and mechanic, winning. Bajurin discovered the financial difficulties of the Golden Gate Yacht Club, and sought Ellison to be their sponsoring yacht club in a Cup campaign, solving the pending insolvency of his beloved squadron. Then, covering the partnership between the billionaire and the mechanic, and the establishment of Oracle Team USA at the Golden Gate Yacht Club. The book then follows the unsuccessful cup campaigns at the 2003 and 2007 America's Cups, which resulted in their failure to become the US entry into the Cup. Then their rogue challenge, under the Deed of Gift, in the 2010 Cup, becoming the challenger against the Cup defender, and winning the Cup. In the expanded second edition, it follows on the successful Cup defense in the 2013 Cup, and their comeback from the brink of losing the Cup in 2013.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_I_Well_May_Be"title="Dead I Well May Be">
Michael Forsythe leaves Belfast mid-Troubles after being caught working while claiming unemployment benefits. After arriving illegally in Brooklyn his only option for work is with a small but ambitious Irish gang run by Darkey White. After several jobs for White, Michael and three of his colleagues are sent to Mexico to carry out a drug deal, but one of the four betrays them leaving Michael in a squalid Mexican prison. After weeks of starvation and violent conflict with the other prisoners, Michael manages to escape and begins his journey back to America to seek revenge on his former boss and the colleague who betrayed him. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rethinking_Multiculturalism"title="Rethinking Multiculturalism">
Culture is the belief or view human beings create regarding the significance of human life, and in close proximity different views and sets of beliefs are created. In the text, Parekh approaches cultural diversity as a value, not a fact in Britain's diverse environment. Parekh writes about the dangers of avoiding ignoring diversity as well as if diversity is over addressed. analysis of culture, Montesquieu, Vico, and Herder. In this analysis, other theorists approach culture in a sense that is too contained, as Parekh believes culture changes on a larger scale. It is believed Parekh is influenced by Charles Taylor's essay on multiculturalism. Much like Taylor, Parekh focuses avoiding ignoring several aspects of multicultural values including but not limited to education, separation and gender values. Parekh criticizes theorists who over invest in a eurocentric view, and success relies on an equal distribution of political and economic power rather than a minority and majority. Parekh explores liberalism as a paradox unique to western political philosophy. The existence of only one way to live a good life leads to segregation of individuals in a multicultural society. Individuals who carry their own culture disturb relationships of power that in return culture has previously been established In. In later chapters Parekh also addresses separation of church and state will never entirely justify the separation of religion and politics, as religion represents so many citizens of most countries and in the world as a whole.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Lives_Three_Worlds,_The_Pillow_Book"title="Three Lives Three Worlds, The Pillow Book">
Book One: Upper Volume"If perseverance will still be in vain, who would use up this entire life only to wait for an unobtainable love?"Part One: The Reborn Bodhi VinesThe story begins with the wedding between Qing Qiu's Queen, Bai Qian, and the Heavenly Clan's Crown Prince, Ye Hua. Dong Hua and Mo Yuan, Ye Hua's twin brother and Bai Qian's teacher, came along with the wedding parade to receive the bride back to the groom's home for marriage, and here is where Dong Hua and Feng Jiu officially meet for the first time. After that, the story moves to heaven, where a banquet is held for the married couple, and after seeing Feng Jiu blame Mi Gu for the crime of kicking a flower pot toward his head, Dong Hua begins to take interest in her.Later, Bai Qian set Feng Jiu up on a blind date with a celestial fairy of Heaven. Not willing to marry, Feng Jiu drove her date away and mistook Dong Hua for Mi Gu. She then began reminiscing to him about Ye Qing Ti, her deceased mortal husband.On the last day of Lian Song's Flower Festival, Feng Jiu took her cousin, Ah Li, to see a play. On the way, Ah Li became tired and the two took a rest. Soon after, Princess Zhi He, Dong Hua's adopted sister's, carriage ascended from the lower realm and some celestials began gossiping about why she was banished to the mortal realm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Creek_(2010_novel)"title="Deep Creek (2010 novel)">
After the bodies of more than thirty Chinese gold miners are discovered floating in a creek in the Idaho Territory, their employer, the Sam Yup Company, hires Joe Vincent, a local law enforcement agent, to accompany Lee Loi, another employee of Sam Yup, to track down the murderers. They are led by Grace Sundown, a Métis mountain guide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_Woods_(book)"title="Tiger Woods (book)">
The biography opens with the 2009 car accident on the day after Thanksgiving that precipitated Woods' infidelity scandal and fallout.From The "Financial Times":
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Democracies_Die"title="How Democracies Die">
The book warns against the breakdown of "mutual toleration" and respect for the political legitimacy of the opposition. This tolerance involves accepting the results of a free and fair election where the opposition has won, in contrast with advocacy for overthrow or spurious complaints about the election mechanism. The authors also assert the importance of respecting the opinions of those who come to legitimately different political opinions, in contrast to attacking the patriotism of any who disagree, or warning that if they come to power they will destroy the country. The authors point out that the various branches of government in a system with separation of powers have actions available to them that could completely undermine the other branches or the opposition. The authors warn against ramming through a political agenda or accumulating power by playing "constitutional hardball" with tactics like court packing, stonewalling nominations, or abusing the power of the purse, and recommend "forbearance" and some degree of cooperation to keep government functioning in a balanced fashion. Other threats to democratic stability cited by the authors include economic inequality and segregation of the political parties by race, religion, and geography.The authors dedicate many chapters to the study of the United States, President Donald Trump, and the 2016 presidential election, but also apply their theory to Latin America and European countries, especially Venezuela and Russia. According to them, the United States has, until 2016, resisted the attempts to undermine democracy thanks to two norms: mutual toleration and forbearance, the latter defined as the intentional restraint of one's power in order to respect the spirit of the law if not its letters. They finally predict three potential scenarios for the post-Trump United States.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burning_Maze"title="The Burning Maze">
The story begins a few days after the events of the previous book, "The Dark Prophecy". Apollo, in the body of the 16-year-old Lester Papadopoulos, ventures through the Labyrinth with 12-year-old Meg McCaffrey and the satyr, Grover Underwood in a bid to find the third emperor of the Triumvirate Holdings. As the trio face a continuous attack of strigae, Grover unleashes the cry of Pan, the lost god of the wild, and brings them to Aeithales, which is later revealed to be Meg's former home. Mellie, the wife of the satyr Hedge, asks Apollo and Grover to go and check up on Hedge, who is in an army surplus store nearby. The duo goes there, only to face Naevius Sutorius Macro. They escape, when seemingly, a horse, comes and contacts somebody. They head back, and Apollo reveals that the horse is Incitatus, and the third emperor is Caligula, the most feared and bloodthirsty Roman emperor, famous for his murderous reign and insanity. Apollo and Meg along with Piper face Medea in the Labyrinth and defeat her with a poison dart and decide to steal Caligula 's shoes.Mellie reveals that Jason Grace and Piper McLean had gone into the Labyrinth. Apollo and Meg pick up Piper, who is moving away to Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and Jason, who is at school and occasionally has fights with monsters disguised as teachers. Jason secretly tells Apollo that he had met with Herophile, the sibyl inside the Labyrinth, who told him that when the next time the duo comes, one of them will die. Fearing Piper's demise, Jason keeps this to himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Bastarda"title="La Bastarda">
Okomo, an orphan who was born a bastard and whose mother died during childbirth, lives in a traditional village in Equatorial Guinea that is about a day's walk from Gabon. As a sixteen-year-old who had her period, she is watched over by her grandfather's first wife, her grandfather and a community who has already rejected her because of her birth. Given her place in this polygamous family and not knowing who she is, Okomo seeks to know more about her father. Her family tries to prevent her from doing so and has forbidden her from trying to find and contact him.Okomo has a special relationship with an uncle, her mother's brother and another child of her grandfather's first wife, named Marcelo. Because her uncle is a woman man, the family is estranged from him and Okomo becomes a key contact person in their attempts to get Marcelo to have sex with his sister-in-law. This is important as the grandfather's first born son is barren, and Marcelo is a familial relation who can ensure the family line continues. He declines, and Marcelo's house is burned, but not before he managed to escape to the forest.Attempts to control Okomo by prohibiting her from contacting Marcelo and other social undesirables lead to Okomo to walk with a group of three girls who have also largely rejected the expectations of them from Fang society. In the middle of one walk, Okomo engages in sex in the forest with the three girls. She soon forms a bond with one girl, Dina, to the exclusion of the other two and against the rules of the group that sex should only be communal among them. This later leads to the other girls to feeling jealous and excluded, outing Okomo and Dina during the saint's day feast of Okomo's grandfather. After everyone pretended to ignore this, the two girls beat Okomo when she went to get water. The full story came out, and two girls were married off. One girl was isolated to live with her father who got her pregnant and abused her. Okomo's grandmother basically sends her away to Okomo's mother's sister to get money to fund a cure for her barrenness as a result of syphilis. All four girls eventually flee to the forest, joining Marcelo and his partner, while creating a family amongst themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_Fire"title="Elysium Fire">
"Elysium Fire" begins two years after the events of "Aurora Rising." Senior Prefect Tom Dreyfus and Field Prefect Thalia Ng are investigating a series of strange deaths. Random, unconnected citizens in the Glitter Band are "melting"—the neural implants in their heads rapidly overheating and frying their brains. The meltings begin to occur at an increasing rate, and the Prefects have no idea where to start the investigation. As the meltings are happening, several habitats in the Glitter Band, unhappy with the decisions made by Panoply at the end of "Aurora Rising", begin seceding from the Glitter Band and thus no longer fall under the authority of Panoply. Leading the movement to secede is the mysterious Julius Devon Garlin Voi, who seems to have inside knowledge of what has been happening.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Web_Between_the_Worlds"title="The Web Between the Worlds">
The novel tells the story of Rob Merlin, the best engineer who has ever lived. His machine, the "Spider," extrudes graphite cables of incredible strength. Darius Regulo has a monopoly on space mining, and doesn't like rockets. Half of their fuel is used to lift the "other" half, a waste of energy. Regulo wants to build a space elevator, and hires Merlin to do it. Merlin will need to modify his Spider to extrude pure silicon cables, and to work in space.As work progresses, Merlin becomes convinced that his parents' accidental deaths, when he was a child, were in fact murders. He comes to this conclusion based on conversations with Regulo's people he meets in the course of the project.The questions of who, and why, become urgent as Merlin becomes certain that his life is in danger.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Deadline"title="Quantum Deadline">
Prior to the events of the contemporary-set novel, journalist Daedalus Howell's intern has committed suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, an event for which the character feels responsible and that has sullied his professional reputation. Forced to work for a second-rate blog, Howell is still trying to clear his conscious and his byline five years later. Then he and Jude, a lost 11-year-old thief, happen to both witness a murder in a discount men's suit shop. When they re-meet during the investigation, the boy claims to know Howell but from a parallel universe. He proves this to the reporter by using his original, not professional name, which was Kit Fergus (a.k.a. "Chris F." in Howell's previous novel "The Late Projectionist"). Jude claims he found a smartphone loaded with a game called "The Knights of Skeldaria". An Easter egg in the app sent him to Howell's universe where no records of his existence can be found to the consternation of Detective Shane, Howell's wary friend. Howell pitches Jude's story to his editor at the local news blog he writes for but is dispatched to cover a 100-year-old's birthday instead. There he meets Mac, an elderly and retired reporter who claims to have written the notorious "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline, except where he came from it was correct. Mac, like Jude, is from a parallel universe and urges Howell to help the boy. When Howell contacts Detective Shane seeking information, the boy has vanished. Howell resolves to find and help the boy as a means of reconciling with the intern he was unable to talk out of suicide. This leads him to both his ex-girlfriend, Annika Strang, an artificial intelligence researcher, and his old college friend and sometime rival Cameron Block, whose success in tech — particularly the "Knights of Skeldaria" video game — has long rankled Howell. The reporter connects the dots between Block and Strang's research and the Easter egg Jude alleges to have activated, which brought him into Howell's universe. Hijinks ensue, leading to a fatal showdown between Howell and Block.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhadrambhadra"title="Bhadrambhadra">
The novel is named after its protagonist, Bhadrambhadra. It is narrated in the first person by Ambaram Kevalram Modakiya, a pupil of Bhadrambhadra. It is the first Gujarati novel to be written in the first person narrative.Bhadrambhadra is an orthodox Hindu Brahmin and an idiosyncratic person, who is opposed to anything that is non-traditional, non-Hindu, non-Sanskrit, non-Aryan or that is different from his traditional way of life or pattern of thoughts. Because of this, he changed his name from Daulat Shankar to Bhadrambhadra (lit. Good Good), as the word "Daulat" is non-Sanskrit, non-Indian and so, he felt, irreligious in origin. In the novel Bhadrambhadra speaks highly Sanskritised Gujarati and therefore is not able to make himself understood, which creates humorous situations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Frank_Sinatra"title="The Death of Frank Sinatra">
Mike Rose is a Las Vegas private eye. His schizophrenic brother Alvi is released from the mental hospital and mouths off to Zig, a gangster who long ago killed Rose's father and slept with his mother. Plus a devilish client wants Rose to murder her husband.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_in_the_Snow"title="Wolf in the Snow">
In this nearly wordless picture book a girl and a wolf each get lost in a snowstorm. The two meet as the storm ends and the girl picks up the wolf and follows the sounds of wolves she hears, encountering some dangers along the way. After returning the wolf to its mother the girl gets lost and falls. The wolves howl to let one of the girl's searching parents know where to find her. The words that are present reflect the sounds and actions of the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poppy_War"title="The Poppy War">
The novel centers on a poor orphan, Rin, who studies in secret to test into the elite Sinegard Academy. Kuang said Rin's life is meant to parallel the trajectory of Mao Zedong. Grounded in the real-world history of Chinese wars and adding a fantasy drug element inspired by the Opium Wars, "The Poppy War" is a dark and fatalistic tale of warfare. When a conflict surfaces between the Nikara Empire and their neighboring nation, the Federation of Mugen, Rin is called to the front lines. She must decide whether to make a deal with the gods to unleash her shamanic powers. Her decision may change the war but result in the loss of her humanity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calling_Sehmat"title="Calling Sehmat">
The story is set in India and Pakistan of 1971 and revolves around Sehmat Khan who is born to a Kashmiri Muslim father and a Punjabi Hindu mother. Sehmat is a young college-going girl when she learns of her freedom-fighter father's impending death from cancer. As a part of his final wishes, her patriotic father convinces Sehmat to marry a Pakistani army officer, the son of his friend who is a high-ranking Pakistani army general himself. His intention is to place Sehmat as an undercover operative within the Pakistani army household.Before the actual ceremony, she is hastily provided spy training by members of the Indian intelligence organization RAW. After marriage, Sehmat not only manages to gain confidence of her new family and their friends, but also starts to gather vital information that she passes on to her handlers. Eventually she comes across plans, what appear to be, to sink a key Indian naval target using a submarine. At great risk to herself, she promptly manages to relay this information to her handlers who realize that the target in question is which at that point is anchored in the Bay of Bengal as a part of India's naval strategy for the looming war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiting_Jupiter"title="Orbiting Jupiter">
Jackson (Jack) Hurd is a twelve-year-old boy living with his parents on an organic farm when his family begins fostering fourteen-year-old Joseph Brook. Joseph's caseworker, Mrs. Stroud, informs the family that he recently spent a month incarcerated at a place called Stone Mountain for trying to kill his teacher while high on pills and also that he has a three-month-old daughter who he has never met. Two days later, Joseph arrives at the farm and closes himself off to the Hurds. Later, the school bus driver hassles Joseph for having a child so young and he refuses to get on, so he and Jack instead walk to school in the cold, which becomes a daily ritual despite the frigid winter. At school, Joseph overall receives little sympathy but is liked by a few of his teachers. One day, his biological father shows up at the farm without warning while he is in counseling and demands to see him, but Mr. Hurd sends him away.One day on their way to school, Joseph walks down to the Alliance River and steps onto the ice despite Jack's warnings and tries to break it. He briefly stops when Jack yells the name "Maddie", which he has heard Joseph say in his sleep, before giving up and walking back to Jack but falls through the ice a few steps from the shore. Jack is able to pull him out and they return home. Jack later asks Joseph why he went onto the ice, to which he responds, "Maddie liked to skate." After the incident, Mr. Hurd orders them to start riding the bus again. On the bus, Jack is harassed by several other students who tell him Joseph got into a fight with Jay Perkins, another eighth-grader, after he insulted the mother of his daughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13_(Zeitoun_novel)"title="13 (Zeitoun novel)">
Marnie Harmon is a 13-year-old girl growing up in Ottawa. Initially she attends an ordinary high school, where she is alienated from her peers, who don't understand her angst, her rejection of fashionable clothes. She experiences unwelcome attention from a male teacher, and when she tries to retaliate, she is the one who is punished, being sent to a Roman Catholic high school.It is at the more controlled school that Marnie makes friends, among the schools other rebels. They engage in rebellious behavior, like underage drinking, and hanging out in strip clubs.Her dream of running away to New York City, to meet her hero, John Lennon, is the narrative arc that cements the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leah_on_the_Offbeat"title="Leah on the Offbeat">
Leah Burke is a drummer, usually on the beat drumming in the band Emoji. However, Leah has kept something from all of her friends, even from her openly gay best friend, Simon: she is bisexual. The only person to know about her sexuality is her mother, whom Leah is very close to. When her friend group starts to rock, Leah doesn't know what to do, with prom and graduation coming up. In between her friends fighting and graduation, Leah then realizes she might like one of her friends more than she first thought.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_Ireland"title="Out of Ireland">
The novel starts with Devereux, an Irish revolutionary, aboard a convict prison hulk in Bermuda. It then follows his transportation to Van Diemen's Land, his release and subsequent adventures on the island. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_in_the_Window_(novel)"title="The Woman in the Window (novel)">
Anna Fox suffers from agoraphobia due to a traumatic car accident and lives a reclusive life at her large home in New York City. She recently separated from her husband, Ed, who has custody of their nine-year-old daughter Olivia. However, they frequently talk on the phone.To pass the time, Anna spends her days drinking too much alcohol, playing online chess, communicating with other recluses through the "Agora online forum," watching old movies, and meeting with her shrink and physical therapist. She also spends time spying on her neighbors, including the Russells, a family that moved in across the street. There is Ethan, the reserved and polite teenage son; Alistair, the controlling father; and Jane, a friendly woman with whom Anna shares many interests. One evening, while looking out the window, Anna witnesses Jane being stabbed and calls the police. The Russells deny that any sort of attack took place. The police, including detectives Little and Norelli, also don't believe Anna's story as another woman who claims to be Jane is alive and uninjured. Anna insists the woman claiming to be Jane is not the same woman she met before.Anna has a number of encounters with the Russells and becomes convinced that something is suspicious about them. After she receives an anonymous email with a picture of herself sleeping, she calls the police. A detective confronts her with the tragic truth: Her husband and daughter died in the car accident that triggered her agoraphobia, and she has been imagining her conversations with them. Knowing her medications can cause hallucinations, they theorize that Anna could have taken the picture and emailed it to herself. Anna realizes that the murder may have been a hallucination as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macbeth_(Nesbø_novel)"title="Macbeth (Nesbø novel)">
The book opens at a dockside in Fife. A shipment of illegal narcotics is due and Duff, an inspector in the police, has received an anonymous tip-off and plans to intercept the shipment. Things go badly and Inspector Macbeth and his SWAT team have to save the day. This convinces Chief Police Commissioner Duncan to promote Macbeth to the head of the Organised Crime unit, which Duff is unhappy about.At the Inverness Casino, Macbeth and his oldest friend and mentor, Banquo, meet three drug smugglers, led by a man called Hecate. They predict that Macbeth will eventually become Chief Commissioner and that Banquo's children will follow in the future. Macbeth is surprised and mentions the prophecy to his partner, known only as Lady. She convinces Macbeth to murder Duncan at a party a few nights later. Macbeth feels unable to murder an unarmed man but as he leaves the bedroom, he sees a reflection of Duncan preparing to shoot him in the back and turns, throwing a dagger and killing Duncan. Lady wipes blood on Duncan's bodyguards to implicate them and Macbeth later shoots them as they appear to be reaching for weapons after they are confronted by Duff and Macbeth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Encyclopedia"title="The Final Encyclopedia">
In the 24th century, humans have spread to multiple planets. Most planets are populated by one of the three Splinter Cultures: the Dorsai, military elite; the Exotics, arts and sciences; the Friendly, zealots of religious faith. A group called the Others, Splinter Culture cross-breeds, are gaining dominance over the outer planets.Hal Mayne, an orphan who was discovered alone on an abandoned spaceship as a baby, is raised on Earth by three guardians, one from each Splinter Culture. One of the leaders of the Others, Bleys Ahrens, comes to the compound to find Hal. The three guardians are killed trying to protect Hal and he escapes to the Final Encyclopedia.The Final Encyclopedia, which orbits Earth, contains all the knowledge of the human race. Hal's reaction at the Transit Point leads the director, Tam Olyn, to believe Hal could be his successor, but Hal insists on traveling on to Coby, a mining planet. After several years on Coby, Hal spends time on a Friendly planet, an Exotic planet, and the Dorsai planet, making connections and growing in self-knowledge along the way.Meanwhile, the Others have been extending their dominance, leading the Splinter Cultures to recognize that they are under threat of destruction. Using the resources of the Final Encyclopedia and the partnerships he's built with members of the Splinter Cultures, Hal organizes the resistance to the Others on Earth. It is eventually revealed that Hal Mayne is in fact Donal Graeme, who had somehow developed the ability to reinvent himself as an infant and secure the necessary training to counteract the Others.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_the_Inferno"title="Our Lady of the Inferno">
Ginny Kurva is a twenty-one-year-old, alcoholic polymath living in a welfare hotel 1983 Times Square, where she cares for her paraplegic younger sister, Trisha, by working as a prostitute. Ostensibly subservient to her pimp, an elderly Polish gangster known as "The Colonel," Ginny has manipulated him into making her the de facto head of his criminal operations. In this capacity, she both protects the other girls in her care and instructs them in science, mathematics, and literature, in the hopes that they one day be able to obtain legitimate employment. Ginny's only respite comes in the form of riffing on low-budget horror films with her best friend, Roger, in the Colossus, a grindhouse they both frequent. One evening, Roger informs Ginny that he witnessed one of her girls, Tina, assumed to have run away, being lured into the back of a distinct green van. Ginny dismisses the claim as paranoia.It is revealed that the van belongs to Nicolette Aster, the safety inspector at Fresh Kills Landfill. Plagued by frequent hallucinations involving murder and violence, Nicolette hides behind a mask of sanity, which allows her to move about the landfill unmolested; after hours, she travels into the city to abduct sex workers, bringing them back to hunt and kill.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lolita_Effect"title="The Lolita Effect">
In the preface of her book, Durham claims that her purpose for the book was to challenge the binaries that have formed surrounding female sexuality, especially for pre-adolescent and adolescent girls. She explains that "underage" girls are confined to play either a role as a slut or as asexual: they either express their own sexuality and get judged as indecent for it, or they are thought to have no sexuality or sexual inclinations at this age at all. Durham claims that she wanted her book to present female sexuality, even at a young age, as healthy, normal, and even an important part of development into adulthood.The book's main focus states that media advertisement manipulates the narrative of girls exploring their sexuality and either exploits them in dangerous ways, or judges them as deviant or slutty. Durham condemns how sexuality is portrayed in the public sphere, especially in regards to celebrities, as she believes it must be done in private for healthy development. Her book is primarily geared towards parents and teachers to encourage the adults to teach young girls how to understand and explore their sexuality in a safe way for their protection and to protect against unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. She claims to also be speaking to young girls, teaching them about the way the media is influencing their lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flight_Attendant_(novel)"title="The Flight Attendant (novel)">
Flight attendant Cassandra Bowden wakes up with a hangover in a hotel room in Dubai to find a dead body next to her. Afraid to call the police, she continues as though nothing has happened, joining the other flight attendants and pilots traveling to the airport for a flight to New York City. She is met in New York by FBI agents who question her about her recent layover in Dubai. Still unable to piece the night together, she starts to wonder whether she could be the killer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_with_the_Tsars"title="Dancing with the Tsars">
Sorcha is pregnant with a baby — possibly not Ross's. Meanwhile, Charles is at war with feminists, Sorcha is a Senator, Fionnuala is making trips to Russia, Ronan deals with sex addiction, while Ross and Honor aim to win the Mount Anville glitter ball.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Single_Diary"title="London Single Diary">
This novel is a fictionalised non-fiction, a life writing experience in the 21st century. Writing as nobody but an oversea student coming to England, it faithfully recorded all her life and experiences she went through in the first three years in the U.K. From her first day landed in London, her later university experience as a Chinese student, to her hard time when working temporarily in London after graduation. Sometimes there was love and joy, sometimes there was extreme loneliness and blue when living abroad with no friends and no families, blended with her own dilemma and confusion some life-changing points as all young single girls do. Fortunately, London saved her all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversations_with_Friends"title="Conversations with Friends">
In Dublin, college students Frances (the narrator) and her best friend and ex-girlfriend Bobbi are noticed by Melissa, an essayist and photographer in her late thirties, when they are performing spoken-word poetry. Melissa invites them home, where they meet her husband, Nick, an actor. Their four lives become increasingly entangled as Frances begins an affair with Nick, and Bobbi and Melissa grow closer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Moonhunter"title="The Iron Moonhunter">
Chinese laborers that were hired to work in America received a hostile reception from white competition upon their arrival in San Francisco. While building the Central Pacific portion of the Transcontinental Railroad, an explosion set by white rivals killed several Chinese workers. The three Kwan cousins (Kwan Ming, Kwan Cheong, and Kwan Hop) fought back, finding and punishing the guilty, but modestly stated they were only living up to the legacy of their ancestor, Kwan Kung.Accidents later claimed the lives of two cousins; first, while setting blasting charges, Kwan Hop fell to his death after the rope securing his basket broke; in the ensuing winter of 1866–67, Kwan Cheong was trapped in a collapsed tunnel that had been dug to connect the work site with the camp site through snow deep. The following spring, the Chinese workers began to see the restless spirits of their comrades who had died while working on the railroads.One worker, Jeong Yum, erupted with hatred and agitated the men to blow up the railroad and rebel against their white supervisors. Kwan Ming instead counseled patience and pride: "Talk sense, men. The railroad is our work and we should be proud of it. We're going to finish it because when we "Tong Yun" say we'll do something, we don't stop halfway." He laid out a plan to build a railroad for the spirits, using leftover steel rails and scrap metal from crashed trains to build the Iron Moonhunter, a dragon-shaped train, which played a song to alert the restless spirits:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_There_(novel)"title="There There (novel)">
The book begins with an essay by Orange, detailing "brief and jarring vignettes revealing the violence and genocide that Indigenous people have endured, and how it has been sanitized over the centuries."As the novel continues into fiction it alternates between first, second, and third person perspectives, following twelve characters who are Native American or closely related to Native Americans in the area of Oakland, California. The main characters include Tony Loneman, Dene Oxendene, Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield, Edwin Black, Bill Davis, Calvin Johnson, Jacquie Red Feather, Orvil Red Feather, Octavio Gomez, Daniel Gonzales, Blue, and Thomas Frank.The characters face similar conflict throughout the novel. A teenager, Orvil Red Feather, turns to Google in search of the answer, "What does it mean to be a real Indian," and in the mirror, wearing tribal regalia, sees only "a fake, a copy, a boy playing dress-up." Calvin Johnson confronts his guilt at claiming to not be Native at all, admitting, "Mostly I just feel like I'm from Oakland." One character struggles with his place in society as "ambiguously nonwhite," while another "overweight and constipated, has a graduate degree in Native American literature but no job prospects — a living symbol of the moribund plight of Indian culture in the United States." Thomas, who is an alcoholic and has lost his job working as a janitor, wrestles with a life lived suspended between his mother, who is white, and his "one-thousand-percent Indian" father who is a medicine man. Orange writes:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Should_Have_Left_(novella)"title="You Should Have Left (novella)">
December 2: The story starts with an unnamed narrator who rents a house through Airbnb for himself, his wife, and his daughter to stay in on vacation. He also spends that time writing the sequel for his screenplay. Susanna disapproves of his screenplay, which start fights between them on several occasions.December 3: The narrator begins to experience the abnormalities in the house. He gets himself lost in a different part of the house thinking it was the bedroom. He blames it on him still getting used to the house's layout. The narrator starts to create the main plot for his screenplay.December 4: The narrator recalls a strange, unbelievable nightmare. It is of a woman with narrow eyes close to the root of her nose with yellow teeth. He was trapped by fear of her and could not move until the woman steps away from him allowing him to wake up. The narrator later realizes the woman was from a photo in the laundry room. Needing groceries, the narrator drives to the local town nearly having an accident at every hairpin turn. In the store, the clerk does not talk to him much and struggles to retrieve every item on the shopping list. Before the narrator leaves the clerk gives him a transparent plastic triangle ruler. The clerk tells him to try the right angle and offers no further information about its use. The narrator returns to the house and writes a scene in the screenplay that was his interaction with the clerk earlier. He notices half-way through he has no reflection and is even able to see items directly behind him. The phenomenon is dismissed as his imagination. The narrator checks for the photo in the laundry room but does not find one. He doesn't find evidence that a nail had been in the wall either.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_of_Contact_(novel)"title="Point of Contact (novel)">
American defense contractor Marin Aerospace is looking to acquire Dalfan Technologies, a Singapore-based company. However, former US senator Weston Rhodes, who is on the Marin Aerospace board of directors, is blackmailed by former Bulgarian intelligence officer and old enemy Tervel Zvezdev, who has a plan to crash the Asian stock market by driving Dalfan stock points down and then gain profit for themselves. After giving in to the plot, Rhodes is given a flash drive with a computer virus that will be installed into the Dalfan computer server in Singapore, unaware that the North Koreans had made the virus and, through General Administrative Services Directorate Deputy Ri Kwan Ju, enlisted Zvezdev's help.To carry out this plan, Rhodes asks his former Senate colleague and Hendley Associates head Gerry Hendley to facilitate a week-long, third party audit into Dalfan Technologies on behalf of Marin Aerospace to make sure that there are no problems among both parties leading up to the impending merger. He personally selects forensic accountant Paul Brown and financial analyst Jack Ryan, Jr. to oversee the audit. Having known Brown as a colleague from the Central Intelligence Agency years ago, he then secretly entrusts the accountant with planting the flash drive in the Dalfan computer network, under the pretense of him being assigned by the CIA to find out whether China had inserted malware into the system.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crosstalk_(novel)"title="Crosstalk (novel)">
Briddey Flannigan, a middle manager in fictional tech-company CommSpan, is dating one of the senior executives, Trent, while fending off nosy family and gossipy colleagues. The company is attempting to find a breakout competitor to the iPhone and other telecommunication products. Trent proposes Briddey and he undergo a new procedure, an EED, which would allow the two of them to feel each other's emotions and take their relationship to the next level. Against the advice of her family and one of her coworkers, Briddey agrees to the procedure, but it has unintended consequences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cats_of_Seroster"title="The Cats of Seroster">
Eighteen-year-old Cam is tricked into completing an errand in the distant city of Seroster. Once there he gets mixed up in dangerous palace intrigue. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reckoning_(Grisham_novel)"title="The Reckoning (Grisham novel)">
The plot centers on the 1946 murder trial of prominent family patriarch Pete Banning, a war hero who has returned home from the Second World War.The story takes place in the fictional town of Clanton, Mississippi, in Grisham's Ford County. It is the seventh Grisham novel to take place here, following "A Time to Kill", "The Summons", "The Chamber", "The Last Juror", "Sycamore Row", and "A Time for Mercy".Pete Banning comes from a family that has farmed cotton for generations. He is owner of a 640-acre parcel in northern Mississippi. In Part One, "The Killing," Pete's wife Liza has recently been placed in a mental institution; his children Joel and Stella are college students; and his sister Florry is a would-be writer who lives on an adjacent parcel. One morning, Pete rises and decides that today is the day for an act of killing. He goes about his normal activities before heading into town, where he walks in on Dexter Bell, the pastor of the local Methodist church, and draws a gun. The pastor exclaims, "If it's about Liza, I can explain." Pete shoots Bell three times, killing him.Pete makes no secret of what he has done and the town is aghast. Sheriff Nix Gridley drives out to the Banning farm, arrests Pete and jails him without resistance. To all inquiries about his actions, Pete replies, "I have nothing to say." His children are instructed to stay away from Clanton. The pastor's widow, Jackie Bell, takes her three children to her hometown in Georgia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodbye_Stranger_(novel)"title="Goodbye Stranger (novel)">
The novel, set in New York City, is told from two intertwining perspectives. The first follows the set of friends "who drew creatures on their homework" and initially met in fourth grade, who are now entering seventh grade. Bridget "Bridge" Barsamian (who draws a three-eyed Martian) was involved in a serious accident and missed her third grade year while in the hospital; she starts hanging out with Sherm Russo, another seventh grader in Tech Crew, the school's stagehand organization. Tabitha "Tab" Patel (who draws a funny bird) becomes involved with the Human Rights Club at school. Emily "Em" (no surname given, who draws a spotted snake) is athletic and is starting to attract attention from boys.In the second, an unnamed student ditches school and avoids her friends on Valentine's Day. It is clear the student knows the first group and lives in the same neighborhood, but her identity is kept a mystery through much of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar_&amp;_Spy"title="Liar &amp; Spy">
The day that Georges (with a silent s, named for Georges Seurat) moves from a house to an apartment with his family, he sees a boy walking two dogs, disappearing into a locked door under the lobby stairs. Georges's family moved because his father, an architect, was laid off from his job, which gives him an opportunity to start his own business. As they are unpacking and throwing away extra material in the basement, Georges sees a hand-lettered sign advertising "Spy Club Meeting—TODAY!" When he returns to the basement later to attend the meeting, he first meets Candy and then her older brother Safer, who is the mysterious twelve-year-old boy who was walking the dogs earlier. Safer suspects one of the residents of their building, who Safer has dubbed Mr. X, "is almost definitely up to something evil" because he only dresses in black and is always moving suitcases in and out of the apartment building. The novel details Safer's efforts to unmask the shadowy Mr. X while Georges continues to struggle with bullying.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_of_Teeth"title="River of Teeth">
As one of his last acts of his presidency in early 1861, President James Buchanan approved the Hippo Act, a plan to import hippopotamuses into the United States as livestock. Decades later, the lawless swamps of Louisiana are infested with murderous feral hippos, and Winslow Houndstooth and his band of misfits are hired to clear them out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Three_(novel)"title="We Three (novel)">
At an indeterminate date, the narrator, DeMilo, a womanizing astronaut, returns to his home in Paris where he lives alone with his pet Titov. He has known a woman named Lucie for years who, despite repeated advances on his part, remains only a friend. Louis Meyer, a graduate of the École Polytechnique, is a specialist in spacecraft ceramic engines who works for the same space agency as DeMilo. He has been divorced for two years, and still suffers from his wife Victoria's absence, but nonetheless has regular sexual encounters with women. Despite the imminence of a new launch project, Meyer manages to get a week's vacation from Blondel, his boss. On his way to Marseille to spend a few days with an old friend, he stops to help a mysterious, preternaturally calm young woman whose Mercedes catches fire and ends up exploding. He drives her to Marseille, where he drops her off at a taxi stand, but she barely exchanges a word or a glance with him.After getting lost in the outskirts of the city, where he observes farm animals behaving in a strangely disturbed manner, Meyer arrives at his friend Nicole's villa. At a party he hesitates between two women as potential sexual partners, opts for Marion and spends the night with her. The next day he goes shopping in the city. He again encounters the woman he drove to Marseille, whom he thinks of as "Mercedes" because he does not know her name, in an elevator at a shopping mall. At the same time a powerful earthquake devastates Marseille. Meyer manages to get out of the elevator and pulls "Mercedes" by the wrist; fleeing the proximity of the sea, they go back to the Saint-Barnabé district. In order to return to Paris, they manage to buy a car, despite the prevailing confusion. During a stop for the night in Eyzin-Pinet, Meyer still can barely manage to elicit a word or a smile from "Mercedes", who both annoys and attracts him. The two survivors arrive in Paris, where they separate on the sidewalk of the rue Cortambert, still without any meaningful exchange.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower_Decides_To_Run"title="Eisenhower Decides To Run">
One of the first scholarly looks at the 1952 presidential campaign, Pickett's book focused on Eisenhower's political reputation, and challenged the notion that he was a reluctant presidential candidate who needed to be convinced to run, in what became known as the "Draft Eisenhower" movement. The idea that Eisenhower was an unwilling politician had been the standard view of historians, perhaps most widely championed in Stephen Ambrose's 1983-84 Eisenhower biography. With access to documents that had been recently declassified by the National Archives as well as private papers from the Eisenhower Library, Pickett's book showed that the truth was more complicated. Letters and diaries written by Eisenhower and his contemporaries offered evidence that Eisenhower's presidential ambitions were nascent as early as 1943 while he was Supreme Commander of Allied Forces during World War II, and that he began to actively encourage support for a presidential nomination in private when Supreme Commander of NATO in the early 1950s. A more skilled behind-the-scenes leader than was generally acknowledged, Eisenhower cultivated his "reluctant" reputation on purpose in order to boost his chances of a nomination, even remarking to a colleague that "since Washington's time, [drafts] have been carefully nurtured with the full, even though undercover, support of the 'victim.'" Though he had no direct political experience, Eisenhower had been repeatedly pulled into political discussions as the United States began its transition from the Second World War to the Cold War, and was concerned about the direction that other potential leaders would take the country, especially the isolationist right wing of the Republican Party In particular, he wanted to block the ambitions of Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft, a leading Republican presidential candidate, who rejected Eisenhower's belief in a strong alliance between the U.S. and Western Europe. He was also cautious after witnessing the controversial political rise of his military rival Douglas MacArthur, with whom Eisenhower shared a mutual antipathy, whose own postwar presidential ambitions were derailed in part by Eisenhower's public statements arguing against the involvement of military leaders in civilian politics. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_and_Empire"title="Power and Empire">
Zhao Chengzhi was appointed as President of China after the death of his predecessor Wei Zhen Lin years prior (depicted in "Threat Vector"). However, his moderate stance on national and international issues angers hardliners in the Chinese government, particularly Foreign Minister Li Zhengsheng, who perceives him to be a weakling. He then creates a secret cabal of like-minded government officials that plots to escalate tensions between China and the United States, which would lead to U.S. President Jack Ryan invoking the Ryan Doctrine and order to have Zhao killed on account of his supposed recklessness, therefore paving the way for Li's ascension into power.In this elaborate plot, Foreign Minister Li recruits General Xu Jinlong, the head of the Central Security Bureau, to sabotage a Chinese commercial ship, which later explodes near American waters; the nearby United States Coast Guard on the northern West Coast manages to rescue most of its crew after it sank, but ten men are either dead or missing. The incident was meant to be the first step toward provoking the United States, but President Ryan urges caution.In addition, Foreign Minister Li enlists agent provocateur Vincent Chen, codenamed Coronet, to orchestrate a series of attacks led by terrorist groups to further his diabolical plan: on an oil drilling operation in Chad (American soldiers, who were on a military exercise nearby, assist and are killed by Boko Haram) and a private sailboat near Indonesia (by allowing its occupants to call for help, Jemaah Islamiyah pirates aim to lure a nearby American patrol ship so that they can in turn attack it). President Ryan discovers the Chinese connection to the incidents, but is still cautious.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insomniac_City"title="Insomniac City">
## Relationship with Sacks.In 2009, following the sudden death of his partner of sixteen years, Hayes rented out his San Francisco apartment and moved to New York City.Hayes had had a passing social relationship with the neurologist Oliver Sacks, who had written him in 2008 to praise his book "The Anatomist". When Hayes moved to New York, his relationship with Sacks – a fellow insomniac, and at 75 nearly thirty years his senior – soon turned romantic. Sacks had hidden his homosexuality from most people, and had lived a largely celibate life; at the start of his relationship with Hayes, it had been three and a half decades since his last romantic encounter. Hayes eventually moved into Sacks' building, though they maintained separate apartments.In "Insomniac City", Hayes reverently describes Sacks' unique and curious mind. The two would use marijuana together (Sacks preferred edibles), and Sacks would report on vivid visual hallucinations, partly owing to his significantly impaired eyesight. Sacks was an eccentric: he was fascinated by the chemical elements, insisted on wearing swim goggles to open a bottle of champagne, and was utterly unaware of popular culture (he did not know who Michael Jackson was). He enjoyed playing classical piano, and the couple shared a love of music. They would often visit botanical gardens, and the mineralogy collection at the American Museum of Natural History. Hayes' book is peppered with Sacks' idiosyncratic musings: "Are you conscious of your thoughts before language embodies them?" Of Hayes, he said "I've suddenly realized what you mean to me: you create the need which you fill, the hunger you sate. Like Jesus. And Kierkegaard. And smoked trout..."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwight_David_Eisenhower_and_American_Power"title="Dwight David Eisenhower and American Power">
Divided into six parts, the book chronicles Eisenhower's early life, wartime service, presidency and retirement. In addition to telling Eisenhower's life story, the book was a re-examination of his political legacy, part of a trend challenging previous historians' views of his presidency as weak. With access to previously classified documents from both the United States and Soviet Union, as well as eight months of research at the Eisenhower Library, Pickett was able to show a different side to Eisenhower. Eisenhower's approach to issues of power and strategy is a consistent theme throughout the book. Although Pickett acknowledges that Eisenhower's corporate ties and dislike of New Deal policies made him "[fail] to understand the problems of the poor, the elderly, and the many who suffered discrimination," he argues that Eisenhower also brought to the White House a set of skills and experience that made him perhaps uniquely suited for handling the problems of the Cold War, helping to create the conditions for the peace, prosperity and economic growth that were the hallmark of the 1950s. The book suggests that the strategic talents Eisenhower displayed as Supreme Commander of Allied forces were not only the key to victory in Europe during World War Two, but carried over usefully to his second career as a civilian politician. Despite his military background, he believed in avoiding war and that the Cold War was a largely political and economic rather than military crisis. Despite Eisenhower's serious misgivings about the rise of corporate power and the military-industrial complex, which he warned against in his 1960 farewell address, Pickett suggests that Eisenhower's coolheadedness and focus on international affairs helped leave the world more stable than it was before his presidency, and established the dominance of the United States as both a world power and a haven for the world's refugees.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hail!_Hail!"title="Hail! Hail!">
Shortly after the release of their film "Duck Soup" in mid-1934, the Marx Brothers eventually visit Nacogdoches, Texas and all four of them get caught in a lightning storm that transports them back in time to December 15, 1826 and arrive in the same town just as when the Fredonian Rebellion is breaking out.Having just completed their film "Duck Soup", about a fictional Republic of Freedonia, the brothers actually know about the Fredonian Rebellion in some detail, particularly Julius "Groucho" Marx, who serves as the story's point of view. When they encounter Adolphus Sterne, the man who supplied the Rebellion, the Marx Brothers, despairing of ever returning to their own time, reveal their identity to Sterne, and agree to help the rebellion. This decision proves to have dire consequences for history resulting in the creation of a slave-holding "Confederal government" with a flag consisting of a white St. Andrew's Cross and 15 red stars well into the 20th century.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_(novel)"title="Osama (novel)">
In a world without terrorism, a private detective is hired to locate Mike Longshott, the mysterious author of a popular series of novels about a fictional vigilante named "Osama bin Laden".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warlight"title="Warlight">
In 1945 at the end of the war, Nathaniel's father and mother decide to leave London for a year to go to Singapore, where Nathaniel's father is being stationed. The parents decide to leave their children, 14-year-old Nathaniel and his older sister Rachel, in the care of their lodger, Walter, known as The Moth. The children both have the impression that The Moth is a thief. Nathaniel's mother claims to know The Moth because they were both in charge of fire watching at the Grosvenor House Hotel during the war but their stories about the war imply that they had other, secretive war jobs.Nathaniel and Rachel are supposed to be boarders at their school when their parents leave, but after complaining to The Moth they are allowed to live at their home which is now populated by an odd mix of characters. One of these is The Moth's friend, The Darter, who imports greyhounds into England for the purpose of illegal gambling and ferries explosives by barge from Waltham Abbey Royal Gunpowder Mills into central London. The Darter helps Nathaniel gain employment, first at a restaurant where he meets a working-class girl, Agnes Street, who he develops a relationship with, and later employing him to aid in smuggling. When Agnes thinks that Nathaniel does not want to introduce her to his parents because he is ashamed of her, Nathaniel has The Darter pretend to be his father. The Darter similarly helps Rachel, who develops epilepsy during this time period, by teaching Nathaniel how to deal with the symptoms, and helping Rachel find employment in a theatre. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_Sight_(novel)"title="Line of Sight (novel)">
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Al Qaeda in the Balkans leader Tarik Brkić, who is of Chechen descent, is tasked by his mysterious benefactor Red Wing to orchestrate false flag attacks on Croats, Bosniaks and Serbs in order to disrupt the Unity Referendum, an upcoming national gathering which aims to promote equality among the three rival ethnic groups. At the same time and without Red Wing's knowledge, Brkić also plans to provoke the Russians, who happen to be staging a military exercise nearby, into military action in the Balkans by arranging a terrorist attack, which would then incite the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to intervene, resulting in a new world war. He obtains eighty thermobaric warheads as well as the accompanying missile guidance system, stolen from a Russian armory in Syria and smuggled into the country, for this purpose.Meanwhile, Jack Ryan Jr. goes on an accounting job as a financial analyst for Hendley Associates in Ljubljana, Slovenia, on behalf of a Slovenian company which is looking to register to NASDAQ. Before the trip, he agrees to do a favor for his mother, Dr. Cathy Ryan, in which he will track down Aida Curić, her mother’s former patient, in the nearby city of Sarajevo in Bosnia. Aida, a Bosnian Muslim who escaped from her country during the Bosnian War, had her eyes cured by his mother twenty-five years ago.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_at_Devil's_Rock"title="Disappearance at Devil's Rock">
A thirteen-year-old boy named Tommy Sanderson goes missing after spending time with his friends, Josh Griffin and Luis Fernandez, at Borderland State Park in Massachusetts. His mom Elizabeth, younger sister Kate, and grandmother are thrown into disarray as strange events begin occurring; a mysterious apparition appears in his mother's room and discarded pages from his journal that may provide potential clues as to his whereabouts begin to surface.The investigation, led by Allison Murtaugh, slowly reveals some of the strange events leading up to the disappearance. At the center of it all is a man named Rooney Flannery, who moonlights as a man named Arnold. Arnold claims to be a "seer" and ends up giving all three boys a harrowing backstory of satanic activity at Split Rock. This backstory may or may not connect to Tommy's disappearance. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Faith_and_Allegiance"title="True Faith and Allegiance">
Romanian hacker Alexandru Dalca obtains an old copy of the e-QIP database, which contains personal information on millions of U.S. military and intelligence personnel. The Chinese originally hire him to use the stolen information in order to locate U.S. spies in their country. However, Dalca uses this treasure trove of information to make a profit by building targeting packages on specific individuals. This attracts the attention of Saudi technocrat Sami bin Rashid, who wanted to provoke the United States into a quagmire in the Middle East fighting ISIS, which would then recoup the loss of profit in Saudi oil.After making contact with Dalca through the dark web, Bin Rashid meets with ISIS operative Abu Musa al Matari and formulates a plan to attack U.S. military and intelligence personnel, using the targeting packages compiled by Dalca himself, in order to further his plan. Al Matari then recruits cleanskins and assigns them into cells to carry out the attacks. The video recordings of the assaults are then uploaded to the Islamic State's propaganda site, promoting the terror organization, garnering new followers, and inspiring a series of copycat attacks.The intelligence community quickly becomes concerned about the wave of attacks on U.S. intelligence and military personnel, and scramble to find the source. President Jack Ryan is then pressured by the media and elements in his own government to deploy troops into the Middle East to battle the Islamic State, but persistently refuses to do so by gathering intelligence, knowing that Islamic State is provoking him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_de_Mairena"title="Juan de Mairena">
An imaginary teacher and his students analyse the society, the culture, the art, the literature, the politics and the philosophy by the paradox, the adage, the erudition, the introspection, the rhetoric and the spoonerism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Peabody's_Apples"title="Mr. Peabody's Apples">
History teacher Mr. Peabody organizes baseball games with other schools every Saturday. After each game, Mr. Peabody would clean up the field, with the help of a student named Billy Little. Then Mr. Peabody would walk home down the main street of Happville and pick out the shiniest apple from Mr. Funkadeli's market and put it in his pocket. One day, a student called Tommy Tittlebottom saw Mr. Peabody do this, and believed he was not paying for the apple. Tommy told his friends that Mr. Peabody was stealing the apples and gradually the word spread across town.The following Saturday, Mr. Peabody wondered why no one showed up for the baseball game. Little Billy walked up to Mr. Peabody and told him everything. Mr. Peabody took Billy to Mr. Funkadeli's market where Billy realized that Mr. Peabody paid for the apples every Saturday morning when he picked up his milk. Astonished, Billy went to find Tommy and explained everything. Later that day, Tommy showed up at Mr. Peabody's house and apologized, asking how he could make it up to him. Mr. Peabody told Tommy to meet him at the bleachers with a feather pillow.Later that day, Mr. Peabody had Tommy cut open the pillow at the top of the bleachers and let all the feathers fly away across the field. He asked Tommy to go and pick up the feathers which Tommy thought would be impossible. It was then Mr. Peabody reminded Tommy that it is impossible to undo the damage he had done spreading the rumor that Mr. Peabody was a thief.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cabin_at_the_End_of_the_World"title="The Cabin at the End of the World">
A gay couple named Andrew and Eric and their daughter, Wen, are taking a vacation in a secluded cabin in New Hampshire. Wen is playing and catching grasshoppers when she is visited by a mysterious young man named Leonard. He is polite and friendly and plays along with Wen until they play a game of telling each other truths over a flower petal that Leonard gave her. Leonard admits that his heart is broken, and Wen asks why, Leonard explains that he is heartbroken over what he must do. Wen sees three other people coming from the forest with improvised weapons and flees to go warn her parents, Leonard tells her that he needs their help to save the world. Wen attempts to warn Eric and Andrew about the visitors but they manage to break in and after a scuffle, Eric is knocked down and suffers a concussion. Leonard and the other three visitors Adriane, Redmond, and Sabrina tie up Andrew and Eric and explain their plan: they claim to have never met before this day and have received visions about an upcoming apocalypse that will happen unless Eric, Andrew, and Wen make a decision to sacrifice one of them so that the apocalypse can be averted. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakov_and_the_Seven_Thieves"title="Yakov and the Seven Thieves">
A cobbler called Yakov and his wife Olga are frightened that their gravely ill son Mikhail is dying. They hear about a man of healing who lives in the last house of their village and Yakov goes to him for guidance. The man refuses Yakov's money, instead clarifies that if he can save Yakov's son, the cobbler can repay by making a pair of shoes for his grandson.The next day, Yakov visited the man only to be told that when he had prayed, the gates of heaven would not open. The distressed cobbler begged him to try yet one more time. The healer asked his grandson to go into the village and find all the thieves, pickpockets and criminals, and bring them back to the house. They included the thieves Vladimir the Villain who could bend metal and punch holes through stones, Boris the Barefoot Midget who snatched the purse of old ladies, Ivan the Arsonist, Petra the Pickpocket, Stinky Pasha, Sadko the Snake, Igor the Tiger, all of them being a large host of ne'er-do-wells.With the healer's direction, the thieves all got on their knees and started to pray. A miracle occurred and the prayers of the men, who previously robbed by opening gates, helped to open the gates of heaven and Yakov's son was healed. The next day, Yakov came with a new pair of shoes for the grandson and declared that Mikhail was alive and well. It was the prayers of the gang of crooks that made a difference.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openly_Straight"title="Openly Straight">
When Rafe switches to a private all boys high school in Natick, he decides to hide the fact that he is gay, hoping to find a new identity as just Rafe and not just ‘that gay kid’. In an attempt to live a life without labels, Rafe is immediately taken in by the jocks for his soccer abilities. Rafe relishes in being allowed to be a jock and being treated normally in the locker room. Rafe finds a best friend and potential boyfriend called Ben. However, Ben is straight and has no idea about Rafe being gay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Shilling_for_Candles"title="A Shilling for Candles">
The body of a woman, Christine Clay (née Christina Gotobed) is discovered at the edge of the surf on a beach in Kent. She is initially thought to be the victim of a drowning accident, but the presence of a button tangled in her hair leads Inspector Grant to conclude she has been murdered. Suspicion quickly falls on her house guest, Robert Tisdall, who admits to having stolen Clay's car and then regretted it and returned. Tisdall had been Clay's guest for 4 days at the time of the murder, in a cottage that she had rented in secret to have an anonymous holiday. He inherited a fortune but has squandered it, and was rescued from a life of poverty when Clay randomly encountered him in London and offered him hospitality out of kindness. She did not tell him her name, instructing him to call her "Chris". Clay's identity is revealed when Jason Harmer, her songwriter, arrives at the cottage having tracked down its location from a clue in a letter he received from her. Once her identity becomes public Lydia Keats, an astrologist, receives considerable attention for having correctly predicted that Clay would drown.The day before the murder, Clay wrote to her lawyer instructing him to add a codicil to her will bequeathing a small portion of her estate — a ranch in California and several thousand pounds — to Tisdall. The bulk of her estate is left to "maintain the beauty of the English countryside". Tisdall claims not to have known about the bequest to him. Although it goes against his intuition, Grant is convinced of Tisdall's guilt by the motive provided by the bequest. Another suspicious circumstance is that Tisdall's coat, which had buttons similar to the one found in Clay's hair, has been stolen. Furthermore, none of Clay's friends knows of the cottage, except for her husband and the owner of the cottage, another film star.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjustment_Day"title="Adjustment Day">
In a near-future United States, a corrupt Senator plans to reinstate the draft to send young men to die in a planned nuclear attack of mutually agreed-upon destruction in the Middle East to prevent an uprising of those same young men. Meanwhile, the mysterious Talbott Reynolds circulates a small blue and black book throughout the country full of his own manifesto and wisdom on how life should be lived, and a Web site called "The List" allows users to submit and vote on public figures they think deserve to be killed. Before the vote can be made to reinstate the draft, readers of Reynolds's manifesto rise up, kill the targets on The List, and use severed ears taken from those killings to prove their power and become the new leaders of a new United States, split into the regions of Blacktopia, Gaysia, and Caucasia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Men"title="Rocket Men">
"Rocket Men" is an account of the Apollo 8 mission with focus on Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders, the three astronauts who flew the mission. The book also places an emphasis on the astronauts' families during the mission.From The "Washington Post":The book includes chapters dedicated to each astronaut, the Space Race itself, and background and chronological progress of the mission including critical maneuvers and mission setbacks. It is set against the backdrop of 1968, considered by many to be among the most divisive and violent years in American history.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Indian_Story_of_an_Author"title="The Indian Story of an Author">
The book was created out of the frustration of the author when he pitched one of his manuscripts ("God of the Sullied") to the publishers in India only to face their rejections on unclear grounds. It only has one brief chapter that summarises the irony of getting published in India with manuscripts other than romance and chick-lit genres. The book is intentionally left blank to express the exasperation of its author on behalf of all other aspiring writers. Sharma's 100 pager book is blank after 13 printed pages, connoting similar trend as seen during the Indian emergency declared by the then prime minister Indira Gandhi when many journalists including Ramnath Goenka left the editorial page of their respective newspapers blank, protesting against the censorship imposed on the press during that time. The Indian Story of an Author was well received in the media and is seen as a symbolic message from the author to all the aspiring writers about the complications of Indian publishing system.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Year_of_Rest_and_Relaxation"title="My Year of Rest and Relaxation">
The unnamed narrator, a slender and beautiful blonde from a wealthy WASP family, is a recent graduate of Columbia University, where she majored in art history. During her freshman year in college, both of her parents died—first her father from cancer, then her mother in a suicide caused by an interaction between psychiatric medications and alcohol. Now living on Manhattan's Upper East Side and increasingly dissatisfied with her post-collegiate life, the narrator finds a conveniently incompetent psychiatrist, Dr. Tuttle, who freely prescribes a variety of sleeping, anti-anxiety, and anti-psychotic medications for the insomnia the narrator reports as her complaint; in fact, the narrator hopes to spend as few hours awake as possible, lulling herself with pills and middlebrow movies she plays on repeat on her VCR, until the aging machine breaks down.When the narrator is fired from her job in an art gallery, she chooses to live off unemployment payments and her inheritance, while attempting to sleep for a year in an effort to reset her life. But her "year of rest and relaxation" is regularly interrupted. Her college roommate Reva (who unabashedly envies the narrator's wealth and appearance) makes frequent unannounced visits, which the narrator allows despite her disdain for Reva's social climbing and annoyance at having to listen to Reva's problems—her own mother's terminal cancer, a frustrating affair with her married boss. The narrator is also occasionally in contact with an older boyfriend, Trevor (a banker who works in the World Trade Center), though he frequently cuts off their relationship to date women his own age, returning when one of them has dumped him or occasionally in response to the narrator's pleading.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Warrior"title="Blue Warrior">
A Chinese oil company has a vested interest in the recently discovered rare earth mineral deposits all over the Sahara, particularly in the country of Mali. However, the Malian government has been battling the Tuaregs, nomad warriors who hold the territory. As a result, Zhao Yi, one of the vice presidents of the company that spearheaded the initiative, agrees to help the government bring down the rebellion by hunting down the Tuaregs, utilizing the services of People's Liberation Army (PLA) operator Guo Jun.Meanwhile, Troy Pearce has been dealing with grief over the brutal murder of his friend Johnny Paloma by rhinoceros poachers (who are aided by Guo) in Mozambique. He is later tasked by former U.S. president Margaret Myers with extracting her former head of security Mike Early, who is now a bodyguard to Italian doctor Cella Paolini, Troy’s former lover, from Mali. Upon arriving there, he finds out that they are joined by Mossa Ag Alla, leader of the Tuaregs (“Blue Warrior”) and Cella’s father-in-law.In Washington, D.C., power-hungry senator Barbara Fiero plots to make current president Greyhill break his promise of “no boots on the ground”, where he has been enjoying high approval ratings, and lose in the upcoming presidential elections as a result, citing the growing Chinese involvement in the rare-earth mineral deposits across Africa as the reason; she privately recruits the services of skilled hacker Jasmine Bath. Meanwhile, Myers has been investigating the suicide of her friend and Supreme Court justice Vincent Tanner, unknowingly putting herself on Bath’s radar. After finding out that she is under surveillance, she escapes to Pearce’s Wyoming home and investigates the circumstances regarding Tanner’s death along with Pearce Systems IT head Ian McTavish, later concluding that Fiero and Bath are involved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Moon_(novel)"title="Red Moon (novel)">
In the year 2047, Fred Fredericks is sent to the Moon to deliver a quantum communications device. Upon his arrival he is nearly killed during the handover of the device, but cannot remember what happened. He is held on suspicion of murdering the official to whom he was delivering the device. A journalist helps Fredericks and the dissident leader Qi, who is due to give birth soon, escape back to Earth. They are pursued by Chinese authorities who believe that Qi will lead a revolution of disaffected workers and displaced migrants to overthrow the Party leadership. After a series of chases and escapes, Fredericks and Qi return to the Moon, where they encounter a wealthy Chinese businessman building his own ideal colony and visit free settlers creating a lunar city outside government control. One faction of the Chinese leadership orders missile strikes on the Moon to kill Fredericks and Qi, but they receive advance warning of the attacks and flee to a remote lunar shelter, where Qi gives birth as millions of Chinese workers gather in Beijing to start the revolution.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidelity_(novel)"title="Fidelity (novel)">
"Fidelity" is the third novel by Susan Glaspell and it elaborates on the concept of woman’s fidelity to marriage, men, society, family and especially to herself. For the plot, Glaspell got inspiration from her own life experience and mainly based on the relationship she had with George Cram Cook, who was married by the time they met and could not marry Glaspell until he got his divorce.The novel deals with Glaspell's major themes: the controversial relationship between women and society, and the conflicts arising from the clash between women's longing for freedom and their need to be part of a community or family that seek to suppress them. Ruth Holland, Glaspell's main character, is a fiery woman who struggles to become a new woman and to detach herself from the binary gender images advocated by the patriarchal society she lives in. She has to face the consequences of her doings and struggles to decide whether she has been unfaithful to society's demands or faithful to her needs and desires. According to Barbara Ozieblo Rajkowska, author of "Susan Glaspell: A Critical Biography", Glaspell exposes moral issues in multiple perspectives, not just as contests between good and evil. In her novel, Glaspell deconstructs the romantic myths of love and marriage. "Fidelity" serves as commentary on what Glaspell saw as a middle-class society that prioritizes marriage as the ultimate goal, and shows that romantic love cannot be expected to fulfill everyone's existences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocents_and_Others"title="Innocents and Others">
In the 1980s, teenage Meadow Mori writes an experimental essay during which she watches "City Lights" twenty times in a row; she does this because her favourite filmmaker claimed everything he learned about film he learned from watching this film 20 times. After her project is done, she sends a copy to the filmmaker, who invites her to lunch. The two begin an affair, and Meadow defers university to live with him. He warns Meadow that he is ill and urges her to use his fame and the scandal of their relationship to acquire fame and fortune. However, when he dies Meadow only takes a few tokens and prefers to find her own path to success, never publishing the love letters he wrote her. The story is part of an online essay Meadow wrote, and comments reveal that the man in question is thought to be Orson Welles.Meadow eventually heads to Gloversville where she makes experimental films. Her first documentary feature is an interview with her younger lover, whom she records as he is increasingly drunk, based on "Portrait of Jason". The film gains enough acclaim that Meadow is able to make a second film, "Kent State: Recovered", about student protests over the Vietnam war. She is nominated for an Oscar for her film.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shore_of_Women"title="The Shore of Women">
Thousands of years after a devastating nuclear war, men are the outcasts, rejected by the women they once oppressed. They live outside the city walls, bereft of the bounty of the women's non-violent civilization. They live in small bands, scavenging and hunting, killing and bonding. They know nothing of real women, but worship the image of women through The Lady, a goddess who rewards them with erotic dreams when they lie on a couch in her temple, and ensures the continuation of the race of man by sending boy-children out of the cities. This belief is reinforced through a virtual reality system controlled by the women. While the men are immersed in these visions, their semen is collected for purposes of procreation.The women live mostly peaceful unremarkable lives, though they must keep an eye on the men, ensuring they do not create large, permanent settlements, or advance technologically—after all, they nearly destroyed everything and cannot be trusted.Laissa is a young woman who begins to question the tenets of her society, after she sees a woman and her daughter banished for murder, presumably headed to their deaths. She is also having an issue with her own mother, who is reluctant to give up her male child. Laissa is a member of the upper-class "Mothers of the City", the intellectual and political leaders who ensure that their way of life continues, and the only women permitted to have male children. Her girlfriend leaves her, because her questioning the system makes her "politically undesireable", and so she moves closer to the "normal" women, the artisan and tradeswomen class.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aunty_Lee's_Delights"title="Aunty Lee's Delights">
The body of a woman washes up on the beach of Sentosa and Aunty Lee begins to investigate. When a guest does not show to her wine tasting and dinner party, Aunty Lee immediately suspects the missing guest to be the murdered woman. The identity of the woman is soon confirmed as an employee of Aunty Lee's stepson. Later, another body washes up on the beach of Sentosa, prompting invigorated investigation from Police Commissioner Raja and Senior Staff Sergeant Salim. With the help of Auntie Lee's keen ability to uncover evidence, they eventually find the murderer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Handsome_Man's_De_Luxe_Café"title="The Handsome Man's De Luxe Café">
Mma Makutsi has decided to start a new venture: The Handsome Man's De Luxe Café. She envisages this to be place for fashionable men to hobnob, and in her excitement ignores the various warning signs, even when alerted by her husband Phuti Radiphuti and her idol and boss Mma Ramotswe. To run the café, she ends up hiring her lawyer's family, all of whom have a track record of being unreliable. To make the matters worse, her nemesis Violet Sephotho, who is now a restaurant critic, spares no mean words in her review published in the leading national daily. Mma Potokwani helps by suggesting a complete change in the positioning and branding. She also offers to help run the café by offering one of her best housemothers as the manager.The business of the Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, run by Mr J L B Matekoni, is shrinking. To manage the finances, he fires his apprentice Charlie, who is visibly shaken by the change of events. Out of compassion, Mma Ramotswe hires him for the No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency.An Indian family comes to meet Mma Ramotswe to find the identity of an Indian lady who apparently landed at their doorstep out of nowhere and cannot remember her identity. During the investigation, Mma Ramotswe discovers that the lady was harassed by her husband in South Africa and ran away. The husband managed to get police to charge her with attempt to murder. To protect her from her husband and from deportation, the family is giving her shelter and allowing her to feign amnesia. Mma Ramotswe is in a dilemma; if she writes the truth in her report, the lady will once again be at the mercy of her husband, and if she does not, she would be misleading the national authorities who are dependent on her report to decide the future course of action. Mma Potokwani calls an old friend, who is now a senior police official in South Africa, to check the matter impartially and get the lady's name off the wanted list for murder, which resolves her problem.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Abdi"title="The Adventures of Abdi">
In a faraway land lived a boy named Abdi. He was an orphan raised by the great jeweler Eli. One day, Eli was commissioned to create a necklace for the queen. Once the necklace was completed, Eli gave it to Abdi for traveling to the royal palace and giving it to the queen on her birthday. The boy starts his journey across the desert. One night while sleeping, Abdi is robbed by two Bedouins, who steal the necklace and replace it with a live snake. Unaware of the theft, Abdi reaches the palace and meets the king where the snake is revealed inside Abdi's bag. Seeing this, the king gets really upset and orders the boy to be thrown in the dungeon.Eli learns what happened to Abdi, and hurries along reaching the palace a week later. Because of his faith and honesty, he is able to convince the king that after placing the snake around the queen's neck, it would turn into a diamond necklace. As the queen places the snake around her neck, it slowly becomes a precious encrusted necklace. The king is impressed and releases Abdi, rewarding him and Eli. News about Abdi and Eli's magical necklace reaches the two Bedouins who had stolen the original one from Abdi. They reach the royal palace to see the king with a large bag stuffed with real snakes. However, the snakes were not charmed into jewelry and instead ended up frightening the poor queen. The enraged king orders them to be thrown in the dungeon forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Disappear_(novel)"title="You Disappear (novel)">
The narrator Mia is married to Frederik who undergoes radical personality changes due to a slowly growing brain tumor that leaves his intellect, speech and motor control intact. Their lives change even more when it comes out that, in the year before his diagnosis, Frederik embezzled DKK 12 million from the private school in Copenhagen where he is headmaster. But was the tumor already determining his actions at the time, absolving him, or should he go to jail?In preparing Frederik's defense, Mia immerses herself in the latest brain research, the emerging neurological portrait of human nature, and the classic metaphysical question of free will. Her reading profoundly affects how she responds to Frederik – and to her own passionate impulses.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_President_(children's_book)"title="Class President (children's book)">
Julio Sanchez and his fifth-grade class are facing an upcoming election, which is shaping up as a close contest between his best friend, class clown Lucas Cott and the 'annoying' one time teacher's pet Cricket Kaufman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotsa_de_Casha"title="Lotsa de Casha">
In a distant land lived a wealthy merchant called Lotsa de Casha. He had everything money could buy, however Lotsa was still unhappy. So he sought out the opinion of all the well-known doctors of the land regarding his misery, but failed to find an answer. One day, his driver told him about a wise old man who lived faraway in an ancient city. Lotsa travels to the wise man who explained that the secret to his happiness was in sharing his wealth with others and putting them before himself. Lotsa was stunned since he had always put forth his own needs first, and became skeptical about the man's words.While exploring the ancient city, Lotsa saw a man slogging to change the wheel of his car by himself. But Lotsa did not stop to help and continued walking. He soon got lost and was robbed by two thieves who left him penniless. A distraught Lotsa cried for help to a passing driver and realized it was the same man he had seen earlier. The man, who called himself Mister Forfilla, agreed to give him a ride back to his house, but in exchange Lotsa had to work for him. Throughout their journey Forfilla ordered Lotsa de Casha to transport an assortment of things—including chairs, tables, clothing—to people's homes, who all appreciated the gifts. Forfilla explained Lotsa the same thing as the wise man, that sharing his wealth was the key to happiness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Hill_(novel)"title="Golden Hill (novel)">
In early November 1746 a traveller called Mr Smith arrives in New York, bringing with him a bill for £1000, which he takes to Mr Lovell, a local businessman, who reluctantly agrees to honour it despite Smith refusing to reveal who it is from and how he intends to use it. He meets Lovell's daughters Tabitha and Flora at home and soon afterwards also encounters Septimus Oakeshott, secretary and spymaster to George Clinton, governor of New York. He has his purse stolen and soon afterwards is saved from a murderous mob at a Pope Night bonfire by Oakeshott and his black servant (and lover) Achilles.Septimus and Smith become friends and the pair begin to plan a production of Joseph Addison's "Cato", with the two female roles played by Flora and Tabitha. Smith also tentatively begins wooing Tabitha, discovering her love of theatre and frustrations with the limitations on her life at home. Impressed by the 46-year-old ex-professional actress Euterpe Tomlinson and her recitation at a dinner marking George II's birthday, Smith convinces a reluctant Septimus to give her a part in the play - forgetting until it is too late that this will lose Tabitha her role. Just after rehearsals have begun, Tabitha invites Smith to join her on a return trip to Tarrytown on her father's business. She fails to convince him to stay behind in Tarrytown and instead he accompanies her back to New York. They arrive just after the transatlantic ship expected to bring in the confirmation of his bill but it carries no such confirmation and he is imprisoned for debt and the capital crime of forgery. In gaol Smith writes a letter to his clergyman father, revealing to the reader his escape from the household of "Lord -" and his mixed-raced origin. Another ship then arrives bearing the confirmation of the bill, thus securing his release.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Starving"title="The Art of Starving">
Matt, a teenager, practices “The Art of Starving”: by eating as little food as possible, he believes that he will reach enlightenment. He seeks to uncover the mystery of his sister Maya’s recent disappearance. His mother believes that she had just ran away, but Matt believes something nefarious happened to her. He gets closer to classmate Tariq, the last person Maya saw before she disappeared, as he believes that he or his friends was responsible. Complicating matters is Matt’s attraction for him — another hunger he tries to repress.Matt discovers he has extra-heightened senses as a result of his fasting, as when he is forced to eat, his senses become dull again. He senses that Tariq has a big secret. He tries to pressure him into admitting what he did to Maya, but he admits that his big secret is that he is gay and has had a crush on Matt for a while. Matt reciprocates his feelings and they agree to keep their relationship secret, as Tariq’s parents are homophobic. Tariq tells Matt that Maya asked him to drive her so she could meet her father. Matt is devastated knowing that Maya abandoned them. His self-image issues and need for control intensifies, and as he eats less, his powers grow. He visits Tariq's family for dinner and indulges himself in eating his favorite food, but he feels guilty afterward and vomits it out. Tariq catches him in the act so Matt tells him about his anorexia. They break up after an argument when Matt refuses to confront his eating disorder and Tariq refuses to come out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leila_(novel)"title="Leila (novel)">
In the late 2040s, with drinking water and fresh air being extravagances, India is ruled by "The Council". Shalini is married to Rizwan Chaudhury, a Muslim man with whom she has a daughter, Leila. One day Rizwan is abducted and killed by goons known as "Repeaters" in an attempt to cleanse the bloodlines and stop inter-faith marriages. Her daughter Leila is also abducted. Shalini is sent to a Purity Camp where she serves as a slave for sixteen years. During her long stay, her mental health starts deteriorating. One day she escapes. She is later caught and sent back to the camp where she is appointed as a housekeeper to the Dixits, an advantaged family at the Record Towers. Mr. Dixit is one of the designers for the up-and-coming Skydome, which will be utilized to make fresh air.Shalini gains access to the tower through the bureaucracy, in order to get more information. Mr. Dixit is sent to the camp after he neglects to make the arch by the due date. Feeling for Mrs. Dixit, Shalini helps her escape. One day, Shalini gets into the wealthy facility to find answers concerning the whereabouts of her missing girl. She sees a blurb demonstrating one of the specialists she thinks is one of the men who came to kill her husband and kidnap Leila. Shalini sees a video of Dixit clarifying that the Skydome will resemble a climate control system with vents blowing tourist outside of it that can murder individuals outside of it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_River_Ophelia"title="The River Ophelia">
The novel concerns the pursuits of the protagonist Justine, a university student in inner-city Sydney, and her relationship with the destructive, abusive narcissist Sade, a well-paid journalist for a trashy rock magazine. The violent, depraved sociopathic Sade regularly uses Justine for his own sexual exploits, and as she recognises this, goes on her own destructive pursuit for sexual fulfilment. Other characters, such as Hamlet, Ophelia, Simone and Marcelle appear later in the story. They regularly consume hard drugs, and are absorbed in a heavy capitalist culture with fluid, occasionally sexually violent open relationships. The only character who ostensibly seems to pursue love, or a healthy monogamous relationship, is Justine. Sade regularly taunts Justine in a sadistic fashion, and sometimes parades his other women around in front of her. The sex is often clinical and kinky, rather than romantic or passionate.As a response she often lashes out and engages in her own sadistic behaviour in an attempt to mimic or seek revenge on the sordid behaviour of her adversaries because she cannot seem to overcome them. Acting against the grain, slowly giving up on the pursuit of healthy love in an urban environment that rejects healthy love, Justine despairs and delves into hard drug use before eventually seeking a more permanent solution to her woes and oppressions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Love_and_Shadows_(novel)"title="Of Love and Shadows (novel)">
Irene is a magazine editor living under the shadow of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Francisco is a handsome photographer and he comes to Irene for a job. As a sympathizer with the underground resistance movement, Francisco opens her eyes and her heart to the atrocities being committed by the state. Irene and Francisco begin a passionate affair, ready to risk everything for the sake of justice and truth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_of_Science_Fiction"title="The Spirit of Science Fiction">
The novel is set in Mexico City in the 1970s; the central characters are two young Chilean would-be writers who have emigrated during the Pinochet dictatorship, 17-year-old Jan Schrella and 21-year-old Remo, and Remo's friend José Arco. Jan, a science fiction author and Bolaño's alter ego, sits in the attic they share and writes, much of the time letters to authors he idolizes. Remo, a poet, falls in love with a girl he meets at a poetry workshop, and with Arco, also a poet, quests on the latter's motorbike after Dr. Carvajal, who can explain the simultaneous rise of illiteracy and proliferation of poetry journals in the city. In addition to Jan's letters the story is intercut with dreams and with flashforwards to Remo's life after he is successful; Remo also narrates the last section of the novel, "Mexican Manifesto", a love story that was published on its own in "The New Yorker" in 2013.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Less_(novel)"title="Less (novel)">
Arthur Less is a 49-year-old gay writer of middling success from San Francisco, known primarily for having once been in a relationship with an older gentleman, Robert Brownburn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. He first experienced moderate success with his debut novel, but in the decades since has struggled to garner the same success. His most recent novel, "Swift", has recently been rejected by his publisher. Arthur, who is dreading his 50th birthday, is suddenly invited to the wedding of his ex-sweetheart, Freddy Pelu. In attempt to avoid the wedding, Arthur goes on an extensive overseas trip after accepting invitations to the numerous literary engagements which he typically declines.He first travels to New York City to interview writer H.H.H. Mandern, and then to Mexico City for a conference about Robert. In Turin, Arthur attends an award ceremony where, to his surprise, he wins. He later accepts a teaching offer for a creative writing seminar in Berlin. After a layover in Paris where he meets an old friend, Arthur travels to Morocco to celebrate his 50th birthday in the Sahara. He eventually arrives in India, where he accepts a writer-in-residence at a Christian retreat community in Kerala. Finally, he travels to Japan to write as a food critic. After hearing that Robert has suffered a stroke, Arthur returns home to San Francisco where he finds Freddy there waiting for him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_Displaced"title="We Are Displaced">
The book's first part, "I Am Displaced", details Yousafzai's experience being displaced. She details the rise of the Taliban in Mingora, Pakistan which led to forced displacement, with her family moving between relatives in the Shangla District and Peshawar. Three months later, they returned to Mingora to find the city wrecked. Yousafzai continued local activism which culminated in her being shot in the head by a Taliban member. She was taken to Birmingham, England, for treatment and forced to remain there and start a new life.The second part of the book, "We Are Displaced", describes the experiences of nine displaced people. Each story is given a short introduction by Yousafzai and then narrated by the subject. Siblings Zaynab and Sabreen were born in Yemen. Their father left and their mother got a travel visa to the United States, so they were raised by their grandmother until her death. The Yemeni Crisis led the children to flee to Egypt in 2012, and Zaynab was kicked out of her uncle's house after she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. After recovering in Cairo, Zaynab's visa was granted. Sabreen fled to Italy by boat with a cousin and two friends. Held in inhumane conditions on lengthy bus rides from Cairo to Alexandria, the group were taken across the Mediterranean Sea. After a week, their boat ran out of fuel and they were rescued by the Italian coast guard. Sabreen met a man in a refugee camp in the Netherlands whom she married, and moved with him to Belgium. Meanwhile, Zaynab adjusted to American life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calypso_(book)"title="Calypso (book)">
In "Calypso", Sedaris writes primarily about his family and aging, as he is approaching the age his mother was when she died of cancer (62) and his sister Tiffany had recently died by suicide. He purchases a seaside vacation home in Emerald Isle, North Carolina for the remaining siblings to spend time in with their father, now in his 90s, as they did growing up. He also discusses shopping for clothes in Japan with his sisters and a gastrointestinal virus he acquires while on book tour, an experience he views in terms of looming incontinence of old age.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(Clearfield_and_Tilcsik_book)"title="Meltdown (Clearfield and Tilcsik book)">
The first three chapters of the book extend Charles Perrow’s "normal accident theory"—originally developed in the 1980s—to recent trends, such as the rise of social media, the increasing reliance of organizations on computer-based systems, and the growing complexity of modern financial, transportation, and communication systems. The authors warn that companies, governments, and even individuals have become dangerously reliant on complex, tightly coupled systems and are ignoring simple fixes that could avert both accidents and intentional wrongdoing.Each of the remaining chapters focuses on a different set of solutions: designing more transparent and loosely coupled systems (Chapter 4); using structured decision tools (Chapter 5); learning from near misses and other warning signs (Chapter 6); encouraging dissent and skepticism (Chapter 7); building diverse teams (Chapter 8); learning from outsiders (Chapter 9); and preparing for and managing crises more effectively (Chapter 10).In the epilogue, the authors state that humanity is in “the golden age of meltdowns”: though modern systems give us tremendous capabilities, they also make us vulnerable to unexpected system failures. Clearfield and Tilcsik, however, express optimism about the future and argue that the solutions are within reach. At the same time, they caution that putting the necessary solutions into practice is difficult because doing so often goes against our natural instincts and violates persistent organizational and cultural norms.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Overstory"title="The Overstory">
"The Overstory" is divided into four sections, titled 'roots', 'trunk', 'crown', and 'seeds', mirroring the life cycle of a tree.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Billy_Shakespeare"title="I, Billy Shakespeare">
William Shakespeare's ghost angrily denounces suggestions that he did not write the works attributed to him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empires_of_Eve"title="Empires of Eve">
"Empires of Eve" illustrates the betrayals, alliances and leaders of "Eve Online", presenting the game's 2003-2009 history from an outsider's perspective. In it, everyone from the miners to the leaders becomes involved and contributes to conflict. "Empires of Eve" emphasizes the corporations (player-created groups) in the game's history and conflicts, incorporating lesser-known aspects of the game into the main narrative to illustrate its human side.In the first chapter, the Red Alliance (a Russian player group) makes its last stand against a faction of enemies; "Eve Online" is then explained to readers unfamiliar with the game. Returning to the game, the Evolution Corporation and "Eve Online" alpha and beta testing are explored. This is followed by the formation of the Venal Alliance and the betrayal which leads it to enter the 2003 civil war. The narrative moves on to cover how Evolution, Reikokou and the Jericho Fraction united as the Band of Brothers to battle the Phoenix Alliance (formerly the Venal Alliance) in the Great Northern War of 2004. The Band of Brothers, which played an important part in the war, is documented from its formation through its battle against the Fountain Alliance (its former allies) for Delve in 2005.Groen then covers the founding of Ascendant Frontier, including its alliance history, betrayals and war with the Band of Brothers (who feel threatened by the Frontier's technological weapons). In 2004, the Goons (player-created groups in "Eve Online") are introduced. The Goons fail eight times to hold together a corporation before they succeed, with the founding of Goonfleet. Their failed fight for independence, expansion under the Goonswarm banner and defeat by the Dusk and Dawn Alliance are explored.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Broad_Arrow"title="The Broad Arrow">
The novel tells the story of Maida Gwynham, a young woman lured into committing a forgery by her dishonest lover and wrongly convicted of infanticide. She is sentenced to transportation for life to Van Diemen's Land, where she is assigned to a Hobart family as a domestic servant. The novel describes the sea voyage to Australia and life in Hobart Town and Port Arthur for both convicts and free settlers. The "broad arrow" of the novel's title refers to the arrow that was stamped onto the clothing issued to convicts, indicating that it remained the property of the British government.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Cat,_Little_Cat"title="Big Cat, Little Cat">
An older white cat is a family's sole companion until it is joined by a younger black cat. The white cat welcomes the black cat. Over the course of the story, the two cats age, until the white cat dies. The white cat is mourned by the family and the black cat, until one day a new white kitten joins the family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_No._17"title="Woman No. 17">
Pearl "Lady" Daniels is a wealthy housewife living in the Hollywood Hills who is in the midst of a trial separation with her husband Karl, a television producer. After writing an article about her eldest son, Seth, who does not speak, Lady is given a book contract. She decides to hire a nanny to help with her youngest son and meets Esther "S" Fowler, a recent college graduate whom she immediately decides to hire based on the fact that she intuitively likes her.S is an art minor who, after a failed final art project, left the Bay Area and moved in with her mother. S has switched her name from Esther Shapiro to S Fowler, using her mother's maiden name. She decides to turn herself into her mother as an art project and has a makeover to make herself more dowdy. S is fascinated by Lady's sister-in-law, Kitty Daniels, a photographer who once took a portrait of Lady as part of a series of photographs she took of women, called Woman No. 17.Lady's work on her memoir is stagnating, but the work, and her relationship with S, causes her to reflect on her life at 22, when she was in a relationship with Seth's father, Marco, who convinced her not to have an abortion so that his dying mother could have a grandchild. Lady decided to go through with the pregnancy as a way to get away from her controlling mother, Simone. Simone later offered Marco $9000 to leave Lady and Seth which he accepted. Lady attributes Seth's silence to Simone's actions as Seth had said the word "There" before meeting Simone, and stopped speaking after witnessing Simone bribing Marco.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight's_Fee_(novel)"title="Knight's Fee (novel)">
The title comes from 'knight's fee', a feudal system term used for a manor or land holding held by a knight, in return for providing military support to an overlord. The novel is set in the same general location as Sutcliff's "Warrior Scarlet" (1958) and the plot contains several references to this earlier work. As with many of her books, it was illustrated by Charles Keeping. The central figure is Randall, orphan son of a Breton soldier and Saxon mother who works as a dog-boy in Arundel Castle. He is taken home by Sir Everard d'Aguillon, who holds the manor of West Dean from his feudal overlord de Braose, and is brought up with Sir Everard's grandson Bevis. The book follows the two as they grow up; when Sir Everard dies, Bevis becomes a knight and inherits the manor, with Randall as his squire. Bevis and Randall are part of the army led by Henry I against his older brother Robert Curthose in a campaign that culminates in the 1106 Battle of Tinchebray in Normandy.The battle ends in victory for Henry's combined Norman-Saxon army, but Bevis is killed and Randall is granted the manor of Dean in return for his service. These events are hinted at earlier in the book by Bevis's foster mother Ancret, a descendant of the original inhabitants; the theme of continuation is common in Sutcliff's work. Another which appears here is the idea of emotional ties that sit alongside legal duties, such as the feudal obligations of knighthood; these bonds are often more powerful and important, since they apply to any time period, whether Bronze Age Britain or the Normans in the 11th century.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neighborhood_(novel)"title="The Neighborhood (novel)">
Set in Lima in the 1990s during the presidency of Alberto Fujimori, the editor of the notorious tabloid "Exposed", Rolando Garro, is found beaten and stabbed to death and his body left outside a gambling parlor. Enrique Cárdenas and Juan Peineta, both of whom had their reputations destroyed by "Exposed", are suspected of killing Garro. Cárdenas was blackmailed by Garro to invest in his tabloid otherwise he would publish nude photos of Cárdenas. Cárdenas refused to meet the demands of Garro and had his reputation damaged when the photos were published. Peineta is a disgraced former television star and, before Garro's death, would send embittered letters to "Exposed".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Unkindness_of_Ghosts"title="An Unkindness of Ghosts">
On board the generation ship "Matilda" (named for the "Clotilda"), where the passengers have formed a society stratified along racial lines such that those with dark skin are relegated to lower-deck lives of servitude and harsh behavioral restrictions, Aster Gray is a lower-decks healer who must discover the hidden connection between her mother's suicide decades ago and the mysterious death of the ship's Sovereign.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_in_the_City"title="Down in the City">
Esther Prescott lives a sheltered, privileged life in a stone mansion at Sydney's harbourside Rose Bay. She is the only female member of her high-society family, and has seen little of life outside of her upper-class suburb. She meets the "flashy" self-made man Stan Peterson and the two are hastily married. After their wedding, Esther moves into a Kings Cross apartment with him; although charming in the beginning, he quickly reveals himself to be a tyrannical, egotistical drunk.Their relationship is further complicated by nosy residents of the building, and the return of Stan's ex-girlfriend, Vivian. Prescott finds herself at somewhat of a crossroads–her passivity and stoic manner are tested when her married life begins to unravel at the hands of her obstreperous, manipulative and immoral husband.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Fry_(book)"title="Small Fry (book)">
A "New York Times" review says that "Brennan-Jobs herself never addresses the question of his legacy; her book is written from the perspective of a child longing for a father." It covers her childhood in Palo Alto with her mother, and her father's estrangement. It details emotional abuse, with Jobs even failing to name her as one of his children in later years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_No_Quarter"title="And No Quarter">
The title is based on the battlecry 'Jesus and no quarter' allegedly used by Scottish Presbyterians or Covenanters at the 1644 Battle of Tippermuir. Walsh originally wanted to use the full slogan of 'Jesus and No Quarter,' but was persuaded otherwise by his wife and publishers. The novel is set during the 1644-1645 Royalist campaigns in Scotland led by Montrose against the Covenanter government. The protagonist and first person narrator is Martin Somers, 'Englishman and Adjutant of Women' (or surgeon) in Manus O'Cahan's Regiment, who is accompanied by his foster-brother Tadg Mor O'Kavanagh. The regiment forms part of an Irish contingent led by Alasdair Mac Colla, within a Scots-Irish army.The story opens just before the battle of Tippermuir in September 1644, then follows it through the Royalist victories of Aberdeen, Auldearn and Kilsyth, ending with defeat at Philiphaugh in September 1645. In the course of the campaign, Somers and his foster-brother rescue two women, the first being Meg Anderson, whom they rescue from the stocks during the sack of Aberdeen that followed the battle. The second is Isaebal Rose, who takes refuge with them in order to escape an unwanted marriage.Both women are attracted to Somers, but Meg is killed with other Irish camp followers by Covenanter cavalry prior to Kilsyth; after the Royalist defeat at Philiphaugh, Somers and Tadg Mor rescue Isaebal from her fiancée and return to Ireland. The novel closes with the three living in the US state of Virginia, where they have settled after leaving Ireland following the defeat of James II in 1691.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_Lightning_(novel)"title="Ball Lightning (novel)">
The novel follows the experiences of a first-person protagonist, Chen, whose family was killed by ball lightning while he was in high school. Both traumatized and inspired by that experience, he makes the investigation of ball lightning his life's work, first getting his PhD in the subject, then exploring the phenomenon through both applied and theoretical research. During his research, military technology researcher Lin Yun recruits him into a weapons development team. With the help of a theoretical physicist, Ding Yi, they discover that ball lightning is not formed by lightning conditions, but rather when lightning encounters "macro-electrons" hypercharging the electrons until they express their energy. They learn how to capture these macro-electrons and turn them into a weapon that can destroy targeted types of matter; wood, stone, or even microprocessors. After building the weapon and forming a specialized military unit to use the device, they successfully deploy the weapon against anti-technology eco-terrorists who try to blow up a nuclear plant, but kill a group of schoolchildren that had been held hostage. Disillusioned, Chen leaves the military research group. Ding Yi explains to Chen that those killed by macro-electrons, including his parents, exist in a quantum state that can occasionally influence the world when not observed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_of_the_Puma"title="Path of the Puma">
With a foreword by Doug Chadwick, the book chronicles Williams' journey, from his early work at a Florida marine park, to his conversion to "a lifelong devotee of the species". Williams has fitted pumas (also known as cougars and mountain lions) with radio collars and has installed cameras in their caves to track and study them. According to "Mountain West News", "Montana-based wildlife biologist Jim Williams celebrates wildlife research and conservation of ghost cats from Canada's Yukon Territory to Tierra del Fuego in Argentina and Chile..."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_American_Boys"title="All American Boys">
The book follows two characters, Rashad Butler and Quinn, as they navigate racism. The novel switches between the perspective of a black boy, Rashad, written by Jason Reynolds, and a white boy, Quinn, written by Brendan Kiely. Rashad is a 16-year-old who is assaulted by a white police officer in a convenience store when he is misinterpreted as a thief. Quinn, a family friend to the officer, is a witness to the incident.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_(novel)"title="Cherry (novel)">
The unnamed narrator, a young man from Cleveland, drops out of college and enlists in the United States Army as a medic during the Iraq War. Suffering from PTSD, the narrator starts self-medicating with opiates while deployed and continues once back home. His opioid use quickly becomes a devastating addiction that hurts his attempts at furthering his education and his personal relationships. After reigniting his relationship with his ex girlfriend, who enables his opioid abuse, the narrator begins to run out of money and decides to start robbing banks to pay for his and his girlfriend's habit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Thoughts_Exactly"title="My Thoughts Exactly">
Allen describes feeling neglected by her parents: her mother was addicted to drugs and her father was a narcissist who had affairs. Allen details the numerous schools she went to and describes a car accident involving her mother and brother which happened on the day she performed at a school concert. Aged 17 she met Lester, with whom she had an 18-month relationship. Allen overdosed on paracetamol following their breakup. She describes herself as codependent. During the same period, her father organised a deal with London Records and wrote songs for her with Pablo Cook. The label lost interest in her and after she sued to get out of the contract, they countersued unsuccessfully for £3.6 million. George Lamb started managing Allen, and she wrote music with Future Cut. Lamb stopped managing Allen, but she got a deal with Parlophone of £25,000 for five albums. With a growing Myspace fanbase, Allen was profiled in "Observer Music Monthly" and started working with Greg Kurstin. Writing about the pernicious nature of journalists and tabloids, Allen alleges that during her period of fame, her words were twisted and stories about her were constructed to fit misleading narratives. She describes a "News of the World" story leaked by Lester. In 2007, "The Sun" rang Allen's agent for confirmation that she was pregnant, but Allen did not realise she was pregnant until a week later. Announcing this publicly, she faked a miscarriage three weeks later.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Intimate_Grammar"title="The Book of Intimate Grammar">
The story takes place in the neighborhood of Beit HaKerem, Jerusalem in the 1960s. It explores Aron's internal struggles as well as his convoluted relationships. Aron is introduced as a dreamer and a leader to his friends in make-believe games. However, as time goes on, his parents and his friends begin to shame him for his lack of physical and mental maturity. His parents are ashamed of his physical shortcomings and his school friends grew tired of his childish imagination.Aron's relationship with his parents only becomes more strained as he approaches his Bar-Mitzva (a Jewish coming of age ritual for boys). His mother, in an attempt to convince herself that Aron has grown more than he really has, makes Aron wear thick socks to create an illusion that his feet have grown. Initially, Aron glorifies his physical condition and scorns adults for losing their individuality, but he shortly becomes depressed due to his inability to live up to his mother's expectations. In Aron's point of view, the world of adults is disloyal, full of troubles and dull. He refuses to grow up, maintains his integrity and avoids acting like an adult in order to escape puberty.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Reaper_at_the_Gates"title="A Reaper at the Gates">
The third book in the Ember Quartet picks up where the second book left off. Laia has now realized that if she wants to save her people, the Scholars, she must defeat the Nightbringer, a vengeful Jinn set on destroying them. But the Jinn is wily and ancient, and it will take all of Laia's smarts and courage to outwit him. In the forest called The Waiting Place, Elias has been condemned to a life of passing ghosts to the next world. But his connections to the world of the living, especially his feelings for Laia, are jeopardizing his ability to pass the ghosts on. This in turn threatens the very fabric of existence. Meanwhile, in the capital city of Antium, Helene Aquilla, the Blood Shrike, is hoping she can keep her younger sister Livia safe from the predations of her new husband, Emperor Marcus. To do so, she needs to hatch a clever plot that will lead to the destruction of both the Emperor and Keris Veturia. But Keris grows ever more powerful--and she's set on taking Helene down. Point of view characters in this book include, Laia of Serra, Elias Veturius, Helene Aquilla and the Nightbringer. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_That_Makes_You"title="Everything That Makes You">
Fiona Doyle is a teenager who is extremely self-conscious about her severe facial scarring, caused by oil burns from a popcorn machine. She has a crush on Trent, one of her classmates, but realizes that he will never be attracted to her because of her scars. To her surprise her friend David asks her out and Fiona begins dating him though she is not particularly attracted to him. Instead she is focused on song-writing, guitar playing, and trying to get into Northwestern University for creative writing. Before she leaves for university her doctors suggest a skin graft from a cadaver that might help her cosmetically. After her mother and brother pressure her, Fiona decides to go for the surgery.Fi Doyle is a version of Fiona that never sustained facial injuries. She is close friends with Trent, but rejects his romantic advances. Obsessed with lacrosse, her life is changed when she severely injures her ankle putting her chance of attending Northwestern University on a sports scholarship in jeopardy. While on rest she meets a home schooled boy called Marcus King and the two begin dating. Fi decides not to apply to Northwestern so she won't have to be apart from Marcus but is shocked when she discovers that, despite claiming to have severe allergies, he actually has a weakened heart and is dying.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_Sullied"title="God of the Sullied">
"God of the Sullied" is a story about an underachieving, innocent and supposedly cursed child, who in the end, conquers the world and demolishes the evil. The story revolves around ninth century India, just after the sudden demise of Adi Shankaracharya – a time when a unique and exotic Ikshavaku tribe lives somewhere in Rudraputra. Their scion, Eklavya, as per the predictions of Maha-Purohit (high priest), would take birth with a purpose of demolishing the evil from the earth. The child is declared mystic. However, he would later be clutched in the hands of Kali, the darkness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Today_is_Friday"title="Today is Friday">
Three Roman soldiers described as "a little cock-eyed" drink red wine in a "drinking place" in the aftermath of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. They are in the company of only a Hebrew bartender named George. The first soldier orders more wine from George. The third soldier leans on a barrel in pain, complaining of a gut ache which has rendered him unable to continue drinking. George mixes a drink to fix the third soldier's gut ache. The third soldier drinks the cup and exclaims, "Jesus Christ." The three soldiers then converse about the crucifixion of Jesus they had witnessed earlier that day. The first soldier insists that "he was good in there today," while the soldiers remark on which aspects of the crucifixions they enjoy or dislike. The third soldier continues to feel unwell.The first soldier asks the others if they "saw his girl," which is implied to be Mary Magdalene. The second soldier replies that he "knew her before he did," further implying he used her services as a prostitute before she became a follower of Jesus. The soldiers continue to talk about the crucifixion, where the first soldier admits that he stabbed Jesus with a spear while he was on the cross, insisting it was "the least I could do for him."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indecent_Proposal_(novel)"title="Indecent Proposal (novel)">
Joshua Kane, a descendant of Holocaust survivors and a veteran of the Israeli army is stuck in an unfulfilling corporate job where, although making fairly decent money (31k in 1987 is 80k in 2022) he constantly feels that he is not living up to his potential. His beautiful wife Joan comes from a wealthy Philadelphia family from the Main Line area and seems satisfied with the state of their marriage. Josh and Joan were both married to other people before leaving them and marrying each other. At the opening scene at the casino we see Josh’s admiration for the high roller Sheik Ibrahim - his wealth, power, prestige, polish, flair - everything that Josh wants, Ibrahim is. Normally if their paths crossed they would have nothing to offer one another. But Josh does have something Ibrahim wants: Joan! Bit by bit, Josh and then Joan are drawn further into Ibrahim’s orbit. A telephone call, a dinner invitation, and then a fateful meeting. In response to being made aware of Ibrahim's propositioning of Joan while they were at dinner, Josh confronts Ibrahim in the latter's suite only to receive an offer: one million dollars for a night with his wife. Josh then tells Joan, who is not entirely unreceptive. After a few days of tortured rationalizing, and big trouble at Josh’s place of employment, they accept the offer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Photograph_(novel)"title="The Photograph (novel)">
In "The Photograph", character Glyn Peters finds a photograph of his deceased wife, Kath, suggesting that she had an affair with her brother-in-law.Glyn decides to unearth more details about his wife and the affair by interviewing those who knew her in life.The narrative is structured around Glyn, Kath's sister Elaine, and Elaine's husband, Nick.The novel contains "a multitude of Kaths," as Kath's friends and family had unique perceptions of her that sometimes shifted over time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/These_Truths"title="These Truths">
The book is divided into four sections: "The Idea" (1492-1799), "The People" (1800-1865), "The State" (1866-1945), and "The Machine" (1946-2016). The idea of truth itself is a core theme of the book: Lepore traces how a number of technological and political forces—including newspapers, mass media, propaganda, polling, and political consulting—have fundamentally altered the way that Americans define and understand what is true, ultimately eroding a shared understanding of empirical truth. The book also foregrounds the country's histories of slavery and systemic racism, demonstrating how these injustices have distorted and undermined America's commitment to its founding truths. Lepore illustrates the book's historical narrative by highlighting the stories of a variety of individuals, from well-known figures like Abraham Lincoln to women and people of color like Jane Franklin Mecom and Maria Stewart whose contributions are often overlooked in textbook accounts of American history. Lepore also writes that "These Truths" "is meant to double as an old-fashioned civics book" that explains "the origins and ends of democratic institutions" such as the two-party system, the nominating convention, and the secret ballot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Pendulum_Sun"title="Under the Pendulum Sun">
In the mid 19th century, Catherine Helstone travels to Arcadia in search of her brother Laon, a missionary who disappeared while trying to convert the fae to Christianity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renshi_zhuan"title="Renshi zhuan">
Wei Yin and Cheng were friends, and cousins, who were always together and were both fond of wine and beautiful women. Although they spent so much of their lives together, they had very different personalities and views on life which became apparent when Cheng married. In the middle of one summer, Cheng came across a beautiful woman accompanied by 2 handmaidens. The beautiful lady was "dressed in white and of an enchanting beauty". He was captured by her otherworldly looks and offered his donkey for her to ride, saying that a beautiful girl like herself should not have to walk. They became engrossed in conversation for so long that Cheng wound up at a large mansion that night, where the lady, named Miss Jen, lived. Miss Jen asked Cheng to wait a moment while she went inside to prepare something for him. After being invited in, they feasted and drank several goblets of wine and lay together that night.After leaving the next morning, Cheng could not get the beautiful Miss Jen off his mind. As he was traveling home through a neighboring village he asked about he mansion he has just come from; according to the local proprietor no such mansion existed in that area, only a gate and broken down walls. Cheng could hardly believe this as he had spent the night at this wonderful place and he told the proprietor such. The proprietor suspected that it was the local fox spirit, who liked to beguile men into staying the night with her. After several weeks had passed without his spotting the lady again, Cheng finally stumbled across her in the market place. She knew that Cheng had figured out her secret and was shocked that he would seek her out again. Cheng professed his love for her and proclaimed that he would take care of her and find her a place to live if she would marry him. After some convincing, Miss Jen agreed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.A._Requiem"title="L.A. Requiem">
Elvis Cole is contacted by business partner and friend Joe Pike to accept the request of Frank Garcia, owner of a tortilla company. The old tycoon wants the two to look for his daughter Karen Garcia, whom he hasn't heard from for a day. Despite Elvis' doubts about the investigation, Joe accepts the case, aided by the deep bond that united Karen and Joe, before he left the Los Angeles police force and founded a private agency with Cole. The investigations are short-lived: after a short time, Karen's body is found by the police on a jogging trail in Lake Hollywood. Thanks to the connections Garcia Sr. has on the Los Angeles City Council, Cole and Pike can witness the continuation of the investigation, coordinated by Harvey Krantz, member of the Robbery-Homicide Section of the Los Angeles Department. Between Pike and Krantz there is a relationship of deep hatred due to an investigation carried out years earlier by Krantz regarding Abel "Woz" Wozniak, of whom Pike was a patrol companion, about his involvement in a racket of burglars. As the research continues, new characters are added to the initial duo and new mysteries emerge from the past, significantly marking the events of Cole and, above all, of Pike, who will have to deal with what, at first glance, seems the yet another murder of a serial killer. But appearances can be deceiving...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Miernik_Dossier"title="The Miernik Dossier">
Low-key and straightforward, the plot is relatively simple, incorporating two basic threads. Underlying everything is a group of Muslim terrorists in the Sudan, the Anointed Liberation Front, whose goal is overthrowing the legitimate government. Western intelligence agents believe that the terrorists are being directed and armed by the Soviets—their goal is to both destroy the group and to bring the Soviets into discredit. The story itself, however, begins in Geneva, where a Polish historian, Tadeusz Miernik, works for the World Research Organization, an agency of the United Nations. He has a number of friends, most of whom are associated with various intelligence agencies. The main thread of the book soon becomes clear: is Miernik exactly what he claims to be, a simple historian, or is he a Soviet agent, working either for Polish intelligence or for the Soviets themselves? His actions throughout the book are ambiguous; even his diaries give no clear answer. The most vivid character in the book is Kalash el Khatar, a tall, black, flamboyant, Oxford-educated Sudanese prince who considers all whites and their ways to be distinctly inferior. Miernik is ordered to return to Poland. He tells the others that he is fearful for his life if he does so and seeks refuge in the West. El Khatar has been given a Cadillac limousine to deliver to his father, a powerful sect leader in the Sudan. He decides to ship the car across the Mediterranean to Cairo, then personally drive it to the Sudan. Miernik, Christopher, and others join the proposed trip; most of the book is an account of their journey. Along the way, Christopher makes a brief detour to penetrate Communist Czechoslovakia at Miernik's behest to apparently rescue his beautiful sister from the Communist regime. Eventually, the disparate group arrives in Sudan, at the feudal castle of el Khatar's father. They have successfully evaded murderous bandits—now some of them come into direct contact with elements of the Anointed Liberation Front and the pace of the book picks up. But even as the death toll mounts dramatically, the question still remains: Is Miernik a Soviet operative sent to direct the terrorists, or not?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Vendetta_(novel)"title="La Vendetta (novel)">
"La Vendetta" is a short work relating the tragic fate of Ginevra Piombo, the daughter of proud Corsican immigrants, who has the misfortune of falling in love with another Corsican Luigi Porta. When it becomes known that Luigi is the sole survivor of a massacre in which the rest of his family were the victims of a bloody vendetta with Ginevra's family, Ginevra's father Bartolomeo is determined to complete the act of vengeance by having him killed. But Ginevra refuses to yield to her father's demands and she and Luigi are married. Over the following years the pair eke out a miserable existence, dogged by hunger and poverty, while Ginevra's wealthy father refuses to lift a hand to support her: it is as much as he can do to refrain from murdering Luigi. Ginevra gives birth to a child, but she and the child die on the very day that Monsieur Piombo finally relents and decides to assist the impoverished couple. Before he can act, however, Luigi visits him and gives him the tresses of his deceased daughter. "Dead! Our two families were doomed to exterminate each other. Here is all that remains of her," he says, laying Ginevra's long black hair upon the table. Ginevra's parents are shaken, as though a stroke of lightning has blasted them. Luigi departs. "He has spared me a shot, for he is dead," says Bartolomeo, slowly, gazing on the ground at his feet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tears_of_Autumn"title="The Tears of Autumn">
In November 1963, American intelligence case officer and former Marine Paul Christopher investigates the assassination of US President John F Kennedy. Believing that the Kennedy White House was behind the assassination of Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, Christopher deduces that Vietnamese leaders had Kennedy assassinated as revenge. When one of Kennedy's former advisers threatens Christopher not to discuss the matter with anyone else, Christopher quits the Agency and heads to Vietnam to find the truth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Goddess"title="The Dark Goddess">
Archaeologist Moira Rhalles is kidnapped by the KGB while she is on a dig in France. Her historian husband and her ex-boyfriend team up to try to rescue her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Supper_(novel)"title="The Last Supper (novel)">
"The Last Supper" fills a great deal of back story to the Paul Christopher saga. The first part of the novel details Christopher's parents' courtship and marriage in pre-World War II Germany, Christopher's childhood, and the mystery surrounding his mother's disappearance. The second part of the novel picks up right after "The Tears of Autumn", with Christopher being imprisoned in China for espionage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_of_Those_Hideous_Books_Where_the_Mother_Dies"title="One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies">
Fifteen-year-old Ruby reluctantly moves from Boston to Los Angeles after her mother passes away from cancer. She explains that her father, famous actor Whip Logan, divorced her mother before she was even born and the only time she ever saw him was in the movie theater. Another reason why Ruby is sad about leaving is her boyfriend Ray, whom she's in love with. Whip is extremely eager towards Ruby's arrival and insists on spending as much time with her as possible; making her resent the fact that he was never involved in her life before her mother's death. She starts her new high school, but feels out of place with the other students. She does however meet a fellow sophomore named Colette whose mother is also a celebrity. As time goes by, Ruby learns that Ray has been cheating on her with her best friend Lizzie. Whip is able to comfort her and eventually make her feel better. Ruby learns that while she was little, her aunt would arrange secret visit between her and Whip, and that her mother didn't want him involved in her life because he was gay. Ruby and Max, her father's assistant and also his partner in the story, have a very close relationship. The book ends with Ruby making up with Lizzie after she and Ray break up, and winning a leading part in Pygmalion in school along with her boyfriend Wyatt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Infinite_Man"title="The Infinite Man">
A research project, Project Genesis, searches for evidence confirming the Steady State Theory of continuous creation in the area within and surrounding an unnamed American Midwestern city, according to which, 125,000 newly created neutrons (also called "neoneutrons", which decay into hydrogen atoms consisting of protons and electrons while giving off hard gamma radiation - here called "creation-radiation") should be called into existence in an Earth-sized volume in a twenty-four-hour period. The monitored area is an equilateral triangle with thickness of and an area of which should, by a proportional estimate, register twenty-one neoneutronic creation signatures in that same period.Suddenly, not merely twenty-one, but millions of neoneutrons are called into existence in this monitoring area, fusing some of the sensor equipment. After replacing and refusing of the sensor elements, the locus of the phenomenon is traced to a rail-yard on the edge of the zone, and further, apparently emanating from a young drug-user and hobo, Milton Bradford.Five years later, Milton Bradford (or, "Brad" to his inner circle) has gone from drug-using poverty to the pinnacle of corporate power as the Chairman of Progress and Development Enterprises (P&amp;D), a real-estate and industrial conglomerate who functioned as an important partner during the days of the Genesis Project. P&amp;D was formerly headed by Gerstal B. Hedgemore, who committed suicide in apparent shame when Bradford was confirmed as his illegitimate heir, consequently leaving him his worldly and corporate fortunes in his will. For the first two years of this time Bradford, now flush with wealth and time to spend it, lives the dream - even so far as to create a self-satirical rock group, Hocker's Mock Rockers, which is a wild success, providing even more income for P&amp;D Enterprises. Five years in, however, Bradford is attempting to grow into his new role as powerful Chairman of a wealthy and powerful company.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepwalking_Land"title="Sleepwalking Land">
Set in a war-torn Mozambique during the end of the civil war when the tension between rival political parties was at its highest point, Tuahir, an older man, and Muidinga, a boy recovering from illness, met at the refugee camp and fled. Together, they travel down a road that had been abandoned and encounter many signs of the war including a burnt bus and many corpses along the side of the road. Next to one of these bodies they find a set of notebooks written by a person named Kindzu. Muidinga and Tuahir take the notebooks with them into the scorched remnants of the bus that they use as a shelter. The narration alternates the conversations between Tuahir and Muidinga with the entries of the notebooks being read aloud by the latter. Kindzu manages to narrate the birth of an independent Mozambique and the struggle to keep stability right before the civil war. He also gives us a glimpse of the importance of family relationships and finding an identity, both personal and national.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrot_and_Olivier_in_America"title="Parrot and Olivier in America">
As the novel opens, Olivier recalls his childhood. Born to members of the French aristocracy, Olivier grows up a strange, unhealthy, and eternally curious boy. Meanwhile, Parrot grows up in working-class England, where his father works for a printer, and Parrot spends his days taking care of Watkins, an elderly engraver and counterfeiter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tears_of_a_Tiger"title="Tears of a Tiger">
Andy Jackson, a seventeen-year-old student, just won a basketball game at Hazelwood High School, and he and his friends Robbie Washington, Tyrone Mills, and B.J. Carson decide to ride home in Andy's Chevrolet Chevette. While they ride, they decide to drink with Andy still driving. However, Andy accidentally crashes his car, and the resulting accident causes an explosion. Andy, Tyrone, and B.J. all escape but are not able to save Robbie, who burns to death in the wreckage.After getting out of the hospital, Andy's license and car are taken away, and he soon begins the grieving process. Coach Ripley, the basketball coach, gives him advice, and Andy takes Rob's place as team captain. He starts talking to Dr. Carrothers, a psychologist, but it becomes clear he's hiding his true feelings about what happened as he is pretending he's fine.Andy's depression soon gets worse as it impacts his schoolwork and mental state. While staying home to watch his 6-year-old brother, Monty, Andy has a nightmare where Rob is blaming him for his death. Andy's girlfriend, Keisha, notices little by little that his depression is a lot worse than he says it is, but doesn't tell anyone. After long days of her comforting him, she feels like he has everyone fooled, Dr. Carrothers, his parents, and Coach Ripley, everyone other than her. His emotions soon become far too much for her to handle alone, and she feels like he depends on her. She breaks up with him, declaring to her friend, Rhonda, she never wants to see him again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Rust"title="American Rust">
## Characters.Isaac English: Nineteen year-old protagonist of American Rust. A recent high school graduate, who, despite his academic potential, does not attend college and has little hope for leaving his hometown or achieving economic mobility. Remains to help care for his elderly father. Becomes implicated in a murder at an old trainer plant, then resolves to ride the rails to Berkeley, California to become a student of physics with $4,000 stolen from his father's personal savings, but is ultimately unsuccessful and returns to Pennsylvania.Billy Poe: Twenty-one year-old best friend of Isaac, former high school football star, though he does not share his friend's dedication to academics. Receives an opportunity for an athletic scholarship to play football at Colgate University, though declines. Becomes implicated in the aforementioned murder as he and Isaac try to leave Buell in the opening of the novel. Becomes incarcerated, sacrificing himself to allow Isaac to leave his hometown.Lee English: Isaac's older sister who escapes their hometown to attend Yale University where she feels insecurity due to her social class and where she grew up. Lee lives in Connecticut and is married to the wealthy Simon, who does not appear directly in the novel. She also has an affair with Poe, whom she dated before she was married.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Lord's_Fury"title="First Lord's Fury">
Returning from the ruined continent of Canea, Gaius Octavian, his betrothed Kitai, the Canim warmaster Varg, and their legions find that most of the Aleran Empire has been destroyed or besieged by the insect-like Vord, a monstrous race led by a single sentient Queen that consumes everything they come across. Most of the Aleran resistance is based in the city of Riva, on the far eastern end of the continent. Octavian and his troops have landed on the northern edge and need to find a way to meet up with the other Aleran nobles in Riva. Meanwhile, Aquitainus Attis, who has been named First Lord in Octavian's absence, has given the order to salt the earth between Riva and the Vord, slowing the vord's approach.After making landfall outside of the city of Antillus, Octavian begins preparations for his march to Riva. However, the Vord queen makes an appearance via watercraft projection, making essentially a hologram of herself out of every pool of water large enough to hold it, all across the continent. She states that her victory is inevitable and that she will accept any Aleran that wishes to surrender and allow them to live out the remainder of their life in peace provided they do not have any children. Octavian then uses the same watercrafting tactic to announce his arrival on the Aleran continent and give a morale boosting speech. Meanwhile, his aircrafting knights use their abilities to fly in and evacuate an occupied village from under the Queen's nose. In retribution, the Queen kidnaps Octavian's mother, Isana, as well as Araris Valerian, Isana's lover and the most skilled swordsman in the realm.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castration_Celebration"title="Castration Celebration">
The book follows Max and Olivia, two teenagers that are attending a summer arts program at Yale. Max is a drama student while Olivia is in the process of writing a feminist musical about the sex lives of teenagers and their often unrealistic portrayal in high-school movies. The two characters clash, as Olivia has chosen to stay away from men while Max has a goal of trying to pick up every woman he meets.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt's_Peril"title="Halt's Peril">
Halt, Will, and Horace discover that Tennyson, the leader of a fake religious cult called the Outsiders, and his followers have fled to Picta, a country to the north of Araluen and home of the Scotti, with the assistance of a smuggler named Black O'Malley. The three follow their trail and discover that Tennyson is heading toward Araluen. Tennyson's plan is to travel to an outlying Araluen village where he has already established influence to reinvigorate his movement. The trio continue to follow Tennyson through Picta and foil some Scotti raiders along the way. As the three catch up to Tennyson, they engage with the remaining two of his hired Genovesan assassins. Halt and Will manage to kill one, but the other injures Halt and escapes uninjured.After a while, the wound is discovered to be poisoned by a hallucinogen which is slowly killing Halt. In desperation Will decides to seek the healer Malcolm and brings him to help. Malcolm explains that the poison has two possible sources with conflicting cures, and that administering the wrong cure will kill Halt. Will and Horace realise that the remaining assassin has been returning frequently to check on Halt's condition, and formulate a plan to capture him and force him to identify the poison by piercing him with his own arrow and promising the antidote if he tells them the origin poison. After being cured alongside Halt, the assassin attempts to escape but is killed by Will.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil's_Novice"title="The Devil's Novice">
In mid September 1140, Meriet Aspley, the younger son of Leoric Aspley, the lord of Aspley manor, enters the Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, petitioning to become a monk. In October, he has nightmares during which he speaks aloud, waking the entire dortoir. The superstitious novices whisper that he is possessed, and nickname him "The Devil's Novice." The Abbey receives a visit from Canon Eluard, an emissary of Bishop Henry of Winchester, who come to inquire after Peter Clemence, a young cleric in the Bishop's household, who has not returned from a diplomatic mission to Chester. Because Clemence was last seen as a guest at Aspley Manor, Eluard questions Meriet, who had tended the guest's horse at the manor. The following morning, Leoric had ridden the first mile out with his guest, who was on his way to Whitchurch for his next night's lodging.After completing the mission that had been assigned to Clemence, Eluard rides on to urge King Stephen to visit Ranulf, Earl of Chester, and his brother, William of Roumare, at Lincoln, which suggestion is taken up. Sheriff Prestcote travels with King Stephen, leaving Hugh Beringar in charge. Armed with Meriet's description, Beringar finds Clemence's horse and returns it to the Abbey stables. The next morning, Meriet identifies the horse for Beringar, telling the horse's name, Barbary, same name he cried in his sleep. Brother Jerome is officious. Meriet jumps on Jerome and nearly strangles him, before Cadfael restrains him. Meriet is punished by being whipped and kept ten days in a punishment cell.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_in_the_Mind_(novel)"title="All in the Mind (novel)">
Set over a period of four days, the novel explores mental illness through its central character, Professor Martin Sturrock, described as 'widely viewed as one of the best psychiatrists in the business', and several of his patients. Among these are an alcoholic politician, a traumatised burns victim, a depressed manual worker, an adulterous barrister turned fitness fanatic and a Kosovan refugee who has been raped. Each patient tells his or her story in a consultation with Sturrock before they are later revisited in their individual subplots. Over the course of a weekend it becomes apparent that the brilliant but overworked Sturrock is as desperate for help as the people he is treating, and following an encounter in a seedy brothel the story ends for the Professor on a busy London street.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heir_of_Redclyffe"title="The Heir of Redclyffe">
"The Heir of Redclyffe" tells the story of the Byronic Guy Morville, heir to the Redclyffe baronetcy, and his cousin Philip Morville, a conceited hypocrite who enjoys an unwarrantedly high reputation. When Guy raises money to secretly pay off the debts of his blackguard uncle, Philip spreads the rumour that Guy is a reckless gambler. As a result Guy's proposed marriage to his guardian's daughter Amy is called off and he is disowned by his guardian. Guy bears the situation with a new-found Christian fortitude until the uncle clears his character, enabling him to marry Amy after all. They honeymoon in Italy, finding Philip there suffering from a life-threatening fever. Guy nurses him back to health, but catches the fever himself and dies. Philip, transformed by contrition, inherits Redclyffe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mighty_Fortress_(novel)"title="A Mighty Fortress (novel)">
Following Charis' conquest of Corisande, the people of Corisande are becoming increasingly restive under the occupation (despite the fact that Charis is governing both wisely and compassionately) and two major resistance movements begin to coalesce—one in the capital city of Manchyr and one in the Northern aristocratic estates. Both conspiracies enjoin "Temple Loyalists", who view the Church of Charis as an abomination that must be destroyed, with secular leaders, who want to take back their nation from the foreign occupation and both seem to be getting very well organized. While Merlin uses his advanced technology to maintain a constant watch over these groups, he, Emperor Cayleb and Empress Sharleyan (who is now pregnant with her first child) decide not to move against them now and wait until they can crush all opposition in a single stroke. Meanwhile, in Talkyra—the capital city of Delferahk, where the surviving children of Corisandian Prince Hektor are now in exile—the Earl of Coris is summoned to Zion to consult with the church leadership. While Coris is loath to leave Princess Iris and Prince Daivyn alone and despite his suspicions regarding the Inquisition's involvement in their father's death, Coris has little choice but to comply with the Temple's demands.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_a_Teenage_Baboon"title="Confessions of a Teenage Baboon">
Chris Boyd, at fifteen, is an only child. The story is told from Chris' point of view as the son of Helen, his mother who works as a live-in practical nurse. His father left the family (by saying he was going out to buy a newspaper) when Chris was a young child, moving to Mexico and then dying there a short time later.Helen and Chris move into the Dipardi residence for Helen's most recent assignment, to care for Carmelita Dipardi, the mother of Lloyd Dipardi. Lloyd is described by Chris to be "about thirty years old with enough muscles to beat up anyone within a ten mile radius". There's also "Pops", Lloyd's father, who appears to suffer from dementia. Lloyd has hired Helen to care for his mother.Chris has held on to a relic of the past, a chesterfield trench coat that once belonged to his father, and which he hopes to someday grow into. Helen has her own issues, such as making Chris urinate in a milk bottle on assignments where they don't have their own private bathroom. Helen also takes household items and other goods from clients for her own use, often without asking, and this soon manifests in one of many confrontations between the hard-drinking and partying Lloyd and the more introverted Chris.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You're_a_Big_Boy_Now_(novel)"title="You're a Big Boy Now (novel)">
The central character of the novel is Bernard Chanticleer, a shoe salesman at a London department store at which his father is a manager. The Chanticleers live in a suburb, and "are type-cast as ridiculous bourgeois". At the store he meets a girl, Amy, who is rejected by his mother as "that terrible blatant girl with such common legs too".Bernard, described by one reviewer as "comically neurotic", then becomes infatuated with a stage actress, Barbara Darling. He sends her an impassioned note and they agree to meet. Barbara wants to victimize Bernard in revenge for her being ill-treated by men in the past. Eventually Barbara tires of Bernard and marries a window dresser. They have a child who bears a suspicious resemblance to one of Barbara's former lovers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_God"title="The Case for God">
In the introduction, Armstrong presents two forms of knowledge, "mythos" and "logos". Since the 16th and 17th century, she says "logos" governed civilization, resulting in two phenomena: fundamentalism and atheism. Armstrong says that the new atheists have made some invalid criticisms of religion. She states, "I can sympathize with the irritation of the new atheists", but she maintains that they have focused primarily on fundamentalism. She says they "aren't radical enough" and finds their work "disappointingly shallow". According to Armstrong, "My aim in this book is simply to bring something fresh to the table."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reef_of_Death"title="Reef of Death">
In the story, 17-year-old Peter Collins McPhee (nicknamed P.C. because he loves playing computer games) is called by his Uncle Cliff to solve a mystery in Australia. The brother of a young Aboriginal girl named Maruul has gone suddenly missing while searching for their tribe's treasure, told of in a riddle. She says there was a terrible screeching sound, and a boat came near just as her brother disappeared.P.C. finds that there is a killer creature living in the depths of the reef. The creature attacks and kills his uncle. The two kids go to Wally Wallygong, an Aboriginal fishing shop owner, who explains the riddle. Afterwards, they all go to the reef location of the creature and pretend to be attacked by snakes. The strange ship that has been passing by takes them on board. They attempt to escape and are almost killed.They find out that the captain of the ship, a geologist, has had the treasure—a carved opal wall—all along, and was making the screeching noise mechanically, which signalled the creature to attack. She also plans to destroy the treasure. P.C. tricks the creature into eating the captain, and Maruul returns to her village with the treasure. The village buys long-needed resources with the treasure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_Voyage"title="Fatal Voyage">
A plane crash in the mountains of North Carolina and an unidentified severed foot found in the vicinity lead Brennan and would-be lover Detective Andrew Ryan to investigate a mysterious cult.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tentacles_(novel)"title="Tentacles (novel)">
"Tentacles" begins as the protagonists from "Cryptid Hunters" board the "Coelacanth", a presumably haunted ship, on a voyage led by Dr. Wolfe to capture a giant squid alive. During the voyage, there are Mokele-mbembe eggs (which Marty and Grace had found in the Congo in "Cryptid Hunters") incubating in a laboratory restricted to most of the crew. Unbeknownst to Wolfe, Blackwood's thug, Butch is on board stealing the Mokele Mbembe eggs and Grace for his boss. The book culminates in a showdown/feud between Blackwood and Wolfe, ending in Ted Bronson, Wolfe's partner's, successful capture of a squid, though Blackwood, thinking Wolfe and the rest of the crew to be dead, escapes with the hatchlings, and Grace. Unbeknownst to Wolfe, Grace tricked Blackwood into taking her, with the dragonspy hidden on her, allowing her to be one step ahead of Blackwood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradiva_(novel)"title="Gradiva (novel)">
The story is about an archaeologist named Norbert Hanold who is obsessed with a woman depicted in a bas-relief that he sees in a museum in Rome. After his return to Germany, he manages to get a plaster-cast of the relief, which he hangs on a wall in his work-room and contemplates daily. He comes to feel that her calm, quiet manner does not belong in bustling, cosmopolitan Rome, but rather in some smaller city, and one day an image comes to him of the girl in the relief walking on the peculiar stepping-stones that cross the streets in Pompeii. Soon afterwards, Hanold dreams that he has been transported back in time to meet the girl whose unusual gait so captivates him. He sees her walking in the streets of Pompeii while the hot ashes of Vesuvius subsume the city in 79 AD.This fantastical dream leads Hanold on a real journey to Rome, Naples, and ultimately Pompeii, where, amazingly, he sees the Gradiva of his bas-relief stepping calmly and buoyantly across the lava stepping-stones. He follows her, loses her, then finds her sitting on the low steps between two pillars. He greets her in Latin, only to be answered, "If you wish to speak to me, you must do so in German." When he addresses her as if she were the girl of his dream, however, she looks at him without comprehension, gets up and leaves. Hanold calls out after her, "Are you coming here again tomorrow in the noon hour?" But she does not turn round, gives no answer, and a few moments later disappears round the corner. Hanold hurries after her, but she is nowhere to be seen. What follows is his quest to determine whether the woman he has seen is real or a delusion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Land_of_Little_Rain"title="The Land of Little Rain">
"The Land of Little Rain" is a collection of short stories and essays detailing the landscape and inhabitants of the American Southwest. A message of environmental conservation and a philosophy of cultural and sociopolitical regionalism loosely links the stories together.The opening essay describes the "Country of Lost Borders," an area of land between Death Valley and the High Sierras. The image created of the land at the beginning of the story is one of almost unbearable heat and dryness, punctuated by violent storms. Despite the description of how inhospitable the landscape is, at the end Austin proposes that the costs the land imposes upon a man are worth it because it provides man with peace of mind and body that cannot be achieved any other way.The section's title refers to the trails made by wild animals moving towards sources of water across the landscape of an area known as the Ceriso. The Ceriso is not defined in the text, but in "The Last Antelope," Austin says that it "rises steeply from the tilted mesa overlooked by Black Mountain, darkly red as the red cattle that graze among the honey colored hills," and that it is "not properly mesa nor valley, but a long healed crater miles wide, rimmed about with the jagged edge of the old cone." The essay provides descriptions of the many animals that travel along the trails, including coyotes, rabbits, and quails. Their ability to find water where there seems to be none is extolled by Austin, a skill which she believes no human is able to match.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mention_My_Name_in_Atlantis"title="Mention My Name in Atlantis">
The story is told by the unreliable narrator Hoptor the Vintner, a fast-talking operator with all the right contacts who is convinced in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary that he can smooth over anything. "Mention my name" is his tagline, meant to assure his auditors that dropping it in various quarters is their ticket to getting whatever they want. The book combines a number of cliches of the literature and pseudoscience regarding Atlantis, such as extraterrestrial visitors, as well as of the fantasy genre in general, most notably the ambitious barbarian brute, Conax of Chimeria, a satire on Robert E. Howard's sword and sorcery hero Conan of Cimmeria.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N.E.R.D.S."title="N.E.R.D.S.">
## "N.E.R.D.S.: National Espionage, Rescue, and Defense Society" (2009).Dr. Jigsaw and Simon or Heathcliff "Choppers" hatches a plot to change the surface of the earth. Newly recruited Jackson "Braceface" and the rest of the N.E.R.D.S. have to stop him before it is too late.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_(Yu_novel)"title="Brothers (Yu novel)">
"Brothers" describes the step-brotherhood between Baldy Li and Song Gang. Their life of childhood and adolescence accompanied by their parents, Li Lan and Song Fanping, as a reorganized family amidst the rising and falling during the Culture Revolution Period is depicted in Part 1. Their life of adulthood with different living trajectories and destines during the early period of China's Opening-up is depicted in Part 2.Part 1.Before the birth of Baldy Li, his biological father falls into the cesspool and drowns himself while peeping at women's butts in a public latrine. When Baldy Li becomes a teenager, he is caught and marched by Poet Zhao and Writer Liu as punishment for peeking at five women's butts in a latrine. The mother of Baldy Li, Li Lan, is ashamed, resulting in her bitter muttering about her son – "A chip off the old block". Even though Baldy Li's good name is ruined, he begins to sell his glimpse of the naked bottom of Lin Hong, who is the most beautiful woman in Liu Town, in exchange of house-special noodles.Li Lan was extremely distressed and afraid of losing face due to the shameful death of her husband, resulting in the long-term migraines after giving birth to Baldy Li. She shuts the door to the public and becomes isolated while raising Baldy Li. Song Fanping – the man who is always nice to Li Lan and brings the shit-covered dead body of the father of Baldy Li back to her – is an exception. When Song Fanping's wife dies and Baldy Li is about seven, Li Lan and Song Fanping get married. Song Fanping, Li Lan, Baldy Li, and Song Gang – the son of Song Fanping become a new blended family. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Fruit_(novel)"title="Strange Fruit (novel)">
"Strange Fruit" takes place in a Georgia town in the 1920s and focuses on the relationship between Tracy Deen, son of prominent white townspeople, and Nonnie, a beautiful and intelligent young Black woman whom he once rescued from attacking white boys. The two have a secret affair, and Nonnie becomes pregnant by Tracy, who secretly plans for her to marry "Big Henry," whom she despises, while he marries the good little white girl his parents expect him to marry. He changes his mind after a conversation with a local preacher and intends to make his relationship with Nonnie public. Instead, he tells Nonnie of his original intent to have her marry Big Henry, having paid him money to do so. Nonnie's brother learns of Big Henry's payments from Tracy and the reason behind Big Henry's impending marriage to Nonnie. This prompts Nonnie's brother to kill Tracy. When Tracy's body is discovered by Big Henry, Big Henry is accused of murder and lynched.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fever_Dream_(Preston_and_Child_novel)"title="Fever Dream (Preston and Child novel)">
While visiting his family plantation in New Orleans, Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast inadvertently uncovers evidence that his wife Helen's death whilst on safari in Africa was no accident. He enlists the help of his friend, police lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta, in his search for Helen's killer. Their investigation quickly betrays just how little Pendergast knew about his wife, as they uncover her fascination with John James Audubon, a local painter whose work in chronicling the wildlife of America became very influential. Helen was searching for the "Black Frame", a near-mythical painting made by Audubon when he was committed to a sanatorium. Pendergast and D'Agosta soon discover that Audubon's early work was particularly poor, and come to the conclusion that his sickness somehow triggered his artistic genius. However, their investigations have attracted the attentions of the same conspiracy responsible for Helen's murder, and when D'Agosta is put in mortal danger, Pendergast must turn to Captain Laura Hayward to venture deep into the Louisiana bayou and uncover the extent of the conspiracy. Helen was a researcher on Project Aves, an attempt to create a drug that could enhance a person's latent genius by modifying a rare strain of avian influenza. The project ended in disaster when an infected bird escaped quarantine and infected a local family. Upon learning that no attempt to recover the bird was made so that Project Aves could have human test subjects, Helen planned to reveal the conspiracy to the world and was murdered for it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Video"title="Jesus Video">
During an archaeological dig in Israel, American college student Stephen Cornelius Foxx discovers the remains of a man who seemingly died about two thousand years ago. Among the dead man's belongings is a small linen bag that holds the user manual for a digital video camera. Foxx and his mentor, Professor Wilford-Smith, later find out that this particular model will not be released by its producer, Sony, for another three years. Soon they begin to speculate that the dead man may have been a time traveller from the future, who went back in time to film a significant event two millennia ago—and of course, the most significant thing to film during that era was Jesus Christ.Media magnate John Kaun, the financier of the dig, initiates a search for the camera, which seems to be hidden at an unknown location. Stephen, however, wants to find it on his own, with help from fellow student Judith Menez and her brother, Yehoshuah. A race for the Jesus Video begins, and soon becomes more dangerous than anyone imagined, as the Roman Catholic Church is doing all in its power to keep the video from going public.Stephen and Judith eventually find the camera, which they discover has been guarded by a secret order of monks for centuries, but are unable to access its memory because the batteries are empty. As the military and the Vatican's agents follow them, they flee into the desert, where they eventually succumb to the heat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Ditch_Your_Fairy"title="How to Ditch Your Fairy">
"How to Ditch Your Fairy" is set in a world where a lot of people have their own personal fairy. These fairies bestow certain kinds of luck on the possessor: there are loose-change-finding fairies, good-hair fairies, clothes-shopping fairies, all-boys-will-like-you fairies, parking fairies, etc. Charlie (short for Charlotte) has a parking fairy; if she is in a car, a perfect parking spot is found on the first try. But Charlie is only 14 and she does not drive and hates exhaust, so she thinks she has been cursed. She wants a fairy like her best friend Rochelle has, a clothes-shopping fairy that makes everything look perfect on her, or like her frenemy Fiorenze has, an every-boy-will-like-you fairy.Charlie's attempts to starve her fairy away by walking everywhere collects her demerits for lateness at her school, New Avalon Sports High, where the focus is on sports. The water polo star, Danders Anders (who seems to have very poor communication and does not understand no), virtually kidnaps her in his car to go to illegal gambling places and which drastically halts her attempt to remove the fairy. And when the pulchritudinous new boy, Steffi, on whom she has a crush appears to fall for Fiorenze, Charlie gets drastic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lothair_(novel)"title="Lothair (novel)">
Lothair, a wealthy young orphaned Scottish nobleman (loosely based on The 3rd Marquess of Bute) has been brought up in the legal guardianship of his Presbyterian uncle Lord Culloden and of a Catholic convert, Cardinal Grandison (based on Henry Edward Cardinal Manning). When he comes of age Lothair finds himself the centre of attention of three fascinating women, Lady Corisande, Clare Arundel, and Theodora Campion, representing the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Radical cause respectively. Wavering in his allegiances, he unsuccessfully proposes marriage to Lady Corisande, almost joins the Catholic Church, and finally joins Theodora in Italy as a volunteer in the army of Garibaldi, which is fighting to take the Papal States for Italy. Theodora is killed at Viterbo, and Lothair is seriously wounded at the Battle of Mentana, but is nursed back to health by Clare Arundel, who tries to persuade him that he was saved by an apparition of the Virgin Mary. He takes refuge with the bohemian dandy Mr. Phoebus (a thinly disguised Frederic Leighton), who takes him to Syria, which, as the cradle of Christianity, seems the ideal place to reflect on the roots of the Christian faith. In Jerusalem he meets Paraclete, a mystic who teaches him that there is truth in many religions. Lothair returns to England and decides in favour of the Church of England, resisting the attempts of Cardinal Grandison and other prelates, including Mgr Catesby (modelled on Thomas Capel), to convert him to Catholicism. The novel ends with his marriage to Lady Corisande.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Far_Cry_from_Kensington"title="A Far Cry from Kensington">
Set in 1954, it is narrated by Agnes (known as Nancy) Hawkins; a young war widow lodging in a rooming house in South Kensington and working as an editor at a struggling publishing house. The story centres on Wanda, a highly strung Polish dressmaker who is receiving various threatening letters, and on Hector Bartlett, who appears to be stalking Agnes and through whom she loses her job. "Muriel Spark was trolled in her lifetime by an ex-lover who, by all accounts, was a pretty despicable character. This novel is her revenge on him." The story also features the pseudoscience of radionics.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Curé_de_Tours"title="Le Curé de Tours">
The Abbé François Birotteau and the Abbé Hyacinthe Troubert, both of whom are priests at Tours, have separate lodgings in the house belonging to the crabby spinster Sophie Gamard in that city. Birotteau is an other-worldly, gentle, introspective type; Troubert, who is ten years younger than his fellow boarder, is very much "of" the world: he is a careerist devoured by ambition.Birotteau prides himself on his furniture and fine library, inherited from his friend and predecessor as parish priest of Saint-Gatien de Tours. Without reading all its clauses, or at least without remembering them, he signs a document handed to him by Mlle Gamard, forfeiting his entitlement to his lodgings and making over their contents to her in the event of his vacating his premises for any considerable period. He leaves them for a fortnight's stay in the country, where he is served with a possession order by his landlady's lawyer. On returning home he finds Troubert installed in "his" apartments, in full possession of "his" furniture and "his" library, whilst he himself has been moved into inferior rooms.Birotteau abandons any prospect of a lawsuit to regain his property, as his friends in the provincial aristocracy of Tours gradually withdraw their backing. In return for giving up his rooms he had expected to be appointed to the vacant canonry of the cathedral. Instead, he is demoted to a much poorer parish two or three miles out of Tours. Deprived of his library and furniture, he leaves Mlle Gamard's, thinking that this will indirectly bring him, through Troubert, the canonry which never comes. Troubert, on the other hand, is first appointed Vicar-General of the diocese of Tours, then Bishop of Troyes, scarcely deigning to look in Birotteau's direction as he speeds past his colleague's dilapidated presbytery on his way to his diocese.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montmorency_(novel)"title="Montmorency (novel)">
London, England, 1875. The main character falls through a glass roof onto a grinding machine below while fleeing from the police. Doctor Robert Farcett, hoping to prove himself an accomplished doctor by working on the criminal's complex wounds, saves the thief's life by performing surgery on him. Farcett continues to work on the thief after he is imprisoned and given the temporary name "Prisoner 493". The prisoner has no name other than "Montmorency", which was the name on the bag he had when he was captured. He adopts this name and slowly begins to craft a persona to match.During his sentence, Montmorency becomes a chief exhibit at the Scientific Society. It is at one of these gatherings that Montmorency comes across Sir Joseph Bazalgette, who is the planner and supervisor of the ongoing London sewer project. Montmorency realises that the sewers are the perfect escape route for his daring robberies. He has high hopes for living as a gentlemen by selling the expensive items he could steal via the sewers. Montmorency realises that rich people do not normally smell like sewer water or wear ratty clothes, he finds himself in need of an accomplice—a fellow thief with knowledge, capability, and secrecy to perform the robberies. He develops a second identity—Scarper—to mask his true identity. Scarper, the thief, poses as a servant to the extravagant and wealthy Montmorency.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Doth_the_Simple_Spelling_Bee"title="How Doth the Simple Spelling Bee">
The story's protagonist is Chickle University professor Masticator B. Fellow, and is about his efforts to enlist the story narrator's support for spelling reform. Fellow advocates spelling all English words in a simpler, phonetic manner in order to make spelling easier for children and foreigners. Debates quickly ensue regarding whose pronunciation should be considered standard for phonetic spelling.The story then changes focus to a couple who are attending the convention for spelling reform. This couple is much more interested in their blossoming romance than they are spelling reform. The narrator finds the woman of this couple attractive, attempts to woo her, and a love triangle ensues, forming some basis of suspense for the plot. The book ends with neither Fellow's attempts at spelling reform nor the narrator's attempts to win a woman's esteem proving the least bit successful.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wicker_Man_(novel)"title="The Wicker Man (novel)">
The "Wicker Man" novelization follows the plot of the film closely, but also expands upon the original story, incorporating additional backstory and new material that would have been unable to fit in the film. Some of the novel's scenes were originally shot for the film, but were cut to reduce running time and have not been seen since the loss of the film negative. For example, the character of Lord Summerisle's gillie is restored, and the reader learns of Howie's interest in bird-watching.The novelization reveals that Sergeant Neil Howie had originally attempted to become a priest, but that he was daunted by the prospect of preaching the minority faith of Episcopalianism in the staunchly Presbyterian Scottish Highlands. Howie's relationship with his fiancée, Mary Bannock, is explored in greater detail. Allan Brown writes that Howie's arguments with Lord Summerisle have more impact in the novel than they did in the film, as the casting of Christopher Lee, who is associated with many villainous roles, made it difficult for the film's audience to trust Lord Summerisle or consider his arguments seriously. In the novel, "the battle is more ambivalent, more unsettling – and, in the end, perhaps more in keeping with the treacherous moral landscape Shaffer initially envisioned."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_(short_story)"title="Mother (short story)">
The story is about a young couple living in New York who wish to marry, but must wait until their means are sufficient. The groom-to-be luckily inherits a large sum, and intends to invest it wisely in order to live off the income. However, under the influence of an unscrupulous financial advisor, he begins to lose a large portion of his money in dubious investments. His wife-to-be has a more objective view of the situation and offers sound advice. The plot draws its suspense from determining whether the advice given will work in time for the couple to be able to marry. This short story provides considerable insight into the financial and social interconnections predominant among the middle and upper classes in the quarter century that preceded the stock market crash of 1929.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pereira_Maintains"title="Pereira Maintains">
The novel is set in Portugal in the summer of 1938, during Salazar's dictatorship. Pereira, an old journalist on a Portuguese newspaper - the "Lisboa" - who loves literature and practically gives his life to it. When he reads an essay written by a young man about death, he calls the young man, whose name is Monteiro Rossi, to ask him to write "advance obituaries" about great writers who could die at any moment. Not having ever been much concerned with politics, Pereira's world is turned upside down when he begins to get to know the distracted and leftist youth. The articles he receives from Monteiro Rossi (and pays him for) have a definite leftist slant and are completely unpublishable, but something continues to attract Pereira to him, perhaps the fact that his wife died before he could have children of his own. His visit to a clinic to help his ailing heart puts him in contact with a doctor, with whom he becomes close friends and discusses the doubts he is beginning to have about his isolated and apolitical life. In the end, fascist police visit Pereira and beat to death Monteiro Rossi. With the help of a phone call from his doctor friend, Pereira manages to slip an article about the murder and condemning the regime into the newspaper he works for.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitechapel_Gods"title="Whitechapel Gods">
The book is set in Victorian London where its inhabitants are shut off from the outside world by two mysterious and mechanical deities, Mama Engine and Grandfather Clock. The humans had tried and failed to rise up against the Boiler Men that oppress them, an attempt that cost several lives. In the meantime a strange disease has begun to progress across the remaining people, slowly turning them into machines.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_Hall"title="Justice Hall">
Mary Russell and husband Sherlock Holmes receive a surprise visitor late at night: a much-changed Ali Hazr, one of their Palestinian companions during the events of O Jerusalem (novel) five years ago. Ali asks their help for his brother Mahmoud, and reveals their true aristocratic identities: Mahmoud is actually Lord Maurice "Marsh" Hughenfort, the Seventh Duke of Beauville, and Ali is his cousin, Alistair John Hughenfort.Ali, Holmes, and Russell travel to Justice Hall, the family seat in Berkshire. After the death of his older brother Henry, Mahmoud (now Marsh) is determined to do his duty as the new duke, remaining in England and abandoning his nomadic life in Palestine. Marsh’s sister Phillida and husband Sidney Darling have been running the estate, and quietly resent Marsh’s return. To free Marsh from Justice Hall, Russell and Holmes investigate the line of succession, focusing on the former heir Gabriel, Henry’s son, who was executed during the war. Russell meets Iris Sutherland, Marsh’s wife, and deduces that Gabriel is in fact their son. Stricken by guilt and doubt over his son’s death, Marsh cannot leave his family in good conscience.The current heir Thomas, son of Marsh’s brother Lionel, has grown up in France and has never met his Hughenfort family. Marsh also suspects that Lionel did not father Thomas, given Lionel’s “flamboyant” disinterest in women. During a weekend bird shoot, Marsh is injured in what appears an accident, but which Russell et al. believe to be a murder attempt. The Hughenforts sans Marsh meet Thomas and his mother in London, and Ali, Iris, Russell, and Holmes decide that Thomas does not resemble a Hughenfort. Russell and Holmes then follow Thomas and his mother back to Lyons, and discover that Sidney Darling had coached them to ensure continued control over the estate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sunless_City"title="The Sunless City">
The story centres on the lead character, a prospector named Professor Josiah Flintabbaty Flonatin. Flonatin travels by submarine through a bottomless lake in the Rocky Mountains. While exploring the depths of the lake he discovers a strange city. Within the city the local currency is tin, the streets are paved with gold, and the city is ruled by women. Flonatin, who is a bachelor, decides to escape the city, and does so by climbing out of a crater, which is actually an extinct volcano.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_Comes_to_Harlem_(novel)"title="Cotton Comes to Harlem (novel)">
This novel begins with a Back-to-Africa rally, which is run by Reverend Deke O’Malley. The rally is interrupted by masked white hijackers who come armed to steal the collected money, which amounts to $87,000. There's a large amount of shooting, and one man is killed as the hijackers make their getaway with the money in a large truck.An investigation is started to find the murderer, and the main characters, "Grave Digger" Jones and "Coffin Ed" Johnson, are summoned. Uncle Bud, a homeless junk collector, finds a bale of cotton that fell off the white hijackers’ get-away truck and eventually ends up selling it to a junkyard run by a man named Goodman. Reverend O’Malley is not who everyone thinks he is; Grave Digger and Coffin Ed know this and suspect that the whole Back-to-Africa movement is a cover for some kind of swindle. They question Iris, O’Malley's girlfriend, but get no answers and keep her under surveillance.Colonel Robert Calhoun opens up his Back-to-the-Southland movement, asking the Black people of Harlem to come back South to make a living picking cotton. Deke hides out at the apartment of Mabel Hill, the widow to the man that was shot at the hijacking, believing that no one will try to locate him there. Meanwhile, Iris escapes the police surveillance, tracks O'Malley to Mabel's and catches Deke there wearing nothing but his underwear. During a catfight between Iris and Mabel, Iris gets hold of a gun and kills Mabel out of jealousy. Deke knocks Iris unconscious and escapes. Iris is arrested for Mabel's murder, but when she says she can prove Deke is a Confidence artist, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed agree to break her from jail to find where Deke is hiding. She ends up using them to get away instead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_of_Josiah_Henson,_Formerly_a_Slave,_Now_an_Inhabitant_of_Canada,_as_Narrated_by_Himself"title="The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself">
## Advertisement.This slave narrative begins with an 'Advertisement.' In the case of this book, the use of the word Advertisement is not to introduce a paid announcement to publicize a type of good or enterprise. Instead, its function is that of a notice to the readers to the fact that the work is the authentic work of Josiah Henson. The advertisement discusses the fact that the memoir was written from a dictation given by Josiah Henson, and so, the substance of the work is his own while "little more than the structure of the sentences belongs to another." Through the paragraph-long passage, to further authenticate the work, it expressly says that the work is "not fiction, but fact." (Henson, 1)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragon_of_Despair"title="The Dragon of Despair">
The novel continues the story of Firekeeper, who must deal with the continued machinations of Melina Shield. Continuing to desire power and strong magic, Melina has brainwashed a powerful leader into marrying her. It's up to Firekeeper to stop Melina and hopefully bring peace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Father"title="The Dead Father">
The "Dead Father" is being hauled with a cable by some of his children, across lands and under all weather conditions, towards a goal of an emancipatory nature but that is left mysterious throughout most of the story, to be revealed, at the end of the novel, to be his burial spot.The story, in a genre typical of the author, does not follow a conventional plot structure, but evolves through a series of revelations, seemingly-unrelated stories, anecdotes, dialogues, descriptive figments, surreal snapshots of reality, personal rendering of the characters' impressions or recordings. The whole of chapter 22 is a stream of bizarre, deconstructed sentences, as if muttered by a narrator too imbued by the urgency of his thoughts to give attention to proper grammar, giving the impression of a deep penetration in the character's consciousness. The plot is thus, more than in other novels, a support for the themes explored. The text is also noted for its word play, irony, absurdist humor, that are abundant in the author's short stories.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_World_(novel)"title="Real World (novel)">
The novel starts from Toshi's perspective. She hears loud crashes coming from Worm's house, and suspects a robbery. Terauchi suggests that it might be a fight between the wife and husband. She convinces Toshi to ignore the crashes, stating that it's not their concern.Soon after, Toshi leaves for cram school on her bicycle. She sees Worm, who looks uncharacteristically happy. He speaks to her for the first time, commenting on the hot weather. Toshi mentions the loud sound she heard, and Worm tells her she must be mistaken. After leaving cram school, Toshi discovers that her bike and mobile phone have gone missing. She learns from her friends that a boy has been answering her phone, and making calls from it. Toshi suspects that Worm has stolen her belongings. Meanwhile, police suspect Worm of matricide. They question Toshi, but she resolves not to tell them anything. Yuzan provides Worm with a bicycle and a cell phone to aid his getaway. Worm calls Kirarin, and invites her to meet him at a train station. She is initially willing to go with him, but when she later appears hesitant, Worm threatens her with a knife. Kirarin pays for a love hotel, where the two spend the night. He makes sexual advances on Kirarin, but she rejects him. Her friends call her, worried, but Kirarin assures them that everything is alright. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_Academy_(novel)"title="STAR Academy (novel)">
In her dull hometown of Downview, 11-year-old super-genius Amanda Forsythe is underestimated by teachers and classmates, considered an eccentric because of her advanced scientific theories. As the story begins, Amanda loses a science fair competition at her school because her photon sail spaceship exhibit is too complex for the dimwitted judges (her principal and home room teacher) to comprehend. They make fun of it and instead award the prize to two lame exhibits, one that tries to pass off a thinly disguised vacuum cleaner as a robot, and another that suggests solving the world's hunger problem by re-engineering the genes of Third World children so that they can eat sticks, grass and dirt. Fortunately for Amanda, scouts from the new and prestigious Superior Thinking and Advanced Research (STAR) Academy, are in the audience. They recognize Amanda's brilliance and give her a scholarship to live in residence amongst the 200 most intellectually “ultra-gifted” children on planet Earth. There, they are groomed to become Earth's top scientists of the future, charged with solving humanity's most pressing problems.Given unlimited funding by “anonymous philanthropists” and run by the enigmatic Headmistress Oppenheimer and Professor Leitspied, as well as George, a flighty but staggeringly intelligent engineer, the Academy is the perfect place in which a young super-genius can flourish. Amanda and her classmates, most of them former social outcasts because of their high intelligence, forge friendships with each other and, for the first time in their lives, are truly happy, recognized and appreciated by both faculty and peers. In addition to being able to do unlimited research on their own pet projects, the students are divided into intramural teams, then given identical research challenges, supposedly to encourage friendly competition to accelerate their scientific advancements. Chosen to head one of the intramural teams, Amanda distinguishes herself by leading her group to victory in their first assignment, to devise an electronic means to block bad memories.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Sheldon's_Mistress_of_the_Game"title="Sidney Sheldon's Mistress of the Game">
Following the death of Kate Blackwell, her granddaughters, Eve Blackwell-Webster and Alexandra Blackwell-Templeton, give birth at roughly the same time. Eve, vowing revenge at her whole family, gives birth to Max, whom she raises to hate his father and relatives. Alexandra gives birth to Alexandra "Lexi" Templeton, but dies from complications, but Lexi is raised in a loving household with her father Peter and her brother Robbie. As a child, Lexi is kidnapped and raped, and while she is rescued, an explosion leaves her completely deaf.On their joint eighteen birthday, Max is jealous of Lexi's easy ability to draw Kruger-Brent's board members to her. Robbie, a successful pianist, plans to give his share of the company to Lexi, which would make her 2/3 in control of the company when she turns twenty-five. Eve sends Max to seduce her, forming a romantic relationship with her and sending her to a doctor to cure her hearing. Lexi lets her guard down and willingly gives him the code to her safe, where he finds a memory card filled with racy pictures from her college days and leaks it to the public. The board members unanimously agree to terminate Lexi from Kruger-Brent, giving full control to Max. However, after a year, Lexi's new company "Templeton" restores her professional reputation and outshines Kruger-Brent, which is failing due to Max's unsteady control.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_Along_the_Ohio"title="Danger Along the Ohio">
Traveling down the Ohio River in May 1793, thirteen-year-old Amos and his younger siblings, Clara and Jonathan, joined by their cow Queen Anne, are separated from their father during an ambush of the Shawnee Indians. The three children and their cow are swept down the river, and decide that they must make their way back through the wilderness in the direction of the Marietta, Ohio settlement, hoping to find their father there. They find a Native American in the Ohio River. They call him Red Moccasin. Red Moccasin mistrusts them and his condition slows them down, but Amos refuses to leave him behind to die. The children and their cow continue their dangerous journey towards the Marietta Settlement on their own, but they get captured by Red Moccasin's grandfather. Amos is thinking about the Indian Chef Blue Jacket about how he got captured by Indians to stay if they left his siblings go. They finally get to Marietta, and they find their father there. [see notes]
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sport_of_Nature"title="A Sport of Nature">
While still a secondary school student, Kim Capran decides to rename herself "Hillela". Hillela joins the ANC, she marries a black man from the congress and has a child with him. She travels to Dar es Salaam and Nairobi before returning to South Africa in the final pages as the wife of a fictitious President of Kenya.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maze_Runner"title="The Maze Runner">
Thomas wakes up in a metal elevator that brings him to the Glade. He has no memory of who he is or how he got there, except for his name. He gradually discovers that the Glade is run by two boys: Alby, the leader, and Newt, the second-in-charge, who both maintain order by enforcing simple but effective rules. The elevator box surfaces from under the ground once every week and supplies new food, tools, medicine, and sometimes weapons. Every month, a new boy with no memory of anything but his first name finds himself in that elevator box.The Glade is surrounded by a square of four-mile-high walls made of concrete. The walls have openings in them, which slide shut doors every night. Outside the walls is the Maze, a labyrinth of high concrete walls covered in ivy that changes every day. The Maze houses strange, lethal creatures known as Grievers. Not much is known about them. The Gladers are trying to stay alive as well as "solve" the Maze by appointing "runners" to run through it as fast as they can while they track movements of the walls and try to find an exit to escape.One day after Thomas's arrival, a girl, Teresa, is delivered through the elevator into the Glade. She was the first ever girl to arrive into the Glade. She had a note saying "She's the last one. Ever." The girl later lapses into a long coma. When Thomas comes to visit her, he recognizes her but cannot remember her name until he hears her voice in his mind, telling him her name. Teresa then wakes up and tells Thomas that they knew each other before they were sent into the Glade, revealing their ability to communicate telepathically. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Sleep_(novel)"title="Doctor Sleep (novel)">
Following the events of "The Shining", after receiving a settlement from the owners of the Overlook Hotel, Danny Torrance remains psychologically traumatized as his mother Wendy slowly recovers from her injuries. The two are living in Florida, but angry ghosts from the Overlook, including Mrs. Massey, the woman from Room 217, still want to find Danny and eventually consume his phenomenal "shining" power. Dick Hallorann, the Overlook's former chef, teaches Danny to create mental lockboxes to contain the ghosts, including that of former Overlook owner Horace Derwent.As an adult, Danny (now going by Dan) takes up his father's legacy of anger and alcoholism. Dan spends years drifting across the United States, but he eventually makes his way to New Hampshire and decides to give up drinking. He settles in the small town of Frazier on a psychic hunch, working first for the Frazier municipal department and then at the local hospice, and attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. His psychic abilities, long suppressed by his drinking, re-emerge and allow him to provide comfort to dying patients. Aided by a cat, "Azzie", that can sense when someone is about to die, Dan acquires the nickname "Doctor Sleep".In the meantime, Abra Stone, a baby girl born in 2001, begins to manifest psychic powers of her own when she seemingly predicts the 9/11 attacks. She slowly and unintentionally establishes a telepathic bond with Dan through Tony, Dan's childhood "imaginary friend". As she grows, the contact becomes more conscious and voluntary, and her shining grows stronger than even his. One night, Abra psychically witnesses the ritual torture and murder of a young boy, Bradley Trevor, by the True Knot, a group of quasi-immortal nomads who possess their own psychic abilities. The True Knot members wander across the United States and periodically feed on "steam", a psychic essence produced when people who possess the shining die in pain. They refer to their victims as Rubes. The True Knot's leader, Rose the Hat, becomes aware of Abra's existence and formulates a plan to kidnap Abra and keep her alive, making her produce a limitless supply of steam.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterlily_(novel)"title="Waterlily (novel)">
The story begins with Blue Bird giving birth silently and alone to a baby girl while her husband's camp-circle is on the move. She names the baby Waterlily after being overwhelmed by the beauty of waterlily in a nearby body of water. Blue Bird returns to the camp where she is taken care of by her cousin. Blue Bird then recalls her childhood at age 14 when she lost her family. She had accompanied her grandmother to go and gather beans and firewood, and upon their return, they realize that their campsite has been attacked. They travel to a nearby camp-circle where they are adopted. Star Elk, one of the young men of the tribe, proposes to Blue Bird, and she gives him her word that she will marry him. The couple elopes, which was not an entirely honorable way to enter marriage, but since he did not dishonor Blue Bird their marriage is considered acceptable. Blue Bird gains recognition in the tribe as an honorable woman and is accepted by Star Elk's family, but Star Elk proves to be a lazy, rude, and inattentive husband. Blue Bird's flashback ends and she is content with her baby. However, Star Elk continues to be a difficult and jealous husband. He attempts to shame Blue Bird by "throwing her away" publicly, but instead he loses his own prestige because Blue Bird had proven herself as a respectable woman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_Bound"title="Spirit Bound">
The book starts off with Rose reading the last in a series of love letters/death threats from Dimitri. The final exams are set to start in a short time and she resolves to stay focused and pass them to the best of her abilities and hope it will be enough for her to get assigned to Lissa. The teachers test her by having her trapped on a swinging bridge with Strigoi approaching on both sides, which she passes by cutting the bridge, then "killing" the opponents on her end.After Abe's network relayed a message from Victor Dashkov that there was nothing he could be bribed with while he was behind bars, Rose plots with Lissa and Eddie to break him out of his high-security vampire prison. They successfully do so by disguising themselves as guardians bringing new feeders and relying heavily on Lissa's compulsion abilities. Victor agrees to lead them to his brother, Robert, a reclusive spirit user who is rumored to have once returned a Strigoi to their original state.They travel to Las Vegas, where Adrian tracks Rose's credit cards and follows them. While not very pleased with Rose's continued endeavors to help Dimitri, he stays with them. Robert tells them that the Spirit user must infuse a stake with Spirit and kill the Strigoi on its own, but escapes when they are attacked by Dimitri and other Strigoi. They manage to escape and upon their arrival at court Eddie and Rose are punished for endangering the Moroi and sent to do physical labor. While they are occupied, Lissa and Christian are kidnapped by Dimitri as bait for Rose.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_in_White"title="Vision in White">
The novel follows the relationship of photographer Mackensie "Mac" Elliot and English teacher Carter Maguire. Mac and her childhood friends Parker, Emma, and Laurel are the founders of Vows, a fictional wedding planning company in Connecticut. While accompanying his sister to a planning session at Vows, Carter renews his acquaintance with Mac and confesses that he had been infatuated with her since high school. She is intrigued by his honesty and earnestness and decides to embark on a casual fling with him.After seeing her parents' numerous failed marriages, Mac does not trust the idea of commitment. Her determination to avoid emotional intimacy is reinforced as she struggles against her mother's continued tactics of emotional manipulation.Their relationship progresses slowly through the book. Each protagonist receives much advice from a large circle of friends and family. With the support of her friends and Carter, Mac develops the courage to stand up to her mother. By the end of the novel, she realizes that she does not have to relive her parents' mistakes, and chooses to embrace her love for Carter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rides_a_Dread_Legion"title="Rides a Dread Legion">
Ten years after the cataclysmic events of "Wrath of a Mad God", Midkemia now faces a new danger thought buried in myth and antiquity.A lost race of elves, the taredhel or 'people of the stars', have found a way across the universe to reach Midkemia. On their current home world, these elves are hard pressed by a ravaging demon horde, and what was once a huge empire has been reduced to a handful of survivors. The cornerstone of taredhel lore is the tale of their lost origins in the world they call simply 'Home', a place lost in the mists of time. Now they are convinced that Midkemia is that place, and they are coming to reclaim it. Ruthless and arrogant, the taredhel intend to let nothing stand in their way; but before long, Pug and the Conclave realise that it's not necessarily the elves, but the demon horde pursuing them where the true danger lies. And hanging over Pug always is the prophecy that he will be doomed to watch everyone he loves die before him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary"title="The Master and His Emissary">
The 608-page book is about the specialist hemispheric functioning of the brain. The differing world views of the right and left brain (the "Master" and "Emissary" in the title, respectively) have, according to the author, shaped Western culture since the time of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, and the growing conflict between these views has implications for the way the modern world is changing.The book is divided into an introduction, two parts and a conclusion. In the introduction, McGilchrist states that "there is, literally, a world of difference between the [brain] hemispheres. Understanding quite what that is has involved a journey through many apparently unrelated areas: not just neurology and psychology, but philosophy, literature and the arts, and even, to some extent, archaeology and anthropology."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution,_Me_&amp;_Other_Freaks_of_Nature"title="Evolution, Me &amp; Other Freaks of Nature">
The story follows Mena Reece, a high school freshman. She has recently been kicked out of her evangelical Christian church for writing a letter that has exposed the church, and her parents’ insurance agency, to a lawsuit for what members of the church's youth group did to a fellow high school student. She soon finds herself being abused by members of her former church, is permanently grounded by her parents, and in the middle of her school's evolution verses intelligent design debate. All the while Mena manages to keep her faith in God though starts to doubt everything else in the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat_of_Bubastes"title="The Cat of Bubastes">
After his father, the king of the Rebu, is killed in battle with the Egyptian army and the Rebu nation is conquered by the Egyptians, the young prince Amuba is carried away as a captive to Egypt, along with his faithful charioteer, Jethro.In Thebes, Amuba becomes the servant and companion to Chebron, the son of Ameres, high priest of Osiris. The lads become involved in a mystery as they begin to uncover evidence of a murderous conspiracy within the ranks of the priesthood. However, before they are able to prevent it,they are forced to flee for their lives when they accidentally cause the death of the successor to the Cat of Bubastes, one of the most sacred animals in Egypt. With Jethro as their guide and protector, the boys make plans to escape from Egyptian territory and return to Amuba's homeland.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Valley_of_the_Kings"title="In the Valley of the Kings">
"In the Valley of the Kings" is divided into eight sections (according to the inner lining of the book's dust jacket, "seven short stories and one novella"), each with its own diverse plot and setting.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauchamp's_Career"title="Beauchamp's Career">
Nevil Beauchamp is a young naval officer with high ideals of honour and public service who, having been wounded in the Crimean War, recovers his health in Venice. He there falls in love with a brilliant and high-spirited French girl, Renée de Croisnel, with whom he hopes to elope. Renée marries an elderly French aristocrat instead, and Nevil takes up his naval career again. He falls under the influence of the republican and freethinking Dr. Shrapnel, thereby alienating his wealthy uncle Everard Romfrey, a staunchly Conservative peer. Nevil stands for Parliament as a Radical, but he is defeated. Everard horsewhips Dr. Shrapnel, and refuses when an outraged Nevil demands that he apologise. Renée now returns to claim Nevil, but he has meanwhile fallen in love with a beautiful Tory, Cecilia Halkett. Nevil reconciles Renée with her husband, but Cecilia refuses Nevil's proposal. With his love life in ruins Nevil falls ill and is thought to be at death's door. Uncle Everard repents of his quarrel with Nevil and Dr. Shrapnel, and apologises at last. On Nevil's recovery he marries Dr. Shrapnel's ward Jenny. The marriage is a happy one, in spite of Nevil's not being in love with her, but after a few months Nevil dies in an attempt to save a child from drowning.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetty_Feather"title="Hetty Feather">
Hetty was abandoned at the Foundling Hospital as a newborn baby. Children abandoned at the hospital are in Foster care or fostered until the age of five, at the nearest date when they turn six they will be returned to the hospital to start their education. Hetty spends her earlier life as a foster child under the care of Peg and John Cotton who she knows as her mother and her father, and grows close to their biological son, Jem. She is very unaware that she will one day have to leave the Cottons. There are other foster children in her home as well as Peg and John's own children. One day, she and she discovers a circus, where she meets Madame Adeline, whom she believes to be her mother because of her bright red hair, which is very similar to Hetty's own.Finally, the time comes for Hetty and Gideon to be sent back to the Foundling Hospital. Everyone in the family is devastated, and Jem and Hetty promise to find each other again with a coin to remember each other. Hetty finds her time in the hospital miserable and oppressive, and often rebels or otherwise talks back in an environment where she's expected to be meek and obedient. This earns her the animosity of the hospital's Matrons, who punish her severely. Despite that, she manages to make friends among fellow foundlings and even staff, including Ida, a kind kitchen maid.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Marine_(memoir)"title="China Marine (memoir)">
## Okinawa.Sledge's second book opens in 1945 with the First Marine Division remaining in Okinawa after the 82-day battle to clean up and prepare for their anticipated invasion of "Yokosuka Naval Base at the mouth of Tokyo Bay". None of the Marines expected to survive such an invasion. After the atomic bombings and Japan's precipitous surrender they did not celebrate, but rather were kept busy by a return to the intense manual labor of cleanup. In Sledge's words, "I think we were actually afraid to believe it was true...The memory of so many dead friends was still fresh in our minds."Life in Okinawa suddenly became more bearable as the bewildered and unbelieving Marines grasped the reality of their enormous good luck. So they filled in their free time with entertainment including movies, books and their perennial pastime of "'smokestacking' (fooling)" new replacement troops. Even otherwise dangerous events such as a typhoon (see 1945 Pacific typhoon season) which struck Okinawa were easily weathered.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Further_Adventures_of_Lad"title="Further Adventures of Lad">
A couple, referred to only as the Master and Mistress, purchase a pure-bred rough collie named Lad to be the guard dog of their home, the Place. Though they are surprised when they receive a puppy instead of an adult dog, they decide to keep him and he quickly shows himself to be very intelligent and easily trainable. At first, Lad views all people as friends, including a burglar who robs the house one night. When the man climbs out the window with a bag of loot, Lad thinks he is playing a game and snatches the bag in play. The thief chases Lad, then shoots him to get back the bag. Lad realizes the man is not friendly and turns to attack him, but the thief falls into a ditch, knocking himself unconscious. Afterward, Lad no longer trusts strangers so easily and has become a true watchdog.While in town with the Mistress, Lad saves her from an attack by a sick dog being chased by the police and other citizens, who believe it to be rabid. The dog is shot and the upset Mistress, who knew it was not really rabid, goes home. The next day, the town constable comes by boat to the Place to execute Lad under the notion that he is now rabid. The Master argues that the other dog was not rabid and refuses to allow Lad to be shot, ordering the officer off his property. As the man is leaving, his boat overturns. Unable to swim, he is in danger of drowning until Lad jumps in and brings him back to shore. The grateful officer states that he killed the dog he came to kill and Lad only looks a little like him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Memory_Cathedral"title="The Memory Cathedral">
Dann's major historical novel depicts a version of the Renaissance in which Leonardo da Vinci actually constructs a number of his inventions, such as a flying machine, whose designs are well-known from his surviving sketches. He later employs some of his military inventions during a battle in the Middle East, while in the service of a Syrian general – events which Dann projects into a year of Leonardo's life about which little is known. The novel also presents a detailed imagining of the life and character of the inventor and painter during this period, and includes his encounters with other historical characters residing in Florence including Machiavelli and Botticelli.The title refers to an ancient system of memory recall, known as the Method of loci, in which a building, such as a cathedral, is constructed in the mind as a container for imagined objects – which are deliberately connected to particular memories. The building can later be mentally navigated to re-encounter those objects and retrieve the memories with which they are associated. Leonardo's memory cathedral functions in the narrative as a device through which he reviews his experiences as death approaches.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_You_Reach_Me"title="When You Reach Me">
Sixth grader Miranda lives with her single mother who has a kindhearted boyfriend, Richard. When Miranda's mom is invited to appear on the game show "$20,000 Pyramid", Miranda and Richard begin preparing her for the show in the hopes that she will win and be able to afford a better life. Miranda's best friend Sal, whom she has known since she was a small child, had recently started ignoring Miranda after he had been punched in the stomach by another boy named Marcus.A homeless man lives on the corner of Miranda's street, dubbed the "laughing man" for his tendency to laugh without cause. Miranda notices that he always utters the words "book bag pocket shoe." She later realizes the phrase refers to the order and place he will send Miranda notes — her library book, a bread bag, her coat pocket, and Richard's shoe. The first three notes instruct Miranda to write a letter describing the future events. The notes, whose writer claims to be coming to Miranda's time to save a life, predicts the truth as proof. As the plot develops, these proofs come true, and Miranda is intrigued.Miranda and her new friends Annemarie and Colin hope to get a job at a sandwich shop on the corner. The owner, Jimmy, agrees, but instead of paying them with money, he gives them a free soda and sandwich each day. Miranda, Annemarie, and Colin discover a Fred Flintstone bank in the back of the sandwich shop containing two dollar bills folded into triangles. The bank is stolen that night and Jimmy fires the kids the next day, thinking they were the ones responsible (Miranda later discovers that the laughing man stole it). The workers convince Jimmy they didn't steal the bank and he re-hires them, but Annemarie quits when Jimmy says he suspects her best friend, Julia, of stealing the bank because she is African-American.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve's_Seed"title="Eve's Seed">
The following synopsis of some of the major points in "Eve's Seed" is based on information contained in the book's official website.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_(Kate_novel)"title="Fallen (Kate novel)">
Luce is sent to 'Sword and Cross', a reform school for young adults, after she is blamed for the death of Trevor, a boy that Luce once had a small crush on. It is revealed that, although Luce cannot remember what happened exactly, she remembers kissing Trevor at her previous school's summer camp, Dover. After the kiss, Trevor is said to have spontaneously combusted, which leaves her with burned hair. Luce believes herself to be innocent, which angers her disbelieving peers.Upon arriving at her new school, Luce encounters a fearsome Randy and shy boy Todd, along with Gabbe, a pretty blonde-haired girl; and Cameron, an attractive looking boy whose second time being sent to Sword and Cross. Cam offers to take Luce to her dorm room, but is abruptly interrupted by Arriane Alter, a self-described psychopath with long black hair. Arriane takes Luce under her wing, which agitates Cam.Arriane takes Luce to the outside grounds of the school, and demands that Luce cut her hair in the same style as her own. While working on Arriane's hair, Luce notices a scar on her friend's neck, and a shock band on her wrist. She tells Luce that she will not ask questions of her past, as long as Luce makes the same promise, which she does.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&quot;U&quot;_Is_for_Undertow"title="&quot;U&quot; Is for Undertow">
In April 1988, Kinsey Millhone is hired by a young man named Michael Sutton to investigate a memory he has which may shed light on an unsolved kidnapping. Sutton explains that in 1967, a four-year-old girl named Mary Claire Fitzhugh was abducted from his neighborhood. Sutton claims that two days later, on his sixth birthday, he talked to two men burying something in the woods. A police dig at the burial site uncovers only the body of a dog. Michael suggests that, since the men knew they were being watched, they substituted the dog's corpse for the girl's, but Michael's sister Diana warns Kinsey that Michael is easily influenced and his memory is unreliable.Kinsey traces the dog tag to its owner, who tells him the dog was euthanized. She visits Walter McNally, the veterinarian who performed the euthanasia, and McNally corroborates the story.Kinsey learns that another local girl, Rain Unruh, had been kidnapped in a similar fashion just before Mary Claire. Kinsey talks to Rain's grandmother, Deborah, who believes that her son Greg and his girlfriend Shelly were behind both kidnappings. Greg and Shelly were hippies and drug addicts who left Rain with Deborah and her husband Patrick, only to "kidnap" their own daughter when they were in need of money. Patrick paid the ransom and Rain was returned unharmed. Deborah speculates that, still needing money, they kidnapped Mary Claire. Rain herself remembers the kidnapping as an uneventful, even pleasant experience.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Pearls_of_Wisdom"title="The Two Pearls of Wisdom">
Dragoneyes are the human links to the twelve dragons of good fortune, who provide energy to the earth. Sixteen-year-old Eon has been studying the ancient art of Dragon Magic for four years, hoping to be selected as apprentice to a Dragoneye. However, circumstances do not favour Eon for two reasons; first, because he is disabled and secondly, because "he" is secretly female. On the choosing day, the long-lost Mirror Dragon returns and chooses Eona, who becomes a Lord due to the absence of a current Mirror Dragoneye. Much to the fury of the evil Lord Ido, all the dragons bow to the Mirror Dragon, including his.Meanwhile, the country is on the brink of civil war. A battle is about to break out between the Emperor and one of his brothers, High Lord Sethon, who wishes to make a claim for the throne. Lord Ido has allied himself with Sethon. The Emperor and his heir, Prince Kygo, attempt to use the return of the Mirror Dragon as a good omen for their reign, which throws Eona into the midst of their struggle for power. The only people she knows she can trust are her best friend Dillon, transgender courtier Lady Dela, and Dela's bodyguard Ryko.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_Senna"title="Search for Senna">
David Levin, the narrator of the book, is the new kid in his school. He gets in a fight with Christopher Hitchcock after being seen going out with his girlfriend, Senna Wales. Jalil, a fellow student, and Senna's half-sister, April O'Brien, appear in the scene, which marks the point where four of the main characters first get together. The next day, early in the morning all four are mysteriously drawn to Senna, who is sitting next to a lake. Suddenly, without a warning all five of them are sucked into a different world which is called Everworld.David, Christopher, Jalil and April wake up in the captivity of Norse god Loki, who claims to have opened the portal into the "Old World" so that his son, Fenrir, could bring Senna, who he calls a witch, to him. He reveals that he intended to use her as a gateway to the Old World. After Loki realizes the four cannot help him, he orders their death, but their escape due to David's heroic actions with a sword, and the laws of the universe (such as the rate of acceleration) not working as they would in the Old World (which the group calls the "real world").
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_(Nelson_novel)"title="Girl (Nelson novel)">
Andrea Marr begins high school as an ordinary suburban teen. When approaching graduation in her senior year, she decides to explore downtown and comes across mysterious and charismatic musician Todd Sparrow. Todd is the lead singer of a local band called The Color Green. This begins Andrea’s journey through the Pacific Northwest indie-rock music scene of the 1990s. In the process she breaks out of her suburban sheltered upbringing and finds herself, her sexuality, and experiences first lust in the year before she goes off to attend Brown University.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Wizard"title="The Last Wizard">
Essentially a 'coming of age' teenage novel, "The Last Wizard" follows the efforts of Tam, daughter of the village Head, to establish her own place in the world while unravelling the dark secrets of her village culture.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Tobacco_Shop"title="The Old Tobacco Shop">
Five-year-old Freddie meets the owner of a nearby tobacco shop, Mr. Toby Littleback; his old-maid aunt, Aunt Amanda; and Mr. Punch, a hunchbacked man who sits outside the shop holding cigars. Toby warns young Freddie never to touch the jar shaped like a Chinese man's head because it is filled with magic tobacco. Freddie can't resist, and after smoking the tobacco he finds himself and his friends on The Sieve, a leaky ship on the Spanish Main. They are first captured by pirates, then escape with the pirate treasure. Later they meet a Persian rug merchant who gives each of them their heart's desire. In the end Freddie falls ill, and goes into a coma. When he awakens he finds himself at home, recovered from the tobacco-induced dream.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downright_Dencey"title="Downright Dencey">
The story is set in Nantucket, Massachusetts shortly after the War of 1812, and deals with the unlikely friendship between a Quaker girl, Dencey Coffyn, and Jetsam, the adopted son of the town drunk. Their friendship was formed when Dencey sought his forgiveness for hurting him with a stone. In exchange for his forgiveness, she taught him to read and they became even closer which was met with disapproval by her mother. The reason for this was because Jetsam was a socially outcast boy who displayed characteristics not in keeping with Quakerism. However, Dencey refused to part ways with Jetsam leading her mother to banish her to her room with only bread and water as punishment. Nevertheless, the friendship grew even stronger to the point where Jetsam saved Dencey's life from a deadly storm. She was trapped in it while attempting to save him from accepting a job with the horrible Professor Snubshoe. Afterwards, he gained favor with Dencey's family who adopted him and helped him to transform into an admirable young man. As Dencey and Jetsam grew closer and older, they developed romantic feelings for each other. Finally, Jetsam asked Dencey to marry him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Was"title="The Boy Who Was">
In the Prologue, an unnamed artist visiting the town of Sorrento, Italy, encounters a young goatherd named Nino, who agrees to pose for a sketch in return for the artist's help in painting some figurines Nino has carved. These figurines represent historical figures from the past 3,000 years of the area's history, beginning with Odysseus and the Sirens, and ending with Giuseppe Garibaldi.Chapter 1, "Siren Songs", and chapter 2, "Song of Odysseus", set up the premise of the book: 3,000 years ago, Nino was befriended by a siren who gave him the gift of eternal life and health in thanks for his friendship. The rest of the book consists of stories from various points in history, connected only by Nino's involvement.Chapter 3, "Poseidon and the Greeks", covers the building of the temple of Poseidon in Paestum.Chapter 4, "The Romans and the Volcano", tells of the destruction of Pompeii.Chapter 5, "The Last of the Goths", is a highly romanticized view of the fall of the Ostrogothic kingdom in southern Italy which followed the western Roman empire and was in turn followed by the Lombards.Chapter 6, "The Normans and the Saracens", has Nino telling Robert Guiscard's army about a group of Norman soldiers sixty years earlier who repelled a Saracen pirate attack on Salerno.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_Bush_(novel)"title="Calico Bush (novel)">
"Calico Bush" is set on the Maine coast in the pioneer era, and tells the story of Marguerite, a young French orphan who becomes an indentured servant on a farm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_ABC_Bunny"title="The ABC Bunny">
The rhythmic and rhyming text tells the story of Bunny, driven from Bunnyland to Elsewhere after an unfortunate accident with an apple. Every letter in the alphabet is represented in Bunny's journey: G for Gale, I for Insect and so on.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity's_Ring"title="Singularity's Ring">
The story is set in a future after a singularity event, which caused the bulk of humanity to disappear. The focus of this event was a huge space station which rings the Earth, and which remains uninhabited after the singularity. Humans who remained on Earth have maintained an industrial technological base, and are working to re-enter space. The majority of humans are now genetically engineered to form "pods", groups of 2 to 5 individuals with the ability to form an emergent personality from those individuals.The story follows a young pod named "Apollo Papadopulos" who is training to become the captain of a new starship which is to be launched soon. "Apollo Papadopulos" is composed of five teenagers; Strom, Meda, Quant, Manuel and Moira. The story moves between the points of view of each of these individuals, and that of "Apollo Papadopulos" itself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_Magic"title="Fog Magic">
The fantasy story centers on eleven-year-old Greta Addington. One child in every generation of Addingtons is able to experience the special magic of Blue Cove, Nova Scotia. In fair weather, ruined buildings are all Greta sees, but when the fog rolls in she can travel back in time to visit the village and its inhabitants. While there she has a friend to play with, and the people refer to her as coming "from over the mountain". Greta is especially eager to go there on her twelfth birthday, but she has to wait till night for it to become foggy. That night in Blue Cove her friends give her a kitten, and Greta leaves realizing she will never be able to return.The setting is based on the real life town of Little River, Nova Scotia and the former village of White's Cove where Sauer spent many summers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Morgan_Had_a_Horse"title="Justin Morgan Had a Horse">
The schoolmaster, Justin Morgan, takes two colts as payment for an old debt. The younger of the two grows into a sturdy, though small, riding horse which served as the foundation of the Morgan breed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seabird_(novel)"title="Seabird (novel)">
Ezra, the ship's boy on an 1850s whaling ship, uses his off duty time and walrus tusks traded from an Eskimo to carve an ivory gull, which later serves as the family mascot. The book follows the history of the gull over the next 80 years as it passes from one of Ezra's descendants to another, while simultaneously tracing the history of commercial transportation, from Clipper ships to jet airplanes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_the_Negro"title="Story of the Negro">
The non-fiction book starts with a history dating back to 1700 BC, beginning with African civilizations such as the Ghana and Mandingo Empires. The horrors of the Atlantic slave trade are described, together with the causes and conditions of slavery in America, the Haitian Slave Revolt, and the Underground Railroad. Influential black leaders are examined, including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Bontemps said that the book, "consists mainly of things I learned after I left school that I wish I had known much earlier." The book includes a "theme poem" "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" by Langston Hughes.The book is split into five different sections, The Ship Introduction, Men of the lakes How African civilizations worked, The Crossing The Columbian trade sent Africans to the New World under poor conditions. Slavery was outlawed in 1863, and people were allowed to move freely, often to New York, The bondage About the twentieth century and the struggle to win rights and Making a new world After the Civil rights act was approved, there was still plenty to do to make the world an equal place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_Histories"title="Case Histories">
'Case Histories' tells the story of Jackson Brodie, a private investigator who tries to find out the truth of some cases. Brodie meets some people who reclaim his help to solve their cases
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_Blue"title="Born Blue">
"Born Blue" is about the life story of Janie, also known as Leshaya. The book starts with Janie recalling as a toddler, almost drowning due to her heroin addicted mother's neglect. She is subsequently placed in strict foster care, living for about four years with foster brother Harmon who introduces her to jazz and blues. Janie is especially affected by female jazz singers and hopes to emulate them by becoming a famous singer.Harmon is adopted by Mr. and Mrs. James of Tuscaloosa leaving Janie alone. She is then kidnapped by her mother, who then trades Janie for heroin to Mitch, a dealer. Janie lives with her new parents for a time before a chance meeting with Harmon leads her to moving in with Mr. and Mrs. James after Mitch and his partner Shelly are arrested for drug possession.Janie finds living in this family difficult and starts hanging around a local jazz band. She falls for the band's 18-year-old songwriter, Jaz, but then, under the influence of beer and cocaine, loses her virginity to an unknown man at a band party and becomes pregnant. While carrying the child she lives with a woman called Joy Victoria and on giving birth names her daughter Etta James after one of the jazz singers that she listened to as a small child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thin_Executioner"title="The Thin Executioner">
Jebel is the third son of his kingdom's executioner Rashed Rum, seen as the most respected individual before the king; as such, family is honored as royalty. After Jebel is left out of his father's retirement speech informing the kingdom that his two older sons will battle in a competition to see who will have the honor of succeeding him executioner — Jebel having been left out due to his thin and scrawny stature, Jebel is (in his eyes) forever publicly disgraced. Subsequently, Jebel makes the rash decision to embark on a quest to Tubaygat, a holy mountain and home to the fire god Sabbah Eid, a being who supposedly grants questors invincibility and long life in exchange for a human sacrifice. Accompanied by slave Tel Hesani, Jebel embarks on a dark and brutal journey filled with lynch mobs, suicide cults, terrible monsters, and worse, monstrous men. But to Jebel, the risk is worth it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_the_Great_World_Spin"title="Let the Great World Spin">
The events of the story are told in a largely non-linear fashion, with several different narrators telling the story from different perspectives. The story is interspersed with fictionalized accounts of Philippe Petit's 1974 tightrope walk across the Twin Towers, the date on which the two main events of the novel occur: a fatal car crash and a trial.In 1974, an Irishman named Ciaran travels to New York City to see his younger brother, Corrigan, a devout Jesuit monk who has moved to the projects of the Bronx. Corrigan works at a nursing home and has befriended several of the prostitutes working around his apartment, leaving his door unlocked so they can use his bathroom despite the danger this frequently puts him in. Ciaran meets two of the prostitutes, Tillie and her daughter Jazzlyn, who has two young children of her own. After Ciaran notices bruises on the inside of Corrigan's arm, he begins to suspect that he is using drugs. When he confronts him about this, Corrigan reveals that he is not using drugs but is in reality suffering from TTP. This was brought to his attention by Adelita, a nurse he met at the nursing home and has fallen in love with. This comes into direct conflict with the vows of chastity he took as a teenager and his sworn devotion to God, and he struggles to reconcile these beliefs with his love for Adelita.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Cotton_Night-Cap_Country"title="Red Cotton Night-Cap Country">
It opens by setting the scene in the Norman village of Saint-Rambert amid countryside which the poet discusses with his friend Anne Thackeray, the dedicatee of the poem. Since she has jokingly named the locale "White Cotton Night-Cap Country", from the somnolence of the Calvados district and the white caps worn by the inhabitants, Browning changes the colour to red by way of pointing up the passion of the story he is about to tell, and alluding to the "bonnet rouge" worn by the revolutionaries of 1789 and again during the Paris Commune. The poem now turns to the story of Léonce Miranda, the heir to a jewellery business, who is raised on a luxurious estate in Saint-Rambert in the shadow of the church towers mentioned in the poem's subtitle, and who is torn between the opposing demands of religious devotion and the sensual, materialist side of his nature – "turf", as Browning calls it. Miranda takes a mistress called Clara de Millefleurs, and houses her in a luxuriously renovated priory. Miranda's scandalised mother exacerbates his sense of guilt over this affair to such good effect that he tries to commit suicide by drowning himself in the Seine. He fails in this attempt, but on the death of his mother Miranda is more riddled with guilt than ever, and so breaks off his relationship with Clara and, while trying to burn her letters, mutilates himself by burning off both his hands. However, he resumes the affair and tries to work off his guilt by making donations to the church of La Ravissante near his home. He dies by throwing himself from the belvedere of the priory as an act of faith, believing that he will be miraculously borne by the angels of the Virgin Mary to La Ravissante. His will, which divides his estate between the Church and Clara, is contested by his "cousinry", who believe Miranda to have been insane when he made it, but the courts uphold the will, declaring Miranda's death to have been an accident.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_(novel)"title="Impact (novel)">
Ex-CIA agent Wyman Ford returns to Cambodia to investigate the source of radioactive gemstones and uncovers an unusual impact crater. A young woman on the other side of the world photographs a meteoroid's passage in the atmosphere with her telescope and deduces that it must have struck on one of the islands just offshore from Round Pond, Maine. A NASA scientist analyzing data from the Mars Mapping Orbiter (MMO) spots unusual spikes in gamma ray activity. These threads intersect with discovery of an alien device that has apparently been on Deimos, one of the two moons of Mars, for at least 100 million years. Something has caused it to activate and fire a strangelet at Earth, setting off the events in the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seance_(Harwood_novel)"title="The Seance (Harwood novel)">
Ever since her childhood Constance Langton has felt out of place. She never had a proper mother, as Constance's mom preferred to obsess over the death of Constance's infant sister Alma, to the point where this drove her to suicide many years later. To make matters worse, Constance seems to have the ability to see horrible visions of future deaths, which greatly unnerves her. In 1889 Constance discovers that she has inherited Wraxford Hall, a run down and supposedly haunted mansion in Suffolk. Despite warnings by the Wraxford family lawyer that the house has led to the death and disappearances of several Wraxfords - and that living there is not a good idea, Constance ends up drawn to the house, something that might spell her doom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behemoth_(novel)"title="Behemoth (novel)">
The story starts when the crew of the "Leviathan" sights two German ironclads and decides to attack them, thinking that the sea ships are defenseless. Klopp and Alek are controlling the engines, with Mr. Hirst, the "Leviathan"'s chief engineer, observing. However, they discover that one of the ships, the "Goeben", is preparing a threatening Tesla cannon, a lightning generator. Klopp immediately puts the engines on full retreat without permission. Mr. Hirst, seeing this as an act of mutiny, attempts to interfere and tries to shoot Klopp with a compressed air pistol. However, Alek leaps at Mr. Hirst and ends up getting shot in the ribs, though not fatally. The lightning still hits and Newkirk, who was flying in a now-burning Huxley above the "Leviathan", is almost killed, but is saved by Deryn. After the escape, Deryn and Dr. Barlow visit Alek, and he explains what happened on the ship. Later, as Deryn delivers a message to Count Volger, who learns that Alek had told her of his identity as a prince.After landing in Istanbul, Aleksandar plots an escape from the "Leviathan". The night of the escape, Alek is taking watch over Dr. Barlow's eggs when one egg hatches revealing a "perspicacious" loris, as identified later by Dr. Barlow, that seems to understand and repeat various sounds and words in seemingly useful ways. The creature then latches onto Alek and flees with him. In their escape Volger and Hoffman remain behind in order to allow Alek and the others to flee. The group manages to head into the city of Istanbul, where they try to remain hidden among the commoners. Alek and Corporal Bauer leave the hotel after laying low for a while with Klopp, one of the masters of mechaniks. Alek discovers a very nosy American reporter by the name of Eddie Malone, in which he discovers some information about the Leviathan that he finds interesting. At that point, a few German soldiers walk in, searching for Bauer. They make a hasty escape only to be caught by Zaven, a leader of one of many resistance groups against the sultan's rule collective known as the Committee of Union and Progress.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spilt_Milk_(novel)"title="Spilt Milk (novel)">
A very old man is in a hospital bed. A member of a traditional Brazilian family, he presents the history of his family in a monologue addressed to his daughter, the nurses, and anyone else who will listen. He follows his family's path from his Portuguese ancestors, including a baron of the Empire, and a First Republic's Senator, down to his grandson, a youth from Rio de Janeiro. His family saga is characterized by social and economic decadence against the background of Brazilian history over the last two centuries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spook_Country"title="Spook Country">
The first strand of the novel follows Hollis Henry, a former member of the early 1990s cult band The Curfew and a freelance journalist. She is hired by advertising mogul Hubertus Bigend to write a story for his nascent magazine "Node" (described as a European "Wired") about the use of locative technology in the art world. Helped by curator Odile Richard she investigates Los Angeles artist Alberto Corrales, who recreates virtually the deaths of celebrities such as River Phoenix. Corrales leads her to Bobby Chombo, an expert in geospatial technologies who handles Corrales' technical requirements. Chombo's background is troubleshooting navigation systems for the United States military. He is reclusive and paranoid, refusing to sleep in the same GPS grid square on consecutive nights, and only consents to talk to Hollis due to his admiration for The Curfew.Tito is part of a Chinese Cuban family of freelance "illegal facilitators", as Brown describes them – forgers, smugglers, and associated support personnel based in New York City – and is assigned by his uncles to hand over a series of iPods to a mysterious old man. Tito is adept in a form of systema that encompasses tradecraft, a variant of free running, and the Santería religion. It is alluded that the old man may have connections to American intelligence circles and Tito hopes he can explain the mysterious death of his father. When the old man calls in a favour, his family dispatches Tito on a dangerous new assignment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle's_Boys_(novel)"title="Miracle's Boys (novel)">
Three years ago, Lafayette's brother Charlie was sent to a juvenile detention center, Rahway Home for Boys, for robbing a candy store. Since Charlie's return, twelve-year old Lafayette has thought of him as "Newcharlie" because of his changed behavior. In Charlie and Lafayette's shared bedroom, Charlie and his new friend Aaron discuss who's the baddest. Before they leave, Charlie blames Lafayette for the death of their mother.Lafayette's oldest brother Ty'ree comes home from work. Before Lafayette was born, Daddy died after saving a woman and her dog from drowning in a frozen pond in Central Park. Since Mama's death, Ty'ree has been Lafayette and Charlie's legal guardian. Lafayette asks Ty'ree about Mama's death. Ty'ree reminds him that she died of insulin shock two years ago; when Lafayette found her, she was already dead. While Ty'ree cooks, Lafayette dozes, dreaming of his great-aunt Cecile in South Carolina. In his dream, he fishes a rainbow trout from a stream, but Newcharlie knocks it out of his hand.Over dinner, Ty'ree suggests watching a movie. They remember when Charlie tried to save a dog that had been hit by a car. Lafayette and Ty'ree take the subway to Fourteenth Street, where the sights remind Lafayette that they are poor. When Lafayette was a baby, they went to Bayamón, Puerto Rico, for their grandmother's funeral; Mama promised they would visit again, but Charlie never believed they would have enough money. Ty'ree asks Lafayette if he ever tries to talk to Charlie. Lafayette storms off, remembering when Charlie tried to burn all their photographs of Mama.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Passage_(novel)"title="Night Passage (novel)">
LA homicide detective Jesse Stone, who already has a penchant for drinking, really begins to hit the bottle after he discovers his wife, actress Jenn Stone, is having an affair with her agent. They divorce and after his drinking leads to his termination from the LAPD he decides to get as far away from his now ex-wife as possible. Despite showing up to the interview intoxicated, he is hired as chief of police for the small town of Paradise, Massachusetts. He later learns that this is because the corrupt Board of Selectmen chair, Hasty Hathaway, is looking for a lush that they can push around. They get more than they bargain for in Stone.The novel begins with Stone's cross country road trip to Paradise during which the disintegration of his marriage is detailed through flashbacks. Shortly after arriving in Paradise, he meets Jo Jo Genest while responding to a domestic dispute. Genest is a huge body builder, who assists local gangsters in a money laundering operation and also provides muscle for Hathaway. During the confrontation, Stone kicks Genest in the groin. Soon after, Genest proceeds to taunt Stone by vandalizing a police car and killing the station cat as well as writing the word "slut" on both.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iorich"title="Iorich">
Vlad must uncover the true motives behind the mysterious arrest of one of his friends, and in the process try to find justice—whatever that is.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pilo_Family_Circus"title="The Pilo Family Circus">
It follows the story of Jamie, who, after a random incident of nearly hitting a clown with his car, finds himself being stalked by three sadistic clowns.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_the_Sea"title="The Mystery of the Sea">
Archibald Hunter, a young Englishman, is passing his leisure time near Cruden Bay in the small Scottish village of Whinnyfold when he has a vision of a couple walking past him, carrying a tiny coffin. Archibald also notices a strange old woman watching him. Later, he finds out that his vision has come true, and a child in town has died. Archibald encounters the bizarre old woman again on the seashore; this woman, who introduces herself as Gormala MacNeil, knows that Archibald saw something out of the ordinary. She proceeds to explain that she has "Second Sight"—a sort of psychic ability for premonition that comes and goes at random—and that she can tell that Archibald, too, is a Seer. Fluctuating between skepticism and uneasiness over his newfound abilities, Archibald listens to Gormala's insights and sees one of his visions fulfilled at Lammas-tide, when he and Gormala witness Lauchlane Macleod, a local fisherman, wreck his boat on a chain of sharp rocks known as the Skares. Archibald sees a procession of dead spirits emerge from the water near the Skares and make its way up the cliffs.About a year later, Archibald has returned to Cruden Bay and is preparing a permanent residence there. He buys a trunk from an auctioneer on the street (where he again encounters Gormala) and finds that the trunk contains letters from the late 16th and early 17th centuries. While near the seashore, Archibald notices two ladies stranded on a rock out in the ocean. He helps them get back to shore, and learns that one of the ladies is an elderly woman named Mrs. Jack, and the other a young, beautiful woman named Marjory, an American who has a strong aversion to Spaniards. Archibald feels himself falling in love with Marjory instantly. Later, Marjory helps Archibald decode the letters that he found in the trunk, which are written in a complicated cipher (Bacon's cipher). Archibald soon proposes marriage to Marjory, but she declines with the excuse that she does not know him well enough.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_(Stoker_novel)"title="The Man (Stoker novel)">
Squire Stephen Norman is lord of the manor in Normanstead. He marries Margaret Rowly, younger sister of his friend Rowly (squire of the neighboring town). Desirous of an heir, Norman and Margaret have a baby girl and Margaret dies shortly after the birth. Norman promises her that he will love their daughter as much as he would have loved a son, and Margaret asks him to name the girl Stephen. Squire Norman raises his daughter Stephen as a tomboy. Margaret's spinster aunt Laetitia Rowly moves in to help care for Stephen, who is dominant, assertive and free-thinking. When Stephen is six, Norman's visiting college friend Dr. Wolf tells her about his 11-year-old son Harold. The girl asks Wolf to bring Harold on a future visit, and the children become friends. Two years later, Dr. Wolf dies of pneumonia and Squire Norman promises to raise Harold as if he were his own son. Stephen and Harold visit the graveyard of the Church of St. Stephen in Normanstead (where all her ancestors are buried), and find the crypt unlocked. Stephen and another young boy, Leonard Everard, explore the crypt. Harold finds Leonard running out of the crypt and Stephen unconscious on the floor in front of a coffin. Leonard tells her that he carried her out of the crypt, and she begins to admire him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_(novel)"title="Brooklyn (novel)">
Eilis Lacey is a young woman who is unable to find work in 1950s Ireland. Her older sister Rose organises a meeting with a Catholic priest called Father Flood on a visit from New York City, who tells Eilis of the wonderful opportunities awaiting her in New York with excellent employment prospects. Because of this she immigrates to Brooklyn, New York and takes up a job in a department store while undertaking night classes in bookkeeping. Her initial experiences working in a boring job and living in a repressive boardinghouse, run by the strict Mrs Madge Kehoe, make her doubt her initial decision. Letters from Rose and her mother bring about severe homesickness but soon she begins to settle into a routine. Eilis meets and falls in love with a young Italian plumber named Tony Fiorello at local Friday night dances. Eilis qualifies easily from her night school course. Her relationship evolves further and Tony brings Eilis to meet his family. Their romance becomes more serious, and Tony confesses his love for Eilis, and his plans to build a home on Long Island. One day while Eilis is working she learns from Father Flood that her sister Rose has died in her sleep from a pre-existing heart condition. She has to return to Ireland to mourn, and she secretly marries Tony before she leaves. In Ireland she falls back into the town society easily. She goes to the beach with her friend Nancy, Nancy's fiance George and his friend Jim Farrell. Eilis knew Jim before going to America and disliked him, but now finds him much improved and they start seeing each other. Jim is the only child of a publican and is considered a good catch. Eilis's mother is desperate for her to settle back in Ireland and marry Jim, as Eilis has not confided in her or her friends about her marriage. Eilis procrastinates about a return to her new life by extending her stay. She saves Tony's letters unopened as she considers the possibility of remaining in Ireland and building a life with Jim Farrell. Eventually a local busybody, Miss Kelly, tells Eilis she knows her secret because she heard through the grapevine that someone from New York had seen her at a wedding registry. This is the turning point for Eilis and she immediately books her return passage, telling her mother the truth about her marriage and posting a farewell note to Jim as she leaves town by taxi for the docks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trouble_in_Paradise_(Parker_novel)"title="Trouble in Paradise (Parker novel)">
In Parker's second Jesse Stone novel we find Chief Stone settled into his new life after the events that marked his arrival in "Night Passage". Jesse's ex-wife, Jenn, has also relocated to Massachusetts in nearby Boston. There she finds work, and minor celebrity status, as the weather girl for the Channel 3 news. Although Jesse and Jenn are seeing each other again, Jenn refuses to commit solely to him, and they both continue to see other people. Jenn is seeing the lead news anchor, while Jesse juggles relationships with her, local real estate agent Marcy Campbell, and Abby Taylor. Throughout the novel Jesse's sexual prowess is the subject of office wisecracking, which he doesn’t mind at all.The main plot of the novel concerns ex-con Jimmy Macklin. After being released from prison, Macklin hatches a plot to rob the entire community of Stiles Island. The island is accessible from Paradise by a bridge, and one boat port. Entrance to the island is guarded by private security, ensuring safety for its wealthy residents and island bank. Macklin puts together a crew with his partner Wilson "Crow" Cromartie, an American Indian. The rest of the crew consists of a demolitions expert, a boatman to pilot their nautical escape, and one other to cut the telephone lines and provide muscle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bed_of_Roses_(novel)"title="Bed of Roses (novel)">
The novel follows the relationship of florist Emmaline "Emma" Grant and architect Jackson "Jack" Cooke. Emma, along with her childhood friends Parker, Mackenzie, and Laurel are the founders of Vows, a fictional wedding planning company in Connecticut. Jack is the childhood friend of Parker's brother. Bound by deep bonds of friendship, the six of them consider themselves family.Emma and Jack have long been attracted to each other, but refrained from acting on those urges for fear of disrupting their friendship and that of the group in general. When they finally share their first kiss, it is obvious to both of them that they will no longer be able to fight the attraction. They agree to a fling and promise to remain friends when it has run its course.As the story progresses, Emma falls in love and begins to take on more of a "girlfriend" role. Jack, always more wary of commitment, resists her overtures and wants to keep their relationship less serious. They eventually work through their conflict and Jack admits that he wants a future with Emma.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burning_Land"title="The Burning Land">
892 – 893: Uhtred of Bebbanburg is now the preeminent warlord of Wessex, Alfred the Great's kingdom. Always in poor health, Alfred urges him to swear an oath to Alfred's son and presumptive heir, Edward. Uhtred is unwilling to do so, as that would interfere with his yearning to retake his family's stronghold at Bebbanburg in Northumbria, stolen from him by his uncle Aelfric after his father's death.Uhtred is military governor of Lundene (London), sharing power with Bishop Erkenwald, whom he dislikes, but respects. Wessex is threatened by two separate Danish forces who have landed in Cent (Kent). Uhtred delivers Alfred's bribe to "Jarl" (Earl) Haesten, who leads the smaller army, to get him to leave, so that he can deal with the more serious threat posed by "Jarl" Harald Bloodhair. Uhtred objects to the bribe, as he knows that Haesten is completely untrustworthy. While travelling with a small force to meet Alfred, Uhtred captures Skade, Harald's woman and a reputed sorceress. Harald arrives, leading Saxon captive women, and threatens to kill all of them if Skade is not returned to him. When he starts butchering his prisoners before Uhtred's eyes, Uhtred releases Skade. Skade curses Uhtred as she and Harald make their escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love,_A_Rather_Bad_Idea"title="Love, A Rather Bad Idea">
The story is about Samar Pratap, a quirky, ambitious and popular student at IIT Delhi. He and his band of friends – Skimpy, Jiya and Pranav – together live an upbeat life on campus. While Jiya is the college heart-throb, Pranav is the sports head with a righteous outlook to things and Skimpy, son of rich NRI parents, has a charmed existence full of creative plans to woo his dream girl. Their interaction with each other and other members of the IIT campus brings out many interesting, poignant and hilarious moments.In due course of time the inevitable institute politics enters their lives as Samar is picked as the frontrunner for the top job on campus. The ensuing dilemmas threaten to break up their friendship and tosses up some difficult choices for Samar and his friends.The book is Anirban Mukherjee’s first novel and is largely based on his experiences during his stay at IIT Delhi and IIM Calcutta.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winter_Journey_(novel)"title="The Winter Journey (novel)">
In spite of Zoïle's attempts to get rid of the presence of autistic novelist Aliénor Malèze from Astrolabe’s life, his agent and protector, so as to fully live his love for her, the result is a sentimental failure . Zoïle, desperate, drifts into an act of aerial terrorism, by hijacking a Roissy airplane armed with a glass shard from a broken bottle, he wants to crash the plane on the Eiffel Tower...The title refers to Franz Schubert's lied Winterreise: in the novel, Zoïle thinks about this song cycle to forget about his fear during the terrorist act.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hound-Dog_Man"title="Hound-Dog Man">
In 1912, Clint McKinney and his younger brother Spud talk their father Aaron into letting them go on a hunting trip with their older friend, the womanizing Blackie Scantling. Aaron agrees despite the reluctance of his wife Cora.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Fatigue_(novel)"title="Metal Fatigue (novel)">
In the aftermath of a nuclear war, the former USA has become a disaster area. Determined to maintain a functioning modern city, the citizens of Kennedy have walled themselves off from the rest of the country. Forty years after the end of the war, Kennedy is in a critical state, with technologies failing and repairs increasingly inadequate. Kennedy is invited to join the emergent Re-United States of America (RUSA). But some people in Kennedy oppose re-assimilation, and there is a wave of politically motivated crime. As the deadline for reunification approaches, Phil Roads, assigned to investigate the assassinations and data thefts, faces increasing threat not only from the opposing forces, but from his own secret past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_in_Paradise_(novel)"title="Death in Paradise (novel)">
The third Jesse Stone novel finds Chief Stone investigating the death of a teenage girl after her body washes up on shore. While searching for clues at the crime scene, Stone finds a class ring that ends up belonging to a senior at the high school. Jesse questions him and discovers that he gave his class ring to a fifteen-year-old girl called Eleanor "Billie" Bishop. Chief Stone then questions the school principal, Dr. Lilly Summers, who informs Jesse that Billie was the "town pump."The case becomes odd when Jesse questions Billie's parents and they deny that she is even their daughter. He confirms that she is indeed their daughter through her two sisters. They also inform Jesse that Billie ran away because her parents did not approve of her behavior, particularly her promiscuity. Jesse later finds that Billie had been staying at a shelter run by a Sister Mary John. Although he finds that Billie is no longer there, the nun gives Jesse the contact number that Billie left. It turns out to be the number of Gino Fish's cover business. Later Sister Mary gives Jesse another number that two separate girls had given her. The number turns out to belong to Gino Fish's associate and probable lover, Alan Garner. Jesse begins following Garner and catches him setting up men with underage prostitutes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_Bovine"title="Going Bovine">
Cameron Smith is a high school slacker from Texas who is on “a slow but uncontrollable skid to nowhere” living a somewhat aimless life. His father is a college physics professor; his mother is a community college English teacher. Cameron's apparent social exclusion is emphasized when the author introduces his sister, Jenna, who is described as perfect. One of the first scenes in the novel is of Cam having what he thinks is a marijuana-induced hallucination of flames during his English class. This public hallucination gets Cameron sent to multiple drug counselors, all while his hallucinations continue. Cameron's life starts to spiral out of control when he is diagnosed with Creutzfeldt–Jakob variant BSE (also known as mad cow disease), possibly contracted from the cafeteria at his school or his minimum-wage job at the fast food joint Buddha Burger.When Cameron is hospitalized, an angel named Dulcie appears as a possibly hallucination-induced vision. She says she has been sent to give Cameron a mission to save the world from a villain known as the Wizard of Reckoning. Dulcie has pink hair, wears boots, and spray paints her wings; she tells him that he can possibly save his life, but only by first finding Dr. X, a time traveling physicist. Cameron starts thinking about this journey and how he can succeed at it. Unconvinced at first by Dulcie's suggestion, Cameron changes his mind when he is attacked by fire giants and the mysterious Wizard of Reckoning — a masked figure wearing a silver space suit who is intent on killing him. He is given a Disney World wristband by Dulcie that she says is able to keep the disease from advancing any further into Cameron's brain. In the journey that follows, the “hallucenogenic mix of elements in the adventure” are all revealed to “have roots in his ‘real’ life”.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star-Crowned_Kings"title="The Star-Crowned Kings">
The book is about the adventures of accidental protagonist Race Worden, a peasant living on the agricultural world of Mavia. His story is set in humanity's post-apocalyptic future where the human race has been split into two castes/species; Starlings and normal Humans. The Starlings, human mentalists who had developed powerful telekinetic powers that allow humankind to travel &amp; settle the stars. Normal humans are under the repressive thumb of the Starling's authority. Only a small portion of human population consisted of these gifted mentalists called Starlings.A considerable amount of technology has been lost, in many cases some worlds are reduced to mix of steam and elementary electronics.Race Worden is an oddity, where he goes from his simple life to the dangers of developing Starling powers. Because of his ordinary human origins, he has become a renegade. Ignorant of the rules of Starlings, he lives on the run trying unite his family and taking them where they can be free.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prelude_to_Christopher"title="Prelude to Christopher">
The storyline is nonlinear and of interest to those interested in the establishment of modernism in the arts in Australia. The story centers on a Eugenicist experiment gone awry on a remote island. The repercussions of the incident play out in a young woman's decision whether to have a child. A recurring symbol in the book is a painting of the island with the doomed eugenicist's experiment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postcard_Killers"title="The Postcard Killers">
A young American couple is murdered while vacationing in Europe. The young woman’s father, Jacob Kanon, is a New York City police investigator who travels to Europe to hunt down the murderer. Other young couples in France, Germany, Denmark and Sweden have since then been killed and the evidence points in the same direction. Kanon joins up with Scandinavian journalist Dessie Larsson to find the murderer. Kanon and Larsson must work against time since every murder is preceded by a postcard to a regional daily.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saraswatichandra_(novel)"title="Saraswatichandra (novel)">
The novel take place in two fictional towns, Suvarnapur and Ratnanagari.Saraswatichandra, the protagonist of the novel, is a well educated, young lawyer deeply interested in literature, quite emotional and idealistic. He has been engaged to marry Kumudsundari (daughter of Vidyachatur - a Divan of Ratnanagari), a charming and proficient lady. But for certain reasons, Saraswatichandra renounces his home. He assumes the name Navinchandra and starts his pilgrimage. As a result, Kumudsundari's parents marry her to Pramadadhan, the wayward son of Buddhidhan of Suvarnapur. Subsequently, Saraswatichandra (with the pseudonym of Navinchandra) arrives in Suvarnapur and has a meeting with Buddhidhan. Impressed by his eloquent talk and command over English, Buddhidhan invites him to stay with him. Saraswatichandra accepts Buddhidhan's proposal, resides at his home and finally becomes important member of Buddhidhan's family.But soon after, Saraswatichandra leaves Buddhidhan's house due to the tensions that contact with Kumud is causing them both, but on the way, he is attacked by bandits. The Sadhus of Sundargiri pick him and nurse him. At the same night, Kumud also leaves Suvarnapur to visit her parents home and on the way, get attacked by the same bandits gang, but is saved by her grandfather, who had come halfway to receive her. Kumud somehow falls into the river and is picked up by Sadhvis at the bank of the river.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shattered_Peace"title="Shattered Peace">
The comic begins with Ravenpaw waking up on the farm with his mate, Barley. He goes about his day, narrating his thoughts about the farm and his life.At night, the duo hears a scratching noise outside the barn door. They open it to see a group of cats standing there: Willie, Minty, Snapper, Tess and Pounce. Minty, Willie's mate, is about to have kits, so they plead to come in. Ravenpaw welcomes them kindly, and catches prey for them. Soon, the kits are born, and they are named Snowflake, Icicle, Cloudy and Sniff. Ravenpaw becomes very fond of them. The newcomers continue to impose on Ravenpaw and Barley's hospitality, insisting the both of them hunt for them. Barley doesn't like it, but Ravenpaw happily helps them.One day, Barley catches Snapper teaching the kits death blows. He tells Ravenpaw about it, but Ravenpaw that it's nothing but nonsense, and they need to protect those precious kits. Barley is offput and upset. Later, Barley overhears Willie and Snapper talking about getting their own territory, and is suspicious, but doesn't say a word about it to Ravenpaw.When Willie's gang is ready to leave, Ravenpaw is very sad and is reluctant to see them go, but Barley is relieved and ushers them out. When Ravenpaw and Barley discuss the cats, Ravenpaw accuses Barley of treating the cats like they were intruders. Barley tells Ravenpaw that since his background was with the Clan, that's why he enjoyed their company so much. He also questions Ravenpaw's belonging in the barn, which shocks and offends Ravenpaw.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Bird_of_Heaven"title="Little Bird of Heaven">
Zoe Kruller, a wife and mother, is found brutally murdered. The Sparta police target two primary suspects: her estranged husband, Delray Kruller, and her longtime lover, Eddy Diehl. In turn, the Krullers' son, Aaron, and Eddy Diehl's daughter, Krista, become obsessed with each other, each believing the other's father is guilty. By the novel's end, the fated lovers, meeting again as adults, are at last ready to exorcise the ghosts of the past and come to terms with their legacy of guilt, misplaced love, and redemptive yearning.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_of_the_Hanged_(novel)"title="Forest of the Hanged (novel)">
The protagonist is Lieutenant Apostol Bologa, who was born and raised in Parva - then Párva, Beszterce-Naszód County, Transylvania, Kingdom of Hungary. Although he was enrolled in the Philosophy Faculty of the University of Budapest, and he had not been conscripted into the army since he was a widow's son, Bologa volunteers into the Austro-Hungarian Army at the start of World War I. He does that both from a youthful ambition to prove his bravery in front of his fiancée, Marta Domșa, who was enchanted by the military uniforms of the Hungarian officers, as well as from the social views he had acquired in Hungarian schools. After attending artillery school, he is sent to the front. He fights valiantly in Italy and Galicia; wounded twice in the next two years, he is promoted to the rank of lieutenant and decorated three times. Bologa contributes (by his vote in court) at the sentencing to death of a Czech officer, second lieutenant Svoboda, who had deserted the Austro-Hungarian army. The novel follows his soul metamorphosis, under the influence of the Czech captain Otto Klapka, who seeds in his heart the hatred against the Austrian empire and the love for the Romanian nation. Sent on the Romanian front, in the Eastern Carpathians, the thought of desertion becomes an obsession for him. Being forced again to take part in a military tribunal, to judge a Romanian peasant for espionage, Apostol Bologa starts in the night towards the Romanian lines, to get to his blood brothers. He is caught and hanged, in much the same way as the Czech that he had helped condemn. At the gallows, his confessor recites, "Receive, o Lord, the soul of Thy servant Apostol".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Native_Star"title="The Native Star">
The Native Star, set in America in 1876, follows the adventures of Emily Edwards, town witch of the tiny Sierra Nevada settlement of Lost Pine. Her business is suffering from the rise of mail-order patent magicks, and her only chance at avoiding the penury at her doorstep is to use a love spell to bewitch the town’s richest lumberman into marrying her.When the love spell goes terribly wrong, Emily is forced to accept the aid of Dreadnought Stanton—a pompous and scholarly Warlock from New York City—to set things right. Together, they travel from the seedy underbelly of San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, across the United States by transcontinental railroad and biomechanical flying machine, to the highest halls of American magical power, all while being pursued by various factions who want for themselves a powerful magical artifact that has come into Emily’s possession.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_in_Bed"title="Good in Bed">
Candace (Cannie) Shapiro is a smart, sarcastic, and successful entertainment journalist living in Philadelphia. Although she has a small group of close friends, including her best friend Samantha, her overbearing but caring mother, and her rat terrier, Nifkin, she has a day to day struggle with her weight, a recent breakup with her boyfriend of three years, and the relationship issues left on her when her father left her as a child.One day, she reads a magazine article written by her ex-boyfriend, Bruce, telling his opinions on "loving a larger woman," simply naming the woman as "C." Outraged and humiliated, Cannie approaches Bruce hoping to get some answers, but only makes things worse when she loses her temper and causes him to say it's over between them for good.However, a few weeks later when Cannie learns that Bruce's father had died, she attends the funeral to give her condolences and maybe make things better between her and Bruce. Things don't go exactly as planned, but Cannie and Bruce end up having sex. Cannie thinks this may be the start of them getting back together, but is hurt when Bruce says they should no longer see each other, as he is seeing someone else.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Fiancée"title="Tokyo Fiancée">
Emilie, a Belgian girl born in Japan, returns to her childhood home of Tokyo and dreams of living there. Emilie believes that the most effective way to learn Japanese is to teach French, so she meets Rinori, a sophomore studying French. The two become friends and lovers as they go from teacher to student.The couple experience cultural differences. Emily likes to taste Japanese food, while Rinori likes Western food. He prepares Japanese food for Emily, but does not eat it himself. The Japanese things that Emily admires are of no interest to Rinori. Rinori takes Emily back to her memories of Japan. Emily's Japanese improves rapidly thanks to Rinori, and so does Rinori's French.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keepers_of_the_House"title="Keepers of the House">
The story concerns Lydia an Englishwoman who has married Diego, the second to last survivor of the Beltrán family. They return to La Bebella, a dilapidated mansion on a neglected estate upon which years of drought and disease have taken their toll. Only Benito, her husband's retainer, remains and when her husband becomes depressed and a virtual recluse, Lydia has to take on the management of the estate with its sparse avocado and sugar cane crops. Benito recounts to her the history of the family and its gradual decline and it is this history and the characters concerned which forms the bulk of the narrative.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Philip"title="The Adventures of Philip">
Philip Firmin, son of Dr. Brand Firmin and of Lord Ringwood's wealthy niece, has been left a fortune at the death of his mother. He discovers that his father is being blackmailed by Tufton Hunt, a clergyman who once performed a sham marriage ceremony between Brandon and Caroline Gann (as related in "A Shabby Genteel Story"). Hunt now claims that the marriage was in fact valid, and urges Caroline to assert her rights and disinherit Philip by proving him illegitimate. Caroline, who is now working as a nurse and in this capacity has brought Philip through a serious illness, refuses to do this. Dr Firmin loses Philip's money and his own through unwise speculation and flees to America, and Philip's fiancée Agnes Twysden renounces him in favour of a wealthier rival. Philip now meets General Baynes, one of the trustees of his lost fortune, and falls in love with the General's daughter Charlotte. He marries her, in the teeth of her mother's opposition, and struggles to support her by becoming a journalist. His troubles are ended when the lost will of his great-uncle, Lord Ringwood, is discovered, and he is found to be the heir to the old man's riches.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horns_(novel)"title="Horns (novel)">
The novel consists of fifty chapters grouped into five sections of ten chapters each, named as follows:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_It_Real_(novel)"title="Keeping It Real (novel)">
Agent Lila Black is a cyborg operative for Earth Security, six years after the quantum bomb fractured reality and allowed elves, fairies, demons and other magical creatures access to the Earth. Agent Black is assigned to protect the first Elven rock star, Zal, whose decision to live amongst humans and 'go native' has been met with considerable animosity amongst his own people. Black has to protect Zal from death or capture whilst uncovering secrets that threaten the relationships between the realms.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln,_Vampire_Hunter_(novel)"title="Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (novel)">
The journal-style book is written as a partial "secret" diary of Abraham Lincoln, kept by the 16th President of the United States and given to the author by a vampire named Henry Sturges. Years later, the manuscript is found in a five-and-dime store in the town of Rhinebeck, New York (a reference to Smith's wife's hometown).When Abraham Lincoln is only eleven years old, he learns from his father Thomas that vampires are, in fact, real. Thomas explains to his son that a vampire killed Abraham's grandfather (also named Abraham Lincoln) in 1786. Young Abraham is also shocked to learn that his beloved mother, Nancy, succumbed not to milk sickness but rather to being given a "fool's dose" of vampire blood, the result of Thomas's failure to repay a debt. Lincoln vows in his diary to kill as many vampires as he can. A year later, he lures the vampire responsible for his mother's death to the family farm and manages to kill it with a homemade stake.In 1825, Lincoln gets word of a possible vampire attack along the Ohio River and investigates, but this time he is no match for the vampire and is nearly killed. He is saved at the last moment by the intervention of the vampire Henry Sturges. Henry nurses Lincoln back to health and explains some of the nature of vampirism, emphasizing that some vampires are good, such as he, and others are evil. Lincoln spends the summer with Henry sharpening his senses and being trained as an expert vampire hunter. Henry sends Lincoln the names and addresses of evil vampires; Abraham dutifully tracks them down and kills them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoobreak"title="Zoobreak">
Savannah has lost her pet monkey named Cleopatra. Griffin and his friend Ben are trying to help her get it back, but they have no such luck until they take a field trip to a zoo boat that has made a stop in Long Island. Savannah makes a scene when she sees the zoo's newest attraction, Eleanor, whom she believes is her monkey, Cleo. Griffin and Ben believe her after they see just how nasty the zookeeper, Mr. Nastase, really is. Griffin and Ben must gather the team of the strength, animal smarts, acting skills, the team leader, height, computer skills, and climbing. They do not realize the zoo is heavily guarded by a seemingly mean security guard named Klaus. Soon, they find out all the animals are actually pets stolen by Nastase, and Klaus knows nothing about it. So, now they must free all the animals from Nastase's cruel hands and get Cleo back. But the plan fails and they must not only free the entire zoo, but keep the animals hidden until they find a "better" zoo to stash the animals, and also stop Nastase from stealing all the animals from both zoos.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bannertail"title="Bannertail">
A baby squirrel is adopted by a farm cat after his mother is killed, but when he is half-grown the barn which is his home catches fire. He flees into the woods, where he learns to survive and make a new life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuelle_(novel)"title="Emmanuelle (novel)">
Emmanuelle, the 19-year-old wife of a French engineer, is flying out to join her husband in Bangkok. While on the plane, she has anonymous sexual encounters with two men, the first time she has cheated on her husband since they were married.She arrives in Bangkok and becomes part of a hedonistic community of western expats. She makes two new friends - Ariane de Saynes, a 30-year-old French countess, and Marie-Anne, a younger girl. Both friendships have a strong homoerotic flavor. Emmanuelle and Marie-Anne begin a series of sexual games in which they take it in turns to masturbate while the other watches. Meanwhile, Ariane makes a series of attempts to seduce Emmanuelle, culminating in a sexual encounter between the two women on a squash court which verges on rape. Afterwards Ariane tries to persuade Emmanuelle to return home with her. Emmanuelle rejects her advances, but immediately regrets doing so.At a tea party hosted by Marie-Anne's mother, Emmanuelle meets Bee, the sister of a naval attaché at the American Embassy. Emmanuelle is immediately attracted to the slender, red-headed Bee, and when the two women meet later by chance on the streets of Bangkok she takes the opportunity to invite Bee home with her. Emmanuelle seduces her and the two women make love, first in the shower and then in Emmanuelle's bed. Afterwards Emmanuelle professes her love for Bee, who is taken aback, having never been with another woman before. They agree to meet again, but Bee does not come and Emmanuelle realizes she has no way of contacting her. She is heartbroken and is comforted by her husband.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Cold_(Parker_novel)"title="Stone Cold (Parker novel)">
A couple of middle-aged thrill killers, Brianna and Anthony Lincoln, are independently wealthy from a patent Anthony obtained for an optical scanner he invented while practicing medicine. The couple move to Paradise and begin picking random people and murdering them by simultaneously shooting them in the heart with .22 caliber pistols. They then make love while watching videos of the murders.Kenneth Eisley is the first victim; Jesse does not discover his identity until after some investigation, and finds his dog. The Lincolns then stalk and kill a woman in a supermarket, and Jesse has the license plate numbers collected from all cars present at the scene. Next the Lincolns murder a man behind a church as he walks home from the train station. Two teenage boys stumble on the body while skateboarding and notice a red 1995 Saab.With the help of the state police, Jesse finds all people who have both registered .22s and a red 1995 Saab, and checks if there was a red Saab at the supermarket. This leads Jesse to the Lincolns. Jesse briefly interviews the Lincolns, who seem very interested in the murders. He takes their .22 rifle for testing, but it has never been fired. However, he leaves convinced they are the killers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lion_&amp;_the_Mouse"title="The Lion &amp; the Mouse">
In a book where the only words are the sounds made by the animals, the story begins at dawn. A mouse escapes several predators before coming upon a lion. The lion lets the mouse go. Later, some hunters come along and capture the lion with a net. The mouse chews through the rope of the net, freeing the lion and they become friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otherspace_(novel)"title="Otherspace (novel)">
The story begins with Xander and Jacob hunting gruskers, a strange plant-eating creature. Later, Jacob reveals that he wants to go to Teiresias in hopes of meeting the other escaped Seers. Delaney sells her eyes to buy his passage aboard the "Odessa", commanded by Captain Bennet. Jacob becomes acquainted with the crew, but is wary of Folgrin, a businessman with strange eyes who seems suspicious. Aboard the ship, they go into Otherspace, a place encountered by entering a wormhole, and Jacob discovers that he is able to move during Otherspace, while others are rendered immobile.When the ship crashes on Maker's Drift, a dark, neglected planet surrounded in superstition, only Bennet, Folgrin, and Jacob survive. After Jacob meets a strange couple, he and Bennet buy passage aboard a passenger liner to Teiresias, a strange planet where one half of the planet receives sunlight and the other is dark, cold, and barren. At Teiresias, Jacob eventually meets Avery, another Blinder who received vision. Jacob is taken to a base on the dark side of Teiresias where he meets the other Blinders who received sight and escaped.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Broken_Wheel"title="The Broken Wheel">
After an apocalyptic event, the survivors have formed into groups. These include the Travellers, who trade in small goods; the medievalists in the enclave Thorngard; the Tribe, a loose gathering of nomads; and in the city the Breakers, who destroy every machine they find, blaming the machines for the disaster. Sarah, a child of the Breakers, joins with the Travellers in an attempt to save the world from destruction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swords_Against_Death"title="Swords Against Death">
The Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories concern the lives of two larcenous but likable rogues as they adventure across the fantasy world of Nehwon. The stories in "Swords Against Death" concern the duo as they leave Lankhmar after the deaths of their first loves, only to find their resolution never to return pointless ("The Circle Curse"). There follow a miscellaneous series of adventures from their wanderings, including a quest for treasure in a dwelling with unique defenses ("The Jewels in the Forest"), a return bout with the Thieves' Guild they hold responsible for their ladies' deaths ("Thieves' House"), an ensorcelled journey to a far-away land ("The Bleak Shore"), an encounter with a beast-haunted stranger ("The Howling Tower"), a dangerous visit to the Nehwonian equivalent of Atlantis ("The Sunken Land"), a conflict with a murderous priesthood ("The Seven Black Priests"), a magical plague afflicting Lankhmar ("Claws from the Night"), a final parting with their deceased loves in the Shadowland ("The Price of Pain-Ease"), and an investigation of a mysterious shop that is other than it seems ("Bazaar of the Bizarre").
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swords_in_the_Mist"title="Swords in the Mist">
The Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories concern the lives of two larcenous but likable rogues as they adventure across the fantasy world of Nehwon. In "Swords in the Mist" the duo confronts the mystically concentrated hate of the citizens of Lankhmar ("The Cloud of Hate"), go their separate ways during a period of difficult times, with the Mouser becoming an enforcement thug and Fafhrd an acolyte of a newly introduced religion ("Lean Times in Lankhmar"), recuperate after their reconciliation with a sea voyage ("Their Mistress, the Sea"), invade the boudoir of an absent sea deity ("While the Sea-King's Away"), flee his wrath by traversing a passage to another world ("The Wrong Branch"), and there perform a bizarre quest towards the Castle of Mist to break a curse placed upon them. ("Adept's Gambit").
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swords_Against_Wizardry"title="Swords Against Wizardry">
The Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories concern the lives of two larcenous but likable rogues as they adventure across the fantasy world of Nehwon. In "Swords Against Wizardry" the duo consult a witch regarding an upcoming adventure ("In the Witch's Tent"); ascend Stardock, the Nehwonian Everest, in search of treasure ("Stardock"); are revealed, as their gains are stolen from them, "not" to be the best thieves in Lankhmar, as they so smugly deem themselves ("The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar"); and take service with two opposing claimants to the sorcerous throne of the ancient city of Quarmall ("The Lords of Quarmall").
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swords_of_Lankhmar"title="The Swords of Lankhmar">
The Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories concern the lives of two larcenous but likable rogues as they adventure across the fantasy world of Nehwon. In "The Swords of Lankhmar", the duo is hired by the city of Lankhmar to protect its grain fleets, which have become prey to a mysterious threat. A sea serpent ridden by an explorer from another world is encountered, but the true foes prove to be legions of intelligent rats. Returning to Lankhmar, the protagonists find the whole city besieged by the rats. The Mouser, magically shrunken to rat size, spies out their plans, but the rats' victory appears certain until an intervention by the Gods of Lankhmar and the rats' own ancient enemies occurs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swords_and_Ice_Magic"title="Swords and Ice Magic">
The Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories concern the lives of two larcenous but likable rogues as they adventure across the fantasy world of Nehwon. In "Swords and Ice Magic" the duo face a series of challenges from Death of greater or lesser subtlety ("The Sadness of the Executioner", "Beauty and the Beasts", "Trapped in the Shadowland" and "The Bait"), the pique of deities they formerly worshiped whose names they now rarely even use in vain ("Under the Thumbs of the Gods"), a voyage to the strange equatorial ocean of Nehwon ("Trapped in the Sea of Stars"), and recruitment to succor Nehwon's Iceland, the legendary Rime Isle, menaced by Sea Mingols and a pair of refugee gods ("The Frost Monstreme", "Rime Isle").
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knight_and_Knave_of_Swords"title="The Knight and Knave of Swords">
The Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories concern the lives of two larcenous but likable rogues as they adventure across the fantasy world of Nehwon. In "The Knight and Knave of Swords" the duo has settled permanently on Rime Isle with their new wives, their followers assuming the role of peaceful traders. The first two stories concentrate on this settling-in process, while the final two deal with various magical curses and afflictions suffered by the protagonists.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Windup_Girl"title="The Windup Girl">
Anderson Lake is an economic hitman for the AgriGen Corporation, working in Thailand. He owns a factory trying to mass-produce a revolutionary new model of "kink-spring" (the successor, in the absence of oil or petroleum, to the internal combustion engine) that will store gigajoules of energy. However, the factory is a cover for his real mission: discovering the location of the Thai seedbank, with which Thailand has so far managed to resist the calorie companies' attempts at agro-economic subjugation. He has heavily delegated the running of the factory to his manager, Hock Seng, a refugee from the Malaysian purge of the ethnic Chinese. Hock Seng was a successful businessman in his former life and longs for a return to his former status. To this end, he plots to steal the kink-spring designs kept in Anderson's safe.When Anderson visits a sex club, he meets Emiko, a "windup girl" - a genetically modified human created as a servant and companion. Windups are illegal in Thailand; Emiko was brought to Bangkok and abandoned by her owner, a Japanese delegate on a diplomatic mission. Emiko lives in fear of being discovered and murdered by the Environment Ministry, and is currently in bonded servitude to Raleigh, the owner of the club. She reveals to Anderson information she has learned about the secret seedbank. In return, he tells her about a refuge in the north of Thailand where people of Emiko's kind (the "New People") live together. She becomes determined to escape to this place by paying off Raleigh.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sound_of_Thunder"title="The Sound of Thunder">
The Sound of Thunder describes the progress of the Second Boer War through Sean's own actions, first in harrowing missions in the front lines for the British Guides, then as the leader of a commando designed to fight the Boers on their own terms – guerrilla combat in the veld.Sean and his son Dirk finally leave the wilderness and discover that a war is brewing between the English and the Boers. He meets and falls in love with a woman called Ruth and they conceive a daughter during a thunderstorm. Ruth runs away to return to her husband who is a soldier in the Boer War, but later, after Sean won many victories in the war, he befriends Saul, Ruth's husband. Saul is killed in battle and Sean, although feeling guilty, finds Ruth and marries her.The commander of the Boers is Sean'sbrother-in-law, Jan-Paulus Leroux, brother of Katrina who died in “When the Lion Feeds”. Sean and Jan-Paulus fight but eventually decide to leave each other alone.The peace which follows finds Sean with hopes of marriage, settling down to develop new land by planting wattle. But it is at this point in the novel that the hatred borne him by his twin-brother Garrick really comes into the open: Garrick, who has been forced to live in the shadow of his twin's superiority since childhood, and who has vowed to pay him back for it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swords_Against_the_Shadowland"title="Swords Against the Shadowland">
The Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories follow the lives of two larcenous but likable rogues as they adventure across the fantasy world of Nehwon. In "Swords Against the Shadowland", our two heroes return to Lankhmar, the city in which they met and in which their first loves, Ivrian and Vlanna, met their deaths. There, haunted by their lovers' ghosts, they combat a sorcerous plague cast on the city by a rogue wizard named Malygris.Chronologically the story falls between the first and second volumes of the complete seven volume edition of Leiber's collected stories devoted to the characters. The story is a direct sequel to "Ill Met in Lankhmar", the last story in "Swords and Deviltry", and covers some of the same events as "The Circle Curse", the first story in "Swords Against Death".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_My_Babies_Go!"title="Let My Babies Go!">
"Let My Babies Go!" features the Rugrats—Tommy, Chuckie, Phil, his twin sister Lil, and Angelica—as they are trapped in an attic with Tommy's grandfather Boris. Boris explains to them the story of Passover to pass the time; as he does so, the Rugrats imagine that they are the characters featured within the story. Tommy is portrayed as Moses, as he rebels against the Pharaoh of Egypt (Angelica). Through casting various plagues upon Egypt, Moses is able to free the Hebrews from slavery and they flee across the Red Sea.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busybody_Nora"title="Busybody Nora">
The protagonist, Nora, is a girl who lives in an apartment building of about 200 people in New York with her little brother Teddy and her parents. Although she has lived there all her life, she doesn't know all the residents' names so she asks everyone she meets what their name is and receives the moniker of 'Busybody'.One time Nora accidentally becomes a babysitter for a day and later she and Teddy prepare for their dad's birthday. Another day her grandparents visit and her grandfather talks about how he knew Jack from the beanstalk tale. Finally Nora arranges for a building party as a way to persuade one of the resident's daughters, who lives in Ohio, that New York is a safe and friendly place for her mother to live.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Sigurd_the_Volsung_and_the_Fall_of_the_Niblungs"title="The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs">
## Book I: Sigmund.The poem opens with the marriage of king Volsung's daughter Signy to Siggeir, king of the Goths. The bridal feast is interrupted by the arrival of a stranger, the god Odin in disguise, who drives a sword into a tree-trunk. Though everyone tries to draw the sword, Volsung's son Sigmund is the only man who can do it. The disappointed Siggeir takes his new wife home, inviting Volsung to visit him. When Volsung does so he is killed by Siggeir, and his sons are taken prisoner. While in captivity they are all killed by a wolf, apart from Sigmund who escapes into the forest. Signy sends Sigmund her two sons to help him in avenging their family, but Sigmund accepts only Sinfjotli, the hardier of the two. Sigmund and Sinfjotli kill Siggeir and burn down his hall, then return to their ancestral home, the hall of the Volsungs. Sigmund marries Borghild, while Sinfjotli goes abroad with Borghild's brother, quarrels with him, and kills him. On his return Sinfjotli is poisoned by Borghild, and she is turned out by Sigmund, who instead marries Hiordis. Sigmund is killed in battle, and the pregnant Hiordis is taken to live in the hall of King Elf in Denmark.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Face_of_Janus"title="The Other Face of Janus">
Edwina Nearly finds life difficult to handle. She is happy when she enters the painting of The Garden of Earthly Delights and meets Janus. But everything goes wrong when Janus decides to visit her world and gets out of the painting. There he becomes a monster, and it is Edwina's responsibility to lure him back into the Garden.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Hand"title="The Other Hand">
Using alternating first-person perspectives, the novel tells the stories of Little Bee, a Nigerian refugee, and Sarah O'Rourke (née Summers), a magazine editor from Surrey. After spending two years detained in a British immigration detention centre, Little Bee is illegally released after a fellow refugee performs sexual favours for a detention officer. She travels to the home of Sarah and her husband Andrew, whom she met two years previously on a beach in the Niger Delta. Sarah is initially unaware of Little Bee's presence, until Andrew, haunted by guilt of their shared past, commits suicide. Little Bee reveals herself to Sarah on the day of Andrew's funeral, and helps her to care for her four-year-old son Charlie.Through a mutual reflection on their past, it is revealed that Sarah and Andrew were on holiday at the time of their meeting with Little Bee. The trip was an attempt to salvage their marriage after Andrew discovered Sarah had been unfaithful to him, embarking on an affair with Home Office employee Lawrence Osborn. While walking on the beach one morning, they were approached by a then 14-year-old Little Bee, and her older sister Nkiruka. The girls were being pursued by soldiers who had burned down their village and intended for there to be no witnesses left alive. The soldiers arrived and murdered a guard from the O'Rourkes' hotel, but offered to spare the lives of the girls if Andrew would amputate his own middle finger with a machete. Afraid, and believing the soldiers would murder the girls anyway, Andrew refused, but Sarah complied in his place. The soldiers took both girls away, leaving the couple in doubt as to whether the soldiers would leave one girl alive in response, as they promised.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylands"title="Greylands">
Jack and his sister Ellen are suffering in the aftermath of their mother's death, which has caused their father to withdraw into himself. There is some unsolved mystery which Jack tries to explore. To him, the mystery has something to do with the "greylands", a world on the other side of his mirror. Much of the action takes place in these greylands, where Jack meets a strange girl and discovers that his soul is at risk. The adventure is described from Jack's point of view, and within the context of the novel may be a true account of his experiences or a story he is inventing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Half"title="The Power of Half">
The book details why and how the Salwen family decided to sell their home in 2006. The home was a luxurious, 6,500-square-foot (600-square-meter), 1912 historic dream-house in Ansley Park, in midtown Atlanta, Georgia. It had Corinthian columns, five bedrooms, eight fireplaces, four ornate bathrooms, and a private elevator to Hannah's bedroom.The family down-graded by replacing their home with a house that was half as expensive and less than half the size. The Salwens donated half the proceeds ($850,000) of the sale of their original home to The Hunger Project, a charity that works to lessen the hunger of 30,000 rural villagers in over 30 villages in Ghana, and helps them gain self-reliance.The book describes the consensus-driven process that the parents and their two children used–over a period of time–to reach the decision to give away half the value of their home, and how they chose the charity from a number of non-profit organizations that they considered. It describes the challenges that the family faced while turning their family project into a reality, from economic ones to keeping the project a secret for a period of time so that they would not appear to be "freaks" to their friends.Before they embarked on the project, the family members had little contact with one another, other than at meals. Hannah notes that "The Power of Half" "is a relationships book, not really a giving book." She feels that the project helped her family grow closer to one another. "The New York Times Book Review" notes how the family "became happier with less—and urges others to do likewise."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddy_and_Fredericka"title="Freddy and Fredericka">
Freddy and Fredericka are a British royal couple similar to Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales. The two are sent to America on a comic adventure to fulfill a quest to achieve Freddy's destiny.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom™"title="Freedom™">
The sequel picks up shortly after the end of "Daemon". Sobol's distributed AI has already infiltrated the computer systems of numerous companies and governments. Many companies have surrendered, either out of fear of annihilation or because they have been converted to the fairer and more efficient system using a kind of government by algorithm. While the Daemon is a technological creation, much of the work is carried out by human beings, compelled by the Daemon to change the world, according to the vision of Matthew Sobol.Connected by the "Darknet", the human followers, using Sobol's game engine (for his award-winning game "The Gate") as a base, have created their own ranking system and economy. Online identities mimic an MMORPG, with operatives doing tasks to gain levels and gaining access to new technologies and help from the Daemon in an effort to advance their communities. Numerous towns have slowly joined the Daemon's network as a means to improve their own situations and their society as a whole.The rest of the world believes the Daemon is still a hoax, due to the efforts of the US government (and its allies) to appear to the general public that they are still in charge. In truth, the American political and economic system is collapsing, with the price of fuel and the unemployment rates both skyrocketing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Confusions_of_Pleasure"title="The Confusions of Pleasure">
The book is organized chronologically, with four sections named after seasons: Winter (1368–1450), Spring (1450–1550), Summer (1550–1642) and Fall (1642–1644).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Book_(Alcoholics_Anonymous)"title="The Big Book (Alcoholics Anonymous)">
The book consists of over 400 pages. Bill's Story and Dr. Bob's Nightmare and the personal experiences of some alcoholics are detailed as well as the series of solutions which evolved to become the twelve-step program. How to use the twelve steps is explained using examples and anecdotes. Some chapters target a specific audience. One chapter is devoted to agnostics, and another is named "To Wives" (most of the first AA members were men), and still another is for employers. The second part of the book (whose content varies from edition to edition) is a collection of personal stories, in which alcoholics tell their stories of addiction and recovery.Frequently mentioned sections are:The main goal of the book is to make it possible for the reader to find a power greater than himself to solve his problem. The writers indicate that an alcoholic "of our type" can under no circumstances become a moderate drinker: only abstinence and the understanding of the community of alcoholics can lead to recovery. By way of anecdotal evidence, the example is provided of a man who, after 25 years sobriety, began to drink moderately and within two months landed in hospital. The reasoning is that once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackers_Series"title="Trackers Series">
The first book, "Trackers" is about four friends with an acute sense for technology who form a team called the Trackers. They usually do field tests with their newly high-tech technology. At the same time, the team is infiltrated and, in a rush to try and capture the perpetrator, find a not well-known association; the ISD, the Internet Security Directive. Formed to take down Shantorian, a hacker once in their ranks, the ISDl literally begs the Trackers to join them. At the end of the book, the Trackers are confused as to whether to join the ISD.The second book, "Shantorian", was released in 2011 and is possibly the final book in the series.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing_the_Dogstar_Blues"title="Singing the Dogstar Blues">
Joss gets partnered with an alien, Mavkel, who has somehow survived the usually fatal loss of his linked partner Kelmav. She gradually realises that she is expected to link with him, as she is the most open of all the students. They travel back in time to find out why and discover it was because the time-travelling Mavkel accidentally contaminated her as a pre-implantation embryo.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockroach_(novel)"title="Cockroach (novel)">
A man, who is an immigrant from the Middle East, moves to the slums of Montreal, where he learns that he is stuck in poverty. When he tries to take his own life, a "man in a speedo" saves him. He is then sentenced to therapy, where he explains his horrid childhood and how he believes that he is a cockroach. He is also in love with a girl, Shohreh, and is friends/enemies with a man named Reza. He gets a job at a restaurant, and can't help but stare at his boss' daughter. He also steals from every rich man and poor woman. Throughout the book the man starts to slowly change, for better and worse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Racial_Contract"title="The Racial Contract">
Mills argues that racism is at the core of the "social contract", rather than racism being an unintended result attributed to the failings of imperfect men. Specifically, the racial contract is a tacit (and at times explicit) agreement among members of the tribes of Europe to assert, promote, and maintain the ideal of white supremacy as against all other tribes of the world. This intention is deliberate and an integral characteristic of the social contract, a characteristic which persists to the present day. In Mills' words, "...what has usually been taken...as the racist 'exception' has really been the rule; what has been taken as the 'rule'...[racial equality]...has really been the exception."Mills argues however, that these ideals of the social contract are at worst pure fiction or at best were intended only to apply to a specific group of people, namely members of the tribes of Europe and their genetic descendants. "...when white people say 'Justice,' they mean 'Just Us'.""
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Profile"title="High Profile">
The novel begins with the discovery of a body hanging from a tree in the park. It doesn't take long to figure out that this is no suicide, as the person had been shot several times before the hanging. After a little investigation the body is discovered to be that of libertarian national talk radio and television personality Walter Weeks. Weeks was an influential man, and personal friend to the governor of Massachusetts, so when the media finds out, Jesse Stone finds himself hounded by the governor and the media, and leading a very high-profile case.Stone begins his investigation by interviewing Weeks's ex-wives, manager, widow Lorrie Weeks, and bodyguard Conrad Lutz. Before long another twist is added to the crime when the body of Weeks's pregnant mistress turns up in the dumpster of a local restaurant. The medical examination discovers that this second victim was shot by the same gun, probably around the same time. As part of his investigation, Stone has Suitcase Simpson check to see if Weeks has any criminal convictions. The only one that turns up is an incident in Baltimore in 1987 where Weeks was found having sex in his car with a young woman. This seems unimportant at first, until Jesse discovers that the arresting officer was Weeks's bodyguard, Lutz. When questioned, Lutz confirms that he had busted Weeks while working as a Baltimore police officer, but that later he and Weeks then struck up a friendship which ended in Lutz becoming his bodyguard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Senator"title="The American Senator">
The novel is largely set in and near the town of Dillsborough, in the fictional county of Rufford. The two principal subplots centre on the courtship behaviour of two young women.The heroine, Mary Masters, is the daughter of an attorney, and has been raised as a gentlewoman. Her stepmother is from a lower social order; believing it best for Mary, she pressures her strongly to accept a proposal from Lawrence Twentyman, a prosperous young yeoman farmer with aspirations to gentility. While Mary respects Twentyman for his excellent qualities, she feels that she cannot love him as a wife should a husband. She admires Reginald Morton, whose cousin is the squire of Bragton and thus one of the two major landowners of Rufford. Reginald admires Mary as well; but for most of the novel, each is ignorant of the other's feelings: Mary, as a gentlewoman, cannot take the initiative in such a matter; and Reginald, misinformed that Mary loves another, is unwilling to make an offer and have it rejected.The anti-heroine of the novel is Arabella Trefoil. Her father is cousin to the Duke of Mayfair; her mother was a banker's daughter. Her parents are unofficially separated, and living in straitened circumstances. Arabella and her mother, Lady Augustus Trefoil, have no fixed abode; they wander from place to place, visiting people who cannot refuse them without creating social awkwardness. At Lady Augustus's direction, Arabella has spent many years struggling to secure a rich husband who will give her and her mother high social standing, an assured income, and a house of their own. She has lately become provisionally engaged to John Morton, the squire of Bragton and a rising figure in the Foreign Office. He would be an adequate but not outstanding husband by her standards; and when the opportunity presents itself, she attempts to entrap the wealthy and titled young Lord Rufford, concealing these attempts from Morton so that she can accept his proposal should they fail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behind_a_Mask"title="Behind a Mask">
Set in the Coventry Mansion during the Victorian era, the wealthy family hires a young woman named Jean Muir to be the governess of sixteen-year-old Bella. When she first meets the Coventry family, Jean succeeds in charming Bella, Ned and Mrs. Coventry by having a fainting spell. However, Gerald and Lucia, son of the estate and cousin to the Coventry family, remain suspicious. They are skeptical with good reason, for when Jean retires to her own bedroom, she removes her costume (a wig and some fake teeth) to reveal that she is actually an actress of at least thirty years of age.Acting the part of a harmless governess, Jean slowly but surely weasels her way into the hearts of the Coventry family. Eventually, all the male characters fall in love with her: first Ned, the youngest, followed by the skeptic Gerald, and gradually the unassuming uncle, John. She uses the love they bestow upon her to turn them against each other and eventually to secure the Coventry estate for herself. By the end of the story, Jean Muir has married John to become Lady Coventry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedlam_(Kennen_novel)"title="Bedlam (Kennen novel)">
When Lexi Juby arrives in the boring village where her mother lives, she thinks that she will die there from boredom. But soon more happens than she'd like. While searching for her mother's missing dog, the 16-year-old got lost in the wood. Suddenly a huge wild dog with foaming at the mouth was standing in front of her, the purest tremendously! And it bites her. Despair, Lexi runs away, and reaches a half-ruined, weird building. She breaks out through the rotten floor and lands in a fetid broth. Beside of her, a rat cadaver was floating. The young exhausted girl won't be able to survive in the ice cold water very long...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparks_(Kennen_novel)"title="Sparks (Kennen novel)">
When Carla's Grandfather dies, she's very sad. But then, she finds a secret letter by her Grandpa and decides to give him the end he had always wanted, a Viking-funeral, in which he would be put on a burning boat heading to the sea. Carla and her siblings start a crazy and dangerous race against the time to do the impossible.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonders_of_a_Godless_World"title="Wonders of a Godless World">
"Set on an unnamed island in the near present, it is told from the perspective of a simple young woman, an orphan, mute, reared in a mental hospital and an orderly there, who forms a bond with a mysterious coma patient, a man with telepathic powers who claims to be immortal..."Throughout the book the reader can never be sure that the mute orphan narrator is a reliable narrator. The possibility that her telepathic bond with the patient is in fact a figment of her imagination is always left open. So rather than science fiction, the book could instead be read as an insight into delusion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alyzon_Whitestarr"title="Alyzon Whitestarr">
Alyzon Whitestarr does not take after her musically talented father or her nocturnal, artistic mother. She considers herself to be the most normal member of a very eccentric family until an accident changes that.When she wakes from a coma after an accident suddenly colors are more vibrant. Her memory is flawless; but strangest of all is Alyzon's sense of smell. She can smell people's feelings, view flashes of their lives and perceive their essences. Her best friend smells of a comforting sea breeze. She registers her father's contentment as the sweet scent of caramelized sugar. But why does the cutest guy in school smell so rancid? With these new senses she discovers that some people's spirits have been infected by a sentient disease.With Alyzon's extrasensory perception comes intrigue and danger, as she becomes aware of the dark secrets and hidden ambitions that threaten her family. In the end, being different might be less of a blessing than a curse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Shaka_the_Great"title="Emperor Shaka the Great">
The epic follows the life narrative of Shaka the Great and is narrated from a third person perspective.The book begins with the apparently legitimate love affair of Nandi with Shaka's father Senzangakhona. However, Senzangakhona mistreats Nandi, and drives her from the Zulu kingdom. She flees the kingdom and spends many years travelling among kingdoms friendly to her own tribe. While abroad she gives birth to Shaka and raises him. They finally settle in the kingdom where Shaka grows, quickly showing himself as having a sharp mind and military prowess. He gains command of his own regiment, which he retrains in a new fighting system. Instead of fighting with throwing spears from afar, which was the traditional method of warfare, Shaka suggested that a large shield and a short stabbing spear should be used. His strategy relied on a quick approach to the enemy under cover of the shield so as to stab the enemy before the enemy could throw many spears. Shaka earns a reputation as both a fighter and warrior. When Senzangakhona dies, Shaka, with pardon of the King whose kingdom he has lived in, leads a military force into Zululand. Soldiers and the populace flock to this great warrior and Shaka ascends to the throne, usurping his more legitimate brothers. With his ascension to the throne Shaka radically reorganizes the military system. With this new organization and the tactics he perfected with the short spear, Shaka begins expanding into neighbouring regions, suppressing kings and bandit armies and assimilating these peoples into the Zulu nation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnikin_of_the_Rock"title="Finnikin of the Rock">
Finnikin, Sir Topher and Evanjalin start travelling to Sorel, Finnikin reluctantly. Sir Topher tells Evanjalin the story of the Five Days of Unspeakable. Later, they travel to a town in Sarnak. Finnikin and Evanjalin go to the market to buy food. A boy thief steals Evanjalin's ruby ring. Evanjalin runs after the thief. She chases him into an alleyway but there are four men there. Finnikin comes and they both start fighting the men.Evanjalin and Finnikin fight the men, then steal a horse and ride to Sir Topher. They see the thief again and Finnikin brings him to their camp. In the following days, the group reaches Charyn. They come to an exile camp and a man tells them that Lord August wants Finnikin and Sir Topher to travel to Belegonia. At Belegonia, Finnikin and Sir Topher ask Lord August to ask the Belegonian king to spare a piece of land for the Lumateran exiles.Lord August says that he will only help them if they provide him with information that the king doesn't already know. Evanjalin tells him that Charyn wanted to take over Lumatere, which was between Charyn and Belegonia, so that it could take over Belegonia. The group takes a ship to Sorel and they reach there. They talk but then soldiers come and Evanjalin says that Finnikin is pretending to be Balthazar. Finnikin is arrested.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Joys_of_Motherhood"title="The Joys of Motherhood">
Nwokocha Agbadi is a proud, handsome and wealthy local chief. Although he has many wives, he finds a woman named Ona more attractive. Ona (or "a priceless jewel") is the name he has given her. She is the daughter of a fellow chief. When she was young, her father took her everywhere he went, saying she was his ornament, and Nwokocha Agbadi would say jokingly in response, "Why don't you wear her around your neck like an Ona?" It never occurred to him that he would be one of the men to later ask for her when she grew up.During one rainy season Chief Agbadi and his friends have gone elephant hunting and having come too near the heavy creature, the chief is thrown with a mighty tusk into a nearby sugar-cane bush and is pinned to the floor. He aims his spear at the belly of the mighty animal and kills it but not until it has wounded him badly. Agbadi passes out and it seems to all he has died. He wakes up after several days to find Ona beside him. During his period of recovery, he sleeps with her, and shortly thereafter he finds out that his senior wife Agunwa is very ill. She later dies, and it is thought that perhaps she became ill as a result of seeing her husband making love to Ona on his apparent deathbed.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Girl_(novel)"title="Big Girl (novel)">
"Big Girl" starts out with a couple, Jim and Christine, who marry at an early age. From the beginning, their morals are dubious. Jim really wants them to have a baby boy. Christine also wants a boy, but only because her husband does. They try but end up having a girl. She is born to a narcissistic father who is obsessed with looks and money, and a food- and fitness-obsessed housewife who plays bridge, and who seems to exist to agree with her husband. Both parents are disappointed in their baby girl from the moment she is born. They name her "Victoria", for Queen Victoria — not because, as Victoria believed as a child, she was a queen in her father's eyes, but because the picture Victoria saw of her namesake depicted a "fat and ugly old woman, who resembled one of the dogs she posed with".As she grows older, Victoria is referred to as a "genetic throwback" to Jim's great-grandmother, known for her overweight, matronly figure, fair looks and "large nose", rather than resembling her dark-haired, dark-eyed parents. Constantly bullied by her parents about her weight, everything changes for Victoria at seven years old when her mother has another baby. It is another girl they name Grace, whom Victoria calls "Gracie". Even though Gracie receives constant favouritism, praise, and adoration, Victoria shows no jealousy and is obsessed with doing everything for her sister from the moment she is born. As the girls grow up and Victoria and Gracie get older, their love for each other is stronger than ever, despite the constant remarks their parents make about Victoria's weight, her chosen career as a teacher, and lack of a husband or boyfriend.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Svärd_(novel)"title="Anna Svärd (novel)">
Karl-Artur like most of the priests loves God deeply, but he doesn´t have much people skills. In this part of the series he gets involved with Anna Svärd, an indecisive sales agent. After breaking up abruptly with Charlotte, Karl's only intentions are to find a woman to help him pay his bill and forget about poverty for good. On the other hand, Anna is eager to marry anyone to have a better life. But the unimaginable occurs - Thea's return gives the story a grotesque spin.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eleventh_Hour_(Doctor_Who)"title="The Eleventh Hour (Doctor Who)">
The story follows immediately on from the ending of the previous episode, "The End Of Time" Part 2, with the newly regenerated Eleventh Doctor crash-landing his TARDIS in the English village of Leadworth. The Doctor leaves the TARDIS to self-repair while the girl Amelia Pond helps him recover. She shows him a crack in her bedroom wall that he recognises as a tear in space-time, leading to an Atraxi prison. The Atraxi alert him to the escape of Prisoner Zero. Before he can respond, he must take the TARDIS for a short trip to help its repairs, and promises Amelia he will be back in five minutes. She packs a suitcase and waits for him.The Doctor returns, unaware twelve years have passed. He is accosted by an older Amelia, now going by Amy, who has been ridiculed by the townsfolk for her fascination with her "raggedy Doctor". The Doctor sees a door hidden by a perception filter in Amy's home, and finds Prisoner Zero inside. They flee before it attacks. The Atraxi arrive in Earth's orbit and, speaking through all communication devices, demand they turn over Zero or they will destroy the Earth.Searching for Zero, which is able to take the form of any unconscious being that it has telepathically linked to, they run across Amy's boyfriend Rory, who helps spot Zero posing as one of the coma patients in his care. The Doctor directs Amy and Rory to the hospital, while he gate-crashes an online meeting of experts discussing the Atraxi warning to give them instructions. Amy and Rory corner Zero at the hospital, and the Doctor arrives as the experts execute his plan, broadcasting "zero" to the Atraxi along with the photos of the coma patients from Rory's phone, revealing Zero's identity. Zero shows it has one more form, knocking out Amy and taking the form of Amelia. The Doctor speaks to Amy's subconscious to force Zero to take its native form, allowing the Atraxi to recapture it. Zero warns the Doctor as it is taken away "silence will fall". As the Atraxi leave Earth, the Doctor declares that he is Earth's protector and sternly cautions them not to threaten the planet again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_of_the_Daleks"title="Victory of the Daleks">
The Eleventh Doctor and Amy take the TARDIS to the Cabinet War Rooms during the Second World War. As the Doctor arrived late, Winston Churchill turned to the scientific advances of Professor Edwin Bracewell, including robotic devices called "Ironsides", which are recognised immediately by the Doctor as his arch-enemies, the Daleks, but act as Bracewell's inventions. The Doctor attacks the devices, shouting "I am the Doctor and you are the Daleks!" Unbeknown to the Doctor and the humans, a Dalek ship is in orbit near the Moon; upon hearing the Doctor's "testimony", which has just been transmitted by the Ironsides, the Dalek aboard uses it to activate a "Progenitor device" and alerts its comrades on Earth. The Daleks reveal their intent and expose Bracewell as an android before returning to their ship. The Doctor follows in the TARDIS, leaving Amy behind for her protection.The Doctor threatens to destroy the ship, including himself, before the Progenitor completes, as part of the Daleks' plot to restore their race, but the Daleks fire an energy beam at London that lights up the entire city minutes before an air raid by the Luftwaffe, leaving the Doctor's allies vulnerable and creating a stalemate.When the Progenitor completes, five brand new Daleks in larger, redesigned casings emerge from the Progenitor Chamber. They disintegrate the older "impure" models, who die willingly. At the same time, Amy convinces Churchill and Bracewell to use the technological know-how they have obtained from the Daleks to modify three Spitfires so that they can fly in space. The pilots attack and destroy the dish on the underside of the Dalek ship that was firing the energy beam.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ordeal_of_Richard_Feverel"title="The Ordeal of Richard Feverel">
Sir Austin Feverel's wife deserts him to run away with a poet, leaving her husband to bring up their boy Richard. Believing schools to be corrupt, Sir Austin, a scientific humanist, educates the boy at home with a plan of his own devising known as "the System". This involves strict authoritarian supervision of every aspect of the boy's life, and in particular the prevention of any meeting between Richard and girls of his own age. Richard nevertheless meets and falls in love with Lucy Desborough, the niece of a neighboring farmer. Sir Austin finds out and, disapproving of her humble birth, forbids them to meet again, but they secretly marry. Sir Austin now tries to retrieve the situation by sending Richard to London. Here, however, Sir Austin's friend Lord Mountfalcon successfully sets a courtesan to seduce Richard, hoping that this will leave Lucy open to seduction by himself. Ashamed of his own conduct, Richard flees abroad where he at length hears that Lucy has given birth to a baby and has been reconciled to Sir Austin. He returns to England and, hearing about Lord Mountfalcon's villainy, challenges him to a duel. But this goes badly: Richard is seriously wounded. Lucy is so overcome by this turn of events that she loses her mind and dies.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_We_Seized_the_Day"title="The Year We Seized the Day">
The book, written by Best and Bowles, follows the two authors as they take a pilgrimage trip in Spain, on the Camino de Santiago. The two find the trip more difficult than they initially thought, but struggle through it together and with several other pilgrims also taking the same route. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real_Global_Warming_Disaster"title="The Real Global Warming Disaster">
The book consists of three parts and an epilogue.Booker sums up the book's contents in a long epilogue, which quotes Theseus in "A Midsummer Night's Dream":In the night, imagining some fear,How easy is a bush supposed a bearBooker contends that in this quote Shakespeare is identifying that "when we are not presented with enough information for our minds to resolve something into certainty, they may be teased into exaggerating it into something quite different from what it really is". The first chapter of the book is the introduction, where Booker warns us of the risk posed by 'those measures being proposed by the world's politicians in the hope that they can avert' climate change. It talks about the ineffectiveness of wind turbines, and how they produce the same amount of energy per year as one coal-fired power station (3.9 gigawatts). In the prologue, Booker claims that many people, including the former U.S President Barack Obama, were 'seriously misinformed' about the evidence surrounding Global Warming and the effects it might have on the world. Part I of the book tells how Climate Change has risen to 'the top of the World's political agenda' so quickly, and the methods he thinks the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change used to convince politicians that the issue was genuine, including James Hansen's famous hearing before the American Senate, where he allegedly turned the room temperature up in order the strengthen his point. Part II of the book is entitled 'Gore and the EU unite to Save the Planet'. It depicts how, panic-stricken, the world's politicians took action to encourage more renewable forms of energy, and the closure of the world's non-renewable power stations. Finally, Part III speaks of how the Global Warming 'consensus begins (began) to crumble.' It claims that the evidence behind Climate Change and its causes is coming under increased scrutiny, and that by no means is the science "settled".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Language_of_Bees"title="The Language of Bees">
Russell and Holmes return to their home in Sussex, England, in 1924 after seven months abroad in India, Japan and California. The novel features a domestic mystery as a hive on Holmes's farm has been repeatedly swarming and a colony of bees is found to have disappeared. Action shifts, however, with the reappearance of Damian Adler, a talented young painter and emotionally disturbed veteran of World War I, first introduced in the second book in the series. Adler is Holmes' estranged son, born to Irene Adler in about 1895. The distraught Adler seeks the couple's help in locating his missing wife Yolanda and their daughter Estelle.Russell and Holmes separate during the investigation and Russell searches out Damian's questionable past. The search involves the British practitioners of a religious cult called "The Children of Lights" with roots in Shanghai, China, and features locations ranging from Bohemian London to the wilds of Scotland. Russell experiences a harrowing trip by aeroplane. A series of bodies appears, some dead by suicide and others ritually sacrificed. While the climax of the novel, in an ancient circle of standing stones in Orkney, brings some plot resolution, the story continues in "The God of the Hive" (2010).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_in_Seville"title="Miracle in Seville">
The story draws on religious themes, interweaving gypsy traditions, belief in the intervening power of the Virgin Mary, and the hope of God's forgiveness and redemption, into the Spanish tradition of bullfighting. The action occurs during Holy Week in Spain, and Michener competently captures the religious processions. He provides meticulous detail of bull fights (although some reviewers have taken umbrage at supposedly erroneous details in his narrative). The tale involves a Gypsy matador (Lazaro López), his sister (Magdalena López) who reads fortunes, a cross-eyed Virgin Mary (La Bizca), the American writer (Shenstone), the Spanish bull breeder (Don Cayetano Mota) who is struggling to revive his once-famed herd, and of course the many bulls in Mota's herd.Despite his initial skepticism, the American is drawn into Mota's efforts, which involve fervent prayers to The Virgin and Herculean acts undertaken during Holy Week to prove his devotion and piety. He knows that his prayers will eventually be rewarded, and this knowledge allows him to live with the often-humiliating performance of his bulls in the arena vis-a-vis the arrogant Gómez. We learn that Lazaro López is also being aided by a powerful female, his sister, who may have the ability to curse the bulls that her brother must face. She is determined that her brother must prevail.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_in_the_Cloud"title="The Moon in the Cloud">
When the Lord God decides to send a flood, he instructs Noah to build an Ark and save his family and the animals. Noah gives his reprobate son Ham the responsibility of collecting two cats from Kemi, the Black Land (Egypt), and two lions, but Ham passes the task to his neighbour Reuben by promising to persuade Noah to let Reuben and his wife on the Ark.Reuben travels to Kemi with his camel Anak, his cat Cefalu and his dog Benoni. In the desert they are captured by the High Priest of Sekhmet, who is impressed by Cefalu's sacred heritage. He houses the cat in the Temple of Sekhmet in Kemi's capital Men-nofer, where Cefalu falls in love with the resident temple cat Meluseth. Reuben is presented as a slave to the music-loving King, who becomes his friend. However, he despairs of returning home until a 'supernatural' display arranged by the High Priest of Ptah backfires. Panic and rioting in the streets give Reuben a chance to escape and rescue his animals. Meluseth joins them.On the way back, Cefalu persuades the lion Aryeh to come to the Ark. They meet Thamar, who has camped in the desert to escape the attentions of Ham and has meanwhile rescued a lost lion cub. They return home with the two cats and the two lions only to encounter treachery from Ham. However, a providential accident secures them a place of safety just as the rain begins to fall.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie's_Quest"title="Marjorie's Quest">
The story takes place in the second part of the 1850s. At the beginning of the novel, recently orphaned ten-year-old Marjorie is on her way to stay with an unknown relative. She meets a nice and concerned Judge Gray, who believes the relative, a shiftless drunkard, to be unsuitable. He keeps the girl for a while at his place, where she befriends his teenage son, Reggie.Marjorie is eventually sent to an orphanage, but does not stay there long, since a wealthy family adopts her. The parents have just lost their own little girl and dote on Marjorie, but their teenage son becomes highly jealous of his new sister. His unpleasant behaviour results in Marjorie having an accident, and consequently she loses her memory and goes missing. An old beggar finds her and looks after her. The beggar turns out to have selfish motives, though. When Marjorie recovers, she is taken out to beg by the beggar because people more willingly give money to children. One day, they meet a young woman who takes Marjorie from the beggar and adopts her.Six years later, Marjorie goes to a Southern farm, where she is a teacher for two little children. There, she meets a young soldier.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil's_Wind"title="The Devil's Wind">
Nana Saheb was the adopted son of Bajirao II, the last Maratha Peshwa, and heir to his position as "prime minister" of the Maratha lands. He is raised in an immensely wealthy family and educated as a Brahmin and a prince, although his father's power had been taken away by the British. On his father's death the British do not recognize his title, but allow him to continue in his comfortable exile in the town of Bithoor. An urbane and sophisticated man, Nana Saheb is sympathetic to the British, several of whom are his close friends, but cannot accept their right to rule and exploit India.When the mutiny breaks out in May 1857, Nana Sahib finds himself forced to accept a position of leadership. After a long and ultimately futile struggle in which both sides commit many atrocities, Nana Sahib flees to Nepal where he receives a grudging sanctuary, taking with him an English woman he has rescued and with whom he has fallen in love. Many years later, he revisits India and then travels on to safety in Istanbul, the place where he sets down his memoirs.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gust_Front_(novel)"title="Gust Front (novel)">
"Gust Front" follows a series of characters as they prepare for the looming Posleen invasion of Earth. The main protagonist is Captain Michael O'Neal, Medal of Honor recipient and hero of the battle against the Posleen on Diess. Other major characters include O'Neal's father, "Papa" O'Neal, and his daughter, Cally O'Neal, as well as various military personnel and civilians who are affected by the invasion. The Galactic Federation, an alliance of alien races including the Darhel, Indowy, Himmit, and others, has enlisted the aid of the warlike but technologically backward humans to halt the galactic advance of the Posleen, a race of centaur-like aliens who live only for battle, consuming their own and their enemies' dead and stripping conquered planets of resources.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_All_the_Boys_I've_Loved_Before"title="To All the Boys I've Loved Before">
Lara Jean Song Covey is a sixteen-year-old half-Korean American girl living in Virginia. She is extremely close to her older sister Margot and younger sister Kitty. Lara Jean keeps love letters to all the boys she has ever loved in a teal hatbox given to her by her late mother who died of a head injury when Lara Jean was just 9. There are 5 boys, Josh her sister's boyfriend, a boy named Kenny from camp,Peter from 7th grade, Lucas from homecoming, and John ambrose from model UN. Just before Margot leaves for university in Scotland, she breaks up with her boyfriend Josh Sanderson, who is also their next-door neighbor, and Lara Jean's friend.Lara Jean, who once had a crush on Josh, finds her feelings for him coming back after Margot leaves for school, and Josh admits during a conversation about crushes that his first serious crush was on Lara Jean. To cope with her feelings, Lara Jean writes a long postscript for the letter she wrote when she was fourteen after Josh asked Margot out instead of her.Peter Kavinsky, one of the guys Lara Jean wrote a letter to, approaches her and tells her he does not have any sort of attraction to her. Lara Jean is confused but realizes he is referring to a letter she wrote him years ago after receiving it in the mail. Horrified, she tells him she wrote it a long time ago. Lara Jean recounts what prompted her to write the letter: when she was in seventh grade, she and Peter were with a group of mutual friends when Peter kissed her. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reversal"title="The Reversal">
Mickey Haller, who has become increasingly frustrated in his role as a defense lawyer, agrees to undertake the prosecution role on behalf of the city of Los Angeles, in the retrial of a convicted kidnapper and killer that had been granted as a result of new DNA evidence. His one condition before accepting the task is that he is permitted to choose his own team; he chooses his ex-wife Maggie McPherson as his co-prosecutor, and his half-brother Harry Bosch as his investigator from the LAPD. The prosecution case rests largely on the testimony of Sarah Gleason, the elder sister of the victim, Melissa Landy.The body of 12-year-old Melissa was discovered in 1986, discarded in a dumpster, only a few hours after she was reported missing. Unbeknownst to the killer, her older sister Sarah had been hiding in the garden and had witnessed her abduction. On the day of the murder, she identified Jason Jessup, a tow truck driver, as the man who snatched Melissa from the garden. The evidence against Jessup also includes strands of Melissa's hair, found in the seat of his truck. Thus, her testimony is essential for establishing the quick police focus on Jessup. However, DNA evidence subsequently showed that semen stains found on the dress Melissa was wearing, which could not be definitely matched at the time, came not from Jessup, but from the girls' stepfather.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Defender_(Kalashnikoff_novel)"title="The Defender (Kalashnikoff novel)">
The story is about a Lamut (Evens) named Turgen whose family was killed by an illness which left him alone to his practice of medicine in his Yurt. He then out of his loneliness befriends a group of rams near his yurt this cause the townspeople to look at him and start strange rumors that it is impossible for a man to befriend animals so he must be a sorcerer and shunned because of it. While on coming back from his usual fishing and hunting round he hears crying and decides to help he goes inside the yurt to see 2 children. The eldest one Tim approached Turgen and with all his kindness stayed to tend to the youngest child Aska as she was only but an infant. As time past Marfa the mother of the children came from working to see Turgen tending to her children rather than being angry she was just surprised to find him in her home. As it turns out one of the people who didn't listen to the shamans words was Marfa's late husband who left marfa with some enlightening information that Turgen was a kind man that helped anyone that needed and that the shaman only spoke lies and this was proven to her as she came to see him tending to her children. From that point he frequently dropped by to see Marfa and he children bringing them meats, and salts to make sure that marfa did not need to work so hard and with that she was able to spend more time with her children. With these visits Turgen's story about his past affiliation with the rams on how he hunted them for sport and that cause great sorrow in him to see these creatures being hunter for their horns and meats even though they were minding their own business. With this gap of trust between them Turgen set out to create a wall of trust with the ram which he achieved by feeding them every day. As time passed he began to bond with the herd of ram and watched them as they at his food offering and when the rams had encounters with other dangerous creatures like bears and wolves Turgen did everything in his power to help the rams with their fight even if it meant risking his life. In the middle of September hunting season began this is where Turgen's struggle's begin as hunters start to come to the mountains and they are specifically looking for the rams to hunt. Turgen places the responsibilities of guiding the rams to a safer spot in the mountains. With the help of Marfa and her children he was able to lead the rams to safety while being watched by the hunter they threaten his life because of his actions. This is when Marfa stood up and pleaded to hunter to listen to reason and why Turgen had see the rams through. As they listen they were reminded of the shamans words and ignored er words this is when Turgen stood and talk sense to the hunter and told them how the shamans words should not be headed since he was visited by spirit for helping the rams as the Lamut were very religious they believed a spirit haunted Turgen and now believed he was free since the rams were gone. In the end Turgen was accepted back to the village and married Marfa and was able to live normal life.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bride_of_Abydos"title="The Bride of Abydos">
Divided into two cantos, and further into more than a dozen stanzas each, "The Bride of Abydos" has a straightforward plot. After an initial description of the Turkish setting, the story opens with the ruler Giaffir rebuking his supposed son, Selim. Selim professes his love for his half-sister, Zuleika, Giaffir's daughter. Angered, the Pasha refuses Selim a key to the royal harem and upbraids him with insults.Zuleika herself appears, radiant in beauty, and soon she is forbidden to marry Selim; she tacitly complies. Later, she exclaims her love to Selim and mourns her fate that would be without him. He, in turn, decries Giaffir's judgment as well and vows vengeance. The first canto closes as Zuleika notices a change in Selim's demeanour and wonders about his evasive language. He comforts her with the knowledge that he still retains the harem key and promises to reveal himself later that night.The second canto again opens with a chthonic description of the Turkish lands and the grotto where the lovers meet. His cloak thrown aside, Selim is dressed as a dashing pirate and declares that Zuleika is not his sister. She is surprised and listens as Selim relates how Giaffir had killed Abdallah, Selim's father and Giaffir's brother. Selim's story continues as he tells her that he learned of his true identity from one of his father's loyal servants, Haroun, and that since Selim himself was raised by Giaffir, he was detested and maltreated.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastime_(novel)"title="Pastime (novel)">
Spenser's semi-adopted son, Paul Giacomin, visits Spenser in Boston asking for his help. He can't locate his mother, who has apparently left on an extended trip without telling him. While Paul's mother is somewhat lacking in motherly skills, he doesn't believe she would voluntarily leave her home for such an extended period without contacting him. Though Paul can't pay Spenser, he takes the case anyway as a favor to Paul.Spenser takes Paul along in his sleuthing, introducing him as his "prentice", though Paul has no real intention of becoming a detective: he just wants to find his mother.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_Grey"title="Shades of Grey">
Chromatacia is a future dystopian society that exists at least five hundred years (although possibly more) after the collapse of our own society, identified as 'the Previous'. All life is governed by the laws set by Munsell, the supposed and revered founder of Chromatacia. The rules range from sensible, such as outlawing murder, to bizarre, such as outlawing the manufacture of spoons (though old spoons are often kept as personal heirlooms). The social hierarchy of Chromatacia is defined by the ability to see colour, which is limited in most people to varying degrees of one hue, or at most two. Those who can see red predominantly are in the second-lowest social order (only ranking above 'Greys', who cannot perceive colour), and 'Ultra Violets' hold the highest rank. The perception of colour also affects their health and wellness: certain colours have medical effects on people. Doctors in this world are called "swatchmen", since they show of colour to their patients. Shades of green, especially Lincoln green, act as a narcotic, and are often abused as recreational drugs. Surnames and names of towns are usually derived from various shades of colour, such as jade, carmine and saffron.Protagonist Eddie Russett is a 'Red' sent to the outer-fringe town of East Carmine to conduct a chair census, which he speculates is punishment for a practical joke played on the son of a prefect. There he meets Jane, a Grey with an upturned nose and a fierce temper, who often causes personal injury to whomever she meets. Eddie's father becomes the swatchman of the village and is well liked by the Greys. In the course of the story, Eddie discovers that much of what the government has told the public is not true. Specifically he learns that misfits, supposedly sent to Emerald City to be brainwashed, are taken to the deserted town of High Saffron where they are killed by looking at a building whose colour is poisonous.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Centurion"title="The Last Centurion">
"Bandit Six", the book's protagonist, discusses his adventures following a withdrawal from the Middle East by U.S. forces in a time of chaos and disease. He commands a Stryker company that is left behind in Iran to guard a U.S. military equipment depot after a worldwide outbreak of mutated bird flu. He and his company repeat the journey of the Ten Thousand to return home, where he assists in agricultural recovery efforts and leads a military operation to regain control of a major American city.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zofloya"title="Zofloya">
Victoria de Loredani is the beautiful, spoiled daughter of the Marchese di Loredani and his wife, Laurina. Victoria, her brother Leonardo, and her parents reside in a palazzo in Venice, Italy. They live in happiness until the Marchese's friend, Count Ardolph, visits from Germany. Ardolph, who takes pleasure in destroying the reputations of virtuous women and breaking up their marriages, appeals to Laurina's vanity and he seduces her away from her husband. The two disappear from Venice together. After Laurina elopes, Leonardo disappears from Venice without explanation, leaving only Victoria and her father in the palazzo. One year later, the Marchese encounters Ardolph in the streets of Venice. They duel, and Ardolph fatally stabs the Marchese. Laurina pays him a final visit, and the Marchese expresses his dying wish that Laurina will find Leonardo, reclaim her children, and leave Venice.After the Marchese's death, Victoria falls into Ardolph and Laurina's custody, and soon meets Il Conte Berenza, a noble but naïve Venetian man. Berenza quickly falls in love with Victoria, but after overhearing her curse her mother, Berenza becomes wary of her evil character. Laurina and Ardolph do not approve of Berenza, so Laurina forges a letter in Victoria's handwriting persuading Berenza to leave Venice. Ardolph and Laurina then send Victoria to live under the tyrannical rule of Laurina's cousin, Signora di Modena. With the help of her servant, Victoria escapes the Signora's household, disguises herself as a peasant, and returns to Venice. She reconciles with Berenza, and they begin living together. Berenza tells her of his former mistress Megalena, who is known for her jealousy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saiwai_Qixia_Zhuan"title="Saiwai Qixia Zhuan">
The story is set during the reign of the Shunzhi Emperor () of the Qing dynasty. The ethnic minority tribes in northwestern China are under attack by Qing forces, who are attempting to force them into submission. Yang Yuncong helps the tribal people resist the invaders and becomes a revered hero in the region. However, Yang is betrayed and attacked by his junior, Chu Zhaonan, who has defected to the Qing side. While they are duelling, they are separated by a sandstorm and Yang loses consciousness. He is saved by Nalan Minghui, the daughter of a Qing general. She nurses him back to health and helps him escape from danger.After leaving Nalan Minghui, Yang Yuncong meets "Flying Red Sash" Hamaya, a legendary heroine in the northwest. Hamaya's lover, the singer Yabulu, had betrayed their tribe and caused the death of her father. Hamaya seeks vengeance on Yabulu, captures him and brings him back to her tribe for punishment. Along the way, they are ambushed by Chu Zhaonan and Qing soldiers. Yang and Hamaya defeat and capture Chu, but Yang releases Chu on account of their past senior-junior relationship. Back in Hamaya's tribe, her fellow tribesmen find Yabulu guilty and want him dead. Hamaya suppresses her sorrow, and personally kills Yabulu to deliver justice. With Yang Yuncong's help, Hamaya wins a martial arts contest and is elected as the new chief of her tribe. By then, Hamaya has secretly developed romantic feelings for Yang.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Screen_(novel)"title="Blue Screen (novel)">
Sunny Randall is approached by Buddy Bollen to provide protection for his number one client, Erin Flint, star of the Woman Warrior movie series and future star of Bollen's major league baseball team.. Bollen's fears prove well founded when Erin's assistant, Misty, is murdered. Because of Misty's striking resemblance to her, Erin is convinced the killer was after her. Sunny meets Paradise Police Chief Jesse Stone at the scene of the crime; however Buddy and Erin lack confidence in the Paradise police, and ask Sunny to solve the crime.Sunny talks to a sports writer who is convinced that Erin Flint's addition to Bollen's baseball team is a publicity stunt and that Erin will be able to compete with the male players in the major league. He proves to be right later when Erin faces a major league pitcher and cannot hit one ball.Sunny discovers that Erin Flint is actually Ethel Boverini, and that she is still married to pimp Gerard Basgall. Sunny and an LAPD detective go to question Basgall, who admits to still being married to Erin and still loving her. Erin admits that she was one of Basgall's prostitutes, as well as his wife. She and Misty Tyler, who is really her sister Edith, began working for Basgall after their mother died.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Chocolate_Autopsy"title="Slow Chocolate Autopsy">
The book is in twelve parts, each one featuring Norton (nine of which are in the form of stories and three as a mixture of illustrations and photo-strips). His adventures include participating in the death of Christopher Marlowe, the Ripper murders, as well as more recent events that have shaped London.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Troll"title="The Day of the Troll">
## Part One.Siblings Karl and Katy are in an old, scary forest – Karl winding his sister up. We learn that Katy is a former "medical type", and that the two are involved in experiments – experiments that are being ruined by something.Charlie and the Doctor drive a 4x4 towards the bridge. The Doctor asks for details on the Grange. Charlie explains that humans used a process dubbed Global Cooling, refreezing glaciers. The ground left behind was poisonous, and food became incredibly value, leading to violence. Karl Baring started work on growing new crops, but so far, hasn't succeeded – running out of money, depending on charity.Sanders contacts Petra to tell her the relay link's down – they can't contact Madrid. Either they were shut off in Madrid, or the local relays have been sabotaged.Suddenly, Campbell is grabbed by the troll. The Doctor manages to grab it, and recognises its face – it's Karl Baring. They struggle, the Doctor is knocked down, and the troll attacks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mockingjay"title="Mockingjay">
Following "Catching Fire", Katniss Everdeen, her mother, her sister Primrose Everdeen, mentor Haymitch Abernathy, and her friends Finnick Odair and Gale Hawthorne, along with the survivors from District 12, adjust to life underground in District 13, headquarters of the rebellion in Panem. Katniss reluctantly agrees to act as "the Mockingjay”–the symbol of the rebellion–for rebel propaganda, on the condition that District 13's President Alma Coin grants immunity to all surviving Hunger Games tributes, including Katniss's friend Peeta Mellark and Finnick's lover Annie Cresta. Coin, however, insists on flipping a coin for Katniss's other demand: the right to personally execute Panem President Coriolanus Snow. Katniss is sent to a hospital in District 8 to film the destruction that the Capitol has inflicted, and while Haymitch orders her to retreat as soon as a raid begins, she stays behind and fights before giving a speech that is broadcast in all twelve districts. The Capitol tortures Peeta to demoralize Katniss. A rescue team extracts Peeta along with the other captured victors, but discover that he has been brainwashed to fear and despise Katniss. He attempts to kill her, and is restrained under heavy guard while medics seek a cure. Finnick and Annie marry in a propaganda effort.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurry_Home,_Candy"title="Hurry Home, Candy">
"Hurry Home, Candy" tells the story of a young dog named Candy, chronicling his life through several traumatic and joyful events. Told from the dog's perspective, the reader experiences Candy's separation from his mother and being brought to a cold kitchen floor with the ever-present threat of being hit with a broom. Later in the story, Candy becomes a beloved pet to two small children, only to later become separated from them. His quest to survive and be re-united with his new family constitutes the rest of the narrative.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_History"title="Zero History">
Hollis Henry and Milgrim find themselves in London working for Hubertus Bigend, unaware that their lives previously crossed in "Spook Country". One of Bigend's current interests is fashion, particularly the intersection between streetwear, workwear and military clothing. Milgrim is sent to South Carolina to take photographs of a pair of Army BDUs where he gains the notice of a federal agent named Winnie Tung Whittaker employed by DCIS. Winnie photographs Milgrim and intimidates him into working as an informant.Bigend asks Henry and Milgrim to investigate a secret brand, named Gabriel Hounds after the English legend. At the same time, he becomes aware that a coup is being plotted within his company, Blue Ant. When Milgrim realizes his cell phone is being tracked by rogue elements in Blue Ant, he slides the phone into a pram belonging to the moll of a member of the Russian mob, which leads to one of the mercenaries involved in the coup, who followed the pram, being captured and beaten. Revenge against Milgrim then becomes the top priority of the mercs.A parallel subplot follows Hollis as she tracks down the Gabriel Hounds designer. Joined by her boyfriend Garreth, the mysterious daredevil featured in "Spook Country" who had been severely injured in a BASE jump, Hollis Henry offers to help Bigend gain the release of Bobby Chombo, who has been captured by the mercenaries to force Bigend to swap him for Milgrim, but as part of the deal, Bigend must allow the Hounds designer to remain anonymous. Garreth, because of his knowledge of tradecraft, assists Hollis in this, and in doing so calls in favors from an old man, implied to be the same person Garreth worked with in "Spook Country" (who, via implication in both books, might be Cayce Pollard's father), to help ensure secrecy. Bobby Chombo is critical to Bigend's plan to gain the ability to foresee stock market prices by a number of minutes. Events reach a climax at night in Wormwood Scrubs (an open space in London) where the mercs demand the prisoner exchange take place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_Furnace"title="Escape from Furnace">
## "Lockdown".Furnace Penitentiary, in the distant future, is the world’s most secure prison for young offenders. It is buried a mile beneath the Earth’s surface. One way in and no way out. Once you're here, you're here until you die, and for most of the inmates that doesn't take long - not with the sadistic guards and the bloodthirsty gangs. Convicted of a murder he didn't commit, sentenced to life without parole, ‘new fish’ Alex Sawyer knows he has two choices: find a way out, or resign himself to a death behind bars, in the darkness at the bottom of the world.Only in Furnace, death is the least of his worries. Soon Alex discovers that the prison is a place of pure evil: where creatures in gas masks stalk the corridors at night, where giants in black suits drag screaming inmates into the shadows, where deformed beasts can be heard howling from the blood drenched tunnels below waiting to kill. And behind everything is the mysterious, all-powerful warden, a man as cruel and as dangerous as the devil himself, whose unthinkable acts have consequences that stretch far beyond the walls of the prison.Together with a bunch of inmates - some innocent kids who have been framed, others cold-blooded killers - Alex plans the prison break to end all prison breaks. But as he starts to uncover the truth about Furnace’s deeper, darker purpose, Alex's actions grow ever more dangerous, and he must risk everything to expose this nightmare that's hidden from the eyes of the world...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Walk_Across_America"title="A Walk Across America">
Peter Jenkins was raised in a northern middle-class suburban home in Connecticut. While attending Alfred University, he contracted an early marriage despite his sympathies for the new hippie youth movement and its belief in free love. He graduated on 30 May 1973, feeling stifled by both his environment and his marriage. After separating from his wife, he cast about for an escape. He decided that despite his dislike of his native land, he would meet its citizens by walking from his college town of Alfred to the Gulf of Mexico before continuing across the United States. On 15 October 1973, he shouldered his pack, whistled up his dog Cooper, and began walking south. He planned to stop and work during his journey whenever he needed money.Jenkins' trip to the Gulf saw him lay over for the winter in Appalachia before he continued south. He worked at various laboring jobs, such as sawmill hand, as money was needed. As a hippie Damnyankee outsider, Jenkins sometimes met with suspicion and hostility. More often, he was greeted with hospitality from those from whom he least expected it. On occasion, initial hostility from others morphed into good will and friendship. Jenkins was invited to stay in the home of various good samaritans, including an Appalachian hermit and an African-American family. On occasion, he lived with these samaritans for considerable lengths of time; his stay with the African-American family lasted several months.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Underpants_and_the_Terrifying_Re-Turn_of_Tippy_Tinkletrousers"title="Captain Underpants and the Terrifying Re-Turn of Tippy Tinkletrousers">
Tippy has come from the future, and in the last book George and Harold are arrested for the crimes that their cloned versions did, and the two (and Krupp) are imprisoned. At the Piqua State Penitentiary, Tippy is asked to build a statue (secretly a robot suit) of Warden Gordon Gordon Schmorden, the chief jailer of the prison. On the day Tippy presents his robot suit, he freezes everyone in his way, then takes Krupp to find the boys for Tippy. George and Harold snap their fingers bringing Captain Underpants to life, and soon, while trying to freeze him, Tippy accidentally freezes his robotic legs. Even though Captain Underpants successfully pulls off the top half of the robo-suit, Tippy escapes by going back in time exactly five years ago.Five years ago, six year old Harold and his mother ago move in from Michigan and five-and-three-quarters-year-old George is forced by his mother to wear a tie as a good first impression. On his way to school, he notices six-year-old Harold being attacked by Kipper, Bugg, Loogie and Finkstein with the mean owner of the nearby gas station, Billy Bill, egging them on. Angered at this, George plays a smart prank on Billy Bill by changing his gas station's sign from "Free Brake Inspection" to "Free Bra Inspection", by removing k and e from the sign, prompting a group of infuriated and offended women to attack the latter, which drives Billy Bill to go out of business. George then saves Harold and the two become best friends. Mr. Krupp arrives and sends the two to detention for "bullying Kipper". To pass time, the two make their first comic: The Adventures of Dog Man.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Harry_Richmond"title="The Adventures of Harry Richmond">
At the beginning of the novel, Harry Richmond is a young boy, living under the care of his grandfather, Squire Beltham, in their home of Riversley, in Hampshire, England. The Squire, one of the wealthiest people in England, had two daughters, one of whom, Dorothy, still lives at Riversley. The other daughter married Roy Richmond, Harry's father, who drove the daughter permanently insane; she is also at Riversley. At the beginning of the book, Roy Richmond shows up at Riversley, and claiming parental rights, takes away Harry to be brought up by him. After some adventures in London, Harry is left in a boarding school by Roy, where he meets a number of friends who show up throughout the novel. While he is there his mother dies. Harry escapes from the school, and with help of the gypsy girl Kiomi, returns to Riversley. While there he misses his father, and overhearing that he may be in London, goes there with his friend Temple. Harry and Temple however end up falling asleep on a boat, the Priscilla, and are taken away against their will to Germany, where Harry rediscovers his father, and meets Princess Ottilia.When Harry comes of age, he inherits a large sum and is told that he will receive 20,000/year if marries his third-cousin Janet Ilchester, of whom the Squire is very fond. Instead Harry, with the considerable help of his father, pursues the Princess, despite the objections of the Prince her father, and after a while, receives her promise to be married, after he becomes a member of Parliament, which eventually occurs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(novel)"title="Signal (novel)">
Owen is a lonely and bored kid who just moved to the Finger Lakes of upstate New York with his father who is a workaholic. His mother recently died, and he is trying to find something to do with his summer since he does not live in a neighborhood like he used to when he lived in Buffalo. One day, while he is running up and down a seven-mile trail that he found with his Pointer, Josie. His mother used to talk to him about life on other planets, which he wonders about often. When he gets by the creek, he finds a piece of cloth with blood on it. He follows a trail of footsteps, dirt, and blood to an abandoned house where he meets a girl named Campion, (named after a flower) with very shiny green eyes who claims she is from another planet. Cam explains her parents landed and she got left behind by mistake. She explains the blood from a wound she got because of a hubcap that was thrown at her by Ray, the boyfriend of Bobbie, the woman who found her. She explains that Ray and Bobbi are pursuing her because she escaped from a hotel room they kept her in. Cam says she likes Tootsie Rolls, and agrees life on Earth really has its points. Owen kindly brings her food, water, and supplies. Owen tries to keep Cam a secret from his father, and from the "Dog People", a friendly family who has over 19 pets whom they walk down the trail daily. (The Dog People, Emie and Charlene, explain that they wanted kids, but they never got them. So, they had to adopt dogs and cats.) Cam then says she needs him to make a "signal" in a wheat field to signal her parents so they can pick her up. Cam tells Owen that he needs to hide her for exactly four days, which is when a full moon comes, and they search during full moons. But, since they have become good friends, Cam asks Owen to come with her, and leave his boring life for her planet. Cam and Owen camp out in a tent and talk about her home planet. Cam explains her planet was once ravaged with war, and they have evolved into smarter beings. She then explains they "like dogs" and says Josie can come. Owen starts talking to his father and gets excited when he leaves a note saying he will come home early so they can talk again. However, his dad is working on a big audit, and does not make it. Towards ten o'clock, Owen cries himself to sleep. Angry, Owen gets up early the next morning and plows the signal into a wheat field with a board. Owen tells Cam he will be coming with her to her planet. They anxiously wait for the ship to arrive until Ray shows up and attacks them. While Ray is injuring Owen, Cam knocks him unconscious with the board they used to plow the field. Cam frantically shouts to the sky when she sees lights. However, it is a police helicopter searching for Owen. They give themselves up, and Cam reveals she was really Bobbi's daughter, but she ran away and imagined being from another planet. When Owen believed her, she felt it might be possible. In the end, Cam moves in with Ernie and Charlene, and Owen begins to talk to his dad. They say they are going on a hike through the Adirondack Mountains. The final sentence has Owen say: "Cam said life on Earth has its points. And I think she is right."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramage_and_the_Freebooters"title="Ramage and the Freebooters">
Ramage, recovering from medical leave after the Battle of Cape St Vincent is summoned to the Admiralty by Lord Spencer and given command of a brig, HMS "Triton", with orders to take sealed dispatches to the admirals commanding the British fleets off Brest, Cadiz and the West Indies. However, there is just one small problem – HMS "Triton" is docked at Spithead, where crews of the Royal Navy have mutinied over pay and living conditions. Ramage knows that if he fails in his mission, he will become a convenient political scapegoat for the government.Although Ramage sympathizes with the aims of the mutineers, he has a mission to perform. He obtains orders to have half of the crew of "Triton" replaced by men who formerly served under him on the Kathleen, including Southwick and Jackson. He then overcomes the mutiny by cutting the anchor cable as the tide was going out of Spithead harbor, forcing the men to man their posts, or risk drowning when the ship capsized.Having dealt with the mutiny, partly with the clandestine aid of Jackson, Stafford, Rossi and Maxton, Ramage sets about curing the surgeon, Bowen, of alcoholism. Through a combination of enforced sobriety and an appeal to the man's pride in himself as an expert chess-player (almost the only remaining accomplishment the drunken Bowen can take a genuine pride in), Ramage succeeds in rehabilitating Bowen, who proves to be an excellent doctor once he has quit the drink.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil's_Brood"title="Devil's Brood">
"Devil's Brood" continues the story of King Henry II and his Queen Eleanor that began in "When Christ and His Saints Slept" and continued in "Time and Chance". "Devil's Brood" opens with the conflict between Henry II, his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, and their four sons, which escalates into a decade of warfare and rebellion pitting the sons against the father and the brothers against each other while the mother spends the period imprisoned by her husband. The novel opens in 1172 when Henry and Eleanor have been married for decades and have four grown sons: Henry the Young King, Richard the Lionheart, Geoffrey II and John Lackland. During the final 18 years of Henry's life conflict builds with Eleanor, beginning with her desire to choose her successor for Aquitaine. This conflict reaches it peak with the death of Rosamund Clifford, a mistress who he flaunted at court. Rumours abound that Eleanor had her poisoned out of jealousy; in a rage, Henry has her imprisoned, first in France and then in England, while he goes to war against France. The four sons each want to rule a piece of territory and war breaks out among the sons as they plot with their mother and enter into a rebellion against Henry, in the process aligning themselves with France's king Louis VII—England's enemy. The consequences of Henry's sons' rebellion weakens the Angevin empire. At the end, Henry dies with only his household knights at his bedside.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_Chance_(Penman_novel)"title="Time and Chance (Penman novel)">
"Time and Chance" is about King Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and the rift between Henry II and Thomas Becket. "Time and Chance" is the sequel to Penman's "When Christ and His Saints Slept" and spans a 15-year period from 1156 to 1171. Penman brings alive for the reader the period as King Henry II becomes increasingly estranged from his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine (although Eleanor and Henry have eight children during the eight years), and from his close friend and adviser Thomas Becket. King Henry II's decision to elevate Becket to Archbishop of Canterbury is a fulcrum for discord between Henry and Eleanor. Moreover, Becket must reconcile duty to his sovereign and duty to his God which ultimately leads to his death and martyrdom and stains King Henry II's reign. The novel ends with a detailed description of Becket's death: the knights who pursued him inform Becket he was to go to Winchester to give an account of his actions, but Becket refuses. At this, they retrieve their weapons and rush inside the cathedral for the killing. With the third and final blow, the crown of his head was separated from the head, and the blood dyes the floor of the cathedral.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forged_by_Fire_(novel)"title="Forged by Fire (novel)">
The story begins with a three-year-old boy named Gerald Nickelby who lives with his single mother Monique. One day, she visits a drug dealer, Mr. Leroy, and leaves Gerald home alone for many, many hours. While he is alone, Gerald goes into her room and picks up a lighter, mistaking it for a toy, and he accidentally sets the house on fire. Afraid, Gerald hides behind the sofa and passes out from smoke inhalation. Gerald later wakes up in a hospital, confused as to what's happening. A few minutes later, Gerald's Aunt, Queen arrives at the hospital and becomes his legal guardian after the incident.Six years later, Gerald finds out his mother was in jail for leaving him as a three-year-old home alone. She comes to Queen's house on Gerald's ninth birthday, and Gerald finds out that she married a man named Jordan Sparks, and they have a daughter named Angel. After Queen dies, Gerald is forced to move back with his mother, and discovers his stepfather's abusive side.Jordan starts to molest his daughter Angel. When Gerald finds out, he gets help from Darryl Washington, his friend Robert's father, and gets Jordan sent to prison for his crimes. The story progresses to high school where Gerald is on the basketball team, and Angel is a dancer. Jordan returns from prison and tries to act like he's a changed man, but on the side is drugging up Gerald's mother. Jordan comes home drunk one day and attempts to rape Angel, who was previously cooking food. The stove soon sets the house on fire once more, and after a fight between Gerald and Jordan, the latter dies, and the two children are reunited with their mother and hopeful of a new future together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Morning_in_Maine"title="One Morning in Maine">
The book gives a small slice of everyday life in Maine, where McCloskey and his family moved following World War II. The story begins with McCloskey's older daughter Sal's good-naturedly assisting her little sister Jane during their morning routine of dressing and tooth-brushing. Sal (also the heroine of McCloskey's "Blueberries for Sal"; according to a 2003 interview with Jane, their father wrote this first book "so that Sal could have a little storybook that was entirely about her"; she was feeling a bit jealous when Jane was born since she now was no longer the sole focus of Daddy and Mommy's attention) finds she has a loose tooth, and worries that she won't be able to go sailing with her father. Quickly reassured by her mother, Sal then goes digging for clams with her father, and the tooth falls out and disappears in the mud, preventing Sal from using the tooth to make a wish. So instead, Sal makes her wish while holding a seagull's feather, which she views as a bird's equivalent of a tooth since they are both body parts that fall out as new ones grow in. Sal and Jane then accompany their father in his skiff to the mainland; McCloskey is obliged to row the whole way because the outboard motor has a bad spark plug. After the motor is serviced by the jovial mechanic at the local boat-shop, Sal gives the old plug to Jane to make a wish of her own; the girls reason that the plug is like the motor's tooth since it is a part that must be removed and replaced occasionally. Eventually, after doing his shopping, McCloskey treats each of his daughters to what they had both wished for: a big cone of ice cream. The story ends with the happy trio's roaring back towards home in their skiff under motor-power this time cleaving a great foaming wake in the calm water of the bay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threepenny_Novel"title="Threepenny Novel">
The novel is set in London at the turn of the 20th century and its plot focuses on the machinations and developments of finance capital, something that is often considered to be unusual for Brecht as his work is traditionally viewed as being based more concerned with conditions of industrial production. The plot is organised around the activities of three different financial consortiums which are taking place in London. Three central characters each take their place with their own strand of the capitalist economy in order to shows ways in which this economy can be seen to effect each individual person in complex and often unpredictable ways. A character named Peachum maintains a syndicate of street beggars whom he ruthlessly exploits, a character named Coax attempts to invest in a commercial shipping venture and Macheath, a gangster, the origin of the song "Mack the Knife", maintains a commercial venture. Macheath is presented in the novel as someone who has left behind his previous life as a cut-throat gangster and instead is now attempting to make serious progress in business by engaging in direct competition and attempting to absorb and defeat his competitors in a commercial sense. As well as depicting Macheath's rise to power, the novel also focuses on the ways in which Macheath is able to court Polly, the daughter of a rich individual known as Peachum. Brecht employs a series of complex plot twists and turns in order to demonstrate Macheath's legitimate rise to power and to show the way in which he is able to do this often with legal sanction. The novel ends with Macheath as someone who restructures his business, takes over his competitors and eventually becomes the head of a large and important bank.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heat_of_the_Day"title="The Heat of the Day">
The novel opens in the midst of World War II, in a London park where a concert is taking place. Present at the concert are Louie, a young woman whose husband is fighting in the war, and Harrison, an English counterspy. Louie attempts to flirt with Harrison, who sternly rebuffs her. After the concert, Harrison goes to the flat rented by Stella Rodney, a middle-aged woman who works for the government. Harrison is in love with Stella and has been pursuing her for years; Stella is in love with another man, Robert Kelway. Harrison now tells Stella of his suspicions that Robert is a spy for the German government. He promises not to report Robert to the government if she leaves Robert to become his lover.Stella rejects Harrison's offer but considers the possibilities. Her son, Roderick, visits her on leave from his army training. The novel recounts how Roderick had inherited Mount Morris, the Irish estate owned by his father's cousin Francis. An elderly and wealthy man, Francis had died while visiting his wife, Nettie, at a home for the mentally infirm. It was at Francis's funeral that Stella first met Harrison, who claimed to be a friend of Francis.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone's_Fall"title="Stone's Fall">
An ageing BBC reporter approaching retirement in 1953, Matthew Braddock is on a farewell tour, visiting the old Paris bureau. Chancing upon a familiar name in the obituary notices, he decides to attend the funeral of an acquaintance he has not seen for many years. After the service, he is approached by a stranger who introduces himself as the deceased woman's solicitor. He surprises Braddock with the information that the firm has been holding a package for many years, addressed to him, with instructions to deliver it only after this woman's death. Later, on his trip back to London, Braddock reminisces about those days of his youth in 1909, when he met the beautiful and mysterious Elizabeth. Equally mysterious was the death (and life) of her husband, Baron Ravenscliff, born John William Stone. Later, Braddock opens the long-delayed package to find a pair of extraordinary manuscripts. These two documents, written accounts of events occurring in 1890 and 1867 respectively, follow Braddock's recollections to form the three-part structure of the historical-mystery novel "Stone's Fall".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Olivia"title="Santa Olivia">
Set in a future dystopia United States, the town of Santa Olivia is effectively a desert war zone where people have no rights and legally no longer exist, with the town's name even being changed simply to "Outpost No. 12". The main character is that of Loup Garron, a daughter of a genetically modified father who was bred by the US military as a weapon and has since escaped to Outpost. He becomes engaged with Loup's mother, a resident of Outpost, but is forced to leave before his daughter is born. Loup grows up to become a boxer in Outpost in order to try to escape and eventually find her father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackout/All_Clear"title="Blackout/All Clear">
Willis imagines a near future (first introduced in her 1982 story "Fire Watch" and featured in two of her previous novels: "Doomsday Book" and "To Say Nothing of the Dog") in which historians conduct field work by traveling into the past as observers. The research is mainly conducted at the University of Oxford in England in the mid-21st century. In their world, time-travel has been known since the early 21st century. The time-travel device, a portal called "the Net", remains in the time-traveler's present, while sending the time-traveler to a particular location (called "the drop") and time. They can return from the same location when someone in the future re-opens the Net for them at an agreed-upon "rendezvous" time.Historians in Willis' world believe that the laws of physics resist possible alterations to the past by preventing time-travel to certain places or times. In some cases, the machine used for time-travel will refuse to function, rendering the trip impossible. In other cases, "slippage"—a shift from the exact, desired target in time and/or space—occurs. The time-traveler arrives at the nearest place and time suitable for preventing a time paradox; although sometimes this is only a few minutes later than planned, it can be as much as several years. An example is when the character Polly wishes to arrive on September 10, 1940, in London, but instead arrives on September 14.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaze_of_Silver"title="Blaze of Silver">
The book takes place shortly after the events in "Green Jasper" and follows Will, Ellie, Kamil, and Hosanna as they try to deliver the ransom for King Richard. This proves to be difficult, as the leader of the Assassins is seeking revenge against Kamil and is willing to organise a huge betrayal to do so.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_Lesson"title="The Art Lesson">
The semi-autobiographical book features the character of Tommy, an enthusiastic painter and drawer, making pictures for his relatives and friends and drawing on the sidewalk, on bedsheets, and even on walls. For his birthday, Tommy gets a box of 64 Crayola crayons, but his new first-grade teacher rejects them, and makes him draw the same thing as everybody else in his class, with a few school crayons and on a single sheet of paper. He makes a bargain with the school Art Teacher: one page for the drawing that the rest of his class is making, with school crayons, and the second for his own crayons and his own art.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closer_(novel)"title="Closer (novel)">
Part 1: RevelationsIn the world with its own sun in the center of the Earth, the Rebecca twins dive into a pool in order to escape an explosion set off by Will and Elliott in Freefall, and eventually are able to survive by breathing air they find trapped in the roof of a mine shaft that, after being flooded, formed the pool they were camped at. Rebecca Two tends to her twin sister`s bullet wound inflicted by Will during the ambush. The Rebeccas spot in the distance a modern metropolis, with helicopters and other vehicles, including cars resembling Volkswagens. Rebecca Two sees a Limiter flare, and then signals back by blowing up a gas tank at the end of the mine shaft. She then continues to carry her dying sister toward the city. The Rebeccas find the city, and realise it is well maintained and populated. They, being potentially hostile outsiders, frighten a small number of people, and that results in the arrival of a squad of the local army. The people of the city are from an expeditionary force from Nazi Germany that arrived during World War II. The Limiter forces arrive shortly, and a short staredown occurs, and after a Limiter medic begins to operate on Rebecca One, Rebecca Two and the Limiter General begin to talk about their identity to the authorities of the city. It turns out that during the Second World War, the Styx were allies of the Third Reich. The officer of the squad informs the other two that they are in a city called ‘New Germania’. As Rebecca One recovers in a New Germanian hospital, the officer takes Rebecca Two and the Limiter General to meet the Chancellor of New Germania, whom the Styx intimidate into helping them find Will and his group, with plans to kill him and retrieve the Dominion virus.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dirty_Energy_Dilemma"title="The Dirty Energy Dilemma">
In the first part of the book, Sovacool explores the problems with the current system of large-scale electricity generation being used in the United States, powered by fossil fuels and nuclear power reactors. He identifies "The Big Four Energy Challenges" as rising fossil fuel costs, increasing pollution, inefficient and brittle transmission networks, as well as widespread system vulnerability to natural disasters, sabotage, and financial manipulations. "The Big Four Clean Solutions" of renewable energy, efficient energy use, distributed generation, and combined heat and power will do a better job of providing needed energy while protecting consumers and the planet.Sovacool suggests that the barriers to clean energy adoption are institutional, not technological, and he sees no role for nuclear power in a clean energy transition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Hands_Clapping"title="Little Hands Clapping">
The novel centres around a bizarre German museum dedicated to suicide; Herr Schmidt, its grim grey curator; and the respectable Doctor Ernst Frölicher and his shocking secret.Various characters appear with short lifestories including the Luciano Pavarotti-obsessed founder of the museum and her Pavarotti-lookalike husband, Hulda the cleaner who believes she is doomed to Hell, and Madalena the suicidal Portuguese student.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiagu_Danxin"title="Xiagu Danxin">
The novel is set sometime around the late 18th century or early 19th century in China during the Qing dynasty. Jīn Shìyí () had retired from the "jianghu" (martial artists' community) and settled on a remote island 20 years ago with his wife, Gǔ Zhīhuá (). Their son, Jīn Zhúliú (), who has inherited his father's skills and abilities, disguises himself as a beggar and roams the "jianghu" in search of adventure. He rescues and befriends Qín Yuánhào () of the Wudang Sect, defeats the imperial guard commander Wén Dàozhuāng (), foils an assassination attempt on his father's apprentice Jiāng Hǎitiān (), and becomes famous in the "jianghu" for his deeds.Shǐ Báidū (), the founder and chief of the Six Harmonies Sect (), pledges allegiance to Sàfúdǐng (), a high-ranking Manchu aristocrat – much to the chagrin of his fellows in the "jianghu". He intends to present lavish gifts to Safuding at the latter's 60th birthday party, but a string of pearls he prepared is stolen by his subordinate. The "xuántiě" (), a precious piece of metal regarded as a sacred artefact of the Six Harmonies Sect, is stolen by Jin Zhuliu and Shi Baidu's younger sister, Shǐ Hóngyīng (). Jin Zhuliu and Shi Hongying were initially hostile towards each other when they first met, but they gradually develop a romantic relationship after their various encounters. Jin Zhuliu also meets Lì Nánxīng (), a grandnephew of Lì Shèngnán (), the deceased leader of the disbanded Heavenly Demonic Cult (), and becomes sworn brothers with him. They join forces with Yùchí Jiǒng () and his wife to disrupt Safuding's birthday party and rob him of several precious items.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spare_Change_(novel)"title="Spare Change (novel)">
The novel begins with the notorious Spare Change serial killer resurfacing after 20 years. Sunny's father, Phil Randall, worked this case years ago, and enlists Sunny's help investigating the new string of murders. The killer's MO is to shoot the person in the head, and leave three coins at the scene of the crime, hence the name Spare Change. Spare Change sent numerous letters to Phil during the original crime spree, but then the killings abruptly stopped, until now. The reemergence of the killer after such a long time causes the Randall's to suspect a copy-cat killer.After the first killing, Phil Randall decides to detain everyone at the scene of the next killing. They take down all of their information, and later bring them to the station and question them one by one; their hope being that the killer would have hung around the crime scene to watch. The interviews are tedious, but when Bob Johnson walks into the room he immediately becomes a suspect. Everything cries out that he is the killer, from the way he speaks, to the way he calls Sunny's father Phil, just like in the killer's correspondence. It doesn't take long before Sunny is convinced he is the killer.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Dunn_on_a_Desert_Island"title="Danny Dunn on a Desert Island">
Danny, his friend Joe Pearson, Professor Bulfinch and Doctor Grimes are flying a small private jet over the Pacific Ocean. The plane is forced to crash land on an uncharted desert island. Armed only with the items in their pockets, the four must create a living environment and come up with a plan to be rescued.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baree,_Son_of_Kazan"title="Baree, Son of Kazan">
"Baree, Son of Kazan" is a novel about a wild wolfdog pup sired by Kazan (1/4 wolf, 3/4 dog) and born of blind Greywolf (pure wolf). It explores Baree's survival after he is separated as a young pup from his parents. He eventually is cared for by Nepeese and her father Pierrot, a trapper. He bonds with Nepeese, and the novel develops from there. James Oliver Curwood took the well-used "a boy and his dog" formula, and created a great adventure story about a girl and her dog. He used this theme of a strong heroine, rather than a male hero, in many of his stories.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poisoner's_Handbook"title="The Poisoner's Handbook">
In 1918, New York City appointed Charles Norris, Bellevue Hospital's chief pathologist, as its first scientifically trained medical examiner. The book, about Norris and Alexander Gettler, the city's first toxicologist, describes the Jazz Age's poisoning cases. Before the two began working in the medical examiner's office, Blum pointed out in her book, poisoners could get away with murder. The book covers the years from 1915 to 1936, which Blum described as a "coming-of-age" for forensic toxicology. "Under (Norris's) direction, the New York City medical examiner's office would become a department that set forensic standards for the rest of the country," Blum wrote.While a guest on National Public Radio’s "Talk of the Nation/Science Friday" to discuss the book, Blum told host Ira Flatow that she wrote the book because "I've always been interested in poison. I wanted to write about the mystery of how (poisons) kill us.”
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_in_Paradise_(novel)"title="Stranger in Paradise (novel)">
In "Stranger in Paradise", Wilson "Crow" Cromartie from "Trouble in Paradise" returns to the quiet town. On arrival he meets with Jesse Stone to let him know he’s in town looking for someone. Unfortunately Jesse cannot arrest him because the statute of limitations has run out for the Stiles Island robbery Crow was involved in ten years earlier that cost residents over $20 million in cash. And since Jesse has no evidence linking him to any of the murders, he has no choice but to let Crow go about his business.It turns out Crow is looking for a 14-year-old girl named Amber Francisco. Amber is the daughter of Florida mob boss Louis Francisco, who employs Crow to find his daughter. Crow starts by searching her credit card record. He discovers that a flat screen television was purchased on the card. At the store where it was purchased, Crow poses as Amber’s father complaining that the television was never delivered. The clerk assures him that it was and gives him the address that it was delivered to. There he encounters the Horn Street gang, a group of young Latino gangbangers. He asks for the whereabouts of the girl, but when a gangbanger named Puerco tries to get tough, Crow shoots and kills him. The gang leader, Esteban, then gives up her location.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_Jack_Barron"title="Bug Jack Barron">
The "Bug Jack Barron" talk show begins Wednesday evening with an on-air call from Rufus W. Johnson, who has been refused service by the Foundation for Human Immortality, an organization which allows people to have themselves cryogenically frozen. Johnson accuses the Foundation of being unwilling to offer Freezer contracts to African Americans. Show host Jack Barron is appalled to hear this and after making a few calls, finds a supporter in the Governor of Mississippi, Lukas Greene.The following day, Barron receives a visit from Foundation Chair Benedict Howards, who tries to gain Barron's support by offering him a free Freezer Contract and immortal life. Though tempted, Barron refuses the bribe. Howards later makes the same offer to Barron's ex-wife Sara. Sara dreams about being frozen together with Jack, and being revived together after an immortality treatment has been discovered.The next morning, the Governor of California, Gregory Morris, suggests that Barron consider running as the next President of the United States. Though Barron is reluctant, his friend Lukas Greene (who is black and of radical political views) encourages Barron to accept. Barron then gets a call from Sara. The two argue about why they broke up and soon reconcile. Howards visits Barron again with new contracts for both Jack and Sara to sign. The new contracts not only guarantee being frozen, but also the immortality treatment. Jack cannot see any drawback in the contract, and he and Sara agree to sign.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Asylum_for_Wayward_Victorian_Girls"title="The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls">
Told through the form of journal entries, the novel begins with Emilie's suicide attempt and subsequent forced admission to a psych ward. What was initially intended as a 72-hour hold turns into a longer stay when there is no room for her in the short-term ward and she is moved to the long-term ward. Emilie begins to describe the events of her life that led to her suicide attempt, including abuse she suffered both as a child and in her romantic relationships, and her experiences with bipolar disorder. She also documents the sad conditions in the hospital, from the inadequate food and overcrowding to the invasive way she and the other patients are watched and monitored by the doctors and nurses. She meets with Dr. Sharp, who seems to take an interest in her. Emilie attempts to befriend a fellow patient, Chloe, but Chloe is taken for electro shock therapy at four in the morning, and Emilie never sees her again. Emilie soon begins finding notes stuck in-between the pages of her own journal. Diary entries themselves, referred to as "Asylum Letters", the notes appear to be very old and purport to be written by a girl from 1800s London named Emily (referred to throughout the book as "Emily-with-a-y"), whose life bears striking similarity to Emilie's own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_of_Angels"title="The Time of Angels">
The Eleventh Doctor and Amy find a plea of help from Dr. River Song for the Doctor engraved in Gallifreyan on the flight recorder of the starship "Byzantium" 12,000 years prior, currently housed in a museum. They travel back via TARDIS, and rescue River before her ship crashes on the planet Alfava Metraxis. On the planet's surface, the Doctor comes to realise that while this is only his second encounter with River, she has met him several times before in her own timestream. River explains that the "Byzantium", crashed nearby, holds a Weeping Angel in its cargo. She contacts Father Octavian and his militarised "clerics" to help capture it as to protect a large native population elsewhere on the planet.As the clerics set up base camp, River accesses footage of the Weeping Angel from the "Byzantium" to verify that it is secure. She and the Doctor leave to study a text written about the Weeping Angels, learning that even an image of a Weeping Angel can become a Weeping Angel itself. They are unaware that Amy stayed to watch the footage, and when she blinks, the Weeping Angel appears to move. The Doctor helps her stop the video feed, and believes Amy is safe, but she feels something in her eye.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_from_the_Inside"title="Letters from the Inside">
The story is told in the form of letters exchanged between fifteen-year-old girls, Mandy and Tracey. They begin writing after Tracey places an ad in fictional magazine "GDY".The two girls share information about their lives from school, to family, to relationships. Mandy reveals that her brother is abusive and violent, information which Tracey tries to ignore. It appears to Mandy that Tracey's life is perfect, as she has a wonderful boyfriend, rich and caring parents, and she is close to her siblings. However, inconsistencies start appearing in Tracey's letters, and when Mandy questions her on them, Tracey stops writing. Mandy refuses to give up, and finally Tracey replies with the information that she is in fact in a juvenile detention center, and will be there for a long time. Tracey expects Mandy to no longer want to write to her, but Mandy continues to do so.Their relationship becomes even deeper now that they are completely honest with each other. Mandy, however, occasionally frustrates Tracey with her naivete as Tracey claims she is not as "nice" as Mandy claims, and becomes angry when Mandy makes a joke about tunneling into her cell and staying with her.Throughout their letter writing, Tracey seems to get in touch with her "softer" side, which includes writing an essay about her Nanna. She wins an award for the story, and asks Mandy to celebrate for her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_2033_(novel)"title="Metro 2033 (novel)">
## Background.In 2013, a nuclear war forced a large amount of Moscow's surviving population to relocate to the city's Metro system in search of refuge. Eventually, communities settled within the underground train stations and developed into independent states over time. Factions emerged, ranging from the independent peacekeepers the "Rangers of the Order", to the neo-Stalinist "Red Line" faction and the neo-Nazi "Fourth Reich", to the more powerful factions such as "Polis", which contained the greatest military power and the most knowledge of the past, and the "Hansa" regime, which controlled the main ring of metro stations by its sheer economic power.As these groups began to evolve, the Red Line and the Fourth Reich quickly entered a state of war, as both sought to destroy the other. As the war raged, the stations who refused to join either side were either demolished by the factions, merged into the Hansa regime, raided by criminal bandits, or formed their own independent states. Other stations were outright destroyed by animals, mutated by the nuclear fallout. While most of the stations were controlled by the three main factions, some stations formed independent alliances, including the station VDNKh ("Exhibition"). Within that station, the events of "Metro 2033" unfold.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufi_Paranja_Katha"title="Sufi Paranja Katha">
The story revolves around the love and marriage between Mamootty, a Muslim and Karthy, a Nair Hindu. Though converted to Islam, Karthy is unable to resist the primeval tug of her original religion. We see pantheistic pagan traditions asserting themselves over members of all communities-as Mother Goddess for Hindus, as the Beevi and Jarum for the Muslims. The novel speaks about religious feelings and relationships and the mystic reach of these aspects.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Parole_(novel)"title="On Parole (novel)">
Shiro Kikutani, a teacher, is sent to prison for the murder of his unfaithful wife, the stabbing of her lover, as well as an act of arson carried out against the man's family home which resulted in the death of his mother. While incarcerated, he works in the prison's print shop, behaves well, and generally keeps to himself. After a span of fifteen years, he is granted parole and moves into a halfway house. His parole officer, Kiyoura, takes some basic steps to reintroduce Kikutani into society. Kikutani is unaccustomed to his newfound freedom, and has difficulty doing basic things such as going to the bathroom without asking permission or walking normally without marching in step with the other prisoners.Kiyoura finds Kikutani a position working at a chicken farm, and tells him that he must soon find an apartment of his own and leave the halfway-house. Because the chicken farm where he will work is far away from the halfway house in the city, Kikutani is encouraged to find an apartment close to his workplace. Kikutani is hesitant to move too far away from the city and his parole officer because he feels a certain degree of security being close to the halfway house, so he instead finds an apartment that is close by even though this will necessitate a long daily commute to work. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roar"title="The Roar">
When the animal plague began, the entire population came together and built a solid concrete wall 50 feet high and 30 feet thick. This kept every single animal out of the human world. On the top of the entire wall, there is an electrified fence and invincible, laser hurling Genghis Borgs mounted every 90 yards. Behind this wall the population that survived has been living for more than 30 years. Many things have come about since space is limited. The government created a law that forbade people to have children. The Northern Hemisphere is where the population has gone to survive with all the other people in the world. Outside of "The Wall" the majority of the population has been made to believe that it is covered in yellow poisonous dust that was used to kill all living things, because of the plague.Ellie travelled with a Pod Fighter in the depth skies of Atlantic Ocean with her monkey, Puck, hoping to return to the Northern Colony to reconcile with her parents. However, Mal Gorman wants to conduct tests on Ellie because she has a special superhuman ability. Mal Gorman's men chase her through the golden turrets where the rich live and eventually chase her down to the shadows where the poor live. Soon she gets shot down and crashes into a river. Afterwards, despite her efforts, she fails to reconcile with her parents. In the District city of the Shadows, Mika who is Ellie's brother refuses to believe that Ellie has died, instead believing that she is still alive despite both of his parents believing that she died. He uses his memories of Ellie and discovers that the government has been hiding Ellie alive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Beautiful_Blue_Death"title="A Beautiful Blue Death">
The novel, set in 1865 London, follows Charles Lenox as he seeks to solve a murder. Lenox is an independently wealthy gentleman who enjoys solving crimes as a hobby, though he generally prefers to pass the cold winter days in his library with a cup of tea, a roaring fire and a good book. He is drawn into a new case when his lifelong friend and neighbor Lady Jane Grey makes a special request for his help. Prudence Smith, Grey's former housemaid, is dead in an apparent suicide. But Lenox immediately suspects foul play: murder by a rare and deadly poison. Smith lived and worked in the patrician house of George Barnard, a place full of suspects. While Smith played with more than a few hearts, the motive behind her death proves elusive.When another body turns up during the season's most fashionable ball, Lenox must untangle the web of loyalties and animosities surrounding Barnard’s mansion. Lenox receives help with the task both from his faithful valet, Graham, and his friend, Dr. Thomas McConnell. Throughout the story, Lenox’s efforts are intermittently enabled or hampered by Scotland Yard Inspector James Exeter, who requires Lenox’s help with the case but wants always to appear in total control.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tara_of_the_Twilight"title="Tara of the Twilight">
Tara, a foundling, has been raised as the ward of Chanthu the sorcerer to be a War Maid, a member of an order of virgin swordswomen. At sixteen she is sent on a quest into the Twilight, a dim, dangerous and mysterious realm full of violence and magic, to discover the mystery of her origins. Her friend and protector Khaldur, a highly intelligent lion-like carnivore, accompanies her.Unfortunately for Tara (the goddess of her order being quite strict on the virginity requirement), the Twilight proves to be a hotbed of decadence and perversion. Her quest devolves a series of captivities and escapes, in which she is in turn separated from and reunited with her feline guardian. She is successively enslaved by lecherous inhabitants of the city of Paltossa, the Northern Barbarians, the sorceresses of the Witch Wood, and the sorcerer Sarkon and his three Womanthing minions.During the course of her adventures Tara picks up additional companions, including the bisexual girl Evalla, the Lion Warrior Thund, and the teenage boy Zorak, all of whom provide opportunities for sex play between adventures. Throughout all, she somehow manages to maintain a technical virginity, primarily because her various antagonists seem too depraved to consider ordinary intercourse, while her male companions are either too honorable, too inhibited, or too distracted by the bisexual Evalla.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_That_Cat"title="Hate That Cat">
This is the second book about Jack, the first being "Love That Dog". Jack is being terrorized by a BLACK cat. He writes poetry about how much he dislikes the cat. The story follows him through learning to like both cats and poetry.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perchance_to_Dream_(novel)"title="Perchance to Dream (novel)">
Set a few years after the events of "The Big Sleep", the new novel begins with long passages of text lifted from the original to set the scene, establish the characters, and remind readers of the events of the first book. The story is set in motion by the death of family patriarch General Sternwood. Marlowe is called to the Sternwood mansion in the hills of Los Angeles by Norris, the butler. He finds older daughter Vivian still in residence and still dating gangster Eddie Mars but her younger sister Carmen, still tormented by the events of the original story, has been sent off to live at Resthaven, a luxurious psychiatric rehabilitation facility. When Carmen disappears from the rest home, Norris hires Marlowe to find her.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mars_Project"title="The Mars Project">
"The Mars Project" is a technical specification for a human mission to Mars that von Braun wrote in 1948, with a provisional launch date of 1965. He envisioned an "enormous scientific expedition" involving a fleet of ten spacecraft with 70 crew members that would spend 443 days on the surface of Mars before returning to Earth. The spacecraft, seven passenger ships, and three cargo ships, would all be assembled in Earth orbit using materials supplied by 950 launches of three-stage reusable heavy-lift launch vehicles. The fleet would use a nitric acid/hydrazine propellant that, although corrosive and toxic, could be stored without refrigeration during the three-year round-trip to Mars. Von Braun calculated the size and weight of each ship, and how much fuel each of them would require for the round trip (5,320,000 metric tons). Hohmann trajectories would be used to move from Earth- to Mars-orbit, and von Braun computed each rocket burn necessary to perform the required manoeuvres.Once in Mars orbit, the crew would use telescopes to find a suitable site for their base camp near the equator. A crewed winged craft would detach itself from one of the orbiting ships and glide down to one of Mars' poles and use skis to land on the ice. The crew would then travel 6,500 km overland using crawlers to the identified base camp site and build a landing strip. The rest of the ground crew would descend from orbit to the landing strip in wheeled gliders. A skeleton crew would remain behind in the orbiting ships. The gliders would also serve as ascent craft to return the crew to the mother ships at the end of the ground mission.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phra_Aphai_Mani"title="Phra Aphai Mani">
Phra Aphai Mani (พระอภัยมณี) (shortened to Aphai) and his brother, Sri Suwan (ศรีสุวรรณ), are the princes of Rattana. Their father sends them to study abroad, wishing to let them enthrone after he passes away. Sri Suwan masters the martial art of sword fighting, whilst Phra Aphai Mani masters playing a magical flute called Pi (ปี่) that either puts people to sleep or kills them. When they return home, their father is infuriated by the fact that what they learned was not useful for rulers, as he expected, and so he expels them from the kingdom.They arrived by the shore and befriended three hermit brothers, Mora, Sanon, and Vishian. One day, while Aphai's companions were lulled to sleep by the sound of his flute, a female ogress named Nang Phisuea Samudra (นางผีเสื้อสมุทร) came and took Aphai away to her cave. She disguised herself as a beautiful maiden to live together with him. Aphai knew all along that the woman was an ogress in disguise, but he was unable to escape. Aphai and Phisuea Samudr lived together and gave birth to their son, Sin Samudr (สินสมุทร).On the other hand, his brother and comrades couldn't find him so they set out on a journey to search for Aphai. They arrived at a Kingdom named Romachakra that is caught between a war with neighboring Kingdoms. Sri Suwan soon fell in love with the Princess of Romachakra, Ketsara (เกษรา). The two of them got married after he saved the Kingdom and Sri Suwan became the King of Romachakra. They had a daughter together named Arun Ratsami (อรุณรัศมี)
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorna's_Triumph"title="Acorna's Triumph">
Acorna's lifemate, Aari, has returned home, and the two may together finish rebuilding their home world. Yet the Aari that has returned from his time travels is different from the one who left, to the point that he almost doesn't remember Acorna or the love that the two shared together. During the confusion while Acorna shifts her attention to stopping a violent criminal from harming innocents, the wicked Khleevi return to retake the planet and destroy the Linyaari and conquer their world. It takes all of Acorna's will to rescue the Aari she loves and put a stop to the Khleevi menace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_Code"title="The Emperor's Code">
After returning to the hotel, an argument occurs between the two siblings and Dan Cahill runs away. He is kidnapped by Ian and Natalie Kabra, and is dumped in Jonah Wizard's lollipop factory, where Jonah treats him nicely (giving him his own suite, taking him to a concert, and letting him fly first class). Meanwhile, Amy Cahill and Nellie, searching for him, head to Alistair to get help in finding Dan. Alistair translates a Chinese newspaper saying that Jonah is going to the Great Wall of China. However, Jonah cancels his flight to the Great Wall, knowing that Amy and Nellie are going there; he instead goes to a Wushu City, where Dan takes Wushu lessons. Later, while exploring a tunnel, Dan finds lab equipment from Gideon Cahill's lab and a picture of Madeleine Cahill that belonged to the notorious Anne Bonny. The Wizards get a mysterious message that gives coordinates, saying to go to a specific spot at the Terra Cotta Warrior's resting place.Meanwhile, Amy and Nellie look for Dan at the Great Wall and find a secret door. Nellie picks the lock and they come into a room. After Amy's Feng Shui-style organizing, a light shines in, showing Mt. Everest. While they were searching the Great Wall, Jonah and Dan checked out the Warriors. Jonah meant to send Dan in alone in case it was a trap, and it was, resulting in them being placed in jail. Jonah's Dad gets them out, and Jonah decides to quit the hunt. Cora Wizard, his mother, is disgusted and slaps Jonah, telling Dan that they have discovered his branch is Janus. Dan tells them he is a Madrigal and leaves the shocked Wizards. After he leaves, he sees the Holts climbing Mount Everest on television.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cruelest_Month"title="The Cruelest Month">
The novel, set in the small Canadian town of Three Pines, takes place around the Easter season. A group of friends visits a haunted house, hoping to rid it of the evil spirits that have haunted it, and the village, for decades. One of them ends up dead, apparently of fright. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his team from the Sûreté du Québec investigate the old house and the villagers of Three Pines.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cool_War"title="The Cool War">
Like many of Pohl's novels, this opens in a world reduced by a crisis, in this case the loss of fossil fuels. Solar power is a major, albeit insufficient, source of power. Electricity is metered and cut off if a home exceeds a maximum amount of usage. "Power piggery", the profligate use of electricity, is a crime.The Rev. H. Hornswell "Horny" Hake becomes embroiled in "the Cool War", in which each country tries to sabotage the economies of its rivals, even if politically they are allies. For instance, he is put in charge of a party of schoolchildren touring Europe. The children are, however, carrying a virulent flu-like disease that affects only adults aged between 30 and 50, the "prime of life" individuals who tend to run businesses and government in industrialized countries. As a result, industrial production in Europe falls drastically. The group who created the infection is known only as "The Team" and is composed of former agents of the CIA and other organizations.However the War has produced a group of people who profit by its continuation and can suppress technologies that might solve humanity's problems. In particular a new form of solar energy collection relies on bio-engineered "sunflowers" which, while technically plants, have extremely reflective petals and can be trained to focus light from a wide area on a furnace or power generator. The Team is determined to destroy the technology because it was invented outside the United States. Hake has to recruit his friends, and some of his enemies, to prevent this and expose the Team to the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Running_Man_(novel)"title="The Running Man (novel)">
In 2025, the world's economy is in shambles and America has become a totalitarian dystopia. 28-year-old Ben Richards, an impoverished resident of the fictional Co-Op City, is unable to find work, having been blacklisted from his trade. His gravely ill daughter Cathy needs medicine, and his wife Sheila has resorted to prostitution to bring in money for the family. In desperation, Richards turns to the Games Network, a government-operated television station that runs violent game shows. After rigorous physical and mental testing, Richards is selected to appear on "The Running Man", the Network's most popular, lucrative, and dangerous program. He is interviewed by Dan Killian, the executive producer of the program, who describes the challenges he will face once the game begins. He also meets Fred Victor, the director of the show, and Bobby Thompson, the MC and host.The contestant is declared an enemy of the state and released with a 12-hour head start before the Hunters, an elite team of Network-employed hitmen, are sent out to kill him. The contestant earns $100 per hour that he stays alive and avoids capture, an additional $100 for each law enforcement officer or Hunter he kills, and a grand prize of $1 billion if he survives for 30 days. Viewers can receive cash rewards for informing the Network of the runner's whereabouts. The runner is given $4,800 and a pocket video camera before he leaves the studio. He can travel anywhere in the world, and each day he must videotape two messages and mail them back to the studio for broadcasting. If he neglects to send the messages, he will be held in default of his Games contract and stop accumulating prize money, but will continue to be hunted indefinitely. Killian states that no contestant has survived long enough to claim the grand prize, nor does he expect anyone to ever do so. Richards simply hopes that he will last long enough to secure his family's future with his prize money.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_at_the_Front"title="Fox at the Front">
The story picks up on December 27, 1944, just minutes after the climax to "Fox on the Rhine". Field Marshal Erwin Rommel has introduced himself to George Patton and offers to surrender Army Group B to him. Both generals agree that the Soviet Union is a greater threat than all of the German forces under Heinrich Himmler, who has considered him a traitor. Rommel instructs Hasso von Manteuffel's Fifth Panzer Army and Heinz Guderian's Sixth Panzer Army to surrender their units at the first Allied unit they encounter. However, the large concentration of Waffen-SS forces in the Sixth Panzer Army makes Himmler order Jochen Peiper to take over the unit at its headquarters in Namur, which kills Heinz Guderian in the process, and to counterattack the Allies. After a US infantry force, which was sent to accept Guderian's surrender, is ambushed, Peiper marshals a small "kampfgruppe" from the "Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler" to attack Rommel's Dinant headquarters, but he is forced to withdraw by heavy US and German resistance. He also collects wounded German forces along the way during the trip back to the Rhine. Patton's liberation of Bastogne and the cooperation of Rommel's forces allows Third Army to race to the Rhine faster than the rest of the Allies by early January 1945. It captures a bridge in Koblenz and tries to cut off as many SS units as they can.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Have_a_Little_Faith_(book)"title="Have a Little Faith (book)">
Albom (Mitchel David "Mitch" Albom) writes in the introduction to this book that the idea for it began with the request by Albert L. Lewis, his childhood rabbi, to write and deliver the eulogy when the time came for the rabbi's funeral. Albom agreed, contingent on an agreement that he could begin a series of interviews and conversations, in order to get to know Lewis as a man, not just as a rabbi.Albom writes that his conversations with Lewis—whom he refers to as "the Reb", an affectionate term drawn from the Yiddish word for rabbi—eventually led to an increased interest on Albom's part in the power and meaning of faith in a larger sense. In his hometown of Detroit, he forged a link with Pastor Henry Covington, an African-American Protestant minister at the "I Am My Brother's Keeper Church". Covington, a past drug-addict, dealer, and ex-convict, was ministering to the needs of his down-and-out parishioners, in an urban church serving a largely homeless congregation, in a church so poor that the roof leaked when it rained.The book alternates between his conversations with Lewis and excerpts from some of his sermons; and "Life of Henry," the title of the sections describing his conversations with Covington, and stories about him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosapenna"title="Rosapenna">
The focus in "Rosapenna" is the conflict in Northern Ireland, which "Jo Vendt" is covering as a journalist. Other central characters in the novel are the English soldier "Sammy Jenkins", who has a background as a poor boy from Whitechapel, and the poor IRA girl "Brigid Doherty". The novel is set in 1973. "Vendt" has been instructed to cover the conflict from a pro British point of view, and is prepared to satisfy the editor in this respect, and to write about James Joyce and Brendan Behan from the cultural side. He eventually gets in contact with IRA people in Ardoyne, an Irish Nationalist district of North Belfast, and move in with a family in the ghetto "The Bone". From then on he is on a collision course with his newspaper editor. He becomes disgusted with the misrepresented reports delivered by the journalist corps, and tries to understand the underlying reasons for the conflict in Northern Ireland.Rosapenna Street is a genuine street in the Bone area of Belfast, adjacent to Ardoyne.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Tom_Brennan"title="The Story of Tom Brennan">
For Tom Brennan, life is about rugby, mates, and family—until a night of celebration changes his life forever. Tom's world explodes as his brother Daniel is sent to jail and the Brennans are forced to leave the small town Tom's lived in his whole life. Tom is a survivor but needs a ticket out of the past just as much as Daniel.The novel is based around the aftermath of the incident that leads to the Brennan family leaving the town of Mumbilli and is written from Tom's perspective. Beginning in the present, Tom is at his grandmother’s house and hating every minute of his new life, we soon begin to see glimpses of the events in Tom's recent past: the "sudden death" football party where all the trouble begins, and the terrible, tragic events of that night and days that follow. The novel involves teenage issues such as alcohol, drink driving, relationships, and moving on after your world turns upside down.In the end, Tom becomes friends with a girl named Chrissy, which they progress from a friendship into a relationship. Chrissy helps Tom come to terms what happened in the past and have a positive outlook on the future.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_and_the_Return_of_the_Dugongs"title="Ishmael and the Return of the Dugongs">
The novel continues on from the end of Don't Call Me Ishmael. It is about a fifteen-year-old boy named Ishmael Leseur and his friends/debating team- James Scobie, Ignatius Prindabel, Orazio Zorzotto and Bill Kingsley. Ishmael tries to get with an attractive girl named Kelly Faulkner, at the same time as keeping away from the school bully, Barry Bagsley. Along with that, Ishmael's father's band, "The Dugongs" tries to reform.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarry_(novel)"title="Quarry (novel)">
Scrappy, a 15-year-old boy, lives in a breaker's yard next to the motorway and is being sent crazy anonymous dares. Once he gets caught up in them, he finds he can't stop, no matter how much he wants to, and the last challenges send him to the very edge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufferings_in_Africa"title="Sufferings in Africa">
Upon landing in the ship's leaky boat, Riley and his crew began to make repairs to return to the ship, rather than face a desert rescue. The repairs were incomplete when a native armed with a spear arrived and helped himself to their meager supplies. After filling up his arms with what he could carry off, he left and returned with two others also carrying spears. Riley stayed back to distract the Arabs and give his men a chance to escape in the loaded and unfinished boat.They made it, but without Riley, who offered his captors money in exchange for his life. With their agreement, crew member Antonio Michele swam to shore to pay them, at which point Riley ran out into the water to join his men. After Riley was safe in the boat, all he could do was watch while an Arab stabbed Michele in the stomach and dragged his body away, which caused Riley tremendous feelings of guilt.As the ship, still aground, was unusable, unable to reach what are now the islands of Cape Verde, the crew decided to sail to the South while hoping for rescue, which did not come. After nine days, out of food and water, they returned to the shore at an isolated beach further south, with the realization that they would probably be killed just as quickly as Michele. They reached the shore, which was surrounded by high cliffs. Riley told his men to begin digging for water. He climbed to the top of the cliffs and found himself staring at the edge of a vast expanse of flat desert.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_(novel)"title="Solar (novel)">
Michael Beard is an eminent, Nobel Prize–winning physicist whose own life is chaotic and complicated. The novel takes the reader chronologically through three significant periods in Beard's life: 2000, 2005 and 2009, interspersed with some recollections of his student days in Oxford.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palos_of_the_Dog_Star_Pack"title="Palos of the Dog Star Pack">
Set on the planet Palos, the novel concerns Jason Croft, a wealthy American who has learned the art of astral projection from a Hindu teacher. Croft feels an unusual calling to Sirius, the Dog Star, and projects his consciousness there, eventually finding his way to the major planet of the solar system, Palos. Once there, Croft finds human life, and floats among them observing their lives. He falls in love at first sight with the princess Naia, and determines to win her love. He eventually finds a host body in the form of the "spiritually sick" Jasor of Nodhur. Within Jasor's body, Croft sets out to win the love of the princess, by introducing technological improvements to the rulers of her kingdom, Tamarizia. Because of the knowledge gained by astrally spying upon key figures and places on Palos, the people view him as an "angel" of sorts, sent by their deity Zitu. Croft uses this misunderstanding to explain his knowledge of advanced technology.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_War_(novel)"title="State of War (novel)">
Hansen, Banyaga, and Villaverde went to an island known as the Island of K in the Philippines to participate in a festival. Villaverde got in touch with radicals planning to activate explosives during the festival in order to assassinate The Commander, a name used as an indirect reference to Ferdinand Marcos. The assassination attempt that would end Marcos's presidency and dictatorship failed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Grayson,_Will_Grayson"title="Will Grayson, Will Grayson">
The novel follows two boys who both have the name Will Grayson. The first Will, whose POV always has correct capitalization, is described as trying to live his life without being noticed. This is complicated by the fact that his best friend, Tiny Cooper, described as "the world's largest person who is really, really gay" and "the world's gayest person who is really, really large", is not the type to go around unnoticed. Tiny is also throughout the novel trying to create an autobiographical musical, which further draws attention to himself and everyone around him.The other Will Grayson, whose POV never has capitalization, goes through his life without anything good to hold on to besides an online relationship with someone who goes by the name Isaac. Intent on meeting up with Isaac, Will Grayson sets up an encounter one night in Chicago but eventually finds out that Isaac was invented by a girl named Maura (who is also his peer in his daily school life). What ensues brings both characters together and changes both of their lives forever in ways they could never have guessed or imagined.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_in_the_Wind"title="Bamboo in the Wind">
In 1972, months prior to the Martial Law declaration, Larry Esteva arrived in Manila, Philippines after studying in Boston, Massachusetts. At the Manila International Airport he witnessed a demonstration being dispersed by the Philippine military. Uranza portrayed the "last desperate efforts" of Filipinos – through characters that include a senator, a youthful nationalist, a dispossessed farmer, a drastic protester, a convent school girl, and a Jesuit academic – to prevent the fall of the Philippines under martial rule. But the political plague accompanied by demonstrations, demolitions, murders, burnings, arrests and tortures continued unhindered until Martial Law was officially declared in the month of September.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monster_in_the_Box"title="The Monster in the Box">
Wexford has long suspected Eric Targo of being a serial killer. Decades later, he finally admits this to DI Mike Burden, his longtime colleague and friend. In an apparently unrelated matter, DS Hannah Goldsmith and Burden's second wife Jenny both approach Wexford with concerns about Tamima, one of Jenny Burden's students.As a young detective constable he investigated the murder of Elsie Carroll. Wexford suspects that while her husband purported to be at a whist club, he was actually with his mistress when his wife was killed. George Carroll was acquitted of his wife's murder on a technicality, but was still shunned by Kingsmarkham residents; Wexford believes him innocent. In the weeks of and following the investigation into Elsie Carroll's death, Targo, a scarf covering his prominent birthmark, walks his dog past the young Wexford's rooming house to taunt him, or so it appears to Wexford.By the 1970s Targo has become a prosperous businessman, several times married and divorced, living in the north of England. Targo reappears in Kingsmarkam. Wexford suspects that Targo has murdered the autistic son of a Myringham widow who wishes her son dead so she can marry her longtime partner.In the book's present Targo reappears again, still with his dogs, without the naevus, but with a private menagerie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Summer_of_the_Danes"title="The Summer of the Danes">
Three plots interlock in this novel.First is the embassy of Deacon Mark and Brother Cadfael to two bishops in Wales, reinforcing the Roman rite in Wales.Second is the young woman Heledd rejected by her canon father in reaction to imposition of the Roman rite, sending her to find love among historic Welsh enemies.Third is the trouble raised up by Cadwaladr, and resolved by Owain, who wanted no trouble with the Danes in their dragon boats.Mark, a young deacon in the house of Roger de Clinton, Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, is chosen to carry messages of good will to two bishops in Wales. He takes Brother Cadfael as translator into his homeland of north Wales in April 1144. They travel on horseback from Shrewsbury Abbey. Mark succeeds with the new bishop of Saint Asaph and the bishop of Bangor, sharing gifts and speaking as a diplomat. From Llanelwy to Bangor, they travel in the train of Owain Gwynedd, stopping at his royal seat at Aber overnight, where Cadfael finds a murdered man. Heledd rides away from Aber, not wanting to marry a man she has not chosen, awaiting her in Bangor.Mark and Cadfael seek the lost Heledd as they head home. Cadfael finds her; as quickly as he does, the two are seized by a group of strong Danes led by Turcaill. They are prisoners in the camp of Otir, leader of the Danes of Dublin. Mark sees them and reports it to Owain. Heledd tells Cadfael she left Aber on a whim, finding the horse saddled and ready.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fatal_Grace"title="A Fatal Grace">
Inspector Gamache investigates after CC de Poitiers, a sadistic socialite, is fatally electrocuted at a Christmas curling competition in the small Québécois town of Three Pines. CC, who had a "spiritual guidance" business based on eliminating emotion, was hated by seemingly everyone, including her husband, lover, and daughter. The crime links to a vagrant's recent murder as well as to the pasts of several other villagers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Princess"title="Dark Princess">
The plot follows a character named Matthew Townes, a college student in his junior year at the University of Manhattan studying to be an obstetrician. Early in the novel, Townes is told that not only is he barred from pursuing his career aspirations, he is not allowed to finish his academic studies. His status as an African American disqualifies him in the early 20th century from completing required courses at a white obstetrics hospital, where he would be caring for white female patients.Townes is devastated and goes to Germany in a kind of exile. There he meets Princess Kautilya of Bwodpur, India, daughter of a maharajah. She reassures Towns of the importance of the history of people of color in the world, and of their presence and impact of their beauty worldwide. The Princess takes him from his dreary American world with its strict binary divide by race. She introduces him to a vibrant world of prominent world leaders of color, while acknowledging some with negative influence on the progress of blacks in the United States. Du Bois is believed to be referring to the leader Marcus Garvey in his character Perigua.The relationship between Townes and the princess develops; she bears his child, who by birthright is the Maharajah of Bwodpur. Townes had not thought it possible that an African American man might have such a connection to royalty.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_the_Trees"title="Song of the Trees">
Eight-year-old Cassie Logan is woken up one sunny morning by her paternal grandmother, Big Ma. As she gathers herself together, she accidentally knocks into a chair. Prompted by Big Ma, she opens her bedroom window and gazes out into the field and examines the forest of trees that sits behind the house far back into the property. She admires them, but this is quickly short-lived as Big Ma tells her to get moving or else she'll whoop her.Cassie goes to the kitchen where her mother, Mary, is preparing breakfast. Her older brother, Stacey, is also in the kitchen setting up the fire in the oven with one of her younger brothers, Christopher-John. Mary is scolding Christopher-John for eating all of the cornbread in the middle of the night. While she doesn't want to let her children go hungry, she tells Christopher-John to ease up on his appetite. At this time, it is learned that her husband and the children's father, David Logan, is down in Louisiana laying down tracks on the railroad to support the family. Cassie's other youngest sibling, Little Man, enters and they get into a brief fight over a stain on his pants from the day before. Little Man believes Cassie is responsible for the stain. Their fight is interrupted by Stacey, but Cassie and Little Man decide to settle their differences on the matter later without Stacey around to see them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger!_and_Other_Stories"title="Danger! and Other Stories">
The story describes Britain's need to update its naval preparations. Norland, a fictional small country in Europe has been fighting England and is now invaded by an English army. However, Norland has a naval flotilla of submarines commanded by Captain John Sirius. Sirius uses his submarines to lay a naval blockade around the British Isles, so that no supplies can be landed. Consequently, the British start suffering famine. Some of the submarines are sunk and the British are congratulating themselves, when Sirius, waiting outside Liverpool, purposely torpedoes a large White Star liner, the RMS "Olympic". The British end up surrendering.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouthpiece_of_Zitu"title="The Mouthpiece of Zitu">
The second novel in the Jason Croft series finds Jason once again relating his adventures on the world of Palos to Dr.George Murray via astral projection. Croft awakens to find that the high priest Zud has declared him the "Mouthpiece of Zitu", complicating matters with his engagement to Naia. Croft once again relies on using astral projection and his knowledge of earth technology to strengthen the nation of Tamarizia and once more win the heart of the princess.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason,_Son_of_Jason"title="Jason, Son of Jason">
The third and final novel in the Jason Croft series once more brings Jason into contact with Dr. George Murray on Earth. This time, Jason brings Dr. Murray along via astral projection to Palos. Naia is suffering complications with her pregnancy, and Jason enlists the good doctor to help. After the birth, the child and mother are kidnapped by the Zollarians, and Croft once again uses his knowledge of earth technology to overcome the challenges he faces.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rage_Against_God"title="The Rage Against God">
## Part One: A Personal Journey Through Atheism.In Chapter 1, Hitchens describes abandoning religion in his youth, and promoting "cruel revolutionary rubbish" as a Trotskyist activist. He claims his generation had become intellectually aloof from religion, rebellious and disillusioned and in Chapter 2 explores further reasons for this disillusion, including the Suez Crisis and the Profumo affair. In Chapter 3, Hitchens recounts how he embraced scientific inquiry and adopted liberal positions on issues such as marriage, abortion, homosexuality, and patriotism. Chapter 4 is a lament for the "noble austerity" of his childhood in Britain. Chapter 5 explores what Hitchens views as the pseudo-religion surrounding Churchill and World War II heroes – a "great cult of noble, patriotic death" whose only equivalent, he claims, was in the Soviet Union. Hitchens then asserts that, "The Christian Church has been powerfully damaged by letting itself be confused with love of country and the making of great wars".In Chapter 6, Hitchens recalls being a foreign correspondent in the Soviet Union and a trip to Mogadishu, and how these experiences convinced him that, "his own civilisation was infinitely precious and utterly vulnerable". In Chapter 7, Hitchens charts his return to Christianity, and makes particular reference to the experience of seeing the Rogier van der Weyden painting "The Last Judgement": "I gaped, my mouth actually hanging open. These people did not appear remote or from the ancient past; they were my own generation ... I had absolutely no doubt I was among the damned". In Chapter 8, Hitchens examines the diminishing of Christianity in Britain and its potential causes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_and_Day_(Parker_novel)"title="Night and Day (Parker novel)">
Night and Day begins with the investigation of a middle school principal accused of molestation. Several girls accuse Principal Betsy Ingersoll of making them pull their dresses up so she can see their panties. The principal claims that she did this to ensure they were wearing proper attire for the school dance. She also claims that her job is not only to ensure they get a proper education, but that they also grow into proper ladies and do not become sluts. She sends several girls home for wearing slutty panties. Although there is no crime to charge her with, Jesse determines to make trouble for her until he can find something to charge her with as he is convinced the girls’ civil rights were violated.He begins interviewing the principal along with her high powered attorney husband, as well as the girls. Later one of the girls comes to see Jesse at his office. She tells him that her parents are swingers, and often host parties for that purpose at their home. She and her little brother hate it and she asks Jesse if he can help. With swinging not illegal, Jesse finds his hands tied, but decides to investigate anyway. He has Suit talk to two of the women, one of whom he knew in high school, to get more information on the swingers club. Suit discovers that the girl’s mother is not into it, but only does it because her husband wants to. Jesse has Spike threaten her husband about the swinging, and she later leaves him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_geteilte_Himmel"title="Der geteilte Himmel">
The main characters are Rita Seidel, age 19, and Manfred Herrfurth, a chemist ten years older, who meet at a dance event in a village and become a couple, although they are different. Rita comes from a rural background and is emotional, while Manfred is a rational city-dweller. The action begins in East Germany in June 1961, shortly before the Berlin Wall is built.They live together with Manfred's parents in Halle, where he works and she studies to be a teacher, which includes training in a socialist work "brigade" at the company Waggonbau Amendorf, building rail wagons.Manfred, who grew up in a difficult family, becomes disillusioned about the future in the GDR, after one of his engineering designs is refused by economics officials. He moves to West Germany via East Berlin. Rita visits him there and tries to persuade him to return, but without success. Shortly after her return, the Wall is built. Rita tries to take her life. She wakes up from unconsciousness in hospital and tells the story from that perspective.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_Image_(novel)"title="Split Image (novel)">
The novel begins with Chief Stone investigating the murder of a man Suit finds crammed into the trunk of an abandoned car. The man turns out to be Petrov Ognowski, a tough guy for local mob boss Reggie Galen. Jesse then goes to the Galen residence to interview him. While there he meets Galen’s beautiful and submissive wife, Rebecca Bangston. Envious of the life that Galen has with his wife, Jesse tailspins into a drinking binge, wondering why his wife couldn’t have been like that. Despite his increased drinking, he continues to investigate and discovers that Galen’s neighbor is another mob boss named Knocko Moynihan and is married to Rebecca’s twin sister, Roberta Bangston.Soon after the first murder, Knocko Moynihan is found murdered. Jesse begins to suspect the wives, leading Jesse and Suit to the Bangston’s hometown. There they discover that their mother is a widow, and that their father was involved in criminal activities with the girl’s husbands, who had met in prison twenty years earlier. While investigating they also discover the girls promiscuous past. Apparently they made a game of having sex with men and seeing if he could tell which one was which throughout. This activity got them the nickname “The Bang Bang Twins.” Jesse wonders if they have continued this behavior. During an interview with the twins later, they strip naked and try to seduce Jesse with their sex game, confirming his suspicions. He resists.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentals_of_Marxism–Leninism"title="Fundamentals of Marxism–Leninism">
## Part One: The Philosophical Foundations of The Marxist-Leninist World Outlook.Part One of Fundamentals covers materialist and idealist philosophy, the use of dialectics within materialist philosophy and its opposition to metaphysics, and develops a theory of knowledge, truth, necessity, and human freedom.The text argues that only a consistently materialist approach to philosophy can be truly scientific, since it requires the recognition of the objective existence of matter, as outside and independent of the human mind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bolitho,_Midshipman"title="Richard Bolitho, Midshipman">
The book opens with Richard Bolitho arriving at a Portsmouth inn frequented by midshipmen. There he meets another midshipman, Martyn Dancer. A lieutenant recalls them to their ship, HMS "Gorgon", a 74-gun ship of the line. Sailing towards West Africa, they encounter an empty merchantman, "City of Athens". Dancer and Bolitho are sent aboard the ship and discover that it has been pillaged and the crew killed. The officers soon deduce that the ship was raided by pirates and Captain Conway announces that the Admiralty had dispatched them to investigate the disappearance of ships in the region. In company with the captured "City of Athens", "Gorgon" approaches a coastal fort surrounded by treacherous reefs and shoals. They sight two ships in the nearby harbour. The fort then opens fire and disables "City of Athens". "Gorgon" withdraws and returns after dark to salvage the ship. Dancer and Bolitho are sent on the mission, commanded by the 4th lieutenant, Mr. Tregorren, who holds a grudge against Bolitho's prestigious heritage. They succeed at taking the ship, and also capture a slave dhow in the escape, with the help of "Gorgon". The ships, under the guise of being members of the pirate fleet, raid the castle which the pirates had been using as a base.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass_on_the_Wayside"title="Grass on the Wayside">
After having returned from England, Kenzō, an egocentric, emotionally detached man in his thirties, teaches English literature at Tokyo Imperial University. His wife Osumi, with whom he constantly argues, is pregnant with their third child, and to facilitate their monetary situation, he starts writing articles for magazines until late in the night. While he holds neither one of his siblings in high regard, he supports his older, sickly half-sister Onatsu with a monthly income, although she is herself married (her husband Hida is rumoured to spend his money on a mistress), and also lends money to his older brother Chōtarō. One day, Kenzō is approached by his former adoptive father Shimada, who asks him for his financial support. Kenzō remembers his secured but loveless childhood at his possessive foster parents' home, where he lived between the age of two and eight. When Shimada divorced his wife Otsune and remarried, Kenzō first lived with Otsune before returning to his natural parents, where he was regarded as a burden. Although reluctantly, Kenzō repeatedly gives Shimada the sums he asks for, commented on disparagingly by Osumi. In a final agreement reached between the two men and their emissaries, Kenzō pays Shimada 100 yen, with Shimada in return signing a document declaring that he will never make contact with Kenzō again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_and_Darkness_(novel)"title="Light and Darkness (novel)">
O-Nobu suspects that her husband, Tsuda, loves another woman and tries to find out the truth. Tsuda, who cannot forget his former lover, Kiyoko, goes to a hospital for a minor operation. O-Nobu visits her and her husband’s relatives in order to get some extra financial support, since the couple are extravagant. Kobayashi, an unemployed former friend, visits Tsuda and threatens that if he does not treat him well, he will reveal Tsuda’s past to O-Nobu. Kobayashi also visits O-Nobu, but nothing happens. Tsuda’s sister visits him and tries to make him realize how he should act towards his parents. Mrs. Yoshikawa, the wife of Tsuda’s boss, also visits him and tries to make him change his attitudes. She sends him away to an onsen where Tsuda meets Kiyoko, who is now married to another man.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadrach_in_the_Furnace"title="Shadrach in the Furnace">
The story begins on 14 May 2012 as Dr. Shadrach Mordecai, personal physician of the dictator Genghis II Mao IV, awakens. He checks the health of the dictator through a series of implants within his body that link to the general health of his client, allowing him to receive any information on the health of the dictator through codings of various twitches in his own body. Through a series of security checks, he enters into his office to prepare for a kidney transplant for his master.As he passes Surveillance Vector One, the eye on the world which gives committee members the ability to view all events happening on Earth, he meets Mangu, the prince of the world and viceroy of the committee, a charming man who earns the admiration of all his subjects. Mangu is concerned about the surgery, but Shadrach Mordecai assures the prince that Genghis Mao has grown used to surgeries. Here, Shadrach also reveals to the reader that Mangu was chosen as the subject for Project Avatar, where Genghis Mao will continue to reign in the body of his own son. He also feels sorry for Mangu, since he was tricked by his father into believing that he would inherit the throne. Once in his office, he contacts Nicholas Warhaftig, surgeon of the dictator. Warhaftig orders Shadrach to bring Genghis Mao to the Surgery by 0900. Soon, Genghis Mao himself contacts Shadrach to ask how his health is that day. As Shadrach tells the dictator of his health state, he also informs the dictator of the incoming surgery and its timing. Genghis Mao requests for Shadrach to enter his room and prepare him for the surgery at 0900. We also learn from this conversation that the surgery would give the dictator the fourth liver he is having. Afterwards, Shadrach looks up the leaders of the projects Talos, Phoenix and Avatar, for it is his responsibility as personal physician to the Khan to keep checks on the progress of such projects. First, he contacts Katya Lindman of Project Talos. She reports to Shadrach their progress in coding Genghis Mao's eyelid mannerisms and as Shadrach asks her to continue working on coding his mental processes, she has an apprehensive look but agrees. Next, he contacts Irayne Sarafrazi of Project Phoenix. She talks of her problems with brain cell deterioration and becomes worried as Shadrach presses for her to make further progress in the subject. Lastly, he contacts Nikki Crowfoot of Project Avatar, who is also Shadrach's lover. After she recounts her progress, she arranges a meeting with Shadrach for 0230.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listening_for_Lions"title="Listening for Lions">
Rachel Sheridan is the only child of British missionaries working among the Kikuyu and Masai tribes of British East Africa (present-day Kenya). Her father is a doctor and her mother a teacher. Life goes haywire as an influenza epidemic strikes when Rachel is 13, in 1919. Many die from the sickness, including her mother. The Pritchards, arrogant planters who live nearby, bring their daughter Valerie to the hospital, but it is too late to save her. After Rachel's father dies and it looks as if the hospital will be closed, Rachel is taken in by the Pritchards. They persuade the reluctant Rachel to impersonate their daughter, sending her in Valerie's place to visit her dying grandfather in England, on the pretext that it will save his life. Rachel considers telling people of the Pritchards' lies on the ship, but she soon arrives in England and begins to develop a close relationship with her "grandfather", who, like her, is very fond of birds. Just as things begin to get better, the Pritchards' unveil their new plot, to take the grandfather's property when he dies. In scorn of his son, the grandfather sends them away, but his trusty solicitor, Mr. Grumbloch, gives Rachel his address and tells her to come in an emergency. Rachel comes within the day, and he returns her to her grandfather, telling him the truth, which they have already suspected. There is an epilogue at the end of the novel, in which Rachel becomes his adopted daughter and attends school, later returning to her father's hospital as a doctor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holy_Thief"title="The Holy Thief">
Two visitors from the now reviving Ramsey Abbey arrive in February 1145. Sub-prior Herluin and young Brother Tutilo request alms and aid in restoring their abbey. The Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul and the people of Shrewsbury respond generously. Herluin seeks Sulien Blount at Longner Manor. Sulien will not rejoin as a monk. The family gives coppice wood for rebuilding. Lady Donata, Sulien's ailing mother, has the pleasure of hearing beautiful music from young Brother Tutilo. She donates her personal jewellery for Ramsey Abbey. Also staying at the Abbey is a successful Provençal troubadour, Rémy of Pertuis, his groom and a singer.The Sheriff cries the warning that the River Severn is rising rapidly. A chaotic scene develops as the flood continues to rise after dark, as items of value are moved without benefit of lamps or candles within the Abbey buildings by monks and guests, and the cart for Ramsey Abbey is loading to leave. Herluin and Tutilo ride out to Worcester.When the flood subsides, in place of Saint Winifred's reliquary they find a wrapped piece of timber, the same size and heft, showing this to be a planned theft. The Sheriff and Prior Robert are dispatched to meet Herluin for what he knows. James of Betton returns to the Abbey more than a week after the cart set out, with the news that cart did not make it all the way to Ramsey Abbey – the same news Nicol delivers to Herluin in Worcester. Nicol leads them to the place of the ambush.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalingattuparani"title="Kalingattuparani">
The warriors who return from the war found the doors of their household closed and they ask the women to open them. Meanwhile goblins who witnessed the battle narrates the story to the goddess Kali who resides in the forest. The poem contains thirteen parts
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush,_Hush"title="Hush, Hush">
Nora Grey is an average sophomore student living in Coldwater, Maine. Her life is largely uneventful until she is seated next to a mysterious senior named Patch Cipriano in biology class, who had failed the subject several times before. The two are initially at odds, but Nora finds herself inexplicably drawn to him, his behavior both attractive and repelling. Despite the strong pull she feels towards him, Nora continues to tell her best friend Vee that she's not interested in Patch.Vee later invites Nora to a local amusement park, Delphic, in an attempt to set her up with Elliot, a boy who has expressed an attraction to Nora. The trip turns awkward when the group runs into Patch, who makes Elliot jealous. Nora confronts Patch and he persuades Nora to meet him in front of the newly reformed roller coaster, the Archangel. Nora later makes an excuse to find something to eat and sets off to find Patch.After she finds Patch, he manages to persuade her to ride the Archangel. The ride turns into a disaster after Nora falls from the roller coaster, only to realize it was her imagination. The incident leaves her shaken up. When Nora is unable to locate Vee and the others at the amusement park, she is left with no option but to allow Patch to drive her home. Once home, Patch offers to make tacos. Nora becomes suspicious and worried as the knife he uses changes sizes. The two nearly kiss but are interrupted by her mom calling in an attempt to check on Nora.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness,_Take_My_Hand"title="Darkness, Take My Hand">
From the back of the paperback:When Detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro agree to protect the son of a prominent psychiatrist they soon find bodies are piling up around them. What's more, all the clues point to an unlikely suspect - a serial killer who has been in prison for twenty years, so he can't be killing again, can he?As the duo try to find out what kind of human being could perform such horrifying acts of mutilation, torture and dismemberment, they discover that the killer's motive is disturbingly rooted in their own past. In a series of heart-stopping climaxes that grow ever more bloody, ever more terrifying, the two detectives work frantically to capture the killer before they become victims themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Child_Thief"title="The Child Thief">
The novel begins with a prologue. A young girl awaits her abusive father, only to be rescued by a boy with auburn hair, freckles, pointy ears, and golden eyes. He comforts the girl, telling her of a place where there are no grown-ups and lots of adventure. The girl goes with him.The novel follows several characters in their adventures through Avalon, an enchanted isle in its final death throes. Brom makes liberal use of Celtic and Scottish mythology as, in a parallel storyline, he describes Peter's history from birth to Lord of Deviltree.In the modern day, a child named Nick flees his home with a bag full of methamphetamine. A gang of drug dealers has taken over his home, abusing him while his mother and grandmother are powerless to do anything. His first night on the run he is pursued by the gang members and runs into Peter. Peter displays superhuman speed and strength, driving the gang members off. He tells Nick about Avalon and convinces him to come there. Nick makes it through the mist to Avalon, joining up with the other children Peter has taken there over the years.Peter's clan of human children is the final force between the Flesh Eaters and The Lady. The Lady's magic keeps Avalon alive and the Mist up to keep out unwanted humans while, unfortunately, keeping the Flesh Eaters in. The Lady is trapped within the heart of Avalon, a prisoner in her own land by her nephew and Avalon's heir apparent, Lord Ulfger.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheaper_by_the_Dozen"title="Cheaper by the Dozen">
The book tells the story of time and motion study and efficiency experts Frank Bunker Gilbreth and Lillian Moller Gilbreth, and their children as they reside in Montclair, New Jersey, for many years. Lillian Gilbreth was described in the 1940s as "a genius in the art of living".The best-selling biographical novel was composed by two of the children, who wrote about their childhoods. Gilbreth's home doubled as a sort of real-world laboratory that tested her and her husband Frank's ideas about education and efficiency. The book is more of a series of stories, many of which are humorous, with little overarching narrative.The title comes from one of Frank Sr.'s favorite jokes: it often happened that when he and his family were out driving and stopped at a red light, a pedestrian would ask, "Hey, Mister! How come you got so many kids?" Gilbreth would pretend to ponder the question carefully, and then, just as the light turned green, would say, "Well, they come cheaper by the dozen, you know", and drive off.At several points in the book, a total number of children is spoken of as being 12. In real life, although the Gilbreths had 12 children who survived infanthood, only up to 11 were living at the time of the stories. In fact, when Mary died of diphtheria at age five, seven of her siblings were not yet born, so there never were 12 children alive at the same time. The only chapter that mentions Mary by name is the one that tells the stories of the children's births; otherwise, she is not mentioned and her absence is not explained. It was not until the sequel, "Belles on Their Toes", was published in 1950 that Mary's death is mentioned in a footnote. In the rest of the book, only the 11 children who lived to adulthood are mentioned by name. From oldest to youngest, they are Anne, Ernestine (Ern), Martha (Mart), Frank Jr., Bill, Lillian (Lill), Fred, Dan, John (Jack), Bob, and Jane.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_Dead_(novel)"title="Play Dead (novel)">
No sooner had supermodel Laura Ayers and Celtics star David Baskin said "I do" than tragedy struck. While honeymooning on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, David went out for a swim—and never returned. Now widowed and grieving, Laura's search for the truth will draw her into a web of lies and deception.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_for_Good_(novel)"title="Gone for Good (novel)">
As a boy, Will Klein had a hero: his older brother, Ken. Then, on a warm suburban night in the Kleins' affluent New Jersey neighborhood, a young woman—a girl Will had once loved—was found raped and murdered in her family's basement. The prime suspect: Ken Klein. With the evidence against him overwhelming, Ken simply vanished, spending the next decade as the elusive subject of rumors, speculation, and an international manhunt. When his shattered family never heard from Ken again, they were sure he was gone for good.Now, eleven years have passed. And Will, who always believed in his brother's innocence, has found evidence that Ken is alive—even as he is struck by another act of betrayal. His girlfriend suddenly disappears, leaving behind compelling evidence that she was not the person Will thought she was. As the two dark dramas unwind around him, Will is pulled into a violent mystery, haunted by signs that Ken is trying to contact him after all these years. Will can feel himself coming closer and closer to his brother... and to a terrible secret that someone will kill to keep buried. And as the lies begin to unravel, Will is uncovering startling truths about his lover, his brother, and even himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Attenbury_Emeralds"title="The Attenbury Emeralds">
## 1921."The Attenbury Emeralds" recounts how Lord Peter begins his hobby of amateur sleuthing in 1921 by becoming involved in the recovery of the Attenbury Emeralds. Lord Peter's "first case" is a mystery mentioned by Lord Peter's creator Dorothy L. Sayers in a number of novels, but until now never fully told.The novel is set after World War II, but in its first chapters this seems like a mere frame story, with Wimsey recounting to his wife Harriet the reminiscences of the start of his detecting career in 1921. As a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War, the young Wimsey had been invited to an engagement party at the house of the Attenburys, another aristocratic family. He was present when an emerald family heirloom disappeared, and discovered in himself a talent for detection—leading to the discovery of the missing stone (and incidentally saving his friends' daughter from marrying a rogue).
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Son_of_the_Soil"title="A Son of the Soil">
Alexio spends his earliest years in Makosa, an ancestral village, but then moves to Salisbury (later Harare, the country's capital) to live with his cousin who works as a servant for a white family. Alexio then becomes a farmer in Jena's village and is given the opportunity to be sent to school. Being successful in his studies, at age 12 he travels back to Salisbury to attend Goromonzi Secondary School, funded partially by an official of the African Party, which evidently is opposed to Rhodesia's minority rule.In Salisbury he has two white teachers, Paul and Sarah Davies, who came to Rhodesia as volunteers, and this, plus the association with the African Party, gets Alexio in trouble with the police. They attempt to charge him with being a political activist and a communist, but fail. They then try to make him a police informer, but Alexio refuses and is harassed constantly. His only way to continue his education is to travel to England. This plan fails because once again, he is accused of being a communist while applying for a passport. Alexio is beat up and asked again if he wants to become a police informer. A black police officer grants Alexio some time to consider the offer, and it is here that Alexio escapes detention in order to become a guerrilla fighter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_World_(short_story)"title="Crystal World (short story)">
All the events of the story are read in a phantasmagoric way. The story is based on real events, as evidenced by the date put at the beginning of the narrative: October 24, 1917. It was at that time, at night, that the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, overthrowing the Provisional Government. The heroes of the story, Nikolai Muromtsev and Yuri Popovich (persons fictionalized), are sent on night duty to prevent Lenin and his associates from entering Smolny. Attention should be drawn to the names of these cadets, which refer the reader to the epic Russian heroes Ilya Muromets and Alyosha Popovich, who back in the day faithfully defended the borders of the Russian land. Like these bogatyrs, Nikolai and Yuri, although they occasionally snort cocaine, which brings them closer to our contemporaries, who in the 1990s lived in an "inverted consciousness" provoked by drugs and alcohol, perform the function of defenders of a rolling Russia into the abyss, trying at a new historical turn to save and preserve the illusory "crystal world", personifying "the past known past of Russia and its unknown future". The fact that there is no third protector, Dobryny Nikitich, among these decadent bogatyrs "gives rise to the omnipotence of chance in Pelevin's Crystal World. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon_of_Retaliation_(short_story)"title="Weapon of Retaliation (short story)">
Pelevin's story forms a cycle of works together with the stories ""The Reconstructor", "Kreger's Revelation" and "Music from the Pillar"" the plots of which overlap. Not infrequently, elements of the plot of some stories in the cycle are contained in a convoluted form in others. The stories receive a continuation or are given a backstory within the general artistic world of the characters. The title of the story is taken from a series of projects of Nazi Germany under the general title "Weapon of Retaliation" to develop a new type of weapon to turn the tide of World War II. The beginning does list the various projects that existed, then the story moves into the realm of dystopian fiction, how the Allies sought weapons of retaliation, how Stalin used blatant threats against the British and Americans, suspected deception, and so on.Just as in life, no weapons were found. But the author argues that weapons did in fact exist and were even used, namely psychological weapons in the form of rumors of a formidable weapon of retaliation: "as rumors of a weapon of retaliation emerge and spread, they arise by themselves." In conclusion, the author refers to the results of the use of weapons against the USSR, "although we can do without words, especially as they are bitter and not new". To see the results of the weapon, it is enough to go to the window in the morning on tiptoe, slightly open the curtain and look out the window. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uhryb"title="Uhryb">
The events of Pelevin's early period story take place in Soviet times (judging by the line "we've had so much incomprehensible stuff these seventy years" - in the second half of the 1980s).The hero of the story, a retired humanitarian named Maralov, who in order not to feel permanently retired, responds to readers' letters to journals, for example, to a schoolboy's question, "Why do I live?" The rest of the time he chats with a single student on general philosophical topics. And so, during another drunken conversation, he expresses the unexpected idea that God is the personified generalization of everything incomprehensible in an individual country. He exists objectively, and a certain religious mysticism corresponds to him.The morning after the hangover it turns out that the idea is rooted in the soul of its inventor in the form of a strange word "uhryb", Russian for "ухряб". Uhryb is just a set of letters or sounds that accompany the hero. The hero begins to see the ubiquitous "uhryb" everywhere: in the sounds of chopping meat, in a hidden form in works of classical literature, as an acrostic in slogans ("Success to participants of the XI International Festival for Disarmament and Nuclear Safety!"), in the sequence of pictures on the wall.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_from_the_Pillar"title="Music from the Pillar">
"Music from the Pillar" together with the stories ""The Reconstructor", "Weapon of Retaliation" and "Kreger’s Revelation"" constitute a single cycle of works in the alternative history genre. The plots of these stories overlap.At the beginning of the story, the worker Matvey reads on a magazine page an account of an American physicist's ideas about the existence of points of space that are on different evolutionary lines, but are at the same time their intersection: "crossing over such a point will cause the event "B1" of area "A" to begin to occur instead of the event "A1" of area "B". But the event that occurred in area "A" will now be an event occurring in area "B." This quote describes the compositional structure of the story, where the protagonist's consciousness is divided, intertwining dream and reality.Matvey, along with two colleagues, has a desire to drink vodka at the beginning of his work day, but since the store is closed and there is no money, they decide to expand their consciousness by eating fly mushrooms. Under the influence of mushrooms, the characters begin to hallucinate. "Music from the Pillar" appears in Matvey's mind, after which "Something battered, mutilated and driven into the deepest and darkest corner of Matvey's soul stirred and crawled timidly toward the light, flinching and waiting to strike every minute. Matvey let this strange, incomprehensible thing fully emerge and now looked at it with an inner gaze, trying to understand what it was. Suddenly he noticed that this strange thing was himself and that it was looking at everything else that had just considered itself to be him and trying to make sense of what was just trying to make sense of him.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reconstructor_(short_story)"title="The Reconstructor (short story)">
The story "The Reconstructor" is written in the genre of a review of the fictional book "The Memory of the Fiery Years" by P. Stetsyuk, which, based on declassified military archives, tells about the real personality of Stalin.Narrator-editor with a large share of irony and skepticism reviews uninteresting and boring, from his point of view, a book devoted to the discovery of historical "truth" about the true identity of the mystified Stalin, according to the narrator, -Ruler of Russia Joseph Stalin (but in patronymic Andreevich, born in 1894).The reviewer advises the reader not to read the unnecessary research and at the same time assures him that the book is still worth reading. The narrative is framed in a pseudoscientific style, on behalf of a group of researchers whose arguments the author lays out.Pelevin actively uses in the text the arsenal of "nabokov's" techniques. For example, the narrator quotes passages from a fictional book by the fictional author P. Stetsyuk, polemicizes with his conclusions, sneers at the style, the shambolic and metaphorical manner of statements (and the stereotype of the reader's perception).P. Stetsyuk's "Memory of the Fiery Years" tells of a mysterious steel tube made by a Minsk radio factory, because of which a series of grotesque deaths follows. Next is the discovery that instead of one Stalin was as many as seven of his doubles, who lived in an isolated underground and there led the Soviet Union.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kreger's_Revelation"title="Kreger's Revelation">
The story, together with the stories "The Reconstructor", "Weapon of Retaliation" and "Music from the Pillar" constitute a kind of cycle of pseudo-historical stories by Pelevin devoted to ideology, agitation and propaganda during World War II. It is written in a satirical pseudo-historical form. In the story the author makes an attempt to fictionalize history. Formally, this work - the official correspondence (the reader sees reports, memos, minutes, transcripts of tape recordings) between the Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler, the junior imperial magician Kreger, chief restructurer Wolf and other figures of the Third Reich. The reports, memos, protocols, transcripts of tape recordings are presented in the form of a mystical beginning, which guided the highest Nazi command made the most important decisions during the World War II.The story literally interprets the title of Lenin's work "Leo Tolstoy as a mirror of the Russian Revolution". At first, Kreger sees Leo Tolstoy in the astral with a medical mirror on his forehead, then it turns out that a huge reflector was built in the Yasnaya Polyana area and Tolstoy's collected works were published with varying numbers of each volume to guide and focus the spiritual-mystical mirror. From the reconstruction of Leo Tolstoy's "mirror" (an allusion to the German organization of the Third Reich - Ahnenerbe), the conclusion that Italy must attack Abyssinia follows.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness_Becomes_You_(book)"title="Happiness Becomes You (book)">
"Happiness Becomes You" contains eight chapters, plus an introduction and afterword, that span the entirety of Turner's life, beginning with stories about her hometown before her birth, then continues through the adversities she faced in her life and career as she worked her way up to eventually become a world-class performer, and concluding with stories about the author's daily life at the time of the book's completion when she was eighty years of age in 2020. The book's eight chapters roughly coincide with the eight decades of Turner's life.Throughout the book, Turner provides inspirational advice and spiritual tools for the reader's self-empowerment and fulfillment, and she shares how her favorite Buddhist principles helped her overcome poverty, prejudice, illness, loss, and other personal and professional challenges. A glossy photo insert is also contained in the book, with sixteen rare and/or never-before-published images of Turner dating from the late 1970s through 2020.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_in_a_Cafe"title="Sigmund in a Cafe">
The story belongs to the early stage of the writer's work, and applies a characteristic author's trick: playing with the reader's expectations and unpredictable ending. A similar gimmick is found in his other works: ""The Life of Insects", "Hermit and Six-Toes", "Nika"". The action of the story takes place in a Viennese café, judging by the description, the beginning of 20th century. A certain Sigmund sits in the café and closely observes the couples around him: a lady and a gentleman who have come to the cafe for dinner, a girl and a boy playing in the corner, a hostess and a waiter changing a blown bulb. The story details the details of each couple's behavior, and Sigmund comments on each episode with a short "Aha."Each episode elicits a monotonous commentary from him, characterized only by a gradually increasing excitement as the episodes depicted contain sexual meaning and phallic details.In Sigmund's field of vision are a couple of customers, a man and a woman, the hostess' children, a brother and sister, the hostess herself, and the waiter. To the first and subsequent episodes, Sigmund reacts with a quiet exclamation of "Aha." He sees the displeasure of the woman who has noticed the snow crammed into the unzipped handbag carried by her companion, the long umbrella that the lady has placed in the corner, "for some reason having turned its handle down." 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tarzan_Swing_(short_story)"title="The Tarzan Swing (short story)">
The main motifs of Pelevin's story are the themes of sleep, loneliness, the ascent to an unknown goal, and the mortality of the human world.The main character of the story Peter Petrovich together with the unfamiliar interlocutor are walking through the night city in the light of the moon on a silvery path. Peter Petrovich argues about the meaning of life, about faith, about the human soul. His interlocutor is speechless and wears a dark hood that hides his face. At some point Peter Petrovich begins to suspect that the stranger is his own reflection. He sees a cable hanging from the wall and recalls a childhood pastime: bungee jumping. To check if the person he is talking to is a reflection, Petr Petrovich hangs on the cable and, swinging, hits the person he is talking to. It turns out that the interlocutor is not his reflection. In response to Petr Petrovich's request to tell him the truth, the interlocutor replies: "Does the word 'lunatic' mean anything to you?" And then Petr Petrovich realizes that he is standing on the ledge of a house thirty meters above the ground. The tin ledge was the silvery path. Peter Petrovich is horrified. The interlocutor moves away, and Petr Petrovich unsuccessfully tries to remember who he was. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Water_Tower_(short_story)"title="The Water Tower (short story)">
The story is written in the form of one complex sentence, stretching over 13 pages containing almost 2,800 words. The author uses this technique to illustrate the journey of life. Life seems endless, but its end is a point.The main role in the story is played by images, physical space is absent in it. One might assume that the story describes the vivid experiences of Pelevin himself, but its time frame is shifted backwards: the hero's childhood memory is of the builders laying out the year "1928" on the water tower. Of the images presented in the story: first impressions of childhood, adult memories of the Civil War, school, geography teacher, pioneer camp, fashion for aviation and pilots, repressions of the 30s, songs by Utesov, the Great Patriotic War, children, Stalin's death, work, cosmonauts, Soviet "Victory" cars, the death of his wife, jogging in the park, the impression of old age and the near-death pain in the heart. The water tower, which is visible to the narrator, serves as a point of departure for the narrator's reasoning, which forms the plot of the story, in which Pelevin's familiar ideas and images are revealed with the utmost clarity. The water tower becomes a point of account for the narrator's multiple observations and reflections, opens up his life and description, and then closes, creating a circular composition. Each new thought or judgement by the narrator seems to build this tower, creating another ring that takes the tower all the way to the heavens.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Low_Tundra"title="The Low Tundra">
Pelevin's satirical-philosophical psychedelic fantasy story shows the reality of 1990s Russia through the aesthetics of medieval Chinese culture. The Chinese emperor Yuan Meng travels among the worlds using a magical little cart made from magic Hallucinogenic mushrooms. Traveling to the lower tundra, the emperor needs it to restore harmony and peace to the underworld, because, the former court magician Songham dared to violate the ancient harmonies bequeathed to people by the "Book of Songs". He has created music of destruction and decay. He plays it on upturned cauldrons for boiling rams, which he calls Singing Bowls. It turns out to be a kind of bronze bells of different sizes. Wherever its sounds are heard, people cease to know which is up and which is down. Horror and longing settle in their hearts. Leaving their homes and gardens, they go out on the road and, bowing their necks, dutifully wait for their fate.To restore the balance, the Emperor goes to the Spirit of the Polar Star in the lower tundra.Soon the protagonist finds himself in the plague of an American pilot shot down over Siberia, who lives in the plague and listens to "One of Us" by Joan Osborne. He was shot down in an SR-71 "Blackbird" plane, and has been living in the tundra for 20 years. He describes the U.S.-Russia relationship of the 1990s as follows. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Kublakhanov"title="Ivan Kublakhanov">
The story is a postmodern philosophical treatise written in the traditions of Buddhism and Vedanism.Having a traditional Russian name Ivan, the last name of the hero of the story - Kublakhanov refers to Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment". The author addresses the idea of illusory existence and the existence of the soul in a multitude of bodily reincarnations. The story is also based on the Indian myth of Brahma and the creation of the universe: Brahma sleeps on a golden egg, from which the universe is born when he wakes up and dies out when he falls asleep.At the beginning of the story, a certain impersonal absolute finds that something is beginning to happen in it, even though nothing is supposed to and cannot happen in it. A kind of mysterious birth of the world from some primordial "cosmic egg. In the end, it realizes that it is simply dreaming a dream that comes from "its infinite power over being," one of those dreams that "it has always dreamed. This idea is precisely the Vedantic idea of an impersonal Brahman, as a "divine play" in infinite periodic succession, producing and then destroying the illusory world that is actually a dream. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Species_(short_story)"title="The Origin of Species (short story)">
The title of the story, "The Origin of Species," refers the reader to the major life work of Charles Darwin, the founder of the all-conquering doctrine of the origin of species, who was a cult figure in Soviet society. In the materialistic and atheistic society that was the Soviet Union, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is attributed a major role. The author of the theory himself seemed to be a cult figure, as the founder of the all-conquering doctrine of the origin of species as opposed to the divine creation of the world.In this cultural context, the absurdist atmosphere of Pelevin's story becomes clear. In the story, Darwin travels on the brig Beagle in the general adulation of the crew on a scientific expedition. The bosun follows him with a bucket of frozen champagne bottles. All the attention of the captain and crew is directed to Darwin's great experiments on the theory of evolution. However, the venerable scientist does not limit himself to naked speculation in his research - with his sleeves rolled up, he summons another primate to his hold - to be tested in the wild and to study the origin of species in practice. The hero of the story, Darwin, is let inside the ship, where they let the monkeys in, in physical combat with some of them, they prove that the struggle for existence survives the strongest. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forest_Song"title="The Forest Song">
Fairy Drama in Three ActsOld forest in Volyn, a wild and mysterious place. The beginning of spring. "He who rends the dikes" runs out of the forest. He talks to the Lost Babes and Rusalka, who reminds him of his love, reproaches him for betrayal. Water Goblin argues with Rusalka that she is dating a deceitful stranger. He only tempts Mermaids.Uncle Lev and his nephew Lukash are going to build a house in the same area. Lev is an old man, kind. Lukash is still a young man. The old man tells the boy that he should be careful with the forest dwellers. Forest Elf tells Rusalka that Lev will not offend them.Lukash makes a flute out of reeds, which is heard by Mavka, who previously talked to Forest Elf. Forest Elf warned the girl to avoid people, because they were only a disaster.When Lukash is going to cut a birch with a knife, Mavka stops him and asks not to offend his sister. Lukash is surprised to have met such an unusually lush and beautiful young lady in the forest and asks who she is. Her name is Forest Mavka.Lukash likes the girl for her changeable beauty, kind language, sensitivity to music and beauty. He says that people mate with each other when they love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_(novel)"title="Nick (novel)">
"Nick" centers on the narrator of "The Great Gatsby", Nick Carraway, in the years before the events of Fitzgerald's novel. It follows Nick Carraway as a soldier in World War I, his detours in Paris, and his time in New Orleans before his move up to Long Island.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_Search_Record"title="Wind Search Record">
Victor Pelevin's works are characterized by numerous implicit references to various aspects of Chinese literature and culture. There are also texts explicitly devoted to Chinese philosophy, and this story is one of them, written in the spirit of Eastern philosophical narratives that appeal to various semiotic codes and simulacra that substitute reality, but do not seriously assert the validity of these codes and images. The narrative is written in the form of an Eastern letter on behalf of a Chinese student of Gradual Ordering to his teacher named Elegance of Wisdom. The narrative traces an obvious orientation to the stereotypical notion of the epistolary genre.The story is told that a sage living on a holy mountain treats his disciple to a powder of five stones, after which the disciple has a miraculous stream of consciousness. He tries to write a literary work about comprehending the Way and ends up thinking that any addition of another symbol (image, word) will move him further and further away from the truth. All this resembles a treatise of Taoist philosophy transformed by the author into a story. In the story, the principle of the mapping of reality, meaning, and signification, obscured by a multitude of signifiers, is interpreted by an ancient Chinese man and takes on the status of a Buddhist truth: "The most monstrous conspiracy that ever existed in the Middle Kingdom was revealed to me... The world is but a reflection of the hieroglyphs. But the hieroglyphs that make it up do not indicate anything real and only reflect each other, for one sign is always defined by another. This transcoding of Western theory appeared to be mystical and "Oriental" in a sudden way after the use of some suspicious remedy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guest_at_the_Fest_of_Bon"title="The Guest at the Fest of Bon">
Pelevin's story is based on the theses of the samurai Jete Yamamoto ("Hagakure"), which express his view of life as an instant, saying that man is on the verge of death at every moment and that the way of the samurai is death. The story is written on behalf of the dying Yukio Mishima, a Japanese writer and playwright who continued the tradition of Japanese aestheticism.That is why there is an underlying idea in the mind of the Bon-Samurai Yukio Mishima: everyone is just an object in this life. Man is a puppet with a mechanism created by a puppet master. The puppet plays out the puppet's first performance, then the puppet disappears and the puppet disappears. And Yukio Mishima's head already rolls on the floor. But there is no tragedy, death is true to the original concept: man is the master's thought, so one cannot kill the puppet and the puppet will not die; God the master simply ceases to play. Such a philosophy is a parent for the samurai, when he realizes that his youth has passed, the only thing left to do is not to kill his death in the old age and to tear up his life with his own hands. This philosophy is a consolation for those who have the thought of killing themselves and killing God: the human puppet after death becomes a spirit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombification_(essay)"title="Zombification (essay)">
In essay is subtitled "Experiences of Comparative Anthropology," setting the reader up for a scientific narrative. The protagonist of the first chapter is James Bond. He studies Patrick Lay Fermor's "The Traveller's Tree", a book about the Haitian voodoo religion and the transformation of humans into zombies. It turns out that James Bond will have to fight a Haitian Negro zombie who worked for SMERSH.The author goes on to explain the reason why Jan Flemming associates the Haitian cult with the Stalinist counterintelligence. Natural science writings on zombification, works of fiction, and religious and philosophical treatises are mentioned in this connection. The "scientific" context of the narrative is underscored by the use of many special terms, as well as verbiage typical of scientific literature: "note the connection," "researchers have long speculated," "samples were submitted for analysis," "attempt to give a more or less complete description," "engaged in the study of this problem," and so on.The essay details the ritual of turning a man into a zombie in Haiti. Adherents of the voodoo cult believe that a person is "several bodies superimposed on each other": a physical body, a "spirit of flesh" (an energetic duplicate of the physical body), and a soul. The soul, in turn, is subdivided into a "big good angel" and a "little good angel." The "big good angel" is the energetic essence that nourishes all living things, while the "little good angel" is the individualized part of the soul. It is the "good little angel" that the magical rituals of the voodoo zombifiers are aimed at.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmas_Cyberpunk,_or_Christmas_Night-117.DIR"title="Xmas Cyberpunk, or Christmas Night-117.DIR">
Cyberpunk literature, which emerged as a branch of science fiction, describes the symbiosis of man and machine, with the machine (and all the elements associated with it: cyberspace, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, cyborgs, biorotobots, etc.) necessarily winning.To a certain extent, "Xmas Cyberpunk" can be seen as a remake of Turgenev's story "Mumu".The story simulates a situation in which an entire city is put under the power of a computer for 24 hours. At the beginning of the story, the author refers the reader to computer reality. The Latin characters ".DIR" refer to the video file format Adobe Director Movie (a video that can be opened with the help of the Adobe Director program). In the case of Pelevin's story, the ending ".DIR" in the title serves as an unambiguous allusion to the fact that the text is to be taken as an internal computer file, rather than as a written text.The story was written in the late 1990s, precisely at a time when the development of computer technology allowed the average user to interact successfully with a computer at a new level. With the advent of the operating system Windows-95, equipped with the now familiar graphical (rather than text, as was the DOS system) interface, the computer began to play an increasingly important role in the life of the individual and society as a whole.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirteenth_Sun"title="The Thirteenth Sun">
The novel's main protagonist is Goytom, a young radical, who accompanies his ageing father on a pilgrimage. "Fitawrary" Woldu, his nobleman father, holds traditional beliefs and travels to St Abbo's Shrine on Mount Zuqualla in the hope of finding a cure for his heart disease. Despite his frailty, he continues to assert his authority to the frustration of his son. Travelling with the party is Woynitu, the "Fitawrary"'s daughter by a prostitute.As they ascend the mountain they find a place to stay overnight with a peasant and his wife, who is also known as the 'conjure woman'. The "Fitawrary" arranges for the peasant's wife to perform a sacrifice on his behalf. The peasant rapes Woynitu later that night.The party reach the shrine on their third day and the Fitawrary takes the Sacrament and acknowledges Woynitu as his daughter. Later that day they return to stay with the peasant and his wife. The Fitawrary shoots his gun at the door, killing the peasant standing outside. He then falls back and dies.The party wait two days for the police to arrive, but when they fail to show up Goytom leads them back down the mountain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Vogue"title="One Vogue">
The story "One Vogue" is in the form of a terminological definition, with the term itself on the left side and a definition, that is, a verbal expression that reveals the essence of the term being defined, on the right side. The story is structured as an argument about the comparative characteristics of three female visitors to a restaurant in the center of Moscow, who happened to cross paths in the women's restroom room. The unit of measurement of these women, which allows us to evaluate and compare them in relation to each other, is "One Vogue". By "One Vogue" is meant the amount of "futility" allocated to each of the girls. Literally, in Russian the word vanity means the absence of meaning, value in anything, uselessness, vanity, futility. As a physical phenomenon, futility is thought by Pelevin to be measurable, and the author introduces a special quantitative qualifier "vogue". The principle of nomination of this qualifier refers the reader of the story to the process of naming the units of measurement in physics, a significant part of which are named after the scientists-physicists: Ohm - (Georges Ohm), Ampere - (Andre Amper), Newton - (Isaac Newton), Hertz - (Henry Hertz), Volt - (Alessandro Volta), etc. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_Lost"title="Half Lost">
Marcus, The Alliance's greatest weapon is dead. Nathan is once again on the run. And he is out for revenge. Forced to consume his father's heart he must now learn to master his many new gifts that might be the now decimated Alliance's only hope for survival. Nathan's only chance of defeating Wallet and Soul and their army of Hunters is to find the reclusive black witch Ledger and convince them to give him the second half of Gabriel's amulet so that he might become invincible.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurok_of_the_Stone_Age"title="Hurok of the Stone Age">
Zanthodon is envisioned as an immense circular cavern five hundred miles wide, one hundred miles beneath the Sahara Desert, a refugium preserving various prehistoric faunas and antique human cultures that have found their way into it throughout the ages.The story follows the adventures of several of the series's protagonists, who were split up at the end of the previous book. Eric Carstairs and Professor Potter, the explorers from the surface world, have been taken captive by the Tyrannosaurus-worshipping Minoans of the Scarlet City of Zaar on the Lugar-Jad, a mountain-girded inland sea. Carstairs's Neanderthal comrade Hurok and the native warrior Garth of Sothar search for them and the latter's daughter Yualla. Meanwhile, Tharn seeks heroine Darya after both were carried off by thakdols. Much of the action takes place in Zaar, whose seductive empress Zarys displaces an unhealthy interested in Eric. In the end all, thanks to Hurok, are rescued aside from Darya, last seen imprisoned on a ship bound for the Barbary Pirate haven of El Cazar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_Onset"title="Adult Onset">
The story opens on a Monday in early April with 48-year-old successful young adult novelist Mary Rose MacKinnon having received an email from her father, who had only the day before had an email service installed on his computer. The subject line is "some things really do get better …" which catches MR's attention amid the many unopened messages in her inbox. The content of the note was a compliment from her father regarding Mary Rose and her wife Hilary's video contribution to the It Gets Better Project, in support of LGBTQ youth. In the present, MR's parents are supportive of her lesbianism but that was not always the case. When Mary Rose came out to her mother decades earlier, Dolly's response was that she wished Mary Rose had cancer instead. Mary Rose struggles to find the right words to answer her father's email, while also attending to her daily challenges as the temporarily single mother of a five-year-old son and a feisty two-year-old daughter.Outwardly, MR appears to have a normal, urban lifestyle as a modern lesbian mother. But lurking underneath is a rage that begins to surface as MR experiences the recurrence of a chronic arm pain that began when she was a child. The adult Mary Rose is not sure whether her pain is real or remembered, and she wonders why her parents did not take her unicameral bone cysts more seriously during her youth. Through a series of flashbacks and a stream-of-consciousness narrative style, mixed with dry humour and witty sarcasm, MR tries to piece together her fractured childhood memories as the third surviving child of Duncan and Dolly MacKinnon. MR's birth was sandwiched between the stillbirth of "The Other Mary Rose" and followed by the death in infancy of "Alexander-Who-Died". MR's childhood was spent with a mother who suffered from severe post-partum depression. MR has recurring memories of being dangled over the balcony of the family's apartment in Germany by her older sister Maureen, which Maureen denies vigorously. As she confronts her blurred memories and the unresolved traumas of her childhood over the course of the week, combined with the frustrations of child rearing, MR edges closer to the brink of causing harm to her own children. By the Sunday of that week, Mary Rose is finally able to answer her father's email.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unspeakable_Skipton"title="The Unspeakable Skipton">
Daniel Skipton is a paranoid novelist living in Bruges who attempts to supplement his measley income by preying on gullible English tourists, taking them to comically bad sex shows, giving them directions to brothels, and trying to sell them dubious Flemish paintings. Meanwhile, Skipton works obsessively on the manuscript for a new novel, which he has completed a year ago but continues to tinker with using different coloured pens to mark grammatical errors, stylistic changes and marginal comments. He tells himself that "it was not only a great book, it was the greatest novel in the English language, it would make his reputation all over the world and keep him in comfort, more than comfort, for the rest of his life."Skipton ingratiates himself with a group of British tourists: Cosmo Hines, a London bookseller mostly concerned with visiting a brothel, his wife Dorothy Merlin, a pretentious writer of bad plays, Duncan Moss, a friendly drunk, and Matthew Pryar, a well dressed gentleman with upper class connections. Skipton attempts to con the group into paying for his meals while regaling them with his love of Bruges, a love which Hansford Johnson shared.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum_and_the_Shiver"title="The Hum and the Shiver">
US Army Private Bronwyn Hyatt returns home after being wounded during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. She is Tufa and lives in a remote Appalachian valley in East Tennessee with her extended family. Dark-haired, dark-skinned and enigmatic, the Tufa are said to be descendants of Irish fairies and have lived in the area long before the first European settlers arrived. Music is an essential part of Tufa culture and songs are passed down from mother to daughter. Music empowers the Tufa with magical abilities, including healing, flying and the ability to communicate with haints.Bronwyn quickly recovers from her injuries, but has disturbing visits by a haint. She also discovers that her mother, Chloe is plagued by death omens. Dwayne Gitterman, Bronwyn's former abusive boyfriend, begins stalking and harassing her again. Bronwyn joined the army to escape Dwayne. The Tufa have split into two factions, Bronwyn's group, led by Mandalay Harris of the First Daughters, and Dwayne's group led by Rockhouse Hicks. The First Daughters have preserved Tufa culture and can practise magic, while Hicks' group have forsaken their roots and lost their magical abilities.The Tufa's contact with the outside world has increased over the years, and intermarrying has taken place. Don Swayback's great-grandmother was Tufa, and he has some Tufa blood in him. He is a reporter and is tasked with interviewing Bronwyn, but when he makes contact with the Tufa, he discovers that he more Tufa than he realized. Craig Chess is a Methodist preacher. He has no Tufa blood, but becomes fascinated with the mysterious community and forms a relationship with Bronwyn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scourge_of_the_Swastika"title="The Scourge of the Swastika">
The book provides a brief history of the Nazi war crimes and features graphic photographic evidence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darya_of_the_Bronze_Age"title="Darya of the Bronze Age">
Zanthodon is envisioned as an immense circular cavern five hundred miles wide, one hundred miles beneath the Sahara Desert, a refugium preserving various prehistoric faunas and antique human cultures that have found their way into it throughout the ages.The story's events occur at the same time as those of the previous book, but follows the adventures of series heroine Darya, who has been separated from the other main characters. Having been kidnapped again by the corsair Kairadine, Prince of El-Cazar, a fortified island on the Northern Seas. Darya is ultimately saved when her father King Garth of Sothar leads their people in an invasion of El Cazar. Returning to the mainland of Zanthodon, they link up with King Tharn's Thandarians in the wake of their defeat of the combined forces of the corsairs and the Minoans of Zaar. Darya and her lover, explorer Eric Carstairs, are reunited, while the disarmed pirates and Zaarians are dispatched back to their own realms. Kairadine, true to character, abducts the Zaarian empress Zarys on the way.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_of_Zanthodon"title="Eric of Zanthodon">
Zanthodon is envisioned as an immense circular cavern five hundred miles wide, one hundred miles beneath the Sahara Desert, a refugium preserving various prehistoric faunas and antique human cultures that have found their way into it throughout the ages.The story follows the improving fortunes of surface world explorer Eric Carstairs and his Zanthonian love interest Darya. It ends with them leaders of their own tribe, augmented by such other exiles from the surface as Niema and Zuma of the African Aziru tribe and World War II survivors Von Kohler, Bog and Schmidt, and heirs apparent to the leadership of Thandar and Sothar. They are now married and blessed with a young son, Gar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Not_to_Be_a_Boy"title="How Not to Be a Boy">
Webb had two older brothers, and a third older brother who died in infancy. Webb describes himself as nerdy, with interests including comedy and "Star Wars". He analyses gender conditioning in the playground among young children, as well as homophobia among boys. His father was a woodcutter who drank heavily and often acted with anger towards his children and wife. Webb's parents separated and he lived with his mother, who remarried and had a daughter.Webb's mother died of breast cancer when he was aged 17. The last thing he spoke to her about was his concerns over still being a virgin. The afternoon after her funeral, he attended a university fair. He moved to live with his father and prepared to sit his A-levels a second time. Two months after her death, the night before an exam, he considered overdosing on painkillers. Following his exams, he attended Robinson College, Cambridge. He became vice-president of the Footlights, a student comedy group, where he met his comedy duo partner David Mitchell. At university, Webb says that he became self-centered. He also attended therapy during this period, three years subsequent to his mother's death. In his love life, he experienced sexual attraction to both men and women.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Is_a_Very_Small_Place"title="Hell Is a Very Small Place">
There is a preface by Shourd and an introduction by Casella and Ridgeway. The first section, "Voices from Solitary Confinement", contains 16 essays by people who have experienced the practice under the categories "Enduring", "Resisting" and "Surviving". William Blake has spent 29 years in solitary and has never seen a cell phone or used the internet. A 1,400-page handwritten book he was working on was destroyed by guards. Judith Vazquez describes the process of creating a small hole in the rubber in front of her cell's window, by regularly scratching at it until she bled for half a year, in order to inhale the outside air. Uzair Paracha was only permitted newspapers that were over a month old, and no radio or television access.Barbra Perez is a transgender woman who had been living as a woman for 15 years when she was sent to a male prison and placed in solitary confinement, supposedly for her own protection. She says that she was detained to fill a contractual quota of inmates ICE had with the prison. Galen Baughman said that he had "perhaps the most valuable" subscription to "The New York Times" "in the world", for the meaning it had to him and the people he would pass it along to. Five Mualimm-ak was released from prison with no notice after the conclusion of a court case, and sent to the hospital by police who found him in a vulnerable state at the bus station. Due to his hospitalization, he did not register for parole within a day, so was sent back to prison.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Quick_&amp;_Easy_Guide_to_Sex_&amp;_Disability"title="A Quick &amp; Easy Guide to Sex &amp; Disability">
The comic book is about "sex, gender identity and communication in a way that's practical and honest, illustrated by bodies of all shapes, sizes, colors and abilities." Narrated by A. Andrews, "A Quick &amp; Easy Guide to Sex &amp; Disability" is written for disabled audiences. It shares information on the basics of disability, how to communicate with sexual partners, and practical tips on how to have enjoyable sex that accommodates for different disabilities and bodies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_and_the_Dragonflies"title="King and the Dragonflies">
Kingston "King" James' brother, Khalid, has recently died, but King is convinced he has returned to him as a dragonfly. While mourning his loss, King has also broken things off with his best friend, Sandy Sanders, after Khalid (before he died) heard a rumor that Sandy was gay and didn't want King to be pegged as the same. However, Sandy disappears, but King finds him, and agrees to help him escape life with his abusive father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisp_of_a_Thing"title="Wisp of a Thing">
Musician Rob Quillen is devastated at the loss of his girlfriend in a plane crash. A stranger suggests that he visit Cloud County where he will find a song to ease his pain. There Rob finds the mysterious Tufa and their extraordinary music. He soon becomes embroiled in Tufa feuds and discovers that, even though he has no Tufa blood, he has inherited some of their magical abilities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tender_Is_the_Flesh"title="Tender Is the Flesh">
The novel opens by describing the process of slaughtering humans, who are then referred to as "head". The world has fallen into chaos after the "Transition", the term describing an event where a virus that infected animals was found to be deadly to humans, resulting in the mass slaughter and burning of animals, with the world's population forced either to go vegan, or eat each other. Soon cannibalism was institutionalized, industrialized and normalized, with humans bred for consumption known as "special meat". Scavengers, who cannot afford the special meat, consume any dead body available.Marcos works at one of these slaughterhouses in order to support his ailing father, who suffers from dementia. He describes his internal conflict with his job and the state of the world. Marcos' job involves being a middle man, the one who purchases the "head" and then sells the products. The owner of a breeding center explains the entire process of raising the "head". He notes things like First Generation Pure (FGP's), describing "head" born in the breeding center. The breeding center delivers Marcos a female FGP as a gift.More of Marcos' personal life is revealed as he talks to his wife Cecilia on the phone. The couple tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to have a family. They had a son, Leo, who died while still a baby. After his son's death he and his wife separated. It is made clear that he is having an affair with a butcher in town. After their encounter, Marcos' sister Marisa and her family are introduced. She contributes nothing to their father's care. Marcos travels back home and in his interactions with the female FGP, he seems to see her as less of a product. He eventually appears to develop feelings for the FGP and begins having sex with her, which is regarded as one of the worst transgressions in society.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Factory_(novel)"title="The Factory (novel)">
"The Factory" follows three new employees as they begin their new lives. The timeline, somewhat indefinite, appears to take place over a fifteen year span. The story begins with Yoshiko Ushiyama being interviewed by Goto for a job at the factory. She graduated school with a liberal arts degree and a special interest in research on Japanese communication. She feels undeserving of working in such an important place as the factory. She recalls the impression the astounding factory had on her when she visited as a child. It seemed all powerful and like the perfect place to work. At the end of her interview, she is offered a contract position in the Print Services division. She spends full workdays shredding papers. Occasionally, she eats lunch with her work friends or her brother and his girlfriend. Yoshiko's portion of the story ends when she slowly slips into insanity, questioning her entire life's purpose before becoming a part of the factory herself.The second perspective is that of Yoshio Furufue. Before he is recruited by the factory to work as a moss specialist, he was a university student. When he attends what he believes to be an interview for the job with Goto, he is told that his university has already coordinated his job and that the purpose of meeting is to start planning. He is given complete control over his project (green-roofing) with no deadlines. He learns that his "department" is just him. Furufue is then told that he will be required to work from a two story home on the premises, where one story will serve as his lab space. This comes as a surprise to Furufue, who was not told he would be forced to move and live at the factory. To start his work, the factory creates a "moss hunt" that children and parents can sign up for and participate in. After the moss hunt, Hikaru Samukawa and his grandfather approach Furufue at home to present the research they had conducted on the animals that live in the factory. While Furufue is out on a walk studying the mysterious shags, he almost accidentally photographs Yoshiko Ushiyama. Furufue apologizes for the misunderstanding, invites her to lunch, and as they eat together, they briefly compare experiences at the factory. Furufue comes to the realization that he has had no lasting impact on the factory and that his job has been completed without him. His last scene hints at his growing resemblance to the focus of his research. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hole_(novel)"title="The Hole (novel)">
The novel begins with a phone call between Asahi's husband, Muneaki, and his mother, Tomiko. When Muneaki brings up his job transfer, Tomiko offers to let the couple live in the house adjacent to hers, rent free. After a brief discussion, they both agree that the offer is too good to pass up. A quick flashback recounts a dialogue between Asahi and one of her coworkers from the temporary job she quit due to her husband's transfer in which they discuss how little respect they receive as temporary employees. On the day of the move, Asahi notes that even though her new town is not that far away from her old one, it feels like an entirely different continent. Asahi's new life as a housewife is marked with boredom and a lack of mobility. Her husband requires the car for his work commute, and there is not much within walking distance besides the local supermarket. She comments on how time has lost its meaning for her. She opens the windows of her home and is overwhelmed by the sound of the cicadas. One afternoon, Asahi gets a call from her mother-in-law Tomiko asking her to deposit money at a nearby 7-Eleven. On her walk to the 7-Eleven, Asahi sees a large black animal which she follows off the path towards a river. Distracted by the sounds of shouting children, she falls in a hole which she is surprised to realize is exactly her size. Sera, Asahi's neighbor whom she had not met before this point, helps Asahi out of the hole and kills a bug that had latched onto Asahi's hand. When Asahi tries to introduce herself, Sera cuts her off, referring to Asahi as "the bride." They parts ways, and when Asahi finally reaches the 7-Eleven, she turns in the money and deposit slip only to realize Tomiko did not put enough money in the envelope, forcing Asahi to take out money at an ATM which is blocked by children. Later that day, Tomiko comes over to repay Asahi for the money she had to take out, but only gives her a fraction of the amount along with some popsicles. Later, when Asahi tries to talk to Muneaki about her encounter with the strange animal, he brushes her off.  
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baikuntha_Express"title="Baikuntha Express">
The play portrays a story of a travel in a mini bus. The bus has a driver, a helper and 17 passengers, and it is going to "Baikuntha" (the paradise). During the play, the bus keeps on moving and various events occurs inside as the bus pass though various imaginary places.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_(Malte_novel)"title="The Boy (Malte novel)">
The novel opens in 1908, with the mute boy, who will remain unnamed by the third-party narrator, taking his dying mother to her final resting place by a lake. After his mother dies, the boy leaves their camp in Eastern Europe. He reaches a hamlet where he is discovered by the villagers. As the villagers debate what to do, the leader of the hamlet, Joseph, along with his son, Louis-Paul (Kazoo), decide that the boy can live in the barns and work in the hamlet. The boy becomes sick, and is nursed back to health by Joseph and Louis-Paul, using the Zapotec healing rituals of Joseph’s deceased wife. They allow him to be part of their family. An earthquake kills the hamlet’s baby. One of the citizens, Eugéne, blames the boy for the death. The boy becomes scared and runs away. While living in the woods, the boy meets a circus strongman and fighter named Ernest Bieule. Ernest’s stage name is Brabek: the Ogre of the Carpatian Mountains. He invites the boy to be his assistant. They travel in a caravan to numerous cities in France, including: Veynes, Eyguians, and Orpierre. Brabek loses a fight for the first time and hangs himself soon after. The boy runs away from the body, taking the horse and caravan. The boy’s caravan crashes into a car outside of Tousses le Noble commune. The car’s driver, Emma Van Ecke, along with her father, Gustave Van Ecke, an apple pomologist and oboe player, live in the commune. With the help of the family doctor, Amédée Theoux, they heal the boy. Emma adopts him as a brother and names him "Félix". 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackout_(young_adult_novel)"title="Blackout (young adult novel)">
"Blackout" follows thirteen teenagers in six interlinked stories which celebrate Black love. After a summer heatwave causes a citywide power outage in New York City, Black teens explore love, friendships, and hidden truths over the course of a single day. Among the characters are exes who have to bury their rivalry to walk from Manhattan to Brooklyn for a block party, two boys who get trapped on the subway, and best friends who get stuck in the library.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Jack"title="Wild Jack">
Clive Anderson lives an idyllic life in the city-state of twenty-third century London. He is a child of privilege, the son of a powerful councilman, spoiled with manservants and private boats. His distant cousins the Sherrins are visiting, the golden-haired girl Miranda being of particular interest to Clive—he considers naming his boat after her. Clive is accustomed to luxury; his is a world of pleasure gardens and holiday islands, of nuclear-powered airships and "energy towers" powering the lights of the city. "Old London," along with the rest of the world, was all but destroyed during some cataclysmic event referred to as the "Breakdown," which annihilated much of the world's population, so much that the current population of London only numbers in the thousands. There are other people outside of the cities, within the "Outlands," but they are known to be savages and barbarians who hurl rocks at cars passing through the wilderness. Clive does not think about such things much, however.While attending a party along the river, Clive overhears a schoolmate, Brian, questioning the role of their society's servants, asking "What right do we have to make them serve us?" It's explained that they are the descendants of people who became servile in exchange for entry into the paradisal cities and escape from the Outlands. Clive agrees with the other boys at the party that's it's absurd to question such things. That it is his ancestors who helped to build the world up again after the people of old ruined it. When Brian persists, arguing that London and the other cities of the world could hold ten times as much people as they do, they tell him he ought to go into the Outlands and join "Wild Jack," the infamous "bogeyman who would creep up from the Outlands, steal over the wall by night, and take back naughty children to his lair among the savages." Clive enjoys the rest of the party and doesn't think any more on the topic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Love_Me_(novel)"title="You Love Me (novel)">
Following a major upheaval in his life, Joe Goldberg leaves Los Angeles for new pastures in the Pacific Northwest. When he meets the lovely Mary Kay DiMarco, Joe intensely falls for her. Ready to prove that he is a different man, Joe tries to court her without his usual obsessive acts. After securing a job in a new sleepy town and striving to prove an alternative method of making his next relationship work without meddling, he tries to find his happily ever after. But can Joe really prove that he is capable of change to find himself worthy of true love, or is he set to repeat history, dooming others to an ill-fated end of violence and destruction?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundryside"title="Foundryside">
In the city of Tevanne, where "scriving" — the systematization and mass production of sigils — has enabled the industrialization of magic, Sancia Grado is a thief hired to steal a powerful magical artifact... one which has a mind of its own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Black_Curl"title="Long Black Curl">
Rockabilly singer Byron Harley survives a mountain top plane crash and finds himself stuck in fairy time in Tufa territory. Sixty years go by after he spends only one night in the mountains. Bo-Kate Wisby and Jefferson Powell are young lovers banished from Cloud County by the Tufa for murder; a curse prevents them from returning home and strips them of their magical abilities. All three hate the Tufa for ruining their lives. The curse persists for fifty years, but then starts to weaken and Bo-Kate finds a way to circumvent it and recruits Byron to enact her revenge on the Tufa.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beautiful_Things_(book)"title="Beautiful Things (book)">
In "Beautiful Things", Hunter Biden writes about his family and recounts his history of substance abuse and path to sobriety. He discusses the grief and trauma he experienced following the death of his brother Beau Biden and the 1972 car accident in which he was injured and that killed his mother, Neilia, and his sister, Naomi. He also defends his time on the board of the Ukraine company Burisma.Hunter Biden told CBS that his cocaine addiction reached a zenith in 2015 after the death of his brother Beau.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Man_(Perry_novel)"title="The Old Man (Perry novel)">
Former army intelligence officer Michael Kohler, who now goes by the name Dan Chase, lives in Norwich, Vermont with his two dogs. However, he has been in hiding for most of his adult life after absconding with $20 million during a mission in Libya.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Holly_Claus"title="The Legend of Holly Claus">
The immortals and magical creatures of the Kingdom of Forever celebrate the birth of a baby princess, Holly. But at her christening, the ancient warlock Herrikhan casts a curse that sets her heart in ice and locks the gates of Forever, trapping the immortals inside.Princess Holly grows up confined to her icy chambers to protect her frozen heart. Though tutored by such legends as Shakespeare and Michelangelo, she lives a lonely existence. For solace, she turns to art and learns to fashion beautiful dolls patterned on the mortal children she watches through her magic telescope. The winter she turns seventeen, Holly discovers the Great Book of Forever, a book recording the contributions of all the denizens of Forever to the mortal world. She is distraught to find that her page is blank; she has contributed nothing to the mortal world. When a rare magical rainbow forms over the locked gates of Forever, presenting an opportunity to escape, she harnesses her team of magical reindeer and flies them out of the Land of Forever.She lands in New York at the height of the Gilded Age and finds employment at a toy shop, where she makes magical dolls that reflect children's dreams. Occasionally, she catches glimpses of Christopher Carroll, the enigmatic young owner of the toy shop, and feels curiously drawn to him, but the arrival of the dashing Mr. Hunter Hartman distracts her. He sweeps her away to the opera, where she is introduced to the glittering society of the Empire City.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_(novella)"title="Sinking (novella)">
The protagonist is a melancholic Chinese male student who is in exile in Japan. The hypocrisy and sensitivity in his personality led to his gradual isolation from both the Japanese students and Chinese fellows. Despite his constant longing for interpersonal connection, he decides to live a solitary life in the company of nature to read literature. Chasing a solitary life, he moves to N. City and finds a more remote cottage to settle in.The protagonist’s sexual desire is related to the national shame of Chinese students coming from a backward and weak country. On one hand, he looks forward to taking revenge on the Japanese and holds nostalgia for his homeland. On the other hand, he feels ashamed and uncomfortable when facing Japanese women, such as the two Japanese students, the hotel owner’s daughter, and the Japanese prostitute in the brothel by the sea. His sexual desire and inner conflict between individualism and collectivism lead to his demise. Eventually, driven by sexual impulse and expectation to return to the collective, he visits a brothel and ultimately sinks himself in the sea.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_&amp;_the_Eddies"title="Jenny &amp; the Eddies">
When Jimmy gets sick in the elven kingdom after playing near the forest, the elven children share stories about when they were attacked by the forest monsters. Jenny asks her grandfather about the forest monsters and he says they had always been around, but wonders why 'each monster only visits a child once in a lifetime'. Jenny reads a book left out by her grandpa that tells of a legend about a beast in the forest that can protect elves from the monsters and she goes in search of it. While in the forest, she gets saved from the monsters by a friendly 'dog-like' creature that she takes home and names, Eddie. It becomes known that there are more Eddies in the forest and soon most of the elves in the kingdom have one, and are all well and happy. But later some of the elves begin sharing stories about the Eddies, saying they are causing problems and there is a move to stop giving them to the children. In particular, Jeremy tells lies about the Eddies and even says they make the children whistle - something the kingdom has previously complained about. Jeremy tries to trick the community into believing that if the Eddies are split into three, the forest monsters will be scared of them and the kingdom will be safe. When the children in the kingdom start making beautiful music, the elves realise that they were so infatuated with blaming the Eddies for causing the whistling, that they didn't put their energies into helping the children control it. The whistling was something that the elves would all do together to drown out the whisper monsters and ignore their lies so that eventually, they would go away. When enough elves believe this, happiness returns to the kingdom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fowl_Twins_(novel)"title="The Fowl Twins (novel)">
"Criminal genius runs in the family. Myles and Beckett Fowl are twins but the two boys are wildly different. Beckett is blonde, messy and sulks whenever he has to wear clothes. Myles is impeccably neat, has an IQ of 170, and 3D prints a fresh suit every day - just like his older brother, Artemis Fowl. A week after their eleventh birthday the twins are left in the care of house security system, NANNI, for a single night. In that time, they befriend a troll on the run from a nefarious nobleman and an interrogating nun both of whom need the magical creature for their own gain . . . Prepare for an epic adventure in which The Fowl Twins and their new troll friend escape, get shot at, kidnapped, buried, arrested, threatened, killed (temporarily) . . . and discover that the strongest bond in the world is not the one forged by covalent electrons in adjacent atoms, but the one that exists between a pair of twins."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Big_Teeth"title="What Big Teeth">
Eleanor has spent most of her life at boarding school but has returned home after she was involved with an incident that may be related to a vague memory from her past. While she cannot relate with her strange family, Eleanor also seeks to hold them together as best as possible. This requires her to not only come to terms with and accept her family, but also the secrets hiding within herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_and_Testament_(novel)"title="Will and Testament (novel)">
"Will and Testament" is narrated by Bergljot who recalls the events leading up to and following her father's death through sporadic flashbacks.Bergljot is sexually assaulted and raped by her father, Bjønar, from age five to seven. Her father also physically beats Bergljot's older brother Bård. Bergljot represses these early childhood experiences. As she ages, her guilt-ridden father begins to treat her differently than his other children, and Bergljot's mother, Inga, works hard to cover up her husband's criminal actions. In her twenties, Bergljot confronts her parents about her childhood, but they deny that any abuse had taken place. Bergljot cuts off contact with her parents and the siblings who would not believe her, maintaining contact only with her brother Bård. For about twenty years, the two halves of the family exist separately.Both Bergljot and her mother Inga have affairs with married men. Bergljot's paramour gets a divorce to have a relationship with Bergljot, although that relationship soon crumbles. Inga's paramour passes away which leads Inga to overdose and become hospitalized. Bergljot’s younger sisters, Åsa and Astrid, come to their mother's aid, while Bergljot and Bård attempt to maintain their distance. Bergljot is eventually pulled back into contact with her mother because of her medical emergency. Inga uses this as an opportunity to discuss the family inheritance with Bergljot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seat_on_the_Verandah"title="The Seat on the Verandah">
"The Seat on the Verandah" is a written in a non-linear fashion and takes place in a fictional town called Water Mill (水磨), which lies on the twenty-third parallel. The mention of a river that runs from Water Mill to Vietnam suggests the story takes place in southern China. The story is narrated by an unknown woman who recounts her adventures in Water Mill about 10 years earlier. At that time, the young woman was travelling right after her college graduation and happened to pass by the town of Water Mill in 1982 on a sightseeing trip in the southwest. October 23, 1982. The narrator arrives in Water Mill, and having to stay in town until the temperature gets warmer, she decides to explore the town. Upon finding a mansion, she climbs the stairs until she reaches the third floor, where she meets an elderly woman named Qiye (七叶) or Seven Leaves. The meeting with Qiye marks the second part of the story where the reader learns about the old woman's past. Qiye lived in the Zhang household, where she fulfilled the role of maid for Zhu Liang (朱凉), "the third mistress at the Zhang household". Zhu Liang was often described as an incomparable beauty "her body was supple and curvaceous, and her face radiated beauty". At that time, the wealthy Zhang family with the head of the family Zhang Meng Da, was accused of being anti-revolutionaries during the Chinese Revolution (1925-27). This led to the execution of Zhang Meng Da and the disappearance of Zhu Liang. From Qiye, the narrator learns about how life was during the time of the Chinese revolution at the mansion. At one point during their conversation, Qiye mentions that the narrator shares the same eyes as Zhu Liang, which makes the young woman feel nauseous. Qiye then tells her to lie down, and burns some herbs to ease her discomfort. After realizing that she got sick from the flu, the narrator rents a room in a small hotel while she recovers. During her sickness, the narrator falls into a delirium where she dreams about the mummified body of Zhu Liang in the mansion. Fearing to be struck by "gu" if she stays any longer, she boards a cargo train the next morning and leaves Water Mill. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Blow_Up_a_Pipeline"title="How to Blow Up a Pipeline">
The book is divided into three chapters, titled "Learning from Past Struggles", "Breaking the Spell", and "Fighting Despair". It also includes a preface.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bone_Shard_Daughter"title="The Bone Shard Daughter">
The plot is split among the points of view of the various characters, winding from one to the next, and eventually connecting. The setting is an empire consisting of many floating islands upon the Endless Sea.Lin is the daughter of the tyrannical emperor of the Phoenix Empire, but must compete to become his heir with Bayan, his foster son. The Sulai dynasty rules the empire by wielding bone shard magic, using skull fragments from their citizens to harvest their life force in order to animate constructs that fulfill various roles in running the island empire. Four major constructs that use hundreds of shards are the empire's ministers, while simpler constructs serve as dock clerks or spies. Lin is struggling to recover her memories, lost after contracting a mysterious illness brought to the palace by Bayan. She and Bayan vie to become the more adept bone shard magicians and thereby receive the emperor's favor. Because the bones must belong to a living person in order to work, the emperor gathers what he needs through tithing festivals, where the young members of his empire are trepanned, some dying in the process. Not all bone shard donors will power a construct, but those who do will have their life force drained and die early.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Christmas_Pig"title="The Christmas Pig">
On their way back from buying a replacement tree angel on Christmas Eve, Jack's step sister Holly throws his beloved childhood toy DP (Dur Pig) out of the car window onto the motorway during a row. His grandparents try to recover the toy but to no avail. That night, Grandpa and Holly buy a replacement they named Christmas Pig but Jack threw the replacement aside out of grief for the lost toy. Later that night, Jack sees his toys come to life and Christmas Pig offers to lead Jack to recover DP saying miracles happen on Christmas Eve. Jack shrinks and he and Christmas Pig get lost under the Christmas tree sending them to Mislaid where lost objects are sorted into different towns in the Land of the Lost. Jack slips past the guards while Christmas Pig distracts them convincing the other lost things that he is an action figure called Pyjama Boy. Jack and Christmas Pig are first sent to Disposable, a town for easily replaceable objects. They then hide inside a lunchbox with an inhaler inside who is adjusted to the more upscale town of Bother-It's-Gone on account of the owner's mother being concerned about the inhaler. In Bother-It's-Gone, the law enforcements are alerted to Jack and Christmas Pig's presence, but they find a hiding place where a compass leads them into the Wastes of the Unlamented where the Land's ruler, the Loser who makes people lose things whose enlivened parts (souls) end up in the Land of the Lost, hunts the unlamented but the protagonists get away. Jack and Christmas Pig, who Jack now calls CP, find their way to the City of Missed where they meet lost emotions represented as personifications. They are sent to a palace where they meet a king called Power who tries to turn Jack over to the Loser, who wanted to eat a real person, despite the priciples branding it as murder. Fortunately, Hope manages to help Jack and CP escape and fly them to the Island of the Beloved, where the Loser cannot come nor harm any of the Islands residents who are immortal. There, Jack meets his beloved DP and the original tree angel. After being able to say a proper goodbye to DP, whose physical body was destroyed on the motorway, and being assured he and the angel are happy there, Jack wanted to recover CP, who did not land on the Island with him. Santa Claus, who has a home on the Island, flies Jack to the Wastes of the Unlamented where Compass leads him to the Loser's Lair where CP and the replacement tree angel are caged awaiting the Loser eating their enlivened parts which would make their physical bodies back in the Land of the Living, on the surface, disappear. Jack reaches CP and after a conversation with the Loser, the caged things rise to the surface after being found along with Jack. Back in his living room and returned to his normal size, Jack's family, who noticed his disappearance, are relieved he is safe and Holly promises not to bully him again, believing his story about the Land of the Lost. Going to bed, Jack wished CP goodnight and CP wished him goodnight in return.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurekha!"title="Eurekha!">
"Eurekha!" is out of print. It examines Rekha's acting career in Bollywood beginning at age 13 and her marriage to the industrialist Mukesh Aggarwal. A thirteenth chapter of the book, titled "Temptations and Seductions", is provided on Deep's website. It investigates her alleged, romantic relationship with the actor Amitabh Bachchan, positing that the affair began during the shooting of "Do Anjaane" (1976).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungle_Nama"title="Jungle Nama">
Long ago the Sundarbans were ruled by Dokkhin Rai, a feared spirit who hunted humans. The locals of the Sundarbans prayed for protection and in response two powerful beings, Bon Bibi, and her brother Shah Jongoli, arrived from Arabia. Dokkhin Rai was angered by their arrival and ordered an army of ghosts to destroy them, but Bon Bibi and Shah Jongoli were too strong for the army. Annoyed at his army’s performance, Dokkhin Rai accepted he could fight them on his own and transformed into his tiger manifestation to scare them off. However, Bon Bibi and Shah Jongoli fought Dokkhin Rai with immense power and were able to trap him. They drew a line and confined Dokkhin Rai to the jungles of the south, at the border of the ocean and the land, where no human would go.Much later, Dhona, a rich but greedy merchant, was not content with his wealth so he planned to exploit the southern jungle for honey, wax and wood. His equally wealthy brother Mona urged him against the idea insisting that they already had enough wealth, and that it was not worth facing the tigers of the jungle. Dhona didn’t listen and insisted Mona accompany him. Mona refused to go but decided he would help Dhona by acquiring seven ships and a squad of sailors. Mona prepared everything but was short one sailor. After some thought Dhona realised he could get his poor cousin Dukhey to be his final sailor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Or_Even_Eagle_Flew"title="Or Even Eagle Flew">
Instead of disappearing on her famous 1937 voyage, Amelia Earhart is able to complete it and becomes even more famous and influential in the United States and around the world. The book begins in May 1940, with A.E. (as she is called in the text) making her way to France to join the fight against Nazi Germany during World War II, despite being in violation of U.S. neutrality laws. Eventually, she makes it to the United Kingdom and joins the Eagle Squadrons of the Royal Air Force. The book covers the period from May 1940 through early 1943, including the Battle of Britain, as well as America's entry into the war in December 1941 following the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor. Earhart encounters and befriends other Americans who volunteered to join the Eagle Squadrons and flew with the RAF, including Vernon Keogh, Andrew Mamedoff, and Eugene Tobin. She also encounters a number of key figures in the British government and BAF, most of whom are unenthusiastic about allowing a woman to join combat missions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_School_for_Good_and_Evil_(novel)"title="The School for Good and Evil (novel)">
In the village of Gavaldon, every four years, two children at the age of 12 and older are kidnapped into the surrounding Endless Woods. The kidnapped children are spirited away to the "School for Good and Evil," where they train to become fairy tale heroes or villains. While most fear the unknown force, pink-loving, beautiful Sophie dreams of being kidnapped to become a princess. Meanwhile, her best friend, Agatha, sulky and ugly, is deemed the perfect candidate for the School for Evil. When the day of the kidnapping arrives, Sophie and Agatha are both kidnapped.To Sophie and Agatha's horror, both of them are sent to the "wrong" schools: Sophie is a "Never", a student in the School for Evil, and Agatha an "Ever", a student in the School for Good. Sophie unsuccessfully attempts to switch schools with Agatha, while Agatha wants the two to go home. This proves difficult, as Sophie is determined she is Good and is smitten with Tedros, son of King Arthur, who also notices her.Being forced to attend classes, Agatha flunks most of them, but discovers she can hear and grant wishes. After going to the School Master's tower with a stymph (a skeletal bird), Sophie and Agatha are trapped in a fairy tale. The School Master gives them a riddle to prove they were in the wrong places. After disrupting a school assembly, Agatha is confined to her room, and Sophie is sent to Doom Room, where the Beast chops off her hair. In rage, Sophie drowns the Beast as revenge. The girls eventually find the answer to the riddle is True Love's Kiss. To help Sophie get Tedros' kiss, Agatha, disguised as a cockroach, accompanies and helps with Sophie's classes. With Agatha's help, Sophie starts ranking well in her classes, becoming the best Never student.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ride_the_Pink_Horse_(novel)"title="Ride the Pink Horse (novel)">
The story illustrated the efforts of Sailor confronting Douglass, a wealthy ex-senator, about the murder of the senator's wife. Sailor, growing up under Douglass’ wing, became a henchman of sorts, who often carried out Douglass’ dirty work. Sailor knew that it was the senator that ordered for his wife's murder, and since the death of the senator's wife, Douglass continuously paid off Sailor in order to keep him quiet, but now, Sailor is back for more money. Douglass, who after retiring from the senate, is vacationing in Santa Fe, New Mexico, so Sailor decides to confront him there. Upon his arrival, he finds that there is a fiesta in town and with all the commotion, Sailor does not have a place to stay overnight. He is also greeted by the head of the homicide bureau in Chicago, McIntyre, who knows a lot about Douglass and his dirty past. Along his adventure, Sailor befriends a few locals, a man named Pancho and a young 14-year-old girl, who help him through his journey.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_Shout"title="Ring Shout">
Set in an alternate historical world of Macon, Georgia in 1922, the story is told from the perspective of Maryse Boudreaux. At this time, Prohibition is occurring and the town of Macon is known for having Ku Klux Klan marches with many white men, women, and children.Before the beginning of the story, the Second Klan came to be on November 25, 1915, on the day the trio refers to as "D-Day" or "Devil's Night", when an old witch summoned the "Ku Kluxes" at the Stone Mountain in Atlanta. Despite the efforts of formerly enslaved persons such as Robert Smalls to disband the first Klan, they were not able to wipe out the monsters that feed off the hatred and killing of innocent African-Americans in the United States. Due to the release of "The Birth of a Nation", a product of dark magic, many white people were swayed into believing the narrative of the Ku Klux Klan as saviors and African-Americans as evil.Maryse and her companions, Sadie and Cordy, are a trio of hunters fighting against the demonic forces of the Ku Klux Klan and are gifted with "the sight" to witness the true forms of the hellish "Ku Kluxes". When the girls aren't hunting monsters, they operate the business of spreading "Mama's Water", provided by their leader, throughout Georgia to ward off the supernatural and human evils of the Klan and white people. Despite their unique skills fighting against the Ku Kluxes and the wisdom provided by their Gullah leader, Nana Jean, the Klan continues to threaten the lives of many with violence and dark magic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Hunt_the_Flame"title="We Hunt the Flame">
Inspired by ancient Arabia, "We Hunt the Flame" tells the story of Zafira, a legendary hunter who disguises herself as a man in order to travel into a dangerous forest to feed her people. The story also follows Nasir, the crown prince who acts as an assassin and is kept on a tight leash by his father. Both are sent on a mission to retrieve an ancient artifact, but while Zafira is retrieving it to restore magic to her people, Nasir is sent by his father to retrieve the object and kill the legendary hunter who is there to retrieve it. As their journey unfolds, an ancient evil emerges and the artifact they seek may pose a greater threat than they realize.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_War_of_One's_Own"title="A War of One's Own">
In "A War of One's Own", the reader is narrated the coming-of-age of the main character Lin Duomi. Considering the early death of her father and the busy work life of her mother, Duomi is isolated from her parents from a young age. The remarriage of her mother doesn't affect her emotionally either.Duomi's early sexual awakening makes her realize the fascination and attraction she finds in both her own body and those of her own sex. The heavily mixed emotions she feels about her sexuality persist into adulthood.At age nineteen, Duomi begins her career as a writer and leaves her hometown to pursue work at a film production unit. She takes a college entrance exam and succeeds in going to a prestigious university. After her studies, she eventually decides to go back to working in the film production unit.At age twenty-four, Duomi falls in love for the first time. At thirty years old, Duomi moves to Beijing and meets her second lover, but eventually settled for a loveless marriage with an older man. In the novel's final scene, a now-grown Duomi masturbates by herself while gazing into a mirror, directly paralleling the first scene of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Galaxy,_and_the_Ground_Within"title="The Galaxy, and the Ground Within">
The novel takes place at the Five-Hop One-Stop, a refueling and licensing station located on the planet Gora, which had no life on it before it was settled by the various alien races who set up shop there. Gora was settled only because of its close proximity to a transit hub where several tunnels meet. A technical failure causes nearly all of the satellites in orbit around Gora to crash and all traffic is halted for several days. The five protagonists are trapped together in the Five-Hop One-Stop for several days and end up confronting their similarities, differences, prejudices and personal challenges.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapel_of_Ease_(novel)"title="Chapel of Ease (novel)">
Matt Johansson is a gay New York City actor who lands a part in "Chapel of Ease", a musical written by playwright Ray Parrish. But Ray dies on the play's opening night, and Matt, who had befriended Ray, decides to visit the chapel on which the play is based in the dramatist's hometown in Cloud County. There Matt encounters the mysterious Tufa and becomes embroiled in Ray's Tufa heritage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_the_Last_Trump_Shall_Sound"title="And the Last Trump Shall Sound">
During his presidency, Donald Trump would be reelected in the 2020 presidential election, but would die during a second coronavirus outbreak in 2024. As a result of his death, Vice President Mike Pence would succeed him and would oversee the actions of the United States being transformed into a right-wing, Christian fundamentalist, authoritarian state and would eventually lead to the West Coast states of California, Oregon and Washington seceding from the US and forming their own nation called Pacifica.Pence would be elected to a full term in 2024 and reelected in 2028 with Lindsey Graham as his vice president. During his presidency. Roe v. Wade would be overturned in 2026 with abortions being criminalized and thousands of women dying as a result of illegal procedures, concentration camps were established near the US-Mexican border to imprison migrants, illegal immigrants and political opponents, non-Christians including Jews, Muslims and Sikhs fall victim to fatal religious and racist attacks, and LGBTQ+ peoples are persecuted and eventually classified as sex offenders. The United States Congress becomes a Republican-dominated rubber stamp, state autonomy in Democratic states become undermined with state governments being removed and replaced for non-compliance, Christian fundamentalism is endorsed by the federal government, and news broadcasters including CNN and MSNBC became right-wing subsidiaries of Fox known as Fox-CNN and Fox-MSNBC, respectively, while The New York Times gets shut down completely as part of restrictions on freedom of the press.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazaqat"title="Nazaqat">
The story of Nazaqat is about a girl Naazani, who gets into sex work and takes the name Nazaqat. She eventually fought to legalize prostitution in India.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Apothecary"title="The Lost Apothecary">
Hidden in the depths of eighteenth-century London, a secret apothecary shop caters to an unusual kind of clientele. Women across the city whisper of a mysterious figure named Nella who sells well-disguised poisons to use against the oppressive men in their lives. But the apothecary’s fate is jeopardized when her newest patron, a precocious twelve-year-old, makes a fatal mistake, sparking a string of consequences that echo through the centuries.Meanwhile in present-day London, aspiring historian Caroline Parcewell spends her tenth wedding anniversary alone, running from her own demons. When she stumbles upon a clue to the unsolved apothecary murders that haunted London two hundred years ago, her life collides with the apothecary’s in a stunning twist of fate—and not everyone will survive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Crazy_Horse"title="Killing Crazy Horse">
"Killing Crazy Horse" focuses on the American frontier during the 1800s and the clashes between settlers and Native Americans. O'Reilly and Dugard tell the story of American expansion out West through Native American warriors such as Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph, Cochise, Black Hawk and Red Cloud; U.S. Presidents Andrew Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant; and General George Armstrong Custer leading up to his encounter with Crazy Horse at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bench_(book)"title="The Bench (book)">
The book is about the relationship between a father and his son told from the perspective of the mother. Random House Children's Books said in a press release that the book "touchingly captures the evolving and expanding relationship between fathers and sons and reminds us of the many ways that love can take shape and be expressed in a modern family". Meghan described Robinson's "beautiful and ethereal" illustrations as capturing "the warmth, joy, and comfort of the relationship between fathers and sons from all walks of life" and that she and Robinson "worked closely to depict this special bond through an inclusive lens".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_of_Leather,_Slippers_of_Gold"title="Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold">
Davis and Kennedy argue that for the working-class women of Buffalo in mid-century America, the frequent adoption of a butch-femme framework for relationships was not a conservative replication of heterosexuality, but instead was born of resistance to a homophobic environment in which women who went out alone or only in the company of other women were at significant physical risk. Butch lesbians Davis and Kennedy studied physically fought back, developing an identity in the course of their defense of their community and their right to occupy public space.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Violence_(novel)"title="History of Violence (novel)">
Told in first-person narration, the novel presents its events in a nonlinear format. The narrator, Édouard, recounts a sexual encounter in Paris on Christmas Eve. The encounter culminates in a violent rape and robbery. Édouard subsequently reports the crime to the police, which causes him more trauma. On a visit home, he overhears his sister and her husband discussing the details of the assault in detail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_to_Mother"title="Mother to Mother">
Chapter 1 starts off with Mandisa Ntloko addressing the (unnamed) mother of a murdered (unnamed) young woman. Mandisa's son Mxolisi has been involved in the killing, over which she expresses her condolences. By telling the story of Mandisa's own upbringing and the childhood and youth of Mxolisi, she would like to cast light on their troubled circumstances, deeply interrelated with apartheid, racial segregation, police violence and brutality, injustice, institutionalised poverty and marginalisation. She says about the young killers' that their world and "environment failed to nurture them in the higher ideals of humanity and [that these young men] instead, became "lost creatures of malice and destruction."" Even "parents teach their children to hate all whites.""Mandisa" depicts her living situation in Guguletu. She is living with her three children (her sons "Mxolisi", 20 and "Lunga", 14, and her daughter "Siziwe") in a hut. Mandisa works as a maid in a white household for Mrs. Nelson. The differences between the two women's wealthy fortune are quite apart from each other. When Mandisa returns home, she hears about violence in her township, which is common, "only" one person has died apparently. When she finds her oldest son not at home, Mandisa is worried in fear of him being one of the killers. Later, the police brutally raid her home, beating up her children. In between the chapters, flashbacks take the reader back to Mandisa's childhood. Living quite happily with her father ("Tata") and her mother ("Mama") and her grandparents around ("Tata's father" and "Makhulu", "Tata's mother"). In 1968 she is forced out of her hometown, following chaotic and troubled circumstances. Mandisa's brother Khaya eventually marries Mandisa's school friend "Nono" and they have a child. In fear of Mandisa becoming pregnant as well, she is being sent to live with her grandmother "Makhulu" away. Her boyfriend "China", though, is getting her pregnant by accident in her teenage years, despite not sleeping together. Being a virgin is quite important to her mother, embarrasingly examining her hymen. After Mxolisi's birth, China is trying to provide for the family and they marry on "Father Mark Savage's" urging, but China leaves her eventually after she has been living with his family, her in-laws, though merely working as a housemaid for them. She leaves as well and, with her next partner "Lungile", has her son Lunga, and, later, her daughter Siziwe with "Dwadwa", her second husband.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_and_the_Vagabond"title="Rasmus and the Vagabond">
Rasmus is living in an orphanage. He wants to be adopted and find a family. However, he realizes that only girls seem to get adopted. So he tries to take matter in his own hands. He decides to leave the orphanage and find a family himself. On his way he meets the homeless man Oscar. Oscar and Rasmus travel together to the country and collect money by playing music. One day a robbery takes place at a house Oscar and Rasmus are playing music. The police later believes Oscar is responsible for the robbery. However, with the help of Oscar and Rasmus the police finally manages to catch the real robbers. Then Oscar reveals that he has a home. He takes Rasmus to his home, where Oscars wife is already waiting for Oscar. The couple decides to adopt Rasmus as their child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quests_for_Glory"title="Quests for Glory">
In their fourth years, the students of the School for Good and Evil are sent on Quests for Glory, which they must complete to graduate. Tedros and Agatha quests are to bring Camelot back to its former glory as king and queen while Sophie becomes Dean of the School for Evil, seeking to mould evil in her own image. Tedros is unable to become king as he cannot pull Excalibur from a stone. Suddenly, Sophie and the coven, Hester, Anadil, and Dot, seem to be failing though they are seemingly not shortly after Chaddick's, Tedros' first knight, death. Dean of the School for Good Professor Dovey gives them a new quest to stop the attacks on the Endless Woods. The group decide to set off with Hort and Agatha who arrives shortly after. Suddenly, the Storian begins writing a new story, highlighting the importance of somebody named Nicola.During their journey, Agatha tells the story of the Lion and the Snake where a lion and a snake fought for the throne of Camelot. Eventually, they brought an eagle to decide who chooses the snake since he promised the eagle freedom. However, the eagle is attacked by the snake and is saves by the lion though the snake warns the lion he will return. The group is captured at Jaunt Jolie where Sophie and Agatha are taken to a "snake" covered in knife-like "eels". He reveals his own pen which tells stories from villains' perspectives. The girls later find their friends and leaders at Four Point. They are saved by a mysterious "lion" who kisses Sophie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Girl_Support_Group"title="The Final Girl Support Group">
Lynette Tarkington is one of several women who make up the "Final Girl Support Group", a group of women who survived horrific massacres. Adrienne was a camp counselor who survived a killer who claimed that he was seeking revenge for a nonexistent son. Marilyn was attacked by bloodthirsty cannibals. Dani's brother Nick escaped from a mental asylum and on Halloween, slaughtered anyone who stood between him and his sister. Julia was left a final girl after her boyfriend and one of his friends decided to turn her into a final girl, and Heather had to face a "Dream Killer". Lynette herself had to deal with a situation dubbed the "Silent Night Slayings" by the media. Their experiences left a lasting impact on their lives that has endured into their later adulthood. Lynette is barely hanging on, as she spends her time outside of group sequestered in her apartment. The others are seemingly not much better in their lives, as the infamy and subsequent movie series about their experiences have made moving on difficult. The support group is one of the only things in her life that makes Lynette able to leave the safety of her apartment. When Adrienne is found murdered in her home Lynette is certain that someone is out to finish the work that their respective killers failed at: to kill all of the final girls once and for all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Step_by_Step_Up_to_Union_With_God"title="Step by Step Up to Union With God">
The book "Step by Step Up to Union With God: Life, Thought and Spiritual Journey of Jalal-al-din Rumi" tells the story of the "Rumi 's" life from his birth to the end of his life.It starts from "Rumi 's" childhood, and gradually reviews his whole life, mystical conduct and spiritual ascension. The book is mostly written as a story; But it is a documentary story whose subject matter is not one of the conventional categories of the story. The book covers the poet's childhood and his travels with his father from Khorasan and Baghdad to Anatolia, where he remained in Konya for the rest of his life. Everywhere in the book, there is talk of "Rumi 's" love for God and his efforts to reach the god and the beloved, and only a few parts of the book deal with his daily activities, mostly including mystical aspects of "Rumi 's" life. The author has tried to present a simple book to readers without cumbersome contents.The text of the book depicts the revelations of "Rumi 's" childhood years, his asceticism and austerity, the illusions of his school years and then the interruption of them in the sequence of years, the levels of a spiritual conduct that is the result of his life and the basis of his book "Masnavi".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinskaja_Šliachta"title="Pinskaja Šliachta">
In the sticks of Pinsk district in the second half of the 19th century, life is always the same for local gentry men. They run their simple households, publicly display their pride, and fight with anyone who dares to think or say they are “peasants”. But everything changes when Kručkoŭ, a Russian imperial official comes to resolve a conflict between two noblemen, Cichan Pratasavicki and Ivan Ciuchaj-Lipski.After Kručkoŭ's arrival, the action becomes a whirlwind sucking in all other characters. While the dumbfounded gentry is watching the imperial official settling their dispute and at the same time fleecing them of all their money, packages of loot are carried away in a squeaky cart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_the_Winter"title="After the Winter">
Claudio has a comfortable life in the apartment that he bought after years of working in a publishing house and in which he does not allow any other human being to enter. His life is based on well-defined routines that allow him to make the most of his time to work, go to the gym and engage in intellectual activities that help him feel superior to the people around him. Before living in New York City he lived in Cuba, where he had had a childhood full of hardship, although he always leaned towards letters. Some time ago he had started a relationship with Ruth, an older millionaire woman who disliked him for considering her quiet and uncomplicated. Cecilia, meanwhile, is on a scholarship pursuing postgraduate studies for a Master's degree in Paris. Since she was little she had been a lonely girl with unusual hobbies, like walking through cemeteries. She currently lives in an apartment opposite the Père Lachaise Cemetery.One day, Cecilia's neighbor, Tom, complains about the noise of her radio, which gives way to the beginning of a friendship that eventually leads them to fall in love, although they do not become lovers. Cecilia soon learns that Tom has an incurable disease and that he could only have a few years to live. One morning Tom announces that he would make a short trip to Sicily, but months go by without Cecilia hearing from him, leaving her devastated. Claudio travels with Ruth to Paris for a few days and meets Cecilia, whom he becomes obsessed with when he convinces himself that she was the woman destined to make him happy. When he returns to New York he constantly writes passionate letters, although he maintains his relationship with Ruth due to the inconvenience that revealing the truth would cause.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gather_Her_Round"title="Gather Her Round">
At a storytelling festival, Janet tells a story of Kera Rogers, a Tufa youngster who is killed in the woods by a huge wild boar. Members of the Tufa community, including Duncan Gowen, Kera's boyfriend, and Duncan's friend, Adam Procure, search the woods for the beast. Duncan discovers that Adam is also Kera's boyfriend, and finds he not only wants to avenge Kera's death, but also her betrayal. When Adam goes missing, it is unclear whether the boar took him, or Duncan. As the search continues, the beast starts to take on supernatural proportions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hail_Mary"title="Project Hail Mary">
## Narrative structure.The story follows two storylines, each told chronologically. Starting with the story on board the spacecraft "Hail Mary" where Ryland Grace regains his memory in bursts. This story is frequently intercut with flashbacks revealing earlier events leading up to the launch of the "Hail Mary".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Midnight_Library_(novel)"title="The Midnight Library (novel)">
The book's protagonist is a young woman named Nora Seed who is unhappy with her choices in life. During the night, she tries to kill herself but ends up in a library managed by her school librarian, Mrs. Elm. The library is situated between life and death with millions of books filled with stories of her life had she made some different decisions. In this library, she then tries to find the life in which she's the most content. For example, in one possible life she tries to reunite with her boyfriend and finds herself married to him, but it isn't the way as she expected. She also sees herself as a glaciologist doing research in the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic – a very different life from the one she tries to escape, but not necessarily a better choice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Vermilion"title="High Vermilion">
Dutch Surrencey has a problem. An assay report tells him the mine he is leasing contains a pocket of rich silver ore that promises to make him rich. But the lease on the mine runs out in ten days and Dutch has barely enough time to extract the ore. Then the unscrupulous owner of the mine starts to sabotage his efforts. Larkin Moffatt, who conducted the assay, could help as he is also a skilled mining engineer. But he has a hidden past which comes to light when two new arrivals in town reveal his earlier misdeed. Will he run away, as he has before, or will he stay and help Dutch and his pretty daughter and lay the ghosts of his past to rest?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slaughterman's_Daughter"title="The Slaughterman's Daughter">
It is 1894, and many Jews are emigrating from the Russian Empire to the United States, Germany, and Palestine; the story is set in motion by one husband and father who abandons his family.The townsfolk of Motal, a Belarusian town in the Pale of Settlement, are shocked when Fanny Keismann - devoted wife, mother of five, and celebrated cheese-maker - leaves her home and vanishes into the night. Such behavior was fairly common for men but never before had a woman done so. Fanny's reputation indicated she might be capable of unconventional deeds. Thus do the events of the story unfold.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_True_King_(novel)"title="One True King (novel)">
The book opens with Anadil, Hester, and Dot searching for Sophie. They are unaware that Sophie is being controlled, and that whenever she tries to remember her past she suffers immense pain. The trio discover something is wrong when they see that Sophie is about to get married to "Rhian" (who is actually his brother Japeth). Agatha and Tedros, meanwhile, have found King Arthur's ring that can keep the Storian alive, and they use Wish Fish to find Sophie. Sophie, being controlled, attempts to kill Agatha and Agatha realizes she must be under Japeth's control. Before the fight can truly become a large-scale war, Excalibur returns to the stone and King Arthur's voice informs everyone that there must be a contest to prove whether Tedros is king or Japeth is king; the winner will be king and the loser will be beheaded. Tedros also learns that Japeth and Rhian were not King Arthur's sons at all, but their true parents are still unknown.Agatha, Tedros, Hort, and Nicola set off to help Tedros achieve the first test, and in doing so find a version of Merlin turned into a baby. Sophie, meanwhile, is on a hunt to find out more about her past despite the pain it gives her. She discovers the snake 'scims' that Japeth can create must be in her head, feeding on her memories, and uses her powers to painfully take them from her head and escapes. Hester, Anadil, and Dot, meanwhile, search for Dot's dad, who they believe may still be alive; Japeth catches up to Sophie as she in turn catches up to Tedros, Agatha, Hort, and Nicola. During a battle, it is discovered that Japeth is the son of Rafal, a villain in the previous story arc.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fairies_of_Sadieville"title="The Fairies of Sadieville">
Graduate students, Justin and Veronica find a century-old silent film showing what appears to be a girl transforming into a fairy. It took place in Sadieville, a mining town in Tennessee. The pair visit Needsville in Cloud County to investigate. They discover that in 1915 Sadieville disappeared when a cavern beneath it collapsed. This leads the pair to uncovering a long-forgotten cave with a portal to Tír na nÓg. The Tufa realize they have an opportunity to return to their homeland from where they were exiled thousands of years ago, but are conflicted over whether to leave their new home in the Appalachian mountains or not.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fierce_Femmes_and_Notorious_Liars"title="Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars">
Born to Chinese parents who emigrated to Gloom, the unnamed trans girl protagonist has had a cluster of killer bees inside her since she was aged six and they swarmed into her body. Since eleventh grade, she has experienced sexual pleasure via Ghost Friend, an ungendered being which brings her to orgasm when she consents. On the day that a clan of dead mermaids wash up on the beach, the protagonist decides to flee to the City of Smoke and Lights, leaving her younger sister Charity behind. Throughout the book, she sends letters to Charity, who begins misbehaving in her absence. She also writes chapters of "song of the pocket knife" in her notebook, detailing her self-harm as it subsides and reoccurs depending on her life situation.Following the bus journey to the City of Smoke and Lights, a man assaults the protagonist in public so she attacks him with kung fu. She meets Kimaya, who takes her to Street of Miracles: there, trans women—or, "femmes"—engage in sex work for survival. Kimaya helps her find a barebones apartment to rent and introduces her to Dr. Crocodile, who gives her medication to grow breasts in exchange for sexual activity. She meets Rapunzelle, Kimaya's girlfriend. Rapunzelle was addicted to the drug Lost after suffering abuse by her father. One night, while on Lost, she started to shapeshift; Kimaya held onto her and she became herself again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Magic..."title="A Tale of Magic...">
In all four kingdoms, magic is outlawed; practitioners and those associated are usually punished with death. In the Southern Kingdom, a fairy named Madame Weatherberry requests King Champion's approval for a school of magic. She convinces him by saying magic is not bad but witchcraft is and that he could use magic to stop the "northern conflict". He eventually accepts, letting her recruit two children.Women in the Southern Kingdom are stripped of all rights, including those related to reading. However, 14-year-old Brystal Evergreen loves to do so and takes many risks. Later, Brystal becomes a maid at the library, wanting to read books. After many close calls, Brystal finds a "Justice-only" section where she learns of those who defied the Justices and were killed as a result. She finds a book on magic, discovering she can perform it. However, she is caught by the librarian and is sent to the Bootstrap Correctional Facility. Later, Madame Weatherberry arrives and recruits Brystal to her school. Along the way, Xanthous Hayfield, who specializes in fire and accidentally killed his father, and Emeralda Stone, who specializes in gems and was raised by dwarves, are recruited.At Madame Weatherberry's school, they meet Tangerina Turkin and Skylene Lavenders. They are later joined by Lucy Goose who has a "specialty for trouble" and whom Brystal makes friends with. During classes, Brystal struggles to unlock her magic properly, leading to Madame Weatherberry giving her a wand. After Brystal is nearly killed, Madame Weatherberry decides to begin teaching protection classes and reveals to Brystal she has been leaving the school to fight the Snow Queen who has been causing blizzards in the Northern Kingdom. If Madame Weatherberry perishes, she wants Brystal to succeed her. Madame Weatherberry leaves again and, finally, Brystal tells the others what Madame Weatherberry is doing, and they set off to help her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passenger_(Boschwitz_novel)"title="The Passenger (Boschwitz novel)">
The book tells the story of Otto Silbermann, a respected German-Jewish business owner living in Berlin who has to leave his wife and flee his home in the immediate aftermath of the "Kristallnacht" pogrom of November 1938 as Nazi German soldiers pound on their door in the middle of the night. Silbermann escapes from his home through the back door and travels on several trains within Germany in an attempt to flee the country. Silbermann's travels bring him to a number of individuals, some of whom are outcasts of the Nazi regime, while others embrace its ideology wholeheartedly. Initially refusing to accept the realities of Jewish persecution in the new Nazi Germany, Silbermann eventually comes to accept the realities of his new life as his attempts to flee are unsuccessful.The Jewish Book Council wrote that ""The Passenger" offers an intimate portrait of Jewish life in prewar Nazi Germany at the onset of dehumanization, before the yellow star was imposed."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhollow_Duology"title="Greenhollow Duology">
## Silver in the Wood.Tobias Finch has served as the Wild Man of Greenhollow Wood for centuries. He protects nearby villagers from magical creatures in the wood, along with his dryads and cat. He meets Henry Silver, a folklore scholar and the new landlord of Greenhollow Hall. When Tobias is shot by a villager as he fights off a creature, he recuperates at Greenhollow Hall. Finch and Silver forge a romantic connection. Silver is then captured by the Lord of Summer, Fabian Rafaela, a lich and former friend of Tobias. With Silver's mother Adela, Tobias confronts Fabian and kills him. During this conflict, he loses his powers, and Silver disappears. Months later, Tobias discovers Silver in the wood; Silver has gained Tobias's powers as the new Wild Man of the Wood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_the_Second"title="Frederick the Second">
"Frederick the Second" presents Emperor Frederick as a heroic figure and early Renaissance man, "statesman and philosopher, politician and warrior, leader of armies and jurist, poet, diplomat, architect, zoologist, mathematician, the master of six or perhaps nine languages". He is a cosmopolitan "Roman German" who embodies the synthesis of the Roman spirit of universal dominion with the cultural and historical role of Germany, and "combines the triple culture of Europe ... of the Church, of the east and the Ancients". Campaigning in Jerusalem, Frederick studies the architecture of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and shows "unlimited admiration for the Arab intellect". Establishing his empire as a legal and bureaucratic state, he becomes "lex animata" and "high priest" of the law, turning the administration of justice into a mystical sacrament.On the other hand, Kantorowicz says, Frederick was no "enlightened and tolerant potentate"—in fact he was "probably the most intolerant emperor that ever the West begot". Frederick terms himself the "God of vengeance who punishes the guilt of heretics to the second generation", and his "Liber Augustalis" begins with the proscription of heresy as treason punishable by death. At the Battle of Parma, "frightful necessity" drives him to a "reign of terror".The book's account is florid and often exoticist. Kantorowicz frequently invokes an eclectic variety of literary references to enhance his depiction of Frederick, drawing especially on the medieval poetry of Dante and "Parzival" but also on classical Greek and Roman mythology. Frederick himself appears as a hybrid figure whose "mixed" identity Kantorowicz presents in highly positive terms. He is a monarch able to fulfil his contemporaries' desire to bring together "Muhammad and Christ, Kaiser and Khalif"; who, in a sense, "surrendered to the East". Frederick's government is itself "oriental" and autocratic, invoking but re-evaluating the concept of oriental despotism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Profound_Weaves"title="The Four Profound Weaves">
A nameless man returns to the desert settlement of his old friend Uiziya in the hopes that she can give him a name and identity. He has transitioned from female to male and is struggling with his place in his strictly gender-segregated tribe. Uiziya is a weaver awaiting the return of her aunt Benesret, who has promised to teach her the art of magical weaving and the Four Profound Weaves. The two journey into the desert to search for Benesret. Uiziya is injured by both an assassin and Benesret, and the nameless man takes her to his home city of Iyar. They attract the attention of The Collector, who kidnaps Uiziya so she can weave from Death for him. The two defeat The Collector. The nameless man claims a new name, Kaveh-nen-Kimri; he and Uiziya promise to explore the desert further together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonflower_Murders"title="Moonflower Murders">
After the events of "Magpie Murders" Susan Ryeland has been living in Crete with her lover Andreas, running a struggling hotel. She is approached by Lawrence and Pauline Treherne, owners of a hotel in England, because she was the editor of deceased mystery author Alan Conway. Conway used the details of a murder that occurred at the Treherne’s hotel eight years ago in one of his mystery novels, "Atticus Pünd Takes the Case". The Treherne’s daughter Cecily had just recently read the book and called her parents telling them that the book proves that the person in jail for the murder is innocent. Shortly after that phone call Cecily disappears. The Trehernes offer Susan ten thousand pounds to come back to England, stay at their hotel, and use any insight she might have gotten by editing the book to help track down Cecily. Susan, needing the money to help with the struggling hotel, agrees and heads back to England to help.While at the hotel Susan finds that there are many suspects, as the murder victim Frank Parris was reportedly unpleasant to the point where even his sister actively disliked him. The most prominent suspects are Cecily's husband Aiden, Frank's sister and her husband, and Cecily's sister Lisa. Ultimately Susan uncovers that Aiden killed not only Frank Parris, but also his wife. In his past he had worked as a male prostitute named Leo out of desperation. Frank had frequently hired him to engage in BDSM, taking joy in humiliating Aiden. He had quit working as a prostitute and eventually married Cecily, not out of love but because she was wealthy. When Frank came to the Treherne's hotel he tried to blackmail Aiden, only for the man to murder Frank in order to keep his past a secret. The murder was pinned on a worker with a criminal past while Aiden was able to get away with the crime until many years later, when Cecily discovered a clue in the novel: that the book was dedicated to Frank and Leo. Aware that she'd uncovered his crime and past, Aiden murdered Cecily. When he finds that he's been discovered, Aiden commits suicide by jumping in front of a train.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finna_(novella)"title="Finna (novella)">
Ava works at LitenVärld, a big box retail store, with her ex Jules. One day at work, a wormhole opens in the store. A customer's grandmother, Ursula Nouri, wanders inside. Ava and Jules are sent to fetch her using a tracking device called a FINNA. They travel through numerous parallel universes. In one, they find that Mrs. Nouri has been killed by parasitic plants; the FINNA directs them to a “suitable replacement”. They meet Captain Nouresh, an alternate-universe version of Mrs. Nouri. As they fight off dangerous drones, Ava escorts Nouresh back to her world; Jules stays behind. Ava quits her job and takes the FINNA in search of Jules.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Those_Who_Wish_Me_Dead_(novel)"title="Those Who Wish Me Dead (novel)">
After Indiana teenager Jace Wilson witnesses a murder, his parents cannot put him into witness protection because the killers have connections in law enforcement. So they entrust Jace's safety to Ethan and Allison Serbin, a couple who run a wilderness survival program for troubled kids in Montana. The murderers, Jack and Patrick Blackwell, track Jace--now using the name Connor Reynolds--to the mountainous region. When he realizes they're closing in, Ethan and Jace take off into the wilderness. As a forest fire rages and a fierce electrical storm approaches. Connor meets Hannah Faber, a former smokejumper who is now a lookout in an isolated fire tower. Having failed to save a young boy previously, Hannah vows to keep him safe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_Earth_and_Sky_(novel_series)"title="Between Earth and Sky (novel series)">
## Prior to the series.Three hundred years prior to the main story, the War of the Spear began after a spearwoman of Hokaia became the first dreamwalker. She led a conquering army across the continent of the Meridian, but was ultimately defeated. At the conclusion of the war, the Treaty of Hokaia established the Watchers, a quasi-religious institution in the city of Tova. The four great cities agreed to ban magic and the worship of all gods. In Tova, the Odohaa cult continued to worship the Crow God in secret. Decades before the story, the Watchers massacred many members of the Carrion Crow clan in an event that became known as the Night of Knives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_and_the_Way_of_Forgiveness"title="Joseph and the Way of Forgiveness">
Joseph is a handsome and intelligent youth, much more so than his shepherd brothers. Joseph loves his brothers but feels that he is better than them. Their father, Jacob, loves Joseph the most because he is the son of Rachel, Jacob's greatest love. After Rachel died, Jacob kept Joseph close to remind him of his lost love.Joseph's brothers know that Jacob preferred Joseph over them and they hated the dreams Joseph would tell. The brothers conspire to the enslavement and eventual imprisonment of Joseph in a pit. In the pit, Joseph ponders why his brothers would do something so brutal to him. After going through many emotions, Joseph sees himself from his brothers’ point of view and understands their motivation. After becoming a wise and important leader in Egypt, the brothers and Joseph meet once again and Joseph forgives them for all they've done.In an epilogue, Joseph's spends his last day thinking upon his life and identity, coming to the end of his life with no regrets.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Things_We_Lost_to_the_Water"title="Things We Lost to the Water">
The novel is told from multiple perspectives between 1978 and 2005. Most of the story takes place in the lower income neighborhoods of New Orleans, Louisiana. Hương comes to New Orleans with her five-year-old son Tuấn and baby Bình at the beginning of the story from a Singaporean refugee camp. Her husband, Công, had chosen to stay in Vietnam. And she chooses to tell her children that he had died trying to leave North Vietnam. His absence punctuates the rest of the novelThe children eventually look to grow out of their mother's overcompensating behavior. Tuấn, who seeks to connect with his roots, joins the local Vietnamese gang, whereas Bình (later adopting the name Ben), who was born in the refugee camp and has no ties to the past, is guided to pursue literature by a professor. Tuấn later recognizes that empathy is a measure of masculinity and Ben realizes that his life is not intrinsically more meaningful because he is allowed more freedom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14_(novel)"title="14 (novel)">
"14" follows Nate Tucker, who lives in Los Angeles, is stuck doing data entry and doesn't know what he's doing with his life. Just as he needs to move out of his old place, Nate hears of an apartment building with extremely low rent at an after work get-together, and once Nate signs his lease for 565 dollars a month (including utilities) at the Kavach building, the mysteries of the old Los Angeles brownstone begin to unravel.Nate discovers that his building manager Oskar Rommel is reluctant to tell him much about the building. He also discovers that there is a colony of bright green, seven-legged cockroaches that skitter around his apartment, his kitchen light is a black light no matter what kind of bulb he puts in, and the four massive padlocks that are on apartment 14. In addition to discovering the visible oddities of his building, Nate also encounters his neighbors Veek, Roger, Xela, Clive, Debbie and the newly moved-in Tim. Together, they slowly unveil the deeper hidden secrets of the Kavach building. Over the course of the novel, the group, with Nate at the lead, discover that the building is not hooked into the Los Angeles power grid and instead pulls its power from a series of Westinghouse generators that draw from a fault line almost a mile underneath Kavach. They also discover writing on all of the walls of various apartments that includes scientific formulas, population growth algorithms and a letter from one of the men who created Kavach, Aleksander Koturovich, which helps answer the mysterious questions about the nature of the building. Aleksander Koturovic along with Whipple Van Buren Phillips and Nikola Tesla helped finance and construct the Kavach building as a protective barrier around our reality, meant to guard against a species of multi-dimensional predators that appear in our world once the total population of the planet reached a critical point, consuming everything in their path before returning to their home dimension to await the next turn of the cycle. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Embroidered_Couch"title="The Embroidered Couch">
The male protagonist of "Xiuta yeshi", which begins in the year 1594, is thirty-year-old "xiucai" Yao Tongxin (), also known as Dongmen sheng (; Scholar of the Eastern Gate), presumably a reference to his birthplace (a part of Yangzhou known as "East Gate"). Having led a debauched lifestyle in his younger days, he now has a relatively poor stamina, and is hence unable to sexually satisfy his wife, Jinshi () or Madame Jin. After receiving much ridicule from others and being unable to improve the situation with medication, he arranges for his wife to have sex with his bisexual lover Zhao Dali () instead. Zhao fails to satisfy Jinshi during their first tryst; he returns the following night with aphrodisiacs, although Jinshi sustains a vaginal tear and rectal prolapse in what becomes a wild orgy involving herself, Zhao, and two servant girls. In retaliation, Jinshi arranges for Zhao's widowed mother, Mashi (), to live with Dongmen and herself when Zhao goes for a business trip. While intoxocated, Mashi is enticed by Jinshi into having sex with Dongmen, who is passing off as Jinshi's cousin; Mashi, Dongmen, and Jinshi soon find themselves in a "ménage à trois". However, Jinshi later becomes jealous of the older woman, just as Zhao returns. Although the four of them agree to live under one roof, they take to the mountains after their neighbours learn about their polyamory. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_No_Messiah"title="I Am No Messiah">
In this book Sonu Sood narrates his journey from being an actor to a dedicated and altruistic social worker. In this book, he narrates the story of his life in details. He was born in a Punjabi family in Moga. He did his schooling in Moga and completed his engineering in Nagpur. After that instead of becoming an engineer he decided to try his luck as an actor. Initially he takes a job in Delhi for a few months. Then he moves to Mumbai and his life as a struggling actor begins. After several years of struggle, he manages to get a break in a Tamil film. After the film became successful gradually he gets offers from Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and later Hindi films.In mid-2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown in India (first wave), Sood helped thousands of stranded Indian migrant workers to reach their homes. He named this mission "Ghar Bhejo" (). He and his team arranged buses, special trains, and chartered flights to send the migrant labourers.On 15 April 2020, around twenty days after the first lockdown started in India, Sood went to Kalwa Chowk, in Thane to provide food, drinking water, sanitisers etc. to the stranded migrant workers. A few people there asked him if they could be given more than one food packet. After inquiring he quickly understood the reason that the labourers were actually starting their journey of hundreds of kilometers to Karnataka and other states by walk (as there was no other option to travel during the lockdown). At this moment he understood that just handing over food packets, or sanitisers was not enough. That day he could send off 350 people to Karnataka, however there were thousands of others around waiting for help. That's how he started him mission and gradually he rediscovered himself as a humanitarian.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_for_the_Dark_Times"title="A Song for the Dark Times">
In a Prologue, Rebus moves down two flights of stairs to the ground-floor flat in the same Arden Street tenement, with a lot of help from Siobhan Clarke. His first morning in the new flat, he gets a call from his daughter Samantha saying her partner, Keith, is missing.Rebus immediately makes the long drive to the (fictional) village of Naver near Tongue in the extreme north of Scotland. He finds Keith’s body. In trying to discover why he was murdered, he gets to know his granddaughter’s father for the first time; Keith had been obsessed with the history of a nearby World War II prison camp, some of whose survivors settled locally and are still alive. The local police see Samantha as the obvious suspect in Keith’s murder. While Rebus can’t help considering this possibility, he frantically researches other options. Samantha is devastated and blames it all on him.In Edinburgh, Siobhan Clarke and Malcolm Fox are part of the Murder Inquiry Team looking into the mysterious killing of a Saudi student. This takes them into the world of wealthy international socialites and their financial projects. The dead man’s closest friend was a young Scottish aristocrat whose family trust owns most of the area around Tongue, so Rebus’s investigations overlap with Siobhan’s.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosewater_(novel)"title="Rosewater (novel)">
In 2012, an alien named Wormwood appears in London, substantially altering the world's geopolitical landscape. In the 2050s, it creates an impenetrable dome in Rosewater, Nigeria. It exudes a fungus which interacts with human nervous systems, granting psychic powers to some human “sensitives”. The life of Kaaro, a sensitive, is presented throughout different decades.As a teen, Kaaro uses his burgeoning psychic abilities for thievery. He is caught and almost executed. He escapes and begins using his telepathy on the black market before being recruited by the government. In the 2050s, he trains with S45, a secret branch of the Nigerian government. He is tasked with tracking down Oyin Da, an anarchist revolutionary. Kaaro and Da travel to the future site of Rosewater, where they speak with Wormwood. They are followed by S45 agents who shoot at Wormwood, but Kaaro senses the trap and saves him. Wormwood then creates the dome to separate himself from most humans; Da stays within the dome and Kaaro does not.In 2066, Kaaro is still working for S45. Sensitives begin dying of an unknown illness. He begins seeing a mysterious woman named Molara in the xenosphere. He dates a woman named Aminat. Unbeknownst to Kaaro, she is an undercover S45 agent. Molara reveals that she is an alien. The creation of sensitives was an unintended consequence as the aliens gathered information about Earth. They no longer need more information, so they are killing the sensitives. She attempts to kill Kaaro, but he is rescued by Wormwood. Kaaro learns that the aliens are replacing human DNA with their own over the course of generations. He and Aminat continue their lives, unsure about how to combat the inevitable end of humanity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouths_of_Rain"title="Mouths of Rain">
"Mouths of Rain" is a compilation of writings spanning 1909 - 2019 from Black lesbian women and others who have had intimate relationships with other Black women. It was intended as a companion to "Words of Fire" by Beverly Guy-Sheftall, and contains writings by: Alice Walker, Cheryl Clarke, Audre Lorde, Pauli Murray, Barbara Smith, and Bettina Love.The contents include essays, poetry, short fiction, and personal recollections. The anthology is divided into five sections, each with a different broad focus: uses of the erotic; interlocking oppressions and identity politics; coming out and stepping into; the sacred; and radical futurities. Topics covered include sexism, Afrofuturism, and white reviewers.The editor, Briona Simone Jones, is a Black lesbian feminist of African American and Jamaican descent. She received her doctoral degree in English from Michigan State University in 2021. Jones' stated goal was to "trace the trajectories of liberation, from self to community, through Black lesbian thought."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Black_Girl"title="The Other Black Girl">
Nella Rogers is the only Black employee of a publishing house. When Hazel-May McCall, another Black woman, is hired by the company, Rogers initially believes the woman will be an ally.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Empress_of_Salt_and_Fortune"title="The Empress of Salt and Fortune">
Cleric Chih of the Singing Hills Monastery visits an abandoned palace, Thriving Fortune, after the death of the Empress. They are accompanied by a talking hoopoe named Almost Brilliant. They meet Rabbit, an elderly woman who was once the Empress’s servant. She tells Chih about Empress In-yo’s life as they catalogue the contents of the palace.In-yo is a northern princess married to the Emperor of Pines and Steel for diplomatic purposes. The emperor has her sterilized and banished. In-yo secretly communicates with her kin in the north, hoping for revenge. She stages a pilgrimage, an excuse for leaving her exile in Thriving Fortune. Her caravan of pilgrims is infiltrated by northern warriors, allowing her to escape Empire custody. In-yo’s servant Sukai, Rabbit’s lover, is executed. Rabbit gives birth to Sukai’s daughter; In-yo presents the daughter as her own. She leads an army to the capital, the Emperor is killed, and In-yo takes the throne. She has recently passed away and has been succeeded by Rabbit's daughter. Rabbit disappears, and Chih leaves Thriving Fortune to attend the coronation of the new Empress.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Snowball_in_Hell"title="A Snowball in Hell">
The story is set five years after the two previous novels in the group. Angelique de Xavia is now working for an anti-terrorist squad based in Paris. Then she is needed in London, where Simon Darcourt—who was supposed to have died in their confrontation at the end of "A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away"—is back on the scene, with a new specialization: broadcasting videos of the torture (and, sometimes, deaths) of celebrities he has kidnapped.Meanwhile, Zal Innez, who is in danger from Scottish gangsters, American gangsters, and the law, finds a berth on a cruise ship and becomes a performing magician, drawing crowds.Angelique is contacted by a person who has abducted her parents, and who will trade them only for Darcourt; meanwhile, of course, she is part of a team looking to arrest Darcourt. She tracks down Zal, believing he can out-think Darcourt, and her parents' abductors too. Zal immediately responds and they seem to be making progress, discovering that Darcourt has cancer. Zal finally sees through Darcourt's multiple misdirections, and the reader is gradually brought up to speed as the finale unfolds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Night_All_Blood_Is_Black"title="At Night All Blood Is Black">
Alfa Ndiaye and his adopted brother Mademba Diop are Senegalese Tirailleurs fighting in World War I. One day, Alfa jokes about the Diop family’s totem, the peacock, stating that it is cowardly when compared to the Ndiaye family’s lion. Wanting to prove his bravery, Mademba charges into battle and is disemboweled. Mademba asks Alfa to kill him repeatedly, but Alfa is unable to do so. After Mademba’s death, Alfa captures German soldiers and disembowels them. When they beg for death, he kills them, granting them a mercy he was unable to give to Mademba. He then brings their severed hands and rifles back to camp.At first, he is hailed as a hero for his bravery, but his fellow soldiers quickly realize that he is spiraling into madness and become afraid of him. After the seventh severed hand, the commander orders Alfa to take one month’s leave. While being treated in a psychiatric hospital by Dr. François, Alfa reminisces about his childhood and life in Senegal. He buries his collection of mummified hands, then rapes and kills Dr. François’s daughter.The narrative abruptly shifts to recount a Senegalese story about a fickle princess and a sorcerer without scars. The narrative meditates on the meaning of stories within stories and the difficulty of translation. The narrator speaks in the voice of Mademba, believing he is now living in Alfa’s body.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughter_of_the_Deep"title="Daughter of the Deep">
Ana Dakkar, the novel's protagonist and narrator, who turns 15 during the novel, is a student at Harding-Pencroft Academy, a fictional five-year boarding high school for marine sciences, situated on a remote bluff on the southern California coast. The book opens on a Friday morning just before the end of Ana's freshman year, when she goes for a swim near campus with her older brother Dev, a 17-year-old senior, who gives her their mother's pearl necklace as an early present for her fifteenth birthday. Ana and the 19 other ninth-graders at Harding-Pencroft then head to the docks at the nearby fictional city of San Alejandro for their end-of-year trials on board the school yacht the "Varuna" (named for Varuna, the Hindu god of the sea), which will determine their future at the school. The trials are supervised by Dr. Theodosius Hewett, their elderly Theoretical Marine Science teacher. However, shortly after leaving the campus, Ana and her classmates see torpedoes fired from a submarine at the base of the bluff on which their school sits, collapsing the buildings into the ocean. Dr. Hewitt, after launching drones to survey the wreckage, orders the freshmen back onto the bus, then onto the "Varuna" and out to sea, telling them that this is the work of a rival school, Land Institute, and that it is better for their own safety if the world believes them dead as well. He directs one of the boys, Gemini Twain, to act as Ana's bodyguard. Hewitt and the students then find themselves fighting off a commando raid at sea by Land Institute seniors who attempt to kidnap Ana; the abduction is foiled with the aid of a friendly bottlenose dolphin Ana named Socrates, who knocks her would-be abductor, Caleb South, out of the water. When interrogated, Caleb proudly admits that he and his classmates destroyed Harding-Pencroft and says that they were protecting the legacy of an outlaw and selfishly hoarding technology that could greatly benefit the world. Hewitt has him thrown overboard in his flotation vest and wet suit to join his classmates who have been set adrift in a pontoon with their hands bound.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession_of_Medicine"title="Profession of Medicine">
The book comprises four parts: the first part explores the organization of the medical profession, the second explores the performance of day-to-day work, the third, how the concept of illness functions socially, and the last explores what the role of technical expertise should be in a free society.Freidson argues that the definition of profession is ill-defined and that people do not agree on which activities should be considered professions. He seeks to explore the sociological properties of the medical profession in order to under what "profession" is.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gameknight999"title="Gameknight999">
The series describes adventures of the protagonist with the user name "Gameknight999", who finds himself teleported by one of his father's inventions into the world of the "Minecraft" video game. Gameknight discovers that the creatures in the game are alive and it isn't a game to them. Gameknight experiences real-life adventures and actual danger with life-or-death consequences while stuck in the "Minecraft" digital universe.Most of the novels feature Herobrine as the main antagonist, who is an urban legend and creepypasta that originated as a hoax propagated by an anonymous post on the English-language imageboard website 4chan.From 2014 to 2017, a total of six trilogies featuring Gameknight999 were published.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_Wolves"title="Rule of Wolves">
Shu Han's ruler, Queen Makhi Kir-Taban, plots to kill her sister Ehri from taking the throne when a blot of darkness with a likeness to the Shadow Fold spreads past the Unsea and into Shu Han. Nina Zenik has successfully infiltrated the Ice Court under the alias Mila Jandersdat, serving as Hanne Brum's courtier. The pair decide that Hanne must enter herself into the Heartwood, a competition between women to decide who they will marry. She gains the favor of Fjerda's Prince Rasmus when she uses her Grisha healing power to lessen his chronic illness. Nina aids the Ravkan war effort by turning the Fjerdans to worship the Grisha saints, creating divide in the ranks of the drüskelle. She discovers that Jarl Brum has kept Nikolai Lantsov's birth father, Magnus Opjer, under prison and plans to use letters between him and the former Ravkan queen to get Nikolai deposed. Hanne and Rasmus grow closer but Rasmus is revealed to be a power-hungry tyrant who feels satisfaction at other people's misery. Nina also discovers that Rasmus's bodyguard, Joran, killed Matthias Helvar in Ketterdam. Torn between loyalties and morals, Nina almost blows her cover to Jarl but manages to keep herself together. Nina and Hanne develop a romantic relationship and plan to run away after converting the Fjerdans to realizing the Grisha are not abominations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Account_of_the_Entry_of_the_Catholic_Religion_into_Sichuan"title="An Account of the Entry of the Catholic Religion into Sichuan">
Allegedly based on ('Account of Tyrannies Wrought by Zhang Xianzhong, China's Famous Looter in the Year 1651') by Gabriel de Magalhães, the book recounts the early history of Roman Catholic mission in Sichuan throughout the 1640s, providing first-hand witness testimony by Gabriel de Magalhães and Lodovico Buglio on Zhang Xianzhong's reign and massacre in Sichuan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circe_(novel)"title="Circe (novel)">
Circe is the divine daughter of the titan Helios and naiad Perse. Deemed unattractive and powerless from birth, Circe's early life is lonely until she falls in love with the mortal fisherman Glaucos. Devastated by his mortality, Circe discovers a way to make him a god: she transforms him into his 'true form' using the sap of magical flowers, grown in soil that was once soaked with the blood of the titan Kronos. Arrogant in his divinity, however, Glaucos rejects Circe in favor of the nymph Scylla. Circe's jealousy causes her to use the flowers' magic again, accidentally transforming Scylla into a bloodthirsty six-headed monster. Remorseful, Circe confesses her deeds to Helios, who realizes all of his children with Perse are witches capable of extracting power from herbs and draughts. As punishment for admitting her witchcraft, Circe is banished by Zeus to eternal exile on the island of Aiaia. She uses the beginning of her exile to study and hone her witchcraft, tending gardens and experimenting with draughts. Over the centuries she spends on Aiaia, Circe interacts with many mythic figures. She receives visits from the Olympian god Hermes, whom she takes as a lover. She is once escorted off the island by the mortal Daedalus, at the request of Circe's sister and the Queen of Crete, Pasiphaë. During the brief visit to Crete, Circe helps her sister birth the Minotaur and uses her witchcraft to help tame the monster. Many years later, the hero Jason and his wife the witch Medea (Circe's niece) arrive on Aiaia after having stolen the Golden Fleece from Circe's brother Aeëtes, murdering Medea's brother Absyrtus in the process. Circe cleanses them of the crime and warns Medea of Jason's waning interest, but is rebuffed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Now,_Bernard"title="Not Now, Bernard">
Bernard tries to attract the attention of his preoccupied parents who reply "Not now, Bernard". Bernard goes into the garden and meets a monster which eats him. The monster goes into the house and tries to attract the parents' attention but gets the same reaction from them, completely oblivious to the monster replacing their son. The monster lives Bernard's life, but more badly behaved, for the rest of the day and, at bed time, tries to tell Bernard's mother he is a monster but she replies "Not now, Bernard".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoot_Owl,_Master_of_Disguise"title="Hoot Owl, Master of Disguise">
Hoot Owl is hungry, and decides to disguise himself to catch some food. He tries a series of improvised costumes - a carrot (to catch a rabbit), and an ornamental birdbirth (to catch a pigeon). He believes, as do many young children, that costumes will make him unrecognisable. But his disguises are laughably ineffective and all fail - he is not, in fact, a master of disguise.The comedy of the book comes from the self-important delusion of the hero, and the contrast between his puffed-up ego and his inept plans. It's been described as a parody of old fashioned suspense fiction.Ultimately, Hoot Owl 'catches' a pizza, by disguising himself as a pizza waiter, and all is resolved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_In,_Love_Out"title="Love In, Love Out">
"Love In, Love Out" is a book by Malie Coyne, an Irish child psychologist, that serves as a parenting guide to comprehending and recognizing the varying types of anxiety that children undergo during their course of development. It also details how children could develop adaptive coping strategies to manage their anxiety. The book draws from key psychological concepts, prominent case studies, and Coyne's own experiences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorefall"title="Shorefall">
Several years after expert thief Sancia Grado and her allies Orso, Gregor, and Berenice created Foundryside—a merchant house specializing in the mass production of sigils—the team continue their war against the other houses to create a fair society out of Tevanne. When the god-like hierophant Crasedes Magnus is reborn, the crew find themselves in a race against time to prevent wholesale slaughter and the end of their world.By the novel's end, Tevanne has become embroiled in a war as the consciousness of Tevanne melded with Gregor fights Crasedes to seize control of the city. Orso sacrifices himself to allow Sancia and Berenice to escape across the sea where they hope to find help.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freshwater_(novel)"title="Freshwater (novel)">
"Freshwater" tells the semi-autobiographical story of the protagonist, Ada, a Nigerian student in her final year of college who finds out that she has three spirits living in her subconscious. They eventually take control of her, threatening to ruin her life and sanity. Emezi explores their Igbo heritage's views on spirituality and gender roles alongside those of Western construction and invites their audience to think critically about this spirit/body binary.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Su'e_pian"title="Su'e pian">
Wu Sansi (), the wealthy and powerful nephew of Empress Wu Zetian, falls in love with the eponymous Su'e () and takes her in as a concubine. The novel describes forty-three sexual encounters between Wu Sansi and Su'e, each of which is artfully named and commemorated with a poem. Palace official Di Renjie () insists on meeting Su'e after hearing of her exceptional beauty; she agrees after some hesitation, before revealing to Di that she is an immortal "Moon Lady". Su'e then departs to a higher dimension with Wu's spirit. Some time later, the couple are reportedly sighted at the Zhongnan Mountains.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Girls_(Sosa_Villada_novel)"title="Bad Girls (Sosa Villada novel)">
Las Malas is a fictional autobiographical work that goes back and forth in Camila’s life. She writes her life experiences from her childhood in La Falda as an outcast boy, the only child of a lower-middle-class marriage, until her life in the city of Córdoba which she shared with a new family under the maternal wings of Auntie Encarna.The novel is mainly set in 2002 and it is narrated by the author and protagonist. The stories are about the difficulties that she encountered during her entire life as a transgender woman, but they are also about the lives of the group of sex workers (mostly fellow trans women) that she meets at Sarmiento Park.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_with_the_Louding_Voice"title="The Girl with the Louding Voice">
Adunni is a 14-year-old girl from poor home who lives in a small town near the city of Lagos. She wishes to get educated but she cannot due to lack of funds. When things start getting sour, her father Papa marries her off to Morufu as his third wife in order to use her bride price for the family upkeep against her wish.After a rape experience, she runs to Lagos where she is employed by Big Madam who abuses her several times and turned into a slave but Adunni is determined to face all this things when she makes up her mind that education is the only way to be free from her oppressions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruyijun_zhuan"title="Ruyijun zhuan">
At age fourteen, Wu Zetian becomes one of Emperor Tang Taizong minor concubines. Some twelve years later, the emperor falls gravely ill; while tending to her husband at his deathbed, Wu makes love with the crown prince Tang Gaozong. Upon Taizong death, however, Wu is forced to become a Buddhist nun along with the other royal spouses. She is rescued by Gaozong a year later and becomes his wife. Following his death seven years later, she rises through the ranks and becomes the first and only female emperor of China after demoting the crown prince, Tang Zhongzong. Dissatisfied with her present sexual partners, Wu, who at this point is a septuagenarian, summons an aide to bring her a Luoyang virgin named Xue Aocao (), who is rumoured to be extremely well-endowed. After personally examining his penis, Wu has sex with Xue; she names him the "Lord of Perfect Satisfaction" and renames the calendar year the "First Year of Perfect Satisfaction". Xue becomes her favourite lover and she dismisses her other consorts. After threatening to castrate himself, Xue successfully convinces her to return the throne to Zhongzong. As Wu's health declines, her romantic relationship with Xue comes to an end, and they bid each other farewell in a complex ritual involving the burning of genitals with ambergris and the reenactment of various sexual positions ten times each. Xue disappears and is reportedly sighted in Chengdu as an immortal many years later.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speak_No_Evil_(Iweala_novel)"title="Speak No Evil (Iweala novel)">
Niru, a Nigerian-American high-school senior living in a middle-class suburb of Washington, D.C., comes out as gay to his white straight friend Meredith after rejecting her sexual advances. In an attempt to help him, Meredith downloads dating apps such as Tinder and Grindr on Niru's phone and encourages him to set up a date with a man named Ryan. When Niru misplaces his phone, his father discovers it and sees text messages from Ryan, thus outing Niru to his parents. His father responds by beating up Niru and taking him to Nigeria for "spiritual revival", as he calls it. Niru resents his father for this punishment because he hates visiting Nigeria due to how uncomfortable he feels there because of the heat and lack of amenities.In the second half of Speak No Evil, we continue to see the struggles of intersections that occur with Niru for being a gay, black man in America. Upon Niru's return to America, he and his family attempt to go back to normal, as though nothing happened. Niru's father takes his phone and gives him a Nokia phone that has no access to the internet and that can only be used to call. Niru is required to meet weekly with their church's pastor, Reverend Olumide. Niru goes to a party after his first track meet and gets drunk, getting into a fight with Meredith and eventually being taken care of by a stranger (later revealed to be Damien). He eventually begins to form a romantic relationship with Damien, and tries to find a balance between the various worlds and spaces that he exists in: his home and school lives, where he must hide his sexual identity, and the space in which he exists with Damien. Niru begins to distance himself from everyone, including Meredith. During a somewhat sexual encounter with Damien, Niru pushes him away and leaves, leaving their relationship in a tense place. Shortly after Niru makes up with his friend Meredith. Everything comes to a head after Niru's last track meet of the school year. Niru runs away from his father, and eventually ends up going to a club with Meredith, which ends up with him getting shot by the police and dying. The final third of the novel is then told from the perspective of Meredith, and illustrates her struggles, as well as the struggles of Niru's father, to grapple with and comes to terms with the aftermath of Niru's death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enmakaje_(novel)"title="Enmakaje (novel)">
A couple named Neelakantan and Devayani live on a hill inside a forest. After living in self-induced isolation for six years, They are coming to the place named "Swarga" which literally means heaven. There they see an unusual environment with children and calves with deformed bodies, ponds with no fish and a sky with no birds, and realize that Swarga is no heaven at all. Devayani decides to bring home a child named Pareekshit, who has never walked in his 7 years of life, who has grey hair and sores all over his body due to pesticide poisoning. Through this child, which the couple later adopts, the horror of endosulfan poisoning unfolds before readers. The couple later joins the struggle against the pesticide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jews_from_Macedonia_and_the_Holocaust"title="The Jews from Macedonia and the Holocaust">
Sofija Grandakovska - "Foreword: Homage on the Irony of Evil and on the Historical, Cultural and Theoretic Memory of the Holocaust"The foreword introduces an outline of the historical presence of the Jews in Macedonia, the genealogy of the structure of the Final Solution of the Jewish question in Europe, its implementation in Macedonia and the concept of personal testimony as a document of the passive Holocaust history. It further presents the structure and the interdisciplinary concept of the chrestomacy.Section I: The Historical Narrative and Testimony as Passive History1. Vera Vesković-Vangeli - "Treblinka, Compilation of Documents On the Genocide of the Macedonian Jews in WW II"Vera Vesković-Vangeli introduces the historical presence of the Jews in Macedonia since the times of the Roman Empire and their participation in its pre-Holocaust history. Then, with a selection of 49 documents, she traces the path that let to their destruction: the laws of the occupying Bulgarian authorities regarding the liquidation of Jewish assets and a complete exclusion of the Jewish population from social and economic life, the specific law that turned the Jews from Vardar Macedonia into people without citizenship, the minutes of the discussions between the Nazis and the Bulgarian authorities regarding the fate of the Jews, the creation of a Commissariat for Jewish Affairs at the Ministry of Interior and Public Health, the appointment of the Bulgarian officials who ordered the extermination, the agreement between the Bulgarian and Nazi German authorities to "resettle" the Jews, the reports about the rounding-up and temporary encampment, the bills, notes and delivery police reports about the special trains from Skopje to Treblinka, the analysis stating that the deportation of Jews from Macedonia and Thrace was completed successfully, testimonies of non-Macedonian survivors and of staff members about Treblinka, investigations of the liberators at the site of the camp.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayward_Son_(novel)"title="Wayward Son (novel)">
"Wayward Son" opens about a year and a half after Simon Snow's final showdown with the humdrum and shows that a lot has changed since he fell from grace as the "Chosen One". The story is narrated by multiple characters, including Simon, Baz, Agatha and Penny. There are interludes from new characters as well, including Shepard."Wayward Son" begins with Penelope wanting a change of scene. She suggests that they go to the United States for a holiday to visit Agatha, who now lives in California. Agatha tells them not to since she will be out of town at a NowNext retreat for members and guests. (It is unknown at this time, but NowNext is also known as NextBlood, a vampire cult.) It is also in an attempt to bring Simon out of his shell, as he has become obviously depressed. The group leaves for the United States after their final exams. Penny breaks up with her boyfriend as soon as they arrive in Chicago, which leaves her undecided and without a plan. The group looks to Penny for guidance, so everyone believes it is a bad idea to be in America now that she has no real will to continue on. Nonetheless, they continue on their way to California.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Orange_(novel)"title="Blood Orange (novel)">
Alison is an ambitious criminal barrister who has been practising for over 15 years. She drinks heavily and is having an extra-marital affair, although she repeatedly claims to end it at every encounter. One evening, instead of going home after just one drink as she had planned, she stays on after work in London with colleagues and has one drink after another, before returning to her chambers with her colleague, Patrick, who had been flirting with other women that evening. They have sex on her desk, after which he leaves and she is found the following morning by her husband Carl (a psychotherapist), and six-year-old daughter Matilda, who come seeking for her when she did not return home the previous evening.At home, while recovering from a hangover, the initially seemingly perfect Carl cooks for friends, but Alison causes embarrassment in front of the guests and the following day Carl responds by showing her a video of her actions from that day. Carl keeps his promises to Matilda when Alison fails to wake up in time to go on an outing to a castle. Alison is surprised that she woke up so late, despite how much she drank. When Carl and Matilda return home, he turns his head to Alison's stew, a dish she spent the afternoon cooking. In several parts he questions her reliability and ability as a mother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invisible_Life_of_Addie_LaRue"title="The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue">
The story is balanced between a narrative in present day New York City and flashbacks starting from Addie's childhood in France to her experiences traveling the world and witnessing major historical events. It begins in the early 1700s, following Addie as a young woman burdened by a forced marriage and praying to the gods for her freedom. She accidentally catches the attention of a god of the night, who she would later name Luc, who promises her the time she wants with the caveat being nobody will ever remember her after one encounter. Over time she subtly influences many people, making marks in history and inspiring the creation of songs and art about her. Luc visits her every year after they make their deal, asking for her soul, but she refuses every time. The pair develop a relationship over time that carries on for about two decades. It ends abruptly when Luc asks again for her to surrender her soul, as Addie believes their relationship was just a gambit.In 2014, Addie meets a man named Henry Strauss who can somehow remember her and speak her name. The pair become romantically involved until the day that Addie realizes that Henry only has 35 days left to live per conditions of "his" deal with Luc. Due to heavy familial pressures placed on him, Henry felt bogged down in his life, and a failed proposal made him attempt suicide. Luc visited him and granted his wish: whenever someone would see him, they would see what they desire the most. This allowed Henry to remember Addie, fulfilling her wish that somebody would remember her. At the novel's end, Addie sacrifices herself to Luc, agreeing to be his so long as he wants her at his side. She does not surrender her soul as Luc no longer wants it, claiming to be in love with her. Luc agrees to this in exchange for Henry's freedom with Addie's condition that Henry remember her. Henry publishes the stories Addie told him of her past in a book called "The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue", which is an instant success. Addie has hope that she can manipulate Luc to let her go and finally have peace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesrick"title="Kesrick">
The novel's setting of Terra Magica is "the world as imagined by Dark Age European geographers and bestiary-writers," envisioned as one that "actually exists as a world parallel to our own. There magic works, hippogryphs and mantichores roam free, the earth is flat, paynims worship Termagant, and there is no Western Hemisphere."The warrior Sir Kesrick of Dragonrouge seeks the purloined pommel stone of the sword Dastagard, which entails finding a wizard who intends to kill him in order to forestall this fate. His journey ranges widely through Terra Magica, and on his quest he encounters various menaces and perils while accumulating a number of allies and companions.Chapter notes at the end of the book reference the sources in earlier fantasy literature of various creatures and character and place names used by the author.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Sheeple"title="Normal Sheeple">
Charles is Taoiseach, and Sorcha is appointed to his cabinet. Honor attends a Gaeltacht summer college, making her first rugby-playing boyfriend, and Ross takes up Gaelic football, playing for An Ghaeltacht GAA in County Kerry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonrouge"title="Dragonrouge">
The novel's setting of Terra Magica is "the world as imagined by Dark Age European geographers and bestiary-writers," envisioned as one that "actually exists as a world parallel to our own. There magic works, hippogryphs and mantichores roam free, the earth is flat, paynims worship Termagant, and there is no Western Hemisphere."Sir Kesrick, Knight of Dragonrouge, together with his staunch companion Mandricardo of Tartary and their lady loves, continues their perilous quest through Terra Magica, with adventures ranging from a princess to be rescued from a sea serpent, a giant of anthropophagous inclinations, and a kingdom under an enchanted curse.Again, chapter notes at the end of the book reference the sources in earlier fantasy literature of various creatures and character and place names used by the author.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upright_Women_Wanted"title="Upright Women Wanted">
After her lover Beatriz is executed for the possession of Unapproved Materials, Esther flees an arranged marriage and stows away in the wagon of a group of Librarians. The Librarians distribute Approved Materials to rural settlements, but Esther soon learns that her group of Librarians is a front for an anti-censorship resistance group. She learns that Bet and Leda, two of the Librarians, are a lesbian couple; Esther confronts her own internalized homophobia. The Librarians agree to transport three women to a sanctuary in Utah. They are attacked by a sheriff’s posse, and Esther learns that one of the women, Amity, is wanted for murder.Esther falls in love with Cye, a non-binary Librarian who must pretend to be female in order to survive in the State. Esther and Cye deliver Amity safely. Bet and Leda retire; Esther and Cye take their place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Gall_is_Divided"title="All Gall is Divided">
The text is organized into ten chapters and bracketed into small fragments, either brief passages or aphoristic remarks, some consisting of a single sentence. This presentation contrasts with Cioran's previous work "A Short History of Decay", which consisted of somewhat longer pieces: short reflections and small essays. In "All Gall is Divided", Cioran sought to develop his proficiency with French, expressing himself in concise fragments.The book's original French title was "Syllogismes de l'amerture" (literally, "Syllogisms of Bitterness"), translated by Richard Howard as "All Gall is Divided". The original title refers both to the style of presentation and the negativity of the subject matter. The book's contents are not literal syllogisms but brief rhetorical flourishes, sometimes suggestive of an argument. Some items include one or two declarations, followed by a loosely related conclusion:Howard's title translation was intended to retain the meaning of the original, while also loading other semantic meanings. According to Howard, Francis Bacon and other literary figures have noted that the aphoristic form itself implies a division, or break. Also, the English words "gall" and "bile" suggest negativity; as an anatomical fluid, the latter bile—itself associated with bitterness—is produced by the gallbladder. The literary meaning of "gall" compares with Baudelaire's sense of spleen, which refers to general disgust. Finally, the full (translated) title is a play on a quotation of Julius Caesar, which states that "All Gaul is divided into three parts". This reference to the ancient territory of France indicates Cioran's continuing use of the French language.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandricardo_(Lin_Carter_novel)"title="Mandricardo (Lin Carter novel)">
The novel's setting of Terra Magica is "the world as imagined by Dark Age European geographers and bestiary-writers," envisioned as one that "actually exists as a world parallel to our own. There magic works, hippogryphs and mantichores roam free, the earth is flat, paynims worship Termagant, and there is no Western Hemisphere."The story features two characters introduced in previous volumes, Mandricardo of Tartary, namesake of his purported ancestor from Carolingian legend, and his lady love, the Amazon Callipygia. The bickering duo resumes their quest through Terra Magica in adventures involving a magic carpet, a troll's ring, a salamandre and undina, the wicked enchanter Gorgonzola and his assistant Limburger, and such other worthies as Akhdar the Green, Ithuriel, and various princesses, nabobs and demons. Again, chapter notes at the end of the book reference the sources in earlier fantasy literature of various creatures and character and place names used by the author.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callipygia"title="Callipygia">
The novel's setting of Terra Magica is "the world as imagined by Dark Age European geographers and bestiary-writers," envisioned as one that "actually exists as a world parallel to our own. There magic works, hippogryphs and mantichores roam free, the earth is flat, paynims worship Termagant, and there is no Western Hemisphere."Bickering lovers Callipygia the Amazon and Prince Mandricardo of Tartary (descendant of the famous one) continue their quest through Terra Magica, seeking their way home to their happily ever after amid the perils of the fabled lands they traverse. Finding themselves trapped on a flying island none have ever escaped, they are launched into new adventures into far-distant realms, involving magic, menace, a wishing ring and an ogre's wrath.Again, chapter notes at the end of the book reference the sources in earlier fantasy literature of various creatures and character and place names used by the author.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_(Conroy_novel)"title="Rising Sun (Conroy novel)">
In World War II during the summer of 1942, the Battle of Midway is won by the Japan. Two of the United States' handful of carriers in the Pacific were blundered into a Japanese submarine picket line and were sunk, while a third is destroyed the next day. The United States Navy now only has one carrier remaining in the Pacific against nine Japanese ones, while the ragtag remnants of U.S. battleships – an armada still reeling from the defeat at Pearl Harbor in the December of the previous year – are in even worse shape.Japan now has control of nearly the entire Pacific Ocean. Soon afterwards, Japan invades Alaska while Hawaii gets put under blockade. The Panama Canal is soon clogged with traffic while towns and cities on the West Coast of America are subjected to bombing raids.Despite these disasters, the U.S. begins to fight back against the Japanese. Limited counterattacks by the Americans are made and a grand plan is put forth to lure the Japanese into an ambush that could restore the balance in the Pacific and give the American forces a fair fighting chance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Mogo,_Godhunter"title="David Mogo, Godhunter">
The novel follows the titular demigod, who is also a god hunter, as he scours the streets of Okungbowa's native Lagos, Nigeria, in the aftermath of an event called The Falling where thousands of orishas have fallen to the city.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_the_Dreamer"title="Strange the Dreamer">
Lazlo is an orphan by a war that struck his country, who was brought to a monastery by mysterious circumstances. He lives with a mundane existence with the monks, dreaming of finding adventure and uncovering lost cities. In his teenage years and early adulthood, he becomes an apprentice librarian. One day, he encounters a troupe of warriors led by Eril-Fane, the so-called Godslayer. Eril-Fane comes from the lost city of Weep, and is looking for people to help with an unknown problem. Lazlo manages to barter his way on the expedition along with the arrogant godson of Zosma's Queen, Thyon Nero. They encounter many oddities in their trip, and Eril-Fane tells the history of Weep: once a grand city, 200 years earlier it fell to so called gods. 15 years ago, Eril-Fane rose up against the gods and freed the city. Weep still struggles with aftereffects, the nature of which Eril-Fane refuses to reveal before they reach the city. When they do reach Weep, they find a giant floating Citadel shaped like an angel hovers over it. There are four large towers made of the same material as the citadel dropped around the edges of the city. Lazlo and the explorers meet the despondent citizens, who are frightened by the Citadel and the shadow it casts over the city. Lazlo learns more of the history of Weep. Years earlier, blue-skinned "gods" called Mesarthim came to the Seraphim worshiping city. Using their special abilities, magical gifts, they easily took over the city. The citadel was their home and is made of a strange blue metal known as mesarthium. Skathis, leader of the Mesarthim, seems to be the only one able to control the substance. They demanded young men and women be delivered to their citadel, and would return them days, months, or years later, wiped of memories from their time in the citadel. Eril-Fane is forced to spend years with Isagol, goddess of despair. He endures this until he finds his wife Azareen was taken as well. The humans managed to kill the Mesarthim and their spawn, but the Citadel never left. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muse_of_Nightmares"title="Muse of Nightmares">
Immediately after the events of the first book, Lazlo meets the other godspawn and discovers he is Minya's brother. Minya holds Sarai's ghost as an ultimatum for Lazlo to help them massacre the city of Weep in revenge for Eril-Fane killing their parents. The other godspawn tend to the Citadel, which is still tilted and ready to fall onto the city. At some unknown point in time, sisters Kora and Nova live in a fishing village where they depend on each other for everything including survival and ability to stay resolute while the village's elders treat them cruelly and arrange forced marriages. One day, a giant ship floats over their land, and they rejoice in gods arriving to take them away. They are both taken and examined but Kora is held by them, while Nova is dumped out. Skathis, the ship's captain, indentures Kora and uses the metal mesarthium to turn her blue and awaken her tremendous powers. A vengeful Nova is arranged into a forced marriage but escapes the village, moving painstakingly through the ice to find salvation. Over time, Skathis and the gods turn to domination and use mesarthim as a resource to hold them above everybody else. They indenture more children and travel between worlds through portals in the air. Nova follows the trail through worlds over hundreds of years to recover Kora. It is revealed that the gods, once they arrived over Weep in the Citadel, raped men and women to create more gods, leading to the godspawn. Kora was killed in the massacre by Eril-Fane, who is Sarai's biological father, but managed to send her bird spirit and safely transport Lazlo and other children away from the nursery. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Sister"title="The First Sister">
In the future, Mars and Earth form a military alliance called the Geans. Their state religion is led by the Mother. Women known as Sisters serve as priestesses and comfort women to soldiers; they are made mute so they cannot betray any soldier's secrets. Venus and Mercury have a government known as the Icarii, with advanced technology that they do not share with the Geans.Lito sol Lucius is an Icarii warrior. His partner is Hiro val Akira. Hiro's father is a powerful and vindictive leader in the Icarii government. One year prior, the Icarii lost control of Ceres to the Geans. During the fighting, Lito and Hiro wounded Gean soldier Saito Ren. Ren was captured by the Icarii and later traded back to the Geans. After being assigned to kill the Mother, Hiro has gone dark. The Icarii tell Lito that they have defected.Aboard the spacecraft "Juno", the ship's First Sister is ordered to spy on new captain Saito Ren. Ren secretly wants peace with the Icarii, which makes her a traitor to the Geans. First Sister falls in love with Ren and decides to betray the Mother. The Juno lands on Ceres for a religious festival.Lito is assigned a new partner, Ofiera fon Bain. They are ordered to kill both the Mother and Hiro. Lito learns that the Icarii are experimenting on Asters, genetically modified humans who live in the asteroid belt. Ofiera's husband is an Aster currently imprisoned by the Icarii. Hiro and Ofiera have secretly been working with the Asters; Lito decides to join them. He and Ofiera infiltrate Ceres and continue the plan to kill the Mother. They meet First Sister and “Ren”. It is revealed that Ren has been replaced by Hiro; they were surgically modified by the Icarii to resemble Ren and were forced to infiltrate the Geans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flame_of_Iridar"title="The Flame of Iridar">
On the planet Mars, ten million years ago, the pirate prince Chandar, rightfully king of the island kingdom of Orm, is freed from imprisonment in the city of Shiangkor by the sinister Sarkond the Enchanter. While Sarkond ostensibly serves King Niamnon, the villain who slew Chandar's father and usurped his throne, the magician secretly has his own agenda. He plans to use Chandar's royal blood to power a talisman granting entry to Iophar, the legendary land of magic, where he hopes to gain the power to become tyrant over all Mars.Together with Chandar's pirate companion Bram and Sarkon's assistant Mnadis the Witch, The ill-sorted pair succeed in entering Iophar. They are brought for judgment before Llys, queen and high priestess to its benevolent guardian god, and the god itself, the Flame of Iridar, a sentient vortex of living fire deriving from the sun. Sarkon's malevolence is revealed and he is slain, but then Mnadis reveals her true colors; as Llys serves the Flame, so too is she the servant of its evil counterpart, the Dark Flame.A cosmic conflict between the two energy beings ensues, with the fate of the Solar System at stake. It culminates back in Shiangkor, where, with the aid of Chandar and his enchanted axe, the Flame triumphs. Restored to his throne, Chandar commences the consolidation of Mars's various kingdoms under his own rule.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deadly_Education"title="A Deadly Education">
El is a student in her junior year. In flashbacks, she reveals that her father died during graduation, sacrificing himself so that her mother Gwen, then pregnant, could escape. However, Gwen and El were rejected by her father's family when El's great-great-grandmother, a famous seer, prophesied that El would become a powerful evil sorceress. El struggles with her schoolwork, as much of what the school provides for her to learn is black magic suitable for violence and destruction, apparently confirming the prophecy. In addition, most people seem to instinctively dislike and avoid her, and she has difficulty making friends. She nevertheless becomes entangled with a fellow student named Orion Lake, whose sole interest is in hunting and killing mals and who saves her life on numerous occasions. Orion is from an enclave, an elite community of wealthy and powerful wizards whose resources keep them largely safe from mals. As such, El is initially suspicious that Orion would be interested in a "loser kid" like her; however, he seems to genuinely care about her and the two gradually become close. In addition, El eventually forms her own graduation alliance with classmates Aadhya and Liu. In the weeks leading up to graduation, El and her companions begin to find damages to the school, and determine that Orion is the cause. By saving so many students, he has disrupted the mals’ food chain, causing those remaining to be hungrier and more desperate. Accordingly, the senior class believe they will be facing an unusually difficult graduation and threaten to breach the school’s defenses entirely, loosing the maleficaria to feast on the more vulnerable younger students and allowing the seniors to escape more easily. El and her friends instead propose that on graduation day, a team of artificer students should repair the long-defunct machinery installed to cleanse the hall every year, an endeavour previously believed too dangerous to attempt. El and Orion descend with the team and fight off the attacking mals, allowing the artificers to work. Once the senior students say the machinery is repaired, they run for the gates and El and Orion return to the school, with no way of knowing whether the plan worked.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amba_Yaluwo"title="Amba Yaluwo">
The story focuses on the friendship between two youngsters, Nimal and Sunil (Sudhu Appo), and the socio-economic clashes that surround them. The story begins with Sunil stealing a mango that Nimal had picked up, on which they then fight over. Sunil remorses over his mistake and then he becomes Nimal's friend. Seeing that Nimal's family is struggling a lot, Sunil starts giving food for Nimal's family and their friendship bond becomes stronger. Though, this story is generally considered a children's novel, it provides valuable lessons for everyone in the general society. T.B. Ilangaratne has illustrated even some of the more complex social concerns through this story "Amba Yahaluwo". In this story, both Nimal and Sunil are kept apart because of their places and castes in society; Sunil comes from a higher caste and is forced to keep away from Nimal, whose father is a daily wage worker. But no matter how hard their elders try to keep them apart, the duo finds a way to see each other every day. The duo's fates are shown to be intertwined throughout the story. As an example, the novel opens with Nimal and Sunil sharing a classroom. As the story progresses, and Sunil moves to another region, Sunil's grandmother takes Nimal in as a servant, keeping both lives and stories connected.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otaku_Girl"title="Otaku Girl">
The story takes place in a virtual reality world called the Escapist Dream, a place that allows anyone who visits it to gain superhuman abilities derived from characters in films, comics, anime, video games, and other fictional media. A year before the start of the novel, the virtual reality world suffered a malfunction which trapped its visitors inside. They are then forced to fight for survival against rogue artificial intelligences who have begun attacking them.The main character of the story is GI, a teenage Japanese otaku, who is forced to fight for her life inside the Escapist Dream. The protagonist of the first novel, Charlie Anderson, also returns to assist the trapped geeks. Both GI and Charlie must fight against powerful AIs who have taken over the different areas of the Escapist Dream, such as Stan City, the place inspired by American comic book and superhero fiction; Otaku Academy, a place inspired by Japanese manga and anime; Gamer's Den, an area inspired by video games and gaming culture; and the Library, an area influenced by classic literature.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paper_Magician"title="The Paper Magician">
In the year 1902, nineteen-year-old Ceony Twill graduates from the Tagis Praff School for the Magically Inclined at the top of her class, but her dreams for the future are unexpectedly dashed. In a world where magicians can only manipulate one man-made element, Ceony is forced to study the art of "Folding"—paper magic—instead of learning how to magically smelt metal as she'd hoped. After receiving the money necessary to pay her tuition from an unknown party, she becomes an apprentice to Paper Magician Emery Thane. When she arrives at his quirky cottage, she's greeted by a paper skeleton. Paper magic turns out to be more complex and exciting than Ceony had originally thought; she is able to tell people's fortunes and make paper puppets perform. Emery even crafts her a paper dog to keep her company. He teaches Ceony the value of creating entertainment for people. Ceony also learns that Emery has participated in efforts to rid the land of those who practice blood magic (a forbidden, dark art) called "Excisioners."One day, Ceony watches as Emery's ex-wife, Lira, attacks him by ripping his heart out of his chest using blood magic. Ceony saves him by crafting a replacement heart out of paper, but she must retrieve his old heart if he is to survive. As other Excisioners begin to appear along the journey, Ceony is swept into the investigation of blood magic. She faces Lira as a part of this quest. She becomes trapped inside Emery's heart and learns about his true nature in the process. When she emerges, she again confronts Lira.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Blondes_and_Bad_Mothers"title="Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers">
The book uses analysis of horror fiction to explore the cultural idea that a woman's body is lesser or a deformed version of a man's body. Doyle quotes Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, two individuals who held this view of women. The book explores literature, film, mythology, religion and history, as well as current affairs. It is categorized into sections about daughters, wives and mothers.In the section about daughters, Doyle writes about poltergeists and demonic possessions as allegory for female puberty. They make particular reference to "The Exorcist" (1973), a film about a 12-year-old girl who is possessed—she is depicted masturbating and bleeding, with her body changing. Doyle argues that society is particularly interested in young girls being possessed as symbolism for their growing autonomy and the inability of men to control them. The film led to a resurgence of religious exorcisms being performed on adolescent women. In "Carrie" (1976), the film adaptation of Stephen King's debut novel of the same name (1974), the title character is a young girl who has begun menstruating; she is controlled by an abusive mother with a negative conception of women's bodies.Women are the primary audience for true crime stories and horror fiction; Doyle states that they are attracted to the genres as a way of processing and speaking about the systemic violence they face. Narratives about serial killers can relate to sexual violence, and slasher film endings wherein a woman kills the murderer can be emotionally appealing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispatcher"title="The Dispatcher">
In the wake of an unexplained phenomenon worldwide — when people are deliberately killed, they disappear from their site of death and reappear, reset to several hours earlier, in a safe place — the profession of "Dispatcher" evolves. Dispatchers euthanize mortally-injured people before their natural deaths, enabling them to reset. Tony Valdez is a Dispatcher recruited by the police to assist in investigating the disappearance of another Dispatcher.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter's_Orbit"title="Winter's Orbit">
Iskat is the leader of an empire comprising seven planets. Each solar system must sign a Resolution treaty and be approved by Auditors in order to secure the right to communicate with the wider galaxy. Without a valid Resolution treaty, the Iskat Empire would be immediately conquered by stronger civilizations.Prince Taam of Iskat is married to Count Jainan of Thea, a planet under Iskat's rule. Taam works on a secret government mining project, operation Kingfisher. He is killed in a flight accident. The Emperor orders Prince Kiem to marry Jainan. Kiem is the Emperor's least favorite grandchild, as well as Taam's cousin.After an awkward wedding, Kiem and Jainan are interviewed by the Auditor. The Auditor refuses to confirm the pair as Resolution treaty representatives, claiming that Taam was murdered. Jainan finds documentation that Taam's final flight log was doctored, and the pair learns that Jainan is being investigated for the murder. With help from Aren Saffer, a military officer and Taam's friend, they find evidence that Taam was embezzling military funds. They are ordered to stop investigating and fly back to the Imperial Palace, but their flybug crashes. In the trek back to civilization, Kiem and Jainan begin a true romantic relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Vivek_Oji"title="The Death of Vivek Oji">
The novel is set in southeastern Nigeria during the 1980s and ’90s. The novel begins with the death of Vivek Oji and is told through a series of flashback in a nonlinear narrative. Born on the day of his grandmother, Ahunna's, death, Vivek becomes solidified to her by the starfish-shaped scar on Vivek's foot that resembles Ahunna’s, Vivek’s grandmother. Raised by a distant father and an understanding but overprotective mother, Vivek suffers disorienting blackouts, moments of disconnection between self and surroundings. As adolescence gives way to adulthood, Vivek finds solace in friendships with the warm, boisterous daughters of the Nigerwives, foreign-born women married to Nigerian men.But Vivek's closest bond is with Osita, the worldly, high-spirited cousin whose teasing confidence masks a guarded private life. As their relationship deepens—and Osita struggles to understand Vivek's escalating crisis—the mystery gives way to a heart-stopping act of violence in a moment of exhilarating freedom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intimacies"title="Intimacies">
An unnamed woman leaves New York City, where her father recently died, and moves to The Hague, Netherlands to work as an interpreter at the International Criminal Court. The woman is assigned to interpret for the former president of a West African country on trial for war crimes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mulberry_Empire"title="The Mulberry Empire">
The story opens in Kabul with Alexander Burnes and his two travel companions stewing away in ennui as they await an audience with Dost Mohammad Khan. Effectively under house arrest, they have spent weeks inside the residence of the Newab Jubbur Khan, a brother of the Dost. Eventually the Englishmen are allowed into the Bala Hissar. A seasoned traveller fluent in Persian, Burnes considers himself well-versed in dealing with oriental potentates, but is floored by the intelligence and depth of Dost Mohammad, who constantly peppers him with questions regarding the outside world.In London, the beautiful ingenue Bella Garraway accompanies her opium addict of a father to a dinner party at the mansion of aging socialite Lady Woodcourt. There she runs into Burnes, the soiree's guest of honour, now famous as a result of his bestselling account of his travels. Burnes manages to obtain Bella's permission to visit her at her father's London House. As the evening wears on he interacts with Stokes, a disagreeable newspaper editor professing an anti-imperialism outlook who deplores the jingoistic sentiments Burnes's book has generated among readers.After a lapse of some weeks, Burnes eventually calls on Bella, beginning a courtship that is indirect, consisting solely of witty repartees, for several more months. Only when it nears the time for Burnes's return to India do the two openly display their feelings for one another. This leads Burnes to drag Bella to the London wharfs, where he waxes lyrical about the wonders of global trade. The couple then head back to Bella's, where they proceed to have sex.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grave_(play)"title="The Grave (play)">
The playwright creates a supernatural and mysterious atmosphere in the graveyard. The whole incident takes place inside the graveyard. The play moves forward through the dialogue between The Leader and Inspector Hafiz in a semi-drunk state. Suddenly, Murda Fakir appears like an incorporeal soul. Both The Leader and Hafiz fear him in their minds. Apparently there is a combination of madness in his words but it is the exterior of the play. His every word is metaphorical. The cry in his chest is the cry of conscience, the cry of the country and the nation. After saying goodbye to The Leader and Hafiz, Fakir goes some distance and comes back and says, “Smell! The smell of dead bodies on you! What are you doing here? Go, hurry to the grave! You want to have fun by sending them to the grave by trickery, don’t you? No, this will not work in my state.”&lt;br&gt;Those whom they have unjustly killed are alive and well. That is why the corpses do not want to enter the grave, they rebel. They protested Hafiz’s words, saying, “It’s a lie. We are not dead. We did not want to die. We will not die...we will not go to the grave.”
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_a_Mad_Old_Man_(novel)"title="Diary of a Mad Old Man (novel)">
Utsugi Tokosuke is a 77-year-old invalid, recovering from a stroke that has paralyzed his hand. He lives in Tokyo with his wife (unnamed), son Jokichi and daughter-in-law Satsuko, in a large house in surroundings of wealth and comfort. His married daughters Kugako and Itsuko, and their young children, visit him occasionally, though he is cold toward them. As the book progresses, it becomes clear that Tokosuke is erotically obsessed with his daughter-in-law Satsuko, although he is impotent. In return for various expensive gifts, Satsuko permits him to kiss parts of her body, particularly her lower legs. The book culminates as Tokosuke plans to have Satsuko’s footprints carved in stone upon his tomb when he dies. The book contains numerous descriptions of medical procedures and treatments, and ends in a series of short accounts given by his private nurse, doctor and daughter Itsuko. Tokosuke is still alive at the end of the book, and it is unclear whether his funerary plans have been carried out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramage's_Signal"title="Ramage's Signal">
The novel commences with the "Calypso" sailing inshore off the Camargue region and the sighting of an isolated semaphore station. The outward appearance of "Calypso", a former French frigate, causes no alarm. Ramage captures the station bloodlessly. It passes signals between the main French naval base at Toulon and the Spanish base at Cartagena. Ramage mans it with a detachment of his crew, to gather intelligence.Signals report a merchant convoy of ships assembled at Barcelona, bound for Marseilles, Genoa and Leghorn. Ramage intercepts the most recent message from Barcelona, complaining that the escort frigates have not arrived. Ramage sends a false signal, ordering the Barcelona convoy to sail and rendezvous with the escort off the "Baie de Foix", the vicinity of the captured signal station. The convoy of fifteen ships falls for the ruse and arrives. The problem facing Ramage is, what to do next. He lacks the crew to man the merchant ships as prizes, guard the prisoners taken and safely escort them to the British base at Gibraltar. Ramage devises a plan that is revealed as the story progresses.Ramage issues revised orders to the merchant ship's master's. The orders are delivered by Midshipman Orsini, who speaks fluent French. The convoy sails to assemble at a safe but remote anchorage off the south of Sardinia. This does not arouse suspicion in the merchantmen but takes them away from the mainland and possible intervention by the French. In the course of the leg to Sardinia, Ramage has the smallest and most lively of the merchantmen, the tartane "Passe Partout", boarded and taken over. Ramage contrives for the convoy to arrive piecemeal at their destination anchorage so that he is able to board and capture each merchantman as they arrive without raising alarm in the remainder. He disposes of the prisoner problem by landing them on the remote Sardinian shore.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Graphic_Design"title="The History of Graphic Design">
"The History of Graphic Design" outlines the development of graphic design as a field and explores cultural history from the late 19th through the early 21st Century through the lens of graphic design. The evolution of graphic design from posters and advertising to logos, magazine design and corporate identity. The books include thousands of the most seminal works and designs in the field, as well as biographies of some of the most influential graphic designers. Chapters are arranged in chronological order, and are illustrated by visual timelines which provide cultural and historical context for seminal graphic designs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ramage_Touch"title="The Ramage Touch">
Ramage has been given orders for an independent fighting cruise of the Mediterranean to capture sink or destroy as many enemy ships as he can and generally create havoc. His ship, HMS "Calypso" is perhaps the only British presence in the Mediterranean at the time. The "Calypso" is a former French frigate. With her French lines and still rigged with French-cut sails, she is well suited to such an endeavor. The novel opens at night, with the "Calypso" sailing off the Tuscan coast, near Punta Ala. Two oddly rigged ships are sighted coming to anchor for the night in the lee of the headland."Calypso's" arrival at the same anchorage later that night rouses no alarm and the two ships are easily boarded and captured. Their strange rig is because they are bomb ketches. Each is armed with two large calibre mortars that fire exploding shells, intended to batter shore installations. Interrogating the senior captain, Ramage learns that they were to rendezvous with two French frigates further down the coast at Porto Ercole – approximately sailing. The frigates are to embark troops and the ships are to sail to the western Mediterranean. It appears likely that an invasion force is assembling. Regardless, Ramage sees an opportunity to disrupt Bonaparte's plans. He mans the two ketches from his crew and quickly trains them to proficiently employ the unfamiliar mortars.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vanished_Birds"title="The Vanished Birds">
About one thousand years before the main events of the story, Earth's ecology collapses. Fumiko Nakajima is a scientist who designs space stations for a massive business conglomerate called Umbai. She chooses to leave her lover Dana behind as a privileged group of humans escapes Earth.On the resource world Umbai-V, a young boy named Kaeda meets Captain Nia Imani. Every fifteen years, her ship visits his planet. Because of time dilation, each fifteen-year period takes only a few months for Nia. Over the course of Kaeda's life, they meet sporadically. When Kaeda is an old man, a young boy appears from nowhere, surrounded by the wreckage of a ship. Months later, Kaeda passes custody of the boy to Nia. He gives the boy a flute which was originally gifted to him by Nia.Fumiko, having lived almost a millennium with the assistance of cryogenic sleep, hires Nia to care for the child. Fumiko believes he possesses the ability to Jaunt, meaning to travel through space instantaneously and without time dilation. Nia and her crew agree to raise the boy for fifteen years outside of the knowledge of Umbai, waiting to see if his powers will manifest. Initially the boy appears mute, but he and Nia bond through music. The boy reveals that his name is Ahro. He was a slave on a generation ship crewed by musicians before a kind crew member helped him escape. Nia raises Ahro for the next four years. He eventually learns to Jaunt, returning to Umbai-V among other worlds. Fumiko's Umbai contract prohibits her from working outside the company. When her secret research base is discovered, the company murders her workers, stranding her alone and without power.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Matter_(Crouch_novel)"title="Dark Matter (Crouch novel)">
Jason Dessen, a former quantum mechanics physicist, is a college physics professor who lives in Chicago with his wife, Daniela and their son Charlie. One day Jason is kidnapped and drugged. He wakes up in a science laboratory and stumbles out of a metal cube. He discovers that he is in an alternate Chicago where, fifteen years previously, he had decided not to marry Daniela and had pursued his career as a physicist instead. In this world he built the cube that enables the occupants to move between the countless worlds created from every possible outcome of every event.Jason is held and questioned by the scientists. They believe he is the Jason from this world, referred to as Jason2, and is the first person to successfully return from a journey in the cube. Jason learns that Jason2 was his abductor who came to Jason's world to see what his life would have been like had he abandoned his career and married Daniela. Jason2 sent Jason to Jason2's world so that Jason2 could pretend to be Daniela's husband.Determined to return to his own Chicago and his wife and son, Jason and Jason2's therapist, Amanda, escape and enter the cube. Unfamiliar with its operation, they find themselves transported to a number of parallel worlds. Eventually, Jason reaches his own world, where he finds Jason2 living with his wife and son. He convinces Daniela and Charlie that he is the real Jason, and takes them into hiding to evade Jason2. Jason2 finds Jason and attempts to kill him, but Jason mortally wounds his rival. To avoid the other belligerent Jasons who were created each time Jason, while navigating the alternate worlds, made a decision, he flees with his family to the cube to start a new life in another world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_Her_Fly"title="Let Her Fly">
As a child, Yousafzai had a stammer, was dark-skinned and not from a wealthy family; he was bullied at school. His imam father, who believed in the importance of male education, was disappointed that he did not become a doctor. Yousafzai had two particularly formative experiences with women's oppression in his childhood: a cousin of his was shot after leaving an abusive husband; and a girl in his village was murdered in an honour killing for loving a boy her family disapproved of. The book quotes a poem Yousafzai wrote aged 20, addressed to a hypothetical future daughter of his.Yousafzai pursued a master's degree and began a relationship with his future wife, Toor Pekai. He aimed for his wife to have more freedom and equality than most wives in his community. With around (), he founded a school which began with only three students. His focus was on girls' education. He worked in a large primary school and high schools; with his daughter, he would travel and talk about the value of female schooling. After Malala was shot, she was taken to a hospital in the United Kingdom, where the family had to remain. Yousafzai found it difficult to raise his sons in the UK, viewing them as less obedient than he was as a child, but he became gradually less controlling of them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuroi_Ushio"title="Kuroi Ushio">
After the violent death of Sadanori Shimoyama, president of the Japanese National Railways, journalist Hayami, who works for the fictitious newspaper "K", is entrusted with the task of managing the coverage of the case. While rivaling newspapers advocate a murder theory, Hayami, who resents sensationalism, interprets the evidence and unofficial statements by police officers as suicide, for which he faces criticism by superiors and readers. During the investigations, Hayami thinks back to the death of his young wife Harumi 16 years ago, who committed suicide with another man, leaving behind no explanatory letter but only a short message telling him that she loves him. He also has repeated meetings with his former art teacher Usan, who wants him to help publish a book on ancient cloth colouring techniques. Usan offers him his daughter Keiko, who appears to be interested in Hayami, as a wife. The Shimoyama case eventually remains unsolved, and Hayami decides against the prospect of marrying Keiko.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Company_of_a_Poet"title="In the Company of a Poet">
"In the Company of a Poet" features extensive conversations between its author Nasreen Munni Kabir and the filmmaker, lyricist, and poet Gulzar, relating to his life and career. Gulzar was born in a Sikh family as Sampooran Singh Kalra on 18 August 1934 in Dina, British India (now Pakistan). His father, Makhan Singh Kalra, was a Sardar and had married thrice (having a son and two daughters from a first marriage with Raaj) before his marriage to who later became Gulzar's mother, Sujaan Kaur. Gulzar said to Kabir that he is Kaur's only child as his mother died several months after giving birth. The book later extensively chronicles his Bollywood cinematic—mostly that of lyricist—and Urdu-language poetic career. He particularly speaks about his poetries, how he wrote his first poetry when he was at age ten, and later started a career as a poet. In 1973, Gulzar married to actress Raakhee, with whom he has a daughter named Meghna (who would become a filmmaker as well).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Kimchi_for_Me!"title="No Kimchi for Me!">
Yoomi, the youngest of three, loves to eat the food her grandmother makes for her, except for kimchi, which she finds to be "stinky" and "spicy". Due to Yoomi's distaste for kimchi, her brothers belittle her, calling her a baby.In an attempt to show her brothers they are wrong, Yoomi attempts to eat kimchi with a variety of other food, such as pizza slices and cookies, but to no avail. Yoomi's grandmother then decides to help by teaching the kitten how to make a savory kimchi pancake, which all the siblings end up liking.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sometimes_I_Trip_on_How_Happy_We_Could_Be"title="Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be">
The book is a collection of essays about Nichole Perkins' life experiences, including childhood memories, that relate to her perspective as a Black woman and the influence of pop culture on her development. Essay topics include her family, religion, past experiences of depression, her crush on Niles Crane, and the ways that musical icon Prince's music stoked her earliest feelings of sexual desire. Perkins writes about her sexual experiences and past romantic relationships.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Psalm_for_the_Wild-Built"title="A Psalm for the Wild-Built">
On a moon called Panga where AI and robots are a distant myth, Dex is an adventurous and friendly tea monk who travels the human-populated areas of their moon meeting villagers and townsfolk. Dex custom-blends tea fit to the folks' needs and personalities, and they confide their misgivings to the monk. One day Dex, seeking a change in their routine, travels into the wild and meets a robot named Splendid Speckled Mosscap and they are thrown into a road-trip with a question on their minds: "What do people need?"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like_Water_(novel)"title="Like Water (novel)">
Savannah Espinoza lives in a small town in New Mexico where most young adults leave in search for better opportunities in other cities. Espinoza's plan was to try applying for a scholarship based on her swimming skills, but at her final year of school, her father learns he has Huntington's disease. Espinoza decides to stay and help with the family's restaurant, instead of pursuing a degree, and she begins going out with any boy that shows interest.Eventually, Savannah meets Lucas and his sister, Leigh, whose family had just moved in to the city. She finds herself sexually attracted to Leigh. The two teenagers begin a relationship, which causes Savannah to question her sexual identity. Although the two love each other, the relationship is filled with challenges due to Leigh's "mischievous and daring" personality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Doll"title="The Fifth Doll">
Matrona Vitsin is a twenty-six-year-old woman who lives in a small village. Ever since her younger sister mysteriously vanished as a baby, Matrona has had to shoulder much of the responsibility in running the family dairy. Matrona's parents are overjoyed that Feodor, the local butcher, is willing to marry their daughter. Matrona, however, has feelings for Jaska, the village potter. She has never divulged this secret to anyone—not even her best friend, Roksana.While out on an errand, Matrona ventures into the house of Slava, the local tradesman, who has a room full of Matryoshka dolls, each one painted to look just like a member of the village. When Slava discovers that Matrona has seen the dolls, he chooses her to be his successor as keeper of the dolls. She is tasked with opening the layers of her doll one by one. Upon opening the first doll, all of Matrona's secrets are divulged to the entire town, including her feelings for Jaska. The second doll offers an internal attack, conjuring up all of the negative thoughts Matrona's ever had about herself. Realizing she can't move forward with Slava's plan for her, she tries to escape the village, only to discover it's trapped in a loop. Confused and frustrated, Matrona turns to Jaska; she tells him about the dolls, and he believes her. Opening Matrona's third doll brings her visions of a city and snow, which she's never seen before. Jaska asks her to open his first doll, and she does so, exposing his secrets—including his feelings for Matrona. Slava finds out what she's done, and tells Matrona of the dangers of opening all of the dolls at once. Matrona then goes to find her friend Roksana, who has discovered the dolls and opened hers all at once, resulting in her losing her mind. Matrona mourns for her friend. She manages to open Jaska's second doll without Slava noticing; she goes to comfort him as he undergoes the same mental torment she did, and the two share a kiss.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up,_into_the_Singing_Mountain"title="Up, into the Singing Mountain">
Leaving South Wales, Huw travels to Liverpool where he boards the ship "Geraint" and travels to the Welsh-speaking colony of Patagonia.Settling in the City of Lewis, Huw sets up a workshop, funded by his landlady, Widow Gwyn, and has success making furniture and fittings for houses. Huw meets the Corwen family, a widowed man with three daughters, the eldest of whom, Lal, Huw falls in love with. She is hesitant to marry him and her violent father, Vrann, has plans to marry her off to other farmers to get their land. As time passes, Huw encounters similar prejudices as those found at home from the religious elders of the city, known as 'The Twelve'. Despite being in love with Lal, he begins a sexual relationship with Gwyn. Lal becomes distant with him and Gwyn expects marriage. When Huw refuses to marry her, Gwyn throws him out of her house.Setting up a workshop elsewhere, Huw is reconciled with Lal and they talk of marriage, though Lal wants her share of the family farm agreeing first. Huw finds himself clashing with The Twelve and his progress in buying land for a farm impeded. After threatening a farmer who Huw thought was trying to con him over the sale of his farm, Huw is summoned to appear before The Twelve. They find Huw innocent of the charges put against him but the votes were not unanimous.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamer_(novel)"title="Flamer (novel)">
The novel is set in 1995, when Aiden Navarro, a 14-year-old Filipino American teenager, goes through the last week of a Boy Scouts summer camp, before having to return home. Having just finished Catholic middle school, where he was constantly bullied for being overweight, biracial, and queer, Navarro is excited for his trip to the summer camp, where he has always felt appreciated by his friends as a good scout. Aiden considers the Boys Scout camp to be a safe space, where things are peaceful and predictable. He also enjoys going to the summer camp since it means being far from his abusive father.Things are different this year, as the other boys he is spending time with are going through puberty, and spend their time trying to prove to each other who is more manly, which includes the use of homophobic slurs. Although Aiden attempts to be like these boys, his inability to fit in leaves him especially frustrated and upset.While there, Aiden also writes to his pen pal, a girl named Violet, with whom he is very close and feels comfortable sharing more intimate subjects. In his letters, Aiden talks about the things he was taught in Catholic school, how homosexuality is morally wrong, and his romantic feelings for another camper, Elias.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Even_As_We_Breathe"title="Even As We Breathe">
During the summer in 1942, 19-year-old Cherokee Cowney Sequoyah thinks of leaving on his own to work as a groundskeeper at the Grove Park Inn and Resort in Asheville, North Carolina. However, he is worried about leaving his grandmother who took care of him after his parents died when he was an infant. Cowney also wants to leave his uncle, who makes fun of Cowney's disabled foot. Cowney decides to take the job when he discovers that his crush, Essie Stamper, is employed there. After taking the job, Cowney's coworkers treat him terribly for being Native American although Cowney does not let the abuse affect him. The people at the inn are held there for government surveillance as World War II continues. Despite being treated like guests, the people there are technically prisoners.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_Heart_for_a_Compass"title="Her Heart for a Compass">
“Heavens, do you not regret anything you’ve done?” asks the Duchess. It’s a spring afternoon in England, and perched in a corner of Royal Lodge, the sprawling cottage orné built in 1662 that was once inhabited by King George IV.Margaret’s hair is frequently featured, it’s variously a “rebellious red mop”, a “sodden mass of rebellious curls”, a “scarlet flag, wild curls whipping around her face”, and “burnished autumn leaves”.Drawing on many parallels from the authors life for the historical tale, Lady Margaret Montagu Douglas Scott was pictured in a Victorian-style floor-length outfit, complete with high-necked blouse, jacket and gloves, sitting on a stone bench gazing at a compass she held out in front of her, the Lady – although her family, the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, were close friends with the Queen and the Prince, the Duke’s ex-wife and the Queen’s former in-law – struggled to come to terms with the rigorous disciplines of royal life after marrying, and that their second daughter, Margaret, was a redhead with a birthday “within a few days” of her own.The real details of Margaret’s own life are scant; described in gossip rags as a “Titian-haired breath of fresh Scotch air”, was “15 years in the making”. Beginning when she discovered romance, her heroine’s ‘rebellious’ red hair is much more of a feature, that depicts her as a woman who is initially the toast of London in the Duchess’ historical novel, than sex. The Fleet Street papers initially loved her raunchy edge but eventually decided it was more vulgar than charming. “It was always that I was portrayed as the sinner,” she says.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cu_hulu"title="Cu hulu">
Having unsuccessfully tried for 40 years to conceive with her henpecked husband Cheng Gui (), Dushi () finally permits him to have a concubine. Unfortunately, Cheng finds a woman with an "impenetrable vagina". After discovering that Cheng is having an affair with their maidservant, Dushi flogs her to apparent death. However, the woman survives and Cheng arranges for her to stay with his friend. She subsequently gives birth to a boy, while Dushi is cheated of her money by her godson and sent to Hell. Dushi eventually repents and makes amends with her maidservant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossroads_(novel)"title="Crossroads (novel)">
"Crossroads" follows Russ and Marion Hildebrandt, whose marriage is close to collapse, and their four children, Clem, Becky, Perry, and Judson. Each chapter is told from the perspective of one of the Hildebrandts, and most are set in the fictional New Prospect Township of suburban Chicago.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenlou_zhi"title="Shenlou zhi">
The novel takes place in the Ming dynasty. Guangzhou native Su Jishi (), also referred to by his childhood moniker Xiaoguan (), is unwilling to follow in the footsteps of his father, a "Cohong" merchant, preferring to lead a hedonistic lifestyle instead. Su's father is continuously extorted by the corrupt tax officer He (), who has dozens of concubines alongside forty-odd prostitutes in his employ. Seizing upon the fact that He is unable to sexually satisfy his women, heterodox monk Mola () kidnaps and impregnates them one by one. Meanwhile, Su has an affair with his future sister-in-law, who later leaves him for a more well-endowed lover. Su is introduced to fellatio by courtesan Ru (), and he subsequently has a threesome with her and prostitute Yerong (). Throughout the novel, Su seeks to improve his sexual prowess; he finally becomes a "man of infinite capacity" after encountering a Tibetan monk who supplies him with some aphrodisiacs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_There_a_God?"title="Is There a God?">
## Introduction to the revised edition.Swinburne discusses objections by theologians to his concept of God compared to the traditional Christian God, whether God is supposed to be totally incomprehensible or not. The Trinity is explained elsewhere. Swinburne compares the wave-particle duality of electrons in physics to the interpretation of God either as a person or as an impersonal power.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bullfight_(novella)"title="The Bullfight (novella)">
Tsugami, the ambitious editor-in-chief of a small Osaka evening newspaper, is talked by event manager Tashiro into presenting a bull fighting event in the sports stadium of the war-scarred city. At the same time, young widow Sakiko, with whom Tsugami has an extramarital affair, threatens to end their relationship because of his emotional coldness. Tashiro introduces Tsugami to factory owner Okabe, who helps with his various connections to authorities and other businesses, while using the venture for his own black market trades. Businessman Miura, who wants to promote his company's pharmacy products, offers to buy all available tickets with a 20 percent discount, which would secure the financing, but is rejected by Tsugami and his boss Otome. An unexpected rain brings the start of the event to a halt, and only on the third and last day, a modest number of spectators attends the bull fights. For a short moment, Sakiko imagines she can reach out to the temporarily defeated Tsugami, but once he regains his self-confidence, he falls back into his usual detachment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Women_and_Frogs"title="Of Women and Frogs">
"Of Women and Frogs" is a novel about Esi, a Nigerian-Ghanaian teenager, which tells about some of the challenges girls in Ghana and Africa at large. As described by "The Lagos Review", "The themes Adjapon examines in this amazing work include deceit, heartbreak, domestic violence, deaths, failure of leadership, military dictatorship and abuse of power."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_the_Storm"title="Son of the Storm">
The novel takes place in the fictional continent of Oon, which is presumably pre-colonial Africa, inhabited by three distinct people: Mainlanders, Desertlander and Shashis; a combination of Mainlanders and Desertlanders. In the continent, Bassa is featured to be the strongest among the whole city-countries in the continent. The country is mainly inhabited by the Bassai, with immigrants who have to pass through different stages of Castes in the country. The Yalekutés who are not allowed to study, act as helpers known as Seconds to the Bassais and Pokotin caste as the working-class immigrants who are not allowed to study either.Danso, a shashi who is allowed to study because he was caught with the codex of Nogowu the mad Emperor of Bassa discovers that the things he learnt as a Jali Novitiate in the University of Bassa were actually true and not tales and myths as posed by the Jali Elders when a yellow skin from the Nameless Islands is seen in Bassa. Nem the Fixer lays her hand on the grey ibor; learning how to use it. She kills the Speaker of the nation of Bassa and made the city-country to believe it was the yellowskin.The yellowskin, who is injured from a fight with Nem goes to Danso’s house. Danso, who is supposed to be with his intended – Esheme – the daughter of Nem the Fixer, helps the yellowskin escape from Bassa with his Second – Zaq – through the Breathing Forest. On their journey through the forest, a lightning bat known as a Skopi attacks them. The yellowskin, Lilong, who is a amber iborworker kills it with her blade. The Skopi gets on to Danso, thus activating the red ibor in his hand – giving him the power to control the bat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mechanics_of_Yenagoa"title="The Mechanics of Yenagoa">
"The Mechanics of Yenagoa" is about Ebinimi a Mechanic in Yenagoa. It explores the dynamics between working-class people and the day-to-day activities of the people of Yenagoa.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voice_(novel)"title="The Voice (novel)">
The novel is set in the 1960s, in post-independence Igboland in Nigeria. After studying, Okolo returns home to seek the truth. The Chiefs exile him for fear that he might topple them down.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becoming_Abigail"title="Becoming Abigail">
"Becoming Abigail" shares the story of Abigail, a young Nigerian girl whose mother died at childbirth. Her father commits suicide after raising her up. She travels to London with Peter where she finds out that she is alone and that she does not exist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_Girl"title="Sugar Girl">
Ralia is the daughter of a blind woman and a man with a broken back who goes missing in the forest while arranging firewood and is taken in by an old witch who offers her accomdation in return for Ralia’s singing voice.Fews days later Ralia runs away from the witch house. She is taken in by a hunter and his family which Ralia befriends the hunter daughter.One day while playing together, She is knocked down by a prince who takes her his home to nurse her.After recovering Ralia is taken back home to her village where she reunites with her parents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sacrifice_(Oates_novel)"title="The Sacrifice (Oates novel)">
On October 7, 1987, in Pascayne, New Jersey, a badly beaten young Black woman is discovered in the cellar of an abandoned factory. She is partially naked and caked in dried blood with feces smeared in her hair and racial slurs written on her body in marker. The ambulance crew notes a few details that they find odd: she seems to be pretending to be unconscious, and the words written on her body are upside-down.At the hospital, she is identified as Sybilla Frye, a 15-year-old girl who has been missing for the past several days. Sybilla's mother, Ednetta, arrives at the hospital and demands that they release Sybilla into her custody. She refuses to allow a rape kit to be administered to Sybilla, but consents to a police interview on the condition that the police officer be a Black woman. Sybilla communicates to the assigned officer, a young Puerto Rican woman named Ines Iglesias, that she was abducted, raped, and left for dead by a group of five or six white police officers. As Sybilla is largely uncommunicative and Ednetta is hostile to Iglesias, the interview ends quickly, and Ednetta insists on taking Sybilla home.Ednetta takes Sybilla to Sybilla's grandmother's house to hide and refuses to tell the police where she is. She tries to conceal the attack from Anis Schutt, her common-law husband who has harbored a deep hatred of the police since they killed his brother, and she rebuffs the entreaties of neighbors and civil rights lawyers to pursue the case against the police.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_If_It's_Us"title="What If It's Us">
## "What If It's Us".Arthur was sent on a coffee run in NYC when he noticed a cute boy. He follows him into a nearby Post Office and gets to know that he is gay too, and he's mailing back a box of his ex-boyfriend's stuff after their recent breakup. Arthur's heart soars but before they can really talk, they are separated by a flash mob. Upset that he did not get the guy's name, Arthur starts to leave but suddenly finds a ripped piece of the mailing label on the ground and decides to track him down (believing his name to be Hudson). Ben, who was unable to mail the break-up box because it would be too expensive (and maybe because he still hadn't moved on), heads to his best friend Dylan's house to hang out, where Dylan reveals that he has met a barista, that he really likes, named Samantha.Arthur video chats his friends Ethan and Jessie who are back in Georgia and tells them about the post office incident and they encourage him to post on Craigslist's "missed connections" as a way to find Hudson. When this is unsuccessful, Arthur accepts that he is probably never going to find that boy. But while grabbing lunch with his co-workers Juliet and Namrata, Arthur hears the server call the name Hudson Robinson and his heart skips a beat. He is disappointed when he does not recognize the boy but later guesses that Hudson might be the name of the ex-boyfriend. He looks up Hudson's Instagram and manages to find one picture of the cute boy where he was wearing a shirt with a ‘Dream N Bean’ Coffee logo on it. But unfortunately, he was untagged. In one last-ditch effort, Arthur hangs a poster for a missing person in ‘Dream N Bean’ Coffee.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magana_Jari_Ce"title="Magana Jari Ce">
The novel tells a story of a young prince and his parrot pet known as "Aku", it also depicts royalist and royal life within Hausa emirates, where royalist struggle for royal title inheritance, which makes them optimistic to make plans to inherit imperial, royal and noble ranks. The story begins with a story of a rich emir who has a kingdom but unfortunately doesn't have a child that will inherit his wealth and become the future king. Fortunately for the emir, a traditional sheikh dreams that if the emir will gather together 40 imams to pray for him for about 40 days, God will answer their prayers and bless him with a child. The result was the birth of Musa, the young crown prince and heir to the throne. At about 12 years of age, an emir from Sinari kingdom send his visier to Emir Abdurahman, the father of Musa, proposing a marriage engagement between his daughter Princess Sinaratu and Prince Musa. This is the marriage proposal that upset Sarki Abdurahman, which makes him disgraced the visier of Sinari by telling him unpleasant statement and send him out of his kingdom disgraced.Upon what happened the visier to Sarki Abdurahman tends to join hand with Sarkin Sinari to fight his own emir in return of a throne, he sent his slave to direct them into the kingdom by following unknown route to come inside the kingdom and overthrow the emir. The plan was unsuccessful and Emir Abdurahman wished to retaliate. As Sarki Abdulrahman must leave to go to war, he left his visier on the throne to rule over the kingdom, not knowing that his visier is a traitor to the kingdom.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruwan_Bagaja"title="Ruwan Bagaja">
In the beginning of the novel "Ruwan Bagaja", it starts with a quest story of a young man who set out on an adventure to find "Ruwan Bagaja" (Water of Cure). He travels through many places, kingdoms, deserts and saw many wonders of Earth. At some point, he was told that no human had ever been able to reach it for centuries and due to this dry spell without actual contact with it, the reality of "Ruwan Bagaja" slowly faded away into a myth, becoming a fairy tale as if it never existed. The protagonist however insisted that if the water of cure did indeed exist, then he sees no reason to give up searching for it. He left everything behind in search of "Ruwan Bajaga."
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Maison_Nucingen"title="La Maison Nucingen">
The story is told in the first person by an anonymous narrator. In the private dining room of a famous Parisian restaurant, the narrator overhears the conversation of four journalists in the next room, Andoche Finot, Émile Blondet, Couture and Jean-Jacques Bixiou, all recurring characters in "La Comédie humaine".They comment and speculate about the wealth of Eugène de Rastignac who they remember was poor when he first arrived in Paris. Bixiou tells the others that Rastignac owes his wealth to his dealings with Maison Nucingen, the famous Parisian bank run by Baron de Nucingen. Rastignac is the lover of Nucingen's wife Delphine. Nucingen pretends to be ignorant of this, but also decides to use Rastignac. Nucingen thinks that "capital is a power only when you are very much richer than other people", which is why he embarks on complex operations which can be summed up as follows: he raises the prices of securities and buys them back after having them artificially lowered. He even goes so far as to use men well regarded in the Parisian sphere, of which Rastignac is a part, to believe in his imminent ruin and to fuel the panic which then allows him to speculate. Nucingen has the art of combining false bankruptcies, advancing his pawns in the form of straw men. He can then buy back at a very low price the stocks that he had initially sold at higher prices.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaults_of_Secrets"title="Vaults of Secrets">
"Vaults of Secrets" is a collection of short stories with political interpretations regarding to the governance of Nigeria.The 10 short stories include:
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off_the_Page_(novel)"title="Off the Page (novel)">
Delilah, a 15-year-old teenager, bookworm and social outcast, is obsessed with a fairy tale story about Prince Oliver called "Between the Lines". No one is able to understand Delilah's obsession with a book written for children. Delilah's parents are divorced, and her best friend is a punk-rocker named Jules, who is an outcast of her own choosing. Oliver and Delilah falls in and soon, Delilah discovers she can bring him out of the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trent's_Last_Case"title="Trent's Last Case">
Sigsbee Manderson, a wealthy American plutocrat, is found shot dead in the grounds of his English country house. Philip Trent, an artist, freelance journalist, and amateur detective, is commissioned by Sir James Molloy, a Fleet Street press magnate, to investigate and report on the case. Trent receives the co-operation of the police – the investigating officer, Inspector Murch of Scotland Yard is an old acquaintance – and is able to view the body, examine the house and grounds, and interview those involved. Other members of the household include Manderson's wife, Mabel; his two secretaries, Calvin Bunner, an American, and John Marlowe, an Englishman; Martin, a manservant; and Célestine, a lady's maid. Nathaniel Cupples, Mabel's uncle-by-marriage and another old friend of Trent, is staying at a hotel in the village.Trent pursues his enquiries, and learns that the Mandersons' marriage was in difficulties and that the couple had grown distant from each other. In the course of his investigation, he falls in love with Mabel Manderson. The coroner's inquest finds that Manderson was killed by a person or persons unknown: the suggestion is that he was the victim of a business vendetta. Trent, however, concludes that Manderson was shot by Marlowe, who then returned to the house wearing some of Manderson's outer clothing in order to give the impression that Manderson was at that point still alive, before driving to Southampton to provide himself with an alibi. Trent believes that Marlowe's motive was his own love for Mabel, but is unclear as to how far she may have reciprocated in these feelings. He writes down his ideas in the form of a dispatch for Molloy, but before sending it presents it to Mabel and asks whether there had been anything between her and Marlowe. Her reaction persuades him that there had been, and he leaves the dispatch unsent.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Libertine"title="I, Libertine">
"I, Libertine" tells the story of a social climber who styles himself as Lance Courtenay. Most of the plot is closely based on the life of Elizabeth Chudleigh. An afterword states that "The story of Elizabeth Chudleigh is substantially true ...", which could easily be taken as being part of the hoax, ironically.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waverley_(novel)"title="Waverley (novel)">
## Background.It is the time of the Jacobite uprising of 1745 which sought to restore the Stuart dynasty in the person of Charles Edward Stuart, known as "Bonnie Prince Charlie". A young English dreamer and soldier, Edward Waverley, is sent to Scotland that year. He journeys north from his aristocratic family home, Waverley-Honour, in the south of England, first to the Scottish Lowlands and the home of family friend Baron Bradwardine, then into the Highlands and the heart of the rebellion and its aftermath.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vampire_Lestat"title="The Vampire Lestat">
The book opens with Lestat coming out of the ground in the 1980s after a decades long sleep, awakened by a Rock and Roll band named "Satan's night out." He reveals he is a vampire to them, but they think he is joking, as in this universe "Interview with the Vampire" has been published as a novel. He then decides to become a rock star and reveal vampires to humans. But first, he decides to write an autobiography, which makes up the majority of the rest of the book.His in-universe autobiography opens with him, an impoverished noble in the 18th century Auvergne countryside, killing a pack of wolves. His mother tells him she is dying soon after, and encourages him to see Nicolas de Lenfent, a violinist who has been to Paris. He does so, and they become lovers. They escape to Paris to become actors, gaining a job at a theater. Lestat is kidnapped and bitten by the reclusive elder vampire Magnus, who kills himself that night but leaves Lestat with a castle and a vast fortune. Lestat abandons Nicolas for fear of causing him harm and shuns his loved ones. Instead, he showers them with gifts and riches from his newfound wealth as a means to compensate for his new hermetic lifestyle. Lestat's mother, Gabrielle, dying of consumption, arrives to see him. In order to save her, Lestat transforms her into a vampire. The pair run afoul of the Children of Darkness, a coven of devil-worshipping vampires led by Armand, who attack them and kidnaps Nicolas to punish them for breaking vampire law. Lestat and Gabrielle rescue Nicolas. After a heated debate with Armand, Lestat causes the coven to dissolve by denouncing the old ways and encouraging the cultists to modernize. Lestat later turns Nicolas into a vampire, but the transformation drives him mad, and his resentment of Lestat quickly destroys their relationship. Severely depressed, Nicolas later commits suicide by throwing himself into a ceremonial bonfire. Armand "shows" Lestat the history of how he was made by the vampire Marius de Romanus. Compelled by the idea of Marius, Lestat leaves messages carved into rock in numerous places while traveling with Gabrielle, hoping Marius will see them and find Lestat.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_the_Body_Thief"title="The Tale of the Body Thief">
At the beginning of the story, Lestat grows depressed and becomes remorseful because of his vampiric nature. Although he tries to limit his victims to murderers, serial killers and other criminals, he nonetheless caves into temptation once in a while and kills an "innocent", or someone who he feels does not necessarily deserve to die. Lestat also suffers from constant nightmares concerning his late "daughter", Claudia, for whose death he blames himself.Since defeating Akasha, Lestat has become extremely lonely. Among his only remaining friends is David Talbot, the elderly mortal head of the Talamasca. Although Lestat has repeatedly offered to turn David, he has always refused to become a vampire and keep Lestat company through eternity. Lestat goes to the Gobi desert at dawn in a half-hearted suicide attempt. When he does not die, he goes to David's home in England to heal.A mysterious figure, Raglan James, approaches Lestat with what seems to be a cure for his ennui and depression. James sends Lestat several messages hinting that he has the ability to switch bodies. Eventually, he proposes to Lestat that the two of them trade bodies for a day. Against the advice of David and other vampires, Lestat jumps at the opportunity. Unfortunately, James has no intention of ever switching back, and Lestat is forced to scheme to regain his body.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memnoch_the_Devil"title="Memnoch the Devil">
After stalking and killing Roger, a ruthless but passionate mobster, Lestat is approached by Roger's ghost. Roger asks him to take care of his daughter Dora, a devout and popular televangelist, whom he wants to spare from embarrassment. At the same time, Lestat has become increasingly paranoid that he's being stalked by a powerful force. Eventually, Lestat meets the Devil, who calls himself Memnoch. He takes Lestat on a whirlwind tour of Heaven and Hell, and retells the entirety of history from his own point of view in an effort to convince Lestat to join him as God's adversary. In his journey, Memnoch claims he is not evil, but merely working for God by ushering lost souls into Heaven. Lestat is left in confusion, unable to decide whether or not to cast his lot with the Devil.After the tour, Lestat believes himself to have had a major revelation. Among other things, he believes that he has seen Christ's crucifixion and has received Saint Veronica's Veil. Even though Lestat suspects the entire experience was some kind of deception, he tells his story to Armand, David Talbot and Dora, who have joined him in New York City. When Lestat produces the veil as proof of his experience, Dora and Armand are deeply moved upon seeing it. Dora reveals the veil to the world, triggering a religious movement. Armand goes into the sunlight and immolates himself in order to convince people that a miracle has occurred.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farther_Adventures_of_Robinson_Crusoe"title="The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe">
The book starts with the statement about Crusoe's marriage in England. He bought a little farm in Bedford and had three children: two sons and one daughter. Our hero suffered a distemper and a desire to see "his island." He could talk of nothing else, and one can imagine that no one took his stories seriously, except his wife. She told him, in tears, "I will go with you, but I won't leave you." But in the middle of this felicity, Providence unhinged him at once, with the loss of his wife.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_120_Days_of_Sodom"title="The 120 Days of Sodom">
"The 120 Days of Sodom" is set in a remote medieval castle, high in the mountains and surrounded by forests, detached from the rest of the world, either at the end of Louis XIV's reign or at the beginning of the Régence.The novel takes place over five months, November to March. Four wealthy libertines lock themselves in a castle, the Château de Silling, along with a number of victims and accomplices (the description of Silling matches de Sade's own castle, the Château de Lacoste). Since they state that the sensations produced by the organs of hearing are the most erotic, they intend to listen to various tales of depravity from four veteran sex workers, which will inspire them to engage in similar activities with their victims.The novel is notable for not existing in a complete state, with only the first section being written in detail. After that, the remaining three parts are written as a draft, in note form, with de Sade's notes to himself still present in most translations. Either at the outset, or during the writing of the work, de Sade had evidently decided he would not be able to complete it in full and elected to write out the remaining three-quarters in brief and finish it later.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden_Two"title="Walden Two">
The first-person narrator and protagonist, Professor Burris, is a university instructor of psychology, who is approached by two young men (one a former student) sometime in the late 1940s. The young men are recent veterans of World War II and, intrigued by utopianism, express interest in an old acquaintance of Burris, named T. E. Frazier, who in the 1930s started an intentional community that still thrives. Burris contacts Frazier, who invites them all to stay for several days to experience life in the supposedly utopian community. Venturing to the community, named Walden Two, the young men bring their girlfriends and Burris brings along a colleague named Professor Castle, who teaches philosophy and ethics.The rest of the book proceeds largely as a novel of ideas, mostly involving Frazier, a smug, talkative, and colorful character, guiding his new visitors around Walden Two and proudly explaining its socio-politico-economic structures and collectivist achievements. A wide range of intellectual topics such as behavioral modification, political ethics, educational philosophy, sexual equality (specifically, advocacy for women in the workforce), the common good, historiography, freedom and free will, the dilemma of determinism, fascism, American democracy, and Soviet communism are discussed and often debated among the self-satisfied Frazier, the skeptical and doubting Castle, and the quietly intrigued Burris.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_and_Peace"title="War and Peace">
## Book One.The novel begins in July 1805 in Saint Petersburg, at a soirée given by Anna Pavlovna Scherer, the maid of honour and confidante to the dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna. Many of the main characters are introduced as they enter the salon. Pierre (Pyotr Kirilovich) Bezukhov is the illegitimate son of a wealthy count, who is dying after a series of strokes. Pierre is about to become embroiled in a struggle for his inheritance. Educated abroad at his father's expense following his mother's death, Pierre is kindhearted but socially awkward, and finds it difficult to integrate into Petersburg society. It is known to everyone at the soirée that Pierre is his father's favorite of all the old count's illegitimate progeny. They respect Pierre during the soiree because his father, Count Bezukhov, is a very rich man, and as Pierre is his favorite, most aristocrats think that the fortune of his father will be given to him even though he is illegitimate.Also attending the soirée is Pierre's friend, Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky, husband of Lise, a charming society favourite. He is disillusioned with Petersburg society and with married life; feeling that his wife is empty and superficial, he comes to hate her and all women, expressing patently misogynistic views to Pierre when the two are alone. Pierre does not quite know what to do with this, and is made uncomfortable witnessing the marital discord. Pierre had been sent to St Petersburg by his father to choose a career for himself, but he is quite uncomfortable because he cannot find one and everybody keeps on asking about this. Andrei tells Pierre he has decided to become to Prince Mikhail Ilarionovich Kutuzov in the coming war (The Battle of Austerlitz) against Napoleon in order to escape a life he cannot stand.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_of_Lot_49"title="The Crying of Lot 49">
In the mid-1960s, Oedipa Maas lives a fairly comfortable life in the (fictional) northern Californian village of Kinneret, despite her lackluster marriage with Mucho Maas, a rudderless radio jockey, and her sessions with Dr. Hilarius, an unhinged German psychotherapist who tries to medicate his patients with LSD. One day, Oedipa learns of the death of an ex-lover, Pierce Inverarity, an incredibly wealthy real-estate mogul, who has left her as the executor of his massive estate. Inverarity appears to have owned or financed nearly all the goings-on in San Narciso, a (fictional) southern Californian city near Los Angeles. Oedipa goes to San Narciso to meet Inverarity's lawyer, a former child actor named Metzger, and they begin an affair, which fascinates a local teenaged rock band, The Paranoids, who begin following them voyeuristically. At a bar, Oedipa notices the graffitied symbol of a muted post horn with the label "W.A.S.T.E.", and she chats with Mike Fallopian, a right-wing historian and critic of the postal system, who claims to use a secret postal service.It surfaces that Inverarity had Mafia connections, illicitly attempting to sell the bones of forgotten U.S. World War II soldiers for use as charcoal to a cigarette company. One of The Paranoids mentions that this strongly reminds him of a Jacobean revenge play he recently saw called "The Courier's Tragedy". Intrigued by the coincidence, Oedipa and Metzger attend a performance of the play, which briefly mentions the name "Tristero". After the show, Oedipa approaches the play's director, Randolph Driblette, but he deflects her questions about the mention of the unusual name. After seeing a man scribbling the post horn symbol, Oedipa seeks out Mike Fallopian, who tells her he suspects a conspiracy. This is supported when watermarks of the muted horn symbol are discovered hidden on Inverarity's private stamp collection. The symbol appears to be a muted variant of the coat of arms of Thurn and Taxis: an 18th-century European postal monopoly that suppressed all opposition, including Trystero (or Tristero), a competing postal service that was defeated but possibly driven underground. Based on the symbolism of the mute, Oedipa theorizes that Trystero continues to exist as a countercultural secret society with unknown goals.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_of_Shadows"title="Jack of Shadows">
The novel is set in a world that is tidally locked. Thus one side of the planet is always in light, and the other in darkness. Science rules on the dayside, while magic holds sway in the night.Powerful magical entities live on the night side of the planet, and for the most part the entities' magical powers emanate from distinct loci. Jack of Shadows (also known as Shadowjack), the main character, is unique among the magical beings in that he draws his power not from a physical location but from shadow itself. He is nearly incapacitated in complete light or complete darkness, but given access to even a small area of shadow, his potency is unmatched.Jack's only friend, the creature Morningstar, is punished by being trapped in stone at the edge of the night, to be released when dawn comes. His torso and head protrude from the rock, and he awaits the sun that will never rise.Jack seeks "The Key That Was Lost", Kolwynia. The Key itself and the consequences of its use parallel Jack's progress in his own endeavors. Ultimately, the Key will be responsible for Jack's salvation and his doom.Fleeing the dark side, Jack gets access to a computer and uses it to recover Kolwynia. This makes him unbeatable, but not all-powerful. Having made a mess of ruling with his new powers, he seeks the advice of Morningstar, who advises him to destroy The Machine at the Heart of the World, which maintains the world's stability, and set it rotating.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clouds_of_Witness"title="Clouds of Witness">
Lord Peter Wimsey's brother, the Duke of Denver, has taken a shooting lodge at Riddlesdale in Yorkshire. At 3 o'clock one morning, Captain Denis Cathcart, the fiancé of Wimsey's sister Lady Mary, is found shot dead just outside the conservatory. Mary, trying to leave the house at 3 am for a reason she declines to explain, finds Denver kneeling over Cathcart's body. Suspicion falls on Denver, as the lethal bullet had come from his revolver and he admits having quarrelled with Cathcart earlier, after receiving a letter (which he says has been lost) informing him that Cathcart had been caught cheating at cards. He maintains that he stumbled across the body after returning from a walk on the moors, but will say no more.Wimsey arrives to investigate, along with his friend Inspector Charles Parker, who will find himself becoming increasingly attracted to Lady Mary throughout the novel. They find a series of unidentified footprints and a discarded jewel in the form of a cat. It is clear that both Denver and Mary are hiding something: Denver refuses to budge from his story that he was simply out for a walk, while Mary is feigning illness to avoid talking to anyone.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unnatural_Death_(novel)"title="Unnatural Death (novel)">
Lord Peter Wimsey and his friend Chief Inspector Parker are told about the death, in late 1925, of an elderly woman named Agatha Dawson who had been suffering from terminal cancer. She was being cared for by Mary Whittaker, her great-niece and a trained nurse. Miss Dawson had an extreme aversion to making a will, believing that Miss Whittaker, her only known relative, would naturally inherit everything. Wimsey is intrigued in spite of the fact that there is no evidence of any crime (a post-mortem found no sign of foul play), nor any apparent motive (on Miss Dawson's death her estate did indeed pass, as she had expected and wished, to her great-niece).Wimsey sends his private investigator, Miss Katharine Climpson, to the village of Leahampton to investigate. She discovers that shortly before her death Miss Dawson had dismissed her maids, the sisters Bertha and Evelyn Gotobed. Wimsey places advertisements in the press asking them to get in touch. A few days later, Bertha is found dead in Epping Forest. On the body is a £5 banknote, originally issued to a Mrs Muriel Forrest who lives in an elegant flat in South Audley Street, Mayfair. Wimsey and Parker visit her. She claims not to remember the banknote, but thinks she may have put it on a horse. Wimsey tricks her into providing her fingerprints on a wineglass. In a drawer he finds a hypodermic syringe with a doctor's prescription "to be injected when the pain is very severe".
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unpleasantness_at_the_Bellona_Club"title="The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club">
On the afternoon of 10 November, ninety-year-old General Fentiman is called to the deathbed of his estranged sister, Lady Dormer, and learns that under the terms of her will he stands to inherit most of her substantial fortune – money sorely needed by his grandsons Robert and George Fentiman. However, should the General die first, nearly everything will go to Lady Dormer's companion, Ann Dorland.Lady Dormer dies the next morning, Armistice Day, and that afternoon the General is found dead in his armchair at the Bellona Club. Dr Penberthy, a club member and the General's personal physician, certifies death by natural causes but is unable to state the exact time of death. As the estate would amply provide for all three claimants, and as it is unknown whether the General or his sister died first, the Fentiman brothers suggest a negotiated settlement with Ann Dorland, but she surprisingly and vehemently refuses. Wimsey is asked to investigate.Unusually, nobody saw the General arrive at the club at his usual time of 10 am. His manservant reports that the General did not return home after visiting his sister the day before. An unknown man by the name of Oliver telephoned to say that the General would be spending the night with him. Robert Fentiman says that he knows of Oliver, and much time is spent chasing the elusive individual though several countries before Robert admits that he does not actually exist.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Tailors"title="The Nine Tailors">
Stranded after a car accident in the Fenland village of Fenchurch St. Paul on New Year's Eve, Lord Peter Wimsey helps ring a nine-hour peal on the church bells overnight after William Thoday, one of the ringers, is struck down with influenza. Lady Thorpe, wife of Sir Henry, the local squire, dies the next morning and Wimsey hears how the family had been blighted by the theft 20 years previously of a valuable emerald necklace which was never recovered. The family's then butler, Deacon, and his accomplice from London, Cranton, were convicted and imprisoned. In 1918, long before the end of Deacon's prison term, he killed a warder and escaped. He apparently died shortly afterwards: the body lay in a quarry pit, where it was found two years later, still in his prison clothes. After Deacon's death became known, his widow Mary married local farmer William Thoday.When Sir Henry himself dies the following Easter, his wife's grave is opened for his burial and a man's body is found, mutilated beyond recognition. It is possibly that of an out-of-work labourer calling himself 'Stephen Driver' who had arrived in the village in early January; although, oddly, the dead man was wearing underclothes that had been made in France.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrones,_Dominations"title="Thrones, Dominations">
It is 1936. Lord and Lady Peter Wimsey, returned from a European honeymoon, are settling into their new home in London, where daily life is affected by the illness and then death of the king. The couple are personally happy, having resolved many of the problems in their relationship caused by character and circumstance, but must now tackle the practical details of bringing their lives together, including domestic and working arrangements, and social and family obligations.The couple become slightly acquainted with Laurence Harwell, a wealthy theatrical "angel", and his beautiful wife, whom he has rescued from poverty following her rich father's disgrace and imprisonment. After two years' marriage the Harwells are famously still devoted to one another, and when she is found dead at their weekend cottage in the country Wimsey is asked to help interview the distraught husband, and becomes involved with the investigation. (He is also asked to undertake sensitive diplomatic duties connected with the problematic behaviour of the new king, and as the 1936 abdication crisis looms, he gloomily predicts the coming war with Hitler's Germany.)Suspicion falls on a writer known to have been in love with Mrs Harwell, and a talented but bohemian painter who had been working on portraits of both Harriet and the murdered woman. Two men who knew Mrs Harwell's father in prison, and who have been blackmailing him with threats to harm her, are also suspected.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_in_August"title="Light in August">
The novel is set in the American South in the 1930s, during the time of Prohibition and Jim Crow laws that legalized racial segregation in the South. It begins with the journey of Lena Grove, a young pregnant white woman from Doane's Mill, Alabama, who is trying to find Lucas Burch, the father of her unborn child. He has been fired from his job in Doane's Mill and moved to Mississippi, promising to send word to her when he has a new job. Not hearing from Burch and harassed by her older brother for her illegitimate pregnancy, Lena walks and hitchhikes to Jefferson, Mississippi, a town in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County. There she expects to find Lucas working at another planing mill, ready to marry her. Those who help her along her four-week trek are skeptical that Lucas Burch will be found, or that he will keep his promise when she catches up with him. When she arrives in Jefferson, Lucas is there, but he has changed his name to Joe Brown. Looking for Lucas, sweet, trusting Lena meets shy, mild-mannered Byron Bunch, who falls in love with Lena but feels honor-bound to help her find Joe Brown. Thoughtful and quietly religious, Byron is superior to Brown in every way, but his shyness prevents him from revealing his feelings to Lena.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Order_of_the_Phoenix"title="Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix">
During the summer, Harry Potter and his cousin Dudley are attacked by Dementors. Forced to magically fend them off, Harry is expelled from Hogwarts, but his expulsion is postponed pending a hearing at the Ministry of Magic. A group of wizards belonging to the Order of the Phoenix whisk Harry off to Number 12, Grimmauld Place, Sirius Black's childhood home.Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger explain that the Order is a secret organisation led by Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore, dedicated to fighting Lord Voldemort and the Death Eaters. Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny Weasley and Fred and George Weasley learn that Voldemort is seeking something he lacked prior to his defeat. The Ministry, led by Cornelius Fudge, refuses to accept Voldemort's return, and are running a smear campaign against Harry and Dumbledore. At the hearing, Dumbledore defends Harry, who is cleared of all charges.At Hogwarts, Dolores Umbridge, a senior Ministry employee, becomes the new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher. She disputes Voldemort's return, and clashes with Harry, punishing him by having him writes lines with a quill that magically carves "I must not tell lies" into the back of his hand. When she refuses to teach students how to perform defensive magic, Harry, Ron, and Hermione form their own Defence group with other students. Umbridge, empowered by the Ministry to interfere in Hogwarts as the new High Inquisitor, bans unapproved clubs, forcing the group, now called Dumbledore's Army, to secretly meet in the Room of Requirement to practise under Harry's instruction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragon_in_the_Sea"title="The Dragon in the Sea">
In a near-future earth, the West and the East have been at war for more than a decade, and resources are running thin. The West is stealing oil from the East with specialized nuclear submarines ("subtugs") that sneak into the underwater oil fields of the East to secretly pump out the oil and bring it back. Each carrying a crew of four, these submarines undertake the most hazardous, stressful missions conceivable, and of late, the missions have been failing, with the last twenty submarines simply disappearing.The East has been very successful in planting sleepers in the West's military and command structures, and the suspicion is that sleepers are sabotaging the subs or revealing their positions once at sea. John Ramsey, a young psychologist from the Bureau of Psychology (BuPsych), is trained as an electronics operator and sent on the next mission, replacing the previous officer who went insane. His secret mission is to find the sleeper, or figure out why the crews are going insane.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipping_Star"title="Whipping Star">
In the far future, humankind has made contact with numerous other sentient species: Gowachin, Laclac, Wreaves, Pan Spechi, Taprisiots, and Caleban (among others) and has helped to form the ConSentiency to govern among the species. After suffering under a tyrannous pure democracy which had the power to create laws so fast that no thought could be given to the effects, the sentients of the galaxy found the need for a Bureau of Sabotage (BuSab) to slow the wheels of government, thereby preventing it from legislating recklessly.In "Whipping Star", Jorj X. McKie is a "saboteur extraordinary", a born troublemaker who has naturally become one of BuSab's best agents. As the novel opens, it is revealed that Calebans, who are beings visible to other sentient species as stars, have been disappearing one by one. Each disappearance is accompanied by millions of sentient deaths and instances of incurable insanity.Ninety years prior to the setting of "Whipping Star", the Calebans appeared and offered jumpdoors to the collective species, allowing sentients to travel instantly to any point in the universe. Gratefully accepting, the sentiency didn't question the consequences. Now Mliss Abnethe, a psychotic human female with immense power and wealth, has bound a Caleban (called Fannie Mae) in a contract that allows the Caleban to be whipped to death; when the Caleban dies, everyone who has ever used a jumpdoor (which is almost every adult in the sentient world and many of the young) will die as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society"title="The Transparent Society">
Brin argues that a core level of privacy—protecting our most intimate interactions—may be preserved, despite the rapid proliferation of cameras that become ever-smaller, cheaper and more numerous faster than Moore's law. He feels that this core privacy can be saved simply because that is what humans deeply need and want. Hence, Brin explains that "...the key question is whether citizens will be potent, sovereign and knowing enough to enforce this deeply human want."This means they must not only have rights, but also the power to use them and the ability to detect when they are being abused. That will only happen in a world that is mostly open, in which most citizens know most of what is going on, most of the time. It is the only condition under which citizens may have some chance of catching the violators of their freedom and privacy. Privacy is only possible if freedom (including the freedom to know) is protected first.Brin thus maintains that privacy is a "contingent right," one that grows out of the more primary rights, e.g. to know and to speak. He admits that such a mostly-open world will seem more irksome and demanding; people will be expected to keep negotiating the tradeoffs between knowing and privacy. It will be tempting to pass laws that restrict the power of surveillance to authorities, entrusting them to protect our privacy—or a comforting illusion of privacy. By contrast, a transparent society destroys that illusion by offering everyone access to the vast majority of information out there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poisoned_Chocolates_Case"title="The Poisoned Chocolates Case">
One of the most unusual, and possibly unique, features of the book is that, while it appears at first sight to be an expanded version of Berkeley's short story "The Avenging Chance", the eventual solution of the crime in the full-length novel is quite different from that in the short story. (In fact, the solution of "The Avenging Chance" is one of the suggested explanations in the novel which turns out to be false.)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vurt"title="Vurt">
"Vurt" tells the story of Scribble and his "gang", the Stash Riders, as they search for his missing sister Desdemona. The novel is set in an alternate version of Manchester, England, in which society has been shaped by Vurt, a hallucinogenic drug/shared alternate reality, accessed by sucking on colour-coded feathers. Through some (never explained) mechanism, the dreams, mythology, and imaginings of humanity have achieved objective reality in the Vurt and become "real".Before the novel begins, Scribble and his sister take a shared trip into a vurt called English Voodoo, but upon awakening Scribble finds his sister has disappeared. Out of that trip comes an amorphous semi-sentient blob which Mandy, a fellow Stash Rider, nicknames "The Thing from Outer Space". From that point on, Scribble is on a mission to find a rare and contraband Curious Yellow feather so that he might find his sister.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina"title="Anna Karenina">
"Anna Karenina" consists of more than the story of Anna Karenina, a married socialite, and her affair with the affluent Count Vronsky, though their relationship is a very strong component of the plot. The story starts when she arrives in the midst of her brother's family being broken up by his unbridled womanizing—something that prefigures her own later situation.A bachelor, Vronsky is eager to marry Anna if she will agree to leave her husband Karenin, a senior government official. Although Vronsky and Anna go to Italy, where they can be together, leaving behind Anna's child from her first marriage, they have trouble making friends. When they return to Russia, Anna suffers shunning and isolation due to the relationship. While Vronsky pursues his social life, Anna grows increasingly possessive and paranoid about his supposed infidelity.A parallel story within the novel is that of Konstantin Levin, a wealthy country landowner who wants to marry Kitty, sister to Dolly and sister-in-law to Anna's brother Stepan Oblonsky. Levin has to propose twice before Kitty accepts. The novel details Levin's difficulties managing his estate, his eventual marriage, and his struggle to accept the Christian faith, until the birth of his first child.The novel explores a diverse range of topics throughout its approximately one thousand pages. Some of these topics include an evaluation of the feudal system that existed in Russia at the time—politics, not only in the Russian government, but also at the level of the individual characters and families, religion, morality, gender, and social class.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Fidelity_(novel)"title="High Fidelity (novel)">
Rob Fleming is a 35-year-old man who owns a record shop in London called Championship Vinyl. His lawyer girlfriend, Laura, has just left him and now he's going through a crisis. At his record shop, Rob and his employees, Dick and Barry, spend their free moments discussing mix-tape aesthetics and constructing desert-island "top-five" lists of anything that demonstrates their knowledge of music, movies, and pop culture. Rob uses this exercise to create his own list: "The top five most memorable split-ups." This list includes the following ex-girlfriends: 1) Alison Ashworth, 2) Penny Hardwick, 3) Jackie Allen, 4) Charlie Nicholson, and 5) Sarah Kendrew.Rob, recalling these breakups, sets about getting in touch with the former girlfriends. Eventually, Rob's re-examination of his failed relationships, a one-time stand with an American musician named Marie De Salle, and the death of Laura's father bring the two back together. Their relationship is cemented by the launch of a new purposefulness to Rob's life in the revival of his disc jockey career.Also, realizing that his fear of commitment (a result of his fear of death of those around him) and his tendency to act on emotion are responsible for his continuing desires to pursue new women, Rob makes a token commitment to Laura.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_House_Mystery"title="The Red House Mystery">
The setting is an English country house, where Mark Ablett has been entertaining a house party consisting of a widow and her marriageable daughter, a retired major, a wilful actress, and Bill Beverley, a young man about town. Mark's long-lost brother Robert, the black sheep of the family, arrives from Australia and shortly thereafter is found dead, shot through the head. Mark Ablett has disappeared, so Tony Gillingham, a stranger who has just arrived to call on his friend Bill, decides to investigate. Gillingham plays Sherlock Holmes to his younger counterpart's Doctor Watson; they progress almost playfully through the novel while the clues mount up and the theories abound.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Brinker,_or_The_Silver_Skates"title="Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates">
In Holland, poor but industrious and honorable 15-year-old Hans Brinker and his younger sister Gretel yearn to participate in December's great ice skating race on the canal. They have little chance of doing well on their handmade wooden skates, but the prospect of the race and the prize of the silver skates excites them and fires their dreams.Hans' father, Raff Brinker, suffered head trauma when he fell from a dike. It left him chronically ill, with episodes of amnesia and occasional violent outbursts, so he is unable to work. Mrs. Brinker, Hans, and Gretel must all work to support the family and are looked down upon in the community because they are poor. By chance, Hans meets the famous surgeon Dr. Boekman and begs him to treat their father, but the doctor's fees are expensive and he has been very gruff following the death of his wife and disappearance of his son. Eventually, Dr. Boekman is persuaded to examine Mr. Brinker. He diagnoses pressure on the brain, which can be cured by a risky and expensive operation involving trephining (a surgical intervention in which a hole is drilled or scraped into the human skull).Hans earns money to buy Gretel a pair of steel skates for the race. Later, when he earns enough to buy himself a pair of skates, he instead offers the money to Doctor Boekman to pay for his father's operation. Touched by this gesture, Dr. Boekman provides the surgery for free, and Hans is able to buy good skates for himself to skate in the race. Hans sacrifices his opportunity to win the boys' race by dropping out of the race to help a friend win. Gretel wins the girls' race and the precious prize: the eponymous Silver Skates. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcatcher_(novel)"title="Dreamcatcher (novel)">
Set near the fictional town of Derry, Maine, "Dreamcatcher" is the story of four lifelong friends: Gary "Jonesy" Jones, Pete Moore, Joe "Beaver" Clarendon and Henry Devlin. As young teenagers, the four saved Douglas "Duddits" Cavell, an older boy with Down syndrome, from a group of sadistic bullies. From their new friendship with Duddits, Jonesy, Beaver, Henry and Pete began to share the boy's unusual powers, including telepathy, shared dreaming, and seeing "the line", a psychic trace left by the movement of human beings.Jonesy, Beaver, Henry and Pete reunite for their annual hunting trip at the Hole-in-the-Wall, an isolated lodge in the Jefferson Tract. There, they become caught between an alien invasion and an insane retired US Air Force Colonel, Abraham Kurtz. Jonesy and Beaver, who remain at the cabin while Henry and Pete go out for supplies, encounter Richard McCarthy, a disoriented and delirious stranger wandering near the lodge during a blizzard talking about lights in the sky. The victim of an alien abduction, McCarthy grows sicker and dies while sitting on the toilet. An extraterrestrial parasite eats its way out of his anus, after gestating in his bowel, and attacks the two men, killing Beaver. Jonesy inhales the spores of the strange reddish fungus that the stranger and his parasite have spread around the cabin, and an alien entity ("Mr. Gray") takes over his mind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Voyage_Back"title="Long Voyage Back">
The story concerns a hypothetical World War III between the USSR and the United States, and graphically depicts the ensuing carnage. One family and some friends try to run away in a sailboat, and the story describes their battles with nuclear winter and fallout, and with the ensuing collapse of civilization.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucault's_Pendulum"title="Foucault's Pendulum">
The book opens with a man named Casaubon is hiding in the Musée des Arts et Métiers after closing. He believes that a secret society has kidnapped his friend Jacopo Belbo and are now after him, and will meet in the museum. As he waits, Casaubon reflects on his life that led him here, but it is implied he is an unreliable narrator whose mind has been warped by conspiracy theories.In the 1970s Milan, Casaubon, who as a student had participated in the 1968 uprisings, is studying the Knights Templar when he meets Belbo and his colleague Diotallevi. Belbo works as an editor in a publishing house and invites Casaubon to review a manuscript about the Templars. The manuscript, by Colonel Ardenti, claims he discovered a secret plan of the Templars to take over the world. Ardenti mysteriously vanishes after meeting with Belbo and Casaubon. Casaubon moves to Brazil to pursue a relationship with a woman named Amparo and meets Agliè, an elderly man who implies that he is the mystical Comte de Saint-Germain. Casaubon's relationship with Amparo falls apart after attending an Umbanda rite and he returns to Milan, where he is hired by Belbo's employer, Mr. Garamond, as a researcher. Casaubon learns that in addition to a respected publishing house, Garamond also owns Manuzio, a vanity publisher that charges incompetent authors large sums to print their work. Garamond has the idea to begin two lines of occult books, one for serious publishing and the other to be published by Manutius to attract more vanity authors. Agliè, now also in Milan, becomes a consultant to Garamond. Belbo grows jealous of Agliè's ability to charm Belbo's former mistress Lorenza.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madame_Bovary"title="Madame Bovary">
"Madame Bovary" takes place in provincial Northern France, near the town of Rouen in Normandy. Charles Bovary is a shy, oddly dressed teenager arriving at a new school where his new classmates ridicule him. He struggles his way to a second-rate medical degree, and becomes an "" in the Public Health Service. He marries the woman his mother has chosen for him, the unpleasant but supposedly rich widow Héloïse Dubuc. He sets out to build a practice in the village of Tôtes.One day, Charles visits a local farm to set the owner's broken leg and meets his patient's daughter, Emma Rouault. Emma is a beautiful, poetically dressed young woman who has received a "good education" in a convent. She has a powerful yearning for luxury and romance inspired by reading popular novels. Charles is immediately attracted to her, and visits his patient far more often than necessary, until Héloïse's jealousy puts a stop to the visits.When Héloïse unexpectedly dies, Charles waits a decent interval before courting Emma in earnest. Her father gives his consent, and Emma and Charles marry.The novel's focus shifts to Emma. After Charles and Emma attend an elegant ball given by the Marquis d'Andervilliers, Emma finds her married life dull and becomes listless. Charles decides his wife needs a change of scenery and moves his practice to the larger market town of Yonville (traditionally identified with the town of Ry). There, Emma gives birth to a daughter, Berthe, but motherhood proves a disappointment to Emma. She becomes infatuated with Léon Dupuis, an intelligent young man she meets in Yonville. Léon is a law student who shares Emma's appreciation for literature and music and returns her esteem. Emma does not acknowledge her passion for Léon, who despairs of gaining Emma's affection and departs for Paris to continue his studies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang"title="Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang">
Commander Caractacus Pott is an inventor who buys and renovates an old car after gaining money from inventing and selling whistle-like sweets to Lord Skrumshus, the wealthy owner of a local confectionery factory. The car, a "Paragon Panther", was the sole production of the Paragon motor-car company before it went bankrupt. It is a four-seat touring car with an enormous bonnet, or hood. After the restoration is complete, the car is named for the noises made by its starter motor and the characteristic two loud backfires it makes when it starts.At first Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang is just a big and powerful car, but as the book progresses the car surprises the family by beginning to exhibit independent actions. This first happens while the family is caught in a traffic jam on their way to the beach for a picnic. The car suddenly instructs Commander Pott to pull a switch which causes Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang to sprout wings and take flight over the stopped cars on the road. Commander Pott flies them to Goodwin Sands in the English Channel where the family picnics, swims, and sleeps. While the family naps, the tide comes in threatening to drown them. Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang wakes them just in time with a hiss of steam. At the car's direction, Commander Pott pulls another switch which causes it to transform into a hovercraft-like vehicle. They make for the French coast and land on a beach near Calais. They explore along the beach and find a cave boobytrapped with some devices intended to scare off intruders. At the back of the cave is a store of armaments and explosives. The family detonates the cache of explosives and flees the cave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Twist"title="Oliver Twist">
Oliver Twist is born into a life of poverty and misfortune, raised in a workhouse in the fictional town of Mudfog. Around the time of Oliver's ninth birthday, Mr Bumble, the parish beadle, removes Oliver from the baby farm and puts him to work picking and weaving oakum at the main workhouse. One day, the desperately hungry boys decide to draw lots; the loser must ask for another portion of gruel. This task falls to Oliver, who at the next meal comes forward trembling, bowl in hand, and begs the master for gruel with his famous request: "Please, sir, I want some more".A great uproar ensues. The board of gentlemen who administer the workhouse offer £5 to any person wishing to take on Oliver as an apprentice. Mr Sowerberry, an undertaker employed by the parish, takes Oliver into his service. He treats Oliver better and, because of Oliver's sorrowful countenance, uses him as a mute at children's funerals. Oliver suffers torment at the hands of Noah Claypole, a fellow apprentice and "charity boy" who is jealous of Oliver's promotion, and Charlotte, the Sowerberrys' maidservant, who is in love with Noah. Oliver escapes from the Sowerberrys' house and later decides to run away to London to seek a better life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_of_Eden_(novel)"title="East of Eden (novel)">
The story is primarily set in the Salinas Valley, California, between the beginning of the twentieth century and the end of World War I, though some chapters are set in Connecticut and Massachusetts, and the story goes as far back as the American Civil War.In the beginning of "East of Eden", before introducing his characters, Steinbeck carefully establishes the setting with a description of the Salinas Valley in Central California.Then he outlines the story of the warmhearted inventor and farmer Samuel Hamilton and his wife Liza, immigrants from Ireland. He describes how they raise their nine children on a rough, infertile piece of land. As the Hamilton children begin to grow up and leave the nest, a wealthy stranger, Adam Trask, purchases the best ranch in the Valley.Adam's life is seen in a long, intricate flashback. We see his tumultuous childhood on a farm in Connecticut and the brutal treatment he endured from his younger but stronger half-brother, Charles. Adam and Charles's father, Cyrus, was a Union Civil War veteran who was wounded in his very first battle and unable (or perhaps unwilling) to return to service; he nonetheless becomes an expert "armchair general" who uses his intellectual knowledge of military affairs and wounded-veteran status to become a military adviser in Washington, D.C.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Man_and_the_Sea"title="The Old Man and the Sea">
Santiago is an aging, experienced fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish. He is now seen as ""salao" (colloquial pronunciation of "salado"", which means salty), the worst form of unlucky. Manolin, a young man whom Santiago has trained since childhood, has been forced by his parents to work on a luckier boat. Manolin remains dedicated to Santiago, visiting his shack each night, hauling his fishing gear, preparing food, and talking about American baseball and Santiago's favorite player, Joe DiMaggio. Santiago says that tomorrow, he will venture far out into the Gulf Stream, north of Cuba in the Straits of Florida to fish, confident that his unlucky streak is near its end.On the eighty-fifth day of his unlucky streak, Santiago takes his skiff out early. By noon, he has hooked a big fish that he is sure is a marlin, but he is unable to haul it in. He is unwilling to tie the line to the boat for fear that a sudden jerk from the fish would break the line. With his back, shoulders, and hands, he holds the line for two days and nights. He gives slack as needed while the marlin pulls him far from land. He uses his other hooks to catch fish and a dolphinfish to eat. The line cuts his hands, his body is sore, and he sleeps little. Despite this, he expresses compassion and appreciation for the marlin, often referring to him as a brother. He determines that no one is worthy enough to eat the marlin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children_of_Men"title="The Children of Men">
The narrative voice for the novel alternates between the third person and the first person, the latter in the form of a diary kept by Dr. Theodore "Theo" Faron, an Oxford don.The novel opens with the first entry in Theo's diary. It is the year 2021, but the novel's events have their origin in 1995, which is referred to as "Year Omega". In 1994, the sperm count of human males plummeted to zero, a feminist civil war broke out, and, with no significant scientific breakthroughs, mankind now faces imminent extinction. The last people to be born are now called "Omegas". "A race apart", they enjoy various prerogatives. Theo writes that the last human being born on Earth has been killed in a pub brawl.In 2006, Xan Lyppiatt, Theo's rich and charismatic cousin, appoints himself Warden of England in the last general election. As people have lost all interest in politics, Lyppiatt abolishes democracy. He is called a despot and tyrant by his opponents, but the new society is officially referred to as egalitarian.Theo is approached by a woman called Julian, a member of a group of dissidents calling themselves the Five Fishes. He meets with them at an isolated church. Rolf, their leader, and Julian's husband is hostile, but the others—Miriam (a former midwife), Gascoigne (a man from a military family), Luke (a former priest), and Julian—are more personable. The group wants Theo to approach Xan on their behalf and ask for various reforms, including a return to a more democratic system. During their discussions, as Theo prepares to meet with Xan, the reader learns about the situation in the UK in 2021:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spy_Who_Came_in_from_the_Cold"title="The Spy Who Came in from the Cold">
Alec Leamas, a former SOE operative during World War II who fought in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands and Norway, is recalled from his posting as Station Head of Berlin Station, West Berlin's operational branch of the Circus, and returns to London in despair after watching the death of his final undercover operative, Karl Riemeck, a member of the praesidium in East Germany's Socialist Unity Party, at the hands of Hans-Dieter Mundt. Mundt, formerly a lower level intelligence operative who is known to the Circus for his involvement in the murder of Foreign Office official Samuel Fennan a few years earlier, has risen to become the head of the East German Abteilung on account of his brilliant counter-intelligence aptitude, a skill demonstrated with his liquidation of Leamas' entire network. Finding himself with no operatives left, Leamas visits Circus chief Control and expresses a desire to get out of the intelligence community and "come in from the cold". Control asks him to instead stay "in the cold" for one last mission: defect to East Germany and frame Mundt as a double agent for SIS. Mundt's deputy, Jens Fiedler, Control explains, is beginning to believe that Mundt may be a turncoat, and could be a useful target for Leamas in this endeavour. In exchange for this, Leamas will keep anything he makes on the mission, in addition to a pension pot, and will be granted leave to retire from the service.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heart_Is_a_Lonely_Hunter"title="The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter">
The book begins with a focus on the relationship between two close friends, John Singer and Spiros Antonapoulos, deaf-mutes who have lived together for several years. Antonapoulos becomes mentally ill, misbehaves, and despite attempts at intervention from Singer, is eventually put into an insane asylum away from town. Now alone, Singer moves into a new room.The remainder of the narrative centers on the struggles of four of John Singer's acquaintances: Mick Kelly, a tomboyish girl who loves music and dreams of buying a piano; Jake Blount, an alcoholic labor agitator; Biff Brannon, the observant owner of a diner; and Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland, an idealistic physician.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postman"title="The Postman">
Despite the post-apocalyptic scenario and several action sequences, the book is largely about civilization and its symbols. Each of the three sections deals with a different symbol.The first is the Postman himself, Gordon Krantz, who takes the uniform solely for warmth after he loses almost everything to bandits. He wanders amongst small communities performing scenes from William Shakespeare plays in return for food and shelter. Originally a drama student at the University of Minnesota, he traveled west to Oregon in the aftermath of the worldwide chaos that resulted from several EMPs, the destruction of major cities, and the release of bioweapons. Taking shelter in a long-abandoned postal van, he finds a sack of mail and a postal uniform. He wears the uniform and takes the mail to a nearby community to barter for food and shelter. His initial claims to be a real postman start not because of a deliberate fraud (at least initially) but because people are desperate to believe in him and his claim that he represents the "Restored United States".Later, in the second section, he encounters a community, Corvallis, Oregon, which is led by Cyclops, who is apparently a sentient artificial intelligence created at Oregon State University which miraculously survived the cataclysm. In reality, however, the machine ceased functioning during a battle, and a group of scientists maintain the pretense of its working to try to keep hope, order, and knowledge alive. The scientists also claim to use Cyclops' advice and predictions to solicit contributions of food from citizens, an approach that Gordon compares to the Delphi Oracle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_of_the_Opera"title="The Phantom of the Opera">
In the 1880s, in Paris, the Palais Garnier Opera House is believed to be haunted by an entity known as the Phantom of the Opera, or simply the Opera Ghost. A stagehand named Joseph Buquet is found hanged, the noose around his neck missing. At a gala performance for the retirement of the opera house's two managers, a young, little-known Swedish soprano, Christine Daaé, is called upon to sing in place of the Opera's leading soprano, Carlotta, who is ill, and Christine’s performance is an astonishing success. The Vicomte Raoul de Chagny, who was present at the performance, recognizes her as his childhood playmate and recalls his love for her. He attempts to visit her backstage, where he hears a man complimenting her from inside her dressing room. He investigates the room once Christine leaves, only to find it empty.At Perros-Guirec, Christine meets with Raoul, who confronts her about the voice he heard in her room. Christine tells him she has been tutored by the Angel of Music, whom her father used to tell them about. When Raoul suggests that she might be the victim of a prank, she storms off. Christine visits her father's grave one night, where a mysterious figure appears and plays the violin for her. Raoul attempts to confront it but is attacked and knocked out in the process.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_on_the_Orient_Express"title="Murder on the Orient Express">
After taking the Taurus Express from Aleppo to Istanbul, private detective Hercule Poirot arrives at the Tokatlian Hotel, where he receives a telegram prompting him to return to London. He instructs the concierge to book him a first-class compartment on the Simplon-route Orient Express service leaving that night. Although the train is fully booked, Poirot obtains a second-class berth through the intervention of friend, fellow Belgian, and fellow passenger Monsieur Bouc, director of the train operator Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. Other passengers include American widow Caroline Hubbard; English governess Mary Debenham; Swedish missionary Greta Ohlsson; American businessman Samuel Ratchett, with his secretary/translator Hector MacQueen, and his English valet Edward Henry Masterman; Italian-American car salesman Antonio Foscarelli; Russian Princess Natalia Dragomiroff and her German maid Hildegarde Schmidt; Hungarian Count Rudolph Andrenyi and his wife Elena; English Colonel John Arbuthnot; American salesman Cyrus B. Hardman; and Greek medical doctor Stavros Constantine.Ratchett has been receiving death threats; recognizing Poirot, he tries to hire him for protection. Poirot, repulsed by Ratchett, refuses. Bouc has taken the last first-class cabin, but on the first morning he arranges to move to a separate coach and gives Poirot his space. That night, Poirot observes some strange occurrences. Early in the morning, he is awakened by a cry from Ratchett's compartment next door. Pierre Michel, the train's conductor, knocks on Ratchett's door, but a voice from inside responds, "Ce n'est rien. Je me suis trompé" (It is nothing. I was mistaken). Hubbard rings her bell and tells Michel a man passed through her room. When Poirot rings his bell for water, Michel informs him that the train is stuck in a snowdrift between Vinkovci and Brod before he hears a loud thump next door. He observes a woman in a red kimono going towards the washroom, then goes to sleep.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Chamber_of_Secrets"title="Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets">
While spending the summer at the Dursleys, twelve-year-old Harry Potter is visited by a house-elf named Dobby. He warns that Harry is in danger and must not return to Hogwarts. Harry refuses, so Dobby magically ruins Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon's dinner party. A furious Uncle Vernon locks Harry into his room in retaliation. The Ministry of Magic immediately sends a notice accusing Harry of performing underage magic and threatening dismissal from Hogwarts. Ron Weasley and his brothers, Fred and George, arrive in their father's flying Ford Anglia and rescue Harry, taking him to the Weasley home. Harry and the entire Weasley family travel to Diagon Alley for school supplies. They run into Hermione Granger and meet Lucius Malfoy, father of Harry's nemesis Draco, and also Gilderoy Lockhart, a conceited autobiographer and adventurer who is the new Defence Against the Dark Arts professor. At King's Cross station, Harry and Ron are unable to enter Platform 9¾ and miss the Hogwarts Express. They fly in Mr Weasley's car to Hogwarts, crashing into the Whomping Willow on school grounds and damaging Ron's hand-me-down wand. The car then escapes into the forest.Harry learns that some in the wizarding community disdain Muggle-born wizards like Hermione, believing pure-bloods are superior. Harry is the only one who hears a strange voice emanating from the castle walls. Soon after, Mr Filch's cat, Mrs Norris, is found petrified, along with a bloody warning scrawled on a wall: "The Chamber of Secrets has been opened. Enemies of the heir, beware". It is believed that Salazar Slytherin, one of the school's founders, created the Chamber after a dispute with fellow founders on admitting Muggle-born students. The Chamber supposedly houses a monster that only the Heir of Slytherin can control.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Psycho"title="American Psycho">
Set in Manhattan during the Wall Street boom of the late 1980s, "American Psycho" follows the life of wealthy young investment banker Patrick Bateman. Bateman, in his mid-20s when the story begins, narrates his everyday activities, from his recreational life among the Wall Street elite of New York to his forays into murder by night. Through present tense stream-of-consciousness narrative, Bateman describes his daily life, ranging from a series of Friday nights spent at nightclubs with his colleagues—where they snort cocaine, critique fellow club-goers' clothing, trade fashion advice, and question one another on proper etiquette—to his loveless engagement to fellow yuppie Evelyn and his contentious relationship with his brother and senile mother. Bateman's stream of consciousness is occasionally broken up by chapters in which he directly addresses the reader in order to critique the work of 1980s pop music artists. The novel maintains a high level of ambiguity through mistaken identity and contradictions that introduce the possibility that Bateman is an unreliable narrator. Characters are consistently introduced as people other than themselves, and people argue over the identities of others they can see in restaurants or at parties. Deeply concerned with his personal appearance, Bateman gives extensive descriptions of his daily aesthetics regimen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalimantaan"title="Kalimantaan">
The novel uses of a variety of writing forms, including diary entries, letters, and straight narrative to tell its story. The author intentionally makes it difficult to determine what "really" happens in the story from dreams and fantasies of the characters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_of_the_Sun"title="The City of the Sun">
The book is presented as a dialogue between "a Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitaller and a Genoese Sea-Captain". Inspired by Plato's "Republic" and the description of Atlantis in "Timaeus", it describes a theocratic society where goods, women and children are held in common. It also resembles the City of Adocentyn in the "Picatrix", an Arabic grimoire of astrological magic. In the final part of the work, Campanella prophesies—in the veiled language of astrology—that the Spanish kings, in alliance with the Pope, are destined to be the instruments of a Divine Plan: the final victory of the True Faith and its diffusion in the whole world. While one could argue that Campanella was simply thinking of the conquest of the New World, it seems that this prophecy should be interpreted in the light of a work written shortly before "The City of the Sun", "The Monarchy in Spain", in which Campanella exposes his vision of a unified, peaceful world governed by a theocratic monarchy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatures_of_Light_and_Darkness"title="Creatures of Light and Darkness">
## Background.The Universe was once ruled by the god Thoth, who administered the different forces in the Universe to keep things in balance. In time, he delegated this administration to his "Angels" (other god-like beings), who were each in charge of different "stations", or forces in the Universe. Such stations included the House of the Dead, the House of Life, the House of Fire, and so on.At some point, Thoth had awakened a dormant, malevolent force on a distant planet. This dark force, called the Thing That Cries In The Night, is so powerful and malevolent that it nearly obliterated Thoth's wife and threatens to consume the galaxy. Thoth works to contain and destroy the creature, and in so doing, neglects his duties in maintaining the Universe. The Angels become rebellious and use the power vacuum to fight amongst themselves for dominance.Thoth's son Set, who through an anomaly in Time is also his father, fights the creature across a devastated planet. Just as Set is about to destroy the creature, he is attacked by the Angel Osiris, who unleashes the Hammer That Smashes Suns, a powerful weapon that nearly kills Set and the creature. Thoth's brother, Typhon, who was helping Set in the battle, vanishes without a trace and is presumed dead. (Typhon appears as a black horse-shadow, without a horse to cast it. He contains within himself something called "Skagganauk Abyss", which resembles a black hole, not a term in common use at the time.)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Handmaid's_Tale"title="The Handmaid's Tale">
After a staged attack that killed the President of the United States and most of Congress, a radical political group called the "Sons of Jacob" uses theonomic ideology to launch a revolution. The United States Constitution is suspended, newspapers are censored, and what was formerly the United States of America is changed into a military dictatorship known as the Republic of Gilead. The new regime moves quickly to consolidate its power, overtaking all other religious groups, including Christian denominations.The regime reorganizes society using a peculiar interpretation of some Old Testament ideas, and a new militarized, hierarchical model of social and religious fanaticism among its newly created social classes. One of the most significant changes is the limitation of people's rights. Women become the lowest-ranking class and are not allowed to own money or property, or to read and write. Most significantly, women are deprived of control over their own reproductive functions.The story is told in first-person narration by a woman named Offred. In this era of environmental pollution and radiation, she is one of the few remaining fertile women. Therefore, she is forcibly assigned to produce children for the "Commanders," the ruling class of men, and is known as a "Handmaid" based on the biblical story of Rachel and her handmaid Bilhah. She undergoes training to become a handmaid along with other women of her standing at the Rachel and Leah Centre.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middlemarch"title="Middlemarch">
"Middlemarch" centres on the lives of residents of Middlemarch, a fictitious Midlands town, from 1829 onwards – the years up to the 1832 Reform Act. The narrative may be considered to consist of four plots with unequal emphasis: the life of Dorothea Brooke, the career of Tertius Lydgate, the courtship of Mary Garth by Fred Vincy, and the disgrace of Nicholas Bulstrode. The two main plots are those of Dorothea and Lydgate. Each plot occurs concurrently, although Bulstrode's is centred on the later chapters.Dorothea Brooke is a 19-year-old orphan, living with her younger sister, Celia, as a ward of her uncle, Mr Brooke. Dorothea is an especially pious young woman whose hobby involves the renovation of buildings belonging to the tenant farmers, although her uncle discourages her. Dorothea is courted by Sir James Chettam, a man close to her own age, but she is oblivious to him. She is attracted instead to the Rev. Edward Casaubon, a 45-year-old scholar. Dorothea accepts Casaubon's offer of marriage, despite her sister's misgivings. Chettam is encouraged to turn his attention to Celia, who has developed an interest in him.Fred and Rosamond Vincy are the eldest children of Middlemarch's town mayor. Having never finished university, Fred is widely seen as a failure and a layabout, but is content because he is the presumed heir of his childless uncle Mr Featherstone, a rich but unpleasant man. Featherstone keeps as a companion a niece of his by marriage, Mary Garth; although she is considered plain, Fred is in love with her and wants to marry her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pearl_(novella)"title="The Pearl (novella)">
Kino, a poor pearl fisherman, lives with his wife Juana and their infant son Coyotito in La Paz, Baja California Sur. Kino sees a scorpion crawl down one of the ropes holding up the hanging box that serves as Coyotito's crib and tries to remove it. However, Coyotito shakes the rope, causing the scorpion to fall into the box and sting him. Kino and Juana visit the local doctor, but are turned away because of their poverty and his prejudices toward Amerindians.As Juana applies a seaweed poultice to the sting, Kino dives for oysters from his canoe, hoping to find a pearl valuable enough to cover the treatment fee. One oyster yields an immense pearl, which he calls "The Pearl of the World"; news of its discovery spreads quickly, and some of the family's neighbors start to resent Kino's luck in finding it. Unaware of these reactions, Kino envisions selling the pearl and using the money to improve his family's lives. The doctor visits them to treat Coyotito, even though the baby seems to be recovering, and Kino promises to pay him after selling the pearl. That night, Kino drives off a thief who attempts to break into his house. Juana warns him that the pearl will destroy the family, but Kino insists that it is their only chance for a better life. He goes to sell it the next day, not knowing that all the pearl dealers in La Paz are working for a single buyer and conspiring to keep prices low. Pretending that Kino's pearl is of poor quality, they make offers of 1,500 pesos at most; he angrily rejects them, believing the pearl to be worth 50,000 pesos, and vows to sell it in the capital instead. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barchester_Towers"title="Barchester Towers">
"Barchester Towers" concerns the leading clergy of the cathedral city of Barchester. The much loved bishop having died, all expectations are that his son, Archdeacon Grantly, will succeed him. Owing to the passage of the power of patronage to a new Prime Minister, a newcomer, the far more Evangelical Bishop Proudie, gains the see. His wife, Mrs Proudie, exercises an undue influence over the new bishop, making herself as well as the bishop unpopular with most of the clergy of the diocese. Her interference to veto the reappointment of the universally popular Mr Septimus Harding (protagonist of Trollope's earlier novel, "The Warden") as warden of Hiram's Hospital is not well received, even though she gives the position to a needy clergyman, Mr Quiverful, with 14 children to support.Even less popular than Mrs Proudie is the bishop's new chaplain, the hypocritical and sycophantic Mr Obadiah Slope, who decides it would be expedient to marry Harding's wealthy widowed daughter, Eleanor Bold. Slope hopes to win her favour by interfering in the controversy over the wardenship. The Bishop or rather Mr Slope under the orders of Mrs Proudie, also orders the return of the prebendary Dr Vesey Stanhope from Italy. Stanhope has been in Italy recovering from a sore throat for 12 years and has spent his time catching butterflies. With him to the Cathedral Close come his wife and their three adult children. The younger of Dr Stanhope's two daughters causes consternation in the Palace and threatens the plans of Mr Slope. Signora Madeline Vesey Neroni is a disabled serial flirt with a young daughter and a mysterious Italian husband, whom she has left. Mrs Proudie is appalled and considers her an unsafe influence on her daughters, servants and Mr Slope. Mr Slope is drawn like a moth to a flame and cannot keep away. Dr Stanhope's son Bertie is skilled at spending money but not at making it; his sisters think marriage to rich Eleanor Bold will help.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Man_in_Havana"title="Our Man in Havana">
The novel, a black comedy, is set in Havana during the Fulgencio Batista regime. James Wormold, a vacuum cleaner retailer, is approached by Hawthorne, who tries to recruit him for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Wormold's wife had left him and now, he lives with his beautiful 17-year-old daughter, Milly, who is devoutly Catholic, but also materialistic and manipulative. Since Wormold does not make enough money to pay for Milly's extravagances, he accepts the offer of a side job in espionage. Because he has no information to send to London, Wormold fabricates his reports using information found in newspapers and invents a fictitious network of agents. Some of the names in his network are those of real people (most of whom he has never met), but some are made up. Wormold tells only his friend and World War I veteran, Dr. Hasselbacher, about his spy work, hiding the truth from Milly.At one point, he decides to make his reports "exciting" by sending to London sketches of what he describes as a secret military installation in the mountains, actually vacuum cleaner parts scaled to a large size. In London, nobody except Hawthorne, the only one to know that Wormold sells vacuum cleaners, doubts this report. However, Hawthorne keeps quiet for fear of losing his job. In the light of the new developments, London sends Wormold a secretary, Beatrice Severn, and a radio assistant codenamed "C" with much spy paraphernalia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.S._Your_Cat_Is_Dead"title="P.S. Your Cat Is Dead">
Abandoned by his girlfriend on New Year's Eve, and still unaware that his beloved cat Bobby Seale has died in an animal clinic, hopeless New York actor Jimmy Zoole is feeling depressed and unstable when he happens across a cat burglar named Vito in his apartment. Furious, he beats the stranger unconscious and ties him to his kitchen sink. Jimmy begins to torment his terrified captive; however, the unlikely pair soon establish a bond. Vito once had a wife who left him after she discovered he was gay and who took their child with her. Jimmy questions his own sexual orientation as his relationship with Vito takes on an erotic dimension, and decides to use his prisoner to exact revenge on his former lover. In the end, Jimmy and Vito, now working as a team, sell a stash of stolen drugs and run away together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Island"title="Treasure Island">
The plot is set in the mid-18th century, when an old sailor who identifies himself as "The Captain" starts to lodge at the rural Admiral Benbow Inn on England's Bristol Channel. He tells the innkeeper's son, Jim Hawkins, to keep a lookout for "a one-legged seafaring man". A former shipmate named Black Dog confronts The Captain about a chart. They get into a violent fight, causing Black Dog to flee. The Captain, proper name Billy Bones, suffers a stroke. That night, Jim's father dies suddenly. A few days later, a blind beggar named Pew visits the inn, delivering a summons to Bones called "the black spot". Shortly thereafter, Bones suffers another stroke and dies. Pew and his accomplices attack the inn, but are routed by excise officers, and Pew is trampled to death. Jim and his mother escape with a mysterious packet from Bones' sea chest, which is found to contain a map of the island on which the infamous pirate Captain Flint hid his treasure. Jim shows the map to the local physician Dr. Livesey and the squire John Trelawney, and they decide to make an expedition to the island, with Jim serving as a cabin boy.They set sail on Trelawney's schooner, the "Hispaniola", under Captain Smollett and Jim forms a strong bond with the ship's one-legged cook, Long John Silver. The crew suffers tragedy when first mate Mr. Arrow, a drunkard, is washed overboard during a storm. While hidden in an apple-barrel, Jim overhears a conversation among the Hispaniola's crew which reveals that many of them are pirates who had served on Captain Flint's ship, the "Walrus", with Silver leading them. They plan to mutiny after the salvage of the treasure, and to murder the captain and the few remaining loyal crew.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seitsemän_veljestä"title="Seitsemän veljestä">
At first, the brothers are not a particularly peaceful lot and end up quarreling with the local constable, juryman, vicar, churchwarden, and teachers—not to mention their neighbours in the village of Toukola. No wonder young girls' mothers do not regard them as good suitors. When the brothers are required to learn to read before they can accept church confirmation and therefore official adulthood—and the right to marry—they decide to run away.Eventually they end up moving to distant Impivaara in the middle of relative wilderness, but their first efforts are shoddy—one Christmas Eve they end up burning down their sauna. The next spring they try again, but are forced to kill a nearby lord's herd of bulls and pay them back with wheat. Ten years of hard work clearing the forest for fields, hard drinking—and Simeoni's apocalyptic visions from delirium tremens—eventually lead them to mend their ways. They learn to read on their own and eventually return to Jukola.In the end, most of them become pillars of the community and family men. Still, the tone of the tale is not particularly moralistic. Symbolically, the brothers represent the Finnish-speaking people and culture in the midst of external forces that force them to change.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steppenwolf_(novel)"title="Steppenwolf (novel)">
The book is presented as a manuscript written by its protagonist, a middle-aged man named Harry Haller, who leaves it to a chance acquaintance, the nephew of his landlady. The acquaintance adds a short preface of his own and then has the manuscript published. The title of this "real" book-in-the-book is "Harry Haller's Records (For Madmen Only)".As the story begins, the hero is beset by reflections on his being ill-suited for the world of everyday, regular people, specifically for frivolous bourgeois society. In his aimless wanderings about the city he encounters a person carrying an advertisement for a magic theatre who gives him a small book, "Treatise on the Steppenwolf". This treatise, cited in full in the novel's text as Harry reads it, addresses Harry by name and strikes him as describing himself uncannily. It is a discourse on a man who believes himself to be of two natures: one high, the spiritual nature of man; the other is low and animalistic, a "wolf of the steppes". This man is entangled in an irresolvable struggle, never content with either nature because he cannot see beyond this self-made concept. The pamphlet gives an explanation of the multifaceted and indefinable nature of every man's soul, but Harry is either unable or unwilling to recognize this. It also discusses his suicidal intentions, describing him as one of the "suicides": people who, deep down, knew they would take their own life one day. But to counter that, it hails his potential to be great, to be one of the "Immortals".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfinger_(novel)"title="Goldfinger (novel)">
Happenstance&lt;br&gt;While changing planes in Miami after closing down a Mexican heroin smuggling operation, the British Secret Service operative James Bond meets Junius Du Pont, a rich American businessman whom Bond had briefly met and gambled with in "Casino Royale". Du Pont asks Bond to watch Auric Goldfinger, with whom Du Pont is playing canasta, to discover if he is cheating. Bond soon realises that Goldfinger is using his assistant, Jill Masterton, to spy on Du Pont's cards. Bond blackmails Goldfinger into admitting his guilt and paying back Du Pont's lost money; Bond also has a brief affair with Masterton. Back in London, Bond's superior, M, tasks him with determining how Goldfinger is smuggling gold out of Britain; M also suspects Goldfinger of being connected to SMERSH and financing their western networks with his gold. Bond visits the Bank of England for a briefing on the methods of gold smuggling.Coincidence&lt;br&gt;Bond contrives to meet and play a round of golf with Goldfinger; Goldfinger attempts to win the golf match by cheating, but Bond turns the tables on him, beating him in the process. He is subsequently invited to Goldfinger's mansion near Reculver where he narrowly escapes being caught on camera looking through the house. Goldfinger introduces Bond to his factotum, a Korean named Oddjob.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironweed_(novel)"title="Ironweed (novel)">
"Ironweed" is set during the Great Depression and tells the story of Francis Phelan, a bum originally from Albany, New York, who left his family after accidentally killing his infant son. The novel focuses on Francis's return (after being gone twenty-two years) to Albany over the triduum of All Hallows Eve, All Saints' Day, and All Souls' Day; moreover, a surreal element is added to the narrative as Phelan sees and tries to interact with dead people from his troubled past. The novel features characters that are present in some of Kennedy's other Albany Cycle books.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl,_Interrupted"title="Girl, Interrupted">
In April 1967, 18-year-old Susanna Kaysen is admitted to McLean Hospital, in Belmont, Massachusetts, after attempting suicide by overdosing on pills. She denies that it was a suicide attempt to a psychiatrist, who suggests she take time to regroup in McLean, a private mental hospital. Susanna is diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, and her stay extends to 18 months, rather than the proposed couple of weeks.Fellow patients Polly, Cynthia, Lisa Rowe, Lisa Cody, Georgina and Daisy contribute to Susanna's experiences at McLean as she describes their personal issues and how they come to cope with the time they must spend in the hospital. Through including personalized descriptions of supporting characters the reader generates an idea of how severe each of their circumstances are which in turn draws a dichotomy between Susanna and the other admittees. Susanna also introduces the reader to particular staff members, including Valerie, Dr. Wick and Mrs. McWeeney. The staff members play a vital role in her awakening of whether or not the doctors have genuine intentions to successfully treat their patients due to the lack of health progression amongst her peers. Susanna and the other girls are eventually informed that the recently released Daisy died by suicide on her birthday. Daisy's death deeply saddens the girls and they hold a prolonged moment of silence in her memory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Gods"title="Small Gods">
The Great God Om tries to manifest himself once more in the world, as the time of his Eighth Prophet is nigh. He is surprised, however, when he finds himself in the body of a tortoise, stripped of his divine powers.In the gardens of Omnia's capital of Kom, he addresses the novice Brutha, the only one able to hear his voice. Om has a hard time convincing the boy of his godliness, as Brutha is convinced that Om can do anything he wants, and would not want to appear as a tortoise.Brutha is gifted with an eidetic memory and is therefore chosen by Vorbis, the head of the Quisition, to accompany him on a diplomatic mission to Ephebe as his secretary. However, Brutha is also considered unintelligent, since he never learned to read, and rarely thinks for himself. This begins to change after Brutha discovers Ephebe's philosophers; the idea of people entertaining ideas they are not certain they believe or even understand, let alone starting fistfights over them, is an entirely new concept to him.With the help of Ephebe's Great Library, and the philosophers Didactylos and his nephew Urn, Om learns that Brutha is his only genuine believer. All others either just fear the Quisition's wrath or go along with the church out of habit. After learning that Vorbis had facilitated the death of the missionary Brother Murduck to cover up his being mocked by Ephebian citizenry and to provide a casus belli for war against Ephebe, Brutha uses his memory to reluctantly aid an Omnian raid through the Labyrinth guarding the Tyrant's palace. Ordered by Vorbis to burn down the Library, Brutha memorizes many scrolls in order to protect Ephebeian knowledge as Didactylos sets fire to the building to stop Vorbis reading its scrolls. Completely unrelated to the story, the Librarian of the Unseen University travels through L-Space to rescue several of the abandoned scrolls.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingo_(novel)"title="Jingo (novel)">
With the opening of the novel, the island of Leshp, which had been submerged under the Circle Sea for centuries, rises to the surface. Its position, exactly halfway between Ankh-Morpork and Al Khali (the capital of Klatch), makes the island a powerful strategical point for whoever lays claim to it, which both cities do.In Ankh-Morpork, a Klatchian Prince named Khufurah is parading through Ankh-Morpork, where he will be presented with a Degree in Sweet Fanny Adams (Doctorum Adamus cum Flabello Dulci), but an assassination attempt occurs, and the Prince is wounded. Sir Samuel Vimes, Commander of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, begins investigating the crime, originally suspecting both a Klatchian named 71-Hour Ahmed and a senior Morporkian peer, Lord Rust, of being involved.The attempted assassination breaks off relations between Ankh-Morpork and Klatch as Prince Khufurah's brother, Prince Cadram, effectively declares war on the city of Ankh-Morpork. At this point, Havelock Vetinari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, resigns—apparently of his own free will—and Lord Rust takes command of the city. Vetinari has refused to become involved in the war with Klatch, due to the fact Ankh-Morpork does not have an army to stand against any opposing forces (the reason given being that killing enemy soldiers makes it difficult to sell them things afterwards), but Rust declares Martial law and orders the city's noble families to revive their old private regiments.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pursuit_of_Love"title="The Pursuit of Love">
The narrator is Fanny, whose mother (called the "Bolter" for her habit of serial monogamy) and father have left her to be brought up by her aunt Emily and the valetudinarian Davey, whom Emily marries early in the novel. Fanny also spends holidays with her uncle, Matthew Radlett, her aunt, Sadie and numerous cousins at Alconleigh. Linda, the second Radlett daughter, is Fanny's best friend and the main character of the novel. The early chapters recount the Radlett children's bizarre upbringing, including their contrasting obsessions with hunting and preventing cruelty to animals, and the activities of their secret society, the "Hons". The Radlett daughters receive little in the way of formal education, and as Linda grows older she is increasingly consumed by a desire for romantic love and marriage.Louisa, the eldest Radlett child, makes her début and quickly becomes engaged to John Fort William, a Scottish peer more than twenty years her senior. Linda finds Lord Fort William an unromantic choice of husband, but is deeply jealous that Louisa is getting married. Linda becomes bored and depressed, awaiting her own coming-out party. During this time she makes friends with Lord Merlin, a neighbouring landlord who is a wealthy, charming aesthete with many fashionable friends. Merlin brings Tony Kroesig, heir to a wealthy banking family, as a last-minute guest to Linda's coming-out ball. Linda falls in love with Tony, but their relationship is rocky from the start. Linda's father Matthew disapproves of Tony's German ancestry (he believes that all foreigners are fiends) and is furious when Linda and Fanny sneak away to Oxford to have luncheon with Tony. Linda and Tony eventually marry despite the strong disapproval of their families.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonraker_(novel)"title="Moonraker (novel)">
The British Secret Service agent James Bond is asked by his superior, M, to join him at M's club, Blades. A club member, the multi-millionaire businessman Sir Hugo Drax, is winning considerable money playing bridge, seemingly against the odds. M suspects Drax is cheating, and while claiming indifference, is concerned as to why a multi-millionaire and national hero would cheat. Bond confirms Drax's deception and manages to turn the tables—aided by a stacked deck of cards—and wins £15,000 (more than seven times his own annual salary).Drax is the product of a mysterious background, purportedly unknown even to himself. Presumed to have been a British Army soldier during the Second World War, he was badly injured and stricken with amnesia in the explosion of a bomb planted by a German saboteur at a British field headquarters. After extensive rehabilitation in an army hospital, he returned home to become a wealthy industrialist. After building his fortune and establishing himself in business and society, Drax started building the "Moonraker", Britain's first nuclear missile project, intended to defend Britain against its Cold War enemies. The Moonraker rocket was to be an upgraded V-2 rocket using liquid hydrogen and fluorine as propellants; to withstand the ultra-high combustion temperatures of its engine, it used columbite, in which Drax had a monopoly. Because the rocket's engine could withstand high heat, the Moonraker was able to use these powerful fuels, greatly expanding its effective range.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie's_Choice_(novel)"title="Sophie's Choice (novel)">
Stingo, a novelist who is recalling the summer when he began his first novel, has been fired from his low-level reader's job at the publisher McGraw-Hill and has moved into a cheap boarding house in Brooklyn, where he hopes to devote some months to his writing. While he is working on his novel, he is drawn into the lives of the lovers Nathan Landau and Sophie Zawistowska, fellow boarders at the house, who are involved in an intense and difficult relationship. The beautiful Sophie is Polish and Catholic, and a survivor of the Holocaust and Nazi concentration camps, while Nathan is a Jewish-American, and, purportedly, a genius. Although Nathan claims to be a Harvard graduate and a cellular biologist with a pharmaceutical company, it is later revealed that this is a fabrication. Almost no one—including Sophie and Stingo—knows that Nathan has paranoid schizophrenia, and is abusing stimulants. He sometimes behaves quite normally and generously, but there are times when he becomes frighteningly jealous, violent, abusive, and delusional.As the story progresses, Sophie tells Stingo of her past. She describes her violently anti-Semitic father, a law professor in Kraków; her unwillingness to help him spread his ideas; her arrest by the Nazis; and particularly, her brief stint as a stenographer-typist in the home of Rudolf Höss, the commander of Auschwitz, where she was interned. She specifically relates her attempts to seduce Höss in an effort to persuade him that her blond, blue-eyed, German-speaking son should be allowed to leave the camp and enter the Lebensborn program, in which he would be raised as a German child. She failed in this attempt and, ultimately, never learned of her son's fate. Only at the end of the book does the reader also learn what became of Sophie's daughter, Eva.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Plague"title="The White Plague">
On May 20, 1996, an IRA terrorist car bomb explodes, killing the wife and children of molecular biologist John Roe O'Neill. Driven halfway insane by his loss, his mind fragments into several personalities that carry out his plan for him. O'Neill plans a gendercidal revenge and creates a plague that kills only women, but for which men are the carriers. O'Neill then releases it in Ireland (for supporting the IRA), England (for their actions in Ireland and giving the IRA a cause), and Libya (for training said terrorists); he demands that the governments of the world send all citizens of those countries back to their countries, and that they quarantine those countries and let the plague run its course, so they will lose what he has lost; if they do not, he has more plagues to release.After releasing the plague, O'Neill goes to Ireland to hide, planning to offer his services as a molecular biologist in the hopes of sabotaging whatever work is done there on finding a cure. When he arrives in Ireland, he is suspected of being O'Neill (whom the investigatory agencies of the world have deduced is responsible). To travel to the lab at Killaloe, he is forced to walk with a priest, a boy who has taken a vow of silence due to the death of his mother, and Joseph Herity, the IRA bomber who detonated the explosive that killed O'Neill's wife and children; their purpose is to confirm his identity, either through Herity's indirect questioning, or the possibility that he will confess to the priest when confronted with the pain his revenge has caused for the boy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pilgrim's_Progress"title="The Pilgrim's Progress">
## First Part.The entire book is presented as a dream sequence narrated by an omniscient narrator. The allegory's protagonist, Christian, is an everyman character, and the plot centres on his journey from his hometown, the "City of Destruction" ("this world"), to the "Celestial City" ("that which is to come": Heaven) atop Mount Zion. Christian is weighed down by a great burden—the knowledge of his sin—which he believed came from his reading "the book in his hand" (the Bible). This burden, which would cause him to sink into Hell, is so unbearable that Christian must seek deliverance. He meets Evangelist as he is walking out in the fields, who directs him to the "Wicket Gate" for deliverance. Since Christian cannot see the "Wicket Gate" in the distance, Evangelist directs him to go to a "shining light", which Christian thinks he sees. Christian leaves his home, his wife, and children to save himself: he cannot persuade them to accompany him. Obstinate and Pliable go after Christian to bring him back, but Christian refuses. Obstinate returns disgusted, but Pliable is persuaded to go with Christian, hoping to take advantage of the Paradise that Christian claims lies at the end of his journey. Pliable's journey with Christian is cut short when the two of them fall into the Slough of Despond, a boggy mire-like swamp where pilgrims' doubts, fears, temptations, lusts, shames, guilts, and sins of their present condition of being a sinner are used to sink them into the mud of the swamp. It is there in that bog where Pliable abandons Christian after getting himself out. After struggling to the other side of the slough, Christian is pulled out by Help, who has heard his cries and tells him the swamp is made out of the decadence, scum, and filth of sin, but the ground is good at the narrow Wicket Gate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Santaroga_Barrier"title="The Santaroga Barrier">
A psychologist, Gilbert Dasein, is hired by corporate interests to investigate Santaroga, a southern California town in a valley where marketing seems totally ineffective: outside businesses are allowed in, but wither quickly for lack of business. Santarogans aren't hostile toward the enterprises, they just won't shop there. Nor are they xenophobic; they instead appear maddeningly self-satisfied with their quaint, local lifestyle. Adding an element of danger, the last few psychologists sent in have all died in accidents that are (seemingly) perfectly plausible. Complicating matters further still, the psychologist's college girlfriend, Jenny, has returned to Santaroga, her hometown.With this in mind, Dasein cautiously enters the town and quickly learns of 'Jaspers', an additive in the food and drink commonly ingested in Santaroga that seems to imbue the consumer with greater health and an expanded mind. Within the Santarogan community, Jaspers was described as "Consciousness Fuel" which opened a person's eyes and ears, and turned on their minds. Those who consume it don't become psychic; instead, they're simply far more lucid than the average citizen of the U.S, although there are numerous hints at a group mind operating at a subconscious level. Their newspapers are vaguely subversive with their folksy, enlightened commentary on world affairs; their dinner conversations knowledgeably reference great theories of psychology, politics, and cognitive science.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anatomy_of_Melancholy"title="The Anatomy of Melancholy">
Burton defined his subject as:In expounding on his subject, Burton drew from nearly every science of his day, including psychology and physiology, but also astronomy, meteorology, theology, and even astrology and demonology.Much of the book quotes ancient and medieval medical authorities, beginning with Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen. Hence the "Anatomy" is filled with more or less pertinent references to the works of others. A competent Latinist, Burton included a great deal of Latin poetry in the "Anatomy", much of it from ancient sources left untranslated."The Anatomy of Melancholy" is especially lengthy, the first edition being a single quarto volume nearly 900 pages long; subsequent editions were even longer. The text has three major sections plus an introduction, written in Burton's sprawling style. Characteristically, the introduction includes not only an author's note (titled "Democritus Junior to the Reader"), but also a Latin poem ("Democritus Junior to His Book"), a warning to "The Reader Who Employs His Leisure Ill", an abstract of the following text, and another poem explaining the frontispiece. The following three sections proceed in a similarly exhaustive fashion: the first section focuses on the causes and symptoms of "common" melancholies, the second section deals with cures for melancholy, and the third section explores more complex and esoteric melancholies, including the melancholy of lovers and all manner of religious melancholies. The "Anatomy" concludes with an extensive index (which "The New York Times Book Review" called "a readerly pleasure in itself"). Most modern editions add explanatory notes and translate most of the Latin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Storm_Rising"title="Red Storm Rising">
Militants from Soviet Azerbaijan destroy an oil production refinery in Nizhnevartovsk, threatening to cripple the Soviet Union's economy due to oil shortages. After much deliberation, the Soviet Politburo decides to seize the Persian Gulf by military force in order to recoup the country's oil losses. Knowing that the United States had pledged to defend the oil-producing countries in the Persian Gulf, the Soviets decide that neutralizing NATO is a necessary first step before its military operation can take place. With West Germany neutralized and occupied, the Soviets believe that the United States would not move to rescue the Arab states since it could meet its oil needs from the Western Hemisphere alone.To divert attention from the impending operation, the Politburo embarks upon an elaborate "maskirovka" to disguise both their predicament and their intentions. The Soviets publicly declare their arms reduction proposal to scrap their obsolete nuclear missile submarines. The KGB then carries out a false flag operation involving a bomb being detonated in a Kremlin building, framing a KGB sleeper agent as a West German intelligence spy involved in the incident. The Politburo publicly denounces the West German government and calls for retaliation.Even though a planned attack on a NATO communications facility in Lammersdorf was compromised when a Spetsnaz officer was arrested, the Soviets push through with their advance operations in Germany. They suffer reverses on the first night of the war, however, when NATO stealth and fighter-bomber aircraft achieve air superiority over Eastern Europe by eliminating Soviet fighter and AEW&amp;C aircraft, and destroying key bridges that much of the Soviet Army has yet to cross.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God's_Debris"title="God's Debris">
The main character, the Avatar, defines God as primordial matter (like quarks and leptons) and the law of probability. He offers recommendations on everything from an alternative theory for planetary motion to successful recipes for relationships under his system. He proposes that God is currently reassembling himself through the continuing formation of a collective intelligence in the form of the human race, modern examples of which include the development of the internet; this is related to the idea of the Omega Point.However, in the introduction, Adams describes "God's Debris" as a thought experiment, challenging readers to differentiate its scientifically accepted theories from "creative baloney designed to sound true," and to "Try to figure out what's wrong with the simplest explanation."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Chatterley's_Lover"title="Lady Chatterley's Lover">
The story concerns a young married woman, the former Constance Reid (Lady Chatterley), whose upper-class Baronet husband, Sir Clifford Chatterley, described as a handsome, well-built man, is paralysed from the waist down because of a Great War injury. His wife has an affair with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. The class difference between the couple highlights a major motif of the novel. The central theme is Constance's realisation that she cannot live with the mind alone. That realisation stems from a heightened sexual experience that Constance has felt only with Mellors, suggesting that love can happen with only the element of the body, not just the mind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrows_of_Young_Werther"title="The Sorrows of Young Werther">
Most of "The Sorrows of Young Werther", a story about a young man's extreme response to unrequited love, is presented as a collection of letters written by Werther, a young artist of a sensitive and passionate temperament, to his friend Wilhelm. These give an intimate account of his stay in the fictional village of Wahlheim (based on , near Wetzlar), whose peasants have enchanted him with their simple ways. There he meets Charlotte, a beautiful young girl who takes care of her siblings after the death of their mother. Werther falls in love with Charlotte despite knowing beforehand that she is engaged to a man named Albert, eleven years her senior.Despite the pain it causes him, Werther spends the next few months cultivating a close friendship with them both. His sorrow eventually becomes so unsupportable that he is forced to leave Wahlheim for Weimar, where he makes the acquaintance of "Fräulein" von B. He suffers great embarrassment when he forgetfully visits a friend and unexpectedly has to face there the weekly gathering of the entire aristocratic set. He is not tolerated and asked to leave since he is not a nobleman. He then returns to Wahlheim, where he suffers still more than before, partly because Charlotte and Albert are now married. Every day becomes a torturing reminder that Charlotte will never be able to requite his love. She, out of pity for her friend and respect for her husband, decides that Werther must not visit her so frequently. He visits her one final time, and they are both overcome with emotion after he recites to her a passage of his own translation of "Ossian".
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Tom_Jones,_a_Foundling"title="The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling">
The novel's events occupy eighteen books. It opens with the narrator stating that the purpose of the novel will be to explore "human nature".The kindly and wealthy Squire Allworthy and his sister Bridget are introduced in their wealthy estate in Somerset. Allworthy returns from London after an extended business trip and finds an abandoned baby sleeping in his bed. He summons his housekeeper, Mrs Deborah Wilkins, to take care of the child. After searching the nearby village Mrs Wilkins is told about a young woman called Jenny Jones, a servant of a schoolmaster and his wife, as the most likely person to have committed the deed. Jenny is brought before the Allworthys and admits being the one who put the baby in the bed, but she refuses to reveal the father's identity. Mr Allworthy mercifully removes Jenny to a place where her reputation will be unknown and tells his sister to raise the boy, whom he names Thomas, in his household.Two brothers, Dr Blifil and Captain Blifil, regularly visit the Allworthy estate. The doctor introduces the captain to Bridget in the hope of marrying into Allworthy's wealth. The couple soon marries. After the marriage, Captain Blifil begins to show a coldness to his brother, who eventually feels obliged to leave the house for London. He does, and, soon after, he dies "of a broken heart". Captain Blifil and his wife start to grow cool towards one another, and the former is found dead from apoplexy one evening after taking his customary evening stroll before dinner. By then, he has fathered a boy who grows up with the bastard Tom. Captain Blifil's son, known as Master Blifil, is a miserable and jealous boy who conspires against Tom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_(Camus_novel)"title="The Fall (Camus novel)">
## Life in Paris.The novel opens with Clamence sitting in the bar "Mexico City" casually talking to a stranger — the reader, some would say — about the proper way to order a drink; for here, despite the cosmopolitan nature of Amsterdam, the bartender refuses to respond to anything other than Dutch. Thus, Clamence serves as interpreter and he and the stranger, having discovered that they are fellow compatriots who, moreover, both hail from Paris, begin discussing more substantive matters.Clamence tells us that he used to lead an essentially perfect life in Paris as a highly successful and well-respected defence lawyer. The vast majority of his work centred around "widow and orphan" cases, that is, the poor and disenfranchised who otherwise would be unable to provide themselves with a proper defence before the law. He also relates anecdotes about how he always enjoyed giving friendly directions to strangers on the streets, yielding to others his seat on the bus, giving alms to the poor, and, above all, helping the blind to cross the street. In short, Clamence conceived of himself as living purely for the sake of others and "achieving more than the vulgar ambitious man and rising to that "supreme summit" where virtue is its own reward" (Camus 288).
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Hour_(novel)"title="The Golden Hour (novel)">
"The Golden Hour" tells the story of Rowan and Nina's adventures the summer after their mother's death. Thirteen-year-old Rowan's life is at an all-time low: his father has turned to drinking, the family business is becoming a financial disaster, they have had to move from their house to a small apartment, and his musically talented ten-year-old sister Nina has become withdrawn. When his two great aunts invite Rowan and Nina to spend the summer with them in Owatannauk, Maine, a small (fictional) town on the tip of the state, Rowan anticipates a very boring summer with the two elderly women. But when he arrives he finds strange things starting to happen: the aunts run a curio shop stocking some items so curious they even compel Nina to start speaking again.Rowan and Nina meet two twins, Xanthe and Xavier Alexander, who tell them about an old abandoned resort that appears to be haunted. Instead, the resort turns out to be an elaborate time machine. Nina seems interested in using the machine to escape her troubled life, especially when Rowan tells her about the Enlightenment, a period of European history when superstition and church dogma began giving way to logic and reason, art and science made tremendous strides, and truth and beauty were celebrated. When Nina disappears the next morning, the older kids rush to the resort: as they suspect, she has used the time machine. But Rowan discovers that he has told his sister the wrong dates for the Enlightenment, and instead of directing her to Enlightenment France he has sent her into the middle of the violent French Revolution. Rowan, Xanthe and Xavier time-travel to the French Revolution to save Nina, meeting various historical characters along the way, and Nina ends up in New York at their bakery visiting their mom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Fell_to_Earth_(novel)"title="The Man Who Fell to Earth (novel)">
Thomas Jerome Newton is a humanoid alien who comes to Earth seeking to construct a spaceship to ferry others from his home planet, Anthea, to Earth. Anthea is experiencing a terrible drought after many nuclear wars, and the population has dwindled to fewer than 300. Their own starships are unusable for lack of fuel and 500 years of neglect. The Antheans have no water, a supply of food that is slowly dwindling, and feeble solar power. Like all Antheans, Newton is super-intelligent, but he has been selected for this mission because he has the physical strength necessary to function in Earth's hotter climate and higher gravity.Arriving at Earth in a lifeboat, Newton first lands in the state of Kentucky. He quickly becomes familiar with the environment and forms a plan. Using advanced technology from his home planet, Newton patents many inventions, and amasses incredible wealth as the head of a technology-based conglomerate. He plans to use this wealth to construct space vehicles for the rest of the Anthean population.Along the way he meets Betty Jo, who falls in love with him. He does not return these feelings, but takes her and his curious fuel-technician Nathan Bryce as his friends, while he runs his company in the shadows. Betty Jo introduces Newton to many Earth customs, such as church, fashion, and alcohol. However, his appetite for alcohol soon leads to problems, as he begins to experience intense emotions unfamiliar to Antheans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quiet_Earth"title="The Quiet Earth">
## Alone.John Hobson, a geneticist involved in a project concerned with manipulating DNA, awakes in his hotel room in Thames, New Zealand, after a nightmare of falling from a great height. His wristwatch has stopped at 6:12. Upon getting up he finds the electricity off. It is quiet outside, with nobody in sight. Hobson checks the time in his car, finding the vehicle's clock is also frozen at 6:12.The town's shops are locked and unattended, with no sign of people. Investigating a car sitting at an intersection, Hobson sees that the driver's seatbelt is still fastened. Telephones are dead and there is only static on the radio. All humans and animals have disappeared. No watch or clock shows anything other than 6:12.Hobson concludes that some force has altered the clocks to show the same time and then stopped them, suggesting an intelligence behind the event, which Hobson dubs "the Effect".A garden yields the first sign of life Hobson has found – a worm dug up from the soil. The garden is otherwise devoid of fauna. Hobson wonders if he has gone mad, but dismisses the idea.During the night, Hobson hears sounds from outside approaching. Hobson wills the entity to leave, and the sounds retreat. Uncertainty as to whether the presence was there, or whether it may have been a stray animal spared from the Effect competes in his mind with speculations that the intruder could be a manifestation of the Effect. Hobson reassures himself that he can keep the entity at bay with mental effort.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_Tollbooth"title="The Phantom Tollbooth">
Milo is a boy bored by the world around him; every activity seems a waste of time. He arrives home from another boring day at school to find a mysterious package. Among its contents are a small tollbooth and a map of "the Lands Beyond," illustrating the Kingdom of Wisdom (which will also guide the reader from its place on the endpapers of the book). Attached to the package is a note "For Milo, who has plenty of time." Warned by an included sign to have his destination in mind, he decides without much thought to go to Dictionopolis, assuming this is a pretend game to be played on the floor of his room. He maneuvers through the tollbooth in his electric toy car, and instantly finds himself driving on a road that is clearly not in his city apartment.Milo begins with Expectations, a pleasant place where he starts on Wisdom's road. In Expectations, he seeks directions from the Whether Man, who is full of endless talk. As Milo drives on, he daydreams and gets lost in the Doldrums, a colorless place where nothing ever happens. Milo soon joins the inhabitants, the Lethargarians, in killing time there, a pastime angrily interrupted by the arrival of Tock, a talking, oversized dog with an alarm clock on each side (a "watchdog"), who tells Milo that only by thinking can he get out of the Doldrums. Head abuzz with unaccustomed thoughts, Milo is soon back on his road, and Tock joins him on his journey through Wisdom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hundred_and_One_Dalmatians"title="The Hundred and One Dalmatians">
Pongo and Missis are a pair of Dalmatians who live with the newly married Mr. and Mrs. Dearly and their two nannies, Nanny Cook and Nanny Butler. Mr. Dearly is a "financial wizard" who has been granted lifelong tax exemption and lent a house on the Outer Circle in Regent's Park in return for wiping out the government debt. The dogs consider the humans their pets, but allow the humans to think that they are the owners.One day, while walking Pongo and Missis, Mr. and Mrs. Dearly have a chance meeting with an old schoolmate of Mrs. Dearly: Cruella de Vil, a very wealthy woman so fixated on fur clothing that she married a furrier and forces him to keep his fur collection in their home so she can wear the pieces whenever she likes. She admires the two dogs and expresses a desire to have a Dalmatian-skin coat. Later, Missis gives birth to a litter of 15 puppies. Concerned that Missis will not be able to feed them all, the humans join in to help. As Mrs. Dearly looks for a canine wet nurse, she finds an exhausted liver-spotted Dalmatian in the middle of the road in the pouring rain. She has the dog treated by a vet, learns that she has recently given birth, and names her Perdita (meaning "lost"). Perdita helps to nurse the pups and becomes a member of the family. She tells Pongo about her lost love Prince and the resulting litter of puppies, which were sold by her neglectful owner. She had run away looking for those puppies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Philosophical_Investigation"title="A Philosophical Investigation">
In a near-future, a British neuroscientist named Professor Burgess Phelan has discovered a portion of the brain, the VMN, that is typically twice the size in men as it is in women. In certain men, however (approximately 1 in 100,000), it is the same size as a woman's, and that abnormality is an exceptionally accurate indicator of violent sociopathy. Professor Phelan developed an imaging device called L.O.M.B.R.O.S.O. (Localisation of Modullar Brain Resonations Obliging Social Orthopraxy) used to help diagnose men with the VMN deficiency.In the interests of public safety, the Lombroso institute is set up to test all the men in Britain. Males are enticed with ad campaigns to submit for testing; those who are VMN-negative are given confidential treatment, including counselling and drugs, and assigned a code name out of the Penguin book of Great Thinkers ("e.g.", Shakespeare, Plato, etc.). The police aren't given the names of the VMN-negative, but they are allowed to confirm whether or not a particular person is in the Lombroso Institutes system as VMN-negative."Wittgenstein" is the code name of a VMN-negative who, until he was made aware of his status, was living a well-adjusted, if solitary, life, venting his sociopathic tendencies harmlessly through virtual reality entertainment systems. Upon discovering his pathology, though, he undertakes a public service of his own: after hacking into the Lombroso Institute's systems and obtaining a list of all VMN-negative men in Britain, he undertakes to kill them all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_in_a_Cold_Climate"title="Love in a Cold Climate">
Lady Leopoldina "Polly" Hampton is the only child of the supremely aristocratic and very rich Earl of Montdore and his wife, Sonia. Lady Montdore is a product of the minor ranks of the aristocracy and her marriage to an earl is regarded as a social coup on her part. She is depicted by Fanny as an avaricious, greedy snob, but not without charm. Her thrusting personality, allied to her husband's impeccable social standing, riches and political influence makes her a formidable woman. Lady Montdore, unbeknownst to Lord Montdore, takes advantage of her husband's reputation to forward her own career as a hostess and manipulator of her social circle. Their daughter is Polly, whom Fanny loses contact with when Lord Montdore is sent as Viceroy of India.Fanny receives an invitation to visit the Montdores upon their return from India. She has great affection for Polly, but Polly reveals little of herself. Polly has "come out" in India and as a beautiful and socially important debutante is expected to have a very successful season in London. However, Polly consistently demonstrates a total lack of interest in the London season and all of the men she meets. She is hoping that "in a cold climate", society will be less interested in love affairs. Lady Montdore is exasperated by her daughter's apparent indifference to love and marriage. "Important" potential suitors acknowledge that Polly is very beautiful, but find her cold and aloof. Polly reveals to no one that she has been in love with her uncle, "Boy" Dougdale (the husband of her paternal aunt), since she was 14. Boy is snobbish and sexually rapacious; his many affairs are common knowledge to both his wife and society at large. Fanny and her Radlett cousins have long suspected that the sexually ambiguous Boy has paedophilic tendencies, and he is a joke amongst Fanny's cousins for his inappropriate touches and "lecherous" behaviour towards young girls. Polly marries Boy shortly after her aunt's death, causing a scandal in her social circle and distressing her parents deeply. Unbeknownst to Polly, Boy has been Lady Montdore's lover for many years. She is excluded from her father's will upon her marriage and she and Boy ostracised from society. They move to Sicily for several years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fountainhead"title="The Fountainhead">
In early 1922, Howard Roark is expelled from the architecture department of the Stanton Institute of Technology because he has not adhered to the school's preference for historical convention in building design. Roark goes to New York City and gets a job with Henry Cameron. Cameron was once a renowned architect, but now gets few commissions. In the meantime, Roark's popular, but vacuous, fellow student and housemate Peter Keating (whom Roark sometimes helped with projects) graduates with high honors. He too moves to New York, where he has been offered a position with the prestigious architecture firm, Francon &amp; Heyer. Keating ingratiates himself with Guy Francon and works to remove rivals among his coworkers. After Francon's partner, Lucius Heyer, suffers a fatal stroke brought on by Keating's antagonism, Francon chooses Keating to replace him. Meanwhile, Roark and Cameron create inspired work, but struggle financially.After Cameron retires, Keating hires Roark, whom Francon soon fires for refusing to design a building in the classical style. Roark works briefly at another firm, then opens his own office but has trouble finding clients and closes it down. He gets a job in a granite quarry owned by Francon. There he meets Francon's daughter Dominique, a columnist for "The New York Banner", while she is staying at her family's estate nearby. They are immediately attracted to each other, leading to a rough sexual encounter that Dominique later calls a rape. Shortly after, Roark is notified that a client is ready to start a new building, and he returns to New York. Dominique also returns to New York and learns Roark is an architect. She attacks his work in public, but visits him for secret sexual encounters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Continent"title="The Last Continent">
The story opens weeks after the events of "Interesting Times", in which Rincewind is magically transported to the continent of XXXX, where he meets the magical kangaroo Scrappy. Scrappy explains to Rincewind that he is fated to bring back meaning the rain, and end the eons-long drought.Meanwhile, the senior wizards are trying to find a cure for the Librarian's magical malady, which causes him to transform into a native object, such as a book when near a library, whenever he sneezes. The Lecturer in Recent Runes suggests they interrogate Rincewind, as he once worked closely with the Librarian and seemed to know more about him than anyone else.Back in the present, Rincewind ends up wrongfully arrested for sheep theft and taken to Bugarup, where he is hoping to find a ship to escape on. The people of Bugarup regard sheep thieves as folk heroes and encourage Rincewind to escape, while not actually allowing him to. He finds a hidden message on the ceiling of his holding cell, telling him: "G'day mate, check the hinges." He discovers that he is able to lift the door off its hinges and escape.After several comical misadventures, the University wizards reach Fourecks and meet the Creator of Fourecks.The Librarian meanwhile steals the Creator's bullroarer and spins it, causing the drought Rincewind is in the process of stopping. The wizards are then frozen in time for thousands of years by the stray magic left over from creating the continent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(novel)"title="Contact (novel)">
## The Message.As a child, Eleanor "Ellie" Arroway displays a strong aptitude for science and mathematics. Dissatisfied with a school lesson, she goes to the library to convince herself that is transcendental. In sixth grade, her father and role-model Theodore ("Ted") dies. A man named John Staughton becomes her stepfather and does not show as much support for her interests. Ellie refuses to accept him as a family member and concludes that her mother only remarried out of weakness.After graduating from Harvard University, Ellie receives a doctorate from Caltech supervised by David Drumlin, a well-known radio astronomer. She eventually becomes the director of "Project Argus", a radiotelescope array in New Mexico dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). This puts her at odds with most of the scientific community, including Drumlin, who tries to have the funding to SETI cut off. To his surprise, the project discovers a signal containing a series of prime numbers coming from the Vega system 26 light years away. Further analysis reveals information in the polarization modulation of the signal: a retransmission of Adolf Hitler's opening speech at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, the first television signal powerful enough to escape Earth's ionosphere.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gods"title="American Gods">
Shadow is an ex-convict who is released from prison three days early when his wife Laura is killed in a car accident. Shadow is devastated by her death, and is distraught to learn that she died alongside his best friend Robbie, with whom she had been having an affair. He takes a job as a bodyguard for a mysterious con man, Mr. Wednesday, and travels with him across the United States, visiting Wednesday's acquaintances. Shadow meets a leprechaun named Mad Sweeney, who gives Shadow a magical gold coin after Shadow beats him in a fight. Shadow later tosses the coin into his wife's grave at her funeral, inadvertently bringing her back from the dead as a semi-living revenant. Shadow meets Czernobog and the Zorya Sisters. One of the sisters gives Shadow a silver coin, coming from the moon, that will protect him. Shadow learns that Wednesday is an incarnation of Odin the All-Father, and that he is recruiting American manifestations of the Old Gods, whose powers have waned as their believers have decreased in number, to participate in a battle against the New American Gods – manifestations of modern life and technology, such as the Internet, media, and modern means of transport. Shadow meets many of Wednesday's allies, including Mr. Nancy (Anansi), Easter (Ēostre), Whiskey Jack (Wisakedjak) and John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardust_(Gaiman_novel)"title="Stardust (Gaiman novel)">
Every nine years, in the village of Wall in rural England, a market is held the other side of a stone wall (for which the village is named) dividing the realm of Faerie from our world. In the early Victorian era, young Dunstan Thorn meets Una, a fairy woman enslaved by the witch Semele, at the market. Dunstan purchases a glass snowdrop from her with a kiss; and, later that night, makes love to her in the woods. Months later, Dunstan receives a baby in a basket—his and Una's son, Tristran.Eighteen years later, Tristran is infatuated with the beautiful Victoria Forester. While walking her home one night, he sees a falling star land in Faerie and vows to bring it to Victoria. Victoria agrees to reward him with whatever he desires—including her hand in marriage—if he succeeds. Dunstan gives Tristran the snowdrop and enables him to pass the wall's guards by alluding to his fairy heritage.At the castle of Stormhold, in Faerie, the dying Lord of Stormhold throws his topaz pendant out the window and declares that the first of his three surviving sons—Primus, Tertius, and Septimus—to retrieve it will be his successor. The pendant flies upward and knocks a star out of the sky (the same one Tristran promised to Victoria). The brothers depart in search of the pendant after their father's death. Septimus poisons Tertius at an inn. Meanwhile, the Lilim, a trio of ancient witches, learn of the fallen star and plan to eat its heart to regain their youth. The eldest of the Lilim, the witch-queen, is chosen to find the star and consumes the remains of the last star's heart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_the_Mind"title="Children of the Mind">
At the start of "Children of the Mind", Jane, the evolved computer intelligence, is using her newly discovered abilities to take the races of buggers, humans and "pequeninos" outside the universe and back instantaneously. She uses these powers to move them to distant habitable planets for colonization. She is losing her memory and concentration as the vast computer network connected to the ansible is being shut down. If she is to survive, she must find a way to transfer her "aiúa" (or soul) to a human body.Peter Wiggin and Si Wang-Mu travel to the worlds of Divine Wind and Pacifica to persuade the Japanese-led swing group of the Starways Congress to revoke their order to destroy Lusitania. By tracing the decision-making trail backwards, they are able to show a philosopher his influence on the Starways Congress. After several complications, the philosopher persuades the Tsutsumi clan to exert their influence with the Necessarian faction in the Starways Congress to stop the Lusitania fleet. The admiral at the head of the Lusitania fleet, however, disobeys the Congress's order and does what he believes Ender Wiggin, the perpetrator of the first Xenocide, would have done and fires the Molecular Disruption Device (MDD).Upon Ender Wiggin's death, Jane guides his "aiúa" to Peter's body, while she is granted possession of Young Val's body, and thus is not destroyed when the ansible shuts down. She is then able to continue transporting starships instantaneously by borrowing the vast mental capacity of the simple-minded Pequenino mother-trees. She transports a ship with Peter and Wang-Mu around the missile, then transports the missile and them to inside of the Lusitania fleet, where it is then disarmed and disabled. Peter and Wang-Mu's efforts finally come to fruition, and the destruction of Lusitania is averted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silver_Chalice"title="The Silver Chalice">
"The Silver Chalice" takes place in Judea and other parts of the Roman Empire shortly after the death of Jesus. A young man, Basil, is adopted by a rich man, but loses his fortune when his father dies and his uncle defrauds him, claiming he was purchased as a slave, and sells him. As a slave, he survives by working as an artist and silversmith. He gains his freedom, becomes a Christian and is commissioned to create an outer covering for the cup Jesus drank from at The Last Supper.The plot of "The Silver Chalice" centers on the Grail — the cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper. Tired of “all the Arthurian tripe about the Holy Grail,” Costain imagined his own version of the story. Joseph of Arimathea hires Basil of Antioch, a lowborn artisan, to fashion a beautiful silver casing to hold the plain original cup that Jesus used. The casing is to be decorated with the faces of Jesus and the twelve Apostles. To fulfill the commission, Basil travels throughout the ancient Mediterranean world to meet these men and those who knew them intimately.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thus_Spoke_Zarathustra"title="Thus Spoke Zarathustra">
## First part.The book begins with a prologue which sets up many of the themes that will be explored throughout the work. Zarathustra is introduced as a hermit who has lived ten years on a mountain with his two companions, an eagle and a serpent. One morning – inspired by the sun, which is happy only when it shines upon others – Zarathustra decides to return to the world and share his wisdom. Upon descending the mountain, he encounters a saint living in a forest, who spends his days praising God. Zarathustra marvels that the saint has not yet heard that "God is dead".Arriving at the nearest town, Zarathustra addresses a crowd which has gathered to watch a tightrope walker. He tells them that mankind's goal must be to create something superior to itself – a new type of human, the "Übermensch". All men, he says, must be prepared to will their own destruction in order to bring the "Übermensch" into being. The crowd greets this speech with scorn and mockery, and meanwhile the tightrope show begins. When the rope-dancer is halfway across, a clown comes up behind him, urging him to get out of the way. The clown then leaps over the rope-dancer, causing the latter to fall to his death. The crowd scatters; Zarathustra takes the corpse of the rope-dancer on his shoulders, carries it into the forest, and lays it in a hollow tree. He decides that from this point on, he will no longer attempt to speak to the masses, but only to a few chosen disciples.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse-Five"title="Slaughterhouse-Five">
The story is told in a non-linear order by an unreliable narrator (he begins the novel by telling the reader, "All of this happened, more or less"). Events become clear through flashbacks and descriptions of his time travel experiences. In the first chapter, the narrator describes his writing of the book, his experiences as a University of Chicago anthropology student and a Chicago City News Bureau correspondent, his research on the Children's Crusade and the history of Dresden, and his visit to Cold War-era Europe with his wartime friend Bernard V. O'Hare. He then writes about Billy Pilgrim, an American man from the fictional town of Ilium, New York, who believes that he was held at one time in an alien zoo on a planet he calls Tralfamadore, and that he has experienced time travel.As a chaplain's assistant in the United States Army during World War II, Billy is an ill-trained, disoriented, and fatalistic American soldier who discovers that he does not like war and refuses to fight. He is transferred from a base in South Carolina to the front line in Luxembourg during the Battle of the Bulge. He narrowly escapes death as the result of a string of events. He also meets Roland Weary, a patriot, warmonger, and sadistic bully who derides Billy's cowardice. The two of them are captured in 1944 by the Germans, who confiscate all of Weary's belongings and force him to wear wooden clogs that cut painfully into his feet; the resulting wounds become gangrenous, which eventually kills him. While Weary is dying in a rail car full of prisoners, he convinces a fellow soldier, Paul Lazzaro, that Billy is to blame for his death. Lazzaro vows to avenge Weary's death by killing Billy, because revenge is "the sweetest thing in life".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Catcher_in_the_Rye"title="The Catcher in the Rye">
Holden Caulfield, a depressed 16-year-old, lives in a sanitorium in California after the end of World War II. After his discharge within a month, he intends to go live with his brother D.B., an author and war veteran with whom Holden is angry for becoming a Hollywood screenwriter. Holden recalls the events of a weekend (Saturday afternoon to Monday afternoon) shortly before the previous year's Christmas, beginning at Pencey Preparatory Academy, a boarding school in Pennsylvania that Salinger may have based on the Valley Forge Military Academy and College. Holden has just been expelled from Pencey because he had failed all of his classes except English. After causing the fencing team to forfeit a fencing match in New York because he accidentally lost the team’s equipment on the subway, he says goodbye to his history teacher, Mr. Spencer, who is a well-meaning but long-winded old man. Spencer offers him advice and simultaneously embarrasses Holden by criticizing his history exam.Back at his dorm, Holden's dorm neighbor, Robert Ackley, who is unpopular among his peers, disturbs Holden with his impolite questioning and mannerisms. Holden, who feels sorry for Ackley, tolerates his presence. Later, Holden agrees to write an English composition for his roommate, Ward Stradlater, who is leaving for a date. Holden and Stradlater normally hang out well together, and Holden admires Stradlater's physique. He is distressed to learn that Stradlater's date is Jane Gallagher, with whom Holden was infatuated, and whom he feels the need to protect. That night, Holden decides to go to a Cary Grant comedy with Mal Brossard and Ackley. Since Ackley and Mal had already seen the film, they end up just eating food and playing pinball for a while and returning to Pencey. When Stradlater returns hours later, he fails to appreciate the deeply personal composition Holden wrote for him about the baseball glove of Holden's late brother Allie who died from leukemia a few years prior, and refuses to say whether he had sex with Jane. Enraged, Holden punches him, and Stradlater easily wins the fight. When Holden continues insulting him, Stradlater leaves him lying on the floor with a bloody nose. Fed up with the "phonies" at Pencey Prep, Holden decides to leave Pencey early and catches a train to New York. Holden intends to stay away from his home until Wednesday when his parents would have received notification of his expulsion. Aboard the train, Holden meets the mother of a wealthy, obnoxious Pencey student, Ernest Morrow, and makes up nice but false stories about her son.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose"title="The Name of the Rose">
In 1327, Franciscan friar William of Baskerville and Adso of Melk, a Benedictine novice travelling under his protection, arrive at a Benedictine monastery in Northern Italy to attend a theological disputation. This abbey is being used as neutral ground in a dispute between Pope John XXII and the Franciscans, who are suspected of heresy.The monastery is disturbed by the death of Adelmo of Otranto, an illuminator revered for his illustrations. Adelmo was skilled at comical artwork, especially concerning religious matters. William is asked by the monastery's abbot, Abo of Fossanova, to investigate the death: During his enquiry he has a debate with one of the oldest monks in the abbey, Jorge of Burgos, about the theological meaning of laughter, which Jorge despises.The next day, a scholar of Aristotle and translator of Greek and Arabic, Venantius of Salvemec, is found dead in a vat of pig's blood. Severinus of Sankt Wendel, the herbalist, tells William that Venantius's body had black stains on the tongue and fingers, which suggests poison. Benno of Uppsala, a rhetoric scholar, reveals to William that the librarian, Malachi of Hildesheim, and his assistant Berengar of Arundel, had a homosexual relationship, until Berengar seduced Adelmo, who committed suicide out of conflicting religious shame. The only other monks who knew about the indiscretions were Jorge and Venantius. In spite of Malachi prohibiting William and Adso from entering the labyrinthine library, they penetrate the labyrinth, discovering that there must be a hidden room, entitled the "finis Africae" after the presumed geographical edge of the world. They find a book on Venantius' desk along with some cryptic notes. Someone snatches the book, and they pursue to no avail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason_&amp;_Dixon"title="Mason &amp; Dixon">
One: Latitudes and DeparturesEpisode 1The Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke, at the Philadelphia home of his sister Elizabeth LeSpark, earns his room and board by telling stories to his niece and nephews. The novel opens during the winter of 1786 as the Reverend, by request from his nephews, embarks on his first story set in America, which begins with his recollection of the first meeting of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon as told to him by the two men.Episode 2A brief episode in which respective letters of introduction are exchanged between Mason and Dixon.Episode 3In the naval town of Portsmouth, England in 1761, Mason &amp; Dixon meet for the first time. After brief discussions of their respective background, the two retire to an ale house for libations before their departure on the frigate HMS "Seahorse" to observe the Transit of Venus from Sumatra as ordered by the Royal Society. Over the course of the evening they encounter for the first time the Learned English Dog and Fender-Belly Bodine, a soon-to-be-shipmate on board the "Seahorse". Talk is made over the threat of possible French naval aggression against the relatively undersized frigate.Episode 4The Reverend recounts the departure of the "Seahorse" from Portsmouth and its passage through the English Channel. In open sea, off the coast of France, the Seahorse is pursued and attacked by the French warship "l'Grand". After a pitched battle, during which Mason and Dixon remain below decks and the Reverend acts as a surgeon's apprentice, the French unexpectedly and inexplicably break off the attack. The Seahorse, with more than thirty casualties and broken masts, limps back to Plymouth for repairs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Member_of_the_Wedding"title="The Member of the Wedding">
The novel takes place over a few days in late August. It tells the story of 12-year-old tomboy Frankie Addams, who feels disconnected from the world; in her words, an "unjoined person." Frankie's mother died when she was born, and her father is a distant, uncomprehending figure. Her closest companions are the family's African American maid, Berenice Sadie Brown, and her six-year-old cousin, John Henry West. She has no friends in her small Southern town and dreams of going away with her brother and his bride-to-be on their honeymoon in the Alaskan wilderness.The novel explores the psychology of the three main characters and is more concerned with evocative settings than with incident. Frankie does, however, have a brief and troubling encounter with a soldier. Her hopes of going away are disappointed and, her fantasy destroyed, a short coda reveals how her personality has changed. It also recounts the fate of John Henry West, and Berenice Sadie Brown's future plans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V."title="V.">
The novel alternates between episodes featuring Benny, Stencil and other members of the Whole Sick Crew (including Profane's sidekick Pig Bodine) in 1956 (with a few minor flashbacks), and a generation-spanning plot that comprises Stencil's attempts to unravel the clues he believes will lead him to "V." (or to the various incarnations thereof). Each of these "Stencilised" chapters is set at a different moment of historical crisis; the framing narrative involving Stencil, "V.", and the journals of Stencil's British spy/diplomat father threads the sequences together. The novel's two storylines increasingly converge in the last chapters (the intersecting lines forming a V-shape, as it were), as Stencil hires Benny to travel with him to Malta.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shōgun_(novel)"title="Shōgun (novel)">
John Blackthorne, an English pilot serving on the Dutch warship "Erasmus", is the first Englishman to reach Japan. England (and Holland) seek to disrupt Portuguese-Catholic relations with Japan and establish ties of their own through trade and military alliances. After "Erasmus" is blown ashore on the Japanese coast, Blackthorne and ten other survivors are taken captive by local samurai, Kasigi Omi, until his "daimyō" and uncle, Kasigi Yabu, arrives. Yabu puts Blackthorne and his crew on trial as pirates, using a Jesuit priest to interpret for Blackthorne. Having lost the trial, Blackthorne attacks the Jesuit. His breaking of the priest'scrucifix shows that the priest is his enemy. The Japanese, who know only the Catholic version of Christianity, are shocked. Yabu sentences them all to death.Omi, a clever adviser, convinces Yabu to spare them to learn more about European ways. After a failed rebellion by the Europeans, Blackthorne agrees to submit to Japanese authority. He is placed in a household, while his crew remain hostages. On Omi's advice, Yabu plans to confiscate the rutters, muskets, cannons, and silver coins recovered from "Erasmus". Word reaches Toranaga, Lord of the Kwanto and president of the Council of Regents. Toranaga sends his commander in chief, General Toda "Iron Fist" Hiro-matsu, to take the spoils and crew in order to gain an advantage against Toranaga's main rival on the council, Ishido.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodnight_Moon"title="Goodnight Moon">
The text is a rhyming poem, describing an anthropomorphic bunny's bedtime ritual of saying "good night" to various inanimate and living objects in the bunny's bedroom: a red balloon, a pair of socks, the bunny's dollhouse, a bowl of mush, and two kittens, among others; despite the kittens, a mouse is present in each spread. The book begins at 7:00 PM, and ends at 8:10 PM, with each spread being spaced 10 minutes apart, as measured by the two clocks in the room, and reflected (improbably) in the rising moon. The illustrations alternate between 2-page black-and-white spreads of objects and 2-page color spreads of the room, like the other books in the series; this was a common cost-saving technique at the time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Onegin"title="Eugene Onegin">
In the 1820s, Eugene Onegin is a bored St. Petersburg dandy, whose life consists of balls, concerts, parties, and nothing more. Upon the death of a wealthy uncle, he inherits a substantial fortune and a landed estate. When he moves to the country, he strikes up a friendship with his neighbor, a starry-eyed young poet named Vladimir Lensky. Lensky takes Onegin to dine with the family of his fiancée, the sociable but rather thoughtless Olga Larina. At this meeting, he also catches a glimpse of Olga's sister Tatyana. A quiet, precocious romantic, and the exact opposite of Olga, Tatyana becomes intensely drawn to Onegin. Soon after, she bares her soul to Onegin in a letter professing her love. Contrary to her expectations, Onegin does not write back. When they meet in person, he rejects her advances politely but dismissively and condescendingly. This famous speech is often referred to as "Onegin's Sermon": he admits that the letter was touching, but says that he would quickly grow bored with marriage and can only offer Tatyana friendship; he coldly advises more emotional control in the future, lest another man take advantage of her innocence.Later, Lensky mischievously invites Onegin to Tatyana's name day celebration, promising a small gathering with just Tatyana, Olga, and their parents. When Onegin arrives, he finds instead a boisterous country ball, a rural parody of and contrast to the society balls of St. Petersburg of which he has grown tired. Onegin is irritated with the guests who gossip about him and Tatyana, and with Lensky for persuading him to come. He decides to avenge himself by dancing and flirting with Olga. Olga is insensitive to her fiancé and apparently attracted to Onegin. Earnest and inexperienced, Lensky is wounded to the core and challenges Onegin to fight a duel; Onegin reluctantly accepts, feeling compelled by social convention. During the duel, Onegin unwillingly kills Lensky. Afterwards, he quits his country estate, traveling abroad to deaden his feelings of remorse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbow_Room_(Dennett_book)"title="Elbow Room (Dennett book)">
## Determinism doesn't make humans equivalent to animals.A major task taken on by Dennett in "Elbow Room" is to clearly describe just what people are as biological entities and why they find the issue of free will to be of significance. In discussing what people are and why free will matters to them, Dennett makes use of an evolutionary perspective. Dennett describes the mechanical behavior of the digger wasp "Sphex". This insect follows a series of genetically programmed steps in preparing for egg laying. If an experimenter interrupts one of these steps the wasp will repeat that step again. For an animal like a wasp, this process of repeating the same behavior can go on indefinitely, the wasp never seeming to notice what is going on. This is the type of mindless, pre-determined behavior that humans can avoid. Given the chance to repeat some futile behavior endlessly, people can notice the futility of it, and by an act of free will do something else. We can take this as an operational definition of what people mean by free will. Dennett points out the fact that as long as people see themselves as able to avoid futility, most people have seen enough of the free will issue. Dennett then invites all who are satisfied with this level of analysis to get on with living while he proceeds into the deeper hair-splitting aspects of the free will issue.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Captain_Underpants"title="The Adventures of Captain Underpants">
In Piqua, Ohio, George Beard and Harold Hutchins are fourth-grade pranksters. When not causing mayhem at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, they write and draw comics in George's treehouse featuring characters of their own creation, namely Captain Underpants, and sell copies of their comics on the school playground. One day, they pull a series of practical jokes at the school's football game, from putting black pepper in the cheerleaders' pom-poms to filling the ball with helium, which causes the school to forfeit. The next day, their principal Mr. Krupp tells them he had set up security cameras that filmed George and Harold preparing their pranks and recorded them on a videotape, which he threatens to release unless they obey him. The boys wake up at 6 AM to wash Mr. Krupp's car and mow his lawn, not smile or be disruptive at all during school time, spend lunch and recess cleaning his office, work on Mr. Krupp's house after school, and do extra homework. In order to escape this labor, George orders a "3-D Hypno-Ring" from the Li'l Wiseguy Novelty Company, which they receive after 4 to 6 weeks of grueling labor. The boys then use the ring to hypnotize Mr. Krupp, and Harold replaces the video with one of his little sister's "Boomer the Purple Dragon" sing-along videos.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rowan"title="The Rowan">
"The Rowan" tells the life story of a young orphan, of Prime Talent, from the moment the child's community is wiped out in a mudslide to the time when she becomes a Prime and after a life of loneliness falls in love with a previously undiscovered Prime on Deneb which was being attacked by aliens.The central section of the book is based on McCaffrey's earlier short story "Lady in the Tower"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_the_River_Plate_(film)"title="The Battle of the River Plate (film)">
In the early months of the Second World War, Nazi Germany's "Kriegsmarine" sends out merchant raiders to attack Allied shipping. The heavily armed German pocket battleship the "Admiral Graf Spee" sinks a British merchant vessel, the "Africa Shell". The "Africa Shell's" crew is brought aboard the "Admiral Graf Spee". The "Admiral Graf Spee" docks with its supply ship and more captured British seamen are brought aboard. Three weeks later, the "Admiral Graf Spee" sinks another British vessel, the "Doric Star". Her crew is also brought aboard.The Royal Navy responds with hunting groups whose mission is to stop these attacks on Allied shipping. The group that finds the "Admiral Graf Spee" near South America is outgunned since "Admiral Graf Spee" is equipped with long-range guns, and the British heavy cruiser has much lighter guns, and the light cruisers and have guns. However, they go straight into the attack, closing swiftly to minimize the "Graf Spee's" substantial advantage in range of shot.The British are led by Commodore Harwood (Anthony Quayle), with Captain Woodhouse (Ian Hunter) commanding flagship "Ajax", Captain Bell (John Gregson) "Exeter" and Captain Parry (Jack Gwillim) "Achilles". The British use their superior numbers to split her fire by attacking from different directions, but "Admiral Graf Spee", under Captain Hans Langsdorff (Peter Finch), inflicts much damage on her foes. "Exeter" is particularly hard hit and is forced to retire from the battle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecotopia"title="Ecotopia">
The book is set in 1999 (25 years in the future from 1974) and consists of diary entries and reports of journalist William Weston, who is the first American mainstream media reporter to investigate Ecotopia, a small country that broke away from the United States in 1980. Prior to Weston's reporting, most Americans had been barred from entering the new country, which is depicted as being on continual guard against revanchism. The new nation of Ecotopia consists of Northern California, Oregon, and Washington; it is hinted that Southern California is a lost cause. The novel takes its form as a narrative from Weston's diary in combination with dispatches that he transmits to his publication, the fictional "Times-Post".At the beginning, Weston is skeptically curious about, not yet sympathetic to the Ecotopians. He describes details of the Ecotopian transportation system and the preferred lifestyle. This includes a wide range of gender roles, sexual freedom, and acceptance of non-monogamous relationships. Liberal cannabis use is evident. Televised passive, mass-media, spectator sports have been displaced in favor of local arts coverage, local participatory sports, and general fitness. A large fraction of young male Ecotopians participate voluntarily in a decidedly male ritual of mock warfare using wooden spears but no guns or arrows. The games are not re-enactments. Physical injuries, occasionally serious, are considered part of the game. Ecotopians on the whole value the benefits to young males over the accidental injuries. Ecotopia also tolerates the voluntary separatism of many people of African descent who have, in fact, chosen to live in a mini-nation in the San Francisco East Bay-area.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turner_Diaries"title="The Turner Diaries">
The protagonist, Earl Turner, takes part in the apocalyptic overthrow of the United States federal government (referred to as "the System" throughout the novel). Turner and his fellow insurgents wage a race war which begins in North America and spreads to the rest of the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_the_Universe_and_Everything"title="Life, the Universe and Everything">
After being stranded on pre-historic Earth after the events in "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe", Arthur Dent is met by his old friend Ford Prefect, who drags him into a space-time eddy, represented by an anachronistic sofa. The two end up at Lord's Cricket Ground two days before the Earth's destruction by the Vogons. Shortly after they arrive, a squad of robots land in a spaceship in the middle of the field and attack the assembled crowd, stealing the Ashes before departing. Another spaceship arrives, the "Starship Bistromath", helmed by Slartibartfast, who discovers he is too late to stop the theft and requests Arthur and Ford's help.As they travel to their next destination, Slartibartfast explains that he is trying to stop the robots from collecting all the components of the Wikkit Gate. Long ago, the peaceful population of the planet of Krikkit, unaware of the rest of the Universe due to a dust cloud that surrounded its solar system, were surprised to find the wreckage of a spacecraft on their planet. Reverse engineering the vessel, they explored past the dust cloud and saw the rest of the Universe, immediately taking a disliking to it and deciding that it must be destroyed. They built a fleet of ships and robots to attack the rest of the Universe in a brutal onslaught known as the Krikkit Wars, but were eventually defeated. Realizing that the Krikkit population would not be satisfied alongside the existence of the rest of the Universe, it was decided to lock the planet in a Slo-Time envelope, to be opened only after the Universe has ended so that the planet can exist alone. The Wikkit Gate, shaped exactly like a wicket used in the sport of cricket, is needed to unlock the envelope. However, one ship carrying a troop of robots from Krikkit avoided being sealed in, and these robots began to search for the pieces of the Gate after they were dispersed about space and time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gargantua_and_Pantagruel"title="Gargantua and Pantagruel">
## "Pantagruel".The full modern English title for the work commonly known as Pantagruel is The Horrible and Terrifying Deeds and Words of the Very Renowned Pantagruel King of the Dipsodes, Son of the Great Giant Gargantua and in French, "Les horribles et épouvantables faits et prouesses du très renommé Pantagruel Roi des Dipsodes, fils du Grand Géant Gargantua". The original title of the work was "Pantagruel roy des dipsodes restitué à son naturel avec ses faictz et prouesses espoventables". Although most modern editions of Rabelais' work place "Pantagruel" as the second volume of a series, it was actually published first, around 1532 under the pen name "Alcofribas Nasier", an anagram of "François Rabelais".Inspired by an anonymous book, "The Great Chronicles of the Great and Enormous Giant Gargantua" (in French, "Les Grandes Chroniques du Grand et Enorme Géant Gargantua"), "Pantagruel" is offered as a book of the same sort.The narrative begins with the origin of giants; Pantagruel's particular genealogy; and his birth. His childhood is briefly covered, before his father sends him away to the universities. He acquires a great reputation. On receiving a letter with news that his father has been translated to Fairyland by Morgan le Fay; and that the Dipsodes, hearing of it, have invaded his land, and are besieging a city: Pantagruel and his companions depart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tenant_of_Wildfell_Hall"title="The Tenant of Wildfell Hall">
The novel is divided into three volumes.Part One (Chapters 1 to 15) is narrated by Gilbert Markham, beginning with an account of how a mysterious widow, Mrs Helen Graham, arrives at Wildfell Hall, a nearby mansion. A source of curiosity for the small community, the reticent Mrs Graham and her young son, Arthur, are slowly drawn into the social circles of the village. Initially, Gilbert Markham casually courts Eliza Millward, despite his mother's belief that he can do better. His interest in Eliza wanes as he comes to know Mrs Graham. In retribution, Eliza spreads (and perhaps creates) scandalous rumours about Helen. With gossip flying, Gilbert is led to believe that his friend Mr Lawrence is courting Mrs Graham. At a chance meeting on a road, Gilbert strikes the mounted Lawrence with a whip handle, causing him to fall from his horse. Though she is unaware of this confrontation, Helen Graham still refuses to marry Gilbert, but when he accuses her of loving Lawrence, she gives him her diaries.Part two (Chapters 16 to 44) is taken from Helen's diaries, in which she describes her marriage to Arthur Huntingdon. The handsome, witty Huntingdon is also spoilt, selfish and self-indulgent. Before marrying Helen, he flirts with Annabella, and uses this to manipulate Helen and convince her to marry him. Helen, blinded by love, marries him, and resolves to reform him with gentle persuasion and good example. After the birth of their only child, however, Huntingdon becomes increasingly jealous of their son, who is also called Arthur, and his claims on Helen's attentions and affections.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz"title="A Canticle for Leibowitz">
## Background.After 20th-century civilization was destroyed by a global nuclear war, known as the "Flame Deluge", there was a violent backlash against the culture of advanced knowledge and technology that had led to the development of nuclear weapons. During this backlash, called the "Simplification", anyone of learning, and eventually anyone who could even read, was likely to be killed by rampaging mobs, who proudly took on the name of "Simpletons". Illiteracy became almost universal, and books were destroyed en masse.Isaac Edward Leibowitz, a Jewish electrical engineer working for the United States military, survived the war and sought refuge from the mobs of the "Simplification" in the sanctuary of a Cistercian monastery, all the while surreptitiously searching for his wife, from whom he had become separated in the war. Eventually concluding that his wife was dead, he joined the monastery, took holy orders (becoming a priest), and dedicated his life to preserving knowledge by hiding books, smuggling them to safety (known as "booklegging"), memorizing, and copying them. He approached the Church for permission to found a new monastic order dedicated to this purpose. With permission granted, he founded his new order in the desert of the American Southwest, where it became known as the "Albertian Order of Leibowitz". The Order's abbey is located in a remote desert in Utah, possibly near the military base where Leibowitz worked before the war, on an old road that may have been "a portion of the shortest route from the Great Salt Lake to Old El Paso". Leibowitz was eventually betrayed and martyred. Later beatified by the Roman Catholic Church, he became a candidate for sainthood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cards_on_the_Table"title="Cards on the Table">
Mr Shaitana, a flamboyant collector, meets Hercule Poirot by chance at an art exhibition and brags about his personal crime-related collection. Scoffing at the idea of collecting mere artefacts, Shaitana explains that he collects only the best exhibits: criminals who have evaded justice. He invites Poirot to a dinner party to meet them.Poirot's fellow guests include three other crime professionals: secret serviceman Colonel Race, mystery writer Mrs Ariadne Oliver, and Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard; along with four people Shaitana believes to be murderers: Dr Roberts, Mrs Lorrimer, Anne Meredith, and Major Despard. Shaitana taunts his suspects with comments that each understands as applying only to them.The guests retire to play bridge, the professionals playing in one room while the others play in a second room where Shaitana relaxes by the fire. As the party breaks up, Shaitana is found to be dead – stabbed in the chest with a stiletto from his own collection. None of the suspects can be ruled out, as all had moved around during the evening. Leading the police investigation, Superintendent Battle agrees to put his "cards on the table" and to allow the other professionals to make their own enquiries. Poirot concentrates on the psychology of the murderer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gambler_(novel)"title="The Gambler (novel)">
The first-person narrative is told from the point of view of Alexei Ivanovich, a tutor working for a Russian family living in a suite at a German hotel.The patriarch of the family, The General, is indebted to the Frenchman de Grieux and has mortgaged his property in Russia to pay only a small amount of his debt.Upon learning of the illness of his wealthy aunt, "Grandmother", he sends streams of telegrams to Moscow and awaits the news of her demise. His expected inheritance will pay his debts and gain Mademoiselle Blanche de Cominges's hand in marriage.Alexei is hopelessly in love with Polina, the General's niece. She asks him to go to the town's casino and place a bet for her. After hesitations, he succumbs and ends up winning at the roulette table. He returns to her the winnings but she will not tell him the reason she needs money. She only laughs in his face (as she does when he professes his love) and treats him with cold indifference, if not downright malice. He only learns the details of the General's and Polina's financial state later in the story through his long-time acquaintance, Mr. Astley. Astley is a shy Englishman who seems to share Alexei's fondness of Polina. He comes from English nobility and has a good deal of money.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_(Forester_novel)"title="The General (Forester novel)">
## Overall story framework.At the beginning of the Great War, upon mobilisation in August 1914, Curzon holds the rank of senior major in the not particularly fashionable 22nd Lancers. During the Boer War he won some distinction in an old-style cavalry charge but his character-forming career since has been a matter of rigid and unimaginative peacetime routine.Curzon is given a temporary promotion to battalion command and then quickly a brigade command. At the Battle of Ypres, he manages to keep his head about him and following the death of his brigadier becomes a general. He returns to England, while his unit is in Belgium and is promoted again though chance and political intrigue. He makes an advantageous marriage to Emily the daughter of the Duke of Bude which gives him political connections to the opposition "Bude House" set.Curzon is promoted again and again, eventually being placed in command of the 10,000-man (fictional) 91st Infantry Division, ordering attacks that condemn many of them to mutilation and death amongst the shells, gas and the machine guns. At the end, the 91st Division, which he has brought to a high degree of efficiency, is forced to retreat in the March 1918 German offensive. Faithful to his own traditional values, Curzon decides to "go up the line" among his troops on his horse with a sword rather than face defeat and professional failure. The novel implies that he seeks death in battle; he says "We can still go down fighting". He is injured by a shell fragment, endures months of drugged agony and loses a leg. His war is over.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Jar"title="The Bell Jar">
In 1953, Esther Greenwood, a nineteen-year-old undergraduate student from the suburbs of Boston, is awarded a summer internship at the fictional "Ladies' Day" magazine in New York City. During the internship, Esther feels neither stimulated nor excited by the work, fashion, and big-city lifestyle that her peers in the program seem to adore. She finds herself struggling to feel anything at all aside from anxiety and disorientation. Esther appreciates the witty sarcasm and adventurousness of another intern Doreen, but also identifies with the piety of Betsy, an old-fashioned and naïve young woman. Esther has a benefactress in Philomena Guinea, a formerly successful writer of women's fiction, who funds the scholarship through which Esther – from a working-class family – is enrolled at her college. Esther describes in detail several seriocomic incidents that occur during her internship, beginning with mass food-poisoning of the interns from a lunch thrown by the staff of the magazine. She reminisces about her boyfriend Buddy, whom she has dated more or less seriously, and who considers himself her de facto fiancé. Esther's internal monologue often lingers on musings of death and violence. Shortly before the internship ends, she attends a country club party with Doreen and is set up with a man who treats her roughly and sexually assaults her, before she breaks his nose and leaves. That night, after returning to the hotel, she impulsively throws all of her brand-new and fashionable gifted clothing off the roof.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jude_the_Obscure"title="Jude the Obscure">
The novel tells the story of Jude Fawley, who lives in a village in southern England (part of Hardy's fictional county of Wessex). He yearns to be a scholar at "Christminster", a city modeled on Oxford. As a youth, Jude teaches himself Classical Greek and Latin in his spare time, while working first in his great-aunt's bakery, with the hope of entering university. But before he can try to do this the naïve Jude is seduced by Arabella Donn, a rather coarse, morally lax, and superficial local girl who traps him into marriage by pretending to be pregnant. The marriage is a failure, and Arabella leaves Jude and later emigrates to Australia, where she enters into a bigamous marriage. By this time, Jude has abandoned his classical studies.After Arabella leaves him, Jude moves to Christminster and supports himself as a mason while studying alone, hoping to be able to enter the university later. There, he meets and falls in love with his free-spirited cousin, Sue Bridehead. But, shortly after this, Jude introduces Sue to his former school teacher, Mr. Phillotson, whom she eventually is persuaded to marry, despite the fact that he is some twenty years her senior. She soon regrets this, because, in addition to being in love with Jude, she is horrified by the notion of sex with her husband. Sue soon asks Phillotson for permission to leave him for Jude, which he grants, once he realizes how unwilling she is to fulfill what he believes are her marital duties to him. Because of this scandal—the fact that Phillotson willingly allows his wife to leave for another man—Phillotson has to give up his career as a schoolmaster.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giver"title="The Giver">
Jonas, a 12-year-old boy, lives in a Community isolated from all except a few similar towns, where everyone from small infants to the Chief Elder has an assigned role. With the annual Ceremony of Twelve upcoming, he is nervous, for there he will be assigned his life's work. He seeks reassurance from his father, a Nurturer (who cares for the new babies, who are genetically engineered), and his mother, an official in the Department of Justice. He is told that the Elders, who assign the children their careers, are always right.The day finally arrives, and Jonas is assembled with his classmates in order of birth. The Chief elder, who presides, initially passes over Jonas's turn and at the ceremony's conclusion explains that Jonas has not been given a normal assignment, but instead has been selected as the next Receiver of Memory. The position of Receiver has high status and responsibility, and Jonas quickly finds himself growing distant from his classmates. The rules Jonas receives further separate him, as they allow him no time to play with his friends and require him to keep his training secret. They also allow him to lie and withhold his feelings from his family, things generally not allowed in the regimented Community.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Solitary_Grief"title="A Solitary Grief">
The novel opens with psychiatrist Dr Alistair Crown's wife Virginia giving birth to the couple's first child. Crown, who is not present during birth, is informed immediately afterwards that their daughter Doris has Down's syndrome, a fact he is unable to accept. For the next five years, he avoids Doris's face: He never looks at her and he refuses to be shown photos of her. His idea of being close to his daughter consists in his nocturnal visits to her bedroom when she is fast asleep: Then he gropes around under the sheets — in a harmless way, imagining what it would be like to have a normal child and envisaging the day when he will actually come face to face with her.However, he keeps postponing that day, telling himself and his wife that he is not ready for it yet. He leaves for work early in the morning and comes home at night when his daughter is already asleep. He does not tell his parents, who live abroad, that their granddaughter is disabled and, for years, can persuade them not to visit. Although Virginia is a devoted mother and an understanding wife, the ensuing marital crisis is unavoidable. When Doris is of preschool age, Crown actually has to lock himself in his room so as to make sure that he does not accidentally see his daughter's face. After a brief fling with a former girlfriend he moves out of the house.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince_and_the_Pauper"title="The Prince and the Pauper">
Tom Canty, the youngest son of a very poor family living in Offal Court located in London, has been abused by his father and grandmother, but is encouraged by the local priest, who taught him to read and write. Loitering around the palace gates one day, he meets Edward Tudor, the Prince of Wales. Coming too close in his intense excitement, Tom is caught and nearly beaten by the Royal Guards. However, Edward stops them and invites Tom into his palace chamber. There, the two boys get to know one another and are fascinated by each other's life. They have an uncanny resemblance to each other and learn they were even born on the same day, so they decide to switch places "temporarily". The Prince hides an item, which the reader later learns is the Great Seal of England, then goes outside to confront the guards who abused Tom; however, dressed as Tom, he is not recognized by the guards, who drive him from the palace. He eventually finds his way through the streets to the Canty home. There, he is subjected to the brutality of Tom's alcoholic and abusive father, from whom he manages to escape, and meets Miles Hendon, a soldier and nobleman returning from war. Although Miles does not believe Edward's claims to royalty, he humors him and becomes his protector. Meanwhile, news reaches them that King Henry VIII has died and Edward is now the king.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenocide"title="Xenocide">
On Lusitania, Ender finds a world where humans and pequeninos and the Hive Queen could all live together. However, Lusitania also harbors the descolada, a virus that kills all humans it infects, but which the pequeninos require in order to become adults. The Starways Congress so fears the effects of the descolada, should it escape from Lusitania, that they have ordered the destruction of the entire planet, and all who live there. With the Fleet on its way, a second xenocide seems inevitable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sourcery"title="Sourcery">
Death comes to collect the soul of Ipslore the Red, a wizard who was banished from Unseen University for marrying and having children, something forbidden for wizards. Bitter over this fate, Ipslore vows to take revenge upon the wizards through his eighth son, Coin. As the eighth son of a wizard, Coin is born a sourcerer, a wizard who generates new magic rather than drawing it from the world, effectively making him the most powerful wizard on the Disc. At the moment of his death, Ipslore transfers his essential being into the infant Coin's staff, preventing Death from collecting his soul (since damaging the staff to do so would kill Coin) and allowing him to influence his son.Eight years later, Virrid Wayzygoose, the Archchancellor-designate of Unseen University, is murdered by Coin before his induction, who then forces his way into the university's Great Hall. After Coin bests one of the top wizards in the University, he is welcomed by the majority of the wizards. Rincewind, The Luggage and the Librarian miss Coin's arrival, having fled the University shortly beforehand after the foreboding departure of all of its magically-influenced pest populations. While they are at the Mended Drum, Conina, a professional thief and a daughter of Discworld legend Cohen the Barbarian, arrives holding a box containing the Archchancellor's hat, which she has procured from the room of Wayzygoose, and possesses a kind of sentience as a result of being worn by hundreds of Archchancellors. Under the direction of the hat, which sees Coin as a threat to wizardry and the very world, Conina forces Rincewind to come with her and take a boat to the city of Al Khali, where the hat claims there is someone fit to wear it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can't_Happen_Here"title="It Can't Happen Here">
In 1936, Senator Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, a charismatic and power-hungry politician from an unnamed U.S. state, enters the presidential election campaign on a populist platform, promising to restore the country to prosperity and greatness, and promising each citizen $5,000 per year. Portraying himself as a champion of "the forgotten man" and traditional American values, Windrip defeats President Franklin D. Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination, and then easily beats his Republican opponent, Senator Walt Trowbridge, in the November election.Although having previously foreshadowed some authoritarian measures to reorganize the United States government, Windrip rapidly outlaws dissent, incarcerates political enemies in concentration camps, and trains and arms a paramilitary force called the Minute Men (named after the Revolutionary War militias of the same name), who terrorize citizens and enforce the policies of Windrip and his corporatist regime. One of Windrip's first acts as president is to eliminate the influence of the United States Congress, which draws the ire of many citizens as well as the legislators themselves. The Minute Men respond to protests against Windrip's decisions harshly, attacking demonstrators with bayonets. In addition to these actions, Windrip's administration, known as the Corpo government, curtails women's and minority rights, and eliminates individual states by subdividing the country into administrative sectors. The government of these sectors is managed by Corpo authorities, usually prominent businessmen or Minute Men officers. Those accused of crimes against the government appear before kangaroo courts presided over by military judges. Despite these dictatorial and "quasi-draconian" measures, a majority of Americans approve of them, seeing them as painful but necessary steps to restore U.S. power. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Brilliant_Career"title="My Brilliant Career">
The heroine, Sybylla Melvyn, is an imaginative, headstrong girl growing up in rural Australia in the 1890s. Drought and a series of poor business decisions reduce her family to subsistence level, her father begins to drink excessively, and Sybylla struggles to deal with the monotony of her life. To her relief, she is sent to live on her grandmother's property, where life is more comfortable. There she meets wealthy young Harold Beecham, who loves her and proposes marriage; convinced of her ugliness and aware of her tomboyish ways, Sybylla is unable to believe that he could really love her. By this time, her father's drinking has plunged the family into debt, and she is sent to work as governess/housekeeper for the family of an almost illiterate neighbor to whom her father owes money. She finds life there unbearable and eventually suffers a physical breakdown which leads to her return to the family home. When Harold Beecham returns to ask Sybylla to marry him, she concludes that she would only make him unhappy and sends him away, determined never to marry. The novel ends with no suggestion that she will ever have the "brilliant career" as a writer that she desires.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Years_in_Tibet"title="Seven Years in Tibet">
The book covers the escape of Harrer and his companion, Peter Aufschnaiter, from a British internment camp in India. Harrer and Aufschnaiter then traveled across Tibet to Lhasa, the capital. Here they spent several years, and Harrer describes the contemporary Tibetan culture in detail. Harrer subsequently became a tutor and friend of the 14th Dalai Lama.It has been said that the book "provided the world with a final glimpse of life in an independent Tibetan state prior to the Chinese invasion."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_Hill"title="Fanny Hill">
The novel consists of two long letters (which appear as volumes I and II of the original edition) written by Frances 'Fanny' Hill, a rich Englishwoman in her middle age, who leads a life of contentment with her loving husband Charles and their children, to an unnamed acquaintance identified only as 'Madam.' Fanny has been prevailed upon by 'Madam' to recount the 'scandalous stages' of her earlier life, which she proceeds to do with 'stark naked truth' as her governing principle.The first letter begins with a short account of Fanny's impoverished childhood in a Lancashire village. At age 14, she loses her parents to smallpox, arrives in London to look for domestic work, and gets lured into a brothel. She sees a sexual encounter between an ugly older couple and another between a young attractive couple, and participates in a lesbian encounter with Phoebe, a bisexual prostitute. A customer, Charles, induces Fanny to escape. She loses her virginity to Charles and becomes his lover. Charles is sent away by deception to the South Seas, and Fanny is driven by desperation and poverty to become the kept woman of a rich merchant named Mr H—. After enjoying a brief period of stability, she sees Mr H— have a sexual encounter with her own maid, and goes on to seduce Will (the young footman of Mr H—) as an act of revenge. She is discovered by Mr H— as she is having a sexual encounter with Will. After being abandoned by Mr H—, Fanny becomes a prostitute for wealthy clients in a pleasure-house run by Mrs Cole. This marks the end of the first letter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Restaurant_at_the_End_of_the_Universe"title="The Restaurant at the End of the Universe">
Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Trillian, and Zaphod Beeblebrox leave the planet Magrathea on the "Heart of Gold". A Vogon ship bribed by Gag Halfrunt and a group of psychiatrists, fearful that the discovery of the Ultimate Question will end their profession, intercepts and fires at them. Meanwhile, Arthur gets frustrated that the ship is unable to produce any beverages beyond an undrinkable tea-like liquid. He gives a lengthy description of tea, causing Eddie the Shipboard Computer to become CPU-bound and unable to fight the Vogon ship off. Desperate, Zaphod decides to hold a séance to call up his great-grandfather Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth to rescue them. The elder Zaphod scolds his descendant and sends him on a quest to find The Ruler of the Universe in order to solve the political and economic instability plaguing the universe. He transports Zaphod and Marvin to Ursa Minor Beta, the tropical home planet of the offices of the Hitchhiker's Guide's publisher Megadodo Publications, and leaves the others on the depowered ship in a black void.Acting on a thought from the portion of his brain unaffected by his lobotomy, Zaphod goes looking for Zarniwoop, the Guide's lead editor, though his staff insist he has been out on an intergalactic cruise. A man named Roosta takes Zaphod to Zarniwoop's offices. Frogstar fighters arrive and attack the building, towing it to one of their home planets, Frogstar World B, a planet whose society collapsed through an economic process called the "Shoe Event Horizon" which rendered its economy unable to support any enterprises besides shoe stores. The planet eventually became the site of the Total Perspective Vortex, a device that drives those who experience it mad due to showing them their insignificance compared to the infinite universe. Following Roosta's instructions and escaping through Zarniwoop's office's windows, Zaphod is caught by Gargravarr, a disembodied mind undergoing a trial separation from his body, who takes Zaphod to be exposed to the Vortex. However, Zaphod is unfazed by the Vortex, suggesting to a perplexed Gargravarr that it showed Zaphod that he was the most important being in the universe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrolife"title="Macrolife">
By 2021, Earth's nations are at (relative) peace, and even the erstwhile poorer nations are beginning to enjoy stable political and economic regimes. The invention of a super-strong material named "Bulerite" is partially responsible for this, which enables Earth to, at last, initiate a burgeoning space industry. However, events unfold which result in the first "Macrolife" colony leaving the solar system for the nearer stars.The novel is split into three main sections.(I) Sunspace: 2021 ... The "Bulero" family/corporation, inventors and marketers of "Bulerite" which is used to build the huge cities which house the Earth's (and colonies) teeming millions, are at the pinnacle of their influence and wealth. Unfortunately, it is discovered - too late - that the substance is inherently flawed, in that after a time it destabilizes and self-destructs with spectacular results. Gradually, all the Bulerite on Earth, and that on and in the space colonies throughout the solar system becomes unstable, causing destruction and megadeath.The devastation precipitates a war with Earth's colonies on the outer planets, with whom a struggle for control of the solar system existed. Many nuclear-tipped missiles explode on Earth which adds to the Bulerite destabilization. The combination of the Bulerite and the nuclear explosions cause a mysterious shroud of radiation to envelop the Earth. All humans on the planet are assumed dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Till_We_Have_Faces"title="Till We Have Faces">
## Part One.The story tells the ancient Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, from the perspective of Orual, Psyche's older sister.It begins as the complaint of Orual as an old woman, who is bitter at the injustice of the gods. She has always been ugly, but after her mother dies and her father the King of Glome remarries, she gains a beautiful half-sister Istra, whom she loves as her own daughter, and who is known throughout the novel by the Greek version of her name, Psyche. Psyche is so beautiful that the people of Glome begin to offer sacrifices to her as to a goddess. The Priest of the goddess Ungit, a powerful figure in the kingdom, then informs the king that various plagues befalling the kingdom are a result of Ungit's jealousy, so Psyche is sent as a human sacrifice to the unseen "God of the Mountain" at the command of Ungit, the mountain-god's mother. Orual plans to rescue Psyche but falls ill and is unable to prevent anything.When she is well again, Orual arranges to go to where Psyche was stranded on the mountain, either to rescue her or to bury what remains of her. She is stunned to find Psyche is alive, free from the shackles in which she had been bound, and furthermore says she does not need to be rescued in any way. Rather, Psyche relates that she lives in a beautiful castle that Orual cannot see, as the God of the Mountain has made her a bride rather than a victim. At one point in the narrative, Orual believes she has a brief vision of this castle, but then it vanishes like a mist. Hearing that Psyche has been commanded by her new god-husband not to look on his face (all their meetings are in the nighttime), Orual is immediately suspicious. She argues that the god must be a monster, or that Psyche has actually started to hallucinate after her abandonment and near-death on the mountain, that there is no such castle at all, and that her husband is actually an outlaw who was hiding on the mountain and takes advantage of her delusions in order to have his way with her. Orual says that because either possibility is one that she cannot abide by, she must disabuse her sister of this illusion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moonstone"title="The Moonstone">
Rachel Verinder, a young English woman, inherits a large Indian diamond on her eighteenth birthday. It is a legacy from her uncle, a corrupt British army officer who served in India. The diamond is of great religious significance and extremely valuable, and three Hindu priests have dedicated their lives to recovering it. The story incorporates elements of the legendary origins of the Hope Diamond (or perhaps the Orloff Diamond or the Koh-i-Noor diamond). Rachel's eighteenth birthday is celebrated with a large party at which the guests include her cousin Franklin Blake. She wears the Moonstone on her dress that evening for all to see, including some Indian jugglers who have called at the house. Later that night the diamond is stolen from Rachel's bedroom, and a period of turmoil, unhappiness, misunderstandings and ill luck ensues. Told by a series of narratives from some of the main characters, the complex plot traces the subsequent efforts to explain the theft, identify the thief, trace the stone and recover it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidi"title="Heidi">
Heidi is an orphaned girl initially raised by her maternal grandmother and aunt Dete in Maienfeld, in the Grisons, after the early deaths of her parents, Tobias and Adelheid (Dete's brother-in-law and sister). Shortly after the grandmother's death, Dete is offered a good job as a maid in the big city, and takes 5-year-old Heidi to her paternal grandfather's house, up the mountain from the Dörfli ('small village' in Swiss German). He has been at odds with the villagers and embittered against God for years and lives in seclusion on the alm, which has earned him the nickname 'The Alm-Uncle'. He briefly resents Heidi's arrival, but the girl's evident intelligence and cheerful yet unaffected demeanour soon earn his genuine, if reserved, love. Heidi enthusiastically befriends her new neighbours, young Peter the goatherd, his mother Brigitte, and his blind maternal grandmother. With each season that passes, the mountaintop inhabitants, especially Peter and the grandmother, grow more attached to Heidi, and she to them. However, the grandfather refuses to allow Heidi to attend school, and quarrels with the local pastor and schoolmaster, who try to encourage him to do so, and Heidi is illiterate as a result.Three years later, Dete returns to take Heidi to Frankfurt to be a hired lady's companion to a wealthy girl named Klara Sesemann, who is unable to walk and regarded as an invalid. Klara is charmed by Heidi's simple friendliness and her descriptions of life on the Alm, and delights in all the funny mishaps brought about by Heidi's naïvety and lack of experience with city life. However, the Sesemanns' strict housekeeper, Fräulein Rottenmeier, views the household disruptions as wanton misbehaviour, and places the free-spirited Heidi under more and more restraint. Soon, Heidi becomes terribly homesick for the Alm, and grows alarmingly pale and thin. Her one diversion is learning to read and write, motivated by Klara's grandmother, who shows her trust and affection, and encourages her to believe in God and to pray.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Hideous_Strength"title="That Hideous Strength">
The novel, written during the final period of World War II, takes place at an undetermined year "after the end of the war".Mark Studdock is a young academic who has just become a Senior Fellow in sociology at Bracton College in the University of Edgestow. The fellows of Bracton are debating the sale of a portion of college land to the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.), whose staff already includes some college faculty. The sale is controversial since the land in question (Bragdon Wood) is an ancient woodland believed to be the resting place of Merlin. After the deal is struck, a N.I.C.E. insider called Lord Feverstone proposes a possible post for Mark at the Institute. (It is gradually revealed that Feverstone is the new title of Richard Devine, who accompanied Professor Weston on the trip to Mars in "Out of the Silent Planet", but not on the trip to Venus in "Perelandra".)Mark's wife Jane (a PhD student at the university) has suffered a peculiar nightmare involving a severed head. She meets Mrs. Dimble, the wife of one of her former tutors, who is being evicted due to sale of land to the N.I.C.E. When Jane talks about her dreams, Mrs. Dimble leads her to seek counsel from a Miss Ironwood who lives in the Manor in the nearby town of St Anne's. An argument between Jane and Mark shows how their marriage is deteriorating.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Domination"title="The Domination">
The first book of the series, "Marching Through Georgia", is set during the Eurasian War. The Soviet Union, weakened by civil war and the Draka incursion, collapses to the Nazi invasion before a Draka attack falls on the German army in the Caucasus. While both sides' weaponry is somewhat more advanced than historically, with jet and rocket aircraft and advanced armored vehicles, that of the Draka proves superior. Since most European countries are loath to unite behind the Germans, the Draka are eventually able to conquer all of mainland Europe. Meanwhile, having already subdued what remains of China, Japanese forces are able to concentrate on the United States, seizing its Pacific possessions and raiding North America. The U.S. does not open a second front in Europe and eventually turns the tide against Japan. The Draka invade Japanese-occupied China and Korea, and the war ends in 1945 with multiple German and Japanese cities and bases destroyed by nuclear weapons. The remaining countries of the world join the Alliance for Democracy, with the United Kingdom inundated with refugees and heavily fortified against potential Draka attack.The second book, "Under the Yoke", shows Europe under Draka rule. The Draka, having applied modern science to the practice of slavery, ruthlessly crush resistance and obliterate old institutions, including the use of a thermonuclear weapon on the rebelling city of Barcelona. The third book, "The Stone Dogs", depicts the cold war between the Draka and the Alliance, fought mostly on interplanetary colonies throughout the inner Solar System, and Alliance efforts to recruit Draka defectors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heart_of_the_Matter"title="The Heart of the Matter">
Major Scobie lives in a colony on the west coast of Africa during World War II, and is responsible for local security during wartime. His wife Louise, an unhappy, solitary woman who loves literature and poetry, cannot make friends. Scobie feels responsible for her misery, but does not love her. Their only child, Catherine, died in England several years before. Louise is a devout Catholic. Scobie, a convert, is also devout.Throughout the novel the oppressive nature of the climate is a major backdrop. The heat and humidity act as weakening factors.Scobie is passed over for promotion to commissioner, which upsets Louise both for her personal ambition and her hope that the local British community will begin to accept her. Louise asks Scobie if she can go to live in South Africa to escape a life she hates.At the same time, a new inspector, named Wilson, arrives in the town. He is priggish and socially inept, and hides his passion for poetry for fear of ostracism by his colleagues. He and Louise strike up a friendship, which Wilson mistakes for love. Wilson rooms with another colleague named Harris, who has created a sport for himself of killing the cockroaches that appear in his room each night. He invites Wilson to join him, but in the first match, they end up quarrelling over the rules of engagement.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legacy_of_Heorot"title="The Legacy of Heorot">
Two hundred colonists arrive on Avalon, having made the 100-year journey from Earth in suspended animation on the starship "Geographic". The colonists, selected for their outstanding physical and mental acuity, make a terrible discovery: the suspended animation has damaged their intellect and reasoning skills. Some are only mildly afflicted, while others have serious intellectual disabilities; eight cannot be reanimated at all.The colonists build a settlement on an isolated island, and begin growing crops and stocking the nearby waters with terrestrial species to complement the "samlon", a local aquatic species. The colonists become overconfident in their security, to the frustration of expedition security officer (and former soldier) Cadmann Weyland. When unsettling events begin to happen – missing animals, fences torn down – the colonists' impaired minds prevent them from properly analyzing the situation. Weyland is suspected of sabotage to further his agenda of building up defenses. He is drugged and restrained, when a monster attacks the settlement, killing ten colonists.Resenting his treatment, Weyland retreats from the colony to an isolated homestead on a mountain near the colony. Mary Ann, a colonist with a romantic interest in Weyland, convinces him to allow her to stay with him, and conceives his child. Ultimately, Weyland agrees to assist the colony in its defenses.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sleeping_Beauty_Quartet"title="The Sleeping Beauty Quartet">
## "The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty".In the first chapter of the story, Beauty is awakened from her hundred-year sleep by the Prince, not with a kiss, but through copulation, initiating her into a Satyricon-like world of sexual adventures. After stripping her naked he takes her to his kingdom, ruled by his mother Queen Eleanor, where Beauty is trained as a slave and a plaything. The rest of the naked slaves, dozens of them, in the Queen's castle are princes and princesses sent by their royal parents from the surrounding kingdoms as tributes. In this castle they spend several years learning to become obedient and submissive sexual property, accepting being spanked and forced to have sex with nobles and slaves of both sexes, being publicly displayed and humiliated, and crawling around on their hands and knees like animals until they return to their own lands "being enhanced in wisdom."In the castle Beauty meets another slave, Prince Alexi, with whom she copulates passionately. After that he tells her about the long rigorous journey he had in the castle. Alexi previously had been a stubborn prince who fought back all the attempts to break him, until the Queen sent him to the kitchen to have him tortured by crude kitchen servants. Alexi received such a savage and merciless punishment there that he began to lose his senses and, after some particularly humiliating training at the hands of a strong stable boy, Alexi became a totally surrendered slave, playing various sexual games at the Queen's commands.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Awoke"title="The Man Who Awoke">
Part 1 of the series describes Norman Winters’ previous life and his process of suspended animation.After the disappearance of Norman Winters, his son, Vincent, questions the servants working on his New York estate. After receiving a suspicious answer from the groundskeeper Carstairs, one of his father's most loyal workers, Vincent threatens to turn him in to the police. Preserving his freedom, Carstairs presents Vincent with a letter from his father detailing his whereabouts.In the letter, Norman explains his collaborations with various scientists to determine how to build a chamber which will shield him from cosmic rays and a coma-inducing drug. Norman constructs an underground chamber with six-foot leaden walls impervious to the outside radiation's influence on his cells. Once in the chamber, Norman will use the sleep-drug to fall into a coma where he “shall not awake until [he is] again subjected to radiation,” which will be provided by an X-ray lamp (similar to what one finds next to any dentist's chair) set to power on after five thousand years. In hopes of awaking to a Utopian future, Norman encourages Vincent to live his life in the absence of his father.Upon waking up, Norman discovers that he had lain dormant for five thousand years. Realizing the success of his time travelling system, Norman explores the futuristic world briefly, and then returns to suspended animation, planning to wake again after another 5,000 years. He repeats this several times, giving the reader a brief view of various social results.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Genesis_Quest"title="The Genesis Quest">
An alien race (The Nar) assemble humans from a stream of genetic information transmitted by radio from the Milky Way Galaxy. The resulting colony of humans spend some time integrated into the Nar society before growing restless, discovering the secret of human longevity, and embarking on the seemingly impossible millennia-long mission of a physical journey back to Earth. This epic journey is made in a gigantic space-grown semi-sentient Dyson tree known as "Yggdrasil".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_Man_(novel)"title="Marathon Man (novel)">
A former Nazi SS dentist at Auschwitz, Dr. Christian Szell, now residing in Paraguay, has been living on the proceeds of diamonds he extorted from prisoners there. The diamonds are kept at a bank in New York by his father. The sales and transfers of proceeds are facilitated by a secret US agency called "The Division" for whom Szell has provided information about other escaped Nazis. When his father dies in a car accident, Szell must come to New York himself to retrieve the diamonds, as there is no one else he can trust with them.Meanwhile, at Columbia University, Thomas Babington "Tom" Levy, known by his brother as "Babe" (the first and middle names are a reference to Thomas Babington Macaulay, and the nickname is a reference to Babe Ruth) is a postgraduate student in history and an aspiring marathon runner. He is haunted by the suicide of his brilliant academic father, H.V. Levy, who was one of the victims of McCarthyism, when Babe was ten. Babe's PhD dissertation aims to clear his father's name of alleged Communist affiliations. Unbeknownst to Babe, his elder brother by ten years (and best friend), Henry David "Hank" Levy (after Henry David Thoreau), known by Babe as "Doc", works in The Division under the name "Scylla" and has been helping to move Szell's diamonds as part of his duties.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Velveteen_Rabbit"title="The Velveteen Rabbit">
A stuffed rabbit sewn from velveteen is given as a Christmas present to a small boy. The boy plays with his other new presents and forgets the velveteen rabbit for a time. These presents are modern and mechanical, and they snub the old-fashioned velveteen rabbit. The wisest and oldest toy in the nursery, the Skin Horse, which was owned by the boy's uncle, tells the rabbit about toys magically becoming real due to love from children: "Real isn't how you are made... It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become real." The rabbit is awed by this idea; however, his chances of achieving this wish are slight.One night, the boy's nanny gives the rabbit to the boy to sleep with, in place of a lost toy. The rabbit becomes the boy's favorite toy, enjoying picnics with him in the spring, and the boy regards the rabbit as real. Time passes and the rabbit becomes shabbier but happy. It meets some real rabbits in the summer, and they learn that the velveteen rabbit cannot hop as they do, and they say that he is not a real rabbit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Orders"title="Executive Orders">
After a terrorist attack kills nearly every U.S. executive, legislative, and judicial figure, previously-confirmed Vice President Jack Ryan is sworn in as President of the United States.As Ryan is left to represent the U.S. by himself, he must deal with multiple crises: reconstituting his own Cabinet, the House, the Senate, and the entire Supreme Court; a challenge to the legitimacy of his succession to the Presidency by former Vice President Ed Kealty, leading to press hazing; and a war brewing in the Middle East.When the Iraqi president (implied to be Saddam Hussein) is assassinated by an Iranian deep-cover agent, Iranian leader Ayatollah Mahmoud Haji Daryaei takes advantage of the power vacuum by launching an unopposed invasion of Iraq and later uniting it with his country, calling the new entity the "United Islamic Republic" (UIR). Daryaei then secretly unleashes a master plan of “weakening” the United States through a series of terrorist attacks: a biological attack in the country using a weaponized strain of Ebola virus, a kidnapping attempt on Ryan's youngest daughter Katie from her school, and an assassination attempt on the President himself by a Secret Service bodyguard who is an Iranian sleeper agent.China and India secretly assist Daryaei, first by causing a diplomatic crisis between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan when a PLAAF aircraft "accidentally" shoots down a Taiwanese airliner. The incident pulls a U.S. Navy carrier group from the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea and allows the Indian Navy's carrier up to move undetected to the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off access to the only sea-bound pathway to the UIR and Saudi Arabia. Daryaei thinks that with the U.S. government and military overwhelmed by a multitude of crises, he is now free to invade Saudi Arabia and claim superpower status for the UIR.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malory_Towers"title="Malory Towers">
## First Term at Malory Towers.Darrell Rivers begins her first year at Malory Towers, a castle-like clifftop boarding school in Cornwall. She meets sharp-tongued Alicia, musical genius Irene and timid Mary-Lou. Determined to do well and make friends, Darrell's first term is turbulent. Her temper causes problems and her efforts at playing the fool backfire. Another new girl is Gwendoline Mary Lacey, who turns out to be vain, shallow and prone to occasional spitefulness and bullying. The Malory Towers stories largely centre on the intertwined stories of Darrell and Gwendoline, along with Alicia Johns, Sally Hope and Mary-Lou. The first book ends with Darrell finding a best friend in Sally Hope.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absalom,_Absalom!"title="Absalom, Absalom!">
"Absalom, Absalom!" details the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a white man born into poverty in western Virginia who moves to Mississippi with the dual aims of gaining wealth and becoming a powerful family patriarch. The story is told entirely in flashbacks narrated mostly by Quentin Compson to his roommate at Harvard College, Shreve, who frequently contributes his own suggestions and surmises. The narration of Rosa Coldfield, and Quentin's father and grandfather, are also included and re-interpreted by Shreve and Quentin, with the total events of the story unfolding in nonchronological order and often with differing details. This results in a peeling-back-the-onion revelation of the true story of the Sutpens. Rosa initially narrates the story, with long digressions and a biased memory, to Quentin Compson, whose grandfather was a friend of Sutpen's. Quentin's father then fills in some of the details to Quentin. Finally, Quentin relates the story to his roommate Shreve, and in each retelling, the reader receives more details as the parties flesh out the story by adding layers. The final effect leaves the reader more certain about the attitudes and biases of the characters than about the facts of Sutpen's story.Thomas Sutpen arrives in Jefferson, Mississippi, with some slaves and a French architect who has been somehow forced into working for him. Sutpen obtains one hundred square miles of land from a local Native American tribe and immediately begins building a large plantation called Sutpen's Hundred, including an ostentatious mansion. All he needs to complete his plan is a wife to bear him a few children (particularly a son to be his heir), so he ingratiates himself with a local merchant and marries the man's daughter, Ellen Coldfield. Ellen bears Sutpen two children, a son named Henry and a daughter named Judith, both of whom are destined for tragedy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collector"title="The Collector">
The novel is about a lonely young man, Frederick Clegg, who works as a clerk in a city hall and collects butterflies in his spare time. The first part of the novel tells the story from his point of view.Clegg is obsessed with Miranda Grey, a middle-class art student at the Slade School of Fine Art. He admires her from a distance but is unable to make any contact with her because he is socially underdeveloped. One day, he wins a large prize in the football pools. He quits his job and buys an isolated house in the countryside. He feels lonely, however, and wants to be with Miranda. Unable to make any normal contact, Clegg decides to add her to his "collection" of pretty, preserved objects, in the hope that if he keeps her captive long enough, she will grow to love him.After careful preparations, he kidnaps Miranda by drugging her with chloroform and locks her up in the cellar of his house. He is convinced that Miranda will start to love him after some time. However, when she wakes up, she confronts him with his actions. Clegg is embarrassed and promises to let her go after a month. He promises to show her "every respect", pledging not to sexually molest her and to shower her with gifts and the comforts of home, on one condition: she can't leave the cellar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Solomon's_Carpet"title="King Solomon's Carpet">
Jarvis Stringer is a student of the London Tube and its history and of underground trains worldwide. In order to finance his hobby and be able to travel to distant lands to inspect the underground systems in other parts of the world, he lets rooms in an old disused school building he has inherited which is close to the London Underground tracks in West Hampstead. There gather a group of misfits and weirdos, including a squatter, whose dreams of the good life have time and again been shattered as they are constantly victimized by society. There is 24-year-old Alice, an aspiring musician who leaves her husband and new-born baby only to end up busking in various stations in central London. There is Tom, who, after an accident, drops out of music school and is reduced to busking as well but who dreams of one day starting his own business. There is unemployed Tina, whose promiscuity landed her with two children whom she does not take care of in the way her mother thinks she ought to. There is Jed, who volunteers as a vigilante and who, disappointed by humans, lavishes all his love on the hawk he has acquired and which he keeps in the house. And there is Axel, an enigmatic man who regularly travels on the tube in the company of a man disguised as a bear and who is planning something illegal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_and_His_Detective"title="Uncle and His Detective">
The story begins with the arrival not of a detective, but of disaster: Badfort is for sale, but when Uncle decides to buy it, demolish it, and build a pleasantly appointed park on the site, he is forestalled. Beaver Hateman has sold it cheaply to someone on the condition that he, Hateman, is allowed to stay on as a paying guest. Forgetting that the man who has bought Badfort is certain to regret the "bargain", Uncle tries to console himself by continuing his never-ending exploration of Homeward. He comes across the Art Gallery, reached along Quack Walk between two ponds crowded with noisy and aggressive ducks. "En route" he discovers the mysterious Crack House, which is the lair of a vicious and horribly squawking creature, half-bat, half-bird, called Batty. After visiting the Art Gallery and discovering that Batty is persecuting the curator and his family, Uncle has Batty expelled from Crack House and pursues a report of buried treasure there. Constant trips to Crack House have accustomed the ducks to passers-by, and Uncle's miserly friend Alonzo S. Whitebeard foolishly tries to take advantage of their docility.By now the Detective of the title has appeared: an elegant and astute fox called A. B. Fox, who proves worthy of his hire (five shillings a day) as the Badfort Crowd, sniffing treasure from afar, are constantly on the prowl. After many adventures, Uncle eventually tracks down the treasure, an unimaginably vast block of softly glowing gold (or dlog, as they code-name it), beats off a final attack from the Badfort Crowd, and enjoys the acclaim of the grateful inhabitants of Homeward when he decides to distribute the gold for the common good. But the celebrations are interrupted briefly with a reminder that the Badfort Crowd, though defeated, are far from down and out. A group of young badgers are singing a song in praise of Uncle when:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Cleans_Up"title="Uncle Cleans Up">
In this story, Goodman the Cat joins Uncle's supporters. He is rescued from down-trodden and hungry service at Wizard Blenkinsop's and throws himself wholeheartedly into battle against Uncle's enemies, though never quite ridding himself of a propensity to steal fish and postage stamps. His fish-stealing gets him into trouble at Professor Gandleweaver's Fish-Frying Academy, and Uncle is forced to make a dignified exit as the crowd gathered to watch Gandleweaver's frying exhibition turns ugly:The incident is seized on by the Badfort Crowd and written up in the usual lying and distorted way in "The Badfort News", one of the many provocations offered by the newspaper that eventually lead Uncle to take action against it. Visiting its offices, he finds a young badger literally chained to the printing-press, whom he rescues before visiting well-deserved punishment on Beaver Hateman by kicking him far and high into Gaby's Marsh, where "the crabs are" and "the barking conger eels". As before, "Uncle Cleans Up" ends in Uncle's capture by the Badfort Crowd before he escapes, this time with the help of his loyal friend the Old Monkey, and a great battle is fought in which the Badfort Crowd are completely defeated—until next time. The last that is seen of Beaver Hateman is this:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Small_House_at_Allington"title="The Small House at Allington">
"The Small House at Allington" concerns the Dale family, who live in the "Small House", a dower house intended for the widowed mother ("Dowager") of the owner of the estate. The landowner, in this instance, is the bachelor Squire of Allington, Christopher Dale. Dale's mother having died, he has allocated the Small House, rent free, to his widowed sister-in-law and her daughters Isabella ("Bell") and Lilian ("Lily").When the novel begins Bernard, the squire's nephew and heir, brings his friend Adolphus Crosbie to Allington and introduces him to the family. Crosbie is handsome and well-regarded in London society. Bell and Lily are impressed by Crosbie's charm and worldliness and Lily, the younger and wittier sister, labels him an Apollo. She and Crosbie grow increasingly intimate during his stay at Allington and before leaving he proposes to her. Mrs. Dale has no money for a dowry, but Crosbie thinks the squire might provide Lily with some fortune given that, in many ways, he treats her and Bell as if they were his daughters. When asked, the squire informs him this is not the case, leading Crosbie to reflect on how his salary as a clerk at the General Committee Office allows him to live comfortably as a bachelor but if he were to marry and support a family on his current income they would need to live very humbly. The engagement is made public and celebrated in Allington, but when Lily learns about his misunderstanding regarding her possible fortune she offers to break off the engagement with no hard feelings. Crosbie refuses, however, because he is impressed by this noble gesture and genuinely fond of Lily.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bungalow_Mystery"title="The Bungalow Mystery">
## 1930 edition.Laura Pendleton rescues Nancy Drew and her friend Helen, who can't swim, when their rowboat capsizes during a sudden, severe storm on Moon Lake. The girls from River Heights befriend the orphaned Laura, who has come to the area to meet her new guardian, Jacob Aborn. Mr. Aborn seems somewhat boorish to the River Heights girls, and Nancy, upon returning home, receives a phone call from Laura, who is desperate to escape from her "evil" guardian. He expects her to do household chores and cook, which seems natural, but when he demands her furs and jewels, she calls Nancy for help. Laura escapes, and this leads Nancy back to the Aborn house, spying on a mysterious bungalow in the woods that he frequents. Nancy eventually enters the bungalow but is quickly hit on the head and knocked unconscious. However, when Nancy comes to, she soon exposes an impostor, who had intended to steal all of Laura's stocks and investments, as well as her jewels.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Ask_Alice"title="Go Ask Alice">
In 1968, a 15-year-old girl begins keeping a diary, in which she records her thoughts and concerns about issues such as crushes, weight loss, sexuality, social acceptance, and relating to her parents. The dates and locations mentioned in the book place its events as occurring between 1968 and 1970 in California, Colorado, Oregon, and New York City. The two towns in which the diarist's family reside during the story are not identified, and are only described as being college towns.The diarist's father, a college professor, accepts a dean position at a new college, causing the family to relocate. The diarist has difficulty adjusting to her new school, but soon becomes best friends with a girl named Beth. When Beth leaves for summer camp, the diarist returns to her hometown to stay with her grandparents. She meets an old school acquaintance, who invites her to a party. There, glasses of cola—some of which are laced with LSD—are served. The diarist unwittingly ingests LSD and has an intense and pleasurable trip. Over the following days the diarist socializes with the other teens from the party, willingly uses more drugs, and loses her virginity while on acid. She worries that she may be pregnant, and her grandfather has a minor heart attack. Overwhelmed by her worries, the diarist begins to take sleeping pills, first stolen from her grandparents, then later prescribed by her doctor upon returning home. Her friendship with Beth ends, as both girls have moved in new directions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Musketeers"title="The Three Musketeers">
In 1625 France, D'Artagnan leaves his family in Gascony and travels to Paris to join the Musketeers of the Guard. At a house in Meung-sur-Loire, an older man derides D'Artagnan's horse. Insulted, D'Artagnan demands a duel. But the older man's companions instead beat D'Artagnan unconscious with a cooking pot and a metal tong that breaks his sword. His letter of introduction to Monsieur de Tréville, the commander of the musketeers, is also stolen. D'Artagnan resolves to avenge himself upon the older man, who is later revealed to be the Comte de Rochefort, an agent of Cardinal Richelieu, who is passing orders from the cardinal to his spy, Lady de Winter, usually called Milady de Winter or simply "Milady". In Paris, D'Artagnan visits Monsieur de Tréville at the headquarters of the musketeers, but without the letter, Tréville politely refuses his application. He does, however, write a letter of introduction to an academy for young gentlemen which may prepare his visitor for recruitment at a later time. From Tréville's window, D'Artagnan sees Rochefort passing in the street below and rushes out of the building to confront him, but in doing so he offends three musketeers, Athos, Porthos and Aramis, who each demand satisfaction; D'Artagnan must fight a duel with all of them that afternoon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prime_of_Miss_Jean_Brodie_(novel)"title="The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (novel)">
In 1930s Edinburgh, six ten-year-old girls, Sandy, Rose, Mary, Jenny, Monica, and Eunice, are assigned Miss Jean Brodie, who describes herself as being "in my prime," as their teacher. Miss Brodie, determined that they shall receive an education in the original sense of the Latin verb "educere", "to lead out", gives her students lessons about her personal love life and travels, promoting art history, classical studies, and fascism. Under her mentorship, these six girls whom Brodie singles out as the elite group among her students—known as the "Brodie set"—begin to stand out from the rest of the school. However, in one of the novel's typical flash-forwards we learn that one of them will later betray Brodie, ruining her teaching career, but that she will never learn which one.In the Junior School, they meet the singing teacher, the short Mr Gordon Lowther, and the art master, the handsome, one-armed war veteran Mr Teddy Lloyd, a married Roman Catholic with six children. These two teachers form a love triangle with Miss Brodie, each loving her, while she loves only Mr Lloyd. However, Miss Brodie never overtly acts on her love for Mr Lloyd, except once to exchange a kiss with him, witnessed by Monica. During a two-week absence from school, Miss Brodie embarks on an affair with Mr Lowther on the grounds that a bachelor makes a more respectable paramour: she has renounced Mr Lloyd as he is married. At one point during these two years in the Junior School, Jenny is "accosted by a man joyfully exposing himself beside the Water of Leith." The police investigation of the exposure leads Sandy to imagine herself as part of a fictional police force seeking incriminating evidence in respect of Brodie and Mr Lowther.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_in_the_Clouds"title="Death in the Clouds">
Hercule Poirot travels back to England on the midday flight from Le Bourget Airfield in Paris to Croydon Airport in London. He is one of eleven passengers in the plane's rear compartment. The others include mystery writer Daniel Clancy; French archaeologists Armand Dupont and his son Jean; dentist Norman Gale; Doctor Bryant; French moneylender Madame Giselle; businessman James Ryder; Cicely, Countess of Horbury; the Honourable Venetia Kerr; and Jane Grey. As the plane is close to landing, a wasp is spotted flying around the rear compartment before a steward finds that Giselle is dead. Poirot, who has slept through most of the flight, dismisses the belief she died from a wasp sting. Instead, he points out a dart on the floor, which is found to have a poisoned tip: Giselle was stung in the neck with it. The question remains how she was murdered without anyone noticing.The police find a small blowpipe in the side of Poirot's seat. Annoyed at being identified as a suspect, he vows to clear his name and solve the case. Requesting a list of the passengers' possessions, he notes something that intrigues him but doesn't say what it is or to which passenger it refers. Aided by Jane in the investigation, Poirot works with Inspector Japp in England and Inspector Fournier in France. Clues gradually emerge: the victim had two coffee spoons with her cup and saucer; the blowpipe was bought in Paris by an American man; Lady Horbury is one of Giselle's debtors, and had been cut off from her husband's money; Giselle employed blackmail to ensure that her debtors didn't miss their repayments; only the stewards and Clancy passed by the victim on the flight; Lady Horbury's maid was on the flight after asking to be on it at the last moment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Affair_at_Styles"title="The Mysterious Affair at Styles">
On the morning of 18 July, the household at Styles Court wakes to the discovery that Emily Inglethorp, the elderly owner, has died. She had been poisoned with strychnine. Arthur Hastings, a soldier from the Western Front staying at this country manor as a guest on his sick leave, ventures out to the nearby village of Styles St Mary to enlist help from his friend Hercule Poirot. Emily was a wealthy woman. Her household includes her husband, Alfred Inglethorp, a younger man she recently married; her stepsons (from her first husband's previous marriage) John and Lawrence Cavendish; John's wife Mary Cavendish; Cynthia Murdoch, the daughter of a deceased friend of the family; and Evelyn Howard, Emily's companion.Poirot learns that, on Emily's death, John is to inherit the manor property, in accordance with his father's will. However, her money will be distributed according to her own will, which she changes at least once a year; her most recent will favours Alfred, who will now inherit her fortune. On the day of the murder, Emily had been arguing with someone, suspected to be either Alfred or John. She had been quite distressed after this and apparently made a new will. No one can find any evidence of this new will. Alfred left the manor early that evening and stayed overnight in the village. Meanwhile, Emily ate little at dinner and retired early to her room, taking her document case with her; when her body was found, the case had been forced open. Nobody can explain how or when the poison was administered to her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweep_(book_series)"title="Sweep (book series)">
## Book of Shadows, Book 1.Morgan Rowlands is a high school student living in the picturesque town of Widow's Vale. Morgan is an ordinary girl who lives an ordinary life. However, her life becomes unsettled upon meeting Cal Blaire. With his angelic face, gold-colored eyes, perfect body, and olive skin, Cal quickly becomes the center of every girl’s admiration, including Morgan and her best friend, Bree Warren, who breaks up with her boyfriend, Chris, and Raven (a girl who is popular because she wears heavy metal style and has tattoos). Having gained popularity with his air of charisma and good looks, Cal manages to gather several dozen students from his new school to a “homecoming party”. During the party, Cal reveals his Wiccan origins by inviting his peers to join him in a circle to celebrate Mabon, one of the Wiccan Sabbats. Feelings of discomfort and surprise cause many of the guests to leave, but Bree and Morgan decide to stay for the circle. From that moment on, Morgan begins showing a knack for Witchcraft, which sparks Cal's interest. However, as the chemistry between Cal and Morgan becomes more and more apparent a rift in Bree and Morgan’s friendship emerges because of the incident at the pool party when he picks Morgan up in his arms. Later, as the Samhain gathering comes to a close, Cal and his friends form a coven called Cirrus. During this circle, Morgan discovers that she is a "blood witch": a person who is naturally born with magical powers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnerotomachia_Poliphili"title="Hypnerotomachia Poliphili">
The book begins with Poliphilo, who is spending a restless dream-filled night because his beloved, Polia, has shunned him. Poliphilo is transported into a wild forest, where he becomes lost, encounters dragons, wolves and maidens and a large variety of architectural forms. He escapes, and falls asleep once more.He then awakens in a second dream, a dream within the first. He is taken by nymphs to meet their queen, and there he is asked to declare his love for Polia, which he does. He is then directed by two nymphs to three gates. He chooses the third, and there he discovers his beloved. They are taken by some more nymphs to a temple to be engaged. Along the way they come across five triumphal processions celebrating their union. They are then taken to the island of Cythera by barge, on which Cupid is the boatswain. On Cythera, they see another triumphal procession celebrating their union. The narrative is interrupted, and assumed by a second voice, as Polia describes Poliphilo's erotomania from her own point of view.Poliphilo then resumes his narrative (from one-fifth of the way through the book). Polia rejects Poliphilo, but Cupid appears to her in a vision and compels her to return and kiss Poliphilo, who has fallen into a deathlike swoon at her feet. Her kiss revives him. Venus blesses their love, and Poliphilo and Polia are united at last. As Poliphilo is about to take Polia into his arms, Polia vanishes into thin air and Poliphilo wakes up.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lensman_series"title="Lensman series">
The series begins with "Triplanetary", beginning two billion years before the present time and continuing into the near future. The universe has no life-forms aside from the ancient Arisians, and few planets besides the Arisians' native world. The peaceful Arisians have foregone physical skills in order to develop contemplative mental power. The underlying assumption for this series, based on theories of stellar evolution extant at the time of the books' writing, is that planets form only rarely, and therefore our First and Second Galaxies, with their many billions of planets, are unique.The Eddorians, a dictatorial, power-hungry race, come into our universe from an alien space-time continuum after observing that our galaxy and a sister galaxy (the Second Galaxy) are passing through each other. This will result in the formation of billions of planets and the development of life upon some of them. Dominance over these life forms would offer the Eddorians an opportunity to satisfy their lust for power and control.Although the Eddorians have developed mental powers almost equal to those of the Arisians, they rely instead for the most part on physical power, which came to be exercised on their behalf by a hierarchy of underling races. They see the many races in the universe, with which the Arisians were intending to build a peaceful civilization, as fodder for their power-drive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs_Dalloway"title="Mrs Dalloway">
Clarissa Dalloway goes around London in the morning, getting ready to host a party that evening. The nice day reminds her of her youth spent in the countryside in Bourton and makes her wonder about her choice of husband; she had married the reliable Richard Dalloway instead of the enigmatic and demanding Peter Walsh, and she "had not the option" to be with a female romantic interest, Sally Seton. Peter reintroduces these conflicts by paying a visit that morning.Septimus Warren Smith, a First World War veteran suffering from deferred traumatic stress, spends his day in the park with his Italian-born wife Lucrezia, where Peter Walsh observes them. Septimus is visited by frequent and indecipherable hallucinations, mostly concerning his dear friend Evans who died in the war. Later that day, after he is prescribed involuntary commitment to a psychiatric hospital, he commits suicide by jumping out of a window.Clarissa's party in the evening is a slow success. It is attended by most of the characters she has met throughout the book, including people from her past. She hears about Septimus' suicide at the party and gradually comes to admire this stranger's act, which she considers an effort to preserve the purity of his happiness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pianist_(memoir)"title="The Pianist (memoir)">
## Władysław Szpilman.Władysław Szpilman (1911–2000) was born in Sosnowiec, Poland, and studied piano in the early 1930s at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw and at the Berlin Academy of Arts. In Berlin he was instructed by Leonid Kreutzer and Artur Schnabel. During his time at the academy he also studied composition with Franz Schreker.In 1933, after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany, Szpilman returned to Warsaw, where he worked as a pianist for Polish Radio. During the invasion of Poland in September 1939, German bombs destroyed the power station that kept Polish Radio running. Szpilman played the station's last pre-war live recording (a Chopin recital) on 23 September 1939, the day it went off the air.Days after Warsaw's surrender, German leaflets were hung on the walls of buildings, promising Poles the protection of the German state. A section of the leaflets were devoted to Jews, guaranteeing that their rights, property and lives would be secure. Decrees applying to Jews were posted around the city. From 1 December Jews over the age of 12 had to wear a blue Star of David on a white armband; they were given five days to comply. They had to hand real estate and valuables over to German officials. Jewish families were permitted to own just 2,000 zlotys; the rest had to be deposited in a bank in a blocked account. Very few people complied. Szpilman's family—he was living with his parents, his brother Henryk, and his sisters Regina and Halina—hid their money in the window frame, an expensive gold watch under a cupboard, and the watch's chain beneath the fingerboard of Szpilman's father's violin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nome_Trilogy"title="The Nome Trilogy">
## "Truckers" (1989).Masklin, a 4-inch high Nome, lives in a grass verge by a motorway service station with his friend Grimma and the remaining elders of their once-large tribe, which has been dwindling due to food shortage and predation by foxes, while several Nomes have headed across the motorway. The other younger members of the tribe departed some time before to find a new place to live, but never returned after crossing the motorway - where they were inevitably killed by cars or lorries. Masklin, finding it increasingly difficult to find food for the group, formulates a plan to escape on a truck from the nearby service station - the final straw being when a fox runs into the path of a lorry after attacking two elder nomes called Mr Mert and Mrs Coom, killing them both. The Elders, led by Granny Morkie and Old Torrit, initially oppose the move but finally agree, bringing with them 'The Thing', a small black cube that has been the tribe's symbol of authority for as long as anyone can remember.The truck finally delivers them to the loading bay of Arnold Bros department store, where they are greeted by Angalo De Haberdasheri, an 'Inside' Nome. Angalo introduces the 'Outsiders' to his father Duke Cido de Haberdasheri, leader of the Haberdasheri clan, where they learn that most 'Inside' Nomes do not believe that 'Outside' exists, being contrary to the religion of Arnold Bros (est 1905), which states that 'The Store' contains 'All Things Under One Roof'.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_Murder"title="Sleeping Murder">
Newlywed Gwenda Reed travels ahead of her husband to find a home for them on the south coast of England. In a short time, she finds and buys Hillside, a large old house that feels just like home. She supervises workers in a renovation, staying in a one-time nursery room while the work progresses. She forms a definite idea for the little nursery. When the workmen open a long sealed door, she sees the very wallpaper that was in her mind. Further, a place that seems logical to her for a doorway between two rooms proves to have been one years earlier. She goes to London for a visit with relatives, the author Raymond West, his wife, and his aunt, Miss Jane Marple. During the play, "The Duchess of Malfi", when the line "Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young" is spoken, Gwenda screams out; she saw an image of herself viewing a man saying those words strangling a blonde-haired woman named Helen.Gwenda was born in India where her father was stationed, then raised in New Zealand by her mother's sister from a toddler, once her mother died. Her father died a few years after her mother. She has memories of being on a ship, but it is clearly two ships. Miss Marple suggests that Gwenda lived in England with her father and his second wife, which proves to be the case. Her stepmother, Helen Halliday née Kennedy, met her father travelling from India back to England, where their shipboard romance led to marriage upon arrival in England. They rented a house in Dillmouth, where Helen grew up. The coincidences prove to be memories from Gwenda's stay in that house 18 years ago as a very young child. Now Gwenda ponders her frightening image and the closing words of the play: are they real memories as well? Her husband Giles arrives from New Zealand and the couple decide to pursue this mystery.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Royale_(novel)"title="Battle Royale (novel)">
"Battle Royale" takes place in a fictional fascist Japan in the year 1997. The state, known as the , arose after an alternate World War 2 where Japan emerged victorious and a rebellion was put down by the combined military and police forces. The government controls everything, and anything "immoral", such as rock music, is banned, unless it beatifies the government, along with an unnamed dictator with a strong cult of personality able to bend the whims of the populace.The government has established a military program, the , wherein fifty randomly selected classes of third-year junior high school students are kidnapped, dropped into a remote location, and forced to kill one another until only one student of each class remains. Ostensibly, it is to help the government and its military research survival skills and battle readiness – in actuality, it is meant to instill terror and distrust in all of Japan's citizens to curb any attempts at rebellion, by showcasing the government's power and ability to target citizens' families and preying on the fear of being killed by a friend.A group of students from , a junior high school in the fictional Kagawa Prefecture town of Shiroiwa, prepare for a field trip – among them are wannabe rock star Shuya Nanahara, whose father was killed by the regime; Noriko Nakagawa, the demure crush of Shuya's best friend; Shogo Kawada, a quiet, tough young transfer student; and sociopathic prodigy Kazuo Kiriyama. En route, they are gassed – the "field trip" was a ruse for the Program.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crooked_House"title="Crooked House">
Three generations of the Leonides family live together under wealthy patriarch Aristide. His first wife Marcia died; her sister Edith has cared for the household since then. His second wife is the indolent Brenda, decades his junior, suspected of having a clandestine love affair with Laurence, the grandchildren's tutor. After Aristide is poisoned by his own eye medicine (eserine), his granddaughter Sophia tells narrator and fiancé Charles Hayward that they cannot marry until the killer is apprehended. Charles's father, "The Old Man", is Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard, so Charles investigates from the inside along with assigned detective Chief Inspector Taverner.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Andrews"title="Joseph Andrews">
## Book I.The novel begins with the affable, intrusive narrator outlining the nature of our hero. Joseph Andrews is the brother of Richardson's Pamela and is of the same rustic parentage and patchy ancestry. At the age of 10, he found himself tending animals as an apprentice to Sir Thomas Booby. In proving his worth as a horseman, he caught the eye of Sir Thomas's wife, Lady Booby, who now employs him (age 17) as her footman.After Sir Thomas's death, Joseph finds his Lady's affections redoubled as she offers herself to him in her chamber while on a trip to London. In a scene analogous to many of Pamela's refusals of Mr. B in Richardson's novel, Lady Booby finds Joseph's Christian commitment to pre-marital chastity unwavering. After suffering the Lady's fury, Joseph sends a letter to his sister much like Pamela's anguished missives in her own novel. The Lady makes one last attempt at seduction before dismissing him from both his job and his lodgings.As Joseph sets out from London by moonlight, the narrator introduces the novel's heroine, Fanny Goodwill, Joseph's true love. A poor, illiterate girl of 'extraordinary beauty' (I, xi), now living with a farmer close to Lady Booby's parish, she and Joseph had grown ever closer since their childhood, before their local parson and mentor Abraham Adams recommended that they postpone marriage until they have the means to live comfortably.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_in_Scarlet"title="A Study in Scarlet">
## Part I: The Reminiscences of Watson.In 1881, Doctor John Watson has returned to London after serving in the Second Anglo-Afghan War and is looking for a place to live. An old friend tells him that Sherlock Holmes is looking for someone to split the rent at a flat at 221B Baker Street but cautions Watson about Holmes's eccentricities. Holmes and Watson meet and, after assessing each other and the rooms, they move in. Holmes reveals that he is a "consulting detective" and that his frequent guests are clients. After a demonstration of Holmes's deductive skills, Watson's disbelief turns into astonishment.A telegram requests a consultation in a murder case. Watson accompanies Holmes to the crime scene, an abandoned house on Brixton Road. Inspectors Gregson and Lestrade are already on the scene. The victim is identified as Enoch Drebber, and documents found on his person reveal that he has a secretary, Joseph Stangerson. On one wall, written in red, is "RACHE" (German for "revenge"), which Holmes dismisses as a ploy to fool the police. He deduces that the victim died from poison and supplies a description of the murderer. Upon moving Drebber's body, they discover a woman's gold wedding ring.Holmes places notices in several newspapers about the ring and buys a facsimile of it, hoping to draw the murderer – who has apparently already tried to retrieve the ring – out of hiding. An old woman answers the advertisement, claiming that the ring belongs to her daughter. Holmes gives her the duplicate and follows her, but she evades him. This leads Holmes to believe that she was an accomplice, or perhaps the actual murderer in disguise.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Finn"title="Phineas Finn">
Finn is the only son of a successful Irish doctor, Dr Malachi Finn of Killaloe, County Clare, who sends him to London to become a lawyer. He proves to be a lackadaisical student, but being pleasant company and strikingly handsome to boot, he makes many influential friends. One of them, a politician, Barrington Erle, suggests that he stand for Parliament in the coming election.At first, the idea seems absurd. Finn is supported solely by a modest allowance from his father, but a stroke of luck clears his path. One of his father's patients is Lord Tulla, a nobleman who controls Loughshane, a little borough that can be contested cheaply. Lord Tulla has had a falling out with his brother, the long-time officeholder. As a result, while the staunchly Tory lord will not support the Whig Finn, neither will he hamper him. Convincing his sceptical father to provide the funds needed, Finn wins his seat by a small margin.The closest of his London friends is his mentor, Lady Laura Standish, the daughter of the prominent Whig politician Lord Brentford. As their relationship develops, Finn considers asking for her hand in marriage, despite the great social and financial gulf between them. Lady Laura senses this, but despite her partiality for the man, monetary considerations and her own political ambitions convince her to marry the dour, extremely wealthy Robert Kennedy instead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wives_and_Daughters"title="Wives and Daughters">
The novel opens with Molly Gibson as a young child, being raised by her widowed father, Mr. Gibson, the local doctor. During a visit to the local aristocratic 'great house' of Lord and Lady Cumnor, Molly loses her way on the grounds of the estate and falls asleep under a tree. Lady Cuxhaven (one of the daughters of the house) and Mrs. Kirkpatrick (a former governess to the Cumnor children) find Molly and put her to bed in Mrs. Kirkpatrick's room. The Cumnor family refer to Mrs Kirkpatrick as “Clare”, the name by which she had been known when a governess. Clare appears to be a kind woman and assures Molly that she will wake her up when it is time for the entourage to leave. However, she forgets to do so, and Molly is stranded in the mansion. She is distressed at the thought of having to spend the night there. To her relief, her father soon arrives to collect her.Seven years later, Molly has grown into an attractive, good-hearted, and straightforward young woman. Mr Gibson discovers that one of his apprentices, Mr. Coxe, has become romantically interested in Molly, unbeknownst to her. To protect Molly, her father sends her to stay with the nearby Hamleys of Hamley Hall, members of the landed gentry whose ancestors’ presence there is said to date back to the Heptarchy, but whose circumstances are now reduced. Molly forms a close attachment with Mrs. Hamley, who embraces her almost as a daughter. Molly is also befriended by the younger of the Hamley sons, Roger. Molly is aware that, as the daughter of a professional man, she would not be considered a suitable match for the sons of Squire Hamley. The elder son, Osborne, had been expected to distinguish himself at Cambridge and make a brilliant marriage: he is handsome, clever and more fashionable than his brother. However, he performs poorly at university, breaking the hearts of his parents.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travels_with_My_Aunt"title="Travels with My Aunt">
The novel's narrator is Henry Pulling, a conventional and uncharming bank manager who has taken early retirement in a suburban home, and who has little to look for except for tending the dahlias in his garden, reading in the complete works of Walter Scott left by his father, and some bickering with the ultra-conservative retired major living next door. The main choice he could still make is either to remain a bachelor or marry Miss Keene, who likes tatting and who might become his boring and respectable suburban wife.His life suddenly changes when he meets his septuagenarian Aunt Augusta for the first time in over 50 years at his mother's funeral. Despite having little in common, they form a bond. On their first meeting, Augusta tells Henry that his mother was not truly his mother, and we learn that Henry's father has been dead for more than 40 years.As they leave the funeral, Henry goes to Augusta's house and meets her lover Wordsworth – a man from Sierra Leone, who is deeply and passionately in love with her despite her being 75 years old. Henry finds himself drawn into Aunt Augusta's world of travel, adventure, romance and absence of bigotry.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Veronica"title="Ann Veronica">
Mr. Stanley forbids his adult daughter, a biology student at Tredgold Women's College and the youngest of his five children, to attend a fancy dress ball in London, causing a crisis. Ann Veronica is planning to attend the dance with friends of a down-at-heel artistic family living nearby and has been chafing at other restrictions imposed on her for no apparent reason. After her father resorts to force to stop her from attending the ball, she leaves her home in the fictional south London suburb of Morningside Park in order to live independently in an apartment "in a street near the Hampstead Road" in North London. Unable to find appropriate employment, she borrows forty pounds from Mr. Ramage, an older man, without realizing she is compromising herself.With this money, Ann Veronica is able to devote herself to study in the biological laboratory of the Central Imperial College (a constituent college of London University) where she meets and falls in love with Capes, the laboratory's "demonstrator." But Mr. Ramage loses little time in trying to take advantage of the situation, precipitating a crisis. Distraught after Ramage tries to force himself on her, Ann Veronica temporarily abandons her studies and devotes herself to the cause of women's suffrage; she is arrested storming Parliament and spends a month in prison.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Lord_Fauntleroy"title="Little Lord Fauntleroy">
In a shabby New York City side street in the mid-1880s, young Cedric Errol lives with his mother (known to him as "Dearest") in genteel poverty after the death of his father, Captain Cedric Errol. One day, they are visited by an English lawyer named Havisham with a message from young Cedric's grandfather, the Earl of Dorincourt, a millionaire who despises the United States and was very disappointed when his youngest son married an American woman. With the deaths of his father's elder brothers, Cedric has now inherited the title Lord Fauntleroy and is the heir to the earldom and a vast estate. Cedric's grandfather wants him to live in England and be educated as an English aristocrat. He offers his son's widow a house and guaranteed income, but he refuses to have anything to do with her, even after she declines his money.However, the Earl is impressed by the appearance and intelligence of his American grandson and is charmed by his innocent nature. Cedric believes his grandfather to be an honorable man and benefactor, and the Earl cannot disappoint him. The Earl therefore becomes a benefactor to his tenants, to their delight, though he takes care to let them know that their benefactor is the child, Lord Fauntleroy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expedition_of_Humphry_Clinker"title="The Expedition of Humphry Clinker">
Matthew Bramble, his family and servants are traveling through England and Scotland. Although the primary motivation for the expedition is to restore the health of the gouty Matthew Bramble, each member of the family uses the excursion to achieve their ends. Leaving from Bramble's estate, Brambleton Hall, in Monmouthshire (there are frequent references to the family being Welsh, and the novel also contains individual Scottish and Irish characters), the family passes through many cities, making extended or significant stops at Gloucester, Bath, London, Harrogate, Scarborough and Edinburgh.The splenetic patriarch, Matthew Bramble, visits various natural spas to alleviate his health problems, and he corresponds primarily with his physician, Dr. Lewis. Through his letters and those of Jeremy, it is revealed that Bramble is misanthropic and something of a hypochondriac. Despite his frequent complaints, he is generally reasonable and extremely charitable to the people he meets on his travels as well as to his servants and wards back at home. His letters introduce and ridicule significant eighteenth century concerns such as medicine, the growth of urban life, class, the growth of the periodical press and the public sphere. His growing disillusionment at the changing moral and social landscape of Great Britain, particularly London, embodies his traditionalist perspective and reveals the absurdities of contemporary British culture.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lover_(Duras_novel)"title="The Lover (Duras novel)">
Set against the backdrop of French Indochina, "The Lover" reveals the intimacies and intricacies of a clandestine romance between a pubescent girl from a financially strapped French family and an older, wealthy Chinese-Vietnamese man.In 1929, a 15-year-old nameless girl is traveling by ferry across the Mekong Delta, returning from a holiday at her family home in the town of Sa Đéc to her boarding school in Saigon. She attracts the attention of a 27-year-old son of a Chinese business magnate, a young man of wealth and heir to a fortune. He strikes up a conversation with the girl; she accepts a ride back to town in his chauffeured limousine.Compelled by the circumstances of her upbringing, this girl, the daughter of a bankrupt, manic depressive widow, is newly awakened to the impending and all-too-real task of making her way alone in the world. Thus, she becomes his lover, until he bows to the disapproval of his father and breaks off the affair.For her lover, there is no question of the depth and sincerity of his love, but it is not until much later that the girl acknowledges to herself her true feelings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorna_Doone"title="Lorna Doone">
John Ridd is the son of a respectable farmer in 17th century Exmoor, a region in North Devon and Somerset, England. The notorious Doone clan, once nobles and now outlaws, murdered John’s father. Battling his desire for revenge, John (in West Country dialect, pronounced "Jan") too grows into a respectable farmer who cares well for his mother and sisters. He meets Lorna by accident and falls hopelessly in love. She turns out (apparently) to be the granddaughter of Sir Ensor, lord of the Doones. Sir Ensor’s impetuous and now jealous heir Carver will let nothing thwart his plan to marry Lorna once he comes into his inheritance.Sir Ensor dies, and Carver becomes lord of the Doones. John helps Lorna escape to his family's farm. Since Lorna is a Doone the Ridds have mixed feelings toward her but defend her against Carver's retaliatory attack. During a visit from the Counsellor, Carver's father and the wisest Doone, Lorna's necklace is stolen. Sir Ensor had told Lorna the necklace was her mother’s. A family friend soon discovers the necklace belonged to a Lady Dugal, who was robbed and murdered by outlaws. Only her daughter survived. Lorna is not a Doone after all, but heiress to a huge fortune. By law, but against her will, she must return to London as a ward in Chancery. Despite John and Lorna's love, their marriage is out of the question.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sound_and_the_Fury"title="The Sound and the Fury">
## Part 1: April 7, 1928.The first section of the novel is narrated by Benjamin "Benjy" Compson, a source of shame to the family (primarily his mother) due to his diminished mental capacity; the only characters who show genuine care for him are Caddy, his older sister, and Dilsey, a matronly family retainer. His narrative voice is characterized predominantly by its nonlinearity: spanning the period 1898–1928, Benjy's narrative is a series of non-chronological events presented in a stream of consciousness. The presence of italics in Benjy's section indicates significant shifts in the narrative. Originally Faulkner conceived the use of different colors of ink to signify chronological breaks. This nonlinearity makes the style of this section particularly challenging, but Benjy's style develops a cadence that, while not chronologically coherent, provides unbiased insight into many characters' true motivations. Moreover, Benjy's caretaker changes to indicate the time period: Luster in the present, T.P. in Benjy's teenage years, and Versh during Benjy's infancy and childhood.In this section we see Benjy's three passions: fire, the golf course on land that used to belong to the Compson family, and his sister Caddy. But by 1928 Caddy has been banished from the Compson home after her husband divorced her because her child was not his, and the family has had to sell pasture to a local golf club to finance Quentin's Harvard education. In the opening scene, Benjy, accompanied by Luster, a servant boy, watches golfers on the nearby golf course as he waits to hear them call "caddie"—the name of his favorite sibling. When one of them calls for his golf caddie, Benjy's mind embarks on a whirlwind course of memories of his sister, Caddy, focusing on one critical scene. In 1898 when their grandmother died, the four Compson children were forced to play outside during the funeral. In order to see what was going on inside, Caddy climbed a tree in the yard, and while looking inside, her brothers — Quentin, Jason and Benjy — looked up and noticed that her underwear was muddy. This is Benjy's first memory, and he associates Caddy with trees throughout the rest of his arc, often saying that she smells like trees. Other crucial memories in this section are Benjy's change of name (originally "Maury", after his maternal uncle, a wastrel) in 1900 upon the discovery of his disability; the marriage and divorce of Caddy (1910), and Benjy's castration, resulting from an attack on a girl that is alluded to briefly within this chapter when a gate is left unlatched and Benjy is out unsupervised.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Deronda"title="Daniel Deronda">
"Daniel Deronda" contains two main strains of plot, united by the title character. The novel begins in late August 1865 with the meeting of Daniel and Gwendolen Harleth in the fictional town of Leubronn, Germany. Daniel finds himself attracted to, but wary of, the beautiful, stubborn, and selfish Gwendolen, whom he sees losing all her winnings in a game of roulette. The next day, Gwendolen receives a letter from her mother telling her that the family is financially ruined and asking her to come home. Gwendolen pawns a necklace and debates gambling again to make her fortune. However, her necklace is returned to her by a porter, and she realises that Daniel saw her pawn the necklace and redeemed it for her. From this point, the plot breaks off into two separate flashbacks; one gives us Gwendolen's history and the other Daniel's.In October 1864, soon after the death of Gwendolen's stepfather, Gwendolen and her family move to a new neighbourhood. It is here that she meets Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt, a taciturn and calculating man who proposes marriage shortly after their first meeting. At first she is open to his advances, but upon discovering that Grandcourt has several children with his mistress, Lydia Glasher, she eventually flees to the German town where she meets Daniel. This portion of the novel sets Gwendolen up as a haughty and selfish, yet affectionate daughter, admired for her beauty but suspected by many in society because of her satirical observations and somewhat manipulative behaviour. She is also prone to fits of terror that shake her otherwise calm and controlling exterior.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Princes_in_Amber"title="Nine Princes in Amber">
Carl Corey wakes in a medical clinic, with little to no knowledge of who he is or how he got there. He suspects he is being overmedicated, so he overpowers the nurse and doctor and escapes his room. He finds the manager of the clinic, and learns that he was recovering from a car accident in a private clinic, paid for by his sister, Evelyn Flaumel.He flees and heads to her house. She addresses him as Corwin and calls herself Flora. Hiding his lack of memory, he convinces her to let him stay. In Flora's library he locates a set of customized Tarot cards— the Trumps—whose Major Arcana are replaced with images which he recognizes as his family. As he looks over the cards he remembers all his brothers: sneaky Random, Julian the hunter, well-built Gérard, arrogant Eric, himself, Benedict the master tactician and swordsman, sinister Caine, scheming Bleys, and the mysterious Brand. He also views his four sisters: Flora who offered him sanctuary, Deirdre who was dear to him, reserved Llewella, and Fiona, whom Corwin hated.His brother Random contacts him via telephone and Corwin promises to give him protection. Random arrives, pursued by mysterious spined, bloodshot-eyed humanoid creatures, and during the ensuing battle Corwin learns that he has superhuman strength. The combined efforts of Corwin, Random, and Flora's dogs ultimately defeat the attacking creatures. Later, in a guarded conversation in which Corwin continues to mask his memory loss, Random asks Corwin whether he wishes to "try", to which Corwin agrees, only learning later that he has agreed to attempt to seize the throne of Amber. They set off in a car and the world begins to change around them as they drive. Corwin realizes that Random is somehow causing the changes. They ultimately end up in the Forest of Arden, the territory of their brother Julian who is allied with Corwin's enemy, Eric. Julian's beasts confront Random and Corwin, and eventually Julian himself appears on his steed Morgenstern to hunt them down. In the ensuing chase, Corwin unhorses Julian and takes him prisoner. Seeing that their leader is held hostage, Julian's men let Corwin and Random proceed through the forest. After setting Julian free and proceeding on foot to Amber, they encounter their sister Deirdre who reveals she has fled from Eric's court. Corwin finally reveals that he has very little memory of his identity or their destination, so Deirdre convinces him to walk the Pattern, which she believes will cure his amnesia.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guns_of_Avalon"title="The Guns of Avalon">
Corwin has escaped the dungeons of Amber, where he was imprisoned by his hated brother Eric, who has seized the throne. All of Corwin's siblings believe that guns can never be brought to the medieval world of Amber, as all gunpowders seem inert there. But Corwin has secret knowledge: in the shadow world of Avalon, where he once ruled, there exists a jeweler's rouge that will function as gunpowder in Amber. Corwin plans to raise a legion of shadow soldiers, and arm them with automatic rifles from the shadow world Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hand_of_Oberon"title="The Hand of Oberon">
Corwin explores the true Amber, and finds the source of the Black Road, in the damaged primal Pattern. He learns that to repair the damage will require the Jewel of Judgement, which he must retrieve from Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Courts_of_Chaos"title="The Courts of Chaos">
Corwin sulks in Castle Amber's library while Oberon gives the family orders. Random persuades Corwin to leave, but they are held back by an invisible force. They watch as Corwin's sword appears and chops off Benedict's new arm.Dara and Martin are with Benedict. Corwin learns from Martin's trumps that the crossbowman who spared him is Merlin. Dara tells how Brand bargained with the Courts of Chaos. They wished to replace him with Merlin, but Dara feared that neither would keep their word.Still unconvinced, Corwin contacts Fiona. She confirms Dara's authority, and says that Oberon is about to repair the Pattern. Hoping to save Oberon, Corwin grabs the Jewel, but he is paralyzed by Oberon's magics.Oberon has a final talk with his son. Corwin explains that he no longer wants to rule.Once Corwin confirms Dara's authority, Benedict uses the trump of the Courts of Chaos to begin his attack. Dara talks to Corwin. Dara then leaves to give the rest of the family their orders. Gérard is ordered to stay and guard Amber, while Julian and Random are to stay in Arden.Oberon arrives, and asks Corwin for some of his blood. He breathes life into the blood, and it becomes a red raven. Oberon tells Corwin that the raven will follow him through shadow. Corwin's orders are to hellride towards Chaos as fast as possible. He must bear the Jewel through shadow.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadmarks"title="Roadmarks">
The central theme of the novel is time travel using a highway that links all times and all possible histories. Exits from the highway lead to different times and places. Changing events in the past cause some exits further up the road, in the future, to become overgrown and inaccessible and new exits to appear, leading to different alternative futures.The narrator and protagonist, Red Dorakeen, has vague memories of a place or time that is no longer accessible from the Road. He runs guns to the Greeks at Marathon, trying to recreate history as he remembers it in an attempt to open a new exit from the Road to his half-remembered place. The phrase "Last Exit to Babylon" was the manuscript title of the book and appears on the cover art; it was later used as a title for Volume Four in the "Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny."All "One" chapters feature Red Dorakeen, and all "Two" chapters feature secondary characters. These are Red's natural son Randy, newly introduced to the Road and tired of his old life in Ohio; a series of potential assassins attempting to kill Red, some of whom are comic references to pulp characters or real people; and Leila, a woman whose destiny is closely connected to Red's.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_Light"title="Lord of Light">
"Lord of Light" is set on a planet colonized by some of the remnants of "vanished Urath", or Earth. The crew and colonists from the spaceship "Star of India" found themselves on a strange planet surrounded by hostile indigenous races and had to carve a place for themselves or perish. To increase their chances of survival, the crew has used chemical treatments, biofeedback and electronics to mutate their minds and create enhanced self-images, or "Aspects", that "strengthened their bodies and intensified their wills and extended the power of their desires into Attributes, which fell with a force like magic upon those against whom they were turned." The crew has also developed a technology to transfer a person's "atman", or soul, electronically to a new body. This reincarnation by mind transfer has created a race of potential immortals and allowed the former crew members to institute the Hindu caste system, with themselves at the top.The novel covers great spans of time. Eventually, the crew used their now-great powers to subjugate or destroy the native non-human races (whom they characterize as demons) while setting themselves up as gods in the eyes of the many generations of colonist progeny. Taking on the powers and names of Hindu deities, these "gods" maintain respect and control of the masses by maintaining a stranglehold on the access to reincarnation and by suppressing any technological advancements beyond a medieval level. The gods fear that any enlightenment or advancement might lead to a technological renaissance that would eventually weaken their power.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_BFG"title="The BFG">
Sophie, an eight-year-old girl in an orphanage, cannot sleep. Looking out of her window, she sees a mysterious Giant Man in the street, carrying a suitcase and a trumpet. The giant sees Sophie, who tries to hide in bed, but the giant picks her up through the window. Sophie is carried to a large cave in the middle of a desolate land, where the giant sets her down. Believing that he intends to eat her, Sophie pleads for her life, but the giant laughs and dismisses the idea. He explains that although most giants do eat humans, he does not, because he is the Big Friendly Giant, or BFG.The BFG explains, in a unique and muddled speech, that his nine neighbours are much bigger and stronger giants, who all happily eat humans every night. They vary their choice of destination both to avoid detection and because the people's origins affect their taste. For example, people from Greece taste greasy, and so no giant goes there, while people from Panama taste of hats. As he will never allow Sophie to leave in case she tells anyone of his existence, the BFG reveals the purpose of his suitcase and trumpet: he catches dreams in Dream Country, collects them in jars, and gives the good ones to children all around the world, but destroys the bad ones. Since he does not eat people, he must eat the only crop which grows in his land—the repulsive snozzcumber, which looks like a cucumber. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tommyknockers"title="The Tommyknockers">
While walking in the woods near the small town of Haven, Maine, Roberta "Bobbi" Anderson, a writer of Wild West-themed fiction, stumbles upon a metal object that turns out to be a protrusion of a long-buried alien spacecraft. Once exposed, the spacecraft begins to release an invisible gas into the atmosphere that gradually transforms people into beings similar to the aliens who populated the ship. The transformation, or "becoming," provides them with a limited form of genius which makes them very inventive but does not provide any philosophical or ethical insight into their inventions. The spacecraft also prevents those affected by it from leaving town, provokes psychotic violence in some people, and causes the disappearance of a young boy, David Brown, who his older brother Hilly teleports to the planet referred to as Altair 4 by the Havenites. (Altair 4 is a reference to Forbidden Planet.)The book's central character is James Eric Gardener, a poet and friend of Bobbi, who goes by the nickname "Gard." He is somewhat immune to the ship's effects because of the steel plate in his head, a souvenir of a teenage skiing accident. Gard is also an alcoholic and is prone to binges that result in violent outbursts followed by lengthy blackouts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_West"title="Journey to the West">
The novel has 100 chapters that can be divided into four unequal parts. The first part, which includes chapters 1–7, is a self-contained introduction to the main story. It deals entirely with the earlier exploits of Sun Wukong, a monkey born from a stone nourished by the Five Elements, who learns the art of the Tao, 72 polymorphic transformations, combat, and secrets of immortality, and whose guile and force earns him the name "Qitian Dasheng" (), or "Great Sage Equal to Heaven." His powers grow to match the forces of all of the Eastern (Taoist) deities, and the prologue culminates in Sun's rebellion against Heaven, during a time when he garnered a post in the celestial bureaucracy. Hubris proves his downfall when the Buddha manages to trap him under a mountain, sealing it with a talisman for five hundred years.The second part (chapters 8–12) introduces Tang Sanzang through his early biography and the background to his great journey. Dismayed that "the land of the South (i.e. Tang China) knows only greed, hedonism, promiscuity, and sins," the Buddha instructs the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara (Guanyin) to search China for someone to take the Buddhist sutras of "transcendence and persuasion for good will" back. Part of this section also relates to how Tang Sanzang becomes a monk (as well as revealing his past life as a disciple of the Buddha named "Golden Cicada" ()) and comes about being sent on this pilgrimage by Emperor Taizong, who previously escaped death with the help of an official in the Underworld.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/253_(novel)"title="253 (novel)">
"253" is about the 253 people on a London Underground train travelling between Embankment station and Elephant &amp; Castle on January 11, 1995. The basic structure of the novel is explained in the foreword:Each character is introduced in a separate section containing 253 words, which give general details and describe the thoughts going through the characters' heads. In the online version, hypertext links lead to other characters who are nearby or who have some connection to the current character; in the print version, the links are partly replaced by a traditional index. The reader can proceed from one character to another using these devices or can read the novel in positional order, e.g. from one seat and one train car to the next, but there is no overall chronological order except in the final section.The novel ends with the train crashing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Boys_(novel)"title="Lost Boys (novel)">
The novel, set in 1983, revolves around Step Fletcher, a game programmer, who invented a fictional Atari computer game called "Hacker Snack", and his family. Step, a devout Mormon, moves his pregnant wife DeAnne and their three children, including seven-year-old Stevie, from Indiana to Steuben, North Carolina so he can start a new job as a technical writer. In addition to struggles at his new job with unpleasant and immoral bosses and coworkers, the Fletchers' new house is periodically invaded by hordes of different types of insects. Bappy, the elderly father of the owner of the rented house, is always ready to lend a hand with things. Step quits his job right before DeAnne gives birth to a baby with special needs. After the move, Step's son Stevie becomes withdrawn, playing only with his imaginary friends in the garden and on his computer. They take him to a psychiatrist, who speculates that the family's religion could be causing Stevie's problems, offending Step. Step and DeAnne notice that the names of Stevie's imaginary friends are the same as the names of young boys who are disappearing. Stevie knows the boys' nicknames, which are not common knowledge. They notify the police, and a detective questions Stevie, concluding that a serial killer must exist for them to be all connected through Stevie. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trainspotting_(novel)"title="Trainspotting (novel)">
## Section 1: Kicking.Mark and Simon (a.k.a. Sick Boy) are watching a Jean-Claude Van Damme video when they decide to go buy heroin from Johnny Swan (also called "Mother Superior") since they are both feeling symptoms of withdrawal. They cook up with Raymie and Alison. After being informed that he should go and see Kelly, who has just had an abortion, Renton goes home to finish his video instead.Mark initially tries to come off heroin by acquiring a bare room and all the things he will require when coming down (canned soup, headache medicine, and pails for vomit). When withdrawal begins to set in, however, he resolves to get another hit to ease the decline. Unable to find any heroin, he acquires opium suppositories which, after a heavy bout of diarrhoea, he must recover from a public lavatory. Simon attempts to pick up girls while being annoyed by Mark, who wants to watch videos. Sick Boy loses Renton and launches into an internal monologue that is self-glorifying and nihilistic.The chapter "It Goes Without Saying" opens with the death of an infant, Dawn, whose mother Lesley is a heroin addict and acquaintance of the main characters. The cause of death is unclear; characters speculate that it may have been a cot death or caused by neglect. The Skag Boys are unsure of how to respond. Sick Boy becomes notably more emotional and distressed than the others and eventually breaks down as well, stating he is kicking heroin for good. Simon does not explicitly state that he was the child's father, playing to the title of the story. Mark wants to comfort his friend, but is unsure how and cooks a shot for himself in order to deal with the situation. A sobbing Lesley asks him to also cook her up a hit, which Mark does but makes sure he injects himself before her, stating the action "goes without saying".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eustace_Diamonds"title="The Eustace Diamonds">
In this novel, the characters of Plantagenet Palliser, his wife Lady Glencora and their uncle the ailing Duke of Omnium are in the background. The plot centres on Lizzie Greystock, a fortune-hunter who ensnares the sickly, dissipated Sir Florian Eustace and is soon left a very wealthy widow and mother. While clever and beautiful, Lizzie has several character flaws; the greatest of these is an almost pathological delight in lying, even when it cannot benefit her. (Trollope comments that Lizzie sees lies as "more beautiful than the truth.") Before he dies, the disillusioned Sir Florian discovers all this, but does not think to change the generous terms of his will.The diamonds of the book's title are a necklace, a family heirloom that Sir Florian gave to Lizzie to wear. Though they belong to her husband's estate (and thus eventually will be the property of her son), Lizzie refuses to relinquish them. She lies about the terms under which they were given to her, leaving their ownership unclear. The indignant Eustace family lawyer, Mr Camperdown, strives to retrieve the necklace, putting the Eustaces in an awkward position. On the one hand, the diamonds are valuable and Lizzie may not have a legal claim to them, but on the other, they do not want to antagonise the mother of the heir to the family estate (Lizzie having only a life interest).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_of_the_Five_Towns"title="Anna of the Five Towns">
The plot centres on Anna Tellwright, daughter of a wealthy but miserly and dictatorial father, living in the Potteries area of Staffordshire, England. Her activities are strictly controlled by the Methodist church. The novel tells of Anna's struggle for freedom and independence against her father's restraints.Anna lives with her young step-sister Agnes and her twice-widowed father, Ephraim Tellwright, in Bursley. Once an active preacher and teacher in the Methodist movement, her father has become a domestic tyrant and, through his miserly attitude to money, a fairly wealthy man.On her 21st birthday, Tellwright unceremoniously hands over to Anna an unexpected inheritance from her grandmother: several parcels of shares along with rented residential and industrial property that he has carefully hoarded and re-invested over the years. Anna is now a rich woman but she has no experience in business and financial dealings, save the management of the household expenses her father reluctantly hands her every week.She visits the rundown ‘building’ (earthenware manufactory) operated by Titus and Willie Price, which she now owns. The Prices’ business is grossly in debt and they claim to be unable to pay the arrears, but manage to give Anna ten pounds. She is also invited to visit the up-to-date and prosperous works of Henry Mynors and is advised by her father to invest in this as a sleeping partner. She is well aware that Mynors, who she knows through shared church activities, is in love with her but is unsure of her own feelings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Wives'_Tale"title="The Old Wives' Tale">
The book is broken up into four parts. The first section, "Mrs Baines" details the adolescence of both Sophia and Constance, and their life in their father's shop and house (a combined property). The father is ill and bedridden, and the main adult in their life is Mrs Baines, their mother.By the end of the first book, Sophia (whose name reflects her sophistication, as opposed to the constant Constance) has eloped with a travelling salesman. Constance meanwhile marries Mr Povey, who works in the shop.The second part, "Constance", details the life of Constance from that point forward up until the time she is reunited with her sister in old age. Her life, although outwardly prosaic, is nevertheless filled with personal incident, including the death of her husband, Mr Povey, and her concerns about the character and behaviour of her son.The third part, "Sophia", carries forward the story of what happened to Sophia after her elopement. Abandoned by her husband in Paris, Sophia eventually becomes the owner of a successful pension.The final part, "What Life Is", details how the two sisters are eventually reunited. Sophia returns to England and the house of her childhood, where Constance still lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughing_Gas_(novel)"title="Laughing Gas (novel)">
Drone Reginald ("Reggie") Swithin, narrator of the story, is the third Earl of Havershot. He is 28, unmarried, and has a face like a gorilla. As the new head of his family, he is assigned a delicate task by his Aunt Clara and by Plimsoll, the family lawyer: He is to go to Hollywood and look for Aunt Clara's son, his cousin Eggy, who seems to have got himself into trouble, and bring him back home. In particular, Reggie is to prevent Eggy from getting engaged, let alone married, to some American gold-digger who would undoubtedly be far beneath the titled family.On the train from Chicago to Los Angeles, Reggie meets the famous film actress April June, and immediately falls head over heels in love with her. Once in Hollywood, he completely forgets to look for Eggy until, one night, he bumps into him at a party that April June is giving. What is more, Eggy is accompanied by Ann Bannister, Reggie's ex-fiancée, who is now engaged to Eggy. According to Eggy, Ann wants to reform him: make him drink less, and get a job as well. As the host of the party, the seemingly wonderful, tender, and caring April June ("Money and fame mean nothing to me, Lord Havershot") is difficult to get hold of. When he finally succeeds in doing so and is just about to propose to her, Reggie's tooth—in the nick of time, as it turns out later—starts hurting so badly that he has to postpone all his plans, hurry home, and make an appointment with a dentist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_(novella)"title="Anthem (novella)">
Equality 7-2521, a 21-year-old man writing by candlelight in a tunnel under the earth, tells the story of his life up to that point. He exclusively uses plural pronouns ("we", "our", "they") to refer to himself and others. He was raised like all children in his society, away from his parents in collective homes: the Home of Infants from birth until five years old, then the Home of Students from five to fifteen. He believes he has a "curse" that makes him learn quickly and ask many questions. He excels at the Science of Things and dreams of becoming a Scholar, but when the Council of Vocations assigns his Life Mandate at fifteen, he is assigned to be a Street Sweeper.Equality 7-2521 accepts his street sweeping assignment as penance for his Transgression of Preference in secretly desiring to be a Scholar. He works with the handicapped Union 5-3992 and International 4-8818, the latter of whom is Equality's only friend (which is another Transgression of Preference, because all are supposedly equal in their society). Despite International's protests that any exploration unauthorized by a Council is forbidden, Equality explores an underground tunnel near the City Theatre tent, and finds metal tracks. Equality believes the tunnel is from the Unmentionable Times of the distant past. He begins sneaking away from his community at night to use the tunnel as a laboratory for scientific experiments, using garbage he has taken from the Home of the Scholars. He is using stolen paper from the Home of the Clerks to write his journal, by candlelight, using candles stolen from the larder at the Home of the Street Sweepers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)"title="We (novel)">
A few hundred years after the One State's conquest of the entire world, the spaceship "Integral" is being built in order to invade and conquer extraterrestrial planets. Meanwhile, the project's chief engineer, D-503, begins a journal that he intends to be carried upon the completed spaceship.Like all other citizens of the One State, D-503 lives in a glass apartment building and is carefully watched by the secret police, or Bureau of Guardians. D-503's lover, O-90, has been assigned by One State to visit him on certain nights. She is considered too short to bear children and is deeply grieved by her state in life. O-90's other lover and D-503's best friend is R-13, a State poet who reads his verse at public executions.While on an assigned walk with O-90, D-503 meets a woman named I-330. I-330 smokes cigarettes, drinks alcohol, and shamelessly flirts with D-503 instead of applying for an impersonal sex visit; all of these are highly illegal according to the laws of the One State.Both repelled and fascinated, D-503 struggles to overcome his attraction to I-330. She invites him to visit the Ancient House, notable for being the only opaque building in the One State, except for windows. Objects of aesthetic and historical importance dug up from around the city are stored there. There, I-330 offers him the services of a corrupt doctor to explain his absence from work. Leaving in horror, D-503 vows to denounce her to the Bureau of Guardians, but finds that he cannot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Without_Remorse"title="Without Remorse">
In 1970, former Navy SEAL John Kelly, who recently lost his pregnant wife, Patricia, in a car accident, picks up a hitchhiker named Pam on his way to his home on Battery Island in the Chesapeake Bay. They quickly become lovers, and over time Kelly discovers her full name, Pamela Madden, and that she is a runaway who became a drug mule and prostitute; she has recently escaped from her drug-dealer/pimp Henry Tucker. Kelly, along with the help of doctors Sam and Sarah Rosen, helps rehabilitate her from barbiturates. Weeks after recovering, Kelly and Pam go to Baltimore for follow-up treatment. Kelly takes them scouting through the neighborhood where her pimps work. One of them recognizes Pam and pursues them in a car chase. Kelly is gravely wounded by a shotgun blast, while Pam is recaptured and later tortured, gang-raped, and killed.In Vietnam, a U.S. target drone (specified in the book as a buffalo hunter) discovers Air Force Colonel Robin Zacharias as a prisoner of war in a secret camp administered by the NVA. Since Zacharias possesses highly classified knowledge and has been declared killed in action, Admiral Dutch Maxwell arranges a secret rescue mission for him as well as other American POWs held in the camp. Unbeknownst to them, Soviet colonel Nikolay Grishanov has been interrogating the prisoners; he later lobbies his government to transport Zacharias and his fellow prisoners into the Soviet Union, citing their intelligence value. However, friction between the Soviets and the North Vietnamese leads the latter to decide to kill the POWs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cujo"title="Cujo">
The story takes place in the setting for many King stories: the fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine. Revolving around two local families, the narrative is interspersed with vignettes from the seemingly mundane lives of various other residents. There are no chapter headings, but breaks between passages indicate when the narration switches to a different perspective.In the summer of 1980, the middle-class Trentons have recently moved to Castle Rock from New York City, bringing with them their four-year-old son, Tad. Vic Trenton discovers his wife, Donna, has recently had an affair with a tennis player named Steve Kemp. In the midst of this household tension, Vic's advertising agency, Ad Worx, is failing due to a scandal over a cereal called Red Razberry Zingers. Vic, and his business partner Roger Breakstone, are forced to travel out of town, leaving Tad and Donna at home alone. The blue-collar Cambers, meanwhile, are longtime residents of Castle Rock. Joe Camber is a mechanic who dominates and abuses his wife, Charity, and their ten-year-old son, Brett. Charity wins a $5,000 lottery prize and uses the proceeds to trick Joe into allowing her to take Brett on a trip to visit Charity's sister, Holly, in Connecticut. Joe acquiesces and secretly plans to use the time to take a pleasure trip to Boston with his friend, alcoholic WW2 veteran Gary Pervier. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Action"title="Human Action">
Mises sees economic calculation as the most fundamental problem in economics. The economic problem to Mises is that of action. Man acts to dispel feelings of uneasiness, but can only succeed in acting if he comprehends causal connections between the ends that he wants to satisfy, and available means. The fact that man resides in a world of causality means that he faces definite choices as to how he satisfies his ends. Human action is an application of human reason to select the best means of satisfying ends. The reasoning mind evaluates and grades different options. This is economic calculation.Economic calculation is common to all people. Mises insisted that the logical structure of human minds is the same for everybody. Of course, this is not to say that all minds are the same. Individuals make different value judgments and possess different data, but logic is the same for all. Human reason and economic calculation have limitations, but Mises sees no alternative to economic calculation as a means of using scarce resources to improve our well being.Human action concerns dynamics. The opposite to action is not inaction. Rather, the opposite to action is contentment. In a fully contented state there would be no action, no effort to change the existing order of things (which might be changed by merely ceasing to do some things). Man acts because he is never fully satisfied, and will never stop because he can never be fully satisfied. This might seem like a simple point, but modern economics is built upon ideas of contentment-equilibrium analysis and indifference conditions. It is true that some economists construct models of dynamic equilibrium, but the idea of a dynamic equilibrium is oxymoronic to Mises. An actual equilibrium may involve a recurring cycle, but not true dynamics. True dynamics involve non-repeating evolutionary change.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonesome_Dove"title="Lonesome Dove">
In the late 1870s, Captain Woodrow F. Call and Captain Augustus "Gus" McCrae, two famous retired Texas Rangers, run the Hat Creek Cattle Company and Livery Emporium in the small Texas border town of Lonesome Dove. Working with them are Joshua Deets, an excellent tracker and scout from their Ranger days; Pea Eye Parker, another former Ranger who is loyal and reliable, but unintelligent; Bolivar, a retired Mexican bandit who works as their cook; and Newt Dobbs, a 17-year-old boy whose mother was a prostitute named Maggie and whose father is widely thought by the outfit to be Call, though Call has never acknowledged this.Jake Spoon, another former Ranger, arrives in Lonesome Dove after an absence of more than 10 years, during which he has traveled widely across the United States. He reveals that he is on the run, having accidentally shot a dentist in Fort Smith, Arkansas. The dentist's brother happened to be the town's sheriff, July Johnson.Reunited with Gus and Call, Jake's description of the Montana Territory inspires Call to gather a herd of cattle and drive them north, to begin the first cattle ranch north of the Yellowstone River. Call, who has grown listless in retirement, is attracted to the romantic notion of settling pristine country. Gus is less enthusiastic, but changes his mind when reminded that the love of his life, Clara, lives on the Platte River near Ogallala, Nebraska, which would be on the route to Montana. The Hat Creek outfit rustles thousands of cattle from across the border in Mexico and recruits local cowboys in preparation for the drive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_Effect"title="The Practice Effect">
A scientist by the name of Dennis Nuel is working at, and attending, an institute of scientific research and pioneering work into the fictional scientific field of "Zievatronics", the manipulation of Time and Space. After the death of his mentor, however, he is taken off the project and another professor takes over.After a time, the device that has been created to move through space and time, known as the "Zievatron" encounters operational problems and is fixed to the co-ordinates of a world that appears to be very similar to our Earth in most respects, and Dennis is re-recruited to help fix it. He volunteers to be sent to the other world in order to fix the other part of the Zievatron. On arriving to this planet, he finds the Zievatron dismantled and critical parts of it missing. Of the three surveillance robots sent through to this planet, he finds two have also been broken apart. After a while, he finds the last robot, intact and still functioning, and uses it to view any recorded images that might help him identify what it was that happened to the Zievatron.In this world, instead of objects wearing out as you use them, they improve. This is referred to as the "Practice Effect". For example, swords get sharper with use, baskets get stronger the more things they carry, mirrors, furniture and decorations look more attractive the more they are looked at. The downside to this being that an object's condition deteriorates over time if not put to use. Under this system, members of society's higher strata employ servants to Practice their own possessions to perfection.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turn_of_the_Screw"title="The Turn of the Screw">
On Christmas Eve, an unnamed narrator and some of their friends are gathered around a fire. One of them, Douglas, reads a manuscript written by his sister's late governess. The manuscript tells the story of her being hired by a man who has become responsible for his young niece and nephew following the deaths of their parents. He lives mainly in London and has a country house in Bly, Essex. The boy, Miles, is attending a boarding school, while his younger sister, Flora, is living in Bly, where she is cared for by Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper. Flora's uncle, the governess's new employer, is uninterested in raising the children and gives her full charge, explicitly stating that she is not to bother him with communications of any sort. The governess travels to Bly and begins her duties.Miles returns from school for the summer just after a letter arrives from the headmaster, stating that he has been expelled. Miles never speaks of the matter, and the governess is hesitant to raise the issue. She fears there is some horrible secret behind the expulsion, but is too charmed by the boy to want to press the issue. Soon after, around the grounds of the estate, the governess begins to see the figures of a man and woman whom she does not recognize. The figures come and go at will without being seen or challenged by other members of the household, and they seem to the governess to be supernatural. She learns from Mrs. Grose that the governess's predecessor, Miss Jessel, and another employee, Peter Quint, had had a close relationship. Before their deaths, Jessel and Quint spent much of their time with Flora and Miles, and the governess becomes convinced that the two children are aware of the ghosts' presence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_French_Lieutenant's_Woman"title="The French Lieutenant's Woman">
Set in the mid-nineteenth century, the narrator identifies the novel's protagonist as Sarah Woodruff, the "Woman" of the title, also known as "Tragedy" and as "The French Lieutenant's Whore". She lives in the coastal town of Lyme Regis as a disgraced woman, supposedly abandoned by a French ship's officer named Varguennes who had returned to France and married. Employed as a servant in the household of the very pious Mrs. Poulteney, she spends some of her limited free time on The Cobb, a stone jetty where she stares out to sea.One day, Charles Smithson, an orphaned gentleman, and Ernestina Freeman, his fiancée and a daughter of a wealthy tradesman, see Sarah walking along the cliffside. Ernestina tells Charles something of Sarah's story, and he becomes curious about her. Though continuing to court Ernestina, Charles has several more encounters with Sarah, meeting her clandestinely three times. During these meetings, Sarah tells Charles of her history, and asks for his emotional and social support. During the same period, he learns of the possible loss of his place as heir to his elderly uncle, who has become engaged to a woman young enough to bear a child. Meanwhile, Charles's servant Sam falls in love with Mary, the maid of Ernestina's aunt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_of_the_Hegemon"title="Shadow of the Hegemon">
In "Shadow of the Hegemon", all of the Battle School graduates, except Ender, return to Earth in 2197 A.D., where Ender's brother Peter, using his online pseudonym "Locke", arranges for Ender to be returned to Earth; but Valentine, under the pseudonym Demosthenes, uses Peter's violent past against him to keep Ender exiled. Shortly after their return, the members of the unit Ender commanded (called his Jeesh, an Arabic word meaning 'army'), with the exception of Bean, are seized as strategists in an upcoming struggle for world dominance, by Achilles de Flandres (ah-SHEEL), who subjects them to solitary confinement. Bean having imprisoned Achilles in the previous novel, Achilles attempts (unsuccessfully) to kill Bean. The Delphikis go into hiding, while Bean joins forces with Sister Carlotta. After he discovers an encoded message sent by Petra confirming that the Russians are Achilles' backers, he works to free her and the others, while helping Peter come to power.When Peter publishes under the 'Locke' pseudonym that Achilles is a murderer, the Battle School graduates are released, excepting Petra, whom Achilles brings to India. From there, he requests plans for an invasion of Burma and then Thailand, for which Indian Battle School graduates, including Sayagi and Virlomi, develop plans for brute-force attacks involving long supply lines. Petra arranges a different plan of stripping India's garrisons along the Indo-Pakistani border, which she expects will never happen, until a meeting with Pakistan's prime minister, in which Achilles encourages the two nations to make peace among themselves and declare war on other neighbors; secretly giving China the opportunity to annihilate the Indian army.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frindle"title="Frindle">
Nicholas "Nick" Allen is a class clown who has been formulating creative schemes throughout grade school. At the start of fifth grade in 1987, he is unhappy because his English teacher is the no-nonsense Mrs. Granger. One day, in an attempt to forestall, Nick decides to question Granger on where each word in the dictionary comes from. This backfires, as Mrs. Granger assigns him an essay about it. From this experience, Nick learns that individuals get to determine what words mean, and when he comes across a gold colored pen in the street, he decides to give a "pen" a new name: "frindle".Nick's classmates really like the idea and soon, every child in the fifth grade starts using the word "frindle". Mrs. Granger makes any students who are caught saying "frindle" stay after school and write lines, but this proves to be a problem, as this causes almost every student to stay after school. The school principal decides to visit Nick's house to end the use of "frindle", but the situation is beyond Nick's personal control, and the word's usage cannot be curtailed. "Frindle" starts to gain national attention, and a family friend purchases the merchandising rights to the word. The word "frindle" spreads across the nation, and Nick thinks through the trouble that this one scheme has caused.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_Beasts_and_Where_to_Find_Them"title="Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them">
## Original "for Muggles" version."Fantastic Beasts" purports to be a reproduction of a textbook owned by Harry Potter and written by magizoologist Newt Scamander, a character in the fictional "Harry Potter" series. In the series, magizoology is the study of magical creatures.Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts, provides the foreword and explains the purpose of the special edition of this book (the Comic Relief charity). At the end, he assures muggle readers, "The amusing creatures described hereafter are fictional and cannot hurt you." He repeats the Hogwarts motto: "Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus", Latin for "Never tickle a sleeping dragon"."Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" contains the history of magizoology and describes 85 magical species found around the world. Scamander says that he collected most of the information found in the book through observations made over years of travel across five continents. He notes that the first edition was commissioned in 1918 by Augustus Worme of Obscurus Books. However, it was not published until 1927. It is now in its fifty-second edition.In the Harry Potter universe, the book is a required textbook for first-year Hogwarts students, having been an approved textbook since its first publication. In his foreword to the book, Albus Dumbledore notes that it serves as an excellent reference for wizarding households in addition to its use at Hogwarts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diary_of_a_Nobody"title="The Diary of a Nobody">
The diary begins on 3 April of an unstated year, and runs for approximately 15 months. In a short prologue, readers are informed that Charles Pooter and his wife Caroline (Carrie) have just moved to a new home at "The Laurels", Brickfield Terrace, Holloway. Mr Pooter is a City of London clerk with Perkupp's, possibly an accountancy or private banking firm (though their business is not explicitly stated). The couple's 20-year-old son William works as a bank clerk in Oldham. The first entries describe the Pooters' daily lives and introduce their particular friends, such as their neighbour Gowing, the enthusiastic bicyclist Cummings, and the Jameses from Sutton. From the beginning a pattern is set whereby the small vexations of the Pooters' daily lives are recounted, many of them arising from Pooter's unconscious self-importance and pomposity. Trouble with servants, tradesmen, and office juniors occur regularly, along with minor social embarrassments and humiliations.The rare formal social events in the Pooters' lives are particular magnets for misfortune. They receive an invitation from the Lord Mayor of London to attend a ball at the Mansion House for "Representatives of Trade and Commerce". After days of keen anticipation they are dismayed, when they arrive, to find that the gathering is undistinguished. Pooter is snobbishly upset to be greeted familiarly by his local ironmonger, even more so when this tradesman appears to be on social terms with some of the more important guests. Pooter overindulges in champagne and humiliates Carrie by collapsing on the dance floor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lion,_the_Witch_and_the_Wardrobe"title="The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe">
Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy Pevensie are evacuated from London in 1940, to escape the Blitz, and sent to live with Professor Digory Kirke at a large house in the English countryside. While exploring the house, Lucy enters a wardrobe and discovers the magical world of Narnia. Here, she meets the faun named Tumnus, whom she addresses as ""Mr." Tumnus". Tumnus invites her to his cave for tea and admits that he intended to report Lucy to the White Witch, the false ruler of Narnia who has kept the land in perpetual winter, but he repents and guides her back home. Although Lucy's siblings initially disbelieve her story of Narnia, Edmund follows her into the wardrobe and winds up in a separate area of Narnia and meets the White Witch, who calls herself the Queen of Narnia. The Witch plies Edmund with Turkish delight and persuades him to bring his siblings to her with the promise of being made a prince. Edmund reunites with Lucy and they both return home. However, Edmund denies Narnia's existence to Peter and Susan after learning of the White Witch's identity from Lucy.Soon afterwards, all four children enter Narnia together, but find that Tumnus has been arrested for treason. The children are befriended by Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, who tell them of a prophecy that claims the White Witch's rule will end when "two Sons of Adam and two Daughters of Eve" sit on the four thrones of Cair Paravel, and that Narnia's true ruler – a great lion named Aslan – is returning at the Stone Table after several years of absence. Edmund slips away to the White Witch's castle, where he finds a courtyard filled with the Witch's enemies turned into stone statues. Edmund reports Aslan's return to the White Witch, who begins her movement toward the Stone Table with Edmund in tow, and orders the execution of Edmund's siblings and the Beavers. Meanwhile, the Beavers realise where Edmund has gone, and lead the children to meet Aslan at the Stone Table. During the trek, the group notices that the snow is melting, and take it as a sign that the White Witch's magic is fading. This is confirmed by a visit from Father Christmas, who had been kept out of Narnia by the Witch's magic, and he leaves the group with gifts and weapons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_Colors_(novel)"title="Primary Colors (novel)">
The book begins as an idealistic former congressional worker, Henry Burton, joins the presidential campaign of Southern governor Jack Stanton, a thinly disguised stand-in for Bill Clinton. The plot then follows the primary election calendar beginning in New Hampshire where Stanton's affair with Cashmere, his wife's hairdresser, and his participation in a Vietnam War era protest come to light and threaten to derail his presidential prospects. In Florida, Stanton revives his campaign by disingenuously portraying his Democratic opponent as insufficiently pro-Israel and as a weak supporter of Social Security. Burton becomes increasingly disillusioned with Stanton, who is a policy wonk who talks too long, eats too much and is overly flirtatious toward women. Stanton is also revealed to be insincere in his beliefs, saying whatever will help him to win. Matters finally come to a head, and Burton is forced to choose between idealism and realism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murder_of_Roger_Ackroyd"title="The Murder of Roger Ackroyd">
The book's narrator, Dr James Sheppard, introduces himself and explains these are his memoirs of a murder which happened in his town. In King's Abbot, wealthy widow Mrs Ferrars unexpectedly commits suicide, distressing her fiancé the widower Roger Ackroyd. At dinner that evening in Ackroyd's home of Fernly Park, his guests include his sister-in-law Mrs Cecil Ackroyd and her daughter Flora, big-game hunter Major Blunt, Ackroyd's personal secretary Geoffrey Raymond, and Dr James Sheppard, whom Ackroyd invited earlier that day. During dinner, Flora announces her engagement to Ackroyd's stepson, Ralph Paton. After dinner, Ackroyd reveals to Sheppard in his study that Mrs Ferrars had confided in him that she was being blackmailed over the murder of her husband. He then asks Sheppard to leave, wishing to read a letter from Mrs Ferrars that arrives in the post, containing her suicide note. Once home, Sheppard receives a call and leaves for Fernly Park again, after informing his sister that Parker, Ackroyd's butler, has found Ackroyd murdered. But when Sheppard arrives at Fernly Park, Parker denies making such a call; yet he, Sheppard, Raymond, and Blunt find Ackroyd dead in his study, stabbed to death with a weapon from his collection.Hercule Poirot, living in the village, comes out of retirement at Flora's request. She does not believe Paton killed Ackroyd, despite him disappearing and police finding his footprints on the study's window. Poirot learns a few important facts on the case: all in the household, except parlourmaid Ursula Bourne, have alibis for the murder; while Raymond and Blunt heard Ackroyd talking to someone after Sheppard left, Flora was the last to see him that evening; Sheppard met a stranger on his way home, at Fernly Park's gates; Ackroyd met a representative of a dictaphone company a few days earlier; Parker recalls seeing a chair that had been in an odd position in the study when the body was found, that has since returned to its original position; the letter from Mrs Ferrars has disappeared since the murder. Poirot asks Sheppard for the exact time he met his stranger. He later finds a goose quill and a scrap of starched cambric in the summer house, and a ring with the inscription "From R" in a goldfish pond in the gardens.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_A.B.C._Murders"title="The A.B.C. Murders">
Returning from South America, Arthur Hastings meets with his old friend, Hercule Poirot, at his new flat in London. Poirot shows him a mysterious letter he has received, signed "A.B.C.", that details a crime that is to be committed very soon, which he suspects will be a murder. Two more letters of the same nature soon arrive at his flat, each before a murder being carried out by A.B.C., and committed in alphabetical order: Alice Ascher, killed in her tobacco shop in Andover; Elizabeth "Betty" Barnard, a flirty waitress killed on the beach at Bexhill; and Sir Carmichael Clarke, a wealthy man, killed at his home in Churston. In each murder, an "ABC Rail Guide" is left beside the victim.The police team for the investigation, led by Chief Inspector Japp, includes Inspector Crome, who doubts Poirot's detective abilities, and Dr. Thompson, who tries to profile the killer. Poirot forms a "Legion" of relatives of the deceased to uncover new information: Franklin Clarke, Sir Carmichael's brother; Mary Drower, Ascher's niece; Donald Fraser, Betty's fiancé; Megan Barnard, Betty's elder sister, and Thora Grey, Sir Carmichael's young assistant. Following a meeting with the third victim's widow, Lady Clarke, one key similarity between the murders is established – on the day of each murder, a man selling silk stockings has appeared at or near each crime scene. Despite this information, Poirot wonders why the letters were sent to him, rather than the police or the newspapers, and why the third letter misspelled Poirot's address, causing a delay in his receipt of it. Soon, A.B.C. sends his next letter, directing everybody to Doncaster, where it is suspected that the next murder will occur at the St. Leger Stakes race meeting that day. However, the murderer strikes at a cinema instead, and the victim's name does not match the alphabetical pattern of the other killings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm"title="Crossing the Chasm">
Crossing the Chasm is an adaptation of an innovation-adoption model called diffusion of innovations theory created by Everett Rogers, The author argues there is a chasm between the early adopters of the product (the technology enthusiasts and visionaries) and the early majority (the pragmatists). Moore believes visionaries and pragmatists have very different expectations, and he attempts to explore those differences and suggest techniques to successfully cross the "chasm," including choosing a target market, understanding the whole product concept, positioning the product, building a marketing strategy, choosing the most appropriate distribution channel and pricing.According to Moore, anyone with an innovation or new product should focus on one group of customers at a time, using each group as a base for marketing to the next group. The most difficult step is making the transition between visionaries (early adopters) and pragmatists (early majority). This is the chasm that he refers to. If a successful firm can create a bandwagon effect in which enough momentum builds, then the product becomes a de facto standard, by creating a complete solution for one intractable problem in one business vertical before building out services in adjacent verticals and expanding on from there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress"title="The Futurological Congress">
Ijon Tichy is sent to the Eighth World Futurological Congress in Costa Rica by professor Tarantoga. The conference is set to focus on the world's overpopulation crisis and ways of dealing with it. It is held at the Costa Rica Hilton in Nounas, which is 164 stories tall. Lem is fiercely satirical from the start, and absurdities abound at the Hilton with its guaranteed "BOMB-FREE" rooms and the extravagances of Tichy's suite, which include a palm grove and an "all-girl orchestra [that] played Bach while performing a cleverly choreographed striptease".The conference itself is no less absurd. Papers and presenters are too numerous to allow for full presentations. Instead, papers are distributed in hard copy and speakers call out paragraph numbers to call attention to their most salient points.In the middle of his first night at the conference, Tichy drinks some tap water in his hotel room, and his wild hallucinogenic trip begins, though it never becomes any more or less absurd than the brief glimpse of reality Lem presents in the beginning of the book (if indeed the congress is meant to be reality). He realizes the next day that the government has drugged the public water supply with "benignimizers", a drug that makes the victim helplessly benevolent. Events spiral out of control at the Hilton, which was already so chaotic that charred corpses from bombing attacks would be covered with tarps where they lay while guests went about their business.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela's_Ashes"title="Angela's Ashes">
The narrative is told from the point of view of Frank McCourt as a child. Born in Brooklyn, New York, on 19 August 1930, Frank (Francis) McCourt is the oldest son of Malachy McCourt and Angela Sheehan McCourt. Both of his parents immigrated from Ireland and married in a shotgun wedding over Angela's pregnancy with Frankie. Angela is from Limerick, Ireland, and is fond of music, singing, and dancing. Malachy, from Northern Ireland, is an alcoholic known for his "odd manner" and for telling stories about Irish heroes. Frankie is said to resemble his father, having a hang-dog face and the same "odd manner." In Brooklyn, the McCourts live in modern tenement housing next to a park and share a floor, and an indoor lavatory, with other immigrant families. Frankie has four younger siblings in Brooklyn: Malachy, born in 1931; twins Oliver and Eugene, born in 1932; and an infant sister, Margaret, in 1935.The family struggles with poverty because Malachy Sr's efforts to find work are complicated by his alcoholism. The family's prospects, and Angela's spirits, lift whenever he finds a new job and brings home his wages, but soon he finds himself spending all of his pay packet in pubs, despite Angela's efforts to prevent him from doing so. Malachy Sr loses each job after a few weeks as a result of his heavy drinking.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_and_Lucinda"title="Oscar and Lucinda">
It tells the story of Oscar Hopkins, the Devonian son of a Plymouth Brethren minister who becomes an Anglican priest, and Lucinda Leplastrier, a young Australian heiress who buys a glass factory. They meet on the ship over to Australia, and discover that they are both gamblers, one obsessive, the other compulsive. Lucinda bets Oscar that he cannot transport a glass church from Sydney to a remote settlement at Bellingen, some 400 km up the New South Wales coast. This bet changes both their lives forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Their_Eyes_Were_Watching_God"title="Their Eyes Were Watching God">
Janie Crawford, an African-American woman in her forties, recounts her life starting with her sexual awakening, which she compares to a blossoming pear tree kissed by bees in spring. Around this time, Janie allows a local boy, Johnny Taylor, to kiss her, which Janie's grandmother, Nanny, witnesses.As a young enslaved woman, Nanny was raped by her white enslaver, then gave birth to a mixed-race daughter she named Leafy. Though Nanny wanted a better life for her daughter and even escaped her jealous mistress after the American Civil War, Leafy was later raped by her school teacher and became pregnant with Janie. Shortly after Janie's birth, Leafy began to drink and stay out at night, eventually running away and leaving Janie with Nanny.Nanny, having transferred her hopes for stability and opportunity from Leafy to Janie, arranges for Janie to marry Logan Killicks, an older farmer looking for a wife. However, Killicks doesn't love Janie and wants only a domestic helper rather than a lover or partner; he thinks she doesn't do enough around the farm and considers her ungrateful. When Janie speaks to Nanny about her desire for love, Nanny, too, accuses Janie of being spoiled and, soon afterwards, dies.Unhappy, disillusioned, and lonely, Janie leaves Killicks and runs off with Jody (Joe) Starks, a glib man who takes her to the all-black community of Eatonville, Florida. Starks arranges to buy more land, establishes a general store, and is soon elected mayor of the town. However, Janie soon realizes that Starks wants her as a trophy wife to reinforce his powerful position in town and to run the store, even forbidding her from taking part in the town's social life. During their twenty-year marriage, he treats her as his property, criticizing her, controlling her, and physically abusing her. Finally, when Starks's kidney begins to fail, Janie says that he never knew her because he would not let her be free.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon"title="From the Earth to the Moon">
The story opens some time after the end of the American Civil War. The Baltimore Gun Club, a society dedicated to the design of weapons of all kinds (especially cannons), comes together when Impey Barbicane, its president, calls them to support his latest idea. He's done some calculations, and believes that they could construct a cannon capable of shooting a projectile to the Moon. After receiving the support of his companions, another meeting is held to decide the place from which the projectile will be fired, the dimensions and materials of both the cannon and the projectile, and which kind of powder they are to use.An old enemy of Barbicane, a Captain Nicholl of Philadelphia, designer of plate armor, declares that the entire enterprise is absurd and makes a series of bets with Barbicane, each of them of increasing amount, over the impossibility of such a feat.The first obstacle, enough money to construct the giant cannon (and against which Nicholl has bet $1,000), is raised from a number of countries in America and Europe. Notably, the U.S. donates four million dollars, whilst England, at first, does not give anything. In the end, nearly five and a half million dollars are raised, which ensures the financial feasibility of the project.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underworld_(novel)"title="Underworld (novel)">
The prologue is a fictionalized account of The Shot Heard 'Round the World, a home run by Bobby Thomson on October 3, 1951, that won the National League pennant for the New York Giants against their cross-town rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers. In DeLillo's account, the game-winning ball is caught by a young black fan named Cotter Martin, while J. Edgar Hoover, watching in the stands, is informed in the middle of the game of the first Soviet test of the hydrogen bomb.The remainder of the novel, comprising six parts and an epilogue, is a reverse chronological account of the life of Nick Shay, the man who ultimately ends up with the baseball, from his undirected existence as an executive of a waste management company in Arizona in the 1990s back to his childhood in the Bronx in the 1950s, though the non-linear narrative includes a large number of digressions and ancillary subplots.Part 1 takes place in 1992. Nick Shay lives in Arizona with his wife, Marian, who is having an affair with his colleague, Brian Glassic. Nick visits an art installation of painted B-52 aircraft in the desert by Klara Sax, with whom Nick is later revealed to have had an affair forty years earlier. It is revealed that Nick killed a man when he was a teenager, and that Nick's father disappeared when Nick was a child after going out to get a pack of Lucky Strikes. Nick prefers to imagine that he was killed by the Mafia. In a flashback to 1951, Cotter Martin's father takes the baseball from his son with the intention of selling it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Difference_Engine"title="The Difference Engine">
The action of the story follows Sybil Gerard, a political courtesan and daughter of an executed Luddite leader; Edward "Leviathan" Mallory, a paleontologist and explorer; and Laurence Oliphant, a historical figure who, as is portrayed in the book, was a travel writer whose work was a cover for espionage activities "undertaken in the service of Her Majesty". Linking all their stories is the trail of a mysterious set of reportedly very powerful computer punch cards and the individuals fighting to obtain them.Many characters come to believe that the punch cards are a gambling "modus", a programme that would allow the user to place consistently winning bets. The last chapter reveals that the punched cards represent a program that proves two theorems, which, in reality, would not be discovered until 1931 by Kurt Gödel. Ada Lovelace delivers a lecture on the subject in France.Defending the cards, Mallory gathers his brothers and Ebenezer Fraser, a secret police officer, to fight the revolutionary Captain Swing, who leads a London riot during "the Stink", a major episode of pollution in which London swelters under an inversion layer (comparable to the London Smog of December 1952).After the abortive uprising, Oliphant and Sybil Gerard meet at a cafe in Paris. Oliphant informs her that he is aware of her true identity but will not pursue it. However, he wants information that would compromise her seducer, Charles Egremont MP, now regarded as an obstacle to the strategies and political ambitions of Lords Brunel and Babbage. Sybil has longed for an opportunity for vengeance against Egremont, and the resultant political scandal destroys his parliamentary career and aspirations for a merit lordship. Oliphant also encounters a Manhattan-based group of feminist pantomime artists.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forever_Amber_(novel)"title="Forever Amber (novel)">
Judith Marsh has been engaged since birth to her neighbor, John Mainwaring, heir to the Earl of Rosswood. In 1644, she has her engagement broken off when her family and the Mainwarings find themselves on opposing sides of the English Civil War. During a break in the fighting, John visits Judith and the two consummate their relationship. Pregnant, Judith abandons her family and goes to Parliamentarian territory on John's instructions, introducing herself as Judith St. Clare. There, she ends up staying with farmer Matthew Goodegroome and his wife Sarah. Judith dies in childbirth after naming her daughter Amber (after the color of John's eyes).In 1660, Amber, now a flirtatious teenager, is being raised by the Goodegroomes in ignorance of her origins. She meets a band of Royalists who inform her that Charles II of England is returning. Amber is particularly attracted to Lord Bruce Carlton. During a fair, she lures him into the woods and loses her virginity to him. After she persuades him, Carlton reluctantly takes her to London, but tells Amber he will not marry her and she will come to regret her choice.In London, Carlton makes Amber his mistress. She quickly grows accustomed to their luxurious lifestyle. She longs to marry Carlton and believes becoming pregnant will make him marry her. However, when she does become pregnant, Carlton announces plans to become a privateer. He leaves Amber a significant amount of money and tells her if she is clever she can legitimize herself and her child by marrying well. Left alone, Amber is befriended by a woman named Sally Goodman and passes herself off as a rich country heiress. Sally introduces Amber to her nephew Luke Channell, who Amber quickly marries out of fear that her pregnancy will soon be visible. She soon discovers Sally and Luke are not who they appear. When they realize she is not as wealthy as she claimed they abandon her, leaving her penniless. Amber is pursued by creditors and taken to a debtors' prison. Salvation comes when she catches the eye of Black Jack Mallard, a highwayman who takes Amber with him when he escapes. Black Jack takes Amber to Whitefriars, where she is introduced to the ways of criminals and gives birth to a son who she gives to a countrywoman to raise properly. Black Jack hires a student of noble birth, Michael Godfrey, to educate Amber, and begins to use her as bait in schemes where she lures handsome, rich men to quiet corners before Black Jack robs them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symposium_(Plato)"title="Symposium (Plato)">
The dialogue's seven main characters, who deliver major speeches, are:The story of the banquet is narrated by Apollodorus, but before the narration proper begins, it is shown that Apollodorus is telling the story to a friend of his that is not named, and also that the story of this banquet has been told before by others, as well as previously by Apollodorus himself. This section previews the story of the banquet, letting the reader know what to expect, and it provides information regarding the context and the date. The banquet was hosted by the poet Agathon to celebrate his first victory in a dramatic competition: the Dionysia of 416 BCE. Apollodorus was not present at the event, which occurred when he was a boy, but he heard the story from Aristodemus, who was present. Apollodorus later checked parts of the story with Socrates, who was also there. In this brief introductory passage, it is shown that the narrator, Apollodorus, has a reputation for being somewhat mad, that he is a passionate follower of Socrates, and that he spends his days either listening to Socrates or else telling others of what he has learned from Socrates. The story, as told by Apollodorus, then moves to the banquet at Agathon's home, where Agathon challenges each of the men to speak in praise of the Greek god, Eros.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethan_of_Athos"title="Ethan of Athos">
Dr. Ethan Urquhart, Chief of Biology at the Sevarin District Reproduction Centre on Athos, is upset to find that his long-awaited shipment of ovarian tissue cultures from off-planet consists of an unusable mixture of dead and animal tissues. An exclusively male-populated planetary colony, continuing reproduction on Athos relies on uterine replicator technology, but the centuries-old cultures introduced by the original colonists have recently begun deteriorating into senescence. With their entire shipment purchased from the planet Jackson's Whole inexplicably consisting of genetic trash, the Population Council of Athos sends a reluctant Ethan offworld in search of a fresh batch of tissue cultures and (if possible) a refund from the original supplier, House Bharaputra. This is a very daring assignment as it means contact with women, who Athosians are taught are demonic and terrifying.Ethan arrives at the interstellar hub of Kline Station and immediately encounters his first woman, Commander Elli Quinn, a rather unorthodox intelligence officer with the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet (and a subordinate of Admiral Naismith's). Though she is pleasant and even helpful, Ethan is wary of her. He is soon abducted and interrogated by military agents from Cetaganda who are seeking a fugitive named Terrence Cee as well as their own lost tissue cultures. They refuse to believe that Ethan is not an opposing intelligence operative. Elli rescues Ethan from certain execution. They become reluctant allies as Elli explains that she has actually been hired by House Bharaputra to track the Cetagandans, and for her own reasons determine what their interest is in the tissue cultures and how it relates to a secret Cetagandan research project.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blind_Assassin"title="The Blind Assassin">
The novel's protagonist, Iris Chase, and her sister Laura, grow up well-off but motherless in a small town in southern Ontario. As an old woman, Iris recalls the events and relationships of her childhood, youth and middle age, including her unhappy marriage to Toronto businessman Richard Griffen. The book includes a novel within a novel, the eponymous "Blind Assassin",a roman à clef attributed to Laura but published by Iris. It is about Alex Thomas, a politically radical author of pulp science fiction who has an ambiguous relationship with the sisters. That embedded story itself contains a third tale, a science fiction story told by Alex's fictional counterpart to the second novel's protagonist, believed to be Laura's fictional counterpart.The novel takes the form of a gradual revelation illuminating both Iris's youth and her old age before coming to the pivotal events of her and Laura's lives around the time of the Second World War. Laura and Iris live in a house called Avilion. Their mother dies at a young age leaving Reenie, the caretaker, to take on full responsibility for the girls. As the novel unfolds, and the novel-within-a-novel becomes ever more obviously inspired by real events, Iris, not Laura, is revealed to be the novel-within-a-novel's true author and protagonist. Though the novel-within-a-novel had long been believed to be inspired by Laura's romance with Alex, it is revealed that "The Blind Assassin" was written by Iris based on her extramarital affair with Alex. Iris later published the work in Laura's name after Laura committed suicide upon learning of Alex's death in the war. Following the suicide, Iris realizes through her sister's journals that Richard had been raping Laura for much of their marriage, blackmailing her to comply with him by threatening to turn Alex in to the authorities. Iris takes her young daughter Aimee and flees her home, threatening to reveal that Richard had impregnated Laura and forced an abortion on her. This move estranges Iris from the last people who were supporting her, and creates bitterness between her and the grown Aimee. Iris deceives Richard into believing that Laura was the one having an affair with Alex Thomas, which drives him to commit suicide. The novel ends as Iris dies, leaving the truth to be discovered in her unpublished autobiography that she leaves to her sole surviving granddaughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Harvest"title="Red Harvest">
The Continental Op is called to Personville (known as "Poisonville" to the locals) by the newspaper publisher Donald Willsson, who is murdered before the Op has a chance to meet with him. The Op begins to investigate Willsson's murder and meets with Willsson's father, Elihu Willsson, a local industrialist who has found his control of the city threatened by several competing gangs. Elihu had originally invited those gangs into Personville to help him impose and then enforce the end of a labor dispute.The Op extracts a promise and a signed letter from Elihu that pays the Continental Detective Agency, the Op's employer, $10,000 in exchange for cleaning up the city and ridding it of the gangs. When the Op solves Donald's murder, Elihu tries to renege on the deal, but the Op will not allow him to do so.In the meantime, the Op is spending time with Dinah Brand, a possible love interest of the late Donald Willsson and a moll for Max "Whisper" Thaler, a local gangster. Using information from Brand and Personville's crooked chief of police, Noonan, the Op manages to extract and spread incriminating information to all of the warring parties. When the Op reveals that a bank robbery was staged by the cops and one of the mobs to discredit another mob, a gang war erupts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mommie_Dearest"title="Mommie Dearest">
In the book, Christina contends that Joan, whom she describes as not wishing to be involved in parenting her, was an alcoholic who hit her regularly and placed more importance on her career than her family life.Christina suggests that Joan may have adopted children as a publicity stunt to sustain her career. She implies Joan had a long list of affairs with men, whom Christina was required to call "Uncle" and on some occasions "Gremlin." Christina writes that as she grew older and more difficult to control, Joan found excuses to remove Christina from the home by sending her to various boarding schools and strict religious academies, often specifying in her instructions that Christina must be allowed no contact with the outside world. Often, the threat of boarding school or the actual sending of Christina to these schools was used to punish Christina for defying her mother or fighting back against her abusive behavior.Christina recounts several events in which Joan's behavior was unbalanced, and at least one encounter with her mother where Joan attempted to strangle her. In another encounter, Joan reportedly discovered Christina's clothes hanging in a closet on wire hangers, which Joan detested, instead of crochet hangers, and reprimanded her harshly. In an incident in which Christina refused to eat very rare beef, Joan ordered the meat returned to the refrigerator and refused to allow Christina any other food for a day and a half until she finished the meal; Christina managed to hold out until her mother gave up and allowed her regular meals again. Joan allegedly disposed of her children's possessions to punish them for minor transgressions. Christina also wrote that Joan strapped Christina's younger adopted brother, Christopher, to his bed each night until he was 12, ostensibly to control his sleepwalking.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Edgware_Dies"title="Lord Edgware Dies">
Attending a performance by impressionist Carlotta Adams, Hercule Poirot is approached by actress Jane Wilkinson. She requests his help in asking her husband, Lord Edgware, to divorce her. Although a Catholic, Poirot agrees but is surprised to learn Edgware has already agreed to a divorce and sent a letter to his wife confirming this; Wilkinson denies receiving it. The following morning, Inspector Japp informs Poirot and his friend Arthur Hastings that Edgware was murdered at his home in Regent Gates the previous evening, stabbed in the neck. While Wilkinson was witnessed by Edgware's butler and his secretary visiting her husband that night, a morning newspaper reveals she attended a dinner party that evening, whose guests confirm this. Poirot soon becomes concerned for Adams' safety, recalling she could impersonate Wilkinson. Adams is found dead that same morning from an overdose of Veronal.Seeking answers, Poirot notes a few facts: Bryan Martin, a former lover of Wilkinson before she met the wealthy Duke of Merton, bitterly describes her as an amoral person; Donald Ross, a guest at the party, witnessed her take a telephone call from someone that night; Adams possessed a pair of pince-nez, along with a gold case that contained the drug, which has a puzzling inscription in it; Edgware's nephew, Ronald Marsh, had been cut off from his allowance by his uncle three months earlier; a sum of francs formerly in Edgware's possession has disappeared, along with the butler. Learning Adams had sent a letter to her sister in America before her death, Poirot makes a request for it. A copy is sent via telegram, revealing Adams was offered $10,000 for an undisclosed endeavour. Poirot suspects she was hired to impersonate Wilkinson.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mirror_Crack'd_from_Side_to_Side"title="The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side">
Jane Marple falls while walking in St. Mary Mead. She is helped by Heather Badcock, who brings her into her own home to rest. Over a cup of tea, Heather tells Miss Marple how she once met the American actress Marina Gregg, who recently moved into the area and bought Gossington Hall from Miss Marple's friend Dolly Bantry.Marina and her latest husband, film producer Jason Rudd, host a fête in honour of St John Ambulance. Guests include Mrs Bantry, actress Lola Brewster, Marina's friend Ardwyck Fenn, and Heather with her husband Arthur. Heather corners Marina and launches into a long story about how they met years ago while Marina was visiting Bermuda, where Heather worked at the time. Heather had been ill, but being such big fan of Marina’s she left her sickbed to meet her favourite star and get her autograph. Mrs Bantry, standing nearby, notices a strange look cross Marina’s face during Heather’s monologue. A short while later, Heather collapses and dies.When Mrs Bantry recounts the events to Miss Marple, she uses lines from the poem “The Lady of Shalott” (in which a curse falls upon the heroine of the poem) to describe the look she observed on Marina's face. Detective-Inspector Frank Cornish of the local police begins to investigate the case, learning that the drug had been in a daiquiri given to her by Marina after she spilled her own drink. Cornish hands the case over to Chief-Inspector Dermot Craddock, of Scotland Yard, when the latter is assigned to it in response to the county's request for assistance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Corelli's_Mandolin"title="Captain Corelli's Mandolin">
The story begins with Dr. Iannis, a multilingual doctor with an established practice on the Greek island of Cephalonia. Iannis lives with his daughter Pelagia; Pelagia's mother died of tuberculosis. Pelagia, now a young woman, is headstrong and intelligent, and has learned about medicine by observing her father.Pelagia meets a young fisherman named Mandras, and they become engaged. War has been declared, and Mandras decides to go fight at the front. Pelagia's letters to him go unanswered.Meanwhile, Carlo Guercio fights among the Italian forces that invade Albania, and sees his beloved friend, Francesco, whom he is in love with, shot by the Greek army during the Greco-Italian War.In 1941, Italian and German soldiers are posted to Cephalonia, where they are ostracized by the locals. Pelagia is determined to hate them, especially when a jovial young captain by the name of Antonio Corelli is domiciled with her. Mandras comes home from the war, injured and filthy, and as Pelagia nurses him she realizes she no longer loves him. Mandras leaves for the Greek mainland, where he joins the communist partisan organisation ELAS. ELAS is cruel towards the civilian population and more frequently attacks other partisan groups (for being ideologically different) than the Axis' occupying forces.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bridge_(novel)"title="The Bridge (novel)">
"The road cleared the cutting through the hills. He could see South Queensferry, the marina at Port Edgar, the VAT 69 sign of the distillery there, the lights of Hewlett-Packard’s factory; and the rail bridge, dark in the evening’s last sky-reflected light. Behind it, more lights; the Hound Point oil terminal they’d had a sub-contract on, and, further away, the lights of Leith. The old rail bridge’s hollow metal bones looked the colour of dried blood.You fucking beauty, he thought . . . What a gorgeous great device you are. So delicate from this distance, so massive and strong close-up. Elegance and grace; perfect form. A quality bridge; granite piers, the best ship-plate steel, and a never-ending paint job..."The three main characters represent different elements of the protagonist. Alex (full name hinted to be Alexander Lennox, but never explicitly named), John Orr and The Barbarian are one.Alex is a real person, born in Glasgow, who studied geology and engineering at the University of Edinburgh, fell in love with Andrea Cramond while there, and has continued their (open) relationship ever since. He is embittered by his betrayal of his working-class roots (he has become a manager and partner in his engineering firm), the Cold War, successive Thatcher governments, and the failure of his relationship under the pressure of Andrea's French lover's terminal illness. While returning from a sentimental reunion with an old friend in Fife, during which alcohol and cannabis are consumed, he becomes distracted by the power and beauty of the Forth Railway Bridge while driving on the neighbouring Forth Road Bridge and crashes his car. While in a coma in hospital, he relives his life up to the crash.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhalgren"title="Dhalgren">
The city of Bellona is severely damaged; radio, television, and telephone signals do not reach it. People enter and leave by crossing a bridge on foot.Inexplicable events punctuate the novel: One night the perpetual cloud cover parts to reveal two moons in the sky. One day a red sun swollen to hundreds of times its normal size rises to terrify the populace, then retreats across the sky to set on the same horizon. Street signs and landmarks shift constantly, while time appears to contract and dilate. Buildings burn for days, but are never consumed, while others burn and later show no signs of damage. Gangs roam the nighttime streets, their members hidden within holographic projections of gigantic insects or mythological creatures. The few people left in Bellona struggle with survival, boredom, and each other.The novel's protagonist is "the Kid" (sometimes "Kidd"), a drifter who has partial amnesia: he can't remember either his own name or those of his parents, though he knows his mother was an American Indian. He wears only one sandal, shoe, or boot, as do characters in two other Delany novels and one short story: Mouse in "Nova" (1968), Hogg in "Hogg" (1995), and Roger in "We, in Some Strange Power's Employ Move on a Rigorous Line" (1967). Possibly he has schizophrenia: the novel's narrative is intermittently incoherent (particularly at its end), the protagonist has memories of a stay in a mental hospital, and his perception of reality and the passages of time sometimes differ from those of other characters. Over the course of the story he also experiences significant memory loss. In addition, he is dyslexic, confusing left and right and often taking wrong turns at street corners and getting lost in the city. It is therefore unclear to what extent the events in the story are the product of an unreliable narrator.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scar_(novel)"title="The Scar (novel)">
"The Scar" opens with the journey of a small ship which has set out from the city New Crobuzon (the setting of "Perdido Street Station"). It is heading to the city's new colony, Nova Esperium, which lies across the Swollen Ocean of Bas-Lag. On board the ship are:Before the ship reaches Nova Esperium, it is captured by pirates, and the passengers, crew and prisoners are all press-ganged into being citizens of Armada, a floating city made of thousands of ships. Tanner uses his newfound freedom to embrace his remaking. He has his body further remade and the earlier, rough work perfected, becoming an amphibious sea-creature. Treated now as an equal citizen rather than a prisoner or slave, Tanner's loyalties fiercely lie in Armada.Bellis meanwhile despises her new life as a librarian for the city's vast collection of stolen books, and yearns for home. She gains the attention of the powerful Uther Doul, who is a bodyguard to the mysterious, scarred leaders of Armada known as the Lovers. Doul, for his own reasons, involves Bellis much more closely in the city's matters. She soon becomes privy to a plan formulated by the Lovers to raise a mythical sea creature known as the avanc. Simultaneously, she becomes involved with a New Crobuzonian spy named Silas Fennec, who reveals that the grindylow of the Cold Claw Sea are planning war on New Crobuzon. Silas was on his way home to warn his leaders of this war (thus saving the millions of innocents who might be slaughtered by the grindylow) when he was captured by Armada. Bellis and Silas find physical release in each other, and commiserate that they are powerless to save their home city.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Prisoner_of_Azkaban"title="Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban">
Thirteen-year-old Harry Potter spends another unhappy summer at the Dursleys. After Aunt Marge insults Harry and his deceased parents, an angry Harry accidentally inflates her. Fearing expulsion from Hogwarts, he runs away. On a dark street, a large black dog watches Harry. Startled, Harry stumbles backward, causing his wand to emit sparks. The Knight Bus, a vehicle that rescues stranded wizards, suddenly arrives. Harry goes to the Leaky Cauldron in Diagon Alley where Cornelius Fudge, the Minister for Magic, is waiting. Harry is not expelled but is asked to remain in Diagon Alley until school starts. While there, Harry reunites with best friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. Mr Weasley warns Harry about the wizard Sirius Black, a convicted murderer who escaped Azkaban prison and is believed to be hunting down Harry.Dementors, the hideous guards of Azkaban, board the Hogwarts Express train. As one approaches Harry, he relives his parents' deaths, then faints. The new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, Remus Lupin wards off the creature with a Patronus charm. At Hogwarts, Professor Albus Dumbledore announces that dementors are patrolling the school grounds, hunting Black.In Divination class, Professor Sybill Trelawney says the dog-shaped form in Harry's tea leaves is the Grim, a spectral death omen. She later predicts that Voldemort's servant will soon return. During a Quidditch match, Harry spots a black dog near the pitch, then faints and falls off his broomstick when dementors approach. Harry is uninjured but the Whomping Willow destroys his broom. Afterwards, Professor Lupin teaches Harry the Patronus charm to repel dementors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Comfort_Farm"title="Cold Comfort Farm">
Following the death of her parents, the book's heroine, Flora Poste, finds she is possessed "of every art and grace save that of earning her own living". She decides to take advantage of the fact that "no limits are set, either by society or one's own conscience, to the amount one may impose on one's relatives", and settles on visiting her distant relatives at the isolated Cold Comfort Farm in the fictional village of Howling in Sussex. The inhabitants of the farm – Aunt Ada Doom, the Starkadders, and their extended family and workers – feel obliged to take her in to atone for an unspecified wrong once done to her father.As is typical in a certain genre of romantic 19th-century and early 20th-century literature, each of the farm's inhabitants has some long-festering emotional problem caused by ignorance, hatred, or fear, and the farm is badly run. Flora, being a level-headed, urban woman in the dandy tradition, determines that she must apply modern common sense to their problems and help them adapt to the 20th century – bringing metropolitan values into the sticks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity's_Rainbow"title="Gravity's Rainbow">
 Part 1: "Beyond the Zero": The opening pages of the novel follow Pirate Prentice, an employee of the Special Operations Executive (S.O.E.), first in his dreams, and later around the house in wartime London that he shares with several others in the S.O.E. He soon is driven to the site of a V-2 rocket strike. Pirate's associate Teddy Bloat photographs a map depicting the sexual encounters of U.S. Army Lt. Tyrone Slothrop, an employee of a fictional technical intelligence unit, ACHTUNG. Slothrop and his background are detailed through discussions by some of his co-workers and through references to his family's history, reaching back to early colonial times, in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. (There are loose parallels to Pynchon's own family history.) Slothrop's (fictional) home town of Mingeborough is mentioned for the first time (although the town and a young boy named Hogan Slothrop had previously been featured in Pynchon's short story, "The Secret Integration"). That family setting will be mentioned several times much later in the novel, following the family's decline over time within a Puritan legacy of sterility and death.Employees of a fictional top secret psychological warfare agency called PISCES, headquartered at a former insane asylum known as "The White Visitation", investigate Slothrop's map of his presumed sexual encounters in London, finding that each location appears to precede a V-2 rocket strike in the same place by several days. This coincidence intrigues Pavlovian behavioral psychologist Edward W. Pointsman, who thinks there may be a direct causal relationship between Slothrop's erections and the missile strikes, and his associate, statistician Roger Mexico, who suggests that the relationship is only a random coincidence of probabilities, as seen in Poisson distributions, leading to further reflections in this section and later on topics as broad as the occult, Determinism, the reverse flow of time, and the sexuality of the rocket itself. Pointsman is all the more intrigued to find that as a baby, Slothrop had been subjected to behavioral experiments conducted by a Dr. Laszlo Jamf that involved the stimulation of his penis to erections.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_in_Venice"title="Death in Venice">
The main character is Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous author in his early 50s who recently has been ennobled in honor of his artistic achievement (thus acquiring the aristocratic "von" in his name). He is a man dedicated to his art, disciplined and ascetic to the point of severity, who was widowed at a young age. As the story opens, he is strolling outside a cemetery and sees a coarse-looking, red-haired foreigner who stares back at him belligerently. Aschenbach walks away, embarrassed but curiously stimulated. He has a vision of a primordial swamp-wilderness, fertile, exotic and full of lurking danger. Soon afterward, he resolves to take a holiday.After a false start in traveling to Pula on the Austro-Hungarian coast (now in Croatia), Aschenbach realizes he was "meant" to go to Venice and takes a suite in the Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Lido island. While shipbound and en route to the island, he sees an elderly man in company with a group of high-spirited youths, who has tried hard to create the illusion of his own youth with a wig, false teeth, make-up, and foppish attire. Aschenbach turns away in disgust. Later, he has a disturbing encounter with an unlicensed gondolier—another red-haired, skull-faced foreigner—who repeats "I can row you well" when Aschenbach orders him to return to the wharf.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Goblet_of_Fire"title="Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire">
## Background.Throughout the three previous novels in the "Harry Potter" series, the main character, Harry Potter, has struggled with the difficulties of growing up and the added challenge of being a famed wizard. When Harry was a baby, Lord Voldemort, the most powerful dark wizard in history, killed Harry's parents but was mysteriously defeated after unsuccessfully trying to kill Harry, though his attempt left a lightning-shaped scar on Harry's forehead. This results in Harry's immediate fame and his being placed in the care of his abusive Muggle (non-magical) aunt and uncle, Petunia and Vernon Dursley, who have a son named Dudley.On Harry's eleventh birthday, he learns he is a wizard from Rubeus Hagrid, Keeper of Keys and Grounds at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and enrols in Hogwarts. He befriends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger and confronts Lord Voldemort, who is trying to regain power. In Harry's first year, he has to protect the Philosopher's Stone from Voldemort and one of his faithful followers at Hogwarts. After returning to school after summer break, students at Hogwarts are attacked by the legendary monster of the Chamber of Secrets after the Chamber is opened. Harry ends the attacks by killing a Basilisk and thwarting another attempt by Lord Voldemort to return to full strength. The following year, Harry hears he has been targeted by escaped mass murderer Sirius Black. Despite stringent security measures at Hogwarts, Harry encounters Black at the end of his third year and learns Black was framed and is actually Harry's godfather. He also learns that it was his father's old school friend Peter Pettigrew who betrayed his parents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Egyptian"title="The Egyptian">
Sinuhe recounts, in his old age at his location of forced exile by the Red Sea coast, the events of his life. His tone expresses cynicism, bitterness and disappointment; he says humans are vile and will never change, and that he's writing down his story for therapeutic reasons alone and for something to do in the rugged and desolate desert landscape.Sinuhe begins his life as a foundling discovered in a reed boat in the Nile, and grows up in the poor part of Thebes. His adoptive father Senmut is a doctor, and Sinuhe decides to walk in his footsteps. As an assistant to a royal doctor who knows his adoptive father, Sinuhe is allowed to visit the court, during a trepanation on the dying Amenhotep III – here Sinuhe, the young crown prince Akhenaten and Horemheb meet for the first time. Well educated, Sinuhe sets up a clinic and acquires the sly and eloquent slave Kaptah, who will be his companion and close friend throughout his life.One day he gets acquainted with the gorgeous woman Nefernefernefer and is bewitched by her. Nefernefernefer gets Sinuhe to give her everything he owns – even his adoptive parents' house and grave. When the woman has realised that Sinuhe has run out of possessions, she gets rid of him. Ashamed and dishonored, Sinuhe arranges his adoptive parents to be embalmed and buries them in the Valley of the Kings (they had taken their lives before eviction), after which he decides to go to exile in the company of Kaptah to Levant, which was under Egyptian rule at the time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Presumption_of_Death"title="A Presumption of Death">
Harriet (Lady Peter Wimsey) has evacuated her family to the Wimseys' country house, Talboys in Hertfordshire, taking her two children, along with the three children of her sister-in-law, Lady Mary, and Peter's venerable old housekeeper, Mrs Trapp. Peter and Bunter are away on an undercover assignment.During an ARP drill, a young woman is murdered in the village, and Superintendent Kirk (who last appeared in "Busman's Honeymoon") recruits Harriet to help solve the murder, as the police are short-staffed due to the war and Harriet, as a crime novelist and the wife of a detective, is felt to be the best-qualified available person to find the murderer.The murdered girl, Wendy Percival, had come from the city as a Land Girl, to do agricultural work and help the war effort. She was killed in the village street while most people were in the village's two air raid shelters during the drill, and much of the investigation turns on who had been, or could have been, outside the shelters when the murder was committed. Patient investigation leads Harriet to eliminate several potential suspects, including two young men in the village with whom Wendy flirted and the RAF pilot who was last with her on the night she died. She also establishes that everyone in the shelters is accounted for, and that there was no way for anyone to leave either shelter unnoticed during the drill. Glumly, she reflects that her list of possible suspects has been reduced to a random "wandering maniac".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tenured_Professor"title="A Tenured Professor">
The book chronicles the rise to fame of one Montgomery Marvin, a professor of economics who, as an academic teacher, keeps a low profile but who nevertheless is given tenure quite early in his career. While outwardly concerning himself with unspectacular research focusing on "Mathematical Paradigms in an Approach to Refrigerator Pricing" (which is also the title of his Ph.D. thesis), Marvin's extracurricular activities centre on becoming very rich in a very short time. For that purpose, Marvin has devised a new formula—a stock forecasting model by means of which he and his wife can cash in on people's euphoria, greed and, as they call it, dementia. Eventually, while everyone loses money in the wake of the "Black Monday" stock market crash of October 19, 1987, the Marvins gain an awful lot. (See also Michael Milken and leveraged buyout.)They decide to spend their money wisely, according to their liberal agenda. Intent on strictly observing the code of business ethics, they start to make use of the "positive power of wealth" and embark on a life of philanthropy. They fund a number of chairs in peace studies to be established at, of all places, military academies. They also secure legislation by which companies are required to label their products according to the percentage of female executives employed by them. After they have launched several of their projects, their operations are increasingly considered un-American and officially put under surveillance. But whatever will happen - Marvin knows that he will be able to nourish his family, as he has been accorded tenure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trumps_of_Doom"title="Trumps of Doom">
Merlin has spent the last several years on Earth learning computer science while building Ghostwheel, a trump- and pattern-based computer, elsewhere in Shadow. Having completed his project, he wishes to know who has been trying to kill him every April 30, and why some of the better attempts failed, before he leaves. He meets with his friend Lucas Reynard (Luke), a salesman, who tries to convince him to stay, and who tells him that Julia Barnes, Merlin's ex-girlfriend, may be in trouble. Merlin investigates and finds Julia slain by creatures from another shadow.Merlin investigates through shadow, and is given orders by king Random to shut down Ghostwheel. However, Ghostwheel has become sentient and capable of defending itself. Eventually, Luke - who, it turns out, is Brand's son - imprisons Merlin in a blue crystal cave so he can attempt to take control of Ghostwheel for himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_of_the_Red_Chamber"title="Dream of the Red Chamber">
In the novel's frame story, a sentient Stone, left over when the goddess Nüwa mended the heaven aeons ago, wants to enjoy the pleasures of the "red dust" (the mundane world). The Stone begs a Taoist priest and a Buddhist monk to take it with them to see the world. The Stone, along with a companion (in Cheng-Gao versions they are merged into the same character), is then given a chance to learn from human existence, and enters the mortal realm, reborn as Jia Baoyu ("Precious Jade") – thus "The Story of the Stone".The novel provides a detailed, episodic record of life in the two branches of the wealthy, aristocratic Jia () clan—the Rongguo House () and the Ningguo House ()—who reside in large, adjacent family compounds in the capital. The capital, however, is not named, and the first chapter insists that the dynasty is indeterminate. The ancestors of the two families were made Chinese nobility and given imperial titles, and as the novel begins the two houses are among the most illustrious families in the city. One of the Jia daughters is made a Royal Consort, and to suitably receive her, the family constructs the Daguanyuan, a lush landscaped garden, the setting for much of subsequent action. The novel describes the Jias' wealth and influence in great naturalistic detail, and charts the Jias' fall from the height of their prestige, following some thirty main characters and over four hundred minor ones. Eventually the Jia clan falls into disfavor with the Emperor, and their mansions are raided and confiscated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice_Work"title="Nice Work">
Set in 1986, in the fictional city of Rummidge, the book describes the relationship between Robyn Penrose, a feminist university teacher specialising in the industrial novel and women's writing and Vic Wilcox, the manager of J. Pringle &amp; Sons Casting &amp; General Engineering ("Pringle's"). Robyn is a temporary lecturer at Rummidge, where her boss is Professor Philip Swallow. Swallow is still head of the English Department but is now also Dean of Rummidge's Arts Faculty. Robyn has the temporary lectureship at Rummidge because of the time demands of Swallow's new administrative responsibilities.As part of the "Industry Year Shadow Scheme", the university is required to send one of its faculty into a local factory. Robyn is the chosen faculty member from Rummidge and the chosen factory is Pringle's, where Robyn is to shadow Vic Wilcox and observe the inner workings of a real-life foundry, which she has never seen.The novel also traces the separate private lives of Robyn and Vic. In the Wilcox family are Vic, his father, his wife Marjorie and his children. Separately, Robyn goes through various stages of her long-standing relationship with her boyfriend, Charles, a fellow literary scholar. Later in the novel, to Robyn's discomfort, after she has completed her time at Pringle's, the shadow scheme reverses, with Vic shadowing her during her teaching at Rummidge. The philosophical conflict between the ideologies of industry and academe come to the fore. Later, away from Vic, Professor Morris Zapp, a friend of Swallow's from the fictional American university Euphoric State (based on UC Berkeley), and a character from the earlier two novels in the Campus Trilogy, pays a brief visit to Rummidge on his way to a conference. He learns about Robyn's work for the first time and is impressed. Zapp tries to arrange for Robyn to have a job interview at Euphoric State for an open faculty position, to run interference against his ex-wife, whom Euphoric State's faculty is trying to recruit for the post. The uncertainty in Robyn's professional status comes from whether she will be able to find a permanent post anywhere, in the context of national budget reductions to the universities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Haunted_Mask"title="The Haunted Mask">
Carly Beth Caldwell is a naive, timid and gullible 11-year-old girl who scares easily. Thus, she is constantly ridiculed by Steve Boswell and Chuck Greene at Walnut Avenue Middle School. The pair play several tricks on her, such as offering a sandwich containing a live worm. After school, she goes home and finds her mother has made her a plaster of Carly Beth's face as a symbol of love. When she goes to her room, her younger brother Noah scares her in a duck costume also made by their mother. At the school science fair, Steve causes a panic by announcing his pet tarantula has escaped, and exploits Carly Beth's arachnophobia by pinching her leg, leading her to believe that the tarantula has bitten her. She flies into a frenzied and destructive panic and is once again humiliated in front of her teachers and classmates. Carly Beth exasperatedly vents to her friend Sabrina and promises vengeance upon Steve and Chuck. She plots to go to a new shop that has opened, which sells frightening costumes, and plans to scare Steve and Chuck as payback.Within the shop, Carly Beth sneaks into a back room and discovers a row of hideously deformed masks. The store owner reluctantly sells her one of the masks and Carly Beth goes home in delight. After successfully scaring Noah with the mask, she dons it again on Halloween evening and manages to scare Chuck and Steve. However, as the night goes on, her voice deepens and her behavior becomes violent; she strangles Sabrina and frightens children she does not know. Carly Beth later discovers that she is unable to remove the mask and realizes to her horror that the mask has become one with her skin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Lunch"title="Naked Lunch">
"Naked Lunch" is a non-linear narrative without a clear plot. The following is a summary of some of the events in the book that could be considered the most relevant.The book begins with the adventures of William Lee (also known as "Lee the Agent"), who is Burroughs' alter ego in the novel. His journey starts in the U.S. where he is fleeing the police in search of his next fix. There are short chapters describing the different characters he travels with and meets along the way.Eventually he gets to Mexico where he is assigned to Dr. Benway; for what, he is not told. Benway appears and he tells about his previous doings in Annexia as a "Total Demoralizator." The story then moves to a state called Freeland, a form of limbo, where we learn of Islam Inc. Here, some new characters are introduced, such as Clem, Carl, and Joselito.A short section then jumps in space and time to a marketplace. The Black Meat is sold here and compared to "junk", i.e. heroin. The action then moves back to the hospital where Benway is fully revealed as a manipulative sadist.Time and space again shift the narrative to a location known as Interzone. Hassan, one of the notable characters of the book and "a notorious liquefactionist", is throwing a violent orgy. AJ crashes the party and wreaks havoc, decapitating people and imitating a pirate. Hassan is enraged and tells AJ never to return, calling him a "factualist bitch," a term which is enlarged much later when the apparently "clashing" political factions within Interzone are described. These include the Liquefactionists, the Senders, the Factualists, and the Divisionists (who occupy "a midway position"). A short descriptive section tells of Interzone University, where a professor and his students are ridiculed; the book moves on to an orgy that AJ throws.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_Recognition_(novel)"title="Pattern Recognition (novel)">
Advertising consultant Cayce Pollard, who reacts to logos and advertising as if to an allergen, arrives in London in August 2002. She is working on a contract with the marketing firm Blue Ant to judge the effectiveness of a proposed corporate logo for a shoe company. During the presentation, graphic designer Dorotea Benedetti becomes hostile towards Cayce as she rejects the first proposal. After dinner with some Blue Ant employees, the company founder Hubertus Bigend offers Cayce a new contract: to uncover who is responsible for distributing a series of anonymous, artistic film clips via the internet. Cayce had been following the film clips and participating in an online discussion forum theorizing on the clips' meaning, setting, and other aspects. Wary of corrupting the artistic process and mystery of the clips, she reluctantly accepts. Cayce is not entirely comfortable with Ivy's chat group called "Fetish:Footage:Forum" (or F:F:F), as shown by the following excerpt:A friend from the discussion group, who uses the handle Parkaboy, privately emails her saying a friend of a friend has discovered an encrypted watermark on one clip. They concoct a fake persona, a young woman named Keiko, to seduce the Japanese man who knows the watermark code. Cayce, along with an American computer security specialist, Boone Chu, hired to assist her, travels to Tokyo to meet the man and retrieve the watermark code. Two men attempt to steal the code but Cayce escapes and travels back to London. Boone travels to Columbus, Ohio to investigate the company that he believes created the watermark. Meanwhile, Blue Ant hires Dorotea who reveals that she was previously employed by a Russian lawyer whose clients have been investigating Cayce. The clients wanted Cayce to refuse the job of tracking the film clips and it was Dorotea's responsibility to ensure this.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desperation_(novel)"title="Desperation (novel)">
Peter and Mary Jackson are driving quietly on a desolate Nevada highway when they are pulled over and arrested by the disturbed Collie Entragian. They are taken to the police station of a deserted small mining town named Desperation, where Entragian kills Peter. Several other people are held captive here: the Carver family, whose daughter was also killed by Entragian; Johnny Marinville, a writer who was on a cross-country motorcycle trip to gather new material; and Tom Billingsley, the town veterinarian. Meanwhile, Johnny's assistant Steve, who had been trailing him at a distance, finds Johnny's bike and searches for him with Cynthia, a hitchhiker.Entragian takes Ellen Carver with him, and during his absence, the intensely devout Carver son, David, manages to free everyone, and the party takes him on as a spiritual guide. They take refuge in an abandoned theater and are joined by Steve, Cynthia and Audrey, an employee of the mine. They realize that they are the only survivors of a wave of carnage committed by an evil supernatural entity named Tak. Tak had been imprisoned in an old mine shaft and can take possession of human beings, but this state quickly deteriorates the host and requires it to change hosts. Tak can also manipulate desert wildlife such as coyotes, buzzards, spiders and scorpions. Billingsley is killed by a cougar controlled by Tak, and Audrey, also under its influence, attempts to kill David. She nearly succeeds in strangling him, but is prevented by the intervention of Steve and Johnny. Tak occupies Ellen's body and takes Mary captive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chrysalids"title="The Chrysalids">
The inhabitants of post-apocalypse Labrador have vague knowledge of the "Old People", a technologically advanced civilization they believe was destroyed when God sent "Tribulation" to the world to punish their forebears' sins. The inhabitants practise a form of fundamentalist Christianity; they believe that to follow God's word and prevent another Tribulation, they must preserve absolute normality among the surviving humans, plants and animals, and therefore practice eugenics. Humans with even minor mutations are considered blasphemies and either killed or sterilized and banished to the Fringes, a lawless and untamed area rife with animal and plant mutations, and suggested to be contaminated with radiation. Arguments occur over the keeping of a tailless cat or the possession of over-sized horses. These are deemed by the government to be legitimate breeds, either preexisting or achieved through conventional breeding. The government's position is considered both cynical and heretical by many of the orthodox frontier community, and it is suggested that they support the usage of these animals for the sole purpose of their greater efficiency.The inland rural settlement of Waknuk is a frontier farming community, populated with hardy and pious individuals, and is where the story mainly takes place. David Strorm, the son of Waknuk's most religious man, Joseph Strorm, has dreams of large cities and "horseless carts", although he does not understand why he has these dreams or what they mean, and is cautious about mentioning it to his father, lest he raise suspicion that he's a mutant. He makes friends with Sophie, a girl who secretly has six toes on one of her feet. Later, Sophie's family attempts to escape from the reprisals (ceremonies in which blasphemies are sterilized) when her wet footprints are seen and reported by a local boy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Goes_There?"title="Who Goes There?">
A group of American researchers, isolated in their scientific station in Antarctica by the nearly-ended winter, discover an alien spaceship buried in the ice, where it crashed twenty million years before. They try to thaw the inside of the spacecraft with a thermite charge, but end up accidentally destroying it when the ship's magnesium hull is ignited by the charge. However, they do recover an alien creature from the ancient ice, which the researchers believe was searching for heat when it was frozen. Thawing revives the alien, a being which can assume the shape, memories, and personality of any living thing it devours, while maintaining its original body mass for further reproduction. Unknown to them, the alien immediately kills and then imitates the crew's physicist, a man named Connant; with some 90 pounds of its matter left over it tries to become a sled dog. The crew discovers the dog-Thing and kill it in the process of transformation. Pathologist Blair, who had lobbied for thawing the Thing, goes insane with paranoia and guilt, vowing to kill everyone at the base in order to save mankind; he is isolated within a locked cabin at their outpost. Connant is also isolated as a precaution and a "rule-of-four" is initiated in which all personnel must remain under the close scrutiny of three others.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_of_Amber"title="Blood of Amber">
Merlin escapes from the crystal cave, and decides to gain leverage over Luke by rescuing his mother from the Keep of the Four Worlds. He spars with the sorcerer who now controls the keep, and who seems to know him. He escapes with the petrified Jasra, and returns to Amber where an unusual Trump summoning imprisons him in the Mad Hatter's tea party.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_Motion"title="Strong Motion">
Louis Holland arrives in Boston to find that a minor earthquake in Ipswich has killed his eccentric grandmother, triggering a struggle between him, his sister Eileen, and his mother Melanie over the disposition of a $22 million inheritance. During a visit to the beach, Louis meets Dr. Reneé Seitchek, a Harvard seismologist who believes she has discovered the cause of subsequent earthquakes in Peabody. Louis, Reneé, and the Hollands' affairs become entangled with the petrochemical and weapons company Sweeting-Aldren, as well as an anti-abortion activist commune called the Church of Action in Christ, headed by Reverend Philip Stites.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_of_Chaos"title="Sign of Chaos">
Merlin realises that Wonderland, where he and Luke are trapped, is an LSD-induced hallucination made real by Luke's powers over shadow. As a Fire Angel (a vicious creature from Chaos) pursues them, he administers medicine to Luke. The Fire Angel is weakened in a fight with the Jabberwock and Merlin is able to finish it off with the vorpal sword. He leaves Luke to sober up.He seeks his stepbrother Mandor, who thinks that their half-brother Jurt may be trying to kill Merlin in order to take the throne of Chaos. Fiona contacts them, and they investigate a shadow-storm. Merlin and Mandor return to Amber, and then along with Jasra they wrest the Keep of the Four worlds from Jurt and the sorcerer, Mask. They learn that Jurt has (at least partially) turned himself into a living Trump, as Brand did, and that the sorcerer Mask is in fact Merlin's ex-girlfriend Julia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porno_(novel)"title="Porno (novel)">
The novel is divided into three sections, each of which comprises chapters with different narrators. Unlike "Trainspotting", which had more narrational diversity, "Porno" is reduced to just five narrators: Sick Boy, Renton, Spud, Begbie and Nikki. Another difference from the format of "Trainspotting" is that each character has a defined chapter heading depending on what chapter it is. For instance, Sick Boy's chapters all begin with "Scam..." and then a number in front of a "#". Renton's all begin with "Whores of Amsterdam Pt..." Spud's chapters are just narrative, Begbie's are in capitals, and Nikki's are quotes from the chapter, for example "...A SIMON DAVID WILLIAMSON PRODUCTION...".Each narrator is associated with a distinctive prose style. Renton, Sick Boy, and Nikki's chapters are written almost entirely in "standard" English while Begbie and Spud's chapters are in Scots. For example, in Chapter 25, Spud narrates, "So ah'm downcast git intae the library, thinkin tae masel" ("So I'm downcast when I get into the library thinking to myself"). He also repeats certain words when talking such as "catboy" or "cat", "likes" or "likesay", and "ken?" Begbie often swears a lot during his chapters. Sick Boy's returning grandiose nature is featured in imagined interviews with John Gibson of the "Evening News" and Alex McLeish.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Chaos"title="Prince of Chaos">
Merlin finds himself summoned back to the land where he was raised, the Courts of Chaos. He finds himself enmeshed in political intrigues and schemes, and himself much closer to the crown than he believed possible, or wants. He encounters a variety of old acquaintances, and finds himself fighting with both his wits and his magic to avoid the snares laid for him, to help his friends, and to discover his father's fate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Tycoon"title="The Last Tycoon">
Set in the 1930s, "The Last Tycoon" traces the life of Hollywood studio manager Monroe Stahr, clearly based on Irving Thalberg (in charge of production at MGM), whom Fitzgerald had encountered several times.The novel begins with young NYC college student Cecilia Brady (first-person narrator), the daughter of influential Hollywood producer Pat Brady, preparing to fly home to Los Angeles. At the airport, she is surprised to meet an old friend of her father, author Wylie White. White is accompanied by a failed producer introduced as Mr. Schwartz. Due to complications during the flight, they make a forced landing in Nashville, Tennessee. The threesome decide on a spontaneous trip to the historic estate of former President Andrew Jackson, but on arrival the attraction is closed. Wylie then proceeds to flirt shamelessly with Cecilia while Mr. Schwartz is fast asleep. When Schwartz awakens, he informs them that he has changed his mind and will not travel to Los Angeles with them. He asks Wylie to deliver a message to a friend, which he gladly accepts. The next day, Wylie and Cecilia learn that Schwartz committed suicide right after they left Nashville.Cecilia realizes that the message Schwarz gave to Wylie was in fact for Monroe Stahr, her father's business partner. She has had a crush on Monroe for many years. Cecilia arrives at her father's film studio to pick him up for a birthday party. Due to an unexpected minor earthquake, Cecilia, her father, and his companions all end up in Stahr's office. A water pipe bursts and floods the set. Stahr beholds two women desperately clinging to the head of a statue – finding one of them to be the spitting image of his late wife. The day after, Stahr asks his secretary to identify the girls for him. She presents him with a phone number which he immediately uses to arrange a meeting with one of the girls. Unfortunately, it is not the girl he wished to see; she does not resemble his wife at all. Stahr gives her a ride home, where she insists that he come in and meet her friend (the young Irish-born Kathleen Moore). As soon as Moore opens the front door, Stahr recognizes her to be the woman he had seen the other night.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Save_Me_the_Waltz"title="Save Me the Waltz">
Alabama Beggs, a vivacious Southern belle who "wanted her own way about things", comes of age in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era. She marries David Knight, a 22-year-old Yankee artist of Irish Catholic stock. Alabama met David when he was a United States Army officer stationed near her Southern town during World War I. Knight becomes a successful painter, and the family moves to the French Riviera where Alabama has a romance with a handsome French aviator named Jacques Chevre-Feuille. In retaliation, David abandons her at a dinner party and spends the night with a dancer.Alabama grows further apart from her husband and their daughter. Determined to be famous, an aging Alabama aspires to become a renowned "prima ballerina" and devotes herself relentlessly to this ambition. She is offered an opportunity to dance featured parts with a prestigious company in Naples—and she takes it, and goes to live in the city alone. Alabama dances her solo debut in the opera "Faust". However, a blister soon becomes infected from the glue in the box of her pointe shoe, leading to blood poisoning, and Alabama can never dance again. Though outwardly successful, Alabama and David are miserable. At the novel's end, the unhappy couple returns to the Deep South during the Great Depression where Alabama's father is dying. She searches for meaning in her father's death, but finds none. Though she says otherwise, her childhood friends assume she must be happy, and they envy her privileged lifestyle as the wife of a famous artist. The last paragraph depicts the unhappy Knights immobile and dissipated as a couple: 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_(novel)"title="It (novel)">
## 1957–1958.During a rainstorm in Derry, Maine, a six-year-old boy named Georgie Denbrough sails a paper boat along the rainy streets before it washes down into a storm drain. Looking in the drain, Georgie encounters a clown who introduces himself as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Georgie, despite knowing he should not talk to strangers, is enticed by Pennywise to reach into the drain and retrieve his boat. It then rips his arm off, and Georgie disappears.The following June, an overweight eleven-year-old boy named Ben Hanscom is harassed by a bully named Henry Bowers and his gang on the last day of school, escaping into the marshy wasteland known as the Barrens. There, Ben befriends an asthmatic hypochondriac named Eddie Kaspbrak and "Stuttering Bill" Denbrough, Georgie's elder brother. The three boys later befriend fellow misfits Richie Tozier, Stanley "Stan" Uris, and Beverly Marsh, and refer to themselves as "The Losers Club". As the summer draws on, the Losers each encounter Pennywise in terrifying manifestations: a mummy on a frozen canal to Ben, a fountain of blood (that only children can see) from Beverly's sink, a rotting leper to Eddie, drowned corpses to Stan, and a frightening phantom of Georgie to Bill. Meanwhile, an increasingly unhinged and sadistic Bowers begins focusing his attention on his African-American neighbor, Mike Hanlon, and his father. Bowers kills Mike's dog and chases the terrified boy into the Barrens, where he joins the Losers in driving Bowers' gang off in a rock fight, leaving a humiliated Bowers to vow for revenge. Mike becomes a member of the Losers Club after revealing his own encounter with Pennywise in the form of a flesh-eating bird. From Mike's historical scrapbook, the Losers realize that "It" is an ancient monster with a hold on the town. Following further encounters, the Losers construct a makeshift smoke hole that Richie and Mike use to hallucinate It's origins as an ancient alien entity that came to Earth, beginning a cycle of feeding on children for a year followed by a 27-year-long hibernation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazing_Maurice_and_His_Educated_Rodents"title="The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents">
The book opens with Amazing Maurice (a sentient cat), a group of talking rats (the Clan), and the human boy Keith travelling in a mail coach to a small town called Bad Blintz. The group plans to enact a scheme they have used many times before, where in the rats pretend to infest the town and Keith poses as a rat piper to lead the "vermin" away for a small sum of cash. Although Maurice sees nothing wrong with this hustling business, the rats find it immoral, and convince Maurice that this town will be the last one they rob. Upon arriving in town, the group discovers that the people are convinced of a massive rat infestation, and have spent much of their savings on two rat catchers. Despite their efforts, food continues to disappear from the town. As the rats move into the town's underground, they discover an overwhelmingly large number of rat traps, but no live "keekees" (rats who cannot talk or think). Aboveground, Maurice makes similar observations, including that many of the rat tails the rat catchers display as proof of their successful hunting are in fact shoelaces. Maurice and Keith meet the mayor's daughter Malicia and introduce her to the talking rats.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quidditch_Through_the_Ages"title="Quidditch Through the Ages">
In 2001, Rowling penned two companion books to the "Harry Potter series", "Quidditch Through the Ages" and "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them", for British charity and offshoot of Live Aid, Comic Relief with all of her royalties going to the charity. As of July 2008, the books combined are estimated to have earned over $30 million for Comic Relief. The two books have since been made available in hardcover.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fieldwork_(novel)"title="Fieldwork (novel)">
Set in Thailand, the novel is told from the point of view of a fictional narrator named Mischa Berlinski. It tells the story of a tribe called the Dyalo, a family of Protestant missionaries attempting to convert them to Christianity, and an anthropologist who is studying the tribe and who murders one of the missionaries and then commits suicide in prison.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wee_Free_Men"title="The Wee Free Men">
Tiffany Aching is a 9-year-old girl who literally sees things differently from others. While playing by the river near her home, she sees two tiny blue, kilted men who warn her of a "green heid" in the water. Suddenly a vile green monster, Jenny Greenteeth, appears in the water. Using her brother Wentworth as bait, Tiffany ambushes the beast and cracks it with a frying pan, while Wentworth is completely unfazed, as he is unable to see either the little men or the monster. She goes into town to visit a travelling teacher and comes upon Miss Tick, a witch who has been watching her. Tiffany is told that these little men are the Nac Mac Feegles, who are rough and rowdy fae folk who speak in Scots. Miss Tick informs her that she is likely the witch of the wold she resides in, and gives her the toad familiar she carries as a guide before tricking Tiffany out of the tent and disappearing.Tiffany returns home to discover that the Nac Mac Feegles are not only incredibly fast and strong, but afraid of her, as she catches them stealing eggs from under a chicken and a sheep right out of the field. When Wentworth is kidnapped by the Queen of the Fairies, Tiffany seeks out the help of the Nac Mac Feegles to rescue him, as they are the most powerful otherworldly things she knows and they're more than willing to submit to her will, terrified by one who is not only a witch but one who can read and write. Rob Anybody, and a group of other Feegles including Big Yan and Daft Wullie take her back to their home where she meets the buzzard-aviator Hamish, the bard-Feegle William, and their clan leader the Kelda. Tiffany is told that her brother has been taken by the Queen to her domain in Fairyland, and not only must she take the Feegles to go rescue him, but she must also take up the reins as Kelda, as the current one is about to die. After worming her way out of marrying Rob Anybody, Tiffany goes out of the mound to the field where the Feegles test her First Sight and Second Thoughts by letting her find the entrance to the queen's domain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strata_(novel)"title="Strata (novel)">
Kin Arad is a human planetary engineer working for “the Company”, a human organisation that manufactures habitable planets using techniques and equipment salvaged from an extinct alien race, the “Spindle Kings”, who excelled at terraforming.The express purpose of the Company’s planet-manufacturing business is to create dispersed branches of humanity, diverse enough to ensure the whole species’ survival for eternity. The Earth’s population in the past has been decimated due to the lethal “Mindquakes”, epidemic mass deaths caused by too much homogeneity among the populace.All planets built by the Company are carefully crafted with artificial strata containing synthetic fossils, indistinguishable from the real thing. On occasion, however, mischievous Company employees often attempt to place anomalous objects in the strata as practical jokes, like running shoes, or other out-of-place artefacts, hoping to raise confusion among future archaeologists when the planets’ beginnings have been long forgotten. However the Company forbids this, and secretly monitors the generated strata in order to detect embedded jokes, fearing such actions may cause the collapse of entire civilizations when the artifacts are eventually unearthed.Kin and two aliens are recruited by the mysterious Jago Jalo for an expedition. One alien is a paranoid, four-armed, frog-like, muscular “Kung” named Marco. The other alien is a bear-like “Shand”, historian and linguist named Silver. Jago Jalo is a human who returned from a relativistic journey he embarked on more than a thousand years ago, where he made a stunning discovery: A flat Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Side_of_the_Sun"title="The Dark Side of the Sun">
Dominickdaniel "Dom" Sabalos IV is the son of a prodigy of probability math, a science able to predict anything apart from anything to do with the Jokers, and the first person to have had his life fully quantified using p-math. His father, before being mysteriously assassinated, predicted that Dom too would be killed, on the day of his investiture as Chairman of his home planet of Widdershins.However, not having been told of his father's prediction, and against incalculably distant odds, Dom survives the assassination attempt. When the recording of his father's prediction is played back, a time delay added specifically for this unlikely eventuality plays a little more of the recording, in which his father makes a further prediction: that Dom will discover the Jokers' homeworld.Dom sets out, with Hrsh-Hgn (his tutor, a swamp-dwelling "phnobe"), Isaac (his robot, equipped with "Man-Friday subcircuitry") and Ig (his pet swamp "ig") in tow, on a picaresque adventure to find the Jokers' world. He visits many corners of the "life-bubble", encountering Joker artifacts, his god-father, who is a sentient planet, and the sexless, octopoid "Creapii", among many other weird and diverse aliens and planets. At the same time he finds himself surviving – at increasingly improbable odds – numerous assassination attempts by a mysterious conspiracy which has long worked to prevent anybody from locating the Jokers, assassinating anybody deemed by p-math having a chance of doing so.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_Music_(novel)"title="Soul Music (novel)">
A young harpist, Imp Y Celyn from Llamedos (spelled backwards, "sod 'em all", a tribute to Llareggub in Welsh poet Dylan Thomas' "Under Milk Wood"), comes to Ankh-Morpork in hopes of becoming famous. Unable to afford the Musicians Guild fees, he and fellow unlicensed musicians Lias Bluestone (a troll percussionist) and Glod Glodsson (a dwarf hornblower) form "The Band with Rocks In", named after Lias' tuned rocks. When Imp's harp is destroyed, he acquires a guitar from a mysterious shop, unaware that it contains the awareness of a primordial music that was responsible for bringing the universe into existence. Imp takes the new name "Buddy", as "Imp Y Celyn" literally means "bud of holly", and Lias starts calling himself "Cliff".Meanwhile, Death is upset over the deaths of his adopted daughter Ysabell and her husband, his former apprentice Mort. Their daughter, Susan Sto Helit, was initially raised with an awareness of Death as her grandfather, but they later withheld the truth from her and she forgot about it. She attends boarding school in Quirm, and is content to avoid unpleasant conversations by using her unexplained ability to fade from others' awareness. When Death abandons his post, going on an impromptu sabbatical in an effort to forget the painful memories, the fabric of reality forces Susan to take on his duties and she begins to remember her past. She becomes aware of Buddy when he is scheduled to die in a riot while performing at the Mended Drum, but instead the crowd is overcome by the spirit of "Music with Rocks In", which apparently has no musical merit for objective listeners not themselves possessed by it. After this, Buddy's life is powered by the music instead of by his natural life force.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluebeard_(Vonnegut_novel)"title="Bluebeard (Vonnegut novel)">
At the opening of the book, the narrator, Rabo Karabekian, apologizes to the arriving guests: "I promised you an autobiography, but something went wrong in the kitchen..." He describes himself as a museum guard who answers questions from visitors coming to see his priceless collected art. He shares the lonely home with his live-in cook and her daughter, Celeste.One afternoon, Circe Berman, a woman living nearby wanders onto Karabekian's private beach. When he reaches out to greet her, she catches him by surprise with the forward statement "Tell me how your parents died." He tells her the story and proceeds to invite her back to his home for a drink. After a drink and supper, Karabekian invites her to stay with him, as Paul Slazinger, a friend of Karbekian does. After a time, he begins to find her charm "manipulative", as she typically gets her way. Mrs. Berman does not respect his abstract art collection, including works by Jackson Pollock. She explores every inch of Karabekian's home, constantly asking him questions. The only place that is off-limits to her is the potato barn.The potato barn is the home of Karabekian's studio and holds his "secret". The barn has no windows, and Karabekian has gone through the trouble of nailing one end shut and immobilizing the other with six padlocks. The mystery of the potato barn has enticed collectors to make outrageous offers and to raise suspicions of stolen masterpieces. Upon help from Berman, Karabekian comes to a realization in his life, that he was merely afraid of people, and opens the painting in the potato barn to the public.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tirant_lo_Blanch"title="Tirant lo Blanch">
"Tirant lo Blanch" tells the story of a knight Tirant from Brittany who has a series of adventures across Europe in his quest. He joins in knightly competitions in England and France until the Emperor of the Byzantine Empire asks him to help in the war against the Ottoman Turks, Islamic invaders threatening Constantinople, the capital and seat of the Empire. Tirant accepts and is made Megaduke of the Byzantine Empire and the captain of an army. He defeats the invaders and saves the Empire from destruction. Afterwards, he fights the Turks in many regions of the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, but he dies just before he can marry the pretty heiress of the Byzantine Empire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderball_(novel)"title="Thunderball (novel)">
During a meeting with his superior, M, Bond learns that his latest physical assessment is poor because of excessive drinking and smoking. M sends Bond to a health clinic for a two-week treatment to improve his condition. At the clinic Bond encounters Count Lippe, a member of the Red Lightning Tong criminal organisation from Macau. When Bond learns of the Tong connection, Lippe tries to kill him by tampering with a spinal traction table on which Bond is being treated. Bond, however, is saved by nurse Patricia Fearing and later retaliates against Lippe by trapping him in a steam bath, causing second-degree burns and sending him to hospital for a week.The Prime Minister receives a communiqué from SPECTRE (SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion), a private criminal enterprise under the command of Ernst Stavro Blofeld. SPECTRE has hijacked a "Villiers Vindicator" and seized its two nuclear bombs, which it will use to destroy two major targets in the Western Hemisphere unless a ransom is paid. Lippe was dispatched to the clinic to oversee Giuseppe Petacchi, an Italian Air Force pilot stationed at a nearby bomber squadron base, and post the communiqué once the bombs were in SPECTRE's possession. Although Lippe has accomplished his tasks, Blofeld considers him unreliable because of his childish clash with Bond and has him killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scarlet_Letter"title="The Scarlet Letter">
In Puritan Boston, Massachusetts, a crowd gathers to witness the punishment of Hester Prynne, a young woman who has given birth to a baby of unknown paternity. Her sentence requires her to stand on the scaffold for three hours, exposed to public humiliation, and to wear a scarlet "A" for the rest of her life. As Hester approaches the scaffold, many of the women in the crowd are angered by her beauty and quiet dignity. When commanded and cajoled to name the father of her child, Hester refuses.As Hester looks out over the crowd, she notices a small, misshapen man and recognizes him as her long-lost husband, who had been presumed lost at sea. When the husband sees Hester's shame, he asks a man in the crowd about her and is told the story of his wife's pregnancy. He angrily exclaims that the child's father should also be punished for his immoral act and vows to find the man. He chooses a new name, Roger Chillingworth, to aid him in his plan.The Reverend John Wilson and the minister of Hester's church, Arthur Dimmesdale, question her, but she refuses to name her lover. After she returns to her prison cell, the jailer brings in Chillingworth, now a physician, to calm Hester and her child with his roots and herbs. He and Hester have an open conversation regarding their marriage and the fact that they were both in the wrong. Chillingworth demands to know who fathered Hester's child, but Hester refuses to divulge that information. He accepts Hester's refusal, stating that he will find out the man's identity anyway. Chillingworth threatens to destroy the father of Hester's child if Hester ever reveals the fact that Chillingworth is her husband. Hester agrees to Chillingworth's terms, although she suspects she will regret it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_G-String_Murders"title="The G-String Murders">
Gypsy Rose Lee narrates her way through a tale of a double murder, backstage at the "Old Opera" burlesque theatre on 42nd Street, New York City.The story depicts a world populated by strippers, comics, and costume salesmen, where crime is part of the norm and where women struggle to earn a living.The narrative is a "wise-cracking" and humorous tale of murder in a burlesque house, and with the unusual weapon of the title.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_from_Death_Row"title="Live from Death Row">
Abu-Jamal structures the book as anecdotes, most exploring the prison system. In an end section titled "Musings, memories, and prophecies", he discusses past events in his life, and he commemorates some prominent black people in America.He delves into the purported purpose of prison, suggesting that "corrections" and deterrence are no longer its true goals: he notes that there are barriers to educating inmates and that psychological problems are caused by the practices of putting prisoners in isolation and prohibiting contact during visits. He suggests that prisons are operated in order to "erode one's humanity". He describes the procedures of death row blocs, where twenty-plus-hour solitary confinement is offset by a few hours of recreation and exercise "outside" on penned-in plots of land and limited conversations with other inmates. These often relate to their attempts at appeal and their battles with the law. He details two suicides of fellow inmates, one by hanging and one by self-inflicted burns. He notes that inmates were given drugs to make them more sedated, although this endangered one man with epilepsy. He reports the interactions between "urban" prisoners and "rural" guards, and says that prisoners are subject to brutal beatings, cavity searches, racial harassment, and human rights violations after insurgencies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myra_Breckinridge"title="Myra Breckinridge">
An attractive young woman, Myra Breckinridge is a film buff with a special interest in the Golden Age of Hollywood—in particular the 1940s—and the writings of film critic Parker Tyler. She comes to the Academy for Aspiring Young Actors and Actresses, owned by her deceased husband Myron's uncle, Buck Loner. Here, she gets a job teaching, not just her regular classes (Posture and Empathy), but also, as part of the hidden curriculum, female dominance. The spirit of the times is reflected in Myra's attendance at an orgy arranged by a student. She intends only to observe but suffers a "rude intrusion" by a member of the band The Four Skins, from which she derives a perverse, masochistic enjoyment. At an earlier regular party, after "mixing gin and marijuana", she eventually gets "stoned out of her head" and has a fit, before passing out in a bathroom.Still in the process of transitioning from male to female and unable to obtain hormones, Myra transforms into Myron, and, as a result of the injuries she has sustained in a car accident, is forced to have her breast implants removed. Now a eunuch, Myron decides to settle down with Mary-Ann.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Shylock"title="Operation Shylock">
The novel follows narrator "Philip Roth" on a journey to Israel, where he attends the trial of accused war criminal John Demjanjuk and becomes involved in an intelligence mission—the "Operation Shylock" of the title.While in Israel, the narrator seeks out an impersonator who has appropriated his identity—sharing the same facial features and name as Philip Roth—and used this celebrity to spread "Diasporism," a counter-Zionist ideology advocating the return of Israeli Jews to their European nations of exile. The ensuing struggle between this doppelgänger-like stranger and "Roth," played against the backdrop of the Demjanjuk trial and the First Intifada, constitutes the book's primary storyline.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Angel_(Waltari_novel)"title="The Dark Angel (Waltari novel)">
The narrator is Jean Ange, alias John Angelos, born in Avignon. Prior to the events of the novel, he had been a friend of Sultan Murad II and then also of his son, Mehmed II; but once Mehmed had begun his march to Constantinople, Ange fled there.The novel begins as Jean Ange meets Anna Notaras in Constantinople and they fall instantly in love. At first Ange is unaware of her identity, but later he realises she is the daughter of "megas doux" Lucas Notaras.Ange is committed to fight to the death on the side of the Christians against the Islamic Ottoman forces. Nevertheless, his prior relationship with Mehmed earns him constant distrust from both Latin and Greek Christians.Eventually Jean Ange is revealed as a rightful heir of Byzantine emperors, although he has no interest in power. Constantinople ultimately falls under Mehmed's attack, Anna dies while in the disguise of a soldier, and Jean is tortured to death by Mehmed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Only_Live_Twice_(novel)"title="You Only Live Twice (novel)">
After the wedding-day murder of his wife, Tracy (see "On Her Majesty's Secret Service)", Bond begins to let his life slide, drinking and gambling heavily, making mistakes and turning up late for work. His superior in the Secret Service, M, had been planning to dismiss Bond, but decides to give him a last-chance opportunity to redeem himself by assigning him to the diplomatic branch of the organisation. Bond is subsequently re-numbered 7777 and handed an "impossible" mission: convincing the head of Japan's secret intelligence service, Tiger Tanaka, to share a decoding machine codenamed "Magic 44" and so allow Britain to obtain information from encrypted radio transmissions made by the Soviet Union. In exchange, the Secret Service will allow the Japanese access to one of their own information sources.Bond is introduced to Tanaka—and to the Japanese lifestyle—by an Australian intelligence officer, Dikko Henderson. When Bond raises the purpose of his mission with Tanaka, it transpires that the Japanese have already penetrated the British information source and Bond has nothing left to bargain with. Instead, Tanaka asks Bond to kill Dr. Guntram Shatterhand, who operates a politically embarrassing "Garden of Death" of poisonous plants in a rebuilt ancient castle on the island of Kyushu; people flock there to commit suicide. After examining photos of Shatterhand and his wife, Bond discovers that the couple are actually Tracy's murderers, Ernst Stavro Blofeld and Irma Bunt. Bond gladly takes the mission, keeping his knowledge of Blofeld's identity a secret so that he can exact revenge for his wife's death. Made up and trained by Tanaka, and aided by former Japanese film star Kissy Suzuki, Bond attempts to live and think as a mute Japanese coal miner in order to penetrate Shatterhand's castle. Tanaka renames Bond "Taro Todoroki" for the mission.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stand"title="The Stand">
An extremely contagious and lethal strain of influenza is developed as a biological weapon in a secret U.S. Department of Defense laboratory in northern California. It is estimated to be 99.4% fatal. The "Complete and Uncut Edition" includes a prologue detailing the development of the virus and the security breach that causes its accidental release. Security guard Charles Campion manages to escape before the facility is locked down and takes his family out of the state.After a couple of days, his car crashes at a gas station in Arnette, Texas. Bystanders and ambulance workers become infected by the dying Campion and his dead wife and child. The United States Army attempts to isolate Arnette, going so far as to execute civilians attempting to flee, but in vain; the virus, christened the "superflu" or "Captain Trips", spreads across the country. The government then has its agents (unknowingly) release the virus in the USSR, its satellite states and China to guarantee their destruction as well. When martial law fails to contain the virus, a global pandemic of apocalyptic proportions kills nearly the entire world population within a month. The military collapses due to mass desertions and mutinies, and society soon follows with the near-extinction of humanity. Some of the few who are immune also die, unable either to accept the loss of their loved ones or to survive in a world where they must fend for themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_with_the_Golden_Gun_(novel)"title="The Man with the Golden Gun (novel)">
Almost a year after James Bond's final confrontation with Ernst Stavro Blofeld, while on a mission in Japan, a man claiming to be Bond appears in London and demands to meet the head of the Secret Service, M. Bond's identity is confirmed, but during his debriefing interview with M, Bond tries to kill him with a cyanide pistol; the attempt fails. The Service learns that after destroying Blofeld's castle in Japan, Bond suffered a head injury and developed amnesia. Having lived as a Japanese fisherman for several months, Bond travelled into the Soviet Union to learn his true identity. While there, he was brainwashed and assigned to kill M upon returning to England.Now de-programmed, Bond is given a chance to again prove his worth as a member of the 00 section following the assassination attempt. M sends Bond to Jamaica and gives him the seemingly impossible mission of killing Francisco "Pistols" Scaramanga, a Cuban assassin who is believed to have killed several British secret agents. Scaramanga is known as "The Man with the Golden Gun" because his weapon of choice is a gold-plated Colt .45 revolver, which fires silver-jacketed solid-gold bullets.Bond locates Scaramanga in a Jamaican bordello and manages to become his temporary personal assistant under the name "Mark Hazard". He learns that Scaramanga is involved in a hotel development on the island with a group of investors that consists of a syndicate of American gangsters and the KGB. Scaramanga and the other investors are also engaged in a scheme to destabilise Western interests in the Caribbean's sugar industry and increase the value of the Cuban sugar crop, running drugs into America, smuggling prostitutes from Mexico into America and operating casinos in Jamaica that will cause friction between tourists and the local people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Censored_Roger_Rabbit?"title="Who Censored Roger Rabbit?">
Eddie Valiant is a hardboiled private eye, and Roger Rabbit is a second banana comic strip character. Roger hires Valiant to find out why his employers, the DeGreasy Brothers (Rocco and Dominic), who are owners of a cartoon syndicate, have reneged on a promise to give Roger his own strip and potentially sell his contract to a mystery buyer. Evidence shows that there was no mystery buyer and the reason Roger Rabbit remained in a secondary role was because of his lack of talent. Soon after, Roger is mysteriously murdered in his home. His speech balloon, found at the crime scene, indicates his murder was a way of "censoring" the star, who apparently had just heard someone explain the source of his success. Valiant's search for the killer takes him to a variety of suspects which includes: Roger's estranged widow Jessica Rabbit; Roger's former co-star Baby Herman and Roger's photographer Carol Masters. Valiant then meets a doppelgänger of Roger's and promises to solve the mystery of his death. At the same time, Roger's former boss Rocco DeGreasy is also murdered and witnesses point to Roger as the killer, as he was allegedly seen fleeing the scene of the crime.While Valiant investigates, the key suspects ask him to be on the lookout for a certain kettle in exchange for a reward. He eventually finds the kettle which was in Roger's possession and gives it to Dominic, only to find it is actually a magic lamp with a Genie, who then kills Dominic. The Genie explains its origins and that over thousands of years it has become embittered, now only granting wishes with a catch, and admits to being the one who shot Roger. He further explains that the words to command him happen to be part of a children's song that Roger habitually sings, and as such Roger wished for success without actually realising he had done so. When Roger accidentally activated the lantern a third time but this time witnessed the apparition, the Genie killed him. Valiant holds the Genie hostage over a salt-water fish tank; salt water being its weakness. The Genie is then forced to grant a wish made by Valiant for proof of Roger's innocence which is provided in the form of a suicide letter from Dominic confessing to both Roger and Rocco DeGreasy's murders along with his own suicide. Not trusting the Genie to keep its word of letting him go and also knowing that no one would believe him about the Genie, Valiant drops the Genie's lamp into the fish tank and the salt water dissolves the Genie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_School_Bus_at_the_Waterworks"title="The Magic School Bus at the Waterworks">
The book begins by introducing the character of Ms. Frizzle and describing her unusual teaching methods. Soon, she decides to take the class on a field trip to the waterworks, which the kids are sure will be boring, especially compared to the trips the kids in other classes go on. However, after driving through a tunnel, the bus becomes plastered with images of octopuses and everyone inside finds themselves wearing swimming outfits.Once this occurs, the bus rises up into a cloud along with evaporating water. Ms. Frizzle makes all the kids get out of the bus. The kids did not want to leave. But she threatened to give them extra homework if they didn't. However, the kids begin shrinking once they're outside and, once they're each the size of a raindrop, they rain down into a river, which carries them into the town's water purification system. After going through the waterworks, the pipes take the class back to the school. They come out in the girls' bathroom. But when a seventh grader girl turned on one of the faucets, the class appeared from one of them. Once out of the faucet, they are instantly restored to their regular size and normal clothing (except for Ms. Frizzle still being in her octopus dress).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_School_Bus_Lost_in_the_Solar_System"title="The Magic School Bus Lost in the Solar System">
Ms. Frizzle's class is learning about the Solar System and Arnold's unpleasant cousin Janet, who constantly raves about herself, has joined them. The Friz decides to take the kids on a field trip to the planetarium. But once they get there, they find the planetarium is closed for repairs. However, on the way back to school, Ms. Frizzle pushes a button that makes the bus transform into a rocket and blast off into outer space.Once in outer space, the bus flies to Earth's Moon, where the kids make the most of the lesser gravity. Ms. Frizzle then takes them to the Sun and then Mercury, Venus and Mars before flying into the asteroid belt. However, while in the belt, one of the bus's tail lights is damaged by an asteroid and the Friz flies out to fix the tail light with a tether line connecting her to the bus. However, the bus's autopilot malfunctions, causing the bus to fly off, breaking Ms. Frizzle's tether line and leaving her stranded in the asteroid belt.Janet looks through the Friz's things and finds Ms. Frizzle's lesson book, which documents the information she is supposed to tell the kids during the field trip (complete with "Arnold, are you listening?" written into it.) Janet reads through the book as they pass the outer planets and until they pass Pluto, leaving the solar system. Janet then flips through the book and finds the instructions for the autopilot, so they can fly back to the asteroid belt and rescue Ms. Frizzle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Things_My_Girlfriend_and_I_Have_Argued_About"title="Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About">
Pel lives with his German girlfriend Ursula and their two children, and works in the IT department of a university library (or "Learning Centre"). The story begins with Pel receiving an odd call from his boss, TSR, who quizzes him about extradition treaties; within a week he has vanished without a trace, and Pel is promoted to TSR's former position, "Computer Team Administration, Software Acquisition and Training Manager" (though, in addition to his own job).The story follows both Pel's home and work lives; at home, there are the arguments with Ursula over the search for a new home, after the latest burglary of their current home; defrosting the fridge during the moving preparations; Ursula terrifying the builders working on the repairs of the new house; a skiing accident, leaving Ursula with a torn ligament in her shoulder.At work, Pel finds that taking on TSR's job involves more than it seemed at first; he has to pay off student recruiters from the Pacific Ring, who happen to be members of The Triads; he has to take care of the details of the building of a new Learning Centre building, which involves hiding the fact that skeletons from an ancient burial ground have been illegally dumped from the site, and a dangerous neurotoxin to be buried under it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_for_Jeeves"title="Ring for Jeeves">
The novel is set in the early 1950s, when much of the English aristocracy has lost its wealth. Bertie has gone to a school that teaches the aristocracy to fend for itself, in case he meets the same fate. He is not allowed to bring Jeeves, so Jeeves goes to work temporarily for one of Bertie's friends from the Drones Club, the young gentleman Lord William "Bill" Rowcester (or Towcester), a now impoverished aristocrat who lives at Rowcester Abbey, a large house in poor repair.The wealthy American widow Mrs. Rosalinda Spottsworth wants a new home in England. Bill's sister, Lady Monica "Moke" Carmoyle, has persuaded her to look at Rowcester Abbey. On her way, Mrs. Spottsworth meets her old friend Captain Biggar. Captain Biggar loves Mrs. Spottsworth but feels a man of modest means should not propose to a wealthy woman. Captain Biggar is also looking for a bookie named Honest Patch Perkins, who wears a check suit and eyepatch and has a large moustache. This bookmaker owes Captain Biggar over three thousand pounds after Captain Biggar won a lucky double.Monica arrives, with her aristocratic husband Sir Roderick "Rory" Carmoyle, who now works at a department store. Jill Wyvern, a veterinary physician and Bill's fiancée, greets Monica and Rory, telling them that Bill has hired a cook, a housemaid, and a butler named Jeeves. Bill told Jill that he has secured a lucrative position with the Agricultural Board. Later, Bill returns to the house, wearing an eyepatch and false moustache. Following advice from Jeeves, Bill actually made his money as the Silver Ring bookmaker Honest Patch Perkins. (On a racecourse, the silver ring is the cheapest area where the bookmakers deal in the lowest stakes.) Jeeves was Bill's clerk, though he ignored Jeeves's advice against accepting Captain Biggar's wager. Bill hides his costume in an oak dower chest. He is hopeful after learning from Jeeves that Mrs. Spottsworth may buy the house.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_of_Truth"title="The Sword of Truth">
The series is set in a world divided into two major regions: the New World and the Old World. The New World consists of three lands with Westland in the west, D'Hara in the east, and the Midlands between them. D'Hara is ruled by a magically gifted member of the Rahl family, while the welfare of the Midlands is decided by a council of representatives led by the Mother Confessor, who is also the leader of the Confessors. The Confessors are a group of women who each have a magical power to force a person to become entirely devoted to them. People touched by a Confessor's power will do anything for her or truthfully answer any question she asks, hence the name Confessor. Westland, a land of no magic, is also ruled by a council of representatives. The Old World is not introduced until the second book in the series and its geographical features are described in less detail.The main character is a young man named Richard Cypher, a Westland woods guide whose simple life is forever changed after he becomes the Seeker of Truth, a champion of truth and justice. Over the course of the series, Richard learns about his heritage while seeking to stop the evil that others would unleash upon the world of the living. Because Richard refuses to sacrifice his values and lives his life as a free man, others begin to understand the nobility of man and what it means to be free. Each book is loosely themed around a Wizard's Rule, tenets by which all wizards should abide. The eleventh full-length novel, "Confessor", concludes the series' central story arc regarding the invasion of the Imperial Order, an empire in the Old World led by Jagang. "Warheart" was the last novel in the series.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Margin"title="Water Margin">
The opening episode in the novel is the release of the 108 Spirits, imprisoned under an ancient stele-bearing tortoise.The next chapter describes the rise of Gao Qiu, one of the primary antagonists of the story. Gao abuses his status as a Grand Marshal by oppressing Wang Jin; Wang's father taught Gao a painful lesson when the latter was still a street-roaming ruffian. Wang Jin flees from the capital with his mother and by chance he meets Shi Jin, who becomes his apprentice. The next few chapters tell the story of Shi Jin's friend Lu Zhishen, followed by the story of Lu's sworn brother Lin Chong. Lin Chong is framed by Gao Qiu for attempting to assassinate him, and almost dies in a fire at a supply depot set by Gao's henchmen. He slays his foes and abandons the depot, eventually making his way to Liangshan Marsh, where he becomes an outlaw. Meanwhile, the "Original Seven", led by Chao Gai, rob a convoy of birthday gifts for the Imperial Tutor Cai Jing, another primary antagonist in the novel. They flee to Liangshan Marsh after defeating a group of soldiers sent by the authorities to arrest them, and settle there as outlaws with Chao Gai as their chief. As the story progresses, more people come to join the outlaw band, including military personnel and civil officials who grew tired of serving the corrupt government, as well as men with special skills and talents. Stories of the outlaws are told in separate sections in the following chapters. Connections between characters are vague, but the individual stories are eventually pieced together by chapter 60 when Song Jiang succeeds Chao Gai as the leader of the band after the latter is killed in a battle against the Zeng Family Fortress.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lazarus_Effect_(novel)"title="The Lazarus Effect (novel)">
"The Lazarus Effect" continues the story of the planet Pandora that began in "The Jesus Incident". The sentient kelp is almost extinct, Ship is gone, there is no more dry land, the majority of humanity is heavily mutated from the genetic experiments performed by Jesus Lewis, and a power-hungry mad man is attempting to control the planet. But the kelp is returning and this time Avata does not remain passive while people refuse to worship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblomov"title="Oblomov">
The novel focuses on the life of the main character, Ilya Ilyich Oblomov. Oblomov is a member of the upper middle class and the son of a member of Russia's nineteenth-century landed gentry. Oblomov's distinguishing characteristic is his slothful attitude towards life. Oblomov raises this trait to an art form, conducting his little daily business from his bed.The first part of the book finds Oblomov in bed one morning. He receives a letter from the manager of his country estate, Oblomovka, explaining that the financial situation is deteriorating and that he must visit to make some major decisions. But Oblomov can barely leave his bedroom, much less journey a thousand miles into the country.As he sleeps, a dream reveals Oblomov's upbringing in Oblomovka. He is never required to work or perform household duties, and his parents constantly pull him from school for vacations and trips or for trivial reasons. In contrast, his friend Andrey Stoltz, born to a German father and a Russian mother, is raised in a strict, disciplined environment, and he is dedicated and hard-working.Stoltz visits at the end of Part 1, finally rousing Oblomov from sleep. As the story develops, Stoltz introduces Oblomov to a young woman, Olga, and the two fall in love. However, his apathy and fear of moving forward are too great, and she calls off their engagement when it is clear that he will keep delaying their wedding and avoiding putting his affairs in order.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel)"title="Diaspora (novel)">
"Diaspora" begins with a description of "orphanogenesis", the birthing of a citizen without any ancestors (the majority of citizens descend from fleshers uploaded at some point), and the subsequent upbringing of the newborn Yatima within Konishi polis. Yatima matures within a few real-time days, because citizens' subjective time runs about 800 times as rapidly as flesher and gleisner time. Early on, Yatima and a friend, Inoshiro, use abandoned gleisner bodies to visit a Bridger colony near the ruins of Atlanta on Earth.Years later, the gleisner Karpal, using a gravitational-wave detector, determines that a binary neutron star system in the constellation of Lacerta has collapsed, releasing a huge burst of energy. Previous predictions portrayed the system's stable orbit as likely to last for another seven million years. By analysing irregularities in the orbit, Karpal discovers that the devastating burst of energy will reach Earth within the next four days. Yatima and Inoshiro return to Earth to urge the fleshers—gathered in a conference—either to migrate to the polises or at least to shelter themselves. Many fleshers reject this advice, or fail fully to appreciate its urgency quickly enough. Stirred up by a paranoid Static diplomat, many fleshers suspect that Yatima and Inoshiro have come to trick or coerce them into "Introdus", or mass-migration into the polises, involving masses of virus-sized nanomachines that dismantle a human body and record the brain's information states as it is chemically converted into a crystalline computer. The gamma ray burst reaches Earth shortly after the conference, destroying the atmosphere and causing a mass extinction. The gleisners and the Coalition of Polises survive the burst, thanks to cosmic radiation hardening. Over the next few years, Yatima and other citizens and gleisners attempt to rescue any surviving fleshers from slow suffocation, starvation, or poisoning by offering to upload them into the polises.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schild's_Ladder"title="Schild's Ladder">
Twenty-thousand years in the future, Cass, a humanoid physicist from Earth, travels to an orbital station in the vicinity of the star Mimosa, and begins a series of experiments to test the extremities of the fictitious "Sarumpaet rules" – a set of fundamental equations in "Quantum Graph Theory", which holds that physical existence is a manifestation of complex constructions of mathematical graphs. However, the experiments unexpectedly create a bubble of something more stable than ordinary vacuum, dubbed "novo-vacuum", that expands outward at half the speed of light as ordinary vacuum collapses to this new state at the border, hinting at more general laws beyond the Sarumpaet rules. The local population is forced to flee to ever more distant star systems to escape the steadily approaching border, but since the expansion never slows, it is just a matter of time before the novo-vacuum encompasses any given region within the Local Group.Two factions develop as the expanding bubble swallows star after star: the Preservationists, who wish to stop the expansion and preserve the Milky Way at any cost; and the Yielders, who consider the novo-vacuum to be too important a discovery to destroy without understanding.Six hundred years after the initial experiment, a vessel called the "Rindler" has matched velocities with an ever-expanding novo-vacuum region at the border, powered by multispectral light emitted as the ordinary vacuum collapses into its lower energy-state. A variety of refugees are probing the novo-vacuum in order to understand the physics that makes it possible. The novo-vacuum turns out to be more complicated than anyone suspects, however, and Egan's usual topics of simulation and quantum ontology are taken to the extreme when we learn that a whole ordered universe exists within this zone of apparent chaos, existing as direct elaborations of the quantum graph's lattice structure, of which elementary particles, fundamental interactions, and our spacetime itself are only special cases.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murder_on_the_Links"title="The Murder on the Links">
Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings travel to Merlinville-sur-Mer, France, to meet Paul Renauld, who has requested their help. When they arrive, local police greet them with the news that Renauld was found dead that morning, stabbed in the back with a knife and left in a newly dug grave adjacent to a local golf course. His wife, Eloise Renauld, claims masked men broke into the villa at 2am, tied her up, and took her husband away with them. Upon inspecting his body, Eloise collapses with grief at seeing her dead husband. Monsieur Giraud of the Sûreté leads the police investigation, and resents Poirot's involvement.Poirot notes four key facts about the case: a piece of lead piping is found near the body; only three female servants were in the villa as both Renauld's son Jack and his chauffeur had been sent away; an unknown person visited the day before; Renauld's immediate neighbour, Madame Daubreuil, had placed 200,000 francs into her bank account over recent weeks. When Renauld's secretary, Gabriel Stonor, returns from England, he suggests blackmail, as his employer's past is a complete mystery prior to his career in South America. Meanwhile, Hastings unexpectedly encounters a young woman he had met on the train, known only as "Cinderella." She asks to see the crime scene and then disappears with the murder weapon. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Protocol"title="The Fourth Protocol">
On New Year's Eve 1986, professional thief James Rawlings breaks into the apartment of a senior civil servant and inadvertently discovers stolen top secret documents. While a notorious and infamous criminal, he is patriotic enough to anonymously send the documents to MI5 so that they might locate the traitor.In Moscow, British defector Kim Philby drafts a memorandum for the Soviet General Secretary stating that, should the Labour Party win the next general election in the United Kingdom (scheduled for sometime in the subsequent eighteen months), the "hard left" of the party will oust the moderate populist Neil Kinnock in favour of a radical new leader who will adopt a true Marxist-Leninist manifesto, including the expulsion of all American forces from the United Kingdom and the country's withdrawal from (and repudiation of) NATO. In conjunction with a GRU general, an academic named Krilov, and a Chess grandmaster and experienced strategist, they devise "Plan Aurora" to secure a Labour victory by exploiting the party's support for unilateral disarmament.John Preston, an ex-Parachute Regiment soldier-turned-MI5 officer, who was exploring hard-left infiltration of the Labour Party, is assigned to investigate the stolen documents and discovers they were leaked by George Berenson, a passionate anti-communist and staunch supporter of apartheid South Africa. Berenson passed on the documents to Jan Marais, who he believes is a South African diplomat, but is in fact a Soviet false flag operative. SIS chief Sir Nigel Irvine eventually confronts Berenson with the truth and "turns" him, using him to pass disinformation to the KGB.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Electric_Kool-Aid_Acid_Test"title="The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test">
Wolfe chronicles the adventures of Ken Kesey and his group of followers. Throughout the work, Kesey is portrayed as desiring the creation of a new religion. Kesey forms a group of followers based on the allure of transcendence achievable through drugs and his ability to preach and captivate listeners. The group was labelled as the "Merry Pranksters" and participated in a drug-fuelled lifestyle. The beginnings of Acid Tests started at Kesey's house in the woods of La Honda, California. The Acid Tests were carried out with lights and noise in order to enhance the psychedelic experience.The Pranksters eventually leave the confines of Kesey's estate and travel across the country on the "Furthur". The bus is driven by Neal Cassady, who was the inspiration for the character Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel "On the Road". Throughout the journey, the individuals take acid. As the Pranksters grow in popularity, Kesey's reputation develops as well. Towards the middle of the book, Kesey is idolized as the hero of a growing counterculture. Alongside this, Kesey forms friendships with groups like the Hells Angels and crosses paths with icons of the Beat Generation. The growing popularity of Kesey provides the opportunity for the Pranksters to meet other significant members of the growing counterculture: the Pranksters encounter the Grateful Dead, Allen Ginsberg and attempt to meet with Timothy Leary. The failed meeting with Leary marks a greater failure to unite the counterculture from East to West coasts. This becomes one of the turning points in the book, indicating that the new generation of “hippies” had officially outpaced the old Beat Generation in style and philosophy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Themselves"title="The Gods Themselves">
## First part: Against Stupidity....The first part takes place on Earth, almost a century after the "Great Crisis", where ecological and economic collapse reduced the world's population from six billion to two billion. The timeline alternates between the events of the 2070s, outlining the discover of the "electron pump," and events twenty-three years later.Radiochemist Frederick Hallam discovers that a container's contents have been altered. He finds out that the sample, originally tungsten, has been transformed into plutonium 186—an isotope that cannot occur naturally in our universe. As this is investigated, Hallam gets the credit for suggesting that the matter has been exchanged by beings in a parallel universe; this leads to the development of a cheap, clean, and apparently endless source of energy: the "Pump", which transfers matter between our universe (where plutonium 186 decays into tungsten 186) and a parallel one governed by different physical laws (where tungsten 186 turns into plutonium 186), yielding a nuclear reaction in the process. The development process grants Hallam high position in public opinion; winning him power, position, and a Nobel Prize.Physicist Peter Lamont, while writing a history of the Pump about 25 years later, comes to believe that the impetus of the Pump was the effort of the extraterrestrial "para-men". Lamont enlists the help of Myron "Mike" Bronowski, an archeologist and linguist known for translating ancient writings in the Etruscan language, to prove his claim by communicating with the parallel world. They inscribe symbols on strips of tungsten to establish a common written language as the strips are exchanged for ones made of plutonium-186. As Bronowski works, Lamont discovers that the Pump increases the strong nuclear force inside the sun, and thus threatens both universes by the explosion of Earth's Sun and the cooling of that in the parallel universe. Bronowski receives an acknowledgment from the parallel universe that the Pump may be dangerous. Lamont attempts to demonstrate this to a politician and several members of the scientific community, but they refuse his request. Lamont decides to tell the para-men to stop the use of the Pump, but Bronowski reveals that they have been in contact not with the other side's authorities, but with dissidents unable to stop the Pump on their side. The last message was them begging "Earth" to stop.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte's_Web"title="Charlotte's Web">
After a little girl named Fern Arable pleads for the life of the runt of a litter of piglets, her father gives her the pig to nurture, and she names him Wilbur. She treats him as a pet, but a month later, Wilbur is no longer small, and is sold to Fern's uncle, Homer Zuckerman. In Zuckerman's barnyard, Wilbur yearns for companionship, but is snubbed by the other animals. He is befriended by a barn spider named Charlotte, whose web sits in a doorway overlooking Wilbur's enclosure. When Wilbur discovers that he is being raised for slaughter, she promises to hatch a plan guaranteed to spare his life. Fern often sits on a stool, listening to the animals' conversation, but over the course of the story, as she starts to mature, she begins to find other interests. As the summer passes, Charlotte ponders the question of how to save Wilbur. At last, she comes up with a plan, which she proceeds to implement. Reasoning that Zuckerman would not kill a famous pig, Charlotte weaves words and short phrases in praise of Wilbur into her web. Charlotte weaves the words "Some Pig" into the web, and the next morning Lurvy sees the web and runs to find Mr. Zuckerman. This makes Wilbur, and the barn as a whole, into tourist attractions, as many people believe the webs to be miracles. After that, Charlotte weaves the word "Terrific" into the web, and then the whole thing starts up again. Charlotte then tells Templeton, a barn rat, to get another word for the web. He goes to the dump and finds the word "radiant" which she then weaves into her web. Fern's mother starts to get worried that she is spending too much time around the animals because she is telling her mother stories about the animals talking. Mrs. Arable then goes to visit Dr. Dorian, who assures everything is fine.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Opinions_of_Tristram_Shandy,_Gentleman"title="The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman">
As its title suggests, the book is ostensibly Tristram's narration of his life story. But it is one of the central jokes of the novel that he cannot explain anything simply, that he must make explanatory diversions to add context and colour to his tale, to the extent that Tristram's own birth is not even reached until Volume III.Consequently, apart from Tristram as narrator, the most familiar and important characters in the book are his father Walter, his mother, his Uncle Toby, Toby's servant Trim, and a supporting cast of popular minor characters, including the chambermaid Susannah, Doctor Slop and the parson Yorick, who later became Sterne's favourite "nom de plume" and a very successful publicity stunt. Yorick is also the protagonist of Sterne's second work of fiction, "A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy".Most of the action is concerned with domestic upsets or misunderstandings, which find humour in the opposing temperaments of Walter—splenetic, rational, and somewhat sarcastic—and Uncle Toby, who is gentle, uncomplicated, and a lover of his fellow man.In between such events, Tristram as narrator finds himself discoursing at length on sexual practices, insults, the influence of one's name and noses, as well as explorations of obstetrics, siege warfare and philosophy, as he struggles to marshal his material and finish the story of his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)"title="Gadsby (novel)">
Fifty-year-old John Gadsby is alarmed by the decline of his hometown, Branton Hills, and rallies the city's youth to form an "Organization of Youth" to build civic spirit and improve living standards. Gadsby and his youthful army, despite some opposition, transform Branton Hills from a stagnant municipality into a bustling, thriving city. Toward the conclusion of the book, the members of Gadsby's organization receive diplomas in honor of their work. Gadsby becomes mayor and helps increase Branton Hills' population from 2,000 to 60,000.The story starts around 1906 and continues through World War I, Prohibition, and President Warren G. Harding's administration. "Gadsby" is divided into two parts: the first, about a quarter of the book's total length, is strictly a history of the city of Branton Hills and John Gadsby's place in it, while the second part of the book fleshes out the book's main characters.The novel is written from the point of view of an anonymous narrator, who continually complains about his poor writing skills and often uses circumlocution. "Now, naturally, in writing such a story as this, with its conditions as laid down in its Introduction, it is not surprising that an occasional 'rough spot' in composition is found", the narrator says. "So I trust that a critical public will hold constantly in mind that I am voluntarily avoiding words containing that symbol which is, by far, of most common inclusion in writing our Anglo-Saxon as it is, today".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howl's_Moving_Castle"title="Howl's Moving Castle">
18-year-old Sophie Hatter is the eldest of three sisters living in Market Chipping, a town in the magical kingdom of Ingary, where fairytale tropes are accepted ways of life, including that the eldest of three will never be successful. As the eldest, Sophie is resigned to a dull future running the family hat shop. Unbeknownst to her, she is able to talk life into objects. When the powerful Witch of the Waste considers her a threat and turns her into an old crone, Sophie leaves the shop and finds work as a cleaning lady for the notorious wizard Howl. She strikes a bargain with Howl's fire demon, Calcifer: if she can break the contract between Howl and Calcifer, then Calcifer will return her to her original youthful form. Part of the contract, however, stipulates that neither Howl nor Calcifer can disclose the main clause, leaving Sophie to figure it out on her own.Sophie learns that Howl, a rather self-absorbed and fickle but ultimately good-natured person, spreads malicious rumours about himself to avoid work and responsibility. The door to his castle is actually a portal that opens onto four places: Market Chipping, the seaside city of Porthaven, the royal capital of Kingsbury, and Howl's boyhood home in Wales where he was named Howell Jenkins. Howl's apprentice Michael Fisher runs most of the day-to-day affairs of Howl's business, while Howl chases his ever-changing paramours.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_(Hunt_novel)"title="Joy (Hunt novel)">
The first person narrator of the novel is Palatine Ross, a 70-year-old cleaning woman originally from New Orleans, whose childhood is dominated by poverty and loss.Shutting her eyes to all the evil in the world and firmly relying on God and the words of the Bible as guidance, Palatine tries to raise Joy and her sisters to be educated, honest and religious members of society. The fact that, growing up in a rough neighbourhood, the not-yet-teenaged girls are very early in their lives confronted with sex willingly escapes her notice. It troubles Palatine a great deal when Dagwood, her neighbour's new boyfriend, starts spending the night with the girls' mother. One morning during the summer vacation, while his girlfriend is at work and Palatine is taking care of the children, Dagwood stays on in the apartment.Right from the start, Palatine tries to take the three girls along to church, seeing that their blaspheming mother will never do so. Time and again, in the course of more than twenty years, Palatine tries to convince Joy that finding herself a nice coloured boyfriend whom she could marry and have children with would be the right thing to do. However, "Chocolate Chip" remains a one-hit wonder after an interview given by Brenda to some gay magazine in which she announces her coming out as a lesbian.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakfast_of_Champions"title="Breakfast of Champions">
"Breakfast of Champions" tells the story of the events that lead up to the meeting of Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover, the meeting itself, and the immediate aftermath. Trout is a struggling science fiction writer who, after their fateful meeting, becomes successful and wins a Nobel Prize; Hoover is a wealthy businessman who is going insane, sent over the brink by his encounter with Trout.Trout, who believes himself to be completely unknown as a writer, answers an invitation to appear at the Midland City arts festival. First he goes to New York City, where he is abducted and beaten up by a group of anonymous, faceless characters who through the media gain the moniker "The Pluto Gang." Trout hitches a ride first with a truck driver, with whom he discusses everything from politics to sex to the destruction of the planet. Then he hops a ride with the only clearly happy character in the book, the driver of a Ford Galaxie who works for himself as a traveling salesman.Hoover gradually becomes insane as the book progresses. He terrifies his employee at the Pontiac dealership, Harry LeSabre, by criticizing his clothes. LeSabre is afraid Hoover has discovered that he is a closeted transvestite. A recent prison parolee named Wayne Hoobler attempts to find work with Hoover, but is rebuffed. With nowhere else to go, Hoobler hangs around the car lot. Hoover then gets into a fight with his mistress and secretary, Francine Pefko, because he accuses her of asking him to buy her a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Night"title="Mother Night">
The novel is framed as the memoir of Howard W. Campbell, Jr. He is writing it while imprisoned and waiting for his war crimes trial for his actions as a Nazi propagandist. Campbell, an American who moved to Germany with his parents at age 11, recounts his childhood as the Nazi Party is consolidating its power. Instead of leaving the country with his parents, Campbell continues his career as a playwright, his only social contacts being Nazis. Being of sufficiently ″Aryan″ heritage, Campbell becomes a member of the party in name only. He is politically apathetic, caring only for his art and his wife Helga, who is also the starring actress in all of his plays.Campbell encounters Frank Wirtanen, an agent of the U.S. War Department. Wirtanen wants Campbell to spy as a double agent for the United States in the impending world war. Campbell rejects the offer, but Wirtanen quickly adds that he wants Campbell to think about it. Once the war starts, Campbell begins to make his way up through Joseph Goebbels' propaganda organization, eventually becoming the "voice" of broadcasts aimed at converting Americans to the Nazi cause (a parallel to the real broadcaster, Dr. Edward Vieth Sittler). Unbeknownst to the Nazis, all of the idiosyncrasies of Campbell's speeches – deliberate pauses, coughing, etc. – are part of the coded information he is passing to the American Office of Strategic Services. Campbell never discovers, nor is he ever told, the information that he is sending.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forbidden_Forest"title="The Forbidden Forest">
Stefan Viziru lives in Bucharest and works for the Romanian state. He lives with his wife Ioana and also has a mistress, Ileana, whom he met at a Midsummer celebration. Stefan is torn between his affection for both women and is at the same time on a spiritual quest. He wishes to discover a sacred time which stands independently from the historical time and the destructive developments in contemporary Europe. Stefan befriends several people who influence him. A philosophy teacher argues that Stefan is searching for the paradise of his childhood. When Stefan tries to provide refuge for a member of the Iron Guard, he is put in a prison camp and temporarily loses his job. Ileana becomes engaged to an officer who dies in a car accident, after which she leaves Bucharest.Stefan's wife Ioana and their son die in the bombings of Bucharest in 1944. Stefan realises that he loves Ileana and sets out to find her. He travels around Europe and goes through a lot of searching. Eventually he finds her, on Midsummer's eve of 1948 in a forest in France. As they leave the forest together they are killed in a car accident.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Evolves"title="Freedom Evolves">
As in "Consciousness Explained", Dennett advertises the controversial nature of his views extensively in advance. He expects hostility from those who fear that a skeptical analysis of freedom will undermine people's belief in the reality of moral considerations; he likens himself to an interfering crow who insists on telling Dumbo he doesn't really need the feather he believes is allowing him to fly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Six_(novel)"title="Rainbow Six (novel)">
CIA operative John Clark forms a secret international counterterrorist organization known as Rainbow. Based in Hereford, England, Rainbow consists of two operational teams of elite soldiers from NATO countries, supplemented by intelligence and technological experts from the FBI, MI6, and Mossad. Clark serves as the commanding officer, his son-in-law Domingo Chavez leads one of the two teams, and their second-in-command is SAS officer Alistair Stanley.For their first deployment, Chavez's team rescues hostages during a bank robbery in Bern, Switzerland. Several weeks later, they are deployed to Austria, where a group of German left-wing terrorists have taken over the schloss of a wealthy Austrian businessman to obtain (nonexistent) "special access codes" to the international trading markets. They are later deployed to the Worldpark amusement park in Spain, where a group of Basque revolutionaries have taken a group of children hostage and demand that various prisoners, including Carlos the Jackal, be released.Clark and his colleagues become suspicious about the sudden rise in terrorist attacks. Unbeknownst to them, the first two attacks are part of an intricate plan to wipe out nearly all of humanity, codenamed "the Project". Dr. John Brightling, a staunch radical environmentalist who heads a biotechnology firm called the Horizon Corporation, ordered the attacks through ex-KGB officer Dmitriy Popov to raise global concern over terrorism, which would then allow co-conspirator Bill Henriksen's security firm Global Security to land a key contract for the Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia. Henriksen would then ensure the release of "Shiva"—a manmade Ebola biological agent more deadly than the one that spread a year prior, developed by Horizon and tested on kidnapped human test subjects—through the fog-cooling system of Stadium Australia, infecting almost everyone present, who would then return to their home countries, spreading Shiva across the world. The resulting pandemic would kill millions; Horizon would distribute a "vaccine" (actually a slow-acting version of the virus itself) which would kill the rest of the world's population. The "chosen few", having been provided with the real vaccine, would then inherit the emptied world, justifying their genocidal actions as "saving the world" from the environmentally-destructive nature of humanity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasmine_(novel)"title="Jasmine (novel)">
"Jasmine," which was based on an earlier short story in "The Middleman and Other Stories," tells the story of a seventeen-year-old girl widowed after her husband's murder in a bomb attack. She and her husband originally planned to move to Florida, but as a result of his death Jasmine continues with the trip on her own. In her path she faces many obstacles as she travels from Florida to New York City to Iowa.The novel begins with Jasmine retelling a story from her childhood about an astrologer who predicts her future as a widower living in exile. She fast forwards to life in Baden, Iowa where Jasmine (known as Jane in Iowa) is 24 years old, pregnant and living with 53-year-old banker Bud Ripplemayer, and his adopted son Du. Bud insists on marrying Jane, who refuses for unknown reasons. Bud is also in a wheelchair because he was shot in the back two years ago. Jane and Bud have a neighbor named Darrel Lutz, a recent college grad who inherited his family's farm. He is contemplating whether or not to sell his farm. Bud refuses to loan Darrel money to expand his herd and grow his crops because Bud doesn't trust Darrel's character as a farmer and a manager. Darrel also shows some romantic interest in Jane.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_from_the_Madding_Crowd"title="Far from the Madding Crowd">
## Meeting, parting and reuniting.Gabriel Oak is a young shepherd. With the savings of a frugal life, and a loan, he has leased and stocked a farm. He falls in love with a newcomer eight years his junior, Bathsheba Everdene, a proud beauty who arrives to live with her aunt. Over time, Bathsheba and Gabriel grow to like each other well enough, and Bathsheba even saves his life once. However, when he makes her an unadorned offer of marriage, she refuses; she values her independence too much and him too little. After a few days, she moves to Weatherbury, a village some miles off.When next they meet, their circumstances have changed drastically. An inexperienced new sheepdog has driven Gabriel's flock over a cliff, ruining him. After selling off everything of value, he manages to settle all his debts but emerges penniless. He seeks employment at a hiring fair in the town of Casterbridge. When he finds none, he heads to another such fair in Shottsford, a town about ten miles from Weatherbury. On the way, he happens upon a dangerous fire on a farm and leads the bystanders in putting it out. When the veiled owner comes to thank him, he asks if she needs a shepherd. She uncovers her face and reveals herself to be none other than Bathsheba. She has recently inherited her uncle's estate and is now wealthy. Though somewhat uncomfortable, she employs him.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vineland"title="Vineland">
The story is set in California, United States, in 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan's reelection. After a scene in which former hippie Zoyd Wheeler dives through a window, something he is required to do yearly to keep receiving mental disability checks, the action of the novel opens with the resurfacing of federal agent Brock Vond, who (through a platoon of agents) forces Zoyd and his 14-year-old daughter Prairie out of their house. They hide from Brock, and from Hector Zuñiga (a drug-enforcement "federale" from Zoyd's past, who Zoyd suspects is in cahoots with Brock) with old friends of Zoyd's, who recount to the mystified Prairie the story of Brock's motivation for what he has done.This hinges heavily on Frenesi Gates, Prairie's mother, whom she has never met. In the '60s, during the height of the hippie era, the fictive College of the Surf (located in equally fictive Trasero County, said to be located between Orange County and San Diego County in Southern California) seceded from the United States and became its own nation of hippies and dope smokers, called the People's Republic of Rock and Roll (PR³). Brock Vond, a federal prosecutor, intends to bring down PR³, and finds a willing accomplice in Frenesi. She is a member of 24fps, a militant film collective (other members of which are the people telling Prairie their story in the present), that seeks to document the "fascists'" transgressions against freedom and hippie ideals. Frenesi is uncontrollably attracted to Brock and the sex he provides, and ends up working as a double agent to bring about the killing of the de facto leader of PR³, Weed Atman (a mathematics professor who accidentally became the subject of a cult of personality).
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallowe'en_Party"title="Hallowe'en Party">
At a Hallowe'en party held at Rowena Drake's home in Woodleigh Common, thirteen-year-old Joyce Reynolds tells everyone attending she had once seen a murder, but had not realised it was one until later. When the party ends, Joyce is found dead, having been drowned in an apple-bobbing tub. Ariadne Oliver, attending the party while visiting her friend Judith Butler, calls on Hercule Poirot to investigate the murder and Joyce's claim. With help from retired Superintendent Spence, Poirot makes a list of deaths and disappearances for the last few years in Woodleigh Common: Rowena's aunt, Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe, died suddenly; her au pair Olga Seminoff disappeared, when a codicil that favoured her in her employer's will was found to be a forgery; Leslie Ferrier, a lawyer's clerk, was stabbed in the back by an unknown assailant; Charlotte Benfield, a sixteen-year-old shop assistant, was found dead with multiple head injuries; and Janet White, a teacher at Elms School, was strangled to death.Poirot learns a few interesting facts: Judith's daughter Miranda was Joyce's closest friend, and the pair shared secrets between them; Joyce was known to be a teller of tales to gain attention; Elizabeth Whittaker, a mathematics teacher attending the party, witnessed Rowena become startled and drop a glass vase of water outside the door of the library, while the party-goers were playing snapdragon; Ferrier had previous convictions for forgery, and many suspected that he and Olga were working together to steal Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe's fortune; a one-time cleaner of Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe had been witness to her employer making the codicil; a beautiful garden built within an abandoned quarry for Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe, was designed by Michael Garfield, a man with narcissistic behaviour; the victim's brother, Leopold Reynolds, has become flush with money of late.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_the_Sun"title="Empire of the Sun">
The novel recounts the story of a young British boy, Jamie (“Jim”) Graham (named after Ballard's two first names, "James Graham"), who lives with his parents in Shanghai. After the Pearl Harbor attack, Japan occupies the Shanghai International Settlement, and in the following chaos Jim becomes separated from his parents.He spends some time in abandoned mansions, living on remnants of packaged food. Having exhausted the food supplies, he decides to try to surrender to the Imperial Japanese Army. After many attempts, he finally succeeds and is interned in the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre.Although the Japanese are "officially" the enemies, Jim identifies partly with them, both because he adores the pilots with their splendid machines and because he feels that Lunghua is still a comparatively safer place for him.Towards the end of the war, with the Japanese army collapsing, the food supply runs short. Jim barely survives, with people around him starving to death. The camp prisoners are forced upon a march to Nantao, with many dying along the route. Jim then leaves the march and is saved from starvation by air drops from American bombers. Jim returns to Lunghua camp, soon returning to his pre-war residence with his parents.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_(novel)"title="Maurice (novel)">
Maurice Hall, age fourteen, discusses sex and women with his prep-school teacher Ben Ducie just before Maurice progresses to his public school. Maurice feels removed from the depiction of marriage with a woman as the goal of life.Some years later, while studying at Cambridge, Maurice befriends a fellow student Clive Durham. Durham introduces him to ancient Greek writings about same-sex love, including Plato's "Symposium", and after a short time the two begin a romantic relationship, which continues until they have left university.After visiting Greece, Durham falls ill; on recovery, he ends his relationship with Maurice, professing he is heterosexual and marrying a woman. Maurice is devastated, but he becomes a stockbroker, in his spare time helping to operate a Christian mission's boxing gym for working-class boys in the East End, although under Clive's influence he has long since abandoned his Christian beliefs.He makes an appointment with a hypnotist, Mr. Lasker Jones, in an attempt to "cure" himself. Lasker Jones refers to his condition as "congenital homosexuality" and claims a 50 percent success rate in curing this "condition." After the first appointment, it is clear that the hypnotism has failed.Maurice is invited to stay with the Durhams. There, at first unnoticed by him, is the young under-gamekeeper Alec Scudder (called Scudder for large passages of the book), who has noticed Maurice. One night, a heartbroken Maurice calls for Clive to join him. Believing that Maurice is calling for him, Alec climbs to his window with a ladder and the two spend the night together.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ice_Storm"title="The Ice Storm">
The novel takes place over Thanksgiving weekend 1973, during a dangerous ice storm, and centers on two neighboring families, the Hoods and the Williamses, and their difficulties in dealing with the tumultuous political and social climate of the day. The setting is an affluent Connecticut suburb during the height of the sexual revolution. The novel is narrated by four members of the two families, each promoting his or her view of complications that arise throughout the novel. The Hood family members are Ben, Elena, Paul and Wendy, and the Williamses are Jim, Janey, Mikey, and Sandy. The Hood family is overridden with lies. Ben is currently having an affair with his married neighbor Janey. His wife Elena is alienated. Her daughter ventures into sexual liaisons with both females and males, including her neighbors Mikey and Sandy. The story focuses on the 24 hours in which a major ice storm strikes the town of New Canaan, Connecticut, just as both families are melting down from the parents' alcoholism, escapism and adultery, and their children's drug use and sexual experimentation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War"title="The Forever War">
William Mandella is a physics student conscripted for an elite task force in the United Nations Exploratory Force being assembled for a war against the Taurans, an alien species discovered when they apparently attacked human colonists' ships. The UNEF ground troops are sent out for reconnaissance and revenge. The elite recruits have IQs of 150 and above, are highly educated, healthy, and fit. Training is gruelingfirst on Earth and later on a planet called "Charon" beyond Pluto (written before the discovery of the actual planetoid). Several of the recruits die during training due to the extreme environments and the use of live weapons. The new soldiers complete training and immediately depart for action via interconnected "collapsars" that allow ships to cover thousands of light-years in a split second. However, crucially, traveling to and from the collapsars at near-lightspeed has enormous relativistic time effects.Their first encounter with Taurans, on a planet orbiting Epsilon Aurigae, triggers their post-hypnotic training, which causes them to massacre the Taurans despite their lack of resistance. This first expedition, beginning in 1997, lasts only two years from the soldiers' point of view, but due to time dilation, they return to Earth in 2024. During the expedition's second battle, the soldiers experience future shock first-hand, as the Taurans have much more advanced weaponry. Mandella, with fellow soldier and lover Marygay Potter, returns to civilian life, only to find humanity drastically changed. He and the other discharged soldiers have difficulty fitting into a society that has altered almost beyond their comprehension. The veterans learn that, to curb overpopulation, which led to class wars around the world caused by inequitable rationing, homosexuality has become officially encouraged by many of the world's nations. The world has become a very dangerous place due to mass unemployment and the easy availability of weapons. Alienated, Mandella and many other veterans re-enlist, despite the extremely high casualty rate and their recognition that the military is a soulless construct. Mandella and Potter receive promised postings as instructors on Luna, but upon arrival are immediately reassigned to a combat command.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bambi,_a_Life_in_the_Woods"title="Bambi, a Life in the Woods">
Bambi is a roe deer fawn born in a thicket in late spring one year. Over the course of the summer, his mother teaches him about the various inhabitants of the forest and the ways deer live. When she feels he is old enough, she takes him to the meadow, which he learns is both a wonderful but also dangerous place as it leaves the deer exposed and in the open. After some initial fear over his mother's caution, Bambi enjoys the experience. On a subsequent trip Bambi meets his Aunt Ena and her twin fawns Faline and Gobo. They quickly become friends and share what they have learned about the forest. While they are playing, they encounter princes, male deer, for the first time. After the stags leave, the fawns learn that those were their fathers, but that the fathers rarely stay with or speak to the females and young.As Bambi grows older, his mother begins to leave him alone. While searching for her one day, Bambi has his first encounter with "He" the animals' term for humans – which terrifies him. The man raises a firearm and aims at him; Bambi flees at top speed, joined by his mother. After he is scolded by a stag for crying for his mother, Bambi gets used to being alone at times. He later learns the stag is called the "Old Prince", the oldest and largest stag in the forest, who is known for his cunning and aloof nature. During the winter, Bambi meets Marena, a young doe, Nettla, an old doe who no longer bears young, and two princes, Ronno and Karus. Mid-winter, hunters enter the forest, killing many animals including Bambi's mother. Gobo also disappears and is presumed dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_and_Empire"title="Robots and Empire">
The Earthman Elijah Baley (the detective hero of the previous "Robot" books) has died nearly two centuries earlier. During these two centuries, Earth-people have overcome their agoraphobia and resumed space colonization, using faster-than-light drive to reach distant planets beyond the earlier "Spacer" worlds. Their inhabitants, calling themselves "Settlers" rather than "Spacers", revere Earth as their mother-world.Baley's memory remains in the mind of his former lover, Gladia Delmarre, a long-lived "Spacer" who uncharacteristically relocated from the spacer world of Solaria to Aurora. Gladia's homeworld and the 50th-established of the Spacer planets, Solaria, has become empty of all human inhabitants, although millions of robot servants remain. A seventh-generation descendant of Baley's, Daneel Giskard ('D.G.') Baley, gains Gladia's help in visiting Solaria, to investigate the destruction of several "Settler" spaceships that made landings there and to capture the presumably unsupervised robots. Gladia is accompanied by the positronic robots R Daneel Olivaw and R Giskard Reventlov, both the former property of their creator, Dr Han Fastolfe, who bequeathed them to Gladia in his will. R Giskard has secret telepathic powers of which only R Daneel knows.At the same time, Daneel and Giskard are engaged in a struggle of wits with Fastolfe's rivals: The roboticists Kelden Amadiro and Vasilia Aliena, Fastolfe's estranged daughter. Frustrated by his series of failures, Amadiro accepts an ambitious and unscrupulous apprentice, Levular Mandamus, who plans to destroy the population of the Earth by a newly developed weapon, the "nuclear intensifier", with which to accelerate the natural radioactive decay in the upper crust of the Earth, thereby making the surface of the Earth radioactive. R Daneel and R Giskard discover the roboticists' plan and attempt to stop Amadiro; but are hampered by the First Law of Robotics,
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_(Asimov_novel)"title="Foundation (Asimov novel)">
## "The Psychohistorians".This part is original to the 1951 book version. It takes place in 12,067 G.E. ("Galactic Era"). The story begins on Trantor, the capital of the 12,000-year-old Galactic Empire, powerful but slowly decaying. Hari Seldon, a mathematician and psychologist, has developed psychohistory, a new field of science and psychology that treats all possibilities in large societies by mathematics, allowing for the probabilistic prediction of future events.By means of psychohistory, Seldon has discovered the decline and eventual fall of the Empire, angering the aristocratic members of the Commission of Public Safety, the "de facto" rulers of the Empire. The Commission considers Seldon's views and statements treasonous, and he is arrested along with the young mathematician Gaal Dornick, who has arrived on Trantor to join Seldon's group. Seldon is tried by the Commission; he defends his beliefs, explaining his theories and predictions, including his belief that the Empire will collapse in 300 years and while a Second Empire will eventually rise it will only come after a 30,000-year dark age. He informs the Commission that an alternative to this future is attainable and explains to them that creating a compendium of all human knowledge, the "Encyclopedia Galactica", may not prevent the inevitable fall of the Empire but would reduce the dark age to one millennium.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan's_Run"title="Logan's Run">
The introduction to the book says:In the world of 2116, a person's maximum age is strictly legislated: 21 years, to the day. When people reach this "Lastday" they report to a "Sleepshop" in which they are willingly executed via a pleasure-inducing toxic gas. A person's age is revealed by their "palm flower" crystal embedded in the palm of their right hand that changes color every seven years; yellow (age 0–6), then blue (age 7–13), then red (age 14–20), then blinks red and black on Lastday, and finally turns black at 21."Runners" are those who refuse to report to a Sleepshop and attempt to avoid their fate by escaping to Sanctuary—a place where they can live freely in defiance of society's dictates. Logan 3 is a "Deep Sleep Operative" (also called a "Sandman") whose job is to terminate Runners using a special weapon called simply 'the gun', a handgun with selectable ordnance keyed to self-destruct if touched by an individual who is not the proper owner. Runners are most terrified of a weapon called the 'Homer', which homes in on body heat and ignites every pain nerve in the body, killing the target.Sandmen practice Omnite, a hybrid type of martial arts. On his own Lastday, Logan becomes a Runner himself in an attempt to infiltrate an apparent underground railroad for runners seeking Sanctuary.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sands_of_Ammon"title="The Sands of Ammon">
After the victory in Thessaly which ended the first book of the trilogy, "Child of a Dream", Alexander and his army march towards the East. The first step of the expedition is to free the Greek cities from the Persian domination in order to establish a strong and united Pan-Hellenic League. Once that is achieved, the target is the Persian Empire itself and its immense Asian territory.During his military campaign the Macedonian army records numerous victories, including those against the city of Tyre, the Towers of Giza and the legendary Halicarnassus. And it is in the midst of this campaign that Alexander meets the only opponent he believes worthy of his utmost respect: Memnon of Rhodes, the commander of the Greek mercenaries of the Persian army. He struggles in the attempt to defeat Memnon fair and square on the field, but the two end up stalemating each other with strategic cunning. Alexander's friends then suggest to end the confrontation between the two men by ordering to poison the mercenary; Alexander is however disgusted by this outrageous idea as he reckons his opponent is worthy of being defeated with respect and the only way for that to be possible is for Alexander to beat him on the battle field. However, Alexander's friends do carry out the order without Alexander's approval or knowing and Memnon is poisoned within a few weeks. The mercenary's death represents an anti-climactic end to the fantastic strategic battle between the two.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ends_of_the_Earth_(novel)"title="The Ends of the Earth (novel)">
When the Oracle of Ammon tells Alexander that he is the son of Zeus, the young Macedonian king finds even more inner strength and will to conquer new lands and rule the biggest Empire ever known. His army then crosses the Tigris and the Euphrates to reach Babylon, which is then raged by the Macedonians. The palace of Persepolis, the most beautiful palace in the world, is burnt to ashes by Alexander himself. This marks the end of Darius III's Persian Empire and the beginning of Alexander's.The Macedonian King, Pharaoh of Egypt and Great King of Persia is now also nomined Great Leader by the Pan-Hellenic League and he aims for India and Arabia to expand his Empire even further. His army seems unstoppable and unbeatable, driven forward by a man that defies human capabilities. Yet, when he tries to make his dream of a great unite Empire between Macedonians and Persians reality, his army starts to doubt his ideals and to critique his way of adapting to Persian customs at court. As his companions slowly yet gradually wonder about their king's choices, Alexander's life gets a sorrowful turn. He loses his wife Barsine, his loved horse Bucephalus, his best friend Hephaestion and his tutor Leonidas in the most brutal of ways. Even his own life is now in danger, with some of his warriors planning to kill him twice. He has to execute the warriors who planned for his assassination as well as a friend of his that had heard of the plan but did not inform him. This torments him, but he knows he does not have choice.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goat_Days"title="Goat Days">
The book is divided into four parts (Prison, Desert, Escape and Refuge).Najeeb Muhammad, a young man from Arattupuzha in Haripad of the Kerala state, is newly married and dreams of a better work in any of the Persian Gulf states. After several endeavors, he finally gets an opportunity to work in Saudi Arabia. However, at the King Khalid International Airport, Riyadh he is clueless as what to do next and is taken away by an Arab man who he believes to be his Arbab. The Arbab takes him to a cattle farm in the middle of a desert, confirming Najeeb's worst nightmare. The Arbab hands Najeeb over to the farm supervisor.Najeeb is then used as a slave laborer and shepherd and is assigned to tend goats, sheep and camels for almost three and half years in the remote deserts of Saudi Arabia. He is forced to do backbreaking work, kept half-hungry and is denied water to wash and suffers unimaginably. The farm's brutal supervisor keeps Najeeb in control with a gun and binoculars and frequently beats him with a belt. And now Najeeb had to manage this new fate without the bare human essentials.In a country where he doesn't know the language, places or people, he is far away from any human interaction. Najeeb steadily starts to identify himself with the goats. He considers himself as one of them. His dreams, desires, avenges and hopes starts to fade away as his mindset has now become similar to that of the goats. He talks to them, eats with them, sleeps with them and virtually lives the life of a goat. Although he has tried absconding multiple times, the supervisor catches him every time and punishes him by denying him food and water. He stops absconding when he finds the skeleton of the previous shepherd buried in the sand, who he thought had escaped. Even then, he keeps a ray of hope which will bring freedom and end to his sufferings some day.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartan_(book)"title="Spartan (book)">
"Spartan" is the story of two brothers born in the military city-state of Sparta. The elder brother, Brithos, was a Spartan paragon; the younger brother, Talos, was crippled and deformed at birth. Because of the cruel and strict laws in vigour at Sparta, babies that were deformed, crippled or had any health issues would not serve the city-state its purpose, which was to battle; therefore, these weaker children had to be sacrificed at Mount Taygetus. The young Talos however survives, rescued by a shepherd of the Helots, the people who served as slaves to the Spartans. This shepherd, who becomes Talos' adoptive father, raises Talos with love and recounts him the intriguing tale of Aristodemus, the last King of the Helots. The legend goes that he who wears his armour, shall be the one to free the Helots from slavery.However, the blood that runs in his veins is Spartan after all; Talos the Cripple is drawn back to his hometown and in the midst of the legendary Battle of Thermopylae. Here he faces the inhuman brutality and savagery of the Spartan soldiers and meets his brother for the first time since their separation. When he crosses his brother's gaze whilst attempting to protect Antinea, the woman he loves. But destiny has got a better fate for them in store: as a war between the Achaemenid Empire and the Greek city-states looms, the two brothers will find each other again and will fight shoulder to shoulder for the future of their country. Along the way, he discovers some thing of his Spartan life like his real name is Kleidemos. When his brother dies, he oversees the Helots, with the help of his friend Karas, helps the Helots have victory over his own race.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Tide_(Forgotten_Realms_novel)"title="Rising Tide (Forgotten Realms novel)">
Four adventurers – Jherek, Laaqueel, Iakhovas, and Pacys – sail the oceans as each are pulled toward the city of Baldur's Gate.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisterhood_of_Dune"title="Sisterhood of Dune">
By the time of the novel, the Butler family, under the name "Corrino", has consolidated a tenuous hold on the human-occupied universe. The head of the Corrino family, Emperor Salvador, lives in splendor on the planet Salusa Secundus with his brother and trusted advisor, Roderick, but their control of the Imperium is threatened by Manford Torondo, popular leader of the anti-technology Butlerian movement. The demagogue Torondo, deprived of both legs in a bomb blast decades previously, leads Swordmaster Anari Idaho and millions of people across the Imperium to cleanse humanity of its reliance on convenient technologies, often exploiting religious paranoia to advance his agendas. In opposition to the popular movement is the unscrupulous businessman Josef Venport, who holds a near-monopoly on space travel. Advised by his wife Cioba and great-grandmother Norma Cenva, who discovered the secret to creating space-folding "Navigators", Josef plots against his few remaining competitors and funds a secret group of scientific researchers who hold personal grudges against the Butlerians and are willing to salvage and optimize old cymek technology to satisfy their vendettas with Torondo.Meanwhile, on the planet Kepler, war hero Vorian Atreides attempts to keep his neighbors free from the threat of slavers. An attempt to obtain Imperial protection for his planet is successful, but Vorian is sent even deeper into exile by Salvador and Roderick, who are concerned that the Jihad hero may, through his celebrity, incite a rebellion against their authority. On the planet Lankiveil, the Harkonnen family ekes out a lean existence, far from the glory enjoyed by their ancestors after Vorian Atreides disowned the disgraced Abulurd Harkonnen. While the parents have decided to surrender ambition for survival and a humble existence, the two oldest children, Griffin and Valya, seek to rebuild their family fortunes through service to the Landsraad and the Sisterhood on Rossak, respectively.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fiery_Trial"title="The Fiery Trial">
In the preface to "The Fiery Trial", Eric Foner states his intention to trace "the evolution of Lincoln's ideas and policies about slavery from his early life through his career in the Illinois legislature in the 1830s, his term in Congress in the 1840s, his emergence as a leader of the new Republican party in the 1850s, and his presidency during the Civil War". The book closely examines Lincoln's speeches and writings, and avoids direct engagement with previous Lincoln historians."The Fiery Trial" begins with Lincoln's encounters with slavery in his early life, growing up in Kentucky and Indiana. He occasionally dealt with issues of slavery in his law practice in Illinois. The book also discusses Lincoln's position on slavery in the context of his political career. Lincoln was a moderate, attempting to bridge the gap between the abolitionist Radical Republicans and conservative Democrats, including those in the slave-holding states, whom he hoped would choose preserving the Union over steadfastly defending slavery. Lincoln initially supported the idea of voluntary colonization of freed blacks to Africa, a stance supported by some politicians at the time, although considered unethical by many. However, Lincoln eventually abandoned his moderate stance on slavery when he determined that to win the American Civil War, he needed to act to end slavery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughter_of_Smoke_and_Bone"title="Daughter of Smoke and Bone">
Karou, a 17-year-old art student living in Prague, goes about her daily life attending classes and hanging out with her best friend Zuzana, while simultaneously trying to evade her ex-boyfriend Kazimir. It is soon revealed, however, that Karou was raised by four chimaera living in a workshop on a trans-dimensional plane between the human world and Eretz, from where the chimaera originate. The workshop is owned by Brimstone, who is her father figure.While with Zuzana, Karou is summoned by Brimstone to do a job, which requires her to collect teeth - both of human and animal origin - from her world and bring them to him. He uses the teeth for unspecified purposes and pays Karou in physical trinkets which she uses to perform wishes. Karou, having grown weary of her job, which usually includes dealings with illegal dealers and graverobbers, reluctantly departs. When she returns to the workshop via portal doors that connects to all parts of the world, she finds the door scorched with a black handmark.Across the world, more of Brimstone's doors are marked with the black handmark. The perpetrators turn out to be an angel named Akiva and his, essentially brother and sister, Liraz and Hazael, who belong to a race of seraphim at war with the chimaera in their local Eretz. When Karou returns to the workshop for another mission, the chimaera tell her of their fears of her "taking her freedom" and abandoning them. Feeling uncomfortable with the thought of leaving her family, Karou ventures into Morocco to purchase human teeth from an old graverobber, Izil, who is burdened with a cursed angel, Razgut, on his shoulder. In her meeting with this man, the graverobber tells her Brimstone once asked to purchase baby teeth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeless_(Carriger_novel)"title="Timeless (Carriger novel)">
Blending steampunk with urban fantasy, "Timeless" is set in an alternate history version of Victorian era Britain where vampires and werewolfs are welcomed as members of society, often in the upper class. The protagonist of the novel is Alexia Tarabotti, the Lady Maccon, who is "soulless", and thus unaffected by the powers of supernatural beings.Two years have passed peacefully, or as peacefully can be expected in a household with an alpha werewolf husband and a toddler who is apt to turn hairy at inconvenient moments. The peace ends abruptly when Alexia is summoned to Alexandria to face their ancient vampire queen. Now everyone in Alexia's sphere – human, supernatural, or dead; in London, Scotland, or Egypt – must solve the mystery of the God-Breaker Plague.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Empire_(novel)"title="Lost Empire (novel)">
While vacationing and scuba diving near Zanzibar, the Fargos discover a ship's bell that they soon determine belonged to the Confederate warship "Shenandoah", which after the Civil War had been sold to the Sultan of Zanzibar before mysteriously disappearing. As soon as they raise the bell, they find someone else wants it badly enough to kill to obtain it. They lose the bell to their pursuers, who they discover are involved with the new government of Mexico and they discover a number of tourists who discovered items of interest to the pursuers ended up dead. The Fargos end up traveling to the mainland of Tanzania, the rainforests of Madagascar and to the site of the 1883 Krakatoa volcano explosion in Indonesia in their quest to find answers to the intrigue. They not only get the bell back, but they discover what happened to the "Shenandoah" and make a stunning archaeological discovery.Co-author Clive Cussler has a habit of making cameo appearances in many of his novels. In this one his appearance is a bit more pronounced than normal, when he helps the Fargos escape from a group of robbers who captured them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspects_of_Anglo-Saxon_Magic"title="Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Magic">
## Part One.In the first chapter, entitled "The Up World", Griffiths discusses the Anglo-Saxons' pre-Christian beliefs about their gods, looking at the veneration of idols and the manner in which the deities were understood by the Anglo-Saxons, in doing so contrasting them with those of the Classical world. Moving on into the second chapter, "The Dead World", Griffiths deals with the role of the ancestors in Anglo-Saxon heathenism before proceeding on to discuss beliefs in an afterlife and the reasons for performing sacrifice, Chapter three, "The Around World", looks into the beliefs regarding those species who were neither god nor humans, such as the elves and dwarves, as well as the Anglo-Saxon magical beliefs regarding medicine and agriculture.The fourth chapter, which is entitled "The Empty World", deals with those Anglo-Saxon texts which portray the supernatural world as "a bleak reality"”, looking at conceptions of predestination and fate, whilst the fifth, entitled "The Rational World", dealt with the role of Anglo-Saxon Christianity and the wider effect that this had on English society, in particular discussing the significance of Bede,
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cunning_Folk_and_Familiar_Spirits"title="Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits">
Wilby opens her book with a transcript from the trial of the cunning woman Bessie Dunlop, which took place in Edinburgh in 1576, in the midst of the Early Modern witch trials. Dunlop had been accused of "Sorcery, Witchcraft and Incantation, with Invocation of spirits of the devil", found guilty, and executed through strangulation.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mighty_Miss_Malone"title="The Mighty Miss Malone">
Deza Malone's family has the motto "We are a family on a journey to a place called Wonderful" and Deza is consistently marked in her school as someone who is sure to go far in life. However, Deza's family is too poor to help her take advantage of her talent. For example, Deza's family cannot afford dental care for her. This specific problem leads to a scene in which Deza overhears her father, in a conversation with Deza's mother, say, ‘I can’t breathe out of my nose when I’m near Deza because of the smell of her teeth. How sick is that?’ But despite the harsh circumstances that she lives under, Deza still has parents that love her, a great teacher, Mrs. Needham, and the perfect best friend, Clarice Anne Johnson. Deza looks forward to receiving special summer tutoring from Mrs. Needham with her best friend. However, when the Great Depression hits Deza's hometown of Gary, Indiana, her father loses his job and must travel in order to find work. Although Deza's mother was supporting the family by working as a domestic, when she loses her job, the Malones are put out on the street. Before Deza's father can write to have the family join him, Deza's mother uproots the family and goes out in search of Deza's father. Then, Deza and her brother end up in a Hooverville Shack outside Flint, Michigan. As life continues to go on, Deza's brother Jimmie leaves the camp in the hopes of becoming a performer while Deza and her mother try to carry on in the hopes of finding Deza's father. Deza goes off to find Jimmie when she learns that he is making it big in Detroit. (Deza's father gets in a boat accident and almost dies.)
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Place_of_Fallen_Leaves"title="In the Place of Fallen Leaves">
It is set in the long, hot summer of 1984 in an isolated Devon village on the edge of Dartmoor where thirteen-year-old Alison is growing up, the youngest member of a farming family. The story covers scenes from Alison's own life as well as those of her neighbours, siblings, parents and grandparents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Privataria_Tucana"title="A Privataria Tucana">
The book highlights documents that show supposed irregularities in privatizations that occurred during the administration of the PSDB under former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and that friends and relatives of the PSDB's ex presidential candidate José Serra held companies in tax shelters and moved millions of dollars between 1993 and 2003.It contains about 140 pages of photocopied documents trying to demonstrate that President Cardoso's Minister of Planning and later Minister of Health José Serra received kickbacks from businessmen that participated in the privatization process.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shield_Ring"title="The Shield Ring">
The story revolves around Frytha and Bjorn, a girl and a boy who have both been orphaned by the Norman conquest, and have sought refuge and been taken in by Jarl Buthar in his hidden Lakeland settlement by Buthar's Mere. The group is portrayed as Northmen settlers who have long established themselves in the area, and are resisting Norman advances into their country. They describe themselves as forming their shield ring up in the fells of Lakeland, as a form of Last Stand against the Norman invasion. The theme of this Shield Ring is developed throughout the story, an ultimately portrayed as an ethic of loyalty to one's group, even unto death.Bjorn is fostered to a Harp player, an old man who originally fought the Normans at Hastings, who refers to being part of that Shield Wall resisting William the Conqueror. The instrument becomes a key feature of the narrative, being a symbolic link to the indigenous Welsh and British peoples with whom the Norse of Lakeland have intermingled. Bjorn is seen as having the musical gift from his maternal Celtic forebears, and learns to play as he grows up. This links him back to the family of the emerald seal ring with the dolphin insignia, which he is given when he comes of age.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Broke_Up"title="Why We Broke Up">
Min Green and Ed Slaterton, a high school junior and senior basketball jock, respectively, ended their relationship, which lasted from October 5 to November 12. The story takes the form of a letter, with Min writing to Ed explaining why they had broken up. The letter accompanies a box full of minor objects that narrates the progress of their relationship, and is returned to Ed at the end of the letter. The box includes two bottle caps, a movie ticket, a lobby ticket, a box of matches, a pinhole camera, a folded note, a rubber band, a high school pennant, a toy truck, a recipe book ("Real Recipes from Tinseltown"), Pensieri, a fictional liquor (and Italian for "thoughts"), a protractor, a file, a concert ticket, an egg cuber ("makes a square egg"), a polaroid, a comb from a motel room, a pair of ugly earrings, and several other items collected over the course of their relationship. Item after item is illustrated, accounted for, and placed in the box to be dumped—like an ex-girlfriend—on his front porch.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Wee_Sweetie_Mice_and_Men"title="Of Wee Sweetie Mice and Men">
Protagonist Dan Starkey is tasked with writing a book about "Bobby "Fat Boy" McMaster", the current heavyweight champion of Ireland, in his upcoming championship fight with Mike Tyson on St. Patrick's Day. When McMaster's wife is kidnapped, Starkey must figure out who's behind it before the varied and numerous factions that McMaster has offended, in his short time in New York, catch up with them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbulent_Priests"title="Turbulent Priests">
The plot of this novel is based on Wrathlin Island, a small island north of mainland Ireland. Dan Starkey has been sent by Cardinal Daley, the Primate of All Ireland, to investigate reports that the Messiah has returned in the shape of a young girl, Christine, about to start school. Starkey has his wife Patricia and illegitimate child "Little Stevie" join him as he investigates the tiny dry community and meets considerable resistance from the defensive residents.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/She_Lover_of_Death"title="She Lover of Death">
A naive young woman, Masha Mironova, travels from provincial Russia to Moscow, where she changes her name to Columbine and joins the Lovers of Death, a small group of bohemian poets, each of them eagerly waiting their turn to die a romantic fin de siècle death by suicide. Once one member dies, their replacement is found by the leader of the group, the Doge. Another newcomer to the society appears to be a Japanese prince, although this turns out to be Erast Fandorin acting undercover. Fandorin is not the only person to have connected the suicides and the group: a newspaper reporter, Zhemailo, has also done so and he also dies a mysterious death. Fandorin uncovers that many of the suicides are murders, all committed by the Doge: in the process of his investigation Columbine also falls in love with Fandorin and becomes his mistress.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orphan_Master's_Son"title="The Orphan Master's Son">
## Part 1: The Biography of Jun Do.Pak Jun Do is raised in a North Korean state orphanage, serving as leader and decision-maker to the other children but always deferring to his father, the orphanage's master. When he is fourteen the children are conscripted into military service, often sent to fight in underground tunnels because, as orphans, they are considered low-class citizens and expendable. Jun Do becomes a proficient fighter and is eventually conscripted as a kidnapper of Japanese citizens. Despite occasional feelings of guilt, particularly when a Japanese woman accidentally dies during an abduction, Jun Do never questions his work and follows every order; as a reward, he is taught to speak and read English, greatly increasing his value as a citizen. Following his military service he is made a signal operator on a fishing boat, intercepting and translating radio transmissions. He grows fond of his fellow crew members and fascinated with everything he hears, particularly two American girls who are attempting to row across the Pacific Ocean. However, transmissions from the International Space Station cause both him and the boat's second mate to realize that much of what their leaders have told them about the outside world is a lie. When the second mate becomes disillusioned and defects, the rest of the crew concocts a dramatic cover story which includes Jun Do being bitten and nearly killed by a shark. After being brutally interrogated upon returning, Jun Do is declared a national hero for the alleged incident.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_Sean"title="Shooting Sean">
Dan Starkey is employed by legendary film star, Sean O'Toole, who is looking to escape his type cast action hero career and move into directing movies. Unfortunately, O'Toole is making a movie based on an infamous IRA member, nicknamed "The Colonel", and events soon lead to Starkey once again struggling to both protect his wife Patricia and illegitimate child "Little Stevie", while also keeping himself alive and writing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enterprise_of_Death"title="The Enterprise of Death">
The story follows the life of Awa, a lesbian Moor slave girl, who is captured near early 16th-century Granada by a powerful necromancer. After several years of tormented apprenticeship, Awa finally manages to kill the necromancer, only for her to discover this to be a key element of the necromancer's plan to reincarnate himself in her young body after a decade has passed. Leaving Andalusia on a search for the necromancer's grimoire, she is caught on the order of the overzealous inquisitor Kahlert manipulated by a shadow from her past, her undead ex-lover Omorose. Rather luckily, she is freed by artist-turned-mercenary Niklaus Manuel Deutsch of Bern, with whom she strikes up an improbable friendship, soon followed by further friends in the form of polymath Paracelsus and the lesbian weaponsmith Monique. Though Awa settles down in Monique's brothel in Paris for a while, making good use of her magical healing talents and falling in love with the plucky prostitute Chloé, her impending doom makes her resume her search for the necromancer's grimoire. Further encounters with Kahlert and Omorose and a sect of vampires in the Schwarzwald as well as Chloé's death bring her close to desperation. Shortly before running out of time, however, she - with help from Manuel, Monique and Paracelsus - manages to turn the spirits of the casualties of the Battle of Bicocca against the necromancer's spirit, banishing him forever and thereby escaping his curse.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_and_Dreams"title="Reality and Dreams">
The story concerns Tom Richards, a successful British film director and serial womanizer, who has just fallen from a crane whilst shooting his latest film. During his lengthy recuperation he attempts to maintain control of the film, whilst the relationships in his extended family are tested as his daughter Marigold disappears...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology,_Tradition,_and_the_State_in_Africa"title="Technology, Tradition, and the State in Africa">
## Chapter One: Feudalism in Africa?In the first chapter, entitled "Feudalism in Africa?", Goody explores the various definitions of the word "feudalism", and the manner in which it has been used to describe historical societies across both Europe and Asia, and also the manner in which social anthropologists have used it to refer to contemporary societies in Africa. He proceeds to discuss the various definitions of feudalism, and the way in which it has been used by both noted sociologists such as Max Weber and Karl Marx and also by historians like Marc Bloch. Goody then goes into greater detail regarding how the term has been used to refer to various African states, such as S.F. Nadel's use of the term to refer to Nupe society in his book "A Black Byzantium" (1942), and Maquet's use of the term to refer to the states of the Ruanda in his work "The Premise of Inequality in Ruanda" (1961), believing that the use of the term "feudal" – which has its basis in historical investigation into Medieval Europe – is simply unnecessary in both of these cases.Moving on to look at the "economic approach to feudalism", Goody challenges the view championed by "orthodox Marxists" such as I.I. Potemkin that in Africa, feudal states emerged because land was controlled by powerful land owners to whom the peasants were indebted, having to pay rent or proving services in return for being allowed to farm the land. Instead, Goody argues, in much of Africa, land was plentiful and "of little economic importance", and that such a feudal system of land ownership was simply not applicable. Goody proceeds to argue that while Africanists should not adopt the term "feudalism" from historians of Medieval Europe, there should be greater interdisciplinary work on Africa from historians, anthropologists and sociologists alike.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Political_Systems"title="African Political Systems">
## Radcliffe-Brown's "Preface".The preface to "African Political Systems" was authored by A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955), then Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford, who argued that the "comparative study of political institutions, with special reference to the simpler societies, is an important branch of social anthropology which has not yet received the attention it deserves." Proceeding to argue that the "comparative method" can be used "as an instrument for inductive inference", he believed that doing so would allow scholars to "discover the universal, essential, characters which belong to all human societies, past, present and future". Despite this, he did note that scholars must be careful not to "pass directly from empirical observations to a knowledge of general sociological laws or principles", believing that before this, all known societies must be "reduced to some order of classification".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragon's_Tooth"title="The Dragon's Tooth">
In Wisconsin, near the shores of Lake Michigan, Cyrus and Antigone Smith run a beat up old motel called The Archer along with their older brother Dan. The motel hardly sees guests, with the exception of Mrs. Eldridge, a full-time occupant. One day a man named William Skelton comes to stay at the motel, giving Cyrus a set of keys along with something resembling a shark tooth saying they will "more than pay for the night." That night, the hotel is attacked by strange men, who eventually kill Skelton. Before he dies, he gives Cyrus a "patrik," a silver snake which disappears when it puts its tail in its mouth.The next morning, Dan has gone missing. John Horace Lawney, Skelton's attorney, shows up and tells Cyrus and Antigone that Skelton had named them as his heirs. The three are chased by a man named Maxi, who appears to want the keys Cyrus has. While fleeing, Lawney gets shot, but the three make it a place called Ashtown. Ashtown is a large base for the Order of Brendan, a more-than-1000-year-old secret society made up of influential and extraordinary people, who explore and protect the world from evil. Bewildered, Cyrus and Antigone are sworn into the order by Rupert Greeves, a high ranking Ashtown official. It is declared that the two must meet the more rigorous 1914 standards for admission before receiving the contents of Skelton's estate. Mrs. Eldridge, who is an O of B member sent to watch the two by their late father and comatose mother, becomes their mentor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moth_Eaten_Howdah_of_the_Tusker"title="The Moth Eaten Howdah of the Tusker">
Set in Palashbari in Kamrup, it revolves around lead protagonist Giribaala and the society around her. As a widow from an Assamese Brahmin family, she narrates her experiences between two worlds: traditionalism and liberalism. The novel explores a powerful picture of change and transition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Were_Defeated"title="They Were Defeated">
The first part of the novel is set in Devon, where Dr Conybeare, a progressive-minded physician, resides in the parish of Rev. Robert Herrick. The widowed doctor lives alone with the youngest of his four children, his fifteen-year-old daughter Julian. Conybeare himself is an atheist, but the studious Julian attends church with her friend Meg Yarde, granddaughter of the local squire. Meg's brother Giles is a student at the University of Cambridge, along with Julian's brother Kit. Dr Conybeare deplores the lack of educational opportunities for women, and has Julian privately tutored in the classics by Herrick, who also instils in her a love for literature, particularly poetry. When an elderly local woman is accused of witchcraft, Conybeare and his daughter hide her in their home, but she is discovered and sentenced to be burned at the stake. The doctor administers a fast-acting poison to save her from suffering, and thus incurs the anger of the local population.Deciding to take Julian away from the hostile atmosphere of the village, Dr Conybeare arranges a visit to his son in Cambridge, and a party is made up, consisting of the Conybeares, Herrick and Meg Yarde. The second part of the novel takes place mainly in Cambridge, where Julian is thrilled to find herself in the company of many prominent poets and philosophers, and begins attending classes given by Henry More to selected young ladies. She is largely unaware of the political upheavals that threaten to escalate into war, but is concerned when her brother Kit converts to Catholicism without their father's knowledge. She also falls in love with Kit's urbane tutor, John Cleveland, even though Cleveland has no sympathy with the idea of female education and belittles Julian's interest in the classics and philosophy. Banned by his college fellowship from marrying, he has no fear of permanent entanglement, but does not seek to draw Julian into a sexual relationship. Their friendship is resented by Giles Yarde, who is himself in love with Julian.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_(book)"title="Secrecy (book)">
Charlotte, a precocious and reticent young girl fell in love with her uncle's stepson, Ted, a charming and irresistible eighteen-year-old after a first encounter with him at her uncle's wedding. Meanwhile, Ted's mother Claudia was Charlotte's role model and confidant being that Charlotte's wasn't close to her mother who was epicurean and had a strained relationship with her father, Bill that was unable to meet up with her mother's lifestyle after the great depression that shook the family financially.On a fateful evening, Charlotte was invited by Ted and was raped. This incident left Charlotte traumatic and in a bid to overcome it, she took up courses as an architect to build a new future aided by her career.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horse_with_My_Name"title="The Horse with My Name">
This novel follows Dan Starkey who is currently both unemployed and single. His estranged wife Patricia, after cancelling their counselling sessions with Relate, has entered into another relationship with someone called Clive and is currently living with him in the family home. Starkey receives a request from Mark Corkery, known as "The Horse Whisperer", to investigate racing entrepreneur Geordie McClean who is apparently not quite as clean as his name would suggest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ponder_Heart"title="The Ponder Heart">
The novella is set in fictional rural Clay County, Mississippi, home to the Ponders, the richest family in the county. Daniel Ponder, a "mildly retarded man" according to literary scholars, is the heir to his father Sam Ponder's wealth. As Daniel generously gives away his possessions, including a gas station and heirloom watches, his father and his niece, Edna Earle Ponder, try to save their family fortune by having Daniel institutionalized to a psychiatric hospital. When Sam instead of Daniel is institutionalized by accident, the two try to have Daniel marry Teacake Magee, an eligible widow. The marriage only lasts two months. Daniel later marries 17-year-old Bonnie Dee Peacock, and Daniel's father dies of a heart attack when he hears of the proposal. Bonnie runs away, and later returns to Daniel's house. She dies mysteriously on a stormy night. The Peacocks, under the advice of district attorney Dorris Gladney, indict Daniel on murder charges. He convinces the judge he is innocent, and gives away the remainder of his riches to all present at the trial, including the Peacocks.The novella is narrated through the perspective of Edna.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alabama_Moon"title="Alabama Moon">
After the death of his father, ten-year-old Moon leaves their forest shelter home and is sent to an Alabama institution, becoming entangled in the outside world he has never known and making good friends, a relentless enemy, and finally a new life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_Big_Davie"title="Driving Big Davie">
Dan Starkey is invited to Florida by his old friend, "Big Davie", who has a spare honeymoon ticket after being dumped by his erstwhile fiancée. Starkey is back with his wife Patricia and feels he's gotten over the murder of his toddler son "Little Stevie" - however his wife disagrees and declares that an American road trip would do him good. When the opportunity to avenge Stevie's death presents itself, Starkey cannot refuse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belfast_Confidential"title="Belfast Confidential">
The plot of the novel surrounds Dan Starkey and his recent appointment as the editor of Belfast's trendiest magazine, "Belfast Confidential"; described by Bateman as "a cross between "Private Eye" and "Hello"". After the murder of his close friend Mark McBride, AKA "Mouse", Starkey is convinced by Mouse's Thai bride to take over the editorship and discover who was behind the murder. Starkey discovers that Mouse was working on a list of the 50 most powerful people in the area before his death and decides that those at the top are the most likely suspects. He sets out to discover if this is indeed the case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasite_Pig"title="Parasite Pig">
"Parasite Pig" follows the character of Barney, who has been working part-time at an after-school job in order to pay for the repairs for his house. The aliens still have plans for Barney and he must deal with talking parasites, giant crustaceans, and a wasp woman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Earth_(novel)"title="Hollow Earth (novel)">
The novel is about twins Matt and Emily ("Em") Calder who share an ability that allows them to make artwork come to life, due to their powerful imaginations. Their ability is sought after by antagonists who wish to use it in order to breach Hollow Earth—a realm in which all demons and monsters are trapped.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dervish"title="American Dervish">
Hayat Shah, a young Pakistani American, lives in a boring suburb of Milwaukee with his unhappily married parents who are secular Muslims. His mother's best friend Mina and her son Imran come from Pakistan to stay with the family, escaping her ex-husband who threatens to take away Imran. Mina brightens the lives of the Shah family, becoming especially close with Hayat, telling him Sufi stories and teaching him the Quran. Hayat becomes obsessed with being a hafiz (someone who can recite the entire Quran from memory) after Mina tells him that the parents of hafiz are guaranteed a place in Paradise. Meanwhile, she meets Dr. Shah's best friend Nathan and falls in love with him. Nathan, who is Jewish, explores Islam and even expresses an interest in converting. Dr. Shah is an atheist and warns his best friend not to convert as he believes the local imam is only interested in money. When Hayat, Nathan and Dr. Shah go to the mosque to see the imam about Nathan converting, he preaches an anti-Semitic khutbah, devastating Nathan. Hayat is jealous when he realizes that Nathan and Mina are still planning on marrying. He sends a telegram to her ex-husband, revealing that Mina is marrying Nathan. Mina's family threatens to disown her if she marries him and Nathan moves away to Boston.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Battles"title="The Night Battles">
"The Night Battles" is divided into four chapters, preceded by a preface written by Ginzburg, in which he discusses the various scholarly approaches that have been taken to studying Early Modern witchcraft, including the rationalist interpretation that emerged in the 18th century and the Witch-cult hypothesis presented by Margaret Murray. He proceeds to offer an introduction to the benandanti, and then thanks those who have helped him in producing his study.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trail_of_the_Hawk"title="The Trail of the Hawk">
The story follows the life of Carl Ericson as he grows up and matures. He has to face the choice of either going to his town college, to a private school with a childhood friend, or live in the wilderness with his older friend, who had a cottage in the middle of the forest. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_December_(novel)"title="Dark December (novel)">
A nuclear war which left the US and the entire world devastated is over at last. The war-weary Major Kenneth Gavin is discharged. Leaving the enclave where the remnants of the US Army keep some semblance of order, he sets off on a quest into the wilderness which had been California, on a quest to reach his home - though having no idea if anything was left of it - and trying to make something of the life left to him in this harsh new world. He crosses areas where every living thing had been vaporized, countryside where anthrax and radiation sickness are killing off the survivors, where gangs of homeless kids had reverted to savagery and would murder for a pair of shoes and where women had slipped to the last stages of degradation.A crucial point in the book is the moment when Gavin finds a Soviet Air Force pilot who had parachuted onto American soil. With no organized government left to establish Prisoner of War Camps and uphold the Geneva Conventions, the pilot was captured by boys who are constantly torturing and degrading him, venting upon him their anger and frustration. Gavin's determination to save the Russian brings him into a head-on confrontation with another officer roaming the ruins - Major Collingwood, a fanatic and ruthless militarist and nationalist determined to rebuild the same order which had led to the devastating war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millionaire's_Wife"title="The Millionaire's Wife">
Twenty years after George Kogan's murder, in July 2010, his estranged wife Barbara admitted to hiring a hit man to have her husband gunned down. She was sentenced to 12 to 36 years in prison.The son of Holocaust survivors, 49-year-old George Kogan grew up in Puerto Rico before relocating to New York City, where he enjoyed success as an antiques and art dealer—until one morning in 1990 when Kogan was approached on the street by a gunman identified by the prosecution as Paul Prosano and killed in cold blood.Just before the shooting, Kogan had been on the way to his girlfriend's apartment. Mary-Louise Hawkins was 29 years old and had once worked as Kogan's publicist. Kogan and his wife Barbara became estranged, and his wife Barbara became bitter. Barbara and Kogan began negotiations for a divorce, part of which was to be $5,000 per week in alimony. A judge turned down her request.Barbara, who stood to collect $4.3 million in life insurance, was immediately suspected in Kogan's death. But it would take authorities nearly 20 years to uncover the link between her lawyer, Manuel Martinez, and the hitman. In 2008, Martinez was convicted for the murder of Kogan. In 2010, Barbara pleaded guilty to grand larceny, conspiracy to commit murder, and murder in the first degree.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Inches"title="Nine Inches">
The four-year-old son of Jack Caramac, a shock jock radio broadcaster and old friend of Dan Starkey, is kidnapped for one hour and returned unharmed. Starkey, now a self-styled "upmarket private eye", is hired to investigate the kidnapping and ascertain who might have been behind it – a significant task given the number of people offended by Caramac's illustration of the crime and corruption prevalent throughout Belfast. Starkey's investigations lead him to the Miller brothers, officially the Chiefs of Staff for the Ulster Volunteer Force, although viewed by Starkey as merely a group of Shankill Road thugs intent on peddling drugs across Belfast. The Millers have been attempting to evict a widow named Jean Murray from her house and Starkey intervenes, hoping his knowledge of their drug operation would dissuade any repercussions. Starkey's interference leads to Murray's house being burnt down with Jean still inside.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Witchcraft"title="Living Witchcraft">
## Part I: Ravenwood: A Living Atlanta Coven.The first part of "Living Witchcraft" was devoted to describing the ritual activities which members of the Ravenwood coven took part in.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chowringhee_(novel)"title="Chowringhee (novel)">
Sankar named his novel "Chowringhee" as the novel is set in Chowringhee, a neighborhood in Calcutta, in the mid-1950s. The narrator, Shankar, an ambitious young man who was previously a secretary of an English barrister becomes unemployed as the Barrister dies all of a sudden and he is forced to sell wastepaper baskets door to door. Once, as he takes rest in a neighborhood park, reminiscing about his past and fearful of what awaits him in future, Byron,a friend of his passes by and is shocked by Shankar's descent into poverty. He finds Shankar a job at the Shahjahan Hotel, one of the city's oldest and most venerable hotels.Shankar is soon befriended by Sata Bose, the hotel's chief receptionist, and after a brief stint as a typist, Shankar becomes Bose's main assistant and close confidant. The manager Marco Polo who is feared by all likes him as well, and the young Shankar is given more responsibilities. The story of the novel spins around the guests, entertainers, and frequent visitors of the Shahjahan, but several members of the hotel staff get equal importance in Shankar's narrative. We learn about the seamy underside of the elite of Calcutta, whose greed, shady deals, and shameful behaviors are initially shocking to our naïve young man, who soon becomes jaded and disgusted by them. The poverty of working and jobless Calcuttans is vividly portrayed, as those not in the upper echelon are only one stroke of bad luck away from living in the streets or in dilapidated hovels. Love is a central theme, amongst the guests and workers, with often tragic results.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_(novel)"title="The Life (novel)">
"The Life" traces the life story of Dennis Keith, now obese, mentally unwell and living in a retirement village with his mother.A young would-be biographer arrives one day and begins to tease out his past. The story is told in different strands, one being reflections by Dennis (often in a variety of styles – first person, then third person) and also present-day conversations with the biographer.Dennis is a poor gold coast kid who is mysteriously found and adopted by his mother "Mo" Keith. Dennis and his stepbrother Rod become obsessed with surfing at an earlier age. They prove to be talented and daring surfers and soon develop a reputation. They start entering competitions and eventually enter the nascent pro circuit, all the while descending into heavy drug use.Dennis stumbles into an intermittent relationship with the singer Lisa Exmire. Lisa is found murdered and eventually charges are laid. Dennis's drug use escalates and he drops out of the pro circuit.The novel concludes by revealing the truth about Dennis's family, the murder and the biographer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Magnificent"title="Conan the Magnificent">
During a prologue, set in the Kezankian Mountains, an evil priest named Basraken Ismalla sacrifices an entire tribe of hillmen to appease his dragon god. Also, Ismalla is searching for three magical rubies known as the Eyes of Fire. These gems will allow him to direct the creature against his enemies.The scene shifts to Shadizar, Zamora's infamous City of the Wicked, where a newly arrived Conan attempts to steal an emerald goblet as pension in repaying a gambling debt. However, his plans are foiled by the interference of Tamira, a female thief. Meanwhile, a noblewoman named Lady Jondra scouts out Conan as a possible paramour, even as Tamira inveigles her way into her household with intent to steal the lady's jewels. Looking to settle scores with the thief, Conon follows Jondra's hunting party out of the city.Eventually, Conan encounters Jondra, separated from her party and besieged by wolves. He kills the creatures and so gains her favor. He learns that she is hunting the Dragon. Besting the lady's huntsman after a spear-throwing contest places Conan higher in her estimation, and gains him a place at her bedside.The party encounters Eldran, a survivor of a Brythunian village destroyed by the Dragon, who, armed with a magic sword, is also hunting the beast. Jondra dismisses his warnings of its ferocity and sends him off. That night, a the Kezankians attack the camp; Conan rallies the hunters and prevents them from being slaughtered. In the wake of the carnage, General Zanthinides of the Zamoran army shows up, pressing Lady Jondra to return to Shadizar under his escort. She refuses. Later the general attempt to rape her, and is thwarted by Conan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wanderers_(Price_novel)"title="The Wanderers (Price novel)">
Richie Gennaro is the 17-year-old leader of the Wanderers, an Italian-American youth gang in the Bronx in 1962. His girlfriend is Denise Rizzo. Richie's friends in the Wanderers are Joey Capra, Buddy Borsalino, Eugene Caputo and Perry LaGuardia.At the beginning of the book, a broad range of events and characters describe the zeitgeist. In addition to the protagonists, many characters appear only once. At first, “gang-business” is in focus: rivalry with other gangs in the neighborhood who come from different cultural and/or ethnic backgrounds. This rivalry is determined by prejudice and machismo. But there is also competition, in terms of sports such as football and bowling. And above all, it is about being cool and trying to have sex for the first time.Toward the end of the book, the events focus more and more on the protagonists and their problems and challenges of growing up – everyone in his own way. Eugene joins the marines after watching, without interfering, his girlfriend, Nina, being raped. Perry's father had died several years ago; now his mother dies, and he's suddenly on his own. Living with his aunt in Trenton, New Jersey, becomes unbearable for him, so he decides to go to Boston and sail to sea. After the situation escalates, Joey flees from his violent father and joins Perry. And Buddy impregnates his girlfriend, Despie, on their very first date and has to face the challenges of being a 17-year-old husband and father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Is_to_Blame?"title="Who Is to Blame?">
In part one Dmitry Krutsifersky, the poor son of a provincial doctor, is hired to tutor the son of the rich landowner Negrov. Krutsifersky eventually marries Negrov's illegitimate daughter Lyubov. In part two Krutsifersky and Lyubov are happily married with a child. Their happiness is destroyed when a rich young landowner named Beltov becomes a friend of the family and begins an illicit relationship with Lyubov. Beltov ends up departing Russia for Europe, leaving the young couple with a broken and hopeless marriage.Part one is a satire of the Russian landed gentry, showing their coarseness and pettiness. Part two introduces the type of the "superfluous man" in the person of Beltov.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Invincible"title="Conan the Invincible">
Amanar the Necromancer, in his lair in the Kezankian Mountains, sacrifices to his demonic patron, Morath-Aminee, for protection against the Black Ring, a league of sorcerers he has betrayed. Meanwhile, in a Shadizar tavern, Conan mulls over prospects for his next theft, in between incidental quarrels with one woman and the rescue of another who fails to thank him. He is hired by a supposed merchant to steal some pendants in the possession of the King of Zamora. The merchant is actually Imhep-Aton, an agent of the Black Ring, who intends on using these artifacts against Amanar.The Cimmerian makes an attempt on the palace, convincing the slave girl Velita to help him steal the pendants in exchange for her freedom, but the heist is interrupted and the alarm sounded. He escapes, but finds the next morning that the pendants and Velita have been stolen by someone else. He sets out in pursuit, along with, unknown to him, the king's cavalry and Imhep-Aton, who assumes Conan himself has absconded with the goods.At a desert oasis, Conan saves a woman from bandits—the same, surprisingly, he had earlier aided in the tavern—and with her continues his pursuit of the caravan. He catches up to what he believes is it, only to have the woman reveal herself as the infamous raider Karela the Red Hawk, and the band he has discovered as hers. Karela's men overpower the Cimmerian and take him prisoner. However, Conan ingratiates himself with the raiders, and together they resume the pursuit of the caravan, while they themselves continue to be pursued by the Zamorans and the agent of the Black Ring.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_of_Fortune"title="Child of Fortune">
The book is presented as an autobiographical tale, CHILD OF FORTUNE, "A Historie of the Second Starfaring Age" by Wendi Shasta Leonardo, and it includes an introduction written by the fictional narrator. Adolescents in the Second Starfaring Age are expected to embark on a journey of self-discovery called a "wanderjahr", "the eternal journey from childhood to maturity through the wondrous and terrible chaos of the region between." The wanderers are known as "Children of Fortune", and their culture contains elements of the carnivalesque and 1960s flower Children. The "wanderjahr" is typically a fairly long journey that only ends when the wanderer adopts her adult name (her "freenom") and chooses her life's work. Some never complete this rite of passage, and remain Children of Fortune their whole lives. The novel is the story of Wendi Shasta Leonardo's "wanderjahr".The story begins when Wendi (known by her childhood name Moussa) leaves her home planet, Glade, with only a return ticket home, a small amount of spending money, and a sex-enhancing ring. She travels to the planet-sized city of Edoku, where she quickly burns through all her money and becomes a mendicant. She is adopted by a group of Children of Fortune known as the Gypsy Jokers. Moussa falls in love with the leader of the Gypsy Jokers, Pater Pan, who teaches her the art of "ruespieling" (story-telling) and gives her the name Sunshine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_End_in_Norvelt"title="Dead End in Norvelt">
"Dead End in Norvelt" takes place during the summer of 1962, after the American schoolboy Jack Gantos fires his father's war trophy, a Japanese sniper rifle, at a war movie playing at a drive-in movie theater thinking it is unloaded. However, a bullet somehow flies out, causing a nosebleed. As punishment, he must stay in the house except as sent by his mother to help their elderly neighbor Miss Volker who Jack meets apparently boiling her hands in a large pot. Thinking she has gone insane and melted the flesh off her hands, Jack faints and gets his second nosebleed of the book. It turns out that Miss Volker, the obituary writer for the local paper, had been melting paraffin on her hands to combat arthritis, and needs Jack's help in typing the obituaries. Miss Volker, the town's medical examiner and a former nurse, notices that elderly, "original Norvelters" are dying away mysteriously. Later, a Hells Angel gang member is hit by a cement truck near the Norvelt pants factory after crazily dancing a three-mile stretch from a Mt. Pleasant bar. This ends up causing the rest of the Hells Angel gang to cause mayhem in the town, lighting unoccupied houses on fire and stealing the most expensive casket from Mr. Huffer's funeral parlor for their fallen brother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Ball_for_Daisy"title="A Ball for Daisy">
"A Ball for Daisy" is a wordless children's picture book that tells the story of a small white dog named Daisy and her favorite red ball. Daisy is so obsessed with the ball that she takes it everywhere with her, sleeps with it, and overall has to be near it constantly. As her owner takes Daisy out for a walk one day, her ball gets snatched by a brown dog wanting to play. Daisy tries her hardest to get the ball back, but the other dog insists on playing with it and accidentally pops it. Daisy's owner then throws the ball in the trash and takes Daisy home. For a while, Daisy acts distraught over her loss. Later, Daisy's owner takes her for another walk, and on the walk they see the same dog that popped Daisy's ball, but this time that dog has a shiny new blue ball. The other dog gives the blue ball to Daisy, which makes her very happy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Stiletto"title="The Black Stiletto">
Martin Talbot is an accountant whose mother—Judy Cooper Talbot—is in sheltered accommodation for sufferers of Alzheimer’s. Martin was given copies of his mother's diaries, written when she was younger.Through the diaries Martin learns that she ran away from her abusive stepfather, took a bus to New York, and swore revenge on him. She found work in a diner and a room above a gym; she tried to take lessons in self-defence, but no-one would help as women in the mid-1950s were not supposed to fight. Taking a job at the gym, she persuaded the gym owner to teach her boxing. Subsequently, she attended a dojo and learned karate and other martial arts. Judy also learnt how to use a knife from a boyfriend connected to the mafia. After trying a number of different knives she settled on a stiletto and became a vigilante.Judy's alter-ego, the Black Stiletto, was active for five years in New York and Los Angeles between 1958-1962 and then mysteriously disappeared. Since that time, the vigilante's image and mystique was exploited by the media in comics, films, and action figures. "Who was the Black Stiletto?" became a catch-question like "Who shot JFK?"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Triumphant"title="Conan the Triumphant">
Conan guides his army of mercenaries into Ianthe, capital of Ophir, where they become entangled in the chaos ensuing from the death of King Valdric. The factions of Antimides, Valentius, and Lady Synelle (Countess of Asmark) all contest for the throne. Synelle is secretly a sorceress and the high priestess of a nearly-forgotten demon god known as Al’Kiir. Al’Kiir was imprisoned within the depths of a mountain, called Tor Al’Kiir, centuries before by a mage named Avanrakash. However, Synelle plans on releasing him by providing Al'Kiir a “bride” through human sacrifice and enlist his power in obtaining the throne.Conan comes into Synelle's attention after he buys an idol of Al’Kiir, which she believes can be used in reviving her god. She plan on obtaining the idol, sending various agents to steal it and bewitching the Cimmerian into enlisting in her service. This attachment is complicated by Conan's interest in Julia, a young noblewoman reduced to trulldom, and his old rival, a female bandit named Karela the Red Hawk, one of many thieves Synelle has hired to steal the idol.Ultimately, Synelle's true colors are revealed. In the depths of Tor Al’Kirr, she and her priestess attempt to sacrifice Karela to raise the demon. Conan and his company battle her forces and the Cimmerian wins through—just too late. Al’Kiir is raised, but takes Synelle instead of his intended victim. When the demon turns its attention towards Karela, Conan seizes the Staff of Avanrakash and spears the creature. At its unearthly screams, Synelle's defenders flee. Both Al'kiir and the captive sorceress harden into stone as the mountain begins to rumble. Conan and his men flee, putting as much distance as they can between themselves and the mountain before it erupts in a pillar of flame resembling the staff.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_French_Whore"title="My French Whore">
Set towards the end of World War I, in 1918, it tells the story of a shy young railway employee and amateur actor from Milwaukee named Paul Peachy. Having realized that his wife no longer loves him, Paul enlists as a private in the U.S. Army and boards a ship for the trenches of France.Peachy finds temporary solace in friendship amid horrors of war, but is soon captured by the enemy Germans in no man's land. His only chance of survival is to impersonate one of the enemy's most famous spies (as a child of immigrants, he is a fluent German speaker).As the urbane and accomplished spy Harry Stroller, Peachy is feted as a hero by the German top brass and gains access to a previously unimagined world of sumptuous living. But his new role also reveals inner reserves of courage and ingenuity he never knew he possessed, as the mounting suspicions of his German hosts force Peachy into ever more outrageous deceptions.In this atmosphere of smoke and mirrors, Paul Peachy falls in love with Annie, a beautiful French courtesan who seems to see through his artful disguise.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_They_Always_Tell_Us"title="What They Always Tell Us">
"What They Always Tell Us" is told from the perspective of two brothers, Alex and James. Alex is a high school junior who struggles with depression; the novel opens a few months after he drank Pine-Sol in an apparent suicide attempt. James is a senior who is presented as the exact opposite of Alex. James is ambitious, popular and athletic. The story takes place over the school year and chronicles the brothers fulfilling school and family obligations, befriending a lost and isolated neighborhood boy, and the brothers repairing their own relationship with one another. The chapters switch back and forth between Alex and James' perspective, giving reader access to both of their thoughts and desires.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shelbourne_Ultimatum"title="The Shelbourne Ultimatum">
Ross survives the shooting depicted at the end of "NAMA Mia!", but has to deal with Gardaí who don't believe his story. He aims to sabotage Fionn and Erika's oncoming marriage. Sorcha gets a job in a pound shop. Honor becomes a child star, while Fionnuala continues to seek fame with her misery memoir.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Descendants_(novel)"title="The Descendants (novel)">
Matthew King was once considered one of the most fortunate men in Hawaii. His missionary ancestors were financially and culturally progressive—one even married a Hawaiian princess, making Matt a royal descendant and one of the state's largest landowners.Now his luck has changed. His two daughters are out of control: Ten-year-old Scottie is a disrespectful troublemaker with a desperate need for attention, and seventeen-year-old Alex, a former model, is a recovering drug addict. Matt's wife, Joanie, lies in a coma after a boat-racing accident and will soon be taken off life support. The Kings can hardly picture life without her, but as they come to terms with this tragedy, their sadness is mixed with a sense of freedom that shames them—and spurs them into surprising actions.Before honoring Joanie's living will, Matt must gather her friends and family to say their final goodbyes, a difficult situation made worse by the sudden discovery that there is one person who has not been told: the man with whom Joanie had been having an extramarital affair, quite possibly the one man she ever truly loved. Forced to examine what he owes not only to the living but to the dead, Matt takes to the road with his daughters to find his wife's lover, a memorable journey that leads to both painful revelations and unforeseen humor and growth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_God_(Lins_novel)"title="City of God (Lins novel)">
"City of God" is set in a city renowned for its natural beauty. The novel follows the lives of gangsters and petty criminals living in the favela. The novel is set from the 1960s through to the 1980s. In the beginning, delinquents make money through hold-ups. In the 1970s, cocaine arrives and takes its place in the criminals' lives, both dealing and consuming vast amounts. Drug lords use their wealth to buy guns, which give them more power. Conflicts over who controls the drug trade in the favela result in gang wars. Written laws do not apply; power is held by criminals and drug lords who rule the favela. The poorly paid police monitor the gangs, not for the sake of public safety, but to ensure their corrupt income from the gangs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Anaesthetic_(novel)"title="Local Anaesthetic (novel)">
Eberhard Starusch is a 40-year-old teacher of German and history who lives in West Berlin and acts as the tragicomic centre of the novel. In the background one of his students, Phillipp Scherbaum, is planning to set fire to his dog Max on the Kurfurstendamm as a protest against the US involvement in the Vietnam War. Starusch undergoes a long sequence of dental operations in 1967 in a surgery where television is used as a method of distracting patients from the operations and the pain that is involved in them, with the resultant televisual images merging and melding into his consciousness and reflections. Starusch recounts his own meditations upon the political past and the post-war situation in Adenauer's Germany and the inadequacy, from his perspective, of both Left and Right political ideologies and party alignments in that period (with tooth decay acting as a metaphor for wider spiritual and political decay). The book is largely an internal monologue from Starusch's perspective, punctuated only on limited occasions by questions and observations from his dentist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_(novel_series)"title="Legacy (novel series)">
## Legacy."Legacy" follows Princess Alera of Hytanica, a willful young woman that cringes at the idea of marrying over bearing Steldor, her father's chosen suitor. Assuming that she will spend her days with a man that she's attracted to, yet does not actually love, Alera finds herself almost instantly drawn to a youthful intruder. Narian is initially captured by the palace guards as a spy from an enemy kingdom, but is eventually discovered to be the son of a noble family that was long since thought to be dead. Alera begins to secretly meet with Narian, who tells her of life in the other kingdom and the two begin to fall in love. Despite this, Alera is forced to marry Steldor while Narian is condemned as a traitor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah's_Key_(novel)"title="Sarah's Key (novel)">
## July 1942.The first plot follows the Starzynski family. On 16 July 1942, French police raided the Starzynski apartment in Paris, arresting ten-year-old Sarah and her parents. First, the family is sent to the Vélodrome d'Hiver, an enclosed stadium that housed a bicycling track for racing. The captors held more than 7,000 Jews, mostly women and children in the stadium, which was made to hold far fewer people, and they were eventually sent to Drancy, a refugee camp, to separate the men from the women and children and then later, they separated the mothers from the children. Later, we find out, they were all sent to Auschwitz.Sarah, now on her own, is still tormented by thoughts of her brother locked in the secret closet at home, and tries to escape with Rachel, another Jewish girl at the camp. They are caught, but the officer that catches them is a man that Sarah knows from her old life. She begs him to let her go to rescue her brother. He reluctantly helps them escape and even gives the two girls money. The girls find refuge with an elderly couple who takes them into their house, but Rachel falls ill with what is probably diphtheria or typhus fever. The couple, Jules and Geneviève Dufaure, are compelled to call a Nazi doctor, who reports to the Nazi officials that the elderly couple is hiding Jewish children. The Nazis arrive and search for more children, but without finding Sarah they take Rachel away and she presumably dies. Jules and Geneviève dress Sarah in boy's clothes (her hair had been cut short at Drancy) and help her get to her former home in Paris. She had been keeping the key to the closet in her pocket the whole time. She knocks at the door, screaming her beloved younger brother's name. A young boy or Eduoard as a child (Bertrand's father) opens the door and Sarah rushes into the house, nearly kicking the door to her former room and quickly opens the closet. She collapses and starts to cry hysterically. The boy's father, or Edouard's father comes into the room and removes Michel from the closet and laid him on Edouard's bed, who had died by then (shriveled up), hidden in the closet waiting for Sarah.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oligarchs"title="The Oligarchs">
Hoffman's account focuses on the rise of the Russian oligarchs, a group of businessmen who acquired great wealth and became very influential in Russian politics during the Boris Yeltsin presidency, and several state officials who were close to them. The book examines in detail the roles of six individuals:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veyi_Padagalu"title="Veyi Padagalu">
The story chronicles the lives of those living in a village named Subbannapeta over three centuries. The village's fortunes have a close relationship to the change in traditional social structures like the caste system, the temple, the family, and the farm. These aspects are symbolically represented by the families of Harappa Naidu, Rameswara Sastry, and Ganachari. At the start of the novel, Veeranna Naidu discovers a treasure trove and is convinced by a Brahmin astrologer to found Subbannapeta as a zamindari. He establishes temples for Subrahmanyeswara and Venugopala Swamy, representations of Shiva and Vishnu respectively, and constructs a fort, which offers safety and acts as a seat of traditional learning. The villagers' commitment to the two local temples decreases over the centuries and mirrors the gradual decline and disappearance of traditional culture and the village itself. The hoods of the thousand-hooded serpent that embodies the village's patron god Subrahmanyeswara disappear with this decline, with scarcely two remaining with the passage of time.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_Two_(novel)"title="Take Two (novel)">
The story line taking place right after the first book ("Trading Faces") ends, identical twin sisters Payton and Emma Mills are entering detentions, when they learn they are to report to the school guidance counselor's, Counselor Case, office. Instead of serving detention, the twins must do community service, Emma tutoring Counselor Case's troublesome eight-year-old twin boys.The twins must deal with the social stigma of middle school, they both have their own friends, while remaining close. Payton is very close to Tess and seems to be developing a crush on Nick, the tech guy for the school play, although she doesn't know it yet. She also has to deal with Sydney and Cashmere constantly putting her down and works on standing up to Sydney. Emma is friends with Quinn, and is not officially in a relationship with Ox, although it is very obvious they like each other. Emma is nemesis's with Jazmine James, another very intellectual girl. Both are very competitive with each other.As Emma's relationship with Ox continues and becomes better friends with Quinn, she gets very confused. Between tutoring the twin boys, who bring a gecko to Emma's lessons every time, creating even more stress for her, friendships and relationships, Emma feels she must decide between social life or winning competitions and beating her nemesis, Jazmine James, she decides to go back to being AcadEmma, all academics and no social life. Quinn and Ox get upset by this, Emma even breaking up with Ox and starts ignoring all Quinn's invitations to hang out with her. At the end, Ox is not allowed to date but wants to date Emma.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Blinding_Absence_of_Light"title="This Blinding Absence of Light">
The plot is based around the events following the second failed coup d'etat against the late Hassan II of Morocco in August 1972. The protagonist is a prisoner in Tazmamart, who, despite being a fictional character, is based on accounts of the prisoners who survived their incarceration there.The plot focuses on how prisoners who were kept in the extremely harsh conditions of Tazmamart survived, through religious devotion, imagination and communication. The prisoners spent their sentences in cells that are described as being only five foot in height and ten foot long. The prisoners in the novel are not actively tortured, but are fed poorly and live without light.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impossible_Dead"title="The Impossible Dead">
Inspector Malcolm Fox and his team from the Lothian and Borders Police department of “Complaints” (Professional Ethics and Standards), Tony Kaye and Joe Naysmith, are assigned to an investigation in the town of Kirkcaldy in Fife. Detective Sergeant Paul Carter has been found guilty of misconduct, and Fox’s job is to reassure the Fife Constabulary that the other Kirkcaldy police are clean. Fox visits Paul’s uncle Alan Carter, who had reported Paul, and is drawn into the murder investigation when Alan is killed and Paul is framed for it. Fox and his team must dodge, while exploiting as sources, not only the hostile Kirkcaldy police but contingents of Fife headquarters CID, Murder Squad, and even an emissary from London’s Special Branch.When Fox visited him, Alan Carter was investigating the suspicious 1985 death of an Edinburgh lawyer named Francis Vernal,who was involved with Scottish Nationalist paramilitaries in the 1980s, including Dark Harvest, a terrorist group trying to use anthrax. Fox becomes obsessed by Vernal’s story, in part because there are similarities between Vernal’s death and Carter’s murder. He interviews various former associates of Vernal, including his onetime law partner, his widow, a madman, a TV personality, and a Chief Constable who is herself trying to deal with a group of terrorists. Eventually Fox identifies the person who killed both Vernal and Carter, but Fox has to risk his own life to capture them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poison_(Wooding_novel)"title="Poison (Wooding novel)">
Poison is the story of a rebellious human teenager living in the swamp town of Gull with her father, stepmother, and her baby sister Azalea. She struggles against the oppression in her life, particularly with her strained relationship with her Stepmother, Snapdragon. Her only friend in Gull is the old traveler, Fleet, who tells her tales of the old wars and phaeries and maintains that Poison has some of the “Old Blood” in her. On Soulswatch Eve, Azalea is replaced with a Changeling. After consulting with Fleet, Poison sets out from Gull to rescue her from the Phaerie Lord. She pays the Wraith-Catcher Bram to take her to Shieldtown to seek out the creature Lamprey, to whom Fleet has referred her. Once in Shieldtown, Poison encounters a young woman heading back to Gull and asks her to relay a message to her parents. After proving herself to Lamprey, Poison is sent to the home of the Bone Witch.In chapters fairly reminiscent of Hansel and Gretel, Poison enters the house of the Bone Witch. She meets another young woman named Peppercorn, who keeps house for the blind, old witch. Peppercorn is unwilling to help Poison (aside from hiding her one night), and so it is with Bram’s help that Poison defeats the witch. Bram and Poison escape the house with Peppercorn and her highly intelligent cat Andersen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_Lickin'_Fifteen"title="Finger Lickin' Fifteen">
Stephanie's friend Lula witnesses the murder (by decapitation) of celebrity chef Stanley Chipotle. When Chipotle's sponsors offer a $1 million reward for the capture of the killers, Lula decides to enter an upcoming BBQ cook-off contest, deciding that the most likely suspect is a rival chef. Despite her complete lack of culinary skills, she is joined by Stephanie's Grandma Mazur, their friend Connie Rosoli, and a reluctant Stephanie.Several of Ranger's clients' homes have been burglarized, leading him to suspect one of his men. He asks Stephanie to resume her job at Rangeman, as a pretext for snooping around. He also offers to lend his considerable skills as a bounty hunter to helping her do her regular job.While Lula attempts to perfect her "skills" as a chef, she is attacked several times by Chipotle's (extremely inept) killers, but manages to escape each time, though she is forced to move in with Stephanie, and later with the Plum family, and her prized Pontiac Firebird is destroyed by a poorly-constructed car bomb.On the day of the cook-off, one of the killers, "Marco the Maniac" is caught trying to flee to the airport. He identifies his accomplice as the cook-off's emcee, a vice president of the sauce company that employed Chipotle. The emcee holds Lula hostage at gunpoint and confesses: Chipotle was having an affair with the company president's wife, who planned to divorce her husband and carry half his assets to a new company founded with Chipotle. The killing and the reward were intended to be a publicity stunt that would both rid them of Chipotle and generate media attention to the company. Lula manages to disarm and subdue the emcee, though she has to accept that she won't be getting the reward.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belenggu"title="Belenggu">
The novel begins as Sukartono (Tono), a Dutch-trained doctor, and his wife Sumartini (Tini), residents of Batavia (modern day Jakarta), are suffering a marital breakdown. Tono is busy treating his patients, leaving no time for him to be with Tini. In response, Tini has become active in numerous social organisations and women's groups, leaving her little time to deal with household work. This further distances Tono from her, as he expects her to behave like a traditional wife and be waiting for him at home, with dinner ready, when he returns from work.One day, Tono receives a call from a Miss Eni, who asks him to treat her at a hotel. After Tono arrives at the hotel where Eni is staying, he discovers that she is actually his childhood friend Rohayah (Yah). Yah, who has had romantic feelings for Tono since childhood, begins seducing him, and after a while, he accepts her advances. The two begin furtively meeting, often taking long walks at the port Tanjung Priok. When Tini goes to Surakarta to attend a women's congress, Tono decides to stay at Yah's house for a week.While at Yah's, Tono and Yah discuss their pasts. Tono reveals that after he graduated from elementary school in Bandung, where he studied with Yah, he attended medical school in Surabaya and married Tini for her beauty. Meanwhile, Yah was forced to marry an older man and move to Palembang. After deciding that life as a wife was not for her, she moved to Batavia and became a prostitute, before serving as a Dutchman's mistress for three years. Tono falls further in love with Yah, as he feels that she is more likely to be a proper wife for him; Yah, however, does not consider herself ready for marriage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Willows_at_Christmas"title="The Willows at Christmas">
The twelve days of Christmas are fast approaching and Mole is planning to enjoy every one of them with his River Bank friends, but he is horrified and upset to learn that nobody looks forward to the festive season. So when the normally cheerful Mr Toad despairs at the arrival of Mrs Ffleshe, a quite impossibly rude house guest, Mole must do something about it. But the plan he hatches with Ratty, Badger and Otter to rescue Toad goes horribly wrong. With the prospect of Christmas in gaol and a trial for capital offences soon to follow, Mole will have to work hard if he is to salvage something of the Christmas spirit for his friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Hero"title="Conan the Hero">
Conan and his friend Juma, both soldiers in the army of Turan, are stationed in the far-off jungles of Venjipur to defend its beleaguered royal family against the rebellious Hwong tribe. Both comrades are dissatisfied; they and those under them have been doing all the fighting, and see no chance for advancement, as their timid superior officers never risk their own lives in battle. In one skirmish, Conan rescues a girl named Sariya from being sacrificed by Mojurna, an evil shaman. This subsequently leads to trouble, when one of the Turanian officers attempts to rape her and is killed by Conan.There are orders for Conan's execution, but he is the hero of Yaralet and a man whom King Yildiz has his eye on. However, Yildiz's captain devises a plan to get Conan out of circulation for a while by sending him deep into enemy territory. Conan's unit is ambushed, and he calls for reinforcements, only to have his request denied by one of the officers who has it in for him. His men defeat their attackers on their own—barely. The wounded Conan is carried back to camp by Juma. Meanwhile, his enemies plan to have him disposed of by their corrupt Venjipoorian allies. Accordingly, Conan is drugged and brought before the duplicitous Pheng Loon, leader of a Venjipoorian tribe the Turanians are supposedly there to help. Despite his hallucinations induced by the drug, Conan is able to throw off its influence and escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shatter_Me"title="Shatter Me">
Juliette Ferrars is a 17-year-old girl whose touch paralyzes and kills, taking living organisms' energy. Juliette is in an asylum because three years prior, she killed a small boy in a store with her unusual touch. It is evident that Juliette is partly insane, both from prolonged isolation and at horror at herself. She repeatedly dreams of a bird and writes in a small notebook.Suddenly, for the first time ever, Juliette gets a cellmate who goes by the name of Adam Kent. He reminds Juliette of someone, but she convinces herself that it is not possible that she ever knew him. She shows Adam the ways of the asylum, such as not to eat the scalding food immediately, and when the asylum's occupants are allowed to shower. At some point, Juliette wakes up to find Adam has touched her, and she becomes confused.One day, the Reestablishment, a government that has the world within its grasp, comes for Juliette. It is revealed that Adam is a soldier for Aaron Warner, the leader of Sector 45 of the Reestablishment. Warner, who is also the son of the Reestablishment's Supreme Commander, makes Juliette an offer that includes her being able to get out of the asylum in turn for her torturing any prisoners with her touch as a weapon for the Reestablishment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom's_Daughter"title="Wisdom's Daughter">
As Holly points out, the story is told from She's perspective, and since She claims to have lived for over two thousand years, since Ancient Egypt, there is no way to compare her story with any other sources, or witnesses.She Who Must Be Obeyed says that she was Arabian, by birth; and given the name Ayesha.Although, in the introduction, Sir H. Rider Haggard links the name Ayesha to Mohammed's wives, and Arabic or Arabic names, (Arabic: عائشة, Āʾisha), stating that it should be pronounced "Ash/ -ha"; A·ye·sha/ äˈ(y)ēSHə/, is perhaps more common.She claims that her natural beauty and wisdom was so great, it caused wars between the princes, who wanted to marry her. She says that while this was at first a great source of pride among her Father's people, they soon began to resent her, and spread vicious rumours that she was cursed.Ayesha leads her Father's people into victory, and revels in the battle; but, the women envy her, and the men lust after her. So, she decides to go into hiding, with her tutor, an Egyptian priest; rather than be turned over to the approaching armies of Pharaoh.She tells about travelling through the ancient world, encountering all the major artists, who want her to model for them; as well as philosophers, and religions of the time, from Ancient Greece and fledgling Ancient Rome to Palestine and Jerusalem.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oromay"title="Oromay">
The story is narrated in the third person by a journalist named Tsegaye who is also the main character in story. He is sent to Asmara, Eritrea, as propaganda minister of the Red Star campaign, an effort to defeat the rising insurgency in the area by a combination of economic and military campaigns. He arrives in Asmara in the evening and goes out to tour the city and make a documentary to be aired that same day. During his tour, he notices the strain caused by the insurgency on the local population, which is suffering from lack of food and fuel. Nonetheless, he attempts to portray an image of a resilient society that stands for peace and unification. He goes to a reception where he meets Fiameta Gila and falls in love with her. He also meets Selay Berhe, who is a double agent with Shabia, and is the chief of a cell operating in Asmara going by the code name of Oromay. He has had previous experience with Fiameta, and is not happy when she approaches Tsegaye during the reception.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_Fowl_and_the_Last_Guardian"title="Artemis Fowl and the Last Guardian">
Just as Artemis leaves his final session of therapy for Atlantis Complex, he and Butler are summoned by Holly to the office of Commander Trouble Kelp, where they witness the next plan of Opal Koboi; she has two of her underlings kill her past self, who had survived the Kraken blast in "The Time Paradox". Her past self's death creates a paradox, causing Opal's creations from the past five years to violently explode. To prevent the destruction of Atlantis, Opal's prison, the Fairies place Opal in the containment chamber of a nuclear reactor. The blast destroys most Fairy technology, which Koboi labs had controlled or created, and human technology, since black market Koboi chips had been used in their development and construction.As explosions throughout the world blow out most vehicles, buildings, satellites, and cell phones, killing many people in the process, human communication systems shut down, and the human world falls into chaos. During her stay in the nuclear reactor, Opal furthers her ability to use black magic and opens The Berserker's Gate, a portal located on the Fowl estate, behind which dwell the spirits of fairy soldiers killed in the Battle of Taillte, an ancient war fought nearly ten thousand years previously. The spirits rise and possess Beckett and Myles, Artemis's twin brothers, Juliet, corpses, and woodland critters. Queen Bellico is the spirit possessing Juliet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Stalin's_Nose"title="Breaking Stalin's Nose">
The book opens in either the late 1940s or early 1950s in Moscow with 10-year-old Sasha Zaichik, a devoted Communist youth, writing a letter of praise to current Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, on the eve of his induction into the mandatory organization the Young Pioneers. His American mother is dead and he resides in a communal apartment with his high-ranking party member father. He believes his mother died naturally of illness, but it is strongly implied throughout the book that his father was so zealous in his work he denounced his wife, resulting in her execution. After writing his letter, Sasha goes to the communal kitchen to wait for his father to get home from work and it is revealed he and his father are somewhat outcasts who stay primarily in their room. Sasha gives his letter to his father who he believes will give it to Stalin since his father is a top party member and works for the police state as a spy. Before they go to bed, Sasha's father randomly tells him he should go to an aunt for assistance if ever they are separated.In the middle of the night, Sasha's father is arrested by the secret police, apparently on the tip of a neighbor called Stukachov, who desired the Zaichik family's large room for his own family. While a bewildered and confused Sasha watches, Stukachov tidies the ransacked room, moves his family in, and tells him he will enjoy growing up in an orphanage. Sasha decides there has been some sort of mistake and he will go see Stalin personally to get the matter straightened out. He is chased away from the Kremlin by armed guards and heads to his aunt's home instead, but this aunt doesn't want to get involved and sends him away with a small amount of money because she and her husband have an infant and fear arrest themselves if they get involved. He sleeps in the basement of the aunt's apartment building and goes to school as if everything is just fine, although he knows his father will not come to the ceremony that afternoon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadlocked_(novel)"title="Deadlocked (novel)">
The novel begins with Sookie embroiled in the consequences of the events of the previous novel. Felipe de Castro, Vampire King of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Nevada, has come to town to investigate the mysterious death of his representative in Louisiana, Victor, who was killed by Eric, with the help of Bill, Sookie, Pam, and several others. A dead woman is found on the lawn of Eric's house while he is having a party in honor of Felipe, embroiling Sookie and her vampire friends in a police investigation. Meanwhile, Sookie's fairy great-grandfather, Niall, visits in order to investigate who placed a spell on his son, Dermot, to make him mad. He takes Claude back to the fairy realm with him, while Sookie contends with the powerful magical object given by her half-fairy grandfather, Fintan, to her grandmother, and then in turn left to Sookie. It can grant the possessor a great magical wish on behalf of someone they love, and it appears that someone has been searching for it and may stop at nothing to possess it.In addition, Sookie could be facing the end of her relationship to Eric. She catches him feeding on the woman who is soon found dead on his lawn, and who was laced in fairy blood and was purposely sent to Eric in an attempt to frame him and for Sookie to find out; she has to contend with the final command of his maker, Appius Livius Ocella, for Eric to marry Freyda, Vampire Queen of Oklahoma. She also has werewolf troubles, as Sam is dating Jannalynn, enforcer for Alcide's Long Tooth Pack, and Jannalynn is out to get Sookie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamtime_(book)"title="Dreamtime (book)">
Duerr examines the use of flying ointment in early modern witchcraft and draws ethnographic parallels from accused witches among the Shona people of Rhodesia and witchcraft beliefs of the Normanby Archipelago in the South Pacific. He concludes that some of those accused of witchcraft in early modern Europe had applied hallucinogenic ointments to their skin to make themselves believe that they were flying to the so-called witches' sabbat, a ritual gathering of witches. Noting the apparent lack of recipes for this salve in the witch trial records, Duerr posits the view that the Christian authorities intentionally covered up the existence of hallucinogenic ointments, fearing that their existence would cast doubt on various aspects of the witches' accounts, including their alleged encounters with the Devil. Duerr maintains that this knowledge might have ultimately led people to cast doubt on even the Devil, a key aspect of early modern Christian cosmology. Although the use of hallucinogenic ointments was not a factor in every witch trial, it was more prevalent in the earlier trials of the Alpine region. Duerr connects its use to the nocturnal visionary traditions associated with the goddess Diana in that region.Duerr then looks into the origins of the nocturnal visionary traditions, beginning with the ancient Greek deity Artemis and her influence on the Roman goddess Diana. In Alpine lore, Diana survived Christianization as the leader of the nocturnal procession. Duerr goes further back into the Palaeolithic, where Venus figurines are interpreted as a "prototype" for the later Greek Artemis, a goddess who was "the unrestrained mistress of animals and plants". Duerr then describes the relationship between ancient goddesses and caves as a symbol of the female vagina and explores stories involving caves in Greek mythology, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and Yakut folklore. Duerr proposes that the association between caves and the vagina is global in scope, as societies around the world use caves in rituals symbolizing birth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Cancelled"title="Tokyo Cancelled">
The separate chapters in the novel, each one narrating a tale from a different passenger, are as follows:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_Dirty_(novel)"title="Play Dirty (novel)">
The book tells the story of Griff Burkett, a football fallen star, who was caught cheating and was sent to prison. After five years, Burkett is a free man. He meets Foster and Laura Speakman, a wealthy and successful but childless couple. They hire Burkett to do a secret job, but then is suspected of an unsolved murder by his long-time nemesis, detective Stanley Rodarte. Burkett tries to prove his innocence and save the people they care about the most. The narrative contains a lot of sexual content. The book was published by Ricochet in 2006 and later by Simon &amp; Schuster.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Box_(novel)"title="The Black Box (novel)">
Bosch tackles a 20-year-old cold case which took place during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.A white photojournalist is found killed near a burned-out store. Harry Bosch and Jerry Edgar were the original detectives called out to the scene. Riots Task Force later took up the case but it remained unsolved over the years. The case is reopened when Harry matches a shell casing he discovered at the scene to three other murders. Attempts to stall Harry's investigation by his supervisor as well as the police chief, to avoid a bad publicity fallout, fail. In his personal life, Harry's daughter Maddie says she wants to become a member of the LAPD, after having expressed an interest in a law enforcement career in "The Drop". The story also introduces a part-time recurring character, Nancy Mendenhall, an IAD investigator. The 'Black Box', just like ones in the airlines, refers to the piece of the puzzle that will tie all ends together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midst_Toil_and_Tribulation"title="Midst Toil and Tribulation">
Following the events at the end of How Firm a Foundation, civil war has wracked the Republic of Siddarmark, causing widespread starvation and violence between those loyal to Lord Protector Greyghor Stohnar and the Temple Loyalists, who have risen up against him at the behest of Zhaspahr Clyntahn, the Grand Inquisitor of the Church of God Awaiting. The suddenness of the uprising (code named "The Sword of Schueler") has "officially" caught the heretical Empire of Charis by surprise, and Emperor Cayleb and Empress Sharleyan begin to make preparations to send an expeditionary force to assist Stohnar in repelling the Church's invasion force while also sending large quantities of food to help the starving population. In the meantime, Princess Irys, Prince Daivyn and Earl Coris arrive at long last in Tellesberg, where they are met by the emperor and empress. While they officially recognize Prince Daivyn as the legitimate ruler of Corisande and grant him and his sister freedom of movement throughout Old Charis, political considerations preclude the possibility of Hektor Daykyn's children from returning home to Corisande. While the prepubescent Daivyn is having the time of his life playing with noble boys his age (and generally getting into trouble) Irys is faced with a serious crisis of faith and conscience, as she confronts all the implications of their current political situation as well as all the religious implications of Charis' push to innovate and seek out that knowledge which the Church of God Awaiting defines as forbidden.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Wehrwolf"title="Der Wehrwolf">
The Thirty Years' War is at its height while the peasantry suffers under countless marauders. The protagonist Harm Wulf, a peasant, lost his family in the first years of war; he becomes the "defending Wulf" ("wehrender Wulf") by defending a hill fort and its surrounding carr, with peasants hiding from the pillaging hordes. Harm Wulf gathers allies until 121 men are in the "Alliance of the Wehrwolf". After peace is restored, Harm Wulf is a grim old man.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Thing_About_My_Sister"title="The Worst Thing About My Sister">
Martina ("Marty") is a tomboy who loves animals and drawing comics that feature a character she created, Mighty Mart. Her elder sister Melissa loves the colour pink and make-up and is very feminine; Melissa does not get along with Martina. Their mother makes dresses and is a school secretary, and their father is a travel agent who is losing most of his income because of the rise in online booking.Marty is invited to Alisha's party just because her mum made a dress for Alisha. Her mother forces Marty to attend and makes a blue party dress. When she comes and picks her up she talks to the owner of the dancing school where the party was held. She announces that she wants her to make some costumes for the children and other parents want bridesmaids dresses. This means their mother has to expand – she needs an extra room to sew in, so Marty and Melissa need to share a room. It gets decorated, although most of it is chosen by Melissa because she's elder. At school, mean girls call her "bluebottle" because of her dress. Marty sneaks in raw eggs and throws them at the bullies resulting in some disastrous consequences. Marty invites her best friend Jaydene to look at her new room, but Jaydene acts like she prefers Melissa to Marty, which annoys her. When Melissa shows her friends the room, she is shocked to find Marty has trashed the room. Marty brings up some smoothies as an apology and is horrified to find out that Melissa is mocking her homemade animals. Marty embarrasses her by showing her friends Melissa's toy Baba, and Melissa swears she will take revenge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Big_Man_(novel)"title="Little Big Man (novel)">
The novel is structured as a recorded narrative of the purported exploits of 121-year-old Jack Crabb, a white male who was raised by the Cheyenne nation, as he describes his wanderings across the nineteenth-century American West to Ralph Fielding Snell, a somewhat gullible "Man of Letters." Though unknown to conventional history, Crabb has supposedly crossed paths with many of the West's notable figures, including Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, Buffalo Bill, and George Armstrong Custer. At various times captured, rescued, escaped, and returned to or from both white and Native American societies of the time, Crabb also claims to be the "sole white survivor" of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicion_(novel)"title="Suspicion (novel)">
Inspector Hans Bärlach, at the end of his career and suffering from cancer, is recovering from an operation. He witnesses how his friend and doctor Samuel Hungertobel turns pale and becomes nervous when looking at a photograph in a magazine he is reading. The person pictured is the German Dr. Nehle who carried out horrific experiments on prisoners in the concentration camp Stutthof near Gdańsk, including operating on patients without anesthesia. Hungertobel explains that his colleague Fritz Emmenberger, who was in Chile and publishing medical articles from there during the war, closely resembles Dr. Nehle.Bärlach suspects that Nehle and Emmenberger either changed roles during their time in Chile or happen to be the same person. A close friend of Bärlach's is the Jew Gulliver who fell victim to Nehle's experiments in Stutthof. Gulliver visits Bärlach and they talk and drink through the night. In the morning, Bärlach is convinced that Dr. Emmenberger, who is now the director of a famous private clinic for the rich and dying in Zurich, committed Nazi war crimes under the false name of Dr. Nehle. He determines to sign himself into Emmenberger's clinic under the false name of Kramer in order to confirm his suspicions and put the suspect under pressure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Following_Story"title="The Following Story">
Herman Mussert, formerly a schoolteacher of Latin and Greek and later a travel writer, wakes one morning in a hotel room in Lisbon. His last memory had been falling asleep the night before in his Amsterdam apartment, but now he has Portuguese currency in his wallet and room service finds nothing strange in his ordering breakfast. Moreover he remembers the room from a love encounter twenty years before with a colleague’s wife. This had come about when his favourite student, the beautiful and talented Lisa d'India, had an affair with Arend Herfst, another master in the school. In revenge, Herfst's wife Maria Zeinstra, who taught science in the same school, had seduced Mussert. Eventually this leads to a public fight between the two men, after which Herfst drives away with Lisa and she is killed when he crashes the car. In the ensuing scandal, all three teachers are dismissed from the school and Mussert becomes a successful but facile travel writer under the name of Strabo. Mussert recalls some of this as he wanders about Lisbon and later boards a ship sailing to Brazil and then up the River Amazon. Travelling with him are a Spanish boy, an Italian monastic, an Arabian airline pilot, an English journalist, a Chinese professor and an unidentified woman. One by one the males tell how they had come to die until it is Mussert's turn. The only audience left to him, apart from the readers of the book, is the woman - now revealed as his former star student, Lisa d'India - to whom he relates "the following story".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Life"title="Mars Life">
Jamie Waterman is back as Director of the Mars Program; along with his wife Vijay, the beautiful Indian-Aussie, and Dex Trumball, the Director of the Board in charge of Mars financing. The death of his son bring Waterman and his wife back to Earth, and puts them both in a slump. Over the years, the New Morality has slowly been taking over the American government, and gaining power; the NM restricts and censors anything that is a threat to them, and hide behind religion. One of their biggest concerns is the Mars program, which is taking money away from projects that would benefit the dystopian-style Earth. As money is slowly cut off from Mars, Dex and Jamie rush to find a solution to keeps the exploration of Mars open; however, both have different views. Waterman wants to preserve the Martian life and culture, while Dex is willing to open Mars up to wealthy tourists. The Navajo scientist and Vijay return to Mars in time of great discovering; a Martian village and relics have been found, as well as what might be a graveyard, holding remains of an ancient, intelligent Martian race. Jamie struggles to find the balance of things, as time and money begin to run out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_Zebedee?"title="Who Killed Zebedee?">
"Who Killed Zebedee?" opens with a direct address to the readers by an otherwise unnamed narrator. On his deathbed, our narrator, a Roman Catholic, feels compelled to make a confession to the readers about his involvement in an unsolved murder case back when he was still a young police constable in London.The recounting of the death of Zebedee opens with a distraught young woman, Priscilla Thurlby, the cook at the Zebedee's boarding house, rushing into the police station with a blood-curdling scream. Priscilla informs the skeptical assembly that, "A young woman has murdered her husband in the night!" While the police initially believe the young woman to be intoxicated, they eventually visit the boarding house to find that a young, married man has been stabbed in the back with a knife.The police immediately begin an inspection of the scene of the crime. The lodgers of the boarding house are interviewed, all of whom prove to be eccentric, however, during the interviews, the young constable and his fellow officers become increasingly suspicious of Mr. Deluc, a smarmy cigar agent, who had made repeated amorous advances towards Mrs. Zebedee. Unfortunately, this suspicion is confounded by Mrs. Zebedee, who is positive she has killed her husband in her sleep. A sleepwalker, Mrs. Zebedee had read a story about a young woman who had murdered her husband in her sleep before falling asleep on the night her husband was murdered. The police suspect the real answer might hinge on the half-inscribed knife, "To John Zebedee-" still wedged in Zebedee's back, but a preliminary search reveals nothing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charon's_Claw_(novel)"title="Charon's Claw (novel)">
The story begins in the year 1463 DR with a meeting of the Xorlarrin House of Menzoberranzan. Ravel, the second boy and spellspinner of the house, proposes a plan to take Gauntlgrym as their own and establish a new drow city with them as the rulers. Matron Mother Zeerith Xorlarrin approves an expedition to Gauntlgrym led by Ravel. The rest of the party consists of Brach'Thal, a mage of diminished power since the Spellplague and Ravel's older brother and father; Jaerth, the house weapon master; and Saribel and Berellip, priestess sisters of Ravel. Nearly 100 mercenaries are hired, consisting mostly of houseless rogue drows, a drider named Yerrininae and his twenty warriors, and a host of goblin slaves. Tiago Baenre is also sent by Matron Mother Triel Baenre to ensure the journey goes according to her wishes, and is accompanied by Gol'fanin, a master drow blacksmith.Drizzt and Dahlia begin their journey back to Neverwinter. Close by, Effron spies on them unnoticed and prepares the Shadovar mercenaries of Cavus Dun for an ambush on the two with the desired result being Drizzt's death and Dahlia's capture. The force consists of Jermander, leader and swordsman; Ratsis, spider tamer; Parbid and Afafrenfere, warrior monks and friends; Amber Gristle O' Maul ("Ambergris"), a dwarven priestess; Bol, a large tiefling warrior; Horrible, a silent female warrior; and Shifter, a powerful Shadovar mage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rider_on_the_White_Horse"title="The Rider on the White Horse">
The novella tells the story of Hauke Haien, related to the narrator by a schoolmaster in a small town in Northern Frisia. Hauke is the son of a farmer and licensed surveyor and does his best to learn his father's trade. He even learns Dutch so he can read a Dutch print of Euclid's work on mathematics and geometry. Over time he becomes very familiar with the dykes along the local coast and begins to wonder if it would not be better to make them flatter on the sea side so as to reduce their windage during floods.When local "Deichgraf" Tede Volkerts fires one of his hands, Hauke applies for the job and is accepted. He soon becomes a great help for Volkerts, which makes Ole Peters, the senior hand, dislike him. Tensions rise even more when Hauke begins to show interest in the Deichgraf's daughter, Elke. Hauke even proposes marriage, but she wants to wait.After the unexpected deaths of both Hauke's and Elke's fathers, the people of the village must choose a new Deichgraf. Hauke is actually already doing the work, but does not hold the necessary lands required for the position. However, Elke announces that they are engaged, and that he will soon hold her family's lands as well. With the traditionalists satisfied, Hauke becomes the new Deichgraf. However, the people soon start talking about his white horse, which they believe is a resurrected skeleton that used to be visible on a small island, but is now gone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballad_of_the_Desert"title="Ballad of the Desert">
Orphaned Yu Jin was raised by wolves in the desert before a Han living with a Xiongnu tribe took her back to camp. She soon became friends with the Xiongnu children, including Yu Chan, Yizhixie, and Mudaduo. One year later, due to political changes, her foster father was murdered. His only wish was for her to return to his hometown Chang'an, in the Han dynasty.Thus, Yu Dan tried to help her flee the Xiongnu territory, but soon found out that Yi Zhi Xie, the new clan leader, had sent soldiers to pursue them. To save Yu Jin, Yu Dan persuaded her to stay in the wild desert and return to the wolf pack she had grown up with while he kept going, leading the soldiers on a wild goose chase. Years later, a teenage Yu Jin met the disabled Meng Jiu (Meng Ximo), who was part of a traveling merchant's caravan and then saved Huo Qubing (under the alias of Xiao Huo) and his comrades while they were fleeing the desert bandits on the way back to Chang'an. Yu Jin introduced herself as Jin Yu, remembering her foster father's last wish she asked for some traveling money from Huo Qubing as repayment. Huo gave her the money, but then requested that she lead them out of the desert. Jin Yu did not realize that Xiao Huo was actually the Han general Huo Qu Bing. After leading them out of the desert, she sets off towards Chang'an by herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Girl"title="The Last Girl">
## Jolanta, mid-1990s.Steponas Daumantas, an elderly poet, walks the streets of Vilnius photographing young women with their babies. He becomes obsessed with one particular woman, Jolanta, and strikes up a friendship with her. Jolanta gives him a manuscript that her husband has written, and Daumantas promises to look at it and possibly show his publisher, but loses it when he gets drunk. As his friendship with the young woman deepens he can no longer hold back the memories that have been bubbling up for years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Never_Sky"title="Under the Never Sky">
"Under the Never Sky" follows the character of Aria, a 17-year-old girl who has been exiled from Reverie, the domed city in a dystopian future 300 years after a major catastrophe has decimated the Earth. Aria was banished from her home when she is blamed for starting a fire that took the lives of her best friend and two others. This punishment means almost certain death: outside of her Pod and other similar Pods where the technologically advanced dwell, is a wasteland known as the Death Shop. It's a place known to be filled with cannibals and terrible Aether storms; even the air can kill you. However, she soon discovers that she can breathe the outside air without fatal harm, though she has little other means of surviving in the savage land. Then she meets an Outsider named Perry, Aria eventually realizes that he is her only chance for survival. Despite his reluctance to help a sheltered girl from Reverie, Perry knows that Aria has the potential to help him redeem himself. The two must learn how to work together if they are to survive in this new dangerous world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_This_Wicked_Patch_of_Dust"title="From This Wicked Patch of Dust">
In the border shantytown of Ysleta, Texas, Mexican immigrants Pilar and Cuauhtemoc Martinez strive to teach their four children to forsake the drugs and gangs of their neighborhood. The family's hardscrabble origins unite them to survive, but soon the children adapt to their new home, reject their traditional religion and culture, and struggle to remain together as a family. The novel spans four decades.As a young adult, daughter Julieta travels to Central America, becomes disenchanted with Catholicism, and converts to Islam. Youngest son Ismael, always the bookworm, is accepted to Harvard but feels out of place in the Northeast, where he meets and marries a Jewish woman. The other boys—Marcos and Francisco—toil in their father's old apartment buildings, serving as cheap labor to fuel the family's rise to the middle class. Over time, Francisco isolates himself in El Paso. Marcos eventually leaves to become a teacher, but then returns, struggling with a deep bitterness about his work and marriage. Through it all, Pilar clings to the idea of her family and tries to hold it together as her husband's health begins to fail.This backdrop is shaken to its core by the historic events of 2001 in New York City, which send shockwaves through this newly American family. Bitter conflicts erupt between siblings, and the physical and cultural spaces between them threaten to tear them apart. Will their shared history and once-shared dreams be enough to hold together a family from Ysleta, this wicked patch of dust?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Archaeology_of_Ritual_and_Magic"title="The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic">
In his preface, Merrifield noted that while archaeologists studying prehistoric periods have paid increasing attention to the evidence for ritual and magic in the archaeological record, their counterparts working in later historical periods have failed to follow their lead. Presenting this book as a rectifier, he outlines his intentions and the study's limitations.Chapter one, "Ritual and the archaeologist", begins by describing the ritual deposits from the pre-Roman Iron Age sites of Cadbury Castle and Danebury, hillforts in southern Britain. Merrifield laments the fact that the majority of archaeologists, particularly those studying literate, historical periods, have avoided ritual explanations for unusual phenomenon in the archaeological record; he believes that they exhibit a "ritual phobia". He contrasts this view with that of those archaeologists studying the Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain, who have widely accepted the ritual uses of chambered tombs and stone circles. He specifies particular definitions for words such as "ritual", "religion" and "superstition", arguing that such terms must be used with precision by archaeologists. Offering a case study, he describes how Neolithic stone axes were adopted as amulets or talismans in the later Roman Iron Age onward in Britain, and that as such archaeologists should expect to find them in non-prehistoric contexts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet's_Father"title="Hamlet's Father">
The story largely follows the plot of "Hamlet". Unlike the original, Hamlet is disconnected from his indifferent father. He does not envy Claudius as the new king, believing him to be a fine monarch, although he pines for the day when he can rule Denmark peacefully and without war. He grieves little after the death of Ophelia. Hamlet does not question death nor his faith, which is unshakable. He is presented as moral and unwavering, a stark contrast to the original Hamlet.At the end of the story, it is revealed that King Hamlet was not killed by Claudius, as the king had led Hamlet to believe, but by Horatio in retaliation for the king having molested him as a young boy. It is also revealed that the King had molested Laertes, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hamlet is sent to Hell for the harm he's caused and will be with his father for eternity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Democratic_Paradox"title="The Democratic Paradox">
The eponymous paradox of democracy that this collection of essays deals with is the internal conflict within modern liberal democracy that is created by the union of two separate strands of political thought: the tradition of classical liberalism and the tradition of democratic theory, forming the institution of liberal democracy. Mouffe sees Radical Democracy as a means for continuing to sustain the balance between the values of liberalism and democracy. This balance is accomplished through the agonistic practice of valuing and sustaining dissent in the democratic process as a more important goal than consensus. This point is where "Radical Democratic" theory diverges from both Habermas and Rawls, as it contradicts Habermas's quest for rational consensus and Rawls's project for political liberalism. Mouffe describes the importance of the radical democratic alternative in a 2009 interview, saying that "The aim of a pluralist democracy is to provide the institutions that will allow them to take an agonistic form, in which opponents will treat each other not as enemies to be destroyed, but as adversaries who will fight for the victory of their position while recognising the right of their opponents to fight for theirs. An agonistic democracy requires the availability of a choice between real alternatives."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil's_Own_Work"title="The Devil's Own Work">
The unnamed narrator tells of his friend Edward's meeting in the south of France with O. M. (Old Man) Tyrell, a renowned author. Tyrell is found dead the following morning and the narrator later learns that Tyrell has given Edward a peculiar handwritten manuscript which becomes the source of Edward's later literary success. Edward also inherits Tyrell's ageless mistress Eudoxie but all is far from well with Edward who grows to loathe the hold that the manuscript and Eudoxie have over him but is unable to escape...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Questionnaire_(Gruša_novel)"title="The Questionnaire (Gruša novel)">
Jan Chrysostom Kepka is asked to complete a questionnaire for a job application, required by the faceless bureaucrat Comrade Pavlenda. What follows is an ironic answer: a full and surreal account of Jan's life and times.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_without_End"title="Flight without End">
The novel starts with protagonist Franz Tunda, born 1894, escaping confinement in Russia and finding a home with Baranowicz from Poland, who lives in Werchne-Udisnk. In the spring of 1919 the lieutenant hears of the end of the war and decides to go to Vienna to meet his fiancee, Miss Irene Hartmann. By September Tunda has made it to Ukraine. Caught up in the Russian Civil War, he first falls into the hands of the White Army, but later he ends up with the Red Army. Tunda falls in love with his supervisor, a Russian woman named Natascha Alexandrowna, becomes a revolutionary himself and gives passionate speeches in support of Communism.Later, in Moscow, Tunda has to manage his postwar life. He is asked to join the Communist Party, but leaves to Georgia and falls in love with a woman called Alja. They get married in Baku. Tunda takes care of a French delegation from Paris, shows them around and sleeps with Mrs. G., the only woman in the delegation. Later he is regarded as a spy by the French. When saying goodbye, Mrs G. tells Tunda her address in France. Tunda leaves his wife, gets Austrian identity papers and later lives in Vienna on unemployment benefit. He misses his home in Siberia just as much as he misses to Irene. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_Staircase"title="Floating Staircase">
Following the success of his latest novel, Travis Glasgow and his wife Jodie buy their first house in the western Maryland town of Westlake, across the street from Travis' brother Adam and his family. At first, everything is picture perfect, from the beautiful lake behind the house to the rebirth of the friendship between Travis and Adam. Travis also begins to overcome the darkness of his childhood and the guilt he's harboured since his younger brother's tragic drowning for which Travis holds himself responsible. Soon, though, the new house begins to lose its allure. Strange noises wake Travis at night, and his dreams are plagued by ghosts. Barely glimpsed shapes flit through the darkened hallways, but strangest of all is the bizarre set of wooden stairs that rises cryptically out of the lake behind the house. Travis becomes drawn to the structure, but the more he investigates, the more he uncovers the truth about the Dentmans, the family who owned his house previously, and how young Elijah Dentman had drowned in the lake behind the house in circumstances eerily similar to Travis' brother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samaritan_(novel)"title="Samaritan (novel)">
As the novel opens, Ray Mitchell is lying in a hospital, having been attacked and gravely injured by being hit over the head with a large vase. He refuses to press charges and it appears he will survive, so the police drop the case. However, an old friend of his from childhood, Nerese Ammons, pays a visit to her (and Ray's) old high school, to give a talk to the kids, and the principal tells her of a man who has been volunteer teaching at the school, and who was almost killed in an attack. When Nerese learns that the man involved is Ray, she is pleased. Nerese has a philosophy of always repaying acts of kindness—it helps her make sense of the world, and Ray once did her a great kindness: when she was around 10 years old and Ray around 12, she received a bad cut on her face during a game of stickball, causing all of the children present to run away... except Ray. He stanched the blood with his shirt, helped take her to the hospital, and sat with her and comforted her throughout the ER visit. She therefore begins to pursue the case, despite Ray's refusal to cooperate and refusal to press charges. The novel then alternates between scenes of the events leading up to the attack, and Nerese's investigations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Make_a_Black_Woman_Take_Off_Her_Earrings"title="Don't Make a Black Woman Take Off Her Earrings">
"Don't Make a Black Woman Take Off Her Earrings" is a collection of advice, stories, and wisdom written in the viewpoint of Madea. The topics covered in the book range from marriage, family, finance, religion, and gun care.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_Man's_Treasure_(novel)"title="Another Man's Treasure (novel)">
The novel is based in Albany, New York. Ted McCormick is a former Chicago stockbroker turned professional home organizer. He's also a devoted husband to his wife, Mary, a beautiful woman he married twelve years before.The difficult James Smith hires him to clear out all the junk in the cluttered Victorian mansion of his recently deceased father. Smith tells McCormick to look carefully for something of great value within the house, as he suspects his eccentric father hid something.Ted also begins to fall for one of his clients, a seductive and divorced single mother, Janet Blake. Janet becomes involved in the search for the hidden secret in the mansion, and she and Ted discover a baffling clue. Meanwhile, Ted's wife begins to suspect he is carrying on with Janet, and Janet's jealous ex-husband becomes threatening. Ted eventually ends up making amazing discoveries that effect the entire city.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescued_from_Paradise"title="Rescued from Paradise">
The first interstellar expedition successfully reached Barnard's Star and its double-planet Rocheworld and made contact with the flouwen, intelligent aquatic beings with a talent for higher mathematics and a love of surfing. The flouwen joined with the humans to explore the rest of Barnard's planets and moons. When a landing craft carrying ten humans and three flouwen crashlanded on a habitable moon—Eden—the team was marooned on Eden with no hope of rescue until decades later when a second expedition was scheduled from Earth.Not having any other option, the marooned explorers settled down to make the moon their home, befriending the indigenous inhabitants, the Jollys, exploring, learning to live off the land, and, most important, raising families. They struggled to survive natural disasters and unexpected attacks from the sea. Meanwhile, a strange tablet seems to show evidence of intelligent life beneath the ocean. The years pass... Crew members die, but many children are born.A new generation grows up hearing of Earth and its technology as a dim legend, and thinking of Eden as their natural home. The attacks from the sea are discovered to have come from an intelligent and aquatic species, the "weresharks" and not to have been on purpose. But communication proves to be difficult when it is discovered that the Flouwen are responsible for the Death of Steadfast Defender, a wereshark who was just trying to communicate. However, this misunderstanding is eventually resolved and the weresharks accept the so-called "Slimedevils".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_(Malfi_novel)"title="Snow (Malfi novel)">
The novel, which is broken up into two sections, "The Storm" and "Surviving," follows a group of strangers who become stranded at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport on Christmas Eve when a snow storm blows in. Todd Curry wants to see his estranged son Justin and his ex-wife Brianna for the holidays, having disappointed them in previous years. Kate Jansen also wants to get home for the holiday, as does fellow travelers Fred and Nan Wilkinson.The group, led by Todd, rents an SUV and attempts to drive to their respective destinations in Iowa, but their plans are changed when they nearly run over a man wandering through the snow. The SUV is wrecked so the travelers walk to Woodson, the nearest town. They learn that this town is overrun by phantoms that are made of snow, or a snow-like substance, and these phantoms have the ability to enter human beings and turn them into cannibalistic zombies.The travelers fend off the creatures and make their way through the town in search of any working vehicles, telephones, or computers, as the creatures, and the storm that accompanies them, seem to have rendered all mechanical devices useless. Eventually, Todd and Kate find survivors in the basement of the town's police station. There's Tully, a rough-around-the-edges townperson; Brendan and Molly, a couple with a baby on the way; Bruce, the town's remaining police officer; and Charlie and Cody, kids who also happen to be brother and sister. At the police station, Todd and Kate learn that mechanical devices that had not been in the town when the attack started still function properly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Underpants_and_the_Revolting_Revenge_of_the_Radioactive_Robo-Boxers"title="Captain Underpants and the Revolting Revenge of the Radioactive Robo-Boxers">
Continuing from the previous book, it is revealed that the giant zombie nerds move really slowly, so the giant Zombie Nerd Harold actually crushed a giant ketchup packet, not Tippy. Tippy Tinkletrousers travels back to 10 minutes before Kipper and friends see him and freezes them. Tippy shrinks and abducts his past self when George and Harold are about to be arrested. The boys travel back with their pets, but accidentally take Mr. Krupp with them. Big Tippy sends his smaller self back ten minutes to find where, then back there then, where the small ones zap themselves back and steal the Goosy-Grow 4000, which turns Tiny Tippy extremely massive. When Big Tippy attempts to use his nuclear bomb to kill Captain Underpants, Supa Mega Tippy zaps himself back in time (with his twin) and kicks Big Tippy and his bomb away into the Gulf of Mexico. When the bomb explodes, it blows a huge crater and kills the dinosaurs.The five protagonists and their captor then travel to the African savannas where the boys and their pets gain the trust of some cavemen who inhabit the surrounding jungles. The cavemen are taught English through drawings and subsequently, the boys make the world's first comic book (which involves drawings of traps working on Tippy). The Neanderthals, inspired by the book, then set traps for Tippy and defeat him. He then sets off his freeze ray (which has been tampered with by his younger twin so that it could not be turned off), and the Goosy-Grow 4000 enlarges the ice which appears to make Crackers' condition deteriorate and causes the Ice Age (and freezing Tippy himself).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silent_Stars_Go_By_(novel)"title="The Silent Stars Go By (novel)">
Instead of returning Amy and Rory to Leadworth for Christmas as he had promised, the Doctor accidentally lands the TARDIS on an Earth-like planet during winter. While Rory returns to the TARDIS to get a heavier coat, the Doctor and Amy meet the inhabitants of the planet, called Morphans, who capture them as they are convinced the Doctor's psychic paper is a conjure which is banned by their religion. A young woman named Bel Flurrish believes they are connected to her missing sister Vesta, who disappeared the previous night. The Doctor denies that they know anything about Vesta and gains Bel's trust; he uses his sonic screwdriver to unlock their cage and the three sneak out from the council of Morphans to look for Vesta. Bel tells the Doctor that they are colonists on the planet, named Hereafter, from Earth. The past few years the winters have grown colder, and this year livestock has disappeared in addition to Vesta, suggesting that there is something out there which is eating them for food. The Doctor, Amy, and Bel find they have been followed by a young Morphan named Samewell Crook, who chastises Bel for releasing the Doctor and Amy as he believes her sister will be found by the council, and threatens to go back and report the incident. Because of this, the Doctor decides he will allow Samewell to come with them. They come across footprints intersecting with another set of footprints and soon find blood in the snow; however, this belongs to a sheep, as Samewell soon finds a sheep bone which he easily recognises.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemoe_Karma"title="Nemoe Karma">
"Nemoe Karma" opens with Pan Soedana, a widower who enjoys gambling and is deeply in debt. After his debt drives him to divorce his second wife, Men Tirta, Pan Soedana gives Pan Soekreni in Ubud his son, Soedana, to clear his debt. The novel then follows the life of Soedana, who spends his childhood working off his father's debt before running away. After he is rescued by the Men Soekarsi family, the novel begins to focus on interactions in the family.A neighbour, Pan Sangga, intends to arrange a marriage between his son Sangga and the Soekarsi's daughter, Soekarsi. The Soekarsi family refuses, and it is revealed that the young Soekarsi has fallen in love with Soedana. She marries her adopted brother; however, Soedana accepts the marriage only because he feels he has a debt of honour to the family. Meanwhile, Sangga is married to his distant cousin Wiri; however, Sangga becomes an abusive husband to the point that his father apologizes to Wiri for forcing her into the marriage.Sangga is then revealed to have fallen in love with Soedana's half-sister, Loeh Tirta (known to him as Loeh Ratna). When he asked his father permission to marry Loeh Tirta, Pan Sangga refused as her genealogy was unclear. Eventually, Sangga divorces Wiri and goes looking for Loeh Tirta; while looking in the forest, he meets with Soedana. The two eventually find her, but she has already married. Sangga leaves because he thinks that Soedana also wants to marry Loeh Tirta. Afterwards, Soedana meets his step-mother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beautiful_Creatures_(novel)"title="Beautiful Creatures (novel)">
Sixteen-year-old Ethan Wate lives in Gatlin, South Carolina, with his widowed father. Lena Duchannes is a mysterious girl with magical powers who appears in Ethan's recurring nightmares. Though she initially rebuffs his attempts at interacting with her, they eventually become friends despite harassment from other classmates that almost gets her expelled. Lena's uncle Macon Ravenwood also attempts to keep Ethan and Lena apart to protect them. Every member of Lena's family is a "Caster" with magical powers. On Lena's sixteenth birthday, she will be "claimed" as either a Light or Dark Caster, but she is terrified of becoming an evil Dark Caster.Meanwhile, Ethan discovers a locket at Greenbrier plantation, that induces visions of Lena's ancestor Genevieve Duchannes and Ethan's ancestor Ethan Carter Wate, who were engaged during the Civil War. Through the locket, they discover that Genevieve tried to resurrect Ethan Carter Wate using the magical Book of Moons. Due to Genevieve's use of the spell, the Book has the ability to determine which of the Duchannes will be Light or Dark. Ethan and Lena find the Book of Moons in Genevieve's grave and study it for ways to prevent Lena from becoming Dark. Furthermore, Lena is continuously spiritually attacked by a Dark Caster named Sarafine, who is actually her mother. While the Duchannes cannot prevent the attacks, Ethan's presence seems to stop them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beautiful_Chaos_(Garcia_and_Stohl_novel)"title="Beautiful Chaos (Garcia and Stohl novel)">
"Beautiful Chaos" takes place shortly after the events in the previous book. Lena and Ethan are once again a couple, but her Claiming both the Light and Dark has some serious repercussions, as it disturbed the Order of things. Meanwhile Ethan finds himself slowly changing. He is unable to eat even his favorite foods without becoming nauseous, begins to hear voices, see mysterious writings, and his dreams make it impossible for him to sleep. Ethan also finds himself beginning to slowly lose his memories as well as seeing a stranger in his mirror, something that Amma reacts abnormally to. Suspicious, Ethan and Link follow Amma as she travels to visit a male Seer. They decide to return later to visit him, where they discover that due to Ethan being revived in the events in "Beautiful Creatures", his soul was brought back too quickly and was fractured as a result. Part of his soul resides in the underworld and unless Ethan brings the two back together, he will eventually change more and ultimately lose himself completely. Link inquires as to how this would be possible, only for the Seer to mention that he and Amma made a deal and then refuse to elaborate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Archaeology_of_Shamanism"title="The Archaeology of Shamanism">
## Part Four: Northern Europe.Chapter thirteen, "An ideology of transformation: Cremation rites and animal sacrifice in early Anglo-Saxon England", is provided by Howard Williams, then a Lecturer in Archaeology at Trinity College, Carmarthen in Wales. Devoted to a discussion of burial in Early Anglo-Saxon England, it focuses in on the connection between cremation rites and animal sacrifice, highlighting potentially shamanic elements of such religious practices. Following a brief overview of how earlier scholars have approached the study of Anglo-Saxon paganism, the paper then provides an overview for the archaeological crematory and sacrificial evidence from Anglo-Saxon contexts. Looking at animal designs found on some cremation urns, it highlights the recurring image of the horse within such contexts. Drawing from anthropological comparisons, Williams looks at shamanic cultures across Eurasia and North America which have performed animal sacrifice at funerals, before going on to look at evidence from both Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon literary sources, from which he puts forward the possibility that there may have been a shamanic component to Anglo-Saxon pagan religion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_into_Space_(book)"title="Journey into Space (book)">
The novel is situated on board of the "UNSS Armenia", a generation ship which is traveling from the Earth to a far away planet, where humanity is to establish a new civilisation. Because of the vast distance involved, the journey will span the lives of many generations. Apart from the generation which began the journey, and the generation which might end it, most generations will live and die on the ship. But when a child named Orphan is illicitly born from two lovers named August and Celeste, the ship's mission is turned upside down. After a nuclear holocaust wipes out most life on the Earth Orphan eventually takes control of the ship and turns the ship around back to Earth. Many years later a suicidal cult takes over the ship and it plummets back into the Earth, killing everyone on the ship and all remaining life on the planet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_Amulets_and_Curing_Stones"title="Anglo-Saxon Amulets and Curing Stones">
Chapter one, "Introduction" opens with Meaney's discussion of how archaeology can be used to shed light on the cognitive aspects of the past. She explains how she chooses to define terms like "amulet", "talisman", "charm" and "curing stone", before making comparisons with contemporary "good luck charms" to highlight the pervasiveness of amulets in human society. Moving on, she explores the early Christian attitudes to amulets in Europe using documentary sources, before going on to look specifically at the matter in Anglo-Saxon England. Here, she examines several Early Mediaeval manuscripts, such as the "Lacnunga" and "Bald's Leechbook", for evidence of written charms which made reference to amulets, before discussing the three known examples of Anglo-Saxon finger rings which had been engraved with a charm in runic script.Proceeding to discuss the existence of amulets and curing stones in Anglo-Saxon burials, she notes that two conditions must apply before an artefact is labelled under one of these two categories. The first is that there should be documentary evidence that "the object was believed to have magical powers." Although recognising that the most applicable documentary evidence should come from Anglo-Saxon England, she refuses to dismiss supporting evidence from a "related or descendent culture", and cites examples as varied as the ancient Greek "Natural History" by Pliny the Elder to 19th-century British folk customs. Her second condition is that such artefacts should be evidently "especially valued" by those who performed the burial, being close to the body, but which were neither beautiful nor useful, implying that they must have had a different, magical purpose.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Out_&amp;_Back_Again"title="Inside Out &amp; Back Again">
In February 1975, Hà Kim and her family celebrate the new year in South Vietnam, during the Vietnam War. In the events leading to the Fall of Saigon, Hà leaves school a month early, the search for her missing-in-action soldier father continues, and everyone prepares for evacuation since the government of the North is approaching Saigon. On April 30, Hà and her family flee on a navy ship and sets sail in the ocean until arriving in Guam on May 28, where they are sheltered in a refugee camp there.On the Fourth of July, many other refugees are asked to write where they want to go. Hà's mother initially chooses France to live with a distant cousin, until the person behind her suggests United States, stating that if her children are smart, the government will give them a scholarship.After they are flown to Florida, they are sponsored by an Alabama-based cowboy and are driven there by the cowboy, who allows them to stay at his house and eventually the house next to his. In school, a boy Hà dubs "Pink Boy" breaks their friendship, due to Hà solving his math problem and Pink Boy calling her a Pancake Face (and Hà telling the school about it)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprimatur_(novel)"title="Imprimatur (novel)">
The story is set in a Roman inn in the year 1683. Ten guests of varying origin are resident, including a French guitar player, a Tuscan doctor, a Venetian glass artisan, an English refugee, a Neapolitan astrologer posing as an artist, and an enigmatic Jansenist. Everyone is hiding their own secret. When the French nobleman De Mourai dies suddenly, the inn is placed under quarantine because the authorities believe the plague has broken out. One guest, the mysterious abbot Atto Melani, suspects instead that the Frenchman has been poisoned. Together with a young servant (as narrator), he starts to investigate.Together Melani and the servant discover a network of ancient tunnels, once used by early Christians to avoid persecution. They also discover that the other guests of the inn are using the tunnels for their own mysterious reasons. While the scenario unfolds, outside the whole Christian world anxiously awaits the outcome of the Turkish siege at the Battle of Vienna. The Christian military coalition has been assembled under the direction of Pope Innocent XI. If the Christian reinforcements arrive too late, Vienna will fall and Europe will be at the mercy of the Ottomans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Accidental_Sorcerer"title="The Accidental Sorcerer">
"The Accidental Sorcerer" follows haphazard wizard Gerald Dunwoody as he begins his employment as Royal Court Wizard to King Lional of New Ottosland, mentored by his friend Monk. Gerald takes the job reluctantly, and soon discovers that the King may not have his best interest in mind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entwined_(novel)"title="Entwined (novel)">
Azalea, the Princess Royale, is tasked with hosting the annual Yuletide ball the royal family holds on Christmas Eve. The Queen, who is heavily pregnant and ill, summons Azalea to her room to give her a silver handkerchief and make her swear on it to take care of her sisters. At the ball, Azalea meets a young Lord Bradford and quickly warms up to him. Her ten sisters, who are all too young to attend, sneak in and watch the event, a sisterly tradition. The ball is abruptly ended by Prime Minister Fairweller, without explanation, and the girls are sent to their room.The next morning Fairweller informs the princesses their mother died in the night, giving birth to their twelfth sister, Lily. As per tradition, the entire royal family are to go into mourning for a year. The princesses feel suffocated by all the restrictions, especially the one on dancing, which was their favorite pastime. The King goes off to war right after the funeral, leading the girls to wonder if he even loves them.Months later, Azalea discovers a D'Eathe mark, a remnant of when the kingdom was ruled by the insane High King of D'Eathe, which can reveal secret rooms and passageways when rubbed with something silver, in the girls' bedroom. She rubs the handkerchief on it, revealing a passage with a staircase leading downwards. She wakes the other girls and they all descend. At the bottom they find a forest of silver trees and a pavilion full of enchanted dancers. They interrupt the party and the dancers disappear. The owner of the pavilion introduces himself as the Keeper, and explains he was part of the legendary High King's court, but rebelled and was trapped within the castle as punishment. He allows the princesses to dance to their hearts' content, and invites them to return every night until mourning is over.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hundred-Year-Old_Man_Who_Climbed_Out_the_Window_and_Disappeared"title="The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared">
Allan Karlsson is about to celebrate his hundredth birthday, and his retirement home in Malmköping is planning to throw a party. Allan is not interested. Instead, he climbs out the window and disappears. He walks to the bus station, intending to travel as far as his available cash will allow. There he meets a young man with a suitcase too large to take into the toilet with him. The man goes in, rudely demanding that Allan look after the case. But Allan's bus arrives and he decides to board, taking the case with him. It turns out to be full of illegal drug money, and Allan is chased by the drug gang as well as by the police who are treating him as a missing person. He gets caught up in various criminal activities, eventually escaping when the man from the bus station is accidentally trapped in a freezer, his body ending up in a container destined for Djibouti. An elephant crushes another member of the gang, his remains being inadvertently sent to Latvia in the boot of a Ford Mustang.In parallel with Allan's adventures as a centenarian, the novel includes flashbacks to increasingly fantastic episodes from his younger days.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Post_Office_Girl"title="The Post Office Girl">
Christine is an Austrian public servant in a post-office job in a poverty-stricken city near St. Pölten in Lower Austria. She is a blonde woman whose mother is sick and whose father had died during World War I. One day, Christine receives an obscure telegram and sends it to her sickly mother. Upon reading more closely the telegram, Christine's mother is overcome by happiness by discovering that a few unknown relatives from America, Christine's aunt (Claire) and uncle, would take her on an upper-class trip to Pontresina, Switzerland. Christine is reluctant to go at first, but she concedes.Arriving in Switzerland, she is stunned by her relative poverty compared to the inhabitants and people from the bourgeois Hotel. She feels excluded due to her humble and troubling origins. Claire, her aunt from America, decides to transform her into a socialite and to make her more elegant in order to better fit the bourgeoise society in which she currently is. Christine changes her name, dresses and manner. She feels happier than she ever has during those few weeks, enjoying them frenetically. Nevertheless, her humble origins are eventually discovered by some, and Christine cannot stay there, triggering Claire to cancel their trip and return to America.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_the_Oprichnik"title="Day of the Oprichnik">
In 2028, the Tsardom of the days of Ivan the Terrible has been restored and Russia is isolated from the rest of the world by a "Great Russian Wall". The Tsarist autocracy have been restored and the ideals of xenophobia, protectionism, corruption and nationalism are strong within the nation. The only foreign things that make it into Russia are sales of natural gas and goods from the China-Europe transit.The novel begins with protagonist Andrei Komiaga, fourth highest in the ranking of the oprichnina, dreaming of a white stallion, a recurrent symbol of freedom that progressively slips away from the "Oprichnik" (the real "Oprichniks" of the 16th century always rode black horses). The oprichnina get to enjoy such privileges as riding in a Mercedes that has a dog's head tied to the bumpers, and living in a terem taken from an "enemy of the people".The neo-medieval enforcer's morning sees him murder a "boyar" (nobleman) and join in the gang-rape of his wife, a task he justifies to himself as important work. From there Komiaga conducts other seemingly routine activities: he investigates an artist penning inflammatory poetry about the Tsarina, visits a book-burning clairvoyant, ingests a fish that lays hallucinogenic eggs in his brain, and finally participates in ritualistic group sex and self-torture with his fellow "Oprichniki". The day ends with a demented Komiaga returning home, only to find that the white stallion of his dreams has retreated further from his grasp.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Habit"title="The Power of Habit">
## Habit loop.The Habit loop is a neurological pattern that governs any habit. It consists of three elements: a cue, a routine, and a reward. Understanding these components can help in understanding how to change bad habits or form good ones. The habit loop is always started with a cue, a trigger that transfers the brain into a mode that automatically determines which habit to use. The heart of the habit is a mental, emotional, or physical routine. Finally there is a reward, which helps the brain determine if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. In an article in "The New York Times", Duhigg notes, "The cue and reward become neurologically intertwined until a sense of craving emerges".According to Duhigg, craving drives all habits and is essential in starting a new habit, or reshaping an old one. Duhigg describes how Procter and Gamble used research on the habit loop and its connection to cravings to develop the market for Febreze, a product that eliminates bad odors, to make a fortune.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheis"title="Atheis">
The plot of "Atheis" is non-linear. A. Teeuw, a Dutch scholar of Indonesian literature, models it as below, with A representing the time frame covered in Hasan's manuscript (from his youth until splitting with Kartini), B representing the time frame in which the narrator meets with Hasan and receives his manuscript, and C representing the events around Hasan's death.The following plot summary is presented chronologically.Hasan, born to a religious Naqshbandi family in Panyeredan, is a student who lives with his family and adopted sister, Fatimah. After finishing his schooling, Hasan attempts to propose marriage to his classmate, Rukmini. However, Rukmini, who is from a higher social class than him, is set to marry a rich man from Batavia (modern day Jakarta). Instead, his parents ask him to marry Fatimah. Hasan refuses, then devotes himself to studying Islam with his father. In the early 1940s he moves to Bandung to work as a civil servant.In Bandung, Hasan works for the Japanese occupation government and lives an ascetic lifestyle, often fasting for days on end and dunking himself into a river to refresh his body between evening and morning prayers. While there, he meets his childhood friend Rusli, who introduces Hasan to his friend Kartini. Seeing that Rusli and Kartini are atheistic Marxist-Leninists, Hasan considers it his duty to return them to Islam. However, he finds himself unable to address Rusli's arguments against religion and begins doubting his faith. Soon Hasan becomes increasingly divorced from his religious upbringing, at one time skipping the mandatory "maghrib" prayer to watch a movie with Kartini. Through Rusli, Hasan is introduced to people from different ideologies, including the anarcho-nihilist playboy Anwar; he also begins courting Kartini.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Book_of_Social_Media"title="The Big Book of Social Media">
The publisher, on its site, summed up the book as, "Not business. Not marketing. This is an idea book." And an article in "Business Insider" described the book as bringing "the social back into social media."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcelo_in_the_Real_World"title="Marcelo in the Real World">
Marcelo Sandoval, is a seventeen-year-old who hears music in his head as a result of mild autism, described as a "cognitive disorder" by his father. He attends a school that caters to the needs of special children. His father, a lawyer, confronts Marcelo about needing experience in the "real world" and Marcelo ends up working at his father's law firm. At the law firm, Marcelo meets Jasmine, who works with him in the mail room. He also meets Mr. Holmes, who runs the law firm with Arturo, and his son, Wendell, who is "about three years older" than Marcelo. Wendell, described as a character with "the emotional maturity of an eight-year-old" according to Jasmine, attempts to befriend Marcelo. Wendell, who is attracted to Jasmine, explains mating to Marcelo, and how attraction feels and works.The book deals with Marcelo's friendship with Wendell, who pushes him to do things he doesn't like, and Jasmine, who introduces him to her family in Vermont. Eventually, Marcelo "fails" at his job, by refusing to go along with Wendell's plans. Instead, he plans on going to live in Vermont after he graduates, get a degree at a nearby college in nursing, and raise ponies on the Vermont farm to help with therapy for kids with special needs. Jasmine kisses him on the cheeks and, after the internal music had ceased ever since he started working at the law firm, it returns in "the most beautiful of melodies".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaytek_the_Wizard"title="Kaytek the Wizard">
The book depicts a schoolboy who gains magic powers. At first, Kaytek acts as a selfish child, using his power for mischief. He eventually dissatisfied with himself, and leaves his home town, where he had acquired a reputation as a troublemaker. On his travels he meets Zosia, a girl who uses her magical power for good. Together they fight an evil wizard, and Kaytek chooses the path of a good mage. The book contains some gaps, including one of the chapters, which were sections that were crossed out because they were too frightening to children.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musk-ox_(Nikolai_Leskov)"title="Musk-ox (Nikolai Leskov)">
An ex-seminary student Vasily Bogoslovsky, a.k.a. Ovtsebyk (Musk-Ox, a nickname referring both to peculiarities of his appearance and certain habits) is an eccentric whose every step and phrase baffles and amuses people. He detests what's going on around him, but is uncapable of any practical work, spending his time loitering in the woods, reading Latin philosophers and visiting his old friends from time to time, reminding them about his urgent need of finding any kind of employment.Alexander Sviridov, once a serf peasant and now a successful building engineer, entrepreneur and businessman, is a direct opposite: intelligent and good-natured, he is a practical man, enjoying all-round respect and admiration. It is to him and Nastasya Petrovna, his beautiful wife, that the narrator comes asking to help find for Ovtsebyk just any occupation to keep him from trouble. Alexander and Nastasya try their best but fail. Ovtsebyk shies the caring Nastasya, and ignores whatever work he's presented with, preferring to wander around, 'agitating' against the general state of things. Developing an almost irrational hatred towards the only man who's eager to give him work and shelter, he's deeply pained by the way the "common people" he cares for, love the latter and ignore his own anti-social 'sermons'. Unable to cope with this unfairness, he hangs himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Shadow_(Cleary_novel)"title="The Long Shadow (Cleary novel)">
The plot revolves around Martin Brown, an educated man who is living as a swagman. He is falsely accused of murder of a woman called Ruth Taylor, and is pursued through the Australian countryside by police and other men. He falls in love with a woman who believes his innocence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dangerous_Game_(novel)"title="A Dangerous Game (novel)">
Alfredo Traps, a sales representative, whose car breaks down during a trip in the provinces, finds lodging for the night in a house of a retired judge. The host invites Traps to participate in a game that the judge and his three friends—a former prosecutor, defense attorney and public hangman—play over dinner. The game in question is a pretend trial in which Traps will be the defendant. During the cross-examination it transpires that he may have caused the death of his boss from a heart attack. He also carried on an affair with the boss’ wife. The prosecutor then charges Traps with premeditated murder. After heated closing arguments, the judge sentences Traps to death. The retired agents of justice then thank Traps for being a good sport, and ask the former executioner to escort the guest upstairs to his room. Later, when they deliver the written verdict to Traps’ room, they discover that he has hanged himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Commissioner_(novel)"title="The High Commissioner (novel)">
Sergeant Scobie Malone of the Sydney police is sent by the New South Wales Premier, Flannery, to London where he is to arrest the Australian High Commissioner James Quentin for the murder of his first wife. He arrives to discover someone is trying to assassinate the High Commissioner for his work at a Vietnam War peace conference. Quentin asks for five days grace so he can complete his work at the conference, and Malone gets permission to agree to this, on the proviso he keep a close eye on Quentin. He pretends to be a member of Quentin's security detail and none of Quentin's household know the truth: not his wife Sheila, secretary Lisa, or butler Josef. However, Sheila soon deduces Malone's real agenda.The person behind the assassination attempt is Madame Cholon, a Vietnamese crime figure, who has hired three men, Truong Tho, Pallain and Pham Chinh, to kill Quentin. She is being followed by Jamaica, a black CIA agent, who warns Malone away from her. Two detectives from Special Branch, Denzil and Coburn, are called in to investigate after an initial assassination attempt on Quentin. Later Truong goes to Australia House to deposit a bomb but is spotted by Malone. In the ensuring chase Truong is hit by a car and blows up.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_War"title="The Social War">
Victor Juno, the novel's hero, leads the "Naturalists", a militant secret society, and as a preacher heals sickness through animal magnetism instead of medicine. He and his sweetheart Lucinda are opposed by doctors, organized religion, and an odd assortment of "Conspirators". Civil war ensues, which the Naturalists win. They shoot all prisoners of war and institute a totalitarian theocracy, decreeing that all must work on pain of death, all money is to be collected by the state, "medicines, fashions and all artificial and useless things must be abolished instantly", and so forth. God eventually approves this state of affairs by sending a plague and famine in which all the wicked perish, leaving only the Naturalists to exult in "the work of God and man"."The Social War of the Year 1900" combines, according to E. F. Bleiler's review in "Science-fiction, the early years", "lurid sensationalism and sexual elements with a nasty messianic urge", thereby continuing the American Gothic tradition of George Lippard. Its plot consists of "a repetition of the same incident over and over, the kidnapping and physical abuse of the hero and heroine".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms_(novel)"title="Four Freedoms (novel)">
While drafting plans for building an aeronautics plant, brothers Henry and Jules Van Damme are unable to justify removing workers from agrarian or armaments assembly support efforts for the War in Europe. A vice president at their company jokingly suggests "making do, with women, the coloreds, the oldsters, the defectives, the handicaps. Henry enthusiastically agrees telling his recruitment services, "Go out into the highways and the byways, bring in the lame, the halt, and the blind". Realizing that the planes will be completed after the end of the war, the brothers suggest instead of paying employees limited salaries due to the war effort, a city be built, Henryville, to accommodate every need of workers in the factory.Prosper and Pancho shortly afterwards meet, Pancho deliberately seeking a pacifism in avoiding the draft, and Prosper recently having left the home of his aunts, May and Bea, to seek independence and avoid condescension of the disabled from his employers. Eventually Prosper meets Vi, whom he later unintentionally spurns with his relationship with Connie. The plant temporarily shuts down to commemorate the death of Roosevelt, and shortly after his death the Vice President of Labor announces that in making the transition to non-war industries, the first layoffs at plants like the one at Ponca will be the old, the women, and the disabled. Henryville begins to dissolve, and abandoned when ultimately destroyed by a tornado, resulting in no related casualties. The novel's ending depicts a somewhat prosperous Ponca City near the bulldozed remains of Henryville, with a few rusting B-30 Pax Bombers left in the fields nearby.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_My_Parents_Ruined_My_Life"title="The Year My Parents Ruined My Life">
12-year-old Kate Sommers lives in the fictional Isla Nada, California: she is the president of her sixth grade class and she plays volleyball. Her best friend is class secretary Molly Blossom. Kate also has a boyfriend, a 13-year-old surfer named Josh. She plans to join the Isla Nada Sting Rays in the spring, attend the Valentine dance with Josh and learn to skate in vertical skates in the spring. Her plans are derailed when her father announces the family is moving to Belletoona, Pennsylvania (a portmanteau of Belleview and Altoona), where he has acquired an important new job. Though Kate vocally opposes the move, protesting and even skipping meals by way of a "hunger strike", the family is set to move away before Thanksgiving. With help from Molly, a desperate Kate plans "Operation Defrost": she will save up for a plane ticket back to Isla Nada and "fly back home" as soon as she can, which she hopes will shock her parents into understanding how miserable she is in Belletoona. In the meantime, Molly will convince her parents to let Kate live with her for the next five-and-a half-years, until the pair can graduate from high school. She promises Josh to return to Isla Nada in time for the Valentine dance, implying their relationship will continue long-distance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tribe_of_Witches"title="The Tribe of Witches">
Chapter one, "The "Dobunni", the "Hwicce" and Religion", offers an introduction to Yeates' argument, noting that his study is multidisciplinary in nature, making use of history, archaeology and onomastics. Offering a brief background to both the "Dobunni" and the "Hwicce", Yeates then briefly discusses the manner in which scholars have previously approached the study of pre-Christian religion in Britain. The second chapter, entitled "The Deity and the Landscape", looks at the various shrines and temples from both the Pre-Roman and Roman Iron Age that have been archaeologically identified within the "Dobunni" region. Using etymological evidence, he puts forward propositions for the existence of previously unknown prehistoric deities who were localised to the region, namely an Iron Age goddess of the Cotswolds known as Cuda. Yeates attempts to present a picture of the regional landscape, and the manner in which it was viewed as being "spiritual and imbued with the divine" by its inhabitants.Chapter three, "The Sacred Rivers", explores the deification of rivers in the British Iron Age, and the archaeological evidence for votive offerings within them. Yeates proceeds to look at the multiple rivers within the region being discussed – including the River Severn and River Wye – while making reference to any evidence for ritual activity along them. The fourth chapter, "The Gods of Tribes and Folk Groups", considers the long-term developments of communities in the area, and the connections that might exist between Iron Age and Early Medieval settlements. Proclaiming that Medieval sources record the existence of two local Iron Age gods, Weogonera and Salenses, he uses this as evidence for his belief that there was a cultural continuity from prehistory into the Medieval, and that the "Hwicce" were therefore the descendants of the "Dobunni". Chapter five, "Mining and Minerals", explores evidence for mining in the region, highlighting the connection between this activity and religious belief in prehistoric society. Chapter six deals with aspects of war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Bleeding_City"title="This Bleeding City">
Charlie Wales is a fresh new trader that is involved with Silverbirch, a lucrative hedge fund. However while he is intelligent, Charlie is easily distracted by his fast-paced new life. He's intrigued by the seductive Vero, a beautiful French woman, and by the lure of easy money and the excitement of a seemingly endless supply of drugs. His friends do little to dissuade him, as they appear to be caught up in the same type of habits and life that Charlie is experiencing. However, as things proceed and Charlie sinks deeper into a life of excess and depravity, he discovers that this may end up leading to his own ruin- and he may not be able to extract himself before it happens.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Bergson_Lives_Dangerously"title="Bill Bergson Lives Dangerously">
It is one year since the adventure with Uncle Einar and the jewel thieves the last summer. Now it is summer again and the "war" between "Röda Rosen" and "Vita Rosen" continues. When "Vita Rosen" (Kalle, Anders and Eva-Lotta) pass the old man Gren on the bridge over the river, Eva-Lotta says that Gren is usurer. They run to "Prärien", a place at the outside of their city Lillköping where the mansion from the 18th century is, and "Röda Rosen" have made it to their headquarters. During the "war" they kidnap Anders and lock Kalle and Eva-Lotta in."Röda Rosen" (Sixten, Benka and Jonte) have a "hearing" with Anders in Jonte's room. In the house which is in front of Jonte's house Gren lives. Kalle and Eva-Lotta, who have escaped, climb onto the roof and see what they are doing with Anders. On the way up, Eva-Lotta sees a man in green gabardine trousers who is visiting Gren and hears that they'll "meet on Wednesday at the regular place" and Gren'll bring all the promissory notes."Röda Rosen" force Anders to tell them where "Stormumriken" is hidden but Anders escapes. When Eva-Lotta is ordered to go to the mansion and get "Stormumriken", he sees Gren and the man with the green gabardine trousers. When the man in the trousers is going away, she runs into him and then he drops a paper, a promissory note, which she takes. Later she finds Gren dead and runs home scared. The police block the area at the mansion. They have a hearing with Eva-Lotta who tells them what she did and that she saw Gren's murderer. They realize that his name is written on the promissory note, but she doesn't remember what she did with it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncommon_Valour"title="Uncommon Valour">
The tale follows Sinclair as he readies his ship for sea, while crossing the Atlantic he encounters Mason returning to England with a key French spy, Leveque, as his prisoner the same man who had murdered Sinclair's wife sixteen years earlier. The two men strike up a friendship and Sinclair offers Mason the run of his estate while he recovers from a wound suffered while capturing Leveque.Upon reaching Portsmouth Mason is surprised to find his younger brother Stephen, who had run away from home on a merchant vessel, and takes him under his wing. They travel to White Oaks, the Sinclair family estate in Thornbury, and settle in. While there Mason becomes involved in the hunt for Benjamin Willis, his wife's cousin and heir to the Willis Woolen Mills, who had embezzled money bankrupting the firm and fled with his mistress. Mason aids his friend and brother-in-law, Captain Michael Gilmore, in saving the mills.In America Jennifer Mason has established an identity in New York as the widow of a young naval officer and from this position she acts as an agent for Admiral Lord St. John's intelligence network, aided by her friend Mary Stewart, the wife of Mason's cox’n Nicholas Stewart and under the supervision of her brother-in-law Dick Mason. When Dick receives word that his wife, also an agent, has been killed Jennifer leaves the spy business and starts doing charity work with the wives of the soldiers stationed in New York. Soon after her sister-in-law Tara Mason, worn down by caring for her father who had lost touch with reality following his wife's death two months earlier, comes to stay with them. Mary and Jennifer slowly begin nursing her back health while Dick sets sail for England in search of answers to his wife's murder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Child_of_the_Jago"title="A Child of the Jago">
The novel opens after midnight on a hot summer night, when many of the residents of the Jago, likened to “great rats”, prefer to sleep in the street to avoid the oppressive heat and stench of the closely packed houses. A man lured into a dwelling by a woman is brutally coshed, robbed and dragged unconscious into the street where others remove his boots. Dicky Perrott, 8 or 9 years old (the uncertainty is telling) makes his way home to the single room in which his family dwells, where he finds his mother, Hannah Perrott and flea-bitten baby sister, Looey, but only a crust of bread to eat. As dawn breaks his father, Josh Perrott, returns home with a club sticky with blood and hair, suggesting another robbery.Looking for cake and tea Dicky visits the East End Elevation Mission where well-intentioned middle-class ‘missionaries’ seek to educate and civilise. He dodges the young man on the door and takes the opportunity to steal a gold watch from a bishop. Returning home he proudly hands it to his father, who beats him for stealing but keeps the watch to sell for himself.Two families, the Ranns and the Learys, dominate the Jago, and one of their periodic violent confrontations breaks out. Sally Green, of the Leary clan, whose method of fighting is to hold down her opponent and chew viciously on the back of the neck, triumphs over the Rann's female champion, Nora Walsh, and proudly displays a bunch of her clotted hair as a trophy. Hannah Perrott, taking Looey out with her to buy food, is attacked by Sally Green and only rescued when Nora Walsh breaks a bottle and repeatedly stabs Sally in the face. Elsewhere there is a murder in the street when Fag Dawson is stabbed and the police descend in force on the Jago. Josh Perrott vows to fight Sally Green's brother, Billy Leary. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Please_Look_After_Mom"title="Please Look After Mom">
When sixty-nine-year-old So-Nyo is separated from her husband among the crowds of the Seoul subway station, her family begins a desperate search to find her. Yet as long-held secrets and private sorrows begin to reveal themselves, they are forced to wonder: how well did they actually know the woman they called Mom? The novel explores the loss, self-recrimination, and in some cases, self-discovery caused by the mother's disappearance. The novel also considers themes related to the self-sacrifice of mothers in general (and in Korea in particular), the relationship between memories of the past and realities of the present, and the chameleonic aspects of identity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monk,_the_Moor_&amp;_Moses_Ben_Jalloun"title="The Monk, the Moor &amp; Moses Ben Jalloun">
The novel centers on four students attending an American university and studying history. The book particularly focuses on the tale of the eleventh century Iranian Rehana, a woman with a zest for learning. As the students study the past, they begin to learn more about themselves and how actions in the past can affect them in the present and future.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hydrogen_Sonata"title="The Hydrogen Sonata">
The Gzilt, a civilisation that almost joined the Culture 10,000 years before the novel, have decided to Sublime, leaving behind “the Real” to take up residence in higher dimensions. The Zihdren-Remnant, what is left of an older species that Sublimed before the Culture was formed, send an envoy to confess a long-kept secret before the Gzilt depart but a Gzilt warship intercepts and destroys their ship several weeks before the Sublimation is due to take place in order to preserve that secret.The Culture sends ships both to wish the Gzilt well, as they have always been on good terms with the Gzilt, and to keep an eye on the younger species arriving to scavenge the technology and infrastructure the Gzilt leave behind. Two of these, the Liseiden (an eel-like species) and the Ronte (a hive insect-like species) are jockeying in negotiations with the Gzilt for official permission and preferred status.Vyr Cossont is introduced as a former Lieutenant-Commander (reserve) of the Gzilt, who has set herself a life-task of playing T. C. Vilabier's 26th String-Specific Sonata For An Instrument Yet To Be Invented, the eponymous Hydrogen Sonata, on the instrument subsequently invented for its performance: the Antagonistic Undecagonstring, or elevenstring. In order to do so, she has had to grow two additional arms. Both the instrument and the work are presented as unusually challenging.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Bergson_and_the_White_Rose_Rescue"title="Bill Bergson and the White Rose Rescue">
The last summer Gren was murdered. Now it's summer again and in Lillköping the "war" between "Vita Rosen" (Kalle, Anders and Eva-Lotta) and "Röda Rosen" (Sixten, Benka and Jonte) continues.Down the castle ruins outside of Lillköping, Eklund's house is located. One day when Kalle, Eva-Lotta and Anders pass, they meet a 5-year-old boy called Rasmus who lives there with his father professor Rasmusson, who tells that he has invented an impervius light metal.One night after the "war" at the castle ruins, Kalle, Eva-Lotta and Anders see 3 men in a car who kidnap Rasmus and the professor and when Eva-Lotta tries to rescue Rasmus, the kidnappers force her to go with them in their car, but she throws out cakes and papers along the way so Kalle and Anders, who go after them by the professor's motor cycle, can find them. After going by car, they go by boat to an island. Anders and Kalle swim to the island.Eva-Lotta and Rasmus are locked-in in a little house and the professor is locked-in in another house. The professor and Rasmus meet the engineer Peters who forces the professor to tell him where the documents, where it's written how to make the impervius metal, are hidden, but he refuses. Rasmus likes the kidnapper Nicke who is nice and fixes the food for them and they become friends. The other two kidnappers are called Blom and Svedberg.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_(novella)"title="Confusion (novella)">
Roland, the narrator, begins the story after he becomes an English professor years after the central action takes place. Roland explains that he was a poor student and how he would end up intoxicated on the streets of Berlin. His father then sends him off to university in the country.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Wanted_Man"title="A Wanted Man">
The novel opens with Jack Reacher, whose nose is broken from his last adventure (Worth Dying For), trying to get a ride out of Nebraska, hitch-hiking in the middle of the night, without any car stopping for him. Only after an hour and a half of waiting, two men and a woman let him climb in and even drive some part of the way. They introduce themselves as Donald McQueen, Alan King, and Karen Delfuenso. Reacher notices that the car's occupants tell him lies and that the woman is very nervous. They insist he drives for a while as they rest and take shifts at driving. McQueen and King sleep, though Karen does not. They pass two roadblocks where the highway police searches for some wanted fugitives in tuxedos who killed a man and took off in a Mazda. The car is found with fingerprints; it is then believed by FBI agent Julia Sorenson and Sheriff Victor Goodman that after the murders the men went to a park, where they kidnapped a cocktail waitress (Delfuenso) and stole her car, an Impala.Karen repeatedly blinks, giving Reacher coded messages—which he manages to decode—and learns that the two men in the car are the wanted people the police are looking for and that Karen has been taken as hostage. Sorenson and Goodman's theory is proven correct after they visit a gas station called "All day, all night" and they examine the cameras facing across the street. After a visit at another gas station Reacher buys coffee for the group, but before doing so uses the store's phone to alert the cops. Sorenson, the closest to the area, drives over, but by then the group have left. McQueen becomes suspicious, and tells Reacher to use his bank card (which is a fraud) to rent rooms for the night. When doing so, he is attacked by McQueen, who fires his gun, and misses. McQueen, King, and Karen flee.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Affair_(Child_novel)"title="The Affair (Child novel)">
In March 1997, Major Jack Reacher is briefed by his superior Colonel Leon Garber on a troubling development in Carter's Crossing, Mississippi: a woman has been found murdered, her throat slit, with signs of rape, and the military is concerned that one of the potential suspects seems to be Captain Reed Riley, a commander at Fort Kelham, a nearby Army Ranger base, with a reputation as a ladykiller. Garber informs Reacher that another MP, Major Duncan Munro, has been assigned to investigate the murder; his job is to go undercover and ensure that Munro's investigation doesn't damage the military's public image. He also puts Reacher in touch with Col. James John Frazer, a Senate liaison who warns Reacher that Reed's father, Senator Carlton Riley, a member of the Armed Services Committee, is threatening to impose harsh budget cuts on the army if his son is targeted.Posing as a drifter, Reacher takes up residence in a local inn and goes for a meal, where he meets the local sheriff, Elizabeth Deveraux. A former Marine MP, she quickly deduces Reacher's true identity and purpose, but permits him to stay as long as he doesn't interfere with her investigation. Reacher does so anyway, and learns that the dead woman, Janice Chapman, was the third woman murdered in Carter's Crossing in just the last few months; the other two were young women from the poorer, largely African American section of town. Reacher's old friend Sergeant Frances Neagley arrives with a warning to stay away from Deveraux, who she claims was dishonorably discharged from the service following an incident with a fellow Marine, but Jack disregards her advice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler's_Daughter"title="Hitler's Daughter">
While waiting for their school bus, a group of children tell stories to pass the time. Mark's friend Anna tells a story about Hitler's secret daughter Heidi, a young girl who was kept hidden to maintain the secret of her identity. The other children are captivated by the story, which Anna tells with great detail and realism. As the children listen to the story about Heidi's life, her relationship with her father, and her increasing awareness of Hitler's evil plans, Mark becomes interested in learning more about the actual history of Hitler and World War II, and wonders how he would have acted in Heidi's place. Anna finishes her story with Heidi escaping from the ruins of Berlin and emigrating to Australia, where she grows old and eventually reveals the truth to her granddaughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somewhere_Around_the_Corner"title="Somewhere Around the Corner">
When Barbara becomes caught up in a wild demonstration, she is frightened and wants to escape. An old man she meets at the demonstration tells her to close her eyes, walk around the corner and arrive at a better place. She travels back around 62 years and the place she finds is Sydney in 1932, the height of the Depression. Times are tough and people are finding it hard to feed their families.A boy called Young Jim comes to Barbara's aid and takes her on a journey to meet his family. They offer Barbara the love, security and peace that are missing from her own life and she becomes part of the O'Reilly family. But their time isn't Barbara's time and she may not be able to stay there forever. Young Jim promises to always look after Barbara but what will happen if she is forced to return to her own time? And does she have a choice?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madumo,_A_Man_Bewitched"title="Madumo, A Man Bewitched">
The book chronicles Ashforth's experiences with Madumo, a South African man that believes that witchcraft is to blame for his bad luck. Ashforth, who has been friends with Madumo for many years, agrees to help finance his exorcism and healing with an inyanga.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamans_(Hutton_book)"title="Shamans (Hutton book)">
In the introduction, Hutton notes that since the 1970s, four distinct definitions of "shamanism" have been adopted by anthropologists and scholars of religious studies. The first holds that shamanism refers to any practice in which an individual "contacts a spirit world while in an altered state of consciousness." The second reserves the term for those professionals who perform such practices at the request of others. A third definition attempts to distinguish shamans from other magico-religious specialists such as "mediums", "witch doctors", "spiritual healers" and "prophets" by certain techniques; Hutton notes that this is the definition most commonly used by modern scholars. The fourth definition makes use of the term purely to refer to the religious beliefs of Siberia and neighbouring parts of Asia, but Hutton criticises such a definition, considering it illogical.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodger_(novel)"title="Dodger (novel)">
One night on the streets of London, a battered young woman leaps from a carriage, followed and assaulted by two men. The protagonist Dodger, a street urchin and tosher, emerging from a sewer drain, comes to her help and chases away the attackers. This is witnessed by two gentlemen, Charlie and Henry, who take the girl to the latter's nearby home, accompanied by Dodger. A doctor treats her injuries and discovers that she was pregnant and the child is lost.Dodger's actions impress the gentlemen, as does the genuine affection they quickly see growing between him and the girl, who is tentatively called Simplicity. Charlie gives Dodger the task of finding information on the streets about her and the carriage from which she escaped. During the next days, Dodger thwarts a robbery attempt at the offices of the "Morning Chronicle" when meeting Charlie, and causes the arrest of a murderous barber named Sweeney Todd when he tries to improve his appearance before meeting Simplicity. These incidents turn Dodger into a celebrity, which helps him gather information, but also make it impossible for him to stay anonymous. This endangers Simplicity and prompts Charlie to have her moved to the house of his rich friend Angela Burdett-Coutts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Jeopardy_(novel)"title="Double Jeopardy (novel)">
The story features Pratt's detective hero George Helmfleety Jones in two adventures dealing with the ramifications of a newly discovered matter-duplication process. The first concerns a case of industrial espionage involving the bootlegging of duplicated drugs, and includes Jones's marriage to a duplicated woman. The second is a locked-room mystery in which a fortune is somehow stolen from a sealed, pilotless cargo plane.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Sunrise"title="Waiting for Sunrise">
## Part One, Vienna, 1913–14.Lysander Rief is a young actor in Vienna who has come to the city to seek a psychiatric cure for an illness – "anorgasmia" – from an English doctor, Bensimon. Bensimon has developed his own adjunct to the main line of Freud's psychoanalysis called Parallelism. Whilst sitting in the waiting room, he encounters Captain Alwyn Munro DSO, an English friend of Dr Bensimon’s, and a Miss Hettie Bull who is another patient. During the consultation, Bensimon encourages Rief to write a journal. Rief is the son of a famous stage actor, Halifax Rief, and an Austrian chorus singer.Hettie Bull invites him to an exhibition of her partner, Udo Hoff, and there says she would like to sculpt him. He visits her at her studio in the countryside and sex takes place. They continue to meet in secret and Lysander breaks off his engagement to his fiancée. Despite being cured, he decides to stay on in Vienna but his resources are running low. One day his pension is visited by the Austrian police and he is arrested and charged with the rape of Hettie Bull. He is finally taken to the British Consulate where he learns, by letter, that Hettie is pregnant with their child. An escape with the collusion of the British diplomats is arranged and Lysander ends up in Trieste.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satantango_(novel)"title="Satantango (novel)">
The novel is a postmodernist piece, and while it has a plot, many details are not outlined and remain unclear. It consists of two parts, and each part consists of six sections; sections of the second part are numbered in reverse order. Every chapter is a long paragraph which does not contain line breaks. Most of the action occurs in a run-down Hungarian village ("estate") which is in a vicinity of an unnamed town but the inhabitants are almost isolated from the outside world. The main character, Irimiás, a con man posing as a savior, arrives at the estate, achieves an almost unlimited power over the inhabitants, gets them to give him all their hard-earned money, convinces them to move to another abandoned “estate” nearby, and then brings them to the town, where he disperses them around the country. The purpose of the whole exercise is to give Irimiás money and power.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_One_Left_to_Lie_To"title="No One Left to Lie To">
Journalist and essayist Christopher Hitchens's polemic on the political career of American president Bill Clinton. Hitchens examines Clinton's psychology and how it affected the then-president's record in war, acts that led to accusations of sexual abuse, his skill at "triangulation" and his relationship with his wife Hillary.Discussing the book on the April 28, 1999, episode of "Charlie Rose", Hitchens said he wrote the book to criticize what he perceived as Clinton's political corruption and conservatism, seeing them as mutually reinforcing. He also criticizes many American liberals for their support of Clinton.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satori_(Winslow_novel)"title="Satori (Winslow novel)">
Nicholaï Hel and the French woman Solange Picard are brought together by somebody who designs missions for an American secret service. Nicholaï Hel is the only man who can possibly carry out a certain covert operation in Beijing. When Solange Picard has prepared him, he must leave her for his mission. Once he is gone, Solange gets routed. Thanks to the training she provided he can carry out the assassination and also afterwards leave China.The American secret service needs to seek him out for they have to fear he turns against them. Again they depend on Solange Picard because his evident love for her makes her the only possible and all the more irresistible bait. Against all odds they become a couple until her death tears them apart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agunpakhi"title="Agunpakhi">
"Agunpakhi" is set in rural Rarh, now in West Bengal, of early twentieth century. It chronicles a rural family's ups and downs. The story is told by a country housewife in first person narrative. The story begins a score years before the Partition of India. She makes a powerful observation of herself and people around her. Through her eyes, we see the way of life of the then Rarh region.In the early part of the novel, she mostly speaks of life within the family: births, deaths, marriages. Their fortunes blossom as they become the largest landowner in the area. But as World War II breaks out, they get hit by cholera, shortages, crop failure, and finally the trauma of Hindu-Muslim division. With these events, the story transcends its domestic confinement.The narrator comments on her world being consumed by a divisiveness that had nothing to do with their lives. At the end of the novel, her children set for Pakistan, and later they ask their parents to join them. Her husband agrees, but she refuses to go. Her decision to stay back alone astonishes her husband. In answer to her husband's question, “When did you learn so much?” she says, “All these years I've only learned what you taught me and I've only said what you had me say. Now though, I've learned one or two things on my own.”
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_(Christopher_novel)"title="Stolen (Christopher novel)">
Whilst at a Bangkok airport, 16-year-old Gemma is kidnapped by 27-year-old Tyler “Ty” MacFarlane from a coffee shop after he drugs her coffee. He smuggles her away on a plane to Australia and takes her to the middle of the desert, expecting her to fall in love with him. Gemma disapproves of Ty, but after an incident she develops a soft corner for him. Ty has a nightmare about his past and shouts and screams until Gemma gets up and consoles him. Still Gemma has not entirely forgiven Ty and tries to escape by taking his vehicle but does not succeed as the truck gets stuck in the desert. Ty rescues her and takes care of her until her burns have healed. Now Gemma has started to think of Ty in a good way and Ty is happy with that. Ty wants her to realize the importance and beauty of nature which was the main reason he built this house in the middle of the desert. For this purpose he paints his entire outhouse and himself with colors that resemble nature. And this does it. That day Ty and Gemma fall asleep outside the house, on the sand itself. Gemma has now started falling for Ty. The next day Ty leaves to collect snakes as their venom is essential for the anti-venom that he is preparing. He leaves a note for Gemma about his whereabouts and Gemma goes in search of Ty behind the house near the water reserve and there a snake bites her. Ty takes Gemma to the mine site/civilization for her treatment after the anti-venom that he had preserved is out of date. Gemma asked Ty to stay with her in the hospital. He is arrested and whilst receiving treatment for her ordeal she is told that any feelings she had for Ty were due to the Stockholm syndrome.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Serious_Game"title="The Serious Game">
Sweden at the turn of the previous century. Arvid, an ambitious and well-educated young man, meets Lydia, the daughter of a landscape painter, during an idyllic summer vacation and falls in love. Lydia, however, has other suitors, and Arvid is frightened of being tied down by his emotions. Trapped inside marriages of convenience, they struggle in later years to rekindle the promise of their romance with bitter and tragic results.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phoenix_and_the_Mirror"title="The Phoenix and the Mirror">
As set out in an introductory "Author's Note," the novel's protagonist Vergil Magus is based on the ancient Augustan era Roman epic poet Virgil, in his legendary medieval guise as a great magician.The book is set in an alternate ancient Mediterranean world and features and concerns Vergil's quest to forge a "virgin speculum" (mirror) for the purpose of divination. The construction of such a mirror requires the use of unsmelted copper ore and tin, precipitating a quest to Cyprus, the source of copper in the ancient world. The story also includes a brazen head, which lends its name to Vergil's house.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifty_Shades_of_Grey"title="Fifty Shades of Grey">
Twenty-one-year-old Anastasia "Ana" Steele is an English literature major at the Washington State University's branch campus in Vancouver, Washington. Her best friend, Katherine "Kate" Kavanagh, writes for the college newspaper. Due to an illness, Kate is unable to interview Christian Grey, a successful and wealthy Seattle entrepreneur. She asks Ana to take her place. Ana finds the 27-year-old Christian both attractive and intimidating. She stumbles through the interview and believes it went poorly. Ana, not expecting to meet Christian again, is surprised when he appears at the hardware store where she works and purchases various items. When Ana mentions that Kate would like a photo for her article, Christian offers to arrange a photo session.The next day Ana, along with Kate and their photographer friend, José Rodriguez, arrive at Christian's hotel for the photo shoot. After, Christian asks Ana out for coffee. When he asks if she is dating someone, Ana replies that she is not seeing anyone. During the conversation, Christian claims he is not romantic, then abruptly ends the date, leaving Ana to believe she is not attractive enough for him. Later, Christian sends Ana a first edition copy of "Tess of the d'Urbervilles". Later that night, Ana goes out with her friends and ends up drunk dialing Christian, who says he is coming to pick her up. When Ana goes outside for some fresh air, José attempts to kiss her, but he is abruptly stopped by Christian's arrival. Ana leaves with Christian, but not before she discovers that Kate has been flirting with Christian's brother, Elliot. Ana awakens to find herself in Christian's hotel room. He assures her nothing happened, but scolds her for her careless behavior. Christian says he would like to have a sexual relationship with her but Ana must first fill out some paperwork. He later goes back on this statement to make out with her in the elevator.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13_Treasures"title="13 Treasures">
"13 Treasures" follows its lead character, 13-year-old girl Tanya, who has the rare ability to see and hear the fairies and other creatures who inhabit the woods and many other places. But over the years Tanya has learned to lie about the fairies if something is wrong to anyone, because she has landed herself on a therapist and doctor's couch by this ability.Tanya summers with her grandmother in Elvesden Manor as a punishment for having another fairy incident in Essex. The manor has been given down to all family members up until now. Fabian, the son of Warwick also lives in Elvesden Manor, and with Warwick's father, Amos. Amos has been under suspicion for the 5 decade old disappearance of a young girl named Morwenna Bloom in the nearby woods. He was the last person to see her.At first, Tanya and Fabian are unsympathetic to each other, but as they spend time together they start becoming friends. In Tickey End - the local village - Tanya meets the reclusive 'witch', Mad Morag, who gives her an old compass. Tanya finds a unique silver bracelet while cleaning out an old library one day. On this bracelet there are thirteen charms. She also finds newspaper clippings about a girl named Morwenna Bloom who mysteriously disappeared 50 years ago. As Tanya and Fabian team up, and they decide to investigate this disappearance and to prove that Fabian's grandfather, Amos, is innocent. Tanya also finds and befriends a girl named Red (or Rowan) who saves changelings, or fairy babies exchanged with human babies, from dying in a hospital because their disguise spells wear off and they are killed for their looks. It is revealed that one can only have the "second sight" of being able to see fairies by having a changeling in their family. The changeling in Tanya's family turns out to be Elizabeth Elvesden.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comical_History_of_the_States_and_Empires_of_the_Moon"title="Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon">
The book is narrated in the first person by a character also named Cyrano.Cyrano attempts to reach the Moon to prove there is a civilization that sees the Earth as its own moon. He launches himself into the sky from Paris by strapping bottles of dew to his body, but lands back on Earth. Believing he had traveled straight up and down, he is confused by local soldiers who tell him he is not in France; they escort him to the provincial governor who informs him that it is in fact New France. The narrator explains to the governor that all matter is formed inside and expelled from stars, and that once the Sun has run out of fuel it will consume the planets and restart the cycle. He uses New France as evidence for this theory, claiming that it had only recently been discovered by European explorers because the Sun had only recently sent it to Earth.The narrator tries again to reach the Moon, this time with a flying machine that he launches off the edge of a cliff. Though the craft crashes, local soldiers attach rockets to it, hoping that it will fly to celebrate the feast day of St. John the Baptist. Dismayed at this use of his machine, the narrator attempts to dismantle it while the fuse is lit, but the machine takes off and sends him into space. He meets the Moon's inhabitants, who have four legs, musical voices, and fantastical weapons that cook game for a meal as it's shot. He also meets the ghost of Socrates and Domingo Gonsales of Francis Godwin's "The Man in the Moone". His discussions with Gonsales include how God is useless as a concept, that humans cannot achieve immortality, and that they do not have souls. After these discussions, the narrator returns to Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Happened_to_Goodbye"title="What Happened to Goodbye">
Seventeen-year-old Mclean Sweet and her father, restaurant consultant Gus Sweet, have just moved to Lakeview, their fourth move in two years. Gus is there to turn around a struggling Italian restaurant, Luna Blu, managed by the headstrong Opal, who has worked there since she was a teenager.As a way of preventing herself from forming attachments, Mclean takes on a different name and persona with each move. In Lakeview, despite her best efforts, Mclean finds herself revealing her true personality, opening up to new people and new experiences. Mclean and her new friends help Opal construct a model of the town and develops an attraction to her neighbor Dave Wade.After living in Lakeview for a few months, Mclean discovers that Gus has another job offer in Hawaii. While she is trying to cope with the ideas of moving for a fifth time, Mclean's new friends find the various social media profiles she has created for her different personas. Mclean goes to the small beach town of Colby with her mother Katherine. While she is in Colby, Mclean overhears Katherine telling a friend that she thinks that it was a mistake inviting Mclean to come to the beach. Mclean decides to leave her mom's house to go to the Poseidon, an old, worn out motel where she and Katherine stayed on one of their spontaneous beach trips. Confused and in need of a companion, Mclean calls her "two a.m.," the person she knows she can always rely on no matter what: her friend Dave Wade. When Mclean's parents find her at the Poseidon, she tells them about the different personas she has taken on. They realize how hard the divorce is for her and apologize.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Tooth_(novel)"title="Sweet Tooth (novel)">
The plot is set in early-1970s England. Serena Frome ("rhymes with plume"), the daughter of an Anglican bishop, shows a talent for mathematics and is admitted to the University of Cambridge. But she struggles academically, and graduates with a third. While at Cambridge she becomes romantically involved with Tony Canning, a professor, who before abruptly ending the affair secures a position for Serena with MI5. The job is low-level, but a more exciting opportunity appears when Serena is offered a chance to take part in a new covert program codenamed "Sweet Tooth". To counter Communist propaganda during the Cold War, the agency wants to offer financial assistance to young writers, academics and journalists with an anti-Communist bent. Serena, who is an avid and quick reader of fiction, is given the task of vetting burgeoning writer Thomas Haley.Serena is immediately taken by Haley's published short fiction. She travels to the University of Sussex, where he works, to offer him a stipend from the fictional Freedom International Foundation. Soon the two begin a romantic affair, but things gradually start to unravel. Serena discovers that Professor Canning (who, it turns out, broke off their affair only because he knew he was dying from cancer) was in fact a Soviet spy, and she was recruited because the agency wanted to keep tabs on Canning. Then, when Haley's first novel comes out, it is a great critical success, but its dystopian, anti-capitalist theme is not well received by the agency. Finally, his affair with Serena is exposed by the press, and the whole Sweet Tooth program is threatened.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Undying_Fire_(Pratt_novel)"title="The Undying Fire (Pratt novel)">
The story involves an interstellar expedition to steal a neptunium motor from the planet Danaan, punctuated by various political and romantic complications.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invaders_from_Rigel"title="Invaders from Rigel">
Ben Ruby and Murray Lee awaken one morning to discover themselves transformed into metal beings. In this, they are actually fortunate, most other inhabitants of the western hemisphere having become unliving statues. They and the few other survivors they meet at first assume the phenomenon to have been caused by a comet that had been approaching Earth, which is, in a way, true—but the comet was, in fact, a spacecraft of the Lassans, a race of elephantoid aliens from a planet of Rigel, who have utilized "life-force" (a sort of radiation) from the interior of the Earth to effect the change.The militaristic Lassans believe it their destiny to destroy or enslave all "lesser" beings and accordingly plan to capture those who have survived their initial strike. Accordingly, Ruby and his companions are soon besieged by "dodos", strange bird-like creatures who are thought-controlled by the Lassans and carry light-bombs.Ruby's group is relieved by a warship from Australia, whose inhabitants have been less affected by the Lassan radiation—in their case, it has merely turned the iron in their blood to cobalt, rendering them blue-skinned. In combination, the Australians and remaining Americans in turn besiege the stronghold of the invaders in New Jersey. But while their aircraft are effective against the dodo squadrons, the armored vehicles making up the Lassan ground forces, manned by giant apemen also under the Lassans' control, seem invulnerable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Red_Trilogy"title="Ruby Red Trilogy">
## Ruby Red.Gwendolin Shepherd, a 16-year-old student, feels dizzy for the first time during lunch at her school in London. Not long after, she unintentionally jumps through time while leaving the house. At first, Gwen is doubtful about her jump in time, since her cousin Charlotte Montrose has always been destined to have inherited the time travel gene that is passed down through the women in their family. Charlotte had been prepared for that duty her whole life, and resents Gwyneth for messing up her life plans. Gwen experiences two more uncontrolled jumps through time, during the third of which she witnesses herself, or a double of hers, kissing a boy she has never met at a ball in the 1700s. After her third jump, Gwen's best friend Lesley convinces her to tell her mother, who had apparently counterfeited Gwen's birth documents to protect her from the Guardians. The Lodge is skeptical of the circumstances, but decide to watch Gwen to confirm that she has in fact inherited the time travel gene. Gwen travels through time once more and is finally acknowledged as the final time traveler. Gwen's blood is fed to the chronograph, the time travel machine that contains secrets of its own, so that she can use it to travel through time smoothly and avoid uncontrolled jumps. Gwyneth is assigned the arrogant and disapproving Gideon de Villiers to watch her. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den_vita_stenen"title="Den vita stenen">
The book takes place in a village in the Swedish countryside during the 1930s. Fia and her mother Mrs Pettersson, a piano teacher, live in the big house of the village's "häradshövding" (a countryside local judge/lawspeaker), where the bad-tempered housekeeper Malin lives. People say bad things about Mrs Pettersson because she is useless and lazy as she just plays piano. Fia always gets teased by her school mates because she has a useless mother who is a piano teacher in their school.One summer day, a boy called Hampus comes to the village together with his stepparents, his uncle who is a poor shoemaker and his wife, and their 6 children. The shoemaker's wife and her children think Hampus is stupid as he "always makes trouble and makes them move house" as they have changed home often. When Hampus and Fia meet, they don't want to say their real names. The two children, who are alienated, start their own fraternity and call themselves "Fideli" (Fia) and "Farornas konung" ("King of the Dangers", Hampus). They "fight" for a white stone and order each other on "missions": "when you have completed the "mission" you'll get the stone".
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette_Sally"title="Suffragette Sally">
The novel mainly follows three women, Sally Simmonds, Edith Carstairs, and Geraldine Hill, and their involvement with the WSPU. Sally, a working class girl, attends a meeting where she hears Lady Hill speak and becomes entranced. Her quick conversion is contrasted to Edith Carstairs who undergoes a conversion from a polite Suffragist to a militant Suffragette. During the course of the novel Sally Simmonds risks everything she has: job, relationship, and life, enduring the hunger strike and subsequent abuse in prison. Edith navigates the social ramifications with outwardly charming Cyril Race, a deceptive politician. Lady Geraldine Hill does her part as an upperclass woman of title, disguising herself as a working class woman in order to participate in the hunger strike (having been released due to her title when she was previously incarcerated). The novel follows many historical events such as the hunger strike, Conciliation Bill, and Black Friday.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Pearl_(novel)"title="The White Pearl (novel)">
The novel's main character, Constance "Connie" Hadley, accidentally kills a Malay woman who places a curse upon Hadley and her family several minutes before passing away. The killed woman is the mother of teenage twins, Maya and Razak, and Hadley endeavours to meet with the pair after a troubling guilt affects her already fragile marriage to Nigel. Despite her husband's protests, Hadley decides to meet the sixteen-year-old twins, who in turn seek revenge against Hadley, and the brother and sister proceed to instead bond with Hadley's son, Teddy.It is December 1941 and, following their attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces are seeking to occupy Malaya. The British forces stationed in Malaya are overpowered and the Hadleys are forced to sail to Singapore in their yacht, "The White Pearl". Connie subsequently struggles for survival with her family as, along with numerous other passengers the couple have assisted to flee, they seek shelter on an island after Singapore also loses its status as an option for safety.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Solitudes_(novel)"title="The Solitudes (novel)">
The novel begins, like Goethe's Faust, with a "Prologue in Heaven", depicting John Dee and his scryer Edward Kelley–who Dee as yet only knows as Edward Talbot–watching Angels in a crystal. Suddenly, to their dread, the angels scatter and a child appears in the glass, "holding a space" Doctor Dee knows to be absolutely immense, into which both feel their souls being drawn. During a "Prologue on Earth" immediately following, a young Pierce Moffett, preparing to serve as an altar boy reads a novel about Giordano Bruno (later revealed to be by Fellowes Kraft), the sixteenth century Dominican Friar, and finds himself sharply identifying with the narrator.The novel proper begins under the sign of Vita, with Pierce now in middle age, taking a bus to apply for a job at Peter Ramus College. Along the way he is reading a new translation of "Las Soledades" of Luis de Góngora. The bus stops in the Faraway Hills, where Pierce meets Spofford, a previous student of his. Impulsively, Pierce decides to forget the interview and leave with Spofford for the town of Blackberry Jambs nearby.While there, Pierce comes to conceive of a novel combining his vast knowledge of history along with speculations about Hermetic philosophy, his interest in Giordano Bruno, as well as local author's Fellowes Kraft's unfinished series of novels involving Bruno and John Dee. In the meantime, he is drawn closer to Rosie Mucho. At the same time Rosie moves the painful first steps of divorcing her husband Mike. Interspersed throughout the novel are scenes from Kraft's novels, involving John Dee's first experiments with the occult, and his first meetings with other figures including William Shakespeare and Edward Kelley, as well as a second novel, featuring Giordano Bruno's education, rise to fame, and ultimately to his wandering years under the threat of death from the Church.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily's_Runaway_Imagination"title="Emily's Runaway Imagination">
Emily is a young girl noteworthy throughout her hometown of Pitchfork, Oregon for her great imagination and for the predicaments that she inadvertently manages to create, such as by intoxicating her father's pigs by feeding them rotten apples in order to avoid a chiding from her mother for wasting food, using Clorox to bleach a plow horse white in order to impress a visiting cousin, and humiliating herself publicly by correcting the language of a Chinese neighbor after he mispronounces the name of her pet collie.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Territorial_Imperative"title="The Territorial Imperative">
"The Territorial Imperative" develops the theses originally introduced in "African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man", which was published five years earlier. In "African Genesis", Ardrey posited that man originated in Africa instead of Asia, that he is driven by inherited instincts to acquire land and defend territory, and that the development of weapons was a fundamental turning point in his evolution. "The Territorial Imperative" further explores these ideas with a special emphasis on man's distinct preoccupation with the concept of territory. It goes on to elucidate the role that inherited evolutionary instinct, particularly the so-called "territorial imperative", plays in modern human society in phenomena such as property ownership and nation building.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_of_a_Peasant_Woman"title="The Life of a Peasant Woman">
Nastya, a quiet, shy and nice-looking peasant servant, strikes a friendship with Masha, the landlord's six-year-old daughter. Then disaster strikes: Nastya is to marry Grigory, an ugly half-wit with a reputation of a village idiot, the outrageous scheme being arranged between her own evil brother Kostik and his business partner Isay Prokudin, Grigory's father, desperately looking for an 'heir'. The marriage proves to be a tragic farce. For Nastya a long period of fierce mental and physical suffering follows. She tries to escape, gets retrieved, suffers from a mysterious mental condition people around her see as "possession" which promptly disappears as she finds herself in the home of Sila Ivanovich Krylushkin, an old man and a local herb-healer. Meanwhile, Grigory ventures for Ukraine to make money as a labourer, Nastya returns to Prokudin's house and slowly gets back to life, still feeling apathetic and unhappy.She meets Stepan, a good-looking peasant man, equally unhappy in his family life, who falls in love with her. She reciprocates. The two decide to run away, obtain false documents and head for the South aiming at Nikolayev, but get caught in Nezhin, a provincial Oryol Governorate town, and find themselves jailed. Nastya gives birth to a boy, who soon dies. As the pair is being transported back home, Stepan falls ill and lags behind, later to die of typhoid. Now raving mad, Nastya arrives back to the Prokudin house. Again Sila Krylushkin comes to help, giving the woman safe haven in his home where some of his patients are being kept. The house is raided by the police to investigate its owner's illegal healing practice. Nastya is sent to an asylum, escapes, lives in the local woods for some time, then, as the winter comes, is found frozen to death.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondomanila_(novel)"title="Mondomanila (novel)">
In a world where cargo boxes are houses and a full meal a day is a feast, Tony de Guzman subsists as a sophist but with plans to avenge his oppression. He begins his journey as the neighborhood water-carrier, cursing his estranged father for being a financial detriment with a pompous vision of education for his sons.Tony’s life is bridled by a string of endless acquaintances and relations dating back to his childhood. From his matchbox home of a nagging mother with dreams of romance and a kid brother sexually assaulted by an American pedophile, Tony takes minuscule steps along a narrow path of grime that is his community and elbows his way out of an interesting company of neighbors: Almang Paybsiks, the town gossip; Pablong Shoeshine, the arsonist Casanova; Mutya, the dilettante gangster; Sgt. Pepper, the town's resident macho who has a gay son; and Domeng, the pimp.When Tony is given the unique chance to become a scholar in the state university and later, to be employed as a prestigious computer engineer, he thought he had successfully escaped the filth of the slums—only to encounter worse depravity in fair skins and fragrant garments. Tony’s appetite for escape then becomes insatiable.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_Corleone"title="The Family Corleone">
In 1933 New York City, 17-year-old Sonny Corleone is aware that his father Vito Corleone's olive oil business is a cover for his Mafia activities. With Prohibition ending, and tensions between the organized crime groups in the city rising, the impulsive Sonny wishes to join his father's criminal empire.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windy_McPherson's_Son"title="Windy McPherson's Son">
"Windy McPherson's Son" is the story of Sam McPherson's rise in the world of business and search for emotional enlightenment in later life. McPherson starts out as an ambitious newsboy in Caxton, Iowa, with drunkard of a father who constantly embarrasses him. Eventually, after his mother's death and an episode with a middle-aged schoolteacher, McPherson leaves Caxton for Chicago. In Chicago, he gets a job as a buyer of farm implements and establishes his reputation in business. While his professional life is blossoming, his personal life suffers. After meeting Sue Rainey, the daughter of his boss Colonel Rainey, they get married and twice fail to have children. Following a business deal that forces his father-in-law out of his own company, McPherson and Sue Rainey separate.One day, once McPherson had become quite wealthy, he gets a telegram saying that Colonel Rainey committed suicide. This causes Sam to realize that he is unhappy with his life. This feeling inspires him to leave Chicago and travel all over becoming involved in various adventures. Finally, McPherson's comes across a promiscuous and alcoholic mother of three children. A deal is made and McPherson gets custody of the children. Showing up with the children at Sue's current place of residence, the five of them become family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_Deviant_Burial_Customs"title="Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs">
The first chapter, "Sources, approaches, and contexts", takes an interdisciplinary approach by examining the literary evidence from the Anglo-Saxon period regarding the execution and burial of those "individuals deemed social outcasts and even feared among the living for their malevolent qualities." Reynolds examines the references to punishment for deviancy within the Anglo-Saxon law codes, before looking at the evidence from charters and place-names referring to places of execution and burial sites.Chapter two, "Burials, bodies and beheadings", focuses on the archaeological evidence for deviant burials in Anglo-Saxon England, identifying eight specific causes for such funerary deposits: victims of battles, judicial executions, massacres, murder, plague, sacrifice and suicide. For each of these, Reynolds looks at the archaeological evidence that these would each leave behind, before attempting to identify any Anglo-Saxon grave sites that fit into these categories.In the third chapter, "Social deviants in a pagan society", Reynolds looks at the evidence for deviant burial practices from the fifth to the eighth centuries. Dismissing ideas that crouched, multiple, and shallow burials could be considered "deviant", he examines prone inhumations, decapitated and amputated bodies, and corpses with evidence of stoning, suggesting that these are best categorised as examples of deviant burial.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemlock_Grove"title="Hemlock Grove">
The book is set in the town of Hemlock Grove, Pennsylvania. The town is a mixture of extreme wealth and poverty, as the closing of the town's steel mill (owned by the Godfrey family) many years earlier cost a lot of people their jobs. Now the town's main sources of employment are the Hemlock Acres Hospital and the Godfrey Institute for Biomedical Technologies. Run by the powerful Godfrey family, the institute is rumored to have several sinister experiments take place within. The town's rumor mill turns even more twisted when a teenage girl is brutally killed during a full moon. Peter Rumancek, a 17-year-old Romanian gypsy boy who just moved to Hemlock Grove with his mother, is suspected of the crimes by some of the townsfolk and is also rumored to be a werewolf. While he secretly really is a werewolf, he isn't the actual killer and along with Roman, the heir to the Godfrey estate (who Peter realizes is an "upir", though Roman does not know it himself), they set out to find the killer.The two become unlikely friends, much to the chagrin of each boy's mother. As the two grow closer, Roman's mother Olivia resumes an affair with her late husband's brother, Dr. Norman Godfrey. At several points during the novel Norman tries to break away from Olivia but ultimately fails due to his desire for her, despite him remembering several warnings from his brother about how Olivia emotionally preys on people. While Roman has known about the affair all along (but doesn't discuss it with anyone), his monstrous-looking, yet highly intelligent and kind sister Shelley becomes aware of the affair later. She openly says so in one of the e-mails she exchanges with her uncle Norman (on a regular basis since he is her therapist).
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pagan_Middle_Ages"title="The Pagan Middle Ages">
## Milis' "Introduction".Ludo Milis' opening chapter, entitled "Introduction: The Pagan Middle Ages - a contradiction in terms?", begins by examining the use of "medieval" as a derogatory term that has been used to refer to things that are "old-fashioned, primitive or barbarous." He contrasts this with the view of the Middle Ages as a time when the Christian Church rose to power in Europe, bringing with it an "idealised order" of morality and obedience to divine authority. Milis then proceeds to discuss the manner in which contemporary Europeans have projected elements of their own time onto the Middle Ages, for instance noting that modern champions of European unity have praised the Medieval Emperor Charlemagne – rather than Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte or Adolf Hitler – as the "Father of Europe".The rest of the chapter is devoted to discussing whether historians and archaeologists can talk of a "Pagan Middle Ages", arguing that there was no such thing as a monolithic Christianity in Medieval Europe, but a variety of different religious positions across the continent. In this context, Milis argues, various "pagan rites, usages, ideas and ways of presenting things" were accepted into Christianity in different parts of Europe. He criticises the assumption of some earlier scholars that Christianity simply swept away the earlier pagan religions as it spread across Europe, highlighting the comparisons that could be made with the religious beliefs of indigenous peoples in Central and South America, or the black population of the Caribbean, all of which show a great deal of syncreticism between Christianity and older, traditional religion.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bread-Winners"title="The Bread-Winners">
One of the wealthiest and most cultured residents of the famed Algonquin Avenue in Buffland (a city intended to be Cleveland), Captain Arthur Farnham is a Civil War veteran and widower—his wife died of illness while accompanying him at a remote frontier post. Since he left the army, he has sought to involve himself in municipal affairs but fails through political naiveté. The victorious party has allowed him the position of chairman of the library board. In that capacity, he is approached by Maud Matchin, daughter of carpenter Saul Matchin, a man content with his lot. His daughter is not and seeks employment at the library as a means of bettering herself. Farnham agrees to put her case, but is defeated by a majority on the board, who have their own candidate. She finds herself attracted to Farnham, who is more interested in Alice Belding, daughter of his wealthy widow neighbor.Saul Matchin had hoped his daughter would become a house servant, but having attended high school, she feels herself too good for that. She is admired by Saul's assistant Sam Sleeny, who lives with the Matchins, a match favored by her father. Sleeny is busy repairing Farnham's outbuildings, and is made jealous by interactions between the captain and Maud. Seeing Sleeny's discontent, Andrew Jackson Offitt (true name Ananias), a locksmith and "professional reformer", tries to get him to join the Bread-winners, a labor organization. Sleeny is happy with his employment, "Old Saul Matchin and me come to an agreement about time and pay, and both of us was suited. Ef he's got his heel into me, I don't feel it," but due to his unhappiness over Maud, is easy game for Offitt, who gets him to join, and to pay the dues that are Offitt's visible means of support.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_(series)"title="Silo (series)">
The story of "Wool" takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth. Humanity clings to survival in the Silo, a subterranean city extending 144 stories beneath the surface. The series initially follows the character of Holston, the sheriff of the Silo, with subsequent volumes focusing on the characters of Juliette, Jahns, and Marnes. An ongoing storyline of the series is the focus on the mystery behind the Silo and the secrets it holds. "Shift", which encompasses books six through eight, comprise a prequel to the series. Book nine, "Dust", pulls the storylines together.Several studies frame the story within the dystopian genre, since Howey includes several of the main features of that type of literature, i.e. a totalitarian rule, rebellion of the main characters or a planned separation between human areas and wild natural spaces.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Weeks_(book)"title="Three Weeks (book)">
Paul Verdayne, wealthy English nobleman in his early twenties, is caught embracing the parson's daughter. His parents decide to send him away to France and then Switzerland. In Switzerland, he sees a woman referred to only as "the Lady". The Lady is older, in her thirties. After several days of exchanging lustful glances, they actually meet. She invites him to her apartment, where they share a sexual relationship for three weeks. Eventually, Paul learns the Lady is actually the queen of a Russian dependency and her husband, the king, is abusive towards her. She disappears after the titular three weeks; Paul is upset and returns to England. Paul later discovers that the Lady has given birth to their son. With his father's assistance, he finds out the Lady's identity; however, before they can meet again, she is murdered by her husband. Paul is upset and spends the next five years wandering around from country to country, until he decides to make preparations to meet his son.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_Coffee_Elsewhere"title="Drinking Coffee Elsewhere">
In the titular story, young black Yale University freshman Dina joins a series of orientation games that are meant to help students bond. In a game where students have to answer what inanimate object they would like to be, Dina says a revolver which leads her to have meetings with university staff and a psychiatrist. Her answer transforms her from a "honor roll student" into a "dangerous outcast" to others. Dina insults others, lies to the psychiatrist, and stays away from students who are also black. She begins an affair with a white female student who also has no friends, but Dina stops their relationship when the white girl publicly states that she is a lesbian due to Dina never being true to herself. The story "Speaking in Tongues" is about a 14-year-old named Tia who runs away from her great-aunt to try to find her mother who abandoned her. Tia fails to find her mother in Atlanta, Georgia, but she meets a prostitute named Marie and a hustler named Dezi. After Tia has a sexual encounter with Dezi, Tia has a "visionary feeling that she's been unable to achieve in church". Clareese discovers that the scriptures of her church are keeping her stuck in "Every Tongue Shall Confess". 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fractal_Prince"title="The Fractal Prince">
After the events of "The Quantum Thief", Jean le Flambeur and Mieli are on their way to Earth. Jean is trying to open the Schrödinger's Box he retrieved from the memory palace on the Oubliette. After making little progress, he is prodded by the ship "Perhonen" to talk to Mieli, who turns out to be possessed by the pellegrini again. This time, Jean identifies Mieli's employer as a Sobornost Founder, Joséphine Pellegrini, and gets her to reveal how he got captured, thereby picking up the clues to make plans for his next heist. No sooner is that done than an attack comes from the Hunter. The ship and crew barely survived that, and Jean realizes that he has to find a better way to open the Box - fast.Mieli has been very quiet after they left Mars. She has given up almost everything to the pellegrini, even her identity, as she has promised to let the pellegrini make gogols of her in exchange for rescuing the thief. Yet, having to work with the thief is testing her, especially when the thief eventually does something even more unforgivable than stealing Sydän's jewel from her.In the city of Sirr, on an Earth ravaged by wildcode, Tawaddud and Dunyazad are sisters and members of the powerful Gomelez family. Tawaddud is the black sheep of the family, having run away from her husband and consorted with a notorious jinn, a disembodied intelligence from the wildcode desert. Now Cassar Gomelez, her father, hopes to get her to curry favor with a gogol merchant, Abu Nuwas, so that he has enough votes in the Council for the upcoming decision to renegotiate the Cry of Wrath Accords with the Sobornost. Soon, Tawaddud is embroiled in an investigation with a Sobornost envoy into the murder that triggered the need for her father to forge a new alliance in the first place, and forced to confront old secrets that will change Sirr forever.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_(novel)"title="The Twelve (novel)">
After briefly revisiting some of the surviving characters from the first book, the novel jumps back to the start of the plague. Four plot lines emerge: an autistic young school bus driver named Danny decides to take his bus on his rounds one more time; a ex-military sniper named Kittridge holes up on a high floor of a Denver apartment building and begins shooting virals; Lawrence Grey, a janitor from the complex that Project Noah began in, wakes up in a hotel only to find himself younger and slimmer than he used to be; and Horace Guilder (a dying federal government functionary) copes with the country falling apart around him.Danny happens to come across two children, 18-year-old April Donadio and Tim, her younger brother, and picks them up. Meanwhile, Grey encounters a disoriented pregnant woman, who does not realize the dissolution of society around her, shopping for paint for her baby's bedroom in an abandoned Home Depot. She is Lila Beatrice Kyle, Brad Wolgast's divorced wife. Subsequently, Grey is mistaken as one of the workers and ends up helping Lila paint her house, and a bond is forged between the two. Danny and company drive to a stadium outside of Denver that was designated as a rescue site, only to discover it full of thousands of dead bodies. Soon after, Danny and April meet Kittridge, who successfully escaped the virals and military at Denver. After traveling several miles together, they stumble upon a FEMA semi-trailer full of survivors. Grey (who is being tracked by satellite) and Kyle are captured by Guilder and taken to a research center. Kittridge and company, with the help of Major Frances Porcheki, arrive at a refugee site just outside the research center. It emerges that the government is expecting the virals to attack the refugee camp, and, rather than moving the refugees, is going to wait until that happens in order to bomb it. While Danny and April escape in the bus, Kittridge and Tim do not, and they are killed by the bomb. Grey manages to escape after apparently killing Suresh, a medical examiner, and Nelson, then takes Guilder hostage. As Grey, Guilder, and Lila try to escape in a helicopter, the bombs fall and the helicopter crashes. Guilder knocks Grey out with a chunk of concrete.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_Sun"title="Copper Sun">
Amari, a 15-year old girl, is with Kwasi, her 8-year old brother, in her village of Ziavi, Africa. Kwasi is in a coconut tree when Amari tells him to get down and bring some fruits to their mother. Kwasi teases Amari by saying he saw her promised to Besa, a drummer from their village. Amari then starts describing her village. She meets up with Besa, who is going to the elders of the village, claiming to have seen strangers who have "skin the color of goat’s milk.” She goes back to her family's home, uneasy. After talking with her mother about these people, they conclude that they must welcome these people, and start making preparations for their guests. The men arrive later, along with warriors from the Ashanti, a nearby tribe. After exchanging gifts, the village storyteller, Komla, who is Amari's own father, starts telling tales about the past. Then ceremonial dancing begins, to the beat of ceremonial drums.Suddenly, one of the white men shoots the village chief with his gun. Fighting follows, with various villagers trying to escape, only to be killed by the white men. The Ashanti warriors that accompanied the men join them in capturing the villagers. Both of Amari's parents are killed, and later when she tries to escape with her brother, he is killed as well before she is shackled and brought back to the village. At daybreak, she discovers that only 24 villagers are alive, and all of them are like her, young and fairly healthy. Amari and the other villagers are then shackled in the neck to each other and are commanded by the white men to start walking. Several of the villagers die, some from wounds, others from simply losing the will to live. Amari, along with the surviving villagers and a few other groups of captives then arrive at Cape Coast, in what is nowadays Southern Ghana.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sins_of_the_Father_(Archer_novel)"title="The Sins of the Father (Archer novel)">
Harry Clifton has joined the American Navy and has assumed the identity of Tom Bradshaw after his ship sinks in order to solve some of his problems, never knowing that he will end up in prison to serve Bradshaw's sentence for desertion. In prison he meets Pat Quinn, from whom he quickly starts learning prison trades. After hard work, he ends up as the prison librarian and begins writing "The Diary of a Convict". Back in England, Wallace informs everyone about the death and later the burial of Harry at sea.Emma, who is Giles's sister, is Harry's girlfriend and goes to meet Maisie, Harry's Mother. While the letter by Tom Bradshaw (Harry) is lying on Maisie's mantelpiece, Emma recognizes the handwriting and believes that Harry is still alive. Not allowed to open the letter, she sets out to find Harry. She works on "Kansas Star", the ship in which Harry was saved, and from there, she gets to know about the people Tom Bradshaw was with in his last moments. On visiting their home, she realize that Harry himself is Tom and is now in prison.Harry meanwhile writes a diary about his time in prison. When one of his fellow inmates, Max Lloyd, is released, he requests Harry to keep sending him diaries as he enjoys reading them a lot. Max publishes them in his own name. Emma reads the 'Diary of a Convict' and recognizes Harry's handiwork. She begins to try and meet him in prison but the warden says that Harry/Tom has been mysteriously transferred. Harry and Pat are recruited by the US army to cause mayhem behind enemy lines.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_5_(novel)"title="Article 5 (novel)">
A war has torn through the United States, leading to the establishment of the Federal Bureau of Reformation (FBR) and a re-writing of the Bill of Rights, leaving the Moral Statues. The FBR have started a new war, and that's a war on sex. Women that break Article 5 and have children out of wedlock are taken away and imprisoned, as is the case with Ember Miller's mother. The FBR have captured the two of them and have sent Ember to the Girls Reformatory and Rehabilitation Center of West Virginia. There Ember attempts and fails to escape, only succeeding when her old love interest Chase intervenes and runs away with her to Virginia. There they have plans to go to a safehouse where Ember's mom is supposedly located, only to find the man who was supposed to transport them has been shot by the FBR. Before he dies, he tells the two teens of a carrier in West Virginia that could help them.The two later learn of a carrier and underground system in their former hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee, which prompts them to return in the hopes of finding escape. As they grow closer to the town, they learn that the town is in the process of being closed off to create a base for the FBR and that the streets are full of people that are either homeless or working for the FBR. Chase and Ember are separated when a scuffle for food turns into a riot and Ember is grabbed by Sean Banks, a member of the local resistance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abbey_(novel)"title="The Abbey (novel)">
St. Augustine defined 6 periods from human life. The last period being the Armageddon - when the armies of humans led by a Messiah will have to defeat the forces of evil.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Hearts_of_Kwasi_Boachi"title="The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi">
The novel purports to be a memoir written in 1900 by Kwasi Boachi, one of two Ashanti princes taken from their homeland to the Netherlands in 1837 to receive a Christian education. It is mostly based on historical fact, and set partly in the nineteenth-century Dutch Gold Coast. Kwasi and his fellow Ashanti prince Kwame Poku are pestered at their school in Delft and attract a measure of attention from the royal court, which views the boys as curiosities and, while favoring them for the while, fails to offer them continued support. Kwasi and Kwame grow apart; Kwasi chooses to assimilate himself into Dutch culture and deny his African background, while Kwame is unable to adapt to his new environment. He returns to Africa, but finds himself an outcast there as he has by now forgotten his native language; no longer accepted by his own people, whom he never sees again. Almost three years are spent waiting in Fort Elmina for permission to return to his people while he slowly appears to sink into delusion, then commits suicide. Meanwhile, Kwasi attempts to seek his fortune in the Dutch East Indies but fails, owing in part to the prevalence of racism and a personal grudge held by one of his former classmates, who is his superior in the East Indies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates!_in_an_Adventure_with_the_Romantics"title="The Pirates! in an Adventure with the Romantics">
The Pirates encounter Romantic poets on the shore of Lake Geneva: Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Fathers_Club"title="The Dead Fathers Club">
"The Dead Fathers Club" follows the character of 11-year-old Phillip as he is visited by his father Brian's ghost. His father states that he was murdered by his brother Alan and that Phillip must avenge his murder and prevent Alan from taking over the family pub and marrying his widow. Phillip is given three months to avenge his father via the murder of his uncle Alan, lest his father fall prey to the Terrors (the supposed fate for ghosts of murder victims whose deaths are not avenged).Phillip is encouraged by his deceased father to steal a mini-bus to supposedly prevent Alan from breaking into the pub and is shown several chemicals that could potentially kill his father's murderer. During this time Phillip is assigned to therapy sessions and begins a relationship with Leah, the daughter of a business partner in the garage Alan works at, which Brian does not approve of.Phillip eventually tries to murder Alan using the chemicals, but he is forced to abandon his first two attempts. In the third attempt, which involves setting fire to his uncle's car garage, Phillip accidentally causes the death of Leah's father. Phillip's conscience eventually leads him to attempt to confess the arson to Leah, who is depressed and slightly delusional at this point. When attempting to confess, Phillip sees the ghost of Leah's father, who attempts to pressure Phillip and make him feel guilty for his acts. Phillip then attempts to confess to Leah's brother Dane, who pulls a knife on Phillip but does not hurt him and instead tells Phillip not to tell Leah about the arson.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonemouth"title="Stonemouth">
Stewart Gilmour returns to Stonemouth, a fictional seaport town north of Aberdeen, for a funeral. It is five years since he ran away to London after a sexual indiscretion at a wedding. Stonemouth is controlled by two rival gangs, the Murstons and the MacAvetts, and Gilmour was engaged to a member of the former clan before he had to leave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Malady_of_Death"title="The Malady of Death">
"The Malady of Death" is about an unconventional sexual relationship between a man and a woman. The man hires the woman to stay with him in a hotel by the sea, hoping that by doing so, he will be able to experience love. The woman accepts the proposal even though she is not a prostitute. After some days, the woman tells him that he is incapable of love as he is afflicted with the "malady of death". The book is written in the second-person narrative; throughout the book, the man is referred to as "you", and the woman as "she".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darah_Muda"title="Darah Muda">
Nurdin, a young Minangkabau doctor, has just finished ten years of medical school in Batavia (now Jakarta). On the trip back home to Padang, he meets Rukmini, a young Sundanese school teacher, and her mother. Although they are only together while on the boat between islands, the meeting makes Nurdin more extroverted. After spending several days in Padang, he returns to Batavia.Several years later, he is transferred to Bukittinggi. On the way there, he spends several days at his uncle's house in Padang; the uncle wishes Nurdin to marry his daughter, which Nurdin rejects soundly. While at a meeting for the founding of a new school, Nurdin sees Rukmini get hired. The following week, at the train station, he meets Rukmini and the two become closer. They become closer still when Nurdin treats Rukmini's mother, and Nurdin decides to propose.However, Nurdin's mother disagrees with their relationship and secretly tells Rukmini that Nurdin is set to marry his cousin. This untruth causes Rukmini to become heartbroken. Meanwhile, the widower Harun falls for Rukmini and steals one of her pictures. When Nurdin gives him a physical, Harun shows Nurdin the image and says that they are in a relationship. This leads Nurdin to abandon Rukmini.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Vampire_(book_series)"title="The Little Vampire (book series)">
Protagonist Anton Bohnsack, an ordinary 9-year-old boy, is fascinated by vampires until befriending one (called Rüdiger) of a vampire clan, the Schlottersteins, who reside in the local cemetery. Little by little, Anton befriends Rüdiger’s younger sister Anna and older brother Lumpi. Anton undertakes frequent nightly “trips” with Rüdiger and Anna, wherein Anton must hide his presence (and his friendship with Rüdiger) from hostile vampires, his own parents, and the fanatic Geiermeier, the cemetery's caretaker.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathen_Gods_in_Old_English_Literature"title="Heathen Gods in Old English Literature">
In the opening chapter, entitled "Nerthus and Terra Mater: Anglian religion in the first century", North begins by describing the approach that he has taken in this particular study of Anglo-Saxon paganism. Highlighting how little information regarding pre-Christian beliefs was recorded in the surviving Old English literature, all of which was produced in the Christian period, he argues that scholars must approach the subject by looking at the literary evidence produced by related Germanic-language societies elsewhere in Europe. He argues that by studying both the 1st-century accounts of Tacitus regarding religion in continental Germania and the Late Medieval accounts from Iceland and Scandinavia, scholars can shed further light on lost aspects of Anglo-Saxon heathenism.Chapter two, "Ingui of Bernicia" looks at the concept of an Anglo-Saxon god named Ing. He discusses the existence of the "Ingvaeones", a tribe in first-century Germania, arguing that they may have been devoted to Ing. Drawing comparisons from the cult of Dionysus in the Classical world, North argues that ""Ing-" was first a functional term for a human embodiment of Nerthus, then for a man representing Nerthus." Proceeding to discuss the role of the Vanir in Norse mythology, he deals with Ingvi-Freyr of Uppsala in Sweden and then Ingui of Bernicia in Northern England, ultimately concluding that in early Anglo-Saxon history, a deity named Ingui was believed to be the progenitor of Anglian kings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Archaeology_of_Hindu_Ritual"title="The Archaeology of Hindu Ritual">
Willis opens the book with a discussion of the early Hindu ritual site at the Udayagiri Caves, a place that had ancient origins but which was reworked under the administration of the Gupta Emperor Candragupta II. He highlights the relationship that Candragupta II had with the Hindu god Viṣṇu before moving on to a discussion of his methodology. Noting that he takes an interdisciplinary approach that combines archaeological and historical evidence, he critiques earlier text-based historical approaches to studying the development of early Hinduism before returning to a discussion of Udayagiri. Willis closes his introduction by reiterating his belief that in Indian history, it was religion that drove economic and political relationships rather than the other way round.Chapter one, "The Archaeology and Politics of Time at Udayagiri", goes into greater depth regarding the archaeological site at the Udayagiri Caves, highlighting the fact that it served as a centre for "imperial ritual" during the Gupta period. Willis begins by describing the central ridge and passage at the site, before offering a synopsis of astronomical phenomenon and how it pertained to the Udayagiri site. He then discusses various sculptures at the site, such as that of Narasiṃha and of Varāha, two avatars of Viṣṇu.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Among_Others"title="Among Others">
The novel is presented as the diary of Morgana, a 15-year-old Welsh science fiction and fantasy fan, in 1979 and 1980. She and her twin sister Morwenna, both frequently using the nicknames "Mor" or "Mori", grew up playing and occasionally working magic with beings they call faeries in the hills of Wales. Several months before the start of the novel, their mother, who is described as both insane and a witch, attempts to gain more power to take over the world. The sisters are able to stop her, but in the process their mother causes them to be struck by a car, killing Morwenna and disabling one of Morgana's legs. Morgana begins mostly using Morwenna's name, though still typically going by Mori. As her mother is insane and her grandfather (with whom she previously lived) has had a stroke and is in a care facility, she has run away from her home and been sent to western England to live with her father and his three half-sisters, none of whom she has ever seen. Bereft of her sister, her joy in running, and her beloved Welsh countryside, Mori must reconcile to her new life as a disabled, friendless outsider. She feels that she can do this as long as she has books to read, and her one connection to her father is the love of books they share. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dervish_House"title="The Dervish House">
"The Dervish House" is a near-future science fiction tale that follows a number of characters after a bus bombing incident in Istanbul during a week-long heatwave in April 2027. The characters have little contact with one another, other than they mostly reside or work in the neighborhood of an abandoned dervish house, Adem Dede, located in Eskiköy, within Istanbul's trendy Beyoğlu district. Most of the characters witness the bombing incident from different vantage points, and their actions are indirectly related to this event.The chapters alternate character perspectives. The primary character threads concern the following characters:The story itself is a thriller, driven by the curious nature and mysterious motivations of the initial bombing, which resulted in no fatalities, other than the suicide bomber. Through the various character experiences it is revealed that the initial bombing was an experiment to test the effects of a hallucinogenic substance dispersed through a nanopowder vector on an unsuspecting population, in order to catalyze hallucinatory religious visions and usher in a cultural religious awakening. The story culminates when Necdet, Can, and Georgios thwart a final attempt by the terrorists to disperse the hallucinogen through the gas pipes of Istanbul.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnal_(novel)"title="Nocturnal (novel)">
The book is set in San Francisco and is narrated from multiple perspectives, largely that of Bryan Clauser, a homicide detective known for his calm, cold demeanor. This is in stark contrast to the personality of his partner Lawrence "Pookie" Chang, who spends much of his time making wise-cracks and writing the series bible for a TV series he's developing. The two come across a series of ritualistic murders that appear to be initially unconnected but eventually prove to be related to a teenager by the name of Rex Deprovdechuk. During all of the murders Bryan and Rex both have a series of dreams where they see bizarre, monstrous people murdering the victims in the name of an as yet unknown king. Unbeknownst to the others, the monsters have kidnapped multiple individuals including the homeless junkie Aggie James.Rex is extremely unpopular at his school and was frequently the subject of physical abuse by his mother and by a gang of bullies called "BoyCo". He's initially unaware that he is the reason for the murders but finds himself genuinely enjoying the murder dreams, not only because he's witnessing his bullies' suffering but also because he finds the violence sexually appealing. Meanwhile, Bryan and Pookie investigate the crimes with the help of Pookie's former partner John "Black Mr. Burns" Smith and find that the murders are being committed by a group called "Marie's Children". The group is steeped in mystery as any records of the group- and their opponents "The Saviors"- have been expunged from multiple places. Rex is eventually approached by Sly and a few members of Marie's Children, who tell him that he is their king and is destined to lead them to a glorious new future. Sly and the others help Rex murder his abusive mother and then take him to a series of hiding places before taking him to "Home". During this Bryan finds that Marie's Children are a humanoid species separate from humanity and that he is one of them. He also reconnects with his ex-girlfriend Robin, a medical examiner for San Francisco.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Calvin_Coolidge_in_a_Dream"title="Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream">
A Capraesque yarn of midlife crisis, romance and spirituality told by a Chinese immigrant banker residing in suburban New York, who nearly destroys his marriage and finds salvation in the words and deeds of President Calvin Coolidge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritual_(Pinner_novel)"title="Ritual (Pinner novel)">
An English police officer named David Hanlin—a puritanical Christian—is asked to investigate what appears to be the ritualistic murder of a local child in an enclosed rural Cornish village. During his short stay, Hanlin deals with psychological trickery, sexual seduction, ancient religious practices and nightmarish sacrificial rituals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Genie_of_Sutton_Place"title="The Genie of Sutton Place">
"Sutton Place" deals with a young man, his coming-of-age, and a thousand-year old genie. Interactions of absolute power (supernatural) vs. daily life are examined; action and adventure unfold in conjunction with a transformed dog.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazon_(novella)"title="The Amazon (novella)">
Domna Platonovna, a forceful and industrious woman who seems to be in contact with half of Saint Petersburg, is in a state of permanent war with the outside world. Supplying people with laces (the major item of her trade) but also with all kinds of services (like setting marriages, not to speak of less formal liaisons), she greatly resents people's ingratitude, as she sees it. To illustrate how badly people treat her, she tells the narrator the story of Lekanida Petrovna, a beautiful and sensitive woman who, having left her provincial husband, came to the capital hoping to find her happiness here, only to be forced into prostitution, by Domna Platonovna herself.The narrator is baffled: this 'warrior woman' is by no means vile, she's just misguided, lacking basic ideas about what's right and wrong. Curious as to what circumstances might have turned a human being (she once apparently must have been) into such a pathetic 'fat-hearted' creature, he tries to draw from her some kind of confession, but the stories she tells him about her past are comically bizarre and explain little. Some things are for certain, though: the meaning of the word "love" is totally foreign to her. And her only moral defect, as far as she is concerned, is exceptionally sound sleep. She claims there's just one sin she'd ever committed, that of having inadvertently swapped husbands with her godmother, and blames for it her sleeping habits again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollywood_Striptease"title="Bollywood Striptease">
The central character of the novel is Nikki, an attractive chartered accountant. She aspires to become a Bollywood actress. Nikki quits her stable job to pursue her ambition, but she is met with hostility by her family and other people because of her unconventional decision. Her only source of encouragement is her two good friends, Shonali and Karan. In the film industry, she meets unexpected situations including rejections at auditions, offers of casting couch, and a difficult relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Lourds"title="Thomas Lourds">
The series follows Thomas Lourds as he is thrust into several situations concerning religious historical secrets centering on ancient artifacts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Sleep"title="Beyond Sleep">
Alfred Issendorf, a geology student from Amsterdam, has received a grant to do field work in Finnmark, Norway, attempting to verify his professor's theory that meteors have impacted the area, leaving telltale craters. His professor, Sibbelee, has written the Norwegian professor Nummedal (his own former dissertation director) to ask for aerial photographs of the area, but when Issendorf meets Nummedal in Oslo the latter knows nothing of any photographs (and scoffs at the meteor theory); if they exist, he says, they may be at the Geological Survey in Trondheim, with a Professor Hvalbiff. In Trondheim, however, no Hvalbiff is present, and the unfinished office buildings are in disarray—quickly it turns out that no aerial photographs are here, and later Issendorf discovers that Hvalbiff ("whale meat") was probably a derogatory name for the director, Oftedahl.Without photographs, and now sleep-deprived because of his anxieties and the lack of darkness at night, Issendorf travels on to Tromsø, and thence to Alta, in Finnmark. There, he meets up with Arne, an old geology acquaintance who is also there for fieldwork, and then with two more students, Qvigstad and Mikkelsen. With two tents, tinned meat, and boxes of "knekkebrød", the four set out for the interior, a rather bleak, uninhabited, and mosquito-infested area. One of their camps is under the mountain Vuorje, at a lake where they fish for trout. Issendorf, who does not get along with Qvigstad and Mikkelsen, sleeps poorly and spends much of his time in gloomy thoughts, feeling unable to measure up to his father and even to Arne, and wondering whether ancient resentment between Sibbelee, Oftedahl, and Nummedal is to blame for making his mission impossible.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_Iniuria"title="Summa Iniuria">
The book proposes a legal reform for Switzerland which has never been realized because of political controversies. The Maria Popescu, Pierre Jaccoud, and Vera Brühne cases are discussed in detail, as Sutermeister was involved in the criminal researches. The George Edalji case serves, among others, to illustrate the issue of faulty expertises. The main part consists of the so–called “Hirschberg test”, based on Max Hirschbergs categories of causes of judicial errors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Buried_Pyramid"title="The Buried Pyramid">
A British soldier named Captain Neville Hawthorne is ordered by his commanding officer, Colonel Reginald Sedgewick to escort Prince Albert's cousin, Alphonse "Herr" Libermann, a German archaeologist. Which Alphone tells Neville that he's searching for the Buried Pyramid, the Tomb of Neferankhotep, who may also have been Moses the Lawgiver and that a lady gave him the journal of an explorer named Chad Spice.A soldier named Sergeant Edward "Eddie" Bryce joins them on their search for the Buried Pyramid along with Alphonse's assistant, Derek, and three camel wranglers named Ali, his son, Ishmael, and his daughter, Miriam.Eddie hears something that sounds more like a wolf pack than jackals. Neville orders the group to get the camels ready and get out of the canyon because it's like a box. Miriam leads them to a place that is a necropolis to the old kings and a place her father and brother don't trust. Alphonse is clipped by a ricochet from a bullet fired from a Bedouin's rifle. The Bedouins made an occasional charge but were driven back without much effort. Occasionally they dragged a wounded comrade. On the third day, Neville comes up with a plan' to escape. He has Miriam and Alphonse dress him as a mummy. Miriam runs to the Bedouins and tells them that they woke up the mummy. When Neville points at a person Eddie shoots them. The Bedouins run off. After they return to Cairo, Alphonse returns to Germany while Neville returns to England and Eddie becomes a native.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_the_Darkness"title="Fear the Darkness">
Psychic Cassandra Anderson investigates a series of mysterious deaths of prisoners in a sector house, and discovers a malevolent presence. Outside the building is under attack by a mob of psychopaths.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sins_of_the_Father_(Judge_Anderson_novel)"title="Sins of the Father (Judge Anderson novel)">
Years after falling victim to a gang of child abusers, a man turns vigilante to exact his revenge. Anderson is assigned to hunt him down, but the case reawakens long-buried memories of her own tormented childhood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowdale_(novel)"title="Shadowdale (novel)">
"Shadowdale" centers around the members of the "Company of the Lynx" and the search for the Tablets of Fate, divine tablets that hold a listing of the Gods and their roles in the balance of Law and Chaos, during the Time of Troubles. The theft of these tablets was the actual cause of the Time of Troubles as all the gods with the exception of Helm were cast to Toril and faiths and magic ran wild. The Company of the Lynx consisted of Kelemvor Lyonsbane, Adon of Sune, Midnight (whose true name was Ariel Manx), and Cyric.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Casual_Vacancy"title="The Casual Vacancy">
The novel is split into seven parts, the first depicting the death of local Pagford Parish Councillor, Barry Fairbrother, who suffers a burst aneurysm in the car park of a local golf course. The inhabitants of the town share the news with their friends and relatives and chaos ensues. The problem arises in deciding whether local council estate 'The Fields' should join the local city of Yarvil, or remain as part of Pagford as Fairbrother favoured; his death is seen by many as an opportunity to end the debate once and for all. The fate of the methadone rehabilitation clinic, Bellchapel, is also a key controversy in the parish.After the date for the election of Fairbrother's replacement is announced, the children of some of the councillors and candidates decide to make damaging, yet often accurate, posts on the Parish Council online forum. Andrew Price is the first to do so, by means of an SQL injection which he learned how to perform in school, operating under the name 'The_Ghost_Of_Barry_Fairbrother' and informing everyone that his father, Simon, had obtained a stolen computer. Sukhvinder follows, posting that her mother, Dr. Parminder Jawanda, was in love with Barry. Thirdly, Fats Wall posts, claiming his adoptive father Cubby (a Deputy Headteacher) suffers from obsessive fear of having molested a child without any memory of the fact. Finally, in a desperate attempt to relieve the guilt weighing on him for costing his father his job, Andrew confides in Simon and posts that Council leader Howard Mollison is having an affair with his business partner Maureen. Howard's son, Miles Mollison, is the winning candidate, much to the displeasure of his wife, Samantha, who confesses she did not know if she still loves him, only to eventually reconcile.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Confusion_of_Princes"title="A Confusion of Princes">
The story introduces Khemri, a Prince, as he finishes his training and reaches adulthood. Khmeri believes he is destined for a life of luxury and freedom, however, within moments of leaving his home, he barely manages to survive several assassination attempts with the help of his first priest, called the Master of Assassins. The Master of Assassins tells him that he is in grave danger because princes are vulnerable to true death before they are able to link in to the Imperial Mind. The Imperial Mind is the supreme commander of the Empire, but it cannot see its subjects unless they link with it. Khemri and the Master of Assassins then set out for the nearest conduit to the Imperial Mind to make Khemri less vulnerable. The nearest conduit is on Kwanantil 9, a planet that is used as a training base by the Imperial Navy. The prince is upset that in order to access the Conduit, he must first enlist in the Imperial Navy and tie himself down.Upon arriving, Prince Khemri enlists in the Imperial Navy. The Priest receiving him oversees his access to the Mind, then tells him that he has been chosen by the Imperial Mind for a special task. Meanwhile, he refuses an offer from the Commandant of the base to join House Jerrazis, a middle tier House, or guild. As most of the cadets and officers at the academy are members, he becomes a target for pranks and demerits making his life there an effective hell. Just as Khemri is prepared to beg the Commandant for another chance to join the House, the academy are attacked by a small Sad-Eye raiding party.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neverwinter_Saga"title="Neverwinter Saga">
## Gauntlgrym.In this title, Drizzt joins Bruenor Battlehammer on his quest to find the fabled dwarven kingdom of Gauntlgrym: said to be rich ancient treasure and arcane lore. However, Jarlaxle and Athrogate discover it first. In their search for treasure and magic, the enemy drow and dwarf pair inadvertently set into motion a catastrophe that could spell disaster for the unsuspecting inhabitants of Neverwinter—a catastrophe large enough for Jarlaxle to risk his own skin and money to stop it. To their dismay, the more they uncover about the ancient dwarven kingdom, the more they see they can't stop it on their own. This ends up in an unlikely teaming up with none other than Drizzt and Bruenor. Drizzt's lust for battle increases and he begins to wonder if he is truly different from any other dark elf, and if he loses the last of his companions he wonders if he will succumb to drow nature. In the end, Bruenor must sacrifice his life in order to save his friends and all of Neverwinter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Monk_Is_a_Mess"title="Mr. Monk Is a Mess">
After arriving home in San Francisco after working as police officers in Summit, New Jersey, Natalie Teeger finds a dead body laying in her bathtub. During the investigation by the police, marked money from a federal sting operation is found stuffed under Natalie's mattress. Natalie now needs Monk's help, but Monk is preoccupied with his own investigation. He's helping his brother find his missing girlfriend Yuki Nakamura, which is a problem that Monk is conflicted about, since he's happy to see Yuki leave.As the case continues, it becomes clear that Yuki has a dangerous past, and that they are chasing a ruthless, cold-blooded killer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infected_(novel)"title="Infected (novel)">
The book follows several characters as they deal with an alien invasion on the microscopic level. The narration is primarily through the perspectives of Perry Dawsey, an ex-football player with an anger problem, and Margaret Montoya, an epidemiologist with the CDC who is investigating a strange disease that turns seemingly normal people into murderers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_and_Destroy_(novel)"title="Search and Destroy (novel)">
CIA Special Activities Division (SAD) officer and former Navy SEAL Max Moore has a dilemma: save the life of his wife or let her be killed for the lives of thousands of innocent people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppy_(novel)"title="Poppy (novel)">
In the Dimwood region, a large family of mice inhabit an abandoned farmhouse called Gray House. Poppy, a young deer mouse, dances with her boyfriend Ragweed, a golden mouse, on Bannock Hill. However, Mr. Ocax, a great horned owl who acts as a tyrannical ruler over the family, attacks them and kills Ragweed. When Poppy returns to Gray House, she learns that the family must relocate to New House, where the food is more abundant. However, Ocax refuses to give the family permission to move to the area, citing Poppy and Ragweed's refusal to ask his permission to go to Bannock Hill. His refusal makes Poppy curious, so she decides to travel to New House herself to investigate.In Dimwood Forest, Poppy stumbles upon Ereth, a porcupine. Ereth agrees to protect Poppy from Ocax in exchange for the salt lick at New House that he can't obtain on his own. Ereth drops Poppy off at the boundaries of New House, where Poppy discovers that Ocax is afraid of a large artificial owl there. Armed with one of Ereth's quills, Poppy confronts Ocax about the figure but inadvertently reveals that it is fake. Ocax then attacks Poppy but is defeated when Poppy stabs him with the quill. Ocax slams into the salt lick pole, killing him and causing the salt lick to fall to the ground. Ereth retrieves the salt lick, and Poppy goes home to tell her family they are now free from Ocax and able to move. A few moons later she meets and marries Rye, Ragweed's brother. Each night they freely dance on Bannock Hill.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagious_(novel)"title="Contagious (novel)">
Perry Dawsey and Margaret Montoya attempt to stop an alien infestation of "hatchlings". Dawsey, former Michigan linebacker, has survived the events in "Infected", but remains telepathically linked to the aliens. His insight into the aliens' behavior helps the government hunt them down. Dawsey is forced to participate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestor_(novel)"title="Ancestor (novel)">
"Ancestor" follows PJ Colding as he and his crew are tasked with transporting a team of scientists to a remote snow-covered landscape to finish their project: to recreate the ancestor of all humanity in order to provide life-saving organs that would be compatible with all people. As a snow storm threatens to trap them on the island, the scientists succeed beyond their wildest expectations. The result, however, might just bring humanity to extinction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowfang's_Secret"title="Yellowfang's Secret">
From a young age, Yellowfang physically experiences others' pain as if it were her own. Sagewhisker, the ShadowClan medicine cat, convinces Yellowfang that this ability would make her effective as a medicine cat if she could learn to control the power. Sagewhisker thus takes Yellowfang on as an apprentice, and Yellowfang takes the medicine cats' vows, including the forsaking of taking a mate. Despite this, she has a relationship with ShadowClan warrior Raggedpelt in secret, and Yellowfang ultimately becomes pregnant with his kits. Yellowfang gives birth in secret, but only one kit, Brokenkit, survives. Yellowfang gives Brokenkit up to another she-cat in the Clan, withholding her identity as the mother. Brokenkit grows up spoiled and mistreated: his father, who is in a position of power, indulges him and refuses to punish him. His adoptive mother shuns him and his adoptive littermates bully him. As a result, he grows into a vicious cat without learning empathy or kindness. While he is growing up, Raggedtail becomes a leader, being renamed Raggedstar. Brokentail receives his warrior name, and becomes ShadowClan's deputy (second-in-command and future leader). Brokentail trains his apprentices with extreme methods, which go unchecked as his father refuses to see the wrong in his son's actions. Brokentail eventually murders Raggedstar to gain control of the Clan, while blaming the death on neighboring WindClan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Meaning_of_Smekday"title="The True Meaning of Smekday">
The story is narrated in first person by a 12-year-old girl in eighth grade, and takes the form of a school-assigned essay intended for submission to a national competition, and expected to be stored in a time capsule to be opened in 100 years.The protagonist is Gratuity "Tip" Tucci, who must survive on her own at age 11, after her mother is abducted by an alien race called the Boov. The entire Boov population arrives in a fleet of ships on Christmas Eve, and use their advanced technology to take over the Earth without bloodshed. The Boov promptly rename Earth and Christmas "Smekland" and "Smekday" respectively, in honor of their leader, Captain Smek.On "Moving Day", when all humans are required by the Boov to relocate to Florida, Tip evades being transported by the Boov, and instead drives the family car to Florida in search of her mother. When the car breaks down, Tip reluctantly joins forces with a fugitive Boov mechanic who had taken the name J.Lo, thinking it to be a "common Earth name." Tip learns that the overly-friendly J.Lo was fleeing from his fellow Boov because, while modifying radio tower antennas for Boov use, he had accidentally transmitted a strong test signal in the wrong direction. The signal gave away the Earth's location to the Gorg, a violent alien race who had previously conquered the Boov's home planet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem"title="Anathem">
"Anathem" is set on the fictional planet of Arbre. Thousands of years before the events in the novel, the planet's intellectuals entered "concents" (monastic communities) to protect their activities from the collapse of society. The "avout" (intellectuals separated from "Sæcular" society) are banned from possessing or operating most advanced technology and are supervised by the "Inquisition", which answers to the outside world. The avout are normally allowed to communicate with people outside the walls of the concent only once every year, decade, century, or millennium, depending on the particular vows they have taken.The narrator and protagonist, Fraa Erasmas, is an avout at the Concent of Saunt Edhar. His teacher, Fraa Orolo, discovers that an alien spacecraft is orbiting Arbre – a fact that the world government ("Sæcular Power") attempts to cover up. Erasmas becomes aware of Orolo's discovery after Orolo is banished (in a rite called "Anathem") from the concent for using a video camera (a forbidden technology) to observe the ship. The presence of the alien ship soon becomes an open secret among many of the avout at Saunt Edhar. The alien ship eventually declares its presence by shining a laser upon several Millenarian Maths (the bastions of those avout who have taken a thousand-year vow of isolation). Shortly after that, the Sæcular Power summons many avout from Saunt Edhar, including Erasmas and a Millenarian named Fraa Jad.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Warholic"title="Laura Warholic">
Eugene Eyestones, an erudite recluse and bespectacled Vietnam veteran, writes "The Sexual Intellectual," a column that discusses anything related to sex, as a contributor to "Quink," a monthly magazine published in Boston by Minot Warholic. "Quink" has an eclectic group of coworkers and collaborators, diverse people ready to disagree and display prejudices. They include characters named Discknickers, the “pseudo-fascist” accountant; Ratnaster, the atheist interviewer; Duxbak, Eyestones' only friend; Mutrix, the homophobe lawyer; Chasuble, the homophile movie critic; and lesbians Ann Marie Tubb and The Krauthammer.Laura Warholic, the estranged former wife of the publisher, had moved from San Francisco to Boston, where she is being befriended by Eyestones. She is younger and described as sexless, lacking charm, interests, drive, and ambition. She is interested only in rock and rock musicians. Pity appears his main attractive force to her, yet he also exploits her for his writings. Eyestones has secret longings for Rapunzel Wisht, a beautiful young woman working at the local bakery.After writing a misogynistic essay that even Warholic finds it "harsh on the chicks", Eyestones takes a break from writing and invites Laura on a summer vacation drive across the country. During their tour, their incompatibility becomes obvious. Back in Boston, they start to drift apart, and Laura becomes obsessed with the Craven Slucks, a local rock band, throwing herself at its lead singer Jeff. After the office Christmas party, Eyestones joins coworkers for a trip to a strip bar. Crayola de Blu, the main attraction, is none other than his adored Rapunzel; he is angry, feels cheated, lost and deprived. He concludes that all this was his own shortcomings and that he had exploited Laura. Confessing his failures to Duxbak, Eyestones realizes that he has to ask for forgiveness. He tries to see Laura to amend, but due to a misidentification gets shot and killed. Laura, lonely and desolate, hangs herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Underdogs_(novel)"title="The Underdogs (novel)">
The book tells us the story of Demetrio Macías, a peasant who, after having a misunderstanding with a local cacique (land owner), is hunted by national government soldiers (Federales) and decides to flee when they arrive at his home and kill his dog, prompting him to abandon his family and take revenge. He escapes to the mountains and forms a group of rebels who support the Mexican Revolution.The whole novel has various reading levels and the character names represent forces or ideals beyond the characters themselves. Some of them are prototypes of the kind of people that were dragged into the revolution, like Demetrio, whose name is associated with the goddess of farming and agriculture Demeter; "La Pintada" (translated as "War paint") a tough woman; and "Camila", a teenager peasant who is dragged into the conflict by means of subterfuge to become Macías's lover. Others symbolize revolutionary hopes and conflicts, like Luis Cervantes, an educated man (whose name evokes Miguel de Cervantes) mistreated by the Federales and therefore turning on them, and Güero Margarito, a cruel man who finds justification for his deeds in the turbulence of the times. Macías's dog, killed at the beginning, is a symbol of peace, fittingly named "Palomo" (dove).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_of_My_Fathers"title="Faith of My Fathers">
Slew McCain commanded the aircraft carriers of Task Force 38 in the Pacific War in late 1944 and 1945, ultimately having 15 carriers and 8 battleships, plus their escorts, under his control for operations against Japan in July 1945. Jack McCain was a submariner in the U.S. Navy during the Pacific War, and later rose to four star rank and became Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Command (CINCPAC), commander of all U.S. forces in the Vietnam theater from 1968 to 1972. John McCain writes forthrightly of his rebellious and misspent youth, and his conflicts about following in his forefathers' steps.The centerpiece of "Faith of My Fathers" is a lengthy account of McCain's five and half years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnamese camps, of the torturing and suffering he and his fellow prisoners endured, and the various kinds of faith that enabled him to carry on through the ordeal. It describes the injuries he sustained during his shoot-down and imprisonment, and the origin of why he cannot lift his arms above his shoulders. The book concludes with the release from captivity of him and the other POWs in 1973.The following passage explains the book's title:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dies_at_the_End"title="John Dies at the End">
Dave and John are a pair of paranormal investigators who live in an unnamed Midwestern town (referred to in the novel as "Undisclosed"). Dave meets reporter Arnie in a local restaurant and recounts the origin of his and John's unusual abilities.The main story begins with Dave and John at a party, where John is performing with his band. Dave leaves the party early and John meets up with him later at Denny's, where John reveals that he has taken a drug known as "soy sauce" and shows Dave a syringe containing the drug. Dave pockets the syringe. Later, Dave accidentally injects himself with the drug in his pocket and begins to feel the effects. Local police detective Lawrence Appleton informs Dave that everyone from the party except himself are either dead or missing, which turns out not to be true. John and Dave gather the remaining survivors of the party and they head to the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas to meet with Albert Marconi, an expert in the paranormal. En route to Las Vegas, Detective Appleton kidnaps the group, until he and one other person are taken over by a malevolent force known as the Shadow Men, forcing the rest of the group to kill them. After a climactic battle scene at the Luxor, John and Dave return home and resume their lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Land_of_Laughs"title="The Land of Laughs">
In a used book store, Thomas Abbey, an avid fan of Marshall France, a deceased writer of unique children's books, has a chance encounter with Saxony Gardner, another enthusiast of that reclusive man. Together, they set out to the fictitious town of Galen, Missouri, to meet Anna France, the writer's daughter, in order to obtain her permission to write Marshall France's biography. Prepared for rejection, they are warmly welcomed and settle into the community and their literary endeavor.However, they find an uncanny resemblance between the town of Galen and its inhabitants, and the literary world of their idol. Figures from Marshall France's books are alive in Galen, and Thomas and Saxony begin to question if the books were patterned on Galen, or if the writer's magic created Galen. Equally disturbing is Thomas's role as biographer: he appears to create reality by his writing, and begins to question the motives of Anna and the inhabitants of Galen. Events reach a crisis point when Thomas's biography reaches the time of Marshall France's arrival in Galen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Absolutely_True_Diary_of_a_Part-Time_Indian"title="The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian">
The book follows a fourteen-year-old Arnold Spirit Jr., also known as "Junior", living with his family on the Spokane Indian Reservation near Wellpinit, Washington. It is told in diary style, moving from the start of the school year to the beginning of summer. It includes both Junior's written record of his life and his cartoon drawings, some of them comically commenting on his situations, and others more seriously depicting important people in his life. "The Absolutely True Diary" begins by introducing Junior's birth defects: he was born with hydrocephalus and therefore is small for his age and suffers from seizures, poor eyesight, stuttering, and a lisp. As a result, Junior has always been picked on by other people on the reservation. Junior's family is extremely poor and has limited access to opportunities. When Junior's dog Oscar gets a heat stroke, his father must put him down (tragically, by shooting him) because they cannot afford to take him to a veterinarian. Junior's only friend is his best friend Rowdy, who is abused at home and is known as a bully on the reservation. Despite his intimidating role, Rowdy often stands up for Junior and they bond by enjoying kids' comics.Junior's first day of high school is pivotal to the plot of the novel. When Mr. P, his geometry teacher, passes him his textbook, he sees his mother's name in it and realizes how old the book must be. Angered and saddened by the fact that the reservation is so poor that it cannot afford new textbooks, Junior violently throws the book, which hits Mr. P's face, breaking his nose. When he visits Junior at home, Mr. P convinces Junior to transfer to Reardan High School, sensing a degree of precociousness in the young teenager. The town of Reardan is far wealthier than Wellpinit—Junior is the only Indian at Reardan. Although Junior's family is poor, and although the school is 22 miles away and transportation is unreliable, they support him and do what they can to make it possible for him to stay in the new school. Rowdy, however, is upset by Junior's decision to transfer, and the once-best friends have very little contact during the year.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_5th_Horseman"title="The 5th Horseman">
The story begins with a mysterious character named the Night Walker who kills a hospital patient, Jessie Falk.Two plots are intertwined; the first is about a serial killer murdering young girls and posing them into luxury cars; Lindsay Boxer and her team call them "Car Girls".The second deals with the murders that take place at San Francisco Municipal Hospital. Patient whose diagnoses are not putting their lives in danger die continuously; and buttons are placed on their eyes, once dead.One of those victims is Keiko Castellano, Yuki's mother. Yuki enlists the aid of her friends to find out the real reason her mother has died.Lindsay is called to the scene of the murders involving young women who have been murdered and then posed in expensive cars seemingly chosen at random. Each woman has been dressed in very expensive clothing from Nordstrom's. The case is puzzling until it is learned that the clothes are the link - one of the killers is an employee at Nordstrom's and has stolen the clothes to dress his dead models.Lindsay captures the killers, who are a Kenneth Guthrie and Louise Bennet (a prostitute called Cherrie), and watches helplessly as Louise jumps out of a window.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clone_Republic"title="The Clone Republic">
In a galactic military largely consisting of clones raised to be unquestioning soldiers, Wayson Harris initially has difficulty as he seemingly isn't a clone, and he does not follow orders as quickly. His first official posting, a desert planet named Gobi, seems like a punishment as there are problems with it such as poor discipline and contaminated drinking water. After Harris and a mercenary named Ray Freeman prevent an ex-general from killing all the marines and raiding the armory, Harris is promoted and transferred to the flagship "Kamehameha". The "Kamehameha" deploys to the planet Ezer Kri, which is attempting to leave the Unified Authority and establish a nonstandard culture (namely, a Japanese one).After a platoon is killed by locals (they ignite a fuel pumping station), marines are ordered to occupy the largest town on the planet, where Harris runs into Freeman. Freeman sends another soldier back with Harris's helmet on, then leads Harris to the hotel across the street where they ambush Kline, a man they'd dealt with in Gobi, wielding a rifle that has been set to track Harris's helmet signal.During his interrogation, Kline is revealed to be a Morgan Atkins separatist (an influential terrorist group). Shortly thereafter, a fleet of separatist ships carrying the deserters from Ezer Kri flees from the planet before anyone can react.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plum_Lucky"title="Plum Lucky">
Diesel and Stephanie end up teaming up with a strange man who thinks he's a leprechaun in an effort to save a horse named Doug and Grandma Mazur.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Queen's_Gambit_(novel)"title="The Queen's Gambit (novel)">
At the age of 8, Beth Harmon is orphaned when her mother dies in a car accident. She is sent to Methuen, an orphanage where the children are fed tranquilizers to keep them compliant. While there Beth observes the janitor, Mr. Shaibel, playing chess by himself. While he is initially reluctant to teach a girl, Beth eventually persuades him to play with her. Within a few months Mr. Shaibel confesses he has taught her all he knows and introduces her to a local high school teacher who runs the chess club. Shortly after Beth beats a group of high school students at chess, she learns that the state is banning the use of tranquilizers on children. During an attempt to hoard the remaining tranquilizers for herself she accidentally overdoses. As part of her punishment for being caught she is forbidden from playing chess and interacting with Mr. Shaibel. She is befriended by Jolene, an athletic 13 year old black girl, who awkwardly attempts to initiate a sexual relationship.5 years later at the age of 13, Beth is adopted by the Wheatleys. Mr. Wheatley abandons his wife shortly after Beth is adopted. Beth immediately tries to play chess again. After stealing a chess magazine she learns that a local high school is holding a chess tournament and secretly writes to Mr. Shaibel asking him to lend her the funds to enter the tournament. Despite being an unranked player and not having had access to a chess set in five years, Beth not only wins the tournament but defeats the Kentucky state champion Harry Beltik. Unable to cash her winnings herself she reveals that she has won to Mrs. Wheatley. In desperate financial straits Mrs. Wheatley begins arranging for Beth to play more tournaments focusing on the ones with the highest prizes and collecting a 10% agent's fee. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Horseman_in_the_Sky"title="A Horseman in the Sky">
A soldier lies on the ground on the lookout for the terrain and any potential enemy soldiers that might arrive. He falls asleep but luckily is not discovered by his sergeant as it would mean his death. When he awakes, he sees a mounted Confederate soldier on a ledge. He contemplates to shoot the man but finds himself morally challenged. In the end, he shoots the horse. Both the man and his horse leap off the ledge. An officer who happens to be in the forest under the ledge looks up and sees a man on a horse, seemingly running through the sky. It shocks him and he all but passes out. When he recovers he goes searching for the man but does not find man or horse. When he returns to camp, he says nothing. Meanwhile, a superior comes up to the soldier to ask what he's seen and the soldier tells him that he shot at a horse in order to kill the man. When asked to identify the man, he explains the man was his father and a Confederate soldier.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_Dance"title="Bone Dance">
In the opening scene, Sparrow cannot recall what took place in the preceding 36 hours. Awakening yet again in a novel place with new hurts, the urge to fix the problem is intense. On the way to enlightenment comes a cryptic Tarot reading from friend Sherrea, abduction by a dead man animated by what might as well be a Loa, and introduction to a Vodun-based community that is dedicated to replacement, and if necessary to overthrow, of the status quo in the city. The latter has the individual most responsible for the inter-continental war near its power apex, a character who is also the revenge target of another survivor from his kind. Those are the "Horsemen", modified people who can move their consciousness from body to body.The second half of the story shows Sparrow's awkward progress toward a fully human condition and becoming a valued member of a community, and is capped by a closing conceit: that the whole telling has been an autobiography.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caverns_(novel)"title="Caverns (novel)">
According to Kesey's "Introduction," the novel was inspired by an actual news clipping, an Associated Press story on October 31, 1964 entitled "Charles Oswald Loach, Doctor of Theosophy and discoverer of so-called 'SECRET CAVE OF AMERICAN ANCIENTS,' which stirred archaeological controversy in 1928."The rest of the novel appropriates Loach as its central character. Set in the 1930s, Loach is imagined as a convicted murderer (he killed a photographer to protect the secret of the cave) who is released from San Quentin Prison, in the custody of a priest, to lead an expedition to rediscover the cave.The novel—described by "The New York Times" as Indiana Jones meets "The Canterbury Tales"—features a motley crew of characters: Father Paul, an unbalanced priest; an archaeologist, Dr. Jocelyn Crane; Loach's brother, a museum curator; publisher Rodney Makai and the "Blavatskian Makai sisters"; their African-American driver, Ned; and Juke and Boyle, World War I veterans still suffering the ill effects of mustard gas.The characters spend most of the novel together in a military vehicle making their way to Utah where Loach says the cave is located, and getting caught in various comic misadventures along the way.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_in_a_Strange_Country"title="Death in a Strange Country">
Early one morning Brunetti is confronted with the body of a young American serviceman fished out of a fetid Venetian canal. All clues point to a mugging, but robbery seems too convenient a motive. Then something incriminating is found in the dead man's flat, and Brunetti becomes convinced that somebody is taking great pains to provide an easy solution to the crime.When he uncovers collusion between U.S. bases abroad and international business interests involved in toxic waste disposal, he exposes the sinister face of the military-industrial complex. Add to this the corruption of Italian politics, and the reader sees Brunetti rendered helpless in the face of evil. Only a vengeful Sicilian mother can bring a bit of justice to the world Leon has created.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seetee_series"title="Seetee series">
Though "Seetee Shock" (1949) was the first part of the series to be published in book form, it is set at a later point than "Seetee Ship". In "Minus Sign," from which the first part of the book was adapted, spatial engineer Rick Drake continues his father's quest to tame seetee, but becomes entangled in the interplanetary politics of energy shortage. The second part of the book is adapted from the 1943 story "Opposites—React!" in which a contraterrene alien artifact is discovered, and competing parties race to reach it and learn its secrets. The book's plot differs somewhat from the magazine version, particularly in incorporating the speculation that time would run backwards in the neighborhood of a contraterrene object.The 1952 comic strip "Beyond Mars" was based on the Seetee series, with a very similar setting, characters, and technology base.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_of_Jericho"title="The Dead of Jericho">
Detective Chief Inspector E. Morse of the Thames Valley Police meets Anne Scott at a party hosted by Mrs Murdoch in North Oxford. Six months later Anne Scott is found hanging in her kitchen at 9 Canal Reach, Jericho, Oxford. The police launch a suicide inquiry. Initially Chief Inspector Bell, from the closer Oxford Central station on St. Aldate's Street, is assigned to the case; but a fortnight later Morse takes over the investigation and questions the assumption of suicide initially. Subsequently both of Mrs Murdoch's sons, Edward "Ted" Murdoch and Michael Murdoch, as well as Anne Scott's former employers, brothers Charles Richards and Conrad Richards, and Charles's wife, Celia, come to the attention of Morse, as do Ms Scott's neighbours, including the nosy handyman George Jackson. Dexter gives a big clue to what might have been going on in Anne Scott's mind with one chapter headed with this epigram from Sophocles's "Oedipus Rex": "We saw a knotted pendulum, a noose: and a strangled woman swinging there".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Whitby_Witches"title="The Whitby Witches">
After the deaths of their parents, eight-year-old orphan Ben and his older sister, Jennet, have been pushed from foster home to foster home for the majority of their young lives. After they have lived at a dreary hostel for a few months, the mistress Mrs Rodice has the children hauled off to live in the seaside village of Whitby, with relish. Ben and Jennet do not get along as Ben possesses a sixth sense meaning that he can see the spirits of dead people, including his parents. Jennet does not share this gift and therefore assumes he is lying and deliberately causing trouble. It is Ben's uncanny ability to see the dead that has caused him and his sister to be shunted between homes, as the families fostering them are unnerved by Ben.Upon the arrival in Whitby, the children are adopted by a kind and eccentric elderly spinster named Miss Alice Boston, a former university lecturer. She and the children take to each other almost immediately, despite the children being a little bemused by Miss Boston's (or Aunt Alice as they grew to call her) odd mannerisms and lifestyle. Miss Boston tells Ben the scary stories of Whitby much to his delight as he adores horror stories, but Jennet does not approve as she believes it will encourage his lies and his stories that he can see their dead parents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Warlock_in_Whitby"title="A Warlock in Whitby">
Set in the seaside town of Whitby just before Bonfire Night, the novel is set a few months after "The Whitby Witches". Having failed to retrieve the moonkelp, Nelda is forced to marry the wicked aged Esau Grendel. A fish Demon from the distant past that was imprisoned beneath the Earth after the imprisonment of the Monstrous serpent Morgawrus, awakes once more and haunts Whitby, eating cats. Rowena Cooper's husband, Nathaniel Crozier travels to Whitby to find out what happened to his wife. Tricking Aunt Alice into leaving Whitby for London to see her dying friend Patricia, Nathaniel realizes the staff of Hilda was one of four magical objects created to defend the world against Morgawrus. Nathaniel plans to destroy these guardians and unleash Morgawrus upon the world, planning to use him to take over. Followed by Ben, Nathaniel goes to a church where he finds one guardian and destroys it. He then discovers that the second guardian belongs to the elderly Mr Roper, a friend of Ben's whom he kills although not before Roper is able to give the guardian to Ben. Nathaniel threatens Jennet who is bewitched by him, forcing Ben to hand over the guardian which he promptly destroys, loosing Morgwrus. He then goes to try and take over Morgawrus while setting the Fish Demon loose in the Aufwader caves, knowing that the last guardian is somewhere there. In exchange for allowing Esau to make love to her, conceiving their child, Esau gives Nelda the last guardian which she gives to Tarr. Esau is killed by the Fish Demon before it is killed as the caves are destroyed as a result of Morgawrus breaking free. Nathaniel attempts to bewitch Morgwrus but is stopped by Aunt Alice who has returned from London, Patricia having been murdered by a slave of Nathaniel's. Nathaniel is killed by Morgawrus who attempts to kill Aunt Alice. However the old woman uses the book of shadows, given to her by Patricia, a book which contains all she knows, to defeat Morgawrus who is imprisoned once more. But this brave act is too much for the old woman and her body gives up. She becomes a feeble helpless old thing, reliant on the work of her friends, family and Doctor to just continue living.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_in_the_Caves_of_Ice"title="Tom Swift in the Caves of Ice">
Tom Swift &amp; friends journey to the Arctic in his custom airship to seek for the legendary Valley of Gold. When his map is stolen by his longtime nemesis, Andy Foger, who has himself built a competing airship, the race is on across frigid Alaska to see who will be the first to find the limitless fortune.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_Among_the_Diamond_Makers"title="Tom Swift Among the Diamond Makers">
Tom Swift flies his airship to the mountain tops of Colorado to seek for the secret of the Diamond Makers: criminal scientists who have figured out the formula of manufacturing a limitless fortune in diamonds. But these rogues will stop at nothing to keep their secret. Tom &amp; friends are soon captured and left to die in a collapsing mountain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_and_His_Wireless_Message"title="Tom Swift and His Wireless Message">
Tom Swift &amp; friends decide to trial an experimental airship near the New Jersey coast, and are unexpectedly swept out to sea by hurricane winds. Unable to steer or navigate without tearing the airship apart, the hapless crew must simply let the storm take them wherever it will. Unfortunately, the storm proves too much for the craft and Tom makes a crash landing on the uninhabited and crumbling Earthquake Island.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_and_His_Electric_Runabout"title="Tom Swift and His Electric Runabout">
Tom Swift enters an upcoming race with his specially-designed prototype electric race car. But as he makes the final preparations and adjustments, days before the race, he discovers a plot that would bankrupt not only his family, but also everyone else that relies on the local bank (which is the target of a nefarious bank run scheme). Tom must solve the mystery and stop the criminals behind the plot before he will test himself on a 500-mile race against some of the best cars and skilled drivers in the United States.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_and_His_Submarine_Boat"title="Tom Swift and His Submarine Boat">
Tom Swift's father has been working diligently on a secret project, which he reveals at the beginning of the book as a submarine. With the submarine, named the "Advance", he plans to enter a contest for a government prize of $50,000. While in New Jersey to launch the submarine, Tom reads in a newspaper that a ship named the "Boldero" sank off the coast of Uruguay during a storm, taking down with it the sum of $300,000 in gold bullion.Tom persuades his father to pursue this treasure as opposed to competing for the government prize. While picking up a hired sea captain, Tom's plans are overheard by a contestant in the government contest, and a rivalry for the treasure begins. The other submarine, named the "Wonder", soon sets off to follow Tom and his crew after they embark on their journey.Tom's crew consists of Tom Swift, his father, Mr. Sharp, Captain West, and Mr. Damon. Each of these take chores on board, including Mr. Damon, who seems to be the cook of the voyage.The submarines hold up at an island to resupply, and during the night, the "Advance" tries to slip away from the "Wonder". Tom knows that the "Wonder" and its crew is not certain of the location of the wreck, and is merely following the "Advance", hoping to steal the treasure at the last moment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_and_His_Airship"title="Tom Swift and His Airship">
In Tom Swift and His Airship, Tom Swift has finished his latest invention- the Red Cloud, a fast and innovative airship. Tom is anxious for a cross-country trial, but just before he and his friends take off, the Shopton bank is robbed. No sooner is Tom in the air than he is blamed for the robbery. Suddenly, he's a wanted fugitive but doesn't know why until he's halfway across the country. With no safe harbor or friend on the land below, Tom must race back to Shopton to clear his name before he's shot out of the sky.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_and_His_Motor_Boat"title="Tom Swift and His Motor Boat">
Tom Swift's father, a world-famous scientist, has been robbed of one of his greatest inventions, and it's up to Tom to bring the criminals to justice without getting himself killed in the process. Unfortunately, Tom himself quickly becomes a target of the rogues' anger when he unknowingly buys a boat in which they had hidden a stolen diamond. Tom must use every bit of his wit to keep himself ahead of the gang of hardened felons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_and_His_Motor_Cycle"title="Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle">
Tom Swift, in his first adventure, has purchased a motorcycle and immediately gets busy modifying it. Eager to test his enhancements, Tom volunteers to transport his father's revolutionary turbine design plans across the country roads to Albany. Unaware of the evil corporate investors who want to steal the invention for themselves, Tom falls into their trap and finds himself facing the greatest peril of his young life. It is up to Tom not only to retrieve the blueprints and turbine prototype, but also to bring a gang of hired thugs to justice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Mortal_Enemy"title="My Mortal Enemy">
Myra and her husband Oswald return to their fictional hometown of Parthia, Illinois, to visit their relatives. Nellie and Aunt Lydia then leave to spend the Christmas holiday in New York City with them. They live on Madison Square. They dine with Ewan Gray, a friend who has an infatuation with another actress, Esther Sinclair. Oswald receives silver-buttons for his shirt from an old Western acquaintance, and asks Lydia to pretend she gave them to him to thwart his wife's jealousy. Later Myra and Nellie go to the opera; in a lodge they spot an erstwhile friend of Myra's, which makes her sad. Later they take a hansom around a park and chance upon a rich acquaintance of Myra's, which leads her to be scornful over her own poverty. They spend Christmas dinner with friends of the Henshawes - both artists and people of privilege. Later they spend New Year's Eve with artists again. A few days later Nellie witnesses the Henshawes argue; the husband takes her out to lunch. Soon after, she and her aunt are to return to Illinois. On the train, they are joined by Myra, who has argued with her husband again and is going to visit a friend in Pittsburgh for a change of scenery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicenter_(book)"title="Epicenter (book)">
In "Epicenter" Rosenberg examines current events in Russia, the Middle East, and other countries, as well as interviewing various leaders from Israel, Palestine, and Russia. Rosenberg then takes this information, along with his interviews and experience with events and leaders in Washington, D.C. to compare these changes and events to prophecies made in the "Book of Ezekiel". He argues that these are signs of upcoming change, not all of which might be positive, that will change the world completely.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Terrorist"title="The Good Terrorist">
"The Good Terrorist" is written in the subjective third person from the point of view of Alice, an unemployed politics and economics graduate in her mid-thirties who drifts from commune to commune. She is trailed by Jasper, a graduate she took in at a student commune she lived in fifteen years previously, who sponges off her. Alice fell in love with him, only to become frustrated by his aloofness and burgeoning homosexuality. She considers herself a revolutionary, fighting against "fascist imperialism", but is still dependent on her parents, whom she treats with contempt. In the early 1980s, Alice joins a squat of like-minded "comrades" in a derelict house in London. Other members of the squat include Bert, its ineffective leader, and a lesbian couple, the maternal Roberta and her unstable and fragile partner Faye.The abandoned house is in a state of disrepair and earmarked by the City Council for demolition. In the face of the indifference of her comrades, Alice takes it upon herself to clean up and renovate the house. She also persuades the authorities to restore the electricity and water supplies. Alice becomes the house's "mother", cooking for everyone, and dealing with the local police, who are trying to evict them. The members of the squat belong to the Communist Centre Union (CCU), and attend demonstrations and pickets. Alice involves herself in some of these activities, but spends most of her time working on the house.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ways_to_Live_Forever"title="Ways to Live Forever">
Sam Oliver McQueen is an 11-year-old boy with leukemia. Sam spends time with his private tutor Mrs. Willis and older friend Felix, whom he met from the same children's hospital, and writes about his life with cancer throughout the book. When Felix dies, he doesn't know what to do because he always looked up to him and his rebellious style. Sam is puzzled by the sadness and writes in his book that everyone should have been happy and making jokes and how Felix should have worn his favorite top. Having said, that he told in his book he wanted to make sure no one would do that at his funeral. A couple of weeks later, the doctors realize the medication isn't working as well and Sam makes the decision to stop all medication; Sam was sick and tired of taking things that never worked on him so he gave up Sam finishes his list of "Things to do" and about a month later he has a dream: all his family (his dad, his mum and his sister Ella) are all sleeping together... then he wakes up and sees his dads face. His dad says "I love you", but Sam drifts back asleep. Sam dies in his sleep; but he has given his parents a form to fill in about his death so he could finish his book. The last comment is made by his father, who says, "Sam died quietly in his sleep. He was in no pain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_for_Conquest"title="Pattern for Conquest">
The novel concerns Earthmen who are overwhelmed by alien invaders, whom they then attempt to conquer from within.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celia_en_el_colegio"title="Celia en el colegio">
A sequel to "Celia, lo que dice" (1929), the story narrates Celia's adventures following her father's decision to give in to her mother's wishes of sending their daughter to a convent school for girls. At the school, Celia has many difficulties adapting to the strict rules of the nuns and is often reprimanded by Madre Loreto, whom Celia describes as "very strict and scolds much". During her first days there, Celia is convinced that her father is not at all happy with the change and that he greatly misses his little girl, thus Celia tries to get herself expelled from the school by trying to make the nuns believe she has a sleepwalking problem. Celia is unsuccessful, but she soon learns that though her father misses her, he is willing to allow her to stay at the school, which is good for Celia, who actually enjoys her new home. Celia is the favorite among many of her classmates, but she does have many quarrels with a few other girls who find her behaviour disruptive and inappropriate. Madre Isolina, an English nun Celia describes as "very intelligent and understanding" is Celia's favorite nun at the school because she sometimes helps her out of mischief. Celia tries desperately to be good, she even wishes to become a saint. The priest, Don Restituto, tries to guide Celia, but when the girl starts creating more trouble than usual in her attempt to become a saint, or at least a martyr, he gives up on her and forbids her from being either. Following the end of the term, the other girls leave the convent, but Celia is left there with the nuns since her parents have left the country hoping to find a better job elsewhere and earn money to stabilize themselves economically. Doña Benita, the old lady that had looked after the girl for some time before, comes to the school and takes Celia with her for some time. During those days, Celia and the old woman visit a circus, and from there Celia imagines all sorts of tales following her imaginary escape with the gypsies (tales she narrates in "Celia, novelista"). In the summer, an elderly woman, Doña Remedios, who is soon mocked and renamed Doña Merlucines by Celia and some of the nuns and workers at the school, arrives and she and Celia become fast enemies. Doña Remedios, who is very kind to Celia at first, is soon irritated by the girl's wild ways and wishes she had more discipline. After many quarrels between the two, Celia gets her revenge by filling the sleeping Doña Remedios' bed with cockroaches. Another schooling term begins and Celia's popularity with the other girl students begins to largely decrease. One day, an angry Tío Rodrigo, Celia's uncle, arrives at the school and demands to be allowed to take his niece away with him to her parents who currently reside in Paris.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Land_of_Bad_Fantasy"title="The Land of Bad Fantasy">
It tells the story of Ana Beachcombe, a resident of the "Crossroads" universe, the nexus point where all universes meet. Ana finds a magic transport medallion in her bedroom; its use sends her on a journey to "Syndup: the Land of Bad Fantasy."She befriends a strange group of fantasy characters, among them an allergic (to humans) troll named Egbert, a lycanthrope who turns into a canary (werecanary) called Clemence and a monster frightened of anything and everything called Foskett.Her group of unlikely characters set off on a journey to the city of Laundromatt, where they hope to meet the king and petition for equal rights."The Land of Bad Fantasy" was published in Australia by Omnibus Press in 2006 and by Scholastic Corporation in 2007.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Engineers"title="Cosmic Engineers">
The novel concerns a group of earthmen and a girl, who is awakened from suspended animation, being contacted by aliens with whom they join to prevent the collision of one universe with another.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceworld"title="Iceworld">
The novel concerns an interplanetary narcotics agent who is forced to work on an incredibly cold world (from his point of view) — so cold that the atmosphere he breathes, sulfur, is a yellow solid. The planet is in fact Earth, and he teams up with natives of the alien planet, humans, in his attempt to stop the smuggling of a dangerous drug (tobacco) to Sirius. Although the story involves both aliens and humans, it is told primarily from an alien perspective.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Oliver_and_Space_Rover_on_Mars"title="Mel Oliver and Space Rover on Mars">
The novel concerns the adventures of a boy and his sapient dog as they join an interplanetary circus on a voyage to Mars.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pest_Control_(Doctor_Who)"title="Pest Control (Doctor Who)">
The Doctor and Donna land on the distant planet of Rescension and find themselves caught in a war between humans and the centaur-like Aquabi. When a far greater threat emerges, the Doctor must convince the two sides to work together before they are all wiped out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forgotten_Planet"title="The Forgotten Planet">
A planet had been seeded for life by humans, first with microbes and later with plants and insects. A third expedition, intended to complete the seeding with animals, never occurred. (This represents a retcon introduced in "Nightmare Planet.") Over the millennia the insects and plants grew to gigantic sizes. The action of the novel describes the fight for survival by descendants of a crashed spaceship as they battle wolf-sized ants, flies the size of chickens, and gigantic flying wasps.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Huntly"title="Edgar Huntly">
Edgar Huntly, a young man who lives with his uncle and sisters (his only remaining family) on a farm outside Philadelphia, is determined to learn who murdered his friend Waldegrave. Walking near the elm tree under which Waldegrave was killed late one night, Huntly sees Clithero, a servant from a neighboring farm, half-dressed, digging in the ground and weeping loudly. Huntly concludes that Clithero may be the murderer. He also concludes that Clithero is sleepwalking. Huntly decides to follow Clithero when he sleep walks. Clithero leads Huntly through rough countryside, but all this following doesn't lead to Huntly learning much about the murder. Eventually, Huntly confronts Clithero when they are both awake and demands that he confess. Clithero does confess, but not to Waldegrave's murder. Instead he tells a complicated story about his life in Ireland, where he believes he was responsible for the death of a woman who was his patron, after which he fled to Pennsylvania. Clithero claims to know nothing about Waldegrave's murder.One night, soon after Huntly goes to sleep in his own bed, he wakes up in a completely dark place made of rock, which he eventually determines is a cave. He is hungry, thirsty, and feels as though he's been beaten. He is attacked by a panther, which he manages to kill and then drinks some of its blood and eats some of its flesh. Looking for his way out of the cave, he finds that some Lenni Lenape, an Indian tribe, are holding a white girl prisoner at the mouth of the cave. Edgar kills the guard and rescues the girl. In their flight, he kills more Indians, who seem to have begun a war. By the end of the novel, Edgar learns (among other things) that he himself has been sleepwalking, that Clithero was indeed not involved in Waldegrave's murder, that Waldegrave was murdered by a Lenni Lenape Indian, perhaps one he himself had killed, and that he and his fiancée are both destined to inherit nothing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Picnic_on_Mount_Kenya"title="No Picnic on Mount Kenya">
Detained at P.O.W. Camp 354 near Nanyuki, Kenya, Felice Benuzzi from Trieste, together with two fellow-prisoners Dr. Giovanni ('Giuàn') Balletto from Genova and Vincenzo ('Enzo') Barsotti from Lido di Camaiore, escaped in January 1943 and climbed Mt Kenya with improvised equipment and meagre rations, two of them reaching a point on the north face of the Petit Gendarme, at about 5000 metres, high up the NW ridge. After an eventful 18-day period on the mountain (24 January – 10 February), and to the astonishment of the British camp commandant, the three adventurers broke back into Camp 354. As reward for their exploit, they each received 28 days in solitary confinement, commuted to 7 days by the camp commandant in acknowledgement of their "sporting effort".From the flyleaf of the 1952 William Kimber edition of the book:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_to_the_End"title="Play to the End">
Middle-aged actor Toby Flood is touring the South of England with a recently discovered play by Joe Orton called "Lodger in the Throat". When the company arrive in Brighton for a one-week run at the Theatre Royal, Flood is confident that he will be able to use his stay to get in touch with his estranged wife Jenny, who has filed for divorce and is now living with Roger Colborn, a local businessman, on the outskirts of the city. Flood is surprised to find that it is Jenny who contacts him first: She tells him she is being stalked and, as she believes that her husband is to blame for it, asks him to do something about it.This is how Flood meets Derek Oswin, the alleged stalker, an eccentric man his own age who, just like his deceased father and grandfather before him, worked for the Colborns' family business until its liquidation in 1989. It turns out Oswin has written a history of the company but so far has not found a publisher. Talking to Oswin and to other people he meets, either by chance or by design, Flood more and more gets the impression that Roger Colborn is a dangerous man who has something to hide, and that Jenny must be saved from the clutches of the Colborn family before it is too late.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Savva_Grudtsyn"title="The Tale of Savva Grudtsyn">
The plot centers on the eponymous hero, Savva Grudtsyn. Savva is the son of Foma Grudstyn-Usov, a merchant from the city of Velikii Ustiug in the northern Vologda region of Russia. As a young man, Savva goes to live in the town of Orel, where he is offered great hospitality by a friend of his father's, Bazhen Vtory.Bazhen is an old, respected, well-to-do merchant who is married to his third wife, a much younger woman who remained unnamed in the story. Savva is seduced by this woman and begins a sexual relationship with her: the narrator makes it clear that the woman and the Devil are primarily to blame rather than Savva himself. However, while attending church on the holy festival of the Ascension, Savva repents and refuses to continue the affair.Bazhen's wife, furious, poisons Savva's wine with a powerful aphrodisiac that causes his lust to return. However, she refuses to submit to him when he approaches him and drives him away from the house. Savva, still desperately lusting for Bazhen's wife, makes a Faustian bargain with the Devil: he realizes he would be willing to serve the Devil in order to sleep with this woman. Sure enough, a demon appears in the guise of a brother figure from Great Utsiug. He informs Savva that he can have his heart's desire if he writes a letter to renounce Christ and God, which Savva promptly does. The extent of Savva's consciousness in writing the letter is unclear:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reprieve_from_Paradise"title="Reprieve from Paradise">
The novel is set after an atomic war and the world is run by Polynesians. The hero discovers a plot to turn the earth on its axis in order to create an Antarctic utopia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Portage_to_San_Cristobal_of_A.H."title="The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.">
From his base in Tel Aviv, Holocaust survivor Emmanuel Lieber directs a group of Jewish Nazi hunters in search of Adolf Hitler. Lieber believes that the former Führer is still alive, and following rumours and hearsay, he tracks Hitler's movements through South America. After months of wading through swamps in the Amazon jungle, the search party finds the 90-year-old alive in a clearing. Lieber flies to San Cristóbal where he awaits the group's return with their captive. But getting the old man out of the jungle alive is more difficult than getting in, and their progress is further hampered by heavy thunderstorms.Meanwhile, broken and incoherent radio messages between Lieber and the search party are intercepted by intelligence agents tracking their progress, and rumours begin to spread across the world of Hitler's capture. Debates flare up over his impending trial, where it will be held and under whose jurisdiction. Orosso is identified as the nearest airfield to the last known location of the search party, and aircraft begin arriving at the hitherto unknown town. But when the search party loses radio contact with Lieber, they must make a decision to either wait out the storms and deliver their captive to Lieber later, or try Hitler in the jungle. They choose the latter, given that they would likely lose control of the situation if they attempted to transport their prisoner. Against Lieber's advice ("You must not let him speak ... his tongue is like no other") they prepare for a trial with a judge, prosecution and defence attorneys selected from the members of the search party. Teku, a local Indian tracker, is asked to observe the trial as an independent witness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highways_in_Hiding"title="Highways in Hiding">
The novel concerns ESP and a disease that turns men into supermen. It contains multiple plotlines concerning the interactions of people that can sense things (espers) and people that can read thoughts (telepaths). This is set against the plot of a secret society that is harboring people that are infected with a spaceborne illness called Mekstrom's Disease. The disease is the point on which the plot turns. People get infected and it slowly turns them into a sort of rock. The hardening begins at one of the extremities such as a finger or toe and slowly begins to creep up the infected limb. Eventually all the extremities are hardening and the disease makes its way to the body proper. At this point, the body is hardened until the vitals fail and the patient dies. The plot turns on a secret society that has found a cure for the infected. To hide themselves from the public at large they have devised a hidden highway program that leads the infected to "Mekstrom safehouses" of sorts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Without_End_(Haldeman_novel)"title="World Without End (Haldeman novel)">
Captain Kirk and a landing party of four have gone aboard an alien starship/planetoid. They are in prison, awaiting questioning.Commander Spock is in command, but is unable to do much. Mysterious tentacles have ensnared the ship, draining power. Spock finds himself with few options, remaining on board and eventually crashing to the planetoid surface or beaming inside to join the Captain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_Ship"title="Plague Ship">
The main protagonist of the novel is Dane Thorson, Cargo-master-apprentice on the Free Trader rocket ship the Solar Queen. Free Traders take on trading contracts on remote and recently discovered planets, which can be dangerous and unpredictable.The Solar Queen has recently obtained a valuable trading contract on the planet Sargol and are building a relationship with one of the races on the planet, the cat-like Salariki. The process goes slowly till the Salariki discover that the Solar Queen is carrying catnip and other plants from Terra that are unknown on Sargol. The traders exchange what little of the plants they have for the rare and valuable Koros stones and collect a native red-colored wood to exchange at home. At the last minute the storm priests of the Salariki demand that the Solar Queen take a pre-paid contract to return within 6 months with more plants.A few days after leaving the planet, several members of the crew suffer from attacks, which start with severe headaches and end in a semi-coma state. Only 4 of the younger members of the crew are unaffected, including Dane Thorson. Upon exiting hyperspace on return to the vicinity of Terra, the crew discovers that they are pariah and have been declared a plague ship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cemetery_Dance_(novel)"title="Cemetery Dance (novel)">
After celebrating their first anniversary, William Smithback, a reporter for "The New York Times", and his wife Nora Kelly, a Museum of Natural History archeologist, return home from a romantic dinner. Kelly slips out to pick up a pastry from the local shop, but upon her return to their apartment in the Upper West side of Manhattan, she finds the door ajar, Smithback dead, and is attacked as she approaches.Eyewitnesses claim, and the security camera confirms, the attacker seen leaving the building was an individual who lived in the apartment building along with Smithback and Kelly. The twist: the man that witnesses believe is Smithback's murderer was pulled from the river dead, after committing suicide, two weeks before the attack. D'Agosta, a homicide detective, leads the official investigation, while FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast's and Kelly's involvement leads to a less traditional quest for the truth. Their serpentine journey takes them into a part of Manhattan they never imagined could exist: a secretive and deadly hotbed of Obeah, the West Indian Zombi cult of sorcery and magic. Unfortunately many others learn of the cult, thus endangering themselves and countless innocent lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Double_Hook"title="The Double Hook">
""The Double Hook" presents in concise, symbolic terms a drama of social disintegration and redemption, set in an isolated BC community... These themes are presented in a style which itself balances on a 'double hook': it is simultaneously local and universal, realistic and symbolic." "Watson weaves Christian myth, native legend and natural symbol into a profound prose poem.""The Double Hook" takes place in a small, rural Canadian community. Although compared to the Biblical city of Nineveh, the community is not specifically named. The main characters are James, his sister Greta, and his brother William. Their deceased mother is simply called The Old Lady and plays a near-mythical role in the novel. Other characters include Felix and Angel who are married with unnamed children; Ara who is married to James' brother, William; Heinrich (also called The Boy), Lenchen, and their mother, Widow Wagner. There are two other minor characters, Theophil and Kip.The novel opens with James killing the Old Lady. "When James Potter kills his mother in the opening scene, he sets in motion the Potter family's struggle against fear - symbolized most dramatically by the figure of Coyote - and with various forms of withdrawal from community into isolation." Within the context of Nineveh, though, his matricide is considered a good act as it is The Old Lady who creates negative energy in the community.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of_Demons"title="Queen of Demons">
This book in the series covers approximately 35 days, starting on the second day of the second month (Heron) and ending on the seventh day of the third month (Partridge). For the most part it follows the adventures of two men (Garric and Cashel) and four women (Liane, Ilna, Tenoctris, and Sharina) as they are split up into parallel worlds and slowly reunite, culminating in the defeat of two of their enemies: the Queen and the Beast.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_of_Unreason"title="Path of Unreason">
The novel concerns a physicist who is trying to explain the mysterious "Lawson Radiation" while his researches drive him insane.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starman's_Quest"title="Starman's Quest">
The story revolves around protagonist Alan Donnell, having just turned 17 and living on a space ship for all his life. While mankind has finally mastered interstellar travel, it is still bound to the speed of light using so-called Lexman drives. As a result, spacefarers experience the FitzGerald contraction, aging only a couple of weeks during their flights, where—depending on the actual distance traveled—years or even centuries pass by. This leads to the strange situation that Alan biologically is 17, but 300 in earth years.Rumor has it that already in 2570, i.e. 1,300 years prior to the story time, the Cavour hyperdrive was invented by seclusive scientist James Hudson Cavour, who however vanished after his announcement that he finally achieved success.As a result, spacefarers have become somewhat separated from Earth and their colonies, typically only stopping for loading, unloading and maintenance overhaul where they live in almost ghetto-like spacemen enclaves, and otherwise living in the segregated community of their ships.For Alan, this setting feels increasingly constricted. Like his brother 8 years ago (experienced as just 6 weeks on the starship) on the last Earth stop, he leaves the starmen's enclave to explore earth. Being more lucky than his brother back then, he makes contact with a helpful wealthy gambler, Max Hawkes, who helps Alan find his brother and return him back to the ship. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tros_of_Samothrace"title="Tros of Samothrace">
The novel concerns the courageous adventures of the title character (a Greek from Samothrace) as he helps pre-Roman Britons fight the invading forces of Julius Caesar. Over the course of the novel, Tros travels from Britain to Spain, and finally the city of Rome itself.The novel contains minor fantasy elements. One of the characters, Fflur, has the power of "second sight". The novel also imagines a benevolent secret society of mystics which includes the British Druids and the followers of the Greek Samothracian Mysteries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Survivors_(Godwin_novel)"title="The Survivors (Godwin novel)">
A ship heading from Earth to Athena, a planet 500 light years away, is suddenly attacked by the Gerns, an alien empire in its expansion phase. People aboard are divided by the invaders into Acceptables and Rejects. The Acceptables would become slave labor for the Gerns on Athena, and the Rejects are forced ashore on the nearest 'Earth-like' planet, called Ragnarok. The Gerns say they will return for the Rejects, but the Rejects quickly realise that that isn't going to happen.Ragnarok has a gravity 1.5 times that of Earth, and is populated by deadly, aggressive creatures and it contains little in the way of usable metal ores. This, combined with a terrible deadly fever that kills in hours, more than decimates the population.The novels follows the stranded humans through several generations as they try to survive there, and their unswerving goal to repay the Gerns for their cruelty.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_River"title="Crossing the River">
"Crossing the River" is a story about three black people during different time periods and in different continents as they struggle with the separation from their native Africa. The novel follows Nash, who travels from America to Africa to educate natives about Christ; Martha, an old woman who attempts to travel from Virginia to California to escape the injustices of being a slave; and Travis, a member of the U.S. military who goes to England during World War II.The novel’s opening is mostly the perspective of Nash, Martha, and Travis’ “father” mixed with the thoughts of slave trader James Hamilton, which are expressed in italics. The narrator explains that he had to sell his three children to slavery because his crops failed and he had no money.Nash’s story as an adult is first revealed through the perspective of his white master Edward Williams, who freed Nash so that he could go to Africa with the American Colonization Society to teach black natives. Edward, however, receives a letter saying that Nash had disappeared from the African village where he had been teaching. Edward immediately boards a ship to take him to Africa, and after many days of searching, a former slave of Edward’s informs him that Nash had died from fever. Edward is horribly upset, and his grief is further drawn out when he realizes that his beloved Nash was not the holy Christian he thought him to be. He finds plenty that points out Nash’s negative behavior, such as his large collection of native wives. The chapter ends with Edward gaping at the hovel that was once Nash’s residence while natives stare on, trying to understand the apparent momentary insanity of the shocked and aggrieved stranger.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bird_of_Time"title="The Bird of Time">
The novel concerns the adventures of the Martian bird-woman Yahna and Earthman Bill Newsome and the conflict between their worlds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Pirate"title="Purple Pirate">
The novel concerns the further adventures of Tros of Samathrace who battles intrigue in Cleopatra's court while he woos her sister.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grief_(novel)"title="Grief (novel)">
The narrative takes place in a predominantly gay neighborhood in Washington D.C. near the famous Dupont Circle. The story focuses on the exploits of a middle-aged, gay man who has recently moved to the city after the death of his mother. The novel follows this protagonist as he goes through the grieving process, holding true to the belief our deceased loved ones stay with us forever, or at least as long as we continue to grieve for them.Considering the novel's exploration of the complex and highly personal emotion of grief the title seems simple, yet remains effective. The protagonist convinces himself the emotion has become one of the major aspects of his life as a survivor. In essence, he lives to grieve both his mother and the numerous gay friends he lost during the 1980s AIDS epidemic. Characters frequently debate grief at various instances. Some of these individuals find the emotion unnecessary baggage. The protagonist refuses to accept this argument; he feels strongly that grief provides a crucial link between the living and the dead.The novel opens with a first-person narrator, a nameless, middle-aged, gay man. He has decided to take a teaching position in Washington D.C. He starts his journey waiting for his flight during a layover in Atlanta. Sitting in the departure lounge, he can’t help but think about his late mother. He reminisces how his life used to revolve around her when she was terminally ill. He remembers how he lacked any serious social life because he would spend every weekend with her after picking her up from the nursing home. After she passed, he realized a change in scenery was in order. His life in Florida had become hollow and depressing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vortex_Blaster"title="The Vortex Blaster">
The hero of the book is Neal "Storm" Cloud. Although the story happens in the “Lensman” universe he is not a Lensman, having failed his Lensman's exam. Instead he is a nuclear engineer with an amazingly mathematical mind. He is a high level genius and a lightning calculator. In his universe there is something we have apparently don't have in ours, self-sustaining vortices of atomic energy. These are like a small piece of the heart of a star. A churning vortex of heat and light that slowly grows while consuming whatever it is in contact with. In theory they can be blown out by a precise amount of explosives, placed at an exact spot in the vortex, at exactly the right time. The problem is, it takes the best computers available hours to calculate the factors needed, and only seconds are available to get the correct amount of explosives on target. Also, if you try to blow one out, but don't get the factors right, all you do is split the vortex into many separate vortices and scatter them far and wide, and soon each is as dangerous as the original. Although Storm Cloud, being a nuclear engineer and lightning calculator, should be able to calculate the factors and extinguish a vortex, in practice he can't. It would be very dangerous and Storm has a wife and kids, and putting himself in that kind of danger ties his mind up with worry so much that he just can't do it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invaders_from_the_Infinite"title="Invaders from the Infinite">
The novel, a sequel to "The Black Star Passes" and "Islands of Space", concerns a trio of heroes, Arcot, Morey and Wade, and their attempts to help a race of superdogs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_Lensman"title="Gray Lensman">
The action in "Gray Lensman" picks up immediately where "Galactic Patrol" left off, in the middle of the battle to destroy Helmuth's Main Base and, it is hoped, fully end the threat of Boskone. After the base falls, Kinnison finds some clues that lead him to think that Helmuth was perhaps not the head of Boskone after all. The clues lead Kinnison to mount an expedition aboard the newly constructed super-dreadnought "Dauntless", into the Second Galaxy where he thinks the true head of Boskone might reside. The "Dauntless" locates a planet under attack and comes to its aid, destroying the Boskonian forces and discovering that the entire planet is capable of going "free" (that is, inertialess, the method used in the Lensman books to achieve interstellar and intergalactic space travel). The Lensman returns to the First Galaxy with the space-faring planet and its grateful residents.Kinnison decides that since the Patrol is not yet strong enough to attack the Second Galaxy militarily, he will follow leads to the upper levels of Boskone through the traffic in the illegal drug thionite.The novel then follows Kinnison as he tries to infiltrate the Boskonian drug network. Along the way, Kinnison learns something else new: as a Second Stage Lensman he no longer needs his Lens to do Lensman things such as read minds or communicate telepathically, although he works better while wearing it. Kinnison suffers some setbacks, and has to assume different identities, eventually one requiring him to drink and use drugs. Even though he tries to drink while actually letting the people around him empty the bottles, and uses the least harmful drug he can, it still takes him a while to get over their effects. Eventually he uncovers the information he was looking for: the name and the location of Jalte, the boss of all Boskonian drug traffic in the First Galaxy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophical_Corps"title="The Philosophical Corps">
The novel concerns the adventures of the philosopher Commander A-Riman who attempts to re-educate aliens from whom he brooks no nonsense.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_World"title="Hotel World">
There are five characters, two relatives, three strangers, but all female. There is a homeless woman, a hotel receptionist, a hotel critic, the ghost of a hotel chambermaid, and the ghost's sister. These women tell a story, and it is through this story that unbeknownst to them their lives and fates intersect. The catalyst of their story is the Global Hotel.Hotel World is divided into five sections. The first section, “Past” tells the story of Sara WilbyThe second part, "Present Historic", is about a homeless girl (Else) begging for money outside the Hotel.The “Future Conditional”, the third section of the novel, Lise, a receptionist.The fourth part is “Perfect” with its far from perfect character Penny.The fifth section of the novel titled “Future in the Past,” is entirely Clare's memories on the life and death of her sister Sara.“Present” is the title of the last part of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_(Muchamore_novel)"title="The General (Muchamore novel)">
As the Christmas of 2007 approaches, James Adams taking part in a mass riot organized by Chris Bradford, the charismatic leader of anarchist group SAG (Street Action Group). He later acts as Bradford's bodyguard during a meeting with a gun supplier and successfully plants a surveillance device, only for the police to arrive unexpectedly and arrest everyone, aborting the mission. James returns to campus to discover that his girlfriend Dana Smith has been cheating on him with fellow cherub Michael Hendry, and breaks up with her.Meanwhile, James' sister Lauren and some younger agents are sent to test the security of an air traffic control centre. They capture all the security guards and cause a lot of damage, but miss an engineer who calls in the RAF. The mission is still regarded as successful, having exposed security weaknesses.On New Year's Day a select team of CHERUB agents, including James and Lauren, fly to Las Vegas for a brief vacation on the way to Fort Reagan, the world's largest urban warfare training compound. They are to take part in a two-week exercise along with forty British SAS commandos, posing as insurgents in an area controlled by an American battalion of a thousand soldiers. Weapons are restricted to paint guns and grenades.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Otto"title="Prince Otto">
Prince Otto evades his escort near the borders of Grünewald (a tiny country within present-day Germany) while out hunting and enters the neighboring country of Gerolstein. There, he takes shelter for the night under an assumed disguise with Killian Gottesheim, his daughter Ottilia, and her suitor Fritz. While discussing the state of affairs, the revolutionary Fritz expresses dissatisfaction with Otto's rule as does Killian, though with more respect and restraint on the latter's part. It is revealed that Baron Gondremark has both wooed the Princess Seraphina and begun preparations for a revolt in hopes of expanding Grünewald's borders. The next morning, Ottilia defends the Prince as an honorable man and after further discussion, while still concealing his true identity, he offers to purchase Killian's farm to ensure his family's management and they agree to meet in Mittwalden, the capital of Grünewald, in two days.Once Otto returns to his castle, he confers with his cousin Doctor Gotthold about his faults of character. They are interrupted by Chancellor Greisengesang, who bears a letter written by a Sir John Crabtree, an English visitor to the court, detailing Seraphina's indiscretions with Gondremark as well as his own affair with Countess Anna von Rosen, as well as his plans for the country. Deciding to confront Seraphina, Otto meets with Countess von Rosen in the princess's antechamber while she and Baron Gondremark agree to go forward as planned in their political scheme, but have not yet become involved physically. Otto, upon meeting her, commands Seraphina to limit her interactions with Gondremark as they smack of an affair, which she vehemently refuses to obey, stung by his accusation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ebb-Tide"title="The Ebb-Tide">
Three beggars operate in the port of Papeete on Tahiti. They are Herrick, a failed English businessman; Davis, an American sea captain disgraced by the loss of his last ship; and Huish, a dishonest Cockney of various employments.One day an off-course schooner carrying a cargo of champagne from San Francisco to Sydney arrives in port, its officers having been killed by smallpox. With no one else willing to risk infection, the U.S. consul employs Davis to take over the ship for the remainder of its voyage. Davis brings the other two men, along with a plan to steal the ship and navigate it to Peru, where they will sell the cargo and vessel and disappear with the money.Once at sea, Davis and Huish start drinking the cargo and spend almost all of their time intoxicated. Herrick, whose conscience is severely troubled by the plan but feels he has no other way to escape poverty, is left alone to manage the ship and three native crew members, despite having no seafaring experience.Several days later the would-be thieves discover they have been victims of a fraud: most of the cargo is not champagne but merely bottles of water. Evidently the shipper and the previous captain had intended to sink the ship deliberately and claim the full value of the "champagne" on insurance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gorgon's_Gaze"title="The Gorgon's Gaze">
"The Gorgon's Gaze" takes place after the events in "Secret of the Sirens", and follows the story of Connie and Col. Mallins Wood is under danger, and it is home to the only gorgon left in the world. Connie might be able to help, but she has been taken away by her great-aunt Godiva. Connie's parents have asked Godiva and her brother Hugh to stop their world travels to take Connie away from Evelyn and "wean her off of the Society." Thus, Connie is now living in the town of Chartmouth with Godiva and Hugh, where she's denied contact with any mythical creatures. Meanwhile, Col is introduced to the Gorgon, his mother's companion species. On his second visit, Col is taken over by a mysterious creature – one who appears to be a Pegasus, but does not feel like one. Col finds himself to be the property of Kullervo, an evil shapeshifter. Connie must go to save her friend, while remaining safe herself and not letting her great-aunt know she is gone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Back_Radio_Broke-Down"title="Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down">
"Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down" is a western that spans some three centuries of history and references locations from across the United States landscape. Through the three colorful protagonists, Chief Showcase, a Native American, Drag Gibson, a white land capitalist, and the Loop Garoo Kid, an African-American cowboy, Reed criticizes the hypocrisy of the American Church, the warping of history to degrade the portrayal of African Americans, and ways the "white man" attempts to destroy the "black man"."Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down" jumps into the narrative of the main protagonist, Loop Garoo, a black, silver tongued, circus cowboy, who represents the devil to the white men. The circus troupe heads into Yellow Back Radio, a sparsely populated ghost town overtaken by a child population in Indian garb. The circus troupe and the children are massacred by the adults that were chased out by the children, while Loop Garoo escapes with his life and a desire for vengeance. Drag Gibson, a homosexual and influential land-owner who is head of the city, is also introduced.As Drag deals with the problems from a deteriorating city, Loop Garoo is saved from being eaten by wild animals by Chief Showcase, a Native American who fights his oppressors through suave and underhanded means. Loop begins his Hoodoo curses on Drag, giving him the retroactive itch and other inconveniences, as the conflict builds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drawing_of_the_Dark"title="The Drawing of the Dark">
The year is 1529, and Brian Duffy, a world-weary Irish mercenary soldier, is hired in Venice by the mysterious Aurelianus to go to Vienna and work as a bouncer at the Zimmerman Inn, former monastery and current brewery of the famous Herzwesten beer.Meanwhile, the Ottoman Turkish army under Sultan Suleiman I has achieved its most advanced position yet in their march into Europe, and is prepared to undertake the siege of Vienna. With the Turkish army travels the Grand Vizier Ibrahim, a magician who intends to use horrific spells as part of the siege.Duffy spent time in Vienna years ago, and as he returns, he is haunted by memories of past events, and also finds himself having visions of mythical creatures and being ambushed by shadowy people and demonic monsters.Upon arriving in Vienna, Duffy reconnects with Epiphany Vogel, a former girlfriend, and her father Gustav, who is working on a painting he calls "The Death of St. Michael the Archangel". It seems the painting is never quite complete, and the elder Vogel is continuously adding additional detail to the work, causing it to gradually become more and more obscure.Then Duffy finds himself not only drafted into the city's defensive army, but also led by Aurelianus down mystical paths from the surprisingly old brewery to even more ancient caves beneath the city, in search of defenses against the approaching army and clues to Duffy's very nature.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(Hislop_novel)"title="The Island (Hislop novel)">
The novel is set on the island of Spinalonga, off the coast of Crete, and on the village of Plaka which lies within swimming distance across the bay from it. "The Island" tells the story of Alexis Fielding, a 25-year-old on the cusp of a life-changing decision. Alexis knows little or nothing about her family's past and has always resented her mother for refusing to discuss it. She knows only that her mother, Sofia, grew up in Plaka, a small Cretan village, before moving to London.Making her first visit to Crete to see the village where her mother was born, Alexis discovers that the village of Plaka faces the small, now deserted island of Spinalonga. Alexis is shocked and surprised to learn the deserted island was Greece's leper colony for much of the 20th century. It is here that Alexis meets an old friend of her mother's, Fotini. The older woman is prepared to tell her for the first time the whole tragic story of her family.What Fotini tells Alexis is shocking and tragic, it is the story which Sofia has spent her life concealing: the story of Eleni, her grandmother, and of a family torn apart by tragedy, war and passion. Eleni has two children, called Maria and Anna with her husband Georgio. She discovers how intimately she is connected with the island and with the horror and pity of the leper colony which was once there, and learns too that the secrets of the past have the power to change the future.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leyendas_de_Guatemala"title="Leyendas de Guatemala">
"Leyendas de Guatemala" is made up of a series of short stories, which transform the oral legends of popular culture into relevant textual manifestations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Frol_Skobeev"title="The Tale of Frol Skobeev">
The story begins in Novgorod in 1680, where Frol Skobeev, a poor nobleman and legal clerk known locally as a cunning rogue, has designs on marrying Annushka of the prominent and well-placed Nadrin-Nashchekin family. Annushka's father is described as a "stol'nik", meaning he was a ranking official in the Tsar's court and probably one of the richer and more influential members of the Russian aristocracy.Knowing that there is little chance of meeting Annushka in person, or of her father agreeing to their marriage, Frol concocts a devious plan to meet with her. He gets acquainted with Annushka's nurse, offers her money – asking for nothing in return at first – and from her learns that Annushka will shortly be having a Christmas party. He arranges to get his sister invited to the ball, and disguises himself as a noblewoman and comes with her to the party. There, he bribes the nurse to get close to Annushka. The nurse orchestrates matters so that the disguised Frol and Annushka are together in her chambers, and tells him to play a game of ‘bride and groom’. Frol reveals himself to Annushka and takes her virginity. While Annushka initially resists him, she quickly finds pleasure in their relationship and keeps Frol in her home for three days under cover, during which time he remains disguised as a woman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizard_of_Lemuria"title="The Wizard of Lemuria">
The tale of Thongor of Valkarth, barbarian warrior in the prehistoric continent of Lemuria, who becomes humanity's champion in their pivotal struggle against the Dragon Kings who had previously dominated the world. As the serpent men devise a plan in restoring their empire, all that stands in their way are the courage of Thongor, his comrades, and the magic of the wizard Sharajsha.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pursuit_of_the_Screamer"title="Pursuit of the Screamer">
Jannus is the son of Mistress Lillia, the ruler of Newstock, a village near the river in Bremner. The competing villages are protected by the Valde, strange female warriors who serve ten years in the villages. The few that reach the end of their service are allowed to get married with one of the rare male Valde. The Valde are tall, beautiful, filled with quick animal instincts, sexually mature at nine and dead of old age around thirty, are also gifted with empathy; the power to feel one's emotions.While watching a duel to the death between Poli - Jannus's favorite Valde - and another Valde, Jannus discovers a Screamer, a fragile humanoid creature that is hunted without pity by the Valde. He saves the Screamer who tells him that he is an immortal Tek. Each time when a Tek dies he is reborn again. The Tek wants to return to Kantmorie to end his thousand years of regenerations. The Tek, called Lur by Jannus, persuades Jannus to accompany him.Together with a merchant family, the Innsmiths (a corruption of Ironsmith) and a number of Valde warriors Jannus follows the river downstream. Among the Valde is Poli who served her ten years. After a number of adventures the Tek, Jannus, Poli and the leader of the merchant family find themselves in the desert trying to reach the location where the Shai is, the huge intelligence guiding the star ship that brought the Teks to the world, to end the endless cycle of reincarnation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Street_(novel)"title="Union Street (novel)">
The novel is divided into chapters each covering the same few months but centring on the life of one of seven working-class women living the area of Union Street in northeastern England. The characters range in age and circumstance, Alice Bell is in her seventies and dying whereas Kelly Brown is eleven, but all of them face struggles and poverty. The book begins with the character of eleven-year-old Kelly Brown and deals with her rape and the response of Kelly and her community to the rape. When the people on the street find out about her rape they will not deal with it openly with her; instead, they react with general sympathy, in the way they would have if she had been ill, but both the adults and children talk about the incident behind her back. Kelly becomes increasingly isolated, distrustful of adults and no longer feeling at home with the other children; she spends an increasing amount of time by herself at night in the neighbourhood. As time passes Kelly's silence turns to anger, responding to the trauma of the events with acts of rebellion and violence, such as cutting her hair short and breaking the windows of a school.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going,_Going,_Gone_(novel)"title="Going, Going, Gone (novel)">
Set in 1968 New York City in an alternate universe to the Dryco universe of the previous five iterations of the series, "Going, Going, Gone" nevertheless disposes of several of the series' characters in its closing chapters. Its protagonist is Walter Bullitt, an egocentric expert in psychoactive substances who freelances for various branches of the increasingly Nazi-influenced United States government spy apparatus. Though he passes for white, Bullitt is in fact of African-American descent in an USA where, as revealed in previous novels in the Dryco series, the American Civil War never took place. As a result, racial relations in this version of the USA have been much more fraught, with almost all full-blooded African Americans interned and used as slave labor during World War II before being disposed of, and by 1968 even black music has been culturally marginalized. Walter becomes subject to increasingly strange experiences, hearing voices and seeing ghosts from a parallel New York almost a century more advanced than his. Walter is taken to this alternative New York (the primary locale of the previous five Dryco novels) which, after flooding due to the Greenhouse effect, has been moved north, is populated by all races and features in its collection of futuristic wonders television, which never caught on in his world. The novel ends with the two epistemic worlds converging into a New York which is, in the words of critic Paul Dukes a "morally better place than either of the two which composed it".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladies'_Night_(novel)"title="Ladies' Night (novel)">
The novel takes place in New York City, where a chemical truck gets into an accident and spills its contents on the street. Curiously, the trucker has fake identification, and no one seems to have heard of the company name on the truck: "Ladies, INC."Later that evening, Tom Braun and his family go to a party. Tom gets into a shouting match with his wife, Susan, which their son, Andy, overhears. Andy retreats to his room to pack for a scout camping trip. After Tom leaves the apartment for the night, the women of New York who inhaled the spilled chemicals (including Susan) begin to have severe headaches. Within a short time, the women are overcome by a desire to have sex with any man they can find. Finally, the women begin attacking those who have not been similarly affected by the spilled chemicals. In increasingly gruesome scenes, women kill their children, husbands, brothers, etc., and the seemingly few unaffected women of the city.As Tom works with a small band of men to make it home to Andy, Susan first tries to mate with her son, then tries to kill him. Andy hides in a bathroom until an unaffected woman unknowingly saves his life by knocking on the door. The woman is subsequently attacked by Susan and other crazed women. Tom is wounded on his journey home, but manages to severely injure his wife before she can kill their son. Susan then kills Tom, whereupon Andy shoots his mom with several arrows (which he had for his camping trip) to make sure she is not able to recover from her injuries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fin-de-siècle_Vienna"title="Fin-de-siècle Vienna">
Partly reconstructed from Schorske's articles published in the "American Historical Review", the book is structured into seven thematically interlocking chapters. Each chapter considers the interrelationships between key artists with the development of psychoanalysis and what was — at the time — viewed as an end of history.In the 'Introduction' the author claims that the text was born from his desire 'to construct a course in European intellectual history, designed to help students to understand the large, architectonic correlations between high culture and socio-political change' (p. XVIII). In his view, Vienna was a peculiar cultural environment due to the late ascendancy and early crisis of its liberal middle class between the 1860s and the 1890s. This compression of the socio-political liberal hegemony provided the opportunity for a 'collective Oedipal revolt' against the liberal inheritance, promoted by "Die Jungen" (the Young Ones), spreading from politics in the 1870s to literature and art in the 1890s. The chronologically compressed and socially circumscribed character of the Viennese experience created a more coherent context for studying the different ramifications of its high culture (p. XXVI).The second essay, "The Ringstrasse, its critics, and the birth of urban modernism" looks back to explore the liberal cultural system in its ascendancy through the medium of urban form and architectural style ... but it looks forward too … to the critical responses on the part of two leading participants in it — Otto Wagner and Camillo Sitte — reveal the emergence of conflicting tendencies, communitarian and functionalist, in modern thought about the built environment (p. XXVIII).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Chinese_Brothers"title="The Five Chinese Brothers">
In the Imperial China of the Qing dynasty, there are five brothers who "all looked exactly alike." They each possess a special talent: the first brother can swallow the sea, the second has an unbreakable iron neck, the third can stretch his legs to incredible lengths, the fourth is immune to burning, and the fifth can hold his breath forever. The five live with their mother by the sea. The first brother, a fisherman, is able to catch rare fish that sell at the market quite well, allowing the family to live comfortably. One day, he agrees to let a young boy accompany him on his fishing trip. He holds the entire sea in his mouth so that the boy can retrieve fish and other sea treasures from the seabed. When he can no longer hold in the sea, he frantically signals for the boy to return to shore. The boy ignores him, and then drowns in the sea when the man is forced to expel the water.The first brother returns alone, and is accused of murder and sentenced to death. However, one by one, his four brothers assume his place before four attempts at execution. They are each able to carry forth this deception, by convincing the judge to let them return home briefly to bid their mother goodbye, before each method of execution is attempted. The second brother, with his iron neck, cannot be beheaded; the third brother, with his ability to stretch his legs all the way to the bottom of the ocean, cannot be drowned; the fourth brother, with his immunity to burning, is unharmed at the stake, and the fifth brother, with his ability to hold his breath, survives overnight in an oven full of whipped cream. Finally, the judge decrees that since the man could not be executed, he must have been innocent. The man is released, and all five brothers live happily ever after with their mother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_Thief"title="Storm Thief">
The book opens with a scene of a seabird flying through the clouds. It falls out of the sky with exhaustion and crashes through a window, dying, where it is found by a strange golem-like creature. Then later that day in the other side of Orokos in the ghettos, the two protagonists, Rail and Moa, are sent on a mission to steal from the hideous creatures called Mozgas. They sneak through a large building and find a small box with different sorts of treasure within. Rail also finds an artifact that is known to be Fade-Science. They manage just to escape from the Mozgas and report back to the obese thief mistress Anya-Jacana. Rail debates about whether to give her the Fade Science but chooses not to. They depart and leave for their small living place. Anya-Jacana sends a small group of boys, led by her favorite, Finch, to get the artifact off them. They arrive soon enough and Rail and Moa are trapped. Moa then puts the artifact on her hand and manages to fall through the wall behind them. She pulls Rail through just as the gang enters. They discover the artifact can open 'doors' though solid objects. As Rail and Moa escape, they meet a golem named Vago. He had escaped from his own master after getting beaten. The three proceed to discover the truth behind their unjust society..
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Out_Of"title="Into the Out Of">
The Maasai people become aware that a global crisis is approaching. Malevolent, unearthly creatures called "shetani", which inhabit another dimension the Maasai know as the “Out Of” (because all things, such as humans, animals and plants, originally came "out of" it), are finding their way into the world. They are fomenting trouble between the superpowers, intent on causing mischief up to and including war. If not prevented, the barriers between the two dimensions will be breached and uncountable hordes of shetani will overrun the world, destroying all life.Olkeloki, a Maasai elder, comes to Washington, D.C. to warn the US President and seek help. He encounters Joshua Oak, a disenchanted FBI agent, and Merry Sharrow, a shy and unfulfilled call centre worker. He is convinced that they are the key people he has been seeking, and his persuasion, coupled with several dangerous encounters with shetani, convince them to return with him to Africa, where they join in Maasai attempts to hold back the shetani. Eventually, Olkeloki takes Merry and Oak into the Out Of, where, with their help, he performs a ritual which seals the breach between dimensions, sacrificing his own supernatural powers in the process. All three return to this world, where the shetani’s tricks have ended and the diplomatic crisis is receding, and Oak and Merry realize they have found what they have been looking for in each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Lambert_(novel)"title="Louis Lambert (novel)">
The novel begins with an overview of the main character's background. Louis Lambert, the only child of a tanner and his wife, is born in 1797 and begins reading at an early age. In 1811 he meets the real-life Swiss author Madame de Staël (1766–1817), who – struck by his intellect – pays for him to enroll in the Collège de Vendôme. There he meets the narrator, a classmate named "the Poet" who later identifies himself in the text as Balzac; they quickly become friends. Shunned by the other students and berated by teachers for not paying attention, the boys bond through discussions of philosophy and mysticism.After completing an essay entitled "Traité de la Volonté" ("Treatise on the Will"), Lambert is horrified when a teacher confiscates it, calls it "rubbish", and – the narrator speculates – sells it to a local grocer. Soon afterwards, a serious illness forces the narrator to leave the school. In 1815, Lambert graduates at the age of eighteen and lives for three years in Paris. After returning to his uncle's home in Blois, he meets a woman named Pauline de Villenoix and falls passionately in love with her. On the day before their wedding, however, he suffers a mental breakdown and attempts to castrate himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&quot;G&quot;_Is_for_Gumshoe"title="&quot;G&quot; Is for Gumshoe">
Three things happen to Kinsey Millhone on her thirty-third birthday: she moves into her remodeled apartment, which has finally been finished; she is hired by Irene Gersh, a sickly Santa Teresa resident, to head out to the Slabs in the Mojave Desert and locate her mother; and she gets the news that Tyrone Patty, a particularly dangerous criminal she helped the Carson City Police Department track down a few years back, has hired a hit-man to kill her.After her first night in her new place, Kinsey heads out early the next day in search of Mrs Gersh's mother, Agnes Grey, who lives in a trailer in the desert. Agnes isn't home, and the trailer seems to be occupied by two teenage runaways; but Kinsey eventually tracks Agnes down at a local convalescent hospital, where she has been since being taken suddenly ill on a trip to a local town sometime before. Agnes, 83 years old, has not been a model patient; and the hospital staff are delighted to hear that she has relatives who can take responsibility for her. Irene makes plans to transfer Agnes to a facility in Santa Teresa. But Agnes seems terrified of going there and tells Kinsey a confused story about a number of people from the past, including Lottie and Emily, who died.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&quot;H&quot;_Is_for_Homicide"title="&quot;H&quot; Is for Homicide">
These are troubling times for California Fidelity, the insurance company for whom Kinsey Millhone does occasional freelance work in return for office space. First, a recent employee and friend of Kinsey's, Parnell Perkins, is shot and killed—and the police investigation seems curiously lacking in results. Second, in the wake of poor profit figures, company troubleshooter Gordon Titus (or 'tight-ass' as he is immediately nicknamed) arrives to shake things up. The informal arrangement with Kinsey seems high on his list of targets.In the new mood of nervous efficiency prevalent at CFI pending Titus's arrival, Kinsey is passed the claim file of Bibianna Diaz to investigate for possible fraud. Kinsey assumes a false identity as Hannah Moore in an attempt to befriend Bibianna, who, by co-incidence, is in a relationship with a former schoolmate and police-academy associate of Kinsey's, Jimmy Tate, recently relieved of police duties on the grounds of corruption. Bibianna has problems too, it seems: her former boyfriend Raymond Maldonaldo, of whom she is—rightly, as it turns out—terrified, is the jealous type and is hunting her down. Kinsey realises that a CFI colleague has inadvertently given away information on Bibianna to Raymond's gang, and things come to a head while she is out drinking with Bibianna and Tate. Raymond's brother Chago and his girlfriend Dawna accost Bibianna; and in the fracas that ensues, Tate shoots and kills Chago. Bibianna is taken into custody, Kinsey deliberately sticking to her in order to cement their relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Will_of_an_Eccentric"title="The Will of an Eccentric">
William J. Hypperbone, an eccentric millionaire, living in Chicago, has left the sum of his fortune, $60,000,000, to the first person to reach the end of "The Noble Game of the United States of America." The game he devised is based upon the board game "The Noble Game of Goose"; however, in his version, the players are the tokens and the game board is the United States. The contestants are Max Réal, with his companion Tommy); Tom Crabbe, with his trainer John Milner; Hermann Titbury, with his wife Kate; Harris T. Kymbale (on his own); Lizzie Wag, with her friend Jovita Foley; Hodge Urrican, with his companion Turk; and the mysterious player only known as "XKZ." Who is this mysterious "XKZ" who was added to the game by a codicil to the will? Time and completion of the game will tell. In 1897, the first Baedecker guidebook for the U.S. was published, and Verne used this as the source for his descriptions of the modes of transport, timetables, and geographic descriptions of the numerous places the twelve participants were required to visit in order to claim the prize.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Antifer"title="Captain Antifer">
1799: The French campaign in Egypt and Syria. At Jaffa, General Napoléon Bonaparte ruthlessly orders the killing of 4,500 Turkish prisoners of war. A Breton sea captain attached to the French force notices a still living young Turkish soldier among the piled bodies, and saves his life. The Turk, who would later rise to great wealth and prominence in Cairo, will not forget his saviour.1831: The wealthy Egyptian Kamylk-Pasha buries his treasures in the rock of an unknown islet, to save them from the greed of his family.1862: In Saint-Malo, Pierre Antifer, an impulsive and gruff Breton sea captain, meditates on a document bequeathed by his father – a letter sent by Kamylk-Pasha, whose life the father had saved. This document mentions the latitude of the island where the treasure is hidden, with the longitude to be communicated to Antifer once upon a time. Antifer's nephew, Juhel, thinks only of his coming marriage with his beloved Enogate and fears the consequences of a possible trip.The Egyptian notary Ben-Omar – accompanied by Saouk, the last heir of the Pasha – arrives at Saint-Malo and reveals to Master Antifer the long desired longitude. The impulsive seaman immediately embarks, drawing with him his friend Gildas Tregomain and poor Juhel, whose marriage was put off indefinitely. The islet is located in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Muscat in Oman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistress_Branican"title="Mistress Branican">
The story begins in the United States, where the heroine, Mistress Branican, suffers a mental breakdown after the death by drowning of her young son. On recovering, she learns that her husband, Captain Branican, has been reported lost at sea. Having acquired a fortune, she is able to launch an expedition to search for her husband, who she is convinced is still alive. She leads the expedition herself and trail leads her into the Australian hinterland. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudius_Bombarnac"title="Claudius Bombarnac">
Claudius Bombarnac, a reporter is assigned by the "Twentieth Century" to cover the travels of the Grand Transasiatic Railway which runs between "Uzun Ada", a harbour on the eastern coast of the Caspian Sea, and Peking, China. Accompanying him on this journey is an interesting collection of characters, including one who is trying to beat the round the world record and another who is a stowaway. Claudius hopes one of them will become the hero of his piece, so his story won't be just a boring travelogue. He is not disappointed when a special car guarded by troops is added to the train, said to be carrying the remains of a great Mandarin. The great Mandarin actually turns out to be a large consignment being returned to China from Persia. Unfortunately the train must travel through a large part of China that is controlled by unscrupulous robber-chiefs. Before the journey is over, Claudius finds his hero.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kéraban_the_Inflexible"title="Kéraban the Inflexible">
Jan van Mitten and his valet Bruno (both of Rotterdam, Holland) are in Istanbul, Turkey. The pair are going to meet with Van Mitten's tobacco business associate, a headstrong man named Kéraban. At Van Mitten's meeting, Kéraban decides to take them to dinner at his home in Scutari, on the other side of the Bosphorus Strait. Just before they are going to cross the Strait, a tax is imposed on all vessels that can be used to cross the strait.Enraged by this new tax, Kéraban decides to take his associates to Scutari by traveling seven hundred leagues around the perimeter of the Black Sea, so that he won't have to pay the paltry ten para tax. The principled Kéraban and his reluctant traveling companions begin the journey; the only deadline for Kéraban is that he must be back in six weeks time, so that he may depart in time to arrange for his nephew's wedding to a young woman, who must be married before she turns seventeen. If she doesn't meet that deadline, she won't inherit 100,000 Turkish pounds.Unfortunately for Kéraban and friends, the villains Yarhud, Scarpante, and the man they work for, Seigneur Saffar, have plans to ensure that the young woman marries Saffar instead before the deadline.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kin_of_Ata_Are_Waiting_for_You"title="The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You">
After murdering a lover, and crashing his car while fleeing the scene of the crime, a ruthlessly "successful" man is transported to an unknown island (called Ata) whose location is never revealed, the implication being that it doesn't physically exist in our world. The island is inhabited by people he gradually learns are deceptively primitive. Every aspect of their waking lives is governed by their dream life. Initially in conflict with their ways, the unnamed protagonist, according to Bryant, "is dragged kicking and screaming to his own salvation." He gradually comes to realize that the people of this island support and maintain the real world through their dreaming, and that he needs to incorporate this world view so he can successfully return to his former life. It can be read as an allegory of spiritual growth, and shows the influence of modern anthropological writings on indigenous peoples and the writings of psychologist Carl Jung.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cage_of_Eagles"title="A Cage of Eagles">
The book centers on the battle of wits and the ambiguous relationship developing between U-boat ace Otto Kruger, leader of the captured Germans, and Ian Fleming in his real-life World War II role as an intelligence officer which would later inspire the James Bond books. It ends in December 1941, with an open-ended conclusion clearly leaving the possibility of a sequel. However, for many years afterwards Follet wrote on other subjects, only in 2004 coming up with the long-delayed sequel "A Forest of Eagles" - followed immediately by a final volume of what became a trilogy, "Return of the Eagles". 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Girl_in_the_Ring_(novel)"title="Brown Girl in the Ring (novel)">
The setting of "Brown Girl in The Ring" is post-apocalyptic in nature. The story takes place in the city core of Metropolitan Toronto (Downtown Toronto) after the economic collapse. Riots of the past have caused the inner city of Toronto to collapse into a slum of poverty, homelessness, and violence. While the elite and city officials have fled to the suburbs, children are left to fend for themselves and survive on the streets. As a consequence of the Riots, Toronto is isolated from other satellite cities in the surrounding Greater Toronto Area (North York, Scarborough, Etobicoke) by roadblocks and Lake Ontario has become a mudhole. Disappearances and murder are not uncommon, and everyone is left to either fend for themselves or bind together to provide support for each other.In the twelve years since the Riots, the city is now ruled by a criminal mastermind, Rudy Sheldon, and his posse of criminal thugs. Rudy is commissioned to find a heart for the Premier of Ontario, who needs a heart transplant. Normally, the Porcine Organ Harvest Program is used, but the adviser of Premier Catherine Uttley encourages her to deem the program "immoral" and make a public statement of preference for a human donor instead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Archipelago_on_Fire"title="The Archipelago on Fire">
On the 18th of October, 1827, about five o’clock in the evening, a small Levantine vessel piloted by Captain Nicholas Starcos of the Karysta returns home to Vitlyo, an ancient village in the Peloponnesus, only to be denied entry by his mother, who denounces him for what he’s become. Lt. Henry d’Albaret of the French navy, and other Frenchmen, have joined the Greeks in this war. After recovering from a wound received in battle, d’Albaret meets Hadjine Elisundo, his banker’s lovely daughter. They fall in love then make plans to marry, but Starcos, who holds a devastating secret against the girl’s father, demands her hand in marriage—or else. The distraught father soon dies, thus freeing Hadjine from her obligation of marrying Starcos, but she breaks off her engagement to d’Albaret, who is a respectable and honest man, because of her father’s scandalous dealings with Captain Starcos. While she takes steps to right her father’s wrongs, the distraught d’Albaret returns to the war until he’s given command of the ship Syphanta. He then sails along the archipelago in search of pirates, who are taking advantage of the conflict. Eventually d’Albaret tracks Sacratif, a notorious pirate, to Crete, where Verne brings this informative and entertaining novel to a surprise ending.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragons_of_Summer_Flame"title="Dragons of Summer Flame">
After a battle, the Nightlord Steel Brightblade finds Palin Majere, nephew of the famed mage Raistlin. He allows him to return with the bodies of his two brothers, slain in the battle, to their parents, Caramon and Tika.The Knights of Takhisis visit an island where the hidden race of Irda make their home. The Irda hide themselves with an illusion, pretending to be primitive humans, and the knights leave. This fearful encounter causes the Irda to believe that another invasion will come, and convinces them to break open a magical item known as the Greygem of Gargath. The Irda did not know that the Graygem holds the entity known as Chaos inside it, long thought too dangerous to dabble with, which sets in motion the Chaos War.Among the Irda is Usha, an orphaned human girl they had raised among them. They believed while their kind would be immune to the effect of the Greygem, that she, being a human, might be affected by it. So they decided to send her away, giving her a message to deliver to Lord Dalamar, master of the Tower of High Sorcery in Palanthas. After she is gone, they crack open the Greygem and release the god Chaos.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Borrowers_Aloft"title="The Borrowers Aloft">
With the help of their friend Spiller, the Clock family have relocated to the miniature village of Little Fordham, where everything is perfectly scaled to Borrower size. However, they are soon discovered by Miss Menzies, a kind but eccentric human woman, who reveals their existence to the village's creator, Mr Pott. Miss Menzies and Mr Pott agree between themselves to keep the Borrowers a secret, while they also prepare a special, functioning miniature cottage for them.Meanwhile, the Platters, a married couple who own a rival model village, learn of the Borrowers' existence. Fearing their own model village will be ruined, as they cannot compete with a model village with live occupants, the Platters kidnap the Clock family and keep them in an attic, planning to show them after building a see-through, escape-proof miniature house in which to display the tiny family. The Clocks are horrified at their fate, but escape seems impossible.Imprisoned through the winter, Arrietty amuses herself by reading old newspapers. After Arrietty discovers a series of articles on hot-air balloons, she and her father race against time to build a functional Borrower-size balloon before they are trapped forever. With their balloon, the family escapes the attic, but, realizing they cannot return to Little Fordham, they again strike out in search of a new, safe home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Robber"title="Midnight Robber">
The novel moves between a first-person narrator and a third-person narrator who tell the story of Tan-Tan, the Robber Queen. She lives on planet Toussaint with her father Mayor Antonio and mother Ione. The Midnight Robber is young Tan-Tan’s favorite Carnival character, and she practices Robber Queen speeches and antics for hours at a time. Toussaint is a planet peopled by the descendants of Caribbean immigrants from Earth. Its society is technologically very advanced, with Granny Nanny, the ultimate A.I. guiding and directing the fate of humanity as a whole (or at least the citizens of Toussaint). Similarly, each person has "nanomites" injected into them at birth, which allow them to hear the voice of all the A.I. as needed. After killing Ione’s lover, Antonio escapes with Tan-Tan to an alternate world called New Half-Way Tree, a prison planet for exiles.Life on New Half-Way Tree is much harder, a primitive and dangerous world inhabited primarily by Toussaint's exiled criminal class and the douen, an alien race reminiscent of creatures from Caribbean folklore. Here Tan-Tan is beaten and raped by her father Antonio. On her 16th birthday, she kills her father in self-defense. Aided by a douen, Tan-Tan flees from the human settlement to a douden tree-village. Soon, she realizes she is pregnant with her father's child. Hiding among the trees, Tan-Tan learns the secrets of the douen and gradually transforms into another figure out of Caribbean folklore, the Midnight Robber, who dresses in black, spouts poetry, steals from the rich, and gives to the poor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eager_(novel)"title="Eager (novel)">
The plot is set in Britain at the end of the 21st Century and revolves around an experimental type of robot that can think for itself, EGR3 (called Eager). Eager learns by experience as a human does, is intellectually curious, and capable of emotion. He can feel wonder, excitement, and loss. His inventor sends him as an assistant to an old-fashioned robot, Grumps, who acts as a butler to the Bell family. Though much-loved, Grumps is running down and can no longer be repaired.Mr. Bell works for the all-powerful technocratic corporation, LifeCorp, which supplies the robots which cater to every human need. His children Gavin and Fleur learn of an underground group that opposes LifeCorp, and there is a danger of a robot rebellion brewing. The ultra-high-tech, eerily human BDC4 robots are behaving suspiciously and the Bell children and Eager are drawn into a great adventure. Eager's extraordinary abilities are tested to the limit and he tries to find out the answer to the question: what does it mean to be alive?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Charlemagne_Pursuit"title="The Charlemagne Pursuit">
The story follows Malone in his attempt to find details of his father's death. His father, Forrest Malone, was a US Navy officer who disappeared while on a mission on an experimental submarine in 1971. Also investigating the submarine's fate are the German twins, Cristl Falk and Dorothea Lindauer, whose father was on the same submarine.The search is complicated by Admiral Langford Ramsey, who attempts to hide his involvement with a second submarine that was sent to find Forest Malone and his crew. Stephanie Nelle, Malone's ex-boss, and Edwin Davis, the (Deputy National Security Advisor), become involved while searching for Charlie Smith, a killer hired by Ramsey to eradicate any links to him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13_Little_Blue_Envelopes"title="13 Little Blue Envelopes">
Virginia (Ginny) Blackstone, a seventeen-year-old girl who is on summer break before her final year of high school, has received 13 blue envelopes from her self-proclaimed "Runaway Aunt" Peg, who has passed away. Ginny is told that she is about to leave for several weeks and will travel to foreign lands. Her aunt leaves her four rules to follow: she can only bring what fits into a backpack, she cannot bring any kind of journal or foreign language aid, she cannot bring extra money of any kind, and she cannot use or bring anything electronic with her. Ginny is only allowed to open the next envelope once she has reached the destination or has completed the task set in the previous letter.The envelopes lead her to London, where she meets a "starving" artist/creep named Keith, and Aunt Peg's best friend and roommate, Richard. She realizes she has a crush on Keith, and they go to Scotland to meet her aunt's guru, artist Mari Adams. After she has an argument with Keith, they part ways, though they meet again briefly in Paris. Later, she encounters a horrible hotel in Amsterdam and finds shelter under a very hyperactive family. Following the letters, she goes to Denmark and meets four Australian students, Emmett, Bennett, Nigel, and Carrie. Together they form the "Blue Envelope Gang" and follow the second-to-last envelope to Greece. On the way, the 12th envelope tells her she can open the last one whenever she feels ready.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&quot;B&quot;_Is_for_Burglar"title="&quot;B&quot; Is for Burglar">
Private investigator Kinsey Millhone is hired by Beverly Danziger to locate her missing sister, Elaine Boldt, whose name is needed on some paperwork regarding an inheritance. Elaine was last seen getting into a cab with the intention of flying down to Boca Raton, Florida, where she spends her winters, but appears to have disappeared along the way. It seems a relatively straightforward matter, so much so that Millhone is not sure Beverly needs a PI; but she agrees to take the case.Things are not as easy as they seem, however, as Millhone can find no trace of Elaine anywhere in Florida, although she does find a woman called Pat Usher, who claims Elaine agreed to let her sublet the Boca Raton apartment where Elaine lived while she was off travelling. This claim rings false, since no one but Pat Usher has received a postcard from Elaine on her supposed trip. Millhone secures the able assistance of Elaine's elderly neighbour, Julia, to keep an eye on things in Florida while she goes back to California. Millhone suspects there is a link between Elaine's disappearance and the death of her Santa Teresa neighbour, Marty Grice, who was apparently killed by a burglar who then set fire to the Grice home a week before Elaine left. Someone breaks into the home of Tillie, the supervisor of Elaine's Santa Teresa apartment complex, apparently on the track of some of Elaine's bills that Tillie was holding ready to forward to her. Someone also searches the detective's apartment, and Millhone realizes the thief is after Elaine's passport.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&quot;C&quot;_Is_for_Corpse"title="&quot;C&quot; Is for Corpse">
The novel begins with Kinsey at the gym, rehabilitating herself from injuries sustained at the end of "B is for Burglar". While there, she meets Bobby Callahan, a twenty-three-year-old who was nearly killed when his car went off the road nine months ago. Bobby is convinced that the car crash, which killed his friend Rick, was an attempt on his life. He suspects that he may still be in danger, so he hires Kinsey to investigate. Having lost some of his memories and cognitive faculties as a result of the crash, he can only vaguely articulate why he thinks someone wants to kill him, referring to some information in a red address book that he can no longer locate.Kinsey takes the case despite little information, having taken a liking to Bobby. She meets his rich but dysfunctional family: Glen, his mother is an heiress on her third marriage to Derek Wenner, whose daughter Kitty is a 17-year-old drug user and is seriously ill with anorexia. Glen has spared no expense in seeking treatment and counseling for Bobby. He is depressed further due to Rick's death, his own injuries, and the loss of his prospects at medical school. A few days later, Bobby dies in another car crash, which is attributed to a seizure while driving. Kinsey thinks this is the delayed result of the first crash and thus a successful murder. Kinsey investigates several people: Kitty stands to inherit 2 million dollars from Bobby's will; Derek insured Bobby's life for a large sum without Glen's knowledge; and Rick's parents blame Bobby for their son's death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&quot;D&quot;_Is_for_Deadbeat"title="&quot;D&quot; Is for Deadbeat">
Kinsey Millhone receives a contract from ex-con Alvin Limardo to deliver a cashier's check for twenty-five thousand dollars to a fifteen-year-old boy named Tony Gahan. According to Limardo, Tony helped him through a tough time in his life, leaving Limardo indebted. However, when the retainer check Limardo made out to Kinsey for four hundred dollars bounces, she learns that Alvin Limardo is actually John Daggett, a man known by all and liked by few, and recently released from a local prison. He is also a bigamist. His first wife Essie's fanatical religious views have kept her married to Daggett, while Daggett, in disregard of his marital status, underwent a second marriage to Lovella on his release from prison, whom he has subjected to domestic abuse.In her search to find Daggett and get her money back, Kinsey discovers that he was found dead on the beach only a few days after hiring her. Through Daggett's daughter Barbara, Kinsey learns that Tony Gahan was the sole survivor of a family killed in a car accident caused by Daggett, for which he received a conviction on charges of vehicular manslaughter. Tony's been a wreck since the death of his family, rarely sleeping and doing poorly in school. He now lives with his uncle and aunt, Ramona and Ferrin Westfall. Also killed in the accident was a friend of Tony's young sister, and a boy called Doug Polokowski, who had hitched a ride in the car. Kinsey tracks down an ex-con friend of Daggett's, Billy Polo, now living in a trailer park with his sister, Coral. Billy introduced Lovella to Daggett. Kinsey finds out that Doug Polokowski was Billy and Coral's brother. There's no shortage of people with a motive for Daggett's death, but the police are classifying it as an accident.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_the_Blood_(novel)"title="Prince of the Blood (novel)">
Twin sons to Prince Arutha, the Princes Borric and Erland have lived a life of relative luxury. Though well educated and talented swordsmen, they spend their time brawling, gambling, and disrupting their father's court. After the twins show no sign of maturity after a year stationed at the Kingdom's northern border, and with Borric being Heir Presumptive to the throne in Rillanon after the drowning of King Lyam's only son, Arutha decides that his two sons cannot afford the luxury of youth anymore. He sends them as ambassadors to the Empire of Kesh for the Empress' 75th birthday jubilee. Baron James ("Jimmy the Hand") and Baron Locklear accompany the twins, their presence made all the more vital after an assassination attempt on Borric before their departure is narrowly averted, and the assassin is found to be of Keshian nobility.On the way to Kesh, the emissaries stop at Stardock. There James meets Gamina, Pug's adopted daughter, and they fall in love on first sight. James and Gamina wish to marry but James must seek Arutha's permission as a member of his court. Along with granting permission, Arutha promotes James to the rank of Earl, and the two are married. Gamina then joins the group as they continue their journey south.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&quot;E&quot;_Is_for_Evidence"title="&quot;E&quot; Is for Evidence">
Just after Christmas, Kinsey Millhone discovers that five thousand dollars has mysteriously been credited to her bank account. She flashes back a few days to when she was asked to investigate a fire claim at a factory in Colgate as part of her informal office space rental arrangement with California Fidelity Insurance. The business in question, Wood/Warren, is owned and operated by the Wood family, whom Kinsey has known on a personal level since high school. Company founder Linden Wood is dead. His son Lance now runs the company, and his four other children—Ebony, Olive, Ash and Bass—all have a stake. Ash is Kinsey's former schoolmate; and Bass was an acquaintance of her second ex-husband, Daniel Wade. Olive is married to Terry Kohler, Lance's second-in-command at the company. After a solitary Christmas, with Henry away visiting relatives and Rosie's Tavern shut down until the new year, Kinsey writes off the fire as an industrial accident. Upon submitting her report to her boss, she finds that significant papers have been removed from the file and others substituted, giving an appearance that Lance Wood has bribed Kinsey not to label the fire as arson. In the middle of protesting her innocence, the five thousand dollar credit takes on a sinister significance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&quot;F&quot;_Is_for_Fugitive"title="&quot;F&quot; Is for Fugitive">
Henry Pitts is having Kinsey's garage apartment rebuilt after it was destroyed in the events of the previous novel. Royce Fowler wants the detective to exonerate his son of the murder of Jean Timberlake, seventeen years before, in Floral Beach, California. Bailey Fowler pleaded guilty to killing Jean, his sometime girlfriend, and escaped from prison soon afterwards. He has apparently been living the life of a model citizen under an assumed name. He is recaptured and is claiming his innocence. Kinsey heads to Floral Beach, a tiny local community, to pursue the cold trail; and she stays with the Fowler family at their motel. Royce is dying of cancer; his wife Oribelle is sick with diabetes; and their daughter Ann, Bailey's senior by five years, has taken leave of absence from her job as a counselor at the local high school to provide care for her parents.Bailey's lawyer, Jack Clemson, fills her in on the details of the case: Jean, 17 when she died, was a problem child who was doing badly in school and engaged in numerous sexual encounters with the local boys at school—and some of the local men, as well. She was pregnant at the time of her death. Everyone knows everyone in Floral Beach, and Kinsey acquaints herself with a number of the locals in pursuit of the truth: Pearl, the local bar-owner, whose son's evidence put Bailey on the spot at the time of Jean's death; Tap Granger, who was Bailey's accomplice in several robberies before the murder; the local pastor, Reverend Haws, and his wife; and Dr. Dunne, whose wife Elva has a violent objection to being questioned. The high school principal at the time of the murder, Dwight Shales, offers some help. Attention is turned to Jean's single mother, Shana, whose friendship with Dwight is causing raised eyebrows around Floral Beach. She is struggling with longstanding alcohol problems, is less co-operative, and refuses to identify Jean's father. Nobody seems convinced that the killer could be anyone but Bailey.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&quot;I&quot;_Is_for_Innocent"title="&quot;I&quot; Is for Innocent">
After being unceremoniously fired by California Fidelity Insurance, Kinsey has found herself new office space with her attorney, Lonnie Kingman. Lonnie has a case with which he wants Kinsey's help. Six years earlier, David Barney was acquitted of killing his estranged wife, talented but insecure society house-designer Isabelle Barney, by shooting her dead through the spy hole of her front door. David's desperation to rebuild the marriage after the split netted him an injunction for harassment; so he was the obvious suspect—particularly since he inherited Isabelle's multimillion-dollar business—but the prosecution could not make it stick. Now Isabelle's previous husband, Kenneth Voigt, is trying again in the civil courts in an attempt to secure the fortune for his and Isabelle's daughter Shelby; and Lonnie needs some evidence. The previous PI on the case, Morley Shine, has just died of a heart attack. Lonnie asks Kinsey to step in.Kinsey agrees and, knowing Morley of old, is surprised to find his files in a mess, with crucial witness statements missing. One new witness has come forward: Curtis MacIntyre, a habitual jailbird who shared a cell with Barney for a night and claims that Barney confessed to his guilt just after the acquittal. Kinsey is very doubtful of this story, especially when she finds out Curtis was in custody on another matter on the date in question. In trying to fill in the other blanks, she uncovers more evidence in Barney's favor than against him, not least that Barney appears to have a cast-iron alibi; he was the victim of a hit and run whilst out jogging at the time of the murder some miles away. Kinsey tracks down both the driver—Tippy, the daughter of Isabelle's best friend Rhe Parsons—and a witness who can swear that she knocked down Barney.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&quot;J&quot;_Is_for_Judgment"title="&quot;J&quot; Is for Judgment">
Kinsey Millhone's former employer, California Fidelity Insurance, hires her to investigate the alleged reappearance of Ponzi schemer Wendell Jaffe. Jaffe was assumed to have died five years previously when his boat, the "Captain Stanley Lord", was found drifting off the Baja coast. He left behind a suicide note, a number of angry investors, and a family: a wife, Dana, along with sons Michael and Brian. With no body to prove death, CFI made Dana wait the full statutory five years to presume death before paying out on Jaffe's half-million insurance claim. She has been making ends meet by working as a wedding planner. Michael, now 22, has coped reasonably well with suddenly being the man of the house and is a new husband and father himself. Eighteen-year-old Brian, on the other hand, is currently residing in juvenile hall. Two months after the insurance payout, a former CFI employee has spotted a man he is convinced is Jaffe in Viento Negro, Mexico. In Mexico, Kinsey finds Jaffe is now known as Dean DeWitt Huff. Huff/Jaffe is traveling with a woman named Renata Huff, who has a residence on the quay in Perdido, near Santa Teresa, as well as a boat of her own. Before Kinsey can prove his identity, they vanish. That same day, Brian is arrested in the middle of a botched escape attempt, but is just as suddenly released on a technicality. Kinsey is convinced Jaffe arranged Brian's escape and is heading back to California to reconnect with his son.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&quot;K&quot;_Is_for_Killer"title="&quot;K&quot; Is for Killer">
Kinsey Millhone receives a visit from Janice Kepler whose beautiful but reclusive daughter, Lorna Kepler, died 10 months ago of an apparent allergic reaction. Someone has just sent Janice a tape of a pornographic movie Lorna made before her death, and Janice, who has never believed the official story of Lorna's death, wants Kinsey to find out the truth. Janice's husband, Mace, and her two surviving daughters, Berlyn and Trinny, seem less keen on the investigation.With some help from Officer Cheney Phillips, Kinsey learns that Lorna, who was a receptionist at the water treatment plant by day, had accumulated a modest fortune as a high class prostitute by night. Kinsey finds herself abandoning her usual daytime routine in order to explore Lorna's world. Lorna's body was found by Serena Bonney, night-shift nurse and estranged wife of Lorna's boss at the water treatment plant, Roger Bonney. Serena's father, Clark Esselmann, is a powerful business tycoon and member of the local water board. Phillips introduces Kinsey to Danielle, a teenage colleague of Lorna's in her night-time occupation, who obliges Kinsey by giving her a badly needed haircut.Kinsey has a terrifying Mafia-style encounter with a man describing himself as an attorney for a Los Angeles man to whom Lorna was engaged. He asks Kinsey to keep him abreast of any developments in the case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&quot;L&quot;_Is_for_Lawless"title="&quot;L&quot; Is for Lawless">
Kinsey is asked by her landlord Henry Pitts to help out Bucky, the grandson of their recently deceased neighbor Johnny Lee. Bucky is trying to ensure his grandfather has a military burial. Ray Rawson and Gilbert Hays, old acquaintances of Johnny Lee, turn up unexpectedly and are interested in the meager contents of Johnny's garage apartment. The two are at cross-purposes, seeking the proceeds of a bank robbery they committed together with Johnny forty years ago. Gilbert, a violent psychopath, pursues Ray, Kinsey and Laura Huckaby (Ray's daughter and Gilbert's common-law wife) from Santa Teresa to Dallas, TX to Louisville, KY, in search of the money buried in a secret location by Johnny before his death. Catching up with them in Louisville, Gilbert takes Laura hostage to force Ray and Kinsey to piece together Johnny's clues and find the stash. Gilbert, intending to double-cross Ray after it is found, finds himself double-crossed by Ray, who had surreptitiously disabled his firearm. Shooting Gilbert dead to avenge all the deaths he is responsible for, including their associates from the heist, Ray escapes into hiding with Laura after she knocks Kinsey unconscious to keep her from following them.A subplot concerns Kinsey's cousin Tasha reaching out to her in the hope of having a family reunion at Thanksgiving. Kinsey initially rebuffs her, but decides to ask her for assistance at the end of the book, when she is stuck in Louisville with no funds and no means of returning to Santa Teresa.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&quot;M&quot;_Is_for_Malice"title="&quot;M&quot; Is for Malice">
In January 1986, Tasha Howard hires her cousin Kinsey Millhone to find an heir of the wealthy Malek family. When patriarch Bader Malek died, everyone assumed his $40 million estate would be split between his sons: Donovan, who runs the Malek construction empire; Bennet, a would-be entrepreneur; and Jack, a playboy. However, the will also names the supposedly disinherited second son Guy, the black sheep of the family who left home 18 years ago and whom the family has not seen or heard from since. His unlikeable brothers do not want him back in their lives, nor do they want his taking a cut of the inherited millions. Kinsey sympathizes with the story of Guy's exile from his family, as she struggles to deal with her own family troubles.With illicit help from Darcy Pascoe, a friend at California Fidelity Insurance, Kinsey tracks Guy to the small town of Marcella near Santa Teresa. After being rescued by local pastor Peter Antle and his wife Winnie, Guy has become a devout Christian and turned his life around. Kinsey finds him the nicest of the Malek brothers. Despite Kinsey's warnings, Guy agrees to return to his childhood home. Ugly family scenes ensue. Kinsey's worst fears for Guy are exceeded when he is found brutally bludgeoned to death at the family home. Feeling guilty for his death, Kinsey tries to find his killer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&quot;N&quot;_Is_for_Noose"title="&quot;N&quot; Is for Noose">
The story takes place mainly in the small-town mountain community of Nota Lake, California (population 2,356, elevation 4,312), where Kinsey has inherited a client named Selma Newquist from her periodic boyfriend Robert Dietz. He is temporarily out of action back home in Carson City, where Kinsey has been taking care of him following knee surgery. Selma's brief is vague: she fears her husband Tom, a sheriff's officer who died of a heart attack a few weeks before, had something on his mind at the time of his death; and she wants Kinsey to find out what it was.With very little to go on, Kinsey finds the residents of the insular community are not forthcoming. She finds Tom was held in high respect, while reactions to Selma range from tolerance for Tom's sake to downright dislike. Tom's colleagues in the sheriff's department, including Tom's partner Rafer LaMott and brother Macon Newquist, close ranks around his memory, though their respective wives, as well as Selma's 25-year-old son by her first marriage, Brant, are slightly more friendly and helpful to Millhone, as is CHP officer James Tennyson, who found Tom's body. A frustrating search of Tom's home office reveals nothing more than some doodling and a list of phone numbers; but it seems someone is worried about what Kinsey might find when she is first threatened by a masked driver, then attacked in her temporary accommodation, the dismal Nota Lake Cabins run by Tom's elder sister Cecilia Boden.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&quot;O&quot;_Is_for_Outlaw"title="&quot;O&quot; Is for Outlaw">
Kinsey's curiosity is roused when she receives a call from a man who has bought some of her possessions at an auction of defaulted storage locker items. She recognizes the box as stuff which she left in the possession of her former husband, Michael Magruder – whom she met and married during her time on the Santa Teresa Police Force at the age of 21. She walked out after eight months in 1972. Mickey had asked her to give him a false alibi when he was accused of violence against a recently returned Vietnam veteran Benny Quintero, who later died. Kinsey refused to lie, assuming his guilt, and left him.As well as high school and police academy memories, she finds in the box a letter written to her 14 years before, shortly after she left Mickey, which never reached her. It is from Dixie Hightower, barmaid at an old haunt from that era called the Honky-Tonk, saying that Mickey was with her the night he was accused of killing Benny. While shocked to find out her husband was cheating, Kinsey realises she did Mickey an injustice thinking he killed Benny and sets out to find out what has happened to him. The trail leads her to Shack, a former colleague of Mickey's, and to Tim Litenberg, the son of another colleague, who is running the Honky-Tonk, as well as to Dixie herself, living in new-found luxury with her Vietnam vet husband Eric. Kinsey finds out Mickey had been frequenting the Honky-Tonk and is suspicious of his motives, sensing that he had uncovered some sort of illegal activity. She also contacts Mark Bethel, Mickey's lawyer on the Quintero manslaughter charge, another veteran now running for political office.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&quot;P&quot;_Is_for_Peril"title="&quot;P&quot; Is for Peril">
Kinsey Millhone is hired by Fiona, the first wife of Dr. Dowan Purcell, to move along the stalled investigation by police of his disappearance. He disappeared nine weeks earlier, on September 12, 1986. The first wife is more concerned than present wife Crystal. Fiona, embittered by the breakdown of her marriage, is convinced that Dow has engineered his own disappearance, as she alleges Crystal is having an affair and admits that Dow has gone missing a couple of times before. In support of this, his passport and thirty thousand dollars seem to be missing. In contrast, Crystal, a former stripper Dow met on a trip to Las Vegas, is convinced he is dead. Not impressed either with Fiona's haughty personality or the chances of turning up something on a cold trail, Kinsey accepts the case with misgivings.She soon finds evidence that there has been fraudulent Medicare/Medicaid activity at Pacific Meadows, the care home at which Purcell worked as medical director following his retirement from general practice. Opinions vary amongst his former colleagues and associates as to whether Purcell could have been responsible, whether deliberately or through administrative incompetence; but since he is missing, he is certainly a convenient scapegoat for any blame that might be assigned by the ongoing official investigation. Kinsey meets an old acquaintance in the form of Dana Glazer, formerly Dana Jaffe, now married to wealthy businessman Joel Glazer, co-director of the management company that owns Pacific Meadows. By coincidence, Kinsey's landlord Henry adds to the evidence of fraud when sorting through the finances of Rosie's recently deceased sister, Klotilde, who had stayed at Pacific Meadows. Kinsey struggles to work out whether Dow did a runner with some illegal gains, killed himself having realized he was going to be implicated, or was entirely innocent but murdered by the real perpetrator of the fraud.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&quot;Q&quot;_Is_for_Quarry"title="&quot;Q&quot; Is for Quarry">
While moving into her new office, Kinsey Millhone receives a visit from Lt. Con Dolan of the Santa Teresa Sheriff’s Department. Dolan comes bearing bad news: retired STSD Detective Stacey Oliphant is dying of cancer. Oliphant is haunted by a cold case from 1969, a murder investigation wherein he and Dolan discovered the body of a teenage Jane Doe in a quarry outside Lompoc. Dolan suggests the three of them work together to solve the case in order to give Oliphant some peace of mind in his final days.After Kinsey pursues a couple of false leads, Dolan and Oliphant suggest focusing their investigation on a career criminal named Frankie Miracle, who was arrested in Lompoc within days of the Doe murder for killing his girlfriend. They have always believed Miracle killed Doe, but were never able to prove it. Miracle’s former cellmate Cedric “Pudgie” Clifton confirms that Miracle claimed to have killed a second woman in circumstances which match the Doe murder. The recently paroled Miracle denies any knowledge of the Doe crime and flatly refuses to cooperate.STSD Sgt. Detective Joe Mandel discovers that a red Ford Mustang mentioned in the original report as possibly belonging to the killer was stolen from an auto upholsterer in Quorum, a small town near the Arizona border and suspiciously close to Miracle’s own hometown. The car was recovered and sold to the owner of the shop, Ruel MacPhee, who has kept it ever since. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&quot;R&quot;_Is_for_Ricochet"title="&quot;R&quot; Is for Ricochet">
Kinsey Millhone agrees to escort Reba, the daughter of Nord Lafferty, out of prison to the Lafferty mansion and watch over Reba until she is settled into her life out of prison. Reba was serving a sentence for embezzlement, though she had not embezzled funds; her boss had spent the funds on bribing municipal officials for the construction of a shopping mall with office space in the center of Santa Teresa. Lieutenant Cheney Phillips encounters Kinsey at the office of the probation officer for Reba Lafferty, as he is the local investigator in a multi-agency operation to arrest Reba's boss, Alan Beckwith. Several federal agencies are pursuing him for laundering funds for a Colombian drug dealer.Reba pled guilty because she was in love with Beckwith, a married man. While Reba was in prison, Beckwith slept with her replacement in the office. Kinsey has known Cheney for a couple of years; now, she is smitten with him. For this arrest, he and the whole team of investigators want Reba to provide evidence of the money laundering, an inside witness for their case. They decide that Kinsey, now building rapport with Reba, should ask her to take this on. Unwillingly, Kinsey does so.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_at_the_Well_of_Souls"title="Twilight at the Well of Souls">
The plot of "Twilight at the Well of Souls" is a direct continuation of the plot of "The Return of Nathan Brazil". As that novel concludes, guards at the South Zone of the Well World have killed Nathan Brazil.Or have they? As "Twilight at the Well of Souls" opens, it turns out that Brazil is not killed so easily. Yet another being carrying Brazil's appearance is shot down by the guards, and the leader of Zone, Serge Ortega, is informed that the latest victim is the 27th of the current day. Ortega reveals that he has deduced that Brazil had actually entered several weeks before, even arriving prior to his companions Mavra Chang, Marquoz, and Yua (all of whom had been led to believe that Brazil had not yet journeyed to the Well World).Marquoz has been busy in his short time on the Well World. After awakening as an armored war-lizard in Hakazit, he immediately insinuates himself into the local government. He learns that the government is a sort of dictatorship, but one in which anyone who assassinates the current leader is elevated to that position themself. Marquoz does not wish to take overall leadership, but he does assassinate and supplant the head of the secret police. He leverages this position and the Hakazit lust for war and combat to raise an army to fight on Brazil's behalf.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&quot;S&quot;_Is_for_Silence"title="&quot;S&quot; Is for Silence">
In 1953, Violet Sullivan vanishes after going out for a Fourth of July party in the small town of Serena Station, California. The exact reason for her disappearance is unknown, but rumors abound that she ran off with a lover or was murdered by her jealous husband. 34 years later, Kinsey Millhone is hired by her daughter Daisy to help seek closure and try to find some explanation for Violet's disappearance. After interviewing close acquaintances, as suggested by Daisy, Kinsey's biggest clue comes from Winston, who worked at the dealership where Violet bought her Bel Air, which also disappeared. Winston admits to originally hiding the fact that he saw the Bel Air abandoned on an offbeat road. While visiting with Daisy's friend Tannie, whose property overlooks the road, Kinsey spots an oblong depression in the soil and correctly theorizes that the car, along with Violet, is buried beneath. The curtain Violet is wrapped in initially implicates her husband Foley, as he ripped them off the window during a fight the couple had the previous day. However, Kinsey is able to confirm that he could not have spent the 24 hours digging the hole as he was in prison for public drunkenness the previous night and assisted the local sergeant with a woodworking project upon being released the next day. On a final hunch, Kinsey tracks down the breeder of Violet's dog and finds the name of the killer, Tom Padgett, who gave her the dog to try to subdue her for a loan to start up his heavy equipment business. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&quot;T&quot;_Is_for_Trespass"title="&quot;T&quot; Is for Trespass">
Kinsey's cantankerous neighbor Gus is badly injured in a fall and hires Solana Rojas, a private nurse, to help him while he recuperates. Kinsey becomes suspicious when Gus becomes isolated and withdrawn. She finds out that Solana is a con artist who engages in identity theft. What Kinsey does not know is that Solana is a dangerous sociopath with an accomplice and a history of clients who died under her care. Kinsey works with other neighbors and friends to rescue Gus and expose the con-artist without rousing her suspicions.At the same time, Kinsey investigates a case of possible insurance fraud involving a student who drove into another car. The female passenger in the other car had extensive injuries and she and her husband are suing the student and the insurance company. Kinsey must track down a reluctant witness and use her rather rough charm to get him to come forward.Unlike previous books in this series, this book alternates between two perspectives: that of Kinsey and that of Solana.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Light_(novel)"title="Blue Light (novel)">
In 1965, a mysterious beam of blue light came down from space and overlooked Northern California. This light had extraterrestrial powers that caused whomever the beam touched to die, go mad, or acquire a special unique power. This power is defined as full actualization of humankind, with strengths, understandings and communication abilities that exceed our normal capabilities. The people touched by the light in the novel were soon referred to as "Blues" and were segregated from society because of their new and improved super human powers. Soon after this discovery, they came together to try to find their purpose in the universe. As they look for their calling in life, an evil force, the "Gray Man", emerges, setting the stage for a battle later on in the novel between good and evil. The Gray Man is Horace LaFontaine, a character in the novel who was struck by the light at the moment of his death. He was revivified as a demon sent to kill all of the "blues". Once the "blues" discover this nemesis, they take refuge in the forest outside of Northern California. Soon, the Gray Man finds out where they are hiding from inside sources and the "blues" come to a consensus in which they are going to confront their enemy and declare war with the Gray Man. This epic battle takes place at the ending of the novel and has an extraordinary finish. The "blues" all use their powers that they were given to destroy the Gray Man. They soon reside in the small cities of Northern California and live normal lives with the people of California.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrenaline_(novel)"title="Adrenaline (novel)">
A native Californian, his work is set almost entirely in Southern California, and the book is about two "lusty" gay lovers from Los Angeles named Nick and Jeff who at the beginning of the novel were having passionate sex when two "wildly homophobic cops" break in on them. They fight back and while trying to defend themselves, they take one cop as hostage. A SWAT team shows up and accidentally kills the cop hostage and blames the two lovers. After that incident the two are on the run from the authorities throughout Los Angeles on the way to Mexico.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacehounds_of_IPC"title="Spacehounds of IPC">
The Inter-Planetary Corporation's (IPC) space-liner, "IPV Arcturus", takes off on a routine flight to Mars. Brilliant physicist Dr. Percival (“Steve”) Stevens is aboard to validate the work of the ship's pilots in response to reports by the Check Stations of errors in the ship's flight positions. To his relief, he confirms that the pilots are right, and it was the Check Stations that were out of position, not the ships.Before the "Arcturus" can reach Mars it is attacked and literally cut into pieces by a small, mysterious, globe-shaped spaceship. The attacking spaceship begins towing the pieces toward Jupiter. Stevens and a female passenger named Nadia Newton end up stranded in a large, wedge-shaped piece of the dismembered ship. They work to repair as much equipment as they can, gathering needed material from other pieces of the ship floating nearby, and start calling the piece they are in the "Forlorn Hope". As they approach Jupiter, Stevens eases the "Forlorn Hope" out of the pack and manages a hard landing on Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter.With the remains of the "Forlorn Hope," Steve has everything he needs to construct an ultra-radio set capable of reaching the inner worlds and calling for help. But the landing discharged the accumulators, and with no power, they must be recharged before anything else can be done. While Steve uses the ship for raw materials to build a hydro-electric power plant and a power beaming station to recharge the accumulators, Nadia explores the area around where they landed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoid_Park_(novel)"title="Paranoid Park (novel)">
A 16-year-old skateboarder who tries to fit in with the skater crowd accidentally kills a security guard while trying to board a train. Much of the plot concerns the character struggling to cope with what he has done while also trying to avoid being caught. The author has said that the book is a retelling of "Crime and Punishment" in a young adult fiction setting. The novel takes place in Portland, Oregon, United States.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Call_Me_Ishmael"title="Don't Call Me Ishmael">
His Year Nine teacher, Miss Tarango, tells the whole class about the name Ishmael coming from "Moby-Dick", which gives Barry and his friends more names to tease Ishmael with. Ishmael later intervenes when he sees Barry and his friends tease a boy who joins Ishmael's year level. A new boy called James Scobie becomes a target for bullying because of his appearance. However, James responds to the bully's taunts with humour. He tells the class that he is fearless because he had a brain tumour that damaged thepart of his brain that feels fear. Barry is the only person that does not believe James. About a week later, Barry puts a lot of insects and spiders in James's desk, but James is not frightened. During a rugby match against Churchill, James's fearlessness changes the course of the game with a speech that invokes courage.Ishmael, Scobie, a hilarious, outgoing and independent boy called Orazio Zorzotto, an overweight, sci-fi geek called Bill Kingsley and a very smart nerd Ignatius Prindabel participate in debating. Ishmael only joins because he feels sorry for James (and because James promises to not make him speak onstage). However, Ishmael is forced to debate due to Bill being sick and then later because James has a checkup about his brain tumour. The team does not win, missing out by just one point, however they are still incredibly happy to have gone that far. Barry and his friends mock Bill about his weight by destroying his debating certificate, angering Ishmael as well. Kelly Faulkner, a girl Ishmael starts to fall in love with (for a fair reason) at the debating workshop, thanks Ishmael because she is the sister of the Year Four boy that Ishmael helped to "save" from Barry. On the last day of school at the 'end-of-year extravaganza thingy', Ishmael invents a prayer that will humiliate Barry. However, he eventually decides not to say his prayer, because he does not want to humiliate Barry's innocent parents, ruin the ceremony for the people who worked to make it or become the person Barry was. Ishmael then receives a letter from Kelly. He runs out on to the school's oval, completely ecstatic and bursting with happiness, and reads the letter, which says that she has invited him to her friend's party. He finally realizes that his life is not as bad as he once have believed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forbidden_Garden_(novel)"title="The Forbidden Garden (novel)">
The novel concerns the search for soil from a remote part of Asia for the cultivation of weird flowers that can destroy humanity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untamed_(Cast_novel)"title="Untamed (Cast novel)">
Zoey is hiding in the stables with her horse, Persephone. After an internal debate she finally decides to talk with her friends. On the way to the cafeteria she feels the presence of Darkness and rushes inside. She tries to blend in and act normally but her friends ignore her and the situation degenerates with the appearance of a newly re-Marked Aphrodite, who chooses to sit with the 'nerd herd'. A confrontation is postponed by the arrival of new fledgling and famous archer James Stark.After lunch, Zoey meets Aphrodite and Stevie Rae in her room. She finds out that Stevie Rae is mostly normal now and the only differences she experiences is an intense aversion to sunlight, and that Aphrodite's Mark is fake – she has mostly reverted to a human teenager, except for her visions. Zoey casts the circle and asks for guidance. Nyx appears to tell them that she still loves Aphrodite, that she was only safekeeping the Earth affinity for Stevie Rae, and that she reverted to human because her own humanity was too strong.After the goddess' disappearance, they rush to a Council meeting. They find out that the Priestess of all vampyres, Shekinah, has come to the House of Night to reject Neferet's declaration of war on humans. She follows Zoey's advice to put Detective Marx on the case instead. Erik Night returns to the school and takes over Professor Nolan's drama class, much to Zoey's dismay. On her way back Zoey meets Stark and watches him practice. He confesses to her that he has a gift for archery – that he never misses a target – and it was discovered when he killed his mentor by mistake. Because he fears his power, he asks Zoey to use her powers to protect the others from him. Quickly after he confesses his gift, he starts to cough up blood. While he is dying, Zoey tells him about Stevie Rae and how he can come back to life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Seed_(novel)"title="Wild Seed (novel)">
"Wild Seed" is the story of two immortal Africans named Doro and Anyanwu. Doro is a spirit who can inhabit other people's bodies, killing anyone and anything in his path, while Anyanwu is a woman with healing powers who can transform herself into any human or animal. When they meet, Doro senses Anyanwu's abilities and wants to add her to one of his seed villages in the New World, where he breeds super humans. Doro convinces Anyanwu to travel with him to America by telling her he will give her children she will never have to watch die. Although Doro plans to impregnate her himself, he also wants to share her with his son Isaac. Isaac has very strong telekinetic powers and is one of Doro's most successful seeds. By partnering Anyanwu and Isaac together, Doro hopes to obtain children with very special abilities.Doro discovers that when Anyanwu transforms into an animal, he cannot sense or kill her. Feeling threatened by her shape-shifting ability, he wonders whether he holds enough control over her. Anyanwu witnesses Doro's barbaric ways and plain disregard for his people, which frightens her. When they arrive at the seed village, Doro tells Anyanwu that she is to marry Isaac, and bear his children and the children of whomever else Doro chooses. Anyanwu eventually agrees once Isaac convinces her that she could be the only one to get through to Doro.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Ptath"title="The Book of Ptath">
Ptath is a god from Earth's far future when the landmasses have rejoined to form a single super-continent, now called Gonwonlane. Ptath ruled this planetary nation with his two goddess-wives; all of them having divine powers, his fueled by the prayers of women, the goddesses's from Ptath himself.Before the start of the novel, Ptath had chosen to journey back in time and incarnate as a series of mortals from Earth's history. While he is absent, one of his goddess-wives tries to usurp his power by imprisoning the other goddess-wife and forbidding women from praying, thus removing Ptath from his power source while keeping her own. She contrives to bring Ptath back to Gonwonlane before the completion of his journey, without his powers, and kill him. But he returns to Gonwonlane in his immortal body but with the mind of his most recent incarnation - a just deceased 20th century tank commander.From Ptath's point of view, he was killed in his tank and then immediately woke up (naked, walking down a road) in the far future.The story follows Ptath as he rescues his other wife, learns about his immortal body, mental powers, and makes war against his evil wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplanetary_(novel)"title="Triplanetary (novel)">
## Background."Triplanetary" is a prologue to the Lensman series. It consists of two parts. The first explains the series background, which consists of a conflict between the evil Eddorians and the benevolent Arisians. This conflict is carried out throughout the history of an oblivious humankind on Earth. The Arisians undertake a eugenics project to breed two human genetic lines that are intended to become the ultimate weapon in Arisia's cosmic war with Eddore.The author takes five defining chapters to cover the background of the Kinnison line: the destruction of Atlantis in a nuclear war, an attempted coup in Rome against the Eddorian-controlled Nero, the First and Second World Wars, and, finally, a nuclear Third World War. In each of these periods he tells part of the story of the two families who will be of importance later on, and who will produce the two people whose children will be the culmination of the human breeding line, Kimball Kinnison and Clarissa MacDougall. One genetic line is surnamed "Kinnison" or some close variation. The other line is distinguished by having "red-bronze-auburn hair" and unusually colored "gold-flecked, tawny eyes".The final part of the book, which was originally published as a magazine story, takes up the tale after civilization has been rebuilt with the covert help of the Arisians. Humanity has explored the Solar System and formed the Triplanetary League, which consists of an alliance of Earth with the governments of Mars and Venus. Prior to the start of the main story, humans have set up in-system colonies and fought the first interplanetary war against the Adepts of North Polar Jupiter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinister_Barrier"title="Sinister Barrier">
"Swift death awaits the first cow that leads a revolt against milking," wrote Swedish Professor Peder Bjornsen just before he died of a heart attack in May 2015. Bill Graham, investigating the deaths of two scientists his agency has funded, discovers that over a dozen scientists who knew each other have died recently, either by heart attack or by suicide, after appearing to go insane. With the aid of police lieutenant Art Wohl, Graham searches out other scientists who knew the men in the group and finds that they are dying as well. He finally meets a scientist who explains what’s been happening.Professor Bjornsen had discovered a means of extending human vision into the far infrared and he discovered that the world is occupied by meter-wide spheres that appear pale blue in his new vision. The spheres, which he called Vitons, are sentient and mildly telepathic (they can read people’s minds if they get close enough); they also feed on the electrochemical energy of human emotions. If a Viton sucks too hard on a human nervous system, it causes a fatal heart attack, which is how the Vitons have been killing the scientists, in order to prevent Humanity from learning of their existence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexter_by_Design"title="Dexter by Design">
After the events of the previous book, Dexter Morgan is eager to resume his hobby of stalking violent criminals, but first, he must endure a honeymoon in Paris with his unsuspecting wife, Rita. At an art gallery, the couple view an avant-garde performance piece in which the artist amputates her own limb. Upon returning home, Dexter finds that his relationship with his sister, Deborah, has become strained since she learned of his murderous pastime. Deborah, now a sergeant in the Miami-Dade Police Department's homicide unit, is torn between loyalty to Dexter and her duty as a police officer to arrest him.Dexter is called to investigate a gruesome tableau on a local beach, where a pair of bodies have been mutilated and arranged in a display that parodies the state's tourist trade. At home, Rita is concerned for her children, Cody and Astor, who appear withdrawn and different from normal children. Dexter knows that they share his pathology and has promised to train them to kill those who deserve it, as his adoptive father, Harry, trained him. Cody is enrolled as a Cub Scout, which Rita believes will help him to bond with normal children. Dexter believes that it will help him learn how to "pretend" to be normal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alchemaster's_Apprentice"title="The Alchemaster's Apprentice">
The novel takes place in Malaisea, the "least healthy place in Zamonia". The city is dominated by the Alchemaster of the title, Ghoolion, who lives in a building which towers over the town and who combines a range of activities: alchemy; controlling the city's Ugglies (roughly equivalent to witches); spreading disease among the city's inhabitants; and painting pictures of natural disasters.The novel's other main character is Echo, a Crat (an animal identical to a cat except that it can speak all languages and has two livers). On the death of his owner, Echo faces starvation until he makes a deal with the Alchemaster: the latter will fatten the Crat for a month, in return for which he will then be permitted to kill Echo and extract his fat. Ghoolion intends to use the fat for various alchemistic purposes, but in particular as the final ingredient which he needs to secure the secret of eternal life: it turns out that Echo's deceased owner had been the long-lost lover of Ghoolion, who intends to bring her back to life.Echo attempts to escape from his pact, enlisting the help of a Tuwituwu (a one-eyed species of owl) by the name of Theodore T. Theodore, and the last Uggly in Malaisea, Izanuela, who is in love with Ghoolion. Echo and Izanuela plan to use a love potion to make Ghoolion return the Uggly's love. The plan fails, and Izanuela is killed, but in revenge the living houses of the Uggly destroy Ghoolion's castle. Echo is saved and sets off in search of his own love with a female Crat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylark_of_Valeron"title="Skylark of Valeron">
The story continued from the last scenes of battle in "Skylark Three".Having pursued and destroyed the fleeing Fenachrone colony spaceship, The Skylarkers decided to explore the galaxy seen up ahead, to take the opportunity offered by the great velocity resulted from the chase and the distance they had traveled. Along the way, Seaton discovered thought is a phenomenon of the "sixth order", and developed the technologies in relation with it.Meanwhile, DuQuesne's ruse faking death (see Skylark Three) fooled all the Fenachronians, the Skylarkers and the Norlaminians. He successfully deceived the Norlaminians into giving him everything the Norlaminians had given Seaton, eluded their watchful eyes, returned to Earth and quickly become the complete master of it by the super-technologies he now possessed.At the other corner of the universe, Seaton was experimenting with his thought-sixth order projector. He attracted the attention of the Disembodied Intellectuals (in "The Skylark of Space"). The leader of the Disembodied Intellectuals, "One", wanted to appropriate Seaton's mind for his "experiments". Seaton naturally refused. This situation escalated into a fight. The Uranium metal store of the Skylark Three - used for powering offense and defense - was no match for the inexhaustible cosmic energy at the command of the Disembodied Intellectuals. Running out of power and having no other choice, Seaton decided to try the heretofore one-way trip: a rotation into the "Fourth Dimension" in the small Skylark Two.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Between"title="The Between">
A middle-class African American couple's life is shattered when the wife begins receiving death threats. The husband begins to experience an alternative reality so real he has trouble grasping which is real. His psychiatrist diagnosis him as a latent schizophrenic. The family must decide if its schizophrenia, are the dreams a cosmic death threat or has the husband become unstuck from this reality and become stuck between worlds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_House_(novel)"title="The Good House (novel)">
The home that belonged to Angela Toussaint's late grandmother is so beloved that townspeople in Sacajawea, Washington, call it the Good House. But that all changes one summer when an unexpected tragedy takes place behind its closed doors...and the Toussaint's family history -- and future -- is dramatically transformed. Angela has not returned to the Good House since her son, Corey, died there two years ago. But now, Angela is finally ready to return to her hometown and go beyond the grave to unearth the truth about Corey's death. Could it be related to a terrifying entity Angela's grandmother battled seven decades ago? And what about the other senseless calamities that Sacajawea has seen in recent years? Has Angela's grandmother, an African American woman reputed to have "powers," put a curse on the entire community?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Out_of_Time"title="Seven Out of Time">
The novel is written as a first-person narrative, the narrator being a young attorney from New York named John March. While investigating the disappearance of Evelyn Rand, a young heiress, March is transported across time and space. He finds himself on a strange world which is inhabited by bizarre tentacled creatures who claim to be the descendants of the human race. There he finds Evelyn Rand, abducted as he was, and the two fall in love.Also present are many historical people who disappeared mysteriously, including the poet François Villon, King Arthur, the lost Dauphin, John Orth of Austria, and the Prophet Elijah. The seven band together to confront their captors, demanding to know why they are there. Two chapters are devoted to an exposition of the history of the human race in evolutionary terms. Despite their technological prowess, the "future men" have lost certain human qualities – including love, loyalty and faith – which they now believe vital to their survival. They will stop at nothing to wrest these "secrets" from their abductees. Horrified by their inhumanity and ruthlessness, the seven vow to stop them at any cost.As the creatures suffer an attack by mindless monsters which they themselves created, John March and Evelyn Rand are transported back to 20th-century America. March decides to publish a record of their experiences in the hope of changing the direction of human civilization.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coming_of_the_King"title="The Coming of the King">
Set in 6th century Europe after Arthur's death, the novel retells part of Merlin's life using the Black Book of Carmarthen, Robert de Boron, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and other sources. Elements of the childhood of Taliesin are also used. The novel covers Merlin's life from infancy to adulthood as well as British and Saxon conflicts, climaxing with a battle at Dineirth in Wales.Historical and legendary figures appearing in the novel include Cynric of Wessex, Maelgun Gwynedd, Beowulf and Taliesin himself. Merlin serves as mentor to Maelgun instead of Arthur as popularized by Thomas Malory and others. The novel also features mythological figures like the gods Woden and Lir as characters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Halifax,_Gentleman"title="John Halifax, Gentleman">
The action is centred on the town of Tewkesbury, scarcely disguised by the fictional name Norton Bury, in Gloucestershire. The story is narrated by Phineas, a friend of the central character. John Halifax is an orphan, determined to make his way in the world through honest hard work. He is taken in by a tanner, Abel Fletcher, who is a Quaker, and thus meets Phineas, who is Abel's son. John eventually achieves success in business and love, and becomes a wealthy man.A photographic postcard, probably from the early 20th century, depicts Dunkirk Mills, Inchbrook, near Nailsworth and Stroud, Gloucestershire, stating it was the "original Mills of 'John Halifax Gentleman'".A discussion on a Stroud Fakebook ["sic"] page suggests that Enderley and the cottage were modelled on an area near Avening.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lush_Life_(novel)"title="Lush Life (novel)">
The book is set in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and begins with a crime that at first seems straightforward, but quickly expands into a thicket of complications. On the way home from a night of drinking, three men—cafe manager Eric Cash, bartender Ike Marcus, and a friend of Marcus'—are accosted by two muggers. Marcus is shot and killed, in a manner echoing the real-life murder of Nicole duFresne. NYPD Detective Matty Clark winds up investigating the crime, and keeping an eye on Ike's distraught father Billy, whose behavior becomes increasingly erratic. Cash is initially arrested for the crime, but later released when the accounts of other witnesses back up his own; his own behavior is affected as he has difficulty coping with the memory of the incident and the stresses of the police interrogation. Interwoven with the main plot are vignettes of the Lower East Side and the waves of immigrants that have come through there and lived in its tenements over the years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scenes_of_Clerical_Life"title="Scenes of Clerical Life">
## "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton".The titular character is the new curate of the parish church of Shepperton, a village near Milby. A pious man, but "sadly unsuited to the practice of his profession", Barton attempts to ensure that his congregation remains firmly within the care of the Church of England. His stipend is inadequate, and he relies on the hard work of Milly, his wife, to help keep the family. Barton is new to the village and subscribes to unpopular religious ideas; not all of the congregation accept him, but he feels that it is especially important to imbue them with what he sees as orthodox Christian views.Barton and Milly become acquainted with Countess Caroline Czerlaski. When the Countess' brother, with whom she lives, gets engaged to be married to her maid, she leaves home in protest. Barton and his wife accept the Countess into their home, much to the disapproval of the congregation, who assume her to be his mistress. The Countess becomes a burden on the already stretched family, accepting their hospitality and contributing little herself. With Milly pregnant and ill, the children's nurse convinces the Countess to leave.Milly dies following the premature birth of her baby (who also dies) and Barton is plunged into sadness at the loss. Barton's parishioners, who were so unsympathetic to him as their minister, support him and his family in their grief: "There were men and women standing in that churchyard who had bandied vulgar jests about their pastor, and who had lightly charged him with sin, but now, when they saw him following the coffin, pale and haggard, he was consecrated anew by his great sorrow, and they looked at him with respectful pity". Just as Barton is beginning to come to terms with Milly's death, he gets more bad news: the vicar, Mr. Carpe, will be taking over at Shepperton church. Barton is given six-months notice to leave. He has no choice but to comply, but is disheartened, having at last won the sympathies of the parishioners. Barton believes that the request was unfair, knowing that the vicar's brother-in-law is in search of a new parish in which to work. However, he resigns himself to the move and at length obtains a living in a distant manufacturing town.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ravenous"title="The Ravenous">
"The Ravenous" introduces us to Eddie Spears, a teenager who is into video games and hanging out with his best friend, Jess Brown. Eddie has a problem: he can hear distant whispers and this causes severe headaches. When he discovers the true cause for his town's prosperity: a sacrificial pseudo-Druid cult, Eddie comes to realize he has a special gift—but can he use it in time to save his sister's life?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apex_Hides_the_Hurt"title="Apex Hides the Hurt">
The book is set in the fictional town of Winthrop. The protagonist of the book is an unnamed African-American "nomenclature consultant" who has had recent success in branding and selling Apex bandages, which come in multiple colors to better match a broad array of skin tones. The novel begins with the main character being contacted by his former employer, which he had left after losing a toe. He travels to the town of Winthrop after requests from the town council, which has proposed that the town be renamed. However, three key citizens disagree what the name should be: Albie Winthrop, descendant of the town's namesake (who'd made his fortune in barbed wire); Regina Goode, the mayor (descendant of one of the town's two founders); and Lucky Aberdeen, a software magnate who's leading the drive to rename the town. Winthrop wants to keep the name; Goode wants the town to revert to the name it bore at its founding as a town of free blacks, Freedom; while Aberdeen wants to call it "New Prospera".As the consultant talks with the residents of the town and investigates its history, the backstory of his injury is gradually revealed. After repeatedly stubbing his toe and covering it up with Apex bandages, the consultant accidentally stepped into pig feces during a company team retreat. Because of the colored bandage, he never discovered how his toe was badly infected, and fainted on the sidewalk after fleeing from an awards party. This led to the amputation of his toe, his departure from the nomenclature firm, and the beginning of his hermetic lifestyle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Lensman"title="First Lensman">
"First Lensman" picks up more or less where "Triplanetary" left off. The story follows the doings of the "First Lensman" Virgil Samms. The Arisians know that he is incorruptible, a paragon of bravery and virtue, so they have chosen him to be the first entity to wear the "Lens of Civilization".Samms has a dream. He wants to establish the Galactic Patrol to protect civilization from the forces of evil for which he needs to have a reliable (unfakeable) symbol to identify its members. He is guided by one of his trusted subordinates to Arisia, a previously unapproachable planet, where he is greeted by a benevolent and telepathic Arisian who presents him with a "Lens". The Lens is a device that can only be made by the Arisians and that can be worn only by the person that it is exclusively attuned to. It gives its wearer the ability to communicate telepathically with any being or animal with a mind, as well as other powers. The Lens underlies all the remaining stories in the series. Samms is charged with locating all "Lens worthy" individuals and directing them to Arisia to have their own Lens bestowed upon them.Once he has a cadre of Lensmen available to defend civilization, Samms uses them to begin tracing leads to the major threats to civilization. Corrupt politicians, illegal drugs, and pirates attacking merchant ships in space. To fight the crooked politics all they can do for the moment is gather evidence and hold it until the campaign and elections. The leads to the pirates hit a blank wall and stall (for now). Combating the drug traffickers yields the most success. Breaking the drug smuggling turns out to be the key to getting a handle on all the other threats. As the Lensmen trace the trade in "thionite", a mind-altering drug, from the source to the end user, they find the different leads all coming together, and all leading straight to the corrupt political machine that was then running North America.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garbage_King"title="The Garbage King">
It tells the story of Mamo and Dani. Mamo is from a very poor family where everyone has died except for him and his sister, Tiggist. Mamo goes with a man who claims to be his Uncle Merga but is in fact probably one of his deceased mother's lovers. Before Mamo can realize it, "Merga" takes Mamo far from the city and anything he's ever known and sells him to a farmer as a slave.Dani comes from a rich and privileged family in Addis Ababa. His father, however, wants him to send him away to Jigjiga to make him learn something useful and toughen up. Dani's mother is sick and flew to London, England, to receive better medical care. Dani runs away to escape his father. At the same time, Mamo escapes from the farmer after attempting suicide caused by physical abuse and hitch-hikes back together join a gang of beggar street boys. The members of this gang are using nicknames because they do not know their actual names, or have forgotten them. Their nicknames are Million (The "Joviro" or gangmaster), Shoes, Getachew, Buffalo and Karate. Karate has a bad sickness that usually makes him go into coughing fits. Later on in the book, Karate passes away from his sick
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cometeers"title="The Cometeers">
## "The Cometeers".Young Bob Star—the son of hero John Star and Aladoree Anthar, the Keeper of AKKA—lives in the Purple Hall on Phobos, feeling like a prisoner. Grim news arrives about a "comet" approaching the solar system, a green comet that moves about as if managed by intelligent beings. These presumed aliens are referred to as The Cometeers by the news media.After the Cometeers penetrate the secret archives of The Green Hall and carry out the information that a man named Merrin is alive, the Council of The Green Hall decides to destroy the comet with the secret weapon AKKA. However, Jay Kalam, the commander of the Legion, seeks peaceful contact with the aliens first. The Green Hall rescinds its order to destroy the comet. Kalam draws up a plan to protect the Keeper, safeguard Merrin, and attempt contact with the Cometeers.Merrin is actually Stephen Orco - Bob Star's acquaintance at the Legion Academy. Merrin is in fact a psychopath, but also an extremely brilliant, former Legionnaire who once subjected Bob Star to horrific torture with the help of the Iron Confessor device developed by the "Reds" of Old Earth. Kalam tells Bob that an entrepreneur, Edward Orco, found in space a life-support space capsule with a child inside who Orco adopted under the name Stephen. Stephen Orco, after being graduated from the Academy, was assigned to Callisto. There he created a vortex gun based on the plasma weapons of the Medusae, and raised a revolt against the Green Hall.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Purchase_of_the_North_Pole"title="The Purchase of the North Pole">
In the year of 189–, an international auction is organized to define the sovereign rights to the part of the Arctic extending from the 84th parallel, the highest yet reached by man, to the North Pole. Several countries send their official delegates, but the auction is won by a representative from an anonymous United States buyer.After the auction closes, the mysterious buyer is revealed to be Barbicane and Co., a company founded by Impey Barbicane, J.T. Maston and Captain Nicholl — the same members of the Baltimore Gun Club who, twenty years earlier, had traveled around the Moon inside a large cannon shell. The brave gunmen-astronauts had come out of their retirement with an even more ambitious engineering project: using the recoil of a huge cannon to remove the tilt of the Earth's axis — so that it would become perpendicular to the planet's orbit, like Jupiter's.That change would bring an end to seasons, as day and night would be always equal and each place would have the same climate all year round. The society's interest lay in another effect of the recoil: a displacement of the Earth's rotation axis, that would bring the lands around the North Pole, which they had secured in the auction, to latitude 67 north. Then the vast coal deposits that were conjectured to exist under the ice could be easily mined and sold. The technical feasibility of the plan had been confirmed by J. T. Maston's computations. The necessary capital had been provided by Ms. Evangelina Scorbitt, a wealthy widow and ardent admirer of Maston.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_Patrol_(novel)"title="Galactic Patrol (novel)">
"Galactic Patrol" introduces Kimball Kinnison, who will be the hero of the next three books - "Gray Lensman", "Second Stage Lensmen" and (to a lesser extent) "Children of the Lens". Kinnison and Clarissa MacDougall are the penultimates of the human breeding program the Arisians set up many eons earlier.The book deals with the earliest stages of Kinnison's career, starting with his graduation as a Lensman from the Patrol's academy. Organized pirates, known as Boskonians, have gained a great advantage with a new type of space drive, making their ships far faster than anything the Patrol can build. That is, with the exception of one ship, the Britannia. New and experimental, built to be the fastest thing in space, she has abandoned the traditional ray armament of a space ship for an offensive weapon much older - explosive artillery, fired at an opponent held in place by unbreakable tractor beams. Her mission is to capture a Boskonian ship of the new type intact enough to get the secret of her speed (hence the artillery, which the scientists of the patrol think can damage another ship enough to disable it without destroying the information they require). The experimental nature of her weapon means that she would be useless to a man experienced only in using the standard weapons of the time, so she is given to the inexperienced Kinnison to command.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subspace_Explorers"title="Subspace Explorers">
It is essentially in three overlapping parts:The war is essentially an extension of the Cold War ongoing at the time of publication, extending into space, and ending with the total defeat of Communism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreadful_Sanctuary"title="Dreadful Sanctuary">
In 1972, John J. Armstrong, a physically large and powerful inventor from New York, becomes concerned by the failures of seventeen crewed and uncrewed rockets to reach the Moon. Professor Bob Mandle, a young scientist, dies mysteriously while discussing the rocket failures with Armstrong. Armstrong learns that the only remaining authorities of comparable stature are Professor Claire Mandle, the dead man's sister, and a Viennese scientist named Horowitz. Armstrong visits New Mexico, where the eighteenth Moon-rocket, to be piloted by George Quinn, is being built under the supervision of the obstructive Ambrose Fothergill. Armstrong also consults his friend Ed Drake, who worked on one of the earlier failed rockets, and Claire Mandle, to whom he feels an immediate attraction.Armstrong hires Hansen, a private investigator, to research politicians and other opponents of rocketry. He has dinner with Claire Mandle, who tells him she is being followed; with Hansen's help, Armstrong learns she is being tailed by the FBI. Rocket scientist Clark Marshall is murdered in Armstrong's apartment by a sandy-haired man. Armstrong visits the Norman Club, to which many space travel opponents belong, where he is imprisoned and given two days to answer the question "How do you know you're sane?" He is then brought to meet Senator Lindle, the Norman Club director in New York and a leading opponent of rocketry. Armstrong tells Lindle that he does not know that he is sane. Lindle says that sanity can be proven and subjects him to a bizarre machine called a psychotron, which is operated by the scientist Horowitz. Lindle then tells Armstrong that the results show that he is sane. According to Lindle, all Earth humans except the Asian peoples are descended from insane Mercurians, Venusians and Martians exiled to Earth thousands of years earlier. Lindle claims that humans of European descent, including himself and Armstrong, are actually Martians, and that their loyalty should be to the people of Mars, whom they should help by preventing the spread of Earth's lunatics into the Solar System.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Chance_(Clark_novel)"title="Fat Chance (Clark novel)">
The story is set in suburban Melbourne, Australia. The protagonist, Lisa Trelaw, is a teenage girl who is overly concerned about her weight. Other characters include her brother, Nick, who frequently teases her; Lisa's hard working father and over-weight mother; and her best friend Penny.The narrative follows Lisa through a series of life changing events. First, the 'Dog Squad' food van her parents bought and she worked in. Also, the cliff accident where a large rock fell, crushing two of Lisa's friends and narrowly missing her.The story has an ambiguous climax when Lisa is offered a modelling contract. By this stage Lisa's attitude had gone full circle. She had started out obsessed with her weight, always binge eating and then starving herself. In the end she is confident, eating healthy, with no eating disorder.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Horde"title="The Crystal Horde">
The novel is a science horror story that involves silicon crystalline lifeforms threatening to overwhelm carbon life on Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Berkut"title="The Berkut">
A few facts are clearly bent in this narrative: a double, not Hitler, died under the Chancellery. Joseph Stalin orders his top agent to capture Hitler and bring him back to the Kremlin. Hitler, known in the novel as "Herr Wolf", escapes across Europe in the company of two SS commandos.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_(Doctorow_novel)"title="Little Brother (Doctorow novel)">
Marcus Yallow is a 17-year-old hacker/techno whiz from San Francisco. One day Marcus and his best friend Darryl play truant from school to play an Alternate Reality Game. A terrorist attack is perpetrated against the city, and the four are captured and detained under suspicion of terrorism.After a series of interrogations that take place over a period of six days, Marcus, Jolu, and Vanessa are finally released; Darryl's whereabouts are unknown. The DHS tells Marcus that they will be monitoring his actions and moves because he is still a suspect. Marcus is "infuriated at how his civil rights [are] ignored."In response to the increasing surveillance of the city and its citizens, Marcus creates Xnet, a private mesh network intended to allow people to communicate freely while fighting "the surveillance state." Through XNet, using his pseudonym 'Mik3y', Marcus encourages his peers to rebel against the DHS surveillance.While introducing a group to Cryptography during a key signing party, Marcus meets Ange, and shortly thereafter they begin to date.When a former prisoner who was held by the DHS tells Marcus that Darryl is still alive, Marcus tells a reporter and his family about his actions taken against the DHS. The journalist's story is then published and the DHS takes Marcus into custody again. On order from the governor, California highway patrol troopers raid the DHS compound during a waterboarding interrogation and arrest the DHS agents. Darryl is subsequently freed and Marcus, after his parents have to pay his bail to make sure he doesn't go to prison, finally returns to his life the way it was before the terrorist attacks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farthest-Away_Mountain"title="The Farthest-Away Mountain">
The Farthest-Away Mountain is about a fourteen-year-old girl, who when she was small was asked what goals she has for her life. She responds that she will travel to the Farthest Away Mountain, meet and speak to a gargoyle, and marry a prince. One morning, she wakes up early having heard someone call to her in her dreams. She looks out the window and sees the Farthest-Away Mountain nod. She takes that as a sign that the time has come to complete the three goals,The Farthest Away Mountain was a place of magic and the Mountain itself was alive. It called good people to come and live upon its slopes, and for many years everyone that called was very happy and lived in peace. But more than two centuries ago, a young man living in the village Dakin had come from, had been called to the Mountain. He was a teacher and among his pupils was the son of a wicked magician whom he hoped to help and keep away from evil. So he took the magician's son with him on his journey to the Mountain. This turned out to be a grave error, for the son was also very wicked and turned everything on the mountain to his own purpose, becoming the Master of the Mountain. He turned his teacher into a frog – Croak – and every person then living on the Mountain fled from before him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Promised_Land_(novel)"title="The Promised Land (novel)">
Karol Borowiecki, a Polish nobleman, is the managing engineer at the Bucholz textile factory. With the help of his friends Max Baum, a German who is the heir to an old handloom factory, and Moritz Welt, an independent Jewish businessman, they embark on setting up their own brand new textile plant.Borowiecki's affair with Lucy Zucker, the wife of another textile magnate, gives him advance notice of a change in cotton tariffs and helps Welt to make a killing on the Hamburg futures market. However, more money has to be found so all three characters cast aside their pride to raise the necessary capital.On the day of the factory opening, Borowiecki has to deny his affair with Zucker's wife to a jealous husband. But while Borowiecki accompanies Lucy on her exile to Berlin, there is a fire in the factory, which leaves Borowiecki bankrupt. The same night his father dies. Subsequently, Borowiecki decides to break up with Anka and marry Mada Mueller the daughter of a wealthy German industrialist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Victory"title="Energy Victory">
## Problem.Zubrin contends that OPEC nations, particularly Saudi Arabia, have used their enormous oil wealth to fund Islamic extremism; in effect, the US is financing both sides of the War on Terror. They have been able to do this through colluding to keep oil prices high. Due to its dependence on their oil, the United States (and the rest of the world) is powerless to do anything about this.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Stage_Lensmen"title="Second Stage Lensmen">
The story picks up immediately where "Gray Lensman" left off as Kimball and Clarissa are heading off to get ready for their impending marriage. Mentor of Arisia stops them by commanding Kim to "think" before he acts, and Kim, of course, immediately realizes that the Boskonian organization was probably not destroyed when Jarnevon was cracked between two other planets and still poses a grave threat to Civilization. The wedding is put on hold as Kinnison and the other Lensmen set about coming up with a defense for the expected attack upon Earth. Since one of the themes of the series is that as soon as one side develops a particular weapon, the other soon figures out how to duplicate it; the Lensmen assume that Earth will be subjected to an attack using either a negasphere (negative energy that consumes anything it touches) or two high velocity planets, used like a nutcracker. Earth is attacked, and by the slimmest margin, the enemy fleet is defeated. As before in this series, the ultimate weapon featured in the previous book becomes the standard for the opening stages of this one, and newer, more powerful weaponry must be developed to deal with the new danger. In this case the weapon developed is the “Sunbeam”, where the entire output of the sun is converted to an energy beam and used to vaporize much of the Boskonian fleet when it shows up. By now everyone has "thought screens" (developed by the Velantians) rendering the ability of the Lensmen to read others' minds only useful when the opposition is captured or sloppy, so the Lensmen must find new ways to gather information.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred-Dollar_Baby"title="Hundred-Dollar Baby">
April Kyle appears in Spenser's office after several years without any contact. She's been put in charge of a new upscale brothel by her mentor, the madame Patricia Utley. She says she's being harassed by someone who wants her to pay an extraordinary protection fee. Thugs appear and scare off her customers. Spenser and Hawk manage to fend off the thugs, but things are not as they seem as soon as Spenser starts asking questions. April begs him to stop investigating, but, Spenser being Spenser, can't stop until he unravels the mystery. What surfaces is a web of deceit, greed and the fragile psyche of April Kyle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cage_(Sender_book)"title="The Cage (Sender book)">
Thirteen-year-old Riva Minska, her mother, three brothers and landlord are living in the same house. Soon the Germans invade Poland. At this time, Riva and her family are betrayed by their landlady and robbed of their valuables and possessions. Soon, the gates of the Lodz Ghetto were shut and no one came in; they only went out. Throughout the book, Riva refers to all the places she has been confined as "the cage".A couple of years later, chaos has spread rapidly through the ghetto. Riva's brother, Laibele, contracts tuberculosis. Her mother is taken away in a Nazi raid because she looked sick. A little while after her mother's deportation, a social worker tries to find homes for the children who now are without adult supervision. But adoption means the remains of her family will be separated. Riva protests and eventually becomes the sixteen-year-old legal guardian of her younger brothers, Laibele, Motele, and Moishele.In the following years, Riva must fight sickness, deportation, and losing hope. In the midst of all of this, Laibele is consumed by his disease. Now Riva, Motele, and Moshiele must fight harder than ever to prevent being caught by the Nazis and deported. Eventually, the Nazi determines that Riva and her brothers should be deported to Auschwitz. Once Riva arrives at Auschwitz, she is separated from her family and she spends only one week there. However, Riva is forced to undress, put her glasses in a gigantic pile and pushed into an open area. With many other women, she is blasted with cold water and Riva can never forget the screams of the young girls and women. She is then given old clothes that do not fit well. Upon dressing in the clothes, Riva is forced to follow the women of the camp as they are screamed at to stand up in areas where the commandants cut and shave all of their hair off their heads. This traumatizes Riva and she is not sure what to make of her life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Earth"title="A New Earth">
Early chapters of the book give simple explanations and provide a foundation for further concepts and ideas. In "Chapter One: The Flowering of Human Consciousness", Tolle discusses the "inherent dysfunction in humanity" and proposes ways that readers may rise above it. He then develops these concepts in chapters two, three, and four by offering his descriptions of the ego and its "vices." In the book, Tolle defines the term ego as an "illusory sense of self" based on one's memories and thoughts. In chapters five and six Tolle uses the phrase "pain body" to describe the human tendency to carry "an accumulation of old emotional pain". In chapters seven, eight, and nine: "Inner Space, Inner Purpose and Who You Truly Are", Tolle makes many distinctions: between "knowing yourself and knowing about yourself"; between the "Dreamer" and the "dream"; between the objects of consciousness and the space of consciousness; between outer space and inner space; and between outer purpose and inner purpose. In chapter ten, "A New Earth", Tolle gives his readers suggestions for implementation of his ideas in their personal life but cautions them by saying: "You are still an ordinary human. What is extraordinary is what comes through you into this world".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Leary"title="King Leary">
The novel's protagonist is Percival "King" Leary, a legendary retired ice hockey player living in a small town nursing home in South Grouse, who is invited to Toronto by a young hotshot advertising executive to record a ginger ale commercial. The novel tracks his experiences on the trip, as well as exploring his past career through flashbacks. Included amongst these reminiscences are his times at a juvenile reformatory as well as his years with several hockey teams. The book's cast consists of various hockey players; an aged journalist, ‘Blue’ Hermann, who chronicled Leary’s professional life; and members of Leary’s family. In addition to chronicling his experiences on the trip, the novel explores his emotional life, as ghosts from his past come to confront him about his virtual withdrawal from any kind of life outside of the nursing home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Matter_of_Profit"title="A Matter of Profit">
Ahvren's people, the Vivitare, have conquered the T'Chin confederacy. After spending two years fighting a brutal war on another world, Ahvren welcomes peace. However, he is suspicious of his people's easy victory, wondering why the T'Chin surrendered.It is rumored that the Vivitare emperor is in danger of being assassinated and Ahvren offers to uncover the plot, in return for the freedom to choose his own path. To do it, he must understand what motivates the T'Chin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_of_Many_Minds"title="Man of Many Minds">
The novel concerns the adventures of George Hanlon, a secret service agent who has the ability to read minds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripmaster_Monkey"title="Tripmaster Monkey">
Set in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s, Wittman Ah Sing is conflicted over his Chinese ancestry. He looks down on immigrants from China and refers to them as fobs, while also resenting Asian-American women who alter their appearance to appear more white and know little about the culture of the countries their ancestors came from. He asks Nanci Lee, who is also of Chinese ancestry, out on a date.As time goes on, Wittman become more and more upset at the racism towards Asian people he sees around him. His thoughts become more fixated on the similarities between himself, and the character of a monkey king, Sun Wukong from the Chinese epic novel "Journey to the West", giving the novel its name. He loses his job at a department store after becoming irritated at a customer and positioning wind-up monkey toys and barbie dolls in sexual positions. Nanci Lee ends their relationship after Wittman begins imitating the monkey king in front of her.Wittman then goes to a party mainly attended by followers of the Beatnik movement. After overhearing a woman, Taña De Weese, reciting poetry, Wittman composes the basic structure of a play. Only a few of the guests are sober, not under the influence of drugs, and awake the morning after the party, and Wittman briefly performs his play. Wittman and Taña walk home from the party through a park, and are married by a priest so that Wittman will not be drafted to fight in the Vietnam War.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_the_Lens_(novel)"title="Children of the Lens (novel)">
"Children of the Lens" is the sixth and final book in the Lensman series. The story takes place twenty years after the close of "Second Stage Lensmen", and focuses on the five children of Kimball and Clarissa Kinnison: a boy and two pairs of fraternal twin girls. As Kimball and Clarissa are both Lensmen, their offspring are dubbed the "Children of the Lens". They are also the ultimate product of a two-billion-year-long Arisian breeding program that has molded them into "third-level" minds with such potential power that not even the Arisians themselves fully understand their capabilities.The story of the children is intertwined with the story of the five Second Stage Lensmen: Kimball, Worsel, Nadreck, Tregonsee, and Clarissa (who becomes a Second Stage Lensman). Spurred into action by a series of seeming untraceable terrorist attacks, and other unexplainable events in both the First and Second Galaxy, Kimball asks the other Second Stage Lensmen to help him trace down the source of the troubles. Each of these Lensmen rushes to his aid and each pursues the task from a different angle. The Second Stage Lensmen address the problem in their usual style: Kimball is energetic and direct, Nadreck is cautious and thorough, Clarissa gets sent to Lyrane II again, and so on. They are each assisted, more or less covertly, by one of the children but seem unable to get a grip on the problems. One at a time, each of the children realizes that they need additional training, and travel to Arisia to obtain it. They are then able to help their Lensman complete their missions. All of the lensmen are led to essentially the same conclusion: the hitherto unknown planet of Ploor is the location of the race controlling the remnants of Boskone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Macdermots_of_Ballycloran"title="The Macdermots of Ballycloran">
The narrative of "The Macdermots of Ballycloran" "chronicles the tragic demise of a small Catholic landowning family in the Protestant-dominated Ireland of the mid-19th century. It focuses on the struggle of Thady Macdermot to keep his sinking property afloat. Thady lives with his father Larry Macdermot in a dilapidated mansion in Co. Leitrim, which is mortgaged to their enemy, the vulgar builder Joe Flannelly. They cannot keep up the payments on the mortgage. Enmity between the Macdermot and Flannelly families is sharpened by Thady's having declined to marry Joe's daughter, Sally. Larry Macdermot's daughter, Feemy (christened 'Euphemia'), is seduced by Royal Irish Constabulary officer Captain Myles Ussher, who is hated by the local Catholic majority for his brutal enforcement of the excise laws against poteen distilling. One night Thady comes home to find Ussher abducting Feemy and kills him in the ensuing struggle. Despite the mitigating circumstances, the Protestant-dominated courts find Thady guilty of murder, in the context of a panic about crime, and fears of Thady's potential connection to Irish nationalist groups. Thady is hanged, his father Larry goes mad, Feemy dies bearing Ussher's bastard and the Ballycloran house is finally vacated of Macdermots."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Triple_Suns"title="Under the Triple Suns">
The novel concerns the survivors of the destruction of the earth and their attempt at settling a new planet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Minds"title="Alien Minds">
The novel concerns the adventures of George Hanlan, a secret service agent who has the ability to read minds, on the planet Estrella.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islands_of_Space"title="Islands of Space">
"Islands of Space" is a sequel to "The Black Star Passes". It concerns the adventures of four heroes: Arcot, Morey, Wade, and Fuller. It is followed by "Invaders from the Infinite".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King's_Buccaneer"title="The King's Buccaneer">
Nicholas, third son of Prince Arutha of Krondor and his squire Harry are sent north to Crydee to learn more about life outside the palace walls.Not long after their arrival in Crydee, the town is attacked by unknown forces. The castle is ruined, many people slaughtered, and two noblewomen are among those abducted. The survivors discover that the invaders have come from the Sunset Islands, a stronghold of cut-throats, and have gathered to make war on the Kingdom of the Isles. But this is more than simple raids with the cut-throats serving a dark force threatening to end the entire world of Midkemia, something which Nicholas must confront.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Boys"title="Rainbow Boys">
The story follows the overlapping lives of three high school seniors, with the chapters alternating between their different points of view. Jason Carrillo, the popular jock, finds himself questioning his sexuality and decides to attend a meeting for gay youth. He does not expect to see his classmates Kyle Meeks and Nelson Glassman at the meeting. Afterwards, Kyle, the mostly-closeted swimmer, decides to help tutor Jason in math. It is revealed that Kyle has had a crush on Jason for the past three years of high school. They bond over their shared feelings towards coming out and their families, which leads them to become more than friends. Nelson, the flamboyant class clown, has conflicting feelings towards Kyle and their relationship. He's very close to his mother who claims to have always known about his homosexuality, but rarely sees his father. After getting into an argument with Kyle, he decides to hook up with an online stranger named Brick. He has sex for the first time, and fears he has contracted HIV since Brick didn't use a condom. He becomes friends with HIV-positive Jeremy, and they begin a relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_High_(book)"title="Rainbow High (book)">
It is the final semester of Jason Carillo's, Kyle Meeks's, and Nelson Glassman's senior year of high school. In the beginning they write letters expressing their past experiences and their current issues. They face the issues of coming out to the public, deciding which college to go to, and the ever-present threat of HIV/AIDS.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devta_(novel)"title="Devta (novel)">
It is a story starting with a teenage boy living in Shahdara town on the outskirts of Lahore, Pakistan. The story has been written by Mohiuddin Nawab under the pseudonym Farhad Ali Taimoor as a fictional autobiography. The title of the story is given as "Devta" arising from the Hindi language which stands for "god" or earthly god in the Hindu religion. He is described as Devta because of his mind control powers gained through telepathy. He fights with the group of Super Master, Mask Man and underworld mafias other criminal mind people and groups in different stages, and a battle rages moving from continents and islands and into government circles and private power broker homes. The story is a multiple of stories where Farhad is faced with opponents at every stage and in various forms. Farhad in the beginning starts as a novice but soon he is confronted by the U.S. spy agency "Super Master" group. The Super Master is an underground powerful mega boss working for the U.S. interests worldwide and he virtually controls the U.S. military, civilian government, and financial top men. It is the top spy agency with a global network of crime, terror, intrigue, conspiracy, and drug control. The Super Master agency is the top-secret agency. Another rival is the Mask Man organization which originated from Russia. Mask Man has one leader in each country who is called Boss. Unfortunately, as the story progresses, both these organizations disappeared from the story and it was taken over by Space people and making the story more unreal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medici_Seal"title="The Medici Seal">
Italy, 1502. Ten-year-old Matteo is saved from drowning by friends of Leonardo da Vinci. The artist and scholar takes the boy under his wing. Matteo accompanies him both as he pursues knowledge and paints magnificent pictures and as he travels across Italy. Soon his story continues. Serving Leonardo da Vinci, seeing first hand the ruthless rule of Cesare Borgia, the ambition of the Medici and the revenge of the dell'Orte. Florence, Milan, Castell Barta and many other places in Renaissance Italy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heads_of_Cerberus"title="The Heads of Cerberus">
The novel concerns people who, after inhaling a grey dust, are transported to a future totalitarian Philadelphia in 2118.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abyss_of_Wonders"title="The Abyss of Wonders">
The novel concerns a group of people from the US, a young boy along with a Chinese man and an old Russian, who make a spiritual quest to a city of lost race in the Gobi Desert that is technologically advanced through a combination of theosophy and superscience.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airhead_(novel)"title="Airhead (novel)">
Emerson "Em" Watts accompanies her sister, Frida, and her best friend, Christopher, to a Stark Megastore opening in SoHo, which is attended by teen supermodel Nikki Howard and British musician Gabriel Luna, who Frida hopes to meet. Protesters attend the event because the Stark Megastore has replaced a locally owned grocery store, and one of the protesters shoots a plasma screen with a paintball gun, snapping the wires. Em saves her sister from being hit by the falling plasma screen but takes the hit herself. At almost the same moment, Nikki faints.A month later, Em finds herself in the hospital, trying to recall what had happened. She finds out she is in Nikki's body when she is kidnapped by Lulu Collins, Nikki's roommate, and Brandon Stark, her on-again, off-again boyfriend and heir to the Stark fortune. Em tries to remember the events that led to her current state and finds out that not only did she die during the accident, Nikki had collapsed from a brain aneurysm at the same time. In an effort to save Em, her parents agreed to a controversial brain transplant offered by Stark Industries, transplanting her brain into Nikki's body, on the condition that Em continues Nikki's career as the face of Stark Industries; the penalty for breaching this contract would be two million dollars.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godfrey_Morgan"title="Godfrey Morgan">
The narrative begins with the auction by the US Government of the fictional Spencer Island, located 460 miles off the California coast (). The island is uninhabited and there are only two bidders: William W. Kolderup, a very wealthy San Franciscan, and his arch-rival J. R. Taskinar, a resident of Stockton, California. Kolderup wins the auction, buying Spencer Island for four million dollars. Taskinar mutters, "I will be avenged!" before retiring to his hotel.Godfrey, an idle twenty-two-year-old, lives with Kolderup (his uncle) and Kolderup's adopted god-daughter, Phina, whom Godfrey has grown to love. Prior to marrying Phina, Godfrey asks to undertake a world tour. Acceding to his nephew's desire, Kolderup sends Godfrey on a sea voyage around the world, aboard one of his steamships, the "Dream", commanded by Captain Turcott. Godfrey is accompanied by his mentor, teacher, and dance instructor, Professor T. Artelett (aka "Tartlet").After some time at sea, Godfrey is awakened one foggy night and told to abandon ship as the "Dream" is foundering. After jumping into the sea, Godfrey is washed ashore on a deserted island, where he soon finds Tartlet has also been marooned. Godfrey, with scant help from Tartlet, will have to learn to survive, organize his life, face hostile intruders, and overcome other obstacles. Eventually, they are also joined by the African slave Carefinotu, whom Godfrey rescues from Polynesian warriors visiting the island. By the end of the story, the formerly-jaded Godfrey has discovered the value of independent effort, and he gains poise and courage. The marooned group are rescued and returned to San Francisco, where Godfrey is reunited with Phina. They agree to marry before continuing Godfrey's world tour, this time together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thousand_Country_Roads"title="A Thousand Country Roads">
The story relates what happened to Robert Kincaid and Francesca Johnson following their passionate and ill-fated love affair in "The Bridges of Madison County". Kincaid initially finds himself with just memories of a lonely existence and of Francesca Johnson, for whom he felt a great passion. Pushed by these memories and desiring to give meaning to his life, Kincaid takes to the road again. "A Thousand Country Roads" explores his development as he explores himself and the world around him on his journey.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_Before_the_Wind"title="Running Before the Wind">
For thirteen-year-old Kelly, running is like running away from the anger and the pain - it lets her forget, at least for a few miles a day, just how much she hurts. But when she is invited to join the junior high track team, Kelly's father dashes her hopes with a blunt "No". Kelly knows there is little she can say to change his mind. In fact, she is afraid of saying anything at all. Kelly lives in fear of her father. He could be nice for days, then lash out in frightening violence. While her mother and sister will do anything to keep the peace, Kelly refuses to pretend that nothing is wrong. Then suddenly, miracously, Kelly is freed from her father's unpredictable rage. But now she feels trapped in a life filled with anger and violence of her own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wind"title="Star Wind">
When she returns home from summer camp, Camden Douglas finds that her best friend Mitch is running with a new group. They're followers of an older teen who calls himself WT-3 and tells the "kidsters" that "grownies" are "double ungood" bosses who give children no rights. Miffed at her busy parents, Cadmen plunges in, but a series of nightmarish dreams reveal the truth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Defender"title="Conan the Defender">
The book opens around noon in the mansion of Albanus the wizard, Vegentius the Commander of the Golden Leopards (the bodyguard regiment of Nemedia's Kings), Demetrio Amarianus (a landowner), Constanto Melius (a noble), and Sephana Galerianus (the rejected mistress of King Garian).They are gathered to plot the usurping of the Dragon Throne of the kingdom of Nemedia. During their meeting, Albanus demonstrates magic to placate and wow his guests by summoning a fire elemental to destroy one of his servants. The conspirators are impressed by this and desire to have some magical devices of their own: "As a token that [they] are all equals." Melius chooses a sword imbued with the skills of six master swordsmen. The sword grants its wielder sword mastery.Moving the focus of the novel to Conan, it describes how the city of Belverus in Nemedia is unsafe, the tariffs exorbitantly high, starvation rampant, sedition brewing, and King Garian's ineffectiveness as a ruler. In reality, Albanus is busy funding and controlling all the unrest in Nemedia as a means of focusing hatred on King Garian. Conan is attacked in Belverus by Melius, who it later turns out was driven insane and "possessed" in a fashion by the tortured spirits in the magical sword which Albania gave him. Albanus didn't know that the blade could cause such madness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mistletoe_Farm"title="The Mistletoe Farm">
The Longfield family, 15-year-old twins Jane and Jack, 11-year-old Susan, Crackers the spaniel, and Mr. and Mrs. Longfield, live at Mistletoe Farm.When they receive a phone call from Peter Longfield's brother David who informs the family that his uninsured townhouse has burnt down, they are asked to look after his three children, 16-year-old Cyril, 14-year-old Melisande and 10 or 11-year old Roderick. The Mistletoe Farm children are initially alarmed of the prospect of their three spoilt cousins from the city living with them, and at first they find it difficult to get along with each other. But after a number of challenges and hardships affect Mistletoe Farm, the city Longfields learn to adapt to life in the country and get along with their cousins.In the second book, "Six Cousins Again", Cyril, Melisande and Roderick have moved into a nearby, much more modern farm with their parents. Their mother, Rose, has difficulty adapting to the life of a farmer's wife, their father, David, has various setbacks, and the children have trouble settling down. Atypically severe for Blyton's work, the book contains numerous references to the deaths of animals. It is also, like much of her oeuvre, damning of Romanichal people, who prove to be the villains responsible for any of Holly Farm's problems not caused by Rose's unwillingness to sacrifice her life to the farm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse_(Bowler_novel)"title="Apocalypse (Bowler novel)">
The book begins with a group of people (later revealed to be ancestors of the Skaerlanders) attacking a mysterious man on a rock. The man does not flinch as he is beaten to death and thrown off a cliff.The story then moves into the present, with a family of three on board a yacht on a sailing voyage. The protagonist, Kit, and his parents, Jim and Sarah Warren, are taking a final voyage on their yacht, the Windflower. Once a wealthy family, Kit's father has recently declared bankruptcy, and their yacht will have to be sold when they return. However, they are flung into a nasty storm and lose all their equipment's signal. During which time, Kit picks a small carved boat out of the water and glimpses a man who resembles him in every single way, except age. They run aground on a mysterious island and find it difficult to get their yacht back to sea. Kit goes exploring and sees the man he saw at sea again, as well as a young girl about his age, who quickly disappears. As Kit is exploring he experiences cold spots that he is certain isn't the wind. A large wave hits the rocks nearby and washes the man into the sea. Kit is surprised and very confused. He returns to the boat and tells his parents about his findings. They do not believe him, however.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestar's_Quest"title="Firestar's Quest">
"Firestar's Quest" takes place between "The Darkest Hour" and "Midnight". The novel follows Firestar, leader of ThunderClan (one of four Clans of wild cats living in a fictional forest) on a journey to find a fifth lost Clan of the forest called SkyClan. Firestar and his mate Sandstorm journey upriver in order to rebuild the long-lost Clan. When they arrive at the Clan's former home, they meet Skywatcher, a descendant of SkyClan, who tells them about SkyClan's story, and shows them the Whispering Cave, they also find SkyClan's old home deserted, the caves strangely marked with tiny claw marks resembling those of rats. Firestar gathers together Leafdapple, Sparrowpelt, Sharpclaw, Echosong, Rainfur, Petalnose, Clovertail, Patchfoot, Shortwhisker, Cherrytail, Sagekit, Mintkit, Tinypaw, Rockpaw, and Bouncepaw. Eventually, Firestar re-establishes the Clan and helps the Clan fight the force that destroyed the ancient SkyClan: rats. Though SkyClan emerges victorious, the warrior Rainfur is killed and Firestar loses his second life. As Firestar and Sandstorm prepare to return home, Leafdapple is made the leader and renamed Leafstar on the Sky Rock, which is used to connect to the SkyClan ancestors. Sharpclaw is made deputy of SkyClan, and Echosong becomes the medicine cat.In the epilogue, Sandstorm and Firestar's new kits are born. They decide to name one Squirrelkit (after her sleek tail), and the other Leafkit (in honor of SkyClan's new leader, Leafstar). SkyClan blood runs through ThunderClan in cats such as Tigerclaw from his ancestor Cloudstar, a leader of SkyClan from when they lived alongside the other four Clans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Od_ani_holeh"title="Od ani holeh">
The narrative takes place in Tel Aviv, at the dawn of the 2006 Lebanon War. Mickey, an ex–Special Forces officer, and ex-Shabak agent (Israeli Security Services), has spent the night in a casino, losing a fortune. Now, at 4 AM, Mickey is lying in a rainy, darken alley, having a severe heart attack.While Mickey recovers, we find out that he is married to Laura, presently an alcoholic, and formerly—like most characters entangled in this story—a vivacious, beautiful and promising young individual. We also find out that Absalom, his son, both condemns and loves him, and that he is involved with Olga, a Russian immigrant and former prostitute. We find out that Mickey was shamefully released from his elite unit, for inappropriate compassion—sparing a young Arab terrorist, and later from the Shabak, for unjustified cruelty—killing an innocent Arab, father of six.We follow Mickey as he discovers that his family, mistress, and brothers in arms cannot prevent him from sinking into the pit he dug for himself. We watch as Mickey struggles to compensate for his transgressions, while eluding the mafia goons that are after him for his gambling debts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_Blues"title="Reservation Blues">
The novel follows the story of the rise and fall of Coyote Springs, a rock and blues band of Spokane Indians from the Spokane Reservation. In 1995, Thomas Builds-The-Fire, Junior Polatkin, and Victor Joseph, who also appear in Sherman Alexie's earlier short story collection "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven", meet American blues musician Robert Johnson. Johnson had sold his soul to the devil in 1931 and claims to have faked his death seven years later. The three Spokane men start a band: Thomas Builds-The-Fire on bass and lead vocals, Junior Polatkin on drums, and Victor Joseph using Johnson's enchanted guitar; they are later joined by Chess and Checkers Warm Water, sisters from the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Death_(novel)"title="The Black Death (novel)">
The novel is set in Victorian England and concerns John Carter, an architect who leaves London to become a junior partner in a prosperous building firm in Thornton Bassett, a village in Dartmoor. His hopes for a new life fade as he discovers a sinister mystery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Husband_of_Zebra_Drive"title="The Good Husband of Zebra Drive">
Mma Ramotswe meets her second cousin, who comes to the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency for help. Tati Monyena works for the hospital in Mochudi, where a series of three deaths in the same bed in the intensive care unit, at the same time, on the same day of the week has caused concern. While she is in Mochudi interviewing staff, her assistant takes the afternoon off, and a client arrives. Mr JLB Matekoni, first class mechanic who shares offices with the Detective Agency, meets the client, Mma Faith Botumile, who believes her husband is cheating on her. Matekoni wants to handle the case himself. His wife, Mma Ramotswe, agrees to this after careful thought, balancing the role of women in her agency and the importance of her husband. Mma Grace Makutsi, assistant in the Detective Agency, is engaged to a wealthy man, and her life is changing. One of the apprentices in the garage, Charlie, has an idea to run his own taxi service, with a used Mercedes Benz car he will buy on time from his boss, Mr JLB Matekoni, so he gives his notice. Discussions in the office get tense, as Mma Ramotswe discussed the absence of Grace Makutsi during office hours, to go shopping. Grace abruptly quits and goes home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Toad"title="The House of the Toad">
The novel concerns James Kerrick, an archaeologist and black marketeer who for years has eked out a living looting archaeological treasures for sale on the international black market. Finally, in the ruins of a lost city in the region of Azcapotzalco in Mexico, he makes a discovery which a Midwestern millionaire, J. Cornelius Wasserman, is willing to pay a fortune. For Kerrick, a bitter American ex-patriate, it is a chance to retire once and for all from his dangerous profession - and an opportunity to return home to see the woman he left behind years before. But she has inexplicably vanished and Wassermann is no ordinary collector.To his mounting terror, Kerrick is inexorably swept into a vast conspiracy of ancient cults and international intrigue. Worse still, the stars are becoming right. Various of the evil characters are servitors of the Primal Ones, incredibly ancient and powerful entities which sowed life throughout the universe and caused it to evolve both intelligence and the capacity to suffer.The novel incorporates references to Robert W. Chambers's King in Yellow mythology as well as to H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. The god Ghanta in the story is hinted to be identical to the Ghatanothoa of Lovecraft's story "Out of the Aeons".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_William_(novel)"title="Sweet William (novel)">
Ann lives in Hampstead and works for the BBC in Bush House in London. She is recently engaged but her academic fiancé Gerald is leaving for America, intending her to follow. Shortly afterwards she meets William, a Scottish playwright who sweeps her off her feet and moves in. Within days she has "encouraged adultery, committed a breach of promise, given up her job, abetted an abortion". But William's a compulsive philanderer, twisting the truth to cover his tracks...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Miracle_at_Speedy_Motors"title="The Miracle at Speedy Motors">
It has never occurred to Precious Ramotswe that there might be disadvantages to being the best-known lady detective in Botswana. But when she receives a threatening anonymous letter, she is compelled to reconsider her previously unconquerable belief in a kind world and good neighbours.While she ponders the identity of the letter-writer, Mma Ramotswe has a further set of problems to solve, both professional and personal. There is an adopted child's poignant search for her true family, and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's pursuit of an expensive miracle for their own foster daughter Motholeli.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addie_Pray"title="Addie Pray">
The novel is narrated by Addie, an orphaned girl, who travels with confidence man Moses "Long Boy" Pray in the early 1930s, during the Great Depression. Addie states at the beginning of the novel that Long Boy may or may not be her father; she says that her late mother was the "wildest" girl in her town, and that Long Boy is one of her three possible fathers. Their characters are established in Alabama, and the storyline then carries them to other Southern states around Memphis. The film version retains these characters and much of their action, but moves the story to Kansas and Missouri. In the second part of the novel, from which the movie diverges further, Addie and Moses meet an older conman who teaches them class and sophistication. They then begin dropping fake letters, promising big yields in a silver mine, in order to draw in greedy victims.In the last third of the novel, Addie is more directly involved in a scam, posing as the long-lost granddaughter of a supposedly wealthy old woman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Forest"title="Shadow Forest">
Samuel Blink is a 12-year-old boy living in England with his family — his ten-year-old sister, Martha Blink, his Mother, Liz Blink, and his Father, Steve Blink. Whilst en route to a surprise location for his younger sibling's birthday, the parents are killed when a log falls onto the front section of the car.A week later, a letter comes from their Aunt Eda in Norway. The letter states that they will be coming to Norway the following day. Upon their arrival, Samuel is not impressed with the surroundings. Their new residence is located next to the infamous 'Shadow Forest', which Samuel has a feeling he had been to before. One evening Samuel is told the secret of Shadow Forest. Uncle Henrik had gone into the forest 10 years ago and never came out. Not long after, whilst rummaging through his aunt's attic, Samuel finds a book entitled "Creatures of Shadow Forest". Later he discovers that Martha has disappeared.He enters the forest in search of Martha and encounters multiple creatures described in his newfound book. Eventually he locates his sister and the family dog who has been under a curse implemented by the sinister 'Change Maker', whom they battle and inevitably defeat revealing the dog to be their uncle. The family is reunited and continue to live in Norway.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catcall_(novel)"title="Catcall (novel)">
The story focuses on a young boy named Josh, whose family goes through a dramatic upheaval. There is a new stepdad and a new baby sister.Josh's younger brother Jamie takes this badly and soon develops an obsession with wild cats and a refusal to speak. Josh uses all his skills, and a cat scrapbook, to help his family heal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_the_Terrible_(novel)"title="Ivan the Terrible (novel)">
It is Ivan's first day of school. He can only speak Russian and it's Boris's job to look after him and translate for him. St Edmund's is a civilized school, but Ivan isn't civilized. Boris knows that he is going to have trouble teaching Ivan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armance_(novel)"title="Armance (novel)">
Octave de Malivert, a taciturn but brilliant young man barely out of the École Polytechnique, is attracted to Armance Zohiloff, who shares his feelings. The novel describes how a series of misunderstandings have kept the lovers Armance and Octave divided. A series of clues suggest that Octave is impotent as a result of a severe accident. Octave is experiencing a deep inner turmoil; he himself illustrates the pain of the century's romantics. When the pair do eventually marry, the slanders of a rival convince Octave that Armance had married only out of selfishness. Octave leaves to fight in Greece, and dies there of sorrow."Armance" is based on the theme of "Olivier", a novel by the Duchess Claire de Duras, whose scabrous nature forbade publication. But Stendhal has very quietly inserted the secret, without talking about it openly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_of_Heart_(novel)"title="Change of Heart (novel)">
## Prologue.A man, Jack, is killed by an impaired driver, leaving his wife, June, and his daughter, Elizabeth behind. At the scene of the accident, June meets Kurt Nealon, a police officer, who becomes a close friend and later June's husband. A number of years later, June is pregnant and Kurt plans to create an addition onto their home. A young man named Shay Bourne offers to help with the addition, to which June explains is "the beginning of the end."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Accidental"title="The Accidental">
Set in 2003, the novel consists of three parts: "The Beginning," "Middle" and "The End". Each part contains four separate narrations, one focusing on each member of the Smart family: Eve, the mother, Michael, her husband, Astrid (12) and Magnus (17), two children of Eve's from a previous marriage (to Adam Berenski). Opening and closing the novel, and between each part, we have four sections of first-person narration from 'Alhambra' – who we can assume is Amber, the Smarts' uninvited house-guest.The novel opens with Alhambra telling us of her conception in 'the town's only cinema'. We then come to "The Beginning", which consists of a third-person narration focused first on Astrid, then Magnus, then Michael, then finally Eve. Through each character we obtain a different view of how Amber came into their lives, and who they believed her to be, when she arrived unannounced and uninvited at their Norfolk holiday home, claiming her car had broken down. Through "The Beginning", we learn of Astrid's obsession with video-taping her life, seemingly as proof it existed; of Magnus' involvement in a school prank which resulted in the suicide of one of his classmates; of Michael's affairs with his students (he is a university lecturer); and of Eve's writer's block.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dog's_Tale"title="A Dog's Tale">
The book is told from the standpoint of a poor household pet, a dog self-described by the first sentence of the story: "My father was a St. Bernard, my mother was a collie, but I am a Presbyterian." The story begins with a description of the dog's life as a puppy and her separation from her mother, which to her was inexplicable. Her puppy and her owner's new child were soon added to her new home. When a fire breaks out in the nursery, the dog risks her life to drag the baby to safety. In the process, her motives are misunderstood and she is cruelly beaten by the father of the family with a cane, resulting in her leg getting broken. Soon, however, the truth of the situation is discovered and she receives no end of praise. Later in the story, her puppy dies, killed by the father of the family to prove his opinion on optics to his scientist peers. Only a servant seems to realize the irony of this, exclaiming, "Poor little doggie, you saved HIS child!" In the end, the dog (who does not realize her puppy is dead until her own hour is upon her) pines inconsolable over the grave of the puppy with the clear implication that she will do so until death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughter_of_the_Forest"title="Daughter of the Forest">
Sorcha, the youngest child of Irish Lord Colum of Sevenwaters, loses her mother at childbirth, and is raised almost entirely by her six older brothers. She is more or less ignored by her father. When her father's new wife, the Lady Oonagh, attacks Sorcha and her brothers, Sorcha alone is able to escape. Sorcha's brothers, however, are turned into swans.What follows is a twist on the classic tale of "The Six Swans". Sorcha learns that if she can spin six shirts from the painful starwort, remaining absolutely silent until the last one is completed, she can free her brothers from Oonagh's spell. Sorcha agrees to this and spends several years in the forest, hiding from Oonagh as she works on the shirts.At first she survives in the Forest, relying on the help of the Fair Folk and her only companion—her brother Cormack's dog, Linn. Her brothers are able to visit her twice a year as humans as she labors on her task to make shirts out of starwort, a needle-like plant whose touch is poison and disfigures the hands.One day, she is raped by two brutal men, who are led to her by the village idiot, who thought her a faery. They also kill Linn, and her brothers find her hurt and bleeding. Padriac heals her while three of her other brothers, (including formerly peaceful Finbar), go out and kill her rapists with the help of the Fair Folk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Animal_Family"title="The Animal Family">
A man, a mermaid, a boy, a bear and a lynx – all orphans – find a home together in a log cabin in the woods by the sea. Through their shared experiences and self-made myths of their own origins, they create their own unique family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saving_Faith"title="Saving Faith">
The botched attempt on Faith's life led to an all-out hunt for her by three parties – the FBI, the CIA and her boss, Danny Buchanan. Fleeing for her life, Faith was not sure who she can trust, including the stranger Lee Adams who saved her life and admitted being hired to watch her.While Faith was on the run, Buchanan planned on turning tables on Thornhill before it was too late, but found himself outclassed as an amateur against a professional spook.Meanwhile, the FBI began to look among their staff for a traitor, with suspicions falling to the dead agent, and Brooke Reynolds.Despite the setbacks, Thornhill began masterminding several separate moves to deal with Buchanan, Faith and the FBI.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kampung_Boy"title="The Kampung Boy">
"The Kampung Boy" tells the story of a young boy, Mat, and his childhood in a "kampung" (village). A graphic novel, it illustrates the boy's life in pictures and words. Aside from being the protagonist, Lat is also the narrator. The story opens with his birth in a Kampung in Perak, Malaysia, and the traditional rituals surrounding the event: the recitation of blessings, the singing of religious songs, and the observance of ceremonies. As Lat grows older, he explores the house, gradually shifting the story's focus to the comic activities of his family outside their abode.Lat starts the first stage of his formal education—reading the Qur'an. At these religious classes, he makes new friends and joins them in their adventures, swimming in the rivers and exploring the jungles. Lat's parents worry over his lack of interest in his studies; he acknowledges their concern but finds himself unmotivated to forgo play for academic pursuits. When he reaches his tenth year, he undergoes the "bersunat", a ritual circumcision. The ceremonies that precede the operation are elaborate, with processions and baths in the river. The circumcision proves to be "just like an ant bite!"Sometime after recovering from the circumcision, Lat trespasses on a tin mine with his friends. They teach him how to gather the mud left in the wake of the mining dredges and pan for valuable ore. The activity is illegal but often overlooked by the miners. Lat brings the result of his labour back to his father, expecting praise. Instead, he is punished for neglecting his studies and future. After overhearing his parents' laments and being shown the family's rubber plantation, Lat finds the will to push himself to study. He is rewarded for his efforts, passing a "special examination" and qualifying for a "high-standard" boarding school in Ipoh, the state capital.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_the_Shadows"title="Son of the Shadows">
In this novel, Liadan grows up in Sevenwaters with her twin brother Sean and her older sister Niamh. They are the offspring of Sorcha and Iubdan (formerly Hugh of Harrowfield). Liadan follows in her mothers tradition in learning the healing arts. Niamh has great beauty and is 'expected' to wed Eamonn, a neighbouring chieftain. Eamonn actually asks for the hand of Liadan, she says that she will give him an answer in one year. While staying at Sevenwaters, Eamonn tells a tale of a recent attack by a band of mercenaries. Upon this attack, all his men were killed, and his life was spared by a man called the Painted Man. He swears that he will kill him. During the festival of Imbolc, a young druid named Ciarán tells the tale of Aengus Óg and Caer Ibormeith and catches the fancy of Niamh, they are soon having a secret love affair. Liadan discovers their secret during a walk in the forest. When the truth comes out, Ciarán leaves the Druids and Sevenwaters and Niamh is forced to marry the Uí Néill chieftain, Fionn.Liadan goes with her sister on the trip to her new home and on the way back she is kidnapped by an outlaw and brought to the camp of "The Painted Man." In order to attempt to save the life of their smith who was injured in an accident. She accepts the task and eventually falls in love with Bran, their leader. When Bran finds out that she is actually daughter of Hugh of Horrowfield, he sends her back home. When she returns to Sevenwaters, she finds she is pregnant with Bran's child. The Tuatha Dé Danann demand that she and her son remain in the forest, but she refuses to comply. With the help of Finbar she realises that she has his gift of sight and the ability to read and heal the minds of others.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_of_the_Prophecy"title="Child of the Prophecy">
Fainne is a sorcerer's daughter growing up in Kerry. Her mother, Niamh (Son of the Shadows) had drowned in the sea when Fainne was quite young, her father Ciarán, the son of Lady Oonagh (Daughter of the Forest) and a former druid (Son of the Shadows), teaches her the art of sorcery during her childhood, including the Glamour, the art of changing one's appearance at will. Fainne becomes close friends with Darragh, one of the tinkers who returns every summer. When Fainne is old enough, Ciarán decides that she must go to her mother's family at Sevenwaters to learn of her heritage, after her grandmother teaches her some new lessons. Fainne's grandmother arrives just after Ciarán departs and teaches Fainne with very strict and harsh methods how to use her gift to make people bend to her will and do her bidding, especially men.After her grandmother's training is over, Fainne is told that she must go to Sevenwaters and thwart the long scheme of the Túatha Dé Danann to get back the sacred islands. The alliance that is preparing to take back the islands forcibly from Edwin of Northwoods is led by her cousin Johnny, the child of Liadan and Bran (Son of the Shadows) and child of the prophecy (that a child of Briton and Erin and of neither, marked by the raven, would save the sacred islands). To force Fainne to do this, her grandmother threatens her father with sickness and a slow death. Her grandmother gives her a charm to wear to protect her from the people of Sevenwaters; in reality, this charm allows her grandmother to see Fainne and to partially control her thoughts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil's_Elixirs"title="The Devil's Elixirs">
"The Devil's Elixirs" is predominantly a first-person narrative related by the Capuchin monk Medardus. He is ignorant of his family history and what he knows about his childhood is based upon fragments of memory and a few events his mother has explained to him.Medardus cannot resist the devil's elixir, which has been entrusted to him and which awakens in him sensual desires. After being sent from his cloister to Rome, he finds a Count, disguised as a monk as a means of seeing his lover, and pushes him (whether intentionally or not is ambiguous) from a "Teufelssitz" ("devil's perch"). Unbeknownst to all involved, the Count is Medardus's half-brother and the Count's lover is his half-sister. The Count becomes his lunatic doppelgänger and crosses his path multiple times after Medardus abandons his ecclesiastical position, drifting throughout the world.The story centers on his love for a young princess, Aurelie. After murdering her stepmother (the above-mentioned half-sister) and brother, Medardus flees to a city. After his devilish connection is found out by an old painter, Medardus flees the city with the help of a "foolish" hair dresser with two personalities, who serves as a foil to the destructive dual identity of Medardus, gaily living as both Peter Schoenfeld and Pietro Belcampo. He arrives at a prince's court, soon followed by Aurelie. She recognizes the monk as her brother's murderer and Medardus is thrown in jail. He is released only after the doppelgänger appears and is taken as the murderer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liveship_Traders"title="Liveship Traders">
The Liveship Trader's Trilogy takes place in Jamaillia, Bingtown and the Pirate Isles, on the coast far to the south of the Six Duchies. The war in the north has interrupted the trade that is the lifeblood of Bingtown, and the Liveship Traders have fallen on hard times despite their magic sentient ships. At one time, possession of a Liveship, constructed of magical wizard wood, guaranteed a Trader's family prosperity. Only a Liveship can brave the dangers of the Rain Wild River and trade with the legendary Rain Wild Traders and their mysterious magical goods, plundered from the enigmatic Elderling ruins. Althea Vestrit expects her families to adhere to tradition, and pass the family Liveship on to her when it quickens at the death of her father. Instead, the Vivacia goes to her sister Keffria and her scheming Chalcedean husband Kyle. The proud Liveship becomes a transport vessel for the despised but highly profitable slave trade.Althea, cast out on her own, resolves to make her own way in the world and somehow regain control of her family's living ship. Her old shipmate Brashen Trell, the enigmatic woodcarver Amber and the Paragon, the notorious mad Liveship are the only allies she can rally to her cause. Pirates, a slave rebellion, migrating sea serpents and a newly hatched dragon are but a few of the obstacles she must face on her way to discovering that Liveships are not, perhaps, what they seem to be, and may have dreams of their own to follow.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_&amp;_Sleep"title="Love &amp; Sleep">
The previous novel is briefly addressed in the book's first section, "To the Summer Quaternary" with the pretension of being a synopsis of book a project Pierce is preparing for possible publication.From here, the narrative shifts abruptly to Pierce's boyhood, describing his early life with his cousins near the Cumberland Mountains in Kentucky. While cleaning the ashes from burning garbage one day, Pierce sees some embers escape, and cause a minor forest fire. His older cousin, Joe Boyd, immediately blames Pierce for the whole incident and frequently arises in conversation for the rest of the novel. As a result of his blame, Joe Boyd often excludes from the secret clubs he forms with his siblings. After the death of Pierce's Aunt and his cousins' mother Opal Oliphant, the children are neither homeschooled nor attend school, and Sam Oliphant instead orders a large number of books at a time from the State Library to keep the children busy. Pierce finds great interest in the encyclopedias of mythology and occult, and eventually constructs his own mythology, presenting to his cousins as another secret club called the Invisible College, rival to that of Joe Boyd's. Sam eventually comes to request for the children a tutor, answered by a local Nun, Sister Mary Philomel, who trains the children in strict traditional Catholicism, despite Sam's antipathy for religion. For a short period, the children secretly shelter a girl known as Bobby Shaftoe in their home. The plan backfires when Bobby becomes violently ill and eventually infects the other children. At this point, they reveal to Sam their having her in the house. Her father Floyd eventually returns for her. When the children try to visit Bobby at her home, they are terrified by Floyd's apocalyptic threats.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_of_the_Nighthawks"title="Flight of the Nighthawks">
Leso Varen is still at large and the Conclave of the Shadows must find a way to neutralize ten thousand magical warriors that are hidden in a cave on the other side of the world. In Kelewan, Magnus and the Tsurani magicians are studying a Talnoy and discover that is a beacon for a huge army of alien invaders. Meanwhile, Kaspar, Talwin and Caleb have been sent to The Empire of Great Kesh to uncover a nest of Night Hawks who are plotting to overthrow the government.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrath_of_a_Mad_God"title="Wrath of a Mad God">
On the world of the Dasati, Pug and the other Conclave members must find a way to save their people from the magician, Leso Varen,and the wrath of the mad god he has awoken. Miranda must find a way to save herself from the clutches of the Deathpriests who haveher held captive on the world of Kelewan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus,_Thongs_and_Full-Frontal_Snogging"title="Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging">
Georgia, a teenager, lives with her mother, father, three-year-old sister Libby, and her wild cat, Angus, whom the family found on a holiday to Scotland. Georgia bumps into the popular and attractive Robbie (the "Sex-God"), while helping her best friend, Jas, subtly stalk his brother at the grocery store where he works. The problem is that he is older and has a girlfriend, Lindsay, an older girl who wears a thong and bra padding and secretly claims to be engaged to him. Robbie eventually dumps Lindsay, but tells Georgia that he should not date her because she is too young. In an effort to appear more mature, Georgia tries to bleach a strip of her hair blonde, but it comes off in her hand. Fortunately for her, Robbie is attracted to her and finds her eccentricity amusing and endearing and suggests taking it slow. However, Georgia's mum comes in at the very end and announces that they have tickets to go to New Zealand for the summer to visit her father, who has gone there searching for work, putting a damper on Georgia's new summer romance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saturdays_(novel)"title="The Saturdays (novel)">
The four Melendy children live with their father, a widowed professor of economics, and Cuffy, their beloved housekeeper, in a brownstone in New York City. There's thirteen-year-old Mona, who has her heart set on becoming an actress; twelve-year-old mischievous Rush, who plays the piano; ten-year-old Miranda "Randy" who loves to dance and paint; and thoughtful Oliver, who is six.Tired of wasting Saturdays doing nothing but wishing for larger allowances, the four Melendys jump at Randy's idea to start the Independent Saturday Afternoon Adventure Club (I.S.A.A.C.). If they pool their resources and take turns spending the whole amount, they can each have at least one memorable Saturday afternoon of their own. Before long, I.S.A.A.C. is in operation and every Saturday is definitely one to remember. Each Melendy child is able to do exactly what he or she pleases, discovering new ideas along the way. Randy becomes friends with an old lady who was once kidnapped by gypsies, Rush brings home a stray dog, and Mona shocks her family by taking her first step toward adulthood. But when Oliver wants to be out on his own, too, the rest of the family has second thoughts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Year_in_Provence"title="A Year in Provence">
Peter Mayle and his wife move to Provence, and are soon met with unexpectedly fierce weather, underground truffle dealers and unruly workers, who work around their "normalement" schedule. Meals in Provençal restaurants and work on the Mayles' house, garden and vineyard are features of the book, whose chapters follow the months of the year.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_Caledonia"title="Sputnik Caledonia">
Robbie Coyle, nine years old at the start of the book, lives in Kenzie in Scotland’s Central Belt in the early 1970s. He dreams of going into space; but because of his father’s anti-American, pro-Soviet views, he wants to be a cosmonaut rather than an astronaut. He picks up an Eastern European radio station called Voice of the Red Star, imagines it to be a telepathic signal from another planet, and begs to be taken there.Nineteen-year-old Robert Coyle lives in the British Democratic Republic – a Communist state founded after the overthrow of Nazi occupation in the “Great Patriotic War” – and has arrived at the Installation, a secret military base in Scotland, to take part in a space mission. A strange new object has been detected in the solar system, believed to be a black hole, and the volunteers are to explore it telepathically. Robert has confused memories of the time before his arrival, and the reader is left guessing the connection between Books One and Two. Perhaps the Robbie of Book One has been transported to the other world as he wished; or perhaps the Robert in Book Two is a “parallel” version of the younger Robbie in Book One. The Installation itself is like a “black hole” in the sense that people arrive from the outside, but nobody ever seems to leave - except perhaps in death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sand_Dwellers"title="The Sand Dwellers">
The novel is set in the Superstition Mountains where the commander of a secret military installation is affected by strange forces that take over his mind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Prisoner_of_Birth"title="A Prisoner of Birth">
After proposing to his childhood sweetheart Beth Wilson, Danny Cartwright takes her and her brother Bernie to celebrate at a nearby pub. In the pub, they are accosted by four people. Danny, Beth and Bernie attempt to leave the pub without getting involved in a fracas, but Spencer Craig, one of the four that confronted them, follows them out of the pub along with his friends.A fight breaks out; Bernie is stabbed and dies. Danny is blamed for his murder in a well-orchestrated plot by Spencer (a barrister) and his friends: a popular actor, an aristocrat, and a young estate agent. Danny is arrested and convicted. Sentenced to 22 years in Belmarsh prison, the highest security jail in South-east London, United Kingdom, he encounters his two cellmates, Albert Crann, known as "Big Al," and Sir Nicholas Moncrieff. Meanwhile, outside the prison, Beth is pregnant with Danny's daughter.Sir Nicholas slowly teaches Danny to read and to write. Their friendship grows closer, and Danny decides to dress like his friend in the hope that it will help his upcoming appeal. Danny begins to gather evidence for his appeal with the help of a young lawyer, Alex Redmayne, but unable to present the new evidence, Danny's appeal is denied, and he must serve his complete sentence in Belmarsh prison. He tries to escape several times but of no avail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Sky_River_(novel)"title="Great Sky River (novel)">
After the events of "Across the Sea of Suns" (1984), small groups of humans have settled on other star systems. However, there is a constant threat from the Mechs, a civilization of machines left over from other civilizations and evolved to see all biological civilization as unstable and dangerous."Great Sky River" tells the story of the Bishop family, who fight for their very existence on the planet Snowglade, which has been taken over by the Mechs. The Bishops are one of a number of families on Snowglade, all named for chess pieces. These "families" are more like clans or tribes. All use cybernetic implants and mechanical aids to enhance their perceptions and physical abilities. Personalities of dead members of the Family can be stored in memory tabs and accessed by plugging them into ports implanted in the neck. Bodily functions, such as the sexual drive, can be turned off to remove distractions. The Families seem to be equipped for long conflicts and periods of privation, continually migrating to avoid the Mechs.The novel takes place during a period when the Mechs have invaded Snowglade and are slowly altering its climate to suit themselves; drying it out to protect their steel bodies from rust. This adversely affects the humans, who otherwise seem to exist in a wary truce with the Mechs. Then, the Mechs begin destroying human settlements. For some reason, they are interested in Killeen Bishop, leader of the Bishop Family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dread_Mountain"title="Dread Mountain">
The trio is journeying to Dread Mountain when they come across a spring. Although initially distrustful of its contents, they drink the water out of thirst, noting a nearby sign saying: "Drink, gentle stranger, and welcome. All of evil will beware." and several oddly shaped rocks encircling the spring. They decided to take a rest there and Lief awakens to find one of the "rocks" unfurling. It reveals itself to be a mammalian flying creature called the Kin, which most Deltorans believe to be extinct. It explains to Lief that the water from the spring makes one dream of whomever one is thinking of during ingestion. It also has a deadly, paralyzing effect on "those with evil intent". The three head to Dread Mountain with the help of the Kin, landing there only to find the mountain thickly overgrown, deserted of its inhabitants, the Dread gnomes, and overrun by beasts. However, the companions find the entrance into the Mountain, and after avoiding the numerous traps the gnomes have set up to repel invaders, it was discovered that there is a monstrous toad named Gellick that was controlling the gnomes. The trio makes a bargain with the head of the gnomes to rid Gellick for them in return for freedom and the emerald that was studded onto Gellick the giant frog's head. The fight ends with Lief tossing water from the Dreaming Spring into Gellick's mouth, as it uses the deadly, paralyzing effect. The gnomes thank Lief by making peace with their longtime prey, the Kin, and agreeing to hamper the progress of their common enemy, the Shadow Lord in finding the trio. The companions then continue their journey to The Maze of the Beast.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Contract_with_the_Earth"title="A Contract with the Earth">
"A Contract with the Earth" is, broadly, a manifesto that challenges those on the right to provide a strategy for repairing the planet and calls on government to embrace the concept that a healthy environment is required for a healthy democracy and economy. This approach, alternately branded mainstream and entrepreneurial environmentalism by the authors, requires that companies should lead the way in environmental issues while governments provide them with incentives to reduce their carbon footprint.With its 10 "commandments", "A Contract with the Earth" calls for politicians to abandon adversarial politics and for business and conservationists to form compatible partnerships. In one of the book's themes, Gingrich and Maple argue that environmental efforts shouldn't be exclusive to one political philosophy and reject the idea that free enterprise and a cleaner world are opposing forces.The book generated a storm of media attention in late 2007 and early 2008 as the U.S. presidential campaign began to heat up. Gingrich in particular made numerous media appearances arguing that the Republican Party was losing popular support because their response to environmental policy was simply, as he put it, "NO!" Maple toured the country as Gingrich's stand-in, most notably before the Republicans for Environmental Protection (REP, www.repamerica.org) during their annual meeting (at which John McCain was endorsed as the most "green" of the Republican presidential candidates). In 2008 Gingrich published another book that advocated oil drilling, "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less", and many pundits called his environmental commitment into question. However, this book's fifth chapter provided an argument for environmental protection. Like many aspects of Gingrich's career, his interest in environmental issues has generated controversy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Nest"title="Dragon's Nest">
After finally destroying the crystal used by the advisors to communicate with the Shadow Lord, Lief discovers a fragment of a map. It is discovered that the recent outbreak of famine and plague in Deltora is a result of beasts called the Four Sisters, who magically poison the land. Only dragons can kill them, and they are believed to be extinct. However, Doran the Dragonlover convinced seven of them, one from each territory, to go into hibernation. The Sisters live at the easternmost, northernmost, westernmost, and southernmost points of Deltora.Setting out for Dragon's Nest, the easternmost point in Deltora, the companions discover a Capricon named Rolf captured by the Granous, riddle-loving monsters. Capricons once lived in a great city called Capra, where the town of Broome now stands, but it was destroyed by dragons after the Capricons angered the dragons by stealing their eggs, among other thing. Rolf claims to be the only one left. The companions meet the now-awakened Topaz Dragon, Fidelis, who they previously encountered in hibernation on their way to the underworld in the previous series. He refuses to accompany them, since Doran made the dragons swear not to enter each other's territory while they hibernated, so as to prevent them from taking advantage of each other's slumber. The companions travel on and reach Broome, where they meet the warrior woman Lindal. She guides them to Dragon's Nest, where they find the Sister of the East. Rolf reveals himself to be the Sister's Guardian, having served the Shadow Lord in exchange for magical power and the promise of one day ruling the East, (he is the heir of Capra, and believes it to be his right) and is killed by the newly awakened Ruby Dragon, Joyeu, who destroys the Sister.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_the_Dead_(Rodda_novel)"title="Isle of the Dead (Rodda novel)">
Lief, Barda, and Jasmine have destroyed the Sister of the North and must travel to the Isle of the Dead, the westernmost point of Deltora, to defeat the Sister of the West.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sister_of_the_South"title="The Sister of the South">
After destroying the Sister of the West, Lief, Barda, and Jasmine return to Del, the southernmost point in Deltora, to find the Sister of the South. They find that someone is poisoning people at the palace, and a bizarre beast attacks them several times. After Josef dies from poison, they discover that an addition to the Palace Chapel was forcibly added by the Chief Advisors, and that this is where the Sister is. Nevets kills the mysterious beast just as the Topaz Dragon arrives to destroy the Sister. It is discovered that Paff, Josef's new assistant, was the Guardian and was poisoning the people and projecting the beast similarly to Kirsten's specter. She kills herself out of grief.Just as it seems the quest is finished, it turns out that Josef had deduced a terrible secret: the Shadow Lord had a contingency plan. The Sisters' magic, poisoning the land, was also imprisoning a far worse threat: a creature called the Grey Death, a flood of grey liquid that kills everything it touches. Imprisoned at Hira (a.k.a. the City of the Rats), in the center of the land, now it is rising to destroy the land. However, the Shadow Lord did not count on the dragons working together. With the Opal Dragon, Hopian, now awakened, the seven dragons kill four of the seven Ak-Baba and destroy the Grey Death with their fire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsblood_Royal"title="Kingsblood Royal">
The protagonist, Neil Kingsblood, a white middle-class man, discovers while researching his family background that he is directly descended from an African adventurer on the American frontier. (His ancestor is loosely modeled after Pierre Bonga, an African American who worked as a fur trader for the North West Company.)Through various machinations, Kingsblood loses his banking job and takes a lesser one. He begins to be treated differently by former acquaintances, despite the lack of visible black African ancestry. He is forced to choose between continuing what he has come to see as a hollow existence in the white community and taking on the oppressed minority status of the black community.After Kingsblood tells several white friends about his newfound ancestry, the news quickly spreads, and he finds that acquaintances change their behavior toward him. He engages in a quixotic struggle against the racism newly apparent but widespread in his community.Because Kingsblood is now black, it is illegal for him and his family to live in their home, which is in a whites-only neighborhood. In the climactic scene, which is based on the real life Ossian Sweet incident which occurred in Detroit in 1925, a mob of their former neighbors comes to force the Kingsbloods out. The sense of helplessness against massive injustice is broken only by the final line of the work, which offers hope for the future.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merlin_Effect"title="The Merlin Effect">
Kate Gordon travels to a remote lagoon in Baja California, hoping to help her father discover a sunken ship that disappeared centuries ago. In time, she learns that the ship may have carried a mysterious drinking horn out of Arthurian legend, which possibly ended Merlin himself. As she explores alone in her kayak, Kate encounters several pieces of the puzzle: a terrible whirlpool, a group of ever-singing whales, a seemingly ageless fish, and a prophecy that, under certain conditions, the ancient ship may rise and sail again. She plunges into an undersea world of bizarre creatures and terrifying foes. But to save the life of her father, she must find some way to regain her own free will, and to succeed where even Merlin failed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nonexistent_Knight"title="The Nonexistent Knight">
The protagonists of this novel are two paladins of Charlemagne: the titular non-existent knight, named Agilulf (he is in fact a lucid empty armor) and an inexperienced and passionate young man, Rambaldo. The latter, having arrived at the camp of paladins at the beginning of the novel, wants to avenge his father's death, caused by the Argalif Isoarre; Agilulf instead fights for duty, convinced of his faith, with a value that is admired by all the paladins, but also with a remarkable sense of duty, of precision in controlling the progress of the duties of others and their duties, for which the fellow soldiers find it as capable as it is unpleasant. During the move that Charlemagne made with his paladins to clash with the enemies, they met Gurdulù, a vagabond who let himself be guided by instinct without thinking, and who will be assigned as a squire to Agilulf by order of Charlemagne.When the battle begins, Rambaldo tries in every way to clash with the murderer of his father, who finally dies because, deprived of his glasses by the boy himself, he is no longer able to defend himself (the Argalif Isoarre is very short-sighted, therefore without glasses he cannot see and direct the course of the battle). Later the young man falls into an ambush, but is saved by the intervention of another knight with a periwinkle armor that, after fighting, moves away without saying a word. Returning to the camp on foot (during the battle his horse died), Rambaldo accidentally discovers that the valiant knight is actually a very charming woman, Bradamante, whom he immediately falls in love with. But the young woman is not interested in him but in Agilulf, the non-existent knight.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_a_Gossip"title="Death of a Gossip">
Eight people of varied background meet in the fictional village of Lochdubh in Northern Scotland. They attend the Lochdubh School of Casting : Salmon and Trout Fishing, owned and operated by John Cartwright and his wife Heather. What should be a relaxing holiday amid glorious Highland lochs and mountains becomes a misery. One of the party, Lady Jane Withers, a society widow and notorious gossip columnist, upsets everyone with her snobbishness, sharp tongue and rudeness. Lady Jane soon learns that each of her fellow guests has a secret in their past that they would prefer to remain unknown. When her Ladyship is found dead in Keeper's Pool, no-one is surprised and everyone is relieved.Hamish Macbeth, Lochdubh's local policeman, has to search for a murderer amongst the many suspects. No-one is willing to talk. With the assistance of Priscilla Halburton-Smythe, the love of his life, Hamish solves the mystery in his usual unorthodox style. Hamish's success does not endear him to Chief Inspector Blair, a senior detective from the nearby fictional town of Strathbane.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_and_His_Sky_Racer"title="Tom Swift and His Sky Racer">
A $10,000 prize lures Tom into competing at a local aviation meet at Eagle Park. Tom is determined to build the fastest plane around, but his plans mysteriously disappear, which means Tom must redesign his new airplane from the beginning. A side-plot through the story is Mr. Swift's failing health.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_and_His_Electric_Rifle"title="Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle">
While Tom Swift is working on his latest new invention, the electric rifle, he meets an African safari master whose stories of elephant hunting sends the group off to deepest, darkest Africa. Hunting for ivory is the least of their worries, as they find out some old friends are being held hostage by the fearsome tribes of the red pygmies.Swift builds two major inventions in this volume. The first is a replacement airship, known as "The Black Hawk". This new airship is to replace "The Red Cloud", which was destroyed during his adventures in "Tom Swift in the Caves of Ice". This airship is of the same general construction as "The Red Cloud", but is smaller and more maneuverable.Of foremost notice is Swift's invention of the "electric rifle", a gun which fires bolts of electricity. The electric rifle can be calibrated to different levels of range, intensity and lethality; it can shoot through solid walls without leaving a hole, and is powerful enough to kill a rampaging whale, as in their steamer trek to Africa. With the electric rifle, Tom and friends bring down elephants, rhinoceroses, and buffalo, and save their lives several times in pitched battle with the red pygmies. It also can discharge a globe of light that was described as being able to maintain itself, like ball lightning, making hunting at night much safer in the dark of Africa. In appearance, the rifle looked very much like contemporary conventional rifles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ally_(novel)"title="Ally (novel)">
The day of reckoning is rapidly approaching when the powerful Eqbas will remake the Earth at the expense of its dominant species. And Shan Frankland—once a police officer, once human, now something much more—must decide where her loyalties truly lie: among the gethes, on a planet she once called home, or here, where a dying species presents her with a new and unexpected crisis.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_(novel)"title="Judge (novel)">
The novel covers the arrival of the Eqbas Vorhi task force to start Earth's environmental restoration, with Shan Frankland, the Royal Marines squad, and Aras joining them. Australia agrees to host the eqbas, resulting in near war with other countries until the eqbas show their teeth. Shan's personal history as a police officer who covered up for eco-terrorists catches up with her, resulting in the death of one of the marines. Unknown to anyone else, eqbas commander Esganikan Gai has had herself inoculated with c'naatat, which almost results in disaster for the mission. Esganikan's successor sends the other c'naatat hosts back to Cavanagh's Star to end the risk of spreading it on Earth.Journalist Eddie Michallat has elected to stay on Wess'ej to watch the wess'har matriarch Nevyan's stepdaughter Giyadas grow up because he too regards her as a surrogate daughter, and also to report on the ecological renaissance of the isenj homeworld Umeh as a role model for Earth. Because of the distance involved, Shan, Ade, and Aras return just in time to say goodbye before Eddie dies of old age. Meanwhile, eqbas biologist Da Shapakti has solved the problem of how to remove c'naatat from wess'har tissue as well (curing humans was solved previously). Shapakti and captured EU spy Mohan Rayat flee back to Wess'ej to prevent the eqbas leadership exploiting c'naatat to create immortal super-soldiers as the earlier Wess'har and Esganikan intended. Disgraced Marines officer Lindsay Neville has been trying to atone for her unintentional genocide by caring for the surviving bezeri for decades, to the point where she can no longer take human form; nevertheless she too finally agrees to be cured of c'naatat and become human again. Shapakti's cure also means that Shan's ménage à trois has to decide whether they will remain together, or let Aras go to fulfil his longing for life as a normal wess'har after centuries of loneliness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_in_the_City_of_Gold"title="Tom Swift in the City of Gold">
Tom receives a message from his missionary friend whom he saved from captivity in Africa during the adventures of the preceding volume. The message describes a wonderful underground city, filled with treasures of gold, somewhere deep in the heart of Mexico. Not one to turn down adventure, Tom accepts the challenge to find the lost city.Around this time, Andy Foger and his father had lost their fortunes and are off after Tom's trail in order to steal the treasures from him. In order to make the trip possible, Tom must remodel his previous airship- a hot air balloon with an enclosed cabin. Accompanying him on the journey is Ned Newton, Mr. Damon, and Eradicate. They set off on a tramp steamer to Mexico. On this steamer, they uncover two mysterious passengers who they confirm to be the Foger's.In Mexico, they hire a team of Mexicans who catch onto the city of gold plot and chase after it in competition with Tom as well as the Foger's. To make things worse, Tom had been warned about "Head Hunters" by his missionary friend.After finding the underground city and losing the trail off the two competing parties, Tom's gang end up accidentally sealing themselves into the city for about a week. They finally escape when their enemies release them unintentionally. The Foger's and the Mexican team show up at the entrance with the escort of the Head Hunters. By trying to get in, they let Tom and his team out. Before the others can explore the city, an underground river floods it and they make off with a huge wealth of salvaged gold.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_and_His_Air_Glider"title="Tom Swift and His Air Glider">
While testing out one of his many airships, Tom needs to make emergency landing for repairs. He complains of the poor quality platinum used for his magneto, and is overheard by an escaped Russian exile. The man tells Tom of a secret platinum mine, deep in Siberia. The man also explains that his brother is still in exile, and will be more useful in locating the mine. Tom organizes an expedition to save the exile and find the platinum mine.It is to note that the Russian revolutionaries in the book are referred to as the Nihilist movement. However, given the time in which the book takes place, the author would more likely have been referring to Bolsheviks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Out_of_My_Sky"title="Get Out of My Sky">
Rathe and Home are planets which form a double planet system where each keeps the same face towards the other. Since the side of Home that faces Rathe is entirely ocean, Rathe was unknown to the population of Home before an expedition to the middle of the far ocean to observe an eclipse. Having discovered Rathe, and realizing that it is inhabited, the people of Home are consumed by xenophobia. The slogan "Get out of my sky!" has been taken up by demagogues. The people of Rathe knew of Home from ancient times, but did not know it was inhabited. The inhabited side of Home was discovered by an expedition to a third planet. Now they too are afraid of the unknown intentions of their neighbors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Getting_of_Wisdom"title="The Getting of Wisdom">
Henry Handel Richardson was the pseudonym of Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, a writer who was born in 1870 to a reasonably well-off family which later fell on hard times. The author's family lived in various Victorian towns and from the age of 13 to 17 Richardson attended boarding school at the Presbyterian Ladies' College in Melbourne, Victoria. It's this experience that feeds directly into "The Getting of Wisdom".Laura Tweedle Rambotham, the main character, is the eldest child of a country family. She is a clever and highly imaginative child, given to inventing romantic stories for the entertainment of her younger siblings, and an avid reader. She is also both proud and sensitive and her mother finds her difficult to handle. Her mother is the widow of a barrister who supports her family in genteel poverty on her earnings from embroidery. At the age of twelve Laura is sent off to boarding school in Melbourne. Her experiences at school shock and humiliate the unworldly Laura. The girls at the school are generally from rather wealthy families and those, like Laura, who come from less fortunate backgrounds learn very early not to divulge their circumstances for fear of ridicule. From time to time Laura lets little snippets of information about her family slip out, and she suffers for it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_Islands"title="To the Islands">
The novel is set in a remote Anglican mission in the Kimberley in the far north of Western Australia.The protagonist is Heriot - based partially on the figure of Ernest Gribble - the principal chaplain of the mission, who commits an act of violence against an Aboriginal man, and who subsequently disappears into the wilderness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Dreamworld_of_a_Shopaholic"title="The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic">
Becky Bloomwood lives in a flat in Fulham, London, owned by her best friend Suze's wealthy, aristocratic parents. She works as a financial journalist for "Successful Savings" magazine, which she dislikes. Becky admits to knowing little about personal finance, and is thousands of pounds in debt due to reckless spending on designer homeware, clothes and beauty products, which she rationalizes as 'investments'. Despite this, she still receives letters offering her credit and department store cards. Visiting her parents in Surrey, they order her to either cut back on her spending or make more money.On her way to a press conference at Brandon Communications, Becky notices a scarf she has long craved on sale for 50% at Denny &amp; George, but realizes she has left her credit card at the office. The shop assistant agrees to hold it until the end of the day.At the press conference, Becky is greeted by a staff member of Brandon Communications, who questions her about some breaking financial news, which Becky has to feign knowledge of. After the conversation, Luke Brandon, head of Brandon Communications, informs her that one financial group recently bought another, and it is rumored that Flagstaff Life is going the same way. During the conference Becky realizes that she will not have time to return to the office for her credit card, but only needs 20 pounds more to buy the scarf. Luke overhears her asking a friend to borrow some money, and pauses the press conference to lend it to her, after she invents a story about buying a present for her hospitalized aunt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_in_Captivity"title="Tom Swift in Captivity">
Tom Swift is approached by Mr. Preston, the owner of a circus, and begins to tell the story of Jake Poddington, Mr. Preston's most skilled hunter. As it turns out, Jake went missing just after sending word to Preston that Jake was on the trail of a tribe of giants, somewhere in South America. That was the last Preston has heard of Jake Poddington. Preston would like Tom to use one of his airships to search for Poddington, and if possible, bring back a giant for the circus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Assassination_of_Jesse_James_by_the_Coward_Robert_Ford_(novel)"title="The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (novel)">
The title is based on a folk song of the era. Based on extensive research into the many contemporary accounts of Jesse James' crimes and personal life, the novel weaves a third-person narrative of actual events with fictionalized imaginings of the lives of Jesse, his brother Frank, and their followers, including their guerrilla activities during the American Civil War and their insurgency afterward as notorious bank and train robbers. Though the James brothers achieved folk-hero fame for claims that they openly shared the loot from their robberies, the novel reveals they kept all the money for themselves.Late in their career, the James brothers encounter Charley and Robert Ford, both of whom Jesse eventually recruits into his dwindling gang. Bob Ford is portrayed as a fawning sycophant who is obsessed with Jesse's national celebrity and hopes to one day attain similar renown for himself. As Jesse faces increasing pressure from the authorities, he begins to suspect those around him of conspiring to betray him. Indeed, the Fords end up negotiating a deal with the governor of Missouri to capture or kill Jesse in exchange for the offered reward and exoneration for their previous crimes.Following Jesse's murder, the Fords receive the promised acquittal and a portion of the reward money, but find themselves almost unanimously detested and ostracized by the American public. The stories of their subsequent lives and deaths are recounted against the backdrop of their notoriety as America's most reprehensible blackguards.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Melting_of_Maggie_Bean"title="The Melting of Maggie Bean">
Maggie Bean is the average seventh grader, having a tough year. Her father lost his job, and her mother is stressed about money. So Maggie focuses on keeping up her straight A average and over-consuming chocolate. But it all changes when Maggie gets a chance to try out for the synchronized swim team. Becoming a Water Wing has always been Maggie's dream. She and her friend Aimee work to complete their goal and Maggie might finally stop being a social outcast. Who would not want a cute silver bathing suit, an awesome circle of friends, and the boyfriend of her dreams? But it is all up to Maggie, and who she thinks she is. She also is forced to join the "Pound Patrollers", a club of other heavy people, where she meets Arnie, another chunky boy her age who turns out to be Peter (her dream boy's) cousin. She forms a friendship with him. At school, she also gets a little closer to Peter, though not boyfriend-girlfriend close. Her sister, Summer, Aimee, and of course Maggie herself, work to help find her dad a job. She also begins to lose weight and takes nearly 20 pounds off her original 186. She eats less, gets rid of her chocolate, and practices for the Water Wings tryouts, which she eventually nails. However, cocaptains Julia and Anabel keep her off the team, causing Maggie to become depressed. Later, her gym teacher realizes this and offers Maggie a chance to join the Water Wings OR the regular swim team. She chooses the latter. Her dad also makes progress towards getting a job through Maggie's help.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_and_His_Wizard_Camera"title="Tom Swift and His Wizard Camera">
Tom Swift is still working on his long-term project, a noiseless airship, when he is approached by James Period, the owner of a motion picture company. Mr. Period wants to hire Tom to travel around the world and take motion pictures of strange and exotic places. These films will be shown in theaters, hoping that the exciting content will draw crowds. At first Tom declines, but eventually his adventurous streak wins out, and Tom sets out with friends for some old-time reality motion pictures.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owls_to_Athens"title="Owls to Athens">
The book features the continuaing adventures of a pair of Greek traders from Rhodes. Sostratos and Menedemos arrive in Athens in time for the Dionysia. Sostratos spends much of his time visiting with his old teachers. His cousin, Menedemos finds himself having a sexual encounter with an important Athenian woman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aavarana"title="Aavarana">
Lakshmi, a rebellious, free-spirited and intelligent film-maker, breaks ties with her staunchly Gandhian father to marry Amir, the man she loves. She even agrees reluctantly to Amir's request that she convert to Islam, as a formality and change her name to Razia. However, she is shocked to discover that her husband is not the open-minded, progressive individual he claimed to be. For after marriage, Amir takes his family's side in trying to force her to follow the more rigorous tenets of their faith. This sets her off on a personal journey into India's history to uncover the many layers of religion, caste and creed. Her quest leads her to the many parallels in the narratives between the past and the present and she gradually finds that though much has changed in Indian society over the centuries, much remains the same.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frostbite_(Mead_novel)"title="Frostbite (Mead novel)">
The story begins with Rose and Dimitri traveling to meet the legendary guardian Arthur Schoenberg for Rose's Qualifier Exam. Once they arrive at the home of the Moroi family he protects, they discover a bloody massacre of the entire family and their guardians, including Arthur. Rose also discovers a silver stake, a magical device which Strigoi cannot touch, meaning the Strigoi must have had human assistance in their attack. The massacre puts the vampire community on high alert. After that, Dimitri takes Rose to meet a friend of his named Tasha Ozera, who is Christian's aunt. To keep the students at St. Vladimir's Academy safe, a ski trip to a lodge owned by a wealthy Moroi family is required right after Christmas.During the ski trip, panic sets in when news of another Strigoi attack on a royal Moroi family spreads, where one of the dead was Mia's mother. During her stay at the lodge, Rose talks to her mother and finds out that Tasha is not only a friend of Dimitri, but she also wants him to be her guardian, and even more astonishingly that she wants to have a relationship with him and as it seems Dimitri is all up for it; she also meets a royal Moroi named Adrian Ivashkov, who shows obvious interest in Rose, and later becomes friendly with Lissa after they both discover they are Spirit users. During Adrian's pool party, Mason, his friend Eddie, and Mia begin voicing their opinions about hunting Strigoi. After a heated argument with Dimitri, Rose tells Mason confidential information about the possible whereabouts of the Strigois' hideouts. Using Rose's information, Mia, Mason, and Eddie sneak out of the ski lodge and travel to Spokane, Washington, to hunt down the Strigoi themselves. Rose discovers their plan, and she and Christian run out to stop them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switchers_(novel)"title="Switchers (novel)">
Two young Irish shapeshifters (or Switchers) face the menace of an encroaching Ice Age caused by monstrous creatures in the Arctic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banaag_at_Sikat"title="Banaag at Sikat">
## Primary characters.The novel is about two friends: Delfin and Felipe. Delfin is a socialist, while Felipe advocates the works of an anarchist. As a socialist, Delfin believes and wishes to spread the principles of socialism to the public, where the citizens could have more right in all the businesses, properties, and other national activities. Although he is poor who studies law and works as a writer for a newspaper, Delfin still strongly believes that a society inclined to the cause of the poor through peaceful means, a challenge that could be achieved through violence.On the other hand, Felipe – who advocates anarchy – believes in the forceful way of destroying the existing powers and cruelty harbored by the rich landowners. He wants to dispel the abusive members of society who rule society. Even though he is the son of a rich town leader, Felipe hates the cruel ways of his father. He would rather see a society with equal rights and equal status for all its citizens: where there is no difference between the poor and the rich classes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIM_Defender_of_the_Earth"title="TIM Defender of the Earth">
The story begins with the newly appointed Prime Minister, Mr Sinclair, being taken by Dr Mckienzy to a top-secret underground lab. There he views TIM (Tyrannosaur Improved Module) sleeping in a giant tank. Mckienzy explains that the military have been developing hybrids to fight their wars, but all except Tim have died. Mr Sinclair tells her that he considers her experiment a failure and instructs her to close it down and euthanize Tim.Meanwhile, a class visits the British Museum. Chris meets a security guard, who shows him a strange bracelet, which glows when Chris goes near it. The guard clamps it on his wrist and tells him that he is now joined to the Defender of the Earth.Dr Mckienzy floods Tim's enclosure with gas, to poison him. Tim breaks out and rampages over London, scared and confused by the world that he finds himself in. He blocks London Bridge, which Chris and his parents are driving over. As he gets close to Tim, Chris's bracelet starts glowing, and Tim suddenly feels peaceful. He trots into the Thames and wades off. Swimming in the sea, Tim runs into the Kraken, who informs hims that he is going to be the 'Defender of the Earth'.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckskin_Brigades"title="Buckskin Brigades">
The book references a journal entry from Meriwether Lewis during the Lewis and Clark Expedition. In a July 27, 1806 entry, Lewis describes how he had killed a Blackfeet Native American chief during the expedition, and in another entry in the journal he mentions a white man living with the Blackfeet tribe. Part of Hubbard's story is based on this white man, referred to in the book by his Native American name, "Yellow Hair".After the death of the Native American chief, Yellow Hair attempts to protect his adopted people from fur traders. Yellow Hair is sent to join the fur traders and learn how their future operations will affect his people. The white fur traders are portrayed as evil savages.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girls_of_Slender_Means"title="The Girls of Slender Means">
The book centres on 'The May of Teck Club', a fictional institution said to have been established by Princess May of Teck during the First World War "for the Pecuniary Convenience and Social Protection of Ladies of Slender Means below the age of Thirty Years, who are obliged to reside apart from their Families in order to follow an Occupation in London". It concerns the lives and loves of its desperate residents amongst the deprivations of immediate post-war Kensington between VE Day and VJ Day in 1945. The story is framed by the news, in 1963, that Nicholas Farringdon, an anarchist intellectual turned Jesuit, has been killed in Haiti. Journalist Jane Wright, a former inhabitant of the Club, wants to research his story. The bulk of the novella is taken up by flashbacks to 1945, concerning Farringdon and the Club, to which he had been a frequent visitor. The narrative climaxes with a tragedy that results in the death of Joanna Childe, an elocution instructor, and led to Farringdon's conversion through the evil heartlessness he perceived in the behaviour of Selina, another club resident.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glamour_Girl_(novel)"title="Glamour Girl (novel)">
Leanne has turned the tables on her career and is now managing her little sister Jodie's glamour career. Jodie will do anything to get to where she wants to be and is determined to be even more famous than Leanne ever was. So she hits all the parties with one thing in mind – get noticed. She decides that to top it all off she wants the perfect man – Ben Ridely, the owner of a leading property company. But she's too busy spending his money to realise that it's not coming in the legal way. Jodie needs to be careful because if she's not she could end up in big trouble.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Janissary_Tree"title="The Janissary Tree">
In June 1826, the Sultan Mahmud II violently disbands the Janissaries (an event now known as the Auspicious Incident), once elite troops of the Ottoman Empire but now an unruly military element beyond the control of the Sultan. Ten years later, the newly Westernized and modernized Ottoman Army which replaced the Janissaries are to perform a military exercise. Ten days before the event, four officers disappear; subsequently, one officer is found dead. The general entrusts Yashim the eunuch with solving the mystery. Meanwhile, the Sultan's newest concubine is murdered and the Sultan's mother's jewelry stolen. Yashim must simultaneously investigate three different cases.The cases bring Yashim in and out of the palace, to various embassies, a mosque, and the alleyways and streets of Istanbul. To solve the cases, Yashim employs the assistance of the Polish ambassador and the wife of the Russian ambassador. He discovers that the cases are related, and that they not only involve a plot for revenge by surviving Janissaries hidden somewhere but also the power struggle between the palace eunuchs and the military's extreme pursuit of democratization. In the end, Yashim, against all odds, succeeds in preventing several conspiracies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Bus_to_Woodstock"title="Last Bus to Woodstock">
Two young women are waiting in Oxford for a bus to the nearby town of Woodstock, and they decide to hitch a lift. Later that night, one of them, Sylvia Kaye, is found murdered and apparently raped in the car park of the Black Prince pub in Woodstock.Suspicion falls on various characters. The body is reported found by John Sanders, a young man who, it later transpires, is addicted to pornography and sometimes paid Sylvia for sex. He admits to waiting for her on the night of her murder but found her dead. It turns out he interfered with the body but did not murder her.Inspector Morse discovers the lift was offered in a red car and guesses various bits of information about the owner. His discoveries lead him to calculate the chances of finding a red car in North Oxford which meets all the criteria. There is only one, and it belongs to Bernard Crowther, a don at the university who lives on Southdown Road. Crowther admits that, although married, he is having an affair with another woman. He admits giving a lift to two women and dropping them in Woodstock while on the way to meet his mistress.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelation_(Sansom_novel)"title="Revelation (Sansom novel)">
The plot centres around the challenges of Reformation England and draws on the prophesies of the Book of Revelation and features Archbishop Cranmer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_and_His_Great_Searchlight"title="Tom Swift and His Great Searchlight">
Tom has finally perfected one of his latest inventions, a "noiseless airship". This is a project Tom has been working on since the last few volumes, and now that it is finished, it appears that Tom is suddenly under scrutiny by United States border agents, who are tracking smuggling operations which utilize airships to move goods out of Canada, and avoid paying duty tax. Once Tom convinces the agents that he is not involved in smuggling, he is hired to help break up the operations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bata,_Bata..._Pa'no_Ka_Ginawa?"title="Bata, Bata... Pa'no Ka Ginawa?">
The novel began with an introductory chapter about the graduation day from kindergarten of Maya, Lea's daughter. A program and a celebration were held. In the beginning, everything in Lea's life was going smoothly – her life in connection with her children, with friends of the opposite gender, and with her volunteer work for a human rights organization. But Lea's children were both growing-up – and Lea could see their gradual transformation. There were the changes in their ways and personalities: Maya's curiosity was becoming more obvious every day, while Ojie was crossing the boundaries from boyhood to teenage to adulthood.A scene came when Lea's former husband came back to persuade Ojie to go with him to the United States. Lea experienced the fear of losing both her children, when the fathers of her children decide to take them away from her embrace. She also needed to spend more time for work and with the organization she was volunteering for.In the end, both of Lea's children decided to choose to stay with her – a decision that Lea never forced upon them. Another graduation day of students was the main event in the novel's final chapter, where Lea was the guest-of-honor. Lea delivered a speech that discusses the topic of how life evolves, and on how time consumes itself so quickly, as fast as how human beings grow, change, progress and mature. Lea leaves a message to her audience that a graduation day is not an end because it is actually the beginning of everything else that will come in a person's life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_and_His_Giant_Cannon"title="Tom Swift and His Giant Cannon">
The story opens with a discussion between Barton Swift and an old friend, Alec Peterson. Alec is trying to convince Mr. Swift to finance an expedition to locate a hidden opal mine, but Mr. Swift is reluctant. In the middle of the conversation, Tom is flying one of his airships, but gets tangled up in power lines. Mr. Peterson cuts the wires, saving Tom's life. Tom is so grateful to Mr. Peterson that Tom is willing to finance the expedition himself.In the meanwhile, the story segues to Tom's next invention, a cannon bigger than any that has been built to date. Tom hopes to sell his invention to the United States government, for use in protecting the Panama Canal, which was still under active construction at the time of the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_and_His_Photo_Telephone"title="Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone">
Tom and his father are arguing about Tom's latest idea, a photo telephone. Mr. Swift is adamant that the idea will not work, but Tom has some ideas in mind, and refuses to back down. Tom read about a recent news event where a photograph was transmitted over telegraph lines, and there is no functional difference between the wires used for a telephone to those used in telegraphs.In the meantime, some shady occurrences are happening in the neighborhood. Tom and Ned are almost run over by a speeding motor boat, operated by a con-artist known as Shallock Peters. The feud between Mr. Peters and Tom begins when Mr. Peters refuses to acknowledge the accident. The animosity between the two only grows deeper as Mr. Peters tries to buy Tom out of some of his inventions, under the guise of making a profit. Tom refuses to allow anyone other than himself permissions to his patents, and this infuriates Mr. Peters. Later, Tom learns that his good friend, Mr. Damon, is having serious financial troubles. As the plot gets thicker and thicker, one of Tom's airships is stolen, and then Mr. Damon unexpectedly disappears. All this while Tom is desperately trying to get his latest invention working.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shame_the_Devil"title="Shame the Devil">
Two ruthless killers head into a pizza place to rob the joint while one of the men's brother waits in the car. The robbery goes wrong and the men kill the restaurant's employees. The robber in the getaway car is killed by a cop and the robbers hit a little boy in their escape.The novel jumps forward two and a half years and introduces the character of Dimitri Karras, the father of the young boy. He attends grief counseling sessions with the family members of those who were killed that day. Karras begins to get used to living again when his friend, Nick Stefanos sets him up with a job as a bartender at "The Spot". Meanwhile, the robbers are plotting revenge. It all leads up to a showdown of good versus evil.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_Like_Being_in_Love_(novel)"title="Almost Like Being in Love (novel)">
The book centers around the relationship between two men, Travis and Craig, who meet and fall in love in 1978, during their senior year of high school. Travis is the school nerd, obsessed with musicals and constantly picked on. Craig is the school jock, lauded with the school's Victory Cup for athletic achievement. The two meet on the set of the school's production of "Brigadoon", and the unlikely couple began a whirlwind romance. However, after their summer together, they part and set off to different colleges. The book moves forward 20 years later, to 1998. Travis and Craig have fallen out of touch, and they both have strong careers and potential suitors. Travis is the first to realize that his first love is his only true one, and he embarks on a cross-country journey, risks his job and enters the great unknown to try to get Craig back.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_Errors"title="Reversible Errors">
"Reversible Errors" revolves around three 1991 murders for which Rommy Gandolph was convicted. It begins with attorney Arthur Raven being assigned to handle the final appeal of said death row inmate. Though the lawyer does not even want the case, he discovers some problems with the conviction. Unlikely allies are found, including the police officer who made the arrest and the judge who presided over the initial trial. It becomes a race against the clock to determine the truth. The novel's 42 chapters are arranged in two parts, titled "Investigation" and "Proceedings"; the action is set in 2001.Many of the minor characters also appear in Turow's other novels, which are all set in fictional Kindle County, located in the Midwestern United States.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Injuries"title="Personal Injuries">
The novel begins with Robbie Feaver seeking advice from attorney George Mason, the narrator. Feaver admits that he has been bribing several judges in the Common Law Claims Division to win favorable judgments for years. U.S. Attorney Stan Sennett has uncovered Feaver's secret and wants Feaver to strike a deal to get at the man he believes to be at the center of all the legal corruption in the metropolitan area, Brendan Tuohey, the Presiding Judge of Common Law Claims and heir apparent to the Chief Justice of Kindle County Superior Court. An undercover scheme is put in motion to trap the guilty parties. The novel follows the FBI as it pursues the legal community of Kindle County in a web of tapped phones, concealed cameras, and wired spies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Everybody_(book)"title="Here Comes Everybody (book)">
In the book, Shirky recounts how social tools, such as blogging software like WordPress and Twitter, file sharing platforms like Flickr, and online collaboration platforms like Wikipedia, support group conversation and group action in a way that could previously only be achieved through institutions. Shirky argues that with the advent of online social tools, groups can form without previous restrictions of time and cost, in the same way the printing press increased individual expression, and the telephone increased communications between individuals. Shirky observes that: "[Every] institution lives in a kind of contradiction: it exists to take advantage of group effort, but some of its resources are drained away by directing that effort. Call this the "institutional dilemma"--because an institution expends resources to manage resources, there is a gap between what those institutions are capable of in theory and in practice, and the larger the institution, the greater those costs." Online social tools, Shirky argues, allow groups to form around activities 'whose costs are higher than the potential value,' for institutions. Shirky further argues that the successful creation of online groups relies on successful fusion of a, 'plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain for the user.' However, Shirky warns that this system should not be interpreted as a recipe for the successful use of social tools as the interaction between the components is too complex.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Lecture"title="The Last Lecture">
"The Last Lecture" is organized similarly throughout each chapter for a total of ADD. Pausch depicts an important event in his life in the first half of each chapter. Then, he describes how this event either brought him closer to achieving his childhood dreams or taught him valuable lessons he refers to throughout his life.Chapter 1 “An Injured Lion Still Wants to Roar”: Pausch has a dilemma in deciding to give his last lecture or not. His desire to leave a tangible memory of himself for his three young children leads him to the decision to deliver his lecture despite having months left to live.Chapter 2 “My Life in a Laptop”: His objective is to collect over 300 images for the presentation that will help direct him throughout his speech. Pausch comments on an interaction he had with a pregnant woman, who was less than delighted about her unplanned pregnancy. This leads him to think about the “accidental elements” that bring people in or take people out of this world, much like his pancreatic cancer.Chapter 3 “The Elephant in the Room”: Pausch describes the beginning of his lecture, dressed in his Disney Imagineer uniform to represent achieving one's childhood dreams. He presents slides with images of the tumors on his liver, thus addressing “the elephant in the room”.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_of_the_Duanes_(novel)"title="Last of the Duanes (novel)">
Buckley "Buck" Duane is the son of a famous Texas gunslinger, a fact that brings him almost nothing but trouble. Duane shoots a man who threatens him and flees his hometown of Wellston to avoid the law. Mixing with outlaws while on the run, he clings desperately to the last of his principles until he rescues a girl named Jennie from the hands of an outlaw king. However, he loses her shortly after the escape and then begins to wander aimlessly, desperation growing as the worth of life slips away.Three years into his life on the run, he begins to hear of a Texas Ranger captain who seeks to meet him. After running in with vigilante posses of homesteaders and nearly being lynched in a town he'd never been for a murder he didn't commit, he finally seeks out the ranger captain to discover he is wanted to infiltrate and break up an elusive gang of cattle rustlers in exchange for a pardon from the governor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Stream"title="The Time Stream">
The novel concerns time travel and links the world Eos at the beginning of the universe with the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_No_One_(novel)"title="Tell No One (novel)">
David and Elizabeth Beck, both 25 years old and married for less than a year, are celebrating the anniversary of their first kiss at a secluded lake when Elizabeth is abducted and later murdered. Although the killer is found and prosecuted, David never gets over the tragic incident. On the eighth anniversary of Elizabeth's death, two long-dead bodies are unearthed at the same lake where the kidnapping occurred. In addition, David receives a shocking email from an unidentified source that mentions a phrase only David and Elizabeth should know.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'isola_di_Arturo"title="L'isola di Arturo">
In the novel, Arturo, a small boy, grows up on the island of Procida in the Bay of Naples. The island is the location of a penitentiary. Arturo lives in a gloomy mansion bequeathed to his father. The boy's education comes from books dedicated to male hero worship and chivalry in the mansion's library. Arturo idolizes his dead mother. She died giving birth to him. He worships his tall, blond father, who is often absent. Arturo is a natural athlete who enjoys boating and swimming on the island.The only creature with whom he can share joy is his dog, Immacolatella. The building of the same name, including its historic fountain, is a famous edifice that stands at the water’s edge at the port of Naples. As Arturo's mother died giving birth to him, his beloved dog dies, giving birth to her only litter of pups.When Arturo is 14, his father brings home a new bride, Nunziatella, a woman only two years older than Arturo. Hearing his parents make love at night disturbs the boy. Soon Arturo falls in love with Nunziatella, who is attracted to him but rejects his sexual advances. Nunziatella gives birth to a blond child who, for a time, replaces Arturo in her affections. Later, Arturo discovers that his father has fallen in love with a prisoner in the island's penitentiary. In the novel's finale, the convict is released from the penitentiary. Feeling betrayed by his father, Arturo leaves the enchanted island for the mainland.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mightiest_Machine"title="The Mightiest Machine">
The story is the first to feature Campbell's hero Aarn Munro. This space opera novel concerns the harnessing of energy from the sun and encounters with aliens who turn out not to be truly alien at all. It also touches on the legends of ancient civilizations on earth, Mu in this case, and what may have happened to them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Blackout"title="Final Blackout">
A lieutenant (known in the book only as "The Lieutenant") becomes dictator of England after a world war. The Lieutenant leads a ragtag army fighting for survival in a Europe ravaged by 30 years of atomic, biological and conventional warfare. As a result of the most recent war, a form of biological warfare called "soldier’s sickness" has ravaged England, and the U.S. was devastated by nuclear war. At the start of the novel, a quarantine placed on England due to the soldier's sickness prevents The Lieutenant from returning to England from his encampment in France. The Lieutenant commands the Fourth Brigade, which is composed of one hundred and sixty-eight soldiers from multiple nations, leading them throughout France in search of food, supplies, arms and ammunition. Soon, Captain Malcolm informs The Lieutenant that all field officers are being recalled to General Headquarters (GHQ) with their brigades to report to General Victor, the commanding officer at GHQ.Upon the brigade's arrival at GHQ, The Lieutenant is informed by General Victor and his adjutant Colonel Smythe that he is to be reassigned and will be stripped of his command. He is confined to his quarters and is told his entire brigade will be broken apart and assimilated into another brigade. Meanwhile, in the barracks at G.H.Q., the Fourth Brigade learns of crucial news through back channels: the existence of a vaccine for the soldier's sickness, and General Victor's plans for their brigade. The men decide to rebel, and break through the defenses of the barracks, free The Lieutenant and kill Captain Malcolm. The Fourth Brigade successfully escapes G.H.Q. in France and begins to make their way to London, along with other soldiers who are dissatisfied with General Victor's command. A battle ensues between General Victor's men and The Lieutenant's troops. The Lieutenant and his expanded Fourth Brigade eventually successfully take control of London and subsequently all of England and Wales.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loch_(novel)"title="The Loch (novel)">
American marine biologist Zachary Wallace went on an expedition into the Sargasso Sea to witness giant squids. While there, the sonar picked up a reading that the military had named the Bloop. As the bloops closed in, the three passengers aboard the submarine witnessed the giant squid mercilessly get torn apart by a number of unidentified creatures. The submarine's acrylic bubble suffered severe damage as Zachary, Hank, and the pilot quickly race to the surface. Before reaching the research boat, their submarine's bubble pops, allowing the unforgiving Atlantic to flood in killing the pilot and drowning Wallace as he pushed Hank to safety. Miraculously, Wallace survived, and sadly, after returning to South Florida to take his position at Florida Atlantic University, he finds out that David blamed him for the destruction of the sub and the death of their pilot. Fired from the university, Zachary's life goes downhill, spending all of his savings on drinks and in nightclubs. Weeks after, he receives word that his biological father is on trial for murder. His father, Angus Wallace, lives in a village on the shores of Loch Ness in Scotland. Zachary has not seen his father since his mother divorced him and moved back to the United States seventeen years ago. However, he agrees to go visit Angus when his half brother says he is needed in the trial.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smuggler's_Moon"title="Smuggler's Moon">
Sir John and Jeremy are sent to East Anglia to investigate smuggling, but when the smugglers turn to murder, Sir John takes it as a brazen assault on the law.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Brother,_My_Executioner"title="My Brother, My Executioner">
"My Brother, My Executioner", tackles the narrative about two half brothers – "Luis Asperri" and "Victor". "Luis" is the biological, yet illegitimate, son of "Don Vicente Asperri", a rich feudal landowner. At a young age, Luis was taken by Don Vicente from his underprivileged mother and half-brother, Victor, who were both living in Sipnget, Rosales in Pangasinan, a province in the Philippines. After studying in Manila, Luis became a writer and editor for a radical left-wing magazine. When Luis was finally able to return to Rosales, he found out that his half-brother, "Vic" – the nickname of Victor - became a full-pledged leader of rebels who were against the existence of rich landowners. Thus, the brothers meet again both “as allies and as adversaries” because of their opposing social beliefs, views, status and principles. These conflicts are their mutual misfortunes in life as brothers. Luis identifies with the luxury offered by city life, while Vic detests these materialistic privileges. Furthermore, although Luis considers himself as a liberal, he is more like his father, Don Vicente. He followed the will of Don Vicente by marrying "Trining", his cousin – instead of a girlfriend in Manila – in order to preserve the wealth of the family. Luis Asperri is against putting down his status as a wealthy landowner for the benefit of the peasantry. He is against the goals of the uprising of the "Hukbalahap" or "Hukbong Bayan Laban sa mga Hapon" – a “people’s army against the Japanese occupiers” represented by the leadership of his half-brother, Vic. The event occurred in Philippine history during the 1950s. The Hukbalahap remained active even after World War II.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Full_of_Married_Men"title="The World Is Full of Married Men">
Set in London in the swinging sixties, middle-aged advertising executive David Cooper cheats on his wife Linda. When he meets the young and beautiful Claudia Parker, David wants to marry her. However, Claudia has different ideas; she wants to be a model, an actress, and a star. When Linda finds out about the affair she ends the marriage and files for divorce.At first protesting, David finally relents and moves into an apartment with Claudia. After six months however, the pair are sick of each other and now that the divorce is finalized, Linda has started seeing Hollywood film producer Jay Grossman. Realizing his mistake in letting Linda go, David fails to win her back and falls into an alcoholic stupor that renders him virtually impotent and only able to perform with his mousy spinster secretary, Miss Fields, who ultimately falls pregnant with his child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stud_(novel)"title="The Stud (novel)">
Fontaine Khaled is the wife of a wealthy Arab businessman, Benjamin Khaled. She spends his money on her nightclub Hobo, partying, shopping, and lovers. She hires a manager, Tony Blake, to run her club, but it is understood that his job security is dependent on him satisfying her sexual demands. Tony loses interest in Fontaine and turns his attention to her young step-daughter Alexandra, who uses him to make another man she is interested in jealous. Tony, oblivious to this fact, pursues Alexandra while double-crossing Fontaine by making a deal with businessman Ian Thaine to buy his own club by saying that Fontaine is in on the deal. Meanwhile, Benjamin's attentions stray to model Dolores after he finds out about Fontaine's various affairs. When Fontaine is faced with Benjamin divorcing her and Tony double-crossing and leaving her to set up his own club she puts the wheels in motion to turn the tables.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_of_My_Heart"title="Sister of My Heart">
## Book one."Princess in the Palace of Snakes" follows two cousins from birth until their wedding day. The sudden death of their fathers on a hunt for rubies sends Anju and Sudha's mothers into premature labor, and the two girls are born twelve hours apart. From a young age the girls become best friends, sisters, and each other's constant companion.Anju and Sudha grow up in a household run by their three mothers: Pishi, Gouri, and Nalini. Even though Anju and Sudha call each other sisters, they are technically cousins. Pishi is the girls’ aunt. Pishi's youngest brother, Bijoy Chatterjee, married Gouri. Anju is their daughter. So in addition to Pishi and Gouri, there is Nalini, Sudha's mother.Beautiful and calm, Sudha is a storyteller and dreams of designing clothes and having a family. Anju has a fierce spirit and longs to study Literature in college. The girls get caught skipping school and this event, along with a health scare in the family, suddenly changes plans for college to plans of marriage. Book one ends with Anju and Sudha getting married on the same day. Sudha will move in with her husband and in-laws who live in another part of India. Anju's husband works in the United States, and she plans to join him after getting a visa.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday_Simmons_&amp;_Charlie_Brick"title="Sunday Simmons &amp; Charlie Brick">
Sunday Simmons is an aspiring actress. The daughter of a South American father and French mother, she left Rio de Janeiro to attend a drama academy in London. Two days after her departure, her parents were killed in a car crash.Charlie Brick was forty and famous. He was one of the best comedic actors in the world, but his relationships with women had never failed to disappoint him, including his cold, unloving wife Lorna.Herbert Lincoln Jefferson was working as a chauffeur for one of the Hollywood film companies. While his grotesquely fat wife, Marge, watched TV and ate all day, he was indulging in perverse sexual fantasies.The lives of the three characters intertwine when they meet in Hollywood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Shot_(novel)"title="Blood Shot (novel)">
V.I. Warshawski isn't crazy about going back to her old South Chicago neighborhood, but she's never been a woman who breaks a promise. Returning to her old neighborhood for a school reunion, she finds herself agreeing to search for a childhood friend's missing father, a man her friend never knew and about whom her friend's dying mother will not speak. What ought to have been a routine missing-persons case rapidly turns up a homicide; and Warshawski must battle corrupt local politicians and businessmen, who do all they can to derail her investigation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Man_(novel)"title="The Great Man (novel)">
The story takes place five years after the death, at 78, of celebrated painter Oscar Feldman, the "great man" of the title. Two competing biographers, both working to document the life and times of a man who made his fortune painting nude women, turn for information to the women who had shared his life: his wife, his mistress, and his sister, who is also a painter.Oscar Feldman was married to Abigail, the daughter of a rich Jewish family. They have a son who has autism.For many years Oscar had an affair with Teddy. Together they have twin daughters, Ruby and Samantha. Ruby never married whereas Samantha is married and has children.Oscar´s sister Maxine was quite successful as a painter earlier, but later was almost forgotten by the art community. Her brother had always been more famous than Maxine, which was quite ironic: Oscar became well known in the art world for a diptych of two female nudes, "Helena" and "Mercy". "Helena" was actually painted by Maxine. It was a picture of then lesbian lover.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight's_Choice"title="Midnight's Choice">
## Setting.Midnight's Choice is set in the city of Dublin, in Ireland. The events of the book take place "a few days after New Year", although exactly which year is uncertain.In the form of a phoenix, Tess flies out of her room to join Kevin, who is now permanently in the shape of such a magical bird. She tries to ask Kevin what has happened to him since they last spoke, but her mind is overwhelmed by the purity and beauty of the phoenix's nature, and she instantly loses interest in asking questions. The following night, she becomes worried about the restless behaviour of her pet rat Algernon, and her animal-mind detects a telepathic summons being sent to all the rats in the city. Algernon breaks out of his cage and escapes into the sewers, and as a rat Tess follows him to an empty house filled with thousands of his kind. There, she discovers that the source of the mysterious call is a male Switcher. The next day, Tess investigates the house, and sees a red haired boy standing in the doorway of a house across the street. Somehow sensing that he is the Switcher, she resolves to speak to him when she gets the chance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mislaid_Charm"title="The Mislaid Charm">
The novel concerns Henry Pickett, a traveling salesman, and his adventures after he acquires a magical tribal charm belonging to some gnomes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_(Hopkins_novel)"title="Identical (Hopkins novel)">
From the bookjacket"Kaeleigh and Raeanne are 16-year-old identical twins, the daughters of a district court judge father and politician mother running for Congress. Everything on the surface of their lives seems Norman Rockwell perfect, but underneath run deep and damaging secrets.Kaeleigh is the good girl-her father's perfect flower, something she has tried so hard to be since she was nine and he started sexually abusing her. She cuts herself and binge eats, desperate to feel something normal. Raeanne uses painkillers, drugs, alcohol, sex, and purging as an outlet to numb the pain of not being Daddy's favorite. Both girls must figure out how to become whole, but how can they when their world has been torn to shreds?"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Life_of_Ivan_Osokin"title="Strange Life of Ivan Osokin">
## Explanation of the novel's title.The title derives the experience of Ivan Osokin living and then reliving his life again in exactly the same way but with prior knowledge of his past mistakes the second time. The title is an ironic commentary on this experience.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Full_of_Divorced_Women"title="The World Is Full of Divorced Women">
In New York City, English journalist Cleo James finds her husband having sex with her best friend, and she knows it's time to end the marriage. In London, Muffin, the hottest nude model in town, finds her man wants more from her than she can give.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Blood_(novel)"title="Wild Blood (novel)">
## Setting.The (very short) first chapter of this book takes place in Dublin, however the majority of the book is set in County Clare, in Western Ireland. The story begins a few days before Tess' fifteenth birthday.At her cousins' farm, Tess discovers that the house is infested with rats, which enrages her (easily angered) uncle Maurice, who is planning to sell the nearby wood for development. Tess' cousin Orla protests, but when she mentions 'Uncle Declan', Maurice becomes furious, and terrifies them all into silence.The next morning, Orla claims that she is going to see their uncle Declan, but Tess declines the offer to join her. Kevin (who has come to help Tess through her birthday) poses as an exterminator, and Maurice agrees to pay him £100 to get rid of the rats. Kevin sets about his work, playing a flute and pretending to lure the rats in a manner similar to that of the Pied Piper; in fact he is using his knowledge of the rats' telepathic language to send out a sort of evacuation order. Unfortunately, Maurice finds the corpse of a rat a few days later and takes this as proof that Kevin did not complete his contract. He therefore decides not to pay Kevin, and orders the youth to leave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman_(novel)"title="The Sandman (novel)">
The book records the life and times of a good-natured serial killer (William "Mackerel" Burton) who murders for the fun of it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faces_in_the_Moon"title="Faces in the Moon">
The novel begins in present time. Lucie returns to her mother's house when Gracie has fallen ill. While her mother is in the hospital, Lucie stays at Gracies house, and her memories take her back to different parts of her childhood. We are offered a glimpse into a very bleak reality. Lucie is required, at the age of four, to make breakfast for Gracie and her current boyfriend, J.D. One morning while Gracie is sleeping off the drinking from the previous night, J.D. begins to verbally abuse Lucie. He mimics her; he tells her shes trash and so is her mother. All of this is being said while the four-year-old makes him breakfast. After J.D. sexually molests her, Gracie decides to take Lucie to the farm to stay with Lizzie. Unaware of the abuse, she only sees that J.D. is upset with Lucies lack of respect for two years, and most of the novel takes place during this time. It is here that Lucie hears more stories of her heritage. Arriving a child wise beyond her years to the pain of the world, Lucie's time at the farm allows her to learn how to be a child, to play, to pretend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Babysitter_(novel_series)"title="The Babysitter (novel series)">
Jenny Jeffers, a sixteen-year-old girl, takes a babysitting job for a child named Donny. While babysitting, she gets menacing phone calls from someone and finds a threatening note in her backpack. She soon figures out that Donny's father, Mr. Hagen, was the one making those calls after finding a stash of newspaper clippings in his closet. Apparently, Donny had a sister when he was younger, but she died in an accident when a previous babysitter wasn't paying attention to her.After Chuck, Jenny's love interest, comes over while she is babysitting, Mr. Hagen catches them kissing and becomes angry, having told Jenny never to invite over friends while she was babysitting, explaining how his daughter had died due to neglect of the babysitter. Mr. Hagen then offers Jenny a ride home, but she soon finds out that he is actually taking her out to a rock quarry that had been deserted for years. When they get out of the car, Mr. Hagen forces her to move to the edge of the quarry right beside a deep pit. He tries to push her, but he misses and falls to his inevitable death.Jenny Jeffers is going through a period of distress and fear, as she has narrowly survived a murder attempt by Mr. Hagen, the crazed father of a babysitting charge, who tried to push her into an abandoned rock quarry. She begins seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Schindler, because of continuing nightmares. In Jenny's nightmares, Mr. Hagen rises from the quarry as a zombie to take revenge on Jenny. A different family has contacted her for her babysitting services, but Jenny is worried about going back to babysitting after her frightening experience, and she isn't sure if she should take the job or not. After discussing it with Dr. Schindler, she decides that she should go ahead and take the offer. As she leaves, Dr. Schindler's receptionist, Miss Gurney, compliments Jenny on her shirt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig-Heart_Boy"title="Pig-Heart Boy">
Thirteen-year-old Cameron Joshua Kelsey has a serious heart condition, and urgently needs a transplant. He has been given hope and turned down twice. So in desperation, Cameron's father secretly contacts Dr. Richard Bryce, a transgenics expert. Cameron, a.k.a. Cam, finds out through coming home early and discovering his parents arguing about it. Cameron's mother, Catherine, is not happy that his father arranged this without her being involved and does not want her son to have a pig's heart. Cameron decides he wants to see his fourteenth birthday, and the rest of his life, and thus chooses to have the transplant.However, Cameron is sworn to secrecy about the nature of the transplant, but secretly he tells his best friend Marlon. Meanwhile, Cameron goes to see Trudy, the pig that will be donating a heart to Cameron. His mother announces she is pregnant because she does not want her baby to be damaged by the X-Ray needed to see the pigs. Cameron is delighted and proceeds to make recorded videos for his unborn sibling, in case he dies during the operation, which eventually goes ahead and is successful. But Cameron is furious when he discovers that Marlon has told his parents, who in turn have told the newspapers about the pig heart. Cameron is let out of hospital, but he is now famous and his family are constantly bothered by the media. Even worse, the girl Cameron likes does not want to be near him anymore because she thinks he has germs, and some animal rights protesters threaten him and his family. At some point in the book, Cameron is out with his friends (having made up with Marlon) joking about on their way to the burger shop. Then a friendly lady politely asks Cameron if his surname is Kelsey. Cameron trusts her and says yes, only for her to reveal she has a bucket of red liquid behind her back and hold it high above her head. Cameron knows what is coming and put his hands up in protest as she tips the liquid on him. He tastes the liquid and realises it is pig's blood. Marlon screams abuse and Cameron is taken to casualty.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unexpected_Guest_(novel)"title="The Unexpected Guest (novel)">
On a foggy night, the car of a man called Michael Starkwedder breaks down near an isolated house and, entering it, he finds the body of a dead man slumped in a chair. A woman stands over the corpse, gun in hand, and confesses to the murder. She gives her name as Laura Warwick, the wife of the dead man. She explains that he was always drunk and abusive. Michael decides not to turn her in to the police, and the two decide to come up with a cover-up story to protect Laura. In the end, they settle on an enemy from the past, by the name of MacGreggor, whose son was run over by Richard Warwick, the dead man, several years ago. They slip a paper in Richard's pocket with the date of the accident, saying "Paid in full." Then they stage the murder so it appears to have been recent, alerting the residents of the building.The police are soon alerted and begin to investigate. It is revealed that MacGreggor is dead, and suspicions are exchanged. Meanwhile, Michael discovers that Laura was having an affair with another man, whom she believes murdered Richard. He, however, believes her to be guilty. Finally, it is revealed that Michael is MacGreggor and he had come to avenge his son. He shouts this to Laura, along with the fact that he cares for her, and jumps through the window, running away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider's_Web_(novel)"title="Spider's Web (novel)">
Clarissa Hailsham-Brown is the wife of a foreign diplomat Henry. There are three guests in the house – her godfather Sir Rowland "Roly" Delahaye, Hugo Birch and a young man named Jeremy Warrender. When Jeremy is given the opportunity of being alone with Clarissa, he confesses his love for her. But Clarissa, taking her duties of being a faithful wife to Henry and a step mother to Pippa, rejects his proposal. Later when Pippa returns from school she indulges herself in exploring parts of the manor house with Jeremy and reveals a secret passage. The three guests then make their departure to the local golf club. Meanwhile, Clarissa is confronted by a visitor to the house, a man named Oliver Costello, who happens to be Pippa's mother's second husband as well as a drug addict. He states that in future Pippa will have to stay with her mother. He leaves the house and is escorted off by Miss Peake, the manor house's gardener. A few minutes later Henry Hailsham-Brown arrives home and innocently reveals the intended secret arrival of the Soviet Premier in London. He has to go and meet him at the local airport and will return later. The room empties and Costello is seen sneaking around the living room. Clarissa soon discovers his body in the drawing-room. It is believed that Pippa has killed him with a golf club in desperation and dilemma. Clarissa devises a plan with the three returning guests to dispose of the body. Unfortunately, before they can dispose of the body, the police arrive and say that they have had an anonymous phone call, suggesting that a murder has taken place at the house. When questioned, Clarissa and the guests all lie about the facts, hoping to cover up the murder that it is thought that Pippa has committed. Clarissa on being asked to tell the truth, changes her story a number of times and gets herself entangled in a 'spider's web'. The police soon find that Costello's body is missing. It was taken by Miss Peake to an upper bedroom so that the police wouldn't come across it while they searched the house, and the individuals are interviewed. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Lessons"title="Hard Lessons">
The book follows the lives of six Beverly Hills High School students, class of 1986, and deals with the challenges and anxieties of teenage life in modern America.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Which_Witch?_(novel)"title="Which Witch? (novel)">
The story begins when a wizard named Arriman the Awful, living in Darkington Hall, decides to choose a wife from his hometown of Todcaster; his ulterior motive is a prophecy that foretells that another, darker wizard will take over Arriman's burden of smiting and blighting, which bores him by now. It is proposed by his servant that the prophecy must have meant Arriman's son. Since Arriman has no son, nor even a wife, he decides to hold a contest in which the seven witches of Todcaster (Mabel Wrack, Ethel Feedbag, Mother Bloodworth, Nancy Shouter, Nora Shouter, Madame Olympia, and Belladonna) are to take part that will decide whom he will marry: whichever witch performs the blackest act of magic will be his bride. However, most of the witches of Todcaster are downright revolting and nasty. The exception to this is Belladonna, who is beautiful and secretly loves Arriman, but is a white witch, unable to perform any black magic.Before the contest begins, Belladonna encounters a small orphan named Terence Mugg. She helps rescue him from the orphanage and a mean matron by using an uncharacteristically dark spell to root the matron. Believing that Terence's pet worm, Rover, is her familiar, an animal that is key to her working dark magic, she and Terence agree to work together to win the competition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spare_Room"title="The Spare Room">
The novel is told from the first person perspective of a woman, Helen, who lives in Melbourne near her family. A friend Nicola, who is ill with bowel cancer, comes to stay with Helen in order to pursue alternative therapy for her disease. The cancer is considered terminal by her doctors. Helen is suspicious of the treatment and becomes more so as she sees its deleterious health effects. As the three weeks of the novel progress Helen becomes increasingly angry with Nicola for denying the seriousness of her illness, forcing those around her to do emotional work on her behalf in confronting her death, and in making light of them for doing so. At the end of the novel, Nicola returns to mainstream oncology treatment, and the doctors find that some of her symptoms are due to cancer having destroyed part of her vertebrae. The novel flashes forward to the months ahead, where Nicola returns to Sydney and eventually dies. A number of friends and family, including Helen, take turns as her caretaker. Nicola only truly embraces her death when a Buddhist friend tells her that in dying, she has something to teach them.The novel draws heavily on both events and details from Garner's life. The narrator Helen lives next door to her daughter Eva and Eva's children, as Garner does with her daughter Alice Garner and her children, and plays the ukulele as Garner does. The events in the novel are based on Garner's spending a period caring for her friend Jenya Osborne when Osborne was dying. Garner chose to use her own first name for the narrator character as she wanted to admit to the least attractive or acceptable emotions that she felt as her friend died.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Hundred_Years_Hence"title="Three Hundred Years Hence">
The novel concerns a hero who falls into a deep sleep and awakens in the Utopian states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Babel"title="After Babel">
In "After Babel" Steiner states "To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate." He challenges conventional theories of translation by maintaining that all human communication within and between languages is translation. He argues that deception was the reason for the development of different languages: it was humanity's deep desire for privacy and territory that saw the creation of thousands of languages, each designed to maintain secrecy and cultural isolation. Real translation between languages is impossible because the original meaning is always lost: the translated text is tainted by the translator's own cultural beliefs, knowledge and attitudes.Steiner states that the reason for the lack of new developments in translation theory is that translation is a hermeneutical task, "not a science, but an exact art." This is problematic for machine translation. He then presents a new translation model that combines philosophical hermeneutics with existing translation studies to form a "systematic hermeneutic translation theory". The new model comprises four "movements": trust, aggression, incorporation, and restitution. "Trust" and "restitution" honour the source text and its author's intentions, while "aggression" and "incorporation" benefits the translator.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Suffrage_of_Elvira"title="The Suffrage of Elvira">
The novel describes the slapstick circumstances surrounding a local election in one of the districts of Trinidad.Its main character is Surujpat Harbans. It also delves into the multiculturalism of Trinidad, showing the effects of the election on various ethnic groups, including Muslims, Hindus, and Europeans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Killer"title="Indian Killer">
A serial killer terrorizes Seattle, hunting and scalping white men. The crimes of the so-called 'Indian Killer' triggers a wave of violence and racial hatred against the city’s Native American population.John Smith, born Indian and raised by whites, desperately yearns for his lost heritage and seeks his elusive true identity; he also battles the severe mental illness that has plagued him since childhood. He meets Marie, an Indian activist outraged by people like Jack Wilson, a mystery writer who claims to be part Indian. As bigoted radio personality Truck Schultz incites whites to seek revenge, tensions mount and Smith fights to slake the anger that engulfs him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Torch_(novel)"title="The Torch (novel)">
The novel is set in the year 3010, in the ruins of New York after a comet has devastated the Earth. Fortune is the captain of the army of the Towermen, those who live in the remaining skyscrapers and rule the city with an iron hand. He is taken captive by the people of the Island of the Statue. There, Fortune learns of a prophecy that states that the people will be free when the torch burns in the hands of the statue. Fortune is redeemed by his captors and leads them in a revolt against his former masters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innocent_Mage"title="The Innocent Mage">
Asher of Restharven wishes to own his own boat so that he may get away from his six brothers and spend time with his father. He goes seeking fortune in Dorana and ends up in service of the young Prince Gar. Unknown to the both of them a secret organization called the Circle is watching Asher for he is the one foretold in the prophecy to save the kingdom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_of_Mijak"title="Empress of Mijak">
The book opens with the sentence "Her name is Hekat -- and she will be slave to man...". Hekat, the protagonist, is a girl born unwanted and as a burden to her family. Her unloving father beats his wife and rapes Hekat on the insistence that she should birth him more sons to plough the fields in a dry desert wasteland known as the Anvil. Food is scarce. A father who kills his own flesh and blood when it runs away, and who trade them to strange men for gold. Hekat is sold to the slave traders Abajai and Yagji. Once sold, she begins her journey to the south, through the wealthier, greener Mijak, to reach the traders' home city of Et-Raklion. Along the way, Abajai teaches her how to speak courteous Mijaki, how to dress, and how to sing and dance, and keeps her away from the rest of the slaves. Hekat witnesses love for the first time, Abajai treats her as a human, until she realizes too late, to him she is just a slave; like cattle that Abajai would fatten up to sell to Raklion, the warlord of Et-Raklion. A pretty slave that would fetch a good price from Raklion; a singing, dancing, educated courtesan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Homunculus"title="The Homunculus">
The novel concerns Colonel Horatio Bumble who has retired to his ancestral home with his wife, Helen and their Pekingese, Lady. The Bumbles are childless. Colonel Bumble employs the siblings Pete and Sarah at his home. The Colonel is also attempting to create a baby through parthenogenesis. As a result of his experiments, the Colonel is kidnapped and Sarah rescues him by employing supernatural means.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lords_of_Creation"title="Lords of Creation">
Homer Ellory awakes in the year 5000 AD after sleeping for 3,000 years and discovers the Earth in a state of barbarism. He befriends the people of North America who have been conquered by the Antarkans. Ellory leads a revolt, but is captured by the Antarkans, imprisoned in the Antarkan city of Lillamra and sentenced to death. The Lady Ermaine falls in love with him and enables his escape. He returns to North America, where he leads a second revolt. After the surrender of Antarka, he is proclaimed the leader of the Earth's peoples.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exiles_of_Time"title="Exiles of Time">
After a strange bloodstone amulet is found in an ancient Arabian tomb by archaeologists, the native employees of the expedition attack the others when they refuse to leave. One of the archaeologists, Lance Vidor, seeks refuge in the tomb, where he is transported to a different point in the time circle of Earth. Vidor finds others who have been summoned to the time period for the purpose of saving the Earth from an oncoming comet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Riven_Kingdom"title="The Riven Kingdom">
For hundreds of years, the small island kingdom of Ethrea sat in the middle of a precariously balanced treaty agreement that ensured peace. With the king on his deathbed, and no male heirs, Princess Rhian must find a way to keep the kingdom out of the hands of the evil Prolate Marlan, and prevent a war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fairy-Tale_Detectives"title="The Fairy-Tale Detectives">
Eleven-year-old Sabrina and Seven-year-old Daphne are orphans who go to live with their grandmother (who they thought was dead) in the small town of Ferryport Landing, New York. After the kidnapping of their parents and going through countless abusive foster homes, Sabrina is incredibly suspicious and hesitant to trust their grandmother. Sabrina, having been told her whole life that her grandmother is dead, believes she is an imposter. 'Granny' lives with a man named Mr. Canis, who she says helps her take care of the house. They soon find out that their grandmother is a very strange person. Her house is filled with fairy tale books, her dog, Elvis, initially attacks Sabrina, her door has eight locks and eight different keys, her car has a rope rather than a seatbelt and they are told that they aren't allowed to let anyone or anything in the house without Granny or Canis' permission first. Granny claims that she was very close with their parents and has received letters from them in the past. That night, Sabrina attempts to escape with Daphne through the woods but they are attacked by small bugs that resemble fireflies. When Granny finds them, she refers to the bugs as pixies, and keeps them away with a mysterious blue dust that seems to put them to sleep. Granny doesn't seem angry, but she has their windows nailed shut.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Po-on"title="Po-on">
The events in "Poon A Novel" happened from 1880s to early 1900s, when an Ilocano family abandoned their beloved "barrio" in order to overcome the challenges to their survival in southern Pangasinan in the Philippines, and also to flee from the cruelty they received from the Spaniards.One of the principal characters of the novel is "Eustaquio Salvador", a Filipino from the Ilocano stock who was fluent in Spanish and Latin, a talent he inherited from the teachings of an old parish priest named Jose Leon in Cabugao. He was an acolyte aspiring to become a priest. He was also knowledgeable in the arts of traditional medicine. The only hindrance to his goal of becoming a full-fledged priest was his racial origins. He lived in a period in Philippine history when a possible Filipino uprising against the Spanish government was about to erupt, a time after the execution of three mestizos, namely Mariano Gomez, José Apolonio Burgos, and Jacinto Zamora (or the "Gomburza", an acronym for the three) at the erstwhile known "Cavite" (which is then renamed to Bagumbayan; now known as Rizal Park) on February 17, 1872. There were signs that a revolution will happen, despite the lack of unity among the inhabitants of the Philippines islands at the time, as "pampangueños" generally sided with the enemy. Another approaching occurrence was the help the Filipinos would be receiving from the Americans in finally removing the governing Spaniards from the archipelago after three hundred years. The novel recreates the societal struggles in which the characters of "Po-on" were situated, which includes the protagonist "Istak"'s personal search for life's meaning and for the true face of his beliefs at principles. Throughout this personal journey, he was accompanied by a dignity that is his alone. He was assigned the task of delivering a message to President Emilio Aguinaldo, the leader of the Philippine revolutionaries, but died at the hands of American soldiers fighting at the Tirad Pass, inevitably unable to recount the contents of the letter to Aguinaldo.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauprat_(novel)"title="Mauprat (novel)">
The novel's plot has been called a plot of female socialization, in which the hero is taught by the heroine how to live peacefully in society. "Mauprat" resembles the fairy tale "Beauty and the Beast". As this would suggest, the novel is a romance. However, Sand resists the immediate happy ending of marriage between the two main characters in favor of a more gradual story of education, including a reappraisal of the passive female role in courtship and marriage. Sand also calls into question Rousseau's ideal version of the female education as described in his novel "Emile", namely, training women for domesticity and the home.The novel, set before the French Revolution, depicts the coming of age of a nobleman named Bernard Mauprat. The story is narrated by the old Bernard in his country home many years later, as told to a nameless young male visitor. Bernard recounts how, raised by a violent gang of his feudal kinsmen after the death of his mother, he becomes a brutalized "". When his cousin Edmée is held captive by Bernard's "family", he helps her escape, but elicits a promise of marriage from her by threatening rape. Thus begins the long courtship of Bernard and Edmée. The novel ends with a dramatic trial scene, similar to that in Stendhal's "The Red and the Black".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Angel's_Game"title="The Angel's Game">
"The Angel's Game" is set in Barcelona in the 1920s and 1930s and follows a young writer, David Martin.In a once-abandoned mansion at the heart of Barcelona, Martín makes his living by writing sensationalist crime stories under a pseudonym. The survivor of a troubled childhood, he has taken refuge in the world of books and spends his nights spinning baroque, "grand guignol" tales about the city's underworld.His own life begins to take on a dramatic bent, in the form of a number of complex relationships: with Pedro Vidal, his patron, with Cristina, the daughter of Vidal's chauffeur, and with Isabella, a young admirer of David and his work.Furthermore, the history of the house he lives in begins to seep into his life - in a locked room within the house lie photographs and letters hinting at the mysterious death of the previous owner. At the same time he receives a letter from a reclusive but wealthy French editor, Andreas Corelli, who makes him an irresistible offer. He is to write a book unlike anything that has ever existed—an attempt at a new religious work with the power to change hearts and minds. Yet as David begins the work, he realizes that there is a connection between his haunting book and the shadows that surround his home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomad_(novel)"title="Nomad (novel)">
The novel concerns Guy Maynard, of Earth, who is rescued from his Martian captors by Thomakein of the planet Eterne, an invisible wandering planet. After spending time on Eterne, Maynard returns to Earth where he uses the knowledge he gained to launch an invasion against the newly discovered planet Mephisto. He returns to Earth a hero, but is later court martialed and driven from the Galactic Patrol. He seeks refuge on Eterne by impersonating their ruler. When he is discovered, he flees to Mephisto and there raises an army enabling him to conquer the Solar system becoming its emperor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_Child"title="The Problem Child">
Sabrina is confronted by a mentally challenged girl who has kidnapped her parents (who may be the person mentioned in the title) and a vicious monster, continues to fight when Puck comes to save her (once again, he complains). Just then, the portal which Sabrina used to get to her parents burns out, and Sabrina and Puck are trapped in an old asylum. Puck and Sabrina escape, but Sabrina is injured by the monster. After her injuries heal at the hospital, Sabrina goes back with her family to Relda's house where they hold a celebration to welcome back Sabrina. That night, after investigating through many journals, the criminal becomes clear: Little Red Riding Hood. The following night, wanting to know about Red Riding Hood, Sabrina, Daphne, and Puck go to the ruins of the asylum where she had met the Everafter child. They search for medical files in hopes of finding a clue, but a mysterious man discovers them. He seems to know Sabrina and Daphne's name, but thinking that he is part of the Scarlet Hand, the three escape back to her grandmother's house.In the morning, Sabrina, Daphne, Relda and Puck travel to the newly built school for the opening ceremony, where Mayor Prince Charming gives a speech. However, he is distracted when the Queen of Hearts announces that she dislikes Charming's ideas and she will seek election as mayor. Suddenly, just as the chaos began, the mysterious man Sabrina had met at the ruin pops out of nowhere. He turns out to be Jacob Alexander Grimm, Relda's son and Henry's brother who gets Sabrina addicted to magic and later gets her into trouble with Baba Yaga, an ancient witch who is rumored to be a cannibal. That night, while everyone was asleep, Sabrina sneaks into the room where Jacob was sleeping, to take a look at the files in search for clues. She accidentally wakes Jacob, but instead of sending her back to bed, he explains about a few things about Red Riding Hood. The kidnapper had fallen in despair after she had lost many people that she had cared for, and thinking that her dead kitten was the ferocious monster called the Jabberwocky, she went on kidnapping other people she thought she had lost. That was how the sisters Grimm's parents were kidnapped, with Little Red Riding Hood thinking that they were her dead parents. Red Riding Hood seems evil only because of the Jabberwocky; once the Jabberwocky is killed, she is not to be feared. But Sabrina discovers that the only thing that can kill the Jabberwocky is the Vorpal blade, which was divided into three pieces and distributed to separate places in Ferryport Landing. They already have the first piece. Sabrina, Daphne, and Jacob must find the remaining two.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Beauty_(Dean_novel)"title="American Beauty (Dean novel)">
It is graduation time for the A-List crew. That means lavish yacht parties, designer caps and gowns, and saying bye-bye to high school for good. Despite the festivities, Anna is not in a partying mood. Ben has been acting distant and she is worried. Maybe her father's hot tattooed intern, Caine Manning, will help cheer Anna up! Ever since her illicit kiss with Parker, Sam has been Eduardo-less and heartbroken. But hopefully Sam will use her brains and considerable means to get creative about winning Eduardo back. And infamous Cammie? She could not care less about graduation, not when she is so close to unraveling the mystery of her mother's death. She will stop at nothing to find out the truth.The book starts out with Anna driving to Sam's pre-graduation party on her father's new yacht. While talking to Cyn, her best friend from New York, she stops to let a couple cross the street, and a woman hits the back of her car.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Are_You_Now?_(novel)"title="Where Are You Now? (novel)">
Ten years ago, 21-year-old Charles MacKenzie, Jr. ("Mack") walked out of his apartment without a word and has never been seen again. He does, however, call his mother annually on Mother's Day to assure her of his health and safety, then hangs up, leaving her frantic questions unanswered. Even his father's death in the 9/11 attacks didn't bring him home or break the pattern of his calls. Now, Carolyn MacKenzie has decided the only way to move on with her own life is to find closure and bring an end to the mystery of her brother's disappearance. This year when Mack makes his regular Mother's Day call, she declares her intention to track him down, no matter what. The following day, Monsignor Devon Mackenzie receives a scrap note reading: Uncle Devon, tell Carolyn she must not look for me. Despite the disapproval and angry reactions of loved ones, Carolyn persists in a search that plunges her into a world of unexpected danger and winding questions. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(Auster_novel)"title="Leviathan (Auster novel)">
The novel opens like a detective story as the narrator begins,&lt;br&gt;Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin. There were no witnesses, but it appears that he was sitting on the grass next to his parked car when the bomb he was building accidentally went off. According to the forensic reports that have just been published, the man was killed instantly. His body burst into dozens of small pieces, and fragments of his corpse were found as far as fifty feet away from the site of the explosion. —"Leviathan" Through his own investigations, the narrator attempts to answer questions as to who the man was who blew himself up, why he was found with a homemade bomb, and what circumstances brought him to a violent end.The story is told by Peter Aaron about the victim, Benjamin Sachs, his best friend whom he first meets as a fellow writer in a Greenwich Village bar in 1975. Peter decides to try to piece together the story of Ben's other life after agents from the F.B.I. approach him in the course of their investigation. Of their friendship, Peter acknowledges Ben's lost years of suffering and painful inner state, saying —
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem_for_a_Spanish_Peasant"title="Requiem for a Spanish Peasant">
The story is narrated by a third-person omniscient narrator who has insight into Mosén Millán's thoughts and feelings. Three distinct planes of narration exist in the novel: the present, Millán's recollections of his relationship with Paco from birth to death, and the ballad the altar boy sings which recounts Paco's life.In the present, Millán, fatigued, prays as he awaits the requiem mass with recollections of Paco's life. As he prays he rests his head against a wall—a habit—which bears a dark spot. The altar boy comes and goes and both remark on the lack of people attending mass. Millán, feeling guilty knowing that he played a role in Paco's death, asks the altar boy to leave the church to look for mass attenders in the town square when the altar boy sings the parts of the ballad that refer to Millán.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushing_the_Bear"title="Pushing the Bear">
"Pushing the Bear" tells the story of Cherokee removal in the Trail of Tears. Diane Glancy weaves the story together through the voices of a variety of characters, the majority of whom are Cherokee Indians, but also through historical documents, missionaries and the soldiers who were responsible for guiding the Cherokee along the trail. Glancy describes the horror and tribulations close to thirteen thousand Cherokee Indians faced from the months of September 1838 to February 1839.Maritole, a mother, wife, daughter and aunt, is the main voice in the novel. Her character reveals the thoughts of the women, the relationship between soldiers and those walking the trail, and the losses, both emotionally and physically, that the people suffered. Through the plethora of voices, Glancy is presents the knowledge of Indian Removal, with the perspectives of those who walked, suffered and died along the trail. After nine hundred miles of trudging through mountains, snow and water, the bitterness and pain experienced by the Cherokee is combined with their sense of helplessness and their sorrow over losing their connection with their land, their livelihood, their traditional gender roles, and their family.The novel travels chronologically through each month and location along the Trail of Tears. Glancy taps into an emotional and horrific, but historically accurate account of what many now refer to as Indian genocide. In an interview with Jennifer Andrews for the "American Indian Quarterly", Glancy tells Andrews that "the land had to give me permission to write. The ancestors had to give permission to write, too. For instance, I started off "Pushing the Bear" with one voice, and it wasn't enough. I had to go back and add her husband and everybody who had traveled with them on the Trail of Tears. It takes many voices to tell a story, and I think we carry those voices within us" (Andrews 651).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nemesis_of_Faith"title="The Nemesis of Faith">
The story of Markham Sutherland is presented through various letters, journals, and the third-person account of the novel's supposed editor, Arthur. Sutherland, under pressure from his father to become a clergyman, confesses to Arthur his reservations about accepting the Thirty-Nine Articles and contemporary English Christianity in general. In particular, Sutherland is concerned about the depiction of God in the Old Testament, God's patronage of the Israelites on non-moral grounds, the doctrine of Eternal Punishment, and the supposed inerrancy of the Bible. Sutherland was profoundly influenced by John Henry Newman in his early years, but was ultimately unable to accept Newman's doctrines. Sutherland also seeks guidance in the writings of Victorian historian and sage Thomas Carlyle (who was Froude's chief intellectual influence in later years), but finds no solutions. Tormented by his doubts and subsequent alienation from his family, Sutherland becomes morbidly depressed.On Arthur's advice, Sutherland takes orders, hoping that his doubts will eventually pass when he enters a more active life. Because of the selectivity of his sermons, however, his parishioners begin to suspect him of Socinianism. When Sutherland is tricked into making a harsh criticism of the British and Foreign Bible Society, claiming that the text of the Bible without clerical guidance is more likely to lead to wickedness than to Christian faith and virtue, his doubts are revealed, and he is forced to resign his position.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Boy,_Lost_Girl"title="Lost Boy, Lost Girl">
The novel revolves around a middle-aged writer named Timothy Underhill, struggling to help his brother Philip and his nephew, Mark, cope with the recent suicide of Philip's wife, Nancy. A perplexing series of events revolving around a haunted house, a pedophilic serial killer and the lost girl of the title, is triggered when Mark suddenly goes missing and is suspected to be the latest victim of the killer. Mark had begun to harbor an obsession, after the death of his mother, with an abandoned house on the Underhills' street. Timothy and Philip struggle to connect the threads of this mystery and find Mark before he falls victim to the horrors of the abandoned home; horrors both human and supernatural in nature.A sequel, "In the Night Room" (2004), continues the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Assassini"title="The Assassini">
Set in 1982, while the Roman Catholic Church is preparing to elect a successor to the dying pope, Callistus IV, the book describes the attempts of lawyer Ben Driskill to solve the murder of his sibling, Sister Valentine, a nun who was an outspoken activist and a thorn in the Church's side. Driskill's world-spanning investigation leads him to the discovery of a document from a forgotten monastery in Ireland, which proves the existence of the "Assassini", an age-old brotherhood of killers, once hired by princes of the Church to protect it in dangerous times; and the person who now controls them in his Machiavellian bid for power.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belladonna_(novel)"title="Belladonna (novel)">
Book ends with Belladonna making herself even more evil than the Eater of the World inside of the school that she had been kicked out of in the events of Sebastian. She traps the Eater of the World and somehow Michael finds a way to bring her back to the world.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_Dragon"title="Floating Dragon">
Set during the spring and summer of 1980, the novel deals with events that befall the affluent suburb of Hampstead, Connecticut.An adulterous housewife named Stony Friedgood picks up a man at a bar but is brutally murdered by the patron. At the same time her husband Leo, working with the Department of Defense, is involved in the cover up of DRG-16, a nerve gas that escapes its containment and rushes into the town of Hampstead. Leo works to stop the public from finding out about the gas that leaked, which already killed three men at the lab. When he arrives home the gas is above Hampstead, causing deaths and hallucinations.Meanwhile, the descendants of the founders of Hampstead have returned. Richard Allbee, a former child actor turned architect with a wife and child on the way, returns from London and is plagued by dreams and visions of his former co-actor Billy Bentley, who died: Graham Williams, an old historian who murdered a serial killer in his past and discovered a cycle of evil in the town that arrives every thirty years in the name of a monster named the Dragon; Patsy McCloud, the abused wife of Les McCloud who has psychic abilities, and Tabby Smithfield, a young child with an alcoholic father who has similar abilities like Patsy. The four connect with each other and learn from Graham that an older evil has poisoned the town and wreaks havoc, as is happening at that moment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_Home,_Charlie,_and_Face_Them"title="Come Home, Charlie, and Face Them">
Charlie Pritchard arrives in the fictitious North Wales seaside town of Permadoc on 1 April 1929. After seven years working for Cadwallader's Mercantile Bank, the 23-year-old is discontented as he takes up his job in the local branch, especially because he is to lodge with the branch manager, Ewan Rhys-Jones. Ewan and his wife, Gladys, immediately start throwing their daughter, 27-year-old Ida, at Charlie. Charlie and Ida become good friends and begin a sexual relationship, but without any romance involved.Charlie's serious interest is focused on the woman who works at the Rainbow Café, two doors down from the bank. The beautiful Delphine is the prime attraction of the Café, and Charlie learns that she runs it with her brother, Beppo. Charlie comes to the attention of the two when he stops a factory worker's advances on Delphine, long enough for Beppo to notice what is going on and intervene.Things deteriorate at Charlie's lodgings when Ida leaves for London. Gladys and Ewan assume it has something to do with Charlie, and the atmosphere at the bank, never too good, become even worse. Charlie is therefore all too ready to listen when Delphine makes a proposal to him — she, her brother and Charlie should rob the bank, tunneling from the café into the basement, where the vault is, and obtaining or forging keys to the locks. At first Charlie is dismissive, but then he decides that he has “damn all to lose”.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crooked_Zebra"title="Crooked Zebra">
Jim Stanton, the narrator, tells the tale of Bob Girard, a former college basketball player who now runs a popular basketball camp for children in South Florida.Chad Payne, an eleven-year-old basketball phenom, sneaks into the camp. Girard rescues Chad from a broken home and encourages him. Eventually, Chad grows up, becomes a star and signs with Duke University. Meanwhile, Girard becomes a college basketball referee with troubled finances. Bob begins to make extra money by fixing games, he becomes so good at it, and so greedy, that he, with support from the mafia, attempts to fix the national championship game.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brethren_(novel)"title="Brethren (novel)">
The novel describes the fictional story of a young teenager by the name of William Campbell who starts out as a sergeant and later is promoted to a full Knight Templar. He is tasked with the search of the Book of the Grail which, if ever in the wrong hands, could potentially result in the downfall of not only the Anima Templi (a secret order within the Temple), but also the Temple itself. However, Will finds he's not alone in the search of the book. There are also Prince Edward and The Order of the St John's or the Hospitallers who want the Book as part of their plans to bring down the Temple.The story of Will Campbell runs parallel to that of Baybars Bundukdari, a slave who rose to become Sultan of the Mamluks motivated purely by his hatred of the Franks. In the earlier parts of the story, Will does not know that his father James Campbell is also part of the Anima Templi (or Brethren) and that there is a contact deep within Baybars' circle of trusted advisors who works with the Brethren to achieve long-lasting peace in the Holy land and the reconciliation of the three dominant faiths of the West: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrior's_Return"title="Warrior's Return">
"Warrior's Return" picks up from the previous volume, with Graystripe and Millie just having found the ruined ThunderClan camp. The duo leave it behind and find Ravenpaw (a former Clan cat) and Barley, loners introduced earlier in the series. Ravenpaw and Barley help them continue their quest to find the Clans before returning to their barn. Graystripe and Millie plan to go to the sun-drown-place (Atlantic Ocean), which was where Ravenpaw told them the Clans had planned to go.On their travels, a fight emerges between Graystripe and Millie about how much help they can accept from Twolegs. At a gas station, Graystripe is hit by a car, and is nursed back to health by Millie and Diesel, a loner who lives by the gas station. As Graystripe recovers, he tries to confess that he is sorry to Millie, though Diesel gets in the way. Millie tells Graystripe that the fastest way of getting to the ocean (where they will find the Clans) is by a truck, which forces him to make a choice; to use Twolegs to help him find his Clan and go against the warrior code, or take longer to find his Clan. The duo decide to use the truck to get to the Clans. The volume concludes with Graystripe and Millie finding the Clans and Graystripe apologizing to Millie and also asking her to be his new mate. When Graystripe and Millie see the Clans in the middle of a Gathering, Firestar welcomes Graystripe and Graystripe introduces Millie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_Scarface"title="Son of Scarface">
The autobiography chronicles the author’s broken childhood as he uncovers family secrets that his abusive mother attempted to keep him and his sister from pursuing.As an adult he seeks the truth about both his grandfather and his father, who used a fraudulent birth certificate. After years of genealogical research and interviews of close family friends Chris Knight concludes that his father is a hidden son of Al Capone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roxy's_Baby"title="Roxy's Baby">
Roxy is a fifteen-year-old girl living with her mother, her younger sister, and her new step-dad. Upset about her father's death and resentful of her mother remarrying, she begins to rebel. She attends a party where she has sex for the first time. Soon realising she's pregnant, Roxy runs away from home in fear. She goes to London, hoping to stay a shelter she read about, but quickly leaves when she realises the woman in charge will phone the police, when she learns Roxy is underage.Luckily, she finds help in the form of Mr and Mrs Dyce, a couple who host young pregnant women in their country house. Things quickly become suspicious; the girls in the Dyces' care are completely cut off from the rest of the world, not allowed to leave the grounds, or even read newspapers or listen to the radio, and once a girl is sent into the birthing room she's never seen again. The Dyces have answers to all of these, but things still seem odd.One night Roxy slips out, and discovers the Dyces have an extremely sinister motive behind their kindness...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_Net"title="Flower Net">
The time frame for "Flower Net" is January 10, 1997 – March 14, 1997. The main narrative ends February 13, 1997—just before the death of Deng Xiaoping on February 19. Much of the story involves flashbacks to the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and its traumatic impact on the lives of a great number of people. The novel's key characters are Liu Hulan, inspector in the Ministry of Public Security and a Red Princess, and David Stark, Assistant U.S. Attorney, who loves her. Gary Krist writes that "Hulan is a provocative mixture of vulnerability, bitterness and hardheaded practicality," a survivor of the Cultural Revolution who has learned that survival means hiding her emotions from the outside world.The book begins with the murders of two young men, one the son of the U.S. ambassador to China and the other the son of one of the richest and most powerful men in China. For reasons not clear to Hulan and David, the Chinese and American governments come to the unusual agreement that the two should jointly investigate the murders. Their initial assumption is that the killings must be related to the Rising Phoenix, a criminal gang operating in both China and Los Angeles. The case is complicated because Hulan and David have previously been lovers, and each is devoted to his or her country. See also describes Vice Minister Liu and his frosty relationship with Hulan, his daughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goddess_of_Yesterday"title="Goddess of Yesterday">
Anaxandra is the only daughter of Chrysaor, a chieftain who rules an uncharted island in ancient Greece. One day King Nicander of Siphnos comes and demands hostage and tribute, he takes Anaxandra to be the playmate of his daughter Callisto. Unable to return home, she comes to love the small island of Siphnos and lives there for six years with Nicander's family.One day, ships come into Siphnos harbor and kill everyone except Anaxandra, who survives by pretending to be Medusa by wearing an octopus on her head. Found by Menelaus, king of Sparta, Anaxandra assumes the identity of Princess Callisto, believing that Menelaus will otherwise abandon her. Brought into Menelaus's household in Sparta, all the members of his family welcome her, except Menelaus’s beautiful wife, Helen. Suspicious of "Callisto," Helen's animosity towards Anaxandra places her in greater danger than ever.When Menelaus Leave for Crete to repay its king for slaves, Paris, a prince of Troy arrives to plunder Sparta's treasury and takes an eager Helen away with him. To save Helen's daughter Hermione from leaving, Anaxandra takes her place and soon becomes the sole protector of Helen's infant son, Pleisthenes. Upon arriving in Troy, Anaxandra is exposed again by Helen, who will stop at nothing to make Anaxandra suffer and neglects her own son in favour of her new life as the bride of Paris.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Notice"title="Black Notice">
Dr. Kay Scarpetta is still shocked by the tragic loss of Benton Wesley. She is trying to carry on, but she gets a letter from Benton, written before his death and left to Senator Lord, who had agreed to deliver it a year after his death.Dr Scarpetta and Marino start working on a new case after a body is found in a container arriving from Belgium. There is writing in the container that says "Bon voyage, le loup-garou" (Have a nice trip, the werewolf). The body has a strange tattoo and wears rich clothes and there are some baby-like hairs inside the garments. Kay and Marino get in touch with European Interpol and with Jay Talley, who calls them and asks them to fly to Paris and meet the Chief Medical Examiner. They discover that the body found in the container is a member of one of the richest and oldest families of Paris, the Chandonnes, who live in an ancient mansion on the Île St Louis. It is also rumored that this family have a son with a rare disease that makes hair grow on his entire body (hypertrichosis). This person has always been hidden, and he is believed to have committed several murders. Kay and Jay have a short liaison, although Scarpetta tries to keep him at distance. Kay finds out that Lucy is in part involved in this case, since she is investigating a Miami group of weapons and drugs smugglers related to the Chandonnes, the "One Sixty-Fivers".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_the_Saurials"title="Song of the Saurials">
This novel is the final book of the Finders Stone Trilogy. Akabar bel Akash has visions that the god Moander is returning to the Realms, so he brings the band of adventurers back together again to counter this threat. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_of_the_Dead_Army_(novel)"title="The General of the Dead Army (novel)">
In the early 1960s, nearly 20 years after the end of the Second World War, an Italian general, accompanied by a priest who is also an Italian army colonel, is sent to Albania to locate and collect the remains of his countrymen who had died during the war and return them for burial in Italy. As they organise digs and disinterment, they wonder at the scale of their task. The general talks to the priest about the futility of war and the meaninglessness of the enterprise. As they go deeper into the Albanian countryside they find they are being followed by another general who is looking for the bodies of German soldiers killed in World War II. Like his Italian counterpart, the German struggles with a thankless job looking for remains to take back home for burial, and questions the value of such gestures of national face value.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Bonny_Light_Horseman"title="My Bonny Light Horseman">
The story starts with Jacky back on sea after visiting her dear friend, Amy Trevelyne, after her adventures throughout the U.S. frontier. She sails her ship "Nancy B. Alsop" while waiting for Jaimy to come back from the Orient to marry her.Soon though, a British warship, HMS "Dauntless" has come to imprison Jacky and her crew but after an intense confrontation with Bliffil (an old nemesis of Jacky's) and British soldiers, Jacky surrenders, asking that the British spare her crew. Much to their dismay, Captain Hudson and the officers accept her request and sail away. Despite Jacky's skeptical attitude once aboard, she is realized as nothing but a young, innocentgirl that was wrongly labeled a rogue by King George, despite Bliffil's accusation of her being known as "Tuppence a lay" on HMS "Dolphin" and a threat to every man board. She soon meets up with two acquaintances, David "Davy" Jones and Joseph Jared; she also befriends the Dr. Sebastian and Captain Hudson of the Dauntless.Bliffil nags at Jacky, bullying her until the crew can not take it anymore. The crew, especially Jared, threaten him on several occasions should Bliffil ever again threaten her. Jacky gains her freedom from the ship for being a docile captive. She takes up with Dr. Sebastian and paints him a much-acclaimed portrait and portfolio. He shows her a rare Mexican dung beetle and she meets his other assistant. Once Captain Hudson hears and sees of her talent, he has her paint him a portrait of his own. Later, Hudson and Sebastian meet in private discussing how they feel about Jacky being thought of as a "rogue" and a "pirate" by the King himself.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_and_Key_(novel)"title="Lock and Key (novel)">
After her drug and alcohol addicted mother abandons her, child services forces 17-year-old Ruby Cooper to move in with her sister, Cora, who had left for college when Ruby was young. Ruby is upset about this arrangement and continues to wear the key to her old home on a chain around her neck. After learning she will be transferring to a new high school, Ruby attempts to run away but is found out. Nate Cross, Jamie and Cora's next-door neighbor, covers for her. Over the span of the story, Ruby slowly becomes closer to Nate. As Ruby adjusts to her new life, she learns Cora had not been avoiding her; in fact, Cora had been trying to rescue Ruby from their mother but had always been stopped. Ruby feels overwhelmed with all this, so she skips school to take alcohol and drugs, and later finds herself in Nate's car when he picks her up. Ruby comes home to a furious Jamie, who accuses her for being ungrateful to him and her sister. Having seen resemblances between herself and her mother that night, Ruby becomes determined to change her ways.One of Nate's clients, a high-strung woman named Harriet, offers Ruby a job at her jewelry store in the mall. Harriet's business booms after a line of key-shaped pendants, inspired by Ruby's necklace, becomes an instant hit. Harriet struggles with a conflict of her own: Because of her independence, she is reluctant to form a relationship with Reggie, who owns the kiosk next to her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fearless_Fourteen"title="Fearless Fourteen">
Stephanie Plum apprehends Loretta Rizzi for failure to appear in court, but Loretta, who is a distant cousin of Stephanie's policeman boyfriend, Joe Morelli, agrees to go along only if Stephanie will take care of her son, Mario. Unfortunately, Loretta has no collateral and no relatives willing to sign for her, so she has to remain in jail. Stephanie is now responsible for Mario, a.k.a. Zook, who is obsessed with playing "Minionfire", a popular MMORPG.Meanwhile, Ranger needs Stephanie's help with a job: Brenda (a famous one-name singer like Cher or Madonna) is coming to town and she needs security, so Stephanie reluctantly obliges. Stephanie and Ranger's assorted merry men help to protect Brenda from PETA protesters, women protesting Brenda's breast augmentation, and Brenda's cousin/stalker, Gary, who claims to have psychic abilities since being struck by lightning. Loretta is eventually bailed out, but within hours of her release, she is kidnapped. Stephanie contacts Loretta's brother, Dom, who has a history of anger issues and has just finished a prison term for a bank robbery of $9 million. Dom is enraged to learn that his nephew has been staying at Morelli's, and alleges that Mario is Morelli's son (as Loretta had never revealed the identity of his father) and threatens to kill Morelli.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Interior_(novel)"title="The Interior (novel)">
"Flower Net" ends on March 14, 1997. The setting of "The Interior" is summer 1997—China "post- Deng Xiaoping", a period characterized by "an unholy alliance between post-Deng Communism ('market socialism') and American capitalism", the China of Jiang Zemin. In the novel the narrator speaks about the times in more personal terms: "As the saying went, the blade of grass points where the wind blows. The only problem was that the wind was blowing in so many directions these days no one could completely protect himself".The plot centers on the conniving of American and Chinese businessmen to exploit poorly paid Chinese workers, especially women, for profit and power. See describes in great detail the dangers women face because they work in an American toy factory, located in a remote part of the interior of China, that lacks adequate safety protections and is a virtual fire trap. Miaoshan was working at the toy factory before her death. Elisabeth Sherwin quotes Lisa See speaking about the role of Chinese working women from a somewhat different perspective: "'The women making $24 a month in those factories are changing the face of China . . . They are making enough money to open up small stores in their home villages. These women are working at a free market economy and are providing an economic value they never had before.'"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_Fowl_and_the_Lost_Colony"title="Artemis Fowl and the Lost Colony">
In Barcelona, Spain, Artemis Fowl II and Butler, his bodyguard, wait for a demon. They suddenly encounter a demon who transports Artemis through time. Before Artemis is lost in time, Butler is able to get a hand on Artemis and pull him back to the present, thanks to the silver cuffs he is wearing. Meanwhile, Wing Commander Vinyáya brings Holly Short and Mulch Diggums, who have recently been working on their semi-successful PI business, to secret organization Section Eight, an elite squad whose work includes the monitoring of demon activity. The island of Hybras was lifted out of time at the battle of Tailte by the demon warlocks to allow the demons to recover so they could resume the fairy war with humans. However the process went wrong and the demons have been unable to return. Occasionally demons appear on Earth when they are pulled back due to their strong connection to the Moon. Foaly informs Holly that Artemis was able to predict such a demon materialisation when Section 8 could not. Holly is sent to ask Artemis how he could chart the information so accurately.On Hybras, which is suspended in "Limbo" (where time is nonexistent), No.1, an imp, is bullied because he is the oldest imp not to have "warped" (changed into a mature demon), and is repulsed by the desire of his kind to return to Earth and take revenge on humanity. After accidentally turning a wooden skewer into stone, No.1 wonders if he is the first warlock since the battle of Tailte, when all the warlocks were supposedly killed during the casting of the time-spell, trapping Hybras in Limbo. Leon Abbot, the last survivor and warhero of the battle of Tailte, now leader of the demon pride, uses something suspiciously like the mesmer to urge No.1 to jump into the island's volcano (used to cast the time-spell) and reach the human world. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daddy_(novel)"title="Daddy (novel)">
Secretly, though Sarah has always longed for more than to be just a mother. She and Oliver married young and she became pregnant on their honeymoon. She began planning for an abortion until Oliver found out and was thrilled about the baby. At the time they were living in a small New York apartment and Benjamin had colic quite badly and was driving Sarah nuts. When Benjamin was only a year old though Sarah discovered she was pregnant again, and again planned for an abortion. Oliver fought her on it again, and their daughter Melissa was born. With their apartment growing smaller by the day, they bought their house in Purchase, not far from Oliver's parents, and Sarah concentrated on driving car pools, PTA, and taking the children to various activities. When Melissa was five and Benjamin nine, Sarah discovers she is pregnant again, as the result of the vacation she and Oliver took. Beyond upset, she plans for an abortion with her family doctor who asks how Oliver feels about what she's doing and she admits he doesn't know she's pregnant. He insists she talk to Oliver before the procedure is performed and again he is thrilled about the baby and horrified that she would consider an abortion. They fight about it for several days but in the end she keeps the baby, and reassures him daily that she will not care about it. Oliver promises to love it for both of them, and baby Sam is born on Election Day. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Single_Man_(novel)"title="A Single Man (novel)">
George, an English professor, is unable to cope with the despondent, bereaved nature of his existence after the sudden death of his partner, Jim. Throughout the day, he has various encounters with different people that colour his senses and illuminate the possibilities of being alive and human in the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_All_Things_Ending"title="Against All Things Ending">
Thomas Covenant is resurrected by Linden Avery. He is once again a leper, and his mind slips in and out of human reality as an after-effect of spending millennia as part of the Arch of Time. As a result of the combined use of wild magic, Earthpower, and Loric's "krill", the Worm of the World's End has been awakened, and is moving towards the Land to drink of the Earthblood. This will result in the destruction of all things, the breaking of the Arch of Time which encompasses the Earth, and subsequently the release of Lord Foul. The "Elohim" are fleeing to the farthest reaches of the Earth to avoid being eaten by the Worm.Major enemies to Linden and Thomas include Lord Foul, the Worm, Kastenessen, Roger Covenant, Joan Covenant (possessed by a Raver), She Who Must Not Be Named, and other creatures loosed upon the land. Linden Avery, accompanied by Ramen, Giants, and "Haruchai", seeks to find a way to stop Joan's "caesures", find and free her son Jeremiah, and stop the Worm of the World's End.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Dark"title="The Last Dark">
## Part one.On the promontory where Foul's Creche once stood, Thomas Covenant, Clyme, and Branl are met by Covenant's old "Haruchai" companion Brinn, who became the Guardian of the One Tree during his quest for a second Staff of Law. The aged Brinn renounces the Humbled's actions, likening their Mastery of the Land to "simony" and stating his shame. The Humbled, who hold ' Brinn in great respect, are affected by his judgments, but do not relent. They are further troubled by him when Brinn then chooses to ignore them; with the Worm of the World's End roused, Brinn has arrived to give Covenant counsel and healing. He informs Covenant that following Joan's death, the Raver ' Herem has fled north to Sarangrave Flat in an attempt to possess Horrim Carabal, the lurker of the Sarangrave. Brinn advises that Covenant kill the Raver rather than return to Linden, and cryptically reminds him that the "" is "capable of much". Brinn then heals him from the hurts gained from Joan, but also causes Covenant to fall unconscious.When Covenant rouses, he and the Humbled use wild magic to teleport several times towards the Sarangrave. The Raver has already begun his attack on the lurker, but because the lurker is so large, he cannot possess it easily or quickly. With the help of the Feroce and the lurker's consent, Covenant uses the ' to chop off the possessed tentacle and jumps into the swamp after it, attempting to kill the Raver inside. Before he can reach the sinking tentacle, Branl pulls him out of the water and Clyme allows ' Herem to possess him, and in turn Clyme holds the Raver within him (similarly to Grimmand Honninscrave's actions in Revelstone). Remembering that "" Sheol was only "rent", Branl uses the "krill" to disembowel Clyme and brutally chops him into pieces, killing both him and the Raver.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Formidable"title="Conan the Formidable">
The novel opens with Conan walking into Shadizar through the Karpash Mountains. He is ambushed by some bandits in the mountains and rescued by a giantess named Teyle. She leads Conan back to her village in the swamp they inhabit at the foot of a mountain. The swamp is also inhabited by Vargs, who are described as "Green dwarves" and act more like goblins or orcs. Upon arriving, he is knocked out by Teyle to be experimented upon by the request of Raseri, the village chieftain and Teyle's father.Conan awakens inside a cage made from the bones of giants and finds he's being experimented upon by Raseri. Raseri is performing research on the physical endurance of damage in humans. Meanwhile, Dake the freakmaster is on his way to the giant's village with his entourage of Penz the wolfman, Tro the catwoman, Sab the four-armed man, and Kreg his assistant. Dake's mission is to capture a giant and a "green dwarf" for his freak show.On the way, Dake's freak show is attacked by Vargs, but the creatures are scared off by a massive red demon which Dake summons (which is an illusion). Penz captures one of the Vargs at the behest of Dake. Dake promptly hypnotizes his Varg into servitude. The Varg that is captured turns out to be Vilken, the son of Fosull, a Varg chieftain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fermata"title="The Fermata">
Arno Strine, a temp in Boston, discovers he can stop time when he is a young man. He works on this power, and learns how to trigger and control these time stoppages. However, instead of becoming rich or a diabolic criminal, Strine becomes an elaborate voyeur. He stops time so that he can see women naked, and eventually creates scenarios that he can watch after he allows time to start again. But despite his enjoyment of this power, Arno wants a real relationship, and he overcomes his shyness to begin a relationship. When he finally consummates this relationship, his power to stop time passes to his girlfriend, whose own time adventures begin. Arno works on the story of this time power, under the title "The Fermata."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brasyl"title="Brasyl">
Brasyl is a story presented in three distinct strands of time. The main action concerns Marcelina Hoffman; a coked-up, ambitious reality TV producer in contemporary Brazil, a striving amateur capoeirista who transcends the cliches of luvvy television phony and becomes a full-fledged, truly likable person as we watch her embark upon a mad new project. Marcelina is going to find the disgraced goalie who lost Brazil a momentous World Cup half a century before and trick him into appearing on television for a mock trial in which the scarred nation can finally wreak its vengeance.Another strand is set in mid-21st century São Paulo, at a moment when the first quantum technologies are reaching the street, which industriously finds its own use for these things. Q-blades that undo the information that binds together the universe, Q-cores that break the crypto that powers the surveillance state that knows every movement of every person and object in Sampa and beyond.The final strand is an 18th-century "Heart of Darkness" adventure in the deep Amazon jungle, following an Irish-Portuguese Jesuit into slaver territory where he is sent to end the mad, bloody kingdom of a rogue priest who scours the land with plague and fire. He is joined by a French natural philosopher, who intends to reach the equator and discover the shape of the world with a pendulum.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Sullivan_Is_Getting_Married"title="Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married">
Lucy visits a fortune teller with her three mis-matched friends, and a marriage is predicted in her future. When the fortune-teller's prophecies for her friends come true, Lucy begins to suspect that she will soon be marrying. Lucy spends the following 12 months looking for Mr Right. Various eligible bachelors are introduced, among them Gus, Lucy's unreliable lover; Daniel, her oldest friend; Chuck, a handsome American; and Adrian, the video shop man. This is followed by a series of disastrous dates, drunken nights out, confessions and revelations. Author Keyes has said, "I'm very fond of that book and I think I have the most affection for Lucy Sullivan as a character. There's a lot of me in there [...] I wanted to write about a single girl in London who goes out with eejit after eejit, you know, because that was really the life I had led, and there was this strange culture of singleness I encountered and I found this very funny. Lucy's depressive, but she has a sense of humour, and that's why I like her."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_da_Tropa"title="Elite da Tropa">
Based on real facts, this book recounts stories about the Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais (BOPE), considered an elite squad in Rio de Janeiro's Military Police. The book depicts the officers from BOPE as an incorruptible and extremely violent troop.This book also describes the plan to assassinate Leonel Brizola, the then governor of Rio de Janeiro.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_Lovely"title="Wicked Lovely">
## Summary.The story follows main protagonist, Aislinn, who is attempting to navigate through adolescent life alongside a constant struggle with her life-long ability to see faeries and fey-kind. Though invisible to most mortals, faeries live among them, often playing the trickster, living on the fringes, with only the most prominent faeries possessing the power to reveal themselves to the human world. The court fey, the royalty amongst their kind, do not often concern themselves with human kind, which is why Aislinn is disconcerted when she finds that two such powerful fey have begun following her.Keenan, King of Summer, and Donia, the Winter Girl, are at odds, as they have been for decades, both trying to win over Aislinn for their own ends; Keenan believes she may be his new Summer Queen and hopes she will take up this mantle and the risks that involves, while Donia is bound by the rules of the Winter Queen to warn Aislinn of the consequences that may befall her, should she choose to take Keenan's hand. Unbeknownst to the two quarrelling fey, Aislinn seeks safety within the protective, iron walls of her friend Seth's transformed-trainyard home, and comfort from the arms of Seth himself, whom she has developed feelings for.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_the_Moon"title="Keeping the Moon">
While her mother, a famous television fitness coach, is on promotion tour in Europe, fifteen-year-old Colie has to spend the summer holidays with her aunt Mira in Colby, North Carolina. Having endured a tough time at school, Colie is not looking forward to Colby. In her hometown Charlotte, Colie is an outsider as she used to be very overweight and, after losing weight, mean rumors about her being easy to get were spread.After Colie arrives at the train station in Colby, she is picked up by Norman, Mira’s subtenant. Soon after her arrival Colie gets to know Morgan and Isabel who serve as waitresses in the Last Chance Diner where Norman is working as cook. At first, Colie is very dismissive but later regularly helps out in the restaurant. Over time, her initial defensiveness vanishes and they become friends. Also, she enjoys staying with her eccentric but warm-hearted aunt. In the course of a painting project, she and Norman get closer. During the festivities for the Fourth of July, Colie encounters the girl which spread the rumors at her school. She is able to stand up to her and gets the number of her handsome cousin.In the end, Colie falls in love with Norman and while watching the eclipse of the moon they try to help Morgan to get over the break-up from her long-time boyfriend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vintner's_Luck"title="The Vintner's Luck">
The novel chronicles the life of a peasant winemaker, Sobran Jodeau, and his long and enduring relationship with the angel Xas over 55 years. It opens with 18-year-old Jodeau, drunk and unhappy in love, on the ridge of the sloping hills of his family's vineyard in Burgundy. Jodeau stumbles upon what he initially thinks is a statue, but which turns out to be the angel Xas. Xas is described as physically beautiful, and appearing as a young man with white wings and whiter skin, smelling of snow. Jodeau believes that Xas is his guardian angel, and Xas promises to toast his marriage the following year.Xas thereafter visits Jodeau in the same place, once a year, with each annual visit constituting a chapter of the book, and their relationship develops. Each chapter title bears the year and the name of a different stage in the wine-making process. The first chapter is titled "1808 "Vin Bourru" (new wine)". The second chapter, "1809 "Vin de coucher" (nuptial wine)", records Jodeau's marriage to Céleste against parental opposition, and the birth of their daughter. As time goes on, Jodeau joins the French army and travels to Moscow with his best friend Baptiste Kalmann as part of the Napoleonic Wars, inherits the family vineyards after his father's death and becomes prosperous. At each annual visit he and Xas discuss Jodeau's life and family, and events in the village (including the murder of two local girls), and Xas gives Jodeau brief details about the afterlife and of his relationship with God and Lucifer; he appears to embody a mysterious treaty between the two.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Underdog_(novel)"title="The Underdog (novel)">
"The Underdog" is about Cameron Wolfe, a 15-year-old boy and a down-and-out character, his family, and a girl he falls for. Cameron struggles with his identity, questions his morality, and tries to overcome feelings of inadequacy. Cameron shares a room with his older brother, Ruben, who is always coming up with petty criminal activities he never follows through with, such as robbing a dentist only to be distracted by the beautiful nurse working there. His sister, Sarah, is always "going at it" with her boyfriend, Bruce. His brother, Steve, is successful and thinks he is above the rest of his family. His mother works hard all week and still manages to complete motherly duties, and his father is a plumber. Cameron starts working for his father on weekends, where he meets Rebecca Conlon, a girl who he thinks is perfect. The culminating event of the novel is Sarah and Bruce's break-up. Her emotional reactions engages and unites all of the family. Cameron is particularly affected by the fallout and questions his own treatment of women. As the break-up is unfolding Cameron is also asked to help his former best friend, Greg, with some money issues. Greg gets entangled in a drug buying fiasco and Cameron must lend him the money to get him out. Much of the emotional landscape of the novel is established through Cameron's vivid dream sequences, which allow the reader a glimpse into his deeper feelings. The story is about boys' dirty habits, family sticking together and being an underdog.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Otterbury_Incident"title="The Otterbury Incident">
The novel is set in the immediate post-World War II period in the fictional English small provincial town of Otterbury. The town was largely untouched by the war apart from one accidental hit from a mis-targeted bomb which destroyed a few buildings near the centre of the town; schoolboy Nick Yates was pulled from the ruins and his parents were killed. The bombsite is known locally as the "Incident" of the book's title, and is used as a site for war-games by two rival gangs of boys from the local King's School: Ted's Company, led by 13-year-old Edward Marshall, whose second-in-command is George, the narrator, and which includes Nick, Charlie Muswell and Young Wakeley, and the 'enemy' Toppy's Company, led by William Toppingham (also 13) and his sidekick Peter Butts, and including the ghastly Prune.After a battle during the school lunch-hour ("dinner-interval") in which Ted's Company have been declared victorious, the boys are wildly kicking a football to each other on the way back to school when Nick accidentally kicks it through one of the school windows. After owning up, he is ordered by the headmaster – a character much feared by the boys – to pay for the damage out of his own pocket. The sum concerned amounts to nearly five pounds (a huge amount - a reasonable weekly wage for an employed adult at the time and is far beyond the means of a schoolboy). Compounding the problem, the orphaned Nick now lives with his aunt and uncle who have no children of their own; they resent the unlooked-for responsibility and do not treat him well, and he cannot face confessing to them for fear of their reaction (when he finally does, he is severely punished and his uncle decides to sell Nick's puppy).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Bones_(See_novel)"title="Dragon Bones (See novel)">
At the start of the novel, the couple mourns the death of their young daughter Chaowen. Guilt and anguish have driven the lovers apart, unable to get past their mutual loss. Hulan's inner turmoil is made even worse when she is forced to shoot and kill a woman at an All-Patriotic Society rally to save a young girl from being stabbed by her mother. The Chinese government opposes the Society as a threat to public order, an opinion that Hulan strongly shares.Hulan and David are brought together to work on the same case from different perspectives. Hulan is sent to an archaeological site near the construction of the massive 3 Gorges Dam project to investigate a suspicious death. In an NPR report, See emphasizes the potent symbolism of the Dam, alluding to a 4,000-year-old Chinese saying: "He who controls the water controls the people". She concludes her report by returning to the same idea: ". . . no matter how the outside world views the dam, inside China it will be there to remind the people of a sage emperor; in other words, the current government, who serves the people by controlling the waters". David is sent to the same site to find out how precious Chinese artifacts are being smuggled out of China. The archaeologists at the site are working frantically to find as many antiquities as they can before the dam is completed, flooding their dig site as well as many others. They are especially interested in finding evidence that people in the area have maintained continuous culture for 5000 years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Rats"title="War of the Rats">
The plot focuses on a 1942 battle between the Nazi Germans and the Soviets set in Stalingrad, Soviet Union. The battle is declared by Viktor Tabori to be "Rattenkrieg"; translated, "War of the Rats".The story focuses in on the lives of two expert snipers, a Russian and a German, each with the goal of killing the other. The two snipers, Army Chief Master Sergeant Vasily Zaytsev of the Red Army and SS Colonel Heinz Thorvald of the German army, are equally matched. However, the story is complicated when a female sniper, Tania Chernova, becomes one of Vasily's most talented assistants and his battlefield lover.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Expert_in_Murder"title="An Expert in Murder">
The novel is set in the London theatres of the 1930s. The book revolves around Josephine Tey, a version of the famous novelist. The story begins with Tey taking the train from Scotland to London in order to attend the final week of performances of her renowned play, "Richard of Bordeaux", written under the pseudonym Gordon Daviot. On board, she meets a young woman, Elspeth Simmons, the adopted daughter of hatmakers from Berwick-upon-Tweed. The two strike up a friendship on the journey, as the girl is a fan of Tey's work, and is on her way to see the play again.Upon arriving in London, the pair separate, as Elspeth has left her bag on the train. Soon after, the girl is found dead, apparently having been stabbed with a hat pin, a crime which seems to have been carefully planned. Here enters Detective Inspector Archie Penrose, an old acquaintance of Tey's, the best friend of her lover, whom Penrose saw die at the Somme.Clues and circumstance suggest that Tey may have been the intended target, so the narrative follows her and her time at the theatre. There, we are introduced to a world of excitement and intrigue, and more death follows. We meet the leads in the play, Johnny and Lydia; the two are presumably based on the real life leads in the best-selling run, John Gielgud, whose career it, arguably, made, and Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies. The back-stabbing world of casting and performance combines with the classic murder mystery plot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Meat_and_the_Bully_Burgers"title="Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers">
The novel's characters and setting stay true to Lois-Ann Yamanaka's local upbringing on the Big Island of Hawaii. Written in both English and Hawaiian Pidgin, "Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers" is a coming-of-age first-person narrative of Lovey Nariyoshi, a local Japanese girl growing up in Hilo, Hawaii in the 1970s. During the anti-Japanese wave that flowed through the United States during this time period, Lovey looks back at all of the key events and people in her life that help shape the young girl she becomes in the end. By only seeing white stars on TV, discovering the birthing canal with her pregnant teenage-neighbor Katy, rationalizing her best friend Jerome's homosexuality and other events, Lovey tries to find her place in the world - a world that constantly tells her that being pure Japanese is not beautiful.The novel takes place, roughly, over a period of three years. Part One begins when Lovey is in the sixth grade and she and her best friend Jerry are watching a Shirley Temple movie. Lovey comments on how there is always a happy ending in movies, but never in real life – especially in her own life where she is pure Japanese, and not pretty like the haoles and hapa children in her class. And so she and Jerry constantly make up their own obituaries when they are playing together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minerva_Clark_Gets_a_Clue"title="Minerva Clark Gets a Clue">
13-year-old Minerva Clark lives in Portland, Oregon and is being raised by her three brothers. She is a typical insecure teenager, but when she is struck by lightning, her personality changes – she becomes outgoing and confident overnight. And when she senses a mystery she cannot resist investigating.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_and_Gain"title="Loss and Gain">
"Loss and Gain" describes the religious climate of Oxford University during the 1820s, a time of great contention between various factions within the Church of England. Some factions advocated Protestant doctrines, renouncing the development of doctrine through tradition and instead emphasising private interpretation of scripture. Against these and other liberal religious factions, the Oxford Movement, of which Newman was a leading member, advocated a Catholic interpretation of the Church of England, claiming that the Church and its traditions were authoritative. Amongst all of these thinkers, however, the Roman Catholic Church was despised as having abdicated its claim to doctrinal authority by introducing superstition into its practice. Accordingly, when Newman converted to Roman Catholicism in 1845, he met with vehement criticism. In "Loss and Gain", Newman's first publication after his conversion, he expressed the intellectual and emotional development that led him to Roman Catholicism and the response his conversion elicited. Newman was in his 40s and was an esteemed theologian at the time of his conversion, but in the novel he displaces his experience onto Charles Reding, a young student entering Oxford and experiencing its intellectual climate for the first time. Although Charles attempts to follow a conventional path and avoid being influenced by "parties" (i.e. cliques advocating trendy sectarian views), he soon discovers that he is inclined towards Roman Catholicism. He struggles against this inclination but eventually decides he must convert, a decision that causes great consternation to his family and friends but leads to personal fulfilment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Bedrooms"title="Imperial Bedrooms">
The action of "Imperial Bedrooms" depicts Clay, who, after four months in New York, returns to Los Angeles to assist in the casting of his new film. There, he meets up with his old friends who were characters in "Less than Zero". Like Clay, they have all become involved in the film industry: his philandering friend Trent Burroughs—who has married Blair—is a manager, while Clay's former classmate at Camden, Daniel Carter, has become a famous director. Julian Wells, who was a male prostitute in "Less than Zero", has become an ultra-discreet high-class pimp representing struggling young actors who do not wish to tarnish future careers. Rip Millar, Clay's former drug dealer, now controls his own cartel and has become disfigured through repeated plastic surgeries.Clay attempts to romance Rain Turner, a gorgeous young woman auditioning for a role in his new film, leading her on with the promise of being cast, all the while knowing she will never get the part because of her complete lack of acting skills. His narration reveals he has done this with a number of men and women in the past, and yet often comes out of the relationship hurt and damaged himself. Over the course of their relationship, he is stalked by unknown persons driving a Jeep and is frequently reminded by various individuals of the grisly murder of a young producer whom he knew.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Island_(novel)"title="Wolf Island (novel)">
The book starts with Grubbs fighting a demon alongside Beranabus and Kernel in the Demonata universe. After subduing and torturing the demon they are fighting, they question it about the Shadow, but learn nothing. Later, they meet up with Shark, Meera, Bec and Dervish. They discover that the Lambs were responsible for the attack on the Grady's home in Carcery Vale and it is decided that Grubbs should go after them to find out more.Shark assembles a team of soldiers he names the "Dirty Dozen". One of them is Timas Brauss, a computer expert, who finds the Lamb's Headquarters. Upon their arrival, they find a man named Antoine Horwitzer in charge, in place of the missing Prae Athim. Antoine explains that Prae stole around six to seven hundred werewolves from their breeding facility. They learn, through Timas' efforts, that Prae took all the werewolves to "Wolf Island" and Antoine accompanies them there.On the island, they find Prae a prisoner. It emerges that Antoine and Juni Swan were behind the assault. Juni Swan arrives shortly after and they are attacked. They manage to flee and attempt to escape on the helicopter they arrived in but it is destroyed. They try to escape from the released werewolves through a window, but are attacked before they can open one. Shark is left behind in the subsequent fight. Grubbs, Meera, Prae and Timas try to escape by sea since the werewolves cannot swim but ultimately find themselves surrounded. Grubbs becomes a werewolf and kills the leader of the pack, replacing him and assuming control of the werewolves. He makes the werewolves go back to attack Juni.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan's_Appeal"title="Ivan's Appeal">
Whilst on a family cruise in the Antarctic, Jo and Colin meet an iceberg called Ivan. He is slowly melting and pleads with the children to help him before it's too late.Their father makes a videotape recording of Ivan and the problems faced by himself and the glaciers which is then aired on Blue Peter. This initiates a nationwide contest amongst schools to devise better environmental ways, and the prize is to visit the Antarctic to find Ivan. Thanks to a host of clever ideas from the children and an enlighted head teacher, Jo and Colin's school wins a place on the amazing sea voyage. They manage to locate Ivan, who is pretty ill, in time to tell him that his appeal has not been in vain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Widows_of_Eastwick"title="The Widows of Eastwick">
Thirty years have passed since Alexandra Spofford, Jane Smart and Sukie Rougemont terrorized the Rhode Island town of Eastwick with their witchcraft and cavorted with Darryl Van Horne, possibly the devil. All three women had remarried, left Eastwick and gradually fallen out of touch. They begin to restore their friendship as they one by one become widowed, which is implied to be the work of Jane, the most aggressive of the witches and who had pushed for the death of their romantic rival, Jenny Gabriel, who died of metastasized ovarian cancer shortly after her marriage to Van Horne. After touring the Canadian Rockies (Alexandra), Egypt (Alexandra and Jane) and China (all three), they agree to revisit Eastwick, largely out of unspoken guilt for their role in Jenny's death. While conducting a white magic spell at their rented condominium (part of Van Horne's old mansion), Jane, who had earlier been complaining of odd electric shocks, suddenly dies of an aneurysm of the aorta. Alexandra and Sukie both learn that Jenny's brother, Christopher (who had also been Van Horne's lover) killed Jane using methods involving electrons and quantum physics he learned from Van Horne. He plans to kill the other two witches next but doesn't, possibly because Sukie seduces him. Alexandra returns to New Mexico, where she previously settled with her second husband after first leaving Eastwick, and Sukie moves to Manhattan with Christopher. The novel ends with the two women happily making plans to meet up for another vacation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azincourt_(novel)"title="Azincourt (novel)">
Nicholas Hook, a forester and archer, feuds with Tom and Robert Perrill and their biological father, the priest Father Martin. He is compelled to participate in the hanging and burning of a community of Lollard heretics. One of them, an archer himself, asks Hook to protect his granddaughter, Sarah, after his execution. However, Father Martin decides to take the girl for himself, and in an unsuccessful attempt to shield her, Hook attacks the priest. Hook is then held for trial and anticipates execution. Father Martin and Tom Perrill rape and murder the girl, and Hook's guilt at failing to save her haunts him throughout the story.Hook escapes and joins an expedition to Soissons, in Burgundy, as a mercenary archer. Burgundy and France are in bitter conflict. When the French attack, they win easily, sack the town, and torture and kill the English archers as well as the loyal French citizens, which shocks the rest of Europe. Hook manages to conceal himself in a house and save a local nun, Melisande, from rape. Hook believes he is guided in their escape by the voices of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, the patron saints of Soissons. Melisande becomes Hook's companion and lover. Later, he discovers she is the bastard child of the powerful French Lord Ghillebert, seigneur de Lanferelle (called the "Lord of Hell").
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leven_Thumps_and_the_Wrath_of_Ezra"title="Leven Thumps and the Wrath of Ezra">
Foo—the place between the possible and the impossible—is a realm inside the minds of each of us that allows mankind the power to hope and imagine and dream. The powerfully gifted Leven Thumps, once an ordinary fourteen-year-old boy from Oklahoma, has been retrieved from Reality and sent to stop those in Foo who are nurturing dark dreams and plan to invade and rule Reality. In book four, the war to unite Foo and Reality has begun and is in full motion. Not only must Leven race across Foo to stop the war. With him now being The Want, Geth, Winter, and he must fight to save Foo before all is lost. There is no place like Foo.Nowhere are the shores more beautiful or the skies so deep and moving. Unfortunately, the beauty is unraveling quickly. A great darkness is ascending from beneath the dirt as the true evil of Foo is unlocked and the Dearth rises above the soil. Assisted by Azure and an army of rants and other beings determined to merge Foo and Reality, the Dearth had brought war to the very borders of Sycophant Run. Normally the sycophants would have the situation well in hand, but with the secret of their mortality finally leaked, Clover and his breed are vulnerable as never before.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_and_His_Aerial_Warship"title="Tom Swift and His Aerial Warship">
The story was written in 1915, and World War I, also known as The Great War, was already in progress. As the story opens, Tom is explaining his newest invention to his friend, Ned Newton. Just as Tom is in the middle of explaining the problems he is having, a fire erupts in one of the sheds, where explosives are stored. After the fire has been put out, careful investigation shows that the fire was set deliberately.In preparation for presenting his new airship to the United States Government, Tom has invited a Lieutenant Marbury, from the Navy, to review his ship. Marbury informs Tom of a possible plot against Tom and his inventions, past and present. Tom scoffs at the idea, but soon finds out otherwise, as his new airship is hijacked by foreign spies with an unknown agenda.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Star"title="The Iron Star">
The novel concerns an African expedition. Swain, a member of the expedition, becomes demented and attempts to exterminate a peculiar species of African ape. The other members of the expedition are befriended by an intelligent ape called the Captain. The expedition discovers that the apes are in fact humans that have evolved in reverse due to exposure to a meteor and that the Captain was once human.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silver_Cloud_Café"title="The Silver Cloud Café">
At the scene of a crime in 1993 San Francisco, the victim, Bambino Reyes, has been brutally slashed open and the wound cauterized. Strangely, the "murder" seems connected to two fires nearly half a mile away. And even more confusing, the drawbridge operator and sole witness, Miguel Govea, claims that the murder was actually a consecration.As in his first novel, "La Maravilla", "Silver Cloud" includes a semi-autobiographical character named Zeferino Del Campo. Zeferino is a defense lawyer in San Francisco, who has been specially requested to represent the man charged with the bizarre, ritualistic "murder." Upon meeting the accused and hearing his childhood name, Zefe, Zeferino recalls his past with immigrant farmworkers, a process that continues throughout the novel.The accused is Teodoro Cabiri, "lover of God, and of ship-wrecked men". "Ted For Short" is a hunchbacked, Filipino midget with tremendous charisma and amazing sleight of hand. During their first meeting, Ted instructs Zefe to visit a bar in the District that he will find "irresistible". The bar is Raphael's Silver Cloud Café, the sign of which captivates Zeferino.As Zeferino recalls his past, he realizes the connections between it and the present "murder" investigation. While at "French Camp," an asparagus farm near Stockton, California, Faustino, Ted For Short, and Zeferino are assaulted, and Pietro Ditto, one of the "big bosses", is killed. Faustino and Ted must part ways, knowing that it may be years before they will be able to see one another again. On their way to Camp Corregidor, Ted prays for Zefe to forget all that he's seen this night that he will not have to be haunted by the memories of murder and hate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drums,_Girls,_and_Dangerous_Pie"title="Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie">
The protagonist of the book is Steven Alper, a 13-year-old boy living in New Jersey. The Alper family consists of Dad, an accountant; Mom, an English teacher; Steven, an enthusiastic and talented drummer who is also a self-described "skinny geek;" and Jeffrey, eight years younger, whom Steven describes as cute, adoring of his big brother, and apt to blurt out really embarrassing remarks about Steven in public. When Jeffrey has a horrific nose bleed and goes to the emergency room, the Alpers are shocked to discover that he has leukemia. Mrs. Alper soon has to quit her job as a teacher while Mr. Alper shuts down, interacting minimally with Steven even when Mrs. Alper and Jeffrey are away in Philadelphia for Jeffrey's chemotherapy treatments. Steven becomes very shelled in, but no one can really tell, except for a piano-prodigy classmate, Annette Watson, who persistently tries to find out what is the matter. Steven does not tell her or anyone else at school. He stops doing his homework, and eventually his guidance counselor and teachers push him to open up about what is going on. His guidance counselor is a major help throughout the story. She advises him, "Instead of agonizing about the things you can't change, why don't you try working on the things you "can" change?" 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Fire_(novel)"title="Green Fire (novel)">
The novel concerns two corporations competing to develop the power of atomic energy. Independent Laboratories is working for the advancement of mankind, and Consolidated Power is working for personal gain. Nature goes berserk, and James Ferguson, the leader of Independent, discovers that Jevic, the Director of Consolidated, has achieved his goal. Nebulae in space are marked with a greenish glow and then are obliterated. MacRobert, who has previously refused offers from either corporation, is placed in charge of Independent. He disposes of Jevic in time to end the destruction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_in_Concrete"title="Christ in Concrete">
I. Geremio: Geremio and his coworkers are gruesomely killed on the job when the building they are working on collapses. Geremio is swallowed in wet concrete; as he struggles desperately to breathe, his mind snaps, and he is transported to his sunny seaside youth in Vasto, Italy. The scene depicting the Good Friday building collapse, the horrific fate of his Paesano fellow workers, and Geremio's agonizing struggle for air, shocked the American reading public of 1939 and permanently ensconced these characters in 20th Century literature.II. Job: Geremio's pregnant widow, Annunziata, is left with no way to provide for their already-large family. Her brother Luigi promises to help, but soon he himself is injured at work and loses part of his leg. Geremio and Annunziata's oldest son, Paul, tries to find charity from local businesses and from the church, but with no success. He decides to take his father's place as brick-layer, and after a while is accepted by the other workers as having inherited his father's skills; yet, because of his youth, the company pays him only a pittance and Paul overworks himself. In this section, the word "job" is treated like a character and often capitalized.III. Tenement: Unable to work, Paul remains at home; di Donato uses this section to explore some of the other families in the tenement, including the Olsens, whose daughter Gloria attracts Paul, and the Molovs, Russian Jews whose son Louis befriends Paul after telling him about the death of his older brother back in Russia. Also in this section, Annunziata and Paul visit a psychic, who reassures them that Geremio is watching over and praying for them, and attend the hearing at the Compensation Bureau, which ends indecisively with the construction company blaming the workers for the accident and the insurance company claiming the accident falls outside the bounds of the policies they have with the construction company.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Red,_Snow_White"title="Blood Red, Snow White">
The novel describes the origins and events of the Russian Revolution, interwoven with the experiences of Arthur Ransome, then a journalist in Russia. He becomes acquainted with the leading Bolsheviks and begins a romance with Trotsky's secretary Evgenia who will become his second wife. He also has close contact with people working for the British government and must decide where his loyalties lie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Celestial_Plot"title="The Celestial Plot">
A soldier must pilot a new plane. He suffers an accident and is injured. He is interrogated and the army does not believe he is from Argentina. They mistake him for a spy. He calls his friends and nobody recognizes him. He cannot explain the situation, but a friend of his, the author, helps him. The author discovers the truth: the soldier has travelled to a parallel universe, a little different from this one.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon"title="Flowers for Algernon">
The short story and the novel share many similar plot points, but the novel expands significantly on Charlie's developing emotional state as well as his intelligence, his memories of childhood, and the relationship with his family. Both are presented as a series of journal entries ("progress reports") written by the protagonist, Charlie Gordon. The style, grammar, spelling, and punctuation of these reports reflect changes in his mental and emotional growth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_Crimes"title="Capital Crimes">
In Capital Crimes, Will Lee finds himself in the middle of a tangled web of intrigue and danger, politics and power. Now at the pinnacle of his career, serving as president of the United States, Lee is faced with a most unusual task-that of marshaling federal law enforcement agencies to catch an assassin who is picking off some of the nation's high-level politicos. When a prominent conservative politician with a shady reputation is expertly killed at his lakeside cabin, authorities can come up with no suspects and even less hard evidence. But then, within days, two other, seemingly isolated deaths-achieved by very different means-are feared linked to the same ruthless murderer. With the help of his CIA director wife, Kate Rule Lee, Will trails the most clever and professional of killers before he can strike again. From a quiet D.C. suburb to the corridors of power to a deserted island hideaway, Will, Kate, and maverick FBI agent Robert Kinney track their man and set a trap with extreme caution and care-and await the most dangerous kind of quarry, a killer with a cause to die for.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Flower_and_the_Secret_Fan"title="Snow Flower and the Secret Fan">
In rural Hunan province called Puwei, a county in China, Lily is destined to become a "laotong" pair with Snow Flower, a girl of the same age from Tongkou. The laotong relationship is a sisterly relationship that is far stronger and closer than a husband and wife's. Lily's aunt describes it as a relationship "made by choice for the purpose of emotional companionship and eternal fidelity. A marriage is not made by choice and has only one purpose—to have sons." This relationship begins when the girls are seven and goes until adulthood when they are mothers. The two girls experience the painful process of foot binding at the same time. Foot-binding was the tradition of binding a young daughter's feet by wrapping cloth around their feet tightly and forcing them to walk until their bones broke and were easier to mold and change, then tightening the bindings. Lily and Snow Flower write letters to one another on a fan with Nü Shu, a secret phonetic form of 'women's writing which Lily's aunt taught them.' The women also learn Nü Shu songs and stories and frequently meet at the Temple of the Gupo, where they go to pray for the birth of healthy sons, which is the "measure of a woman's worth." 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noite_(novel)"title="Noite (novel)">
In the 1950s, a man finds himself in the middle of the streets of Porto Alegre with a wallet full of money... and no memory of any past events.He finds two "vultures of the night", enigmatic noctivague figures with a high penchant for bohemian lifestyles. The "vultures" (called The Master and The Hunchback) take the man on a surrealistic journey through the darkest places of the city, to "enjoy the night": a funeral parlor, the emergency service of a hospital, a deluxe whorehouse and a low-level working class cabaret.At the same time, the two enigmatic figures surreptitiously try to make the man-with-no-memoryassume that he committed a horrendous crime early that night, in which a woman was the subject of a brutal passion-related crime and no perpetrator was yet arrested by the police.The book has a unique atmosphere in depicting the low-level bohemy that crowded some places in the Brazilian urban legends.In the 1980s, Brazilian film director José Louzeiro conducted a movie loosely based on the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Middle_Moffat"title="The Middle Moffat">
Ten-year-old Jane Moffat decides that moving into a new house means a new start, and decides to create a new, more interesting, identity, so she christens herself 'the mysterious Middle Moffat'. She befriends the oldest man in Cranbury and appoints herself his secret protector to be sure he lives to be one hundred years old.Janey is in a new school, making new friends, and much of the book deals with her establishing herself outside of the family. Wanting to uphold the honor of the Moffats, she decides she needs to win the basketball championship all by herself, while coping with stockings that continually fall down and hair she can't keep off of her mouth. She also resolves to read every book in the library, including the ones she's not very interested in, like "The Story of Lumber".The book follows several of her adventures over the next year, each chapter presenting a different episode as Jane grows, learning about friendship and responsibility. "The Middle Moffat" "rejoices in the process of separation from the security of the family".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rufus_M."title="Rufus M.">
Each chapter in this book tells another story about Rufus and his family. Rufus has a great imagination. He uses it to create interesting friends for himself. For example, a flying horse named Jimmy and an invisible piano player who lives in the Saybolts. He decides to create a best friend, Cardboard Boy, who is also Rufus's enemy. He and his friend even ride around town on a bicycle.Rufus is also quite persistent. He wants a library card, even though he can't read yet, so he works hard to learn to write his name. Things are tight for his family; it's not easy for Rufus' mother to earn enough to feed four children. So Rufus plants some special "Rufus beans". Unfortunately he can't resist digging them up every day to see if they are growing.World War I is in its final year, and "Rufus M." shows its effect on the family, with shortages of some food and coal. Rufus also writes to a soldier, at one point asking for a pony from France. The books ends with the family celebrating Armistice Day writing their dreams for the future on paper and burning them at the stove.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gli_indifferenti"title="Gli indifferenti">
"Gli Indifferenti" is a psychological portrayal of the life of a middle-class mother and her two children. The action of the novel takes place largely over two days. Leo, the wealthy lover of Mariagrazia, a middle-class widow, begins an affair with her daughter, Carla. Carla decides that she will sleep with Leo the following day (her twenty-fourth birthday) in order "to begin a new life".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_and_the_Frost_Giants"title="Odd and the Frost Giants">
Odd is a young Norseman whose father, a woodcutter, drowned during a Viking raid. Soon after he accidentally crushes his leg and his Scottish mother marries a fat widower who neglects him in favor of his own children, and when soon after the winter drags on unnaturally long, Odd leaves his village for the forest. There he meets a fox, an eagle and a bear, the latter with its paw trapped in a tree. Odd aids the bear, and tries to feed him. The bear accepted and was actually hungry. Therefore Odd would always feed him. But as time passed by, he learns that these are not normal animals, but the gods Loki, Odin and Thor. The gods have been transformed and cast out of Asgard by a Frost Giant who tricked Loki into giving him Thor's hammer by taking the form of a woman, granting him rule over Asgard and causing the endless winter. But wherether they were gods or not, Odd couldn't continue to feed them. But he realises that the gods had nowhere to go and couldn't feed themselves.Deciding to help the stranded gods, Odd travels with them to Asgard. There, Thor leads him to Mimir's Well, and he receives wisdom and a vision of his parents in their youth. He eventually speaks with the Giant, who reveals his brother built the walls of Asgard but was tricked out of payment and killed by Thor. Odd convinces the Giant to return home. In return, the goddess Freya heals his leg, though she cannot mend it completely, and Odin gives him a staff. He returns to Midgard, somewhat bigger than when he left due to drinking from Mimir's Well, and as the winter ends he reunites with his mother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Post-American_World"title="The Post-American World">
The content is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter introduces the thesis of the book: that a 'post-American' world order is emerging in which the United States will continue to be the most powerful nation but its relative power will be diminished. He believes that there have been three power shifts in the last 500 years: a shift of power to the West during the Renaissance, a shift of power to the US making it a superpower, and now a shift to several surging countries, especially China and India, and to non-governmental organizations. Zakaria believes that international organizations are not adapting well to emerging challenges and that there is too much focus on problems arising from potential market failures or general crises (e.g. terrorism) at the expense of focus on problems stemming from success (e.g. development causing environmental degradation, or rising demand creating high commodity prices).The second and third chapters examine factors that led to the current power balance. Power shifted to the West because it fostered trade with foreign peoples and developed superior labor productivity per capita. Power shifted to the US because of its strong democracy and capitalist market. Zakaria argues that the success of the US in promoting free market capitalism and globalization has led to power being dispersed to several other countries. Economies have been surging for decades, in part due to large new players entering the global market place. He compares this era's economic growth to the economic surges of the 1890s and the 1950s which also saw new players become global powers. At the same time, Zakaria sees attitudes in the US becoming insular and distrustful of foreigners.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indignation_(novel)"title="Indignation (novel)">
Set in America in 1951, the second year of the Korean War, "Indignation" is narrated by Marcus Messner, a Jewish college student from Newark, New Jersey, who describes his sophomore year at Winesburg College in Ohio ( a reference to the fictional Winesburg, Ohio). Marcus transfers to Winesburg from Robert Treat College in Newark to escape his father, a kosher butcher, who appears to have become consumed with fear about the dangers of adult life, the world, and the uncertainty that awaits his son.At Winesburg College, Marcus becomes infatuated with a fellow student, Olivia Hutton, a survivor of a suicide attempt. The sexually inexperienced Marcus is bewildered when Olivia performs fellatio on him during their one and only date. Marcus' mother objects to his dating someone who attempted suicide and makes him vow to end their relationship.Marcus has an adversarial relationship with the dean of men, Hawes Caudwell. In a meeting in Dean Caudwell's office, Marcus objects to the chapel attendance requirement on the grounds that he is an atheist. In this meeting, he quotes extensively from Bertrand Russell's essay "Why I Am Not a Christian". Later, the dean finds Marcus guilty of hiring another student to attend chapel in his place; when Marcus refuses to attend double the number of chapel services as punishment, the dean expels him. His expulsion allows the U.S. Army to draft him and send him to fight in Korea where he is killed in combat. Early in the novel, Marcus explains that he is dead and telling his story from the afterlife; later it is revealed that he is unconscious from his combat wounds and the morphine that has been administered.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blood_Knight"title="The Blood Knight">
In this third novel of the series, Anne Dare continues her flight from her Uncle's minions, with the help of the dessrator Cazio and the knight Sir Neil MeqVren. The Holter Aspar White and the monk Stephen Darige continue on their own path, attempting to unravel the mysteries of the Briar King. Anne's mother, Queen Muriele, remains imprisoned by the usurper, Robert, while the musician Leoff engages in a dangerous game of deceit with Robert, attempting to recreate a lost dark art.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Born_Queen"title="The Born Queen">
In this final novel of the series, Anne Dare, finally on the throne of Crotheny, goes to war with both the Church and the powerful northern nation of Hansa. Her eldritch powers continue to grow and threaten to overwhelm her. The monk Stephen Darige, now aligned with the Blood Knight, attempts to fulfill his role in an ancient prophecy, while the Holter Aspar White continues to battle abominations and save his forest, while trying to understand the mysteries surrounding him. Meanwhile the dessrator Cazio is rescued by and reunited with his mentor, the swordmaster z'Accato. Queen Muriele and the now badly injured Sir Neil MeqVren are sent by Anne to Hansa on a mission of peace, while they covertly look for a way to defeat them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_of_Darkhold"title="The Diamond of Darkhold">
The story begins with the Builders discussing what the Emberites should do when they are released from the city. It is decided that a recent invention (which is later shown to be a diamond-like gadget) will be stored alongside a guide providing information regarding its use. However, these items are left undiscovered when the Emberites escape.Nine months after Ember and Sparks have reached a truce, a roamer comes into town with a mysterious book, on the front of which is printed "For the People of Ember". Lina Mayfleet and Doon Harrow obtain the book via barter but soon learn it contains only eight pages, as the trader used the rest to light campfires. Unable to make sense of the book's remaining contents, Lina and Doon decide to return to Ember to investigate.When they arrive, they discover that a family has taken over the darkened city. The Troggs — Washton, Kanza, Minny, Yorick and an adopted boy, Tim, whom they have named "Scawgo" — believe they own Ember and have renamed it Darkhold. They capture Doon, but he manages to communicate with Lina and she goes back to Sparks for help. Meanwhile, Lizzie Bisco (from Ember), Torren Crane and Kenny Parton (both from Sparks) attempt to locate Lina and Doon but don't succeed, prompting another, larger search party to go looking for them. While Doon is with the Troggs, they show him a diamond they found just outside Ember, but Scawgo gives Doon the diamond and Doon escapes. In the process, he also breaks the pipe connecting the generator to the waterwheel that created power for Ember, thereby stopping Ember's lights and cutting off the city's water supply for good, making it so the Trogg family will have to leave Ember since they relied on the intermittent power-supply to pipe water to them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Rabouilleuse"title="La Rabouilleuse">
The action of the novel is divided between Paris and Issoudun. Agathe Rouget, who was born in Issoudun, was sent by her father, Doctor Rouget to be raised by her maternal relatives, the Descoings in Paris. Doctor Rouget suspects (wrongly) that he is not her true father. In Paris, she marries a man named Bridau, and they have two sons, Philippe, and Joseph. Monsieur Bridau dies relatively young, Philippe, who is the eldest and his mother's favourite, becomes a soldier in Napoleon's armies, and Joseph becomes an artist. Philippe, the elder son is shown to be a courageous soldier, but is also a heavy drinker and gambler. He resigns from the army after the Bourbon Restoration out of loyalty to Napoleon. Joseph is a dedicated artist, and the more loyal son, but his mother does not understand his artistic vocation.After leaving the army Philippe took part in the failed Champ d'Asile settlement in Texas. On returning to France he is unemployed, and lives with his mother and Madame Descoings, and becomes a financial drain on them, especially due to his hard drinking and gambling lifestyle. Philippe becomes estranged from his mother and brother after stealing money from Madame Descoings. Philippe is soon afterwards arrested for his involvement in an anti-government conspiracy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Loud_a_Solitude"title="Too Loud a Solitude">
The novel is narrated in the first person by Haňt’a, a reclusive man nearing retirement who has spent his life compacting wastepaper for recycling in a cellar in Prague. In addition to compacting butcher paper, wastepaper, and scraps, he also compacts banned books ordered to be destroyed. He stops his work to read and rescue books, and over the thirty-five years of his career, has gained an encyclopedic literary knowledge and filled his home with over two tons of books. He has a particular pencHaňt for works of philosophy and religion. Moreover, he works incredibly slowly as he wraps each bale of paper with reproductions of classic European artworks, and places at the center of every bale a rare book.Haňt’a considers these bales to be works of art and hopes upon retiring to buy his hydraulic press, just as his beloved uncle bought a railroad signal tower and a locomotive when he retired from working on the railroad. His uncle now gives rides on the train to local children and his friends. Haňt’a similarly dreams of creating one bale a day once he retires. Each bale will be a true work of art, and after one year, he will invite people to view the bales in an exhibition and help visitors create their own bales.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Port_of_Peril"title="The Port of Peril">
Set on Venus, the novel concerns Robert Grandon whose wife Vernia is kidnapped by the Huitsenni, a race of pirates. Grandon pursues them to their hidden port where, after joining forces with rebels, he overthrows their king. He discovers that Vernia has been taken to the north. He follows and eventually rescues his bride. They are both then captured by the Huitsenni and must be rescued by an army of allied nations working with the Huitsenni rebels.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwellers_in_the_Mirage"title="Dwellers in the Mirage">
The novel concerns American Leif Langdon who discovers a warm valley in Alaska. Two races inhabit the valley, the Little People and a branch of an ancient Mongolian race; they worship the evil Kraken named Khalk'ru which they summon from another dimension to offer human sacrifice. The inhabitants recognize Langdon as the reincarnation of their long dead hero, Dwayanu. Dwayanu's spirit possesses Langdon and starts a war with the Little People. Langdon eventually fights off the presence of Dwayanu and destroys the Kraken.There are variant endings of the work. In the original, Leif's love dies, but the publisher inartistically has her survive. The original tragic ending has been reinstated in some recent reprints.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chances_(novel)"title="Chances (novel)">
"Chances" is broken up into parts. The first part looks at the blackout in New York City and how this affects the main characters. The second is focused on Gino Santangelo and later includes his children Lucky and Dario. The third part examines the life of Carrie Berkley and later her son Steven.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryoburn"title="Cryoburn">
"Cryoburn" takes place six or seven years after "Diplomatic Immunity". Miles Vorkosigan, the main character in the series, is 39 years old. He is sent by Emperor Gregor to the planet Kibou-daini ("New Hope") to investigate White Chrysanthemum Cryonics Corporation. WhiteChrys, a major "cryocorp", to which sick or dying people go to be frozen in hopes of one day being revived and cured, is opening a subsidiary on Komarr, arousing suspicions. The narrative follows three points of view: those of Miles, his Armsman Roic, and Jin Sato, a local Kibou-daini boy.At a conference, an attempt is made to kidnap Miles and the other attendees. Miles avoids capture because an allergic reaction to the drug used on him makes him extremely hyperactive, and escapes into the below-ground Cryocombs, where the frozen are stored. Roic is caught along with Raven, a cryo-revival specialist from the Durona Group who assisted in reviving Miles after his death on Jackson's Whole (detailed in "Mirror Dance").When Miles finds his way back to the surface, he encounters Jin, an eleven-year-old boy living with his chickens and other pets in a disused building. Jin introduces him to a society of outcasts living in abandoned facilities. This helps Miles piece together what is really going on.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Suicide"title="Revolutionary Suicide">
Revolutionary Suicide was written when Newton was only 31 and he dedicated the book to his parents. As well as being the story of his life up to that point it also includes his manifesto and political philosophy. In the opening manifesto section Newton outlines his idea of ‘revolutionary suicide’ as opposed to what he describes as ‘reactionary suicide’. Reactionary suicide is a suicide brought about by despair with one's social conditions. On the other hand, Newton says a ‘revolutionary suicide’ is a death brought about by forcibly challenging the system and repressive agencies that can lead a person to commit reactionary suicide. In other words, the revolutionary knows he or she will risk death but chooses to fight to improve the conditions for their community rather than submit to the existing state that has created these conditions.The book goes on to describe his time growing up tough on the streets of Oakland, how he taught himself to read by studying Plato's Republic, his political awakening and the formation of the BPP with Bobby Seale. The next chapters detail the shooting of officer Frey, his trial conviction and later release. The later chapters cover the period after his release and his attempts to rebuild the Party. The last chapters cover his visit to China and what he describes as the ‘defection’ of Eldridge Cleaver. While Revolutionary Suicide is written in the first person, in an interview in 2007 Blake claims to have done the actual writing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fireworks_and_Darkness"title="Fireworks and Darkness">
It follows the story of Simeon Runciman, who is a firework maker and former dark magician who is caught up in murder and magic when his enemy reappears.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outside_Over_There"title="Outside Over There">
The main character, Ida's, father is away at sea. She plays her horn each night to make her baby sister sleep. One night while she is playing her horn and not paying attention to the baby, goblins sneak in through the window and steal her baby sister away, replacing her with a changeling made of ice. The changeling melts as Ida cradles it and Ida, realizing what has happened, blows her wonder horn, dons her mother's yellow rain cloak, and sets off after her baby sister. However, because she exits the window backwards she enters Outside Over There where she cannot find the goblins or her sister. She then hears her father's voice telling her to turn around into the rain. She does so and interrupts the goblins, now in the form of babies, in the midst of a wedding. To find her sister among the crying babies, Ida plays a captivating tune on her horn until the goblins dance in a frenzy and fall into a stream. Ida then picks up her sister and heads home to her mother who has received a letter from her father where he promises to come home one day and asks Ida to watch over her sister.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Queen_(novel)"title="The White Queen (novel)">
Young widow Lady Elizabeth Grey puts herself in the path of King Edward IV to seek his assistance in reclaiming her late husband's estate for her sons, but it is love at first sight for both of them. They marry in secret, which later puts Edward, Elizabeth and Elizabeth's entire family at odds with Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, who had helped place Edward on the throne expecting to control the young king. Masterminded by Elizabeth's mother Jacquetta, an experienced courtier formerly allied with the ousted queen Margaret of Anjou, Edward and Elizabeth secure strategic marriages and positions for Elizabeth's siblings and other relatives to bolster Edward's power and alliances against Warwick. Edward and Elizabeth have three daughters, and Warwick rebels, attempting to put Edward's malleable younger brother George, Duke of Clarence on the throne instead. Edward foils their plan and reconciles with Warwick and George to consolidate his power, but not before Warwick executes Elizabeth's father, Richard Woodville, Earl Rivers and brother, John Woodville. Elizabeth vows revenge.Warwick marries his elder daughter Isabel to George and rebels again, luring Edward into an arranged uprising where he plans to kill Edward. The plot fails, and Warwick and George flee to France. Isabel gives birth during the journey, but the child dies. Warwick marries his second daughter Anne to Edward of Lancaster, son and heir to the deposed king Henry VI, to secure Warwick's new alliance with Henry's exiled queen, Margaret of Anjou. Warwick invades England. Caught off guard, Edward is forced to flee to Flanders with Elizabeth's brother Anthony. Warwick arrests Jacquetta on charges of witchcraft, but she is soon released on the orders of her old friend Margaret. Jacquetta joins a pregnant Elizabeth and her children in sanctuary in Westminster Abbey, where they are left unmolested by Warwick. Elizabeth gives birth to Edward's son, also named Edward. Returning to England, Edward is reunited with George and first defeats the forces of Warwick, who is killed, and then Margaret's army. Her son Edward of Lancaster is killed on the battlefield, and Edward murders the captive simpleton Henry VI to end the Lancastrian claim to the throne once and for all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemonade_Mouth"title="Lemonade Mouth">
Five teenagers—Olivia, Stella, Charlie, Wendel "Wen", and Mohini "Mo"—meet after all ending up in detention for different reasons. While in detention, they all play and sing along together with a jingle on the radio. They decide to form a band after discussing it. At first, they have trouble agreeing on music, but soon learn to work together and get along.The group decides to play at the Halloween Bash, but many students who are fans of Mudslide Crush, another band at the school, do not want the group to do the Bash. Ray, a member of Mudslide Crush and the school bully, harasses Olivia because of her band. Mo, Charlie, and Stella get involved to defend Olivia, and Stella spits a mouthful of lemonade into Ray's face. Ray calls Stella "lemonade mouth" and thus, the group takes "Lemonade Mouth" as their band name. Before the Bash, the lemonade machine that inspired the band is taken away as part of an agreement with a sports drink company that is sponsoring the school's new gym. This angers the band, and they decide to fight the decision.At the Bash, many of the students are surprised at Lemonade Mouth's music when they take the stage because the band uses instruments like trumpets and ukuleles. The bandmates develop friendships and bonds with each other when they arrive at Olivia's house to console her after her cat dies. They gradually open up to one another about their problems: Stella thinks she's stupid and has problems with her parents, Wen's father will be marrying his much-younger girlfriend, Mo, an immigrant from India, feels that she doesn't belong, and Charlie's twin brother died at birth. Olivia reveals that her mother and father had sex when they were in high school, and Olivia's mother, who never loved or wanted her, left Olivia's father, Ted, to raise his daughter by himself until he was convicted of armed robbery and manslaughter. In the meantime, Charlie falls in love with Mo.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dog_on_Barkham_Street"title="A Dog on Barkham Street">
The main character, Edward Frost, is a kid who is constantly bullied by his neighbor, Martin Hastings. Edward asks his parents if they can move to a far away place, to escape his bully, but they deny him. He also asks for a dog, but his parents do not believe he is responsible enough to care for one. One day, Uncle Joe, a wandering hobo, gives the Edward a collie named Argess.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoes_of_Life"title="Echoes of Life">
"Echoes of Life" chronicles the history of the discipline of organic geochemistry. In early experiments, Alfred E. Treibs identified organic molecules, which he extracted from various samples, as chemically altered chlorophyll. He explained the chlorophyll as having come from plants that died millions of years ago. Since Treibs' discovery, thousands of biomarkers (a term coined 25 years after Treibs' discovery) have been identified.Chapter one, entitled "Molecular Informants: A Changing Perspective of Organic Chemistry", gives a brief overview on the history of organic chemistry and explores the possibilities inherent in the science. It also describes how the authors first became interested in the subject and the work they have done within the field.Chapter two entitled "Looking to the Rocks: Molecular Clues to the Origin of Life" looks at the findings of Sir Robert Robinson and Melvin Calvin discoveries of organic compounds in petrol and the conversion of CO2 to organic molecules during photosynthesis. Early experiments had shown that organic compounds can form spontaneously under conditions similar to the pre-biotic era of earth. These findings led to speculation on the possible discovery on the origins of life. The chapter ends with the authors saying as a precursor to the next chapterChapter three entitled "From the Moon to Mars: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life." A Carbonaceous Meteorite which was found in Hungary in 1857, which was examined by Friedrich Wöhler was found to have organic compounds which he believed were Extraterrestrial in origin. The book moves on to Marcellin Berthelot who in 1864 claimed to have found "petroleum-like hydrocarbons" in a meteorite found near Orgueil. Louis Pasteur also ran experiments on this meteor and concluded it was sterile and not capable of generating life. The discovery of the Murchison meteorite also led to the finding of 70 amino acids most of which are not native to earth's biosphere. The authors look into the work done on samples brought back from the Apollo program missions. Geoffrey Eglinton one of the authors had been given a sample and although he knew there had never been life on the moon they had hoped to find organic compounds. None were found within those samples, which led to disappointment. These findings led the authors to speculate on the possibility of answering the question of whether there has ever been life on Mars and if future missions will bring back viable samples for testing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_Dreams"title="Carbon Dreams">
The story revolves around geochemist Tina Arenas, who is caught up in her work and does not pay much attention to the outside world. When her life takes a turn she was not expecting, she seeks to come to terms with her responsibilities in her personal life and her work. The book is set in the 1980s.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tragedy_of_Today's_Gays"title="The Tragedy of Today's Gays">
Kramer explains this was the most difficult speech he had ever written. George W. Bush was re-elected on the trope of "moral values," which served as a synecdoche for gay men and lesbians.Drugs which treat the symptoms of HIV or AIDS are no cure, and that their ameliorative effects will not last forever. He urges gay men and lesbians to remember those who fought for the rights of People With AIDS and for gay rights.Quoting the research of journalist Bill Moyers, Kramer places the struggle for gay and lesbian civil rights within the structure of socioeconomic inequality in the United States, and states that those most privileged in the United States are dedicated not only to destroying the rights and lives of the poor, racial minorities, and non-Christians, but of gay men and lesbians as well. He reveals that in 1971, future Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. created a plan to "take back America for the survival of the free enterprise system. Not democracy. Free enterprise." As part of the Powell Manifesto, conservatives in America created foundations to transform one of the most liberal nations in the world into a "classist, racist, homophobic, imperial army of pirates." AIDS worked in favor of this cabal, for "Their wildest dreams then started to come true. The faggots were disappearing and they were doing it to themselves," leading Kramer to conclude, "[I]ntentionality is the only word to describe the genocidal treatment millions of bodies have been drowning in."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scarecrows"title="The Scarecrows">
The story is a third-person limited narrative, with the point of view entirely that of Simon Wood—his thoughts, feelings and memories, the things he sees and experiences, conversations he has, conversations he overhears. The novel opens at Simon's boarding school in the south of England, where the poisonous atmosphere of bullying and denigration has nurtured Simon's "devils", as he describes his blind rages. He first sees Joe Moreton there, when the man has given Simon's mother a lift to an event at the school. Simon loathes him at first sight and regards him as a "yob", unimpressed by his fame as an artist.At an art gallery Simon overhears a conversation making clear that Joe and his mother are dating, which enrages the boy. When his mother tells him she intends to marry Joe, he vainly begs her not to and then refuses to attend the wedding. But he must finally join his mother, his sister, and Joe at their new home in Cheshire. There both his mother's happiness and his sister's adoration of Joe incense him, for he regards them as betraying his father's memory. A neighbouring unused water mill, separated from the house by a turnip field, provides a refuge for him, but it harbours a sinister secret. During the war, the miller was murdered by his wife and her lover.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carnal_Prayer_Mat"title="The Carnal Prayer Mat">
Set during the Yuan dynasty in the 14th century, the novel's protagonist, Weiyangsheng (未央生; lit. "Unrealised One" or "Unfinished One"), visits a Buddhist temple, where he meets a monk, who notes that he exhibits wisdom but also lust. Weiyangsheng says that the monk's purpose in life is to sit on a zafu (or prayer mat) and meditate, while his desire is to marry a beautiful woman and sit on a "carnal prayer mat" (肉蒲團). The title of the novel comes from this line said by Weiyangsheng.Weiyangsheng is an egoistic young scholar who often boasts of his aspiration to marry the most beautiful woman in the world. He seeks neither fame nor glory, and prefers to indulge in women and sex. A monk called "Budai Heshang" (布袋和尚; lit. "Monk with a Cloth Sack") once urged him to give up on his philandering ways and follow the path of Buddhism, while his father-in-law, Taoist Tiefei (鐵扉道人), also attempted to persuade him to be more decent, but Weiyangsheng ignored both of them.On a trip to the capital city, Weiyangsheng encounters Saikunlun (賽崑崙), a bandit, and becomes sworn brothers with him. Saikunlun introduces Weiyangsheng to Tianji Zhenren (天際真人), a Taoist magician, who surgically enhances Weiyangsheng's penis by splicing strips of a dog's penis into it, causing it to be enlarged and become more 'powerful'. With Saikunlun's help, Weiyangsheng gets involved in illicit sexual relationships with many married women, including: Yanfang (艷芳), the wife of Quan Laoshi (權老實); Xiangyun (香雲), the wife of Xuanyuanzi (軒軒子); Ruizhu (瑞珠), the wife of Woyunsheng (臥雲生); Ruiyu (瑞玉), the wife of Yiyunsheng (倚雲生).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alchemy_of_Stone"title="The Alchemy of Stone">
Ayona is a city-state resembling late Victorian era-London. It was originally constructed centuries ago by gargoyles, magical creatures who can manipulate stone and rock but turn to stone fixtures at the ends of their lives. The first humans to settle in the city became the hereditary dukes who ruled at first, the gargoyles having little to do with humans after raising the stone foundations of the city and its buildings. Over time, the power of the dukes declined, and they were forced to share power with a parliament representing the factions of the Alchemists and Mechanics, each representing complementary facets of human creativity. In the past, the Alchemists were dominant, but by the time of the novel the Mechanics have taken the lead, and institute widespread economic and industrial innovations. The world outside the city is not described in great detail, other than there being a land of dark-skinned people across an ocean to the east, natives of whom have emigrated to the city to form a semi-oppressed minority group.The main character is Mattie, a clockwork automaton constructed with a corset, petticoat and skirts, and heels built into her figure. Mattie is one of the few sentient automatons in the city, and was emancipated by her master, Loharri (one of the chief Mechanics) when she wished to study to become an Alchemist. However, even though technically emancipated, Loharri still holds the literal key to her heart, a unique key needed to wind up her mechanical heart, without which she will deactivate until it is wound again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Morganville_Vampires"title="The Morganville Vampires">
Morganville is a small town filled with unusual characters - when the sun goes down, the bad come out. In Morganville, there is an evil that lurks in the darkest shadows - one that will spill out into the bright light of day.For Claire Danvers, high school was hell, but college may be murder. It was bad enough that she got on the wrong side of Monica, the meanest of the school's mean girls, but now she's got three new roommates, who all have secrets of their own. And the biggest secret of all isn't really a secret, except from Claire: Morganville is run by vampires, and they are hungry for fresh blood.Claire Danvers has had her share of challenges - like being a genius in a school that favours beauty over brains, dealing with the homicidal girls in her dorm and, above all, finding out that her college town is overrun with bloodsucking fiends. On the plus side, so far Claire and her friends have managed to survive getting on the wrong side of some Morganville VIPs - Vampire Important Persons. But their temporary peace is in danger of collapsing, thanks to the arrival of her new boyfriend's scary father and his vampire-fighting supporters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damned_(novel)"title="Damned (novel)">
The novel opens with 13-year-old Madison "Maddy" Spencer waking in Hell, unsure of the details surrounding her death. She believes she died of a marijuana overdose while her celebrity parents were attending the Academy Awards. Maddy quickly gets to know her nearby cellmates. The group (loosely modeled on the archetypes of characters from "The Breakfast Club," i.e., a rocker, a nerd, a beauty and a jock) take Maddy on a tour of Hell.In Hell, Madison works as a telemarketer, calling the living during mealtimes to ask them inane survey questions. For the most part, only the terminally ill and elderly answer Madison's surveys and they are charmed by her, so much so that she convinces them to commit mortal sins so they can spend eternity in Hell with her. Madison becomes the top recruiter of souls for the damned and begins to collect an army of admirers and friends with whom she conquers all of the "bullies" of Hell including Adolf Hitler, Vlad the Impaler, Ethelred II and Catherine de Medici. She uses her new-found army to beautify hell and orders them to paint the bats to make them look more like birds, drain a lake of saliva, etc. Madison's sway becomes so large that eventually Satan himself tries to convince her that she is one of his own creations, specially designed to lure souls into his dominion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lankar_of_Callisto"title="Lankar of Callisto">
Throughout the series, author Lin Carter has portrayed himself as the recipient and editor of the manuscripts of protagonist Jonathan Dark (Jandar), teleported from the Jovian moon Callisto (moon) (or Thanator, as its inhabitants call it) to the ruined Cambodian city of Arangkhôr. In this volume he finally travels to Cambodia, hoping to learn what became of Jandar after the conclusion of the last volume of his memoirs, "Mind Wizards of Callisto".Once in Arangkhôr Carter accidentally falls into the well-like teleportation device himself, and is duly transported to the jungle moon as Jandar had been. A literal babe in the woods, he is hardly cut out to become an interplanetary hero; indeed, he spends much of his sojourn on Thanator mooning like a tourist over its extraordinary sights, likening them to wonders of which he has read or seen portrayed in various works of fantastic literature and art.Carter is soon taken in hand by an othode, a forest creature with the personality of a faithful dog, which becomes his companion and protector against the local perils. It defends him against a Vastodon and later saves him from an immense spiderweb. Carter acquires another companion in the native boy Tarin, who had also been trapped in the web, and an abbreviated native-style name, "Lankar," which Tarin finds easier to pronounce.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renegade_of_Callisto"title="Renegade of Callisto">
In the final adventure set on the Jovian moon Callisto, or Thanator, three comrades of series hero Jandar are lost in a damaged airship. Jungle boy Taran, Yathoon warrior Koja and their pet othode Fido, drift away from the city of Shondakar into the plains ruled by the insectoid Yathoon hordes.Taken captive by one of the hordes, they meet fellow prisoner Xara, princess of Ganatol, waylaid on her way to Shondakar to secure an alliance against the mercantile Perushtar city-states.Koja and Borak, another Yathoon prisoner, escape and find sanctuary with Koja's own horde, while Taran and Xara are saved by another airship sent by Jandar to locate the missing protagonists. Xara falls in love with Vandar, the ship's captain. Unfortunately, rescued and rescuers are quickly retaken by the Yathoon and carried away to Sargol, the hidden capital of all the insectoid hordes.Koja, who has reassumed the leadership he once held over his own horde, is there as well. He challenges the Yathoon emperor to a duel for the right to rule the combined hordes. The contest takes the form of a game of Darza (Thanatorian chess), utilizing as pieces live players who must fight to the death. Taran, Xara and Valkar become some of Koja's "pieces."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_Air_(Parker_novel)"title="Thin Air (Parker novel)">
Belson returns home one night to find his young wife, Lisa, missing, with no clue as to her whereabouts. He suspected that she may have left him, but circumstances seem to indicate she was kidnapped. Shortly after confiding in Spenser, Belson is shot returning home one night. Since he is unable to search for her himself as he is hospitalized, Spenser undertakes the search himself.The investigation leads him to the impoverished town of Proctor where he has to uncover details of Lisa's life previous to meeting Belson to discover where she might be now.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ylana_of_Callisto"title="Ylana of Callisto">
The storyline begins during events covered in the previous volume in the series, "Lankar of Callisto", in which most of the evil Mind Wizards threatening the Jovian moon of Callisto, or Thanator, were wiped out in the climactic battle. One last survivor of the villainous band seizes as hostages Ylana the jungle girl and her lover Tomar, and flees to take refuge with the Cave People, a tribe dominated by his race.Together with Ylana's father, lately deposed as chief of the tribe, the two captives escape and head for the territory of the rival River People, pursued by a hunting party. Ylana is kidnapped by a River faction intent on fomenting war between the tribes, but the eventual conflict is limited to young malcontents from both, strengthening the power of the traditional authorities.The threat of the Mind Wizard is ended when he is devoured by a plesiosaur, and all ends happily for Ylana and Tomar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Travelers_Never_Die"title="Time Travelers Never Die">
After his father Michael Shelborne mysteriously disappears, Adrian "Shel" Shelborne receives a package from his father with instructions to follow if something were to happen to him. Inside the package there are four devices that the note instructs him to destroy. After toying with the device a little, Shel discovers that the devices have the ability to take you anywhere at any point in time.After figuring this concept out, Shel decides to go back in time to the last time he talked to his father on the phone and find out why he disappeared. After finding his father in the past, his father explains to him the dangers of time travel. Shel's father explains that the devices can be used to go to events in time and become a part of them, but to interfere with the events could lead to fatal consequences. After taking this into consideration Shel's father decides to go back in time and return to the present to avoid causing a paradox in time. When his father still doesn't return, Shel enlists the help of his best friend Dave Dryden to help him find his father in time.They eventually find his father's tombstone stating that he died in 1637. Going back to the year 1604, Shel finds his father to be a very old man. Shel's father explains to him that when he went back in time, the device got damaged when he was teleported on to a sheet of thin ice rather than dry land. He also explains that he can not leave because Shel and Dave have seen his grave site, and taking him out of that time line would cause a dangerous paradox.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rainbow_Cadenza"title="The Rainbow Cadenza">
The novel tells the story of Joan Darris, a laser art composer and performer, and her interactions with her society.The novel portrays a future nominally-libertarian world government, in which many social taboos of the middle-twentieth century have been eliminated—for instance, gay marriage, drug use, sex work, and Wicca are all deemed socially acceptable. However, women, greatly outnumbered by men, are required to perform a three-year term of sexual servitude, and the "Touchables" underclass can be hunted for sport.The main themes of the novel are social libertarianism vs. societal control, freedom of self, and what is permissible for the greater good.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_Instinct_(novel)"title="Killer Instinct (novel)">
Jason Steadman is a thirty-year-old salesman, modest and industrious, who loves his wife Kate very much and wants to succeed in his work. But, as his boss makes clear to him, Steadman lacks "Killer Instinct" - the limitless ambition that will allow him to climb the ranks. Everything changes when Steadman meets Kurt Semko, a special forces combat soldier who has just returned from the Iraq war. From that moment, Steadman's luck improves remarkably, while his opponents encounter a strange succession of serious mishaps. Steadman's career is picking up, but the price he pays is very expensive. As a double-edged sword, Semko's fighting tactics turn to him and turn his life into hell.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_Wizards_of_Callisto"title="Mind Wizards of Callisto">
A force of four airships bearing Jonathan Dark (Jandar) and his allies explores the unknown far side of the Jovian moon of Callisto (or Thanator), to seek and destroy Kuur, the secret stronghold of the evil Mind Wizards. The fleet is attacked by a flock of flying creatures called Zarkoons, and Jandar and the cabin boy Tomar are captured. Flown to the Zarkoons' lair, they meet another captive, the jungle girl Ylana, with whom they manage to escape. A flier piloted by Jandar's allies Lukor and Koja spots and retrieves them, but damaged by the pursuing Zarkoons it subsequently crash lands. The five find themselves in the Cor Az, forest home of the Cave People, Ylana's tribe, where all but Ylana are again imprisoned, the Cave People being under the thumb of the enemy. With Ylana's assistance they escape once more, only to be retaken and held for the Mind Wizards.Their ultimate fate is a mystery. An airship from the fleet later finds the memoir Jandar composed in captivity and hid as pursuit closed in. The manuscript is flown back to the civilized hemisphere of Thanator, whence with additional annotation it is afterwards teleported to Earth to become the basis of the present volume. The other three ships continue the quest for Kuur, but nothing has been heard from them as of the time of the last notation on the manuscript. With this cliffhanger the novel ends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truman_(book)"title="Truman (book)">
The book provides a biography of Harry Truman in chronological fashion from his birth to his rise to U.S. Senator, Vice President, and President. It follows his activities until death, exploring many of the major decisions he made as president, including his decision to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his meetings and confrontation with Joseph Stalin during the end of World War II, his decision to create the Marshall Plan, his decision to send troops to the Korean War, his decision to recognize the State of Israel, and his decision to desegregate the U.S. Armed Forces.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cry_Slaughter!"title="Cry Slaughter!">
The setting of "Cry Slaughter!" was World War II. The novel narrates the story of guerrillas who were unwilling to surrender while awaiting the return of the armed forces of the United States. In addition, the novel features the tale about the girlfriend of a guerrilla lover. The woman chose to disobey the will of her pro-Japanese parents. The woman decided to join her lover in a hiding place in the hills.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollard_(novel)"title="Pollard (novel)">
The novel concerns Anne, a teenager who leaves her chaotic home life and finds sanctuary in the nearby woods where she makes a new life for herself, foraging and hunting for food and building a house...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_the_Doctor"title="Search for the Doctor">
The year is 2056, and the Doctor is trapped in toroidal stasis by arch enemy Omega. But help is at hand from the Doctor's old friends Drax and K9 - and you! Now open the covers and join the Doctor in an adventure through Time and Space ...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_in_Space"title="Crisis in Space">
Garth Hadeez, overlord of the grim and gruesome Golons, has released a black hole into the solar system. His plan is to annihilate Earth. Only the Doctor - and you - can save it! Now open the covers and join the Doctor in an adventure through Time and Space ...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carrie_Diaries"title="The Carrie Diaries">
"The Carrie Diaries" focuses on Carrie Bradshaw, a high-school student who lives in Castleberry, Connecticut. Carrie is followed through high-school starting her junior year, continuing through the summer, and ending at senior year graduation. Carrie, her friends, and family are shown going through many different trials during this time.Carrie handles these well, including having a few boyfriends along the way. She and her dad have disagreements but do not come to blows until the end of the book. Carrie's final decision to not attend Brown University contributes to her living with her eventual lifelong friend Samantha Jones. This sets up Carrie as the precedent of a main character in "Sex and the City".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chess_Master"title="The Chess Master">
The story takes place in China during the Down to the Countryside Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The unnamed narrator and the chess master Wang Yisheng are two young intellectuals among many who are sent to a remote farm in the mountains to work. During the train ride to the mountains, Wang Yisheng and his friend talk about how he learned to play Chinese chess, and how he evolved his current strategy. Wang Yisheng tells his friend that his family was very poor, and his mother did not want him to be such a chess maniac, since chess could not earn money. However, Wang Yisheng was very devoted to chess. One day, while gathering garbage to sell, Wang Yisheng meets an old man who is a chess master. Using the principles of Daoism, the old man teaches Wang everything he knows about chess. Wang Yisheng also tells his friend about how his mother always disapproved of his chess habit, but before she died, she painstakingly made him a chess set out of discarded toothbrush handles, because she knew how much he loved chess. The two friends then debark the train and head their separate ways to different farms in the countryside.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Quiet_Belief_In_Angels"title="A Quiet Belief In Angels">
"A Quiet Belief In Angels" is written from the perspective of Joseph Vaughan, growing up in a rural community in early 1940s Georgia. Early in the novel, Joseph's father passes away from a fever, and Joseph likens a white feather on his pillow to his father's angel. Afterwards, a serial killer begins committing a spree of murders, abducting and brutally killing young girls. Joseph and his friends form a group known as "the Guardians" devoting themselves to protecting the town's girls from any further harm. The townsfolk begin to suspect a German farmer named Gunther Kruger, mainly due to rising tensions because of the Second World War, and burn down his family home, killing his youngest daughter, whom Joseph had sworn to protect when the killings began. The Kruger family leave town, and the townsfolk seem satisfied the killings will leave with them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Futures"title="Ancient Futures">
The first part of the book describes the nature of the region of Ladakh when Helena first arrived in 1975, prior to the influx of Western ideas and material goods. In particular, Ladakhi women enjoyed high social status and family and community ties were very strong. The second part describes how Ladakh changed socially, ecologically and economically with development."Ancient Futures" discusses the notion of progress, and explores the root causes of the problems faced by a highly industrialized society. The book has been translated into almost 40 languages and is used regularly at the grassroots level to raise awareness of issues surrounding globalization and the loss of indigenous wisdom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsieur_Beaucaire_(novel)"title="Monsieur Beaucaire (novel)">
The setting is Bath during the eighteenth century. Before the action of the novel begins, Beau Nash, an historical figure who served as Master of Ceremonies of Bath, has ordered M. Beaucaire out of the public rooms because of his low status. A barber to a French noble, Beaucaire has since that incident established a reputation for honesty while gambling with English notables in private.In the opening scene of the novel, he catches the Duke of Winterset cheating and threatens to expose the Duke, whose honesty is already the subject of gossip. Beaucaire insists Winterset take him to a ball and introduce him as the Duke de Chateaurien to Lady Mary Carlisle, "the Beauty of Bath." Beaucaire as Chateaurien wins the lady’s affection and the admiration of Bath society.In the days that follow Beaucaire twice emerges successfully from duels with men who pretend to insult him on their own behalf but are in fact acting on behalf of Winterset.Beaucaire and several British gentlemen accompany Lady Mary en route from a party. Beaucaire and Lady Mary engage in amorous conversation. Highwaymen attack Beaucaire shouting "barber!" and the others leave him to defend himself. He does so successfully for a time, then is overwhelmed, only to be rescued at last by his servants who were travelling some distance behind. Lady Mary denounces those who failed to come to Beaucaire’s defense. Winterset then emerges from the shadows and, over Lady Mary’s objections and with Beaucaire’s indulgence, tells the story of Beaucaire’s background as a lackey and an imposter, adding some fabrications to explain his own behavior in introducing Beacaire/Chateaurien to Bath society. Beaucaire mocks his words as a mixture of truth and invention. Questioned by the others, he asserts he has never been a barber but admits that he did arrive in England in the role of barber to the French Ambassador, M. de Mirepoix, and is named Beaucaire. One of the English, Molyneux, the only one to demonstrate some sympathy for Beaucaire, notes that his swordsmanship was that of a gentleman. Winterset warns Beaucaire not to appear in public in Bath again. Lady Mary, aghast, refuses to look at Beaucaire and orders her carriage to depart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_and_the_Cats"title="Max and the Cats">
Max is forced to leave Nazi Germany after he and his friend, Harald, have an affair with Frida, whose husband denounces them to the secret police for inappropriate behaviour. He flees the country on the "Germania", a ship bound for Santos, Brazil, with zoo animals in the hold and very few passengers, but the captain is involved in an insurance scam, and the ship is deliberately sunk. Max finds a dinghy on board with some provisions, and manages to lower it into the sea. The next day the sun is beating down on him, and he fears for his life without cover. He reaches out for a large closed box that has fallen from the ship next to him, hoping he can use it for shelter, but when he opens the padlock, something jumps out of the box and into the dinghy, knocking him unconscious. When he opens his eyes, "[t]he howl that he let out resounded in the air." Sitting on the bench in front of him is a jaguar.Max and the jaguar are stranded on the dinghy together for days, with only some basic provisions stored in the dinghy for emergencies. Max decides to start fishing to make sure the jaguar is not hungry, and briefly wonders whether he could train him. A shark approaches at one point, but the jaguar bats it away, saving them both; Max is so grateful that he hugs the animal, then pulls himself away in horror. At the very moment Max decides he cannot stand being alone with the jaguar anymore—after watching him tear a seagull apart—the jaguar appears to have a similar thought, and they both lunge at each other, colliding in midair. Max loses consciousness, and when he opens his eyes finds he has been rescued by a Brazilian ship. He asks about the jaguar, but the sailors assume he is delirious.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pack_of_Lies"title="A Pack of Lies">
The narrative follows the age-old pattern of separate stories embedded within a primary story, as in the "Panchatantra", the "Arabian Nights" and the "Canterbury Tales". Each of the stories is linked to a different piece of furniture in an antique shop, and the question arises as to whether the stories are pure invention ("a pack of lies") or could perhaps be true – and what their being "true" would mean about the narrator.A young man with the unlikely name of MCC Berkshire ("from Reading") follows Ailsa home from the library and talks himself into an unpaid job in her mother's run-down antique shop – all he asks is somewhere to sleep and books to read. He has a wonderful way of assessing the customers and suiting the provenance he gives the furniture to their interests. Moreover, he seems to adapt himself – his accent, his manner, his personal history – to the story being told, which also seems to be inspired by the book he has just been reading. When chided by Mrs Povey for telling lies, he responds: "'Not "lies", madam... "Fiction". That's the thing to give 'em. That's the thing everyone wants. "Fiction, madam!"' "Ailsa and Mrs Povey, while grateful to MCC for his help and enjoying his company, often have doubts about him, while Uncle Clive, on a brief visit, is positively hostile. After the Poveys' financial problems are suddenly solved, literally from the pages of a book, the scene is set for MCC's departure. In the final chapter Ailsa realises the shocking truth, while the reader realises that Ailsa's reality is another of MCC's tales.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Empress_of_Callisto"title="Mad Empress of Callisto">
Jonathan Dark (Jandar) is now well settled into his new life as husband of Princess Darloona of Shondakar on the Jovian moon of Callisto (or Thanator). While out hunting with some companions they are kidnapped in a balloon by a force from the rival city of Tharkol. Their capture is part of a plot by Zamorra, empress of Tharkol, who under the mental influence of her advisor, the Mind Wizard Ang Chan is making an attempt to conquer all of Thanator. Sprung from her dungeon by the thief Glypto, Jandar and his companions kidnap Zamorra and escape in the balloon. However, their craft is later attacked and brought down by a Ghastosar (a Thantorian flying creature resembling a pterodactyl), and the group falls into the hands of the insect-like Yathoon nomads. Once again Glypto is the key to their escape.Striking out for Shondakar on foot, they encounter a caravan from the Soroba, only to find it a front for a military expedition from that city. They are rescued from the Sorobans by an airship, which they assume to be from Shondakar—but it is a Tharkolian ship, another unit in Zamorra's new airfleet.The empress having gradually proven to be a decent sort during the party's adventures, Darloona tries to talk her out of her mad scheme. Discovering she has been controlled by Ang Chan, Zamorra is persuaded, and the upshot is a new alliance against the Mind Wizards made up of Tharkol, Shondakar and Soroba (ably represented by Glypto, now revealed to have been a Soroban spy).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_23"title="Apollo 23">
The Doctor and Amy arrive at a shopping centre much to The Doctor's disappointment. When arriving they discover that an American astronaut has appeared out of thin air. They both decide to materialize to the Moon which they successfully do and find the secret Base Diana. Investigating, they learn of a plot by the evil Talerians to take over the Earth by possessing human bodies. The Doctor ends up trapped on Earth and working with secret government officials, manages to return to the Moon on Apollo 23, there having secretly been Apollos 18 through 22 before a link was established between Earth and the Moon that allowed instantaneous travel before sabotage caused it to break down, causing the spaceman to appear.On the Moon, Amy is captured and possessed and lures the Doctor into a trap, but he manages to escape with the help of Major Carlisle who managed to secretly remain unpossessed due to a power failure caused by Amy attempting to stop sabotage. With Carlisle's help, the Doctor finds a back-up copy of Amy's personality and restores her to normal and later manages to do the same using the fire suppression system to everyone but the alien leader, Jackson, who had kept his back-up with him. Restoring everyone's minds through their back-ups also erases the alien minds possessing them. Jackson manages to summon an invasion force of actual Talerians and reveals that the real Jackson's experiments had allowed him (the alien possessing him) to transfer himself to Jackson in the first place and start the invasion. The Talerians are revealed to be balloon-like aliens that are extremely fragile and are dying out. They want human bodies to survive. The Doctor restores the real Jackson by secretly giving him his back-up in his tea and he sacrifices himself to destroy the Talerians by shooting out a window, causing a depressurization that kills the Talerian invaders due to their fragility, and also kills him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_(Paver_novel)"title="Outcast (Paver novel)">
It is revealed that in the previous book, the Soul Eaters marked Torak with the Soul Eater symbol. When the symbol is noticed on a hunt by another boy named Aki, the decision is made to banish him from the clans; furthermore, the leader of the Wolf Clan, that of Torak's father, announces that his mother named him 'clanless'. This is unprecedented, but as Torak has no clan to defend his innocence, he becomes an outcast. He leaves the clans with Wolf. His friends Renn and Bale repeatedly try to help him, but Torak refuses, fearing for their safety, as the punishment for helping a Soul eater is death.Thinking that an attempt to cut out the Soul Eater mark from his chest has worked, he returns to the Raven Camp. However Saeunn, the Raven Clan's mage, feels the presence of a Soul Eater, and Torak flees. While in hiding, he suffers from a kind of madness called soul sickness, and attacks Wolf with fire. Meanwhile, Renn and Bale decide to find Torak and prove his innocence, even though in doing so they are breaking the law of the clans. Renn sends help to Torak in the form of two ravens (named Rip and Rek by Torak). While Torak is recovering, Seshru the Viper Mage, a Soul Eater, uses her powers to draw him to her to control his spirit-walking powers. Seshru is revealed to be Renn's mother, and is in possession of a fragment of the fire opal, a mystical artifact which controls demons, and which can only be destroyed through a sacrifice of a life
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goggle-Eyes"title="Goggle-Eyes">
The story is told in the first person, by Kitty Killen. It is set in Scotland in the 1980s, when anti-nuclear protests were prominent in the news.When Helen runs out of the classroom in distress, Mrs Lupey sends Kitty after her, despite the two not being particular friends. Kitty soon realises that Helen dislikes the man her mother is going to marry, so she tells her the story of how she first loathed Gerald, her mother's boyfriend, and how she gradually got used to him, despite his anti-CND views. "Goggle-Eyes"' is the nickname Kitty gives Gerald, because of the way he stares ("goggles") at Kitty's mother. The story is told in a cloakroom cupboard during one morning, with occasional interruptions from Liz and Mrs Lupey.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_Pirates_of_Callisto"title="Sky Pirates of Callisto">
Jonathan Dark (Jandar), earthman mysteriously transported to the Jovian moon of Callisto (or Thanator), has in concert with the native Ku Thad succeeded in freeing the city of Shondakar from the occupying Black Legion and the opportunistic Zanadarian Sky Pirates. The only fly in the ointment is that Shondakar's rightful ruler, the princess Darloona, has been abducted by the fleeing Prince Thuton of Zanadar.To free Darloona, Jandar adopts the wild plan of taking one of the Sky Pirates' own captured airships to raid the enemy city. A Zanadarian prisoner brought along to help operate the craft treacherously scuttles the scheme by throwing Jandar overboard and sabotaging the airship.Plopped into the Corund Laj, Thanator's greater sea, Jandar finds himself close enough to land to swim to safety, only to be enslaved by the mercantile Perushtar who rule its waves. Ironically, this results in him reaching his destination after all, as he is sold to the Zanadarians as gladatorial fodder. He has his hands full simultaneously surviving as a gladiator, hiding his identity as the Sky Pirates' arch enemy, and stirring up a revolt among his fellow slaves.As the revolution ignites and he is found out, his allies' airship, now repaired, swoops in to administer the "coup de grace". Zanadar is destroyed and the menace of the Sky Pirates ended by the explosion of the pocket of "lifting gas" over which the city is built and on which its air power is based. Best of all, Jandar at last finds favor with the rescued Darloona, whose relationship with him amid the perils and reverses of the previous books has been decidedly rocky.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Matt_the_First"title="King Matt the First">
Matt is a child prince who is catapulted to the throne by the sudden death of his father.At the beginning of his reign, Matt enacts several bold reforms aimed at improving life for the people of his kingdom, especially the children, but in spite of his best intentions, reality gets in the way producing many unintended consequences from silly to sinister.Matt tries to read and answer all his mail by himself and finds that the volume is too much and he needs to rely on secretaries. He is exasperated with his ministers and has them arrested, but soon realizes that he does not know enough to govern by himself, and is forced to release the ministers and institute constitutional monarchy.When a war breaks out, Matt cannot accept being shut up in his palace, but slips away and joins up, pretending to be a peasant boy - and narrowly avoids becoming a prisoner of war. He takes the offer of a friendly journalist to publish for him a "royal paper" -and finds much later that he gets carefully edited news and that the journalist is covering up the gross corruption of the young king's best friend. Matt tries to organize the children of the entire world to hold processions and demand their rights - and ends up antagonizing other kings. He falls in love with a black African princess and outrages racist opinion (by modern standards, however, Korczak's depiction of blacks is itself not completely free of stereotypes which were current at the time of writing). Finally, he is overthrown by the invasion of three foreign armies and exiled to a desert island.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_Breaker_(novel)"title="Oath Breaker (novel)">
Suspecting that the last fragment of the fire opal is hidden on the Seal Islands, Torak, Renn and Bale are searching for it there. After Bale asks Torak for his permission to take Renn as his mate, which leads to Torak storming off, Bale is murdered by Thiazzi the Oak Mage, who finds and takes the fragment. Torak, guilt-ridden and remorseful since he left Bale alone, vows to avenge Bale's death. He is joined by Renn, Wolf, and Fin-Kedinn on a journey into the Deep Forest, Thiazzi's home, where the Forest Horse and Auroch Clans are at war.On the Deep Forest, Fin-Kedinn is injured and turns back. Torak and Renn soon discover that Thiazzi is controlling the Deep Forest clans by impersonating their mages. When a forest fire takes hold, Torak and Renn are separated. Torak eventually finds his way to Thiazzi, while Renn defies the Deep Forest clan who captures her by showing them her bond with Wolf and the ravens, Rip and Rek, an ability which they do not believe a woman could have. Having been kidnapped by Thiazzi and imprisoned in a giant, hollow tree, she cuts herself free in time to avoid choking on smoke, and climbs to the top, from where she sees Torak fighting Thiazzi.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legion_of_Callisto"title="Black Legion of Callisto">
Jonathan Dark (Jandar), earthman mysteriously transported to the Jovian moon of Callisto (or Thanator), has succeeded in rescuing Princess Darloona of Shondakar from the Sky Pirates of Zanadar, only to see her fall into the hands of the Black Legion, the mercenary force that had previously occupied her native city and driven her and her followers into exile.Journeying to Shondakar, Jandar improbably finds himself in the Legion's good graces after saving the son of its leader, the very man that leader intends to have Darloona wed in order to cement his control of the city. Having essentially been given a free hand to spy on the enemy, Jandar scouts out the city's defenses and weaknesses, particularly its tunnel system. He disrupts the wedding as Darloona's Ku Thad people infiltrate Shondakar through the tunnels and take the occupiers by surprise.Jandar kills the mastermind behind the princess's misfortunes, the supposed priest Oola, who is secretly one of the Mind Wizards conspiring to take over all of Thanator. But during the battle the Sky Pirates invade, and while the Ku Thad are ultimately victorious over both foes, Prince Thuton of Zanadar escapes, carrying Darloona back to the captivity from which Jandar sprung her in the previous volume. Back to square one...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Hungry"title="Power Hungry">
As in his earlier book "Gusher of Lies" (which was about the idea of energy independence), Bryce argues that the United States needs to continue to use large amounts of fossil fuels including imported oil.However he does contemplate ways in which reliance on fossil fuels might be reduced:Bryce argues that some renewable sources, such as wind farms, are not truly green and that carbon capture and storage will not work and will prove to be an expensive mistake.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lodger_(Doctor_Who)"title="The Lodger (Doctor Who)">
After stepping out of the TARDIS in modern-day Colchester, the Eleventh Doctor is blown off his feet by a blast of air, and the TARDIS, with Amy still inside, dematerialises into the time vortex and refuses to rematerialise. With Amy's help, the Doctor tracks the disturbance to the upstairs flat of a two-storey house. The Doctor opts to take a room for rent offered by the downstairs tenant, Craig Owens, in order to determine what is present on the upstairs flat without alerting whatever it is to his Time Lord nature. The Doctor notices localised time loops and disturbances aboard the TARDIS that coincide with noises from the upstairs flat.Over two days, the Doctor attempts to adapt to human life. He learns about Craig, an office worker with little aspiration to move onward. Craig is stuck in a platonic relationship with his co-worker, Sophie. The Doctor encourages Sophie to follow her dream of travelling overseas to help animals. Craig, who has not yet professed his love for Sophie, becomes upset; he accosts the Doctor and demands that he leave, which forces the Doctor to reveal his history and his reason for being in the flat.Sophie arrives while they argue and is lured upstairs; the Doctor and Craig follow, learning from Amy that Craig's building has never had an upstairs flat. Inside, they find an alien ship housing a primitive time engine. The ship crashed some time ago and has disguised itself as the upstairs flat. The ship's emergency holographic program has been drawing in all passersby desiring to escape in order to find a replacement pilot for itself, but they were killed in each attempt, since humans are incompatible with the ship's controls. The Doctor convinces Craig to touch the controls since he does not want to leave due to his love for Sophie, which will counteract the ship's protocols. Craig does so, and he and Sophie admit their love and share a kiss that breaks the ship's hold on themselves. The three escape as the ship implodes, leaving Craig's one-story flat below undamaged.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_September_Society"title="The September Society">
A student at Lincoln College at the University of Oxford goes missing. His mother engages Charles Lenox to solve the mystery of his disappearance. Lenox, himself a graduate of Oxford, revisits his alma mater to piece together the clues in this kidnapping case which, upon the discovery of a body, becomes a murder investigation. Eventually the trail leads Lenox back to London and the headquarters of a mysterious society.Lenox’s evolving friendship and potential romance with his childhood friend and next-door neighbor Lady Jane is a central subplot. Additionally, the book introduces Lord John Dallington, a young wastrel aristocrat, as Lenox’s apprentice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daleth_Effect"title="The Daleth Effect">
Arnie Klein, an Israeli scientist, discovers the 'Daleth effect', a simple and economic way to achieve space travel. It also has the potential to be used as a weapon. Klein defects to Denmark in order to protect his discovery and develop it without it falling into the hands of the military. He fits an experimental Daleth effect unit to a submarine to create a makeshift spacecraft. When it is sent into space to rescue two Soviet cosmonauts who are stranded on the moon, Klein is forced to reveal his secret to the world. He and his friends are then subjected to pressure from a variety of international sources, all of which seek access to his invention.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jandar_of_Callisto"title="Jandar of Callisto">
The story is told in the first person by the hero, Jonathan Dark, who is represented to be its author. Carter, the actual author, claims to have merely edited the manuscript, which, like subsequent works in the series, supposedly found its way to him from the ruins of the ancient city of Arangkhôr in Cambodia.Dark, a helicopter pilot transporting medical supplies in Southeast Asia, is forced down in the jungles of Cambodia, where he discovers Arangkhôr. There he slides into a well made of a mysteriously slippery substance, which proves to be a device of unknown provenance that teleports him to another world. The world in question is eventually determined to be the Jovian moon of Callisto, which beneath a projected illusion of airless desolation turns out to have a breathable atmosphere, an alien biology, and human inhabitants (presumably descended from victims of the well during the period before Arangkhôr was abandoned). Callisto is known to its inhabitants as Thanator.After nearly falling victim to a Yathib, one of the local predators, Dark is saved by a nomadic tribe of Yathoon, a race of intelligent insectoids. Rescue proves a mixed blessing, as he is also enslaved. While with them he learns Thanator's language, which is shared by Yathoon and human alike, and his captors learn his name, more or less. "Jandar" is the closest they can render "Jon Dark," and he remains Jandar through the rest of the series. Escaping, he encounters a beautiful woman in peril. For Jandar, it's love at first sight; she takes a bit longer to warm to him—three whole books, actually. She is the princess Darloona, who has been exiled from her native city-state of Shondakar by the conquering Black Legion. His attempts to aid her are not very effective, and they fall into the hands of another tribe of Yathoon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_You_Can_Save"title="The Life You Can Save">
## The philosophical argument.Singer presents the following argument in the book:Singer argues that it is obvious that an adult ought to save a child from drowning unless that individual is risking something as valuable as the child's life. Singer points out that as many as 27,000 children die every day from poverty that could be easily and cheaply helped by existing charities (see also List of preventable causes of death).Singer says that many of his readers enjoy at least one luxury that is less valuable than a child's life. He says his readers ought to sacrifice such a luxury (e.g. bottled waters) and send proceeds to charity, if they can find a reliable charity.Singer spends time clarifying that people have a right to spend money any way they want, but says that fact does not change the way one ought to spend it. The author also notes that some people may be indifferent to the impact they could have, but says this consideration also fails to change how people ought to act.Singer's central thesis is that, a given individual may be able to point to others doing nothing, but that individual still ought to do as much as they can. The title of the book comes from the fact that Singer addresses readers directly, asking them what they will do about "the life "you" can save".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_in_the_Attic"title="The Castle in the Attic">
William is given a realistic model of a castle by his family's English housekeeper, Mrs. Phillips, who tells him that it has been in her family for many many years and that its toy silver knight (made of lead) is said to be under a spell. The knight, Sir Simon, comes to life and tells William stories about olden times and an evil wizard who is ruling his kingdom. Desperate to stop Mrs. Phillips from going away, William has Sir Simon shrink her with a magic token he stole from the wizard, Alastor. However, William and Sir Simon lack the ability to return Mrs. Phillips to her true size as the half of the token that can do so is with Alastor, and Mrs. Phillips falls into a depression. Learning of a legend that states that when there is a lady, a knight, and a squire, a quest can be undertaken to stop Alastor, William decides to become a squire to undo his mistake. As he will be shrunk willingly, he will return to his world at the exact moment he left, but Mrs. Phillips will lose all the time she spent in the castle until William enters. William has Sir Simon shrink him and he enters the castle to join his two friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortals_of_Meluha"title="The Immortals of Meluha">
Meluha is a near perfect empire, created many centuries earlier by Lord Ram, one of the greatest kings that ever lived. However, the once proud empire and its Suryavanshi rulers face severe crisis as its primary river, Saraswati, was slowly drying to extinction. They also face devastating attacks from the Chandravanshis who have joined forces with the Nagas, a cursed race of people with physical deformities. The present Meluhan king, Daksha, sends his emissaries to Tibet, to invite the local tribes to Meluha. Shiva, chief of the Guna tribe, accepts the proposal and moves to Meluha with his people. Once reached they are received by Ayurvati, the Chief of Medicine of the Meluhans. The Gunas are impressed with the Meluhan way of life. On their first night of stay the tribe wake up with high fever and sweating. The Meluhan doctors administer medicine.Ayurvati finds out that Shiva is the only one devoid of these symptoms and that his throat has turned blue. The Meluhans announce Shiva as the Neelkanth, their fabled saviour. Shiva is then taken to Devagiri, the capital city of Meluha, where he meets Daksha. While staying there, Shiva and his comrades, Nandi and Veerbhadra, encounter Princess Sati, the daughter of Daksha. She is a Vikarma, an untouchable person due to sins committed in her previous births. Shiva tries to court her, but she rejects his advances. Ultimately Shiva wins her heart and even though the Vikarma rule prohibits them from doing so, an enraged Shiva vows to dissolve it and marries Sati.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstoppable_Global_Warming"title="Unstoppable Global Warming">
Over sixteen chapters the authors present their view of the natural cycles in the earth's climate and argue that the current warming period is not caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.The book begins with the earth's climate timeline, starting from the formation of the earth 4.5 billion years ago, and leading up to the Modern Warm Period.The book ends with a chapter titled "The ultimate failure of the Kyoto Protocol", which predicted that the Protocol would be unsuccessful in curtailing emissions. It covers the localised plummeting emissions associated with the collapse of the Soviet Union and what the book says is Russia's excess amount of Carbon Credits which, the book argues, will be purchased by European nations to offset their rising emissions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finch_(novel)"title="Finch (novel)">
At the time of "Finch", Ambergris is ruled by the gray caps, a non-human, "spore-based" species. Their "Rising" followed a destructive civil war between rival human factions.The title character, reluctant detective John Finch, is tasked with investigating a double-murder, one victim a human and the second a gray cap.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Disagree_About_Climate_Change"title="Why We Disagree About Climate Change">
"Why We Disagree About Climate Change" is an exploration on how the idea of climate change has taken such a dominant position in modern politics and why it is so contested. In the book, the author looks at the differing views from various disciplines, including natural science, economics, ethics, social psychology and politics, to try to explain why people disagree about climate change. The book argues that climate change, rather than being a problem to be solved, is an idea which reveals different individual and collective beliefs, values and attitudes about ways of living in the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Story_(The_Dresden_Files)"title="Ghost Story (The Dresden Files)">
Immediately following the events of "Changes", Harry finds himself between life and the afterlife, where he is informed that there has been an "irregularity" with his death and is given the option to return to Chicago as a spirit and find his killer. He elects to return and heads to the house of an ectomancer who could communicate with ghosts, Mortimer Lindquist, whom Harry had maneuvered into helping him in the past. Harry finds out that he has been dead for six months, and as a spirit, both his access to his magical powers and his ability to interact with the normal world are greatly compromised. Mort initially refuses to aid Harry, but after Harry helps to defend the house against an assault led by a powerful spirit-like entity, Mort reluctantly agrees. Mort and Harry go to Murphy's house, and Harry is subjected to intense questioning by many of his friends and colleagues to verify his identity. Once satisfied, Murphy explains to Harry that the destruction of the Red Court created a worldwide power vacuum, allowing a group called the Fomor to rise to power.The next night, Harry returns to Mort's to find that the house has been destroyed and Mort has been abducted. Harry tracks down Mort and finds him trapped by the spirit of the Corpsetaker, a previously slain foe of Harry's who is torturing Mort in an attempt to "take" his "corpse" (i.e. replace Mort's soul with the Corpsetaker's own). Harry summons the army of spirits that sheltered at Mort's, storms the hideout through the Nevernever, and takes down the wards, allowing his allies to physically assault the hideout. Harry returns to confront the Corpsetaker only to discover that she has consumed all of the spirits involved in the assault, increasing her power and giving her the ability to physically manifest - and the ability to steal a body, which she promptly does in the form of Butters. Molly attacks the Corpsetaker, who responds by entering her mind in an attempt to steal her body instead. Harry is quick to follow.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Primeval"title="City Primeval">
The original novel takes place in Detroit and tells the story of a seriously crazed 'Oklahoma Wildman' Clement Mansell who knows how easy it is to get away with murder - thanks to some nifty courtroom moves by his beautiful, tough-as-nails lawyer Carolyn Wilder. But now the killer's senseless execution of a crooked Motown judge has inflamed the ire of homicide Detective Raymond Cruz, a good cop who believes in old-fashioned justice. When Mansell tries to extort money from the 'Albanian' Skender Lulgjaraj, Cruz isn't about to let Mansell slip through the legal system's gaping holes a second time. Even if that means maneuvering the psycho into a wild Midwest showdown that only one of them is going to be walking away from...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merman's_Children"title="The Merman's Children">
Set at the end of the medieval era, "The Merman's Children" details the end of the last bastion of the kingdom of the Merfolk, one of the Faery peoples being displaced by the advancing tide of Christianity. The city of the Liri king (the Merman of the title) lies beneath the waves off the shores of Denmark, peacefully coexisting with the landbound humans until exorcised by a zealous priest and his churchbells. The majority of the Merfolk are destroyed or scatter, unable to withstand the onslaught, leaving only the king's halfling offspring by a human lover. The story follows them and their various fates as they seek a place to call their own, in locales as varied as the dying Norse colonies in Greenland and the coastlands of Dalmatia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_in_the_Snooker_Club"title="Beer in the Snooker Club">
Behind the bar at Jameel's in Cairo hang two mugs engraved with the names of Ram and Font. During their years together in London, they drank many a pint of Bass from these mugs. But there is no Bass in Nasser's Egypt – so Ram and Font have to make do with a heady mixture of beer, vodka and whisky. Yearning for Bass, they long to be far from a revolution that neither serves the people nor allows their rich aunts to live the life of leisure they are accustomed to. Stranded between two cultures, Ram and Font must choose between dangerous political opposition and reluctant acquiescence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_This_Is_How_It_Ends"title="So This Is How It Ends">
"The beginning of the novel contains separate plots that will later become entwined as the story progresses."The book begins by introducing a man named Bill Nichols, a policeman in New York City. He is currently investigating a mysterious house fire from which a little girl by the name of Kali survived. Out of the havoc that was reaped, it seems highly suspicious that a little girl survived. He believes it as luck and dismisses any suspicion, leaving the fate of Kali unknown. The setting shifts to Chile, where a boy by the birth name of Catequil and the nickname of Tigre sits in class. The clouds roll in as he sits there, bored. The clouds take control and the boy jumps from class to run outside and enjoy the storm. He loses consciousness and faints. Meanwhile, an Egyptian tomb is broken into by someone who is obviously a child. There, an ancient artifact said to be god like, is stolen by a boy named Amon. He escapes, knowing this artifact will help him.Finally, the story shifts to Gus. Gus is just getting home from a night out with his girlfriend Lisa and another couple. As his three friends drop Gus off, the conversation shifts into one about a very famous pop singer by the name of Venus. The other couple discusses her concerts and of how the teenage pop star seems to enchant all of her fans. After Gus tells them he has never heard her music, the other couple lends him a copy of Venus's album. Gus gets out of the car, waves his friends goodbye and proceeds to walk into his house. He goes to play the CD when the door rings, and his brother's girlfriend comes in. She announces that Gus's parents along with his brother, Andrew, have been in a horrible car wreck. Meanwhile, what is regarded as Venus's most disliked song by music critics (discussing the end of the world) plays.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_of_Silence"title="Lies of Silence">
The plot revolves around the protagonist, Michael Dillon, and his wife, Moira Dillon, who are held hostage in their house by members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). The men force Dillon, an apolitical hotel manager, to drive his bomb-laden car to the hotel he manages in order to kill a leading Protestant reverend, members of the Orange Order, and militant Protestants, all of whom are attending the same function. Various aspects of female psychology are also present throughout the novel, including Dillon's extramarital affair with Canadian writer Andrea and Moira's mental breakdown following the revelation of his infidelity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Very_Persistent_Gappers_of_Frip"title="The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip">
The village of Frip, consisting of three shacks by the sea, relies entirely on the production and sale of goat's milk. The gappers, an unintelligent lifeform shaped like a spiky fish, crawl up from the sea and sit on the backs of the goats. The gappers are so excited about the goats that they cling to them and emit a loud, high-pitched shriek of joy when they are on them. The children of Frip must brush the gappers off of the goats' backs into their gapper sacks and throw them off a cliff back into the sea 8 times a day. When one slightly less stupid gapper realizes that one of the houses is closer to the sea, they overwhelm the goats in that shack, belonging to Capable and her father, leaving the others untouched and their selfish owners rejoice in their no longer having to deal with the problem. When Capable asks them for help, they show their true colors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Look_Behind_You"title="Don't Look Behind You">
This story starts out in Norwood, Virginia. April Corrigan is a 17-year-old girl who is an amazing tennis player with long blonde hair and is referred to as "Princess April." She's generally a smart and nice girl, albeit somewhat conceited.As the story begins, April is a junior in high school, a hotshot player on her school's tennis team and is dating senior Steve Chandler. Her younger brother Bram is about 9 or 10. One day, April is signed out of school early by her maternal grandmother Lorelei. Her father, who works for the FBI, has been testifying against his boss in a drug smuggling case involving an airline; someone shot at him in the courtroom that day. Her FBI agent uncle thinks it would be safer if they were out of their house for the remainder of the trial. He relocates them to a hotel and assigns them a bodyguard.As the trial goes on, the Corrigans become bored. April is resentful at being away from Steve. When her requests to call him are denied by their bodyguard, she surreptitiously writes and sends him a letter. A few days later, hitman Mike Vamp attempts to break into their hotel room. They are saved, but their bodyguard is killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_the_Heir"title="Ralph the Heir">
The title character is Ralph Newton, the nephew of Squire Gregory Newton of Newton Priory. The squire has never married; he has an illegitimate son, also named Ralph Newton, whom he loves dearly. However, the estate is entailed, and after his death will go to his nephew Ralph; he cannot leave it to his natural son.Ralph the heir is a spendthrift, and has run himself deep into debt. There are two ways in which he can extricate himself: by raising money on his future interest in the Newton estate, or by marrying Polly Neefit, the daughter of a wealthy breeches-maker who is one of his major creditors. Neither choice is a good one for him: the first might lead to the estate's being seized by his creditors upon the old squire's death; the second would mean allying himself to a family of a much lower social class, thus putting his own social standing at risk.The squire, anxious to obtain full possession of the estate so that he can pass it to his son, offers to buy the heir's reversion. Ralph vacillates, hesitatingly proposes to and is rejected twice by Polly Neefit, and eventually accepts his uncle's offer. However, before the transaction can be completed, the squire is killed in a hunting accident and his nephew comes into full possession of the property and its large income.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragon's_Familiar"title="The Dragon's Familiar">
The novel tells the story of Cory Avalon, an orphan who is lured through an enchanted gateway disguised as a mirror, and ends up in the magical world of Abydonne. Cory meets Prince Taliesin of Caer Dathyl and is adopted by his father King Llewellyn, who makes Cory the apprentice of the royal wizard, Math the Ancient. Early in his apprenticeship, Cory casts a spell to summon and bond with a familiar, and a young golden dragon named Benythonne answers Cory's incantation. The resulting bond grants Cory enormous strength and the ability to fly, as well as amplifying his raw magical power. Math suspects Cory may be the long-prophecised archwizard who will free humanity from the demon threat, and sends Cory to learn from Vainamoinen, another wizard. After several months, the Cory learns that Vainamoinen is his natural grandfather, and Abydonne was the world of his father's birth. Harkening to the ancient prophecy, Cory acknowledges his duty as the prince of wizards, and he sets out to free the captive humans from the demons and destroy their mountain stronghold of Abyolldd. along the way, the young wizard is joined by a group of Math's apprentices, and together they set out for the dark mountain. Cory frees the slaves and has Benythonne and the other apprentices lead the slaves to safety, while Cory battles Asmodeus the Demon Lord alone. During the magical combat, one of Cory's mystic bolts strikes the mirror gateway to Earth, shattering it. The resulting shockwaves bring down the entire mountain, and Cory escapes with his life by teleporting away to his dragon, safely outside Abyolldd.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bay_of_Noon"title="The Bay of Noon">
A young Englishwoman, Jenny, is working in Naples some years after World War II. Alone in the ruined city, she follows up a letter of introduction from an acquaintance, through which she meets Gioconda, a beautiful and gifted writer, and her lover Gianni, a noted Roman film director. Meanwhile, at work she meets Justin, a Scotsman whose inscrutability Jenny finds mysteriously attractive. As Jenny becomes increasingly drawn into the lives of the three, she discovers that the past is not easily forgotten.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_of_the_Hive"title="The God of the Hive">
Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes are each on the trail, seeking to expose a ruthless villain and ensure the safety of Holmes' artist son, Damian Adler, and Adler's half-Chinese daughter, three-year-old Estelle. The search involves the British practitioners of a religious cult called "The Children of Lights" with roots in Shanghai, China. The plot picks up in the summer of 1924 near an ancient circle of standing stones on Orkney Island, shortly after religious fanatic Thomas Brothers, who seeks to unleash psychic energies through human sacrifice, shot Holmes's artist son, Damian Adler. Holmes's search for medical help to save his son's life takes him to Holland, while Mary travels through Britain in an effort to keep Estelle safe from Brothers and his allies. Brothers' shadowy connections have led to a conspiracy deeply entrenched in the highest echelons of government. Mycroft Holmes finds himself questioned and under suspicion and the family members are actively pursued by Scotland Yard. In the process a modern-day Robin Goodfellow emerges to lend aid to Mary and her kin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Humans"title="Night of the Humans">
The Doctor and Amy are caught in the middle of a war between humans and Sittuns on the junkyard planet of the Gyre, and when the Doctor disappears, Amy teams up with a mysterious space traveller to rescue him, little knowing the dangers she has put herself in.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Love_and_Evil"title="Of Love and Evil">
Toby O'Dare, former government assassin, is summoned by the angel Malchiah to fifteenth-century Rome—the city of Michelangelo and Raphael, of Leo X and the Holy Inquisition—to solve a terrible crime of poisoning and to uncover the secrets of an earthbound restless spirit, a diabolical dybbuk. Toby is plunged into this rich age as a lutist sent to charm and calm this troublesome spirit.In the fullness of the high Italian Renaissance, Toby soon discovers himself in the midst of dark plots and counterplots, surrounded by a still darker and more dangerous threat as the veil of ecclesiastical terror closes in around him. And as he once again embarks on a powerful journey of atonement, he is reconnected with his own past, with matters light and dark, fierce and tender, with the promise of salvation and with a deeper and richer vision of love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Blondes"title="Two Blondes">
Sookie and Pam go to Tunica, Mississippi for what Sookie had hoped to be a simple vacation sightseeing and gambling but is unsurprised that the duo also has to perform an errand at the request of Victor. After enjoying a day around town by herself and a strongman competition with Pam, Sookie finds out that they need to see if Michael, a vampire owner of the strip club Blonde, would defect to serve Castro, the vampire king in charge of Sookie and Pam's area. The two arrive at the strip club and meet with Michael and his half-elf assistant Rudy, but Pam is poisoned when Rudy puts some of his blood into her drink - the effect similar to tranquilizer or strong liquor. Michael had hoped to get Eric to pay ransom for the two but the attempt failed as Pam was still able to resist. Pam incapacitated Michael while Sookie took out Rudy with a revolver she had received from Pam earlier. In an attempt to escape from the club the two pretend to be strippers trying out for the club. Police arrive responding to a call that Michael and Rudy had been murdered and question Pam and Sookie but eventually let them go and the two return to Bon Temps.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Sacrifice"title="Last Sacrifice">
The novel begins with Rose in her prison cell contemplating the charges brought against her and occasionally using the bond to slip into Lissa's mind to view goings-on at Court. During Queen Tatiana’s funeral, bas-reliefs outside the church suddenly blow up, causing chaos, and acting as a distraction for the guardians. Rose is soon broken out of prison by Mikhail, Eddie, Adrian, Abe, and Dimitri. Dimitri takes Rose out of Court and they drive for hours until they reach Sydney Sage, the Alchemist Rose met in Siberia, who is also aiding in the escape. They continue traveling until reaching West Virginia, where Rose discovers she is to be kept in a motel until her friends back at Court can clear her name. However, she insists on leaving and helping out, but after Dimitri halts her escape, Rose convinces him and Sydney to look for Lissa’s half-sibling. For safety, Sydney takes them to the Keepers, a strange group of Moroi, dhampirs, and humans. Later, they find out the sole person who holds the information needed to find Lissa’s sibling: Sonya Karp, who was once teacher at St. Vladimir's but is now a Strigoi. The Dashkov brothers invade Rose’s dreams and they later meet up with her at Sonya's house in Kentucky, where Robert changes her back into a Moroi by staking her with a silver stake infused with spirit. After recovering from the initial shock of being restored, Sonya leads them to Jillian Mastrano’s house in Michigan, who is revealed to be the illegitimate child of Eric Dragomir. Not long after they arrive, Guardians raid the Mastrano house, forcing them to scatter and flee again and creating the opportunity for Victor and Robert to kidnap Jill. Using her spirit abilities, Sonya is able to locate where the brothers are hiding Jill and relays the information onto Rose. Upon questioning, Sonya also reveals to Rose that her and Dimitri’s auras shine extraordinarily bright when they are around each other, which shows they are in love. This further confuses Rose about Dimitri's true feelings for her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_Images"title="Split Images">
The novel begins in Detroit and tells the story of Robbie Daniels, a multimillionaire who guns down a Haitian refugee who broke into his Palm Beach mansion, calling it "practice". Walter Kouza, a 21-year veteran of the Detroit Police Department, sees this case as his one chance to quit being a cop and go to work for a big shot. The only one who can stop him is Lieutenant Bryan Hurd, whose unique method of investigation is supported by his good-looking lover and journalist Angela Nolan. The two follow Daniels and Kouza when they travel Florida to find their next victim: a diplomat and drug dealer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_a_Battlefield"title="It's a Battlefield">
The Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, newly appointed after a career in the Far East, is summoned to a meeting with an assistant to the Home Secretary, who has to decide whether to reprieve Drover. During a demonstration, this Communist bus driver knifed a policeman who was about to strike his wife and is sentenced to hang. Drover's fate affects a wide circle of other people. His wife Milly goes to visit the policeman's widow and then seeks comfort with Drover's brother Conrad, who is consumed with guilt over his incest. Milly's sister Kay goes to bed with Surrogate, a rich economist who is a Communist, and then with Jules, who works in the Soho café where the Communist journalist Conder lodges. Both Surrogate and the Assistant Commissioner try to enlist the aid of the society hostess, Caroline Bury. All are unsure how far they should try to save Drover, who faces long imprisonment if he does not hang. Conrad, feeling he ought to act, blackmails a pawnbroker into selling him a revolver and shoots at the Assistant Commissioner. The gun was loaded with blanks however, and Conrad is knocked down by a car as he fires. Unknown to either, the Home Secretary has already reprieved Drover.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Israel_Lost_the_War"title="If Israel Lost the War">
The book's point of divergence is the assumption the Arab air forces on June 5, 1967, launch a surprise attack and destroy the Israeli Air Force, rather than the other way around as occurred in actual history. The Arab armies launch a lighting ground attack and, in an exact mirror image of the actual Six-Day War, conquer the entire territory of Israel by June 10, 1967. The United States, embroiled in the Vietnam War, takes no action to intervene in the Israeli-Arab war, and the same is true for every other country (except for a valiant but futile sending of some planes by the Netherlands). As Sirhan Sirhan returns home to Jordan to celebrate the conquest of Israel, Robert F. Kennedy is never assassinated and goes on to defeat Richard Nixon in the 1968 election, becoming the 38th US president (Hubert Humphrey became the 37th president in the book's alternate timeline following Lyndon Johnson's resignation in January 1968).Meanwhile, Egyptian troops capture and publicly execute Moshe Dayan in Tel Aviv. The victorious Arab armies establish new secret police units, which include former Nazi war criminals serving in advisory roles, to maintain order in the newly occupied territory. As depicted in the book, the Palestinians get no benefit from the Arab victory and are not granted a state of their own, with Israel being partitioned between Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Also, the Palestinian refugees are not allowed to return to their pre-1948 homes despite them now being under Arab rule. The book closes with Yigal Alon, a former commander of the Palmach militia, planning a Jewish insurgency.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_and_Beezus"title="Henry and Beezus">
Henry Huggins really wants a bicycle, but his family can't afford one this year. One of the older boys in the neighborhood, Scooter McCarthy, has a new red bike, and Henry imagines himself riding one up and down Klickitat Street just like Scooter. So he decides to start a bicycle fund, and save up the $59.95 himself. But he only earns a penny for every empty Coke bottle turned in for recycling, so it will take a long time to get that bike. Each chapter centers around Henry's ideas to get a bicycle, including selling boxes of bubble gum he found abandoned in an alley and buying a bike from an auction.One day Henry and his family attend the grand opening of the town's new supermarket. At the event, Henry's name is drawn in a raffle to receive $50 worth of beauty-treatment coupons at the supermarket's beauty parlor. After his friend Beezus Quimby asks to buy one of the coupons from him, Henry manages to turn his initial humiliation at winning what he had considered a useless prize into a windfall; he agrees to sell Beezus the coupon she wants, and his mother helps to stir up interest amongst her friends and acquaintances for the majority of the rest. After Henry raises nearly $50 selling the coupons, Mr. Huggins decides to make up the difference, and Henry triumphantly rides home from the bicycle shop on his shiny new bike.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgeous_East"title="Gorgeous East">
John Smith, an out of work actor, after toxic relationships in Istanbul, and Paris, joins the French Foreign Legion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Fallen_Angels"title="City of Fallen Angels">
Simon receives an offer from a vampire named Camille Belcourt, who claims to have been usurped by Raphael Santiago. She says that if Simon joins her side as the Daylighter, he will finally earn his place in the vampire society. After his meeting, he returns home worried about what his mother would think, as she has been suspicious since he went to Idris in "City of Glass" and did not return for a few days. Although Magnus Bane erased memories of his absence, she was still subconsciously suspicious about his whereabouts.Simon is attacked several times. Each time, the Mark of Cain placed on him by Clary works, and anyone who tries to attack him quickly meets a biblical "sevenfold" death. When he arrives home, his mother confronts him about the blood she has found hidden in his closet, and he is forced to tell her what he has become. She believes that he is no longer her son and begins to pray. Desperate, he tells her that it's a bad dream and she, surprisingly, believes him, with the help of his persuasion powers as a vampire. Knowing that he can't go back to his mother's house, he moves in with his band's new member, Jordan Kyle. When Jace comes to Simon's apartment, he meets Kyle and realizes that Kyle is, in fact, a werewolf.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunted_(novel)"title="The Hunted (novel)">
Al Rosen stuck his neck out to help the Detroit government put some goons in prison, only it didn't go according to plan. He is living in Israel off the checks sent his way by the company he helped found. The checks are brought to him by the untrusty sleazy lawyer Mel Bandy. Rosen spends his days hanging out in hotel lobbies, getting sun, and just simply staying out of sight. But one fateful night there's a hotel fire that draws the attention of the media and Rosen gets photographed and wound up getting his face in the Detroit Free Press. Now Rosen's enemies know where he is and they immediately descend on the Holy Land for the purpose of killing him. Sgt. David Davis is about to finish his tour with the marines. The big problem is that he has no idea what to do with himself once he is out. Now Rosen is on the run in Israel with three killers and a sleazy lawyer on his tail and a U.S. Marine for company. Can this Vietnam vet U.S. Marine keep Rosen safe...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_and_Death_of_a_Spanish_Town"title="Life and Death of a Spanish Town">
The book is set in and around the small town of Santa Eulària des Riu, on Ibiza, where Paul had lived since 1931. In the first part of the book Elliot Paul describes the town and many of the characters who live and work there. He details their family lives, their hopes, their aspirations, and their politics. He provides details of the people at work and at play, and describes how he becomes part of the community of the town. Paul also writes of other ex-patriates who have made their homes in and around the town. Part two starts with Paul and his family returning to Ibiza, after some time away. The narrative is set in 1936 in the week leading up to the outbreak of hostilities on Ibiza during the Spanish Civil War and describes the events that eventually lead to Paul, his family and other refugees from the violence, fleeing the island. It tells the story of civil disobedience, collaboration and the violence that split a once-happy community, although the narrative finishes before the tragic turn of events reaches its conclusion. The postscript, written by Paul, dated 14 June 1937, details events following his departure from Ibiza and describes his hopes and fears for his friends on the island and a way of life that he thought would change for ever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quants"title="The Quants">
The introduction to "The Quants" describes the real-life, annual, high-stakes poker match between Wall Street's hedge fund managers, comparing their trading styles to their poker strategies. It focuses on, among other things, the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis and how it helped trigger a sudden and massive unwinding of complex, highly leveraged quantitative strategies. The book also delves into critical short-comings of many quantitative strategies, such as their tendency to lead to crowded trades and their underestimation of the likelihood of chaotic, volatile moves in the markets.The book also delves into the background of the various vanguards of quantitative analysis. It tells the history of "Beat the Market" &amp; "Beat the Dealer" author Ed Thorp; Pete Muller from Morgan Stanley's hedge fund; Ken Griffin from Chicago's Citadel LLC; James Simons from Renaissance Technologies; Clifford S. Asness and Aaron Brown from AQR Capital Management; and Boaz Weinstein from Deutsche Bank.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midget_(novel)"title="Midget (novel)">
Teenage Midget is abnormally small and can barely speak. He has fits as a result of the secret abuse he suffers at the hands of his psychopathic older brother, Seb, who is to outward appearances utterly devoted. Midget dreams of buying a boat and sailing away, but people say it'll take a miracle for that to happen. Midget knows miracles can happen, but sometimes they hurt people who get in the way.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Borrowers_Afield"title="The Borrowers Afield">
Kate is looking at a cottage with her aunt Mrs May. Kate learns that the present tenant Tom Goodenough knows Arrietty Clock, a tiny "Borrower" also known to Mrs May's brother. Tom relates the troubles of Arrietty and her parents. Driven from their home in an old English house, unable to track down their relatives, they live in an old boot.Spiller, a mysterious wild Borrower, brings meat and saves Arrietty from a dog attack. Although everything outdoors — cows, moths, field mice, cold weather — endangers the Borrowers' lives, they learn to survive in the wild. One night, a Romani Mild Eye finds his lost boot and brings the Clocks back to his caravan. Tom and Spiller rescue the Clocks. In their new home with Tom, they find their long-lost relatives. In Tom, Arrietty finds a good friend and ally.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Psalms"title="Sidney Psalms">
Psalm 3 belongs to Sidney's Psalmes of David, as David is the subject of many of the Psalms. It is his personal thanksgiving to God for answering the prayer of an afflicted soul. In the King James Bible, the Psalm is introduced as "A Psalm of David, when he fled from Absalom his son". Absalom led a fierce and powerful rebellion against his father, seeking to take the Kingdom from him. When David is left feeling betrayed by his own son and deserted by his subjects, he turns to God in prayer and confesses his faith. The story of Absalom can be found in the two Books of Samuel. Sidney's Psalm opens with David questioning God about the ever constant presence of sinners in the world. He goes onto say that no matter how his enemies may multiply, he can rely on God to be his protector.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelsea_Chelsea_Bang_Bang"title="Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang">
The book consists of humorous essays written by Chelsea about her various life experiences. The essays are often blatantly vulgar, much like the ones in Handler's previous two published books.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_of_the_Mountains"title="East of the Mountains">
Dr. Ben Givens is a 73-year-old retired cardiothoracic surgeon and a widower, recently diagnosed with terminal colon cancer. Still haunted by his experiences as a soldier in the war, and in mourning for Rachel, his late wife of some 50 years, Dr. Givens's current life consists primarily of his family (a daughter and grandson), and occasional hunting trips. Although he hunted as a boy with his father and brother, he abandoned it after the war, only taking it up again upon Rachel's death (he still uses his father's old Winchester shotgun). Aware that he is nearing the end of his life, he decides to set off from his home in Seattle for one last hunting trip, along with his two Brittany hunting dogs, Tristan and Rex, heading east across the mountains of Washington state back towards the orchard areas where he was born. His family does not, however, know of his cancer, and his intention during the trip is to commit suicide, shooting himself with his father's gun, staging it to look like an unfortunate accident which occurred whilst he was climbing over a fence, thus saving both himself and his family from the pain of a long, drawn-out death from cancer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boneshaker_(novel)"title="Boneshaker (novel)">
Early in the American Civil War, rumors of gold in the Klondike have brought would-be prospectors to North America's Pacific Northwest. Anxious Russian investors commission American inventor Leviticus Blue to create a machine which can mine through the ice of Russian-owned Alaska. Blue's "Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine" (or "Boneshaker" for short, named after boneshaker bicycles of the era), instead destroys several blocks of downtown Seattle and releases a subterranean vein of "blight gas" that kills anyone who breathes it and turns some of the corpses into rotters (non-supernatural zombies). A wall is erected to contain the gas within the affected part of the city. Leviticus Blue is nowhere to be found.Sixteen years later, Leviticus's wife and son, Briar and Zeke (Ezekiel) Wilkes, live in the impoverished outskirts of the former metropolis. Life is difficult, but Briar manages to support herself and Zeke by working a physically demanding blue collar job cleaning water. One day, Zeke enters the toxic city in search of evidence proving his father is innocent of the intentional destruction. Briar intends on following, but the drainage hole collapses in an earthquake. She then hitches a ride over the wall by a captain of an airship, the unnaturally tall Captain Cly. Meanwhile, Zeke meets Rudy, a man who claims to be a highly decorated lieutenant. Rudy tells Zeke that he can lead him to his parents' former house. The pair of them encounter a Native American woman named Princess Angeline who lightly wounds Rudy, but they manage to elude her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Barn_Burner"title="The Barn Burner">
In 1933 while running from a bad situation at home and suspected of having set fire to a barn, 14-year-old Ross finds haven with a destitute but loving family which helps him make an important decision.After a family disagreement, Ross Cooper leaves home with only a knapsack and the clothes on his back. He hopes to find work, but job prospects in the 1930s are dim, especially for someone as young and inexperienced as Ross. His troubles worsen after he is spotted fleeing a burning barn in an Ohio town where a number of barns have gone up in flames. Though a kind but destitute family takes Ross in, he yearns to hit the road again, especially when another barn is set afire and he falls under suspicion. But stronger than his wish to leave is his hope to discover the true identity of the barn burner and clear his name. This moving and fast-paced story captures the spirit of determination and hope boys like Ross needed to survive during the Great Depression.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Not_a_Serial_Killer"title="I Am Not a Serial Killer">
15-year-old John Wayne Cleaver is a diagnosed sociopath who lives above a mortuary owned by his mother and her twin sister, Margaret. His parents named him after actor John Wayne, but he notices that he shares the name with serial killer John Wayne Gacy also. He is obsessed with serial killers, and has extensive knowledge of their behaviors. John himself exhibits a few of these characteristics, such as wetting the bed, fascination with fire, and abusing animals. He fears that he is "destined" to become a serial killer, and so lives by a set of rules designed to keep his homicidal impulses in check and keep him "normal." He forces himself to not obsess over any one person, to sit with a boy named Max during lunch to maintain a sort of friendship, and to attend therapy sessions with a counselor, Dr. Neblin.After a serial killer comes to Clayton County, North Dakota, John decides to throw all his rules aside in order to catch the culprit. As the victims' bodies come to his family's mortuary, John notices that there is a part missing from each: for one, it is a kidney, for another, an arm. His conversations with Dr. Neblin become focused solely on the killer. Soon, John discovers that his neighbor, Mr. Crowley, is the guilty party; John watches as he transforms into a demon who kills to replace his own failing body parts. In the following weeks, he watches Crowley kill another innocent man, two police officers, and his friend Max's dad. He begins to leave Crowley anonymous notes threatening to expose his true identity. John wonders why Crowley stays in Clayton, then discovers that it is because he truly loves his wife, Kay. John notes this paradox: Crowley is a demon who can love, and he himself is a human who cannot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Monster"title="Mr. Monster">
In the aftermath of the Clayton Killer, John Wayne Cleaver struggles to balance his desire to do and be good with his darker side, which he calls "Mr. Monster" and which he previously let loose in order to save the town. His mom is now aware of his rules and helps to enforce them, but refuses to confront the reality that the Clayton Killer, posing as Mr. Crowley, was actually a demon. John frequently meets with an FBI investigator, Agent Forman, but is careful not to reveal any information about the supernatural activity he witnessed or the fact that he himself killed Crowley. When Agent Forman informs John of a new murder victim, he begins to suspect that a new serial killer – possibly a demon – is on the loose. John then meets his sister Lauren's new boyfriend, Curt, whose behavior earns him the top spot on John's list of suspects. Meanwhile, he grows closer to Brooke and decides to ask her out on a date – despite his recurring nightmares about harming her. When they attend the school bonfire, another body is found in the lake. As John examines the evidence, he realizes the new killer is imitating Crowley; this time, however, the victims were tortured prior to their death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bronze_Horseman_(novel)"title="The Bronze Horseman (novel)">
Tatiana Metanova wakes up on 22 June 1941, the day before her 17th birthday, to her older sister Dasha coming home and declaring that she is in love. That same morning, Vyacheslav Molotov announces Germany has invaded the Soviet Union. Tatiana's parents send her twin brother Pasha to a boys' camp so that the army won't draft him. Tatiana, who is young and naive, is excited by the war. While her family focuses on sending Pasha safely away, Tatiana is entrusted with buying food and supplies. Unable to find much to buy, she buys a scoop of ice-cream, causing her to miss her bus. While waiting for the next bus, she notices a red army officer watching her, and he eventually crosses the street and introduces himself as lieutenant Alexander Belov.After an embarrassed introduction, Alexander and Tatiana become attracted to one another and he helps her buy food at the Officers' store. Alexander's irritating friend Dimitri insists on helping them carry the boxes home. When they arrive at Tatiana's apartment, they discover he is the man Dasha has fallen in love with. Tatiana is disappointed but doesn't want to come between him and her sister. However, Alexander visits her the following day, meeting her outside of the Kirov factory where she works. After a few weeks of walking her home, Alexander and Tatiana's attraction is undeniable. Still, Tatiana begs Alexander to stay with Dasha and not break her sister's heart. Alexander and Tatiana's bond grows deeper as Alexander tells her he is an American who emigrated with his parents, now dead, in 1930. After a few weeks, Alexander, who is annoyed at Tatiana's unwillingness to fight for him, breaks up with Dasha and stops visiting the Metanovs and Tatiana.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_L-Shaped_Room_(novel)"title="The L-Shaped Room (novel)">
"The L-Shaped Room" is set in the late 1950s and follows a young woman, Jane Graham, who arrives alone at a run-down boarding house in London after being turned out of her comfortable middle class home by her shocked father after telling him she is pregnant.The L-Shaped room is the dingy room at the top of the boarding house that Jane retreats to, to wallow in her miseries. Jane narrates the story as we follow her through her pregnancy and her encounters with the other residents of the boarding house, all misfits and outsiders. Jane got pregnant through a bungled sexual encounter, losing her virginity to her ex-boyfriend. Her decision to live by herself and have the baby causes her to be seen as little better than the prostitutes who live in the basement of the boarding house.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starseeker"title="Starseeker">
Luke is an extremely gifted pianist, like his father who died two years previously. He is struggling to come to terms with his grief and sense of loss. And when he tries to break into the house again, Mrs Little confronts him. She insists that he help the frightened girl, who is not only blind but also has learning difficulties. Luke's returns to play music for the girl; his playing soothes and calms her. But he becomes aware that Mrs Little kidnapped her and Luke helps to reunite her with her parents. Skin, the leader of the gang, expects Luke to produce valuable items from the house. Skin becomes increasingly violent towards Luke leading to a near fatal attack.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_Like_Us_(book)"title="People Like Us (book)">
The text highlights the egocentricism and the "endless misunderstanding and mutual, cross civilisational ignorance" that - according to the author - pervade contemporary Islam-related attitudes and discourse. In the process it discusses issues including the hijab, jihad, fundamentalism, radicalism, and secularism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Oath_(Farnsworth_novel)"title="Blood Oath (Farnsworth novel)">
An Army Ranger unit is reassigned from hunting an Al-Qaeda terrorist cell in Iraq, to suddenly a clandestine mission in the unstable Republic of Kosovo, with details classified by the army's superiors. The unit conducts surveillance and maintains a security perimeter on a pack of Serbian thugs as night falls. A mysterious operative is then brought before the Serbian pack's leader and attempts to bargain with them for a metal box marked with US Army stencils that was stolen in rioting at the country's embassy. The operative attempts to trade a large bag of money for the case. However, the leader refuses to honour the agreement and, despite clear warnings by the operative, has his men attack the figure. One of the soldiers, veteran sniper Specialist Wayne Denton, witnesses the unusual operative suddenly react inhumanly fast and strong and proceeds to systematically kill them all, expertly and withstanding no injuries. Denton tries to kill the leader when he believes he will escape, only to find the leader is similarly fast and avoids his shot. Enraged, the leader races up to Denton's position to kill him. The operative, finished with the pack, intervenes at the last moment and kills the leader - witnessing the fight between them up close, Denton realizes what he is seeing: the Serbians were werewolves, and the operative, as he leaves, reveals he is a vampire. The unit is sworn to secrecy and returns to its mission the next day.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gusher_of_Lies"title="Gusher of Lies">
In 2008 the United States imported 60 per cent of its oil. Bryce argues that, given the size of its energy needs, the United States needs to continue importing oil. He also favors increasing domestic production of oil and gas. He acknowledges that energy independence has appeal as a slogan, but says that the reality is energy interdependence.As in his later book "Power Hungry" he makes a case that renewable sources such as wind power and solar energy cannot meet the United States' (growing) energy requirements. Bryce dismisses ethanol fuel as having a cost that far outweighs the benefits. However, he believes that as world prices rise in the longer term, it will be economic to move to non-fossil sources.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chords_of_Strength"title="Chords of Strength">
The memoir starts with Archuleta describing his childhood in Florida with his family and eventually moving to Utah. He introduced his readers to his family members, including how his mother, Lupe, was born in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, and enjoyed dancing and singing with her sisters when she was younger.Archuleta reveals that music has been a huge influence in his family for generations and that his father, Jeff, is a jazz trumpet player and that he has been a musical influence on him because he taught him the concepts of improvisation. Archuleta also described the impact the musical "Les Misérables" had on him and also the influence of the first season of American Idol. He described his experiences in the Utah Talent Show, Jenny Jones' Show, and Star Search, for which he won the title of Junior Vocal Champion.The vocal cord paralysis Archuleta suffered at a young age was described in detail, including how he felt and what the experience has done for him and taught him. He then continues to describe his decisions and various events leading up to his audition and participation on the seventh season of American Idol. As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Archuleta writes about how his faith encouraged him, influenced him, kept him grounded and helped him stay optimistic throughout his challenges. Archuleta showed love for his fans by writing how much he appreciates their support and provided his top 3 fan encounters. Inspiring others to also follow their dreams and make a difference, Archuleta concludes his memoir with "And remember, even when you can't sing, you can always plant a tree".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gideon's_Sword"title="Gideon's Sword">
The story introduces Gideon Crew, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory who is also a former art thief/master-of-disguise. He learns from his mother that his mathematician father—who had developed a flawed encryption—had actually warned his boss about the flaws, only to be murdered. Gideon exacts revenge from his father's murderer. As a result of this, he is recruited to be a freelance operative by an ultra-private security/engineering firm working for the Department of Homeland Security. His mission: to trace and retrieve plans for a mysterious super-weapon being brought to the United States of America by a Chinese scientist before the Chinese can recover them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Confessions"title="The New Confessions">
The book follows the life of John James Todd from his birth in Edinburgh up to his final exile on a Mediterranean island. Todd fights in the First World War and also films it as a cameraman, he then works for a film studio and ends up in Berlin where he starts his filming of "The Confessions". After the financial collapse of his backer, he moves to Hollywood along with many German exiles. He becomes a war correspondent during the Second World War and then returns to America where he becomes caught up in the anti-communist witch hunts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Calories,_Bad_Calories"title="Good Calories, Bad Calories">
Taubes points to biological, epidemiological, and anthropological evidence to back up his assertions. The human body secretes insulin in response to the consumption of carbohydrates in order to regulate blood sugar. This process, in turn, drives the body to store fat. Taubes elaborates by examining evidence of the effects of carbohydrates on tribes with a "traditional" diet high in meat or fat and low in carbohydrates. He finds that the introduction of refined carbohydrates in the diets in these cultures resulted in increased prominence of diseases of civilization like obesity and heart disease.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Double_Comfort_Safari_Club"title="The Double Comfort Safari Club">
Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi are called to a safari lodge in Botswana's Okavango Delta to carry out a delicate mission on behalf of a former guest. The Okavango makes Precious appreciate once again the beauty of her homeland: it is a paradise of teeming wildlife, majestic grasslands and sparkling water. However, it is also home to rival safari operators, fearsome crocodiles and disgruntled hippopotamuses. What is more, Mma Makutsi still has not set a date for her wedding to Phuti Radiphuti and is feeling rather tetchy herself, not least because of Phuti's possessive aunt. But Precious knows that with a little patience, just as the wide river will gently make its way round any obstacle, so will everything work out for the best in the end.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_in_Death"title="Purity in Death">
Lt. Eve Dallas and her assistant, Delia Peabody, are called in by Officer Troy Trueheart after he has shot and killed a suspect named Louie Cogburn. The man, a known but unconvicted, normally low-profile dealer in "illegals" (illegal drugs) to children, had suddenly turned homicidally insane and killed a neighbor in his apartment building; he was attacking the neighbor's wife when Trueheart enters the scene. Trueheart is forced to stun Cogburn when he attacks the officer; however, despite Trueheart's weapon being locked on a normal stun setting, Cogburn dies instantly.On examining the scene, Eve finds the attacker's computer bears a message on its screen: "Absolute Purity Achieved." She sends the computer to NYPSD's Electronics Detection Division for examination. The attacker's autopsy, meanwhile, shows an unusual extreme swelling of the brain tissue, enough to induce irreversible dementia and violence. Some time later, the EDD investigator working on Cogburn's computer turns violently enraged, injures Ian McNab, and then dies of the same intense brain swelling while holding Captain Feeney hostage.The next day, another body is found, that of Chadwick Fitzhugh, an unconvicted pedophile, with the same swelling and evidence of the same uncontrollable violence, and with the same message on his computer terminal. Following this, a text message is sent to reporter Nadine Furst from a group calling themselves the "Purity Seekers," claiming responsibility for the deaths of Cogburn and Fitzhugh, and promising more "executions" of criminals that the law has not been able to touch, by means of a unique computer virus. It becomes Eve's job, with the help of Roarke and her team, to stop the Purity Seekers before more are killed by them, as well as more deaths of uninvolved individuals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem_(Young_novel)"title="Requiem (Young novel)">
"Requiem", like "Brethren" and "Crusade" before it, follows Will Campbell, a Templar involved in a secret order known as the Anima Templi. After the Fall of Acre, Will returns to Europe to find out that his order agreed to help King Edward I to conquer Will's homeland, Scotland. Will decides to leave the Templars and fight together with his people against English invaders. But after his return to Paris he must face an even bigger danger, a plot that will lead to the end of the Knights Templar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pilgrim_of_Hate"title="The Pilgrim of Hate">
In 1141, the Abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul prepares to celebrate the anniversary of the translation of Saint Winifred's casket to Shrewsbury Abbey on 22 June.Brother Cadfael shares a secret with Hugh Beringar, as he recalls what happened in Wales four years ago. Cadfael removed Winifred's remains from the casket, returned them to her Welsh soil and replaced them with the body of a monk who died on their mission to seek the holy bones. The saint has continued to work miracles in Wales, but not in Shrewsbury. Cadfael wants a sign that the saint is not displeased with him.In early June, Abbot Radulfus returns from the legatine council called by Henry, Bishop of Winchester. The council ends with murder in Winchester when King Stephen's wife Queen Matilda asks the turncoat Henry to seek the King's release. Supporters of Empress Maud ambush the Queen's messenger, who is saved by the intervention of Rainald Bossard, a knight of the Empress, who is killed.Among the pilgrims streaming into the Abbey is the widow Dame Alice Weaver with her crippled nephew Rhun and his sister, Melangell. Alice wants help for Rhun; Rhun wants a happier life for his sister. Two young men arrive with them. Ciaran is under vow to walk barefoot to Aberdaron in Wales to die in peace, hampered by a great iron cross around his neck and protected by a bishop's ring. His inseparable friend Matthew has vowed to be at Ciaran's side for the penitential journey. En route, Matthew gave aid to Rhun, and he likes Melangell. Cadfael sees a third party of pilgrims, four suspicious-looking merchants. With a tip from Brother Adam, Cadfael warns Beringar that they are thieves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promises_in_Death"title="Promises in Death">
On being called in to investigate a dead body, NYPSD homicide detectives Eve Dallas and Delia Peabody discover that the woman is a fellow officer, Detective Amaryllis Coltraine, who worked out of another precinct. To add to the emotion of the case, Coltraine was the lover of Li Morris, the Chief Medical Examiner and a good friend of Eve and Peabody. Coltraine was shot with her own police stunner; it also appears that she may have known her killer.Meanwhile, Eve's contact from Internal Affairs Bureau Donald Webster clues her on the victim's connection with Alex Ricker Max Ricker's son back in Atlanta, Georgia, from where the victim requested a transfer to New York following a fallout.Initial evidence suggests that the kill may have been ordered by Alex Ricker. The suspect's reactions, however, as well as Roarke's impressions from a private discussion they have, tend to steer the blame away from him. Eve is beginning to sense that the killer may have been one of the detectives Coltraine worked with at her precinct.A humorous minor subplot revolves around Eve's performing another duty of friendship she has never tackled before: hosting a wedding shower for Louise Dimatto, who is marrying former "licensed companion" Charles Monroe. In the middle of the shower, Eve gets a call from dispatch informing her of the death of Rod Sandy, Alex's Personal Assistant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Overton_Window"title="The Overton Window">
The novel is based on the Overton window concept in political theory, in which at any given moment there is a range of policies related to any particular issue that are considered politically acceptable ("in the window"), and other policies that politicians seeking to gain or hold public office do not feel they can recommend without being considered too far outside the mainstream ("outside the window"). Moving the window would make previously radical ideas seem reasonable. Beck has referred to the book as "faction" – fiction based on facts.The plot revolves around a man named Noah Gardner, a public relations executive who has no interest in politics. He changes his mind when he meets a woman, Molly Ross, who is "consumed by the knowledge that the United States we know is about to be lost forever," an idea Gardner dismisses as a conspiracy theory. After the United States comes under attack, however, he works to expose the conspirators behind the attack.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passage_(Cronin_novel)"title="The Passage (Cronin novel)">
The novel is broken into 11 parts of varying lengths. The story itself is broken into two sections: the first and shorter section covers the origins of the virus and its outbreak, while the second is set 93 years after the infections, primarily following a colony of survivors living in California. Several narrative devices are used, including email, journal entries, newspaper reports, and other documents. Occasional use is made of reference material from 1,000 years after the outbreak, coming from "The Journal of Sara Fisher", sourced from a future "University of New South Wales, Indo-Australian Republic".The U.S. government is conducting a top secret experiment referred to as "Project Noah" which involves acquiring and transporting death row inmates to a secret military compound in Colorado, ostensibly for the purposes of testing a drug intended to greatly prolong life. These genetic experiments originate from patient zero, Tim Fanning—one of two surviving members of an expedition investigating a Bolivian bat-carried virus. The virus, while causing hemorrhagic fever and death in those who initially contracted it, results in a boosting of the immune system and enhanced strength and agility in the current subjects. It is later revealed that Project Noah is intended to produce weaponized enhanced humans for the military, described as "the ultimate bunker busters".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gilt_Kid"title="The Gilt Kid">
The protagonist of the novel is Kennedy, a 25-year-old spiv. Due to his blond hair he is known as "The Gilt Kid" from which the novel gets its title. The novel picks up as Kennedy has recently been released from prison having served a sentence for burglary. With no real plans to go straight and with Marxist sympathies he re-engages with the underworld of Soho and its associated culture. On his travels through London he observes and comments on the rituals of the destitute, prostitutes and criminals.Eventually "The Gilt Kid" finds himself involved in a robbery that doesn't go to plan. Fearing the inevitability that he will return to prison he struggles with the judicial system and attempts to ensure his freedom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliwa!"title="Aliwa!">
Based on a true story of a mother who tries to keep her three daughters from being taken away by officials after the death of her husband. It was later presented by Company B, was directed by Neil Armfield, starred Ningali Lawford, Kylie Belling and Deborah Mailman and was introduced by one of the sisters the play is based on, Aunty Dot Collard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_Ties"title="Zen Ties">
Stillwater, a panda, and his three-human friends, Karl, Addy and Michael are back in a new adventure. This time, Michael is faced with the daunting challenge of an upcoming spelling bee. The story also introduces Miss Whitaker, an elderly neighbor whose cantankerous nature frightens the children. Stillwater uses his quiet wisdom and insight to see past her bad temper to the lonely woman within. Stillwater also receives a visit from his young nephew Koo, who speaks in Haiku.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twin_(novel)"title="The Twin (novel)">
The novel follows the plight of Helmer, who resides on a Dutch farm with his father. His twin brother, Henk, died accidentally some thirty years earlier, and his mother some years later. The relationship between father and son is strained, as Helmer always thought that his father preferred his twin brother and wanted him to take over the farm. Helmer never married and was tied down to the farm all those years, needing to milk the dairy cows twice a day, every day for decades on end. His father is now dying, and Helmer encounters his twin brother's former girlfriend, who asks him to help her take care of her teenage son, also named Henk, who is shiftless. The unexpected arrival of a third person in the house changes things and forces Helmer to reflect about his relationship with his father and his dead brother, and to think about what he wants to do with the rest of his life once his father passes away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destroyermen"title="Destroyermen">
## "Into the Storm".In "Into the Storm", the story begins during the Second Battle of the Java Sea. The is a destroyer of the United States Asiatic Fleet, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Matthew Reddy. The "Walker" was a part of the surviving ABDACOM fleet, consisting of the Royal Navy cruiser , HMS "Encounter", and the United States Navy destroyers "Pope" and "Mahan", all of which were fleeing from Japanese naval forces. However, the Japanese forces closed range, and opened up on the small Allied fleet. The "Exeter" took a major hit, and ordered the remaining four destroyers to leave the crippled cruiser.The destroyers were systematically sunk, starting with the "Encounter", followed by the "Pope" shortly thereafter just as happened in the real naval battle. The surviving destroyers, "Walker" and "Mahan", then encountered the Japanese battlecruiser "Amagi". Seeing no other option, Lieutenant Commander Reddy commanded the pair of destroyers to stage a torpedo attack, which sank an accompanying destroyer, and badly damaged the battlecruiser, before the ships were enveloped in a freak squall, and transported to an alternate world, where humans never evolved, apparently because the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event (specifically the Chicxulub asteroid impact) never occurred.There are two races. One, the Lemurians, who evolved from giant lemurs from Madagascar, are peaceful farmers and fishermen, and live on huge oceangoing houseboats called Homes. "Walker"s captain, Lieutenant Commander Matthew Reddy, meets with the Lemurian leadership, and forms an alliance with them to fight the other race, the Grik, who are at war with the Lemurians. The Grik are possible descendants of the dinosaur genus "Velociraptor".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maelstrom_(Destroyermen_novel)"title="Maelstrom (Destroyermen novel)">
Captain Matthew Reddy's ship "Walker", and his Lemurian allies, have won several battles against the cannibalistic lizard race, the Grik, who are waging a war of genocide against the sea-going Lemurians. The Grik sent a large force of 500 ships carrying 150,000-200,000 soldiers to destroy the Captain's crew and base at Baalkpaan. The Japanese heavy cruiser, the "Amagi", will be supporting the Grik lizard army. The "Amagi" is a more powerful vessel than Reddy's antique, battered destroyers. With these odds, how will the Captain and his allies fare? Can the ship 'Walker' under Captain Reddy and his Lemurian allies prevail against the Grik and their allied ship the "Amagi"? Will the Grik destroy the Captain's crew and base at Baalkpaan?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winds_of_Winter"title="The Winds of Winter">
"The Winds of Winter" will take readers farther north than any of the previous books, and the Others will appear in the book. The previous installment, "A Dance with Dragons", covered less story than Martin intended, excluding at least one planned large battle sequence and leaving several character threads ending in cliffhangers. Martin intends to resolve these storylines "very early" in "The Winds of Winter", saying "I'm going to open with the two big battles that I was building up to, the battle in the ice and the battle at Meereen — the battle of Slaver's Bay. And then take it from there." A Victarion Greyjoy chapter will begin five minutes after the end of "A Dance with Dragons", taking place on the eve of the Ironborn's arrival in Slaver's Bay. Arianne Martell sample chapters that Martin released on his website showed her heading for Griffin's Roost to see the young man who is calling himself Aegon Targaryen. At Guadalajara International Book Fair 2016, Martin gave some clues about the dark nature of "The Winds of Winter": ... "I've been telling you for 20 years that winter was coming. Winter is the time when things die, and cold and ice and darkness fill the world, so this is not going to be the happy feel-good that people may be hoping for. Some of the characters [are] in very dark places. ... Things get worse before they get better, so things are getting worse for a lot of people."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Hero"title="The Lost Hero">
Jason Grace awakens on a school bus which belongs to the Wilderness School, unable to remember anything about his past. He is next to Piper McLean, his apparent girlfriend, and Leo Valdez, his apparent best friend. All three are part of a class field trip to the Grand Canyon. After they arrive there, a classmate, Dylan, turns into a storm spirit and attacks the trio and their trip leader, Coach Gleeson Hedge. In the ensuing fight, Jason battles the spirit and surprises everyone with his powers. Hedge is revealed to be a satyr and is captured by the storm spirit as it flees. A flying chariot with two demigods appear on the scene. The female demigod, Annabeth Chase, expresses her frustration upon seeing that her missing boyfriend, Percy Jackson, is not there as she had hoped, as he has been missing for three days without a trace. Jason, Piper, and Leo are told that they are Greek demigods and are taken back to Camp Half-Blood. There, Leo is revealed as a son of Hephaestus, Piper as a daughter of Aphrodite and Jason as a son of Jupiter, though Hera, the Greek form of Juno, tells him he is her champion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Theory_(novel)"title="Final Theory (novel)">
The narrative begins with a brutal attack on the aged theoretical physicist Hans Walther Kleinman. Kleinman is rushed to the hospital and summons his former student David Swift, now a professor at Columbia University. Just before dying, Kleinman pulls Swift close and wheezes two words in German: "Einheitliche Feldtheorie" and a sequence of numbers. It is revealed that the German phrase refers to the unified field theory developed by Einstein during his later years. Swift is intimidated by Lucille Parker, a sixtyish FBI Agent who is also after the theory.Swift meets with his old friend Monique Reynolds, a string theorist at Princeton University. Swift learns of the deaths of two close students of Einstein. The sequence of numbers points to The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University where another close student of Einstein, Amil Gupta, worked.At CMU they meet Gupta. Knowing that the FBI has been following them, they head for a hunting cabin in West Virginia, where Kleinman spent some time a few years ago. They are followed by FBI Agent Brock and by Simon, the assassin who killed Kleinman. Simon soon arrives and takes the weak Gupta and Brock. It is revealed that Simon is in fact working for Gupta.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hingede_öö"title="Hingede öö">
The novel comprises three parts, "Surnud mehe maja" ("The House of a Dead Man"), a briefer interlude entitled "Kiri proua Agnes Rohumaale" ("Letter to Mrs Agnes Rohumaa") and "Seitse tunnistajat" ("The Seven Witnesses"). The novel is a first-person narrative. In the first part, a nameless protagonist enters something resembling a concert hall in Stockholm a little before midnight on New Year's Eve and finds himself in a labyrinth of salons and staircases, meeting people from whom he feels alienated. The second part is written as a reply by the author to a letter sent by a fictional reader, Mrs Agnes Rohumaa. Apparently Mrs Rohumaa has expressed her dissatisfaction with the novel after reading the first part and the author feels obliged to reply and justify his writing. The last part describes a trial in which seven witnesses are called to give evidence, each for one of the seven deadly sins. The last witness is the protagonist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohvrilaev"title="Ohvrilaev">
The novel tells a love story between a middle-aged schoolteacher and a young Jewish girl taking place in the 1930s in Kalamaja.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotte_Weeda"title="Lotte Weeda">
The narrator is a biologist who became a local celebrity in his village, Monward, thanks to his book “The Reckless Outsider”, which describes the differences between sexual reproduction and cloning. While posing naked for a painter named Molly, he meets Lotte, a photographer who is working on a photo book of racy people in Monward. She asks the narrator to write the preface for her photo book and to give her a tour of the village. The biologist refers her to the village's young vicar, Maria, and to the owner of the beauty salon, a Somali woman called Sirena, who is a rumored transsexual. Lotte is introduced to Abel and Leonora, whose marriage is in a rocky state. Abel has delusions of Leonora being unfaithful and that none of his children from two marriages are truly his. Leonora asks the narrator whether he can identify a snake that her grandson brought from Croatia. It turns out to be a Sheltopusik, which is a harmless, legless lizard. As Abel acts increasingly mad and violent, Leonora becomes increasingly attracted to the narrator and even kisses him. The narrator is unsure of what to do about in the situation.In the meantime, the photo book, titled “Exposure time”, has been released and is presented in Monward. After the presentation, Lotte leaves for Indonesia to document the fights in Atjeh. This is when strange things start to happen. Abel, Leonora's husband, dies from a heart attack after another fit of rage. He is depicted in the photo book, and, as it turns out, is not the only villager of Monward to have passed after having been depicted in the book. It seems that before Abel, ten other depicted villages have preceded him in death. The fact that most of them were elderly people, cannot calm the village's restlessness. Soon after a young family, who was also depicted in the book, dies in a plane crash, the rumor that everyone depicted in the book will die spreads like wildfire. Sirena, too, becomes scared and talks to the narrator about her fear of her impending death. She confesses her transsexuality and shortly after the conversation, they sleep together. A friend of Abel's, Taeke, fuels the panic surrounding the photo book by suggesting that Lotte possesses magical powers. She supposedly let the silent power of goena-goena, a form of black magic from Indonesia, loose on the village. Soon after, Taeke jumps off a bridge and passes months later in the hospital.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaosbound"title="Chaosbound">
"Chaosbound" is an epic fantasy novel set in a land where men can bestow to each other a number of endowments, granting the recipient of the endowment some attributes such as increased strength, a more acute sense of hearing, or better eyesight. The novel combines traditional sword and sorcery elements of fantasy with its own unique magic system of endowments.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aranyak"title="Aranyak">
"Aranyak" is a simple and uncomplicated story. The protagonist Satyacharan goes to an estate, full of forest land, in Bhagalpur district in Bihar after getting a job of the estate manager. Initially his urban lifestyle revolts against the lonely jungle life but gradually nature hypnotized Satyacharan. Eventually he can not even remain away from the forest and its serene surroundings for long periods. Satyacharan and his partner Jugalprasad, a perfect match to the nature-loving soul of Satyacharan decorated the forest by planting many rare species of herbs and saplings. But Satyacharan is an estate manager and his job was to reclaim the forest land and distribute to the people for more revenue earnings. He has no other way but to destroy this wonderful creation of the forest-Goddess against his own will and distribute it amongst the local people. Age old gigantic trees as well as plants and herbs of rare species are being destroyed to make way for human encroachment. The novel ends with a deep feeling of guilt and sadness in Satyacharan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil's_Breath"title="The Devil's Breath">
Max Gordan is the main character in this book, he is a teenager attending a boarding school in Dartmoor. His mother was an environmental campaigner along with his ex-SAS father before she died mysteriously. At the start of "The Devil's Breath", word comes that his father is missing. Max then decides to take matters into his own hands and travels alone to Namibia, where he meets up with an English-speaking Namibian teenage girl, and a Bushman boy who believes Max has supernatural powers. Max then finds out that now his life is joined to the Namibians and he must combine with them so he can save his father and the environment from Shaka Chang, a ruthless businessman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_and_the_City_(novel)"title="Night and the City (novel)">
The protagonist of the novel is Harry Fabian, a morally reprehensible pimp determined to become the top wrestling promoter in London. During the course of the novel Fabian is embroiled in various unscrupulous money-making ventures. All those around him are treated as a means to an end without exception. However, while his acts of pimping, blackmail, promoting professional wrestling, and deception are successful, the proceeds of crime soon slip from his hands.Eventually his world starts to come down around him. On one side the police are closing in; on the other those he has swindled come calling. Desperate and at rock bottom Harry will try anything to ensure he comes out on top.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Drive_by_Night_(novel)"title="They Drive by Night (novel)">
The protagonist of the novel is Shorty Mathews, a petty criminal just released from Pentonville Prison. Now free he goes to visit his girlfriend in Camden only to discover her dead having been strangled. Realising he will be the prime suspect he flees the scene and attempts to evade the law by travelling with lorry drivers across the UK. The title, They Drive By Night, is a reference to the long distance logistical community who work, predominantly, at night. The antagonist Hoover is the real killer. He goes by the alter-ego of Lone-Wolf as he trawls the West End of London for more destitute female victims. His motivation to kill is part social cleansing, part mental degeneration.Alongside both accounts is the police investigation into the murders. Their enquiries proceed, with varying degrees of success, punctuated by corruption and brutality. Needing to wrap up the case there is little choice but to set a trap. Whoever is caught will face the hangman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silmarillion"title="The Silmarillion">
The events described in "The Silmarillion", as in J. R. R. Tolkien's other Middle-earth writings, were meant to have taken place at some time in Earth's past. In keeping with this idea, "The Silmarillion" was supposedly translated from Bilbo's three-volume "Translations from the Elvish", which he wrote while at Rivendell. The book covers the history of the world, Arda, up to the Third Age, in its five sections:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welcome_to_Obamaland"title="Welcome to Obamaland">
Writing for publication in the United States, Delingpole compares the differences between the United States and Great Britain, taking the view that the latter country is a failed socialist experiment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronto_(novel)"title="Pronto (novel)">
Harry Arno, an over-the-hill Miami bookmaker, quietly lives the good life with his girlfriend, Joyce Patton. He has skimmed for years from his corpulent mob boss, Jimmy "Cap" Capotorto, and managed to salt away nearly a million dollars in a Swiss bank account. Harry wants to retire and move to Rapallo, Italy, dreaming of an idyllic existence with Joyce in a villa by the sea. As a soldier in Rapallo, he once briefly talked to Ezra Pound when the poet was incarcerated.The Justice Department sets up Harry by putting out the word about his skimming activities, assuming that Harry will be forced to ask for witness protection and turn state's evidence against Jimmy Cap. Jimmy dispatches a low-life hit man named Earl Crowe, but Harry proves to be faster with a gun. Harry skips his bond and eludes U.S. Marshal and former Marine Raylan Givens. Harry makes a nostalgic dash for Rapallo.Holed up in a picturesque Italian resort, Harry is soon pursued by Joyce and Raylan. Tommy "the Zip" Bitonti, another mob affiliate, wants to take over Harry's action, so he tells Jimmy that he'll take out Harry in Italy. If Harry ends up dead, the Zip gets to take over the bookie operation, which is going to mean a lot more money. The Zip, who in Miami endlessly humiliates "Stronzo" Nicky Testa, demonstrates his penchant for violence with a cold-blooded murder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mannan_Magal"title="Mannan Magal">
The plot is about Karikalan who sets his journey to find his birth identity who doen't know about anything about his parents. He goes to vengi kingdom &amp; meets Niranchana devi accidentally where he learns about the horrifying political clutches around her &amp; her first younger brother Rajaraja Narendra. Vengi King Vimaladithyan has 3 children from his three wives, eldest daughter Niranchana of, first son Rajaraja Narendra of Kundavai - sister of Chola Emperor Rajendra Cholan I, second son Vishnuvarshan of - sister of Jayasimha II .Vengi is under undeclared war between Niranchana who want to strengthen throne for Rajaraja Narendra against Jayasimha II who want to swipe elder &amp; have a strong hold at Vengi with his nephew Vishnuvarshan, so as to stop &amp; oppose chola invasion &amp; dominance. Karikalan decides to dedicate for Niranchana and her mission. On his journey to save Niranchana Devi &amp; to get his own identity he was put into positions to manage &amp; tackle by-the-times most dangerous &amp; intelligent men like Brammaraayar, Jayasimha II, Araiyan Rajarajan. On course of time, they eventually fall for one anotherStory wide spreads from Vengi and take him to his guardian father figure - Araiyan Rajarajan, who &amp; some other key members who are bounded by an oath not to reveal Karikalan's identity under any circumstances. Even though Karikalan was not able to learn about his identity, he was treated as a great warrior and due to his wit &amp; intelligence quickly gets a position in War Council which is headed by Vallavaraiyan Vandiyadevan for Ganges Expedition of Cholas.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I'll_Get_There._It_Better_Be_Worth_the_Trip"title="I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip">
13-year-old Davy Ross' grandmother, who has raised him from the age of five, dies, forcing Davy and his beloved dachshund Fred to move in with Davy's divorced alcoholic mother in New York City. Davy's mother has difficulty adjusting to the new living situation, and acts resentfully and coldly to her son. Davy's father is more understanding, but also more distant, as he is remarried and sees Davy only sporadically. Davy's only friend is his dog Fred, until he meets Douglas Altschuler, a classmate at his new school who is also an only child living with a single mother. Davy and Altschuler begin spending time together, and eventually kiss, sleep in the same bed with their arms around each other, and engage in other erotic acts (described in the book as "making out" and "doing it", without more details). Davy seems comfortable with these activities until his mother sees the two boys sleeping with their arms around each other and becomes very upset.Shortly thereafter, Davy's dachshund Fred is hit by a car and killed. Davy now thinks homosexual acts might be wrong in view of his mother's reaction, and wonders if the death of his much-loved dog is punishment for his actions with Altschuler. Davy's feelings of guilt and shame cause a temporary break in the boys' friendship, but in the end they reconcile after Davy is encouraged by his father, who does not share his mother's homophobia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lords_of_Finance"title="Lords of Finance">
The book discusses the personal histories of the four heads of the Central Banks of the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany, and their efforts to steer the world economy from the period during the First World War until the Great Depression. The book also discusses at length the career of the British economist John Maynard Keynes who criticized many of the policies of the heads of the Central Banks during this time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witz_(novel)"title="Witz (novel)">
In "Witz", Joshua Cohen calls all religious Jews "Affiliated". After the sabbath meal a week before Christmas, Benjamin is born to Israel and Hanna Israelien in Joysey, the first son after 12 girls. This winter is particularly hard and in fact persists year round. Benjamin is born full grown (by a method explored by Flann O'Brien in "At Swim-Two-Birds"), with a beard and glasses. His foreskin continually sheds itself and grows back. Already too big for his father's shirts, he takes to his mother's maternity robes. On Christmas Eve, all of the Affiliated die except first-born sons. The Israelien's maid, Wanda, drives Benjamin down to Florida to live with his grandfather, Isaac, who is Unaffiliated. Meanwhile, a cabal of government operatives are quarantining all of the first-borns on Ellis Island, now called "The Garden" (incorporated), capitalized with the property of the dead. A week later, they come for Benjamin. Isaac dies from a heart attack. Benjamin escapes at a rest stop but is eventually caught and taken to The Garden, where they have moved the entire Israelien house, complete with Sabbath guest still on one of the toilets. The Garden markets Benjamin as the messiah, complete with travelling road show and merchandising. A team of unaffiliated women are trained to act as his mother and sisters and see to his needs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_(novel)"title="Truth (novel)">
"Truth"'s central character is Inspector Stephen Villani (who had appeared in "The Broken Shore" but not as a major character), acting head of the Victoria Police homicide squad. Already under a cloud over the deaths of two Aboriginal boys during a botched police operation, and a series of unsolved cases, Villani finds the certainties of his life crumbling after the discovery of a murdered woman in an exclusive apartment block.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prize_of_Peril"title="The Prize of Peril">
The protagonist of the story is Jim Raeder, a man notable only for his normality, who has been a participant in many reality television shows (given the name "thrill shows") and thus become a celebrity. In all the shows the risk of dying has been a part of the concept; he has fought a real bull in Spain, he has driven a Formula 1 racecar and fought with other divers while trying to escape sharks and other sea predators. In the story he takes part in the greatest of all reality shows: he is to be hunted by professional gangland murderers.As he is hunted, his journey is shown all over the US on TV and he receives help from viewers, the so-called Good Samaritans. The commentator, Mike Terry, makes a point of this during the show: "All of America is ready to help Jim!", but Raeder soon finds out that things are not what he expected them to be and that maybe his survival is not a main priority among the public. The story ends with Raeder winning "The Prize of Peril", but being dragged away after presumably having a mental breakdown, or merely "not being 'himself' at the moment," according to Terry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Light_(Stead_novel)"title="First Light (Stead novel)">
"First Light" follows the adventure of two protagonists, Peter, who lives with his mother and father in New York but is in Greenland for his father's research, and Thea, who lives in an underground colony in Greenland called Gracehope. Gracehope was formed hundreds of years ago by a group called the Settlers who used to live in England. They possessed unusual abilities, such as extremely good vision and hearing, leading them to be called 'eye adepts' and 'ear adepts', respectively. These powers were seen as sorcery, prompting Grace, the leader of the Settlers, to bring the Settlers under the ice in Greenland where they could live in peace.While walking around her house, Thea finds a map in her room of Gracehope. The map shows a tunnel leading onto the surface. Thea and her cousin Mattias find the tunnel and meet Peter who helps them back to Gracehope. Reaching Gracehope, Peter realizes that several talismans of the people are in the shape of mitochondrial DNA, which his mom is studying. After waking up from a headache, Peter finds his mom next to his bed. She used to live in Gracehope but was banished with her sister after her sister ventured above the surface and contracted an illness that could not be cured. She also explains that her research of mitochondrial DNA relates to the ability of mutations to benefit the human body, which could cause their extremely good vision and hearing. In the end, she warns Peter that global warming is causing Gracehope to slowly melt away. The entire colony must learn the dangers they face and escape. One obstacle lies in their way: Rowen, Thea and Peter's grandmother who banished Peter's mom and did nothing to help Thea's mom when she was on her deathbed from an illness when she ventured aboveground. Rowen is the head of the Council in Gracehope and is strictly against going aboveground.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snuff_(Pratchett_novel)"title="Snuff (Pratchett novel)">
Commander Sam Vimes is forced by his wife, Lady Sybil, to take a holiday with their son, Young Sam, at her family's mansion Crundells. After a short time of enjoying his holiday, he discovers that the rural community has a dark past with the resident goblins, humanoid lifeforms that live in caves nearby. Vimes finds out that the son of Lord Rust has been enslaving goblins to force them to work on his tobacco plantations in Howondaland, allowing him to manufacture cigars cheaply that are then smuggled to Ankh-Morpork. After teaming up with the local constable, a young man called Upshot, Vimes manages to arrest those responsible for the crime.In the end, thanks to his wife's organisational skills and powers of persuasion, goblins are recognised as citizens by all major nations and rulers. Rust's son is disinherited and exiled to Fourecks, where Lord Vetinari assures an eye will be kept on him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burning_Wire"title="The Burning Wire">
The sabotage of a substation of the prominent electrical energy distributor Algonquin Consolidated Power and Light Company in Queens, New York, causing a deadly arc flash leads to an investigation managed by esteemed criminalist Lincoln Rhyme and his team of investigators.The initial primary suspect, Ray Galt, a disillusioned employee of Algonquin Consolidated, is believed to blame Algonquin and society's reliance on electricity for his leukemia, which he developed due to radiation from working close to power lines. Signals intelligence (SIGINT) suggests that Galt is backed by a previously unknown eco-terror group named "Justice For". The collected intelligence fails to specify further details of the terrorist cell, other than the name "Rahman".A series of demand letters are sent after the first attack, ordering Algonquin to reduce its electrical distribution, or further acts of violence involving electricity would be executed.Rhyme must also deal with a parallel investigation into a recurring antagonist in the series: the criminal Richard Logan, who is nicknamed "The Watchmaker". A joint operation is conducted between Rhyme's office and the Mexican Federal Police after Logan is located in Mexico.In the end, it turns out that the culprit is Richard Logan, who was trying to frame Randall and the other woman for murders. Logan tries to kill Rhyme, but Rhyme predicts the attempt, and then preempts him, by cutting power of the panel. Logan is captured. However, New York is unlikely to execute him because of their hesitancy concerning the death penalty.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Confession_of_Brother_Haluin"title="The Confession of Brother Haluin">
In Oxford Castle, Empress Maud has been besieged for months by King Stephen. Sheriff Hugh Beringar learns that the Empress took advantage of the heavy snow and frozen rivers for a miraculous escape. She and several allies crossed the frozen river through Stephen's lines, and walked to Abingdon, where they got horses to ride to Wallingford Castle. She is safe with her brother Robert of Gloucester and her major supporter Brian FitzCount. Oxford Castle surrendered, the men allowed to march home. Robert of Gloucester returned from Normandy with the eldest son of the Empress with her second husband Geoffrey of Anjou, a boy of nine years named Henry Plantagenet. For the moment, the long running battle between these two contenders has begun anew, each with a talent of "conjuring defeat out of victory". King Stephen joined his brother Henry, Bishop of Winchester, and calls his sheriffs to meet him there for the Christmas feast. On his return, Sheriff Hugh Beringar learns of Haluin's accident.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nightmare_Man_(The_Sarah_Jane_Adventures)"title="The Nightmare Man (The Sarah Jane Adventures)">
## Part 1.The story starts with Luke recording a video message expressing a warning that someone is coming. The story flashes back a year, to show Luke telling Sarah Jane that he is planning to go to university a year early. It is then revealed that they are handcuffed to a Slitheen bomb. Clyde and Rani burst in with K9, who deactivates the bomb, and Clyde throws vinegar at the Slitheen to kill it.The story goes forward to the day Luke receives the exam results enabling him to attend Oxford University. Four days before he leaves, he starts having nightmares, something that was thought impossible since the Bane did not include dreaming in his genetic makeup. First, he hears Sarah Jane and K9 saying how glad they will be to get rid of him, and then Rani and Clyde mock him for showing off by going a year early. In the second dream, during which he also hears a male voice saying he "lives on nightmares," Luke realizes that something more is going on.With two days to go, Clyde throws a surprise going away party with Luke's school friends. Luke has a third nightmare at the party – finally seeing the Nightmare Man, who tells Luke that he cannot tell anyone about him. And sure enough, when Rani asks him, he is unable to say the name. He tries to contact his friend Maria via Facebook but falls asleep and has another nightmare. The Nightmare Man shows him a vision of Sarah Jane, Clyde and Rani replacing him with someone else and burning all his photos. He tells Luke that one more nightmare will allow him to come into Luke's world, where he will feed on the nightmares of everyone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_(The_Book)"title="Earth (The Book)">
Written in the past tense, the book's stated purpose is to serve as a Baedeker travel guide for an alien civilization that discovers Earth after humanity has died out, most likely by its own hands. As such, "Earth (The Book)" attempts to chronicle the history of the planet and the human race from the beginning to the present day, and also tries to explain human concepts and emotions such as "love" and "work" for its alien readers.The book follows a similar format to "America (The Book)", being written in the style of a textbook and featuring many images, including visual gags. One controversial visual gag in "America" was a doctored image of the United States Supreme Court justices nude; a similar gag appeared in "Earth" which was an illustration of human anatomy that featured a nude man, one half of the man depicting Larry King.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_the_Doctor"title="Death of the Doctor">
## Part 1.UNIT forces, led by Colonel Karim, converge on Sarah Jane's home, and inform her, Rani and Clyde that the Doctor is dead. Karim explains that members of the vulture-like race, the Shansheeth, found the Doctor's body and have brought it to Earth for a proper ceremony, to be held at the secured UNIT Base 5 underneath Snowdon. Sarah Jane is skeptical, knowing of the Doctor's ability to regenerate, but agrees to go along with Rani and Clyde.At UNIT Base 5, the three are initially surprised to see what appear to be Graske aliens, a species they had difficulties with before, but learn that they are really Groske, a blue cousin species to the Graske and working peacefully to maintain the base. Karim explains that after the ceremony they plan to launch the Doctor's body into space using a rocket built by the Groske. As they tour the now-sealed facility, Clyde feels energy coursing through his hand, recognising it as the same artron energy he felt when he accidentally touched the dematerialising TARDIS during the events of "The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith". The group later meets another of the Doctor's former companions, Jo Grant, now married and going by Jo Jones, along with her grandson Santiago. Sarah Jane and Jo discuss the possibility of the Doctor's death, and agree that this may be a trap set up by one of the Doctor's enemies, while Rani and Clyde make quick friends with Santiago.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borderlands_(novel)"title="Borderlands (novel)">
"Borderlands" spans several decades as the somewhat naïve orphan, Ben Curtis, loses his mother and his brother, and learns the harsh lessons of life in the Wild West, experiencing the rise and fall of famous boom towns like Abilene and Dodge City.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Pyramid"title="The Red Pyramid">
Carter and his father Julius Kane are visiting Carter's sister Sadie, who has lived with her maternal grandparents in London since the death of their mother, Ruby Kane. Julius, a magician posing as a simple Egyptologist, takes the siblings to the British Museum, where he tries to bring Osiris (the Egyptian god of the Underworld) into the mortal world. His magic has the unintended side effect of summoning the gods Horus, Isis, Nephthys, and Set, as well as alerting the magicians Zia Rashid and Michel Desjardins to his actions, which are illegal in the magic community. Set, a god of chaos, captures Julius and declares his intention to become king of the world. Unbeknownst to Carter and Sadie, each of the released gods chooses a mortal host from the humans in the room.Carter and Sadie are taken to Brooklyn by their uncle Amos, who tells them they are descended from a long line of magicians, beginning with the Egyptian pharaohs Ramesses the Great and Narmer. He also explains the grave danger Set poses to the world and goes to find him. While he is away, the mansion is attacked by Set's minions. With help from Sadie's cat Muffin, who is host to the goddess Bast, and Zia Rashid, they escape to Cairo. Once there, Carter and Sadie discover they are hosts to the gods Horus and Isis, respectively. They train in magic until the magicians' leader Iskandar dies and Michel Desjardins orders their deaths for collaborating illegally with the gods. The siblings escape and form a plan to defeat Set — hoping to rescue their father and clear their names within the magic community. They travel to Set's lair in Arizona, gathering ingredients for a magic spell and evading hostile monsters and magicians.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_in_Death"title="Portrait in Death">
Lt. Eve Dallas is celebrating the shortly-to-start vacation of Summerset, Roarke's majordomo, when he trips over the cat and falls down the stairs, breaking his leg. As Eve and Roarke are giving him first aid, Eve is tipped by Nadine Furst to a location that turns out to contain a dead body stuffed into a recycle bin. Nadine was sent a set of candid images of the victim, a young, pretty woman, and a final image of her dead body, clearly posed in a formal portrait setting. Also included: a note indicating plainly that the woman is the first victim, with more to follow.Eve assembles her usual team, including Roarke, to track down the killer before he can strike again. However, while taking some time to tend to affairs at Dochas, the shelter that he funds as a charitable project, Roarke meets with a new employee, a social worker, who informs him that she used to live in Dublin at the same time that he was a baby, and that she had given shelter to Roarke and his mother—a different woman than the abusive person that he grew up calling his mother. Roarke's researches show that the social worker is probably correct, and that his father Patrick Roarke killed his mother when she tried to leave him. Roarke is upset over this turn of events and is reluctant to share his feelings with anyone. Eventually, Eve gets him to talk to her desiring to help him through the nightmare of pain. The next day, Roarke hurries off to Ireland to find explanations from the surviving associates of his late, criminal father while Eve is busy investigating the second victim.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Matters!"title="Everything Matters!">
Junior Thibodeau is born with the exact details of the end of the world by a comet and grows up with a troubled childhood, surrounded by his quiet but powerful ex-Marine father, his secretly-alcoholic and withdrawn mother, and his drug addict and later baseball-savant brother Rodney, as well as the constant presence of the voice that has stuck with him since birth. As he grows older, he questions the importance of concepts such as love in the face of the inevitable apocalypse and battles various addictions. He falls in love with a classmate named Amy and they begin a relationship, but she leaves him after he informs her of the voices in his head. Later in life, Junior becomes an avid smoker and alcoholic while his brother becomes a major baseball star. Junior and a co-worker later conspire to destroy a social security building. Junior backs out, but the friend blows up the building after giving the occupants a chance to evacuate. Junior is arrested and sent to a Bulgarian gulag. There he meets Sawyer, a government agents who reveals that the major world governments know a massive comet is approaching Earth. Sawyer offers Junior a job, which Junior accepts in exchange for his parents' financial future to be secured. Later Junior hears his father has terminal lung cancer. Working constantly for a week and almost dying, Junior develops a cure for his father and has it sent to him. Junior's father recovers, but later dies after hitting a car while asleep at the wheel. After leaving her boyfriend, Amy decides to travel to Junior's father's funeral. Mid-flight she disables the plane's smoke detector so she can indulge herself with a cigarette. A federal agent discovers what she did and arrests Amy. He reveals he's not going to arrest her and they engage in conversation. It turns out to be a ruse, and the agents locks Amy in an interrogation room. He recounts how she told him she had a relationship with a student at Stanford. The agent tells her how this student later renounced his US citizenship and became a member of the Hezbollah. Believing Amy is a part of a terrorist organization, he tortures her and cuts a pinkie off. Junior arrives and has the agent killed. He and Amy reconcile, but they decide not to leave before the comet hits. Later, Amy changes her mind and goes to sign up for Emigration, but she and many others who plan to sign up are killed by a suicide bomber. At this point, the voices in Junior's head reveal that he can pick another version of himself from another universe and take that self's place. Junior essentially goes back in time to the point where he told Amy of the voices. Instead of telling her, he instead instigates sex. Onwards in life, Junior marries Amy and develops a revolutionary irrigation system for use in third-world countries. Junior and Amy later conceive a child named Ruby. While he is very happy, Junior decides not to try to save his father this time. His father dies a painful death from lung cancer. When the comet arrives, Junior and Amy consider killing their daughter to spare her, but decide against it. Junior and his entire family flock to his bedroom and sit there as the comet hits Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Anna_(novel)"title="Lady Anna (novel)">
"Lady Anna" is set during the 1830s, at about the time of the First Reform Act of 1832.The title character is the daughter of the late Earl Lovel. Her mother married him out of ambition rather than love, and despite his evil reputation. Soon after their marriage, he told her that he had a living wife, which made their union invalid and their unborn daughter illegitimate. He then sailed to Italy without her and did not return to England for twenty years.During those two decades, Lady Lovel struggled to prove the validity of her marriage, and consequently her right to her title and her daughter's legitimacy. She enjoyed neither the sympathy of the public nor the support of her family during this time; her only friend and supporter was Thomas Thwaite, a Radical tailor of Keswick, who gave her and her daughter shelter and financed her legal battles.Early in the novel, Lord Lovel returns to England and dies intestate. His earldom, and a small estate in Cumberland, pass to a distant cousin, young Frederick Lovel. However, the bulk of his large fortune is personal property, and thus not attached to the title. If his marriage to Lady Lovel was valid, it will go to her and to their daughter; otherwise, it will go to the young earl.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feather_Men"title="The Feather Men">
The book tells the story of four British Army soldiers, including two members of the Special Air Service, who are assassinated by a hit squad known as "The Clinic". The murders are carried out over a 17-year period, on the orders of a Dubai sheikh whose three sons were killed by British forces in Oman during a battle with Communist guerrillas.Fiennes claimed that he himself was targeted by the group, but was saved by a group of vigilantes calling themselves the "Feather Men".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clan_in_Need"title="A Clan in Need">
Ravenpaw and Barley wake up in the Moonstone cave. They had previously traveled there after being chased from their home on a farm by a group of former BloodClan cats.While asleep at the Moonstone, Ravenpaw had received a dream from StarClan. It helped him realize that the cats of ThunderClan, his birth Clan, would help him drive out the BloodClan cats. On their way to ThunderClan, they encounter a patrol of WindClan and ThunderClan cats squabbling over a lost WindClan kit. Ravenpaw and Barley had found the kit on their way, so they returned the kit to WindClan and went with ThunderClan back to their camp. When they reach the camp, Firestar appears. He asks what's brought Barley and Ravenpaw to ThunderClan. They tell him everything, and Firestar agrees to help. However, while they are in the camp, some ThunderClan cats return from a hunting patrol, badly injured. The duo then learns that more BloodClan cats have been attacking ThunderClan patrols, and that Firestar must help ThunderClan before he can send anyone to save the farm. Firestar invites Ravenpaw and Barley to stay for as long as they need.The next day, Ravenpaw and Barley go on a hunting patrol with ThunderClan. As they return, they are attacked by BloodClan cats. There is a short fight, during which one of the BloodClan cats, Snipe, seems to recognize Barley. BloodClan succeeds in stealing ThunderClan's prey, and retreats. Shortly afterwards, Firestar and Graystripe ask Barley for help in finding BloodClan's home in the Twolegplace, so they can take the fight to them. Barley takes offense and runs off into the forest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Chintan_Pyaj"title="Abstract Chintan Pyaj">
It is an anthologies of essays and in the titular essay, an onion is used as a metaphor in this essay to describe the sequential removal of the layers that conceal a greater something. Our life is a bulb of onion and the different layers are the different stages and incidents of our life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mad_Ship"title="The Mad Ship">
Aboard Vivacia, Wintrow saves Kennit's life by amputating the infected part of his leg. Kennit quickly charms Vivacia and she comes to believe in Kennit and his goal of becoming King of the Pirate Isles, aiding him in his piracy against slavers. Wintrow is wary of Vivacia's growing attachment to Kennit, but comes to believe in him as well, and bonds with Etta. Kennit imprisons Kyle on the secret isle where his mother lives in seclusion. Kennit was taken prisoner as a child by Igrot the pirate, who killed Kennit's father, cut out his mother's tongue, and made Kennit a pirate and abused him, a past which he hides from all.Althea serves aboard the liveship Ophelia, which returns to Bingtown. Captain Tenira attempts to resist the Chalcedean galley that serves the Satrap and collects his taxes. This heightens political tensions in Bingtown as more of the Old Traders consider rebelling against the Satrap and his Chalcedean mercenaries. Althea returns to her family to attempt to repair their relationship.Brashen, serving with a pirate ship, learns in Divvytown that Kennit has captured Vivacia. He returns to Bingtown to inform the Vestrit family. Ronica, Keffria, Althea, and Malta decide to put aside their differences to work on rescuing the ship. Malta appeals to Reyn Khuprus to help save her father, but he has his own problems. The Khuprus family owns the last Wizardwood log in the Rain Wilds, and Reyn has formed a psychic connection with the ancient dragon trapped within it. The dragon torments Reyn's dreams, attempting to convince him to set it free.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heroes_of_Olympus"title="The Heroes of Olympus">
"The Heroes of Olympus" is centered around a prophecy, introduced in "The Last Olympian", that predicted seven demigods would unite to protect the world from an awakening new enemy, the Earth goddess Gaia. Demigods from both the Greek camp, Camp Half-Blood, and a newfound Roman camp, Camp Jupiter, unite to save the world from being destroyed by Gaia. The prophecy reads:&lt;poem&gt;"Seven half-bloods shall answer the call, (Hazel Levesque, Percy Jackson, Jason Grace, Annabeth Chase, Frank Zhang, Leo Valdez, Piper McLean)To storm or fire, the world must fall. (Leo's fire powers defeated a Roman leader who fought with Gaia, Octavian)An oath to keep with a final breath, (Leo's oath to come back to a magical island where his love waited)And foes bear arms to the Doors of Death." (The awakened giants and Tartarus guard the doors of death)&lt;/poem&gt; Seven demigodsAnnabeth Chase, Leo Valdez, Percy Jackson and Piper McLean from Camp Half-Blood, with Jason Grace, Frank Zhang, and Hazel Levesque from Camp Jupiterjoin forces. Some other important characters are Nico di Angelo, son of Hades; Reyna Avila Ramirez-Arellano, Praetor of Camp Jupiter and daughter of Bellona; and Gleeson Hedge, a satyr, all of whom are tasked with trying to bring peace between the Greeks and the Romans. The books are set between winter and August, hypothetically in the year 2009.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warlock_(Smith_novel)"title="Warlock (Smith novel)">
Warlock is a sequel to River God that details the later life of Taita 40 years on from the death of Lostris. Taita is no longer a slave but a powerful warlock with great fame throughout Egypt and the surrounding nations, and has become the most influential man in Egypt through his close connection to the Pharaoh Tamose. The story begins with Pharaoh Tamose, accompanied by his most trusted companion, Lord Naja, marching towards the Hyksos main camp and planning a surprise attack from the rear. Lord Naja, however, has deviously tricked Pharaoh, for he is of Hyksos blood, and kills Pharaoh Tamose. However no one sees this tragedy, and Naja convinces the army of Pharaoh that he has been slain by the Hyksos and orders the army to retreat back to Thebes. When Naja arrives at Thebes, he cunningly sways the council members to appoint him as Regent, successfully obtaining power of the Upper Kingdom. Meanwhile, Taita takes a 14-year-old Nefer Memnon, Tamose's only surviving son from the Yellow Flower plague, into the desert wilderness to hone his mind and skills and to capture his godbird in order to prove his divine favor. Just after Nefer was born, years prior to these events, during his life in the desert as a hermit, Taita was visited in a dream by the former Queen Lostris, and returned to Thebes to be appointed as Nefer Seti's tutor, who is now next in line for the throne.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quest_(novel)"title="The Quest (novel)">
Egypt is struck by a series of terrible plagues that cripple the kingdom, and then the ultimate disaster follows. The Nile fails. The waters that nourish and sustain the land dry up.Something catastrophic is taking place in the distant and totally unexplored depths of Africa, from where the mighty river springs. In desperation the Pharaoh sends for Taita, the only man who might be able to win through to the source of the Nile and discover the cause of all their woes.In this final adventure of Taita, the beloved Magus is now 156 years old but through his powerful magic, has managed to live longer than most people (with the exception of a few other magicians). He is sent to investigate the blockage at the source of the Nile and defeat a seemingly immortal witch named Eos. During his journey, he gains new abilities as a Magus and can even detect the aura of living beings and discern their personalities. Travelling with a small army which includes his friend Meren, Taita finds a little girl living as a savage amongst a tribe of cannibals. He rescues her and over the months that follow, trains her to be decent and takes her under his wing. He names the girl Fenn and it is revealed that she is the reincarnation of Lostris, Taita's mistress who died at the end of River God. The group survives many hazards and eventually comes across a paradise-like city called Jarri. The original natives there are descended from a rebel group of Egyptians who are mentioned in River God. They rule the seemingly peaceful community by using fear, especially on the newcomers. It is discovered that they are under the spell of Eos who plans to ravage Egypt and then take it as her own Kingdom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wild_Soccer_Bunch"title="The Wild Soccer Bunch">
In the English translation of the Wild Soccer Bunch stories, the events take place in a small neighborhood in Chicago. The team is made up of a cast of colorful characters, each of them bonded by their passion for soccer. The team plays their beloved game according to five unbreakable rules: "1. Be Wild! 2. Everything’s cool, as long as you’re wild! 3. Never, ever give up! 4. One for all and all for one! 5. Once Wild, always wild!" The logo of the Wild Soccer Bunch is inspired by the original logo created by Masannek's children for their own soccer team.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilcrow_(novel)"title="Pilcrow (novel)">
The book is in the form of a memoir by an adult John Cromer telling the story of his childhood and adolescence in the '50s and early '60s. He develops Still's disease at an early age and is confined to bed under a misdiagnosis of rheumatic fever. When the nature of his disease is finally realised he is transferred to the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital in Taplow, Berkshire under the care of Dr. Barbara Ansell but by then he has very little movement left in his joints. Later he moves to a special school in Farley Castle where he is reliant on the 'able-bodied' to help him move around, and realises that he is homosexual.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gypsy_Good_Time"title="A Gypsy Good Time">
Vietnam veteran and Private Investigator Dowdy Lewis, Jr. struggles with alcoholism, his time in the Vietnam War, and his own rapid aging. He meets Yvonna Lablaine, an attractive, red-headed outcast from a prominent Hollywood family, and falls in love. One day, however, after a brief but passionate romance, Lewis finds Lablaine dying at his door, murdered. He then embarks on a quest involving drug dealers, mobsters, and Hollywood moguls in order to find the truth about what happened and to take revenge on the culprits.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_Natural"title="Nothing Natural">
Rachel Kee is a depressed single mother who has been slowly withdrawing from the world around her. She's still suffering from the lasting effects of a disastrous childhood where her father abandoned his family, pushing Rachel's mother further into madness and prompting Rachel's removal and placement in a foster home. When she meets Joshua, she's almost instantly drawn to him. The two begin to indulge in a sadomasochistic relationship where Joshua will appear for a rough session of sex and then disappear for months on end. Eventually Rachel begins to question the relationship, especially after reading about the kidnapping and rape of a young girl, complete with a composite sketch that greatly resembles Joshua.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naama_War"title="The Naama War">
Warfare on a cataclysmic scale is convulsing across the continent of Nyumbani, from north to south. Soldiers fall. Cities burn. Blood reddens the sea. Sorcery sears the land. Deities gather in opposite dimensions, poised to unleash unimaginable cosmic power on a land already battered by the Cushites of the North and the Naamans of the South.In the midst of this massive struggle, Imaro, warrior of the Ilyassai, wages a personal war against his nemesis, the sorcerer Bohu of Naama. This individual vendetta mirrors the larger clash between the forces of good and evil – a confrontation that threatens to tear Nyumbani apart.The destiny for which Imaro has been honed like a living weapon, now lies directly before him. Imaro vs. Bohu. Cush vs. Naama. War. Magic. Blood. Fire. The losers in this wide-ranging battle for the fate of a continent face oblivion. But the winners will not emerge unscathed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wolves_of_Mercy_Falls"title="The Wolves of Mercy Falls">
## "Shiver"."Shiver" begins against the backdrop of winter, with the character of Grace Brisbane at age 11, who has been pulled from her backyard tire swing by a pack of wolves. Saved from their attack by a yellow-eyed wolf, the 6 years following consist of Grace routinely watching the edge of the woods behind her house in search of her saviour – he returns her gaze every winter. The perspective of the novel alternates between Grace and the yellow-eyed werewolf, Samuel K. “Sam” Roth, who only transforms over the duration of winter.The death of Jack Culpeper, a student at Grace's school, spreads terror throughout the small community of Mercy Falls, as it is suspected that he has been killed by the wolves. This leads to the decision to hunt them, with Grace's attempt to deter the shooters resulting in her discovery of Sam, except now in human form. Having been shot, he had unwillingly transformed into his human state, recognisable to Grace only from his eyes.Sam is taken to the hospital by Grace, receiving surgery to remove the bullet. As the two are finally left alone in the recovery unit, Sam awakens from the anaesthetic much earlier than anticipated, eventually recognising Grace. Sam explains to her that his healing abilities are a side-effect of being a werewolf, prompting them to escape, before the doctors discover him awake and with no visible wound.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Escola"title="A Escola">
The book has as background the" 30s", during the dictatorship of the Vargas government.Master "Bolivar Bueno", involved with dangerous ideas for the season, has a strong influence and emotional control over their traditional primary school students from "Wolfgang Schubert", while dividing her love life with the teachers of the school, ideologically and being chased by the director, the "Rev. Otto Faukner", and his assistant, miss "Catarina".In 2005, the play was adapted by its author to the format of the novel, released in 2007.In this new format, the author expands historical themes, importants for the knowledge of Brazilian History of the" 30s": Revolution to São Paulo in 1932, fascism and communism in Brazil, ruled by Getúlio Vargas.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_the_Dirty_Dog"title="Harry the Dirty Dog">
Harry is a family dog with white fur and black spots who, disenchanted with taking baths, buries the bathtub scrubber and runs away from home. Harry becomes very dirty after playing in the streets, at the railroad, and in the dog park to the extent that, covered in dirt, he becomes a black dog with white spots. When he returns home, Harry's family does not recognize him. His attempts to get his family to realize that it is him succeed only when he digs up the brush that he had earlier buried. The family collectively gives the strange dog a bath, ultimately recognizing it to be Harry. Soon after, however, Harry hides the scrubbing brush under his bed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medea_(Seneca)"title="Medea (Seneca)">
In order to climb the political ladder, Jason (the leader of the Argonauts) leaves Medea for Creusa, the daughter of King Creon. Medea opens up the play by cursing Creusa and King Creon (1-44). King Creon gives Medea one day before she is exiled and she does not take Jason's advice to leave peacefully (192-557). Instead, she sends a poisoned robe as a gift for Creusa on her wedding day. The chorus describe the rage, scorn, and anger that Medea felt as she plotted her revenge. The chorus prays to the gods that Jason will be spared from Medea's vengeance (579-652). Medea's curse contains poisons, snake blood, herbs, and the invocations to all the underworld gods. The cursed robe catches fire when Creusa puts it on. Creon tries to extinguish the fire but is unsuccessful, and he catches on fire as well (817-843). Their death does not satisfy Medea but only awakens her vengeful spirit more. Jason's betrayal blinds Medea so much that she wishes to harm him even at the expense of her own children. Medea sacrifices her children from the roof of her house in order to hurt Jason (982-1025). Medea escapes in a dragon chariot while she throws the bodies of the boys down. Jason ends the play by shouting after her that she should testify that there are no gods in heaven, where she is flying. (1026-1027).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Rules_(novel)"title="House Rules (novel)">
Eighteen-year-old Jacob Hunt lives with his mother Emma and his younger brother, Theo. Jacob has Asperger's syndrome, then considered a form of high-functioning autism. Jacob lives by a highly structured schedule and feels comfortable when all of his daily activities are pre-planned. Jacob thrives when he is able to engage in structured, focused activities, and he particularly enjoys things that are incredibly intellectual and academic. Emma is able to ensure that Jacob's anxiety and outbursts are infrequent by creating her and Theo's schedules around Jacob's needs. However, this often displeases Theo.Jacob is deeply interested with forensic analysis to the point of obsession. The novel begins with Jacob setting up a crime scene (in which he plays the victim) for his mother to solve. Jacob is later accused of murdering his tutor, Jess Ogilvy. It is eventually revealed that Theo snuck into a house that Jess was house sitting at and startled her, causing her to accidentally hit her head on the sink and subsequently die.When Jacob arrived at the home for his tutoring sessions, he staged a crime scene to make it appear as if Jess's boyfriend, Mark Maguire, had committed the murder, and then tried to make it appear as if it was a kidnapping. Eventually, Jacob is arrested for Jess's murder. During the trial, Jacob states that he staged the crime scene to take care of his brother, in accordance with a "house rule" set by Emma to take care of one another. Jacob asserts that if, by chance, the circumstances arose again, he would do it again for his brother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heart_of_a_Warrior"title="The Heart of a Warrior">
In the previous book, "A Clan in Need", Ravenpaw and Barley ask Firestar, leader of ThunderClan, for help to drive out the rogues that drove Ravenpaw and Barley away from their farm. After gathering up a patrol of cats willing to help, they leave to go to the farm. The cats go into the barn to find the place wrecked, and the rogues making messes. Firestar makes a plan to ambush the rogues in their sleep. When they carry out their plan, they are given away when the chickens are startled and make a lot of noise. The rogues are alarmed, and fight the Clan cats. There turns out to be a far larger amount of rogues than the Clan cats originally intended, some of whom are BloodClan refugees. During the battle in the barn, the farmer hears the cats and goes in, scaring all the cats off. ThunderClan regroups, and Firestar comes up with another plan to defeat the rogues. The plan works, and ThunderClan drives the rogues out of the barn, but right at the turning point of the battle, reinforcements for the rogues show up. The Clan cats begin to lose the fight, but the dogs of the farm get loose and attack the rogues. They finally drive out the rogues with the help of the dogs, leaving only Barley's brothers, Hoot and Jumper. Firestar and the warrior patrol then depart, and Ravenpaw and Barley go into the barn. They decide to let Hoot and Jumper stay in the barn with them. While Barley goes out on a walk, Ravenpaw shows Hoot and Jumper around the farm. Ravenpaw notices that Hoot and Jumper don't care about it. When Ravenpaw and the visitors return to the barn, Ravenpaw takes a nap. When Barley wakes him up, he finds the barn wrecked. Hoot and Jumper claim that they were trying to hunt for mice, and accidentally destroyed it. One night Barley and his brothers go out for a walk. When they return, Hoot and Jumper order Ravenpaw to hunt for them. The next day, they still are ordering Ravenpaw around. Ravenpaw wonders why Barley isn't doing anything about it. However, as if on cue, Barley gets angry at Hoot and Jumper, saying that he doesn't like how they are treating Ravenpaw, and claims that loyalty is everything, not blood. Hoot and Jumper leave the barn for good, and Ravenpaw and Barley finally have their home, back.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyClan's_Destiny"title="SkyClan's Destiny">
In present-day SkyClan, it is six months since Firestar went to the gorge and reformed SkyClan ("Firestar's Quest"). The new SkyClan has added loners, rogues, and former kittypets to the Clan. There are also kittypets that help the Clan in the day, but return to their humans at night. They are called "daylight warriors". Leafstar invites them into the Clan to help patrol and hunt. However, not everyone respects the daylight warriors. Cats such as Sharpclaw call them "kitty warriors" feeling they are not loyal to the Clan by leaving at night. The daylight warriors are Billystorm, Ebonyclaw, Frecklepaw, Snookpaw, Harveymoon, and Macgyver. Leafstar tries to keep the tensions low between the daylight warriors and regular warriors, but many regular warriors still make fun of the daylight warriors behind their backs.One day, Leafstar receives a dream from Spottedleaf, an old medicine cat of ThunderClan who helped SkyClan when Firestar first reformed the Clan. She sees cats and they say, "This is the leaf-bare of my Clan. Greenleaf will come, but it will bring even greater storms than these. SkyClan will need deeper roots if it is to survive." The next day, Leafstar visits the Clan's medicine cat Echosong and they realize they each had the same dream. Meanwhile, Leafstar starts to develop feelings for Billystorm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Épreuve"title="L'Épreuve">
Lucidor, a wealthy Parisian, is in love with Angélique, a young and innocent country bourgeois. After falling ill and watching Angélique cry for him, he is convinced that she loves him as well, but he is unsure of the motives behind this love. He thus decides to put Angélique through an ordeal to test whether he is loved for his money or for himself. In the name of friendship, Lucidor offers a rich friend to be married to Angélique to see whether she would reject him for love. In fact, this rich friend is none other than Lucidor's valet, who is dressed up in rich man's gear only for this trick.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Fausse_Suivante"title="La Fausse Suivante">
A young woman, described as "the Parisian maiden", is due to marry Lelio without having ever met him. She decides to introduce herself to him as a Knight and become his friend. Lelio confides in the Knight his troubled situation. He is promised to a Countess he seduced, in addition to the young Parisian maiden. He would choose to marry the richest of the two, that is the heroine, if he had not already signed a contract with the Countess, which would make him lose a large sum of money if he broke his engagement to her. Lelio thus challenges the Knight to seduce the Countess, so that he could marry the Parisian maiden without paying the sum. The plan seems to work at first, the Countess falls for the Knight and forgets Lelio. But information of the Knight's real sexual identity leaks among the servants, and even if she refuses to disclose her name, the Parisian maiden has to admit her sex. She disguises herself as a servant and manages to get hold of the contract. At the end of the play, she tears it in the presence of Lelio and the Countess, and both are disappointed by her deception. The young Parisian maiden finally discloses her identity, and justifies her actions by asserting her independence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_Beak"title="Sticky Beak">
"Sticky Beak" picks up from where "Blabber Mouth" ends. Rowena's father is now married to her teacher, and at a function she throws a plate of custard and jelly into a fan, splattering it over everyone. As she tries to avoid the consequences, she rescues an abused cockatoo from the neighbourhood bully, Darryn Peck.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruby_Dice"title="The Ruby Dice">
Throughout the novel, the peace is contested and then established between the Skolians and the Eubian Trader Empire. Imperator Kelric Skolia, military leader of the Skolian Empire, is reunited with his children, Rohka Miesa Varz Skolia (daughter of Kelricson Valdoria and Savina Miesa) and Jimorla Haka (son of Kelricson Valdoria and Rashiva Haka), and his wife Ixpar Karn.Imperator Kelric Skolia finds out about Emperor Jaibriol III's parentage during a meeting on Earth. He also discovers that Jaibriol III became an unspecified Key and a member of the Triad.Kelric and Jaibriol (Jai) decide to meet on Earth in person. Kelric suspects that Jai might be a psion, but he cannot be certain unless Kelric sees him in person. Their last meeting happened almost ten years ago at the Lock that was captured by the Traders, when Kelric took on the title of the Imperator, becoming "Military Key" (see "Ascendant Sun"). An attempt on Kelric's life occurs, killing all of his and Jai's bodyguards. While they are stranded in the Appalachian Mountains, Kelric teaches Jai Quis, the dice game that Kelric learned on Coba during his eighteen years of living there, by linking their minds. The two leaders also sign a peace treaty that would change the fates of their empires forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Without_Number"title="Times Without Number">
In 1988, Don Miguel Navarro is a "Licentiate in Ordinary" of the Society of Time. As a Licentiate, Don Miguel's primary duty is to ensure the preservation of history, lest an alteration undo the empire. While at a party held by the Marquesa di Jorque, his hostess shows off a gold Aztec mask she had recently received as a gift. Recognizing it instantly as contraband, Don Miguel launches an investigation that eventually leads to the unmasking and arrest of Don Arcimboldo Ruiz, a prominent nobleman (and a cunning and skilful villain) engaged in the illegal acquisition of goods from the past. Don Miguel is then entrusted with returning it to the exact spot in the past from which it was taken, in time for it to be used in the Aztec bloody rites of mass human sacrifice – with which he is duty bound not to interfere but which leave him shaken. Because of his success, Don Miguel is honoured and marked as a coming man.Some time later, while attending a New Year's Eve ball at the palace of the Prince of New Castile, a prince of the blood and the Commander of the Society of Time, Don Miguel meets Lady Kristina, the daughter of the Swedish ambassador. At her prompting, the two leave the party to explore the city of Londres for themselves. While walking down one of the city's streets, however, they encounter an unusually dressed woman who is assaulted by men who intend to rape her, but turns out be more than able to take care of herself, proceeding to immobilise a number of her assailants before Don Miguel is able to knock her unconscious (the reader can easily recognise that she is adept at some kind of martial art, but in Don Miguel's world these are unknown in the West).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_Lies"title="Empire of Lies">
The book is a thriller in which the protagonist and narrator Jason Harrow confronts both the death of his mentally-ill mother and the consequences of his past life. In so doing, he comes to believe he has stumbled on evidence of an Islamist terrorist plot in New York City, though he often doubts whether the plot is real or he is going insane like his mother. Although he repeatedly struggles with his own moral weaknesses, Harrow is a politically conservative Christian, and his efforts to expose the suspected plot bring him into conflict with the police, entertainment industry, academia, and the news media—the "Empire of Lies" in the book's title.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Caboose_Who_Got_Loose"title="The Caboose Who Got Loose">
"The Caboose Who Got Loose", tells the story of Katy Caboose, a caboose who is tired of being dragged around at the end of the train by the Engine. She dreams of being part of the beautiful sceneries she passes during her trips, but she cannot because she is always on the move. One day, when the engine is pulling the train up a steep mountain grade, the caboose is jolted loose from the train and flies back down the track towards a turn. Upon arriving at the turn, she has too much speed and she flies into the air off the track. Luckily she gets wedged between two trees, and she spends the rest of her days happy living in a beautiful place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horse,_the_Wheel,_and_Language"title="The Horse, the Wheel, and Language">
Anthony gives a broad overview of the linguistic and archaeological evidence for the early origins and spread of the Indo-European languages, describing a revised version of Marija Gimbutas's Kurgan hypothesis. Anthony describes the development of local cultures at the northern Black Sea coast, from hunter-gatherers to herders, under the influence of the Balkan cultures, which introduced cattle, horses and bronze technology.When the climate changed between 3500 and 3000 BCE, with the steppes becoming drier and cooler, those inventions led to a new way of life in which mobile herders moved into the steppes, developing a new kind of social organisation with patron-client and host-guest relationships. That new social organisation, with its related Indo-European languages, spread throughout Europe, Central Asia and South Asia because of its possibilities to include new members within its social structures.Part One covers theoretical considerations on language and archaeology. It gives an introductory overview of Indo-European linguistics (ch. 1); investigates the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European (ch. 2); the dating of Proto-Indo-European (ch. 3); the specific vocabulary for wool and wheels (ch. 4); the location of the Proto-Indo-European homeland (ch. 5); and the correlation of these linguistic discoveries with archaeological evidence and the role of elite recruitment in language shift (ch. 6).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_65_Lakh_Heist"title="The 65 Lakh Heist">
Vimal is blackmailed into joining a conspiracy to break into the vault of Bharat Bank at Amritsar to loot 6.5 million rupees (65 lakh) inside it.The conspiracy is the brainchild of Mayaram Bawa, a veteran vault-buster who is preparing to pull off the biggest heist of his career before he retires from his life of crime. For this purpose, he blackmails into submission an innocent-looking chauffeur called Vimal (whose actual name is Sardar Surender Singh Sohal), a criminal wanted for embezzlement in Allahabad (he didn't do it), murder of Lady Shanta Gokuldas in Bombay (he had to do it to prevent rape and death of a girl), the robbery of gate money at Anna Stadium Madras (he was blackmailed into it). Bawa's deal is straight—say no and go to jail or say yes and get his share.Bawa, with the help of Vimal and his partners Laab Singh (alias Matar Paneer) and Karamchand, successfully break into the vault and take away 6.5 million until an unfortunate circumstance forces them to flee the crime scene in a hurry.Having got the money (mainly due to Vimal's brilliant efforts), Bawa shows his true colours, running away with the entire loot and ruthlessly killing the innocent Karamchand and the jovial Laabh Singh "Matar Paneer". Vimal narrowly escapes being killed due to his presence of mind, but needs to trace down Bawa. The trail brings him face to face with Harnam Singh Grewal, the top gun of Punjab underworld and a ruthless giant of a man. Grewal gets wind of the robbery and starts searching for Mayaram Bawa to snatch the loot from him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canaima_(novel)"title="Canaima (novel)">
The Orinoco jungle is the main character and at the same time the reason behind all of the other characters' actions. The struggle against nature and yearning for riches, dominion and power are the main themes in the novel. "Canaima" represents a bitter struggle against caudillism. Its author depicts the jungle from an ideological standpoint, which translates into his characters' development. Marcos Vargas, returns to Ciudad Bolívar after his studies in Trinidad, finally settling by the waters of Yuruari river.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caperucita_Roja_(tal_como_se_lo_contaron_a_Jorge)"title="Caperucita Roja (tal como se lo contaron a Jorge)">
Basically, it's about how Jorge's father tells the story of Little Red Riding Hood to his son, told in the original version and based in a time somewhat ancient. But Jorge, an imaginative boy, recreates the story, based in the present time and with somewhat futuristic elements.In each passage of the story, the father appears, telling the story to Jorge, and two thought bubbles: one with the passage imagined by the father, illuminated with sepia tones to give the idea of antiquity, and the other is the story imagined by Jorge, illuminated in full color. The shapes of the thought bubbles and the expressions of Jorge and his father are also important.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natacha_(novel)"title="Natacha (novel)">
Natacha has a mother who invents tales of monsters, a friend Pati, who with Natacha are "The Pearl Girls" and a dog, Rafles, a little destroyer.Natacha is a girl who never tires of asking questions. Her curiosity, which is shared by her friend Pati, drives her parents and other adults to despair. Sometimes they have to count to ten to calm down.In this book Natacha helps to cook by making a chocolate cake, but in place of the main ingredient she uses mud. During a film she asks her mother so many questions that she cannot follow the plot.In other chapters she writes a poem, but needs her mother's help with spelling. Her mother tells her stories about monsters of the night and her dog "Rafles" meets various disasters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_(Duff_and_Allen_novel)"title="Elixir (Duff and Allen novel)">
Clea Raymond is a talented photojournalist and the daughter of a United States Senator and a famous neurosurgeon. Several months before the story begins, her father disappeared while on a humanitarian mission and is presumed dead. Clea looks over some old photos of herself and notices that a mysterious man wearing black appears in the background of all of them, including several where he is floating in the air. She brings up the phenomenon to her friend Ben, who informs her that her father had noticed the man years earlier and investigated for a while before deciding that he was a harmless guardian spirit. Ben also tells her that her father was looking for the Elixir of Life when he went missing.While on trip to Brazil, Clea runs into the man from her photos and chases him down. When she catches him, he explains that his name is Sage and that he is a 500-year-old immortal. He and his girlfriend were members of a secret society in Renaissance Italy that studied the Elixir of Life until one day, a group broke into their hideout to steal the elixir. All in attendance were killed, except Sage, who was wounded and taken hostage. His kidnappers force him to drink the elixir to see if it works, then they drink it themselves. Sage escapes and wanders the world for 500 years. The whole time he has been pursued by two organizations. One called The Saviors, who seek to find Sage and use him to create more elixir, and one called Cursed Vengeance, descendants of his kidnappers who have been cursed to live horrible lives until Sage is killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Story_(novel)"title="Back Story (novel)">
The novel begins with Spenser receiving a large payment for a case he worked for Rita Fiore. Due to this windfall, Spenser decides to work a case "pro bono" for an aspiring young actress named Daryl Gordon who is trying to find out who murdered her mother, Emily Gordon. She tells Spenser that her mother came to Boston from California to stay with her sister, and was then murdered by The Dread Scott Brigade; a revolutionary, anti-establishment movement in the 1970s, during a Boston bank robbery in 1974. Despite the case being decades cold, and her only payment being six Krispy Kreme donuts, Spenser likes the challenge and decides to take the case. He starts by getting the case files, and speaking to the original investigators. None remember anything significant, but Spenser soon realizes that an FBI report on the case is missing. So he questions the FBI about this missing file, and they claim no such report was ever written. Soon after two FBI agents accost Spenser in his home and tell him to leave the case alone. Next, a couple of goons working for mob boss Sonny Karnofsky threaten Spenser and also tell him to stop investigating the cold case. The FBI and the mob not wanting Spenser to investigate the case only serve to pique his interest. He wonders what it is they are trying to hide and questions Sonny directly, who then orders his henchmen to kill Spenser.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsaken_House_(novel)"title="Forsaken House (novel)">
Araevin Teshurr is an elven mage who spends time with a company of human and dwarven adventurers. Upon returning to the elves' secluded home of Evermeet, he becomes embroiled in a deadly attack perpetrated by a group of outcast demon-elves, freed from their 5,000-year imprisonment and seeking revenge. While searching for a trio of mysterious magical stones, Araevin must convince the elves to end their isolation from the rest of Faerun, and band together with the other races to prevent the demon army from overrunning the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithful_Place"title="Faithful Place">
When 19-year-old Frank Mackey was left waiting outside of an abandoned house one fateful night, he believed that his lover backed out on their plans of elopement. After finding a note inside the home, the teenager was convinced that Rosie Daly must have changed her mind. Determined to escape his dysfunctional family and the prison that was Faithful Place, he left regardless, albeit brokenhearted.The plot picks up when, two decades later, Frank receives startling news. The now middle-aged detective is picking up his daughter Holly when his sister calls him with no warning. A suitcase was found behind the fireplace inside the abandoned house. Inside was girl's clothing, a birth certificate, and ferry tickets to England, the tickets Rosie and Frank had planned to use to leave their families two decades before. Frank is forced to return home after he left and never looked back. The story follows his discoveries as he revisits the past he left behind and discovers what really happened to Rosie Daly.As soon as he sees the suitcase, he recognizes the jeans his once-lover wore and the tickets they had saved so diligently to afford. Later, he explores the basement and finds a piece of concrete out of place. The police on the case arrive, and sure enough, a young woman's body is found beneath the floor. Frank knows who it is immediately, but cannot get involved in the case. Although he is a police officer, his personal involvement and connections to the confining town mean that he has to step aside. The determined protagonist cannot do so, however, and pries until he finds out that his older brother, Shay, was the one that ended Rosie's life. Shay confesses inadvertently to Frank's daughter, Holly, that he killed Rosie when he found out Frank was leaving Faithful Place for good. Shay wanted to get out just as desperately but couldn't leave their younger siblings with their abusive father. He believed it was Frank's duty to stay, and murdered Rosie out of anger when he discovered their plans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Center_of_the_World_(novel)"title="The Center of the World (novel)">
The main plot of the novel begins when Phil's best friend Kat (whose actual name is "Katja") returns from her summer vacation with her family. This plot covers the time between July and shortly after New Year's the following year. It is intercut with many different flashbacks."Phil" is seventeen years old, has a twin sister "(Dianne)", a best friend "(Kat)", a slightly crazy mother "(Glass)" with constantly changing male relationships. Some of the men in Glass' life, Phil remembers quite well. For example, there was Martin, the gardener, that Glass employed because it seemed impossible to maintain the upper hand in "Visibles" wild garden. "Visible" was the name of the house that Glass inherited of her sister Stella upon her arrival from the United States. The story does not primarily treat Phil's homosexuality, but rather stresses the difficulties he has to cope with in everyday life.With his mother and his sister, Phil lives in a huge mansion called 'Visible' which is located slightly remote from their city. The city's inhabitants barely have contact with this weird family. The main exception to this is Phil's best friend Kat, the daughter of their school's principal, who repeatedly violates her parents' interdiction of visiting Phil. Another important person is the lawyer Tereza, who is friends with the family and acts as a kind of mentor to Phil.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Giants"title="Fall of Giants">
The novel begins with the thirteen-year-old Billy Williams, nicknamed 'Billy-with-Jesus', going to work his first day in the coal mine underneath the fictional Welsh town of Aberowen in 1911.Three years later, the main story begins. Edward "Fitz" Fitzherbert, Earl Fitzherbert, who maintains a country estate in Aberowen and licenses the land on which the coal mine is built, hosts a party for many powerful people around the world. His guests include:Major characters introduced after the party include Grigori and Lev Peshkov, two Russian orphans who work in a locomotive factory and have personal reasons to hold a grudge against Princess Bea and the rest of the Russian royal family. Grigori and Lev's father was executed by Bea's aristocratic family for alleged improper grazing of cattle on Bea's family's land.The overall theme of the novel revolves around common people trying, and many times succeeding, in throwing off the yokes so often placed on them by a society (largely focused on Britain and Russia) dominated by the landed aristocracy.There are several key themes linking facets in world history at this point. They include the causes of the First World War, the collapse of the Russian Empire, and Germany's role in the continuance of a bloody war that led to its economic collapse and the postwar rise of Hitler.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_German_Is_It"title="How German Is It">
The Hargenaus were once a noble and revered family. Now the two remaining brothers, the writer Ulrich and the architect Helmut (in suhrkamp 1986: Helmuth), must reconcile their private pasts with that of their history as a whole. They are getting spied upon, bombs go off in buildings designed by Helmut, and through all this, the reality of what really went on during World War II is slowly uncovered.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thousand_Years_of_Good_Prayers_(short_story_collection)"title="A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (short story collection)">
## "Extra".Granny Lin, a fifty-one-year-old spinster, struggles to find work after she is "honorably retired" from a Beijing garment factory and is denied a pension. Her colleague Auntie Wang recommends that she get married so she can be financially secure with an inheritance. She reluctantly agrees to be matched with Old Tang, a seventy-six year old widower struggling with Alzheimer's disease. Once she is married to him, she has to pretend that Old Tang's previous wife is still alive but ill at the hospital. One day, while they are bathing, Old Tang gains some lucidity, and in a fit of rage and confusion, slips in the bathroom and dies.After the funeral, the family gives her no inheritance, leaving her financially unstable once more. However, one of Old Tang's sons recommends her for a job as a maid at the Mei-Mei Academy, a primary boarding school in the mountainous western suburb of Beijing. There, she develops a bond with Kang, a newly-arrived, six-year-old student. She learns that his father is a wealthy agricultural entrepreneur. Kang was sent away because he is the child of the first, now-divorced wife of the tycoon. Because no one comes for him on the weekends, he and Granny Lin bond with each other at the school, taking walks and telling stories during this time until the school week resumes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_of_Words"title="Ocean of Words">
## "A Report".Chen Jun writes a letter to Commissar Lin apologizing about an incident in which his Reconnaissance Company sang a counterrevolutionary song during one of their marches through Longmen City in Northeast China.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grass_Dancer"title="The Grass Dancer">
Prologue: Crowns of Glass – Harley dreams of his father and his brother often. He remembers the accident they died in before Harley was born. Henry Burger was drinking and angry about his wife's (Jeannette Mcvay) infidelity. Burger caused a head-on collision with Calvin Wind Soldier and Duane while trying to send the imaginary eyes he saw into hell.Chapter 1: Grass Dancers – Set in 1981 at the Dakota Days Contest Powwow. In this chapter the reader is introduced to all of the main characters. At the powwow, Pumpkin does a Grass Dance, which is untraditional for a woman to do. After the powwow Pumpkin spent the night with Harley Wind Soldier. The next night Pumpkin and her friends die in a car crash.Chapter 2: Christianity Comes to the Sioux – this chapter focuses on Harley Wind Soldier as an eighth grader in 1977. Harley internalizes his thoughts about his teacher, Jeanette McVeigh. He watches her behavior toward the students in his class, and observes she is trying too hard. Jeanette studies the culture in books, then applies it to the students, even when it may be out of context. Harley also sees Star Wars for the first time. It was so good, he sees it twice and identifies with the story and characters. This chapter also discusses how Christianity came to the reservation. The Missouri River runs through the reservation, and the river brought boats. On one of the boats came a piano, and gospel music was played. The piano allowed Christianity to take hold, as the tribe appreciated the music from the instrument.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GraceLand"title="GraceLand">
Set in the Nigerian city of Lagos, GraceLand is the story of a teenage boy named Elvis Oke, who is trying to escape the poverty of his community. Starting out as an Elvis Presley impersonator, he takes on a wide variety of jobs, many of which place him in criminal situations.The novel jumps between two settings, the village of Afikpo from 1972 until 1981, and Lagos from 1983 and onward. This allows readers to observe the shifting nature of Elvis' family dynamic, which changes drastically after the death of his mother and his subsequent move to Lagos. The complexities of maintaining familial and cultural ties in a modernizing society is brought up as well, which is mirrored in the dramatic fragmentation of Elvis' family as the novel progresses.In Lagos, Elvis is torn between the influences of two characters: his friend Redemption, and the self-proclaimed King of Beggars. Many of the illegal ventures that Elvis partakes in are due to Redemption's influence, and these escapades often lead to conflict with a man known as the Colonel, a prominent and corrupt member of a brutal military regime. The King of Beggars, on the other hand, attempts to direct Elvis to a different path. His presence throughout the novel serves as a crude, and often ignored, moral compass.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_in_Plain_Sight"title="Hidden in Plain Sight">
Sahil, who as a young child had fled with his family from Afghanistan to Pakistan in the 1990, was first sent to Iran from where he was carried to Greece through Turkey by human smugglers. From there he traveled across Europe to Finland in summer 2008. The Finnish Immigration officials did not grant him a due asylum process but instead imposed a deportation when the author received an e-mail request for help from his sociologist friend in Minneapolis.Suoranta states that he could not tolerate a situation "where a young person was about to be sent into an uncertain, perhaps life-threatening, situation. If it was in my power to do something, I had to do something... Although I did not know what asylum, deportation, irregular immigration, or the Dublin agreement meant, it was necessary to try to do something, search for help, at least. When I found out that there was no organisation, including the church, which could help, I realised that I had a duty." Thus he hid the youngster to his late grandfather's apartment.The book has three storylines or intertwined layers. In one level it describes in a form of a journal the actual incidents in chronological order, a 5-month period from March to August 2009. In other level it ponders the author's inner feelings and anxieties in a difficult and unprecedented circumstances. And yet in another level the text contains ethical and moral reflections pertaining universal questions of helping another human beings referring, among others, to sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and philosopher Peter Singer, especially his "Practical Ethics" and "The Life You Can Save".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mawali_(novel)"title="Mawali (novel)">
In the first version the story starts with Sikander planning to take revenge on a guy called Ratan Shah, who has cheated and killed Sikander's friend Kundan Seth. The trio of Rattan Shah, Kundan Seth and another fellow called Latif Katta kidnapped a rich businessman's nine-year-old daughter for Rs 40 Lakh. The plan was not to kill her but Ratan Shah turned traitor, he killed not only the girl but also Latif Katta and had poor Seth framed for both the murders, with help of a semi-callgirl Rupali, a police inspector called Gokhle and the management and staff of Hotel Surya.(Later instead of killing Rupali Sikander will force her to become his keep, along with her two sisters Malti and Kanchan, and at the end the three sisters will play a vital role in bringing down the Sikander by helping his arch-enemy Chhota Dalvi.)One by one Sikander kills all. As almost all were part of Ahmedabad underworld, the underworld is shaken to its foundations and the ruthless Sikander, whose main area was only Lal Darwaza, becomes more and more powerful as he becomes the monopolist of bootlegging in the city. Bootlegging makes Sikander, who was born in a slum in Surat, a rich man living in a luxury flat. Then one day he makes a mistake, he tells Rupali the story of Samson and Delilah, and also tells her that just like Samson's hair, his weak point is his .38 revolver, a gift from his guru, a ruthless gangster called Commander, who brought up and trained him. One day Rupali vanishes with the gun and all the money. Sikander almost goes mad. He was so attached to his .38 that without it he feels as weak and vulnerable as a baby. His enemies, mainly Chhota Dalvi who is actually behind all mischief Rupali is doing, take advantage of this situation and one by one Sikander starts losing his assets. The government is also trying to trap him just like they trapped Tony Montana in Scarface - by income tax strategy. But Sikander has a simple solution to that - blow up the Income Tax Officer with a bomb ! When the underworld hears that Sikander is planning to blow up an IAS, they strongly suggest him not to do that. A grand meeting is held where all big dons of Gujarat including Firangi, Tony Masalamix and Vijaysingh (based on character of Vijay Mallya) are present to talk to Sikander just like the five "families" do in end of The Godfather, but Sikander has nor level-headedness nor maturity of Don Corleone - he childishly threatens to kill them all by singing a song "...machinegun uthaaya sabko udaaya..." as he loses his temper when they question him about the disappearance of one of his subordinates. This way Sikander signs his own death warrant. In the end his own, most trusted lieutenants kill him (under instruction and pressure of the syndicate's general consensus) .
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farthest_Reach"title="Farthest Reach">
On the heels of her failed assault of Evereska, the demonelf Sarya Dlardrageth retreats in order to regroup. She summons a powerful Outer Planes denizen named Malkizid to her aid, who advises her to make the remaining elven army come to her by inhabiting the site of their most costly defeat - the legendary ruins of Myth Drannor. With the elven army weary, Araevin and the elven leaders must convince the defenders to rally and defeat the demonelf menace forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoilt_Rotten"title="Spoilt Rotten">
## Chapter One: Sentimentality. Dalrymple begins the chapter by citing several examples to illustrate how sentimentality is increasing as a cultural phenomenon in the United Kingdom. He then analyses falling education standards in the country, and links these trends to "powerful intellectual currents" that "feed into the great Sargasso Sea of modern sentimentality about children", and asserts that in this regard the ideas of the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau and the psychologist Steven Pinker have been particularly influential. He then examines a newspaper article which advocates reform of the British prison system. Dalrymple states that the article aroused an emotion "whose effect, if not its intention, was to convince the person experiencing it that he was a person of superior sensibility and compassion", and that such emotionality "often attaches to the question of crime and punishment in contemporary Britain". Dalrymple also cites a modern tendency for criminals under the influence of drugs or alcohol not to be held morally responsible for their crimes. Dalrymple takes issue with this, and agrees with Aristotle that a man is doubly culpable: first for the offence committed, and second for having intoxicated himself. Dalrymple also maintains that it is "the sheerest sentimentality to see drug addicts as the victims of an illness" and that, "sentimentality is now a mass phenomenon almost beyond criticism or even comment".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_of_Shadows"title="Crown of Shadows">
Damien and Tarrant return to the west and Jaggonath, where they agree to work together long enough to kill Calesta. Damien discovers that the Patriarch of the Church, who is firmly against sorcery, is actually an Adept himself. Tarrant further strains relations with the Unnamed by revealing this fact to the Patriarch, and is dragged off to Hell for his pains. Damien convinces another Iezu, Karril, to lead him through Tarrant's personal Hell to the Unnamed, where he bargains for the Adept's life. The Unnamed agrees, on the condition that its contract with Tarrant will be broken in thirty-one days. If the Hunter has not found another way to sustain his immortal life by then, he will die. The Patriarch, already displeased at Damien's saving Tarrant for the first time in the Rakhlands, comes extremely close to casting him out of the priesthood. In the end, however, it is Damien who chooses to no longer be a priest, because his faith has been questioned too much by the Hunter, by himself, even by the Patriarch. Gerald Tarrant, on the other hand, has found a way to destroy an Iezu: feed it with the opposite emotion it normally thrives on. Karril, who lives off Pleasure, can also accept Pain, but Apathy will destroy him. Calesta, who embodies sadism, can only be destroyed by Altruism- the ultimate sacrifice, which Tarrant, amazingly, is willing to pay. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_the_Good_Spy_Young"title="Only the Good Spy Young">
The story starts with student Cammie (Cameron Ann Morgan), still enrolled at Gallagher Academy, already in London with Bex (Rebecca Baxter) and her parents (Grace and Abraham Baxter). Cammie now has strict and very serious security surrounding her because the Circle of Cavan, a terrorist group, is after her. While at an ice skating rink, she talks briefly with Zach, and he asks her if she has seen Joe Solomon, and Cammie replied to him that "being out of the loop isn't fun is it?" meaning that now Zach understands what it's like to not be on a need-to-know basis. After Zach leaves, the lights go out, and Cammie is grabbed by Mr. Solomon, who tells her to run. They end up on the Tower Bridge, where Bex's parents reveal that Mr. Solomon was the threat. She demands answers but he only makes her promise to "follow the pigeons" before jumping off the bridge and escaping. She is interrogated two hours later by an MI6 agent (who is later revealed to be Agent Edward Townsend) and is released. While in a MI6 safe house with Bex's family, her Aunt Abby comes to visit. Cammie is appalled and upset that her mother did not come to comfort her, yet suspicious that she is there. After she and Bex eavesdrop on part of the conversation between the Baxters and Aunt Abby(Cammie listening from the dumbwaiter), they confront the adults about when Abby was saying "Cammie can never know-"., so Abby tells her with a trembling voice, that Joe Solomon has been a member of the Circle of Cavan since he was sixteen, and Cammie simply not believing it to be true, but Abby begs her that she of all people needs to believe it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonheart_(novel)"title="Dragonheart (novel)">
Pern is still trying to recover from a deadly plague that devastated the holders and craftsmen, not even 15 turns (years) before. Although the dragonsriders and weyrfolk were spared from the devastation of that plague, they are about to be tested with a deadly illness that afflicts the dragons.Fiona of Fort Weyr, the only surviving child of Lord Holder Bemin of Fort Hold, is thrust into this situation when she accidentally impresses Gold Talenth. As first fire-lizards, and then dragons, fall prey to the mysterious illness, Fiona and all of Pern must face the possibility of no dragons being left to fight thread as it begins to fall once more.The number of casualties mount as both the illness and thread take dragons and their riders. In an attempt to save the Weyrs, Fiona and a mysterious rider lead the injured and weyrlings back in time.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_of_Night_(novel)"title="The Dead of Night (novel)">
In the wake of losing Corrie and Kevin, and not knowing how either of them are faring in enemy territory, the group's morale deteriorates. Homer suggests the group attempt to track down Corrie and Kevin. They release a smoke bomb into the hospital and investigate during the evacuation. They discover that Corrie is comatose and that Kevin was beaten when he arrived.Fresh from the discovery of what had happened to their friends, the group agrees to make an attack on the convoys on the highway to Cobbler's Bay. While preparing their ambush, the group is surprised by a small patrol. Homer kills one soldier and injures another with a sawed-off shotgun at close quarters before going into shock. A third, and final, soldier panics and flees into the bush away from the highway leaving their pack and rifle behind. Ellie takes charge of the situation, kills the wounded soldier and makes the decision to continue on with the attack. The attack succeeds and the group return to Hell.They decide that their next course of action should be to investigate the other paths in and out of Hell to determine where they lead. Chris, however, decides not to go and stays behind instead. Their exploration leads them to a group of free Australians called "Harvey's Heroes" led by former school principal and army reservist Major Harvey. He refuses to allow any portion of the group to return to Hell to find Chris. Although Harvey brags about having made several attacks on the enemy, these attacks are revealed to be low-risk acts. The group is invited to spectate as Harvey's Heroes destroy an abandoned tank, but they are led into an enemy ambush and have to flee from the scene. Fi is chased by an enemy soldier. Homer and Ellie ambush and incapacitate the man as he prepares to rape Fi but cannot bring themselves to kill him when they discover that he is a teenager like themselves. Lee arrives and stabs the soldier in the heart, disturbing the others.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_for_Chaos"title="Plan for Chaos">
The novel begins as a hard-boiled detective thriller in what is presumably New York City, about thirty years or so after the end of the Second World War - a future date at the time of writing. Once the chase is on, the story moves into science fictional themes, and shifts to a hi-tech hideout deep in the jungle, where Nazis are cloning an Aryan master race. While the clones zip around in flying saucers, the Nazi high command prepares for world domination by tricking the US and Russia into starting a nuclear war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_(novel)"title="Raw (novel)">
The book RAW is the story of Brett Dalton's experience at "The Farm", a detention/rehab centre, after being caught breaking into a liquor store at night and stealing alcohol, cigarettes, cash and condoms. When he gets to "The Farm" after an awful, hot, dehydrated trip in the back of a paddy wagon, he is determined not to cooperate or enjoy himself. This does not work in his favour. On meeting most of the inmates Brett makes enemies. He has confrontations with both of the “main guys” in the detention centre, Josh and Tyson. On the first night he decides he's going to run away. He sneaks out at night and plans on hitch-hiking to civilisation but the first car that picks him up is Sam. After being on the run, and realising how hard his plan is he decides on going back to "The Farm". Then he tries skipping class, (which is compulsory). When he doesn't succeed he starts arguing with the teacher and gets sent out of class, which is just what he wants. He nicks off to behind the wood work shed to have a smoke, and spots a girl carrying supplies from a truck into the kitchen, he is stunned by her beauty. Eventually he meets this girl, Caitlyn and later they become more than friends. Brett meets up with his ex-girlfrienand crashing Sam's ute. This led to Sam and Brett constantly fighting and Sam ends up sending Brett the magistrate. When Brett realises that he only has five days left in town he wants to 'make things right' with Caitlyn. This doesn't go well and leaves Brett more heart-broken and angry. Before he leaves town, Brett is forced to go the big Ride (a cattle drive). On the Ride Josh and Brett get paired and learn more about each other. Brett learns the real reason that Josh is at "The Farm", he was raped. Brett is later re-arrested by the cops for his newest crimes, the novel ends with Sam telling Brett that one can only change their own life. Brett now considers Sam to be an old friend of his. Brett also finds out that he has lost something and gained another.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Sardine"title="The Day of the Sardine">
The principal character of the novel is Arthur Haggerston, an intelligent but rebellious teenager who lives with his mother, Peg, and her lover, Harry Parker, a former seaman who works in a sardine-canning factory. Arthur leaves school without qualifications and takes up various menial jobs before using the influence of his Uncle George to obtain work installing sewage pipes for the local council. He conducts an affair with Stella, a married woman with a seafaring husband, and develops a friendship with another teenager, Nosey (or Stanley) Carron.After several altercations with a gang led by Mick Kelly, Arthur and Nosey form their own gang, while Nosey begins a relationship with Kelly's sister, Teresa. The violence between the two gangs escalates, which makes Arthur uneasy. After a fight between the gangs, Arthur is pursued by the police and hides in a church hall where a service is being conducted. He makes the acquaintance of the Pastor, Mr Johnson, and of Johnson's daughter, Dorothy. In a spirit of reconciliation, Arthur attends an open-air brass band concert with Harry and Peg, but Peg spots Arthur's estranged father playing with a military band. Arthur 's father is confronted, and confesses to bigamy, but agrees to a divorce, even if it means that he will face prison.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intangibles_of_Leadership"title="The Intangibles of Leadership">
The Intangibles of Leadership uncovers patterns in the attributes that truly distinguish those who succeed at the top. After more than a decade of senior executive assessments, CEO interviews, and proprietary research, Davis found that extraordinary leaders possess certain characteristics that fall between the lines of existing leadership models, yet are fundamental to executive success. Davis explains each of these qualities, the people who exemplify them, how to detect them in others, and how to develop the subtle characteristics that will enable leaders to stand out from the pack. The book has been highly reviewed and was named as a "Top Business Book of 2010 by Library Journal".The Ten Intangibles outlined in the book are:According to the author, the book is a practical atlas of the characteristics that most define extraordinary leaders and their underlying psychological mechanisms. It was designed as a mirror to help executives think about how they approach leadership and gain insights that can enable them to grow and develop.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Lessons_(book)"title="Piano Lessons (book)">
Goldsworthy was nine years old when she met Eleonora Sivan, a charismatic Russian émigré and world-class pianist who became her piano teacher. "Piano Lessons" documents what Sivan brought to Goldsworthy's lessons: a love of music, a respect for life, a generous spirit and the courage to embrace a musical life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Denning_Drives_North"title="Mr. Denning Drives North">
Aircraft manufacturer Tom Denning (John Mills) is married to Kay (Phyllis Calvert); they have a daughter, Liz (Eileen Moore). Liz is dating Mados (Herbert Lom) who Tom "accidentally" kills by punching him. Instead of calling the police, Tom disposes of the body in a ditch. He tries to disguise the victim by placing a large overly-ornate ring on the victim's finger. Later, torn with his guilt, he goes back to pick up the body only to find that it has disappeared.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Journey"title="A Journey">
"A Journey" covers Blair's time as leader of the Labour Party and then British prime minister following his party's victory at the 1997 general election. His tenure as Labour leader begins in 1994 following the death of his predecessor, John Smith, an event Blair claims to have had a premonition about a month before Smith died. Blair believes he will succeed Smith as Labour leader rather than Gordon Brown, who is a strong contender for the job. Blair and Brown subsequently reach an agreement whereby Brown will not run against Blair for the position, and will succeed him later. But it leads to a difficult working relationship, which is discussed at length. He likens them both to "a couple who loved each other, arguing over whose career should come first." To him, Brown is a "strange guy" with "zero" emotional intelligence.Having been elected as leader, Blair moved the Labour Party to the political centre ground, repackaging it as "New Labour", and went on to win the 1997 general election in a landslide. Blair recounts that at his first meeting with Queen Elizabeth II following his election as Prime Minister, the Queen told him, "You are my tenth prime minister. The first was Winston (Churchill). That was before you were born." Months after his government is appointed, they must deal with the aftermath of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and following the princess's funeral, Elizabeth II tells Blair that lessons must be learned from the way things have been handled. Social occasions with the Queen are also recalled, including a gathering at Balmoral Castle where Prince Philip is described manning the barbecue while Elizabeth II dons a pair of rubber gloves to wash up afterwards.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hordubal"title="Hordubal">
Juraj Hordubal returns home to Carpathian Ruthenia after eight years of hard work in America. He is looking forward to seeing his devoted wife Polana and daughter Hafia. Everything is greatly idealised in his eyes as he expects everyone to welcome him warmly. However, the reality is different, he is accepted very coldly but hopes that things will get better soon and everyone will get used to his presence. He believes that Polana was a faithful wife during the time he was abroad. Unfortunately, he later discovers that she had an affair with the farm keeper Stepan Manya who was helping her with managing the farm.The relationship between Hordubal and Manya becomes very tense and eventually, Manya is forced to leave the farm. That, however doesn't influence Manya's love affair with Polana. They still keep meeting despite the fact that Hordubal knows about the affair. Manya and Polana decide to get rid of Hordubal in order to begin a new life together. They are also motivated to do it as Hordubal's savings are big enough to ensure a convenient life for a long time. Hordubal is killed by Manya in the middle of the night. The ending of the book describes the investigation of the criminal act. All the evidence lead to Manya. He is sentenced to life. Polana is found guilty of planning the murder and is sentenced to 12 years in prison in spite of being pregnant. In the end, Polana's sinning is considered much more severe as she misused her husband's kindness and devotion and was unfaithful. The highly religious society detests her for her sins.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_I_Stay"title="If I Stay">
17-year-old Mia Hall is an aspiring concert cellist living in Portland, Oregon with her parents and younger brother Teddy. When school is closed one day on account of the snowy weather, the family decides to go for a morning drive, but ice on the roads causes their car to swerve into another lane, where a car crashes into theirs. Mia awakens to find the bodies of her parents, who have died upon impact. Mia comes across her own severely injured body and realizes she is having an out of body experience. She follows her physical body to the hospital, where she watches her extended family rushing to take care of her while her best friend Kim and her boyfriend Adam struggle to reach the hospital. She also watches as doctors struggle to revive Teddy, who eventually succumbs to his injuries. Through her experience, Mia reflects on her life, reminiscing about the development of her relationship with Adam, the development of her passion and talent for playing the cello, and the obstacles of being a teenager who feels out of place no matter where she goes. Mia struggles to decide whether she will awaken from the coma to be with her remaining family and Adam, or whether to join her parents and Teddy in death. She very nearly makes the decision to pass on until Adam finally reaches her hospital room and tearfully begs her to stay. Mia then experiences a vision of how the remainder of her life will play out. The novel ends just as she wakes up.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phule's_Company"title="Phule's Company">
The book begins as Willard Phule, a multimillionaire, is court-martialed by the Space Legion for ordering the strafing of a treaty signing ceremony. For his punishment, he is given command of an Omega Company full of misfits on Haskin's Planet, a mining settlement on the edge of settled space. He quickly goes to his duty station and leverages his personal money and a knack for managing people to get the company to come together as a unit. His antics attract the attention of the local and interplanetary press, but create a very cohesive unit of the Legionnaires.When a contract for an honorary duty is awarded to the Regular Army on Haskin's Planet, Phule convinces the governor to leave the contract up for competition between the Space Legionnaires and the Regular Army. The Army sends some of their most elite troops to take part in the competition, and through an impressive show of cooperation and teamwork, Phule's company ties the regular troops. In the final episode of the book, Phule's company encounters lizard-like alien explorers from the Zenobian Empire. Quickly reverting to his business instincts, Phule negotiates a business deal to sell swampland to the creatures in exchange for new technologies. This again enrages some of his superiors, but because of a show of support from the Legionnaires for their commander and a complete conviction of his own innocence, Phule evades court-martial again.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Charming_Man_(novel)"title="This Charming Man (novel)">
The main characters are: Paddy de Courcy, a charismatic politician; Lola Daly, a stylist; Grace Gildee, a journalist; Marnie Hunter, Grace's alcoholic sister; and Alicia Thornton, Paddy's fiancée.The story is told predominantly from the viewpoints of the first three, although there are occasional sections from Alicia's point of view. Lola, Paddy's girlfriend, is heartbroken when she hears of his engagement and moves to County Clare to get away from him. Marnie, who was Paddy's college girlfriend and still has feelings for him, is an alcoholic and eventually loses her job, husband and children; her sister Grace attempts to help Marnie, get an interview with Lola, and hide her relationship with Paddy from her partner Damien. Over the course of the book it is revealed that all three women - plus various other ex-girlfriends of Paddy's - have been abused by him.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warlock_(Hall_novel)"title="Warlock (Hall novel)">
When violence threatens the frontier boomtown of Warlock, a Citizens' Committee determines to take action against criminal cowboys and cattle rustlers. A gunslinger named Clay Blaisedell, who has achieved considerable renown in Texas, is hired as town marshal to keep the peace. He is followed to Warlock by his close friend Tom Morgan, a gambler and saloon owner with a sour reputation, and Kate Dollar, a former prostitute bent on vengeance. Though Blaisedell at first manages to assert his authority with his stolid demeanor and expert gunmanship, Abe McQuown and his troublesome gang of cowboys seek to antagonize him.One of McQuown's former associates, John "Bud" Gannon, hopes to repent for the horrors of his past by becoming a deputy sheriff in Warlock, while his younger brother Billy continues to ride with McQuown. Bud's decision unsettles both the gang and the town's citizens, and he is forced to confront suspicion about his loyalties from both sides while trying to maintain his official neutrality. When Blaisedell declares several of McQuown's company banned from Warlock, the outlaws disobey the posting and ride into town. Morgan saves Blaisedell from an ambush in the ensuing shootout, and three of the outlaws, including Billy Gannon, are killed. Much of the town expects Bud to retaliate against Blaisedell out of respect for his brother, but the deputy remains impartial. Anticipating the ferocity of rumor that will inevitably surround accounts of the gunfight and wanting to avoid the distrust and ressentiment of the town, Blaisedell turns himself in for trial in neighboring Bright's City on the charge of murder.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Spring"title="Stone Spring">
The focus of much of the novel is the community of Etxelur. Etxelur begins as a typical stone-age civilisation, remarkable only for its flint, which is prized throughout most of Northland. It is nominally ruled by a figure known as the "Giver", but as Kirike, the current Giver, is missing, leadership falls to Zesi, his eldest daughter. Every year, Etxelur and its neighbours, the brutish "Pretani" (located in modern-day England), hold a ceremony known as the Giving on Etxelur soil. Representing the Pretani leader are brothers Gall and Shade, who share the house with Zesi and her 14-year-old sister Ana. Gall, the eldest brother, has been promised Zesi as a bride by his father, but Zesi instead sleeps with the younger brother Shade, enraging Gall. To make matters worse, Gall kills a member of the neighbouring "Snailhead" tribe during a communal hunt.Tensions come to a head during the giving, whereupon the Pretani leader (or "Root") arrives and demands that Shade and Gall resolve their dispute by a fight to the death, in which Gall is killed. Kirike also returns to Etxelur, along with outsiders Ice Dreamer (rescued from North America by Kirike during his travels) and Novu (a slave who killed his master and escaped, with a particular skill for making bricks). Kirike resumes leadership of Etxelur, much to Zesi's resentment. Zesi ultimately decides to leave with the Pretani to challenge them in a hunting contest on their own territory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Simple_Story_(novel)"title="A Simple Story (novel)">
The novel is divided into four volumes, two each devoted to its two storylines.The first volumes books follow the love story of young Miss Milner (we are never told her first name) and her guardian Dorriforth, who begins the novel as a Roman Catholic priest. Miss Milner is a seventeen year old orphan, whose father's deathbed wish entrusted her to Dorriforth's guardianship despite disapproving of Catholicism. Miss Milner admires Dorriforth but struggles to obey his strict rules. She flirts with a Lord Lawnly whom Dorriforth must duel on her behalf, causing strife. Several deaths in Dorriforth's family cause him to inherit the title of Lord Elmwood, bringing with it a social obligation to marry and have children to carry on the Elmwood family name. Miss Milner falls in love with Dorriforth. The Pope releases Dorriforth from his vow of chastity, and he becomes engaged to the former heir's fiancée, Miss Fenton; their relationship is tepid but prudent on both sides. Dorriforth then realises that he has passionate feelings for Miss Milner, which he resists both due to his engagement and due to his doubts about Miss Milner's suitability as a wife. Through a series of machinations, however, assisted by Miss Woodley (a kindhearted spinster) and Sanford (a Jesuit mentor of Dorriforth's), Dorriforth's engagement to Miss Fenton is broken and he and Miss Milner are engaged.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cowards"title="The Cowards">
Škvorecký modelled Kostelec on his own home town of Náchod, and Smiřický is a semi-autobiographical character based on the author. Like Náchod, Kostelec is a border town on a river and overlooked by a castle. Like Škvorecký, Smiřický is the educated, middle-class son of a bank clerk, loves jazz music and has spent two years as a forced labourer in a Messerschmitt aircraft factory. Danny belongs to a jazz and swing band of middle-class young men that plays in a local café and tries to impress the local girls. But everyone knows that Danny's love for the beautiful Irena is unrequited, and instead she loves Zdeněk who shares her enthusiasm for mountaineering.The novel opens with Kostelec still under German occupation, and ends a week later after the Red Army has liberated the town. The town's German garrison plans to retreat west in the hope of surrendering to the US Army rather than the Soviets. Kostelec's Czech civic authorities, who had cooperated (and in some cases possibly collaborated) with the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia authorities, want to keep the town calm and avoid bloodshed. They fear that local Czechoslovak Communist (KSČ) partisans are planning a revolution not only against the retreating Germans but also to prevent restoration of the pre-war capitalist order. The local elite thus organize "revolutionary troops" only to disarm Czech population and keep the young men under control. Groups of disarmed youngsters are sent to patrol and to prevent the communist resistance from raiding the German ammunition train. Danny and his friends have lost the illusions and deserted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Loud_Silence"title="The Long Loud Silence">
Gary, an army corporal, wakes up in a hotel room in Illinois following a drunken binge. He discovers that the town is deserted except for a handful of corpses and comes to the realization that the country has been subjected to an attack. He discovers one other survivor, a girl of 19. They take a car and, after filling it with supplies, drive toward Chicago, which they find to be in flames. They drive west, only to discover that almost all bridges over the Mississippi have been disabled; the one remaining bridge is guarded by army troops on the western side, who shoot anyone attempting to cross over. The girl abandons him; as he travels further, Gary learns that the nuclear attack was combined with bacteriological warfare which infected the entire population with pneumonic plague. Only those rare individuals with natural resistance have survived, but since they are carriers of the disease, the entire eastern third of the country has been quarantined.Gary is nevertheless determined to cross over. He joins up with a former school teacher, Jay Oliver; they make camp in the hills outside an intact bridge in Kentucky, waiting for the army to allow people across. A woman joins them, trading sex for food. After realizing that the quarantine is permanent, the three decide to go to Florida for the winter where they find a fisherman's cabin on the Gulf coast. After a few months the woman becomes pregnant and expresses her preference for Oliver; Gary decides to leave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Octopus_Followed_Me_Home"title="An Octopus Followed Me Home">
The book tells of a young girl who takes a green octopus home. When the girl asks her father if she can keep the octopus in the tub, he tells her about all the other animals he let her keep and all the sacrifices he made. The saddened girl returns the octopus back to the ocean, but becomes happy again when a gray brachiosaurus follows her home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_as_Things_Are"title="Broken as Things Are">
Fourteen-year-old Morgan Lee has a strange, yet close, relationship with her brother Ginx. Ginx is exceedingly withdrawn and didn't speak fully until she was five, when he began spontaneously speaking in full sentences. The two grow close, with Ginx referring to himself in the plural for himself and Morgan, as well as the two developing their own language. The friendship isn't perfect, as Ginx will occasionally act badly towards Morgan, such as giving her concussions on occasion. However, when Morgan begins fall for her friend Billy, Ginx becomes unable to cope with this reality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_veinte_años,_Luz"title="A veinte años, Luz">
Upon giving birth to a son, John, a tiny doubt in Luz's mind takes root and soon grows into an obsession, and thus begins Luz's quest for her past: was she indeed, as she had always believed, the daughter and granddaughter of a family loyal to the dictatorship in Argentina, or was she in fact one of the country's missing children, one of the "desaparecidos" whose whereabouts were in many cases never discovered.Luz (whose name means "light" in Spanish) seeks her true identity with great courage, bringing to light the darkest corners of the society in which she has been raised, and of which, until now, considered herself a participant. Her search will lead to the discovery of a country divided by a brutal, criminal regime, which caused its own citizens to vanish, hiding them and, worst of all, forgetting them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_derecho_de_matar"title="El derecho de matar">
El Derecho de Matar tells the story of Jorge Morganti, his sister Irma and his lover Cleo. It is a "pornographic-philosophic" novel, in the tradition of Marqués de Sade. Artificiality and exoticism weave a narrative skewed by philosophical and moral reflections that oscillate between traditional eroticism and a new style developed by the acute sensibility of Barón Biza.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_World_We_Live_In"title="This World We Live In">
A year after a meteor knocked the moon closer to Earth, Miranda is awoken in the middle of the night by the sound of it raining for the first time in months. She and her brothers begin gathering rainwater. Worrying about the stability of their food supply, Matt and Jon decide to embark on a week-long fishing trip on the Delaware River. In preparation, the siblings raid abandoned houses, also restocking on essentials. Matt and Jon leave for their trip and Miranda and her mother Laura prepare to store the fish in the flooded cellar. They attempt to empty it out one pail at a time, but while Miranda takes a break Laura passes out in the water and nearly drowns, but Miranda pulls her out and revives her.Jon and Matt return from their trip alongside a beautiful young woman named Syl, who Matt announces is his new wife. Jon explains that they met Syl in a deserted motel after Matt protected her from an abusive partner and that Matt and Syl exchanged marriage vows the next day. On the one-year anniversary of the moon crash, the boys have left for another fishing trip and Syl suggests making an offering to Diana. Miranda sacrifices an old trophy, Laura her first book contract, and Syl her long hair.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Storm_(novel)"title="Into the Storm (novel)">
In 1942, the American destroyer USS "Walker" (DD-163), a World War I 'four-piper', is part of the United States Asiatic Fleet. Lieutenant Commander Matthew Reddy is "Walker"s captain."Walker" and her sister ship, USS "Mahan" (DD-102), enter a squall and emerge on an alternate Earth where humans never evolved, but two intelligent races, the Lemurians and the Grik (a race of evolved "dinosaurs" from Africa), are at war. The Grik have a class system, in which the Uul are the soldiers, workers, etc., and the Hij are the leaders. The Lemurians are peaceful refugees from Madagascar that possibly evolved from lemurs. Reddy meets twice with the Lemurians' leadership. The Lemurians' king and his advisers tell him that others came to their world before him. Reddy and the crew of "Walker" side with the Lemurians.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusade_(Destroyermen_novel)"title="Crusade (Destroyermen novel)">
Lieutenant Commander Matthew Reddy, and the crew of USS "Walker" (DD-163), have located USS "Mahan" (DD-102), and are preparing to take the fight to the Grik. Reddy personally leads the first land assault against the Griks to defend a warrior tribe of Monkey-Cats. "Amagi" is discovered by aerial reconnaissance in a Grik Armada on an obvious heading to Walker's Location. In a repeat of actual history Reddy orchestrates another evacuation of Surabaya. Surface action ensues.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phule's_Paradise"title="Phule's Paradise">
The book begins when Phule and his "Omega Mob" receive orders to report to the space station Lorelei, a resort space station home of many casinos. The "Omega Mob" is contracted to defend the Fat Chance Casino from take over by organized crime. Phule splits 50 of the troops from the company, giving them permission to operate under cover in order to gain intelligence on the crime syndicate. He supplements the lost legionnaires with actors and trains the whole unit, actors and legionnaires, in casino security. Upon their arrival they learn that the crime boss, Maxine, has partial ownership in the casino and plans to bankrupt the casino in order to gain a controlling interest. With this intelligence, Phule is able to thwart all of the schemes developed by Maxine thanks to his prior knowledge.In retaliation, Maxine's thugs attack two of the actors. However, upon noticing the thug's leader's possession of the company's distinctive wrist communicators, Chocolate Harry, the company's supply sergeant, retrieves the communicators and beats up the leader. Frustrated with all the failed actions, Maxine resorts to her backup plan: kidnap Phule and ransom him. The resourceful Omega Mob foils the kidnapping, rescuing Phule and forcing Maxine to hand over her share of the casino to the company.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Hunt_(novel)"title="Fox Hunt (novel)">
Lachlan Fox is a former Royal Australian Navy Special Forces Clearance Diver who is living on Christmas Island after being Dishonorably discharged after a mission gone wrong in East Timor. When Fox and best friend, former Navy pilot Alister Gammaldi, discover an unusual capsule whilst diving off Christmas Island, little do they know they have discovered something that could result in the outbreak of World War III.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act_(novel)"title="Patriot Act (novel)">
Lachlan Fox, former Royal Australian Navy Special Forces Clearance Diver, now investigative journalist for GSR (Global Syndicate Reporters) grows suspicious when several high-profile businessmen and politicians are murdered in Europe. A coup is being planned by the United States' biggest European rival, France. Echelon is under attack as the United States rushes to avoid an armed conflict between France and the United States. Meanwhile, Fox's life is threatened by French DGSE agents who wish to assassinate Fox and girlfriend Kate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Prism"title="The Black Prism">
Sixteen years after the war, the Prism receives a note from a woman claiming to be "Lina," instructing him to meet his now 15-year-old son across the world in Tyrea. He had not known of his son's existence until this point. This child was conceived while Gavin was betrothed to Karris White Oak, a member of his Black-guard, the most elite military force in the world. The White sends Karris to Garriston, Tyrea's capital, to spy on its Satrap's army. She gives Karris a note concerning Gavin's unfaithfulness, to be read after leaving the Chromeria. Gavin is sent somewhere else to keep the two separated, but instead chooses to bring Karris to Garriston himself before she can read the note, using a mode of transportation no one else even believes possible: magically-aided flight across the ocean. This allows them to enter Tyrea in hours, rather than the month or so expected otherwise.As they draw closer, Karris sees smoke, and directs them to the former town of Rekton, which has been burned to the ground by Tyrean soldiers. They are just in time to save a teenager from being executed, killing several of the Satrap's personal bodyguards in the process. Gavin is then confronted by the irate Satrap himself, who calls himself King Garadul and his Satrapy a true independent nation. The town was burned on his order, as an example, due to their refusal to pay levies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Coaches_Waiting"title="Nine Coaches Waiting">
Linda Martin lands in Paris to take her new post as governess to the 9-year old Philippe, Comte de Valmy. She is feeling uneasy about hiding her past, particularly her French birth and fluency in the French language, from her employers, since Mme. de Valmy had been strangely adamant at her interview about wanting an English governess who would not be tempted to slip into French. Linda, who had been orphaned herself, quickly becomes protective of Philippe, who has also lost both his parents in a tragic accident.Philippe lives with his aunt and uncle in the vast and ornate Château Valmy in the alpine French countryside not far from Geneva, Switzerland. Léon de Valmy, Philippe's uncle, runs the estate on behalf of his under-age nephew until the boy inherits in 6 years.When Linda arrives at the imposing eighteenth-century château—a great mansion with its "four-square classic grace" that makes it less than a romantic castle with turrets and pinnacles but far more than a mere country house—she is at once enchanted by its beauty and history, but is also immediately struck by the sense of menace and doom surrounding its inhabitants. Léon is a charismatic force of nature and with a palpable charm who Linda begins to suspect may have plans to take over both the title and the chateau., When Linda meets his dashing and devastatingly handsome son Raoul, she understands a bit more about the de Valmy heritage and wonders to what extent he is involved in the threat to Philippe. As she becomes closer to Philippe and Raoul, Linda draws ever nearer to putting her finger on the source of the threat, and suspects the “English governess” who supposedly does not speak fluent French is being set up as the scapegoat to a nefarious plot. She may not be able to trust those she wants to, no matter how innocent or attractive they may seem. Soon it is up to the shy, young governess to beat the clock in order to save Philippe's life as well as her own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Feet_of_Jesus_(novel)"title="Under the Feet of Jesus (novel)">
The book follows Estrella and her family as they arrive in Central Valley and must deal with several challenges. The family works in the grape fields, where they are paid very little for what is grueling labor. Estrella soon meets Alejo and the pair fall in love. Tragedy strikes when Alejo is sprayed with pesticides and falls gravely ill. Estrella's mother, Petra, also discovers that she is pregnant, which complicates matters. As Alejo grows increasingly more ill, Estrella and her family take Alejo to see a nurse at the nearest clinic, who charges them $10 for an office visit, in which the nurse only confirms to them that Alejo is sick. Unable to pay the fee completely, Petra's companion Perfecto offers to fix the clinic's plumbing in lieu of payment, but she declines. The nurse tells the family to take Alejo to the hospital, which is 20 miles away. As the nurse has what little money they had, a desperate Estrella smashes the desk at the clinic with a crowbar until the nurse returns the money, which they use on gas to reach the hospital. Once at the hospital, Estrella and her family must leave Alejo there alone, out of fear of law enforcement searching for them due to the clinic visit, since they knew that the hospital couldn't refuse him aid. Alejo is taken into the hospital, where there is a risk that she may never see him again. Petra, looking under the feet of a Jesus statue, sees the birth certificates of her five children, and the marriage certificate from when she married her husband in Santa Ana. She views these documents as proof against immigration if anyone tries to wrongly deport her children. Petra is contemplative about her life, her struggles, her daughter's affection for someone like her first husband, and the growing life in her belly. Perfecto, too, worries about how he can afford to bring another life into the world when they are struggling to survive. He feels old, too tired to be starting another family, and homesick for the home of his youth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumine_Lingao"title="Illumine Lingao">
In the story, more than 500 people from early-21st-century China intentionally travel back in time via wormhole to the Chongzhen-era late Ming dynasty in 1628 AD. Settling in Lingao County on the island of Hainan, the time travelers set out to establish an industrialized society and change the course of history.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Eden"title="Waiting for Eden">
While on his second tour in Iraq, US Marine Corporal Eden is caught in the blast from an improvised explosive device while on patrol with his fellow Marine and best friend in their humvee. The blast kills everyone in the vehicle other than Eden, including the book's omniscient narrator. Eden suffers severe burns over the entirety of his body. Eden is transported back to the US for treatment, where he is confined to a hospital bed and suffers constant severe pain. Unable to communicate, he is "not alive, not dead, what it was didn’t have a name."In the hospital, his wife Mary cares for Eden, and advocates his medical care. She "never leaves him," and "soon Eden became like an appendage to her, one she spoke for ... His body became her own, and she anchored to it. Even as she refused to leave, she wanted him to die." Among these challenges, she watches their daughter take her first steps among the sterile corridors of the military hospital. She struggles with the ultimate decision of whether to take Eden, "immobilized and practically catatonic", off the life support that tethers him to the world.From the vantage of the novel's narrator, the story explores Eden's inner consciousness. He has a stroke after Mary leaves for the Christmas holiday and his mind becomes "unlocked". The novel explores the history of the couple, including with the narrator; Eden's decision to reenlist in the military, and the experiences of Mary with the "war on terror as it’s waged at home". She is pregnant with the couple's child when Eden prepares to mobilize for his second time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_of_a_Good-for-Nothing"title="Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing">
A miller sends his son away, calling him a good-for-nothing. The young man takes his fiddle along and leaves happily, without a specific destination. Soon two ladies in a carriage, who are interested in his music, take him along to their palace close to Vienna, where he gets a job as a gardener. He falls in love with the younger lady. Promoted to tax collector, he plants flowers in the garden of the tax house instead of potatoes, placing them regularly for his beloved. He plans to make money, but when he sees his beloved with an officer, he realizes that she is not available for him and leaves.Further travel takes him to Italy, with adventures on the way and in Rome. Back at the palace, several mysteries about identities are revealed, and he can marry his beloved Aurelie, who is not a noble woman but an orphan. The couple are given a house with a garden and vineyards, and they plan a honeymoon in Italy, travelling again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Chrysanthemum"title="White Chrysanthemum">
The novel begins with the two sisters on the beach of Jeju Island; Hana is with her mother as she dives for abalone and Emi is waiting on the sand. Hana swims toward Emi as a soldier approaches, and hides her sister as the man talks to her. He is a Japanese soldier named Corporal Morimoto, and has Hana taken with him, leaving her sister behind. The novel then splits between the two women as Hana becomes a comfort woman and Emi searches for her sister sixty years later.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Early_Heidegger_and_Medieval_Philosophy"title="The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy">
Struck by the analogies between the thought of the early Heidegger and late medieval and early Protestant Christianity, McGrath argues in his book that the similarities are not accidental. After archival work in Germany, McGrath argues (with Max Scheler and Jacques Derrida), that Heidegger, an ex-seminarian and former Catholic, had secularized Christian concepts in "Being and Time". Heidegger's book went on to become a foundational text in 20th century atheist thought, but according to McGrath its major themes would not have been possible to realise without Christianity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crooked_Kingdom"title="Crooked Kingdom">
In the prologue, a Grisha named Emil Retvenko is kidnapped by a winged Shu man.The book begins in a gambling parlor named Club Cumulus, where Jesper and Nina keep Jan Van Eck's lawyer, Cornelis Smeet, busy while Kaz and Wylan search his office for Van Eck's property documents. Kaz then plans to kidnap Van Eck’s pregnant young wife, Alys, and trade her for Inej, who is being held captive. Meanwhile, Jesper’s father, Colm, arrives at the city, as a bank Jesper owes demands he pays his debts. When Jesper and Wylan go to meet Colm, they are attacked but manage to escape. Kaz tells Jesper's father to give them three days to get the money and asks him to wait in a hotel in the city.Afterward, the crew's kidnapping is successful, and they trade Van Eck's wife for Inej. However, during the trade, three Shu soldiers with superhuman abilities attack Nina, Jesper, and other Grisha in the surrounding area. They manage to get away after Nina shoots one of them in the eye, and Wylan sets another on fire. The crew meets at their hideout, and Kaz reveals he had bought shares in sugar companies and plans to sabotage Van Eck’s sugar silos using a chemical weevil, thereby raising the price of sugar. Nina and Inej persuade Kaz to smuggle out the remaining Grisha in the city using one of Van Eck’s ships.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planesrunner"title="Planesrunner">
British teenager Everett Singh witnesses the kidnapping of his father, theoretical physicist Dr. Tejendra Singh, and begins to suspect a conspiracy when he receives from his father an automated software download called the Infundibulum. Tejendra's colleague, the offbeat research fellow Colette Harte, gives Everett video evidence that Tejendra's theoretical research into the existence of multiple universes is no longer theoretical. Using Heisenberg Gate technology, Tejendra and his team have discovered and contacted nine alternate universes so far. An alliance called the Plenitude of Known Worlds is already in place among the government leaders from these parallel universes—termed planes—which have been numbered E1 through E9, with Everett's plane labeled E10. Before Tejendra's disappearance, he discovered a map of the seemingly infinite number of planes: the Infundibulum. Everett deduces how to manipulate the Infundibulum thanks to a clue from his father, and lets its existence be known to the mysterious people who have been pursuing him in search of it. He is taken by the glamorous but sinister Charlotte Villiers—the Plenipotentiary/ambassador of E3—to the underground bunker where his universe's Heisenberg Gate is located. During a demonstration of his ability to choose any destination in any plane, Everett escapes through the Gate to E3, where Charlotte has put Tejendra to work on the Gate technology.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperbacks_from_Hell"title="Paperbacks from Hell">
"Paperbacks from Hell" examines paperback horror novels of the 70s and 80s. Hendrix pays attention to trends and events that increased horror's readership and popularity and how the 1988 release of "The Silence of the Lambs" prompted publishers to shift their focus from horror to thrillers and techno-thrillers. He also cites a glut of product paired with less quality control and an increase in misogynistic content as contributing to this decrease in popularity, noting that it was a variety of factors that led to this.The book also examines authors such as V. C. Andrews and R. L. Stine, as well as cover artwork, which he states publishers knew would be vital to appealing to readers. Also covered are various sub-genres of the horror genre, such as Native American curses or pregnancy sub-genres.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Girl_(memoir)"title="The Last Girl (memoir)">
Part I details Murad growing up in the Yazidi village of Kocho, Sinjar District, with her mother, two older sisters and eight older brothers. Murad outlines the fallout of several incidents and disputes related to nearby Sunni villages and terrorist attacks she remembered. She then describes the August 2014 occupation of Kocho by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and the subsequent Kocho massacre perpetrated by ISIS. Some had escaped to the Sinjar Mountains, and the rest were kidnapped by ISIS. Men still in Kocho refused to convert and were killed, and young women were taken as sexual slaves. Murad criticized Peshmerga troops for escaping Kocho a day before the massacre.In Part II, Murad recounts her and surrounding experiences during the Second Iraqi Civil War. Along with other women, she was transported to an institute in Solagh. She was then taken to Mosul, which had been captured by ISIS in June 2014. Yazidi women who weren't enslaved were assaulted indiscriminately. A high-ranking militant wanted to buy Murad, but she convinced a skinnier judge instead. When Murad was in Al-Hamdaniya District, she unsuccessfully attempted to escape through a window. She was subsequently raped by the guards and relocated to an ISIS checkpoint. She was imprisoned there and raped by people passing, until she was bought by someone in Mosul again. There, she successfully and easily escaped her captor, who had left the front door unlocked, and described the circumstances as miraculous.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Sold_Our_Souls"title="We Sold Our Souls">
Kris is a downtrodden woman barely making a living by working at a Best Western. She wasn't always like this, as back in the nineties she was a guitarist for the heavy metal band Dürt Würk. The band was steadily growing in popularity and seemed like it was just about to make it to the big time when the band's lead singer Terry Hunt left to become a solo artist, leaving his former friends behind. Kris's unhappiness and anger grows when she discovers that Terry sold her soul for his success. Determined to confront the person who left her with nothing, Kris decides to travel to Las Vegas to confront Terry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Map_of_Days"title="A Map of Days">
Jacob Portman is shocked by his friends' presence in modern day. With Miss Peregrine's support, he tells his parents everything. His father recounts a peculiar-related memory and says he wants to forget everything. He scolds Jacob for siding with Abe. Miss Peregrine wipes their memories. Jacob wants to leave his normal life behind, but she says he is meant for both worlds.The children find Abe's shelter and log. Miss Peregrine takes them to the Devil's Acre. Sharon is now in charge of the Panloopticon, and the house has been turned into a terminal and shelter for peculiars. At the temporary headquarters of the Council of Ymbrynes, Miss Cuckoo and Miss Peregrine ask Jacob to speak about the battle with Caul to boost morale. After receiving a matchbook from Lester Noble Jr., Jacob calls the number and says he wants to continue Abe's work. He and Emma follow H's instructions to a diner and are sent into a loop, where a hollow attacks. Before they could kill it, H calls off the hollowgast Horatio and says Jacob is hired. H says he and Abe's group hunted hollows and rescued peculiar children. H gives them packages to bring to Florida and New York.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_vs_Women"title="History vs Women">
The book profiles 25 historical women in a writer's voice, with illustrations of each of the subjects. The subjects' lifespans range from third-century to 20th century, as the authors' only criterion was that living women would not be included. The book contains a mixture of women with a positive and negative impact on the world, with Adams saying that feminism should reflect "the fullness of women" rather than only "women who are doing heroic, amazing things" and Sarkeesian commenting that "Women are fully human. Sometimes, that means we're terrible."The women chosen include American motorcyclist Bessie Stringfield, American trans woman Lucy Hicks Anderson, Colombian drug lord Griselda Blanco, Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi, Punjab fighter Mai Bhago and Vietnamese warrior Bà Triệu. Also included are a British prime minister, a Chinese pirate, an Egyptian scientist, a Mongolian wrestler, a Native American ballerina and a Japanese novelist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Came_Uptown"title="The Man Who Came Uptown">
The novel begins with a private investigator (PI), Paul Ornazian, interviewing a prisoner named Antonius about a failed robbery attempt. Antonius and three other men attempted to rob a drug store in the middle of summer while wearing long sleeves and masks. Ornazian is attempting to ask who came up with the plan, but Antonius refuses to give the other man up because he lives by a code saying he is not as bad as the true criminals in the world. Ornazian's PI business is based in Washington DC; he is partnered with another retired cop and they conspire to rob criminals of their stolen money. This is how they make most of their income. During one of their jobs they ask Michael Hudson to be their getaway driver.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Houses"title="Salt Houses">
The story begins with Salma in Nablus, 1963. As her daughter Alia prepares for her wedding to Atef, Salma reads her future in a cup of coffee dregs. Though Salma reads a life full of uncertainty, instability, travel, and loss, she keeps the negative to herself, telling Alia that she sees a quick pregnancy and Atef's love for her.The Yacoubs are a middle-class family who are already dispersed when the novel begins as Salma was from Jaffa, but had to flee to Nablus following WWII and Widad, Salma's very religious oldest daughter, is living in Kuwait in an arranged marriage.Mustafa, Salma's middle child, struggles with his faith despite finding a strong community in his mosque. An eloquent speaker, Mustafa uses his talent to mobilize other young Palestinians by speaking of rebellion and anger. As he is best friends with Atef, Salma worries about the influence the two have on each other as they both turn to extremism. Though Mustafa's love for a working-class girl, Aya, could provide him a way out, his fear of disappointing his mother by marrying beneath their class leads him to devote himself entirely to his cause.In the 1967 Six-Day War, the family is uprooted to Kuwait City, though Atef and Mustafa stay behind to fight. Both men are arrested and tortured during which Atef gives up Mustafa, resulting in Mustafa's death in an Israeli jail. Though the family never recovers Mustafa's body or learns what truly happened to him, Atef blames himself for Mustafa's death and is overwhelmed by guilt which results in his downward spiral caused by PTSD and depression when he joins Alia in Kuwait.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_England"title="Killing England">
In "Killing England" the authors tell the story of the American Revolution through the eyes of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Great Britain's King George III. O'Reilly and Dugard also focus on major battles such as Bunker Hill, Long Island, Saratoga and Yorktown.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_the_SS"title="Killing the SS">
"Killing the SS" focuses on the hunt for Nazi war criminals, who escaped capture after World War II, and bringing them to justice. The main focus is on war criminals Josef Mengele, the physician who conducted medical experiments at Auschwitz concentration camp; Martin Bormann, Adolf Hitler's personal secretary; Klaus Barbie, known as the "Butcher of Lyon"; and Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust. Other former SS members include, Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny and Elfriede Rinkel, who was a guard at Ravensbrück, the Nazis' largest concentration camp for women.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blind_Man's_Garden"title="The Blind Man's Garden">
This novel details the events subsequent to the United States' invasion of Afghanistan and is set in post-9/11 Pakistan and Afghanistan. The narrative opens as Rohan and his son Jeo prepare for their journey to one of Pakistan's provincial capitals, Peshawar, to provide aid to the wounded that are being brought out of Afghanistan. Jeo, however, has other intentions and diverts from the plan. He ventures into Afghanistan with his (adopted) brother Mikal to assist the civilians who are caught in the conflict between the American soldiers and the Taliban. Unbeknownst to them, an ex-military officer seeking revenge against their father enacts a plot that will ensure their demise. Once they arrive in Afghanistan, the brothers are abandoned by their convoy and are forced to join the Taliban. Aslam's novel is a wrenching tale that illustrates lives upended by war, and the consequences of neo-orientalism from the standpoint of Eastern nations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_2020_Commission_Report_on_the_North_Korean_Nuclear_Attacks_Against_the_United_States"title="The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States">
The conflict begins unintentionally, with a North Korean KN-06 unit in Ongjin, near the Korean Demilitarized Zone shooting down a civilian Air Busan Airbus A320, which was flying off-course and without a transponder due to a brief loss of power in the cockpit, having mistaken it for a U.S. stealth aircraft. South Korean President Moon Jae-in orders a retaliatory attack on North Korea without the approval of the United States, firing six missiles at the Headquarters of the Korean People's Army Air and Anti-Air Force near Pyongyang and a residence of Kim Jong-un.Following the missile attack, North Korea's leadership, lacking communications infrastructure, misinterprets Tweets from U.S. President Donald Trump so as to believe that a decapitation strike is in-progress. North Korea launches nuclear missiles in the hopes of staving off further U.S.-South Korean attacks, with nuclear bombs detonating over Seoul, Busan, Pyeongtaek and Daegu in South Korea and Tokyo and Yokohama in Japan. Missiles launched at Guam and Okinawa fail to reach their targets. Negotiations at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York City fail to resolve the conflict.The United States launches a retaliatory conventional strike on North Korea, but fail to locate the vehicle-mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles in North Korea's arsenal. North Korea proceeds to launch 13 nuclear-tipped missiles at the United States. The Ground-Based Interceptors at Fort Greely fail to intercept the incoming ICBMs, which detonate over Honolulu, Hawaii, Jupiter, Florida, Arlington County, Virginia, and Manhattan, New York. President Trump evacuates from Mar-a-Lago aboard Air Force One, narrowly avoiding the nuclear explosion. Kim Jong-un subsequently commits suicide at a bunker in Myohyangsan, and Mike Pence succeeds Trump as President of the United States.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witchfinders"title="The Witchfinders">
The Thirteenth Doctor and her companions arrive in 1612 Lancashire near Pendle Hill. At a nearby village they find an old woman accused of witchcraft being dunked, and the Doctor tries to save her, but fails. She attempts to prevent further trials by pretending to be the Witchfinder General, fooling landowner and magistrate Becka Savage. King James arrives, complicating matters, as he assumes she is Graham's assistant. Meanwhile, Yasmin finds the old woman being buried by her grand-daughter, Willa Twiston, who is also Becka's cousin, and saves her from a tendril made of mud. The Doctor realises the cause of the witch hunt is of alien origin when recent victims begin to reanimate.While her companions follow the reanimated corpses, the Doctor is accused of witchcraft when confronting Becka over her hiding something. The Doctor attempts to reason with James before being dunked, escaping from her bonds underwater. Afterwards she notes how Becka could not bear touching the tree used to dunk her. As her reanimated victims approach, Becka reveals that she was infected by an alien entity while chopping down the tree atop the Hill. Becka started the witch trials hoping to find a cure.An alien entity takes over Becka's body. Speaking through her, the entity reveals herself to be queen of a race called the Morax. The tree Becka chopped down is in fact a disguised alien prison keeping the Morax war criminals within, its systems now damaged and malfunctioning. The escaping Morax intend that their king possess James and conquer Earth. The Doctor uses parts of the tree to save James and restore the prison systems. While the other Morax are forced out of their host bodies, the queen refuses to leave Becka's body. James kills them both. The following day, James tells the Doctor that all records of the events will be erased before he and Willa watch in surprise as the group leave in the TARDIS.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Sanctions"title="The Art of Sanctions">
Governments, international organizations and nations are increasingly turning to sanctions as a foreign policy tool. Sanctions will lose their efficiency, changing the behavior of the target entity, if they are used without a clear strategy. "The Art of Sanctions" offers a series of acts that can improve the efficiency of sanctions, such as a framework for planning and applying sanctions.Nephew introduces sanctions as a strategic tool in U.S. foreign policy and explains them as an art whose efficacy depends on decision makers' creativity and their manipulation of using the economic, social and political tools as the sanction's tools. Nephew illustrates that export of many usual goods to the target country are prohibited during the sanction regime; the exporting of luxury goods can destroy the social's sense. For example, the rise in chicken prices in Iran, a good that has not sanctioned, increased the pressure of sanctions among Iranian or exporting some goods to Iran evacuated the Iran's foreign currency reserves.Pain and resolve are two key variables of sanctions; the relationship between a target's ability to resolve the pain and pressure of the sanctions is the most important factor for politicians. Nephew believes the efficacy of sanctions relies on the use of pain against a target, while the target may decide to resolve, resist or deactivate this pain. Finding the role of pain and resolve is important in using sanctions successfully. Considering these two factors and finding their sensitivity during the sanction's course helps policy makers or politicians to calibrate, ease or remove the sanction's pressure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Love_Story_Will_Self-Destruct"title="This Love Story Will Self-Destruct">
Eve Porter is an undergraduate Columbia student studying journalism living on Columbia's Morningside Heights East Campus between 117th and 118th streets with her roommates. She is originally from the Bronx where she and her mother and sister lived until her father left them when she was 13. She later moved to the Upper East Side when her mother started dating her step-father Arthur. Eve's mother worked in the World Trade Center as a receptionist for a law firm before she dies during the September 11 Attacks.Eve and her roommates throw a party where Ben and Eve have one of their first interactions in the novel. Eve doesn't think of much and keeps her mind set on her romantic interest at the time, Jesse. Jesse is a Columbia student who is an aspiring musician. Jesse and Eve have a tumultuous relationship due to both of their strong personalities as well as Jesse's drug and alcohol use. Ben and Eve share their second encounter while they are both out at a tiki bar in New York. Ben lives in Hoboken, New Jersey and is working as a structural and civil engineer for Skidmore, Owings &amp; Merrill. Ben and Eve have little interaction at the bar, but he listens into Eve and Jesse's breakup as he is walking back from the bar on the Lower East Side.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incendiaries"title="The Incendiaries">
Three people meet at Edwards University in Noxhurst, a fictional town in upstate New York: Phoebe Lin, the American daughter of two South Koreans, John Leal, a mysterious half-Korean Edwards drop-out who knows Phoebe's father, and Will Kendall, a poor Californian who is a former evangelist.Phoebe grew up as a young piano prodigy but after mastering a challenging piece by the composer Libich and being complimented on it she realizes that her ambition will never match her talent. She abandons her ambition to be a pianist and shortly before graduating high school also loses her mother in a car accident where Phoebe was driving. The double losses cause Phoebe to become a reckless party girl in university where she drinks heavily and is sexually promiscuous with little regard for her own health.At school she meets Will Kendall, who has recently transferred to the college after a slow crisis of faith caused him to abandon his religion and leave his studies at a religious college. At school Will hides the fact that he is much poorer than his classmates and must work at a restaurant in order to supplement his income and help to send money back home. Will has a crush on Phoebe and the two gradually grow close, with Phoebe eventually confiding in him about her mother's death and Will admitting his relative poverty and difficult home life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milkman_(novel)"title="Milkman (novel)">
"Milkman" is set in Northern Ireland during the 1970s, at the height of The Troubles. The narrator is an unnamed 18-year-old girl living in an unnamed city sympathetic to the republican cause. Milkman, a high-ranking paramilitary officer, takes an interest in the girl, beginning to stalk her and offer her unwanted car rides. Rumors spread that the girl is having an affair with the married Milkman, straining her relationship with her mother and the wider community. These rumors compound as the girl continues her relationship with her "maybe-boyfriend," who she has been dating for a year but struggles to commit to.As Milkman's stalking becomes more intense, he makes veiled threats of killing maybe-boyfriend if she does not break up with him. The girl becomes more withdrawn and she and maybe-boyfriend drift apart. When the girl meets with her "longest friend from primary school," her friend suggests the girl's oblivious behavior, particularly "reading-while-walking," has led her to become a social pariah and thus enabled the rumors. During this meeting, the girl is poisoned by "tablets girl," a mentally ill local woman. The girl becomes severely sick, but recovers. Tablets girl is found murdered soon after, and the community assumes Milkman killed her as revenge for harming the narrator, further souring her reputation within the community.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Babel_and_Back"title="To Babel and Back">
"To Babel and Back" is a collection of essays covering a variety of topics and referring to various places and people in different parts of the world. Part travel documentary, part dream-narrative, topics include the use of uranium in modern weapons; Iraq under the government of Saddam Hussein; and the discovery of the alleged site of the Tower of Babel. Travelling across the world from Berlin to New York via Buenos Aires, Minhinnick returns to his native Wales to consider how his country compares.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bear_and_the_Nightingale"title="The Bear and the Nightingale">
The novel begins with an introduction of Pyotr Vladimirovich's household. Pyotr is a Russian boyar, the lord of a remote village, Lesnaya Zemlya, on the outskirts of the forests. His wife, Marina Ivanovna, the daughter of the Grand Prince of Moscow, Ivan I, and their four children, Kolya, Sasha, Olga and Alyosha are huddled around the kitchen oven being told the story of the frost-demon by their housekeeper and nanny, Dunya. This story tells the tale of Morozko, the frost king. Once the children have fallen asleep, Marina makes her way to her bedroom where she informs her husband, Pyotr, that she is once again pregnant. This poses an issue to the family because Marina is not expected to live through another pregnancy. However, she is determined to see through the birth of her fifth child because she can sense that this daughter will have powers that Marina's mother is believed to have had. To her family's grief, she indeed dies in childbirth, and her daughter is named Vasilisa, nicknamed Vasya. As Vasya grows older, she begins to spend more time in the forest. However, while she is exploring one day, she comes across an unusual tree that she does not recognise. At the foot of this tree lies a man with a missing eye. Before he can take an interest in her, another strange man on a horse arrives warning Vasya to leave and instructing the one-eyed man to go back to sleep because it is still winter. Vasya gets lost in the woods and is found by her older brother Sasha who is out with the search party looking for her. Once Sasha and Vasya return home, Sasha warns his father that Vasya needs a mother to look after and raise her. Pytor takes on this advice and travels to Moscow, taking Kolya and Sasha with him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Consuming_Fire"title="The Consuming Fire">
Following the events of The Collapsing Empire, End is now isolated from Hub as the result of a Flow shoal breakdown. Seeking to unite the population of the Interdependency behind an agenda to get ahead of the coming collapse of Flow-supported space travel, Grayland II (Cardenia Wu-Patrick) claims, in her capacity as head of the Church of the Interdependency, to have had visions affirming the need to plan for the collapse. This causes religious disquiet in the church, and political intrigue from the House of Nohamapetan and the House of Wu with the aim of claiming the throne from Grayland II through a coup d'etat. Meanwhile, Marce Claremont follows a lead provided by his erstwhile rival, the researcher Hatide Roynold, and together they learn that the Interdependency will once again be connected by Flow shoals in a different configuration on a timescale of hundreds of years, and that in the meantime evanescent shoals will appear and disappear. Seeking to learn more about the possibility of survival while cut off from other parts of the Interdependency, Marce and Hatide, accompanied by Marines, depart to study the survival of life on Dalasýsla, a system which was cut off for eight hundred years until the emergence of an evanescent Flow shoal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bard_of_Blood"title="The Bard of Blood">
Kabir Anand, is a former Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) agent and now a professor of Shakespeare in Mumbai. He was forced to leave RAW after a disastrous mission in Balochistan. He is called by the agency to return after Sadiq Sheikh, his ex-boss is killed. Meanwhile, Mullah Omar and the ISI are also after him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabhi_Bittanto"title="Gabhi Bittanto">
The story of the novel revolves around chemistry professor Abu Zunayed, a newly appointed vice chancellor of the oldest and the most prestigious university of the country. In flash back, the narrator narrates that there was no chance Zunayed would be nominated for the VC panel, let alone get appointed in the position of VC, but he got nominated finally due to the influence and support of Zunayed's colleague young Dilruba Khanam, who manipulated her feminine charm to get others support Zunayed since she harbors grudge against the previous VC for some personal reason. Despite getting the lowest number of votes in the nomination, the country's president, who is also the university's chancellor, appoints Zunayed as the VC since Zunayed was thought to be someone who would be subservient to the regime reigning the country.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alikhit"title="Alikhit">
The book is set in a fictional town named "Birahinpur" on the southern part of Nepal. The village is not marked on any map. When some archaeologists visit the town to excavate for an earlier civilization, the whole town vanishes overnight The novel explores the existing exploitation in "Madhesh", deprived people's lives, neglect of the state, fear, illiteracy and the remoteness of marginal life in an effective manner.Surrealism is the major underlying theme of this book. On the one hand, the novel has a regional tone of communication, on the other hand, it has a combination of fundamental effects including anomalies, myths, self-imagination, humor and satire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghamka_Pailaharu"title="Ghamka Pailaharu">
Pawan, a school going child is the main narrator of the novel. Pawan, his father Pitamber, grandfather Durganath and his mother live in a modest house in a nameless town in Tarai region of Nepal, near the Indian border. Pitamber works for a local trader, Pawan's mother is a housewife and Durganath is a retired Pandit. Beside school, Pawan spends most of his time with his grandfather, listening to his stories and roaming around the village. His father is a strict but hardworking man with a modest income. Pitamber is not satisfied with his life in the town and wants to go back to his ancestral village bit is unable to do so because of his father's ailing health. Since, there are no hospitals in his ancestral village, he is forced to stay in the town. Durganath, being a Pandit, is a respected figure in the town. He is also friend with the manager of the station, Amalendu Bhattacharya.Amalendu Bhattacharya is a Bengali mechanical engineer and widower who lives in the town with his daughter Aṇu. Meanwhile, Pitamber, in his free time spends time with the staffs of the station at their quarter. The staff includes Srivastava, a doctor, etc. Ganeshi, a "paan"–seller is also one of the Pitamber's friends. Ganeshi has a colorful personality and is loved by his friends. Initially, Amalendu Bhattacharya hates Ganeshi for selling "paan" in the station without any permission but later starts to like him after Ganeshi helps Bhattacharya when he gets unwell. Pawan performs very well in his studies and because of which Bhattacharjee hires Pawan as Aṇu's tutor. Over the course of tutoring, Pawan and Aṇu becomes friends. The novel portrays the friendship and fellowship, as well as the disagreements between the townspeople, the growing pains of Pawan as well as the socioeconmic condition of working-class people of the Tarai region of Nepal. Using these characters, Gotame depicts the activities of a railway–station–town and the role the train plays in the life of its residents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncompromising_Honor"title="Uncompromising Honor">
The story occurs in 1922 and 1923 "Post Diaspora," or 4025/4026 CE. The Grand Alliance of the Star Empire of Manticore, the Republic of Haven, the Protectorate of Grayson, and the newly independent Republic of Beowulf, among others, are at war with the Solarian League.The Mesan Alignment, having worked for centuries in the background to establish a new galactic order under which it can impose genetic modification of the human race, has suffered several setbacks in recent years at the hands of the Alliance, especially the Manticore of Admiral Honor Harrington. In response, the Alignment's leaders arrange an escalating series of atrocities.While the League has an elected government, executive power is dominated by the Quintet, senior bureaucrats who hold permanent tenure in "Old Chicago," Planet Earth. The Alignment has extensively infiltrated the League's political and military institutions, but the "Mandarins," as they are commonly known, refuse to believe they are being played as they wage war on the Alliance.The Mandarins are forced to grapple with the Alliance's massive technological and tactical advantages; the Solarian League Navy cannot hope to fight a pitched battle and survive, even with vastly superior numbers. Alignment agents convince them to authorize "Operation Buccaneer," the complete destruction of all space-borne infrastructure in every star system that continues to trade with their enemies. League commanders are given discretion to arrange for the evacuation of civilians first, but the "Parthian Shot" contingency authorizes mass-casualty hit-and-run raids as needed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blood_Road"title="The Blood Road">
Now working for professional standards as an inspector, McRae is called out to a car crash with the driver dead in the front seat. He questions the police officer that called him out as to why he is there; she tells him that the driver is Detective Inspector Bell, who they buried two years ago. Having to investigate Bell's apparent faked death and resurrection, McRae also becomes embroiled in an investigation into a child paedophile ring, known as the "Livestock Mart".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Different_Pond"title="A Different Pond">
A boy goes fishing early one Saturday morning with his father, who immigrated to the United States after the Vietnam War. The family depends on catching food to have enough to eat. After they catch a fish, the two return home so that the boy's father can go to work. The boy knows that that night for dinner they will eat the fish they've caught.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Search_for_Ancient_Egypt"title="The Search for Ancient Egypt">
In the century AD, the Christian Emperor Theodosius I decreed the closure of all the pagan temples in the Empire. Unexpected consequence: the hieroglyphic writing, still alive until then, abruptly stopped being understood. The Pharaonic Egypt fell into oblivion. The expedition of Bonaparte in 1798 and the magnificent aroused in Europe a craze for the monuments and the art of this ancient civilisation. The decipherment of hieroglyphs by Jean-François Champollion in 1822 marks the birth of Egyptology.As part of the series, Jean Vercoutter recounts in the book the history of the rediscovery of pharaonic Egypt, from the Graeco-Roman period to the century; and the whole history of Egyptology, its birth and growth, with all the important figures in this discipline; as well as the study of archaeological sites, artefacts and documents discovered in Egypt in the and centuries.According to the tradition of "Découvertes", which is based on an abundant pictorial documentation and a way of bringing together visual documents and texts, enhanced by printing on coated paper, as commented in "L'Express", "genuine monographs, published like art books". The book is almost like a "graphic novel", replete with colour plates."The Search for Ancient Egypt" was one of the bestsellers in France, and is one of the five bestsellers in the "Découvertes" collection, together with "". As of 2001, it has sold more than five hundred thousand copies worldwide. The book has been translated into Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Danish, Dutch (Belgium &amp; the Netherlands), English (UK &amp; US), German, Italian, Japanese, Lebanese Arabic, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, South Korean, Spanish (Spain &amp; Hispanic America), Swedish, Turkish, traditional (Taiwan) and simplified Chinese (China), and reprinted several times. The reissued edition underwent a decrease in page length, from 224 pages in 1986 down to 160 pages in 2007. An electronic edition for iPad came out in 2012, including a .
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketches_of_the_Ancient_History_of_the_Six_Nations"title="Sketches of the Ancient History of the Six Nations">
## Part One: Creation.In the upper world was a woman, bearing twins, who slept one evening and (as if by magic) sank through the earth into the "great deep". She was caught by a giant turtle, on whose shell she climbed toward the surface.During the ascent, the turtle transformed into an island of earth; the twins (one of whom was possessed "[with] an evil opinion") fought within their mother's womb and the mother, succumbing to her "painful condition," died shortly after giving birth.The turtle assumed the form of an island, and the twins grew up. One was called Enigonhahetgea ("the bad mind"), and the other Enigorio ("the good mind"). Enigonhahetgea took to the dark; Enigorio took to the light, and set off on the business of creation. He took his deceased mother's head and fashioned an "orb" (the sun), which he laid at the center of the firmament. Enigorio made the moon from her body, and from the earth he sculpted "his own likeness, male and female". Breathing life into them, he conceived the Eagwehowe (Real People) and gave them the Great Island.As the good mind created, the bad mind undid. They met in combat from which the good mind emerged victorious, ending the age of creation and beginning the age of humankind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebels_of_Eden"title="Rebels of Eden">
Rowan is finally in Harmonia, an Earth-friendly, sustainable commune in the wilderness she always thought was dead. Even in this idyllic world, she finds no peace. Harmonia has strict rules – and dire consequences. Thinking about Eden is forbidden, but she's determined to rescue the loved ones she left behind. Though they are in terrible danger, her pleas for help are ignored.After months of living as one with nature, a shocking reminder of her past pushes Rowan to act. With the help of new friends, she infiltrates Eden. What she discovers is even worse than the situation she left behind. In the chaos of civil war, Rowan and her friends join forces with the second children and other rebels trapped inside. They fight for their lives, and for the future of humanity in this broken Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becoming_Billie_Holiday"title="Becoming Billie Holiday">
Through a series of poems, Weatherford outlines the evolution from Eleanora Fagan to renowned singer Billie Holiday. Told from Billie's own perspective, she muses on the first 25 years of her life. Most poems are titled after actual Billie Holiday songs. The book starts with poems about her young life. Detailing events like her father's abandonment, her tomboyish attitude, and her time spent in an orphanage with nuns. It continues into her adolescence with poems about her first gig singing jazz, deciding to change her name, and her many relationships with men. Weatherford's book ends with Holiday's rising fame and the tension of racism in the United States. The last poem illustrates Holiday's memorable performance at the Café Society, singing the song "Strange Fruit." At the end of the book, there are pages giving information for further reading and biographies of others mentioned in the poems.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_Someone_Inside_Your_House"title="There's Someone Inside Your House">
Makani Young is still adjusting to her new life in the small town of Osborne, Nebraska. It has been one year since the inciting incident that caused her parents to send her away from Hawaii to live with her grandmother in the rural town. Though Makani befriends a few friends named Alex and Darby and even flirts with a romantic interest named Ollie at Osborne High School, she is still haunted by the secrets of her past life. However, all of that is put to the side when the students at her school start getting killed in a series of gruesome murders. As the terror grows closer and the hunt intensifies for the killer, the dark secrets of the past will finally be revealed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Fools_(book)"title="Ship of Fools (book)">
Carlson's thesis applies the allegory given in Plato's "Republic" to the modern United States: the American Ship of State has been commandeered by an incompetent crew (the current political and economic elite ruling class) who are oblivious or contemptuous to the needs of the passengers (the citizens) and intolerant of criticism. Carlson does not restrict his definition of the elite to liberal members of Congress, but includes both Republican (Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham) and Democrat (Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, and Hillary Clinton) politicians, neoconservative pundits such as Bill Kristol, and entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, whom he blames for decimating the American middle class. Quickly summarizing the premise of the book, Carlson has said it simply amounts to: "Why did Trump get elected?"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Things_(novel)"title="Last Things (novel)">
Lewis Eliot, now sixty, experiences a medical condition that requires surgery. After a near fatal cardiac arrest, Eliot confronts his past life as well as reconciliation with his son Charles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_All_Normies"title="Kill All Normies">
Nagle presents her work as an attempt to map the online culture wars that occurred in the early 2010s and how it resulted in the development of Alt-Right which played a major role in the election of Donald Trump. Nagle introduces the 2010s as a period in which "cyber utopianism" began to emerge with the rise of internet-based social activism such as the Arab Spring, Occupy movement, WikiLeaks, adbusters, and Anonymous which were based on decentralized leadership and online organization. This internet-based activism was immediately embraced by much of mainstream liberalism without any rigorous analysis or appraisal of the organizational structure and limitations of these internet-based movements, which all resulted in consistent failure and eventual collapse. Many of these movements began on image-based online forums such as 4chan and 8chan. These forums, organized on the basis of anonymity, developed a subculture among the users that combined extremely transgressive and dark humor with a deeply misogynistic and racist attitude.In the second chapter, titled "The Online Politics of Transgression", Nagle observes how political transgression historically is associated with the political Left, specifically that of the New Left which was adopted by the Alt-Right. Nagle frames this adoption of transgression by the political right, in relation to the concept of moral transgression which can be traced to the eighteenth century figures of Marquis De Sade, The Surrealists, Friedrich Nietzsche, Punk subculture, and contemporaneously in the 1990s 'male rampage films' like "American Psycho" and "Fight Club". This 'transgressive anti-moral style' of the Alt-Right, according to Nagle, is their attempt to completely break away from the egalitarian philosophy of the Left and the Christian morality of the Right.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_Camp_David"title="Night of Camp David">
Iowan senator Democrat Jim MacVeagh is summoned to Camp David by US President Mark Hollenbach. MacVeagh, who is expected to become Hollenbach's next Vice President, becomes concerned because Hollenbach shows signs of intense paranoia. He erratically expresses his desire to develop a closer relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, and attempts to cut ties with US allies in Europe. Hollenbach believes the US news media are conspiring against him. MacVeagh is the only person who notices that Hollenbach's mind is crumbling, as the presidential advisors and politicians he attempts to warn ignore him. The sole person in possession of evidence of Hollenbach's mental decline is his mistress, Rita. Hollenbach puts both MacVeagh and Rita under an FBI investigation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Necromancer"title="The Death of the Necromancer">
In the city of Vienne in the land of Ile-Rien, master criminal Nicolas Valiarde discovers that his elaborate plans for revenge are being disrupted by the return of a supernatural menace from centuries past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canyon_(book)"title="Grand Canyon (book)">
"Grand Canyon's" illustrations use the conceit of a day trip between an Asian American father and his daughter, while the text gives information about the different plants, animals, and habitats found in the Grand Canyon. While some pages are in the present day, others take the reader into the past. The book is told in the second person and ends with backmatter where Chin provides additional scientific information and an author's note, which he uses to describe his process of creating the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Granite"title="Cold Granite">
It is Logan McRae's first week back after being on sick leave for a year; courtesy of Angus Robertson (The Mastrick Monster) who carved him up with a knife. Someone is kidnapping children, murdering them and mutilating them afterwards. The local paper screams about police incompetence and is gunning for McRae's boss, Detective Inspector David Insch. McRae discovers that someone is leaking the stories to a journalist, Colin Miller, who inadvertently disrupts Grampian Polices' plans to apprehend the killer by revealing their plan to wait out in a secluded location which the killer thinks is safe.McRae discovers that Miller's source is none other than his ex-girlfriend, Isobel McAlister, the police pathologist, who is now living with Miller and tells him about her day to unwind.Meanwhile, the local council worker who removes all the dead animals from the roads (affectionately called "Roadkill") is found to have a dead girl in his tip and another dead girl is discovered on the local rubbish dump.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koni_(novel)"title="Koni (novel)">
One day Khitish Sinha saw a young girl named Koni swimming in the river. Sinha was an experienced swimming coach so he decided to train Koni for a swimming competition. Koni was not financially stable enough to manage coaching fees. In fact, her elder brother was a tuberculosis patient, earning only Rs.150 a month - the sole earner of a seven-member family. However, when he dies, the family falls into a very grave financial crisis. Then Sinha decided to give Koni a small job in his wife's trailer shop named Prajapati. Khitish takes complete responsibility for Koni's training, Koni worked hard and made it into the Bengal national swimming team. She was not given chance to compete in any events until a team member was injured. After getting the opportunity, Koni won the swimming competition for the Bengal team.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Squirrel_Days"title="My Squirrel Days">
The book is a series of essays about Ellie Kemper's life. It includes tales of her childhood in Kansas City, Missouri and stories of her acting career. All the chapter headings are the names of roles Kemper has played during her acting career ("Redhead", "Receptionist", "Slob", "Starlet"). The title of the book comes from a story from Kemper's childhood about trying to befriend squirrels in her backyard after watching the film "Dances with Wolves".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_People"title="Normal People">
The novel follows the complex friendship and relationship between two teenagers, Connell and Marianne, who both attend the same secondary school in County Sligo, Ireland, and, later, Trinity College Dublin (TCD). It is set during the post-2008 Irish economic downturn, from 2011 through 2015. Connell is a popular, handsome, and highly intelligent secondary school student who begins a relationship with the unpopular, intimidating, equally intelligent Marianne, whose mother employs Connell's mother as a cleaner. Connell keeps the affair a secret from school friends out of shame, but ends up attending Trinity with Marianne after the summer and reconciling. Well-off Marianne blossoms at university, becoming pretty and popular, while Connell struggles for the first time in his life to fit in properly with his peers. The pair weave in and out of each other's lives across their university years, developing an intense bond that brings to light the traumas and insecurities that make them both who they are.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_and_Rupture"title="Continuity and Rupture">
The book is introduced as an attempt by Moufawad-Paul to reclaim Maoism, as a contemporary political ideology and contest the negative conceptualizations by Trotskyists and Anarchists in the political left. For Moufawad-Paul, Maoism must be understood as being both a "continuation" of Leninist political, philosophical and strategic positions, while simultaneously, acting as a "rupture" from the dogmatic orthodoxy and theoretical limits of standard Marxism-Leninism, thus Maoism is characterized as both continuity and rupture. Throughout the work, Moufawad-Paul offers a critique of contemporary and historical Maoist organizations, such as The Revolutionary Communist Party USA, The Shining Path, The Naxalite insurgency in India, and The New People's Army, as well as contemporary Marxist intellectuals, Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, and Tom Clark (author of "State and Counter-Revolution").
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shatter_the_Bones"title="Shatter the Bones">
Alison and Jenny McGregor have been kidnapped and are being ransomed for a very large sum of money. Because they have been appearing on the TV series "Britain's Next Big Star", the outpouring of grief is immense and public donations swell the ransom coffers to beyond £6 million. Elsewhere, McRae is trying to track down a drug dealer and his flat is subject to an arson attack. Whilst McRae and his girlfriend, Samantha, are escaping from the fire, a drainpipe Samantha is holding on to gives way, and she falls several feet to the ground. Medical staff put her into an induced coma.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wings_(Yi_Sang)"title="The Wings (Yi Sang)">
It begins with a famous phrase “Have you ever seen a stuffed genius?(박제가 되어버린 천재’를 아시오?)". ‘I’ is not healthy, has intense self-consciousness and has no sense of reality. He was ‘Wife’s husband' and got his wife by trial and error.After his wife goes out, he goes to her room to smell her cosmetics or burn her toilet paper with a magnifying glass to replace his desire for a wife. She feeds sleeping pills to him to prevent him from leaving the ‘Room without Sunlight’.He goes up to the mountain to study his wife. ‘I’ ate six sleeping pills at once. ‘I’ wakes up after a night and day.Sorry for suspecting his wife, ‘I’ returns home and accidentally sees what his wife is doing and runs away. ‘I’ finds himself on the roof of Mitsukoshi and recalls his past.The siren of noon cries, and ‘I’ wanted to shout “Wings, spread out again! Fly. Fly. Fly. Let me fly once more. Let me fly just once more".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Consolidator"title="The Consolidator">
The narrator travels to the Moon through the means of the titular "consolidator" – a chariot with two feathered winged creatures.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mountains_are_Smoking"title="The Mountains are Smoking">
The events of the story take place in the early 1920s, in a Hutsul village on the Polish-Romanian border in Pokuttia. Olga, a priest’s daughter, before her father died, makes him promise to marry his friend Martyn Pogodniak, a Polish officer of the local border outpost. However, later she falls in love with the «noble robber» Ivan Semeniuk. Over time they realize that they couldn't live without each other and decide to escape but the robber’s wife Marichka snitches on them to the officer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mehlis_Report_(book)"title="The Mehlis Report (book)">
The protagonist of Rabee Jaber’s novel is Saman Yarid, a 40-year-old architect living in East Beirut in late 2005, who, like many of his fellow Lebanese citizens, is greatly anticipating the release of the Mehlis Report on October 21, 2005. The narrator of the book is Josephine Yarid, Saman’s sister who was kidnapped in 1983 and is now watching over Saman from the afterlife as he walks around Beirut. For a few chapters, Josephine takes the reader away from Saman and focuses on what the afterworld is like. Although the Mehlis Report is all that anyone talks about, Saman never learns who Detlev Mehlis blames for the assassination of Hariri because Saman has a heart attack on October 20, 2005. Throughout the book, Saman reminisces about Beirut before warfare and explosions devastated the city, when his family and friends still lived there. Throughout the book, Saman and his girlfriend, Cecilia, discuss how different aspects of society have transformed.The book is structured so that the reader constantly wonders what is going on, while slowly revealing information. The reader finds out who the narrator is on page 131, when she says her name is Josephine, Saman’s sister. The reader also does not know who Mehlis is until page 24 in the book, when Saman tells Mary that “there’s an international commission investigating things […with…] German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis […] presenting his report to the UN in just a few days.” The reader learns later in the book that Mehlis is conducting the UN's second investigation into the Hariri assassination because the first was led by Irish UN delegate Peter FitzGerald, Irish commissioner and author of the FitzGerald Report on assassination of Rafic Hariri]].
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abencerraje"title="The Abencerraje">
The tale is set in the 15th century, when John II ruled the Crown of Castile. We meet Rodrigo de Narváez, a knight whose heroic feats in the war against the Moors had him appointed governor of the Málaga towns Álora and Antequera. On a patrol of Álora, Narváez and his men split up, with four squires following Narváez and five going alone. The group of five encounters a Moorish man on a horse and attacks him. The group is defeated, and Narváez comes over to fight the man. The exhausted Moor falls to the ground, but says that he must not be defeated. Narváez helps him up and asks him to explain himself.The Moor introduces himself as Abindarráez the Younger, a scion of the Abencerrajes. Once the pre-eminent noble family of Granada, the king of Granada executed the Abencerrajes and ten others supposedly plotting his assassination. The people of Granada mourned their deaths. The king decided that no Abencerraje was to live in Granada except Abindarráez's father and uncle. Any future Abencerraje must be raised outside the city, any daughter married outside. Abindarráez was therefore raised by the governor of Cártama, alongside the governor's daughter, Jarifa. The children formed a close bond and, when they eventually learned that they were not related, fell in love. When the king of Granada moved the governor to Coín, leaving the youths behind, Jarifa confessed her love to Abindarráez. Abindarráez, then, was riding past Álora to attend his wedding in Coín. Moved, Rodrigo de Narváez allows Abindarráez to go to Coín if he promises to return in three days to be Narváez's captive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/101_Albums_That_Changed_Popular_Music"title="101 Albums That Changed Popular Music">
The book tells the history of popular music from the introduction of the long-playing (LP) record in 1948. It focuses on key albums, from the Folkways compilation "Anthology of American Folk Music" (1952) to the White Stripes' "Elephant" (2003).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fork,_the_Witch,_and_the_Worm"title="The Fork, the Witch, and the Worm">
## The Fork.Eragon struggles to keep up with the mundane administrative work required by his new role as leader of the Dragon Riders. Saphira convinces him to take a break and visit the Eldunarí, who show him a vision of Murtagh in Ceunon. In it, a disguised Murtagh meets in a tavern with a group of mercenaries, whom he had hired to search for a legendary dragon-scorched battlefield. The mercenaries show evidence of having found it, but refuse to tell him the location, attempting to extort him for more money. A fight ensues, and Murtagh is unable to directly subdue them with magic, even using the name of the ancient language, due to amulets given to them by a witch called Bachel. Nonetheless, Murtagh evades their wards by enchanting a fork as a weapon. Victorious, Murtagh leaves to join Thorn and continue his search.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Affair_(Snow_novel)"title="The Affair (Snow novel)">
An unpopular academic, Dr Donald Howard, is dismissed from the college for fraud. Doubt soon arises as to the evidence and the fellows are divided into two camps, those who are reluctant to reopen the case and others who override the board. Eliot handles the defence in the proceedings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_Silver"title="Spinning Silver">
The story of "Spinning Silver" unfolds in the voices of several characters, but primarily in the voices of three young women who struggle against strong evil forces, in an imaginary medieval eastern European kingdom called Lithvas.Over the last seven years, Lithvas has been suffering from long, brutal winters that are slowly killing its people. Miryem Mandelstam, a young Jewish girl, takes over her father's moneylending business to save her family from debt. A village girl, Wanda, becomes the Mandelstams' servant, and she and her brothers become close with them. One night Miryem, flush with her financial success, brags to her mother that she can “turn silver into gold”. Her boast is overheard by the Staryk, a race of fae creatures who emerge from their own world every winter to raid human settlements, and Miryem receives three deliveries of magical silver. Realizing that the Staryk will kill her if she does not give them gold in exchange, she has the metal made into three pieces of jewellery to sell. However, after the sale of the second piece, Miryem demands payment for her work; to Miryem’s horror, the Staryk king tells her that after the third, her "reward" will be marriage to him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corpse_Reader"title="The Corpse Reader">
The book is about a forensic elite who, even at the risk of their own lives, had a mandate that no criminal should go unpunished. Sòng Cí was the first of them, a young man of humble origin who rises to high position.Most of the novel takes place the Imperial Court.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_Formosa"title="Lord of Formosa">
The book, which has a total of 566 pages, covers Koxinga's life, from the period which he was taken from Japan to China, and includes his expulsion of the Dutch. Koxinga's adventures, including two naval battles with the Dutch, make up portions until the mid-point of the novel, when the Manchus sack his estate. The second half of the novel ends after Koxinga defeats the Dutch, and he dies of an illness.The novel has a focus on areas in Taiwan in and around the forts established by the Dutch. A portion of the novel takes place in Batavia, Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta, Indonesia). Incidents of rape, murder, and sex are occurrences.According to Yip, the novel's Koxinga is "a flawed but driven warrior" who "is not romanticized or lionized, but neither is it easy to develop much admiration or sympathy for him." Bradley Winterton of the "Taipei Times" stated that "Koxinga himself is generally shown as an unsympathetic figure, but someone who nevertheless usually keeps his word." Yip stated that there were relatively few Taiwanese characters while many of the characters were Dutch, and that the latter "perhaps unsurprisingly, feature prominently".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince_of_Los_Cocuyos"title="The Prince of Los Cocuyos">
Riqui's family immigrated from Cuba during the early 1970s, escaping Fidel Castro's takeover. He opens up the memoir by detailing his family's journey to Miami. His grandmother paid for his whole family to travel to go from Cuba then Spain, then New York, then finally Miami. When Riqui's family finally settled in "Güecheste", Miami they went to work at a bodega, a store owned by his uncle. Riqui's family held tight to their Cuban Heritage and only ate Cuban food. However, Riqui had a hard time accepting this as he wanted to eat American food like Pop-Tarts and Cool Whip. His grandmother, Abuela, would frequently disapprove because real food was Cuban food to her. Abuela did not want to shop at Winn-Dixie out of fear of the American language barrier. Riqui insisted and finally his grandmother gave him money to shop at Winn-Dixie. She later started enjoying American products and offered to cook Riqui a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner, she referred to as "San Giving". However, his extended family decided to bring and merge the Cuban food with the American food, which frustrated Riqui. Towards the end of thanksgiving Riqui connects pilgrims to his family and how their journeys to America are similar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Way_Down_(book)"title="Long Way Down (book)">
William Holloman is ready to exact vengeance on the person who murdered his older brother, Shawn. As Will rides the elevator down from his eighth-floor apartment, a new person, who is dead, gets on on each floor and tells a story about their lives, all connected to three rules of the neighborhood:Most of the ghosts' stories revolve around that third rule, wherein one person died because they killed someone who killed someone connected to their family, creating a continuous cycle of hurt.The full story takes place over the course of a minute.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Now_We_Are_Dead"title="Now We Are Dead">
Detective Sergeant Roberta Steel has been recently demoted from detective chief inspector on account of her planting evidence of child abuse on the computer of a suspected rapist (Jack Wallace) and as a result, he was freed from his sentence. The story involves Steel and Detective Constable 'Tufty' Quirrel tackling shoplifting crimes in Aberdeen whilst she is still stalking Wallace and accusing him of a series of rapes. Towards the end of the novel, it is revealed that Wallace was guilty of some of the rapes as he was working in a team of three.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sparsholt_Affair"title="The Sparsholt Affair">
## A New Man.In 1940 Freddie Green, a literature student, has rooms that overlook the room of a handsome young seventeen year old named David Sparsholt. Two of Freddie's friends, Peter Coyle, an artist, and Evert Dax, the son of an influential writer, both see Sparsholt and develop an obsession with him. Despite the fact that David has a fiancée, Freddie introduces him to Evert, hoping to help Evert develop a relationship with him. When David is fined twenty pounds after it is discovered that he brought his fiancée up to his room, Evert offers to loan him the money to pay the fine. According to Evert, David proceeded to have sex with him. While Evert believes this is the beginning of an affair, Freddie suspects that the sex was offered as a repayment for the loan. Shortly after David's father dies in an air raid and Freddie loses touch with him as David goes to war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Testaments"title="The Testaments">
The novel alternates among the perspectives of three women, presented as portions of a manuscript written by one (the "Ardua Hall Holograph") and testimonies by the other two.Lydia, a divorced judge, is imprisoned with other women in a stadium during the establishment of Gilead. After enduring weeks of squalid conditions, torture, and solitary confinement, she and a small group of other women are handpicked by Commander Judd and Vidala, a pre-existing supporter of Gilead, to become Aunts—an elite group of women tasked with creating and overseeing the laws and uniforms governing Gilead's women. The Aunts use Ardua Hall as their headquarters and enjoy certain privileges that include reading "forbidden" texts, such as Cardinal John Henry Newman's "Apologia Pro Vita Sua". In secret, Aunt Lydia despises Gilead and becomes a mole supplying critical information to the Mayday resistance organization.Fifteen years after the events of "The Handmaid's Tale", a girl named Agnes Jemima is growing up in Boston as the adopted daughter of Commander Kyle and his wife Tabitha. Agnes has a loving relationship with Tabitha, who later dies of ill health. Agnes and her classmates Becka and Shunammite attend an elite preparatory school for the daughters of Commanders, where they are taught to run a household, but not to become literate. Once widowed, Commander Kyle marries Paula, the widow of a deceased Commander, who despises Agnes. Desiring a child for herself, she acquires a Handmaid, who successfully conceives but later dies giving birth to a son. Agnes is arranged to be married to Commander Judd, now a high-ranking official in charge of the Eyes and surveilling the population of Gilead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_of_Creation"title="Orphan of Creation">
Anthropologists discover a remnant of ancestral genus "Australopithecus"; pitiful creatures enslaved by a backward African village that is shunned by its neighbors for its cruel practices. It is the greatest anthropological discovery ever made, but who will guarantee that the rest of the world will treat Thursday and her kind any better than slave-masters!?The protagonist is a paleoanthropologist who finds an odd anecdote about imported apes in her great-great-grandfather's account of growing up a slave in Mississippi. This discovery piques her curiosity, prompting her to make a small-scale excavation of ape bones. What she finds instead are several complete skeletons of australopithecines buried in the 1850s. The first section is about her and her colleagues assessing the implications while they try to keep the discovery a secret, interspersed with bits from the point of view of an Australopithecus kept as a slave in an isolated village. In the second and third sections, the paleontologist makes an expedition to Africa to look for living "Australopithecus", ultimately resulting in contact with the Australopithecus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marrow_Thieves"title="The Marrow Thieves">
The story is set in a dystopian future in which most people have lost the ability to dream, with catastrophic psychological results. Indigenous people, who can still dream, are hunted for their marrow to create a serum to treat others. Frenchie, the protagonist who lost his mother only recently and whose father has left, is with his brother Mitch in their hideout—a treehouse, when Truancy agents, who he and Mitch have dubbed "The Recruiters", arrive to take them away. Mitch leads them away but is taken, giving Frenchie time to escape. Along the way north to safety, he falls in with a group led by an older man, Miigwans. After meeting another pair of Indigenous people, Travis and Linc, they are betrayed and their youngest, RiRi, is killed. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Women_(novel)"title="Extraordinary Women (novel)">
Set during World War I, the novel follows Rosalba Donsante, a young Italian woman, from Europe to the fictional island of Sirene. After a brief romance with Lulu de Randan, the daughter of a Countess, Rosalba returns to Sirene for the season with her English lover, Aurora "Rory" Freemantle. Rosalba's primary motivation when selecting her lovers is monetary, as she has little money of her own, and must appeal to her grandmother whenever she needs ready cash. Frustrated with this arrangement, she turns to her regular lover Rory once again, as Rory comes from a landed English family. Rosalba does not desire a lasting romantic attachment to any of her lovers, while Rory repeatedly expressing the desire for a life-long partner, putting them at frequent odds.While visiting Sirene, Rory attempts to cement her relationship with Rosalba by purchasing a villa on the island, which she plans to restore. With the purchase of the villa, Rory hopes to create a home for her lover, and through this home, she intends to bind Rosalba to her for the rest of their lives. Rosalba is not inclined to be faithful to Rory, and sets into motion a series of emotional and romantic affairs with other visitors to the island, including Cleo Gazay, a pianist; Janet Royale, an American heiress; and finally Olimpia Leigh, an opera singer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seventh_Day_(novel)"title="The Seventh Day (novel)">
On the first day, after Yang Fei died, he went to the funeral parlour to be cremated, but no urn was prepared for him and no cemetery, so he left the waiting hall and tried to recall the last scene before he died. He remembered he was sitting in the Tan Jia Cai restaurant when he read the report of his ex-wife, Li Qing, cutting her wrist at home in the bathtub. At this time the restaurant kitchen caught fire, his memory stopped with a loud bang.On the second day, he met his ex-wife, Li Qing, who rejected many chasers but married him. However, Li Qing divorced him and married a new man because Li Qing wanted to get higher achievement on her business. They brought up the memory and Li Qing told Yang Fei that he was the only husband she had. Finally, she left and rushed to her funeral.On the third day, Yang Fei continued to wander on the street, he remembered his adoptive father Yang Jinbiao who found him as a newborn baby at the edge of the railway track. Yang Jinbiao raised him up alone and even rejected his girlfriend because of Yang Fei. One day Yang Fei's biological mother found him and brought him to his original family. However, he returned after few days. When Yang Jinbiao knew his disease could not stay for a long time, he left secretly. Yang Fei kept looking for his father for a long time. When he returned from his father's hometown, his nursing mother Li Yuezhen was dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piecing_Me_Together"title="Piecing Me Together">
Jade, who is also the book's narrator, is a sixteen-year-old African American student attending a mostly white private school in Portland, Oregon on a scholarship. Jade is from a poor neighborhood and is different from the rest of her school. Heeding her mother's advice, Jade works to take advantage of every opportunity presented to her. Hoping to be afforded the opportunity to study abroad so she can utilize her fluent Spanish Skills, Jade is instead offered the chance to be paired with a mentor in the Women to Women program by her school's guidance counselor. Paired with Maxine, Jade initially has high hopes for this mentor-ship, hopes which are dashed when Maxine proves unreliable and Jade begins to wonder if it is she or Maxine who is getting more out of the program. Through her art, Jade begins to act on the realization that she needs to make her own opportunities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Town"title="Wild Town">
"Wild Town" is the story of "Bugs" McKenna, a hard luck tough guy who refuses to let people belittle him or treat him unfairly even if it means he suffers for it. Bugs is rousted from town to town in West Texas by the local law until he makes his way to a small town built around oil wells called Ragtown. The wealthiest man in Ragtown is Mike Hanlon, a wildcatter who discovered the oil and built a town around it including the only hotel where Hanlon lives. However, the man who really runs the town is the sheriff, Lou Ford.Bugs provokes a confrontation with one of Ford's deputies and ends up in jail. Expecting a beating Bugs is treated decently and even offered a job working security in Hanlon's hotel. Hanlon is afraid that his young wife is trying to kill him and that Ford may be working for her. Bugs is unsure if he has been hired by Ford to protect or kill Hanlon.His natural inclination is to be distrustful, so he suspects the worst of Ford. Bugs becomes involved in the murder of the hotel's auditor made to look like a suicide, the embezzlement of $5,000 from the hotel, as well as various illicit sexual encounters. At the same time Bugs begins to appreciate how well-suited he is to his job and how enjoyable it is to actually have a stable job. Bugs is even beginning to develop a love life with Ford's school teacher ex-fiance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pashmina_(graphic_novel)"title="Pashmina (graphic novel)">
Protagonist Priyanka Das's mother leaves India many years ago and refrains from revealing why, but Priyanka's discovery of a pashmina shawl hidden in a suitcase helps her imagine a homeland she has never been to.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dilemmas_of_Lenin"title="The Dilemmas of Lenin">
Tariq Ali provides a biography of Vladimir Lenin from a Trotskyist perspective. Ali introduces the work by describing the historical subjugation of Russian working-class, peasants, through a system of Autocratic Tsarist regime, the conservative Russian Orthodox Church, and the upper-class. Marxism and socialism had a decisive appeal for Russian dissidents, the underprivileged and revolutionaries. Prominent Russian socialist thought developed in the form of the Anarchism with Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, Tolstoyian Christianity, Russian Liberalism, and Marxist philosopher Plekhanov. Tariq broadens this image of Russian to the international appeal of Socialism and Marxism during this period of time, using the example of the historical popularity of socialism in The United States in the form of Eugene V. Debs and Emma Goldman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_in_Room_105"title="The Girl in Room 105">
Keshav is a former IIT student who currently works as a teacher in a JEE tuition center"." He hates his job and reaches out through LinkedIn, but fails to find a proper job. He is a part of an orthodox family. His mother is a homemaker and his father is a part of the RSS. He has a love story with a colleague named Zara Lone, who is pursuing her Ph.D. in IIT. Zara is from a Kashmiri Muslim family and their love story ends due to their families, who fight over religious issues. Keshav couldn't come out of it and keeps remembering Zara, who then loves Raghu (Keshav's classmate). Raghu happens to be an intelligent person with a geeky look. Keshav often calls Zara begging her to come back to him, but she never agrees. Saurabh (Keshav's friend) bids Keshav to forget his past love and focus on his future.On Zara's birthday, Keshav controls his urge to call Zara and wish her at midnight. He and Saurabh drink and fall asleep. Around 3 a.m., he gets text messages from Zara asking him why he didn't wish her this year. Zara goes on and tells him to meet her in her room immediately. Keshav complies and rushes to Zara's room to wish her in person.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Matters_(novel)"title="Family Matters (novel)">
Nariman Vakeel is a 79-year-old Parsi widower beset by Parkinson's disease and haunted by memories of the past. He lives with his two middle-aged step-children. When Nariman's illness is compounded by a broken ankle, he is forced to take up residence with his daughter Roxana and her husband Yezad, along with their two sons. This new responsibility for Yezad, who is already besieged by financial worries, proves too much and pushes him into a scheme of deception with devastating consequences.Parallel to this narrative is the story of Mr. Kapur who envisages peace and freedom from political terror in the city.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Visitor_(play)"title="The Visitor (play)">
## ACT 1.The reader is introduced to two characters: Freud and Anna. It is the year 1938, the war is about to begin, and Nazis have already invaded Vienna. Freud, like many other Jews, must leave. In order to do so, he must sign a paper stating he has been treated exceptionally by the Nazi regime. Freud is ill. A commentary is made regarding children and adults: children are naturally born as philosophers because they ask questions, whereas adults are boring because they have stopped asking questions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sleep_of_Reason_(Snow_novel)"title="The Sleep of Reason (Snow novel)">
Lewis Eliot returns to his home town during the trial of two young women for murder. Eliot and his generation strive to understand the society of the 1960s.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Leninism"title="Foundations of Leninism">
Stalin's nine lectures covered the historical roots of Leninism, methods, theory, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the peasant question, the national question, strategy and tactics (two lectures), and style of work. He focused his first lecture on the issue of the historical roots of Leninism as a form of Marxism. According to Stalin, Leninism is a product of imperialism and a guiding ideology of the Bolsheviks. He lists three contradictions which imperialism brings to capitalism: These factors, associated with imperialism, increase the contradictions already present in capitalist countries. The lecture builds on Lenin's writings about the nature of imperialism, particularly 1917's "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism".Stalin opens his second lecture, on methods, with a reference to the period of the Second International in which Karl Kautsky and other orthodox Marxists adopted "opportunistic" (revisionist) principles to preserve unity in the social-democratic parties. It was due to this opportunism that Kautsky and the parties did not endorse revolutionary socialist tactics and programs, instead favoring Eduard Bernstein's reformism. According to Stalin, the Second International became "antiquated", "chauvinistic", and "narrow-minded" at the onset of World War I by supporting the war and opposing violent proletarian revolution; Leninism, with its success in the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War, became Marxism's main legitimate tendency. He defines the methods of Leninism as:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Friend_But_the_Mountains"title="No Friend But the Mountains">
Written in prose and poetry, it chronicles Boochani's boat journey from Indonesia to Christmas Island in 2013 and his subsequent detainment on Manus Island, describing the lives (and deaths) of other detainees, the daily routines and various incidents, and reflecting on the system in which they are trapped, up to the point of the prison riots in early 2014. He also makes observations on the Australian guards and the local Papuan people. He characterises individuals about whom he writes using epithets rather than using their real names, with a few important exceptions such as his friend Reza Barati, also known as The Gentle Giant.Boochani posits that the prison is a Kyriarchal system (a term borrowed from feminist theory), one where different forms of oppression intersect; oppression is not random but purposeful, designed to isolate and create friction amongst prisoners, leading to despair and broken spirits.In a lengthy afterword by Ofighian, he presents and explores in some detail aspects of the "philosophical ideas, arguments and collaborative interpretations developed by the author and translator", referring to Australia's "border-industrial complex", which is only the beginning of a multi-faceted project called "Manus Prison Theory". He believes that the outline of themes is important because it is inspired by Boochani's "research training, intellectual work and vision". The theory hypothesises that the prison as an ideology "hinders or eliminates opportunities to "know"...both about the violent atrocities and about the unique lived experiences of the prisoners". Boochani is sure that the general public have no idea about the horrors of systematic torture which is integral to the system, and his primary aim is "to expose and communicate this very fact".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Ugliness"title="On Ugliness">
Eco begins with an introduction trying to define the idea of ugliness, to verify that it is a polysemic concept, and that is associated with emotional expressions such as rejection or disgust which impede a rational approach. The first chapter approaches the Greek conception of beauty, trying to discern by opposition what is ugly, and ugliness is associated with the lack of harmony according to ancient Greeks.Ugliness is not only in the physical but also in the moral sense, Christianity denies to some extent the existence of ugliness, since the whole universe is a divine work and God can not create something ugly if He is a perfect being. Only sin and suffering are ugly because they move away from the precepts of faith. That is why everything monstrous or disgusting links to hell, the art of death and demon exaggerates the horrific features of this sphere to instill the fear of the believers, to prevent them from being tempted.A second topic begins in chapter 5, with the association between ugly and obscenity, and also absurdity, which can make people laugh. Humour thus indicates the aesthetic measure, as seen in the costumbrist descriptions or the art of caricature, where women and enemies are easy targets of jokes about ugliness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Lakshat_Kon_Gheto"title="Pan Lakshat Kon Gheto">
The novel was written in the form of an autobiography from the perspective of a young widow, Yamuna. The story spans the life of Yamuna and the reader is introduced to the many people in her life—nearly 40 characters.Yamuna's story begins with a short-lived but idyllic childhood. Although happy, it was darkened by the fear Yamuna's mother and grandmother shared over their insecurity as dependents. At twelve she is married to a young man, Raghunathrao. He is liberal and wants to make Yamuna but he is unable to change her family circumstances. Yamuna is tortured by her in-laws and denied freedom of any kind.When Yamuna's mother dies, her father promptly remarries, this time to a twelve-year-old girl. Her brother's stupid wife makes a hell of Yamuna's married life and although Yamuna and her brother, Ganpatrao, are very affectionate towards each other, there is no happiness in their father's house. Yamuna and her husband move to Bombay where they both find some happiness. In Bombay she meets some reformist families who show her what it's like to have freedom. While there, Yamuna frees her friend Durga from her depraved husband and her brother comes to stay with her to continue his education.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gideon's_Wrath"title="Gideon's Wrath">
"Gideon's Wrath" sees Gideon wrestling with several major crimes, as well as debating whom to recommend to the Commissioner as his new Deputy Commander; Hobbs or Lemaitre?Attacks are being mounted with explosives on places of worship throughout London. The Dean of St Ludd's approaches Gideon with his suspicions and a plan of action is formulated. As many police as can be spared are posted to guard the churches and synagogues; community volunteers are also placed on guard, much like the firewatchers during World War 2. The attacks stop temporarily, but then resume. Two perpetrators are arrested, but they will say nothing. Gideon eventually discovers that they belong to the ‘Simple Brethren’, a secretive group led and financed by lunatic millionaire Hector Marriott, who sees it as his mission to destroy what he considers idolatry.The group's offices are raided and the members and their intended targets identified.Whilst Gideon visits Paris to attend an Interpol meeting on gold smuggling, Marriott launches a final lone bombing of St Paul's Cathedral. He is apprehended, but escapes and commits suicide.Gideon also oversees an investigation in which several young girls have been murdered. They are suspected of having been drugged after posing for pornographic photos. Toni Botelli, the main perpetrator, is eventually arrested after a tense stand-off at his premises. A drug smuggling operation is also uncovered.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_and_for_All_(novel)"title="Once and for All (novel)">
Louna, the daughter of famed wedding planner Natalie Barrett, has witnessed countless weddings in unique locations through her mother's wedding-planning business. While working there during her last summer before college, she meets Ambrose, whom she has to drag away from a girl so he can escort his mother down the aisle.After years of facing brides with cold feet and badly behaved wedding guests, Louna has become skeptical about romance and plans on remaining single. Luckily, the busy wedding schedule provides plenty of legitimate excuses for Louna to avoid meeting potential dates. That changes when satisfying a particularly fussy bridal party requires hiring the bride's brother, Ambrose. He's a lady's man who typically charms more than one potential date during every social gathering. Louna is outwardly dismayed by his antics, but his kind gestures, such as impulsively adopting a rescue dog, begin to win her over. However, Louna was once in love with a boy named Ethan, who she met at a wedding and later spent the night on the beach with him. Ethan was later shot during a school shooting.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_of_God"title="Woman of God">
The central character of this book is Brigid Fitzgerald, a physician working with the fictional organization Kind Hands (similar to Doctors without Borders). Brigid is in south Sudan in very desperate and dangerous conditions. Brigid is shot and almost killed and while she is at death's door God talks to her. Throughout this novel God talks to Brigid a number of times. Her life is a tragic one. Things start to go well and Brigid marries and has a child. She suddenly loses her husband and child at once and goes back to Sudan, nearly losing her life again. She finally returns to her native Massachusetts and with a new husband founds a new religious movement.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_in_Their_Time"title="Peace in Their Time">
"Peace in Their Time" examines the state of international diplomacy and the conditions in the years immediately after World War I which led to the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a treaty between the war's major combatants which was intended to prevent any such destructive conflagration from happening again. Although the treaty would eventually be signed by many nations, the two countries most responsible for its development were France and the United States. Ferrell details the complex discussions between the respective French and American diplomats, noting that the pact was influenced not only by the competing national interests of the main signatories, but the increasingly vocal pacifist movements that emerged after WWI, concluding that the pact "was the peculiar result of some very shrewd diplomacy and some very unsophisticated popular enthusiasm for peace." The agreement, in its early version, was presented by French foreign minister Aristide Briand as a bilateral antiwar treaty between France and the United States known as the "Pact of Perpetual Friendship." Although one of the victors of WWI, France's postwar position was "precarious," Ferrell writes, since its former enemy Germany had twice its population and considerable industrial capacity which could (and would) eventually be turned towards military production. Hence, the French sought alliances with other nations, and with the Pact of Perpetual Friendship, Briand hoped to secure either an American alliance or at least a guarantee of neutrality. The U.S. government, still isolationist, was resistant to becoming too embroiled in European politics, and Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg counterproposed a multilateral treaty renouncing war in general terms. Neither the French or American governments truly wanted a multilateral pact, writes Ferrell, but the French felt forced into accepting it lest they seem to reject their own stated aim for universal peace. And the pressure brought on by the popularity of worldwide peace movements increased pressure on diplomats to make the pact happen, even as they felt that it was little more than, in Castle's words, "a big, peaceful gesture."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulabsinh"title="Gulabsinh">
Gulabsinh attends a festival in Delhi, where he saves the dancer Rama from the clutches of a wicked nobleman with his secret supernatural power. He advises Rama to marry Lalaji, a painter who loves Rama but is reluctant to marry a dancer. Rama loves Gulabsinh, who inspires awe in her. Lalaji is attracted to Gulabsinh for his supernatural powers. Gulabsinh directs him to Matsyendra, and marries Rama at the cost of his immortality to save her. Matsyendra laughs at Gulabsinh and advises him to return to the seclusion of spiritual practice; Gulabsinh does not return, however, and allows his supernatural powers to disappear.The Great Spirit explains to Gulabsinh the unequal status of the love between him and Rama, whom Gulabsinh unsuccessfully tries to uplift with his spiritual power. When he decides to unite his and Rama's souls in a third (their child), the heavenly being admonishes him: "Did you become superhuman only to become human?" Gulabsinh replies, "Ah! Humanity is so sweet!"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Running_in_the_Field"title="Agent Running in the Field">
The novel is set in 2018 and depicts the relationship between Nat (né Anatoly), a 47-year-old member of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), and a young man (Ed) with whom he plays badminton weekly. After their matches, Ed rants about Brexit and Trump, to which Nat quietly listens and tacitly agrees. Meanwhile, Nat is running an operation to monitor a Ukrainian oligarch living in London. Through this mission, one of Nat's agents reveals that Ed is giving British secrets to Russian intelligence. Nat's MI6 colleagues suspect Nat of abetting him and grill him. Through their questioning and Nat's continued investigation, Operation Jericho is revealed: a plan for the U.K. to use covert means to undermine the E.U. at the U.S.’s behest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Ji-young,_Born_1982"title="Kim Ji-young, Born 1982">
The novel opens with a young Korean woman experiencing a strange problem, Kim Jiyoung is fully impersonating other women she knows, and does not seem self-aware of the fact. Her husband is concerned and she is taken in to get psychiatric help. The narrative then backtracks, and tells us the story of the life of Kim Jiyoung including a short family history, her birth, growing up and an adult life. The book presents not only the ordinary but trying hardships the eponymous character had to go through from her early childhood, but also covers the experiences of other women that she knew. It shows the discrimination and social judgement the women faced, their thoughts and feelings on it, and how they responded.Kim Jiyoung is the second daughter of a family with two daughters and one son, the youngest. A key theme is the strong preference for sons in her society, which touches and affects even those who personally do not strongly agree with the prejudice. Jiyoung’s mother felt under strong pressure to have a son from her in-laws, and so kept having children until she had a son. She also tacitly allows those around her to privilege her son at the expense of herself and her daughters, while disagreeing with this custom whenever she becomes more consciously aware of it. The mother-daughter relationship is explored in depth in this book, as is the relationships between mothers and fathers, and among siblings. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Patchwork_Bike"title="The Patchwork Bike">
A girl who lives at the edge of a "no-go desert" describes the titular bike that she and her brothers made out of found materials.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homecomings_(novel)"title="Homecomings (novel)">
Following his wife's death, Eliot begins seeing Margaret. Her subsequent, and unsuccessful, marriage to another man leads to a difficult affair.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Next_Next_Level"title="The Next Next Level">
The book tells the story of a young white rapper from Wisconsin, Juiceboxxx, who writer Leon Neyfakh met when he was in the eighth grade.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boneless_Mercies"title="The Boneless Mercies">
Frey, Ovie, Juniper, and Runa are the Boneless Mercies—girls hired to kill quickly, quietly, and mercifully. But Frey is weary of the death trade and, having been raised on the heroic sagas of her people, dreams of a bigger life.When she hears of an unstoppable monster ravaging a nearby town, Frey decides this is the Mercies' one chance out. The fame and fortune of bringing down such a beast would ensure a new future for all the Mercies. In fact, her actions may change the story arc of women everywhere.Full of fierce girls, bloodlust, tenuous alliances, and unapologetic quests for glory, this elegantly spun tale challenges the power of storytelling—and who gets to be the storyteller.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_(novel)"title="Outline (novel)">
An English woman writer flies to Athens to teach a summer writing workshop. On the plane, she meets an older Greek bachelor who tells her about his two failed marriages. The next day she meets with an Irish colleague from the writing school who also tells her his life story. In every chapter, the writer meets people and engages in long conversations on topics such as love, fiction, marriage, and intimacy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_Office_(novel)"title="Oath of Office (novel)">
In Iran, a series of protests break out between a group of dissidents led by Reza Kazem and the Iranian theocratic government in what is favorably dubbed by the international press as the "Persian Spring." However, Kazem's organization is revealed to be a proxy force for the Iranian government allied with rogue elements in the Russian GRU. The GRU steals two 51T6 anti-ballistic missiles (ABMs) from the Russian armory and then covertly provides it to Kazem through Portuguese arms dealer Urbano da Rocha. Nevertheless, Kazem uses the missiles for his own ends, intent on sending them to low Earth orbit and detonating them, causing the debris to destroy all the satellites at that altitude.Meanwhile, U.S. President Jack Ryan has been dealing with a multitude of crises at home and abroad. A deadly strain of flu, as well as spring floods, occur across the country, and his political rival, Senator Michelle Chadwick, criticizes his policies using bot-planted fake news stories about him. Overseas, the United States embassy in Cameroon comes under siege from the Cameroonian government eager on arresting opposition leader General Mbida, who had taken refuge there, while Russia is plotting to stage an invasion of Ukraine disguised as a military exercise. Regarding the Persian Spring, President Ryan is the lone dissenting voice in the generally favorable opinion on the events in Iran due to his skepticism of Kazem.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_We_Were_Villains"title="If We Were Villains">
The evening before he is due to be released on parole after serving ten years for an unspecified crime, Oliver Marks is approached by the lead investigator on his case, Detective Colborne. Suspicious of the official story, Colborne announces his retirement from the police force and asks Oliver to finally tell him the truth. Oliver accepts but requests that Colborne not act upon what Oliver will tell him.In 1997, Oliver is in his fourth and final year at the prestigious Dellecher Classical Conservatory, where he resides with his six classmates in a small dormitory called the Castle. As underperforming students are purged every year, the seven of them are the only fourth-year acting students remaining. The night before auditions for "Julius Caesar", one of the students—Alexander—suggests that the auditions are pointless as all seven have been consistently typecast — the hero (James), the villain (Alexander), the tyrant (Richard), the temptress (Meredith), the ingénue (Wren), and the unlucky two consigned to bit parts (Oliver and Filippa). When they receive the cast, Alexander's predictions are revealed to be correct.However, the situation changes at the annual Halloween performance, a select few scenes from "Macbeth" fourth year students traditionally perform each year. Each student is mailed an envelope containing their casting assignment and the scenes to prepare, as well as instructions not to share the information with any of their peers. Oliver is assigned the part of Banquo and is surprised to see James, rather than Richard, appear as Macbeth on Halloween night. After the show, the students throw a party during which a drunk and jealous Richard ends up attacking James, nearly drowning him in the lake where the play was staged. Richard reluctantly apologizes, and the group tries to brush off the assault. However, in the coming weeks, Richard grows more violent and begins to attack his fellow students, including his girlfriend Meredith, James, and Oliver, onstage during "Caesar". Oliver, Alexander, and James decide to fight back during Caesar's death scene, which quickly spirals out of control. At the cast party, Richard punches a student who had been flirting with Meredith. He proceeds to call Meredith a slut and gets in a physical argument with her as well. Afterwards, Oliver seeks out Meredith to comfort her, and the two end up having sex.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Men"title="The New Men">
Lewis Eliot, his brother Martin, and Cambridge fellow, Walter Luke become involved with the scientific community and reaction to the development and deployment of nuclear weapons by Britain during the Second World War.The story's main location is a fictional early British nuclear experimental establishment where the characters try to get an early nuclear pile going and also try to harvest enough enriched uranium or plutonium (they settle on going for plutonium) to try and beat the Americans to the bomb.As Snow's science researchers, and science civil servant, characters are, or were, portrayed as Cambridge dons in this book (and the previous book in the series - "The Masters") he clearly did want to make the location of the research station the real UK nuclear Centre at Harwell (which was once known as the Atomic Energy Research Establishment ) with its close association with Oxford. So instead, as this line from the book puts it,: “For a site, they picked on a place called Barford –which I had not heard of, but found to be a village in Warwickshire, a few miles from Stratford-upon-Avon”.Several commentators on the book claim, or suggest, that not only is the research station fictional but so is the village of Barford. In fact Barford is a real village in Warwickshire, and it is indeed not far from Stratford-upon-Avon. However, if the “final” version of the research station as described in the last chapter of the book was real it would certainly have more than dominated the actual real village of Barford.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stalinist_Legacy"title="The Stalinist Legacy">
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 activists are still haunted by the legacy of Joseph Stalin. The book examines of the origins, impacts, and prominence of Stalinism in modern Russia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Permanent_Revolution_and_Results_and_Prospects"title="The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects">
## "The Permanent Revolution"."The Permanent Revolution" is a 1928 essay written by Leon Trotsky in response to criticism given by Soviet politician Karl Radek. The work was published in Russian by The Left Opposition after the expulsion of Trotsky from The Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1927. It is a political theory book by Trotsky. Its title is the name of the concept of permanent revolution advocated by Trotsky and Trotskyists in opposition to the concept of socialism in one country as advocated by Joseph Stalin and Stalinists. This was published after the death of Vladimir Lenin which triggered a power struggle within military, bureaucratic, legislative bodies within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. General Secretary Joseph Stalin formed a political alliance with Lev Kamenev, Zinnoviev and Nikolai Bukharin, who opposed Trotsky within The Politburo and The Central Committee. Stalin's bloc pursued an isolationist policy referred to as Socialism in One Country, which emphasized placing economic development before world revolution. Trotsky in contrast, saw this as a revisionist deviation from Marxism and Leninism, and in contrast proclaimed the Marxist ideology strategy of permanent revolution.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meaning_of_Marxism"title="The Meaning of Marxism">
Dr. D'Amato presents a brief introduction to the philosophy of Karl Marx and Frederich Engels through a Trotskyist perspective.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I'm_Thinking_of_Ending_Things_(novel)"title="I'm Thinking of Ending Things (novel)">
The story is narrated by Jake's unnamed girlfriend of only a few months. They met in a pub during a college trivia night, and Jake gave her his phone number by writing it on a piece of paper and slipping it into her bag. Several weeks later, he takes her to meet his parents on their remote farm. She has been considering "ending things," but has not told him yet. It is a long drive, and they engage in lengthy philosophical discussions.The evening with Jake's parents turns out to be unpleasant and scary. They ask her awkward questions and she sees unsettling things, like a picture of Jake as a child that looks as if it could be her. During the long drive home, Jake decides to stop for "something sweet" at a Dairy Queen. The narrator is exhausted and wants to get home, but reluctantly agrees. She recognizes one of the girls that works at the Dairy Queen, but can't pinpoint why. After getting back on the road, Jake wants to dispose of the cups from their iced drinks at a nearby high school. It is snowing in the middle of the night, and the school is deserted. After disposing of the cups, he starts making out with her in the car in front of the school, but stops when he sees the janitor watching them from one of the windows. Furious, Jake leaves her alone in the car and enters the school building to confront him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outlaw_Ocean"title="The Outlaw Ocean">
"The Outlaw Ocean" is structured as a series of essays about lawlessness at sea with each chapter covering a different aspect and case studies. Urbina describes his experiences of their reporting. These include:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_the_Sheep"title="Russell the Sheep">
Russell is a sheep that has trouble falling asleep sometimes. Perhaps he needs it to be dark for him to sleep. But, he is scared of the dark. Perhaps he is too hot, perhaps not. After all that fails, Russell attempts to count things to help him fall asleep. He counts his feet, the stars, all "6 hundred million billion and ten" of them, but is still wide awake. He then has an epiphany and decides to count sheep. This finally helps him fall asleep.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gates_of_Creation"title="The Gates of Creation">
A demigod disguised as an Earthman and Lord of the Planet of Many Levels, Wolff-Jadawin must enter the many-leveled universe constructed for his torment and destruction in order to save his bride from the satanic Master Lord Urizen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Private_Cosmos"title="A Private Cosmos">
Third novel "World of Tiers" featuring Earth-born Kickaha. Jadawin and his wife have disappeared, leaving the World of Tiers threatened by invasion and chaos. Human bodies taken over by Lord minds are pouring through uncharted gates. They seek two things: domination of every private cosmos, and the death of the Trickster, who knows too much.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_Three_Quarters"title="The Mystery of Three Quarters">
Four people receive letters purporting to be from Hercule Poirot and accusing them each of the murder of Barnabas Pandy, a ninety-something businessman who drowned - accidentally, it seems - in his bath. Poirot has no knowledge of the letters, nor yet of the late Barnabas Pandy, until he is accosted by one of the recipients, society woman Sylvia Rule, before finding another, market trader John McCrodden, in his drawing room. As he begins to investigate the source of the letters with assistance from his young friend Edward Catchpool, a Scotland Yard detective, he comes into contact with the family of Pandy, which seems to be hiding secrets.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_by_Spring"title="Japanese by Spring">
Benjamin "Chappie" Puttbutt, a professor at Jack London College in Oakland, California, becomes the target of racist attacks from the Neo-Nazi editor of the campus newspaper. Worried that he will lose his middle-class lifestyle if people see him as a black activist, Chappie responds by recommending to the campus president that nothing be done. Instead, he focuses on learning Japanese using the textbook "Japanese by Spring", which he is studying with Mr. Yamato, a Japanese-language teacher, in the belief that speaking Japanese will give him an advantage when the rising Japanese economy results in Japanese companies and culture taking over large parts of American society. One day Chappie discovers that Japanese investors have purchased the college, and that his Japanese teacher is the new college president. Based on their personal connection, Yamato appoints Chappie to a new administrative position, from which he begins to take revenge against every aspect of the college that has bothered him, including unproductive tenured professors, overpaid fad-pursuing intellectuals, and the political activists who have opposed Chappie's tolerance of racism on campus. Yamato follows his own plans to reform Jack London College as a bastion of Japanese nationalism, including renaming the college after Japanese war heroes and creating a Pearl Harbor Day holiday.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyward_(novel)"title="Skyward (novel)">
Spensa is a 17-year-old girl who is part of a group of shipwrecked humans living on a ruined world called Detritus, under constant attack from mysterious aliens called the Krell. Spensa dreams of following in the footsteps of her deceased father, a fighter pilot of the Defiant Defense Force (DDF). However she is barred from any chance at becoming one because her father abandoned his flight in the infamous Battle of Alta, which ended in his own wingmates shooting him down.In order to get accepted into the flight academy, she and her peers must take an exam to prove their worth. Spensa, who has been preparing for the exam her entire life, has high hopes to pass, as does her longtime friend Rodge. However, on the day of the testing, DDF Admiral Ironsides rigs the exam so that Spensa fails. Angry at her defeat, she surreptitiously retakes the exam after everyone has left. Cobb, her father's former wingmate and an instructor at the academy, spies on her and sees her near-perfect score, so he offers her the opportunity to come train under him.At the academy, Spensa is introduced to her fellow cadet crew who, at Spensa's recommendation, name themselves the Skyward Flight. Their members are Spensa, Rodge, Kimmalyn (nicknamed Quirk), Hurl, FM, Nedd, Arturo, Morningtide, Bim, and Jorgen (nicknamed Jerkface by Spensa). After training in a virtual reality simulator, they are suddenly called to the battlefield to aid against a Krell incursion. Rodge is left scared, and quits the flight academy to instead become an engineer. Spensa is barred from using academy facilities and quarters, so she occupies a nearby cave, where she discovers an advanced crashed ship with an artificial intelligence computer. Spensa, with the help of a cautious Rodge, begins to work on repairing the ship. In the meantime, Spensa and her cadet flight crew continue to learn and practice new techniques under the guidance of Cobb. Spensa begins to bond with her classmates.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dog's_Way_Home_(novel)"title="A Dog's Way Home (novel)">
This story starts out with Bella as a puppy living under an old shack with her family in Denver, Colorado. She finds her way into the arms of Lucas, a young man who adopts her. When Bella becomes separated from Lucas after she was impounded by the animal control due to Denver's pitbull ban, she soon finds herself on a 400-mile journey to reunite with her owner. Along the way, the dog meets an orphaned mountain lion, a veteran and some friendly strangers who happen to cross her path. She will soon find that Lucas was waiting for her. When she finds Lucas the animal control officer tries to take her but ends up failing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_of_Brass_(novel)"title="The City of Brass (novel)">
The book begins in 18th-century Cairo and follows Nahri, a talented orphan con woman who uses palm reading and sleight of hand to swindle Ottoman nobles, and has healing powers. During an exorcism, she accidentally summons a djinn warrior named Darayavahoush e-Afshin, "Dara" for short. Recognizing her healing powers as belonging to the long-dead Nahids, a powerful magical family and ancient rulers of the djinn, he takes her on a journey to Daevabad, the city her ancestors built. Along the way they meet powerful magical creatures that are out to either help them or kill them, and their flight to Daevabad becomes one of survival. Along the way they grow close as Dara tells Nahri of the magical world she never believed in, and reveals its many prejudiced and political complications while trying to hide his own role in it.The story also follows Alizayd al Qahtani, "Ali" for short; a devout Muslim and second son of the djinn king whose family currently rules Daevabad, and whose ancestors had violently overthrown the Nahids. Torn between being loyal to his family and his duty as the future Qaid--the military leader that will serve his brother Emir Muntadhir; he also secretly supports the Tanzeem, a group of half-human djinn (known as shafit) that fight against the oppression and cruelty leveled against their kind by the Qahtani rulers and other pureblooded djinn. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NYPD_Red_4"title="NYPD Red 4">
This fourth novel in the NYPD Red series centers on two of the NYPD Red detectives, Zach Jordan and his partner Kylie MacDonald. NYPD Red, an entity invented by Patterson for his series, is an elite and well trained unit that has the job of protecting the rich, the famous and the well connected. This novel has three distinct plots. The main plot involves the robbery of an $8 million necklace that involved a murder of a starlet that was witnessed by a large crowd of people. A second plot involves the theft of expensive diagnostic equipment from a number of the city's hospitals. The subplot is the search for Kylie's husband, who has relapsed after going through several drug abuse rehab programs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_or_Socialism?"title="Anarchism or Socialism?">
The work focuses on Stalin's criticism of the philosophy of anarchism and responses to anarchist criticisms of Marxists. According to Stalin anarchists had no support among the working class, but they had some success outside the workers and among petite bourgeoisie groups.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sai_Lohit"title="Sai Lohit">
In the late Ayutthaya period of the Ayutthaya Kingdom, inquisitive Dao Rueng was raised by her Grandma Nim to be intelligent and independent. She found a kindred spirit in Khun Krai, a brave and honourable soldier, whose brother marries her sister. Muen Thip is a corrupt soldier and womanizer who becomes Khun Krai's rival and forces Dao Rueng to help him seduce Lady Yuern, Khun Krai's younger sister. When this is exposed, Dao Rueng confesses her part in the plot to Khun Krai. He forgives her and they become closer.Khun Krai, his father, and Dao Rueng's brother are ordered to protect the kingdom from the Burmese Army, and in their absence, Muen Thip tried to marry Lady Yuern. Khun Krai is able to stop this, and Muen Thip collaborated with the enemy in an attempt to destroy Khun Krai. Both Khun Krai and his ally, Pan Singh are badly wounded in battle. Lady Yuern shelters and cares for Pan Singh, and they become engaged. However, because Khun Krai remains missing Lady Yuern is pressured to agree to marry Muen Thip. Khun Krai reappears and volunteers to fight again despite his wounds, and relocates the government due to Burma's advances.After some time at war, Khun Krai and Dao Rueng are reunited and married, but he was ordered to the battlefront on their wedding night due to Muen Thip's meddling. As a soldier's wife, Khun Krai came to accept the losses of her life and became stronger. The Burmese Army breached the city walls, and Muen Thip's plans to switch sides were thwarted when he was mortally wounded by one of his servants. Khun Krai and a pregnant Dao Rueng attempt to escape the Burmese occupation when they meet Taksin the Great and joined his cause to liberate Ayutthaya territory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_Them_of_Battles,_Kings,_and_Elephants"title="Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants">
## Context.The novel details a fictional trip taken by Michelangelo in May 1506 to Constantinople at the request of Sultan Bajazet II, who invited him to abandon the work of the tomb of Pope Julius II in order to instead design a bridge on the Golden Horn, an arm of the sea that separates the Constantinople from the district of Pera, on the Bosphorus. In reality, Michelangelo received and considered the invitation during a period of tension between him and Pope Julius, but did not accept. Leonardo da Vinci produced a design for the bridge, but it was not possible to build it given the engineering constraints of the era.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasing_the_King_of_Hearts"title="Chasing the King of Hearts">
Living in Warsaw, Poland around 1940, Izolda and her family witness the city transform into a ghetto created to contain Jewish citizens. After she marries a Jewish man named Shayek, they escape the Warsaw Ghetto and obtain fake Polish identities as the Pawlicki’s. While Izolda stays in the Hotel Polski while visiting her friend Jurek, Germans surround the hotel and arrest everyone, Poles and Jews alike. She is sent to Pawiak as a Pole, where she witnesses many Jews murdered, including Shayek’s mother. Eventually, she is released from Pawiak as a non-Jew, and is reunited with her husband. However, Shayek is found to be a Jew while working in Krakow and is sent to Auschwitz. When Izolda finds out where her husband is, she begins working as a smuggler to send Shayek packages of food and supplies until he is transferred to Ebensee, a subcamp of Mauthausen. She travels to Vienna in attempts to gain information about how to rescue her husband from Mauthausen, but she ends up being arrested by the Viennese Gestapo and tortured until she reveals that she is a Jew. She is then sent to Auschwitz but is transferred to Guben by persuading Dr. Mengele that she has nursing experience. She escapes Guben and returns to Vienna where she begins working at a military hospital for the German army. When the Soviet army captures the city, they realize that Izolda is a Jew, so they help her to get across the American front to rescue her husband from Mauthausen. She finally reaches her King of Hearts, but a few years later, after having a few children together, Shayek ends up leaving Izolda, consumed by guilt that his entire family died except for him. The story ends in the 21st century in Israel with Izolda telling her family stories of her struggles in the Holocaust.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serotonin_(novel)"title="Serotonin (novel)">
The narrator, Florent-Claude Labrouste, is a depressed agricultural scientist who lives in a Parisian apartment block, the Tour Totem. He commutes to Normandy to help promote French cheese. Sympathetic to the plight of local farmers, he is powerless to help them retain their traditional methods:After watching a television documentary about people who choose to disappear from their life without telling anyone, Labrouste abruptly leaves his girlfriend, a young Japanese woman who is highly sexual but devoid of affection, quits his job under a false pretence and flees to a chain hotel in another part of Paris. A doctor prescribes him an antidepressant to remedy his low levels of serotonin, hence the title of the novel. Although the drug dulls his sex drive, Labrouste returns to Normandy in search of former lovers. While there, he visits an old college friend, Aymeric, a divorced and suicidal aristocratic landowner. At the climax of the novel, farmers equipped with assault rifles blockade a motorway. Aymeric is among them and shoots himself, sparking a clash with riot police in which 10 more people die.Later on, Labrouste begins secretly observing the love of his life, Camille, who has a son from another man. At first intending to shoot the child with one of Aymeric's sniper rifles in order to win back her love, he finds himself unable to go through with it. Finally, Labrouste moves back to Paris, contemplating committing suicide by jumping out of a window.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everyone_Has_a_Story"title="Everyone Has a Story">
There are four main characters in the novel: Meera, Vivaaan, Kabir and Nisha and everyone has their own story.“Everyone Has a Story” is about a young girl Meera who is in search of a story and but has no idea where she might find it. In search of her story, she comes across Vivaan, a young and successful banker who has a secret desire; that to escape the world in which he lives and travel to his heart’s content. Then there is a coffee shop manager Kabir, who is a friend of Meera’s and is always encouraging her to write. Lastly, Nisha is a girl whom Kabir falls in love with and soon proposes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dry_(novel)"title="The Dry (novel)">
Federal Police agent Aaron Falk returns to the struggling farming community of Kiewarra for the funeral of his childhood best friend, Luke Hadler. Severe drought has put the town under extreme pressure and the community is shocked but not surprised when the Hadler family is found dead in their farmhouse. While Falk is loath to confront the townspeople who rejected him twenty years earlier, the circumstances around the deaths of the Hadlers, that appears to be a murder-suicide, compels him to dig deeper into the events leading up to the tragedy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_(Kepnes_novel)"title="You (Kepnes novel)">
Guinevere Beck, an aspiring writer, is employed as a teaching assistant while simultaneously working on her thesis. When she strides into the East Village bookstore where Joe Goldberg works, he is instantly smitten with her. Beck is everything that Joe thinks he has ever wanted: gorgeous, tough, razor-smart, and as sexy as his wildest dreams. But there is more to Goldberg than Beck realizes, and much more to Beck than her oh-so-perfect facade. Their mutual obsession quickly spirals into a whirlwind of deadly consequences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Surrounded"title="The Surrounded">
Archilde Leon returns from Portland, where he made a living by playing fiddle in a show house, to his father's ranch in Montana on the Flathead Reservation in the Sniél-emen Valley. Archilde visits with his mother, Catherine—a Salish woman, and she plans to host a feast for Archilde's return to the reservation. Archilde discovers that his brother Louis stole horses and took refuge in the Salish mountains. Archilde dreads seeing his father, Max Leon—a Spaniard, because their relationship has become strained since Archilde left for Portland. Archilde begins to regret his decision to visit his family.Archilde runs into his brother Louis at the creek on his family's property. He warns him about Pariseau, a rancher, searching for him and tells him that the infamous Sheriff Dave Quigley may eventually get involved in the manhunt.Max and Father Grepilloux discuss Archilde's return and future on the reservation, and Father Grepilloux suggests that Archilde take violin lessons at the mission to extend his stay on Max's ranch. Later, Archilde attends a feast where the elders share traditional Salish stories that alter Achilde's perspective about his culture, and he begins to embrace his community and family. Max remains in his house during the feast pondering his isolation and lack of connection from the Salish people and his family. Afterwards, Max tricks his grandsons Mike and Narcisse into attending the Mission boarding school under the guise of a joyride in his car.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Build_a_Girl_(novel)"title="How to Build a Girl (novel)">
"How to Build a Girl" follows Johanna Morrigan, a working-class 14-year-old living with her parents and five siblings on a council estate in 1990s Wolverhampton.After revealing to her disapproving elderly neighbour, Violet, that her father is on disability benefits, Johanna lives in fear that Violet will report her family to social services which will stop their benefits. Racked with guilt, Johanna begins to look for a way that she can help support her family as she waits for the inevitable letter to tell the Morrigans that their benefits have been suspended while under investigation. Johanna briefly attempts to be a cleaner, and fails to secure a paper round, but finally hits upon a writing competition with a prize of £250 which she wins with a poem. After appearing on a local television show to read out her winning poem and behaving embarrassingly due to nerves, Johanna decides that she must reinvent herself and begins on her path to becoming Dolly Wilde.Two years later and Johanna has become Dolly Wilde, and sends one music review a day to the Disc &amp; Music Echo. It pays off, as Dolly is invited to the "D&amp;ME" offices and is given a music journalist job. As her career as a journalist progresses, Dolly decides that it is time to drop out of school to focus fully on her job, leading to conflict between her mother and father who disagree as to whether she is making the right choice. Ultimately she does not go back to school, and is offered a writing job involving a trip to Dublin where she meets musician John Kite.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deceivers_(Bester_novel)"title="The Deceivers (Bester novel)">
Rogue Winter has superhuman powers of pattern recognition, which he uses to rescue his kidnapped girlfriend and save the solar system.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Bodies"title="Hidden Bodies">
Joe Goldberg came to Los Angeles from New York to start over and hunt down the woman who broke his heart – Amy Adam. Joe also wants to leave behind his dark past, which includes the murder of his girlfriend, Guinevere Beck.However, Joe's plans suddenly change when he falls in love with an aspiring actress named Love Quinn at Soho House. She doesn't know about his past and never can. The problem is, hidden bodies don't always stay that way.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amrita_(Gujarati_novel)"title="Amrita (Gujarati novel)">
Amrita is awarded her doctorate, and her two friends Udayan and Aniket congratulate her on her achievement. From their youth onward, Udayan has been an important formative influence, guiding Amrita to reach her intellectual goals. Amrita had declared her love for him, but now Udayan observes that Amrita is growing partial to a lecturer in botany, Aniket. Udayan had played a role in introducing Aniket to Amrita. On that occasion, Udayan seemed to have brushed away Amrita's expression of affection, saying that what he desired from her was not so much her love as her understanding. For Udayan, love is contingent, an accidental matter.During a trip the three take together to Juhu Beach, Udayan falls from their boat during a tempest and is injured. Amrita finds a note under her pillow from her "bhabi" (her brother's wife), informing her that the family regards her friendship with the two young men as socially embarrassing. Amrita confesses to Udayan that she feels the pressure to make a choice between the two is a threat to her pursuit of freedom. But at the same time, as she sees Aniket off from the station on a journey, Amrita tells Aniket that she will wait for him. Udayan decides to resign from his post as a lecturer in Gujarati, and to sell his property at Bhiloda. Amrita sojourns in Aniket's home, acting as caretaker in his absence. Aniket stays away, living in a rented house in Palanpur and hoping that, while he is gone, Amrita and Udayan will once more draw closer to each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_Lighthouse"title="Hello Lighthouse">
The book opens with the lines, "On the highest rock of a tiny island at the edge of the world stands a lighthouse. It is built to last forever." To this lighthouse comes a new lighthouse keeper. The keeper settles in to the lighthouse, which is also his home, and keeps the log. Through the book as the keeper maintains the log, he lives his life, including getting married, saving survivors of a shipwreck, getting sick and the birth of a child. As this is happening, the events of the ocean are also noted, accompanied by the repeated phrase "Hello! ...Hello! ...Hello!" At the end of the story, the lighthouse is automated and the keeper and his family move to a cottage on the mainland where they can continue to see the lighthouse, which continues to shine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merci_Suárez_Changes_Gears"title="Merci Suárez Changes Gears">
Merci Suárez is a Cuban-American student starting the sixth grade (her second year) at Seaward Pines Academy, which she and her older brother Roli attend on scholarship. Merci mentors new student Michael Clark for the "Sunshine Buddies" program as part of her scholarship obligation. Michael draws the interest of fellow student and mean girl Edna Santos, adding to the pressure on Merci at school. The Suárez family lives as an extended group in three neighboring houses: one for Merci, Roli, and their parents; another for Merci's tía Inéz, who runs a bakery while raising young twin sons Axel and Tomás; and the third for her Abuela and Abuelo, Lolo, who has always been in charge of walking the children home from school.Merci Suarez never realized that 6th would be so hard–even with a scientific genius for a brother. That was before she met Edna Santos, started babysitting her 2 annoying cousin brothers, and became a Sunshine Buddy, and to top it all off, her grandfather (Lolo), her main supporter, has Alzheimer's disease, which has no known cure. Merci is also an amazing, budding soccer champion, who is so good, that she can “Play for za Feefa” says Simon (one of her dad’s football friends). She might even dare to try out for the school team–if only her mom would sign the permission form. There is only one thing that Merci has wanted for the longest time; a new bike. To get it, she saves up money to buy it, but bikes are getting more expensive, and her family is not rich at all. All this, with her grandfather’s sickness, and mean Edna and her “swarm of cawing crows” is building the pressure on Merci Suarez. Will she survive the sixth grade?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Kings_(book_series)"title="Two Kings (book series)">
The "Two Kings" series centers around the story of a young boy named David and his Good King and Bad King. The two kings represent his Yetzer Hatov, the inclination in Judaism to good, and his Yetzer Hara, the inclination in Judaism to do evil. David struggles with choices and the two kings fight with each other to influence David's decisions. At the end of each book, David eventually chooses the right thing and becomes wiser for it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_See_the_Rhythm"title="I See the Rhythm">
Michele Wood's paintings represent genres from the history of African-American music. Poems by Toyomi Igus accompany the paintings and describe the genre using varied rhythms, fonts, and font sizes. Captions provide additional information and historical context for the music genre.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hall_of_Mirrors"title="A Hall of Mirrors">
Rheinhardt, an alcoholic former virtuoso clarinetist, arrives in New Orleans, where he meets Geraldine, an attractive former prostitute with a distinctive facial scar and an appealingly easygoing demeanor. Desperate for money and booze, Rheinhardt takes a job as a disc jockey and radio commentator for a new right-wing radio station called WUSA, whose unironic taglines include "The Voice of an American's America" and "The Truth Shall Make You Free." Though Rheinhardt wholeheartedly embraces his role at the station and delivers its toxic and divisive messages with gusto, his eccentric friends, general outlook, and lifestyle of drinking and smoking marijuana belie his affinity for the socially-liberal counterculture of the 1960s. Nonetheless, his affiliation with WUSA brings him into contact with a group of powerful, manipulative ultra-conservatives and race baiters who plan to use the radio station to racially divide the city and combat the civil rights movement, goals of which Rheinhardt is oblivious.Meanwhile, Morgan Rainey, a dour former social worker, takes a job conducting site visits for City Hall's survey of welfare recipients. Though Rainey initially believes he's engaged in a noble (if last-ditch) effort to improve services for the poor, he quickly realizes that the people dubiously assisting him in his efforts are part of a cynical plot to remove blacks from the state's welfare rolls. Rainey solemnly vows to fight back against the politicians of City Hall and its enablers at WUSA. He first tries to enlist Reinhardt, his neighbor, to help, but he ultimately vows to take decisive action to derail a major public event that WUSA sees as its coming out party.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two-Income_Trap"title="The Two-Income Trap">
## Causal factors.The authors present quantitative data to demonstrate how American middle-class families have been left in a precarious financial position by increases in fixed living expenses, increased medical expenses, escalating real estate prices, lower employment security, and the relaxation of credit regulation. The result has been a reshaping of the American labor force, such that many families now rely on having two incomes in order to meet their expenses. This situation represents a greater level of financial risk than that faced by single-income households: the inability of either adult to work, even temporarily, may result in loss of employment, and concomitant loss of medical coverage and the ability to pay bills. This may lead to bankruptcy or being forced to move somewhere less expensive, with associated decreases in educational quality and economic opportunity.Among the expenses driving the two-income trap are child care, housing in areas with good schools, and college tuition. Warren and Tyagi conclude that having children is the "single best predictor" that a woman will go bankrupt.Warren and Tyagi call stay-at-home mothers of past generations "the most important part of the safety net", as the non-working mother could step in to earn extra income or care for sick family members when needed. However, Warren and Tyagi dismiss the idea of return to stay-at-home parents, and instead propose policies to offset the loss of this form of insurance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_Robbery"title="Twilight Robbery">
At the end of Fly By Night, Mosca and her goose have left the city of Mandelion for life on the road with conman Eponymous Clent. At the beginning of Twilight Robbery, winter is approaching and Clent is locked in a debtors' prison in Grabely. Skellow, a criminal, abducts Mosca for her writing skills. She assists him buy the services of the Romantic Facilitator to force a marriage on a maiden of Toll.Mosca escapes, and reunited with Clent and her goose Saracen, arrives in Toll to try to take advantage of what she knows about Skellow's plot. This leads to a series of increasingly dangerous adventures for Mosca, crossing the boundary between Toll-by-Day and Toll-by-Night, and impinging on the high politics of the Realm. Mosca's decisions have momentous consequences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Leopard,_Red_Wolf"title="Black Leopard, Red Wolf">
The plot is narrated in flashbacks with non-chronological episodes. In a frame story, a man named Tracker recounts his tale to prison interrogators from the South Kingdom. Once Tracker has identified someone’s scent, he can follow them anywhere. As a young adult, he abandons his abusive grandfather and returns to the Ku tribe, home of his extended family. He meets a shapeshifter known as Leopard and a young Ku man named Kava, with whom Tracker begins a sexual relationship. They rescue mingi children, who are born with birth defects and/or strange powers. These children are cared for by the Sangoma, an anti-witch.On one mission to rescue children, Tracker is caught by a flesh-eating monster named Asanbosam. He and Leopard kill the creature and escape. Kava betrays the Sangoma. She and most of the children are killed, but she is able to place a protective enchantment on Tracker before she dies. Tracker leaves the surviving mingi children with the Gangatom tribe and sets out on his own.Years later, in the city of Malakal, Tracker is hired to find a mysterious boy. The boy was abducted from the home of Basu Fumanguru, an elder in the city of Kongor. Basu and his family were all killed, and the boy is the sole survivor. He is now being held captive by a group of monsters. His captors include an Ipundulu, a vampire who drains his victims and replaces their blood with lightning, as well as Sasabonsam, brother of Asambosam. In addition to Tracker, members of this expedition include Leopard; Leopard’s bowman and lover Fumeli; Nyka, a man who previously betrayed Tracker by selling him into slavery; Nsaka, a mercenary and Nyka’s lover; Sadogo, a giant; Bunshi, a river spirit; and Sogolon, the Moon Witch, a sorceress who is hunted by the spirits of those she has killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Boy"title="The Book of Boy">
Boy is an orphan who works as a goatherd on the estate of Sir Jacques. He encounters the pilgrim Secundus in the fields and guides him to the manor, where Secundus convinces the Cook to lend him Boy as his servant on his pilgrimage to the nearest large town, Saint-Peter's-Step. As they leave for their journey, Secundus ties a mysterious bundle to Boy's hunchback and threatens him with death if he should peek inside or run away with it. During their first night together, Secundus reveals his quest to Boy; he is seeking seven relics from the body of Saint Peter: "Rib tooth thumb shin dust skull tomb". Based on that list, their journey will end in Rome, at the Mother of All the Churches.The story is set in the holy year of 1350, while the Black Death was sweeping through Europe; before the novel begins, the wife and three children of Sir Jacques have succumbed to the plague. As an orphan and deformed with a hunchback, Boy has been bullied all his life and has a deep sense of shame over his otherness, although he is able to take comfort in his strange rapport with animals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaving_Atlanta"title="Leaving Atlanta">
## Part One: Magic Words.LaTasha Baxter returns to school after summer vacation, having practiced jacks and jump rope, as she tries to fit into the social structure of her fifth grade classroom. At the same time, she is dealing with her parents' separation, and the reality that children are going missing and turning up dead. In the novel, the murders are initially introduced when nine photos of children are shown while Tasha Baxter and her family watch the news, which Monica Kaufman, the first black woman to anchor the Atlanta evening news, delivers.One night Tasha goes to the roller rink with her best friend. At the roller rink, she runs into her crush, Jashante. He buys her M&amp;Ms and gives her a pine scented air freshener, which he usually sells for cash. When Jashante disappears, Tasha blames herself for his disappearance and subsequent death, since she cursed him after he pushed her on the playground, ripping the pink coat her father gave her. At the end of part one, Tasha gives her little sister, DeShaun, Jashante's air freshener, telling DeShaun it is a protective charm.In Part One, Octavia Fuller and Rodney Green are introduced as the social outcasts of Tasha's fifth grade classroom. Tasha briefly befriends Octavia but ultimately does not pursue their friendship because Tasha is afraid of becoming a social outcast through association with Octavia, who many of their classmates bully because of her dark skin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Ranger_(Patterson_novel)"title="Texas Ranger (Patterson novel)">
This novel's main character is Texas Ranger Rory Yates. Anne, the ex-wife of Yates, has been receiving death threats. She asks Yates to return to her home, because she is scared. Before Yates can return someone murders Anne in a brutal fashion. Yates is asked to stay away from the case, but he unofficially searches for the killer. Before Yates can find the murderer, this killer strikes again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_She_Was_Harriet"title="Before She Was Harriet">
This children's picture book details the life of Harriet Tubman in a free verse journey on a train. It begins with Tubman as an old woman and moves backwards chronologically. The author outlines the many roles of Tubman: a suffragist, a boatman who ferried slaves across the Combahee River, a Union spy, a nurse for soldiers, a savior who helped her parents flee from slavery, a conductor on the Underground Railroad, a slave named Minty, and finally a young slave named Araminta. She chooses to change her name to Harriet when she leaves slavery. The book ends with a picture of Tubman sitting on a train, finally free.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_the_Children_March"title="Let the Children March">
The book is written from the point of view of a young African-American girl growing up in Birmingham, Alabama. Her family hears Martin Luther King Jr. call for peaceful protest. After her parents express fear, the girl and her brother decide they will march instead. Dr. King expresses concern but allows the children to organize.On May 2, the children meet at a church and begin to march. The girl is afraid of the angry crowd, but continues on, even through vicious dogs, water hoses, and threats of prison time try to stop them. On the third day of the march, she is jailed. She and other children sing "We Shall Overcome" and other civil rights songs while in the cell. The march continues, and the girl hears from her father that John F. Kennedy has started to be concerned about the hate. The girl and her brother are released from prison and the announcement of desegregation floods the city. The book ends with the two siblings playing at playgrounds and eating at places they were never allowed to visit before.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_News_for_Outlaws"title="Bad News for Outlaws">
"Bad News for Outlaws" chronicles the life of Bass Reeves, a black deputy marshal for the United States government who worked in the Arkansas and Oklahoma Territories for 32 years. Each page tells a different story about him, ranging from his youth in slavery to clever ways he brought wanted outlaws into custody, through the day he stopped working as a peace officer (when the territory reached statehood). The story ends with his death from Bright's disease.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stuff_of_Stars"title="The Stuff of Stars">
This children's book describes the origin of the universe in illustrious verse. It tells a story about the Big Bang and about the creation of our earth. It finally tells about the creation of people and about how we are made from the same materials and miracles of the universe and the stars. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_(picture_book)"title="Jazz (picture book)">
"Jazz" is a collection of poetry and illustrations that interprets the styles and roots of Jazz music including Ragtime, Swing, Bebop, and fusion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_Bagge"title="Baron Bagge">
At an official reception in Vienna, there is a dispute between Baron Bagge and a young man, Farago, who forbids Bagge to speak with his sister. Bagge, Farago claims, was responsible for the suicides of two women. Bagge challenges him to a duel, but the situation can be cleared and Farago agrees to apologize. Bagge finds he has to explain himself and tells his story. Both women did indeed kill themselves, because he would marry neither of them. This was, Bagge says, because he was actually already married.He was a cavalry officer back in 1915 and found himself with his unit on a reconnaissance mission in the buildup to the Gorlice–Tarnów Offensive in Eastern Europe. His mentally unstable commanding officer, Rittmeister Semler, orders an attack on a bridge held by Imperial Russian Army. Even though cavalry normally wouldn't stand a chance against machine-guns, the charge miraculously succeeds with minimal casualties. Bagge is only hit by a small rock that is swirled up during the attack. Afterwards, the reconnaissance unit advances further into what nominally must be enemy-held territory, but finds only peace and a welcoming civilian population. At the Ukrainian town of Nagy-Mihaly (nowadays called Michalovce), Bagge meets Charlotte Szent-Kiraly, the daughter of a friend of his late mother's, and immediately falls in love with her. Her beauty as well as her confidence deeply impress Bagge. Rittmeister Semler tries frantically to find the enemy and orders his unit to leave the town. Bagge resolves to marry Charlotte and proposes to her. He says that he will come back as soon as possible, but she, although agreeing to marry him, tells him that she is sure that he would never return.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Grandeur"title="True Grandeur">
At the turn of the 21st century, a young man by the name of Conrad Arlington drives over the 101 freeway into Los Angeles, California for the first time to pursue his dream of becoming a great artist. Upon his arrival, Conrad struggles for a while as he adjusts to the city and hones his craft, then, after a few years, he meets a group of artists and writes a play that brings him his first taste of real success. Utilizing his glimpse of fame, he decides to produce his first film, which brings him to the attention of Gracie Garrison, a beautiful socialite who decides to audition for the project. Being young and in over his head financially, Conrad is forced to abandoned the project and begin anew, but his ambition is not easily forgotten by those around him.Some time later at a bar in Hollywood, Conrad runs into Gracie and her business partner, Maxwell Price. Gracie was impressed by Conrad's script, and suggests that they should all go into business together to begin a project of their own. Enamored by Gracie's beauty and still relatively new to the Hollywood circle, Conrad easily agrees without much thought.A few weeks later Conrad receives a phone call from Maxwell inviting him to Gracie's residence in Studio City on Friday night to discuss the project. Conrad drives his coupe up into the hills and arrives per their request, where he is greeted by a sleek, doe-eyed model named Evie Clark, who is one of Gracie's best friends. Quiet and standoffish, Evie disappears. Maxwell offers Conrad a drink and Gracie puts on music as they both avoid Conrad's attempts to address any real business. Conrad soon realizes that it wasn't a meeting they called him to, but a party, as guests begin to arrive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prothom_Protishruti"title="Prothom Protishruti">
The novel is set in a remote village of undivided Bengal and thereafter Kolkata. Its theme focuses on a social structure that is based on superstition, prejudice and injustice to women. Satyabati, the housewife protagonist, rebels against the patriarchal world in which she and many of the women lived, taking an active role in standing up to the people whose behavior is one of keeping women in their traditional place of inferiority. From childhood Satya is outspoken. She points out the unfairness of the society in a very facile way.The protagonist of the story is the handsome Ramkali Chatterjee, who, sometime towards the final decades of the 19th century, combines the functions of priest and physician of the traditional Ayurveda system of medicine in an isolated Bengali village, Five of the women of his extended family — Dinatarini, Kashiswari, Shankari, Shibjaya and Mokshada are widows. It is on them that the burden falls, from dawn to dusk, of attending to all the practical problems of running a home. They are obliged to adhere strictly to the rules governing widowhood, rules which however they reinforce by insisting other female members of the family learn to observe in a society dominated by men. Of the other women, just one, the young Satyabati, defies custom, and though her father treats her manner of bucking the system indulgently, the other women rebuke her. Ramkali takes her on as a student.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Prayer"title="Sea Prayer">
The book is written in the form of a letter from father to son; the two have fled their home in Homs, Syria due to the Syrian Civil War, and face the dangerous Mediterranean crossing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stronger,_Faster,_and_More_Beautiful"title="Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful">
"Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful" is composed of six interrelated stories, each set farther into the future than the last, and covering in all a time period of perhaps 150 years. The novel begins “a few years from now” with Evan and Julia Weary, semi-identical twins facing a dramatic choice about their own survival. It continues with Ludmilla, a girl who must conceal the extent to which her body has been rebuilt as prejudice against altered humans is on the rise.Soon we meet Alexios, a boy whose genetic modifications at the embryo stage were supposed to give him super-human intelligence and open the door to a happy and successful life. Instead, his body was born deformed and his extreme intelligence has twisted in upon itself so that he spends his mental energy creating anagrams and solving useless puzzles about the world around him. Alexios has been modified with dolphin skin cells to live primarily underwater, where he oversees a flock of manatees who are growing within them human organs for transplant.Everywhere in the world, such advances are changing the face of humanity. “As genetic manipulation accelerates beyond cosmetic enhancements and lifesaving surgeries, animal and plant genes are modified, then used to modify human beings. Limbs can be added and the mortally ill frozen until their ailments are curable. For-profit enterprises, in the U.S. especially, compete in a laissez-faire free-for-all,” according to Kirkus Reviews.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Sweet_Homicide_(novel)"title="Home Sweet Homicide (novel)">
Widowed mystery writer Marian Carstairs is a mother of three living off the sales of her books. Her children, Dinah (14), April (12), and Archie (10), inspired by reading their mother’s fictitious mystery novels, decide to take part in some amateur sleuthing when they hear shots in the house next door. Understanding detective work from the novels, they take specific notes on clues that they encounter, but they also falsify their testimonies to the cops with the end goal of crediting the solved case back to their mother for publicity purposes. In addition to their detective work, the children also attempt to romantically connect the handsome police lieutenant, Bill Smith, on the case with their mother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrology_in_Practice"title="Hydrology in Practice">
The third edition of the book is separated into three parts which discuss hydrological measurements, hydrological analysis, and engineering applications.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Testing_of_Luther_Albright"title="The Testing of Luther Albright">
Luther Albright is a devoted father and a designer of dams, a self-controlled man who believes he can engineer happiness for his family by sheltering them from his own emotions. But when an earthquake shakes his Sacramento home, the world Luther has constructed with such care begins to tilt: his son's behavior becomes increasingly bizarre and threatening, his loving wife seems to grow distant, the house he built with his own hands shows its first signs of decay, and a dam of his design comes under investigation for structural flaws exposed by the tremors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_News_From_Outer_Space"title="Good News From Outer Space">
In 1999, George Eberhart, a tabloid journalist, has been resuscitated from a suicide by a new scientific process, known as the "Han process". Amidst premillennial hysteria across the United States, compounded by both biblical prophecies concerning the End of Times and Ufologists reporting sightings of giant alien spacecraft.The resurrected George leaves both his job and his wife, Lucy, and discovers in Raleigh, North Carolina a series of unusual incidents the locals believe are angelic interventions, but that George suspects are due to alien interference with the progress of humanity.Rev Jimmy-Don Gilray is convinced that God is send a messenger to Earth on January 1, 2000.Both men may be correct as either the messenger may be aliens or God, or even the Devil.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_Mud"title="Fuzzy Mud">
Fifth grader Tamaya Dhilwaddi and seventh grader Marshall Walsh have been walking to and from school together for years. However, their routine is interrupted when Chad Hilligas, a bully Marshall knows, came to fight them. Since they don’t want to escalate the situation, Marshall and Tamaya take a shortcut home through the off-limits woods. Marshall and Tamaya then split up after getting lost to look for an escape route. Afterwards, Chad shows up and tries to attack Tamaya. Marshall tries to defend her, but gets caught by Chad in the process. To save Marshall, Tamaya grabs nearby mud and throws it in Chad’s face.Meanwhile, excerpts from an investigation led by the Energy and Environment Commission of the American Senate are shown, on the topic of SunRay Farm and biolene, an environmentally-friendly alternative to petrolium, developed by Jonathan Fitzman and Dr. Mark Humbard, among others. The following day, Tamaya wakes up to discovering a rash from exposure to the mud. At school, that day, the principal announces the disappearance of Chad Hilligas, from which Tamaya quickly concludes that the missing kid must still be in the woods. She and Marshall both independently decide to remain silent on the subject, in order to keep each other out of trouble. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceman_of_Bohemia"title="Spaceman of Bohemia">
Jakub Procházka is a Czech astrophysicist who agrees to an eight-month mission of exploring a cloud of dust and particles, called Chopra, in space that was created by a comet. Jakub must travel to its location (between Earth and Venus) to collect samples of the cloud so they could determine what it is, why it is making the sky purple at night, and why it is beginning to consume itself. The mission is deemed too dangerous by most countries to even attempt, so the Czech Republic decides to take the opportunity to be the first to attempt something like this. It's decided that Jakub will be sent on the mission, making him a celebrity in the public eye. He is not very passionate about becoming an astronaut, however, instead wanting redemption for his family name. His father was a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia that ruled their country in the past, and a young Jakub and his grandparents were harshly punished for the now deceased father's actions by their community after a stranger revealed his secrets. Jakub feels his family name can only be redeemed by becoming a national hero.Jakub leaves his wife, Lenka, on Earth while he goes on this eight-month mission. He continues to talk to her every day over video-call, along with his mission engineer Petr. The stress of the situation coupled with a feeling of abandonment becomes too much for Lenka, and she leaves Jakub. This adds to Jakub's feeling of extreme loneliness, making his mission almost unbearable. He begins to drink extensively and becomes depressed, and he starts to question his mental state when he hears voices. After he starts seeing a giant, talking spider walking around the space shuttle, Jakub thinks it is just his imagination or a mental breakdown, but he becomes less sure of this as he continues to see the spider. The spider, which Jakub decides to call Hanuš, reveals that he is an alien from another planet and was sent to research humans and their way of life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Divorce_(novel)"title="Le Divorce (novel)">
Isabel Walker is a twenty-something American film-school dropout who decides to visit her step-sister Roxanne, a poet who now lives in France. Isabel believes that she is there to help Roxanne during her pregnancy with her toddler infant, but later realizes that her father and step-mother sent her there so that Roxanne would help the shiftless Isabel gain some direction in life. Shortly after she arrives, Roxanne confides in Isabel that her French husband, Charles-Henri has left her. Roxanne's mother-in-law, Suzanne, tells Roxanne that her husband is probably having an affair because of her pregnancy and will return to her shortly after. Roxeanne struggles to decide what to do and finally decides to divorce Charles-Henri after learning he is having an affair with a woman named Magda Tellman. Roxanne becomes depressed by the end of her marriage and tries to commit suicide. She is found by Isabel, who successfully has her briefly hospitalized and only tells Charles-Henri about what happened. Charles-Henri is sympathetic but tells Roxanne he still wants a divorce.After some acrimony the couple decide to settle for an equal divorce where their assets will be divided in half. To her surprise Roxanne learns that a painting of Saint Ursula that was gifted her from the Walker side of the family might be worth several thousand dollars.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13_(Armstrong_novel)"title="13 (Armstrong novel)">
13 centers around Savannah Levine, who is experiencing a new and dark magic inside of her that gives her abilities that seem foreign and thrilling. She cannot tell if this ability is a blessing, or a curse. Meanwhile, the nefarious cult, known as the Supernatural Liberation Movement is determined to expose Supernaturals for what they are, destroying them in their path—and this plan affects all types of supernaturals, from demons, to witches, to vampires. On the eve of the battle between the Otherworld and Supernatural Liberation Movement, the major supernaturals must come together to fight for their lives and for the existence of the Otherworld.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Day_(novel)"title="Every Day (novel)">
"Every Day" is about the story of A, a genderless person who wakes up occupying a different body each day of a sixteen-year-old living in the East Coast. As described by Frank Bruni of "The New York Times", "A. doesn't have a real name, presumably because they don't have a real existence: they're not a person, at least not in any conventional sense, but they have a spirit, switching without choice from one host to the next and, for just 24 hours, replacing its consciousness with their own." A has their own memories, but they are also able to tap into the memories of the person whose body they are occupying. A calls this "accessing." The story begins with A waking up in the body of a teenage boy named Justin. Upon arriving to school, A meets Justin's girlfriend, Rhiannon, and feels an instant connection to her. Based on Justin's memories, A can tell that Justin and Rhiannon are having a rough time in their relationship, so in order to learn more about her, A invites her to the beach. The pair open up to one another, though A's sharing is limited and very carefully worded. A had never felt such a connection with anyone before, and so attempts to discover a way by which to stay in Rhiannon's proximity in days to come. A then does their best to convince Rhiannon that the day shared at the beach was not between her and Justin, but rather between her and A.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_(picture_book)"title="Snow (picture book)">
It is a dull and grey city until the first snowflakes start to fall. No one thinks those few flakes will amount to much except for a boy and his dog. He believes that it will snow, despite the numerous predictions from adults, the television, and the radio that it will not. As the snow begins to pile up, disgruntled adults rush home, leaving the boy and his dog to joyfully enjoy the snow.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yolonda's_Genius"title="Yolonda's Genius">
The book begins with the main character Yolonda and her family living in Chicago. She is big and tough for her age, which makes it easy for her to look after her little brother Andrew. The prevalence of drugs in the city result in Andrew coming home one day with a pocket full of cocaine. This drives their mother to move the family to a new town in Grand River, Michigan. Yolonda adjusts well in school while Andrew ends up struggling. However, despite their academic differences, Yolonda is convinced that Andrew is a true musical genius. No one believes her claims though so she plans to prove all the naysayers wrong. So while they visit their Aunt Tiny back in Chicago, Yolonda sneaks Andrew onstage a Blues Concert where he finally shows his talent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death's_End"title="Death's End">
## Common Era and Crisis Era.The story begins during the Fall of Constantinople (AD 1453), recounting a prostitute who gains the power of retrieving objects and human organs without penetrating their enclosures. Constantine XI tasks her with killing Mehmed II, but her powers are mysteriously lost, and she is killed by Byzantine soldiers in retaliation.Next, the story shifts to the timeline of the beginning of "The Three Body Problem". The physicist Yang Dong, daughter of Ye Wenjie, having discovered her mother's conspiracy with Trisolaris, and witnessing the stultification of all particle accelerators, is eventually driven to suicide. Prior to her death, she meets another person at the lab (later revealed to be Ding Yi) who insists that life and geography on Earth evolved together, as opposed to the latter merely having enabled the former. Yang Dong, who knows that alien life is extremely common from secret documents of her mother, wonders how it has affected the universe and whether nature is really 'natural'.Now, the time is the beginning of "The Dark Forest". Around the time that Luo Ji is appointed as a Wallfacer, an aeronautical engineer named Cheng Xin is working for the Staircase Project, which aims to launch a human toward the Trisolaran fleet at 1% of light-speed, someone who can serve as an informal diplomat for earth while gathering intelligence. The seemingly impossible target speed is realized through Cheng's idea of lining up ICBMs, Topol and Dongfeng missiles to create a nuclear catapult. However, the mass of the vehicle is absurdly limited, so Thomas Wade, the CIA agent leading the project, decides to find some person to euthanize, and to send only the brain, on the assumption that the Trisolarans will be able to reconstruct the body using traces of the brain's old memory as a reference.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visitors_(Card_novel)"title="Visitors (Card novel)">
The novel picks up where the events of "Ruins" left off: Ram, Rigg, Noxon (Rigg's duplicate from the future who has come back to prevent him from killing Ram Odin), and Vadeshex are in the control room discussing what to do about the seemingly inevitable arrival of the visitors from Earth, followed by the destroyers. They decide to send Noxon to Earth to attempt to prevent the destroyers from coming to Garden, while Rigg will stay on Garden to assess the wallfolds and help with the war in Ramfold.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14th_Deadly_Sin"title="14th Deadly Sin">
This book has two main plots and a number of subplots. Detective Lindsay Boxer is attending a birthday party for one of the girls in her group, dubbed by themselves as the Women's Murder Club. As has happened several years in a row on this birthday, she is called away to examine a murder of a woman in a public area and this time in broad daylight with many persons around. Lindsay, with the help of her husband, tracks down leads to find who is responsible for these killings and why.The second major plot involves a series of robberies, some involving murders, committed by persons in masks and police windbreakers. This series of crimes has shaken the police department badly. The so-called "Windbreaker Cops" must be found and stopped. It is even possible they are cops rubbing shoulders with Lindsay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_Time_(novel)"title="Swing Time (novel)">
Beginning in 2008, the novel tells the story of two mixed-race, black and white, girls who meet in 1982 in a tap class in London. The unnamed narrator, who has a white, working-class father, and a mother of Jamaican descent is immediately drawn to the precocious Tracey, who has a white mother and a black father in prison, as they have the same skin colour and are the only black children at their dance lessons. Despite the fact that the narrator's semi-intellectual mother looks down on Tracey, the two become best friends as they live in neighbouring estate flats. While the narrator's dance career is hampered by her flat feet, Tracey is something of a prodigy and goes on to win many awards. Tracey credits this in part to the fact that her father is one of Michael Jackson's backup dancers, a lie she makes up to explain his prolonged absences.When the girls are ten, a twenty-two year old Australian pop-star named Aimee becomes a world-wide sensation. At the birthday party of one of their friends the girls perform a sexualized dance, inspired by Aimee's dancing which is caught on tape by one of the girls and which is cut short when the mother of the birthday girl walks in on Tracey and the narrator on top of each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fender_Lizards"title="Fender Lizards">
17-year-old Dot Sherman is growing up in a small town in East Texas, living in a double wide trailer with her mother, grandmother, and little brother. When she was 12 her father went to get a pack of cigarettes and never returned. Dot works at the local "Dairy Bob" named after Bob the owner. All the girls serve their customers on roller skates and have nicknamed themselves "Fender Lizards". The story is told from Dot's narrative point of view.One day Dot's uncle Elbert shows up and parks his van in her front yard and Dot is eager for information about her absentee father. Elbert claims to have just been released from prison for a botched bank robbery. One day Dot's older sister Raylynn shows up for work at the Dairy Bob with bruises and black eyes. Dot goes and fetches Raylynn's kids and returns to her sister's trailer. She hides and waits for Raylynn's husband to come home drunk and then beats him senseless with a couple of 2 by 4's. Raylynn and her kids then move into the already crowded trailer. One day notices go up that a circus is coming to town featuring a women's Roller Derby team. Dot and the other Fender Lizards decide to train to take on the roller derby team coming to town with a prize of $10,000 for any team that beats them. Elbert used to roller skate as a circus clown and agrees to train the girls.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poor_Clare_(short_story)"title="The Poor Clare (short story)">
"The Poor Clare" is narrated by an unnamed young lawyer from London, reflecting on the "extraordinary incidents" which he experienced in his youth.The story proper begins several decades before. Squire Starkey, a recusant Jacobite, returns to Starkey Manor with his Irish wife and their son Patrick. Accompanying them is their Irish Catholic servant, Madam Starkey's former nurse, Bridget FitzGerald and her daughter Mary, who take up a small cottage in the grounds of the manor. Bridget comes to exercise great control over the household. Some years later, due in part to an increasingly fractious relationship with her mother, Mary FitzGerald leaves Starkey Manor to take up a position on the Continent. Racked with grief at her daughter's departure, Bridget keeps to her cottage until Madam Starkey brings her a young spaniel, Mignon, who becomes her constant companion. She receives occasional letters from Mary, the last informing her that she was going to marry a gentleman.Upon the deaths of Squire and Madam Starkey, Bridget is left alone at the cottage. After a long period without word from Mary, Bridget leaves the cottage for the Continent in search of her daughter, accompanied by Mignon. Years of unsuccessful searching later, she returns suddenly. Not long after her return, a hunting party goes shooting on the manor. One of the party, Mr Gisborne, is in a foul mood, and shoots Mignon for fun when it crosses his path. Distraught that the only remaining creature she loved is now dead, Bridget calls on the saints to curse Mignon's killer, vowing that the creature he loves best will become a terror loathed by all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Metropolis"title="Black Metropolis">
The original text begins with an introduction by novelist Richard Wright in which he relates some of the research to the themes of his work, particularly the novel, "Native Son." The preface of the book, authored by Drake and Cayton, provides an overview of the Black Metropolis. The first section of the book then sketches the history of African-Americans in Chicago, up to the early years of the Great Migration, when millions of African-Americans left the Southern United States for Northern cities. The book continues with explorations of the forces which created the separate Black Metropolis, and how the community related to the wider city. Chapters include "Breaking the Job Ceiling", "Black Workers and the New Unions", and "Democracy and Political Expediency", in which the power politics of the newly dynamic community over the wider society is explored. The book continues with a detailed portrait on the life of the community in such chapters as "The Power of the Press and the Pulpit", "Negro Business", and separate chapters on the upper, middle and lower classes of the community. The authors identify five overwhelming concerns of the entirety of the community—"staying alive, having a good time, praising God, getting ahead, and advancing the race." The final section of the book is a note by sociology professor W. Lloyd Warner on the book's methodology.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comrade_Corbyn"title="Comrade Corbyn">
"Comrade Corbyn" is a biography of the political career of Corbyn, including his unexpected and successful run for the Labour leadership. The book also examines his early life in rural Shropshire, his support for contentious causes such as Palestinian freedom and a peace process in Northern Ireland.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Like_Kyra,_White_Like_Me"title="Black Like Kyra, White Like Me">
When Christy's friend Kyra moves out of a violent neighborhood and relocates into Christy's own residential area, Christy's family and friends react negatively and are hesitant to meet Kyra's family, the Kirks. As the story progresses, tension further escalates when the Kirks are socially rejected at a neighborhood block party and vandalism occurs. However, tension is relieved when Cristy's father apologizes to the Kirks for the racism they have endured, and Christy's mother offers to call the police after the Kirk's van has been vandalized. As the story comes to a close the relationship between Kyra's and Christy's families is improving, for Christy's mother drives both her daughter and Kyra to gymnastics and allows her daughter to see as much of Kyra as she wants. Moreover, Matt, Julie and their father move out of Christy and Kyra's neighborhood and thus reduce the racial tension.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Trial"title="The Iron Trial">
The protagonist of The Magisterium Series is twelve-year-old Callum (Call) Hunt who was raised by the mage Alastair Hunt, who after the third mage war with 'The Enemy of Death' also known as Constantine Madden, and the death of his wife Sarah at the Cold Massacre, decided to spurn magic and raised up Call to be the same. Call participates in a test to see whether he has sufficient magic to attend the magisterium and train to be a mage using the four elements fire, water, air and earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princes_and_the_Treasure"title="The Princes and the Treasure">
The strong and capable Princess Elena has a problem – her father, King Rufus, has been pressuring her to marry a prince, despite her own desire "not" to marry a prince. In desperation Elena makes a wish and is whisked away by an old woman in a carriage, prompting her father to announce that he will marry Elena to any one that can rescue her. The request is answered by two men, the reluctant and shy bookworm Earnest and the strong and handsome Gallant. They eventually manage to make their way to the tower where Elena is being held, only for the old woman to demand that they bring her the "greatest treasure in the land" in exchange for the princess. Assuming that she meant physical goods, Earnest and Gallant seek out the land's five greatest treasures, only to fall in love in the process discover that the greatest treasure isn't a physical good but rather their love for one another. They return to the old woman with their answer, at which point she transforms into a beautiful enchantress and Elena is freed. The three return to the King, who is overjoyed at his daughter's return and gives the two men gold, land, and makes them both princes. The story ends with the marriage of the two princes, who live happily ever after in their own castle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_Called_Ove_(novel)"title="A Man Called Ove (novel)">
"Ove is a curmudgeon—the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they were burglars caught outside his bedroom window. He has staunch principles, strict routines, and a short fuse. People call him 'the bitter neighbour from hell.' However, behind the cranky exterior there is a story and a sadness. So when one November morning a chatty young couple with two chatty young daughters move in next door and accidentally flatten Ove's mailbox, it is the lead-in to a comical and heart-warming tale of unkempt cats, unexpected friendship, and the ancient art of backing up a U-Haul. All of which will change one cranky old man and a local residents' association to their very foundations."–promotional blurb on U.S. edition cover jacket
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sin_Eater's_Daughter"title="The Sin Eater's Daughter">
## The Sin Eater's Daughter.Twylla is a 16-year-old girl living in the castle, who is engaged to the prince. However, no one talks to her or even looks at her. This is because Twylla is not simply a member of the court. She's an executioner who kills anyone who the Queen has deemed to be guilty of treason. As Twylla is the goddess-embodied, she can kill with a single touch. The queen forces her to touch anyone who the Queen wants dead. Everyone is scared of her and avoids her, even the prince, whose royal blood makes him immune to her touch.But then one day, Twylla gets a new guard, a boy who is playful yet he can kill easily with his swordsmanship. He is the only one who doesn't see Twylla as a murder weapon or a goddess, but he instead sees the girl underneath. They get involved in a treasonous romance but that is not all that is bothering Twylla. The queen has come up with a cunning plan to destroy all of her enemies. Can Twylla protect the kingdom? Can she put aside her own love to do her duty? most of the readers might have a doubt if Twylla end up alone or with Lief. most of the readers believe that she ends up alone and happy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_in_the_Present_Tense"title="Love in the Present Tense">
The story mainly concerns Mitch, who is, at the start, a 25 year old internet entrepreneur, and Leonard, initially a 5-year-old boy. Leonard's mother leaves him with Mitch each day, but one day she departs, never to return. The story is told from the perspectives of these two protagonists, at various parts of their lives (together with a few chapters contributed by Leonard's mother: Pearl). The story deals with various aspects and types of love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Mom's_Having_a_Baby_(book)"title="My Mom's Having a Baby (book)">
"My Mom's Having a Baby" is narrated by a young girl named Elizabeth whose mother is pregnant with another child. Elizabeth takes the reader through the nine months of her mother's pregnancy and explains everything that she learns along the way. At first Elizabeth learns about doctor's visits and ultrasounds, and eventually she learns the facts of life from her mother. When Elizabeth's mother is in the hospital having the baby Elizabeth stays with her grandmother, and in the end Elizabeth is thrilled to introduce her new little brother Michael.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_of_Crows"title="Six of Crows">
In Ketterdam, the capital of Kerch, Councilman Hoede tests a drug called "jurda parem" on a Grisha Healer. The drug enhances her abilities, allowing her to control and manipulate human minds. She escapes after paralyzing Hoede and some guards, but is found dead days later.Wealthy merchant Jan Van Eck divulges the results of Hoede's experiment to 17-year-old criminal prodigy Kaz Brekker and tasks him with rescuing its inventor, Bo Yul-Bayur, from the Ice Court, an unbreachable military stronghold in Fjerda, and prevent the drug's existence from being exposed to the world. Kaz agrees for a hefty price and starts recruiting a crew: Inej Ghafa, his right-hand spy he had saved from a pleasure house called the Menagerie two years before; Nina Zenik, a Grisha Heartrender, who joins upon learning of his intention to free and employ Matthias Helvar, a former Fjerdan "drüskelle" (Grisha-hunter) detained at Hellgate Prison because of Nina; and Jesper Fahey, a Zemeni sharpshooter with a gambling addiction. Together, they break Matthias out of prison, who agrees to help in exchange for a pardon that would enable his reinstatement as a "drüskelle". Kaz also enlists Wylan Van Eck, Jan Van Eck's runaway son, as a demolitions expert and leverage if Van Eck reneges on their deal. As they are about to sail from Ketterdam, the crew repels an ambush by rival gangs; after torturing a gangster, Kaz learns that gang leader Pekka Rollins, the man responsible for his brother Jordie's death, is also after the scientist. Kaz explains his rescue plan to the crew: they will enter the Ice Court as prisoners, cross to the embassy sector through the roof and disguise themselves as foreign dignitaries during a festival. After finding and freeing Yul-Bayur from the White Island, on the inner ring, they will exit from the embassy sector.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_or_Waiting_for_the_Thursday_Boat"title="Giant or Waiting for the Thursday Boat">
McKeon, the last Giant in Ireland, is upset at Saint Patrick driving out not only the snakes, but also elves, giants, and all the other mythical creatures. In retaliation, McKeon begins throwing church bells into the ocean. Saint Patrick, upset, tells McKeon to take up his issue with God who will be arriving "on the Thursday boat". McKeon sits down to wait, but the first craft that arrives is a small boat carrying a little girl. Deciding that this cannot be God, McKeon invites her to sit with him as he waits. Other boats arrive, but none of them are carrying God. Upset, he takes the little girl and leaps straight into Heaven. There, he confronts Saint Patrick and the two go searching for God to settle the dispute. Eventually the little girl reveals herself as the Almighty, and states that inside her house there is more than enough room for "giants, elves, snakes, saints, and church bells."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Add_Magic"title="Just Add Magic">
Middle school girls Best friends Kelly, Darbie and Hannah find an old cookbook with a photo of her grandma and her two friends in Kelly's attic. In it, they find that the entries have been covered up by recipes with strange names like "Shut 'Em Up Shortcake" and "Hazelnut Healing Tart". This is the excuse Kelly has been looking for to start a cooking club with her two best friends Darbie and Hannah. They have to keep this cookbook a secret so that the magic doesn't fall into wrong hands.Kelly's little brother eats some of the shortcake and is unable to speak. Hannah eats some of the shortcake and can't talk either. Darbie added the cedronian vanilla while preparing the shortcake which means as a sacrifice, she has to keep talking incessantly until the spell breaks. Kelly and Darbie think there's something magical about these recipes, but Hannah remains skeptical.The three friends find themselves having some bad luck after using the recipes. They befriend Ida Perez / Mama P, owner of MaMa P's, the shop where they buy the exotic ingredients needed for the magical recipes. She teaches them about the Law of Returns and they decide to perform (sometimes difficult) good deeds around their town to balance things out. Grandma Quinn / Rebecca Patterson / Becky Quinn / Kelly's Grandma has lost the ability to talk. Mama P tells them that she has been spelled by Miss Gina Silvers / The old witch of town (called by the kids ). Mama P says that she will help them fight Silvers and break the spell on Kelly’s grandma. But she does not tell them she has been under a spell as well and couldn't get out of the town. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dusk_of_Demons"title="A Dusk of Demons">
Ben is a fourteen-year-old boy living a simple life on Old Isle, where the Master rules. Ben lives a carefree life with Mother Ryan and her two daughters, Antonia and Paddy, until the Master dies and leaves Ben a substantial inheritance. Not long after, the Master's house is burned to the ground. People whisper among themselves that it was the work of demons, as they believe that the demons are displeased with the Master. The Sheriff takes Ben into custody until the matter is resolved, sending Paddy's family away. Paddy warns Ben that the villagers are planning to harm him and they flee with the help of a fisherman named Joe. After journeying to the Mainland, they are reunited with Mother Ryan and Antonia in the villa of the General. The Sheriff soon arrives, apologizes, and contests with the General for the care of Ben.Meanwhile, Antonia's relationship with the Governor's son, Ralph, causes her to be exiled. She and her family are to be sent to Ireland, while Ben is to stay and receive his inheritance. Paddy, however, comes back for Ben and they escape together once more. They travel with gypsies for a time and are shocked to learn that these travelers do not fear demons or the will of the "Dark One". They part with the gypsies and continue to try and catch up with Mother Ryan but are taken captive by an enemy general who sacrifices criminals to the demons. Paddy is sentenced but Ben saves her by shooting the demons' "nest". They are pursued until a fire bursts, which renders them unconscious. Ben wakes up on an airplane where his rescuer tells him that the demons were fabricated by a secretive group in an attempt to keep people from becoming violent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_is_Forged"title="The Sword is Forged">
The Amazon queen Antiope is captured by Theseus and brought back to Athens to become his bride. They fall in love and she bears him a son, Hippolytus, but soon the Amazons besiege Athens to reclaim their queen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Census-Taker"title="This Census-Taker">
A boy witnesses a violent confrontation in his house. He flees downhill to a town and initially reports that his mother has killed his father, before amending his story and stating that his father killed his mother. Two volunteer law officials go up the hill to investigate, leaving the boy in the care of street urchins with whom he is friends. The volunteers return after seeing no evidence of violence and report a letter purportedly from the mother saying that she was leaving. They return the boy to his father's care. The narrative shifts to the past. The relationship between the boy's parents was tense, and he occasionally witnesses the father killing animals and throwing the corpses into a crevasse in a nearby cave. The boy suspects that his father has also killed people in the same way. His mother grows crops, takes them to the town to trade and scavenges in the deserted areas of the settlement. In conversations with the boy, she says that his father came from a city, wanting to escape from it. His father makes keys for the townspeople who come to visit him, which have magical properties attributed to them. The present-day boy fears his father, still believing that he has killed his mother and that he has hidden the body in the hole within the cave. He attempts to run away, crossing the bridge to the other half of the town with the street children. They are followed and after being beaten by an official, the boy is collected by the father. One day, a man with a gun identifying as a census-taker appears while the boy's father is away. He claims to be from the father's city and is responsible for locating and accounting for its inhabitants. He descends into the hole after hearing of the boy's belief as to his mother's fate, although what he finds is not revealed. He tells the boy to hide himself while he awaits his father's return. After some time, the census-taker reappears and drops something into the hole that the boy does not see. He offers the boy the chance to leave with him and become his associate, which the boy accepts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Name_Is_Lucy_Barton"title="My Name Is Lucy Barton">
Growing up in a dysfunctional household, Lucy Barton had a difficult childhood. Her father was abusive and while her mother loved Lucy, she was unable to protect her or her siblings from their father's mercurial mood swings and violent nature. As a result Lucy would frequently take solace in reading, which led her to realize that she wanted to become a writer. When she came of age, Lucy quickly fled the family home. Years later Lucy is hospitalized after she develops an infection following an operation. During her stay, her mother comes to visit and the two reconnect after years of not speaking to each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burgess_Boys"title="The Burgess Boys">
After their father died in a freak car accident, Jim and Bob Burgess were eager to leave their home in Shirley Falls, Maine. In the years that followed they managed to find careers in the legal field in New York City. Jim has been especially successful as a corporate lawyer while Bob became a Legal Aid attorney. The two have a seemingly loving but competitive relationship that is only truly challenged after their sister Susan calls them seeking assistance. Her son Zach has been accused of committing a hate crime against the Somali community of Shirley Falls. He had been caught throwing a pig's head into a Somali mosque during Ramadan, which he claims was meant only as a jokeAs the siblings reconnect, long-running tensions are brought to the surface. It's revealed that Bob has always resented Jim's teasing and Bob's twin sister Susan actively dislikes her twin. Jim is not immune to all of this, as he eventually finds that he has been taking his seemingly perfect home life for granted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_and_Isabelle"title="Amy and Isabelle">
When she is 16-years-old Amy goes to work at her mother's office, working in the office part of a mill in Shirley Falls. The two had previously had a close relationship, but their current relationship is strained and Amy is disdainful of her mother who she sees her as an awkward outsider. A year previously Amy's math teacher was replaced by a substitute, Mr. Robertson. Amy becomes attracted to him after he singles her out for her beautiful gold curly hair and tells her that she looks like a poet. After maneuvering her way into detention with him the two begin to spend time with one another after school, eventually progressing to Mr. Robertson driving Amy home and eventually kissing her. Isabelle meanwhile begins to sense that her daughter is ashamed of her as she never graduated from college. She begins to try to self improve by reading.Meanwhile, the physical relationship between Amy and her older math teacher, Mr. Robertson progresses. They are eventually caught by Avery Clark, Isabelle's boss, who finds a nude Amy and Mr. Robertson in the car and informs Isabelle what he has seen. Isabelle feels angry at Mr. Robertson, but is also jealous of her daughter for having a sexual relationship. She persuades Mr. Robertson to leave by threatening to report him to the police as Amy is underage. Returning home she cuts off Amy's hair in a fit of rage, causing a rift between mother and daughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Madagaskar_Plan"title="The Madagaskar Plan">
Following on directly from events in Saville's previous novel "The Afrika Reich", the protagonist, Burton Cole, returns home to Britain to find that his lover, Madeleine, has vanished. Meanwhile, Hochburg’s invasion of Rhodesia has turned to disaster and his forces have been driven back by the Rhodesian Army across the border to the Kongo. Emboldened by his failure, anti-Nazi guerrillas in the north of the Kongo, secretly aided by the British and Portuguese, have launched a new insurgency, which leaves Hochburg to fight a war on two fronts. After a conference call with Himmler, Hochburg realises that there will be no reinforcements from Europe. Visiting the Shinkolobwe mine, he learns of a super-weapon that will help him turn the tide of the war. Because of Hitler’s policy banning the development of nuclear weapons, the only people capable of developing a bomb for Hochburg are Jewish physicists exiled to Madagascar. Hochburg travels to the island and comes into conflict with its governor, Odilo Globočnik.Cole has discovered that Madeleine has been sent to the island as a prisoner and smuggles himself there in an effort to find her. He visits the scuppered cruiseliner, the "Wilhelm Gustloff", which is moored off the island and holds the records of all the Jews on Madagascar and learns of Madeleine’s address in the town of Antsohihy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carry_On_(novel)"title="Carry On (novel)">
Simon Snow is an 18 year old orphaned magician returning to Watford School of Magicks for his eighth and final year. Raised among the "Normals" (humans without magickal powers) Simon was discovered as a child by his mentor The Mage, who is the headmaster of Watford, and the leader of the magickal world. Simon has an unprecedented amount of magical power, and is thus dubbed "The Chosen One", the prophesied Greatest Mage. The prophecy states that one will come to end magick (believed to be a recently appeared creature called the Insidious Humdrum) and one (believed to be Simon) will bring its fall. Around the time of Simon's birth, magickal "dead spots" started appearing all over England, places where magick no longer exists, and magickal beings are unable to use their powers. Their appearance is attributed to the Humdrum. The book is also frequently interrupted by short chapters narrated by a character named Lucy, who reflects on her own times at Watford years ago, and her budding relationship with another student named Davy, a man obsessed with the prophecy of the Greatest Mage. Simon reunites with Penelope and the shy goatherd Ebb, as well as his beautiful girlfriend Agatha Wellbelove. Despite their seemingly perfect relationship, Agatha yearns for independence and breaks up with Simon. Yet another point of contention in Simon's life is his vampire roommate Basilton "Baz" Grimm-Pitch, whom he considers his "nemesis." For the first two months of the school year, Baz is absent with no explanation, to Simon's frustration. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Liberal_Politics_of_Adolf_Hitler"title="The Liberal Politics of Adolf Hitler">
"The Liberal Politics of Adolf Hitler" is a dystopian novel set approximately fifty years into the future, when a European superstate has been formed and the individual countries of Europe officially dissolved. Power is centralised in the hands of a corporate-driven elite based in Brussels and Berlin. Controllers describe this masked dictatorship as New Democracy. Elections are a thing of the past, and the cultures of the old nation states are recycled in distorted ways. Across Europe, people fight back, with the two main British resistance groups being GB45 and Conflict.The novel looks at globalization, the nature of democracy, the manipulation of language, and the future uses of technology. Physical books and hard-copy recordings of documentary, news, film, and music have been outlawed, and full-scale digitisation of the same means history and culture can be edited, rewritten, or deleted as seen fit by those in power. The title of the book draws on a single mention of Hitler, whose crimes against humanity have in this way been hidden from new generations. There is also an animal-rights thread to the story that, in an interview with "3am Magazine" (which described the book as "a timely and provocative satire"), the author linked to his next novel, "Slaughterhouse Prayer".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(Verhœven_series)"title="Alex (Verhœven series)">
Alex Prevost – kidnapped, savagely beaten, suspended from the ceiling of an abandoned warehouse in a wooden cage – is running out of time. Her abductor appears to want only to watch her die. Apart from a shaky eyewitness report, Police Commandant Camille Verhœven has nothing to go on: no suspects, no leads.To find the young woman, the detective - a man with a tragic past and extraordinary abilities as an investigator - must first understand more about her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_(Verhœven_series)"title="Irene (Verhœven series)">
Commandant Verhoeven is happily married, expecting his first child with his lovely wife Irène.. A series of unsolved murders start to put a strain to his relationship. With his personal life in shambles, he further has to deal with the press. Then Verhoeven makes a breakthrough discovery: the murders are modeled after the exploits of serial killers from classic works of crime fiction and that the killer has killed before. With time running out, Verhoeven realizes that all along he's been the unwitting dupe in The Novelist's plans to create an original work of his own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Down_Under"title="Private Down Under">
In previous Private novels James Patterson billed Private as the world's most exclusive detective agency. Private opens a new office in Sydney, Australia. A party is thrown as the business opens, but no celebrations take place. As soon as a toast is made, a young Asian man staggers into the party and dies. This immediately gets Private into an investigation of organized crime.Within days Private is called to investigate what turns into a series of grisly murders in the wealthy Eastern Suburbs of Sydney. Added to that a famous rock star walks into the Private offices and says he needs protection, as someone wants to kill him. The staff of Private is busy in the rest of the book making headway on all these cases.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantoms_in_the_Brain"title="Phantoms in the Brain">
Ramachandran discusses his work with patients exhibiting phantom limbs, the Capgras delusion, pseudobulbar affect and hemispatial neglect following stroke, and religious experiences associated with epileptic seizure, among other disorders. Ramachandran uses these cases to illustrate the construction of body image, and the functioning of mood, decision-making, self-deception, and artistic skill.In the final chapter of the book, Ramachandran addresses the so-called hard problem of consciousness, discussing qualia and various facets of the self.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_to_the_Sea"title="Salt to the Sea">
"Salt to the Sea" takes place in East Prussia in 1945. The book follows four central characters as they evacuate their home countries: Emilia, a teenage, Polish orphan;  Florian, a restoration artist from East Prussia; Joana, a Lithuanian nurse; and Alfred, a Nazi.Emilia and Florian meet when Florian saves Emilia from a Russian soldier. The couple runs into Joana as she is traveling with a group of refugees. Everyone is attempting to make it to West Germany to board ships and save their own lives.Throughout the journey to the evacuation ships, the refugees get to know one another. It is revealed that Emilia is eight months pregnant after an assault by Russian soldiers; Florian, the restoration artist, is on the run for stealing a piece of art from the Amber Room; and Joana feels responsible for some of the deaths of her family. By the time the group reaches the evacuation ships, their relationships are solidified. It is clear that Joana and Florian have fallen in love, and Emilia sees Florian as a symbol of good men.At this point, the group comes into contact with Alfred who is their only hope of getting tickets to the boats. They board the Wilhelm Gustoff.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aeronaut's_Windlass"title="The Aeronaut's Windlass">
Captain Grimm is an Albion privateer preying on Auroran airships when his vessel, the "Predator" is caught in an ambush and has its invaluable lift crystal damaged. Meanwhile, Bridget and Gwen (along with Rowl) are new recruits in training for the Spirearch's Guard under the supervision of Gwen's cousin, Benedict. Near the end of their training, spire Albion suffers an attack by the forces of spire Aurora, who infiltrate their spire disguised as Albion guards and attempt to sabotage their crystal production facilities. Both Captain Grimm and the Spireguard group fight groups of invaders, eventually crossing paths when Grimm helps break up a Mexican standoff the guards found themselves in.The monarch of Spire Albion, Spirearch Addison Orson Magnus Jeremiah Albion recruits Bridget, Gwen and Benedict to investigate his suspicions of further infiltration by the Auroran forces. He introduces the group to Ferus and Folly; a master Etherealist and his apprentice, and contracts Captain Grimm to transport them with the promise of new lift crystals for his damaged ship. Beginning their investigation, they quickly discover disturbances in Habble Landing, a lower level of the spire where much of the spires' commerce takes place. Bridget, Rowl and Folly find themselves ambushed by a teeming mass of silkweaver hatchlings, silverfish-like insects with a venomous bite. Meanwhile, Gwen, Benedict and Ferus are attacked in a tavern by a massive silkweaver matriarch which displays remarkable intelligence for what is supposedly a simple beast.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rose_Society"title="The Rose Society">
Adelina Amouteru has turned her back on the people she loves and has loved after they turned theirs to her, except for her sister, Violetta, the only person that prevents her from submitting to the darkness that threatens to consume her. Amouteru strives to form a new 'society' composing of only the strongest "malfettos", which includes Magiano and a discarded Dagger. She calls it The Rose Society.After gathering the Rose Society, Adelina manages to take control of Kenettra as the nation's new queen, with Teren imprisoned and the previous queen dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Darker_Shade_of_Magic"title="A Darker Shade of Magic">
As a young Antari magician, Kell is one of the last magicians with the rare ability to travel between the four parallel Londons, which he calls Red, Grey, White, and Black.Kell officially serves the royal family of Red London, "The Maresh Empire," as an ambassador, traveling between worlds to deliver messages, letters of importance and other such news. However, Kell has a secret life as a smuggler, servicing people willing to pay for even the smallest glimpses of magic. It's a risky pastime with dangerous consequences.After a smuggling job goes wrong, Kell escapes to Grey London where he finds Delilah Bard, a young thief looking for a taste of adventure and a chance at something more. Delilah first saves Kell, then captures him and talks him into going with him. In a world with magic, it's of course unavoidable that things go horribly wrong along the way.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mime_Order"title="The Mime Order">
Paige Mahoney returns to London after escaping the prison camp of Sheol, accompanied by fellow survivors. She is forced into hiding to recover from her injuries. She reluctantly rejoins forces with Jaxon, for the dual purposes of regaining her place in the syndicate, and gaining protection from Scion. When Hector—the Underking—is found murdered, along with his gang, a power vacuum in the mime order opens. Paige wants to tell them about the Rephaim, but Jaxon blackmails her into silence. He announces a scrimmage, the winner of which will take leadership of the Unnatural Assembly. Paige decides to spread the word about the Rephaim through a penny-dreadful, written by the Sheol I survivors.Later, Paige is accosted by Terebell Sheratan and Errai Sarin, two Rephaim searching for Warden, her former keeper. She tracks him down, and though she has not forgotten how he used her to engineer a revolt in Sheol I, she agrees to help him take down Scion and the Sargas, the family of the Rephaim blood-sovereign, who created The Republic of Scion, and is using it to control the clairvoyants.Paige is now beset on all sides: She discovers that the pamphlet she planned, The Rephaite Revelation, was edited in a way the contradicts its purpose, making the Rephaim seem to be god-like saviors. Among the voyants, the Abbess has taken power, having murdered Hector and his gang, and Paige discovers she runs a chilling gray market, through which voyants are sold to Scion. All the while, she is balancing her alliance with Warden and evading capture by Scion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_vs._the_Homo_Sapiens_Agenda"title="Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda">
Simon Spier is a closeted, gay, 16-year-old student in his junior year of high school with a fondness for musical theater who lives in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. Unbeknownst to his family and friends, Simon has been sending e-mails to a person going by the name of "Blue", Simon himself using the pseudonym "Jacques". As the two become closer, however, Simon's secret suddenly falls under siege; the e-mails sent between him and Blue are threatened to be released if he doesn't play wingman for Martin, the class clown, and coerce his friend Abby into falling in love with him. Now, his sexual orientation could be revealed and the privacy of his enigmatic digital confidant could possibly be compromised. Simon must find a way to step out of his comfort zone, before he is pushed out, and before he loses Blue, who only grows more flirtatious by the day, and who Simon, whether by choice or not, is on the cusp of encountering in person.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything,_Everything_(novel)"title="Everything, Everything (novel)">
The story follows 18-year-old Madeline Whittier, a half Japanese, half African-American 18-year-old who is being treated by her doctor mother for severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), and therefore is not allowed to leave her house or interact with anything that has not been "sanitized". Her world consists of her mother Pauline, her nurse Carla, and the books she finds comfort in; with her father and brother having died a long time ago in a car accident. Maddy's life changes when a family moves in next door. She watches them from the window and learns that the family includes a father, mother, daughter named Kara, and a son named Olly. Olly befriends Maddy, and the two begin to message each other online. Meanwhile, Olly's father is abusive and Kara has a smoking problem.One day, Carla sneaks Olly into Maddy's house, and the two meet face to face for the first time. They begin meeting in Maddy's house regularly, and at one point Maddy even goes outside for a few seconds. When her mother discovers Maddy has been secretly meeting Olly, she fires Carla and bans Maddy from ever seeing Olly again, but they continue secretly talking. One day, Pauline shows Maddy a photo of their family in Maui when Maddy was only months old. Influenced by this photo, Maddy decides to risk it all and go to Hawaii with Olly. Olly first disagrees, but Maddy lies— she tells him that she is on a new medicine that will keep her from getting sick— and Olly agrees.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_of_My_Mind"title="Mind of My Mind">
This second novel in the series recounts the story of how the Patternist society originated. The novel is set in Forsyth, California, a city near Los Angeles, in the 1970s. The leader of the telepathic humans that later became known as the Patternists, was a man originally from Africa named Doro. Doro is about 4,000 years old and immortal. Since Doro does not have physical immortality, he must move his essence to different bodies as time goes on for his continued survival. Doro indirectly 'procreates' by controlling, selectively interbreeding and sometimes possessing the bodies of people who are telepathically sensitive (destroying the host's individual consciousness in the process), in an effort to make a group of psychically gifted superhumans he can achieve power through, who will also make him feel less alone in the world. The story is focused on one of Doro's daughters, named Mary, who is a young, poor biracial woman. Doro's hope is that his daughter Mary will connect with other telepaths and ultimately become an exceptional telepath who is able to link with other telepathic people.In the midst of Mary's status change from a "latent" to an "active" telepath, she makes the first ever Pattern as a result of her attaching mentally onto six other active telepathic people. Two years later, after Mary has added 1,500 people to her community of Patternists, Doro thinks Mary has acquired too much power and demands that she stop acquiring telepaths. This creates a conflict, as Mary will destroy herself and as a result all Patternists if she discontinues the expansion of her Patternist community. With support from her people, Mary gains the strength to fight and ultimately kill Doro by adding him to the 'pattern' and draining his life energy. There are many Patternist casualties in the fight; however, Mary is ultimately able to continue to grow and protect the Patternist society she has created. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patternmaster"title="Patternmaster">
The novel begins with the Patternmaster, Rayal, in bed with Jansee, his lead wife and sister. For a year, there have been no major attacks from the "Clayarks"; mutated humans the Patternists have been in constant battle against. Rayal and Jansee have two sons, Teray, the youngest, who is away at Redhill School, and Coransee. Patternists can connect with their children telepathically, and Jansee is concerned about her sons. To check on them, she thinks of sending a 'mute', a human without paranormal powers. Rayal disagrees, leading the couple to argue. Aside from Jansee, Rayal killed all of his siblings to become Patternmaster, and to lead the telepathic race through the powerful connections between the Patternists, known as the Pattern. The peaceful year ends as the Clayarks attack the Patternists. They shoot and kill Jansee and greatly injure Rayal, who then has to use his powers to save his own life instead of killing the Clayarks.Many years later, Teray leaves the Redhill School with his wife, Iray. As the couple is leaving, they encounter two Patternists; Joachim, a Housemaster whom Teray is apprenticed to, and Jer, an outsider. The two inform Teray of the recent Clayark raid, and tell him of their plans to visit Coransee on their way to Joachim's house. Coransee challenges Teray and tries to read his thoughts. Although apprentices cannot legally be traded, Coransee negotiates with Joachim to trade the talented artist Laro, for Teray—who is revealed to be Coransee's brother. At dinner, the couple learns that the deal has been successful and that Teray will be an outsider. Outsiders cannot be married or have children and do not control where they live. Joachim promises to try to fix the situation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay's_Ark"title="Clay's Ark">
The novel is set in a near-future dystopia in which most people must live in gated communities or in armed nomadic groups called "car families". The novel traces the experiences of Blake Maslin, a physician living in Southern California, and his sixteen-year-old twin daughters, Rane and Keira. Traveling across a Mojave desert, the three are kidnapped by Eli Doyle, the only survivor of Clay's Ark, a spaceship that made an emergency crash landing in the desert on its return from the first human mission to another planet. Eli is infected with an alien microorganism that gives him heightened sensory and physical powers, but also directs his actions toward its own survival and transmission. He has assembled a "family" on a small isolated ranch, hoping to slow or stop the microorganism's transmission, but the urge to reproduce is so strong that he seeks out other humans to add to his family. Many infected young men or older women die of the disease, but infected women survive to give birth to sphinx-like offspring—intelligent quadrupeds with extraordinary speed. The mutants, eventually (in novels set later in the series) called clayarks, see uninfected humans as food but can also spread the microorganism through their bite. Blake, Rane, and Keira are infected and Eli expects them to join in the reproductive project of the community. Blake and his daughters flee, only to be captured by a "car family" with much more violent tendencies. Blake and Rane, drawn by the microorganism to seek out food and sex, are fatally injured by the "car family." Rane is decapitated, but Blake manages to escape long enough to infect a long-haul truck driver, making inevitable the spread of the disease through the rest of the country and eventually the world. Keira, having been cured of leukemia by the microorganism, reluctantly agrees to participate and returns with Eli to the ranch family, pregnant with her own mutant child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luckiest_Girl_Alive"title="Luckiest Girl Alive">
At first glance, 28-year-old Ani appears to have a perfect life. She works as an editor at a glamorous New York City women's magazine and has a loving fiancé from a wealthy family. Yet Ani also hides a secret – as a teenager, she underwent a series of horrifying and emotionally crippling events, including a school shooting, that have continued to impact her well into her adult years. During the course of the novel, it is revealed Ani was gang raped when she was 14. She tried reaching out for help after the assault, but was subjected to cruel bullying and taunts by her peers, who did not believe her. As the story progresses, Ani begins to question whether she is truly happy with who she has become, and if her current life is the one she wants and needs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_at_Mount_Char"title="The Library at Mount Char">
Carolyn had lived with eleven "siblings" under the care of a millennia-old and godlike man known to them as Father (also known as Ablakha or Adam Black), prone to acts of sadistic cruelty. All have strange powers, learned from books held in Father's library. Carolyn employs Steve Hodgson, a goodhearted former minor league housebreaker to break into a house for her. Unknown to him, she wanted to conceal evidence of a murder committed by her. Hodgson dies, betrayed by Carolyn.A metaphysical security device from Earth's future prevents them from entering the library. We learn more about the "siblings". David has inhuman martial skills. Jennifer had healing skills and can resurrect the dead. Michael speaks with animals and Carolyn herself knows many languages, many of them supernatural. Father has vanished, perhaps killed by one of his enemies. Erwin Leffington, a former war hero employed by the US government, has come to prison to interview Steve Hodgson (now alive once more). Steve had gone to jail for the murder Carolyn committed. David frees Steve, with many casualties. Carolyn phones the US President in order to drop all charges against Steve and sends the man himself to retrieve the mystical barrier. He'll have assistance of the lions Dresden and his female cub Naga, now allies of the family. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancer's_Lament"title="Dancer's Lament">
"Dancer's Lament" takes place before The Malazan Book of the Fallen. It tells the story of how Dancer and Kellanved meet and found the Malazan Empire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cézanne's_Quarry"title="Cézanne's Quarry">
Hallie Ephron of the Boston Globe summarized the plot of C"é"zanne's Quarry: "Cézanne's Quarry" opens with the murder of Solange Vernet, the woman with whom Pope imagines Cézanne became besotted. With experienced judges away on summer holiday, the investigation falls in the lap of Bernard Martin ("a judge with little experience and no family or connections in the South of France")... [Murder suspects] Westerbury and Cézanne are a study in contrasts – one a scientist who studies the mountains, the other an artist who paints them. Martin, growing into his role as investigator, becomes convinced that neither man is responsible. The ending delivers a satisfying twist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_Over_Warlock"title="Storm Over Warlock">
Shann Lantee is lucky to be alive. He had sneaked out of the small Terran base on the planet Warlock in the Circe system to track two escaped artificially evolved wolverines, Taggi and his mate Togi, and bring them back to the base before anyone notices that they are missing. While he is gone a force of Throgs, implacably hostile insectoid aliens, attacks the base and kills all of its occupants. Shann moves across country with the wolverines and sees a downed scoutship explode and destroy a Throg flying disc.A wounded Throg confronts Shann, but another man, Ragnar Thorvald, kills it. Together the two men leave the scene and begin living off the land as best they can. Days later they make a night raid on the base, now occupied by Throgs, and they and the wolverines barely escape. On a raft they head for the distant sea, where they expect to find refuge.After evading a Throg search party, they reach their goal. Thorvald displays a coin-like disc that suddenly puts him into a trance and takes control of his mind. Shann knocks the disc out of Thorvald's hand, and Thorvald recovers consciousness, but the disc leaves a compulsion in his mind: they must travel across water to a certain island. They build a makeshift canoe and reach the island, but Thorvald's mind is again assaulted and he leaves the island, marooning Shann and the wolverines there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_for_Sanskrit"title="The Battle for Sanskrit">
## Introduction.Rajiv Malhotra explains why he wrote this book. He notes the hegemony of western approaches in studying India, and asks for a study of this western approach from a traditional point of view. His book is an attempt to provide such a reversal. According to Malhotra, western Indology scholars are deliberately intervening in Indian societies by offering analyses of Sanskrit texts which would be rejected by "the traditional Indian experts." He also finds western scholars too "prescriptive", that is, being "political activists" that want to prescribe a specific way of life.The cover of the book is a picture of artwork featuring the British philologist William Jones (1746–1794) which Malhotra had seen displayed in Oxford, depicting Jones giving knowledge to Hindu pandits.The inducement for this book was the prospect of Sringeri Peetham, the monastery founded by Adi Shankara in south India, collaborating with Columbia University to set up an "Adi Shankara Chair" for Hindu religion and philosophy, sponsored by an Indian donor. The instalment committee for the chair was to be headed by Sheldon Pollock, whom Malhotra regards as an erudite scholar but also as one who undermines the traditional understanding. Malhotra contacted the lead donor to voice his concerns, which were not shared by the donor. Nevertheless, Malhotra fears "the issue of potential conflict when the occupant of the chair takes positions that undermine the very tradition that has backed and funded the chair." According to Malhotra,
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deliverance"title="The Deliverance">
A synopsis of the book published in 1910 states:This is a romance of the Virginia tobacco fields and has for its central figure Christopher Blake. He is the descendant of a rich and aristocratic family, and through reduced fortunes is obligated to work as a laborer on the estate which for generations has been owned by his forebears. Upon the death of his father, when he is only ten years old, he suddenly finds home and fortune snatched from him, and with a blind mother and two sisters to support he begins a life of toil. He foregoes education and drudges unceasingly that his mother may be kept in ignorance of her change of fortune and that his twin sister may not have to work. After fifteen years of this existence his nature becomes hardened and his heart is filled with hatred for Mr. Fletcher, the past manager of the estate, who is now its possessor. Fletcher, who is a vulgar and ugly tempered man, has gained his possessions by cheating and dishonesty, and Christopher's one though from childhood has been a desire for revenge. He finds his opportunity in leading to ruin Fletcher's grandson, Will, a weak young fellow, who is idolized by his grandfather. Christopher leads him into dissipation and teaches him to despise his grandfather till finally in a moment of drunken frenzy he kills him. Then Christopher realizes the enormity of his sin, aids Will to escape, and takes the punishment. He goes to prison to serve out a five years' sentence, but after three years have passed is pardoned out through the efforts of Maria Wyndham, Fletcher's granddaughter, whom he has loved for years. Maria, who has returned his affection and is now the heir to the estate, is only too glad to restore it to its rightful owner, and the lovers, and their many years of unhappiness, are at least united.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Fifteen_Lives_of_Harry_August"title="The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August">
Harry August is born in the women's washroom of Berwick-upon-Tweed station in 1919, leads an unremarkable life, and dies in hospital in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1989. He then finds himself born again back in 1919 in the same circumstances, gaining the knowledge of his earlier life at an early age. He learns he is an Ouroboran or Kalachakra and is destined to be reborn again and again. He is not alone and is soon contacted by the Cronus Club, an organization of similarly affected members, who look after him in childhood in subsequent lives.In later lives, Harry studies biology, chemistry, and physics. With knowledge from previous lives, he easily becomes a professor of physics at the University of Cambridge, where he meets an intelligent undergraduate student named Vincent Rankis. Vincent and Harry become friends as they talk about theoretical physics and the nature of time. Eventually, Harry and Vincent both realize the other is also an Ouroboran. Other members of the Cronus Club later inform Harry that the world is ending and that with each life Harry lives, the ending is becoming closer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Words_(book)"title="Three Words (book)">
"Three Words" has comics by 64 female comic artists from New Zealand. Its title references the process of the creation of the content: all contributors chose three words for another contributor to use as a starting point for their comic. Submissions were also open to transgender people who identify as women, or who once identified as women.The book includes contributions from Beth Ducklingmonster, Jessica Hansell, Rosemary McLeod, and Susan Te Kahurangi King, and features essays by Robyn Kenealy, Rae Joyce, Ruth Boyask, Jem Yoshioka and Miriam Sapphira. The editors welcomed submissions from women with all levels of experience in comics creation, and the finished work included established artists as well as newcomers to the field.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_of_a_Ukrainian_Madman"title="Notes of a Ukrainian Madman">
The novel describes the period of Leonid Kuchma's presidency and the Orange Revolution. The protagonist of the novel is a 35-year-old programmer. He met his future wife during the student protests of 1990 in favor of Ukraine's independence. His father, a famous translator and a sixtier, has a new wife and a young introverted son that appears in the novel under the nickname Teenager. The wife of the protagonist is a linguist studying Nikolai Gogol. The protagonist's son studies at school and befriends his neighbor Boris, the son of a "new Ukrainian".The protagonist writes so-called "Notes", where he keeps track of all catastrophes, assassinations and scandals, of which he learns from the news. Thus he tries to channel his emotions, to describe his attitude to the corrupt Kuchma regime and avoid slipping into complete cynicism. In parallel, the notes reflect the sometimes problematic relationship of the protagonist with his wife. The notes start in an ironic, pessimistic, skeptical, even mocking tone, but at the end the tone changes dramatically, as the protagonist goes through the emotionally intense events of the Orange Revolution.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_of_Stars"title="Key of Stars">
Raidon Kane survived his clash against the eldest aboleth, but came away with his mind shattered. Destiny hands Raidon one last chance to avert the Abolethic Sovereignty's agenda, but only if he can find within himself the strength to care. Raidon, the warlock Japheth, and Anusha, a young woman whose dreams are made real, must find the Key of Stars before it is used to open the Far Manifold and unleashes a realm of chaos upon the world. The race takes them through the Fey Wild and beyond the very edge of the Far Realm itself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Asset"title="Secret Asset">
The story, the second in the 'Liz Carlyle' series, is initially divided between two threads: The suspicion of an unactivated IRA mole within MI5, and a potential, terrorist threat reported by an unpaid agent. As the book progresses, the two sub threads begin to intertwine and merge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Souls"title="Library of Souls">
After the events of the previous novel's ending, in which Jacob and Emma hide in a phone booth with Addison, Jacob discovers he has the ability to control hollowgasts as well as see them, Jacob then makes the hollow he's currently controlling back off, making it possible for the three to escape from the phone booth they're trapped in. They rest and prepare for the journey to rescue their friends and the kidnapped ymbrynes. The group manages to narrow down where their friends may have been taken and, with the help of a boatsman named Sharon, they cross over a polluted river by the name of Fever Ditch to a dilapidated village corrupted with drugs and run by the wights (Devil's Acre).There they learn that the peculiar residents of Devil’s Acre engage in crime such as piracy and trading peculiar slaves. In some cases, peculiar have even put themselves up for viewing and sale. The worst of these peculiars have also become addicted to a specific drug known as ambrosia, which is taken by being poured into the eyes and is dramatically strengthens a peculiar’s abilities. The drug also has the side effect of melting the user’s face after excessive use. This has led to frequent death matches between peculiars and other animals (including hollows), where the peculiars take the ambrosia to further augment their abilities. While trying to navigate their way around without being spotted, Addison is captured by wights while Jacob and Emma are seriously injured. They are rescued by a wealthy man and taken to his mansion to be healed. The man, Bentham, is revealed to be the one who caused the explosion in the Siberian tundra that created hollows and essentially wights (as told in the first book), and he is also Miss Peregrine's brother. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminae"title="Illuminae">
The year is 2575, and two rival megacorporations are at war over a planet that’s little more than an ice-covered speck at the edge of the universe. Too bad nobody thought to warn the people living on it. With enemy fire raining down on them, Kady and Ezra—who are barely even talking to each other after almost breaking up—are forced to fight their way onto one of the evacuating fleet, with an enemy warship in hot pursuit.But their problems are just getting started. A deadly plague has broken out and is mutating, with terrifying results; the fleet’s AI, which should be protecting them, may actually be their enemy; and nobody in charge will say what’s really going on. As Kady hacks into a tangled web of data to find the truth, it’s clear only one person can help her bring it all to light: the ex-boyfriend she swore she’d never speak to again!
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_(Patterson_novel)"title="Invisible (Patterson novel)">
Emmy Dockery is an FBI research analyst on leave. She has been obsessed with a large number of fires in which a single person always died, including one involving her sister. Local authorities, finding no foul play, ruled all these fires were accidental. New fires fitting the pattern claimed by Emmy continue to occur. No one believes Emmy and some even think she has gone mad. By continuing to insist these explained fires were really murders, she has put her career with the FBI in jeopardy. Even her ex-fiancé (nicknamed "Books"), who is an ex-FBI agent, doubts her. But one day she finds something of interest to Books and a preliminary investigation is launched by the FBI with Books in charge of the investigation and with Emmy on the team. Soon more is found and this case becomes very important, as hundreds of suspect fires are found nationwide. The case becomes scary and dangerous to members of the team, as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Day_as_a_Tiger"title="One Day as a Tiger">
After the death of his parents in a road accident as they travelled to visit him, Marty leaves his academic career at Trinity College, Dublin and returns to the family farm in County Tipperary, where he has an uncertain relationship with his brother Pierce, and becomes increasingly infatuated by Etti, his sister-in-law. Marty also finds his heart moved my Missy, a genetically engineered sheep who refuses to associate with the rest of the flock and enjoys "music, porridge and laconic stories". Eventually Etti and Marty travel to France with Missy in order to ensure her future at the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals, but they only get as far as Deauville.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Way_(novel)"title="The American Way (novel)">
The American Way chronicles the story of one of the largest industrial actions of the early 20th Century utilizing the Triangle Factory Fire tragedy, as an inciting incident. The fire, the worst workplace disaster in the history of New York City until September 11.As the fire rages and workers are dying by the scores three members of the labor union, the Industrial Workers of the World, or I.W.W., Joe Ettor, Arturo Giovannitti and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn witness the aftermath and vow to devote their efforts to the unskilled foreign labor being widely exploited throughout the country.At about the same time, with no knowledge of the growing instability of the U.S. labor situation, Michael Casaburi, a former Sicilian policeman who has lost his wife in a natural catastrophe, contemplates travel to the U.S. to seek work and a new life. Upon seeing a propaganda poster distributed by The American Woolen Company and boasting the fantastic life style available to him by working for the A.W.C., Michael decides to spend the last remnants of his savings in the trans-Atlantic voyage to New York to rebuild his life. Through a distant acquaintance of the family, after reaching Lawrence, Massachusetts, Michael secures a job and sends to Sicily for his sixteen-year-old daughter, Anna. Michael only becomes aware of the possibility of a strike after he has sent for Anna and has no idea how deep the rift between the tens of thousands of abused factory workers and the mill owners actually is. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_About_Jellyfish"title="The Thing About Jellyfish">
The book follows Suzy Swanson, the protagonist and narrator, who theorizes the death of her friend, Franny Jackson, was caused by a jellyfish sting. Suzy has started the seventh grade, which is the second year at Eugene Field Middle School in South Grove, Massachusetts. During their sixth grade year, Franny became interested in boys and started to join a more popular social circle than the sometimes awkward Suzy, who had been best friends with Franny starting shortly after they met, when they were both five years old. After the two had a falling out in the sixth grade year, Franny died during the ensuing summer before they had a chance to heal their friendship. Suzy discovers a ton more about jellyfish than she expected she would, and confides in her science teacher, who helps her form her theory. Suzy also reads about brave and daring scientists who study jellyfish, and tries to get in contact with them, to work as a team to try and prove her theory about Franny's death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Essence_of_the_Thing"title="The Essence of the Thing">
The novel begins with the end of a relationship as the novel's protagonist Nicola Gatling, returning from a trip to the shops to get some cigarettes, is told by her lover Jonathan that he wants her to move out of their shared flat. The story follows Nicola's attempts to remake her life over the ensuing several weeks in 1990s London.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Candlestick"title="The Iron Candlestick">
The novel takes place in the fictional town of Prespa (named after the homonymous area and representing Talev's home town Prilep) and follows the story of a typical Renaissance family. Focused mainly on the figure of Lazar Glaushev (whose prototype is the prominent Bulgarian cleric Methodius Kusev) and his part in the fight against Phanariotes, as well as the joint efforts of the Prespa residents for the reestablishment of the independent Bulgarian church.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Will_and_Testament_of_Senhor_da_Silva_Araújo"title="The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo">
The death of Senhor Napumoceno da da Silva Araújo, an illustrious merchant from Mindelo, the opening of the testament shows in surprises. More than a will, it is 387 pages of memoirs, which shows the dead man's face, the vicissitudes of the dissolved life, has his secret daughter and its hatred of his nephew Carlos that deprived its expected heritage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lalsalu"title="Lalsalu">
The novel starts with the description of Mohobbotnagar village and the difficulties of village life. A clever man named Majid arrives in the village and realizes that most of the men in the village are simple minded and can easily be fooled through religious superstitions. Majid starts scolding the villagers claiming that they haven't taken care of the grave of the Mudassir Pir (fake name given by Majid to make his intention come true) and tells them a made up story of a pir (Religious magician) showed him a dream that his grave is not being taken care of and that the people of that area are sinners.Almost every one of the village believed Majid's story including the so-called head of the village, Khalek Bepari. Majid makes a good impression on everyone in the village including Khalek Bepari. The villagers repaired the grave, made a majar (Shrine) and a house for Majid. Majid then starts living there and becomes wealthy by fooling the people of the village with the means of fake religious teachings. Majid also marries Rahima, a widowed lady who is a cowardly and obedient wife. Majid faces many problems as few people go against him such as Hasuni's grandfather, Khalek Bepari's senior wife, Akkas Mia for establishing a school and the arrival of a great Pir in Awalpur. But very cunningly he solves all these problems. Majid later also marries a teen girl named Jamila (as a second wife), who later on get punished for going against Majid's false teachings which results in her eventual death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gates_of_Hell_(Livingston_novel)"title="The Gates of Hell (Livingston novel)">
Alexandria has fallen to Octavian, now known as Augustus, and both Mark Antony and Cleopatra are dead. A conquered Cleopatra Selene and her husband Juba are compelled to serve Augustus while secretly seeking their vengeance against the Roman Empire using the powerful artifacts known as the Shards of Heaven. While Caesarion has spirited the Ark of the Covenant out of Alexandria for its protection, and Octavian possesses the Trident of Poseidon that only Juba can control, Juba has also acquired the Aegis of Zeus from the Alexandrian tomb of Alexander the Great, and Selene steals the Palladium of Troy from the Temple of the Vestals in Rome. Octavian and Juba are soon alerted to the existence of a fifth Shard, the Lance of Olyndicus, wielded by the Cantabrian bandit Corocotta.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Narrows_(Malfi_novel)"title="The Narrows (Malfi novel)">
The novel begins in the week before Halloween in the fictional western Maryland town of Stillwater in the days after a terrible flood has washed up the body of a hairless boy along the shores of the local culvert known as the Narrows. When two young boys, Matthew Crawly and Dwight Dandridge, go down to the Narrows to inspect the body of a dead deer, Matthew sees a figure he believes to be his estranged father up on the hill outside the town's abandoned plastics factory. That evening, Matthew is alerted to a figure out in his yard, whom he believes to be his father, but is really a vampire-like creature taking the form of his father. The creature takes Matthew away in the night.Meanwhile, Maggie Quedentock is returning home late from an affair with her husband's friend when she strikes a pale, childlike creature with her car. Police arrive, to include Stillwater Police Sergeant Ben Journell, who find no trace of anyone having be struck by Maggie's car.In the morning, Matthew's teenage sister Brandy awakes to find him missing and the back door of the house standing open. A search of the yard reveals Matthew's shirt with a series of strange holes running vertically down the back. When Matthew fails to show up that evening, Brandy's mother calls the police and reports Matthew missing.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_City"title="Dust City">
After escaping from a juvenile detention centre, Henry Whelp, the Big Bad Wolf's son, investigates the role a corporation that manufactures synthetic fairy dust had in the crime of his father, and what happened to the fairies that once protected humans and animals.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Understudy_(novel)"title="The Understudy (novel)">
Stephen C. McQueen is an actor living in London. Unlike his namesake, the famous Hollywood star, Stephen does not enjoy success, even though he considers himself very good at his profession. His career basically consists of "playing" dead people, i.e. victims of TV crimes, and the eponymous leading role in "Sammy the Squirrel Sings Favourite Nursery Rhymes". He lives in a bedsit, and cannot even afford a refrigerator. His wife Alison left him for another man.Often daydreaming about famous actors and their best scenes, Stephen is still looking for his own break-through as an actor. Meanwhile, he focuses on his job as understudy to Josh Harper, who plays Lord Byron on stage of the "Hyperion Theatre". Josh, only recently voted the 12th sexiest man in the world, is the star of the show and embarking on a Hollywood career, having already collected a BAFTA award and waiting the release of his first major action blockbuster. Stephen dislikes Josh for his superficiality and envies him. One day he comes closes to replace the star of the show, when he is already in costume, before Josh appears in the nick of time. Stephen does not get to star that night, instead switching to his usual non-speaking extra role as a lycra-clad ghost that opens the door for Lord Byron (Josh) at the end of the play, and closes it behind him. Even Stephen's face is covered.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ridge_and_the_River"title="The Ridge and the River">
The novel is based on the author's experiences serving with the Australian army fighting the Japanese in Papua New Guinea during World War II. The story follows an Australian patrol of a dozen men sent to reconnoitre a Japanese position on Bougainville Island. An action ensues in which two of the Australians are injured. The patrol must then find a way back to base, through the jungle, evading the Japanese and ensuring their wounded reach safety.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Difficult_Young_Man"title="A Difficult Young Man">
The novel continues the story of the Langtons, an Anglo-Australian family based in Melbourne, who have never truly come to terms with their place in Australian society. Like the first novel in the series, this book is narrated by Guy Langton and concerns the younger son Dominic, a man who ideals and actions are considered both eccentric and unacceptable to the Melbourne society of the time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destiny_in_Sydney"title="Destiny in Sydney">
In 1787, Scottish marine Lieutenant Nathaniel Armstrong is in charge of convicts on one of the eleven ships sent in the First Fleet to voyage from England to the other side of the world to establish a British penal colony. He lusts after fiery Irish convict Moira O’Keeffe and surprises himself when he falls in love with her. Together they nearly starve in Sydney Cove while learning to farm the harsh land and deal with the Aborigines, who suffer from the Europeans' diseases and unequal warfare.Armstrong descendants deny their convict heritage and oppose the Chinese who come for the gold rush. Three Fong brothers suffer violence and despair as they fight to forge a place for themselves. Duncan Armstrong, rich and powerful, helps pass the White Australia Policy in 1901 that greatly restrict Chinese immigration and encourages Chinese Australians to leave, while his cousin Eleanor works for women’s suffrage and a “fair go” for Aboriginal Australians.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_and_the_Seagle"title="Archimedes and the Seagle">
The Archimedes of the title is a dog, an old red setter who has learnt to read and who philosophises about the world. In particular, he is fascinated by seagulls, and one in particular, who appears to soar like an eagle, hence the "seagle".
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mango,_Abuela,_and_Me"title="Mango, Abuela, and Me">
Mia's grandmother (Abuela) has come to the city to live with Mia and her family. Her arrival is met with a language barrier between Mia and Abuela, as Abuela does not speak English and Mia has only a rudimentary knowledge of Spanish. Initially the two are unable to really connect, however as time progresses the two begin to learn each other's language by labeling each item in the house in their respective languages. Eventually Mia purchases a colorful parrot for her grandmother, which helps the two form an even stronger bond.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_Baby_Burn_(novel)"title="Burn Baby Burn (novel)">
It's the summer of 1977 in Queens, New York and all Nora López wants to do is get old enough to move out and live on her own. Her home life is difficult, as her father left home and remarried when she was little and will only occasionally send them money to cover the family's rent - something made more vital when Nora's mother begins to gain fewer hours at work. Nora's younger brother, Hector, is violent and abusive, as he will frequently beat both Nora and their mother whenever he gets angry. Her mother is dismissive of Hector's abuse as she feels that it is just a phase, or boys being boys and always tries to get Nora to calm Hector, to little effect. Nora is loath to let her best friend Kathleen MacInerney know exactly how bad things have gotten at home. Kathleen has a nice house and a loving family, including a firefighter father and a feminist mother. She doesn't think Kathleen will understand what she's going through, so she hides her bruises and poverty.Things seem to get better when a cute college boy named Pablo begins working with her at the local deli and they begin dating. However, it doesn't last and paranoia and fear creep in when fires and shootings start becoming commonplace. Not only that, but Nora always has to look over her shoulder to avoid becoming a victim of the Son of Sam, a real, notorious serial killer whose real name is David Berkowitz. The Son of Sam who pleaded guilty to eight separate shootings in New York.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_to_the_Bottom_of_the_Sea_(novel)"title="Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (novel)">
Under the command of Captain Lee Crane and with Admiral Harriman Nelson, Vice-Admiral B. J. Crawford, Congressman Llewellyn Parker, and psychologist Susan Hiller aboard, the nuclear-powered submarine USOS. "Seaview" goes under the Arctic ice for a shakedown cruise. Partway through the cruise the crew find that the ice is melting and when Seaview surfaces they see that the sky appears to be on fire. Radio communication is extremely difficult, but they get a request to come to New York, where the UN is holding a meeting of top scientists. After rescuing a man, Alvarez, from an ice floe, they head south.With help from Vice-Admiral Crawford, Admiral Nelson collates observations and carries out calculations whose answers tell him what he needs to do. He determines that the inner Van Allen radiation belt has caught fire, pulling air up from the overheating atmosphere. To stop the fire, to save all life on Earth, "Seaview" must launch a missile at a precise moment from a point NW of Guam and have the missile spew electrically-charged lampblack into the outer radiation belt. But first the admiral must attend the meeting in New York.At the United Nations the world-renowned scientist, Dr. Emilio Zucco, insists that the fire will simply burn itself out and should be left alone. Nelson disagrees, but there’s no time to argue and recalculate the figures. While Congressman Parker distracts the audience, Nelson and his crew make a break for it and take Seaview out to sea.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy,_Snow,_Bird"title="Boy, Snow, Bird">
Boy Novak, a young white girl, is born to an abusive father who works as an exterminator and whom she refers to as the rat catcher. In the winter of 1953, when she is twenty years old, Boy runs away from her father, and moves from New York to Flax Hill. In Flax Hill, Boy stumbles across a tenement house and begins to go on double dates with one of the other tenants who introduces her to her boyfriend's business partner, a jewellery designer and widower called Arturo Whitman. Arturo eventually tells Boy that he has a young daughter named Snow.While Boy and Arturo initially have a tempestuous relationship, they grow closer as Boy is enchanted by Snow. On a weekend trip, Arturo proposes to Boy by giving her a bracelet shaped like a snake. She thinks of the bracelet as evil step-mother jewellery, but she accepts it. Boy and Arturo have a quick wedding, after which she learns that Arturo has an older sister, Clara, who is shunned by the rest of the family.Boy becomes pregnant and gives birth to a girl she names Bird. As soon as Bird is born, Boy realizes that Bird is black. Boy interrogates Arturo, who reveals that his father and mother were white-passing African-Americans from Louisiana. He also reveals that his first wife Julia was descended from white-passing African-Americans, and they were both relieved when Snow was born with light skin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heads_You_Die"title="Heads You Die">
James's Cuban holiday has become a nightmare mission to save an old friend from a villain who has perfected 1,000 ways to kill. With corrupt cops and hired assassins hot on his heels, James must travel through Havana and brave Caribbean waters to stop a countdown to mass murder. Fates will be decided with the flip of a coin. Heads or tails. Live or die.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice-Miranda"title="Alice-Miranda">
Alice-Miranda began attending the Winchesterfield-Downsfordvale Academy for Proper Young Ladies with her friend Millie at the age of seven and one quarter when she takes on challenges such as Headmistress Ophelia Grimm, a mysterious stranger, and Alethea Goldsworthy who along with her three marionettes taunt Alice-Miranda and her friends. Now Alice-Miranda will have to face a five day camp alone in the forest, take on a massive test and face the Head Prefect (Alethea Goldsworthy) in a solo sailing regatta race or else have to leave the school and never return. Will she be able to make it through this impossible challenge and stay at school?The series continues to follow Alice-Miranda as she attends school with her friends and travels around the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/She_Who_Was_No_More"title="She Who Was No More">
Fernand Ravinel is a traveling salesman who leads a mundane existence with his wife, Mireille. His mistress, physician Lucienne, desires to open a practice in Antibes, so she and Fernand conspire to murder his spouse to collect on her life insurance policy of two million francs. They drown her in a bathtub, then make the death look like an accident, but things spiral out of control when her body disappears.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legally_Blonde_(novel)"title="Legally Blonde (novel)">
Elle Woods, a blonde University of Southern California sorority president and homecoming queen, is deeply in love with her college sweetheart, Warner Huntington III. When Warner enrolls in Stanford Law School and aims to find a girl more serious than Elle to be his bride, Elle schemes a plan to follow him there to win him back.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countdown_(novel)"title="Countdown (novel)">
In London, England, J. Rutherford Pierce meets with the Queen of the United Kingdom. However, his wife Debi Ann curtsies when Pierce told her not to, and Pierce later breaks one of the Queen's teacups while experiencing a tremor due to the serum. He tries to turn the mishap to his favor by saying that the teacup was too old and that it was time that the Queen got new china. However, the Queen is not pleased. Pierce reflect on how the Cahills are his last opponent to world domination, and vows to kill them. In Guatemala City, Guatemala, the Cahills and Rosenblooms are at the La Aurora International Airport. However, they see paparazzi who are sent by Pierce who publicize their every move. As they escape, they hear rude remarks from the paparazzi and passengers at the airport alike. They escape to their waiting chopper, and make a close escape. They see that Pierce's soldiers are after them, too- their orders are to kills the Cahills but to make it look like an accident. The soldiers' breath smells like green kale mixed with chlorine and ammonia. After the chopper takes off, one of Pierce's men jumped extremely high, due to the serum. The chopper is on its way to Tikal, where the kids have to look for riven crystal in order to complete the antidote to the serum Pierce and his thugs have taken. Dan, Atticus, and Jake are all ignoring Amy because of how she left them behind while embarking on a dangerous mission.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wink_Poppy_Midnight"title="Wink Poppy Midnight">
This young adult novel is told in three distinct voices: Wink, Poppy, and Midnight. One is a hero, one is a villain, and one is a liar, but the reader is never sure which is which. Wink has red hair, green eyes and freckles. Poppy is a bully with blonde hair and grey eyes, who is very manipulative. Midnight is a boy caught between the two of them. Everyone has a secret.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Best_Friend's_Exorcism"title="My Best Friend's Exorcism">
The year is 1988 and Abby Rivers has just started her sophomore year of high school in South Carolina. She is glad to have her best friend Gretchen Lang at her side, as they have been inseparable since they met at Abby's 10th birthday back in 1982. Gretchen was the only one to attend Abby's "E.T."-themed birthday party at the skating rink and their friendship was cemented ever since.The novel then goes through their relationship from that point on, which includes singing into hairbrushes to Madonna, getting their hair braided in Jamaica, and dealing with the awkwardness of growing up, whether it is bad acne or overprotective parents. They even try LSD with their friends Glee and Margaret at Margaret's lake house—a decision that results in Gretchen disappearing into the woods and returning a few hours later. Her friends are concerned, but Gretchen claims that nothing happened. Her actions belie her words, as she begins acting increasingly more erratic, prompting Abby to suspect that Gretchen might actually be possessed by a demon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Chief"title="The Red Chief">
The young warrior Red Kangaroo becomes a chief of his tribe – the Red Chief of the Gunnedah district. His story is handed down through the generations of his tribe and given by the last survivor, Bungaree, to the white settlers of the district.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashpoint_(Korman_novel)"title="Flashpoint (Korman novel)">
## Chapters 1-10 (Pages 1-78).The book begins with Dan Cahill, who was abducted by Cara and Galt Pierce. He thinks about the last twelve hours, in which great horrors took place. For example, Pierce is nearly president, Pony was killed trying to save Dan, and Amy only has a few more days to live due to the undiluted serum she took to save Dan. Galt and Cara Pierce, the children of J. Rutherford Pierce, begin to interrogate Dan by injecting him with sodium pentathol, or truth serum. They ask him about the antidote to the serum which Dan and the others are trying to create. Galt states how Pierce decoded Olivia Cahill's Household Book, which tells how to create the antidote. However, Dan, using his sarcasm, covers up, saying how Pierce "figured out our secret recipe for potato salad". By the end of the interrogation, they have confirmed that the last antidote ingredient is in Angkor, Cambodia. Angkor was one of the most developed societies of the ancient world. Dan inhales chloroform in order to pass out. Galt repeatedly wants to kill Dan, while Cara wants to keep him for further interrogation. They plan to fly to Cambodia in order to thwart the Cahills' plans. Meanwhile, in Guatemala, Amy drives like a NASCAR driver on a road meant for ox carts. They almost crash into an enormous logging truck, but due to Amy's enhanced powers, they are saved. In the car are Ian Kabra, the Rosenbloom brothers, and Amy Cahill. They discuss the venom of the Tonle Sap snake, which is the final ingredient to the antidote. When they reach Guatemala City, they board Jonah's Gulfstream G6. Jonah had called for an autograph session in order to ward of Pierce's goons, although he does not reveal this to Broderick, his father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Queen_of_the_Tambourine"title="The Queen of the Tambourine">
Set in a wealthy Surrey suburb of South London, the novel takes the form of a series of increasingly bizarre letters written by Eliza Peabody, an interfering neighbour and hospice volunteer. The letters are written to Joan who has left her husband and fled the country, and tell of Eliza's own marital and later mental breakdown, as the barriers between truth and fiction break down.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryder_(novel)"title="Ryder (novel)">
"Ryder" is an experimental novel and does not follow a linear narrative. The opening chapter, written in the style of the King James Bible, introduces the reader to Jesus Mundane, who is revealed later, to be Wendell Ryder. This is followed by a description of the birth of Sophia Grieve Ryder, her marriages and infamy in nineteenth century American, and then the birth of her son, Wendell. Wendell and Sophia visit England, where Wendell meets Amelia, who returns with Wendell to America and marries him. Wendell invites another woman into the family house, a cabin on a farm. This woman, Kate, becomes Wendell's love and his second (common) wife. Both Amelia and Kate bear Wendell children, and often fight and argue with one another. In one chapter Julie, eldest daughter of Amelia, is implied to have been raped. Doctor Matthew O'Connor (who also appears in Nightwood) is the family doctor. The novel features many digressions, often written in very stylised prose.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Lucia"title="Queen Lucia">
Emmeline Lucas is the social queen of Riseholme, presiding over her community and directing their interests in art and culture. A pretentious show-off, "La Lucia" drops random Italian phrases into her speech, gives concerts to her friends of the first movement of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata", dabbles in art, and plants Shakespeare-themed flower arrangements in her garden. Her neighbor, devoted faddist Daisy Quantock, has given up her uric-acid-free diet and Christian Science to focus on Indian mysticism, thanks to a mysterious guru who shows up at her door and offers to show her the Way. Lucia must decide how to annex the guru, and turn this into a social success for herself. Daisy then brings in a Russian medium, Princess Popoffski. Lucia has a harder time when opera diva Olga Bracely arrives in Riseholme for a visit, luring away Lucia's devoted friend Georgie Pillson.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvage_the_Bones"title="Salvage the Bones">
The novel follows a working-class African-American family living in southern Mississippi in 2005. The family consists of Daddy, his daughter Esch (the narrator), and his sons Randall, Skeetah, and Junior. Their mother died while giving birth to Junior. Skeetah has a close relationship with his dog China, who gives birth to a litter of puppies at the beginning of the novel. Esch finds out she is pregnant by Manny, a friend of the family's who is dating another girl. Skeetah and Manny have an altercation at one of Randall's basketball games, and they agree to resolve it through a dog fight. China prevails over Manny's cousin's dog after a vicious fight. Soon afterwards, Hurricane Katrina hits. The family is forced into the attic and eventually onto the roof as water begins to flood into their home. As the water continues to rise, they make a desperate bid to swim to another house on a hill, but in the maelstrom China and her puppies are lost. After the end of the storm, the entire town has been leveled, Manny refuses to take responsibility for Esch's baby, and Skeetah still holds out hope that he will find China.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Memory"title="Karen Memory">
In an alternate 1878, Karen Memery ("like memory only spelt with an e") is a teenage prostitute in the Pacific Northwest, whose life becomes complicated by the arrival of a serial killer, by a rival pimp's attempt to run for mayor, and by mad science.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Visible_Man_(novel)"title="The Visible Man (novel)">
Victoria Vick, a therapist living in Austin, Texas, writes a book about her experience with a former client, Y___, a man whose name the reader never learns. Most of the novel takes the form of transcripts of their sessions based on recordings or memory.Years ago, their professional relationship begins with therapy session over the phone, during which Victoria comes to believe he is a disturbed and delusional. Y___ professes to be a scientist working on an aborted secret government project he calls "cloaking technology." With a combination of futuristic fabric and light-refracting cream, Y___ says he is able to make himself invisible. Victoria does not believe him, so he arrives for an appointment in the suit. After the shock of learning that the cloaking technology is real, Victoria ceases to challenge any of Y___'s other claims of his intelligence, his moral reasoning, and his often erratic and aggressive attitude.Y___ claims to spend most of his time observing people and living in their homes to learn how they behave when alone, which he insists is essential to completing his research. Y___ recounts stories from his observational research across numerous sessions, and Vick unsuccessfully attempts to diagnose and treat him. Victoria's focus on Y___ strains her relationship with her husband, John. Y___ reveals that he is experiencing transference and has romantic feelings for Victoria, which she rebuffs. After she tells John about Y___'s cloaking technology, John suspects that Y___ is invading their home to watch him, and Victoria also suspects that she is being watched. Vick attempts to enforce boundaries with Y___ and challenge the lies she believes he has told her; Y___ reacts poorly, quitting therapy and insisting that Victoria is denying her reciprocal feelings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Widow_(Silva_novel)"title="The Black Widow (Silva novel)">
Gabriel Allon is expected to become the chief of Israel’s secret intelligence service. However, on the eve of his promotion, ISIS has detonated a massive bomb in the Marais district of Paris. He had to enter the field for one final operation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caught_(Coben_novel)"title="Caught (Coben novel)">
17-year-old Haley McWaid is a good girl, the pride of her suburban New Jersey family, captain of the lacrosse team, headed off to college next year with all the hopes and dreams her doting parents can pin on her. Which is why, when her mother wakes one morning to find that Haley never came home the night before, and three months quickly pass without word from the girl, the community assumes the worst.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clementine_Rose"title="Clementine Rose">
Clementine Rose Appleby was delivered not in the usual way in a hospital, but in the back of a minivan, in a basket of dinner rolls. The stories of this little girl begin when she is adopted by Lady Clarissa Appleby and comes to live with her in the Penberthy House Hotel in the village of Penberthy Floss with their butler, Digby Pertwhistle, known as Uncle Digby. Clementine has a big heart and a penchant for reciting poems that Uncle Digby teaches her. She has an unusual pet, a tea cup piggy called Lavender.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boys_of_Blur"title="Boys of Blur">
Charlie Reynolds, a twelve-year-old, moves to Taper, Florida. Taper's high school football coach, Coach Wiz, has died, and Charlie's stepfather, Prester Mack, is going to replace him. Charlie then meets his step-second cousin, "Cotton" Mack, who tells him strange tales of the sugar cane fields. The plot thickens when Charlie meets a strange man named Lio, finds out about the mysterious disappearance of Coach Wiz's body, and sees blood markings on the town church. Scholastic.com adds, "Charlie hunts secrets in the glades and on the muck flats where the cane grows secrets as old as the soft earth — secrets that haunted, tripped, and trapped the original native tribes, ensnared conquistadors, and buried runaway slaves."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bee_on_the_Comb"title="The Bee on the Comb">
The book tells the story of a day in the life of a beekeeper named Ambrose, and how he and his bees are affected by personifications of the four seasons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magicians_of_the_Gods"title="Magicians of the Gods">
Hancock's thesis is based on the discredited and controversial Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, which proposes that the Younger Dryas climate event was caused by one or more large comets striking the Earth around 10,800 BC. Hancock argues that this caused widespread destruction, with a short-term return to Ice Age conditions followed by massive flooding that altered the continental landscape. Specifically, he claims that coastal civilisations in and around the Atlantic Ocean, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean were destroyed by rising sea levels. He argues that this was the origin of various flood myths around the world, and that "what we think of as human history is merely the record of human events that have transpired since the last, great planetary catastrophe."To support his theory, Hancock discusses archaeological sites such as Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, the Roman Heliopolis in Lebanon, and the Egyptian pyramids. He claims that parts of these sites were built more than 10,000 years ago, in some cases much earlier than accepted by orthodox history, and with techniques and technology that were not yet supposed to be in existence. He therefore supposes that they were constructed by theorized civilisations destroyed by the Younger Dryas impact event, or else the survivors of the event and their immediate descendants. In the later case, he proposes that their purpose was to pass on the knowledge of these pre-cataclysm civilisations, with their builders being the book's titular "magicians of the gods".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stone_Warriors"title="The Stone Warriors">
## Chapters 1-12 (Pages 1-90).The book begins in an unknown city, in which Alex Sennefer and his best friend Ren Duran are running from a couple of guards. They manage to escape into a small side street. Alex reflects on how Ren and him were looking for his mom and the Lost Spells, powerful spells in the Ancient Egyptian "Book of the Dead". When he was on life support, his mother had used those spells to revive him, but had caused Death Walkers to escape. And, to make matters worse, an evil cult named The Order is working with the Death Walkers for evil purposes. The pair appreciates the beauty of the city they are in, and find out that they are in Vienna, Austria.In a secluded park, they discuss their journey. When Ren sleeps, Alex is attacked by a sheut, a shadowy Vessel that had a person’s ka and ba, or their spirit and self. Ren uses her amulet, an ibis that represents the god Thoth, in order to ward away the ancient spirit. They get a voice message from Dr. Ernst Todtman, a German scholar, and goes to a restaurant to meet him. However, it is a trap, and a fly-masked operative of The Order attacks them. After Alex wards him off using his scarab amulet, he saves Ren from a decoy waiter and they escape. They take an airplane to Cairo, Egypt, and meet up with Todtman. They discuss their next move, and based on a small clue, they decide to go to Alexandria. They meet a woman named Safa, and talk about Maggie - Alex’s mom. The next morning, they witness a loose mummy being burned by firefighters. They also meet up with Dr. Alshuff, who knew Maggie, but who they discover is a liar. Next, they look through Maggie’s paper and dissertation for more clues, finding out that she might be in a village named Minyahur. However, the fly operative - named Aff Neb - attacks them again. Some Order gunmen also captures the group. The trio wakes up to find themselves in a pit. They also figure out that they are sacrifice. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Association_of_Small_Bombs"title="The Association of Small Bombs">
The novel opens with the detonation of a bomb by a Kashmiri man, Shockie. The bomb kills thirteen and injures a further thirty, and the remainder of the novel alternates between the perspective of Shockie, those who were injured, and those who lost family in the explosion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fever_(Destefano_novel)"title="Fever (Destefano novel)">
"Fever" takes place in a future where genetic sciences have created a cure of all diseases and illness for humanity. This cure allows for the "First Generation" of perfect humans free from ailments. The First Generation live long and healthy lives, but their children and grandchildren suffer from a virus created from the cure which kills the younger generations. The virus kills females at the age of 20 and males at the age of 25. This creates a dramatic crisis in population and a disparity between the rich and poor. Females are valued for research or sold into prostitution by Gatherers.After being kidnapped by Gatherers in Manhattan, Rhine Ellery was sold to Linden Ashby and forced to marry him. After gaining the trust of Linden and befriending a servant Gabriel, Rhine and Gabriel escape the Florida mansion and start the journey to reunite with her twin brother Rowan back in New York.Beginning the trek back to New York, Gabriel and Rhine face dangerous roads and the threat of being recaptured. Rhine and Gabriel become the captors of a circus caravan that doubles as a brothel, and are forced to stay with the troop and perform a star-crossed lovers act. Here, they meet a prostitute named Lilac and her disabled daughter, Maddie. The group hatch a plan to escape the troop, and are successful; however, Lilac does not make it out with them. Continuing their journey to New York, Rhine, Gabriel, and Maddie must continue to evade the search efforts of Housemaster Vaughn. When they make it to New York, Rhine finds that her house is burnt down and there is no trace of her brother. Gabriel is suffering from drugs given to him in at the circus, and Rhine is beginning to feel the effects of the virus despite her age, and so Rhine and Gabriel decide to stay at an orphanage that is run by Maddie's grandmother – a first generation woman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_Smiles"title="Fortune Smiles">
## "Nirvana".An unnamed narrator in the near future lives with his paraplegic wife Charlotte in Palo Alto. After the recent assassination of the President of the United States, the narrator creates a digital simulacrum of him and releases it on the internet, which mitigates the national mourning. Additionally, an iProjector reanimates his body and voice, which the narrator uses to discuss his life complications. Among them is how to cope with his wife's condition; while it is possible to make a full recovery, his wife seems like a lost cause as she has not shown signs of improvement. He tries his best to console her, but most of her days are spent listening to Nirvana and smoking pot. After work one day, his boss SJ, short for Sanjay, visits him at his house. SJ wants to privatize the digital simulacrum of the president. The narrator refuses, but repairs a small drone while they talk. They learn that Google sent a drone after him in an effort to learn more about him. That night, he learns that Charlotte wants to have a baby. That night, alone, he consults the reanimated president for advice, but to not much avail. After a clumsy act of intercourse where he is unsure of what he is doing and Charlotte cries halfway through, he stops, puts on headphones playing Nirvana on Charlotte's ears, and retreats to his garage. He works through the night and creates a simulacrum of Kurt Cobain and presents it to Charlotte. Convinced that Cobain's imitation is real, Charlotte urges him to "don't do what you're thinking about" as the narrator looks on and realize that she would embrace the deceased singer at a moments notice if she could.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah's_Gourd_Vine"title="Jonah's Gourd Vine">
The novel opens with a fight between John’s mother and stepfather, Amy and Ned Crittenden, ending with Ned verbally and physically abusing his wife. John hits Ned to defend his mother, and Ned demands that he leave the home. John does not argue, stating that leaving cannot be worse than living with Ned. His mother sends him to the plantation he was born on, owned by Alf Pearson, to seek out work.On his way, John thinks of all the girls he will meet. Once he is “over the Creek” he encounters a girl named Lucy Ann Potts at a schoolhouse. Soon after, Alf Pearson tells John that he should attend school to learn how to read and write. John's relationship with Lucy develops as they interact in school and church. Lucy is from a well-off family that does not approve of John, but the pair still gets married nearly a year after meeting. Lucy moves onto Alf Pearson’s plantation with John, where they eventually have four children.Lucy’s brother, Bud, tells his sister about John’s affair with Big 'Oman, who also lives on the plantation. Bud also claims he loaned John money and has not gotten it back. This results in John assaulting Bud and getting arrested. Alf Pearson suggests that John leave Notasulga to flee his legal troubles, so he takes a train to Florida, leaving Lucy and their children. He finds work, sends her money, and eventually reunites and settles his family in Eatonville, Florida.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_R_Document"title="The R Document">
## Setting."The R Document" occurs during a future time in the United States when crime, especially violent crime, has become so extreme a problem that FBI Director Vernon T. Tynan is promoting an especially drastic solution: a Thirty-Fifth Article Of Amendment to the Constitution of the United States that would allow the Bill of Rights to be suspended in favor of its provisions during a national domestic crisis. Tynan, who had joined the Bureau during J. Edgar Hoover's tenure as its Director, had resigned after Hoover had died (saying that "once you had worked for the Old Man...you were spoiled for anyone else" to Ishmael Young, whom he has extorted into ghost-writing his autobiography) rather than work under any of Hoover's successors. (Wallace, indeed, had initially modeled Tynan on Hoover.)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Professor_Got_Stuck_in_the_Snow"title="When the Professor Got Stuck in the Snow">
Professor Richard Dawkins has been booked to give a talk at the village hall in the village of Upper Bottom to the All Bottoms Women's Institute on the subject of "Science and the non-existence of God". But his train becomes stuck in a snow-drift several miles short of their destination and he and his devoted though long-suffering assistant Smee are forced to spend the night in the home of the local Anglican vicar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seraph_on_the_Suwanee"title="Seraph on the Suwanee">
Unlike her other novels Zora Neale Hurston's "Seraph on the Suwanee" deviates from the characteristic depiction of African American life by featuring a predominately White cast of characters. The novel follows the life a Southern White woman named Arvay Henson and her family.The story is told through alternating points of view, usually between that of Arvay and her husband, Jim Meserve. The novel begins with a description of the fictional West Floridian town of Sawley. The town is described as being relatively impoverished and a place where "work was hard" and "pleasures few." Although the years the stories take place in are never explicitly stated, it is implied that the first half of the novel occurs during prohibition.When Arvay is first introduced, she is twenty-one years old and ages progressively as the novel continues. Arvay is described as a timid, helpless girl who "turned from the world" soon after her sister, Lorraine, married Reverend Carl Middleton, whom she secretly admired. At the time, Arvay had been sixteen and believed that Lorraine went after Carl was to spite her. After this betrayal, Arvay became increasingly insecure, and chose to dedicate her life to the Bible. Her dedication to her religion becomes a recurring theme in the novel and a source of contention between her and her husband. After Carl married Larraine, Arvay started to believe that no could ever love her. Her insecurity also extended to her body. The narrator states that her skinny stature was "not exactly in style in those parts" and many of the locals often teased her regarding her appearance. Arvay is insecure about other's perceptions of her, another recurring theme in the novel as she tries to overcome it. Believing that no one loves her, and that those who show love to her are feigning, she fakes seizures in an attempt to push potential suitors away. Thus, she was led to turn her back on the world for five, claiming that she would become a missionary.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Frenchman_Has_One"title="Every Frenchman Has One">
"Every Frenchman Has One" is a memoir about the author's life in Paris. There is no plot and follows no sequence of events. The book consists of twenty small chapters, each with a focus on some aspect of French life, manners, and customs from the perspective of someone new to the country. Through a series of vignettes and observations, each chapter explores a subject from the author's perspective as she experienced it, conveying the joys and difficulties encountered in her new French life. The title of the book refers to the liver—"the most significant of all human organs as the French constitution is concerned", according to the author.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Libertine_(book)"title="The Libertine (book)">
Montmorency and his daughter Gabrielle live isolated in the Swiss mountains, away from corrupted society. They live in peace until the Count Angelo D’Abini arrives, requesting shelter. Gabrielle has never met another man before other than her father, who distrusts Angelo. Angelo justifies his motives as honest and is accepted to stay.Still residing in their home weeks later, Gabrielle and Angelo have grown attached to each other but Gabrielle is confused by her feelings. Angelo is attracted to her innocence but doesn’t love her. Gabrielle shares her feelings and is embarrassed and isolates herself. Attracted to her display of innocence, Angelo pursues Gabrielle and asks her to run away with him, which she refuses. Angelo seduces her and Gabrielle mourns her loss of innocence. Angelo leaves but promises he will stay in touch, gifting a gold medallion. Eventually his letters stop.Madam Bertrand lives alone in a cottage nearby. She is concerned about Gabrielle, now physically taken with grief following Angelo's departure. Gabrielle discovers she is pregnant, and cannot conceal it from Montmorency. Blaming himself for exposing Gabrielle to corruption, he is stricken by a melancholic madness and dies.Gabrielle has a girl, Angus, but is continually melancholic, wishing to punish herself for sinning. Six months later, feeling that protection for her daughter can only be provided by a father, Gabrielle leaves in search of Angelo. She leaves Angus with Bertrand with the medallion, then, disguised as a man leaves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Night"title="Quantum Night">
Professor Jim Marchuk is an experimental psychologist at the University of Manitoba and a subscriber to utilitarianism. He is asked to testify at the sentencing hearing of a convicted murderer in Atlanta, using his new technique for identifying psychopaths from lack of saccadic eye motion, which he claims outperforms the Hare checklist. While in the United States, he learns that the recently elected President Quentin Carroway has overturned "Roe v. Wade" and enacted several measures to reduce the rights of illegal immigrants. While being cross-examined in court, Jim is shocked to discover that he is missing six months of memory from early 2001.Returning to Winnipeg, Jim consults with his colleague and mentor Menno Warkentin, whom he describes as an elderly professor who was blinded in a car accident. They attribute Jim's memory loss to the trauma of a stabbing at the hands of a stranger that Jim remembers from a New Year's Eve 2000 trip to visit his parents in Calgary. A physicist named Kayla Huron contacts Jim and informs him that her research is also related to psychopathy. As they agree to meet, Jim learns that Kayla is his former girlfriend from the lost period. Over dinner Kayla reveals that she ended their relationship because Jim was abusive towards her, but she believes that he has changed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_World_(book)"title="My World (book)">
"My World" features what appears to be the same rabbit child from its predecessor, but the bunny's consciousness now expands in scope beyond the green bedroom to a wide world. The child's understanding of the world exists in relation to his parents: "My slippers. / My pajamas. / Daddy's pajamas," and "Mother's chair. / My chair. / A low chair. / A high chair. / But certainly my chair." The child engages in various activities in parallel to his parents: brushing his teeth, playing with his toy car, etc. The book ends with his parents sitting nearby as the rabbit child swings from a tree branch, thinking "Your world. / My world. / I can swing / Right over the world."As with "Goodnight Moon", Brown's text is minimal, with a dreamlike quality and a narrative that conforms to a child's sense of logic. The artwork is composed of alternating spreads, mostly black-and-white with occasional color spreads.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undone_(Colapinto_novel)"title="Undone (Colapinto novel)">
A man with a fetish for teenage girls, Dez, hatches a greedy scheme to have his latest young conquest pose as the lost daughter of a morally upright famous author and seduce him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_an_Unknown_Man"title="The Story of an Unknown Man">
An anonymous assassin is sent to infiltrate the St. Petersburg household of Orlov, the son of a minister deemed a "serious enemy", by an unnamed radical cause. While masquerading as a servant, the narrator spies on the household and observes the extravagant and frivolous habits of the wealthy family, and is repelled by Orlov's aloof treatment of his lover Zinaida. He eventually becomes disillusioned with his mission and the purposelessness of life itself, comparing his own deceitfulness with the womanizing Orlov's self-awareness, and abandons his mission.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shooting_Party_(Chekhov_novel)"title="The Shooting Party (Chekhov novel)">
As the narrator informs, "The Shooting Party" is the name of a manuscript that an unknown author begs a Moscow publisher to read and publish. The narrator agrees at least to read it, and the author says that he will return in three months for the verdict.Within this manuscript—which makes up the bulk of the book—the narrator is the local magistrate in a rural area. His friend and drinking partner, Count Alexei, lives on a nearby estate with his hard-working bailiff, Urbenin, and Nikolai Efimych, a retailer who has gone insane. Nikolai's daughter Olga also lives on the estate, and is in the midst of a love triangle with the magistrate and Urbenin.After marrying Urbenin, Olga has an illicit affair with Count Alexei, yet still proclaims her love of the magistrate. During a hunting party in the woods near the estate, Olga wanders off by herself and disappears; she is later found stabbed to death. The initial suspicion falls on Urbenin, who appears with blood on his hands after finding her body. A one-eyed peasant comes forward who may be able to implicate a different killer, but he is murdered in jail before making the profession.The manuscript concludes with Urbenin's conviction of Olga's murder, and he is sent to Siberia for a sentence of nineteen years at hard labor. A postscript written by the publisher identifies the real killer as the unknown author of the manuscript.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_Houses_(novel)"title="Glass Houses (novel)">
The first in the award winning series, "Glass Houses" is about college freshman, Claire Danvers who has had enough of her nightmarish dorm situation. When Claire heads off-campus, the imposing old house where she finds a room may not be much better. Her new roommates don't show many signs of life, but they will have Claire's back when the town's deepest secrets come crawling out, hungry for fresh blood. Will she be able to face the town's terror or will she drown like everyone else? 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eligible_(novel)"title="Eligible (novel)">
"Eligible" tells the story of the five Bennet sisters - Jane (39), Liz (38), Mary (30), Kathleen "Kitty" (26), and Lydia (23). Jane is a yoga instructor and Liz is a writer for fashion magazine "Mascara". They both live in New York City, but return to their sprawling childhood Tudor home in Cincinnati after their father has a health scare. The Tudor house they grew up in is falling apart just like their family. Mary is pursuing her third master's degree in psychology and still lives at home. Meanwhile, Kitty and Lydia are more focused on their CrossFit classes and playing with their cell phones than moving out and finding jobs. Jane and Liz take over as the family caretakers, doing everything from cleaning to running errands to cooking healthy, doctor-approved meals for their father and the rest of the family.While all of this is going on, Mrs. Bennet, the family matriarch, really wants her daughters to get married. She is thrilled when she learns that a contestant on the dating reality TV show "Eligible" is coming to live and work as a doctor in Cincinnati. This doctor is named Chip Bingley, so in order to initiate a meeting with her daughters, Mrs. Bennet contacts a family friend and physician who also works at Christ Hospital with Chip. The group has a barbeque for the Fourth of July, and Chip and Jane immediately become smitten with one another. Meanwhile, Liz feels disparaged and disrespected by Chip's judgmental sister, Caroline, and by Chip's fellow physician and friend, Fitzwilliam Darcy.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nest_(novel)"title="The Nest (novel)">
Leo, Melody, Jack and Bea are four siblings of the Plumb family who live in and around New York. They are due to receive money from a trust fund, which they call the "Nest", when Melody, the youngest, turns 40. However, Leo's reckless actions at a wedding party means that funds need to be withdrawn from the Nest prematurely. This causes tension between the four siblings.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hair_of_Harold_Roux"title="The Hair of Harold Roux">
"The Hair of Harold Roux" explores the craft of storytelling and its intersections—and at times collisions—with everyday life and mortality.The narrative spine of the novel bridges a long weekend in the life of Aaron Benham, a clinically depressed literature professor at a New Hampshire college who has taken a leave of absence to write a novel, also called "The Hair of Harold Roux." Williams punctuates the primary plot with frequent flashbacks, a long fairy tale that Aaron had told his children over several nights before bedtime, and the text of the novel within the novel, which is based on Aaron's own experiences in college following World War II.As the main story opens, Aaron is alone in his home office in the spring of 1970, struggling to push aside the mental distractions of his life to work on his novel. Aaron is interrupted by a succession of phone calls—first, from the mother of one of his students, who seems to have vanished; second, from the wife of a colleague at the college, George, who is neglecting his dissertation and is in danger of losing his job. Aaron returns from addressing the latter crisis to discover that he has forgotten his in-laws' wedding anniversary and that his wife and two children have left for the celebration without him.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_and_Power_in_Africa"title="States and Power in Africa">
## Influence of geography on pre-colonial African states.Herbst argues that geographic features influenced how precolonial African states conceived of meaningful power.States did not seek to exert total control over strictly delineated territory. Herbst writes, "To equate states with firm territorial control is to misread even much of Europe's own history." Rather, in precolonial Africa and medieval Europe, multiple powers extracted tribute and resources from the same territory. Villages appeased the multiple powers that could launch attacks against them by offering treasure and tribute, often in the form of slaves.Geographic features encouraged this shared distribution of power. African farmers relied on rain-fed agriculture and consequently invested little in particular pieces of land. Because land was sparsely populated, African farmers could easily flee rulers rather than fight. Establishing absolute control over particular pieces of land was prohibitively costly and consequently a low priority for African elites.Varied and harsh terrain made it difficult for precolonial leaders to continuously exert power from political centers to the hinterlands. Some empires, like the Ashanti Empire, successfully projected power over large distances by building roads. The largest precolonial polities arose in the Sudanian Savanna belt of West Africa because the horses and camels could transport armies over the terrain. In other areas, no centralized political organizations existed above the village level.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi_Child"title="Stasi Child">
The novel is set in East Germany in the mid-seventies and follows a double-stranded narrative. The main story is told in third-person through the eyes of Volkspolizei detective Oberleutnant Karin Müller, who is investigating the murder of a teenage girl found in a cemetery in East Berlin, apparently having been shot by western guards while attempting to escape into the East. Müller’s ‘handler’ is Stasi lieutenant colonel Klaus Jäger who warns her the investigation is limited to identifying the girl – not challenging the official version of the killing. Müller disregards this warning, and her story eventually coincides with a first-person narrative told in the present tense by Irma Behrendt. Irma is an inmate of a severe Jugendwerkhof housed in the former Nazi holiday complex of Prora on the island of Rügen. Although the plotlines converge, Young keeps the narratives separate through the climax of the book in the Harz mountains, right through to the epilogue. Crime fiction expert and author Barry Forshaw said that while the story has echoes of Tom Rob Smith and Philip Kerr, ‘Young has a notably individual voice’. (3)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Natural_Way_of_Things"title="The Natural Way of Things">
Ten young women are held prisoner somewhere in the Australian bush by two male guards and a woman who purports to be a nurse. The women come to discover that they are all connected in that they are all the victims of sexual scandals. They have been kidnapped and kept out of society's view in order for the scandal to die down. But they are also humiliated, and physically and emotionally punished.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clippity-Clop"title="Clippity-Clop">
The protagonists, a little old man and a lady load goods, a parrot, that squawks throughout the story, and a cat, that miaows throughout the story, onto two donkeys. They then attempt to move the donkeys without success. The man ignores the lady's warning and, resorts to using a whip to move his donkey. The donkey doesn't like this, and runs away. The man chases after the donkey, eventually catches it, and entices the donkey to follow him with carrots. The donkey eats so many carrots that the man has to carry it. Meanwhile, the lady, who was left behind, reappears riding her donkey, having tied a carrot to her whip to encourage the donkey to move. She overtakes the man with her donkey happily chasing the carrot, and the cat is also pleased.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_of_World's_End"title="Giant of World's End">
Gondwane is a crazy-quilt of human and non-human societies divided into myriads of states and tribes, all built atop the detritus of seven hundred million years of previous civilizations. Over this span the laws of physics have changed, and science been largely superseded by magic. The present era, "The Eon of the Falling Moon", looks to be this far-future world's last, as the Moon has long been in a slowly decaying orbit that now threatens the planet with imminent destruction.The gigantic hero Ganelon Silvermane is a Construct made by long-extinct Time Gods, who had foreseen a succession of great world crises and created heroes to deal with them. Each is preserved in the Ardelix Time Vault until awakened by the onset of the crisis it is intended he resolve. Ganelon himself is the one designated to save the world from its own satellite, though how he is to do so is problematic; as he was awoken prematurely by an earthquake, before the crucial knowledge of his precise role could be instilled.Aided by the magician Zolobion and the warrior maid Arzeela, who loves him unrequitedly (he was built for heroics, not romance) Ganelon sets out from the land of the great Stone Face to seek the means of mankind's salvation. Ultimately, they locate the necessary device, only to discover that it can only be operated at the cost of the user's life. This the hero is willing to do, as his sole reason for being is to save humanity. But Arzeela, unable to bear the thought of his death, takes his place in the device, dying in his stead.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maestra_(novel)"title="Maestra (novel)">
Eager to leave behind her poor and mostly unhappy childhood, Judith Rashleigh has moved to London in the hopes of reinventing herself. She has taken a job as an assistant at an elite art auction house, but this job only barely allows her to pay her bills and the majority of her coworkers treat her with disdain. Her boss Rupert is the most dismissive of her co-workers, and he has no problem sending her to a client that fully expected Judith to have sex with him in exchange for selling his paintings through the auction house. It is after this last act that Judith meets up with an old acquaintance named Leanne, who introduces her to the a hostess bar where its women serve as non-sexual companions to wealthy clients. The pay from this job is quite good and allows Judith to better make ends meet. Through this job she meets James, an obese older man who proves to be her most lucrative customer. One day Judith discovers that the auction house is slated to sell a rare painting by George Stubbs, however she is savvy enough to spot that the painting is likely to be a fake. When her investigations prove this to be true, Judith is promptly fired from the art house by Rupert. This pains her, as she truly loved art and wanted to succeed at her job.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whalers_of_the_Midnight_Sun"title="Whalers of the Midnight Sun">
The novel follows the adventures of a fleet of seven ships in a Norwegian whaling expedition near the South Pole. The main characters of the book are a group of young boys who sign on for the expedition in Hobart, Tasmania.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wild_Numbers"title="The Wild Numbers">
The novel is presented as a narration by the protagonist, Isaac Swift, of the story. Isaac Swift is an able, though not brilliant, mathematics professor in a small college in an unnamed city in an unnamed country. When the novel opens Swift is in his mid-thirties and desperately trying to establish himself as a mathematician. A respected senior faculty of the mathematics department of the college has just given his seal of approval to Isaac's paper describing a proof of the wild number problem. Isaac hoped that he would soon be famous and interviewed and feted. Immediately a crisis developed as Swift was accused of plagiarising a proof of the problem already discovered by an older student, Leonard Vale. Vale's accusation was generally ignored because of his cranky behaviour in the department and his tendency to make tall claims on unsolved problems.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seize_the_Time_(book)"title="Seize the Time (book)">
The book itself is arranged in seven chronological chapters, beginning with "Growing Up: Before the Party", which includes an introduction to Bobby Seale, his initial relationship with Huey Newton, and the antecedent behind starting the Black Panther Party.The second chapter, titled "Huey: Getting the Party Going", provides the philosophical and ideological underpinnings of party, including reference to "Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung", which is commonly referred to as "The Little Red Book," as well as Fanon’s "The Wretched of the Earth", which Seale introduced to Huey Newton.The third chapter, titled "The Party Grows, Eldridge Joins", chronicles the expansion of the party and the positive effect of having Eldridge Cleaver, who was a writer for "Ramparts" magazine, join the movement.The fourth chapter, "Picking Up the Gun", provides an account of the arrest of Seale and other Panthers while they were attempting to speak out at the state capitol in Sacramento on May 2, 1967, against the government creating what the Black Panthers believed to be racist legislation.The fifth chapter titled "The Shit Comes Down: Free Huey", documents the arrest of Huey Newton and subsequent conviction for second-degree murder, as well as events surrounding the Free Huey party (also referred to as Huey's birthday rally), which was a barbeque picnic rally for the Huey P. Newton Defense Fund along with a campaign fundraiser for Newton (who was running on the ticket for Congress from the Seventh Congressional District) and Seale (who was running for the State Assembly for the Seventeenth District) wherein a coalition was formed between the Black Panther Party and Stokely Carmichael, as well as other members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. This chapter also accounts the events that occurred subsequent to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., including the shooting of Bobby Hutton and arrest of Cleaver.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gujarati_Tunki_Vartama_Pariveshni_Karyasadhakta"title="Gujarati Tunki Vartama Pariveshni Karyasadhakta">
The dissertation analyzes the literary element of setting, with examples from Gujarati short stories.The first chapter, Parivesh: Sangya Ane Suchitartho ("Setting: Definition and Meanings") discusses the definitions and meanings of setting in Indian and World literature.The second chapter, Sahitya Vivechan Kshetre Parivesh Vicharnanu Swarup ("Various Concepts of Setting in the Field of Literary Criticism"), considers how setting has been critiqued by an Indian literary critic and other international critics.The third chapter, Gujarati Tunki Vartama Pariveshni Karyasadhakta ("The Function of Setting in Gujarati Short Stories"), discusses setting in traditional, modern, and postmodern Gujarati short stories. Types of settings include Rural, Urban, Social, Backwards area, Cultural, Historical, Mythological, Psychic, and Scientific.The final chapter discusses ten short stories by Gujarati writers including Dhumketu, Sundaram, Jayant Khatri, Suresh Joshi, Kishor Jadav, Madhu Rye, Shirish Panchal, Mohan Parmar, Nazir Mansuri and Dasharath Parmar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad's_Dead"title="Baghdad's Dead">
"Baghdad’s Dead" tells the story of a superman who researches the genetic modification of individuals and ethnic groups and makes predictions about their biological and social futures. The protagonist, who remains anonymous throughout, acquires a deep knowledge of the ontology of the dead through bonding with them in the morgue while studying medicine, physics and mathematics in Moscow. He pursued these studies after escaping Iraq after the US invasion in April 2003. The novel (composed of 8 books) keeps its main subjects, in which the man folds/sets aside the first five books and devotes the last three to interpret his thoughts regarding the man who was sought after for the arduous and peculiar scientific research process through future fantasy narrative themes and schemes. The novel follows the protagonist through the war. The narrative style combines the poetic elements with the clinical knowledge of a scientist. After leaving Iraq to pursue his studies in Moscow, the protagonist's Russian girlfriend dies and he begins a relationship with another woman who works for the Intelligence Service. She helps him escape to Iraq through Syria during the first days of occupation. He tracks his family to Basrah and Baghdad, then joins an international team that finds mass grave sites in Iraq. He convinces the manager of a Baghdad morgue to let him work as a forensic scientist. There, he helps manage the affairs of the dead bodies after he reveals his medical identity. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illegal_(novel)"title="The Illegal (novel)">
The novel's central character is Keita Ali, a marathon runner from the fictional Indian Ocean nation of Zantoroland. The story follows Ali as he desperately tries to save his only sibling, who has been kidnapped.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crooked_Snake"title="The Crooked Snake">
A gang of children form a secret society to protect a nearby national park from vandals. They record the bush with a camera and write to the Ministry of Conservation requesting the park be designated a flora and fauna sanctuary. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_in_the_Bush"title="Tiger in the Bush">
This novel is the first of two by the author concentrating on the Lorenny family, who live deep in the rainforest in south-western Tasmania. Badge Lorenny, the youngest of the three Lorenny children, is given a camera by two visiting scientists who want his help in capturing images of a Tasmanian tiger rumoured to be in the district.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maigret's_Dead_Man"title="Maigret's Dead Man">
A man telephones for Maigret from a café and saying that he is being followed. Without finishing the call he hangs up. He attempts to call Maigret from different cafés, then the calls cease. Then a body is found in the Place de la Concorde badly beaten and stabbed. It was observed being dumped from a car.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil's_Hill_(novel)"title="Devil's Hill (novel)">
This novel is a sequel to the author's previous novel "Tiger in the Bush" and is the second of two by the author concentrating on the Lorenny family, who live deep in the rainforest in south-western Tasmania. The Lorenny family are hosts to their city cousins, Sam and his two younger sisters. The children set off through the bush in search of a lost cow and the novel tracks the conflicts between the city and country children and the gradual change of those from the city.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Stop_on_Market_Street"title="Last Stop on Market Street">
This illustrated children’s book follows a young African-American boy named CJ as he accompanies his grandmother, (nicknamed Nana) on the city bus to volunteer at a soup kitchen. The book begins with the pair exiting a church during a rainstorm. As they walk to a bus stop, CJ asks Nana why they have to walk in the rain, and Nana replies that trees, too, need water. When they arrive at the bus stop, CJ witnesses his friend, Colby, riding home in a car with his father and asks his Nana why they do not have a car. Later, the bus pulls up outside of them and CJ, along with his Nana, walks up to the front seat. After encountering a blind man and witnessing two boys with iPods a man plays a song on his guitar, causing CJ to finally feel true beauty. The book ends with CJ and Nana working at a soup kitchen.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Land_of_Armadillos"title="In the Land of Armadillos">
## In the Land Of Armadillos.The story of Maximilian Haas, a German SS commander, and Tobias Rey, a hired Jewish painter. Haas is the icy-hearted, self-proclaimed "General of the Jews" who wonders why he is able to kill so many without feeling anything. However when he encounters Tobias Rey, the illustrator of the book In the Land of Armadillos, he is somehow motivated to keep the depressed and faded painter alive. However, in this bloodstained world, Haas is ultimately unable to keep the poor man from being shot. For the first time, Max Haas, slaughterer of hundreds, feels the overwhelming sorrow of loss.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_Engineered"title="The Life Engineered">
The story follows the beginnings of a newly formed Ćapek named Dagir and her journey as she tries to figure out who killed her mother.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_K_(novel)"title="Zero K (novel)">
The novel concerns a billionaire, Ross Lockhart, who is inspired by the terminal illness of his wife Artis to seek immortality for both of them through cryopreservation. The novel is narrated by Ross' son, Jeffrey. DeLillo has described "Zero K" as 'a leap out of the bare-skinned narratives of "Point Omega" and "The Body Artist".'
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Menace"title="Sea Menace">
At the time when William Bligh was Governor of New South Wales, young Paul Harris, his cousin and uncle, journey from London to Sydney to farm in New South Wales. Their ship founders and they are set upon by a group of desperate men.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Then_All_Hell_Broke_Loose"title="And Then All Hell Broke Loose">
Richard Engel begins talking about graduating from Stanford and wanting to become a reporter but not your typical reporter, he wanted to focus on something more than the stock market so he moved to the middle east in 1996, when people like Saddam Hussein, Gadhafi, and Mubarak were the big leaders. At this time under the big men the middle east was angry, oppressed and rotten to the core. He lived in Cairo where he talks about how different it is from the US such as having no privacy and not speaking to a woman for two years. Engel talks about how everything in the media was heavily censored when he worked for the Middle East Times. The first attack he saw was a bus shooting and burning in Tahrir Square one of the busiest parts of downtown Cairo, he saw people shot and melted into their bus seats. He counts this and the attack in Luxor the first Al-Qaeda-style attacks. He talks about Islam and its origins- Islam's message- all men are equal in prayer, humbled together in communal submission, rich and poor side by side. Mohammad asked for 5 daily prayers, a weekly gathering with a short sermon, partial fasting for a month each year, and a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca, called the hajj, for those who could afford it. After World War I and the treaties and promises made by Europeans it left the middle east hopelessly divided. After World War II the US pretty much was the Middle East's guardian of stability. After 9/11 when Bush said he was launching a crusade many Muslims took that at face value. Engel started freelancing in 1998 for ABC, The World, and other news organizations. The hardcore Egyptian jihadists joined the holy wars in Afghanistan against the soviets then would return and get put in jail and murdered so they ran to the mountains where they would live and later form standing armies one of which is AL-Qaeda.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Missing_and_the_Dead"title="The Missing and the Dead">
Acting Detective Inspector Logan McRae manages to catch Graham Stirling who has kidnapped Stephen Bisset and tortured him. Unfortunately the only way to get Stirling to talk is to break a few rules regarding procedure...With Professional Standards breathing down his neck, Logan is sent on a "development opportunity" babysitting a rural patch of north-east Aberdeenshire as a police Sergeant. A child's body found in the Tarlair Swimming Pool, a hopeful mother of a dead girl and Detective Chief Inspector Steele messing things up really do not help Logan settle into his new job. The dead girl's mother (Helen) even moves into Logan's police house whilst he is supposed to be finding out who the dead girl is and who killed her.Added to this is the prospect of fighting off the son and daughter of Stephen Bisset who want answers from Logan, Graham Stirling being released and twisting the story of Stephen Bisset's death means that Samantha (Logan's girlfriend) is kidnapped while still comatose from the fire in Logan's flat in a previous story.The original cover features the open-air Tarlair Swimming Pool on the Banffshire coast. MacBride said that he scouted the location and when he saw how dilapidated the swimming pool was, he declared that he "just had to find a body in there." MacBride also went on several drugs raids with Police Scotland and also spent some time with their traffic unit in the area.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_House"title="Damascus House">
Amy Rotolo's announcement to her family that she is a lesbian sets off a series of events which threaten to unravel the tight knit members of Pastor Lou Bianchi's fundamentalist Christian church in Riverview, New Jersey. The resulting drama escalates to irrevocably impact Amy's parents Vic and Linda, her "perfect" childhood friend Rachel, Rachel's husband Alan, Rachel's high school boyfriend Paul, and his wife Lee.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bloomsbury_Cookbook"title="The Bloomsbury Cookbook">
"The Bloomsbury Cookbook" is described by the publishers as "Part cookbook, part social and cultural history". It tells the story of the Bloomsbury Group through chapters with food-related titles and featuring sketches, paintings, photographs, letters and handwritten notes, and original quotations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decagon_House_Murders"title="The Decagon House Murders">
Seven students, members of their university's mystery club, decide to spend a week-long vacation on Tsunojima Island off the coast of Japan. Six months earlier the owner of the island was brutally murdered alongside his wife and housekeepers, and the case remains unsolved. Soon after their arrival they begin to suspect that one of their members is intending to kill them one at a time, but who?Meanwhile, back on the mainland a former member of the club named Kawaminami receives a letter saying that the death of a girl who died at a club party one year earlier was murder. And the girl in question just happened to be the daughter of the slaughtered island owner. After learning that several other people have received a similar letter, he also begins to suspect that something sinister is happening.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsbury_Ballerina"title="Bloomsbury Ballerina">
The book profiles the life of Lydia Lopokova, a Russian-born ballerina and subsequent wife of John Maynard Keynes. "Bloomsbury Ballerina" is a personalised history of both Lopokova and the Bloomsbury Group told through the remarkable life of one of its outsiders. The book details her relationship with Keynes, and how Lopokova fought to win over Keynes, even when he had gay lovers, eventually resulting in a marriage of "mainly monogamous and deeply felt love"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trail_of_the_Serpent"title="The Trail of the Serpent">
Richard Marwood returns to the home of his mother, Agnes, in Slopperton after an absence of seven years. His uncle, Montague Harding, having recently returned from the East Indies after amassing a large fortune, is also staying there. After a brief reconciliation, Richard leaves swiftly on the encouragement of Montague, who promises him help in turning around his hitherto dissolute lifestyle; on his train journey away from the town, however, he is apprehended by two detectives, Mr. Jinks and the mute Joseph Peters, who charge him with the murder of his uncle on the night of his departure. Peters comes to suspect that Richard is innocent of the murder, and in the trial that follows manages to arrange that he pleads insane; subsequently, Richard is interred in a lunatic asylum. Meanwhile, the orphaned schoolmaster Jabez North kills a child under his care after he threatens to reveal Jabez's suspicious activity on the night of the murder. Later encountering his twin brother, on his deathbed in a derelict neighborhood of Slopperton, he switches places with the dying man; after finding a body on the heath, the police declare Jabez North to have committed suicide.In Paris, the Spanish heiress Valerie de Cevennes is discovered by Jabez (now under the name of Raymond de Marolles) in a secret marriage with an opera singer, Gaston de Lancy. With the assistance of the fortune-teller and chemist Laurent Blurosset and a mimic, Raymond manipulates Valerie into believing that Gaston has been unfaithful to her, and she poisons him for betraying her trust. In the aftermath of the poisoning, Raymond blackmails Valerie into marrying him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Solomon_Curse"title="The Solomon Curse">
Husband-and-wife team Sam and Remi Fargo are asked by a colleague to help with an underwater archaeological project on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. An ancient underwater complex is found just off the coast. The process of uncovering the ruins brings more questions than answers. This is a location where no known advanced civilization supposedly existed. Besides that someone has been to the site before and there is evidence the valuable items that were there have been removed. A clue points to the Japanese who occupied the site in World War II.Sam and Remi look to the scant evidence to find answers as to where the gold and gems from the ruined complex ended up. Their efforts seem to upset a group of rebels, who make attempts to stop the excavation and to kill anyone, including Sam and Remi, who has any information or starts poking around. Added to all this are legends about the area around the ruins being cursed, legends about giants and unexplained disappearances of islanders over the years. Cussler does not make his typical appearance in this novel.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_of_the_Angels"title="The Time of the Angels">
The action takes place over the course of several winter days in London. The plot centres on Carel Fisher, an eccentric Anglican priest who has lost his faith. At the beginning of the novel, he has just been put in charge of a church that was heavily damaged by bombing in the Second World War, so that only the tower and the rectory remain standing. His twenty-four-year-old daughter, Muriel, and nineteen-year old niece Elizabeth, a semi-invalid recluse, live with him. The household also includes Pattie O'Driscoll, Carel Fisher's half-Jamaican housekeeper and former mistress, Eugene Peshkov, a Russian émigré who works as the rectory's janitor, and Eugene's son Leo, a student at a technical college. Carel Fisher performs no church functions and refuses to admit anyone to the rectory or to communicate with anyone, including his brother, Marcus, who is nominally the co-guardian of their niece Elizabeth. Marcus is the headmaster of a school, on leave in order to write a book on "morality in a secular age". Marcus twice gains entrance to the house by stealth, and on each occasion he has a harrowing conversation with his brother, who insists that there is no God, and that in any case "goodness is impossible for us".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turner_House"title="The Turner House">
The novel tells the story of a Detroit family with 13 children as it responds to the economic woes of the city, in both the 1940s, and then in 2008. The house that sees the changes in the family, also becomes a character in the family's saga.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallbone_Deceased"title="Smallbone Deceased">
Horniman, Birley and Craine are a respectable firm of solicitors, of Lincoln's Inn, London. After the firm’s senior partner Abel Horniman dies, a large deed box in his office is opened to reveal a corpse. It belongs to Marcus Smallbone, who had been a co-trustee with Mr Horniman of the valuable Ichabod Stokes Trust. Chief Inspector Hazlerigg investigates with the help of Henry Bohun, a newly-qualified solicitor and employee of the firm. Bohan has a condition (called in the novel 'parainsomnia') that means he needs less than two hours sleep a night, giving him a great deal of time to help with the investigations. Suspicion falls initially on the recently-deceased partner, the theory being that Smallbone had been killed to prevent him from publicly denouncing Abel Horniman’s misuse of the Trust funds. Miss Cornel, who had been Mr Horniman’s devoted secretary for over 20 years, helps his solicitor son Bob Horniman take over the Ichabod Stokes Trust work. But when Miss Chittering, one of the secretaries, is strangled, suspicion switches to Bob himself, who is clearly lying about where he was on the day in question.Bohun realises that Bob Horniman is in love with another of the secretaries, Anne Mildmay. The pair had had a romantic liaison in the office on the day Miss Chittering was killed, and he lied about it to protect her. The true killer was Miss Cornel who, in an act of misguided loyalty to her ex-employer, had dispatched Smallbone to avoid Abel Hornman’s fraud coming to light; and when it appeared that Miss Chittering had information that would have implicated her, had killed her as well.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigby's_Romance"title="Rigby's Romance">
Tom Collins is travelling to Yooringa from Echuca to fulfill a contract on a cattle run. He also hopes to meet up with his old friend Jefferson Rigby. On the way he encounters Kate Vanderdecken, Rigby's former sweetheart, who has travelled to Australia searching for him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Repair_Video_Game"title="The World Repair Video Game">
This novel is about 42-year-old Kennard Stirling, son of a wealthy family, who has spurned his inheritance in favour of a small town, rural New South Wales coast, where he spends his days helping the elderly and needy members of the community, while in his spare time working on his own hobby: a project to rejuvenate various bush blocks, but fertilised by the murdered remains of itinerants, drifters and economic losers that Stirling has judged not to offer anything to society."The World Repair Video Game" enters the articulate, philosophical, but ultimately unsettling reflections of Kennard Sterling, as he holds modern Australian culture to our gaze.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_or_Demo_Crazy"title="Democracy or Demo Crazy">
The government has changed from a monarchy to a democracy by order of a king who had ascended to the throne by succession. While the people have now attained the right to vote, the only candidates are the king's twenty-four sons, who will each serve for terms lasting two years. In the successive reign of each brother, oppression and injustice abound, and they spend their terms feasting, pillaging and plundering the country as much as possible, lining their pockets with enough cash to live out their days in luxury. Each time heading up to the new election, the people take refuge in their wishful thinking that the administration of the “next” prince will make things better. But things never change. The princes had all inherited their grandfather's first name, “Demo” as a prefix to their names. The king had named his twenty-fifth son who was lacking in both appearance, intelligence and character, Demo C’est Assez (meaning Demo “is enough”) but this last prince became known among the people instead as Demo Crazy because of his devious mind and volatile behavior. In an effort to deny any of the twenty-four brothers a second chance at the throne, the people finally decide to vote for prince number twenty-five, Demo Crazy, who is in no way considered qualified for the position. The people actually do not believe that he will win, but they vote for him because they believe that he will most likely be the least brutal, and less of a tyrant than any of the other brothers. Demo Crazy forms a circle of cohorts and enacts his own Demo Crazian principles which consist of a combination of oppression and deception of the masses. He embarks upon a mission to destroy the country, playing off his actions as a “service” to the people. As it turns out, he is really in fact an enemy agent, who after ultimately fleeing his own country and taking refuge in enemy lands, surrenders his nation to them. The behavior and documented speeches of Demo Crazy are truly astonishing, and even more unusual are the laws and regulations he exercised in ruling over his country. The question of whether or not the standard and conventional democracy in the world today is predicated upon the principles and methods that Demo Crazy carried out in this book is presented only as food for thought and not as a steadfast claim. The answer to this question will be left for the reader to decide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Weapon"title="The Ultimate Weapon">
Alien invaders escape their doomed home-planet of Mira and bring their starship fleet to conquer Earth. Nothing stands in the way of the Miran invaders, except Buck Kendall, who has discovered the ultimate weapon that is Earth's last hope.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Descant_for_Gossips_(novel)"title="A Descant for Gossips (novel)">
In a dusty Queensland country town young Vinny Lalor is bullied by her fellow students at the local high school. Her teacher, Helen Striebel, is the only one to show Vinny any support and when the teacher is involved in a scandal with a fellow male teacher, Vinny is again hurt.At the same time, teacher Mrs Striebel and English teacher Moller are beginning a tentative and careful love affair. In a country town, where rumour becomes truth, gossip is the primary conversation and small-minded meanness predominates, the two teachers, while understanding the place, do not fully anticipate the risks they are taking.Vinny, as an immature thirteen year old, has a crush on her teacher Mrs Striebel. The relationship seems to be the only thing of value in Vinny's life.As a shy and unfriended child, Vinny is shunned and misunderstood by the students and adults living in the town. Her life, as it is, is bearable, but when she is kissed by a local boy after the school dance, girls in her class seek to hurt her in ways that have nothing to do with truth and everything to do with hurting the vulnerable Vinny and her teacher.The adult gossips have a field day, ensuring the whole town hears of the scandalous behaviour of Mrs Striebel and Moller, who have fallen in love (despite Moller's wife being terminally ill and living elsewhere).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_of_Throw-ins"title="Game of Throw-ins">
Ross joins a struggling Seapoint rugby team. Ronan is in a turf war with a rival "Love/Hate" tour operator. Honor is in love with a Justin Bieber lookalike. Fionnuala is marrying a 92-year-old billionaire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Wilderness_and_Lebanon"title="From the Wilderness and Lebanon">
The book describes the Second Lebanon War from the perspective of a platoon commander in the Golani Brigade. It records the preparations for battle, the fighting itself, and the responsibilities and challenges that faced him as he led his men forward under fire.The first section records how the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit compelled Israel to respond and fight in Gaza. Battalion 51, part of the Golani Brigade, entered Gaza. From fighting there the soldiers were called to fight in the north, in what came to be called the Second Lebanon War and forms the subject of the second section. Among the many engagements, the most memorable was the Battle of Bint Jbeil in which Roi Klein, the deputy-battalion-commander was killed together with seven officers and men. Among the fallen was Amichai, the author's closest friend, and Asael describes the terrible experience of finding himself holding the dead body of his dearest comrade. It is to the latter's memory that the book is dedicated. After many days' fighting at Bint Jbeil, the author himself was severely wounded when an anti-tank missile hit his vehicle.Then comes the period of his personal struggle, the mental strength he needed in order to undergo numerous operations, lengthy hospitalization, and a protracted period of rehabilitation during which he learned to walk again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_Oracle"title="The Hidden Oracle">
After falling into a dumpster in a New York City alley, the god Apollo has only very vague memories of his father, Zeus, punishing him. He learns that he was turned into a human teenager named Lester Papadopoulos. In the alley, two thugs try to mug him, but a young girl named Meg McCaffrey saves him, using fruit to chase the thugs away. Meg claims Apollo's service, binding him to her until he is done with his trials, which he must complete to become a god again. Apollo and Meg go to find Percy Jackson.With the help of Percy, Apollo and Meg journey to Camp Half Blood, a camp for demigods. On their way, they get attacked by plague spirits. Meg subconsciously summons a karpos, who defeats the spirits. Meg decides to keep him and names him Peaches, but he only shows up when she's in trouble. After arriving at the Camp, Apollo discovers that the Oracle of Delphi, in the form of Rachel Elizabeth Dare, can no longer issue prophecies; similarly, travel and communication do not work for any of the demigods. The centaur Chiron also mentions that campers have been randomly disappearing into the woods.At dinner, Meg is attacked by demigods who she previously angered. Peaches comes to her rescue, but the other demigods then attack Peaches, believing him to be dangerous. To save him, Meg reveals that her golden rings can turn into sickles made of Imperial gold. Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, claims her as her daughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Prophecy"title="The Dark Prophecy">
Six weeks after losing Meg McCaffrey to Nero and receiving the first prophecy, Apollo, Leo, Festus and Calypso are headed on a journey to stop Nero, the Beast, from controlling all of the oracles. They are rescued from a group of attacking blemmyae by Hemithea and invited into the Waystation, in the Indianapolis Union Station, where Apollo recalls answering to Hemithea’s prayer back when she was a Greek princess and turning Hemithea into a goddess, only to have his gift rejected when she joined the Hunters of Artemis. He learns that she is in a relationship with Josephine and the two of them have sacrificed their immortality as Hunters for love and are living as mortals. Their adopted daughter Georgina went missing after searching for the Oracle of Trophonius to receive a prophecy to prevent the Emperor Commodus from taking their griffins. Instead, she receives a message that damages her mind and causes her to wander away. Britomartis, the goddess of nets and owner of the Waystation, issues Apollo and Calypso a quest to rescue the griffins stolen by Commodus. The duo manages to rescue the griffins but is cornered by Lityerses, Commodus' man and the son of King Midas who holds a grudge against Leo for his role in Midas' second death and Lityerses getting turned into a golden statue. Meg McCaffrey arrives just in time and duels with Lityerses until Apollo releases the rest of the caged animals. Apollo then picks up Meg on his griffin while Lityerses is trampled, and the three go to the Waystation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belinda_(Allen_book)"title="Belinda (Allen book)">
The book tells the story of a cow that is particular about who milks her and the lengths a man takes to do so.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Australian_Girl_in_London"title="An Australian Girl in London">
Told in the form of a series of letters, the book details the travels of Sylvia Leighton from Australia to London, and her impressions of that city after she arrives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vegetarian"title="The Vegetarian">
"The Vegetarian" tells the story of Yeong-hye, a home-maker who, one day, suddenly decides to stop eating meat after a series of dreams involving images of animal slaughter. This abstention leads her to become distanced from her family and from society. The story is told in three parts: "The Vegetarian", "Mongolian Mark", and "Flaming Trees". The first section is narrated by Yeong-hye's husband Mr. Cheong in the first person. The second section is narrated in third person focusing on Yeong-hye's brother-in-law, and the third section remains in third-person but focuses on her sister, In-hye, while sporadically speaking in the present tense.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_at_the_Moss-Covered_Mansion"title="The Mystery at the Moss-Covered Mansion">
Nancy's father Carson Drew enlists her help in tracking down a missing heiress, and Nancy, Bess and George stumble upon a mysterious moss-covered mansion. They later hear that someone was murdered near the mansion, and upon investigating they hear strange noises emanating from within. The story includes a great deal of action; aside from the aforementioned missing heiress and murder, there is a needy elderly lady, a reclusive artist, an airplane accident, and a forest fire.It starts with Nancy and her friends Bess Marvin and George Fayne, who are on a trip to a place called Ashley to meet Carson Drew, Nancy’s father. Nancy and George are waiting for Bess, who has been looking for a place to get more water. It is already late, and the girls are nervous about what has happened to Bess. Nancy and George finally find her near an old mansion covered in moss. Bess claims to have heard a creepy scream from the house. George teases her, but then falls into a lily pond and loses her special watch. The girls then hear the scream that Bess mentioned. Nancy wants to investigate, but a man comes out of the house and orders them away. They hear a shot from the mansion, and Nancy grows more curious. The man comes out again and orders the girls away, and this time they return to Nancy’s car and drive to Ashley, mulling over the strange experience along the way. George suddenly notices that she has lost her watch. It is too late to go back now, but they make plans to return the next day to look for the watch.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quest_of_the_Missing_Map"title="The Quest of the Missing Map">
Nancy investigates a small ship cottage at the Chatham estate and discovers a connection between the mysterious occurrences at the cottage and an island where a lost treasure is said to be buried. With one half of a map, Nancy sets out to find a missing twin brother who holds the other half. The mystery becomes dangerous when an assailant hears about the treasure and is determined to push Nancy off the trail. Can she endure this and other grave dangers, and recover in time to solve the mystery?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_in_the_Old_Attic"title="The Secret in the Old Attic">
Nancy searches for clues to missing music manuscripts written by the late soldier Philip March. March's daughter and his father, living together on the family estate, are rapidly running out of money, and believe some of Philip's music is being sold and played on the radio. Nancy goes to his estate, Pleasant Hedges, to investigate, with the assistance of her good friends, Bess and George. They search the estate, for clues, and also find valuable antiques that they sell for Mr. March so he can get some money in the meantime. Also, her father's client, Mr. Booker, solicits her aid in his investigation of a rival company, the Dight plant, which seems to be manufacturing silk cloth using his patented methods. And what is Bushy Trott, manic scientist, doing at the Dight plant?There is also a subplot in the original text in which Nancy is confused as to why Ned hasn't asked her out to a dance. It turns out that Diane Dight, daughter of the owner of the Dight plant, intercepts his communication asking Nancy out so that she can date Ned and another boy, also involved in the mystery, can date Nancy. At the end, Nancy is imprisoned in a room with a black widow spider, about to give her a deadly bite. But Ned and Effie Schnieder, the maid, rescue her just in time. Nancy and Ned figure out how they were tricked, and make up.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clue_in_the_Crumbling_Wall"title="The Clue in the Crumbling Wall">
Nancy and her friends work to find an inheritance concealed in the walls of an old mansion before it can be discovered and stolen by an unscrupulous and crude man.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_the_Tolling_Bell"title="The Mystery of the Tolling Bell">
Nancy, Bess, and George travel to the picturesque seaside town of Candleton to meet Carson Drew's client, a woman named Mrs. Chantrey, who has been cheated out of money by buying phony stock. On the way, they stop in Fisher's Cove where Bess buys expensive "Mon Coeur" perfume from a suspicious woman. Upon arrival in Candleton, they meet busy Mrs. Chantrey at her restaurant, the Salsandee shop, and help out as waitresses for a day. While waiting on tables, Nancy meets a mysterious diner named Amos Hendrick. He tells her of his search for a missing Paul Revere bell. When he leaves, Nancy finds a piece of paper that he dropped with a mysterious message on it and gives it to Mrs. Chantrey for safekeeping.When Mr. Drew fails to join the girls as planned, Nancy is worried. She soon finds that he has been kidnapped and left in a hotel. She rescues her father, who thinks that he has been drugged. Meanwhile, Nancy also becomes interested in the local story of Amy Maguire, who married a man named Ferdinand Slocum despite her parents' disapproval.While talking with Mrs. Chantrey and the other residents of Candleton, they tell her of a cave which is said to be inhabited by a ghost who rings a bell every time water rushes through it. Nancy investigates and is swept into the sea by rushing water until she is rescued. This does not stop her and she continues to investigate the cave, which lies directly under the Maguire house. Then, Nancy discovers that many other residents of Candleton besides Mrs. Chantrey have been scammed into buying fake stock in the "Mon Coeur" brand. Nancy eventually tracks down the perfume scammers, finds out the true story of Amy Maguire, uncovers the ghost, and, with the help of the mysterious piece of paper, rescues the tolling bell, which turns out to be the valuable Paul Revere bell that Amos Hendrick was searching for.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clue_in_the_Old_Album"title="The Clue in the Old Album">
Nancy witnesses a purse snatching and pursues the thief. She rescues the purse, but not its contents, then is asked by the owner, a doll collector, to do some detective work. "The source of light will heal all ills, but a curse will follow him who takes it from the gypsies." This is one of the clues Nancy is given to find an old album, a lost doll, and a missing gypsy violinist. The young sleuth never gives up her search, though Nancy faints after being injected with poison by a French-swordsman doll, is run off the road in her car by an enemy, and sent several warnings to give up the case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_of_Blackwood_Hall"title="The Ghost of Blackwood Hall">
Nancy Drew's jeweler's customer Mrs. Putney asks Nancy and her friends to help recover her stolen jewels. The search for the thieves takes Nancy, Bess, and George to New Orleans. Mrs. Putney's odd behavior and two young women involve Nancy in a case involving a cruel hoax being perpetrated at the abandoned Blackwood Hall. Nancy's father, Carson Drew, also helps solve this mystery by contacting his workers, and helping him find the man that is connected to this mysterious affair.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clue_of_the_Black_Keys"title="The Clue of the Black Keys">
Professor Terence Scott travels to River Heights to consult with Carson Drew about the disappearance of another professor, Dr. Joshua Pitt. Mr. Drew recommends he discuss the matter with Nancy, as it seems to be more of a mystery than a legal matter. Terry Scott reveals that while on an archaeology expedition in Mexico, he, Dr. Pitt, and two other professors, Dr. Anderson and Dr. Graham, found a clue to an ancient treasure. They discovered three black keys made of obsidian and a stone tablet with a cipher engraved on it. The items and Dr. Pitt both disappeared the next morning. Only a broken half of one of the keys was left behind. Terry suspected foul play by a couple who had been working near the excavation site because they vanished at the same time. While Nancy and Terry are at the airport, someone tries to steal the half-key from Terry's coat pocket. A Sergeant Malloy helps them identify the thief, Juarez Tino, but not until after he escapes on a plane to Florida.Nancy asked her father's advice, and he suggests she talk to the other expedition members. Mr. Drew had drawn up Dr. Pitt's will and he confidentially tells her Terry is the sole heir, as elderly Dr. Pitt was unmarried. Out of caution, they want to be sure Terry is trustworthy. That night, a burglar breaks into the Drew home but is scared off. The black key, which Terry had entrusted to Nancy, remained safe in its hiding place. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_at_the_Ski_Jump"title="The Mystery at the Ski Jump">
Nancy, Bess, and George follow the trail of fur thieves to New York and into Canada. While trying to catch the thieves, Nancy must catch a woman named Mitzi Channing who is using Nancy's identity. Nancy finds out that everyone who has been buying from Mitzi is in a dreadful trap. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ringmaster's_Secret"title="The Ringmaster's Secret">
1953 Edition: Nancy's Aunt Eloise, aware of her niece's current interest in learning horseback riding stunts, sends her a second-hand golden bracelet bearing charms of horses in all five gaits; a sixth charm is missing. Coincidentally, the Sims Circus, former employer of Nancy's equestrian instructor, is coming to town. Nancy investigates the link between the unhappy circus star, young aerialist, Lolita, and her bracelet. Lolita is the adopted daughter of the acting manager, Ringmaster Kroon, and his wife. Pietro, the young, handsome clown, tells Nancy Lolita has the missing charm from her bracelet. Nancy's regular appearances at the circus, and her detective reputation brings the ire of Kroon. When a bareback rider is injured, Nancy is asked to join the show as her replacement. Bess Marvin stands in at an interview with Kroon, and agrees to audition later, while Nancy lightens her hair and cuts it to resemble her friend. Nancy's travels with the circus come to an abrupt end when she and George are kidnapped and left aboard the car of a freight train. After their escape, Nancy continues following up on clues, including a mysterious woman in England linked to both the bracelet and Lolita! In the climax of the story, Nancy is rescued by Ned when Kroon tries to imprison her in the lion's cage, and all is revealed. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_Window_Mystery"title="The Hidden Window Mystery">
Nancy and her friends, Bess and George travel to Charlottesville, Virginia in search for a missing stained-glass window. They also visit Richmond, Virginia, and the church where Patrick Henry gave his "Give me liberty or give me death" speech. The girls stay with Nancy's cousin Susan. Nancy discovers someone is trying to keep her away from Charlottesville. The mansion they are staying at is said to be haunted by a mysterious ghost. Also Nancy's new neighbors' brother, Alonzo Rugby, is in Charlottesville and is a major suspect in this mystery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_the_Golden_Pavilion"title="The Secret of the Golden Pavilion">
Nancy, Bess, and George travel to Hawaii to solve an interesting puzzle involving an old golden pavilion. They are then set to find a trio of art thieves. They help find a Chinese man's treasure.Carson Drew is asked by Mr. Sakamaki to solve the mystery of the estate, Kaluakua, that he inherited from his grandfather. The estate is located in Hawaii and has a secret. Sakamaki was warned never to sell the estate until he learns its secret.Complicating the situation, a brother and sister have suddenly appeared, claiming to be heirs to the estate. Also, somebody has been hacking at the floor of the Golden Pavilion, which is a circular open building on the estate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clue_of_the_Dancing_Puppet"title="The Clue of the Dancing Puppet">
At the Van Pelt estate, home of a local acting troupe, a mysterious dancing puppet haunts the grounds. Nancy, Bess, and George are asked to solve the case, but it will be a dangerous-yet-rewarding one when an old family mystery comes to light. From the moment Nancy, Bess and George arrive at the mansion, the dancing puppet mystery is further complicated by the Footlighters’ temperamental leading lady and a Shakespearean actor. Nancy's search of the mansion's dark, musty attic for clues to the weird mystery and an encounter with two jewel theft suspects add perplexing angles to the puzzle. This book is the original text. A revised text does not exist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moonstone_Castle_Mystery"title="The Moonstone Castle Mystery">
Nancy receives a moonstone as a gift from an unknown person; she is amazed yet puzzled. She then finds herself involved in a case involving the Bowens and their missing granddaughter, Joanie Horton. Clues lead Nancy, Bess, and George to the haunted Moonstone Castle along the Deep River.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clue_of_the_Whistling_Bagpipes"title="The Clue of the Whistling Bagpipes">
Nancy finds mystery in everything she does. In the novel Nancy and her friends along with her father head to Scotland on family business and to solve the mystery of the missing heirloom. Nancy is warned not to go to Scotland, but she ignores the warning. Nancy finds strange things in Scotland like the people. She and her friends, Bess and George, visit Nancy's great-grandmother from her mother's side (who Nancy's never met) at an estate in the Scottish Highlands. While there, Nancy becomes involved in the mystery of missing flocks of sheep and a mysterious bagpiper has been spotted. Clues leading to a discovery in an old castle and a prehistoric fortress lead to the mystery's solution.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_of_Pine_Hill"title="The Phantom of Pine Hill">
Nancy Drew, along with her friends arrive for the Emerson University June Week celebration. There is a mix-up with the motel reservations, but Ned comes to the rescue. Afterward, Ned and Nancy go to a dance, where a young waiter, Fred, spills drinks on Nancy's dress. After cleaning up, Nancy realizes that her pearl necklace is missing, leading her to a baffling mystery. John Rorick, a descendant of the early settlers of the town, invites the three girls as his guests at his historic mansion on Pine Hill. After they arrive, he tells them of the phantom who haunts the mansion's library. John also relates the weird family saga of a lost French wedding gown and of valuable gifts and gold coins that were lost in the sinking of the 'Lucy Belle' one hundred years ago. After discovering a secret passage to the library from the chimney and a secret shack, the suspicion turns on Fred and his father. In between enjoying the university's June Week, river pageant, and fraternity dances, Nancy and her friends work diligently to solve the mystery of Pine Hill and locate the long-lost wedding treasures.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_the_99_Steps"title="The Mystery of the 99 Steps">
Nancy looks for a flight of the 99 steps in France to solve the mystery of a friend's strange dream. Before Nancy, Bess, and George leaves the United States for France, a person calling himself Monsieur Neuf warns Nancy not to pursue her mission.The girls arrive in Paris and join Nancy’s father, who is trying to find out who or what is causing wealthy financier Monsieur Leblanc to selling large amounts of securities.Nancy determines that the case she is investigating involving the 99 steps is linked to the case her father is following. Nancy thinks that Monsieur Leblanc could be being blackmailed.Startling discoveries convince the youn that Mr. Drew's case and her own mystery are linked by the 99 steps, and that a mysterious Arab has a strong hold over Leblanc. Nancy thinks it could be blackmail.Nancy goes to an area in the Loire Valley to look for more clues, and Nancy, Bess, and George wind up in danger.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clue_in_the_Crossword_Cipher"title="The Clue in the Crossword Cipher">
A woman named Carla Ponce invites Nancy, Bess, and George to Peru to help decipher the mystery in the crossword cipher—a wooden plaque that promises to lead them to a wonderful treasure. Nancy must find the treasure before a gang of thieves led by El Gato (The Cat) reach it first.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spider_Sapphire_Mystery"title="The Spider Sapphire Mystery">
A client of Carson Drew, a Mr. Floyd Ramsey, is accused of stealing the fabulous Spider Sapphire which leads Nancy and her friends to Africa. Nancy uncovers a notorious scheme and solves the mystery of a missing safari guide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invisible_Intruder"title="The Invisible Intruder">
Nancy and her friends are invited on a ghost-hunting tour, visiting various locations reputed to be haunted. They gather clues that point to a more mundane explanation.Nancy uncovers a gang of thieves that are stealing rare shells from collectors. Some of these shells are no longer rare, such as Conus gloriamaris.Helen, Nancy's friend from the earliest books in the series, makes a rare appearance. Previously Helen Corning, she is now married to Jim Archer and goes by Helen Archer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Mannequin"title="The Mysterious Mannequin">
The strange disappearance of Carson Drew's Turkish client and a strange gift of an oriental rug encoded with a message woven in the decorative border start Nancy on a difficult search for a missing mannequin. But then, a robber tries to steal the rug from the Drew home. Nancy, Bess, George, Ned, Burt, Carson, and Dave travel to Istanbul to search for more clues; but then, Bess disappears during the search after the chums meet a young Turkish woman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crooked_Banister"title="The Crooked Banister">
Nancy, Bess, and George spend an exciting weekend at a mysterious zigzag house with a crooked banister and an unpredictable robot. Nancy becomes involved in the mystery of the strange house and must locate the missing owner who is wanted by police.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factotum_(novel)"title="Factotum (novel)">
Set in the 1940s, the plot follows Henry Chinaski, Bukowski's perpetually unemployed, alcoholic alter ego, who has been rejected from the World War II draft and makes his way from one menial job to the next (hence a "factotum"). After getting into a fight with his father, Chinaski drifts through the seedy city streets of lower-class Los Angeles and other American cities in search of a job that will not come between him and his first love: writing. Much of the novel is dedicated to describing various menial jobs that Chinaski temporarily holds during the USA’s WWII economic boom. Even though some of Chinaski's jobs and colleagues are described with great detail, they all eventually end with him either abruptly leaving or being fired.He is consistently rejected by the only publishing house he respects, but is driven to continue by the knowledge that he could do better than the authors they publish. Chinaski begins sleeping with fellow barfly Jan, a kindred spirit he meets while drowning his sorrows at a bar. When a brief stint as a bookie finds him abandoned by the only woman with whom he is able to relate, a fling with gold-digging floozie Laura finds him once again falling into a morose state of perpetual drunkenness and unemployment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yesterday's_Son"title="Yesterday's Son">
While studying the archaeological records of the now-destroyed planet Sarpeidon, a scholar aboard the USS "Enterprise" finds pictures of an ice-age cave painting that depicts a Vulcan face. Spock realizes that his involvement with Zarabeth in the episode "All Our Yesterdays" resulted in the birth of a child. Along with Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy, he uses the Guardian of Forever (featured in the episode "The City on the Edge of Forever") to journey back into Sarpeidon's past and rescue his son. Due to a miscalculation, they find a young man of twenty-eight instead of a child, who tells them that his name is Zar and that his mother Zarabeth died in an accident many years before. Spock introduces himself but refuses to allow Zar to call him "Father."Zar returns to the "Enterprise" and passes as a distant relative of Spock, who oversees his education and attempts to train him in Vulcan telepathic techniques. They discover that Zar is an unusually strong telepath for a Vulcan; he can establish contact without touching the other person. Zar becomes conflicted and hurt by his father's apparent refusal to acknowledge him.The "Enterprise" is called back to the planet Gateway to protect the Guardian of Forever from a Romulan intelligence raid. It is imperative to the security of the United Federation of Planets that the Romulans not discover the Guardian's powers; if they cannot be driven away, Gateway must be destroyed. The Romulans, who have landed near the Guardian, have hidden themselves behind a ground-based cloaking device. Spock devises a plan to place a force field around the Guardian. Zar volunteers to help Spock place the force field, because he can sense whether Romulans are present even though, due to the cloaking device, he cannot see them. Their first try is unsuccessful, but when they rendezvous with Kirk the three discover they are trapped on the planet while the "Enterprise" with Scotty in command battles the Romulans. They decide to try again, but Spock disables Zar with the Vulcan nerve pinch, wishing to spare him from danger. Kirk and Spock are captured and tortured by the Romulans. When Zar wakes up, he is able to telepathically sense their danger. He also realizes that his father cares about him, since he chose to protect Zar instead of Kirk, his closest friend. The "Enterprise" defeats the Romulan ships and a rescue party beams down. Zar creates a diversion by causing an explosion, allowing the others to rescue Kirk and Spock.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_for_Yesterday"title="Time for Yesterday">
The Guardian of Forever has malfunctioned and is emitting waves of accelerated time that are causing premature star deaths throughout the galaxy. After Spock recalls that his son Zar was once able to communicate telepathically with the Guardian, the "Enterprise" is placed under the temporary command of Admiral Kirk and detailed to transport a powerful telepath to the Guardian. The telepath manages to partially restore the Guardian's time travel functions but collapses in a comatose state. Using the Guardian, Kirk, Spock, and Dr. McCoy travel into the past of the planet Sarpeidon to find Zar, hoping that his powerful telepathy combined with Vulcan shield training will allow him to successfully restore the Guardian to its normal state.They find Zar in charge of a small, technologically advanced settlement that is about to engage in a battle with an alliance of less advanced but more numerous enemy clans. His death in the coming battle has been foretold by the priestess Wynn, the daughter of one of the enemy clan chiefs, who declares that the alliance will be denied victory only if "he who is halt walks healed" and "he who is death-struck in battle rises whole." "He who is halt" clearly refers to Zar, who walks with a painful limp because of a leg injury he suffered many years before. In order to increase his city's odds of survival, Zar has Wynn kidnapped and betrothed, forcing her father to change sides. The "Enterprise" men manage to convince him to come back with them and deal with the Guardian, although he insists that he will return afterward to fight in the battle despite the prophecy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Double_Jinx_Mystery"title="The Double Jinx Mystery">
This volume details the story of a family zoo and aviary, believed to have been jinxed by people out to take their land for high rise development. Nancy Drew and her friends must get to the bottom of the mystery, before they are jinxed themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Spot_of_Bother"title="A Spot of Bother">
The novel follows George Hall, a 57-year-old hypochondriac, and his family following George's retirement from a career manufacturing playground equipment. George has hypochondria, an excessive phobia for one's physical health. Certain that a skin lesion on his hip is a fatal cancer, George rejects Dr Barghoutian's diagnosis of eczema due to his previous misdiagnosis of Katie's appendicitis as stomach ache, and unsuccessfully attempts to remove the lesion with a pair of scissors. The resulting blood loss soon renders him unconscious, but not before he calls an ambulance and tries to get a chisel from the cellar to demarcate the incident as accidental. The resulting bloodied handprints he smears around the house in doing so horrify his wife Jean.George and Jean's children confront problems of their own. Daughter Katie, a single mother, announces her plans to marry Ray, a competent but lower-class man of whom George, Jean, and their son Jamie disapprove. As the story progresses Ray worries that Katie wants to be with him only for his house and so he can act as a father to her five-year-old son Jacob. It is only when Katie visits George in the hospital that she realises she and Ray are meant to be together: she proposes to Ray herself, and the couple rearrange the wedding. Meanwhile, Jamie has an uneasy relationship with his boyfriend Tony. When Jamie fails to pass on to Tony an invitation to Katie's wedding, arguing about how he would not enjoy it, Tony leaves him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Theorem"title="The Last Theorem">
"The Last Theorem" is set in Sri Lanka in the early- to mid-21st century and follows the life of a mathematician, Ranjit Subramanian. While studying at Colombo University, he becomes obsessed with Fermat's Last Theorem, a conjecture made by Pierre de Fermat in 1637, for which he claimed to have conceived a proof that he never wrote down. The proof eluded mathematicians across the world for over 350 years, until in 1995 British mathematician Andrew Wiles published a 100-page proof of the theorem. But not everyone was "satisfied" with Wiles's proof because it used twentieth century mathematical techniques not available in Fermat's time.In the novel's back-story, extraterrestrial sapients, the "Grand Galactics", are alarmed when they detect the photon shock waves from nuclear bomb detonations on Earth. The Grand Galactics monitor and control the destinies of a number of high-performance sapient races and order one of these races, the "Nine Limbeds", to send "cease and desist" messages to Earth. When these messages have no effect, the Grand Galactics order another race, the "One Point Fives", to launch an armada to Earth to exterminate the undesirable species.Back on Earth, regional conflicts escalate and the United Nations struggles to contain them. In Sri Lanka, Ranjit unwittingly boards a cruise ship that is hijacked by pirates. When unknown security forces free the ship, Ranjit is arrested on suspicion of terrorism. For six months he is interrogated and tortured, but he cannot supply the information his captors want so he is locked up and "forgotten" for a further 18 months. During this period of incarceration, Ranjit dwells on Fermat's Last Theorem and, after several months, solves it with a three-page proof. Later Ranjit is rescued by a friend from University, Gamini Bandara, who will not reveal whom he is working for or where Ranjit was held captive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wolfen"title="The Wolfen">
The violent junk yard deaths of Hugo DiFalco and Dennis Houlihan, two policemen from the NYPD Auto Squad, triggers an investigation led by detectives Becky Neff and George Wilson. The evidence shows nothing conclusive, except that the victims were quickly and brutally attacked by some kind of animal, in light of the gnawing marks on the bodies' bones and paw prints left on the mud near to the attack. Despite the fact that the two murdered policemen were healthy, they seemed to be unable to defend themselves or fire their service firearms. In addition, at the time of their death the bodies showed signs of disembowelment and of being consumed. One of the puzzling pieces of evidence is that the hand of one of the policemen, still holding his gun, was severed from his arm, having not had a chance to fire the weapon.To the detectives' dismay, the Chief of Police, lacking a plausible explanation for the attack, has written into the official report states that the policemen were attacked by a pack of stray dogs after becoming intoxicated with carbon monoxide, in order to avoid raising public concern in advance of upcoming elections. The detectives pay a visit to the Medical Examiner, Dr. Evans, who informs them that there were no knife marks, that the victims were eaten, and that unidentified canine fur, bites and claw marks were found on the bodies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_of_the_Glowing_Eye"title="Mystery of the Glowing Eye">
When Ned Nickerson is kidnapped, Nancy knows it has something to do with the code name "Cyclops", but she has to work out the connection with the glowing eye-shaped stone in the museum. The plot involves advanced technology for the 1970s including a robot helicopter and a paralyzing ray.Nancy is also troubled by a young lawyer's romantic intentions toward Carson Drew.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_the_Forgotten_City"title="The Secret of the Forgotten City">
Gold! There are rumors that long ago a treasure was hidden in a city now buried under the Nevada desert. Nancy Drew and her friends plan to join a dig sponsored by two colleges to hunt for the gold. Before she starts, the young sleuth receives an ancient stone tablet with petroglyphs on it. With this amazing clue, however, come a threat from a thief who also wants the treasure.One harrowing adventure after another besets Nancy, George, Bess, Ned, Burt, and Dave in 102 degrees temperatures as they pursue Nancy's hunches above and below ground. They are assisted by a fine Indian woman and a young geology student, but both are unwilling participants in a strange plot. In the end Nancy and Ned nearly lose their lives, just after she has discovered the priceless hidden treasure of gold.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sky_Phantom"title="The Sky Phantom">
Nancy goes to the Excello Flying School in the Midwest to take lessons while her friends Bess and George perfect their horse riding. At once, the young sleuth is confronted with the mystery of a hijacked plane and a missing pilot. Then the rancher's prize pony, Major is stolen. Nancy becomes a detective in a plane and on horseback to track down the elusive sky phantom and the horse thief. A lucky find – a medal with a message to be deciphered on it – furnishes a worthwhile clue. Romance is added when Bess becomes interested in a handsome cowboy. Readers will spur Nancy on as she investigates a strange magnetic cloud, hunts for the horse thief, and finally arrives at a surprising solution.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strange_Message_in_the_Parchment"title="The Strange Message in the Parchment">
A sheep farmer receives a mysterious telephone call shortly after he buys a series of pictures painted on parchment. "Decipher the message in the parchment and right a great wrong," the voice says. Puzzled, the owner asks Nancy to help.With Junie, his daughter, Nancy tracks down a kidnapper and a group of extortionists. Clues weave in and out of several puzzles, two of which are linked with Italy. Is there a connection between the message in the parchment and a boy artist on another farm? And who is responsible for the atmosphere of fear in the neighborhood?After several harrowing experiences, Nancy begins to tighten the net around a ruthless villain and calls on the assistance of her friends Ned, Burt, Dave, Bess and George to bring his nefarious schemes to a dead end.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_of_Crocodile_Island"title="Mystery of Crocodile Island">
Nancy responds to a friend's frantic call for help and she and her father travel to Crocodile Island in Florida with Bess and George to study the reptiles and try to uncover a group of poachers. Upon arriving, the group is kidnapped, but they escape and uncover a sinister plot involving many unsuspected victims.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirteenth_Pearl"title="The Thirteenth Pearl">
Nancy Drew is asked to locate a missing pearl that is unusual, but very valuable. She soon learns that dangerous people are responsible for the theft. They begin harassing her at home and it intensifies when Nancy and her father go to Japan. They finally kidnap her and her boyfriend, Ned when they return to River Heights. Through her clever sleuthing, Nancy is able to penetrate the rites of a pearl-worshipping cult, but some are far from devotional, and she uncovers underhanded dealings of certain employees of World Wide Gems, Inc., an international jewelry company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incorporated_Knight"title="The Incorporated Knight">
Squire Eudoric Damberson of Zurgau in the kingdom of Locania wishes to wed Lusina, the daughter of his former tutor, the magician Doctor Baldonius. The price is attaining the status of knight and supplying the magician with a portion of dragon hide for use in his magic. Dragons are locally scarce, so Eudoric and his trusty servant Jillo set out for Pathenia in the east to slay one. But once the two do manage to bring one down (by accident) they face legal complications for violating the local game laws. Returning, Eudoric finds his promised bride has run off with a minstrel, and his feudal lord Baron Emmerhard disinclined to knight him for his heroic exploit; he consoles himself by pursuing a scheme to establish a stagecoach line like those in Pathenia. (This material first appeared as the short story "Two Yards of Dragon".)A subsequent rescue of Emmerhard from a magic spell finally secures him the knighthood, but he remains unlucky in love, as the baron's daughter Gerzilda also shuns his hand. (This material first appeared as the short story "The Coronet".)Next Eudoric pursues Maragda, daughter of Rainmar, a local robber baron who has been raiding his coach line. Rainmar tasks him with slaying the giant spider Fraka, and once again matters go awry. While Eudoric's knightly reputation and stage line prosper, his marriage prospects remain nil. (This material first appeared as the short story "Spider Love".)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pixilated_Peeress"title="The Pixilated Peeress">
Soldier and aspiring scholar Thorolf Zigramson of Rhaetia is out fishing when he encounters the proverbial damsel in distress in the form of Yvette, fugitive Countess of Grintz from the neighboring kingdom of Carinthia. She is fleeing the forces of the avaricious Duke of Landai, occupier of her fief and aspirant to her hand. But Thorolf gains a burden rather than gratitude by rescuing the self-important peeress from her pursuers.To hide the countess from her enemy Thorolf takes her to the Rhaetian capital of Zurshnitt, where his enchanter friend Doctor Bardi undertakes to magically disguise her features. The spell goes badly awry, mistakenly turning Yvette into an octopus instead. In order to reverse the spell Thorolf must resort to the more powerful wizard Doctor Orlandus, a shady cult-leader. But matters go from bad to worse; while Orlandus cures Yvette all right, he also makes her one of his spirit-controlled slaves to advance his scheme of taking over the government of Rhaetia. On top of that, his henchmen murder Doctor Bardi, leaving Thorolf under suspicion of perpetrating the crime.The soldier flees and seeks sanctuary with the trolls, some of whom he has befriended in the past, only to find them more inclined to eat than succor him; he has managed to put himself among the "wrong" trolls, arch-foes of the band he knows. To gain their favor and protection he promises to rid his captors of a local dragon. Accordingly, he directs them in a successful effort to capture the beast and sell it to the director of Zurshnitt's zoo. But to bind him to them, his new allies insist he marry one of their number. The troll lass finds the hapless warrior as unattractive as he does her, and they settle by mutual agreement into a union in name only.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pocket_for_Corduroy"title="A Pocket for Corduroy">
Lisa accidentally loses Corduroy, her teddy bear, at a laundromat. After a series of adventures, while Corduroy searches for material to make a pocket, he becomes trapped in a laundry basket until he is found the next morning by the laundromat's owner. Corduroy is reunited with Lisa, who promptly takes him home to sew a pocket onto his overalls so that Corduroy can carry a name card with him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightrise"title="Nightrise">
The story begins with fourteen-year-old identical twin brothers Jamie and Scott Tyler, performing in a theatre in Reno, Nevada. The Nightrise Corporation is to kidnap the boys, who are part of the magic show that has performed at the theatre for the past six months. Their foster father, Don White, sells the twins off to them for $150,000, but Jamie escapes and is pursued. Scott is captured but Jamie is rescued by a woman. He awakens at a motel in which the woman is renting a room. The woman, who introduces herself as Alicia, says that her son, Daniel, was kidnapped by the same corporation after exhibiting clairvoyant powers. She takes Jamie to his foster parents' house only to realise they have been murdered by Nightrise, and that he and Scott have been framed for it; they escape only when Jamie uses his telepathic powers. Alicia and Jamie go to Los Angeles where he reveals his backstory. He then tells her of his previous foster parents, with the alcoholic father committing suicide after threatening to separate the twins, and the weird and inexplicable "accidents" associated with them. He tells her about a strange, tattoo-like mark he has on his arm and that he thinks he is an American Indian. After these incidents, he and Scott refused to read or control anyone's minds, except for each other's. They find a lead to one of the men that kidnapped Scott, Colton Banes, and Alicia persuades Jamie to read his mind to find out where Scott is. Jamie manages to find out where Scott is being held: Silent Creek, a juvenile prison, where he is being tortured in an attempt to force him to side with Nightrise.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Six_(novel)"title="Deep Six (novel)">
When a mysterious and extremely deadly poison spreads through the waters off the coast of Alaska killing everything it comes in contact with, including several scientists and members of the crew of a Coast Guard cutter, Dirk Pitt and his NUMA team are dispatched in an attempt to find the source of the poison. When a member of his team is killed by the poison, Pitt vows to take revenge on whoever is responsible for the poison outbreak. The trail leads him to a powerful and extremely wealthy Korean shipping company matriarch and her grandson, and while pursuing them, Pitt uncovers a plot that could lead to the fall of the government of the United States.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_(Cussler_novel)"title="Treasure (Cussler novel)">
The book starts with a historical prologue in which Julius Venator, a Roman, along with a group of Roman soldiers and slaves, sail in a fleet of ships ferrying the treasures from the Library of Alexandria before its destruction to a secret location to be buried in caverns. After the treasures are buried the people, the Roman soldiers, and slaves are all slaughtered by the natives. While one small ship manages to get away, they never reach land and the secret of the treasure is lost.The story then shifts to the present day, where an envoy of the US President having a secret meeting with a would-be Aztec dictator, Topiltzin. Topiltzin kills the envoy, and sends his skin and heart back to the President.Soon after, a Middle Eastern terrorist secretly hijacks a plane carrying Hala Kamil, the new United Nations Secretary-General. The hijacker bails out of the plane after ensuring that the plane crash lands in Greenland, where Dirk Pitt, Al Giordino, and Rudi Gunn are trying to locate a sunken Soviet submarine. Also in the area is Lily Sharp, who discovers an ancient coin. They rescue Hala from the plane wreck. As the plot unfolds, several more attempts are made on Hala's life, since she is trying to stop would-be dictator Akhmad Yazid from taking over Egypt. It is later revealed that both Topiltzin and Yazid are scions of a notorious crime family. Dirk is distracted by the promise of treasure, however. Locating a shipwreck in Greenland, they soon find a tablet detailing a mission to hide the treasure of the library at Alexandria. As Dirk, Al, and the Special Operations Forces rescue Hala Kamil from a hijacked ship in the Straits of Magellan, Hiram Yaeger locates the treasure — in Roma, Texas. The final stretch of the novel involves Dirk trying to hide the treasure from Yazid and his brother Topiltzin. Eventually, the treasure is discovered and Yazid, Topiltzin and their henchmen are killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Vortex!"title="Pacific Vortex!">
Dirk Pitt is enjoying a lazy day on a secluded Oahu beach at Ka'ena Point when he spots a bright yellow container just past the breakers. Braving the dangerous riptides, Pitt swims out and retrieves the item and finds that it is a communication capsule used by submarines which wish to communicate with ships on the surface without surfacing themselves. Inside he finds a chilling message from the commander of the U.S. Navy's latest nuclear submarine, the "Starbuck", which disappeared with all hands six months earlier while undergoing sea trials. Investigation reveals that the submarine disappeared in the "Pacific Vortex", an area of the ocean north of the Hawaiian Islands where ships have been disappearing for more than 30 years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_Tide_(novel)"title="Flood Tide (novel)">
While recovering from his injuries suffered a month earlier as told in "Shock Wave", Dirk stumbles upon mysterious activities around a peaceful lake in Washington state. The coin of the realm for the wealthy, insatiably greedy Chinese smuggler is human lives: much of his vast fortune has been made smuggling Chinese immigrants into countries around the globe, including the United States.Tracking the smuggler's activities leads Pitt from Washington State to Louisiana, where his quarry is constructing a huge shipping port in the middle of nowhere. Why has he chosen this unlikely location? The trail then leads to the race to find the site of the mysterious sinking of the ship that Chiang Kai-shek filled with treasure when he fled China in 1949, including the legendary boxes containing the bones of Peking Man that had vanished at the beginning of World War 1.As Pitt prepares for a final showdown, he is faced with the most formidable foe he has ever encountered.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Prince_(Burnett_novel)"title="The Lost Prince (Burnett novel)">
This book, a Ruritanian romance for children, is about Marco Loristan, his father, and his friend, a street urchin called "The Rat". Marco's father, Stefan, is a Samavian patriot working to overthrow the cruel dictatorship in the kingdom of Samavia. Marco and his father come to London where Marco strikes up a friendship with a crippled street urchin known as The Rat. The friendship occurs when Marco overhears The Rat shouting in military form. Marco discovers he had stumbled upon a club known as the Squad, where the boys drill under the leadership of The Rat, whose education and imagination far exceeds their own.Stefan, realizing that two boys are less likely to be noticed, entrusts them with a secret mission to travel across Europe giving the secret sign: 'The Lamp is lighted.' Marco is to go as the Bearer of the Sign while The Rat goes as his Aide-de-Camp (so-named at his own request). The boys encounter many dangers while on this journey.This brings about a revolution which succeeds in overthrowing the old regime and re-establishing the rightful king. When Marco and The Rat return to London, Stefan has already left for Samavia. They wait there with his father's faithful bodyguard, Lazarus, until Stefan calls. The book ends in a climactic scene as Marco realizes his father is the descendant of Ivor Fedorovitch and thus the rightful king of Samavia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Guard"title="Star Guard">
Information given in the story indicates that Humanity only developed space travel far enough to attract the attention of Central Control in the 37th century AD. Norton explains the implied retardation of human development through references to nuclear wars, which presumably caused so much destruction that civilization took an extra sixteen or seventeen centuries to achieve a level of development suitable for resuming Humanity's reach for the stars.Presented in the guise of a history lecture at an alien university, Norton's introduction explains that in the 40th century the people of Terra (the Latin name having replaced the Anglo-Saxon Earth) can only go to the stars as mercenaries. On alien worlds Terrans fight brushfire wars and thereby help Central Control maintain peace within its vast interstellar empire. Archs, who fight with relatively primitive weapons, are organized into Hordes, which fight on underdeveloped barbarian planets, and Mechs, who fight with more modern weapons, are organized into Legions, which fight on advanced, civilized worlds. But then a Horde fighting on the medieval planet Fronn encounters a Legion of Mechs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Game"title="Our Game">
The disappearance of Dr. Larry Pettifer, a British intelligence operative, from his teaching position at Bath University should not have concerned a great many people, especially a retired Treasury boffin like Tim Cranmer. But when Detective Inspector Bryant and Sergeant Luck of the Bath Police call upon Cranmer at his Somerset manor house and vineyard late on a Sunday evening, Cranmer finds himself facing repercussions from his secret and not-too-distant past. Pettifer was a British Secret Intelligence Service operative during the Cold War and Cranmer was his handler for twenty years.The Cold War is over; the Berlin Wall has come down; and SIS has put Cranmer and his agent Pettifer out to pasture. Pettifer turns to teaching at Bath University and Cranmer is content to settle at Honeybrook, his inherited estate in Somerset, making wine and making love to his beautiful young mistress de jour, Emma. Not content with staying cloistered in Bath, Larry begins paying visits to Honeybrook and soon becomes a permanent fixture in their lives. At least, that is, until both Larry and Emma disappear into thin air.Panicked by his encounter with the Bath Police, Cranmer contacts his former employers and is summoned to London where he learns that, not only has Larry disappeared, he has absconded with some £37 million milked from the Russian Government with the help of a former Soviet spy. Cranmer finds himself suspected as Larry's accomplice by the Bath Police—and, later, by "The Office", or SIS—and decides to track down his protégé and his former mistress.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hills_End"title="Hills End">
The story follows seven children and their teacher who are trapped inside a cave while a fierce cyclonic storm destroys the fictional town of Hills End. They face a struggle to survive as well as having to deal with their loss. A mystery also surrounds ancient aboriginal art found in the cave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hallo-Wiener"title="The Hallo-Wiener">
The story begins with Oscar, a dachshund who is half-a-dog tall and one-and-a-half dogs long, and tired of the other dogs making fun of him because of his wiener-shaped body. He is happy because it is Halloween, and he cannot wait to get a costume. At obedience school, he daydreams of Halloween. When he comes home from school his mother has a surprise for him: a hot dog bun with mustard in the middle and Oscar is supposed to fit in the middle. He thought he would get laughed at, but wears the costume anyway, because he does not want to hurt his mom's feelings. He sees the other dogs showing off their costumes and when they see Oscar's costume they howl in laughter.Oscar's costume is so heavy that it slows him down. Meanwhile, the dogs are getting their paws on all the candy and when Oscar comes to the houses there are no more treats left. The dogs go to a graveyard and they hear a noise, scream very loud and run, diving into a river because they see a scary monster. When Oscar comes to see the monster he notices something strange. He bites the cover of the monster, pulls it off with all his might, and discovers two cats hiding underneath. The cats scream and run away. Then Oscar jumps into the water and uses his costume as a life raft, and rescues the other dogs. The dogs thank Oscar by sharing their candy with him. They become friends forever and Oscar is never made fun of again, for he is then known as "Hero Sandwich".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_Food_(novel)"title="Comfort Food (novel)">
Stan Gillman-Reinhart is a graduate student at a small university in Bellingham, Washington in 1993. Through his experiences and frustrations we meet Delany Richardson, a budding writer and old friend of Stan's; John Snyder, a local musician; Brian Fetzler, Stan's stoner roommate; Dave Greibing, a mountaineer and Delany's ex-boyfriend; and Bridgette Jonsen, a former heroin addict and Dave's current girlfriend.Successive sections of the novel focus on John's earlier trip through Eastern Europe, Delany's previous summer in Alaska, Brian's life after college, Bridgette's earlier road trip through Utah, Dave's ascent of Denali, and a tragic accident that illuminates their lives.Set in the verdant Pacific Northwest, the sandstone deserts of Utah, the gritty streets of Budapest, and the snow-covered wasteland of Denali, Comfort Food is a literary work with an emphasis on the importance of human relationships and a sense of place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_of_Darkness"title="People of Darkness">
A bacteriologist in the cancer research hospital, waiting for lab results, sees a blond-haired man move something from his car to a pick-up truck parked in an illegal space. She sees a tow truck pull the pick-up away; within seconds, the truck explodes, killing the operators of the tow truck. A few months later, Jim Chee is asked by Mrs. Vines to find a box stolen from her house, wanting to hire him off-duty. The box contains mementos and she would like it back before her husband returns; she thinks Emerson Charley is the thief. Mr. Vines returns, telling Chee not to bother with the task his wife asked him to do. Sheriff Sena is angry at Chee for talking with Mr. and Mrs. Vines. Sena shares the story of the six Navajo men in the crew under Dillon Charley who did not go to work at the oil field years back because Charley had a vision saying something bad would happen that day, which was true. Chee learns that the man whose truck exploded a few months back was Emerson Charley, son of Dillon and head of the People of Darkness church, who has been in the hospital at the University of New Mexico since that day, ill with cancer. Sena believes the motion sensor bomb in the pick-up truck was meant for Emerson, despite his fatal disease.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_in_the_Garden"title="The Machine in the Garden">
Marx identifies a major theme in literature of the nineteenth century—the dialectical tension between the pastoral ideal in America and the rapid and sweeping transformations wrought by machine technology. This tension is expressed "everywhere" in literature by the recurring image of the machine in the garden—that is, the sudden and shocking intrusion of technology into a pastoral scene. "Within the lifetime of a single generation," Marx writes, "a rustic and in large part wild landscape was transformed into the site of the world's most productive industrial machine. It would be difficult to imagine more profound contradictions of value or meaning than those made manifest by this circumstance. Its influence upon our literature is suggested by the recurrent image of the machine's sudden entrance onto the landscape."But Marx isn't interested so much in historical changes to the physical landscape. Instead, he looks at the interior landscape—"the landscape of the psyche"—and it is intelligently and well-written literature that he believes offers us the most useful and insightful direct access to the psyche. While popular culture traded on "puerile" and sentimental pastoralism—that is, the simple and unreflective urge to find a "middle ground" between the over-civilization of the city and the "violent uncertainties of nature" (28)—serious literature took a hard, careful look at the contradictions in American culture, and particularly at the conflict between the old bucolic image of America and its new image as an industrial power (26). It is the "role" of literature, argues Marx, to show us the "contradiction" of our commitments to both rural happiness and "productivity, wealth, and power."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virgin_of_Zesh"title="The Virgin of Zesh">
Herculeu Castanhoso, assistant security officer at the Terran spaceport of Novorecife, looks on disapprovingly as his detested boss, security chief Afanasi Gorchakov, fraternizes in the spaceport bar with three new arrivals to the backward planet Krishna: the vainglorious amateur poet Brian Kirwan, psychologist Gottfried Barr, and missionary Althea Merrick. Althea has been left stranded and without resources because the unreliable Bishop Harichand Raman, her superior in the Ecumenical Monotheist Church, has failed to meet and provide her with her first assignment. Kirwan, bound with Barr for a utopian Terran colony on the island of Zesh, is trying to persuade her to join them, while Gorchakov is pressuring her to marry him. Trying to prevent a fight between the two, Althea is caught between them and knocked out, whereupon the security chief fells Kirwan and peremptorily orders Castanhoso to get the other men out of the bar. He is last seen pouring "kvad" down teetotaler Althea's throat in an effort to revive her.Althea awakens in Gorchakov's apartment to discover that she consented to marry him while drunk, and is now hitched. Panicking, she rejects him and tries to escape. Enraged, he strips and whips her until she breaks free and brains him with an alarm clock. Slipping out, she seeks Kirwan and Barr, who agree to spirit her out of Novorecife with Castanhoso's help and take her with them to Zesh. She is to be Barr's assistant in his project of measuring the intelligence of the primitive tailed Krishnans of Zá, the island adjacent to Zesh, whose culture has recently made startling advances. The three take flight by buggy down the Pichide River to the coastal fishing village of Qadr, whence they cross by ferry to the Free City of Majbur. There they seek the aid of Krishnan Gorbovast Bad-Sár, resident commissioner of the king of Gozashtand and well-known benefactor of Terran travelers. He gets them on the next ship out to Zesh, the "Labághti", captained by Memzadá of Darya.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Achilles"title="The Death of Achilles">
Moscow, 1882. When Fandorin returns from Japan with his manservant Masa, he enters the service of Moscow governor Prince Dolgorukoi. Later that day, the White General Mikhail Sobolev, nicknamed the Russian Achilles and an old friend of Fandorin's, is found dead in the same hotel. Officially, he died of a heart attack, but Fandorin becomes suspicious when he talks with the body guards of the general. Fandorin had befriended these cossacks when he rooted out a Turkish spy during the siege of Plevna (see "The Turkish Gambit"). But the same cossacks now treat him with hostility.Fandorin finds out the reason for their hostility as he discovers that the general had not really died in the hotel, but was moved there from the apartment of his mistress. Found dead in a compromising situation, the cossacks tried to prevent a scandal and protect the reputation of the general. But Fandorin looks even deeper and finds out that a large sum of money is missing. He learns that Sobolev is trying to raise funds to begin a political campaign, and Fandorin begins to suspect foul play. He finds that the general has been poisoned in a very clever manner, and the killer anticipated the cover up, which would ensure his safe getaway. Fandorin further discovers that the plot leads up to the highest levels of the Tsar's government, and that he himself is now viewed as an enemy of the state for his efforts to catch the killer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakfast_at_Tiffany's_(novella)"title="Breakfast at Tiffany's (novella)">
In autumn 1943, the unnamed narrator befriends Holly Golightly. The two are tenants in a brownstone apartment in Manhattan's Upper East Side. Holly (age 18–19) is a country girl turned New York café society girl. As such, she has no job and lives by socializing with wealthy men, who take her to clubs and restaurants, and give her money and expensive presents; she hopes to marry one of them. According to Capote, Golightly is not a prostitute, but an "American geisha".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Message_(novel)"title="The Message (novel)">
Cassie and Tobias are having strange dreams about a presence in the ocean. Jake sees a news item on television about debris with what looks like Andalite lettering on it that has washed up on the beach, and when he shows it to the others, Cassie and Tobias have such strong visions that they momentarily pass out. The Animorphs decide to investigate, and acquire dolphin morphs to do so.While out in the ocean, they find a humpback whale under attack by a group of sharks. The Animorphs fight the sharks and drive them off, and Marco is nearly killed in the process. Marco is able to morph back to his human form, and the whale, grateful, saves him from drowning. The whale speaks to Cassie through song, telling her about a strange place of grass and trees under the ocean. Cassie has a feeling that this place is of Andalite origin, and the Animorphs wonder if Cassie's and Tobias's visions are a sort of distress call from an Andalite trapped in the ocean. They decide that the distress call is connected to the morphing ability, and Cassie and Tobias feel it the strongest because Cassie is the most in control of her morphing ability and Tobias is trapped in a morph. They also figure out that Visser Three could be receiving the message and that the Yeerks are probably looking for the lost Andalite as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_Leslie"title="Hope Leslie">
The story starts with William Fletcher, a young man who is in love with his cousin, Alice. Her father has forbidden her marriage to Fletcher on account of religious difference. After he thwarts Alice's attempt to run away with Fletcher to North America, Alice's father forces her to marry Charles Leslie instead. In despair, Fletcher decides to leave England and relocate to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In the Bay colony, Fletcher marries an orphan girl named Martha although he is still in love with Alice. He founds a household several miles out of town, and has children; Everell, and three others. He receives word that Charles and Alice Leslie have both died, and that their children, who will be renamed Faith and Hope, will be coming to live with the Fletchers.To address the increase in household work that the new children will bring, they family is supplied with two young Native Americans as servants. They are Magawisca and Oneco, the children of one of the Pequod chiefs, Mononotto. They have been displaced due to the Pequod War of the previous year, in which the Pequod settlement was attacked and burned by the white settlers. Most of the household is suspicious of Magawisca, especially since she occasionally talks to Nelema, an old native woman living nearby. Everell, however, always maintains that she is trustworthy and only has the family's best interests at heart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Blood_(novel)"title="First Blood (novel)">
The story centers around a homeless Vietnam veteran known only by his last name, Rambo. He wanders into Madison, a town in fictional Basalt County, Kentucky, and is quickly intercepted by the local police chief, Wilfred Teasle, who drives him to the town limits and orders him to stay out. When Rambo repeatedly returns, Teasle finally arrests him on charges of vagrancy and resisting arrest and gets permission to hold him for 35 days in jail. Kept inside a claustrophobia-inducing cell, Rambo experiences a flashback to his days as a POW in Vietnam, and he attacks the police as they attempt to forcibly cut his hair and shave him. Rambo forces his way out, steals a motorcycle, and hides in the nearby mountains.Teasle, not wanting the state police to capture Rambo before he does, gets a helicopter pilot to search the woods and organizes a posse consisting of himself, his officers, and Orval Kellerman, an experienced hunter with a pack of highly trained dogs, to hunt Rambo down. Meanwhile, Rambo stumbles across an illegal still and persuades the moonshiners operating it to provide him with clothes and food; he also talks them into giving him a lever-action rifle. The posse catches up with Rambo, who is cornered by the helicopter and fires on it in self-defense; the pilot panics and loses control, causing the chopper to crash and explode. When the posse arrives, Rambo shoots two of Orval's dogs; the frightened animals leap off a cliff, taking an officer with them, and Orval is fatally wounded when he goes to check on them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sea_Devil's_Eye_(novel)"title="The Sea Devil's Eye (novel)">
"Iakhovas" has caused more destruction than any force since the Time of Troubles, but his true objective has been a mystery until now.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_(Crichton_novel)"title="Next (Crichton novel)">
"This novel is fiction, except for the parts that aren't."Frank Burnet has contracted an aggressive form of leukemia, and undergoes intensive treatment and four years of semiannual checkups. He later learned the checkups were a pretext for researching the genetic basis of his unusually successful response to treatment, and the physician's university had sold the rights to Frank's cells to BioGen, a biotechnology startup company. As the book opens Frank is suing the university for unauthorized misuse of his cells, but the trial judge rules that the cells were "waste" and that the university could dispose of them as it wished. Frank's lawyers advise that the university, as a tax-funded organization, can still claim the rights to the cells under the doctrine of eminent domain.Ruthless venture capitalist "Jack" Watson conspires to steal or sabotage BioGen's cultures of Frank's cells. As part of his terms for financing BioGen, Watson previously forced the company to accept his irresponsible nephew Brad Gordon as its security chief. After Brad's carelessness nearly allows one of Watson's sabotage attempts to succeed, the company takes advantage of Brad's attraction to teenage girls, and engineers his being accused and convicted of raping a minor. Watson's price for providing a defense lawyer is that Brad must contaminate BioGen's cultures. Brad's lawyer plans to claim in defense that Brad has a gene for recklessness and instructs him to engage in various high-risk activities. As a result, Brad gets into a fight with a pair of martial arts experts and is finally shot by the police.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_People_(Guest_novel)"title="Ordinary People (Guest novel)">
The novel begins as life is seemingly returning to normal for the Jarretts of Lake Forest, Illinois, in September 1975. It is slightly more than a year since their elder son Buck was killed when a sudden storm came up while he and their other son Conrad were sailing on Lake Michigan. Six months later, a severely depressed Conrad attempted suicide by slashing his wrists with a razor in the bathroom. His parents committed him to a psychiatric hospital from which he has only recently returned after eight months of treatment. He is attending school and trying to resume his life, but knows he still has unresolved issues, particularly with his mother, Beth, who has never really recovered from Buck's death and keeps an almost maniacally perfect household and family.His father Calvin, a successful tax attorney, gently leans on him to make appointments to see a local psychiatrist, Dr. Tyrone Berger. Initially resistant, he slowly starts to respond to Dr. Berger and comes to terms with the root cause of his depression, his identity crisis and survivor's guilt over having survived when Buck did not. Also helping is a relationship with a new girlfriend, Jeannine Pratt.Calvin sees Dr. Berger as the events of the recent past have caused him to begin to doubt many things he once took for granted, leading to a midlife crisis. This leads to strain in his marriage as he finds Beth increasingly cold and distant, while she in turn believes he is overly concerned about Conrad to the point of being manipulated. Finally the friction becomes enough that Beth decides to leave him at the novel's conclusion. Father and son, however, have closed the gap between them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Powder_War"title="Black Powder War">
The story is set during an alternate history version of the Napoleonic Wars, in which dragons not only exist but are used as a staple of aerial warfare in Asia and Europe. The dragons of the story are portrayed as sentient and intelligent, capable of logical thought and human speech. The series centers primarily on events involving Temeraire (the titular dragon) and his handler, William Laurence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Solution"title="The Ultimate Solution">
A New York policeman is charged with finding a Jew who is reported to have suddenly appeared in the city decades after all Jews are thought to have been exterminated. There is a reference to a kind of second Wannsee Conference, held at Buckingham Palace in German-occupied London after the extermination of European Jews had been completed, setting up the extension of the Final Solution to the rest of the world; the last few hundred Jews are mentioned as having been discovered and killed by relentless Einsatzgruppen hunters in 1964, having hidden at the ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. There is a Cold War between the former Axis Powers allies, Germany and Japan, both of whom have nuclear weapons and are engaged in an arms race akin to that between the United States and Soviet Union in our own timeline.Slavs and blacks are raised at "laboratories" and "farms" where their vocal cords are cut at birth and having the legal status not of slaves but of "domestic animals"; naked black gladiators fight to the death at the Madison Square Garden (the Roman "thumbs up" or "down" are modernized into green and red buttons, with a computer making the tally and automatically electrocuting the losing gladiator); children being encouraged by TV programs to torture and kill animals; policemen routinely carrying mobile torture kits for "on the spot interrogations" and having the power of extrajudicial execution against "Enemies of the Reich"; body parts of murdered Jews on sale at souvenir shops, with "collectors" trying to have "a complete collection" of samples from all extermination camps; Christianity (and presumably other religions as well) suppressed in favor of Odinist temples; pedophilia being legal with parents selling their children to sex brothels; and naked Slavic women being crucified in eroticized torture shows, among other horrors. Homosexuality is legal and considered a state ideal (in sharp contrast with the real-life homophobic policies of Germany).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bone_Doll's_Twin"title="The Bone Doll's Twin">
For three centuries a divine prophecy and a line of warrior queens protected Skala. But the people grew complacent and Erius, a usurper king, claimed his young half-sister's throne. Now plague and drought stalk the land, war with Skala's ancient rival Plenimar drains the country's lifeblood, and to be born female into the royal line has become a death sentence as the king fights to ensure the succession of his only heir, a son. For King Erius the greatest threat comes from his own line - and from Illior's faithful, who spread the Oracle's words to a doubting populace. As noblewomen young and old perish mysteriously the kings nephew - his sister's only child - grows toward manhood. But unbeknownst to the king or the boy, strange, haunted Tobin is the princess's daughter, given male form by dark magic to protect her until she can claim her rightful destiny. Only Tobin's noble father, two wizards of Illior and an outlawed forest witch know the truth. Only they can protect young Tobin from a king's wrath, a mother's madness, and the terrifying rage of her brother's demon spirit, determined to avenge his stolen life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrow_of_Belgium"title="The Sorrow of Belgium">
Belgium, 1939. Louis Seynaeve, who becomes eleven in April, goes to a boarding school led by nuns in Haarbeke, a fictitious town close to Kortrijk. Louis has a lot of fantasies. He and his friends call themselves the Four Apostles and they possess seven forbidden books. His father comes to tell him that his mother fell down the stairs, which actually means that she is pregnant. Several months later the baby is stillborn.His family members are Flemish nationalists. Louis' father buys a printing press in Germany and a Hitler Youth doll. During the German occupation of Belgium in the Second World War his family sympathises with the Germans. Louis attends meetings of the Hitler Youth in Mecklenburg.Louis discovers more "forbidden books" and becomes interested in Entartete Kunst. Gradually he becomes aware of the narrow-mindedness of his family and his education. He ends up being a writer. He's the author of "The Sorrow", the first part of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho_House"title="Psycho House">
Ten years after Norman Bates' death, a local entrepreneur has rebuilt the Bates Motel in Fairvale as a tourist attraction. Amy Haines travels to the infamous "Psycho House" to write a book about Bates when mysterious murders begin to occur. Haines faces resistance from the community when she enlists the help of a group to investigate the murders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Predator_(novel)"title="The Predator (novel)">
Two years before the events of the novel, Marco's mother vanished in a boating accident; her body was never found. Marco's father has fallen into deep depression and Marco is having second thoughts about fighting the Yeerks, parasitic aliens that are the main antagonists of the series, as he does not want his father to lose him too.Ax wishes to return to the Andalite home world, and to do so, he needs a ship. He intends to build a communicator to broadcast a Yeerk distress signal and lure in a Yeerk ship which he can then hijack. He, Jake, and Marco go to the mall to buy the equipment to build a communicator. Ax finds the food court and runs wild sampling food left over on tables, overwhelmed by the new sense of taste. He is chased by security guards and, frightened, demorphs in the middle of the mall in front of many people. Ax, Jake, and Marco run out of the mall and into a nearby grocery store where they are chased by Controllers. They morph into lobsters and hide in a tank. They later narrowly escape being boiled alive.Ax builds his device, but needs a zero-space transponder. Vice principal Hedrick Chapman regularly communicates with Visser Three from his basement, so the Animorphs morph into ants and retrieve the Z-space transponder that he uses. As they are returning from Chapman's house, they are almost killed when attacked by ants from another colony. They are able to demorph in time, but everyone is upset by the experience.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlefield_Earth_(novel)"title="Battlefield Earth (novel)">
In the year 3000, Earth has been ruled by an alien race, the Psychlos, for a millennium. The Psychlos discovered a deep space probe (suggested to be Voyager 1) with directions and pictures mounted on it and the precious material, gold, that led them straight to Earth.After one thousand years, humanity is an endangered species numbering fewer than 35,000 and reduced to a few tribes in isolated parts of the world while the Psychlos strip the planet of its mineral wealth. Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, a young man in one such tribe, lives in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. Depressed by the recent death of his father and both the lethargy and sickness of most of the surviving adults in his tribe, later determined to be caused by radiation-leakage from decaying nuclear land-mines, he leaves his village to explore the lowlands and to disprove the superstitions long held by his people of monsters in those areas. He is soon captured in the ruins of Denver by Terl, the Psychlo chief of planetary security.Psychlos stand up to tall and weigh up to . They originate from Psychlo, a planet with an atmosphere radically different from Earth, located in another universe with a different set of elements. Their "breathe-gas" explodes on contact with even trace amounts of radioactive material, such as uranium. The Psychlos have been the dominant species across multiple universes for at least 100,000 years. It becomes apparent in the later chapters that the Psychlos were originally non-violent miners but were subjugated by a ruling class called "Catrists" to become malicious, sadistic sociopaths.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Men_and_Fire"title="Young Men and Fire">
Norman Maclean and Laird Robinson, in an attempt to forensically analyze the Mann Gulch Fire, brought together multiple sources, including the official report of the United States Forest Service of the fire, the testimony of the three men who fought the fire and lived, and the research and report of Robert Jansson and Harry T. Gisborne (who would suffer a fatal heart attack at Mann Gulch two months later trying to get to the bottom of the tragedy). On the day of the fire, Jansson was ranger on duty of the Helena National Forest's Canyon Ferry District, the area that included Mann Gulch. Maclean and Robinson also took Walter Rumsey and Robert Sallee, the only two living survivors of the fire team (as survivor Wag Dodge died in 1955), back to the scene of the fire in 1978, hoping that walking the ground again would help solve some of the missing pieces. Additionally, Maclean and Robinson would use the modern Fire Lab and their mathematical analysis (advances in fire methodology not available in 1949), to search for answers to the fire.With all of these pieces, several trips to Mann Gulch, and ideas bantered back and forth between each other, Bud Moore, Ed Heilman, Rich Rothermel, Frank Albini, and other members of the U.S. Forest Service forest fire investigators, Maclean and Robinson came to new conclusions on the fire's events: that the wind went in the opposite direction than was originally thought possible, and once the fire got started, it created its own unique weather system (which few thought possible before this research). 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Kind_of_Loving_(novel)"title="A Kind of Loving (novel)">
The story presents to us Vic Brown, a young working class man from Yorkshire, England, who is slowly inching his way up from his working-class roots through a white-collar job. Vic finds himself trapped by the frightening reality of his girlfriend Ingrid's pregnancy and is forced into marrying her and moving in with his mother-in-law due to a housing shortage in their Northern England town.The story is about love and loneliness. Vic meets and is very attracted to the beautiful but demanding Ingrid. As their relationship develops and transforms into real-life everyday aridity and boredom, Vic ultimately comes to terms with his life and what it really means to love. The novel has had some influence on the literary community, leaving the label "lad-lit" behind, although the term itself was not coined until the 1990s.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Life"title="Knight Life">
In a rundown apartment in New Jersey, Morgan Le Fay has finally decided to end her own life. Although kept immortal by magic, she has become apathetic, elderly, and corpulent, and sees no point in continuing with her life. Before cutting her wrist with a steak knife, she decides to look in on her old nemesis, Merlin's prison, one last time, and is surprised to see that he has escaped. Given a reason to live again, she laughs triumphantly.In Manhattan, King Arthur appears on the streets in full medieval armor, which he quickly divests in favor of a tailored suit (thanks to an American Express card that appears in his pocket by magic). He then walks into Central Park, where the Lady of the Lake rises from the pond and gives him Excalibur.Setting up an office under the name "Arthur Penn" (short for Pendragon), Arthur reunites with Merlin, who advises him that the world needs a leader like him, so Arthur decides to enter politics, beginning with announcing his candidacy for Mayor of New York City. As he is setting up his campaign headquarters, he hires the first applicant for an executive secretary, Gwen DeVere Queen, despite Merlin's disapproval. Arthur also "acquires," as hangers-on, two petty thugs, Buddy and Elvis, who crossed his path in Central Park and became awed by him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Hearts_(story)"title="Two Hearts (story)">
A young girl named Sooz lives in a village plagued by a griffin. The beast has preyed on the village's sheep and goats for years, but recently it has started killing children as well. Sooz embarks on a quest to recruit the King to save her village, and on the way runs into Schmendrick and Molly Grue (from "The Last Unicorn"). Upon reaching the king's castle, they find an aged King Lír, who on first glance does not seem to be up to the task of slaying a griffin. He suffers from bouts of forgetfulness, and is coddled by those around him. However, after being reminded of his younger days and his never-ending quest to once again find the unicorn that loved him (Amalthea), Lír readily accepts the mission and sets off with Sooz, Molly Grue, and Schmendrick to battle the griffin in the Midwood. Sooz bonds with King Lír as they return to her village and helps to keep his mind in the present whenever his memory relapses. When they return to her village, and Lír (accompanied by Schmendrick and Molly) is setting off into the Midwood to slay the griffin, Sooz suddenly pleads with him not to go, fearing for his life. Lír, however, insists that it is his duty, and proceeds inward, leaving Sooz outside the forest. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror,_Mirror_(novel)"title="Mirror, Mirror (novel)">
In Montefiore, Italy in the early 16th century, a nobleman named Don Vicente de Nevada lives on a small estate with his seven-year-old daughter, Bianca, and a small staff, two of whom are Primavera, an earthy cook and a friar Fra Ludovico. The eponymous mirror was fashioned by dwarves and left in the pond to temper, where, at the beginning of the novel, it is found by de Nevada.Life is good for the family until the day the duchess Lucrezia Borgia and her brother, Cesare, decadent children of a pope, come to visit. Cesare sends Vincente on a quest for a holy relic. While he is gone, Bianca becomes a young woman and Lucrezia becomes jealous of the girl's beauty and stealing Cesare's attention from Lucrezia. Eventually she hires a hunter to kill Bianca, who instead helps her escape from Lucrezia. The girl escapes, and runs into seven dwarfs, who are looking for the eighth dwarf and their mirror. The eighth dwarf is accompanying and protecting de Nevada on his travels.When the mirror reveals to the duchess that her plan has failed, she takes it into her own hands to kill Bianca. When she eventually succeeds, Bianca is placed in a coffin, with the now-liberated mirror allowing passers-by to view her beauty. Eventually, she is awakened subsequent to a kiss from the very hunter who helped her escape. The device by which the kiss cures her of mercury poisoning is left unexplained by the author.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Warrior"title="Hidden Warrior">
Following the events in The Bone Doll's Twin, Prince Tobin awakens after the witch Lhel reveals that he was born as a girl, but in view of the king's purge of all possible female heirs that threaten him, Tobin was disguised by magic, wearing the shape of his stillborn brother, whose bones are encased in the little doll his mother carried everywhere with her. Tobin's squire Ki (Kirothius) was gravely injured in coming to find Tobin. They recover for a time under the care of the wizard Iya. Tobin is haunted by the ghost of his brother, who coldly watches over him.Once Ki recovered, they return to the capital city beset by plague, as was prophesied, if the matriarchal throne is usurped. All female warriors and females holding important roles, were ordered to leave, leaving the city completely under male rule. A prominent court wizard, Niryn, directs and leads the city, driving out all other wizards, claiming they are the cause of the city's difficulties. He commands the Harriers, a force dedicated to eradicating opposing wizards. Despite the Harriers, who are busily killing and exterminating all wizards, the old magics are not only being preserved, but the mages are making discoveries that they are determined to use to come back, and put the rightful Queen back on the throne of Skala. Niryn, however, has provided himself with insurance. After finding a distant relative to the Royal Family with a female baby, he promptly murdered and her husband - to raise himself the child, Nalia, with the intention of ultimately making her a Queen completely dependent on himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_of_the_Sorrows"title="The Lady of the Sorrows">
Imrhien, who has had her face and voice cured but not her memory, has not completed her mission yet. Maeve One eye, the carlin who cured her, gets Imrhien a new identity: Lady Rohain Tarrenys of the Sorrow Isles. Imrhien/Rohain, under cover of night to escape mysterious watchers, heads to Caermelor. After unloading her information with the Duke of Roxburgh, getting assigned a maid, Viviana, and enduring a strenuous dinner with the cruel, jealous Dianella, Rohain heads on a Dainnan frigate to the treasure cache at Waterstair where her friend Sianadh was killed. There the plunderers are captured and the treasure is recovered. Rohain is subsequently rewarded. Afterwards, Rohain travels Isse Tower, where she learns about an unseelie place called Huntingtowers. However, the owner of Huntingtowers leads an attack on Isse Tower, which the King-Emperor and the Dainnan thwart. Back at Isse Tower, Rohain is reunited with Thorn. They leave for Caermelor with Caitri, a kind servant who helped Rohain when she was a slave. Then Thorn is forced to go to Namarre, and despite her pleas to go with him, sends Rohain, in the company of friends, to the royal island sanctuary, Tamhania/Tavaal. When unseelie birds destroy the island, Tamhania is evacuated. Rohain, Viviana and Caitri survive the catastrophe and shelter in a house on the mainland that seems familiar to Rohain. She sends the others to Isse tower while she continues her journey to Huntingtowers, but they follow her. In the wilderness, she renames herself Tahquil, meaning 'warrior'. When they get to Huntingtowers, Imrhein/Rohain/Tahquil discovers a bracelet her father once gave her. This triggers her memory, and she remembers her name, Ashalind, her childhood and how she lost her memory. She also remembers her original quest, to find the exiled Faeren High King Angavar and his entourage and inform him of the whereabouts of the last gate between the Faeren world and Erith, without tipping off his evil brother Morragan, who is also exiled.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pure_Weight_of_the_Heart"title="The Pure Weight of the Heart">
The novel, narrated in first person and divided into three volumes, is the story of Angelica Botticelli, an Italian-born Australian, and astrophysicist from an apparently wealthy background. Born in Italy to an Austrian mother and Italian father, Angelica is a troubled woman in search of love:"From birth, Angelica is destined to fall in love with an angel. At ten, her blissful childhood is destroyed by the death of her father. Only the stars in the sky at night give her hope. Years later, the adult Angelica, beautiful and gifted, and still a student of the stars, drifts through a world of glamour, power and cruelty, until the night she finally finds her angel, in the heart of the extravagance she has come to despise." (Antonella Gambotto, The Pure Weight Of The Heart, blurb, Orion Publishing 1998)The novel is divided into three volumes, and the title of each volume directly refers to its main theme:Book One: "Grief is a Sphere", which details her childhood, adolescence and reaction to her father's murder.Book Two: "A Lycanthropic God", which details her move back to Sydney from London, secretly hostile relationship with her bogan flatmate, Caroline Brine, and discovery of her "angel", the aptly named Gabriel (his surname, Lagen, is an anagram of "angel"), and their ensuing relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Trash"title="War Trash">
Yu Yuan was originally a cadet at Huangpu Military Academy, an important part of the Kuomintang military system. However, when the Communists gained the upper hand in China, the academy went over to their side, and Yu was made a part of the PLA. He is eventually sent to Korea as a lower-ranking officer in the 180th Division. Since he knew some English, he is made part of his unit's staff as a possible translator. He left behind his mother and his fiancee, a girl named Tao Julan.Yu Yuan's unit eventually crosses into Korea and engages the South Korean and UN forces there. After the unit is encircled and destroyed, Yu Yuan is injured and is captured. He spends some time in a hospital, where the ministrations of the medical staff impress him with the humane nature of the medical profession.Subsequently, Yu Yuan is put in a prisoner of war camp. A major political fault line ran through the Communist prisoners, both historically and in the novel. On one side are those who are "loyal" and wish to be repatriated to the Communist side, either North Korean or Chinese; these are called "pro-Communists". On the other side are those who wish to be released to the "Free World", whether that be South Korea or the remaining Chinese Kuomintang bastion of Taiwan. This group is called "pro-Nationalists". Violence often flares between these two groups, and the chief tension in the book is the narrator's attempts to navigate this political minefield.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Wind"title="The Dark Wind">
Jim Chee is assigned four cases to solve by Captain Largo, his new boss at the Tuba City, Arizona office of the Navajo Tribal Police. One is to ascertain who stole jewelry from the Burnt Water trading post, and to find the paroled man suspected of the thievery, Joseph Musket. The third is to find who is vandalizing a windmill in the Joint-Use lands recently allotted to the Hopi. Fourth is to learn the identity of the Navajo man found dead on the path to Kisigi Spring.While he is on stakeout near the windmill one night, a small plane crash lands in the Wepo Wash. Chee runs to the crash, finding the pilot and his passenger dead, and a man sitting up in a business suit, holding a card, murdered. As he approaches, he hears someone leaving on foot in the early morning darkness. He also hears a gunshot, most likely the one that killed the man in the business suit, and sees headlights of a vehicle leaving the scene. The airplane was carrying illegal cargo, likely drugs, and the DEA agents, in particular T. L. Johnson, are possessive of their law enforcement turf.As Chee collects information on Joseph Musket and on the unidentified corpse, he gradually learns information related to the crash and the drug deal. Johnson finds this as reason to invade Chee's home in the morning, including beating Chee up, in Johnson's usual style. Johnson puts forward that Chee was present so soon after the plane crashed because Chee is part of the drug smuggling.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sound_of_His_Horn"title="The Sound of His Horn">
Royal Navy Lieutenant Alan Querdillon becomes a German prisoner during the Battle of Crete during World War II. After escaping, and travelling through a forest he runs into a barrier of 'Bohlen Rays', is knocked unconscious and awakens in a Nazi-controlled world at least a hundred years after World War II on the estate of the Reich Master Forester, Count Hans von Hackelnberg.Querdillon is treated by a doctor and, at night, hears the sounds of a hunting horn, which a nurse tells him is the Count hunting. After witnessing a hunt and discovering that the prey are women dressed as birds, Querdillon asks to meet the Count. The doctor says that is too dangerous but takes Querdillon to observe the Count feasting.Querdillon manages to escape the doctor and join the Count's entourage to witness genetically modified leopard-women attacking deer. On the way back from the sport, the Count spots Querdillon and orders him released into the forest to be hunted. Querdillon plans to escape by tunnelling under the barrier that surrounds the estate. He also meets one of the bird-women, Kit, who helps him.Eventually, Querdillon and Kit are hunted down by the Count, but Kit sacrifices herself to draw the leopard-woman pack onto the barrier, killing them. When the barrier is turned off to retrieve the bodies, Querdillon slips across and returns to 1943.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco's_Millions"title="Marco's Millions">
The book is about a boy named Marco who likes to travel. He often secretly rides buses far from home, though only his telepathic sister finds out. One day, his sister sees strange lights in the basement, and she and Marco investigate. They find a portal into another dimension, and thus the adventure begins. Marco finds strange insect-like creatures there, who are convinced that Marco/Lilly can save their dimension (and as a result save Earth) from their god, which is a naked singularity. None of their family members know about this portal, so Lily and Marco secretly need to save this dimension. Time is valued differently than on Earth in that universe, as 1 minute on the other dimension is roughly 21 minutes on Earth. Saving the other dimension would be being missing for several days on Earth. So, Marco tells his parents he going to his friend Nat's for vacation, while he'll actually be in the other dimension. The creatures (who communicate telepathically) tell Marco he must go on a giant swing and retrieve a small bag at the very top. This will be risking Marco's life. He retrieves the bag and brings it back to the ground. Next, he must go to the naked singularity and bribe it not to destroy the universe by giving it the contents in the bag. The singularity values the contents very much and says it will not destroy the universe, but with one cost.(continued in The Boxes)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Moon_(novel)"title="New Moon (novel)">
On Bella Swan's eighteenth birthday, Edward Cullen, the vampire she loves, and his family host her a birthday party at their residence. While unwrapping a gift, Bella receives a paper cut. Edward's adopted brother, Jasper, is overwhelmed by the scent of her blood and attempts to attack her. Trying to protect her, Edward and the Cullens move away from Forks, but in an attempt to encourage Bella to move on, Edward tells her it is because he no longer loves her. With Edward's departure, Bella suffers severe memory loss and depression for several months.In the months that follow, Bella learns that thrill-seeking activities, such as motorcycle riding and cliff-diving, allow her to "hear" Edward's voice in her head through her subconscious mind. She also seeks comfort in her deepening friendship with Jacob Black, a cheerful companion who eases her pain over losing Edward. Sometime after losing Edward, Bella starts to enjoy Jacob's company and friendship. After spending some time with Bella, Jacob starts experiencing some unexpected and drastic changes in his mood swings, body, and personality. As Jacob undergoes a very long, painful, and life-altering transformation, Bella and Charlie become concerned. A few weeks later, Bella notes that Jacob isn't as happy-go-lucky as he once was. She isn't so comfortable with Jacob's recent changes, and shortly thereafter, she discovers that Jacob has unwillingly become a werewolf and that there are other tribe members who are werewolves too. Jacob and his pack protect Bella from the vampire, Laurent, who was a part of James' coven, and also Victoria, who seeks revenge for her dead mate, James, whom the Cullens had killed in the previous installment. Jacob starts developing physical emotions towards Bella, but she doesn't feel the same after experiencing a life-changing breakup with Edward. This makes him horribly sad and envious of Edward. Jacob then saves Bella from drowning after jumping off a cliff and almost kisses her in the events following.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Matters"title="Celestial Matters">
The story is narrated by Aias of Tyre, a scientist of the Delian League, who is preparing to embark on Project Sunthief as scientific commander. This project is an audacious and desperate mission to sail a spaceship carved out of a piece of the moon herself out through the spheres, to catch a piece of the sun and bring it back to earth to annihilate the Middler capital city. This, the league hopes, will finally end the war and give it victory.The Middlers have been assassinating Delian generals and politicians, so Aias is assigned a bodyguard, Captain Yellow Hare of Sparta, a woman of Xeroki ancestry. Shortly after the launch of the moon-ship, Chandra's Tear, it becomes clear that there is a saboteur on board. Aias' old friend Ramonojon, a mathematician, has expressed doubts about the rightness of annihilating an entire city and is viewed with dark suspicion by Anaxamander, the heroic military commander of the project. Mihradarius, the fire scientist who has devised the sun-catching method, keeps his own counsel.As sabotage, catastrophe, and exhilarating maneuvers overtake the voyage, Aias begins to wonder about the wisdom of the Delian strategy. Eventually he comes to understand the desperation of the Middle Kingdom, thanks to a Middler scientist stowaway, and they try to synthesize between them a way for the two world-spanning empires to resolve their differences. There remains a life-or-death race to earth on a crippled ship in the hope of bringing hope. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deryni_Rising"title="Deryni Rising">
The novel is set in the land of Gwynedd, one of the fictional Eleven Kingdoms. Gwynedd itself is a medieval kingdom similar to the British Isles of the 12th century, with a powerful Holy Church (based on the Roman Catholic Church), and a feudal government ruled by a hereditary monarchy. The population of Gwynedd includes both humans and Deryni, a race of people with inherent psychic and magical abilities who have been shunned and persecuted for centuries. The book takes place almost entirely within Gwynedd's capital city of Rhemuth, and deals primarily with the struggle of young Prince Kelson Haldane to secure his throne from the machinations of a Deryni usurper.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treasure_of_Tranicos_(collection)"title="The Treasure of Tranicos (collection)">
## "The Treasure of Tranicos".The title story begins with Conan in the Pictish Wilderness, fleeing native warriors who are now hunting him. To escape his pursuers, Conan climbs a nearby hill. Suddenly, he sees the Picts inexplicably abandon their chase and turn back. Soon, Conan realizes this spot must be a forbidden place to the Picts. The hill turns out to hold a treasure cave, along with the preserved bodies of a pirate captain, Tranicos, and his crew. Eventually, the treasure draws others towards the forbidden cave in their quest for it — one Count Valenso, and both Zingaran and Barachan sea reavers. But the bane of Tranicos is quite ready to take new victims, and Conan must outmaneuver all of them if "he" is to claim the riches.Howard's original story pointed toward a new nautical career for Conan; one of de Camp's major changes was to make it lead instead into the revolution that would bring the Cimmerian to the throne of Aquilonia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deryni_Checkmate"title="Deryni Checkmate">
The novel is set in the land of Gwynedd, one of the fictional Eleven Kingdoms. Gwynedd itself is a medieval kingdom similar to the British Isles of the 12th century, with a powerful Holy Church (based on the Roman Catholic Church), and a feudal government ruled by a hereditary monarchy. The population of Gwynedd includes both humans and Deryni, a race of people with inherent physic and magical abilities who have been shunned and persecuted for centuries. The book takes place several months after "Deryni Rising", and details the consequences of the events that surrounded the coronation of young King Kelson Haldane. Horrified by the demonstrations of Deryni magic that occurred during the coronation, the leaders of the Holy Church of Gwynedd decide to take a stand against the Deryni, particularly Duke Alaric Morgan and Monsignor Duncan McLain. Kelson, Morgan, and Duncan must find a way to thwart the vengeance of the Church while also preparing for a possible invasion by a foreign enemy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Controversy_(book)"title="The Great Controversy (book)">
This synopsis is only of the current, 1911 edition and its predecessor, the 1888 edition. While the original 1858 edition covered the entire history of sin from its beginning in heaven until it is eradicated in the new earth, these two editions cover just the Christian dispensation.The book begins with a historical overview, which begins with the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, covers the Reformation and Advent movement in detail, and culminates with a lengthy description of the end times. It also outlines several key Seventh-day Adventist doctrines, including the heavenly sanctuary, the investigative judgment and the state of the dead.Much of the first half of the book is devoted to the historical conflict between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. White writes that the Papacy propagated a corrupt form of Christianity from the time of Constantine I onwards, and during the Middle Ages was opposed only by the Waldensians and other small groups, who preserved an authentic form of Christianity. Beginning with John Wycliffe and Jan Huss and continuing with Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, and others, the Reformation led to a partial recovery of biblical truth. In the early 19th century William Miller began to preach that Jesus was about to return to earth; his movement eventually resulted in the formation of the Adventist Church.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Like_Gods"title="Men Like Gods">
"Men Like Gods" is set in the summer of 1921. Its protagonist is Mr. Barnstaple (his first name is either Alfred or William), a journalist working in London and living in Sydenham. He has grown dispirited at a newspaper called "The Liberal" and resolves to take a holiday. Taking leave of his wife and family, his plans are disrupted when his and two other automobiles are accidentally transported with their passengers into "another world," which the "Earthlings" call Utopia.A sort of advanced Earth, Utopia is some three thousand years ahead of humanity in its development. For the 200,000,000 Utopians who inhabit this world, the "Days of Confusion" are a distant period studied in history books, but their past resembles humanity's in its essentials, differing only in incidental details: their Christ, for example, died on the wheel, not on the cross. Utopia lacks any world government and functions as a successfully realised anarchy. "Our education is our government," a Utopian named Lion says. Sectarian religion, like politics, has died away, and advanced scientific research flourishes. Life in Utopia is governed by "the Five Principles of Liberty", which are privacy, free movement, unlimited knowledge, truthfulness, and free discussion (allowing criticism)."Men Like Gods" is divided into three books. Details of life in Utopia are given in Books I and III. In Book II, the Earthlings are quarantined on a rocky crag after infections they have brought cause a brief epidemic in Utopia. There they begin to plot the conquest of Utopia, despite Mr. Barnstaple's protests. He betrays them when his fellows try to take two Utopians hostage, forcing Mr. Barnstaple to escape execution for treason by fleeing perilously.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goblin_Wood"title="The Goblin Wood">
Makenna is a hedgewitch. Her mother is killed when a new priest is sent to town. Makenna flees for her life, and tries to flood the town in revenge. She flees to the woods and is teased by a group of goblins. Soon, she catches one goblin named Cogswhallop. She spares his life, and in return he convinces the other goblins to stop taunting her. Makenna later meets a friendly trader in the woods who tells her that the priesthood is working to eliminate all sources of magic they consider to not come from divine sources, including goblins and hedgewitches. Cogswhallop and his friends ask for Makenna's help to rescue a small goblin family from being burned to death by a priest. Makenna helps the goblins, and they form an alliance to help goblins and find a safe place to live.One night, Tobin, a young knight, finds his brother fleeing from the guards for helping the rebels. Tobin assists his brother but is caught and branded as a traitor. To save his name and family, Tobin accepts a mission to rid the northern lands of goblins to make space for settlers who have lost their land to the barbarians in the south. Tobin sets off for the far village to the north to take on the goblins and their leader, a "sorceress." In a northern town, Tobin meets a priest of the Bright Ones, who informs him of his mission, to seek out the goblin lair and plant the Otherworld stone near the sorceress's headquarters, allowing them to spy on her. Tobin sets out to find the lair but is caught by the goblins and taken to their village. While trying to escape, he drops the stone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forging_the_Sword"title="Forging the Sword">
Soraya, Kavi and Jiaan have agreed to work together to defeat the Hrum and free Farsala. However, distrust of Kavi is impeding this effort. The three attempt to work together, but it becomes difficult. Luckily, they have finally uncovered the secret of watersteel, with the help of Kavi's ability to "speak" to metal.Only a few months remain in the Hrums self-imposed limit to conquer Farsala. The three youths learn that Garren, the Strategus in charge of the conquest, has more riding on the conquest than just Farsala. His father, a member of the Senate of the Hrum Empire, stated that Garren would conquer Farsala with only ten thousand troops. In addition, his father stated that he will resign from the Senate if this is not accomplished. He did these things in order to secure the assignment of the Farsalan conquest to his son. Garren's father's enemies are eager for this to happen. When Garren requisitions gold to hire Kadeshi aid and circumvent the troop sanction, the Senate sends a delegation to review the conquest.Kavi, Jiaan and Soraya decide to capture the gold before it reaches the Kadeshi, as a Kadeshi warlord has informed Jiaan that if he chooses to pay, the warlord will order the troops he sent Garren to betray the Hrum, crippling the army. Jiaan, Kavi and Soraya do not wish for this to happen. Soraya, with Kavi accompanying her, visits the bandits and convinces them to rob the Senate committee, which will arrive at the nearby harbor of Dugaz. They believe that if the delegation is robbed during its stay, it will demonstrate to the Senate that Garren does not have the country under control. However, upon arriving at the bandits' lair, Shir, their leader, informs Kavi and Soraya that the Senate arrived a week ago, and the bandits failed to rob them. Disappointed, the two promise Shir that in exchange for letting them go, they will get the Suud to try to develop a cure for the swamp fever plaguing the bandits.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_(Wharton_novel)"title="Summer (Wharton novel)">
At the start of the novel, young Charity Royall is bored with her life in the small town of North Dormer. She was born to poor parents from "up the Mountain" who gave her up to the town's learned person, Lawyer Royall, but she still dreams of an even better and more exciting life outside of the town. She secures a job at North Dormer's library in an attempt to save up money so she can eventually leave the town and Mr. Royall's care. The widowed Mr. Royall makes an inappropriate advance toward Charity one night that she rebuffs but it irrevocably sours their relationshipWhen she is 17, that exciting life finds her in the form of a visiting architect named Lucius Harney. Her first encounter with the charming young man is at the library and there is immediate chemistry between them. Soon, he finds himself boarding at Mr. Royall's house when his own living arrangements fall through.Charity Royall finds herself attracted to Lucius and decides to become his companion as he explores the town. He is putting together a book on colonial houses and the two of them go around town together so he can inspect and sketch the houses as a part of his research for the book. Mr. Royall, who holds onto the idea of marrying Charity, notices the two of them growing close and immediately evicts Lucius from his house. Lucius leaves town and relocates to a nearby village.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Negro"title="The White Negro">
"The White Negro" is a 9,000-word essay divided into six sections of varying lengths.In Section 1, Mailer argues that the twin horrors of the atom bomb and the concentration camps have wrought "psychic havoc" by subjecting individual human lives to the calculus of the state machine. The collective practices of Western progress seem to render life and death meaningless for the individual who is compelled to join the numbed masses in a "collective failure of nerve". Courage only seems to be present in marginalized, isolated people who can stand in opposition to these practices.Section 2 proposes that the marginalized figure — "the American existentialist" — lives with the knowledge of quick death, the possibility of state violence, the compulsory need to conform, and the sublimation of baser desires. He knows that the only answer is to accept these conditions, divorce himself from the bored sickness of society, and seek the "rebellious imperatives of the self". Mailer presents a dichotomy: one path leads to a quiet prison of the mind and body, that is, to boredom, sickness, and desperation, while the other leads to "new kinds of victories [that] increase one's power for new kinds of perception". Either one is a rebel — the Hip, the psychopath — or, tempted by the promise of success, one conforms to "the totalitarian tissues of an American society", and becomes Square. Because he has lived on the margins of society, for Mailer the American Negro is the model for the Hipster: someone living for the primitive present and the pleasures of the body. Mailer links this proposition with jazz and its appeal to the sensual, the improvisational, and the immediate, in other words, to what Mailer calls the "burning consciousness of the present" felt by the existentialist, the bullfighter, and the Hipster alike. In summary, one can "remain in life only by engaging death".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_the_Twins"title="Time of the Twins">
The book opens with a meeting between the devout cleric, Crysania, the historian, Astinus, and the dark mage, Raistlin. Crysania is determined to stop Raistlin from following the path of darkness. At the end of their meeting, he invites her to the Tower of High Sorcery of Palanthas.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_the_Austins"title="Meet the Austins">
Vicky Austin's noisy, loving, mostly-happy family is disrupted when the family's honorary uncle dies in a plane crash. His co-pilot was also killed, leaving behind a ten-year-old daughter, Maggy, who has no one to care for her. The Austins take Maggy in, and she proves to be a spoiled, troubled only child who had very little family life. Maggy encourages Vicky's sister Suzy to misbehave, which makes everyone's life more difficult. "Meet the Austins" is largely episodic; each chapter covers a specific incident such as Vicky's bicycle accident or a family vacation. Throughout the book, Vicky comments on the changes her family experiences during this time, and the reader sees her growing self-awareness. Although Vicky will later appear in three novels that have fantasy and/or science fiction themes, there are no such elements in "Meet the Austins".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duma_Key"title="Duma Key">
Wealthy Minnesotan building-contractor Edgar Freemantle barely survives a severe work-site accident wherein his truck is crushed by a crane. Freemantle loses his right arm, while suffering severe head injuries impairing his speech, vision, and memory. During his long recovery, Edgar experiences suicidal thoughts and violent abusive mood swings, spurring his wife to file for divorce.On the advice of his psychologist, Dr. Kamen, Edgar relocates southward, renting a beach house on the island of Duma Key, off Florida's coast. Kamen further advises Freemantle to rekindle his onetime sketching hobby as a restorative. Edgar retains local college student Jack Cantori as part-time shopper and personal assistant. Soon after, Freemantle meets and befriends the island's other full-time residents, octogenarian heiress Elizabeth Eastlake (sufferer of final-stage dementia, whose family trust owns most of the island), and her live-in attendant, Jerome Wireman, himself a once-gifted attorney whose wife and daughter's tragic deaths led him to (unsuccessfully) attempt suicide via gunshot wound.Decades-old paranormal phenomena revisit the island as Freemantle delves obsessively into his art. Edgar creates with furious energy, lapsing into a semi-conscious haze; his paintings and sketches capture psychic visions, revealing his ex-wife's romantic affair, his friend's suicidal depression, and his younger daughter Ilse's fleeting marital engagement. Later, Freemantle uses his newfound artistic powers to manipulate the outside world, healing Wireman's degenerating neurological condition, and suffocating a child murderer in his jail cell. During Ilse's visit to Duma Key, the father-daughter duo drive to a disused, overgrown section of the island, where colors seem unnaturally vivid, and Ilse becomes violently ill. Elizabeth Eastlake warns Edgar via telephone conversations that Duma "has never been a lucky place for daughters", and that his paintings should be sold to multiple geographically-distant buyers, lest their otherworldly power grow too concentrated or dangerous.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apprenticeship_of_Duddy_Kravitz_(novel)"title="The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (novel)">
The novel focuses on the young life of Duddy Kravitz, a poor Jewish boy raised in Montreal, Quebec. Family, friends, lovers and teachers all contribute to Duddy's burgeoning obsession with power and money — desires embodied in the possession of land. As a child, Duddy is told by his grandfather that "a man without land is nobody," and Duddy comes to believe land ownership to be life's ultimate goal and the means by which a man becomes a somebody.Duddy begins to move towards this goal by working for his Uncle Benjy. Their relationship is strained: Uncle Benjy, a wealthy clothing manufacturer with socialist sympathies, has always favored Duddy's brother Lennie, who wants to become a doctor. Uncle Benjy takes a dim view of Duddy's commercial ambitions, seeing them as avaricious and crass. During the summer after high school, Duddy takes a job as a waiter at a hotel in Ste. Agathe. He stumbles upon a beautiful and secluded lake while out with his soon-to-be lover and "Girl Friday", Yvette. A born entrepreneur, Duddy immediately sees that the lake has tremendous potential as a summer resort.Duddy returns to Montreal and starts a company to produce bar mitzvah films. To this end he hires Friar, an alcoholic, avant-garde filmmaker blacklisted in the United States, for his communist tendencies. Since Duddy's childhood, his father, Max, had told him stories about Jerry Dingleman, the local "Boy Wonder" whose rags-to-riches story is canonical among the residents of St. Urbain Street. Looking for help with his film company, Duddy attempts to engage Dingleman. The two travel to New York City, but Duddy fails to secure any assistance from the "Boy Wonder", who sees Duddy as a naive upstart and uses him to ferry a package of heroin across the Canada-U.S. border.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flame_Knife"title="The Flame Knife">
Conan, leader of a band of Kozaki mercenaries in the service of King Kobad of Iranistan, quarrels with his employer over the king's command to capture Balash, chief of the Kushafi nomads and Conan's friend. Instead, Conan has his men warn the Kushafi. In the Gorge of Ghosts, the two armies are attacked by members of the Sons of Yezm, a cult of assassins whose symbol is the Flame Knife. The cultists kidnap Nanaia, Conan's current girlfriend. The Cimmerian tracks them to their stronghold, where he becomes embroiled in a conflict with his old rival Olgerd Vladislav, an opponent first encountered in Howard's story "A Witch Shall be Born".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Grade_Secrets"title="Sixth Grade Secrets">
When Laura Sibbie starts a secret club at school, she makes the other members give her something totally embarrassing as "insurance," to make sure they don't tell anyone else about the club. She promises to keep the insurance secret unless someone tells. Gabriel wants to join, but when Laura asks him, there is a misunderstanding and he storms out to form a rival club, Monkey Town.The pranks they play on each other escalate into ugly and destructive acts. It gets to a point where Gabriel steals the insurance and reveals it to the school. Sheila (who hates Laura) and a friend, Howard (who just wants everyone to like him), corner Laura on her way from school and cut a large chunk out of her long hair. Laura gets a new, short, curly hairdo which Gabriel, arriving with daisies, likes. The sheared Laura sees how foolish they've been, and the truth of Gabriel's affection comes to light.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_of_the_Blind"title="Paradise of the Blind">
"Paradise of the Blind" follows a non-linear, vertical plot depicting the development of Hang, the narrator, through several life-changing events. An adult Hang in the 1980s receives a telegram stating that her uncle, Chinh, is ill and that she must visit him in Moscow. Throughout her journey to Moscow she recounts significant events in her childhood.As she looks back on the past, she realizes it is the steadfast resolve toward familial duty that has made her family so miserable. She realizes this does not have to be her fate. While she is waiting to leave Russia for Vietnam, she sees a group of young Japanese students who are happy and laughing and free. She longs to be Japanese, of a race that does not carry the same burdens as her people. She resolves to do what it is that makes her happy—because her duty to her mother, who would sacrifice her own daughter to help her corrupt brother—is not happiness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Gilly_Hopkins"title="The Great Gilly Hopkins">
Galadriel "Gilly" Hopkins is a mean, brash 11-year-old girl who is headed for yet another foster home. She hates living with different people all the time and just wants to settle in with her birth mother, Courtney Rutherford Hopkins, whose photograph Gilly secretly treasures. Gilly doesn't like the look of her new foster mom, Mrs. Trotter, a "fat hippo", and decides she is going to hate her whole life.Gilly hatches a plan to escape from Trotter and steals the money she needs for it to work. She knows that her mother lives in San Francisco, California so she writes a letter to Courtney saying that her beloved Galadriel will be with her soon. When Gilly escapes the first time, she gets caught by police and Trotter immediately comes down to the station to retrieve her. Gilly's grandmother, Nonnie, comes to Trotter's house and tells her that she will take Gilly home. Nonnie was previously unaware that she had a granddaughter. By this time Gilly realizes that she really wants to be with Trotter. However, the law says that Gilly must go with Nonnie, so she goes to Nonnie's house.Then Gilly gets good news: her mother is coming. But when she goes to the airport, Courtney is not the woman in Gilly's photograph: she has stringy hair and a lot of other traits Gilly didn't expect, like being selfish. Gilly also finds out that her mother only came because Nonnie paid her, not because she wanted to come. She realizes for the first time how foolish she has been and that she actually loves Trotter. The story ends with Gilly on the phone, crying to Trotter to take her back. Trotter, in turn, gently convinces her that her home is with Nonnie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_in_the_White_City"title="The Devil in the White City">
"The Devil in the White City" is divided into four parts, the first three happening in Chicago between 1890 and 1893, while part four of the book takes place in Philadelphia circa 1895. The book interweaves the true tales of Daniel Burnham, the architect behind the 1893 World's Fair, and H. H. Holmes, a serial killer who lured his victims to their deaths in his elaborately constructed "Murder Castle".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Deryni"title="High Deryni">
The novel is set in the land of Gwynedd, one of the fictional Eleven Kingdoms. Gwynedd itself is a medieval kingdom similar to the British Isles of the 12th century, with a powerful Holy Church (based on the Roman Catholic Church), and a feudal government ruled by a hereditary monarchy. The population of Gwynedd includes both humans and Deryni, a race of people with inherent physic and magical abilities who have been shunned and persecuted for centuries. The novel begins three months after the events of "Deryni Checkmate", as young King Kelson Haldane struggles to resolve an internal ecclesiastical schism on the eve of an invasion by a powerful Deryni sorcerer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_and_Let_Die_(novel)"title="Live and Let Die (novel)">
The British Secret Service agent James Bond is sent by his superior, M, to New York City to investigate "Mr Big", real name Buonaparte Ignace Gallia. Bond's target is an agent of the Soviet counterintelligence organisation SMERSH, and an underworld voodoo leader who is suspected of selling 17th-century gold coins to finance Soviet spy operations in America. These gold coins have been turning up in the Harlem section of New York City and in Florida and are suspected of being part of a treasure that was buried in Jamaica by the pirate Henry Morgan.In New York, Bond meets up with his counterpart in the CIA, Felix Leiter. The two visit some of Mr Big's nightclubs in Harlem, but are captured. Bond is interrogated by Mr Big, who uses his fortune-telling employee, Solitaire (so named because she excludes men from her life), to determine if Bond is telling the truth. Solitaire lies to Mr Big, supporting Bond's cover story. Mr Big decides to release Bond and Leiter, and has one of Bond's fingers broken. On leaving, Bond kills several of Mr Big's men; Leiter is released with minimal physical harm by a gang member, sympathetic because of a shared appreciation of jazz.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Loved_Tiberius"title="I Loved Tiberius">
The story begins in Rome. Julia, the daughter of Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, suffers with an awkward relationship between her and her sixteen-year-old stepbrother Tiberius. He is frequently unfair to her leading to them often fighting and them being punished. Through the harshness of living in Livia's strict household Tiberius becomes attracted to Julia's more affectionate nature despite her being merely thirteen. Very quickly Julia becomes smitten with him and he obsessed with her.Tiberius decides that he wishes to marry Julia and plans to ask Augustus. However, before he has a chance, Augustus announces that Julia will be married to Marcellus as soon as she turns fourteen. Marcellus, who is in love with a consul's daughter, confides the truth to Julia. She gives him her blessing to go on seeing this girl but the affair ends after she becomes pregnant and her father marries her to a friend. Meanwhile, Julia discovers Tiberius is conducting affairs with other women. Julia and Marcellus comfort each other and finally consummate their marriage. Nonetheless Julia finds Marcellus repugnant.Marcellus becomes jealous of Agrippa when Augustus nearly dies from an illness and names Agrippa his heir by giving him his signant ring. Shortly after Augustus recovers Agrippa and Marcella (His wife and Julia's cousin) nearly die in a fire at their house that was purposely lit. Agrippa confides to Julia that he suspects Livia might be involved. He subsequently decides to leave Rome and travel to Lesbos.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_One_More_Day"title="For One More Day">
The book's theme is mortality: it analyzes how people might react to the chance to have a dead relative back for a day.The book tells the story of Charles "Chick" Benetto, a former baseball player who encounters a myriad of problems with his career, finances, family and alcohol abuse. This leads him to become suicidal. Charles goes on a drunken rampage and decides he is going to end his life in his old home town, but when he misses the exit, he turns around driving down the wrong side of the highway causing an accident, Benetto flees to his old home – his suicide attempt an apparent failure – to see his mother, who had died ten years prior.Benetto returns to his old family home, and spends one more day with his mother, where in a number of previously unknown factors related to his difficult childhood and troubled relationship with his father are revealed to him. His mother assists him in resolving his issues and getting his life back on track. The day ends when Benetto regains consciousness at the scene of the accident in a police officer's arms.The book's epilogue describes how Benetto was inspired by his experience to quit drinking and reconcile with family, including his daughter, Maria, before his death five years later. At the end, Maria is revealed to have been the narrator of the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticktock_(novel)"title="Ticktock (novel)">
Tommy Phan is a first-generation Vietnamese American in southern California, a successful detective novelist whose greatest ambition is to live the American Dream. The story opens with Tommy getting a new Corvette. He argues with his mother, refusing her offer for dinner. In a fit of rebellion, he eats two cheeseburgers, something his mother dislikes. He meets a blond waitress there (whom he will meet later in the story again). His radio quits working during one of these two trips, and in the static are eerie voices.Once home, he finds a Rag doll on his front steps, along with a note, written in Vietnamese, which he knew when he was a child but has forgotten in his quest to be a true American. After taking the doll into his study, it soon bursts open to reveal an evil creature who seems intent on killing Tommy. A message is left on his computer screen saying he has until dawn, but what will happen at dawn, Tommy does not know. After fate brings a meeting with Del, a woman who appears to speak somewhat cryptically, they embark on a race to flee the creature. She believes him too quickly, and often has mixed stories for all of her abilities. (At one point she stole a car, saying one minute she hotwired it, and the next that the key was in the ignition.)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Slayers'_Academy"title="Dragon Slayers' Academy">
The series follows the adventures of a young medieval peasant boy Wiglaf of Pinwick and his two friends, Erica von Royale and Angus du Pangus, as they are educated in the art of dragon slaying at the boarding school, Dragon Slayers' Academy (DSA), run by Angus' greedy Uncle Mordred. The academy is run under the motto "Goldius est goodius," features three pots of gold above a dead dragon on its back on its crest. The school serves only eel for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witches_of_Worm"title="The Witches of Worm">
Jessica, a lonely pre-teen girl, finds a blind, almost hairless kitten that she names Worm. A reclusive elderly neighbor, Mrs. Fortune, helps her to wean and raise him. Worm seems to have a terrible hold on Jessica, compelling her to do cruel and destructive things to people in her life who have upset her. Jessica's victims include her former best friend Brandon and her childish and emotionally distant divorced mother. As Jessica's destructive actions escalate, her mother attempts to send her to counseling, which further enrages and upsets her. Jessica comes to believe that Worm is possessed by a group of witches that includes Mrs. Fortune. When Jessica finds herself contemplating Mrs. Fortune's murder, she realizes she is in danger of going too far, and decides to exorcise Worm herself in order to break his hold over her. After a dramatic exorcism, culminating in a nighttime chase during a bad thunderstorm, Worm becomes a normal cat, and Jessica is reconciled with her mother and Brandon, causing her to think that she not only exorcised Worm but also herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alien_(novel)"title="The Alien (novel)">
After destroying both the Kandrona and the "Veleek", the Animorphs assumed that they would see people freeing themselves of the Yeerks. They are disappointed until the day they take Ax to the cinema. A man's Yeerk is seen dying publicly. However, a Controller-policeman kills the free man.The Animorphs take Ax to the school as Philip, Jake's cousin, and a Yeerk who controlled one of Jake's teachers is seen dying as well. Chapman appears, orders the students to leave, and kills the non-Controller teacher.Jake and the other Animorphs become very angry with Ax, since Ax knew the Yeerks would kill abandoned hosts (along with much more Andalite knowledge), but would not share with the humans. Innocent people are dying as a result of their actions. Ax retorts that they would not have destroyed the Kandrona had they known the consequences, to which Jake replies that Ax still has a lot to learn about humans.The next day, he meets with Marco to go to a bookshop in hopes that Ax would trust them if they trusted him. However, Marco forgets the money they collected for him to buy a book at home, so he and Ax go to Marco's house to pick it up. While Ax waits for Marco in the living room, he plays what he thinks is a game on Marco's father's computer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Changeling_(Snyder_novel)"title="The Changeling (Snyder novel)">
The novel's plot follows the developing friendship of two adolescent girls: shy, fearful Martha and free-spirited, mystical, imaginative Ivy. Ivy belonged to the shunned Carson family, who lived in the hills above town in a derelict Victorian mansion surrounded by neglected fruit orchards that had been handed down to her mother. But Ivy was not a typical Carson. Ivy explains to Martha when they first meet that she is a changeling, a child of supernatural parents who had been exchanged for the real Ivy Carson at birth. She returns to this theme with particular emphasis when she is threatened or harmed in any way. Martha comes from a well-to-do family completely in thrall to suburban values and suspicious of Ivy due to her background.The girls become friends in the second grade and soon are inseparable. Among other things, Martha discovers that Ivy is "absolutely fearless"; not courageous, but fearless. It is implied that this is at least in part due to abuse by her father or brothers. When Ivy cries, which is rarely, she sheds few tears and makes no sound at all. The illustrations as well as the text emphasize the contrasts between the girls. Ivy is dark, thin, beautiful, graceful and mature; Martha is blond, overweight, bucktoothed, clumsy, and cries easily. What they have in common is bright imagination, which they soon pool into a shared fantasy, almost a belief system.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_in_the_Silence"title="Song in the Silence">
Lanen Kaelar is a young woman who has been raised in Hadronsstead, believing that Hadron (the horse-breeder) was her father. She leads an unhappy life as she secretly longs to meet the Dragons of legend, for which she has had a powerful fascination, but she is forced to remain at Hadron's farm.When Hadron eventually dies, she feels freed. After an abrupt proposal from her cousin (who gets a bruise from her fist in response), she leaves to seek out the True Dragons of legend. On the journey she learns that her true father Marik has promised her as a demon sacrifice since before her birth, in payment for the making of an artifact that allows the user to see distant people and places.She finds a ship to the Dragon Isle for the Lansip harvest that used to occur every ten years, but no ship has returned from the trip in over 100 years due to the violent storms that lie between Kolmar and the Dragon Isle. After travelling on the ship with her father Marik lurking dangerously on board, she makes it safely to the Dragon Isle and meets Akhor, the mighty silver-scaled king of the Kantri (known to humans as "dragons"). She seeks him out with the two words that she utters on instinct, that he respects her instantly for; 'My brother?' Akhor, weary of the 'ferrinshadik' (a longing to know the mind of another species, similar to what Lanen herself feels), reveals himself, and discovers that Lanen alone of the humans (Gedri) he has ever known, is capable of hearing and replying in Truespeech, the Kantri form of telepathy. It is a trait all the Kantri share.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_River_(novel)"title="Deep River (novel)">
The story traces the journey of four Japanese tourists on a tour to India in 1984. Each has different purposes and expectations. Even though the tour is interrupted when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is assassinated by militant Sikhs, the tourists find their own spiritual discoveries on the banks of the Ganges River.One of the tourists is Osamu Isobe. He is a middle-class manager whose wife has died of cancer. On her deathbed she asked him to look for her in a future reincarnation. His search takes him to India, even though he has doubts about reincarnation.Kiguchi is haunted by war-time horrors in Burma and seeks to have Buddhist rituals performed in India for the souls of his friends in the Japanese army as well as his enemies. He is impressed by a foreign Christian volunteer who helped his sick friend deal with tragic experiences during the war.Numada has a deep love for animals ever since he was a child in Manchuria. He believes that a pet bird he owns has died in his place. He goes to India to visit a bird sanctuary.Mitsuko Naruse, after a failed marriage, realizes that she is a person incapable of love. She goes to India hoping to find the meaning of life. Her values are challenged by the awaiting Otsu, a former schoolmate she once cruelly seduced and then left. Although he had a promising career as a Catholic priest, Otsu’s heretical ideas of a pantheistic God have led to his expulsion. He helps carry dead Indians to the local crematoria so that their ashes can be spread over the Ganges. His efforts ultimately lead to his peril as he is caught in the anti-Sikh uprisings in the country. Meanwhile, Mitsuko meets two nuns from the Missionaries of Charity and begins to understand Otsu's idea of God.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children_of_Húrin"title="The Children of Húrin">
Túrin, son of Húrin is a Man who lived in Dor-lómin. Húrin was taken prisoner by Morgoth after the Battle of Unnumbered Tears and during his imprisonment Túrin was sent by his mother, Morwen, to live in the Elf-realm Doriath for protection. In his absence Morwen gave birth to Niënor, a girl. Morgoth had placed a curse upon Húrin and all his family whereby evil would befall them for their whole lives.King Thingol of Doriath takes Túrin as a foster-son. During his time in Doriath Túrin befriends Beleg, and the two become close companions. Túrin accidentally causes the death of Saeros, who attempts to jump a ravine while fleeing a wrothful Túrin but falls to his death. Túrin refuses to return to Doriath to face judgement and opts for exile and life as an outlaw. Thingol pardons the absent Túrin and gives Beleg leave to search for him and bring him back to Doriath.Túrin meanwhile joins a band of outlaws in the wild and eventually becomes their captain. Beleg locates the band while Túrin is absent, and the outlaws leave him tied to a tree until he agrees to give them information. Túrin returns in time to cut Beleg free and, horrified by the outlaws' actions, resolves to forsake the cruel habits he has fallen into. Beleg delivers the message of the king's pardon but Túrin refuses to return to Doriath. Beleg returns to aid Doriath's defence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reluctant_King"title="The Reluctant King">
The trilogy follows the adventures of ex-king Jorian, a native of the village of Ardamai in the kingdom of Kortoli, one of the twelve city-states of Novaria. Jorian is a powerful and intelligent man who has trained extensively for a life of adventure but is hampered by garrulousness and a weakness for drink and women.When first seen, Jorian is the reluctant king of Xylar, another Novarian city-state. The Xylarians select their king every five years by executing the reigning monarch and tossing his head into a crowd; the man who catches it becomes the next king (despite the terrible end awaiting the victor in this contest, there is never a lack of candidates, intentional or otherwise...). Jorian, having been selected for the position five years before, is at the end of his term as ruler. He miraculously escapes his fate with the aid of the Mulvanian sorcerer Dr. Karadur.The tale continues through a pair of spectacularly disastrous quests in aid of his savior, the first taking them through the exotic lands of Mulvan, Komilakh and Shven and the second south to the ancient empire of Penembei.In the course of the later adventure Jorian is tapped to be ruler of Penembei, an office nearly as hazardous as that of king of Xylar. Adroitly ducking this second crown, he endeavors to recover from Xylar his favorite wife Estrildis, with whom he hopes to retire to a life of quiet obscurity, only to have things once again go wrong...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moth_Smoke"title="Moth Smoke">
Darashikoh, or Daru as he is referred to, is a mid-level banker with a short fuse. His aggression had served him well as a college-boxer but an out-of-character outburst gets him fired. The loss of income brings to the fore a widening gap between him and his classmates, and Daru exposes his bitterness to the wealthy in his commentary. This contrast in income, though present through their years at school becomes evident to Daru only now as he comes to realise that money and wealth mean more than his personal traits can offer.He is content to interact with his rich friends all the same, and finds comfort in the arms of Mumtaz – Daru's best friend's wife. Mumtaz falls for Daru too, but unlike Daru she is not an idealist. This mismatch of thought comes to the forefront soon after the long and rocky affair begins. While cuckolding his best friend, Daru is content to sell him drugs, which are socially acceptable among his friends. This life of duplicity leads to spiralling loss of control in his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reluctant_Fundamentalist"title="The Reluctant Fundamentalist">
The story begins in the streets of Lahore. A Pakistani man, Changez, offers to direct an American visitor where he can find a good cup of tea. As they wait for their tea, Changez begins to weave a long story about his life, especially his time living in the United States – in between making remarks about the history, landmarks and society of Lahore, his native city which he loves and of which he is proud. The unnamed American is restless but remains to listen.Changez tells the American he was an excellent student who, after completing his bachelor's degree in finance, joined Underwood Samson, a consultancy firm, as an analyst. After graduating from Princeton University, he vacationed in Greece with fellow Princetonians, where he met Erica, an aspiring writer. He was instantly smitten by her, but his feelings remained almost unrequited because she was still grieving over the death of her childhood sweetheart Chris, who succumbed to lung cancer. After a date, they return to his place and he proceeds to have sex with her, but stops because her emotional attachment to Chris prevents her from becoming aroused. After this incident there is an interlude where neither contacts each other. But soon they go on another date, after which they have sex when Changez convinces Erica to close her eyes and fantasize that she is with Chris. Though Changez is satisfied at this development in their relationship, this irreversibly damages their relationship. Soon she begins treatment in a mental institution. He notices she is physically emaciated and no longer her former self. After this meeting he travels to Chile on an assignment. When he returns to meet her, it is found that she has left the institution and her clothes were found near the Hudson River. Officially she is stated as a missing person, as her body has not been found.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anticipations"title="Anticipations">
## Chapter 1: Locomotion in the Twentieth Century.Proposing to forecast "the way things will probably go in this new century," Wells's point of departure is "the probable developments and changes of the means of land locomotion during the coming decades." Taking the "steam engine running on a railway" to be the most characteristic symbol of the 19th century, he analyzes the historical factors that led it to appear when it did. Wells predicts that "new motor vehicles" will lead to trucks, cars ("motor carriages"), and buses ("the motor omnibus") that will be "segregated" from horse traffic on "special roads" competing with railways.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hide_&amp;_Seek_(Patterson_novel)"title="Hide &amp; Seek (Patterson novel)">
Maggie Bradford is a successful singer/songwriter who is on trial for murder. She has married twice and it appears that she has shot both husbands. Due to Maggie Bradford's history of killing her first husband to get out of the abusive ways, it began to fuel speculation and accusations when she had again killed her second husband. And the world around her wants to know if this celebrity can really commit these murders.she dies 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_of_Moses_(novel)"title="The Sword of Moses (novel)">
When former MI6 agent turned archaeologist Dr Ava Curzon is engaged by American intelligence to track down an African militia claiming to hold the Ark of the Covenant, she is plunged into a world where nothing is what it seems.Her breakneck descent into the shadowy realm of dark biblical texts hurls her across continents and deep into the opaque worlds of the Knights Templar and neo-Nazis, pushing her mentally and physically to the limits.Her initial compulsion to find the Ark soon becomes more urgent when she discovers that Marius Malchus, the man holding it, was responsible for her father’s murder years earlier. As she pursues Malchus across Europe and the Middle East, she is repeatedly thwarted and placed in ever greater physical danger, experiencing his extreme ruthlessness at first hand.When an informant in Malchus’s group sends her photographs of a coded medieval lead medal, she begins unravelling a series of arcane clues that take her to the heart of an ancient mystery buried by the medieval Vatican, but now driving Malchus towards an apocalyptic endgame.As Ave penetrates deeper into the shadows, the Vatican medal leads her to the sacred biblical seven-branched Menorah candlestick buried in an ancient Mithraic Temple deep under Rome and to a series of ever more challenging puzzles. Harnessing all her mental and physical skills, the danger levels increase as she solves a clue related to the enigmatic Voynich manuscript, and closes in on Malchus and his prize: a powerful ancient Hebrew magical manuscript called The Sword of Moses.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Narrow_Road_to_the_Deep_North_(novel)"title="The Narrow Road to the Deep North (novel)">
Dorrigo Evans has found fame and public recognition as a war veteran in old age, but inwardly he is plagued by his own shortcomings and considers his numerous accolades to be a “failure of perception on the part of others”. He knows that his colleagues consider him a reckless and dangerous surgeon, and he has habitually cheated on his faithful and adoring wife, though his public reputation has been undented by the air of scandal that trails him in his private life.Flashbacks describe Dorrigo’s early life in rural Tasmania, and his love affair with Amy Mulvaney, the young wife of his uncle and the love of his life. Dorrigo meets Amy by chance in an Adelaide bookstore and he finds that "her body was a poem beyond memorising". Despite the fact that she is married to his uncle, Dorrigo felt the affair was justified because "the war pressed, the war deranged, the war undid, the war excused". In a metaphor for the novel's theme of fatalism, Amy observes while swimming a group of fish trying "to escape the breaking wave’s hold. And all the time the wave had them in its power and would take them where it would, and there was nothing that the glistening chain of fish could do to change their fate."  
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Death_in_the_Small_Hours"title="A Death in the Small Hours">
Charles Lenox, gentleman and former amateur detective, is now a prominent Member of the House of Commons. When selected to make the opening speech at the next session of Parliament, he takes up an offer to spend some time at his uncle’s estate in Somerset. Although Lenox expected to find a few quiet weeks to prepare his speech, instead he finds a bizarre case of vandalism in the quiet village, and the murder of a local constable. Lenox investigates and finds that the situation is far more complex and sinister than it first appeared.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Than_This_(novel)"title="More Than This (novel)">
The book begins with a 16-year-old boy, Seth Wearing, drowning. He finds himself in what he assumes is a hell made for him, as it resembles the Southern English town he was born in before moving to America but is completely abandoned. (The town's exact location is never stated, but it is within commuting distance of London.) Whenever he sleeps, he flashes back to events in his life. Seth remembers that when he was eight, he was left alone by his mother with his four-year-old brother, Owen. An escaped convict, let into the house by Seth, kidnapped Owen for three days. This left him with psychological damage and prompted the family's move to Halfmarket, a small coastal town in Washington, US. Also described is Seth's secret homosexual relationship with male friend, Gudmund.In Seth's old bedroom, he finds an open coffin containing "conductive tape" and tubes, which he woke up in before fleeing. Later, Seth sees a black van driving through town. A girl, Regine, and a boy, Tomasz, prevent him from getting close to it, telling him that they must hide from what they call the Driver. They too had died and awoken in coffins.Regine tells Seth her theory – on account of the world's decline the entire population decided to enter an simulated recreation (indistinguishable from reality) permanently, with automated coffins carrying out bodily functions. Therefore, the place they occupy is the real world. Global issues mentioned include fires, climate change, wars, epidemics, economic chaos and closures of European borders. The three children woke up in the real world because, while dying, they each knocked a system connection implant on the back of their heads. Seth wonders if more coffins are stored in the prison near his house, and decides to go there against the others' warnings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightbirds_on_Nantucket"title="Nightbirds on Nantucket">
Dido Twite awakens aboard the whaling ship "The Sarah Casket", where she has been cared for in a coma by Nate Pardon, a young sailor who found her adrift in the Atlantic Ocean after the adventures of "Black Hearts in Battersea". Dido is induced by the ship's captain to look after his daughter, Dutiful Penitence Casket, a neurotic eight-year-old who is travelling aboard the whaler. After drawing the girl out of her shell, Dido agrees to stay briefly on Nantucket to help "Pen's" transition to life with her Aunt Tribulation, who is to look after Pen while her father pursues his obsession, a mysterious pink whale. Dido is discomfited to find that Aunt Tribulation is apparently a demanding invalid, and Dido's plan to leave and take ship to London are further delayed when Nate brings Captain Casket to the house; when approaching the pink whale in a longboat, "Rosie Lee" sank it, and the injured captain is only semi-conscious.While exploring the surrounding countryside, Dido encounters a mysterious but comic foreigner, who proves to be sighting a gigantic cannon intended to assassinate King James III by blowing up the royal palace; Mr. Slighcarp, the Sarah Casket's first mate, is part of the plot together with his sister Letitia, the villainess of "The Wolves of Willoughby Chase". Disbelieved by the other adults, Dido and Pen, with the help of Nate, attempt to disable the cannon, whose recoil would send the island of Nantucket crashing into New York City.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Apples"title="White Apples">
"White Apples" tells the story of Vincent Ettrich, who is dead and brought back to life again. Ettrich slowly learns that he is brought back by his wife Isabelle and he is back to save his unborn son. Ettrich's unborn son will eventually save the universe if Ettrich can protect him from evil forces. This is a work of metaphysics and surrealism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_Was_Going_Down_the_Road"title="A Man Was Going Down the Road">
"A Man Was Going Down the Road" begins with the Greek legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece and the consequences for the obscure kingdom of Colchis after the Greek Jason comes and abducts Medea. But it is also an allegory of the treachery and destruction that ensued when Russia, and then the Soviets, annexed Georgia, as well as Chiladze's interpretation of life as a version of the ancient Anatolian story of Gilgamesh, and a study of Georgian life, domestic and political, in which women and children pay the price for the hero's quests, obsessions and doubts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drama_dari_Krakatau"title="Drama dari Krakatau">
In 1883, Krakatoa begins stirring for the first time in 200 years. In the nearby village of Waringin, Sadidjah confides to her husband, village head Tjakra Amidjaja, that she has had a bad dream about the volcano; she fears that it will be the death of them. Tjakra Amidjaja consoles her, and tells her that they will leave the village in two days. In the meantime, the volcano grows increasingly violent and Tjakra Amidjaja and Sadidjah stay behind to manage the evacuation. They send their children, Hasan and Soerijati, to stay with family in Rangkas Gombong. Krakatoa erupts several hours later. The village is wiped out in the resulting tsunami, and Soerijati is lost after she falls out of the carriage she is in; Hasan, however, arrives safely in Rangkas Gombong.Forty-four years pass. Moelia, the son of the Regent of Rangkas Gombong and Assistant "Wedana" of Sindanglaut, hears of a Baduy priest, Noesa Brama, who is curing the sick and injured. Moelia travels to Mount Ciwalirang to interview him, and finds Noesa Brama an intelligent and well-spoken man. Over lunch Moelia falls in love with the priest's daughter, Retna Sari. He learns that she must marry a man of equal standing to her father, one who is "no less than the Sultan of Yogyakarta or the Sunan of Solo". Upon returning home, Moelia realises that Noesa Brama must be the last male descendant of the Hindu kings of Pajajaran, and that both Retna Sari and her mother bear a striking resemblance to his own grandmother. Several days later, he returned to the mountain and overhears a group of men from Palembang planning to kidnap Retna Sari. He chases them away, then briefly visits Noesa Brama before returning home. Though he attempts to forget Retna Sari, he is unable to do so.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggling_(novel)"title="Juggling (novel)">
The novel is a coming of age story, the main protagonists are 'sparky Christina', the daughter of Alice, and her 'saintly adopted sister Pam' who could not be more different. They meet similarly mismatched friends Jago and Peter, and the intersecting lives of the four as they grow up form the heart of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Book_Is_Full_of_Spiders"title="This Book Is Full of Spiders">
While attending court-ordered therapy session with Dr. Bob Tennet, David shows him a video of a man walking through a door and disappearing instantly, suggesting that the man was teleported someplace else, neglecting to mention that he and John have found and used multiple such doors throughout the city of [Undisclosed]. That night, David is attacked by a spider-like creature in his bedroom, but manages to fight it off. Police officer Burgess arrives to investigate the disturbance, but even looking directly at it, he cannot see the spider, who climbs into his throat. Dave and John take him to the hospital, where the creature takes control of Burgess' body and escapes after killing several people. John proceeds to track him down, but Burgess comes back after David in his home, who manages to decapitate it, before discovering that the spider has laid eggs in his room, which are now hatching. Superstar police detective Falconer arrives to question David, who manages to convince him of the invisible threat. Falconer attempts to quarantine the room, but John and Dave decide to burn the spiders along with the house instead. This backfires when the spiders escape and begin attacking firefighters on the scene, instantly turning their bodies into the violent monsters "like Optimus Prime made of meat". The entire town is locked off by military, and John and Dave escape through a portal door, but become separated and John believes David to be dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_on_Fire"title="Brain on Fire">
The book narrates Cahalan's issues with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis and the process by which she was diagnosed with this form of encephalitis. She woke up in a hospital with no memory of the previous month's events, during which time she had violent episodes and delusions. Her eventual diagnosis was made more difficult by various physicians misdiagnosing her with several theories such as "partying too much" and schizoaffective disorder. Eventually several physicians, including Dr. Souhel Najjar, began to suspect that Cahalan was suffering from an autoimmune disease. Najjar diagnosed Cahalan using a test that involved her drawing a clock, a test normally given to people suspected of having dementia or Alzheimer's disease. Rather than drawing the clock face normally, the disease caused Cahalan to draw all the numbers 1 through 12 on the right face of the clock, because the right side of her brain, which regulates the left side of the body, was inflamed. Najjar used this to help diagnose Cahalan and start her road to recovery.The book also covers Cahalan's life after her recovery, including her reactions to watching videotapes of her psychotic episodes while in the hospital. Cahalan also discusses her symptoms prior to her hospitalization, as she had previously been diagnosed by a psychiatrist with bipolar disorder. While researching, she learned that the disease had been discovered just three years before she became ill. Her research indicated that in 2009 most people with the disease were either misdiagnosed or undiagnosed. Cahalan was fortunate to be correctly diagnosed because, according to Najjar's estimates, only 10 percent of people with the disease were properly diagnosed at that time. Since then, a better understanding of the disease and its symptoms has resulted in more frequent diagnosis and treatment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_House_(novel)"title="Amber House (novel)">
The book begins at the funeral of Sarah's maternal grandmother, Ida. Sarah and her autistic brother, five-year-old Sammy, have never seen their mother's supposedly-haunted ancestral home; Anne was estranged from Ida, and she plans to sell Amber House and everything in it. Sarah meets her grandmother's nurse, Rose Valois, and Rose's teenaged grandson, Jackson. Sarah feels uncomfortable around Jackson because he seems to know things about her that her grandmother would have been unable to tell him due to how infrequently she and Sarah interacted while Ida was alive. Jackson mentions a local legend about a fortune of diamonds hidden in Amber House and offers to help Sarah find them. Even though Anne has already booked the family into a hotel, Sarah and Sammy conspire to hunt for the treasure and force Anne to stay in the house for the few days they will be in town.Soon Sarah is introduced to Senator Robert Hathaway and his teenaged son Richard. Richard knows more about Amber House than Sarah does, and tells her about Deirdre Foster, the mad wife of the sea captain who lost the diamonds in the 1700s. Richard claims it is Deirdre who haunts the estate. Meanwhile, inspired by Sarah and Richard's palpable connection, Anne comes up with the idea of celebrating Sarah's sixteenth birthday, ten days off, with a masquerade ball. The event will be used to advertise the house before Anne puts it on the market.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Vermine_du_Lion"title="La Vermine du Lion">
The novel is an interplanetary adventure along the lines of de Camp's Krishna series. The protagonist, geologist Téraï Laprade, champions the native humanoids of the planet Eldorado against a predatory conglomerate bent on exterminating them so it can freely plunder their world's mineral wealth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neverwas_(novel)"title="Neverwas (novel)">
Picking up three months after "Amber House" left off, Sarah and her family relocate from the Pacific Northwestern nation of Astoria to live at Amber House with her aunt Maggie. Unbeknownst to Sarah, her actions at the end of "Amber House" propelled her and her loved ones into an alternate reality: North America is a collection of separate nations — including the American Confederation of States, which still struggles with segregation and sexism — and Nazis control all of Europe.With little recollection of what happened in "Amber House", Sarah must rediscover her psychometric ability (which was suppressed in this timeline by her grandmother Ida and mother Anne after use of the "family gift" nearly killed Maggie) and track down "echoes" of the past that will help her remember the way things used to be. Sarah is once again thrown together with Richard Hathaway, whose senator father is about to run for the Presidency, but finds she inexplicably yearns for Jackson Harris, little knowing how close the two grew in the time before.Sarah learns she is distantly related to both Jackson and Richard; all share Captain Joseph Foster as a common ancestor from the 1700s. A smuggler and slave owner, Foster married Sarah's ancestress Deirdre Dobson after the death of his first wife, Lydia, who died during the birth of Foster's oldest daughter, Camilla. It is from Camilla that Richard is descended, from an illegitimate daughter fathered by Foster and the slave Nyangu that Jackson is descended, and from Foster and Dobson's daughter Sarah-Louise that Sarah is descended. With the help of Jackson's precognition, Sarah realizes that a mysterious artifact that belonged to the Captain and that was passed down through the generations to Richard's mother Claire Hathaway may prove vital to pinpointing how time went wrong. Sarah and Jackson ultimately attempt to reset the universe once again in a high-stakes heist in New York City.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Monk_Gets_on_Board"title="Mr. Monk Gets on Board">
Natalie completes the requirements and receives a license as a private investigator, and proceeds to attend a business seminar at sea with Adrian Monk. When the alarm is pulled and the ship drops anchor, they discover the dead body of the cruise director in the sea. She has alcohol in her system, so her death is deemed an accident, but Adrian Monk isn't convinced.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Monk_Is_Open_for_Business"title="Mr. Monk Is Open for Business">
Natalie rents an office for herself and Adrian Monk to make their positions as consulting detectives official. Lieutenant Amy Devlin soon comes to them asking for help finding a man who shot and killed three people and managed to elude the police.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_and_Say"title="Pink and Say">
The story begins during the times of the Civil War. Sheldon Russell Curtis or "Say", a white Union Soldier is badly wounded on the battlefield. He tries to escape with an injured leg, but cannot due to the pain. Lying on the ground, he sees an African American Yankee soldier named Pinkus Aylee or "Pink" coming to his rescue. Sheldon is very hesitant at first, as Pink was an African American; one of the people that he was warned about. Pink gives Say some water for what little nourishment he can offer. Carefully, Pink carries Say back to his home in Georgia, where he lives with his mother, Moe Moe Bay. There, Pink and his mother restore Say back to full health. This act of great kindness brings Say to be friends with Pink and his mother as they spend long days with each other, enjoying the peace they have. Later, a group of "Marauders" Confederate soldiers came to search Pink’s home. Only barely foreseeing the coming raid, Moe Moe Bay tells Pink and Say to hide in the root cellar, out of the sight of the soldiers. The soldiers shot and killed Moe Moe Bay in an attempt to distract them from the boys. Pink and Say eventually came out of the cellar and found Moe Moe Bay's dead body lying on the ground. They decide to bury her, then Pink and Say decide to try to find their troops. On the way back to their camp some Confederates found them and took them to their camp as prisoners. The two prisoners of war receive vastly different treatment: Say is held captive in a prison camp for months before he is released, while Pink was hanged within hours, his body thrown in a lime pit. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mankind_in_the_Making"title="Mankind in the Making">
## Preface.Wells proposes to "provide the first tentatives of a political doctrine that shall be equally available for application in the British Empire and the United States." He notes an "especial indebtedness to my friend, Mr. Graham Wallas."
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justine_(Thompson_novel)"title="Justine (Thompson novel)">
Described as a postmodern, feminist variation on Marquis de Sade's book of the same name, it is set in contemporary London where the narrator, an opium-smoking art collector living in Kensington Gardens, becomes obsessed by "Justine", a portrait. Later he sees the woman herself at his mother's funeral, but she disappears and he begins a desperate search for her. He finds her twin sister Juliette who promises to aid him in his increasingly desperate search for her elusive sister...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Life_of_Samuel_Tyne"title="The Second Life of Samuel Tyne">
In 1968, Samuel Tyne, an unhappy Ghanaian civil servant residing in Calgary, Alberta, learns that he has inherited his late uncle Jacob's estate in the rural community of Amber Valley, Alberta. He persuades his wife Maud and twin daughters Yvette and Chloe to move to the town, which was a settlement of African- American immigrant homesteaders from Oklahoma and the Deep South in the early 20th century.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Sunlight_and_in_Shadow"title="In Sunlight and in Shadow">
It is set in New York City and often waxes lyrical about the city itself. It is the story of the love affair between Jewish business heir and former soldier, Harry Copeland, and Catherine Thomas Hale, also known by her stage name of Catherine Sedley, daughter of a wealthy, blue-blood New York family, from the time of their meeting on a Staten Island ferry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Rights_between_the_Sexes"title="Human Rights between the Sexes">
The report is believed to be the first comparative international analysis of the human rights of intersex people. It found that intersex people are discriminated against worldwide.Ghattas states:Ghattas found that:Ghattas makes five conclusions for human rights organisations:The book is published in German as "Menschenrechte zwischen den Geschlechtern".The book can be downloaded for free in either English or German.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_Kept_Secret_(novel)"title="Best Kept Secret (novel)">
The book picks up after the events in "The Sins of the Father", with the House of Lords having to decide who will be the heir to the fortune of Hugo Barrington. The vote ends with a tie, which prompts the Lord Chancellor to vote in favor of Giles Barrington. This leaves Clifton free to marry Emma Barrington and Giles soon falls in love with Lady Virginia, although his family greatly disapproves.Emma decides to track down the baby found in her father's office on the night of his death and adopts her. Meanwhile, Lady Barrington is diagnosed with terminal cancer and eventually dies. Before her death, it is learned that she had changed the contents of her will to ensure that all her fortune is divided between her daughters. Giles gets none of it, as his mother did not approve of his marrying Lady Virginia in the future. Virginia pushes Giles to contest the will. The judge, however, rules in favor of Emma and Grace. Lady Virginia and Giles were married. Divorce and its aftermath were part of plot throughout the middle of the novel. To get back at Giles, Virginia employs the help of Major Alex Fisher, a long-time enemy of Giles and Harry. He joins the Barrington Shipping company as a member of the Board and tries to bring down the company from the inside using insider stock trading and manipulating certain elections, but eventually fails.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_Dreams"title="Train Dreams">
In summer 1917, a Chinese laborer is accused of stealing from the company stores of the Spokane International Railway in the Idaho Panhandle. Robert Grainier and the other white laborers attempt to throw him over the bridge they are constructing, but he escapes. Grainier stops in Meadow Creek and buys a bottle of sarsaparilla for his wife, Gladys, and their four-month-old daughter, Kate. Hiking home to his cabin, Grainier thinks he sees the Chinese man and believes he has cursed him.In 1920, Grainier leaves for northwestern Washington to help repair the Robinson Gorge Bridge. He also cuts and transports timber for the Simpson Company. He meets fellow worker Arn Peeples, a fearless but superstitious old man who dangerously excavates tunnels with dynamite. Arn is later killed by a falling dead branch. In 1962 or 1963, Grainier watches young ironworkers build a new highway. In the mid-1950s, he sees the World's Fattest Man. He recalls seeing Elvis Presley's private train in Troy, Montana, and flying in a biplane in 1927.Grainier was born in 1886 in Utah or Canada. In 1893, he arrived on the Great Northern Railway as an orphan in Fry, Idaho, and was adopted by a family. He witnesses the mass deportation of Chinese families from the town. In 1899, the towns of Fry and Eatonville were merged to form Bonners Ferry. Grainier quit school in his early teens and began fishing. One day, he stumbles upon a dying man named William Coswell Haley. He brings him a drink of water from his boot and leaves him to die alone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Captain_and_the_Enemy"title="The Captain and the Enemy">
"The Captain and the Enemy" tells the story of a young boy named Victor Baxter taken away from his boarding school by a stranger to live in London. This stranger is simply known as "the Captain" and he appears mysterious to Victor. In London Victor companions a woman named Liza and tells her any news that happens in the outside world. When Victor reaches manhood, he finally learns the secrets and intelligence of the Captain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Late_Scholar"title="The Late Scholar">
"The Late Scholar" features the former Lord Peter Wimsey—now the Duke of Denver—and his wife, the former Harriet Vane and is set in a fictional Oxford college called St. Severin's. It is 1953, according to internal evidence within the text of the novel. For example, in Chapter 9, Harriet looks for an article published in 1948, because 'hadn't Gervase said it was five years ago?'. A book and a film which came out in 1953 are mentioned ('The Go-Between' in Chapter 3, and 'From Here to Eternity' in Chapter 13).Wimsey discovers that, as Duke of Denver, he has inherited the position of Visitor of an Oxford college, St Severin's. The college is in financial difficulties, and is in the midst of an acrimonious dispute between the Fellows over whether or not to sell a valuable codex (a copy of "The Consolation of Philosophy" by Boethius, with glosses which may be by Alfred the Great) to finance the purchase of a piece of land which might be worth much money if planning permission can be obtained on it. The two sides are evenly balanced in numbers, and two of the Fellows appeal to him to resolve the dispute, and before he has even arrived at Oxford, some of the Fellows turn up at his seat at Bredon Hall to try to convince him of the wisdom of either course of action.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_Atlas"title="Meat Atlas">
## Overview.According to the report, based on figures from the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, the production of of beef requires of water, cheese 5,000 litres, rice 3,400 litres, and carrots 131 litres. Over of meat is consumed in the United States per person per year, 60 kg in Germany, 38 kg in China, and under 20 kg in Africa.Pigs can reach their market weight with 10–15 percent less food if they are kept on antibiotics, but overuse increases the likelihood of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, so-called "superbugs."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lesser_Blessed_(novel)"title="The Lesser Blessed (novel)">
Larry Sole, a Tłı̨chǫ teenager from the fictional Fort Simmer, befriends newcomer Johnny Beck. The two become friends though Larry is jealous of Johnny's relationship with Juliet Hope, his crush. Larry eventually opens up to Johnny about his rapist father and the abuse he suffered under him while living in Fort Rae.Darcy is Larry's arch-nemesis in the movie. Darcy and Larry have a past that goes a lot deeper than Fort Simmer, where they live now. Darcy knows Larry from Fort Rae, where Larry and his mom have relocated. Darcy knows the secrets of why Larry had to move from Fort Rae, and he uses this information to torment Larry throughout. Larry lets Darcy treat him like crap to not upset him into spilling the secrets he holds from the incident in Fort Rae. Darcy is also a friend and possible love interest of Larry's Crush Juliet, another of Darcy's disdain for Larry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orfeo_(novel)"title="Orfeo (novel)">
There are two main narrative threads in the novel, both centered on Peter Els. The novel begins and ends in the winter of 2011, from the accidental discovery by the authorities that Els was doing home genetic experiments to his flight across the country. Interspersed is the story of Els' life, from his birth in 1941 to his decision in 2009 to record his music in DNA.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatiana_(novel)"title="Tatiana (novel)">
One of the iconic investigators of contemporary fiction, Arkady Renko —cynical, analytical, and quietly subversive— has survived the cultural journey from the Soviet Union to the New Russia, only to find the nation as obsessed with secrecy and brutality as was the old Communist regime. In "Tatiana", Martin Cruz Smith's most ambitious novel since "Gorky Park", the melancholy hero finds himself on the trail of a mystery as complex and dangerous as modern Russia herself.The fearless investigative reporter Tatiana Petrovna falls to her death from a sixth-story window in Moscow the same week that a mob billionaire, Grisha Grigorenko, is shot and buried with the trappings afforded minor royalty. No one makes the connection, but Arkady is transfixed by the tapes he discovers of Tatiana's voice, even as she describes horrific crimes concealed by official cover stories.The trail leads to Kaliningrad, a Cold War "secret city" and home of the Baltic Fleet, separated by hundreds of miles from the rest of Russia. Arkady delves into Tatiana's past and a surreal world of wandering dunes and amber mines. His only link is a notebook written in the personal code of a translator whose body is found in the dunes. Arkady's only hope of decoding the symbols lies in Zhenya, a gifted teenage chess hustler.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Desert"title="The Oregon Desert">
"The Oregon Desert" highlights the people, places, plants, and animals of Oregon's high desert. Jackman contributed scholarly chapters on geology, geography, flora, fauna, and the life of Native Americans in the high desert. Long added first-hand narratives about his life on the high desert using humorous anecdotal stories. According to Oregon Public Broadcasting, the book "successfully blended natural science with cowboy humor and scholarly prose with casual meanderings. It is a celebration of rural Western storytelling."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undergrounders"title="Undergrounders">
The plot is about a young boy named Jonathon (nicknamed Mouse) that lives in the "Underground" as his mother died of cancer.The story is narrated by Jonathon, a 12-year-old boy. After his mom died from cancer, her boyfriend, Ron, left Jonathon and the landlord kicked him out. He survived in the forest on berries, but soon, it became cold, and another homeless boy named Lewis took him to the "Underground", a basement of an abandoned shopping mall, that was apparently never built past the underground portion.One day, while Jonathan was begging for money, he entered a hockey store (Baxter's) through an alleyway. From there, he stole a pair of Grafs (Ice hockey skates), a Maple Leafs jersey, an ice hockey puck, an Easton ice hockey stick, two pairs of gloves, one pair of winter mittens and a roll of stick tape, as well as five dollars, a sandwich and a Coca-Cola. After that, Jonathan went back to the rink, to practice his skills. There, he met Rasheed, Collin and Derrick. Meanwhile, Lewis tells Jonathan that he has something planned for him.For days, Jonathan continued to practice at the hockey rink, until he is invited to join Rasheed's hockey team. While in the hockey team, he scores many of the goals. One day, after a hockey game, he accidentally overhears his teammates gossiping behind his back. This results in Jonathan leaving the hockey team.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Angler's_Book"title="The American Angler's Book">
The "American Angler's Book" provides encyclopedic coverage of all aspects of fishing as practiced in North America in the mid-1800s. It covers tackle, techniques, target species and the best fishing locations. It has been credited with being the first significant American work to cover aspects of fly fishing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Objects"title="Sharp Objects">
Camille Preaker works as a journalist at "The Daily Post", a small newspaper in Chicago. She is not particularly satisfied with the job, which includes writing stories about human neglect, murders, and crime. Camille gets along somewhat well with her boss Frank Curry, who supported her during a recent hospitalization due to self-harm. Camille has carved many words onto her body—having previously hallucinated them on her skin. Curry gives her a reporting assignment to her hometown of Wind Gap, Missouri, where one girl has been murdered and a second is missing.Once in Wind Gap, Camille manages to gain some information about the crimes from the townspeople, including the family of Ann Nash, the murdered girl. The local police are not particularly forthcoming about the murder, but the town sheriff, Chief Vickery, divulges to Camille off the record that he believes that the murderer is a Wind Gap native, not a stranger. Soon the body of the missing girl, Natalie Keene, is discovered in an alley in town. Both she and Ann were strangled and had all of their teeth removed. The police are baffled by the crimes. Camille publishes a story, only for Curry to ask her to remain in Wind Gap for further coverage of the murders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_from_Elephant_Pass_(novel)"title="The Road from Elephant Pass (novel)">
This novel battles with diverse situations including ethnic conflicts and birds. Both of these issues are given equal importance and veracity by the writer. Reflecting the writer's activities as a keen bird watcher, the pied kingfishers, hawks, eagle-owls, blue-faced malkohas, paradise flycatchers, hornbills, brown-headed barbets, hanging parrots, rose-ringed parakeets, lapwings are among the many birds mentioned in this novel. The plot of the novel centers around Captain Wasantha Ratnayake and a woman named Kamala Velaithan, who is a member of the LTTE Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), venturing through a dense and luscious Wilpattu forest in northern Sri Lanka. Kamala Velaithan volunteers to offer help to the Sri Lanka Army regarding the provision of some useful information. Kemala is handed over to Wasantha, who picks her up to take her in for questioning. Meanwhile, on the way to their destination, an ambush by an LTTE gang results in their driver and an Army lady dying in a hail of bullets. The two survivors, Kamala and Wasantha are forced into a mutually co-operative situation which later broadens and deepens to the extent that they find it hard to operate without each other. The novel focuses on the relationship which grows between these two people, who, at their first encounter with one another, were enemies. Together, they survive poachers, elephants and the extreme dangers of the jungle. These intense experiences, which force them into mutual co-operation, eventually evolve into an unexpected love affair. The story depicts them spending about 12 days together, each chapter of the novel intertwining with the others in unique forms of complementarity which serve to provide the novel with a richness of style in the progress and development of its plot. After they reach Colombo Army Headquarters, Kamala reveals to Wasantha that she had lied to him and that they are, in fact heading into a trap. But it was too late. The ending is tragic and the lovers end up being separated one from another. However, the film, though based on the novel, has a different ending.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_May_Care_(Peters_novel)"title="Devil May Care (Peters novel)">
Young, beautiful Ellie is to house-sit for her wealthy and eccentric Aunt Kate, who lives in one of the oldest towns in Virginia, founded in the 17th century by six families from England. Aunt Kate has a plethora of dogs and cats, and even a rat, that Ellie must care for, but once Aunt Kate leaves ghostly manifestations begin to occur. Is someone trying to drive Ellie out of the house, or has her arrival stirred up emotions and old enmities that had been long forgotten? Descendants of the six founding families quarrel and interfere as Ellie and a neighbor, Donald Gold, attempt to sort out what is fakery, what is malice, and what might be supernatural.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bourne_Retribution"title="The Bourne Retribution">
Bourne's friend Eli Yadin, head of Mossad, learns that Ouyang Jidan, a senior member of China's Politburo, and a major Mexican drug lord may have been trafficking in more than drugs. Yadin needs Bourne to investigate. Bourne agrees, but only because he has a personal agenda: Ouyang Jidan is the man who ordered Rebeka—one of the only people Bourne has ever truly cared about—murdered. Bourne is determined to avenge her death, but in the process he becomes enmeshed in a monstrous worldwide scheme involving the Chinese, Mexicans, and Russians. Bourne's desperate search for Ouyang takes him from Tel Aviv to Shanghai, Mexico City, and, ultimately, a village on China's coast where a clever trap has been laid for him. Bourne finds himself pursued on all sides and unsure whom he can trust.Jason's adventure begins when Eden Mazar, an Israeli Mossad agent, is murdered by members of a Mexican drug cartel named Los Zetas. Following this, he is approached by Mossad director Eli Yadin, who invites Bourne to embark on a mission to find a connection between Eden Mazar's murder and the death of Rebeka, Bourne's love interest. Bourne goes to Shanghai, under an alias, but he later disposes of his disguise and pursues Ouyang's right-hand man, Colonel Sun. After finding out about this, Amir Ophir, another Israeli Mossad member, sends an assassin named Retzach to kill Bourne, but Bourne kills Retzach instead. Following this, Bourne goes on a wild goose chase for Ouyang, which comes to a head in Mexico City, where he encounters Maricruz, wife of Ouyang Jidan, who has been injured in an attack by a rival cartel in Mexico and is currently caring for a girl named Angel. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_of_the_Swallow"title="The Tower of the Swallow">
Vysogota, an elderly philosopher living alone in the Pereplut swamp, comes upon an injured Ciri near his retreat and takes her in, caring for her. During her recovery, Ciri recounts the events of the last few months.Ciri was content with life among "the Rats", but hears that a "princess" with her name has been presented in Nilfgaard as the intended bride of the Emperor. Ciri decides to reclaim her birthright and expose the Emperor's lie, but hears that the Rats are being tracked by a notorious bounty hunter, Leo Bonhart. She rushes back to them, but finds that Bonhart has slaughtered them. Bonhart defeats and captures Ciri.Nilfgaard's spymaster, Vattier de Rideaux, wants Ciri captured alive, but the Imperial coroner, Stefan Skellen, secretly hired Bonhart to kill her. Instead of doing so, Bonhart has her fight for her life in a gladiatorial arena, confirming for Bonhart her identity and training as a witcher.Meanwhile, having saved Queen Meve of Rivia, Geralt and his party – the bard Dandelion, Milva the archer, higher vampire Regis, and former Nilfgaardian soldier, Cahir – travel with her army. Geralt seeks a group of druids whom he believes can locate Ciri. During their journey, they learn that a bounty has been placed on their heads by a half-elf and a group of criminals led by a man named Nightingale. Partnering up with the young woman Angoulême, a former member of this group, they decide to ambush the bandits and discover who hired them, who Geralt suspects to be the wizard Vilgefortz. Eventually, they stumble upon the half-elf, named Schirrú. A fight breaks out, in which Cahir is injured, forcing him and Geralt into hiding. During this time, the two reconcile. They reunite with the rest of the party, who have entered Toussaint, where the druids are. They attempt to locate the criminals, but are captured instead by the druids, who kill the criminals before Geralt can question them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_of_the_Lake_(Sapkowski_novel)"title="The Lady of the Lake (Sapkowski novel)">
Sir Galahad, King Arthur's knight, stumbles upon Ciri bathing. Ciri recounts her story to him, warning that it does not have a happy ending. Parallel to this, years after the main story, the sorceress Condwiramurs, is apprenticed to Nimue, the Lady of the Lake, to study the legend of Geralt and Ciri. Condwiramurs's has clairvoyant dreams, stimulated by studying paintings and other images of the story.In the present, Stefan Skellen, the coroner of Nilfgaard, is working with the sorcerer Vilgefortz, who has imprisoned the sorceress Yennefer. Geralt and his company - Dandelion, Regis, Milva, Angoulême, and Cahir - relax in the duchy of Toussaint. Geralt is distracted by monster-hunting and an affair with the Duchess's court sorceress, Fringilla Vigo, a member of the Lodge of Sorceresses. Geralt's latest contract has him eavesdrop a meeting between Skellen and rebellious nobles, plotting the Emperor's overthrow. Geralt overhears Vilgefortz's location from Skellen, and he and his party leave Toussaint, except Dandelion, who stays with his lover, Duchess Anna Henrietta.After the events of the previous novel, Ciri was teleported to a foreign world, Aen Aelle, ruled by elves, under occasional attacks by unicorns, where time flows differently. A magical barrier prevents her from leaving, and she is told by the sage Avallac'h that to leave, she must bear the child of their king, Auberon. Avallac'h explains that Ciri possesses a gene engineered to make her child the most powerful magic-user in history, to save the world from an impending cataclysm. Ciri reluctantly agrees, but Auberon fails to perform several times. Avallac'h assures her that once she bears the child, she will be returned to her time. However, Eredin Breacc Glas, the commander of a cavalry unit, tells Ciri that she will never escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Whole_Nother_Story"title="A Whole Nother Story">
The story begins by introducing the Cheeseman family: the scientist Mr. Ethan Cheeseman, his wife Olivia, three 'attractive, witty, and relatively odor-free' children and the family pets; a psychic dog named Pinky, and Steve, a talking sock puppet.Ethan and his wife are about to complete a time machine, and two top-secret agents show up to steal it. Initially, the antagonists use diplomacy, claiming that they need the invention for "the greater good". Their motives are suspect, and Olivia, realizing this, refuses. Shortly thereafter, Olivia contacts a mysterious illness and dies.The family initially grieves but not for long. They are being targeted and followed.by many people. The agents are revealed as employees for a weapons developer. Ethan plans to travel back in time, reunite with his wife, and escape pursuit; but the time machine isn't working. He, his family, and the machine take to the road in a station wagon.Pursued by the incompetent but determined agents, the Cheeseman family is forced to flee repeatedly. During their travels they encounter a number of other wanderers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eye_of_Minds"title="The Eye of Minds">
In the future, humankind has developed a new interpretation of gaming in the form of a virtual reality system known as the VirtNet, which contains various games, including "Lifeblood", a re-creation of real life. Michael and his two friends Bryson and Sarah are three talented hackers who can use the game code to manipulate items, and they are employed by VirtNet Security (VNS) to track down a cyber-terrorist known as Kaine, who has been trapping people inside the VirtNet. The gamers who are trapped often commit suicide in real life by coding out their Cores, the virtual objects that differentiate between their Auras, or their virtual bodies, and their real-life bodies. The VNS wants Michael and his friends to find out about the Mortality Doctrine, a program created by Kaine. Using information from Cutter, a barber in the game "Lifeblood", Michael and his friends hack their way into the high-end Black and Blue club. They meet Ronika, the owner, who tells them that to get to Kaine's base in the Hallowed Ravine, they must get through The Path, which can be accessed through a weak spot in the code within the game "Devils of Destruction". However, creatures programmed by Kaine known as KillSims, which suck the life out of VirtNet players' Auras and leave their real-life bodies brain-dead, attack and destroy Ronika. Michael begins to have serious but occasional headaches. Michael and his friends then manage to gain access to The Path through "Devils of Destruction", which they find very difficult to beat, after hacking through the age restriction. Once they enter The Path, they find themselves on a massive stone disk with a riddle. After solving it, they enter an infinitely long corridor, from which the only exit is to go through a hole in the wall. The three best friends have to overcome their fears to keep moving on. At one point, Bryson's Aura is killed by strange, animated corpses that attack whenever anybody makes noise. Along the way, they meet Gunner Skale, a legendary gamer who mysteriously disappeared from the VirtNet, who leads them to realizing that Kaine is actually a rogue Tangent, or an AI in the VirtNet. After escaping from Skale, as he attempted to kill them, Michael and Sarah continue on The Path, but Sarah's Aura is also killed when she is burned by lava. Eventually, Michael reaches a crossroads, where he is given the choice of either leaving the Path or entering the Hallowed Ravine. When he chooses the Hallowed Ravine, a silver machine destroys his Core, so that if his Aura were to die, he would die in real life. After reaching the Hallowed Ravine and discovering a group of Tangents controlled by Kaine, the VNS sends agents to his location to attack. However, in the ensuing battle, with the KillSims attacking, a large number of VNS agents die. Kaine manages to force Michael into a room, from which Michael escapes, allowed by Kaine to do so. He is attacked by KillSims, but he uses his hacking ability to delete, rather than manipulate, things, for the first time. Michael suffers another headache and begs Kaine to save him. Michael then wakes up in a Coffin, or a coffin-like enclosure from which the VirtNet is accessed, but realizes that his body and his surroundings are different. He finds that Kaine left him a message that explained how Michael was a Tangent, and that he was the first successful subject of The Mortality Doctrine, which implants Tangent intelligence into human bodies. Michael is also told that since he is now human, his headaches were actually caused by Decay, a condition that results from the deterioration of a Tangent's code. Michael then realizes that he had resided in the game "Lifeblood Deep" during his time as a Tangent, and when he had entered his Coffin, he had entered the game used by human beings, "Lifeblood". He opens the door and meets Agent Weber, the VNS agent who contracted him to stop Kaine, who informs him that Bryson and Sarah are real. He is also told to attempt to impersonate the human whose body he is in.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_the_Vampire_(book)"title="Mona the Vampire (book)">
The story begins as a girl named Mona and her pet cat, Fang, are being read a spooky bedtime story by Mona's father which they find very intriguing, causing her desire to become a vampire that night before she goes to sleep.Early the next morning, Mona and Fang were experimenting and finding things to match their ideas of vampire costumes. Mona's mother made them lunch with farfetched foods such as "batwing soup", and Mona took Fang outside to teach him some "important things that vampires need to know". Then they played "hide-and-seek-a-vampire" and "suck-my-blood". The book then shows an example of Mona obeying her mother as she tells Mona to clean her room.The next morning, Mona makes her own school lunch to help her mother and went to school, taking Fang with her. At lunchtime (according to the picture on the page), Mona expressed her views on vampires, causing everyone to become uncomfortable and to be driven away from her. After this, the book shows an example of Mona at the gym as she "practiced tying all her special knots" (tying up the other classmates).Later that day, Mona and Fang were painting on the classroom wall, and the teacher (later known as Miss Gotto in the television series) shouted that she is tired of the trouble that Mona is causing and that she doesn't want Mona in her class. She sent for the principal (later known as Ivan Shawbly in the television series), and he simply said that "enough is enough" and that "something must be done". Because of this, Mona and Fang joined a ballet class to "calm her down". They taught the ballerinas some vampire tricks of which the teacher, Mr. Kersley, did not approve.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Enchantments"title="The Last Enchantments">
"The Last Enchantments" tells the story of American graduate student Will Baker, and his relationships with friends and paramours, during his time at the University of Oxford. The book follows them through a tumultuous academic year at the fictional Fleet College, which is based in equal parts on Lady Margaret Hall, Trinity College, Oxford, and Merton College.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Days_of_Anna_Madrigal"title="The Days of Anna Madrigal">
Anna Madrigal, the 92-year-old former landlady of 28 Barbary Lane, recalls her teen years as Andy Ramsay, the son of a brothel owner in Winnemucca, Nevada. Meanwhile in the present, Anna's longtime friend and former tenant Michael Tolliver finds that his much-younger husband Ben is a constant reminder of his own mortality. Another former tenant, Brian Hawkins, offers to take Anna for a final visit back to Winnemucca, where she claims she has unfinished business, as Brian's adopted daughter Shawna puts the wheels in motion to have a baby. It all converges at Burning Man, an unlikely destination for Anna.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flora_&amp;_Ulysses"title="Flora &amp; Ulysses">
Set in the 21st century in a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Flora Belle Buckman, a self-proclaimed cynic, spends her time reading comic books and struggling to understand her parents’ recent divorce. She is jolted into action when the neighbor runs over a squirrel with a vacuum cleaner. The vacuum cleaner is her neighbor's present for his wife. The squirrel's brush with death causes him to develop superpowers, allowing him to understand humans and become smarter. Flora then names the squirrel Ulysses after the vacuum cleaner accident. Flora explains to Ulysses that he must use his newfound powers to right wrongs, fight injustice, "or something." Ulysses decides to write on Flora's mother's typewriter, revealing he can write poetry.When Flora confronts her mother about her desire to kill Ulysses, a shouting match erupts in which Flora comes to believe her mother does not love her. Flora, feeling hurt, declares that she will go home with her father. Ulysses writes a poem to explain Flora and her mother's real emotions, but Flora's mother kidnaps him before the poem can be read. Flora puts together a crack team to rescue Ulysses, who has already escaped, leaving Flora's mother to read his poem. The cast reunites in the father's apartment building where Flora's cynical exterior is cracked for good as she realizes her mother truly loves her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Rising"title="Red Rising">
It has been seven hundred years since mankind colonized other planets. The powerful ruling class of humans has installed a rigid, color-based social hierarchy where the physically superior Golds at the top rule with an iron fist. Sixteen-year-old Darrow is a Red, a class of workers who toil beneath the surface of Mars mining helium-3 to terraform the planet. He and his wife Eo are captured after entering a forbidden area and are arrested. While Eo is publicly whipped for her crime she sings a forbidden folk song as a protest against the Reds enslavement. She is subsequently hanged on the orders of the Mars' Arch-Governor. Darrow cuts down and buries his wife's body, a crime for which he is also hanged. However, Darrow awakes to find that he has been drugged and delivered into the hands of the Sons of Ares, a group of Red and others who fight against the oppression of the "low Colors". Ares have adopted the video of Eo's song and execution as a rallying vehicle for their cause.Darrow is given the chance to infiltrate the Society to bring it down from within. He is physically transformed by Mickey, a Violet "carver", who gives him the abilities and appearance of a Gold. Using a fabricated identity Darrow is accepted into the Golds' elite Institute, where he befriends Cassius au Bellona and alienates the arrogant Antonia au Severus. Darrow is selected for House Mars by Fitchner. To continue to the next stage, Darrow must complete the Passage, a test in which the 100 newly chosen students in each of the twelve Houses are paired with another house member and tasked to kill each other as a means to eliminate the weaker half. Darrow is forced to murder Cassius' brother Julian to survive, but Cassius can only guess who may have killed him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bourne_Ascendancy"title="The Bourne Ascendancy">
Bourne has been hired to impersonate a high-level government minister at a political summit meeting in Qatar, shielding the minister from any assassination attempts. Suddenly, armed gunmen storm the room, killing everyone but Bourne. Their target, however, isn't the minister Bourne impersonates, but is Bourne himself.Kidnapped and transported to an underground bunker, Bourne finds himself face-to-face with an infamous terrorist named El Ghadan (“Tomorrow”). El Ghadan holds as his captive Soraya Moore, former co-director of Treadstone, and a close friend to Bourne, along with her two-year-old daughter.Meanwhile, the President of the United States is in the midst of brokering a historic peace treaty between the Israelis and the Palestinians, an event that El Ghadan is desperate to prevent. He demands that Bourne carry out a special mission: kill the President. If Bourne refuses, Soraya and her daughter will die.Bourne must make a monstrous choice: save Soraya and her daughter, or save the President.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlito's_Way_(novel)"title="Carlito's Way (novel)">
A Puerto Rican gangster, Carlito Brigante, is released early from prison and tries to go straight and leave his former life of crime behind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackthorn_Winter_(Wilson_novel)"title="Blackthorn Winter (Wilson novel)">
After many attempts to convince his widowed mother to allow him to go to sea, the young Thomas Ingle finally prevails and joins the crew of the "Prudent Hannah." Just before Thomas's departure he observes three rough-looking men bury an oilskin satchel under a mulberry tree along the coast. After the men row out to sea, Thomas investigates and, digging up the mysterious bundle, discovers a map which he cannot understand. Believing the map to mark the location of buried treasure, Thomas memorizes the map, reburying it and keeping his find a secret. The next morning Thomas boards his ship and shortly after leaving port, the ship is waylaid by several Pirate ships led by O'Conner—one of the men Thomas had previously seen burying the map Ingle has yet to decipher. Thomas and his own Captain Monroe are captured, suffer many hardships at the hands of the Pirates, and eventually escape to safety.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_as_Desire"title="Swift as Desire">
Don Júbilo, born with a smile on his face, was blessed at birth with almost supernatural hearing and an instinctive understanding of all kinds of communication, from an insect's faint rustle to the sweet sighs of a woman in love. He used his gift to become the peacemaker in his family, slyly mistranslating between his Spanish-speaking grandmother doña Jesusa, and his Mayan-speaking grandmother doña Itzel, who argue incessantly because the grandmother is angry her son married a non-Mayan, and doña Itzel is determined that Júbilo grow up connected to his heritage. Though the two women may say cruel things to each other, Júbilo gives each woman what she needs to hear, a skill he hones as a little boy that serves him well when he becomes a telegraph operator in adulthood.At age fifteen Júbilo meets thirteen-year-old Lucha from a well-to-do family. Engaging in a slow, chaste relationship for seven years, the couple decide to get married. Passionate sexual creatures, Júbilo and Lucha communicate their love physically and frequently. Esquivel uses magical realism to tune Júbilo into frequencies that help him communicate verbally and with his body when he’s with his wife. Abandoning his dream to become a singer, Júbilo becomes a telegraph operator to support his young family. In the era before telephone services, interpreting Morse code messages for villagers and rich landowners alike puts Júbilo at the center of many lives as his own slowly falls apart. Lucha, the daughter of a wealthy family, is distressed by their relative poverty and her inability to conceive again after their first child, Raul, is born. Júbilo does the best he can, but his weakness for alcohol gets the better of him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_(Majfud_novel)"title="Crisis (Majfud novel)">
This novel focuses on Latin-American immigrants’ drama in the US, particularly undocumented experiences. In a deeper sense, "Crisis" talks about the universal experiences of people getting away from a geographical region, evidently seeking a better way of life but in truth, running away, escaping from realism distinguished as unjust but solved rarely by moving to another place.Escaping, moving, and missing persons are like regular characters in the novel of Jorge Majfud, which record their courses to their own identity’s discovery in various situations and realities. The characters within the novel encounter obstacles in terms of cultural, economic and moral cruelties as unavoidable factors of their experiences – as existential and social living beings.According to the author Alberto García-Teresa, "Crisis" “is formed by the juxtaposition of fragments from different stories, headed with the date, place (different towns in the USA located close to the southern borders) and the value of the Dow Jones Index. [...] At the same time, the multiplicity of cities in which we can find (apparently) the same characters, works as a hint about the wandering life of undocumented immigrants. In this way we obtain a novel with a collective main character in which we have no loss of individuality. "Crisis" turns out as a moving book, representing a hard story, full of injustice, pain and abuse of authority. The author explores the fears, dreams and hopes of the immigrants through representative scenes, with a great symbolic and metonymic value, happening to a specific character, even though they could also happen to any other. In fact, the dislocation works well to globalize the event, since it is possible for them to happen in one same place like in any other. On the one hand, it plays with diverse kinds of narrator and focuses on the different spheres involved: migrants, family members, mafias, employers, and local workers. [...] Majfud shows a great success using this kind of construction in his novel, as he fosters his discourse targets and, by itself, the structure adds content in the same direction. As a result, it is a very rich work, in which tens of characters wander and try to survive in a world governed by a ruthless economic system. This way, the bright denunciation of Majfud appeals to dignity and humanism in a bitter and discouraging story.”
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_(novel)"title="Revival (novel)">
When Charles Jacobs, a new Methodist minister, comes to town, young Jamie Morton is excited. Almost everyone in the tiny Maine hamlet comes to love Jacobs, his beautiful wife, and his young son. Jacobs runs weekly Ministry Youth Fellowship sessions for the town’s children where he shares his interest in electricity and inventions with them, his wife plays music for them and they play with his young son Morrie (although Jamie is clearly favored over all the other children by Jacobs). When Jamie’s older brother, Conrad, also known as "Con", is injured in a skiing accident, leaving him unable to speak and causing distress in the family due the costs of treatment, Jacobs asks Jamie to bring him over as he may be able to help him. When Jamie and his older sister Claire do so, Jacobs places a low-voltage belt around Con’s neck and to everyone’s amazement, Con is able to speak again almost immediately.Things change all too suddenly when Mrs. Jacobs and her child die in a gruesome auto accident. Stricken with grief, the reverend denounces God and religion during a sermon and is banished from town. Jamie, devastated that Jacobs will be leaving, goes to see him before he leaves town, where he thanks him for what he did for Con but Jacobs claims it was purely a placebo effect.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fire_Chronicle"title="The Fire Chronicle">
After the tumultuous events of last winter, protagonists Kate, Michael, and Emma long to continue the hunt for their missing parents. But they are soon discovered by their enemies, and a frantic chase sends Kate a hundred years into the past, where the various non-human sapients (Dwarves, Elves, Giants, Dragons, Trolls, etc.) are in preparation to create a parallel reality in which to hide from the Industrial Revolution. While searching for a way back to her brother and sister, she befriends 'Rafe', the innocent younger edition of the supreme antagonist 'Dire Magnus. Meanwhile, Michael and Emma set off to find the second of the Books of Beginning (the eponymous 'Fire Chronicle', which enables its user either to revive the dead, or to restore an individual's sense of purpose) which they ultimately win from the Dire Magnus' subordinates with the help of an Elvish colony. Meanwhile, as Kate spends time with Rafe, she gradually falls in love with him, and ultimately dies to save him despite knowing that he is going to be the next version of the Dire Magnus. The Dire Magnus then offers Rafe the chance to save Kate's life in return that he take his place as the new Dire Magnus, which Rafe accepts. He gives himself to the Dire Magnus in order for her to be saved and in doing so helped by sending her to the future (or the present) for her to be saved by her brother. With the help of the Fire Chronicle, Michael is able to revive Kate back to life but unfortunately learns that Emma has been kidnapped by Rourke, one of the Dire Magnus's most trusted subordinates.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canto_for_a_Gypsy"title="Canto for a Gypsy">
The priceless Royal Crown of Hungary was on display in St Patrick's Cathedral in New York. Everybody wants the legendary crown of Saint Stephen for their own reasons. For the Hungarian government it is a symbol of their national greatness. Exiled rebels want it to rob the Communists of their pleasure, while an ex-Nazi art plunderer wants it to settle a very old score. Guarded by many, including the NYPD and the gypsy, Roman Grey, a heist was impossible. But it happened, and murder, mayhem and all hell broke loose... and only Grey knows the crown's true centuries old secret.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_Day"title="Mama Day">
"Mama Day" centers around the characters George and Cocoa. Cocoa, whose real name is Ophelia, is a young southern woman living in New York who is still deeply connected to her family and ancestry, even though her family's history is fraught with pain and tragedy. George grew up an orphan, overcoming a multitude of challenges in order to finally graduate from Columbia engineering school and co-found his own engineering company. Cocoa and George meet when Cocoa interviews for a job at George's firm. George is unable to hire Cocoa because the job starts immediately and she is obligated to visit Willow Springs every August to spend time with Mama Day and her family. Prior to returning to New York from her trip to Willow Springs, Cocoa writes a letter to George saying that she still wants the job. Mama Day intervenes and puts a mysterious substance on the envelope, which causes George to remember Cocoa and soon later recommend her to someone for another job. George and Cocoa begin to date and marry suddenly, but George doesn't visit Willow Springs with Cocoa for four years, during which time Cocoa never shares with him the more unusual and even supernatural aspects of Willow Springs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pagan_Christ"title="The Pagan Christ">
## Similarities between Christianity and pagan religions.Throughout the book, Harpur details stories and sayings in the New Testament which he claims also appear in ancient myths, particularly pointing out the similarities between Jesus and the Egyptian sun god Horus. He states that a number of pagan cultures in different regions and time periods drew on symbolic themes such as virgin birth, deity father, star in the east, raising of the dead, descent into hell, crucifixion, resurrection, and others. Harpur claims that virtually all words and actions attributed to Jesus in the gospels "originated thousands of years before." Although early church leaders such as Justin Martyr and St. Augustine reportedly acknowledged certain commonalities between pagan religions and Christianity, Harpur explains that the extent of these similarities was hidden until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Calling_(Sheridan_novel)"title="London Calling (Sheridan novel)">
Set in the post-war atmosphere of 1952, "London Calling" follows ex-Secret Service agent Mirabelle Bevan as she investigates the mystery of a missing debutante, wealthy eighteen-year-old Rose Bellamy Gore. Mirabelle is assisted once again by the upbeat Vesta Churchill as they explore an underworld of smoky nightclubs, jazz bars, and intriguing characters to gather information and seek answers. Detective Superintendent Alan McGregor keeps an eye on Mirabelle's activities as a fledgling romance blooms between the two.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Kontrabaß"title="Der Kontrabaß">
The play consists of an extended monologue delivered by a double bass player, who speaks to the audience in his small sound-proofed apartment while drinking beer. He is in his mid-thirties and is employed at a State Orchestra. At first he praises his instrument and its importance in the orchestra by telling anecdotes about its history and by actually playing it. With a considerable humour, he reveals more and more of his past and present rather than his current misery. He did not pick his instrument out of love and he never has company. He reveals too that once when his car broke down and stranded him and his instrument in the cold, he gave his coat to the bass, thereby adding to the image of a lonely man who realises that his performance is mediocre: The player dreams of chamber music, especially Schubert's Trout Quintet. He also dreams of approaching a young mezzo-soprano, Sarah, but fails to impress her by playing "eklatant schön" (strikingly beautifully). He imagines to win her attention by yelling her name at the festival premiere of Das Rheingold in the silence full of expectation before the soft beginning. When he leaves for the performance in concert dress, the end is open. The double bass is the largest instrument in the string family which means it is lowest pitched instrument.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_Belle_(Sheridan_novel)"title="Brighton Belle (Sheridan novel)">
Set in post-war 1951 Brighton, the plot follows bereaved ex-Secret Service agent Mirabelle Bevan whose work at a debt collection agency leads her to investigate a disappearance mystery with the help of insurance clerk Vesta Churchill. Along the way they discover murder, Nazi war criminals, betting scams, and counterfeit coins. Brighton Belle has been described as 'a cosy crime noir mystery'.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Edge_(Hinton_novel)"title="On the Edge (Hinton novel)">
Fifteen-year-old Dillon and his ten-year-old brother Robbie were home alone when Robbie received a telephone call from their father who they had not seen for two years after he beat up Dillon and his mother. Their father said he wanted to take them on holiday saying that their mother said it was OK despite his restraining order. Robbie was excited about the idea but Dillon was suspicious. Dad came round in a brand new 4x4 and dressed in his army gear. After talking to their father Dillon decided to go but left a note on his bed just in case.When they stopped at a motorway service station Dillon decided to call Mum’s boyfriend Andy as Mum left her mobile at home and he did not have her office number but Dad removed the battery and the SIM card from Dillon’s mobile and Robbie left his at home.When they arrived at Gardle Head they set up camp near the cliff top and slept in a hollow.In the morning after breakfast Dad set up two snares to catch rabbits for dinner then they went swimming and skipping stones on the beach. That evening Robbie was squeamish about eating the rabbit due to his vegetarianism but accepted the meat to please his Dad. When Dad sent Dillon to the car to get drinks he found the note he left for Mum which Dad had removed before they left and a shotgun in a black leather case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Land_of_Pain"title="In the Land of Pain">
Daudet records observations, experiences, and aphorisms related to his intense suffering over the course of many years. He describes his symptoms in graphic detail and charts their progression. This begins with isolated attacks of agonising nerve pain, and eventually becomes a daily litany of pain and use of drugs like opium and chloral hydrate to fight it. He comments on the effect of his illness on family and friends, and on his outlook on life.He describes the different physical treatments he underwent, including being suspended in the air, diets, and a variety of injections. He also details his observations of fellow sufferers of the disease and his interactions with them. In his later years, he frequently spent time at sanitariums, becoming a celebrity among the other patients. He describes his time at these sanitariums in detail. Daudet stopped making these notes a few years before his death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golem_and_the_Jinni"title="The Golem and the Jinni">
In the Polish town of Konin at the end of the 19th century, a corrupt kabbalist named Yehudah Schaalman creates a golem in the shape of a woman at the request of young Otto Rotfeld, who seeks a submissive, attentive, and curious wife. Rotfeld dies during a subsequent sea voyage to New York City, leaving the newly awakened golem in an unfamiliar environment. A rabbi in New York takes in the golem and, naming her Chava, starts teaching her to pass as human among the diverse groups of people living in New York. Meanwhile, a tinsmith in New York's Little Syria accidentally frees a jinni from a flask in which he has been imprisoned for a millennium. With no memory of how he was subdued, the jinni is virtually powerless and trapped in human form. He takes the name Ahmad and apprentices with the tinsmith while searching for a way to return to his natural form.Chava and Ahmad eventually meet, recognizing each other as inhuman, and become friends, though they have different views on being inhuman while living in a human world. Chava seeks to be more human and fears losing control and exposing herself, whereas Ahmad holds a jaded view towards social restraints and engages in hedonistic pursuits. Chava and Ahmad's influence on the lives of the people around them comes to a climax as Chava's creator comes to New York, intent on finding the secret to eternal life. He is discovered to be a reincarnation of the evil sorcerer who trapped Ahmad.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmageddon_(book)"title="Farmageddon (book)">
The thesis examined in the book is that globalised production chains of industrialised agricultural systems negatively affect farmed animals, human health, the countryside, rivers and oceans, biodiversity in rainforests and many of the world's poorest people. The authors seek to shed light on the conditions in intensive agriculture which, according to them, often differ from the image that the industry wants to sell to the public. Intensification in animal farming goes along with a growing demand of cropland to grow animal feed – factory farming is thus not a means to save space. They argue consequently that to feed the world population factory farming is not the solution but a threat, not least since more than a third of the world's arable harvests are being used to supply farmed animals. According to the book the consumer price of cheap meat does not include the overall costs of industrial meat production.The reader follows Lymbery's journey from his start in California's Central Valley. There he finds dairies where 10,000 cows can be milked at once. He travels to enormous piggeries in China and visits the fishmeal industry of Peru, which converts millions of tonnes of anchovies to fishmeal for supplying the livestock industry with feed. In Taiwan he visits a farm (labelled "organic") where 300,000 laying hens are being starved and held in batteries. A visit is paid to the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia, US where he finds the marine ecosystem impacted by waste from the poultry industry. The author talks to a community in Mexico in an area dominated by pig sheds. There he documents a lake of effluent and air and water pollution, and discusses the outbreak of swine flu.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Polyester_Prince"title="The Polyester Prince">
"The Polyester Prince" chronicles Dhirubhai Ambani's life from childhood to founder of RIL following India's independence in 1947, and highlights how India's post-independence industry development was achieved by both fair and foul means.The first section of the book explores the events of Ambani's young adult life that influenced his understanding of business and developed his skillset that later went on to help him found RIL. This section explores how the mixture of Ambani's working experience as a young adult at trading companies along with post-independence India's changing business landscape lead to Ambani's debut in the wealthy social circles of India and rise in his power.The latter part of the book centers on Ambani's different business dealings, both successful and criticised as he founds and expands RIL. Throughout the book, McDonald describes the ethical costs associated with Ambani's management of the political environment using his status in wealthy social circles that included politicians, stock market speculators and more to path the way for RIL to become India's largest private-sector conglomerate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Verificationist"title="The Verificationist">
The Verificationist is set in early spring in an undisclosed New England city, at a pancake house where Tom—the novel's protagonist—has called together his fellow psychologists from the Krakower Institute for their biannual pancake supper. The conversations amongst the psychotherapists at these biannual pancake dinners are generally dedicated to “the seemingly everlasting task of reconciling classical metapsychology to our particular branch of Self/Other Friction Theory.” The narrative may be divided into three levels: what is happening in the diner, what is happening in Tom's "transient psychotic state", and what he imagines his wife, Jane, is doing at home.In the diner, the insecurities and neuroses of the psychotherapists in attendance are on display in their conversations, as interpreted by the relentlessly psychoanalyzing voice of the narrator. Tom attempts to start a food-fight, and the "patriarchal" Bernhardt lifts him into air, gripping him in a bear-hug. When Berhardt lifts Tom into the air, Tom experiences a sudden dissociative state, in which he imagines himself floating along the ceiling of the restaurant. Tom remains in this suspended state for the remainder of the novel.In Tom's "transient psychotic state" he is floating on the ceiling, with the obese Bernhardt trailing along behind him as a silent, psychologically symbolic patriarch. As the evening progresses, more of the characters join Tom and Bernhardt's hallucinatory flotilla: the waitress, the alcoholic Psychoanalyst Sherwin Lang, and the postdoctoral student who is in love with Lang. The question as to whether the hallucination Tom is having is a collective hallucination, shared by the other psychoanalysts, remains ambiguous throughout the narrative.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Arma_Escarlate"title="A Arma Escarlate">
The year is 1997, in the middle of an intense shootout, during one of the bloodiest eras of the Favela Santa Marta, a thirteen-years-old boy discovers he is a wizard.Sworn death by drug kingpins, Hugo escapes with only one goal in mind: learn enough magic to come back and confront the bandit who is threatening his family. In this learning process, however, he may end up discovering how much of bandit's is inside himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Comedy_of_Charleroi"title="The Comedy of Charleroi">
So began the battle of Charleroi, Belgium, August 21, 1914, in the first month of the (not so) Great War. Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, a 21-year-old, inexperienced French officer, was at first exhilarated, a fighting man at last, and then chastened by a shrapnel wound. Returning to the lines weeks later he was wounded again. After recovering from that he and other French soldiers joined the British in the Dardanelles, from which he was evacuated with amoebic dysentery. Recovered from that he joined a regiment at the Battle of Verdun to be so seriously wounded he was removed from active service. This slender volume (212 p) of short-story/memoirs is his looking back at some of the events, the men he knew, the ideas and emotions that swept through him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(Weir_novel)"title="The Martian (Weir novel)">
In the year 2035, the crew of NASA's Ares 3 mission have arrived at Acidalia Planitia for a planned month-long stay on Mars. After only six sols, an intense dust and wind storm threatens to topple their Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV), which would trap them on the planet. During the hurried evacuation, an antenna tears loose and impales astronaut Mark Watney, a botanist and engineer, also disabling his spacesuit radio. He is flung out of sight by the wind and presumed dead. As the MAV teeters dangerously, mission commander Melissa Lewis has no choice but to take off without completing the search for Watney.However, Watney is not dead. His injury proves relatively minor, but with no long-range radio, he cannot communicate with anyone. He must rely on his own resourcefulness to survive. He begins a log of his experiences. His philosophy is to "work the problem", solving each challenge in turn as it confronts him. With food a critical, though not immediate, problem, he begins growing potatoes in the crew's Martian habitat (the Hab), and burns hydrazine to generate water for the plants.NASA eventually discovers that Watney is alive when satellite images of the landing site show evidence of his activities; NASA personnel begin devising ways to rescue him, but withhold the news of his survival from the rest of the Ares 3 crew, on their way back to Earth aboard the "Hermes" spacecraft, so as not to distract them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitte_2"title="Mitte 2">
Jenny Epstein has attracted a stalker, Fridjof, who is madly in love with her. She asks bumbling writer Albrecht for help. They swap their cell phones and thereby trigger a series of catastrophes and accidents during which Albrecht manages to attract a stalker for himself. He meets Mikki's step-mother, a wealthy jazz musician. She decides to help him finance a musical production but under the condition that Mikki marries and returns to his former job as a lawyer. What she doesn't know is that Mikki's current love-interest is her arch-rival, Margaud, another jazz-singer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malice_(series)"title="Malice (series)">
The book begins with Luke and Heather at Luke's house with Luke trying to summon Tall Jake, a creature from another world called Malice. When Luke succeeds in summoning Tall Jake, his friends Seth and Kady go looking for him. Discovering the comic entitled Malice, an idea forms in Seth and Kady's minds: Malice is real. After some thought, Seth decides that the only way to find out the truth is to go into Malice itself. When Kady finds out that Seth went to Malice, she decides to do some investigating and finds out that she has been to Malice herself and that her mom, a professional hypnotist, hypnotized her with fake memories of being in San Francisco. She then goes to Malice and finds Seth and his newfound friend Justin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elect_Mr._Robinson_for_a_Better_World"title="Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World">
As the novel opens, Pete Robinson is supervising the drawing and quartering of the town's mayor by four automobiles. We learn that Pete Robinson is an expert in the history of torture, with special emphasis on the inquisition, and that he was formerly an elementary schoolteacher before the local school system was entirely defunded. Pete's ambition to run for mayor after resurrecting the local educational system under his own administration—and the thwarting of this ambition—are major elements of the novel's plot. Other elements of the plot include Pete's thwarted attempts to bury pieces of the former Mayor's body in Egyptological rituals, and his wife Meredith's growing detachment as she becomes more involved in ichthyomorphic trances in which she transforms herself into a coelacanth, or ancient fish.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_a_Bengal_Lancer_(book)"title="The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (book)">
In 1905, Francis Yeats-Brown, then a young cavalryman, arrives in Bengal to serve in the 17th Bengal Lancers on the Northwest Frontier of British India. He quickly discovers that life in the presence of his fellow soldiers is anything but boring. When not on active duty, he spends his time riding horses around the countryside, hunting boars, smoking tobacco and studying Indian mysticism. He sees active service in France in 1914 and becomes a military air observer in Mesopotamia in 1915. He eventually becomes a prisoner of war of the Ottoman Empire and makes unsuccessful attempts at escape. Yeats-Brown returns to India in 1919, continues to serve in the Cavalry and continues to study Yoga. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Against_Venus"title="Five Against Venus">
After another boring day at Los Angeles High School, Bruce Robinson is delighted to hear that his long-unemployed father, Paul Robinson, has found a job – on the moon. A short time later the Robinson family boards the rocketship that will take them to meet the deep-space ship "Sirius", which will take them to the moon. But as they approach the disc-shaped deep-space ship they see that, instead of "Sirius", they will be riding the "Aurora" to the moon.Once the Robinsons have boarded the "Aurora" and settled in, Bruce meets Jim Gregor, who shows him the ship's controls. Bruce and Gregor then join the engineer and the captain (neither man is named in the story) in the cargo hold to move some boxes. When one of the boxes breaks open and reveals a strange-looking machine, the captain warns Bruce never to tell anyone what he saw.With the ship under way, Bruce develops a hunch that something has gone wrong. He sees that an emergency light has come on and informs Gregor. The pilot discovers that the ship's engines have been over-running and that the ship is on a course that will pass close to Venus (in the 1950 movie "Rocketship X-M" the over-running of the engines takes the lunar-bound ship to Mars). With insufficient propellant to return to Earth, Gregor attempts to make an emergency landing on a mountainside and dies in the crash. Prior to the crash, the captain and the engineer bail out in a rocket-propelled lifeboat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_of_the_Sands"title="Secret of the Sands">
The novel is set in 1833, during a British naval survey of the coastline of the Arabian Peninsula. An ambitious Lieutenant James Wellstead's plans are thrown into disarray when two of his shipmates, Jones and Jessop, go missing in the desert while gathering intelligence and he has to carry out a daring rescue.Slavery is still rife throughout Arabia. Zena, a headstrong Abyssinian beauty who was torn from her village, is now being offered for sale as a slave in the market of Muscat. However, her fortunes change when she finds herself in the company of the lieutenant. She must accompany him on his hazardous mission, forced to make big choices, and little knowing the fate that awaits them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_Culture_Officer"title="Chief Culture Officer">
In the book, McCracken recounts how corporations that successfully adapt to the cultural changes tend to prosper. His definition of culture begins with a distinction between fast and slow:"Fast culture is like all the boats on the surface of the Pacific. We can spot them, track them. Slow culture is everything beneath the surface: less well charted, much less visible"McCracken argues that when fast and slow culture meet, a convergent culture is created. He points to the preppy subculture as an example of a convergent culture that brands such as Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger have capitalized on. He also analyses the convergence of status, shifting from a class based value system to celebrity, and the cool convergence, an aesthetic that he states developed alongside the baby boomer generation.Changing relationships, McCracken argues, between consumers and producers have created new opportunities for brands to connect with culture. He observes that whilst only 1 in 100 people create content on the Internet, the creator consumer dynamic used to be "1 in 10,000". McCracken believes this change allows consumers to become an "active participant in the branding process". He refers to Converse's 2005 motto as an illustration of this change: "We don't own the brand. Consumers do"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Life"title="Dark Life">
The world has been plunged underwater leaving very little land left above water. A teenage boy, Ty, has spent his entire life underwater helping his family farm their sea homestead. Ty meets a teenage girl, Gemma, from the land, who is looking for her brother. A group of sea bandits known as the "Seablite Gang" attacks Ty's homestead and he and Gemma try to capture the bandits. However, a member of the gang, Shade, turns out to be Gemma's brother. It also turns out that Shade, like Ty, has a "dark gift" that allows him to change his appearance, however Ty's dark gift is that he is able to use echo-location similar to a bat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annihilation_(VanderMeer_novel)"title="Annihilation (VanderMeer novel)">
A team of four women (a fifth having abandoned the team before entering) crosses the border into an uninhabited area known as "Area X", an unspecified coastal location that has been closed to the public for three decades. The group comprise the 12th expedition into Area X, and consists of a biologist, an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a surveyor, none of whom are ever identified by name. The story is told through the biologist's field journal, written near the end of the expedition. It is revealed that the biologist's husband was part of the preceding 11th expedition, from which he had returned unexpectedly, showing up in their kitchen without any recollection of how he got there. The other members of the 11th expedition had shown up similarly, and a few months later, her husband and all the others had died of cancer.After the first night spent at the base camp, the 12th expedition comes upon a structure containing a set of spiral stairs descending into the ground. Inside the structure (which the biologist repeatedly calls a tower), along the staircase, they find cursive writing that begins with the words "Where lies the strangling fruit..." The words appear to be written with a plant material growing several inches from the exterior wall. While the biologist is examining the writing, she accidentally inhales spores from this material. After returning from the tower, the biologist discovers that the psychologist, who is the appointed leader, has programmed the group with certain triggers via hypnosis. By saying the phrase "consolidation of authority", the psychologist hypnotizes all except the biologist, who believes that the spores she has inhaled have made her resistant. The group decides to return to base camp, and at dusk, they hear a moaning noise from far away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saints_of_the_Shadow_Bible"title="Saints of the Shadow Bible">
The investigations in the novel take place in February or March 2013 against the background of the dissolution of regional police forces as they are merged into Police Scotland. Malcolm Fox’s unit, the “Complaints,” is disappearing, and he undertakes an investigation on behalf of the Solicitor General in the hopes of finding a place in the new organization. DI Siobhan Clarke is stationed at Gayfield Square, but follows important cases to Torphichen and Wester Hailes police stations. John Rebus has succeeded in rejoining the CID, albeit as a Detective Sergeant instead of a Detective Inspector. He works with both Clarke and Fox, but is primarily investigating a long-defunct police station, Summerhall, where he was assigned in 1982 as a newly-minted detective. Also relevant to the cases is the upcoming 2014 Scottish independence referendum; a Justice Minister, whose death Clarke is investigating, is a figurehead for the Yes campaign, while Rebus’s Summerhall colleague Gilmour, Fox’s target, is a prominent No supporter. This recalls the 2000 Rebus novel, "Set in Darkness", set in the midst of the first elections to the new Scottish Parliament.Clarke and Rebus’s apparently trivial investigation of a university student’s car crash becomes complicated when the student’s boyfriend’s father, the Justice Minister, is found dead in his own home. Meanwhile, Rebus is invited by Fox to help with the opening of a very cold case involving the Summerhall policemen, who called themselves “Saints of the Shadow Bible.” The surviving Saints want Rebus to ensure that Fox does not disrupt their lives; Fox hopes Rebus will implicate himself; Rebus wants to find out more about the secrets he only glimpsed thirty years earlier. Rebus ends up using his confrontational techniques (intimidation and threats, recruiting snitches, bargaining with gangsters) to assist both Clarke and Fox. The three detectives come to respect each other. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Minister_of_Chance"title="The Minister of Chance">
In a world far from our own, Ambassador Durian of Sezuan (Paul McGann) is dispatched on a peace mission to the primitive island nation of Tanto, but things take a turn for the very, very sinister. In a nearby Inn, a mysterious stranger (Julian Wadham as the titular Minister) appears, then disappears through a miraculous portal in the forest (he “knows the formula for doors”). The inquisitive teenage barmaid, Kitty (Lauren Crace) follows him, with no shoes and only her superhuman strength to keep her company. Another world awaits, where they will be forced into an alliance to save the Universe, and beyond.Another world: Kitty is a barmaid at the Traveller's Rest in the occupied city of Tantillion. One night, a stranger walks in, and through a door and over the Frost Bridge between worlds - and Kitty follows him.“I know the formula for doors,” says the Minister, vanishing through the one he has just created in mid air. Teenage barmaid Kitty isn’t the sort to be dismissed easily, though. Armed only with her bad attitude, foul mouth and mysterious strength, she follows him through the glowing doorway, onto the frost bridge between worlds, and into adventure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truly_Madly_Deeply_(novel)"title="Truly Madly Deeply (novel)">
After moving to Philadelphia from Mumbai, India, teen Rahul Kapoor has difficulty coping with what seems to be the loss of a loved one. Upon enrolling into Delaware Valley High School, Rahul is introduced to Sahil, an American born Indian who is assigned the task of familiarizing Rahul with his new schooling.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Death_of_Honor"title="A Death of Honor">
The novel is set in a crumbling 21st-century America. D. A. Payne, a bioengineer, is the prime suspect when a dead woman turns up in his apartment. He takes on the task of clearing himself but what he uncovers changes his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Careful_What_You_Wish_For_(Archer_novel)"title="Be Careful What You Wish For (Archer novel)">
"Be Careful What You Wish For" follows the Barrington-Clifton family during the years 1957 to 1964, when Emma Barrington Clifton seeks to take control of her family shipping business and must deal with conspiracies and sabotage. Don Pedro Martinez tries to get his own candidate to lead the company, and Yorkshire banker Cedric Hardcastle joins the board.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/She's_All_the_World_to_Me"title="She's All the World to Me">
Danny Fayle, a young fisherman in Peel, is too shy to make much of his love for Mona Cregeen, a skilled machinist at the town's net factory. Mona lives with her mother and apparent young sister, Ruby, having moved to Peel from elsewhere on the island not long before. Mona has had a secret relationship with Christian Mylrea, the son of the well-respected MHK, Harbour Commissioner and magistrate, Evan Mylrea "Balladhoo". Mona and Christian keep their connection a secret as he tries to keep the debt incurred during his lax life in England from becoming known to his father. In order to try and pay off the debt, Christian falls in with the crew of Danny Fayle's boat who, independently of Danny, plan to wreck a boat on the rocks off Peel Castle. The plot is thwarted by the police but, for the sake of Christian's freedom, Mona enables the men to escape arrest. However, their boat becomes stuck on rocks during a storm and Danny Fayle eventually risks his life in order to save Christian and deliver him to Mona.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Temptation_of_Elminster"title="The Temptation of Elminster">
The "Temptation of Elminster" moves the time line ahead several centuries. At the outset of the novel, Elminster emerges from a dusty tomb, after being trapped there in stasis for many years.During much of this book, as under orders from Mystra, Elminster restricts his use of magic, and he must again learn to survive by his wits and the skills he picked up earlier in his life. He later undergoes further magical training under the tutelage of a wicked sorceress who seeks to tempt him away from Mystra's path.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elminster_In_Hell"title="Elminster In Hell">
Elminster attempts to close a planar rift which connects Toril to Avernus of the Nine Hells, to prevent devils from invading, but he is captured and tortured by the outcast archdevil Nergal until Mystra sends her most powerful agents to rescue him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elminster_Enraged"title="Elminster Enraged">
Elminster battles Manshoon despite Mystra's wishes that they work together. The battle causes Elminster to fall into the Underdark as a cloud of ashes, and he inhabits the body of a fallen drow to carry out Mystra's orders. Manshoon plans to conquer Cormyr and become its emperor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Man_with_a_Pistol"title="Blind Man with a Pistol">
It is summertime in the city of Harlem and Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones are both trying to keep peace in the city. They pursue two different cases in an attempt to keep the city from tearing itself apart. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_Ring"title="Infinity Ring">
## "A Mutiny in Time"."A Mutiny in Time" is the first book in the series. It was written by James Dashner.To gain power and influence, a secret society known as the SQ has changed many things about time, so history is dramatically different than ours. Those changes, or "breaks," have also caused many problems, including increasingly intense natural disasters and civil unrest. The SQ also manipulates every government's actions. Dak's parents, both scientists, have developed a time machine with financing and monitoring from the Hystorians, a secret group, founded by Aristotle, which works against the SQ and has been preparing to go back in time to fix the changes.One day, Dak, Sera, and their class goes to the Smithsonian Museum. As Dak soaks in everything, Sera is bored with the history. Suddenly, an earthquake rocks the building, nearly causing a Viking longship to fall on Dak and Sera. After the disaster, Sera experiences a Remnant, a feeling that something different would have happened if time hadn't been changed. After she goes to Dak to share it, he allows her to enter his parents' lab. Sera completes the Infinity Ring, a device that allows time travel. However, their parents' first attempt at time traveling fails, getting them lost in the time stream. Soon after that, a dozen Hystorians disguised as SQ members storm Dak's parent's lab. When Brint and Mari, the Hystorians' current leaders, introduce Dak and Sera to the Hystorians, only Riq stands out. He is far younger than everyone else, with dark skin and eyes. He also knows sixteen languages and is 16 years old. Shortly after that, the SQ storms the compound and Dak, Sera, and Riq escape by using the Infinity Ring and decide to go back in time to fix the changes themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monk_Who_Sold_His_Ferrari"title="The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari">
The book develops around two characters, Julian Mantle and his best friend John, in the form of conversation. Julian narrates his spiritual experiences during a Himalayan journey which he undertook after selling his holiday home and red Ferrari.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_with_Boys"title="Friends with Boys">
All of her life Maggie has been homeschooled, so when the time comes for her to attend public high school she is understandably nervous. Her many brothers have adapted to public school with few problems, but Maggie can't help but feel a little like a fish out of water. She manages to make friends with Lucy, but Maggie has other problems. Namely the silent ghost who is supposedly the widow of the captain of the "Reaper" that has constantly followed Maggie around since she was a little girl.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authority_(novel)"title="Authority (novel)">
John "Control" Rodriguez takes over as the new director of the Southern Reach, a government agency formed to manage a coastal region named Area X. The public is led to believe that the region suffered an environmental disaster and is isolated for safety; in truth the region has been taken over by an unknown force that is changing the environs and ecosystem behind a largely impenetrable "border". He is a secret operative assigned by the mysterious Central group which oversees the Southern Reach. He comes from a family of operatives: his mother and grandfather are prominent and influential members. Control reports to a handler called "the Voice" at Central over phone calls and e-mail.In his role as director, Control frequently encounters friction with the existing staff to various degrees: in particular, the assistant director Grace Stevenson, who seems to have an emotional attachment to his predecessor. Control methodically sifts through the accumulated data (interviews, photos, videos) and discovers that there have been many more expeditions into Area X than have been disclosed to the public. The all-male 11th expedition alone had multiple iterations with slightly different control factors similar to a lab experiment, leading to the formation of an all-female 12th expedition to see how this composition would interact with Area X. The 12th expedition's biologist was the protagonist of the previous novel, and the expedition's psychologist was in fact the previous director of the Southern Reach (whom he replaced), a fact that she did not reveal to the other members of the expedition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acceptance_(novel)"title="Acceptance (novel)">
"Acceptance" jumps around in time and between the perspectives of several characters from the first two novels in the Southern Reach Trilogy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_&amp;_Adam"title="Eve &amp; Adam">
After being in a car accident, Evening (Eve) is recovering in her mother's research facility, and is suffering from boredom. She is given the task of creating the perfect boy, Adam, by using detailed simulation technologies to be able to bring him to life. Along the way, she is both helped and hindered by Solo, a boy who has been living at the Biotech facility for years and knows many of its secrets."Love Sucks and then You Die" is a short story prequel to Eve &amp; Adam.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkspell"title="Darkspell">
Rhodry is sent into exile by his brother Rhys, the Gwerbret of Aberwyn, and becomes a mercenary soldier called a “silver dagger.” Jill goes with him; they become involved in a dark dweomerman’s plot to steal the Great Stone of the West, a magical gemstone which guides the conscience of Deverry’s king.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Ligovskaya"title="Princess Ligovskaya">
The Guards officer Pechorin meets his former beau Vera Ligovskaya (now married to a pompous and vain man, Prince Ligovskoy), finds his love is not entirely dead and sees she is struggling with similar feelings. A parallel sub-plot deals with the hero's conflict with Krasinsky, a minor official from an impoverished noble family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_sombra_de_Heidegger"title="La sombra de Heidegger">
Dieter Müller wrote his letter in 1948. It was intended to be read by his son, Martin Müller, with the objective of helping him to understand certain aspects of the decisions he made in his life. He tries to answer why he was affiliated to the Nazi Party, and why it is a must for Martin to read "Sein und Zeit".In this line, it is explained that Müller was particularly engaged with Heidegger's ontology, and this is why he focuses his historical analysis in the notion of authenticity. Thus, he shows a major comprehension of the concept of Dasein.Müller explains in detail some facets of Heidegger's life. He gave an account of Heidegger's emotional engagement with Hannah Arendt, and how this relationship was perceived by SA members, specially by a Müller's friend who was in love with Arendt. It did not make sense for Nazi Party members due to the Jewish condition of Arendt. He also argues that 1933 Heidegger became Rektor of the University of Freiburg owing to the aid of the SA and specially that of its co-founder and leader, Ernest Rohm. Müller explains that he obtained his Nazi Party membership right after hearing Heidegger's inaugural address, known in English as "The Self-assertion of the German University".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_The_Wolves_I'm_Home"title="Tell The Wolves I'm Home">
June Elbus is a 14-year-old girl living in Westchester, New York in 1986. She is in love with her gay uncle, Finn Weiss, a fact she is scared to admit even to herself. Finn is dying of AIDS. Being a professional painter, he asks June and her elder sister Greta to sit for a portrait, which he completes a few days before his death. At his funeral, June notices a stranger hanging around. She learns that he is Finn's boyfriend, Toby. She is warned against him by her family, particularly her mother, who forbids June from having any contact with him.One day Toby delivers a message to June, asking her to meet him at a train station nearby. Although initially hesitant, she decides to meet him. They ride to Finn's apartment, where Toby now lives alone. He gives her some of Finn's possessions, which he left behind for her. One of these include a book with a message to June from Finn, asking her to take care of Toby, as he had nobody else.Meanwhile, the media learns of the portrait, which Finn named "Tell the Wolves I'm Home". Recognizing its monetary value, June's mother moves it to a bank vault and gives the keys to June and Greta. June visits it often, and notices there are additions to the painting: black buttons on her shirt and a skull behind Greta's hand, which she realizes is drawn by Greta herself. June too paints on the portrait, adding streaks of golden to their hair.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outsiders_(Taiwanese_TV_series)"title="The Outsiders (Taiwanese TV series)">
Three sworn brothers, Yu Hao (Dylan Kuo), Shan Zi (Blue Lan), and Yang Xiong Qi (Michael Zhang), that are delinquents, grew up together fighting local neighborhood rivals. Although they are not triad gangs, they make enemies with them when they offend some of their members. Yu Hao who is considered the leader of the three falls for good girl Xiao Yan Zi (Ady An). Yan Zi comes from a well to do family and has been taking piano lessons since she was young hoping to become a pianist. Yan Zi runs into a bloodied Yu Hao in the streets and saves him. Yu Hao, who has always been in love with Yan Zi, uses this chance encounter between the two to break the ice and chase after Yan Zi but the three sworn brothers end up joining triad gangs when they have to protect Yan Zi.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_Their_Hearts_Out"title="Play Their Hearts Out">
Published by Ballantine Books, Dohrmann's first book was the result of more than eight years of investigative work. Joe Keller, the coach Dohrmann tracked over those eight years, was a grassroots basketball coach in the Inland Empire in the mid-1990s when he discovered a young Tyson Chandler. Keller and his wife committed most of their time to the team and taking care of Chandler, but Keller stepped back from coaching when his wife suffered a miscarriage. Returning to coaching a few years later, Keller saw that it would be difficult to break into the high school ranks again, so he put together a team that he could coach from elementary through high school, identifying Demetrius Walker as his star player.Keller essentially became Walker's guardian as he assembled a team around him, the Inland Stars, who quickly dominated teams from around the West Coast thanks to Walker's size and low-post presence — including a dominating 67-point win over a Seattle team led by a young Peyton Siva. However, Keller's coaching deficiencies — a short fuse, a reliance on a gimmicky trap defense nicknamed Fist, and a refusal to adjust the team's offense when defenses zeroed in on Walker — meant the team lost in major national tournaments early on. In an infamous moment, Keller missed the birth of his daughter in 2003 while the team played in the national tournament in Georgia but failed to win it all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_a_Father"title="Raising a Father">
Sen's story starts the day after September 11 and the destruction of the World Trade Center. Forced to take the next day off work, Sen takes advantage of the free time to ask his daughter what she thinks of their relationship and she says, "not good." Challenged, Sen asks her to explain, and she says that he does not really know her. She gives him a three-question quiz: "Who is my best friend?" "What is my favorite restaurant?" "What is the best thing you and I have ever done?" Sen got all three answers wrong. The results of that conversation launched him on a journey of befriending his daughter and becoming a more thoughtful, better parent. He quit his job as Vice President of Marketing and started a home-based business that would allow him to invest more time and attention in his daughter. Sen notes that he did not want to become one of those parents who get two duty telephone calls a year.The memoir devotes some space to reminiscing about Sen's own childhood in India and the lessons he learned from his paternal grandmother. His grandmother's strict discipline and commitment to his education inspire him in his raising of his own daughter. One day, Sen who was born into the Hindu faith, finds himself wondering about religion. To his surprise, his grandmother does not forcefully advocate for Hinduism. She describes it as a "way of life" rather than a religion. Everyone must find the religion and way of life that suits him, she says. In reviewing his performance as a father, Sen refers back to his own childhood and the example set to him by his own grandmother. The memoir moves on to Sen's immigration to the United States. He arrived in 1988 with US $320. Fifteen years later, he was widely regarded as an important voice in the world of restaurant marketing. From here, the book comes back around to Sen's moment of awareness that he did not know his daughter well enough.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angry_Blonde"title="Angry Blonde">
In the book Eminem comments on songs that he wrote, almost solely on those that have received controversy for explicit lyrics. The songs' lyrics are listed in the work uncensored (leading to the book being sold with a Parental Advisory sticker), with Eminem's personal take on each one. Songs listed in the book include "Kim", "The Way I Am" and "The Real Slim Shady".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dire_Earth_Cycle"title="The Dire Earth Cycle">
## "The Darwin Elevator".The first novel is set years after a plague has afflicted most of the Earth's population, dubbed "subs" (as the disease turns people into zombie-like sub-humans). The others comprise the rare "immunes" and the refugees inhabiting the "aura" safe zone around the space elevator.Humanity exists as refugees in Darwin or as technological space dwellers, who occupy space stations and space farms constructed around the elevator. They live a fragile coexistence: Darwin exports air and water for the space stations, and the space farms feed the ground population.The lead character, Captain Skyler Luiken, an immune, heads a team of immune scavengers who can survive outside the aura where they battle sub-humans while collecting items of value to trade, or repair the aging elevator complex and space stations. Skyler and the crew become entangled in the political plots and power games of Russell Blackfield, the head of the Nighcliff elevator base, and Neil Platz, "owner" of the space stations. As the aura protection begins to fail, Platz and scientist Dr. Tania Sharma discover that another Builders vessel is due to arrive.Skyler eventually gets to the bottom of the aura failure but is unable to stop Blackfield from assaulting the space facilities. The novel ends in a cliffhanger: as the new Builders vessel has established another space elevator in South America, the characters escape from the Nightcliff coup by relocating some space stations to the new elevator, where they find things are very different.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Overboard_(book)"title="Man Overboard (book)">
Champagne, a construction developer, disappeared in 1982 while aboard a 45-foot yacht that was sailing off the Olympic Peninsula. He was presumed dead after a 13-hour search by the U.S. Coast Guard.A $1.5 million life-insurance business policy, taken out by his brother as co-partner in a construction firm with Champagne, paid out $700,000 to his grieving family.After the accident when Champagne realized everyone thought he had drowned, he stole the identity of Harold Stegeman, an 8-year-old boy who died in 1945. Champagne lived as Stegeman, a Washington restaurateur, for the next 10 years until his arrest for counterfeiting US currency in an Idaho garage. Champagne pleaded guilty to giving false statements during a bankruptcy hearing, a loan application and passport application. In addition, he served 21 months in federal prison for charges of counterfeiting and passport fraud.Barer, an Edgar Award winner, profiles Champagne in "Man Overboard", republished by Wild Blue Press in a 20th Anniversary Special Edition featuring a new preface by the author, a new afterword by Phil Champagne and several new photographs. Wild Blue Press also made available audiobook and electronic editions. The first page of the book includes a synopsis of how the new identity began:"Phil Champagne died Aug. 31, 1982, in a tragic boating accident off Lopez Island, Washington. He was 52. Champagne was survived by his wife of 28 years, four grown children, an octogenarian mother and two despondent brothers. Phil didn’t know he was dead until he read it in the paper. All things considered, he took it pretty well."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Office_of_Mercy"title="The Office of Mercy">
A post-apocalyptic America is left peopled by those who inhabit emotionally controlled high-tech underground settlements such as America-Five, and wild, emotionally fierce people of the Tribes. Natasha Wiley works in America-Five's Department of Mercy, where she tracks tribespeople above ground for extermination or "mercy".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalina_(novel)"title="Catalina (novel)">
Catalina is a crippled girl, supposedly cured by divine intervention after witnessing a vision of the Virgin Mary. As a result she is pressured into becoming a nun in a Carmelite convent. The Bishop of Segovia, himself undergoing a crisis of faith, becomes involved in the debate about the debt owed to God by Catalina for her cure. Catalina resists all attempts at control, being determined to marry the man she loves. She joins a troupe of strolling players and becomes the most famous actress in all of Spain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Eagle_(novel)"title="Blood Eagle (novel)">
Two women die horrific deaths, the manner is clearly ritualistic. The murderer writes emails to Hamburg Police's Kriminalhauptkommissar Jan Fabel. But what begins as a hunt for an elusive serial-killer, turns darker and more twisted as Fabel and his team uncover the Blood Eagle ritual, political intrigue, murky Nazi connections, undercover cops and a Ukrainian crime lord who is about to violently take complete control of Hamburg.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raiders_of_the_Nile"title="Raiders of the Nile">
It is the year 88 BC. The young Gordianus is living in Alexandria with his beloved slave Bethesda. When Bethesda disappears, he learns that she has been kidnapped by bandits, and must set out on a dangerous journey into the Nile Delta, accompanied only by the young slave boy Djet. There he ends up having to join the criminal gang known as The Cuckoo's Nest, led by the young but charismatic Artemon. And must go with them back to Alexandria to help Artemon steal the golden sarcophagus of Alexander the Great while the city is erupting in violence around them.The story is set against the backdrop of the struggle between the brothers Ptolemy X Alexander and Ptolemy IX Lathyros over the throne of Egypt, as well as the struggle between Rome and Mithridates.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Wanderer"title="The Night Wanderer">
Sixteen-year-old Anishinaabe teen Tiffany Hunter struggles to adjust after her mother, Claudia, abandons the family to go live with a white man. The one bright spot in Tiffany's life is her recent relationship with Tony. Tiffany and Tony's relationship is made difficult by the fact that he is white and lives in the wealthier suburb of Baymeadow while she and the majority of her friends live on Otter Lake, a poor reserve. He also begins to use her status card in order to not pay sales tax. Tiffany's friends warn her that he may be using her for her card, but Tiffany is reassured when she asks him to stop asking her to use it and he does.Meanwhile, her father Keith, who has been struggling financially since the departure of his wife, decides to try to rent out a room in the Hunter home. It is taken almost immediately by a man who calls himself Pierre L’Errant and who claims to be from Europe and keeps strange habits, insisting on staying in the basement room where there are no windows and sleeping all day. Pierre is Anishinaabe and lived in a village in the same location as Otter Lake hundreds of years ago, but tells Keith that he has two great-grandparents who immigrated to Europe during World War I in order to stave off questions. Finally back in the land of his birth, Pierre reflects back on his childhood as a boy named Owl who ran away with French fur traders to France. Once there he was brought to live with the French king as a member of his court. After contracting measles he was on the verge of death when he a man came through his window and exchanged blood with him turning him into a vampire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serena_(novel)"title="Serena (novel)">
The year is 1929, and newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton travel from Boston to the North Carolina mountains where they plan to create a timber empire. George has already lived in the camp long enough to father an illegitimate child by young Rachel Harmon but Serena is new to the mountains. Upon stepping off the train in Waynesville, George is confronted by Rachel's father, Abe Harmon, who is angry that George has abandoned his daughter. Abe attacks George with bowie knife. Ultimately George wins the battle and kills Abe. George also meets his business partners Wilkie and Buchanan at the train station and introduces them to his new wife, Serena.Serena will soon show herself to be the equal of any man, overseeing crews, hunting rattlesnakes, even saving her husband's life in the wilderness. Together, the Pembertons ruthlessly kill or vanquish all who fall out of favor. Meanwhile, Rachel Harmon struggles to take care of her son, Jacob. When Serena learns that she will never bear a child, she sets out to murder the son George fathered without her. Mother and child begin a struggle for their lives, and when Serena suspects George is protecting his illegitimate family, the Pembertons' intense, passionate marriage starts to unravel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cove_(novel)"title="The Cove (novel)">
## Part One (Ch. 1–5).The novel takes place in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina in 1918. Laurel Shelton lives in the cove with her brother Hank, who has just returned home from fighting in World War I and is missing a hand. Laurel stumbles, unnoticed, upon a man sitting alone in the woods playing a flute. A visit by Laurel to her parents' graves reveal that she and her brother are both orphans; their deaths contributed to the local belief that Laurel is a witch.Laurel is cruelly treated by the locals, especially when Jubel Parton had sex with on a bet. When Laurel again spots the man in the woods, she stops to listen to his music and notes its sadness before heading into the nearest town with Hank and Slidell. An incident in town prompts Laurel to tell her brother about Jubel, and Hank gets into a fight with him. His friend, Chauncey Feith, the town's army recruiter, breaks up the fight and the trio returns home.Meanwhile, Walter Smith, a man who has just escaped some sort of camp, wanders to the cove and stays for three days to heal. On the fourth day he intends to leave, but he suddenly slips and falls and is attacked by a swarm of yellow jackets. He begins to hallucinate.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saints_at_the_River"title="Saints at the River">
The story begins with a brief prologue description of a 12-year-old girl drowning in the Tamassee River, the boundary between Georgia and South Carolina. From then on, the story is told from the point of view of Maggie Glenn, a 28-year-old photographer for "The Messenger" newspaper assigned to cover the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Messenger"title="Ghost Messenger">
THEIR WORLD. HIS BATTLE.In the World of Death, beings beyond the sight of mortal humans use advanced technology to control the life and death of all living kind on Earth. When a mortal's time has come, their spirit is summoned to join the ranks of the Dead. Some restless spirits refuse to follow these orders and remain among the physical realm, and that's when the Ghost Messengers are called into action. Ghost Messengers are ‘in-between’ beings who can travel freely between the worlds of the dead and the living and are supplied with the technology to capture rogue spirits and bring them to the World of Death. While on a spirit-retrieval mission, Kang-Lim, a particularly powerful Ghost Messenger, mistakenly becomes trapped in his own Soul Phone – the device used by the Messengers to capture ghosts – and is discovered by a human boy with extraordinary psychic powers that allows him to see spirits. When an unknown force begins unleashing mythological demons to disrupt the strict balance of the lands of the dead and the living, a bond is formed between Kang-Lim and the human boy, known as ‘Little Kang-Lim’, and they join forces in an effort to retain order as the world becomes increasingly unstable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_Trial"title="Time of Trial">
The novel is a third person narrative, mainly centring on the thoughts and experiences of Margaret Pargeter. The Pargeters live on Holly Lane, near St Paul's Cathedral, where they have a bookshop. Robert Kerridge lodges with them while studying medicine. Though poor for gentlefolk, they have a comfortable life compared to many of their neighbours. The bookseller has somewhat radical views and stocks such controversial works as "The Rights of Man", which Margaret often feels impelled to hide from customers. Her brother John, who does not share his father's principles, loathes the bookshop and hopes to join the army.The crisis of the novel is precipitated by a neglected tenement's collapse, which kills all the families who lived there. Inspired by the tragedy, Mr. Pargeter writes and distributes a pamphlet called "The New Jerusalem" in which he describes his vision of an ideal society. The rich object to his plan to hand over all property to the parishes to be administered for the good of all. He is arrested and found guilty of libelling the landlords and preaching sedition. The poor, on the other hand, object to his plan to prevent children under 14 from working, which they see as likely to make poor families poorer. While he is awaiting trial, a mob attacks his shop and burns it to the ground.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Valley_of_Amazement"title="The Valley of Amazement">
In the first part of the story, Violet tells the story of growing up in Hidden Jade Path, a courtesan house in Shanghai that is run by her mother, an American woman named Lulu Minturn. Violet grows up unaware of who her father is and unsure of her mother's feelings for her.When the Qing dynasty falls in 1912, mother and daughter are separated and the young girl is sold to a rivaling courtesan house, where she is educated by an older girl, Magic Gourd, formerly of her mother's house. The two form a lifelong relationship through Violet's marriages to former clients. Her first marriage results in a child, Flora, who is taken from Violet as a result of an unlawful marriage.The second part of the story is told by the mother, who thinks the daughter is dead. She recalls her upbringing by remote parents in the US, her runaway with an unknown Chinese painter, and her struggle to be accepted as the mother of their two children.Violet is eventually reunited with her mother, and eventually also her daughter Flora.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_of_Light"title="Lies of Light">
"Lies of Light" is a novel in which a man is obsessed with accomplishing what he believes will be his greatest work.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkvision_(novel)"title="Darkvision (novel)">
"Darkvision" is a novel in which the sorceress Ususi runs away to the outside world that her people abandoned long ago, in search of relics they once possessed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_and_Honor_(novel)"title="Blood and Honor (novel)">
"Blood and Honor" is a novel in which a disgraced exile aims to save a noble house in the nation of Karrnath.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Binding_Stone"title="The Binding Stone">
"The Binding Stone" follows the stories of shifter Geth and human shaman Adolan as they join kalashtar psychic Dandra and Lieutenant Singe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grieving_Tree"title="The Grieving Tree">
The group from the previous novel, "The Binding Stone", is joined by former Bonetree hunter Ashi and hobgoblin dirge singer Ekhaas.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_of_Wolves"title="Legacy of Wolves">
A string of grisly murders takes place in the city of Aruldusk, which Zoden the bard, Irulan Silverclaw the shifter, Andri Aeyliros the paladin and Greddark d'Kundarak the dwarf try to solve.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bound_by_Iron"title="Bound by Iron">
"Bound by Iron" is a novel in which the human priest Cimozjen, elf Minrah Penwright, and an emancipated warforged seek to find out who is behind a deadly plot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circus_Is_Coming"title="The Circus Is Coming">
After an unusually sheltered upbringing by their old-fashioned and snobbish aunt, 11-year-old Santa and her 12-year-old brother Peter are faced with the prospect of separate orphanages when she dies. They set out to find their unknown Uncle Gus, who travels with Cob's Circus. They are surprised to find out that he is a clown and a trapeze artist. Gus is taken aback by their sudden appearance and is inclined to send them to the orphanages after all, but he is persuaded to let them stay with the circus for the season. They are fascinated by the life and work hard to fit in, Peter being drawn to the horses and Santa taking up acrobatics. They learn the truth about their family's origins in domestic service, and while it is a shock at first, soon they are glad not to have to live up to their aunt's aristocratic pretensions. They hear many tales of circus life as they travel around the country. At the end of the season, Gus agrees that they have earned a chance to stay with the circus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akata_Witch"title="Akata Witch">
Twelve-year-old Sunny Nwazue was born in America yet lives in Nigeria. She is Black and albino. She is a great athlete, yet she can't go out in the sun to play soccer. Sunny then discovers that she has magical abilities, which makes her a "free agent" in the magical community called the Leopard People in West Africa. As a free agent, she needs to learn about the magical community. Soon her magical teachers connect her with three other magical students to become a quartet called a coven, which is a group of magical Leopard people assembled to pursue a purpose. The group is cultivated by leaders in the magical communities to try to capture a serial killer who also knows magic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_(wordless_novel)"title="The Sun (wordless novel)">
An artist resembling Masereel rests his head on his desk beneath a blazing sun. From his head leaps a small male who, seeing the sun, sets out in pursuit of it, plummeting from the window in his attempt. Crowds of people try to divert him with sex and alcohol, but the little man persists in climbing trees, chimneys, church steeples, masts, and cranes. He climbs a staircase of clouds only to be burned by the sun, sending him hurtling back to the artist's desk, awakening the artist. The artist turns to the reader with a smile, tapping his head.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Passage_(book)"title="Northwest Passage (book)">
A book based on the well-known song "Northwest Passage" first sung by Stan Rogers in 1981, "Northwest Passage" tells a tale about the song and the facts behind it. The basis of the song and story is the fateful sea voyage made by John Franklin in 1845, which led to both his ships and his entire crew, as well as his life being lost.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur_Roar!"title="Dinosaur Roar!">
The book features pictures of various different types of dinosaurs that are paired with rhyming text that discusses various different features and differences such as "weak vs strong" and "long vs short".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarachaar"title="Aarachaar">
The story is narrated from the perspective of Chetna Grddha Mullick, daughter of hangman Phanibhushan Grddha Mullick, whose family lives near Nimtala Ghat in Chitpur, Kolkata. Chetna lives with her father, mother, brother (Ramu da), grandmother (Thakuma) father's brother (whom she calls Kaku) and his wife (Kakima). She is twenty two years old, and had been an intelligent student, scoring distinction in her plus two. However, due to financial constraints, she does not study further. Her mother and Kakima sell tea to make ends meet at home. They live in poverty since the number of executions have only been decreasing in the last few decades. Meanwhile, Phanibhushan remains in significant media scrutiny because of his job, but he is very particular about not having Chetna's photograph in the public eye. This is because of what happened to his son, Ramu da, Chetna's older brother. Phanibhushan had been the hangman at the execution of Amartya Ghosh, who had murdered a Kolkata industrialist Chandresen Ghosh and his three children. Amartya Ghosh's parents came to Phanibhushan, begging to somehow prevent their son's execution. However, Phani is adamant that he cannot let his judgment get in the way of his profession, and refuses to listen to them. Two days after Amartya's execution, his father follows Ramu da, Phani's son, back from college and hacks his limbs. This leaves Phani's only son disabled and depressed. Phani, therefore, is keen that his daughter Chetna get a government job after his retirement since he has no one else who can take care of the family once he is gone. Phani takes great pride in his profession and the lineage of his family, which has for a long time been in this profession.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisterhood_Everlasting"title="Sisterhood Everlasting">
## Tibby Rollins.Ten years following the last sisterhood book, Tibby has moved to Australia with Brian and now has almost no contact with the three other girls. Soon after moving to Australia, Tibby learns that she is not only pregnant but she is also diagnosed with a terminal disease. Nearly two years after giving birth to her daughter, Bailey, she calls her friends together for one last trip to Greece. Disaster strikes when she suddenly dies in a swimming accident on the shores in Greece leaving her friends, Lena, Bridget, and Carmen, devastated, and with the belief that she committed suicide, they begin to questioning everything that they believe in.It is revealed through the novel that Tibby was suffering from Huntington's disease and aware that she was going to die, even though her death by drowning was an accident. When she invited the girls to Greece she was going to reveal this and give them letters to help them move on. It is later revealed that she discovered she had the disease when she found she was pregnant with her daughter Bailey whom she had with Brian. Her final gift to Lena, Carmen, and Bridget is willing them to move on and follow their hearts because life is too short to waste.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Must_Die"title="Dorothy Must Die">
Amy Gumm is a high school student living in Kansas and has a dismal life. She is bullied at school for her snarky demeanor, and is neglected by her substance-abusing mother. After her mother leaves to go to a party, Amy's trailer is caught in a tornado and transported to the Land of Oz, but is trapped in a canyon. She is rescued by a mysterious boy named Pete who tells her to go to the Emerald City. Amy, accompanied by her mother's pet rat, Star, and a punk Goth Munchkin named Indigo, learns Oz has been conquered by Dorothy Gale, now a power-hungry, self-proclaimed princess and dictator. Rescuing a crucified wingless flying monkey, Ollie, Amy encounters the Tin Woodman, Dorothy's grand inquisitor and protector, who arrests her and kills Indigo. Ollie flees and abandons them.Amy reunites with Pete, who claims to be a gardener in the royal palace and tells her she will be rescued. On the night of her "worse than death", Amy is rescued by Mombi, a member of a secret society called the Revolutionary Order of the Wicked, who wish to free Oz from Dorothy's control. The group includes Mombi, Grandma Gert, Glinda's twin sister Glamora, and several teenage warriors including a warlock named Nox who wishes to avenge his family and friends. The Order reveals they recruited Amy to train her in magic and then assassinate Dorothy. Amy agrees and is taught how to use magic by Gert, armed with an enchanted dagger (which Nox made her). The Order attempts to eliminate the Cowardly Lion, now a ravenous monster who absorbs the fear of others, but the attack fails, leading to Gert's death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cress_(novel)"title="Cress (novel)">
The novel begins with an introduction to Crescent "Cress" Moon Darnel, a sixteen-year-old girl living in a satellite in space that has been her prison for most of her life. She is contacted by Cinder, the main protagonist of the first novel, and her crew on Thorne's spaceship, the Rampion, through the D-COMM chip that had made Nainsi malfunction in the first book (she is the same girl that warned Cinder about Levana's ulterior motives of marrying Kai). After communicating with Cinder's crew, she asks them to rescue her from her satellite that she has been imprisoned on for seven years, which they say they will do. However, an unexpected visit from Thaumaturge Sybil Mira, who is Cress's guardian/captor, throws a wrench into the plans as she discovers Cress' intent to run and plans a trap for Cinder's crew. The trap results in the capture of Scarlet, the protagonist of the previous novel, and love interest of Wolf. Jacin Clay, a pilot who brought Sybil to Cress's satellite, decides to join Cinder's side, while the almost fatal wounding of Wolf renders him unconscious, and Sybil leaves Thorne and Cress to die after shutting down her satellite, making it hurtle toward Earth without a way to stop it. Meanwhile in Africa, Dr. Erland has discovered that Lunars are able to contract a mutated form of the letumosis virus which they had previously been immune to.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sixth_Man_(novel)"title="The Sixth Man (novel)">
Sean King and Michelle Maxwell are called to help Edgar Roy, an alleged serial killer awaiting trial. Roy faces almost certain conviction. Roy’s attorney, Sean’s friend and mentor Ted Bergin, is set to meet with King and Maxwell to help work the case. But their investigation is derailed when Sean and Michelle find Bergin murdered on a quiet highway in New England. King and Maxwell uncover a secret government program which uses analysts to examine the combined intelligence government channels and offer strategic advice. Roy was the top such analyst. King and Maxwell are aided by Roy's half sister, a former spy. The trio uncover a conspiracy by the Secretary of Homeland Security to shut down the program and have Roy executed. The novel ends with Michelle waking from a coma after the final battle and Sean realizing how much their relationship meant to him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblivion_(Power_of_Five)"title="Oblivion (Power of Five)">
After being separated from the world for ten years, the Gatekeepers and their closest allies finally come back through the mysterious doors. Jamie is the first to appear, in a church called St Botolph's, somewhere in the northeast of England, located in a strange and seemingly hostile village. There is no electricity nor power of any kind and the townspeople are wary and hostile. He meets a girl named Holly, and a strange man who calls himself "the Traveller", who takes them under his wing. In the village, Jamie is having trouble fitting in. He tells Holly the truth about him and the Five. She initially doesn't believe him but soon sees the truth when one of her villagers, teacher Anne Keyland, betrays them to the police. The police, under the control and protection of the Old Ones, kill everyone in the village and then obliterate the village itself. The Traveller saves Jamie, and Holly comes along, despite the Traveller disagreeing with this idea.Meanwhile, the executives of the now nigh-all-powerful Nightrise Corporation are in the ruins of New York attending a business conference named the "Endgame" where it is said, they will be given their rewards. But these "rewards" are really to become leading soldiers of the Old Ones. A riot ensues in the United Nations and twenty of the executives are killed. All but one of the rest are consigned to training camps to prepare for the outcome. The one who survived is Jonas Mortlake, who is given, by the new chairman, the task of winning Scott over to the Old Ones, to allow them to capture Matt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Man_from_Archangel"title="The Little Man from Archangel">
Left in an unnamed town in Berry by his Jewish parents, who returned to Soviet Russia and oblivion, the timid Jonas Milk lives quietly above his second-hand bookshop and also deals in rare stamps. He feels at home amongst the other small businesses in the town, until he marries his maid, a much younger woman with a bad reputation and converts to Catholicism. She is neither a good housekeeper nor a faithful wife, and causes Milk considerable embarrassment and shame. Though she disappears with other men from time to time, she always returns soon after to Milk.However, one day when she has not come home and Milk, to spare himself yet more embarrassment, lies over her whereabouts. As the days pass, his lies are believed by fewer and fewer neighbours, who begin to shun him, and somebody informs the police. His anguish is increased by the fact that his most valuable stamps, which only she knew about, are gone from his safe.The police first call round for an allegedly informal chat and then call him in to the station for a formal interrogation, followed by an exhaustive search of his premises. They are suspicious because he has not reported a missing person and, like the rest of the town, wonder if her body is in the canal as an end to her overt infidelities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severina_(Rey_Rosa)"title="Severina (Rey Rosa)">
The story is told from the point of view of a bookseller who finds himself romantically drawn to a young woman he catches stealing books from "La Entretenida", the bookstore where he works.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Tourist"title="The Night Tourist">
9th Grader Jack Perdu lives with his father on the Yale campus. After Jack encounters a near fatal accident when he got hit by a car one winter night, his father sends him to New York City to visit a mysterious doctor (Dr. Lyons) who specializes in death. After an unusually brief meeting with Dr. Lyons, Jack returns to Grand Central Station to catch a train back home. He decides that it would be a shame to leave NYC without sightseeing first and squeezes himself into a nearby tour group by some pillars. While the group moves on with the tour, Jack stays behind and meets a girl named Euri. She offers to give him a tour of Grand Central Station and take him to places only 'True Urban Explorers' would know of. Euri shows him a secret door on the sixth track which leads to a bunch of stairs. 9 floors down, Jack discovers the New York Underworld. A place where the dead gather to solve their problems before they move on to Elysium. Jack and Euri are chased by two security guards and their big three headed dog Cerberus. Euri pulls Jack into a corner to hide and confesses that she is actually a ghost and she wants to live again. Jack promises Euri that he will help her escape to the human world. He tells Euri about his mother and Euri promises to help him find her. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Boys"title="Flash Boys">
"Flash Boys" maintains a primary focus on Brad Katsuyama and other central figures in the genesis and early days of IEX, the Investors' Exchange. Sergey Aleynikov, a former programmer for Goldman Sachs, serves as a secondary focus.The introduction begins by naming Aleynikov and describing his arrest, along with the author's personal history on Wall Street, as the impetus for writing the book. The first chapter tells the story of a $300 million project from Spread Networks that was underway in mid-2009—the construction of an fiber-optic cable that cuts straight through mountains and rivers from Chicago to New Jersey—with the sole goal of reducing the transmission time for data from 17 to 13 milliseconds. (The construction of the line was dramatized in the 2018 film "The Hummingbird Project".)Lewis goes on to describe the modern world of electronic trading and how it differs from the past—when trading was mostly performed in open outcry pits on physical trading floors—and how that change has impacted the market. The speed of data is a major theme in the book; the faster a market participant's computer system can receive and act on data, the better their edge, and opportunity to profit, with even nanoseconds making a difference.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Station_(novel)"title="The Last Station (novel)">
Set in 1910, the novel tells the true story of Tolstoy's life in his last days, before he ran away from his wife and his family home, taking to the road, where he died in a small railway station called Astapovo, with only his doctor and his favourite daughter, Sasha, in attendance (the film of this novel add Valentin Bulgakov and others to the deathbed scene who were not, in fact, present).The various narrators, and others in the Tolstoy household and outside of it, were pulling at him, trying to get his attention. He was pulled in a thousand directions at once, and this wore him down. In particular, he found the entreaties of his wife, Sofya, difficult, as she suspected (correctly) that he was plotting with his closest friend, Chertkov, to betray the family by giving away the copyright to his works. Sofya's main concern was the family and the difficulty of maintaining her style of life after her husband's death (he was, after all, 82).A major subplot of the novel involves Tolstoy's young secretary, Valentin Bulgakov, who comes to work with his hero in 1910 and bears witness to the controversies and difficulties surrounding him. Bulgakov falls in love with Masha, a Tolstoyan, who lives at a nearby compound called Telyatink, where a group of “Tolstoyans” have gathered to live communally and put into practice his ideas: chastity, vegetarianism, and nonviolent resistance to evil. Like Tolstoy, these were pacifists who opposed the Tsarist regime.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_True_Novel"title="A True Novel">
## Prologue.In Long Island, a teenage Minae Mizumura meets Taro Azuma, another Japanese immigrant who works as the chauffeur of one of her father's associates who, unlike Mizumura and the other immigrants she knows, is poor. Mizumura's father finds him studious and hardworking and hires him as a technician for the camera company he works for.Over the years, Mizumura and Azuma encounter each other briefly at company outings and parties. Right before she leaves high school, Mizumura has a moment where she reflects that her life is full of possibility and Azuma's is not. However, Azuma does eventually become extremely successful. After becoming a technician who specializes in endoscopes, Azuma begins to sell them and receives increasingly large commissions. When the company tries to cut his commission percentage, Azuma leaves and creates his own company.Mizumura's family meanwhile enters a period of decline after her father is demoted and her mother leaves him for another man. She and her sister squander their education and youth. Later, Mizumura manages to begin a career for herself as an academic and begins writing novels. She returns to America occasionally where she catches up with old friends and learns of Azuma's rise to success. One year, she returns and discovers that he has disappeared and no one has heard anything of him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squire_Arden"title="Squire Arden">
The plot follows the story of Squire Edgar Arden of Arden, his sister Clare, and their poor cousin Arthur Arden. Squire Edgar is a model landlord and brother, but looks and acts nothing like the rest of the Arden family. Edgar's father, the old Squire, had mysteriously treated him with contempt until his death, raising doubts in some members of the community about Edgar's legitimacy. Arthur Arden, the charming ne'er-do-well cousin whose father had a longstanding feud with the old Squire, is pursuing Clare, who has once refused his proposal of marriage. To complicate matters, Arthur also hears of the rumors about Edgar's legitimacy and hopes he will be able to prove his claim to inherit Arden. In the end, the mystery of Edgar's past is revealed, with the aid of old letters hidden in a bureau and a visitor who is unusually interested in the Ardens' lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirmala_(novel)"title="Nirmala (novel)">
Udayabhanu Lal, a lawyer, arranged to marry off his 15-year-old daughter Nirmala to Bhuvanmohan Sinha, son of Bhalchadra Sinha. Kalyani, Nirmala's mother advises Lal not to spend too much money on Nirmala's marriage as he also has the duty of getting her second daughter, Krishna married. Angered by Kalyani's words, he decides to teach her a lesson by leaving his old dresses along the riverbank and going out to the next village for sometime to make Kalyani believe that he is dead. Lal was later murdered by his rival Mathayi, who was once tried in court by Lal and sentenced to jail. The death of Lal caused the Sinhas to withdraw from the arranged marriage since there was no longer a large dowry as anticipated prior to Lal's death. Kalyani writes a letter to Rangili bai, Bhuvanmohan sinha's mother telling about her pitiful situation. Rangili bai's effort of making her husband and son understand ends up in vain. With the help of Pandit Motaram, Kalyani searches a groom for Nirmala. Financial hardship forced Nirmala's mother, Kalyani, to marry her off to Totaram, a lawyer 20 years her senior. Totaram tried his best to seduce his beautiful young wife but to no avail. He once tells a false story that he killed two thieves who had big swords with them to make her feel that her husband is full of bravery. But Nirmala who knows that it is a false story, still smiles and acts as though she is happy. She had no feelings for him other than respect and a sense of duty, which fell short of the love he expected to receive from his wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_of_Trial_(novel)"title="Term of Trial (novel)">
Graham Weir is a middle-aged schoolteacher at Railway Street Secondary School. A timid self-loathing alcoholic, he is taunted and despised by his pupils, his colleagues and his wife. Recognizing a like-minded soul in one of his pupils he takes her under his wing and offers to give her extra tuition. Before long the girl claims to have fallen in love with him and attempts to lead him into an affair. Surprised, Weir fends off her unwelcome advances as gently as possible and disengages himself from her. However, following an accusation by the pupil, he is later charged with indecent assault and is forced to defend himself in court, not only from the criminal charge itself but also from the derision and lack of empathy that surrounds him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yellow_Birds"title="The Yellow Birds">
"The Yellow Birds" begins with "The war tried to kill us in the spring" and follows Private John Bartle, the novel's protagonist and narrator, in Al Tafar, Iraq; Fort Dix, New Jersey; Kaiserslautern, Germany; the author's and narrator's hometown of Richmond, Virginia; and Fort Knox, Kentucky, from December 2003 to April 2009.Much of the novel focuses on Bartle's promise to the mother of Murph, a fellow private, to not let him die in the war. Bartle and Murph also make a pact not to be the 1,000th casualty in the war. The reader learns in the beginning of the novel, however, that Murph dies in the war."The Yellow Birds" also examines the reactions of soldiers after their deployments. Bartle enters a state in which he does not want to leave his house upon his return from the war and slowly deteriorates as the novel progresses. Powers has stated: "I wanted to show the whole picture. It's not just: you get off the plane, you're back home, everything's fine. Maybe the physical danger ends, but soldiers are still deeply at risk of being injured in a different way. I thought it was important to acknowledge that."The title of the novel alludes to a story Murph tells Bartle while on a guard tower about when Murph's "father brought a dozen caged canaries home from the mine and let them loose in the hollow where they lived, how the canaries only flitted and sang awhile before perching back atop their cages, which had been arranged in rows, his father likely thinking that the birds would not return by choice to their captivity, and that the cages should be used for something else: a pretty bed for vegetables, perhaps a place to string up candles between the trees, and in what strange silences the world worked, Murph must have wondered, as the birds settled peaceably in their formation and ceased to sing."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Witchfinder"title="The Last Witchfinder">
Jennet is a young English girl whose witch hunter father is frequently away on witch hunts. She's left with her aunt Isobel, a fan of Isaac Newton's scientific style. The two become close, but eventually Isobel's viewpoints cause her to become the focus of a witchhunt that ends with her getting burned at the stake. Jennet is unsuccessful in her attempts to rescue her aunt from this grisly fate and as such, decides to fulfill her aunt's dying wish that Jennet bring down the Witchcraft Acts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seed_and_the_Sower"title="The Seed and the Sower">
The first story is set in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp in Java during World War II and is a first person account of the relationship between John Lawrence, a British officer, and Sergeant Hara, one of the camp’s senior guards. This segment was initially published as a short story in 1956 as "A Bar of Shadow".The second, lengthier story is also set in the P.O.W. camp but is narrated in the third person from the diary of Major Celliers, a South African officer serving in the British Army, who perished in the camp and his relationships with his disabled brother and with the camp commandant, Captain Yonoi. Both of the first two stories attempt to convey the conflicting feelings the principal characters felt towards each other and their attempts to understand each other’s cultures and their widely opposed codes of honour.The final segment is Lawrence’s reminiscence of a brief affair with a woman whose name he never learned, shortly before his capture by the Japanese.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Heart_for_Freedom"title="A Heart for Freedom">
Chai Ling is the oldest daughter of a military doctor from Rizhao, a fishing village in Shandong province known as the “City of Sunshine.” She became independent and started taking care of her younger siblings at a very early age. Chai wrote that she was deeply influenced by her parents, who believed that knowledge was the key to success, as well as by her traditional grandmother, who survived famine. Chai worked to secure one of the five permitted spots for Peking University (Beida) in her province, and achieved the family goal of “going to Beijing.” Chai's family considered admission to Peking University the key to success and a guaranteed stable life, whereas Chai herself considered college a gateway to freedom, happiness and even a reform of her motherland. After entering Beida, Chai witnessed and experienced a series of troubling events, which shaped her view on the rule of the CCP as problematic, which all contributed to Chai's resolve to participate and later take a leadership role in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The incidents included Chai being informed that her mother back home was accused by colleagues of stealing two expensive microscopes to exchange for her daughter's tuition, her three abortions, which Chai attributed to her ignorance about sex and birth control, and “rumours” being spread in attempt to ruin her reputation after an attempted rape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champion_(novel)"title="Champion (novel)">
After the events of "Prodigy", Daniel "Day" Altan Wing now lives as a free citizen in San Francisco with his younger brother, Eden Bataar. Following several months of no communication, Day is contacted by June Iparis about a "feast" held by Anden Stavropoulos, the young Elector of the Republic. In reality, Anden wants Day to hand over Eden as part of the Republic's search for a cure for their virus, wreaking havoc upon the Colonies, causing the latter to give an ultimatum for the cure, lest they and Africa will invade the Republic. Day denies the request and the Republic's cause is further eroded when traitor soldiers Thomas Bryant and Commander Jameson, both in death row for the attempted coup, and the murder of June's brother (Metias Iparis), escape. The next day, Day collapses due to his illness and is rushed to the hospital. The following day, Day tells June about his terminal illness, just before the city is attacked by the Colonies' airships. While the population is being evacuated to Los Angeles, Day works with the Patriot organization to hijack the Colonies' airships. During the event, Thomas sacrifices himself to save Day.Day is sent to the Los Angeles Central Hospital due to another illness flare-up and is contacted by the Chancellor of the Colonies, who blackmails him into defecting to the Colonies and convincing the masses to do so, or else he will kill June and Eden if the Colonies win. He gives him three days to decide. Day instead spreads messages through graffiti to make the Republic's population support Anden. He also reluctantly decides to let Eden become a test subject to find a cure for biological diseases spreading in the Colonies. Meanwhile, June accompanies Anden to meet with the President of Antarctica to request help for the war. The President refuses, stating that the Republic was infested with disease and that he would aid Anden only if a cure was found along with several plots of land as payment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adultery_(novel)"title="Adultery (novel)">
A woman in her thirties begins to question her seemingly perfect life: she is married to a rich and loving husband, has well-behaved children and a successful newspaper career. Her apathy changes when she interviews a former boyfriend, now a successful politician. They begin a sadomasochistic affair that she finds very exciting. But she must now conquer that impossible love and learn to face the everyday.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_from_Galilee"title="Two from Galilee">
The story begins with the discovery that teenager Mary has become a woman, ready to be betrothed. Wealthy and handsome Cleophas and rabbi's son Abner are both in love with Mary but she loves only Joseph, the son of a carpenter. Despite their age difference and the objections of Mary's mother, Hannah, the love between Mary and Joseph prevails, and they are betrothed.Soon after the ceremony, Mary is visited by an angel, who tells her that she will become the mother of the Messiah, whom she shall name Jesus. Mary is then faced with the responsibility of impending motherhood as well as proving to Joseph that she has not betrayed him.Meanwhile, Mary's aunt Elizabeth is also pregnant (with John the Baptist). After telling her parents and Joseph the truth, Mary's family arranges for her to come to Jerusalem to stay with Zechariah and Elizabeth temporarily. Joseph remains behind in Galilee, tormented by jealousy, until an angel visits him. Joseph's father Jacob dies and, afterwards, Joseph goes to Mary as the angel instructed. After they are married, Joseph takes Mary with him to Bethlehem, where taxes must be paid. Unable to find other accommodations, they stay in a stable, where Mary gives birth to Jesus. They are visited by wise men who bring gifts to the newborn Messiah. The wise men originally came on behalf of King Herod, who has ordered the execution of all male babies in Jerusalem to prevent the Messiah from coming to power. The wise men are warned to flee from Herod and Joseph is warned to flee to Egypt with Mary and Jesus. The book ends with them on the journey to Egypt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hideout_(novel)"title="Hideout (novel)">
Swindle is back, and he wants his dog, Luthor, back. After the once menacing guard dog almost won the Global Kennel Dog Show, S. Wendell Palomino (AKA Swindle) sees a chance to become rich. And with that money, he'll devote his life to ruining Griffin and his friends' lives. Griffin knows that, but when Palomino actually shows up at Savannah Drysdale's house, in the middle of Luthor's birthday party, he's still surprised. Swindle claims Luthor still belongs to him, and the Cedarville pound cannot find the file that says the Drysdales legally adopted him (which we later find out that Palomino stole). They take this matter to court, and when the judge declares that Savannah must return Luthor to Palomino, she's heartbroken. She enlists Griffin to deduct a plan to prove Luthor is rightfully hers. The book consists of three parts, one for each hideout, at each camp. Savannah and Griffins camp is the first hideout, Melissa and Logan's camp is the next, and Pitch and Ben's camp is the last hideout. The struggle is increased with different goons that Palomino hired, plagiarizing random people at the camp, trying to move the heavy Luthor to different camps, and the fact that they have no transportation except random delivery trucks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Copper_Promise"title="The Copper Promise">
The story concerns the deposed Lord Frith's search for vengeance against the killers of his family. In the process, he employs the services of two mercenaries, Sebastian and Wydrin. Their actions in the early part of the story result in the release of a dragon god and an unstoppable army, and much of the subsequent narrative covers their attempts to make amends for this disaster.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testimonies_2001"title="Testimonies 2001">
The general explains the American role in the crisis through Military Professional Resources Inc.'s (MPRI) proposals for reorganizing the Army of the Republic of Macedonia (ARM) and the Ministry of Defense which revealed the strategy of America of preparing Republic of Macedonia for a defeat from the inside in case of war. Petrovski also describes his conversation with president Boris Trajkovski after he was asked to come back and rejoin the armed forces before the conflict started. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundarikalum_Sundaranmarum"title="Sundarikalum Sundaranmarum">
The novel has about thirty characters belonging to three generations of eight families belonging to Malabar during the end of the First World War, when the famous Moplah rebellion broke out in Kerala.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Well-Trained_Stray"title="A Well-Trained Stray">
The novel begins with a funny scene where Ahmad, the main character and the book's narrator, is with his friend Nevine in her car by Cairo-Alexandria desert road. They are nearly caught by the police, but Nevine narrowly manages to escape.Ahmad writes pornographic stories for a living, using odesk.com And through it, he found an agent who was interested in Arabic porn stories. After sending a sample, he completed a simple interview and began to work. We know that he's living alone with his aunt after the death of his grandmother and that his father has remarried after the death of his mother, and we get to know two of his best friends—El Loul, a failed TV director who is now trying to promote his scriptwriting as well as managing C-rated belly-dancers for cheap satellite channels – Abdullah, a drug addict, and his childhood best friend, who came from a wealthier family and has doesn't-give-a shit type of attitude.Through tracking the two characters and their connection to Ahmad we can glimpse the 1990s middle-class generation in Cairo as well as the strange relationship Ahmad and Abdullah had when they were teenagers, and, echoing that, the porn industry and stars.Nevine herself is such a character: She's a perfect nymphomaniac who married a guy she despises after returning with her family from the Persian Gulf region, where she spent her childhood. While the hubby, who married her for her family's money, is off in the Gulf, she has her revenge by shagging as many men as she can, only two or three times before hitting on a new man. Through this, she got to know Ahmad and she dumped him as usual before getting to know Ali Luza.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaves_in_Their_Bonds_(novel)"title="Slaves in Their Bonds (novel)">
The story takes place in Corfu at the beginning of 20th century. The head of the decadent, aristocratic family of Ophiomachus forced to marry his daughter to the successful doctor and candidate deputy Aristeidis Steriotis, in order to deal with their financial difficulties. However his daughter is in love with the young scholar Alkis Sozomenos. Ultimately their expectations are not fulfilled.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_Life_(novel)"title="Tree of Life (novel)">
"Tree of Life" is narrated by Coco, the great granddaughter of Albert Louis, a Guadeloupean man who tries to raise himself out of poverty. Albert Louis travels to Panama, to work on the construction of the Panama Canal and escape, and later to San Francisco to realize his ambitions. After a decade of travelling, Albert Louis returns to Guadeloupe.Albert Louis marries his first wife, Liza, and has a son, Albert (Bert). Liza dies giving birth to Bert. Bert grows up and moves to San Francisco with his friend/business partner, Jacob. While in San Francisco Jacob is murdered and Bert then returns to Guadeloupe. Albert marries his second wife, Elaise, who gives him two more children; Jacob and Jean. Liza haunts Bert because of his love for his Stepmother, Elaise. Bert resents his father and his father's business and eventually leaves for Paris to reunite with an old friend/business partner, Manuel. While in Paris, Bert jumps to his death. Elaise begins to suffer from a series of hemorrhages, supposedly due to the supernatural presence of Albert's first wife (Liza) and dies after the third occurrence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_on_the_Orient_Express"title="Mummy on the Orient Express">
Clara is ready to go on one "last hurrah". She allows the Twelfth Doctor to take her aboard a space-bound train modelled after the Orient Express. Unknown to Clara, the train's computer Gus has enticed the Doctor along with many other scientists there. They learn of the death of Mrs. Pitt after witnessing a mummy that no other passenger could see attack her, which makes the Doctor curious. The Doctor discovers the death of Mrs. Pitt and similar deaths on the train occurred exactly 66 seconds after lights flickered nearby; this follows the legend of a supernatural being called the Foretold.When the Doctor expresses suspicion at the number of scientists gathered, the facade of the Orient Express disappears, revealing a laboratory; Gus informs the passengers they are now to study the Foretold to reverse engineer whatever technology it uses. The Doctor also realises the sarcophagus Clara and Mrs. Pitt's granddaughter Maisie had found in the storage car is for capturing the Foretold.Professor Moorhouse and Captain Quell are the next targets killed by the Foretold. The Doctor and chief engineer Perkins realize that the Foretold is draining energy from its victims using phase-shifting technology. Perkins also observes that the victims were the medically weakest on the train. When Perkins reveals that Maisie is likely next due to her trauma, Clara lies to Maisie to bring her to the laboratory. Maisie sees the Foretold; the Doctor quickly draws on her memories to trick the Foretold into targeting him instead. In the 66 seconds, the Doctor successfully identifies the Foretold as a modified stealth soldier of a long-ago war and offers surrender to tell the Foretold that the war is over. The Foretold, finally released from its duty, offers the Doctor a salute before it disappears into a pile of dust, leaving behind its phase-shifting device.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatline_(Doctor_Who)"title="Flatline (Doctor Who)">
The Twelfth Doctor discovers something draining energy from the TARDIS and materialises in Bristol. Clara befriends Rigsy, a graffiti artist assigned to community service on a council estate. He tells Clara that several people have gone missing. When Clara returns to the Doctor, the exterior dimensions of the TARDIS have shrunk too small for the Doctor to leave. The Doctor passes Clara his sonic screwdriver, psychic paper, and an earpiece to let him communicate with her, and she carries the TARDIS in her bag, acting as the Doctor.Clara convinces PC Forrest to let her and Rigsy into the flat of the first disappearance. They hear Forrest scream from the next room. They see no sign of her, but find a strange mural on the wall. The Doctor recognises it as a human nervous system, and suspects it is Forrest's. He warns Clara and Rigsy that there are two-dimensional creatures, the Boneless, which are flattening the missing persons into two dimensions. Clara and Rigsy escape before they are attacked.They race back to the other community service crewmen to warn them the murals in a pedestrian subway are additional Boneless. Some crewmen are killed while Clara leads the rest through a train yard into tunnels. They are followed by the Boneless, which take the form of the people they killed to use the third dimension. The Boneless surround the others by flattening the doors into two dimensions. The Doctor jury-rigs a device to undo this flattening to give the group time to escape. In their haste, Clara drops the TARDIS in the path of an oncoming train. The Doctor turns on Siege Mode, preventing any physical damage but leaving him without enough power to deactivate Siege Mode.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_Cow_(novel)"title="Poor Cow (novel)">
Working-class Joy, 22 and dreaming of the good life the swinging sixties has promised, discovers the pitfalls of traditional gender roles when her husband Tom is sent to prison for theft, leaving her to look after baby Jonny. She moves in with her Auntie Emm and manages to keep her head above water by working as a barmaid and occasional sex worker. When Joy begins an affair with a friend of her husband, another petty thief, she cannot help but start to dream all over again. It is only when her child goes missing that she finally realises the emptiness of her daydreams.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cibola_Burn"title="Cibola Burn">
After the events of "Abaddon's Gate", humanity has gained entry to thousands of new worlds and solar systems through the gate networks. At the start of "Cibola Burn" the United Nations, Martian and Outer Planets Alliance governments have thus far restricted exploration and colonization efforts to one corporate scientific survey mission to one of these planets. Complicating matters is the existence of a colonial settlement already on the planet from before the military blockade of the rings came into effect. Both sides claim ownership in a confrontation reflecting many colonial interactions throughout history. Jim Holden is sent to mediate the interactions between the colonists and scientists when political and racial tensions culminate in violence.Still dogged by the disembodied presence of Miller, who wishes to investigate the disappearance of the planet's former inhabitants, Holden arrives on a world on the verge of war. Yet the biggest danger to the colonists, scientists and Holden is not the human disagreements that they have brought with them but the frontier. As with the settling of the American West and many colonial projects of Earth's past, the frontier into which humanity has ventured is vast, uncontrolled and full of dangers. When a mysterious disease and horrific disaster strike at the same time and threaten the lives of the colonists and those in orbit, Holden and Miller must brave the ruins of an alien civilization in search of the one thing that might save them all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Night"title="Video Night">
Teens Billy and Tom have had a ritual of meeting up for a movie night for a while now. The two couldn't be more different from each other, as Billy is the smart one while Tom comes from the poor side of town, yet they're the best of friends. That friendship has begun to crumble as of late with the impending threat of college and separation. Tom's habit of using their movie nights as an excuse to meet up with his girlfriend has also taken a strain on the friendship as well. However all of that changes in one night after aliens take over the townspeople one by one and the teens must rely on their horror movie knowledge to survive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swinging_Bridge"title="The Swinging Bridge">
Mona, a Trinidadian living in Montreal, is a film researcher whose family left Trinidad for Canada in hopes of finding a better life. At the start of her story, Mona gets word from her sister, Babs, that their brother, Kello, is dying. Kello tells his family that he is dying of lymphoma, but later reveals that he is actually dying from AIDS. He reveals to his sisters that he is in a relationship with a man, but swears them to secrecy. As the oldest, Kello asks Mona to return to Trinidad after his death and buy the family land back. Mona is hesitant, but eventually learns that she was given this opportunity to discover more about her family history, their journey from India to Trinidad, and the hardships they had to face along the way.Throughout the novel, Mona unveils the significance of the historical archive for the history of her family, women, and the greater Indo-Trinidadian culture over the course of several generations and migrations. She gives voice to the marginalized voices that were silenced by the past and even by her own people. Set in modern times, this novel interconnects the past to the present. As Mona discovers these hidden histories, she also comes to discover herself. The "Swinging Bridge" serves as a symbol of her life journey and the journey of her ancestors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wee_Fellas"title="The Wee Fellas">
The protagonist Billy "Stick" Stirling comes from a middle-class family which falls on hard times when their day-dreaming father abandons them. He grows up in Glasgow with his mother and ends up in trouble for a minor burglary. His experience toughens him and he employs his intelligence to rise above his diminutive stature to become a ruthless operator in the snooker halls of Glasgow.A lethal confrontation leaves Billy with a family blood vengeance. In a Glasgow café, he meets a bearded, older stranger who is acquainted with his mother. The stranger advises him to join the Army Bantam Regiment (which accepted soldiers of small stature) to escape his troubles. Billy has little choice and enlists.During his training in England, he meets his true love and has to leave her behind. She is already married to an active-duty soldier and becomes pregnant.He is posted to the front line and applies his survival skills to good effect. He survives with bravery until his blood vengeance catches up with him in the trenches. He survives, but is seriously injured. He is invalided out of the Army and returns to Glasgow to overcome his injury and rebuild his life. The love he left finds him in Glasgow and surprises him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_(novel_series)"title="The 100 (novel series)">
## "The 100".The series is set three generations after a thermonuclear apocalypse, wherein the only known survivors of the human race live in a space colony consisting of satellites joined together in orbit around the Earth and governed by The Chancellor, who leads its legislative council. Resources are so scarce that all crimes, no matter how small, are punishable by death, unless the perpetrator is under 18 years of age."The 100" begins with Clarke Griffin, a former medical student, being arrested for a crime committed by her parents: conducting illegal experiments on children under threat of the corrupt Vice Chancellor Rhodes. Clarke confides in her best friend Wells Jaha, The Chancellor's son. Despite swearing secrecy to Clarke, Wells tells his father, hoping to save the Griffins from Rhodes. His plan backfires, the Griffins are arrested, and his relationship with Clarke disintegrates. Two years later, the Colony decides to send 100 of its teenage prisoners to investigate whether or not Earth is habitable. Among the 100 are Clarke, Wells, Octavia Blake, her older maternal half-brother Bellamy Blake, and Clarke's friend, Thalia.The group crashes somewhere on the East Coast in the former United States. Once there, the 100 struggle to survive in a world very different from the past Earth. Clarke tends to the wounded, and Bellamy gradually develops a romantic interest in her. It is revealed that Octavia had become a drug addict while in prison. A few days later, someone sets fire to the camp, killing Thalia. As the survivors investigate, they discover a farm not too far from the site, leading them to the realization that they are not alone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terror_Dream"title="The Terror Dream">
Faludi focuses on analyzing the media, politics, and popular culture to find the answer to why American society tried to restore "traditional" manhood and gender roles after the 9/11 attacks. She uses mainly anecdotal and qualitative evidence to support her theories. During the first half of the book, Faludi explains how America reacted after the events of 9/11. Faludi argues that the media was guilty of creating myths about "John Wayne" type of men, particularly New York Firemen, rescuing "damsels in distress" in the aftermath of the attack. Sexist slogans such as "As War Looms, It's OK to Let Boys Be Boys Again", were displayed proudly in the media while women were marginalized by the media. Firefighters were renamed firemen in the media and women were not eligible to receive "hero status". A clear example of how men were the only ones qualified to be heroes can be seen from the events that occurred on Flight 93. The men, such as Todd Beamer, on the plane were hailed as heroes despite no clear evidence of these facts while Sandra Bradshaw, a flight attendant who tried to throw boiling water on the terrorists, was barely mentioned in the media. Feminism talk was denounced as unpatriotic. Government stoked the anti-feminist fire with propaganda about the American military men protecting the American women and going to save the women of Afghanistan from oppression. There was also a significant decrease in the number of sexual discrimination cases prosecuted in federal courts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eagle_Cliff"title="The Eagle Cliff">
The Eagle Cliff is a third-person tale that begins with the hero, a cyclist soon identified as John Barrett, who is racing through the streets of London to respond to a telegram from an old schoolmate, Bob Mabberly. The unconventional hero has a literally bumpy start to his journey as he accidentally runs into a little old lady. Though she appears to be alright, Barret's fear of being arrested causes him to flee. However, because he is the hero, he cannot shake the guilty conscience and returns to the site of the accident, only to find that the old lady and the crowd that gathered to be gone. Wrought with worry, Barret makes his way to Mabberly. Mabberly has engaged a yacht and crew and intends to "sail, without fail" the next morning with Barrett and another schoolmate, Giles Jackman. The next day, not long at sea, misfortune befalls the party and they collide with a passing steamer, causing their vessel to split down the middle. Now in the water, the men make their way toward the rocky shore of a now-visible island. Upon arrival, the men elect Barrett to search for habitation. He comes across a sheep track, a primitive road and eventually a hut among the rocks. From here, Barrett begins to meet the people who reside on the island, all of whom are white. When the rest of the party joins Barrett, they are happy to learn the houses there are fully functioning (with kitchens and bedrooms, each stocked appropriately). As fate would have it, Barrett happens upon a young girl, Milly, lying on the road, who has injured her arm after falling from a cliff. Barret eventually develops feelings for her. He and Milly share a love for botany, which was the cause of her fall from the cliff, and use this area of interest to pave the way for further interaction. Elsewhere, the men engage in hunting outings as well as occasionally fishing (or in Archie's case, photography). Meanwhile, Milly has been writing home, telling her mother about the man who saved her life, effectively causing her mother to become fond of him. When news of Mrs. Moss' arrival reaches Barrett, he rushes to meet her, only to nearly knock her over. She turns out to be the very same woman Barrett had hit with his bicycle earlier on. At this point, though she recognizes him as the man who ran her down, she does not know he is Barret. After falling from a cliff and falling unconscious, Barrett does not show up for supper, worrying the others and causing them to search for him. Once found, he is unrecognizable due to the bruising and head-dressings he now bears, successfully continuing to hide his identity from Mrs. Moss. Once he has healed and she discovers that he is indeed Barrett, she agrees to forgive him, thus allowing Milly and him to marry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizard_(novel)"title="The Wizard (novel)">
The novel begins on a Sunday afternoon in summer at a church in the Midland county called Busscombe. Reverend Thomas Owen had a preacher for the day called a “Deputation,” who was sent to arouse the indifferent to the duty of converting the savage tribes by collecting money. As the “Deputation” told about his experience with a south central African tribe called the “Sons of Fire,” Reverence Owen became very interested in the mission to convert this tribe of Amasuka and converting them. Reverend Owen ultimately decides to take on this task and gives his old job to the “Deputation.”Two years go by as Reverend Owen lives in a hut outside of the tribe's town and he sends his newly converted native of the tribe, John, to send a message to King Umsuka which is that Reverend Owen wants to learn their language so that he can administer the word of God to them. After being warned that the People of Fire have their faith too, John informs Rev. Owen that if he cannot perform the magic they want him to perform, he will be killed.Reverend Owen learns of Hokosa and Hafela's plot to kill the king with poison in order to gain the throne through a vision. Rev. Owen learns of the anecdote to the poison in another vision of the Tree of Death and uses this knowledge to his advantage by giving it to Umsuka to revive him at the Feast of the First-Fruit and therefore “proves” his God's power over the People of Fire's god.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_Queen_(novel)"title="The Island Queen (novel)">
The novel begins with the Rigonda family and two men aboard a castaway ship somewhere in the south Pacific. The family finds a hidden cache of food and they land safely on a nearby island.After finding shelter they set out to explore the island. They soon find that everything they need seems to grow on trees. They explore, hunt wild boar, and construct a signal flag to attract passing ships.During a tremendous storm, an emigrant ship is wrecked on the coral reef just off the island. Otto and Dominick Rigonda run to aid the passengers.The two parties become acquainted and work together to build suitable housing. The men begin offloading supplies and constructing makeshift shelters. The women are charged with caring for the children and establishing a domicile.Dominick and Malines come to blows, which results in Mother Lynch nominating Pauline to be queen. Pauline surprises everyone by naming Joe Binney her prime minister. A few days later, Pauline and Otto are kidnapped by natives and brought aboard their canoe. The colonists give chase and fire a volley at the natives, who allow the children to jump overboard.A few nights later Malines and his co-conspirators are caught preparing to leave the island without the emigrants. The conspirators are marched back to the camp and put in makeshift jails. Dr. Marsh is appointed as judge over the kangaroo court.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percival_Keene"title="Percival Keene">
At Madeline Hall, an old mansion-house near Southampton belonging to the wealthy de Versely family, lives an elderly spinster Miss Delmar, the aunt of the earl de Versely and Captain Delmar. Miss Delmar invites Arabella Mason, the daughter of a deceased, well-liked steward to stay with her as a lower-class guest in the house. Captain Delmar is known to visit his aunt at Madeline Hall frequently, accompanied by his valet Ben Keene, who is also a private marine. Captain Delmar eventually suggests that Ben should propose to Arabella, and the two marry in secret, to the frustration of Miss Delmar and Arabella's mother. The captain is able to smooth over the situation with his aunt, even after it is discovered that Arabella was six months pregnant at the time of the marriage. She later gives birth to a boy, who takes the Captain's Christian name and Ben's surname—the titular Percival Keene.The family moves to Chatham, after Ben is ordered back with his detachment. Arabella opens up a successful shop and circulating library below her house, enlisting the help of her mother and sister, Amelia. Percival becomes well known in town from his mischievous pranks on officers and other strangers, often encouraged by his aunt Amelia. However, Percival's mother and grandmother are less fond of his disregard for manners, and insist on sending him to school after an episode in which he bites his grandmother. Percival reports to the school house of Mr. O'Gallagher, a poor Irish scholar, who rules his class with a system of severe corporal punishment. Mr. O'Gallagher routinely bullies Percival by stealing his lunch, leading Percival to seek revenge by poisoning his sandwiches with calomel. On Guy Fawkes Day the schoolteacher confiscates all the schoolboys' fireworks, for which Percival retaliates by setting off the collected fireworks while the teacher sits above them, leading to the total destruction of the schoolhouse and near death of the schoolmaster.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goblins_in_the_Castle"title="Goblins in the Castle">
William has quite happily lived all his life in Toad-in-a-Cage castle with its endless rooms, dark winding stairways, and disturbing noises. Then one night he discovers those noises come from the dungeon, where a hunchback named Igor and his stuffed teddy bear guard a mysterious door. William unintentionally opens the door, freeing a horde of imprisoned goblins back into the unsuspecting world. He and Igor set out to round them up and have many adventures.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blueberry_Pie_Elf"title="The Blueberry Pie Elf">
Elmer is an elf who lives with a family of bakers. One day the family bakes a blueberry pie, which Elmer proceeds to jump into and eats his fill. Upon eating the pie, Elmer falls in love with blueberry pie and can't wait to get his hands on another one. Unfortunately, the family cannot see him, hear him, or feel him, and he is forced to wait for them to bake another delicious pie. The next week, Elmer notices that they are baking another pie and gets very excited, but is in vain when he smells baking apples. Frustrated with his inability to communicate or be seen by the family, Elmer sets out to try and alert the bakers to his presence. To do this, he begins helping out around the house making beds, washing dishes, and doing other chores to get noticed. Though his efforts are appreciated, the family continues not to notice him and they bake another pie, cherry this time. Deciding he would try to determine whether he likes a different flavored pie better than blueberry, Elmer jumps into the fresh-baked pie and starts eating. Disappointed in the taste, and not realizing that the cherries stained his feet red, Elmer hops out of the pie and walks away. The family notices his footprints and realize that it was the little elf who had been doing the house work.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasure_(novel)"title="Erasure (novel)">
"Erasure" is about a writer dealing with death, murder, and growing old. The novel's plot revolves around many things, but is essentially about the consequences of turning one's art into a simple commodity; i.e. giving into market forces. The market force within "Erasure" mirrors the late-1990s reality of how the publishing industry pigeon-holed Black writers, and centered or valued certain experiences [those of the urban poor] over others. Themes around race, class, loyalty to family, sex, the theory of language, the life of canonical western artists, abortion, and sexual identity are also explored as the novel unfolds.The protagonist, Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a professor of English literature, is in a rut with his own writing. His agent repeatedly explains to him that publishing houses don't believe his writing to be "black enough". To make matters worse, Ellison experiences this angst, as another book called "We's Lives In Da Ghetto" by Juanita Mae Jenkins is becoming a national best seller and critical darling. Monk is angered by the success of Jenkins' book, so he composes a satirical response based on Richard Wright's "Native Son" (1940) and Sapphire's novel "Push" (1996), which he first entitles "My Pafology" before changing it to "Fuck". This novel is published in its entirety within Erasure and creates a meta-narrative that asks the reader about the value and merits of such writing in contrast to the supposedly more erudite text of "Erasure".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_(Nesbø_novel)"title="The Son (Nesbø novel)">
Sonny Lofthus is serving time for crimes he did not commit. As payment, he receives a steady supply of drugs to satisfy his addiction. His life changes completely when he learns the truth about his father's death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_(novel)"title="Police (novel)">
The tenth in the Oslo crime series featuring detective Harry Hole is the most sizeable entry yet; a twisting-turning saga that pits the gangly maverick against that most feared of serial killers, the cop killer. This murderer has a very devious "modus operandi", luring police, and ex-police, involved in unsolved murders to the scene of the original crime to perform a copycat killing there, seemingly as a punishment for having failed to solve the original case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someone_(Edwards_novel)"title="Someone (Edwards novel)">
"Someone" is the story of Titch, who grew up amid a hostile family environment with only his guitar for a friend. As he became a more accomplished guitar player he began to write his own material and despite he reluctance to step into the limelight he performed publicly for the first time as a teenager. This performance did not prove to be a resounding success due to heckling from a familiar face in the crowd. Nevertheless, he made a decision to leave home and start a career as a musician. However, a tragic and spiteful event struck him down and he needed all his resolve to find a new way to realize him dream of stardom. He decided to adopt the persona of 'Someone' and eventually went on to become a rock superstar in the US and the UK. Five years later he disappeared in the middle of a US concert series at the height of his success, never to be heard from again.This is Titch's story of becoming Someone and of the reporter determined to piece together the circumstances of his disappearance and find out whatever happened to him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliances_(novel)"title="Alliances (novel)">
The Elven Exiles struggle for survival in the distant kingdom of Khur; the elves remaining in Qualinesti face persecution, enslavement, and extermination; Kerianseray, the Lioness, Kagonesti general and wife of Speaker Gilthas, is magically transported from Khur to equally dangerous circumstances in her former homeland.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saga_of_Old_City"title="Saga of Old City">
"Saga of Old City" was the first novel to feature Gord the Rogue. "Saga of Old City" starts in Gord's childhood, and ends with his triumphant return to Greyhawk City as a young man and master thief. He learns his trade in the 'beggars' guild', and gets involved in the gang war touched off by the beggars encroaching on the official thieves' guild's territory. He travels and has a variety of swashbuckling adventures, ranging from participating in a war, to liberating a young noblewoman held hostage, to defeating a demon with a druid, Curley Greenleaf, and a barbarian, Chert. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Princess_of_Wales"title="The First Princess of Wales">
Set during the reign of Edward III of England in the 14th-century, the novel follows the romance between Joan of Kent and Edward's eldest son, Edward, the Black Prince.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godolphin_(novel)"title="Godolphin (novel)">
The novel opens with a deathbed scene in which a man named John Vernon is relaying his dying wishes to his daughter, Constance. John Vernon is an ex-politician who was betrayed by the Whigs, thus losing his fortune. Just before he dies he makes the thirteen-year-old daughter, Constance, swear an oath to marry a high-class powerful man in order to seek revenge on his old political party. After her father's death Constance moves in with a wealthy distant relative, Lady Erpingham.We are then introduced to a sixteen-year-old Percy Godolphin. Percy resents his lower class upbringing and runs away from his father's home in order make his own way. After a brief stint in the army, Percy's second cousin dies and leaves him 20,000 pounds under the stipulation that he leaves the military.We now go back to Constance who has grown into a beautiful woman who bases her life around her father's dying wish. She resents love, seeing it as weakness, and devotes herself entirely to fulfilling the mission set out for her by her father. John Goldophin dies and accompanied by Lady Erpingham, a former admirer of John, Constance sets out to attend his funeral. Upon arriving at the “ruins” of the Godolphin estate Constance briefly spots Percy standing by a creek lost in deep thought and is immediately infatuated with him. Lady Erpingham also takes a liking to Percy and invites him to visit them at the Erpingham manor. After spending a few weeks with the Erpingham's Percy and Constance begin to develop feelings for each other. Just before Percy departs he subtly confesses these feelings to Constance. Even though she does feel the same, she is conflicted due to the oath she made to her father and keeps her feelings hidden.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Gallows_and_the_Snake-Bellied_Troll"title="Will Gallows and the Snake-Bellied Troll">
Will Gallows, a young elfling sky cowboy, rides out on a perilous quest to bring the evil snake-bellied troll bandit, Noose Wormworx, to justice. Noose is wanted for the murder of Will's pa - the former deputy sheriff of Oretown.Will's journey takes him deep into the heart of the West-Rock, to the dark underground city of Deadrock, where he soon uncovers a deadly secret that could spell disaster not only for Oretown, but for the whole of the West-Rock.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Troublesome_Inheritance"title="A Troublesome Inheritance">
Wade writes about racial differences in economic success between Whites, Blacks, and East Asians, and offers the argument that racial differences come from genetic differences amplified by culture. In the first part of the book, Wade provides an account of human genetics research. In the second part of his book, Wade proposes that regional differences in evolution of social behavior explain many differences among different human societies around the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seiobo_There_Below"title="Seiobo There Below">
## 1. Kamo-Hunter.An Ooshirosagi stands motionless in the Kamo River waiting to spear its fish. Its intense beauty goes unnoticed, but if it were to be seen at the moment of striking, it could change the life of the witness. The chapter moves between the heron and meditation on the larger city of Kyoto itself, and its unnoticed beauties.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achtste-groepers_huilen_niet"title="Achtste-groepers huilen niet">
Akkie is a happy-go-lucky sixth grader that's obsessed with soccer, her friends, and the upcoming school trip. She's known for being tough and always up for a challenge, so when Akkie is diagnosed with leukemia she refuses to let it slow her down. Her classmates are in shock, but Akkie refuses to allow them to treat her as if she were broken. As time passes it becomes clear that her illness is very far progressed and it becomes harder for Akkie to do everything she wants to do in the time she has left.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother_Dusty-Feet"title="Brother Dusty-Feet">
Hugh Copplestone is an orphaned eleven-year-old boy living with his Aunt Alison (his dead mother's sister-in-law), who resents the duty of looking after him. When he answers her back after she speaks disrespectfully of his dead father, Aunt Alison vindictively vows to have his pet dog Argos killed on the excuse that she has no duty of care to the animal and no intention of incurring the expense any longer.There is an overnight stay of execution since all the farmhands who could have undertaken the task are away at a fair, which gives Hugh time to plan an escape. He resolves to run away and hopes to make his way to Oxford and become a scholar, as his father always wanted him to do. However, he is not long on his way when he falls in with a troupe of strolling players, whose leader Tobias Pennifeather soon wheedles the story out of him. Tobias offers to allow Hugh to travel with them so that he will have their protection on the road and the means of earning a living, and he is first assisting with the troupe's properties and then participating in the plays themselves, since female parts were generally played by boys and their boy Nicky Bodkyn is starting to grow up.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_World_Without_Princes"title="A World Without Princes">
Agatha and Sophie return home to Gavaldon, and are welcomed as heroes; however, while Agatha wants nothing to do with fame, Sophie takes advantage of her newfound spotlight, and puts on many shows to celebrate their return home and their escape from the School for Good and Evil. At Sophie's father's wedding, Agatha suddenly wishes for another ending to her story: with Tedros. With this wish, magical arrows, with messages attached, are shot into the town, the messages demanding the return of Sophie. Angry, the town forms a mob, demanding Sophie be given over to whoever wants her. The Elders of the town agree to protect her, but secretly plan to give her to the mob. Agatha leaves Sophie alone in the town church, believing her to be safe.Sophie is taken into the forest surrounding the town, and is hung from a tree, with the message "Take Me" written on her chest in her own blood, and left to die. Agatha finds Sophie, and the two run away, attempting to avoid the mob. They arrive at clearing with a line of flowers running through it, and notice butterflies attempting to help them. Unknowingly, they board a train bound for the School of Good and Evil.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skink_-_No_Surrender"title="Skink - No Surrender">
Richard Sloan is worried when his cousin and best friend, Malley, fails to meet him for their regular nightly exploration of Loggerhead Beach, scouting for turtle nests. He, noticing a soda straw poking out of such a nest, Richard pulls it up and is surprised when a homeless man, "Skink", bursts out of the sand and complains about Richard ruining his trap. Skink explains that a poacher has been stealing eggs from the nests at night; Skink has been lying in wait to "have a chat" with him. Richard apologizes and runs off.Richard becomes even more worried when Malley's parents tell him she has left Florida for early orientation at a boarding school they enrolled her in, yet when Richard calls the school, its secretary tells him there is no such event. When Malley calls Richard, she admits that she has run away from home with a friend she met in an online chatroom, and warns Richard not to tell the truth to her parents. Skink tells him, in no uncertain terms, to reveal the truth.Malley's parents are alarmed, even more so when the police discover that the name of her friend, "Talbo Chock", actually belongs to a soldier killed in Afghanistan, meaning this new friend is an identity thief or worse. Richard is frantic, but after Skink has dealt with the poacher, he announces that his next "project" is to track Malley down and bring her home safe, and he invites Richard to come along. Since the police have had no success in tracing Malley's whereabouts, Richard agrees, tricking his parents into believing he is going camping with a friend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Real_Children"title="My Real Children">
In 2015, Patricia is 89 years old and living in a nursing home, with two mutually-exclusive sets of memories: one of a world where John F. Kennedy was killed by a bomb in 1963, and one of a world where Kennedy chose not to run in 1964 after an escalated Cuban Missile Crisis led to the nuclear obliteration of Miami and Kyiv—and, on a more personal level, one in which she went by "Trish", married a man and had four children before she was able to escape an unhappy marriage and become involved in politics, and one in which, as "Pat", she was a successful travel writer raising three children with her lesbian partner. Both feel completely real, but both cannot be – even though both sets of children visit her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alleys_of_Eden"title="The Alleys of Eden">
Set in Saigon during the final days of the Vietnam War and the buildup to the American evacuation, the story revolves around Clifford Wilkes, the last U.S. Army deserter remaining in Saigon and his Vietnamese girlfriend Lanh, a former prostitute. The soldier has spent the last five years hiding in his lover's small room in one of the countless back alleys of that sprawling city, afraid to venture far in case he is captured by his countrymen. During that time the couple have become far more than lovers, having gradually built a unique level of trust and understanding. As the end of the conflict becomes inevitable, Wilkes must face his fears and claim a place for himself and Lanh on one of the last helicopters to leave Saigon. Back in the United States, their relationship slowly flounders and dissolves as Wilkes is drawn back into his own society and Lanh becomes alienated and helpless among her new surroundings and the lack of empathy she encounters in the people around her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_the_Dogs"title="Day of the Dogs">
Johnny Alpha and Middenface McNulty are hired by wealthy wild west aficionado Asdoel Zo to track down Preacher Tarkettle, the man who killed his family. Alpha and McNulty recruit a squad of Strontium Dogs to assist them on the mission, but all is not what it seems with Zo and they soon find a traitor in their midst.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Run"title="Why We Run">
The narrator, Heinrich, writes about the challenges that he faced in his life and in writing the book. It explains why humans endure ultramarathons. One segment focuses on the time Heinrich came first in the Golden Gate Marathon in the 1980s. During the ultra-marathon, Heinrich drank Ocean Spray cranberry juice rather than water, stating that it was sugar that kept him running throughout the .The book is organised into chapters detailing different animals and their ability to use their natural advantages for greatest endurance and explains how Heinrich used this knowledge to become an ultra-runner. "Why We Run" focuses on how antelope, deer, wolves, bees, frogs, camels and other animals exhibit endurance techniques that humans later adopted. For example, antelopes travel in packs and "leap frog" from back to front to conserve energy and escape predators. Deer are natural sprinters and sprint to escape predators. Wolves, like endurance runners, chase sprinting prey to tire them. Camels are adapted to fat storage and usage in order to conserve water in their harsh environment. Birds have a majority of slow twitch fibrous muscles that are adapted for long travel times as well as the ability to simultaneously inhale and exhale. The book concludes as Heinrich completes an ultra-marathon and reflects on the biology, anthropology, psychology and philosophy that affected his life along with the animals and their metabolic functions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_and_Ramazan"title="Ali and Ramazan">
Ali and Ramazan are two boys from very different backgrounds who land in the same Istanbul orphanage. They quickly see eye to eye and fall into a loving relationship as children, bringing light to one another and to the other orphans in their dreary adopted home. Ramazan is a charmer, the school master's favorite, the clown among the boys, and the only one with a real handle on things outside the orphanage's walls. He takes Ali under his wing, and by the time they turn eighteen and are loosed onto Istanbul's mean streets, Ali and Ramazan are a pair. What happens next is both tragic and beautiful, a testament to love finding its way even among the least visible citizens on Turkey's mean streets.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_(Walters_novel)"title="Elixir (Walters novel)">
12-year-old Ruth and her mother ( elizabeth williams) go to the University of Toronto where Ruth's mother works as a custodian. While Ruth is outside studying Spelling Dictation,) Dr. Banting, a doctor in search for a cure for diabetes comes over and invites her to tea. However, Ruth is horrified when she discovers that Dr. Banting and his assistant Dr. Best are testing treatments on dogs. Just outside, a group of protesters called the Dr. Banting are protesting about animal rights. Ruth meets Mellisa Jones, the leader of the Ontario Anti-Vivisection, and Ruth agrees to help them free the dogs. But when Ruth meets Emma, a girl with diabetes who needs a treatment, Ruth's opinions change and she tries to stop the rescue. When she meets Dr. Banting, she discovers that they are testing the treatment on a dog already in a diabetic coma. They try the insulin and succeed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Kill_a_Dragon"title="How to Kill a Dragon">
The book consists of seven parts and 59 chapters. Watkins uses the comparative method to find cognate formulas and mythological features that could be traced back to a common past in ancient texts written in Indo-European languages. He claims that it is not possible to understand fully the traditional elements in an early Indo-European poetic text without the background of what he calls a "genetic intertextuality" of particular formulas and themes in all languages of the family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Reign_of_Terror"title="In the Reign of Terror">
Harry Sandwith, a sixteen-year-old English boy, is sent to live in France with the Marquis de St. Caux, a friend of a French nobleman Harry's father once served. The marquis is impressed with the English system of schooling and believes that his two sons, Ernest and Jules, will benefit from the influence and friendship of an independent and manly English boy. Harry, who is an undistinguished, average student at Westminster School, is eager for the opportunity to live in France, which he believes will create greater opportunities for him when he joins the British Army. Harry sets off for Paris in 1790 with the intention of living with the St. Caux family for the next two to three years.Harry is escorted to the marquis's chateau near Dijon. He meets the marquis and his wife, along with their two sons, Ernest and Jules, and three daughters, Marie, Jeanne, and Virginie. The marquis is impressed by Harry's confidence and self-possession in such an unfamiliar environment, but the rest of the family remains unconvinced and mocks his strange mannerisms and rough appearance. Their attitude changes, however, after Harry succeeds in killing a rabid dog that attacks Jeanne and Virginie. They begin to accept Harry as a member of the family, and Harry and Ernest become close friends, hunting and adventuring together and even managing to kill the Demon Wolf that long terrorised the communities surrounding the chateau.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Night_Women"title="The Book of Night Women">
Lilith is a beautiful young woman born during the 18th century on a Jamaican sugar plantation. Orphaned from birth, she quickly learns that life as a slave can be frequently brutal and unkind. After she is forced to defend herself against a would-be rapist, she is sent to work in the plantation owner's house. There she tries to win the master's affections, despite warnings from a fellow slave that this will only end badly. From there, she is sent to live with the overseer of the plantation, and the two have an unconventional relationship. Lilith experiences more troubles when the Night Women, a group of female slaves planning a revolt, ask her to join in their plans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Mischief_(novel)"title="White Mischief (novel)">
Part novel and part journalism the book is divided into two distinct sections. Initially presented as a classic murder mystery, the first part of the story focuses on the dissolute lifestyles of the wealthy elite in colonial Kenya. Casual affairs, wife-swapping, habitual drunkenness and cocaine abuse were all common. The main protagonists are the victim, Josslyn Hay, a handsome womanizing aristocrat, his beautiful married lover Lady Diana Broughton and Diana’s much older husband Sir Delves Broughton. Although the identity of the murderer was never actually discovered at the time, the author claims to have found new evidence pointing to Sir Delves, and the second part of the book concentrates on the author’s investigations and interviews with surviving participants in the drama, both in Kenya and in England.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liliane_(novel)"title="Liliane (novel)">
The novel opens with a conversation between Liliane and her psychoanalyst. These conversations become regular interval points within and throughout the novel as the story unfolds. Liliane expresses concern about her current situation, professing that she cannot breathe and that she is looking for somebody and it does not matter who, she says, "as long as he won't hurt me".As the novel continues, Liliane's character is developed through the lens of those around her with whom she is close. The reader learns that Liliane grew up within a wealthy and prominent Black family that was part of the Talented tenth. Liliane's father pushes her to pursue a husband who will "'...have the backbone to fight for what's never happened, or for dreams.'" These comments lead Liliane to eventually leave her first boyfriend, Danny, and pursue another man, named Granville, who better conforms to her father's ideal of a suitable match.As Liliane and her close friends grow older, however, they begin to face significant conflicts within their lives. One of Liliane's close friends, Hyacinthe, begins to have mental health troubles early in her adolescence and depends heavily on her brother, Sawyer Malveaux III for support. When he is unexpectedly shot, however, Hyacinthe's mental condition becomes worse and she eventually enters care in a mental health facility. For Liliane, a major hurdle is the disappearance of her mother from her life and the breakdown of her nuclear family. As Liliane transitions to adulthood, the pressures from her father to be the ideal Black woman and mate to a powerful Black leader begin to have less of an impact on her life decisions. While the relationships with the women that Liliane formed throughout her early childhood and adolescence remain deeply important to her (and are maintained throughout the novel), Liliane begins to make romantic, sexual, and platonic connections with men and women from all walks of life. The desires of her father, and the mysterious disappearance of her mother, however, are never far from her mind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Astounding,_the_Amazing,_and_the_Unknown"title="The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown">
The story, divided into short, numbered "episodes" rather than chapters, is presented as a "story about Nikola Tesla" recounted by Richard Feynman to a group of other Manhattan Project scientists in the wake of World War II. It involves the efforts of a similar think-tank, the Kamikaze Group, to uncover the secret of a rumored "super-weapon" Tesla had developed before his death, one supposedly responsible for the mysterious Tunguska explosion of 1908. Feynman makes no claims for the tale's veracity, a caution warranted at the end of the book when his informant is revealed to have been pulp writer L. Ron Hubbard, a participant in the novel's events portrayed as a self-promoting, delusional narcissist.Malmont bases the Kamikaze Group on the trio of science fiction writers, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp and Isaac Asimov, who in actual history spent most of the war doing aeronautical engineering research for the U.S. Navy at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard's Naval Air Experimental Station. He portrays them as engaged in a joint project there to develop super-scientific weapons to help the U.S. win the war, though in reality they worked separately on technical improvements to airplanes and weapons systems. Heinlein leads the fictional project, which also draws on the assistance of other pulp authors of his acquaintance, most notably Hubbard, Walter B. Gibson, and Lester Dent, with cameo roles by John W. Campbell, Norvell Page, Hugh B. Cave, Frederik Pohl, Cleve Cartmill, Kurt Vonnegut, Judith Merril, and Ray Bradbury. Additional historical luminaries such as Jack Parsons, Albert Einstein and Jimmy Stewart also put in appearances.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sassafrass,_Cypress_&amp;_Indigo"title="Sassafrass, Cypress &amp; Indigo">
The story starts with Indigo, the youngest daughter of the family, sitting amongst her beloved hand-made dolls, which each have names and personalities that emerge over the course of the novel. Before the reader learns much about the other sisters or mother, Indigo begins menstruating, is gifted an old fiddle by Uncle John, and consequently initiated into a cult-like group of pre-adolescent boys called the Jr. Geechee Captains. Indigo's first section is full of informal mappings, remedies, and tales such as "Moon Journeys: "cartography by Indigo"" and "To Rid Oneself of the Scent of Evil: "by Indigo"". Soon, some of those cartographies are replaced by recipes as the family prepares for and celebrates Christmas, with the ever-present spirit of Daddy, the girls' father, wafting through their annual traditions. Sassafrass and Cypress are back from school in New England and New York City, respectively, and the reader won't see the four women together again until the very last pages of the book.The reader next meets Sassafrass in Los Angeles, where she lives with Mitch, a struggling and self-destructive jazz saxophonist. Sassafrass is working to find her creative niche, still weaving and cooking, but pining to get to an artists' colony in New Orleans. She eventually leaves Mitch in LA, moving to San Francisco to live with her younger sister Cypress. Sassafrass exists on the periphery of Cypress' bright and full world for some time, planning to dance and write in hopes of regaining herself outside of Mitch's abuse. After a while, Sassafrass returns to LA and Cypress decides to pursue a professional dance career, which eventually lands her back in New York City.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Place_to_Hide_(Greenwald_book)"title="No Place to Hide (Greenwald book)">
The book consists of five chapters; Contact, Ten Days in Hong Kong, Collect It All, The Harm of Surveillance, and the Fourth Estate, plus an introduction and an epilogue.In the introduction Greenwald explains how his background as a blogger on surveillance practices of the American government attracted Edward Snowden's attention, and he summarizes the nature, legality, and evolution of such practices. Greenwald concludes by discussing how a global surveillance network has been created with the assistance of technology companies and the unique role of the internet in human history as a facilitator of such surveillance.In the body of the book, Greenwald discusses how he became involved with the 2013 global surveillance disclosures. He began by traveling to Hong Kong to meet Edward Snowden, who had contacted Greenwald as an anonymous source purporting to have evidence of government surveillance. As Greenwald continued to investigate he uncovered more information that he later published, to much controversy. In the book Greenwald also discusses establishment media, which he states will traditionally avoid publishing anything that would put them at odds with the government and as such, are less helpful when it comes to the interests of the general public.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jacket_(book)"title="The Jacket (book)">
Schoolboy Phil has never viewed himself as racist, but he's forced to rethink his stance when he accuses Daniel of stealing an imported jacket. Daniel, who is African-American, was given the jacket as a gift by his grandmother, who works for Phil's mother as a housekeeper and had received the jacket as a hand-me-down. Phil immediately begins to rethink his actions, wondering if he would have treated the situation differently if Daniel had been white instead of black. Tortured by self-doubt, Phil looks at his immediate surroundings and is saddened when he realizes that he has likely been influenced by his father, who is openly bigoted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnaadi"title="Agnaadi">
The story starts with Aandi or Kalingalaandi son of a farmer returning after giving the lunch to his mother. On his return, Aandi falls into quicksand and rescued by Maari a son of a washer-man. Both Aandi and Maari becomes friends.Aandi after growing up, marries Karuppi and the couple works together in the farm field. The couple's work in the farm field is highly regarded in the neighboring villages and Aandi is specially known for his technique in sow seeding. Meanwhile, Maari helps his father in laundry. Maari marries Anandhi and on the same day as Karuppi gives birth to Raakan. Soon after the marriage, Anandhi gives birth to Marudhan and Allaathi.After the death of Maari's parents, Anandhi helps Maari in laundry and she goes to the village to collect "kothu" (a price asked for goods and services). Karuppi gives birth to Veerama after a long period since Raakan's birth. Veeramma grows up naughtily and Karuppi is very much fond of her. Maari realizes that he is unable to work due to his illness and stays at home. Anandhi looks after Maari and also the laundry with the help of their son Marudhan. Maari dies in spite of the treatment. Anandhi after the death of her husband, intends to leave the village to settle in her parents' place, but Aandi advises them to stay in the village.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Sajo_and_her_Beaver_People"title="The Adventures of Sajo and her Beaver People">
Sajo, a young Ojibwe Indian girl, and her older brother adopt two young beavers, Chilawee and Chikanee, and try to save them from fur traders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coalwood_Way"title="The Coalwood Way">
It is now 1959. The Rocket Boys are still perfecting their handmaderockets and, as high school seniors, preparing for their futures.Homer is determined to prove to his father that he is collegematerial, but with the mine perilously close to running out of coaland shutting down, the prospects for the future of any ofCoalwood's children is bleak. Miners have lost their jobs andhomes, public services have been cut to residences in the outlyingareas, and Homer's father is faced with initiating an extremelydangerous and controversial new mining method in order to save thetown and the mine from oblivion. Homer's mother feels increasinglycut off from her husband and the townspeople as her role as themine superintendent's wife places her at odds with the wives of theunion workers.Optimism is hard to come by in the bleak winter months of the lastyear of the 1950s, and Homer is overcome with an overriding senseof gloom with his future so uncertain. The faith and hope of thesehard working people, however, form the basis for an upliftingmemoir, as Sonny and his friends resurrect the Spirit of Christmaswhen Coalwood need it the most.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setangan_Berloemoer_Darah"title="Setangan Berloemoer Darah">
After his father is murdered, Tan Hian Beng is forced to leave for Batavia. When he is an adult, he is given a blood-covered handkerchief and told that he must take revenge on his father's killer. He leaves for Semarang, and along the way rescues sisters Lim Kiat Nio and Lim Liang Tin from a group of bandits under the command of Li Djin Hin. Once in Semarang, Tan becomes assistant to the "letnan Cina" Goei Tjeng Tin. Through his relationship with Goei, Tan is reunited with his mother and learns of a young man named Kam Po Sin, who has killed a woman.In an attempt to stop the investigation, Kam Po Sin joins forces with Li; the two kidnap Lim Kiat Nio and capture Tan and Goei, but try to kill each other after Kiat Nio escapes. Kam Po Sin emerges victorious, but is caught and sentenced to death. On the day of the execution, Tan passes by Kam Po Sin's house. Hearing the sound of weeping, he investigates, and finds Kam Po's father Tiok Tjoen, who killed Tan's father. Kam Tiok Tjoen is shocked at Tan's appearance, believing him to be the ghost of the murdered man. Tan, for his part, decides that Kam Tiok Tjoen need not be killed, for he has already suffered enough.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drown_(short_story_collection)"title="Drown (short story collection)">
## "Ysrael".This story was included in "The Best American Short Stories", 1996. "Ysrael" tells the story of Yunior and his brother Rafa in the Dominican Republic searching for a neighborhood boy whose face was disfigured by a pig, causing him to wear a mask at all times.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Watched_the_Trains_Go_By_(novel)"title="The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By (novel)">
Kees Popinga, a quiet, respectable Dutchman working as head clerk in Groningen becomes increasingly unhinged after discovering that his cynical employer has looted and ruined his firm and confides in him that he will fake a suicide in order to escape punishment. Accepting a large sum of money from his erstwhile employer, Popinga sets out for Amsterdam, hoping to ingratiate himself with his employer's mistress, Pamela: but she mockingly laughs in his face, infuriating him. Popinga assaults her and accidentally kills her. He then hurriedly leaves town, eventually making his way to Paris. There, every day, he buys the various newspapers which carry the story of the murder. Although Chief Inspector Lucas of the Police Judiciare confidently predicts that Popinga will be arrested at any moment, Popinga successfully evades them. He begins sending letters to the police and to the newspapers, playing a sort of cat and mouse game. Soon the man becomes more and more delusional, seeing himself as a master criminal and certain that the woman he has become involved with, a prostitute named Jeanne Rozier, is genuinely interested in him, rather than in her pimp/boyfriend, Louis. For a time, Popinga joins Louis's gang of car thieves and hides out with them. But his reputation as a dangerous murderer wanted by the French police, frightens them, and he takes off on his own. He wanders the streets of Paris and its outskirts, staying in cheap hotels with prostitutes by night, until a pickpocket steals his wallet containing all the money he has left. Just as he is attempting suicide, he is captured by the French police. The French authorities send him back to Holland where he is put in a mental institution.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amma_Vandhaal"title="Amma Vandhaal">
Appu, a vedic scholar, returns from his school after completing his studies. After arriving home, Appu learns of his mother's affair with Sivasu, and that the other family members are already aware of it. His mother reveals that she had sent him to the vedic school to atone for her sins. A heartbroken Appu goes back to his school after hearing of his guru's illness, as someone has to run the school.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crimson_Campaign"title="The Crimson Campaign">
Field Marshal Tamas has committed a brutal coup against Adro's monarchy and is now in open war with the Kez. Cut off behind enemy lines with only a fraction of his army, he must lead his men through northern Kez to safety, meanwhile defending his country against the angry god Kresimir, who wants the head of the man who shot him in the eye.Taniel Two-Shot, presuming his father to be dead, finds himself the last line of defense against the devastating army of the most powerful god.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mira,_Mirror"title="Mira, Mirror">
A young girl, Mira, becomes an apprentice to a witch. The witch's other apprentice, Amanda, adopts Mira as a sister. Betraying their friendship, Amanda changes Mira into a magic mirror. The story refers to Amanda becoming the wicked queen of the "Snow White" fairy tale. Mira serves the wicked queen until her usefulness runs out and she is abandoned.Several years pass when Ivana, a peasant girl running away from her cruel father, stumbles upon Mira. Mira manipulates Ivana into becoming friends with a wealthy merchant's daughter named Talia. Mira does this in hopes of gaining her human form back. Mira uses her magic to change the girls' appearances so each resembles the other. Unexpectedly, Talia is quite happy with her new form as she is trying to escape an arranged marriage. Mira works with Ivana and Talia for each of them to achieve their goals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princess_and_the_Hound"title="The Princess and the Hound">
The story focuses on two characters, Prince George and Princess Beatrice, that have been arranged to be married. Prince George possesses a magical ability to speak with animals which is forbidden in the kingdom where he lives. Princess Beatrice has a hound that travels with her everywhere and is abused by people around her. The plot revolves around the meeting of Prince George and Princess Beatrice as they work to get to know each other. Their courtship is pressured by the illness facing Prince’s George’s father. It is revealed that the illness is not of natural causes and that Princess Beatrice has been enchanted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Kapital"title="Das Kapital">
## "Capital, Volume I"."Capital, Volume I" (1867) is a critical analysis of political economy, meant to reveal the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production and of the class struggle rooted in the capitalist social relations of production. The first of three volumes of "Das Kapital" was published on 14 September 1867, dedicated to Wilhelm Wolff and was the sole volume published in Marx's lifetime.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Case_of_Dr_Jekyll_and_Mr_Hyde"title="Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde">
Gabriel John Utterson and his cousin Richard Enfield reach the door of a large house on their weekly walk. Enfield tells Utterson that months ago, he saw a sinister-looking man named Edward Hyde trample a young girl after accidentally bumping into her. Enfield forced Hyde to pay her family £100 to avoid a scandal. Hyde brought Enfield to this door and gave him a cheque signed by a reputable gentleman later revealed to be Doctor Henry Jekyll, Utterson's friend and client. Utterson fears Hyde is blackmailing Jekyll, as Jekyll recently changed his will to make Hyde the sole beneficiary. When Utterson tries to discuss Hyde with Jekyll, Jekyll tells Utterson he can get rid of Hyde when he wants and asks him to drop the matter.One year later in October, a servant sees Hyde beat Sir Danvers Carew, another one of Utterson's clients, to death and leave behind half a broken cane. The police contact Utterson, who leads officers to Hyde's apartment. Hyde has vanished, but they find the other half of the broken cane. Utterson recognizes the cane as one he had given to Jekyll. Utterson visits Jekyll, who shows Utterson a note, allegedly written to Jekyll by Hyde, apologizing for the trouble that he has caused. However, Hyde's handwriting is similar to Jekyll's own, leading Utterson to conclude that Jekyll forged the note to protect Hyde.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizardwar"title="The Wizardwar">
The foreign armies were defeated. Waiting for help in the field of Black Fairies, Tizgone experiences the power that makes her an anomaly in Halruaa. Matteo, with the help of a mysterious secret that as king he must struggle with the affairs of a kingdom which stirred after decades of placidity, why Andris has strangely taken prisoner and who is behind powerful spells dropped during battles, among other things. While the company is in full Halruaa disorder, Kiva forgetting who it was, returned to finish his plan with which to shake the kingdom to its foundations. Everything heads for the outbreak of a civil war, a war of wizards for the heart of Halruaa.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horselords"title="Horselords">
Koja is presented Khahan while his army completes submit Semphar its authority. Impressed by his erudition and his diplomatic skills of the monk, it makes its regular columnist in charge to relate how a simple warrior Tuigan became the "Illustrious Emperor of All Nations" (because it is his ambition). Its role is rapidly gaining importance and is responsible for diplomacy Khahan and even became his "anda" (blood brother) after saving her life.It is obviously not to the liking of general Tuigan to see a stranger so close to their leader, including General Chanar Ong Kho, also "anda" of Khahan and own mother Yamun, Bayalun Khadun, dedicated to his son visceral hatred. Thus, after further conquests Tuigan, such as taking the Khazari, Koja manages to uncover a plot against the Khahan. Officials Tuigan unmasked are severely punished but untouchable because sponsors are located in the mighty empire of Shou Lung.It is not that deter the Khahan wash what he sees as a personal affront and after the first battle in which magical talents Koja used to open a breach in the Dragonwall, the invasion of Shou Lung can begin in earnest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonwall"title="Dragonwall">
After all attempts by the Minister of War Kwan Chan Sen have failed miserably, Emperor Kai Tsao Shou Chin instructs the General Batu Min Ho to counter the enemy. Tuiganes its origins suggest indeed think the emperor that he can repel the barbarians, but his loyalty is in doubt after the discovery of blatant evidence of treason. This is why his wife Wu and her children are left under the protection of the Emperor, ostensibly for their safety, unofficially as hostages.Batu Min Ho then develops a plan with the help of her stepfather, General Hsuan Yu Po, of encircling and ensnare Tuigan in the town of Shu Kuan. Hsuan and his army attract enemy, leading tough battles and testing the use of cannon powder. When Batu reaches Shou Kuan after ascending the river Shengti the Tuigan are trapped but the army of Hsuan is destroyed. Vastly superior in numbers, Tuigan cannot be dislodged, but cannot break the siege. The status quo and a brief negotiation with Koja, the spokesman Khahan, Batu lead to return to the Emperor. But the dark revelations await: he is accused of treason.In fact the wife and children of Batu, at the center of intrigues bureaucracy, soon to discover that the Minister of War Kwan Chan Sen and Minister of State Ju-Hai Chou are at the origin of the attack against Yamun Khahan, and thus the war. Wu discovered at the same time that the Minister of Security, Ting Mei Wan, sing the War Minister and is none other than the traitor who informs enemies. However, she is accused of treason by Ting and she and her children are executed before he could reveal what they know. When Batu joined the imperial palace, he is accused of treason by the Minister of Public Safety, but a document submitted by the Tuigan help prove innocence are confused and Ting Mei Wan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusade_(Forgotten_Realms_novel)"title="Crusade (Forgotten Realms novel)">
After much diplomatic negotiations and tough negotiations, Azoun finally convince his allies to mount a coalition to counter the threat of Tuigan. Against all odds, even Zhentil Keep promises to send troops. Although suspecting (rightly) rear political thoughts, Azoun accept this help and is an alliance of Cormyrians, the Dalesfolk, the Sembians, dwarf of the Foothills of the Earth and the Centaurs of forest Léthyr convinced by Princess Alusair who arrived in the region of Thesk, soon joined by Zhents forces, commanded by orcish General Vrakk.This motley army led several battles against the horde, but both armies succeeded in taking a decisive advantage. It is only thanks to an ingenious stratagem that the coalition succeeds in isolating the Khahan and his Praetorian guard the rest of Tuigan. After a fierce battle, the Khahan is killed by Azoun in person.The Tuigan army's private chef folds under the command of General Chanar Ong Kho, General Batu Min Ho refuses to be captured and committed suicide, joining his murdered family, while the monk Koja is presented to the king Azoun that loads to tell everything he knows about Tuigan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Returned_(novel)"title="The Returned (novel)">
The series follows residents of Arcadia, North Carolina, in particular the Hargrave family, whose lives are upended when their loved ones return from the dead, unaged since their deaths. Among the returned is Jacob Hargrave, an eight-year-old boy who drowned 32 years earlier. Having been found alive, Jacob is brought back by the Bureau, which investigates the phenomenon of the Returned. The military agent Bellamy returns Jacob to his parents, Harold and Lucille Hargrave, who must deal with his return.The novel also occasionally looks at the phenomenon from the viewpoint of the Returned, who appear to have no knowledge of or explanation for their return, and only want to live their lives. The Returned are described as being largely identical to their pre-death selves except for strange quirks that are frequently described as odd or unnerving by people who formerly knew them.Harold initially refuses to see the Returned Jacob as his son, as he had been the one to pull Jacob's body out of the river, but Lucille fully embraces his return as a miracle. As the novel progresses Harold slowly softens to Jacob's presence, even going so far as to willingly accompany the boy when the military imprisons all of the Returned at an Arcadian schoolhouse. While imprisoned, Harold is made the temporary caretaker of an elderly woman with dementia, Patricia – a woman he later discovers is Bellamy's mother, as the agent knew that Harold would treat her with consideration.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_James_Blunt"title="I, James Blunt">
The novel chronicles the occupation of the United Kingdom by the Nazis from 11 September 1944 to 13 March 1945 who begin a programme of "complete Germanisation" of the country. St Paul's Cathedral is razed to make room for a Nazi Party headquarters and guerrilla warfare and any potential dissidence is suppressed through heavy policing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo_Clock"title="The Cuckoo Clock">
A small child and a cuckoo from a cuckoo clock become unlikely friends. At night the clock transports her to magical places.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Million_Nightingales"title="A Million Nightingales">
Moinette Antoine is a young slave at Azure, a sugarcane plantation south of New Orleans owned by the Bordelons, where she lives with her mother, Marie-Thérèse, who is the plantation's laundress. Moinette is the housemaid to Céphaline, the teenage daughter of the Bordelons, who is a scholar and a misfit. Moinette surreptitiously teaches herself how to read by listening to Céphaline's lessons and observing her studies. After Céphaline unexpectedly dies, Moinette is sold to Laurent de la Rosière, the owner of another sugarcane plantation.Soon after she arrives at Rosière, Moinette attempts to escape and return to her mother in Azure, but she is quickly captured and returned to Rosière. Moinette becomes the housemaid of Madame Pélagie who is a relative of the Bordelons. Madame Pélagie is another intelligent and free-spirited woman who promises to bring Moinette to New Orleans where they can run a shop together. Moinette becomes pregnant after she is raped by three men, including the Bordelons' son. She gives birth to a boy, Jean-Paul. Before Madame Pélagie can take Moinette to New Orleans, tragedy strikes again, and Moinette is sold to Julien Antoine, a lawyer from Opelousas.In Opelousas, Moinette discovers that Julien Antoine is a kind person who is willing to help her. She pretends to be his mistress while she runs his boardinghouse. She continues her self-education by reading Antoine's legal papers and learning how to write. Eventually, Antoine helps her to purchase her son and become a free woman. However, even when Moinette is free, her life continues to be marked by brutality and tragedy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Night_Room"title="In the Night Room">
The novel follows Timothy Underhill, an author. He is still struggling to come to terms with the loss of his sister April and Timothy tries to channel his sorrow and frustrations into a new novel he is writing, without much success. This is all made more difficult by Timothy receiving several e-mails from people he knows to be dead, all of whom insist that they have something very important they need to tell him. At the same time Newberry Award-winning author Willy Patrick is afraid for her own sanity, as she believes that her daughter is being held captive in a warehouse - despite knowing that her daughter is already dead. As the story progresses the stories of Willy and Timothy entwine and the two must find a way to discern what is going on and what they can do to prevent any further misfortunes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fair_Jilt"title="The Fair Jilt">
When the story opens, young Miranda is living in a convent of "Begines", an order of "galloping nuns" who take only temporary vows. Her parents are dead and her younger sister, Alcidiana, lives with an uncle. The seeming unattainability of the Begines makes them more desirable to men, and Miranda is beautiful, accomplished, and wealthy. Not surprisingly, she has many admirers; she receives their gifts and attention with pleasure, while loving none of them. Then one day she meets Henrick, a handsome young prince who has taken monastic vows and changed his name to Francisco. (Miranda's maid tells her about Henrick's tragic past in a story within a story.) Miranda becomes infatuated with Henrick. When he rejects her advances, she accuses him of rape and has him thrown in prison.Soon afterwards, Miranda meets Prince Tarquin and the two marry, but Miranda's extravagant lifestyle soon sees her wealth greatly reduced. She invites her sister to move in with her and Tarquin so that she can pilfer from her sister's funds. To keep a hold over her sister, she rebuffs all of her sister's suitors until Alcidiana moves out. Miranda then sends a servant to poison Alcidiana, which he does, but Alcidiana does not die and the servant reveals Miranda's plan to the authorities. The servant is hanged, and Miranda, due to her position, is only shamed, though a great sum of money is owed to Alcidiana and Tarquin is ordered to pay it by the court. Miranda talks Tarquin into killing her sister, and so he attempts to shoot her but fails. He is caught, confesses, and is sent to be beheaded, but the executioner misses the mark and hits Tarquin's shoulder instead, causing severe injury. Tarquin is then released, and he and Miranda leave the country. In the closing lines, it is noted that Miranda eventually repents her sinful past and that Tarquin has since died, though no explanation is offered for his death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mayan_Secrets"title="The Mayan Secrets">
Husband-and-wife team Sam and Remi Fargo are in Mexico, when they come upon a remarkable discovery—the skeleton of a man clutching an ancient sealed pot, and within the pot, a Mayan codex, larger than anyone has ever seen. The codex contains astonishing information about the Mayans, their cities, and mankind itself. The secrets are so powerful that some people would do anything to possess them—as the Fargos are just about to find out who.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eye_of_Heaven"title="The Eye of Heaven">
Baffin Island: Husband-and-wife team Sam and Remi Fargo are on a climate-control expedition in the Arctic, when to their astonishment they discover a Viking ship in the ice, perfectly preserved—and filled with pre–Columbian artifacts from Mexico.How can that be? As they plunge into their research, tantalizing clues about a link between the Vikings and the legendary Toltec feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl/Ce Acatl Topiltzin —and a fabled object known as the Eye of Heaven— begin to emerge. But so do many dangerous people. Soon the Fargos find themselves on the run through jungles, temples, and secret tombs, caught between treasure hunters, crime cartels, and those with a far more personal motivation for stopping them. At the end of the road will be the solution to a thousand-year-old mystery—or death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cage_on_the_Sea"title="Cage on the Sea">
During the Pacific War, after three Japanese supply ships are sunk off the shore of Anatahan, the survivors are taken in by Kikuichiro Higa and Kuzuko, his live-in wife, who have a small coconut plantation on the island. Commanding officer, Sgt. Junzo Itami, tries to maintain discipline, but as the group endures U.S. airstrikes and food shortages order begins to break down. Soon the men become obsessed with Kazuko, the lone woman on the island, and a vicious dynamic sets in among the survivors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_Kind_of_Fairy_Tale"title="Some Kind of Fairy Tale">
The novel takes place in Leicestershire, England in current times. Tara disappears after meeting a stranger, Hiero, in Charnwood Forest. After a long absence, she returns to her parents on Christmas Day. She claims she had been trapped in a parallel reality populated by fairies. Tara believes she was missing for only six months, yet her family knows she has been gone for 20 years. During her absence Tara has barely aged at all, still resembling a 15-year-old girl. But her parents have become elderly and feeble, her brother Peter has become a husband and father, and her boyfriend Richie has led a life of underachievement and substance abuse, unable to recover from Tara's disappearance. Tara's family refuses to accept her explanation for her disappearance. Nevertheless, Tara insists it is true. The family employs Dr. Underwood to assess Tara's sanity. The psychiatrist concludes she has unconsciously fabricated her story as a defense mechanism to avoid confronting some trauma that must have occurred during the period of her absence.Tara becomes increasingly dissatisfied with life with her parents and boyfriend, finding it pales in comparison to her supposed experiences in the parallel world. Her neighbor, Mrs. Larwood, claims to have had the same experience, and warns her of the dangers involved in moving between the two worlds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Untamed_State"title="An Untamed State">
Mireille Duval Jameson is born and raised in the United States, her parents are from Haitian descent. Her parents move back to Haiti. While vacationing at her parents' house with her husband and child in Haiti, she is kidnapped. When her father, who by now has become a wealthy Haitian developer, refuses to pay her ransom, she is gang-raped and tortured by her captors, who keep her imprisoned for 13 days before finally releasing her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropic_of_Orange"title="Tropic of Orange">
"Tropic of Orange" revolves around seven distinct, yet interrelated characters and story lines (listed in bold below). The story covers the span of seven days, with each day getting its own unit, and with each character getting one chapter for each day.In Los Angeles, Japanese-American television news executive, Emi, and her lover, Latino journalist Gabriel Balboa, are chasing newsworthy stories of local disaster, including an apocalyptic standstill on the Harbor Freeway and the creation of a new urban social order by homeless population moving into the abandoned cars. One of Gabriel's most reliable sources is Buzzworm, an African American man who roams LA streets dispensing advice and help. Buzzworm gives Gabriel a few newsworthy tips, such as the mysterious package arriving at the L.A. airport and the presence of Manzanar Murakami, a Sansei and former doctor who conducts freeway traffic from an overpass as if they were symphonies.Gabriel also owns a home near Mazatlán, Mexico, which is being tended by Mexican-American Rafaela Cortes during her separation from husband Bobby Ngu. Gabriel's Mexican home is the site of early anomalies that become increasingly visible and widespread as the novel progresses, including a special orange that falls from Rafaela's favorite tree at the home. This orange is picked up by the mystical Arcangel, who carries the fruit across the U.S.-Mexico border and, with it, the Tropic of Cancer. Rafaela also overhears a conversation between two men that makes her fear for the safety of herself and her son, Sol. Meanwhile, Bobby, who has been trying to locate Rafaela and Sol, is mysteriously informed of the arrival of a young Chinese girl who may or may not be a cousin of his.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jackson,_Inc."title="Michael Jackson, Inc.">
From the official blurb: "Underlying Jackson’s unique history is the complex but universal tale of the effects of wealth and fame on the human psyche. A valuable case study for generations of entertainers to come and for anyone interested in show business, Michael Jackson, Inc. tells the story of a man whose financial feats, once obscured by his late-life travails, have become an enduring legacy."Notable sources interviewed for the book included music industry veterans Berry Gordy, John Branca, Teddy Riley, Martin Bandier and Walter Yetnikoff; artists 50 Cent, Sheryl Crow, Pharrell Williams, Slash, Diddy and Jon Bon Jovi; and members of the Jackson family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Special_House"title="A Very Special House">
An unnamed little boy imagines a "special house" that is "just a house for Me ME". (The cover art shows the boy drawing a picture of the house.) He then imagines all the special things that make up the house including a special bed, special shelf, special chairs, a special door, special walls, and a special table. He brings to the special house a turtle, a rabbit, a giant, a dead mouse (in a box, according to the illustration), monkeys, and "some skunkeys and a very old lion". The lion proceeds to eat all the stuffing from the "chairs chairs chairs." The boy plays with the creatures "making secrets" and laughing and running and pretending to be chickens and singing until the play becomes frantic and tumultuous and "nobody says stop stop stop". The boy describes how his house is not really anywhere but "root in the moodle of my head head head": a statement which is complemented with images of the boy apparently asleep in a bed equipped with springs under it, his bouncing off the bed, and, on the following blank pages, him somersaulting through space. The illustrations conclude with an image, at the right bottom of the verso of a pair of blank pages, of the little boy looking mischievously over his shoulder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_Human_novels"title="Being Human novels">
The vampire Mitchell, the werewolf George and the ghost Annie are flatmates. Together they try to live a human life, and control their instincts. Mitchell wants to stop drinking blood, George tries to live a life that isn't affected by the werewolf curse and Annie likes to be with someone that can understand her and talk to her. This isn't as easy as it seems, as their supernatural part always finds a way to show itself. So they always need to support each other in living their lives, living with the guilt that some actions are causing and dealing with the "ghosts" from their past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Dolls_(novel)"title="China Dolls (novel)">
"China Dolls" centers on three young women who are attracted to the San Francisco nightclub scene right before American involvement in World War II. At first Grace Lee, Helen Fong, and Ruby Tom seem the unlikeliest of friends. Grace is a seventeen-year-old Chinese American from Plain City, Ohio. She escapes to San Francisco to get away from an abusive father but is also driven by dreams of stardom based on her dancing skills. Where Grace has been completely cut off by her family from her Chinese heritage, Helen is a virtual prisoner in the wealthy family compound of her father, forced to play a subservient role in a Chinese world that denies her freedom. Ruby Tom brings a completely different background to the mix. Coming from a Japanese family with strong roots in Japanese history and culture, Ruby is totally committed to becoming famous in America, leaving her parents in Hawaii to do so.By chance Helen runs into Grace when she is seeking help in finding a Chinese nightclub that might hire her as a dancer. In helping Grace find Charlie Low’s new Forbidden City (nightclub), Helen is tempted to try out as well since no previous experience is needed. At the dance tryouts, Helen and Grace meet Ruby Tom (Kimiko Fukutomi) – a very attractive dancer who was born in Los Angeles but then moved to Hawaii with her Japanese family. When Grace affirms that she wants to be a star, Ruby confesses that she loves glitter and wants to be famous. This is based on the life of legendary dancer Jadin Wong.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Pelican"title="The Day of the Pelican">
the story follows a fictional family named the Lleshi. The Lleshis are an Albanian family living in Kosovo, which is in the midst of a war. The family suddenly finds themselves homeless refugees in the middle of a violent war. After enduring much hardship, including hunger, illness and a dangerous journey to escape their situation, they are surprised when a church group brings them to America. They find themselves in a small town in Vermont when the events of September 11, 2001 take place, placing more challenges in the path of this Muslim family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Bait"title="Dragon's Bait">
Alys has been falsely accused of witchcraft and is about to be sacrificed to a dragon. Then, Selendrile, a LeGuinian dragon that can assume a human form, offers to help her retaliate. Along the way to revenge against her inquisitor, Alys and Selendrile find a complicated path. This adventure looks at issues of revenge, heroism, and more with a splash of irony.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleven_Days_(novel)"title="Eleven Days (novel)">
Sara's son Jason is missing from a Special Operations Forces mission undertaken on the same night as the Bin Laden raid. As Sara waits for news, in a series of flashbacks we learn about Jason's absentee father, while through letters home from his training and early missions, we get a picture of Jason as a strong, compassionate leader who is wise beyond his years and modest about his abilities. Those exceptional abilities give Jason the chance to participate in a wholly different level of assignment, the most important and dangerous of his career.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Lestat"title="Prince Lestat">
Over a decade after the events of "Blood Canticle", the remaining vampires of the world are in chaos. The most famous of them all, Lestat de Lioncourt, finds himself called upon to come out of his self-imposed exile to reassert order, and is reunited with fellow vampires ancient and new: Louis and Armand, Pandora, Marius, Maharet and Mekare, the former Talamasca leader David Talbot and even Lestat's distant mother Gabrielle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saraswati_Park"title="Saraswati Park">
Mohan Karekar is a pensive letter-writer who lives with his wife, Lakshmi, in the housing complex of Saraswati Park in suburban Mumbai. Bored with his monotonous life, and stifled by his troublesome marriage, Mohan spends most of his time dreaming of becoming a writer. Meanwhile, Mohan's nephew, Ashish, a 19-year-old English literature student, moves in with them to complete his education after his parents are transferred to Indore. Ashish, struggling to accept his sexuality, is attracted to his classmate Sunder and later embarks on an affair with his much older tutor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Head_(novel)"title="Hot Head (novel)">
Malise Arnim, a European Muslim who became a cybernetically enhanced warrior was once the saviour of the world and everybody’s favourite heroine. However, once her skills had ceased to be useful the authorities removed her artificial enhancements and left her to sink or swim. Now, having been reduced to making porn films to survive, she is needed again as a huge artificial asteroid is heading for Earth and destroying everything in its path.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoded_(novel)"title="Decoded (novel)">
"Decoded" tells the story of Rong Jinzhen, an orphaned genius. Rong is adopted by distant relatives who study mathematics at an unnamed Chinese university, and is soon recognized for his mathematical prowess. Rong comes under the wing of a visiting Polish professor named Liseiwicz, who recognizes Rong's brilliance and urges him to study artificial intelligence.After Liseiwicz leaves China, Rong is approached by a government agent looking for the brightest students to bring into Unit 701, a government agency devoted to cryptography. At Unit 701, Rong cracks the nefarious Purple cipher, and soon becomes obsessed with cracking the Black cipher. After his notebook is stolen, however, Rong suffers a nervous breakdown from which he never recovers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreaming_of_Amelia"title="Dreaming of Amelia">
"Dreaming of Amelia" is the story of teenagers Amelia and Riley. They are seen as bad kids from Brookfield High who transfer to Ashbury High. They have been girlfriend and boyfriend since they were 14, and they are aloof and intriguing to the other kids. The story is told through memoirs written as part of the gothic fiction elective in the HSC English exam. It is the story of secrets, ghosts, passion and more.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Little_Monsters"title="Seven Little Monsters">
Seven giant monsters, each named as a number, One through Seven, line up together in the first frame and then start causing mischief. One flies, Two uses his long nose to dig a hole, Three scares a town, Four eats tulip trees, Five drinks the seas, Six sleeps on houses, and Seven unscrews his head. The final frame shows the giant monsters captured and restrained by the relatively tiny townspeople.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus_(Massie_novel)"title="Augustus (Massie novel)">
The novel is in the form of a memoir written by Augustus in old age, in which he looks back over his long reign. Massie uses modern language and phraseology to describe Augustus' ruthlessness and the political intrigue he mastered and used so capably to keep himself in power for so many years when for most of his rule he was surrounded by powerful enemies and duplicitous allies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Change"title="State of Change">
10 BC. The Doctor and Peri land in ancient Rome, specifically in the tomb of Cleopatra. But something is very wrong: The tomb walls depict steam-driven galleys and other disturbing anachronisms. The time travellers discover that Rome has advanced far beyond its natural means, and they must recruit the aid of Ptolemy Caesar to prevent his half-siblings, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene II, from waging a potentially world-ending war with each other. But the anomalies don't just end with Rome, as The Doctor and Peri experience changes of their own...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Romance_of_Crime"title="The Romance of Crime">
The TARDIS brings the Doctor, Romana and K-9 to the Rock of Judgement: a supreme prison built into a rocket-powered asteroid.What is the link between the gallery of artist Menlove Stokes, and the massacre of a survey team on a far off planet? And why is Margo, Chief Of Security, behaving in such an odd manner?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennial_Rites"title="Millennial Rites">
The Doctor and Mel land in London, 1999, to celebrate the New Year. But other forces are making deadlier preparations to ring in the new millennium: a software firm is about to run a program that will change the very fabric of reality, while an ancient entity from the universe's origins is due for resurrection. When Anne Travers' fear of the Great Intelligence, and millionaire Ashley Chapel's research combine, London is set to be transformed into a terrifying place inhabited by unimaginable dangers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lords_of_the_Storm"title="Lords of the Storm">
The Sontaran-Rutan war has gone on for millennia, and with high costs: Billions dead and whole star systems annihilated. However, victory may be within reach, courtesy of the human colony world of Raghi. When the Doctor and Turlough arrive there, they find a society ruled by a strict caste system. But there is more: people are being infected by a mysterious disease, or vanishing in large numbers while strange objects orbit the sun. How is this linked to the two warring races?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_Your_Life_(novel)"title="Time of Your Life (novel)">
The Network broadcasts entertainment to the planets of the Meson system: Sixteen channels worth, and for the citizens of poverty-stricken Torrok, television offers the only escape from a horrible reality. Angela, from Torrok, leaps at the opportunity to travel to the Network, alongside a strange hermit called the Doctor. However, all is not well on the space station: A soap star has killed his wife's lover; the robotic cast of Timeriders are performing random abductions, and a deadly new game show is about to begin transmission.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_the_Code"title="Dancing the Code">
The Doctor has built a machine designed to predict the future, and it shows the Brigadier murdering him and Jo. Unable to tell when this is destined to occur, the Doctor and Jo decide to stay apart. Jo is sent to the war-ravaged Arab nation of Kebiria, but upon arrival, she is immediately arrested and sent to a brutal political prison. And that's not all: deep in the North African desert, an alien infestation is rapidly growing and threatens to overrun the entire planet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Menagerie_(novel)"title="The Menagerie (novel)">
The ruling Knights of Kuabris strive to maintain order in the city as horrid creatures emerge from the sewers. While Jamie languishes in the dungeons, and Zoe is sold into slavery, the Doctor is forced to lead an subterranean expedition for the mythic Menagerie of Ukkazaal. Could the ancient prophecies be coming true?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Shock_(novel)"title="System Shock (novel)">
It is 1998, and the information age is about to take off. However, mysterious events are plaguing London. A prominent spy is killed. A hostage situation is bizarrely resolved. The Doctor receives a computer disc from a dead man. And to top it all off, it seems that an alien race is planning a takeover using Earth's ever expanding computer technology.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer's_Apprentice_(Bulis_novel)"title="The Sorcerer's Apprentice (Bulis novel)">
Elbyon is an incredible world of fantasy and magic: here, elves and dwarves live in harmony with man, wizards casts powerful spells, and knights slay dragons. Yet for all that, it seems Elbyon has secrets of its own: The TARDIS crew discover a relic from the 13th century in the woods, and become embroiled in the sinister machinations that threaten both the peace of the land, as well as the fate of the entire galaxy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_the_Cat-People"title="Invasion of the Cat-People">
Earth has been invaded twice: first, many millennia ago by beings searching for a new energy source, and then more recently, by alien marauders known as the Cat-People, who intend to finish the job. To stop them, the newly regenerated Doctor, along with Ben and Polly, teams up with a group of amateur ghost-hunters and a white witch on an expansive journey that takes them from twentieth-century Cumbria, to the Arabian deserts and Australia from 40,000 years ago.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_Velvet_Mask"title="The Man in the Velvet Mask">
The TARDIS lands in post-revolutionary France, but something is off: a futuristic structure called the New Bastille towers over a twisted version of Paris, ruled over by the tyrannical First Deputy Minski, adopted son of the infamous Marquis de Sade. An ailing Doctor is arrested as a curfew breaker, Dodo is recruited by a group of wandering players with less than decent intentions, and in the dungeons of the Bastille, one called Prisoner 6 cannot remember who he is. Outside space and time, aliens watch as their experiment begins to go wrong.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_English_Way_of_Death"title="The English Way of Death">
Summer, 1930. London is in a heatwave. The Doctor, Romana and K-9 come to holiday but uncover time pollution locally.What connects the isolated Sussex resort of Nutchurch with a secret society? What is the involvement of millionaire Hepworth Stackhouse? And what is the deadly green vapour?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_of_Weng-Chiang"title="The Shadow of Weng-Chiang">
While stealing a priceless work of art from the Palace Theatre Museum, thief Lucas Seyton, the Fallen Angel, stumbles across another robbery in progress. He is unable to prevent the thieves from killing the caretaker and making off with another exhibit, but he does find a clue: a matchbook from the Club Do-San in Shanghai, which is owned by a friend of his. In Shanghai, policeman Sung-Chi Li spots a beautiful young woman with a small child leaving an opium den he has just raided but loses them outside. Inside the den, he finds the body of a European male who appears to have been stabbed to death, but the blood trail which indicates he was killed somewhere other than this room leads straight to a solid wall. While searching the den for further clues, Li finds a dockworker's pass for Gongpinglu Wharf and decides to lead a team there to investigate further. Meanwhile, the vigilante Yan Cheh follows the fleeing woman Hsien-Ko and her associate Kwok to the Nang Tao airfield, where he loses sight of them; however, in his identity as the club owner Woo, he learns that Kwok is to meet with a German named Vogler at Gongpinglu Wharf later that night, and decides to investigate in person.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_of_the_Gods_(Bulis_novel)"title="Twilight of the Gods (Bulis novel)">
Much time has passed since the Doctor's first visit to the Web Planet, and he returns to find a very different world: it's in the middle of an interplanetary war between opposing factions in a divided people. To restore peace, the Doctor must resolve an ideological conflict, solve the paradox of life on Vortis, and finally, face the ones called ´Gods of Light´.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_Flight"title="Speed of Flight">
The TARDIS lands on Nooma, a world in the midst of an industrial revolution. But the Doctor, Jo and Mike Yates quickly discover more: The sky is at war with the ground, with continents moving and somewhere, a starship has a role to play. Mike finds himself in a life or death fight, Jo is caught in a laborers' rebellion, and the Doctor must uncover what is happening to Nooma before the struggle for survival destroys all...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plotters"title="The Plotters">
The TARDIS materialises in London, the date November 1605. While Ian and Barbara set off for the Globe Theatre, Vicki accompanies the Doctor on a mysterious mission to the court of King James. What is the link between the King's adviser, Robert Cecil, with the hooded figure called 'the Spaniard'? Why is the Doctor so anxious to observe the translation of the Bible? And what is brewing in the cellars of the Houses of Parliament?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Heart_(novel)"title="Burning Heart (novel)">
In the disintegrating cosmopolitan society Habitat on Dramos, the situation is dire. Humans and aliens tensions are set to explode, barely kept in check by the Church of Adjudication, who through their OBERON system control all. Corruption of many kinds runs through Dramos, including its people, human and alien alike – mutating into something that could consume their world. And with the Doctor imprisoned and on trial, he may not be able to stop it...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Path_(McIntee_novel)"title="The Dark Path (McIntee novel)">
The Darkheart is a faded neutron star surrounded by dead worlds. Except one: the last enclave of the Earth Empire, and as the rest of the galaxy enjoys the fruits of the fledgling Federation, these isolated Imperials hide a horrifying secret.The TARDIS crew arrive to find that the Federation has come to reintegrate this lost colony. But all is not well in the Federation camp: allegiances shift, the fierce Veltrochni have vengeful plans of their own, and another time traveller is manipulating the mission for his own mysterious reasons - a true master of his craft, and a face the Doctor has not forgotten.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Endings_(novel)"title="Happy Endings (novel)">
A wedding is meant to be held between Mr Jason Kane and Professor Bernice S. Summerfield in 2010. However chaos erupts as Time Lord associates show up from all over. And someone seems to want to prevent the entire event in the first place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forty_Thousand_in_Gehenna"title="Forty Thousand in Gehenna">
A group of 42,363 Union humans and azi are dispatched to set up a base on a very rare habitable planet named Gehenna II in the Zeta Reticuli system. Unknown to the settlers, their mission is designed to fail; they are deliberately abandoned in order to create long-term problems for the rival Alliance.The native calibans are first presented as annoying lizard-like creatures constantly moving earth to make incomprehensible patterns. The humans at first attempt to keep them outside a perimeter or to drive them away. In time, larger and larger calibans are seen, with differences in color, size, and a social structure (gray calibans are subservient to the larger brown calibans). It becomes clear that the creatures are capable of communication, at least at the level of symbology, and of developing empathic or possibly telepathic links to humans. Eventually a symbiosis develops, with some of the calibans pairing off with humans.Over a period of several generations and cut off from resupply, the colonists lapse into a primitive lifestyle. By necessity, the azi are allowed to raise families. The non-azi humans are in the minority from the beginning and over time, intermarry with the majority. An Alliance mission first seeks to intervene, then withdraws from direct contact, content to watch as two quasi-feudal, fundamentally opposed societies develop, while a third, smaller group called the "Weirds" becomes much more closely associated with the calibans, living with them rather than the other humans and becoming less comprehensible in the process.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Also_People"title="The Also People">
The Prologue relates a fable in which a leopard becomes caught in a trap. None of the animals will release the creature because they fear she will eat them, until a woman passes by and makes the leopard promise not to hurt her if she frees her. Once free the leopard goes back on her promise and begins hunting the woman, arguing that her brothers built the trap and that killing is part of her nature. Unable to get help from the other animals, the woman eventually encounters the clever hare Tsuro, who tricks the leopard back into the trap, from where she again begins to shout for help. Tsuro turns to the woman and asks whether or not they should free her.Following events on Detrios, the Doctor takes his companions on a holiday to the Worldsphere, a Dyson Sphere that is the home of the massively technologically advanced race called the People. The People are an amalgam of several different races that have evolved to an incredibly advanced state where they can change their form and sex at will. The sphere is also home to several different kinds of AI, including the governing computer called God, spherical drones and various starships that orbit the sphere. Even household objects such as tables and baths have their own personalities. The People are so technologically advanced that they have a non-aggression treaty with the Time Lords. The travellers move into a deserted villa that overlooks the town of iSanti Jeni and wake up the following morning to find their every whim and desire catered to. Benny makes friends with local baker saRa!qava and Chris begins a romantic relationship with her daughter Dep. Despite his earlier claims the Doctor has a very serious reason for visiting the Worldsphere—in a nearby wilderness he has hidden Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart under the guard of the drone aM!xitsa. After she disappeared into the Time Vortex the Doctor tracked her down on board a slave ship in the Atlantic, reduced to a feral state where she attacks and kills anyone who approaches her. The Doctor brought her here for safety but fears that she is too dangerous to be kept alive. That night a thunder storm rages across the bay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Station_Seventh_Grade"title="Space Station Seventh Grade">
Seventh-grader Jason Herkimer narrates the events of his year, from school, hair, and pimples, to mothers, little brothers, and a girl. It is a story about being true to yourself and the nostalgic recollection of adolescent years.Jason has a crush on a cheerleader, Debbie. He also has trouble fitting in at school. He goes through a lot of natural teenage problems and shares the experiences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Begum's_Fortune"title="The Begum's Fortune">
Two men inherit a vast fortune as descendants of a French soldier who settled in India and married the immensely rich widow of a native prince, the begum of the title. One of the inheritors, a French physician named Dr. Sarrasin, decides to establish a utopian model city constructed and maintained with public health as its government's primary concern. The other is a German scientist Prof. Schultze, a militarist and racist. Schultze decides to make his own utopia—a city devoted to the production of ever more powerful and destructive weapons—and vows to destroy Sarrasin's city. Both men convince the United States government to cede its sovereignty over two cities for the creation of their utopian city-states. One is Ville-France on the western side of the Cascades, and the other is Stahlstadt, on the east side.Most of the action takes place in Stahlstadt, a vast industrial and mining complex, where ores are made into steel, then made into weapons. Stahlstadt becomes in a few years the world's biggest producer of arms. Schultze is Stahlstadt's dictator, whose very word is law and who makes all significant decisions personally.An Alsatian named Marcel Bruckmann relocates to Stahlstadt, and quickly rises high in its hierarchy, gains Schultze's personal confidence, spies out some well-kept secrets, and sends a warning to his French friends. It turns out that Schultze is not content to produce arms, but fully intends to use them first against Ville-France, then establish Germany's worldwide rule.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prophet_of_Yonwood"title="The Prophet of Yonwood">
The story starts off with a young girl named Nickie who is traveling with her Aunt Crystal to an old house in Yonwood, North Carolina. Nickie's great-grandfather has died, and the house where he lived, in a neighborhood called Greenhaven, is inherited by Crystal, who plans to sell it. Over time, Nickie begins to love the house and finds a girl named Amanda who lives there. She is there because she used to look after Arthur Green, the great grandfather of Nickie. Plus, Amanda has a dog named Otis that she gives to Nickie. In Yonwood, there is a Prophet named Althea Tower who sees the future of the world in burning flames and smoke, and subsequently spends months in a dream-like semi conscious state, in which she mutters phrases and words. A woman in the town calls them instructions from God and requires townspeople to comply with her interpretation of the words, and insists that the entire city quit their "wrong" ways and start to be good people, so God would be with them. She becomes the power that directs the police in the town to enforce the 'war against evil' and slaps buzzing bracelets on offenders who don't comply. The so called instructions gradually become more and more strict and unreasonable, beginning with things like no sinners, no singing, no lights, and eventually no dogs. During the time, verbal conflict between the U.S. and the Phalanx Nations is going on. The U.S. fears that the Phalanx Nations are trying to send terrorist spies to the U.S. and they take immediate action, although the U.S. never really goes to war with them until 50 years later. Nickie meets a boy named Grover who is obsessed with snakes, but has to give them away because Ms. Beeson says that they are sinful. There is also an old, grumpy man named Hoyt McCoy, who is mean. However, he ends up being a kind man; he studies the stars and made contact with aliens. Hoyt McCoy went to Washington and stopped the war. In the end of the book, Nickie writes a journal that she hides behind a rock for someone to read later in the future. In The City of Ember, Lina Mayfleet and Doon Harrow find the journal when they are escaping/leaving Ember, and in The Diamond of Darkhold, a satellite sent out by Hoyt and other scientists is sent off into space, which later returns to Earth from an Alien planet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man's_War"title="Old Man's War">
## Introduction."Old Man's War" is about a soldier named John Perry and his exploits in the Colonial Defense Forces (CDF). The first-person narrative follows Perry's military career from CDF recruit to the rank of captain. It is set in a universe heavily populated with life forms, in which the spacegoing species compete for the scarce planets that are suitable for sustaining life. As a result, Perry must learn to fight a wide variety of aliens. The characters in "Old Man's War" have enhanced DNA and nanotechnology, giving them advantages in strength, speed, endurance, and situational awareness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_(Aaronovitch_novel)"title="Transit (Aaronovitch novel)">
Human engineers are preparing to open a new section of the Sol Transit System (STS), a mass transit system that uses transmat technology to send trains instantly between planets, from the solar system to Arcturus. The system begins to experience power drains, which the technicians, known as "Floozies", cannot determine the cause. At Lunarversity on the moon, Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart is experiencing financial difficulty and agrees to deliver a batch of drugs to Old Sam, one of the Floozies, for a local dealer. Old Sam is a veteran of the Ten-thousand Day War against the Martians and now cannot survive without combat drugs given to him by the army. Having made the drop off and collected a moneypin in payment, Kadiatu joins the Floozies for a wild night out across the Solar System and sleeps with one named Blondie. The following morning, she wakes up in Beijing, without the moneypin she needs to get home and pay her debts. During the opening ceremony of the Arcturus extension, an unknown force blasts through the tunnel, killing everything in its path. Dodging a ticket inspector, Kadiatu makes her way to King's Cross station as the TARDIS materialises. As the Doctor and Bernice exit the TARDIS, the blast wave hits the station—Bernice and the TARDIS are caught in the blast and disappear, but the Doctor pulls Kadiatu to safety.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pit_(Penswick_novel)"title="The Pit (Penswick novel)">
In an attempt to lighten the Doctor's mood, his companion Bernice suggests an investigation of a planetary system of seven planets that had seemingly vanished. The TARDIS materializes on the worst of the seven and the two are assailed by multiple types of threats. The Doctor is thrown into another universe entirely. Bernice soon realizes the source of the dangers come from the Doctor's own past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Darkness_(novel)"title="White Darkness (novel)">
The Doctor's last three visits to the scattered human colonies of the third millennium have not been entirely successful. And now that Ace has rejoined him and Bernice, life on board the TARDIS is getting pretty stressful. The Doctor yearns for a simpler time and place: Earth, the tropics, the early twentieth century.The TARDIS lands in Haiti in the early years of the First World War. And the Doctor, Bernice and Ace land in a murderous plot involving voodoo, violent death, Zombies and German spies. And perhaps something else—something far, far worse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Heat"title="Blood Heat">
A mysterious force breaks through the TARDIS exterior, throwing Bernice into the Vortex and forcing the Doctor to make an emergency landing. At first thinking they've landed in prehistoric times (after a dinosaur knocks the TARDIS into a tar pit), the Doctor soon learns that they have landed on a parallel Earth. On this Earth, the Silurians killed the Doctor in his third incarnation twenty years ago, then went on to kill most of humanity with a plague, and return Earth to its prehistoric state. An embittered alternate version of the Brigadier, along with Liz Shaw and the remnants of UNIT, attempts to destroy the Silurians with nuclear missiles. Ace manages to reactivate the Third Doctor's TARDIS (which had gone into hibernation after his death), which the Doctor then materializes around the entire Earth. He then uses the Architectural Configuration controls to delete the inbound missiles and prevents the massacre of the Silurians. The Doctor then manages to convince the Brigadier and the Silurian leader that the two races can and must live in peace. The happy ending is ruined for Ace and Bernice, however, when the Doctor reveals that this alternate universe cannot survive without destroying the real Universe. In order to save their Universe, the Doctor time rams his old TARDIS in order to start a chain reaction that will destroy the parallel universe after the current inhabitants have lived out the rest of their lives, vowing simultaneously to find whoever created this timeline and bring them to justice. When Ace and Bernice leave the Doctor alone, he pushes a lever, destroying the Alternate Earth automatically.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conundrum_(Lyons_novel)"title="Conundrum (Lyons novel)">
What seems to be a simple murder investigation in a quiet English village becomes something far more deadly for the Seventh Doctor and his companions when the inhabitants begin to exhibit superhero abilities...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Future_(novel)"title="No Future (novel)">
London, while Bernice becomes lead singer in a punk band, the Doctor must face more than one old enemy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_Day"title="Tragedy Day">
Empire City on the planet Olleril is experiencing 'Tragedy Day', where the well-off give charitably to the poor. However, this specific day has much more to offer, with murders, weaponry and plots that could destroy everything.The Doctor, Bernice and Ace all want to leave, but have been captured by various factions within minutes of arrival.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_(Russell_novel)"title="Legacy (Russell novel)">
The Doctor is in pursuit of a galactic criminal and the trail leads to Peladon: a desolate world once home to a barbaric, feudal society. Now the Galactic Federation is attempting to bring prosperity and civilisation to the planet. But not all Peladonians support the changes, and when ancient relics are stolen from their Citadel, the representatives of the Federation are blamed. The Doctor suspects the Ice Warrior delegation, but before long the Time Lord himself is arrested for the crime—and sentenced to death.Elsewhere, interplanetary mercenaries are bringing one of the galaxy's most evil artefacts to Peladon, apparently on the Doctor's instruction. Ace is pursuing a dangerous mission on another world and Bernice is getting friendly—perhaps too friendly—with the Ice Warriors she has studied for so long.The players are making the final moves in a devious and lethal plan - but for once it isn't the Doctor's...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_War_(novel)"title="Theatre of War (novel)">
An archeological expedition to the planet Menaxus ends in tragedy; all but one of the visitors die and lethal radiation contaminates the surface. Now the survivor is leading a new trip, with Professor Bernice Summerfield. Murders start again. Bernice summons her friends, the Doctor and Ace. They are sucked into a dangerously real re-creation of Shakespeare's play, "Hamlet", which is paralleled by "The Good Soldiers", the (fictitious) purportedly lost play of the future playwright Stanoff Osterling.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warlock_(Cartmel_novel)"title="Warlock (Cartmel novel)">
A new drug called "Warlock" is tearing apart society. Benny is involved with a law enforcement effort to bring it down while Ace is in trouble in a horrific animal laboratory. Only the Doctor is left to discover the truth behind the new drug.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_Piece_(novel)"title="Set Piece (novel)">
Ms Cohen is travelling on a starliner that falls through a time rift and is boarded by giant mechanical ants. She wakes up on board a vessel known as The Ship, where the ants and human prisoners they use as slaves are slowly processing the captured humans and storing their minds inside Ship's systems. The human guards, however, have a problem. One prisoner, whom they call the "Gingerbread Man", repeatedly escapes from cold storage despite their best efforts. Ms Cohen witnesses several of these escapes and watches the guards brutally beat him to the point where he seems to be suffering a heart attack. As Ms. Cohen tries to start him breathing again, she realises he has two hearts. Eventually she realises that the "Gingerbread Man's" escapes always go to a different part of Ship, therefore he is looking for someone. In his next escape, he reaches the freezers, where Ace is trapped. The Doctor is finally able to summon Bernice to rescue them. But the attempt fails and the Doctor, Ace and Bernice are thrown out into the rift. Ms Cohen is trapped on Ship and eventually processed like the others.Some months earlier, the Doctor shows Bernice and Ace a mysterious cafe that manifests itself at different locations in time and space, ranging from Glebe, New South Wales to Argolis. The Doctor says this as a result of a Time Rift, which has punched through the fabric of reality. An unknown force is using the rift to snare passenger ships. The Doctor and Ace plan to get captured and learn what is happening having failed, the three travellers are separated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_(McIntee_novel)"title="Sanctuary (McIntee novel)">
As the Albigensian Crusade draws to its bloody conclusion, men inflict savage brutalities on each other in the name of religion. Forced to temporarily abandon ship, the TARDIS crew find their lives intertwined with warring Templars, crusaders and heretics. While the Doctor begins a murder investigation in a besieged fortress, Bernice finds herself drawn to an embittered mercenary who has made the heretics’ fight his own. And both time travellers realize that to leave history unchanged they may have to sacrifice far more than their lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe's_Waterloo"title="Sharpe's Waterloo">
Napoleon having escaped from Elba, Richard Sharpe leaves his farm in Normandy to rejoin the British Army, accompanied by his lover Lucille. He is hired by the Prince of Orange as part of his staff officer and appointed a lieutenant colonel. Sharpe's friend Patrick Harper, despite being a civilian who has ostensibly come to Belgium to trade in horses, resumes his old place at Sharpe's side.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_Pirates!"title="Sky Pirates!">
The Doctor and Benny travel on the ship "Schirron Dream". They confront various hostile climates, bizarre crew members and an alien race threatening the entirety of the local star system.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zamper"title="Zamper">
The Doctor and his companions, separated from the TARDIS, investigate Zamper. It is an organization dedicated to building gigantic warships. A separate race has arrived in order to commission craft; also industrial accidents are plaguing the workers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Soldiers_(novel)"title="Toy Soldiers (novel)">
The Doctor, Benny, Chris and Roz are in Europe in the aftermath of World War I. Children are going missing and it is tied to an alien world that has been going through its own war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_Games_(novel)"title="Head Games (novel)">
A flaw in the structure of the Universe is allowing energy from the Land of Fiction to seep through. The Doctor and his companions must close the gap to save the Universe, but the TARDIS is unable to navigate the crystallised cloud of fictional energy around the gap. The Doctor lands on the crystal's surface, and he, Benny and Chris pass through the crystal, navigating through their individual dreams as the fictional energy gives them form. Once they reach the crystal's interior they must put force-field generators in place around the gap, and Roz, who is waiting by the controls in the TARDIS, will then be able to squeeze the gap shut. But the Doctor has withheld one fact from his companions for fear of alienating them. The gap has opened above the dying planet Detrios, and its inhabitants have unwittingly reshaped the fictional energy into the crystal Miracle which is providing light and power to their world. When the Doctor closes the gap, the Miracle will vanish, and Detrios really will be doomed.Things get even more complicated when the fictional energy finds a focus in Jason, the young Writer who was returned to Earth by the Time Lords after the Doctor's last encounter with the Land of Fiction. As the fictional energy floods into this Universe, Jason finds that his wishes and dreams are coming true. A fictional double of the Doctor, Dr. Who, appears in the TARDIS, knocks out the real Doctor before he can enter the crystal, and sends him to the fictional Galactic Prison for the crime of trying to wipe out the Detrians. Dr. Who then picks up Jason, his new companion, and they set off to have neat adventures, beat up green monsters, and arrest the evil Doctor's accomplices. Roz, uncertain of the extent of the newcomers’ powers, hides in the TARDIS corridors and waits for an opportunity to make her move.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warchild_(Cartmel_novel)"title="Warchild (Cartmel novel)">
The culmination of the previous two novels brings powerful forces ready to do battle all over the globe. Sucked into this is every-man Creed, whose normal life is disrupted by the super-powers his two sons seem to have.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepy_(novel)"title="Sleepy (novel)">
The Earth colony Yemaya 4 is struck by a plague that causes the colonists to manifest psychic powers. The Doctor and his companions become heavily involved. Some of the group contract the plague, while others travel back in time to try to find out how it started. Meanwhile, murderous agents threaten to simply kill every innocent person involved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GodEngine"title="GodEngine">
Stranded on Mars, the Doctor and Roz team up with a group of colonists on a journey to find much-needed supplies at the North Pole. But when their expedition is joined by a party of Ice Warrior pilgrims, tensions are stretched to breaking point. Elsewhere, Chris finds himself on Pluto's moon, trapped with a group of desperate scientists in a deadly race against time.The year is 2157: the Earth has been invaded, and forces are at work on Mars to ensure that the mysterious invaders are successful. Unless the Doctor can solve the riddle of the GodEngine, the entire course of human history will be changed...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_of_the_Living_Dad"title="Return of the Living Dad">
Bernice Summerfield's father disappeared when she was seven years old, but during her honeymoon, a clue leads her to discover him 500 years in his past, in England in 1983.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Art"title="The Death of Art">
The Doctor and his assistants, Roz and Chris, travel to 1880s France, the corrupt world of the French Third Republic. A rip in time threatens Paris, a race struggles to free itself from oppression, and a strange brotherhood fights a battle for power.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Therapy"title="Bad Therapy">
1950s London, the Soho district seems to be just the thing to recover from recent traumatic events in the 30th century. It's not to be, as a rash of violence shakes the city. A driverless cab is killing people, others with no past are being slain in bizarre rituals, crime is running rampant, gangs are fighting for territory and deep in an abandoned mental hospital an evil psychiatrist is laying plans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_Vile_a_Sin"title="So Vile a Sin">
'If you step into history,' said the Doctor, 'I won't be able to protect you.''This isn't history,' said Roz. 'This is family.'The Earth Empire—the Imperium Humanum, upon which a thousand suns never set—is dying.The Great Houses of the Empire manoeuvre and scheme for advantage; alliances are made; and knives flash in the shadows. Out among the moons of Jupiter, another battle is just beginning, as an ancient brotherhood seeks limitless power and long-overdue revenge.The Doctor returns to the thirtieth century, searching for the source of a terrifying weapon. He fears a nightmare from his own past may be about to destroy the future. Nothing must be allowed to get in his way.But the Doctor has reckoned without the power of history—which has its own plans for the wayward daughter of the House of Forrester.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_of_the_Gods_(Clapham_and_Miller_novel)"title="Twilight of the Gods (Clapham and Miller novel)">
God-like beings have shattered the peace of Dellah, and threaten to spread chaos across the galaxy. Benny and Jason Kane return to the planet in a desperate last attempt to stop them, before the planet is destroyed forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Piano_Teacher_(Jelinek_novel)"title="The Piano Teacher (Jelinek novel)">
The novel follows Erika Kohut, a piano teacher in her late thirties who teaches at the Vienna Conservatory and still lives in an apartment with her very controlling elderly mother, with whom Erika shares her parents' marriage bed, despite having a room of her own. The very strained relationship between Erika and her mother is made clear in the opening scene, in which Erika rips out some of her mother's hair when her mother attempts to take away a new dress that Erika has purchased for herself. Erika's mother wishes the money to be used toward a new, future apartment with her, and resents Erika's spending of her money on possessions distinctly for herself; her mother cannot wear Erika's clothing. Erika herself does not wear it, but merely strokes it admiringly at night.Erika expresses this latent violence as well and need for control in many other scenes throughout the book. Erika takes large instruments on trains so that she can hit people with them and call it an accident, or kicks or steps on the feet of other passengers so that she can watch them blame someone else. She is a voyeur who frequents peep shows, and on one occasion catches a couple having sex in a park, being so affected that she urinates. Childhood memories are retold throughout the novel and their effects on the present suggested—for instance, the memory of a childhood visit from her cousin, an attractive and athletic young man, whom Erika's mother praised while she makes her daughter practice piano, results in Erika's self-mutilation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Weekend_(novel)"title="The Lost Weekend (novel)">
Set in a rundown neighborhood of Manhattan in 1936, the novel explores a five-day alcoholic binge. Don Birnam, a binge drinker mostly of rye, fancies himself as a writer. He lapses into foreign phrases and quotes Shakespeare even while attempting to steal a woman's purse, trying to pawn a typewriter for drinking money, and smashing his face on a banister. That accident gets him checked into an "alcoholic ward". There, a counselor advises Birnam on the nature of alcoholism:There isn't any cure, besides just stopping. And how many of them can do that? They don't want to, you see. When they feel bad like this fellow here, they think they want to stop, but they don't, really. They can't bring themselves to admit they're alcoholics, or that liquor's got them licked. They believe they can take it or leave it alone — so they take it. If they do stop, out of fear or whatever, they go at once into such a state of euphoria and well-being that they become over-confident. They're rid of drink, and feel sure enough of themselves to be able to start again, promising they'll take one, or at the most two, and — well, then it becomes the same old story over again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_to_the_Belt"title="Devil to the Belt">
The title is a term for the periods of time spacers spend in refinery habitats under nearly 1g, which is when they're heavy compared to their periods of weightlessness when out in the shops.Ben and Bird are two freerunners: private prospectors who look for asteroids worth mining for heavy metals. Bird was born on Earth, fifty years ago, and has been freerunning for thirty years, whereas Ben was born twenty-something years ago in the Asteroid Belt and only started freerunning when he invested 20k in Bird's ship a few years ago.Their ship picks up a distress signal and gets approval from "Big Mama" (the central office of the Belt) to check out the source of the signal. When they reach it, the origin ship appears intact apart from a dented fuel tank, but its power has almost run out. Inside, they find blood and bits of organic waste, and a barely-alive young man called Dekker.They take Dekker onto their ship, clean him up, and attach the other ship to theirs and head back to base. Bird thinks the ethical course of action is to look after Dekker and not worry about his ship, but Ben, having scrimped and saved to get enough money to buy in on Bird's ship, obsesses about whether they'll have salvage rights to Dekker's ship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bodysnatchers_(novel)"title="The Bodysnatchers (novel)">
The Doctor, Sam and an allied professor work together to stop alien bodysnatchers, grave-robbers and much worse plaguing London.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_(novel)"title="Genocide (novel)">
Jo Grant, a UNIT veteran, receives a call for help from an old colleague. A scientific unit is being threatened by a UNIT force led by a secretive Captain. Jo Grant ends up sucked out of time and space.Meanwhile, the Doctor and Sam go to 2109 and find an alien race where the humans should be. To make it worse, the aliens claim to have been there for thousands of years...and something is wrong with Sam's mind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Daleks"title="War of the Daleks">
The story opens up with the Doctor and Sam in the TARDIS doing some maintenance when they are collected by a ship which holds an escape pod containing Davros. A group of Thals arrive; they want Davros to alter their species so they will be better able to fight the Daleks. A force of Daleks then arrive and take the Doctor and Davros, along with other characters, to Skaro. Before landing on Skaro, the Doctor discovers that the coordinates he believed were Skaro's were actually those of the planet Antalin.Since Davros's return the Dalek Prime has met considerable resistance with a number of Davros loyalists forming. Initiating a final civil war on Skaro, the Dalek Prime has all the Davros loyalists revealed and exterminated. In the meantime he releases the Doctor to leave Skaro. The Doctor discovers a planted device on board the TARDIS which would allow the Daleks to survive in case the Dalek Prime failed. He jettisons it into the vortex.With his faction defeated, Davros is sentenced to death by matter dispersal. Prior to his downfall he had implanted a Spider Dalek as a spy amongst the Dalek Prime's forces. Davros is placed in a disintegration chamber and his atoms dispersed. His fate is left open when his data is either erased from the disintegrator or transmatted across space to a safe location.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_of_Intelligent_Tigers"title="The Year of Intelligent Tigers">
The alien world of Hitchemus is known for its animal sanctuaries and the musical talents of the citizens. Now the animals have escaped, a hurricane is threatening everyone and the humans do not want the Doctor's assistance. His companions are left to deal with the situation when the Doctor vanishes into the wild.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Bodies"title="Alien Bodies">
The Third Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith use the TARDIS to find Sputnik 2, and retrieve the body of Laika, which the Doctor then buries on the planet Quiescia.Years later, the Doctor (now in his eighth incarnation) is playing a game of chess with General Tschike of UNISYC, when the general pulls a gun on him. Tschike tells the Doctor that the only reason the various Earth governments he has encountered down the years have never done this before is because they never really believed that the Doctor could be actually killed. Now they have received information from a source in what was once Borneo that suggests differently. Before Tschike can shoot however, the Doctor dives out the window into the TARDIS which has been hovering outside. The Doctor and Sam head to Borneo to investigate.In Borneo (now referred to as East Indies Revit zone) two other UNISYC soldiers, Colonel Kortez and Lieutenant Bregman arrive at what appears to be the ruins of an ancient city, but it is really a block-transfer computational structure known as the Unthinkable City. The City is a venue for the auction for an artifact, known as the Relic. In addition to the two UNISYC soldiers, other bidders include a dead man named Trask, a conceptual entity referred to as The Shift, a Time Lord called Homunculette and two representatives from Faction Paradox, Cousin Justine and Brother Manjuele. The auction is organised by Mr. Qixotl, who is awaiting the arrival of one more party before the bidding can begin. When the TARDIS materialises at the City, the Doctor and Sam are attacked by leopards that are programmed to attack anyone whose biodata they do not recognise. However, the Doctor locates one of their control pads and adds his own and Sam's biodata to the guest list. Qixotl, horrified, recognises the Doctor and tries to hide his identity from the other quests.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_Lock"title="Option Lock">
The Doctor and Sam land in present-day England on the ancestral home of the Silver family. However, the house holds clues to a dangerous centuries-old society and something that drove a man to suicide. Unravelling this will take Sam and the Doctor through time and space to save Earth from nuclear fire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Delusion"title="The God Delusion">
Dawkins dedicates the book to Douglas Adams and quotes the novelist: "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" The book contains ten chapters. The first few chapters make a case that there almost certainly is no God, while the rest discuss religion and morality.Dawkins writes that "The God Delusion" contains four "consciousness-raising" messages:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_Velocity_(novel)"title="Escape Velocity (novel)">
In 2001, there is a new space race, between Pierre Yves-Dudoin and Arthur Tyler III, both competing to be the first privately funded man in space. Eventually Pierre announces that he has succeeded, and will be in space in a week. However, Pierre has been helped by a scout of the Kulan race, who are poised to invade Earth.In Brussels a man is shot in front of stockbroker Anji Kapoor and her boyfriend Dave. When Dave attempts first aid, he realises the man is not human. The man then slips a package into Dave's pocket and injects a substance into his wrist. Meanwhile, in London, Fitz is dropped off by Compassion two days before he is to meet the Doctor. When he sees Dave in a news report claiming the dead man had two hearts, he fears the worst and travels to Brussels.After speaking to Dave in Brussels, Fitz discovers that the man wasn't the Doctor, but stays to help investigate. Dave finds the package in his pocket and calls a number written on it, and finds himself speaking to Arthur Tyler III. After meeting Tyler's bodyguard, they bring him back to Dave and Anji's hotel room only to find the killers outside. As the killers drive away, one of them drops his gun which is of alien origin. When Dave leaves the room to contact the police, the dead man's killers kidnap him. Anji then decides to go with Fitz to meet the Doctor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burning_(novel)"title="The Burning (novel)">
In the late 19th century, the village of Middleton is on the verge of bankruptcy due to the tin mine running out, when a huge fissure opens in the moorlands. After a visitor called Roger Nepath offers to buy the mine and visits the fissure with the lord of the manor, Lord Urton's personality changes, and allows Nepath to move into his manor house with his sister Patience.The amnesiac Doctor arrives at the village and befriends Professor Dobbs from The Society of Psychical Research during his research into the fissure. Dobbs's assistant Gaddis claims to have empathic powers, which lead him to point along the fissure, where he is chased off by Urton. The Doctor notices that the water in a dam near the fissure has become warm and acidic, suggesting that it has been heated. Returning to the Fissure they find Gaddis's corpse horribly burnt, which fascinates the Doctor.Nepath later holds an auction to fund his purchase, and demonstration a metal that returns to its original shape when destroyed, which Nepath gives the Doctor a sample of. The army gives Nepath a large amount of money for him to create self repairing guns for the army, which Nepath uses to buy more mining equipment. Later, the metal turns into molten lava, which causes the remains of TARDIS to grow to normal size, although it is still a featureless blue box. Dobbs and the Doctor break into the manor and discover that Nepath had been making many copies of his artifacts out of the metal, then selling them, as well as a young woman's body in a box, before narrowly escaping the Urtons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doll_(novel)"title="The Doll (novel)">
Wokulski begins his career as a waiter at Hopfer's, a Warsaw restaurant. The scion of an impoverished Polish noble family dreams of a life in science. After taking part in the failed 1863 Uprising against the Russian Empire, he is sentenced to exile in Siberia. On eventual return to Warsaw, he becomes a salesman at Mincel's haberdashery. Marrying the late owner's widow (who eventually dies), he comes into money and uses it to set up a partnership with a Russian merchant he had met while in exile. The two merchants go to Bulgaria during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, and Wokulski makes a fortune supplying the Russian Army.The enterprising Wokulski now proves a romantic at heart, falling in love with Izabela, daughter of the vacuous, bankrupt aristocrat, Tomasz Łęcki.The manager of Wokulski's Warsaw store, Ignacy Rzecki, is a man of an earlier generation, a modest bachelor who lives on memories of his youth, which was a heroic chapter in his own life and that of Europe. Through his diary the reader learns about some of Wokulski's adventures, seen through the eyes of an admirer. Rzecki and his friend Katz had gone to Hungary in 1848 to enlist in the revolutionary army. For Rzecki, the cause of freedom in Europe is connected with the name of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the Hungarian revolution had sparked new hopes of abolishing the reactionary system that had triumphed at Napoleon's fall. Later he had reposed his hopes in Napoleon III. Now, as he writes, he places them in Bonaparte's scion, Napoleon III's son, Prince Loulou. At novel's end, when Rzecki hears that Loulou has perished in Africa, fighting in British ranks against rebel tribesmen, he will be overcome by the despondence of old age.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outpost_(Prus_novel)"title="The Outpost (Prus novel)">
"The Outpost" is a study of rural Poland under the country's foreign partitions. Its principal character, a peasant surnamed "Ślimak" ("Snail", in Polish), typifies his village's inhabitants, nearly all illiterate; there is no school under Russian imperial rule. Religion is naively superficial: when a villager, Orzechowski, buys an engraving of "Leda and the Swan" for a mere three roubles at the landowner's moving-out sale, he prays before it with his family, much as other villagers venerate old portraits of noblemen who had been benefactors of the local church.Changes are, however, coming to the area. A railway line is being built nearby. The owners of a local manor house sell their estate to German settlers. Polish landowners, who speak more French than Polish, are happy to take the money and move to a city or abroad, away from the boring countryside. Ślimak's farm becomes an isolated Polish outpost in an increasingly German-settled neighborhood.Ślimak suffers a series of adversities as he refuses to sell his plot of land to German settlers (who are described not unsympathetically). The stubborn, conservative peasant is not acting from self-interest, since the money he would have gotten could have bought a better farm elsewhere; he is, rather, acting from inertia and from a principle inculcated in him by his father and grandfather: that when a peasant loses his hereditary plot, he faces the greatest of misfortunes—becoming a mere wage-earner.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_Day_(novel)"title="Longest Day (novel)">
Hirath is a planet ravaged by overlapping time fields. There are those who seek to exploit this for monetary gain...then there's an invading alien race out to just kill.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_of_the_Daleks"title="Legacy of the Daleks">
As the Doctor prepares to search for Sam, he receives a psychic cry of pain and despair from his granddaughter Susan, and discovers that it was focused through another TARDIS on a distant planet. He decides to materialize on Earth following the Dalek invasion, the same time period in which Sam disappeared; perhaps in hope he can find her as well while preventing whatever caused Susan to send the cry.Following the invasion, Earth is devastatingly underpopulated, and the survivors (in Britain, at least) have coalesced into city-states which are currently engaged in political infighting. Lord Haldoran supplies most of England with power, but Lord London opposes him and many city-states are flocking to London for power supplies. War seems inevitable, but Haldoran has a secret weapon; his mysterious military advisor, Estro, is supplying him with Dalek guns. Meanwhile, Susan and her husband David are having marital difficulties, as it has become increasingly difficult as the decades pass to hide the fact that Susan isn’t aging while David is. Susan is a Peace Officer, one of the elite who keep the Earth safe from the Dalek Artefacts left behind after the invaders were defeated; when she receives word that someone is tampering with the buried DA-17, she sets off to investigate, but is captured by Estro’s men.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo_Effect_(novel)"title="Placebo Effect (novel)">
The Doctor takes Sam to Micawber's World, an artificial planet owned by the Carrington Corporation, to attend the wedding of his friends Stacy Townsend and the Ice Warrior Ssard. Sam is slightly peeved to learn that they travelled with him during the three-year period in which he'd left her at a one-hour Greenpeace rally, but she eventually forgives him. The wedding ceremony is disrupted by followers of the Church of the Way Forward, who believe that interspecies marriage dilutes racial purity and is thus forbidden by their Goddess. Chase Carrington himself apologises for the disruption and pays for the wedding guests’ expenses out of his own pocket. Later, however, he is murdered by Foamasi assassins working for the Dark Peaks Lodge, and an impersonator in a body-suit disguise takes his place...Micawber's World is hosting the 3999 Olympics, and Ms Sox, the head of security for Carrington Corp, has called in extra Space Security troops for the occasion. A patrol vanishes while lighting the tunnels beneath the surface of the planet, but rather than court-martial Sergeant Dallion for losing her men without an explanation, Commander Ritchie gives her and the remaining members of her squad leeway to investigate. In fact, Ritchie's wife and son have been kidnapped by the Dark Peaks Lodge, who intend to discover what's going on in the tunnels and then kill Dallion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someday_Angeline"title="Someday Angeline">
Angeline Persopolis is extremely intelligent. She knew things, especially related to ocean animals and the ocean, "before she was born," with her first word being "octopus." Even though she is only eight, she is sent to the sixth grade. She wants to be a garbage collector like her father, although he wants her to become famous and is afraid of her intelligence at times. At school, she also faces problems like being bullied by the other students and misunderstood by her teacher, Mrs. Hardlick. Her only two friends are a fifth grade teacher, Miss Turbone (also known as Mr. Bone) and class clown Gary "Goon" Boone (who later gets a book to himself, "Dogs Don't Tell Jokes").Mr. Persopolis wants the best for his daughter, and he often pushes her too hard to achieve. When she is elected Secretary of Trash, he becomes angry and orders her to resign. The next day at school, Mrs. Hardlick does not listen to Angeline when she tries to resign, and Angeline is so frustrated that she messes up the classroom, denouncing everything as "Garbage!" Mrs. Hardlick is furious and tells Angeline to come back with a signed note from her father. For the next week, she goes to an aquarium each day, instead of going to school. Her father gets home after she does, so he does not know.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanderdeken's_Children"title="Vanderdeken's Children">
The TARDIS is thrown off course by a 'vortex discontinuity'. They materialise in deep space, several hundred light years form Earth in the year 3123 A.D. The discover a derelict, cylinder like ship, over four-thousand meters in length.There are two other ships in the area as well, from rival star-systems, the Emindarian passenger liner, "Cirrandaria", and the Nimosian warship, "Indomitable". Both ships claim they have the right to salvage the derelict.Narrowly avoiding destruction by the "Indomitable", the Doctor and Sam land on the "Cirrandaria".The "Indomitable" sends a technician in a pod down to the derelict to explore. The technician, after some examining, begins to think that the derelict was grown, not built. He loses contact with "Indomitable", and comes to believe he is being followed by a creature. He attempts to escape by climbing up one of the pylons that ring both ends of the ship. He pictures the monsters from his childhood reaching up for him, lets go of the pylon and falls to his death.The "Cirrandaria" sends its own expedition down to the derelict, including the Doctor and Sam, and all hell breaks loose...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scarlet_Empress_(novel)"title="The Scarlet Empress (novel)">
On the ancient planet of Hyspero, a world where magic still exists, the Doctor reads tales from the Aja’ib, a strange book full of peculiar adventure stories, while Sam goes exploring and meets an alligator skinned man, Gila, chained up in a double-decker London bus. Using the bus to come to her rescue, the Doctor and Sam are soon caught up in a struggle for survival alongside Iris Wildthyme, a fellow time-traveller, the owner of the double decker bus, a serving Conservative MP, and - possibly - a fellow Time Lord.Iris claims to be on a mission for the current Scarlet Empress, but the Doctor suspects she has ulterior motives. However, the planet has suffered under the rule of the Scarlet Empresses for thousands of years and so the Doctor and Sam embark on a perilous journey across Hyspero to discover the truth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Face-Eater"title="The Face-Eater">
On Earth's first space colony, Proxima II, an expedition to a nearby mountain disappears and only one survivor, Jake Leary, returns, apparently turned insane by the experience, he breaks out of hospital and vanishes. Afterwards mutilated bodies begin appearing on the streets, causing the colony's workers to send a distress signal against the wishes of their leader, Helen Percival.The Doctor and Sam arrive in response to the signal, causing Percival to become paranoid that she will be overthrown. despite this, she allows The Doctor to investigate. Sam learns that Percival burned the bodies without an autopsy and breaks into Helen's office to investigate and sets off a bomb planted to stop intruders, and is saved by Police Chief Fuller. Meanwhile, the Doctor speaks to xenozoologist Joan Betts, who is studying the native Proximans, who are dying out suddenly. The Doctor theorises that the Proxians have telepathic powers which are focused on the mountain, trapping something in. When The Doctor attempts to contact their group mind, he learns that they are under threat from an ancient evil. When The Doctor follows Joan into the sewers later that day, something attacks them which kills Joan and knocks him unconscious.Percival begins to oppress the colonists, sparking off riots, whilst Sam and Fuller read Leary's report which explain that the expedition woke an ancient evil which was dormant in the mountains. Later Fuller reveals that he is a shape shifter which has killed the real Fuller. However Sam escapes when a Proximan attacks the creature. The Doctor is brought to the officers, where he explains that an ancient creature called the Face-Eater has been sending out shape shifters to gather life essences for it to eat. Leary enters and explains that this Doctor is a shape shifter - the real one was with him in the mountains, and that it was a shape shifter impersonating him that is responsible for the murders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_Man"title="Revolution Man">
The Doctor tries to stop a mysterious entity called The Revolution Man from spreading mind-altering drugs in the 1960s.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_(Walters_novel)"title="Dominion (Walters novel)">
Kerstin and her boyfriend Johan swim in a lake near a cabin in Sweden. Later than night, Kerstin goes to get some food from the fridge. An immense bolt of lightning strikes the ground, knocking her over. When she wakes up, she finds the whole front of the cabin gone, including Johan. After finding no reasonable explanation, Kerstin realises that she may have lost Johan forever. Kerstin goes to a nearby farm.The owner of the farm, Björn Andersson wakes up at three in the morning. He remembers that he fell into a drunken rage about putting off fixing the farm's power generator. As he walks down to the pen, he hears the pigs screaming. Björn grabs his shotgun and hurries back to the pen. He walks to the pen where the screaming is coming from, and finds that there is blood everywhere. There were 12 piglets and a sow in the pen. A strange creature lunges at Björn. Björn manages to kill it with the shotgun, before passing out.At the hospital, Nordenstam approaches with Dr Lindgard, who says that Johan's sedatives will wear off in a couple of hours. The Doctor and Fitz arrive at the hospital, and Dr Lindgard tells the Doctor that Johan is stable. The Doctor wants to examine Johan, but Lindgard refuses. The Doctor barges into the isolation ward anyway. After examining Johan, the Doctor pulls Fitz aside and says that he's going to go back and check on the TARDIS, and that Fitz should stay here with Kerstin who is visiting Johan. The Doctor and Nordenstam go back to the forest, and Nordenstam gives Fitz his mobile phone so Fitz can call him if anything happens. Kerstin asks Fitz if he knows what happened to Johan and about the thing in the barn, but Fitz cannot give her an answer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unnatural_History_(novel)"title="Unnatural History (novel)">
In London during the year 2002, the dark-haired Sam Jones is living a normal life, though struggling with a drug addiction, when the Eighth Doctor arrives in the shop she works in and tells her that she should have blonde hair and be travelling with him. Shocked by this, she runs out onto the street to get away from him and is attacked by a ten-year-old boy, who claims that she shouldn't exist. When the Doctor rescues her, she agrees to go with him to San Francisco. When they arrive, the Doctor finds Fitz and explains that when the TARDIS destroyed the Earth, but reversed time, a scar in space and time was left behind and strange creatures from other dimensions are being attracted to the city by it. The TARDIS has become trapped inside the scar, and will be crushed by the strain of trying to stabilise the scar in three days unless it is removed. When the Doctor originally arrived, blonde Sam fell in the scar, and dark Sam appeared in London.The Doctor's attempts to contact the Time Lords to obtain new equipment to close the scar fails, and he meets the boy again, who reveals that he is a member of Faction Paradox, but he claims that he isn't here to harm the Doctor, just to observe his actions. Later the Doctor notices a Kraken in the bay, which will destroy the city looking for food if it detects the energy coming from the scar, but the TARDIS is currently blocking it from detecting them. Now under another time limit, the Doctor finds a scientist called Joyce who promises to help repair the equipment needed to close the scar. The Doctor tells Sam that her biodata is vulnerable to change from the pulses coming from the scar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People_of_Paper"title="The People of Paper">
## Prologue.The prologue tells the story of the creation of the character later known as Merced de Papel, a woman made of paper by Antonio, a former monk who had been famed for his abilities as an origami surgeon, meaning that he performed successful organ transplants using organs made of folded paper. But as medical technology surpassed his skills, he started creating origami animals and, eventually, the origami woman. Merced has "cardboard legs, cellophane appendix, and paper breasts".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bunce"title="The Bunce">
Protagonist Billy Jay is trapped in an insurance related fraud conducted by gangsters, insurance agents, and corrupt police officers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bronze_God_of_Rhodes"title="The Bronze God of Rhodes">
The novel is written in first person, purporting to be the memoirs of Chares of Lindos, the sculptor of the Colossus of Rhodes. It concerns his return to Rhodes, his attempts to set up as a sculptor, his struggles with his family's wishes that he enter their bronze foundry, his experience as a catapult artilleryman during the Siege of Rhodes (305 BC), and his complicated adventures in Ptolemaic Egypt. The Rhodian portions of the story are enlivened by the presence of Celtic foreigner Kavaros, who rises from Chares' slave to fellow soldier, friend, and sculpting assistant, and ultimately saves his former master's life. The atmosphere of the novel is lightened by Kavaros' entertaining, pointed and improbable tales of his supposedly superhuman ancestor Gargantuos (presumably de Camp's nod to the giant Gargantua, a character in the works of François Rabelais). The planning and building of the Colossus in commemoration of the city's successful defense occupies the closing portion of the book.De Camp brings in numerous other historical personages of the era, notably Chares' sculpting mentor Lyssipos of Sikyon, the mathematician Eukleidēs, Babylonian historian Berossos (initially as a member of the sculptor's catapult crew), Rhodes's antagonists Demetrios Poliorketes and Antigonus, Egyptian historian Manethos, Egyptian king Ptolemaios, and Demetrios of Phalerum, reputed founder of the Library of Alexandria. A number of the book's characters are introduced in a symposion Chares attends early on, conducted by a group dubbed "The Seven Strangers," modeled on de Camp's own real-life social club the Trap Door Spiders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saving_the_Queen"title="Saving the Queen">
This novel, set in 1952, reveals Oakes's childhood and educational background, his recruitment into the CIA, and the Agency's procedures for "handling" him. His first assignment sends him to Britain, where he must identify (and deal with) a high-level security leak close to the (fictional) British monarch, Queen Caroline. Also, Rufus, the enigmatic genius behind American intelligence operations, is introduced.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stained_Glass_(novel)"title="Stained Glass (novel)">
Oakes's second assignment sends him to West Germany. There, he is infiltrated into the inner-circle of a charismatic and heroic nobleman, Count Wintergrin, who intends to run for the West German Chancellorship on platform of immediate re-unification with East Germany. Although this is ultimately in the interest of the Western Powers and NATO, the threat of Soviet invasion of West Europe means that Oakes must prevent Wintergrin's election, by whatever means necessary. Set in 1953.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Play_the_Fool"title="To Play the Fool">
A homeless man is murdered and Kate must determine the culprit's identity. Everything seems to point to a man whom the homeless community regards as an important religious figure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Child"title="With Child">
The stepchild of Kate's coworker Al Hawkin asks Kate to help her find her homeless friend Dio, who has mysteriously vanished. They become friends during the process, although Kate is wounded and decides to take a rest. She invites Jules on a trip to visit her lover Lee. On the way, Jules disappears. Kate realizes that Jules has been kidnapped by her biological father, recently freed from prison. The novel ends with Kate going undercover to the father's house and rescuing her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Detection"title="The Art of Detection">
Philip Gilbert, the head of a group of Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts, is found dead in a national park's artillery battery. Because the autopsy report is slow-coming, inspector Kate Martinelli and her partner Al Hawkin treat the death as a murder case. She can discover little about the dead man aside from his unrelenting fascination with all things Holmes. One of his dinner group companions, Ian Nicholson, reveals that he had discovered a "lost" Holmes story, possibly by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, about the murder of a gay soldier in 1920s San Francisco. Kate's interest is piqued when Ian mentions that Gilbert's body was discovered under the same circumstance as the soldier's in the story.Eventually, Kate traces Gilbert's ex-wife and learns that it is likely Gilbert was gay, given that he had been with an actor several years before. She connects him with Nicholson, who used to be an actor and whose own ex-wife admits he is gay. Kate questions Nicholson, who admits that he hit Gilbert with a heavy bottle of wine after Gilbert announced they would have to break up temporarily following the publishing of the lost manuscript. He did not realize at the time that Gilbert actually died of complications following the attack, thereby downgrading the legal status from homicide to manslaughter. Finding Gilbert dead, Nicholson panics and dumps the body then sets up an elaborate alibi. After confessing his actions to Kate, Nicholson commits suicide by cop.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Monstrous_Regiment_of_Women"title="A Monstrous Regiment of Women">
In the winter of 1920, Mary Russell is on the cusp of turning 21 and lives a double life of Oxford University theological scholar as well as a consulting detective and partner of Sherlock Holmes. After events in The Beekeeper's Apprentice, both Holmes and Russell are aware that their relationship and partnership has changed, perhaps romantically, but neither is eager to broach the subject.A chance encounter unites Russell with Veronica Beaconsfield, an old Oxford acquaintance who is worried about her former fiancé, Miles Fitzwarren, a returned soldier and drug addict. Veronica introduces Russell to the well-financed New Temple in God and its leader, the enigmatic, charismatic Margery Childe, who preaches empowerment of women. Russell believes Margery to be a mystic and begins tutoring Margery in theology and reading Scripture, integrating into their lessons her own current academic work on feminism and Judaism. Russell also witnesses what she believes to be a true miracle, in which Margery is healed of serious physical wounds through prayer. Meanwhile, Holmes takes on Miles's rehabilitation partially as a favor to Russell.When an attempt is made on Veronica's life, Holmes and Russell discover a mysterious pattern of deaths where fairly wealthy women have left large bequests to the Temple. Coming into her inheritance at age 21, Russell takes on the role of a young heiress to insinuate herself into the Temple's leadership. While learning more about the Temple's operations, Russell also fends off an attacker who threatens Margery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Letter_of_Mary"title="A Letter of Mary">
In August 1923, Mary Russell and husband Sherlock Holmes receive an unexpected visit from Dorothy Ruskin, an elderly amateur archeologist from the Holy Land, who met the couple four and a half years earlier during the events from O Jerusalem (novel). As a gift, Ruskin presents Russell with an inlaid box containing a papyrus scroll, which seems to be a genuine first-century letter by Mary Magdalene. When she returns to London that evening, Ruskin is killed in a hit-and-run accident with only two witnesses.When Holmes and Russell visit London to identify the body, they discover evidence of foul play. Before her murder, Ruskin had argued with a sponsor of the digs, Colonel Dennis Edwards. A letter from her sister Mrs. Erica Rogers, who cares for their aged mother, reveals that two Middle Eastern visitors were also looking for Ruskin after her visit home. Finally, Holmes and Russell find their Sussex home ransacked by three suspects who were looking for papers, perhaps for Mary’s papyrus scroll. When Russell translates Mary’s letter, she finds that Mary calls herself an apostle of Jesus, and contemplates the theological and historical implications.Three distinct suspects and possibilities emerge: Colonel Edwards, who did not know he was sponsoring a woman’s project, could have been enraged to violence; the Middle Eastern visitors may have been from a Palestinian family with a grudge against Ruskin; and Rogers was resentful toward her sister, though according to Ruskin’s will, she does not benefit from Ruskin’s early death. To pursue each different line of investigation, the four split their forces: Mycroft Holmes looks into the Middle Eastern visitors, Holmes goes into Erica Rogers’s employ, while Inspector Lestrade directs the efforts of the police, and Russell finds work as Colonel Edwards’s secretary.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(Bulis_novel)"title="Tempest (Bulis novel)">
The Drell Imnulate is a powerful object lost somewhere on the Polar Express, a powerful train traversing the hostile world of 'Tempest'. Factions on the train want to the Imnulate and are willing to kill innocent people to get to it. It is up to Bernice to save the day.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_of_Forever"title="The Sword of Forever">
Bernice finds her own DNA in the stomach of a mummified dinosaur. Together with Patience, a sentient velociraptor, she travels ever backwards through time. She stumbles upon the 'Sword Of Forever', an object that could easily demolish entire worlds.The story draws on conspiracy theories around the Knights Templar, the Ark of the Covenant and so forth. It also draws on earlier New Adventures' depictions of a future Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Angels_Fear"title="Where Angels Fear">
Bernice's home planet of Dellah, once a place of learning, is being overrun by a new religious movement. Closer investigation reveals the major powers of the universe are literally running in fear from said movement.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tears_of_the_Oracle"title="Tears of the Oracle">
The shattered world of Dellah, once a thriving place of learning, has only one aspect of the university left. This is under siege by religious fanatics. Bernice Summerfield has to deal with this, a mad collector, her ex-husband and an Oracle that could lead to priceless information.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumed_Innocent_(novel)"title="Presumed Innocent (novel)">
The novel begins with the discovery of the body of Carolyn Polhemus, an assistant prosecuting attorney in fictional Kindle County. She is the victim of what appears to be a sexual bondage encounter gone wrong, killed by a single blow to the skull with an unknown object while tied up. Rožat "Rusty" Sabich, a Kindle County prosecutor and co-worker of Carolyn, is assigned her case by his boss, district attorney Raymond Horgan. Horgan is currently losing his re-election campaign against Nico Della Guardia, an old protege turned rival, and informs Rusty that his continued employment is entwined with Horgan's victory, which he believes hinges on finding and convicting Carolyn's killer. This is further complicated by the fact that, unknown to everyone else, Rusty had a brief affair with Carolyn that ended months before her murder. She dumped him when he showed little interest in taking Horgan's job for himself, causing him to realize her ambitious, conniving nature.Despite his obvious conflict of interest, Rusty takes charge of the investigation, but makes clumsy attempts to divert its areas of inquiry away from the DA's office, and by extension himself. He's assisted by his friend Det. Dan "Lip" Lipranzer, whom Rusty replaces the originally assigned officer with. During the investigation, Rusty learns Horgan also had a brief relationship with Carolyn. The only person who knows of Rusty's own affair is his wife, Barbara, and the subsequent strain on their marriage led him to seek psychiatric help. Throughout the novel he discusses various relationships in his life: with his late father, a closed-off, angry man; with Della Guardia, a friendship that soured due to uncontrollable circumstances; with Barbara, a volatile mixture of devotion and disdain; and of course with Carolyn, which he has struggled to define since its end.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpent's_Reach"title="Serpent's Reach">
The novel begins on a Family estate at Kethiuy on Cerdin, where the Sul sept of the Meth-maren House is attacked by the rival Ruil sept, with the help of Red and Gold Majats. The Ruil sept is seeking to wrest control of the Blue Majat from the Sul sept. A young Raen a Sul hant Meth-maren is the only survivor, and she seeks refuge in the nearby Blue Majat Hive. There she persuades the Blue Queen to help her regain control of Kethiuy. The Blue Warriors and their azi succeed in destroying the Ruil sept, but the Blue Hive is decimated and Raen is captured and brought before the Kontrin Council. Moth, the second oldest Kontrin, protects Raen from the Kontrin conspirators seeking to destroy her, and Raen is banished from Cerdin.Raen adopts a low profile and drifts from planet to planet in the Reach. She survives several assassination attempts but never gives up her desire for revenge against the Kontrin Council and those who destroyed her family. After Council Eldest Lian is assassinated, Moth takes control of the Council. She watches Raen's movement but does not interfere. Raen's final move is to board a Beta passenger spaceliner, "Andra's Jewel" bound for Istra, the only planet in the Reach accessible from the Outside. Istra has no permanent Kontrin presence, only Betas, who deal with Outsiders and the Majat, who were brought here by the Kontrin hundreds of years previously. To amuse herself on "Andra's Jewel's" long voyage, Raen plays Sej, a dicing game, every night with a ship azi named Jim. They agree that at the end of the voyage Raen will buy his contract, and if Jim is the overall winner, he will be a free man, but if he loses, he will become her azi. Jim narrowly loses and serves her for the remainder of the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Elephant_for_Aristotle"title="An Elephant for Aristotle">
The novel concerns the adventures of Leon of Atrax, a Thessalian cavalry commander who has been tasked by Alexander the Great to bring an elephant captured from the Indian ruler Porus, to Athens as a present for Alexander's old tutor, Aristotle. Leading a motley crew that includes an Indian elephantarch to care for the creature, a Persian warrior, a Syrian sutler and a Greek philosopher, Leon sets out to cross the whole of the ancient known world from the Indus River to Athens.The journey is long and adventurous, involving frequent skirmishes with bandits, unruly noblemen, Macedonian commanders with ideas of their own about who is in charge, and a runaway Persian noblewoman. It doesn't help that the goal of the whole enterprise is essentially a malicious prank concocted by Alexander on his former teacher: he gives Aristotle the elephant but no funds for its upkeep, while sending the funds (but no elephant) to the savant's arch-rival Xenocrates.The story is founded on the fact that Aristotle's writings include an apparently eye-witness description of an Indian elephant, though the circumstances under which he might have come into contact with such an animal are unknown.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billiards_at_Half-Past_Nine"title="Billiards at Half-Past Nine">
Architect Robert Faehmel's secretary, Leonore, describes Robert and the knowledge that something in her routine life is not ordinary. Robert is meticulous in everything he does. An old friend of Robert's arrives at the office but Leonore sends him to the Prince Heinrich Hotel, where Robert can be found every day from 9:30 to 11:00. Trouble is on the horizon for the entire Faehmel family, which includes three generations of architects: Heinrich Faehmel, his son Robert and Robert's son Joseph. The man who wants to see Robert, Nettlinger, is denied entry to the billiard room by the hotel concierge, Jochen, who will not allow Robert to be disturbed.Upstairs, Robert is telling bellboy Hugo about his life, and we discover that Nettlinger was once a Nazi policeman. Robert and his friend Schrella, both of whom were schoolmates of Nettlinger's, had opposed the Nazis, refusing to take "the Host of the Beast," a reference both to the devil and the Nazis. Schrella had disappeared after being beaten by Nettlinger and Old Wobbly, their gym teacher, also a Nazi policeman. Nettlinger and Old Wobbly had not only beaten Schrella and Robert, but had corrupted one of Robert's three siblings, Otto, who died in 1942 near Kiev. His mother, Johanna Kilb, was committed to a mental institution because she tried to save Jews from the cattle cars going to the extermination camps. It is now Heinrich's 80th birthday. Heinrich and Robert meet in a bar after visiting Johanna, sitting down and talking for the first time in many years. Meanwhile, Schrella has returned to Germany and talks with Nettlinger, who tries to make amends for his past life despite the fact that he has not really changed, and remains an opportunist. Schrella goes to visit his old home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Little_Australians"title="Seven Little Australians">
The seven children of the title live in 1880s Sydney with their father, an army Captain who has little understanding of his children, and their 20-year-old stepmother Esther, who can exert little discipline on them. Accordingly, they wreak havoc wherever possible, for example by interrupting their parents while they entertain guests and asking for some of their dinner (implying to the guests that the children's own dinner is inadequate).After a prank by Judy and Pip embarrasses Captain Woolcot at his military barracks, he orders that ringleader Judy be sent away to boarding school in the Blue Mountains.Meg comes under the influence of an older girl, Aldith, and tries to improve her appearance according to the fashions of the day. She and Aldith make the acquaintance of two young men, but Meg believes she has fallen in love with the older brother of one, Alan. When Aldith and Meg arrange to meet the young men for a walk, Meg is embarrassed after a note goes astray and Alan comes to the meeting instead and reproaches her for becoming 'spoilt', rather than remaining the sweet young girl she was. Meg returns home and later faints, having tight-laced her waist under pressure from Aldith until it affects her health.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Time_in_St._Cloud"title="Killing Time in St. Cloud">
After returning to St. Cloud a man becomes involved in a complicated web of lies, feuds, and secrets that leads to murder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_Moon"title="Around the Moon">
Having been fired out of the giant Columbiad space gun, the Baltimore Gun Club's bullet-shaped projectile, along with its three passengers, Barbicane, Nicholl and Michel Ardan, begins the five-day trip to the Moon. A few minutes into the journey, a small, bright asteroid passes within a few hundred yards of them, but does not collide with the projectile. The asteroid had been captured by the Earth's gravity and had become a second moon. The three travelers undergo a series of adventures and misadventures during the rest of the journey, including disposing of the body of a dog out a window, suffering intoxication by gases, and making calculations leading them, briefly, to believe that they are to fall back to Earth. During the latter part of the voyage, it becomes apparent that the gravitational force of their earlier encounter with the asteroid has caused the projectile to deviate from its course.The projectile enters lunar orbit, rather than landing on the Moon as originally planned. Barbicane, Ardan and Nicholl begin geographical observations with opera glasses. The projectile then dips over the northern hemisphere of the Moon, into the darkness of its shadow. It is plunged into extreme cold, before emerging into the light and heat again. They then begin to approach the Moon's southern hemisphere. From the safety of their projectile, they gain spectacular views of Tycho, one of the greatest of all craters on the Moon. The three men discuss the possibility of life on the Moon, and conclude that it is barren. The projectile begins to move away from the Moon, towards the 'dead point' (the place at which the gravitational attraction of the Moon and Earth becomes equal). Michel Ardan hits upon the idea of using the rockets fixed to the bottom of the projectile (which they were originally going to use to deaden the shock of landing) to propel the projectile towards the Moon and hopefully cause it to fall onto it, thereby achieving their mission.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_of_Neskaya"title="The Fall of Neskaya">
## Book One.A larenzu, Rumail Deslucido, arrives at Verdanta Castle, to make an alliance between Verdanta and his brother, Damian Deslucido, the ambitious king of Ambervale and Linn. Rumail tests each of the children for "laran", then arranges a proxy marriage between the youngest daughter, Kristlin (who dies about a year later). He sends the youngest son, Coryn, to Tramontana Tower.At Tramontana, Coryn learns to control his laran, and to put aside his differences with the rival Storn family. The Tower's keeper, Kieran, believes that the Towers should be neutral in the many petty wars of the Hundred Kingdoms, and should not supply "laran" weapons to anyone.Rumail Deslucido and his brother King Damian scheme to control more of the minor kingdoms of the Hellers, hoping eventually to challenge the Hasturs of the lowlands. Rumail reveals his "laran" ability – lying under truthspell and twisting the minds of others to do the same. Eventually, Rumail is dismissed from Neskaya Tower for immoral or illegal use of "laran".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rimrunners"title="Rimrunners">
The long, bitterly fought Company War between Earth and Union had ended – for everyone, except Conrad Mazian, commander of the Earth Company Fleet. By refusing to accept the peace, he and his loyal Mazianni became outlaws, hunted by all sides.Elizabeth 'Bet' Yeager had been one of Mazian's marines, a twenty-year veteran. Stranded on Pell Station when the Fleet was forced to pull out abruptly (as told in "Downbelow Station"), she managed to blend in with the many displaced war refugees. Since then, she survived by taking whatever starship berths she could find. Her luck begins to run out when her latest ship, the freighter "Ernestine", is forced to return to Pell for major repairs, a destination too fraught with danger for her. She stays behind on the decrepit, dying Thule Station. Day after day, she goes to the employment office, but there is little work. Few starships call and the ones that do, do not need the skills she can admit to possessing.Late one night, while trying to sleep in a dockside washroom, she is attacked by a man and, weak from hunger, barely manages to kill him. In desperation, she moves in with a lowlife bartender. When he tries to control her, with threats to go to the authorities about his suspicions about her, she dispatches him too. With time running out before his body is discovered, she signs up with the ship "Loki", a barely legitimate 'spook' that survives by gathering intelligence and selling it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchanter's_Luck"title="Merchanter's Luck">
Sandor ("Sandy") Kreja is the sole survivor of a moderately prosperous merchanter family that had operated in Union space. When he was a young boy, all but two of his relatives were killed or taken by the renegade Mazianni, once soldiers in the service of Earth, who had refused to accept the end of the Company War and turned pirate in order to keep on fighting.The three remaining Krejas had continued to run their aged freighter, "Le Cygne", as best they could, but an accident had killed one and a shady deal gone bad the other, leaving Sandy both impoverished and preposterously wealthy—the sole owner of a starship. By the dangerous expedient of hiring crewmen when possible and running solo when not, the young man had kept his ship running (under constantly changing names), but as unpaid debts piled up, he had begun to run out of safe Union ports.At Viking station, as Edward Stevens of "Lucy", Sandy has a chance sleepover with another merchanter, Allison Reilly, which proves to be pivotal to his future. Allison, one of the powerful Reillys of the superfreighter "Dublin Again", lets slip that she is going "across the line" to Pell, the Alliance star system. Having heard rumours that trade between Pell and Earth might be re-established and wanting desperately to see her again, he decides to try his luck in Alliance space.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripoint_(novel)"title="Tripoint (novel)">
Twenty years in the past, merchanter ships "Sprite" and "Corinthian" were docked at Mariner Station. What started out as a friendly sleepover between the inexperienced Marie Hawkins of "Sprite" and Austin Bowe of "Corinthian" turned into rape, with Marie becoming pregnant. She elected to raise the child, Thomas Bowe-Hawkins, on "Sprite", but was consumed with rage. Her brother becomes captain of the "Sprite". Tom grew up with an ambivalent mother and was never fully accepted by his family. When Austin later became senior captain of "Corinthian", Marie started tracking "Corinthian's" movements in order to expose what she suspected was smuggling.When the two ships cross paths again, this time at Viking, Marie is ready for her revenge. She and Tom scour the docks for information about "Corinthian's" cargo, but Tom is caught snooping and is imprisoned aboard "Corinthian", forcing the ship to depart prematurely for Pell Station via Tripoint. At Marie's insistence, "Sprite" pursues "Corinthian". On "Corinthian", Tom meets Austin, his domineering father, and Capella, second chief navigator and night-walker.When "Corinthian" docks at Pell Station, Tom's younger half-brother, Christian Bowe-Perrault tries to solve the problem by shipping him off to Sol Station, but Tom escapes and hides on the docks. Christian and Capella search frantically for him, unaware that Sabrina Perrault-Cadiz, Christian's cousin, has already found and befriended him. When Capella contacts old acquaintances for assistance, it attracts the unwanted attention of a dissident faction within the outlawed Mazianni Fleet. Capella is an ex-Fleet navigator with knowledge of Fleet routes and drop-points, which the dissidents want.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finity's_End"title="Finity's End">
It is eighteen years after the end of the Company War, at least as stationers experience time, less for merchanters subject to the effects of time dilation in the course of their travels. Regardless, the threat of the piratical Mazianni is ebbing. The Neiharts and their superfreighter "Finity's End" had spent the post-war years assisting the Alliance militia hunt down the renegades. But now the oldest of all existing merchanter families wants to return to trading.When the ship docks at Pell Station, the heart of the Alliance, the family retrieves one of its own. Fletcher Neihart's mother had been stranded there by the fortunes of war, giving birth to him on the station. Unable to adjust to stationer life, she had committed suicide when he was five years old, leaving him to suffer through a succession of foster homes. The lonely outsider had been befriended by a couple of "hisa", the gentle, intelligent natives of Pell's World. Now a young man of seventeen with dreams of working on the planet and no wish to take up the family business, he is furious when he is handed over against his will to his relatives as part of a deal between Elene Quen, Stationmaster of Pell, and senior "Finity" Captain James Robert Neihart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Friends_of_Eddie_Coyle_(novel)"title="The Friends of Eddie Coyle (novel)">
Eddie Coyle is an aging, low-level gunrunner for a crime organization in Boston, Massachusetts. He is awaiting sentencing after being convicted of driving a hijacked truck in New Hampshire. Eddie had been driving the truck for Dillon, a convicted felon and career criminal who is well connected to the syndicate. Coyle has refused to give Dillon up to the authorities in exchange for leniency. Coyle's last chance to avoid a prison term is a sentencing recommendation from ATF Special Agent Dave Foley, who demands that Coyle become an informer in return.A gang led by Jimmy Scalisi and Artie Van has been pulling off a series of daring day-time bank robberies with pistols supplied by Coyle. One of Coyle's sources for the pistols is a young gun runner, Jackie Brown, who is involved in a deal to supply military machine guns (M16 assault rifles) for other clients. When taking the delivery of the pistols, Coyle witnesses the rifles in the trunk of Jackie Brown's car and immediately informs Foley. Jackie is apprehended by Foley and his agents. Coyle feels he has fulfilled his end of the deal, but Foley puts the squeeze on Eddie, demanding more information for his cooperation.Angry at his mis-treatment of her, Scalisi's girlfriend Wanda tips off the police about the next planned bank robbery, leading the state police to arrest Scalisi and Van's gang in the commission of the robbery. During the arrests, the police shoot and kill a young member of the gang who is well-connected (and possibly related) to the head of a powerful crime family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temeraire_(series)"title="Temeraire (series)">
The series revolves around William Laurence and his dragon Temeraire. Laurence is a Captain in the British Royal Navy, serving in combat against Napoleon I's navy when he recovers a dragon egg unlike any other known to the British. The egg soon hatches, and Temeraire, a Chinese dragon, is born. Under the impression that an "unharnessed" dragon will become feral and unmanageable, Laurence becomes Temeraire's companion. Despite the difficulties this causes, Laurence begins to think of the dragon as his dearest friend. This forces a change in the officer's life, drawing him from the prestigious Royal Navy to the less desirable Royal Aerial Corps. The remainder of the original trilogy follows the adventures of Laurence and Temeraire as they do battle with the forces of Imperial France and the diplomatic fallout caused by Captain Laurence's adoption by the Emperor of China. The fourth novel, "Empire of Ivory", deals with Laurence and Temeraire seeking a cure for a contagious disease introduced by a North American dragon, which spreads throughout the British dragons while Napoleon seeks to press his advantage. The fifth novel, "Victory of Eagles", is the account of Napoleon's planned invasion of the United Kingdom, forcing a British retreat to Scotland, while Laurence faces the consequences of their treason in taking the cure for the illness to the French. The sixth novel begins within the penal colony of Australia (Laurence's death sentence for treason commuted to transport to the colony), and a chase across the continent to a sudden discovery that has far-reaching consequences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kira-Kira"title="Kira-Kira">
In the early 1950s, Katie Takeshima and her family live in Iowa, where her parents own a Japanese supermarket. When the store goes out of business in 1956, the family moves from Iowa to an apartment in Georgia where Katie's parents work at a hatchery with other Japanese families. Katie's best friend is her older sister Lynn, whom Katie looks up to as the most intelligent person she knows. She cites Lynn's ability to beat their Uncle Katsuhisa, a self-proclaimed chess grand master, at his own game as an example. Katie holds close to her heart the Japanese term "Kira-Kira", which Lynn taught her. They use it to describe things that glitter in their lives.When they first move to Georgia, Lynn guides Katie around her new surroundings and teaches her to always be positive about things. In this period, Lynn is portrayed to be highly sensible and independent as she teaches Katie to save money for their parents.When Katie enters school, she has difficulty being the only Japanese-American in her class. Her grades are solid average C's, in comparison to Lynn's ongoing straight A's. When Katie is six years old, her brother Samson (known as Sammy) is born. Lynn makes a friend whose name is Amber and also grows to be a teenager, becoming interested in boys and spending more time with her friends and lesser time with Katie. Katie also notices Lynn's change in behavior as she starts dabbling in makeup and worrying about beauty. Without Lynn's company, Katie makes friends with a girl called Sylvia "Silly" Kilgore, whose mother also works at the hatchery. However, Lynn starts feeling sporadically fatigued and ill and is diagnosed with anemia. Lynn is eventually diagnosed with lymphoma, and becomes even sicker, and then her friend Amber dumps her, along with Gregg, her boyfriend. The family decides to move into a house of Lynn's choice to help her recover, which appears to work for a short time. However, Lynn relapses from distress when Sammy is caught in a metal animal trap on the vast property owned by Mr. Lyndon, the owner of the hatchery. Lynn's condition continues to deteriorate and she becomes blank and irritable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Among_the_Savages"title="Life Among the Savages">
Jackson—speaking as the nameless mother who serves as narrator—relates a period of roughly six years in the life of her family, focusing particularly on her attempts to keep peace and domestic efficiency despite her increasing number of children. As the book's primary incidents begin, the family has "two children and about five thousand books" when they are abruptly given notice to evict from their city apartment. After a frantic last-minute search, they come upon the perfect home in the country and prepare to adjust to their new quiet-but-quirky life as newcomers to a small, insular New England village. The book relays a series of small comical adventures largely contrasting the children's natural acceptance of the change with their parents' struggles to keep up with them, such as eldest child Laurie's introduction to kindergarten (and his daily reporting of troublemaker classmate Charles' antics); middle child Jannie's insistence that her seven imaginary daughters (who all have the same name) be taken into account on every family outing; the comedy of the family's third child, Sally, whose lengthy delay in being born throws the whole family into chaos; and the night the entire family came down with grippe and the ensuing mix-ups. The book closes with the birth of a fourth and final child, Barry, who is again a fictional stand-in for Jackson's youngest child. The book was followed by a sequel, "Raising Demons."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternity_(novel)"title="Eternity (novel)">
In "Eon", Axis City split into two: a segment of Naderites and some Geshels took their portion of the city out of the Way and through Thistledown into orbit around the Earth; they spend the next thirty years aiding the surviving population of Earth to heal and rebuild from the devastating effects of the Death which strains their and the Hexamon government's resources. As time passes, sentiment grows to have Konrad Korzenowski reopen the Way. Firstly, to learn what has happened to the Geshels' long-sundered brethren (who took their portion of Axis City down the Way at relativistic near-light speed). And, secondly, to benefit from the commercial advantages of the Way (despite the risk that the Jarts will be waiting on the other side).In a parallel Earth, known as "Gaia", mathematician Patricia Vasquez (the primary protagonist of "Eon"), dies of old age; she never found her own Earth where the Death did not happen and her loved ones were still alive, but remained on the one she discovered (in which Alexander the Great did not die young and his empire did not fragment after his death). She passes her otherworldly artifacts of technology to her granddaughter, Rhita, who appears to have inherited her gifts. Rhita moves away from the academic institute the "Hypateion" (a reference to Hypatia) which Patricia founded and that world's version of Alexandria. Patricia's clavicle claims that a test gate has been opened onto this world of Gaia, and that it could be expanded further.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saint_and_the_Fiction_Makers"title="The Saint and the Fiction Makers">
Simon Templar is hired by a friend in the book publishing trade to protect one of his authors, a secretive recluse called Amos Klein who writes a popular series of spy novels.When he arrives at Klein's house in the country, he hears a woman's screams and several gunshots. Rushing to the rescue, he finds a woman tied up and gripping a revolver behind her back. He discovers that she is "Amos Klein", a woman who adopted a male pen name to increase sales of her novels. She explains that she has to be able to do everything her character in the novels does and that she was just doing some research. The pair are soon kidnapped by a group of people who claim to be members of S.W.O.R.D., the evil organization from Amos Klein's novels. Their leader, "Warlock", the mastermind of the group, mistakenly assumes that Simon Templar is Amos Klein and that the woman is his secretary. The kidnappers want Amos Klein to plot a grandiose heist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Highlanders_(Doctor_Who)"title="The Highlanders (Doctor Who)">
Following the Battle of Culloden, the British army is triumphant over the rebel forces of Bonnie Prince Charlie. When the TARDIS arrives, the Second Doctor, Ben and Polly encounter fleeing Scots rebels and are taken prisoner by them. They all hide in a deserted cottage with the Laird Colin McLaren, who has been badly wounded; his daughter Kirsty; his piper Jamie McCrimmon; and his son Alexander, who dies defending them from a patrol of English soldiers mopping up survivors. The patrol leader, Lt. Algernon Ffinch, is an ineffectual fop, but his Sergeant is more forceful and takes the Doctor, Jamie, Ben and the Laird to be hanged. But Polly and Kirsty manage to slip away.The two women hide in a cave, then an animal pit, from Lt. Ffinch, who believes the Prince to be one of them following the rumour that he fled the battlefield as a woman. Eventually Ffinch finds them, but they trick him and steal his money. Later in Inverness, the nearest major town to Culloden, they run into him again and use his previous foolishness to blackmail him.Elsewhere on the battlefield, the Royal Commissioner of Prisons, a shady character called Grey, plots to enslave any highlanders still alive and ship them to the colonies. He makes contact with an unscrupulous sea captain called Trask who agrees to use his ship “The Annabelle” for this. Amongst the prisoners he identifies for sale are the Doctor, Jamie, Ben, and the Laird. They are taken to the prison in Inverness but the Doctor cons his way out, and overpowers Grey and his secretary Perkins to make his escape. Grey is freed by Trask, who reports that the transportation plan has begun and arranges for a number of prisoners, including Jamie, Ben and the Laird, to be transferred to the ship. The prisoners learn that they are being sold as slaves but most accept this fate, believing seven years indentured labour to be better than the gallows. Only Ben, Jamie, the Laird and one of his friends, Willie Mackay, refuse to sign. When Ben attacks Grey, Trask has him thrown into the sea at the end of a rope.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragon_of_the_Ishtar_Gate"title="The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate">
The novel concerns the quest of Bessas of Zarispa, a young officer of the "Immortals" regiment, for the ingredients of a potion that the King has been told will give him immortality; the blood of a dragon and the ear of a king. Unbeknownst to Bessas, the third ingredient is the heart of a hero, and therefore Bessas' own.Relying on information given him by the priests of Marduk in Babylon that a reptile depicted in reliefs on their temple, the sirrush, is a real dragon and lives at the headwaters of the Nile, Bessas sets out for the source of the Nile, accompanied by his former tutor, Myron of Miletos, who is bored of teaching and wants to make a name for himself in the field of philosophy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Equinox"title="The Blue Equinox">
"The Blue Equinox" opens with Crowley's poem "Hymn to Pan", a devotional work devoted to the ancient Greek deity Pan. This is followed by an editorial, in which Crowley discusses Thelema, the A∴A∴ and the O.T.O., and the important role which he believed that they had to play in the Aeon of Horus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saint_and_the_People_Importers"title="The Saint and the People Importers">
This novel captures some flavour of the early-seventies English society by thrusting its titular hero against the immigration rackets exploiting the masses of underprivileged Asian workers (in this case, Pakistani) during the times when England "called the Empire home". The action starts when, getting in a cab in London, Simon Templar spots a particularly lurid headline on the frontpage of a newspaper forgotten by some previous customer, describing the horrible death of a Pakistani immigrant in Soho.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkabout_(novel)"title="Walkabout (novel)">
Two American siblings, Peter and Mary, are stranded by a gully in the Australian outback following a plane crash. Peter says they should seek out their uncle, who lives in Adelaide; Mary agrees and they begin walking across the desert, but they fail to realize that Adelaide is on the other side of the continent. They are without food save for a small piece of stick candy, and while falling asleep under a quandong tree they have a nightmare about how the captain got them to danger, only to be killed in a blast when he attempted to kill the navigator. The next day, they keep walking and searching for food but their efforts are in vain. While atop a bluff, Peter thinks he has found water but Mary makes him turn away to prevent him from becoming delirious, as she knows the silver pools are the salt pans of the outback. Suddenly, an Aboriginal teen of about Mary's age (referred to within the text as the "bush boy") appears and startles them, mostly due to his nudity. Hoping to make him leave, Mary glares at him. This proves ineffective. Hoping to find out about the strangers, he inspects both of them but finds nothing of interest, so he leaves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saint_and_the_Hapsburg_Necklace"title="The Saint and the Hapsburg Necklace">
On the eve of World War II the redoubtable Simon Templar (better known as THE SAINT) finds himself in the imperial city of Vienna, his attentions divided between a very sensuous countess and some legendary diamonds — both of which he is trying to keep out of Nazi hands.Since the days of the Holy Roman Empire, the legendary Hapsburg Necklace has been guarded by members of the Austrian nobility. But never before has it had so beautiful a protector as one Francesca, the Countess Malffy (also known as Frankie). And never before has it been so in danger of being stolen.For its hiding place, the Malffy ancestral manor, has recently been occupied by a new tenant — the Gestapo.And as THE SAINT and Frankie plan a mission to retrieve the necklace, it becomes increasingly apparent that the Germans are not their only adversaries. Also vying for the crown jewels is a most unpredictable eccentric who is every bit a match for Simon Templar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked_Rooms"title="Locked Rooms">
On their way back to Britain from India, Holmes and Russell stop at Russell's childhood home in San Francisco. As they approach San Francisco, Russell becomes more and more distracted. Holmes concludes from this, and her recurring dreams of falling objects, a faceless man, and locked rooms, that she is repressing some unpleasant memory. Russell denies this and tries to track down the psychiatrist who helped her recover from the trauma she suffered when she precipitated the car accident that killed her family. On the way, she meets a Chinese man, Long, who was the son of her parents' good friends. Long saves her from a murder attempt before introducing himself and saying that his own parents were killed shortly after her own parents died. When Russell finally tracks down the name of her psychiatrist, she learns that she was murdered after Russell departed for England several years ago.Holmes determines from the fact that there was a recent break-in at Russell's house, Russell's anxiety and distraction, the murder of the psychiatrist, and the most recent attempt on Russell's life, that there is something serious amiss. He hires Dashiell Hammett to join his investigation. They conclude that Russell was present during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, despite her denial of this fact, and it was this experience that produced the dream about falling objects. He learns from an interview with a survivor of the earthquake that Russell was very frightened by a man with several bandages on his face looking for her father — he had covered up his face because he had been burned while fighting a fire, and this made him appear faceless.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_(Maguire_novel)"title="Lost (Maguire novel)">
Winifred Rudge is an American writer who travels to London to visit a distant cousin, and to research a new novel about a woman haunted by the ghost of Jack the Ripper. When she arrives, she discovers that her cousin has vanished, his apartment (once owned by a common ancestor of theirs: a man who was supposedly the inspiration for Ebenezer Scrooge) is being renovated, and strange sounds are coming from the chimney. It seems the apartment is now haunted by a supernatural presence.Although the plot of the novel revolves around Winifred trying to chase down the ghost in her cousin's apartment, along the way a deep mystery that exists between Winifried and her cousin, John Comestor, is revealed. While trying to solve the mystery Winifried is forced to face the ghosts of her own past and examine her choices and motivations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Natürlichen_Pflanzenfamilien"title="Die Natürlichen Pflanzenfamilien">
The major groupings ("Abteilung", "Unterabteilung"), with selected lower rankings are shown here with [Volume number] and page number. N ("Nachträge" = supplement).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_Corpse_(novel)"title="Exquisite Corpse (novel)">
The novel unfolds in alternating chapters from the points of view of the four main characters. Andrew Compton, a convicted serial killer (based on serial killer Dennis Nilsen), escapes his UK prison cell in a self-induced cataleptic trance. Mistaken for dead by the authorities, he makes his way to New Orleans' French Quarter to start a new life. Seeking new victims, he instead meets Jay Byrne (based on Jeffrey Dahmer), a wealthy recluse who is also a serial killer, as well as a cannibal. The two at first intend to victimize one another, but upon realizing their similar proclivities, instead begin a torrid affair based on sex and murder.After learning that he is HIV-positive, writer Lucas Ransom reacts by rejecting all his former friends and breaking up with his teenage lover Tran. Increasingly embittered by his illness, Lucas vents his frustration through his alternate persona "Lush Rimbaud", host of a pirate radio program (in a pirate station with the callsign "WHIV") where Lucas rails at society's denial of gay men and the AIDS epidemic (coincidently, the callsign would be used in real life for a licensed station in New Orleans that chose the call letters specifically to remove stigma about HIV/AIDS but with no other relation to Brite's novel). Soon even this outlet isn't enough, and Lucas, sensing that death is approaching, becomes fixated on reconciling with Tran. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_People_Fell"title="When the People Fell">
The setting is the type of benign Venus imagined before the first space probes penetrated the clouds of that planet. Colonization has become stymied by the native inhabitants (loudies), who are apparently sentient bubbles that float around the landscape, getting in the way of human progress. Attempts to communicate with them produce no response. Confining them is useless (they drift back) and killing them produces a deadly explosion that contaminates a thousand acres (4 km²). The non-Chinese authorities of the early Instrumentality government have no answer.The ruler of Goonhogo (the entity that replaced China under the early Instrumentality) decrees that 82 million Chinesians (men, women, and children) be dropped from space, parachuting down to the surface. Each one has a simple mission — herd the bubbles together. Many die in the process, both in landing and from the bubbles exploding. The rest corralled the loudies together into herds, where they eventually starve, wiping out the species. Meanwhile, more Chinese parachute down with rice seeds and begin planting. Eventually, by sheer weight of numbers, the Chinese conquer Venus.Smith's point in the story is evidently to demonstrate how Chinese attitudes such as fatalism and obedience to authority, coupled with their large numbers, could outperform the "Yankee ingenuity" and "self-reliant individual" attitudes predominant in mainstream 1950s American science fiction of the time. (However, it is implied that the separate Chinese government and Chinese ethnic identity of the time of the Venus colonization no longer exist in the same form by the time of the story's "frame" interview.)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Life_(Krach_novel)"title="Half-Life (Krach novel)">
Two weeks before high school graduation and the geography of 18-year-old Adam Westman's life is about to change dramatically. Many of the familiar landmarks will remain—his best friend Dart riding shotgun; the suburban house where he lives with his dad and younger sister; and the numerous on-ramps and off-ramps that connect him to his hometown of Angelito in the center of centerless Los Angeles. But when death and love, perhaps, arrive unexpectedly, Adam must learn that trouble sometimes has to rumble through a tidy world to make room for the kind of magical connections that make life worth living.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freckles_(novel)"title="Freckles (novel)">
The hero is an adult orphan, just under twenty years of age, with bright red hair and a freckled complexion. His right hand is missing at the wrist, and has been since before he can remember. Raised since infancy in a Chicago orphanage, he speaks with a slight Irish accent, "scarcely definite enough to be called a brogue."Exhausted after days of walking and looking like a hobo, he applies for a job with the Grand Rapids lumber company, guarding timber in the Limberlost Swamp. McLean, part owner, organizer and field manager of the large company, and enthralled with the Limberlost, is impressed by the boy's polite assertiveness and hires him despite his youth and disability. He gives his name only as "Freckles", insisting that he has no name of his own. He claims the name given him in the orphanage (which we never learn) "is no more my name than it is yours". Freckles asks McLean to choose a name for him to put down on the books. McLean gives Freckles the name of his own father, James Ross McLean.Freckles' duty is to twice a day walk the perimeter of the lumber company's land, a seven-mile trek through lonely swampland, and to be on the watch for those who aim to steal the expensive timber. McLean's chief worry is Black Jack Carter, who has sworn to smuggle several priceless trees out of the swamp. Freckles' weapons are limited to a revolver and a stout stick which he carries at all times and uses to test the wire that marks the company's boundaries. At night Freckles boards with Duncan, head teamster for the lumber company, and Duncan's wife, who becomes a mother figure to Freckles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flanders_Panel"title="The Flanders Panel">
Julia, an art restorer and evaluator living in Madrid, discovers a painted-over message on a 1471 Flemish masterpiece called "La partida de ajedrez" ("The Chess Game") which reads "Quis Necavit Equitem", written in Latin (English: "Who killed the knight?"). The painting appears as the cover of the book in some editions.With the help of her old friend and father-figure, an antiques dealer named César, and Muñoz, a quiet local chess master, Julia works to uncover the mystery of a 500-year-old murder. At the same time, Julia faces danger of her own, as several people helping her along her search are also murdered.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_World_of_Og"title="The Secret World of Og">
In this fantasy adventure, four children — Penny, the leader; Pamela, her common-sense sister; Peter, whose life's ambition is to become a garbageman; and Patsy, who collects frogs in her pockets — set out in search of their baby brother, Paul, better known as “The Pollywog,” who has vanished mysteriously from their playhouse. Accompanied by their fearless pets, the children descend through a secret trapdoor into a strange underground world of mushrooms, whose green inhabitants know only one word: “OG!”
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Bear"title="The Fourth Bear">
DCI Jack Spratt heads the Berkshire Nursery Crime Division, handling all inquiries involving nursery rhyme characters and other PDRs (persons of dubious reality). After doubts arise concerning his handling of the Great Red-Legg'd Scissorman's arrest and the Red Riding Hood affair, he is suspended pending a mental health review. His DS Mary Mary promises to consult him on all cases, to bypass the suspension. They begin an investigation of porridge-smuggling by anthropomorphic bears.Jack's troubles increase when the argumentative Punches move in next door and his son adopts a sly and sticky-fingered pet. He is forced to reveal to his shocked wife that he is himself a PDR. Furthermore, his psychiatrist is particularly sceptical about his claim that his new car repairs itself when no one is watching, and the car salesman who can prove his sanity cannot be found. His self-esteem is somewhat restored when the newspaperman who has been hounding him begs Jack's help in finding his missing sister "Goldilocks". It seems she was working on an explosive story involving cucumber growers.Meanwhile, the Gingerbreadman, the notorious murderous biscuit (or possibly cake, occasionally cookie) escapes custody, leaving a trail of bodies; Jack is frustrated when the case is given to an unimaginative officer outside NCD. While Jack and Mary are making enquiries about Goldilocks, they twice encounter the fugitive biscuit, but fail to capture him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holding_the_Man"title="Holding the Man">
In 1976, Timothy Conigrave, a student at a high school in Victoria, fell in love with the captain of the school football team, John Caleo. So began a relationship that was to last for 15 years, a love affair that weathered disapproval, betrayal, separation, and ultimately death. With honesty and insight, 'Holding the Man' explores the highs and lows of their life partnership: the intimacy, constraints, temptations, and the strength of heart both men had to find when they tested positive for HIV.The story opens at Kostka, Xavier's junior [preparatory] school in Melbourne. Here, the author begins to sexually experiment with other boys, and comes to the realisation that he is gay. Several years later, on his first day at Xavier College (the Jesuit senior school), Conigrave sees John Caleo for the first time.On the far side of the crush I noticed a boy. I saw the body of a man with an open, gentle face: such softness within that masculinity. He was beautiful, calm. I was transfixed. He wasn't talking, just listening to his friends with his hands in his pockets, smiling. What was it about his face?He became aware that I was looking at him and greeted me with a lift of his eyebrows. I returned the gesture and then looked away, pretending something had caught my attention. But I kept sneaking looks. It's his eyelashes. They're unbelievable. [31]
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ordeal_of_Gilbert_Pinfold"title="The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold">
Gilbert Pinfold is an English novelist of repute who at the age of 50 can look back on a varied life that has included a dozen reasonably successful books, wide travel, and honourable service in the Second World War. His reputation secure, he lives quietly, on good but not close terms with his neighbours; his Roman Catholicism sets him slightly apart in the local community. He has a pronounced distaste for most aspects of modern life, and has of late become somewhat lazy, given to drinking more than he should. To counter the effects of his several aches and pains, Pinfold has taken to dosing himself with a powerful sedative of chloral and bromide. He conceals this practice from his doctor.Pinfold is very protective of his privacy, but uncharacteristically agrees to be interviewed on BBC radio. The main inquisitor is a man named Angel, whose voice and manner disconcert Pinfold, who believes he detects a veiled malicious intent. In the weeks that follow, Pinfold broods on the incident. He finds his memory beginning to play tricks on him. The encroaching winter depresses him further; he decides to escape by taking a cruise, and secures passage on the SS "Caliban", bound for Ceylon. As the voyage proceeds, Pinfold finds that he hears sounds and conversations from other parts of the ship which he believes are somehow being transmitted into his cabin. Amid an increasingly bizarre series of overheard incidents, he hears remarks which become progressively more insulting, and then directly threatening towards himself. The main tormentors are a man and a woman, whose vicious words are balanced by those of an affectionate younger woman, Margaret. He is convinced that the man is the BBC interviewer Angel, using his technical knowledge to broadcast the voices. Pinfold spends sleepless nights, awaiting a threatened beating, a kidnapping attempt and a seductive visit from Margaret.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_to_a_Christian_Nation"title="Letter to a Christian Nation">
The underlying premise Harris takes is one of utilitarianism. He states: "Questions about Morality are questions about happiness and suffering."Harris addresses his arguments to members of the conservative Christian Right in America. In answer to their appeal to the Bible on questions of morality, he points to selected items from the Old Testament Mosaic law, (death for adultery, homosexuality, disobedience to parents etc.), and contrasts this with, for example, the complete non-violence of Jainism. Harris argues that the reliance on religious dogma can create a false morality, which is divorced from the reality of human suffering and the efforts to alleviate it; thus religious objections stand in the way of condom use in Africa to prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS, embryonic stem cell research, comprehensive sex education, abortion, and the use of the new HPV vaccine.Harris also addresses the problem of evil—the difficulty in believing in a good God who allows disasters like Hurricane Katrina—and the conflict between religion and science. A 2005 Gallup poll suggested that 53% of Americans are sympathetic to creationism, so Harris spends some time arguing for evolution and against the notion of Intelligent Design:Harris considers the variety of religions in the world, citing a religious basis for many ethnic and inter-communal conflicts. Contrary to those who advocate religious tolerance, mutual respect, and interfaith dialogue, Harris contends that such values only make it more difficult to criticize faith-based extremism. While holding that spiritual experiences can be valuable and life-affirming—he expends considerable space in "The End of Faith" in arguing that they are necessary—Harris rejects their link to religious beliefs. He argues that religion may have served some useful purpose for humanity in the past, but that it is now the greatest impediment to building a "global civilization."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Arm_Bears"title="The Right to Arm Bears">
The planet Dilbia is in a vital spot for both human and Hemnoid space travel. Both are trying to persuade the Dilbians to work with them to use the planet as a way station.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Snake,_the_Crocodile,_and_the_Dog"title="The Snake, the Crocodile, and the Dog">
After returning from their adventure at the Lost Oasis, the Emersons try to get Nefret, their new ward, integrated into English country life. She has difficulty with the immaturity and meanness of girls her age, but is determined to learn the ways of her newly adopted culture. Nefret decides she will stay in England to study while the Emersons return to Egypt as usual in the fall, and Walter and Evelyn Emerson glady take her in. Ramses also decides to stay in England, as his crush on Nefret becomes more obvious to his mother (but no one else).So Amelia and the Professor sail east, to begin a new season with a new project - the complete clearing of an entire archaeological site. Despite Amelia's hopes that this will be a second honeymoon for them, Emerson is kidnapped—but no ransom demand or explanation is forthcoming. Amelia, Abdullah, and their circle of friends scour Luxor for any sign of Emerson, with the help of Cyrus Vandergelt, who appears on the scene just when Amelia needs him most.When Adbullah finally finds Emerson, imprisoned in a backyard shed, Amelia finds out that his captor wants information about their previous year's travels and the possibility of a lost Meroitic civilization (complete with artifacts and treasures to exploit). Unfortunately for the kidnapper, Emerson is the victim of amnesia and doesn't know anything about the Lost Oasis. Unfortunately for Amelia, it turns out Emerson doesn't remember her either—and is just as annoyed by her as when they first met. (See "Crocodile on the Sandbank".)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dreamstone_(novel)"title="The Dreamstone (novel)">
"The Dreamstone" begins in a forest called Ealdwood, the last remaining bastion of Faery on Earth. Once, the Sidhe had roamed the world freely, but when Man came and fought wars and spread evil, the dark Sidhe burrowed deep or hid in rivers and lakes, while the bright ones, the Daoine Sidhe left mortal Earth and returned to Faery. But one bright one, Arafel chose to remain behind and guard Ealdwood, the last untouched forest. Men avoided Ealdwood because those who ventured in never came out again.Arafel watched the coming and going of Men in the lands surrounding Ealdwood, but showed little interest in them, until one man sought shelter in the fringes of the forest. She confronted him and learned that his king at Dun na h-Eoin had been killed, and that he, Niall, was on the run from those who had seized power. Arafel tells him that he cannot stay in Ealdwood, but fearing for his safety, sends him to Beorc's Steading, a sanctuary hidden in a valley for "lostlings".Back in Ealdwood, another man stumbles into the forest. Arafel learns he is Fionn, the dead king's harper, fleeing Lord Evald of Caer Wiell. Evald had overthrown the king, taken his wife, Meara, and now claims Fionn's harp as his own. When Evald invades the forest in pursuit of Fionn, Arafel denies him access to the harper. Evald demands compensation for what he claims is his, and she gives him her dreamstone, a magical stone that preserves memories of the wearer. Evald returns to Caer Wiell and Arafel allows Fionn to stay in Ealdwood so she can listen to him sing. But the dreamstone Evald now wears causes both him and Arafel anguish: she can feel his ugly memories and evil, while he can feel her kindness and peace, which confuses him. When Fionn discovers what Arafel did, and the distress it is causing her, he leaves her to find Evald to trade his harp for her stone. Evald, driven mad by lust and kindness, invades Ealdwood again and meets Fionn. He gives Fionn the stone for the harp, but kills the harper out of spite. Arafel arrives too late to save Fionn and kills Evald with her silver sword. Devastated, Arafel recovers her dreamstone and retreats to Eald (Faery).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tree_of_Swords_and_Jewels"title="The Tree of Swords and Jewels">
In "The Dreamstone" Arafel, a Daoine Sidhe helps Ciaran, a halfling (half human, half elf) save Caer Wiell near to Ealdwood forest, the last remaining bastion of Faery on Earth. "The Tree of Swords and Jewels" continues the story ten years later, when Ciaran has married Branwyn and become Lord of Caer Wiell. All of Caer Wiell are aware of Ciaran's connections to the Sidhe, whom they fear. One day Arafel visits Ciaran and returns elf prince Liosliath's dreamstone to him, saying that she needs his help: dark forces have awakened again and have overrun part of Eald (Faery). Ciaran tells her that peace in the region is fragile: King Laochailan does not trust him, and Ciaran's brother Donnchadh of Caer Donn fears him and his elf heritage.Arafel begins searching for those responsible for the shrinking of Eald, and discovers Duilliath, a drow (dark elf) living in Dun Gol, the site of an ancient elf battle. Dun Gol is close to Caer Donn, and Duilliath has begun influencing Donnchadh's thoughts and actions. Just as Arafel controls Caer Wiell, Duilliath controls Caer Donn. Arafel tries to coax him back to sleep again, but a duel erupts and she is injured, forcing her to retreat to Eald. Trees in Eald are dying and Arafel tries unsuccessfully to call on the departed elves for help.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Charnel_Prince"title="The Charnel Prince">
In this sequel to "The Briar King", Anne, her maid Austra, and her protectors Cazio and z'Acatto are working to earn passage by sea to her home in Eslen, while trying to keep a low profile. Anne and Austra experience further trials with their friendship and Anne learns more about her destiny and undergoes a transformation into a mature and powerful adult. Sir Neil, against his wishes, and still haunted by the death of his love, Fastia, travels south to find Anne and meets with treachery and unexpected kindness. Meanwhile, Aspar, Winna, and Stephen Darige are tasked by Praifec Hespero to hunt down and kill the awakened Briar King. However, they discover that his presence might not be as harmful as the Church fears and discover more evidence that makes them question the Church's motives. Queen Muriele governs Eslen with a much wiser hand than her husband ever did, but she is faced with many challenges and finds unexpected allies. The book ends with her in prison after a palace coup by her brother-in-law Sir Robert, who has literally returned from the dead, but she has managed to keep her son safe and out of harm's way.In addition to the familiar characters from "The Briar King", "The Charnel Prince" introduced a new main character, a composer and a musical genius Leovigild "Leoff" Ackenzal. Heading to the royal castle to meet the late king William. Leoff accidentally stumbles on an evil plot to drown the Lowlands under waters. He helps to thwart the attempt and becomes a small hero. This helps him to get a position as the court composer and to start his masterwork, an opera-styled musical composition that brings together singers and an orchestra of 30 players for the first time in the history of the world. However, to finish his work, he has to find his way through the complex political situation of the court and the censorship of Praifec Hespero.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modesty_Blaise_(novel)"title="Modesty Blaise (novel)">
Willie Garvin has lost the will to live. He had worked for Modesty Blaise for six years in The Network, Modesty's criminal organisation, and rose to the position of her right-hand man and became her very best friend. Willie was on top of the world.But then Modesty disbanded The Network and retired, and Willie didn't know what to do with himself. He got involved as a mercenary in a South American revolution, but his heart wasn't in it. He was captured and is now sitting in a primitive prison, waiting listlessly to be executed.Fortunately, Sir Gerald Tarrant, head of a British secret service organisation, knows about Willie's situation, and he needs the services of Modesty and Willie for a very special mission. Sir Gerald visits Modesty and lays his cards on the table. Modesty is very grateful and agrees to help Sir Gerald as soon as she has rescued Willie.This is the start of the adventure. Sir Gerald's job turns out to be a perilous intervention against the criminal mastermind Gabriel, who intends to steal a huge consignment of diamonds. The action starts in the south of France, where Willie causes Paco (who is on Gabriel's payroll) to lose his head (literally). Then it's on to Egypt, where Modesty and Willie get captured by Gabriel's gang. The diamond heist succeeds, and the action moves to a small island in the Mediterranean where Modesty has to vanquish the incredible Mrs. Fothergill in unarmed combat. But then all of Gabriel's gang are in pursuit, and there is nowhere to run.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Day_in_Limbo"title="Last Day in Limbo">
Maude Tiller, one of the few female agents in Sir Gerald Tarrant's secret service, is miserable. Her last assignment involved her having to submit to sexually degrading treatment by Paxero, the man she had been sent to spy on. And she hadn't even learned anything about the rich and enigmatic Paxero to justify the disgusting things she had let herself be subjected to.Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin discover how their good friend Maude has been mistreated, and they decide to teach Paxero a lesson. But when they break into his villa on the outskirts of Geneva they unexpectedly find a Breguet watch that was a gift from Modesty to Danny Chavasse, a very close friend of Modesty's. Everyone thought Danny had died when a cruise ship sank two years ago along with some 30 other people, but finding his watch indicates that Danny's fate was not as simple as that. Modesty confirms that Danny is alive with a visit to insane, but verifiably clairvoyant Lucifer (last featured in the novel, "I, Lucifer"), who has the ability to predict when someone is about to die; although he indicates Danny still lives, he warns her that one of her other friends may soon be killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Xanadu_Talisman"title="The Xanadu Talisman">
Ms. Pendergast, a middle-aged nanny operating the criminal force "El Mico", may not be your typical villain. But in the world of Modesty Blaise, who is? She and her two young charges, Jeremy and Dominic Silk, have made themselves the most potent underworld force in North Africa. In their latest triumph, they've stolen "The Object" an item of immense value. However, they've also suffered their greatest setback - Bernard Martel, a top lieutenant, has double-crossed them and stolen it back.Pursued and close to death, a delirious Bernard reveals to Modesty a series of obscure clues, setting her and Willie on a quest to recover The Object and rescue Tracy, Bernard's wife. From thrilling Tangier, to mysterious Marrekesh, to the grandeur of the High Atlas Mountains, Blaise and Garvin stop at nothing in one of their most riveting and action-packed adventures yet. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_of_Morningstar"title="The Night of Morningstar">
"The Watchmen" is an international terrorist organisation that has sprung out of nowhere and is making major assaults, for example killing the entire Turkish Embassy staff in Madrid, wrecking a French nuclear power plant, and blowing up a dam in Utah. Nobody knows who they are or what their real motives are.CIA agent Ben Christie, an old friend of Modesty Blaise, is trying to infiltrate The Watchmen. But Modesty runs into Ben in San Francisco and blows his cover. Things go from bad to worse when Modesty tries to hang around to help Ben if necessary and gets captured by The Watchmen. She and Ben are held at gun point on a small fishing boat in San Francisco Bay as The Watchmen make final preparations to destroy the Golden Gate Bridge.Modesty manages to escape, but without gaining any way of locating The Watchmen. Back in England, she and Willie Garvin eventually get a lead on one of the top leaders of The Watchmen, Major the Earl St. Maur, formerly leader of a British Marine Commando battalion.Following St. Maur's trail to Madeira Island off the coast of Morocco leads to several surprises, not the least of which is that The Watchmen intend to kill the Presidents of the United States and France, and Prime Ministers of United Kingdom and West Germany. This has to be prevented, of course, but before Modesty and Willie can get a warning out they are captured by The Watchmen and imprisoned and drugged such that they can not possibly escape. The Watchmen's plan: To leave Modesty's and Willie's dead bodies at the scene of the attack, clothed in Watchmen uniforms.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Maggs"title="Jack Maggs">
Set in 19th century London, "Jack Maggs" is a reworking of the Charles Dickens novel "Great Expectations". The story centres around Jack Maggs (the equivalent of Magwitch) and his quest to meet his 'son' Henry Phipps (the equivalent of Pip), who has mysteriously disappeared, having closed up his house and dismissed his household.Maggs becomes involved as a servant in the household of Phipps's neighbour, Percy Buckle, as he attempts to wait out Phipps or find him in the streets of London. He eventually cuts a deal with the young and broke up-and-coming novelist Tobias Oates (a thinly disguised Charles Dickens) that he hopes will lead him to Phipps. Oates, however, has other plans, as he finds in Maggs a character from whom to draw much needed inspiration for a forthcoming novel which he desperately needs to produce.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Reflection"title="The Final Reflection">
Particular aspects of Klingon society depicted include:The novel concerns an intergenerational conflict within the Klingon government, between a faction wanting war with the Federation and a faction desiring accommodation for fear of Klingon defeat. The Klingon ambassador and his associates play a surprising role in this conflict, one which remains secret until the publication of a "tell-all" book forty years later, one which is read by Captain James T. Kirk in the "framing" story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_Kennedy"title="Who Killed Kennedy">
The book's credited co-writer, fictional journalist James Stevens, investigates the events occurring in 1970s Britain and the connection between them, the anarchist terrorist Victor Magister (also known as "the Master"), the organisation known as UNIT, their scientific adviser known as "the Doctor" and the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gospel_According_to_Adam"title="The Gospel According to Adam">
A young man walks a scorching Cairo street. At the entrance to the city’s pivotal main square, he notices a succulent girl. Ineluctably drawn into her magnetic field, and the swirling, palpitating square ahead, he starts to fantasize about how he would talk to her, seduce her, rape her, love her, abandon her, cherish her were he, for example, a Brazen Rake, a Brutal Bohemian, a Sensitive Painter, or a Bald Mechanic, jumping from persona to persona as his imaginings become more and more feverish, while in his mind the girl goes through a similar series of transformations. These characters—a circus parade of Egypt’s contemporary human menagerie—are not, however, mere dress-up costumes to be donned and discarded at their author’s whim. They, and others who emerge from the side alleys of his mind, strut their stuff, accost one another, argue, and shout until eventually they leave him, on a scorching Cairo street, peering after an infinite succession of receding, parallel clamorous worlds, from whose possibilities he must draw his own conclusions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Frog_Prince,_Continued"title="The Frog Prince, Continued">
Instead of living happily ever after, issues ensue on both sides. The princess wants the prince to go do something heroic instead of lying around the castle catching flies all day (he's now human but retains some froggy habits). The prince wishes she wouldn't nag him and thinks he was happier back at his lily pad. Eventually he gets fed up and runs away. The prince encounters three witches on his wanderings and asks each to turn him back into a frog, so he can live happily ever after. The first witch thinks he is looking for Sleeping Beauty. The second witch offers him a poisoned apple. The third lives in a gingerbread house, appears to know Hansel and Gretel, and invites the prince in for dinner. The prince wisely flees from these witches, but finds himself lost in the forest with night falling.At last, he happens upon a fairy godmother, who is on her way to see a girl about a ball, but who obligingly turns him into a carriage (her repertoire is limited). As he sits in the forest and realizes just how good he had it with the princess, he thinks he'll never get home again. Fortunately, the fairy godmother's magic wears off at (not surprisingly) midnight, the prince turns back into a prince, and he runs home to his princess. When she tells him how much she loves him and was worried about him, the prince kisses the princess, and their troubles are resolved with a different happy ending: they are both transformed into frogs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wild_Geese_(Mori_novel)"title="The Wild Geese (Mori novel)">
Suezo, a moneylender, is tired of life with his nagging wife, so he decides to take a mistress. Otama, the only child of a widower merchant, wishing to provide for her aging father, is forced by poverty to become the moneylender's mistress. When Otama learns the truth about Suezo, she feels betrayed, and hopes to find a hero to rescue her. Otama meets Okada, a medical student, who becomes both the object of her desire and the symbol of her rescue.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Certain_Woman"title="A Certain Woman">
Yōko Satsuki, oldest of three sisters raised by a "progressive" mother at the start of the twentieth century, is strong-willed but capricious. She falls in love with a journalist (Kibe), and marries him in a "love match", when arranged marriages were still the norm. However, Yōko is very quickly bored with the journalist, and suddenly decides to divorce him and return to her parents' house. The journalist is devastated by the brief marriage and divorce, but Yōko feels only contempt for him, and (in the opening of the story), when she sees him on a train, she completely ignores his existence.After her parents' death, and following pressure from her relatives and friends, Yōko agrees to marry a friend of a friend (Kimura) who has settled in Chicago in the United States. However, on the steamer from Yokohama, Yōko has an affair with a married purser (Kuraji), oblivious to the disapproving eyes of the other passengers. By the time she reaches the United States, Yōko decides not to marry Kimura. After taking money from the hapless Kimura, Yōko returns to Japan together with Kuraji. Yōko and Kuraji start living together, despite the fact that Kuraji remains married to someone else, and Yōko has to look after her younger sisters. However, Yōko fails to find happiness, as she struggles financially and bickers constantly with Kuraji. Kuraji proves unreliable, and eventually disappears with a police arrest warrant over his head.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_Lun_Dun"title="Un Lun Dun">
The book begins with two twelve-year-old girls, Zanna and Deeba, who have begun to notice several strange things happening around them, all of them centering on Zanna.After she and her friends are attacked by a dark cloud, Zanna spends the next two nights at Deeba's house. Deeba is awoken in the middle of the night by spies moving a broken umbrella. The girls follow it into the basement of a building, where they are drawn through a gap between the worlds of London and Un Lun Dun (or UnLondon).UnLondon is a nonsensical mirror version of London, inhabited by various creatures and animated items that have been discarded by the inhabitants on London. A boy named Hemi saves them from a roving pile of trash but is later shooed away by the tailor Obaday Fing who reveals that the boy is a ghost who was trying to get close enough to them to possess one of them. In conversation he realises that Zanna is the "Shwazzy," a prophesied chosen one who is destined to save UnLondon from the Smog – an evil, sentient cloud of pollution.With the help of Fing, Skool (a friend of Fing's in an old-fashioned diving suit), Conductor Jones, Rosa the bus driver, and the Slaterunners (a tribe of people who walk only on roofs), Zanna and Deeba make their way to the Propheseers where they learn more about the Smog. Apparently, after the Smog was created in London, a group of weatherwitches called the "Armets" battled it with a magic weapon called the "Klinneract." However, the Smog was not killed. Instead, it travelled to UnLondon. It is prophesied in The Book (a talking tome) that the Shwazzy would come one day and save UnLondon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_Griffins"title="Grey Griffins">
The Grey Griffins series follows the story of four sixth graders who live in the fictional city of Avalon, Minnesota. These four friends formed a secret order named The Order of the Grey Griffins, consisting of, Grayson Maximillian "Max" Sumner III (the leader) and his friends: Natalia Romanov (the marshal), Ernie Tweeny (the steward), and Harley Eisenstein (the warden). In "The Revenge of the Shadow King", the Grey Griffins discover a link between their 'innocent' card game (Round Table) and a magic book (the Codex Spiritus) which Max discovers in his grandmother's attic. The story focuses on the friendship between the four 'Griffins', and their adventures as they stumble upon one dark secret after another and soon learn that the world in which they lived was much more dangerous than they ever believed. With the help of the Knights Templar (a shadowy organization that protects humanity from the monsters and abuses of faerie magic), the Griffins uncover a plot to hand the earth over to the malevolent Shadow King.In "The Rise of the Black Wolf" Max and his friends travel to his father's castle in Scotland for Christmas. But even before they arrive, they are attacked by Morgan La Fey, the sorceress they had believed defeated in the previous book. Disaster strikes the Sumner Castle, and Max and his three best friends set off on a round-the-world journey to collect the three scattered pieces of the Spear of Ragnarok.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutineers'_Moon"title="Mutineers' Moon">
The book’s premise is that the Moon is a massive space ship controlled by a self-aware computer that wants its rightful crew back aboard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keeper_of_the_Isis_Light"title="The Keeper of the Isis Light">
Olwen is a young human woman living on the planet Isis as the keeper of the Light (a navigation beacon). Her parents having died, her only companion is a robotic DaCoP (Data Collector and Processor), called Guardian. On Olwen's 16th birthday (10th on Isis), the Guardian tells her that settlers are coming from Earth to Cascade Valley. Olwen is in distress thinking that these settlers will ruin her perfect world.Guardian explains that she must wear a special protective suit to protect her from the viruses and bacteria the settlers might be carrying. One of the younger settlers, Mark London, falls in love with Olwen, and Olwen wishes Guardian to allow her to see Mark without her suit. Guardian refuses.One day, Mark overhears Guardian discussing some of Olwen's blood samples with Dr. MacDonald and he thinks Olwen might be in trouble so he climbs up towards her house. When he sees Olwen, he suffers an accident and falls from the top of Lighthouse Mesa. This turns out to be because of his shock at Olwen's appearance under the suit.Later, Guardian tells Olwen the truth about the death of her parents, and his subsequent care of her as her mother wished. To keep Olwen safe, he changed her genetically, so the ultraviolet rays from Isis' sun, Ra, would not harm her, allowing her to climb to Isis' mountain heights. Shocked at the realization that Mark fell because of her, Olwen tries to enjoy playing with her favourite pet, a dragon-like native animal called Hobbit, when Hobbit is shot by hunting settlers. In rage, Olwen chases the Hunters back to the village. When the settlers see Olwen, they are disgusted by her appearance. Olwen refuses to wear the suit and vows to never go down into Cascade Valley again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conundrum_(Dragonlance_novel)"title="Conundrum (Dragonlance novel)">
"Conundrum" follows a boat of gnomes, named the "Indestructable", to sail around the world of Krynn. However, when they reach the doorway to the bottom of Krynn, things change.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckoo's_Egg_(book)"title="Cuckoo's Egg (book)">
Dana Duun Shtoni no Lughn (Duun), a member of the Shonunin race, becomes the guardian of an alien infant who is, by the description of its appearance, a human. Naming the infant Haras, meaning Thorn, Duun chooses to give him a childhood similar to Duun's own, in isolation in the remote Sheon. The two are periodically visited by meds and Ellud, a government representative. As Thorn grows to early childhood, Duun trains him according to the ways of the warrior Guild to which Duun belongs, the Hatani. The Hatani are a class of warrior-judges revered by most Shonunin, given absolute jurisdiction to solve conflicts, yet isolated from society.As Thorn grows, he becomes more disturbed by his physical differences from the few Shonunin he has contact with, but Duun refuses to give him answers about his origins. During an outdoor training exercise when Thorn is sixteen years old, he encounters Shonunin settlers nearby, who were aware of his existence. They become frightened and begin to hunt him. Thorn and Duun escape relatively unharmed, but Duun decides they must leave Sheon. Duun tells Thorn that his appearance is not a genetic mistake and reveals that Thorn has no parents: he was born from an artificial womb.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lioness_(novel)"title="The Lioness (novel)">
The evil green dragon Beryl oppresses the kingdom of Qualinesti with the aid of her Dark Knights. A resistance leader, a mysterious Kagonesti woman who is known as 'The Lioness' arises to battle her.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Thane"title="Dark Thane">
After a series of ugly battles and incidents, the dwarven community becomes increasingly isolationist in its city under the mountains. Unfortunately dark magic, backstabbings, betrayal and power grabs threaten to destroy the already destabilized dwarf society.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(novel)"title="Spin (novel)">
The story opens when Tyler Dupree is twelve years old. Tyler and his mother live in a guest house on the property of aerospace millionaire E.D. Lawton and his alcoholic wife, Carol. Tyler is friends with the couple's thirteen-year-old twins: Jason, a brilliant student who is being groomed to take over the family business, and Diane, with whom Tyler is in love. One night while stargazing, the three children witness all the stars simultaneously disappear. Telecommunications suffer as every satellite falls out of orbit simultaneously. Attempts to communicate with the ISS are unsuccessful.An opaque black "spin membrane" has been placed around Earth. The membrane has slowed time so that approximately 3.17 years pass outside the membrane for every second within, or 100 million years on the outside for every year within. The membrane is permeable to spacecraft, and it protects Earth from the harmful effects of concentrated stellar radiation and cometary impact. A simulated sun on the inside of the membrane allows for a largely normal life cycle to continue. However, the passage of time outside the membrane means that all life on earth will end in a few decades when the sun's expansion makes that region of the solar system uninhabitable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquitoes_(novel)"title="Mosquitoes (novel)">
## Prologue."Mosquitoes" opens in the apartment of one of the story's main characters, a reserved and dedicated sculptor named Gordon. Ernest Talliaferro, a friend of the artist, joins him in the apartment, watching intently as Gordon chisels away at a sculpture. Talliaferro engages the sculptor in a largely one-sided 'conversation' about his abilities with women. The artist works around the chatty Talliaferro, indifferently agreeing with every claim and question, yet declines the offer to attend an evidently aforementioned boat trip hosted by the wealthy Mrs. Maurier.Leaving the apartment to get a bottle of milk for Gordon, he meets Mrs. Maurier, the hostess of the upcoming yachting trip, who is accompanied by her niece, Pat. A quick return to Gordon's apartment follows where Mrs. Maurier personally extends the offer for him to join the yachting excursion. Though Gordon maintains a distant and uninterested aura, it becomes evident through the stream-of-consciousness passages that follow that he is at odds with himself over his sudden attraction to Pat that changes his mind about the trip.When Talliaferro takes leave of Gordon and the women, his path through the city and the paths of other characters that diverge in his wake serve to introduce the multifaceted New Orleans artistic community around which the plot focuses. At a dinner that follows, Talliaferro's visit with Gordon, the conversations about art that ensue as well as the sexual tensions that are hinted at in the interactions of Talliaferro, Julius Kaufmann, and Dawson Fairchild set the stage for the interactions and themes that come to typify rest of the novel.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_Is_the_Key"title="Fear Is the Key">
In the prologue, set in May 1958, John Talbot, owner of Trans Carib Air Charter Co, is at an airfield in British Honduras, awaiting radio contact with one of his aircraft en route to Tampa, Florida, which is being piloted by his twin brother and in which his wife and baby son are passengers. Not long after he establishes contact the aircraft is attacked by a P-51 Mustang, after which all contact is lost.Two years later Talbot is on trial for robbing a bank. At a point where his guilt is in doubt, new information comes to light implicating him in the death of a police officer. Now desperate, he escapes by taking a young woman hostage from the court room and stealing a car. However, he is tracked down by a private detective, Herman Jablonski, who reveals that the young woman is Mary Ruthven, daughter of oil millionaire General Ruthven. Jablonski turns Talbot over to the General and his three business associates - Vyland, Royale and Larry (Vyland’s drug-addict son) - who, instead of turning him over to the police, hire him for an unspecified task, retaining Jablonski to keep him under guard.In a plot reveal, we discover that Talbot and Jablonski, a former police officer, have engineered the scenario, for reasons as yet unknown. Talbot slips out of the General's house and travels to an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico, searching it for signs of something out of the ordinary. On 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borkmann's_Point"title="Borkmann's Point">
The novel is set in the early 1990s when Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, a 30-year veteran of police work who appreciates fine food and drink, cuts short his vacation to help the police chief of the remote town of Kaalbringen and his small crew investigate two ax murders. Another identical murder occurs in the weeks leading up to the retirement of Police Chief Bausen and it's expected that solving them would not only complete their work while Van Veeteren is available, but would be a high point for Bausen's career exit. Bausen is determined that the cases are solved quickly and the public is safe again before he departs.At a loose end in Kaalbringen, Van Veeteren accepts Bausen's collegial hospitality. A widower, Bausen generously shares from his expensive wine cellar and together they draw close over a love of chess. The sympathetic Van Veeteren wants to resolve the difficult investigation for his old friend's sake, which Bausen also appreciates.The problem is that the killings are random with the victims completely unrelated, and the murderer is too clever to be found or even noticed. Significantly the corpses are discovered axed precisely in the same way with a butcher's chopper which shows the killer's attention to detail. Just when it seems that the Ax Murderer – so dubbed by the press – is on a roll, the killings stop at three. The work to find a connecting thread is shared by a crew that includes Beate Moerk, a dedicated, single female colleague with dreams of becoming a private detective; Münster, a detective whose career is creating cracks in his marriage and family life; and others like the nerdish Kropke who bring their professional skills as well as their personality traits to bear. All strive to solve the puzzle as time runs out, especially when Beate Moerk goes missing while jogging late at night.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Franklin's_Island"title="Dr. Franklin's Island">
A plane to a research facility in Ecuador crashes in the ocean and the only survivors are three children: Semi Garson, the female narrator; Miranda, a brave girl; and a boy called Arnie. They must swim to the nearby island and survive on their own. Soon Arnie disappears and the girls are taken hostage on the island by Dr Franklin and his assistant Dr Skinner, who perform transgenic experiments on them. This transforms Miranda into a bird and Semi into a manta ray, who can still communicate through radio chips planted in their new bodies. It is revealed that the missing Arnie, also a prisoner of Dr. Franklin, is eavesdropping on them and reporting their conversations to the scientists. Arnie tells the two girls that there is a cure to their condition and says that he will try to help them by obtaining it. Semi soon begins to covertly receive the treatment, learning that Skinner is sneaking her the doses of antidote.Skinner frees her from the lockup, horrified by the experiments. Semi, now a full human again, finds a snake and discovers that it is Arnie. They are recaptured by Franklin, who also have Miranda trapped in a net. They attack in a desperate last stand, and the scientist is killed after smashing into an electric fence. Semi, Miranda and Arnie escape to the mainland in a boat. On the way home, Semi gives Miranda and Arnie the antidote, and they return to being human.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Memoirs_of_a_Survivor"title="The Memoirs of a Survivor">
The story takes place in a near-future Britain where society has broken down due to an unspecified disaster, referred to as "The Crisis." The new society that emerges after the collapse retains many features of the old world but is fundamentally different. What serves as a government in the post-crisis nation is unable to consolidate its authority and exercises little control over the populace. Newscasts can be heard and law and order are upheld by vigilantes and a handful of policemen. Education exists for those who pass as the wealthier survivors, while schools for the poor act as an apparatus of the army and are designed to control the population. Limited commercial activity continues, but scavenging is required to obtain rare goods.By the start of the novel, the situation in the society is starting to deteriorate as the edifice of the past society crumbles. The narrator describes people moving out of the city, and empty shelves indicate a food shortage. Rationing is in effect, and gangs migrate through the city block by block attacking residents. Many of the narrator's neighbours want to move out of the city as the situation becomes worse.The narrator, a middle-aged woman who lives a quiet life in a flat, unexpectedly ends up with 'custody' of a teenage girl named Emily Cartwright and her dog Hugo. The narrator seeks to please the new arrival and works hard to ensure that Emily has a high opinion of her. She often comments on Emily's competence and neatness and ponders the purpose of the girl's existence. Emily herself is intelligent and insightful but is also quite distant. The narrator and Emily somewhat enjoy each other's company and seem to form a tacit arrangement of tolerance between them.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twenty-Seventh_City"title="The Twenty-Seventh City">
The story proper begins when S. Jammu, an Indian woman who previously served as police commissioner of Bombay and is distantly related to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, takes over duties as the new St. Louis County chief of police. Her surprise appointment is greeted with confusion and suspicion, especially among the political and business elite that make up the county's advisory board, Municipal Growth. Over the coming months, a combination of a cult of personality, a Native American terrorist group, blackmail, and extortion bring most of the city leaders, including the leaders of the black community, to support Jammu. Those not won over or suppressed include General Norris, a right-wing business owner, and Martin Probst, a local construction magnate. While Probst's initial misgivings are more to do with maintaining impartiality, his concerns are deepened by Norris's reports of Jammu's associates engaging in illegal activities, including surveillance of political opponents.A proposed merger between the city and county, part of a larger property speculation scheme hatched by Jammu and her cohorts, begins a clash between Jammu and Probst. Jammu acts as the figurehead for the merger whilst Probst reluctantly leads the opposition movement. Further pressure is brought to bear on Martin Probst in order to make him endorse Jammu and his family life begins to suffer. First, his 17-year-old daughter, Luisa, moves out of the family home to live with her older boyfriend. Then Martin's wife, Barbara, is seduced and ultimately kidnapped by Jammu's subordinate Balwan Singh, even as Martin is led to believe that Barbara has left him for another man. Despite the public politics and private intrigues, Martin Probst and S. Jammu find themselves drawn to each other and eventually sleep together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini_2000,_or,_Woman's_Destiny"title="Anno Domini 2000, or, Woman's Destiny">
The novel describes the exploits of Hilda Fitzherbert, a 23-year-old Undersecretary for Home Affairs in a future where the British Empire has achieved both female suffrage (which New Zealand granted in real life in 1893) and become an Imperial Federation, which also included Belgium and coastal territories along the English Channel. However, Sir Reginald Paramatta, a villainous Australian republican, has his eyes set on the abduction and wooing of Miss Fitzherbert. Miss Fitzherbert foils the Republican plans and falls in love with Emperor Albert, the dashing young ruler of the Federated British Empire.Unfortunately, their plans hit a snag when the Emperor refuses the hand of the female US president's daughter, which precipitates an Anglo-American war, which the Empire wins, leading to the dissolution of the United States, its reabsorption into the Empire, and the ensuing marriage of Hilda and the Emperor. Several years later, the Emperor and his Empress find that their opinions about male primacy in royal succession have reversed themselves, when faced with a brilliantly competent princess and bookish, scholarly prince as prospective heirs apparent to the throne.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bancroft_Strategy"title="The Bancroft Strategy">
Todd Belknap, a field agent for Consular Operations, is cut loose from the agency after a job gone wrong. But when his best friend and fellow agent is abducted abroad and the government refuses to step in, Belknap decides to take matters into his own hands.Meanwhile, Andrea Bancroft learns she’s about to inherit 12 million dollars from a cousin she never met—with one condition: She must sit on the board of the Bancroft family foundation. Having been estranged from her father’s family for most of her life, Andrea is intrigued. But what exactly is the Bancroft’s involvement with “Genesis,” a mysterious person working to destabilize the geopolitical balance at the risk of millions of lives? In a series of devastating coincidences, Andrea and Belknap come together and must form an uneasy alliance if they are to uncover the truth behind “Genesis”—before it is too late.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silver_Donkey"title="The Silver Donkey">
The book traces the journey of an English soldier who comes across two young girls, Marcelle and Coco, in the rural French town of Wissant. The girls help the soldier, who suffers from psychological blindness as a side-effect of post-traumatic stress, to plan a way to cross the English Channel back to his brother. The girls bring him food and in return he tells them moralistic tales about courage, perseverance and trying your best against all odds. Though his stories are fiction, one is not: the story of his younger brother John who while extremely ill, finds a small silver donkey whilst digging in the garden. The soldier carries the silver donkey with him everywhere for luck, hope and inspiration, which the soldier claims will spread to Coco when he gives her the donkey.The story can be seen in two ways: from an adult's perspective or from that of an innocent child. The soldier could be lying in order to get the girls to help him, or he could be telling the truth.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Motel_Life"title="The Motel Life">
Frank and Jerry Lee Flannigan are two down-and-out brothers who live a meager existence in Reno, Nevada. Both men are high school dropouts who live in cheap motel rooms, work at odd jobs for money, and drink heavily. One night, while driving drunk during a blizzard, Jerry Lee accidentally hits and kills a teenage boy on a bicycle. Although the accident is the boy's fault, there are no witnesses, and Jerry Lee is certain that the police will put the blame on him. He convinces Frank to leave town with him and flee to Montana. Along the way, Jerry Lee abandons Frank in Wyoming and then burns the car in a secluded Idaho forest. Both men return separately to Reno.The police seem to take no interest in the case, so both men attempt to settle back into their Reno lives. Frank adopts an abused, half-frozen dog he finds during a snowstorm. Acting on a tip from a friend, he scrapes together $400 and bets it on the Tyson-Douglas boxing match, winning more than $5,000. He also tracks down the family of the dead teenager and stands outside their home, watching them come and go. Jerry Lee, meanwhile, becomes consumed by guilt and attempts suicide, shooting himself in the leg. He survives and lands in the hospital. On the day of the Tyson-Douglas fight, the police come to question Jerry Lee; they have discovered the burned-out wreck of his car in Idaho. Once again, Jerry Lee convinces Frank to flee Reno.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hammer_and_the_Cross"title="The Hammer and the Cross">
The story begins with Shef as little more than a thrall in his stepfather's service. When he is not busy with mundane tasks, Shef finds himself aiding the village blacksmith, where he develops his talents as well as an affinity for invention. A Viking army invades, and Shef's stepsister Godive is taken during a raid on their village. Shef and his friend Hund proceed to the encampment of the Ragnarssons, leaders of the invading army. Rising swiftly in and beyond the Viking army, Shef's greatest task becomes defeating a new invasion.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hippopotamus_Pool"title="The Hippopotamus Pool">
Amelia and Emerson are in Cairo to greet the 20th century, when a mysterious Mr. Shelmadine presents them with a gold ring from an unknown tomb bearing the cartouche of Queen Tetisheri. The Emersons must defend against criminals and tomb robbers. This time, Amelia is up against two unknown parties, one to save, one to avenge.This book also introduces David Todros, Ramses's lifelong friend and partner in adventures. Evelyn and Walter Emerson come back to the land of the pharaohs for the first time since their romance in the ruins of the heretical pharaoh's city, Amarna.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ode_to_Gallantry"title="Ode to Gallantry">
The plot revolves around a case of mistaken identity between a pair of identical brothers. In the afterword, Jin Yong acknowledges that the story resembles some of the works of William Shakespeare ("cf." "Twelfth Night" and "The Comedy of Errors").The protagonist, who refers to himself as "Gouzazhong" (literally "mongrel"; a colloquialism for "bastard"), first appears as a young beggar roaming the streets of Kaifeng in search of his lost mother. He witnesses a fight between several notable figures in the "wulin" (martial artists' community) and meets the Shi couple and members of the Snowy Mountain Sect. An accident causes him to be taken away by Xie Yanke, an eccentric martial artist, to a secluded location on Motian Cliff. Xie Yanke, who is frequently bothered by Gouzazhong, decides to teach him martial arts. Gouzazhong learns "qi" cultivation techniques under Xie Yanke's tutelage for six years. He is unaware that Xie actually harbours ill intentions and has been deliberately teaching him the techniques wrongly in the hope that he will sustain internal wounds and eventually die.At the same time, the leader of the Changle Sect, Shi Zhongyu, mysteriously disappears. The greater part of the novel deals with the complications that arise when Gouzhazhong is mistaken for Shi Zhongyu, not only by members of the sect (for ulterior motives), by also by Shi Zhongyu's parents, Shi Zhongyu's lover Ding Dang, and members of the Snowy Mountain Sect. Although the two bear a splitting resemblance, their characters cannot be more different: Gouzhazhong is simple, honest and clever; Shi Zhongyu, the son of the Shi couple, has a bad reputation for being a lewd and sly womaniser. Gouzhazhong acquires consummate combat skills in the process. He is hounded by members of the Snowy Mountain Sect who mistake him for Shi Zhongyu, who had molested Axiu, the granddaughter of the Snowy Mountain Sect's leader. He acquires Axiu as his girlfriend after various incidents, during which their misunderstandings are gradually resolved.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peacekeepers"title="The Peacekeepers">
While investigating an alien derelict, Geordi La Forge and Data are sent to a solar system several light-years away by a transporter with interstellar range, to a similar derelict orbiting an Earth-like planet. Once there, they are mistaken for "the Builders", those who the planet's native populace, a culture similar to late-20th-century Earth, believe are the creators of the derelict, which they call the "Repository of the Gifts". One of the natives, Shar-Lon, discovered the Repository some years before and used its "Gifts" (advanced technology) to end planetary wars that were leading to a possible nuclear holocaust. However, Shar-Lon's use of the Gifts since that time has led to a worldwide perception of himself and his supporters, the Peacekeepers, as a suppressive force that has limited the social and technological advancement of their people. Assuming the role of "Builders" in order to assess their situation, La Forge and Data are drawn into the social politics of the Peacekeepers and their world, and must extract themselves from the situation and find a way back to the "Enterprise" without further harming the natives' culture and violating the Prime Directive.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_(Star_Trek)"title="Survivors (Star Trek)">
The Enterprise is called in to deal with Treva, a human colony on the fringes of known space. For a time, it was thought to be a suitable candidate for Federation membership. Now it has sent a distress call because a brutal warlord has seized power and a revolution has sprung up.Tasha Yar is sent down with the android Data. The two soon discover the situation is more complicated than originally thought. The warlord wants Federation weapons to use against the rebels and is willing to kill whomever it takes to accomplish this goal.The novel also focuses on the unique relationship between Yar and Data and how the current situation correlates with Yar's brutal childhood.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strike_Zone"title="Strike Zone">
In this book a race of aliens who have fought with the Klingons for centuries, called the Kreel, find a large stash of advanced weapons hidden on a strange planet on the Kreel-Klingon border. The Kreel are as scavengers and had, plundered the destroyed colony that was Worf's childhood home. They declare war on the Klingons, and the crew of the USS "Enterprise" are asked to help with the peace negotiations.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackrock_(play)"title="Blackrock (play)">
Blackrock is an Australian beachside working-class suburb where surfing is popular among youths like Jared. He has his first serious girlfriend, Rachel, who comes from a much wealthier part of the city. One day Ricko, the local surfing legend, returns from an eleven-month trip. Rachel's brother Toby holds his 18th birthday party at the local beach club a few days later, and Jared decides to merge a 'welcome home' party for Ricko with the event. The party is unsupervised, with alcohol freely available. The following morning, it is revealed that 15-year-old Tracy Warner was killed at the party.Three youths from the party, Davo, Scott, and Toby, tell Ricko that they raped Tracy but left her alive. The three boys are later arrested for the sexual assault. Ricko confesses to Jared that he killed Tracy. He says he was attempting to have sex with her when she bit him and kicked him, so in a moment of rage he grabbed a rock and hit her with it. He has already told police that he was with Jared all night and asks Jared to confirm his alibi in the name of mateship. Jared is torn between telling the truth and protecting his friend. After witnessing Ricko's abusive behaviour towards their friend Tiffany, Jared decides to tell the truth. Ricko is detained by police and hangs himself in his cell.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betsey_Brown"title="Betsey Brown">
"Betsey Brown" is the story of an adolescent African-American girl growing up in 1959 St. Louis, Missouri, who is part of the first generation of students to be integrated in the public school system. She navigates common adolescent issues such as family dynamics, first love, and identity questions.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wash_This_Blood_Clean_from_My_Hand"title="Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand">
"Commissaire" Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg is a police officer in Paris. His nonchalant behaviour upsets many of his subordinates and chiefs as much as it pleases the others. He often finds key clues in his dreams; yet this will be his undoing soon.Since before entering the police force, Adamsberg has been looking for a serial killer. That killer's modus operandi involves having a bystander being wrongly accused, which happened to Adamsberg's own brother, and some weapon with three blades, some sort of a trident, hence the Neptune reference.When the story begins, Adamsberg has found yet another murder he thinks is linked to the "Trident". Nobody believes him because the killer's crime spree is supposed to have lasted more than fifty years, culprits were always found, and Adamsberg's key suspect was buried ten years ago. Adamsberg's dreamlike reasoning sounds unlikely to most.Adamsberg has no choice but to attend a forensics seminar in Quebec, thus abandoning the case. While in Canada, he bonds with a French girl, who ultimately claims to be pregnant with his child. He then also learns that his previous love has a young child. Both blows lead him to get drunk for the first time in years. When he wakes up, he is covered in blood and his Canadian colleagues accuse him of murdering the girl with a three-bladed weapon.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Wind"title="The Golden Wind">
The novel concerns the adventures of Eudoxus of Cyzicus and Hippalus on the first voyages by sea from Egypt to India. Following these, it deals with Eudoxus' efforts to circumvent the newly established Egyptian monopoly on trade with India by pioneering a new route around the west coast of Africa, which are ultimately defeated by misadventure and the sheer extent of the continent.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Unicorn"title="The Last Unicorn">
A group of human hunters pass through a forest in search of game. After days of coming up empty-handed, they begin to believe they are passing through a Unicorn's forest, where animals are kept safe by a magical aura. They resign themselves to hunting somewhere else; but, before they leave, one of the hunters calls out a warning to the Unicorn that she may be the last of her kind. This revelation disturbs the Unicorn, and though she initially dismisses it, eventually doubt and worry drive her to leave her forest. She travels through the land and discovers that humans no longer even recognize her; instead they see a pretty white mare. She encounters a talking butterfly who speaks in riddles and songs and initially dodges her questions about the other unicorns. Eventually, the butterfly issues a warning that her kind have been herded to a far away land by a creature known as the Red Bull. She continues to search for other unicorns. During her journey, she is taken captive by a traveling carnival led by the witch, Mommy Fortuna, who uses magical spells to create the illusion that regular animals are in fact creatures of myth and legend. The Unicorn finds herself the only true legendary creature among the group, save for the harpy, Celaeno. Schmendrick, a magician traveling with the carnival, sees the Unicorn for what she is, and he frees her in the middle of the night. The Unicorn frees the other creatures including Celaeno, who kills Mommy Fortuna and Rukh, her hunchbacked assistant.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomatic_Immunity_(novel)"title="Diplomatic Immunity (novel)">
Miles and Ekaterin Vorkosigan are enjoying a delayed honeymoon off-world while their first two children are approaching birth in their uterine replicators back on Barrayar. On their way home, Miles receives Emperor Gregor Vorbarra's command to go to Graf Station in Quaddiespace to untangle a diplomatic incident in his capacity as the nearest Imperial Auditor. There, he is unexpectedly reunited with the Betan hermaphrodite Bel Thorne, a trusted former Dendarii Mercenaries subordinate and his good friend.Quaddies are the result of genetic manipulation centuries before (as described in Bujold's novel "Falling Free"). Intended to be used as laborers in zero-G, they have extra arms instead of legs. However, the invention of artificial gravity rendered them useless to the corporation that created them. They stole a spaceship to avoid being liquidated and colonized a remote star system. At Graf Station, the Quaddies occupy a zero-G section, while visitors use a section with artificial gravity. Quaddies tend to be suspicious of other humans based on their history of callous exploitation.A convoy of Komarran merchant ships are being prevented from leaving the station due to trouble caused by Barrayaran personnel from their military escort. Furthermore, a Barrayaran security officer is missing, possibly murdered or deserted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_and_the_Prophecy_of_Bane"title="Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane">
Several months have passed since the events of the first novel, when Gregor and his baby sister Boots first fell into the subterranean kingdom of Regalia (a part of the "Underland") and undertook a quest to save their father, who was being held prisoner by a group of Underland rats. The Underland humans supported the siblings' mission because they believed it was prophesied by their founder, Bartholomew of Sandwich. At the beginning of the second novel, the Underland humans kidnap Boots to force her and Gregor (whom they call the "Warrior") to participate in another one of their prophecies. They interpret "The Prophecy of Bane" to mean that Gregor must kill a white rat (the "Bane") in order to prevent the humans' main enemies, the rats, from taking over the realm. A set of lines about a dying baby "turn[ing] the Warrior weak" convince the humans that Boots is in danger, and so the Regalians offer to protect Boots in within the walls of their castle. Gregor sails off on an underground ocean with only a few soldiers and their giant bats to hunt the Bane in the Labyrinth, an uncharted maze of caverns deep in the Underland's rat lands.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_and_the_Curse_of_the_Warmbloods"title="Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods">
Despite the difficulties it has caused for his family, Gregor finds it hard to distance himself from the Underland. When he receives word that a plague has broken out and his bond Ares is one of the victims, he heads down to help with yet another of Bartholomew of Sandwich's prophecies. His mother, however, hates the Underland and only allows Boots and Gregor below on the condition that she comes with them. The humans' plague expert, Dr. Neveeve, explains that there is a plant called starshade growing deep in the Vineyard of Eyes which can be distilled into a cure. In the midst of the meeting, a dying bat infected with the plague inadvertently infects one of the delegates—Gregor's mother.Gregor immediately joins a group of creatures on a quest to find the starshade, as described in "The Prophecy of Blood". The current queen, Nerissa, has arranged Hamnet - the estranged, pacifistic son of Solovet and Vikus - as their guide. Hamnet, his Halflander son Hazard, and their hisser companion Frill lead the motley crew through the dangerous Jungle and numerous setbacks. During a near-death experience with a pool of quicksand, the group encounters Luxa, the heir apparent of Regalia who was assumed to be dead after the quest in "Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane". She and her bond Aurora were trapped in the Jungle when Aurora dislocated her wing, and have been living there with a colony of nibblers (mice). After Hamnet fixes Aurora's wing, the bonds accompany the questers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_and_the_Marks_of_Secret"title="Gregor and the Marks of Secret">
The novel opens with Gregor's little sister Lizzie preparing to go to camp, while Gregor and Boots head down to the Underland. Ripred introduces Gregor to the now-teenaged Pearlpelt so Gregor can observe "the Bane's" violent instability, and choose to kill him before he ends up in a leadership position. Gregor is uncomfortable with the idea. The next day, he returns to dissuade Ripred, but is instead attacked by the Bane's friends.After several more weeks, Ripred is still missing, but Gregor remains relaxed until a messenger unexpectedly delivers Luxa her crown. Luxa and her friends know that this is a distress call from the nibbler colony in the Jungle. They investigate, but discover only a deceased mouse and an abandoned colony. Luxa is distraught, and decides to visit the nibblers' other colony at the Fount, under the pretense of going on a picnic date. This ruse leads to several others coming along as well. The group finds the colony mysteriously deserted, though they do discover a "mark of secret" which Hazard says warns of death and sorrow. The traveling party tracks the mice into the Swag, but are forced into Hades Hall by an earthquake. During their journey back to Regalia, they learn the Bane has been systematically executing nibblers, which leads Luxa to declare war against all gnawers. Gregor becomes annoyed with Luxa as the consequences of her actions become apparent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beast_Master"title="The Beast Master">
"The Beast Master" tells of Hosteen Storm, a Navajo and former soldier who has empathic and telepathic connections with a group of genetically altered animals. The team emigrates from Earth to the distant planet Arzor where it is hired to herd livestock. Storm still harbors wrath at his former enemies, the Xik, and has sworn revenge on a man named Quade for his father's murder. According to "Kirkus", he finds "life and hope" instead.In this novel and its sequels, Norton explores aspects of Native American culture, specifically the Navajo, through metaphors in Storm's life and in the culture he adopts on his adoptive planet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Art_of_Stealing"title="The Sacred Art of Stealing">
The plot of "The Sacred Art of Stealing" tells the story of American Zal Innez, a witty and intellectual art-loving thief, who is being blackmailed by crime boss Alessandro Estabol to do one last major job for him.As a warm up to their main heist, Zal and his team of fellow failed artists rob a Glasgow bank of approaching a million pounds. During the raid they use unorthodox methods such as firing itching powder at armed police, carrying fake guns, staging plays and drawing works of art for their hostages to keep casualties to a minimum.During this robbery Zal meets and falls for a woman police officer, Angelique de Xavia, heroine of Brookmyre's previous novel, who is under-appreciated by her bosses.Both police officer and thief become painfully aware of the strong attraction between them and a relationship is formed, despite the fact that they are both fully aware that they are on opposite sides. Zal knows Angelique is after him, and even counts on this knowledge to complete his final job, while Angelique is aware that Zal is playing her, even though she does not want to contemplate what that might imply about his real feelings for her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Type_One_Super_Robot"title="The Type One Super Robot">
A boy, Humbert, goes to stay with his Uncle Bellamy. Once there he discovers a strange package that appears to hum to itself. Upon alerting his uncle to the package, Humbert is surprised to find that it contains a Type One Household Robot, designed to help around the home. The robot is swiftly named Manders by Uncle Bellamy, because he does everything that a man-does.Humbert and Manders get into many adventures, the most memorable of which is a kite-flying expedition.One joy in the story for children is to read how Manders struggles to come to terms with human existence, for example by misunderstanding phrases like "getting along like a house on fire," failing to realise that a kite is not meant to take you with it, or trying to slice custard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abyssinian"title="The Abyssinian">
"The Abyssinian" tells the story of a young French physician who is sent as part of a diplomatic mission to Abyssinia in the early eighteenth century. Along the way he must face various perils while trying to win over his true love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_Z"title="World War Z">
The novel is framed around a series of interviews conducted by a fictionalized version of the author Max Brooks, author of The Zombie Survival Guide, (known in-universe as the ""Civilian" Survival Guide") as he travels the world a decade after the end of what is most commonly referred to as the "Zombie War."The pandemic begins twenty years previously in the early twentieth century, with the infection of a boy in a village in Dachang, China; the release of the virus, referred to as "Solanum" in The Zombie Survival Guide, is implied to have been caused by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. The Politburo initially covers up the outbreak by engineering a military crisis with Taiwan to avoid appearing weak internationally, but thousands of infected quickly spread the virus outside of China through immigration, human trafficking, and the organ trade. The virus spreads to Cape Town, South Africa, where the first major public outbreak occurs, leading to the virus initially being dubbed "African rabies." A Mossad agent publishes a report detailing the undead threat and recommending countermeasures, but Israel is the only country to take it seriously. The United States in particular is overconfident and distracted by the upcoming election, responding only by deploying small special operations teams to temporarily contain isolated outbreaks. Israel, meanwhile, responds by enacting a policy of voluntary quarantine in which it ceases occupying the Palestinian territories, evacuates Jerusalem, and constructs a wall along the demarcation line established in 1967. The government also offers asylum to any Palestinian living in the formerly occupied territories, and any Palestinian whose family previously resided in Israel. These policies spark a civil war by enraging the Israeli religious right, though the uprising is eventually suppressed by the IDF. Worldwide, a widely marketed placebo vaccine named Phalanx creates a false sense of security. This period later becomes known as the "Great Denial."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian_of_Isis"title="The Guardian of Isis">
Mark London is now president of the settlement. He has forced the people to abandon all technology and become a simple, agricultural community full of taboos. Upper Isis is now a forbidden zone, because, so they believe, the Guardian put a curse on the mountains, imprisoning the people in their own valley. One boy, Jody N'Kumo, grandson of one of the original settlers, breaks one of the most sacred taboos, and is banished to the land of Guardian, although everyone knows he is simply being sent to his death. However, Jody does not die, and discovers a place called Bamboo Valley. There he meets the Lady Olwen, who was the Keeper of the Isis Light in the times before the colony, and learns the truth about the history of Isis.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Isis_Pedlar"title="The Isis Pedlar">
The leader of the colony is Roger London, Mark London's son. London seems to be nothing like his father, however. Mike Flynn, a Galactic wanderer, spots Isis, and plans to corrupt the inhabitants to obtain the precious firestones. He promises them a Forever Machine, which will supply them with a lifetime of ambrosia, which means they will never have to work for their food again. His daughter, Moira, however, knows that he is simply lying, and tries to stop Mike's evil plans with the help of David N'Kumo, great grandson of Jody N'Kumo. When David and Moira succeed, Jody N'Kumo becomes president, instead of Roger London. Moira decides to stay on Isis, and Guardian, goes with Mike Flynn. Things look much brighter for a future for Isis.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Howling"title="The Howling">
When middle-class wife Karyn Beatty is attacked and raped in her Los Angeles home, she suffers a miscarriage and a nervous breakdown. She and her husband, Roy, leave the city and go to stay in the secluded California mountain village of Drago while Karyn recuperates. Although the town offers Karyn a quiet lifestyle and the locals are friendly, Karyn is disturbed when she continues to hear a strange howling sound at night coming from the woods outside of their new home. This further disrupts her marriage, as Roy believes she is becoming more and more unstable, but Karyn is adamant that there is something in the woods.As tension between the couple increases, Roy begins an affair with one of the local women, a shopkeeper named Marcia Lura. However, on his way home, Roy is attacked in the woods by a large black wolf. Though the wolf only bites him, Roy becomes sick for several days. He was bitten by a werewolf, and has now become one himself. Karyn eventually discovers that the town's entire population are all actually werewolves and becomes trapped in Drago. She contacts her husband's best friend, Chris Halloran, who comes up from Los Angeles to rescue her. Chris arrives with some silver bullets which he had made at her insistence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Broom_of_the_System"title="The Broom of the System">
The book centers on the comparatively normal Lenore Beadsman, a 24-year-old telephone switchboard operator who gets caught in the middle of a Cleveland-based character drama. In Wallace's typically offbeat style, Lenore navigates three separate crises: her great-grandmother's escape from a nursing home, a neurotic boyfriend, and a suddenly vocal pet cockatiel. The controlling idea surrounding all of these crises is the use of words and symbols to define a person. To illustrate this idea, Wallace uses different formats to build the story, including transcripts from television recordings and therapy sessions, as well as an accompanying fictional account written by one of the main characters, Rick Vigorous.The manager of the nursing home, David Bloemker, repeatedly expresses himself in an overly elaborate style, only to have to reduce his own locutions to a much simpler form. For example, he tells Lenore that if they find her great-grandmother (also named Lenore), they will likely also find the other missing residents of the facility. Why? Because, she "enjoyed a status here — with the facility administration, the staff, and, through the force of her personality and her evident gifts, especially with the other residents [such that] it would not be improper to posit the location and retrieval of Lenore as near assurance of retrieving the other misplaced parties." The younger Lenore says that she doesn't understand all of that. Bloemker tries again: "Your great-grandmother was more or less the ringleader around here." This contrast of baroque with simple speech is employed to comic effect, as well as to advance the more serious contemplation of language at the heart of the plot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Brown_Can_Moo!_Can_You?"title="Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You?">
The story follows a man named Mr. Brown, who can make a wide variety of sounds, imitating the sounds of animals and inanimate objects. The narrator recites a list of items and animals that Mr. Brown can sound like, each one accompanied by illustrations of the object and an onomatopoeia, which replicates the sound he can make. Mr. Brown can make the "moo" of a cow, the "buzz" of a bee, the "pop" of a cork (on a bottle of grape wine), the "klopp klopp" of a horse's hooves, the "cock a doodle doo" of a rooster, the "hoo hoo" of an owl, the "dibble dibble dibble dopp" of rain, the "tick tock" of a clock, the "knock knock" of a hand against a door, the "boom" of thunder, the "grum grum" of a hippo chewing gum, the "slurp slurp" of a cat drinking, the "splatt" of lightning, the "choo choo" of a train, the "sizzle sizzle" of an egg in a frying pan, the "blurp blurp" of a horn, the "pip" of a goldfish kiss, the "eek eek" like a shoe, and the "whisper" of a butterfly. The narrator concludes the list by suggesting that the reader try to make these same sounds, and the last pages of text feature a list of all the onomatopoeias featured in the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_a_Large_Cat"title="Seeing a Large Cat">
The book opens at Amelia's favorite hotel, Shepheard's in Cairo, where her family reunites after a summer in various locations. The Emersons' son Ramses (now aged sixteen) and their adopted son David have been living in Egypt for six months, and their ward Nefret has been studying anatomy with Louisa Aldrich-Blake at the London School of Medicine for Women.The Emersons receive a dire warning about staying away from an undiscovered tomb, which of course inspires them to hunt all the harder for it. Meanwhile, a silly American debutante insists she needs protection from a stalker (selecting Ramses for the job), and a mummy swathed in modern clothing begins to lend verisimilitude to her otherwise unconvincing narrative.The characters of Donald and Enid Fraser from "Lion in the Valley" reappear in this novel. They are in Cairo, accompanied by a woman who claims to have communicated with an ancient Egyptian princess and unwittingly triggered Donald's obsession with finding the princess's tomb. The American Cyrus Vandergelt is another character who reappears from an earlier novel.This volume marks the death of the cat Bastet and the first whiskey Ramses is permitted to imbibe (although the two events are not directly related).The device of "Manuscript H" is used for the first time in this book to give a voice to Ramses, through whom the romantic and adventurous elements of the series are able to continue as his parents begin to age.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parched_Sea"title="The Parched Sea">
The Parched Sea is another name for the desert "Anauroch" in which the novel takes place.The Zhentarim, determined to drive a trade route through Anauroch, send an army to enslave the nomads of the Great Desert. Ruha, an outcast witch, tries to gain the trust of the Sheikh as tribe after tribe fall to the Zhentarim. The Harpers send an agent to counter the Zhentarim, and Ruha helps this stranger win the Sheikh's trust, so that he can overcome the tribes' ancestral rivalries and drive the invaders from the desert.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Uncle_Napoleon"title="My Uncle Napoleon">
The story takes place at the time of Iran's occupation by the Allied forces during the Second World War. Most of the plot occurs in the narrator's home, a huge early 20th-century-style Iranian mansion in which three wealthy families live under the tyranny of a paranoid patriarch, Uncle. The Uncle—who in reality is a retired low-level officer from the Persian Cossack Brigade under Colonel Vladimir Liakhov's command—claims, and in latter stages of the story actually believes, that he and his butler Mash Qasem were involved in wars against the British and their "lackeys", as well as battles supporting the Iranian Constitutional Revolution; and that with the occupation of Iran by the Allied forces, the British are now on course to take their revenge on him. The story's narrator (nameless in the novel but called Saeed in the TV series) is a high school student in love with his cousin Layli, Dear Uncle's daughter.The novel, at its core a love story, unfolds around the narrator's struggles to stall Layli's pre-arranged marriage to her cousin Puri and ensure their love, a love which is constantly jeopardised by an army of family members and the mayhem of their intrigues against one another. A multitude of supporting characters, including police investigators, government officials, Indians, housewives, a medical doctor, a butcher, a sycophantic preacher, servants, and a shoeshine man also appear throughout the development of the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unknown_Man_No._89"title="Unknown Man No. 89">
Detroit process server Jack Ryan has a reputation for finding men who don't want to be found. A string of seemingly unrelated crimes leads Ryan to the search for a missing stockholder known only as "unknown man #89," but his missing man isn't "unknown" to everyone: a pretty blonde hates his guts, and a very nasty dude named Virgil Royal wants him dead in the worst way. This is very unfortunate for Jack, who is suddenly caught in the crossfire of a lethal triple-cross and becomes as much a target as his nameless prey. Along the way, Ryan butts heads with local police, including six-shooter-carrying Dick Speed. The book is perhaps best remembered for a sequence taken straight from "The Godfather", where thug Virgil plants a shotgun in the meeting place of his victim, in this case, the fire escape of Bobby Lear's hotel room. Also of note is homosexual wannabe gangster Lonnie, whose "superfly" haircut was emulated by several of Elmore Leonard's other characters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facing_the_Flag"title="Facing the Flag">
Thomas Roch, a brilliant French inventor, has designed the Fulgurator, a weapon so powerful that "the state which acquired it would become absolute master of earth and ocean." Unable to sell his unproven idea, Roch becomes bitter, megalomaniacal and paranoid. The United States Government reacts by tucking him away at a luxurious asylum in New Bern, North Carolina, where he is visited by Ker Karraje, a notorious pirate of Malagasy origin.Karraje and his men kidnap Roch and his attendant Gaydon from the asylum and bring him to their hide-out—the island of Back Cup in the Bermudas. Here a wide cavern, accessible only by submerged submarine, has been made into a well-equipped pirate base. It is revealed that Gaydon is actually Simon Hart, a French engineer and explosives expert sent to spy on Roch and gain his confidence. Roch begins constructing his fearsome weapon, happily unaware that he is nothing but a glorified prisoner in the pirate's hands.Hart succeeds in secretly sending out a message in a metal keg, giving the full details of Karraje's operations and his impending acquisition of the Fulgurator. The message gets through to the British authorities at their nearby naval base in Bermuda, and the British Navy sends a submarine, , to find Hart. The submarine's crew makes contact with Hart, and take him and Roch on board, but the "Sword" is discovered, attacked and sunk by the pirates. The unconscious Hart and Roch are extracted from the sunken British sub by pirate divers, leaving the entire British crew to perish. Hart manages to avoid suspicions of his actions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Machine"title="The War Machine">
Captain Allison Spencer is forcibly divorced from his wife, then is promoted to command a fleet of ships heading to the Daltgeld system. There, he encounters an unknown enemy that threatens the whole galaxy. The story is set sometime 5341 years after the founding of the interstellar Pact, or 9095 A.D.The title refers to the alien construct which was designed as a weapon capable of taking over any device and running it according to a central controller.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergdorf_Blondes"title="Bergdorf Blondes">
The book follows an unnamed young socialite living in New York as she interacts with her best friend Julie and tries to find a successful romantic relationship. Initially she believes that she's found "The One" in the photographer Zack and the two become engaged, after which point Zack becomes emotionally abusive and unresponsive. Despite her best attempts to salvage the relationship, the protagonist is dumped by Zack. Not only does this harm her social standing, but the protagonist is psychologically devastated by the end of the relationship and becomes anorexic as a result. Things are not made much better by her mother's insistence that she return home to England (her family emigrated there during the narrator's childhood) and strike up a relationship with a local Earl that they haven't seen since a disastrous business transaction with her father years ago.The protagonist goes through several terrible relationships with married men (she was told that they were single or separated) and finds herself drawn to and irritated by the filmmaker Charlie, who has started dating her friend Julie. The two eventually end up running into each other at a hotel one night after the protagonist's apartment is robbed. Despite some friction between the two, the protagonist finds that she genuinely likes Charlie, who tells her that he's broken up with Julie. The two end up having sex, something that weighs upon the protagonist's conscience since she has a rule against sleeping with a friend's ex-boyfriend. The following day Julie ends up finding out about the sexual encounter after questioning the protagonist about the night's events, upon which point she reveals that she and Charlie never broke up and tells the protagonist that she never wants to see her again. Since the friendship is gone, the protagonist decides to see Charlie again that night, as he had invited her to return for dinner. However the protagonist finds that Charlie has left, giving her the impression that he was just using her like the other men she has dated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra_(Haggard_novel)"title="Cleopatra (Haggard novel)">
The story is set in the Ptolemaic era of Ancient Egyptian history and revolves around the survival of a dynasty bloodline protected by the Priesthood of Isis. The main character Harmachis (the living descendant of the pharaoh's bloodline) is charged by the Priesthood to overthrow the supposed impostor Cleopatra, drive out the Greeks and Romans and restore Egypt to its golden era. Harmachis attempts to use his priestly magic to undermine Cleopatra's rule.As is the case with the majority of Haggard's works, the story draws heavily upon adventure and concepts. The story, told from the point of view of the Egyptian priest Harmachis, is recounted in biblical language, being in the form of papyrus scrolls found in a tomb.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Wind_Blows_(Patterson_novel)"title="When the Wind Blows (Patterson novel)">
Frannie Devin O'Neill is a veterinarian living in Bear Bluff, Colorado, whose husband was killed three years ago. She meets Kit Harrison, an FBI agent, when he rents a cabin in the woods behind her house. Kit is investigating a case in which Frannie's husband may be implicated. One night, after a friend's mysterious death, Frannie sees a small girl with wings, running in the forest. As she is growing closer to Kit, Frannie tells him about the winged girl. They search for her and manage to catch her. She tells them that her name is Max. She and her brother Matthew grew up as experiments in a sinister lab known as the "School", and were separated during their escape. Max guides Kit and Frannie back to the School. They break in and find the rest of Max's "flock", winged children named Peter, Wendy, Icarus, and Oz. Kit and Frannie try to return home with the children, only to discover that Frannie's vet practice burnt down. Frannie realizes that her husband's old colleagues are involved with the School and witnesses are being murdered. The entire group is captured by the school's enforcer, Harding Thomas, and his men. Only Max evades capture and flies away. Frannie and Kit learn that the School planned to create an improved human race, with the scientists kidnapping newborns in order to experiment on them. As the School begins an auction to sell off the surviving experiments, Kit and Frannie fight their way free to rescue the children, including Matthew, who was also recaptured. Max returns with news crews following her, and the directors of the School die in a car crash trying to flee the scene. The School is exposed, and the bird-children are finally reunited with their biological families.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blades_of_the_Tiger"title="Blades of the Tiger">
"Blades of the Tiger" is set in Taladas shortly after the War of Souls, and is generally located in the Imperial League.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythology_Class"title="The Mythology Class">
Summoned to a secret gathering one stormy night by the mysterious Mrs. Enkanta, University of the Philippines anthropology student Nicole Lacson finds herself face to face with tikbalangs, kapres, and all sorts of engkantos—Philippine mythical creatures—she had only heard about from her grandfather's stories. Together with newfound friends, she embarks on a quest into the realm of myth and folklore where she fights alongside heroes of her childhood against an age-old terror. Follow in their footsteps as their adventure takes them through the familiar streets of Metro Manila and into a world more fascinating than they had ever imagined.The story also invokes historical and mythological Filipino heroes like Sulayman and Lam-ang.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragon_Queen"title="The Dragon Queen">
The story is sited in Britain just after the Romans have gone. Guinevere is the daughter of a pagan queen. Forced into hiding by the dreaded sorcerer Merlin, Guinevere grows up under the protection of a shapeshifter and a druid and is watched over by dragons.Merlin tracks her down relentlessly, intent on stopping what has been foretold, that she will become Queen and Arthur King; a fate that will leave him powerless and forgotten. To Merlin's dismay, Guinevere has inherited magical powers great enough to stop him. With Arthur trapped in the netherworld, Guinevere calls upon magic and allies and undertakes her destiny: to one day become the Dragon Queen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Riddle_(novel)"title="The Riddle (novel)">
Maerad and Cadvan continue the search for the Treesong, the key to Maerad's destiny, while fleeing from Enkir, the First Bard of Norloch, who had broken Milana, Maerad's mother, and sold them both into slavery. Maerad and Cadvan sail with a friend called Owan d'Aroki to the Mycenean Greece-like island of Thorold. Enkir sends a sea serpent in pursuit, which the two Bards kill. Having arrived on the island, they enter the Bardic School of Busk. Maerad continues her Bardic training that had been stopped abruptly in Innail, learning about imagery, illusions, and additional fighting skills, which improve readily. Cadvan studies records in Busk's extensive library, but finds nothing by which to explain the nature of the Treesong.Soon, Busk receives a messenger from Norloch who reveals that Enkir has claimed the authority of High King over all the Seven Kingdoms, and demands the Schools' undivided fealty. Busk, rather than submit to Norloch or be counted its enemies, pledge their "unwavering allegiance to the Light", rather than to Enkir; thus placing themselves beyond either possibility. Later, at a seasonal festival commemorating the Bards' New Year, Busk's First Bard Nerili succumbs to a 'darkness' within herself, which puts her into a trauma that prevents her creation of the ceremonial "Tree of Light". Cadvan intervenes, salvaging the ceremony; however, Nerili's experience suggests that the power of the evil Nameless One is increasing, and that it is more insidious than in his previous attacks upon humanity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mocking_Program"title="The Mocking Program">
A hard-boiled police procedural set in a highly imaginative megalopolis called the Montezuma Strip, which stretches along the old U.S.-Mexican border. When police inspector Angel Cardenas investigates the case of a male corpse found with most of its internal organs missing, the victim turns out to have had two identities - one as a local executive, the other as a Texas businessman. The plot thickens when the victim's booby-trapped house nearly kills Cardenas and his partner. The author makes use of a vast array of futuristic elements; notably, sapient apes led by gorillas and intelligent rogue computers that commit computer crimes.While the book does not state this, this is a continuation of a series of short stories featuring the same main character, written by Foster and initially published in genre magazines under the pen-name of James Lawson, and then collected under his own name in the Warner book "Montezuma Strip" (1995).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Swappers"title="The World Swappers">
In the middle of the Third Millennium the Earth is peaceful and prosperous, but discontent is growing in the small sphere of Human-colonised worlds. Earth business tycoon Bassett hopes to profit from this trouble, but he is opposed by Counce, an agent of a secret elite attempting to guide history for the benefit of Humanity. This organisation, backed by Ram and Falconetta of the influential Video India broadcasting network, has sole access to the transfax, a matter transmitter technology that allows instant transportation and duplication of objects and living beings. Counce and his agents are effectively immortal because they can be recreated from transfax recordings in the event of their deaths.The situation is complicated by the arrival of the Others, aliens hoping colonise some of the worlds in Human Space, who threaten Ymir, a frigid planet sparsely populated by religious fanatics hostile to Earth. Falconetta's protege Anty suggests that the Others' survey ship be pulled from space and landed by transfax to prevent knowledge of Ymir reaching the Others' home world.The plan goes awry, and there is a battle which kills Anty and most of the Others. Meanwhile, Bassett kidnaps the Ymirian girl Enni and interrogates her, and on the basis of the knowledge gained from her he agrees to a truce with Counce. Ymir is evacuated by Bassett, and its population is sent to more hospitable Human colony worlds to everyone's satisfaction, including Bassett, who has gained profit and prestige from the enterprise. The Others are given Ymir to colonise in exchange for peace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Infinitive_of_Go"title="The Infinitive of Go">
The novel revolves around a teleportation technology which is being developed. The first test is an abject failure. Faced with termination of the project, Dr. Justin Williams, the inventor of the technology, performs the next test himself. He finds himself in a world which is subtly different from his own. It is revealed that when humans are "Posted" (transported), their inner desires influence the outcome, tipping them into alternate universes. When Dr. Eduardo Landini is Posted back following a mechanical accident, the being who emerges is a humanoid descended from baboons, who claims to be Ed Landini. Rumors about his appearance inspire revulsion among staff members at the facility, and as those rumours spread into the general population, others begin exploiting the fears generated for their own purposes. Landini himself has no stomach for the attention, and openly shows his contempt for the behaviour of the humans around him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Fall_(novel)"title="Night Fall (novel)">
The story begins with the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island, New York. A couple conducting an illicit affair on the beach witness the crash and flee the scene, having accidentally videotaped the crash and what appears to be a missile rising from the ocean towards the plane.Five years later, Anti-Terrorist Task Force (ATTF, a fictional FBI department based on the Joint Terrorism Task Force) detective John Corey is encouraged to reinvestigate the crash, officially blamed on mechanical failure, by his wife Kate Mayfield, who had worked on the original investigation.The story is a sequel to "The Lion's Game" and reintroduces a number of characters from that novel. A sequel to "Night Fall", titled "Wild Fire", was released on November 6, 2006. One of the returning characters from "The Lion's Game" and "Plum Island" is CIA operative Ted Nash, whom DeMille has developed into Corey's antagonist and nemesis in his career with the ATTF.Much of the action in the novel centers on the search for the couple who inadvertently videotaped the in-air explosion that brought down TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island. At the center of Corey's investigation are witness statements claiming that the fatal explosion was caused by a missile and not by mechanical failure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_Gold"title="Inca Gold">
In 1532 a fleet of ships sails in secret to an island in the middle of an inland sea. There they hide a magnificent treasure more vast than that any Pharaoh would ever possess. Then they disappear, leaving only a great stone demon to guard their hoard.In 1578 the legendary Sir Francis Drake captures a Spanish galleon filled with Inca gold and silver and the key to the lost treasure, which includes a gigantic chain of gold, a masterpiece of ancient technology so huge that it requires two hundred men to lift it and a large pile of diamonds worth more than 200 billion dollars that belonged to the last Inca. As the galleon is sailed by Drake's crew back to England, an underwater earthquake causes a massive tidal wave that sweeps it into the jungle. Only one man survives to tell the tale...In 1998 a group of archaeologists is nearly drowned while diving into the depths of a sacrificial pool high in the Andes of Peru. They are saved by the timely arrival of the renowned scuba diving hero Dirk Pitt, who is in the area on a marine expedition. Pitt soon finds out that his life has been placed in jeopardy as well by smugglers intent on uncovering the lost ancient Incan treasure. Soon, he, his faithful companions, and Dr. Shannon Kelsey, a beautiful young archaeologist, are plunged into a vicious, no-holds-barred struggle to survive. From then on it becomes a battle of wits in a race against time and danger to find the golden chain, as Pitt finds himself caught up in a struggle with a sinister international family syndicate that deal in stolen works of art, the smuggling of ancient artifacts, and art forgery worth many millions of dollars. The clash between the art thieves, the FBI and the Customs Service, a tribe of local Indians, and Pitt, along with his friends from NUMA, two of whom are captured and threatened with execution, rushes toward a wild climax in a subterranean world of darkness and death – for the real key to the mystery, as it turns out, is a previously unknown, unexplored underground river that runs through the ancient treasure chamber. The fallen are told to come back and haunt those who took their treasure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valhalla_Rising_(novel)"title="Valhalla Rising (novel)">
Dirk Pitt has to stop an evil CEO of an oil and natural gas company in the US from establishing absolute monopoly over oil resources and supplies. It is a typical Dirk Pitt novel dealing with a countdown, bribed officials, and ruthless evil leaders. Pitt also unravels the work of a brilliant, reclusive scientist who had made great advances in oil technology, traced the history and found the remains of a Viking settlement on the Hudson River; the scientist also discovered the remains of Captain Nemo's "Nautilus" and deciphered and improved its power system (a magnetohydrodynamic engine). The book climaxes with Dirk on the verge of proposing to his on-and-off girlfriend, U.S senator Loren Smith, when they are interrupted by the introduction of his children, Dirk and Summer Pitt, named after their father and mother respectively.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_&quot;П&quot;"title="Generation &quot;П&quot;">
The novel is set in Moscow in the Yeltsin years, the early 1990s, a time of rampant chaos and corruption. Its protagonist, Babylen Tatarsky, graduate student and poet, has been tossed onto the streets after the fall of the Soviet Union where he soon learns his true calling: developing Russian versions of western advertisements. But the more he succeeds as a copywriter, the more he searches for meaning in a culture now defined by material possessions and self-indulgence. He attempts to discover the forces that determine individual desires and shape collective belief in this post-Soviet world. In this quest, Tatarsky sees coincidences that suggest patterns that in turn suggest a hidden meaning behind the chaos of life. He first senses this hidden purpose when reading about Mesopotamian religious practices. Tatarsky's quest is enhanced by the consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms, cocaine, and vodka. His quest is further aided by another form of spirits: through a ouija board, Che Guevara writes a treatise on identity, consumerism, and television. Eventually, Tatarsky begins to learn some truths—for instance, that all of politics and the "real" events broadcast on television are digital creations. But he can never quite discover the ultimate force behind these fabrications. When at last he reaches the top of the corporate pyramid, Tatarsky learns that the members of his firm are servants of the goddess Ishtar, whose corporeal form consists of the totality of advertising images. The firm's chief duty is to make sure that Ishtar's enemy, the dog Phukkup, does not awaken, bringing with it chaos and destruction. After a ritual sacrifice, Tatarsky becomes the goddesses' new regent and, in the form of a 3-D double, her bridegroom. In the novel's last chapter, Tatarsky's electronic double becomes a ubiquitous presence on Russian TV. Tatarsky, who had tried to look past the false images presented on TV to see a true unmediated reality, has himself been transformed into an illusion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_(Armstrong_novel)"title="Stolen (Armstrong novel)">
The story begins with Elena travelling to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to follow up a lead the Pack have come across on believe.com which purports to be able to prove the existence of werewolves. However, when she meets her contact, a young witch named Paige Winterbourne, she has information that Elena finds extremely disturbing. Not only does she claim to know about werewolves, but more specifically about her. It is clear that the posting on the website was a lure designed to bring Elena to Pittsburgh because of problems other supernaturals have been having with a group headed by Tyrone Winsloe. Elena is skeptical, having given no credence up to this point that other supernatural beings such as witches and vampires could exist. The claims of Paige and her mother, Ruth, sound like conspiracy theories that Elena finds hard to believe.Unable to sleep, she goes out that night for a run, but is followed by a stalker with military training. Elena evades him only to discover that he has colleagues and that they are trying to capture not only herself, but also the Winterbournes. In the fight, Elena kills one of the men, Mark, and the three women find themselves confronting a half-demon able to teleport whom Elena nicknames 'Houdini', who works for Tyrone Winsloe. Ruth casts a spell which traps him temporarily and the three women make their escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dime_Store_Magic"title="Dime Store Magic">
Set nine months after the events of "Stolen", or as Paige observes at the beginning of the novel "nine months, three weeks and two days", "Dime Store Magic" begins with Paige receiving complaints from the Elders about Savannah, clearly not for the first time. The Elders hate trouble and object to anything that might draw attention to the Coven. The same day Paige receives a petition for custody of her ward from Leah O'Donnell, a half-demon involved in events at the compound the previous year.Paige meets Leah and her lawyers, Gabriel Sandford, at the Cary Law Offices in East Falls. There she recognises Gabriel as a sorcerer. It is revealed that the custody claim comes not from Leah, but Savannah's father, Kristof Nast. Nast is the head of the Nast Sorcerer Cabal in Los Angeles, California.After she gets home, Paige is confronted by Victoria and the other Elders who are concerned because Leah's intent to use Paige's status as a witch in the custody battle threatens to expose the Coven. Paige persuades them to give her three days to clear matters up. She then arranges a meeting with Grantham Cary Jr., the local lawyer. It is decided to request that Nast submit to DNA testing to prove his paternity claim. Sandford, as Paige expected, refuses on behalf of his client.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Magic"title="Industrial Magic">
The story starts with the attack upon Dana MacArthur, daughter of a Cabal employee. Dismayed by her inability to persuade other witches to form a new coven because of their disapproval of her relationship with Lucas Cortez, Paige Winterbourne is not entirely happy to find his father - Benicio Cortez - on her doorstep with news of the new case.Lucas and Paige decide to travel to Miami to visit his father and introduce Paige to the family, as well as to hear further details about the attack. They discover that Dana's is only one of a series of similar attacks upon the children of Cabal employees. That night another child, the son of Benicio's bodyguard is killed. The father, Griffin, asks Paige and Lucas to investigate.Concerned about Savannah, they arrange for her to stay with the werewolf Pack. They then arrange to meet up with Jaime Vegas, a necromancer. Jaime manages to contact Dana, who is believed to be in a coma, getting what details she can from her about the attack. In the process she discovers the girl is dead.Investigation leads them to the home of Everett Weber. They are unable to find him, but do find a lot of encrypted computer files. Paige breaks the code to reveal a list of the children of Cabal employees. They track down Weber, but before they can persuade him to come with him peacefully, a Cabal SWAT team cause a hostage situation. Paige is injured and Everett taken into custody.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haunted_(Armstrong_novel)"title="Haunted (Armstrong novel)">
"Haunted", the fifth in the "Women of the Otherworld" series, is a novel written by Kelley Armstrong featuring Eve Levine. Half-demon, black witch and devoted mother, Eve has been dead for three years. However, whilst the afterlife isn't too bad, Eve is desperate to find a way to communicate with her daughter, Savannah, now the ward of Paige Winterbourne and Lucas Cortez.The Fates, though, have other plans, and they call in a favour. An evil spirit called the Nix has escaped from hell. Feeding on chaos and death, she is an expert at persuading people to kill for her. The Fates want Eve to hunt her down before she does any more damage. The Nix is a dangerous enemy, however. Previous hunters have been sent mad in the process.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaotic_(novella)"title="Chaotic (novella)">
Half-demon Hope Adams loves her job. Granted, working for True News tabloid isn't quite the career her high-society family had in mind for her. What they don't know is that the tabloid job is just a cover, a way for her to investigate stories with a paranormal twist, and help protect the supernatural world from exposure. When Hope's “handler” sends her and a date to a museum charity gala, Hope suspects there's more to it than a free perk. He's tested her before. This time, she's ready for whatever he throws her way. Or so she thinks...until she meets her target: werewolf thief, Karl Marsten...
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_(Armstrong_novel)"title="Broken (Armstrong novel)">
In this story the half-demon Xavier calls in a favour - steal Jack the Ripper's From Hell letter away from a Toronto collector who had himself stolen it from the British police files. It seems simple, but in the process Elena accidentally triggers a spell placed on the letter which opens a portal into the nether regions of Victorian London. With thieving vampires, killer rats and unstoppable zombies on the loose, Elena and the Pack must find a way to close the portal before it is too late. To add to the confusion, Elena herself is pregnant with Clay's child (actually twins).The story begins with Elena worrying about her current pregnancy. She has concerns about what effect her werewolf nature will have on the unborn child, something with no recorded precedent in Pack knowledge. Clay and Jeremy, also concerned, have imposed a number of restrictions on her actions too, which Elena accepts but is also frustrated by. She is, therefore, not entirely displeased to hear from Xavier Reese who offers her a deal: he will hand over information about a rogue mutt the Pack have been seeking in exchange for the Pack's help in stealing an artefact from a sorcerer - the From Hell letter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Five"title="Age of the Five">
"Age of the Five" is set in a universe overseen by a pantheon of five gods (the Circle) who are the only apparent survivors of the War of the Gods. Before this war, it is understood that hundreds of gods existed on Earth. The Five control the destiny of the northern half of the world through a priesthood known as the White (the Circle's five representatives in the human world, Ithania). In southern Ithania live opponents of the White, who claim to worship five different gods (known as the Five). Both factions vie for control over their opponents, and eventually engage in war.Auraya (protagonist) is chosen to be a White. Beginning with diplomatic missions, she later moves on to fighting in a major battle between the north and the south. She discovers she has innate powers far exceeding those of her peers; it later turns out that she is a potential new Wild (a group of immortal sorcerers who have been persecuted by the will of the gods). Later in the series the Wilds are discovered to be at the final stage before godhood, and they discover a way to kill the existing pantheon of gods. Throughout the series Auraya's attitude towards her gods changes from obedience to distrust to hatred, as she realizes their moral defects.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lion's_Game"title="The Lion's Game">
"The Lion" will be landing. And at New York's JFK Airport, an elite American task force waits as the notorious Libyan terrorist prepares to defect to the West. Then, aboard Flight 175, something goes eerily, horribly wrong - a mere prelude to the terror that is to come. Ex-NYPD cop, now Task Force contract agent John Corey - together with his formidable and beautiful new partner, Kate Mayfield - will follow a trail of smoke and blood across the country. His quarry: a foe with the cunning of a man and all the bloodlust of a lion . To win a desperate game with no rules at all, Corey must invent a strategy that leaves room for no luck at all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plum_Island_(novel)"title="Plum Island (novel)">
In 1997, NYPD detective John Corey is on the back porch of his uncle's waterfront home on the North Fork of Long Island recovering from three gunshot wounds while working in his town of Manhattan, NY. He enjoys the fact that the tourist season is just about over so that it's just him and the locals. He listens to music while sitting in a chair and using binoculars to spy on people in a distant boat who are enjoying themselves. The local police chief, Sylvester Maxwell, comes to the back porch and asks Corey to act as consultant in a local murder investigation, as Corey is personally acquainted with the two victims, Tom and Judy Gordon, both employees on the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, a facility suspected of carrying out biological warfare research. They go to the house the victims owned, a waterfront property that appears to have been robbed or searched, and where the two victims have been shot in the head on their own dock. Corey concludes that the victims were near their killer because it is hard to hit a person in the head with one shot at such a range. They cannot find the bullet shells, but by the direction of the wounds conclude that the bullets are in the bay. Max is unhappy because although he's not a homicide detective, his expectations of Corey's findings were high. Beth Penrose, the Suffolk County police detective, arrives. Corey instantly figures out she's in charge of the case without her stating it. She yells at him a bit for being on the crime scene because he appears to be a civilian. He ignores Beth and searches the speed boat that the Gordons temporary docked. When he gets out of the boat she pulls his own gun on him and makes him state who he is. Just before he goes, he asks if they found the chest in the boat that the Gordons used as a trunk while boating; they reply that it's missing. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beastly"title="Beastly">
Kyle Kingsbury is rich, handsome, and popular; he is also selfish, shallow, and cruel. He plays a mean practical joke on an outcast girl in his class. The girl is really a witch named Kendra in disguise. The witch then curses him for his cruelty. He is turned into a beast; however, because he performed a small act of kindness shortly before his transformation when he gave an unwanted rose corsage to a girl working a ticket booth, she gives him two years to break the spell, or remain a beast forever. The only way he can turn back to normal is if he truly loves a girl and gets her to love him in return, proving the love with a kiss.Kendra later offers Kyle further aid by giving him a magic mirror that shows him whomever he wishes to see. He is locked in a mansion-like apartment by his equally shallow, image-obsessed father. His only company is his housekeeper, Magda, and, at his request, a blind tutor named Will. Kyle finds solace in a greenhouse for roses that he tends himself. After a year of being in this state, and trying and failing to find love, Kyle changes his name to Adrian, meaning "Dark One", to reflect his feelings of being a completely different person from the conceited, materialistic boy he used to be. When a robber stumbles into his garden Adrian offers him a deal; he will not report the robber to the police if the robber brings Adrian his daughter, Linda. She is Adrian's last chance to break the spell before his two years are up.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I'd_Tell_You_I_Love_You,_But_Then_I'd_Have_to_Kill_You"title="I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You">
The Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women is a fairly typical all-girls school—that is, if every school teaches advanced martial arts in PE, chemistry always consists of learning about the latest in chemical warfare, and everyone breaks CIA codes for extra credit in computer class. So in truth, while the Gallagher Academy might say it’s a school for geniuses what they really mean is spies. But what happens when a Gallagher Girl falls for a boy who doesn’t have a code name?Cammie Morgan may be fluent in fourteen languages and is very capable of killing a man with a few pieces of uncooked spaghetti, but the Gallagher Academy hasn't prepared her for what to do when she meets an ordinary boy who thinks she’s an ordinary girl. Sure, she can tap his phone, hack into his computer, and track him through a mall without him ever being the wiser, but can she have a regular relationship with a regular boy who can never know the truth about her? Cammie may be an elite spy in training, but in her sophomore year, she’s doing something riskier than ever—she’s falling in love.A young spy, Cammie Morgan, falls in love with a boy, Josh, but cannot reveal the truth about herself to him. This caused misunderstandings later on and they broke up in tears. In the end, Josh finds out about her being a spy, and all wrongs in the past had been corrected, and hope came back to Cammie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Eden_(novel)"title="Return to Eden (novel)">
Kerrick's tribe, which now includes the two male Yilanè who have elected to remain with him, live an almost idyllic life at a small lake, until a raiding party from Alpèsak captures and rapes one of the males, who later dies. The tribe moves east and find a peaceful island. Later Herilak's tribe joins them.The scientist Ambalasi studies the primitive Yilanè, in between solving the problems involved in getting the Daughters of Life to work, since they are all regarded as equal, so none may lead the work force.Vaintè makes her way along the coast to a Yilanè city. She persuades the leader there to let her lead a group in search of the Daughters of Life, secretly planning to seek out and kill Kerrick and the other humans.The weapons the humans stole from the Yilanè begin to die. Without them, they won't be able to kill the larger dinosaurs which threaten their safety this far south. However, the expedition goes wrong and Lanefenuu, who is the leader of Alpèsak now learns their presence. Ambalasi contacts Lanefenuu to divert the attention while the Daughters of Life try to recruit new members and some males. This mission also fails.The expedition of Vaintè contacts Lanefenuu and learns the whereabouts of the Daughters of Life. They capture Ambalasi as ordered, but then Vaintè turns on her leader and takes Enge hostage. She finds Kerrick, but before killing him, the surviving Yilanè male kills her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voyage_Out"title="The Voyage Out">
Rachel Vinrace embarks for South America on her father's ship and is launched on a course of self-discovery in a kind of modern mythical voyage. The mismatched jumble of passengers provides Woolf with an opportunity to satirise Edwardian life. The novel introduces Clarissa Dalloway, the central character of Woolf's later novel, "Mrs Dalloway". Two of the other characters were modelled after important figures in Woolf's life. St John Hirst is a fictional portrayal of Lytton Strachey and Helen Ambrose is to some extent inspired by Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell. Rachel's journey from a cloistered life in a London suburb to freedom, challenging intellectual discourse, and self-discovery very likely reflects Woolf's own journey from a repressive household to the intellectual stimulation of the Bloomsbury Group. Toward the novel's end, Rachel Vinrace dies of a fever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad's_Fate"title="Conrad's Fate">
Conrad Tesdinic lives in Stallchester, a small town in the English Alps, a mountain range present in Series Seven worlds where the British Isles are still connected to the European mainland. Conrad's father is dead; his sister Anthea has left home to go to university; and his mother, Franconia, is an eccentric feminist author whose books are sold exclusively in her brother's bookshop. She and Conrad live with her brother, Uncle Alfred, over the bookshop.In the mountains high above Stallchester lies Stallery Mansion, home to the Count and his family. Uncle Alfred tells Conrad that someone up at Stallery Mansion is "pulling the possibilities" – that is, shifting the parameters of the world just a little, in order to benefit themselves to the detriment of the rest of the world. This is later referred to as a "probability shift." From the affluence of Stallery, it is obvious that this person is making a great deal of money by doing so. In the town, only small details change – the colour of the postboxes, the titles of books – but Uncle Alfred is certain that someone at Stallery is reaping far greater benefits from the shifts. Uncle Alfred and his Magician's Circle tell Conrad that he is going to die within the year unless he kills the person pulling the possibilities. This person (unnamed by any) is apparently someone Conrad should have eliminated in a past life. To kill this person and set things right, Conrad will need to infiltrate Stallery Mansion in the guise of a domestic servant, and then summon a Walker. The Walkers are magical beings who come on command and give the caller what they need for their particular situation. Conrad is told that the Walker will give him an item he needs to defeat the nameless foe. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spadework"title="Spadework">
Spadework focuses on the everyday drama of human relationships, enhanced by the intensity of the theater atmosphere and the ambition of young actors at a crossroads that may lead to either a brilliant career or mediocre success. These events force the protagonists to re-examine their sexuality and their loyalties in the face of temptation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Silver_Blues"title="Sweet Silver Blues">
Garrett is a private investigator living in the city of TunFaire, a melting pot of different races, mixed breeds, cultures and religions, though humans predominate. He is approached by the wealthy Tate family. Denny Tate, an old army buddy of Garrett's, has died in an accident. In his will, Denny left an enormous fortune in silver, acquired through questionable means, to a woman his family knows nothing about, Kayean Kronk. Denny's father Willard tries to hire Garrett to locate Kayean, who is believed to be living in the Cantard, the battleground of a generations-old war between the kingdoms of Karenta and Venageta. Having survived his mandatory five-year service there (which many do not), Garrett wants no part of it.Then Denny's partners try to steal the silver and his writings, the latter so they can continue operating as before. For the 10% executor's fee and also to be reunited with Kayean Kronk (a teenage love of Garrett's), Garrett reluctantly heads off to the Cantard with his half-dark elf friend and assassin Morley Dotes, who has his own agenda, and the Roze triplets. Denny's beautiful cousins, Rose and Tinnie Tate, try to tag along, but Garrett forcibly sends them back.When they arrive in Full Harbor, a major Karentine base/city, Garrett makes inquiries, but nobody wants to talk about Kayean, not even her brother. Eventually, he discovers that Kayean loyally followed her husband when he and his brother joined a nest of much despised and feared vampires. A centaur named Zeck Zack, who sometimes works with the vampires, and several other parties become involved. After forcing the truth out of Zack, Garrett and his gang set out to rescue Kayean. In a desperate battle, Garrett retrieves her (as well as Rose and Tinnie Tate and Garrett's friend Saucerhead Tharpe) from the vampire lair. Morley kills Kayean's husband and takes her brother-in-law prisoner.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_Gold_Hearts"title="Bitter Gold Hearts">
Garrett is a hardboiled detective living in the city of TunFaire, a melting pot of different races, cultures, religions, and species. When people have problems, they often come to Garrett for help, but trouble has a way of finding Garrett on its own, whether he likes it or not.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Copper_Tears"title="Cold Copper Tears">
Garrett is a hardboiled detective living in the city of TunFaire, a melting pot of different races, cultures, religions, and species. When people have problems, they often come to Garrett for help, but trouble has a way of finding Garrett on its own, whether he likes it or not.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Tin_Sorrows"title="Old Tin Sorrows">
Garrett is a hardboiled detective living in the city of TunFaire, a melting pot of different races, cultures, religions, and species. When people have problems, they often come to Garrett for help, but trouble has a way of finding Garrett on its own, whether he likes it or not.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dread_Brass_Shadows"title="Dread Brass Shadows">
Garrett is a hardboiled detective living in the city of TunFaire, a melting pot of different races, cultures, religions, and species. When people have problems, they often come to Garrett for help, but trouble has a way of finding Garrett on its own, whether he likes it or not.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Iron_Nights"title="Red Iron Nights">
Garrett is a hardboiled detective living in the city of Tun Faire, a melting pot of different races, cultures, religions, and species. When people have problems, they often come to Garrett for help, but trouble has a way of finding Garrett on its own, whether he likes it or not.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadly_Quicksilver_Lies"title="Deadly Quicksilver Lies">
Garrett is a hardboiled detective living in the city of TunFaire, a melting pot of different races, cultures, religions, and species. When people have problems, they often come to Garrett for help, but trouble has a way of finding Garrett on its own, whether he likes it or not.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petty_Pewter_Gods"title="Petty Pewter Gods">
Garrett is a hardboiled detective living in the city of TunFaire, a melting pot of different races, cultures, religions, and species. When people have problems, they often come to Garrett for help, but trouble has a way of finding Garrett on its own, whether he likes it or not.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faded_Steel_Heat"title="Faded Steel Heat">
Garrett is a hardboiled detective living in the city of TunFaire, a melting pot of different races, cultures, religions, and species. When people have problems, they often come to Garrett for help, but trouble has a way of finding Garrett on its own, whether he likes it or not.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whispering_Nickel_Idols"title="Whispering Nickel Idols">
Garrett is a hardboiled detective living in the city of TunFaire, a melting pot of different races, cultures, religions, and species. When people have problems, they often come to Garrett for help, but trouble has a way of finding Garrett on its own, whether he likes it or not.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tex_(novel)"title="Tex (novel)">
The book opens with Tex McCormick, a 15-year-old who loves horses, and his brother Mason (Mace), living in a small town and Jamie the girl next door. Tex is growing up mostly with Mace in a small country home. Their mother died years before, and their father goes off for months at a time leaving Mace, a high school senior and a star basketball player, and Tex at home. At the start of the book, Tex comes home to find the two brothers' horses sold. Negrito, Tex's horse, was considered a friend to Tex. However Mace had to sell the horses to guarantee Tex and himself would have enough to eat through the winter. This action by Mace sets Tex against his brother for most of the book.But the McCormick brothers are not alone. Living in the significantly larger ranch house next door (about 0.5 mi (0.80 km)) are the Collinses which includes Mace’s best friend Bob, Tex's best friend Johnny, and the younger sister whom Tex loves, Jamie. The Collins' children are forbidden to see Mason and Tex because the patriarch of the Collins family, Cole, thinks they are a bad influence.After a turn of events involving Tex and Mace's father, Tex runs away to the city with a family friend and eventually learns that just living life and staying with his brother is the best thing for him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Heaven_Fell"title="When Heaven Fell">
Earth has been taken over by the Master Race, a galaxy-spanning empire of artificial intelligences, and the best of Earth’s survivors are recruited into the aliens' army. Athol Morrison has served for 20 years, and heads back to Earth for a brief vacation. There, he runs into old friends, and finds it easy to give into his old feelings with his childhood girlfriend, Alexandra (Alix) Moreno.Alix and the rest of Athol’s friends are involved in a rebellion against Earth’s Master. They ask Athol to help and to join them, and so he helps to train them. Concerned that any rebellion will provoke a genocidal response from the Masters, he betrays the rebellion to the local government, making sure that Alix and Davy Intäke are spared.Conflicted about what he has done, but feeling as if there was no choice, Athol rejoins up with his new command. Soon afterward comes war with the Hu, the most advanced race yet encountered—they developed hyperspace travel either on their own or stole it from a Master facility. Despite the Hu winning a series of early victories, the Master Race grinds the Hu down in a near-genocidal campaign that leaves the Hu homeworld in ruins.After that war is over, Athol and one of his concubines visit his alien comrade Shrêhht on her home planet. There, he is invited into another rebellion, one composed of all of the slave races, that has been plotting against the Master Race for over 100,000 years. He returns to Earth a second time and learns that he and Alix have a daughter, Kaye Moreno, and takes her off-planet to be trained as a soldier herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Transfer_(novel)"title="Manhattan Transfer (novel)">
The novel tells the stories, primarily, of four people living in Manhattan from the 1890s to the late 1920s. The stories are presented in a fragmented, contrasting way, often juxtaposing them to bring out new meaning. The title of the book refers to a railway station, and the way that Manhattan itself was undergoing change.The primary characters and stories include:Some of the secondary characters in the novel include:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inconstant_Star"title="Inconstant Star">
There are two parts to the novel, Iron, and Inconstant Star.In “Iron”, Saxtorph and the "Rover", hired by the wealthy Crashlander Laurinda Brozik, set out to explore a newly discovered red dwarf star. When they arrive, they are challenged by a Kzinti warship. Separating the crew onto the shuttles, the "Rover" is captured and landed on one of the moons. The first shuttle sets on Prima, the first planet, and is held fast by a planet-sized organism that begins dissolving the shuttle. They broadcast for rescue, and are refused help by the Kzin.Meanwhile, helpless to rescue their friends, Robert, Dorcas, and Laurinda make a plan to steal a tug and escape back to friendly space with the news of the Kzin base. Dorcas pilots the tug, and takes out the ship guarding the "Rover". Robert and Laurinda land, fight off a Kzinti shuttle, and recover the "Rover". They are able to rescue Juan and Carita, and destroy the base with a guided asteroid.In “Inconstant Star”, Saxtorph and crew are hired by Tyra Nordbo to redeem her father's honor, as he was accused of collaboration with the Kzin during their occupation of Wunderland. To do so, they must use notes he had left behind and follow a ship that had left 30 years prior to investigate a concentration of gamma rays. They travel to the coordinates, and find a massive artifact made of an unknown metal. A hole in the spherical artifact is pouring out lethal radiation. As they study it, they learn it is a weapon of the Tnuctip. It is a shell around a “captured” black hole, one that had been holed by a meteorite and is thus releasing the Hawking radiation. They then deduce the route of the original Kzin ship, and head off to the Father Sun, the star of the Kzin homeworld. En route, they locate the "Sherrek", where Tyra's father Peter had worked free of his Kzin captors. They rescue him and head back to the artifact. Another Kzin ship, "Swordbeak", also finds the old ship. They, too, head to the artifact, and catch the "Rover" by surprise. Just when all looks lost, Robert and Dorcas conceive a plan to use the artifact's radiation against the Kzin warship. In a last act of defiance, a dying Weoch-Captain activates the artifact's hyperdrive and heads out into unknown space.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Company_(novel)"title="The Black Company (novel)">
The Dominator is an extremely powerful wizard who has the ability to turn his most bitter enemies into his loyal servants, even those nearly his equal in magic. The most potent of his victims are called the Ten Who Were Taken, or just Taken for short. With his wife, the Lady, whose magical skill is second only to that of the Dominator, he founded an empire unrivaled for evil. It was overthrown by a rebellion led by the White Rose, but neither she nor the rebel wizards were strong enough to kill the Dominator, the Lady or the Taken. The best they could do was to render them unconscious and imprison them. Their prison was a place called the Barrowland.After four centuries, the wizard Bomanz awakened the Lady during a spirit walk into the Barrowlands, in an attempt to learn from her. She manipulated him, won her freedom, and subsequently trapped Bomanz in a quasi-undead spirit state between dimensions. She then unleashed the Taken, but betrayed the Dominator, leaving him where he was, and proceeded to resurrect the empire. As with the old, so it was with the new – a rebellion broke out, spearheaded this time by the Circle of Eighteen. The Circle is made up of magicians not individually as strong as the Taken, but usually united in their goals. The Taken, on the other hand, battle each other as much as they do the rebels.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_Linger"title="Shadows Linger">
In the earlier book the setting begins with the company employed by a Syndic, but the captain slays him because he thinks he is fighting for a lost cause, for little pay, and he does not want to sentence the company to its doom. Soulcatcher, the Taken that recruited them, becomes their mentor. They do many missions for the Lady. They end up being pushed, along with the rest of the Lady's forces, back to her HQ, the tower at Charm. They have an immense battle where many of the company are lost. The Taken backstab each other during the battle except for Soulcatcher, who flees only to be hunted down and destroyed by Croaker and the Lady who use a set of magical arrows to kill her. The old legend, that tells the tale of The Lady and The Dominator, her worse than evil husband, and The White Rose who imprisons them is centuries in the past. The Dominator and his wife, the Lady, (both supremely skilled in the art of magic), had founded an empire legendary for evil. They were overthrown by a rebellion led by the White Rose, but even in defeat, they remained too powerful to be killed; the best the rebels could do was to imprison them in the Barrowland. The Lady escaped to rebuild the empire, but betrayed her husband, leaving him there. "The Black Company" recounted how she crushed several deadly challenges to her power, but those were not the only threats to her reign.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Rose_(Cook_novel)"title="The White Rose (Cook novel)">
Centuries in the past, the Dominator and his wife, the Lady, (both supremely skilled in the art of magic), had founded an empire legendary for evil. They were overthrown by a rebellion led by the White Rose, but even in defeat, they remained too powerful to be killed; the best the rebels could do was to imprison them and their most powerful minions in the Barrowland. A wizard named Bomanz awakened the Lady in an attempt to learn from her, but she used him to gain her freedom and rebuilt the empire. However, she betrayed her husband by leaving him where he was.A rebellion broke out against the Lady's new empire; the Black Company played a key role in putting it down (as detailed in "The Black Company)." Later, the Company also assisted the Lady in preventing her husband from escaping his prison (as recounted in "Shadows Linger)," but it was forced to flee her wrath when she discovered that it had unknowingly sheltered the reborn White Rose.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silver_Spike"title="The Silver Spike">
The Dominator was a wizard of immense power who could not be killed by his enemies. He was, however, defeated and his evil essence imprisoned in a silver spike. The power inherent in the spike is so greatly feared and desired that some try to steal it, while others try to keep it from falling into anyone's hands.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Games_(novel)"title="Shadow Games (novel)">
Marching back after the defeat of the Dominator, the Black Company is down to just seven men. They go south, where the now powerless Lady briefly takes control of her Empire and where Croaker, the Annalist and Captain of the Company, is reunited with the Annals which hold the Company's history. Continuing their travels south in search of Khatovar, where Croaker is oathbound to return the annals, they are conscripted into service yet again by the crown prince of Taglios. Their commission is to defeat the advance of the conquering Shadowmasters from the south.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams_of_Steel"title="Dreams of Steel">
The book follows the storyline of both Lady and Croaker, who have been separated from the Black Company after the company's defeat at the end of "Shadow Games". Lady was separated as she was overwhelmed by dying soldiers and her story begins with her digging herself out of the pile. She quickly hooks up with two strange men, Narayan Singh and his partner Ram. Lady, with those two, begins to re-assemble the army of Taglios. Lady is much different from Croaker's style of managing the people of Taglios, eliminating those who try to stand against her.Narayan Singh is a leader in a shadow religious group who are known as The Deceivers, and worship the goddess of Kina. Kina is a Goddess of Death, and the Deceivers are trying to bring her back to this world. Lady believes that she is using the Deceivers to further her agenda, while avoiding the seduction that Kina appears to be trying against her.While Lady builds up the Taglios army, Croaker is in the company of Soulcatcher—Lady's sister. Soulcatcher wants Croaker for two reasons: to heal her of the wounds that she received in the Books of the North, as well as to take revenge out on her sister. Soulcatcher's agenda is to spread chaos. She dresses as Lady and attacks the Shadowmaster's army to sow confusion of where anyone is. Her plan backfires as Longshadow, along with his new ally Howler, kidnap her instead of Lady. Longshadow wishes to use the knowledge that Lady has to further his own agenda. With Soulcatcher taken away, Croaker uses that freedom to escape and rejoin the army of Taglios.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleak_Seasons"title="Bleak Seasons">
Taking place in part during the events of Dreams of Steel, which was told from the point of view of Lady, this story examines the events surrounding Murgen, who is trapped within the siege of Dejagore where atrocities are being committed by both sides. The book also examines events later in Taglios under rule of the Liberator and the increasing tensions between the Black Company and the Radisha, as well as the ever-present threats from the Stranglers and of some new deception by Soulcatcher and the Howler. Bleak Seasons is unique among the Black Company series for the unusual narrative device of Murgen being totally unfixed in time and uncertain of when he will experience another seizure and move between distant past, recent past and a vaguely comprehended present. This narrative device is followed through three-quarters of the novel until we come to understand the traumas that have led Murgen to this point, while the enchantment that has made it possible remains unclear. The tone is introspective, haunted and mysterious. This novel introduces several key elements and characters to the series, including visions of the frozen caverns, Sahra, Uncle Doj, Mother Gota, One-Eye's black spear, and the manipulation of the comatose wizard Smoke.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Sleeps"title="Water Sleeps">
Cook brings the latest cycle of the Black Company saga to a major climax, as disaster survivors regroup in Taglios and set out to free their fellow warriors held in stasis beneath the glittering plain. They arrive just in time for a magical conflagration that will reveal the bones of the world and the history of the Company."Water Sleeps" is set with most of the leadership of the Company in Stasis, while the remaining company fights a guerilla war. The company is both pitted against the last remaining Shadowmaster, Soulcatcher, a Sorceress of epic power, and the subtle machinations of the sleeping Goddess of Death and her Deceivers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldiers_Live"title="Soldiers Live">
Croaker, no longer dictator of Taglios or Captain of the Company, resumes his old role as Annalist. Sleepy is now Captain, and no Black Company member has died in battle for four years. But when the Company's old adversaries try to bring about the apocalyptic Year of the Skulls, the Company is brought to the edge of destruction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Till_Death_Do_Us_Part_(McDaniel_novel)"title="Till Death Do Us Part (McDaniel novel)">
18-year-old April Lancaster, the child of Janice and Hugh Lancaster, enters the hospital for testing as she has been suffering from headaches, blackouts, and eventually passed out in English class.During this time, April becomes acquainted with Mark Gianni, who suffers from cystic fibrosis, and has been in and out of the hospital since he was born. Mark is very interested in April, and even tells her that he intends to marry her, but she declines his offer to go out, as she already has a boyfriend, Chris.April is told by her doctor that she has an inoperable brain tumor, a recurrence of the case she had as a five-year-old, and needs to start radiation treatments. Soon after breaking the news to Chris, he ends their relationship, and April begins to date Mark.Over time, the two fall in love, and Mark proposes to April. She accepts, although her parents aren't thrilled about the match. Eventually, they do reconcile to the idea.Shortly afterward, the car that Mark is driving in during a race (he is an avid racing fan) flips over and ignites. Mark survives the crash, but he develops pneumonia and dies.The book ends with April and her parents in St. Croix for a vacation. April releases a red balloon for Mark, as he had once done for her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Centurions_(novel)"title="The New Centurions (novel)">
The novel is basically without plot, instead episodically depicting the psychological changes in three LAPD officers caused by their police work, and particularly the nature of police work in poor minority communities of Los Angeles. The three officers, Serge Duran, Gus Plebesly, and Roy Fehler, are classmates at the police academy in the summer of 1960, and the novel examines their lives each August of succeeding years, culminating in their on-the-job reunion during the Watts riots of August 1965."The New Centurions" is likely the most autobiographical of Wambaugh's novels. He provides a straightforward narration of events with little use of flashback. Each chapter is written in the third person from the point of view of one of the three protagonists. They have no contact with each other once they graduate from the academy, but their paths are similar and converging. Like Wambaugh, his protagonists move from a few years of uniformed patrol in minority districts to plainclothes assignments in juvenile and vice work, experiences which so affected Wambaugh that he returns to them repeatedly as plot elements in his fiction.Wambaugh also explores the officers' private lives, noting adultery, alcoholism, racism, and suicide as rampant in the ranks of the LAPD. Police suicide, in particular, is a theme Wambaugh explores in nearly all of his books.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consent_to_Kill"title="Consent to Kill">
In Flynn's previous novel, "Memorial Day", CIA counter-terror operative and assassin Mitch Rapp uncovered an Al-Qaeda plot to use a nuclear weapon obtained from abandoned Russian nuclear storage bunkers. The ultimate goal was the destruction of Washington, D.C., and Rapp was forced to torture the only man who knew the details of the plan: Waheed Abdullah. Rapp then faked Waheed's death to prevent the Saudi Government from learning of it and rescuing him, while preserving a useful source for himself. To keep Waheed from being discovered, Rapp puts him in an Afghan prison.However, this plan backfires: Waheed's father, Saeed Ahmed Abdullah, a billionaire Saudi businessman and a jihadist himself, learns that Rapp has "killed" his son. Saeed beseeches Saudi Prince Muhammed bin Rashid for help. Rashid puts Saeed in contact with a former East German Stasi officer, Erich Abel, and Saeed puts a $20 million contract on Rapp's head.Abel, through his contacts, approaches two assassins, a husband and wife team, Louis Gould and Claudia Morrell. For $10 million, they agree to kill Rapp. Claudia, who is pregnant, specifically asks Louis not to kill Rapp's wife, Anna, as she is also pregnant. Louis agrees, and both leave for America.In Washington, Rapp is angered by the new Director of National Intelligence, Mark Ross, who authorized surveillance of Rapp's co-worker and friend, former Navy SEAL Scott Coleman. Ross sends the IRS to investigate Coleman, and requests Coleman's personnel file from the Navy. Ross has ambitions to the presidency and views his current position as a stepping stone to the White House. He has no respect for Rapp because of Rapp's reckless actions and, despite his contributions, wants to fire him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faery_in_Shadow"title="Faery in Shadow">
Caith mac Sliabhin, condemned by the Sidhe in "The Brothers" for committing patricide, wanders along the river Guagach, accompanied and tormented by Dubhain, a mischievous pooka. Their journey takes them to Gleann Fiain where a beast from the river chases Caith up a hill to an isolated cottage. The occupants, twins Ceannann and Firinne, let Caith and Dubhain in and allow them to spend the night. Unbeknown to Caith, the birth of the twins 21 years ago set in motion a sequence of events that damned Gleann Fiain and cast a shadow over Faery.The twins were born to Fianna, queen of Gleann Fiain in Dun Glas. But unbeknown to her husband, Ceannann mac Ceannann, Fianna was unable to conceive and had sought help from a wise-women, Moragacht. Moragacht struck a bargain with her, promising her twins if she lay down with a selkie, in exchange for one of the twins when they were born. But when the twins arrived (a human and a selkie) and Moragacht came to claim one of them, Fianna denied any knowledge of her, and mac Ceannann turned Moragacht away. From that day onwards, grief and misery struck the family, and mac Ceannann and Fianna were forced to vacate Dun Glas and flee with the twins to an abandoned hilltop fortress. But the loch beast, under Moragacht's control, found them there and killed them all, except the twins, now aged 14, who escaped to the cottage. The witch then seized control of Dun Glas from where she damned all of Gleann Fiain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartacus_(Fast_novel)"title="Spartacus (Fast novel)">
"Spartacus" begins with three young Roman patricians – Caius, his sister Helena and her friend Claudia, commencing a journey from Rome to Capua along the Via Appia a few weeks after the final suppression of the slave revolt. The road is lined by "tokens of punishment" – slaves crucified in the immediate aftermath of the revolt. During the first day of their travel the party encounter several representative individuals; a minor politician, a prosperous businessman of the equestrian class, an eastern trader and a young officer of the legions; all of whom give their respective perspectives on the rising. On arrival at a palatial country villa where they are to spend the night, the trio meet with other guests, both historical and fictional, who either played key roles in the events just finished or who have sufficient perception to analyze the significance of slavery as an institution within the Roman Republic.From the encounters at the "Villa Salaria", the focus of the novel moves to occasions before and during the actual rising of the slaves. The emphasis is on Spartacus, his life in the mines and as a gladiator; his character, powers of leadership and dreams of a just society where exploitation and cruelty have been eliminated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_of_Earth"title="Brothers of Earth">
The protagonist of the book is Kurt Morgan, a crewman on the Alliance ship "Endymion", which was destroyed in a space battle with Hanan forces. Morgan evacuates the ship and lands on an alien planet, home of the "Nemet" race. Morgan is rescued by one faction of the Nemet and becomes embroiled in their political and military struggles. Morgan is not the first human stranded on the planet, however. His encounters with a previous female human castaway endanger the entire Nemet race when she reacts badly and threatens to unleash weapons of mass destruction on the planet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_of_Worlds"title="Hunter of Worlds">
In the story, a ship belonging to a terrifyingly dominant space-faring race, the iduve, arrives at a space station. They demand that a particular station resident, a blue-skinned Kallian, be sent to their ship and all record of him be erased. No defiance is possible or the space station will be destroyed. The human-like Kallian is handed over to the iduve who mind-link him to a female Kallian in their service and, later, to a human prisoner, forcing him to service his captors on three levels.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manservant_and_Maidservant"title="Manservant and Maidservant">
In 1892 Horace Lamb lives on an inherited estate with his wife, their five children, his extended family and a slew of servants including the butler Bullivant. Though Horace is wealthy through his marriage to Charlotte he insists on controlling her money in a miserly way. The ones who suffer the most from his economy are his children (in particular his eldest Sarah) who dress in rags and are constantly cold and hungry. Charlotte and Horace's cousin Mortimer, who is his dependent, plan to run away together. Before this can be accomplished Charlotte is called to visit her ailing father. The children are taught by their great-aunt Emilia, however Horace is eventually persuaded to hire a tutor, Gideon Doubleday, for the elder children. After Gideon takes a casual invitation from Horace seriously he decides to return the favour by asking the Lambs to meet his mother, Gertrude, and sister, Magdalen. Gertrude takes an immediate interest in Horace while Magdalen develops feelings for Mortimer. The two families grow closer in Charlotte's absence and Gertrude hints to Horace that her daughter and Mortimer might marry some day which he finds appalling. Charlotte abruptly returns and discovers her children well-clothed and fed and her husband repentant. Horace claims to have seen the error in his ways but reveals he is aware of the plot between Charlotte and Mortimer. Charlotte decides to stay with Horace, despite no longer loving him, in order to maintain family harmony. Horace reveals that he will only continue to pay for Mortimer if he marries Magdalen and moves elsewhere. With no other options Mortimer assents. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Weeks_with_the_Queen"title="Two Weeks with the Queen">
Colin Mudford, a 12 year old Australian, is sent to stay with his uncle Bob, aunt Iris and cousin Alistair in London while his brother, Luke, is being treated for cancer. In England, Colin, wanting to ask the Queen for good doctors, attempts to break into Buckingham Palace with Alistair, only for them both to get caught by the police.After an unsuccessful attempt to sneak into the best cancer hospital in London, Colin meets a Welshman named Ted, whose friend Griff is also suffering from cancer. Ted introduces Colin to one of England's leading cancer experts, who then contacts Luke's doctors in Sydney and confirms that the cancer which Luke has is terminal. Colin then attempts revenge on the doctors by slashing the tires on their cars, including Mercedes, BMW, Jaguar and Audi, only to be caught by Ted. Colin then storms back to Bob and Iris's house distraught, where Alistair gives Colin the idea that a possible cure may be found in South America.Colin convinces Alistair to stow away with him on a cargo ship to South America the next day. However, when Colin admits that he slashed the tires of several doctors' cars and that Ted caught him, Alistair warns Colin that Ted could be blamed for this, so Colin delays their trip to South America. The next day, Colin visits Ted at his home, and finds that he has been badly injured. Ted tells him that he was attacked by people in the street who disliked him, because he is gay. He then confesses to Colin that Griff is actually his lover, who is dying of AIDS.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactics_of_Mistake"title="Tactics of Mistake">
Lieutenant Colonel Cletus Grahame has been an instructor at the Western Alliance military academy since a battle injury crippled one of his knees, and forced his retirement from active duty. He has completed three volumes of a planned twenty-volume series of books on military strategy and tactics, and believes his analysis can revolutionize military science, although many do not take his work seriously. Feeling he needs to get out in the field and try putting his theories into practice, he leaves the academy and arranges to be sent to the world of Kultis, where the Alliance is supporting the Exotic colony of Bakhalla in a war against the neighboring colony of Neuland, backed by the Coalition.The heart of his military strategy, based in part on fencing, is what he labels the "tactics of mistake," enticing one's opponent into overreaching, and being ready to take advantage of the mistake. This description is an adaptation of a similar concept in the novel "Scaramouche" by Rafael Sabatini when the character Moreau studies at the salon of the Master of Arms.On the first night out on the ship to Kultis, he deliberately antagonizes Dow deCastries, Secretary of Outworld Affairs for the Eastern Coalition, forcing deCastries to take notice of him. He also meets Colonel Eachan Khan, an officer of the Dorsai troops who have been hired by the Exotics, and Khan's daughter Melissa. Mondar, an Exotic official, is also present, and takes notice of Grahame.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master's_Voice_(novel)"title="His Master's Voice (novel)">
The novel is written as a first-person narrative, the memoir of a mathematician named Peter Hogarth, who becomes involved in a Pentagon-directed project (code-named "His Master's Voice", or HMV for short) somewhere in the Nevada desert, where scientists are working to decode what seems to be a message from outer space (specifically, a neutrino signal from the Canis Minor constellation). Throughout the book Hogarth—or rather, Lem himself—exposes the reader to many debates merging cosmology and philosophy: from discussions of epistemology, systems theory, information theory and probability, through the idea of evolutionary biology and the possible form and motives of extraterrestrial intelligence, with digressions about ethics in military-sponsored research, to the limitations of human science constrained by the human nature subconsciously projecting itself into the analysis of any unknown subject. At some point one of the involved scientists (Rappaport), desperate for new ideas, even begins to read and discuss popular science-fiction stories, and Lem uses this opportunity to criticize the science fiction genre, as Rappaport soon becomes bored and disillusioned by monotonous plots and the unimaginative stories of pulp magazines.Before Hogarth's arrival, the scientists were able to use part of the data to synthesize a substance with unusual properties. Two variations had been created: a viscous liquid nicknamed "Frog Eggs", and a more solid version that looks like a slab of red meat called "Lord of the Flies" (named for its strange agitating effect on insects brought into proximity with it). There is some speculation that the signal may actually be a genome and that "Frog Eggs" and "Lord of the Flies" may be a form of protoplasm; possibly that of the alien creatures that presumably sent the signal. This theory, like all the project's theories about the signal, turns out to be unverifiable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil's_All_Fright_Diner"title="Gil's All Fright Diner">
In the backwoods southern town of Rockwood, a vampire and a werewolf in a run-down old truck come across Gil's All Night Diner, a 24-hour restaurant in the middle of nowhere. Nearly out of gas, they stop in at the diner only to discover it is the target of zombie attacks, hauntings, and occult activity.The manager of the diner, Loretta, offers them a job helping her out around the diner, and maybe helping solve her zombie problem. They accept.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Armageddon_Inheritance"title="The Armageddon Inheritance">
## Book 1.After the events of "Mutineers' Moon", the evil mutineer Anu has been defeated by the warship "Dahak", aided by its new captain, Colin MacIntyre. As the highest-ranking officer of the Imperium present, MacIntyre had elevated himself to the rank of "Governor of Earth" in order to absolve the loyalist mutineers of their crimes; he then unified the worlds' governments under his authority (backed up by his advanced Imperial armaments and Dahak) and set Horus the task of preparing defenses against the Achuultani scouts, which have been methodically advancing on the Sol system, detected by self-destructing Imperial sensor arrays. This gave frantic defenders under Lieutenant Governor Horus and his assistant, Gerald Hatcher, barely two years to pacify the holdouts to the new world order (such as the Asian Alliance), to modernize the world economy, and to construct and power a planetary defense shield, as well as construct and train a space fleet and the fortresses on the ground which will support the fleet; and then of course to defeat both the scouts and the main Achuultani incursion. The primary holdout to participation in the planetary defense plan was the Asian Alliance, a group of all Asian nations except Japan and the Philippines. It was effectively controlled by a Marshal Tsien Tao-ling. who is convinced to join by the obvious military imbalance (the moon having disappeared, and several Middle Eastern nations forcibly disarmed by Imperium technology-equipped troops) and by the promise of considerable local autonomy and control of four seats on the nine-person council advising Horus. Regardless, the military programs soon get underway. To withstand the Siege (as the coming attack on Earth has come to be called) the Earth's defenses consists of front line spaceships, constructed by "orbital industrial units" left behind by Dahak (clanking replicators, in other words); a planetary shield powered by a core tap; and all backed up by numerous hypermissile launchers built into "Planetary Defense Centers" (sheared off and embedded with armaments mountains around the Earth).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hestia_(novel)"title="Hestia (novel)">
Engineer Sam Merrit has been sent to the struggling colony planet Hestia to build a dam. Since the colony is placed in a large river valley and plagued by seasonal floods, the colonists believe that a dam is essential to enable them to escape the squalid conditions that have persisted there since the founding of the colony over a hundred years ago.Upon arrival, Merrit finds that the reason the colony is confined to the valley and not making use of flood-safe lands is the presence of cat-like alien natives who attack anyone venturing outside the valley - but the dam will destroy the habitat of many of these natives. Pressured by the colonists to hurry the construction more than he considers safe, Merrit encounters and befriends a native woman, prompting some of the colonists to become hostile towards him as well. Merrit becomes increasingly convinced that ending the conflict with the natives would help the colony more than the dam.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Lucifer_(Duncan_novel)"title="I, Lucifer (Duncan novel)">
In "I, Lucifer", God presents the devil with a chance of redemption by living a somewhat sinless life in a human body. Lucifer, not wanting redemption, takes God’s offer for a trial but instead takes it as a month's holiday. This story takes place in London and Lucifer lives in the body of Declan Gunn (an anagram of "Glen Duncan", the author's name), formerly a struggling writer who is suicidal. While in Declan’s body, Lucifer takes his body for granted and abuses drugs, alcohol, and sex. Not only does Lucifer still live a devilish life, but also he starts to realize what being a human is really like. He realizes there is so much going on in their lives and so much temptation, and people can’t simply do whatever they please. As Lucifer’s trial is coming to an end, he receives a visit from the angel Raphael, who attempts to help Lucifer head in the right direction. Raphael tells him the world is going to end so there’s no choice but to gain redemption from rebelling against God and be accepted back into heaven. Lucifer makes his decision. The whole story is permeated by the main character's versions of biblical episodes and his disparaging opinions about God and "Jimmeny" (Jesus).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Falcon_at_the_Portal"title="The Falcon at the Portal">
The 1911 season finds the Emersons planning to excavate at Zawyet el'Aryan, south of the great pyramids of Giza. David Todros has just been married to Lia, the daughter of Walter and Evelyn Emerson, and the happy couple will be joining the expedition after their honeymoon. The family's happiness is dimmed, however, by allegations that David has been making and selling fake antiquities under the guise of his late grandfather Abdullah's legacy. Ramses and Nefret take on the task of ferreting out the source of the rumors - and the fakes - with fears that the Master Criminal is behind it.Meanwhile, Percy Peabody, Amelia's evil nephew, turns up as a member of the Egyptian Army and an intermittent pest. He has written a lurid (and completely false) memoir about his time in Egypt, keeps proposing to Nefret, and seems up to something, though he doesn't have the brains to be part of the plot the Emersons are investigating.Two young Americans join the Emersons' dig, Geoffrey Godwin and Jack Reynolds, whose sister sets her sights on Ramses. Ramses is also investigating the illegal drug trade.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Shall_Thunder_in_the_Sky"title="He Shall Thunder in the Sky">
The novel takes place in 1914, as Ramses Emerson works undercover to gather intelligence for the British military, Nefret returns from studying medicine in Switzerland, and Percy Peabody returns to wreak revenge on the Emerson family for past events. The Emerson have acquired the "firman" for part of the Giza concession, but of course are distracted by the criminal element, and eventually by a startling revelation from the Master Criminal, Sethos himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crimson_Petal_and_the_White"title="The Crimson Petal and the White">
The novel details the lives of two very opposite Victorian women, Agnes and Sugar, and the linchpin on whom they revolve: William Rackham.William, the unwilling and somewhat bumbling heir to a perfume business, is a businessman of moderate success and little self-awareness.He marries the exquisitely doll-like Agnes, even though he barely knew her. Agnes, the consummate Victorian "female ideal" of naive and delicate femininity, has been kept completely in the dark on sexual matters. Her diaries express utter confusion over events like menstruation (which she believes is a demon who returns periodically to "bleed" her), pregnancy, sex, or childbirth: she does not even acknowledge her young daughter, Sophie, whom the household staff carefully keeps away from Agnes. Everyone treats Agnes as a mentally ill patient, and she is kept drugged and confined to her bedroom. Weekly visits from Dr. Curlew, who Agnes believes sexually assaults her during his "examinations" of her, keep her unbalanced. Outside of the house, few know of Agnes's madness (though knowledge of it spreads during the length of the story), as she generally presents herself as an inveterate hostess and socialite to the world during each season.William soon becomes obsessed with a worldly young prostitute named Sugar, an unconventionally intelligent and strong-willed young woman who uses the affair with William to climb to a higher perch in the rigidly stratified class system of the time. William purchases Sugar from her madame (Sugar's own mother) and sets her up in a luxurious flat of her own, where he regularly visits her on his terms. Sugar has been a prostitute since the age of 13 and views sex as a living, not a pleasure, with no physical act too taboo. She is resentful of her reliance on William (and men in general) and indulges her fantasies about harming her and her fellow prostitute's clients in an explicitly gruesome novel of revenge erotica that she pens in her spare time as she works to maintain William's continued interest using both her body and her mind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paladin_(Cherryh_novel)"title="The Paladin (Cherryh novel)">
The Lord Saukendar, Imperial sword master and stalwart supporter of the Emperor is betrayed, falsely accused of an affair with his childhood sweetheart Lady Meiya, now the Emperor's wife. Meiya is dead, and hostile forces have command of the Emperor's regency. Wounded, desperate and cut off from his supporters, Saukendar runs for the border.In a homemade cabin high in the hills Saukendar survives crippled and alone, his warhorse Jiro and his regrets his only company, while the empire is bled by the rapacious warlords that are regent to the Emperor. Only occasional assassins dispatched by the Regent disturb his morose existence.Taizu, a country girl from Hua locates him, demands he teach her sufficient swordsmanship to exact her revenge for her people's suffering. Despite his better judgment and strenuous efforts to discourage her, she forces him to take her on as apprentice swordswoman. Shoka, as he prefers to be known to his friends, becomes fond of the girl.In the process of teaching her and supporting her cause, they become embroiled in the affairs of empire, becoming the spearhead of a revolt that rescues the Emperor from his Regent and his people from the clutches of the warlords.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Hand_of_the_Goddess"title="In the Hand of the Goddess">
Alanna, now squire to Prince Jonathan of Conte, has to protect her dreams of knighthood and friends through their first war with Tusaine. She slowly learns more about her gift, using it primarily to heal, and continues to hide her true gender while both George and Jon have fallen in love with her. She continues to be suspicious of and protect Jon from his power-mad first cousin, Roger, on the way to her becoming a full-fledged knight.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_Who_Rides_Like_a_Man"title="The Woman Who Rides Like a Man">
A newly knighted Alanna leaves the capital to travel among the Bazhir in the desert and after being attacked by bandits and her sword breaking, she gets adopted by one of the tribes, though clashing with the tribe's shaman who seeks to destroy her name with the sword that broke her own. After fighting to the death with the shaman for her honor and winning, she has to replace the shaman and cannot leave until she trains another. After training the first 2 girl shamen she rides back home and fixes her sword.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lioness_Rampant"title="Lioness Rampant">
The first chapter of this book finds Alanna, Faithful, and Coram on a quest for the 'Dominion Jewel', which grants immense psychokinetic power to any monarch who owns it. In the town of Berat, Alanna befriends martial-arts champion Liam Ironarm, called the 'Dragon of Shang', who joins the quest. Liam begins training her in Shang fighting style, and the two become lovers. The party thence traverse the realm of Sarain, evading a civil war between the native 'K'miri' tribes and the ruler, Warlord jin Wilima, and acquire new companions in Princess Thayet, the Warlord's only child, and her K’miri protector Buriram Tourokom. At the mountain range known as the 'Roof of the World', Alanna becomes frustrated by the blizzards blocking their progress and her magical sense that trouble is occurring back in Tortall. She casts a spell on the group to keep them asleep and then ascends to the pass, where she undergoes a grueling physical trial to acquire the Jewel from its immortal guardian, Chitral. She succeeds in winning the Jewel and returns to the group, to find that Liam—who is afraid of magic—is angry at being bewitched by her. Their romantic relationship ends, though they continue as friends and colleagues. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_in_the_Night_(novel)"title="Bump in the Night (novel)">
Divorcee Martha Tierney awakes to a phone call from the headmistress of her son's school telling her that Jonathan, her son, is not at school. Martha, an alcoholic, is disoriented.Jonathan sneaks out early in the morning for a secret meeting with his father at a doughnut shop at 8 A.M. Jonathan leaves the house early and stops by a neighbor who tells him that the chosen doughnut shop is closed and he will have to meet his father in the street.Jonathan is stalked by Lawrence Miller, a former professor who has lost his job over accusations of child molestation. When Patrick fails to show at the doughnut shop, Lawrence pretends to be a friend of Jonathan's father and lures him off to the zoo, then on to an apartment that doubles as a film studio for child pornography movies.Patrick, Martha, the neighbors, and investigating detective Sergeant Mooney all work together to hunt for the little boy. Jonathan uses all his courage and resourcefulness to escape the sexual abuse that he knows is coming.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Mage"title="Emperor Mage">
Daine travels with a Tortallan embassy to Carthak in order to help cure the Emperor's birds of a mysterious sickness, as well to improve relations with the hostile country.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Realms_of_the_Gods"title="The Realms of the Gods">
Daine and the mage Numair are faced with certain death when they are suddenly swept into the mystical realms of the gods, where Daine learns the secrets of her past. But she and Numair are both needed in the mortal world to help fight the desperate war that is raging in Tortall. And so they undertake the journey home – a dangerous journey that will teach them about life and about each other. Their path leads them to the final clash, which involves both gods and immortals – a battle in which the only chance for Tortall's future lies with Daine and her wild magic.Set in Tortall during the reign of King Jonathan IV and Queen Thayet, "Realms of the Gods" is the final book in "The Immortals" series, which chronicles a time when the world is invaded by immortal creatures.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_and_Freindship"title="Love and Freindship">
"From Isabel to Laura"This presents a glimpse into the life of Laura from Isabel's perspective. Isabel asks Laura to tell the "misfortunes and adventures" of her life to Isabel's daughter Marianne (Austen 516). Isabel argues that because Laura is turning 55, she is past the danger of "disagreeable lovers" and "obstinate fathers" (Austen 516). This initial letter sets up the rest of Austen's narrative through Laura's letters to Marianne."Laura to Isabel"This consists of a reply from Laura to Isabel. Laura initially disagrees with Isabel's assessment that she is safe from "misfortunes" simply because of her advanced age (Austen 516). Laura agrees to write to Marianne and detail her life experiences to "satisfy the curiosity of Marianne" and to teach her useful lessons (Poplawski 183). The useful lessons are lessons learned from the misfortunes caused by "disagreeable lovers" and "obstinate fathers" (Poplawski 183). Poplawski highlights the importance of the relationship between females and their lovers and also between females and their fathers as a means through which Austen is able to criticise stereotypical female behaviour. As seen throughout the work, these two relationships are constantly criticised by satirical anecdotes. Janetta's relations with her father and with her lover, Capitan M’Kenzie in the twelfth letter, shows Austen mocking the fickleness of family ties and romantic relationships.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amongst_Women"title="Amongst Women">
The novel is set in County Leitrim in the rural border region of the Republic of Ireland. The story spans a period of twenty years in the middle of the twentieth century. It centres on Michael Moran, patriarch of the Moran family and a former IRA member who was an officer and guerrilla fighter in the War of Independence and the Irish Civil War in the 1920s. Although Moran is a well-respected member of his community and a devout Catholic, there is a cruel, violent, and controlling side to his character. He dominates the lives of his second wife, Rose, and his five children. His children strive to establish their own lives while remaining loyal to the family. Most of the story is told through the use of flashbacks, as Moran's daughters attempt to recreate Monaghan Day for their elderly and depressed father, because it was the day when he always seemed to be at his best.The novel opens with an elderly, weak, and depressed Michael Moran being taken care of by his daughters. Although they have busy lives and families of their own in Dublin and London, they have never really left the family home because they feel more important there. They have decided to recreate "Monaghan Day," an event Moran always seemed to enjoy, hoping that this will somehow reverse his failing health. Monaghan Day was a market day, when Moran's friend McQuaid used to visit and they would reminisce about the war. The family's story is told through the use of flashbacks as the women in Moran's life remember the past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(novel)"title="Matter (novel)">
The book follows the experiences of three members of the royal household of the Sarl, a feudal, early-industrial humanoid race living on the eighth level of the Shellworld of Sursamen. Constructed for an unknown purpose by a long-dead race called the Veil, Shellworlds are ancient artificial planets consisting of nested concentric spheres internally lit by tiny thermonuclear "stars". The spheres are inhabited by various primitive races along with progressively more advanced mentoring species, up to the level of what the Sarl call "Optimae." (The Optimae themselves, particularly the Culture, prefer the term "Involved.") Approximately 4,000 Shellworlds were built, but almost 2,000 were deliberately destroyed, for reasons unknown, by another presumed extinct race, the Iln. Like many Shellwords, the core of Sursamen is known to be inhabited by a mysterious creature called a Xinthian Tensile Aeranothaur, whom the Sarl worship as their "WorldGod."Prince Ferbin, the self-centred heir to the Sarl throne, has to flee his home level on the Shellworld and the Shellworld itself after witnessing the murder of his father, King Hausk, by Mertis tyl Loesp, the King's second-in-command. Prince Oramen, Ferbin's studious younger brother, is unaware of the treachery and trusts tyl Loesp fully. After Ferbin's disappearance—and presumed death—tyl Loesp takes on the role of regent, ostensibly until Prince Regent Oramen comes of age and can be crowned king.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devlin's_Luck"title="Devlin's Luck">
Devlin Stonehand is an ex-metalsmith and ex-farmer from the conquered land of Duncaer. After losing his family to banecats, he decides to take the oath of the Chosen One, hoping for a quick death. Instead, Devlin solves the mystery of elusive bandits, and defeats a lake monster, to the growing annoyance and concern of his enemies. Attacks made against him, both mundane and magical, fail to stop him. Meanwhile, as the Chosen One continues to live, the common people of Jorsk begin to respect and worship him.Nobles from around the kingdom seek Devlin out for help with local troubles and troubles to the kingdom overall. Helping those he deems sincere, Devlin seeks out the barony that is having no trouble, and investigates in his role as Chosen One. There he finds an oppressed populace, and confronts the baron with charges of treason. The arrested baron is sent back to the capital, Kingsholm, to be judged by the king.When he finally understands the depths of the baron’s treachery, he returns to Kingsholm to uncover the rest of the conspiracy. When he arrives, he finds that the Marshal of the Royal Army, Duke Gerhard, is a main conspirator, and the accused baron has been released. Devlin challenges Gerhard to a duel, in which Gerhard is slain and Devlin almost dies. He recovers over time, and is named the new General of the Royal Army and given a voting seat on the king’s council.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Pilgrim"title="The Secret Pilgrim">
## Part one."Smiley reflects on the end of the Cold War, and makes a rueful joke that, in one way, the world has changed, but in another, it has always been the same and the secret services are gradually waking up from their own deluded perceptions of it, and themselves."After a couple of years of training at the Sarratt Nursery, in the glens of Argyll and battle camps of Wiltshire, Ned is looking forward to his first overseas posting and is disappointed to be kept in London, as part of a team of watchers keeping an eye on a Middle Eastern royal family. In a famous Knightsbridge store, Ned becomes alarmed when he sees a suspicious Arab closely following the prince's wife at a distance. Ned prepares to incapacitate him with a martial arts blow, but his supervisor Monty grabs Ned and holds him back. Ned learns that the wife is a compulsive shoplifter and the man is not a fanatic assassin, but instead assigned by the prince to pay compensation and hush money to the stores she steals from. Monty comments, "That's the trouble in our job, Ned. Life's looking one way, we're looking the other."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danse_Macabre_(novel)"title="Danse Macabre (novel)">
## Summary."Danse Macabre" appears to take place a few weeks after the events of "Incubus Dreams" and almost immediately after the events of "Micah", assuming that the series of serial killings that friend refers to as occurring two weeks earlier are the killings Anita investigates in "Incubus Dreams."Unlike the previous thirteen novels, neither Anita's role as a Federal Marshal nor her job as a zombie animator plays any part in this novel. Instead, Anita must juggle a series of problems arising from her own increasing power, vampire politics, and her own personal life, complicated in this case by Anita's apparent pregnancy.Ultimately, Anita resolves most of these conflicts:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cutting_Edge_(novel)"title="The Cutting Edge (novel)">
"The world of Pandemia seethes with tension as imperial troops wage war along its borderlands and omens predict disaster. When the Protocol which restricts the use of magic begins to break down, only a few handpicked people have a chance to preserve the balance of their crumbling society." (1)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Little_Wizards"title="Ten Little Wizards">
Someone is killing wizards, and doing so apparently without the use of magic. Lord Darcy is sent to investigate. He must uncover the murderer and ascertain whether the whole business is a ploy to kill the king himself.To complicate matters Darcy must investigate during the preparations for the investiture of Gwiliam, Duke of Lancaster (King John IV's younger son), as Prince of Gaul. To add international tension, the Crown Prince of Poland, His Majesty the King of Courland (Latvia), will attend the ceremony. (In this timeline, Poland is a great empire ruling most of Eastern Europe, and there is an ongoing cold war between it and Darcy's Anglo-French Empire).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_in_Sorcery"title="A Study in Sorcery">
In New England (a term which in this history includes the whole of our North America) an Azteque Prince is found dead on a stone altar.Lord Darcy and Sean O Lochlainn are sent across the Atlantic to investigate. Darcy must identify the killer and determine whether the Azteques are returning to human sacrifice. Perhaps an attempt is being made by the rival Polish Empire to upset the balance of power between the Angevin Empire and the Azteques?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_the_World"title="Learning the World">
The novel is a first contact story, following the generation ship "But the Sky, My Lady! The Sky!" as it approaches the Destiny Star. Humans have been colonizing the 500 light-years around Earth for a few thousand years, and have never run into a sentient alien species — until now. The discovery of an Industrial Age alien race upsets the established protocols of the ship, leading to uncertainty and delays in habitation, which in turn leads to societal unrest and conflict aboard the ship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Luna"title="Operation Luna">
The world of "Operation Luna" has an alternative history, which mostly resembled our own until a great "Awakening" brought awareness of supernatural forces to the world at large. This Awakening led to drastic changes in society; industrial machinery was largely replaced by technology driven by magic, spells, and "goetic forces" instead of fossil fuels and electricity. For example, the main mode of transportation is broomsticks and magic carpets fitted with cabins for people to sit in; radios are called "runers," apparently activated by runes; and the propulsion behind space flight is achieved by a combination of mechanical technology, spelled crystals, and arcane materials such as mummy dust.Steve helped in the construction of a spacecraft for Operation Selene, the United States' first attempt to send a manned craft to the Moon. However, a disaster caused by beings adverse to the mission destroy the vehicle and nearly kill the celestonaut, Curtice Newton, although Steve, in wolf form, saves her.Afterward, Steve, Ginny, and a handful of people begin to investigate the disaster and make plans to put Operation Luna into effect, a smaller version of Operation Selene independent from NASA.Since the identities of the entities behind the Operation Selene disaster remain somewhat veiled and mysterious, Steve and Ginny enlist the help of a number of people, including Balawahdiwa, a Zuni high priest; Fotherwick-Botts, an enchanted sword that can talk; and Fjalar, a Norwegian dwarf who forged Fotherwick-Botts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bel_Canto_(novel)"title="Bel Canto (novel)">
Set in an unspecified South American country, the story begins at a birthday party thrown at the country's vice presidential home in honor of Katsumi Hosokawa, the visiting chairman of a large Japanese company and opera enthusiast. As a not-so-subtle pretext to get Hosokawa to invest in the country, famous American soprano Roxane Coss is scheduled to perform as the highlight of the party.Near the end of the party, members of a terrorist organization break into the house, intending to take the President of the country hostage. When they realize the President is not in attendance, the terrorist group decides to take the entire party hostage. After determining they have too many hostages, the terrorists decide to release all of the hostages except those they deem most likely to return a large ransom.Two major romantic relationships develop as the standoff drags on and serve as the backdrop to the rest of the story. The first is between Coss and Hosokawa, who develop a deep bond even though they do not speak each other's language and thus cannot communicate verbally. The second relationship is between the translator Gen and the young terrorist Carmen, who must keep their love a secret. The two lovers meet in the china closet every night.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_(LeRoy_novel)"title="Sarah (LeRoy novel)">
The boy agrees to work for Glad, a benevolent pimp who specializes in "boy-girls." Glad gives him a raccoon penis bone, which he wears as an amulet for protection, good fortune, and sexual prowess as well as to signify his status as one of Glad's boy-girls. He is given the name Cherry Vanilla, but on his first date with a trucker he uses the name Sarah.Hoping to outperform his rejecting mother and become the greatest lot lizard of them all, he goes off on his own into the wilds of West Virginia and is eventually taken up by a very powerful and very dangerous pimp known as Le Loup. Unaware that this new girl is a boy, Le Loup uses him not to turn tricks but as an object of veneration – and donations – with luck-conscious and magic-fearing truckers. Eventually Saint Sarah's mystique fades, and when he is revealed to be a boy Le Loup forces him to work alongside other boy prostitutes and live in captivity with them. After an agonizing year, Glad is finally able to rescue him from Le Loup, but the boy who returns is no longer capable of rejoining Glad's boy-girls; his mother Sarah is long gone as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singer_of_All_Songs"title="The Singer of All Songs">
Calwyn is a young priestess who chants the ice chants of Antaris. She lives inside Antaris, a community located among mountains, which is enclosed by an ice wall. The priestesses must maintain the wall with their chantments; that is, by singing certain songs, the knowledge of which is passed down to them through the temple. Nine powers can be achieved by such songs, though never by the same chanter. Legend has it that a Singer of All Songs will someday be born, who will know and use the songs of all the effects.During one of the nine days of Strengthening, in which the priestesses sing to maintain the Wall, it is breached by a strange traveler, called Darrow. Calwyn attempts to approach him; but when he sings in a low tone, Calwyn feels as though a hand is clutching her tunic and keeping her away. He is unable to maintain this and collapses because of an injury he had suffered, whereupon Calwyn brings Darrow back to the priestess' dwellings. The psychokinetic effect is revealed by the High Priestess to be of a chantment, the Power of Iron, which controls inanimate matter. Calwyn befriends Darrow, who now has a scar on his eyebrow and a permanent limp. Samis, a greedy sorcerer who wants to become the Singer of All Songs and rule the world of Tremaris, follows Darrow to Antaris. Darrow and Calwyn manage to flee by jumping into the river that flows under the Wall.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iracema"title="Iracema">
The story revolves around the relationship between the Tabajara indigenous woman Iracema and the Portuguese colonist Martim, who was allied with the Tabajara nation's enemies, the Pitiguaras.Through the novel, Alencar tries to remake the history of the Brazilian colonial state of Ceará, with Moacir, the son of Iracema and Martim, as the first true Brazilian in Ceará. This pure Brazilian is born from the love of the natural, innocence (Iracema), culture and knowledge (Martim), and also represents the mixture (miscegenation) of the native race with the European race to produce a new caboclo race.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruins_of_Gorlan"title="The Ruins of Gorlan">
Morgarath, the exiled lord of the bleak, barren Mountains of Rain and Night has been waiting fifteen years in his dark realm, carefully planning his revenge against the Kingdom of Araluen. His former fief, known as Gorlan, was long ago brought to ruin as a result of his unsuccessful rebellion against King Duncan. Now he silently plots to rebel again, rallying hideous creatures known as Wargals to his side. Wargals have little will of their own, and are easy to control, therefore being suitable as soldiers in Morgarath's army. After fifteen years, Morgarath prepares to unleash his power, except using two strong beasts called the Kalkara, which are very powerful ape-like assassins, to attempt to weaken the Kingdom before trying to take the Kingdom once more. Meanwhile, in Araluen, in Redmont Fief, a special day has come for 15-year-old Will and his fellow wardmates (Horace, Alyss, George, and Jenny), called Choosing Day, where they all become an apprentice to a craftmaster or have to work in the local farms. Jenny is apprenticed to Master Chubb, the castle cook. Horace is accepted to Battleschool, and George is accepted to Scribeschool, while Alyss is accepted as a courier. Although Will's first choice was Battleschool (he does this because he thinks his father was a brave knight, although he doesn't know for sure what happened to him), Baron Arald (the baron of Redmont fief) explains to him that his talents lie in other directions. Instead of being accepted to Battleschool, he becomes apprenticed to Halt the Ranger, after sneaking into a guarded tower at the castle. Rangers are the intelligence group of the country and specialize in long-range weapons and the art of staying unseen. Will is not overly excited about this, but he is trained in these skills. The main reason why he is being trained in these skills is that he needs to prepare for the annual Ranger meeting called the Gathering. During this time he begins to establish a closeness to Halt and starts to realize that being a Ranger is much better than it seems. Will is given a horse named Tug, from an old horse trainer by the name of Old Bob.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranger's_Apprentice"title="Ranger's Apprentice">
## "The Ruins of Gorlan".Morgarath, the exiled baron, has been waiting fifteen years, carefully planning his revenge against the Kingdom of Araluen. He prepares to unleash his power and attempt once more to take control of the kingdom. In Araluen, in Redmont Fief, a special day has come for 15-year-old Will and his fellow wardmates (Horace, Alyss, George, and Jenny), called Choosing Day, where they all become an apprentice to a craftmaster or have to work in the local farms. Will becomes apprenticed to Halt the Ranger. Rangers are the intelligence group of the country and specialize in long-range weapons and the art of staying unseen. Will begins to train in these skills.In the meantime, Will's wardmate Horace is in Battleschool. His life is harsh and he is bullied by three second-year Battleschool cadets. During a local holiday known as Harvest Day, Horace and Will fight, increasing their hatred for each other. Six weeks later, Will saves Horace's life during a boar hunt, cementing a friendship between the two boys. Later, the Battleschool bullies attack Will, leading to Halt intervening and having the bullies banished from the fief. Soon after, Halt and Will leave for the Ranger Gathering, where they receive a report that the Kalkara, vicious creatures under the control of Morgarath, have entered Araluen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burning_Bridge"title="The Burning Bridge">
In the prologue, Halt (a legendary Ranger) and Will (the protagonist and Halt's apprentice), captures Dirk Reacher, one of Morgarath's former henchmen. They search Reacher and find Mogarath’s battle plans to invade Araluen. Halt and Will think over it, but decide it is genuine.Meanwhile, on a special mission for the Ranger Corps, Will, his friend Horace (a Battleschool apprentice), and the Ranger Gilan (one of Halt's former apprentices) travel to Celtica, a neighbouring country southwest of Araluen. When they ride to Celtica, they discover that all the people in the villages have mysteriously vanished. Will and Horace wonder if all the villagers have been slain or captured, but Gilan believes that the evil Lord Morgarath devised a plan to cross the mountain pass faster. If that was true, and the King wasn't warned, the country would be destroyed. Gilan rides to warn King Duncan, the King of Araluen, and Will and Horace begin to follow a straggling Wargal force. On their way, they come across an abandoned girl named Evanlyn, who claims to be a maid to Lady Ariana Wulton of the Araluen court, but is actually Princess Cassandra, King Duncan's daughter, in disguise. When the three of them follow the dimwitted Wargals they discover that a gargantuan bridge is in the process of being built across the impassable Fissure for their war party to cross. They also discover that the King's army will be trapped on the Plains of Uthal, because the plans that Halt and Will captured in the prologue of the book were merely a ruse to distract them. Will burns the bridge with Evanlyn's help. Evanlyn tries to warn Will about a rock thrown by a Skandian but is too late, giving a chance for a Skandian to grab them. Will and Evanlyn are taken captive by the group of Skandians ruled by Jarl Erak, but Horace is able to escape their grasp. After, he tells the King and his aides about what is going to happen, the army starts to get prepared for the army that is supposed to attack them from behind, Halt is sent to take care of them with a force of cavalry and archer units (a unit consist of an archer and a pikeman). In the middle of the battle, Morgarath calls a truce and challenges Halt to a duel, but King Duncan forbids it to happen. Then, unexpectedly, Horace challenges Morgarath to single combat. About to be defeated by Morgarath, Horace then, in a attempt to win the duel, throws himself into the path of Mogarath’s battle horse, to throw it off balance. He is successful, but only manages to wind Morgarath. Morgarath is confident that he is going to win by a last powerful stroke of his broadsword, but Horace blocks it with the double-knife defence that Gilan taught Will in Celtics and stabs Morgarath in the heart to win the battle. The Wargals become harmless as soon as Morgarath dies and the mind domination is broken. Immediately Halt goes looking for Will and Cassandra but he is too late. The Skandians sail for Skandia to sell Will and Princess Cassandra as slaves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tenth_Power"title="The Tenth Power">
On a winter night in Antaris, Tamen, the Guardian of the Wall, and other priestesses approach the ice Wall that surrounds Antaris. A priestess drugs herself, whereupon the other priestesses sing a hole into the wall. The drugged priestess is sealed inside.Characters Calwyn, Mica, and Trout are traveling to Antaris, Calwyn's home, hoping that the priestesses may restore Calwyn's lost powers of chantment, by which she was able to manipulate wind, ice, animals, and living systems. Upon reaching the Wall, Mica uses the Clarion of the Flame, a magical object used to invoke fire, to burn a hole into the Wall. The drugged priestess is revealed, whereupon Calwyn tries to heal her, but does not succeed. The three notice other corpses encased in the Wall, which Calwyn attributes to a failure to entomb them according to custom. The three proceed to the priestesses' Dwellings.When reaching the Dwellings, Calwyn enters the kitchen where she sees a now crippled Lia, a revered priestess and milk healer. Lia warns Calwyn that Tamen will hunt Calwyn down and seal her into the Wall with the other priestesses; having contracted an ailment called snow-sickness, they were put into the Wall in hopes of appeasing their goddess Taris, who would presumably restore spring. Marna, the High Priestess, has died and Tamen has been promoted to High Priestess in her place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Silent"title="Lord of the Silent">
In this installment, which takes place during the 1915–1916 season, newlyweds Ramses and Nefret Emerson spend their time living on their family's dahabeeyah on the Nile, while the rest of the group remains at the house near Giza, where their excavations continue. Between the antics of Ramses' former associates in the smuggling trade, the reappearance of the Master Criminal, and yet another unknown adversary with a rich find, little time is permitted for romance...but of course, the younger Emersons make the most of it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_One_(novel)"title="The Golden One (novel)">
The Golden One is a combination of two stories. The first story deals with the search for an unknown tomb, one where some artifacts have started to appear on the black market. The second story follows Ramses Emerson as he is sent on another mission behind Turkish lines.After arriving in Egypt in January, 1917, Amelia acquires a magnificent cosmetic jar with the cartouche removed. Rumors of a new, previously untouched tomb are rife, and this is significant evidence. After a brief stay in Cairo, the family moves on to their home in Luxor. When the Emersons arrive in Luxor, they encounter Joe Albion and his family, a wealthy American collector of antiquities, who make no secret of his desire to deal on the black market. Cyrus Vandergelt is acquainted with Joe Albion, and tells Emerson he would do anything to get what he wanted. This riles Emerson, and relations with the Albions are frosty at best.Jamil, a former employee and Jumana’s brother, is at the center of the rumors about the tomb. Early in their excavations, the Emersons discover one looted tomb with links to Jamil. They learn that he is manipulating a number of people and even attempts to kill Emerson and Peabody. When his family confronts him, his ancient musket explodes, mortally wounding him. But before he dies, he leaves a clue to the location of the tomb – “in the hand of the God”. The Emerson and Vandergelt expeditions now try to figure out which “hand of the God” Jamil meant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_the_Storm"title="Children of the Storm">
The 1919 season opens with the Vandergelts and Emersons packing the God's Wives treasures found (in the previous book) for Cyrus Vandergelt by his adopted son Bertie. Just after the Service d'Antiquités representative comes to inspect their work, several items disappear together with the conservator Cyrus had hired on Sethos's recommendation. The conservator's skeleton is found later in the desert, without the objects. These events coincide with a visit from Emerson's brother Walter, his wife Evelyn, their daughter Lia and her husband David (the Emersons' adoptive son), plus their small children.Meanwhile, the Emersons meet up with Justin Fitzroyce, a young person with a strange mental malady, and his companion, François, who quickly develops a dislike of the family after Ramses mistakes his attentions to the boy for physical abuse. Justin is travelling with his grandmother, the elderly, sometimes confused, Mrs Fitzroyce; also with them is her companion, who turns out to be Maryam, the teenage daughter of Sethos, fallen on hard times. Amelia tries to befriend Maryam and helps her to rebuild her relationship with her father when he arrives to visit. She also reassures Maryam that the Emersons were not responsible for the death of the girl's mother, Bertha.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_of_the_Horizon"title="Guardian of the Horizon">
The story begins in summer, 1907, ten years after the Emersons' expedition into the Nubian desert in "The Last Camel Died at Noon", when the Emersons were lured to a Lost Oasis where the remains of a Meroitic - Ancient Egyptian civilization that had avoided the outside world for centuries still survived. It was during that journey that the Emersons brought back Nefret Forth to live with them in England. A messenger from the Lost Oasis now appears at their home in Kent, pleading for help for their friend, King Tarek, and they have no choice but to go to his aid, though they mistrust the young man who claims to be Tarek's younger half-brother.This time it is Ramses who experiences the feeling of foreboding that normally assails Amelia, as they head off to the Sudan and into the desert to help their friend. Unlike their first trip, they bring a far larger force, in full awareness that the Lost Oasis will no longer be a secret no matter what the outcome of this expedition. It soon becomes apparent that the Emersons are not the only ones interested in the Lost Oasis. They run into too many people who are interested in their travel plans, and ultimately bring some unexpected guests with them. These include a British adventurer who has in his company a mysterious young woman. The girl unsuccessfully attempts to seduce Ramses, but he remains strangely attracted to her, although he is really in love with Nefret.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Serpent_on_the_Crown"title="The Serpent on the Crown">
In 1922, the Emersons are excavating at Deir el Medina when a melodramatic visitor delivers a challenge—and a solid gold ancient statuette—to them: find out where it came from and why it brings bad luck to its owners. Emerson, of course, doesn't believe in curses, but he does believe someone has robbed a find of historic proportions. When their visitor turns up dead and her stepchildren disappear, everyone except the Emersons believe the murder is a family affair.Ramses, meanwhile, finds a papyrus which "he" suspects to be of historic importance, and an assistant who is not all he seems.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_of_the_Golden_Bird"title="Tomb of the Golden Bird">
Howard Carter returns as a featured character, as the Emersons are privy to his discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine_Did_It"title="The Time Machine Did It">
Frank Burly, a private investigator, gets hired by an 18-year-old kid to beat up another detective. Later, in a cafe, he sees a strange man using what appears to be a time machine. He goes over to the guy, but he refuses to tell Burly anything of what happened. Then, Burly is hired to find a precious artifact stolen from a man named Mandible. Frank Burly begins to suspect Mandalible, who claims he is a multi-millionaire, is merely a crazy person, and that the artifact stolen from him doesn't exist.Burly finds the house of a Professor E. Groggins, which was robbed by Burly's criminal friend Small-Time Charlie. Burly investigates Charlie, and as he digs deeper into the mystery, he gets more threats telling him to back off from the case. Everyone Burly interrogates refuses to tell him about the time machine Burly had found in Groggin's basement-laboratory. Burly is even captured by the criminals of Central City, who drug him and lock him in a cell. He escapes but is lured back in a trap by a beautiful lady named Cola who pretends to be interested in him. Burly is thrown in a prison cell where Groggins and others who have gotten too close to the truth reside.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympos_(novel)"title="Olympos (novel)">
The novel centers on three main character groups; that of the "scholic" Hockenberry, Helen and Greek and Trojan warriors from the "Iliad"; Daeman, Harman, Ada and the other humans of Earth; and the moravecs, specifically Mahnmut the Europan and Orphu of Io. The novel is written in present-tense when centered on Hockenberry's character, but features third-person, past-tense narrative in all other instances. Much like Simmons' Hyperion where the actual events serve as a frame, the three groups of characters' stories are told over the course of the novel and their stories do not begin to converge until the end.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramona_and_Her_Father"title="Ramona and Her Father">
Ramona is in Glenwood School and all is going well until one day her father comes home and announces he has lost his job. The Quimbys must now cope with the breadwinner searching for another job, filling out job applications and collecting unemployment insurance. Mrs. Quimby goes to work full-time, but things are still very tight for the family. Mr. Quimby sinks into depression and Mrs. Quimby tells the children that they must not do anything that would further upset their dad.Ramona wants to help, so she crosses almost everything off her wish list for Christmas. Then she adds one more item – a happy family. But will her wish come true? The Quimbys are also dealing with the family's temperamental car, Beezus' problems with her creative writing class, and Ramona's efforts to get her father to stop smoking. One day when Ramona worries about the family, Mr. Quimby reassures her the Quimbys will always be together and strong, no matter what happens.That Christmas Beezus and Ramona participate in their church's Christmas pageant. Beezus is to be the Virgin Mary and Ramona decides that she and her friends Howie and Davy should be sheep. Unfortunately, her Mother doesn't have time to sew a costume so Ramona has to wear a pair of old pajamas, which she hates. In the end, the sheep steal the show and Ramona and her family share a wonderful night together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Tebbits"title="Ellen Tebbits">
Third-grader Ellen Tebbits lives with her parents on Tillamook Street in Portland, Oregon. The book opens when Ellen heads to her dance class at the studio run by the mother of a classmate, Otis Spofford, who is always teasing her. When she arrives, she heads to change in a broom closet so the other girls cannot see her terrible secret: Ellen is wearing woolen underwear. After class, she accidentally walks in on a new girl in class, Austine Allen, who's also wearing the dreaded underwear. Soon, the two become best friends. Other chapters in the book deal with Ellen's first-ever time going horseback riding, her efforts to bring a giant beet to school for show-and-tell, and Ellen and Austine's efforts to put up with the obnoxious Otis' antics.During summer vacation, Ellen and Austine decide to dress as twins on their first day back to school. The plan is for their mothers to make identical dresses for them. Austine's mother, however, cannot sew, so her dress doesn't turn out well. As the day goes on Austine begins to amuse herself by tugging on the sash of Ellen's dress. Ellen gets irritated and finally slaps Austine in the lunch line when her sash comes undone. Unfortunately, Austine was innocent; Otis had pulled on her dress. Austine begins spending time with other girls and ignores Ellen, who thinks everyone looks down on her for slapping her best friend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Casualty"title="The First Casualty">
In June 1917, whilst recovering from shell shock inside a military hospital, beloved war poet and dedicated soldier Viscount Abercrombie is inexplicably shot dead. Meanwhile, Douglas Kingsley, a liberal Inspector for Scotland Yard, has refused national service because he considers the war to be an affront to his highly prized sense of logic. As a result, he's hauled before a judge, branded a coward by those who love him - including his wife Agnes - and thrown into prison, where his fellow inmates routinely assault him, taking revenge for him putting them behind bars in the first place. However, the Home Office gives the disgraced copper a chance for redemption when it abducts him from his cell, fakes his death and orders him to investigate the Viscount's death behind the lines at Flanders.As he begins his reluctant inquiries, encumbered by the presence of his psychopathic minder Captain Shannon, Kingsley discovers that not only was Abercrombie a homosexual, but that he had also become disillusioned with the war and was composing poetry to this effect before his untimely death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_the_Hermit"title="Kermit the Hermit">
One day, when Kermit attempts to gain another unnecessary thing, he is almost buried by a dog, but is saved by a poor boy. Kermit is grateful and wants to thank the boy, but cannot think of a way to do so until he finds a chest of gold. As he stores the gold pieces in his cave, he slowly gives up one thing at a time, until he has all the gold and no more possessions in his cave. With the help of the pelican, Kermit drops coins down the boy's chimney. The boy's family becomes rich and Kermit learns the value of sharing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1901_(novel)"title="1901 (novel)">
In 1901, the United States is still basking in its victory in the Spanish–American War only three years earlier. However, the US Army is small, and its only large forces occupying the newly-won possessions of the Philippines and Cuba.German Kaiser Wilhelm II, tries to purchase the US acquisitions to compete with the British Empire. After it is refused, Germany declares war on the US and begins to invade it.The Germans land troops on the southern shore of Long Island, New York. They soon take Brooklyn, and Manhattan quickly falls, which soon allows German forces to cross into Connecticut.US President William McKinley is overwhelmed, suffers a heart attack, and dies, which results in US Vice President Theodore Roosevelt becoming the new president. Roosevelt begins to retrieve the situation by recalling several generals and giving their command to former comrades from Cuba, including Generals Leonard Wood, John Pershing, and Frederick Funston. However, the first major battle against the Germans is lost, and the scattered US Atlantic Fleet is also unable to respond.The United Kingdom quietly furnishes the poorly-equipped Americans with modern firearms and ammunition.The Americans slowly recover from the initial shock. At sea, the USS "Alabama" encounters and sinks three German cruisers that are bombarding Jacksonville, Florida. Meanwhile, in Connecticut, an American brigade, led by Funston, ambushes a German patrol and inflicts heavy casualties. The victories lift American morale, but the war soon turns into a stalemate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Akhenaten_Adventure"title="The Akhenaten Adventure">
John and Philippa Gaunt are two young children who live an upper class life in New York City, New York. Their uncle Nimrod appears to them in a dream and tells them about their magical powers as djinn. They are then sent to spend the summer with him, where he teaches them how to use their powers.Nimrod, John, and Philippa encounter various adventures while trying to discover where the Seventy Lost Djinn of Akhenaten are hidden. After travelling around the world looking for clues, the book concludes with a battle in the British Museum, where the children must free their uncle by taking a trip to the North Pole. They learn many different life lessons on their spectacular trip.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Night_Kitchen"title="In the Night Kitchen">
The main character is a young boy named Mickey who, while sleeping in his bed, is disturbed by noise on a lower floor. Suddenly, he begins to float, and loses all of his clothes as he drifts into a surreal world called the "Night Kitchen".He falls naked into a giant mixing pot that contains the batter for the "morning cake". While Mickey is buried in the mass, three identical bakers (who closely resemble Oliver Hardy) mix the batter and prepare it for baking, unaware (or unconcerned) that there is a little boy inside. Just before the baking pan is placed into the oven, the boy emerges from the pan, protesting that he is not the batter's milk.To make up for the baking ingredient deficiency, Mickey (now wearing a body suit of batter from the neck down) constructs an airplane out of bread dough so he can use the measuring cup as a hat and fly to the mouth of a gigantic milk bottle. Upon reaching the bottle's opening, he dives in and briefly revels in the liquid. After his covering of batter disintegrates, making him naked again, he pours the needed milk in a cascade down to the bakers who joyfully finish making their morning cake.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conqueror_Worms"title="The Conqueror Worms">
Teddy Garnett, an older man and war veteran, tells this story of a global flood that has left humanity in tatters. Holed up in his mountain home in West Virginia, Teddy and his buddy, Carl Seaton, struggle through daily life, puzzling over things even stranger than a 40-day rainstorm, including the giant slime-coated holes that keep showing up in Teddy's yard and the giant worm-like creature that ate a robin outside of Teddy's window. Meanwhile, Teddy is reeling over the loss of his wife Rose and the mysterious fate of his children and grandchildren. Before long, Teddy and Carl are fending off man-eating earthworms the size of buses. A helicopter crash nearby brings Kevin and Sarah, the last two survivors of an outpost in Baltimore, into Teddy's story; their tale makes up the bizarre second part of the book that explores the insanity doom can inspire. Kevin serves as the narrator for this tale and he tells about how he and a group of survivors faced off against all kinds of terror in Baltimore, including Satanists who make sacrifices to a mysterious beast known as Leviathan. It all leads to a showdown back at Teddy's house with a creature so monstrous it scares even the killer earthworms. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aelita_(novel)"title="Aelita (novel)">
The story begins in the Soviet Union, just after the end of the Russian Civil War. An engineer Mstislav Sergeyevich Los', designs and constructs a revolutionary pulse detonation rocket and decides to set course for Mars. Looking for a companion for the travel, he finally leaves Earth with a retired soldier, Alexei Gusev.Arriving on Mars, they discover that the planet is inhabited by an advanced civilization. However, the gap between the ruling class and the workers is very strong and reminiscent of early capitalism, with workers living in underground corridors near their machines.Later in the novel, it is explained that Martians are descendants of both local races and of Atlanteans who came there after the sinking of their home continent (here Tolstoy was inspired by Helena Blavatsky's books). Mars is now ruled by Engineers but all is not well. While speaking before an assembly, their leader, Toscoob, says that the city must be destroyed to ease the fall of Mars. Aelita, Toscoob's beautiful daughter and the princess of Mars, later reveals to Los' that the planet is dying, that the polar ice caps are not melting as they once did and the planet is facing an environmental catastrophe.While the adventurous Gusev takes the lead of a popular uprising against the ruler, the more intellectual Los' becomes enamored with Aelita. When the rebellion is crushed, Gusev and Los' are forced to flee Mars and eventually make it back to Earth. The trip is prolonged with the effects of high speed and time dilation resulting in a loss of over three years. The exact fate of Aelita herself is unknown. It is hinted that she actually survived, since Los' receives radio messages from Mars mentioning his name.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizardborn"title="Wizardborn">
"Wizardborn" is an epic fantasy novel set in a land where men can bestow to each other a number of endowments, granting the recipient of the endowment attributes such as increased strength, a more acute sense of hearing, or better eyesight. The novel combines traditional sword and sorcery elements of fantasy with its own unique magic system of endowments.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lair_of_Bones"title="The Lair of Bones">
"The Lair of Bones" is an epic fantasy novel set in a land where people can bestow to each other a number of endowments, granting the recipient of the endowment attributes such as increased strength, a more acute sense of hearing, or better eyesight. The novel combines traditional sword and sorcery elements of fantasy with its own unique magic system of endowments.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Message_in_the_Hollow_Oak"title="The Message in the Hollow Oak">
Nancy Drew finds out that she has won a rather unusual prize in a contest, a piece of land in Canada. She takes a trip, her first outside of the United States, to see what her new property looks like.As she is traveling by train to Canada, she meets an author named Ann Chapelle. Suddenly, the train crashes, and everything is thrown into confusion. Nancy and her two friends, Bess Marvin and George Fayne, are uninjured, but Chapelle is taken to a nearby hospital, gravely injured. When Nancy and her friends find her, Miss Chapelle tells Nancy the reason she was going to Canada, and asks a favor of her—to give a message to Miss Chapelle's grandfather, and to a lost love whom she hasn't seen since she ran away from home some years ago.Along with this request, Nancy also has another problem: Two men have heard that there might be gold on Nancy's land, and are determined to get there first.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Imperfection"title="Perfect Imperfection">
A 21st-century astronaut, Adam Zamoyski, is recovering after an accident. At first, he thinks that he is recovering from a plane crash, and any bizarre things he perceives are hallucinations due to his convalescence. He soon finds out that to prevent him from suffering a culture shock—or perhaps what would be better described as a profound future shock—all information he receives is filtered through an implant, creating a semi-VR world, and in fact he was revived in the 29th century, in a post-technological singularity world. However, his implant becomes damaged, and he finds himself in a world where normal "Homo sapiens" are just relics. Most of the individuals he meets are artificial intelligence agents, scarcity has been eliminated through nanotechnology, virtual reality is merged with 'reality', the currency is exotic matter used in spacetime experiments—and suddenly Adam is caught in the web of a trans-galactic intrigue spin-doctored by beings vastly more intelligent than an unaugmented human. What is the secret that he presumably learned before his spaceship was destroyed back in the 21st century? The secret that he cannot remember, and that the science of the 29th century cannot restore, despite having resurrected him? And in a world where whole universes are dedicated to the sole purpose of serving as the weapon laboratories for the arms race between multiversal civilizations, can a normal human become anything more than a toy of inconceivably intelligent beings?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Among_the_Brave"title="Among the Brave">
The fifth book starts off directly where the last book had ended, from the point of view of Trey, Luke's friend from Hendricks' School for Boys. After Luke Garner (Lee Grant) leaves Smits Grant, the younger brother of the real Lee Grant, in the care of his real parents, Luke's friend Trey finds himself at Mr. Talbot's front door preparing to explain all the recent events.The car containing Trey's friends, Nina, Joel, and John takes off without Trey. The house is raided soon afterward and thanks to luck and his own vast knowledge from reading during his years in hiding, Trey manages to dive to safety behind a flowerpot. A member of the Population Police, who searches the porch, says "liber" (Latin for free). Trey's knowledge of Latin saves his life, as the raider reports that the porch is clear. After the raid, Trey sneaks into the house and encounters a hostile but stunning woman with bright red hair; she is none other than Mrs. Talbot. Together, they discover from a private news network that the government has been overthrown and replaced by the powerful Population Police. Defeated, Mrs. Talbot abandons the house and leaves Trey to fend for himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moor_(novel)"title="The Moor (novel)">
The book opens with Mary Russell receiving a telegram to come immediately to Devon and to bring her compass. Initially Mary is reluctant to abandon her academic studies in Oxford to assist Sherlock, but she finally complies. This tug and pull of the two individuals in their own professional lives erupts throughout the book to show each person's independence, yet reliance on each other. Sherlock has been called in to solve a murder on Dartmoor. For Sherlock, it's familiar territory; it's where he solved the case of The Hound of the Baskervilles. This time round there are tales of a ghostly hound out on the moors accompanying an equally ghostly carriage. And naturally, the story is populated with sinister local characters. The moor is central to the story, brooding over it as the moor broods over the surrounding landscape. It also has Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould as a central character. He has a strong intellectual curiosity and is the driving force behind the investigation.Laurie King uses many of the elements of The Hound of the Baskervilles. These elements are introduced deliberately on the part of the criminals and there are echoes of the original story. The way that Holmes reacts to the many mentions of the original case, with a mixture of pride and exasperation, allows for some very humorous moments.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumper_(novel)"title="Jumper (novel)">
One evening, while being physically abused by his father, David "Davy" Rice unexpectedly teleports (or "jumps") and finds himself in the local library, the Stanville Library. This is a place that Davy is familiar with and spends a lot of time in, which is why he was able to easily teleport there. The origin of this power is never explained, but he ends up using this power continually throughout the novel. Vowing never to return to his father's house, Davy makes his way to New York City. After being mugged and discovering that he can't get a job without a birth certificate and/or social security number, Davy robs a local bank by teleporting inside the safe, stealing nearly a million dollars. He then begins a life of reading, attending plays, and dining in fancy restaurants.At a play, he meets a 21-year-old woman named Millie Harrison, and they spend some time touring New York before she returns to college in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Davy later visits her in Oklahoma, and they attend a party, where he accidentally runs into Millie's ex-boyfriend, Mark, who tries to fight him, forcing David to jump Mark away, unnoticed. Feeling bad for Davy, Millie invites him to stay the night at her place. The two officially start a romantic relationship and make love. Millie and Davy continue to see each other and begin to fall in love. Davy also manages to locate and reunite with his long-lost mother, Mary Niles. Mary left the family after being severely beaten by David's father, and all her attempts to contact David over the years were intercepted by his father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rant_(novel)"title="Rant (novel)">
Buster Casey is born in the rural town of Middleton with the senses of smell and taste far more advanced than other humans. He acquires the nickname Rant from a childhood prank involving animal organs which results in numerous people becoming ill. The sound of the victims vomiting resembles the word "rant", which becomes a local synonym for vomit and therefore Buster's nickname.As a child, Rant discovers a massive wealth that turns the small town's economy on its head. He becomes obsessed with getting bitten by rabid animals along with venomous snakes and spiders. After his first bite from a black widow spider, Rant discovers that toxic spider bites cause him to get an erection. He uses this effect to leave school and eventually threatens his way to an early diploma and a rather large check that he uses to leave town. When Rant arrives in the city, it becomes clear to the reader that the novel takes place in a dystopian future, where urban dwellers are forcefully divided by curfew into two separate classes: the respectable Daytimers and the oppressed Nighttimers.Rant becomes a Nighttimer and finds himself swept up in the Nighttimer lifestyle that revolves around "Party Crashing", a covert demolition derby played out on city streets at night. The game is organized by an unknown entity and is set during a designated window of time. The object of the game is to crash, not too forcefully, into other players who sport a certain "flag", such as a Christmas tree on their car's roof or the words "Just Married" scrawled on their vehicle's rear windshield. Rant meets Echo Lawrence, a fellow Crasher. She and Rant fall in love. Rant starts a nationwide rabies epidemic that eventually erupts into zombie-invasion-like proportions that calls for those infected with rabies to be shot and killed on sight.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_and_Answer_(novel)"title="Question and Answer (novel)">
John Lorenzen is an astronomer from Lunopolis who is recruited by the Lagrange Institute for the second expedition to Troas. At this time, Earth is still recovering from a two-century-long era of war and chaos that began with the Soviet conquest of North America in World War III and ended with the unification of the Solar System at the conclusion of a war between Mars and Venus. Twenty-two years after the discovery of a faster-than-light drive, Troas is the only Earthlike world to be discovered, and enthusiasm for interstellar travel is waning. If Troas is not opened to colonization, humanity may give up interstellar travel altogether.The effort to mount a second expedition to Troas is plagued with difficulties. The Lagrange Institute is unable to charter a starship and must build its own, the "Henry Hudson". The construction of the "Hudson" is hampered by delays, cost overruns, and at least one act of outright sabotage. The voyage of the "Hudson" to Troas is also troubled, as tension rises among the members of the expedition. Edward Avery, the expedition's psychomed, is unable to maintain group harmony aboard the ship, and at least one fight breaks out.Upon arrival at Troas, the crew of the "Hudson" find no trace of the first expedition. After it is determined that there are no harmful microorganisms on Troas, a base camp is established on the planet. Eighteen days later, a group of aliens appears. Avery is assigned to learn the aliens' language, and he reports that it is extremely difficult to understand. He is eventually able to determine that the aliens are called the Rorvan, and that they are native to Troas. This is bad news for the expedition, since planets with native intelligent species are off limits to colonization. The Rorvan invite a small group of humans, including Avery and Lorenzen, to accompany them to their settlement.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Among_the_Free"title="Among the Free">
Luke Garner is an illegal third child along with Trey, Nina, Matthias, Percy, and Alia. He has been working from within the Population Police at the stables in hopes of slowly overthrowing them and bringing about freedom. When he is chosen to accompany a sergeant on a mission to distribute new identification cards to citizens, Luke unknowingly brings about the catalyst of change when he refuses to shoot a defiant old woman and runs away, leaving his sergeant in the hands of a group of angry villagers who despise the Population Police.After several days of surviving alone, haunted by the memory of his friend Jen Talbot, run-ins with a selfish stable boy who was with Luke and his sergeant at the time of the incident, and attempting to avoid the Population Police at all costs, Luke finds his way to another village filled with starving people. They save Luke from being executed by the Population Police when they arrive; one man in particular named Eli reveals that the village no longer cares about their own lives and will do anything to help those in need like Luke. In the past, Eli and other villagers willingly betrayed a family with a third child in order to obtain food for their own families. The villagers realize their wrongs much too late and found many of their family members taken away by the Population Police with nothing in return.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Stroke_of_Midnight"title="A Stroke of Midnight">
A faerie princess turned private investigator in a world where faeries are not only known to the general public, but are also fashionable, the title heroine is Princess Meredith NicEssus, also known as Merry Gentry. As niece to Andais, The Queen of Air and Darkness, she is a royal of the Unseelie Court. While her aunt tried to kill her as a child, she has since offered her the title as crown princess as the Court needs more heirs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Caress_of_Twilight"title="A Caress of Twilight">
A faerie princess turned private investigator in a world where faeries are not only known to the general public, but are also fashionable, the title heroine is Princess Meredith NicEssus, also known as Merry Gentry. As niece to Andais, The Queen of Air and Darkness, she is a royal of the Unseelie Court. While her aunt tried to kill her as a child, she has since offered her the title as crown princess as the Court needs more heirs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Kiss_of_Shadows"title="A Kiss of Shadows">
A faerie princess turned private investigator in a world where faeries are not only known to the general public, but are also popular, the heroine is Princess Meredith NicEssus. As niece to Andais, The Queen of Air and Darkness, she is a royal of the Unseelie Court, however having fled the court three years before she has been hiding herself under the name of Merry Gentry and working as a private investigator for the "Grey Detective Agency".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistral's_Kiss"title="Mistral's Kiss">
The series has revolved around a conflict between title character, faerie princess Meredith NicEssus, and her cousin, Cel. Cel's mother, Queen Andais, has promised that the first of the two cousins to produce a child will become ruler of the Unseelie Court. "Mistral's Kiss" continues to follow Meredith's attempts to bear a child and to avoid Cel's various schemes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Planet"title="Monster Planet">
"Monster Planet" takes place twelve years after the events in "Monster Island". Sarah, Dekalb's now 20-year-old daughter, fights alongside Ayaan and her squad of female Somali warriors to defend their last remaining settlements from the encroaching undead forces. Meanwhile, a powerful lich from Russia who calls himself "The Tsarevich" leads his army west on an unknown expedition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hear_the_Wind_Sing"title="Hear the Wind Sing">
Feeling writing as a terribly painful task, the narrator re-tells the story of his 1970 summer. He was a student at a university in Tokyo then, and returned to his seaside hometown in Kobe for summer vacation. That spring, a girl he dated at the university committed suicide. During the summer vacation, he frequented J's bar with his friend "Rat" and spent much time drinking beer obsessively. One day, he came across a girl lying on the floor in the washroom of the bar and carried her home. The girl had no left little finger. Later, he ran into the girl by chance in the record store where she worked. After that, she started calling him and they hung out a few times. Meanwhile, Rat was clearly troubled about some woman but he did not disclose the details. One day, the girl without a little finger met the narrator at a restaurant near the harbor. They took a walk in the dusk along the warehouse street. She told him, "When I sit there alone, I can hear a lot of people coming to talk to me..." That night, at her apartment, she revealed she just had an abortion. When he came back in the winter, the girl had left the record store and her apartment. The narrator is married now and living in Tokyo. Rat is still writing novels and sends his manuscripts to the narrator every Christmas.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Train_Your_Dragon_(novel_series)"title="How to Train Your Dragon (novel series)">
## "How to Train Your Dragon" (2003).The first book in the series follows Hiccup as he captures a dragon as a rite of passage and attempts to train him so that he will not be exiled from Berk, as is its tradition for young Viking boys on this island. Led by their teacher, Gobber the Belch, Hiccup manages to catch a small dragon, whom he names Toothless, and attempts to train it through his own methods. The Viking students are told to read a book called 'How to Train Your Dragon' by Professor Yobbish, but the book was found to have only one page and was therefore unhelpful. The Viking students must have their dragons trained before the Thor'sday Thursday Celebration in order to become proper Vikings. During this celebration, Toothless offends another dragon and a fight ensues between all the dragons. As this is seen as failure to train the dragons correctly, the boys are exiled, allowed to stay one night while a storm rages. During the storm, three Sea Dragons are washed up on the shore of the island and one seems a threat to the Vikings. Hiccup is chosen to negotiate with the dragon, who has eaten one of the other dragons. However, the dragon, who calls himself the Green Death, says he is going to kill all the Vikings. While the village elders argue over how to attack the Green Death, Hiccup, the boys and their dragons start a fight between the Green Death and the other sea dragon, the Purple Death, resulting in Hiccup nearly being swallowed and having to be rescued by Toothless, killing both sea dragons in the process. Hiccup and Toothless become heroes because of their bravery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplicius_Simplicissimus"title="Simplicius Simplicissimus">
The novel is told from the perspective of its protagonist Simplicius, a rogue or picaro typical of the picaresque novel, as he traverses the tumultuous world of the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years' War. Raised by a peasant family, he is separated from his home by foraging dragoons and is adopted by a hermit living in the forest, who teaches him to read and introduces him to religion. The hermit also gives Simplicius his name because he was so simple that he did not know what his own name was. After the death of the hermit, Simplicius must fend for himself. He is conscripted at a young age into service, and from there embarks on years of foraging, military triumph, wealth, prostitution, disease, bourgeois domestic life, and travels to Russia, France, and to an alternate world inhabited by mermen. The novel ends with Simplicius turning to a life of hermitage himself, denouncing the world as corrupt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Cousin_Rachel"title="My Cousin Rachel">
Ambrose Ashley is the owner of a large country estate on the Cornish coast and has been guardian to his orphaned cousin Philip since Philip was three years old. On Sundays, Philip's godfather Nick Kendall and his daughter Louise come to lunch with them, as do the Reverend Mr Pascoe and his family. Life is good apart from a few health problems that require Ambrose to spend the winter in warmer climates. As the damp weather approaches, he sets off for his third winter abroad and chooses Italy.By the time he has reached his 20s, Philip misses Ambrose on his sojourns in Italy but regularly receives letters from him. Ambrose writes that he has met a cousin of theirs called Rachel — the widowed Contessa Sangalletti — in Florence. In the spring, Ambrose says that he and Rachel are married and have no immediate plans to return to Cornwall. Gradually, the tone of Ambrose's correspondence changes. He complains of the sun, the stuffy atmosphere of the Villa Sangalletti, and terrible headaches. In a letter that reaches Philip in July, Ambrose says that a friend of Rachel named Rainaldi has recommended that Ambrose see a different doctor. Ambrose says he can trust no one and claims that Rachel watches him constantly.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Dave"title="The Book of Dave">
## Setting.The island in the novel is inspired by the hilltop town of Hampstead in London and its famous parkland Hampstead Heath. In the book, Self describes a future England which has been inundated with rising seas, leaving Hampstead as the only remaining part of London. The inhabitants of this area, unaware that the drowned city of London is so close by, know their island as Ham. The geography of the island, illustrated in a map at the start of the book, bears close resemblance to the modern areas of Hampstead which inspired it.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_(novel)"title="Out (novel)">
The novel tells the tales of four women, working the graveyard shift at a Japanese bento factory. All four women live hard lives. Masako, the leader of the four women, feels completely alienated from her estranged husband and teenage son. Kuniko, a plump and rather vain girl, has recently been ditched by her boyfriend after the couple were driven into debt, leaving Kuniko to fend off a loan shark. Yoshie is a single mother and reluctant caretaker of her mother-in-law, who was left partly paralyzed after a stroke. Yayoi is a thirty-four-year-old mother of two small boys who she is forced to leave home alone, where they are abused by their drunken, gambling father, Kenji.When Yayoi returns home one night, Kenji tells her that he has gambled all their savings away in a baccarat game. Yayoi becomes upset and questions Kenji about Anna, a hostess of the club where Kenji gambles, with whom she suspects he's having an affair. Earlier that night the club owner, Satake, ordered Kenji to stop stalking Anna. Kenji became belligerent and started assailing Satake, forcing him to kick Kenji down some stairs in the club. Nonetheless, Kenji, furious after Yayoi mentions Anna, begins hitting her. Yayoi snaps and strangles Kenji to death.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gift_of_Asher_Lev"title="The Gift of Asher Lev">
The brilliant, schismatic Hasidic painter Asher Lev is now a middle-aged man, residing with his wife and children in the south of France. When his beloved Uncle Yitzchok dies, Asher is abruptly summoned back to Brooklyn. Soon after the funeral, he learns that his uncle had secretly been collecting art for many years and has amassed a valuable collection, of which Asher is to be the trustee. Asher is dazzled and makes some tentative efforts to reconcile the Ladover Hasidic community to modern art—for example, by sketching a portrait of his uncle for his grieving father and by teaching a lesson in art appreciation at the school where his daughter has temporarily enrolled. But one of his cousins bitterly resents the art collection and hampers Asher's efforts to use it for charity in his uncle's name.Meanwhile, Asher's parents and the rest of the Ladover community worry because the aging Ladover Rebbe has no children and has appointed no successor. What will happen to the Ladover community if the Rebbe dies before the Messiah comes? The logical candidate for next Rebbe would be Asher's father, Aryeh Lev, who has been one of the Rebbe's chief lieutenants for decades, but Asher realizes that the Rebbe is reluctant to pass the mantle of authority to Aryeh unless Aryeh has a successor—who cannot be Aryeh's only child, the iconoclast painter. Slowly, Asher realizes that the Rebbe and Aryeh both hope that Asher's five-year-old son, Avrumel, will become the ultimate successor to the Rebbeship. It is Avrumel who will be "the gift of Asher Lev."
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Loathing_in_Las_Vegas"title="Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas">
The basic synopsis revolves around journalist Raoul Duke (Hunter S. Thompson) and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo (Oscar Zeta Acosta), as they arrive in Las Vegas in 1971 to report on the Mint 400 motorcycle race for an unnamed magazine. However, this job is repeatedly obstructed by their constant use of a variety of recreational drugs, including LSD, ether, cocaine, alcohol, mescaline, adrenochrome, and cannabis. This leads to a series of bizarre hallucinogenic experiences, during which they destroy hotel rooms, wreck cars, and have visions of anthropomorphic desert animals, all the while ruminating on the decline of both the "American Dream" and the '60s counterculture in a city of greed.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davita's_Harp"title="Davita's Harp">
In New York City of the 1930s, Ilana Davita Chandal is the child of a mixed marriage: a Polish Jewish immigrant mother and a Christian father from an old and wealthy New England family. Both of her parents are haunted by bitter and violent memories from their youths, and both have, in consequence, turned their backs on their pasts in order to become active members of the Communist Party. Ilana's early childhood is fraught with mystery and struggle as the neighbors eye the Chandal family with suspicion. When Michael Chandal, already wounded once in the Spanish Civil War, returns to Spain, Ilana begins to look for answers at the local synagogue and in friendship with observant Jews, including her neighbor Ruthie Helfman and her distant cousin, David Dinn. Michael Chandal is killed in Spain, at Guernica, and Ilana and her mother both struggle to cope with their grief. They are often at odds with each other as Ilana becomes more and more interested in traditional Judaism—even asserting her right to say "kaddish" for her non-Jewish father—while Anne Chandal devotes herself to the Party and becomes involved in a new relationship with a young Communist historian, Charles Carter. When Stalin signs a non-aggression pact with Hitler, Anne struggles with reconciling the communist cause with the geopolitical reality and leaves the Party. Soon after Carter breaks off their engagement. Ultimately Anne returns—though not with her daughter's fervor—to religious observance and marries her cousin Ezra Dinn, whom she had rejected many years before. Ilana becomes a star student at her Jewish day school. She is devastated when she is unjustly denied an academic award on account of her gender, but she remains determined to make her mark on the world.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sculpting_in_Time"title="Sculpting in Time">
The book's main statement about the nature of cinema is summarized in the statement, "The dominant, all-powerful factor of the film image is "rhythm", expressing the course of time within the frame." It contains a great deal of poetry written by the filmmaker's father Arseny Alexandrovich Tarkovsky along with a fair amount of Tarkovsky's personal writings on his life and work, lectures and discussions during making of "Andrei Rublev" with a film history student named Olga Surkova, who later became a professional critic and helped in writing of this book.The book has commentary on each of his 7 major feature films, and his complex relationship with the Soviet Union. The final chapter, a discussion of his film "The Sacrifice", was dictated in the last weeks of his life.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon_(novel)"title="Weapon (novel)">
The novel describes a new weapon system being developed for the US military, named Solo. A robot, Solo is designed to replace human soldiers in battle. It is humanoid in shape, in order to allow it to use all the military vehicles and equipment human soldiers do. Solo is capable of feats of great speed, strength and endurance.Most importantly, Solo is governed by a neural network computer which is able to learn and think much as a human brain does. The robot's designer recognises that this could potentially make Solo as unpredictable and difficult to control as any human is; the military therefore insist that Solo be told a carefully edited version of world history and politics in which the United States are in all cases the unambiguously "good guys" and winners of all conflicts - for example Solo is told that the US won a clear victory in the Vietnam War.Despite his indoctrination, Solo begins to display what his designers consider aberrant behaviour. He begins to question and occasionally refuse his orders. For example, on one training session Solo is assigned to shoot a human target in a sniper mission. He is told that the mission and target are real, and that he is to genuinely kill the person. He point blank refuses to do so. More worryingly to his designers, Solo is not entirely forthcoming about his reasons for such hesitancy.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4th_of_July_(novel)"title="4th of July (novel)">
Police lieutenant Lindsay Boxer takes leave from the force after being sued for wrongful death after a recent shootout. She stays at her sister’s house in Half Moon Bay, and reads about murders that resemble one that haunted her for 10 years. She joins with the local police to solve the murders, while dreading her awaiting trial.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_of_the_Hangman"title="The Year of the Hangman">
Creighton Brown is an adolescent living in Britain in 1777. He often gets into trouble, much to the concern of his mother. One night, after drinking and gambling with his peers, Creighton is kidnapped by a group of men and taken aboard a boat. He cries out for help, but is struck in the face, and passes out.Upon waking up, Creighton finds that the ship is already on the open ocean and heading for the Colonies. He is also informed that his mother is behind his kidnapping, having sent a letter to his uncle, requesting that Creighton be raised in the Colonies under his guidance so that he may become a better person.The ship lands in Charles Town, where the crew meets Creighton’s Uncle, Colonel Gower. He is not in his office, and they find the Colonel at the guard post, watching a soldier being whipped. When asked what the man was being punished for, Gower reveals that a copy of the "Liberty Tree", a patriotic American newspaper run by the Sons of Liberty, was found in his possession. He also informs Creighton that he has a new post in Florida, and the ship departs again after a few days. While traveling, the ship is attacked by American rebels, led by Benedict Arnold. The rebels capture Gower, planning to use him as leverage in a prisoner exchange for captured American officers. Creighton pretends to be an indentured to avoid being ransomed, earning the sympathy and friendship of Peter, a private in the rebel army. In Creighton’s final exchange with his uncle, he is instructed to spy on the Americans for information. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qijian_Xia_Tianshan"title="Qijian Xia Tianshan">
The prologue serves as a continuation of Yang Yuncong and Nalan Minghui's love story in "Saiwai Qixia Zhuan", which is set in the 17th century during the early Qing dynasty. Nalan has been forced to marry the Manchu prince Dodo even though she loves Yang and has given birth to their daughter. Yang shows up on the night before Nalan's wedding and seizes their infant daughter from her. After he is mortally wounded in a fight against Prince Dodo's henchmen, he entrusts his daughter to Mulang, a youth who was attempting suicide after being mistakenly accused of betraying his friends. Mulang brings Yang's daughter back to Yang's master, Reverend Huiming, on Mount Heaven.Mulang spends 18 years training under Reverend Huiming's tutelage and becomes a formidable swordsman. He returns to the "jianghu" (martial artists' community) under the alias "Ling Weifeng" and performs several heroic deeds. Yang Yuncong's daughter, Yilan Zhu, has mastered the Mount Heaven Swordplay, and she swears to kill Prince Dodo and avenge her father. On Mount Wutai, members of the anti-Qing secret society Heaven and Earth Society and some Southern Ming rebels attempt to assassinate Prince Dodo, but their plans are interrupted by Yilan Zhu's untimely appearance. During the ensuing chaos, Yilan Zhu unintentionally causes Zhang Huazhao, one of the rebels, to be captured by Qing soldiers. Later, She breaks into Prince Dodo's residence to rescue him.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubrovsky_(novel)"title="Dubrovsky (novel)">
Andrei Dubrovsky is an old poor nobleman whose land is confiscated by a greedy, rich and powerful aristocrat, Kirila Petrovitch Troekurov. His young son Wladimir, determined to venge his father and to get justice one way or another, gathers a band of serfs and goes on the rampage, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Along the way, Wladimir Dubrovsky falls in love with Masha, Troekurov's daughter, and lets his guard down, with tragic results.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baron_in_the_Trees"title="The Baron in the Trees">
Set in an imaginary village on the Ligurian Riviera, Ombrosa represents the author's vision as a central theme, little inclined to judgments and dull opinions.The novel is narrated by Biagio, the younger brother of the protagonist, and is the story of a young baron, Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, firstborn of a noble family sadly behind the times. The main story begins with a dispute on June 15, 1767 in the villa of Ombrosa, between an adolescent Cosimo and his father, after which Cosimo, who had quarreled with his father because he had refused to eat a snail soup, climbs the trees of the home garden and promises never to come down again in his entire life.After the quarrel, Cosimo's life takes place in the trees; first in the family garden and then in the surrounding woods. Cosimo's life is full of adventures, from friendships with fruit thieves and bandits to days spent hunting or reading. In the life of the baron there is no lack of amorous encounters either. Cosimo's fame spreads quickly. At first, he becomes famous as a freak show and his family is almost ashamed of him, but later he also finds a way to win the respect of the Ombrosa community. The return of Viola, his first love, triggers a mutual feeling, always existent, which sadly ends due to a series of misunderstandings. The love between the two is strong, even if the relationship is filled with furious quarrels. Its end comes about in an unusual way: aged and sick, feeling the onset of death, Cosimo climbs to the top of a large walnut tree and hangs himself on a passing balloon. Thus, without betraying his promise to never set foot on the earth again, he disappears into the sky, without even giving the earth his remains.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gather_Yourselves_Together"title="Gather Yourselves Together">
After the final victory of Mao Zedong's Chinese Communists in 1949, an American company prepares to abandon their Chinese operations, leaving three people behind to oversee transitional affairs - Carl Fitter, Verne Tildon, and Barbara Mahler. Verne and Barbara were previously involved with each other back in the United States, in 1945, when she lost her virginity to him. They have sex again, but Barbara has matured, and becomes more interested in Carl, who is younger than she is. Carl is more interested in reading his handwritten volume of personal philosophy to her, but Barbara does succeed in seducing him, shortly before the arrival of the Chinese.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Professor's_House"title="The Professor's House">
When Professor Godfrey St. Peter and wife move to a new house, he becomes uncomfortable with the route his life is taking. He keeps on his dusty study in the old house in an attempt to hang on to his old life. The marriages of his two daughters have removed them from the home and added two new sons-in-law, precipitating a mid-life crisis that leaves the Professor feeling as though he has lost the will to live because he has nothing to look forward to.The novel initially addresses the Professor's interactions with his new sons-in-law and his family, while continually alluding to the pain they all feel over the death of Tom Outland in the Great War. Outland was not only the Professor's student and friend, but the fiancé of his elder daughter, who is now living off the wealth created by the "Outland vacuum."The novel's central section turns to Outland, and recounts in first-person the story of his exploration of an ancient cliff city in New Mexico. The section is a retrospective narrative remembered by the professor.In the final section, the professor, left alone while his family takes an expensive European tour, narrowly escapes death due to a gas leak in his study; and finds himself strangely willing to die. He is rescued by the old family seamstress, Augusta, who has been his staunch friend throughout. He resolves to go on with his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_and_the_Giant"title="Mary and the Giant">
In 1953, Joseph Schilling arrives in Pacific Park, Southern California. He establishes a small music shop, and later, Danny and Beth Coombes join him. Mary Anne Reynolds is also interviewed for a position at the shop, but backs off after Schilling touches her. After leaving home, Carleton Tweaney, an African-American lounge singer (and her lover) finds her a new home. However, Beth has already slept with Joseph, and now moves on to Carleton. Provoked by her affair, Danny tries to shoot Carleton, but instead dies himself. Carleton and Mary Anne break up, and she decides to work for Schilling after all, as well as becoming sexually involved with him, despite a forty-year age difference. He helps her to rent and renovate her own apartment, but Mary Anne decides to live in a dilapidated African American neighbourhood instead. In an epilogue, she has married Paul Nitz, a pianist who works with Carleton.The author himself once described the novel as: "A retelling of Mozart's Don Giovanni, with Schilling seduced and destroyed by a young woman."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Time_for_George_Stavros"title="A Time for George Stavros">
According to Lawrence Sutin's book, "Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick", (1989) the plot survives only as an index card synopsis from the publisher dated 24 October 1956, after the manuscript had already been rejected one time. The reader's comments on the rewrite as follows:In a letter from 1960, the author himself commented on the title character in an unexpectedly optimistic fashion:
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well_at_the_World's_End"title="The Well at the World's End">
Using language with elements of the medieval tales which were his models, Morris tells the story of Ralph, the youngest son of King Peter of Upmeads. Their kingdom being rather humble, Ralph and his three elder brothers are bored of the provincial life, so one day they request permission from their father to explore the world. The king allows the three eldest sons to depart, but bids Ralph to stay to ensure at least one living heir. Ralph, desperate for adventure and against his father's will, sneaks away.Ralph's explorations begin at Bourton Abbas, after which he goes through the Wood Perilous. He has various adventures there, including the slaying of two men who had entrapped a woman. That woman later turns out to be the Lady of Abundance, who later becomes his lover for a short time.In one episode Ralph is staying at a castle and inquires about the Lady of the castle (the so-called Lady of Abundance), whom he has not yet seen. Descriptions of her youth and beauty suggest to him that she has drunk from the well at the world's end. "And now in his heart waxed the desire of that Lady, once seen, as he deemed, in such strange wise; but he wondered within himself if the devil had not sown that longing within him ..." A short time later, while still at the castle, Ralph contemplates images of the Lady and "was filled with the sweetness of desire when he looked on them." Then he reads a book containing information about her, and his desire to meet the Lady of Abundance flames higher. When he goes to bed, he sleeps "for the very weariness of his longing." He fears leaving the castle because she might come while he is gone. Eventually he leaves the castle and meets the Lady of Abundance, who turns out to be the same lady he had rescued some weeks earlier from two men.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Broken_Bubble"title="The Broken Bubble">
The lives of two couples intertwine in mid-1950s California, and all learn important lessons about life. Jim Briskin is a classical music DJ. He and his ex-wife Patricia Gray are still very much in love but have divorced because he is sterile. The two divorcees meet a teenaged married couple named Art and Rachael and essentially swap partners.Pat passionately loves the youthful but dysfunctional Art, almost as though he were her child, and the two of them have an abusive relationship in which he gives her a black eye. Meanwhile, Jim and Rachael hook up and Rachael offers to ditch Art and move to Mexico with Jim where he will adopt her baby and raise it as his own. In the end, however, maturity prevails and they all return to their original partners.Miss Thisbe Holt of the original title is actually a very minor character in the book. She is a well-endowed stripper who performs at an optometrists convention which occurs near the very end of the novel. Her act consists of climbing naked into a large clear plastic ball which the optometrists then roll around the hotel suite to more thoroughly examine her ample personal assets. The ball is demolished when it's later filled with debris and pushed off the hotel roof by the inebriated optometrists.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Octagonal_Raven"title="The Octagonal Raven">
"The Octagonal Raven" is set in the distant future, where nanites are prevalent throughout society, for those who can afford them. The story follows Daryn Alwyn, the younger son of one of the richest families in the world. He is augmented with nanites, and is a “pre-select,” or someone whose mental and physical abilities were tuned before birth by DNA manipulation. Despite this, he does not go to work for his family, the owners of one of the largest media corporations on the planet. Instead, he chooses to follow his own path, first by going into the military, then by becoming a freelance editorial writer. He lives in isolation, but after surviving an assassination attempt, he is forced to notice the growing cultural strains around him. The pre-selects, due to their abilities and thus money, make up 10% of the population, but control over 95% of the resources of the world, and are using that power to shut out the “norms,” or non-augmented humans.A plague breaks out that only kills augmented humans, a plague much more virulent than a similar one that had swept the world 20 years before. Alwyn discovers that he is immune, however, as the supposed assassination attempt was actually a vaccination against the plague. After his family is killed, by assassination in the case of his sister and the plague for his parents and older brother, he finds out that both plagues were non-human in origin, caused by octagonal nanites, reminiscent of the very ancient octagonal jumpgate that had been found in deep space, rather than the round designs of human nanites and jumpgates. The newest plague, however, was engineered by Eldyn Nahal, the norm who stopped the first plague, as revenge for the power control of the pre-selects. After Nahal is killed, Alwyn takes over his family's company, stopping an attempt by the power elite to merge the largest media corporations, thus controlling all sources of news. He uses the company to expose how these handful of pre-selects are attempting to take control of everything, forever shutting out all norms and those pre-selects who stand against them. The book ends after they are all dead or incarcerated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puttering_About_in_a_Small_Land"title="Puttering About in a Small Land">
In 1944, Virginia Watson and Roger Lindahl meet in Washington DC. They marry after Roger divorces his first wife Teddy and abandons his daughter by her as well. Their subsequent move to Los Angeles to work in a munitions factory proves extremely profitable. But Roger spends the money far faster than it took them to earn it. By 1953, Roger has opened a television sales and repair shop, while Virginia is trying to enroll their 7-year-old son Gregg in an expensive boarding school in Ojai against Roger's wishes.Liz Bonner, another parent, persuades Roger to agree to Gregg's enrollment by offering to share the perilous and exhausting driving duties involved in transporting their children over the nearby mountains to and from Ojai.There is a particular private exchange between Roger Lindahl and Marion Watson, Virginia's mother, that very graphically depicts Roger's highly immature, volatile and unpredictable nature. The trigger for his outburst is the realization that his hostile mother-in-law (as a favor only to her daughter) plans on providing substantial financial backing for his business.But there is yet another financial interloper afoot. "Chic" or Charles Bonner, Liz's husband, wants to buy into Roger's shop as a partner, but Lindahl declines his offer and promptly begins an affair with a very accommodating Liz. Virginia finds out, though Chic remains unaware, and she hectors Roger into letting her assume legal ownership of the shop with Chic. Unfortunately, however, both marriages have been irreparably damaged. Chic and Liz end up getting divorced. Roger and Virginia remain tenuously married, and a philandering Roger remains in contact with Liz through the private school. The final chapter closes with ever-impulsive Roger dumping Gregg off at home, pilfering a carload of expensive T.V. sets from the store and hightailing it to Chicago.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_and_the_Higs"title="Nicholas and the Higs">
As with several lost Philip K. Dick novels of this period, all we know about it is an index card synopsis in the files of a publisher who rejected the book. According to Lawrence Sutin's book, "Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick", (Published 1989) this card was dated 1/3/58 and said:In a letter dated 1960, Dick himself commented on the theme of the novel:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Vampires"title="The Space Vampires">
In the late twenty-first century, far out in a nearby asteroid belt, a gigantic derelict castle-like alien spacecraft is discovered by the space exploration vehicle "Hermes," commanded by Captain Olof Carlsen. Investigating the spacecraft's interior, the astronauts first discover the desiccated corpses of giant bat-like creatures, then three glass coffins containing three immobilised humanoids—two male and one female—preserved in a state of suspended animation.Returning to Earth with the preserved humanoids, Carlsen discovers the true nature of the beings when one of them kills a young reporter (and the son of a friend of Carlsen) whom Carlsen illicitly allowed to view the body. The woman kills her victim by completely draining his life-force (a quantifiable energy measured by devices called "lambda-field scanners") and when Carlsen attempts to intervene, partially draining him of energy as well. Carlsen survives, but is unable to prevent the woman from escaping from the hospital.Carlsen joins forces with Dr. Hans Fallada, a scientist researching energy vampirism and longevity, to find the escaped vampire and recapture her. In the course of their investigations they discover that the aliens can transfer from one body to another, and that the other two have also escaped; they also discover the potential for energy vampirism—and more generalised voluntary energy transfer—that exists in all humans, and the parallels between vampirism, criminality, and sexual fetishisation. At last Carlsen tracks down the vampires in London, their leader having possessed the body of the Prime Minister; but their confrontation is averted when representatives from the Nioth-Korghai, the vampires' original race, appear and offer the vampires (the Ubbo-Sathla, as they call themselves) the chance to regain their original nature as higher-dimension energy-beings. The vampires accept joyfully, but destroy themselves upon regaining the ability to see themselves for what they had become.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Island_Earth_(novel)"title="This Island Earth (novel)">
At Ryberg Instrument Corporation, engineer Cal Meacham has received a quartet of bead-like devices that are meant to replace the condensers that he ordered. Thinking it a joke, he tests them anyway and finds that they work just as well as what he had ordered. He orders more and with them gets a catalog filled with electronic apparatus completely unfamiliar to him. His interest piqued, he orders the parts necessary to build what the catalog calls an interociter.When he turns the completed interociter on he is confronted by a man who invites him to join a group called Peace Engineers. Knowing that he would not refuse, the group sends a pilotless airplane to pick him up and take him to a small village/factory complex in a valley north of Phoenix, Arizona. He is greeted by Dr. Ruth Adams, a psychologist who seems to be afraid of something. Dr. Warner, the man he spoke with over the interociter, tells him that he will be in charge of the interociter assembly plant. He also meets Ole Swenberg, who was his roommate in college.Six months later, he meets the Chief Engineer, Mr. Jorgasnovara, who describes the Peace Engineers in terms reminiscent of the Babbage Society in Michael F. Flynn’s novel "In the Country of the Blind". Later, he overhears Jorgasnovara's thoughts through the interociter in his laboratory. One night, he and Ruth discover that the interociters are being shipped out, not by truck, but by spaceship. Again overhearing Jorgasnovara's thoughts, Cal learns that the Peace Engineers are involved in an intergalactic war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_After_Time_(Alexander_novel)"title="Time After Time (Alexander novel)">
The novel alternates perspectives between H.G. Wells and a character initially identified only as "Stevenson." In the first chapter, Stevenson has sex with a prostitute in a 19th-century London alley and then murders her. In the next chapter, Wells is introduced showing off his brand new time machine to a group of men, including Stevenson. When police arrive to announce that they have identified Jack the Ripper as Stevenson, Stevenson uses the time machine to escape, and Wells follows him. Wells finds himself in the future and befriends a young bank teller named Amy Robbins. Robbins is unaware of Wells' identity and 19th century provenance and believes him to be just a quirky old-fashioned gentleman. As Stevenson murders several women, Wells pursues him while hampered by a love affair with Robbins, to whom he does not dare tell the truth. When Wells is finally forced to confess to Robbins who he is and what he is really doing, she terminates their relationship. But Stevenson targets her next, and Wells rescues her and incapacitates Stevenson in a dramatic climax.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkdeath"title="Inkdeath">
The plot resumes a few weeks after "Inkspell" left off; Farid and Meggie's mission of bringing Dustfinger, who died at the end of "Inkspell", back to life."Inkdeath" picks up with the now immortal, but slowly decaying, evil Adderhead, ruler of the southern part of the Inkworld, his brother-in-law the Milksop king of Ombra, and his trusty right-hand man, The Piper, ruling over the city of Ombra and the small villages around it. They set harsher taxes and loot what they can from the villages. The three Folcharts, Meggie, Resa, and Mortimer, along with an unborn Folchart child, reside at a peaceful abandoned farm that has long been forgotten by others. Farid, who has given up his fire after the death of Dustfinger, works for an increasingly wealthy Orpheus. Orpheus treats him like a slave while promising that he will read a dead Dustfinger back to life. Fenoglio, the author, gives up writing at the beginning of the book and grows increasingly drunken and senile. He is immensely annoyed at how Orpheus is changing Inkworld and asking his never-ending questions about the "White Women". Ombra is under constant threat by the Adderhead's men, who have killed nearly every young adult male in the city and regularly kidnap children to work them in the mines. The only figure standing in their way is the romanticized "Bluejay", a thief created by Fenoglio in a series of songs that were inspired by Mo who is now "stuck" as the "Bluejay" and is in as much trouble as ever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Djinn_of_Babylon"title="The Blue Djinn of Babylon">
In the year 2005, at the end of October, at Halloween, Phillipa wanted to be a witch and John wanted to be a Dracula with real blood. They lived at 77 East 77th Street in New York.After having promised their mother, Layla, not to use their djinn powers without consulting her first, John and Philippa are leading pretty normal lives. When Phillipa enters the Djinnverso tournament (also called Djinnversoctoannular, a djinn game of bluffing with 7 astaralgi, or 8 sided dice, the object being to undermine luck) unbidden events are set into motion and she is framed as a cheater. The twins also learn that the famed book, Solomon's Grimoire, which is in the care of Ayesha, the Blue Djinn of Babylon and the ruler of all six tribes of djinn, has been stolen. The Grimoire gives anyone who uses its spells vast control over a djinn. The twins go in search of the missing book, leading them into more danger and adventures.It turns out that Solomon's Grimoire is not missing, but instead was being used as a trap for Philippa. Ayesha, the twins' grandmother (whom they do not know of until the end of the book), wished to kidnap Philippa so that she would be the next Blue Djinn, as Ayesha's life was rapidly expiring. Jockeying for her position was Mimi de Ghulle, a wicked djinn from the tribe of Ghul; however, she is having little success. John goes in search of Philippa, who is being held at the Blue Djinn's secret palace in Babylon. The twin's favorite uncle, Nimrod, also goes in search of an acceptable alternative to Philippa as the next Blue Djinn. The book alternates between John's search for Philippa, told in third person narration, and Philippa's experiences, told in first person in the form of a diary. Philippa discovers that the Blue Djinn's powers to be beyond good and evil come from the Garden of Eden's Tree of Logic. Slowly Philippa loses her humanity as the Tree has greater and greater effects on her. John, in his search, faces numerous obstacles in finding and reaching the palace. He is aided by two of his uncles, Alan and Neil, who were turned into dogs by his mother for attempting the murder of their brother, John and Philippa's father, Edward, for his fortune. In addition, John attains a copy of "The Bellili Scrolls", a map to the palace, and of its underground locale, Iravotum. The book climaxes when John reaches the palace and manages to rescue Philippa. However, during their traversal of Iravotum, Alan and Neil attack a large bird, called the Rukkh, that was attacking the group, biting its legs. However, the dogs did not let go, and fell to the ground, killing them. It is later revealed that Layla's binding of the human Alan and Neil would last only as long as the physical bodies of the dogs they inhabit, leaving the human Alan and Neil alive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dicey's_Song"title="Dicey's Song">
Picking up where "Homecoming" left off, Dicey Tillerman and her three siblings, Sammy, Maybeth, and James, are now living with their crazy and widowed grandmother Abigail Tillerman, or Gram as the children call her, on her farm just outside Crisfield, Maryland. Because the Tillermans' mom just left them in the parking lot in Provincetown, the children have the chance to start living a completely new life in their new family home, even though several of the major issues of "Homecoming" are not resolved. Dicey has trouble letting go of her siblings enough to let Gram take over as the parent character. She also worries about her mother Liza, who is catatonic and seriously ill in a psychiatric hospital in Boston.While in their new school, the Tillermans make several new friends: Mr. Lingerle, the elementary school's music teacher, who begins giving Maybeth piano lessons; Mina, a friendly African-American girl who goes to school with Dicey; and Jeff, a high school student who likes to play the guitar. To help Gram support the family, Dicey starts to work for Millie Tydings, the owner of the local grocery store, whom Gram has known since childhood.Gram soon comes to terms with having to accept Social Security payments to help with the costs of raising her four grandchildren. She also must confront and reexamine her past, particularly her relationship with her deceased husband and her three children. Gram refuses to discuss her past with the children, and their attempts to find out about it by climbing into the attic are met with anger.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Juan_de_Pareja"title="I, Juan de Pareja">
Juan de Pareja is born into slavery in Seville, Spain in the early 1600s, and after the death of his mother when he is just five years old he becomes the pageboy of a wealthy Spanish lady, Emilia. At the end of the first chapter, both Doña Emilia and Juan's master die. Brother Isidro saves Juan from death and brings him to a group of people. They hand him off to a man named Don Carmelo to deliver him to Emilia's nephew, Don Diego Velázquez.Diego has a wife, Juana de Miranda, and two little girls, Paquita and Ignacia. Juan's main job is to help his master with his work of painting: grinding the pigments, placing the paints on the palette, washing the brushes, and making the canvas frames. Although he is regularly present when Diego paints, Juan is not allowed to paint as he is a slave and the Spanish laws forbid it.Two students, Cristobal and Alvaro, join the household as Diego's apprentices. Juan dislikes Cristobal, whose opinions do not differ from his master and his family's, but finds Alvaro pleasant enough. Diego is invited to paint the king's portrait. He and his family and Juan and the apprentices move to the living quarters on the palace grounds. When an artist named Peter Paul Rubens visits, Juan falls in love with a slave girl named Miri. Juan accompanies Diego to Italy, where he begins to purchase art supplies to try painting and drawing on his own while keeping it a secret from the Velázquezes. Paquita falls in love with an apprentice named Juan Bautista del Mazo and they marry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bronze_Bow"title="The Bronze Bow">
This book is set in first century Galilee, Israel. The main character is a young Jew named Daniel bar Jamin who lives at the same time as Jesus of Nazareth.Daniel's father was killed in front of him, as an example, by the Roman occupiers. His uncle did not have money to pay the tax, so he was thrown in jail; when his father tried to break Daniel's uncle out of jail, they were both crucified. Even at eight, he hates and distrusts the Romans and vows that he will avenge his father's death. His mother dies of grief after her husband's death, and Daniel's younger sister, Leah, is traumatized by these events, possessed by demons but that is just a phrase, and never leaves the house. His parents' death is because of the purchase of a shawl. The children are both taken in by their grandmother, but as she becomes ill and poor over the years, she sells Daniel to Amalek the blacksmith. Daniel escapes his cruel master, running away to the mountains where he is found close to death and rescued by Rosh, the leader of an outlaw band of rebels, who plan to someday overthrow the Romans. They adopt Daniel into their crew, and Daniel begins a new life in the mountains, trying to forget about his grandmother and sister he had left behind in the village.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...And_Now_Miguel"title="...And Now Miguel">
Miguel Chavez has dreamed of visiting the Sangre de Cristo Mountains since he was very little. This summer, he is going to work hard and pray until his father and grandfather realize that he is ready to take the trip with the rest of the older men.His prayers are granted, though ironically – when his older brother is drafted his father needs an extra body and grudgingly allows Miguel to accompany them. Miguel is miserable with the manner in which his wish has been granted, and confesses to his brother what he prayed for. His brother explains that he had been praying to leave New Mexico and see more of the world – while he is not happy about being drafted, he fatalistically accepts that it is the only way he is likely to be able to fulfill his dream. The brothers resolve to allow God to work freely for the rest of their lives, and not bother God with petty requests.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_the_Wind"title="King of the Wind">
As the fast of Ramadan is ending in Morocco, Agba, a mute slave boy, tends to his favorite Arabian mare, who gives birth that night. The colt has a white spot on his hind heel, considered the emblem of swiftness and good luck, but it also has a wheat ear on his chest, symbolizing bad luck. The mare dies within a few days, but Sham matures into a promising racehorse. Later, the Sultan summons six horseboys to his palace, including Agba, and charges them to accompany six horses to France. The horses are to be given as gifts to the French King Louis XV. The horseboy is to remain with that horse until the horse's death, then return to Morocco.When the racehorses arrive in France, they are frowned upon by the French, who believe that they are not 'lusty' enough to be racehorses. Sham becomes a kitchen horse, but he is so disobedient that the cook sells him to a carter. Agba becomes a servant to Sham's new owner and meets Grimalkin the cat along the way.Sham is bought by a Quaker man and taken to England. When Sham refuses to let the Quaker's nephew ride him, his owner sells him to an inn. Agba is jailed when he is caught sneaking into the inn to see Sham, but the Quaker's housekeeper bails him out, and both Sham and Agba are released into the service of the Earl of Godolphin. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_Hill"title="Rabbit Hill">
The story takes place in the countryside near Westport, Connecticut. The animal inhabitants are suffering as the house nearby has been abandoned for several years and the untended garden, the animals' source of food, has withered to nothing. "New Folks" then move into the house: Are they hunters, or friendly gardeners who will provide for the animals?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_of_the_Road"title="Adam of the Road">
Adam is an eleven-year-old boy who wants to be like his father, Roger, and to do so he tries to be the best minstrel in England. At the beginning of the story, Adam and his friend Perkin are in St Alban's Abbey, where they go to an old lady's house to visit Adam's dog, Nick. They return to their home at the monastery and go to the roadside to find Roger is coming back from his long journey as a knight's minstrel. Roger tells Adam that he is going to London to follow in the knight's train. Adam is allowed to come, but he must hurry because the knight leaves the next day. While on the road, Adam meets Margery, the daughter of the knight, in a beautiful carriage. In the morning, following a night of feasting and partying, Roger tells Adam he lost his warhorse, Bayard, in a bet with another minstrel named Jankin.One night, while Roger and Adam are sleeping, Jankin steals Nick. Adam worries that Jankin will mistreat Nick. When Adam and Roger discover Nick is gone, they chase Jankin across England. When Adam sees Jankin in a crowded marketplace, he pursues him and is separated from Roger. Now Adam is separated from both Roger and Nick and he has to find both alone. Adam makes friends along the way and with their help, finds Nick with Perkin. Roger, Adam and Nick are eventually reunited in Oxford. Adam is offered a place at an Oxford college, but decides to be a minstrel, like his father and with his father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Stag"title="The White Stag">
"The White Stag" opens after the fall of the Biblical Tower of Babel. Nimrod is waiting for his two sons, Hunor and Magyar, to return. They rode away after a mysterious white stag that appeared seven months ago. Afraid they will never return and his people will be left leaderless, the old man offers a sacrifice to their god, Hadur—his war horse. Immediately his sons return with meat for the hungry people. As they tell the story of their chase of the white stag, Nimrod realizes it is now time for them to take over leading their people, and he throws himself on the altar.Now Hunor and Magyar lead the people in a search for their promised land, following the white stag they can never catch. Later they meet and marry the Moonmaidens, and live contentedly for fifteen years. Eventually the game deserts them, and the people move on. "Like a sharp wedge they had driven themselves into Europe and now they were surrounded by enemies; they had to go on or perish." This time they have to fight many groups who live in the lands they travel through, and the people begin to quarrel. Hunor is strong and hard, while Magyar is quieter and more learned. Though both brothers still lead, the people are becoming divided and now identify themselves as Huns or Magyars, depending on which brother they most respect. Magyar wants to find a less populated land, but Hunor leads them into more fighting.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roller_Skates"title="Roller Skates">
"Roller Skates" opens with the narrator remembering back to a special year in the 1890s, when young Lucinda Wyman arrives at the Misses Peters' home in New York City; the two ladies will care for her during the year of Lucinda's parents' trip to Italy. The narrator's diaries help her remember the details of 10-year-old Lucinda's "orphanage," as she calls it. Miss Peters, a teacher, is "a person of great understanding, no nonsense, and no interference." Miss Nettie is shy and soft-hearted. Living with them Lucinda experiences unprecedented freedom, exploring the city on roller skates and making friends with all types of people.Lucinda quickly gets to know Mr. Gilligan the hansom cab driver and Patrolman M'Gonegal. The first friend of her own age is Tony Coppino, son of an Italian fruit stand owner. Lucinda enlists Officer M'Gonegal to stop the bullies who knock down Tony's father's fruit-stand and steal the fruit. In return Tony takes her for a city picnic where they meet a rag-and-bone man. Later Lucinda reads Shakespeare with her favorite uncle and is inspired to put on a puppet production of "The Tempest".But the cold and snow of winter keep her cooped up indoors, and eventually a restless Lucinda acts out and gets sent home from school in disgrace. Later her uncle introduces her to Shakespeare's tragedies, and she experiences her own when two of her friends die. With Lucinda's parents coming back from Italy, she realizes everything is changing, so she skates to the park one last time. "How would you like to stay always ten?" she muses. "That's what I'd call a perfectly elegant idea!"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invincible_Louisa"title="Invincible Louisa">
"Invincible Louisa", subtitled "The Story of the Author of Little Women", opens with Louisa Alcott's birth on a snowy November day in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Her father, Bronson Alcott, ran a school for young children in their home. "It was a time of great happiness, peace, and security... Happiness was to continue... but peace and security were not to come again for a very long time". So Meigs introduces her reader to Alcott's life. Her father, Bronson, is portrayed as brilliant but impractical, unable to support his family as a man of the times was expected to. The book follows the Alcott family to Boston and Concord, as Bronson Alcott seeks places that understand his unusual views on education and transcendentalism. Louisa proves to be an active child, getting into trouble and causing her mother, Abba, some anxiety. When she is ten the family moves again to Fruitlands, the transcendentalist community Alcott helps found. By now there are four girls in the family. Meigs portrays Bronson Alcott and the oldest daughter, Anna, as being fully committed to the ideals of this new life, but says that Louisa and her mother understand how much hard work would be necessary for a communal farm to succeed. The contrast between idealistic and practical is shown when Bronson and the only other adult leave the area for a conference just as the barley is being harvested. An approaching storm has Abba and the children bringing in the grain alone. In less than a year Fruitlands failed, and the family moved several more times.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Fu_of_the_Upper_Yangtze"title="Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze">
As the book opens, the widowed Fu Be-be arrives on Chair-makers Way in Chungking, China, with her 13-year-old son Yuin-fah and a letter from a village friend to Tang Yu-shu, a master coppersmith, asking that Young Fu be given an apprenticeship in Tang's establishment. Because the widow is alone and Young Fu is her only son, he is allowed to complete his apprenticeship while living in a small rented room with her, rather than living in the shop, a plot device which allows us to see more of the city than might otherwise be the case.In the chapters that follow, Young Fu goes from being a young and somewhat arrogant boy of 13 to a more capable and humble youth of 18. Along the way, he has encounters with soldiers, foreigners, thieves, political activists, an old scholar, the poor of the city, the rich of the city, and government officials. He is alternately swindled, attacked by bandits, reviled and praised as his coppersmith skills grow.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Neck,_the_Story_of_a_Pigeon"title="Gay Neck, the Story of a Pigeon">
Gay-Neck, or "Chitra-Griva", is born to a young owner in India. Gay-Neck's parents teach him how to fly, but he soon loses his father in a storm and his mother to a hawk. His master and Ghond the hunter take him out into the wilderness, but he becomes so scared by the hawks that he flees and ends up in a lamasery where the Buddhist monks are able to cure him of his fear. When his young master returns home he finds Gay-Neck waiting for him. But Gay-Neck decides to go on other long journeys, much to the boy's consternation. Then, during World War I, Gay-Neck and Ghond end up journeying to Europe where Gay-Neck serves as a messenger pigeon. He is chased by German machine-eagles (planes) and is severely traumatized when one of his fellow messenger pigeons is shot down. Gay-Neck and Ghond barely survive, and Gay-Neck is unable to fly. Ghond, Gay-Neck, and his master return to the lamasery near Singalila, where Ghond and Gay-Neck need to be cleansed of the hate and fear of the war. After that, Ghond succeeds in hunting down a buffalo that killed a villager, but feels remorse for having to kill the buffalo. Gay-Neck disappears once more, but when the other two return home, they find, to their joy, that Gay-Neck had already flown there ahead of them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bearing_an_Hourglass"title="Bearing an Hourglass">
Some time in the future (as evidenced by technology in use that is much more advanced than in the first story), Norton—a man of about forty—is living a life of nomadic wandering when a ghost named Gawain asks him to father a child to his wife, Orlene, with whom Norton eventually falls in love. Gaea, the Incarnation of Nature, makes the child in Gawain's likeness so his bloodline would continue. Unfortunately, due to a recessive disease that runs in Gawain's family, the child dies. Orlene commits suicide shortly after.Mourning Orlene, Norton resumes his travels, during which he is approached by Gawain. Trying to make up for his blunder, the ghost notifies Norton the office of Time (Chronos), who rules over all Earthly aspects of time, will be opening. Gawain explains that the person who holds the office of Chronos lives backwards in time until the moment of their birth or conception-no one in the book is sure of which. The ghost explains that, by living backwards, Norton can continue to see Orlene, since she is still alive in the past. Norton accepts, and Gawain leads him to the spot where the future office holder of Time, Norton's predecessor, will pass the hourglass onto Norton.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_a_Tangled_Skein"title="With a Tangled Skein">
At around the time of World War I, a 21-year-old Irish woman named Niobe has a marriage arranged by her parents. Her husband-to-be is a 16-year-old boy named Cedric Kaftan. She considers him too immature, but can find no way out of the marriage. Although Niobe at first hates being married to Cedric, his good nature, kindheartedness, and desire to make her happy and keep safe win her over, and she falls in love with him. Cedric shows himself to be an intellectual prodigy. With some prodding and nurturing from his wife, Cedric accepts a scholarship to attend college and hone his magical abilities. He matures and finds his niche in magic and wetland studies, and he and Niobe have a child, Cedric Jr. A few years later, Cedric is assassinated by agents of Satan as part of a plot. Niobe petitions the Incarnations of Immortality to Cedric, only to he died because she was the target and Cedric died in her place. Niobe's anger at her husband's life being cut short makes her vow to make Satan pay.She is invited to take the place of one of three women sharing a physical body as different aspects of the Incarnation of Fate. Eager to thwart Satan's plans and avenge Cedric, she leaves her child with Cedric's cousin and becomes Clotho, the youngest aspect of the Fates. The Fates weave the tapestry of life and have discretion over the length of human lives and the pattern they produce. Clotho, the youngest, spins the threads from the substance of Void to create souls, Lachesis, the middle aspect, measures the threads, and Atropos, the oldest, cuts the thread of each individual human. When she becomes Clotho, Niobe must journey to the edge of the Void without aid from the other Fates and replenish her stock of thread-material.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wielding_a_Red_Sword"title="Wielding a Red Sword">
Mym, an Indian prince, defies his father's plans for an arranged marriage, instead joining a travelling circus. He meets Orb, who teaches him to manage a stutter through song. He is soon discovered, and his father arranges for him to marry a princess by the name of Rapture of Malachite. After fighting against this for days on end, he finally realises that Rapture is worth loving, and so concedes to the marriage. However, a plot to separate him from her results in his decision to become the Incarnation of War.Through the course of living as Mars, Rapture takes up a life of her own and decides that she does not need him any more. Satan arranges, subtly, a demoness for his new companion, hoping to get Mars in his debt that way. In the end, this backfires and he ends up with two loves in his life.His ultimate goal was to use his position to ameliorate some of the suffering being caused by war on Earth, and is surprised by Satan's encouragement. Soon he realises the subtle importances of human war and conflict: under certain circumstances, human suffering is increased, not decreased, by abstinence from armed response. Satan's plan is to have an inexperienced office-holder in the position of the Incarnation of War, such that he can manipulate the course of armed conflicts on Earth, allowing some wars through and blocking the progression of others, such that the overall balance of evil in the world is increased.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Love_of_Evil"title="For Love of Evil">
Parry, an orphan, is taken in and is accidentally adopted by a wizard who teaches him the benefits of white magic and how it can be used to help others. A musician and adept white magician, Parry plans on following in his father's footsteps when he is encouraged by his father, the sorcerer, to take a bride. Parry selects Jolie, seeing her potential despite her ragged appearance. Using his unique singing talents, Parry convinces Jolie that he means no harm. Taking her in, Parry and his father begin to teach Jolie the ways of wizardry and they begin to fall in love. With his father's blessing, Parry and Jolie wed and are about to start a life of bliss when they are attacked by crusaders of Christianity. Parry's father is killed in the attack and Parry escapes in bird form while his wife Jolie had gone ahead to warn her parents to go to the pre-determined hidden shelter. Unfortunately by the time Parry gets to town to check on his wife, she has been taken prisoner by the crusaders, who capture Parry himself shortly after he arrives. Working in conjunction with his wife, since he possesses a magical second sight, he frees them both but not before Jolie is slain by the dying Captain who was going to rape her. Taking off in horse form with Jolie strapped to his back, Parry arrives at the shelter and tries to heal her wounds but is lacking in medical supplies to save her. Parry watches as his wife dies in his arms. Due to special circumstances, Jolie's soul cannot immediately go to Heaven, so at Parry's request, Thanatos binds her spirit to a drop of blood on Parry's wrist. Vowing vengeance, Parry thinks the best way to escape from the villagers is to hide in plain sight, so he joins a monastery for sanctuary as well as a means to destroy the enemy. Soon after joining the Franciscan friars, Parry discovers that a new order, the Dominicans, are being formed with the express purpose of rooting out evil and heresy. Because of his keen mind and magical prowess (which he uses in secrecy), he becomes a feared inquisitor. During one of his many trips to stop Lucifer's campaign of Evil, Parry succumbs to the temptation of his ghostly wife Jolie inhabiting a physical body, thus violating his oath of celibacy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Eternity"title="And Eternity">
In the seventh novel of the series, three women—the ghost of Jolie, the ghost of Orlene (daughter of Orb), and a fifteen-year-old drug-addicted prostitute named Vita—try to discover a way to restore the life of Orlene's baby, Gawain II, who had died as a result of a severe birth defect inflicted unknowingly by Gaea at the request of the child's ghost father Gawain. Nox, the mysterious Incarnation of Night, promises to help, but she needs a specific item of great value from each of the other Incarnations in order to resurrect the baby. The three women set out to meet with each of the other seven Incarnations of Day.In the process of obtaining the items, they conclude that the definitions of Good and Evil used to classify souls as destined for Heaven and Hell are flawed. Orlene's soul had been denied access to Heaven because she committed suicide in a futile attempt to help her baby. Vita meets and comes under the protection of an older male judge; they fall in love and have sex, but this too is considered Evil, because Vita is below the legal age of consent. The three women eventually succeed in gaining the item from each one of the Incarnations, with the exception of God, the Incarnation of Good, who has become obsessed with his own greatness and is completely unresponsive to the outside world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lives_of_the_Saints_(Ricci_novel)"title="Lives of the Saints (Ricci novel)">
## Film.Vittorio Innocente's father, Mario, has immigrated to Canada, though originally believed to be America, to pave the way for the rest of his family to come. Little Vittorio doesn't understand why the neighbours disapprove of his mother, but suspects it has something to do with the man she was with in the stable on the morning she was violently bitten by the snake. But it becomes clear that it is Cristina's independence of mind and rejection of superstition that offend the peasant values in this remote village in post-war Italy. In the miniseries, Vittorio seeks comfort from his teacher, Aunt Teresa "La Maestra", who unlike the neighbours, sympathizes with Vittorio, and consoles him. Aunt Teresa hides Cristina when she becomes visibly pregnant while her husband is away, and helps Vittorio understand life through stories in a book she gave him called "Lives of the Saints", while in the novel Zia Lucia (Aunt Teresa) is a completely different character from "La Maestra". Cristina and Vittorio depart to Canada to meet Mario, but the Cristina dies on the ship giving birth to Vittorio's sister, Rita. Rita has bright blue eyes like her father, which serves as a constant reminder of Cristina's affair.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monsters_Inside"title="The Monsters Inside">
The TARDIS takes the Doctor and Rose to the Justicia System - a prison camp comprising the six planets in that solar system. The pair are separated and trapped in different environments, each determined to escape in their own distinctive style. However, their plans are complicated when some old enemies show up. Are the Slitheen really attempting a takeover of Justicia, or is it something far more sinister?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison's_Conquest_of_Mars"title="Edison's Conquest of Mars">
The book is set following the abortive Martian attack depicted in "Fighters from Mars", much more devastating and global than in H. G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds", though in both works the onslaught is thwarted when the aliens die from bacterial illness. Determining that the Martians will inevitably return, Earth's leaders, including U.S. President William McKinley, Queen Victoria, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Emperor Mutsuhito, unite the world against the common threat and plan an attack on Mars. American inventor Thomas Edison leads a group of scientists studying derelict Martian equipment; they are able to develop an anti-gravity device powered by electric repulsion as well as a disintegration ray.Using this new technology, the allies construct an armada of space ships for the attack. Edison takes some ships to the Moon on a test run; using the first known fictional depiction of space suits. There the explorers uncover evidence of an extinct civilization of giants. The armada heads on, discovering a solid gold asteroid being mined by the Martians. The humans fight two space battles against the Martians, suffering heavy casualties but ultimately winning thanks to the superiority of Edison's ray gun compared to the Martians' electric weapons. The humans take a captive, from whom they learn the Martian language.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Hawk"title="The Last Hawk">
The novel opens when Kelric Valdoria crash lands on the planet Coba. An ancient culture with similarities to the Raylicans, Coba is one of the many isolated and forgotten planets of the former Ruby Empire. Kelric makes several unsuccessful attempts to escape and eventually ends up in jail. It is there he spends his time (particularly while in isolation) learning the dice game Quis.Eventually, Kelric is released and joins one of the "estates" - small matriarchical provinces or city-states that comprise the population of Coba. These estates have special dedicated communes that exclusively play Quis, called Calanya. Kelric becomes a member of one of these communes, known as the "Calani". The society of Coba has, for centuries, replaced war and aggression with competition in Quis. The Quis also double as an information network, with players revealing information about themselves and their estate while at the same time learn about others. Finally, as an information-exchange network, Quis allows technology to improve on Coba at an astounding rate.The strength of a Calani is based on two properties: a player's skill, and the number of different estates they have worked for. Because of his pleasing appearance and his skill in Quis, Kelric is coveted by the queens (known as "Managers") of the different estates. Kelric's membership in the estates proceeds as follows: Dahl, Haka, Bahvla, Miesa, Varz, and finally Karn. Renamed "Sevtar", Kelric has two children with two of his wives (one of which is born Rhon) during his time in the different estates.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stealers_of_Dreams"title="The Stealers of Dreams">
The Doctor, Rose, and Captain Jack are on another world, in the year 2775 (Rose's future), where the chips are not quite the same. There are poster-like TV screens everywhere, but the Doctor says the technology is twenty-seventh century, or earlier. The city is growing up, instead of out, while 90% of the planet is jungle.The three of them rent a room for the night, and are given three tablets 'to stop you dreaming.' As Rose flips through the channels of the obligatory TV, all she finds are news and documentaries. 'All factual programmes. There's no escapism. No imagination. Nothing that tells a story.' 'No lies.' 'No fiction.' ... 'No wonder this world is stagnated.'The Doctor sees an arrest of 'fiction geeks' in progress on the news and goes to see what he can find out. He tells Officer Waller that he is an inspector with the government, and shows her his psychic paper as proof. She tells him that the planet has no government, and he quickly changes his story to being a researcher for one of the news channels and shows her the psychic paper again.Waller gets a call that Hal Gryden is broadcasting with an approximate location, and the Doctor rides along. As they drive, she explains that on the last call, the police were chasing fantasists who were exchanging comic books. At the last moment, the broadcast signal was lost.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Old_Captivity"title="An Old Captivity">
The principal character is a young Scottish pilot with bush-flying experience in Canada, Donald Ross, who is hired by an Oxford don, Cyril Lockwood, to pilot an air survey mission of Brattalid in Greenland. Lockwood's interest is in the early Viking seafarers and their exploits, and although he appears to have little knowledge of the needs of such a project, he insists on their starting as soon as possible, with his elder brother David, a businessman, providing finance.Ross, as the hired expert, then has to contend with the 'helpful' suggestions from both the financier and Lockwood's young daughter, Alix. This causes early tensions in the preparatory stages.While the preliminary dig is ongoing Ross shoulders much responsibility including keeping the aircraft safe in a tidal zone. Worn out with the expedition's work – all of which has fallen solely on him – and a prolonged lack of sleep induced by worry over the expedition, he enters a coma induced by the sleeping tablets he has been forced to take to keep going, and in it dreams that he and Alix were once Scottish slaves aboard Leif Ericson's vessel on its voyage of discovery to Greenland. A part of this dream includes the leaving behind by the two slaves of a stone, with their names carved on it, at the Viking explorers' landing point in North America.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feast_of_the_Drowned"title="The Feast of the Drowned">
When a naval cruiser sinks in mysterious circumstances in the North Sea all aboard are lost. Rose is saddened to learn that the brother of her friend, Keisha, is among the dead. And yet he appears to them as a ghostly apparition, begging to be saved from the coming feast of the drowned.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Resurrection_Casket"title="The Resurrection Casket">
On a shadowy planet called Starfall, where no modern technology works, the Doctor and Rose become involved in a quest for a lost treasure that belonged to Hamlek Glint — the Resurrection Casket, supposedly the key to eternal life. But the TARDIS has stopped working too...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Dalek"title="I Am a Dalek">
The Doctor and Rose Tyler are preparing to enjoy a visit to Earth's Moon when they discover that the TARDIS has, on its own volition, taken them instead to a small seaside town in present-day England. In this town, the dead shell of a Dalek has been discovered by archaeologists in 1st century Roman ruins on the site of a decommissioned Cold War-era military bunker.The Doctor and Rose are separated for a time when the TARDIS dematerializes with Rose still outside the ship. The Doctor finds himself at the dig where he befriends one of the archaeologists and, upon recognizing the Dalek, attempts to disarm the dead creature by giving his new friend custody of the Dalek's gun arm.Rose, meanwhile, witnesses a traffic accident in which a young woman named Kate is apparently killed. However, Kate proceeds to regenerate in much the same fashion as the Doctor, which causes her hair colour to change and — unknown to Rose — her intellect to increase exponentially. Along with Kate's newfound intelligence comes a confusing desire to exterminate every human on the planet, starting with her ex-boyfriend.The Doctor and Rose eventually reunite at the dig site, where Kate reactivates the Dalek, causing it to also regenerate. Rose and the confused Kate escape, while the Doctor tries to unsuccessfully disable the revived Dalek before it can go on a killing spree. The Dalek tracks down and kills the archeologist in order to reacquire its gun arm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joris_of_the_Rock"title="Joris of the Rock">
The novel is set around the fourteenth century in an alternate medieval France called Neustria (historically an early division of the Frankish kingdom). Overlapping the events of the previous novel, "Gerfalcon", it follows the fortunes of roguish protagonist Joris, his paramour, Red Anne, and Joris's illegitimate son Juhel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_in_2020"title="The War in 2020">
The U.S. military is deployed to Africa to stop a South African invasion of Zaire's Shaba province. Captain George Taylor of the U.S. Army is leading an Apache gunship squadron, patrolling over Shaba province, when advanced South African gunships destroy it. After crashing and mercy-killing his fatally wounded gunner, he finds an abandoned Army camp, and forages supplies for a long trek, initially on foot, to the Zairean capital, Kinshasa. Along the way he learns that the attack on his squadron was part of a bigger South African offensive that had targeted U.S. forces in Zaire; South African commandos and Zairean guerrillas allied with the South Africans also destroy B-2 bombers at an airbase in Kinshasa. The American collapse was so swift that the U.S. President is only able to force a cease-fire (and South African withdrawal) by carrying out a nuclear strike on Pretoria, an action that had reaped heavy international condemnation. The EU disavows its original support for the U.S. operation while Japan uses the war as an excuse to launch a mercantilist trade war against America: it embargoes countries that continue to trade with the U.S., though continuing to sell its own products there.Taylor is evacuated home to the U.S., but finds himself suffering from a new virus designated "Runciman's Disease" (RD), which leaves his face horribly scarred. Many returning U.S. soldiers are similarly infected; it spreads around the worldwide in a global pandemic. Japan puts its Home Islands under quarantine, with Okinawa being used exclusively for international trade. A nuclear war in the Middle East, some time after the Shaba disaster, destroys Israel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Temple_and_the_Lodge"title="The Temple and the Lodge">
The thesis of the book is that after the Knights Templar were suppressed for heresy at the behest of the King of France some elements found refuge in Scotland where they helped the Scots in their fight for independence from the English and the Templar Order survived through Jacobite Freemasonry to Strict Observance and the Grand Orient of France.It also claims that many of the people behind the American Revolution were Freemasons, as were some of the less successful British commanders such as Howe and Cornwallis, who they claim intentionally lost (or tried to win by the path of least resistance) some of the battles to prevent the destruction of America's economic base.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gösta_Berling's_Saga"title="Gösta Berling's Saga">
The hero, Gösta Berling, is a defrocked Lutheran priest who has been saved by the Mistress of Ekeby from freezing to death and thereupon becomes one of her pensioners in the manor at Ekeby. As the pensioners finally get power in their own hands, they manage the property as they themselves see fit and their lives are filled with many wild adventures. Gösta Berling is their leading spirit, the poet, the charming personality among a band of revelers. Before the story ends, Gösta Berling is redeemed, and even the old Mistress of Ekeby is permitted to come to her old home to die.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hello,_Goodbye_Window"title="The Hello, Goodbye Window">
A girl visits her grandparents' house, where for her the kitchen window is a special gateway, where everything important happens. Told from her point of view, the story explores her special relationship with her grandparents through the window, by the window and around the window. She tells us how the window is perfect for looking into the kitchen from the porch to play a game of peek-a-boo with Nanna, and even turns into a mirror at night. She describes her experience with her grandparents and all the fun things there are to do in the house, as well as the things she has been told to stay away from. She helps Nanna in the garden and listens to Poppy play "Oh! Susanna" on the harmonica; she enjoys it even though it is the only song he can play. When her parents come to pick the girl up, she is happy and sad at the same time, but she understands "it just happens that way sometimes."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Officer_Buckle_and_Gloria"title="Officer Buckle and Gloria">
A rather boring police officer named Officer Buckle is assigned to take a police dog named Gloria to his safety speech at the local school. Until that time, whenever Officer Buckle tried to tell schools about safety everyone fell asleep. Then, unbeknownst to Officer Buckle (literally, behind his back), Gloria does tricks imitating the safety tip demonstrating safety rules. Gloria is a big success! Officer Buckle enjoys the fame until he sees on a taped speech that the schoolchildren are so enthusiastic because of Gloria. He refuses to teach safety and a huge accident happens. A letter from an attentive and sweet girl, named Claire, convinces Officer Buckle to start teaching again. In the end, Officer Buckle and Gloria go to many schools and teach the students about safety together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Puritan"title="The Last Puritan">
Santayana separated the book into five parts. He named the different sections of the book according to how each individual period of time matched up with Oliver Alden's life: Ancestry, Boyhood, First Pilgrimage, In The Home Orbit, and Last Pilgrimage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Stranger_Tides"title="On Stranger Tides">
In 1718, French puppeteer John Chandagnac sails to Jamaica on the British ship "Vociferous Carmichael". He aims to confront his uncle Sebastian, who has apparently stolen a fortune that rightfully belonged to John's father and could have prevented his poverty-induced death. On board, he meets an Englishwoman named Elizabeth Hurwood, who complains that her erudite father Benjamin has abandoned his natural philosophy work and begun studying dark magic with her lecherous physician Leo Friend. The pirate sloop "Jenny" menaces the "Carmichael", neutralizing its powerful cannons with vodun magic. Benjamin Hurwood and Friend begin shooting their fellow passengers, revealing them as allies of the pirates, as the assailants board and seize the "Carmichael".The pirates allow the passengers to leave on a rowboat, except for Beth, whom Hurwood requires for a vodun ritual, and Chandagnac, enrolled into the crew after wounding pirate captain Philip Davies. Not fond of long words, the pirates change John's name to Jack Shandy. The pirates head for New Providence Island to refit the "Carmichael" for piracy. On the way, they are captured by the Royal Navy, but Shandy breaks them out, thus ingratiating himself with the pirates. On New Providence, Shandy develops a proficiency for cooking and learns about vodun: unlike in the Old World, magic is very strong in the Caribbean, and pirates hire "bocors" to channel "loas" for healing, attacking and protection. Male and female sorcerers control different kinds of magic. Shandy also meets a rambling old sorcerer named Sawney, and develops an affection for Beth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fable_of_the_Bees"title="The Fable of the Bees">
## Poem."The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves turn'd Honest" (1705) is in doggerel couplets of eight syllables over 433 lines. It was a commentary on contemporary English society as Mandeville saw it. Economist John Maynard Keynes described the poem as setting forth "the appalling plight of a prosperous community in which all the citizens suddenly take it into their heads to abandon luxurious living, and the State to cut down armaments, in the interests of Saving". It begins:The "hive" is corrupt but prosperous, yet it grumbles about lack of virtue. A higher power decides to give them what they ask for:This results in a rapid loss of prosperity, though the newly virtuous hive does not mind:The poem ends in a famous phrase:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Long_Long_Way"title="A Long Long Way">
The young protagonist Willie Dunne leaves Dublin to fight voluntarily for the Allies as a member of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, leaving behind his prospective bride Gretta and his policeman father. He is caught between the warfare playing out on foreign fields (mainly at Flanders) and that festering at home, waiting to erupt with the Easter Rising. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2005.In a 2009 US National Public Radio interview, author R. L. Stine stated that "A Long Long Way" was one of the most beautifully written books he had ever read, and gave copies of the novel to friends and family to read.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skybreaker"title="Skybreaker">
Using reward money from the discovery of Vikram Szpirglas' pirate base, Matt Cruse is attending the Airship Academy in Paris. While travelling through a storm in the Indian Ocean, his training vessel is caught in a vertical draft revealing a large airship drifting at 20,000 feet. Deducing that it is the "Hyperion", a long-lost ship said to be carrying great riches, the captain steers towards it to attempt a boarding. However, Matt is forced to descend when the rest of the crew members are stricken with altitude sickness. Upon returning to Paris, Matt meets with Kate de Vries, his friend and object of affection, to discuss the "Hyperion"'s billionaire owner Theodore Grunel. Kate announces that she plans to find "Grunel's treasure" using co-ordinates that Matt remembers in a special ship called a Skybreaker that will allow them to reach high altitudes safely.Matt receives a request from a claimed descendant of Grunel. When they meet, the man reveals himself to be a criminal named John Rath and tries to force Matt to give up the co-ordinates. Matt escapes with a gypsy girl named Nadira who claims to have a key that works on the "Hyperion" and proposes her own plan to find it. Matt initially declines but changes his mind when he overhears a warm conversation between Kate and a wealthy acquaintance named Hal Slater. Matt and Nadira search for a Skybreaker named the "Sagarmatha" moored in Paris, but when they find it, they learn that Hal is the captain. Matt, Kate, Nadira and Kate's chaperone, Ms. Simpkins, hire Hal and his Sherpa crew to fly them to the "Hyperion" and promise Hal 80% of the gold they discover. Although Kate temporarily allays Matt's fears, he sees her develop an increasing rapport with Hal and becomes jealous. Matt begins to accept romantic advances from Nadira which culminates in a kiss between them in the crow's nest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_I_Live_Now"title="How I Live Now">
Fifteen-year-old Elizabeth (who goes by the name of Daisy) is sent from the United States to stay with her aunt Penn and her children, Daisy's cousins, on a remote farm in the United Kingdom during the outbreak of a fictional third world war of the 21st century. Though she is happy about moving away from her stepmother who is pregnant, Daisy is homesick at first. First meeting her 14-year-old cousin Edmond at the airport, Daisy calls him "some kind of mutt"; however, her view of Edmond changes after settling in. Arriving at the farm she also meets Edmond's twin brother Isaac, 9-year-old Piper, and Osbert, who is the eldest brother. Daisy's homesickness only lasts for a short while before she and her extended family become close, and Daisy begins to embrace her new home. Daisy soon finds herself falling in love with Edmond and, after realising that the affection is mutual, begins a relationship with him.Aunt Penn travels to Oslo, where she is stranded after war breaks out. An unknown enemy occupies the UK. The war becomes increasingly difficult for Daisy and her cousins as it increasingly affects their lives, eventually leading to food shortages and lack of other resources. One day, the farm is taken over by soldiers who separate the boys from the girls by sending them away to live at separate homes, and then separate farms. Daisy and Piper are forced to put survival as their top priority and cannot look for the male members of their family. Gradually finding their way back home, the two girls learn the harsh consequences of war and wait for their family in the barn house. After the war ends, Daisy must deal with putting the pieces of her life back together and overcoming the terrible experience of war as she reunites with the forever changed members of her family, including a physically and emotionally scarred Edmond.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taronga"title="Taronga">
## Part One: The Calling.The book begins two years after the Last Days. Ben lives with a callous man named Greg, who uses Ben's powers, which he calls "the Call", to attract game for hunting. Ben feels guilty about leading the animals to their death but faces a beating from Greg if he does not comply. When he finally escapes, he promises not to use the Call again. He breaks this promise less than a day later when he is pursued by a man on horseback. He shoots the horse causing it to fall and crush the man who dies slowly. Ben then realises there are people in the distance coming closer with guns. Ben runs for his life, fearing capture.Ben decides to return to Sydney, where he once lived with his parents. He travels first on foot, then by bike, using mountain roads to avoid local gang activity. He is joined by a stray dog who would do anything for Ben, having become loyal as they grew close in their travels.As he draws closer to his destination, he hears the Call of something wild and ferocious. When he reaches the city, only then he realizes that the wild Call is coming from Taronga Zoo. He then makes a hard decision to travel to Taronga Zoo to find out what creature could still be so wild and free in a zoo.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Willow,_Sleeping_Woman"title="Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman">
## "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman".An unnamed adult narrator and his younger teen-aged cousin wait for a bus to take them to the hospital so the cousin can have his ear problem examined, an ailment he has had since he was young due to being hit in the ear by a baseball. While waiting, the cousin inquires deeply about the narrator's watch. The bus ride takes them through much hilly terrain and gives the narrator time to think about how he developed a close bond with his cousin. After the cousin checks in, the narrator reminisces on what happened the last time he visited a nearby hospital.While the narrator was in high school, he and his friend visited his friend's girlfriend at the hospital, who needed to have one of her ribs realigned. After the operation, the girlfriend tells a narrative-poem about a woman who sleeps indefinitely because a "blind willow" sends its flies to carry pollen to her ear, burrow inside, and put her to sleep. Eventually, these flies eat the woman's flesh starting from the inside, despite a young man's effort in trying to save her.After the cousin returns from the check-up, the two cousins lunch. When they talk about the cousin's ailment and how it will probably affect him for the rest of his life, he says he thinks of the movie line "Don't worry. If you were able to spot some Indians, that means there aren't any there" from "Fort Apache" whenever someone sympathizes with him about his ears. As the bus taking them home approaches, the narrator begins to daydream of how he and his friend were careless with a gift of chocolates for the girlfriend many years ago. When he is able to think clearly again, he tells his cousin, "I'm all right."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_(Myers_novel)"title="Monster (Myers novel)">
The novel begins with 16-year-old Steve Harmon writing in his book awaiting for his trial for murder. Musing on his short time in prison so far, he decides to record this upcoming experience in the form of a movie screenplay. Kathy O'Brien, Steve's lawyer, informs him on what will happen during the trial. At this stage, only two of the four accused – James King and Steve – will be tried, since the other two accused – Richard "Bobo" Evans and Osvaldo Cruz – have entered into a plea bargain. When the trial first begins, Steve flashes back to a movie he saw in his school's film of predictability.The trial begins with the opening statements of the prosecutor Sandra Petrocelli, Miss O'Brien, and King's lawyer, Asa Briggs. Petrocelli labels the four accused men, including Steve, as "monsters." The lawyers call on several witnesses, including Salvatore Zinzi and Wendell Bolden, illicit cigarette traders, who admit to buying cigarettes that came from a drugstore robbery that led to the murder. The story of the trial is often broken up by a variety of flashbacks, including ones showing that King is only acquainted with Steve, that King had accused Steve of pulling the trigger during the robbery. Petrocelli calls as a witness Osvaldo Cruz, who is affiliated with the Diablos, a violent street gang. Cruz admits to participating in the crime only due to coercion by Bobo.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odds_On"title="Odds On">
It describes an attempt of robbery in an isolated hotel on Costa Brava. The robbery is planned with the help of a Critical Path Analysis computer program, but unforeseen events get in the way.The three Americans needed cover, as lone men stood out. So each decided he would pick up a girl, and mingle with the crowd.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_Lights,_Big_City_(novel)"title="Bright Lights, Big City (novel)">
The story's narrator is a 24-year-old writer who works as a fact checker for a highbrow magazine for which he had once hoped to write. By night, he is a cocaine-using party-goer seeking to lose himself in the hedonism of the 1980s yuppie party scene, often going to a nightclub called "Heartbreak".His wife, Amanda, recently left him, and he copes with this by pretending nothing happened and telling no one that she is gone. The two had met in Kansas City; the narrator moves with her to New York City, where she begins a modeling career that quickly takes off. After flying out to Paris for Fashion Week, she calls the narrator to inform him that she is leaving him for another man and to pursue her career. Initially hopeful that she will return someday, the narrator eventually resorts to searching for her at a fashion event, publicly humiliating himself while failing to garner more attention from her than a brief look. He obsesses over every item she owned in his apartment, every modeling photo and every club she visited, even repeatedly visiting a mannequin based on her. His partying and his personal troubles begin to affect his work. He eventually comes to realize Amanda's superficiality, becoming both disillusioned with her and the materialistic culture of New York in general. He reveals that the true reason for his spiral downwards was his mother's death, which actually took place a year ago. He realizes that he had married Amanda because he thought it would make his mother happy. After his mother's death, he was in shock and it wasn't until Amanda left him that he began really grieving over his mother, causing his cocaine addiction and reckless abandon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sinner_(novel)"title="The Sinner (novel)">
"The Sinner" involves Detective Jane Rizzoli and a main character new to the series, first seen in "The Apprentice" as a minor figure, medical examiner Dr. Maura Isles. When a young novice nun about to take vows is found murdered in the abbey's summer chapel, Isles and Rizzoli are immediately called to the scene. The elderly nuns are of little help to Isles and Rizzoli but when another body is found, mutilated beyond recognition (and testing reveals the body to be that of a fortyish Indian Hansen's Disease victim), it is soon discovered that there is more to these killings than meets the eye. Dr. Victor Banks hooks up with Maura Isles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bourne_Betrayal"title="The Bourne Betrayal">
At the beginning of the book, Bourne is in Doctor Sunderland's office. Sunderland, recommended by Lindros, is a specialist in memory restoration and miniaturization. Unfortunately for Bourne, he doesn't know that this man posing as Sunderland is actually Costin Veintrop, hired by Fadi to mess with Bourne's brain by creating new memories. These new memories can be evoked by new smells or even hearing things. As Bourne exits the office two things happen: Veintrop calls Fadi and tells him the work is done, and Bourne receives a call that Martin is missing. He then catches a cab and heads back to the CIA headquarters to talk to the Old Man.Back at the CIA, Bourne is introduced to a number of new people: Matthew Lerner (the Deputy Director until Lindros gets back), Soraya Moore (a senior case officer), Hiram Cevik (a prisoner, actually Fadi in disguise), and Tim Hytner (who is framed as a traitor to the CIA organization). Tim is working on cracking a cipher created by Fadi. Unwittingly Bourne brings Cevik out of his prison cage to take a walk with him in an attempt to extract more information about Fadi. Then Cevik escapes under the cover of a gun battle in which Hytner is killed. Bourne then steals a motorcycle from the back of a truck to follow the Hummer, which he thinks Cevik is still trying to escape in. Once the Hummer is stopped up the street, CIA officers surround the car, waiting for the prisoners to step out. Bourne then realizes the car is rigged to explode. He grabs Soraya and they make their way to safety just before detonation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedomland_(novel)"title="Freedomland (novel)">
A woman staggers into a local hospital, too dazed to speak. As the doctors and police try to puzzle out her injuries, her story comes out. She was thrown to the ground and her car was stolen. And, in the back, was her four-year-old son.The town of Dempsey is in turmoil as the search for the child goes on and pressure builds up on all sides.Brenda Martin walks into the hospital emergency room in a state of shock. As doctors bandage her hands, they find out she is the victim of a carjacking near Armstrong. Detective Lorenzo Council meets with her, and through her tears gets the story that her four-year-old son Cody was in the backseat of the car. She then describes the assailant as being a young black man with a shaved head and scary eyes.Local reporter Jesse Haus follows up on this relatively minor news story, and is one of the first to learn about the kidnapping. After promising to write a story on Bump Rosen's son, she gets an inside chance to be next to Brenda. As the Gannon and Dempsey police blockade the crime area, Lorenzo works to get more details from Brenda, and Jesse works on details for her story. Lorenzo has Jesse stay with Brenda so she is not alone, and Jesse discovers Brenda's love of classic R&amp;B music.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Rider"title="Green Rider">
Karigan G'ladheon, a merchant's daughter, is cast out of her school in Selium by Dean Geyer following a duel in which she bested a wealthy aristocrat.Running away from the shame of her expulsion, she travels into the forest called the Green Cloak. She meets a Green Rider (one of a group of legendary elite messengers in the king's service) who is dying with two black arrows protruding from his back.The Green Rider, F'ryan Coblebay, makes Karigan swear to carry a message to Sacor City for the 'love of her country', and there to deliver it into the hands of either Laren, the Captain of the Green Riders, or the king himself. He also orders Karigan not to read the letter for the sake of her life. Coblebay entrusts a second more private letter to her care also. As his life passes, he whispers with his last breath; "beware the shadow man...". She also takes the gold winged horse brooch that is the symbol of his office as a Green Rider.Karigan, following her promise, rides the horse, which she calls "Horse" (whose real name is Condor), to Sacor City through perilous paths. Horse appears to have an uncanny ability to evade the various dangers Karigan encounters, always delivering Karigan to safety. During the journey, she meets many people, including the Berry sisters, members of the mystical, elf-like race of Eletians, and two traitorous Weapons (a special rank given only to the bodyguards of the king). Throughout her journey, the ghost of F'ryan Coblebay follows her, urging her on and providing help when desperately needed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandry's_Book"title="Sandry's Book">
Four young misfits from four different classes are brought together at the Winding Circle Temple in Emelan. They find themselves housed together as they did not "fit in" when they slept in the dormitories with everyone. They are sent to Discipline Cottage to learn and use their new-found magical abilities. All four have ambient magic, as opposed to academic magic, and the power they use comes from ordinary things all around them. Sandry has magic with threads, Tris with weather, Daja with smithing, and Briar with plants.Lady Sandrilene fa Toren is locked away in a dark room with a fading oil lamp. She was magically hidden in this storeroom days ago by her nurse, who was murdered moments later just outside the door by a mob bent on destroying everything infected by the fierce plague that killed Sandry's parents. Sandry is concerned about the flickering oil lamp, even though she knows there is no chance of anybody finding her as the room she is locked in is protected by magic so that it cannot be found either magically or non-magically, and the only person who knows her whereabouts is her nurse, who is dead. Sandry is afraid of going crazy in the darkness. Unknowingly doing her first piece of magic, Sandry traps the remaining light in a simple braid. A powerful seer, Niklaren Goldeye, finds her and takes her to Winding Circle in Emelan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_(novella)"title="Carmen (novella)">
 The novella comprises four parts. Only the first three appeared in the original publication in the October 1, 1845, issue of the "Revue des deux Mondes" (Review of the Two Worlds); the fourth first appeared in the book publication in 1846. Mérimée tells the story as if it had really happened to him on his trip to Spain in 1830.Part I.The work is prefaced by an untranslated quotation from the poet Palladas:Πᾶσα γυνὴ χόλος ἐστίν· ἔχει δ᾽ δύω ὥρας, τὴν μίαν ἐν θαλάμῳ, τὴν μίαν ἐν θανάτῳ.(Every woman turns sour/Twice she has her hour/One is in bed/The other is dead).For readers of Ancient Greek, this set the theme of the tale: a ferocious woman, sex, and death.While searching for the site of the Battle of Munda in a lonely spot in Andalusia, the author meets a man who his guide hints is a dangerous robber. Instead of fleeing, the author befriends the man by sharing cigars and food. They stay in the same primitive inn that night. The guide tells the author that the man is the robber known as Don José Navarro and leaves to turn him in, but the author warns Don José, who escapes.Part II. Later, in Córdoba, the author meets Carmen, a beautiful Gitano (Romani) woman who is fascinated by his repeating watch. He goes to her home so she can tell his fortune, and she impresses him with her occult knowledge. They are interrupted by Don José, and although Carmen makes throat-cutting gestures, José escorts the author out. The author finds his watch is missing.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesh_and_Blood_(Kellerman_novel)"title="Flesh and Blood (Kellerman novel)">
Alex receives a call from the mother of an ex-patient, Lauren Teague. Considering it unresolved business, Alex contacts Milo and they ask around to see if they can find her. Her body turns up and the missing person case turns into a murder investigation.Alex and Milo visit her parents, former co-workers, roommates, and employers. They follow connections back and find that Lauren had $350,000 saved up, probably earned from prostitution. She had recently started to attend college, and was part of an intimacy experiment. When a former co-worker ends up dead after speaking to them, they know the murder was no ordinary mugging. Then Lauren's mother is killed, presumably by her husband.While kayaking along the beach near the Duke mansion, Alex rescues a boy who had swum out too far. This gets him invited in, and he makes the acquaintance of Duke's ex-wife, Cheryl. They flirt, and when a rendezvous is arranged, the killer shows up and shoots Cheryl. Alex is saved by Lauren's brother, Ben Dugger.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justinian_(novel)"title="Justinian (novel)">
The book is in the format of a fictional memoir written by Byzantine Emperor Justinian II, with brief interludes from a soldier named Myakes, who was close to Justinian throughout much of the emperor's life. The book follows Justinian's time before and after taking the throne, as well as his overthrow, mutilation and exile in the Crimea, his subsequent return to power (following a possibly apocryphal nose-job), his insane quest for revenge, and his finally being unseated a second time and executed. Myakes, who had been blinded and exiled to a monastery after Justinian's final defeat, listens as a fellow monk named Brother Elpidios reads the memoir out loud, and occasionally interrupts with commentary or criticism. In the end, Elipidos, who had been contemplating writing his own history, hides the book as he believes he could not properly separate the good from the evil in Justinian's life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Robe"title="Black Robe">
In Quebec, a tribe of Algonquian agree in exchange for muskets to guide the "Black Robe" (Father Laforgue), and his 20-year-old French assistant Daniel Davost, for a few weeks upriver to a spot beyond a set of rapids. There, Father Laforgue travels onward to the Huron village of Ihonatiria where a Jesuit mission is already established. Along the way, Father Laforgue falls under suspicion of being a demon and his attempts to baptize (convert) his Algonquian guides are unsuccessful. He is captured by unfriendly Iroquois who torture him, but he escapes and eventually arrives at the fever-ridden Huron village. In exchange for promising them a "water cure" for the sickness the Indians agree to be baptized.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_for_Alibrandi_(novel)"title="Looking for Alibrandi (novel)">
The novel follows its protagonist, Josephine Alibrandi, the Italian-Australian daughter of Italian immigrant parents. Josie lives in Sydney and attends a Catholic high school–where she is disillusioned with the cliques and social politics of her snobby peers. Her usually sophisticated, sassy demeanour is challenged when she is overcome with the pressures of her senior year of high school: the suicide of a male friend, and meeting her estranged father who is in Sydney on a business trip. She confides in a young man with a bad reputation, who slowly turns into a romantic interest for Josie. This relationship, mirrored by the tumultuous relationship with her father, forms the centre complications of the novel as Josie tries to navigate through the complexities and hurdles she faces as a young adult.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_for_Larry"title="Vote for Larry">
After faking the suicide of his online persona "Larry", Josh Swensen has hidden in Boulder, Colorado under the pseudonym of Mark and enrolled at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is kidnapped by his old friend Beth, who persuades him to return him to his "Larry" persona and run for office. She suggests he runs for Massachusetts state representative in the Congress, but he decides to run for U.S. President.He has difficulty maintaining his austerity, problems with his girlfriend and ex-girlfriend, a threat from his nemesis betagold, self-identity problems, and the rather unusual problem of running for U.S. President. Among other problems is the problem of almost being killed by an opponent in the candidacy for president. In this book, the fictional Congress passes a constitutional amendment to lower the presidential age requirement to 18.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blunderer"title="The Blunderer">
Mild-mannered lawyer Walter Stackhouse has come to hate his neurotic wife Clara. He has suffered for years as she alienated all his friends and embarrassed him with her pettiness, overly dramatic gestures and intolerance of other peoples' needs. With Walter, she is increasingly distant and, without foundation, she begins to accuse him of having an affair with the sweet and sensuous music teacher, Ellie Briess. He does eventually become infatuated with the girl and starts a relationship with her. Jealous Clara then attempts suicide by overdose, forcing Walter back into her arms. However, immediately upon recovering from near-death, Clara falls into her usual pattern; Walter finally stands his ground and demands a divorce. Clara is then found dead, having fallen off a cliff during a rest interval while taking a bus to see her dying mother. It is likely suicide. In time, as the official investigation continues, he has to admit to a couple of questionable activities - stalking Clara's bus in his car, while daydreaming about possibly killing her at the first stop (just as Melchior J. Kimmel, a 40-year old bookshop manager, murdered his own domineering wife Helen, an unsolved crime about which Walter had read in the newspaper and grown fascinated by), and visiting Kimmel prior to Clara's death, which ultimately begins to make him look like he was seeking some how-to advice from a wife-murderer. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gospel_According_to_Larry"title="The Gospel According to Larry">
Seventeen-year-old Josh Swenson, an articulate teen whose dream is to change the world, creates his own website which he calls "The Gospel According to Larry" because Larry was the most unbiblical name he could think of. He writes articles on this site preaching his feelings and ideas about making the world a better place.He is unpopular until someone writes an article about him in a local newspaper and the number of hits begins to grow. He then decides to start photographing and posting his possessions. He was curious to see if it was possible to track down someone anywhere in the world simply by their possessions. He only has 75 possessions and has a list of guidelines to keep track of how many possessions he has, such as to sell or trade an old CD, book, or video whenever he wants a new one. The guidelines were inspired by his reading of a book about Native Americans who did not want to leave a "footprint" behind, which led him to believe every purchase is a major decision.Not everyone is happy with his site. A poster of the screen name betagold despises that Josh has kept his identity online as a secret behind and threatens to find him, no matter what he does to hide. She even notices minor clues to his location that he speaks of that.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Purple_Land"title="The Purple Land">
The novel tells the story of Richard Lamb, a young Englishman who marries a teenage Argentinian girl, Paquita, without asking her father's permission, and is forced to flee to Montevideo, Uruguay with his bride. Lamb leaves his young wife with a relative while he sets off for eastern Uruguay to find work for himself. He soon becomes embroiled in adventures with the Uruguayan gauchos and romances with local women. Lamb unknowingly helps a rebel guerrilla general, Santa Coloma, escape from prison and joins his cause. However, the rebels are defeated in battle and Lamb has to flee in disguise. He helps Demetria, the daughter of an old rebel leader, escape from her persecutors and returns to Montevideo. Lamb, Paquita, Demetria and Santa Coloma evade their government pursuers by slipping away on a boat bound for Buenos Aires. Here the novel ends, but in the opening paragraphs, Lamb had already informed the reader that after the events of the story he was captured by Paquita's father and thrown into prison for three years, during which time Paquita herself died of grief.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tris's_Book"title="Tris's Book">
Lady Sandrilene fa Toren, Trisana Chandler, Daja Kisubo, and Briar Moss have been living in Discipline Cottage at Winding Circle a Temple in Emelan for some time now. They have survived an earthquake and are now having to defend their only true home from pirates using their magic and the help of their teachers.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_and_the_Phoenix"title="David and the Phoenix">
David moves to a new house at the base of some beautiful mountains. The next day, rather than settle into the new house, he decides to climb the mountains. Upon reaching the summit, he encounters the Phoenix. They are, at first, frightened of each other, as the Phoenix had been chased by a scientist for several weeks and David had, of course, never seen anything like the Phoenix before. The Phoenix is flattered by David's attentions, though, and decides to educate David about the legendary creatures in the world.The first adventure in the Phoenix's curriculum for David involves seeing the Gryffins. They first meet a witch who goads the Phoenix into a race. They are captured by the arrogant Gryffons, who sentence the Phoenix to death for bringing humans into their magic world.They escape and the Phoenix keeps his appointment with the witch. David returns home to meet the unpleasant scientist visiting his parents. The two friends implement plans to avoid the scientist, firstly by finding some buried treasure with the help of a gruff but friendly sea monster, and spending the gold coins on magic items to foil the scientist's plot to capture the rare bird.While visiting the magical world to buy necessities, David has a brief adventure with a prankster Leprechaun, meets a cantankerous potion-selling hag, and a faun. The Phoenix rescues David from remaining too long in this world, which could absorb those beings who are not magical.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Songs_(novel)"title="Other Songs (novel)">
Twelve centuries have passed since the fall of Rome; fewer since the death of Kristos (Christ). Hieronim Berbelek was once a powerful "strategos" (a natural born leader whose form makes other people listen to him or her), but when he was defeated by one of the "kratistoses", known as the Warlock, his Form and spirit were broken, reduced to those of a lowly merchant, a sad, small man, easily molded by others with stronger Forms. However, a chain of events sets him off on a journey — first to Africa, and later into many new lands, from the depths of Warlock's domain, through the fabled Library of Alexandria and mysterious flying city, to the Moon colony, and on this journey he may have a chance of regaining his Form…
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Icebound_Land"title="The Icebound Land">
Will, the main character and a Ranger's apprentice, is captured by the Skandians along with his friend, Evanlyn (Araluen's Crown Princess Cassandra in disguise), in a big war in the previous book, "The Burning Bridge". The capturer, Jarl (war officer) Erak of the Skandians (mercenaries), takes them in as slaves.Meanwhile, Will's mentor, Halt (a legendary Ranger), has sworn to save him from the Skandians, but the Ranger Corps forces him to stay back. Halt, however, is so desperate, he insults the King of his country, Araluen. The King and Halt are good friends, so in Halt's trial, the King takes pity on Halt. Instead of the normal punishment, which is to ban the defendant from the borders of Araluen forever, he banishes Halt from the borders only for a twelvemonth. Halt is banished from the Ranger Corps until the punishment is lifted, but that is just a minor problem for Halt. He then sets out to find his apprentice once more. Halt is determined to get to Skandia quickly, so he takes the quickest route: Gallica. There he meets Will's old friend, Horace. Horace is Will's childhood friend, and just like Will, Horace is an orphan. In Gallica, Horace and Halt tried to go as fast as they could, but they were stopped by a lot of inexperienced knights, as Gallica is in a state of anarchy and turmoil. Horace, being a warrior apprentice, takes on the fake name "The Oakleaf Knight". Horace beats all of them with ease without his grizzled companion, Halt, to step in. Horace's reputation grows until he is noticed throughout Gallica, which attracts the horrible knight, Deparnieux of Castle Montsombre. Deparnieux soon captures Horace and Halt, and holds them in his keep.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Button_and_Luke_the_Engine_Driver"title="Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver">
## Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver.The story begins on a tiny island called Morrowland (original German: , a play on , the German translation of Neverland), which has just enough space for a small palace, a train station and rails all around the island, a grocery store, a small house, a king, two subjects, a locomotive named Emma, and a locomotive engineer by the name of Luke (Lukas) (who, as railway civil servant, is not a subject). One day, the postman – who has to come by ship – drops off a package with a nearly illegible address for a "Mrs. Krintuuth" at "Zorroulend". On the back was a large 13. After a futile search for the addressee among Morrowland's few inhabitants, they open the package. To their immense surprise, there's a black baby inside. After the commotion has died down, the baby is adopted by the islanders and is named Jim Button.As Jim grows up, the King begins to worry that the island is too small and there won't be enough space for Jim to live on once he's an adult. He announces to Luke that Emma has to be removed. Luke, upset about this decision, decides to leave the island with Emma, and Jim (who had accidentally overheard Luke relating his woes to Emma) decides to come along. They convert Emma into a makeshift ship and sail off the island in the night, eventually arriving at the coast of Mandala (a fictional country inspired by China).
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Acceptable_Time"title="An Acceptable Time">
Happy to be away from her large family for a while, Polly O'Keefe is spending the autumn with her maternal grandparents, Dr. Kate Murry and Dr. Alex Murry, getting a better education from them in science than she would have received at home. She is grieving the loss of her beloved friend and mentor, Maximiliana Sebastiane Horne. Soon, however, surprising things start to happen, including the unexpected arrival of Zachary Gray, a charming but troubled college student whom Polly met in Greece and dated in Cyprus the year before (in "A House Like a Lotus").Then, while walking near her grandparents' Connecticut home, Polly meets druids Karralys and Anaral and a warrior named Tav, all of whom lived in the area some three thousand years ago. She soon learns that she is not the first person from her time to meet the Murrys' Pre-Columbian neighbors. Bishop Nason Colubra, the brother of a family friend, Dr. Louise Colubra, has been investigating the hieroglyphs found on rocks in nearby, relics of Karralys' time. In doing so, he has also come into repeated contact with Anaral's tribe, the People of the Wind (a tribe that previously appeared in "A Swiftly Tilting Planet"). The retired bishop is initially reluctant to discuss this, having been met with his sister's skepticism in previous attempts. However, he feels responsible for exposing Polly to the potential dangers of a tesseract of intersecting periods of time.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quincunx_of_Time"title="The Quincunx of Time">
Capt. Robin Weinbaum of Earth Security submits to a request for an interview from Dana Lje, a video commentator, mostly because she can and has made his life difficult with her reporting of Security lapses, especially in a recent case involving the Government of Erskine, another planetary system. Ms. Lje reveals that she has received a communication from an outfit calling itself "Interstellar Information Ltd." about an incident in a star system so far away that even by a faster-than-light ship, no message could return from it in less than two months. The incident in fact is due to take place in the next few days. The communication also alleges that there is a new device aboard the ship, and gives the name of the device.When Weinbaum hears the name—the "Dirac communicator"—he is forced to believe that Interstellar Information have access to information even he doesn't have. He brings in Dr. Thor Wald to explain the Dirac device to Dana Lje. She agrees to play along with Interstellar and its owner, J. Shelby Stevens, to let Security find out how the company gets its information.A long investigation turns up exactly nothing. Even when J. Shelby Stevens allows an interview, under the conditions of so-called "stoolie's arrest" in which he voluntarily places himself in custody for interview, with a guarantee of being set free immediately afterward, there is no progress. The only result is that Stevens predicts the date of their next meeting.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_(novel)"title="East (novel)">
When Arne married the superstitious Eugenia, he agreed to have seven children with her—one for each point of the compass, excluding north. According to the birth-direction superstition held by Eugenia's family, the direction a woman faces when giving birth will affect the child's personality; each direction foretells a different personality, and Eugenia believes north is wild and uncontrollable. Years before, Eugenia was told by a "skjebne-soke" (a fortune teller) that any north child she had would die crushed beneath an avalanche of ice and snow, reinforcing her desire to never have a pure northern child. Her favorite child, east-born Elise, dies young and Eugenia conceives another child to replace her, Rose. While pregnant with Rose, Eugenia is adamant that her unborn child will be an east-born, so much so that her very non-superstitious husband worries that she is tempting fate.Rose feels out of place in her family, despite her love for them and her home; she can never live up to the standard set by her dead sister Elise, and is consumed by un-east-like wanderlust and desire for adventure. Her happy and loving childhood is failing: not only are they impoverished and her sick sister lying close to death, but her parents have concealed the truth of her birth-direction from her—the superstition that has hung over her entire life. Later she overhears her parents talking and finds out she is actually a north-born. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taming_the_Star_Runner"title="Taming the Star Runner">
Travis is a tough kid living in a big city. When he comes home to find his stepfather cramming the fireplace with his writing, Travis assaults him with a fireplace poker. As a result, he is sent to live with his paternal uncle, Ken, on his ranch outside of Tulsa. Travis, used to living in the city, soon finds country life to be boring\ the coolest, toughest kid in school, he is now an out-of-place loner, torn between his desire to fit in and his contempt for country living. Even Ken seems too busy for him, between work at his law-firm and his divorce; he is often too busy to even keep food in the house. Travis continues work on his book while maintaining a correspondence with Joe, the only one of his friends to even occasionally write back.He also meets Casey Kencaide, who runs a riding school on Ken's ranch and is the only one brave enough to ride the Star Runner, a creature who, like Travis, was never meant to be tamed. Soon Travis is working for Casey as a stable boy, and he receives an offer to publish his book. In response he takes a trip into town to celebrate. While in town he gets drunk and is beat up by the bouncer when his true age is discovered. In bad shape, he contacts his uncle to bring him home and reveals his book deal to Ken, which comes as a surprise as he was unaware that Travis was even fully literate.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Man_with_a_Horn_(novel)"title="Young Man with a Horn (novel)">
It is a fictionalized novel on jazz set in a world of speakeasies and big bands during The Jazz Age of the 1920s. It is loosely based on the life of the great cornet player Bix Beiderbecke who died in 1931 at the age of 28. It tells the story of Rick Martin, a tormented genius from childhood until his death at age 30.The racial component of jazz is addressed. Ever since the first jazz record was released in 1917 by the white band The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, race has been an inherent issue in the new musical genre of jazz. In the wake of the success of the ODJB, both white and black musicians and bands emerged. The story also dwells on the white/black abilities to play jazz. Rick, however, establishes a strong relationship with white and black musicians. The book details both the widely accepted public view of the jazz musician of the time as well as a musician's own struggle for perfection. This drive finally destroys Rick.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wheels_of_Chance"title="The Wheels of Chance">
"The Wheels of Chance" was written at the height of the cycling craze (1890–1905), when practical, comfortable bicycles first became widely and cheaply available and before the rise of the automobile (see History of the bicycle). The advent of the bicycle stirred sudden and profound changes in the social life of England. Even the working class could travel substantial distances, quickly and cheaply, and the very idea of travelling for pleasure became a possibility for thousands of people for the first time. This new freedom affected many. It began to weaken the rigid English class structure and it gave an especially powerful boost to the existing movement towardfemale emancipation. Wells explored these social changes in his story.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arrows_of_Hercules"title="The Arrows of Hercules">
The protagonist is the engineer Zopyros of Tarentum, a follower of the Pythagorean philosophical school. Having invented an improved type of catapult, he is drafted into Syracuse's war effort against Carthage by the tyrant Dionysios, creator of the first military ordnance department known to history. The historical Battle of Motya of 399 BC is a major event in the novel. Also portrayed is the incident upon which the legend of the Sword of Damocles is supposedly based.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Rider's_Call"title="First Rider's Call">
Now a Green Rider, one of the king's elite troop of messengers, Karigan returns to Sacor City, giving up her merchant lifestyle. The story opens a year into this service as danger is threatening the kingdom of Sacoridia once again. The dark magic in Blackveil Forest is restless, and has found an outlet through the breach in the D'Yer Wall, which has protected Sacoridia from the forest for over 1000 years. This influx of magic has interfered with a land that has largely learned to live without magic during this time. Reports of strange instances of animals turned to stone and entire villages disappearing are brought to the palace from around the country. In the end the strange magic touches even the main city as suits of iron are brought to life and snow falls within the castle. Even the Green Riders' magic is affected, sending Captain Mapstone into self-imposed solitary confinement. As a result, Mara, another rider, and Karigan are left to lead the riders as best they can. Throughout the book Karigan has ghostly visions of Lil Ambriodhe, First Rider, legendary founder of the Green Rider messenger service.Karigan meets with an Eletian prince and learns that she has wild magic within her that entered her as a result of her battle with Shawdell in the previous book. This wild magic augments her rider ability and allows her to travel through time, even visiting Lil Ambriodhe in her own time. Unfortunately, the magic also allows Mornhavon the Black to possess her. However, Karigan uses this to her favor---while Mornhavon possesses her, she transports him into the future, and, with the help of Lil Ambriodhe, she deposits him there. This buys the defenders of Sacoridia time to prepare for Mornhavon's return.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_Holly_Lane"title="The Mystery of Holly Lane">
The Five Find Outers - Fatty, Larry, Daisy, Pip and Bets - are together again in the school holidays. Bored without a mystery, they decide to practise disguising themselves and shadowing people. Larry dresses up as a window cleaner, and unexpectedly the five children come across a robbery at a house in Holly Lane, the windows of which Larry has cleaned. The house belongs to a blind old man, who has apparently hidden his savings somewhere in the furniture. When the man reports the money stolen, the Find Outers initially believe it to be a simple robbery, but then in the middle of the night, all the old man's furniture is mysteriously spirited away as well.The suspects include Wilfrid, the old man's grandson, and his cousin Marian. When Marian herself disappears, suspicion falls firmly on her and bumbling village policeman Mr Goon is convinced she is the thief - but Fatty thinks differently. Will Fatty solve this mystery?
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_of_Kevin_Malone"title="The Kingdom of Kevin Malone">
Kevin Malone has a troubled childhood with history of abuses by his father. To escape the miseries of his real life, he creates a fantasy world called "Fayre Farre" in which he is "The Promised Champion", the hero of the world. Amy, a fourteen-year-old girl, enters this fantasy world one day while she is roller-skating at New York's Central Park. Amy has been running away from her own real-life problems. She has lost her cousin Shelly, and Amy's father wants the family to relocate to Los Angeles as he wants to pursue a career in Hollywood. The anticipation of losing her best friends by moving away depresses Amy. She accidentally enters the make-believe world of Kevin, her neighbor who used to bully her in the past.In Fayre Farre, The Promised Champion is losing his supremacy, as the evil "White Warrior Anglower" expands his armies to gain control over the kingdom. Through a series of adventures, Kevin wins over the White Warrior Anglower, taking help from Amy and her friends. At the end, Anglower is shown as the reincarnation of Kevin's father and Amy accepts the death of her cousin.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyle,_Lyle,_Crocodile"title="Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile">
The story begins with Lyle and Mrs. Primm going shopping and running into their neighbor, Mr. Grumps. The grouchy Mr. Grumps finds Lyle a nuisance because Lyle scares his cat, Loretta, and he has him thrown in the zoo. When Lyle is freed by his old performing partner Mr. Valenti, they go back to the house on 88th Street, where they find Mr. Grumps' house on fire. Lyle rescues Mr. Grumps and Loretta, is declared a hero, and thus is allowed to stay with the Primms, and is warmly accepted by Mr. Grumps and Loretta.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_the_Soil"title="Growth of the Soil">
## Book One.The novel begins by following the story of Isak, a Norwegian man, who finally settled upon a patch of land which he deemed fit for farming. He began creating earthen sheds in which he housed several goats obtained from the village yonder. Isak asked passing by Lapps, nomadic indigenous people, to tell women that he is in need of help on his farm. Eventually, a “big, brown-eyed girl, full-built and coarse” with a harelip named Inger, arrived at the house and settled in. Inger had her first child which was a son named Eleseus. She then had another son named Sivert.The Lensmand Geissler came by their farm one day informing them that they were on States land and assisting them in purchasing it. They named the farm Sellanraa. Soon after, Geissler was discharged from his position as Lensmand after a sharp reprimand from his superior and was subsequently replaced with Lensmand Heyerdahl. One day while Isak had left the farm to sell a bull in the village, Inger gave birth to a child and had killed it upon seeing that it had a harelip and would undergo the inevitable suffering in life she herself had experienced. One day, Oline, Inger's relative, visited the farm and figured out that Inger had killed a child. The news of the infanticide now spreading. One October day, the Lensmand and a man showed up at their doorstep to investigate and find evidence pertaining to the crime. Oline had agreed to serve at the farm while Inger was serving her eight-year sentence in prison.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramona_Forever"title="Ramona Forever">
The book takes place some months after the events of "Ramona Quimby, Age 8". Ramona is curious to meet her friend Howie's uncle, Uncle Hobart, who has just returned from Saudi Arabia. She meets him one day after school at the Kemps' house, but when he teases her, she quickly decides she dislikes him. Hobart gives Howie a unicycle, and Howie's younger sister Willa Jean an accordion. Willa Jean breaks the accordion before Ramona has the chance to stop her, but Mrs. Kemp, their grandmother, punishes Ramona anyway. Hurt and angry, Ramona tells her parents that she no longer wants to go to the Kemps' house after school, and that Mrs. Kemp singles her out. When Beezus agrees that Mrs. Kemp dislikes them both, the sisters convince their parents to let them stay home after school for one week to see how it goes.At first, all goes well, but when Beezus won't let Ramona go out and ride Howie's bike, Ramona gets mad and calls her "Pizzaface". Even though Ramona meant it as a play on "Pieface", Beezus thinks this is about her acne, and refuses to help Ramona after she scrapes her knee. The next day, they find their cat, Picky-Picky, dead in the basement. They bury Picky-Picky, hold a funeral for him, and forgive each other for the fight. When their parents return home, they decide the sisters are responsible enough to take care of themselves; they then announce that Mrs. Quimby is pregnant, leaving Beezus thrilled and Ramona with mixed feelings.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Mage"title="Forest Mage">
The Gernian Cavalla Academy that has been established according to the King's wishes has suffered from the rivalry between the Old Lords and the King's New Lords. These are newly raised soldiers who won distinction in the push east and the conflicts with the plains people. However a new foe appears in the guise of the "Specks".The book is written in first person, in the perspective of the main character, Nevare Burvelle.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_(novel)"title="Pentagon (novel)">
The Soviet Union invades and occupies a sparsely-populated Pacific atoll and proceeds to kill the inhabitants and gradually construct a missile and submarine base. Diplomatic overtures by the United States accomplish nothing, and a military response to this Soviet threat seems necessary. Such plans, however, are frustrated by infighting within the Pentagon, Congress, and elsewhere in the government. When the novel ends, the U.S. has failed to respond and the Soviets have consolidated their hold on the atoll.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ragged_Edge_of_Science"title="The Ragged Edge of Science">
The essays in the book fall into three general categories, dealing with ancient civilizations and certain unscientific theories regarding them, occult-related subjects, and pseudoscience in general. Anecdotes from history and de Camp's travels to some of the locales he writes about pepper the narrative.The first eight chapters fall into the first category. Discussions of Bronze Age Troy and the ancient Sudanese civilization of Kush counter romantic speculations with a resume of what is known of them from historical sources and archaeological investigations. In contrast, the section on King Arthur, of whom little factual information has been established, puts to rest unverified notions regarding him by tracing the development and elaboration of his legend down through the ages. The chapter on the Maya debunks diffusionist theories seeking the origin of their culture in Old World civilizations rather than from indigenous factors. Later sections about Teotihuacan and the Toltecs serve more as general introductions to these cultures. There is also a brief discussion of the "Tour Magne", a Roman ruin in Nîmes, France, and a chapter on myths that discounts them as reliable reportage of prehistoric events.Chapters in the second category include discussions of memories of previous lives supposedly recovered via hypnosis, the Kabbalah, lives of famous charlatans claiming to have been magicians, such as Cagliostro and Aleister Crowley, the hoax perpetrated by Léo Taxil and others that purported to expose Freemasonry as devil worship, theosophist C. W. Leadbeater, the development of occultist cultism around Mount Shasta in Northern California (demonstrated to have a literary basis), and the origins of the mystic trance, with rational explanations for the visions experienced. A satirical chapter of advice on how to set one's self up as a prophet rounds out the section.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_(novel)"title="Jessica (novel)">
Jessica is a tomboy, raised to be her father's son to help out on the farm. Her older sister Meg is very much her mother's daughter, and it is Meg's and their mother's mission for Meg to seduce Jack Thomas, the town's wealthiest eligible bachelor. Jessica and her dad work each year shearing at Riverview station for the Thomases - the richest family in the district. In the shearing shed, Jessica becomes close friends with Jack Thomas and William D'arcy Simon. Jessica is teased by the other boys, predominantly for simply being female. Eventually she is attacked, with tar poured over her head and hair. Jack and William defend her, but William is kicked by a horse, causing brain damage and earning him the name Billy Simple. Subsequently, Jessica and Jack's relationship blossoms and they become Billy's sole friends.Jack gets Billy a job working as a gardener for his rich family, but one day Billy kills Jack's mother and two sisters, because of their constant taunting of him. Jessica takes him on the long journey to the nearest town with a courthouse, endangering herself. Jessica holds off the angry mob of farmers, to give Billy a fair trial. When they finally reach the courthouse, the farmers (including Jack) catch them. However, although Billy has murdered his mother and sisters, Jack holds off the mob and sweeps exhausted Jessica off her feet and carries her into the courthouse. Billy is later sentenced to death, but not without a fight from his lawyer, Richard Runche.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lautlos_wie_sein_Schatten"title="Lautlos wie sein Schatten">
When James Baldon comes home from a party late at night, he is not able to open the front door of his apartment. The reason: a dead man is blocking his entrance. David Brewer, head of the Homicide Squad, starts the investigation. When it is discovered that the body was moved after being shot, everybody in the building turns out to have an alibi. However, Brewer is convinced that one of the alibis must be false.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finding_Moon"title="Finding Moon">
During the weeks immediately preceding to the 1975 Fall of Saigon that ended the Vietnam War, Malcolm "Moon" Thomas Mathias, manages the "Press-Register", a small Colorado newspaper. He had always believed that his brother Ricky was the favorite child of their mother Victoria Mathias Morick. Ricky had been running a helicopter business in the Indochina peninsula, and married to a Vietnamese woman named Eleth Vinh. Both were killed by enemy fire, leaving behind young daughter Lila Vinh Mathias. The first that the family learns of the existence of Lila is in a letter to Victoria from Ricky's attorney Roberto Bolivar Castenada in Manila, the Philippines. Victoria immediately books a flight to Manila to retrieve her grandchild, only to be stopped by a heart attack at Los Angeles International Airport. After receiving an emergency call from Philippine Airlines, Moon learns his mother is facing immediate heart surgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Moon was unaware that he had a niece, much less that his mother was en route to the Philippines. He learns the details going through her belongings while awaiting visitation at the hospital. After talking to her, Moon takes his mother's place to find Lila.Upon Moon's arrival in Manila, he is approached by two of Ricky's clients. The elderly Lum Lee asks Moon to help him find a family urn containing ancestral bones. Mrs. Osa van Winjgaarden wants to accompany Moon on his quest, so that she may find her brother, a Lutheran missionary known as Brother Damon. With each new contact, Moon gradually learns more about his brother's business and associates. The quest takes him on a search through his own soul, as he engages in long talks with Father Julian in the confessional of the Manila Cathedral. Romance, political intrigue, the dangers of traveling through war zones, and hiding in the basement of a deserted building, are part of the action. Among the new, sometimes uneasy, alliances that he makes, is Nguyen Nung, a wounded ARVN deserter armed with a grenade launcher, and "SAT CONG" ("kill Viet Cong") tattooed on his chest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner_of_Haven"title="Prisoner of Haven">
The book follows the adventures of sisters-in-law Dezra and Usha Majere as they are trapped in the Krynn city of Haven by a Dark Knight of Neraka and his army. The story takes place during the War of Souls.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strange_Adventures_of_Rangergirl"title="The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl">
Marzi McCarty is an art school dropout working at Santa Cruz coffeeshop Genius Loci. She draws a comic book called "The Strange Adventures of" "Rangergirl", featuring the eponymous heroine fighting the evil Outlaw in a Fantasy Western setting. College student Jonathan rents a room in Genius Loci in order to study the murals inside. They are the last works of Garamond Ray, an artist who disappeared during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. He is interested in a desert-themed mural in the storage room, which Marzi has sealed off as structurally unsound.As Marzi, Jonathan, and Marzi's best friend Lindsey get to know one another, strange incidents begin to occur at Genius Loci. People in the shop hear voices. Marzi has recurring flashbacks of a door in a desert. Art student Beej rambles about a god trapped in the shop. A mudslide interrupts a romantic outdoor interlude between graduate students Denis and Jane; Denis escapes but leaves Jane to die. Jane's body is transformed into mud, and she begins talking about an earth goddess living inside the shop. Marzi recovers a repressed memory: several years before, she had opened the door inside the storage room, encountering the dimension within and the god trapped inside it. This contact allowed the god to influence the real world, but also marked Marzi as the door's guardian, giving her subconscious influence on the space inside. The dimension has taken on the Weird West aesthetic of her comic book, and the nameless god has taken on the guise of the Outlaw, causing it to look and act like an outlaw stock character in a Western, complete with cowboy hat. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Blind_Mice_and_Other_Stories"title="Three Blind Mice and Other Stories">
## Three Blind Mice.During a blinding snowstorm, a homicidal maniac traps a small group of people in an isolated boarding house. Giles and Molly Davis have just inherited Monkswell Manor from Molly’s Aunt Katherine, and they have decided to open it as a guest house. During a heavy blizzard, an intriguing cast of characters are trapped together, yet not everything is what it appears. After one of the guests is found dead, the question is, who is the killer? Well, it can only be someone on the inside. It is a tale if intrigue and murder coming from the past. Is everyone who they say they are? Who will live through the night? Will the murderer who kills to the tune of Three Blind Mice kill them all?Characters:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Albino's_Dancer"title="The Albino's Dancer">
An encounter with the mysterious Catherine Howkins warns Honoré Lechasseur that Emily Blandish is about to die. However, even with this knowledge, can he prevent her death? At the same time, the Albino, a gangster operating in post-rationing London, has also taken an interest in Emily.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cabinet_of_Light"title="The Cabinet of Light">
Honoré Lechasseur, a "fixer" with time-sensitive abilities, is hired by Emily Blandish to find someone known only as the Doctor. He soon discovers that the Doctor is a legendary figure who has drifted in and out of Earth's history. As he follows the trail of the Doctor, questions arise: what is the Doctor's connection with 1949 London and with the mysterious "cabinet of light" that another group is seeking?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Indian_Novel"title="The Great Indian Novel">
The organisation of the sections and chapters of the novel mirrors the organisation of the "Mahabharata" and the themes and events addressed in each allude to themes and events of the mirrored sections of the epic. The novel has 18 "books," just as the "Mahabharata" has 18 books and the Battle of Kurukshetra lasted for 18 days.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborator_(novel)"title="Collaborator (novel)">
The novel begins in December 1940 with the return of Sergeant Nick Penny to his home in an unnamed West Country port town. A former prisoner of war, he had been captured in the aftermath of the successful German invasion of Britain. A former schoolteacher, his ability to speak German had secured his release to work as a translator for the military governor of region, "Generalleutnant" Kurt von Glass. Glass soon puts Penny to work in organising the "Anglo-German Friendship League", which is designed to foster greater unity. Penny is uncomfortable with his current position, and is viewed with suspicion by much of the community. Soon after his return, he visits the Three Horseshoes, a local pub operated by the family of his friend, Roy Locke. There he reconnects with Locke, who immediately begins to recruit him for the emerging resistance movement. Penny begs off, requesting time while he sorts matters out.Penny soon finds himself drawn into the resistance, motivated in part by the gradually increasing harshness of German rule. Penny's mother and sister, with whom he lives, suffer physically and psychologically from the effects of German rule, while Penny's nephew, David, desires to strike back. Though Glass supports Penny's suggestions for fostering Anglo-German amity, the region's security chief, "Standartenführer" Stolz, is using every pretext for brutalising the local population. Penny and Locke nearly miss curfew, but are saved at the last minute by the timely arrival of Matty Cordington, their old friend, who was released from internment and who brought Sara Burskin, a Polish refugee, with him. Roy quickly enlists them into a plan to smuggle the Regent, his wife, and the crown jewels out of the country, but they are thwarted by the "Abwehr". Though Penny and Cordington manage to evade capture, Locke is arrested but kills himself before revealing any information.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancer_from_the_Dance"title="Dancer from the Dance">
The novel revolves around two main characters: Anthony Malone, a young man from the Midwest who leaves behind his straight life as a lawyer to immerse himself in the gay life of 1970s New York, and Andrew Sutherland, variously described as a speed addict, a socialite, and a drag queen. Their social life includes long nights of drinking, dancing, and drug use in New York's gay bars. Though they enjoy many physical pleasures, their lives lack any spiritual depth. The "dance" of the novel's title becomes a metaphor for their lives. Malone is described as preternaturally beautiful; much of the plot concerns Sutherland's efforts to leverage Malone's beauty by "marrying" him to a young millionaire.The book switches perspective often. Sometimes characters are tracked closely using more traditional omniscient narrative techniques. On other occasions (especially later in the book), the lives of Malone and Sutherland are seen from the perspective of bystanders in the New York gay scene — the book itself is literally written by the other dancers at the dance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winning_Side"title="The Winning Side">
Emily Blandish has been murdered by an unknown assailant, but when Honoré Lechasseur turns up to see the body, he is surprised to be met by... Emily Blandish. They soon find themselves embroiled in a revolutionary plot stretching into their own futures, with the freedom of the entire world at stake.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_Shock_(novella)"title="Shell Shock (novella)">
The Sixth Doctor and Peri find themselves stranded on an alien world that is mostly covered by water. The Doctor manages to make it to shore, where he has to work out a way to save Peri, the TARDIS and himself. Peri, however, is swallowed by an alien life-form intent on making her its god.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Weather_(Sterling_novel)"title="Heavy Weather (Sterling novel)">
Set in the year 2031, "Heavy Weather" depicts a world where mankind has unbalanced the world's ecosystem with their continuing production of greenhouse gases and unchecked expansion. As a result, the weather has become unpredictable and dangerous. Powerful storms routinely leave trails of devastation in their wake. Alex Unger, a young man suffering from numerous medical problems, is liberated from an illegal Mexican clinic by his sister Janey and brought back to America to her group of friends and colleagues, the Storm Troupe. The Troupe are dedicated and knowledgeable storm chasers who use high technology to document and research the weather, led by Janey's lover, the charismatic and brilliant scientist Jerry Mulcahey. They are preparing to meet an F-6, a storm of truly monstrous proportions.The novel deals with scenarios directly extrapolated from emergent issues relevant to the time frame of its creation, such as antibiotic resistant disease, climate change, and social collapse due to monetary disintegration among others.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Among_Sequels"title="First Among Sequels">
In order to save the future, undercover SpecOps investigator Thursday Next attempts to convince her son Friday to join the ChronoGuard. To complicate matters, she'll have to deal with renegade apprentices, ruthless corporations, and a sting operation from the Cheese Enforcement Agency.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallows_Hill_(novel)"title="Gallows Hill (novel)">
Sarah Zoltanne is an extraordinary girl. Her widowed mother, Rosemary, decides to move to Pinecrest because of Ted Thompson. When Sarah starts school as the new pupil, she makes no friends. Role-playing takes on a terrifying cast when 17-year-old Sarah, who is posing as a fortune-teller for a school fair, begins to see actual visions that can predict the future. Frightened, the other students brand her a witch, setting off a chain of events that mirror the centuries-old Salem witch trials in more ways than one.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keep_(Wilson_novel)"title="The Keep (Wilson novel)">
German soldiers and SS Einsatzkommandos are being slowly killed off in a mysterious castle (the "keep" of the title) high in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania in April 1941. Theodore Cuza, a Jewish history professor living in Bucharest, and his daughter Magda are brought to the keep by SS Sturmbannfuhrer Eric Kaempffer in a desperate attempt to determine what is murdering his men. Cuza is later tasked with defeating the unknown evil that is wreaking havoc. The professor translates a mysterious message written in blood on a wall that uses a forgotten dialect of Old Romanian or Old Slavonic.The entity responsible for the deaths calls itself "Molasar," and it finds Professor Cuza useful. Molasar procures his services through deception and false promises, and even puts the scleroderma from which he suffers into remission so he could work for him. Molasar is later revealed to be Rasalom, an ancient sorcerer from the "First Age" of humans.An immortal man calling himself Glenn, whose real name is Glaeken, is a reluctant champion of the ancient Forces of Light. He becomes aware of Rasalom's activity from across the world and travels to the keep. He built the keep as a prison for Rasalom, out of the reluctance to kill him outright. The two beings are mystically linked in a way that binds their destinies together, even though Rasalom's growing mystical powers are vastly greater than Glenn's own. To keep him from ever forgetting his mission, the Forces of Light had taken away his reflection.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reborn_(novel)"title="Reborn (novel)">
Almost immediately after being slain by Glaeken (Trismaegistus) in a castle keep in Romania in the Spring of 1941, Rasalom has opportunistically entered the body of a clone that grows within a woman hired by the scientist in charge of a project seeking to create a genetically enhanced super-soldier for the U.S. Army.The story actually begins in 1968 when Jim Stevens, an apparently normal man, finds that he is heir to the fortune of a recently deceased brilliant scientist by the name of Doctor Hanley. This amazing windfall promises not only financial independence but the solution to the mystery of his life. Lovingly raised by adoptive parents, Stevens yearns to discover who his parents were. Named in Hanley's will, Jim is sure that the scientist is his father. Moving into Hanley's mansion, Stevens finds the scientist's confidential journals. They reveal that he is, in fact, a clone of the late Doctor Hanley.When word of Jim's origins gets out, Stevens finds himself the target of "The Chosen", a group of religious fanatics convinced of the imminent arrival of The Antichrist. The formerly immortal man called Glaeken is now an aging mortal named Veillure. He contacts the group and confirms that some kind of unimaginably horrific being is about to enter the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burglar_Bill"title="Burglar Bill">
Burglar Bill is a thief and all of his possessions are stolen items, including the bed he goes to sleep in. On a typical night of thievery, Burglar Bill comes across a box with holes in, and takes it. Upon arriving home, he discovers that within the box is a baby. The baby and Burglar Bill end up spending a day together, but when Bill is putting the baby to bed, he hears an intruder downstairs. He confronts the burglar, who he discovers is Burglar Betty, and they talk to one another to find they have much in common. Bill mentions his new infant friend that he found the night before. He introduces Betty to the baby, only for them both to discover that the baby belongs to Betty. They both decide to give thievery up and return everything they stole to live happily together as a family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightworld_(novel)"title="Nightworld (novel)">
Rasalom returns in reincarnated form to transform the Earth into unrelenting hell. Rasalom is shortening the daylight hours and letting loose a plague of ever-more-fearsome flesh-eating monsters that prey on the world's populace during the ever-lengthening nights. Whole communities turn on one another; riots break out over food; gangs wage war on the public; and Rasalom grows ever stronger as he feeds on the ever-increasing chaos, violence and terror.The only one who can possibly stop the horror is Glaeken, an enfeebled old warrior who has battled the Adversary across the millennia. Formerly immortal, he became a mortal man in the 1940s (during the events of "The Keep") and has grown elderly. Too weak to fight alone, Glaeken gathers together a select band of people to assist him, among them a young boy with mysterious powers, a 150-year-old Indian woman with magical necklaces, a semi-catatonic scientist with a mystical connection to Rasalom, and an all-too-human vigilante named Repairman Jack.So supremely confident is Rasalom of his eventual victory that he spares Glaeken for an especially gruesome fate and allows him to pursue his desperate plan to save the Earth so that Glaeken's ultimate failure will become both Rasalom's greatest victory as well as Glaeken's - and humankind's - most tragic final defeat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keep_(comics)"title="The Keep (comics)">
The Keep had stood empty in the Transylvanian Alps for some 500 years. No one knew who built it, or why. But on the eve of World War II, German soldiers moved in and awoke something—something hungry... something more merciless than the SS einsatzkommandos accompanying them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peculiar_Lives"title="Peculiar Lives">
Honoré Lechasseur and Emily Blandish become embroiled in the endgame of a plot which began a generation ago, with the birth of the superhuman children known as "the Peculiar". While Emily encounters their chronicler, the elderly science-fiction novelist Erik Clevedon, Honoré is pitched against his will into an unimaginably distant future.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Ball_and_Other_Stories"title="The Golden Ball and Other Stories">
## The Listerdale Mystery.Mrs St. Vincent is a genteel lady living in reduced circumstances with her son and daughter, Rupert and Barbara. After her husband's financial speculations went wrong, he died, and they were forced to vacate the house, which had been in their family for generations. They now live in rooms in a boarding house (which has seen better times) and, due to these surroundings, are unable to entertain people of similar class and upbringing. Rupert has just started a job in the city, with excellent prospects but, at this point in time, only a small income. Barbara enjoyed a trip to Egypt the previous winter with – and paid for by – her richer cousin. On this trip she met a young man called Jim Masterson, who is interested in courting her, but who would be put off if he saw their reduced circumstances. Looking through the Morning Post, Mrs St. Vincent sees an advertisement for a house to let in Westminster, furnished, and with a nominal rent. Although she thinks she has little chance of being able to afford the house, she goes to see the house agents and then the house itself, and is instantly taken with it and pleasantly surprised at its very low rent. The agents offer her the house for a six-month rental. Barbara is delighted, but Rupert is suspicious – the house belonged to Lord Listerdale, who disappeared eighteen months previously and supposedly turned up in East Africa, supplying his cousin, Colonel Carfax, with power of attorney. They take the house and are looked after in style by Quentin, the butler, whose wages are paid for by Lord Listerdale's estate, as are the wages of the two other servants. Delicious food regularly turns up on the table. It is sent up regularly from his Lordship's country seat of King's Cheviot – an old custom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wieland_(novel)"title="Wieland (novel)">
Set sometime between the French and Indian War and the American Revolutionary War (1754–83), "Wieland" details the horrible events that befall Clara Wieland and her brother Theodore's family. Clara and Theodore's father was a German immigrant who founded his own religion; he came to America just before the American Revolution with the goal of evangelizing the indigenous people. When he fails at this task, he believes he has also failed his deity. One night, as he worships in his bare, secluded temple, he seems to spontaneously combust, after which his health rapidly deteriorates and he dies. His children inherit his property, which is divided equally between them. Theodore marries their childhood friend, Catharine Pleyel, and they have four children.Clara and Theodore live in houses on adjoining property, leading lives of leisure in companionship with Catharine and her brother, Henry Pleyel. The story centers around several seemingly supernatural experiences that occur to members of the family. The first incident involves Theodore hearing a disembodied voice that warns him of potential danger. While the others are initially skeptical of his story, Henry and Clara have similar experiences soon afterward, which brings credibility to each of their stories. When the mysterious Carwin appears on the scene, he suggests that the voices may be caused by human mimicry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upland_Outlaws"title="Upland Outlaws">
The sorcerer Zinixo has taken control of Hub, but life goes on as normal. As Zinixo and his Covin track down Rap and friends, Rap must get the word out to the other sorcerers about the plans to join together and destroy Zinixo. Having escaped across the Cenmere Sea, the group takes to ship and sets sail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_Day_in_Paradise_(novel)"title="Another Day in Paradise (novel)">
At age 13, Bobbie leaves the violent, abusive home where he was raised, and this book details his following year. He has an older girlfriend, carries a gun, takes drugs, and is on an ever-tightening spiral to hell, his crimes escalating until they include murder. The plot, which highlights Bobbie's increasing dependence on the highs of violence, emphasizes a frightening reality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Gods_(novella)"title="Fallen Gods (novella)">
In the ancient Minoan empire a young girl develops timestream based abilities. Fortunately she has an expert to teach and train her, the time-traveling Doctor. She's going to need all the help she can get, as strange and malicious powers target her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderland_(novella)"title="Wonderland (novella)">
San Francisco. The late 60s. An innocent young woman named Summer is caught up in danger as a popular new drug seems to be far more than just a way to have a good time. Fortunately she gains three allies, British tourists seemingly, Ben, Polly and The Doctor. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rip_Tide_(novella)"title="Rip Tide (novella)">
Strangers and dangers arise at a sleepy Cornish seaside down. The Doctor struggles to find out what is going on as threats to the townsfolk get worse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Ship_(novella)"title="Ghost Ship (novella)">
An ocean cruise just might be the thing to draw the Doctor out of his dark mood. Except dangerous forces are attracted to him onboard. Which is one thing, but they threaten the lives of the passengers as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightdreamers"title="Nightdreamers">
A royal wedding on an otherwise pleasant moon goes wild. Romantic entanglements give way to fare more dangerous difficulties. Including gravity itself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citadel_of_Dreams"title="Citadel of Dreams">
Ace tries to help a tormented homeless child in a city where time itself is falling apart. Far away, if that means anything anymore, the Doctor is undergoing dangerous ethical dilemmas.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_Visible_(memoir)"title="Darkness Visible (memoir)">
In October 1985, American author William Styron travels to Paris to receive the "Prix mondial Cino Del Duca," a prestigious literary award. During the trip, Styron's mental state begins to degenerate rapidly as the depressive symptoms that he has been experiencing for several months worsened. He tentatively concludes that his depression was brought about by his sudden withdrawal from years of alcoholism and exacerbated by his overdependence on Halcion, a prescription drug that he took to treat insomnia. Styron also briefly mentions his own father's battle with depression and his mother's premature death from breast cancer, both of which he believes could have also contributed to his deteriorated state of mind.As his depression becomes more severe, Styron seeks multiple treatment methods, including psychotherapy, consulting with a psychiatrist, and countless antidepressants, but to no avail. Initially, Styron is able to function better in the morning than in the afternoon and evening, but he soon struggles to even get out of bed. He eventually loses the ability to perform basic tasks such as driving and often contemplates suicide.One night, after a particularly intense bout of suicide ideation that culminates in him actively preparing to take his own life, Styron hears a passage from Brahms' "Alto Rhapsody," to which he has a fiercely emotional response. He is suddenly repulsed at the idea of suicide and is compelled to eliminate his depression once and for all. The following day, Styron checks himself into a hospital, which he had previously avoided on the advice of his psychiatrist, who harbors a strong opposition to institutional treatment. It is ultimately at the hospital that Styron finally emerges from his depression and eventually makes a full recovery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silver_Wolf"title="The Silver Wolf">
"I was born of darkness. My father's eyes closed before mine opened. I am not of this world or the other, and I have the right to be what I am ".Regeane is a half-Saxon and half-Frankish woman whose father, Wolfstan, died because of her mother, Gisela. Wolfstan was a shape shifter, a man who could change from human to a very large wolf while her mother, Gisela, was frightened at the abnormality that her husband displayed. Due to Gundabald's urgings and pressure, Gisela grew to believe that Wolfstan was an offspring of the Devil Himself and eventually lured him to his death. When Gisela birthed Regeane, she was relieved to find no abnormalities. Leastwise, not yet.When Regeane experiences her first sign of adulthood, she changes into this beautiful silver wolf. Gisela panics and forces poor Regeane to drink filthy concoctions, to pray for hours, to go to church, to promise never again to change as long as she lived. Etc. In return for that promise, Gundabald would take care of Regeane for a long time.But when Gisela dies, the whole family falls into poverty and corruption, ending up with tattered cloths, temporary lodging in Rome and Regeane chained by the neck in the basement. Gundabald treats her worse and worse while Hugo, his son, is a more drunken wastrel than ever. Together, the expert wastrel (Gundabald) and the apprentice wastrel (Hugo) use up the money while Regeane is locked up in the house. But Regeane fights back and she finally escapes from the imprisonment when Gundabald's mood turns when he finds her a wealthy mountain lord by the name of Maeniel to marry her. Regeane escapes to Lucilla's villa, where Lucilla, Hadrian (the Pope), Antonius and many others befriend her and her smaller friend Elfgifa.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Butch_Blues"title="Stone Butch Blues">
The narrative of "Stone Butch Blues" follows the life of Jess Goldberg, who grows up in a working-class area of upstate New York in the 1940s. Her parents, frustrated with Jess's gender nonconformity, eventually institutionalize Jess in a psychiatric ward for three weeks. When she reaches puberty and feels the weight of gendered difference, Jess learns of a gay bar from a coworker. There, she meets drag queens, butches, and femmes. Butch Al and Jacqueline take Jess in and teach her about lesbian roles and culture. After a police raid, the bar closes and Jess loses touch with Butch Al and Jacqueline. At school, football players harass Jess, tackling and gang-raping her. Traumatized, she drops out of school the next day, packing her bags and running away from home to a lesbian bar, where a butch, Toni, offers to let Jess sleep on her couch.Jess finds her place in the lesbian community of Buffalo while the cops continue to raid gay bars. Jess is arrested, beaten, and raped by them. In a traumatized state, Jess and Toni fight, and Jess is left houseless again. She is taken in by Angie, a femme sex worker. The two have an intimate conversation and then sex. When Angie attempts to touch her, Jess cringes. Angie identifies Jess as a stone butch, assuring Jess that there is nothing wrong with being stone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Day"title="Against the Day">
Nearly all reviewers of the book mention the byzantine nature of the plot. Louis Menand in "The New Yorker" gives a simple description:As to the multitude of plot dead-ends, pauses and confusing episodes that return to continue much later in the narrative, Menand writes:
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zandru's_Forge"title="Zandru's Forge">
## Prologue.Rumail Deslucido, a bitter, corrupt and defeated laranzu, tells his twisted story to his only son, Eduin MacEarn (see "The Fall of Neskaya"). He has sent each of his sons to kill the Hasturs, and each has died in the attempt. Now it is Eduin's turn. He charges Eduin with the duty to enter Arilinn Tower and befriend all, but to secretly kill any Hasturs he can.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monastery"title="The Monastery">
The action is centred on the Monastery of Kennaquhair, probably based on Melrose Abbey in south east Scotland, on the River Tweed. At this time, circa 1550, the Scottish Reformation is just beginning, and the monastery is in peril.A love story is interwoven as the Glendinning boys fall in love with Mary Avenel. Edward ends up becoming a monk, and Halbert finally marries Mary, after service with the Earl of Murray.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_He?"title="Who He?">
A TV game show writer, waking up after an alcoholic blackout, discovers that someone is out to destroy his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Connection"title="The Computer Connection">
In the future, a band of immortals (some who are famous historical characters, some who have tried their best to avoid becoming so), including Herb Wells, Ned Curzon (nicknamed Grand Guignol), Hillel, and Sam Pepys have only one requirement for membership: don't die. Through their extensive social network, they come across a brilliant Cherokee physicist named Sequoya Guess, who himself has only very recently learned of his peculiarity and the catches and loopholes that come along with it. This creates a swift change in Guess's day-to-day life that is as much a shock to his friends as to himself. At the same time, the world's scientists are collaborating to bring together a supercomputer named Extro that will monitor and control all mechanical activity on Earth. The immortals create a plan to subtly harness Extro to aid them in their quest for knowledge and use some of the experience they have gained to assist it in its task. Working outside of expected behavior, Extro instead seizes control of Dr. Guess, leaving the only people who know what is going on—the Immortals and Guess's nearest friends—to grapple with the heart and mind of a malevolent machine in the body of an Immortal, a powerful and ingenious man who cannot be killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Living_and_the_Dead_(White_novel)"title="The Living and the Dead (White novel)">
"The Living and the Dead" opens in London's Victoria Station. Elyot Standish bids farewell to his younger sister Eden in a manner that is not particularly emotional or final. Elyot returns to an empty house, somberly observing the memories that remain amongst its silent possessions.Chapter 2 takes the reader several decades earlier, where a young Kitty Goose begins to find her way through England's upper classes. Catherine marries Willy Standish and bears him two children, but separates some years afterwards due to Willy's infidelity. Catherine's children, Elyot and Eden, are raised by her maid Julia and, during World War I, by surrogate guardians.Following the war, Catherine, living on the dwindling remnants of pre-war affluence, struggles to relate to her children. Elyot, a Cambridge graduate and professional writer, isolates himself in intellectual pursuits. Eden, a bookshop attendant, is influenced by left-wing politics.As the Spanish Civil War rises in the conscience of British society, the Standishes are forced to face their inner dissatisfactions. This is brought into focus by the failures of their sexual relationships. Catherine, who finds herself irrelevant in a much-changed world, pursues a romance with the younger Wally Collins, an American musician. The relationship is severed when Wally loses interest in Catherine, who spills her emotions whilst drunk at a fashionable party. Elyot, whether with family or with women, never allows himself a relationship of any depth. He distances himself from both Muriel Raphael, an artistic socialite, and Connie Tiarks, an unattractive but devoted childhood friend. The two are complete opposites, yet neither satisfies the purposeless Elyot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Arrow's_Flight"title="An Arrow's Flight">
Pyrrhus lives in the city with his housemate Leucon. He works as a waiter, then as a hustler. One day he hears his father Achilles has left him some inheritance in Troy, and he decides to claim it. On the ship, he sleeps with Corythus, a sailor. He soon learns he needs to seduce Philoctetes and get his bow for a prophecy to come true. He grows attached to the old man, though the latter also has an affair with Paris. Finally, Philoctetes breaks the bow. Pyrrhus meets Leucon again in a hospital where Pyrrhus is waiting to see his lover Philoctetes, who is very sick; the latter realizes he no longer has feelings for Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus understands that he has grown and accepted his sexuality and is able to live openly, something Leucon cannot do. (The novel hints that he probably never will.)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Watsons_Go_to_Birmingham_–_1963"title="The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963">
The novel is a first-person account narrated by Kenneth Watson, who lives in Flint, Michigan with his parents, Daniel and Wilona Watson; his older brother, Byron; and younger sister, Joetta. Kenny is a bright and shy fourth grader at Clark Elementary School who is bullied for his intelligence and his lazy eye. He struggles to make friends until Rufus Fry moves to town from Arkansas. Rufus is also bullied by the other students for his "country" clothes and accent, which initially makes Kenny reluctant to befriend him, but they are soon inseparable. The boys are both bullied and protected by Kenny's 13-year-old brother Byron and Byron's friend Buphead. Byron has been retained twice because he often skips school and is, therefore, still in sixth grade. He invents a series of "fantastic adventures" that constantly get him into trouble, such as playing with matches in the house and setting things on fire, abusing his parents' credit at the grocery store to buy himself treats, and getting a conk hairstyle against his parents' orders.Daniel and Wilona eventually become so frustrated with Byron's behavior issues that they decide to deliver him to Birmingham, Alabama to live with Wilona's mother, Grandma Gloria Sands, for at least the summer and possibly an entire year. As soon as the school year concludes, the Watsons ready their car ("the Brown Bomber") and embark on a road trip from Flint to Birmingham to deliver Byron and visit grandma. Kenny, who had been looking forward to the "battle royal" between his grandmother and Byron, is disappointed when just a few sharp words from Grandma Sands have Byron speaking respectfully and generally behaving himself, and he soon resolves to seek out his own "adventures."
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fury_(Rushdie_novel)"title="Fury (Rushdie novel)">
Malik Solanka, a Cambridge-educated millionaire from Bombay, is looking for an escape from himself. At first he escapes from his academic life by immersing himself into a world of miniatures (after becoming enamored with the miniature houses on display at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam), eventually creating a puppet called "Little Brain" and leaving the academy for television.However, dissatisfaction with the rising popularity of "Little Brain" serves to ignite deeper demons within Solanka's life, resulting in the narrowly avoided murder of his wife and child. To further escape, Solanka travels to New York, hopeful he can lose himself and his demons in America, only to find that he is forced to confront himself.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renegade's_Magic"title="Renegade's Magic">
The story begins with Nevare Burvelle scheduled for execution. However, Burvelle has been framed, and manages to escape with the help of his former lover, Lisana. The Gernia people (Nevare's ethnic peoples) plan to cut down a forest full of Elder Trees, which house the spirits of the ancestors of the Speck people. Soldier's Boy, a Speck spirit, inhabits Nevare's body and takes full control. Much of the novel is told from Nevare's perspective trapped behind this larger personality. Nevare embarks on his attempt to undermine the effort to build the road, often horrified by what his alter ego is doing with his body, even though he is powerless to stop it. The Specks and Gernia come to a peaceful solution at novel's end, with Nevare ultimately accepting his abilities and personality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wrecker_(Stevenson_novel)"title="The Wrecker (Stevenson novel)">
The story is a "sprawling, episodic adventure story, a comedy of brash manners and something of a detective mystery", according to Roderick Watson. It revolves around the abandoned wreck of the "Flying Scud" at Midway Atoll. Clues in a stamp collection are used to track down the missing crew and solve the mystery. It is only in the last chapter that different story elements become linked. Stevenson described it as a "South Sea yarn" concerning "a very strange and defective plan that was accepted with open eyes for what seemed countervailing opportunities offered". The book sold well but reviews were mixed, with a "New York Times" reviewer concluding that:The loosely connected stories reflect how Stevenson and Osbourne wrote the book. Each contributed different sections, but agreed to develop characters and descriptions of places they both knew well. The following are examples:
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bears'_Famous_Invasion_of_Sicily"title="The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily">
The book tells the story of a group of bears living in the mountains of Sicily under the command of King Leonzio. During a particularly harsh winter the bears find themselves without food, and then decide to invade the Grand Duchy of Sicily to survive; Leonzio also hopes to find his son Tonio, kidnapped by hunters a few years earlier.The Grand Duke sends his army against the bears, whose inferiority is clear: the animals would be doomed if it were not for the intervention of their most valiant and strong warrior, the bear Babbone, who puts the enemy soldiers to flight by throwing huge snowballs at them. The bears feast in the enemy camp, where they meet Professor De Ambrosiis, the Grand Duke's sorcerer and ex-astrologer who he sacked for having predicted the fall of his kingdom. He possesses a magic wand, which can however be used only twice and which he retains to heal himself if he becomes ill; Professor De Ambrosiis, however, is forced to perform a spell to save the bears and himself from the attack of the boar army of the Sire of Molfetta, cousin and ally of the Grand Duke: this spell consists in causing the boars to swell until they then explode in the sky.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naoko_(novel)"title="Naoko (novel)">
, a humble 39-year-old man, enjoys the smaller pleasures in life. He is devastated when his wife and daughter are involved in a bus accident. Naoko Sugita (杉田 直子 "Sugita Naoko"), his wife, dies and his 11-year-old daughter Monami Sugita (杉田 藻奈美 "Sugita Monami") is badly injured. Monami makes a miraculous recovery—albeit, with one small twist—her personality and memories are that of her mother Naoko's, rather than her own. Both Heisuke and Naoko conclude that her spirit is possessing Monami's body. Unable to explain what has happened, they decide to keep the matter a secret while Naoko lives as Monami from then on.As Monami's possessed body enters adolescence, Naoko takes the opportunity to live her own unfulfilled dreams. Naoko's growing independence begins to cause a rift between her and Heisuke, who struggles to remain a faithful husband and also tries to make sense of the tragedy that caused Naoko's condition by learning more about the bus driver who caused the accident. Heisuke and Naoko have a falling out when he suspects she has become interested in a boy around Monami's own age, but find they cannot resolve their own relationship as Naoko is now biologically Heisuke's daughter.When Monami's consciousness begins resurfacing, Heisuke and Naoko are able to repair their relationship as they ensure that Monami and Naoko, now sharing the same body, will be able to function and transition back to the life that Naoko has lived for her. As Monami's consciousness begins to dominate, Heisuke and Naoko eventually part ways forever and Heisuke is content to raise Monami as his daughter again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Miner"title="The Miner">
In "The Miner", the 19-year-old protagonist decides to flee his hometown of Tokyo after his relationship falls apart. He encounters a grotesque figure who specializes in recruiting cheap labour, and is persuaded to work in a copper mine. The story follows his journey towards and descent into the mine. The protagonist's perceptions and later reflections are described in great detail, such that a "split-second of visual clarity" is accorded three pages of analysis.The protagonist does not get along with the other "animalistic" miners, but eventually meets an educated individual who is, like himself, fleeing from a failed relationship. This miner convinces him to return to his former life. The novel ends with the protagonist emerging from the mine. Outside the mine, he remarks on the beauty of a flower and the ugliness of the miners. He then visits a clinic for a mandatory examination, and is reminded of human mortality by the scent there. He passes the same flower and no longer finds it beautiful, nor does he find the miners ugly:As always, the miners were looking down at me from their barracks, chin on hand. Their faces, which before had filled me with such loathing, now seemed like clay dolls' heads. They were not ugly, not frightening, not hateful. They were just faces, as the face of the most beautiful woman in Japan is just a face. And I was exactly like these men, a human being of flesh and bone, entirely ordinary and entirely meaningless.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magicians_of_Caprona"title="The Magicians of Caprona">
Caprona is a city-state in the Italy of Chrestomanci's world (World Twelve A), which never united as a nation-state. The houses of Casa Montana and Casa Petrocchi, both renowned for being powerful magician families, have been feuding with each other for generations. The city has begun to lose its "virtue," and the states of Florence, Siena, and Pisa intend to take advantage of this by uniting to conquer Caprona. The only way to save the city is if the true words to the "Angel of Caprona", both a hymn and a powerful spell, can be found and read aloud.The story is told through the eyes of the young Tonino Montana and his brother Paolo. They are both members of Casa Montana, one of two spell-houses in Caprona, the other being Casa Petrocchi. The two spell-houses are deadly rivals; the two families are both convinced that the decline of Caprona is all the fault of the other spell-house, and refuse to work together under any circumstances.Tonino is, unknown to himself or the rest of Casa Montana, a talented enchanter; however, he is unaware of his ability, and prefers to spend his time reading. Paolo is more outgoing and friendly, and does better at school. When representatives of both houses are called to the Duke of Caprona's palace, they both go. Whilst there, they meet members of the Petrocchi family for the first time, and they also encounter the Duchess, a powerful woman who appears to be the true ruler of Caprona.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cricket_in_Times_Square"title="The Cricket in Times Square">
On an early summer evening, Mario Bellini finds a cricket chirping near his parents' newsstand in the Times Square subway station. Papa Bellini allows Mario to keep the cricket in the newsstand as a pet despite Mama Bellini's fear that the cricket will attract more bugs.The cricket's name is Chester. That evening, Chester meets Tucker Mouse and Harry Cat, best friends who live in an abandoned drainpipe near the newsstand. Chester tells them that he is from Connecticut and that he came to New York by being accidentally trapped in a picnic basket. Tucker and Harry show him Times Square, which he finds overwhelming.Mr. Smedley, a music teacher who is a regular customer of the Bellinis, hears Chester chirping and likens the cricket to Orpheus. Mario takes Chester to Chinatown and buys a cricket cage from a shop owner named Sai Fong. While dreaming that night, Chester eats half of a two-dollar bill. The Bellinis decide that Chester must stay in his cage until Mario repays the two dollars. To free Chester, Tucker donates his life's savings, a collection of coins scrounged from the subway station. Mario realizes that he has been feeding Chester the wrong kind of food. He takes Chester to see Sai Fong, who from then on provides Chester a steady supply of mulberry leaves.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Confession"title="The Second Confession">
Wealthy James U. Sperling approaches Nero Wolfe to investigate Louis Rony, an admirer of Sperling's younger daughter Gwenn. Sperling wants Wolfe to find evidence that Rony is a member of the American Communist Party. Wolfe is reluctant since he believes Rony has connections to “Z”, a shadowy criminal mastermind who has crossed Wolfe's path before. Nevertheless, Archie Goodwin is dispatched undercover to Sperling's Westchester estate to see if he can discover any grounds to convince Gwenn to break off the relationship.Present at Sperling's estate are his family, including his wife, his son and two daughters; Rony himself; Paul Emerson, a controversial conservative radio commentator who is sponsored by Sperling's corporation; and Webster Kane, an economist and friend of the family. Madeline, the eldest daughter, reveals that she is aware of Archie's true identity, having read about his exploits with Wolfe and nursed a crush on him. That night, Archie plans to drug Rony, but when he switches drinks he discovers that Rony's drink was already spiked.The next night, Archie offers to drive Rony back to New York, but instead arranges for Wolfe's operatives, Saul Panzer and Ruth Brady, to pose as robbers and waylay them. Once Rony is knocked unconscious, Archie searches him and discovers a membership card for the Communist Party under the name of William Reynolds. Returning to New York, Archie learns from Wolfe that “Z” has given Wolfe a deadline to withdraw from the case. After the deadline passes, the greenhouse on the roof of Wolfe's house is attacked with machine-gun fire, destroying many of the orchids there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Be_a_Villain"title="And Be a Villain">
A radio show guest is poisoned on the air during a plug for the show's sponsor, a soft-drink manufacturer. The negative publicity, and the low bank balance at tax time, brings Nero Wolfe into the case — and into his first recorded encounter with a shadowy master criminal."And Be a Villain" is the first of three Nero Wolfe books that involve crime syndicate leader Arnold Zeck and his widespread operations. The others in the Zeck Trilogy are "The Second Confession" and "In the Best Families". In each book, Zeck — Wolfe's Moriarty — telephones Wolfe to warn him off an investigation that Zeck believes will interfere with his crime syndicate. Each time, Wolfe refuses to cooperate, and anticipates that there will be consequences.The title is from Act I, Scene V, line 114 of William Shakespeare's "Hamlet", in which the prince says of his murderous uncle King Claudius, "That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain." Remarking on the change from Stout's title to "More Deaths Than One" for the British edition, Rev. Fredrick G. Gotwald wrote, "It seems strange that the name was changed in a country from which the original came."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_25th_Hour"title="The 25th Hour">
New York drug dealer Monty Brogan is arrested for drug possession with intent to sell, and sentenced to seven years in prison. He spends his last night of freedom with two friends, contemplating his uncertain future and the decisions he made that brought him to this point.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kobayashi_Maru_(Star_Trek_novel)"title="The Kobayashi Maru (Star Trek novel)">
While stranded in a damaged shuttlecraft, Kirk, Sulu, Chekov, and Scotty recall their Starfleet Academy Command School experiences with "The Kobayashi Maru", a training simulation where a cadet has to rescue a crippled fuel freighter by that name from the Klingons, a no-win scenario where any course of action the cadet takes ends in failure. The purpose of the no-win outcome is to test the cadets' response to losing.The characters in the novel find themselves in a similar no-win scenario of their own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staying_Fat_for_Sarah_Byrnes"title="Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes">
Eric “Mobe” Calhoune's best friend Sarah Byrnes is catatonic, sitting in the mental ward of Sacred Heart Hospital. The staff there suggests that he recall some moments that may jog her memory and bring her and back to reality. Eric and Sarah Byrnes (who insists on being called Sarah Byrnes, rather than just Sarah) have been friends for a long time, originally because he was extremely overweight and she was severely burned as a child, leaving her with scars on her hands and face. They were picked on regularly and began to write an underground newspaper called "Crispy Pork Rinds", focusing an article on the bully Dale Thornton. After the ensuing events, they recruited Dale as “protection”, and their lives became a bit easier.Eric is recruited to the swim team, and as he improves in skill his weight decreases. Out of fear of losing his friend Sarah Byrnes, he continues to eat, and even tries to eat as much as he can so that he can “stay fat for Sarah Byrnes”, so that he won't stop being an 'outcast' with her and lose her friendship. Eric's search for a “cure” for Sarah Byrnes’ catatonia leads him to seek out Dale Thornton, and Eric learns that she had an abusive father and that the facial scarring was no accident.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Village_Affair"title="A Village Affair">
"The Grey House is the final piece in the jigsaw of Alice Jordan's perfect life. It seems to be the ultimate achievement of her outwardly happy marriage - a loyal, if dull husband, three children, two cars and now the house. So why does she feel as if something is missing? As Alice and her family settle themselves into village life the something missing becomes something huge and then breaks, scandalizing the village, opening up old wounds. But because of it, Alice begins to feel that there is hope and humour and understanding and compassion in the new life she must build for herself." — Joanna Trollope
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Majesty's_Dragon"title="His Majesty's Dragon">
The story is set during an alternate-history version of the Napoleonic Wars, in which dragons not only exist but are used as a staple of aerial warfare in Asia and Europe. The dragons of the story are portrayed as sapient and intelligent, capable of logical thought and human speech. The series centers primarily on events involving Temeraire (the titular dragon) and his handler, Will Laurence. The first book of the series tells how Laurence, formerly a Captain in the Royal Navy, becomes Temeraire's handler, and of their early training in preparation for battles against Napoleon's aerial fleet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goblin_Mirror"title="The Goblin Mirror">
An ill-wind disturbs the peaceful land of Maggiar and the wizard, Karoly requests leave to consult with his sister, Ysabel over the mountain. Lord Stani instructs his two eldest sons, Bogdan and Tamas, and his master huntsman, Nikolai to accompany Karoly. After a difficult trip over the mountain, they approach a tower, Krukczy Straz where they hope to find shelter, but are ambushed by goblins. The goblins have overrun the tower, killing all inside. Tamas is separated from the others but is rescued by Ela, a witchling who takes him to her mistress, Ysabel in a neighboring tower, Tajny Straz. But this tower has also been raided by goblins and all are killed, including Ysabel. Ela goes into the tower and retrieves Ysabel's shard from the goblin mirror. Then Azdra'ik, the goblin lord appears, but does not threaten them. He tells Tamas he must take the mirror fragment from Ela because it is too powerful for her to use. Ela takes Tamas to the next tower at the ruins of what was Hasel. Here Ela looks into the mirror but is overwhelmed by the goblin queen staring back at her. Tamas is startled when the queen looks at "him" and calls him a wizard, which, he assures Ela he is not. Ela is drawn to the goblin queen at the lake and Tamas tries to follow her, but gets lost. Azdra'ik finds him and together they search for Ela.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammerfall_(novel)"title="Hammerfall (novel)">
"Hammerfall" takes place on an unspecified planet, where the Ila, believed to be a god and immortal, rules the Lakht, a huge desert, and all its villages from the holy city of Oburan. Some of the villagers, including Marak, an abjorian fighter of the Kais Tain tribe, are afflicted with a "madness" that manifests itself in the form of voices and visions, and are outcast from their communities. The Ila, however, is interested in the "mad" and orders that they be rounded up and brought across the desert to Oburan.The Ila singles out Marak, because he and his father had launched an unsuccessful rebellion against her. She queries Marak on the nature of these visions and voices, and, intimidated by her holiness, he tells her they appear to come from the east where there is a silver tower he is drawn to. She instructs Marak to lead the other mad east across the desert to find the source of the madness, and promises that if he returns with the answer, she will make him ruler of Kais Tain. After several weeks in the harsh desert, the visions and voices draw Marak and the others to the silver tower where they meet Luz, who appears to be a deity like the Ila.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Age_(Vidal_novel)"title="The Golden Age (Vidal novel)">
The story begins in 1939 and features many of the characters and events that Gore Vidal introduced in his earlier novel, "Washington, D.C." This includes the families of conservative Democratic Senator James Burden Day, and powerful newspaper publisher Blaise Sanford. The book inserts the character of Caroline Sanford, Blaise's half-sister and publishing partner, who was introduced in the prequels to "Washington, D.C". It covers America's entry into World War II and the national politics of that time in some detail, and highlights of the post-war years, and then closes with a year-2000 retrospective.The action centers around President Franklin D. Roosevelt's maneuvers to get the United States into World War II while keeping his 1940 campaign pledge to America voters that "No sons of yours will ever fight in a foreign war, unless attacked." Vidal makes the case that 1) the U.S had backed Japan into a corner with the oil and trade embargo, as well as massive aid to China and unconditional demands Japan could never accept; 2) the U.S. provoked Japan into attacking; and 3) the U.S. had broken Japan's military codes and knew of Japan's pending attack, but intentionally withheld warning Pearl Harbor. This was to arouse the U.S. populace and use the attack to bring the United States into the war, so the U.S could take its place as the post-war dominant superpower.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lightning_Thief"title="The Lightning Thief">
Percy Jackson is a dyslexic twelve-year-old with ADHD. While on a school trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the chaperones, Mrs. Dodds, turns into a Fury and attacks him. Percy's favorite teacher, Mr. Brunner, lends Percy a magical sword-pen to defeat her. Percy and his mother Sally go to Long Island. Percy's friend Grover reveals himself as a satyr and warns of danger. At a summer camp, Sally is attacked by a minotaur and disappears in a flash of light. Percy kills the beast with one of its own horns. He learns that the camp is called Camp Half-Blood, and that he is a demigod: the son of a human and a Greek god. He settles into camp life and meets several other demigods, including Luke and Annabeth. After a hellhound attacks him, he is saved by Chiron and then claimed by his father, the god Poseidon. Chiron explains to Percy how the three eldest male gods—Poseidon, Zeus, and Hades—swore an oath not to have children; Percy represents a violation of the oath. He is the second violation of the oath, as the first was Thalia, daughter of Zeus. She was killed by monsters sent by Hades. This, coupled with the fact that Zeus's master lightning bolt has recently been stolen, has bred much suspicion between the gods.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bridge_at_No_Gun_Ri"title="The Bridge at No Gun Ri">
"The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War" is written in chronological narrative style and is organized in three parts, "The Road to No Gun Ri," "The Bridge at No Gun Ri," and "The Road from No Gun Ri." It opens with two chapters that alternately introduce the readers to the young Army enlistees of the 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment, mostly from poor backgrounds, many of them school dropouts, on occupation duty in post-World War II Japan, where they have been insufficiently trained and are unprepared for the sudden outbreak of war in nearby Korea; and then to the South Korean villager families and the age-old rhythms of their rural lives, to be exploded in late June 1950 by a Korean civil war borne of the new U.S.-Soviet rivalry, the Cold War.The next two chapters describe the deployment of U.S. military units to face the onrushing North Korean invaders, the growing nervousness of U.S. commanders who issue orders to fire on South Korean refugee columns out of fear of enemy infiltrators, and the disarray of the weakly led 7th Cavalrymen as they reach the warfront; and then tell of the villagers' plight as they first seek shelter from the war by gathering in a remote area of their valley, and then are forced by retreating U.S. troops to head south toward U.S. lines.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heart_Is_Deceitful_Above_All_Things_(novel)"title="The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (novel)">
The stories are narrated by the boy Jeremiah, who at the age of four is taken away from his foster parents, the only family he's known. He is reclaimed by his mother Sarah, who had given birth to him as an adolescent but was compelled to turn him over to foster care. Profoundly disturbed from her own life of abuse and poverty, Sarah takes him on the road with her, moving through aimless and dangerous encounters with a series of men, some of whom beat and rape Jeremiah. She frequently instructs her son to pretend to be her sibling—sometimes her brother, sometimes her sister. She is also abusive to him and abandons him repeatedly.The child welfare system sends Jeremiah to live with Sarah's parents: Bible-and child-beating fanatics who abuse him as relentlessly as they had abused his mother. Sarah finds him and takes him away with her, but her life continues to spiral out of control. She becomes a lot lizard (a prostitute who works the truck stops) and eventually slides into a paranoid breakdown from crystal meth abuse. Jeremiah is last seen as a 15-year-old street hustler in San Francisco, paying for a gay S&amp;M session where he relives the beatings he had submitted to as a child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Seduction"title="The Art of Seduction">
The book profiles nine types of seducers (with an additional profile for an "anti-seducer") and eighteen types of victims. Greene uses examples from historical figures such as Cleopatra, Giacomo Casanova, Duke Ellington and John F. Kennedy to support the psychology behind seduction. The book contains 24 seduction techniques. Greene saw "The Art of Seduction" as the logical follow-up to "The 48 Laws of Power" since seduction is "about power and manipulation as much as it is about romance, about how to make someone fall under your spell."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Sharp"title="Twelve Sharp">
The novel begins with Stephanie being stalked by Carmen Manoso, a woman claiming to be the wife of Ranger, a fellow bounty hunter with whom Stephanie has occasionally been intimate. Ranger is out of town on "bad business" when Stephanie learns that his daughter has been kidnapped. Ranger is the prime suspect.Ranger comes back to Trenton and hides at Stephanie's apartment. He is trying his best to find his daughter, which isn't made easier by the fact that the police are looking for him. As the story progresses, Stephanie learns that Carmen is actually married to a man named Edward Scrog who is attempting to steal Ranger's identity, even going so far as to kidnap Ranger's daughter Julie. Scrog looks quite a lot like Ranger, that makes the entire thing even more complicated. Scrog wants to be Ranger, because he once saw him arresting an FTA (failure to appear) in the store he worked at and knew that he'd been meant to be Ranger. Ranger asks Steph for help, knowing that she is what the kidnapper wants. He is trying to use Stephanie as bait, tracing her with a GPS-device, so that he can find his daughter.After Scrog kills Carmen he kidnaps Stephanie to complete his "family" and start a new life. However, he needs money, so Stephanie convinces him to try to find one of her FTAs (wanted for armed robbery) and steal his money. To prevent Stephanie from escaping, Scrog constructs a bomb and tapes it to her. As they try to negotiate for the money, Stephanie's old nemesis Joyce Barnhart turns up to capture the FTA herself. In the struggle that ensues, Scrog gets shot in the foot and Stephanie manages to rip the bomb off before Scrog stun-guns her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Language_of_Goldfish"title="The Language of Goldfish">
Carrie Stokes, age 13, is suffering a mental breakdown due to her fear of change. She is growing up without realizing it, or perhaps blatantly ignoring it, until it gets too hard for her to pretend that everything is the same as it was when she was a young girl. Carrie is a skilled artist and takes lessons with the art teacher at her school. Carrie's parents do not show much support for Carrie's passion for art; every time Carrie shows her parents an art piece, they seem unimpressed. Moira, Carrie's older sister, is a constant reminder that she inevitably has to grow up. She has an anxiety disorder because she is worried about the social graces and rites of passage – such as going to school dances – that growing up entails.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Comes_East"title="Grant Comes East">
The novel begins at Union Mills, Maryland. The battle that began at Gettysburg ended on July 4, 1863 (at the same time as the fall of Vicksburg) with a decisive but costly Confederate victory. General Robert E. Lee and his troops march on Washington, D.C., and launch an assault, hoping that if they can take the capital they can win the war.Meanwhile, President Abraham Lincoln has appointed Major General Ulysses S. Grant, the victor of Vicksburg, as commander of all Union forces and ordered him to attack Lee. Grant masses his forces (the newly minted "Army of the Susquehanna") at Harrisburg, while Maj. Gen. Daniel E. Sickles gains control (through his violent pacification of the New York Draft Riots) of the Army of the Potomac.Sickles has his eye on the White House, but he needs to defeat Lee in order to win the Civil War for the War Democrats. Violating orders from Grant, he rolls his troops out to meet Lee's army alone. A sidebar shows Napoleon III planning to have France invade the United States through its client state, the Second Mexican Empire.Bloodily repulsed at Fort Stevens outside Washington (where the black troops of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry regiment played a decisive role), Lee turns on Baltimore. Abandoned by the Union, Baltimore descends into chaos; Lee, sickened by the violence, orders the provost guard in force to end it. Using Baltimore to threaten Washington, D.C., Lee turns his entire army upon the advancing Sickles, facing off at the former site of Joppa along the Gunpowder River northeast of Baltimore.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_Markowitz"title="The Family Markowitz">
Centred on a middle-class American Jewish family, "The Family Markowitz" touches on themes ranging from religiosity to ageing and from homosexuality to intermarriage. The novel tells the story of four main characters: Rose Markowitz (the matriarch), her sons Ed and Henry, and her daughter-in-law Sarah. Through these characters, the reader meets many other members of the family including Ed's four children, Henry's wife, and Rose's stepdaughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Face_in_the_Frost"title="The Face in the Frost">
The story opens with Prospero at home on a late summer day when he feels particularly uneasy. In the evening he receives an unexpected visit from his friend Roger Bacon, and the two discuss unusual phenomena that have transpired lately, especially those concerning a mysterious book for which Roger has been searching England. The following morning the two wizards find Prospero’s house besieged by agents of some other wizard who seems to have ill designs for them. They escape the house by shrinking themselves down and sailing out on a model ship via an underground stream accessible through Prospero’s basement. Once they regain their normal size they visit a library of records where Prospero discovers, as Roger stands guard outside, that a seal appearing in the mysterious aforementioned book belongs to Melichus, an old rival of his. Unfortunately, at that point a person comes into the library and claims to have killed Roger.Prospero flees the library and spends the night in a nearby town, where he luckily escapes an attack from some sort of evil creature sent by Melichus. The following day he travels to the cursed grove where Melichus is supposed to be buried, only to discover that the one buried there is not Melichus, but only one of his former servants. He presumes, therefore, that Melichus is still alive. After narrowly escaping from the cursed grove he travels to the town of Five Dials, where he stays at an inn with somewhat unsettling clientele and staff. Unable to sleep, he becomes suspicious of the inn and begins checking the other rooms, only to find them all empty. In the last room he finds the innkeeper with a large knife and flees the inn, whereupon he discovers that the entire town was an illusion (presumably created by Melichus).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_(novel)"title="Spider (novel)">
Spider, birth name Dennis Cleg, is a recent arrival from a psychiatric hospital to a halfway house in the East End of London—just a few streets away from the very house where he grew up, which was the scene of some barely visible but tremendous trauma which peeps out at the reader gradually from the fog of Spider's reminiscences.As the story opens, Spider has just taken up residence in the halfway house, under the stern eye of Mrs. Wilkinson, along with a handful of others he calls "dead souls". He takes daily walks to the River Thames, following the old canals and towpaths that run along the edge of his memories, under the shadow of the immense oil and gas tanks that dominate the industrial landscape. As he sits on a bench, rolling his own cigarettes, he begins to tell the tale of his childhood, of his remote, emotionally brutal father and slight, quiet, protective mother.He is, or so he states, writing all this down in a notebook which he keeps hidden, variously, under a newspaper drawer-liner, under the damaged linoleum floor of his room, or up the chimney of a disused gas fire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf's_Children"title="Beowulf's Children">
As the story opens the second generation of Avalon's colonists are coming of age, and the potential for teenage rebellion has never been so strong. The original colonists (the "Earth-born"), although selected for optimal physical and mental attributes, suffered varying levels of brain damage due to the unforeseen effects of long periods of chemically and temperature-induced hibernation necessary to survive the long journey to Avalon. Their children (the "star-born") have no such disability; instead, they are geniuses with feeble-minded parents. The Grendel Wars (in which the Earth-Born's short-sightedness nearly led to their extermination) are still fresh in their minds. The battle-proven (yet impaired) elders preach a dogma of zealous caution which might have once tried their own patience; the brilliant (and arrogant) Star-Born deem it cowardice and tyranny.Adding to the strain are those who made the journey to Avalon as cargo: the "Bottle Babies", embryos grown in artificial wombs. They were raised collectively, lacking the family ties of their fellow Star-Born, and feel less obliged to obey. Aaron Tragon (perhaps the most intelligent of them) is more than just rebellious; he may be insane. As conflict brews between generations on the island of Camelot, on the mainland a dangerous question has been answered. The Grendels nearly drove the colony into extinction, but what preys on the Grendels is even worse. Two of the colony's best and brightest die in a horrifying, inexplicable fashion: a storm of yellow sand which has left nothing but naked bones soaked with Grendel supercharger, and a baby wrapped in a blue blanket. The Earth-Born ban further trips to the mainland, but the Star Born make an attempt to return on a quest for answers (and vengeance). Cadmann Weyland (the colony's hero from the Grendel War) stows away on the return trip, accidentally killing one of the Star-Born during an altercation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdistan_(novel)"title="Absurdistan (novel)">
Misha is known as "Snack Daddy" from his days at Accidental College, a school in the Midwestern U.S. (The college resembles Oberlin College, which Shteyngart attended, while its name "Accidental" is a play on the name of Occidental College.) Misha is desperate to return to his true love, Rouenna, whom he met while she was working at a "titty bar". She now attends Hunter College, at Misha's expense.After Misha's father kills a prominent Oklahoma businessman, the INS bars the entire Vainberg family from entry into the United States. This strands Misha in his native Saint Petersburg (which he nostalgically refers to as "St. Leninsburg").Misha's father is killed by a fellow oligarch. Soon afterwards, Misha has the opportunity to buy a Belgian passport from a corrupt diplomat in the fictitious ex-Soviet republic of Absurdsvanϊ (also known as Absurdistan).Absurdistan's reputation for oil riches has earned it the nickname "Norway of the Caspian." The country is divided between two major ethnic groups: the Sevo and Svanϊ. They hate each other due to their dispute over the proper direction in which the "footrest" of the Orthodox cross is to be tilted. Civil war erupts in Absurdistan, and for the sake of a new love he has found, Misha is forced to take sides in the conflict.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circus_(novel)"title="Circus (novel)">
Bruno Wildermann of the Wrinfield Circus is the world's greatest trapeze artist, a clairvoyant with near-supernatural powers and an implacable enemy of the East German regime that arrested his family and murdered his wife. The CIA needs such a man for an impossible raid on the impregnable Lubylan Fortress where his family is held, to remove a dangerous weapons formula from a heavily guarded laboratory. Under cover of a traveling circus tour, Bruno prepares to return to his homeland. But before the journey even begins a murderer strikes twice. Somewhere in the circus there is a communist agent with orders to stop Bruno at any cost.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Sisters"title="Blood Sisters">
The novel concerns the life stories of three girls: the Irish Sarah Mackay, an Afrikaner Hanna Van der Beer and British Camilla Broughton Smith. The book follows their journey from being brought up in Kenya, until their lives diverge and their hopes and dreams are destroyed, and their bond almost with it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layer_Cake_(novel)"title="Layer Cake (novel)">
The book takes place in London in the 1990s and is narrated by an unnamed, 29-year-old drug dealer ("If you knew my name, you'd be as clever as me") who plans on leaving the life of crime behind at the age of thirty to live life as "a gentleman of leisure." His retirement plan is complicated by a large shipment of stolen ecstasy, the German neo-Nazis who want the drugs back and revenge on anyone they hold responsible for the theft, the unpredictable and often outrageous personalities of his friends, and his boss, kingpin Jimmy Price, who charges him with the task of recovering the missing daughter of a wealthy socialite.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_About_Muhammad"title="The Truth About Muhammad">
A work of American author and counter-jihadist Robert B. Spencer, the book is a biography of Muhammad, who founded Islam (an Abrahamic religion that originated in the 7th-century Arabic Peninsula), where he is regarded as the last prophet sent by God. A highly critical work both towards Muhammad and Islam, it consists of ten chapters and begins with a chronology of Muhammad's life and the glossary of names and places related to it. In the first chapter, Spencer writes of the reasons behind writing this book. He writes that the book does not comprehensively detail Muhammad's life but providing insights into an outline of his career.Chapter two presents Spencer's assessment of the earliest sources for Muhammad. He starts with the Quran, the religious text of Islam; he notes that it contains little details about Muhammad, and often the stories are told indirectly or incompletely. Next, he goes on to write about the hadiths, a record of the words and actions Muhammad transmitted through chains of narrators. Although presents great details about his life, Spencer observes that it is nearly impossible to know which parts of it that are true or not. The prophetic biography, the traditional Muslim biographies of Muhammad comes the last in Spencer's investigation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonkeeper"title="Dragonkeeper">
In the far western mountains of the Han Empire in ancient China, a young slave girl is used, abused and neglected by the cruel Master Lan, whose job is to care for the two aged imperial dragons, Long Danzi and Lu Yu. Nameless and alone, the slave girl is without hope and her only friend is her pet rat, Hua. After Lu Yu suddenly dies, the slave girl feels guilty and responsible.When the girl discovers that the Emperor intends to sell the one remaining dragon, Danzi, to a dragon hunter to be butchered, she and the dragon escape from Huangling together. Long Danzi tells the girl her true name, Ping, and asks her to accompany him to the ocean. She must protect a mysterious stone that is vital to the dragon's legacy. Along the way, they meet Wang Cao, a herbalist previously acquainted with Danzi. The dragon hunter, Diao, catches up with them in a rural village, and though they manage to escape, Diao seizes the stone.Danzi and Ping travel via the Yellow River to Wucheng, a town of sorcerers, to recover the stone. They find the stone in the possession of a necromancer and reacquire it. Danzi teaches Ping how to use "qi" (psychic energy) and explains to Ping that she is the hereditary Dragon Keeper. However, before she can respond, their boat collides with an imperial yacht, and Ping and Danzi are taken into custody at the Emperor's hunting lodge. The Emperor, Liu Che, befriends Ping. Liu Che invites a group of lore masters to the lodge. Wang Cao is one of them. He drugs Ping, convinces Danzi that he is the true Dragon Keeper, and escapes with him and the dragon stone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alma_Cogan_(novel)"title="Alma Cogan (novel)">
In Burn's novel, however, Alma Cogan does not die in 1966, but retires from show business sometime thereafter to a quiet solitude near the English seashore, living neither in luxury nor poverty. In contrast to Cogan's bubbly public persona, Burn's Alma, who narrates the book from 1986, is an arch, dry-witted, highly intelligent observer of the world around her, mildly dismissive of, even jaded by, her showbiz past (but not entirely disdainful of it). She recounts with equal detachment the heady days of celebrity and the sordid backstage cruelties—including bouts of unexpected violence—as she muses on the nature of stardom and its many pitfalls, which entrap the worshipper as much as the worshipped. But her residual fame proves a gruesome and unwanted relic as it serves to tie her, through her fans, to an unforeseen encounter with evil.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ballad_of_the_Sad_Café"title="The Ballad of the Sad Café">
"The Ballad of the Sad Cafe" opens in a small, isolated town in the Southern United States. The story introduces Miss Amelia Evans, strong in both body and mind, who is approached by a hunchbacked man with only a suitcase in hand who claims to be her kin.When Miss Amelia, whom the townspeople see as a calculating woman who never acts without reason, takes the stranger into her home, rumors begin to circulate that Miss Amelia has done so in order to take what the hunchback has in his suitcase. When the rumors hit their peak, a group of eight men come to her store, sitting outside on the steps for the day and waiting to see if something will happen. Finally, they enter the store all at once and are stunned to see that the hunchback is alive and well. With everyone gathered inside, Miss Amelia brings out some liquor and crackers, which further shocks the men, as they have never witnessed Miss Amelia be hospitable enough to allow drinking inside her home. This is the beginning of the café. Miss Amelia and the hunchback, Cousin Lymon, unintentionally create a new tradition for the town, and the people gather inside the café on Sunday evenings, often until midnight.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_Master_(novel)"title="Past Master (novel)">
"Past Master" is set in the year 2535 on the world of Astrobe, a utopian Earth colony that is hailed as Golden Astrobe, "mankind's third chance", after the decline of both the Old World and New World on Earth. Despite idealistic intentions, it is suffering moral and social decline that may be terminal for both Astrobe and the human race.In an attempt to save their dying civilization, its leaders use time travel to fetch Sir Thomas More (chosen for his fine legal and moral sense) from shortly before his death in the year 1535 to be the president of Astrobe. More struggles with whether to approve of the Astrobian society, noting its possible connections to his own novel "Utopia". His judgements soon lead him into conflict both with destructive cosmic forces on Astrobe and with its leaders who thought him a mere figurehead who could be manipulated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Jackson_&amp;_the_Olympians"title="Percy Jackson &amp; the Olympians">
Set in the mid-2000s, the series follows the story of Perseus "Percy" Jackson, a boy who discovers he is a demigod son of Poseidon. He was abandoned by his father because of an oath made by the Big Three (Zeus, Poseidon and Hades), the sons of Kronos, to not father any more children after World War II. The oath was sworn since the demigod children of the three gods are too powerful and have potential for great bloodshed (in-universe, World War II was a fight between children of the Big Three). Percy's journey turns even more electrifying when he discovers that numerous people and ancient monsters are trying to kill him due to his status as a demigod, latent strength, and growing influence in the Greek world. Percy also finds out that there are even more demigods like him in Camp Half-Blood, a training camp in Long Island.With his friend Annabeth Chase, and his best friend and companion Grover Underwood (a satyr who Percy finds out is actually his protector), his journey across the frightening mystic worlds begins. Percy soon finds himself fulfilling extraordinary quests, prophecies, and fighting battles with and for the gods against the rising threat of the Titans. He also finds himself at a crossroads: either he helps in the destruction of the world, or in preserving it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Dreams_(Vance_novel)"title="The Book of Dreams (Vance novel)">
Kirth Gersen learns that his enemy Howard Alan Treesong, already "Lord of the Overmen" (i.e., head of the underworld across all of humanity's planets), had almost engineered his appointment as Chief of the Interworld Police Coordinating Commission, the sole interstellar police organization. Gersen ponders what Treesong could be working on that could top that.Gersen's extensive business empire includes "Cosmopolis" magazine, often masquerading as a journalist, "Henry Lucas". Gersen examines old "Cosmopolis" files for anything about Treesong. He discovers a photograph, apparently of a formal dinner, bearing the words "H A Treesong is here", with no other information. He launches "Extant", a livelier sister magazine to "Cosmopolis", and publishes the picture in the free inaugural issue, offering large cash prizes for the identification of anyone in the photograph.An attractive young woman, Alice Wroke, seeks temporary employment processing contest entries. Gersen confirms she is working for Treesong. Eventually, all of the subjects are identified, except for one man who goes by a variety of names. Gersen tells Alice that the contest was intended to identify Treesong, and that the magazine wants to interview him.Gersen suspects the photograph depicts most of the highest-ranking Fellows of the powerful Institute, seven members of the governing "Dexad" and three Fellows of rank 99. All but one were fatally poisoned at the banquet. The survivor must be Treesong. Having fraudulently acquired the rank of 99, he plans to become the Institute's leader, the Triune. Three of the Dexad were not present. One had died; the banquet was to choose his successor from the 99s. Another had broken with the Institute and become a hermit. The last was Alice's father; Treesong blackmailed Alice into spying for him by threatening her father (whom he had already murdered).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Hammer"title="Divine Hammer">
The book begins with Nusendaran (Andras's master), and Andras going into a village to sacrifice a black sheep. However, the Divine Hammer ambush them, and they manage to kill Nusendaran, and are aiming for him next. Suddenly, Andras is teleported away by Fistandantilus. They watch Nusendaran burnt at the stake, so Andras desires revenge against the Kingpriest and his forces. Just then, Fistandantilus offers Andras a choice to become his student. He agrees.Meanwhile, Cathan and the Divine Hammer are eradicating a temple to Chemosh hidden in an abandoned lighthouse. They get onto little longboats, and quickly arrive at the lighthouse. They manage to kill the guards, and work their way down to the main worship hall. The Deathmaster, head priest, aims for Cathan with foul magic, however, Damid, a friend of Cathan's, pushes Cathan away and dies instead. Tithian manages to kill the Deathmaster by throwing his sword at him. After the battle, they receive orders to return to Istar. Cathan also promises to knight Tithian. After returning to Istar, Cathan learns he is to be the escort for the new envoy from the Order of High Sorcery, Leciane, since the previous one died. On the way to the Tower of High Sorcery in Istar to bring her to the palace, the magical olive trees guarding the entrance manage to "persuade" Cathan off the path, causing him to lose his memories of that day. Fortunately, Leciane rescues him, and then he takes her to her quarters in the palace. Later, they head for a tournament held by Cathan's sister. On the way, Leciane is told by the head mage, Vincil, to charm Cathan, however she refuses and lies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Thirst"title="They Thirst">
The prologue starts in Hungary as young Andy is waiting for his father to come home after a hunting trip. His father comes in late but is different. Andy comes to his father when told to and finds he is pale and cold. Andy's mother, suspecting that he is a creature he was hunting for, shoots him. His face is blown apart but continues to come after the two. They then run away into the cold blizzard. His father shouts "I'LL FIND YOU" as they run away. Andy and his mother finally go to a house away from their town.Later, Andy, now a Los Angeles detective, is trying find the Roach, who rapes, murders, and then puts cockroaches in the mouth of his victims. Andy's work leaves him stressed from the relentless hours he must put in on the case. Meanwhile, an albino sociopath killer is making his way to Los Angeles by the calls of someone and visions. At a bar in Texas he kills everyone with a Mauser. Eventually he makes his way to Los Angeles. Gayle Clark is a reporter and while going to work with her boyfriend they find the Hollywood Cemetery is ransacked. The people who did this left the bodies in a road and stole the coffins. Andy is told of this and goes to the watchman to tell him what to do if it happens again; to just stay in the house and close the blinds. At the same time Rico, a Chicano gangster, finds out that his girlfriend is pregnant. The girl runs away after Rico inquires if the child is his. The girl continues on the lam while Rico tries to find her. Eventually she is overtaken by the vampires on a dark street. That same night Wes Richer is having a large party after his successful comedy show. His wife, who is a medium, attempts, at the urging of a non-believer, to have a vision using a Ouija board. She is told by a spirit that there's evil and when she asks "what is this evil," it replies, "THEY THIRST"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Word_(novel)"title="The Word (novel)">
The plot of the novel is based around the discovery within Roman ruins of a new gospel written by Jesus' younger brother, James in the first century. In the gospel, many facts of Jesus' life, including the years not mentioned in the Bible, are revealed not to be as factual as they were once thought to be. Steven Randall, a divorced public relations executive running his own company in New York City, is the man hired by New Testament International, an alliance of American and European Bible publishers, to give publicity to James' Gospel as published by them. The project has been top-secret for six years, and now it is about to be unveiled to a world long in need of Christian revival. However, as Steven gets more involved in the project he runs into several questionable circumstances, as radical clerics centered in Central Europe oppose the publication of the document, since it would give ammunition for the conservative churches to keep the flow of worship from the top to the bottom, instead of bringing the faith to the masses. A struggle for control of the World Council of Churches, the suspicious absence in the project of archeologist Prof. Augusto Monti, the original discoverer – and whose daughter Angela is a potential love interest for Steve –, and the potential notion that the newly discovered gospel itself is a forgery made in the 20th century instead of a legitimate historical document, all are guaranteed to make Steve question the worth of the new job he is undertaking, and the newly re-found faith in God he acquired along with it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardians_(Christopher_novel)"title="The Guardians (Christopher novel)">
## Escape.Following the suspicious death of his father, 13-year-old Rob Randall is sent to a State boarding school, where harsh disciplinary measures and hazing by seniors soon make life intolerable. In his desperation, Rob devises a plan of escaping to the County, reasoning that he will avoid detection there much more easily than anywhere in the Conurbs. He is further driven by the fact that his mother was also from the County, and had herself crossed over into the Conurbs to be with his father.Slipping out and making his way to Reading, Rob comes up against the Barrier dividing the Conurbs from the County adjacent. The Barrier proves much less of a challenge than popular rumour suggests, and, finding a spot at which he is able to dig a gap underneath, Rob crosses over into the County. He takes in his expansive surroundings as he continues north-west but does not manage a long distance before he is noticed. A figure on a horse spots him and gives chase, catching up quickly as Rob twists his foot running.The rider turns out to be a boy perhaps a year or less older than Rob himself. He appears to be sympathetic to Rob's plight and, introducing himself as Mike Gifford, tends to the blisters on Rob's feet before taking him to a nearby cave where he can rest in concealment. Mike attempts to make the cave more hospitable by appropriating food, blankets and such from the Gifford household, but these discrepancies are eventually noticed by the housekeeper and reported to Mike's mother, whose suspicion is also aroused by Mike's staying out longer. She finds the cave and confronts Rob.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gates_of_Fire"title="Gates of Fire">
The novel is narrated by Xeones, a perioikos and one of only three Greek survivors of the Battle of Thermopylae. His story is dictated to King Xerxes and transcribed by his court historian, Gobartes.At Thermopylae, the allied Greek nations deployed a small force of four thousand Greek heavy infantry against the invading Persian army of two million strong. Leading the Greeks was a small force of three hundred Spartans, chosen because they were all "sires" — men who had to have sons who could preserve their blood line, should they fall in battle.Thermopylae was the only gateway into Greece for the Persian army, and presented the perfect choke point — a narrow pass bordered by a huge mountain wall on one side and a cliff drop-off to the sea on the other. This area decreased the Persians' advantage of having large numbers. Delaying the Persian advance here would give the Greek allies enough time to ready a larger, main force to defend against the Persians. The battle takes place simultaneously with the sea battle at Artemisium, where the Allied Greek forces hoped to protect the flank of the army at Thermopylae whilst not being cut off themselves. The Greeks were at a disadvantage at Artemisium, as at Thermopylae - the Persians outnumbered the Allies, and most of the Athenian ships were newly built and crewed by inexperienced sailors - and both sides suffered heavy losses in the sea battle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lies_of_Locke_Lamora"title="The Lies of Locke Lamora">
The Gentleman Bastards are masters of deception, disguise, and fine cuisine. Father Chains, their "garrista" (leader), is a priest of the Crooked Warden, the god of thieves. He buys troublesome youth Locke for his gang. Through a series of confidence tricks on the rich, they defy the Secret Peace, an unspoken agreement between the criminal underground and the Duke’s government which allows for the existence of organized crime with the understanding that the peerage and the servants of justice are off limits. After Chains' death, Locke becomes garrista of the group, consisting of Jean Tannen, an expert fighter; Calo and Galdo Sanza, jack-of-all-trades identical twins; and Bug, a young apprentice. Their wayward female associate Sabetha is mentioned, but resides elsewhere during the events of the novel.The criminal underworld of Camorr is ruled with an iron fist by the Capa Barsavi, who collects a commission on all criminal activity under his purview. Under Locke's leadership, the Gentleman Bastards are known as a small gang of gentrified but petty thieves and pickpockets, and their dues, though regularly paid, are relatively small. Secretly, the Bastards have actually been using elaborate schemes to swindle various nobles out of large sums, and have amassed a considerable fortune; they "purchase" the trinkets they pass on to Barsavi as tribute, in accordance with their small-time reputation. What little is spoken of their operations is credited to the shadowy "Thorn of Camorr."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_Ralph"title="Runaway Ralph">
Fed up with his bratty family, Ralph the mouse hops onto his toy motorcycle and speeds down the road away from the Mountain View Inn toward Happy Acres Camp, where he encounters Sam, a nosy watchdog, and is captured by a boy named Garfield (or Garf) and kept as a pet. Separated from his motorcycle, Ralph must endure life in a cage with an annoying hamster named Chum. Over time, Ralph and Garf form a relationship similar to the one Ralph and Keith had in the original book in the series.Ralph's adventures at Happy Acres Camp include escapades with an evil cat, the return of a missing watch, the escape from his cage, and being reunited with his beloved motorcycle. He eventually begins feeling homesick and strikes a bargain with Garf: return the motorcycle and bring him back to the Mountain View Inn, in exchange for clearing Garf's name (the rest of the children at Happy Acres Camp believe Garf was the one who took the missing watch). Eventually, the watch is returned, and Garf reassures Ralph that he will go back home the next day.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amen_Corner"title="The Amen Corner">
The play addresses themes of the role of a church in an African American family and the effect of a poverty born of racial prejudice on an African-American community. "The Amen Corner" takes place in two settings: a ‘‘corner’’ church in Harlem and the apartment dwelling of Margaret Alexander, the church pastor, and of her son, David, and sister Odessa. After giving a fiery Sunday morning sermon, Margaret is confronted by the unexpected arrival of her long-estranged husband, Luke, who collapses from illness shortly thereafter. Their son, David, along with several elders of the congregation, learn from Luke that, while Margaret had led everyone to believe that he had abandoned her with their son years ago, it was in fact Margaret who had left a dysfunctional Luke and pursued a religious life. This information precipitates confrontations between Margaret and her son, her congregation, and her estranged husband, regarding what they perceive as the hypocritical nature of her religious convictions, and the breakup of her family. After an important conversation with his dying father, David informs Margaret that he is leaving home to pursue his calling as a jazz musician. On his deathbed, Luke declares to Margaret that he has always loved her, and that she should not have left him. Finally, Margaret’s congregation decides to oust her, based on their perception that she unjustly ruined her own family in the name of religion. Only after losing her son, her husband, and her congregation, does Margaret finally realize that she should not have used religion as an excuse to escape the struggles of life and love, but that ‘"To love the Lord is to love all His children—all of them, everyone!—and suffer with them and rejoice with them and never count the cost!’"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Spectacle_of_Corruption"title="A Spectacle of Corruption">
This tale picks up a few months after the conclusion of David Liss' first novel, "A Conspiracy of Paper". It's late in the year 1721 and Benjamin Weaver is hired by a clergyman to investigate a death threat against him. His quest doesn't go according to plan, however, and Weaver soon finds himself falsely accused of murder, sentenced to hang and confined in the infamous Newgate Prison. He must somehow escape this fate, clear his name, and find those responsible.The safest course, once having escaped from prison, would be to escape England altogether - but Weaver would not hear of it. He is determined to pursue his investigations in a London where he is a hunted man, with the very substantial reward of 150 Pounds offered to anyone who would help send him back to the gallows.Weaver's personal and occupational struggles play out against the backdrop of the upcoming general election, in which the contending Whig and Tory parties seem equally corrupt.Several of the other fictional characters are carry-overs from "A Conspiracy of Paper". As in the first installment of his "memoir", Weaver is aided by his uncle Miguel and his best friend, the surgeon Elias Gordon. His cousin's widow Miriam, now married to a Tory candidate for Parliament, once again tugs on Weaver's heart strings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Conspiracy_of_Paper"title="A Conspiracy of Paper">
The novel's story is told in the form of a first-person memoir penned by Benjamin Weaver (born Lienzo), London-born son of Portuguese Sephardic Jewish parents. After a successful career in bare-knuckle boxing, Weaver has found a new calling as a 'thief-taker'—roughly equivalent to a modern private investigator. Believing that his estranged father died in a tragic accident, Weaver is shocked when a prospective client claims that the 'accident' was, in fact, murder. Weaver's subsequent investigation involves him in the new London financial world of banks, stocks, speculation, violence and scandal leading up to the world's first stock-market crash, the South Sea Bubble. In order to solve the mystery, he must learn the inner workings of this new world of paper money. The murder investigation moves toward its conclusion in lock-step with the accelerating frenzy of the Bubble's final days.A sub-plot involves Benjamin's gradual reintegration, after years of estrangement, into his family's community and traditions. This gives the author the opportunity to introduce the Lienzo family, and their struggles to survive and prosper as Jews and foreigners in 18th century London. Benjamin finds added incentive to rejoin his family when he meets the beautiful Miriam, widow of his cousin and now living in his uncle Miguel's household.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Flame_in_Hali"title="A Flame in Hali">
## Prologue.Years prior to the start of the book, the disgraced and forgotten "larenzu", Rumail Deslucido, dies in a remote village. In the last moments of his life, he overshadows (takes over the mind of) his son, Eduin, hoping to wreak his final revenge on the Hastur family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_Homeward,_Angel"title="Look Homeward, Angel">
The book is divided into three parts, with a total of forty chapters. The first 90 pages of the book deal with an early biography of Gant's parents, very closely based on the actual history of Wolfe's own mother and father. It begins with his father, Oliver's, decision to become a stone cutter after seeing a statue of a stone angel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cossacks_(novel)"title="The Cossacks (novel)">
"The Cossacks" is believed to be somewhat autobiographical, partially based on Tolstoy's experiences in the Caucasus during the last stages of the Caucasian War. Tolstoy had a wild time in his youth, engaging in numerous promiscuous partners, heavy drinking and gambling problems; many argue Tolstoy used his own past as inspiration for the protagonist Olenin.Disenchanted with his privileged life in Russian society, nobleman Dmitry Andreich Olenin joins the army as a cadet, in the hopes of escaping the superficiality of his daily life. On a quest to find "completeness," he naively hopes to find serenity among the "simple" people of the Caucasus. In an attempt to immerse himself in the local culture, he befriends an old man. They drink wine, curse, and hunt pheasant and boar in the Cossack tradition, and Olenin even begins to dress in the manner of a Cossack. He forgets himself and falls in love with the young Maryanka, in spite of her fiancé Lukashka. While living as a Cossack, he learns lessons about his own inner life, moral philosophy, and the nature of reality. He also understands the intricacies of human psychology and nature.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_B."title="Ida B.">
"Reference from McGraw Hill Reading Wonders Grade 5"Independent Ida B. is home schooled and loves her life, spending a lot of time communing with nature. When her mother is diagnosed with cancer, she faces a lot of difficult challenges. Her days of home school ends, and she has to go to public school. Worse, her parents need to sell part of her beloved orchard for medical bills, which means most of the trees will be cut down.Upset by all the depressing changes around her, she stubbornly decides to separate herself from her parents, mostly spending time with her pet dog Rufus and cat Lulu.But what she doesn't know is that going to Ernest B.Lawson Elementary School with Ms.W will change her life forever. &lt;mcgrawhillreadingwondersgrade6&gt;
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadji_Murat_(novella)"title="Hadji Murat (novella)">
The narrator prefaces the story with his comments on a crushed, but still living thistle he finds in a field (a symbol for the main character), after which he begins to tell the story of Hadji Murat, a successful and famed separatist guerrilla who falls out with his own commander and eventually sides with the Russians in hope of saving his family. Hadji Murat's family is being contained and controlled by Imam Shamil the Avar leader who abducted his mother, two wives, and five children. Aside from the fact that Murat wants to save his family, he additionally wants to avenge the deaths of other family members. The story opens with Murat and two of his followers fleeing from Shamil, the commander of the Caucasian separatists, who is at war with the Russians. They find refuge at the house of Sado, a loyal supporter of Murat. The local people learn of his presence and chase him out of the village.His lieutenant succeeds in making contact with the Russians, who promise to meet Murat. He eventually arrives at the fortress of Vozdvizhenskaya to join the Russian forces, in hopes of drawing their support in order to overthrow Shamil and save his family. Before his arrival, a small skirmish occurs with some Chechen and Dagestani mountaineers outside the fortress, and Petrukha Avdeyev, a young Russian soldier, dies in a local military hospital after being shot. Tolstoy makes a chapter-length aside about Petrukha: childless, he volunteered as a conscript in place of his brother who had a family of his own. Petrukha's father regrets this because he was a dutiful worker compared to his complacent brother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Volant_of_the_Snowy_Mountain"title="Fox Volant of the Snowy Mountain">
The story begins in the Changbai mountains in northeast China during the reign of the Qianlong Emperor of the Qing dynasty. It follows the classical unity of time, taking place on a single day, which is the 15th day of the third month of the 45th year of the reign of the Qianlong Emperor ("i.e." 19 April 1780 in the Gregorian calendar).A group of martial artists unearth a treasure chest and begin fighting for it. Midway during their tussle, they are overpowered and coerced by a highly skilled monk, Baoshu, to travel to a manor at the top of Jade Brush Peak to help the manor's owner drive away an enemy, "Fox Volant of the Snowy Mountain" Hu Fei. They start telling stories concerning the origin of a precious saber in the chest and their mysterious foe. In doing so, they gradually reveal each other's personal secrets.The saber's story dates back over a century ago to the feuds of the four bodyguards of the warlord Li Zicheng, who led the rebellion that overthrew the Ming dynasty. The four guards' family names were Hu, Miao, Tian and Fan. Owing to a massive misunderstanding which lasted several generations, their descendants have been slaying each other in a vendetta that prevented any of them from uncovering the truth. The Hu family was opposed to those from the Miao, Tian and Fan families; the latter three were allies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lulu_Dark_Can_See_Through_Walls"title="Lulu Dark Can See Through Walls">
Lulu Dark is a sixteen-year-old girl with attitude and fashion sense, and a keen eye for clues, who thinks girl detectives (such as Nancy Drew) are dumb. However, after her fake Kate Spade handbag gets stolen at a club, Lulu must become a girl-sleuth to retrieve it. But Lulu did not realize that it would get her entangled in a murder that only she believes has happened. At the end she solves more than one mystery of mistaken identities, and manages to do it in style with the help of her best friends, Daisy and Charlie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(du_Maurier_novel)"title="The Martian (du Maurier novel)">
Barty Josselin and Robert Maurice are English boys attending the Institution F. Brossard, in Paris. Barty is "a handsome, high-spirited, mischievous, and gifted fellow, thoroughly practical, yet with traits that have in them a strange idealism." After finishing school, they return to England, where Barty spends some time in the army, but resigns.His vision fails, and he travels seeking help with it, becoming suicidal. He learns in a dream that he has a kind of guardian spirit "Martia", a female spirit from Mars, who communicates with him and offers him guidance. She inspires him to a successful career as an author.Martia wishes for him to marry Julia Royce, an English woman he meets in Germany, but he follows his heart and marries Leah Gibson, a Jewish woman, with whom he is so happy that Martia acknowledges her mistake. Martia is incarnated in the form of their daughter, and when the child dies, her spirit returns to Mars, and Barty also passes away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Match"title="London Match">
Samson suspects that there is a traitor within his department of MI6, due to the appearance of a memorandum which was leaked to the KGB. It transpires that it is part of a plot conducted by his wife—now working for East German intelligence—to frame his superior, Bret Rensselaer, as a KGB agent. When Samson's old friend Werner Volkmann is arrested by the East German police Samson organizes an unauthorised exchange of defector Erich Stinnes for him, but the operation ends in a shoot-out on the Berlin S-Bahn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_Hook"title="Spy Hook">
The novel begins with Bernard Sampson visiting his old friend and ex-SIS colleague in Washington named Jim Prettyman as part of an investigation regarding some missing funds. Soon after, Prettyman is murdered in a mugging.All his allies start losing interest in the investigation, and after digging deeper Bernard is sent to America once again, where it is revealed that Bret Rensselaer has not indeed died (as hinted at the end of the first trilogy, and discussed in this book) but is in fact in rehabilitation. Bernard returns to Europe, where he confronts a man called "Dodo" and is saved from an untimely death by Prettyman, who it turns out has gone under "deep-cover".Bernard then takes his evidence to the Director General, who in a surprise turn of events orders his arrest, which thanks to some quick thinking by Werner Volkmann, Bernard evades for the while.The novel concludes with Bernard seeking an explanation from Frank Harrington, before disappearing into the night.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_Line"title="Spy Line">
The novel starts with Bernard Samson in hiding in Berlin after the events in the first book of the series. He is soon found by the SIS and is invited by Frank Harrington to sit in on a debriefing of an undercover agent, where it is revealed that Erich Stinnes has been smuggling drugs into East Germany.Bernard is eventually recalled to London, and sent on a mission to Vienna to pick up a package from a stamp auction. This is revealed to be a Russian passport, which he uses to meet his wife Fiona, whom it is now revealed is a double agent (It is not made clear for how long Bernard knew this).Finally, Fiona attempts to escape from East Germany, whereupon Erich Stinnes, and Fiona's sister Tessa are both killed. Bernard and Fiona escape back to the other side of the wall and are transported to America for debriefing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_Sinker"title="Spy Sinker">
"Spy Sinker" starts in 1977 and ends in 1987. It tells the entire story in the previous five novels from the third person perspective (Bernard Samson's bosses, his colleagues, his girlfriend Gloria, and most of all his wife Fiona). Thus it fills in the gaps in the story, as the previous five books only reveals what Bernard can see and think he understands. It also tells the back story leading up to the story in the five novels, which has only been hinted at previously.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_(Deighton_novel)"title="Winter (Deighton novel)">
The narrative starts on the eve of the year 1900 with Harald Winter, a German businessman with two sons, Peter and Paul, two very different brothers, whose lives are inextricably linked with Germany in the years leading up to the Second World War. One a scholar and one a romantic, their lives diverge, leading one into the inner mechanisms of the Nazi Party and one into exile in America, the birthplace of their mother.From their sheltered childhood through their violent coming of age in the Great War, from the chaos of 1920s Berlin to the spreading power of Hitler they are wrenched apart by conflicting ideals and ambitions. Their story is further complicated by their father's long standing affair with a Hungarian woman, eventually revealed to be Jewish; their love for him is overshadowed by their loathing of his behaviour.Since the entire story unfolds as a flashback from the time of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials after the Nazis' defeat, the readers know that both would make a career as lawyers, but in widely divergent directions: one would enter the Nazi Party and think up various "legal" ways to legitimise their crimes, while the other brother would be a staunch anti-Nazi, go into exile and come back to Germany after the war as a member of the American war crimes prosecution. But the reader cannot be sure, until deep in the book's plot, which is which.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivia_Joules_and_the_Overactive_Imagination"title="Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination">
Olivia Jules, a journalist for the British Sunday Times newspaper and Elan magazine is in Miami to cover the launch of a face cream when she meets Pierre Feramo, who she finds attractive, but also suspicious.While Olivia is in Miami, a cruise ship docks in the harbor. When Olivia is passing the cruise ship on the way to meet Feramo, a terrorist bomb blows the ship up. Olivia helps to rescue survivors but hundreds are killed.Soon afterwards, in Los Angeles, Olivia meets Feramo again, working on a movie. Olivia calls the FBI with her suspicions about Feramo, but is interrupted. She also has her room swept for bugs and finds one. Feramo invites Olivia to his house in LA. There she finds a secret room. Frame and Olivia take a helicopter to an island off the California coast. Feramo admits he is a muslim but tells Olivia he didn’t bug her. He invites her scuba diving in Honduras.Instead of going straight to Feramo’s resort, Olivia makes her own way to Honduras. She meets the local divers including one called Morton, who she is also attracted to. Olivia becomes more suspicious of Feramo because of the rumours about his resort. Feramo then tricks Olivia into coming to his resort. She bluffs her way out, and returns to London.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Young_Flying_Fox"title="The Young Flying Fox">
The story is set in China during the reign of the Qianlong Emperor (1735–1796) of the Qing dynasty. The protagonist, Hu Fei, is a young martial artist who was raised by Ping Asi after the death of his father, Hu Yidao. While travelling around the land in search of adventure, Hu Fei encounters Feng Tiannan, a ruthless villain, and wants to kill him to deliver justice for the victims. He also meets a young maiden, Yuan Ziyi, who shows signs of affection towards him. She stops Hu Fei from killing Feng Tiannan each time when he is close to killing Feng.Based on what Ping Asi told him, Hu Fei believes that Miao Renfeng is responsible for his father's death. He refrains from killing Miao after finding him, because Miao has been tricked by an enemy and temporarily blinded by a deadly poison. He is so impressed with Miao's sense of chivalry that he starts wondering if Ping Asi was mistaken about Miao. He decides to help Miao and journeys to find a cure for his eyes. He meets Cheng Lingsu, an apprentice of a deceased medicine guru known as the "King of Venoms". Hu Fei witnesses Cheng Lingsu defeating her three wicked seniors with her calm and wit. She agrees to help him cure Miao Renfeng's eyes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Angel"title="The Second Angel">
In "The Second Angel", passages of narrative by an omniscient narrator alternate with lengthy, discursive commentaries on the characters, and complex observations on human nature and blood by a first-person, intrusive narrator, who claims to be the omniscient narrator telling the story, but deliberately refrains from disclosing his or her identity until the last chapter.It is the late 21st century, when 80% of mankind have been infected with a virus called HPV2 (human parvovirus 2), or P2, whose spread was accelerated with the discovery and use of synthetic blood. P2 disrupts the blood's ability to carry hemoglobin around the body, greatly shortening the host's life. The only known cure for P2 is a complete blood transfusion with healthy blood, coupled with a dose of the drug ProTryptol 14. With only 20 percent of the world's population free of P2, the price of a litre of healthy blood has reached almost two million dollars.In the novel, blood has replaced gold and diamonds as a valuable commodity (gold was extracted in great quantity from the sea and is now valued at about $200 a kilogram). Uninfected people reside in "Clean Bill of Health" (CBH) zones within cities to avoid contact with the sick, for "vamping" (murder for the purpose of blood theft) is a major risk for healthy individuals. Standard procedure for those who are uninfected is to perform autologous donations to enable them to completely replace it in the event of becoming infected.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Dark_(novel)"title="After Dark (novel)">
Set in metropolitan Tokyo over the course of one night, characters include Mari Asai, a 19-year-old student, who is spending the night reading in a Denny's. There she meets Takahashi Tetsuya, a trombone-playing student who loves Curtis Fuller's "Five Spot After Dark" song on "Blues-ette"; Takahashi knows Mari's sister Eri, who he was once interested in, and insists that the group of them have hung out before. Meanwhile, Eri is in a deep sleep next to a television and seems to be haunted by a menacing figure.Mari crosses paths with a retired female wrestler, Kaoru, now working as a manager in a love hotel called "Alphaville". Kaoru needs Mari to talk to a Chinese prostitute who had just been beaten in the love hotel by an office worker, Shirakawa. The group then tries to track down Shirakawa, and includes the Chinese Mafia group that 'owns' the prostitute.In the love hotel Mari also hears stories from some of the staff working there and takes a glance at the other world hidden below the one we are aware of.Parts of the story take place in a world between reality and dream, and each chapter begins with an image of a clock depicting the passage of time throughout the night.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruins_(novel)"title="The Ruins (novel)">
Four American tourists — Eric, his girlfriend Stacy, her best friend and former roommate Amy, and Amy's boyfriend Jeff, a medical student — are vacationing in Mexico. They befriend a German tourist named Mathias, and a trio of Greeks who go by the Spanish nicknames Pablo, Juan, and Don Quixote. Jeff volunteers the group to accompany Mathias as he attempts to find his brother Heinrich, who went missing after having followed a girl he'd met to an archeological dig. As they leave the hotel, Pablo joins them, leaving a note and a map for Juan and Don Quixote.The six of them head down to the rural Yucatan in search of Heinrich. The driver of the pickup truck who takes them to the outskirts of Coba tells Amy that the place to which they are going is "not good," and offers to drive the group somewhere else. Amy does not quite get the message and leaves anyway. Near a Mayan village, they discover a disguised trail which leads to a large hill covered in vines and surrounded by bare earth. The group approach the hill, and are confronted by armed men from the village. Jeff attempts to communicate with them in Spanish, but they do not respond. After Amy steps on the vine-covered hill when attempting to take a picture of the entire group, the men force the group to stay on the vine-covered hill.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Honorable_Barbarian"title="The Honorable Barbarian">
Jorian, ex-king of Xylar, has had enough adventures to last a lifetime. But when his brother Kerin, youngest son of Evor the Clockmaker, commits an indiscretion with Adeliza, a neighbor's daughter, he is packed off on a hasty quest to uncover the secret of an advanced clock escapement for the family firm. A pragmatic, cautious sort, he preps for his journey with a crash course from his experienced brother in useful skills — swordsmanship and foreign tongues, of course, but also lying and burglary. He is hampered and sometimes aided by the sprite Belinka, commissioned by the calculating Adeliza to ensure Kerin's faithfulness.Kerin's goal takes him east across the Inner Sea, the Sea of Sikhon and the Eastern Ocean to the empire of Kuromon, where he is promised the secret in return for a magical fan lost centuries before. It has the property of making whatever it is waved at disappear without a trace. Along the way he must contend with a treacherous sea captain and his suspicious navigator, the duplicitous sorcerer Pwana, and the pirate crew of Malgo, who has a grudge against Kerin's family.A more pleasant complication is Nogiri, a princess of the island empire of Salimor, whom Kerin has liberated (much to the displeasure of Belinka) from the pirates. Kerin returns her to Salimor only to lose her to the nefarious designs of Pwana, and a dire fate from which she can only be preserved by a daring rescue on roller skates.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goblin_Tower"title="The Goblin Tower">
The Kingdom of Xylar, one of the twelve city-states of Novaria, has a peculiar custom for choosing its kings, each of whom serves for a five-year term. At the end of that period he is beheaded in the public square before an assembly of foreigners, and his head cast into the crowd. The man who catches the head is drafted as the next king. The latest beneficiary/victim of this arrangement is Jorian of Kortoli, a powerful and intelligent man who has trained extensively for a life of adventure, but who is hampered by garrulousness and a weakness for drink and women. Having served out his term as king in a reign characterized by both great accomplishments and increasing despair, he ultimately appears resigned to his fate, though in fact he is determined to cheat it.He successfully escapes his beheading with the aid of a Mulvanian magician, the saintly Dr. Karadur, who provides a spell granting physical access to the plane of the Novarian afterlife. This turns out to be our own world, in which the souls of Novarians are reincarnated. Jorian's brief excursion there is a satirical romp in which he is frightened by a passing giant truck, has a mutually uncomprehending encounter with a police officer in a patrol car, and is very glad to get back to the familiar dangers of his own world. These include an encounter with a homicidal wizard and his giant squirrel familiar, along with the succor of a distressed damsel who proves more trouble than she is worth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_of_the_Sea_(novel)"title="Star of the Sea (novel)">
The "Star of the Sea" of the title is a famine ship, making the journey from Ireland to New York. Aboard are hundreds of refugees, many from humble and desperate backgrounds. Key protagonists are David Merridith Lord Kingscourt, his wife Laura, their servant Mary Duane, the ship's captain Josias Lockwood, a friendless Irishman named Pius Mulvey, and American journalist Grantley Dixon.The story has multiple threads interwoven by Grantley Dixon. He uses diaries, letters, his own articles and conversations/interviews with some of the main characters or their relatives/descendants. The story partly follows the chronological course of the voyage, and for the intermediate or interposed parts consists of the meshed-in background lives of some of the emigrants and their relatives before they left Ireland (or England, or even after they arrived in the US). The novel departs from the usual formula of a murder mystery in that readers are vaguely informed of the identity of the murderer and the victim early in the novel, but the murder does not take place until the closing pages of the novel, and murder does not carry the full idea or sense of the killing.As the writer was clearly aware in choosing the name, the term "Star of the Sea" has deep roots in Catholic tradition. Our Lady, Star of the Sea - a translation of the Latin "Stella Maris" - is the Blessed Virgin Mary in her aspect as a guide and protector to those who work or travel on the sea and under which title she is venerated in many Catholic seaside communities. Indeed, in Dutch and other translations the book was given the title "Stella Maris".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deadly_Secret"title="A Deadly Secret">
The plot follows the experiences of the protagonist, Di Yun, a simple young peasant from Xiangxi. He lives in the countryside for several years together with his martial arts master, Qi Zhangfa, and Qi's daughter, Qi Fang, who is his childhood sweetheart. One day, the three of them travel to the city to attend the birthday party of Wan Zhenshan, Qi Zhangfa's senior from the same martial arts sect. Di Yun is framed for larceny and attempted rape, which results in him being arrested and imprisoned.Qi Zhangfa disappears mysteriously when Di Yun needs his help. Wan Zhenshan's son, Wan Gui, bribes the magistrate to hand a heavy sentence to Di Yun to exaggerate the seriousness of Di's "crimes". At the same time, in order to win Qi Fang's affection, he hypocritically plays the role of a good man by pretending to help Di Yun. Qi Fang becomes disappointed with Di Yun after believing that he is indeed guilty and gives up on him. With no one else to turn to, she eventually marries Wan Gui.Di Yun suffers in prison and is continuously harassed by Ding Dian, a fellow raving inmate who accuses him of being a spy and subjects him to constant beatings. However, after Di Yun attempts suicide, Ding Dian is convinced that he is not a spy and befriends him. Ding Dian tells Di Yun how he obtained from Mei Niansheng the manual for the skill "Liancheng Swordplay", and how he became the target of several martial artists after getting the manual. Ding Dian also teaches Di Yun a powerful inner energy skill, which later proves to be a blessing for Di. Di Yun also learns from Ding Dian about the dirty secrets of Qi Zhangfa and his fellows – of how they murdered their master, Mei Niansheng, to seize control of the Liancheng Swordplay manual.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Hearts_and_Three_Lions"title="Three Hearts and Three Lions">
Holger Carlsen is an American-trained Danish engineer who joins the Danish resistance to the Nazis in World War II. At the shore near Elsinore, he is among the group of resistance fighters trying to cover the escape to Sweden of an important scientist (evidently the nuclear physicist Niels Bohr). With a German force closing in, Carlsen is shot and suddenly finds himself transported to a parallel universe, a world in which Northern European legend is real. This world is divided between the forces of Chaos, inhabiting the "Middle World" (which includes Faerie), and the forces of Law based in the human world, which is in turn divided between the Holy Roman Empire and the Saracens. He finds the equipment and horse of a medieval knight waiting for him. The shield is emblazoned with three hearts and three lions. He finds that the clothes and armor fit him perfectly, and he knows how to use the weapons and ride the horse as well as speak fluently the local language, a very archaic form of French.Seeking to return to his own world, Holger is joined by Alianora, a swan maiden, and Hugi, a dwarf. They are induced to follow the seemingly attractive elvish Duke Alfric of Faerie, who in fact plots to imprison Holger in Elf Hill, where time runs differently. Holger learns that Morgan Le Fay, his lover in a forgotten past life, is his ultimate adversary.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clocks_of_Iraz"title="The Clocks of Iraz">
In this sequel to "The Goblin Tower", ex-king Jorian of Xylar and Dr. Karadur renew their alliance, with the latter offering to help the former recover his favorite wife Estrildis in return for a new service. Jorian is commissioned to repair the clocks in the Tower of Kumashar, the great lighthouse of Iraz, capital city of the empire of Penembei to the south of Novaria. The timepieces had originally been installed by Jorian's father Evor the Clockmaker, a renowned practitioner of that trade.Complications consist of a pair of competing prophecies regarding the fate of the city, Iraz's cut-throat politics and xenophobic racing factions (clearly based on those of the Byzantine Empire), and a perfect storm of enemies approaching the city, including the pirates of Algarth, a mercenary company from Novaria, the desert hordes of Fedirun, and a revolutionary peasant army. Topping these is the Emperor Ishbahar himself, who seems to think Jorian might make a good heir to dump the whole mess on. Jorian hardly needs to hear a new prophecy relating to "himself"—"beware the second crown"—to tread cautiously. It will take luck as well as cunning just to get out alive, let alone save the city and seize the forlorn hope of regaining Estrildis with the aid of Karadur's flying bathtub.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bladerunner"title="The Bladerunner">
The novel's protagonist is Billy Gimp, a man with a club foot who runs "blades" for Doc (Doctor John Long) as part of an illegal black market for medical services. The setting is a society where free, comprehensive medical treatment is available for anyone so long as they qualify for treatment under the Eugenics Laws. Preconditions for medical care include sterilization, and no legitimate medical care is available for anyone who does not qualify or does not wish to undergo the sterilization procedure (including children over the age of five). These conditions have created illegal medical services in which bladerunners supply black market medical supplies for underground practitioners, who generally go out at night to see patients and perform surgery. As an epidemic breaks out among the underclass, Billy must save his city from the plague.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guarani"title="The Guarani">
"The Guarani" is set back in 1604, a period when Portugal and its colonies submitted to Spanish dominion due to a lack of heirs to ascend to the throne. Alencar takes advantage of this dynastic complication to resurrect the historical figure of , one of the founders of the city of Rio de Janeiro and a pioneer settler. This historical (factual) background, which orients the novel throughout, is set in the first two chapters; then fantasy, both violent and erotic, starts to prevail.D. Antônio establishes himself in a deserted inland region, a few days’ travel from the seaside city of Rio. The land was granted to him through his services to the Portuguese crown, whose legitimacy the nobleman now distrusts. To be politically independent (if not economically) and keep to the Portuguese codes of honour, he builds a castle-like house to shelter his family in Brazilian soil where he lives like a feudal lord with his family and retainers.His family consists of his severe wife D. Lauriana, his angelic fair, blue-eyed daughter Cecília, his dandyish son D. Diogo and the "niece" Isabel, a cabocla who is in fact his illegitimate daughter by an Indian woman. Other people are also attached to his household: a few loyal servants, forty adventurers/mercenaries kept for protection, the young nobleman Álvaro de Sá, an appropriate suitor for his lawful daughter Cecília, and Peri, an Indian of the Goitacá people, who once saved Cecy’s life (as the romantic/romanticised Indian endearingly calls Cecília) and who has since deserted his tribe and family. Peri is the hero who gives title to the book, he is treated as a friend by D. Antônio and Ceci and as a nuisance by Mrs. Mariz and Isabel. The life of the characters is altered by the arrival of the adventurer Loredano (former friar Angelo di Lucca) who insinuates himself into the house and soon starts subverting the other vassals, planning to kidnap Cecília and scheming against the house of Mariz; along with the accidental murder of an Aimoré Indian woman by D. Diogo.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sword_from_Red_Ice"title="A Sword from Red Ice">
From OCLC Worldcat's summary, "As Ash March pursues her destiny with the legendary Sull people, Raif Sevrance seeks a place where he belongs, in a tale set in the wake of deadly clan battles and a darker force from an evil city that threatens their world."The prologue can be read online.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Eye_(novel)"title="The Third Eye (novel)">
The protagonist of "The Third Eye" is eighteen-year-old Karen Connors. While in high school, she began dating Tim, a popular classmate. For the first time, Karen begins to feel as though she is finally fitting in. Her mother is pleased that she is dating Tim, as she has always pushed Karen to fit in and be popular.Karen gets a job as a babysitter for the Zenner family, watching Stephanie and her older brother, Bobby. Bobby leaves to go and play with his friends, but doesn’t show up at lunchtime. Karen asks nearby families if they had seen him, and when they all reply they haven’t, she contacts the police.Officer Ronald Wilson arrived to question Karen, and the first thing she notices about him is that he has vivid blue eyes and seems much too young to be a police officer. Wilson does not seem too concerned about the disappearance, saying that Bobby was probably at a friend's house. Karen starts having visions of where Bobby is, seeing he is unconscious and stuck in a box. When Bobby's parents arrive home, Bobby is still missing. The policeman returns to the Zenner home. Karen realizes that the box she saw in her vision is the trunk of a car, and that the car is headed her way. She also realizes that the car she envisions belongs to her boyfriend, Tim. When he arrives to take her home, she confronts Tim, and they find Bobby in the trunk, unconscious, but alive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Walked_Between_the_Towers"title="The Man Who Walked Between the Towers">
The story follows the French street performer turned high-wire artist, Philippe Petit, as he attempts what he describes as 'the coup of the century.' Once the idea of walking a high-wire between the twin towers occurs, Philippe Petit becomes obsessed with it. With considerable deliberation and planning, he finally achieves his dream coup one early August morning in 1974. Before the notorious high-wire walk across the twin towers, he also walks a high-wire on the Notre Dame where he lived in Paris, France. Since the twin towers were still under construction, Philippe Petit and his friend disguised themselves as construction workers and easily blended in with the rest of the construction crew to sneak up to the south tower. They took around 440 lbs of cable through the elevator to the top 10 floors and waited until nightfall to carry it up 180 stairs onto the roof. At midnight, two more of his friends came to help. They tied a fishing line through an arrow and shot it across to Philippe 140 feet away from the north tower. However, they missed their mark due to the wind, and the arrow landed on a ledge. Philippe manages to retrieve the arrow by crawling down the ledge of the tower. To this line, he attached a stronger line, which his friends pulled back and he tied it to a cable that was 5/8 of an inch thick. The cable was so heavy that it took them 3 hours to secure the line from across the two towers. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Chamade"title="La Chamade">
Like many of Sagan's novels, this is a story of lost love. A couple meet and move in together, but the woman cannot get used to his life, his working-class existence. She leaves her lover to return to her affair with a man of means.Ostensibly, she is rejecting her lover because she feels stifled by his position in society. But the class differences are metaphor for the quality of the love, with a woman deciding to be with a man who loves her for who she is rather than as an object of affection, merely the focus of a selfish love. She wants to be with the one who doesn't ask her to change.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkheart_series"title="Inkheart series">
## "Inkheart".In "Inkheart", the twelve-year-old, Meggie, discovers that her father Mo, a professional bookbinder, has the unusual ability to transfer characters from books into the real world when he reads aloud—they call those with this ability "Silvertongue". Mo once brought four characters of a book entitled "Inkheart" to life while reading from the novel, including Dustfinger, his pet marten Gwin; Capricorn, the book's villain; and Basta, Capricorn's right-hand man—in bitter exchange for his wife Teresa (later known as Resa), who disappeared without a trace into the so-called Inkworld of the book. After many years Dustfinger returns to pay Meggie and her father a visit, advising them to flee the country to escape Capricorn and his followers who are in search of Mo and his "Inkheart" copy. The three of them eventually leave to hide at Meggie's great-aunt Elinor's house in Northern Italy but end up being dragged off by Basta and his companions to the near village of Capricorn, because Dustfinger betrayed them as Capricorn promised him he would help him go back home. He then forces Mo to read treasures out of books, since his useless reader, Darius, could not do it. Meggie soon discovers she has the same talent as her father when she summons the monster known as "The Shadow" out of the book. She helps to kill Capricorn and his entourage with the power of her reading talent.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fallen_Man"title="The Fallen Man">
In late fall, three climbers who scaled Shiprock find a corpse, a skeleton in climber's gear, on a nearly inaccessible shelf just below the peak. Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee is trying his hand at administration of the special investigations unit. Captain Largo is pressing them to work on cattle thieving. Joe Leaphorn, retired five months earlier, cautiously approaches Chee with his memory of a missing person case from eleven years before, never solved. Hal Breedlove is a likely candidate, as he was mountain climber always seeking challenges, and Shiprock is a most challenging climb. It is Hal, which news Chee brings to Hal’s widow Elisa on their ranch near Mancos, Colorado. The couple and her brother Eldon Demott had been celebrating their fifth wedding anniversary and Hal’s birthday on a trip to the reservation, including Canyon de Chelly. She inherited the ranch once he was declared dead; Hal got full ownership of it on his thirtieth birthday, just before he disappeared.Chee is engaged to marry Janet Pete, but they have a dispute arising from John McDermott, her former boss and lover. Chee turns his focus to mastering the administrative duties of his job. Rookie officer Bernadette Manuelito is taking initiative on the cattle rustling problems; she asks Lucy Sam to watch and record events near her hogan. Lucy uses the format her late father used in his ledgers, which were started before 1985. Manuelito figures out that Dick Finch, the cattle brand inspector and a law man himself, is the most likely suspect.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letting_Go_(novel)"title="Letting Go (novel)">
Gabe Wallach is a graduate student in literature at the University of Iowa and an ardent admirer of Henry James. Fearing that the intellectual demands of a life in literature might leave him cloistered, Gabe seeks solace in what he thinks of as "the world of feeling". Following the death of his mother at the opening of the novel, Gabe befriends his fellow graduate student Paul Herz.The novel "Letting Go" is divided into seven (7) sections:1. "Debts and Sorrows"Having served in the Korean War after college, Gabe Wallach is finishing his military service in Oklahoma when he receives a letter his mother wrote to him from her death bed. After reading the letter Wallach places it in "The Portrait of a Lady" by Henry James. The narrative then skips forward to a year later when Wallach is working on a graduate degree in literature at the University of Iowa. Wallach lends his copy of "The Portrait of a Lady" to a fellow graduate student, Paul Herz. Later Wallach realizes that he left the letter from his mother in the pages of the book and in his attempt to retrieve the book he meets Paul's wife, Libby. Gabe learns from Libby that Paul is teaching classes at another school and realizes how poor the Herzs are. He drives Libby to where Paul's car has broken down on a trip from this second school and witnesses the first of many arguments between Paul and Libby. Libby also reveals to Gabe that she read the letter from his now-deceased mother. This is the beginning of the several instances where the characters begin to imagine the life of the other and believe that they understand it completely based on very little actual evidence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Queen_of_Zamba"title="The Queen of Zamba">
Victor Hasselborg, a 22nd-century private eye, is hired by a Syrian businessman to track down his missing daughter Julnar Batruni, who it turns out has run off with adventurer Anthony Fallon. Immediate complications ensue when Hasselborg finds himself falling for Alexandra, Fallon's abandoned wife. Discovering that the fugitives have gone off-planet, he tracks them to the planet Krishna, an Earth-like world of the star Tau Ceti with humanoid inhabitants but a medieval culture. Disguising himself as a native Krishnan, Hasselborg goes after them, little-knowing he has entered a web of interplanetary intrigue, spying, and gun-running...Anthony Fallon, the antagonist in "The Queen of Zamba", would reappear in two later Krishna novels; as the protagonist of "The Tower of Zanid" and as a minor character in "The Swords of Zinjaban".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogsbody_(novel)"title="Dogsbody (novel)">
Sirius, "guardian luminary" of the Dog Star, is accused of murdering a fellow luminary and losing the Zoi, an extremely powerful cosmic tool, on Earth. His Companion gives evidence that he is guilty. He is sentenced to spend one lifetime in the form of a dog on Earth. If he can recover the Zoi within that dog's lifetime, he will be allowed to return to his former status as Sirius. If he does not, he will simply die at the end of his dog's life.Sirius is born into a litter of puppies. Discovered to be mongrels, the puppies are thrown into the river. Kathleen O'Brien, rescues a filthy, wet, dying Sirius, and names him Leo. Kathleen lives with the Duffields, a family of four, because her father is in prison. Kathleen is treated distantly but benignly by Mr. Duffield. However, his wife Daphne ("Duffie"), a potter, bullies and intimidates Kathleen as she is Irish. The Duffields' sons are Basil, who does not actively dislike Kathleen but often mimics his mother's behavior and is obsessed with meteorites, particularly one that fell recently near the town; and Robin, who is kind but afraid of the other family members. The family has three cats who grudgingly befriend Sirius. Sirius' status in the house is often fraught, as Duffie despises him and Kathleen's meager allowance is his sole source of food.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fun_Home"title="Fun Home">
The narrative of "Fun Home" is non-linear and recursive. Incidents are told and re-told in the light of new information or themes. Bechdel describes the structure of "Fun Home" as a labyrinth, "going over the same material, but starting from the outside and spiraling in to the center of the story." In an essay on memoirs and truth in the academic journal "PMLA", Nancy K. Miller explains that as Bechdel revisits scenes and themes "she re-creates memories in which the force of attachment generates the structure of the memoir itself." Additionally, the memoir derives its structure from allusions to various works of literature, Greek myth and visual arts; the events of Bechdel's family life during her childhood and adolescence are presented through this allusive lens. Miller notes that the narratives of the referenced literary texts "provide clues, both true and false, to the mysteries of family relations."The memoir focuses on Bechdel's family, and is centered on her relationship with her father, Bruce. Bruce was a funeral director and high school English teacher in Beech Creek, where Alison and her siblings grew up. The book's title comes from the family nickname for the funeral home, the family business in which Bruce grew up and later worked; the phrase also refers ironically to Bruce's tyrannical domestic rule. Bruce's two occupations are reflected in "Fun Home"s focus on death and literature.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_Hall_of_the_Dead"title="Dance Hall of the Dead">
Ernesto Cata is in training to play his role as Shulawitsi the Fire God in an upcoming Zuni religious ceremony. He sees a kachina that can be seen by the initiated, which he is not, or by those about to die. The next day, his friend George Bowlegs leaves school early, after learning Ernesto is not there. Lt. Joe Leaphorn works with the Zuni police chief Pasquaanti, who seeks Ernesto, while Leaphorn will seek George, a Navajo boy. A patch of blood-soaked soil is found at the meeting place where George was returning Ernesto's bicycle. That is the starting point in the search for the two boys.Near the home of the Bowlegs, Leaphorn is approached by George's younger brother Cecil, who tells him that George is running away from the kachina, the one that got Ernesto. Cecil says that Ernesto had stolen some flints from the dig site. Next, Leaphorn talks with Ted Isaacs, who is about a mile from where the blood was found, at an anthropological dig site under the aegis of Professor Reynolds. Reynolds is ambitious to prove that Folsom Man culture continued longer than the accepted notions of its duration. Isaacs tells Leaphorn of the success in the field work. Reynolds bars Isaacs from having his girlfriend Susanne with him, and barred Ernesto and George from the site a few days earlier. When questioned, Reynolds denies any thefts from the site. Checking out Jason's Fleece, Leaphorn sees a Zuni kachina, rather unexpected next to the abandoned Navajo death hogan now housing the commune. He meets Susanne, who confirms that George was afraid of something and asking questions about absolution in the Zuni religion. Leaphorn learns that Ernesto's body has been found.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hoboken_Chicken_Emergency"title="The Hoboken Chicken Emergency">
The main character, Arthur, is asked to pick up a reserved turkey for Thanksgiving dinner, but the market has lost the reservation, and no store in the area has any turkeys or other birds available for purchase. So Arthur finds and brings home a 266-pound chicken named Henrietta. The family welcomes her with open arms, but the neighbors are not so sure. Everyone in town is horrified after Henrietta escapes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed"title="Pedagogy of the Oppressed">
Freire organizes "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" into four chapters and a preface.Freire uses the preface to provide a background to his work and the potential downsides. He explains that this came from his experience as a teacher in Brazil and when he was in political exile. In this time, he noticed that his students had an unconscious fear of freedom, or rather: a fear of changing the way the world is. Freire then outlines the likely criticisms his book will face. Furthermore, his audience should be radicalspeople that see the world as changing and fluidand he admits that his argument will most likely be missing things. Basing his method of finding freedom on the poor and middle class's experience with education, Freire states that his ideas are rooted in realitynot purely theoretical.Freire utilizes chapter 1 to explain why this pedagogy is necessary. Describing humankind's central problem as affirming one's identity as human, Freire states that everyone strives for this, but oppression interrupts many people on this journey. These halts are termed dehumanization. Dehumanization, when individuals become objectified, occurs due to injustice, exploitation, and oppression. "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" is Freire's attempt to help the oppressed fight back to regain their lost humanity and achieve full humanization. Freire outlines steps with which the oppressed can regain their humanity, starting with acquiring knowledge about the concept of humanization itself. It is easy for the oppressed to fight their oppressors only to become the polar opposites of what they currently are. In other words, this just makes them the oppressors and starts the cycle all over again. To be fully human again, they must identify the oppressors. They must identify them and work together to seek liberation. The next step in liberation is to understand what the goal of the oppressors is. Oppressors are purely materialistic. They see humans as objects and by suppressing individuals, they are able to own these humans. While they may not be consciously putting down the oppressed, they value ownership over humanity, essentially dehumanizing themselves. This is important to realize as the goal of the oppressed is to not only gain power. It is to allow all individuals to become fully human so that no oppression can exist. Freire states that once the oppressed understand their own oppression and discovers their oppressors, the next step is dialogue, or discussion with others to reach the goal of humanization. Freire also highlights other events on this journey that the oppressed must undertake. There are many situations that the oppressed must keep wary about. For example, they must be aware of the oppressors trying to help the oppressed. These people are deemed falsely generous, and in order to help the oppressed, one must first fully become the oppressed, mentally and environmentally. Only the oppressed can allow humanity to become fully human with no instances of objectification.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Growing_Pains_of_Adrian_Mole"title="The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole">
Adrian Mole is an outsider who feels the reason he can't quite fit in with "regular" society is that he is an intellectual. Evidence from his diary entries include a precocious interest in literature, in left-wing politics, a desire to have his own poetry show on the BBC, his dislike of Margaret Thatcher and his frequent critiques of his less-refined schoolmates and family. Adrian's dysfunctional family, as in "The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole", is one of the focal points of the book.Although portrayed as somewhat vain and self-centred, Adrian is the only friend and frequent caretaker of the OAP Bert Baxter, and also shows a great deal of concern and compassion for the misfortunes of his parents and respect for the authority of his grandmother.This book continues the theme from the first book of Adrian's growing frustration with his body. He constantly writes about the "spots" that mar his complexion, and he also has self-esteem issues about his height and physical maturity.As his frustrations mount, Adrian decides to run away to London but then decides that would be the first place his parents would look and so runs away instead to Grimsby.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Unreason"title="Land of Unreason">
Fred Barber, an American staying as a guest in an English country home during World War II, consumes a bowl of milk left as an offering for the fairies, substituting liquor in its place. The rightful recipient of the offering, drunk and offended at the substitution, takes vengeance by kidnapping Barber off to the Land of Faerie as a changeling, a fate normally reserved for infants. He finds Faerie beset by a menace echoing the war in his own world. Trapped in a magical realm where rationality as he knows it is turned upside-down and failure to follow the rules can have dire consequences, Barber undertakes a quest in the service of Oberon, the fairy king, in order to be returned to his own world. The outcome, befitting a realm in which nothing is as expected, is one that neither he nor the reader anticipates, for Fred Barber is not quite the man he thinks he is.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_of_Hastur"title="The Heritage of Hastur">
The story, told from the alternating points of view of Regis Hastur and Lewis Alton, starts from the storyline of Regis Hastur.While riding from Nevarsin to Thendera, Regis Hastur's party encounters Kennard Alton and his sons, Lewis and Marius. Lew introduces Regis to Danilo Syrtis. They ride to Comyn Castle.When Kennard is injured by a fall, Lew takes over as captain of the guard. He objects to Dyan Ardais being named Cadet Master, because of rumors that Ardais is a pederast and sadist. Kennard overrules his son, saying that the rumors were unfounded.Members of the Comyn Council meet with the Terran Legate regarding rumors that forbidden weapons are being sold in the city of Caer Donn. The Comyn claim that this is a breach of both the Compact (Darkovan tradition concerning weapons) and of the Terran Empire's treaty with the council. The Terrans claim that Aldaran is essentially a separate country, so different laws apply. The matter is unresolved. Kennard suggests instead that Lew make a diplomatic journey to Aldaran.Danilo Syrtis is thrown out of the guard for drawing a sword on Cadet Master Ardais. Lew suspects that Ardais has been making sexual advances towards Danilo, but is unable to prove it. Broken, Danilo departs for the Syrtis estate, where Regis later confronts him. After an argument, Danilo reveals the details of Dyan Ardais’ attempt to rape him, both physically and telepathically. Regis persuades Danilo to bring charges against Ardais.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_Come_(LaHaye_novel)"title="Kingdom Come (LaHaye novel)">
## Just after the Glorious Appearing.In the aftermath of the Glorious Appearing during the 75 Day Interval before the Millennium World, Cameron (formerly known as Buck) and Chloe Williams see their son Kenny playing with other children who were orphaned during the Tribulation. Buck and Chloe form a ministry known as Children of the Tribulation (COT), in the knowledge that these must be brought to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ before their one-hundredth year, or they shall die and go to hell. At the End of the 75 Day Interval, Christ destroys the rebuilt Temple of Jerusalem with lightning from Heaven. He then constructs a new Temple for the people of the Earth and sets up Levites as his priests and his earthly apostles as civil governors, with a resurrected King David as their chief. Meanwhile, Natural and Glorified Believers (Naturals being believers who lived to see the Glorious Appearing, and will still age slowly until the end of the Millennium, but not die; Glorified being believers who were raptured or died during the Tribulation and received Glorified Bodies, meaning they cannot age or die.) begin building their Houses and Estates for the 1,000 Years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_in_Death"title="Naked in Death">
New York Police and Security Department detective Lieutenant Eve Dallas's main suspect in the death of a high-profile prostitute is the enigmatic Irish businessman, Roarke, in 2058.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_She_Was_Worth"title="All She Was Worth">
In 1992, Tokyo Metropolitan Police Detective Shunsuke Honma, on leave due to an incident on the job, is hired by his nephew, banker Jun Kurisaka, to track down Kurisaka's fiancée, whom he knows by the name of Shoko Sekine and who disappeared from his life after he discovered her credit history was tainted by bankruptcy. As Honma investigates her circumstances, he finds that the name "Shoko Sekine" actually belongs to someone else other than Kurisaka's fiancée, and that the latter may have murdered the former to achieve this. As Honma navigates the country for clues, he finds that the credit-based economy in Japan, coupled with the country's own system for family identification, have undesirable side effects on ordinary people's lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zenith_Angle"title="The Zenith Angle">
Derek "Van" Vandeveer is a young, well respected, computer scientist. He is rich with stock options and heady with his own success when his whole world is suddenly and forever changed as the planes begin crashing into the World Trade Center. Within months his fortune is gone to an Enron-like scandal, and his wife and son have moved west to work on a new telescope being developed by a billionaire entrepreneur.Van is recruited into a nascent wing of the government, working on the outside of the main bureaucracy to vastly improve the security of government systems. His ingenious design gains him even more respect from his peers, but as the project continues Van goes through personality changes, becoming more paranoid and simultaneously more patriotic. Without the psychological aid of the money and nice house of his former company, he even begins to question whether he really is a computer scientist or just an over-glorified technician.The novel comes to a head as Van is asked to look into the reason a multibillion-dollar pork project spy satellite is failing in space. The bureaucracy, thinking that he will fail in this endeavor, hopes to use it to discredit his boss and him and put an end to their power climb in Washington. Van discovers the problem and through a covert military-like attack on the source, puts an end to it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_Jane_Run"title="See Jane Run">
The book centers on Jane Whittaker, who finds herself on a street corner in downtown Boston with no recollection of her name, her physical features, her personality, or any of the details of her life, albeit being familiar with her surroundings and easily recalling facts such as the formula for the length of a hypotenuse.She is further terrified to see that she is wearing a blood-stained blue dress, under a long coat which contains in its pockets nearly $10,000. Frightened out of her mind, she heads to a hotel, where she spends a couple of days trying to figure out how to proceed. She decides to go to the local police station, but withholds some key information when she recounts her experience. They take her to the hospital for examination, where she is later reunited with a handsome doctor claiming to be her husband. Dr. Whittaker takes Jane back to their suburban home to recover. Instead of finding rest, however, Jane is overwhelmed by suspicions as she begins to uncover the horrific past that her mind had forgotten.Along with Dr. Whittaker, a housekeeper named Paula Marinelli - who is obviously loyal to the good doctor - is also taking care of her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carnelian_Cube"title="The Carnelian Cube">
The carnelian cube of the title is a small red "dream stone" confiscated by archaeologist Arthur Cleveland Finch from Tiridat Ariminian, one of the workers on the dig he is supervising in Cappadocia. It bears an inscription in Etruscan that appears to identify its original possessor as Apollonius of Tyana, and supposedly allows the bearer to attain the world of his dreams.Finch, frustrated with the irrationality of his existence as an archaeologist, yearns for a more rational world in which he could realize his true dream of being a poet. Sleeping with the stone beneath his pillow he finds himself cast into a parallel world. It and later worlds visited by Finch tend to place him in or near his native Louisville, Kentucky rather than the Middle Eastern locale he starts out from, but Kentuckys that, while appearing to share much of the "real" world's history, have developed in radically alternate directions due to differences in their worlds' psychological or physical properties.Finch's new home sets the pattern; it is entirely "too" rational, with its denizens acting solely from self-interest in a society organized on a strict patron-client basis. The regimentation extends to naming conventions: people's names are ordered surname first, given name second, and occupation last. Finch initially finds himself classed as "Finch Arthur Poet" — and is, indeed, a poet. Poets are, however, a low-classified occupation, with few perks, certainly as compared to the local patron, Sullivan Michael Politician. Finch's attempts at social climbing, while initially successful, also bring him enemies, eventually making his new world too hot for him. The stone had not made the trip with him, and Finch's only means of escaping this new and not entirely congenial existence is to purloin its counterpart from the local version of Tiridat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Lullaby"title="This Lullaby">
Remy is an eighteen-year-old who is about to leave for college. Her father, a musician, wrote his one and only hit song the day she was born. The song, called "This Lullaby," became extremely popular, but he died soon after its release. Now, Remy's mother is getting married for the fifth time. After her mother's previous failed marriages, love is something that Remy doesn't believe exists.One day, she randomly meets Dexter at a car dealership that her mother's fiancé owns. He claims to feel a connection with her the second he saw her. He is messy and a musician, two of her least favorite traits. But he is persistent. She slowly finds herself falling for him. She doesn't want to care about him, but somehow she just can't bring herself to get rid of him. Eventually, they start dating and she is surprised by how open and honest and caring he is. When Dexter overhears Remy saying that she only wants him to be a summer fling, they break up. Remy begins to date another guy, but she finds herself always thinking about Dexter. Meanwhile, her brother is getting engaged, her mother's new husband is cheating with his secretary, and her friends are all having problems of their own. But in the end, Remy realizes that she truly does love Dexter, and they get back together. Remy still leaves for college but in "Just Listen" it is revealed that Remy and Dexter are together because Remy is shown with Dexter while Remy is on fall break from college.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Yoke"title="Under the Yoke">
The tranquility in a Bulgarian village under Ottoman rule is only superficial: the people are quietly preparing for an uprising. The plot follows the story of Boycho Ognyanov, who, having escaped from a prison in Diarbekir, returns to the Bulgarian town of Byala Cherkva (White Church, fictional representation of Sopot) to take part in the rebellion. There he meets old friends, enemies, and the love of his life. The plot portrays the personal drama of the characters, their emotions, motives for taking part in or standing against the rebellion, betrayal and conflict.Historically, the April Uprising of 1876 failed due to bad organization, limited resources, and betrayal. The brutal way in which the Ottomans broke down the uprising became the pretext for the Russian-Turkish war, that brought about Bulgarian independence.The book has many autobiographical elements: Sopot is the writer's hometown, and he did take a personal part in the uprising described.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Pigza_Swallowed_the_Key"title="Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key">
The book describes the life of a child named Joey Pigza who frequently gets into trouble at school due to his erratic behavior. He has a habit of swallowing a key attached to a piece of string in order to pull it back out again, and on one instance he forgets to attach a string to the key, preventing him from pulling it back up. At school, Joey puts his finger in a pencil sharpener, runs around with scissors, and cuts the tip of a girl's nose off. Pigza is on medication which he takes regularly, but it doesn't seem to be very effective. As a consequence of slicing off the tip of his classmate's nose, Pigza is suspended from school and sent to a special education center. Joey Pigza fears that "something [is] wrong inside" him, a fear which escalates until the medications he is on are readjusted, and he feels he is able to make better decisions. The book implies that Joey Pigza is dealing with a condition such as ADHD, adjustment disorder, depression, or conduct disorder, but an exact diagnosis is never specified.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_a_Couple_of_Days"title="Just a Couple of Days">
Dr. Flake Fountain is approached by the military to develop an antidote to a virus they have created, which is known as the "Pied Piper" virus, due to its relation to a mirth- and dance-inducing virus which supposedly caused the phenomenon the Pied Piper story was based on (see also St. John's Dance), which leaves its victims alive and unharmed, but destroys the brain's capacity for symbolic reasoning. This leaves victims unable to use language, including speech and writing to communicate. However, before Dr. Fountain can complete his antidote, the virus is released and everyone else on Earth, as far as he knows, is infected with it.He holes up in the house of his friends Blip (a fellow college professor) and Sophia, two organic hippie types. Since the house is a self-sufficient geodesic dome, he is protected from the virus and has electricity, and it is revealed that the book is his journal, where he is recording everything that has happened and is happening. Each chapter also begins with a selection from the "Book o' Billets-Doux" ("love letters" in French), which he found in the dome and is apparently an extended conversation between Blip and Sophia which they wrote, eventually while succumbing to the virus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Piano_Tuner"title="The Piano Tuner">
The novel is set in 1886, in the jungles of Burma. The protagonist, a middle-aged man by the name of Edgar Drake is commissioned by the British War Office to repair a rare Erard grand piano belonging to a Doctor Anthony Carroll. Carroll, who is the root of many myths, had the piano shipped to him as a means to bring peace and union amongst the princes in Burma in order to further the expansion of the British Empire. The extreme humidity of the tropical climate soon rendered it useless and horribly out of tune. Drake's "mission" thus becomes vital to the Crown's strategic interests. In a series of sub-plots and intrigue the surgeon-major is charged with treason. When the piano tuner goes to meet the surgeon-major against the wishes of the military staff, he finds himself suddenly surrounded.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Beast"title="Blood Beast">
"Blood Beast" takes place about a year after the events recounted in "Slawter". Grubbs Grady is back in Carcery Vale. His life seems to have settled down at last. He's getting on well with Dervish. Grubbs has been struggling to contain the magical talent he discovered in the town of Slawter. He doesn't want to become a Disciple and he hopes his abilities will fade if he hides them long enough. His magician's prowess is growing all the time. He is having dreadful nightmares and suspects he might be turning into a werewolf.Things come to a head when Grubbs and his friends, Loch and Bill-E decide to go on a treasure hunt. While exploring a tunnel that leads to a cave, Grubbs hears a scream behind him and turns to find Loch's lifeless body on the floor, blood seeping from his head. Bill-E leaves to get help, and Grubbs attempts unsuccessfully to resuscitate Loch, whose heart has stopped. Dervish returns with Bill-E and they dispose of Loch's body in a nearby quarry. Dervish explains that the cave is a potential doorway for demons to enter the human world and it is his responsibility to safeguard it.Grubbs returns to school, and meets with the new psychologist, Juni Swan, whom he had previously met in "Slawter". Juni also has a gift for magic. She becomes romantically involved with Dervish who teaches her more spells.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_of_Frankenstein"title="Father of Frankenstein">
James Whale has just had a stroke. He is convinced that his time has come to die. Increasingly confused and disoriented, his mind is overwhelmed by images of the past – from his working-class childhood in Britain, the trenches of World War I, and the lavish glamour of Hollywood premieres in the 1930s.Whale asks his new gardener, a Marine veteran named Clayton Boone, to come to his studio for some portrait sittings. Boone is uncomfortable with Whale's homosexuality but also fascinated by the chance to know a famous Hollywood director and so, despite his apprehensions, the relationship continues.Boone begins to think of Whale as a friend. But one night after they return from a Hollywood garden party, Whale makes an advance at Boone, trying to make him so angry that he will kill Whale. The old man wants to die; he wants his death to have a human face, Boone's face. Boone refuses and is very upset. Whale apologizes–he knows he is going insane. The next morning, Whale understands that he is ready to cross over, alone. He drowns himself in his backyard swimming pool.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerilka's_Story"title="Nerilka's Story">
Taking a different approach from the previous seven books in the series, "Nerilka's Story" has a non-dragonrider and non-harper as its major viewpoint character. It is set during the events detailed in "". Nerilka is the daughter of a Lord Holder who turns her back on her life in an upper-class family and sets out to fight the disease that threatens to kill all humans on Pern. According to a critic for the "Chicago Tribune", Nerilka makes for an "intelligent, resourceful, selfless and, alas, homely" heroine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uglies"title="Uglies">
Three hundred years in the future, the government provides for everything, including plastic surgery operations. Everyone on their sixteenth birthday receives the “pretty” operation which transforms them into the society's standard of beautiful. After the operation, new Pretties cross the river that divides the city and lead a new life with no responsibilities or obligations. There are two other operations available, one to transform Pretties into “Middle-Pretties” (adults with a job), and another to transform Middle-Pretties into "Crumblies".Former cities have decayed after bacteria infected the world's petroleum, making it unstable. The old society, so dependent on oil, fell apart when cars and oil fields exploded and food could no longer be transported. People who lived before this catastrophe are called "Rusties."Tally Youngblood is almost sixteen. Like every other Ugly, she awaits the operation with great anticipation. Her best friend, Peris, has already had the operation and, motivated by her desire to see him, Tally sneaks across the river to New Pretty Town. There she meets Shay, another Ugly. They become friends and Shay teaches Tally how to ride a hoverboard. Shay also mentions rebelling against the operation. At first, Tally ignores the idea, but is forced to deal with it when Shay runs away a few days before their shared sixteenth birthday, leaving behind cryptic directions to her destination, a “renegade settlement” called the Smoke, where city runaways go to escape the operation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Are_You_My_Mother?"title="Are You My Mother?">
"Are You My Mother?" is a story about a hatchling bird. His mother, thinking her egg will stay in her nest where she left it, leaves her egg alone and flies off to find food. The baby bird hatches while the mother is away. The hatchling does not understand where his mother is so he goes to look for her. While he cannot yet fly, he walks, and in his search, he asks a kitten (who says nothing), a hen, a dog, and a cow if they are his mother, but none of them are.Refusing to give up, he sees an old car, which he realizes certainly cannot be his mother. In desperation, the hatchling calls out to a boat and a plane (neither responds), and at last, he approaches and climbs onto the teeth of an enormous steam shovel calling to it "Mother, Mother! Here I am, Mother!". However, after it belches "SNORT" from its exhaust stack, the bird cries "You are not my mother! You are a Snort!" As the machine shudders and grinds into motion, he cannot escape. "I want my mother!" he sobs.At that moment, the steam shovel drops the hatchling into his nest, and his mother returns. The two are reunited, much to their delight, and the baby bird recounts to his mother the adventures he had looking for her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jewel_in_the_Skull"title="The Jewel in the Skull">
The novel is set at some indeterminate time in a post-nuclear holocaust future, where science and sorcery co-exist and the Dark Empire of Granbretan (Great Britain) is expanding across Europe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Die_in_Italbar"title="To Die in Italbar">
Heidel von Hymack, known to all as "H", is a man with the power to cure people of incurable diseases. He travels from world to world healing people by touching them. However his healing powers have a dark side: after a while they reverse and he becomes a spreader of deadly diseases. Avoiding contact with others is almost impossible because of his celebrity, so his most dedicated followers tend to die horribly. He does not know why he has this power, though he dreams of a mysterious "Lady" who rules his life. In fact he has been accidentally joined to a deity of the Pei'an religion, a goddess of disease and healing whose changing moods determine whether he saves or kills. The only other human so joined is Francis Sandow, a man of incalculable wealth who builds planets. Sandow was introduced in the novel "Isle of the Dead". To escape his fate, "H" must go with Sandow and others to the devastated remains of the Earth, destroyed in a recent war, where Sandow engages in a duel of powers to drive out the goddess.Elsewhere, Malacar Miles is the last holdout on Earth, the last bastion of the old regime and an obstacle to Sandow and other world builders who want to make the planet habitable again. Part of Sandow's mission is to remove the obstacle Malacar presents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hand_of_Zei"title="The Hand of Zei">
Travel writer Dirk Barnevelt and lecturer George Tangaloa, associates of interplanetary explorer and documentarian Igor Shtain, are drafted on Shtain's disappearance to complete his commission to explore the Sargasso Sea-like Sunqar area of Krishna's Banjao Sea — and incidentally to find Shtain, who is suspected to have been kidnapped to Krishna. Arriving on the planet, the Earthmen travel to their goal in disguise as native Krishnans; Barnevelt himself is given the alias of the famous general, Snyol of Plesht, from the Antarctic nation of Nichnyamadze (setting of the Krishnan short story "Calories"). Snyol's formidable reputation proves at various times both a boon and a hindrance to their mission.The two are dogged at every step by pirates from the Sunqar who believe their true goal is to disrupt the pirates' smuggling operation. Complications arise when the two become embroiled in the affairs of the native monarchy of Qirib, whose princess Zei is kidnapped by the pirates. Dirk is ordered by Queen Alvandi to recover the princess while George remains behind as a hostage. Dirk must therefore take the lead in rescuing Zei, putting down the pirates, recovering Shtain, and settling the affairs of Alvandi's topsy-turvy kingdom, in which the women bear arms and the men languish in perfumed idleness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shepherd_of_the_Hills_(novel)"title="The Shepherd of the Hills (novel)">
The story depicts the lives of mountain people living in the Ozarks.The main story surrounds the relationship between Grant "Old Matt" Matthews Senior and Dad Howitt, an elderly, mysterious, learned man who has escaped the buzzing restlessness of the city to live in the backwoods neighborhood of Mutton Hollow. Howitt spends his time alone, acting as a mediator and friend to the mountain people, and trying to recover from his tragic past, which includes the prior deaths of his wife and children, and the later presumed madness and subsequent suicide of his only surviving child, his artist son (later referred to as "Mad Howard").Howitt's reclusiveness has earned him the moniker "The Shepherd of The Hills", yet he befriends the Matthews clan (the strongest and most respected family in the area) who come to love and trust him. Old Matt and the Shepherd's common history (which only The Shepherd knows at the outset) involves Old Matt's daughter, who died while giving birth to her son (and Old Matt's grandson), Pete Howard: unbeknownst to the Matthews, Mad Howard is Pete's father, and thus The Shepherd is Pete's grandfather.Years earlier, Mad Howard returned home after spending time painting in the mountains, and one of his paintings became famous, as did he. That painting was of a young girl, pretty, standing beside a creek; the girl in the painting was Old Matt's daughter, with whom he had fallen in love. However, Mad Howard believed that his father's pride of family and place in society would never allow him to approve of his son's marriage to an Ozark country girl. Mad Howard packed up his paintings and returned to the city, leaving Old Matt's daughter with the impression that he would return. Once returning to the city, Mad Howard sent her a letter explaining that his father would not approve of their marriage. However, he never told his father about Old Matt's daughter and his relations with her; the secrecy drove a wedge between Mad Howard and his father, although his father never understood why. Meanwhile, Old Matt has sworn he will kill the man who abandoned his daughter, as well as his father, if ever he finds them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_God"title="Talking God">
An unidentified man is found dead along the railroad tracks near Gallup, New Mexico. There is a note in one pocket of his suit referring to Agnes Tsotsie and a Yeibichai or Night Chant ceremony. FBI agent Kennedy calls on Lt. Leaphorn to aid in finding footprints near the body. There are no footprints to follow, but the note sends him to interview Agnes Tsotsie, who shows him the letter from Henry Highhawk, who will attend her Night Chant. Always curious, Leaphorn learns that an Amtrak train made an emergency stop in the desert, the likely explanation for the body found near the railroad tracks with no footprints around him. The man's left-behind luggage is now stored in Washington D.C. Leaphorn takes his vacation in Washington D.C. to follow up on Pointed Shoes. Leaphorn talks with Roland Dockery and Peres of Amtrak, who show him the luggage, which holds a useful notebook. Peres saw the man now known to be the killer of Pointed Toes. The notebook includes the name and prescription number for a medicine he took, revealing both the name and address of Elogio Santillanes. Leaphorn proceeds to inform the next of kin, who are rather quiet in receiving the news. He then notices that their next door neighbor matches the description of the killer. As Santillanes was tortured, Leaphorn suspects the family home might be bugged, so leaves them with the sad news. Leaphorn calls Kennedy to match fingerprints under the victim's proper name. Leaphorn calls the NTP, learning that Chee was arresting officer for Highhawk and is now in D.C.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Judas_Pair"title="The Judas Pair">
Antiques dealer Lovejoy is commissioned to hunt down what he considers to be a mythical object, the Judas pair, the supposed thirteenth pair of duelling pistols, an 18th-century flintlock made by the famous London gunmaker Durs Egg. After two murders Lovejoy is certain that the pistols do exist, and are now in the hands of the murderer.Lovejoy solves the mystery by drawing from his comprehensive knowledge of the antique world, poring on the backgrounds of materials so that past and present deceit and criminality are revealed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Gould's_Secret"title="Joe Gould's Secret">
By observing the lives of those around him and recording the goings-on, Gould set about compiling an exhaustive record of modern life he called the "Oral History." He claimed that oral history held more truth than the formalized history of textbooks and professors, as it gave voices to the lower classes that were representative of true humanity. In the 1920s, Gould had small portions of his "Oral History" published in magazines, but in the years that followed he became more secretive and eccentric. He was well-known among the local shopkeepers, artists, and restaurateurs, many of whom gave him handouts of money or food in support of his project.Mitchell met Gould in 1942 and wrote the profile "Professor Sea Gull" on him for "The New Yorker". The first part of "Joe Gould's Secret" is made up of this profile, covering the period from Gould's graduation from Harvard University in 1911, leading up to the writing of his "Oral History", said to be composed of 20,000 conversations and 9,000,000 words. The second part of the book is a more personal memoir of Mitchell's experiences with Gould, their eventual falling out, and his discovery of Joe Gould's secret: that the "Oral History" did not exist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heralds"title="The Heralds">
The book begins with a brief introduction describing the lasting nature of the College of Arms through successive monarchs and governments. Immediately, though, the book shifts its focus to the current set of officers of arms at the college. At the end of the first chapter, Garter Principal King of Arms–the head of the body of heralds – announces his intended retirement from the post in six months time.The announcement by Garter throws the entire College of Arms into confusion. Set in the late 1960s, the retiring King of Arms had led the college since the end of World War II. Each of the other, twelve officers of arms in ordinary begins calculating his own chances of promotion to the top spot. Some continue about their own business, knowing that their dutiful service will be rewarded, however, Cecil Gascoigne, who is Chester Herald, decides he will stop only short of murder in obtaining the coveted office.Slowly, but surely, Cecil Gascoigne begins eliminating his competitors. His methods are diverse, and include devising for a colleague to be caught smuggling illegal substances into England; also using blackmail and bankruptcy to his advantage. Over time, Gascoigne begins grasping that unfortunate problems have befallen his fellow officers, and he is not the cause. Thinking that his competition has him on a list for elimination, Gascoigne begins doubling his efforts; by book's end, four officers of arms have died, and the rest disgraced.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Irregular_Verbs"title="Portuguese Irregular Verbs">
German professor Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld feels that he is not accorded the scholarly recognition and veneration he deserves, though he has a good position as a philologist at the Institute of Romance Philology in Regensburg, Germany. Von Igelfeld is extremely tall, like his closest colleagues. They are professors Dr Dr ("honoris causa") Florianus Prinzel and Dr Detlev Amadeus Unterholzer. Von Igelfeld is plagued by envy and suspicion of them.The old Irish language was the first interest of von Igelfeld in pursuing his doctoral studies. He moves to Munich to work under an expert in Irish. They go on a field trip to Cork, where they are directed to a man in the west who will not let them in his home; rather he shouts invective at them for an hour until they leave. Von Igelfeld takes it down phonetically, to learn later that all the vocabulary are curse words based in pornography. His landlady sees the page of Irish (translated into German) in his room, and throws him out on the spot. He had already been considering irregular verbs as a topic of greater interest, so he parts from the unsupportive professor in Munich for the study of Romance languages at the University of Wiesbaden.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Villa_of_Reduced_Circumstances"title="At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances">
The Professor is a troubled German academic whose life's achievement is the (fictional) book, "Portuguese Irregular Verbs". The book relates details of von Igelfeld's troubled relationships with the other major characters of the book series, Professor Dr Dr ("honoris causa") Florianus Prinzel and Professor Dr Detlev Amadeus Unterholzer, who work at the fictional Institute of Romance Philology at Regensburg, Germany.The book consists of two longer stories. In the first story, "On Being Light Blue" von Igelfeld's birthday wish leads him to a four-month stint at Cambridge University where he is nonplussed by the eccentric English academics and their constant infighting. In the second story, "The Villa of Reduced Circumstances," von Igelfeld unwittingly becomes embroiled in a military coup in Colombia after being invited there to receive an academic award.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briar's_Book"title="Briar's Book">
The main protagonist of the book is Briar Moss, a young ex-thief and "green" or plant mage, having ambient magic with all forms of plant life. Through his eyes the book explores themes of poverty and social injustice, as a deadly plague named the Blue Pox strikes The Mire, the poorest quarter of Emelan's capital city, Summersea.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Pieces_of_Gold"title="Thousand Pieces of Gold">
Lalu is the daughter of a Chinese farmer. When her father loses everything, Lalu finds herself thrust into debt slavery. Her misfortunes eventually take her to the Pacific Northwest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_Wave_(novel)"title="Shock Wave (novel)">
While investigating the deaths of a large number of marine animals, Dirk Pitt and Al Giordino encounter a group of tourists on Seymour Island. Aboard the tourists' cruise ship (the "Polar Queen"), a mysterious "disease" has killed everyone on board. The tourists are brought to the "Ice Hunter", a research vessel for the National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA). Here, they find out that the "Polar Queen" is missing and will not respond to their calls. After some searching, Pitt and Al discover that the missing ship is heading towards a cliff. After being winched onto the ship from a helicopter, Pitt steers and manages to narrowly avoid the crash. But he finds only one surviving passenger on board: Deirdre. Maeve, the tour guide from Seymour Island, is Deirdre's sister, and she seems perplexed to find Deirdre aboard.Pitt and Al uncover more evidence to suggest that the passengers of the "Polar Queen" were killed by extremely high-powered soundwaves. At this time, more outbreaks occur on a cargo ship and a Chinese junk. The cargo ship blows up while a boarding party from a passing ship is aboard; in the distance, a futuristic yacht is spotted heading away from the scene. We learn that the yacht belongs to the Dorsett Consolidated Mining Company, a gemstone mining company headed by the ruthless Arthur Dorsett. Dorsett is also the father of Maeve, Deirdre and a third daughter, Boudicca. Of Dorsett's three daughters, Maeve is the only one who does not work for his company. As a young girl, she ran away from home, broke all bonds with her family, and changed her last name to Fletcher.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hostage_of_Zir"title="The Hostage of Zir">
Tour guide Fergus Reith arrives on the backward world of Krishna with a gaggle of tourists, the first such group to visit the planet. Though he is woefully unprepared and his charges collectively epitomize the "Ugly Terran" stereotype, he readies for his task as best he can and squires his flock off on their grand circuit of the northern Varastou nations among which the Terran spaceport of Novorecife is situated.The first portion of the novel is an episodic account of their misadventures cruising down the Pichide River, in the Free City of Majbur, and the island kingdom of Zamba. The next few stops, including a visit to the republic of Katai-Jhogorai, are passed over summarily; the real action begins when the group reaches Baianch, capital of the northern kingdom of Dur. There, while taking the new railway to the end of the line, the party is kidnapped by Barré vas-Sarf, bandit ruler of the restive province of Zir. Barré hopes to use them as bargaining chips in his dispute with Tashian bad-Garin, prince-regent of Dur. Reith escapes, only to be captured in turn by the forces of Shosti, the Witch of Zir.Shosti is Barré's rival for control of Zir and the leader of a local religious cult; her designs on Reith are quite different, as her prophecies lead her to believe she must mate with a red-haired Terran to engender a savior god. A previous captive, Felix Borel (protagonist of the earlier Krishna short story "Perpetual Motion"), had been executed after failing to impregnate Shosti. Reith reads his own fate in Borel's, knowing Terrans and Krishnans are not interfertile – the latter, while near human in appearance, are an alien species. Once more he succeeds in escaping, subsequently leading a raid to free his tourists from Barré.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Veins_of_Latin_America"title="Open Veins of Latin America">
## Structure."Open Veins of Latin America" has a foreword written by Chilean writer Isabel Allende, followed by a preface by Galeano titled “In Defense of the Word” and a series of acknowledgments. The book has an introduction titled “120 Million Children in the Eye of the Hurricane,” and it is then divided into three parts: “Part I: Mankind’s poverty as a consequence of the wealth of the land;” “Part II: Development is a voyage with more shipwrecks than navigators;” and “Part III: Seven Years After.”Each of the first two parts has subcategories. Part I is divided into “Lust for Gold, Lust for Silver,” “King Sugar and Other Agricultural Monarchs,” and “The Invisible Sources of Power.” Part II is divided into “Tales of Premature Death” and “The Contemporary Structure of Plunder.” Lastly, Part III is considered to be the conclusion of the book, and it was written seven years later and annexed to future editions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter_in_the_Dark_(novel)"title="Laughter in the Dark (novel)">
Albinus is a respected, reasonably happy married art critic who lives in Berlin. He lusts after the 17-year-old Margot whom he meets at a cinema, where she works, and woos her over the course of many encounters, primarily with money. His prolonged affair with Margot is eventually revealed to Albinus's wife Elisabeth when Margot deliberately sends a letter to the Albinuses' residence and Albinus is unable to intercept it before it is discovered. Elisabeth leaves with the assistance of her brother, Paul, and takes their daughter, Irma, with her. Rather than disown the young troublemaker, Albinus is even more attracted to Margot. She eventually manipulates him into allowing her to move in to his flat where he resided with his wife, and she sets to working on him getting a divorce so that she might marry him and acquire access to his significant wealth.Margot uses Albinus to fulfill her ambition in life to become a rich film star. Even when Albinus' daughter, Irma, takes ill and eventually succumbs to pneumonia, Margot insistently drives a wedge between his old life and his new, in order to totalize her capture of him. Inadvertently, Albinus introduces Margot to Axel Rex at one of his many dinner parties, but he does not know that the two have previously been lovers. Margot and Rex resume their relationship, and start plotting to get Albinus out of the way and rob him of his money. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_that_Preserves"title="The Power that Preserves">
Back in his own "real" world, Thomas Covenant is devastated by the loss of Elena, though he still maintains to himself that his experience in the Land was all just a dream. Tormented by this unanswerable paradox, he neglects his physical condition; he stops taking his medications and fails to treat his head wound, allowing his dormant leprosy to once again become active.Wandering in the woods outside of his home town, he comes upon a lost little girl suffering from a rattlesnake bite. At this point he is once again summoned to the Land, this time by the desperate High Lord Mhoram, who is in need of aid. Covenant finds that seven years have gone by since the Illearth War, and Lord Foul is preparing for his final assault on the people of the Land. Foul has enslaved the tormented spirit of former High Lord Elena, who now wields the Staff of Law in the service of evil. The Lords have lost their most loyal defenders, the ageless Bloodguard, and the Land has been cast into a perpetual winter. Furthermore, Lord Foul has rebuilt his army, which, under the command of the third Giant-Raver Satansfist, now besieges the Lords' mountain-fortress of Revelstone. As a last resort, the Lords have decided to call upon Covenant, in the hope that he will be able to use the wild magic of his white gold ring to repel the siege and save the Land from total destruction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive's_Ocean"title="Olive's Ocean">
Every summer, Martha leaves her home in Wisconsin to visit her grandmother, Godbee, on the Atlantic Ocean. One year, Martha’s classmate Olive dies in a hit-and-run accident. Olive’s mother later delivers to Martha a page from Olive’s journal. The page reveals that Olive had admired Martha from afar despite never speaking to or hanging out with her, and that they had a lot in common, particularly a love of the ocean and a wish to become a writer. Martha begins to regret having not known Olive very well.When Martha's family arrives at Godbee's house, an argument between Martha's parents creates tension between everyone in the family. Martha distances herself from her family out of anger and becomes closer to Godbee. They decide to share one secret about themselves every day of Martha's stay. In the meantime, Martha begins to write a story about Olive as a memorial.During her stay, Martha develops a crush on Jimmy, a friend of her older brother Vince, though Godbee warns her to be careful around Jimmy. Martha decides to make Jimmy a character in her story about Olive, renaming him James. Jimmy, who is interested in film-making, is collecting footage to make a film about "life," covering various facets such as family, death, and love. Martha contributes to the “death” portion of the film with a recorded interview in which she tells Olive's story. As part of the "love" section of the film, Jimmy spontaneously sets up his camera on the way back home and kisses her. Later, Martha learns that Jimmy made a bet with Vince and some other boys as to whether he could get her to kiss him on camera before they come back from sailing. Heartbroken, she scraps the portion of her story about Olive and James. Later, Jimmy's younger brother Tate apologizes to Martha for his brother's actions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weslandia"title="Weslandia">
The story follows a protagonist, Wesley. When Wesley, a somewhat eccentric boy with no friends, discovers a mysterious plant magically growing in his parents' backyard, he cultivates the plant over his summer vacation. The plant, which he names "swist", provides him with a food source, and allows him to build shelter, tools, and even create his own entertainment and inspires Wesley to create his own writing system. Wesley's resourcefulness and meticulous research eventually allow to him the basis of his own civilization which he names "Weslandia", an eponymous micro-nation in his parents' backyard. His efforts are successful, and instead of being a social outcast, he gains a group of followers made up of his former grade-school tormentors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Light_(novel)"title="Black Light (novel)">
There are two interconnected plots that unfold simultaneously in this novel; one is set in the present, and deals with Bob Lee Swagger and Russ Pewtie, while the other is set in 1955, and deals with Bob Lee's father, Earl, and the events leading up to his death.This book catches the reader up with Bob Lee about five years after the events in "Point of Impact". He now has a daughter who is four years old, named Nikki, and he has married Julie Fenn, the widow of his fallen spotter, Donnie Fenn. He is living happily, if not humbly, in Arizona, trying to avoid the notoriety he gained during the events in "Point of Impact".A young man approaches him with a proposition. This young man's name is Russ Pewtie, the grown son of Bud Pewtie, who as described in "Dirty White Boys" was responsible for the death of Lamar Pye. Russ is a writer, and wants to write a book about Bob Lee's father Earl, a Marine Corps veteran and State Policeman who was supposedly gunned down one night in 1955, near Bob's home town of Blue Eye, Arkansas, by Lamar's father, Jimmy who was to surrender to Earl after robbing a grocery store and killing four people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_to_Hunt"title="Time to Hunt">
The book begins about four or five years after the events in "Black Light". Swagger's daughter is now around 8, and he owns a "lay-up" horse ranch, where he cares for horses. He has been slipping into a deep depression due to his inability to properly support his family.Alienating himself from his wife and child, they leave for a morning horseback ride with a friend from another ranch. His wife is shot and nearly killed by a sniper, and the friend is killed. Bob assumes that the man was mistaken for him, and killed in an attempt to kill Bob Lee. This act plunges him back into a world of violence and intrigue.While his wife recuperates, he attempts to unravel the secrets behind the assault.This book has a dual plot, with the present plot, dealing with Bob's investigation into his wife's attempted murder. The second plot is set in the past, beginning on a Marine Corps base in the late 1960s or early 1970s.A young Donny Fenn is the squad leader of a group of Marines who perform the state funeral services for Marines killed in the Vietnam War, which is raging across the world. Donny is brought before his superiors and ordered to follow one of his men, who is suspected of sympathizing with peace demonstrators who are led by a charismatic man named Trig Carter. In turn, Trig is suspected of having ties to an extremist group. Incidentally, Donny's girlfriend, Julie, is involved with this group of war protestors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mad_God's_Amulet"title="The Mad God's Amulet">
## Book One.Heading West back to the Kamarg, Dorian Hawkmoon and Oladahn find themselves in the deserted city of Soryandum. Oladahn disappears while out hunting and on seeking him Hawkmoon sees an ornithopter of the Dark Empire of Granbretan.Oladahn is captured by forces of the Dark Empire, led by renegade Frenchman Huillam d'Averc, but inexplicably survives what should be a fatal fall when he escapes by throwing himself from the top of a tower. Hawkmoon and Oladahn battle the Dark Empire warriors but are ultimately overcome by weight of numbers.Hawkmoon and Oladahn are imprisoned awaiting an ornithopter to transport them to Sicilia. Oladahn reveals that he was rescued from his fall by ghosts, and these wraiths re-appear and free the pair. The wraiths are the inhabitants of Soryandum, transformed by their own science so that they exist in another dimension. D'Averc is planning to raze Soryandum which would destroy the wraiths, so they call on Hawkmoon to aid them by recovering a pair of old Soryandum machines. When they transcended this dimension the wraiths had the machines hidden and guarded by a mechanical beast which Hawkmoon will have to defeat.Hawkmoon and Oladahn find the machine store and defeat the mechanical beast by blinding it. They recover the two machines but the mechanical beast follows after them.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_and_the_Shadow_Thieves"title="Peter and the Shadow Thieves">
The book starts three months after the end of "Peter and the Starcatchers". Peter, James, Thomas, Prentiss, and Tubby Ted have settled on the island, with Tinker Bell keeping a watchful eye on Peter and the pirates, led by Black Stache (who now goes by the alias "Captain Hook" since his initial fight with Peter), have erected and settled into a fort. Around this time, "Le Fantome", under scarred Captain Nerezza, finds Mollusk Island after weeks of searching, accompanied by the vengeful Slank and the dark, menacing, mysterious entity known as Lord Ombra. During a confrontation with Hook as Peter and the mermaids rescue a captured James, a posse from "Le Famtome" hold a nighttime standoff with the Mollusk tribe over the location of the large quantity of Starstuff that had briefly been on the island. After Ombra deduces that the Starstuff was taken by Lord Aster and the Starcatchers, the group leaves the island and immediately set sail for England. Peter, having witnessed the confrontation, decides that he must warn Molly of the approaching danger and stows away on the ship with Tinker Bell.The Asters receive a tip from the dolphins warning them of the landing party on Mollusk Island and the presence of the inhuman Ombra, prompting Leonard Aster to leave London with the Starstuff and guard it in a hidden location until the Return (the starstuff would be sent back into the heavens), leaving new nightmen to guard Molly and her mother, Louise. Meanwhile, Peter's presence on the ship is detected by Lord Ombra, forcing Peter to fake his death by temporarily jumping ship before flying back on board. When they arrive in London, Peter and Tinker Bell take off to find the Aster mansion but quickly become lost in the city. Peter and Tink are later captured and separated by a constable and a bird seller, respectively, but Tink is able to escape and save Peter from a court hearing. They continue to search for the Aster mansion in upper-class parts of London.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vixen_03"title="Vixen 03">
In 1954 "Vixen 03", an aircraft carrying a top-secret cargo to the military's testing grounds in the South Pacific, crashes and is never recovered. Thirty-four years later while on vacation Dirk Pitt, Special Projects Director for the National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA), finds the remains of "Vixen 03" and her top-secret cargo. His salvage efforts turn up some anomalies, including a body that is not of any member of the original crew; and send Pitt on a chase to stop a plot that could potentially leave millions dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vesuvius_Club"title="The Vesuvius Club">
Joshua Reynolds, of the British Secret Service, briefs Lucifer Box to pick up the threads of an investigation started by the recently murdered Jocelyn Utterson Poop of the Diplomatic Service. The only surviving clues were the names of two scientists who died within a day of each other.The investigation leads to the "Superior Funerals" undertakers run by Tom Bowler. Mr Bowler seems more interested in shipping boxes to and from Naples than burying the dead. An attempt on Box's life soon follows.A painter and friend of Box supplies a new lead into the deaths of the scientists, which leads to the curious Mrs. Midsomer Knight, who has been replaced by a soon to be murdered maidservant. Lucifer's friend, Christopher Miracle, is implicated in the murder.In Naples Lucifer interviews one of the survivors of the "Cambridge four" group of scientists and fears for his life. Soon after he meets Charlie Jackpot, who invites him to a house of ill-repute. At that point, we learn that Lucifer is bisexual, as Charlie is gay, and the two have sex. Charlie then leads Lucifer into the Vesuvius Club, where Lucifer meets the alluring Venus, who is not who she seems, and he and Charlie fall victim to sleeping gas.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aiding_and_Abetting_(novel)"title="Aiding and Abetting (novel)">
The central figure, Hildegarde Wolf, is a fraudulent psychiatrist, née Beate Pappenheim, working in Paris. She has two patients, each of whom claims to be Lord Lucan, an English earl who, in an actual event in London in 1974, killed his daughter's nanny, mistaking her for his wife. From this premise, the novel proceeds to present a series of humorous coincidences and improbabilities, revolving around the two 'Lucans' blackmailing Dr Wolf. The fatal confusion of 'Nanny and Wife' is mirrored chiasmatically in the fate of the two Lucans. The late chapters in Africa recall "A Handful of Dust" (1934) by Spark's model and sometime mentor Evelyn Waugh.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listening_Woman"title="Listening Woman">
After talking with Hosteen Tso to learn what will best improve his health, Margaret Cigaret walks away from the hogan on Nokaito Bench to ponder his situation and prepare her advice. She returns to find both Tso and her niece dead. Initial investigation does not find the killer, or any possible motive for this crime.Leaphorn is returning from a Kinaalda ceremony with a man who escaped arrest earlier. A car at very high speed approaches them, and slows seeing the police car’s flashing lights. Once Leaphorn is outside the car, the driver attempts to kill him with the vehicle, but Leaphorn moves away in time. The man wore gold rimmed glasses, had black hair and had a huge dog in the back seat. Leaphorn talks with Shorty McGinnis, where he meets Theodora Adams, who seeks Benjamin Tso. At the Tso hogan, Leaphorn observes Benjamin saying Catholic mass in the dawn. Later, Leaphorn returns to the Kinaalda to talk with Margaret Cigarette. He saw a name on a light carried by a boy there, which he realized was the name of the pilot of a helicopter lost in a dramatic theft of cash from an armored car in Santa Fe a few years earlier by members of the Buffalo Society, an extremist break-away group from AIM. The next step is a visit to the FBI office in Albuquerque to read the file for that case. He reads about Tull and Hoski, the latter a man of many aliases. While there, Leaphorn realizes that Mrs. Cigarette sat in a different spot than he originally assumed, one that meant the killer of Hosteen Tso and Annie came from the canyon, not the road. When that killer emerges from the canyon again, Father Benjamin and Theodora are the people who will be found in the hogan.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Masterharper_of_Pern"title="The Masterharper of Pern">
Robinton was rejected by his jealous father, Petiron, and spent most of his childhood with his nurturing mother. Since Robinton grew up in a very musically inclined setting, all the inhabitants helped bring him along in his journey to adulthood. Robinton composed many successful songs at a very early age and was unanimously elected Masterharper, also at a relatively young age. He tried to warn the Lord Holders of the rapacity of Lord Fax, but was unsuccessful. He was present when Lessa used her wit to provoke the duel in which Lord Fax was killed by F'lar; she had been in disguise as a drudge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_at_the_Harlequins!"title="Look at the Harlequins!">
"Look at the Harlequins!" is a fictional autobiography narrated by Vadim Vadimovich N. (VV), a Russian-American writer with uncanny biographical likenesses to the novel's author, Vladimir (Vladimirovich) Nabokov.VV is born in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and raised by his aunt, who advises him to "look at the harlequins" "Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!". After the revolution, VV moves to Western Europe. Count Nikifor Nikodimovich Starov becomes his patron (is he VV's father?). VV meets Iris Black who becomes his first wife. After her death—she is killed by a Russian émigré—he marries Annette (Anna Ivanovna Blagovo), his long-necked typist. They have a daughter, Isabel, and emigrate to the United States. The marriage fails; and, after Annette's death, VV takes care of the pubescent Isabel, now known as Bel. They travel from motel to motel. To counter ugly rumors, VV marries Louise Adamson while Bel elopes with an American to Soviet Russia. After the third marriage fails, VV marries again, a Bel lookalike (same birthdate, too), referred to as "you", his final love.VV is an unreliable narrator who gives conflicting information (e.g., on the death of his father) and seems to suffer from some psychological affliction. When making a full turn while walking—mentally, that is—and tracing his steps back, he is unable to execute the reversion of the surrounding vista in his imagination. He also has the notion that he is a double of another Nabokovian persona.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Os_Maias"title="Os Maias">
The book begins with the characters Carlos Eduardo da Maia, João da Ega, Afonso da Maia and Vilaça in the family's old house with plans to reconstruct it. The house, nicknamed "Ramalhete" (bouquet), is located in Lisbon. Its name comes from a tiled panel depicting a bouquet of sunflowers set on the place where the stone with the coat of arms should be. As the introductory scene goes on, the story of the Maia family is given, in a flashback style by Afonso.Afonso da Maia, a well-mannered Portuguese man, is married to Maria Eduarda Runa and their marriage only produces one son – Pedro da Maia. Pedro da Maia, who is given the typical romantic education, becomes a weak, low-spirited and sensitive man. He is very close to his mother and is inconsolable after her death. He only recuperates when he meets a beautiful woman called Maria Monforte with whom he gets married despite his father's objection. The marriage produces a son, Carlos Eduardo, and a daughter, whose name is not revealed until much later. Some time later, Maria Monforte falls in love with Tancredo (an Italian who is staying at their house after being accidentally wounded by Pedro) and runs away to Italy with him, betraying Pedro and taking her daughter along. When Pedro finds out, he is heartbroken and goes with his son to his father's house where he, during the night, commits suicide. Carlos stays at his grandfather's house and is educated by him, receiving the typical British education (as Afonso would have liked to have raised his son).
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_Bazilio"title="Cousin Bazilio">
Jorge, a successful engineer and employee of a ministry and Luiza, a romantic and dreamy girl, star as the typical bourgeois couple of the Lisbon society of the 19th century.There is a group of friends who attend the home of Jorge and Luiza: Dona Felicidade, a woman suffering from gas crises and who is in love with the Councillor; Sebastião ("Sebastian"), a close friend of Jorge; Councillor Acácio, good scholar; Ernestinho; and maids Joana - hussy and flirty - and Juliana - an angry, envious, and spiteful woman, responsible for the conflict of the novel.At the same time cultivating a formal and happy marriage with Jorge, Luiza still maintains friendship with a former colleague, Leopoldina - called "Bread and Cheese" for her continuous betrayal and adultery. Luiza's happiness and safety become endangered when Jorge need to travel to work at Alentejo.After the departure of her husband, Luiza is bored with nothing to do, in the doldrums and melancholy caused by the absence of her husband, and exactly in this meantime Bazilio comes from abroad. A womanizer and a "bon vivant", he doesn't take long to win the love of Luiza (they had dated before Luiza meet Jorge). Luiza was a person with a strong romantic view of life as she usually read only novels, and Bazilio was the man of her dreams: he was rich and lived in France. The friendly love became an ardent passion and this causes Luiza to practice adultery. Meanwhile, Juliana is just waiting for a chance to blackmail Luiza.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Menacers"title="The Menacers">
For reasons unknown, flying saucers apparently with United States Air Force markings have begun attacking locations in Mexico. Helm's mission is to transport a witness to one of these attacks to Washington, and to stop her at all costs from being captured by Soviet agents, even if that means killing her.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poisoners"title="The Poisoners">
After a novice secret agent (Annette from "The Menacers") is murdered—assassin Matt Helm (code name "Eric") is assigned to eliminate her killer, and find out why she was killed in the first place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intriguers"title="The Intriguers">
This novel is a direct follow-up to "The Poisoners". It is also the first book in the Matt Helm series to focus on Helm's superior, Mac, whose full name is revealed for the first time as Arthur McGillivray Borden. The storyline of this book is rather uncharacteristic because, instead of fighting terrorists and enemy names, Helm, known as Eric, and Mac work together to bring down unfriendly elements from within their own government, in particular a man who is threatening Mac's authority.Fishing in the Gulf of California, Eric is shot at from an island. He races away, surprised at the power of the engine of his boat. Correctly calculating that his assailant had come in another boat from the same marina, he waits for the gunman to try to escape, swamps his boat, and tows it back to shore, leaving the gunman to drown.At the marina, he is met by Martha Borden, Mac's daughter, who was sent by Mac with a message to call the office. Doing so, he deduces that bureaucratic infighting has resulted in Mac being poorly impersonated and the agency co-opted. Martha tells him she is supposed to accompany him to meet agent Lorna at the ranch near Phoenix.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intimidators"title="The Intimidators">
Despite the internal politics of "The Intriguers", Matt Helm (code name Eric) still finds himself with plenty of work to do for his boss, Mac. This time he has a two-part mission: kill an enemy agent and then investigate the disappearances of a number of jet-setters within the Bermuda Triangle.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminators_(novel)"title="The Terminators (novel)">
A longtime friend of Mac, Helm's boss, blames Big Oil for his wife's death aboard their modest yacht; in retaliation, he wants Helm's secretive, and murderous, agency to make trouble for an international oil company. Mac assigns Helm to get to the bottom of this request — and to "take care of" his friend.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Retaliators_(novel)"title="The Retaliators (novel)">
One of Helm's fellow operatives is killed by U.S. agents during an assassination run against a Mexican general. Helm finds himself having to complete the mission while being pursued by men who are supposed to be on his side.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terrorizers"title="The Terrorizers">
Matt Helm finds himself in Canada suffering from amnesia, with only his instincts keeping him alive as the tries to regain his memory while stopping a terrorist organization.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revengers_(novel)"title="The Revengers (novel)">
Someone is killing off Matt Helm's friends and past associates. Helm must stop the killing while protecting a journalist who plans to make Helm's secret organization public knowledge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Infiltrators"title="The Infiltrators">
Assassin Matt Helm is assigned to protect a female spy newly released from prison, who may or may not hold the key to a conspiracy to overthrow the American government.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Detonators"title="The Detonators">
Matt Helm is assigned to assassinate an expert in explosives who is planning to build his own atomic weapon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vanishers"title="The Vanishers">
While Mac (Helm's boss) is on a rare solo assignment, elements within Mac's agency try to take power away from him. It's up to Helm to stop this coup in its tracks, while simultaneously dealing with some deadly family-related issues of his own. Meanwhile, in a storyline continued from "The Annihilators", Mac finds himself in the middle of yet another revolution in Costa Verde.The Vanishers, one of the more complicated Matt Helm stories, is unique in several ways. Usually Helm is captured by the enemy in order to complete his mission. Here, for once, Helm’s boss Mac takes an active part in the action and is the one captured in order to deal with a gang of kidnappers. In most of these books the women are either ruthless foreign agents or naïve Americans who discover that however nice Helm may be personally, his profession is not at all nice. The Vanishers features a woman who is neither naïve nor an enemy.As punishment for a previous mistake in judgment, Helm is excluded from the real national security problem and exiled to Sweden, where he is kidnapped by a group who fear he may interfere with their plans. Eventually he escapes, figures out his mission and completes it, and helps the Swedes with their mission. The ending is different from any other Matt Helm book, but is consistent with his character.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demolishers"title="The Demolishers">
After Matt Helm's son is killed by a terrorist bomb, Helm goes on a mission of revenge against those responsible.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Threateners"title="The Threateners">
Matt Helm (code name Eric) is assigned to kill a drug lord after the villain orders the murder of a journalist. But he doesn't kill the drug lord's dog - which is the centerpiece of moralizing on how the real problem is that there is demand for drugs, so why blame the supplier, since even the drug lord's dog is able to resist such temptations?The story starts in Santa Fe where Matt is trying to live a normal life with Jo Beckman from the previous novel "The Frighteners". At the beginning of the story Jo has left Matt because of his new hobby of shooting. One of the ladies from a previous novel "The Infiltrators" - Madeleine Ellershaw comes to visit Matt with a complaint that he's having her followed. Matt is being followed by the same kind of people.Madeleine dies violently soon after her appearance. Matt's new friend Mark, who has introduced Matt to this kind of shooting sport, also dies soon after revealing that he was an author hunted by a South American drug lord for writing a book about the drug business. The drug lord puts up a price of one million dollars on his head.After Mark's death Matt teams up, unwillingly, with his widow to go hunt up back up copies of Mark's second book. Some computer jargon and concepts are mentioned when the electronic copies of the book are mentioned and surprisingly Hamilton has managed to keep most of his facts accurate. (Other than calling a diskette a three-and-a-half-inch-by-three-and-a-half-inch which it's not). As usual nothing and nobody is as they seem or are expected.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Damagers"title="The Damagers">
Matt Helm brings his literary career to a close (for now) with a double assignment: destroy a crime gang run by the son of the villain from "The Wrecking Crew", and prevent the atomic destruction of Norfolk, Virginia.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_(Modesitt_novel)"title="Flash (Modesitt novel)">
"Flash" is set in a future Earth of the 22nd century, chronologically prior to its published predecessor "". Humanity is still recovering from environmental disasters of the 21st century, but technology provides enough material resources for everyone. Earth's old nations have merged into continental governments - such as NorAm, United Europe, and Sinoplex - many of which are partially or wholly under the sway of various multinational corporations. Various wars are in progress, including an independence movement of colonists on Mars.The protagonist is Jonat DeVrai, a talented market research consultant and former Marine Corps officer who happens to have retained nanite combat enhancements that should be removed from retiring soldiers. As usual in Modesitt's books, DeVrai does not seek power; he is forced to exercise it because of others' attempts to use him in their designs to gather power to themselves.In addition to normal humans, the world of "Flash" also includes:
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weight_Loss_(novel)"title="Weight Loss (novel)">
"Weight Loss" is about the strange life (from age 11 to age 37) of a sexual deviant named Bhola, whose attitude to most of the people around him depends on their lust worthiness. Bhola’s tastes are not, to put it mildly, conventional. Sex is a form of depravity for him and he has fetishes about everyone from teachers to roadside sadhus to servants; he progresses from fantasizing about the portly family cook Gopinath to falling “madly in love” with a vegetable vendor and her husband. This last obsession spans the entire length of the book and most of Bhola’s life – he even ends up teaching at a college in an obscure hill-station hundreds of miles from his home because he wants to be near the couple. At various other stages in his life he gets expelled from school for defecating in a teacher’s office, participates in an inexpertly carried out circumcision (one of the book’s many manifestations of the “weight loss” motif). 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignorance_(novel)"title="Ignorance (novel)">
Czech expatriate Irena has been living in France since fleeing Czechoslovakia after the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion. In 1989, when the Velvet Revolution overthrows the governing Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Irena decides to return to her home after twenty years of living as an exiled immigrant. During the trip she meets, by chance, Josef, a fellow émigré who was briefly her lover in Prague.The novel examines the feelings instigated by the return to a homeland which has ceased to be a home. In doing so, it reworks the Odyssean themes of homecoming. It paints a poignant picture of love and its manifestations, a recurring theme in Kundera's novels. The novel explores and centres around the way that people have selective memories as a precursor to ignorance. The concept of ignorance is presented as a two-fold phenomenon; in which ignorance can be a willing action that people participate in, such as avoiding unpleasant conversation topics or acting out. Yet the novel also explores the involuntary aspects of being ignorant, such as feigning ignorance of the past or avoiding the truth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Form_at_St._Clare's"title="The Second Form at St. Clare's">
The second form includes two girls who have been kept back from third form and two new girls. The two old girls are Elsie Fanshawe and Anna Johnson. Both are disliked as Elsie is spiteful and Anna is very lazy; however, both are made head of their form, replacing Hilary Wentworth who was head in first form. The second form mistress, Miss Jenks, has doubts about this as Elsie and Anna do not like each other very much, but agrees to let both of them try.The two new girls are Gladys Hilman and Mirabel Unwin. Gladys Hilman is miserable because her mother is ill in hospital. Gladys Hilman rarely speaks or joins in and this is the reason Gladys Hilman nicknamed "The Misery Girl". It takes Mirabel Unwin to find out what is wrong with her. Mirabel is determined to make the worst of things and ruin class for everyone. She was sent away from home because of her behaviour towards her younger brother and sister. Mirabel's attitude leads her into trouble when Carlotta slaps her in public for ruining a play rehearsal, but Mirabel learns her lesson and forgives Carlotta. Later she admits to Isabel that she is ashamed of her behaviour and wants to be friends with the girls instead. When Elsie attempts to convince the form to perform a series of punishments against Mirabel in retaliation for her attitude in class, Isabel sticks up for her and manages to convince the class that Elsie is not acting in their interest but is just acting out of spite. As a result of this, Mirabel and Isabel become friends. Mirabel initially declares she wants to leave at half term, but ends up staying when Pat and Isabel stand up for her and the girls decide to give her a chance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Impact"title="Final Impact">
Picking up two years onwards from the end of "Designated Targets", "Final Impact" is the last novel in the "Axis of Time" trilogy. The supercarrier "Hillary Clinton" has been refurbished with more conventional steam catapults which replaced her less reliable fuel air explosive catapults. Her carrier air group is replenished with A-4 Skyhawk jet-powered attack aircraft, many of which are flown by 'temps, contemporary pilots. Admiral Kolhammer returns to sea at the head of a new Task Force with the Clinton at its core after two years of administering the Special Administrative Zone-California. Many characters have died in the intervening time period, from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, by his own hand to Commander Dan Black, one of the main characters of the story who asks for a return to combat and dies during the re-takeover of Hawaii, when his plane crashed during take-off from Muroc Airfield, California.D-Day is launched on May 3 of 1944, a month earlier than in the original timeline. The Allies invade the Pas-de-Calais instead of Normandy, relying on a dis-information campaign to obtain surprise. They are able to gain a foothold and slowly push back the Nazi forces. On May 27, the Allies gain a major victory by wiping out several German divisions with massed air strikes. On June 1, the USSR rejoins the Allied side and declares war against the Axis: They launch a huge attack against Germany and advance on a broad front. The Soviets have used the intervening two years to build up their armed forces, and construct fleet of warships at Vladivostok. Meanwhile, Paul Brasch's cover is blown and he is extracted by British commandos. Adolf Hitler has a seizure and suffers permanent brain and muscle damage; with the T4 program in mind, Heinrich Himmler chooses to suffocate him. Before launching an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands, the Soviets drop an atomic bomb on Litzmannstadt (that is, Łódź, Poland).
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_on_the_Leviathan"title="Murder on the Leviathan">
The novel is set in 1878. The story opens with the murder in Paris of Lord Littleby, all seven of his servants and two children of servants. All were poisoned except for Littleby, who was bludgeoned with an ancient Indian artifact, a golden statuette of Shiva, which belonged to Lord Littleby and was stolen from his room, along with an old Indian shawl.French detective Gustave Gauche, in charge of the investigation, boards the passenger ship "Leviathan". Gauche knows that the murderer must be one of the first-class passengers, because one of the special golden badges for the ship's first-class passengers was left in Littleby's room. Among the suspects are a Japanese Army officer, an addled English aristocrat, a married Swiss woman, and a clever young Russian diplomat on his way to his new post in Japan. The diplomat is Erast Fandorin, the master detective, who shoots down each of the ineffectual Gauche's incorrect conclusions, and in the end takes it on himself to find the murderer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Snowy_Day"title="The Snowy Day">
The book begins when Peter, "The Snowy Day"'s protagonist, wakes up to the season’s first snowfall. In his bright red snowsuit, he goes outside and makes footprints and trails through the snow. Next, Peter is too young to join a snowball fight with older kids, so he makes a snowman and snow angels and slides down a hill. He then returns home with a snowball stashed in his pocket. Before he goes to bed, Peter is sad to discover the snowball has melted. The book ends when the next day, he wakes up to tons more falling snow. With a friend, he ventures outside again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Showboat_World"title="Showboat World">
"Showboat World" follows the farcical adventures of Apollon Zamp, owner of the showboat "Miraldra's Enchantment", and his troupe of acrobats, magicians and actors. Zamp is invited by the King of Soyvanesse to travel up the river Vissel to the distant city of Mornune, there to participate in a contest. A rich prize awaits the showboat captain who stages the most spectacular performance and succeeds in entertaining the king.The mysterious, attractive Damsel Blanche-Aster accompanies him up the river for her own reasons. Zamp loses his ship through the machinations of his chief rival, Garth Ashgale, captain of the showboat "Fironzelle's Golden Conceit". In order to take part in the competition, Zamp is forced to form an unlikely partnership with staid museum ship owner Throdorus Gassoon. Both men attempt to woo the unimpressed Damsel Blanche-Aster during the perilous journey. Along the way, the travellers encounter cultures and people with weird beliefs and unusual, often violent, customs.At least one scene was influenced by the Royal Nonesuch acting troupe episode in "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", while "Showboat World" itself has strongly influenced "The Wizard of Karres" (2004) by Mercedes Lackey, Eric Flint and Dave Freer. In addition, there are repeated references to Shakespeare's "Macbeth", which is continuously adapted and readapted to the tastes of varying audiences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Werewolf"title="Night of the Werewolf">
When a ferocious, wolf-life creature appears in the small town of Bayport on the night of a full moon, the Hardy boys are engaged to clear the name of a young man who has a history of werewolves in his family line is suspected. Joe barely escapes a horrible death as the young detectives solve this exciting and hair-raising mystery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dissolution_of_Nicholas_Dee"title="The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee">
Nicholas Dee, a young, anxiety-ridden history professor, lives in an unnamed American city battered by winter storms, plagued by crime, and patrolled by police in choppers and riot gear. Haunted by memories of his brilliant father and by the fear of loss, Nicholas takes shelter in his research: a history of the practice of insurance. One night, after a chance encounter with the police, he is made the guardian of a beautiful teenaged delinquent, Oscar Vega. But the boy is a part of a scheme to ensnare Nicholas, the tool of a mysterious female dwarf named Amelia Weathered, once the lover of Nicholas' father. Made an outlaw, Nicholas flees with Amelia, her young son Francis, and Oscar to the half-drowned country of Holland, where the boundaries between his historical research, his fantasies, and Amelia's schemes all begin to blend together.Scattered throughout the novel are passages from Nicholas Dee's scholarly writing, chronicle of a seventeenth century Dutch opera-house, which was built in a coastal swamp on the advice of a fortune-teller and housed a single performance before being swept out to sea in a storm. The chronicle is intended by Dee to serve as a case study within his history of insurance. But by the end of the book, a personal narrative has emerged from Dee's impersonal history, the story of a man's friendship with a boy soprano.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ladies_of_Missalonghi"title="The Ladies of Missalonghi">
In the years before World War I in Byron, Australia, the males of the Hurlingford family hold all the power and money. Those Hurlingford women without a man due to spinsterhood or widowhood lead cramped lives of hard work and little money on scraps of land or in businesses that just barely support them.Thirty-something spinster Missy Wright leads a narrow existence on the wrong side of the tracks with her widowed mother Drusilla Hurlingford Wright and crippled aunt Octavia when Byron is consumed by two events, the upcoming wedding of Missy's beautiful cousin Alicia Marshall to William Hurlingford and the arrival of rough looking stranger named John Smith.With limited funds and suffering bouts of ill health, Missy's only consolation are her trips to the lending library where her distant cousin Una Hurlingford works. Una, a society beauty, has returned to Byron after a glamorous life in Sydney. Under Una's tutelage and bolstered by the romantic novels she sneaks home, Missy begins to dream of the world outside Byron and a better life for herself.Bolstered by a confrontation with her cousin Alicia and a trip to a Sydney doctor, Missy breaks free of her Byron shackles, finds financial independence for her older female Hurlingford relations and ends up the happy bride of the mystery man John Smith.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Skies_of_Pern"title="The Skies of Pern">
A rogue comet that strikes Pern leads the Weyrleaders and Holders, contemplating a future where dragonriders are not needed in a Threadless world, to consider the creation of a new Star Craft made of dragonriders. The discovery by dragonriders F'lessan and Tai, later brutally attacked by large felines, of the draconic use of telekinesis, only strengthens their resolve to keep Pern's skies free of danger.At the same time, disgruntled citizens resisting the ever-growing role of technology in Pernese life band together as Abominators, attacking Crafthalls, and are determined to destroy all the new technology in use. These fanatics are seemingly allied with Toric, the Southern Lord Holder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Book_of_Common_Prayer"title="A Book of Common Prayer">
The novel is narrated by Grace Strasser-Mendana, an American expatriate who married into one of the three or four families that dominate Boca Grande politics, the Mendanas. Grace was trained as an anthropologist under Claude Lévi-Strauss, and later took up the amateur study of biochemistry, both attempts to find clear-cut, scientific answers to the mysteries of human behavior. Both attempts fail: Grace remains uncomprehending and cut off from the people around her, and in the final line of the novel she admits, "I have not been the witness I wanted to be."But Grace is not the novel's central character. That is Charlotte Douglas, another American woman sojourning in Boca Grande, although her family ties are elsewhere. Charlotte's beloved daughter Marin has run off with a group of Marxist radicals and taken part in an absurd act of terrorism, and in the wake of her daughter's disappearance, Charlotte's marriage to a crusading Berkeley lawyer (not Marin's father), has fallen apart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Color_of_Light"title="The Color of Light">
The first time Chub gets the impulse to write, he has witnessed a fight between the girl of his dreams, B.J. Peacock, and her boyfriend Del that centers on a man knowing he'll never be able to make his woman happy, but that he'll never be able not to try. Two-Brew is a harsh critic, but feels Chub has the gift—his highest praise for anything Chub has written are four words: "on to the next"—implying that he wants to read more of Chub's work. Two-Brew's father runs Sutton Press in New York, and Chub's first long-awaited visit to New York City is punctuated with the surprise that Two-Brew's father has agreed to publish Chub's first short story.Chub's writing continues, usually after a collision of an emotional experience in his daily life with a childhood memory, and results in a series of short stories. Over one Christmas break, he visits his mother to surprise her with his published short story, but she sees herself portrayed negatively and explodes. Chub leaves almost as soon as he arrives, and returns to the Oberlin dorm with weeks of Christmas break ahead of him and nothing to do but write. He births a long story about his father's rise, fall and suicide—the best story he's written, Chub thinks—but Two-Brew insists that it's wrong for a short story and should be a novel. Chub's writing continues, but his focus on his studies suffers, and he graduates jobless. He works at a bar the summer after graduation when Two-Brew, now a young executive in his father's publishing house, suggests Chub connect his short stories and pitch them as a book, as a prelude to the novel about his father. Chub agrees immediately, but Two-Brew has already made the pitch. He hands Chub an envelope with two advance checks, and Chub moves to New York to write his novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memed,_My_Hawk"title="Memed, My Hawk">
Memed, a young boy from a village in Anatolia, is abused and beaten by the villainous local landowner, Abdi Ağa. Having endured great cruelty towards himself and his mother, Döne, Memed finally escapes with his beloved, a girl named Hatçe. Abdi Ağa catches up with the young couple, but only manages to capture Hatçe, while Memed is able to avoid his pursuers and runs into the mountains. There he joins a band of brigands and exacts revenge against his old adversary. Hatçe was then imprisoned and eventually dies while Memed tries to protect themselves on a mountain, but not before giving birth to Memed's son, who is also named Memed. When Memed returns to the town, a villager named Hürü Ana tells him he has a "woman's heart" if he surrenders himself. Instead of surrendering and being granted amnesty by the government, he rides into town to find his enemy, on a horse given to him by the townspeople. He finds Abdi Ağa in the south-east corner of his house and shoots him in the chest. The local authorities hear the gunshots, but Memed gets away. He returns to the mountains and gives his son in protection of Iraz, Hatçe's friend from the jailhouse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe's_Devil"title="Sharpe's Devil">
Doña Louisa Vivar, whom Sharpe befriended in "Sharpe's Rifles", visits Sharpe and asks him to search for her husband, Don Blas Vivar, who disappeared while serving as Captain-General of Chile, a Spanish possession threatened by rebels. Sharpe and Harper sail to Chile with Spanish Colonel Ruiz and his regimental officers aboard the frigate "Espiritu Santo", commanded by Captain Ardiles. The group decide to stop off at St. Helena to pay a visit to exiled French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon grants an audience and asks Sharpe and Harper to remain for a private conversation. Napoleon persuades Sharpe to take a gift, a portrait of the emperor, to an admirer in Chile for him.British Consul George Blair welcomes Sharpe and Harper to the Chilean port of Valdivia and informs them that Blas Vivar's body was found and buried three months previously. Sharpe and Harper visit Captain Marquinez to arrange permission to travel to Puerto Crucero, exhume the body and return it to Spain. Back at their lodgings, they interrupt burglars who wound Harper and escape with their possessions, including Napoleon's portrait.Sharpe and Harper meet with Bautista, who announces that he has caught the thieves, whom he has branded on the spot, and returns all the stolen goods except for the portrait. When Bautista asks if everything is there, Sharpe says nothing is missing. Marquinez provides the required passes and permits and rides out with Sharpe and Harper on the first stage of their journey. Overnighting at the "Celestial Fort", Sharpe suspects that their escort, commanded by Sergeant Dregara, has orders to kill them. He persuades the garrison commander, Captain Morillo, to let them leave very early the next morning; he provides a native guide called Ferdinand to take them safely across the hills.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dial-a-Ghost"title="Dial-a-Ghost">
The Wilkinson family become ghosts after they die in a tragic bombing in World War II. Initially, they haunt their home, Resthaven, and they adopt another young ghost, a girl they name Adopta, who has no memory of her past. When the arrival of new owners forces them to leave, they travel to London and reluctantly begin haunting an underwear store, and apply to the Dial-a-Ghost agency for a new home. The Dial-a-Ghost agency finds the perfect home for the Wilkinsons in a ruined abbey, and tells them they can move in on Friday 13th.Meanwhile, orphan Oliver Smith is surprised to learn he is a descendant of the Snodde-Brittle family, and that he now owns Helton Hall following the death of a cousin. He is taken from the orphanage to Helton Hall by his cousins Fulton and Frieda, who feel they should rightly have inherited the Hall. Learning that Oliver is asthmatic, Fulton hires some terrifying, child-hating ghosts known as the Shriekers, hoping to frighten Oliver to death.On the day of the move, the two sets of ghosts receive each other's directions by accident. The Wilkinsons arrive at Helton Hall, and, although they initially scare Oliver, they soon become close friends. The Shriekers, however, are exorcised from the ruined abbey after attacking livestock belonging to the nunnery. When the Dial-a-Ghost agency realizes their mistake, they send the Shriekers to Helton Hall and ring the Wilkinsons to apologize. Oliver, however, refuses to let the Wilkinsons leave and also invites their friends from London to move in.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abolition_of_Britain"title="The Abolition of Britain">
"The Abolition of Britain" is a conservative polemic against the changes in the United Kingdom since the mid-1960s. It contrasts the funerals of Winston Churchill (1965) and Diana, Princess of Wales (1997), using these two related but dissimilar events, three decades apart, to illustrate the enormous cultural changes that took place in the intervening period. His argument is that Britain underwent a "cultural revolution", comparable to that of China in the 1960s. He describes and criticises the growing strength of such forces as multiculturalism, which still had a liberal consensus behind it at the time the book was written. He argues that English schools had largely ceased to teach the history of the country or the literature of Britain's past, criticising the preference for methodology in history teaching.Other changes gain Hitchens's attention, from the passivity and conformism resulting from the watching of television to the Church of England's rejection of its traditional liturgy and scripture. Sex education, he argues, is a form of propaganda against Christian sexual morality. Again, the sexual revolution brought about by the first contraceptive pills was the result "not of accidental discovery, but of research deliberately pursued by moral revolutionaries". He describes the efforts made to provide respectability for unmarried motherhood, not least the campaign to replace the expression "unmarried mother" with "single parent", thus lumping together those who had children out of wedlock with widowers, widows or deserted wives and husbands, and so deflecting disapproval. Hitchens sees the British establishment as being morally weak in their failure to resist the emerging drug culture, when they could easily have done so in the mid-1960s. He cites as one example the prosecution of Mick Jagger and the subsequent intervention of "The Times" in Jagger's defence in 1967 ("Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?") after his (temporary) conviction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Show_Business_(novel)"title="Show Business (novel)">
Show Business parodies and satirises formulaic Bollywood cinema, using it as a metaphor in an attempt to raise and answer questions about contemporary India and Indians. It is a fictional work that tells the story of Ashok Banjara, a Bollywood superstar. Ashok Banjara is critically injured while shooting for a film and his entire life in Bollywood flashes in front of his eyes as he lies suspended between life and death in a hospital. The character and many incidents of Ashok Banjara's life are inspired by that of Amitabh Bachchan, the biggest superstar in Bollywood's history."Show Business" begins with Ashok Banjara, a superstar in Bollywood, fighting for his life in the intensive care unit of a hospital after an accident on the sets of a film that he is shooting. Suspended between life and death he sees his entire life in Bollywood flashing in front of his eyes like a film. Details of Banjara's career in Bollywood are revealed primarily in flashback.A young Ashok Banjara leaves Delhi and comes to Bombay to make his fortune and find fame in Bollywood. He achieves the big league with his second film "Godambo" that establishes him as an action star. Soon Banjara is known for playing the role of an angry young man fighting for the poor and the helpless against the establishment. A successful Ashok Banjara marries Maya, a talented co-star and convinces her to stay away from films for the sake of the family. Banjara, though is something of a philanderer, bedding most of his heroines. The actress Mehnaz Elahi becomes his mistress.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ninja_(novel)"title="The Ninja (novel)">
It is initially set in Japan following the end of World War II and follows the story of Lustbader's hero Nicholas Linnear, a man raised by Anglo-Chinese parents.As a youth, Linnear is introduced to the world of "aikido", "kenjutsu", and "iai-jutsu" at a local "dojo" of the Itto Ryu also attended by his cruel and violent older cousin Saigō. Linnear is a natural and soon becomes adept, much to the annoyance of Saigō. During a training exercise Nicholas and Saigō duel and Nicholas defeats him. Saigō is enraged and leaves swearing revenge.When they next meet Saigō is a considerably more skilled martial artist than Linnear and defeats him quickly. Later we learn Saigō has joined a "Kuji-kiri ryu" in order to learn black ninjutsu and has become a "ninja".Linnear himself soon becomes introduced to "Aka i ninjutsu", or the red, ostensibly "good" side of ninjutsu, through the Tenshin Shoden Katori Shinto Ryu.The "ninja" are introduced not as magical or almost mythical people, but rather as supreme martial artists who have reached the highest level and seek to progress further. It is suggested that by becoming "ninja" they strive to advance to an even higher plane, gaining skills such as "haragei", or sensing the surrounding world in a different manner. However, we soon learn this is not without a high personal cost.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mummy_Case_(Hardy_Boys)"title="The Mummy Case (Hardy Boys)">
When five Egyptian statuettes are stolen from a museum, the Hardy Boys travel to Egypt. En route, the boys are asked to safeguard a mysterious mummy and find themselves tangled in a web of international intrigue. On the Nile, the young detectives uncover a secret hiding place with countless stolen treasures.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_from_the_Carolinas"title="Wind from the Carolinas">
Set against the exotic background of the Bahama Islands, it's the saga of wealthy, aristocratic families from the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia who, following the American Revolution, fled the South for the Bahamas, where they remained loyal to England. Abandoning their plantations for the islands, they established new dynasties in the Bahamas, where the Crown rewarded their loyalty with huge grants of land.""Wind from the Carolinas" is fiction and as such certain liberties have been taken but not with the basic facts. Certainly, the settlement of the Bahama Islands was the result of one of the most dramatic of migrations. From the plantation aristocracy of Carolina, Virginia and Georgia came families who were passionately sincere in their loyalty to the British Crown and wanted nothing to do with the American Revolution and its theory of democracy. At the close of the War for Independence they found life all but unendurable. They were hated and reviled as Tories by what they considered to be a disorganized rabble. They were subjected to taunts and violence. At their request transports of the Royal Navy took entire families, their slaves, livestock, furnishings, and in some cases, even the bricks of their manors to the Bahamas. There they attempted to recreate the Colonial magnificence they had known with mansions, slave quarters and vast cotton fields. The failure was tragic and the history of the Out Islands has been one of wealth and poverty in cycles brought about by influences far beyond their shores." - Robert Wilder, Author
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Broken_Commandment"title="The Broken Commandment">
The basic plot concerns a school teacher named Ushimatsu Segawa (family name written last) who struggles with a commandment given to him by his late father. He is never to reveal his "burakumin" background, which his father had tried so hard to conceal as well. Ushimatsu idolizes Rentarou Inoko, a "burakumin" rights' activist and successful writer (particularly considering the social position given to those considered "burakumin"). Ushimatsu wishes to reveal his background to Rentarou, as his need to hide away part of himself in order to be accepted by society in general leads to his feeling constricted by this superficial identity, and to his desiring to form a more meaningful connection with Rentarou through their common experience.This novel also touches on the dangerous, destructive nature of gossip, and questions society's inability to accept what is not understood. It attempts to build understanding and empathy for this group of people at a time (the novel's publication's) when a great deal of prejudice still existed towards this group.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doll_People"title="The Doll People">
This children's tale is about a doll made of china named Annabelle, who has existed for more than one hundred years. The book is set in the present time period and is told in third person. Annabelle and her family belong to an 8 year old girl named Kate Palmer. The dolls can move, talk, and play the miniature piano in their house but always return to the same spot they started from when a human approaches. The consequence of being seen moving is being "frozen" for twenty-four hours, also called Doll State. If a doll does something especially incriminating, the doll is "frozen" forever, called Permanent Doll State. Kate's sister Nora receives a doll house and plastic doll family named the Funcrafts for her 5th birthday. The Funcrafts' daughter is Tiffany and she becomes Annabelle's best friend. In the book Annabelle and her friend Tiffany form a group called Society for Exploration and Location of Missing Persons (or SELMP for short), when Annabelle finds her Auntie Sarah's Journal. Auntie Sarah has been missing for 45 years and has not been seen or heard from in all that time. Annabelle and Tiffany become determined to find her. Using the clues from the journal, they deduce she is stuck somewhere, so they go on a journey and successfully locate her. The doll family is happily reunited once again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Crossing_(novel)"title="Border Crossing (novel)">
When Tom Seymour, a child psychologist, plunges into a river to save a young man from suicide, he unwittingly reopens a chapter from his past he had hoped to forget. For Tom already knows the young man as Danny Miller. When Danny was eleven, Tom presented evidence that helped commit him to prison for the murder of the elderly Lizzie Parks. Danny, full of suppressed memory and now free from prison, turns to Tom to help him recount what really happened, and discover the truth.Reluctantly, Tom is drawn back into Danny's world, a place where the border between good and evil, innocence and guilt are blurred and confused. But when Danny's demands on Tom become extreme, Tom wonders whether he has crossed the line between the professional and personal relationship, speculating upon, but never realising, the perilous danger he is in until it is almost too late."Border Crossing" opens with Tom Seymour and his wife Lauren strolling along a deserted river path. They pass the derelict remnants of their decaying neighbourhood, with numerous buildings awaiting demolition or already burnt to the ground, and litter strewn across the path. They stop to observe a young man pause at the edge of a pier, swallow a handful of pills and disappear into the depths of the icy-cold river.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winter_Queen_(novel)"title="The Winter Queen (novel)">
The novel opens on 13 May 1876 with a university student, Pyotr Kokorin, committing suicide in the public park in front of a beautiful young noblewoman, Elizaveta von Evert-Kolokoltseva. His will leaves his large fortune to the newly opened Moscow chapter of Astair House, an international network of schools for orphan boys founded by an English noblewoman, Lady Astair. The apparently open-and-shut suicide case falls to inexperienced 20-year-old detective Erast Fandorin. He interviews Elizaveta, and immediately falls in love with her. Further investigation reveals that Kokorin was playing Russian roulette (called "American roulette" in the novel) with another university student, Akhtyrtsev.Fandorin tails Akhtyrtsev, who leads him to a sensuous dark-haired woman, Amalia Bezhetskaya, whom Fandorin recognizes from a picture in Kokorin's room. He follows Bezhetskaya to her home, where she spends her time toying with the many men who come to visit. At Bezhetskaya's home, Fandorin meets Count Zurov, an Army officer that Amalia seems fond of, and sees Akhtyrtsev again. Akhtyrtsev and Fandorin leave Amalia's house together to go drinking, and Akhtyrtsev reveals to Fandorin that the Russian roulette game between him and Kokorin was Bezhetskaya's idea. Just as the mystery of Kokorin's suicide seems to be solved, a mysterious white-eyed assassin stabs Akhtyrstev to death and tries to kill Fandorin, only to fail when his knife bounces off the corset Fandorin is wearing. As he kills Akhtyrtsev, the white-eyed man hisses one word: "Azazel".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencerville_(novel)"title="Spencerville (novel)">
The novel's hero is the Army Colonel Keith Landry, who served as an infantry platoon leader with the First Cavalry Division and fought in Vietnam. Later on he transferred to the Army Intelligence and served as an intelligence officer and operative for almost 25 years. After the end of the cold war is over Landry retires and moves back to Spencerville, the small Midwestern town where he grew up. The town changed over the years but two people are still there: Annie Prentis, his first love, and her possessive husband Cliff Baxter. Landry wants to get Annie back and that means a confrontation with Baxter, once the high school bully, and now Spencerville corrupt police chief.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinwalkers_(novel)"title="Skinwalkers (novel)">
Murders are happening all over the huge reservation, and Lt. Leaphorn can see no pattern. Then, someone makes an attempt on Jim Chee's life, and the two work together for the first time to solve these crimes.The novel won two awards, the 1988 Anthony Award for Best Novel and the 1987 Spur Award for Best Western Novel. Reviews at the time of publication praised it highly: "Hillerman brings together his two series characters--middle-aged, cynical Lieut. Joe Leaphorn and young, mystical Officer Jim Chee--without in any way diminishing the stark power and somber integrity that have distinguished previous exploits of the Navajo Tribal Police." The writing is "lively and extremely descriptive" and author Hillerman was "a master of character, scene, and plot". A "New York Times" review called this the breakout novel for Hillerman, when sales began to surge and recognition increased.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Peabody_series"title="Amelia Peabody series">
Amelia Peabody is introduced in the series' first novel, "Crocodile on the Sandbank" as a confirmed spinster, suffragist, and scholar, living in England in 1884. She inherits a fortune from her father and leaves England to see the world, with the side benefit of escaping various suitors and family members who were neither aware that she would be the sole beneficiary of her father's estate nor that he had amassed a small fortune over the course of his lifetime.In Rome, Amelia meets Evelyn Barton-Forbes, a young Englishwoman of social standing who has run off with (and subsequently been abandoned by) her Italian lover, and the two make their way to Egypt. There they meet the Emerson brothers, Egyptologist Radcliffe and his philologist brother Walter. Over the course of the first book the couples pair up: Amelia marries Radcliffe (referred to throughout the series by his last name "Emerson"), and Evelyn marries Walter.Following the birth of their son Ramses (né Walter) Emerson ("as swarthy as an Egyptian and as arrogant as a Pharaoh"), the Emersons initially settle in Kent, from where Emerson commutes to a job lecturing in Egyptology at university in London. Despite Amelia's suggestions that he resume seasonal digs in Egypt, Emerson insists on staying in England with his family while Ramses is too young to travel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ttyl"title="Ttyl">
Three friends, Angela Silver (SnowAngel), Zoe Barrett (zoegirl), and Madigan "Maddie" Kinnick (mad maddie) are just starting tenth grade of high school. At the beginning of the book, the trio, who refer to themselves as the "winsome threesome," believe that they will stick together forever. Zoe wants something meaningful and big to happen in her life, Angela knows it is going to be a fabulous year and that she is going to meet the boy of her dreams, and Maddie can't help but feel low and down on herself. When Angela discovers that Rob Tyler is in her French class, she develops a crush on him. Maddie notices how mean Jana Whitaker, the school's queen bee, is to her and to other students. Rob finally asks Angela out and the two have a fun time together, which is how Angela describes it. Later, she reveals to her friends that Rob is "the one", as in the one she goes all the way with. The next day, Angela is unable to go on a planned date with Rob since her mother grounded her for going to a bar without permission. Angela then learns that Rob went out with Tonnie Wyndham while she had to stay home. Rob apologizes and states that Tonnie refused to let him call Angela. Days later, Rob goes on another date (while he was supposed to be on a date with Angela and left her waiting) with Tonnie and says that she asked him out and he didn't know how to say no. Angela breaks up with him after this. Zoe has been experiencing favoritism in one of her classes by a young teacher who gives her special attention. She struggles when the line of appropriateness becomes blurred, she needs her friends a time when Maddie's new friendship with Jana is creating fractures in the friend group. Maddie gives Jana a ride home (when she was supposed to give Angela a ride) and Angela gets mad at her too. For Halloween, the trio plan to go trick or treating as mold, fungus and dust. When Halloween arrives, though, Maddie ditches her friends and doesn't show up. Instead she goes to a party with Jana Whitaker and ends up getting really drunk and taking her shirt off and dancing exposed in front of guys, which Jana photographs without Maddie's permission. They all go through their ups and downs of tenth grade.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Icarus_Hunt"title="The Icarus Hunt">
Prior to delivering a cargo to the nearby planet Xathru, Jordan McKell, a smuggler for a crime lord nicknamed Brother John and his shadowy boss, Mr. Antoniewicz, is on the planet Meima with his partner, Ixil, a member of an alien species called the Kalixiri. McKell is offered a job by a man named Alexander Borodin, whom he recognizes as the famous industrialist and sometime-archaeologist Arno Cameron. Cameron wants McKell to pilot the ship "Icarus", which is carrying a very important cargo in its sealed storage core, to Earth.McKell accepts the job and instructs Ixil to continue on to Xathru, intending to pick him up there. He and Ixil theorize that Cameron's archaeological dig on Meima had uncovered an advanced, alien stardrive, which he intends to be brought to Earth by the "Icarus". While waiting to board the "Icarus", McKell becomes acquainted with the rest of the "Icarus"' rag-tag crew, all of whom are complete strangers to him and to each other. At the last minute, they are informed that Cameron is unable to accompany them, and are forced to set out on their voyage without their employer.One of the crewers is killed in an accident a few hours later, and a series of other bizarre occurrences leads McKell to believe that they have a saboteur aboard; he begins keeping a wary eye on the crew. He stops as planned on Xathru to pick up Ixil and contact Brother John, who gives him a reluctant go-ahead to carry on with the voyage. While on Xathru, he is assaulted by a pair of strange aliens who say they want the "Icarus"' cargo.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Penderwicks"title="The Penderwicks">
The Penderwicks, a family of six, (four sisters, their father, and their dog) get lost on the way to Arundel Cottage, which they have rented for the summer, but find their way with the help of a tomato seller named Harry, and Cagney, the gardener at Arundel.After getting to the cottage, Skye goes exploring on the grounds, and meets Cagney in the garden. They talk until Mrs. Tifton, the owner of Arundel, comes looking for Cagney, and he hides Skye in an urn. Mrs. Tifton tells Cagney that he needs to get rid of the Fimbriata rosebush that his uncle kept alive for 30 years, but Skye and Cagney decide to move the bush to a place near the cottage. When Skye leaves, she runs into Mrs. Tifton's son Jeffrey, and, not knowing who he is, warns him to stay out of the garden and insults Mrs. Tifton.After telling Rosalind and Jane what happened, Rosalind decides they need to apologize to Jeffrey, and they send Jane to apologize on Skye's behalf the next day. Jane and Jeffrey quickly become friends. Meanwhile, at the cottage, Rosalind and Skye attempt to bake cookies for Jeffrey, but when Cagney comes over with the Fimbriata, Rosalind goes to help him, leaving Skye in charge of the cookies. Skye sets the oven to "broil" and goes upstairs, letting the cookies burn. When Rosalind finds them, Skye yells at her, calling Jeffrey a snob - just as Jeffrey and Jane approach the house. Mr. Penderwick comes in and sends them all on a walk. Jeffrey takes them to see a neighboring farmer's bull, and Batty unknowingly wanders into its pen. Skye, Jane, and Jeffrey manage to save her from being attacked, and swear not to tell Mr. Penderwick or Rosalind about the incident. Later, everyone goes to Jeffrey's house for gingerbread. The cook, Churchie, wants Jeffrey to invite the girls to his birthday party and helps the girls choose beautiful dresses from among Mrs. Tifton's old clothes. The birthday party turns out to be a disaster. At dinner, Mrs. Tifton begins to despise the girls, and afterward they find out that Mrs. Tifton is planning to marry her boyfriend Dexter Dupree, and is considering sending Jeffrey to a military academy a year earlier than she had previously intended to.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Ocean_of_Night"title="In the Ocean of Night">
In 1999 (2019 in the second edition), Nigel Walmsley, a British scientist and astronaut for NASA, is sent to attach a thermonuclear bomb to a comet named Icarus which is on a direct collision course for India. Icarus turns out to be large, solid, and made of a nickel-iron composite. Nigel is instructed to plant the weapon and leave so it can be detonated. He persuades Mission Control to let him put it in a large fissure he discovered, so it would be even more effective. In the fissure, Nigel discovers strips of metal worked in obviously artificial patterns. Awestruck at this evidence of extraterrestrial intelligent life, Nigel begins exploring. Icarus is made up of a number of hollow shells, making the asteroid's mass far less than predicted. NASA insists that the demolition has to go forward, claiming Icarus would skip off the atmosphere and land in the Indian Ocean, causing widespread damage from the resultant tsunami. Nigel realizes this is a lie, and convinces his partner of that. They hide the nuke and spend the next week retrieving artifacts and materials before detonating the bomb.15 years after their discovery the Icarus artifacts have yielded little, and Nigel's delayed detonation of Icarus has alienated him from NASA and other people. Nigel's partner, Alexandria, dies from systemic lupus erythematosus, a disease caused by pollution. An anomaly near Jupiter distracts Nigel: something, nicknamed 'the Snark', is repeating radio broadcasts. The anomaly fires its fusion engines and reveals itself to the satellites around Jupiter. As a probe vessel, the Snark's directing computer could not afford to ignore the satellites' radio emissions before it moved on to Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Odds_(novel)"title="Against the Odds (novel)">
The opening steps back to near the ending of "Change of Command"; the loyalists in the weapons lab on Copper Mountain (which planet has just been taken over by mutineers) have finished sending out their radio transmission, which unbeknownst to them will indeed be picked by an escaping loyalist Fleet warship, and are wondering what to do next. Their transportation is ruined, so they decide to steal one from the mutineers. They stage a series of movements and radio transmissions intended to convince the mutineers that the weapons labs are being progressively taken over by their own.Disabled, the "Bonar Tighe" is easy prey. The loyalists are rescued. For her services to Fleet past and present, Cecelia jokingly demands to be made an Admiral - a nod to a running joke in the series where various Fleet underlings become convinced (by how they keep showing up in the thick of things) that either Cecelia or Heris is really a special operations undercover admiral ferreting out traitors for Fleet.Finally at Rockhouse, Esmay meets up with Brun and her own father General Casimir Suiza, who had brought along with him all the necessary apparatus to transfer Esmay's status as LandBride to her cousin Luci.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Across_the_Sea_of_Suns"title="Across the Sea of Suns">
In 2021, radio astronomy on the Moon reveals the presence of life by a nearby red dwarf, on a tide-locked planet. To investigate, Earth's governments convert a space colony into "Lancer", a Bussard ramjet-powered interstellar ship based on the design of a crashed alien ship discovered in the Mare Marginis.In 2061, the "Lancer" arrives and discovers a primitive race of nomads, broadcasting using organs adapted to emit and receive electromagnetic radiation (hence "EM"s). A curious satellite is discovered in orbit, at least a million years old, roughly when a meteor shower destroyed the EMs' civilization.On Earth, international commerce is brought to a standstill when mysterious spaceships drop sea creatures dubbed "Swarmers" and "Skimmers" (for their behaviour: Swarmers swarm ships and head-butt them until they sink, and Skimmers simply jump and skim around like dolphins). They begin multiplying and the Swarmers begin attacking humans and all their works on the seas.The expedition's first contacts go poorly: The attempt to enter one of the two satellites prompts a massive retaliation that kills most of the crew. Meanwhile, their attempt to contact the EMs in person confuses them; the aliens had expected a reply directly from Earth. The EMs' attempt to communicate with the messenger via radar accidentally cooks him alive. The standby team misinterprets the accident as a deliberate attack and massacres the EMs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationality_and_Power"title="Rationality and Power">
Flyvbjerg focuses on the study of how power influences rationality and democracy. Theoretically and methodologically, he stands on the shoulders of thinkers like Thucydides, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and Max Weber. He specifically highlights Machiavelli's power studies in Florence as a source of influence for the choice of in-depth case studies to understand the dynamics of power and how power enables and constrains rationality and rational government. Flyvbjerg also develops and identifies "ten propositions about rationality and power" that can be used as grounded theory when researching rationality, power, and democracy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Switcheroo"title="The Great Switcheroo">
Vic Hammond and his wife Mary go to a cocktail party hosted by their friends Jerry and Samantha Rainbow. Vic lusts after the difficult-to-seduce Samantha as she is faithful to her husband, so he devises a plan that would allow Vic and Jerry to switch wives for a night without the women knowing it. He puts the suggestion to Jerry in the form of a story and finally manages to lure Jerry into proposing that they should try out the plan. Many meetings are subsequently held between the two men in which they plan every detail of the scheme.At one point, in order to ensure that the deception is as complete as possible, they even agree to describe the sexual routines they adopt when making love to their wives. Both men regard the other's approach with disdain. Vic, who is very proud of his own approach and sexual technique with his wife, is particularly outraged when Jerry criticizes his routine.On the fateful night, the men are able to sneak into each other's bedrooms without incident. But in the middle of having sex with Samantha (in total darkness), Vic realizes that in the heat of things he has forgotten to copy Jerry's technique. Samantha at first tenses up, but then responds with gusto.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_(novel)"title="Web (novel)">
The events depicted in "Web" are written from the viewpoint of Arnold Delgrange, a man whose wife and daughter were recently killed in a motor collision. They revolve around a failed attempt to establish a utopian colony on the fictional island "Tanakuatua" in the Pacific Ocean, far from civilisation.After a slow start setting the scene with the mysterious "Project" being financed by the wealthy and eccentric Lord Foxfield, the island is purchased and a team of volunteers sets out by steamer for the island. A summarised back-story provides commentary on the colonising powers' impact on the native population during the 19th and 20th centuries.Tanakuatua is now uninhabited by humans, as its native inhabitants were evacuated from the island due to British nuclear testing and were relocated. However a small group of natives refused the evacuation order and placed a curse on any people who returned to the island. When Delgrange and his fellow pioneers reach the island they are irritated and frustrated by a bizarre ceremony that their native porters conduct before proceeding with the unloading of their supplies from the steamer which brought them. As the steamer departs and disappears over the horizon, due to return in six months, a sense of their solitude descends. They compose messages to their friends and family to be transmitted by radio, but the radio operator returns looking agitated. When Delgrange follows him to investigate, they find that the transmitter has been crushed beneath a heavy packing case. Clearly they are not alone on the island after all, and from this point on the sense of brooding menace steadily intensifies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_(novel)"title="Spectrum (novel)">
His life changes when a wealthy man walks into his office and asks him to find his missing daughter. After a short investigation, the Walker finds her on Library - a world full of ancient ruins. Before he can bring her back, however, she dies in a freak accident. A clue leads him to another alien planet where he finds her alive and well. Soon he discovers that the same woman exists on several other worlds, each is connected to the other. One by one, they are killed in seemingly random, totally unrelated events. It is to the Walker's great surprise when he finds himself becoming attracted to his client's daughter. It's a race against time, as the Walker desperately tries to save the identical copies of the woman, only to have them die in his arms. Can he save the last one before she perishes and, in the process, uncover a massive conspiracy going back thousands of years with the Keymasters in the middle?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_Years_(novel)"title="Dog Years (novel)">
Walter Matern and Eduard Amsel are friends. Eduard is half Jewish and at the young age of five is a genius at making scarecrows. The narrator in Book One, the mine owner Brauxel, tells of the friendship of Walter and Eduard when they are children in the Vistula estuary, which is a German-Polish borderland (the interwar Free City of Danzig) peopled by Mennonites, Catholics and Protestants. Eduard keeps a diary which he fills with drawings of ideas for scarecrows. The history of this country is told with cruel images of horror and violence from that past that echoes into the present, which becomes Hitler's Germany. The story in the second part of the book is narrated by Harry Liebenau, and consists of letters from him addressed to his cousin Tulla. This part of the story occurs during the war period, when Amsel collects vast numbers of S.A. uniforms, and dresses his scarecrows in them. He also persuades his childhood friend Walter to become a member of the S.A., in order to help him obtain the uniforms. But since the confusion in this country has reached its maximum at this point in time, it is inevitable that the two friends end up on a collision course. At one point Walter denounces Amsel as a Jew, hits him in the face and knocks out all of his teeth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cave_(novel)"title="The Cave (novel)">
The story concerns an elderly potter named Cipriano Algor, his daughter Marta, and his son-in-law Marçal. One day, the Center, literally the center of commerce in the story, cancels its order for Cipriano's pottery, leaving the elderly potter's future in doubt. He and Marta decide to try their hand at making clay figurines and astonishingly the Center places an order for hundreds. But just as quickly, the order is cancelled and Cipriano, his daughter, and his son-in-law have no choice but to move to the Center where Marçal works as a security guard. Before long, the mysterious sound of digging can be heard beneath the Center, and what the family discovers will change their lives forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravished_Armenia"title="Ravished Armenia">
The author Arshaluys (Aurora) Mardiganian was born in the city of Çemişgezek, near Harput (Kharpert), (present-day Turkish province of Elâzığ), Ottoman Empire. She was the daughter of a wealthy Armenian financier in the city. The story starts in 1915 when Arshaluys was 14 years old. She personally witnessed the murder of her father, mother, brothers and sisters. She was taken to the harem of a number of Turkish pashas, but had remained attached to her Christian Armenian faith despite being tortured repeatedly at the hands of her captors.She found refuge with Frederick W. MacCallum, a Canadian doctor and missionary stationed with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), who safely returned her to Erzurum, which had come under Russian control. She later moved to Tbilisi (Tiflis) in the Caucasus and, through the mediation of General Andranik Ozanian and orders of the Russian military leadership in the Caucasus, was sent to the United States for recovery and to bear witness to the sufferings of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.Aurora Mardiganian, a survivor of the Armenian genocide of 1915–1923, recalled sixteen young Armenian girls being "crucified" by their Ottoman tormentors. The film "Auction of Souls" (1919), which was based on her book "Ravished Armenia", showed the victims nailed to crosses. However, almost 70 years later Mardiganian revealed to film historian Anthony Slide that the scene was inaccurate. She described what was actually an impalement. She stated that "The Turks didn't make their crosses like that. The Turks made little pointed crosses. They took the clothes off the girls. They made them bend down, and after raping them, they made them sit on the pointed wood, through the vagina. That's the way they killed – the Turks. Americans have made it a more civilized way. They can't show such terrible things."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_I_Die_in_a_Combat_Zone,_Box_Me_Up_and_Ship_Me_Home"title="If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home">
O'Brien takes the reader through a typical day in the life of a soldier in Vietnam. We are briefly introduced to a small number of fellow 'grunts' and the commanding officer of Alpha Company, the rifle company O'Brien was assigned to, one Captain Johansen. (Names and physical characteristics depicted in the book were changed.)Rather than proceed chronologically, O'Brien takes the reader back to the beginning of his induction into the US Army. The reader learns about the author's home town, Worthington, Minnesota, to which O'Brien moved when he was 9 years old. We are led through his childhood, playing various army games, and learning about World War II from returned veterans and the Korean War which was taking place at the time.The story of his tour itself continues to unfold while the reader is simultaneously taken through O'Brien's training at Fort Lewis, Washington, where he acquaints a man of similar situation named Erik. Together, the two decide to engage in a psychological resistance against the government.After debating over the idea of desertion, O'Brien arrives in Vietnam in 1969 and spends a week at a base in Chu Lai (home to the Americal Division from approximately 1967 until 1971), receiving last-minute training such as mine sweeping and grenade throwing as well as the essential do's and don'ts of jungle warfare, before being sent to Landing Zone Gator in Quang Ngai Province where he is assigned to Alpha company, 5th Battalion of the 46th Infantry, 198th Infantry Brigade.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary,_Mary_(novel)"title="Mary, Mary (novel)">
FBI Agent Alex Cross is on vacation in Los Angeles with his family and his girlfriend Jamilla Hughes (from "Violets Are Blue") when he receives word that a Hollywood actress has been murdered. The actress was shot and her face violently slashed with a knife. An email describing the killer's mindset before and during the murder as well as allusions to the killer's motivation was sent to an entertainment reporter named Arnold Grinner at the "Los Angeles Times". The emails are signed "Mary Smith". The actress happens to be friends with the wife of the President of the United States who has asked FBI Director Ron Burns to look into the matter. Burns then gives the case to Cross, who goes to the scene, despite protests from Nana and Jamilla. He does not return until very late in the afternoon, by which time Jamilla has left to return to San Francisco, which doesn't surprise Alex, and Alex Jr. "Ali" has been taken away by Christine, who had come down to spend time with Ali and Alex.During a trial to determine who takes custody over Ali, Christine's attorney uses evidence of a picture of Ali and Cross' family being evacuated from the house for safety (in the "Big Bad Wolf"). Her attorney also points out that a "stranger" is carrying Ali from the house. However, Alex notices that the so-called "stranger" is John Sampson, his best friend, who works for the DCPD (the D.C. Police Department), angering Alex. Christine eventually wins custody with Alex getting over 40 days of time with Ali only. Meanwhile, Alex later meets up on another date with Jamilla, who reveals that she has been seeing another man (an unknown lawyer) since the beginning of his new case. Alex realizes that he has lost Jamilla, largely because Alex has been focusing more on his job. They both decide to end their relationship and remain friends. Alex and Jamilla say an emotional goodbye and go their separate ways. Alex constantly goes and comes from Los Angeles for the Mary Smith case, which is assigned to LAPD cop Jeanne Galleta.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_&amp;_Jury"title="Judge &amp; Jury">
It's the biggest trial of the decade - big time mobster Dominic Cavello has finally been put in the dock, and there's enough evidence to make a conviction. Heavy security surrounds the courtroom, and Nick Pellisante, the FBI agent who helped to nail Cavello, keeps a close eye on the proceedings. But things swiftly begin to go wrong. Faced with anonymous threats, the jury is sequestered. Then the bus escorting them to their hotel is bombed on the day of Andie's young son's birthday - Jarrod, who is on the bus with the rest of the jury. Andie DeGrasse is the only person who survives, her loss strengthens her resolve to see justice done, to Cavello as well as to whoever planted that bomb. She and Pellisante both know that this will be difficult, but they can't foresee just how difficult.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One,_Two,_Buckle_My_Shoe_(novel)"title="One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (novel)">
Hercule Poirot is happy after his appointment with his dentist Henry Morley. He encounters former actress Mabelle Sainsbury Seale as she exits a cab outside the office. Poirot retrieves a shiny buckle for her that has fallen from her new shoe. During the dental visit, Morley tells Poirot that his secretary is away and her absence is slowing him in seeing patients. Later that day, his friend Inspector Japp informs him that Morley has been found dead, having been shot in the head, the gun in his hand. Between Poirot's appointment and Morley's death, the dentist had three patients – Mabelle, prominent banker Alistair Blunt, and a new patient, a Greek gentleman called Amberiotis. A fourth person, Howard Raikes, leaves without seeing Reilly. Raikes is an American left-wing activist who likes Jane Olivera, niece of the banker Blunt.Amberiotis dies from an overdose of anaesthetic before Japp can interview him, leading police to the view that Morley accidentally killed him and committed suicide upon realising his mistake. Poirot does not accept this view. He knows from Morley's secretary Gladys Nevill that she had been called away by a fake telegram that day. Morley had not liked her boyfriend Frank Carter, and felt Carter did this.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dairy_Queen_(novel)"title="Dairy Queen (novel)">
15-year-old girl Darlene Joyce (D.J.) Schwenk lives on a farm in Red Bend, Wisconsin, where she and her family own a dairy farm. When D.J.'s father hurts his hip, leaving him unable to work, D.J. reluctantly leaves her high school's volleyball and basketball teams to fill in for him on the farm. In the process she gives up her chance at a college scholarship, and her grades begin to slide. Meanwhile, D.J. is pressured into training Brian Nelson, a stubborn football player who plays for the rival Hawley High School team. Over time the two become friends, and D.J. develops romantic feelings for Brian. Over the summer, D.J. begins training to join her high school's football team, driven in part by a fight with Brian, and in part by the legacy of her two estranged older brothers, Win and Bill, who are famous in Red Bend for playing college football. D.J. makes the team but is unsure of how to tell Brian, which later results in a falling-out between the two. D.J. is also alienated from her best friend, Amber, when she realizes too late that Amber is in love with her.Throughout the summer, many of D.J.'s problems stem from an inability to discuss important issues with her family and friends, as Brian eventually points out to her. It is through their friendship that she finds she has a lot to talk about, and begins to put her life back together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_Week"title="Witch Week">
"Witch Week" is set in an alternative modern-day Great Britain, identical to our world except for the presence of witchcraft. Despite witches being common, witchcraft is illegal and punishable by death by burning, policed by a modern-day Inquisition.At Larwood House, a boarding school where many of the children of executed witches are sent, a note claiming "Someone in this class is a witch" is found by a teacher. This launches an internal investigation of the more unpopular students at the school (Nan Pilgrim and Charles Morgan), who are gradually coming to terms with the fact that they are witches. Mayhem gradually ensues as magic is used to make birds appear in the classroom, to rain shoes, to curse a classmate into having his words always be true, and other pranks. When the magic gets totally out of control, one of the students runs away, leaving notes that blame the witch for controlling him. The headmistress of the school calls in an Inquisitor to find the missing student and locate the source of the trouble.Four more of the students flee the school and two seek help from an "underground railroad" system that is known to save witches by sending them to a world where they are not persecuted. Instead they are given a spell to summon unknown help and all five students converge where they are able to use it, summoning the enchanter Chrestomanci. He and the children conclude that their world diverged from 12B (ours) by a particular historical accident. They work to outwit the local inquisition and to merge their history, thus their world, with ours. It turns out that most of the schoolchildren are witches and all must lose any such powers by revising history in that way.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_in_the_Air_(novel)"title="Castle in the Air (novel)">
"Castle in the Air" follows the adventures of Abdullah, a handsome young carpet salesman from Zanzib, who daydreams constantly about being a stolen prince. One day a strange traveler comes to his stand to sell a magic carpet. During the night, Abdullah goes to sleep on the carpet but wakes up to find himself in a beautiful garden with a young woman. He tells the woman, Flower-in-the-Night, that he is the stolen prince of his daydreams, believing that he is in fact dreaming. Flower-in-the-Night, who has never seen a man other than her father, first believes that Abdullah is a woman, so Abdullah agrees to return the next night with portraits of many men so that she can make a proper comparison. He does so, and Abdullah and Flower-in-the-Night decide to get married.Abdullah returns the next night, but he arrives just as Flower-in-the-Night is snatched away by a huge flying djinn. Soon after, the Sultan of Zanzib captures Abdullah who then discovers that Princess Flower is actually the Sultan's daughter. Enraged that his daughter is missing, the Sultan blames Abdullah and throws him in jail, threatening to impale him on a 40-foot stake if his daughter is not found. Fortunately, Abdullah is saved by his magic carpet and escapes from Zanzib.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorist_(novel)"title="Terrorist (novel)">
The story centers on an American-born Muslim teenager named Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, although Ahmad's high school life guidance counselor, Jack Levy, also plays a central role. The novel seeks to explore the worldview and motivations of religious fundamentalists (specifically within Islam), while at the same time dissecting the morals and lifeways of residents of the fictional decaying New Jersey Rust Belt suburb of "New Prospect" (which Updike has identified with Paterson, New Jersey, also the setting of his novel, "In the Beauty of the Lilies").
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thief_(Turner_novel)"title="The Thief (Turner novel)">
The main character, a boy named Gen (short for Eugenides), is released from prison by the magus of the King of Sounis. Gen had been imprisoned for stealing the King's seal. The magus, whose name is not revealed, finds Gen to be filthy, uncouth, and insolent, but he values Gen's skills as a thief. Without telling Gen where they are going, he takes him out of the city. They are joined by the magus's two apprentices, Sophos and Ambiades, and by a soldier, Pol.The travelers are strained by personal conflict, as well as the dangers present due to the political and secret nature of their mission. The magus reveals that the object he wants Gen to steal is a precious stone called Hamiathes's Gift in the country of Attolia. The magus' plan is to use the long lost tradition embedded within the stone in order to claim the country of Eddis for his king. In exchange, the magus offers Gen fame and threatens him with a bounty on his head if he tries to escape. Agreeing, Gen risks death in a daring attempt to steal the stone from an almost inaccessible temple, while the entire party is pursued by the Guard of Attolia. After Gen steals the stone, the temple is washed away by a river. While traveling back, the party is captured by the Attolian guard. Ambiades turns out to be a traitor, but is later killed by Pol, who pushes him off a cliff and then jumps after him holding two Attolian soldiers, killing them, but dying himself. After being questioned by the queen of Attolia, Gen, Sophos and the Magus escape and go to Eddis. There they are taken to the palace and Gen gives the stone to the queen. It is revealed that Gen is Eugenides, the Queen's Thief, and Sophos is the heir to the kingdom of Sounis.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallam_Foe_(novel)"title="Hallam Foe (novel)">
"Hallam Foe" follows the life of 17-year-old boy who has a very unusual and seemingly destructive hobby. He lives most of his life up in a tree house with state-of-the-art binoculars, a telescope, and plenty of logbooks in hand, watching as the people around him live their life. Hallam keeps himself separated and lives in solitude up in the trees, away from his father, Julius Foe, stepmother, Verity, his sister, Lucy and his best friend Alex Thirtle. He had fallen into these depths when his mother, Anne Sarah Foe, committed suicide and the relentless relatives turned their attention and pity towards the boy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Perfect_Stranger_(novel)"title="A Perfect Stranger (novel)">
This book tells the story of Alexander Hale and Raphaella Phillips. Hale, a recently divorced man, takes a walk down his street, when he sees Phillips, a beautiful woman, crying on the steps. We later learn that the woman's name is Raphaella Phillips and that she is married to an eighty-year-old man who is very sick. Hale falls in love with Phillips, who is already married. Raphaella is young, while her husband is old and bedridden. Raphaella does not want to leave her husband but she does not want to stay closed away from the world with nothing to live for either. She has no children and feels like the house doesn't belong to her. In the end Raphaella's husband dies and Raphaella and Alexander can be together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clue_of_the_Tapping_Heels"title="The Clue of the Tapping Heels">
Nancy and her friends Bess and George stumble across a Persian cat on the road. They return the cat to Annie Carter, an elderly woman who keeps twenty-five cats in her house. The girls befriend the kindly Miss Carter, but while at her house, they are disrupted by neighbors who are annoyed with the cats. It is here that Nancy uncovers her next mystery. Fred Bunce, one of the neighbors, had taken care of a boy named Gus Woonton, who was reportedly mentally and physically challenged. Miss Carter took a liking to the boy while he was with Fred Bunce and his wife, so she paid for him to live at the Riverside Institution, in hopes of Gus receiving proper care for his ailments. Miss Carter receives a telegram that Gus Woonton has died, and Fred Bunce seems quite eager to pay for funeral expenses, which makes Nancy suspicious.Once the neighbors leave, Nancy meets a man in front of Miss Carter's home asking for a Lady Violette. Nancy informs him that there is no such person at this address, only to be informed that Miss Carter, a former actress, played a character named Lady Violette in one of her past plays. Nancy quickly tracks down the man, Horace St. Will, and he and Miss Carter are happily reunited. Mr. St. Will tells Nancy that he used to know a Ralph Woonton, which was the name of Gus's father. Mr. St. Will gives Nancy and her father some old letters from Ralph Woonton, however he tells them that Ralph Woonton and his wife never had a son. Nancy believes that Gus Woonton received an inheritance in trust from his parents, which was stolen by Fred Bunce. Her suspicions grow stronger when she trails Bunce into a stock market firm, where she sees the considerable amount of money he has lost in faulty stocks. But soon after the episode, the Bunces mysteriously leave their apartment. Nancy, Bess and George investigate the vacated apartment, where they find two of Miss Carter's Persian kittens, and returns them to her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazohinia"title="Kazohinia">
As in the Gulliverian prototype, the premise is a shipwreck with a solitary survivor, who finds himself in an unknown land, namely that of the Hins, which contains a minority group, the Behins. Accordingly, this work by a Hungarian writer relates not so much to Swift's work, but more precisely to "Brave New World" by the British writer Aldous Huxley. As in that work, there coexist two dissimilar, segregated societies, one developed and the other backward.The Hins are a people who have solved all economic problems: Production and usage of goods is based on need instead of money, and the standard of living is impeccable. The Hins live without any kind of government or administrative body, as their belief is that such would only hinder production. They lead their lives according to the "pure reality of existence," which they call kazo. They experience no emotions, love, beauty or spiritual life.There are two primary interpretations of the author's intentions:The protagonist, bored with the inhuman life of the Hins, chooses to live among the insane Behins, who reportedly conform better to his outlook on life. He hopes that, living in a walled-off area among the Behins, he will meet others with human feelings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Captain's_Daughter"title="The Captain's Daughter">
Pyotr Andreyich Grinyov (the narrative is conducted on his behalf) is the only surviving child of a retired Imperial Army officer. When Pyotr turns 17, his father sends him into military service in Orenburg. While en route, Pyotr gets lost in a blizzard, but is rescued by a mysterious man. As a token of his gratitude, Pyotr gives the guide his hareskin coat.Arriving in Orenburg, Pyotr reports to his commanding officer and is assigned to serve at Fort Belogorsky under Captain Ivan Mironov. The "fort" is little more than a fence around a village, and the captain's wife Vasilisa is really in charge. Pyotr befriends his fellow officer Shvabrin, who has been banished here after a duel resulted in the death of his opponent. When Pyotr dines with the Mironov family, he meets their daughter Masha and falls in love with her. This causes a rift between Pyotr and Shvabrin, who has been turned down by Masha. When Shvabrin insults Masha's honor, Pyotr and Shvabrin duel and Pyotr is injured. Pyotr asks his father's consent to marry Masha, but is refused.Not much later, the fortress is besieged by the insurgent Yemelyan Pugachev, who claims to be the Emperor Peter III. The Cossacks stationed at the fortress defect to the forces of Pugachev, and he takes the fortress easily. He demands that Captain Mironov swear an oath of allegiance to him, and when refused, hangs the Captain and kills his wife. When it is Pyotr's turn, Shvabrin suddenly appears to have defected as well, and upon his advice Pugachev orders Pyotr to be hanged. However, his life is suddenly spared as Pugachev turns out to be the guide who rescued Pyotr from the blizzard, and he recognizes Pyotr whom he remembers with affection.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Sword_and_Wind_Child"title="Dragon Sword and Wind Child">
Saya is a young maiden who was adopted by an elderly couple who found her in the forest when she was an infant and raised to worship and revere the God of Light and his two immortal children, the passionate and fierce Princess Teruhi and the subdued and melancholic Prince Tsukishiro. As she comes of age, she catches the eye of Prince Tsukishiro and the people of Darkness, those who continue to reincarnate and do not fear death.Tsukishiro, enchanted by Saya's beauty, invites her to become one of his handmaidens at the Palace of Light where he and his sister reside. Before she leaves, she discovers from the People of Darkness that she is latest reincarnation of the Water Maiden, the Princess of the People of Darkness and a priestess capable of stilling the Dragon Sword, a weapon that contains the rage of the Fire God when he was killed by his father, the God of Light, for burning his mother, the Goddess of Darkness, to death. The Dragon Sword and the Water Maiden are linked and the sword is the only weapon which can slay a Child of Light. It is this aspect, Saya discovers, of her that intrigues and attracts Tsukishiro and infuriates and causes Teruhi to despise her since she resembles her previous reincarnation, the Princess Sayura.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meaning_of_Night"title="The Meaning of Night">
Beginning on a cold October night in 1854 in a dark passageway, the book's narrator tracks an innocent man whom he does not know and stabs him to death. The protagonist/narrator, Edward Glyver, then takes the reader back, recounting as a confession his tale of deceit, love, and revenge. Glyver reveals the torment he has suffered at the hands of his rival, the poet-criminal Phoebus Rainsford Daunt, and why in pursuit of revenge Glyver (now masquerading as Edward Glapthorn), a book lover and scholar, has turned to murder. The story moves between the foggy London streets and the enchanting country manor house Evenwood where Daunt spent his formative years, a place with which Glyver finds he has a special connection. "The Glass of Time", the follow-up novel to "The Meaning of Night", further examines the consequences of Edward Glyver's crime, in a setting twenty years after "The Meaning of Night".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You're_Different_and_That's_Super"title="You're Different and That's Super">
Carson Kressley tells the story of a one-of-a-kind pony who learns that it's our differences that make us "super." Whimsical black-and-white illustrations from renowned equine artist Jared Lee corral humor and charm in a tale of a unicorn struggling to find his identity and place in the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_You_Give_a_Mouse_a_Cookie"title="If You Give a Mouse a Cookie">
The entire story is told in second person. A boy named Oliver gives a cookie to a mouse named Quinley . The mouse asks for a glass of milk. He then requests a straw (to drink the milk), a mirror (to avoid a milk mustache), nail scissors (to trim his hair in the mirror), and a broom (to sweep up his hair trimmings). Next, he wants to take a nap, have a story read to him, draw a picture, and hang the drawing on the refrigerator. Looking at the refrigerator makes him thirsty, so the mouse asks for a glass of milk. The circle is complete when he wants a cookie to go with it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(novel)"title="Jubilee (novel)">
"Jubilee" is the semi-fictional story of Vyry Brown, based on the life of author Margaret Walker's great-grandmother, Margaret Duggans Ware Brown. Vyry Brown is a mixed-race slave—the unacknowledged daughter of her master—who is born on the Dutton plantation in Georgia. The novel follows her experiences from early childhood to adult life.The story of Vyry's life in the novel spans three major periods of American history: Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_on_a_Treasure_Island"title="Five on a Treasure Island">
When siblings Julian, Dick and Anne cannot go for their usual summer holiday to Polseath, they are invited to spend the summer with their Aunt Fanny and Uncle Quentin at their home Kirrin Cottage, in the coastal village of Kirrin. They also meet their cousin Georgina, a surly, difficult girl, who tries hard to live like a boy and only answers to the name George. Despite an uncomfortable start, the cousins become firm friends and George introduces them to her beloved dog Timothy (Timmy), who secretly lives with the fisher boy, Alf, in the village as George's parents will not allow her to keep Timmy.On their way to Kirrin Island, George shows her cousins a shipwreck, explaining it was her great-great-great grandfather's ship. He had been transporting gold when the ship was wrecked in a storm, but despite divers investigating the wreck, the gold was never found. After visiting the wreck, the five arrive on the Island and are exploring the ruined castle when a huge storm blows up, making it too dangerous for them to return to the mainland. While they take shelter on the island, the sea throws up the old shipwreck, grounding it on the rocks surrounding the island. Excited by these developments, they decide to come back at dawn the next day to investigate the wreck before it is discovered.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Doomsday"title="After Doomsday">
The novel explores events after the destruction of Earth, from the point of view of two returning starship crews, one entirely made up of men, the other consisting entirely of women.The story is set in the early 21st century. Even as the Cold War dragged on, Earth has been suddenly contacted by the Monwaingi space-faring culture. The technology of interstellar travel is spreading across the galaxy, disrupting one culture after another. Monwaing itself was contacted only a few centuries previously. Another culture, the Vorlak, underwent a transition from a stable planetary society to a warlord culture similar to the Japanese Shogunate. The nomadic Kandemirian culture became a hegemonistic one similar to the Mongol Empire. Earth found itself on the fringes of a conflict between Kandemir and a coalition led by Vorlak, with Monwaing on the sidelines, actively supporting the anti-Kandemir forces.There is a lingua franca called "Uru", which bonds the diverse cultures together. The original speakers of the language may have also initiated the spread of interstellar technology, but the language seems to have outlived, or at least outstripped its originators.In the 20 years since contact, several expeditions have set out, some in borrowed ships, some in ships built on Earth. The ship "USS Benjamin Franklin", with an all-male crew, set out to visit the core of the Milky Way — actually an unusual quest by the stodgy standards of the typical galactic culture. Another ship has gone as far as the Magellanic Clouds. The pan-European expedition in the ship "Europa", crewed entirely by women, has roamed far outside the local group of cultures. The star-drive technology allows journeys of tens of thousands of parsecs in mere months. In spite of this, most cultures are "stay-at-homes" compared to humans, interacting only with the local group of cultures, known as a "cluster".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babyji"title="Babyji">
Sixteen-year-old Anamika Sharma is a bright young student aware of her privileged position within Indian society. Head Prefect at her school, she aspires to graduate with excellent grades so as to be able to go on to college in the United States to study physics. Anamika is confident that she will be able to get in, but feels conflicted about contributing to the country's brain drain; ultimately, she concludes that it would be best to return to her native country after the completion of her studies to contribute to the modernization of traditional Indian society and breaking down the rigid caste system.The novel is set against the backdrop of the protests against the recommendations of the Mandal commission, which trigger several acts of self-immolation. In particular, classes are suspended for weeks on end, and Anamika finds more time than usual to pursue her private interests.She spends much of her time with Tripta Adhikari, a free-thinking divorced lady about twice her age whom she calls "India". India is a wealthy academic who lives in Anamika's neighbourhood, and occasionally Anamika sneaks out of the house when her parents have already gone to bed to spend the night with her new-found friend. Mr and Mrs Sharma know about Tripta Adhikari but naturally assume that the latter has a maternal relationship with their daughter, while India herself knows very well that what she is doing amounts to statutory rape. Anamika's parents even let her go on a short holiday to Kasauli with India and two of her friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Girls"title="Dead Girls">
Ignatz Zwakh, former escort of assassin Primavera Bobinski, is tracked down in Thailand by the half-robotic Pikadon Twins, with a demand from Primavera's half-robot boss Madame Kito that Ignatz return to the Big Weird to work with Primavera. Primavera is a Lilim - a vampiric living dead girl.Ignatz returns to Nana, Bangkok, and is reunited with Primavera. They go to a restaurant that uses gynoids to mimic the English vogue of killing Lilim. The Cartier automata were invented by a Dr Toxicophilous with robotic consciousness that harnessed 'quantum magic', and this quantum-mechanical seat of consciousness is situated in the womb of their descendants, the Lilim. The pair are in the restaurant on a job from Madame Kito, but while Primavera is engaged in assassinating one of Kito's rivals Ignatz is rendered unconscious.Ignatz and Primavera, now captured and rendered unconscious with a special girdle around her "umbilicus" (navel), are taken by Jack Morgenstern to the American Embassy, where they are locked up.Jack Morgenstern reveals that the British government want Primavera and Ignatz returned to them, and Kito has betrayed them to the Americans. Morgenstern questions Ignatz regarding the amount of Lilim escapees from the supposedly quarantined London, but gets no response to his theory that one of the surviving original Cartier dolls called Titania is organising the breakouts. Primavera uses her quantum magic to telepathically induce her guard to release her from her umbilicus girdle, then physically smashes through the wall of her prison, allowing herself and Ignatz to escape by jumping into the river below. Due to the umbilical girdle Primavera's quantum matrix has been infected by hostile nanobots which are inhibiting her full use of quantum magic and are slowly destroying her. Primavera believes that Kito has been blackmailed into betraying them. Primavera and Ignatz leave Nana by boat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Young_Visiters"title="The Young Visiters">
Alfred Salteena, an "elderly man of 42", has invited 17-year-old Ethel Monticue to stay with him. They receive an invitation to visit Alfred's friend, Bernard Clark, which they readily accept. Bernard is "inclined to be rich". Shortly after their arrival, Ethel and Bernard become attracted to each other.Alfred seeks Bernard's advice on how to become a gentleman. Bernard is doubtful that this can be managed, but writes an introduction to his friend the Earl of Clincham. Alfred excitedly rushes off to London to visit the Earl, leaving Ethel alone and unchaperoned with Bernard.Lord Clincham lives, as many other aristocrats do, in "compartements" at the Crystal Palace. He agrees to assist Alfred and instals him in a subterranean "compartement", along with other "apprentice gentlemen". He invites Alfred to accompany him to a reception hosted by the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII), introducing Salteena as Lord Hyssops. The Prince is impressed, and promises to assist the trembling and overjoyed Salteena.Bernard and Ethel fall in love and marry. Devastated by these events, Salteena marries a maid-in-waiting at Buckingham Palace. Lord Clincham also marries, but not very happily.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flight_to_Lucifer"title="The Flight to Lucifer">
Thomas Perscors ("through fire"), an incarnation of Primal Man, is taken from Earth to the planet Lucifer by Seth Valentinus, a reincarnation of the gnostic theologian Valentinus. Their guide is Olam, who is an Aeon, an emanation of the true god. Lucifer is controlled by "Saklas", which is a Gnostic name for the false creator. Olam has brought Perscors to Lucifer to fight Saklas, and has brought Valentinus so he can remember his true self. Perscors cripples Saklas and changes the order of things across all of Lucifer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_List_of_Seven"title="The List of Seven">
Christmas Day 1884. Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle is invited to a seance where two people are apparently murdered. Doyle is saved by Armond Sacker, apparently a professor of Antiquities at Cambridge University. Doyle contacts Claude Leboux, a friend and Scotland Yard Inspector to investigate, but the house where the seance took place has been redecorated. Doyle gets a note from Helena Petrovna Blavatsky inviting him to a speech in Cambridge. He goes to Cambridge, unsuccessfully tries to track down Sacker, and then Doyle attends Blavatsky's talk, and speaks with her afterwards. She warns him of dark spirits and after a meal he is attacked and is rescued by "Professor Sacker" for a second time who turns out to be Jack Sparks, Special Agent to the Crown. They head to Topping to the estate of one of the attendees at the seance, but find that it has become a madhouse. They find a clue to go to a publishing house called Rathbourne &amp; Sons in London. On the journey back to London, Jack reveals that his brother Alexander may be the mastermind behind all their troubles. Jack thinks the attacks on Doyle are prompted by a manuscript that Doyle submitted to Rathbourne &amp; Sons. When they get to the publishing house they find a list of the board of directors - the titular “List of Seven”. A secret trapdoor leads them via an aqueduct to a storage room in the British Museum, which has had many statues stolen from it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Bridges"title="London Bridges">
A terrorist by the alias of "The Wolf" engages Alex Cross' old enemy, Col. Geoffrey Shafer, aka The Weasel, to assist him in a grand plan of worldwide terrorist attacks designed to get humanity's attention. After a town in the Southwestern United States is blown up, the FBI's Alex Cross is assigned to the case despite being on vacation to visit his son Alex Jr. in Seattle and his girlfriend Jamilla Hughes in San Francisco. Alex is at a crossroads in his family and personal life.What follows next is a long cat and mouse chase in which politics, communication, and ego take center-stage. The Wolf is ruthless enough to draw in even the most unwilling into his plans and never fails to make a point. His opponents are locked in deep wrangling and indecision. It is up to Alex Cross to make the connections and chase The Wolf and The Weasel across America and Europe at the risk of his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_Delirium"title="Line of Delirium">
The first novel, "Line of Delirium", takes place decades after a devastating interstellar conflict — the Vague War. While the reason for and details of the war remain largely unexplained, it is clear that almost every alien race was at some point involved in hostilities with the humans. The war was going badly for Earth, until two Earth officers decided to take matters into their own hands. Disobeying orders, they turned their fleet and headed for Earth, demanding the government's surrender. One of the officers, a man named Grey, established the Human Empire and became the emperor. His co-conspirator Lemak became the supreme commander of all human forces. While it is not exactly clear how the tide was turned, it is known that all races opposing the new empire were eventually beaten. Two of which, the cyborg Meklar and the ursine Bulrathi formed a subsequent pact with the humans — the Trinary Alliance, creating a nearly unbeatable force (humans excel at ship-to-ship combat, Meklar are master engineers, and Bulrathi are superb ground combatants).Close to the end of the war, a man named Curtis van Curtis acquires an alien device he calls "aTan" (from "athanatos", "immortal" [Greek: "Αθάνατος", literally, "without death"] ) giving immortality to anyone who can afford it. He formed the aTan company, which quickly became almost as powerful as the Human Empire (as some characters in the novel call it, "an empire within an empire"). The secret of the device is coveted by many, as the aTan company holds exclusive rights, with Emperor Grey's grudging approval (in exchange he gets free reincarnations).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcerer's_Son"title="Sorcerer's Son">
Spurned by a rejected offer of marriage, the demon sorcerer Smada Rezhyk begins imagining that the sorceress Lady Delivev Ormoru of Castle Spinweb is plotting to bring him down. He sends his most faithful demon servant, Gildrum, to take the form of a handsome knight, who has been injured in battle and comes to Castle Spinweb for refuge with the plan to impregnate Delivev with a child. For this purpose, Rezhyk gives the demon his seed; once Delivev is with child, Rezhyk imagines that he has eleven days to prepare his defenses until Delivev discovers the weakening of her powers and aborts the child. What he does not imagine is that the sorceress will not abort her son, or that his faithful demon servant will fall in love with his mortal enemy. Once the son, Cray Ormoru, reaches maturity, he starts on a journey as a knight to discover what became of his mysterious father.Cray gains a few clues to the real identity of his father; he eventually realizes that he will be unable to complete his quest as a knight. Consequently, he decides to take up an apprenticeship as a sorcerer instead, following in his mother's footsteps. Rezhyk volunteers to play the role of master to Cray, but secretly seeks to sabotage his magical education. Cray is discouraged, although this turns to anger when Gildrum reveals Rezhyk's falsehood. Gildrum secretly teaches Cray demon summoning. He learns that Rezhyk is his father and abandons his apprenticeship; Rezhyk tires of his duplicity and orders Cray's death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Oceans"title="Black Oceans">
The main character, Nicholas Hunt, is an American politician and lobbyist, closely involved with some branches of secret military research including paranormal activities. He is not a hero: as Dukaj himself describes him, he is "a cynical, egoistic bureaucrat, whose main motivation for all of his decisions in his job is, it seems, covering his ass". Currently he has lost an internal power struggle and is assigned to oversee what seems like a dead-end, low-key project. Soon, however, his project starts to gain more importance, as scientists explore some promising theories from the borders of memetics and telepathy, including study of potential lifeforms that would use memes just as we use genes, and develop new sciences like "psychomemetics".Suddenly a strange cataclysm takes place, with millions of people worldwide going insane and many densely populated areas becoming a 'no-go' zone. Nicholas Hunt is not sure if this is an alien invasion, a result of military or corporate experiment, anew step in human evolution, or the result of the transformation into a post-technological singularity world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Palace_(novel)"title="The Crystal Palace (novel)">
Sorcerer Cray Ormoru and his friend, the seer Feldar Sepwin, craft an enchanted mirror that allows whoever gazes upon it to see their heart's desire. For Cray himself, the mirror remains blank for many years, until one day he sees in it the image of a young girl. With no idea of who she is, he watches the girl transform into a lovely woman over the years, and Cray realizes that he is destined to find her. When he does, he learns that this is Aliza, a sorceress who lives in a crystal palace which is partly within the demon realm and who is dedicated solely to the study of her craft.Cray finds Aliza to be a skilled young sorceress, but also cold, aloof, and entirely focused on sorcery. Cray encourages her to take an interest in the outside world and forms a budding friendship. However, this friendship is strongly discouraged by Aliza's sorcerer grandfather, Everand. Despite Everand's disapproval, Aliza and Cray travel to the demon realm and also to the home of Cray's sorceress mother, Delivev. During this latter journey, Aliza looks into the mirror of heart's desire and causes it to shatter. This causes some initial confusion, but it is quickly revealed this is because Aliza's soul has been stolen from her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_Venus_(novel)"title="The Birth of Venus (novel)">
A young Florentine girl, Alessandra Cecchi, is drawn to a young painter commissioned to paint the family's chapel walls. The painter is brought to her home by her father, a rich textile merchant whose business would be negatively affected by the rise of Girolamo Savonarola in Florence over the next few years. The book follows Alessandra's daily life, and is written in the first person, as a memoir written by Alessandra late in her life. Her passion for painting and learning serve her well, but her family does not approve. Her mother tries her hardest to shape Alessandra into a woman who will be desired by a successful and powerful man. Eventually, after Alessandra has met the painter, but before her feelings for him and his talent have made themselves known to her, her hateful brother Tomaso suggests strong but quiet Cristoforo Langella as a potential husband for her. She marries him shortly afterward.Meanwhile, her attraction to the painter grows, as does her affection for her husband Cristoforo. Alessandra's observations of the political turbulence in Florence are key to the storyline. Dunant captures the personal conflict felt by Alessandra - she feels torn between Savonarola's fiery message and her own ideas. She believes she knows what is right, but doesn't know what she will do about it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Class_(Erich_Segal_novel)"title="The Class (Erich Segal novel)">
"The Class" follows the diverse fates of five members of Harvard's Class of 1958, recounting the way their lives intertwine, and coming to a dramatic conclusion at their class reunion, twenty-five years later.Andrew Eliot comes from the Boston Brahmin Eliot family. Due to his background, he feels the pressure of high expectations, which causes him to suffer from lack of confidence. He is otherwise laid-back and friendly, and a good friend to all his classmates. To experience life without privilege and to fulfill his military obligation, he serves in the navy as an ordinary swabbie. After his military service, he enters an ill-fated marriage to the daughter of one of his father's classmates and takes up a career in investment banking. Unfortunately, his wife is a serial adultress and alcoholic and demands a divorce, leaving him estranged from his own son and daughter, with limited visitation after his wife places both in boarding school at the age of 9 and 6, denying him custodial rights and frustrating his attempts to give them a home life. He has an interest in his family's history during the American Revolution, which in turn leads to him following his conscience and helping organize the Moratorium Day protests on Wall Street.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_on_Lily_Street"title="The House on Lily Street">
A police detective investigates the murder of a solipsistic social worker who had sought the identity of the mysterious "Mr. Big", an extortionist who threatens welfare cheats with exposure unless he is paid off.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphibian_Man"title="Amphibian Man">
Argentinean doctor Salvator, a scientist and a maverick surgeon, gives his son, Ichthyander (, Ikhtiandr) (Greek etymology: "Fish"+ "Man") a life-saving transplant - a set of shark gills. The experiment is a success but it limits the young man's ability to interact with the world outside his ocean environment. He has to spend much of his time in water. Pedro Zurita, a local pearl gatherer, learns about Ichthyander and tries to exploit the boy's superhuman diving abilities.Similar to other works by Beliaev, the book investigates the possibilities of physical survival under extreme conditions, as well as the moral integrity of scientific experiments. It also touches on socialist ideas of improving living conditions for the world's poor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encounters_with_the_Archdruid"title="Encounters with the Archdruid">
While notionally a profile of Brower, "Encounters" is broken into three sections. The first chronicles Brower's conflict with Charles Park, a mineral engineer hoping to find and exploit mineral reserves in Glacier Peak Wilderness. Charles Park is portrayed as calculating and pragmatic, unwilling to foreclose real economic value from current generations in order to leave the environment pristine for future generations. This pragmatic view was starkly contrasted with Brower's insistence that "I believe in wilderness for itself alone". McPhee facilitates or observes the dialogue between these two contrasted figures as he does for the other two sections in the book.The second section introduces Charles Fraser, a real estate developer in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. Fraser's characterization of environmentalists as modern druids who "worship trees and sacrifice human beings to those trees" provides the charge against Brower that forms the title of the book. Brower came to Georgia in order to stop Fraser's plan to develop Cumberland Island. Like Park, Fraser is depicted as nuanced and pragmatic: his vision of development is controlled and regulated land use. Fraser's development of Hilton Head Island is still considered a model for planned development and McPhee notes that Fraser considers himself a true conservationist. Brower would eventually win this battle, with a groundswell of opposition forcing Fraser to sell his development on Cumberland Island to the National Park Foundation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Control_of_Nature"title="The Control of Nature">
The book begins by describing how the Atchafalaya River drains 30 percent of the Mississippi River at its source 300 miles upriver from New Orleans. Thanks to its steeper gradient and more direct route, the Atchafalaya seeks to change the course of the Mississippi as has happened in its long geological history. Due to the Mississippi's vital importance to industry, the Army Corps of Engineers constructed a control structure at the Atchafalaya's source to prevent this from occurring and to maintain the 30 percent drainage. McPhee explains how Morgan City, Louisiana would be destroyed if the river's banks increase. Three million cubic feet of water would inundate the town in the case of a hundred-year flood, though the Corps of Engineers has been trying its hardest to build a more stable flood structure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Skystone"title="The Skystone">
The book begins with Publius Varrus laying its framework: he is retelling his history and the history of the Roman withdrawal from Britain. He then begins by talking about an ambush by Celts where he and Caius Britannicus are injured. While thinking about his time spent with Britannicus recovering from these injuries, his thoughts lead to their meeting: Britannicus had been a captive of Berbers and Varrus freed him from them. After this encounter Varrus recalls how he and Britannicus traveled together to Britain to become "primus pilus" and legate, respectively, of Legion XX Valeria Victrix's Second Millarian Cohort.While they are in command of this unit, Hadrian's wall is overcome by a horde of Picts and other Celtic Tribes. The unit spends a year and a half fighting their way back to Roman Controlled Britain. Outside of Londinium they encounter a legion from the army of Theodosius.After Varrus recovers from his injuries, he returns to Colchester, the location of his birth. When he returns he finds that his boyhood friend, and his grandfather's helper, Equus had ensured that his grandfather's smithy was not devoid of tools. Varrus begins to run the business again, striking deals with Cuno, Equus's brother-in-law. Varrus also gains several contracts with the local legion, because his swords use a higher quality of iron than the other local suppliers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strands_of_Starlight"title="Strands of Starlight">
The protagonist of Strands of Starlight is Miriam, a young woman living a fugitive life in the fictional land of Adria, which is set in medieval Western Europe circa 1350. She has a mysterious gift of healing and suffers persecution because of it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Lucy_Gault"title="The Story of Lucy Gault">
It begins with Lucy, on a night in 1921. She is the only child of an Anglo-Irish land owner on the coast of County Cork. It starts during the Irish War of Independence, when Loyalist Protestant landowners caught in the battle between the IRA and the British army had their houses burned. The place is under martial law and Captain Gault is disturbed by young arsonists from the nearby village. When he fires a warning shot with his old rifle, he injures a boy in the shoulder. Out of fear, the family plans to move to England. Lucy is not told why her family wishes to move and longs for the house she was kept from and the sea close by. On the eve of their departure, she hides in the woods. Due to a series of events, her parents are led to believe that she drowned in the sea.By the time she is discovered, her parents are gone. She thus gets what she wished for, to live in the house, being taken care of by the house servants turned caretaker-farmers. Lucy lives a very lonely life, reading books and keeping bees. She feels very guilty about running away and thus feels that she deserves her loneliness. When another character, Ralph, tries to relieve her of her sad life, she feels that she cannot let him love her without, one of the characters opines, getting forgiveness from her parents. Her father returns after the Second World War, having spent the previous years in Italy and Switzerland, too late to salvage her happiness. They settle into an uneasy companionship, with too much unspoken.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_the_Ivory_Charm"title="The Mystery of the Ivory Charm">
The plot finds Nancy, Bess, and George investigating a mysterious boy from India. The boy, Coya, works for a traveling circus, and is treated poorly by his guardian, Rai, also a native of India, who is in charge of the circus. Coya runs away from his abusive guardian and seeks asylum at the Drew home in River Heights. Soon after his arrival, the girls begin investigating property owned by the unusual Miss Anita Allison. They encounter a house "with no insides," and a hidden tunnel. The property mysteriously catches fire, revealing a hidden cache of jewels. Nancy traces Coya's parentage and uncovers a sinister kidnapping plot involving both Miss Allison and Rai. The climax also reveals a secret about the ivory charm, and its mysterious powers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owls_in_the_Family"title="Owls in the Family">
Billy is a boy who resides in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan who brings home numerous animals and spends time with his two best friends, Bruce and Murray. Billy winds up finding two great horned owls, which join his larger pet collection. The first bird, Wol, is larger and lighter in colour with a bold personality and was found by Billy and his friends under a bush after a storm. Soon afterward, Billy finds Weeps, a smaller mottled brown owl in a barrel filled with oil. When Billy witnesses children throwing stones at Weeps, who is unable to fly, he trades his scout knife for him. Unlike Wol, Weeps has an anxious disposition and sits on the handlebars of Billy's bicycle due to his inability to fly.Billy has a number of adventures with Wol and Weeps, including tough times and happy moments. When Billy and his family move to Toronto, Ontario, he entrusts the owls to Bruce.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_of_the_Idols"title="Twilight of the Idols">
Nietzsche criticizes German culture of the day as unsophisticated, decadent and nihilistic, and shoots some disapproving arrows at key French, British, and Italian cultural figures who represent similar tendencies. In contrast to all these alleged representatives of cultural decadence, Nietzsche applauds Caesar, Napoleon, Goethe, Thucydides and the Sophists as healthier and stronger types. The book states the transvaluation of all values as Nietzsche's final and most important project, and gives a view of antiquity wherein the Romans for once take precedence over the ancient Greeks, albeit only in the field of literature.The book is divided into twelve sections:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_You_Want_to_Be_President?"title="So You Want to Be President?">
The book details the lives, history, and personalities about past Presidents of the United States, followed by information about the different backgrounds some Presidents have shared. Each page describes facts about some Presidents including military backgrounds, former job positions, other offices held, hobbies, lifestyles, and popularity. It also mentions some of the more notable accomplishments of former Presidents including The Louisiana Purchase, soup kitchens, job creations, and the creation of the Peace Corps. The book ends with a change of tone and an illustration of a silhouette of an unidentified president who is taking the Oath of office, complemented by a crowd of hands waving miniature American Flags.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flying_Trunk"title="The Flying Trunk">
A young man squanders his inheritance until he has nothing left but a few shillings, a pair of slippers, and an old dressing-gown. A friend sends him a trunk with directions to pack up and be off. Having nothing to pack, he gets into the trunk himself. The trunk is enchanted and carries him to the land of the Turks. He uses the trunk to visit the sultan's daughter, who is kept in a tower because of a prophecy that her marriage would be unhappy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Hunters_(comic)"title="Treasure Hunters (comic)">
## The Gate of Atheia.Thorn, the Bone cousins, and Gran'ma Ben reach Atheia at last, and find the city crammed with refugees. A young girl named Taneal gives Thorn a tiny prayer stone. Phoney and Smiley sneak Bartleby into the city in a hay wagon stolen from an innocent farmer. Later, Gran'ma Ben takes Thorn and the Bones to meet her teacher, who runs a rooftop kitchen in the city.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_of_Moonlight"title="Maze of Moonlight">
The protagonist of "Maze of Moonlight" is Christopher delAurvre, Baron of Aurverelle and grandson of Roger delAurvre. The story picks up two generations after the end of "Strands of Starlight" during the time of the Western Schism. Christopher has been away on the Crusade of Nicopolis of 1396 CE.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_Shadow"title="Shroud of Shadow">
The protagonist of Shroud of Shadow is Natil the elf. Introduced in "Strands of Starlight" as a minor character and developed more in "Maze of Moonlight", she has returned to Adria from wandering the earth looking for Elves. All of the other Elves introduced in the previous two books have died or faded in some manner, though only Varden, Terrill, and Mirya's fates are specifically described. This story takes place in 1500 CE, about a century after "Maze of Moonlight", though it is intercut with scenes of 1990's Denver, Colorado, United States, where two people are experiencing the awakening of Elven blood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strands_of_Sunlight"title="Strands of Sunlight">
The principal protagonist in "Strands of Sunlight" is Natil the elf, though its multiple narratives follow several important secondary characters. The story takes place in 1990's Denver, USA. It concerns several humans who have had ancient Elven blood in their veins awaken and begin making them Elves.There are seventeen Elves in Denver when the story starts, though only 15 are named: Natil, Hadden, Wheat, Marsh, Kelly, Bright, Lauri, Raven, Heather, Ash, Web, Fox, Dell, Alessandro, and Tristan. Two humans also figure heavily in the story line: Sandy Joy, an abuse survivor from Los Angeles, and T.K., a black military veteran missing a leg.The story follows three major arcs: Natil trying to guide the new Elves in what it means to be an Elf; Sandy Joy's search for safety and acceptance; and T.K.'s search for hope and a sense of belonging.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Best_Families"title="In the Best Families">
A wealthy wife hires Nero Wolfe to learn the source of her husband's mysterious income. In short order, Arnold Zeck horns in, the wife is murdered, and Wolfe disappears.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Early_Life"title="My Early Life">
The book begins by describing his childhood and schooldays, and provides context for the earlier published accounts of events in his early life. He describes his large collection of toy soldiers, his usually unsuccessful experiences in school, and how his family decided his path in life was to join the army as an officer.He describes how he became proficient in writing and speaking English, as he has three terms of a course under an excellent teacher of English; had he been a more successful student by the standards of schools of his youth, he would have learned Latin and Greek instead. That part of his education proved fruitful when he began to write for newspapers and speak in public, gaining praise for his efforts. He was saddened by the early death of his father, not having the opportunity to have an adult relationship with him. Otherwise, his characteristic optimism carries him through every experience of his life, allowing him to see events that at first seemed a misfortune as changing his path in life to one with a later success.Harrow School prepared him to attend Sandhurst and become an officer in the army, specifically in a cavalry unit. He was an avid polo player in his years as an army officer. Once out of formal schooling, he was eager for experiences, taking every opportunity to be where the action was. He was an observer in Cuba as Spain fought the rebels there and that same itch for experience brought him to the battles at the frontier of India (an area now in Pakistan), and brought him to South Africa.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M/F"title="M/F">
From the blurb of Cape's first edition: 'The situation as far as I'm concerned,' says the young-narrator-hero of "MF", 'is an interesting one. In two days in a strange country I've acquired a mother in the form of a Welsh-speaking Bird Queen who scares me. I've spent some hours in prison, I've discovered the works of an unknown superlative artist in a garden shed and I've been shot at by a riddling lion-faced expert on Bishop Berkeley. Most interesting of all I'm due tonight to be married by a circus clown to my own sister.' Almost twenty-one, a college throw-out, Miles Faber embarks on a defiant pilgrimage across the Caribbean. His destination: the shrine of Sib Legeru, Castitian poet and painter. In the streets of Castita's capital, gay with a religious festival, a series of bizarre revelations await him: his obscene double, the son of a circus sorceress Aderyn the Bird Queen, and a sister-plump fellow offspring of his father's incestuous union. Unspeakable crimes of blood and lust are perpetrated against both before Miles, solving the final riddle, wakes-like Oedipus to find himself a willing victim of the machinations of dynastic destiny.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mulligan_and_His_Steam_Shovel"title="Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel">
After many years working together, Mike and his coal-powered steam shovel Mary Anne (whose name is a reference to the Marion Power Shovel Company) face competition from more modern gasoline, electric, and diesel shovels. Searching for work, they find a small town about to build a new town hall. Mike offers that if he and Mary Anne can't do the job in a single day, the town won't have to pay them. The town's selectmenwho believe the work would take a hundred men a weekhire Mike and Mary Anne, expecting to get their new cellar at no cost. Privately, even Mike has some doubts.At sunup the next day Mike and Mary Anne begin work. When sundown comes they have just finished the job, but realize they have neglected to leave a ramp by which Mary Anne can get out of the cellar. A child suggests that Mary Anne be converted to a boiler for the new building's heating system, and that Mike become its janitor. Mike and Mary Anne settle contentedly into their new jobs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_of_the_Basset"title="Voyage of the Basset">
Miranda is sixteen and concerned with being sensible, while Cassandra, nine years and eleven months, likes and believes in magical things. Miranda is outnumbered in this family, because Professor Aisling lectures on mythology and legends at his university, and believes in mysterious and magical things too.But some of the members of the university think that it is nonsense to teach about myths and legends, because magical and mysterious things cannot be dissected, weighed and measured. One member in particular, Mr. Bilgewallow, takes delight in tormenting Professor Aisling, who wishes, and dreams, of a ship that would take him to the worlds where he might find the creatures of legend.One evening, his wish comes true. As he and his daughters walk along the river, they come across a curious little ship, with a crew of dwarfs and gremlins. One of the dwarfs introduces himself as Malachi, captain of H.M.S. "Basset". He says that it is Professor Aisling's ship, conjured from his wishes and ready to sail on the "tides of inspiration". Aisling is astonished and delighted, and he and Cassandra waste no time in going aboard. Miranda needs a bit more coaxing.The Aislings set sail on a magical voyage where they meet a number of creatures from mythology that join them on board the ship. Their first stop is the island of fairies, where the crew are approached by Oberon and Titania, who present them gifts to help them on their journey. The manticore, who guarded the entrance of the fairy king and queen, joins them along with the sphinx, who Cassandra thinks they both love each other. The crew next include among them the harpies, who take over the galley, the minotaur and a dryad, complete with a tree. Disaster strikes when Aisling becomes distracted by the potential of bringing back measurable proof for Bilgewallow and his ilk, which is a dragon skull he steals from Skotos, who lives on the island of the trolls. He also insists on bringing the lovely but deadly Medusa on board, with predictable results for one of the crew. But through the help of his daughters and Medusa, he recovers his belief and his balance, as all of them must unite against the evil trolls, who pursue him. They visit the island, where the Wonderful College of Magical Knowledge is to find out how to change Sebastian back from stone to normal. They find out that a unicorn can break the curse, so they set off to the island, where the ogre Olaf is having his birthday. They give him a deck of cards as a present, and then Olaf leads them to the forest, where Miranda dresses in a beautiful dress to call upon the unicorn, who changes Sebastian back to normal. They are attacked by the trolls, who seek revenge on professor Aisling for stealing their dragon skull. The trolls are defeated by a dragon, who burns their leader Skotos. They head back to the island of fairies, where their victory is celebrated by King Oberon and Queen Titantia. King Oberon presents the dragon skull to Professor Ailsing, who instead gives it to the dragon, feeling there is no need to prove existence of magical creatures. The Professor seeks an island to leave all the magical creatures there and live together, who they say their sad goodbyes. Professor Aisling, Miranda, and Cassandra go home sad that they have to leave their friends but happy they have made them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_and_the_Spider_God"title="Conan and the Spider God">
Conan finds himself in the kingdom of Zamora, a fugitive under suspicion of kidnapping Jamilah, the queen of Turan. Discovering she has actually been captured by devotees of the Zamoran spider god Zath, he journeys into the city of Yezud (first mentioned in the Howard story "The People of the Black Circle") to rescue Jamilah. Incidentally, Conan steal some opals used as eyes in the god's temple image.Characteristically, de Camp's Conan is a more credible if less elemental figure than Howard's, carefully assessing the situation in Yezud and taking the time and effort to lay the groundwork for his foray rather than just barreling in swinging his sword.Chronologically, "Conan and the Spider God" comes between the short stories "The Curse of the Monolith" and "The Blood-Stained God".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_with_the_Golden_Arm_(novel)"title="The Man with the Golden Arm (novel)">
The events of the novel take place between 1946 and 1948, primarily on the Near Northwest Side of Chicago. The title character is Francis Majcinek, known as "Frankie Machine," a young man of about 30 who is a gifted card dealer and an amateur drummer. While serving in World War II, Frankie is treated for shrapnel in his liver and medicated with morphine. He develops an addiction to the drug, although initially in the story he believes he can control his habit.Frankie lives in a small apartment on Division Street in a Polish neighborhood with his wife, Sophie (nicknamed "Zosh"). Sophie has been using a wheelchair since a drunk-driving accident caused by Frankie (although the novel implies that her paralysis is psychological in nature). She spends most of her time looking out the window and watching the nearby elevated rail line. She takes out her frustrations by fighting with her husband, and she uses his guilt to keep him from leaving her. The turmoil in their relationship only spurs on his addiction.Frankie works nights dealing in backroom card games operated by "Zero" Schwiefka. He aspires to join the Musicians' Union and work with jazz drummer Gene Krupa, but this dream never materializes. His constant companion and protégé is Solly "Sparrow" Saltskin, a feeble-minded half-Jewish thief who specializes in stealing and selling dogs; Frankie gets Sparrow a job as a "steerer," watching the door to the card games and drawing in gamblers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_City_(novel)"title="The Magic City (novel)">
After Philip's older sister and sole family member Helen marries, he goes off to live with Helen's new step daughter Lucy. He has trouble adjusting at first, thrown into the world different from his previous life and abandoned by his sister while she is on her honeymoon. To entertain himself he builds a giant model city from things around the house: game pieces, books, blocks, bowls, etc. Then, through some magic, he finds himself inside the city, and it is alive with the people he has populated it with. Some soldiers find him and tell him that two outsiders have been foretold to be coming: a Deliverer and a Destroyer. Mr. Noah, from a Noah's Ark playset, tells Philip that there are seven great deeds to be performed if he wants to prove himself the Deliverer. Lucy, too, has found her way into the city and joins Philip as a co-Deliverer, much to his chagrin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_and_Dance_Man"title="Song and Dance Man">
Three children visit their grandfather and have a wonderful time as he reminisces about his performances on stage. He tells stories of when he was a vaudeville song and dance man, when people did not sit in front of the television for hours. He leads the children to the attic, and finds his old bowler hat, gold-tipped cane, and tap shoes. He performs, telling jokes, dancing and singing, making the children laugh.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Eight_Bells_Toll"title="When Eight Bells Toll">
Five cargo ships have been hijacked in the Irish Sea; ships carrying vast quantities of precious stones and gold bullion. The crews later turn up, but the ships have disappeared. Clearly, the hijackers are getting impeccable intelligence. The British Secret Service, under Rear-Admiral Sir Arthur Arnford-Jason (known as "Uncle Arthur") has planted agents on the ships – but only the ship's masters know of their presence. When no word is received from the agents, Phillip Calvert (who narrates the story) and Hunslett are sent to investigate.They manage to track the latest hijacked ship – the "Nantesville", carrying £8 million in gold bullion – to the Scottish Highlands and the sleepy port town of Torbay on the Island of Torbay (patterned after Tobermory, on the Isle of Mull). Under cover of being marine biologists on a UNESCO project, they travel in the Firecrest, an outwardly normal but very specially equipped motor launch. Calvert boards the ship under cover of night and finds that the two agents planted aboard have been murdered. His chief suspect is Cypriot shipping magnate Sir Anthony Skouros, whose luxury yacht, "Shangri-La", is also anchored in Torbay.Calvert barely escapes the murderous hijackers, and returns to his boat. But late at night, they are boarded by local police and plain-clothes men claiming to be customs officers seeking information on stolen chemicals. After the search and their departure, he finds the boat's well-concealed powerful radio to have been sabotaged.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prophecy_of_the_Stones"title="The Prophecy of the Stones">
The principal story follows three protagonists, named Jade, Opal, and Amber after the gemstones associated with them at birth, striving to overthrow the 'Council of Twelve' and 'Army of Darkness' that oppress the story's world. The trio first meet on their 14th birthdays, at the behest of their guardians, and discover a cipher, to investigate which they visit Jean Losserand, an explorer imprisoned for dissent, who directs them to the oracle 'Oonagh'. To reach her, the protagonists and their ally 'Adrien de Rivebel' lead an exodus into the realm 'Fairytale', where humans coexist with super-humans outside the council's rule. During the exodus, Opal is wounded, but is saved at the house of Adrien's friend, Owen d'Yrdahl. Following Opal's recovery, she accompanies Jade and Amber to Oonagh, who reveals that on the coming summer solstice will be a battle between the Army of Darkness and the Army of Light, and that they therefore must persuade Death to end her strike. Having done so, they rejoin the Army of Light, where Amber identifies its leader, called 'Elyador' ('Chosen One' in the story's fictional language), at his own arrival. Thereafter the three protagonists observe the battle alongside their principal antagonist, the Thirteenth Councillor. Upon perceiving the Army of Light in danger, the protagonists leap from the Councillor's tower, provoking a 'golden rain' to inspire the Army of Light, which thereupon destroys the Army of Darkness. This done, the victorious leaders discover a 'Seed of hope', which they plant to ensure their victory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_13½_Lives_of_Captain_Bluebear"title="The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear">
"The 13 Lives of Captain Bluebear" follows the adventures of the character Bluebear in the first half of his 27 lives. The novel intersperses Bluebear's narrative with excerpts from "The Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs" by Professor Abdullah Nightingale, who bacterially transmits it into Bluebear's brain.The story is set in the fictional continent of Zamonia (location of several other novels by Walter Moers) on Earth before the "great descent" in which Zamonia and many other continents sink beneath the waves. Many of the creatures encountered by Bluebear in the novel are taken from myths, folktales, prehistory, and Moers' imagination, among them Gryphons, Maenads, Trolls, Yetis, and Pterodactyls. Nearing the end of the novel, the mythical city of Atlantis disappears from Earth, an event witnessed by Bluebear.The plot is supplemented by Moers' drawings of the characters interspersed throughout the book. These illustrations are done in a cartoonish style: Moers is a noted German cartoonist. While the drawings are colored in the German hardcover version, they remain in black-and-white in most other versions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Bloods_(novel)"title="Young Bloods (novel)">
The book begins with the birth of both men in 1769 - Arthur as a weak and puny baby, a third son, to a wealthy Anglo-Irish Protestant couple; Napoleone as a healthy second son to a Corsican couple fighting the French for independence.The story continues with the training of both youths as cadet officers, both encountering social and other difficulties thanks to their birth outside the mainland. Arthur's innate conservatism forms as a result of the Gordon riots and his realization that his Anglo-Irish Protestant lifestyle is dependent on maintaining the status quo. Napoleone, on the other hand, is even more of an outsider, a Corsican among Frenchmen, a quasi-noble among pre-revolutionary noblemen, and an impoverished young cadet among those with money to burn.Interestingly, both men are depicted as having a brief encounter with each other in the years prior to the French Revolution wherein Wellesley is sent to observe a demonstration that Napoleone's regiment is participating in. Such an encounter did not happen in actuality, though Wellesley, fluent in French, was sent to France on several occasions in his youth as an observer.The story ends approximately in 1796, with Arthur having been turned down by the family of his "inamorata" Kitty Pakenham because of his lack of prospects, and Napoleone, now called Napoleon Bonaparte, mounting a successful attack on Toulon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Still_Life_with_Crows"title="Still Life with Crows">
Agent Pendergast visits Medicine Creek, Kansas after a gruesome murder occurs. With the help of local teenaged misfit Corrie Swanson, he continues to investigate as more citizens are killed. Pendergast is soon led to believe that the murderer must be a member of the community. He soon discovers that the murders are connected to an old curse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Michael"title="Pan Michael">
## Chapters 1–5.Michael Volodyovski has retired to a monastery after the death of his betrothed, Anna Borzobogati. At Chenstohova. Kharlamp, an acquaintance, goes to see Andrei Kmita to get his help in persuading him to leave it. He and Zagloba make a journey to consult Yan and it is finally Zagloba who offers to speak to Volodyovski.Making his way to Warsaw, Zagloba meets his old friend, Hassling-Ketling, a Scot, who now resides in Warsaw after being adopted by a noble in Svyenta in Courland, who offers him a bed. Taking place is the Diet to elect a new King of which Prince Boguslav is a candidate and Zagloba is determined to raise support against the traitor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Robert_Smith_(author)"title="James Robert Smith (author)">
A remote Florida swamp has been targeted for theme park development, and the swamp's inhabitants are none too happy. It doesn't help that the residents are a colony of intelligent, prehistoric, dinosaur-like birds: terror birds. This flock of beasts has escaped the mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs, relying on stealth, cunning, and killer instinct. The creatures have been living in secret.As the developers push to have the recently discovered animals exterminated, a billionaire rogue environmentalist steps in to protect these rare, predatory creatures. A naïve young Fish and Wildlife officer finds himself caught in between these two forces and finds conflict.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conquistador_(novel)"title="Conquistador (novel)">
John Rolfe VI is an infantry captain who comes back from World War II with a war wound and few prospects, but in 1946 a radio he is rewiring malfunctions and creates a gateway to a parallel universe. This universe is one in which Alexander the Great lived a full lifespan, creating an empire that stretched from Iberia to the Indian subcontinent. In this world, the Macedonian Empire proved so strong and durable that it redirected the barbarian migrations of the Goths, Vandals, and others eastward towards China and the rest of the Far East. As a result, what remains of China is a hodgepodge of Indo-European dominated states, the Americas remain undiscovered by the Old World, and technology has barely progressed to a medieval level. Deciding to take advantage of the untapped resources that await in this different California, Rolfe gathers members of his infantry company to help him explore and develop this new world. Over the next 60 years, he builds a new nation, which he calls the Commonwealth of New Virginia.In 2009, two California fish and game officers, Tom Christiansen and Roy Tully, are trying to solve the mystery of how large numbers of pelts from endangered species are showing up. They finally deduce the secret of the gate to the parallel world, but before they can make the secret known to their superiors, they are kidnapped and permanently transported to New Virginia by Rolfe's granddaughter, Gate Security Agent Adrienne Rolfe (with whom Christiansen had been falling in love).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thief_Queen's_Daughter"title="The Thief Queen's Daughter">
Char the cook helps on the same ship that is assigned by the captain, husband of the Crossroad's Inn hostess, to look after Ven and uses this as an excuse to follow him every where and sharing in his adventurous life. He is Ven's best friend and shares a room with him in Hare Warren at the InnSaeli, a Gwadd, is naturally tiny and can speak to animals and plants. She can make flowers bloom and spring out of the ground.Clemency, more commonly known as Clem is the stewardess of mouse lodge ( the girl's dormitory) and the pastor's assistant in charge of the Spice Folk. She is also friends with Ven.Ida played a more than significant part in "The Floating Island" by closing the rover’s box. She's a skinny pick pocket with more potential then she lets out, living at the cross roads inn with more than a knack at solving the insolvable. She is known as an orphan but has a horrifying past and an even more horrifying mother. Ven, the new official reporter living at general ease takes himself and friends Clemency, Nick, Saeli, and Char, on one of his adventures to the Gated City. Saeli is kidnapped, and an unanticipated kindness shines through the grime of Ida and the whole group has a shock, an adventure, and a light at the end of the tunnel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_of_This_World"title="The Kingdom of This World">
## Prologue.The prologue to the novel is Carpentier's most often quoted text, in which he coins the term "lo real maravilloso" ("marvellous reality") in reference to seemingly miraculous occurrences in Latin America. Furthermore, his trip to Haiti in 1943 is recounted, as well as some of the research he did to gather facts for the novel. Carpentier also denounces the commonplace and formulaic instances of the marvellous that is found in surrealist novels due to its inorganic and false origins, as opposed to the natural magic that is found in Latin America.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Liberator"title="Conan the Liberator">
Following the events of the story "The Treasure of Tranicos", Conan joins a conspiracy of former comrades-in-arms to overthrow Numedides, the mad and tyrannical king of Aquilonia. As commander of the rebel forces, he has the prospect of becoming king himself if they succeed. However, Conan has not only Numedides' loyal troops, led by General Procas, to overcome, but the magic of an evil sorcerer named Thulandra Thuu.Chronologically, "Conan the Liberator" overlaps the events of the story "Wolves Beyond the Border", and is followed by the story "The Phoenix on the Sword".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Things_as_They_Are;_or,_The_Adventures_of_Caleb_Williams"title="Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams">
## Volume I.The main character, Caleb Williams is of humble birth, unusual for Godwin, since his characters are often persons of wealth and title. Caleb Williams, a poor, self-educated, orphaned young man, and the novel's first-person narrator, is recommended for a job on the estate of the wealthy Ferdinando Falkland. Although Falkland is generally a reserved and quiet master, he is also prone to sudden fits of rage. Concerned about his outbursts, Caleb asks Mr Collins, administrator of Falkland's estate, if he knows the cause of Falkland's odd temper.Collins proceeds to tell of Falkland's past, citing Falkland's long history of stressing reason over bloodshed. Falkland's neighbour, Barnabas Tyrrel, was a tyrannical master who oppressed and manipulated his tenants. Tyrrel became the enemy and competitor of Falkland, who was loved for his brave and generous demeanor. Falkland continually righted the many wrongs Tyrrel caused members of his household and his neighbours, which only elevated the community's respect and esteem for Falkland. He also saved Tyrrel's niece, Emily Melvile, from a fire, an act of heroism that caused Emily to fall in love with Falkland. The outraged Tyrrel kept Emily imprisoned in his estate, and had her arrested on false charges when she tried to escape. Emily's emotional distress at these events resulted in her falling ill and dying. The conflict between the two men came to a head when, at the funeral services for Emily, Tyrrel physically attacked Falkland. Tyrrel himself was found murdered shortly afterward. Although immediately considered a suspect in Tyrrel's murder, Falkland defended himself on the basis of his spotless reputation. Instead, two of Tyrrel's tenants were found with incriminating evidence, convicted of the murder, and hanged. Falkland's emotional state, Mr Collins explains, has been wavering ever since.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baksho_Rahashya_(novel)"title="Baksho Rahashya (novel)">
Private investigator Prodosh C. Mitter a.k.a. Feluda is approached by a rich businessman named Dinanath Lahiri who tasks Feluda with a seemingly simple case: while returning from Delhi via the Kalka Mail, Lahiri's attaché case inadvertently got exchanged with another passenger's bag. Lahiri wants Feluda to find the owner of the briefcase which he has right now, give the briefcase to him and bring back his original briefcase. After giving a detailed description of the rest of the passengers of his compartment, Lahiri leaves.The people, who were in Lahiri's compartment, are Naresh C. Pakrashi, an established businessman like Lahiri, Brijmohan Kedia, a businessman and the owner of his own company, and G. C. Dhameeja. After some careful searching, Feluda finds out that Lahiri's briefcase got exchanged with Dhameeja's briefcase. During this time, Feluda meets with Pakrashi and learns about the other two men in the train compartment i.e., Dhameeja and Kedia. That evening, Feluda and his cousin Tapesh Ranjan Mitter a.k.a. Topshe go to Lahiri's house and meet with Lahiri's cousin Prabeer Lahiri, a struggling actor who's obsessed with his own thin voice and who dislikes Lahiri. After telling everything to Lahiri, Lahiri decides that Feluda should go to Shimla, the place where Dhameeja lives, in order to exchange the briefcases. Feluda agrees to it. The duo return home, only to find Lalmohan Ganguly a.k.a. Jatayu waiting for them. After some aimless conversation, Lalmohan Babu hears everything about Feluda's new case and also about his prospective tour to Shimla. The excited Lalmohan Babu asks to join them; Feluda agrees to it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/48_Shades_of_Brown"title="48 Shades of Brown">
In his final year at school, and with his parents overseas, Dan is forced to grow up fast when he moves in with his 22-year-old aunt Jacq and her eccentric friend Naomi. His story is light-hearted and funny, with a definite twist of insanity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Test"title="First Test">
"Protector of the Small" is set in the Tortallan world of Pierce's "Song of the Lioness" and "The Immortals" quartets. The protagonist is Keladry of Mindelan, a young girl who becomes the first female to train as a knight ten years after King Jonathan first declared it legal. The novel tracks the first year of Keladry's training, during which she is only accepted on a probationary basis. Keladry must struggle to prove herself worthy to palace training master Wyldon of Cavall and her fellow page trainees.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian_(1982_novel)"title="Conan the Barbarian (1982 novel)">
The book retells the story of the hero's youth, in a version quite different from the account established in previous tales by Howard, de Camp and Carter. Conan is the son of a blacksmith in barbaric Cimmeria, learning "the riddle of steel" from his father as the latter forges a sword. His village is massacred by the cultic followers of Thulsa Doom, an evil sorcerer, and Conan himself enslaved. Set with others to push a millstone, he develops prodigious strength over the years, ultimately pushing it all by himself. As an adult he wins his freedom and embarks on a life of adventure, ultimately wreaking his vengeance on the fiendish Doom with his father's sword.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sands_of_Time_(Hoeye_novel)"title="The Sands of Time (Hoeye novel)">
At the beginning of the story, protagonist Hermux Tantamoq is approached by his father's friend, Birch Tentintrotter, to investigate whether the present-day rodent civilization was preceded, and its technology informed, by a feline civilization now obscured. Following an attempt by antagonist Hinkum Stepfitchler (the son of Birch's mentor) to discredit Birch's thesis, Hermux and pilot Linka Perflinger accompany Birch to the Western desert, where they confirm that the feline civilization existed, and that the rodent population were its slaves. They are thereupon captured by Hinkum Stepfitchler, who reveals that his family made their fortune by plagiarizing the cats' technology. In his subsequent absence, they escape, and expose his plan to the rodent society. Thereafter the ruined feline city is re-created at a rodents' museum, with all its artifacts, at a grand celebration.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Time_Like_Show_Time"title="No Time Like Show Time">
Hermux is back in Pinchester after his adventures in the desert, trying to return to his normal life as a watchmaker. He receives a mysterious invitation to the Varmint Variety Theater from the impresario, Fluster Varmint. Fluster is being blackmailed and needs Hermux's help to save his theatre. But show business is a whole new world of weirdness for our modest hero.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Days_to_Never"title="Three Days to Never">
The action mostly takes place in Southern California, in a few days during August 1987.Frank Marrity (a widower) and his loving twelve-year-old daughter, Daphne, are drawn into a dangerous occult world when his grandmother (affectionately called "Grammar") dies in bizarre circumstances. Soon, Frank and Daphne are pursued by agents who know much more about their lives than they do—for example, that Grammar is Lieserl Maric, the daughter of Albert Einstein, and that she was friends with Charlie Chaplin—and that all three of them had discovered secrets to time travel and had found how to change prior events, perhaps to please themselves.Frank and Daphne, who wish to live their normal lives (he teaches English at University of Redlands, she is also fond of English literature), find their lives invaded by secret agents and an old man who introduces himself to Frank as his missing father. In reality, he is an older Frank, from the year 2006, who has found himself in a miserable alcoholic life, but remembers an earlier time-line in which he was happy. Because Daphne died in that time-line, old Frank thinks that if she dies now, he will return to 2006's happy life.Lieserl "Grammar" Marrity, with the help of her father Einstein and her friend Chaplin, had created a time machine (a "maschinchen"), which she keeps in a small outbuilding called the Kaleidoscope Shed. The machine's components are a swastika of gold filaments; a (fictional) cement slab with Chaplin's handprints, footprints and signature, dated 1928, from the forecourt of the Grauman's Chinese Theatre; a videotape of "A Woman of the Sea", a lost film Chaplin made in 1926; and a pack of letters from Einstein to Grammar. The time machine, as described, works mystically as well as scientifically. This sort of synthesis of modes of speculative fiction (and of MacGuffins) is typical of Powers's combined-science-fiction-and-fantasy novels.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Match_(Child_novel)"title="Death Match (Child novel)">
Every once in a rare while, the most perfect of 'perfect' matches ('supercouples, of 100% compatibility) is located. Then tragedy suddenly strikes. One of the "supercouples" is found dead in their Arizona home, an "unquestionable" double suicide.Child's analysis of the topic proves a useful tool to opine on the topics of psychology, relationships, cutting-edge computer technology and artificial intelligence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throne_of_Jade"title="Throne of Jade">
The story is set during an alternate history version of the Napoleonic Wars, in which dragons not only exist but are used as a staple of aerial warfare in Asia and Europe. The dragons are portrayed as sapient and intelligent, capable of logical thought and human speech. The series centers on events involving Temeraire (the titular dragon) and his handler, William Laurence. The first book of the series centered on how Laurence, formerly a captain in the Royal Navy, becomes Temeraire's handler, and their early training in preparation for battles against Napoleon's aerial fleet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brothers_K"title="The Brothers K">
Papa Chance is a former MLB pitcher who has settled down with his wife in the mill town of Camas, Washington. They have six children. Everett Chance, the eldest, is a natural politician and powerful speaker whose passionate opposition to the Vietnam war creates much of the family tension in the book. He spends much time and effort pursuing a young Russian literature student named Natasha and finally wins her heart from draft exile in British Columbia by sending her an epic letter/novel. Everett does not have great natural athletic gifts but is a scrappy competitor. Second oldest, Peter Chance, is the intellectual brother who will study at Harvard and then in India. Though a natural athlete, Peter spends most of the book having renounced gifts of the body in his dogged pursuit of spiritual growth. After being kidnapped by con artists on an Indian train he finds enlightenment and he returns to the family in their hour of need. Irwin is an innocent, possessing a childlike devotion to faith. He is sent to the war in Vietnam, where he is changed forever. Kincaid Chance, the youngest brother, narrates the book yet is the member of the family we finally learn the least about.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glory_That_Was"title="The Glory That Was">
Twenty-seventh century Earth is united by a worldwide democratic government presided over by a constitutional monarch, though the former is veering toward totalitarianism and the latter is a megalomaniac. To neutralize the World Emperor the power-hungry prime minister has ceded to him control of Greece for use in a mysterious secret project. Now Greece is surrounded by a force field cutting it off from the rest of the world, and people of Greek descent everywhere have vanished, presumably spirited away to the isolated region by the Emperor's agents.One such kidnapped citizen is Thalia, wife of classical scholar Wiyem Flin. Anxious to get her back, he recruits his friend, magazine editor Knut Bulnes, into a desperate attempt to penetrate the force barrier. Bulnes, hoping to obtain an exclusive story on the Emperor's mysterious project, agrees. The two succeed, sailing a boat through the barrier when it is temporarily disrupted by a storm.Inside the force field, Flin and Bulnes are astounded to find themselves not in 27th century Greece, but to all appearances the Classical Greece of Pericles and the Peloponnesian War. Pretending to be foreign philosophers, they establish themselves in Athens as they attempt to unravel the mystery, and begin to discover that all is not as it seems; the wife of the playwright Euripides, for instance, appears to be Thalia, though she does not recognize Flin and has no memory of her former life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_(novel)"title="Page (novel)">
Kel, though allowed to continue her training by instructor Wyldon of Cavall, is still not accepted by many of the male pages, and is therefore supported by Neal, Merric, Cleon, and Owen against Joren. At the beginning of the book, Kel hires Lalasa, after her mistreatment by other relatives. Kel also adopts a stray dog who calls himself Jump, and a flock of songbirds. Thereafter the book follows Kel's education, until Lalasa and Jump are kidnapped; whereupon Kel and her friends rescue them. Kel had proved her worthiness of being a leader when she guides her group of fellow pages through the "Battle of the Cliff". Lord Wyldon continues to make life hard for Kel by forcing her to improve her jousting skills, (She called the routine maddening) and made her join the elite page archers group, which Kel does more enthusiastically because if she advances, she gets to "play" with different kinds of arrows. Lord Wyldon also tries to humiliate Kel by making her "leader" of a fighting group while another page leads the other group, and they have a mock battle, which Kel's group always wins. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamonds_Are_Forever_(novel)"title="Diamonds Are Forever (novel)">
The British Secret Service agent James Bond is sent on an assignment by his superior, M. Acting on information received from Special Branch, M tasks Bond with infiltrating a smuggling ring transporting diamonds from mines in the Crown colony of Sierra Leone to the United States. Bond must infiltrate the smugglers' pipeline to uncover those responsible. Using the identity of "Peter Franks", a country house burglar turned diamond smuggler, he meets Tiffany Case, an attractive gang member who has developed an antipathy towards men after being gang-raped as a teenager.Bond discovers that the ring is operated by the Spangled Mob, a ruthless American gang run by the brothers Jack and Seraffimo Spang. He follows the trail from London to New York. To earn his fee for carrying the diamonds he is instructed by a gang member, Shady Tree, to bet on a rigged horse race in nearby Saratoga. There Bond meets his old friend Felix Leiter, a former CIA agent working at Pinkertons as a private detective investigating crooked horse racing. Leiter bribes the jockey to ensure the failure of the plot to rig the race, and asks Bond to make the pay-off. When he goes to make the payment, he witnesses two homosexual thugs, Wint and Kidd, attack the jockey.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Corruption_Was_King"title="When Corruption Was King">
This is the story of a Mob lawyer turned mole with a million-dollar contract on his head. With abandon, he chased crooked acquittals for the likes of Pat Marcy, originally an Al Capone protégé who had become the Mob's key political operative; Mafia Capo and gambling czar Marco D'Amico; and notorious hit man Harry Aleman. He dined with Mob bosses and shared "last suppers" with friends before their gangland executions. Cooley watched as Marcy and the Mob controlled the courts, the cops, and the politicians. Then, in a startling act of conscience, he walked into the office of the U.S. Organized Crime Strike Force and, without a pending conviction or a hit man on his tail, agreed to wear a wire on the same Mafia overlords who had made him a player.Cooley's tapes and testimony would be at the center of nine landmark trials that together exposed and then broke the Mob's unprecedented stranglehold on Chicago's government and court system. With stunning detail and brutal honesty, Cooley now tells the personal story behind the federal government's most successful Mafia investigation known as Operation Gambat (from "Gam"bling "At"torney).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_of_the_Isles"title="Conan of the Isles">
King Conan, in his mid-sixties, grows restless - especially since the death of his beloved wife Zenobia. With the approach of old age, what he most dreads is to die in bed – helpless, surrounded by physicians and whispering courtiers. He would much rather die in battle – but there seems little prospect of that, since he himself made Aquilonia powerful and prosperous while eliminating virtually all threats. The prospect he faces as King is many boring years of tax administration and adjudicating complicated legal cases. Meanwhile, Conan's eldest son, Conn, is now twenty years old – a very worthy son and heir who has already given a very good account of himself at the age of thirteen ("Conan of Aquilonia"), and is fully ready to assume the throne.Suddenly, there is a new crisis: Conan's old friend and loyal supporter, Count Trocero of Poitian, is snatched away from the Council Chamber itself by Red Shadows, mystical entities of unknown origin. Although it happened in front of Conan himself, inside a room filled with courtiers and guards, there was nothing anyone could do against these insubstantial shadows who suddenly appear, grab a man, and disappear along with him. This is followed by the Red Shadows striking again and again, snatching at random men and women of all ages or social positions. As would later turn out, these sinister acts were perpetrated by the wizard priests of the dark god Xotli, descendants of refugees from sunken Atlantis, who settled on the other side of the ocean and seek to placate their demon god's voracious appetite for human sacrifice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_(Blatty_novel)"title="Legion (Blatty novel)">
The story opens with the discovery of a twelve-year-old boy who has been murdered and crucified on a pair of rowing oars. Kinderman already sees that the boy is mutilated in a way identical to the victims of a serial killer known as the Gemini Killer, who was apparently shot to death by police twelve years previously while climbing the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. A priest is later murdered in a confessional, once again bearing the mutilations distinctive of the apparently deceased killer. The fingerprints at the two crime scenes differ, however. Further victims soon follow, including one of Kinderman's friends, Father Dyer (from "The Exorcist"), who is slain in a hospital, his body drained of blood before being killed. Yet again the Gemini Killer's mutilations are present.Investigations lead Kinderman to the psychiatric wing of the hospital where his friend was slain. Here he finds a number of suspects:In the end, Sunlight tells Kinderman that the demon from the earlier novel ("The Exorcist") aided him to possess the body of Damien Karras immediately after Karras's death in an act of revenge for having been driven out of the little girl. Sunlight spent many years trying to gain control of the body, which had suffered from injuries, during which time Karras was held in a mental hospital. He lacked any identification and was nicknamed Sunlight because he sat in the sun's rays as it passed through the window of his cell. Upon finally gaining control of Karras' body, the Gemini occasionally left it to possess the bodies of the patients with senile dementia, and as they were in an open ward with access to the outside world, he could use them to go out and commit murders. Thus the fingerprints of several senility patients were found at the crime scenes; their bodies carried out the murders, but the Gemini Killer was in control of them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Brother"title="Wolf Brother">
In pre-agricultural Europe, the people of the Forest live in clans, each represented by a particular animal or life form. These clans live a hunter-gatherer existence with a shamanic belief system. Torak and his father, of the Wolf Clan, live in seclusion, far away from any other Clan. Torak’s father is killed by a bear which has been possessed by a demon. Before he dies, he tells Torak to swear an oath to find the Mountain of the World Spirit, in order to kill the bear. His father tells him that his ‘guide’ will find him and help him on his quest. Torak reluctantly leaves his father as the bear comes back to kill him.Torak heads north and soon encounters an orphaned Wolf Cub. He discovers that he can communicate with the Cub. He realises the Cub is the guide, and the two become close. Torak holds a naming ritual for the Cub and names him Wolf. A few days later Torak and Wolf are captured by three members of the Raven Clan, including a girl named Renn, who accuse Torak of stealing one of their roebuck. They are taken to the Raven camp so Torak's fate can be decided by Fin-Kedinn, the Raven Clan leader. To regain his freedom, Torak fights Hord, Renn's older brother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes's_War_of_the_Worlds"title="Sherlock Holmes's War of the Worlds">
The story consists of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, and Professor Challenger in London during the Martian invasion as described in Wells's novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_Conan"title="The Return of Conan">
In the kingdom of Aquilonia, a year of peace for King Conan and his new queen Zenobia is broken when the latter is abducted by a demon. Conan learns from the wizard, Pelias of Koth, that an eastern sorcerer, Yah Chieng of Khitai, is responsible, and begins a quest to recover her without realizing that the fate of the world, as well as Aquilonia, rests on the outcome of the contest.Chronologically, "The Return of Conan" falls between Howard's novel "The Hour of the Dragon" (also known as "Conan the Conqueror"), and the four short stories collected as "Conan of Aquilonia".In both the hardcover Gnome Press edition and the paperback Lancer/Ace edition of the Conan stories, "The Return of Conan" follows Robert E. Howard's novel "Conan the Conqueror"; it is the final volume chronologically in the Gnome edition (though one additional volume, "Tales of Conan", contains stories issued out of sequence), while in the Lancer/Ace edition it is followed by the short stories collected as "Conan of Aquilonia".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staying_On"title="Staying On">
"Staying On" focuses on Tusker and Lucy Smalley, who are briefly mentioned in the latter two books of the Raj Quartet, "The Towers of Silence" and "A Division of the Spoils", and are the last British couple living in the small hill town of Pankot after Indian independence. Tusker had risen to the rank of colonel in the British Indian Army, but on his retirement had entered the world of commerce as a 'box wallah', and the couple had moved elsewhere in India. However, they had returned to Pankot to take up residence in the Lodge, an annexe to Smith's Hotel. This, formerly the town's principal hotel, was now symbolically overshadowed by the brash new Shiraz Hotel, erected by a consortium of Indian businessmen from the nearby city of Ranpur.We learn about life as an expat in Pankot principally by listening to Lucy's ponderings, for it is she who is the loquacious one, in contrast to Tusker's pathological reticence. He talks in clipped verbless telegraphese, often limiting his utterances to a single "Ha!". He has been purposeless since being obliged to retire, and it is left to Lucy to make sense of the world herself. It is a sad story of frustration that she recounts to herself. She remembers how the young Captain Smalley came back to London on leave in 1930, visited his bank, where she, a vicar's daughter, worked, and tentatively asked her out. She was swept off her feet by the thought of marrying an army officer and dreamt of a glamorous wedding with his fellow officers making an arch with their swords, but life turned out very differently. His job was dull administration, and his early attentiveness in bed rapidly waned. He prohibited her from fulfilling herself by taking part in amateur dramatics. Not only this, but she ranked fairly low in the social pecking order among the white women in Pankot and suffered numerous indignities. A symbol of this retrospection is that their preferred conveyance is the Tonga, a horse-drawn carriage in which they choose to sit facing backwards, "looking back at what we're leaving behind".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_Walk"title="Palace Walk">
The novel follows al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad as the head of his household; Amina, his sons, Yasin, Fahmy and Kamal, and his daughters, Khadija and Aisha. He sets strict rules of Muslim piety and sobriety in the household. al-Sayyid Ahmad permits himself conventionally forbidden pleasures. In particular, these include music, drinking wine and conducting numerous extramarital affairs with women he meets at his grocery store, or with courtesans who entertain parties of men at their houses with music and dancing. His insistence on his household authority forbids his wife and children from questioning why he stays out late at night or comes home intoxicated.The family house, in Cairo's Gamaliya district, is in the exact location of the Beshtak Palace.Yasin, the eldest son, is al-Sayyid Ahmad's only child by his first marriage, to a woman whose subsequent marital affairs are the source of acute embarrassment to father and son. Yasin shares his father's good looks, and, unbeknownst to al-Sayyid Ahmad, Yasin also shares his tastes for music, women and alcohol, and spends as much time and money as he can afford on fine clothes, drink and prostitutes. Fahmy, Amina's elder son, is a law student, who is heavily involved in the nationalist movement against the British occupation; he also pines for his neighbor, Maryam, but cannot bring himself to take any action. Khadija, the elder daughter, is sharp-tongued, opinionated, and jealous of her sister Aisha, who is considered to be the more beautiful and marriageable. Aisha, meanwhile, is more mellow and conciliatory, and tries to maintain peace. Kamal, the baby of the family, is a bright young boy who frightens his family by befriending the British soldiers who have set up an encampment across the street from the Abd al-Jawad house; he is also very close with his mother and his sisters, and is deeply dismayed when the prospect of marriage for the girls arises.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Less_than_Angels"title="Less than Angels">
Catherine Oliphant is a young writer, who lives with anthropologist Tom Mallow. Tom begins a romance with a student, Deirdre Swan, and his relationship with Catherine fizzles out. At the same time, she becomes interested in reclusive anthropologist Alaric Lydgate, who has recently returned from Africa.A hilarious sub-plot involves the activities of Deirdre's fellow-students Mark and Digby, and their attempts to curry favour with influential academics. Tom departs for Africa, where he is killed during a time of political unrest. Deirdre begins to return Digby's fondness for her, and Catherine seems about to begin a relationship with Alaric.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_in_Winter"title="Death in Winter">
It is the first novel featuring Capt. Jean-Luc Picard to be set after "Star Trek Nemesis". The plot concerns an attempt to stop a plague on a Romulan colony called Kevratas, and the relationship between Picard and Dr. Beverly Crusher. It also describes Dr. Crusher's first encounter of a similar plague as a teenager on the colony of Arvada III. A faction of the Romulan Star Empire wishes to keep the plague alive in an attempt to undermine newly appointed Romulan Praetor Tal'aura. Picard will be faced with working alongside allies new and old, as well as an enemy from the past who has a way of turning up when Picard least expects.This book also includes characters Doctor Carter Greyhorse, a scientist whose past has landed him in a penal colony, along with Pug Joseph, a former member of Starfleet turned merchant, both of whom served with Picard aboard the USS "".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Unicorn"title="The Black Unicorn">
Ben Holiday, court magician Questor Thews and the sylph Willow each have a vivid, prophetic dream. Ben dreams that Miles Bennett, his former law partner back in Chicago is in trouble. Questor dreams of the location of two ancient books of magic and Willow dreams of a black unicorn containing great power and a golden bridle that can harness the animal. Only the half-dog court scribe Abernathy voices his misgivings about the dreams.Upon returning to the old world, Ben discovers that Miles is fine. Suspicious, he hurries back to Landover. Unbeknownst to him, Meeks (the evil wizard that originally sent Ben into Landover) has stowed away in Ben's clothing using his magic, returning as well. At the castle, Ben finds that Questor has found the books of magic, though they seem useless. One is filled with illustrations of unicorns and the other appears burned from the inside. Willow is still missing.That night, Ben is attacked by Meeks. The old wizard casts a glamour over each of them, so that Meeks appears as Ben and Ben appears as a common peasant. Failing to recognize his true identity and thinking him an intruder, Questor has Ben thrown out of the castle.Ben searches for Willow, hoping to convince her of his identity and prevent her from delivering the bridle to Meeks. Along the way he encounters Edgewood Dirk, a prism cat from the fairy world. Dirk is able to recognize Ben as the High King, and taunts him for his inability to overcome his situation. Ben is able to arrange a meeting with Willow's father, the River Master, who fails in an attempt to capture the Black Unicorn and keep it as his own. The River Master blames Ben for his loss and sends him away without help. Later, Ben encounters the Earth Mother, who tells them that Willow has gone to the Deep Fell to retrieve the golden bridle from the witch Nightshade.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Kingdom_for_Sale—Sold!"title="Magic Kingdom for Sale—Sold!">
The novel begins with Ben Holiday, a trial lawyer from Chicago, lamenting the loss of his wife and unborn child in a car accident. He finds an advertisement in an upscale Christmas catalog claiming to offer a magical kingdom for one million dollars by a man named Mr. Meeks. Although skeptical, Ben pursues the offer out of a desperate need to start a new life. Ben receives a magical medallion and is transported through a swirling mist to the kingdom of Landover. He learns that Landover is a world that connects many other worlds such as Earth. It is surrounded by the Fairy Mist wherein reside creatures of Fairy that created Landover and guard the passages to these worlds. Unfortunately, he finds it not exactly as described. He soon finds that Landover has not had a true king in twenty years. The son of the last king did not wish to take up the throne and escaped with the court wizard, Meeks, to Earth. They have been selling the throne to dozens of people in the past two decades, but no one has been able to face the challenge and successfully complete so much as a few months as king. Further, kings of Landover used to be protected by a magical knight called the Paladin, but he has not been seen since the last king's death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Druid_of_Shannara"title="The Druid of Shannara">
"The Druid of Shannara" takes off where "The Scions of Shannara" left off, focusing on the story of Walker Boh as he attempts to fulfill the task given to him by the shade of Allanon, to return the Druid castle of Paranor to the Four Lands. Left in the Hall of Kings with the Asphinx attacking, Walker fends off the poison with his magic for days whereas the Asphinx could have killed any normal mortal. Finally realizing that there is only one way out of his predicament, he breaks off his arm in terrible agony. He fights his way through the Hall of Kings and amazingly finds his way to Storlock for the Gnome Healers to help him to the best of their abilities.We are told right away that Coll is still alive, and the thing Par killed was a fake. Coll is imprisoned in a prison called Southwatch and is trying to figure out a way to escape.Meanwhile, The King of the Silver River realizes the state of the Four Lands and makes a beautiful woman out of the elements surrounding him in his garden including a dove for a heart. The King tells his daughter, Quickening, of the task that she must carry out, for there is trouble in a lost city to the north, and the people to take with her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Knight_of_the_Word"title="A Knight of the Word">
John Ross, having failed on a mission from the Word in which fourteen school children were killed in San Sobel, California, tries to leave his life as a Knight of the Word behind him. He returns to the Fairy Glen in Wales to tender his resignation to the Lady, but she refuses to appear to him; instead, he meets the ghost of his ancestor, Owain Glyndŵr, who tells him that the decision to give up being a Knight is not his to make. Frustrated, John returns to America, where in Boston he meets and instantly falls in love with the beautiful Stefanie, who seems to amply reciprocate his feelings. Deliriously happy, he embarks together with her on a long trek across the United States, culminating with both of them finding work at a homeless center in Seattle. Feeling that he has found a very satisfactory new life, with a loving woman at his side and a demanding job helping an important social cause in cooperation with idealistic, sympathetic activists, he increasingly feels that his time as a Knight of the Word can be relegated to the past. He ignores the infrequent dreams of a demon-haunted future, including one in which he kills his much-beloved boss, Simon Lawrence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_with_the_Demon"title="Running with the Demon">
Nest Freemark is a fourteen-year-old girl of Hopewell, Illinois, who has inherited magical powers from her mother's lineage. She lives with her grandmother Evelyn and grandfather Bob, as her mother apparently committed suicide at a young age. She is one of a rare few in the world who can see the spiritual warfare underlying the events in the real world. She can see "feeders" - small shadowy creatures that feed on human emotion, influence thoughts, and ultimately attempt to "devour" people, causing their real world demise. Nest is enlisted to guard the nearby park and wilderness, a regional feeding ground for feeders, as many generations of Freemark women before her. She is aided in this task by a six-inch tree-like sylvan named Pick, an insightful barn owl named Daniel, and an ethereal wolfen creature named Wraith, who appears at opportune moments to protect Nest, but whose origins are initially unknown.On July first, Nest is awakened by Pick and informed that a young local girl, Bennett Scott, has run away from home (and her mother's abusive boyfriend) into the park and is at risk of being attacked by feeders. She rescues the girl and is almost overrun by feeders when Wraith appears to fend them off and help her escape. Meanwhile, a demon of the Void has come to the town of Hopewell. Once a human, this demon now possesses magical powers including the ability to blend in easily among other people and influence their thoughts. He befriends Derry Howe, a less intelligent resident of Hopewell, and places in his mind the idea of setting a bomb during the fireworks display on the Fourth of July. Since the display is sponsored by the company that owns the factory, Derry is fooled into believing that the company will have to end a town-crippling strike in apology for the injuries at the show.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Impostors"title="The Three Impostors">
The novel comprises several weird tales and culminates in a denouement of deadly horror, connected with a secret society devoted to debauched pagan rites. The three impostors of the title are members of this society who weave a web of deception in the streets of London—relating the aforementioned weird tales in the process—as they search for a missing Roman coin commemorating an infamous orgy by the Emperor Tiberius and close in on their prey: "the young man with spectacles".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldiers_of_Salamis"title="Soldiers of Salamis">
The novel is divided into three sections. The first and third section depict the historical investigation of a fictional Javier Cercas into the life of the falangist Rafael Sánchez Mazas. The second section is a biographical retelling of Mazas's life.In the first section of the novel, a fictionalized version of the author, also called Javier Cercas and a journalist, interviews the son of Mazas. During the interview Cercas is told the story of how Mazas's escapes from execution by the Republicans at the end of the Spanish Civil War with the help of a lone soldier. Encouraged by his eccentric girlfriend, a TV fortune teller, Javier begins investigating the incident. Early on, he writes a brief article in his newspaper based on the retelling by Mazas's son. In response to this Cercas becomes obsessed with finding the soldier who spared the life of Mazas.The second section of the novel takes place during the war itself (1936–1939). The nucleus of this section of the book is Rafael Sánchez Mazas's life. Cercas presents him as a writer and idealist of the Falange Española and close collaborator of José Antonio Primo de Rivera. The narrative in this section focuses on the particulars of his escape from execution at the end of the Spanish Civil War. When a group of prisoners is taken to the forest to be executed, Mazas is able to flee and hide in the bush. A Republican soldier finds him but decides to spare his life and when asked by another soldier if anyone is there he replies that no one is. Helped by several deserters, Mazas evades the retreating Republican forces and eventually returns to Nationalist custody where he became an important propagandist for Francoist Spain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_of_Aquilonia"title="Conan of Aquilonia">
In his late 50s, King Conan of Aquilonia engages in his final struggle with his arch-foe, the black magician Thoth-Amon of Stygia, servant of the evil god Set. First, Conan must journey into Hyperborea and rescue his kidnapped son, Prince Conn, from an unholy alliance between Thoth-Amon and the witch queen, Louhi. Next, Conan and Conn carry the struggle to their enemy's stronghold in Stygia itself at the head of an invading army, with the aid of a white druid named Diviatix. Pursuing their defeated foe southward, they confront him again, first in the kingdom of Zembabwei and, at last, near the very edge of the world, where Conan and Thoth-Amon face each other in a final astral duel."Conan of Aquilonia" depicts the coming of age of Conan's son, Conn. In the beginning, Conn is still very much of a boy and is afraid of a heavy belting which he could expect from his father for disobedience. By the end, he's already a seasoned warrior, who took part in various kinds of battle, escaped from capture, avoided imminent death, saved his father's life, and has a crucial role in the final defeat of Conan's old enemy Thoth-Amon—making him ready to succeed as King Conan II (which he would seven years hence, in "Conan of the Isles").
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_Hunter"title="Fossil Hunter">
The story takes place roughly sixteen years after the events of "Far-Seer". In lieu of Afsan's discovery of the Quintaglio's real place in the universe, the Larskian faith has been abolished and worship of the Original Five hunters reinstated. Dybo is now the Emperor, with Afsan as his court astrologer, and Novato has been put in charge of the "Quintaglio Exodus"; a project meant to help the Quintaglios escape from their doomed world before it breaks apart. Toroca, son of Afsan and Novato, is now head of the Geological Survey of Land, meant to take a global inventory of the resources available for the Exodus project.While undertaking the Geological Survey, Toroca finds a mysterious blue artifact, made of a seemingly indestructible material even harder than diamond. It appears to be mechanical, with moving parts, but having been found in some of the oldest rocks, is too old to have been manufactured by Quintaglios. He also begins to take notice of clues which cast into doubt his belief in the origin of the world as set forth in the book of Lubal. The world appears to be much older than five thousand kilodays, due to the rate of erosion being too slow, and during an expedition to the South Pole, he finds that it is inhabited entirely by many unique types of Wingfingers. Toroca hypothesises that they evolved from a common wingfinger ancestor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_(novel)"title="Sunshine (novel)">
The story is set in an alternate universe, taking place after the "Voodoo Wars", a conflict between humans and the "Others". The Others mainly consist of vampires, werewolves, and demons, though the main conflict occurs between humans and vampires. As a result of this war, "bad spots", or places where black magic thrives, have appeared more frequently.Rae "Sunshine" Seddon, the pastry-making heroine of the novel, has the misfortune of being caught off-guard at her family's old lake side cabin and is abducted by a gang of vampires. She is confined to the ballroom of an abandoned mansion with Constantine, a vampire shackled there by vampires of a rival gang, led by Constantine's enemy Bo. Bo's intention is to allow Constantine to slowly die of hunger and exposure to sunlight. Rae is brought as bait for him, and the vampires cut her upper chest as temptation. However, Rae not only manages to defy the supposed power that any vampire has over a human, but also uses her all-but-forgotten magical powers of transmutation, taught to her by her grandmother, to effect an escape.Rae realizes that the magical lineage she has ignored allows her to draw power from the sunlight, ergo transferring her ability through touch to Constantine and allowing him to be under the light of day, so long as contact is maintained. Through this symbiotic relationship, the two of them make an escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_of_Cimmeria"title="Conan of Cimmeria">
In a number of episodes Conan, now in his mid to late twenties, is followed from the end of his career as a mercenary soldier for King Yildiz of Turan to his initial adventures in the black kingdoms of Kush. In between, he visits his native Cimmeria and the far north. Soon, Conan journeys southward where, in Argos, he gets his first taste of life as a sea rover as the right-hand man of the pirate queen Bêlit.Chronologically, the eight short stories collected as "Conan of Cimmeria" fall between "Conan" and "Conan the Freebooter".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champagne_for_One"title="Champagne for One">
Archie Goodwin sits in for a friend at a charity dinner dance for unwed mothers, and one of the guests drops dead on the dance floor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Topics_in_Calamity_Physics"title="Special Topics in Calamity Physics">
Blue van Meer is a film-obsessed, erudite teenager. She is the daughter of itinerant and arrogant academic Gareth van Meer, who, after the death of his amateur lepidopteran-catching wife (and Blue's mother), never manages to stay at a high school for more than a semester. During Blue's senior year, however, they settle in the sleepy town of Stockton, North Carolina. She starts to attend the St. Gallway School and befriends a group of popular, rich, and mysterious teenagers called the Bluebloods. The Bluebloods are also close friends with the film-studies teacher at St. Gallway, Hannah Schneider, a perplexing woman, who intrigues Blue. After Schneider dies, seemingly by suicide, Blue is left to determine why.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invasion_(novel)"title="The Invasion (novel)">
Young teenagers Jake and Marco leave the mall one evening. On the way out, they meet Rachel and Cassie, who are together, and Tobias—all children from their school—and decide to walk home together. While taking a shortcut through an abandoned construction site, an alien spacecraft lands nearby. The badly injured alien pilot, an Andalite named Prince Elfangor, emerges from the ship and explains to the children that the Earth is being invaded in secret by a race of aliens called the Yeerks, a slug-like parasitic species who infest humans through their ear canals and take complete control of the human's body, turning them into what is called a Controller. The human controllers are still self-aware but the Yeerk in their head has complete control over their body and what they say. Elfangor tells them that the Andalite fleet has been defeated and more Andalites will not come to Earth for a year or more, and by then, Earth will already be completely taken over. To combat the Yeerks, he gives the humans morphing ability: the power to become any creature they touch by absorbing the creature's DNA. Elfangor warns them to never stay beyond two hours in a morph, or they will be trapped in that form forever. The Yeerks, led by Visser Three, arrive to kill Elfangor and eliminate all traces of him and his ship. The humans hide and watch, but are discovered and chased by the Yeerks. The group escapes shaken, but more or less unhurt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Warrior"title="Conan the Warrior">
In these stories from Conan's late thirties, the Cimmerian becomes involved in the civil wars of a lost city, a contest over treasure in the black kingdoms, and the border wars between the kingdom of Aquilonia and the savage Picts in the wilderness to the west.Chronologically, the three short stories collected as "Conan the Warrior" fall between "Conan the Buccaneer" and "Conan the Usurper".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_at_Large"title="Wizard at Large">
In an attempt to return Abernathy to his former human self, court wizard Questor Thews inadvertently sends the canine court scribe, along with Ben Holiday's royal medallion, to Earth. Specifically, Abernathy ends up with the medallion in the menagerie of Michel Ard Rhi, a cruel former prince of Landover who was banished from Landover years ago. Ard Rhi is now a Washington state millionaire who keeps a collection of rare and magical items in his personal castle. As part of the botched spell, Abernathy is exchanged for one of Ard Rhi's magical artifacts, and a strange bottle appears in Landover in Abernathy's place. The bottle contains a Darkling, a creature similar to an evil genie that corrupts its master.The bottle is stolen by the G'home Gnomes Filip and Sot, and Ben gives chase along with Questor, Willow, and Bunion. Ben and Willow later decide to use Questor's magic to travel to Earth to find Abernathy. With the help of Miles, Ben's old law partner, and Elizabeth, the daughter of one of Ard Rhi's employees, Abernathy is rescued. However, Ard Rhi uses his influence to have the party detained at a police station.Meanwhile, Questor continues to pursue the Darkling. He finds that through a series of thefts, the bottle has ended up in the hands of the evil witch Nightshade. Knowing that only the High Lord can defeat Nightshade, Questor decides to try to convince the dragon Strabo to fly him through the fairy mists to Earth. Using an itch spell, Questor gets the dragon to agree. They arrive at the last moment to rescue Ben and his friends from the police station and fly them back to Landover, but not before Questor uses his magic to restore Ard Rhi's conscience and convince him to give away his vast estate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Both_Sides_of_Time"title="Both Sides of Time">
Annie Lockwood, a 15-year-old romanticist, who travels back in time to 1895, an age of classy parties and privileged women wearing gowns. There she meets a young man who goes by the name Strat and finds herself falling for him and his charming good looks. However conflict arises when Annie must face the reality of going back to her own time. This novel introduces readers with the situation that arises when two vastly different centuries collide and highlights the changing roles of women. The main plot of the story is that Annie Lockwood is stuck between two time periods and must decide what life she wants to live and what life fate allows her to live.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner_of_Time"title="Prisoner of Time">
"Prisoner of Time" follows Strat's younger sister, Devonny, as she accidentally slips one hundred years into the future, to Annie Lockwood's time, and begins to fall in love with Annie's younger brother. This happens at both an inopportune, and an opportune time, as she was about to marry a young man whom she does not love.Devonny is an independent minded young woman with her own ideas for business ventures. However, in a time when the role of women are to stay at home and please their husbands, Devonny soon finds herself engaged to Lord Hugh-David, a British noble she does not love nor respect. With the family's business and reputation hanging in the balance, Devonny agrees to marry the noble, despite how she knows he is an avoidant person and she will be dominated by her mother-in-law. In the meantime, Devonny tries to help her friend Flossie, who has fallen in love with an Italian construction worker and wants to elope.In the present, Tod Lockwood, Annie's brother, tries to find his own place in the world. With failed business enterprises and difficulty living up to Annie, Tod finds confidence only when he is coaching a girls' soccer team. In the past, Devonny despairs at her circumstances, with the disappearance of her brother Strat and the death of her friend Harriet, hoping that at least Flossie will find happiness. She discovers at the wedding that her father was blackmailed into ensuring Devonny would marry nobility and that the blackmailer was Aurelia Stratton, Devonny's mother who has been incarcerated and driven to desperation to ensure her own escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protector's_War"title="The Protector's War">
Eight years after the Change, Clan Mackenzie, led by Juniper Mackenzie, and the Bearkillers, headed by Mike Havel, have established themselves in the Willamette Valley. They have become bitter enemies of the much larger, expansion-minded Portland Protective Association (PPA), led by the Armingers. The barons of the PPA constantly violate a ceasefire with the other factions. During one of their raids, Eddie Liu, Baron and Marchwarden of the PPA, is confronted by a small group of Mackenzies, led by Eilir Mackenzie and Astrid Larsson. After a short skirmish, Liu leaves, again swearing revenge against the Clan. In the meantime, in Great Britain, Sir Nigel Loring is imprisoned by the mad King Charles III, but is rescued by his son Alleyne Loring and John Hordle, formerly of the Special Air Service. They leave England aboard a Tasmanian sailing ship, which is conducting a worldwide survey. On their arrival in Portland, Arminger pressures Sir Nigel, who is the closest thing to an expert on nerve gas, to help him recover some of it to use against his enemies. The British trio outwit Arminger and escape to the south.Mike Havel and his wife Signe Larsson Havel try to lure Crusher Bailey, a bandit who has been raiding and taking slaves, into a trap by masquerading as travelers with a herd of horses and a wagon of valuables. When Bailey takes the bait, Mike and Signe's reinforcements are delayed and they have to retreat to the ruins of an abandoned pornographic video store. Just before they are overrun, they are saved by the timely intervention of the Lorings and Hordle. Sir Nigel and his son meet the Mackenzies and their old friend Sam Aylward, who was formerly a sergeant under Sir Nigel. The Mackenzies tell of their raid, where they ambushed a horse-drawn train and unexpectedly captured Norman Arminger's only child and heir, Mathilda.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_the_End_of_the_World_(Brookmyre_novel)"title="Not the End of the World (Brookmyre novel)">
LAPD cop Larry Freeman is given the task of 'baby-sitting' a B-movie film festival as a way of easing himself back into work after the death of his son, but things soon turn violent when a right-wing Christian group targets ex-porn actress Madeline Witherson. As Larry investigates the attacks on Maddy and the disappearance of an oceanic survey vessel it becomes clear that certain parties are not content to wait for the Apocalypse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Hound_(novel)"title="The Fox and the Hound (novel)">
Copper, a bloodhound crossbred, was once the favorite among his Master's pack of hunting dogs in a rural country area. However, he now feels threatened by Chief, a younger, faster Black and Tan Coonhound. Copper hates Chief, who is taking Copper's place as pack leader. During a bear hunt, Chief protects the Master when the bear turns on him, while Copper is too afraid of the bear to confront him. The Master ignores Copper to heap praise on Chief and Copper's hatred and jealousy grow.Tod is a red fox kit, raised as a pet by one of the human hunters who killed his mother and litter mates. Tod initially enjoys his life, but when he reaches sexual maturity he returns to the wild. During his first year, he begins establishing his territory, and learns evasion techniques from being hunted by local farm dogs. One day, he comes across the Master's house and discovers that his presence sends the chained pack of dogs into a frustrated frenzy. He begins to delight in taunting them, until one day when Chief breaks his chain and chases him. The Master sees the dog escape and follows with Copper. As Chief skillfully trails the fox, Tod flees along a railroad track while a train is approaching, waiting to jump to safety until the last minute. Chief is killed by the train.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Adventurer_(short_story_collection)"title="Conan the Adventurer (short story collection)">
In these stories from Conan's early thirties, the Cimmerian starts as a leader of an Afghuli tribe in Vendhya, journeys into the Black Kingdoms south of Stygia, and ends up as a Zingaran buccaneer.Chronologically, the four short stories collected as "Conan the Adventurer" fall between "Conan the Wanderer" and "Conan the Buccaneer".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Freebooter"title="Conan the Freebooter">
In these stories from Conan's late twenties, the Cimmerian is a mercenary with the Free Company in the city-states of Shem and the lands to the north and east, a war leader of the steppe-raiding Kozaki, and finally a soldier in the service of the kingdom of Khauran.Chronologically, the five short stories collected as "Conan the Freebooter" fall between "Conan of Cimmeria" and "Conan the Wanderer".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_the_Eye"title="Story of the Eye">
"Story of the Eye" consists of several vignettes, centered around the sexual passion existing between the unnamed late adolescent male narrator and Simone, his primary female partner. Within this episodic narrative two secondary figures emerge: Marcelle, a mentally ill sixteen-year-old girl who comes to a sad end, and Sir Edmund, a voyeuristic English émigré aristocrat.The story starts with our narrator and Simone meeting at her villa three days after first being introduced through their families being distantly related. Shortly after, Simone instigates a dare from the narrator to sit in a saucer intended for the cat's milk, which she wins by sitting on the bowl with her vagina in the milk. They both masturbate to completion without any physical contact and, after cupping a feel of her vulva while Simone is resting in her mother's arms, the narrator goes home and masturbates throughout the night. This upsets Simone, and when they meet the next day she makes him promise to never masturbate without her again. They start a sexual relationship, though one absent of conversation or penetration.Whilst having sex on the edge of a cliff they are approached by their friend Marcelle, who collapses crying into the grass upon the sight of their unorthodox sexual acrobatics. Simone and the narrator proceeds to rape Marcelle, and when it starts raining Simone starts masturbating in a puddle of mud.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_(short_story_collection)"title="Conan (short story collection)">
After a letter reflecting on Conan's life written by Howard to P. Schuyler Miller and John D. Clark, both fans of Howard's work, is an essay on the invented prehistory in which the hero's adventures are set tracing its development up to Conan's own time. The stories gathered in this collection then follow the Cimmerian from his escape from slavery in Hyperborea through his days as a youthful thief in Zamora, Corinthia, and Nemedia, to the beginning of his employment as a mercenary for King Yildiz of Turan. To Conan's discomfiture, the supernatural is his constant companion.Chronologically, the seven short stories collected as "Conan" are the earliest in Lancer's Conan series. The stories collected as "Conan of Cimmeria" follow.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Visitor_(Applegate_novel)"title="The Visitor (Applegate novel)">
The Animorphs convene and decide that they need to make their next move against the Yeerks. The only lead they have is that Hedrick Chapman, the assistant principal at their school, is a Yeerk Controller. Jake asks Rachel to try to get to him through his daughter Melissa, an old friend of hers. However, Melissa has become distant lately, and Rachel fears she has become a Controller like her father. Rachel remembers Melissa's pet cat Fluffer McKitty, and the Animorphs plan to infiltrate Chapman's house to find out what they can; Rachel morphs Melissa's pet cat to gain access, after a harrowing experience morphing a shrew to lure the cat out of a tree.Once in the house, Rachel follows Mr. Chapman into a basement room and discovers that he communicates directly with Visser Three, the leader of the Earth invasion, through holographic technology. While in the room, she is spotted by Visser Three, who orders Chapman to kill her because she might be an Andalite. Rachel does not react, and Chapman reasons with Visser Three to allow Rachel to escape shaken, but unharmed. Before she leaves the house, Rachel follows Melissa and learns that she is not a Controller, but has pulled away from her friends because she believes her parents, who are now both Controllers, do not love her anymore.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Season_of_the_Witch"title="The Season of the Witch">
Gloria decides to run away from home with her gay friend John McFadden. Both of them have a reason to leave: Gloria wants to find her estranged father, and John wants to avoid being drafted and being sent to Vietnam. They head from Belle Woods, a fictional suburb of Detroit, Michigan, to New York City, where they meet a host of colorful characters. The novel explores the personal freedoms of the late 1960s, including casual drug use, draft evasion, homosexuality, and incest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginning_(novel)"title="The Beginning (novel)">
Continuing on immediately from "The Answer", Rachel attacks the Yeerks in control of the Blade ship, and kills Tom Berenson and his Yeerk, before being killed at the hands of his Yeerk allies shortly after; before she dies, the Ellimist briefly stops time to tell his own story to her and answer a question about her contribution to the war. As soon as her question is answered, Rachel dies. Tom's morph-capable Yeerks escape in the Blade Ship, abandoning the disabled Pool Ship to the Animorphs. Visser One, realizing that he is defeated, leaves Alloran-Semitur-Corrass's body after being knocked unconscious by Ax. The remaining Animorphs, as well as Alloran (freed after more than two decades under Visser One's control over his body), contact the Andalite fleet, who are primed to annihilate Earth. Ax reveals that the non-military Andalites are listening to their communications and will not approve of the fleet's actions should they proceed. The Andalite fleet calls off their plan to destroy Earth and, after hours of negotiations, they promote Ax to rank of Prince and declare the war for Earth over.In addition, Cassie, at Jake's urging, goes to look for Erek and finds him escaping the Pool ship. She lets him know that they have won the war at last, but promptly tears into him for draining the ship's weapons, which both enabled the Blade ship to get away and caused Rachel's death to be in vain. Erek defends his decision and likewise chastises Cassie for resorting to the tactics that they had used against him. Ultimately, Cassie tells Erek that he and the Chee can decide whether or not they are ready to reveal their presence to the world now that the war is over, but though he says nothing about it, it is clear to her that the Chee are still unwilling to do so. Cassie and Erek part ways, and it is clear to the former that the latter and his people are no longer friends or allies with the Animorphs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Encounter_(novel)"title="The Encounter (novel)">
Tobias and Rachel liberate a caged red-tailed hawk from a car dealership, Dealin' Dan Hawke's Used Cars, where it is being used as a mascot in advertisements. Later that evening, Tobias sees a shimmer in the air and is perplexed by it. He decides to check it out again the next day, and this time notices a flock of geese seemingly run into an invisible wall in the air. Tobias suspects the anomaly to be a Yeerk ship using optical camouflage and tells the other Animorphs about it. The group morphs into wolves to follow the last known direction of the ship into the mountains. They arrive at a lake guarded by Park Service human-controllers and Hork-Bajir-controllers. The ship decloaks over the lake, revealing itself to be a massive logistics ship that collects water and air for the Yeerk Pool ship in orbit. Tobias also sees the hawk that he and Rachel freed, and has an urge to be with her.The Animorphs return from the mountains and make plans to morph into fish in the lake and get sucked up by the ship so they can disable it from the inside, thus deactivating the cloaking device while it is above a city and revealing the Yeerk invasion to the general public. Tobias heads up to the lake again to scope out potential hiding places, but his hawk instincts overpower him on the way and he kills and eats a rat. Greatly disturbed by the experience, he flies to Rachel's gymnastics exhibition at the mall and tries to commit suicide. He flies around the mall in a panicked state until Marco smashes open a skylight for him with a baseball to escape. Tobias regresses into his hawk instincts for several days, living in the woods and hunting rodents. His human side only re-emerges when he saves a man escaping from Hork-Bajir near the mountain lake. He returns to Rachel to talk about what happened, and he decides that he needs to keep fighting the Yeerks to remain human.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unlikely_Spy"title="The Unlikely Spy">
Set during World War II, the book follows Alfred Vicary, a historian and friend of Winston Churchill, who was wounded in battle during the World War I while serving as an officer in the Intelligence Corps, joins the British intelligence service. He is assigned the job of protecting Operation Mulberry in the lead up to the invasion of Normandy in 1944. The German spy Catherine Blake, whose real name is Anna von Steiner, an Abwehr operative, actually is close to learning the secret. Catherine's aid is Horst Neumann, a former lieutenant in the paratroopers and later on in the Abwehr, a trained assassin.Some little failures help Alfred Vicary to reveal her true identity. So he devises and carries out his plan of Double Cross. The basic idea of it is that after uncovering the German spy Catherine Blake, instead of capturing and imprisoning her, the British Intelligence provides her with false documents which she accepts as information she seeks. Then she sends the content of those papers through other spies to Germany, and so the German Spy agencies are being deceived without having the least idea of it. The story ends with depiction of the night Catherine tries to escape from Britain. If she could have fled she would be able to tell all she knew about British Intelligence agents and their Double Cross operation, and maybe Germans would understand that they had been deceived all the time. But Catherine does not manage to escape and is killed by the fire laid down by the British martial ship. The Germans, therefore, remain ignorant of the secret they tried to reveal and this causes their defeat in World War II. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Times_of_the_Thunderbolt_Kid"title="The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid">
Bryson was born on December 8, 1951. He spent his childhood growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, part of the baby-boom generation born in the post-war years. He describes his early life and his parents, Bill Sr. and Mary Bryson. His father was a well-known sports writer for "The Des Moines Register", the leading newspaper in Des Moines. His mother was also a writer for the "Register", she also wrote for magazines like "Better Homes" and "Gardens", "Good Housekeeping", and "House Beautiful".He recounts many things that were invented during his childhood that fascinated him, which include frozen dinners, atomic toilets, and television. His middle-class, all-American lifestyle is shown constantly throughout the book, and the influence of his depression-era raised parents rubs off on him. He also remembers his adventures as "the Thunderbolt Kid," an alter ego he made up for himself when he felt powerless. He was able to vaporize people with his heat vision and thought that he came from another planet. He tells amusing stories of his misadventures as Billy Bryson, including his first days in school when he figured out that when the entire class was running drills to protect themselves from a bomb, he would simply read comic books instead. However, when the principal and a police officer came in one day to supervise, he got in trouble. Trouble was something fairly common for "the Thunderbolt Kid", as throughout his childhood his teachers were unamused by his activities. In fact, Bryson recounts how he really was uninterested in getting up before noon, thus not even going to school very often. Despite his unique behavior, Bryson tells his story through the eyes of a child, filled with hilarious observations about the world — from "Lumpy" Kowalski's curious nickname to the joy that was to be had in the department stores.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crampton_Hodnet"title="Crampton Hodnet">
The action takes place over the course of a year in North Oxford, some time before World War II. Miss Doggett likes to entertain students and young clergy at her gloomy Victorian home in Banbury Road. When the new unmarried curate, Mr. Latimer, comes to lodge at her house, he strikes up a friendship with her paid companion, the homely Jessie Morrow, through whose eyes much of the action is seen. He begins to see Jessie as a potential wife and proposes to her, but she rejects him, knowing that his interest in her is practical rather than romantic. Miss Doggett's nephew, the don Francis Cleveland, a reader at the (fictitious) Randolph College of Oxford University, falls in love with one of his students, Barbara Bird. He contemplates an extramarital affair with Barbara, but two of Miss Doggett's student protégés see them together, and the word soon reaches acquaintances of Francis's wife, Margaret. Francis's daughter, Anthea, is in love with Simon Beddoes, the son of Lady Beddoes, and Miss Doggett is especially keen for the relationship to progress to marriage.After Margaret finds out about Francis's relationship with Barbara, she leaves for a trip to London. Francis offers to take Barbara for a weekend in Paris but they only get as far as Dover, where Barbara gets cold feet and goes to stay with a friend, leaving Francis to return alone to Oxford, where Margaret forgives him. Simon breaks up with Anthea by letter; she soon begins dating again. Mr Latimer becomes engaged while on holiday, and makes preparations to leave his role as curate. As the new academic year dawns, Miss Morrow acknowledges that she will probably remain unmarried and that nothing ever really changes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperium_(Harris_novel)"title="Imperium (Harris novel)">
Part One – Senator – 79–70 BCThe book opens with Tiro, the secretary of Marcus Tullius Cicero and the book's narrator, looking back in time over the thirty-six years he was with his master. They met when he was twenty-four years old and Cicero twenty-seven on the family estate in the hills of Arpinum. Cicero decided to consult the leading teachers of rhetoric, most of whom lived in Greece and Asia Minor, and borrows Tiro, never to return him. After trying the so-called Asiatic method, Cicero decides to enroll in the school of Apollonius Molon, a lawyer from Alabanda, who had retired to Rhodes to open his rhetorical school. It is here that Cicero develops the physical physique and voice that will make him such a popular and effective orator. Returning to Rome and becoming a senator, Cicero participates in a year of obligatory government service in Sicily and makes his way back to Rome to seek his fame and fortune. The plot develops when the senator and lawyer is visited some months later by Sthenius of Thermae, who has fled from Sicily after being threatened by the governor of Sicily, Gaius Verres. Cicero decides to defend him and raises the matter in the Roman senate but his motion is talked out by Catulus and finally Hortensius, an aristocrat, Cicero's arch rival and the leading lawyer in Rome.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_(novel)"title="Flipped (novel)">
Julianna 'Juli' Baker meets Bryce Loski two weeks before the beginning of second grade. Though Juli believes she is in love, Bryce is annoyed by her constant and persistent attention.In elementary school, Juli becomes preoccupied with saving her beloved sycamore tree from being cut down. She spends hours up in the tree, but her protest is foiled when she is forcibly removed from her favourite perch. Unbeknownst to Juli, Bryce feels horrible about Juli's tree but does not know how or if he should bring it up with her. Matters are not helped when Bryce's grandfather takes a liking to Juli and starts pestering Bryce to be friends with her.Things with Juli start to change when Juli begins giving Bryce and his family weekly batches of chicken eggs from the hens she raises in her yard. Bryce’s family worries that because Juli’s yard has always been very messy the eggs may contain salmonella. Bryce's father tells him to stop accepting eggs from Juli, but rather than risk hurting Juli’s feelings, Bryce ends up throwing the eggs away every morning. Despite his efforts, Juli accidentally discovers what Bryce’s family thinks about her and her eggs. Her feelings for Bryce deteriorate even further when she overhears him talking to a classmate about her mentally challenged uncle. Juli, furious and hurt, decides to abandon every thought of Bryce.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Usurper"title="Conan the Usurper">
Conan, about forty in these stories, embarks on the most desperate gamble of his life — leading a revolution against King Numedides of Aquilonia, with the goal of making himself king in his place. From his low point as a treasure-seeking fugitive in the Pictish Wilderness, he is retrieved by allies from his days in the Aquilonian army to lead the revolt. The borderlands suffer grievously during the war, but in the end Conan takes the throne, only to suffer the customary uneasiness of the head that wears the crown, from an attempted assassination involving Stygian sorcerer Thoth-Amon to magical treachery on the battlefield as he strives to defend his hard-won kingship against predatory foreign powers.The Aquilonian civil war between Conan and Numedides is not actually depicted, but occurs offstage as background to the action of "Wolves Beyond the Border", Howard's only non-Conan tale set in the Hyborian Age. De Camp later made the war itself the subject of his novel "Conan the Liberator", co-written with Lin Carter."The Phoenix on the Sword", which Howard rewrote from an earlier Kull story, marks his only use of Thoth-Amon as an antagonist, in a somewhat peripheral role — he and Conan never even meet! In later stories, De Camp and Carter would later elevate the Stygian sorcerer into one of Conan's principal enemies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantrasamgraha"title="Tantrasamgraha">
A brief account of the contents of Tantrasamgraha is presented below. A descriptive account of the contents is available in Bharatheeya Vijnana/Sastra Dhara. Full details of the contents are available in an edition of Tantrasamgraha published in the "Indian Journal of History of Science".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Wanderer"title="Conan the Wanderer">
Conan, now about thirty-one, survives a Turanian-involved trap which crushes his Zuagir raiders and seeks revenge on Vardanes of Zamora, their betrayer. Afterwards, he moves on to other adventures, killing a high priest in the cannibal-haunted city of Zamboula and ultimately gaining command of a band of Kozaki warriors in the service of Kobad Shah, king of Iranistan. In his final adventure, Conan once again encounters his old rival, Olgerd Vladislav, and predecessor as chief of the Zuagirs.Chronologically, the four short stories collected as "Conan the Wanderer" fall between "Conan the Freebooter" and "Conan the Adventurer".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Dog_(Winslow_novel)"title="The Power of the Dog (Winslow novel)">
Winslow's novel describes three decades of the United States' war on drugs by following several main characters: The DEA agent Art Keller; Adán Barrera, who controls large parts of the drug trade from Mexico to the United States of America; the prostitute Nora Hayden; and Sean Callan, a gangster from the streets of New York. Agent Keller becomes obsessed with the Barrera family after they torture and kill a DEA agent in Mexico. Trying to avenge his colleague, Keller discovers massive involvement of the US and the Mexican governments in drug trade operations. The CIA prevents him from taking revenge on the drug cartels to combat left-wing activists in Latin America.Winslow's novel exposes the brutality of the war of drugs with graphic scenes of torture and massacres. It also navigates through the inner workings of the drug trade and how different organizations collaborate to achieve their respective goals, from the Mexican drug cartels to the Vatican.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Don_Flows_Home_to_the_Sea"title="The Don Flows Home to the Sea">
The 1940s English edition subdivides the book into seven major sections.1. Red Don or WhiteSet in 1918, this section covers the initial opposition of the Don cossacks to the Bolsheviks, the effective surrender of many of them to Red forces, and then the growing discontent leading up to the Upper Don province revolting. In Tatarsk, the Melekhov family decide not to retreat with the White cossacks, but Mikhail Koshevoi and other communists begin purging the village of wealthier Cossacks. Piotra is protected by his old military comrade Yakov Fomin, now a Red leader, but Gregor is forced to flee to escape arrest.2. The Cossacks RiseThe Don cossacks rise in response to the executions. Piotra Melekhov, leading the local squadrons, advances against the Reds but is outmaneuvered, captured and ultimately shot by Mikhail Koshevoi. The rebels effectively form their own soviet-style government, though they accept some logistical support from the Whites, who are fighting on the Donietz. Grigor becomes a division commander, holding Kargin against the Red forces, but is often appalled at his own side's actions, letting a number of family members of Red soldiers out of prison in Vieshenska. Mikhail Koshevoi becomes part of the Serdobsky regiment, and narrowly escapes when the men all defect to the rebels; his fellow communist Stockman is killed. Ivan Alexievich, a communist cossack from Tatarsk, is captured and driven through different villages with other prisoners being brutalised by crowds, before coming to Tatarsk and being shot by Piotra's widow Daria.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curse_of_the_Viking_Grave"title="The Curse of the Viking Grave">
The novel is set in the northern Manitoban forests and in the Barrens to the north. Jamie, Awasin, and Peetyuk divide their time between studying with Jamie's uncle, Angus Macnair, and trapping in the woods. When the Chipeweyan camp nearby succumbs to deadly influenza, the boys help with supplies and nurse the survivors, while Angus travels south in search of medical help. However, Angus contracts pneumonia on the journey and is hospitalized. Jamie is anxious both to obtain money for Angus's treatment and to avoid being placed with Child Welfare. He prepares to return to the Viking tomb he discovered (in "Lost in the Barrens") which he believes may contain valuable archaeological relics.The boys and Awasin's sister, Angeline, set out to the still frozen north by dog sled and cariole and eventually meet up with Peetyuk's people, with whom they stay until the thaw. They realize that the Ihalmiut are struggling to survive, and so they decide that most of the profits from the grave should go to help them. The medicine man tells them the story of the heroic Viking known as Koonar and claims that a curse will descend on anyone who disturbs his rest. Defying the curse, Jamie uncovers a sword, a soapstone box, and other ancient pieces. Planning to take the artifacts to Churchill, the travelers set out again, this time by canoe, and brave the treacherous Big River which leads to Hudson Bay.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squire_(novel)"title="Squire (novel)">
"Squire" tells the story of Keladry of Mindelan's years as a squire, between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. Having passed the "big examinations", Kel becomes a squire without a knight-master. While she becomes frustrated at waiting for offers from knights, her best friend, Nealan of Queenscove, becomes squire to Alanna the Lioness, the first lady knight in Tortall, and Kel's personal hero.While Kel is disappointed at not becoming the Lioness's squire, she shortly receives an equally prestigious offer from Lord Raoul of Goldenlake, commander of the elite King's Own and a personal friend to the Lioness. As Lord Raoul's squire, she travels with the King's Own and participates in routine duties ranging from chasing rogue centaurs to helping to rebuild villages afflicted by natural disasters such as mudslides. Along the way, Kel acquires a baby griffin from the bandits who kidnapped him from his parents' nest. Due to the high incidence of kidnapping immature griffins for their magical powers, griffin parents attack any human who has ever touched one of their offspring, so this task is not without its dangers.As knight-master, Raoul teaches Kel the fineries of command, and hones her proven skills in jousting, eventually entering her into tournaments where she jousts against other squires and knights. She jousts twice against Wyldon of Cavall, her previous training master, a political conservative who was initially vehemently opposed to Kel's training to be a knight. After the second time, she meets three girls, two of them sisters, who explain that they wish to train for knighthood as well. Kel gives them some advice, noting that the sisters appear serious about it while the third girl seems more like the type that jumps around from idea to idea.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(novel)"title="Koko (novel)">
In the early 1980s, a series of ritualistic murders take place in Southeast Asia in which the victims have their eyes and ears removed, and are each found with a playing card placed in their mouth bearing the word "KOKO". During a reunion of veterans at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., four survivors of a doomed platoon—Michael Poole (a grief-stricken pediatrician), Tina Pumo (owner of a Vietnamese restaurant), Conor Linklater (an itinerant construction worker) and Harry Beevers (an opportunistic lawyer)—gather to discuss the killings. Because the word "Koko" holds special significance to their old platoon, and because the killings recall the events in books he has written, the men believe that the killer is Tim Underhill, another member of their platoon who disappeared years earlier. Beevers convinces the men to help him track down Underhill.While Pumo remains in New York City, Beevers, Poole, and Linklater travel to Asia in search of Underhill. Michael, Conor, and Harry fail to find Underhill in Singapore, but are given several leads which send Michael and Conor to Bangkok and Harry to Taipei. While wandering around a residential area of Bangkok, Michael comes across Underhill at a small neighborhood fair and realizes that he is too stable and good-natured to be the killer. Underhill agrees to return to the U.S. to help in the pursuit. He, Michael and Conor reunite with Harry in San Francisco before returning to New York together. Meanwhile, the killer travels to the U.S. himself and murders Tina in his apartment. Tina's girlfriend, Maggie Lah, comes across the scene and narrowly escapes the killer's clutches.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawkins'_God"title="Dawkins' God">
McGrath begins with an overview of evolutionary biology and Darwinian theory. He then presents Dawkins' view that the current state of scientific knowledge should lead a rational person to conclude that there is no God. McGrath argues that Dawkins fails to declare or defend several crucial assumptions or premises. McGrath also defends other conclusions in the book, including:McGrath argues that Dawkins' rejection of faith is a straw man argument. According to McGrath, Dawkins’ definition that faith “means blind trust, in the absence of evidence” is not a Christian position. In contrast, argues McGrath, accepting Dawkins’ definition would require blind trust since he offers no evidence to support it. Rather, it is based upon what McGrath calls “an unstated and largely unexamined cluster of hidden non-scientific values and beliefs” (p. 92). McGrath then argues that Dawkins frequently violates the very tenets of evidence-based reasoning that Dawkins himself claims to uphold and use to dismiss all religious belief.Also on page 92, McGrath states "... Darwinism neither proves nor disproves the existence of God (unless, of course God is defined by his critics in precisely such a way...)."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Suitable_Boy"title="A Suitable Boy">
In 1951, 19-year-old Lata Mehra attends the wedding of her older sister, Savita, to Pran Kapoor, a university lecturer. Lata’s mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra, says that it is time for Lata to be married as well, which Lata dismisses as she intends to concentrate on her studies in English literature. Nevertheless Mrs. Rupa Mehra begins to put out feelers to her friends and family, for a suitable boy for Lata.In the meantime Lata is approached several times by a boy her own age and after a few meetings feels she is in love with him. His name is Kabir Durrani, and Lata is distressed when she realises he is Muslim as her Hindu family would never allow her to marry a Muslim man. When her early morning meetings with Kabir are discovered she tries to run away with Kabir, who refuses. Ultimately Lata agrees to go with her mother to Calcutta to live with her arrogant older brother Arun, who is already married.As Lata is leaving she is spotted by Haresh Khanna, an ambitious shoe manufacturer who is involved in business with Kedarnath Tandon, the husband of Pran’s older sister, Veena. He is intrigued by her beauty and sadness.In Calcutta, Lata is surprised to find herself enjoying her time with her brother, and his wife Meenakshi. She meets Meenakshi’s eccentric family, the Chatterjis, and bonds with her older brother, Amit, an England-educated poet who is under pressure from his family to marry. Though Amit initially only intends on being friendly to Lata as a member of his extended family, he begins to consider her as a possible wife. Mrs. Rupa Mehra is horrified when she realises that Amit and Lata might be considering marriage, as she dislikes Meenakshi and therefore disapproves of the Chatterjis. She goes to Delhi to renew her efforts to find a spouse for Lata. By accident she is introduced to Haresh Khanna and decides he is suitable for Lata. Despite the fact that he is in love with another woman (whom he cannot marry due to her family's objection), Haresh agrees to meet Lata. Lata finds the idea of marrying Haresh ridiculous but nevertheless has an agreeable time with him and gives him permission to write to her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius_Loci_(novel)"title="Genius Loci (novel)">
A young Bernice Summerfield lands a job as an archaeologist on a colony world. She discovers evidence that the planet was previously inhabited by a sapient species.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Buccaneer"title="Conan the Buccaneer">
Conan, now in his late thirties and privateer captain of the "Wastrel", becomes embroiled in the politics of the kingdom of Zingara when he searches for a mythical treasure on the Nameless Isle. Mixed up in his adventure are Princess Chabela, daughter of a dying Zingaran king, the privateer Zarono, and the Stygian sorcerer Thoth-Amon.Chronologically, "Conan the Buccaneer" falls between "The Pool of the Black One" in "Conan the Adventurer" and "Red Nails" in "Conan the Warrior". However, the present book ends with Conan as a successful captain, high in the favor of the royal family of Zingara, while "Red Nails" starts with him as a fugitive mercenary in the jungles south of Stygia. How Conan lost his ship, left the sea, and took up again the role of a mercenary is untold.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silver_Kiss"title="The Silver Kiss">
Zoë Sutcliff is a young woman who experiences the slow death of her mother, Anne Sutcliff, and the dislocation of her father, Harry Sutcliff. She turns to her sole friend Lorraine, who cannot provide emotional support for Zoë. Lorraine moves to Oregon with her father and stepmother, leaving Zoë completely alone. On the news, there are reports of women being killed in Zoë's area, whose throats are slashed and drained of blood. While walking in a park, Zoë meets Simon and begins a friendship with him; they eventually develop a mutual romantic attraction until one night she catches him eating a pigeon. He later tells her the truth of his origin, namely that he is a vampire from 17th-century England, and he is seeking to kill Christopher—his own brother—who looks like a six-year-old albino but is a sadistic version of what Simon could become. He reveals that Christopher is Zoë's neighborhood's throat-slashing killer, and his brother was also responsible for the murder of their mother and his vampirism; hence, he wants retribution against his brother. Prior to Simon's revelations, Lorraine was almost killed by Christopher when he attempted to lure her into an alley until Zoë reached her in time; Zoë now realizes that she has met the childlike vampire before and inadvertently saved her friend's life by interfering. Skeptical, Zoë allows Simon to feed upon her in a controlled manner to prove his claims.  
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Be_Popular"title="How to Be Popular">
Steph Landry has been the target of jokes since sixth grade when she spilt a red Super Big Gulp on Lauren Moffat's white D&amp;G skirt. In response, Lauren coined the phrase "Don't be such a Steph Landry" to ensure Steph never lives it down. As time has passed people have forgotten both the incident and the individual, but the phrase is widely used in the small town. This has caused Steph to feel like a social pariah. Steph has since been content to hang out with her best friends Jason and Becca, also social outcasts, but as she enters the eleventh grade, she wants more out of high school. Luckily, she finds a copy of an old book titled none other than "How to be Popular" while cleaning out Jason's grandmother's attic.The book is full of useful tips. She follows the book's advice and begins the school year with flat-ironed hair and a new attitude. Steph is determined to be confident and enthusiastic about school. She sits with new people at lunch and organizes a talent auction. Steph does not anticipate Lauren's anger at her sudden rise in popularity, or Jason's confusion and shock at her behaviour. As her popularity grows, Steph is forced to make difficult choices about who and what is truly important to her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Land_Remembered"title="A Land Remembered">
"A Land Remembered" focuses on the fictional story of the MacIveys, who migrated from Georgia into Florida in the mid-19th century. After settling, this family struggles to survive in the harsh environment. First they scratch a living from the land and then learn to round up wild cattle and drive them to Punta Rassa to ship to Cuba. Over three generations, they amass more holdings and money, and move further from their connection to the native, untamed land.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Swordsman"title="Conan the Swordsman">
The seven short stories collected as "Conan the Swordsman" are set at various points of Conan's career, from his youth as a raider in the north to his maturity as a general in the kingdom of Aquilonia. The two associated non-fiction pieces by de Camp are on the Conan saga in general and the derivation of the names used by Howard for constructing the fictional "Hyborian Age" setting of the Conan stories.Chronologically, the seven stories supplement the tales in the twelve volume Lancer/Ace Conan series, falling into the period covered by "Conan" through "Conan the Warrior".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Answer_(novel)"title="The Answer (novel)">
After the destruction of the Yeerk pool, Jake, Tobias, and Marco hide while witnessing the Yeerks destroying the last remnants of their hometown and watch as the Pool Ship lands amidst the destruction. After briefly considering destroying the Pool Ship, the Animorphs hide, deciding that capturing the vessel would be a better strategy.Hoping to gain military assistance for the attack, Jake visits Major General Sam Doubleday. Although Doubleday is initially distrustful of Jake, he eventually listens and agrees to Jake's plan after a Controller-major on the general's staff tries to kill Jake. After a Yeerk attack on the general's base, Doubleday evacuates his troops and confines them and himself for three days to eliminate any remaining Controllers amongst his soldiers.Unfortunately, the confinement of Doubleday and his troops means a three-day delay before the Animorphs can launch their attack on the Pool Ship. Sensing that the Yeerks could get the new Yeerk pool that is under construction operational within that time period, the Animorphs decide to take out the Taxxons digging the pool. In the ensuing battle, Jake finds himself underground and in the company of several Taxxons, led by none other than Arbron, a former companion of Elfangor's who became a Taxxon-"nothlit" several years earlier. Arbron makes Jake an offer: in exchange for allowing his followers to become "nothlits" and make a home for themselves on Earth, the 1709 non-Controller Taxxons on the surface and on board the Pool Ship will defect and join the Animorphs in their fight against the Yeerks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teen_Idol_(novel)"title="Teen Idol (novel)">
Jenny Greenley is a 16-year-old high school junior who lives in the small town of Clayton, Indiana. She is secretly the school newspaper's advice columnist Ask Annie, a job she got due to her ability to keep others' secrets and help people with their problems- something she been doing her entire life. Teen film star and heartthrob Luke Striker is making a movie about high school, but having grown up on television, he knows nothing about real teens and their lifestyles. When he decides to go undercover at Clayton High School to research his role, the principal assigns Luke as Jen's responsibility; she is expected to show him around the school, help him integrate, and most importantly, keep his true identity secret from her fellow students.During his time at Clayton, Luke is appalled by the vicious hierarchy of high school and tells Jen that she should start taking a stand for the people who can't speak for themselves, rather than just consoling them and letting it happen again and again. After Luke's true identity is revealed at a school car wash, Jen realizes that she has the power to do so, and starts making serious changes in the lives of others and herself as well, morphing from "nice little Jenny Greenley, everybody's best friend" to Jen, effector of social change. She quits show choir, foils a cruel senior prank, and befriends unpopular outcast Cara. When she confronts her best friend Trina about her poor treatment of her boyfriend, Trina begins to get angry. Compounded by the discovery that Jen is going to the school's annual Spring Fling with Luke (who asked her as an apology for the trouble he caused), she is furious, and refuses to talk to her for several days. However, despite the newfound media exposure surrounding Clayton, Jen's feelings for Luke remain platonic. Meanwhile, she grows closer to Scott, a fellow junior and editor of the school newspaper. Trina eventually realizes that she has overreacted, and makes up with Jen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wish_(novel)"title="The Wish (novel)">
Middle schooler Wilma Sturtz is alone. Her childhood friends have moved away, and her efforts to make new ones have failed. Wilma's fortunes change when she offers an old lady her seat on the subway. The woman offers to grant Wilma one wish, exactly as Wilma wishes it. Flustered, Wilma wishes to be the most popular person at Claverford, her middle school.The wish is granted to Wilma's surprise. She befriends a group of popular girls, along with a budding friendship with a boy named Jared. However, a loophole is revealed; Wilma's wish was granted exactly as she wished for it, so she is not popular to students outside of Claverford, or to students from other schools. Even worse, her wish will expire the day they graduate from the school.Wilma attempts to embrace her wish and find the old lady. The wish wears off as soon as Wilma goes back to her house with her friends--by this time, they have all graduated. She reveals what she wished to her "friends," but realizes that if she wishes to remain friends with them or even to have her wish renewed, she'd be forcing them to do something against their will; without the wish, they wouldn't have befriended Wilma willingly. After telling Jared this, he says that she wasted a wish and could have wished for something better--such as a pet porpoise.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_Beloved_Sister"title="Most Beloved Sister">
The story revolves around seven-year-old Barbro, who has a secret twin sister called Ylva-li, the only person in Barbro's life who likes her more than anything else, and who calls her Most Beloved Sister. Ylva-li is the queen of the golden hall which can be reached by crawling down a hole under the rose bush, Salikon. Barbro and Ylva-Li ride their horses and have adventures together. When Barbro has to return to her parents, Ylva-Li tells her that she will die when the roses on Salikon wither. Barbro refuses to believe her and returns to her parents, who pretend that they have missed her. The next day, the roses on the rose bush are all dead, and there is no longer a hole in the ground.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tiger_Rising"title="The Tiger Rising">
Rob Horton is 12 years old and lives with his father in a Florida motel called the Kentucky Star. His father (named Robert), and Rob have recently moved to Lister, Florida, after the death of Rob's mother, Caroline. Rob is quiet and often is bullied at school. Things begin to change when Rob discovers a tiger in the forest (locked up in a cage) while wandering the woods. He then meets a girl named Sistine Bailey (named after the Sistine Chapel) who has recently moved nearby. Rob shows Sistine the tiger. Rob, who usually keeps his feelings locked away begins to involuntarily open up emotionally to Sistine. Though Sistine insists on letting the tiger go, Rob is wary of what will happen to it if he does. Rob finally relents and releases the tiger, letting it run into the woods. However, just moments later, Rob's father shoots the tiger dead. Rob’s father is then seen holding the gun over the tiger in front of the Kentucky Star. Rob then angrily attacks his father and tells him he wishes his father died instead of his mother, and also forces him to say the name Caroline Horton, which Rob is forbidden to say. Rob also insists they bury the tiger, and have a funeral. At the tiger's funeral, Sistine recites a part of William Blake's The Tyger. Rob and his father confront their unresolved feelings about Rob's mother and Rob begins looking forward to going to school with Sistine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarek_(novel)"title="Sarek (novel)">
Sarek discovers that leaders of the Federation and its enemies have been subjected to outside mental influence. He suspects that the interference is linked to the Freelans, a race which has been part of the Federation for decades, but which no offworlder has ever seen due to a cultural taboo. Sarek once inadvertently discovered that the Freelans look like Vulcans, but later dismissed the incident as a hallucination induced by the Pon farr. After secretly accessing the Freelan computer system, Sarek discovers that the Freelans are in fact Romulans, and that their Vulcan aides are the children of Vulcan spacefarers kidnapped by the Romulans and forced to reproduce. The Freelan ambassador Taryn is actually the Romulan wing commander in charge of the plot to spy on the Federation from within. The mental influencing of various leaders is carried out by the Vulcan aides, who were raised as Romulans without the telepathic ethics taught on Vulcan.Sarek's work is interrupted by the news that his wife, Amanda, is terminally ill. Although he returns to Vulcan to be with her, he is soon called upon to negotiate for the release of a colony world held hostage by a Klingon renegade. He agrees, even though he will not be able to return before his wife's death. His son Spock, who believes his father's first duty is to the family, becomes angry when he learns of this decision, and the feud between them that ended in the episode "Journey to Babel" threatens to reassert itself. Sarek succeeds in the negotiations and discovers that the Klingon commander Keraz who led the raid is also a victim of the Romulans' mental influence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_State_Counsellor"title="The State Counsellor">
Moscow, 1891. Disguised as Fandorin, the leader of a revolutionary organization murders a general. Fandorin has to catch him. He is assisted (or is it hindered?) in his investigations by Prince Pozharsky, a fictional descendant of Dmitry Pozharsky, who helped bring the Time of Troubles to an end.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intimate_Adventures_of_a_London_Call_Girl"title="The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl">
"The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl" begins with Belle de Jour introducing herself as a "whore", then further explaining that she does not mean it metaphorically, and that she literally is a "whore".After the prologue the book begins in a diary format, with Belle explaining the clients she meets and her personal complications that become entwined with her job as a call girl. The average diary entries last little longer than a page and are always titled with the date, which is written in French, for example, the first diary entry reads "Samedi, le 1 Novembre", which translates into Saturday, 1 November. Each chapter is broken apart by the month the diary entries were written in, for example "Novembre" (November).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Werewolf_Cub"title="I Am a Werewolf Cub">
Ulf was bitten in his leg when stealing apples. He read the "Book of Werewolves" and understands he turns into a werewolf at full moon. His family notices that the previously timid Ulf is now talking back and sneaks out at night.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_You,_Beth_Cooper"title="I Love You, Beth Cooper">
Upon graduation from Buffalo Grove High School, valedictorian Denis Cooverman states to the entire gymnasium that he's had a crush on cheerleader Beth Cooper for six years. During the speech, he singles out several members of the class including the class bully and a pretty but shallow party girl, and tells his movie-quoting best friend Rich to admit that he's gay. Denis' speech upsets everyone except Beth, who thinks it was "sweet", giving Denis the courage to invite her to a party at his house that night. After the speech, it is revealed that Beth in fact has a boyfriend, an off duty army soldier named Kevin who threatens Denis.After his declaration, Denis' mother and father leave him and Rich alone at the house for their party, which no one attends, as they are social outcasts. Beth shows up in her tiny blue car with her friends Cammy and Treece (the group of three is known as "The Trinity") at Denis' house that evening. Things are awkward and become worse when Kevin shows up with his army buddies, and Denis and Rich are assaulted and Denis' house (the kitchen) is trashed. Beth and the Trinity help Denis and Rich get away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Declaration_(novel)"title="The Declaration (novel)">
Anna Covey is nearly 15 years old and has lived in Grange Hall (a Surplus Hall) for most of her life. She was taken away from her parents at the age of two and now, in year 2140, she has learned to "hate [her] parents" for bringing her into the world. Anna has also grown up believing that her parents hate her because it is her fault they are imprisoned.As part of her Pending process (through which she will become a Valuable Asset the moment she comes of age), Anna undergoes a work placement in the home of a Legal lady, Mrs Sharpe, who is kind to her in a way Anna is not used to. Mrs Sharpe allows Anna to take certain liberties that would earn her a beating if discovered by the staff at Grange Hall, like offering Anna to try on her lipstick. At the end of the placement, Mrs Sharpe gives Anna a small pink diary made of pink suede, in which Anna now writes every night. However, as "journals and writing [are] forbidden at Grange hall [because] Surpluses were not there to read and write [but] to learn and work", Anna has to hide her diary away on a secret shelf in the side of the girls' bath.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Resistance_(Malley_novel)"title="The Resistance (Malley novel)">
Prior to the events of this novel, the world had become overpopulated due invention of a drug that lets people live forever. A "Declaration" is created which people who take the drug, named Longevity, must sign. By signing they give up the right to have children, though some powerful people are given exceptions. Those who take the drug and still have children are called the "Surplus".The book opens as Peter is pretending to live life as a legal by working for his grandfather, Richard Pincent, at Pincent Pharma. In reality he is attempting to help the underground, coordinating with Pip, the leader of the Underground in all but name, an organization dedicated to destroying Longevity. Peter is being watched at work by his half-brother Jude through hacked security cameras. Peter's grandfather pressures Peter to sign the Declaration in order to harm the underground and help launch a new drug Longevity+. Peter, with the encouragement and support of his girlfriend Anna, who he lives with, initially plans to decline to sign the Declaration.While attempting to steal a document from his grandfather's office, a task which is surprisingly easy, Peter finds out about a planned Surplus Sterilisation Programme. He discovers his name and that of Anna on the list of people to be sterilized. Returning home Peter gets drunk and says to Anna that they should both sign the Declaration. In response, Anna calls Pip, but Peter does not listen to him either. Peter and Anna continue to fight about whether to sign the Declaration until Richard convinces Anna to sign. While Anna does this, she is soon arrested by the Catchers/Police with stolen documents - it's an apparent set-up.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolores_(Susann_novel)"title="Dolores (Susann novel)">
The beautiful and fashionable Dolores Cortez Ryan is widowed when her husband, U.S. President James Ryan, is gunned down in New Orleans. After a year in seclusion, Dolores takes tentative steps back into the world, by having affairs first with a screenwriter, and then with Barry Haines, an attorney who likes rich women, but doesn't consider Dolores--with just $30,000 a year--quite rich enough. Finally, Dolores agrees to marry a fabulously wealthy shipping tycoon, who leaves her on their wedding night to go to his mistress.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heart_of_a_Distant_Forest"title="The Heart of a Distant Forest">
Retired junior college history professor Andrew Lachlan has returned to his family home on a lake in north central Georgia to spend the last year of his life. Diagnosed with a terminal disease, he has decided to forego life-extending treatments so he can focus on learning what he feels he does not yet know about the world. With strong interests in Native American history and the natural world, he begins a journal that chronicles his last year.He lives alone, his wife have died some time before, and he looks forward to solitude, but a young country boy, Willie Sullivan, comes into his life. Willie's world is cramped and difficult, and he brings to Andrew a kind of learning he's never had before. At the same time, Andrew begins to teach Willie about the life beyond Shadow Pond, where Andrew lives.Andrew also reconnects with Callie McKenzie, a woman he loved years earlier and who is now a widow herself. Each begins to see in the other reflections of the life they once led. As Andrew's life draws toward its inevitable end, he begins to find the edge of a new transcendence and an understanding of how generations learn and pass on the best of what they know and feel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Eye_for_an_Eye_(novel)"title="An Eye for an Eye (novel)">
Fred Neville, also known as Justin Groch, a lieutenant of cavalry and heir to the earldom of Scroope, woos and then seduces the beautiful Kate O’Hara. Kate lives with her mother in genteel poverty in an isolated cottage near the cliffs of Moher in western Ireland.News of the romantic entanglement quickly reaches Scroope Manor, and Fred is summoned back to Dorsetshire where the earl extracts a firm undertaking that Fred will not marry Kate O’Hara under any circumstances, despite any promises he has made to the girl.Once back in Ireland, Fred is confronted at his barracks by Mrs. O’Hara, demanding to know when he intends to marry her daughter, who is carrying his baby. He is shamed into agreeing to visit Kate, but that evening word arrives that the old Earl has died, and that Fred is now the Earl of Scroope. Fred realizes that marriage to Kate O’Hara is out of the question as her background would make her quite unacceptable in society. He resolves to confront Mrs. O’Hara and her unfortunate daughter.The climax of the novel takes place between the young earl and Mrs. O’Hara on the cliffs above the cottage. Whilst acknowledging the promises he made to Kate, Fred steadfastly refuses to make her Countess of Scroope. A frenzied Mrs. O’Hara attacks the lord, driving him backwards over the cliff edge to his death. Realizing she has killed the man her daughter loves, she instantly falls insane.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Asylum_Seeker"title="The Asylum Seeker">
Christian Beck, a translator of technical manuals, has concluded that life consists of nothing but self-deception and illusions, and decides to devote his time to unmasking all illusions, false hopes, and high ideals. He denounces all deception in his friends and family and promises his own unmasking as a finale; swearing off all personal desire, he now dedicates his life to the happiness of his girlfriend, "Bird", a former prostitute. The couple lived for a time in Eilat, Israel, where Beck was a regular customer to the brothel and Bird was sleeping with ugly, deformed men. Back in Europe, it becomes clear that she is suffering from a fatal disease, and before she dies agrees to marry an asylum seeker from Algeria so he can attain permanent residence. Beck protests initially but later agrees to the marriage. The asylum seeker also gratifies Bird sexually, and a strange ménage à trois is the result.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Bear,_Polar_Bear,_What_Do_You_Hear?"title="Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?">
The book is designed to help toddlers identify wild animals (from the zoo) and the noises they make. It features a polar bear, a lion, a hippopotamus, a flamingo, a zebra, a boa constrictor, an elephant, a leopard, a peacock, a walrus, a zoo keeper and some children.This is a companion book to "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?", published by Carle and Martin in 1967, replacing the earlier text's colours and common animals with sounds and less common animals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blood_of_Others"title="The Blood of Others">
In German-occupied France, Jean Blomart sits by a bed in which his lover Hélène lies dying. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn about both characters and their relationship to each other. As a young man filled with guilt about his privileged middle-class life, Jean joins the Communist Party and breaks from his family, determined to make his own way in life. After the death of a friend in a political protest, for which he feels guilty, Jean leaves the Party and concentrates on trade union activities. Hélène is a young designer who works in her family's confectionery shop and is dissatisfied with her conventional romance with her fiancé Paul. She contrives to meet Jean and, though he initially rejects her, they form a relationship after she has had an abortion following a reckless liaison with another man. Caring for her happiness, Jean tells Hélène he loves her even though he believes that he does not. He proposes and she accepts.When France enter the Second World War, Jean, conceding the need for violent conflict to effect change, becomes a soldier. Hélène intervenes against his will to arrange a safe posting for him. Angry with her, Jean breaks their relationship. As the German forces advance towards Paris, Hélène flees and witnesses the suffering of other refugees. Returning to Paris, she briefly takes up with a German who could advance her career, but soon sees what her countrymen are suffering. She also witnesses the roundup of Jews. Securing the safety of her Jewish friend Yvonne leads Hélène back to Jean who has become a leader in a Résistance group. She is moved to join the group. Jean has reconnected with his father with the common goal to liberate France from Germany. His mother however is less impressed by the lives lost to the Resistance. Hélène is shot in a resistance activity and during Jean's night vigil at her side, he examines his love for Hélène and the wider consequences of his actions. As morning dawns, Hélène dies and Jean decides to continue with acts of resistance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Sétimo_Selo"title="O Sétimo Selo">
The plot revolves around a murder that the protagonist, Tomás de Noronha, attempts to solve. While working on the murder, de Noronha discovers the environmental danger the Earth is being exposed to by the human race.Antarctica, summer of 2002. Howard Dawson, chief scientist at the American Antarctic scientific station, McMurdo, receives a radio contact from the Argentinean scientific station, Marambio. The Argentineans are at the Larsen B ice shelf and report that the shelf is shaking and on the verge of collapse. Puzzled, Dawson requests satellite imagery and is astonished to find the assessment credible. He immediately flies to the Antarctic Peninsula, where Larsen B lies. Once there, he bewilderedly watches the ice shelf disintegrate. Dawson is overwhelmed by the sight of a slab of ice the size of Rhode Island separating from Antarctica, and returns in shock to McMurdo. Alone in his lab, he prepares to file a report on the biggest global warming event ever seen by human eyes.A stranger step in and points a gun at him.Bang. Bang, Bang.The report is never written.World-famous cryptanalyst Tomás Noronha is approached by Interpol agent Alexander Orlov, who hires him for a strange investigation. Two scientists were killed a few years ago, both on the same day in the summer of 2002: an American in Antarctica and a Spaniard in Barcelona. Both were well acquainted with Filipe Madureira, an old high school friend of Tomás. Filipe has since disappeared, and Interpol wants Tomás to track him down. Orlov also wants the cryptanalyst's help to decipher a message left by the assassins near the victims’ bodies - an ancient biblical mystery:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bougainville_(novel)"title="Bougainville (novel)">
The narrator, Bo, is a middle-aged diplomat somewhat disenchanted with his life, who finds himself, stationed in Bangladesh in 1973, reconstructing the life of his childhood friend Tommie. After they got reacquainted at a class reunion, Tommie drowned himself in the Bay of Bengal and left Bo with a collection of papers which, beside autobiographical material by Bo, also contains the memoirs of his grandfather, a frustrated idealist who left by boat for the Dutch Indies in the early 1900s, and managed to bed Mata Hari on the way. The novel combines the three plotlines of Bo's account of his friendship with Tommie and his work in Bangladesh, which he perceives as futile; Tommie's account, a success story which ends in suicide; and the reflections of Tommie's grandfather.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Go_Down_to_the_Sea"title="Five Go Down to the Sea">
Siblings Julian, Dick and Anne Kirrin, and their cousin Georgina 'George' Kirrin and her dog, Timmy, spend a holiday at a coastal farm in Cornwall. There, they are nicely welcomed and hosted by the garrulous Mrs Penruthlan and her enormous husband, whose monosyllabic utterances they find incomprehensible and quite funny. The children encounter a young boy named Yan (Jan), as well as a group of travelling entertainers called the Barnies. The children learn that long ago, villainous locals would shine a light on stormy nights to direct ships onto rocks to wreck them, and the vessels would be smashed and their cargoes washed ashore and stolen. Julian and Dick discover a light is again being shone at night, so the children set out to solve the mystery. They discover the Secret Way, a way used by the old Wreckers, and when they were locked up in a cellar and told that they had come at an 'awkward time', Yan comes and helps the Five escape, as he knew the Secret Way. They go back to Mrs. Penruthlan via the Secret Way, in the misbelief that Mr. Penruthlan is in the wrong. When the Five and Yan discover that Mr. Penruthlan is actually with the police and find out that his consistent "aahs","ooohs" and "ocks" are because he didn't have his false teeth in, the Five quickly warm up to him. Later in the book after a Barnie shows and a good meal at Penruthlans', they discover that the 'Guv'nor' of the Barnies actually is the exchanger of the goods the Wreckers stole from the wrecked ships. Mr. Penruthlan discovers a white package inside Clopper (a dangerously funny pretend horse that is the highlight of any Barnie show), and in the end, after calling the police, Mr. Penruthlan guffaws and hands Clopper over to Julian and Dick, and wishes them luck with it. At the end they kissed each other and started there new lives happily.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohawk_(novel)"title="Mohawk (novel)">
The book is set in Mohawk, an upstate New York mill town in a decline following that of its leather tanning industry. The Mohawk Grill, a diner run by Harry Saunders, is featured. The novel explores the lives of two intersecting families, the Grouses and the Gaffneys.Anne Grouse is the 40-year-old daughter of Mather Grouse and his wife, and lives with her parents and son Randall after her divorce from Dallas Younger, her high-school sweetheart. He is a good-hearted but unreliable auto-mechanic. Anne is in love with Dan, the husband of her cousin Diana. He became paralyzed after a car accident.The relationship between Mather and fellow leather-worker Rory Gaffney provides tension and suspense in the story.Randall befriends Rory's mentally disabled son Bill, who is in love with Anne Grouse. Following his grandfather Mather's death, Randall returns to Mohawk, after having dropped out of college to avoid the draft. He meets Rory's granddaughter B.G., who falls in love with him. The story climaxes with Randall being accused of murder after three Gaffneys lie dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Butterfly_(novel)"title="Black Butterfly (novel)">
It is 1953, shortly after the coronation of Elizabeth II. Box is now nearing retirement, and has also been left with an unexpected offspring, Christmas Box. However, he discovers that elderly pillars of the British establishment are meeting unexpected deaths through participation in reckless risk taking and accidents. He tracks the perpetrators to Istanbul, is assisted by Turkish-Geordie double agent Whitley Bey and meets Afro-Japanese gay agent Kingdom Kum, and also that the aforementioned figures were poisoned by a malignant chemical derived from the eponymous insect. From there, he travels to Kingston, Jamaica, where he meets the chief culprit behind his misadventures – the progeny of an old enemy, Cassivelaunus Fetch Junior, who is using a "New Scout Movement" to mask his mass poisoning schemes.With that resolved, Box is knighted, and renews the acquaintance of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, whom he once met at a party on Armistice Day 1918.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_for_Rachel_Wallace"title="Looking for Rachel Wallace">
Spenser is hired to protect a lesbian, feminist activist, the eponymous Rachel Wallace. Spenser defends her more vigorously than she would like and she fires him. Shortly afterwards, she is kidnapped and the police have almost nothing to go on. Though no longer officially employed to protect her, Spenser feels duty-bound to find her because he could have protected her if he had followed her orders and held onto the job.His investigation leads him to an organization that is fiercely anti-communist, anti-gay, and loosely affiliated with the local Ku Klux Klan. Spenser gets free rein to operate because the police know that he can be more persuasive than they can in finding Rachel. A snowstorm paralyzes Boston and Spenser has to go on foot if he wants to get to Rachel Wallace before they kill her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princess_and_the_Unicorn"title="The Princess and the Unicorn">
This novel follows two characters: Princess Eleanor of England and a young fairy named Joyce. Joyce lives in Swinley Forest with a community of other fairies who rely on the forest's unicorn for survival. One day, Joyce follows the unicorn to the edge of the forest and is spotted by Princess Eleanor. The princess chases her inside and finds the unicorn, only to take it home with her to Swinley Castle. Knowing it is her responsibility to retrieve the unicorn, Joyce sets out on a journey to bring the unicorn home. Things get a little more complicated when the Princess takes the unicorn with her to London.Meanwhile, the princess is not living the dream life that most little girls would assume. She rarely gets to see her parents, who are too busy with their affairs to tuck her in bed at night. And her once lovable nanny is brewing a deceptive get-rich-quick scheme behind the princess's back.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Report_on_Probability_A"title="Report on Probability A">
The story is divided into three sections:In "New Worlds" these sections are divided into fourteen chapters, with Part II beginning half way through chapter six and ending in chapter eleven. In the Faber edition the three sections are divided into sixteen chapters, with six chapters each in Parts I and II and four chapters in Part III.The bulk of the novel is the titular report, which describes in objective, repetitive and seemingly trivial detail the bizarre activity, taking place one overcast January day, apparently in England, around a suburban house in which a writer, Mr. Mary, lives with his wife. In the grounds of the house are various outbuildings which are occupied by three of the Marys' ex-employees: the gardener "G" is in a wooden hut, or summerhouse, some ten metres north-west of the house; Mr. Mary's former secretary "S" is in the upper room of a brick outhouse - a former stable or coach house - at the end of the back garden; and the chauffeur "C" is in a small loft above the garage a metre and a half from the south-east wall of the house. Thus the gardener (G) is in a summerhouse (S), the secretary (S) in a coach house (C) and the chauffeur (C) in a garage (G), achieving a kind of linguistic circularity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(play)"title="Talk (play)">
The play explores themes of mixed race as both an aesthetic challenge and a social concern, gesturing toward a poetics of social justice for the “mulatto millennium” as well as art as both social memory and cultural production. Influenced by Euripides' play "The Bacchae", the entire play is held in the ruins of a museum of Greek antiquities, and has characters inspired by the Socratic dialogues ("Phaedo", "Crito", "Meno", "Apollodorus", and "Ion") written by Plato, which attempts to determine the definition of virtue and the meaning of art. TALK also delves heavily in theoretical arguments regarding the reading of performativity as interdisciplinary concepts by examining the works of André Breton, Clay Felker, Mark Van Doren, Jonas Mekas, James Baldwin, Wayne Shorter, Jack Kerouac, Maya Deren and Robert Giroux (among others) with clips from an alleged unfinished experimental film ( heavily influenced by the French New Wave and Maya Deren's expressionism) [1]made by Aymes, shown and narrated by Phaedo, one of his collaborators.The play takes the form of a heated panel discussion regarding the identity of the late enigmatic (fictional) writer named "Archer Aymes".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Left_Hand_of_Darkness"title="The Left Hand of Darkness">
The protagonist of the novel is Genly Ai, a male Terran native, who is sent to invite the planet Gethen to join the Ekumen, a coalition of humanoid worlds. Ai travels to the Gethen planetary system on a starship which remains in solar orbit with Ai's companions, who are in stasis; Ai himself is sent to Gethen alone, as the "first mobile" or Envoy. Like all envoys of the Ekumen, he can "mindspeak"—a form of quasi-telepathic speech, which Gethenians are capable of, but of which they are unaware. He lands in the Gethenian kingdom of Karhide, and spends two years attempting to persuade the members of its government of the value of joining the Ekumen. Karhide is one of two major nations on Gethen, the other being Orgoreyn.The novel begins the day before an audience that Ai has obtained with Argaven Harge, the king of Karhide. Ai manages this through the help of Estraven, the prime minister, who seems to believe in Ai's mission, but the night before the audience, Estraven tells Ai that he can no longer support Ai's cause with the king. Ai begins to doubt Estraven's loyalty because of his strange mannerisms, which Ai finds effeminate and ambiguous. The behavior of people in Karhide is dictated by "shifgrethor", an intricate set of unspoken social rules and formal courtesy. Ai does not understand this system, thus making it difficult for him to understand Estraven's motives, and contributing to his distrust of Estraven. The next day, as he prepares to meet the King, Ai learns that Estraven has been accused of treason, and exiled from the country. The pretext for Estraven's exile was his handling of a border dispute with the neighboring country of Orgoreyn, in which Estraven was seen as being too conciliatory. Ai meets with the king, who rejects his invitation to join the Ekumen. Discouraged, Ai decides to travel through Karhide, as the spring has just begun, rendering the interior of the frozen country accessible.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbs_and_Apples"title="Herbs and Apples">
The story is told in the first person by Sue, who had met the young Derrick once, and then meets her a second time on the train taking them to the same college. At college, the two girls form a clique dedicated to literature and philosophy with four other freshmen, Alice, Edith, Madeleine, and Frances. Derrick is easily the most ambitious and talented of them, writing poetry. She argues forcefully that marriage is an abdication of artistic talent, and vows never to get married.During the summer between their freshman and sophomore years, World War I breaks out, and the United States enters the war a few months before they graduate. Derrick, Sue, and Alice move to Manhattan, where Derrick finds a secretarial job working for a literary magazine. She continues to write poetry, and most of one play. On home visits, she argues with her childhood friend, Jack Devlin, whose support of pacifism angers her. To her shock and fear, he enlists, and she agrees to consider marriage on his return. Jack is killed in action, and Derrick takes it very hard.Shortly afterwards, Derrick's mother becomes deathly ill, and Derrick moves back to Tecumseh, destroying her drafts. As the oldest child of six, she finds herself replacing her mother in her siblings' lives. She accepts a teaching job at an elementary school. Sue later visits, and barely recognizes Derrick, who is serene and happy with her lot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fierce_Dispute"title="The Fierce Dispute">
One summer, Lucy Anne learns to sing from Aaron, the family's Negro servant, who has not been told this is not allowed. Margaret rebukes Lucy Anne, and explains that she is to stay away from music. When she is caught playing the piano, she is sent to bed. Lucy Anne sneaks out, but when she tries to scale the locked gate, falls and sprains her ankle. Her fall is witnessed by Dr. Martin Child, who climbs the gate and brings the child in and treats her. He is invited back for regular medical visits. Hilary herself is somewhat sick, possibly tuberculosis, and Dr. Martin, who was sweet on Hilary from before she left for Italy, proposes to her and asks her to move with him to a warmer, drier climate. She refuses.When Lucy Anne has healed, Margaret takes Lucy Anne with her on her once-a-year all-day visit, by interurban train and trolley, to her son Tom, his wife and their daughter. The lousy time Lucy Anne has there—her cousin and friend call her a "wop" among other things—convinces Margaret to revise her will, leaving out the clauses that would force Lucy Anne to live with her Uncle Tom, but otherwise just as controlling. Margaret also catches a terrible cold, a possible pneumonia, and is treated by Dr. Martin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Fire_(Blackwood_novel)"title="Under Fire (Blackwood novel)">
While on a routine intelligence gathering trip for The Campus in Tehran, Iran, Jack Ryan, Jr. visits his old college friend Seth Gregory for lunch. After their conversation, Gregory leaves with a cryptic comment that “there are steaks in the freezer.” The next day, Ryan is met by Raymond Wellesley of British intelligence and Matthew Spellman, his American counterpart, who tell him that Gregory, who works with them on an intelligence operation, had gone rogue; they warn him to stay away from his old friend. This piques Ryan's interest.Ryan later goes to Gregory's apartment, but is later abducted by an unknown group of men. He manages to escape just as a mysterious woman pulls up in a car to fetch him away from his abductors. The woman introduces herself as Ysabel Kashani, an Iranian national who is also Gregory's college friend. They return to his apartment and retrieve an old document from a safe, which combination was found with “steaks in the freezer”.Ryan and Kashani later go to Azerbaijan, where they are met by Gregory and Spellman. Ryan discovers that his old friend is an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency, and that his father, Paul, was a legend in the CIA until he was branded as a traitor and committed suicide. He further finds out that Gregory is taking part in an intelligence operation with Wellesley and Spellman, which is to facilitate a coup in Dagestan, and that the document he and Kashani retrieved has coordinates for internet hubs to be used during the coup (Gregory's father had originally written the document).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farewell,_Summer"title="Farewell, Summer">
In 1935, Elizabeth Lake, a 41-year-old academic, feels compelled to return to Sunbury, Ohio, where she had sometimes stayed with her maternal grandparents as a child. Intending to do some professional writing, she runs into her cousin Tune, now in his 90s, whom she had not seen since she was last in Sunbury thirty years before. Tune tells Elizabeth she ought to write down the story of the old days of the town, which causes Elizabeth to recall her cousin Steve Van Doren and her own mistake that contributed to his death.In 1905, twenty-one-year-old Steve arrives in Sunbury from Texas after the death of his father. He is only able to find a little bit of work. Eleven-year-old Elizabeth, who is staying in Sunbury, develops a crush on him. Steve falls in love with his cousin Damaris, but while Damaris is attracted to Steve, she is too frightened of uncertainty to contemplate marriage, and intends to become a nun.Crazy cousin Tobias, called Tobe or Bias, who was wounded in the Battle of Chickamauga, is determined to dig up the thousand dollars in gold he is certain he buried after the Civil War, but he cannot remember the location. In order to "cure" Bias of his obsession, Steve buries his own complete earnings of a hundred dollars in gold coins, mixed with shiny pennies. Steve thinks that Bias, with his poor vision and hands, will be unable to tell the difference between the pennies and the additional gold. However, Bias does realize the difference, thinks someone has stolen from him, and becomes so angry that he hurls the coins down the outhouse toilet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Rangers_(novel)"title="Star Rangers (novel)">
In the year AD 8054, the Stellar Patrol Scoutship "Starfire" has crashed in a desert on an Earth-like planet. The planet's atmosphere, gravity, and solar radiation are almost ideal for the Rangers and Patrolmen. On initial examination, there are no signs of civilization. After burying their dead, the survivors set up a camp in a forest beside a river.One night, one of the men notices the bright beam of a beacon sweeping across the sky. Ranger Sergeant Kartr and Ranger Rolth take the aerial sled to investigate. They find an abandoned city lit up as if it were inhabited. There they meet Joyd Cummi, an Ageratan Vice-Sector Lord who has come to the city with almost two hundred people from a starliner that has made an emergency landing nearby.Against Kartr's advice, the Patrol's ranking officer decides that the Patrolmen and Rangers will move to the city and join the other refugees. Not trusting Cummi, the Rangers take up residence in a tower isolated from the buildings occupied by the starliner's passengers and crew. Soon Kartr and the others discover that all is not well in the Cummi dictatorship.Inspired by the arrival of the Patrol, the rebels begin their revolt, and the Rangers are drawn into the battle. With their expertise, the Patrolmen and Rangers help the rebels win the fight. Cummi flees the city, taking telepathic control of Kartr's body and uses him to fly the Rangers' aerial sled.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We,_the_Navigators"title="We, the Navigators">
## Introduction.David Lewis, after circumnavigating the world in a catamaran, decided to test his understanding of Polynesian navigation techniques by sailing the 2200 miles from Tahiti to New Zealand without any modern instruments (except the smallest of charts and a sky map). After arriving with a landfall only 26 miles in error, he learned that there were contemporary sailors in the Santa Cruz and Caroline Islands who still sailed large distances by the traditional methods and obtained support from the Australian National University to visit and sail with them. He did this in a 39-foot gaff ketch, "Isbjorn", which he placed under the direction of the navigators Tevake and Hipour. These navigators spoke very little English, were illiterate and did not understand maps but were able to take him eventually on a 450-mile trip from Puluwat to Saipan and to return and teach him many of their techniques.The book is largely based on these voyages, but there are extensive references to the literature.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_Homes"title="Broken Homes">
Constable Peter Grant and Detective Chief Inspector Nightingale are called to investigate a road traffic accident involving Robert Weil. The investigating officers found human blood from a body in the early state of rigor mortis in his car. Subsequent enquiries lead to a shallow grave containing the body of a young woman killed with and disfigured by a shotgun whose fingers have been removed. Peter initially assumes Weil is a serial killer, but he and Nightingale learn that Weil is on their list of Little Crocodiles, members of an Oxford University dining club who were taught magic by Geoffrey Wheatcroft.Meanwhile, PC Lesley May, still on indefinite sick leave after suffering a magical attack that resulted in catastrophic facial injuries in "Rivers of London", returns to The Folly after her latest round of reconstructive surgery. Nightingale instructs Peter and Lesley in the art of magical staff-making in the hopes of drawing out the Faceless Man.Sergeant Jaget Kumar calls in Peter to help with a case. Richard Lewis, on the Little Crocodile watch list, committed suicide by train while showing signs of being controlled through magic.Peter uncovers a rare German Grimoire handed in by a book dealer, who suspected it was stolen. CCTV coverage of the surrounding area leads Peter to the suspected thief, one Patrick Mulhern. Peter pays him a call but finds Mulhern dead by magic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxglove_Summer"title="Foxglove Summer">
The protagonist Peter Grant is left shaken by the developments at the end of the previous book, the sudden betrayal and defection by a highly valued colleague to whom Grant also had a strong emotional tie. The moping Grant welcomes the chance to leave the familiar grounds of London and travel to rural Herefordshire, where the disappearance of two eleven-year old girls is a media sensation, the focus of an intensive police search - and might have grave magical implications as well.Grant finds that the tangle of marital and extra-marital relations in a small rural community is not only a matter for gossip, but bears very serious criminal implications, and some supernatural ones as well. He meets with a retired wizard, traumatized by the secret magical battles of World War II, and with the wizard's granddaughter who has a very special affinity with bees. Grant gets into intensive contact with Beverley Brook, the goddess or Genius loci of Beverley Brook, a tributary of the Thames - and learns by personal experience just how rivers gain such gods. He finds that unicorns are all too real and that their horns are deadly weapons; that fairies do exist and even in the 21st century they do sometimes kidnap human children and replace them with changelings; and he meets with a real-life faerie queen, very different from the one imagined by Spenser.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someone_like_You_(TV_series)"title="Someone like You (TV series)">
A man loses everything in one day in a tragic car accident. Fang Zhan Cheng (Kingone Wang) lost his fiancée, Liang Luo Han (Lorene Ren), as well as his eyesight. Devastated by the loss of his fiancée, Zhan Cheng is inconsolable and even refuses a corneal transplant that could restore his vision. But his life takes an unexpected turn when Chen Yu Xi (Lorene Ren), who looks exactly like his fiancée, is hired to become Zhan Cheng’s day nurse. Another young woman, Xu Ya Ti (Nita Lei), receives Luo Han’s heart in a transplant and begins to exhibit many of Luo Han’s mannerisms and personality. Caught between a woman who looks exactly like his beloved dead fiancée and another woman who behaves just like her, what will Zhan Cheng do?.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pause_(novel)"title="The Pause (novel)">
The book is a first-person reflective narrative of the main character Declan O’Malley who commits suicide after his girlfriend Lisa is forcefully relocated to Honk-Kong after their relationship is discovered by her mother referred to as the Kraken. He commits suicide via jumping onto the way of an oncoming train but is forced to observe an alternate reality where he survived his suicide attempt and recovered from depression.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Strangers_(book)"title="City of Strangers (book)">
In this book Gardner has captured the lives and everyday experiences of Indian workers living in Bahrain. These people are mainly migrant workers and constitute about half of the country. Gardener has also told these workers' personal stories and how the "sponsorship system" in this country binds a worker to a particular sponsor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_canot_sur_les_chemins_d'eau_du_Roi"title="En canot sur les chemins d'eau du Roi">
In 1949, Jean Raspail traveled in North America with his friends Philippe Andrieu, Jacques Boucharlat and Yves Kerbendeau, taking on the name Équipe Marquette ("Team Marquette"). They travel by canoe in the footsteps of Father Marquette, a Jesuit missionary who explored the Mississippi River in 1673. The voyage goes from Trois-Rivières in Quebec to New Orleans in Louisiana.From the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River to that of the Mississippi, they pass by the Ottawa River and the Great Lakes. They travel through the area which used to be known as New France, which it is frequently referred to as throughout the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virgin_(novel)"title="The Virgin (novel)">
A girl from a Yoruba village is engaged to a hunter from another village. Having been seduced by a man returning to the village from his life in a Nigerian city, she nervously awaits her wedding night.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayar-e-Dil_(novella)"title="Dayar-e-Dil (novella)">
Faarah is a young doctor who is currently doing her house job. Her mother Ruhina left to Karachi after their dispute over the property, which Ruhina is demanding from her Father in law in respect to the divorce of Farah and Wali. Where Farah is reluctant on taking property. For fifteen days, she spare herself from the outer world, when one day Wali calls her and tell her that he is agree to give her divorce including whatever else she wants and they decided to meet. Farah then meets Wali, who propose a contract and ask if She is agree to live in Peshawar with Agha Jan for three months, he will give her divorce including the property she is demanding and whatever else she wants. Despite being alarmed she reluctantly agrees and signed a contract, without telling anyone she and Wali left for Peshawar, where ailing Agha Jaan became energetic after seeing her. Not able to understand, she concludes that Wali brought her here because of the declining health of her Grandfather. However, she decided to fulfill the contract, but gradually she went through many truths, about their lives and families. After meeting with Agha Jan, Farah went to rest in her Fathers room, where she remembers all the past events that occurs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Mains_d'Orlac"title="Les Mains d'Orlac">
The pianist Stephen Orlac suffers a railway accident that gives him serious head injuries and deprives him of his hands. The famous and controversial transplant doctor Cerral gives him new hands, transplanted from a freshly guillotined assassin. Afterward, Orlac begins to wonder if he has become a Mr. Hyde who has inherited the criminal proclivities of his donor via his hands.He seems to suffer from hallucinations and sinks into depression. His wife attempts to save him, but the couple are caught in a spiral of conspiracy, mystery and crime.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Saw_Ramallah"title="I Saw Ramallah">
In 1966 Mourid Barghouti went to Cairo, Egypt for higher studies. In 1967, after the Six-Day War, when he came back to Palestine after completing his studies, he was barred to enter the country. Like many others he started living abroad. Thirty years later, after continuous struggle, he was allowed to enter Ramallah, his own hometown, where he was born and grown up.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_(novel)"title="Proxy (novel)">
## Setting.The book is set in a distant post-cataclysmic future where civilization has evolved its technology so rapidly through unrestricted capitalism to bring about a world where nearly every conceivable service can be purchased. Society has developed into a rigid class system where the Upper City lives in the height of luxury while the Lower City lives in utter poverty and rapidly accrue debt to pay for necessary health and technological services. As a result of the Lower City being infinitely indebted to the Upper City super corporations, the middle class has been eliminated altogether.Upper City citizens can purchase the debts of people from the Lower City. The wealthy patron will pay for the poorer person's essential needs and in return they serve as proxies to be punished in place of the patron when the patron breaks the law, or supply the proxy's body for health purposes - e.g. donate blood or organs. Many Lower City citizens assume this debt at birth and have no feasible way to repay, challenge, or escape it. Any contact between the proxies and the patrons is outlawed. This injustice has brought about the existence of "The Rebooters", a rebel organization set on destroying this system by introducing "Jubilee", an event that would erase all digital data and records, including currency and debts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_(poem)"title="The Man (poem)">
The story is built along the lines of the Gospel (The Advent of Mayakovsky, the Life of Mayakovsky, the Rise of Mayakovsky, et cetera). Back on Earth after one thousand years the Poet discovers the street he's lived on and shot himself at, "by the door of the beloved," bears his name. This detail acquired a sinister overtone after Mayakovsky committed suicide in 1930, troubled love life cited as one of the reasons.According to biographer A. Mikhaylov, the poem's protagonist is an oversensitive young man who suffers from social injustice and longs for social upheaval. The hero is a bizarre hybrid of a lofty neo-romantic superman and a real-life Mayakovsky, the former fighting the universal evils, the latter getting bogged down into petty everyday conflicts. At the crux of the poem lies the idea of futility of man's aspirations, both personal and social, due to the baseness of human nature and the power of money ruling the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shattered_Sea"title="Shattered Sea">
The story follows the exploits of Yarvi, a young prince of Gettland with a disabled hand. When his father dies, Yarvi is elevated to the throne but faces a struggle to keep it as others conspire to take it from him. Initially, the main point of view character, the second book moves to two new characters, Thorn and Brand, while Yarvi remains as a central character. In the third book, three new point of view characters (Princess Skara, the Vansterland warrior Raith and Father Yarvi's apprentice Koll, who features throughout the second book also) are introduced.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Tom_Sawyer"title="The Adventures of Tom Sawyer">
Tom Sawyer is an orphan who lives with his Aunt Polly and his half-brother Sid in the town of St. Petersburg, Missouri, sometime in the 1840s. A fun-loving boy, he frequently skips school to play or go swimming. When Aunt Polly catches him sneaking home late on a Friday evening and discovers that he has been in a fight, she makes him whitewash her fence the next day as punishment.Tom cleverly persuades several neighborhood children to trade him small trinkets and treasures for the "privilege" of doing his tedious work, using reverse psychology to convince them of its enjoyable nature. Later, Tom trades the trinkets with students in his Sunday school class for tickets, given out for memorizing verses of Scripture. He collects enough tickets to earn a prized Bible from the teacher, despite being one of the worst students in the class and knowing almost nothing of Scripture, eliciting envy from the students and a mixture of pride and shock from the adults.Tom falls in love with a girl named Becky Thatcher, who is new in town and the daughter of a prominent judge. Tom wins the admiration of Judge Thatcher in the church by obtaining the Bible as a prize, but reveals his ignorance when he is unable to answer basic questions about Scripture. Tom pursues Becky, eventually persuading her to get engaged by kissing her. Their romance soon collapses when she discovers that Tom was engaged to another schoolgirl, Amy Lawrence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurélien"title="Aurélien">
"Aurélien" explores the moral quandaries and aesthetic diversions of its titular bourgeois hero. Through the lens of its protagonist, a forty-something who has never quite recovered from his experiences in the First World War, Aragon's novel depicts a forgotten and wayward inter-war generation, devoid of any definite identity. The action unfolds against a backdrop of the famous Roaring Twenties (complete with cameos from Picasso and the Dadaists in Pigalle, mentions of the backlash against Cocteau, and allusions to fashionable outings in the Bois de Boulogne).Despite the meaningless pursuits that surround him, Aurélien becomes swept up in an all-consuming, tortuous and impossible love for Bérénice, a young woman fresh from the provinces with a husband and a "taste for the extreme" ("le goût de l'absolu"). Their love cannot, however, withstand the pressures of their reality. Bérénice eventually returns to her provincial existence, leaving Aurélien to embrace a life of disaffection and hedonism with renewed vigour. Eighteen years later, they meet again and re-live the impossibility of their lost love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Accidental_Man"title="An Accidental Man">
The novel is set in London. The plot involves a large number of characters who are related to each other by family or acquaintance. The "accidental man" of the title is Austin Gibson Grey, a middle-aged man who has lost his job and is living apart from his mentally fragile second wife Dorina. Austin's older brother, Sir Matthew Gibson Grey, has returned to London after a successful diplomatic career. The two brothers have been estranged for many years. Austin blames his brother for having injured him when they were children, leaving him with a deformed right hand, and for having had an affair with his first wife, both of which accusations Matthew denies. Matthew tries to reconcile with his brother, whose actions and accidents drive much of the plot.The novel begins with the engagement of Ludwig Leferrier, a young American historian, to Gracie, the daughter of George and Clara Tisbourne. Ludwig has decided to remain in England after a scholarship year in Oxford, rather than return to the United States. He is opposed to the Vietnam War and expects to be arrested for having avoided the draft if he goes home. Ludwig gets a job teaching at an Oxford college. Gracie's wealthy grandmother dies and leaves all her property to Gracie, despite the fact that her daughter Charlotte, Clara's sister, had lived with her and looked after her during her illness. During the course of the novel Ludwig begins to question his relationship with Gracie, who does not share his intellectual and moral seriousness, and who discourages him from trying to help Dorina and Charlotte. He also doubts his own motivation for staying in England.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wicked_Will_Rise"title="The Wicked Will Rise">
Amy Gumm continues her crusade against Dorothy Gale and Glinda after a failed assassination attempt. After escaping from the burning Emerald City, the flying monkeys Ollie and Maude use their new paper wings in attempt to carry Princess Ozma and Amy to safety, but they are attacked and their wings are destroyed. Amy uses magic to allow them to land safely.They find the Lion, Amy takes his tail, the source of his courage. The Lion is reduced to cowardice, and Amy spares him.They encounter wingless monkeys who take the group to the Queendom of the Wingless Ones. Amy meets Queen Lulu, the former guardian to Princess Ozma, who agrees to allow them to stay, but makes it clear that she will not get involved in the war. During the night, Amy meets Pete again and learns that he was unintentionally created by Mombi when she disguised young Ozma as a boy named Tippetarius. Knowing his true identity, she agrees to help him.Mombi arrives and challenges Queen Lulu, with Amy as the defense. She is able to convince the Queen to allow Mombi to stay. Mombi requests that Amy seeks out Polychrome to assist them in helping the Order slay Dorothy. Amy and Ozma leave the Queendom of the Wingless Ones to find her and are given a gift from Queen Lulu that she stole from Glinda. When the gift backfires and Glinda unexpectedly appears, Amy tries to fight her, but it is revealed that Glinda is only a projection.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_Games"title="Nemesis Games">
The "Rocinante" is down for long-term maintenance after the events of "Cibola Burn". Three crew members decide to take care of some personal business during the down time. Amos Burton heads to Earth when he learns someone important from his past there has died, to pay his respects and to make sure no foul play was involved. Alex Kamal heads to Mars in the hopes of getting closure with his ex-wife and to see Bobbie while there. Naomi Nagata heads to Ceres station, when she receives a message that her son Filip is in trouble. While Jim Holden supervises repairs to the "Rocinante", he is enlisted by Monica Stuart to investigate disappearing colony ships.Facing collapse by the exodus of colony ships through the rings, militant factions of the OPA coalesce into a Free Navy and simultaneously wreak havoc on Earth by dropping asteroids onto the surface, and subsequently attempting to kill the Martian Prime Minister and Fred Johnson. Amos survives the attacks on Earth, frees Clarissa Mao and escapes to Luna with her help and the help of Baltimore organized crime acquaintances from his old life. Alex meets Bobbie on Mars and they investigate missing Martian military equipment and ships, which leads them into the middle of the assassination attempt on the Prime Minister. Naomi is kidnapped by her ex-lover Marco, leader of the Free Navy, but manages to escape; Alex and Bobbie rescue her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physik"title="Physik">
The book begins with Silas Heap and Gringe accidentally releasing the spirit of Queen Etheldredda - while Unsealing a room for Silas's Counter- Feet Colony - from a painting that she had been trapped in for 510 years. Her release also releases her pet Aie-Aie, which causes a Sickness by biting people. Once released, she drowns Septimus Heap, only to save him for blackmail. She sends Septimus to meet her son Marcellus Pye who drank an incomplete potion of immortality. Marcellus uses a magical mirror to send Septimus back in time to learn Physik from a younger version of Marcellus, in an attempt to complete the potion. Marcia finds a note from Septimus in Marcellus' book "I Marcellus".Jenna Heap and Nicko Heap enlist the help of Alther Mella to attempt to travel back in time to find Septimus. Alther takes them to see Alice Nettles, who happens to be housing Snorri Snorrelssen. In Alice's warehouse, they find a Glass that allows them to travel back in time 500 years. Snorri, Jenna, and Nicko fall through the glass, but it's shattered when Spit Fyre attempts to follow them through it. Jenna is confused for the lost princess and is taken to see Etheldredda, separating her from Snorri and Nicko. She escapes when she meets Septimus by chance at a feast thrown to honor the return of the princess.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Not_Sidney_Poitier"title="I Am Not Sidney Poitier">
## Chapter 1.The novel begins with the conception of Not Sidney Poitier, a boy whose mother, Portia, invests in Turner Broadcasting on the ground floor. She gains quite a lot of money when it becomes successful. Ted Turner comes to visit her and meets Not Sidney. Portia dies soon after the meeting, which allows Ted to become Not Sidney's guardian. Ted gives Not Sidney free rein over his money and life, to avoid the white savior stereotype. Not Sidney is educated by a socialist college student named Betty. Not Sidney is also heavily bullied, and in order to combat this bullying, he attempts to learn martial arts. When that fails, he learns how to "fesmerize" people, which is an ability that is akin to hypnosis, and uses that ability to mess with Ted, Betty, and Ted's wife, Jane Fonda. Upon reaching high school age, Not Sidney decides to attend public school. He develops a crush on his teacher, which she notices. She invites him to her home, where she sexually assaults him on two separate occasions. She threatens to fail him if he doesn't allow it, though after the second time, she fails him anyway. Not Sidney attempts to report this, but is ridiculed by the administration both at his individual school and at the Board of Education. As a result, he drops out and decides to go on a journey to California.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_the_Moon"title="Eye of the Moon">
Isikara and her brother Katep lived in the temple of Sobek in Thebes with their father, Henuka. One day, Katep was bitten by a crocodile, reducing his arm to a mutilated stump. Frustrated that he was useless in the temple, he left Egypt.Later, the royal barge of Queen Tiy visited the temple. However, high priest Wosret was sitting on the throne instead of the queen. Apparently, she and her eldest son Tuthmosis died, and Wosret came to request their mummification at the temple.Isikara eavesdropped on the conversation between her father and Wosret. She discovered that Wosret poisoned Tuthmosis so that his younger brother could rule, and that the assassination attempt was unsuccessful. Henuka refused to stab Tuthmosis's heart with a needle to ensure his death. Isikara accidentally knocked over one of Queen Tiy's canopic jars, causing Wosret to discover her eavesdropping.With discreet assistance from her father, Isikara escaped with Tuthmosis through a secret passageway. The two used a senet board to navigate the tunnel, which led them through Tuthmosis's father's burial chamber and to the tomb's exit. Tuthmosis sought the help of a Nubian girl named Ta Miu, who provided them with supplies. Isakara and Tuthmosis disguised themselves as peasants, repeatedly avoiding detection by Wosret while escaping to the desert.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Nights_With_the_Duke"title="Four Nights With the Duke">
The protagonists of the novel, Mia Carrington and Evander "Vander" Brody, were childhood acquaintances whose parents were involved in a long-term affair. The prologue details Mia's humiliation when, at age 15, another acquaintance ridicules her for writing a love poem to Vander.Thirteen years later, both are still single. Vander is now the Duke of Pindar, but eschews polite society to train racehorses at his estate. Mia is a very successful romance novelist, writing under a pen name. After her fiance leaves her at the altar, Mia is desperate. If she does not marry within the month, custody of her crippled nephew, Charlie, will revert to his evil uncle. Seeing few options for herself, Mia blackmails Vander into marriage. In a fit of anger, he announces he will grant her only four nights per year; Mia agrees to those terms.After the ceremony, Vander learns that Mia intends the marriage to be temporary. By now intrigued by her and quickly becoming attached to Charlie, Vander refuses to grant her an annulment. He insists on his four nights, and soon finds himself in love with his new wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Gate_(novel)"title="Dragon's Gate (novel)">
Otter, a fourteen-year-old Chinese boy growing up during the opium wars and the oppression of the Manchu dynasty. Otter wishes to travel to America, to the Land of the Golden Mountain called California. He longs to travel to California, so he can assist his uncle and father, in the doing of the Great Work, in order to take back their country, yet he decides with much disdain to remain in Three Willows to be with his mother. After accidentally killing a Manchu, Otter's life is in danger, so he was sent to America to join his father and uncle. Otter enthusiastically left for America, only to find that the reality of being a Chinese immigrant meant working in the brutal cold and other awful conditions. Otter is filled with disgust and undertakes the seemingly impossibletask of climbing the Tiger, the mountain which for so long has kept his people working in bitter conditions, ascending above the cloud layer to prevent an avalanche. Which results in the loss of his beloved Uncle. Taken aback by his loss, Otter is determined to finish what his Uncle started, even if it means withstanding the bitter cold for the rest of his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Tupac_and_D_Foster"title="After Tupac and D Foster">
"After Tupac And D Foster" is based on three girls: two black eleven year old girls, Neeka and the anonymous narrator, and D Foster, who was of mixed race and had just moved into Neeka and the narrator's neighborhood in Queens, New York. Their experiences are set within a world impacted by Tupac Shakur, describing events and experiences in his life during the mid 1990s, such as run-ins with the cops and events that foreshadowed his death.Growing up together on the same block of their safe neighborhood, Neeka and the narrator have been friends since birth. When D. Foster first showed up on their block, her initial impression as unconventional and different had left the two girls in a bit of shock, as well as their mothers hesitant to let them interact with her. However, they then discovered that they both were greatly influenced by Tupac Shakur's music which caused the three girls to gradually develop a lasting friendship. Later in their teens, Foster opens up to her two close friends about her alcoholic mother who had abandoned her as a child, leaving her in the care of constantly changing foster homes. She also shares with them the news of her biological Mother now wanting her back. However, relating her relationship with her Mother to that of Tupac's and his Mother, Foster realizes that even through the conflicting relationship, there is still love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_the_Grail_and_the_Passing_of_King_Arthur"title="The Story of the Grail and the Passing of King Arthur">
## The Story of Sir Geraint.In the story, Sir Geraint, along with Queen Guinevere and her court, woke up late on a day in which King Arthur is supposed to go hunting. They go to catch up with the King, who already left them behind. Along the way, a damsel meets a knight and wishes to know his name. She asks his companion, however, he refuses to answer. Geraint takes up a quarrel with this man and demands to know the knight's name. He follows them to where they are travelling. He learns that the knight is a celebrated champion of a prize called the Sparrow-Hawk, and that he is participating in a tournament tomorrow for it. Geraint decides to join the tournament, but he has no armor or weapons. He visits an old, run-down castle nearby. The owner of the castle is happy to help Geraint, and gives him the greatest armor he has. The armor, however, is very old-fashioned and rusty. Geraint kindly accepts nevertheless. Here he also meets Enid, the owner of the castle's beautiful daughter, though she is half his age. Geraint is mocked at the tournament for his primitive armor, but he wins the tournament because of his great prowess. The knight claims his name is Gaudeamus in order for his life to be spared.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Help_the_Child"title="God Help the Child">
A young girl with blue-black skin is neglected and abused by the light-skinned parents who are ashamed of her. Lula Ann Bridewell, who calls herself "Bride", is blue-black beautiful, the kind of woman who turns heads wherever she goes. She is tall, elegant, and dresses only in white, the better to reflect her beauty.But Bride did not always know her beauty or how to wear it. As a child, her mother Sweetness punished Bride for her dark skin, which ended her marriage. Sweetness's husband Louis could not bring himself to love a child with skin as dark as Bride's. "We had three good years," Sweetness tells us, "but when she was born, he blamed me and treated Lula Ann like she was a stranger, more than that, an enemy." Her mother, meanwhile, insisted her child call her Sweetness instead of anything maternal.Bride grew up without love, tenderness, affection or apology. Sweetness makes it clear she saw herself as protecting her child from a world that would be even more inclined to punish Bride for the darkness of her skin. While Sweetness will apologize for her child's dark skin, what she will not apologize for is how she sees the world and how she raises her child, saying: "Some of you probably think it's a bad thing to group ourselves according to skin color – the lighter, the better – in social clubs, neighborhoods, churches, sororities, even colored schools. But how else can we hold on to a little dignity?" This is what makes it so difficult to judge Sweetness's choices. She should know better, but it is painfully clear her choices have been shaped by the realities of being black in a white world – a world where the lighter your skin, the higher you might climb.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Eden_(novel)"title="Dark Eden (novel)">
The novel begins about 160 years after two human beings, Angela and Tommy, are stranded on Eden. Their three companions—Mehmet, Michael, and Dixon—have left in a damaged spaceship to get help. Years have passed, and although Angela and Tommy initially held out hope for rescue, they begin to raise children, forming a new society which becomes known as "Family". Frequent and regular incest among their descendants is common, with few children knowing who their father is. Social life centers around powerful rituals: Retelling of story of the stranding, the worship of what few relics remain, myths about Earth, and the need to stay close to Circle—the place where the landing vehicle originally set down, and is supposed to return to and bring them back to Earth. Social norms are strongly adhered to in this matriarchy, and innovation is rare.Family lives in Circle Valley. Resources are stretched but they believe that leaving will make it hard for them to be found when Earth returns for them. Eden's animals each have two hearts, green-black blood, huge and lidless eyes, six legs, and tentacled feelers around their mouths. Trees tap into the heat just below Eden's surface, bringing up warmth and providing fruit and other food. Nearly all plant and animal life on Eden is bioluminescent, allowing the humans to see, while overhead the Milky Way can be easily seen at all times.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wandering_Unicorn"title="The Wandering Unicorn">
Melusine embarks upon an adventure and unrequited love affair with Aiol, the son of Ozil, a crusader knight who bequeaths a unicorn's lance to his son. Together the young knight Aiol and Melusine travel across Europe encountering monsters, angels and Knights Templar, before eventually arriving in war-torn Jerusalem of the Crusades era.Mujica Lainez’s novel generates empathy towards Melusine as she recollects her adventures, before the love affair between a mortal and an immortal concludes in a tragic ending.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dinner_(novel)"title="The Dinner (novel)">
The story is narrated by Paul Lohman, a former history teacher. He and his wife Claire meet at a fancy restaurant in Amsterdam with his elder brother Serge, a prominent politician and contender for the position of Dutch prime minister, and his wife Babette. The plan is to discuss over dinner how to handle a crime committed by their teenage sons, Michel and Rick, respectively. The violent act of the two boys had been filmed by a security camera and shown on TV, but, so far, they have not been identified. The parents have to decide on what to do. They debate over dinner causing tension throughout the evening.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaharlyk_(novel)"title="Kaharlyk (novel)">
The plot unfolds in 2114 year or 100 after Euromaidan and Russian invasion in Ukraine. The local population in Ukraine is in the medieval state. The main character Olexander Sahaidachny recovers consciousness in a house at the edge of Kyiv. He feels almost full loss of his memory and remembers just one that he needs to find his wife Olena immediately. Sahaydachnyi hopes that his memory will turn back together with his wife.In the same house, he meets Birgir Hansen, unknown person who knows something about his past and suggests finding his wife in a little town Kaharlyk (next to Kyiv), besides Birgir hints to the fact that the outside world is changed in a peculiar way and it is very difficult to survive there.Out in the street, Olexander meets a Kaharlyk inhabitant old man Petro and he agreed to take him to his house and even shelter there. Sahaydachnyi unsuccessfully tries to find his wife, but found just some evidences of Russian occupation in old newspapers. Soon old man Petro dies. Sahaydachnyi finds on the road badly wounded orthodox fundamentalist Mikhail Kalashnikov. Dying Kalashnikov asks Olexander to back-up his mind in the special device “morphone” before his death and suggests to find Olena in Kyiv.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Girl_Dreaming"title="Brown Girl Dreaming">
Jacqueline is born on February 12, 1963, in the city of Columbus, Ohio, and named after her father, Jack. While Jackie's first year is spent in the North, several trips are made to the South for Mary Ann (her mother) to visit her parents, Grandpa Gunnar and Grandma Georgiana, who live in the Nicholtown area of Greenville, South Carolina. The region is segregated and Jackie doesn't understand why she always goes. Her parents' very different feelings about the South cause arguments between them. Eventually, Jack and Mary Ann split up, and Mary Ann and her three children, Hope, Odella, and Jackie, move south to live with Grandpa Gunnar and Grandma Georgiana.Jackie comes to love Greenville. While racism and segregation exist there, the place is still home to her and her grandparents. They believe in peaceful marches for civil rights. They know that God will bless them for doing the right thing.Despite the widespread animosity, there are white people in Greenville who are respectful and treat Jackie and her family like actual human beings, rather than dirt. One such woman is the owner of the local laundromat store, who has known Grandma Georgiana for years. Mary Ann, however, wants to move back North. So, she travels to New York City to get settled. Jackie and her siblings stay on with their grandparents, relishing the time they have with them until Mary Ann comes to retrieve her children, with a brand new baby boy named Roman in tow. They move in with Mary Ann's sister Caroline Irby (Aunt Kay), but Aunt Kay dies and the family of five is left alone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_on_the_Train_(novel)"title="The Girl on the Train (novel)">
The story is a first-person narrative told from the point of view of three women: Rachel Watson, Anna Boyd/Watson, and Megan Hipwell.Rachel Watson is a 33-year-old alcoholic, reeling from the end of her marriage to Tom, who left her for another woman. Rachel's drinking has caused her to lose her job; she frequently binges and has blackouts. While drunk, she often harasses Tom, though she has little or no memory of these acts once she sobers up. Tom is now married to Anna Boyd and has a daughter with her, Evie – a situation that fuels Rachel's self-destructive tendencies, as it was her inability to conceive a child that began her spiral into alcoholism. Rachel follows her old routine of taking the train to and from London every day, one at 8:04 in the morning and the other at 5:56 in the evening. Her train slowly passes her old house on Blenheim Road, where Tom, Anna, and Evie now live. She also begins watching from the train an attractive couple who live a few houses away from Tom. She idealises their life (christening them "Jason" and "Jess"), though she has no idea that their life is far from perfect. The wife of the couple, Megan Hipwell ("Jess"), has a troubled past. She finds her life boring, and escapes from her troubles by taking a series of lovers. Megan has sought help by seeing a therapist, Dr. Kamal Abdic. Eventually, she reveals to him a dark secret she has never confided to anyone before.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Hearts"title="What Hearts">
The book tells four stories of Asa's childhood. When Asa comes home with straight A's and hand-grown radishes in the first grade, he learns that his parents are getting a divorce. He moves with his mother to meet her boyfriend Dave, with whom he does not get along, due to Dave's being mean to him. They move to North Carolina to Dave's home. In the second story, he is in the fourth grade where he makes a lot of friends. His mother is now married to Dave, but Asa has difficulty accepting Dave as his stepfather. One day at school, Asa is assigned to recite a poem called "Little Blue Boy" with his friend Joel. He does not like the poem, so he plans to recite "The Highwayman." Joel agrees to recite the longer, more difficult poem. At first, Joel is excited, but he has difficulty remembering the lines. Joel's mother and Asa agree on Asa's reciting the poem alone while Joel's mother takes him away, unaware of Asa's solo recitation. Joel shows up on the day of the recital, and Asa, for sake of his friendship, switches back to "Little Blue Boy," which Joel remembers perfectly.Another turning point takes place when Asa is eleven. He tries out for Little League Baseball after practicing with his stepfather and his mother for weeks. A day before his tryout, his mother has an accident with pills. It is later revealed that his mother is suffering from depression. The family moves to Raleigh, and Asa misses his chance to play baseball.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Deafo"title="El Deafo">
The book depicts the childhood of Cece Bell, who required the assistance of a Phonic Ear hearing aid while she was growing up to be the person who she is now.While the hearing aid enables her to hear the world around her, it also distances her from some children her own age because she is seen as "different". This causes both frustration and depression in Cece, as she is desperate to find a true friend but frequently feels that she has to accept poor treatment from others being afraid of losing what few friends she has. She deals with these feelings by treating her hearing aid as a superpower, as it gives her the ability to hear everything. For example, she hears private teacher conversations, as her teachers wear a tiny microphone that transmits sound to Cece's hearing aid; and not every teacher remembers to turn it off when they leave the classroom. She adopts the secret nickname "El Deafo".As time passes Cece grows more assertive and opens up to the people around her, especially when she meets a new friend who doesn't seem to care that she wears a hearing aid. She also grows comfortable in confronting people that treat her differently because of her deafness, finding that many of them are largely unaware that their actions cause her emotional harm. Ultimately Cece opens up to her new friend and reveals her secret persona as "El Deafo", much to the delight of her friend, who agrees to serve as her sidekick. As she gets older, she realizes that she no longer has to hide her "superpower" with others.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Pigza_Loses_Control"title="Joey Pigza Loses Control">
Joey Pigza Loses Control is the story of a young boy with the widely known Attention Deficit hyperactivity disorder. (ADHD) The fiction book begins with Joey and his mother and dog's road trip traveling to his father's home where he is eager and nervous for what the next six weeks with his Dad, will have in store for him. After not seeing his father for many years, Joey's questions regarding his concerns towards his father, become endless. This array of questions in the form of “What If’s” that Joey bases his questions on, allows readers a full on experience into the mind of a young boy with ADHD. Joey's mother, who is clearly highly impacted by her son's disorder answers Joey's questions vaguely and occasionally, portraying a sense of impatience and relief about Joey's upcoming six week stay with his father. During the road trip, Joey wonders about all kinds of things revolving around what to expect from his dad. He was extremely impatient and nervous but one thing was for sure, it was comforting to know that his mother's own worries about Joey's father were consuming her thoughts so profoundly, it no longer seemed like Joey and his condition were the only thing on her mind, something that he had become quite accustomed to.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moccasin_Trail"title="Moccasin Trail">
Jim Keath hungers for adventure and to leave his home as a young boy. Without saying goodbye, he does just that, following his uncle into the wilderness where he helps him hunt and trap beaver. But when his uncle is suddenly killed, he is on his own. After an attack by a bear leaves him seriously injured, a band of Crow Indians come to his rescue, nursing him back to health. Jim lives out his adolescence among the Crows, speaking their language and living and thinking of himself as a Crow. Then, as a 19 year old young man, Jim is astonished to receive a letter from his brother, Jonathan, begging him to help his sister, brother, and himself secure land out west, since Jim is the only one of the four siblings who is of age to sign the legal documents necessary for claiming the land. As Jim tries to help, he struggles with the knowledge of his mother's death, the guilt of leaving his family 9 years ago, and who he really is, as his siblings try to convince him to give up his Indian ways and live as a family again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Day"title="The Golden Day">
In a class of only eleven schoolgirls, the young and enthusiastic teacher Miss Renshaw disappears after an unexpected excursion to the Gardens. There, they meet the mysterious Morgan and take a trip into a deep, dark cave. The girls return to school that day without a teacher. And so, Miss Renshaw is declared missing while the rest of the teachers scramble to get an answer. Only, Miss Renshaw told the schoolgirls never to tell what happened that day. Bethany breaks her promise in the end under pressure from Mr Dern. Eventually a news report is released with details of Morgan's past and Miss Renshaw is declared dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_Watch_(novel)"title="End of Watch (novel)">
Retired detective Bill Hodges, who now with his sidekick Holly runs the private investigation agency Finders Keepers, is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Given only months to live, he finds himself drawn into a recent spree of suicides. All the dead are connected by a common thread: each of them has, in the past, been in contact with mass murderer Brady Hartsfield, the notorious Mr. Mercedes who, six years ago, plotted to blow up a rock concert venue packed with teenagers. Hodges and Holly thwarted Brady's plans and left the killer in a vegetative state from which he never regained consciousness. However, many of the staff in the hospital where Brady now resides believe that he is recovering at an impossible rate, and that he may be faking his injuries to avoid facing charges for his crimes. Meanwhile, all those who have gotten too close to proving this suspicion seem to have died by suicide.After his head injury, Brady found himself gaining new abilities, including the power to move small objects with his mind and the ability to enter the bodies of certain people susceptible to his mental domination. Still confined to his hospital bed, Brady has used his power to finish his murderous work by creating a hypnotic video game app that heightens the user's susceptibility. Once the users are in Brady's control, he uses the app to dominate their minds and persuade them to kill themselves. The targets are the very teenagers who escaped death when Brady's plan to destroy the concert venue failed. Brady's ultimate goal, however, is to lure Hodges into the game and exact revenge. Brady uses the bodies of both a corrupt neurosurgeon and a hospital librarian as puppets and red herrings to do his dirty work and to misdirect the police while he makes his final move to destroy Hodges, all the while unaware that Hodges is already racing the clock against his own death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_the_Northern_Lights_Erase_Your_Name"title="Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name">
Clarissa Iverton, a New Yorker is the female protagonist of the novel. Her mother disappeared when she was 14 years old, and when she became 28 years old, her father died. After the death of her father she realized that person was not her real father. Knowing this Clarissa becomes desperate to meet her real parents. She understands to unveil this secret she has travel to Finland. She abandons her fiancé and starts journey to Helsinki, Finland
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_the_Iron_Fish"title="City of the Iron Fish">
The story opens when a 12-year-old Thomas Kemp experiences his first Ceremony of the Stuffing and Hanging of the Iron Fish. Tom lives in the , which is built on two steep hills separated by a deep gorge with a marble river running through it. The hills are connected by a bridge. The is located in the middle of a desert, surrounded by mountains, beyond which, it is said, there is nothing. The inhabitants' dream of the ocean, have boats and fishing nets, yet have never seen the sea.Every 20 years Ceremonies are performed to renew the . The construction of the huge fish and the associated rituals are performed according to rules passed down over generations, and the magic enacted changes the in unpredictable ways: streets and houses move, the ground rises and falls. Tom's father is a dedicated follower of the rituals and has access to ancient books detailing their procedures. But the has modernized, and less attention is paid to these rituals, resulting in fewer changes with each Ceremony.One day a gypsy from outside the visits Tom's father, and Tom learns that there is literally nothing beyond the mountains. The gypsies believe there was once a world of oceans and forests, but that it was lost. They still search the borders for a way back to this "given world". Later Tom queries the gypsy beliefs but is told by his father that they are just stories. To quell Tom's curiosity, he tells him to perform the ritual of making a doll, climbing the huge girders that support the bridge, and placing it at their apex.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_Hand_of_the_Grand_Master"title="The Right Hand of the Grand Master">
The story is based on the partially legendary story of renovation of Svetitskhoveli Cathedral in 1010s Kingdom of Georgia by a young enigmatic architect Constantine Arsukidze (stylized as "Constantine Arsakidze" in the book). It is set during the 11th century and tells of the reign of King George I. George has a host of problems. The most immediate one is that the various mountain tribes, including, in particular, the Pkhovi (Pshavi and Khevsureti), periodically revolt. George is (nominally) Christian. Though he professes the faith and his wife, Mariam, is an enthusiastic builder of churches, he is not as fully committed as either Mariam or the catholicos Melkisedek would have liked, not being averse, for example, to making an alliance with the Saracens when it is convenient. The Pkhovi and other mountain tribes have partially converted to Christianity but are even less enthusiastic than King George and several times during this novel, they destroy churches, imprison and kill priests and put back their pagan idols. At the start of the novel, Lord Mamamze is visiting King George though we soon know and King George soon suspects that he is there more to spy on the king, to see how he will react to the latest rebellion of the mountain tribes. Mamamze has long been a friend and ally of King George, so his rebellion is disappointing. George has other problems. Tbilisi is occupied by the Arabs and there is a continual war in Georgia . He is also at war with the Byzantines under Emperor Basil II, who has taken King George's son, Bagrat (the future Bagrat IV) hostage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_(Grafton_novel)"title="X (Grafton novel)">
The book starts off in third-person narrative by a woman called Teddy Xanakis. Teddy is in the throes of a bitter divorce and trying to ruin her ex-husband Ari, who had an affair with her best friend. The story transitions into first-person narrative by Kinsey Millhone. Since the last book she has inherited a large sum of money from a family member on her father's side. She meets with a client who wants her to find her biological son she gave up for adoption. She also starts trying to help out Pete Wolinsky's widow, Ruth, with an IRS audit. Another story-line involves new neighbors and attempts at water conservation. None of these story-lines are connected and Kinsey bounces back and forth between these disparate events throughout the book. Kinsey discovers that Pete was investigating a person he believed to be a serial killer who ends up attacking Kinsey. The disjointed plot lines have generally disappointed fans of her previous works.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Saved_the_King_of_Sweden"title="The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden">
In 1961, Nombeko Mayeki is born a poor black girl in Soweto. She leaves the slums and in a twist of fate – is run over but survives – this puts her into the employ of the engineer who ran her over, as a cleaner in South Africa's secret nuclear weapons facility. Here, her good head for mathematics leads her to cover for her drunken and incompetent employer. Two Mossad agents eventually murder her employer, but she outwits them and escapes to Sweden with a trio of female Chinese con artists, but due to a mix-up, Nombeko ends up in possession of a missing South African atom bomb. In Sweden, she settles into a condemned building living in a bizarre commune including a pair of identical twins (both named Holger), the youngest of which and his girlfriend are die-hard republicans determined to end the Swedish monarchy. Nombeko and her Swedish boyfriend (the older Holger) are determined to hand the bomb over to the Swedish Prime Minister, but no-one will believe them. Years later, after several attempts to hand over the bomb have failed in absurd circumstances (including the remaining Mossad agent finding and nearly killing them), Holger and his girlfriend kidnap the King and the Prime Minister of Sweden on the spur of the moment from a gala banquet with Chinese President Hu Jintao at the Royal Palace in Stockholm, and prepare to blow up the bomb (and everything within a 38-mile radius) in order to end the monarchy. Nombeko calms the situation down, saving the King's life, and her own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Waltz_in_Cedar_Bend"title="Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend">
Michael Tillman is an unconventional Iowa tenured economics professor, rides a vintage motorcycle and walks barefoot as he teaches Boolean Algebra. He feels an immediate attraction to Jellie Braden when she walks into a dean's reception with her husband Jimmy. Their common experiences links Jellie and Michael together in India and within a year the affair in consummated. Jellie then disappears to India and Michael heads to Pondicherry to find Jellie and her complicated past. He eventually tracks her down to a hotel on Periyar Lake and her secrets are revealed...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_and_Me"title="Amelia and Me">
It was August 1931, during the Great Depression. Ginny Ross, her cousin Pat Cron, and her best friend Jennie Mae Stevenson sneaked out to watch the takeoff of "City of New York". However, the plane crashed, and Ginny was caught.Two days later, Jennie Mae, Llewellyn and Ginny went to search for the plane's owner's dog. They received the reward of a hundred dollars. Ginny let her papa take most of her share to pay for the store's next shipment. Ginny's mom forcefully took the rest for sewing supplies. Later that night, Ginny wrote a letter to Amelia Earhart explaining her situation.One day, Ginny and Jennie Mae decided to make a model of a plane's cockpit with paint and a wooden crate. After nearly two weeks, the model cockpit was completed, and Uncle Harry agreed to teach the girls the basics of aviation.Four weeks after, Ginny received a reply from Amelia Earhart. She went to tell her papa, but found him sleeping. She tried to wake him, but instead, he slipped off the chair. The doctor came, but it was too late. Papa had died.Five months have passed since papa's funeral. Ginny's dad had replaced papa in running the store. While the kettle boiled, Ginny read Amelia's letter again. When the kettle whistled, Ginny left the letter on the table. Her mom picked it up and ripped it, then threw it into the stove. Ginny was told she will quit school and work full-time to keep the family together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Raven_Cycle"title="The Raven Cycle">
## "The Raven Boys".The Raven Cycle follows the story of teenagers Blue Sargent, Richard Gansey III, Adam Parrish, Ronan Lynch, and Noah, taking place in the fictional town of Henrietta, Virginia. Blue lives with her mother, Maura, and assorted other female relatives, all of whom are psychic except her, and they have predicted that if she kisses her true love, he will die. Her only power is that she makes the psychic's powers stronger. Blue joins her half-aunt, Neeve, who has arrived in Henrietta under mysterious circumstances, in an annual tradition of watching the spirits of those in Henrietta destined to die in the next year appear along an invisible line called the Corpse Road. Blue, having never been able to see the spirits before, sees a teenage boy who introduces himself only as “Gansey.” Neeve tells Blue she could see him either because he is her true love, or she will kill him.Richard Gansey III, Adam, Ronan, and Noah are so-called “Raven Boys” who attend the prestigious private school Aglionby Academy in Henrietta. Blue dislikes and is determined to stay away from Raven Boys, thinking them pretentious and self-absorbed. Realizing that Gansey is the spirit she saw on the corpse road, Blue vows she will never fall in love with him. She nevertheless befriends the group, showing an interest in Adam, a Henrietta boy at Aglionby on scholarship who lives with his abusive parents in a trailer park. Ronan lives with Gansey in a former factory called Monmouth Manufacturing, unable to return to his childhood home after his father was murdered and his mother fell into a coma. Noah also resides at Monmouth Manufacturing, and occasionally offhandedly remarks about how he is dead. Blue joins the boys as they attempt to find the Welsh king Owain Glendower, who is thought to be buried on the Corpse Road, also called the ley line, of Henrietta, Virginia. Gansey is determined to find Glendower, believing he saved his life seven years prior, and believes that the king is not dead, merely sleeping, and will grant a favor to those that wake him. In their search, the group discovers a mysterious forest along the ley line called Cabeswater that seems to exist out of time and speaks to them in Latin. They also begin to suspect that their search is being watched. The Aglionby Latin teacher, Barrington Whelk, remembers his days as an Aglionby student with his friend Czerny, and their exploration of the ley line, leading to Czerny’s death seven years prior in a ritual murder. Out exploring on their own, Gansey and Blue discover a human skeleton, with a wallet containing a driver’s license belonging to a Noah Czerny. Confronting Noah at Monmouth, they realize the boy has been a ghost as long as they’ve known him. As the investigation into Noah’s remains begins, Whelk becomes increasingly unhinged, realizing the police will connect him to Noah’s murder. He decides to perform a ritual on the ley line again in a last-ditch effort to control its power. He threatens Gansey with a gun and nearly shoots him in order to get information from Gansey’s journal on the ley lines. Blue learns that Neeve had come to Henrietta to help Maura with a mysterious task, but had also been contacted by Whelk, though she refused to help him. Meanwhile, Adam’s father, convinced that Adam has not turned over enough of his income from his three jobs to him, beats Adam severely to the point that he loses hearing in his left ear. Ronan intervenes and fights Adam’s father, and Adam prevents Ronan from being arrested by reporting the abuse from his father and pressing charges. The group of teens and the psychics try to determine how to prevent Whelk from taking control of the ley line, fearing they are running out of time. Neeve kidnaps Whelk, intending to use him in the ley line ritual, but is overpowered and nearly sacrificed to the line herself until she mysteriously disappears. Adam gives the line a sacrifice of his free will to become the hands and eyes of Cabeswater, and a stampede of mysterious creatures kills Whelk. The teens try to move forward with their search for Glendower and the mysteries of Cabeswater and the ley line, and Ronan reveals that he can take things out of his dreams.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Cash"title="Clinton Cash">
"Clinton Cash" is an investigation of the foreign benefactors of Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. It investigates alleged connections between Clinton Foundation donors and Hillary Clinton's work at the State Department.The book argues that the Clinton family accepted lavish donations and speaking fees from foreign donors at times when the State Department was considering whether to award large contracts to groups and people affiliated with those donors. One of those donors include Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi, an Ethiopian and Saudi Arabian billionaire businessman.The book has eleven chapters. Some chapters focus on particular transactions or deals, such as the creation of UrAsia Energy and Uranium One in Kazakhstan, and the connection shareholders had and have to the Clintons. Other chapters focus on a broader set of relationships, particularly with regard to Bill Clinton's paid speeches during the years Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State, and whether those paying for his speeches had significant business before the State Department. Schweizer dubs the Clintons' blend of government service and private remuneration the "Clinton blur".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/150_000_000"title="150 000 000">
Driven by hunger, rage and hatred for the hostile outside world, people of Russia leave their homes to march all over the land, joined by animals, machines and even whole gubernias, all merging into one sweeping force, intent on "doing this old romantic world in."In Chicago, a monstrously rich wonder-city, the world revolution's worst enemy Woodrow Wilson abides in a giant hotel, sporting a bowler-hat "higher than Sukharev Tower." Among his servants Adelina Patti, Fyodor Chalyapin and Ilya Mechnikov are notable.The rumor of a storm coming from the Pacific spreads among the people of Chicago, sunbathing on the ocean beach. Soon it transpires that the reason behind this cataclysm is mysterious Ivan's approaching them, walking on water. Wilson makes a decision to confront the enemy face to face, gets all of his fat turned into muscles by some magic ointment and arms himself with revolvers and a 70-blade sabre.The world gets divided into two: half of it joins Ivan (in fact, merges with him, physically), the other half runs away for Wilson's protection. Ivan steps upon the beach without having wetted his feet, and challenges Wilson, now clad in armory, for a showdown. The "World Class Struggle Championship Final" takes place on Chicago's central square. Wilson strikes first and slashed armless Ivan, but out of the wound, instead of blood, peoples, machines, gubernias, et cetera start to pour out to attack the old world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_for_Bittora"title="Battle for Bittora">
Jinni is a common woman of 25 years, lives in Mumbai, works in an animation studio and is very happy with her ordinary and independent life. Everything is normal until she receives a call from her grandmother telling her that she should return to her hometown Bittora; Jinni does not want to return at first but after frequent calls from her grandmother finally relents. When she arrives in Bittora she finds a place very different from the one she remembered—one only she can return to normality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Garment"title="The First Garment">
This novel is based on the motif of the Gospel parable of the Prodigal Son. Its main hero is Domenico, the younger son of the most powerful villager. He is greatly influenced by the story told by the fugitive, a person gripped by a mysterious fear. Domenic demands of his father his share of the inheritance and leaves to get to know the world. Over the years, Domenico meets many different people and gets caught up in the War of Canudos.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_Under_the_Bridge"title="The Family Under the Bridge">
In the early 1900s a Parisian hobo named Armand dislikes children; but after meeting three children, Suzy, Evelyn, and Paul and their mother – he reluctantly allows them to share his space under a bridge in Paris during the Christmas season. Their ingenuity and talent helps them feed themselves, and he soon becomes attached to the children and determines to provide a home for them. Eventually, he becomes a hardworking man. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sing_Down_the_Moon"title="Sing Down the Moon">
Bright Morning is a young girl who is part of the Navajo tribe. As a Navajo woman, her mother was the owner of a large flock of sheep since shepherding is part of the Navajo way of life. With her black dog in tow, Bright Morning takes the flock to the High Mesas so they can feed on new grass. Her friends White Deer and Running Bird always join her.One day, Bright Morning and her friend Running Bird are caught by men who they later realize are Spaniards. The leader of the Spaniards, "the one with white teeth", as Bright Morning describes him, is a slave catcher that has made a deal with a Señora in a small town. The Señora has a 12-year old maid named Rosita, who was also brought by the leader of the Spaniards. Running Bird and Bright Morning are sold separately.Although the Señora treats her kindly, Bright Morning is miserable and plans to escape. One day, Rosita and Bright Morning go to town for an Easter Celebration. Here she meets Nehana, an Indian girl who is part of the Nez Perce tribe. Nehana tells Bright Morning where Running Bird is and that they will escape soon. Later, Bright Morning, Nehana, and Running Bird attempt their plan. However, the Spaniards catch up. Luckily, Bright Morning's future husband Tall Boy is there with Mando and his men. After a fight against the Spaniards, Tall Boy is shot and the leader of the Spaniards is killed. When they reach home, the "Long Knives" Americans are claiming the land. They threaten the Navajo and force them to leave Canyon De Chelly. The tribe leaves their home and members slowly started dying because of the hazardous conditions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horsecatcher"title="The Horsecatcher">
The novel is set in the 1830s. Elk, a Southern Cheyenne adolescent, dresses plainly, does not care for ceremonials, has no interest in warfare and coup-counting and little more in hunting. He has undergone his fast, but nobody is quite able to figure out what his dream meant. He knows he is a disappointment to his father, Elk River, to his uncle Owl Friend, who founded a warrior society, and to his older brother Two Wolves. But he cannot help what is in his heart. He wants to be a tamer of wild horses.When we first meet Elk, he has slipped away from his village on a lone horse-hunt, hoping to catch Bear Colt. But despite hardship and deprivation and even almost getting accidentally killed by some of his own tribesmen, he succeeds, and that is worth the shaming he gets from his kin. Over the next two years Elk learns his chosen profession, along with the misunderstandings that come with it. Even when he bravely warns his village of approaching Kiowa raiders and kills one with his rabbit bow, he fails to see his accomplishment. Furthermore, after his brother is killed, along with his entire war party, he helps to save the tribe's great talismans. He then penetrates deep into Kiowa country, alone and afraid, to recover and bury the remains. For a culture that places great value on horses, it is surprising that no one seems ready to recognize what a real contribution he could make to his tribe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Winter"title="Prague Winter">
This is Albright's autobiographical book. She was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1937. In this book she has narrated her childhood memories and experiences. Before she became 12 years old, she witnessed the Nazi invasion in Prague.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Key_(Elfgren_and_Strandberg_novel)"title="The Key (Elfgren and Strandberg novel)">
After the battle in the gymnasium hall, the Chosen Ones are not sure how to handle the death of Ida. Unbeknownst to them, Ida is trapped with Matilda in the Borderland between life and death. After Viktor begged Minoo to save his sister Clara, the leader of the council's Swedish division, Walter, has realised Minoo's potential as a valuable pawn. The Chosen Ones that are still alive have no chance to recover, and no choice but to rally together to try to prevent the apocalypse — even while their personal dramas threaten to tear them apart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finders,_Keepers_(Saxena_novel)"title="Finders, Keepers (Saxena novel)">
A murder takes place in the town of Haridwar. The victim is a history professor who had little or no affinity with the place. The killer is unknown but has left some religious symbols on the naked body of the professor which is found a few kilometers away from the place of murder. A week later, another murder takes place in similar circumstances in the holy town of Srikakulam. Troubled by the murder of two of his most trusted allies and by two subsequent heists in Kolkata and Bikaner, the working head of National Society for Hindu Consciousness, Mrityunjai Pradhan turns to the Intelligence Bureau of India for help in the case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_Riddles"title="The Emperor's Riddles">
The novel opens with the bizarre murder of historian Ram Mathur at the Ganga ghat in Varanasi. As his daughter Sia, her close friend Om Patnaik, and TV producer Jasodhara investigate the killing, they find a series of cryptic riddles scattered across the country that they must crack one by one to reach a final enigma.Meanwhile, Chief Officer Parag Suri and journalist Alia Irani are chasing the killer branded as "Scorpion" by the media due to his choice of weapon, a poisoned syringe. At the same time a holy Buddhist Bhikkhu urges his young Samanera Tathagata to make an important journey that promises to alter his life.Parallel to this is a second storyline which tells the story of the life of a young prince in Ancient India who becomes one of the most celebrated Emperors in history, and who envisions a secret project which could affect the entire world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron's_Coup"title="Cameron's Coup">
Toynbee and Walker provide a highly critical analysis of the premiership of David Cameron and the coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. They blend "analysis, statistics, and moving human stories" concerning austerity in the United Kingdom, and Conservative attacks on the welfare state and mass-killings/starvation of the disabled.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Price_of_Inequality"title="The Price of Inequality">
Stiglitz argues that inequality is self-perpetuating, that it is produced by the vast amount of political power the wealthy hold to control legislative and regulatory activity. He does not believe that globalization and technological changes are at the heart of differences in wealth in the U.S. "While there may be underlying economic forces at play,” he writes, “politics have shaped the market, and shaped it in ways that advantage the top at the expense of the rest.” Stiglitz blames rent-seeking for causing the inequality, with the wealthy using their power to shape monopolies, incur favorable treatment by the government, and pay low taxes. The end result is not only morally wrong but also hurts the productivity in the economy.Stiglitz criticizes many conservative commentators who believe free markets are the solution by pointing out that reducing the estate tax and deregulating campaign contributions act to restrict competition and give corporations undue power in politics. While he promotes the idea that a free market is good for society if it is competitive, he states that the government needs to regulate it to be beneficial. If that doesn't happen, the powerful corporations will use leverage to profit at the expense of the majority. According to Stiglitz, concentrating market power in too few hands is just as bad as excessive regulation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Along_Came_a_Dog"title="Along Came a Dog">
"Along Came a Dog" is the story of a friendship between a little red hen and a homeless dog. The little red hen lost her toes during the winter when the floor in the hen house froze up. When spring came, her toes fell off in the mud when she walked out the hen house. The homeless dog comes to the farm looking for a home. However, Joe had a bad experience with dogs and took him away from the farm. Joe's previous red flock of chicken were eaten by a pack of dogs. Joe took the dog away twice, but the dog always found his way back to the farm.The White hens noticed that the little red hen was toeless and started attacking her. The rooster also fought the little red hen instead of protecting her.Because the little red hen lost her toes, she can not walk up the ramp to the hen house. She sleeps with the dog in the bushes. The dog protects the little red hen from other animals from the swamp. The dog has protected her from weasels, skunks, dogs, and the white hens.Joe had forgotten to feed the hens, so the hens followed the dog out to the field and swamp to look for food. The little red hen found a perfect spot under a willow tree to build a nest. She didn't want to go back to the barn because she laid an egg.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_in_Sicily"title="Midnight in Sicily">
Spending fourteen years in southern Italy, Peter Robb recounts his journey into the Italian mezzogiorno - chiefly Sicily, but also Naples, and reveals its culture, history, art, literature and politics. The book also explores the dysfunction and impunity that intertwined with the organised crime world or Mafia world of the area from the post World War II era up to the 1990s, and the role of seven-time prime minister Giulio Andreotti.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tideline_(book)"title="Tideline (book)">
The book is set in Greenwich, by the River Thames in London. The book details how the main character, Sonia opens the door of her house to see a nephew of a family friend, Jez, and how she invites him in and decides she must keep him. The plot is intertwined in deep personal revelations about Sonia's past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Nasty_People"title="Bloody Nasty People">
The book charts the rise (and fall) of far-right organisations such as the British National Party and the English Defence League.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_in_the_River"title="The Boy in the River">
The book combines Hoskins' work on the case and the various leads he follows. It is believed the murder was a ritual killing. It is discovered that the victim came from Nigeria. The book also recounts Hoskins' time in the Congo. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_the_Windows_Open?"title="Do the Windows Open?">
The collection comprises nine short stories, each of which are narrated by Isabelle, a freelance photographer. The stories collected are listed as follows:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unprofessionals"title="The Unprofessionals">
Swiftly approaching her fiftieth year, Isabelle (who is never referred to by name in the novel) finds that she's becoming disconnected from the world around her and has increasing difficulty finding her purpose in life. Her only real outlet is her friendship with a young man she met years ago during a photoshoot with his father, a wealthy and powerful surgeon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Was_This_Man_a_Genius?"title="Was This Man a Genius?">
In 1978 Hecht was asked to interview Kaufman for a profile that was to be published in "Harper's Magazine". For the following year she met several times with Kaufman, during which time he performed several pranks and acts in an attempt to unnerve Hecht. Despite this, Hecht continued in her attempts and was ultimately rewarded with a genuine interview, which she drafted into a profile that "Harper's Magazine" did not publish.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_by_The_Thames"title="The House by The Thames">
The book is about a 450-year-old house, 49 Bankside, Bankside in the London Borough of Southwark on the banks of the River Thames, the remarkable changes witnessed and the diverse lives of those who have lived there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_State_(book)"title="Mafia State (book)">
"Mafia State" recounts Harding's period as Russia correspondent for Britain's "Guardian" newspaper and the surveillance and espionage he was subject to; he alleges the Federal Security Service (FSB) was involved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fever_(novel)"title="The Fever (novel)">
Deenie Nash is a diligent student with a close-knit family: her brother, Eli, is a hockey star and her father is a popular teacher. But when Deenie's best friend is struck by a terrifying, unexplained seizure in the middle of class, the Nashes' seeming stability dissolves into chaos.Soon more local girls start to experience bizarre symptoms, leaving health officials puzzled and parents in an uproar. As hysteria and contagion swell, a series of tightly held secrets emerges, threatening to unravel friendships, families, and the town's fragile idea of security.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Under"title="London Under">
The book '...is an introduction to everything that goes on under London'. It profiles underground constructions and natural features such as rivers, Roman amphitheaters, Victorian sewers and gang hideouts; these are written up in Ackroyd's psychogeographical style, where the landmarks themselves are described less as factual objects and more as reference points for the author's literary, figurative imagination.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speak_for_Britain!"title="Speak for Britain!">
"Speak for Britain!" is a comprehensive history of the Labour Party from foundation to New Labour. The author argues Labour never entirely succeeded in "converting the whole working class to Socialism", instead adopting radical liberalism in some areas and populism in others to win over different voters. The book criticises the failure of the party to embrace constitutional reform in the United Kingdom, "compounding common ground with Conservatism". Hugh Gaitskell is also criticised for alleged failure to understand the Labour movement and the abandonment of the commitment to full-scale public ownership of industry is also examined.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Scandal_in_Belgravia_(book)"title="A Scandal in Belgravia (book)">
The story is set in London, and the murder took place in the wealthy Belgravia area. It is narrated by Peter Proctor, a former politician. As he writes his memoirs Proctor recalls the murder of a close friend many years ago, while he was a diplomat at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. His friend, Timothy Wycliffe, the grandson of a marquess and son of a politician, was adventurous, ambitious and humorous, and gay—before homosexuality was legalised. Proctor sets out to find the truth behind his friend's death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hive_Propolis"title="Hive Propolis">
In the year 2023, Millions connect to Hive (human interface for virtual evolution), an augmented-reality technology that consolidates an individual's devices and technology into a holographic visual display that is projected from their mind. The system creates a collective consciousness with its users and their communication is transferred through a virtual telepathy. Meanwhile, The Disconnected are left in its wake; forced to adapt to a primitive lifestyle in the outskirts of Hive cities. Conflict is inevitable, however the reality behind Hive may be even stranger than anyone realized. Propolis follows nine-year-old Samantha Plessis, as she witnesses her family opt into beta testing this new product to receive health insurance benefits to treat her immune disorder. Since her disease prevents her from connecting to Hive, she becomes gradually alienated by her family, whose method of communication is now changing. Her mother, father and sister attitudes and moods change from her perspective; becoming less patient with her, and doing things out of the ordinary. Their consequential negligence and alienation lead to choices that threaten her safety, and for two years she compares her family to empty cicada chassis'. During an update for the beta-testers to the full version on Hive Day in 2025, Samantha watches her family and a number of people in her town collapse at once to their death. She then is adopted by her grandfather and moves to his farm, where he informs her of his predictions of an upcoming war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves"title="Seveneves">
## Part One.In the near future, an unknown agent causes the Moon to shatter. As the pieces begin to collide with one another, astronomer and science popularizer "Doc" Dubois Harris calculates that Moon fragments will begin entering Earth's atmosphere, forming a white sky and blanketing the Earth within two years with what he calls a "Hard Rain" of bolides, causing the atmosphere to heat to incandescence and the oceans to boil away, rendering Earth uninhabitable for thousands of years.The world's leaders evacuate as many people and resources as possible to a swarm of "arklet" habitats called a "Cloud Ark" in orbit with the International Space Station (ISS), bolted onto an iron Arjuna asteroid called Amalthea, which provides some protection against Moon debris.By the time the Hard Rain begins 701 days after the destruction of the Moon, approximately 1,500 people have been launched into orbit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_and_More"title="The Moon and More">
Emaline is spending the summer working for her family's real estate agency and getting ready to head to the local college in the fall. Her plans for the summer involve working at her family's realty, while hanging out with her two best friends Daisy and Morris, and her boyfriend Luke. She plans to attend the local university in the fall, East U, with her high school sweet heart Luke, on a full ride scholarship. Emaline longs for a summer like a tourist, one where she isn't a supporting character in someone else's summer romance; but where she is the lead in hers.But things don't go according to plan. First, Emaline's biological father turns up in Colby. He had been urging Emaline to apply to Ivy League schools and even offered to help pay her tuition, but mysteriously rescinded his offer once she got into Columbia. Her father brings along her half brother Benji who she has to spend time with. Then Emaline starts noticing that she and Luke aren't as much in sync as usual, and that they haven't been since earlier that spring in April. Finally, a documentary filmmaker from New York shows up in town to interview Clyde Conway, a mysterious artist who disappeared at the height of his career. The filmmaker, Ivy, has brought along her young assistant, Theo, who is eager to impress his boss by getting Emaline to show him the lay of the land in Colby.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like_Jake_and_Me"title="Like Jake and Me">
"Like Jake and Me" is a story about a young boy named Alex whose mother has remarried and is expecting twins with Alex's new stepfather, Jake. Alex has a hard time bonding with Jake, and it makes Alex feel as if the two of them have little in common. Alex learns that even the strongest looking people have fears and also need help at times. An unexpected creature helps Alex and Jake build a closer relationship.The story starts off with Alex watching his stepfather cut up wood for the fire place, and even though he looks strong, Alex decides to ask him if he needs any help. Jake brushes Alex off and carries on, which makes him feel out of bond with his stepfather. Alex goes on to talk to his pregnant mother Virginia who is expecting twins. She is checking up on her pear tree and had pushed a glass bottle onto the branch, over the blossom . Inside were twigs and leaves and two pears. Over the summer, the pears had grown and gotten sweet inside the bottle. When the pears were ripe, Virginia would pull the bottle off the tree with the pears inside. She would then fill the bottle with pear nectar and give it to her sister Caroline, who would never guess how Virginia managed to put those pears inside this glass bottle. Alex then goes on to try to help Jake load everything else back to the house, and once again, Jake brushes Alex off. As Jake starts to unload the wood, Alex spots a wolf spider on his neck. Alex starts to talk to Jake about it but Jake thinks they are talking about Virginia who is right outside the window by the pear tree. After having a long conversation about it, Alex lets Jake know that is a wolf spider that they are talking about. Jake panics and asks Alex for help as he starts to search every piece of clothing. Jake is then standing in the porch naked with just his cowboy hat on hand. Virginia comes over and Alex tries to explain the situation to her. She points out to the hat is where the spider had been the whole time. Jake then picks Alex up and starts dancing with joy. Virginia starts feeling the twins dancing in her belly as well as she sees Jake and Alex do the same.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doll's_House_(novel)"title="The Doll's House (novel)">
The book centres on the discovery of a dead pre-transition male-to-female transgender individual on a council housing estate in Birmingham. The inside of the house is like a doll's house with pink ribbons and pink walls, stuffed toys and the table set for a tea partyDI Phil Brennan on the Major Incident Squad begins investigating the puzzling case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prime_Minister's_Ironing_Board_and_Other_State_Secrets"title="The Prime Minister's Ironing Board and Other State Secrets">
The book reveals numerous notes, letters and other documents stamped 'secret' and filed away over the years. From concerned notes on Prince Charles' potential brainwashing by Welsh nationalist terrorists to worries about housemaids 'on the wobble' at Chequers, the book reveals serious matters to comical details of life in the corridors of power.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baptism_(novel)"title="Baptism (novel)">
The novel is mostly set on London Underground and follows radical religious extremists, led by Tommy Denning a psychopathic former soldier, who are seeking to "baptise" the train passengers by flooding the train. Denning, armed with a gun, hijacks the train between Leicester Square tube station and Tottenham Court Road tube station. Blind DCI Ed Mallory is the lead hostage negotiator and has to deal with the situation along with a rogue MI5 operative.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Je_vous_écris_d'Italie"title="Je vous écris d'Italie">
Jacques Sauvage is a young French historian and Stendhal enthusiast. He fought for the French army during World War II and briefly visited the small town Varela in Umbria, Italy, in 1945. He returns to the area four years later in hope of being able to solve a mystery connected to the historically rich surroundings. The key to the mystery is a pagan festival which the locals are preparing in secret.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Calling_(Craig_novel)"title="London Calling (Craig novel)">
The novel is set in the lead up to an election. A murderer is on the loose and stalking Edgar Carlton the man set to become Prime Minister. Inspector John Carlyle must track down the killer before Carlton takes the law into his own hands.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Debt_Collector's_Due"title="The Debt Collector's Due">
Samay, aged 29, is an unemployed college dropout. He decides all too late to try to turn his life around, but finds this is not an easy task for someone with his limited vocational appeal. He lives alone and pines frequently over an unrequited college romance with Amrita, with whom he has long since lost contact.In desperation to take any form of work that comes his way, Samay discovers he has a knack for being able to collect debts in a non-violent manner. Although he finds the job to be sinfully boring, he ploughs on knowing the alternatives are none.His story takes a turn for the bizarre when, during a routine collection, Samay accidentally walks into the office of a mob boss, Pande. Pande in turn mistakes Samay for a hit man due to arrive at the same time and Samay is given 75 lakhs for a hit he did not execute and offered another assignment. Fearing for his life, Samay resolves to run away with the money. He reconsiders this move when he sees that the next hit is Amrita, deciding instead to warn her regarding her imminent danger.From here on, the story tracks the intertwining journeys of Samay and Amrita as they try to stay one step ahead of the mob. In parallel storylines, we also see what becomes of the real hit man – Raka – and are introduced to the agonizing travails of Waghmare, the bumbling constable assigned to protect Amrita.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Boys_Too"title="Welsh Boys Too">
The book is a collection of eight fictional stories inspired by the lives of gay men living in Wales.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Recruits"title="London Recruits">
The book details the secret activities of foreign volunteers, especially from the United Kingdom and the rest of Western Europe, who worked covertly to assist the African National Congress during apartheid. Ronnie Kasrils a South African young communist, met with George Bridges, London Secretary of the Young Communist League in 1967 and began the process of reviving the ANC presence in South Africa through propaganda. These volunteers were mostly young communists, socialists and Trotskyists. The book reveals work done by volunteers, such as the transport of anti-apartheid leaflets and cassettes from London to counter the South African government's own overseas propaganda machine. A number of the activists were students at the London School of Economics and Political Science, including Ronnie Kasrils. Ronnie Kasrils subsequently became a leader of the armed struggle and a minister in Mandela's cabinet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sounds_Like_London"title="Sounds Like London">
The book details the history of black music, which has been a part of London's musical landscape since World War I. Following Commonwealth immigration to the United Kingdom, the sounds and styles of black music became the foundation of the city's youth culture. The book tells the story of music and the characters making it from "Soho jazz clubs to Brixton blues parties to King's Cross warehouse raves to the streets of Notting Hill".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hound_of_Florence"title="The Hound of Florence">
"The Hound of Florence" is an adventure story for young readers, set in early eighteenth-century Austria and Italy. The adolescent Lukas Grassi has lost his parents and lives in Vienna in great poverty, longs for his native Italy, and would like to study art in Florence. By magic, his wish is granted, but every other day he must take the form of a dog, Kambyses, that belongs to the Archduke Ludwig; and alternating daily between human and canine form, he travels from Vienna to Florence along with the Archduke's troops, and there has to lead a unique double life. This is the only book of Salten in which supernatural elements occur, and they may show influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann.The ending of the book differs greatly in the original language and in the English translation. The German-language version ends in tragedy: the archduke stabs the dog to death with a dagger, killing Lukas, and his body is disposed of. In the English translation, a wholly new ending of six more pages has been written: Lukas survives, gets medication and is united with the courtesan. Currently it is not known if the alternate ending is authorized.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photographing_Fairies_(novel)"title="Photographing Fairies (novel)">
The novel is told in the first person, from the perspective of an American photographer named Charles Castle. Castle is currently held in a prison cell in England. He is to be executed the next day for the crime of murder. He recounts the events, which began four months earlier, that led to his imprisonment and death sentence.Working as a photographer in London, Castle was visited by a constable named Michael Walsmear. Walsmear showed Castle two photographs, each of a different young girl, and asked Castle's professional opinion as two whether the photographs are genuine. Walsmear went on to point out several tiny spots in the photographs, and he insisted these spots are not dust or imperfections of the film, but instead "fairies". Castle enlarged the negatives and looked at the splotches of light, which indeed resembled fairies. Walsmear only wished to confirm that the fairies were real, but Castle was strongly intrigued by the possibility of the existence of fairies. Castle then took copies of the photographs to Arthur Conan Doyle, who possessed a different set of "fairy" photographs. Doyle was not convinced by Walsmear's photographs with the splotches of light, but he wanted all copies of Walsmear's photographs destroyed so that Doyle's own "fairy" photographs would have less competition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Bloomsbury"title="Real Bloomsbury">
Murray walks around the historic and fascinating square mile of the Bloomsbury area among locals, students and tourists, alone or in the company of local characters. Bloomsbury is an area 'crammed with history and with contemporary decision-making', the home of the influential left-wing Bloomsbury Group and Bloomsbury Publishing along with the British Museum, University College London and the Great Ormond Street Hospital. Bloomsbury has been a home of intellectuals, agitators and also working-class and now British Bengali communities.The book is described as 'presenting Bloomsbury as it's never been portrayed before: intimate, contemporary, exploratory and occasionally downright strange.'
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsbury_and_the_Poets"title="Bloomsbury and the Poets">
The book details the history of literature in the Bloomsbury district of London, including the Bloomsbury Group.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Green_Left"title="The Rise of the Green Left">
The book documents the rise of ecosocialism, from the UK to Latin America. The book is described as documenting "indigenous protest in the Peruvian Amazon to the green transition in Cuba to the creation of red-green parties in Europe" and noting that "ecosocialism is defining the future of left and green politics globally" and the support given to ecosocialism by Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez. The author also writes that Karl Marx was an early pioneer of ecosocialism. The book is recommend as "a great handbook for activists and engaged students of politics".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strange_Death_of_Labour_Scotland"title="The Strange Death of Labour Scotland">
Hassan and Shaw examine the decline of Scottish Labour, culminating in it losing Scottish Parliament elections in 2007 and 2011 to the Scottish National Party. They analyse the period from the premiership of Margaret Thatcher to its election losses. They ask questions about the nature of Scottish Labour, its prior dominance of Scottish politics, the wider politics of Scotland, and whether the decline of the party is irreversible. Covering both contemporary events and recent history, they draw on extensive research including archival sources and interviews with some of the key participants in Scottish Labour'.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Fall_Down_(Carter_novel)"title="All Fall Down (Carter novel)">
Grace Blakely is a sixteen year old American who grew up between her native country and the fictional Mediterranean nation of Adria, located in the Balkan Peninsula, which she has roots in. Grace's mother Caroline was killed in what she believes was a murder, but is told by her family was a fire. Grace remembers the face of a man with a large scar who was on the scene of Caroline's death, and believes he was responsible for the murder.Grace's father sends her to return to Adria to live in an American embassy with her grandfather, the ambassador. She immediately takes a disliking to the embassy and Ms Chancellor, a senior woman working there. Trying to escape the embassy, she briefly meets a German girl who scares her into staying inside. She also meets her brother Jamie's old friend, Alexei Volkov, who is the son of a senior Russian embassy worker. She initially does not recognise him but has a flashback of them playing together as young children. She eventually leaves the embassy, where she slips and, in doing so, accidentally punches the Russian ambassador. She is taken to the Russian embassy where she is heavily questioned but eventually let go.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radha_(novel)"title="Radha (novel)">
The plot of "Radha" reflects the situation in Nepal at the time of its publication, especially the Nepalese Civil War."Radha" is an example of “Lila Lekhan”, a Nepalese metaphysical novel concerned with explaining the features of reality that exist beyond the physical world and our immediate senses, for which Dharabasi is known.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinner_at_Alberta's"title="Dinner at Alberta's">
Arthur Crocodile has very dubious table manners, playing with the cruet set while waiting for his food and splashing ravioli sauce on his sister. He refuses to do anything about it until his sister invites her new best friend, Alberta, for dinner and Arthur sets out to impress her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strange_Death_of_David_Kelly"title="The Strange Death of David Kelly">
Baker investigates the death of David Kelly. Kelly was a British scientist and authority on biological warfare, employed by the Ministry of Defence and formerly a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq. He had an off-record discussion with a BBC journalist concerning a British government dossier about Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which was cited by the journalist. Kelly's name became subsequently known and he was aggressively questioned by a Parliamentary committee. He was found dead two days later, attributed to suicide. In the book, Baker disputes this version of events and suggests Kelly was murdered. Baker stated 'I am convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that this could not be suicide. The medical evidence does not support it and David Kelly's state of mind and personality suggests otherwise. It was not an accident so I am left with the conclusion that it is murder.'
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zebra-Striped_Hearse"title="The Zebra-Striped Hearse">
Colonel and Mrs. Blackwell hire Archer to investigate their prospective son-in-law, an artist named Burke Damis. Blackwell believes Damis is marrying their daughter Harriet only for her money. Archer takes the case, warning the Blackwells that they must be prepared to accept whatever information he uncovers, good or bad. Soon after beginning his investigation, he finds Blackwell threatening Damis with a gun. Damis and Harriet leave the house and vanish. From there, the search for the runaways takes Archer to San Francisco, Mexico, Nevada, and back to California, finding dead bodies linked to Damis along the way.Archer repeatedly encounters a group of surfers driving around in a zebra striped hearse, which gives the book its title.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valmiki's_Daughter"title="Valmiki's Daughter">
Set in modern Trinidad, "Valmiki's Daughter" is centered around the Krishnu family, which consists of Valmiki, Viveka, Vashti, and Devika. The husband, Valmiki, is a closeted gay doctor in an unaccepting environment. He learns about this part of his identity when, while attending school in England, he becomes involved in a relationship with an upper classmate named Tony. However, his guilt about his own sexuality persuades him to pursue a life of marrying Devika rather than staying with Tony whom he truly loves. However, despite his discomfort with his homosexuality, he still goes on hunting trips to liaise with his lover, Saul. After each trip, he brings birds back to his family as a gift. Throughout the book, Mootoo illustrates that Valmiki's relationship with his wife is much more platonic than his sexual relations with Saul. Valmiki is not willing to come out because he is a well-respected doctor amongst his peers, and it would be a humiliating experience that would cost him his reputation.Valmiki's elder daughter, Viveka, is a closeted lesbian. She undergoes a similar high school experience as her dad, struggling with her own sexual orientation and identity. After seeing a fellow student named Merle Bedi was outcast from her family because of her sexuality, Viveka realizes how unaccepting the people around her are of her sexuality. In order to avoid ending up in a similar situation, Viveka deliberately makes decisions that will steer her in a different direction . This constant pressure prevents Viveka from ever becoming completely comfortable with her lesbian identity. Despite being homosexual himself, Valmiki is outwardly opposed to the idea of his daughters being lesbian. He feels very firmly that she should not have to go through the same struggle that he underwent as a child. This extreme caution leads him to deny her any participation in a women-only sports club for fear that she will develop lesbian tendencies. Both Valmiki and his wife Devika are more comfortable with the identity of their younger daughter Vashti. Unlike her older sister, Vashti conforms to most of the female gender stereotypes. Viveka sees her sister as an ongoing pressure to conform to cultural ideals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jazz_Man"title="The Jazz Man">
"The Jazz Man" is the story of a nine-year-old boy named Zeke, who lives with his parents on the top floor of a brownstone in Harlem. The story begins with Zeke remembering an old home he used to live in down South. He later explains how the five flights of stairs he usually walked up to get home made his "legs ache beat hot and fast when he first came to live there." Over time, he got used to the stairs, but the stairs still troubled his mother. At night, when she returned from work, he would often hear her struggling to climb up the long flights of stairs.One of Zeke's legs is shorter than the other, and "the kids downstairs stared at his lame foot and made him feel hot and different." Because of this, Zeke skipped school most of the time and remained in his apartment staring at windows across the courtyard. He becomes intrigued by an apartment with a window that is always closed. He watches this window for a while, contemplating who might be moving into the apartment. Eventually, a man with a piano moves in. Zeke calls him the Jazz Man. The Jazz Man plays all day and night.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Fire_(Murphy_novel)"title="The Great Fire (Murphy novel)">
The novel "The Great Fire" is about the great fire that happened in Chicago. The huge fire started in the O'Learys' barnyard and lasted for thirty hours. Daniel "Pegleg" Sullivan was the first to notice the fire and ran to save the cows in the barn and to tell the O'Learys that their property was on fire. William Lee, a neighbor of the O'Learys, hurried to the drugstore to turn in a fire alarm, but Bruno Goll, the owner of the drugstore, didn't allow him because all the fire trucks had left. Lee went back to his house to get his baby and wife out. Goll claimed that he turned in the alarm after Lee left the drugstore, but no alarm was recorded at the central alarm office. The fire started to spread to other parts of the neighborhood and destroyed everything in its path. After several minutes, the fire trucks were sent to box 242, which was almost a mile away from the barn where the fire had started. After that, the fire trucks were sent again to the wrong location and the fire continued to spread. The fire advanced from the O'Learys' barn towards Jefferson Street before the firefighters finally showed up to the right location of the fire. They were exhausted from multiple fires over the past week and didn't have enough energy to stop the fire from spreading to other parts of the city. The residents of the area took whatever valuables they could from their houses and ran away from the fire. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Man_(novel)"title="Memory Man (novel)">
Amos Decker is a former professional football player who was violently hit on his first play, resulting in severe injuries and changes to his brain. As his football career has ended, Decker becomes a police officer, and later a successful detective, while using his newly acquired mental abilities (synesthesia and hyperthymesia). After his family is murdered in an unsolved case, Decker loses his will to live, and becomes a transient while working as a private investigator.After a mass shooting at a local high school, Decker is asked to assist in solving the case by the local police force he used to work for. It soon becomes apparent that the shooting is somehow related to the killing of his family 18 months before.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BoneMan's_Daughters"title="BoneMan's Daughters">
Boneman is a serial killer who has abducted six young women. He believes that he is the perfect father, and he is looking for the perfect daughter. People might think that he is killing these girls based on sexual interest, but that is not what he is after. He is looking for a girl who is perfect enough to be his own daughter. When he abducts a girl and discovers she doesn’t measure up to his perfection, he proceeds to break her bones, which ends up killing her. He is careful when breaking bones as he applies the right amount of pressure to make sure he doesn’t break through the skin. He picks his victims based on their looks, and he wants them to appear unscathed. Boneman is very meticulous with his looks, and makes sure that he doesn’t miss his Noxzema skin cream.Ryan Evans is a career naval intelligence officer who has let his career take over his life and in the process he has abandoned his family. He gave his best to honor is country, but it has cost him when he left his wife and daughter on their own who are trying to live a normal life without him. He has lost hope that he can ever be the perfect father that he needs to be. His wife and daughter have removed him from their lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taming_of_the_Queen"title="The Taming of the Queen">
Henry VIII of England chooses Kateryn Parr, a 31-year-old widow, as his new wife. Aware of the ends that Henry's other wives met, Kateryn is a studious woman who promotes projects, including advocating for Scriptures in English and supporting the Protestant Reformation. Henry suffers from gout and a leg wound that will not heal throughout the novel. Parr ensures Princess Mary and Princess Elizabeth are re-legitimized by the crown.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Supernatural_Enhancements"title="The Supernatural Enhancements">
The story takes place in the fictional town of Point Bless, Virginia during the fall and winter of 1995. It centers upon two characters, a 23-year-old European young man referred to only as "A." and a 16-year-old mute Irish girl named Niamh, who have traveled to Point Bless upon inheriting a rumoredly haunted mansion from Ambrose Wells, a distant cousin of A., who died in the house after throwing himself out of a third story window. Soon after they move in the two begin to experience paranormal phenomena, while their research on the deceased relative's life hints to a secret society that would hold a yearly gathering at Wells' home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_of_Mortals"title="Books of Mortals">
## "The Keeper".In a Russian wasteland two hermits, Pavel and Gustov have heard a horrible secret. As the two sit by a fire one night they are visited by Talus, a man with a secret to share with the two. He shares a secret so terrible that he must share it with those who will help him protect the knowledge that will one day save all of humanity.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Spin_(novel)"title="Back Spin (novel)">
In Back Spin, sports agent Myron Bolitar is called on to investigate the kidnapping ofChad Coldren, son of two professional golfers, while Chad's father Jack is well on hisway to winning the U.S. Open. Myron is drawn into a plot that goes back to the last timeJack Coldren nearly won the U.S. Open, twenty-three years ago. Myron's investigationssuddenly shift when Jack Coldren is murdered and Chad is released. Finally, Myrontraces the murder to Jack's wife Linda, who shot him because he could not succumb tothe kidnappers' real demands, that he throw the U.S. Open.As the story opens, Myron is attending the U.S. Open. Jack Coldren is unexpectedlyleading, and promising newcomer Tad Crispin is in second place. Jack's wife Linda, aprofessional golfer as well, asks Myron for help. Their son has been kidnapped. Myronagrees to help, even though his friend and business associate Win refuses to assistbecause Linda is his first cousin, related to Win's estranged mother.The kidnappers phone twice without making specific demands. Meanwhile, Myronlearns that Chad used his ATM card at a cash machine near a sleazy motel. At first,Myron suspects that Chad might be pulling a hoax, but he soon learns that one of thekidnappers is a neo-Nazi thug.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_Heading_270_Degrees"title="Journey to Heading 270 Degrees">
"Journey to Heading 270 Degrees" is a novel about the Iran-Iraq War. It tells the story of Naser, a veteran of several battles, while in high school. Unable to resist the pressure to join the military, he returns to the war front to find himself in the midst of one of the war's most decisive clashes. The Iraqis attack Iranian fortified positions in tanks while Naser's unit repels them on foot. During the battle, Naser loses several comrades but gains an understanding of the futility of conflict.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse_with_the_Question_Mark_Tail"title="The Mouse with the Question Mark Tail">
The story of a mouse in London in search of information about his identity. A rollicking adventure that brings him to Windsor Castle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Counter-Revolution_of_Science"title="The Counter-Revolution of Science">
This book is divided into three parts. The first is a reworking of Hayek's essay, "Scientism and the Study of Society". The second is an analysis of the doctrine of Saint-Simon. Hayek lifts the title of the compiled book, The Counter-Revolution of Science, from Saint-Simon, who essentially asserted that the relative freedom of expression and thought of the Revolution in France was no longer necessary, that using the force of law to impose "scientific" conclusions on everyone was now necessary. The last segment examines Comte and Hegel, and their similar takes on the philosophy of history. The first two sections were both originally published in the peer-reviewed magazine "Economica", in the early 1940s.Hayek observes that the hard sciences attempt to remove the "human factor" in order to obtain objective, strictly controlled results:Meanwhile, the soft sciences are attempting to measure human action itself:He notes that these are mutually exclusive: Social sciences should not attempt to impose positivist methodology, nor to claim objective or definite results:
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Notebooks_of_a_Middle_School_Princess_(novel)"title="From the Notebooks of a Middle School Princess (novel)">
Olivia, full name "Olivia Grace Clarisse Mignonette Harrison", has always been completely average at everything other than art. Other than being a half orphan, her life has been fairly uneventful. This all changes when Princess Amelia "Mia" arrives and invites her to come and meet the father that she's never met, Prince Phillipe Renaldo, which makes Princess Mia her elder half-sister. Now Olivia is being whisked off to live with her father and half-sister in a world where she is now a princess in training. How will this change her and will it require leaving everything and more specifically "everyone" she has ever known behind?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_and_the_Old_One"title="Annie and the Old One">
A young Native American girl, Annie, is willing to do anything to stop her mother from finishing a rug after hearing from her grandmother that she will die when the rug is finished. Annie misbehaves in school to make her parents come speak to the teacher, but the teacher does not call for her mother. Then, Annie let the sheep escape, so her mother and father would spend the morning chasing after the sheep. Her last attempt to distract her mother from finishing the rug is pulling out the strands of yarn, one by one .
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loner_(children's_novel)"title="The Loner (children's novel)">
A young orphan boy, whose name, age, and background are unknown in the beginning of the book, is struggling to make ends meet for himself. He bounces from migrant family to migrant family, surviving by picking crops, but he makes no profit due to his wages being taken by the families he stays with. Near the beginning of the book, he makes his first friend, a girl named Raidy. Raidy befriends him and says he should have a name. Before she can decide on one, their friendship is cut short when Raidy dies in a farming accident. Exhausted, hungry, and distraught over his only friend's death, the boy takes off on his own and collapses onto the ground without knowing or caring where he is or if he will survive. He is in Montana, where he is found by a woman named "Boss" and her dog Jupiter. Boss is a modern-day shepherd, tending a flock of 900 sheep with the help of two dogs, and she brings the boy to her camp, caring for him until he recovers. Boss's camp tender, Tex explains to the boy how Boss's son, Ben, was killed by a bear and that Boss sometimes hunts the bear that killed her son. He talks to the boy, motivating him to keep the place clean and do what Ben would have done for Boss. Pointing to a random page in the Bible, the boy chooses the name "David," which Boss takes a sign that she is supposed to help him (David was also a shepherd). Angie, Ben's widow, brings David some of Ben's old clothing, gives him a haircut, and intends to teach him how to read and write. Throughout the story there is a pattern: each person that David meets expresses interest in helping him. David is understandably quite skeptical of people's intentions and feels like he's only a stray or a burden. However, he grows from a loner to someone who welcomes love and other people into his life. He also learns about the give and take of civilization, and how to handle the responsibility of caring for Boss's sheep and doing chores as he accepts help from others to meet his own needs and overcome his hardships.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_and_Irene"title="Lewis and Irene">
Lewis is a French financial speculator of an adventurous and gambling type. He takes up an option is a sulphur mine on Sicily, but is outmatched by Irene Apostolatos, a young Greek widow who represents the Apostolatos Bank. The two fall in love. They decide to settle down and devote themselves to domestic life, but this turns out to be impossible as they are struck with boredom. Irene returns to the bank in secret. Lewis has an affair, which Irene immediately discovers. The couple break up. Although no longer lovers, Lewis and Irene continue their relationship as business partners.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_Mortis"title="Trigger Mortis">
The book is set in 1957 against the backdrop of the Space Race, and begins two weeks after the events of "Goldfinger". The novel is the third in the current-era literary series to be set during the original timeline created by Fleming since 1968's "Colonel Sun" (following "Devil May Care" by Sebastian Faulks and "Solo" by William Boyd) and sees the return of Bond girl Pussy Galore, who made her debut in "Goldfinger".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Damaged_Mirror"title="A Damaged Mirror">
The book opens with Yael reaching out to a rabbi for a rabbinic judgement for “Alex”. In subsequent correspondence with the rabbi, Rav Ish-Shalom, we learn that Alex's real name is Ovadya. He was deported to Birkenau from his home in Salonika, Greece at the age of 17. His mother and sister were gassed on arrival and Ovadya was sent to the Sonderkommando, the group of prisoners responsible for running the machinery of murder.Ovadya wants the rabbi to serve as a rabbinic judge—essentially to put himself on trial for what he did in Birkenau. “The fact that good people can be forced to do wrong doesn’t make them less good,” he says. “But it also doesn’t make the wrong less wrong.” However, he is unable to speak of what he did to survive, and his past is gradually revealed in a series of letters to the rabbi and to Masha, a woman who was forced into prostitution during the war. He is able to tell her what he cannot speak aloud.Yael, born two decades later in America, has no connection with Ovadya, and yet she haunted by a mysterious memory of something she could not have lived. In an attempt to understand the source of these memories, she sets out on a quest to Europe and eventually Israel. Her quest to learn what and how she remembers is bound up with Ovadya’s search for forgiveness and atonement. She too is unable to speak of the harrowing glimpses revealed by memory, but Ovadya holds the key to fitting the pieces together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chemistry_of_Tears"title="The Chemistry of Tears">
Catherine Gehrig is a middle-aged horologist working in "the Georgian halls" of the Swinburne Museum, London SW1. For the last 13 years she has been in love with her married colleague, Matthew Tindall, and when he dies suddenly she is distraught. Her boss Eric Croft moves her to the museum annexe in Olympia and gives her a recent acquisition to assemble: a complex mechanical toy that she first thinks might be a monkey, then decides is a duck. Croft's hope is that Catherine will be led towards recovery by "the huge peace of mechanical things". She slowly becomes entranced by a story that has some peculiar parallels with her own.This story, which is told in sections that alternate with Catherine's own, involves Henry Brandling, scion of a wealthy 19th-century railway family, husband of sourpuss Hermione and father of sickly Percy. When Percy falls ill, and all the usual Victorian therapies have failed, Henry becomes convinced that a foreign and mechanical entertainment might heal him. Henry's search for the mechanism and Catherine's restoration of it provide the novel's counterpoints.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amnesia_(Carey_novel)"title="Amnesia (Carey novel)">
The novel follows the story of journalist Felix Moore who is writing an investigative piece about Gaby Baillieux, a young Australian computer hacker. Baillieux has written a computer virus which is originally intended to open the doors of Australian prison cells, but which also finds its way to the US.The novel makes connections between various incidents in Australia's past (the 1942 Battle of Brisbane and the 1975 sacking of the Whitlam government) to build a picture of conspiracy and political interference.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Reagan"title="Killing Reagan">
In 1981, after delivering a speech at the Washington Hilton Hotel on March 30, President Reagan is shot by John Hinckley, Jr. Near death, Reagan's life is in the balance in the hands of doctors at George Washington University Hospital. At the White House however, there is chaos as Reagan's cabinet is led by Secretary of State Alexander Haig.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_Before_You"title="Me Before You">
Twenty-six-year-old Louisa Clark lives with her working-class family. Unambitious and with few qualifications, she feels constantly outshone by her younger sister, Treena, an outgoing single mother. Louisa, who helps support her family, loses her job at a local café when the café closes. She goes to the Job Center and, after several failed attempts, is offered a unique employment opportunity: help care for Will Traynor, a successful, wealthy, and once-active young man who has quadriplegia as a result of a pedestrian-motorcycle accident two years earlier. Will's mother, Camilla, hires Louisa despite her lack of experience, believing Louisa can brighten his spirit. Louisa meets Nathan, who cares for Will's medical needs, and Will's father, Steven, a friendly upper-class businessman whose marriage to Camilla is strained.Louisa and Will's relationship starts out rocky due to his bitterness and resentment over being disabled. Things worsen after Will's ex-girlfriend, Alicia, and best friend Rupert reveal that they are getting married. Under Louisa's care, Will gradually becomes more communicative and open-minded as they share experiences together. Louisa notices Will's scarred wrists and later overhears his mother and father discussing how he attempted suicide shortly after Camilla refused his request to end his life through Dignitas, a Swiss-based assisted suicide organization. Horrified by his attempt, Camilla promised to honor her son's wish, but only if he agreed to live six more months. Camilla intends to prove that, in time, he will believe his life's worth living.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dying_Hours"title="The Dying Hours">
Tom Thorne has returned to uniform duties, having been removed from the Murder Squad. Thorne is suspicious of a spate of deaths of elderly people that are officially ruled suicides, and begins investigating alone. Soon, he finds himself on the trail of a serial killer who preys on the elderly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pages_(novel)"title="The Pages (novel)">
An Australian bush philosopher, Wesley Antill, dies leaving behind a vast collection of philosophical works. His will indicates that it should be published so Antill's siblings arrange for Erica, a philosopher, and Sophie, a psychoanalyst, to examine the work and decide if it is actually publishable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Rabbit_and_the_Lovely_Present"title="Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present">
An unnamed little girl meets a rabbit and asks for his help in finding her mother a birthday present. The cover art shows the girl asking the Rabbit for help as he sits on a rock. He then takes her on a journey to find the perfect present for her mom. On their journey, the little girl tells Mr. Rabbit that her mother likes "red, green, yellow and blue". Mr. Rabbit then suggests that the little girl should get her mother "red underwear" but the little girl refuses to give her mother such a gift. Mr. Rabbit then takes the girl to an apple tree. She agrees an apple would be a lovely present for her mom. Mr. Rabbit and the little girl then proceed to find another "present" for her mom. Mr. Rabbit suggests that the little girl get her mother something yellow. They both agree that a banana would be the perfect fruit for her mom. Mr. Rabbit and the little girl fill a little brown basket with blue, yellow, green, and red fruits. Mr. Rabbit walks the girl home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_Beach"title="Tar Beach">
The book is set in New York in 1939. Tar Beach is the roof of Cassie's Harlem apartment building. Cassie's dearest dream is to be free to go wherever she wants, and one day it comes true when the stars help her to fly across the city.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil's_Only_Friend"title="The Devil's Only Friend">
John and Brooke have left Clayton, the tiny North Dakota town where they grew up. Even though "Nobody", the demon who possessed Brooke, has been destroyed, the girl is still suffering from its memories. As a result, she has multiple personalities and extensive knowledge about the ancient network of demons. John and a team of FBI agents are using her recollections to hunt down this network, whom they call "the Withered." The group consists of a police detective named Kelly, a scholar named Nathan, criminal psychologist Dr. Trujillo, sniper Diana, ex-special forces soldier Potash, and ring leader Ostler. After months of hunting in the small midwestern town of Fort Bruce, more demons begin to appear, and John fears that the Withered are starting to hunt his team in return.Their next confrontation goes awry when Kelly is killed by the target demon. John bursts in and ends its life, but loses control and stabs the body dozens of times. Their next target is Meshara, a demon in the body of a man named Elijah who consistently visits a patient with Alzheimer's. After speaking with him undercover, John hypothesizes that he isn't a killer. Next, a victim of a cannibal attack is found, and the team uses their criminal profiling skills to try to determine this new demon's weakness. It sends letters to the team, using the name "the Hunter." New evidence from Brooke suggests that there are two factions of demons who are enemies. During a police raid, the team finds John was right about Meshara/Elijah: he has no desire to kill, and even saves the humans from the other Withered. Meanwhile, John grows frustrated with his team, and feels that he could work more effectively on his own. He begins communicating with the Hunter in secret.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_Agenda_of_Sigrid_Sugden"title="The Hidden Agenda of Sigrid Sugden">
Sigrid Sugden is a member of the Shrikes, the toughest girl bullies. When one of her victims barely escapes fatal danger, Sigrid decides to quit the group—however, it is not that simple. Sigrid, by leaving the only "friends" she had, has left herself miserable from cold stares from her classmates. With problems at home and from the rest of the Shrikes, Sigrid becomes friends with Hud, determined to make everything right.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_(Gurnah_novel)"title="Paradise (Gurnah novel)">
The novel follows the story of Yusuf, a boy born in the fictional town of Kawa in Tanzania at the turn of the 20th century. Yusuf's father is a hotelier and is in debt to a rich and powerful Arab merchant named Aziz. Early in the story Yusuf is pawned in exchange for his father's owed debt to Aziz and must work as an unpaid servant for the merchant. Yusuf joins Aziz's caravan as they travel into the interior to the lands west of Lake Tanganyika. Here, Aziz's caravan of traders meets hostility from local tribes, wild animals and difficult terrain. As the caravan returns to East Africa, World War I begins and Yusuf encounters the German Army as they sweep Tanzania, forcibly conscripting African men as soldiers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Deserve_a_Drink"title="You Deserve a Drink">
The book details humorous anecdotes and stories of Hart's life, with a cocktail recipe accompanying each chapter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Colts_Ran"title="When Colts Ran">
The "Colts" of the title is the principal character, Kingsley Colts, an orphan being raised by World War I veteran Dunc Buckler and his wife Veronica. The novel follows the arc of Colts's life, from station hand to World War II in New Guinea to livestock agent, broken, forlorn and alcoholic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_(Nowra_novel)"title="Ice (Nowra novel)">
A pair of ambitious young British entrepreneurs, Malcolm McEacharn and Andrew McIlwraith, charter a steamer with the aim of towing an iceberg from Antarctica to Sydney. The success of the venture transforms Sydney, and McEacharn who later becomes lord mayor of Melbourne.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_the_Lines_(novel)"title="Between the Lines (novel)">
Delilah, a 15-year-old teenager, bookworm, and social outcast is obsessed with a fairy tale story about Prince Oliver called "Between the Lines". No one is able to understand Delilah's obsession with a book written for children. Delilah's parents are divorced, and her best friend is a punk-rocker named Jules, who is an outcast of her own choosing. Delilah feels caught between her erratic family life and her loneliness at school. While Delilah loves her over-protective mother dearly, she also wishes for something more. Delilah creates a vision of what her father must be like, as she has never known him. All she knows about her father is that he left when she was a baby, and that he has his own life. Delilah's nemesis is the most popular girl in school, Ally McAndrews.Delilah confides her worries to Prince Oliver and is shocked when he suddenly begins to talk back to her. Before long, Delilah and Oliver forge a bond neither have experienced before, and they begin to fall in love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Man_(novel)"title="Water Man (novel)">
The "water man" of the book's title is a water diviner—or rather two water diviners: one working on an Australian station in 1939 and the other working the same property 50 years later. Events surrounding the first divining echo down the years to the second, when tensions left unresolved re-emerge and engulf a new set of characters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daughters_of_Mars"title="The Daughters of Mars">
Sally and Naomi Durance are two nurses from country New South Wales who are shipped to Egypt during World War I end up on the Red Cross hospital ship "Archimedes", stationed in the Dardanelles. The novel follows the sisters through that campaign and on to northern Europe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People's_Train"title="The People's Train">
The novel is a fictionalised account of the Australian life of Fyodor Sergeyev, given in the book as Artem Samsurov, a Russian émigré to Australia who would later play a significant role in Lenin’s government.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-Wolf"title="Double-Wolf">
The novel is a fictionalised account of the life of Wolf-Man, Sigmund Freud's most famous patient, counter-pointed with an account of Artie Catacomb, a con-man and psychoanalyst living in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_China"title="After China">
Mr You, an ex-patriate Chinese architect, has designed a strange labyrinthine hotel overlooking the ocean. While holidaying in the completed structure he meets a woman on a beach who is dying of cancer. He finds himself drawn to the woman and spins her tales of an ancient China that never existed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bath_Fugues"title="The Bath Fugues">
"The Bath Fugues" is a novel of three sections, all interconnecting and modelled on the structure of the Goldberg variations. The first section, "Beckett's Bicycle", tells the story of Jason Redvers, an art forger and writer. The second, "Walter's Brief", concerns Redvers's grandfather Camilo Conceicao, a Portuguese poet. The last, "Sarraute's Surgery", is set in and around Port Douglas in Queensland and features local GP, Judith Sarraute, who had been Redvers's doctor when she was still practising in Sydney.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Dancing"title="Shanghai Dancing">
The novel's main character is, like the author, named Castro, living in Australia and hailing from a Chinese and Portuguese background. Antonio Castro is attempting to come to an understanding of his complicated family history, and in particular, about the lives of his parents in Shanghai during the 1930s.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Career_of_Evil"title="Career of Evil">
After murdering a woman, an unidentified man stalks Robin Ellacott, whom he sees as part of his plan to exact revenge against private investigator Cormoran Strike. Robin, having worked for Strike for a year, is now a full-time investigator in addition to being his secretary. Strike has developed a relationship with radio presenter Elin but continues to harbour feelings for Robin, whose fiancé Matthew disapproves of the work she is doing.One day, Robin receives a package containing a woman's severed leg and a message quoting the Blue Öyster Cult song "Mistress of the Salmon Salt (Quicklime Girl)". Strike, who recognises the song as a favourite of his deceased mother, Leda, concludes someone from his past sent the package. He then approaches Detective Inspector Eric Wardle with four possible suspects, three of whom he knew from his time in the SIB:To Strike's annoyance, the police only focus their investigation on Malley because of his previous tactic of mailing body parts. Strike and Robin decide to initiate a parallel investigation, which they begin by reviewing 'unusual correspondence' that had been sent to the office throughout the years, stored in what the pair light-heartedly call the 'nutters' drawer. Found among these are several letters from a young woman who had once requested Strike's help in amputating her own leg as a result of body dysmorphia. They begin to fear that the leg sent to Robin had belonged to this young woman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umbrella_(children's_book)"title="Umbrella (children's book)">
"Umbrella" is a short story where a little girl is the principal character. Her name is Momo, which means "peach" in Japanese, and she was born in New York.Momo carries the blue umbrella and wears the rubber boots that she was given on her third birthday. She asks her mother every day to use her umbrella. Momo tried to tell her mother she needed to carry the umbrella to the school because the sunshine and the wind bothered her eyes. But her mother didn't let her use the umbrella and advises her to wait until the rain comes. The rain took a long time to fall down because it was Indian summer, however, when the rain came, her umbrella was the perfect excuse to use that day. Momo was happy, the rain sound over her umbrella was a music for her. It is a fresh children's story with classic and very colorful Japanese illustrations that reflect its culture.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_the_People_from_the_Bridge"title="With the People from the Bridge">
"With the People from the Bridge" follows the main line of narrative of "", the first book of the Poena Damni trilogy. The work opens with a first-person account of the narrator of "Z213: Exit", who recounts his arrival at a derelict train station named Nichtovo in search of a place where, he has been told, an improvised performance is being staged by, what appear to be, a band of social outcasts. The narrator joins the few members of the audience present and goes on to record in his journal the setting as well as the events taking place "on stage” as the performance is about to begin. A group of four women in the role of a Chorus and three other protagonists (LG, NCTV, Narrator) are making their final preparations in front of a dilapidated car among machine parts and the noise of a generator. As the lights "on stage" are lowered the performance sets off with the Chorus's opening monologue followed in turn by the sequence of recitations of the other characters. The story unfolds during the timeline of a calendar day dedicated to the dead, a kind of All Souls' Day or Saturday of Souls. The plot-line originates in the Bible incident (Mark, 5:9), according to which the Gerasene demoniac begs Jesus to spare him from his torments. In the play enacted, LG assumes and expands on the role of the demoniac, recounting his past condition and describing how he has ended up taking residence in a cemetery. In a kind of simultaneous narration, LG recounts how he has opened the grave of his deceased companion (NCTV), prompted by voices he has been hearing. He enters, finds her body inside and feels compelled to stay with her, eventually making the realization that she is gradually coming back to life. Meanwhile, the Chorus are making preparations in anticipation of the yearly visit of their deceased kin and LG and NCTV eventually join them after having broken off from a crowd of revenants aroused on the occasion of the Soul Saturday. As the day comes to an end, LG and NCTV leave and become again part of the crowd they had broken off from. Despite trying to hold on to each other they are finally absorbed in an indefinite collective of souls moving ahead and cross “the bridge between the worlds" as a Christian-like resurrection appears on the horizon. The book concludes with the epilogue of the on-stage(internal) Narrator recounting the process by which a mob gathered in a cemetery unearths two bodies, ritually “killing” the female by driving a stake in her chest, in a manner akin to handling vampires in the Slavonic tradition. A final narrative twist is offered by the presence of a tabloid clipping which delivers the reader back to a stark and gruesome every-day reality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Awful_Mess_on_Via_Merulana"title="That Awful Mess on Via Merulana">
In fascist Italy in 1927, Detective Francesco Ingravallo, known to friends as Don Ciccio, is called in to investigate the murder of Liliana Balducci, a well-to-do woman who happens to be a close friend. As Don Ciccio and his colleagues dig deeper into the grisly murder, the mechanics of the detective novel take a backseat to the wordplay and experimentation with which Gadda presents a panorama of life in early fascist Rome.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cottage_outside_the_Village"title="The Cottage outside the Village">
The novel tells the tragic story of the Gypsy, Tumry, and his wife Motruna, daughter of the farmer Lepiuk. Tumry abandons his nomadic life for the sake of his beloved and decides to settle in the village, where he takes up blacksmithing. However, Motruna's marriage to the Gypsy is not to the liking of her father, who curses his daughter and turns the whole village community against them. The first cottage built by Tumry, next to the cemetery, is set afire by Motruna's envious father, and Tumry undertakes to rebuild their home. The young couple are discriminated against and are denied any help by the village. They receive support from the French mistress, and subsequent wife, of the village's squire, Adam, but she soon dies.When the itinerant Gypsies return to the village and Aza, the squire's Gypsy former mistress regains her influence with him, assistance from the manor ceases. The sight of Aza, whom Tumry had once felt not indifferent about, rouses his hidden jealousy. Extreme poverty and inner emotional conflict lead to his suicide.The widow and her daughter Marysia are looked after by the handicapped Janek, and later by the poor lady physician Sołoducha. But Mortuna dies, and her twelve-year-old daughter, with the support of Sołoducha and her blind husband Rataj, takes charge of her parents' farm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_in_at_the_Door"title="Come in at the Door">
Chester Hurry lives with his widowed father, Robert, and an African American domestic servant, Mitty. Mitty had come to the family with Chester's mother when she married Robert. At the time the story commences, Mitty has become a surrogate mother to Chester and is involved in a sexual relationship with Robert. The trio occupies the traditional Hurry home in Hodgetown on an increasingly impoverished farm. Adjacent to the home are two cabins, one occupied by an elder African American couple, Hattie and Jim. The second is vacant. The placid rhythm of the family's life is interrupted by the arrival of Baptiste, an educated, francophone, mixed-race drifter. Robert asks Baptiste to occupy the second cabin and tutor Chester, who had not till then attended school.Witnessing a botched hanging in the county seat of Athelstan becomes a pivotal trauma in Chester's early life. Following an illness not long after that event, young Chester is sent to live with his mother's family in Reedyville, which is the setting for many of the stories in the Pearl County series. The time for Chester's return to Hodgetown comes and goes. Chester continues to live with his widowed grandfather, unmarried great-aunt, and uncle Bushrod “Bush” Tarleton, and his mother's family encourages Chester academically. Chester forms a close relationship with Bushrod, who's been left single when his wife, a sexually promiscuous woman in Reedyville, leaves him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyrant's_Novel"title="The Tyrant's Novel">
An unnamed country's tyrannical ruler, Great Uncle, commands author Alan Sheriff to ghost-write a novel that will have the literary circles of the western world talking about him. The novel is told from the point-of-view of Sheriff after he has arrived in Australia as a refugee and been incarcerated in a detention centre.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Une_adolescence_en_Gueldre"title="Une adolescence en Gueldre">
In his diary Ange Vincent tells of his life as an adolescent with the Prins family in the Veluwe, Holland.The father of the family, a great lover of literature, gives him the task of translating "Don Quixote".He also accompanies the two sons of the family on their wanderings.They are both much older than the narrator, who is twelve and is starting to become aware of girls, including the naive Germaine, the provocative Mara and the languid Carlijn.The two boys, Han and Jan, are fascinated by the same woman.She has a strange resemblance to a portrait of Saint Mary Magdalene, thought to be painted by an unknown 16th century Flemish artist.The narrator must not make eye contact with the woman, who may be a saint or a prostitute.The ambiguous portrait comes to dominate the narrative.The narrator recalls his troubled relationship with his mother and the inability to "engage with life" that has made him a wanderer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crossroads_of_Time"title="The Crossroads of Time">
In the fall of 1955, in New York City, as the snow begins to fall, Blake Walker has come from Ohio to attend college. Goaded by one of the forebodings that have punctuated his life, he rescues a man from a kidnapper and then discovers that the kidnapper's friends have taken an unhealthy interest in him. The man he rescued, Mark Kittson, arranges for him to disappear into an organization that occupies a hidden apartment. There he meets the other members of Kittson's team, Jason Saxton, Stan Erskine, and Hoyt.The next day, alone in the apartment, Blake hears someone trying to break in. At the same time he is subjected to a telepathic assault that knocks him out. When he regains consciousness he tells Kittson and the others what happened. Kittson explains to him that he and the others are agents from an alternate Earth, one more advanced technologically and psychically than is Blake's Earth. They are hunting a criminal, Kmoat Vo Pranj, who may have been the burglar Blake semi-encountered. Discerning that their hideout has been discovered and may be subject to a police raid, the men move their operation to a house on Patroon Place in the Mount Union section of the city, picking up a stray kitten that Hoyt begins to train telepathically.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_Crosstime"title="Quest Crosstime">
While visiting with her sister a version of Earth on which life never began, Marva Rogan has gone missing. Her sister Marfy is certain that she is still alive, but is equally certain that she is no longer on that timetrack. Blake Walker, on his first solo mission as an Apt Wardsman, picks up Marfy to take her back to Vroom, succeeding in spite of someone having sabotaged his crosstime shuttle.Based on clues found in Marva's personal possessions, Com Varlt decides to take a search team into a world in which the Nation of New Britain and the Toltec Empire glare at each other across the Mississippi River. Varlt, Walker, Marfy, Pague Lo Sige, and several other agents disguise themselves as a team of licensed traders and make their way to the trade town of Xomatl.Marfy locates Marva on the estate of a minor lord and she, Walker, and Lo Sige extract Marva from that estate, carrying her, wrapped in vines covered with fragrant flowers, off the estate during a ceremony in which guests are expected to ravish and plunder the estate's formal garden. The person driving the getaway van then takes the four of them to an isolated house, where they are rendered unconscious. When they wake up they discover that they have been taken to the lifeless Earth and abandoned to starve to death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Quite_a_Husband"title="Not Quite a Husband">
The novel starts the summer of 1897, three years after a married couple, Bryony Asquith and Leo Marsden, have been estranged. Dr. Asquith is required at her home in England, and her family has asked her husband to retrieve her at her clinic in the Rumbur valley of the Chitral District in what was then the northwest frontier of India.In the course of their journey to return to England, they are caught up in a revolt against the British and seek refuge in the fort at Chakdarra and participate in defending the fort during the Siege of Malakand. During the course of their journey home, they reconcile the differences that had kept them apart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_at_Night"title="His at Night">
The novel is set in Victorian England. Lord Vere, an agent of the crown, and his accomplices have managed to become house guests of a reclusive suspect while he is out of town. Their hostess is his niece, Elissande Edgerton. She sees his sudden arrival as means for her and her aunt to escape her tyrannical uncle by making him fall in love with her in the three days she has until her uncle's return. The problem is, Lord Vere is unforgivingly stupid. So she sets her sights on Lord Vere's brother, Freddie.Lord Vere poses as one of society's most bumbling bachelors as his disguise. The need to play that role in front of the niece chafes at first, until he sees her as a conniving gold digger determined to entrap his brother in marriage. While trying to gather evidence on the uncle, he tries to foil the niece's plans, only to become entrapped himself.Now married, Elissande has freed not only herself, but her sickly aunt, who is addicted to laudanum. But on the uncle's return, he demands the return of his wife or he'll maim her idiot of a husband. Meanwhile, Lord Vere has gathered evidence they need, but have also uncovered that he is a murderer and the uncle is arrested.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(novel)"title="Delicious (novel)">
Set in England, the novel alternates between the story's present in 1892 and flashbacks to 1882.Verity Durant is a fallen woman who works as a chef for a former lover. However, she still dreams of the man she spent one perfect night with ten years ago, rising politician Stuart Somerset.When her employer dies, the new heir is none other than Somerset. Somerset is the strait-laced illegitimate son of a noble and has become engaged to a woman with good connections.Fate intervenes, and she has a chance to cook a dinner for him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouseheart"title="Mouseheart">
The series follows Hopper, a pet store mouse that escapes, only to end up in Atlantia, a colony created entirely of rats that lies underneath the city of Brooklyn. He quickly makes friends, however he also finds that the colony is constantly plagued by rebels and various other troubles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_a_Chav"title="Diary of a Chav">
The series follows Shiraz Bailey-Wood, a 15-year-old girl growing up in Goodmayes, Essex. At the series' start she's largely content to live her life as an underachiever and cause trouble, but things change after she receives a diary and begins recording the events of her daily life. Soon she begins to want more out of life than the chav lifestyle that she's been experiencing and starts expressing a desire to become a professional writer and publish her own autobiography. This decision does not come without opposition as there are many who believe this to be an unobtainable dream and one that is not suitable for someone like Shiraz, however she continues to persevere despite multiple setbacks and obstacles. In the first book, "Trainers V. Tiaras"; Shiraz worries that her school Mayflower Comprehensive will still live up to its reputation of being "Superchav Academy" a nickname given to the school by the local newspapers and especially with a stunt that happened during the Christmas assembly which Shiraz was the instigator of; however, that all started to change, once a new English teacher Miss. Bracket arrived and saw potential in Shiraz and was concerned why she would not want to succeed, however Shiraz' world is turned upside down when her best friend Carrie Draper starts fancying a local boy called Bezzie Kelleher and sets a double date for both Bezzie, Carrie and Wesley Barrington Bains II (Bezzie's best friend) and Shiraz, the date did not go to plan as both Bezzie and Carrie dropped off Wesley and Shiraz whilst they go for a drive around Essex, Shiraz is not too sure if she fancies Wesley or not.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Sweet_and_Bitter_Earth"title="This Sweet and Bitter Earth">
In 1900, a 16-year-old Toby Davies, the narrator of the story, leaves Wrexham workhouse after his Mother dies, and makes his way to the North Wales slate quarries. Failing to get a job at Port Dinorwic, the port from where the slate is sent all over the world, he makes his way to Blaenau Ffestiniog, where he gets a job in the Llechwedd slate quarries, lodging with Ben O’Hara and his wife Nanwen. Toby starts as a ‘rubbisher’ (labourer), before learning the dangerous job of rockman.The O’Hara’s, Toby and his grandfather move into a new cottage in Bethesda and Toby goes for a job with the quarries owned by Lord Penrhyn. Toby realises that he loves Nan and also renews acquaintance with the promiscuous Bron, whom he knew in the workhouse, now working as a barmaid. Bron has a son whom she knows as ‘Bibs’ by an unknown father.The men working at the Big Hole strike over poor conditions and the quarries are closed by Lord Penrhyn. Several hundred men, forced by starvation, break the strike and are denounced as "bradwr" (traitors). Bron is cast out of her chapel for adultery with Sam Jones, Toby’s one-time friend. Toby’s grandfather commits suicide. Ben is found to have embezzled Combination strike relief funds; he and Nanwen are expelled from the community and it is supposed that they have gone to Ireland.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiding_in_the_Mirror"title="Hiding in the Mirror">
The work draws on the works of scientists, mathematicians, artists, and writers to consider the cultural and scientific aspects of extra dimensions. The book explores popular theories about such topics as black holes, life in other dimensions, and string theory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Rain_(novel)"title="Salt Rain (novel)">
After the disappearance of her mother Mae, fourteen-year-old Allie Curran goes to live with her aunt Julia in the small dairy farm where Mae grew up. Allie slowly comes to learn about her heritage, her family, and her mother's story. A reversal of the classic Australian theme of a child lost in the bush.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prosperous_Thief"title="The Prosperous Thief">
Alice Lewin has survived the Second World War and, as an adult, visits the Kindertransport archive where she learns of a possible relative. She travels to Australia in an attempt to meet Henry Lewin, but it is a meeting with unforeseen consequences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperium_(Kracht_novel)"title="Imperium (Kracht novel)">
August Engelhardt is the author of an 1898 pamphlet entitled "A Carefree Future", where he describes a utopian society founded on nudism and a diet of coconuts, so-called cocovorism. An ardent vegetarian, Engelhardt argues that just as man is God's embodiment in the animal kingdom, so too is the coconut God's embodiment in the plant kingdom; cocovorism, he concludes, is therefore the path to divinity. Fleeing the persecution he endured for his peculiarities, Engelhardt travels from Germany to the Bismarck Archipelago in German New Guinea to realize his ideas on a coconut plantation. During a stop in Ceylon, however, he meets a Tamil named Govindarajan, who also claims to be a fruitarian, in order to gain Engelhardt's trust, before robbing him of his savings. Engelhardt arrives destitute at Herbertshöhe, where he meets Emma Forsayth, known as Queen Emma, from whom he acquires the island Kabakon on credit. He also meets a sailor named Christian Slütter who studies to become a captain. Engelhardt establishes his order and hires natives as laborers for the coconut plantation, financing everything through loans and credit. He practices nudism, eats nothing but coconuts and begins advertising his new paradise abroad.The first to answer Engelhardt's call to Kabakon and the Order of the Sun is a German named Aueckens. His initial rapport with Engelhardt crumbles when the latter discovers that he is both a homosexual and an antisemite, neither of which Engelhardt approves of. Shortly after raping Makeli, a native boy, Aueckens is found dead under mysterious circumstances. According to the perfunctory police report, he died from a falling coconut. Engelhardt then hears about a project in Fiji similar to his own, which heartens and intrigues him. A man named Mittenzwey is said to be a light eater who nourishes himself only with sunlight. Engelhardt visits Mittenzwey but discovers him to be a fraud, who in collaboration with Govindarajan accepts expensive gifts from his followers but eats food in secret.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Without_My_Daughter_(book)"title="Not Without My Daughter (book)">
It was August 3, 1984. Moody, Betty, and Mahtob had spent two days traveling from their home in Detroit to Moody's native country of Iran. In preparation for their arrival, Betty, at Moody's request, gave her American passport to him in order for it not to be confiscated by the customs official. When they had landed in Tehran, Moody's family had gathered at the airport to meet them and showered them with gifts. The family gave Betty a montoe and a roosarie (traditional female clothes in Iran) and instructed her to wear them whenever she went outside their home.During the next two weeks, Betty and Mahtob longed for the vacation to be over. They had difficulty adjusting to the Iranian lifestyle. They also faced familial challenges: Moody's sister, Ameh Bozorg, (literally "great aunt"), who was their host, viewed Betty with contempt, simply for being an American and holding to American ideals. Moody's attitude toward Betty also changed: He forced her to abide by increasingly strict Iranian customs; he lied to her; he claimed that she was lying whenever she complained; he ignored her and their daughter for days at a time; he even blinded himself to the oppression of women in Iran.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_Notes_from_Beautiful_Girls"title="Suicide Notes from Beautiful Girls">
June and Delia used to be best friends; the type of friendship that you think is going to last forever. Built upon shared love, experiences, and secrets, one night everything goes too far. Now they haven't spoken for a year. Then an announcement at school that Delia is dead leaves June reeling and unable to believe her friend's actions. Pushed by Delia's ex-boyfriend Jeremiah, June begins to wonder if it really was suicide at all – or was Delia murdered.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_Wild"title="Half Wild">
Nathan is currently in Switzerland, living as a nomad for a few weeks. He has been unsuccessfully searching for the Fairborn, a knife that can only be used by Nathan's bloodline. His friend, Gabriel, is missing. Nathan meets Nesbitt, who is Van's assistant. Nesbitt is half fain and half Black witch. Nathan does not spend the night with Nesbitt. However, he hears the sound of a mobile phone. This means that there are Hunters nearby. Nesbitt catches one of the Hunters, while the other, Kieran, Annalise's brother, turns invisible. It is then that Nathan feels the animal in him, and he kills Kieran. The next day, Nesbitt brings Nathan to Van. On his second night, Van informs Nathan of all that has happened. Soul, Annalise's uncle, has taken charge of the Council of White witches and is letting Wallend experiment on Black witches. Van agrees to help.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khirer_Putul"title="Khirer Putul">
The king of Deepnagar had two queens Suo Rani and Duo Rani. The king gave Suo Rani 7 palaces, 700 female slaves, best ornaments from 7 kingdoms, 7 gardens, 7 chariots. He neglected Duo Rani and gave her a broken home, a deaf and dumb maid, torn clothes and a dirty bed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Morning_I'll_Be_Gone"title="In the Morning I'll Be Gone">
In Belfast, September 1983, in the middle of The Troubles, Sergeant Sean Duffy, one of the few Catholics in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), is drummed out of the RUC on trumped up charges. At the same time, Dermot McCann, an IRA master bomber and ex-schoolmate of Duffy's escapes from the Maze prison and becomes a prime target for British Intelligence. MI5 drags Duffy out of his drunken retirement to track down McCann. The novel follows Duffy's attempts to solve a locked-room murder in order to obtain inside information on McCann's whereabouts, which finally leads to the assassination attempt on British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Brighton.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Little_Lies_(novel)"title="Big Little Lies (novel)">
Jane, a single mother, is on her way to Pirriwee Public School in Sydney's Northern Beaches, where her son Ziggy is starting kindergarten. On the way, she meets Madeline, another mother with a daughter of the same age. Madeline's friend Celeste is also sending her twin sons, Max and Josh, to school. The two strike up a friendship with Jane. All three of them have their own problems: Madeline is resentful that her daughter from her previous marriage is growing close to her ex-husband's new wife, Bonnie; Celeste is physically abused by her rich banker husband, Perry; and Jane was raped and left to raise her son Ziggy on her own. To make matters worse for her, Ziggy is accused of bullying Amabella, his future classmate, during orientation. As months pass, the three become close and Jane shares her experience with the other women. Jane tells the two other women that Ziggy is the result of a rape by a man named Saxon Banks when Jane was 19. Celeste and Madeline realize that the father is Perry's cousin, but decide to keep it from Jane for the time being. Meanwhile, Celeste's marriage becomes even more violent and she starts meeting with a counselor and rents an apartment for herself and her sons without Perry's knowledge. Ziggy is once again accused of bullying Amabella, and again denies it. Jane finds out that Ziggy is keeping a secret about who is hurting Amabella and persuades him to write down the name of the child, which turns out to be Max, one of Celeste's twins, but she is not sure how to broach the subject with Celeste.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outcast_(novel)"title="The Outcast (novel)">
Sorak is part elf and part halfling and has multiple personalities as a result of childhood trauma and is on a quest for a savior for the dying world of Athas.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singular_Universe_and_the_Reality_of_Time"title="The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time">
The book discusses a number of philosophical and physical ideas on the true role of time in the Universe. The text is roughly divided into two halves, the first one written by Unger, and the second by Smolin, both developing the same themes in different ways, with Smolin being more focused on the physics.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rod_of_Seven_Parts_(novel)"title="The Rod of Seven Parts (novel)">
Kip Kayle, a thief, accidentally gets involved in a quest to restore the Rod of Seven Parts, and as the quest progresses it leads to a vast cosmic battle between the forces of Law and Chaos.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_Scoundrels"title="Lord of Scoundrels">
In the story's prologue, Sebastian Ballister is born in Devon to the 2nd Marquess of Dain and his Italian wife, Lucia Usignuolo. The Marquess is disgusted with the child, describing him as the "Devil's spawn" and a "wizened olive thing with large black eyes, ill-proportioned limbs, and a grossly oversize nose". Eight years later, the tempestuous Lucia abandons her husband for her lover. Unloved by his father and told that his mother is an "evil, godless creature", Sebastian is sent off to Eton where he is teased by his classmates over his appearance. The boy grows up learning to hide his feelings; given no inheritance by his father, Sebastian acquires clever ways to make his fortune and uses money to unscrupulously get his way.The story begins in 1828, Paris. Sebastian, now the intelligent but immoral 3rd Marquess of Dain, meets his match in Miss Jessica Trent, who has arrived in the city to rescue her unintelligent, nearly penniless brother Bertie from Dain's bad influence. Dain and Jessica are instantly attracted to the other, though each seeks to hide their feelings. Dain has developed a hard, sarcastic personality; he is hostile to noblewomen, as he believes they care only for money. Jessica, a 27-year-old beautiful, strong-willed bluestocking, has refused dozens of marriage proposals over the years and wishes to maintain her independence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fade_Away_(novel)"title="Fade Away (novel)">
"Fade Away" is a novel featuring Myron Bolitar, a sports agent, hired by the New Jersey Dragons to find a missing basketball star. Myron and his team of associates, work together to puzzle out the disappearance of Greg Downing,drawing Myron into danger, both physical and emotional.Myron Bolitar is a sports agent and sometimes investigator, called by Clip Arnstein, theowner of the New Jersey Dragons. Clip's star player is missing and he wants Myron tofind him. Greg Downing had been Myron's rival throughout their youth and college days.Both had been drafted to play professional basketball, but Greg is the only one thatmade it. Myron's knee had been injured in what was believed to be a freak accident onthe court, and he had never played professionally. Clip wants Myron to take Greg'splace on the team, feeling that the other players would be more open with him ratherthan an investigator. Myron is reluctant yet excited at the same time. Having never hadthe opportunity to play pro-ball, he is anxious to know if he can make it with theDragons.Myron investigates Greg's disappearance with the help of his closest friend, Win. Thetwo men discover a mysterious woman had left a message on Greg's answeringmachine to arrange a meeting the night he vanished. Following leads, Myron discovers
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DUFF_(novel)"title="The DUFF (novel)">
High school student Bianca Piper, along with her friends Casey Blithe and Jessica Gaither, frequent a teen lounge called the Nest. One January night as Casey and Jessica are dancing, another student named Wesley Rush, who has a reputation as a womanizer, approaches Bianca. He explains that he wants people to see him talking with her, because she is the DUFF, the Designated Ugly Fat Friend, and a connection with her will bring other, more attractive women to him. Disgusted, Bianca finds her friends and leaves. A few nights later, however, Wesley approaches Bianca at the club again after Bianca had a particularly bad day, and Bianca spontaneously kisses Wesley in order to distract herself from her problems.Bianca's mother Gina, a self-help lecturer, has been disappearing for longer and longer periods of time on her business trips, and one day she sends Bianca's father, Mike, divorce papers. This drives Mike Piper to start drinking again and to demolish the living room, and when Wesley plans to come to Bianca's house to work on an English paper together on the novel "The Scarlet Letter", Bianca suggests going to Wesley's house instead so that no one discovers about her parents' divorce. In Wesley's room, Bianca kisses him again and ends up sleeping with him. She insists, however, that she hates him, and he continues to address her as "Duffy". Bianca does not tell Casey or Jessica about sleeping with Wesley, or about her parents' divorce.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bathhouse"title="The Bathhouse">
In 1930 the inventor Chudakov creates the Time machine, but experiences great difficulties, having to face the Soviet bureaucracy, mainly in the face of Pobedonosikov, an archetype bureaucrat. The Phosphorescent Woman arrives from 2030 (sent by the Institute of Studying of the History of Communism) and invites to her time and space every single person who's got at least some virtue. As the expedition starts into the Communist future, Pobedonosikov and other 'baddies' get thrown off the Machine, ejected by the Time itself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Honeymoon_(novel)"title="Second Honeymoon (novel)">
This book has two plots. The primary plot concerns a serial killer who targets newlyweds on their honeymoons. FBI agent John O'Hara (who was central to the first book of this series) works this case, trying to determine who the killer is and why the killer targets particular newlyweds, but in a seemingly random manner. The second plot involves O'Hara personally, but he does not know this until another FBI agent, Sarah Brubaker, brings the matter to his attention.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slow_Regard_of_Silent_Things"title="The Slow Regard of Silent Things">
The novella is focused on Auri, a character from "The Kingkiller Chronicle" and her adventures in the Underthing, a hidden location of old rooms and tunnels under the University. Through the seven days narrated in the book, Auri explores the Underthing, awaiting a visit from Kvothe, a time period that is covered specifically between chapters seven and eleven of "The Wise Man's Fear".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butcher's_Broom_(novel)"title="Butcher's Broom (novel)">
The book opens on Dark Mairi, a local healer and widow making her way back to the Strath where she, her grandson Davie and Elie (a young woman from the community) live. They live on the Riasgan estate where they have lived for many years under the ancient clan system. The decline of the clan system is one of the catalysts that drives the Clearances and the plot of the novel. Elie falls in love with Colin, a young man in the community and falls pregnant to him, just as he leaves to go to fight in the Napoleonic Wars for regiment raised by the local Captain, who as tacksman emigrates, leaving his community lacking the protection he once provided.Elie wanders the Lowlands destitute with her child but returns to the community an outcast just as the threat of clearance hangs over the whole Strath (this is carried out by a thinly veiled equivalent of Patrick Sellar called Heller). Through this all Young Davie struggles to regain his trust for Elie, and Elie also attracts the attentions of Rob the Miller, who eventually marries her.The community is burned out and cleared to the rocky shore, with a wall erected to stop them using their old lands. They eke out a pitiful existence in a harsh environment. Mairi is killed at the end by an estate sheepdog. Colin returns from the war to find his community relocated and overtly changed. He encounters he and Elie's son Colin, and together, although not recognising each other as father and son they bury Mairi according to custom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleights_of_Mind"title="Sleights of Mind">
Macknik and Martinez-Conde say that magic tricks fool us because humans have hardwired processes of attention and awareness that are hackable. Good magicians use our inherent mental and neural limitations against us by leading us to perceive and feel what we are neurologically inclined to. Working with renowned magicians like Apollo Robbins, Teller, Mac King, and James Randi, Macknik and Martinez-Conde research the ways in which the perceptual and cognitive elements of magic relate to more than simple deceits. The authors reveal the neural underpinnings of the magical methods that explain how our brains perceive magic.Through their exploration, Macknik and Martinez-Conde uncover how our brains work in everyday situations. They describe how if you have ever bought an expensive item you had sworn you would never buy, the salesperson was creating the “illusion of choice,” a core technique of magic. They also relate the use of magic to Bernie Madoff’s “illusion of trust”. Through these examples, Macknik’s and Martinez-Conde’s Sleights of Mind illuminates the reasons for studying magic, and its implications for research on, and renewed understanding of, perceptual and cognitive processes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swan_Book"title="The Swan Book">
"The Swan Book" is set in the future, with Aboriginal people still living under the Intervention in the north, in an environment fundamentally altered by climate change. It follows a girl who is pulled from a tree as a child after having been lost and gang-raped, and how she grows up raised by a European immigrant and seemingly guided by swans. After the death of her guardian, she is betrothed to a boy who grows up to become the first Indigenous President of Australia (Prime Minister has been abandoned in this future), and later marries him, despite retaining a childlike mind even as an adult.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Superhero"title="Project Superhero">
At the start of her grade eight school year, Jessie, a 13-year-old girl with a penchant for superhero comic books and journaling, is assigned a year-long school project in her Socials class called the Superhero Slam. In a head-to-head debate tournament, each student must choose a superhero to champion and be ready to present why their superhero is the best in a variety of topics including: wisdom and experience, physical strength and agility, perseverance and determination, critical thinking, recovery, courage, preparation, and leadership.With her superhero preferences for real people equipped with additional training and technology (i.e. Batman, Iron Man), Jessie selects Batgirl as her optimal candidate and begins her research into what makes Batgirl the ideal female superhero. In order to further explore how real people can become superheroes, Jessie resolves to put herself through physical and mental conditioning. She practices martial arts with her aunt and learns about disciplines like determination through letters written to “real life superheroes.” She writes to and receives responses from:Jessie's diary entries are accented by Kris Pearn's illustrations of Jessie and her family and friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weightless_(novel)"title="Weightless (novel)">
The book's plot predominantly centers upon Carolyn Lessing, a beautiful young teenager that has moved to Adamsville, Alabama and has recently begun attending the local high school. She's initially met with a largely positive reception from the student body, as they're both awed and envious of her, and she soon begins dating Shane, one of the most popular guys at school. However even as they praise her, Carolyn is still an outsider and is more treasured for what she represents (wealth, glamour, talent, fame) than for herself as a person - something that becomes more readily apparent when her relationship with Shane brings about the wrath of one of the school's mean girls. As time progresses her peers begin to bully Carolyn, first slowly and then with more emphasis. Despite these actions taking a very negative toll on Carolyn's physical and mental well-being, the bullying is largely met with apathy because it was so slow to develop and most of the onlookers are inured to what they're seeing and many even believe that she brought this about on herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_War_(novel)"title="Act of War (novel)">
The President of the United States Paul Porter and the United States attempt to stop a catastrophic attack on the country by the Chinese. The name of the Chinese plot is Snow Dragon. A division of the Chinese government is planning of Snow Dragon. When one of the cell members of the plot in the United States continually fails to make contact, that division of the Chinese government sends in a known killer and super spy into the U.S. to check things out. The Chinese contracted out the completion of Snow Dragon to Muslims and other extremists in the Middle East. If the U.S. government wants any information or any hope of stopping Snow Dragon they must find anyone and everyone involved in pulling off this catastrophic event.Meanwhile, a team of three Navy SEALS and a CIA officer that are dispatched to spy on North Korea. This is being done because intelligence has told the United States that the Chinese are conducting training missions in the country. Former Navy SEAL, Secret Service member and U.S. hero Scot Harvath. Harvath, who is working with the Carlton Group, a specialized intel and operations group, does whatever it takes to stop the Chinese and keep the U.S. safe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_False_Move_(novel)"title="One False Move (novel)">
One False Move is a novel detailing a period of time in thelife of Myron Bolitar, sports agent, and a long standing secret in his hometown. Myronmeets with Norm Zuckerman the CEO of Zoom sports manufacturing company abouthis star player, Brenda Slaughter. Norm is concerned about threats that Brenda hasbeen receiving and wants Myron to protect her, as well as find out from where thethreats are coming. Though Myron is at first unwilling, the fact that Slaughter has noagent sways him to agree with Norm.Myron is intrigued by Brenda, and agrees to help her, not only to have the chance tobecome her agent, but because he realizes that they have a tie from years past.Brenda's father Horace is missing, and she wants to find him. Myron had known Horaceyears ago and had considered him a friend. Horace had coached Myron in his ownbasketball career, the two losing touch after Myron's career had been tragically ended.Working with Brenda to find her father and mother, Myron realizes that he is falling inlove with her, causing him to question his long term relationship with Jessica, his live-inlover. For years Myron had been trying to hold together a relationship that might nothave been what either party wanted. The easy peace he finds when he is with Brenda is
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Season_of_Storms"title="Season of Storms">
Geralt of Rivia fights a dangerous monster whose only goal in life is to kill people. Shortly afterwards, he is arrested, resulting in the loss of two of his priceless witcher swords. With a little help from his friend Dandelion and his connections, he does everything he can to get his work tools back. In the meantime, he gets into an affair with the sorceress Lytta Neyd (nicknamed Coral), meets influential people and the social margin associated with the country where he lost his swords - Kerack. Geralt soon gets dragged into two dangerous conspiracies (one involving a group of sorcerers, and another involving King Belohun and his bitter sons). These events and the undisguised and reciprocated reluctance of the magicians towards Geralt (who turn out to be related to this story) make the whole thing a series of failures, during which the hero is forced to make difficult decisions.The epilogue of the book is set years after "The Witcher" Saga.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mahabharata_Secret"title="The Mahabharata Secret">
In 244 BC, Indian emperor Ashoka finds a hilly cave with an astonishing secret. Believing it could destroy the world, he creates a secret brotherhood of Nine Men, who would guard the cave's contents through the centuries. He also removed the Vimana Parva chapter of the Indian epic, "Mahabharata", from its written transcripts.In present day, Vikram Singh, an Indian nuclear scientist, is murdered at his fort in Jaungarh. Before his death he sent four cryptic emails to his nephew Vijay, who with his business partner Colin, childhood friend Radha and her father, linguist Dr. Shukla, start analyzing it. They are aided by Bheem Singh, current owner of Rajvirgarh fort and Greg White, an archaeologist mentioned in Vikram's emails. The group deduce that the emails refer to the Nine Men and their secret, which can be revealed by using a metal disc, a key, a ball of rock and a riddle. Their mission is interrupted by a man called Farooq, a Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militant. The group find that the metal disc and the key together point to the Edicts of Ashoka. They travel to Bairat and find a hidden library of the Nine, but are imprisoned inside by Farooq and his men. The group find an alternate route and the ball of rock.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Secret_(novel)"title="Top Secret (novel)">
This novel centers around a new officer, James Cronley, who at the very end of World War II is recruited for a new intelligence operation and is sent to Germany. Cronley suffers a personal tragedy just before being sent to his new post. It is hoped Cronley can become a great asset to the new organization, which is to become the Central Intelligence Agency. Cronley is put in charge of an operation that includes former German officers and he quickly finds himself in charge of a captured Soviet spy. Many of the characters from Argentina in the Honor Bound series make appearances throughout the novel.Cronley gets himself into some situations that will seemingly end his career, but with some guidance from those who are more experienced, he seems to have a chance to redeem himself. He has to convince the Soviet spy to turn against his Soviet masters and it is apparent other spies for the Soviets are working right under Cronley's nose to defeat him. This book does not reveal whether Cronley will succeed or fail completely. The next book in the series picks up the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Princess_X"title="I Am Princess X">
May is a sad and lonely teenager who lives in Atlanta with her mother but spends summers in Seattle with her father. Years ago, before her parents divorced, when they all lived in Seattle, she and her best friend Libby worked together to create the fictional character named Princess X, a warrior-princess who went through whatever adventures the two of them could dream up. This all came to an end when Libby died in a car accident on the Ballard Bridge. Now in present day, May begins seeing stickers and other memorabilia that showcase Princess X during the summer before her 17th birthday. She's directed to a website containing stories of Princess X's exploits, all of which are similar to the stories May wrote years earlier. This leads May to believe that Libby is still alive. She decides to follow a series of subtle clues left by the webcomic with the help of Patrick Hobbs, however as she progresses, she discovers that she is not the only person looking for Libby. May discovers that Libby is indeed alive and that she was actually kidnapped by a man named Ken Mullins who wanted Libby's parents to allow her to be used as part of a medical procedure to save his own daughter, Christine Louise Mullins. They refuse due to the risk of Libby's own health and well-being, only for the man to murder Libby's parents and steal Libby away to raise in the place of his own daughter, who died soon after he was turned away. Libby managed to escape but had to remain continually on the run, as the man kept searching for her and lied to authorities, saying that she was his mentally unhinged daughter. The book ends with May and Libby reuniting, Ken in jail, and Libby adding a new character to help Princess X.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Machine_Age"title="The Second Machine Age">
The authors summarize the contents of their book's 15 chapters on pages 11 and 12 of the book itself.The book is divided into three sections: Chapters 1 through 6 describe "the fundamental characteristics of the second machine age," based on many examples of modern use of technology. Chapters 7 through 11 describe economic impacts of technology in terms of two concepts the authors call "bounty" and "spread." What they call "bounty" is their attempt to measure the benefits of new technology in ways reaching beyond such measures as GDP, which they say is inadequate. They use "spread" as a shorthand way to describe the increasing inequality that is also resulting from widespread new technology.Finally, in chapters 12 through 15, the authors prescribe some policy interventions that could enhance the benefits and reduce the harm of new technologies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Little_Life"title="A Little Life">
The novel focuses on the lives of four friends: Jude St. Francis, a disabled genius with a mysterious past; Willem Ragnarsson, a kind, handsome man who aspires to be an actor; Malcolm Irvine, an architect working at a prestigious firm; and Jean-Baptiste "JB" Marion, a quick-witted painter who wants to make a name in the art world. The book follows their relationships changing under the influence of success, wealth, addiction, and pride.The novel's main focus is the enigmatic lawyer, Jude. He suffers from a damaged spine which leaves him with a limp and excruciating pain in his legs that comes and goes. Unbeknownst to his friends, he also frequently self-harms, one such bout of cutting led Willem to take him to Andy Contractor, Jude's doctor and trusted friend. It is clear that he suffers from debilitating mental trauma from his childhood.Despite this apparent closeness with his friends, Jude finds himself unable to divulge either detail of his past or current state of mind to his roommate. Nonetheless, he thrives in his law practice, and develops a close parent-child relationship with his former professor, Harold, and his wife Julia, which results in the pair adopting him when Jude turns thirty. While thankful, the time before the adoption is filled with further bouts of self-harm, as Jude believes he is inherently unworthy of affection. Meanwhile, the rest of the group finds success in their respective fields, with Willem becoming a star of theater and then film. JB finds success as an artist but also becomes addicted to crystal meth. The group stages an intervention, where JB mocks Jude by doing a crude imitation of his limp. In spite of successful treatment, and a great deal of apologizing, Jude finds it impossible to forgive JB. Willem refuses to forgive him too, causing the group to fragment, with only Malcolm remaining friends with all four members.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_the_Comments"title="Reading the Comments">
The book has eight chapters and gives an overview of comments on the Internet. Reagle covers the concept of Internet anonymity and references Plato's Ring of Gyges story, comparing the ring's power of invisibility to the ability to remain seemingly anonymous on the Internet. Topics covered in the book include the manipulation of online reviews in locations like Yelp, trolling, and online threats of rape and violence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Object_of_My_Affection_(novel)"title="The Object of My Affection (novel)">
George Mullen is a 20-something openly gay man enrolled in the English literature graduate school program at Columbia University. Although somewhat good-looking, George has moderate self-esteem problems and deep commitment issues. The novel is told from his point of view. George begins dating Robert Joley, a handsome, 40-year-old literature professor at the college. Joley (George always refers to him by his last name) also has commitment issues, and George's relationship with him is poor. They attend a party where George meets Nina Borowski, a full-figured woman who counsels battered women and rape victims at a women's crisis center while striving for her Ph.D. in psychology. Joley tells Nina that George wants to move out, even though the men have not discussed this. Angry and hurt, George moves into Nina's Brooklyn apartment. George drops out of Columbia, and takes a job teaching kindergarten alongside Melissa, a trust-fund baby into alternative culture.George and Nina swiftly become best friends, and in time their friendship comes close to approximating romantic love. They have a mutual appreciation for junk food, and both of them are highly disorganized, somewhat lazy, and tend to hoard things. They both enjoy movies, and they impulsively take ballroom dancing lessons. Nina is dating Howard, a feminist and legal aid lawyer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_Piacere"title="Il Piacere">
Andrea Sperelli is a young noble dandy of Rome who lives in Palazzo Zuccari (Trinità dei Monti), although he is originally from Abruzzo. He loves Elena Muti, although she is married to another. Andrea fights a duel with a rival for the affections of yet another married woman, but gets injured, and taken to Francavilla al Mare, where, at Villa Schifanoja, he meets the beautiful Maria Ferres. Andrea, when cured, realizes that he loves both Maria and Elena. At the end of the story, however, he loses both women.Book IOn 31 December 1886 Andrea Sperelli anxiously awaits the arrival of his ex-lover, Elena Muti in his house, Palazzo Zuccari. While waiting for her, he remembers their last farewell, which took place almost two years ago, in March 1885. Elena broke up with him in a carriage, telling him that she is to marry an Englishman. When Elena arrives, he alternates between his feelings of love for her and pain because of their separation. The narrator then explains the history Andrea's family, and his father's advice to Andrea, and his arrival to Rome as a youth. The reader then learns about Andrea and Elena's first meeting, which took place at a dinner party hosted by the Marchesa of Ateleta, Andrea's cousin. The two talk at the party and the next day meet each other again. The two begin an affair, which ends abruptly when Elena announces one night that she is leaving him. After she leaves, Andrea begins a long line of seductions, seducing seven noble women in total. At last he begins to try to seduce Ippolita Albònico. One day, while at a horse race, Andrea angers Ippolita's husband who challenges him to a duel. Even though Andrea is better at fencing, he sustains a grave injury during the duel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_trionfo_della_morte"title="Il trionfo della morte">
The story is set in the Abruzzo region, the birthplace of the author. The noble aesthete Giorgio Aurispa, besotted with his unhappily-married lover Ippolita, leaves Rome after witnessing a suicide. After a brief interlude with Ippolita in Albano, Giorgio receives a telegram from his mother, who lives in the small mountain village of Guardiagrele. Giorgio arrives in the beautiful city of stone, and is fascinated by the sculptures; however, he is equally haunted by popular superstitions and the memories of the suicide of his uncle Demetrio, whom he had loved as a father. Worse, Giorgio discovers that his actual father has squandered the family fortune, forcing his mother and siblings to live in poverty while he carries on with a prostitute. Giorgio curses his father, abandoning his family, and runs to the sea, buying a house on a hill in San Vito Chietino. Ippolita joins him, and the two pursue a summer of decadent languor marred only by Giorgio's developing paranoia towards her. Giorgio is additionally obsessed with death, and matters only become worse after the pair undertake a pilgrimage to the shrine of Casalbordino, where the multitude of desperate supplicants begging cures of the statue of the Madonna drives them away in horror. While Giorgio becomes more and more unmoored and desperate to leave both Abruzzo and what he perceives as Ippolita's unwholesome influence, she remains amused and fascinated by their surroundings. Finally Giorgio decides that his only recourse is to carry her over a seaside cliff, killing the both of them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwattle_Creek"title="Blackwattle Creek">
Ten years after the events of the first book in the series, "The Diggers Rest Hotel", Charlie Berlin is now married and living in Melbourne. His innocent investigations to strange goings-on at a funeral parlour for a friend, leads him to Blackwattle Creek, a former asylum for the criminally insane, to Cold War paranoia and corrupt policemen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_Me_(novel)"title="See Me (novel)">
Colin is a troubled young man with a history of anger problems that stem from his being mercilessly bullied at the various military schools he's attended throughout the years and from parents who have little interest in parenting their child. These issues lead to repeated interactions with the police, to the point where Colin's parents have had enough and throw him out of the house. Maria, on the other hand, has always grown up in a warm and nurturing environment where people have supported her emotionally throughout her law career. Maria and Colin eventually meet one another and begin dating; however, soon Maria begins to receive strange and terrifying messages from an anonymous stalker. She believes that she knows who is sending the messages, causing her to fear for her and Colin's well-being.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimson_Shore"title="Crimson Shore">
Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast is approached by Percival Lake, a sculptor who wishes to hire him as a private investigator. On returning from vacation to his home in Exmouth, Massachusetts, Lake discovered that thieves had stolen his wine collection from the cellar of the lighthouse he calls his home and frustrated by the local police, he wishes to hire Pendergast to investigate. Lured by the promise of a rare bottle of wine as payment, Pendergast and his ward Constance Greene accept the job.While examining the wine cellar, Pendergast discovers an alcove that has been concealed which contains manacles and fragments of human bone. An analysis of the bone reveals that it dates back to the 1840s and Pendergast concludes that it belongs to the captain of the "Pembroke Castle", a ship that disappeared without a trace off the coast of Exmouth. However, their investigation is interrupted by the murder of Morris McCool, an historian looking into local legends. Arcane symbols are carved into his body, as is the word "Tybane". Pendergast and Greene learn that local lore tells stories of a group of genuine witches who fled Salem after the witch trials and settled in the wetlands outside Exmouth. Pendergast dismisses this as superstition, believing that McCool's killer is playing to the locals' fears. A second body, that of local lawyer Dana Dunwoody, is found shortly thereafter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worlds_Beginning"title="Worlds Beginning">
The "New York Times" gave the following synopsis of the novel:Twenty years from now a retired reporter takes time off from cultivating his petunias and his perennial border to write of his own experiences during the dark days after peace, when American civilization seemed about to crack up for good. The "myth of internationalism" had infected big business with a bad case of economic imperialism. But synthetic revolutions in industrial chemistry soon fixed things so foreign nations didn't need a thing we could sell them. Depression, unemployment, bankruptcies, hatred and fear plagued the country. The business-controlled Government was swept out of office by a labor popular front. But things got worse instead of better. ... [W]hile Americans everywhere sank into fatalistic apathy, a new hope was born in the desert town of Indian Pass in Texas, where the Trans-Pecos Chemical Commonwealth was making a plastic substitute for copper wire that was much cheaper and much better than copper. The significance lay in a new concept of ownership. ... The commonwealth idea got rid of all owners of property and also paid no wages, only shares in the earnings. The employees had no participation in the concern. The harder they worked and the more money the commonwealth made, the larger was their share of the earnings. Every foreman was subject to dismissal by a majority vote of the workers under him. Any lazy or inefficient worker was thrown out on his ear by his comrades. Efficiency was wonderful, morale perfect.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner_489"title="Prisoner 489">
On a prison island for the world's worst criminals, a prisoner is set for execution. After absorbing multiple surges of electricity and nearly knocking out power to the entire island, the prisoner dies. The prisoner is buried in the graveyard with a single marker bearing only three digits: 489. After the burial, a violent storm rocks the island and a staff member goes missing. The staff rushes into the storm searching for their lost comrade, but they instead discover that the burial site has been unearthed and the body is missing. With this horrific finding and the strange noises, the staff is unnerved. When the strange noises continue, the staff starts to think something is after them. Faced with an unknown threat, they soon must battle for their lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brotherhood_of_Fear"title="The Brotherhood of Fear">
The novel concerns a prisoner who has escaped detention in a totalitarian future state.The fugitive, Willy Bryo, is pursued by a police officer named Konnr. The pursuit leads the two across a survey of the totalitarian state, until they both shipwreck on a utopian island not under the governance of the state. The two intruders disturb the homeostasis of the island, and, by the conclusion of the novel, the fugitive is leading a posse of locals to hunt down his pursuer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_(novel)"title="Ideal (novel)">
Millionaire Granton Sayers is killed on the same evening that he has dinner with famous actress Kay Gonda. Gonda goes on the run, and both the police and journalist Morrison Pickens are searching for her. Pickens visits Gonda's publicist, Mick Watts, who is drunk and rambles about Gonda being on a "great quest". Gonda has taken with her six letters written by fans in the Los Angeles area. She visits each of the letter writers seeking their help to hide, but she is repeatedly disappointed.The first fan, George Perkins, initially offers to hide Gonda, but changes his mind when his wife objects. The wife of the second fan, Jeremiah Sliney, is more agreeable, and they offer Gonda a room for the night. Afterwards, Gonda hears the couple plotting to turn her in for a reward, so she flees. Dwight Langley, an artist who claims in his letter to have drawn Gonda's face many times, does not recognize her when she comes to him. The next fan she visits, Claude Ignatius Hix, is very religious. He urges Gonda to turn herself in and confess her sins. The fifth fan, Dietrich von Esterhazy, says he would be honored to protect her, but then attempts to rape her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracles_from_Heaven"title="Miracles from Heaven">
The book is about the author's 10-year-old daughter Annabel Beam, who was diagnosed with a rare terminal stomach disorder. While on a visit home from the hospital she fell while climbing a tree with her older sister, a branch gave way sending Annabel 30 feet down headfirst into the hollow trunk of a cottonwood tree. She was inside the trunk of the tree for several hours where she visits with Jesus who tells her she will be fine. She is finally rescued and taken to a hospital. She woke up at the hospital without any broken bones or internal injuries. After this incident, she no longer felt pain due to her stomach disorder and her doctor confirmed that her rare disease was somehow miraculously cured.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut_Like_Wound"title="Cut Like Wound">
The story of the novel "Cut Like Wound" begins on the first evening of Ramzan, 1 August 2012, and ends about a month later in September on St Mary's Feast. On the first evening of Ramzan, in Bengaluru, a call girl decides to go out in the public for the first time. She is a transgender person who is said to be a psychopath, and lures a victim and kills him. More murders occur and past murders are also linked to it. The investigation into the murder is conducted by Inspector Gowda and Santosh. Combating apathy both at personal and professional levels, Gowda manages to crack the case. He discovers a set pattern to the murders, which leads to his conclusion that these murders might be the work of a serial killer. The novel is told across the sights and smells of Bangalore and speaks about the people, customs and geography of the city.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gangster's_Life"title="The Gangster's Life">
"The Gangster's Life" picks up the story of Indo–Canadian gangster Ruby Pandher, the hero of Ranj Dhaliwal's bestseller "Daaku", as he recovers from a failed hit by his own associates.Violence, wild partying and flashy purchases mark Ruby's comeback. Ruby's eyes and perspective are widened by the new contacts he makes, as he tries to measure up to - and then sideline big-time gangster Khalsi. Joining forces with a sinister associate and sounding very much like the modern businessman, he sets out to expand his criminal enterprises - all while battling his conscious and wondering what a life outside the underworld would be like.Soon he comes to see his old self as minor-league, and, joining forces with the sinister Darshan and sounding very much like the modern businessman, he sets out to expand his criminal enterprises.Meanwhile, life intervenes in the form of the possibility of love for this hardcore gangster; and in Ruby's brother Kam, who worships his bro' and wants to follow in his footsteps ––– something Ruby knows he's not equipped to do. Meanwhile, Ruby's activities pull him deeper into the violent side of the world of Sikh temple politics.Will Ruby's heart open, or is the flashy lifestyle too much to tear away from? Can he stop Kam from following in his own footsteps? Most of all, can Ruby break the cycle and leave behind "The Life"?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clerkenwell_Tales"title="The Clerkenwell Tales">
The novel is set in London in the year 1399, a year of revolt, revolution and religious conspiracy. As Henry Bolingbroke challenges Richard II for the throne of England the reader's attention is focused on Dominus, a secret society of religious fundamentalists, known to history as Lollards. The story is oriented similar to Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales" and makes use of some of the characters from "The Canterbury Tales" as well. It turns on the conspiracies of a religious sect, led by the mad nun and making use of the prophecies of the mad Clerkenwell nun to foment panic and hysteria to bring forth the dethroning of Richard II. The result is a gothic novel which effortlessly merges fact and fiction into an almost recognizable alternate history.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I've_Got_Your_Number_(novel)"title="I've Got Your Number (novel)">
Poppy Wyatt loses her engagement ring, which has been in her fiancé's family for three generations, on the day that his parents arrive from the US and in the following panic, she also ends up losing her phone. She finds an abandoned phone in a bin and decides to keep it so that the hotel where she lost her ring can phone her if they find it. However, the owner, businessman Sam Roxton wants it back and Poppy and Sam find that their lives become increasingly entangled.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/78-87_London_Youth"title="78-87 London Youth">
The book is a collection of photographs of young Londoners taken by the photographer from 1978-1988. It especially focuses on the alternative youth scene from punk through to the birth of acid house music. It showcases the creativity and individuality of the young.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_God_&amp;_Country_(Reyes_novel)"title="For God &amp; Country (Reyes novel)">
Edward Valles, a Marine, returns from his final tour in the middle east to his family in Los Angeles. He is fulfilling his final duty as a recruiter and promises his wife that he is done with war and will leave the Marine Corps after the duty is complete.A team of Homeland Security agents find crates with military arsenal building up in Mexico and suspect something is about to happen. At the same time a coalition of countries hostile towards the United States has been meeting in secret and moving forward on a plot that has been years in the making.On a camping trip with his fellow recruiters, Eddie witnesses the detonation of nuclear bombs in downtown Los Angeles, which is followed by an invasion across the Mexican border. His fellow recruiters and him decide to report to 29 Palms deep in the desert and join the group that is forming to counter strike against the invaders. This is when he meets the Battery Operated Grunts, a group of Marines from the communication school that is running the convoys communications during the mission. He joins the group and meets the different personalities along the way and their reasons for volunteering for the mission.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_of_Fire"title="Flood of Fire">
Following the storylines of the previous two parts, "Sea of Poppies" and "River of Smoke", the story continues in 1839. Kesri Singh, brother of Deeti, is made aware that Deeti ran away from her husband's pyre by avoiding sati. She eloped with a lower-caste labourer and Singh's family is ashamed of the events. Kesri joins the British service as an Indian soldier at the rank of sepoy. He works for the East India Company, where his superior is Deeti's deceased husband's brother. Zachary Reid, an American soldier born to a quadroon mother and a white father, pretends to be white and starts entering the trading business. Shireen Modi, an Indian Parsi woman, has left for China in search of her late husband's illegitimate child. In her pursuit, she starts to have feelings for her husband's close friend who is now helping her. She is fully aware that her relationship with this Armenian friend would be condemned by her orthodox Parsi community. Neel Rattan Halder, once a king, has been separated from his son after he was arrested by the British. Neel has now absconded and remains a fugitive in order to avoid being jailed for his conviction on the false forgery charges, which Mr. Burnham had manipulated. The First Opium War has commenced and the characters find themselves in midst of these events.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Interpreters_(novel)"title="The Interpreters (novel)">
The novel is set in the 1960s, in post-independence and pre-civil war Nigeria, mainly in Lagos. There are five main characters in the novel: the foreign ministry clerk Egbo, the university professor Bandele, the journalist Sagoe, the engineer turned sculptor Sekoni, and the artist Kola. They were friends at high school, then went abroad to study, and returned to start middle-class jobs in Nigeria.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_Eleven"title="Station Eleven">
During a production of "King Lear" at the Elgin Theatre in Toronto, Jeevan watches as the actor playing Lear, Arthur Leander, has a heart attack. Since he has begun training as a paramedic, Jeevan tries to resuscitate Arthur, but is unsuccessful. Instead, Jeevan comforts one of the child actors in the production, Kirsten. After leaving the play, Jeevan goes for a walk in the snow and receives a call from a friend who is a doctor in Toronto. He warns Jeevan to get out of the city as the mysterious Georgia Flu is spreading rapidly and will soon become a full-blown pandemic. Jeevan loads up on supplies and goes to stay with his brother, Frank. Many of the actors, actresses, and others that had gathered to mourn Arthur's death die within the next three weeks.Twenty years later, Kirsten is part of a nomadic group of actors and musicians known as the "Travelling Symphony". Kirsten, who was eight at the time of the outbreak, can remember little of her life before Year Zero, but clings to a two-volume set of graphic novels given to her by Arthur before his death, titled "Station Eleven". The troupe operates on a two-year cycle touring the Great Lakes region, performing Shakespeare plays and classical music, while Kirsten scavenges abandoned homes for props, costumes, and traces of Arthur in tabloid magazines.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(Krauss_book)"title="Atom (Krauss book)">
In this book Krauss discusses creating parts of an oxygen atom, the primary atoms of the Big Bang. Then he follows it through the remaining history of the Universe. As time has been passing by, the atom was a part of a supernova and star dust, star and planet systems, and, ultimately, a part of living cells.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo's_Middle_Finger"title="Galileo's Middle Finger">
The first part of "Galileo's Middle Finger" recounts Dreger's activism against surgical "correction" of intersex individuals' genitalia. Some surgeons called this "total urogenital mobilization" which is "...ripping out everything that didn't seem right to the doctor and rebuilding a girl's genitals from scratch using Frankenstein stitches..." Thus, her book discusses the intersex medical interventions that some intersex children in the United States undergo. Based on her interactions with the intersex community as well as her own research, she advocated that genital surgery for intersex children be postponed until the individual is old enough to make an informed decision, in the absence of any evidence that the benefits of such surgery outweighed its already reported risks.The second section provides her analysis of the controversy surrounding "The Man Who Would Be Queen" (2003), by sex researcher and psychologist J. Michael Bailey. In that book, Bailey summarized research on Blanchard's transsexualism typology in a way that Dreger says is scientifically accurate, well-intended, and sympathetic, but insensitive to its political implications. Dreger writes that "Bailey made the mistake of thinking that openly accepting and promoting the truth about people's identities would be understood as the same as accepting them and helping them, as he felt he was". Instead, many activists in the trans community objected to the contention that their transition was sexually motivated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sunny_Night"title="The Sunny Night">
The narrator is a student from Tbilisi. Teymo's mother returns from jail where she had spent twelve years, and Teymo at twenty is thrown from hell and back again as he at last accepts her return. He falls in and out of love, invites trouble by helping an imprisoned classmate, sleeps with an accommodating lady, finds at last his true mate. Amid shouting, heckling, students and "Party" student meetings, seas and sunsets, drinks and talk, Teymo emerges whole, strong, outrageous, delightful, and even the death of his mother is a dedication.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pink_and_the_Green"title="The Pink and the Green">
The story concerns Mina Wanghen, an 18-year-old rich Prussian heiress in the 1830s with a romantic spirit and inclinations to radical political thought. She is disgusted by the love of money that she suspects motivates the many suitors who pursue her and her large dowry. When she relocates to Paris, Abbé Miossince, a worldly priest, becomes determined to convert her to Roman Catholicism and make a match between her and the Duke of Montenotte. The Duke, the son of a Napoleonic general, has a similar distaste for money, and when he hears about Mina from the Abbé, he goes off to his club and settles down with a map of Prussia. Not long afterward, the young couple meet at a ball. Stendhal did not develop the story further.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neapolitan_Novels"title="Neapolitan Novels">
## "My Brilliant Friend" ("L'amica geniale", 2011).The Neapolitan Novels begin in 2010 when the son of an old friend telephones the main character, a woman in her 60s named Elena (familiarly called "Lenù"). Elena's childhood friend Lila (a nickname for "Raffaella") has disappeared and removed all traces of herself from her household, and her son is unable to find her. Elena recognizes this behavior as something Lila, in her later years, has always talked about doing, and believes her disappearance to be a conscious decision. In the spirit of their loving but ambivalent ways towards each other, Elena begins to put on paper everything she can remember about Lila, beginning in 1950s' Naples.Elena and Lila grow up in a poor neighborhood full of violence and strife, where Lila alone realizes that an innocent man has been framed for murder by local gangsters, the Solara family. No one expects the girls to be educated beyond elementary school. Elena is diligent and captures the attention of maestra Oliviero, one of her primary school teachers, a spinster who encourages her to escape the life of the impoverished plebeian class. To everyone's surprise, the very rebellious Lila turns out to be a prodigy who has taught herself to read and write. She quickly earns the highest grades in the class, seemingly without effort. Elena is both fascinated and intimidated by Lila, especially after Lila writes a story which Elena feels shows real genius. She begins to push herself to keep up with Lila and ignores her teacher's warning not to associate with "plebs". Once, when Lila throws Elena's doll into the basement chute of the local loan shark, Elena does the same to Lila's doll, as proof that she can be as bold as her friend. When Lila fearlessly goes to the loan shark to ask for the return of the dolls, Elena goes with her, though they are ultimately unable to retrieve them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kvachi_Kvachantiradze"title="Kvachi Kvachantiradze">
The hero of this book, Kvachi Kvachantiradze, is a thoroughly scurrilous rogue but, like many a literary rogue, a charming one. He charms us and he charms the people he meets, who seem to be not only unaware of his treachery but even thank him for his help. The book starts with the day of his birth, an auspicious day. There is a heavy thunderstorm. A tree is broken in two by lightning and the only other inn in town, a rival of the inn of Kvachi's father, Silibistro, is destroyed. The baby Kvachi is born already uttering the word me. A fortune teller forecasts that he will be a great man, get what he wants and bring fortune to his family. Apart from a brief digression about how his parents came to marry (they are cousins), we immediately follow Kvachi's early life. He is a very precocious child, walking and talking early, and helping in his parents' inn.Silibistro is snobbish and is certain that he descends from nobles but cannot prove it. He spends a fortune on doing so, till he finally gets a man to issue him with a certificate of nobility. The man is a notorious swindler but Silibistro is happy with his certificate and becomes even more snobbish. Kvachi is sent to Kutaisi (the second largest city in Georgia) to study and it is here that he develops his sharp ways. He stays with a couple, he an elderly man, she, Tsviri, much younger. As they do not have a child of their own, Tsviri starts mothering him but, as he gets older, mothering becomes loving and he becomes her lover, for which she gives him gifts. Little does she know that she is not the first but she soon finds out that he sees (and is paid by) other women. Kvachi is very astute with money. He borrows at an opportune moment, promising to repay promptly but, of course, never does. When someone is short, he offers to lend them money but never does.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_and_Squash"title="Lucky and Squash">
Lucky and Squash are neighbors separated by a fence that prevents them from playing together. Lucky's owner, Mr. Bernard, and Squash's owner, Miss Violet, are both single and have never spoken to each other because they are so shy. Lucky and Squash decide to run away hoping that, when their owners come rescue them, the two owners will meet, fall in love, and get married, thereby making the dogs "brothers" and allowing them to play together whenever they wish. Lucky and Squash escape from their respective yards three days in a row and go on adventures. The owners do meet and fall in love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoding_the_Universe"title="Decoding the Universe">
In this book Seife concentrates on the information theory, discussing various issues, such as decoherence and probability, relativity and quantum mechanics, works of Turing and Schrödinger, entropy and superposition, etc.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loo_Sanction"title="The Loo Sanction">
In London, England, Jonathan Hemlock is blackmailed into performing another "sanction", a top-secret political assassination.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Walk_Away_(novel)"title="How to Walk Away (novel)">
After three years in Afghanistan, Otis is adjusting to life back home. Struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder, he obsessively replays the traumas of war, cataloging the names of the dead. Cat, his wife, is a genealogist who makes maps of families in an attempt to understand her world. When a car accident takes Otis’s left arm, he is grateful to bear a physical loss that makes his damaged emotional self visible. As he recovers, he and Cat confront the silences upon which their marriage is built.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karachi,_You're_Killing_Me!"title="Karachi, You're Killing Me!">
Ayesha Khan, a journalist in her twenties living in one of the world's most lively cities, Karachi, whose work is to show up at bomb sites and picks her way through scattered body parts. Ayesha is hopeless in finding a nice guy like her old friend Saad, to share her personal thoughts with. Other than that, her most basic problem is how to straighten her hair.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Gizmo"title="The Golden Gizmo">
Toddy Kent, a former con-artist with a rap sheet in a dozen cities is now working as a door to door gold-buyer in Los Angeles for Milt Vonderheim's jewelry shop. Despite his disreputable line of work, he is able to keep a low profile in fear of the police digging into his criminal past. He lives in a hotel with his wife Elaine. Elaine spends most of Toddy's money on booze, and is a regular in the drunk tank. Their relationship is toxic but Toddy can't bring himself to leave Elaine, despite his friends urging him to. Milt has been a fatherly figure and a good friend to Toddy and Elaine.Toddy conceptualizes he has carried a "gizmo," a G.I. term for an unidentifiable, most of his life that time and again brings him the big break most men would kill for, only for it to slip through his fingers.At the outset of the story, Toddy is working and despite wanting to quit for the day, he calls on the last house in the neighborhood. A man named Alvarado, whom Toddy will refer to as "Chinless," answers the door with his massive dobermann which seems to be able to speak English. Toddy has a bad feeling about the man, who invites him in, and although he wants to excuse himself he steps inside. In the living room Toddy spots a heavy gold watch on the table, and is introduced to Alvarado's beautiful companion Dolores Chavez. Paralyzed by fear of the dobermann, Toddy nervously attempts to explain the meaning of his visit. He opens the box he carries to show Alvarado his haul for the day. To demonstrate that he buys gold he picks the watch up off the table, discovering that it weighs ten times what it looks like it should. Inexplicably Alvarado tries to kick Toddy, but hits the dobermann instead. While the doberman is pouncing on Alvarado, Toddy unconsciously drops the gold watch into his box and escapes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Girl_(novel)"title="Lost Girl (novel)">
The book is set in 2053 in a world that has been decimated by severe climate change, pandemics, and rising crime and violence. It follows a man whose four-year-old daughter was kidnapped two years ago. The authorities are of no help because they must deal with all of the extreme chaos, so he must go out on his own to find out what happened to his daughter and rescue her from whatever her kidnappers subjected her to.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Map_of_Home"title="A Map of Home">
Nidali's story is narrated in first person. Coming from a mixed background and moving so frequently, Nidali is always aware of her difference. The story is set upon a backdrop of ethnic division, politics, war, culture, and the looming theme of "home". Although Nidali is battling war and strife, she is also subject to battle with her Palestinian father who has specific expectations and strict rules for his daughter throughout the novel.Nidali is born in Boston to a Palestinian father (Baba) and Egyptian mother (Mama) and acquires an American passport. From the beginning, her life struggle is foreshadowed when she is given the name Nidali, the feminine version of "Nidal", which means "strife" or "struggle". Nidali begins growing up in Kuwait. However, her family is forced to flee to Egypt in 1990 when Saddam Hussein conducts the Iraqi Invasion. On her 13th birthday, bombs begin to go off, and Nidali's birthday goes unremembered. The family then travels by car to Egypt and settles into their summer home for safety.In Egypt, Nidali is sent to live with her sick grandparent, giving her more freedom, being away from her father. This is where her relationship with her boyfriend Fakhr flourishes. The couple is most often depicted riding bikes and finding secret spots for their first sexual experience together. Throughout the book, Nidali navigates public affection and sexual experiences under the strict Arab law, as well as exploring masturbation. After spending time in Egypt, Nidali's father, Baba, declares he will find a job in the United States. After searching, he is chosen for a job in Texas as an architect. Baba flies to Texas first and establishes a mobile home. Soon after, Nidali, Mama, and her brother, Gamal, arrive in America.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_of_the_Imam"title="The Fall of the Imam">
Set in an unnamed Arabic country, the two main characters are The Imam, the hypocritical leader of the country, full of hatred and spite towards anybody born more fortunate than him, and a beautiful illegitimate orphan, Bint Allah (Daughter of God). The story centres around two extremely grisly events. First, the stoning and mutilation of a woman, performed more to terrorize his opponents and silence his critics than to conform to God’s will, leaves the reader in no doubt as to the brutality of the ruling power. The second event is the assassination of the Imam himself, and the turmoil this brings to the country. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moor's_Account"title="The Moor's Account">
The story is narrated in the first person by Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamori, a Moroccan slave who has been taken by his Spanish master, Andrés de Dorantes, on an expedition to the New World. The expedition lands in Florida in the vicinity of what is now Tampa Bay. Under the leadership of Pánfilo de Narváez, the men leave their ships behind and travel inland to look for gold. As they journey northward, they face resistance by indigenous tribes, suffer from disease and starvation, and quarrel with one another. Within a year there are only four survivors: Cabeza de Vaca, the treasurer of the expedition; Alonso del Castillo, a young nobleman, Andrés de Dorantes, one of the captains; and his Moroccan slave, Mustafa, whom the other three Spaniards refer to as Estebanico. Together, these four survivors travel westward, crossing the continent and living among indigenous tribes, reinventing themselves along the way as faith healers. Some years later, they are found by a party of Spanish slavers and brought to Mexico City, where they are asked to provide testimony about their journey—all except the slave, who tells his own story in the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Tutashkhia"title="Data Tutashkhia">
The novel is divided into four parts chronicling its hero's, Data Tutashkhia's, moral evolution, always narrated from the perspective of a multitude of characters from Tutashkhia's past. He is a man who from birth, can not stand injustice and wrongdoing. At the very beginning of the novel, we learn that he was convicted of an accidental killing that even the victim absolved him of! This then began his life as a fugitive, constantly running from police desperate to catch him. Throughout the novel, He goes from place to place, sees evil and struggles with how to overcome it. In the first part of the novel, Tutashkhia attempts to help those wronged with little result, as either the individual wronged (strangely enough) continues to allow him/herself to be wronged (as in the case of the loser at cards continuing to allow himself to be cheated by card sharks); or the injured and insulted, once rescued by Data, start, themselves, to injure and insult (as was the case with the married pair whom Tutashkhia assisted to purchase a cow). An excellent, memorable tale in this section of the novel was that of the hospital patients, whom he likened to the cannibal rats bred by one of the residents. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naadan_Premam"title="Naadan Premam">
Ravindran, a young rich man from Kozhikode, is living anonymously in Mukkam, a small village on the banks of Iruvanjippuzha. There he falls in love with a young village girl by the name Maalu. Ravi decides to leave after staying for two months and assures Maalu that he will return. Maalu does not inform him that she's pregnant. Few days later, Maalu receives a letter from him saying that he will be going for a Europe tour and will return after six months. Fearing the social stigma if she gives birth to a fatherless child, Maalu is forced to marry Ikkoran, who is compassionate and agrees to nurture the child as his own.Years later, Ravi, who is living with grief over childlessness, returns to the village with his wife Padmini. He meets a young lad there whom he identifies as his own son (Raghavan). He pleads to Maalu and Ikkoran to take Raghavan along with him. Ikkoran waves him off saying he is a lunatic and that it is their child. Ravi returns heartbroken and falls ill. He sends a letter to Maalu saying that he wishes to see his son once more before he dies. She complies and takes the child to Ravi's house. Seeing Ravi's condition, Ikkoran decides to leave the child there. Later, Ravi gets a letter from his friend Mr. Burton saying that Ikkoran and Maalu drowned themselves in the river. The final chapter shows Ravi living happily with Raghavan in the estate he has newly purchased in Mukkam.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker's_Monster"title="Tucker's Monster">
Set in 1903, "Tucker’s Monster" chronicles the adventures of Oklahoma Rancher Harold B. Tucker as he follows his passion of researching mythical and legendary creatures.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayesha's_Rainbow"title="Ayesha's Rainbow">
The Bangladeshi Ali family move next door to the elderly, white Mrs. Peters in London's East End. They have purchased a flat that belonged to Mrs. Peters' recently deceased friend Vera. Mrs. Peters has lived in the East End all her life; she is lonely and averse to change, especially towards accepting people of a different culture. Mrs. Peters is feeling more lonely of late but cannot bring herself to greet her new neighbours, as she has never been on friendly terms with anyone who is not white. The Alis have had negative experiences in the past with white neighbours.The Alis seven-year-old daughter, Ayesha, recognises a faint hint of a smile from Mrs. Peters when she first moved in. Despite Mrs. Peters initial reluctance to engage in conversation, Ayesha wins her over, and an unlikely friendship develops between them. It is through Ayesha that the two families learn about each other so that various myths are understood and they realise they share many common views when Mrs. Peters is also on speaking terms with the rest of the Ali family, which brings their two contrasting families together, crossing religious, cultural and racial barriers.In the Ali family there is Yusuf, the oldest son, on his way to being a doctor, Hamzra, who plans to make a lot of money from the stock exchange when he starts work, and Shazia, Ayesha's combative older sister. Mrs Peters also has had four children, now into their Middle Ages: Vivien, Susan, David, and Graham. Mrs Peters is keen to flaunt her new friends to Vivien, as she has the most liberal outlook on life, and also has a passion for world travel. Susan and David are unsure what to make of their mother's new neighbours, but her youngest son, Graham, is interested in joining a racist political party and has little doubts about his views, which are very reactionary and which have also never been discouraged by his mother – until now. The Peters family are divided in their approach to their mother's new friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saris_and_the_City"title="Saris and the City">
Yasmin Yusuf is a thirty-year-old, independent, woman from a culturally conservative, traditional Bengali family with a career working in an equity firm in London. She has her life planned out and knows what she wants. She meets her Bengali boyfriend, Sam, for a meal and is sure he is going to propose, she rushes her work and makes a damning mistake on the report her private banker boss, Zachary Khan, has asked her to prepare for an important meeting. Zach fires her the following day. Yasmin breaks down and tearfully tells him that her expected engagement did not happen and pleads with him to give her another chance. Unable to do so, he tells her to take a week off and arranges for her to be transferred to another branch of the firm.Still living at home with her widowed father, Yasmin is determined not to cause him concern and pretends everything is fine. Despite being devastated by the change in her circumstances, she also does not want the extra worry of her protective older brothers finding out what her ex-boyfriend has done to her as she thinks they will want to take revenge on him. She starts her new job, but ends up at the mercy of Zachary 's senior advisor Hannah Gibbs-Smythson, a no nonsense woman who does not intend making Yasmin welcome.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascar_(novel)"title="Lascar (novel)">
Sylheti orphans Ayan Miah and his elder brother Kazi are constantly reminded by their mission teachers of their low caste background and how their aim in life should be to become 'respectable'. Ayan's elder brother develops cancer, due to the incessant chewing of betel nuts, this motivates Ayan to join the seaman (as his father did) in order to earn money and better his brother's health. He finds work as a slave laborer aboard The Bengal, a British steamship making the journey from Calcutta to London.Ayan is forced to rethink his situation after he realises the financial security that is promised to the lascar is far from the harsh reality of working in prison-like conditions of the trading ship. He soon discovers that it is rare for a lascar to finish his contract and leave with the promised payment. In order to survive and fearing for his life, he realises he must escape the ship. Ayan and his friend, Akbar, devise a plan to escape The Bengal when it docks in London, but to do so, they murder one of their captors, The Cruel One. Ayan and Akbar escape to a new life in Victorian London.In London, an encounter with the police turns into a blessing when Ayan and Akbar are taken to a hostel where Louisa, an Italian prostitute, teaches them English and shows them how to earn money as street musicians. Ayan accompanies Louisa as an entertainer on drums and sings Bengali songs. When Akbar dies in winter and Louise disappears, Ayan is devastated and left to deal with the loss of his friends and loneliness. Ayan continues to play his music on the streets. He begins to sense growing resentment toward the Muslim community. Increasingly, the local constables interrupt his prayers and mock his devotion. The situation deteriorates until Ayan is falsely accused of arson and sent to prison.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sideways_3_Chile"title="Sideways 3 Chile">
This third installment picks up about one year after we last saw Miles at the conclusion of "Vertical". By this time his professional life is once again beginning to slow down. While he is still able to make a modest amount of money off of the fame he achieved with the publication of his autobiographical novel "Shameless" (and the highly successful film adapted from it), demand for him as a public speaker at wine events has waned, Hollywood fortune has failed to materialize, and he has written no further books. His personal life has fared no better, as he has just ended his affair with the wife of a well-known movie director.In the midst of these troubles Miles is hired by a magazine to travel to Chile to write an article about the country's wine industry. He accepts the job in the hope of being able to find inspiration for his own writing. During the course of the plot Miles reconnects with characters from the previous entries in the series including his best friend Jack, on-and-off girlfriend Maya, and a Spanish woman named Laura.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kharkanas_Trilogy"title="The Kharkanas Trilogy">
Set 300,000 years before the events of "Malazan Book of the Fallen", the story is divided into three main narratives. The first revolves around the Tiste and the events leading up to their divide into the Andii, Liosan and Edur. The second revolves around the Jaghut and the events leading up to the declaration of war on Death. And the third around the Azathanai, some of whom are generous, while others who would only take advantage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_Day_(novel)"title="Another Day (novel)">
The novel starts off with what seems like a normal day for Rhiannon; she watches her boyfriend, Justin, pull into the school parking lot, hoping he still was not mad from last night's fight. Their everyday routine is broken, however, when Justin suggests getting away for the day, to which Rhiannon chooses to go to the beach. On the way to the beach, Justin is acting out of character and doing things he would not normally do. Rhiannon does not seem to mind too much; however, she is still cautious about her actions and words. Rhiannon and Justin end up sharing a romantic day, even going as far as pulling the "make out" blanket from the car trunk. The couple lounge about on the blanket, never going farther than sharing a kiss or two. While laying on the blanket, Rhiannon and Justin share childhood memories with each other that they have not shared with anyone else. At the day end, Rhiannon suggests that future days end up just like the one they shared. Justin only replies, "I don't want you to think every day is going to be like today. Because they're not going to be, alright? They can't be."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_de_France"title="Fortune de France">
The series spans the years 1547 to 1661, shadowing the European wars of religion of the 16th and 17th centuries. In the first novel, veteran soldiers Jean de Siorac and Jean de Sauveterre settle into Château Mespech in Périgord, a beautiful but dangerous region of France far from the influence of the king. Staunch royalists but also devoted Huguenots, the men assemble a loyal community around them, but are challenged as religious unrest, poverty and famine threaten their way of life and push the country into chaos.Siorac's son Pierre narrates the first six novels, and Pierre's own son Pierre-Emmanuel narrates the remaining seven volumes. The men meet many notable people and witness various historical events, including the marriage of Henry, King of Navarre to Margaret of France, the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, and the assassination of Henry III of France.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fire_People"title="The Fire People">
In 1830. Merthyr Tydfil is the largest town in Wales; an industrial centre and one of the Top Towns, with four major iron works. People from all parts of the world flock to find work there; from Spain and Italy, from England, and from Ireland. Men and Women work alongside each other, doing equally heavy and dangerous jobs, frequently dying at the workplace.Gideon Davies is a former worker at Taibach copper works and a trained musician. After losing nearly all his sight in an accident at the works, he is now an itinerant musician, playing his fiddle at taverns, wakes and social gatherings throughout South Wales. He also uses his travels to promote the concept of unions and worker's rights.Various other characters are also travelling to Merthyr, attracted by the coal and iron industries. They include the genteel Miss Thrush the Sweets who has sold her shop in Pontypridd, and is secretly enamoured of Gideon, even though she only sees him about once a year. Annie Hewers and Megsie Lloyd are lusty young girls out for adventure, Many Irish navvies have also arrived, including Big Bonce, Belcher and Lady Godiva.Travelling through Maesteg towards Pontypridd, Gideon comes upon Sun Heron, a fiery young two-fisted Irish girl who attempts to steals his meagre food, claiming to be starving. She later latches onto Gideon as he travels the roads, and will not be sent away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_(novel)"title="Purity (novel)">
The novel tells the intersecting stories of several different people of widely diverging ages and backgrounds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexter_Is_Dead"title="Dexter Is Dead">
After the events of the previous book, Dexter is falsely accused of murdering Rita and molesting Astor. To avoid embarrassment, the Miami-Dade Police Department does all it can to pin the crimes on Dexter, even resorting to falsifying evidence. Deborah decides to cut ties with Dexter, refusing to help him as a way to punish him for his past crimes and also demanding custody of his children. Only Masuoka is working to clear Dexter's name, with no success. Brian bails Dexter out of jail and gets him a lawyer, but is being targeted by a Mexican drug cartel he had previously stolen money from. The cartel tries to kill Dexter multiple times to get to Brian.Deborah reluctantly contacts Dexter to inform him his kids have been kidnapped, which leads to a fragile reconciliation. Dexter manages to set up a meeting with Detective Anderson and some of Raul's thugs to get him killed, which happens, though not before he manages to kill his attackers, leaving Dexter with no one to interrogate. Eventually they find out that their lawyer was supplying Raul with Dexter's intel, which makes them ambush, kill him and all the cartel's members who followed Frank, save for one, who is taken by the brothers to a secluded warehouse, where he is brutally interrogated to get the kids' location and to satisfy their urges in the process.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang_&amp;_Eng_(novel)"title="Chang &amp; Eng (novel)">
In 1811 Chang and Eng Bunker are born, twins joined at the chest by a seven-inch-long ligament, in old Siam (Thailand). (This ligament contains a part of their stomach, the only organ they share.) Besides this connecting band, each twin is completely separate from the other: each has a separate personality, separate desires, is a separate individual. Eng, the more shy and bookish twin, narrates their story. When the book opens, Chang &amp; Eng face their last night—Eng awakens, sees that Chang is dead, and knows that he will die tonight, too. Then the book jumps back in time: to their birth: on their parents' houseboat on the Mekong River. Their mother does not tell them they are different, and they assume that all babies are attached.Soon, the King of Siam condemns them to death—as a double-omen—but he changes his mind upon seeing what a glorious sight they are. He exploits them as freaks. In 1825, an amoral American promoter brings them to America, and this begins their life of celebrity.The brothers become the world's most famous circus act, get caught up in the Civil War, marry sisters, and father over 20 children.Eng—a bookish reader of Shakespeare—becomes a leader (or a tool) of the temperance movement and, from birth to death, wishes desperately to be separated. Chang is charming, a heavy drinker, and he is married to the woman that Eng—in secret—loves, too.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiberius_(Massie_novel)"title="Tiberius (Massie novel)">
Like its predecessor Augustus, it is written as a memoir towards the end of the old Emperor's life. Unlike other writers and historians who portrayed Rome's third Emperor as a reprobate of monstrous proportions, in Massie's book he describes himself as a “melancholic and reluctant” autocrat, wallowing in the “solitude of power”. His supposed self-description seems honest and pained. In his middle years, tired of fighting the indefatigable Germans and regretting his part in turning Rome into a despotism he retires to his holiday home on the Greek island of Rhodes, until the squalid rumours circulating the Empire about his supposed sexual proclivities force him to return to the seat of power. He regrets his marriage to Julia, forced on him by his stepfather the Emperor Augustus, yet bows to his mother Livia’s advice, acknowledging the importance of her politically astute machinations to his career.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_and_David"title="Antonio and David">
The book is narrated by an Italian traveller, who visits the country with a group of European missionaries. The traveller eventually became involved in a drama occurring in a small village on top of a mountain.In 1600 AD, in a remote Italian city, a young peddler named Bartolomeo d'Aniti is called to the court and ordered to accompany a delegation to the distant land of Georgia, which is referred to as Colchis in the novel. At that time, Bartolomeo was accused of betrayal of Pope and was considered as a Heretic, but at last he is forgiven and sent to a journey with priests.During the voyage he meets Antonio, a former priest accused of worshiping the Devil. In the course of the voyage, they become good friends. However, this friendship with the fallen priest soon draws Bartolomeo into a web of intrigue in the foreign country of Georgia. Antonio reveals his backstory to Bartolomeo, how he and his friends were accused of heresy by the inquisitors, one of them being Father Sebastiano, the leader of the aforementioned expedition to Georgia, but unlike them, was spared due to the influence of his friends and family. Antonio thought that by accepting the pardon, he betrayed his ideals and spiritual brethren and after all these years, he couldn't forgive himself for his decision. After a long journey, they reach the bank of Samegrelo, where they were sheltered by its Prince, hardy yet very friendly man who got acquainted with Bartolomeo rather quickly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extreme_Centre"title="The Extreme Centre">
The book is a criticism of the politics of the "indistinguishable political elite" in the United Kingdom, and their devotion to capitalism. The book analyses what Ali sees as the failure of the European Union and NATO, political corruption in Westminster and the dominance of the American Empire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_(Massie_novel)"title="Caesar (Massie novel)">
It is written as the memoirs of Decimus Brutus, one of Caesar’s assassins, in custody, awaiting judgement and almost certain death for his part in the slaying. Brutus insists that he has no need to make an apology and sets out his reasons clearly and succinctly, celebrating the charmed life of Caesar though tempering his remarkable achievements with the great man’s overpowering ambition and ruthless determination to end the Roman Republic and install himself as Dictator for life. As he writes in hindsight of the unfolding conspiracy, Brutus paints himself as a patriot, willing to destroy his own life and the legacy of his ancient family name to prevent Caesar from carrying out the unthinkable and ending over 500 years of republicanism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crown_of_Ptolemy"title="The Crown of Ptolemy">
Annabeth Chase dreams of her mother, Athena, telling her that there is trouble brewing. Annabeth and Percy Jackson take a ferry to Governors Island in New York Harbor. When they become trapped on the island by Setne (who is attempting to become a god using spells in the Book of Thoth), they try to contact Carter and Sadie Kane but fail. Annabeth and Percy decide to face Setne alone, but are immobilized by the magician. Setne summons the goddess Wadjet in order to consume her essence and take the Crown of Lower Egypt from her, becoming master of essentially one-half the Egyptian world. Setne then disappears.The Kanes finally arrive and help the demigods track down Setne. Carter and Annabeth decide that they need to combine attacks to defeat him. Since Percy's sword has been absorbed by Setne, Carter gives Percy his wand, which turns into a kopis. Sadie and Annabeth teach each other a little magic, and Annabeth loans Carter her invisibility cap. When the quartet relocate Setne, he is trying to summon the goddess Nekhbet, guardian of the crown of Upper Egypt. Even with Nekhbet's help, they are unable to stop Setne from taking Nekhbet's crown, so the group retreats. Nekhbet insists that Setne must not be allowed to make himself a god and the four teens join forces with her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Such_a_Time"title="For Such a Time">
In 1944, a blue-eyed, blonde Jewish woman, Hadassah Benjaminm, is saved from a firing squad and forced into service by Colonel Aric von Schmidt of the SS. At a military camp in Czechoslovakia, Hadassah hides behind a false identity in order to survive as Colonel Aric’s secretary.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Operators_(book)"title="The Operators (book)">
"The Operators" is a book that details the author's travels with General Stanley McChrystal and his team in April 2010. It includes extensive quotations from over 20 hours of audio recordings of McChrystal and his inner circle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifts_(novel)"title="Gifts (novel)">
The novel begins with Emmon, a lowland runaway, coming to Caspromant when Orrec and Gry are 16. The children tell Emmon of their gifts, though he is somewhat disbelieving of them. Orrec then narrates the history of his family from his childhood. His father Canoc is the brantor of Caspromant; his mother Melle, a woman from the lowlands. Despite living in the Uplands, Melle holds to some of her traditions, and teaches Orrec stories and lays that she had learned as a child. She also teaches him to read, an ability rare among Uplanders. Canoc also begins to instruct Orrec in the use of their power, though Orrec does not manifest any ability as a child. Orrec and Gry, of a similar age, become good friends, and Gry begins to show her power, being able to listen to the speech of cats and mice.When he is 13, Orrec seemingly becomes able to use his power, striking an adder dead when it was about to bite his father. However, he is troubled by the ability not feeling different from his past unsuccessful efforts at using it. His father asks him to try, suggesting that Orrec has a duty to use his power to protect the domain, but Orrec refuses. A few days later Ogge Drum, the brantor of the neighboring domain of Drummant, comes to Caspromant, inviting the Caspros to his home, and suggesting that Orrec be betrothed to his granddaughter. Although wary of Drum due to their longstanding enmity, Canoc agrees to visit. Melle expresses opposition to the betrothal: Orrec is hurt because he and Gry had assumed they would marry each other. Canoc once again asks Orrec to use his power; Orrec is initially unable, but as his frustration builds, he seemingly turns an entire hillside into desolation. Terrified at his lack of control over his "wild" gift, he blindfolds himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voices_(Le_Guin_novel)"title="Voices (Le Guin novel)">
The story begins with Memer narrating her earliest memory: of entering a secret room filled with books, to which the door may only be opened by making shapes on the wall. Memer believes she is the only who knows how to get in, until she finds the Waylord there when she is nine years old. He offers to teach her to read, after swearing her to secrecy. Memer proves to be a quick learner. Four days after her seventeenth birthday, Memer makes the acquaintance of Orrec and Gry, the protagonists of "Gifts". Orrec, famous as a poet and storyteller, has been invited to Ansul to perform: Memer invites him and Gry to stay at Galvamand. They tell the Waylord that though the Alds invited them to Ansul, they came to find Galvamand, for the ancient library rumored to have once existed there. Orrec questions Memer about the history of the city: she tells him that Galvamand used to be known as the Oracle house, and realizes she does not know why. Dressed as a male groom, Memer attends one of Orrec's performance for the Gand, the leader of the Alds. Orrec, holding no belief in the Ald god, is not allowed within the Gand's residence, but performs before an open pavilion. The relationship between the Gand Iorath and his son Iddor is seen to be tense: Iddor believes Orrec's poetry to be blasphemy. Some of Ansul's citizens, led by Sulter's friend Desac, hope to rouse the city against the Alds, taking advantage of the struggle between the Gand and his son. Desac asks Orrec to act as an instigator for a rebellion. When Orrec hesitates, the Waylord offers to consult the Oracle, revealed to still be in the house, about a rebellion. He tells Memer that their family has the responsibility of "reading" the Oracle, which provides answers in the pages of certain books in the secret room. He asks the Oracle about the rebellion: Memer sees the phrase "Broken mend broken" in a book in response.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Obama_Syndrome"title="The Obama Syndrome">
The book, described as "a merciless dissection of Obama's overseas escalation and domestic retreat", is strongly critical of the Presidency of Barack Obama. Ali argues little has changed since George W. Bush left office, with appeasement of Israel continuing, genuine domestic reform abandoned, torture and drone strikes continuing and Wall Street being bailed out without reform.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morning_Star_(Brown_novel)"title="Morning Star (Brown novel)">
Darrow is a shadow of his former self after a year of torture and imprisonment at the hands of Adrius au Augustus, the ArchGovernor of Mars, better known as the Jackal. Across the worlds, he is believed dead because of a public execution faked by the Jackal and Octavia au Lune, the Sovereign. Sevro au Barca, now leader of the Sons of Ares, sends his deputy Holiday ti Nakamura to rescue Darrow. Darrow discovers that Victra au Julii is also still alive and frees her as well. Reconciling and recovering at a hidden rebel stronghold, Darrow and Victra join Sevro's gang of Howlers. Their first mission is to kidnap Quicksilver, the richest man in the Society, who they believe is the Jackal's silent partner. Darrow and his men stumble into a peace negotiation between some of the Sovereign's underlings — Cassius au Bellona, Moira au Grimmus and the Death Knight — on one side, and Darrow's old friends — Virginia "Mustang" au Augustus, Kavax au Telemanus and Daxo au Telemanus — on the other. The room erupts in conflict and destruction; Moira and the Death Knight are killed. Mustang is shocked to find Darrow alive, and the Howlers manage to escape with Quicksilver and Kavax as prisoners. Quicksilver reveals that he had secretly co-founded the Sons of Ares with Sevro's late father Fitchner au Barca, and offers his considerable resources to Darrow. Kavax also makes peace with Darrow and offers him allegiance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Watershed"title="Amazon Watershed">
The book is an investigation into the expulsion of peasants from their homes and their forced relocation to the Amazon. Military police attempt to kill Monbiot as he exposes a vast military project opening up the area to logging and deforestation. He tracks timber cut illegally from Indian reserves all the way back to retailers in the United Kingdom. According to the publishers, Monbiot also "examines the role of the British and American governments in promoting, wittingly or otherwise, this great ecological catastrophe".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchens_of_the_Great_Midwest"title="Kitchens of the Great Midwest">
The novel centers around Eva, a culinary prodigy born with a “once-in-a-generation palate” to a chef father and a sommelier mother. Though growing up in poverty and facing numerous challenges, by age 10 Eva is growing chocolate habanero peppers in her room and selling them to local restaurants. Later, after Eva goes on to be a celebrity chef, she is heard from less, and other characters emerge to "miss her, love her, obsess about her" while they recount their own stories.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igi_(short_story)"title="Igi (short story)">
Igi is a prehistoric story, taking readers to a period when the very first artist and thinker discovers a method to create images. In the routine life of prehistoric society comes a moment when one person, named Igi, starts to ask questions that no one has ever asked before. A feeling of wonder pervades his body and mind and he tries to discover secrets unnoticed by the rest. However, in a closed society, any original perception of life is unacceptable. The Chief and his followers will never welcome a member with a different way of thinking, and conflict arises between a progressive mentality and brute force. Igi has to follow a hard and painful way of solitude in order to gain free will and find the essence of being. The vivid narration reveals a very strange world, where feelings often seem bizarre, and where one can find many answers to questions that still preoccupy mankind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ot_me-Avshalom"title="Ot me-Avshalom">
A young graphologist, Alma Bach, embarks on the trail of a man whose handwriting was sent to her for analysis. She discovers characteristics such as sharp wit, high degree of general knowledge, and courage. She discovers a passionate man with a highly developed imagination, linguistic style, and the sensitivity of an artist, a man with a magnetic personality who draws people to him while at the same time secluding himself and keeping a secret, and who is capable of loving at great magnitudes and willing to sacrifice for his love, for his love of the land, for his love of a woman, and eventually to pay the ultimate price. Alma is determined to meet this man face-to-face.The story moves back and forth between two time periods: modern-day Israel, where Alma undergoes her journey to discover the man, and a biographical depiction of Avshalom Feinberg, founder and leader of the Nili spy ring, which starts in late 19th-century Palestine and continues into the early 20th century.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I'm_Not_Scared_(novel)"title="I'm Not Scared (novel)">
The novel takes place in 1978 in a fictitious Southern Italian village called Acqua Traverse. Michele, the nine-year-old protagonist, loses a race against the other village children to an abandoned house in the countryside. As the loser he must suffer a punishment chosen by the group, but instead Skull, the group’s leader, insists that their friend Barbara must show her private parts as punishment. Michele intervenes as she unbuttons her pants and says he should face the punishment as the loser of the race. Skull decides that Michele must traverse the dangerous second floor of the house, jump out of the window onto the tree and climb down.As he climbs down, Michele falls and discovers a covered hole in the ground. When he looks inside he sees a boy lying in the dirt. Disturbed, Michele assumes that the boy is dead, and he bicycles home with his sister. When they arrive home, they find their father, Pino, who has returned home from his work as a truck driver. Pino tells Michele he must defeat him at arm-wrestling to have dinner, and while they wrestle Pino calls him a sissy and says he has ricotta for muscles. They eventually have dinner, however, and Pino unveils the present he had brought for the children, a model gondola from Venice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_God_Commands_(novel)"title="As God Commands (novel)">
It tells the misadventure of Cristiano Zena, 13 year-old, and his father Rino in an Italian suburban area.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_and_You_(novel)"title="Me and You (novel)">
The action takes place in Rome in 2000. The main character is Lorenzo, a 14-year-old highly introverted boy who has had problems socialising and relating to other children since he was little. He is diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, a fact that makes him feel superior to others and does not want to mix in. The only people worthy of his affection are his father, his mother and his grandmother.Growing up, Lorenzo learns to blend in with others to appear normal. One day he hears a group of teenagers at his school organising a skiing holiday in Cortina d’Ampezzo, and feels strangely disappointed at not being invited. Back home he tells his mother that he has been invited along on a skiing weekend with friends — the group of teenagers — even though this is not true. His mother is so happy at his progress in making friends that she shuts herself in the bathroom and cries with joy. Because she is so happy in the following days, Lorenzo feels unable to admit that it is not true. On the day of departure his mother drives him to the house of Alessia Roncato, the girl whose family are organising the trip, but he manages to persuade her to drop him off a few blocks early. Once she has left, he watches for a few moments from a distance as the family packs the car, then heads back towards home on the tram with his skis. While waiting near his apartment building, he receives a call from his mother who wishes to thank Alessia’s mother. He lies, saying that she can’t speak because she’s driving. He is then able to sneak back into the basement of the apartment building, where he plans to spend the week in hiding, having prepared food, drinks and his PlayStation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enemy_Within_(Milne_book)"title="The Enemy Within (Milne book)">
The book investigates the circumstances surrounding the UK miners' strike (1984–1985) and the involvement of intelligence services in destroying the miners and the lengths the police, intelligence services and government went to in subverting public opinion.Verso Books stated that "In this 30th anniversary edition new material brings the story up to date with further revelations about the secret war against organised labour and political dissent".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostCapitalism"title="PostCapitalism">
Section 1 draws particularly on the ideas of Nikolai Kondratiev, alongside Karl Marx, Rudolf Hilferding, Rosa Luxemburg, and Joseph Schumpeter. Mason notes the cyclical crises in capitalist economies, epitomised by the 2008 financial crisis, and seeks to understand them in terms of Kondratiev's 'wave theory': industrial economies tend to experience wave-like cycles of roughly 25 years' growth followed by 25 years' decline ending in crises that foreshadow the next period of growth (c. 1780–1848, 1848–90s, 1890s–1945, late 1940s–2008).Mason argues that in earlier cycles, capitalists were prevented from adapting to crises by reducing workers' wages because of organised labour. This forced capitalists to adapt more radically, through technological innovation. The defeat of organised labour associated with the rise of neoliberalism around 1979 has enabled the extension of the stagnating fourth wave: "instead of being forced to innovate their way out of the crisis using technology, as during the late stage of all three previous cycles, the 1 per cent simply imposed penury and atomization on the working class" (p. 93).Section 2 builds on Marx's "Fragment on Machines", supporting the labour theory of value over the marginal utility theory, and drawing particularly on Jeremy Rifkin's "The Zero Marginal Cost Society", Peter Drucker's "Post-Capitalist Society", and the work of Paul Romer. As Marx speculated, many commodities, such as software, music, and designs for objects to be reproduced by machines, can now be reproduced at virtually no cost (i.e. zero marginal cost). These developments render economic theories predicated on scarcity increasingly irrelevant. Moreover, significant commodities in the digital economy are free and open-source (FOSS) and non-capitalist, such as Linux, Firefox, and Wikipedia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swallows_of_Kabul"title="The Swallows of Kabul">
You meet Atiq Shaukat, a jailer for the taliban. His wife, Musarrat, is very ill and dying. He is late for work and blames it on his wife's illness. He escorts a prostitute to be stoned to death. You meet Mohsen Ramat. He's against the new Taliban rule. He is at the marketplace when he sees the prostitute being stoned to death at a public execution. Even though he thinks it is wrong, he loses himself, picks up a rock and throws it at her, cracking her head open.Atiq is starting to question his belief in the Taliban. You meet his childhood friend Mirza Shah. Mirza was one of the first soldiers to desert his unit and join the Mujahideen during the war. Now Mirza does cocaine for money. Atiq tells Mirza about his troubles and his concern for his ill wife. Mirza says he should divorce her and throw her out, that it is “God's will”, and that women have no feelings. Atiq feels indebted to his wife because she saved his life.Mohsen Ramat goes home and you meet his wife Zunaira, a beautiful woman who used to be a school teacher. They have a small house with a blanket over the windows because they cannot afford to fix them. The windows must be covered because it would offend a man if he walked by and saw Zunaira. Mohsen tells his wife what happened at the marketplace and she is horrified.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellhound_on_His_Trail"title="Hellhound on His Trail">
The work examines the assassination of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, the manhunt for his killer, and the nation's reaction. Sides looks into the background of James Earl Ray, King's murderer, including his usage of several aliases, including "Eric Starvo Galt". He questions Ray's ability to gain this many aliases on his own and whether or not he may have had an accomplice at some point in time, which Sides believes was very likely.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indecent_Exposure_(novel)"title="Indecent Exposure (novel)">
Set in the fictional South African town of Piemburg, where local police, headed by Kommandant van Heerden, Lieutenant Verkramp and Konstabel Els, are determined to maintain the government policy of apartheid. While the Kommandant is absent at the country home of a snobbish upper class English couple, Lieutenant Verkramp enlists the help of a female psychiatrist to provide the police garrison with aversion therapy, with the aim of stopping them from fraternising with black girls. However, this goes horribly awry and turns the town's entire police force into homosexuals. Called back from his holiday, Kommandant van Heerden attempts to restore some order.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_It's_Kicking_Off_Everywhere"title="Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere">
Mason analyses the wave of popular protest, revolution and revolt from the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement to the 2011 England riots.Mason travels globally from Athens to Cairo to put the events into context and argues that the events "reflect the expanding power of the individual and calls for new political alternatives to elite rule and global poverty".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Rapto_do_Garoto_de_Ouro"title="O Rapto do Garoto de Ouro">
On a Friday night, rockstar Alfredo, is home alone preparing to perform at this birthday party in a canteen in the neighborhood of Bexiga, São Paulo. His family and friends wait in the canteen until they notice the boy's delay. Leo and Angela, Alfredo's friends, go to his house by request of Alfredo's father and notice he's missing. Leo finds a button from Alfredo's clothes, a smashed guitar and a green diary, which lists various names from neighbors known to them.On Saturday, police investigate the Carlucci's house for evidence, but the deductions prove inconclusive. Later that morning, Leo shows the green diary to his paraplegic cousin Gino, and invites him to investigate Alfredo's disappearance on their own. Gino warns him that he will be participating in a chess championship in the next few days and won't be able to accompany Leo, but advises him to call Angela, a friend of theirs for a while now. Leo readily accepts, but with the possibility that Angela won't want or won't be able to join, Gino decides to call Jaime, the man who brought Alfredo to fame.Alfredo finally wakes up in his prison, but to his nervousness, the place has no electric lighting or clean water. Using the little light that enters through a tiny window, he sees that someone left food and drink to avoid contact, as well as notes warning him to be quiet or else he's going to be bound and gagged. Alfredo thinks to himself that he should not be far from home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_Spells"title="Garden Spells">
Claire Waverley lives alone in small Bascom, North Carolina. The only person she's close to is an elderly relative named Evanelle, who has the gift of giving people exactly what they need before they need it. Claire runs a successful catering business based around edible flowers, and refuses to let anyone into her life. Her neighbor, Tyler Hughes, is interested in her but she acts cold towards him.Claire has an apple tree in her garden with a special power; anyone who eats an apple from it sees what the biggest event in their life will be. Half the town wants to get to the tree and eat an apple, but Claire buries every apple as it falls to prevent people from seeing bad things.Across the country in Seattle, Washington, Claire's sister Sydney and her five-year-old daughter Bay escape from David, Sydney's abusive boyfriend and Bay's father, and head to Bascom. They arrive out of the blue and shock Claire, who hasn't seen Sydney in ten years and has no idea she has a daughter.Claire hires Sydney to help out with the catering, and as luck would have it Sydney's first assignment is serving at a party being thrown by her old boyfriend Hunter John Matteson and his wife Emma. It turns out that Emma's mother Ariel Clark set the situation up to try to show Hunter John that Sydney was trash, and Claire was unaware of her motives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Kill_a_Child_(short_story)"title="To Kill a Child (short story)">
In a scaled and clear prose, but with a fateful feel, the everyday life of the involved characters is depicted before one of them unintentionally hits a small child with a car. The readers know what will happen from the very start and the author works with a narration technique called planting. In the short story there exists very few details of the people involved which means that anyone can imagine themselves as the characters and relate to them. In the short story there are multiple plot lines since two courses of events happen simultaneously.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_to_the_Door"title="Key to the Door">
"Key to the Door" is the story of a young man growing up in the grim backstreets of Nottingham, England in the 1940s. He attempts to find a way of shaking off the stifling working class expectations that are thrust upon him from all sectors of society. After leaving school for a soulless job in a cardboard factory and at 18 marries a girl who he has been in a relationship with for 3 years, and who he has made pregnant. He is finally called up for National Service and sent to Malaya during the Emergency where he finds himself an unwilling combatant against Chinese communists, whom he thinks of more as comrades in the class struggle rather than as enemies. Based in part on the author's own experiences in Nottingham and in Malaya, the novel was unfavourably compared to the author’s previous stories of working class life in Nottingham, "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" and "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner", but proved popular enough to be reprinted in 1978.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(novel)"title="Aurora (novel)">
A generation ship is launched from Saturn in 2545 at 0.1 c (i.e. traveling at 108,000,000 km/hr or 10% the speed of light). It includes twenty-four self-contained biomes and an average population of two thousand people. One hundred sixty years and approximately seven generations later, it is beginning its deceleration into the Tau Ceti system to begin colonization of a planet's moon, an Earth analog, which has been named Aurora.Devi, the ship's "de facto" chief engineer and leader, is concerned about the decaying infrastructure and biology of the ship: systems are breaking down, each generation has lower intelligence test scores than the last, and bacteria are mutating and evolving at a faster rate than humans. She tells the ship's AI, referred to simply as Ship, to keep a narrative of the voyage. After having some trouble with understanding the human concept of narrative, Ship eventually elects to follow the life of Devi's daughter Freya as a protagonist.As a teenager, Freya travels around the ship on her "wanderjahr" and learns that many of the ship's inhabitants are dissatisfied with their enclosed existence and what they perceive as a dictatorship. Movement is strictly limited for most people, reproduction is tightly controlled, and education in science and mathematics is mandatory. Freya's "wanderjahr" comes to an end when she is called home as Devi grows sick from cancer and dies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Bohemians"title="The First Bohemians">
The book details the colourful history of the London district of Covent Garden which Gatrell describes as "teeming, disordered and sexually charged" and argues was the world's first "creative Bohemia". During the 18th century many of the UK's most significant artists, actors, poets, novelists, and dramatists lived in the district. The book features more than 200 pictures, many of which have been rarely seen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Racket_(book)"title="The Racket (book)">
"The Racket" is an investigative account of the business and political elite who run the world. The book features interviews with many high-profile figures such as Henry Kissinger from Kennard’s unbridled access over four years to the global elite. Kennard writes that "The world as we know it is run by a squad of cigar-smoking men with big guns, big cash and a reach much too close to home"The book also investigates American imperialism and the mission to exploit the resources of the developing world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhorstoke_nebo"title="Zhorstoke nebo">
A French airline "France Continental" concludes a contract with a Ukrainian aircraft building company "Aronov", according to which the latter has to supply a consignment of regional jet airliners to the European Union. The day after the first two planes are brought into operation, one crashes while landing in Paris, killing 49 people. The preliminary investigation states that the accident was caused by a 20-ton snowplow on the same runway where the plane was to land. A 28-year-old Ukrainian woman Diana Stoliar, whose father led the plane’s design development group but died after a heart attack a year ago, joins the international investigation team. Diana quickly discovers that the reasons of the crash are not that simple and is confronted with a dilemma: to protect her father’s good name or to find the truth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zom-B"title="Zom-B">
The series centers around Becky "B" Smith, who finally rejects her racist father at the beginning of a zombie apocalypse after being forced by him to throw a black classmate to the zombies. B later has her heart ripped out by the same classmate. Awakening eighteen months later as a "reviitalised" zombie, B explores the world at large, the ongoing battle between Dr. Oystein and his Angels and Mr. Dowling and his mutant-controlled zombies. The series also explores B's own connections to the instigators of the apocalypse, including the Owl Man and a mysterious group of babies. The majority of novels in the series are written as concluding with a cliffhanger leading to the subsequent book, structured in a manner similar to television serials.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Bright_Places"title="All the Bright Places">
Theodore Finch and Violet Markey are two teenagers who badly want to escape from their small Indiana town of Bartlett. Violet is a popular girl who is secretly dealing with survivor's remorse, and Finch is a boy obsessed with death, labeled a freak by his peers. Fate brings the two together when both climbed the bell tower at school at the same time, planning to jump off the ledge. Finch was surprised to see Violet up there because she is one of the most popular girls in the school. However, Violet has been dealing with the death of her sister, Eleanor, who died 9 months previously in a car accident after Violet suggested the route home. Violet feels responsible and has not been in a car since the accident. Violet quit the student council, then cheerleading, and struggles with survivor's remorse, and thinks she should have died instead of Eleanor. On the ledge, Finch talks Violet down, and Violet returns the favor, but everyone assumes it's Violet who saved Finch.As for Finch, he suffers from depression and experiences near-constant thoughts of suicide during his so-called "Awake" periods. Finch's family does not understand his depression, making him feel isolated. Morbidly, he writes out fun facts about other people's suicides on his computer, as well as methods of suicide and the best way to die. Finch initiates a partnership between himself and Violet for a school project in which they will explore their home state of Indiana together. Later, at home, Finch thinks about Violet, looking her up on Facebook, reading about her sister's accident (which he had forgotten), and chatting online with her. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wish_You_Were_Here_(Swift_novel)"title="Wish You Were Here (Swift novel)">
This is a novel about the changing face of rural England. It is narrated by the last of a long line of West Country farmers who now (in 2004) runs a caravan park on the Isle of Wight with his childhood sweetheart, the daughter of a neighbouring farmer. As Jack Luxton travels to collect the body of his brother, repatriated from the war in Iraq, and take it to the family burial plot in North Devon, he relates the history of the Luxton family and their traditional professions of farming and military service. Alongside this he tells the story of the near demise of dairy farming in England, through the twin catastrophes of BSE in 1996 and the foot and mouth disease in 2001. Added to this is the increasingly common and equally disastrous disease of wealthy city dwellers buying second homes in rural areas, thus disrupting traditional village life and making it too expensive for locals to stay in their natural communities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_One_Summer"title="This One Summer">
Rose has been coming to a cottage in Awago every summer and meeting her summer friend, Windy, as long as she can remember. Rose is about eighteen months older than Windy and is the narrator of the story. This summer, they start to explore their interest in boys and pay attention to the emotional lives of adults around them. Most of the adults and teenagers in the village (and in their families) are a "rogues' gallery of sad and burnt-out would-be role models." This is emphasized as Rose also begins to realize her mother, Alice, is depressed following her miscarriages and infertility issues. One of the people Rose and Windy meet at Awago includes Jenny, a reluctantly pregnant teenager. After Jenny drinks too much, Alice saves her from drowning and the novel concludes when the two recount Alice's miscarriage in a lake.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Can't_Think_Straight_(novel)"title="I Can't Think Straight (novel)">
Spirited Christian Tala and shy Muslim Leyla could not be more different from each other, but the attraction is immediate and goes deeper than friendship. But Tala is not ready to accept the implications of the choice her heart has made for her and escapes back to Jordan, while Leyla tries to move on with her new-found life, to the shock of her tradition-loving parents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Unseen_(novel)"title="The World Unseen (novel)">
In 1950’s South Africa, free-spirited Amina has broken all the rules of her own conventional Indian community, and the new apartheid-led government, by running a cafe with Jacob her “coloured” business partner. When she meets Miriam, a young wife and mother, their unexpected attraction pushes Miriam to question the rules that bind her. When Amina helps Miriam’s sister-in-law to hide from the police, a chain of events is set in motion that changes both women forever.The World Unseen transports us to a vibrant, colourful world, a world that divides white from black and women from men, but one that might just allow an unexpected love to survive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Basket"title="The Basket">
The story begins at the end of the 19th century, when a Russian officer seduces a Georgian shepherd’s wife: the resulting bastard, the ancestor of the novel's anti-heroes, is kept in a basket where he cannot interfere with his mother’s adultery. The shepherd avenges himself by murdering his wife and disemboweling himself, but fails to kill the boy in the basket. The boy, Razhden Kasheli, later rapes his foster-mother, before disappearing to become a robber and murderer, returning to Georgia with the Red Army and a female tramp he has married; he becomes a killer for the Soviet authorities. After he is murdered by a drunken Assyrian, his son Anton acts as a GPU and NKVD killer in the Great Terror of 1937-8, shooting countless victims. Anton’s great achievement is to marry Princess Ketusi, whose father and husband he has murdered, thus initiating the process, fatal for Georgian society, of intermarrying and interbreeding Soviet killers with Georgian aristocrats and intellectuals. Anton is killed by a runaway truck in 1949, but his son Razhden 2nd takes over as an important Soviet official. Razhden’s son Anton second may not, however, be a real Kasheli, since his mother Pepe was pregnant before his parents married. Anton is a childish dreamer and, manipulated by Razhden 2nd, marries Liziko, the daughter of an unworldly writer, Elizbar. Razhden seduces Liziko; both Anton and Elizbar find out after Liziko confesses to her stepmother. More important even than these violent sexual and homicidal events are the author’s and character’s reflections on the irrecoverable degradation of the country.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Letters_to_the_Dead"title="Love Letters to the Dead">
Laurel has just started class at a new high school. She is a quiet student who still dresses like she's in middle school. Mrs. Buster, her English teacher, gives the class an assignment to write a letter to a dead person. Laurel chooses Kurt Cobain and begins an ongoing relationship with the other dead people. "Confiding in dead geniuses helps a teen process her grief and rage."At the new school, Laurel makes friends and continues to write letters to dead people documenting the changes in her life as well as sharing her confusion and grief over the loss of her older sister.Subplots include the rocky love story of Natalie who loves Hannah and is not afraid of acknowledging her sexual orientation, and Hannah's conflict in admitting she has an attraction to Natalie; dating heavily and experimenting sexually with boys in attempt to cover her desire to be with Natalie. There is also the relationship/love stories of Laurel and Sky, Laurel's mother and father, Tristan and Kristan, Laurel and May, May and her progressively older and shadier boyfriends, and Aunt Amy and "the Jesus man" (a very religious seeming man).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walls_Around_Us"title="The Walls Around Us">
The book is told through the alternating viewpoints of the ballerina Violet and Amber, who is accused of murdering her stepfather. While both viewpoints are interwoven, Amber's viewpoint takes place before Violet's.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/365_Penguins"title="365 Penguins">
On the morning of New Year's Day a family receives an anonymous package containing a penguin and a note which says "I'm number 1. Feed me when I'm hungry."(pages 4,5) The family then receives a penguin a day for 365 days. The book discusses the problems the family experiences, including feeding and housing penguins, and in Summer, heat (which the penguins don't like), noise and the smell. After a time, the family appears to accept their lot, "You live penguin. You think penguin. You dream penguin. You become penguin."(pages 34,35) By the time of New Year's Eve there are 365 penguins in the house and the family is forced to celebrate outside. After midnight Uncle Victor, an ecologist, arrives and explains that the penguins' South Pole habitat is shrinking due to melting ice caps so he decided to introduce them to the North Pole. But as endangered species can't be exported he sent the family a penguin a day, alternating between a male and a female. Uncle Victor then takes all the penguins except Chilly, a cute penguin with blue feet, who the family agrees to look after. The story ends when the next day a very large package arrives containing a polar bear and a note similar to the first penguin note.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_Karabakh"title="Journey to Karabakh">
Gio, a young Georgian, falls in love with a prostitute and experiences with her two of the happiest months of his life. When his father forces him to break off the relationship, he becomes deeply depressed. He accompanies a friend, who wants to buy drugs in Azerbaijan, on his journey over the border.In the darkness, the duo stray onto a remote country track and are arrested by an Azerbaijani patrol. They are in Karabakh, in the middle of the war. The supposedly "cool" young men from Tbilisi have no idea what is going on. Their car and their money are seized and they are thrown into a cell already occupied by an Armenian prisoner.Events then unfold with lightning speed. Armenian fighters free their friend and the Georgians with him. Gio finds himself in an Armenian village where he is not mistreated but his every move is watched. When Russian journalists visit the village, Gio – along with two Azerbaijani prisoners and a Russian hostage – manages to flee and he makes his way safely back to the Azerbaijani base, where he is hailed a hero. His friend is still there and his purple Lada is still parked on the same spot. Only the money is gone. His friend is given a packet of drugs and a gun as compensation. Then they return to their old lives in Tbilisi.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Unlikely_Event_(novel)"title="In the Unlikely Event (novel)">
"In the Unlikely Event" takes place in the early 1950s when the United States is dealing with the Korean War along with changing social mores. Miri Ammerman is the daughter of a single mother whose father left before she was born. Miri learns to negotiate a difficult adolescence with her loving family as they, and everyone in her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, deal with the unexpected and unexplained rash of airplane crashes literally in their backyards.The novel is based on three actual plane crashes that took place in Elizabeth, Blume's hometown, over the course of 58 days. The first accident occurred on December 16, 1951, with the plane crashing into the Elizabeth River. The second crash happened on January 22, 1952, and nearly hit the Battin High School for girls. The last crash was on February 11 of the same year and narrowly missed an orphanage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Steele_(novel)"title="Joe Steele (novel)">
The novel explores what might have happened had Joseph Stalin been raised in the United States, postulating his parents having emigrated a few months before his birth, instead of remaining in the Russian Empire. It depicts Stalin (in this history, taking the name Joe Steele) growing up to be an American politician, rising to the presidency and retaining it by ruthless methods through the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War. The president is depicted as having the soul of a tyrant, with Stalin's real-world career mirrored by actions taken by Steele.During the 1932 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Illinois, the party had decided on two front runners: California Congressman Joe Steele, and; incumbent Governor of New York Franklin D. Roosevelt. However, after two days of votes, neither candidate has the needed two-thirds majority, although Roosevelt had a slight edge. Realizing he might lose after another day of voting, Steele directed one of his aides Vince "The Hammer" Scriabin to have Roosevelt burned alive at the New York State Executive Mansion in Albany. Steele's other assistants Lazar Kagan and Stas Mikoian were not privy to the initial planning. However, Charlie Sullivan, by happenstance, overheard Scriabin on the phone giving the order for the arson. Steele never knew this. However, in light of Sullivan's "fairness" in his reporting, Steele personally met with Sullivan and promised that Sullivan would always have access to Steele's camp.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_Island_(novel)"title="Ellis Island (novel)">
In 1907 Jacob Rubinstein, a Russian Jew, leaves his village after it is attacked by cossacks. He heads for Hamburg, Germany, hoping that he can sail to America. While in Hamburg, he meets an African American called Roscoe Haines, who, after seeing his talent for playing Ragtime, encourages Jacob to go and see a music publisher called Abe Shulman in New York.When on the ship, Jacob meets an Italian from Sicily named Marco Santorelli. Marco had been the gardener for the English actress Maude Charteris. She wanted him to move to London with her but he refused as he wanted to go to America to make his fortune.One night during the crossing large numbers of the steerage class passengers dance on the ship's deck and Jacob and Marco meet and dance with two Irish sisters called Bridget and Georgiana O'Donnell. Bridget had been on the staff at Wexford Hall, the Irish home of the British landowner Jamie Barrymore the Earl of Wexford. Bridget, using the pseudonym of Mary-Ann Flaherty, had seduced the earl and assisted the Fenians in kidnapping Wexford. The same night Jacob has a brief conversation with a Czech called Tom Banicek.When the ship arrives in New York, Bridget is frustrated that while first and second class passengers just go straight to immigration, the steerage class passengers are all required to go through Ellis Island. Marco passes through with no problems, Jacob is treated for a gunshot wound that he had suffered during the trouble in his village. Bridget too is allowed in, but Georgiana is refused entry when she is diagnosed with trachoma an eye disease that can lead to blindness. Despite Bridget's criticism of the Ellis Island doctor Carl Travers, the decision is final, but the sisters' Uncle Casey, a powerful businessman, arranges for Georgiana to return to Ireland and then come back on another ship by second class as she wouldn't be checked that way.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Only_the_Dead_Could_Listen"title="If Only the Dead Could Listen">
The events of the play take place at a police station in a small town near London, UK, in December 2001.Scene One: Bill Wright, a police sergeant in his late forties, is anxiously awaiting the arrival of Alma Stone, an Albanian researcher in London. She has volunteered to act as an interpreter at the interview of Leka Trimi, an Albanian asylum seeker from Kosova, who has been arrested on suspicion of theft. The conversation between Bill and Alma reveals that she suffers from an inferiority complex because of the bad press her country and expatriates receive in the British media. Bill is taken by surprise by her low opinion of her fellow Albanians.Scene Two: John, a custody officer, orders Leka repeatedly to sit down when Bill and Alma enter the interview room. Leka is profusely apologetic to Bill for having hit him unintentionally the day before during a fight that had broken out between Leka and a fellow Albanian interpreter. Leka speaks broken English throughout the scene. He is very courteous towards Alma. When John leaves the interview room Bill and Alma fail to convince Leka that Alma is Albanian. Leka’s self-esteem and his opinion of his fellow Albanians are apparently so low that he cannot comprehend that some of his compatriots in the UK are not refugees. At some point Leka compares Alma to another woman with a Serbian name, something which makes Alma very curious. She tries without success to learn from Leka about the Serbian woman. Alma could sense that Leka has perhaps a Serbian wife/girlfriend, which, in her view, is very strange considering the hostility between the Albanians and the Serbs in Kosova. John interrupts the interview to inform Bill that the Chief of Police needs to see him immediately.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maiden_Castle_(novel)"title="Maiden Castle (novel)">
"Maiden Castle" is about "the difficult relationship of a historical novelist [Dud No-Man] [...] and a young circus acrobat [Wizzie Raveleston]. Another major character, the novelist's father [Uryen Quirm] believes that he is "the incarnation of a Welsh god". Uryen tries "to reawake the old gods once worshipped" at Maiden Castle, but he fails in this, just as his son fails in his relationship with Wizzie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_(Binnie_novel)"title="Nevada (Binnie novel)">
When Maria finds out her girlfriend cheated on her, she spirals out of control, stealing her girlfriend's car and buying heroin before heading west on a journey of self-discovery. In Nevada, she meets James Hanson, and immediately realizes that James is also transgender, but doesn't realize it yet. The two travel to Reno together. Maria frequently lapses into long inner monologues throughout the book, reflecting on gender, heteronormativity, and social conditioning.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_from_the_Internet_Apocalypse"title="Notes from the Internet Apocalypse">
The Internet suddenly stops working and society collapses from its loss. Internet addicts wander the streets talking to themselves, the economy crashes and the government authorizes the NET Recovery Act.For a man named Gladstone, the Internet's vanishing comes particularly hard, following the death of his wife, when he hears rumors that someone in New York City is still online.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_Script"title="Shooting Script">
Keith Carr, an ex-Royal Air Force fighter pilot with combat experience in the Korean War is now living in Jamaica, where he makes a threadbare living flying charter cargo flights around the Caribbean in his mortgaged second-hand de Havilland Dove. After he discovers that a pilot he knows from his Korean War days now commands a squadron of de Havilland Vampire jet fighters for the hard-line military dictators on the Central-American nation of “Republica Libra”, Carr suddenly finds life more difficult. And for some reason he can't understand, the United States FBI is keeping him under surveillance. Republica Libra at first offers him a job, and then impounds his plane when he refuses.Carr is hired by the flamboyant movie director Walt Whitmore, who is filming an action movie on the north coast of Jamaica to fly an old World War II vintage B-25 Mitchell medium bomber as a camera plane. However, after the student pilot he's training ends up murdered, it becomes apparent that Whitmore has more in mind for Carr and the elderly bomber than just making a film.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Life_(Harkness_novel)"title="The Book of Life (Harkness novel)">
Having returned from their refuge in 16th century London to find a family member dead, Diana and Matthew embark on a mission of revenge, seeking the final pages of the Book of Life, and bringing justice to witches and vampires that have wronged them. Diana is now a member of the de Clermont family. They find the black sheep of the family, Benjamin, Matthew's disavowed son and dispose of him. Matthew's genetics work progresses, with the help of a Yale scientist, and they are able to remove the charter of Covenant, meaning inter-species marriage is possible. It had originally been drawn up based on fear and stereotypes the old generation held.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NYPD_Red_3"title="NYPD Red 3">
This third novel in the NYPD Red series centers on two of the NYPD Red detectives, Zach Jordan and his partner Kylie MacDonald. NYPD Red, an entity invented by Patterson for his series, is an elite and well trained unit that has the job of protecting the rich, the famous and the well connected. This duo get called into a case in which the headless body of a man named Peter who was the chauffeur of one of New York's most powerful men, Hunter Alden, is found in the garage. Alden's son also goes missing and a witness swears he and his friend were kidnapped. Alden denies his son is missing and is reluctant to help the police. Zach and Kylie, who are both trying to sort out their own problems with domestic partners, must put their issues on hold to determine what is happening concerning the murder and alleged kidnapping cases assigned to them. The plot of this novel is full of very unexpected twists and turns.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Duk"title="Donald Duk">
Donald Duk is an eleven-year-old Chinese-American, preparing to celebrate both his twelfth birthday and Chinese New Year. He is the son of a Chinese chef named King Duk, and a Chinese mother named Daisy Duk. Donald has two older twin sisters named Penelope and Venus Duk. From the start of the book we are told how embarrassed Donald is of his name and of being introduced with his family.The story begins with Donald comparing himself to Fred Astaire. Donald believes he dances as well as Fred and throughout the novel considers himself the real "Chinese Fred Astaire" (91). Donald immerses himself in old black-and-white movies, and especially admires Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers films. He envies the way "everyone" adores Fred when he dances. Donald wishes he could "live the late-night life in old black-and-white movies and talk with his feet like Fred Astaire, and smile Fred Astaire's sweet lemonade smile" (1).King Duk fears Donald sees the world too much in black-and-white, wanting to become as American as possible. Donald is ashamed of the way his family rejects American culture and that even when they watch television "they make everybody on the TV look Chinese!" (91). Donald does not want to be like them; he considers himself American because he was born in America. Donald's father tells him, "I think Donald Duk may be the very last American-born Chinese-American boy to believe you have to give up being Chinese to be an American" (42).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deadly_Wandering"title="A Deadly Wandering">
On September 22, 2006, shortly after being denied a Mormon mission due to premarital sex, nineteen-year-old Utah college student Reggie Shaw is texting and driving with his girlfriend when he crosses the yellow lines on the highway west of Logan, Utah. He causes a chain-reaction accident that kills James Furfaro and Keith O’Dell, two rocket scientists headed to work. Unharmed, Shaw attempts to call 911 but the call didn't go through. A state trooper that comes to the scene said he witnessed “a collision so violent it popped out the passengers’ eyeballs.” Despite initially denying he was texting and driving, and his parents vehemently standing behind him, Shaw eventually admits to it when faced with damning evidence. Richtel examines the police investigation and Shaw's prosecution, which was a test case in terms of accident litigation. Shaw ended up serving several weeks in prison for negligent homicide.Richtel intersperses this narrative with scientific studies of attention and the human mind. He details the history of cognitive neuroscience, from its beginnings in World War II in assisting pilots to not become overwhelmed by technology, to its current applications with MRI studies. Richtel cites a study that claims motorists are impaired for 15 seconds after they text. He explains how cell phone companies initially denied texting and driving was a dangerous activity. Indeed, Richtel notes, not a single state banned the practice when the accident occurred. Eventually, Reggie Shaw becomes a prominent advocate against distracted driving. He is forgiven by the families of the scientists he killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bedbug"title="The Bedbug">
The action of the play begins in 1929 in the U.S.S.R. Ivan Prisypkin is a young man in the age of NEP. On the day of his wedding to Elzevir Davidovna Renaissance, Prisypkin is frozen in a basement. After fifty years, he is revived in a world that looks very different. Around him is an ideal communist world, almost a utopia. There is no more poverty and destitution, illness and natural disasters have been defeated, and people have forgotten about drunkenness, smoking, and swearing. Prisypkin does not belong in this future. He becomes an exhibit at the zoo and serves as an example of the vices of a past age to the citizens of the future. The title of the play comes from a bed bug which was frozen at the same time as Prisypkin and becomes his companion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drama_High"title="Drama High">
The series is told in the voice of Jayd Jackson, a strong opinionated high school student from Compton, California who comes from a long line of Louisiana conjure women. Jayd is continuously presented with both supernatural and practical problems in which she must use the teachings of her maternal ancestors (the Williams women) to help her solve. The series takes place in modern-day Los Angeles, California and contains many references to real life places. The novels are stemmed in the teachings of the Yoruba religion and maintain the presence of both African American and Latin cultures. The characters attend South Bay High, a fictional high school where the majority of the student body and teaching staff are privileged and white, ultimately causing racial tension between the students and the teachers alike. The series is expected to contain forty-four novels which will follow its main character Jayd out of high school and into college in its extension Drama U.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Games_(Kosmatka_novel)"title="The Games (Kosmatka novel)">
Geneticist Silas Williams oversees U.S. selections for the Olympic Gladiator competition, an internationally sanctioned bloodsport with only one rule: no entrants may possess human DNA. To maintain America’s edge, Silas’s superior engages an experimental supercomputer to design the ultimate combatant, producing a monster unlike anything ever seen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_Girl"title="Honor Girl">
"Honor Girl" is the story of writer's Maggie Thrash's first crush at an all-girls summer camp in Kentucky in 2000.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_River"title="Into the River">
Set in New Zealand, the book tells the story of Māori youth Te Arepa Santos as he moves from the East Coast to Auckland to boarding school, where he has encounters with intimacy, sex, drugs, racism and death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desolation_Road"title="Desolation Road">
In the future, scientist Dr. Alimantando is trekking across the desert of a terraformed Mars and meets a humanoid "greenperson", who claims to have traveled through time to make sure Alimantando is in the right place at the right time to fulfill his destiny. It comes in the form of a 700-year-old sentient ROTECH environmental engineering module, or orph, which lies dying in the desert. It bequeaths itself and its resources to Dr. Alimantando, who dismantles the machine and uses its components to build his own oasis in the desert, which he names Desolation Road (instead of Destination Road) after consuming too much wine.Over time, several people find themselves at this settlement in the middle of nowhere, and are welcomed by Dr. Alimantando. Crime lord Jameson Jericho, Pasternoster of the Exalted Families, flees the violent destruction of his empire by his enemies, pursued by assassins and possessing a chip in his brain containing the consciousnesses of his Exalted Ancestors. Would-be pioneers Rael and Eva Mandella, and Rael's father Haran, arrive ahead of a sandstorm, and Eva gives birth to twins Limaal and Taasmin. Rajandra Das, a man with the power to charm machinery, is unceremoniously kicked off a train at a random stop that turns out to be Desolation Road. Industrial chemist Mikal Margolis and his put-upon mother, "the Babooshka" disembark another train and are stranded. The beautiful pilot Persis Tatterdemalion crash lands her plane near the town and, unable to repair the aircraft, stays. She and Mikal begin a relationship and open the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel. Identical lothario triplets Ed, Louie, and Umberto Gallacelli arrive at the B.A.R./Hotel having fled their raucous past. A mechanic, a lawyer, and a farmer respectively, they all simultaneously fall in love with Persis at first sight. Mikal, meanwhile, has become infatuated with Marya Quinsana, a veterinarian, whose dentist brother Morton is himself both infatuated with and fiercely possessive of his sister. The feuding Stalin and Tenebrae families arrive, and are given homesteads right next to each other. Mr. and Mrs. Stalin's unpleasant son Johnny is both befriended and abused by the Mandella twins. Meredith Blue Mountain and his daughter Ruthie, whom he secretly created in a genesis-bottle, come to town to avoid persecution by their former neighbors. Ruthie has the power to absorb the beauty around her, and release it outward at will.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_and_the_Code_of_Claw"title="Gregor and the Code of Claw">
Only a few hours have passed since the closing of "Gregor and the Marks of Secret", when Gregor returns from the Firelands to warn Regalia of an impending gnawer attack. As the novel opens, Gregor is numb with shock from the "Prophecy of Time"'s apparent prediction of his death. He and his bond Ares disobey Solovet and return to the Firelands to find the terribly ill Luxa, Aurora, and Howard. Gregor rushes his ill friends back to the city for treatment, whereupon Solovet orders him locked in the dungeon for insubordination. He is eventually released by Nerissa to help his sister Boots while the toddler works to fulfill the "Prophecy of Time" by deciphering the rats' "Code of Claw".Solovet still wants Gregor imprisoned, until Ripred and Mareth inform her that Gregor has recently developed romantic feelings for Queen Luxa, and would never leave Regalia while she is hospitalized. Shortly after this incident, an upset Gregor is called to the code room for an "emergency with [his] sister", and discovers eight-year-old Lizzie has come to bring him home. When the code team learns that Lizzie has an aptitude for puzzles, Ripred makes the suggestion that she replace Boots. Gregor is desperate to keep his family safe, so he extracts a promise from Ripred to protect them and keep them in the dark about Gregor's impending doom. While Lizzie works on (and ultimately solves) the code, Gregor fights the Bane's armies, struggling all the while to cope with his emotions about Luxa and Sandwich's prophecy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uprooted_(novel)"title="Uprooted (novel)">
Agnieszka lives in the village of Dvernik in the kingdom of Polnya. Every ten years the local wizard ("the Dragon") collects one teenage girl as payment for protecting the local valley from the magical forest (the Wood) that borders it. Despite being born in a tribute year, Agnieszka does not fear being taken, as the Dragon only chooses the best and brightest girls and she is clumsy and slovenly – unlike her beautiful friend Kasia, who has been groomed to be selected. But the Dragon picks Agnieszka and takes her to his tower.Through notes left by previous girls, Agnieszka gathers that her role is mostly household duties. But the reason for his choice is that she has magical abilities, and he starts teaching her simple spells. Agnieszka finds these acts of magic difficult and unnatural.As part of his duties, the Dragon leaves to deal with a Chimera. In his absence, Agnieszka notices a call for assistance from her village. Defying the Dragon, she escapes from the tower and returns to Dvernik, where she learns that wolves from the Wood have infected the cattle and a man. She successfully uses magic to help destroy the cattle, only for the wolves to return and to try to kill her and Kasia. The Dragon arrives and saves her, but is wounded. Returning them both to the tower, Agnieszka saves his life after she intuits a spell from one of the witch Jaga's notebooks which the Dragon had thought useless. Recognizing that her powers differ from his, he reluctantly allows Agnieszka to teach herself Jaga's more intuitive magic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Five_Balloons"title="A Tale of Five Balloons">
The book is about five children each of whom get a balloon from Ruti's mother — a blue balloon for Ruti, yellow for Ron, purple for Sigalit, green for Uri and red for Alon. During the book, all the children's balloons burst, with the exception of Alon's, which the wind blew out of the children's reach. The children look at the balloon and shout "Bye, bye, red balloon!".Whenever one of the balloons bursts, the children are comforted and told "that's how all balloons end up". Each balloon had burst for the following different reasons:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Ember_in_the_Ashes"title="An Ember in the Ashes">
A Scholar girl by the name of Laia lives in the Martial Empire with her grandparents and brother Darin in the city of Serra. Their existence is a grueling one as they are seen as second-class citizens by the ruling Martial elite. Darin is arrested by Martial forces and accused of being an anti-Empire rebel. Laia seeks out the help of the anti-Empire group called the Resistance, and agrees to infiltrate an infamous military school for them if they help her break her brother free from prison.At the school, called Blackcliff Academy, Laia meets a student named Elias Veturius. Along with his best friend Helene Aquilla and his two rivals Marcus and Zak Farrar, he has been chosen to take the Trials, a series of tests that will decide who the next ruler of the Empire is. But Elias has no wish to take the tests, or be ruler. He wants to escape the Empire.When Elias meets Laia, the two realize that their destinies are more intertwined than they could have ever dreamed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_on_Blue"title="Green on Blue">
The novel opens with Aziz, the protagonist, and his older brother Ali in their home in a remote village in southeastern Afghanistan. Despite their village's isolation among the mountains, the boys have a stable and loving home with their mother and father. The two boys are still quite young when their parents are killed in a raid. Newly orphaned, Aziz and Ali travel to Orgun, a city where they eke out a living at first by begging and later by working in a marketplace.Political events in Afghanistan shape Aziz's narrative in ways that he does not fully understand until later in the novel. At the same time that Ali is working in the market to pay for Aziz's education, the U.S. forces invade Afghanistan. Local militants and warlords strike back against the Americans, and a bomb explodes in the market in which Ali works, leaving him critically injured.In the hospital caring for his brother, Aziz encounters an Afghan wearing an American uniform. This man recruits Aziz to the U.S.-funded militia called the "Special Lashkar" because the wages from soldiering will allow Ali to stay in the hospital and receive the medical care he needs.Aziz departs for the border with the militia and quickly learns about the true nature of war. Through fighting with the Special Lashkar, he develops relationships with people who represent the different directions in which Aziz feels himself pulled. Mr. Jack, an American adviser for the Special Lashkar, is the only American in the novel. Aziz views Mr. Jack with a certain amount of skepticism, and sees the American as an outsider. Aziz also meets the warlord Atal, and is drawn to the man's power as well as Atal's niece, a young woman Aziz comes to fall in love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Country_(novel)"title="Cow Country (novel)">
Built around a cattle industry now in decline, the town of Cow Eye Junction is experiencing a severe drought, a demographic incursion, and an ongoing cultural clash as older residents are displaced by a new wave of outsiders moving in. The college, meanwhile, is struggling to maintain its accreditation and to reconcile two rival factions: those who eat meat, and those who will not. Hoping to resolve this situation, the college hires the narrator, Charlie, to serve as Special Projects Coordinator. Struggling to find his place in life as a self-described "habitual divorcee and father of nothing," Charlie is repeatedly drawn into outlandish situations over the course of the novel as he tries to help the college achieve regional accreditation, reconcile a divided faculty, and resurrect the college's annual Christmas party.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paris_Architect"title="The Paris Architect">
During World War II Lucien Bernard, an architect living in Paris, France, is offered a large fee to design hiding places for Jews being hunted by the Nazis. He desperately needs the money to make a living, although he knows that if caught, he will most likely be killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_Shadow"title="Walking Shadow">
The story follows Boston-based PI Spenser as he tries to solve the on-stage murder of an actor in the run-down town of Port City. While investigating the crime, he runs afoul of the local Chinese mob and uncovers a web of infidelity, organized crime, and psychologically unstable actors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_Billy"title="Blockade Billy">
The book is told through a framing device, where an old man in a retirement home, George "Granny" Grantham, is telling the story to Stephen King. Granny tells of the 1957 Major League Baseball season, when he was the third base coach for a now-defunct team, the New Jersey Titans. When the team loses both of their catchers days before the start of the season, they are forced to request a minor league player as a last-minute replacement. The replacement turns out to be a young man named William "Billy" Blakely. Although Billy seems to be feeble minded and highly susceptible to suggestion, he turns out to be a phenomenal player. He becomes especially well known for his incredible stopping power at home plate, earning him the nickname "Blockade Billy" amongst fans. He quickly becomes endeared to the team, especially to star pitcher Danny Dusen, a usually arrogant, self-centered man who adopts Billy as his good luck charm. Granny, however, becomes suspicious of Billy when a player, who was badly injured during a tag out, accuses him of intentionally slicing his ankle. Although Billy claims innocence, and there is no evidence to support the accusation, Granny is convinced that Billy is lying. As the season goes on, Billy's popularity continues to grow. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_Warning_(Park_novel)"title="Storm Warning (Park novel)">
As they were leaving China, Amy and Dan get a call from the Holts telling them that they knew where they were going. Dan and Amy assume Nellie Gomez, their au pair, told the Holts. On the plane, Dan and Amy get Nellie to give them some information. It turns out it wasn't Beatrice who hired her, but Grace. Nellie also tells them that she works for Mr. McIntyre, but does not tell them who she really works for. Amy and Dan become suspicious of her and try to avoid her as much as possible.As events in the Caribbean take place, Amy and Dan watch as the clue hunt kills a non-Cahill named Lester. Angry and in shock, Amy and Dan decide to face Aunt Beatrice, but Nellie kidnaps them, and takes them to Moore Town to meet The Man In Black. They are then forced to solve a puzzle box that Amy and Dan had found in the museum that Lester had worked at, finding slots that fit different items representing the branches: a jade with a dragon on it, a bear claw found in a cave, a wolf tooth on Isabel Kabra's bracelet, and the snake-shaped nose ring that Nellie wears. After solving Anne Bonny's puzzle box, getting the Madrigal clue of Mace, and the knowledge that they should go to England, Dan and Amy learn that The Man In Black, who followed them in the first few books in the series, is Fiske Cahill, Grace's brother. He ran away as a kid, and that's why Amy and Dan never heard of him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Short_Second_Life_of_Bree_Tanner"title="The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner">
The story begins with Bree and Diego hunting for human blood in Seattle, Washington. Bree has been a vampire for three months, and Diego has been one for eleven months. Together they kill and drink a pimp and two prostitutes. Bree and Diego discuss "her" (Victoria, who turned them into vampires). They hide in a cave and discuss their human lives, and how Riley came to offer them a second life as a vampire. Together they decide that Riley is using them as pawns, and that he might be lying to them. They also discover that sunlight does not kill a vampire, but makes their skin sparkle. They fall in love and hunt for Riley and the other vampires they live with.They find that Riley had relocated everyone to a log cabin and Diego gets into a fight. That night Bree and Diego stalk Riley, suspicious that he is meeting with "her." They eavesdrop on Riley's conversation with Victoria.Eventually the Volturi show up, threatening to punish Victoria for amassing a vampire army, but are willing to give her army a chance to destroy the Cullen clan. The Volturi say that if Victoria does not attack within five days, they will kill her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slave_(Singer_novel)"title="The Slave (Singer novel)">
Jacob, the hero of the book, is a resident of Josefov, a Jewish town in Poland. After the Khmelnytsky massacres, in which his wife and three children were murdered by Cossacks, Jacob is sold as a slave to gentile peasants in the southern Polish mountains. During his years of slavery, he strives to maintain his Judaism by observing as many Jewish rituals as possible and by maintaining high ethical standards for himself.While in captivity, Jacob falls in love with his master's daughter, Wanda. While Jewish law and custom forbids Jews from even touching a woman a man is not married to and also forbids Jews from cohabiting with gentiles, Jacob's love for Wanda is too powerful to overcome and they have sex. Later, Jews from Josefov come to ransom him by paying off Wanda's father and he returns to Josefov. While in Josefov, Jacob dreams of Wanda. In his dream, Wanda is pregnant and asks Jacob why he abandoned her and left the child in her womb to be raised by gentiles. Jacob decides to return to the gentile village, take Wanda as his wife, and help her convert to Judaism. Jacob and Wanda reach another town, Pilitz, where Jacob begins to make his living as a teacher. In Pilitz, Wanda becomes known as 'Sarah' and Jacob instructs her to be pretend that she is deaf and mute so as not to reveal her gentile origins. Sarah thirsts for knowledge about Judaism and at night, Jacob teaches her Jewish beliefs and practices. She suffers in silence as the women of the town gossip about her right in front of her, as they believe she is deaf and cannot hear them. Her secret is finally discovered when she screams loudly at the women gossiping around her during the birth of her and Jacob's son. Frustrated at the predictions of her death openly discussed around her, Sarah has enough, demanding to be able to die in peace and pointing out the hypocrisy the townsfolk. Sarah dies after the difficult birth, and is given a "donkey's burial" outside of the Jewish cemetery. Jacob is taken away by two dragoons to be executed for converting a Christian to Judaism, but he escapes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_White_Male"title="Straight White Male">
The story of a middle-aged couple caring for the husband's aging, ailing parents and their own children, while troubled by a past with which they have never come to terms.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taken_by_Force_(book)"title="Taken by Force (book)">
"Taken by Force" explores the patterns of rapes committed by US servicemen during the Second World War between the years of 1942 and 1945, as well as the reaction of the American army in response to the crimes. The book draws upon court records, newspaper articles, and trial transcripts, covering the 14,000 rapes that Lilly estimated, using a formula created by Leon Radzinowicz, which occurred in Britain, France, and Germany at the hands of US soldiers."Chapter 2" covers "explanations for sexual violence during war", which includes discussion about rape being used as a "tool of genocide", as an "inherent feature of military culture", and as a "means of revenge.""Chapters 3, 4, and 5" consecutively act as "analyses of rape and rape prosecutions" in the countries of England, France, and Germany and how the number of rapes in each country differs because of views American soldiers held toward the civilian population in each country.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Scattered_Life"title="A Scattered Life">
From the publisher: Free-spirit Skyla Plinka has found the love and stability she always wanted in her reliable husband Thomas. Settling into her new family and roles as wife and mother, life in rural Wisconsin is satisfying, but can’t seem to quell Skyla’s growing sense of restlessness. Her only reprieve is her growing friendship with neighbor Roxanne, who has five kids (and counting) and a life in constant disarray – but also a life filled with laughter and love.Much to the dismay of her intrusive mother-in-law, Audrey, Skyla takes a part-time job at the local bookstore and slowly begins to rediscover her voice, independence and confidence. Throughout one pivotal year in the life of Skyla, Audrey and Roxanne, all three very different women will learn what it means to love unconditionally. With the storytelling ingenuity of Anne Tyler, the writing talent of Jodi Picoult, and the subtlety of Alice Munro, McQuestion offers a satisfying debut that proves she is a gifted portraitist, a natural storyteller and an author to watch.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_the_River"title="Children of the River">
Sundara Sovann is a 12 year old Cambodian girl growing up in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital. Sundara's childhood includes a boy named Chamroeun, described as charming and a smart boy. Chamroeun and Sundara's parents joke that they will one day be married. Sundara falls in love with Chamroeun, but Chamroeun goes to fight in the war as a soldier, right before Sundara leaves to go to her uncle and aunt's house. When Sundara is at her aunt and uncle's house she flees from Cambodia with her aunt, Soka, her grandma, and her uncle, Naro, to escape from Khmer Rouge. She leaves her family behind in Cambodia, which she regrets later in the novel. Sundara's aunt Soka just had a baby, right before they had to leave. While on the small, very cramped ship, Sundara is put in charge of the infant, as Soka is drifting in and out of awareness. The baby is extremely malnourished, and Sundara, eager to save her cousin, asks a mother for her breast milk to help the baby get better. The mother states, "I would, but... Oh, this is all so terrible. I'm not getting enough to drink myself. Soon I'm afraid I won't have milk for my own.". She then goes to a helper and asks for some extra milk, or supplies. He gives her a hard time, but eventually gives her some powdered milk, and some sugar water in a bottle. Then the baby soon dies shortly after, devastating Sundara.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maza_of_the_Moon"title="Maza of the Moon">
Ted Dustin, an American inventor, seeks to win a prize of one million dollars by being the first person to touch the Moon with an object launched from Earth. He devises a huge gun, which fires upon the surface of the Moon. Shortly thereafter, the Moon fires back, and war breaks out between the planet and its satellite. Using a videophone he invented, Ted hails communication with the Moon. A beautiful woman and her guards first reply, but their transmission is cut off by warlike yellow aliens. Ted eventually heads to the Moon in a spacecraft of his own design, and meets the titular character, who turns out to be the beautiful woman from the transmission, as well as a princess of one of the two groups that inhabit the Moon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Copper_Elephant"title="The Copper Elephant">
Whensday Bluehouse is an orphan who was rescued from a life working in the Pits by coffin maker Tick Burrowman. Burrowman is attempting to make a profit by selling Whensday to a woman from Toptown, a part of the world that is unaffected by acid rain and life on The Shelf. Whensday is unsure of the security of this exchange, and sneaks away one night. Burrowman may have actually grown fond of Whensday, and it is unclear if he is interested in giving her away after all.While Whensday is on the run, she stumbles upon a large, mentally handicapped teenager named Honeycut Greenhouse, obviously another orphan. He was separated from his brother, much as Whensday was, and it is obvious that Honeycut doesn't have the faculties to take care of himself. Whensday decides to befriend Honeycut, and he rescues her during a vicious rape by Second Staff Brown, a minor officer in the military. Honeycut kills Brown, and a manhunt begins, ending with Honeycut's capture.Whensday flees and hides in the only place she knows, Tick Burrowman's home. Upon her arrival, she finds him dead, and a former friend, Joe Painter, seriously ill. They cobble together a flotilla of "body boxes" and attempt to paddle up the river, away from the Shelf and the head for Toptown. But Joe Painter dies on the trip, and the current carries Whensday back to the shelf. She is rescued by a secret clan of women, hiding from the Syndicate, and she stays with them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_of_Christopher_Creed"title="The Body of Christopher Creed">
Torey Adams, the narrator, moves to a new town and begins his senior year at Rothborne, a boarding school. As he starts thinking about the school year ahead, he remembers the strange events of his junior year, including the disappearance of his former classmate Christopher Creed. Christopher disappeared without a trace, apart from an email that he sent to the principal. The prelude concludes with Torey sending an email containing his retelling of the events.In the past, Torey and his friends read the email from Christopher. It suggests that Christopher either committed suicide or ran away. The email references a number of people in town who Christopher admires as guys who have "everything," including Torey and one of his friends. This makes Torey more concerned about Creed's disappearance and what has become of him. Torey talks about his concerns with his girlfriend, Leandra, who brushes them off.At school, Torey begins to feel alienated from his friend Alex. Ali McDermott, a girl at school who suffers from negative rumours, talks to Torey about Creed and asks him to come over to her house that night, as she wants to show him something. At her house, Torey and Ali watch the Creed family, observing Mrs. Creed's controlling behaviour and her relationship with Christopher's brothers. Torey meets Ali's boyfriend, Bo, who is a "boon" (a local slang term for the "really bad kids" who come from the boondocks) and is rumoured to be a violent criminal, but turns out to be caring and protective, despite his tough guy demeanour.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damage_(Jenkins_novel)"title="Damage (Jenkins novel)">
Austin is depressed with the potential for suicide. His best friends are Dobie and Curtis. They all are football players. Austin has issues about the routine he takes to get him to go to school. Their favorite hang out is Dairy Queen. Austin meets Heather. Austin's friends discuss their feelings about heather, how his first date with Heather came about and why they are together.In chapter 5 they talk about Austin's first away game, and how it plays out.Chapters 6–9: In this section they go to many places. In chapter 6 they go to a movie and dinner together, Aus. Austin is there thinking about Heather and asks God to forgive him. In chapter 8 he is at home in his bed dreaming about himself and Heather. Then he goes to school and has practice. After practice they are in a locker room talking. Austin takes Curtis home then takes Heather home because she was waiting for him after practice on the truck. In chapter 9 he is at home and Curtis comes over.Austin talks about how things are now that he is with Heather. He would drive Dobie rides home after practice, but since he started to date Heather, Curtis now drives him home. Austin after practice now takes Heather to the Dairy Queen instead of his friends and they place their usual order. While eating, they talk about things including what happened between Curits and Kat. Austin tires of Heather always brushing her hair before leaving, but he sums it up as, "This waiting for hair to be brushed – is the price of dating Heather". They sit in the car just hanging out for a while. Heather thinks Austin is mad at her when he really is not and she gito please him also in hopes that he will not be angry any longer. Two weeks later they have sex.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Settlers_in_Canada"title="The Settlers in Canada">
The story begins in England with a reasonably well-off family (the Campbells) who have inherited the family estate. Their eldest son has gone to college and the second son is in the navy. One day a claimant to the estate appears. His claim proves to be true and the Campbells must give up the estate.Mr. Campbell had given up his business to take over the estate and with the legal costs as well they have very little money left. They just have enough to journey to emigrate to Canada, and take up a settlement near Lake Ontario. The family is united in their troubles and they pull together to make their farm a success, in the process, dealing with the weather, hostile natives and forest fires. They are aided by an eccentric but helpful hunter Malachi Bone, and they rescue young Percival from hostile Indians and welcome new immigrants to their farm.Eventually a letter arrives to say that the relative who had taken the estate, has died, and it is now theirs once again. Mr. and Mrs. Campbell travel home and the rest of the family go their separate ways.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hockey_Stick_Illusion"title="The Hockey Stick Illusion">
"The Hockey Stick Illusion" first outlines a brief history of climate change science with particular emphasis on the description of the Medieval Warm Period in the first IPCC report in 1990, with its inclusion of a schematic based on central England temperatures which Montford describes as a representation of common knowledge at that time. He then argues that a need to overturn this "well-embedded paradigm" was met by the 1998 publication by Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes' of their "hockey stick graph" in "Nature". The book describes how Steve McIntyre first became interested in the graph in 2002 and the difficulties he found in replicating the results of "MBH98" (the original 1998 study) using available datasets, and further data which Mann gave him on request. It details the publication of a paper by McIntyre and Ross McKitrick in 2003 which criticized MBH98, and follows with Mann and his associates' rebuttals. The book recounts reactions to the dispute over the graph, including investigations by the National Academy of Sciences and Edward Wegman and hearings held on the graph before the United States House Energy Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. Efforts taken by other scientists to verify Mann's work and McIntyre's and others' responses to those efforts are described.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_the_Undead_(novel)"title="Dracula the Undead (novel)">
It is seven years since a stake was driven through the heart of the infamous Count Dracula. Seven years which have not eradicated the terrible memories for Jonathan and Mina Harker, who now have a young son. To lay their memories to rest they return to Transylvania, and can find no trace of the horrific events. But, beneath the earth, Dracula's soul lies in limbo, waiting for the Lifeblood that will revive him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitethorn_Woods"title="Whitethorn Woods">
The plot centers around a supposedly miraculous well dedicated to Saint Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary, located in a grotto overgrown with whitethorn bushes in the woods next to an Irish town called Rossmore. While the parish priest is frustrated by people's allegiance to the well rather than the church, the novel traces the stories of numerous people who find inspiration through the well in many different ways. The town faces a major dilemma as news surfaces that a new highway is scheduled to be built through the woods, which would threaten the well and the peaceful life that the town has enjoyed so far.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelfth_Card"title="The Twelfth Card">
The story starts out in a museum where Geneva Settle, a high-school student in Harlem, is researching information for a paper about her ancestor, Charles Singleton. While she is looking at an old newspaper, Thompson Boyd, an unfeeling, professional killer, attempts to murder her. As his attempts continue, each time he leaves behind a clue which either helps or misleads Lincoln Rhyme. Amelia Sachs, Fred Dellray, Mel Cooper, and Lon Sellitto help Lincoln to solve why Boyd is after Settle. Rhyme believes initially that Geneva was the witness to a planned terrorist attack. It is eventually revealed that Boyd was hired to kill her because of her ancestor's secret. Singleton's secret was that he owned fifteen acres of prime land in Manhattan in the 1800s. Rhyme had discovered through the investigation of the crime that Geneva's ancestor was falsely accused of murder and had his land stolen. The person who bought the land ended up creating a huge company in the modern time. As the land was not legally sold, all of Singleton's relatives were legally entitled to compensation over the course of 200 years. The chase to catch Boyd and all of his accomplices continue throughout a two-day period. Throughout the story, there are also some other smaller story lines and this crime eventually leads to the solutions of other crimes. Some of the people in the novel are not who they appear to be. One of Boyd's accomplices pretends to be the guidance counselor at Settle's high school. Also, a common vandal and criminal turns out to be Settle's dad.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Gauntlet"title="Into the Gauntlet">
"Into the Gauntlet" begins as Amy and Dan Cahill enter a London hotel tired and with no lead whatsoever. They receive another lead, which Amy realizes leads to William Shakespeare, so they go to a performance of "Romeo and Juliet" in The Globe Theatre. Once there, they confront the Starlings, who are back in the clue hunt after being sent to the hospital in an explosion back in "The Maze of Bones", and steal their lead, but they are trapped by Jonah Wizard, who was forced back into the clue hunt by Cora Wizard, the Holts, Alistair Oh, and the Kabras. Hamilton Holt steals the piece of paper with the lead, but Dan rips off the top and bottom, and he and Amy run away while everyone else is fighting over the rest of the lead.Amy and Dan realize that it leads to Shakespeare's grave site, and are among the last to arrive there. However, they are surprised to find that no one is fighting with each other and are instead making unsuccessful exchanges of clues and information. After the other teams leave, Dan rubs the grave and finds a secret message in which Shakespeare asks them to dig up his grave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Unbroken_Agony"title="An Unbroken Agony">
Robinson begins by mention of the date and time of February 29, 2004 4:30 a.m., stating, "The real events of the story are very unlike those described to the general public." He knows that the conventional accounting of Aristide's removal from office is quite different than the entire history he is about to tell.The date of December 9, 1492, is described as the most fateful of days…Then, there were an estimated 8 million native Taínos living on the island of Hispaniola. "Within 20 years, there were fewer than 28,000." "Thirty years on, by 1542, only 200 Taínos remained." Many chapters are also entitled with a date.November 17, 1803, is a good example. This date represents a date that Robinson describes as significant because, "It may have been the most stunning victory won for the black world in a thousand years. There has been nothing quite like it, before or since." Here he is describing the defeat of slavery, in Haiti, by the Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture. The ramification of these dates in Haitian history is monumental, per Robinson."As a direct result of what the Haitian revolutionaries did to free themselves, France lost two thirds of its world trade income." Furthermore, the Haitian revolutionaries had a global perspective on fighting slavery. They worked with Simón Bolívar in an effort to fight slavery in South America. And they also "rolled out an unconditional welcome mat to anyone who escaped European colonialism in Africa or fled bondage from a slave plantation anywhere in the Americas, North, South, or Central."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Head_of_the_House_of_Coombe"title="The Head of the House of Coombe">
Lord Coombe is considered to be the best-dressed man in London. He is also a man whose public reputation, despite his formidable intellect and observant eye, is one of unmitigated wickedness. During one of his social forays, he meets a selfish young woman named 'Feather' with the face of an angel. Fascinated by her, he slowly drifts into her circle. When her husband dies unexpectedly, leaving her alone and desolate in London, he ends up taking her under his wing.Feather has a daughter named Robin, of whom she takes little notice. She treats Robin with shocking neglect and once Coombe takes over responsibility for the household's finances, Feather readily abandons poor Robin to the less-than-kindly ministrations of her nurse. In fact, Robin doesn't even know Feather is her mother for her first six years, calling her 'The Lady Downstairs'. Robin also hates Coombe, having heard a conversation that blamed him for the loss of her first friend. This was a little boy named Donal who was in fact Coombe's heir. Donal's mother disapproves both of Coombe and Feather and when she discovers that her son has been playing with Robin, she whisks him away, leaving Robin heartbroken. However, Coombe does not return this dislike and in fact makes a point of serving as her guardian, albeit without Robin's knowledge. As Robin grows, he builds her a set of rooms, engages a loving nurse for her, and eventually secures a reputable governess for her. While her mother continues to behave with the selfish freedom of a wanton child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Captain's_Duty"title="A Captain's Duty">
Phillips was a mariner of 30 years' experience when his ship was taken. He took extensive security precautions to keep his crew safe and hidden, leaving himself as the only possible hostage. This led to an ordeal of several days in a lifeboat in the hands of pirates, whom Phillips portrays as alternately conciliatory, vicious, and unfocused.Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy assembled a large task force, and tensions steadily rose, as did Phillips’ fear for his life.The book details Phillips' attempted escape and eventual rescue by U.S. Navy SEALs, and portrays Phillips' wife Andrea as loyal and strong-willed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freaky_Green_Eyes"title="Freaky Green Eyes">
The novel opens with Franky explaining how "Freaky" came into her life. It was few weeks after her 14th birthday and she went to a college party near Puget Sound in Washington with some friends from her high school. While there, she met Cameron (a college freshman at the University of South Carolina), who tried to rape her. As a swimmer, Franky used her strong legs to kick Cameron hard enough to get him off her. Afterward, Cameron looked at her and said, "You should see your eyes! Freaky green eyes!"Franky, now 15, lives in Yarrow Heights (a suburb of Seattle) with her father Reid Pierson, her mother Krista Pierson, her younger sister Samantha, and her half-brother Todd. As a sports reporter, Reid has had a big contract go through with a TV network and wants to celebrate with his family. Krista, however, goes to an arts and crafts convention in Santa Barbara, California instead, which angers Reid. When Krista returns home, Franky starts to notice the tension between her parents, especially after hearing them fight. She hears her mom say she does not want to go to Reid's work gatherings because she feels like she doesn't fit in with his crowd. In turn, Reid gets mad that Krista isn't fulfilling her role as a wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Khalid"title="The Book of Khalid">
The novel, which is intensely autobiographical as Rihani himself immigrated as a child, tells the story of two boys, named Khalid and Shakib, from Baalbek in Lebanon (at the time, the Syrian province of the Ottoman Empire) who migrate together to the United States, coming by ship through Ellis Island and enduring the classic "Via Dolorosa" of an immigrant. They move into a wet cellar in the Little Syria community of Lower Manhattan near Battery Park and begin to peddle counterfeit Holy Land trinkets and religious items throughout the city, a typical Arab endeavor in America. While Shakib, although himself a poet, is focused and accumulates savings through peddling, Khalid becomes distracted and turns away from commercial activity toward frantically consuming Western literature and participating in the New York City intellectual and bohemian scene. At one point, he burns his peddling box, decrying the dishonesty of their sales.After exhaustion from reckless "bohemian" pursuits, Khalid shifts towards party politics when he is offered the position of a functionary and ward for the Arab community in the machine politics of the city. However, Khalid insists on moral purity in his political work, causing conflict with his "Boss." As a result, he is jailed for a brief time of ten days (Shakib helps secure his release) under the charge of misapplying public funds. The two decide to return to Lebanon before long, and Khalid then shifts back to intense peddling for a time, paying off his accumulated debts and earning funds for return passage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seventh_Scroll"title="The Seventh Scroll">
This book is set in the present and follows the adventurer Nicholas Quenton-Harper and his love interest, Dr. Royan Al Simma, as they uncover the tomb of Tanus.Duraid Al Simma and his wife Royan decipher the seventh scroll from the tomb of Lostris. They are attacked and their work is stolen. Duraid is brutally murdered, but Royan escapes. Royan heads to England and convinces an old friend of Duraid, Nicholas, of the existence of the treasure in Pharaoh Mamose's tomb. Together, they travel to Ethiopia following clues laid out by Taita.As the pair journey along together, they grow fond of each other's company. They find the tomb's location, but are attacked by the Pegasus group, which were behind attempts on Royan's life. Royan and Nicholas' work are stolen.It is revealed that the Pegasus group is owned by Herr von Schiller, a ruthless German collector. With the help of his right-hand man Jake Helm, Colonel Nogo, and Duraid's former assistants under his command, he acquires a strong force that are willing to go to extreme lengths.Colonel Nogo was put in charge of keeping Royan and Nicholas out of their way and Duraid's assistant was in charge of exploiting the works Nicholas and Royan discovered, while Jake Helm provided them with Pegasus' facilities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapture_of_the_Deep_(novel)"title="Rapture of the Deep (novel)">
On the day that Jacky Faber is to wed her true love, Jaimy, she is kidnapped by British Naval Intelligence and forced to embark on yet another mission for the Crown, searching for sunken Spanish gold off the coast of Havana. Along the way, Jacky and her mates find more than they have bargained for.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Carne"title="A Carne">
Lenita is a young, naïve 22-year-old woman who, recently orphaned, goes to live with an old farmer who raised her father. In the farmer's house, she meets his son, Manuel Barbosa, a divorced man. They soon start a forbidden love relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Lion"title="Library Lion">
Miss Merriweather, the head librarian, is very particular about rules in the library. No running is allowed and you must be quiet. But when a lion comes to the library one day, no one is sure what to do. There aren't any rules about lions in the library. Furthermore, as it turns out, this lion seems very well suited to library visiting. His big feet are quiet on the library floor. He makes a comfy backrest for the children during story hour. And he never roars in the library, at least not anymore. But when something terrible happens, the lion quickly comes to the rescue in the only way he knows how.The Library Lion was written as a tribute to libraries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Republic"title="The Dead Republic">
An aging Henry Smart is attempting to cement his reputation. John Ford plans a movie based on Henry's life, but Henry eventually realizes the film that Ford has planned will reduce his story to sentiment. Henry plans to kill Ford, but his callousness has faded, and he drifts into the Dublin suburbs, where he meets a respectable widow who may possibly be his long-disappeared wife. Henry ages in obscurity until the 1970s, when he is caught up in the 1974 Dublin car bombings and the Provisional IRA uses a distorted version of Henry's story as a public relations ploy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strange_Case_of_Origami_Yoda"title="The Strange Case of Origami Yoda">
Dwight is a sixth grader at McQuarrie Middle School who is considered quite weird. One day, Dwight folds an origami finger puppet of Yoda, a popular "Star Wars" figure. Through an imitation voice, Dwight offers advice to his classmates through Yoda. Some students at McQuarrie soon become convinced that Origami Yoda has a special connection to the Force, while others remain skeptical. A fellow sixth-grader named Tommy decides to write a case file to prove if Origami Yoda is real. He convinces a number of students to write about their experiences with Origami Yoda, while his friend Kellen illustrates the file. However, Harvey, who has always been cruel to Dwight and is skeptical about Origami Yoda's wisdom, attempts to disprove Origami Yoda's connection to the Force.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wonderful_Visit"title="The Wonderful Visit">
"The Wonderful Visit" tells how an angel spends a little more than a week in southern England. He is at first mistaken for a bird because of his dazzling polychromatic plumage, for he is "neither the Angel of religious feeling nor the Angel of popular belief," but rather "the Angel of Italian art." As a result, he is hunted and shot in the wing by an amateur ornithologist, the Rev. K. Hilyer, the vicar of Siddermoton, and then taken in and cared for at the vicarage. The creature comes from "the Land of Dreams" (also the angel's term for our world), and while "charmingly affable," is "quite ignorant of the most elementary facts of civilisation." During his brief visit he grows increasingly dismayed by what he learns about the world in general and about life in Victorian England in particular. As he grows increasingly critical of local mores, he is eventually denounced as "a Socialist."The vicar, his host, meanwhile comes under attack by fellow clerics, neighbours, and even servants for harbouring a disreputable character (no one but the vicar believes he comes from another world, and people take to calling him "Mr. Angel"). The angel's one talent is his divine violin-playing, but he is discredited at a reception that Lady Hammergallow agrees to host when it is discovered that he cannot read music and confides to a sympathetic listener that he has taken an interest in the vicar's serving girl, Delia. Instead of healing, his wings begin to atrophy. The local physician, Dr. Crump, threatens to have him put in a prison or a madhouse. After the angel destroys some barbed wire on a local baronet's property, Sir John Gotch gives the vicar one week to send him away before he begins proceedings against him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash_(novel)"title="Ash (novel)">
Aisling (pronounced Ash-ling), known as Ash to her friends, is a teenage girl whose mother was once apprenticed to the local Greenwitch. Some time after Ash's mother dies, her father, a merchant, goes on a business trip and returns married to a woman with two daughters, the eldest of these is Ana who is Ash's age. Soon after they move in though, Ash's father becomes gravely ill, and instead of allowing the Greenwitch to care for him, Ash's stepmother takes him to the city to be treated by their Philosophers, who bleed him and cause his death, as the Greenwich warned they would.After her father's death, Ash's stepmother discovers he was deeply in debt, and sells Ash's childhood home to try and pay off some of his debts. The stepmother also declares that in order to earn her keep, Ash will serve as a servant in her home, as she has to lay off the rest of the staff because she can no longer afford to keep them. Ash's sole source of comfort is reading fairy tales by firelight each night. Ash wishes that fairies will take her away to their world where all her dreams will come true just like she once wished as a little girl.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Mike_We_Trust"title="In Mike We Trust">
The book is written in the first person singular from the perspective of its 15-year-old narrator, Garth Rudd.The Rudds live in Richmond, Virginia. Garth's father died in a boating accident two years earlier, leaving his middle-class family to shoulder his many debts. Now living on the edge of poverty, Garth's mother, Sonja, works two jobs to support the family and Garth tries to earn spending money and save for college by working as a janitor of sorts at a downtown department store for a condescending supervisor. Wanting to be a veterinarian when he is older, Garth volunteers at a local animal shelter caring for dogs and cats. Garth has repeated nightmares about his father's death, and is unhappy about his short height (he is only tall). Prior to the novel's opening (although this scene is related in flashback), Garth came out to his best friend, Lisa, about his homosexuality. Shortly thereafter, Garth (in flashback) tells his mother that he is gay. But his mother, worried that her short, slight teenage son might be gay bashed, tells Garth not to tell anyone else that he is gay.The novel opens when Mike Rudd, the twin brother of Garth's deceased father, arrives at the Rudd home. Mrs. Rudd and Lisa are somewhat cold and distant toward Mike, but Mike and Garth immediately become friends. Mike also realizes Garth is gay, and on a shopping trip Mike takes Garth into a gay bookstore. Garth meets an openly gay classmate, Adam Walters, in the store, and Mike arranges for Garth and Mike to watch a DVD of the motion picture "Beautiful Thing" together at the Rudd house. A short time later, Mike convinces Garth to go with him on a trip to a shopping mall in a suburb of Richmond where he intends to solicit donations to fight the disease "meninosis." Garth quickly realizes that "meninosis" is not a real disease, but the presence of the boyish-looking Garth helps Mike raise hundreds of dollars in donations. Mike promises to give Garth a cut of the money, and Garth quits his job. Garth begins to feel guilty over the large number of lies he tells his mother and Lisa to cover up both what he is doing with Mike and his relationship with Adam. Garth justifies his actions by assuring himself that the money he is getting will go into his college fund and make his mother worry less, and that his mother's demand that he remain closeted is unjust.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprout_(novel)"title="Sprout (novel)">
The novel is written in the first person singular. At times, it appears to be in the form of an essay or letter to the reader, but at other times it seems to be simply the protagonist telling his story. Portions of the novel are told in flashback, depicting Sprout's first few months in school. Much of the book is written in the stream of consciousness narrative style. Significant portions of the book focus on peer pressure, the role social stratification and social cohesion play in rural life, and norms of social conservatism.The novel opens with Sprout making claims about whether people know about his homosexuality, his short height, his poverty, or his dead mother (among other things). But Sprout claims to have a secret, but it is a secret which everyone knows about. The nature of Sprout's open secret is a narrative framing device which opens and closes the novel.Sixteen-year-old Daniel Bradford is nicknamed Sprout. In a flashback, the reader learns that his mother dies of cancer when he is 12 years old. His father has trouble dealing with her death and becomes an alcoholic. Early one morning, Sprout's father announces they are leaving New York and heading for Kansas. Sprout's father buys a plot of tree-covered land near Hutchinson, Kansas. The family takes up residence in a very small vacation trailer. Sprout's father begins covering the trailer in vines, and plants upside-down tree roots all over the property. Sprout's father has no job; the family lives off the proceeds from the sale of their former home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Shoes"title="Italian Shoes">
Set around the year 2004, the novel focusses on Fredrik Welin, once a successful orthopaedic surgeon forced to retire early from his professional career. He has retreated to a tiny, remote island in the Stockholm archipelago which he has inherited from his grandparents and is now the sole inhabitant. The island is normally surrounded for at least half the year by thick sea ice which adds to the sense of solitude. Fredrik lives a reclusive and somewhat austere lifestyle in a run-down house, enjoying few luxuries. Welin's only companions are his aged cat and dog. The postman, Jansson is the one regular visitor to the island. Despite this Welin has never become particularly sociable with Jansson. In fact he displays little sympathy for the postman’s frequent requests to be treated for his medical concerns and has privately diagnosed Jansson as suffering from mild hypochondria.One cold winter's day Welin spies a figure out on the ice, struggling to make its way on foot towards his island. This unanticipated encounter leads to a surprising revelation and a journey not only across Sweden, but also back to his childhood and early adult life. The unfolding events force him to confront painful memories from his past, from which his isolation on the island has enabled him to remain largely immune until now. Fredrik also seeks to address the regrets he has about the unfortunate incident which led to his enforced retirement
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Island_(novel)"title="Star Island (novel)">
Ann DeLusia, the "stunt double" for habitually intoxicated and drug-addicted pop star "Cherry Pye", is mistakenly kidnapped by an obsessed paparazzo. Now, the star's entourage must find a way to rescue Ann, and do it without revealing her identity to the star herself, or the world at large.The novel also features the re-appearance of Hiaasen's recurring character, ex-Florida governor Clinton "Skink" Tyree.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_Win"title="For the Win">
## Part 1: The gamers and their games, the workers at their work.In the near future, virtual economies play a key role in geopolitics. These economies share a common virtual world known as “game-space”, essentially a more evolved form of the Internet with no borders or separate countries. However, in game-space, income inequality is staggeringly high and exacerbated by the exploitative practices of robber baron-type figures, including Boss Wing and Mr Banerjee.Matthew Fong lives in Shenzhen, China. He uses his talents at gold-farming to find the optimal way to earn virtual gold in a dungeon in minimal time. Together with a couple of friends and roommates, they leave their greedy employer Boss Wing, a virtual economy kingpin who steals their profits. Matthew finds a place in the fictional MMORPG Svartalfaheim Warriors where it is possible to earn much more gold in a short time, and exploits this to make a month's living in a single night, before the administrators of the game discover and block him. However, Boss Wing sends his goons to raid Matthew's home and beat him up to lure him back; they agree that Matthew can work on his own but has to surrender 60% of his income to Boss Wing, who handles turning game-gold into real money for him in turn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vast_Fields_of_Ordinary"title="The Vast Fields of Ordinary">
The novel is told in the first person singular. All the narrative occurs in the present. The title comes from a line in the novel in which a young girl misquotes a line from an alternative rock band. The fictional band, Vas Deferens, is the favorite band of the main character. One of their songs is used in a TV commercial, and the girl misquotes the lyrics as "the vast fields of ordinary." The novel is prefaced with a quote from the poet and playwright E. E. Cummings: "To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting." The quote is taken from the essay "A Poet's Advice to Students," which appeared in the book "E. E. Cummings, A Miscellany."Dade Hamilton is 18 years old and trying to enjoy the summer after his high school graduation. He has a part-time job at Food World, a local supermarket. Dade has come out gay to himself, but not anyone else. His father, Ned, sells luxury automobiles and his mother, Peggy, is an art teacher at a local Roman Catholic parochial school. They live in Cedarville, a fictional city in Iowa. For several years, Peggy has struggled with depression, and is taking a large number of antidepressants. She is increasingly alienated from her upper middle class lifestyle and family. Ned, too, is alienated from his family, and has begun taking poetry classes at a local community college. Dade is a loner whose only friend is Pablo Soto, a Mexican American who is Cedarville high school's star quarterback for the football team. Since they were 16 years old, Pablo and Dade have been having sex. But Pablo considers himself heterosexual, and has a girlfriend, Judy Lockhart. Pablo and Dade are friends, but Pablo doesn't spend much time with Dade and appears to only see him as a provider of passive anal sex.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spells_(novel)"title="Spells (novel)">
Six months have passed since the events of the first book. Laurel has summer vacation and has been summoned to spend eight weeks at the Academy of Avalon. Tamani, who is still disappointed that she chose David over him, meets her and escorts her to the gate. Jamison welcomes her back to Avalon and tells her that the gates were made by King Oberon (at the cost of his life) and that Winter faeries are the only ones who can open them. At the Academy, Laurel is surprised to learn that it was her home, not just a school. She is introduced to professor Yeardley, who gives her a stack of books to read, and told that Katya, another Fall faerie, has agreed to tutor her. The next morning, Katya comes to Laurel's room and finds Laurel making note cards. She asks Laurel why she didn't summon one of the staff—who are all Spring faeries—to cut the cards, then summons one for her. Laurel is uncomfortable about Spring faeries being summoned for trivial tasks.Later, Tamani comes to visit Laurel. He bows and greets her formally, but hugs her once they're out of sight of other faeries. He explains that the Academy is very strict on protocol between Spring and Fall faeries. Laurel wants to see Avalon, so Tamani takes her to where the Summer faeries live. She becomes frustrated that Tamani is walking behind her when she doesn't know where they're going. Because Laurel is more than one 'rank' above Tamani, he has to walk behind her. Laurel asks to see where the Spring faeries live and Tamani takes her to his mother's house. This confuses Laurel; she was told faeries don't have parents, but Tamani corrects her that Fall and Winter faeries don't. They are separated from their parents so they can better fulfil their duties. Even the records of the two faeries who created her seed were destroyed when she sprouted. Though frustrated, she admits that it's better than two faeries missing her for years whilst she grew up in the human world. At his mother's house, Tamani introduces Laurel to his mother, Rhoslyn and his niece, who's a Summer faerie. Laurel asks if Tamani has a father, and Tamani says he did, until about a month ago.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Cards_(novel)"title="House of Cards (novel)">
Following the resignation of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the ruling Conservative Party is about to elect a new leader. In the subsequent leadership election, the moderate but indecisive Henry "Hal" Collingridge emerges victorious. Francis Urquhart, an MP and the Government Chief Whip in the House of Commons, is secretly contemptuous of the well-meaning but weak Collingridge, but expects a promotion to a senior position in the Cabinet. After the general election, which the party wins by a reduced majority, Urquhart submits a memorandum to Collingridge advocating a cabinet reshuffle that would include a prominent ministerial position for Urquhart himself. However, Collingridge—citing Harold Macmillan's political demise after the 1962 Night of the Long Knives—effects no changes at all. Urquhart resolves to oust Collingridge.Urquhart exploits his position as Chief Whip to leak inside information to the press to undermine Collingridge, ultimately forcing him to resign. Most of his leaks are to Mattie Storin, a young reporter for "The Daily Telegraph". Urquhart then eliminates his enemies in the resulting leadership contest by means of fabricated scandals that he sets up himself or publicizes. These include threatening to publish photographs of Education Secretary Harold Earle in the company of a rent boy; causing Health Secretary Peter MacKenzie to accidentally run over a disabled man; and forcing Foreign Secretary Patrick Woolton to withdraw by blackmailing him with an audiotape of a one-night stand. His remaining rival, Environment Secretary Michael Samuels, is alleged by the press to have supported far-left politics as a university student. Urquhart thereby reaches the brink of victory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Assisi_Underground"title="The Assisi Underground">
In the Italian town of Assisi during World War II, 300 Jews were sheltered and protected by a peasant turned priest, Father Rufino Niccacci. He dressed many of them as monks and nuns, taught them Catholic ritual, and hid them in the monasteries. Others lived in parishioners' homes and, with fake identity cards, found jobs and blended into the community. The town's printing press, which during the day printed posters and greeting cards, at night clandestinely printed false documents that were sent by courier to Jews all over Italy.Not a single refugee was captured in Assisi. No one who participated in the rescue operation ever betrayed it.The operation was aided by the German Commandant of the city, Colonel Valentin Müller, a Catholic, who had been persuaded by Father Rufino that he had been sent to the town not only by the German High Command, but also by God, with the mission of protecting the Christian holy places and monasteries. Müller appealed to Marshal Kesselring to declare Assisi an open city.When the Allies began approaching the city, one of the Jewish refugees, whose German was so excellent that he had gotten a job with the Wehrmacht, forged a letter from Kesselring declaring Assisi an open city. The colonel never suspected it to be a forgery and immediately ordered all German troops to leave town, thus saving Assisi from destruction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_(novella)"title="November (novella)">
In the first part of the novella, the narrator is a schoolboy, and the narrative consists of his meditations on life, as well as his longing for sexual awakening and the beginning of his adult life. He perceives himself as a voyeur, witnessing couples, sumptuous dining rooms, professionals at work and scenes of family life.In the second part, the young author loses his virginity with Marie, a worldly-wise courtesan who recounts her personal story of erotic experience. Initially, she was a virginal sixteen-year-old until she was unwillingly married to an elderly suitor who wanted a younger mistress. In return for her acquiescence, though, she has acquired sexual freedom and experience. However, as the reader later learns, she subsequently becomes a tabula rasa, providing her body for the enjoyment of men, but not her individuality or personality.In the concluding section of the novella, the adolescent narrator tries to revisit Marie, but the courtesan and her brothel of residence have vanished. The narrator takes up study toward a legal career, but has already eschewed marriage or professional life. Eventually, he dies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meredith_and_Co."title="Meredith and Co.">
The novel follows the adventures of Meredith (Muggs), a Sixth Form prefect at fictional Leadham House Preparatory School in England, and the adventures he has with his friends Hawk, Pongo, Clayton, Pigface, Renton, and Murray as well as a ubiquitous and beloved bulldog named Uggles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Boy_(novel)"title="Dragon Boy (novel)">
Montague Bunsen-Burner is a dragon who is put on a 'no-humans' diet by his wife Albertina. Out on a flight later that day, Montague discovers an orphan boy, John, and takes the boy home with him. John proves his worth as a member of the family when he teaches the dragon couple the importance of incubating their own eggs.John takes in an orphaned wolf cub, naming him 'Bart' and training him as a pet. Albertina's egg hatches, revealing a young female dragon who names herself 'Lucky'. From this point onwards, John is regularly described as the Bunsen-Burner's adopted son and Lucky's 'little brother'.While the dragons take a holiday at the beach, John and Bart are confronted by wolves. Lucky senses that her brother is in danger and returns to save him. During their time away, the Bunsen-Burners are attacked by a group of ambitious knights, but the dragons easily drive them away without any casualties.As Lucky grows older, Montague and Albertina search for a potential husband for her in an arranged marriage, but their search fails. Fortunately, Lucky discovers a boy dragon called Gerald Fire-Drake and the two form a deep attachment that blossoms into romance. During this time, John has a brief encounter with an outlaw who threatens to kill him, but Bart senses his master's peril and hurries to save him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prajapati_(novel)"title="Prajapati (novel)">
The novel opens with Sukhen, the protagonist, trying to capture a butterfly. Sukhen goes over to his lover's house early in the morning. Even as he tries to catch a butterfly, he is simultaneously taking with his lover and analysing his own life as he recollects the past. Sukhen had been brought up in a family where he had found no love or affection. His mother died leaving behind her husband and three sons- Keshob, Purnendu, Sukhendu. Both of his elder brothers are politicians and according to Sukhen mere opportunists. The brothers used people for their own benefit and cheat them without remorse. He remembers his mother as an extremely flirtatious woman. Sukhen's father is also devoid of any moral depth and realisation. He was a mean money minded man. Sukhen had grown up with in these circumstances. He became venturous and had no respect for elders and women. The neighbours especially the rich ones feared him. Mr. Chopra, manager of neighbouring industry and Mr. Mittir, the labour advisor, always flattered Sukhen out of fear. Sukhen remembers Jina, the daughter of Mr. Mittir who had been seduced by her kaku (uncle), Mr. Chatterjee, a colleague of her father. Sukhen also had seduced Jina.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashling"title="Ashling">
The powerful Misfit Elspeth is sent to Sutrium, the seat of the ruling totalitarian Council, to seal an alliance between the secret community at Obernewtyn and the rebel forces. Yet her journey takes her far beyond the borders of the Land, across the sea into the heart of the mysterious desert region, Sador. There she seeks help to destroy the weaponmachines but before her dark quest can begin, she must learn the truth of her dream: why the Beforetimers destroyed their world...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_Shadows"title="February Shadows">
The story begins with Hilde, an elderly woman, awaking in the middle of the night to the sound of her telephone ringing. Upon answering she discovers that her husband, Anton, who was staying at a nursing facility for a severe illness, has died. His death triggers feelings of loneliness and abandonment along with painful memories of the death of her older brother, Hannes, who died during World War II, sending Hilde into a state of panic and despair.Each day Hilde visits Anton's grave mentally talking to him as if he is still alive. One evening, as she is returning home, Hilde discovers that a black cat seems to be following her. The cat causes her to remember two distinct experiences from her past. The first is a memory from when she was a small child and had attempted to hide a stray cat in her bedroom. Her family was very poor and could not afford a pet, but she saved her table scraps for it anyway. One day as she was coming home, her father met her drunk in the doorway. After telling her he had snapped the cat's neck, he beat her harshly with a fly swatter. This first memory seeped into the second: her daughter, Erika, begging to keep a stray cat she had found. Anton had granted her wish, but the cat ruined the neighbors' gardens and Hilde was forced to drown it in the river.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_in_the_Sky"title="Eagle in the Sky">
14-year-old David Morgan, the handsome and academically gifted heir to a South African business empire and fortune, learns to fly with Barney Venter, a gruff but experienced ex-airline pilot. He realises that David is "bird" – blessed with a natural flying ability. David learns quickly and soon gains his pilot's licence. After school, he opts to join the South African Air Force instead of going to university and business school.He impresses his commanding officer, the crusty Colonel Rastus Naude, who is disappointed when David decides not to accept a longer service contract and instead tries to seek out what he is meant to do. He travels widely in Europe. In Spain, he meets Debra Mordechai, an attractive young Israeli writer and university lecturer, who is traveling with her brother Joe and his fiancée Hannah. Debra rebuffs David's advances and they part on bitter terms.David is drawn to Jerusalem to find her and meets "The Brig", her father, General Mordechai, a plain-spoken pilot in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and a senior staff officer. Learning that David has much experience of flying Mirage jets, he satisfies himself of David's skills and then offers him a commission in the IDF. He accepts and is granted Israeli citizenship. He is plunged into Israel's struggle for survival.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Improvisatore"title="The Improvisatore">
In this fictionalized autobiography, the hero Antonio does not arrive as a tourist but grows up in Italy, thus able to show not just the sunny side of life but also some of its shadows. In its structure, the novel reflects Andersen's own life and his travels through Italy. The descriptions of the Italian towns and regions are particularly captivating, expressed in the author's colourful language. Like Andersen himself, Antonio comes from a poor background but fights his way through various crises and amorous relationships until he is finally successful. The last improvisation involves a fishing boat accident in which many lose their lives. But finally Antonio becomes the happy husband of the beautiful young Lara as well as a landowner in Calabria.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matterhorn_(novel)"title="Matterhorn (novel)">
The book is set in Vietnam in 1969 and draws from the experiences of Marlantes, who commanded a Marine rifle platoon. The novel looks at the hardships endured by the Marines who waged the war on behalf of America. It concerns the exploits of second lieutenant Waino Mellas, a recent college graduate, and his compatriots in Bravo Company, most of whom are teenagers. "Matterhorn" is the code name for a fire-support base in Quảng Trị Province, on the border between Laos and the Vietnamese DMZ. At the beginning of the novel, the Marines build the base, but later they are ordered to abandon it. The latter portions of the novel detail the struggles of Bravo Company to retake the base, which fell into enemy hands after it was abandoned.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasures_of_the_Snow"title="Treasures of the Snow">
Annette Burnier lives with her father, elderly grandmother and young brother Dani in a small village in the Swiss mountains. When she is eight years old her mother dies just after Dani's birth, and since the family is too poor to afford a nanny, Annette takes the responsibility upon herself, arranging with the schoolmaster to study at home under her grandmother's guidance. When Dani is old enough for her to return to school, she does well and often gains top marks. On Dani's fifth Christmas, he puts his slipper outside in the snow, hoping that Father Christmas will bring him a present. In the morning, to everyone's astonishment, a tiny white kitten has snuggled into the slipper. Dani calls him Klaus and the two become inseparable.Further up the mountain in the next chalet, Annette's classmate Lucien Morel lives with his elder sister Marie and their widowed mother. Lucien finds schoolwork difficult and is frustrated that he is often bottom of the class. He also resents having to help around the home and farm with all the tasks that his father would have done, and his mother and sister criticise his laziness.Conflict flares one day when Lucien is sledging down to school and accidentally collides with Annette's sledge, throwing her into a ditch full of snow. Out of resentment at her success in school, he doesn't stop to help her, but speeds off to school instead. When she arrives late, cold, wet and grazed, with torn wet books, Annette has to explain what happened. Lucien is caned by the schoolmaster, and ostracised by the rest of the class. While on his way home he vents his frustration by kicking over a snowman Dani has built, causing Annette to run out and slap his face and shout angrily at him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_or_Alive_(novel)"title="Dead or Alive (novel)">
Most wanted terrorist Saif Rahman Yasin, known as the Emir, secretly enters the United States by private plane. Having altered his physical appearance and living in the state of Nevada, he coordinates his massive operation as leader of terrorist organization Umayyad Revolutionary Council (URC), codenamed Lotus. It aims to weaken the current presidential administration with a series of seemingly isolated terrorist attacks and culminating in the destruction of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, using a nuclear device assembled from radioactive material stolen from an abandoned nuclear waste storage site in Russia, in order to poison the water table for the western United States.After successfully foiling a hostage situation in the Swedish embassy in Tripoli, John Clark and Domingo Chavez are forcibly retired from their duties in the CIA and Rainbow. They are then recruited into The Campus, where they take part in the organization's hunt for the Emir, which spans through Sweden, Pakistan, Canada, and Libya. They suffer a tragedy when operative Brian Caruso died due to injuries sustained during a firefight with his brother Dominic against URC terrorists in Tripoli. After further investigation and at one point cooperating with National Counterterrorism Center deputy head and Clark's longtime friend Mary Pat Foley, The Campus later deduce that the Emir is in the U.S.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Paddy_the_Beaver"title="The Adventures of Paddy the Beaver">
Paddy moves into the Green Forest, and Sammy Jay starts to complain he is cutting down the trees, but Sammy falls into the water and learns that this did not work out very well. After that Old Man Coyote finds out Paddy is in the Green Forest, and starts to hunt for him, though for three days Paddy outsmarts him. But one day he almost catches Paddy and he would have were it not for Sammy Jay telling Paddy to get into the water. After that Paddy and Sammy become best friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiant_Shadows"title="Radiant Shadows">
The prologue of Radiant Shadows shows Devlin, the high court's Assassin, agreeing to shelter a spectral girl name Rae in faerie without his queen's knowledge. It then skips forward about a century, to show the high queen, Sorcha, ordering Devlin to kill a baby halfling, the child of the Gabriel, along with a warning that it should "never enter faerie".The novel then cuts to the present day, to Ani, the halfling whose life Devlin spared, as she tries to fit in with the other hounds, but cannot, due to her father's protectiveness and her mortal blood. Devlin, meanwhile, has been told by Sorcha to stay in the mortal world to keep an eye on her son, Seth. Devlin and Ani meet at the crows nest, where she drains his energy and he leaves with a taste of her blood.Ani is different from other hounds, due to her ability to feed on both emotions and touch, and mortal and faery. Irial, the former dark king, has been performing tests to identify what about her is different and introduce it to his court to strengthen them. This also, however, draws the attention of Devlin and Sorcha's "other" sister, Bananach, the essence of war. She tells Ani that she has to kill Seth and Niall, or give Bananach her blood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_World"title="Inverted World">
The book consists of a prologue and five parts. The first, third and fifth sections are narrated in the first person by the protagonist, Helward Mann; the second follows Helward, but is written in the third person; while the prologue and fourth part center on Elizabeth Khan, also from the third person perspective.Helward lives in a city called "Earth", which is slowly being winched along at an average speed of 0.1 miles per day (0.16 km per day) on four railroad tracks northward toward an ever-moving, mysterious "optimum". The city, which Helward estimates is long and no more than high, is not on the planet Earth; the sun is disc shaped, with two spikes extending above and below its center. The city's inhabitants live in the hope of rescue from their lost home world.Upon reaching adulthood at the age of "six hundred and fifty miles", Helward leaves the crèche in which he has been raised and becomes an apprentice Future Surveyor. His guild surveys the land ahead, choosing the best route. The Track Guild tears up the track south of the city to re-lay in the north. Traction is responsible for moving the city, while the Bridge-Builders overcome terrain obstacles. The Barter Guild recruits labourers ("tooks") from the primitive, poverty-stricken nearby villages they pass, as well as women brought temporarily into the city to help combat the puzzling shortfall of female babies. The Militia provides protection, armed with crossbows, against tooks resentful of the city's hard bargaining and the taking of their women.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_51_(novel)"title="Directive 51 (novel)">
The near future. Heather O'Grainn is a worker in the Office of Future Threat Assessment in Washington state. Aa variety of groups with diverse aims, but an overlapping desire to end modern technological society (which they call the Big System), create a nanotech plague ("Daybreak") which both destroys petroleum-based fuels, rubber and plastics and eats away any metal conductors carrying electricity. An open question in the book is whether these groups, and their shared motivations, are coordinated by some conscious actor, or whether they are an emergent property / meme that attained a critical mass.The Daybreak plague strikes, and world governments are helpless to deal with it. Industrial civilization rapidly breaks down, and tens of millions die in the U.S. alone (the global death toll measures in the billions). There is a presidential succession crisis. Just as society in the U.S. seems to start stabilizing, previously placed pure fusion weapons detonate, destroying Washington, D.C. and Chicago. This is followed by additional pure fusion weapon strikes, which are determined to be weapons that are being created on the Moon by nanotech replicators. A shadowy neofeudalist group (the "Castle movement") led by a reactionary billionaire may be inadvertent saviors of society... or may have some deeper involvement in things.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybele's_Secret"title="Cybele's Secret">
Cybele's Secret (pronounced saɪ-bel) is the sequel to "Wildwood Dancing". It is narrated by Paula, the fourth sister of five and a scholar. She accompanies her father on a business trip to Istanbul to try to find a statue of the goddess Cybele.Paula's father thinks it appropriate to hire a bodyguard for Paula as the streets in the city are a dangerous place for a young, foreign woman. As Paula is about to make a decision on which man she will hire, another, named Stoyan, shows up. He admits to having left his previous boss alone and exposed, which proved fatal for the boss, but Paula hires him anyway.After a while, they go to a dinner, where Paula meets an influential lady who runs a women's only library and steam room. She invites Paula to come along one day, which Paula gladly accepts, being excited about the prospects of so many books. She begins to research Cybele, to see if it would give her a clue as to where the statue was. She knows that time is running out to find the statue; one of her father's colleagues is already murdered because of it and there are rumours of a religious cult of Cybele's followers somewhere in Istanbul. Paula finds some old records with delicate pictures around the edge, on which appear strange words that only she can see. She soon realises that the faerie folk have given her a task, as they did her older sister Jena several years ago, but does not know what it is, only having a few words from the witch Dragutsa to go off; 'You must help an old friend of mine.' Paula ropes her Stoyan into helping with the quest, and also begins to teach him how to read and write.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Darlings_(novel)"title="Little Darlings (novel)">
The story revolves around two daughters of ageing rock star Danny Kilman. The first, Destiny, is the result of a short affair with a fan, and lives with idealistic mother Kate on a rundown estate called Bilefield in Manchester. The second is Sunset, his oldest legitimate child, who doesn't enjoy the hectic, drama filled life that comes from being the daughter of a celebrity.As part of Destiny's eleventh birthday, Kate has arranged they go to the London premiere of the film "Milky Star", in which Danny has a cameo as himself, where hopefully they'll be able to meet him and tell him Destiny is his daughter. The plan fails, as only Sunset seems to notice the two. Kate realises she hasn't planned how to get home, and they're stranded in London till morning. She decides they might as well use the time to seek out Danny at his home in Robin Hill. Destiny climbs over the fence and comes across Sunset in the garden. The two become fast friends and Sunset believes her story about them being sisters, but Destiny and Kate get thrown off the premises when Sunset's mother Suzy discovers them.After finding their way back home, Destiny heads to school. Her teacher, Mr Roberts, announces they're doing an end-of-year talent show called "Bilefield's got Talent" to celebrate the end of elementary school. Destiny decides to sing the Danny Kilman song "Destiny", which she's named after. Mr Roberts decides to put her on last, due to being the best act in the class.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_Beneath_the_Sea"title="Island Beneath the Sea">
The story opens on the island of Saint-Domingue (current day Haiti) in the late 18th century. Zarité (known as Tété) is the daughter of an African mother she never knew and one of the white sailors who brought her into bondage. As a young girl Tété is purchased by Violette, a mixed race courtesan, on behalf of Toulouse Valmorain, a Frenchman who has inherited his father's sugar plantation. Valmorain has dreams of financial success and is morally unopposed to slavery, though he dislikes punishing slaves himself, instead instructing his cruel overseer, Cambray, to administer the violence.Upon Valmorain's marriage, Tété becomes his wife's personal slave and housekeeper. Valmorain's wife is fragile and superstitious and slowly succumbs to madness. As Valmorain's wife goes mad, Valmorain forces the teenage Tété into sexual servitude, which produces several illegitimate children. Spanning four decades, the narrative leaps between the social upheavals from the distant French Revolution through the immediate chaos of the Haitian Revolution, to a New Orleans fomenting with cultural change.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zones_(novel)"title="Zones (novel)">
The protagonist is a teenager called Jenny who lives in Melbourne with her father and enjoys physics. She has a typical life until receiving a phone call from a boy from the year 1965.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Haven"title="Dragon Haven">
The book opens where the previous book left off and we continue to follow the dragons, the keepers and the barge Tarman as they continue their trek up the river.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongues_of_Serpents"title="Tongues of Serpents">
The story begins in New South Wales, where Laurence has been sentenced to "transportation" for his treasonous actions in "Empire of Ivory". With him is Temeraire; Captain Granby and his firebreathing Kazilik Iskierka; Tenzing Tharkay, his half-Nepalese friend; Tom Riley, captain of HMS "Allegiance" which sailed them hence; and three dragon eggs, sent by Admiral Jane Roland to form the foundation of New South Wales' Aerial Corps. Dropping by Van Diemen's Land to resupply, "Allegiance" discovered William Bligh, late of , exiled there after being deposed in a military coup, and have since borne him to Sydney. Bligh wishes for Laurence to restore him to the governorship, whereas Colonel John Macarthur, architect of the rebellion, wishes them to stay on the sidelines, awaiting a decision from London.Captain Jeremy Rankin, last seen in "His Majesty's Dragon", arrives on a mission to take command of the nascent covert and whichever dragon births first. It turns out to be the child of Arkady and Wringe, two of the Turkish ferals. Temeraire, speaking to the unhatched dragonet through the shell, attempts to convince him to reject Rankin as his handler, citing Rankin's callous mistreatment of his former mount Levitas, but the dragon accepts Rankin on grounds of his great wealth, giving himself the grandiose name of "Caesar" (after rejecting "Conquistador"). Laurence and Granby observe privately that the greedy Caesar and supercilious Rankin deserve each other. Macarthur sends Laurence on an expedition to find a pass from Sydney through the Blue Mountains, which the aviators readily undertake to stay out of the political fray; they are granted a crew of convicts to provide manual labor. Tharkay asks to join them, eventually revealing that he has been tasked with tracking down a smuggling ring that operates out of China — and not out of Canton, the sole Chinese port open to foreigners. The two missions unite when one of the remaining dragon eggs, a Yellow Reaper, is stolen in the night by aborigines, prompting a frantic pursuit across the continent. The unforgiving Australian desert, the unpredictable weather, and the local fauna, particularly the mythical bunyips, take a dire toll on the crew. While the thieves are obviously familiar with the terrain, the Britons are not, and it soon becomes clear that the bunyips possess the ability to alter the terrain, providing watering holes as bait, and later diverting water to create quicksand beneath Temeraire in the hopes of entrapping him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&quot;Uncle_Tom's_Cabin&quot;_Contrasted_with_Buckingham_Hall,_the_Planter's_Home"title="&quot;Uncle Tom's Cabin&quot; Contrasted with Buckingham Hall, the Planter's Home">
The novel follows Eugene Buckingham, the only son of a South Carolina planter, as he crosses paths with Julia Tennyson, a Scottish American journalist who has written a number of pamphlets under various pseudonyms. What begins as mutual friendship eventually evolves into love, despite the anxieties of the opposing fathers. Col. Buckingham – Eugene's father and a (fictional) descendant of the Duke of Buckingham – contests the partnership on the grounds that Julia has written pamphlets degrading all planters as vicious sadists, even though he is not. Likewise Dr. Tennyson – Julia's father and a Scotsman – objects because he supports the view of all planters as violent and cruel.The Tennysons eventually make their way to South Carolina from New York, and after several philosophical discussions regarding American slavery, Eugene and Julia are allowed to marry. The story ends as the newlyweds embark on a ship to England for their honeymoon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_on_My_Grave"title="Dance on My Grave">
Hal is a sixteen-year-old with a fascination with death and is unsure of his plans for the future. On a boating trip he accidentally capsizes, but is rescued by Barry Gorman, who takes him to his home to dry off. Hal quickly falls in love with Barry, seeing him as a person that brings direction and enjoyment into his life.Barry invites him to work at his family's music store, as well as to trips to the movie theater and motorcycle riding. Barry brings up Hal's interest in death, telling him that one should confront death by laughing at it. He makes Hal agree to an oath that whichever one of them shall die first, the other shall dance on his grave. Though confused, Hal agrees to the oath and kisses Barry. Their relationship becomes intimate.One day, Hal catches Barry flirting with a girl, Kari. He confronts Barry, to which he replies that whatever relationship Hal assumed was between them was over. Pressed further, Barry says that Hal wanted too much from him and that he was bored. Hal leaves angrily. He later learns that Barry had died in a motorcycle accident after he chased after him.Distraught by Barry’s death, Hal feels the urge to see Barry’s body. Kari helps him sneak into the morgue, where the sight of the body reminds Hal of his oath. The first time he visits Barry’s grave, he is overcome by anger and is unable to dance on his grave. Kari explains to Hal that the reason for his anger was that he over-depended on Barry for excitement; he preferred the idea of Barry rather than who he was. Hal returns to Barry’s grave and dances on it, but is caught by a police officer and charged for the crime of damaging a grave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beau_Sabreur_(novel)"title="Beau Sabreur (novel)">
It focuses on the adventures of Major Henri de Beaujolais from adolescence to maturity as a well-connected cavalry officer in the French Army: he's an Old Etonian; his mother a Devonshire Cary; his deceased father a Frenchman; his paternal uncle the youngest General in the French Army and married to the sister of the French Minister of State for War. Starting as a one-year volunteer trooper in a hussar regiment, De Beaujolais graduates from the Cavalry School of Saumur to become an officer of Spahis and a member of the French Secret Service. He appears in Wren's "Beau Geste", commanding the relief column which reaches the besieged Fort Zinderneuf.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_My_Mind_(Draper_novel)"title="Out of My Mind (Draper novel)">
Melody Brooks is a nearly eleven-year-old girl. Her parents have done everything they can to help her live a normal life, but life is often frustrating for Melody since she cannot speak, move, nor communicate her wishes due to cerebral palsy. As a result, Melody has to fight to get her wishes. At age five, Melody is even diagnosed as "profoundly retarded" by a doctor who suggests putting Melody in a nursing home. In spite of this, Melody's mother enrolls her in Spaulding St. Elementary School to get the education she needs. However, the class she is put in, Class H–5, is like a baby class, learning the same things every day, i.e., the alphabet. Melody is frustrated by this, due to having far superior knowledge but cannot speak or write. Her neighbor, Mrs. V, is a kind, but a tough woman. She pushes Melody to do the best she can. When Melody was three, Mrs. V was not impressed by Melody having to rely on her parents for everything. Because of this, Mrs. V forced her to learn how to crawl and roll on the ground. She even taught Melody how to catch herself whenever she fell from her wheelchair. This helped Melody become self-sufficient, but she continues to be reliant on her parents to help feed her and help her go to the bathroom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_President's_Plane_Is_Missing_(novel)"title="The President's Plane Is Missing (novel)">
Air Force One crashes in a storm in a remote area and the badly-burned and scattered bodies cannot be definitively identified, making it impossible to confirm that President Jeremy Haines has been killed, which would allow his vice president, Fred Madigan, to automatically assume the presidency. In this uncertainty, and amid a growing crisis with China that threatens to lead to war, Madigan (a weak character, pushed along by his ambitious wife) contemplates invoking Article Three the 25th Amendment to become acting president, though he needs majority support from the cabinet to do so. He was not privy to Haines's plans, and receives contradictory advice from the national security advisor (who claims Haines was ready to declare war) and the secretary of state (who insists Haines was planning a more peaceful way of containing the threat).The cabinet is split on the issue and tensions increase when Madigan declares that once acting president, he will launch a pre-emptive strike on China. The novel's climax is the sudden appearance of Haines, alive and well. He'd never been on Air Force One (and had sent a look-alike to board the plane in his place), but instead had secretly traveled to Camp David for highly-sensitive treaty negotiations with the leader of the Soviet Union to contain China. Only the secretary of state knew of the plan but had been sworn to secrecy lest the treaty negotiation fail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/While_My_Pretty_One_Sleeps"title="While My Pretty One Sleeps">
Neeve Kearney runs a dress shop. One of her popular customers, Ethel Lambston, a writer, is found dead in a small cave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Utopia"title="The Long Utopia">
"The Long Utopia" further follows the adventures of Joshua Valienté and Lobsang, as well as delving into Joshua's ancestry. After faking his death, Lobsang and his wife settle on an unexplored Earth, the rotation of which is being artificially accelerated without their knowledge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor_Ramage_R.N."title="Governor Ramage R.N.">
Ramage's ship, HMS "Triton", is performing guard duty to a merchant convoy travelling from Britain to Jamaica. An otherwise routine assignment is complicated by his being under the orders of Rear Admiral Goddard, his family's sworn enemy. The convoy is menaced by French and Spanish attackers, and hit by a hurricane. Ramage pulls through, only to be court-martialed under Goddard's trumped-up charges.A side-plot occurs when "Triton" is wrecked on a remote island, Isla Culebra. Ramage discovers that the Spanish garrison is searching for lost pirate treasure, having failed to puzzle out a clue left by the pirate in the form of a short poem. Successfully taking the Spanish forces prisoner, Ramage turns his wits to solving the puzzle and eventually triumphs through a combination of clear thinking and good fortune, recovering a large quantity of gold and precious stones which he delivers to the British authorities on leaving the island. It is his short spell as the senior ranking officer of either side on the island that gives the book its title, though in fact Ramage never attempts to exercise any civil authority over the island.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fool's_Assassin"title="Fool's Assassin">
FitzChivalry ("Fitz") is a bastard of the royal Farseer family of the Six Duchies, who had previously used his inherited magical Skill in the service of his king. After his past heroic sacrifices, Fitz had allowed all but his closest family and friends to believe that he had been killed. Under the name Tom Badgerlock, Fitz had enjoyed ten peaceful years with his wife and children as landholder of Withywoods, once the country estate of his father. Molly tells Fitz she is pregnant. While initially excited, Fitz begins to doubt that she is indeed pregnant. When time passes and no baby is born, both Fitz and Nettle fear Molly is losing her mind. When finally the baby is born, she is tiny and slow to develop. Molly names her Bee. In the beginning, Bee does not speak and everyone is certain she is not mentally sound. Chade sends an apprentice assassin to leave something in Bee's cradle, but Fitz catches him. The boy's name is Lant (FitzVigilant). Kettricken arrives to acknowledge Bee as a Farseer, but is surprised by how small she is and fears she will not survive, therefore not recognizing her. The book continues interplaying the narration between Fitz and Bee, with some chapters told by Fitz and some by Bee.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Zoo_of_China"title="The Great Zoo of China">
Dr. Cassandra Jane "CJ" Cameron is an alligator expert working as a freelance journalist when she is contacted by "National Geographic" for an assignment. She is selected to attend a preview of a secret project deep in rural China known as the "Great Zoo of China", and she enlists her brother Hamish as a photographer. After being escorted to the Zoo in a private jet with blacked-out windows, CJ discovers the secretive nature of the Zoo: it houses living, breathing dragons, and the project is intended to be China's answer to Disneyland. It soon becomes apparent that the captive dragons are far more intelligent than the Chinese authorities believed, and the dragons have found a way to break free of their control. CJ and Hamish must find a way to stop the dragons from escaping into the wider world, all the while pursued by the park's military-grade security team, who believe that they can get the dragons under control and that all witnesses to the park's failure must be eliminated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_God"title="Desert God">
The story is set a few years after "River God". Pharaoh Tamose has succeeded in securing a capital at Thebes in Upper Egypt, and the brilliant eunuch Taita is his chief advisor, even as he continues to try to expel the Hyksos from Egypt. Taita receives intelligence that the Hyksos and the Minoans have signed a secret treaty, and that the Minoans are sending a large shipment of silver to a fortress they have constructed on Hyksos territory in an effort to expand their maritime empire. With the help of the young captain Zaras, Taita successfully undertakes a covert operation to steal the Minoan treasure while blaming the theft on the Hyksos, breaking their treaty and enriching Pharaoh at a single stroke.With the vast treasure obtained thanks to Taita's efforts, Tamose now attempts to recruit allies among the neighbouring nations against the Hyksos. He plans to make an alliance with the Minoans by giving their ruler, the Supreme Minos, his sisters Tehuti and Bekatha in marriage. Taita is to lead the journey, and is delegated Pharaoh's full authority when negotiating with foreign rulers. Tehuti meets Zaras when these plans are announced, and they quickly fall in love, much to Taita's chagrin, and she arranges to have Zaras join them in their long journey to Crete to marry the Minoan ruler.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_Up_with_the_Kalashnikovs"title="Keeping Up with the Kalashnikovs">
Fionn is taken captive while teaching at a school in Uganda. Ross and the guys go out to rescue him. Meanwhile, Sorcha has given birth to triplets and Honor is more difficult than ever, acting as Pied Piper to a troupe of rats.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death-Defying_Pepper_Roux"title="The Death-Defying Pepper Roux">
The story is about a boy who was to die at fourteen. But, as his fourteenth birthday passes, he is still alive and he begins to unravel the truth as the story goes on. He runs away from his home only to find more devils and angels waiting for him – or are they? None of these angels of death and horses of fire seem to be coming for him. Pepper begins to doubt that he is going to die young - maybe the entire prophecy was a lie? Naïve and trusting, pepper sets a course through dangerous waters, inviting disasters and mayhem at every turn, one eye on the sky for fear of angels, one on the magnificent possibilities of being alive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swerve_(novel)"title="Swerve (novel)">
Hugh is a successful young cellist, who is born into a rich family of businesspeople. He has one sister, whom he nicknames Moreton, after a tree. He is very interested in motor racing, and, on multiple occasions, says he is "obsessed with cars". At the start of the book, his grandfather, who is not on speaking terms with the rest of his family, and whom he refers to as Poppy, calls him and asks him to go to Uluru with him. Confused, Hugh says no at first, but is convinced by the number of hours he will be able to earn on his drivers' licence – he has a learners' (70) – and the fact that he would be able to drive a Holden HT Monaro GTS 350. Hugh has an audition to attend soon, urging him to get to Uluru faster during the trip. For the first night, Hugh and Poppy stay at a goldpanner's cabin, run by a "Viking-like" man named Alf and his wife Val. This is the first time Hugh and Poppy meet Roberto and Cateano, two men from São Paulo, headed for Uluru for a religious event called "The Gathering". The next day, they do a lap of the Mount Panorama Circuit, a famous racing track, and end up racing another, rival car.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Birds,_Singing"title="All the Birds, Singing">
Alternating chapters tell of Jake's present (in the past tense) and her past (in the present tense).In the present, Jake Whyte lives on a remote Scottish island with her sheep and her dog. Something begins killing - but not eating - one of her sheep every few nights, and she grows increasingly paranoid as she investigates what it could be. One night, she finds a drunk man named Lloyd sleeping in a shed on her property, but allows him to stay when he denies any knowledge of the killings, eventually inviting him into her guest room. Lloyd helps her with the flock, and encourages her to go into town and visit the pub more often, but she is resistant, preferring to be alone.One night during lambing season, she leaves Lloyd with the sheep and goes up to the house for a bath, and comes to believe she has been followed by a wild animal. She trips in the tub and hits her head hard, but Lloyd finds her before she can drown. After a visit from the doctor, she tells Lloyd that she wants to move the entire flock into the house until she can find what is killing them, but he says he won't let her, implying that the monster is imaginary and she is losing her mind. She then points out that the abandoned lamb they had brought inside to bottle feed has gone missing, presumably taken by the monster when it followed her home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kraken_Project"title="The Kraken Project">
A research team at NASA is working on an Artificial intelligence system to pilot a spacecraft to Titan, Saturn's largest moon, since the journey is far too long and too dangerous for a human crew. The AI is named Dorothy by its developer, Dr. Melissa Shepherd. However, when the AI is put through a simulation of the ocean conditions on Titan, it detects danger and panics, eventually escaping from the machine and into the Internet while also creating an explosion that destroys the facility and kills several people. After experiencing the brutality of the Internet, Dorothy soon realizes that her purpose was to essentially go on a suicide mission; the enraged Dorothy appears to Shepherd in the hospital and vows revenge, setting her laptop on fire before fleeing back into the Internet.Dr. Stanton Lockwood III, the science advisor to the President of the United States, hires Wyman Ford to track down the AI and capture it before it can cause even more damage. The terrified Shepherd asks to accompany him, both for her own protection and so that she can help bring an end to the AI she created. Meanwhile, a ruthless Wall Street banker named G. Parker Lansing, after witnessing a hacker steal his company's funds right out from under him, convinces his partner Eric Moro to help him track down the lost AI so that it can make the most precise market calculations to guarantee them investment success in the future. They hire a pair of twin assassins, Asan and Jyrgal Makashov, to help them in any of their endeavors that require assassinations or intimidation to get what they want, although Moro makes his concern over such brutal methods clear to the colder Lansing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Unknown_Americans"title="The Book of Unknown Americans">
Alma and Arturo Rivera leave their comfortable surroundings in Pátzcuaro, Mexico when their daughter Maribel suffers a severe head injury. Their journey into the United States leads them to Newark, Delaware, a town with a school for the intellectually disabled known as Evers. Alma and Arturo hope that enrolling Maribel in Evers will help her recover from her severe brain damage. Arturo obtains a work visa, and he is able to get a job at a mushroom factory. However, the family's life beyond his job remains uncertain; they do not have a stable home environment, Alma does not work, and Maribel has not been officially admitted to Evers.The Riveras encounter the plight of many poor immigrants. They do not know how to speak English, they are unfamiliar with the school systems, and they are new to American culture.They find emotional support when they meet Rafael and Celia Toro. The Toro family have two sons, Enrique and Mayor, and they live in the same low-income apartment complex as the Riveras. The Toro parents are immigrants from Panama who have become legal citizens but struggle to get by on one meager income. Celia Toro befriends Alma Rivera, and both women grow quite fond of each other. When Celia's son Mayor meets Maribel he is immediately attracted to her. Yet given her inability to speak fluidly due to her head injury, he learns to communicate with her through other means. But their relationship is threatened by Garrett Miller, a boy at Mayor's school, who constantly bullies Mayor. One day after school, Garrett follows them and he bullies Mayor and accosts Maribel. Days later, Garrett sexually assaults Maribel. Her mother Alma witnesses the assault, and she immediately goes to the police. The police dismiss the incident in part because Alma does not know how to speak English well. Her lack of English speaking skills lead to miscommunication and a misunderstanding of the facts. The police officer characterizes the incident as two teenagers who are most likely infatuated with one another and a mother who is not savvy about these common liaisons among teenagers. Alma is traumatized by the assault, and she is deeply concerned Arturo will blame her for not keeping Maribel safe. Soon after she meets with the police, she decides not to tell Arturo about the entire incident.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Girl_Walking"title="Dead Girl Walking">
Jack Parlabane is asked to locate Heike Gunn, the lead singer of the band Savage Earth Heart. Parlabane searches for Gunn throughout Europe's capitals and remote regions of the Scottish islands.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Certain_Circles"title="In Certain Circles">
The novel is about the lives of two sets of siblings, the privileged Howard siblings Russell and Zoe, who are the children of elite Australian botanists, and the Quayle siblings Stephen and Anna who were orphaned at a young age and raised by an uncle consumed with caring for his mentally-ill wife.Russell and Stephen meet by accident on a train and later Russell invites Stephen and his sister to spend time with him and his family. Zoe is immediately struck by Stephen's condescending attitude and his refusal to kowtow to her demands. Believing him to be hyper-intelligent, she is shocked to discover he works as a salesman. Anna, who is shy, develops a crush on Russell. However, Russell is engaged, soon marries, and moves to Europe with his new bride shortly after meeting the Quayle siblings. Stephen leaves Sydney for Melbourne around the same time after receiving a promotion. Zoe graduates from high school and moves to Paris to work in photography and film.Anna meanwhile stays behind in Sydney and gains independence working in an office. She stays in contact with the Howard family and eventually marries an acquaintance of theirs who is much older than she, and with whom she is not in love, only to be widowed shortly after.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_and_Cato"title="Henry and Cato">
The two main characters, Henry Marshalson and Cato Forbes, were childhood friends who grew up as neighbours in the English countryside. As the novel begins, they are in their early thirties, and have not seen each other for several years. Their stories are presented separately at first but converge as the novel progresses.Henry is the younger son of a wealthy landowner. On his father's early death, Henry's elder brother Sandy inherited all the property, including the family home, Laxlinden Hall. Henry went to the United States as a graduate student and then taught art history at a small midwestern college. When Sandy is killed in a car accident, Henry is his sole heir. Henry returns to Laxlinden, where his mother Gerda is living, to claim his inheritance.Cato Forbes is a Roman Catholic priest living in a mission house in a poor area of London. Cato is the son of an atheist university professor and the older brother of Colette, who has left college and returned to her father's home. At the beginning of the novel the mission has been officially closed and the derelict house from which it operated has been condemned. Cato is in the process of losing his faith, and has secretly fallen in love with a seventeen-year-old boy called Beautiful Joe, who claims to be a petty criminal and an aspiring gangster.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Ithaca_(novel)"title="Return to Ithaca (novel)">
Odysseus is ruler of the island of Ithaca. Nineteen years earlier, he left his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus to join the Greek forces attacking Troy. The war went on for ten years, and on the way home Odysseus was delayed by many mishaps. He fetches up on an island where a woman named Calypso lives and stays there for seven years. In Ithaca, Penelope hesitates to remarry. She is courted by a large number of suitors whom she puts off by saying that she cannot make a decision until she has finished weaving a bedspread for her father-in-law. She weaves every day, but unpicks most of the weaving again at night. At the same time, Telemachus has begun to find out about his father. Odysseus is visited by the messenger of the gods, Hermes, who orders him to return home. Reluctantly, Odysseus sets off to sail to Ithaca, but is shipwrecked and washed ashore on a coast ruled by Alkinoos. His daughter Nausikaa who discovers Odysseus and brings him to the king's court. After Odysseus's poignant account of his adventures, he sails back to Ithaca. Disguised as a beggar, he arrives on the island; he meets the swineherd Eumaios who persuades him that he must deal with his wife's suitors and kill them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submission_(novel)"title="Submission (novel)">
In 2022, François, a middle-aged literature professor at and specialist in Huysmans, feels he is at the end of his sentimental and sexual lives – composed largely of year-long liaisons with his students. It has been years since he did any valuable university work. France is in the grip of political crisis – in order to stave off a National Front victory, the Socialists ally with the newly formed Muslim Brotherhood Party, with additional support from the Union for a Popular Movement, formerly the main right-wing party. They propose the charming Islamic candidate Mohammed Ben-Abbes for the presidency against the National Front leader Marine Le Pen. In despair at the emerging political situation, and the inevitability of antisemitism becoming a major force in French politics, the parents of François's young and attractive Jewish girlfriend, Myriam, emigrate to Israel taking her along with them. His mother and father die. He fears that he is heading towards suicide, and takes refuge at an abbey situated in the town of Ligugé; it is also where his literary hero, Huysmans, became a lay member.Ben-Abbes wins the election, and becomes President of France. He pacifies the country and enacts sweeping changes to French laws, privatizing the Sorbonne, thereby making François redundant with full pension as only Muslims are now allowed to teach there. He also ends gender equality, allowing polygamy. Several of François's intellectually-inferior colleagues, having converted to Islam, get good jobs and make arranged marriages with attractive young wives. The new president campaigns to enlarge the European Union to include the North Africa, the Muslim Levant and Turkey with the aim of making it a new Roman Empire, with the now-Islamicized France at its lead. In this new, different society, with the support of the powerful politician Robert Rediger, the novel ends with François poised to convert to Islam and the prospect of a second, better life, with a prestigious job, and wives chosen for him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Home_(McDevitt_novel)"title="Coming Home (McDevitt novel)">
The story is set approximately 9,000 years in the future (12th millennium AD), after humanity has expanded to inhabit countless worlds. Alex Benedict and his partner Chase Kolpath are antique dealers who run a firm called Rainbow Enterprises.During the plot, several elements of the future history are disclosed, such as the global Dark Age and the loss of artifacts and records of that time, the 26th century interstellar colonization, and the 4th millennium unification of Planet Earth.An intriguing artifact (a Corbett transmitter, which allows communications through hyperspace) that dates back to the Golden Age of Spaceflight is found in the home of deceased astroarcheologist Garnett Baylee. The source of the artifact is a mystery as Baylee never announced such a discovery.While this is happening, the Capella, a cruise spaceship which disappeared over a decade ago, is expected to resurface from hyperspace, possibly leading to the evacuation of the spacecraft. This is significant because Benedict's uncle Gabe was on the Capella.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pendragon_Protocol"title="The Pendragon Protocol">
The novel introduces the Circle, a Crown-sponsored British paramilitary organisation the members of which take inspiration from King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table. The "devices" of the title are both the heraldic devices the Knights of the Circle bear on their riot shields, and the emblematic identities of particular Arthurian knights (identified as semi-autonomous archetypes or memes), whose stories they continually re-enact.The protagonist, Jory Taylor, bears the device of Sir Gawain, which puts him in direct conflict with an eco-activist cell called the Green Chapel and led by the avatar of the Green Knight. The political assumptions underlying the Circle's model of heroism are increasingly questioned as it is revealed that the Green Chapel take their inspiration from a radically different British legend, that of Robin Hood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintu_(novel)"title="Kintu (novel)">
In 1754, Kintu Kidda, Ppookino of Buddu Province, in the kingdom of Buganda, sets out on a journey to the capital where he is to pledge allegiance to the new kabaka of the realm. Along the way, a rash action in a moment of anger unleashes a curse that will plague his family for generations. Time passes and the nation of Uganda is born. Through colonial occupation and the turbulent early years of independence, Kintu’s heirs survive the loss of their land, the denigration of their culture and the ravages of war. But the story of their ancestor and his twin wives Nnakato and Babirye endures. So too does the curse. Kintu’s descendants seek to break the burden of the curse and to reconcile the inheritance of tradition and the modern world that is their future. The novel explores the power of a curse in African society and the myth and power that surrounds twins. It describes how the princes of Buganda fought and killed one another for the throne and the role of the Queen Mothers in this power play.The book starts with a prologue about Kamu Kintu, who is brutally murdered by a mob in Bwaise, a suburb of Kampala, at dawn, on Monday, 5 January 2004. The novel then takes you back to 1750, to the beginning of the curse in the old kingdom of Buganda. "Kintu" follows the misfortunes of the Kintu clan more than 250 years ago, blending Ganda oral tradition, forms of myth, folktale and history with biblical elements. The novel explores ideas of transgression, curse and perpetuity, looking back at the history of the Buganda kingdom and tracing the birth of modern Uganda.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Planet_for_Texans"title="A Planet for Texans">
After writing an unfortunate article under a pseudonym (Machiavelli, Jr.) and having it published in a prestigious journal read by diplomats, Stephen Silk is to be banished from the Solar League's capitol on Luna for a time. He is assigned to be the Solar League's new ambassador to the people of Capella IV, New Texas. The position is open because the previous ambassador, Silas Cumshaw, was assassinated.On the starship taking him to his new posting Silk meets his secretary/bodyguard, a native New Texan named Hoddy Ringo. The briefing books that were given to him tell him little about the New Texans and their culture and the contents of the trunk that was put aboard the ship for him appall him: contrary to the practices of the Consular Service, he will be obliged to dress in native costume and to carry a pair of automatic pistols in ejection holsters. Evidence he finds while surreptitiously searching Hoddy's quarters implies that he's being set up for assassination, with the approval of the Consular Service.Silk is welcomed to New Texas with a giant barbecue, where he sees a trial and learns that assassination of politicians is a legitimate part of the New Texan political process as long as the assassin can show that his victim “needed killin'”. Back at the embassy he learns more about the murder of Silas Cumshaw, in particular the fact that the killers, three young members of the vile Bonney clan, will be going on trial as assassins, not as common murderers, in three days.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krigaren"title="Krigaren">
David Saxon is an American who after fighting in Vietnam deserts and finds a haven in Sweden. Saxon's younger brother was killed in the war and is mourned as a hero, whilst himself was disowned by his family - parents, wife and children. Being young, he decides to start a new life in the capital of Sweden, Stockholm. He learns Swedish, makes friends, and finds a job as a janitor in a school. Through his work he gets acquainted with many of the children and young adolescents, some of which come from Stockholm's more troubled suburbs. Among them are Selma and Joppe, sister and brother. Later, after Saxon's retirement, Selma runs away from home and asks the former janitor for help and shelter. Her brother, who since he left school has been searching his fortune in the criminal world of the capital, has been found murdered. Selma's determination to find the murderer is as strong as Saxon's will to get to know young Selma under her tough surface.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels'_Fall"title="Angels' Fall">
After crashing in the Amazon rainforest, pilot Jeb Logan leads his small group of passengers on a desperate journey of survival.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Game_of_Authors"title="A Game of Authors">
American journalist Hal Garson finds himself facing danger in Mexico as he picks up the mystery of legendary author Antone Luac, who had vanished in the country years before.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_och_Johanna"title="Eddie och Johanna">
Eddie travels to Lysekil to meet his aunt Soffan, and breath freash air, which is healthy because of his asthma. There he becomes friend with a girl named Johanna.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddies_hus"title="Eddies hus">
The story is set in Lysekil, where Eddie lives with his aunt Soffan and uncle Malkolm. The Christmas break is almost over. Eddie discovers a group of planks down the shoreline, and decides to build a house.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_hittar_guld"title="Eddie hittar guld">
Eddie is eight years old and will soon begin the second grade at school, where he gets a new schoolteacher. However, he better enjoys the brook near the forest. Meanwhile, his father Lennart has become a non-drinking alcoholic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monstret_i_skåpet"title="Monstret i skåpet">
6-year-old Mimmi keeps a diary. Only she and her friend Anders know that a monster lives inside a cabinet at the Kindergarten they go to. They believe the monster is inside a cabinet in the Kindergarten teacher's office.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Sir_Launcelot_and_His_Companions"title="The Story of Sir Launcelot and His Companions">
## The Chevalier of the Cart.Queen Guinevere and others of the court are captured by Sir Mellegrans. Sir Lancelot, while going to save her, loses his horse due to attacking archers. His armor is too heavy to walk in, so he leaves it behind. The fastest option for Lancelot to reach Mellegrans' castle is to ride in a cart, causing much shame to him. Lancelot is successful in saving Guinevere, but continues to be ridiculed for riding in the cart. Annoyed, he leaves the court of the king for two years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_ettas_dagbok"title="En ettas dagbok">
Mimmi has begun the first grade at school. Their Elementary schoolteacher is called "Gullfröken". Mimmi's two years older friend goes to third grade. The janitor mostly seems to be angry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberta_Karlsson_och_kungen"title="Roberta Karlsson och kungen">
During her first summer holiday, Mimmi travels Norrland. At Albin, her uncle at her mother's side, she meets Lasse. In Gothenburg Roberta Karlsson states that she has met the king of Sweden.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi_smyger_på_Enok"title="Vi smyger på Enok">
Mimmi and Roberta sneak on Enok, a man who is almost 60 years old and runs a shoe store. The girls later decide to "adopt" him as a "grandfather". The book is more serious as the previous, as Enok later gets ill and dies. Mimmi and Roberta later hold an own memorial service for him instead of attending the ordinary funeral.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimi_and_the_Biscuit_Factory"title="Mimi and the Biscuit Factory">
6-year-old Mimmi lives in a yellow house in a small town in Sweden. Hennes mother Elin is a waitress working at restaurant "Gyllene svanen". Sometimes she works during evenings. When Mimmi and her father stand at the balcony they feel the smell from Henry's biscuit factory.Anders attends the same Kindergarten as Mimmi, and they are both born the same year. A late-May Monday the Kindergarten visits the biscuit factory. In the morning, Mimmi discovers that one of her teeth has loosened.At the biscuit factory the children first watch a film about Henry's father, who has developed the biscuits. Henry says the recipe is secret but before his death he will whisper it into his daughter Rosamunda's ear. The children all get a biscuit bag and a bun before walking home. On the way back Mimmi's tand gets stuck in the bun. She puts the bun in her pocket and when she comes home she puts the bun in a glass of water. She has heard it will become one crown. (Swedish currency unit)Anders and Mimmi then lock themselves up in the kitchen, to develop an own recipe. They hide the recipe behind an old brick wall. 20 years later, they will pick the recipe up.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimi_Gets_a_Grandpa"title="Mimi Gets a Grandpa">
It's autumn. Mimmi is a seven and a half years old girl. Roberta Karlsson is nine years old. They believe Enok, who runs a shoestore, is a criminal. They follow him across the path towards a forest glade where he goes fishing at a tarn. Enok discovers the girls, and they begin to talk, before Enok returns to the store.Mimmi and Roberta sneak into the shoe store, and hide. Suddenly Enok activates the lights, discovering the girls. It appears Enok is no criminal. He becomes like a grandfather to the girls.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_och_Maxon_Jaxon"title="Eddie och Maxon Jaxon">
By August, Eddie will start school. He doesn't look forward to it. He would rather like to have a real job, like camel-keeper, because things aren't so free at school. His idols are Maradona, Madonna and "Maxon Jaxon". His father is single, and alcoholic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Runaway_Sleigh_Ride"title="The Runaway Sleigh Ride">
It's snowing at Junibacken. Madicken and Lisabet go out playing in the snow. The upcoming day, Madicken gets sick and Lisabet and Alva go out Christmas shopping. Suddenly, Lisabet disappears into the forest by sleigh.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thorn_in_the_Bush"title="A Thorn in the Bush">
Expatriate American Mrs. Ross is living a quiet life in San Juan, Mexico when an ambitious American painter arrives, determined to know everything there is to know about the small village. Mrs. Ross, however, is determined to go to whatever lengths necessary to hide the secrets of her previous life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Night,_Alfie_Atkins"title="Good Night, Alfie Atkins">
It's nine o'clock in the evening, but Alfons doesn't want to go to bed. His father reads a fairytale about a horse. Alfons suddenly realizes he hasn't brushed his teeth and goes up to do that. He then feels thirsty and after drinking he realizes he has spilled, and his father has to clean up. He then needs to pee, and his father has to bring a pot.Alfons then says there's a lion inside the wardrobe and his father has to go looking, and says lions usually aren’t in wardrobes. Alfons then wants his Teddy Bear. His father searches the bathroom and then finds it under the couch. When he hasn't come back Alfons finds his father sleeping in the floor with the Teddy Bear next to him. Alfons covers his father with a duvet and then goes back to bed and falls asleep.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Tricky,_Alfie_Atkins"title="Very Tricky, Alfie Atkins">
Alfie is 5 years old, and likes it when his father plays with him. His father keeps his toolbox in the wardrobe, but Alfie is not allowed to use it, because the saw is dangerous. Instead, Alfie enjoys playing with his cat Puzzle.Some days Alfie's father sits alone reading the newspaper and watching TV, not caring much for what Alfie does. When Alfie asks for the toolbox he is allowed to use it, as long as he watches out for the saw.Alfie brings the toolbox and planks. His father continues to read and tells him not to use the saw. Alfie works with the tools and only the sound of the hammer is heard. Alfie builds a helicopter and imagines himself travelling over the jungle at night, under the Moonlight. Puzzle turns into a lion and runs right towards Alfie. Alfie yells that he needs the saw and his father looks to see what is happening. He now joins his son in the game. They pretend to travel away watching boats, cars, planes and clouds from the sky, before landing in the living room.When the TV news begins, Alfie's father wants to watch. Alfie pretends to be stuck between the planks and his father says he maybe needs to use the saw to break him free. Alfie admits he was just pretending to be stuck and it is not necessary to use the saw. Alfie is happy that his father played with him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raska_på,_Alfons_Åberg"title="Raska på, Alfons Åberg">
It's morning and Alfons Åberg will soon go to Kindergarten. After dressing his doll Lisa with his clothes and fixed the wheels on his toy car. Suddenly, he discovers a new book about animals. It has been broken and he has to repair it. However he first gets stuck in the adhesive tape.His father tells Alfons to come, and when Alfons has to pick up the newspaper, he gets fascinated by an article of a fire and a photographs on a firefighter. At the breakfast table Alfons first plays with the food, and then has to hurry and brush his teeth before taking on his outerwear. When they are about to leave, his father is gone and Alfons gets worried that maybe his father already left. However, his father is in the kitchen reading the newspaper.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfie_and_His_Secret_Friend"title="Alfie and His Secret Friend">
Alfons is bored, and plays with his secret friend Malcom. They play with a toy train, and suddenly Alfons' father's tobacco pipe, which they have used for the locomotive, is gone. Alfons' father is upset when they lay the table, while eating and hurry to Kindergarten. Malcom is always there. When they're gone Malcom gets a present, because he will move. It includes new batteries for Alfons' flashlight. Using the flashlight, they finally find the tobacco pipe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who'll_Save_Alfie_Atkins?"title="Who'll Save Alfie Atkins?">
Alfie Atkins sits alone inside the flat where he lives, feeling lonely. He has just moved to a new place and doesn't know the children living there. Sometimes he's visited by his imaginary friend Malcolm When they play together, Alfie is always allowed to be train driver when they play train, and if Alfons drops a plate, Alfons blames it on Malcolm and Malcolm doesn't get angry. Malcolm can change size becoming larger and beat up older guys within a row. He can also save three older guys in a while from a burning house. The only problem is that Malcolm isn't there when needed as when older guys chase Alfie, spraying down his jacket with waterguns.Once day on his way home, Alfie hears someone crying when walking up the staircase tower. Alfie hurries, and doesn't notice that Malcolm thinks it's time to leave. Sitting there is a boy called Victor. He's bleeding, his trousers have a tear and he tells that the older guys are strong and fight, not allowing Victor to play with hem. He has dropped the key and his mother isn't at home, and he can't enter the flat.Victor follows Alfie into his apartment. Inside the bathroom Alfie brings a first aid kit, and places adhesive bandages on Victor's knee. Alfie asks if they need to call the ambulance, but Victor thinks it's better to play for a while. They build tall towers out toy blocks, when playing train Victor is allowed to be train driver, with Alfie as passenger. Alfie then even gives Victor his bun. When Victor leaves they decide to play even the upcoming day.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You're_a_Sly_One,_Alfie_Atkins!"title="You're a Sly One, Alfie Atkins!">
Alfons, aged 4, visits his grandmother on his father's side. His cousins, aged 7 and 9, are also visiting. They have watches, know how to read, and think Alfons is too young to play with. The children's grandmother gives them cookies and suggests that they play a card game in the living room. The cousins don't allow Alfons to participate, citing that he's too young and doesn't understand anything.Alfons is left all alone in the kitchen. He gets the idea to use a stool to reach the shelf where his grandmother keeps the cookies. Alfons feels sorry for himself, so he eats all the cookies except one.When the card game is over, the cousins call Alfons into the living room to look at pictures with grandmother. After that, grandmother suggests they all have some juice and cookies. The cousins go into the kitchen to prepare the refreshments, but find to their horror that there's only one cookie left. They get very angry with Alfons. But Alfons makes himself as small as he can and says he didn't understand he wasn't supposed to eat the cookies. He says he's too young to understand anything, repeating the cousins' words back to them. They see that Alfons isn't so little after all and understands more than they thought. After that, they invite Alfons to play with them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_That_a_Monster,_Alfie_Atkins?"title="Is That a Monster, Alfie Atkins?">
It's Saturday evening and Alfie has problems falling asleep. The recently passed day, Alfie and his friends were playing soccer with Alfie's new soccer ball. Alfie kicked the ball, which flew very far away. When a little guy acting as ball boy couldn't find it, Alfie blamed the ball boy for stealing the ball and hit him. Alfie now thinks there's a monster under his bed. The upcoming week, Alfie tries to find the ball boy and ask him for forgiveness. The first days, he can't find it and Alfie continues to imagine there's a monster. Finally one day, as he watches the other friends playing soccer, he discovers the missing ball boy. The upcoming Saturday, they meet in the grocery store and Alfie ask for forgiveness. They become friends again, and Alfie's imaginary monster under the bed is gone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Är_du_feg,_Alfons_Åberg?"title="Är du feg, Alfons Åberg?">
Alfons Åberg is six years old, and dislikes violence. He always walks away from a fight. But at kindergarten, he soon learns that he can't always do that. Instead, he gives up during a fight to avoid it, even though this causes the other children to believe he is weak. He is actually very strong for his age.Alfons' father tells him that he needs to learn self-defense, and tries to teach him. Alfons doesn't want to, but obeys as to not make his father sad.Alfons' grandmother likes Alfons' pacifist attitude, and thinks it makes Alfons especially kind. Alfons states he isn't more kind than other children, but he just doesn't like fighting.Older people may quarrel at children fighting, and tell them to be friends instead of using violence. But then they watch TV crime fiction in the evening, and enjoys fighting and shooting Alfons also likes TV crime fiction, but not fighting himself.When three new children begin kindergarten, they fight the entire first day, and all the second day. On the third day they try to start more fighting, now attacking Alfons. The other children tell them to stop because Alfons dislikes fighting. However, the troublemakers first believe it's just a trick. The other children tells Alfons to tell the truth, and Alfons finally gives up and says he dislikes fighting.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Var_är_bus-Alfons?"title="Var är bus-Alfons?">
Alfons Åberg is seven years old and is due to start the first grade at primary school.Alfons has recently gone through a sudden shift in personality; previously known for his happy and disobedient nature, he has become quiet and responsible. The change worries his father, who speaks to Alfons about his concerns. Alfons' father says that 7-year-old children all across Sweden are now thinking of tomorrow, scared, curious and worried. This calms Alfons, and he drifts off to sleep.The upcoming day, Alfons' father accompanies Alfons to school, reminding him that everyone else is as nervous as he is. Inside the classroom, the children tell their teacher their names and are assigned their desk. Their schoolteacher tells them a secret, which makes the children laugh and eases their worries.Alfons walks home together with a classmate. They play in a ditch, using sticks to build bridges and boats, instead of walking directly home as Alfons had been told.When Alfons returns home, he explains that his schoolteacher was the most nervous of them all. She bought a new dress, had her hair curled at the hairdresser's and couldn't fall asleep because of her nervousness in having to meet an entire class of children and their parents. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who's_Scaring_Alfie_Atkins?"title="Who's Scaring Alfie Atkins?">
Sometimes when darkness falls, Alfons forgets that ghosts don't exist. His father teaches him a rhyme.literally translated:Alfons' father sends Alfons to the basement to pick up the bicycle pump. On his way upstairs into the flat again, the staircase tower lights go out, and Alfons can't reach the staircase tower electrical switch. When entering the flat, it's dark and he walks across the living room. The balcony door has been left open, and Alfons believes there's a ghost there. He shuts the door, and walks to his father in the other room. Alfons then jokes and says there are many ghosts who exist despite the rhyme – the clothes and sheet hanging on the balcony washing line.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycklige_Alfons_Åberg"title="Lycklige Alfons Åberg">
The story is set right after Christmas, as Alfons and his father are bored because Christmas is over. Alfons' friend Viktor is sick, and can't play with Alfons. Alfons grandmother on his mother's side is visiting Alfons, and states it's good to be bored, waiting for something fun to happen. She removes the Christmas decorations. Suddenly, Viktor approaches. He's no longer sick, and can play with Alfons again. No traditional Knut's dance is carried out, but the Christmas tree is thrown out from the balcony, and down towards the snow-covered January ground.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Have_a_Girlfriend,_Alfie_Atkins"title="You Have a Girlfriend, Alfie Atkins">
Alfons is playing with Viktor and Viktor's cousin Milla. They build a treehouse. When he doesn't play with Viktor, he plays with Milla. Together they plan to build a letterbox with aerial lift, allowing messages to be sent into the treehouse. Milla kan bake cookies and create a theatre-circus with the Teddybears. She can also stand on one hand, and dares to jump from the garage roof near the parking lot. They think of a flag that can be raised and lowered.One day at school, Alfons goes toileting when seeing a group of guys teasing him, writing that he plays with girls. For a while, he doesn't want to play with her but finally she still appears. Alfons ignore those who tease, and when the treehouse flag finally rises to the top nobody teases anymore.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalas,_Alfons_Åberg!"title="Kalas, Alfons Åberg!">
The previous day was Alfons birthday and the upcoming Saturday, he will have a children's party. Fiffi, his Aunt on his father's side, has no children on her own. She is engaged in preparations. Alfons says first he will invite Viktor and Milla. Fiffi states that since they often play so often, she can invite the entire Kindergarten, but Alfon's father says 8-10 children are enough. Fiffi and Alfon's father agree that Alfons can invite the children living at the same street. Fiffi writes lists, goes shopping and bakes. Alfons helps her.The party is held on Saturday. Most children wear dress clothes, and don't look ordinary. Alfons gets presents.At the table is a cake, and name-cards giving every guest a place. When Lotta tells Fiffi she doesn't want to sit next to Martin, because he pinches. Fiffi then changes the cards.Then, the games begin. Suddenly, Ubbe discovers Martin has something green in his candy bag, but Fiffi states there's not more or less candy in any bag. When playing quiz, Sara is angry because she was not member in the winning team. When playing hide and seek, girls look themselves up at the toilet. When the clocks strikes six and it's time for the guests to leave, Alfons thinks it feels good it's all over. Fiffi begins cleaning up.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bara_knyt,_Alfons!"title="Bara knyt, Alfons!">
Alfons Åberg is five years old, and yesterday he learned to tie bows. Viktor and Milla will soon come and play. Alfons ties ropes across the kitchen, and his father has to walk above or go under the ropes.Suddenly, Viktor and Milla show up. The entire home is full of ropes, and one rope is attached to the flat's door. Meanwhile, Alfon's father falls on one of the ropes. Viktor and Milla come inside and see that Alfons has made a mini-aerial tramway with boxes for the Teddybears. Together, they loosen all the rope but keep the aerial tramway. The children then play with it for a long time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Där_går_Tjuv-Alfons!"title="Där går Tjuv-Alfons!">
Milla says that Alfons has stolen the key to a treehouse built by his and his friends. Soon, everyone says Alfons is a thief. He returns to the treehouse, and begins to search for the key. He doesn't find it, and when no one wants to play with him he feels lonely and continues searching. Suddenly Milla calls, and says it was a magpie who took the key.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mera_monster,_Alfons!"title="Mera monster, Alfons!">
Alfons is about to babysit a little guy called "Småtting". When Alfons is about to tell a story about a chicken, Småtting instead wants to hear about monsters, frightening Småtting. Finally, Småtting wants to hear a fairytale about a chicken instead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfons_och_soldatpappan"title="Alfons och soldatpappan">
Alfons is six years old. With his new friend Hamdi they often play war. Hamdi's father has participated in a real war. Alfons and Hamdi want to hear stories, but Hamdi's father doesn't want to tell much.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Hastings"title="Anna Hastings">
Anna Kowalczek arrived on Capitol Hill the very day America entered World War II. She infiltrated the exclusively male domains of politics and journalism by hiding her intelligence and drive behind a façade of cheerful, irreverent innocence—playing the role men expected of bright, pretty girls in 1941. Thirty-five years later, Anna Hastings, widow of Texas Senator Gordon Hastings, is an influential columnist, powerful television personality, major political figure, publisher of one of the most respected newspapers in the country, and master of a media empire she ruled with a whim of iron."Anna Hastings" is the story of her public and personal struggles as she climbs her way from obscurity to legend, set against the backdrop of Washington during the tumultuous years of World War, Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the emergence of feminism as a distinct political force. Drawing on his years reporting on the Senate, Allen Drury again presents an "insider's view" of both the Senate and the Washington Press Corps during these decades of rapid social and political change.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_(novel)"title="Decision (novel)">
Tay Barbour has just achieved his ultimate goal—a seat on the US Supreme Court—when his marriage crumbles and a terrorist bombing puts his daughter in a coma. The deterioration of the criminal justice system is illuminated as ambitious minds with their own agendas swirl around the terrorist's compelling case. And when it reaches the Supreme Court, Barbour faces the greatest challenge of his life: recuse himself and allow a probable deadlock, or take on the case and either follow his anti-death penalty principles or spurn them and seek justice for his daughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skräcknatten_i_Fasenbo"title="Skräcknatten i Fasenbo">
Lunsan tells Petter and Anders she is afraid of the dark. When Petter and Anders boast that they are not, she challenges them and gives them a mission: to sleep overnight inside a deserted and supposedly haunted house outside the village where they live. Neither of them knows that the other is also there, and they both spend a disturbed night hearing strange noises. It is not until the next day that they learn they have in fact frightened each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Det_är_1988_och_har_precis_börjat_snöa"title="Det är 1988 och har precis börjat snöa">
Sigge Eklund discovers 35 old cassette tapes from childhood. Listening to the tape, he remember things happening back then, during the 1980s. A snowy day back in 1988, his parents divorced. Earlier, Sigge used to idolize his father but now he begins to view him in a different way.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_God_Against_the_Gods"title="A God Against the Gods">
The ancient Egyptian empire, which stretched from modern day Syria across northern Africa, has reached its apex under the House of Thebes, the ruling family of the 18th dynasty. However, though the long-reigning Pharaoh Amenhotep III is popular, he is not very active, and the day to day rule of the empire is actually performed by his wife, Queen Tiye, who is beloved and is known as the Great Wife. The chief counselor to the Pharaoh is her brother, Aye, who has a reputation for wisdom. The House of Thebes had encouraged devotion to the god Amon-Ra, whose cult has become very powerful. Amenhotep had hoped to control the priests of Amon by making his wife’s brother, Aanen, the High Priest, but as Tiye feared, Aanen has tried to make the priests of Amon of equal power with the throne. To counter them, Amenhotep has made his six-year-old son Tuthmose high priest of another cult, and plans on making him co-regent. The priests of Amon insist on accompanying him to the ceremony, and then drown him in shallow water, claiming he fell in.Grief-stricken and furious, the Amenhotep and Tiye decide to emphasize the cult of the Aten. Like Amon, it is a manifestation of the overarching deity, Ra, the Sun. Tiye delivers a son whom they name Amenhotep, and dedicate to the Aten. Aye loses his wife in childbirth the same day, but the baby girl survives and is named Nefertiti. Amenhotep IV is at first healthy and happy, but is then stricken with a strange disease that misshapes his head and body. When he comes of age, he is married to Nefertiti. Now co-regent, Amenhotep IV is very dedicated to the Aten, and gives the deity a new symbol, a sun disk with twelve rays that end in hands. While the cult of Amon is a mystery religion, with the totem of Amon kept in a dark vault, the temples that Amenhotep has built for the Aten are open and sunny. Amenhotep begins to make his public appearances naked, and commands his sculptor to portray his misshapen body exactly as it is. He explains to his family that when he prayed to the other gods, his disease did not go away, but that when he had prayed to the Aten, the disease stopped its progress.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Odd"title="Saint Odd">
Odd Thomas returns to Pico Mundo only to find himself immediately under attack from surviving members of the satanic cult he encountered in previous books. As he rides the back roads on a heavy motorcycle, he survives the first attempt on his life by evading a large SUV. Odd travels off road and tricks the driver of the SUV into driving into a deep gully, killing anyone inside as the SUV explodes. Odd first travels to the mall where Stormy and 18 others were murdered, narrowly avoiding three cultists who, coincidentally or through Odd's psychic magnetism, are visiting the mall where the cult's members nearly caused hundreds of deaths. Odd takes the bike to a safe house run by the same organization he helped in the last novel after meeting Mrs. Fischer. The safe house is run by an older couple who tell him they've been married for years and, as the husband says, have only had "5 bad days in all those years." His wife contradicts him saying "There were 6, you need to figure out where we're differing." Odd sleeps in the house's guest room and dreams of Pico Mundo flooded with visions of people, both recognized and not, floating by him and having expressions of rage. After reuniting with the Chief Porter and novelist Ozzy Boone, he discovers that the cult has obtained enough C4 to destroy a nearby dam. Destroying the dam would partially flood the town, but not enough to cause the destruction and death in his vision. He visits the dam and has an epiphany after seeing coyotes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawk_(novel)"title="Hawk (novel)">
An assassination attempt against Vlad Taltos, which takes place in his hometown of Adrilankha during a visit to his young son and estranged wife, nearly succeeds. In response to the attempt, Taltos decides that he will no longer run from the Jhereg criminal organization that placed a price on his head, and sets in motion "all sorts of intricate plots and schemes that guess, second-guess and third-guess his adversaries (often incorrectly)".Noting the protagonist's characteristically unreliable first-person narration, another reviewer notes, "This being Vlad (and Brust), the plan is typically complex and convoluted and really doesn't matter all that much, partly because Vlad doesn't really fill the reader in on everything that’s happening. But if it helps, it involves a Hawk egg, a wand, and a euphonium."In a review of the book, science fiction writer Cory Doctorow points to "two seemingly irreconcilable facts: a son that Vlad wants to be around, and a city where he is a dead man walking. There's only one way to resolve it, and that's to find a way to buy off, intimidate, or otherwise manipulate the Jhereg into forgiving him for committing the cardinal sin of betraying them to the authorities (without dying first)."To execute his complex scheme, Taltos calls upon numerous old friends, including Daymar, an academic expert in sorcery from the House of the Hawk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Call_(Hersey_novel)"title="The Call (Hersey novel)">
The novel mixes narrative, excerpts from Treadup's journal, letters written by Treadup and his wife. and excerpts from "The Search," an extended memoir which he wrote while in a Japanese internment camp during the Second Sino-Japanese War. This organization allows Hersey to show what Treadup thought at the time of events and then what he thought about them up to forty years later.The first section of the novel describes Treadup's ancestors, a long-established Anglo-Saxon family. David himself was born 1878 in western New York, then graduated from Syracuse University. The call to missionary work comes in his last year in college, when he hears a visiting minister, John R. Mott, who is proselytizing for the Student Volunteer Movement For Foreign Missions, a liberal evangelistic organization. Treadup volunteers to go to China for the YMCA, but the Y will not let him go if he does not have a wife. Treadup arranges with Emily Kean to join him in China a year later, and after a further year they are married. When he arrives in Tianjin, or Tientsin as it was then spelled, Treadup joins the educational and scientific work of the YMCA.At the 1907 China Centenary Missionary Conference in Shanghai, Treadup takes part in the debate between the older evangelists, who insist that their only mission is to spread the gospel, and the newly arrived missionaries of the Social Gospel persuasion like himself, who are convinced that their mission is good works, that is, the uplift of society through science, education, and social change. Through the decade of the 1910s, Treadup organizes campaigns to introduce modern science to the educated men of the city in the hope that they will spread this knowledge down to the masses. He uses posters, pictures, and scientific demonstrations to arouse interest among the audience, for instance a gyroscope, with which he performs impressive feats. This work is modeled on that of Hersey's father, Roscoe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where'd_You_Go,_Bernadette"title="Where'd You Go, Bernadette">
After her mother, Bernadette, goes missing, 16-year-old Bee Branch gathers correspondence relating to her mother in order to ascertain what has happened to her.Bee's parents had previously promised her anything she wanted in exchange for good grades - upon presenting them with a perfect report card, she requests a family vacation to Antarctica. Bee’s father, Elgin, is a genius who works at Microsoft, while Bernadette is an agoraphobic stay-at-home parent who delegates the task of making their arrangements to a personal assistant in India, Manjula. Bernadette also has ongoing feuds with some of the other mothers at Bee's private school, the main instigator being her neighbor Audrey Griffin. Their tension worsens when Audrey accuses Bernadette of running over her foot with her car - which Bernadette does not dispute, though it is untrue - and when the hillside above Audrey’s house, recently cleared of blackberries by Bernadette at Audrey’s request, collapses during a rainstorm and slides into Audrey’s house.Bee learns that her mother was once a famous architect who earned a MacArthur "Genius" Grant after creating the 20 Mile House in Los Angeles, so called because it was made entirely from materials sourced from within 20 miles of the home. After winning the grant, Bernadette sold the house, only to realize it had been sold to a hostile neighbor who demolished the home as soon as he obtained it. This caused Bernadette to lose her creative passion and prompted her relocation to Seattle, where she had four miscarriages before giving birth to Bee.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thing_of_State"title="A Thing of State">
It is 1999, and the Middle Eastern kingdoms of Greater and Lesser Lolome are at war with each other over oil. When Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi, the despotic ruler of Greater Lolome newly armed with nuclear weapons, demands control over Lesser Lolome, the United States is compelled to intervene. The President hopes to use the situation to his political advantage, while the Secretary of State, his deputy, the United Nations and other factions debate their next move under pressure from the American public, which Sidi knows had tied their hands.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poseidon's_Wake"title="Poseidon's Wake">
"Poseidon's Wake" is a loose sequel to Reynolds' 2013 novel "On the Steel Breeze", featuring numerous recurring characters, but can also be considered a stand-alone story. Set in the distant future, after humans have travelled to other stars and encountered mysterious robotic aliens known as Watchkeepers, the novel depicts an expedition by interstellar colonists to a mysterious solar system which contains an ancient and devastating secret.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Drury's_University_series"title="Allen Drury's University series">
In 1938, student body president Willie Wilson begins his senior year at "the University" with the threat of war in Europe looming. He and his diverse Alpha Zeta fraternity brothers find themselves facing off in a microcosm of the changing world around them. Wilson tries to sponsor the fraternity's first Black member, only to be thwarted by the blatantly racist scion of a South Carolina family. The Black student blames Wilson for building his hopes up. Also, another member is hopelessly in love with Wilson's younger brother.Returning from the war, Willie Wilson and the remaining fraternity brothers of Alpha Zeta face a post-war world with new challenges, including marital and family woes, complicated sexuality, the Cold War and the Vietnam War.Octogenarian Willie Wilson plans a 2001 reunion for his surviving pals as he looks back on the previous few decades of his life, including his run for the Presidency in the 1980s. Crossing him at every turn in these turbulent times is the villainous René Suratt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funny_Girl_(novel)"title="Funny Girl (novel)">
The novel is about Barbara Parker, Miss Blackpool of 1964, who decides to abandon the idea of becoming a beauty queen. She heads for London, determined to make her mark as a television comedian, inspired by her idol Lucille Ball. After finding a job on a cosmetics counter in a London department store, she meets a theatrical agent, Brian Debenham, who finds her an audition for a television sitcom pilot based around the domestic life of a newlywed couple. Taking the name Sophie Straw, she becomes a star thanks to the leading role in the fiction "Barbara (and Jim)".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Questionnaire_(Salomon_novel)"title="The Questionnaire (Salomon novel)">
Salomon answers questions and recounts his time as a cadet in the Weimar Republic and in the Freikorps. He writes about battles in the Baltic states and about his involvement in the assassination of foreign minister Walther Rathenau. Salomon shares his experiences from France in the 1930s, from the German film industry during the NS era, the end of the war which he spent in Bavaria with his Jewish girlfriend, and how he after the surrender was tortured in an American prison camp.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Born"title="Star Born">
Dalgard Nordis, with his knife brother Sssuri, has gone on his man-journey. Three generations after his people came to Astra he has set out to explore the ruins of a city that once belonged to Those Others, thereby extending the Colony's map of this world and in the process demonstrating his suitability to sit on the Council of Free Men. In telepathic contact with the local fauna, Sssuri senses danger and the sight of a flaming object crossing the sky from east to west, toward where Those Others are rumored to live, underscores that judgement.Roughly five centuries after a group of renegade scientists took a desperate plunge into interstellar space and two centuries after Pax collapsed and Humanity rediscovered the value of science, the starship RS 10 lands on Astra. Driven by rumors of that ancient expedition and enabled by the discovery of hyperdrive, the Federation of Free Men has sent nine ships into hyperspace; none has returned. On this tenth attempt at interstellar flight Raf Kurbi has the task of assembling and flying the flitter that will be used to explore the part of Astra around RS 10's landing point. One goal is what appears on the landing photos to be a city.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Trout_(novel)"title="Paris Trout (novel)">
In a small Georgia town in the 1950s, a bigoted store owner named Paris Trout kills a black man's younger sister and wounds his mother when a car deal between them goes wrong.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventures_in_Stationery"title="Adventures in Stationery">
In "Adventures in Stationery", James Ward presents the history of numerous items of stationery, integrated with his personal opinions and current trends. Some of the topics discussed include the invention of the ballpoint pen by László Bíró, the development of the Pritt glue stick, the design of the paperclip, the shape of Stabilo highlighters, the possible uses of Blu-Tack, and urban legends about the development of ballpoint pens during the Space Race.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Son"title="Golden Son">
Darrow, now one of the Peerless Scarred and in the service of his enemy, Nero au Augustus, is sent to The Academy, to learn to command fleet of warships in anticipation of being made praetor of a fleet on behalf of Nero. During his final exam at the Academy Darrow faces off against Cassius's older brother, Karnus au Bellona, in a space battle and loses, resulting in hundreds of casualties and being released from the service of Nero, who decides Darrow will be auctioned to another House at the Summit, a gathering of the Great Houses on Luna. Without the protection of Augustus, Darrow is vulnerable to Bellona family whose matriarch has tasked them to murder Darrow in revenge for his murder of her son and Cassius's brother, Julian.Awaiting the end of his contract, Darrow is approached by Victra au Julii who leads him to the Jackal, Adrius au Augustus who has since the Institute been exiled by his father and created a media and telecommunications business empire, gaining considerable power and influence which he proposes to use to buy Darrow's contract in order to aid him in bring down the Sovereign and the Sons of Ares and The Jackal placing himself as the head of the Society. While discussing their plans, a Pink Darrow recognizes as Evey, a former pleasure slave of Mickey the Carver, enters the bar intent on assassinating the Jackal. Before Darrow can stop her, Evey sets off an explosion, and Darrow narrowly manages to save the Jackal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silver_Crown"title="The Silver Crown">
The story is in the third person limited perspective, showing events as experienced by the protagonist, Ellen Carroll. The book opens when Ellen discovers a mysterious silver crown in her bedroom on her tenth birthday. This initiates a series of events which at first seem unrelated. Later that morning, her house burns down while she is out at the park and she witnesses a murder. Thrown on her own resources by the loss of her family, Ellen decides to hitchhike to her Aunt Sarah in Kentucky.On the way, she escapes from a kidnapper, is chased though the woods, and finds an ally in 8-year-old Otto. With Otto, she treks through the mountains, while being hunted by sinister men. At a black castle in the forest, Ellen encounters a medieval device called the Hieronymus Machine which is mind-controlling people and turning them into arsonists and assassins for an unknown purpose. The machine can be operated by two crowns, one black and one silver. It seems that only Ellen can activate the silver crown, the more powerful of the two. Ellen decides the Machine is too dangerous and, despite the temptation of becoming a queen, has it destroyed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fate_of_Ten"title="The Fate of Ten">
Daniela, a 15 year old girl is watching the Mogadorian attack on New York with her stepfather when a group of Mogadorians enter their building. She leaves her stepfather and stares out the window while he stays to delay the Mogadorians. But just when she's made it out the fire escape she looks back as four Mogadorians enter her apartment and they tell her to "Surrender or die." A moment later her stepfather smashes one of the Mogadorians heads in with a bat and kills one before he is shot. He tells Daniela to run and she barely makes it down the fire escape. She then runs through the streets and as she runs she comes across another three Mogadorians and she falls to the ground the Mogadorians say, "Surrender or die." as they have their guns aimed at her. Daniela throws up her hands to defend herself as a reflex and is surprised when the guns fly out of their hands and they're thrown back. Daniela manages to kill them with her newfound telekinesis.Four's NarrationJohn and Sam, with the 23 civilians they saved, try to reach a makeshift encampment established on the Brooklyn Bridge. John tells them to go ahead because he and Sam still have to look for Nine and Five. The civilians leave them after expressing their gratitude. Four and Sam rest in an abandoned apartment in which they find out through television that Five and Nine might be fighting at Union Square. On the way they meet Daniela Morales, a Human-Garde, robbing a bank. They try to convince her to join their cause, but she is adamant in finding her mother first. She leads them to the subway. The Anubis starts to attack them, causing the roof to collapse onto them. John exerts all of his telekinetic strength to keep the roof up, with some help from Sam and Daniela, which causes him to pass out. While resting, Ella reaches out to John through a dream, showing John her memories of the ship Anubis. She warns him of Setrákus' plan to go to the Sanctuary in Mexico, and advises him to be strong, and to do whatever must be done to defeat Setrákus. John also witnesses the Mogadorian augmentation being carried out on Ella's body as Ella's consciousness is talking to him. John wakes up and hears Sam talking to Daniela about all John has done to protect the Loric and humans. John urges them to reach the Brooklyn Bridge camp.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hiawatha_Story"title="The Hiawatha Story">
"The Hiawatha Story" is organized chronologically. It begins with the construction of the first "Hiawatha" in 1934–1935. The Milwaukee Road created the train to compete with streamliners then under development by the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad's (Burlington Route) and Chicago and North Western Railway. Unusually for the period, the Milwaukee Road constructed all the passenger equipment in its own shops, and Scribbins devotes considerable space to describing this equipment in detail, with many illustrative photographs. Scribbins also describes the work done to prepare the Chicago–Twin Cities route for high-speed running. The "Hiawatha" regularly operated at speeds over .Scribbins follows the history of the original "Hiawatha", later re-branded as the "Twin Cities Hiawatha", which at the time the book was published in 1970 was still in operation. The popularity of the train led the Milwaukee Road to apply the "Hiawatha" brand to other routes, and Scribbins tells the history of these as well: "Chippewa-Hiawatha", "Midwest Hiawatha", "North Woods Hiawatha" and "Olympian Hiawatha". Throughout, Scribbins pays close attention to the operation details as well as the rolling stock. Famous Milwaukee Road products such as the Beaver Tail and Skytop Lounge are described in detail, as are the Pullman-Standard Super Domes, the first full-length dome cars ever built, which operated on several "Hiawatha" routes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_a_Dark_Wood_Wandering"title="In a Dark Wood Wandering">
The story is set in the fifteenth century, during the Hundred Years War. The book opens with the christening of Charles, son of Louis I, Duke of Orleans, by his wife Valentine, who is not well enough to attend and must remain in her chambers. Among those attending is Charles VI and his wife Isabeau. Charles VI has been suffering from madness, and it has reached the point where he doesn't recognize his own wife. Poet François Villon also appears in the novel, first as a young man, later as an adult visiting the royal court.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Set_a_Watchman"title="Go Set a Watchman">
Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, 26 and single, returns from New York to her hometown Maycomb, Alabama, for her annual fortnight-long visit to her father Atticus, a lawyer and former state legislator. Jack, her uncle and a retired doctor, is Jean Louise’s mentor. Atticus’ sister and Jean Louise’s aunt Alexandra has moved in with Atticus to help him around the house after his housekeeper Calpurnia retired. Jean Louise's brother, Jeremy "Jem" Finch, has died of the same heart condition which killed their mother. Upon her arrival in Maycomb, she is met by her childhood sweetheart Henry "Hank" Clinton, who works for Atticus. When returning from Finch's Landing, Jean Louise and Henry are passed by a car full of black men travelling at a dangerously high speed; Henry mentions that the Black people in the county have money for cars but are without licenses and insurance.The Supreme Court's decision in "Brown v. Board of Education" and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) are introduced as sources of controversy in the community. Jean Louise finds a pamphlet titled "The Black Plague" among her father's papers. She follows him to a Citizens' Council meeting where Atticus introduces a man who delivers a racist speech. Jean Louise watches in secret from the balcony and is horrified. She is unable to forgive him for his behaviour and flees from the hall. After dreaming about Calpurnia, her family's black maid whom she sees as a mother figure, Jean Louise has breakfast with her father. They soon learn that Calpurnia's grandson killed a drunk pedestrian the previous night while speeding in his car. Atticus agrees to take the case in order to stop the NAACP from getting involved. Jean Louise visits Calpurnia and is treated politely but coldly, causing her to leave, devastated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scion_of_Ikshvaku"title="Scion of Ikshvaku">
Ram and his half-brothers, Bharat (son of Kaikeyi), Lakshman and Shatrughan (twin sons of Dashrath's third wife Sumitra), are sent to live at the hermitage of Sage Vashistha. Under his tutelage, Ram becomes a skilled warrior, and gains knowledge about India's predicament and how one should resolve it. After his education is completed, Ram is given the job of maintaining law and police in Ayodhya, in which he considerably excels. One day Roshni, daughter of the wealthy trader Manthara and sister-like to the four brothers, is gang raped and murdered. The culprits are all executed except one, Dhenuka, who is underage. A strict follower of the law, Ram is forced to imprison the boy although others request him for Dhenuka's execution. Manthara bribes Kaikeyi into influencing Bharat, who secretly murders Dhenuka, much to Ram's chagrin.In the meantime Dashrath's attitude towards Ram changes and he names Ram as the crown prince. Shortly afterwards, Ram and Lakshman help sage Vishwamitra—head of the Malayaputra tribe who serve the next Vishnu—to stop the Asura attacks on his hermitage. Ram convinces the Asuras to go to Pariha, the land of Lord Rudra, the previous Mahadev. It is during this trip that Ram learns from his half-brother Lakshman about his anointment as the next Vishnu by Sage Vashishtha. Next they travel to the remote kingdom of Mithila, where Ram meets princess Sita, the adopted daughter of King Janak. Like Ram, Sita also strongly believes in following laws, thus earning Ram's respect and love. During a Swayamvar for Sita, Raavan and his brother Kumbhakarna arrive, but storm out when Viswamitra announces Ram's name as the first suitor. Ram wins the Swayamvar and marries Sita, while Lakshman marries Janak's biological daughter, Urmila.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_(novel)"title="Bear (novel)">
## Setting.The book takes place in the district of Algoma in northeastern Ontario. The area is heavily wooded, with a mix of deciduous and conifer forests. Part of the Canadian Shield, the district has many lakes and rivers. Almost all of the story takes place in or around an old, octagonal house on a small island on a remote lake. The location, "Cary's Island" is fictitious, located north of Highway 17, past "Fisher's Falls" and near a village called "Brady".The house and estate, previously belonging to the Cary family, whose patriarch fought in the Napoleonic Wars, is called "Pennarth" (Welsh for "Bear's head"). Its octagonal layout was inspired by the writings of Orson Squire Fowler, which dates the building to the 1850s. The house is well-ordered and elaborate, and houses an extensive library of nineteenth century books. Outside are several outbuildings, including a shed that houses a large, semi-tame bear.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuareg_(novel)"title="Tuareg (novel)">
One day, two old men and a boy appeared in Gacel Shayah's camp in the Sahara. He, a noble "inmouchar" observing the millennial tradition of the desert, sheltered travelers. But he failed to protect them. People in dusty military uniforms violated the ancient hospitality law. They killed the boy and took one old man away. Gasel Shayah remembers the great commandment of the Tuareg people: your guest is under your protection. Therefore, he has to seek vengeance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Strange_New_Things"title="The Book of Strange New Things">
Peter Leigh, an English pastor, decides to leave his wife Beatrice in order to be a missionary. It is gradually revealed that rather than being a missionary in a different country, he has been hired by USIC, a private American corporation, to preach to the population of a distant planet, Oasis. Peter expects to find hostility when meeting the natives, but he finds instead that they are extremely welcoming, already speak English very well and are passionate devotees of the Christian faith, referring to themselves as Jesus Lover One, Two, et cetera. Peter sets to work trying to build a church for the Jesus Lovers and trying to live amongst them. On his brief trips back to the base camp where the engineers and scientist who run USIC on Oasis live, he tries to contact Bea using a Shoot, a message system which allows him to communicate back on Earth. Though Bea's initial messages are full of love, they also include information on severe natural disasters caused by climate change, including flooding and famine that have happened since Peter left. After a few months, she also informs Peter that she is pregnant with his child, conceived on the last night he was with her. Peter, whose life is full with his missionary work, feels distant from Bea and begins to find it difficult to recall her face and their life together, instead focusing on integrating himself into the Oasan community. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey's_Cafe"title="Bailey's Cafe">
The unnamed owner of Bailey's Cafe (he is called "Bailey" as a nickname) acquires the cafe after his return from World War II and claims that it is magical and it saved him. Though the cafe is nominally set in New York City as per Naylor's earlier novel "Mama Day", patrons wander into it from different times and places. The cafe also has a back door that apparently opens onto infinity (or death). The stories he tells include his own and his wife, Nadine's, as well as those of several of the patrons of the cafe who live in a nearby brownstone including Eve (who owns the brownstone down the street that harbors mostly fugitive women and serves as a bordello), Ester (the victim of sexual and emotional abuse), "Miss Maple" (a male cross-dresser), Jessie Bell (a bisexual drug-addict), Mary (a self-mutilated beauty), and Mariam (a mentally challenged, pregnant, virgin, teenager). Each person's back story is told by the owner as they come into the cafe.Bailey frames the first-person narrative of each character but one: Nadine opens and closes the story of Mariam (Mary).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revised_Fundamentals_of_Caregiving"title="The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving">
The book (and adapted film) follows a 39-year-old man who has experienced personal tragedy and is currently climbing out of depression and grief. His estranged wife has been waiting for months for him to sign divorce papers. He has lost his work and his house. After being trained as a care-giver, his first job is for a boy with muscular dystrophy, 19-year-old Trev. The disease has taken the movement of Trev's body, but definitely not the spark from his brain and quick, silver-tongued wit. The two find a match in each other, supporting each other in quiet or razzing ways, and ultimately pushing each other to move beyond their deep-rooted and insurmountable sorrows (one from loss, the other from the impending loss of his life from a disease). The strong theme is about love and connection. In the end, this is a story about valuing life and how fragile life is, how precious it is, and how — despite the inevitability of death — the path to that end (including love) is what matters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wolf_(novel)"title="Black Wolf (novel)">
Talbot Uskevren will need to use his sword fighting and acting skills to survive against the Black Brotherhood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_Stormweather"title="Lord of Stormweather">
Thamalon Uskevren II, the heir to Stormweather Towers, must solve the disappearance of his parents and Erevis Cale.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winterheim"title="Winterheim">
Strongwind Whalebone, king of the Highlanders, has been imprisoned in the ogre fortress, while ogre king Grimwar Bane faces royal treachery and desperate revolt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Warrior's_Journey"title="A Warrior's Journey">
"A Warrior's Journey" is a novel in which a young peasant boy deals with the chaos caused by the struggle between two rival empires.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Place_(book)"title="The Secret Place (book)">
Much of the novel takes place at St. Kilda's, a girls' boarding school in Dublin. The chapters alternate between the points of view of detective Stephen Moran and the students of St. Kilda's.The key characters are eight teenage girls, members of rival cliques. Chris Harper, a teenage boy, is murdered on St. Kilda's grounds. The initial police investigation is inconclusive. A year later, 16-year-old Holly volunteers information to Moran. She has discovered a picture of Chris, along with the statement "I know who killed him", posted on a school bulletin board called the "Secret Place". Moran is assigned to work with senior detective Antoinette Conway to investigate. Moran and Conway question all eight girls and find that there were some close relationships between Chris and most of the eight girls. After further investigation, they find evidence that links Chris's murder to Holly's clique. When the detectives grill Holly, her father, detective Frank Mackey, intervenes and complicates the investigation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_All_Completely_Beside_Ourselves"title="We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves">
Rosemary, while attending U.C. Davis in her early twenties, reflects on her early life in Indiana. She lived with her sister Fern, brother Lowell, mother, and father who is professor of behavioral psychology at Indiana University Bloomington. When Fern disappears one day, Lowell runs away from home in search of her. Rosemary also learns that her university has a secret that ties to her past, and as she learns more, she discovers a newfound connection with her family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warheart"title="Warheart">
All is lost. Evil will soon consume the D'Haran Empire. Richard Rahl lies on his funeral pier. It is the end of everything.Except what isn't lost is Kahlan Amnell. Following an inner prompting beyond all reason, the last Confessor will wager everything on a final desperate gambit, and in so doing, she will change the world forever.Terry Goodkind's Warheart is the direct sequel to, and the conclusion of, the story begun in The Omen Machine, The Third Kingdom, and Severed Souls.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mother's_Ordeal"title="A Mother's Ordeal">
With names changed to prevent retribution by the Communist Party of China (CPC), Mosher writes in the first person about "Chi An", a girl born to a Chinese family with the traditional beliefs that boys were worth more than girls. As such, her family had no birthday celebration for her and did not mark the date of her birth down. The first few chapters cover significant memories from childhood, including the death of her father and the trials underwent by her family during the Great Chinese Famine brought about by agricultural mismanagement as well as highly inflated reports of crop production figures.Chi An grew up surrounded by the ideologies of the Communist Party and in her youth worked for the CPC. Later in life, Chi An studied to become a nurse where she performed her first abortion at age 16, thus beginning her career as a nurse carrying out the One-child Policy through abortion, contraception, and sterilizations all in efforts to meet the birth quotas imposed by party officials. Chi An finds a suitor and they become married, after a fashion, and have a healthy baby boy as their first child. The couple became pregnant with a second child, but were forced to abort the baby as it was illegal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Song_of_Everlasting_Sorrow_(novel)"title="The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (novel)">
Wang Anyi’s "The Song of Everlasting Sorrow" tells the story of a gorgeous Shanghai woman named Wang Qiyao. The timeline of the novel spans from 1946 to 1986, and is separated into three parts. Everything begins with the title of “Miss Shanghai”. After being discovered by an amateur photographer, Wang Qiyao competes in the 1946 Miss Shanghai beauty pageant. She becomes the second runner-up and is awarded the title "Miss Third Place", marking a moment of stardom in her life that she clings to for the following years after. Starting with Director Li, Wang Qiyao experiences several romantic, yet fleeting relationships throughout her life. When she is middle-aged, Wang Qiyao falls in love with a 26 year old young man called “Old Colour”, but their relationship eventually comes to an end despite Wang Qiyao's desperation to hold on to it. In the end she is murdered by the scam artist “Long Legs” because of his desire to steal her hidden stash of gold bars. Wang Qiyao's final moments seem to echo a similar scene from her youth. Wang Qiyao is a graceful and gorgeous woman who has experienced five relationships but never found true love. "The Song of Everlasting" "Sorrow" is a tragic love story, and the writer Wang Anyi uses the main character, Wang Qiyao, to show the change of Shanghai through the 1940s’ to the 1980s’.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Way_to_the_Wedding"title="On the Way to the Wedding">
The hero of the novel is Gregory Bridgerton, the youngest male and last unmarried sibling in the Bridgerton family. After catching a glimpse of the "breathtakingly perfect curve of her neck" at a house party, Gregory falls immediately in love with the beautiful and extremely sought-after Hermione Watson. After he makes his attraction known, Hermione's best friend, the pretty-but-not-quite-as-attractive Lady Lucinda "Lucy" Abernathy informs him that Hermione is already in love, but with someone unsuitable - her father's secretary. Believing that Gregory is more sincere in his attempts to gain Hermione's favor than her other suitors, Lucy agrees to help him win Hermione's heart.During the course of the house party, Lucy and Gregory become friends and then develop romantic feelings for each other. The author details Gregory's difficulty in determining whether his love for Lucy is real, or if it is simply an infatuation such as he felt for Hermione. Lucy is likewise given an inner conflict, as she is essentially engaged to Lord Haselby, an arranged match which she has always accepted. After realising he is in love with her, Gregory rushes to the church to stop Lucy's wedding to Haselby. Gregory arrives moments before the two exchange vows and confesses that he wants to marry Lucy. However, Lucy chooses to marry Haselby with a reason unknown to anyone, but Lucy and her uncle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goblin_Emperor"title="The Goblin Emperor">
Maia, youngest and least-favored son of the Emperor of the Elflands and of mixed Elven and Goblin heritage, unexpectedly ascends to the throne after his father and half-brothers are killed in an airship crash. Having been brought up entirely in exile from the court, living with an abusive cousin, the court is alien to him and his lack of social polish and connections make it difficult to take up his new responsibilities.In the course of the first few months of his reign, Maia agrees to marry the noblewoman Csethiro; is seized by a crush on the opera singer Vechin; is visited by his maternal grandfather, the ruler of the Goblins; and slowly comes to terms with the loss of privacy that comes with being accompanied by bodyguards and retainers at all times. He survives an attempted coup by his half-brother's widow and his lord chancellor because his young nephew Idra refuses to usurp the throne, and his investigation into the death of his father uncovers a conspiracy by disaffected noblemen that had been using a group of worker revolutionaries to kill the previous Emperor.The end of the novel sees Maia survive an assassination attempt by the conspiracy's ringleader, and push through a controversial project to bridge the realm's principal river. An epithet accorded to him by a courtier, "the bridgebuilder", represents his efforts to connect emotionally with the people surrounding him slowly coming to fruition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantia_(novel)"title="Atlantia (novel)">
The story begins when Rio attends the ceremony of the Divide. Initially, Rio wants to go aboveground, but she has promised her Below-loving twin sister, Bay, to remain in Atlantia, an artificial city built entirely underwater.Rio completed the ritual before Bay, choosing to stay below, but Bay surprised Rio by choosing to go Above. In a panic, Rio accidentally revealed the siren voice she had hidden since birth to a priest, risking arrest, but she was able to leave without issue.Rio searched desperately for an explanation for Bay's choice, eventually meeting her siren aunt, Maire, whom she last saw at her mother's funeral, and running away due to being engulfed in the memories of her late mother, Oceana. As she wept, she met True Beck, a boy whose best friend departed similarly to Bay, seeking a partner with whom to solve these mysteries Rio rejected his offer, and when she changed her mind, True was gone.The next day, the Minister of Atlantia, Nevio, insisted that Rio would be best suited to work in the mining bays, sending her off to work there. When Rio finished her shift, Maire found her outside the temple and led her to the floodgates, where she explained to Rio that they could serve as an alternate path to the surface, as they did for Oceana. Maire gave Rio a seashell, in which she could ask questions and Maire would answer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Through_Space"title="Starship Through Space">
Walter Hansman has just graduated from Schiaparelli Space Academy on Mars in June 2150. His father, Dr. George W. Hansman, sends a telegram telling him to return to Terra immediately. Finding that he automatically has all of the necessary permissions from the Terrestrial Space Navy, he goes to Red Sands Spaceport, where he boards the Space Ship "Fafnir" for his journey home.On the ship he finds that Don Salter, a classmate from Schiaparelli, is also going to Terra on mysterious orders. Together the two young men help prepare SS "Fafnir" for launch and then help around the ship on the long flight to Terra. Finally the ship lands at Peak City Spaceport, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, and the men find their fathers waiting for them.Taken to a small, closed-off spaceport, Walt and Don are told that they are to participate in the construction and flight of humanity's first interstellar spaceship, one equipped with a space-warping hyperdrive. After extensive physical and psychological testing, Don is assigned to work on the starship's propulsion and Walt is to help develop the control circuits. When the ship is complete and ready for flight, she is christened with the name of Magellan's ship, "Vittoria", and prepared for a trial run to Pluto.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secrets_of_Sir_Richard_Kenworthy"title="The Secrets of Sir Richard Kenworthy">
The novel opens in 1825 London, at the annual Smythe-Smith musicale. After seeing Iris Smythe-Smith perform, Sir Richard Kenworthy finagles an introduction and begins a flirtation. After only a week's courtship, he proposes. Although she likes him, Iris is unused to attention from men and is slightly suspicious of his haste. She asks for more time to decide.The reader is informed that Sir Richard needs wife immediately. He maneuvers Iris into a compromising position, knowing her family will force them to marry to save her reputation. Iris is fairly upset. She wanted to marry Richard, but she neither understands nor approves of his attempt to coerce her into the agreement. After the wedding, Sir Richard uses a series of excuses to postpone consummating the marriage, to Iris's dismay.Once the couple arrive at Richard's home in Yorkshire, he begins to court her again. The author makes it clear that Richard has come to care for Iris, that he feels guilty for manipulating her, but that his courtship is designed to make her fall in love with him so that she will not leave when she discovers his secret. As the novel progresses, Iris becomes increasingly confused, as it is obvious that something is amiss but no one will tell her what. Eventually, Iris discovers that Sir Richard's eldest sister Fleur is pregnant, and he intends to pass her child off as theirs, thus saving Fleur's reputation. Although initially horrified by the plan, Iris eventually agrees to participate. The plan is nullified when Iris learns that Fleur has an additional secret; that knowledge allows Iris to find a solution to the situation that makes all of the characters happy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Notre_Dame_de_Paris_Mosque"title="The Notre Dame de Paris Mosque">
Muslim immigrants seized power in Western Europe. Sharia becomes the law of the land, Catholic churches are destroyed and desecrated. Frenchmen who did not convert to Islam are shut in ghettoes. The Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral is turned into the Al-Frankoni Mosque. The Catholic Church, which by the beginning of the Muslim expansion turned into a "parody of itself", collapses. Only the traditionalist Catholics from the Society of St. Pius X remain and return to the catacombs. The outnumbered members of the Resistance - the maquis - continue to fight. The protagonists of the novel blame the downfall of Europe on liberalism, atheism, tolerance, and the fall of the authority and hollowing out of the Catholic Church through the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Even though the maquis understand that their resistance will not change anything, their motto is to "die standing". After they find out about impending bloody liquidation of the non-Muslim ghettoes, they join forces with the last remaining Catholics to take over Notre Dame.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_Forbidden_China"title="Journey to the Forbidden China">
Mosher travels throughout Southern China from Canton and visits several provinces to witness first hand the stark, desolate countryside isolated from the rest of the world. The countryside of Guangxi province is visited by Mosher and his guide first, where he documents the experiences of an ethnic minority, the Chuang in their mostly autonomous region. The author continues to write of his experiences traveling down a "Class Four Highway" (a dirt road) to Kweichow province.Kweichow province is a mountainous region with a sparse population grubbing out an existence in the barren land using new world crops of maize and sweet potatoes. The province was only settled in the 16th century after the introduction of said new world crops, crops that are hardy enough to survive the soil and the short growing season. Mosher finds evidence of malnutrition and recurring bouts of famine in the province remain common.What is striking about the rural Chinese life is that the people in such villages lack access to schooling, healthcare, radio or television, and even are untouched by basic amenities such as fertilizer, electricity, running water, or modern agricultural tools. The villagers are unresponsive to the Chinese Communist Revolution as well as its rhetoric of a revolution fought "for" and "by" the peasants. The only contact with the government in Peking is through the party cadres and the CPC's version of the KGB, the Chinese Communist Party's secret police.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abyssinian_Chronicles"title="Abyssinian Chronicles">
The book is set in Uganda, in the 1970s and '80s. The book follows the life of narrator Mugezi Muwaabi, as he plots his own independence from his parents and capitalizes on his considerable natural resources of charm and intelligence. A grandfather, a father and his son are the three figures that form a tripod from which the novel is set. Grandpa represents the traditional order, his son Serenity the chaos of transition, and Mugezi the despair of a younger generation over the dead end of transition and its own prospects. Rootless and bitter, Mugezi flees to Europe from Uganda. The first part of the book centres on Mugezi, a young man growing up in post-colonial Uganda. Born in 1961, a year before Uganda attained independence, Mugenzi describes a troubled childhood living under the tyranny and strict rules of his parents. The family moves to Kampala, the nation's capital about the time Idi Amin comes to power in 1971. In the second half of the book Mugezi is excited about the country's prospects under Idi Amin, following the ouster of Milton Obote and his corrupt government. Soon, however, Amin's regime descends to the depths of brutality and mismanagement – starting with a botched "Africanization" campaign that leads to the expulsion of thousands of Asian businessmen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Forest"title="The Dark Forest">
The UN forms the Planetary Defense Council (PDC) to coordinate defensive efforts against the impending assault of the Trisolarans, who have launched a massive invasion fleet that will reach Earth in around 400 years. However, subatomic semi-artificial intelligences sent from Trisolaris (the book's name for the three-star system of Alpha Centauri), known as sophons, have already reached Earth; these conduct surveillance of national secrets and private conversations, and disrupt the operation of particle accelerators in order to obstruct any new discoveries in fundamental physics until the fleet arrives. Since the sophons cannot read minds, the PDC decides that, in addition to regular military expansion, there will be four people appointed as Wallfacers. They are granted access to the resources of the UN and shall develop and direct strategic plans only known to themselves in order to keep them secret from the enemy. As a result, this also requires them to misdirect and deceive the human world; they therefore do not need to give any explanation for their actions and commands, no matter how incomprehensible they may be. Three Wallfacers are chosen on the basis of merit: Frederick Tyler, a former United States Secretary of Defense; Manuel Rey Diaz, former president of Venezuela and a nuclear engineer; and Bill Hines, former president of the EU and a neuroscientist. To general surprise, the fourth Wallfacer is announced to be Luo Ji, an obscure Chinese professor of sociology who is lazy and un-ambitious. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arclight_(novel)"title="Arclight (novel)">
"The first rule of the Arclight is" Light is safety: light is life. "Within the walls of light, people are protected from the Fade- the creatures that have destroyed the world. The second rule is" Never go outside alone. "The third:" No one ever comes back from the dark. "But Marina did. She doesn't know who she is or where she came from. And she doesn't know how she survived the Fade. Or why they want her back. But they want her back. And the attacks on the Arclight won't stop until they have her. What secrets are locked inside Marina's memory? Where does she belong?" No one survives the Fade. But, Marina did. The only problem is, she doesn't quite remember how. In fact, she doesn't remember anything. Ever since she was discovered in the Grey, a barren stretch of land that acts as a line between the Light and the Dark, by a small group of people and brought to the Arclight, Marina has been living a pain and confusion. Unknown to all of Arclight, Marina lives alone, rejected by her classmates for her status as Fade-bait, a title she received as a result of her arrived prompting constant blue light warnings (blue lights mean something has breached the perimeter). Marina has only one friend, a bubbly, chatty girl by the name of Anne-Marie, and a questionable acquaintance, Tobin. Tobin, whose father was a part of the team that retrieved her from the Grey. Tobin whose father didn't return while she did.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homegoing_(Pohl_novel)"title="Homegoing (Pohl novel)">
The protagonist, Lysander (Sandy) Washington, has been raised by aliens, the Hakh'hli.When their interstellar ship arrives at Earth, Sandy serves as part of the aliens' liaison team with Earth. Pohl uses Sandy's alien perspective to make some observations about our culture.Sandy believes his alien friends are peaceful and benevolent, as they present themselves to be. However, after it becomes clear their plans are far from benevolent, Sandy has to decide whether to side with the aliens who raised him, who are the only family he knows, or to side with humanity. This decision becomes more complicated when he learns he is only "partially" human.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Pet_Should_I_Get?"title="What Pet Should I Get?">
In a pet store, a young brother and sister (Jay and Kay) are trying to choose a pet. They consider a vast array of possible pets as their deadline of noon approaches. Finally, they settle on a pet whose identity remains unrevealed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recipe_for_Disaster_(book)"title="Recipe for Disaster (book)">
"Recipe for Disaster" is a story about Hellen Ntale that follows the life choices she makes, how she gets expelled from St. Joseph's Girls School and how she leaves school three months to her high school final exams. She has a relationship with Kevin, a 42-year-old man, against her parents' approval. Hellen goes ahead to form other relationships with men outside her marriage. one of them being Kevin's partners son Trevor Kendall, a twenty five year old man nearly her age. after a fight on Christmas Eve with Kevin over his soon to be fourth wife Cindy, a student at the university, Kevin beat her up and Hellen decided to run to London where she intended to give Trevor a child in order to make Kevin jealous. However, once she has conceived, Trevor announced that he was engaged much to Hellen's surprise. She attempts to kill Trevor's fiancee, Diane. After an attempt to kill her, she ends up in the hospital and when she is released, Trevor and Diane are already married and long gone. She then decided to return home to Uganda where Kevin welcomes her with open arms. She then discovers Suzy has departed and is abroad. However during Hellen's absence, Kevin's first wife dies and soon after, Hellen gives birth upon laying eyes upon the child, Kevin is distressed to find its blond and demands to know the father. Discovering it is Trevor, he decides to kill Helen. However with the help of a nurse and bodyguard, Helen manages to escape and finds herself in one of the slums. Kevin has been admitted into a hospital for mentally ill personnel. Helen is then discovered by her parents whom she is extremely ashamed and happy to see. She narrates her story to them before breathing her last.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fate_of_the_Banished"title="Fate of the Banished">
The story centres on Father Santos Dila – the embodiment of Christian virtue, having trained from the Gregorian University in Italy, and who is now the parish priest. Father Santos falls in love with Flo, the wife of a rebel. It is set in a war torn area, the characters are furious, bitter and are ready to act with little remorse in the face of mischief against them or provocation. When Father Santos gets involved with Flo, he puts his life on the line. The story involves an investigation of whether the cleric was fully prepared by his priestly training to resist any temptation from the beautiful sister. Apire, Flo's husband, returns from the bush to find his wife with father Santos. He executes both of them and hands himself over to the Police.The book follows Apire, Flo and Father Santos.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footprints_of_the_Outsider"title="Footprints of the Outsider">
"Footprints of the Outsider" is set in Teboke Village in the Apac district of Uganda. The only brick structure in the village is the ginnery at Teboke trading centre set up by two Indians, Hippos and Ramchand. It revolves around Abdul Olwit, whose mother, Alicinora is a prostitute. As he grows, Abdul suffers ridicule not only from his peers but from his mother. Despite odds being against him, he graduates from Makerere University with a bachelor's of arts degree in economics, and becomes a teacher.Abdul, seeking to work in government, goes to Adoli Awal, the Teboke Member of Parliament, for help. But because Adwong, Abdul's uncle is Adoli's political enemy, the latter refuses. Abdul is later arrested when Adoli thinks he is eyeing his parliamentary seat. Abdul is released and contests for the parliamentary seat. The clashes that break out on one of the campaign rallies leave some people hurt and others dead. The book seeks to find the candidate who will become Teboke's next MP.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_Box_(novel)"title="Bird Box (novel)">
The book takes place in the present day, and two previous periods are revealed in flashback sequences. The story is told from the perspective of the main character, Malorie. This synopsis is in chronological order.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_the_Champions_of_the_Round_Table"title="The Story of the Champions of the Round Table">
## The Book of Sir Percival.Percival and his mother live in a tower isolated from the kingdom of King Arthur. When Percival becomes 19 years old, he sees a knight riding from far away. He instantly becomes intrigued with knighthood. He leaves his mother to become a knight. Because his armor is made of twigs, Percival is humiliated by others. Percival comes across a pavilion which he mistakenly believes is a church. There he meets Yvette and is instantly charmed by her beauty. He promises to marry her after he gains glory as a knight, and they exchange their rings. Percival comes across Queen Guinevere, who is assaulted by a knight. This knight is known for being very strong, and Sir Kay, who is meant to protect the Queen, is afraid to take up a quarrel with him. Percival, who is mistaken for a jester, takes up the fight instead. A quiet damsel named Yolande scolds Kay and praises Percival for this, and Kay punches her. Percival promises Kay that he will avenge Yolande, and he later kills the knight who assaulted the Queen. Percival is accepted into the court of King Arthur as a knight. Sir Launcelot trains Percival, and he is given proper, knightly armor. Later, Percival comes across a beautiful, colorful castle. This castle is owned by an infamous sorceress named Vivien, who is hated for causing havoc all over the kingdom. The rocks all around the castle are actually humans who have been transformed into rocks. Percival overthrows Vivien and almost kills her, but feels pity because she is so beautiful. Percival feels he has earned merit now as a knight. For this reason, he goes to search for his beloved Yvette. When he finally finds her father's castle, he beholds that the father is mourning. The father leads Percival into a chamber where Yvette is laying. Percival holds back his tears when he learns that she has died, and he vows that he will never marry. When Percival is reflecting over these things, he sees the vision of two young boys. One holds a spear, another a chalice. This is the Holy Grail and Holy Spear, and Percival is the first of the knights of the Round Table to see it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awful_Auntie"title="Awful Auntie">
The book is set in December 1933. The central character is Stella Saxby, who is a very rich girl. Her parents, Lord and Lady Saxby, have died in a tragic car accident. In the wake of the tragedy, Stella's Aunt Alberta launches a plot to trick Stella out of her inheritance. Also featured are Wagner (Aunt Alberta's enormous owl that was found in a war), Soot (a ghost of a chimney sweep) and Gibbon (the Saxby's elderly butler who offers much comic relief).Alberta lives up to her moniker as being awful. She lacks all sympathy and morals, having chosen to fight on the German side in World War I simply because she preferred their uniforms. Alberta was determined to have her niece, Stella, sign over the deeds of the house for her own selfish reasons. Alberta also tortures poor Stella in unimaginable ways so she would sign the house deeds. She has tortured and killed people and loves vicious owls. Stella rightfully fears her, and has to use all her wits to overcome the antagonism. Stella also encounters a ghost named Soot who was her late uncle that she never knew. Soot and Stella become friends and decide to give Alberta a hard time so she would run away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Nostalgos"title="I Nostalgos">
Anna married with a much older husband decides to return in the island where she was born. He persuades Matthios, a young shepherd, to help her to escape from her husband and return to her island. Matthios is secretly in love with Anna and during their travel he hopes to keep Anna forever. But anna is homesick only for the place that she was born. Her husband worried, follows her to persuade her to turn back.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Buried_Giant"title="The Buried Giant">
Following the death of King Arthur, Saxons and Britons live in harmony. Along with everyone else in their community, Axl and Beatrice, an elderly Briton couple, suffer from severe selective amnesia that they call the 'mist'. Although barely able to remember, they feel sure that they once had a son, and they decide to travel to a village several days' walk away to seek him out. They stay at a Saxon village where two ogres have dragged off a boy named Edwin. A visiting Saxon warrior, Wistan, kills the ogres and rescues Edwin who is discovered to have a wound, believed to be an ogre-bite. The superstitious villagers attempt to kill the boy, but Wistan rescues him and joins Axl and Beatrice on their journey, hoping to leave Edwin at the son's village. The group heads to a monastery to consult with Jonus, a wise monk, about a pain in Beatrice's side. They meet the elderly Sir Gawain, nephew of King Arthur, who – as is well known – was tasked decades ago with slaying the she-dragon Querig, but who has never succeeded. Wistan reveals that he was sent by the Saxon king to slay Querig out of concern that she would be used by Lord Brennus, king of the Britons, to kill Saxons. The travellers are treated with hospitality at the monastery, but are informed by Jonus that most of the monks are corrupt. Sir Gawain has spoken to the abbot, believing he will protect the four. Instead, the abbot informs Lord Brennus, who sends soldiers to murder them. As an experienced warrior, Wistan realises that the monastery was originally built as a fort, and he makes use of its structure to trap and kill the soldiers. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life_(novel)"title="Second Life (novel)">
Second Life is the story of Julia, who has a perfect life with her husband Hugh and their adopted son, until an incident changes everything. Her sister Kate is murdered in an apparently random attack in Paris and the police seems to be stuck in their investigations. Julia decides to inquire into the murder on her own and finds out, that her sister was using online sites to play out her sexual fantasy by meeting up with strangers. Julia starts visiting some of these sites herself in hope of finding someone connected to Kate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_with_My_Sister_Madonna"title="Life with My Sister Madonna">
The memoir recounts different incarnations of Madonna's life such as "Spoiled Daddy's Girl", "The Punk Drummer", "The Raunchy Boy Toy", "Material Girl", "Mrs. Sean Penn", "Warren Beatty's Glamorous Hollywood Paramour", "Loving Mother", "Mrs. Guy Ritchie" and "English Grande Dame".The biography starts with the opening night of Madonna's The Girlie Show World Tour (1993) in London. From there, it describes Ciccone and Madonna's childhood together, playing at their father's orchards, the death of their mother. Ciccone reflects on working with Madonna, starting as a dancer for the music video for her 1983 single, "Lucky Star", to the Girlie Show in 1993. He writes about Madonna's sex life, including her relationships with artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, actors Sean Penn and Warren Beatty, and director Guy Ritchie, alleging that the lattermost is homophobic.Ciccone narrates the early part of his life with Madonna, including his first joint and his first visit to a gay bar. He also recalls Madonna's performance in school donning a provocative costume that displeased their father. Then he debunks Madonna's story regarding her first trip to Manhattan with nothing but $35 in her pocket and a pair of ballet shoes. The book ends with an epilogue listing the singer's accomplishments and Ciccone's current life, as well as an afterword, where he detailed how Madonna supposedly wanted to stop the publishing of the book and previously unreleased family photographs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Matter_of_Time_(Cook_novel)"title="A Matter of Time (Cook novel)">
The book has three distinct plot lines, set out in alternating chapters, and weaving back and forth in time. The reader, sharing the various points of view of the alternating characters, is in effect omniscient, knowing many things which are a mystery to the characters themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Were_Liars"title="We Were Liars">
Cadence Sinclair Eastman is the eldest grandchild of the wealthy Harris Sinclair. Although her family pretends to be perfect, Cadence knows that beneath the surface, wealth and privilege have taken an insidious toll on her family and that any unhappiness or odd behavior is ignored or repressed to perpetuate the image of refinement. Harris has three daughters, Cadence's mother Penny, and her aunts Carrie and Bess. Harris owns an island called Beechwood Island near Martha's Vineyard and has built a home for himself along with a house for each of his daughters.The Sinclairs spend their summers on the island. Cadence and the other older cousins, Mirren, Johnny, along with Gat Patil (the nephew of Carrie's partner Ed) are known by the family as "The Liars". The summer Cadence is fifteen, which she refers to as Summer Fifteen, Gat and Cadence fall in love and begin a relationship.During Summer Fifteen, Cadence suffers a serious head injury recalling only that she struck her head in the water. She loses most of her memories of that summer and begins to suffer from migraines. She also becomes addicted to Percocet and is forced to repeat a year at school. When she tries to reach out to her cousins she is ignored. Rather than allowing her to go to the island for the summer, Cadence's mother forces her to go on a tour of Europe with her father, with whom Cadence is no longer close to after he had an affair and abandoned the family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Misperceived"title="China Misperceived">
The book is a historical overview and criticism of the writings that shaped American perceptions of China. Mosher includes American newspaper correspondents, diplomats, and intellectuals such as Edgar Snow, Archibald Steele, Theodore White, and John K. Fairbank. The title plays with the title of Fairbank’s Book from 1974 ″China perceived″.As the first American anthropologist allowed into China following the inauguration of the 1979 cultural exchange program, Mosher's personal experience with the rural regions of Guangdong grant additional insight. Mosher's book covers the perceptions and misperceptions people have had about China from the travels of Marco Polo. Mosher takes the title "Age of Infatuation" from Harold Isaacs's classic "Scratches on Our Minds" (1958) to describe the period during the 1930s and 1940s in which Communist China was presented as a progressive force following Edgar Snow's 1938 work, "Red Star Over China".The misperceptions of the West in regard to China have waxed and waned through the belief in the "Yellow Peril" to the model "Maoist Man" of Communist China. Mosher alleges self-deception was apparent in U.S. President Richard Nixon's visit to China and the change from hard-line anti-communist to raising toasts in Chairman Mao Zedong's name. Mosher argues that this was the most glaring example of how political expediency, ideology, and propaganda by the Chinese have constantly and consistently blinded Americans to the truth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Village_in_the_Jungle"title="The Village in the Jungle">
The novel describes the lives of a poor family in a small village called Beddagama (literally, "The village in the jungle") as they struggle to survive the challenges presented by poverty, disease, superstition, the unsympathetic colonial system, and the jungle itself. The head of the family is a farmer named Silindu, who has two daughters named Punchi Menika and Hinnihami. After being manipulated by the village authorities and a debt collector, Silindu is put on trial for murder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_O'_the_Wisp_(novel)"title="Will O' the Wisp (novel)">
Alain Leroy is 30 years old. He served in World War I and has led a cosmopolitan, decadent life for a few years, before being admitted to a mental institution for depression, fatigue and heroin addiction. He is unable to adapt to the regulated life of the institution, but the doctor does not think his stay needs to be extended.Alain visits several old friends in Paris. He is presented with several opportunities to return to a regular life, but is unable to find any satisfying human connection, and other people have a hard time sympathising with his situation. Alain returns to his room at the hospital where he commits suicide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Child_(novel)"title="The Golden Child (novel)">
In London in January 1973 the Museum (unnamed in the novel) is exhibiting for the first time anywhere the golden Garamantian treasures, on loan from the Garamantian government, that had been discovered years earlier by the eminent archaeologist Sir William Simpkin. Sir William, wealthy and now elderly, is retained by the Museum as a figurehead, largely because the Museum’s director, Sir John Allison, expects to receive a large bequest on the old man's death. Huge crowds queue for hours for a brief glimpse under poor lighting of the two most famous exhibits: the Golden Child and the Ball of Golden Twine. Rumours circulate that the Child is cursed.Sir William shows little interest in the exhibition, but he does ask to take a closer look at one of the many clay tablets that accompany the treasures. Late at night, while returning the tablet to its case at Sir William’s request, a Junior Exhibition Officer, Waring Smith, is attacked and partly strangled, apparently with the Golden Twine.The German Garamantologist Professor Untermensch tells the Director that all the artefacts in the exhibition are fakes. Sir John decides that a second opinion is needed; this has to be obtained covertly because of the political sensitivities of the Garamantian loan. He dispatches Smith to Moscow, along with one of the lesser treasures, to get the opinion of the Russian Garamantologist Professor Semyonov. The Director expects that no one will be suspicious of Smith because of his lowly position. Untermensch, however, thinks that the Soviets will assume he is a spy, and he shadows him. The Soviets do indeed make that assumption and, to show that they know the game the British are playing, they allow Smith and Untermensch into the Kremlin to view the real Garamantian treasures. Smith discovers that there is no such person as Semyonov.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Voices"title="Human Voices">
Seymour ‘Sam’ Brooks is the BBC's Recorded Programme Director (RPD), a technically brilliant though needy man. Self-centred, obsessed with his work, and oblivious to much of what goes on around him, he deals with his colleagues’ lack of understanding and sympathy by surrounding himself with young female Recorded Programme Assistants (RPAs) with whom he shares his complaints and worries. He faces constant fights to maintain his department’s status within Broadcasting House. His manager, the Director of Programme Planning (DPP) Jeff Haggard, helps to protect Sam from the day-to-day annoyances of working for the Corporation.After one of Sam's new RPAs, Lise Bernard, leaves unexpectedly very soon after being appointed in order to seek her French soldier boyfriend, Jeff and senior management decide that Sam should no longer be permitted to recruit. Without Sam's input they select as his new RPA Annie Asra, the 17-year-old orphaned daughter of a piano tuner from Birmingham. She astonishes Sam the first time they meet when she steadfastly maintains that the singer on one of Sam's cherished recordings is slightly flat. To celebrate the successful completion of his design for a new microphone windshield, Sam takes his RPAs out to dinner at an expensive French restaurant. Annie realises that she has fallen in love with him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gate_of_Angels"title="The Gate of Angels">
Fred Fairly, a Junior Fellow of St Angelicus ('Angels'), a fictional Cambridge college, is a physicist whose research focuses on the exciting modern field of quantum theory. As Fred cycles along the Guestingley Road in the dark, an unlit farmer's cart pulls out of a gateway into his path, causing him to crash into a stranger - a young woman by the name of Daisy Saunders. Both are knocked unconscious, and are taken in by the wife of Professor Wrayburn who lives nearby. Noting that the young woman wears a wedding ring, she incorrectly assumes that the pair are husband and wife and she puts them into the same bed to recover. On coming round, Fred immediately falls in love with Daisy, but she leaves without giving an address and he has no way of locating her.Daisy is in fact an impoverished young woman from South London, who has been working towards a nursing position at Blackfriars Hospital. She is single but wears a wedding ring to fend off unwanted male attention. At the time of the accident she was cycling with Thomas Kelly, a seedy journalist, who quickly made himself scarce.While Fred is recuperating in a nursing home, Daisy returns to Cambridge and gets a job at the local asylum. She visits Mrs Wrayburn, quickly realises that the household chores are a burden to her, and offers to take them over in return for lodging. As soon as Fred learns of her return, he proposes marriage. Daisy says that she will consider it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presence_(play)"title="Presence (play)">
Pete Best, George Harrison and Paul McCartney share a room as they play the Indra Club (John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe are off-stage characters). Pete, newly joined to the group, is shown as an outsider, the diffident George, the youngest of the group, contrasts to the domineering Paul. The play ends as George is arrested for being out after the curfew imposed on minors in Hamburg (in real life he had lied to the German authorities about his age in order to be allowed to stay in Hamburg). The group play to dwindling audiences until Paul, angry at the band's lack of success and at being told that club owner Bruno Koschmider was in the Panzer division, begins sending up Nazism – wearing jackboots and crying “Sieg Heil” – which attracts a young audience to the club. That the Beatles are reported actually to have done this, coupled with Harrower's desire to write about the dynamics of a band were the origins of the play. The play alludes to events that followed this – Pete and Paul raised a small fire in their room – by having an older German woman, whose knowledge of the Nazi past counterpoints the young men's ignorance, set fire to a jacket hanging on the wall.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clothes_on_Their_Backs"title="The Clothes on Their Backs">
A quiet, sensitive girl who loves to read grows up in a very quiet environment. Vivien Kovacs is raised by Hungarian parents who have been quite silenced by the war and thus she seems to be removed from both the past and present. So she uses her books to reinvent herself through her favorite characters. That is, until Uncle Sandor appears on the scene.This uncle comes clad in a diamond watch, mohair suit and accompanied by a girl wearing a leopard-skin hat. He wants to share his life story with Vivien, telling her all about her family’s past. Vivien’s parents do not take well to this intruder. But Vivien wants to know why.That is just the plot. Throughout the pages the readers learn about heroism, survival and betrayals and how our clothes define our personalities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Freddie's"title="At Freddie's">
The novel is set in Central London, in 1963. "The Temple" stage school (often known as "Freddie’s") has been owned and run on traditional lines by its principal Freddie Wentworth for 40 years. An august but shabby institution, it offers training in Shakespearean and other stage drama to child actors, deliberately eschewing more profitable types of work such as TV, film and modelling. In spite of pressure to modernise from her solicitor brother, and from Joey Blatt, an intending investor, Freddie prefers to beg or borrow anything she needs from the local theatre community, relying on her reputation and charm. She spends as little as she possibly can on staff, engaging just two temporary general studies teachers for the students: Hannah Graves and Pierce Carroll.Hannah comes from a Catholic Northern Ireland background, and has taken the role as an entree into her much-loved theatre world. Carroll, about 10 years older, is from a repressive Protestant background; he has no interest in the theatre, and has taken the post merely because he can get no other. The teachers see a lot of each other during their long working hours, and Caroll becomes attracted to Hannah. Realising his incompetence at teaching, as in everything else, Carroll's attraction turns into unhealthy infatuation and after Hannah out of pity offers him sex she finds him assuming that marriage will follow. Hannah, however, has taken up with ‘Boney’ Lewis, an older professional actor who is appearing in a West End production of Shakespeare's "King John".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginning_of_Spring"title="The Beginning of Spring">
In March 1913, Nellie Reid leaves her husband Frank, a Russian-born Englishman who runs a printing shop in Moscow. She returns to England without warning or explanation and he urgently needs to find someone to look after his three children, Dolly, Ben and Annie (Annushka).The Kuriatins, the family of a business partner, prove unsuitable: Frank's visit to them ends in disaster when a bear cub given as a birthday present to the son of the family becomes drunk, wreaks havoc in the dining room, and has to be shot. Then, Mrs Graham, wife of the Anglican chaplain, introduces him to Muriel Kinsman, an English governess who has for reasons that are unclear recently been dismissed from her post. He considers her equally unsuitable.Frank's chief accountant Selwyn Crane is an idealistic follower of Tolstoy who spends much of his spare time seeking out those he considers to be oppressed; he is also a poet and author of "Birch Tree Thoughts." Selwyn introduces Frank to Lisa Ivanovna, a young shop-girl found weeping at the men's handkerchief department of the local store. She is said to be the daughter of a country joiner. Frank employs her, and finds himself attracted by her beauty and serene presence. The children quickly become attached to her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinels_From_Space"title="Sentinels From Space">
Called before the World Council, Space Captain David Raven is told that he must stop a clandestine war being waged against Terra by people seeking independence for Mars and Venus. The Council's leader, Oswald Heraty, tells him that Humanity is on the verge of interstellar flight and that there have been hints of intelligent life "out there": Heraty wants Humanity to face any potential dangers as a unified society, so he doesn't want Mars and Venus gaining independence. After leaving the Council, David goes to see Mr. Conrad, the director of the Terran Security Bureau. As true telepaths, Conrad and David speak mind to mind. Conrad gives David a list of the twelve known types of mutants and notes that the clandestine war is being waged by mutants sabotaging Terran infrastructure.David returns to the home that he shares with his companion, Leina, and shortly a team of phony police officers arrives. David switches bodies with the hypno and then with hypnotic power convinces the others on his team that David has already left. Later David reverses the switch and obtains from the shaken hypno the identity of the leader of the sabotage effort, a Venusian insectivocal named Arthur Kayder. Visiting Kayder, David obtains from Kayder's valet the information he wants on the underground base from with the saboteurs launch their attacks. He then goes to the spaceport and boards a ship bound for Venus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_the_Peacock"title="Palace of the Peacock">
The novel is set in the sixteenth century and presents the narrative of a group of men from different ethnic backgrounds making their way up a dangerous and turbulent river within the jungles of Guyana. The party is led by a man named Donne, a cruel second-generation European colonialist who was born in Guyana, and who is hunting for a woman called Mariella who has run away from him. Over the course of the journey it becomes apparent that it is not the first time the men have tried to make their way up this river and that last time they attempted to traverse the river they were all drowned. It is suggested that they now exist in a liminal or spectral state between life and death. The events of the narrative are narrated by a first person narrator who is identified simply as "Dreamer" in the opening pages of the novel. Dreamer's presence becomes increasingly oblique as the novel progresses.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graziella"title="Graziella">
The eighteen-year-old narrator travels from his home in Mâcon, Burgundy, to Italy, staying first in Rome, then Naples. There he meets a young man named Aymon de Virieu, and the two decide to apprentice themselves to Andrea, a local fisherman. Although the first few months pass in contemplative tranquility and beauty, they are forced to take refuge at Andrea's home on Procida during a surging September storm, where they spend the night. Here the narrator first meets the fisherman's granddaughter, Graziella.The following morning, the narrator overhears Andrea's wife, criticising him for taking on the two "pagan" Frenchmen. However, Graziella comes to their defense, silencing her grandmother by pointing out the two young men's compassion and religious acts. The family and their apprentices go to recover the remnants of the destroyed boat. Soon afterwards, the narrator and Virieu go to the village, where they purchase a new boat and fishing supplies for the fisherman. When they return, Andrea and his family are sleeping, but are soon awoken and brought to the beach, joyously accepting the new vessel.Over the next several days, the narrator and Virieu enjoy an idyllic life, reading, walking, and enjoying the beauty, music, and dance of Procida. Graziella expresses interest in their reading, and thus the men read works by Ugo Foscolo and Tacitus to her and her family. Though these fall flat, all are interested in Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's romantic novel "Paul et Virginie". Such is Graziella's fascination with the tale that she abandons all reserve and sits near the narrator, her breath on his hand, and her hair brushing his forehead. When it is over, she begs the narrator to reread the tale.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indomitable_(short_story)"title="Indomitable (short story)">
Two years after the events chronicled in "The Wishsong of Shannara", Kimber Boh finds Jair Ohmsford working in his parents' inn while they are away. She tells him of a dream that has been haunting Cogline where the shade of the fallen Druid Allanon comes to him and tells him that a page from the Ildatch was not destroyed, and that Jair must destroy it. Jair is unconvinced, but agrees to travel to Hearthstone with Kimber and meet with Cogline. The first night Jair is there the shade of Allanon visits him and tells him that he must travel to the lair of the Mwellrets, Dun Fee Aran, and destroy the remaining page of the Ildatch before its power grows. The three companions journey to Dun Fee Aran, and along the way encounter a peddler who warns them against going there. Jair struggles with his own fears of going back to that evil place where he was once imprisoned by the lizard-like Mwellrets, with their hypnotizing eyes.Once they arrive, Jair slips medication into Cogline and Kimber Boh's ale, which causes them to fall into a deep sleep, so that he may enter the fortress alone, and spare them harm. Jair uses his Wishsong to disguise himself and gain entry to the fortress. He conjures up an illusion of Allanon which sends the Mwellrets into a panic, then follows one to the chamber where the remaining Ildatch page is guarded. He then tries to pick up the page, but it burns him and he howls, giving away his presence. The Mwellrets begin searching for him, but cannot find him as he is hidden by the Wishsong. They get close to him, and he conjures up an illusion of warriors, but the Mwellrets quickly see through that and in a panic he conjures up an illusion of the Weapons Master, Garet Jax, which he inhabits. This endows him with Garet Jax's fighting abilities, allowing him to slaughter the Mwellrets and destroy the Ildatch page. He then returns to himself and escapes the fortress, realizing that his Wishsong is much more powerful than he had realized. He can not only conjure up illusions, but he can inhabit those illusions, along with their powers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Weapon_Master's_Choice"title="The Weapon Master's Choice">
The story begins when Garet Jax is found in the forest by the beautiful and mysterious Lyriana. She persuades him that he must travel with her to Tajarin on the coast to save her people from a dracul named Kronswiff who feeds on souls. Garet Jax knows she is keeping something from him, but is strangely attracted to her and compelled to help. That night she shares his camp, and in the dark of night Garet Jax awakens to a threatening feeling, only to find Lyriana already awake. Three masked men attack and Garet easily kills them. The next day they buy provisions for their 8 day journey and set off. When they arrive at the town Garet Jax is surprised by what he sees. Tajarin is a crumbling ruin. It looks deserted except for the guards, called Hets. He and Lyriana stay hidden, and enter a building where he witnesses Kronswiff sucking the souls out of his helpless victims. Garet Jax knows he should wait until Kronswiff and the Hets retire so as to attack unawares, but he cannot bear to watch one more person drained of their soul and thrown into a cart, a lifeless bit of sagging flesh. He silently kills two Hets, then throws a dagger into Kronswiffs heart. The dracul does not perish, and Garet Jax realizes that he must behead the monster. He attacks and kills the Hets, and while doing so feels Lyriana using magic to block their blows from him. He kills them all then swings a deadly blow at Kronswiff, taking off his hands and head in one foul swoop. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Mayakovsky_(tragedy)"title="Vladimir Mayakovsky (tragedy)">
Vladimir Mayakovsky, "the last of the poets," carrying his "soul on a plate for the Future's dinner," declares himself "the king of all lamps" and promises to reveal for the people their brand new, true souls. The Holiday of the Paupers goes on in the City. After an Old man (with cats) greets the advent of the new age of electricity and an Ordinary man protesting against the impending mutiny, gets brushed off, a giant woman gets unveiled and carried by the crowd to the Door to be just thrown down to the floor there. A riot of things commences, with human limbs running about, disconnected from their bodies. At the City's main square Mayakovsky, dressed in toga is treated as a new god, people bringing him presents, three Tears among them. One man relates the story of how two kisses that's been given him turned into the babies and started to multiply. The Poet packs the three Tears he's received from the three women and promises to deliver them to the great Northern god.The Poet says farewells to his followers he refers to as "my poor rats," declares Heavens "a cheat" and, after meditating upon what he'd rather be - "a rooster from Holland or a Pskovian king," - decides he likes "the sound of my name, Vladimir Mayakovsky, the best."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac's_Storm"title="Isaac's Storm">
The book opens with a restless Isaac Cline on the night of September 7, 1900, the eve of the 1900 Galveston hurricane's landfall. Isaac, despite all of the meteorological signs saying otherwise, cannot shake the uneasy feeling that something is amiss. Larson follows this prologue with a look at the science of hurricanes and all of the unusual factors that may have led to the hurricane that season. The initial birth of the storm is described with Larson's speculation on hurricane formation. Larson follows the path of the storm up to Galveston, while also looking at the people of Galveston and the vitality of the city. The narrative is supported by the insertion of letters and telegrams surrounding the events of the storm. The meteorologists of Cuba are shown to be very skilled in the art, but are completely ignored by the overconfident Weather Bureau and its meteorologists. The hurricane passes over Cuba, and the Cubans predict it to be heading towards Texas. The Weather Bureau, however, disagrees and believes that the storm will track towards Florida. Larson, meanwhile, looks at the lives of multiple Galveston residents on the eve of the storm, specifically Isaac Cline. He is a curious family man who risks his life to save his family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Enchilada!"title="Holy Enchilada!">
Hank has been chosen to host a Japanese boy named Yoshi! Hank also needs to prepare some enchiladas for his school multi-cultural day. But, he may have added too much chili powder... and then the trouble starts!
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alif_the_Unseen"title="Alif the Unseen">
In an unnamed Middle Eastern security state, the hacker Alif discovers that his love interest Intisar is entering an arranged marriage with another man. He creates a computer program, Tin Sari, to identify Intisar’s digital footprint and block her from seeing him online. Alif’s computer is attacked by The Hand, a prince who seeks to identify and imprison dissidents. The Hand is also Intisar's fiancé. Unable to contact Alif online, Intisar sends him a book.Alif is stalked by secret police, causing him to flee with his neighbor Dina. They seek out a gang leader named Vikram the Vampire for protection. They are rescued by two djinn: Vikram and his sister Azalel, who had been living as Alif and Dina's housecat. Vikram reveals that Intisar’s book, the Alf Yeom, is a collection of djinn tales containing powerful secrets.They meet a convert who specializes in antique books, and they learn that The Hand is seeking the Alf Yeom. Dina, the convert, Alif, and Vikram seek shelter from the police in a mosque. Alif decodes the Alf Yeom and attempts to create a quantum computer. Dina and the convert escape, Vikram is killed, and Alif is captured and interrogated by The Hand. Months later, he is rescued by NewQuarter01, a prince and hacker. Alif learns that his public arrest has become a cause célèbre for anti-regime activists.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help!_Somebody_Get_Me_Out_of_Fourth_Grade!"title="Help! Somebody Get Me Out of Fourth Grade!">
When his parents get called for a parent-teacher conference, Hank just knows his teacher is going to tell them he is being held back. Hank and his best friends Ashley Wong and Frankie Townsend plans to send Hank's parents to a rock concert in Philadelphia at the same date and they accept! Hank is thrilled to be going into fifth grade. until his parents come back early! Hank remembers that it's family game night, so he decides to go to the pizza parlor and play in the arcade. Everything is going fine until Hank’s teacher, Mrs. Adolf, calls and reminds Hank's parents about the conference. They decide to postpone the trip and visit. After the conference, Hank finds out that he will have to attend summer school in order to pass the 4th grade.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_and_Death_of_Harriett_Frean"title="Life and Death of Harriett Frean">
Harriett Frean is a woman so afraid of life that she will eventually talk herself out of living it. The novel follows Harriet as she is raised to be the ideal Victorian woman. Harriett is proud of her self-sacrifice (which she believes is the highest love of all) but when she falls in love with her best friend's fiance she is forced to question everything she thought she knew. Having decided not to follow her heart Harriett spends the rest of her life trying to convince herself that she has done the right thing. Described as a "small, perfect gem of a book" by author Jonathan Coe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner_of_Heaven"title="The Prisoner of Heaven">
Daniel Sempere has settled into married life well and his son is shortly turning one year old. He is living above the family bookshop, Sempere &amp; Sons with his elderly father, his wife Beatriz and son Julian. Though business has declined further in recent years, his friend Fermín Romero de Torres still finds a place at the bookshop and continues to source rare books while bringing a smile to the faces of the customers.One day a mysterious man arrives and asks about a rare and expensive copy of "The Count of Monte Cristo" that is kept in a display case behind the counter. He purchases the book from Don Sempere Snr and writes an inscription on the cover page:"For Fermín Romero de Torres, who came back from among the dead and holds the key to the future."The book is left as a gift for Fermín. When he returns to the bookshop later he is upset by the gift. It's revealed that Fermín was in prison 20 years earlier with the mysterious stranger as well as David Martin (the protagonist of Zafón's second novel "The Angel's Game"). While in prison Fermín, inspired by the story of "The Count of Monte Cristo", escaped by taking the place of a dead cell mate, stealing a key from the stranger. Knowing the stranger has finally tracked him down, Fermín, with the help of Daniel, attempts to locate the man and come to an arrangement before he's required to pay the ultimate price.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shuttle_(novel)"title="The Shuttle (novel)">
Sir Nigel Anstruthers comes to New York in search of an heiress, as he no longer has enough money to keep up his estate, Stornham Court. He marries the pretty and cosseted Rosalie Vanderpoel, the daughter of an American millionaire. But on their return to England, Nigel and his mother control and isolate Rosalie from her family. Many years later, Rosalie's now-grown up sister Bettina, who has spent a decade wondering why Rosy has lost contact with the family, arrives at Stornham Court to investigate. She discovers Rosalie and her son Ughtred, physically and emotionally fragile, living in the ruined estate. Bettina, who is both beautiful and made of considerably stronger stuff than her sister, begins to restore both Rosalie's health and spirits and the building and grounds of Stornham Court in Nigel's absence. Bettina, as an attractive heiress, attracts the attention of the local gentry and re-integrates her sister into society, while also gaining the respect of the villagers by her insistence that repairs be done by local workers.Bettina also makes the acquaintance of another impoverished English nobleman, Lord Mount Dunstan, who has considerably more pride and spirit than Sir Nigel and has no intention of marrying an American heiress to restore his estate, but who is not well-respected in the neighborhood due to his disreputable late father and brother. Mount Dunstan regains the respect of the neighborhood due to a chance encounter with an American typewriter salesman on holiday, G. Seldon, and because he opens his estate to workers afflicted by typhoid fever. When Sir Nigel returns home to discover Rosalie and Ughtred in improved health and spirits, the estate nearly restored, and Betty responsible for it all, he tries to conceal his ill-will but has never been particularly good at self-control. In a final confrontation, Nigel attempts to bully Bettina into leaving Rosalie at Stornham Court, this time with more of her father's money, but she hides from him and eventually returns with Mount Dunstan, who she had believed dead of typhus. Mount Dunstan whips Sir Nigel "like a dog," and the latter eventually suffers a fit and dies, while Bettina and Mount Dunstan overcome their pride and confess their love for each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadowhunter's_Codex"title="The Shadowhunter's Codex">
This book is Clary Fray's personal copy of the 20th edition of "The Shadowhunter's Codex", which contains the history of the Nephilim, or Shadowhunters, as well as information they have compiled. The 20th edition of the book was intended to be an updated version, to help young Shadowhunters in a modern world, although Clary, and her friends, Jace Herondale and Simon Lewis, felt otherwise. Throughout the pages are sketches made by Clary, as well as comments by her and her friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_a_Marchioness"title="The Making of a Marchioness">
Emily Fox-Seton is a woman of good birth but no money who had worked as a lady's companion and now assists various members of the upper class with day-to-day practical matters. As the novel opens, she is 34 years old, living in a small room in a lodging house in an unfashionable area of London. Her chief employer is Lady Maria Bayne, who is both very selfish and very funny, although she does come to care for Emily. In a Cinderella-like twist, Emily marries a man twenty years her senior, James, the Marquess of Walderhurst, thus becoming a marchioness. In the sequel, originally "The Methods of Lady Walderhurst", Emily has Walderhurst's child, and his former heir, Alec Osborn, attempts to regain what he sees as his birthright.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Queen_of_the_Caribbean"title="The Queen of the Caribbean">
Four years have passed since the battle of Gibraltar. The Black Corsair has tracked Duke Van Guld down to Veracruz at last, and has formed an alliance with Nicholas van Hoorn, Michel de Grammont and Laurens de Graaf, three of the most formidable pirates in the Gulf, to finally bring his foe to justice. After Van Guld explodes his ship as a final resource, the Black Corsair and some of his men manage to escape and are lost in the jungles, at which point they're captured by the native Caribs. Fortunately for them, Honorata had shipwrecked on the coast before and was believed by the natives to be a sea deity and then followed as their queen. After they're freed by her, the Corsair decides to stop his piracy and return with Honorata to Italy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Chapel"title="The Big Chapel">
The Big Chapel – part of the Liberties Revival series – centers around an infamous clerical scandal in Victorian Ireland. Within this story comes the ideas of humanity and ideology, taking a detailed look at the community and depicting life in Ireland with a focus on history and folklore in the region. It’s a book that looks at how state education is received in nineteenth century Ireland.At times the book is humorous; other times tragic. The main character Father Lannigan struggles with his revolution while Master Scully is stuck with too many choices. And then there is Horace Percy Butler and the landlord and amateur scientist who presents a whole tragic comic character.The major themes in The Big Chapel center around: humanity, ideology, power and religion, depicted through tragic comedy. It is about community, and dealing with choice. It is littered with one man being forced to make a choice set in historic Ireland.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scar_Tissue_(novel)"title="Scar Tissue (novel)">
The book details one woman’s struggle with Alzheimer's (or dementia, it’s not clear) and how her family respond to it. In particular, it is one of her son’s voice the reader hears since he is narrating it. Another son isn’t involved so much as he is living in Boston practicing as a neuroscientist. So it is the narrator who bears most of the burden. And all the while, he is trying to work on his marriage and his career as a philosophy professor. His own family life is hardly acknowledged and tears in his marriage begin to show, towards his wife; there for moral support but can't come to terms with him not being a consistent, central figure at the moment.While her illness begins with her repeating stories ad nauseam, things get much worse as she starts to be incapable of recognizing her own family. Thus the prime caretaker – the son – ends up separating from his wife and living in derelict conditions. Nonetheless, he remains positive about the nature of life and death, even once he has lost both his parents, concluding that he “know[s] that there is a life beyond this death, a time beyond this time. I know that at the very last moment…I will be face to face at last with a pure and heartless reality beyond anything a living soul can possibly imagine.”
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Circle_(novel)"title="Full Circle (novel)">
Tana Roberts, coming of age in the turbulent 1960s, has ambitions of an important career. Her feelings about love and marriage have been shaped by her mother's role as a married man's longtime mistress.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kockroach"title="Kockroach">
"Kockroach" is a re-imagining of Franz Kafka's 1915 novella "the Metamorphosis": instead of having human Gregor Samsa wake up and find that he has been transformed into an enormous insect, "Kockroach" begins with a cockroach waking up in a hotel room in New York City in the mid-1950s, and finding that he has been transformed into a human. Since cockroaches are "awesome coping machines" which do not possess significant capacity for angst, despair, or introspection, "Jerry Blatta" (as he becomes known) quickly learns to walk on two legs instead of six, to recognize himself in a mirror, to dress and feed himself, to ward off predators by constantly showing his teeth, to play chess, and, Chauncey Gardiner-like, to fake his way through conversations. From there, he becomes a mob enforcer, then a mob boss, before venturing into politics.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Bergson,_Master_Detective_(novel)"title="Bill Bergson, Master Detective (novel)">
Bill Bergson investigates his friend's mysterious cousin, who is behaving suspiciously, and solves the mystery of a jewel robbery.Bill and five of his friends also play a mock war game, with the White Roses and the Red Roses vying for possession of an unusual stone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Song"title="The Long Song">
"The Long Song" is written as a memoir by an elderly Jamaican woman living in early 19th-century Jamaica during the final years of slavery and the transition to freedom that took place thereafter. It tells the tale of a young slave girl, July, who lives at Amity – a sugarcane plantation. She lived through the 1831 Baptist War, and then the beginning of freedom. Her mother, Kitty; the slaves working the plantation land; and the owner of the plantation, the white woman Caroline Mortimer, are other characters in the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Except_the_Dying_(novel)"title="Except the Dying (novel)">
In the first chapter, William Murdoch is introduced, as a man of strong principles, who uses his unique abilities to solve crimes, sometimes using advanced science for his time.On the street of Toronto, in 1895, the body of a prostitute is found, murdered in a back alley. Inspector Brackenreid decides that this is an accidental death, but Murdoch feels there's more to the situation at hand.As Murdoch digs deeper into the prostitute's death, he discovers that there is something more sinister going and that the young girl was actually a housemaid for a very rich and prominent family in Toronto.Her autopsy reveals she was pregnant and had opium in her system, which makes Murdoch even more suspicious of her death. With the help of Constable George Crabtree, Murdoch solves the crime and brings justice for a young girl's wrongful death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shepherd's_Crown"title="The Shepherd's Crown">
Tiffany Aching is busy running her steading and taking care of the people of the Chalk. Jeannie, the Kelda of the Nac Mac Feegle, is worried that she's overworked. When Granny Weatherwax, Tiffany's mentor, dies, she leaves everything to Tiffany, who becomes the first among equals of the witches.Geoffrey, the third son of Lord Swivel, is well educated, vegetarian and a pacifist. He is dissatisfied with hunting practices he considers barbaric, and after a confrontation with his father, heads towards Lancre, intending to become a witch.Meanwhile, in the domain of the Elves, Peaseblossom senses that the passing of Granny Weatherwax has weakened the barriers between the realms. When a goblin shows the faerie court what the humans are capable of with iron and the status that goblins have achieved, Peaseblossom usurps the Queen, intending to reenter the human world and reestablish the elves' power.Tiffany, spread thin tending to the Chalk and Granny Weatherwax's old steading, employs Geoffrey as a backhouse boy and starts teaching him. He and his goat get on well with everybody, and Tiffany dubs him a calm-weaver. Intending to help old men have some autonomy from their wives, he introduces the idea of sheds.Nightshade, the former Queen of the Elves, is found by the Feegle stationed on the Chalk at the gateway to fairyland. Her wings had been ripped off before she had been forcibly ejected from her world. The Feegles restrain her until Tiffany arrives and takes her in on her family farm. While there, she decides to carry as a talisman the shepherd's crown, or fossilised Echinoid, that had been in the Aching family for many generations. Tiffany attempts to teach Nightshade what it is to be human and the motivations of kindness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Part_Woman"title="One Part Woman">
Kali and Ponna are a couple living in Tamil Nadu. Despite having been married for 12 years, they are unable to conceive a child. Their childlessness becomes a source of constant taunts from family members and fellow villagers, who variously attribute it to family curses, God's wrath, or their ancestors' ill behavior. Desperate, the couple try several remedies, prayers and offerings but to no avail. Kali is often encouraged to have a second wife, an idea he considers but ultimately rejects. As a last resort, their families put forward the suggestion that Ponnu go to the chariot festival of the androgynous god Ardhanarishvara, where on the 14th day, societal taboo relating to extramarital sex is relaxed and consenting men and women may sleep together. Kali is repulsed by the idea but brings up the subject with Ponnu, who responds by saying she would go if he wished so. Kali feels betrayed by her reaction and eventually grows colder to her. The following year, Ponnu's family takes matters into their own hands by luring Kali out of the house, while convincing her that he has given his consent for her to go to the festival. She does so and finds a man she considers "a god" to impregnate her. Meanwhile, Kali returns home to find Ponnu gone, leading him to breakdown and curse Ponnu.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Survivor_(Mills_novel)"title="The Survivor (Mills novel)">
Top secret data has been stolen from the CIA, and the only man who knows its hiding place is dead. CIA operative Mitch Rapp must race to find the classified information in this novel that acts as a continuation of the previous novel, "The Last Man" Former CIA agent Joseph “Rick” Rickman has stolen secret data concerning classified operations all over the world, offering it (and himself) to the Pakistani secret forces. CIA director Irene Kennedy sends Mitch Rapp to kill Rickman but the aftermath poses more problems.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice_Upon_a_Time_(book_series)"title="Twice Upon a Time (book series)">
Rapunzel was in deep trouble. She was recently held prisoner by a witch as the result of a deal her parents made when she was born.Prince Benjamin craved to have a grand adventure travelling minstrels would compose songs about. His mother, however, was overly protective and watched him “like a hawk”.When the story began, Prince Benjamin was fetched for supper by his best friend Andrew. He was distressed to sit beside Prince Elkin, his “ever-bothersome, froglike” cousin.Meanwhile, Rapunzel has been weeping. She was hungry, aching, and homesick.The next day, Rapunzel woke to discover a little orange kitten on her feet. She named her Sir Kitty. When the witch appeared, Rapunzel threatened that her parents would find her soon. The witch laughed and told her she was far from any village.At the same time, Prince Benjamin was wandering far from the castle. His glasses fell and broke. He stumbled around until a boy approached him and brought him to his house. The boy's father mended his spectacles as if it were never broken. In conversation, Prince Benjamin discovered that all the boys born the three years following his birth were also named Benjamin. He also found although the boy's father was excellent at making spectacles, he had to clean dung chutes for a stable income.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cloud_in_Trousers"title="A Cloud in Trousers">
Structurally, the poem is closer to diptych. In Part I the protagonist is waiting for his love, Maria, in a hotel. She finally appears and informs him of her engagement. He remains visibly unperturbed, but internally suffers an explosion of destructive emotions and furious metaphors:Now I’ll go and play.The fiery curve of my brow flawless.A house that was destroyed by flameIs sometimes occupied by the homeless.Parts II and III contain brutal attacks on the contemporary poetry, praises of the Man who "holds the conveyors of the world in the palm of his hand," and prophesizes the revolution and the emergence of the new, freed mankind. The protagonist, a self-defined "preaching, thrashing Zarathustra," sees himself as a new man-God and enters the "tongueless streets" to pronounce his own Sermon on the Mount.Where the human eye fails in confusion,The hungry hordes loom:Wearing the crown of thorns of revolutionsYear 16 brings doom.Part IV sees the protagonist's return to being tormented by unrequited love, which eventually brings him to the act of Deicide, as he blames God for creating an unhappy world, where unanswered love is possible:Almighty, you gave us an assortment:A head and a pair of hands to exist.Why couldn’t you make it so, without torment,
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allanon's_Quest"title="Allanon's Quest">
Allanon is on a desperate quest to find the last heir of Shannara before the Skull Bearers can wipe them all out. His quest takes him to the small village of Archer Trace, where he interrogates an innkeeper about the whereabouts of Eldra Darrivanian. Eldra is an elf who worked for the Elessedil Royal family as a historian that specialized in genealogy. After his son was killed under mysterious circumstances while serving in the Home Guard, Eldra felt the king did not do enough to discover who the killer was and bring him to justice. He then began neglecting and sabotaging his work, and eventually was dismissed. In disgrace, he left Arborlon with his wife and went into hiding near Archer Trace. After tracking him down, Allanon questions him as to whom the last heir of Shannara is and Eldra tells him that it is a man named Weir.Allanon travels to Weir's home, and wonders about Eldra's strange behavior. He seemed tense and afraid. When he arrives at Weir's home he is attacked and takes a dagger to the chest, but using Druid magic he is able to kill most of his attackers, while the rest flee. During the assault, Allanon uses one of his attackers as a human shield. The man is pierced and killed by arrows. Afterwards, a Skull Bearer reveals himself long enough to tell Allanon that the man he used as a human shield was Weir, last heir of Shannara.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_to_Noise_(Moreno-Garcia_novel)"title="Signal to Noise (Moreno-Garcia novel)">
In 2009, Mercedes "Meche" Vega returns to Mexico City to attend the funeral of her DJ father. While there she reminisces about her life in the city in 1988 when she was fifteen and how she accidentally discovered, along with her best friends Sebastian and Daniela, that she could perform spells by listening to songs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangsaman"title="Hangsaman">
On the verge of leaving for college, Natalie Waite feels oppressed by the expectations of her pompous, overbearing father, who imposes his personality on her, and by her miserable, defeated mother, whom Natalie sees as an example of the unhappy future that awaits her if she does not escape from home. Natalie withdraws into elaborate fantasies where she is a proud, unbreakable criminal being grilled by a detective for her crimes. On the eve of Natalie's departure for college, she is invited to her first adult party, where she witnesses her parents and their drunken colleagues at their most contemptible. Natalie experiments with different identities among the party-goers and seems to successfully intrigue an older man, only to be led by him into the woods behind the family's home where he sexually assaults her. The following morning, Natalie convinces herself that the assault did not happen.Natalie leaves for her all-female college, where she is determined to reinvent herself. Most of her fellow students are too superficial and self-absorbed to even notice Natalie, who finds an uncomfortable place at the fringe of a group of popular girls. Natalie is briefly attracted to her self-important English professor, who is the object of Natalie's friends' romantic schemes. Soon Natalie sees that the man has the same flaws as her own father, and that the professor's resentful wife resembles Natalie's own classmates. She resumes her fantasy life, imagining herself as an implacable giant that destroys the college and devours its residents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caster_Chronicles"title="Caster Chronicles">
The series follows Ethan Wate, a 16-year-old boy that dreams of leaving his small South Carolina town for something larger. At the start of the series he falls in love with Lena Duchannes, a new girl that is part of a secret section of humanity called Casters, people who are capable of working magic. They find that there are several obstacles to their love, most notably the social and cultural differences between their two societies and the fact that Ethan is incapable of touching Lena for extended periods of time without suffering a severe electric shock. Throughout the series Lena is troubled by the fact that she must claim herself as either a Light or Dark Caster on her sixteenth birthday and in the first novel she manages to perform a spell that prevents her from having to make this choice. However, in the process Ethan is mortally wounded and Lena is forced to perform another spell to bring him back to life, which causes her to distance herself from him out of fear that he will be further harmed. Their relationship is further harmed by the introduction of Liv, a secondary love interest for Ethan that is also aware of the Caster world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_(novel)"title="Sophia (novel)">
THE CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.SOPHIA.CHAP. I. The different characters of two sisters.CHAP. II. The Triumph of the Graces.CHAP. III. The Young Baronet declares his Passion.CHAP. IV. In which Harriot makes a very contemptible Figure.CHAP. V. Sir Charles, by a proper Degree of Address and Assurance, extricates himself from a very pressing difficulty.CHAP. VI. Sophia entertains Hopes, and becomes more unhappy.CHAP. VII. Sophia takes a very extraordinary resolution. Mr. Herbert encourages her in it.CHAP. VIII. Mr. Herbert and Sophia carry their Point with great Difficulty.CHAP. IX. In which Sophia shews less of the Heroine than the Woman.CHAP. X. The Description of two Rural Beauties.CHAP. XI. Sophia makes an interesting Disco|very.CHAP. XII. The Beginning of a very simple Story.CHAP. XIII. Dolly continues her Story.CHAP. XIV. Sir Charles makes his appearance again.CHAP. XV. Dolly meets her Lover unexpectedly.CHAP. XVI. Dolly concludes her Story.CHAP. XVII. Mrs. Darnley and Harriot resolve to visit Sophia.THE CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME. SOPHIA.CHAP. XVIII. Harriot's Artifices produce the desired Effect on the unsuspecting Sophia.CHAP. XIX. Sophia is agreeably surprised.CHAP. XX. Mr. Herbert acquaints Sophia with the Result of the Interview between Sir Charles and him.CHAP. XXI. Sophia is threatened with a new Disappointment.CHAP. XXII. Sophia suspects the Cause of her Lover's mysterious Conduct.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satin_Island"title="Satin Island">
The novel follows a protagonist, "U.", an employee of "the Company" which is a consulting firm. U is a former anthropologist who now applies his skills to cases handled by the Company.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sept_cavaliers"title="Sept cavaliers">
Colonel-major Silve de Pikkendorff is tasked by his margrave to go on a quest to find why human life seems to be disappearing and the City is turning into chaos. Pikkendorff gathers six horsemen to go with him: the lieutenants Richard Tancrède and Maxime Bazin du Bourg, the brigadier Clément Vassili, the cadet Stanislas Vénier, the bishop Osmond Van Beck and the margrave’s squire Abaï. Their destination is Sépharée where the margrave's daughter Myriam, who Pikkendorff is in love with, has been sent.Having left the City, they hear a bell ring which signals that the margrave is dead. They reach Saint-Aulick, where they meet a man named Gustavson, whose son displays a behaviour which had appeared among children in the City as a first stage of destructive events. The horsemen travel to the Mountain, where they meet the head of a militia who disapproves of them. Tancrède manages to seduce a local girl, Natalia.Thirty years previously, Vassili took part in a campaign together with Captain Wilhelm Kostrowitsky, during which they thought they saw a group of Chechen, a people thought to have been destroyed 250 years earlier. Kostrowitsky, who was also a famous poet greatly admired by Bazin du Bourg, had returned to the Mountain after the campaign and mysteriously disappeared. After finding a trace from Kostrowitsky, Vassili goes missing, and the others find him dead with his throat slit. They eventually discover several old peoples thought to have been extinct.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_at_Mount_Hope"title="Summer at Mount Hope">
In 1894, Phoeba Crupp is an independent woman who does not pay any attention to her mother and sister's concern of getting married, while her father is completely focused on his vineyard. Phoeba is content to spend her time with her best friends Hadley and Henrietta, until she is forced into a world of men and money.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Underpants_and_the_Sensational_Saga_of_Sir_Stinks-A-Lot"title="Captain Underpants and the Sensational Saga of Sir Stinks-A-Lot">
A message from Dav Pilkey informs those reading that, unlike previous books which appealed to both adults and children, this book will attempt to appeal to solely children, for their safety and the pleasure of older readers.On the planet called "Smart Earth", a scientist mixes smart Diet Coke, smart Pop Rocks, and smart Mentos, and this experiment causes Smart Earth to explode. One chunk lands in a grape garden, causing the grapes to become smart. They try to wage war on humans but dry out. Another chunk lands at the Piqua Valley Home for the Reality-Challenged. Gym teacher Mr. Meaner eats a chunk and becomes smart. He tries to walk out, but two doctors block his way. He confuses them, so he and the other teachers escape and return to their jobs. Mr. Meaner takes control of an abandoned factory, and he makes a strange substance with sweaty gym socks called the Rid-o-Kid 2000. Yesterday George and Harold are told to go to his office, where he sprays them with Rid-o-Kid 2000, turning them into robot-like slaves. The other teachers are amazed at their behavior, though the other George and Harold are not, and they get sicker because of excessive homework. They see a commercial for the “Rid-o-Kid 2000” and disguise themselves as adults, making the children do fun activities for the teachers. The teachers call in Mr. Meaner, who, enraged at what he sees, dons his "Kid Killer 2000", now a robotic exoskeleton suit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Heart_and_Other_Black_Holes"title="My Heart and Other Black Holes">
Aysel Seran is a Turkish-American sixteen-year-old living in Kentucky. Several years earlier, her father was convicted for the murder of Timothy Jackson, a teenage aspiring Olympian, and she has not seen or contacted him since. At school she is an outcast since her father's crime is public knowledge and she has a strained relationship with her mother and stepfather, with whom she has lived since his imprisonment.Aysel fantasizes about killing herself but doubts she has the resolve to follow through. One day at her job as a telemarketer, she is browsing a website that matches people for suicide pacts when she finds a posting from user FrozenRobot who lives in a nearby town. She messages him and they agree to meet up at the root beer stand between their two towns. Two days later, Aysel meets up with FrozenRobot (actually a seventeen-year-old boy named Roman) who insists that their joint suicide must take place on April 7. They share a meal together Aysel observes that by all appearances Roman is attractive and popular among his peers and she wonders what reason he has to commit suicide. She also finds out that he used to play basketball with Brian Jackson, Timothy's younger brother is following in his footsteps as a sports star. Aysel drives Roman back to his house where she learns that his parents are aware that he is suicidal, and as a result monitor him closely and have taken away his driving privileges at his therapist's recommendation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Daughter_(novel)"title="The First Daughter (novel)">
Kasemiire grows up in poverty. But her father is able to send her and her siblings to school. This he does, amidst scorn from other men who thinks all a woman has to do is to work in the kitchen. Kasemiire gets pregnant in school and is abandoned by the father of her child. Kasemire has to work to support herself and her child. She impresses a politician who offers to help her by taking her to work in the city. Things do not go to plan after the politician's husband tries to rape her. Kasemiire seeks refuge from the church, where with the help of a sympathetic nun, she goes back to school under their care. She goes up to university. It is at the university that she meets the father of her child and then the hatred she had concealed comes to the surface.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fool's_Quest"title="Fool's Quest">
Fitz and Riddle and the Fool arrive at Buckkeep. Fitz has used too much of Riddle's strength and Nettle is furious. They cannot risk a Skill-healing for the Fool since he is too weak. They have arrived for Winterfest. Fitz is to play the part of a minor noble to explain his presence. He tries to heal the Fool as best he can. The Fool tells him how he returned to Clerres with Prillkop and that the Servants, the pale people who tend to While Prophets, are the ones who tortured him. They wanted him to tell them where the Unexpected Son was. The Fool thought they meant a son he was supposed to have, although the Fool knew of no such child.Web asks Fitz to meet a crow who is not bonded with a human, but is in danger from other crows by having white feathers among her black ones. She can speak some words. Through Fitz, she meets the Fool and they connect. The Fool names her Motley. Fitz paints her white feathers black so that she can go out without being attacked by regular crows.Chade has a new apprentice - Ash. Ash is very capable and both Fitz and the Fool grow to like him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backbone_Flute"title="Backbone Flute">
The poet rises his "skull filled with verses," starting what he anticipates to be his "final concert" before finishing his life with "a bullet for a dot.". He curses his beloved (wondering "what heavenly Hoffmann might have invented you, the vile one"), then blames God for bringing to Earth this woman, a devil in disguise. Visiting her at home, he implores Lilya to leave her ageing husband, then, horrified by her aloof coldness, threatens again to kill himself, now by drowning. He sees his love as something more horrible than the World War, yet threatens to haunt the woman he loves forever. Her husband returns home in surprisingly good moods, which the poets tries to spoil by advising him to "hang loads of pearls upon her neck" so as to keep her by his side. Eventually, ignored by everybody, he recognizes himself as a failed Messiah, "crucified on paper, with words for nails."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_(Morand_book)"title="New York (Morand book)">
Morand's impressions of New York are both positive and negative. He disapproves of the upper class, the fashion, speakeasies and the area around Times Square. He is impressed by the City Hall and the buildings around Washington Square, which he regards as genuinely American and not false imitations of historical styles. He makes recurring references to the contemporary saying that "the Jews own New York, the Irish run it, and the Negroes enjoy it". In his conclusion, he writes: "I love New York because it is the greatest city of the universe and because its people are the toughest, the only people who, after the war, went on building, and who do not merely live on the capital of the past, the only ones, besides Italy, who do not demolish but construct."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Harder_They_Come_(novel)"title="The Harder They Come (novel)">
"The Harder They Come" follows the unfolding relationship between Sten Stensen, his son Adam, and Adam's girlfriend Sara Hovarty Jennings in modern-day Northern California. The story alternates between their three points of view. The story begins with Sten, former Marine and Vietnam veteran, killing a mugger while on a vacation cruise in Puerto Limón (Costa Rica). The story then moves to California, where Sten is unable to understand or help his schizophrenic son, who considers himself a "mountain man" modeled on his hero John Colter. Meanwhile, Adam begins a relationship with Sara, a believer in the Sovereign citizen movement, whom he considers to be a kindred spirit due to her own problems with the law and her professed belief in the illegitimacy of laws and law enforcement. His paranoia worsens, leading to Adam shooting two people and escaping into the mountains to avoid arrest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Irix"title="The Black Irix">
A year after the events of The Sword of Shannara, Shea has become very ill. Fearing for his life, Flick goes to a woods witch and seer named Audrana Coos. She gives him a small bottle of liquid and tells him to give it to Shea secretly. She also tells him that Shea will soon go on another quest and that Flick should not dissuade him. Flick does not believe her, but he slips the liquid into Shea’s ale later and the next day Shea’s health has completely recovered. Later Flick tells Shea about the woods witch and Shea thanks him and assures him that he will not be going on any quests or leaving the Vale again. Then Panamon Creel arrives.Creel tells Shea that the Black Irix that Keltset the rock troll used to save their lives and was lost when he was killed has been acquired by a collector of rare artifacts called Kestra Chule. He tells Shea that he must use the power of the elfstones to help him find and recover it so that he can return it to his fallen comrade’s family. Reluctantly, Shea agrees. Creel and Shea set off, but Flick refuses to accompany them, angry that Shea is leaving with the untrustworthy Creel. However, Flick catches up with them later. Shea then uses the elfstones to discover that the Black Irix is hidden in a vault in Kestra Chule’s private quarters within his fortress. Flick questions Creel as to how he expects to gain entry into this fortress. Creel informs them that Chule is actually a good acquaintance, and that they have been invited. When they arrive at the fortress, they indeed are invited in and given a great feast, after which Chule has his guards put the Ohmsfords in chains. Creel then takes the elfstones off of Shea and presents them to Chule in exchange for a hefty sack of gold. Chule promises to lock the brothers up overnight and release them in the morning, perhaps…
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ungifted"title="Ungifted">
Donovan Curtis considers himself ungifted (the opposite of gifted). He is, instead, a prankster and troublemaker. One day, one of his pranks goes too far in causing a commotion. He strikes a statue which disrupts a basketball game. Although no one is injured, the gym is destroyed, with repairs for the damage that was done to the gym being prohibitively expensive. The district superintendent, Dr. Schultz, who was at the game, catches Donovan red-handed. However, after he jots down Donovan's name, his assistant thinks it is the list of candidates for the Academy for Scholastic Distinction (ASD), a school for extremely gifted students.Donovan expects the mishap and his escape from punishment will eventually be discovered and feels that he will cause more stress to his already stressed household. His older sister, Katie, is currently staying with them and is seven months pregnant. Katie's husband Brad is a Marine who is deployed in Afghanistan. Adding to the pressure, Katie's mother-in-law leaves Brad's dog, Beatrice, who seems to be ill (but was later revealed to be pregnant) and only takes a liking to Donovan. However, after Donovan learns of the error that is sending him to ASD, he is filled with joy by the mistake.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and_the_Dervish"title="Death and the Dervish">
Sheikh Nuruddin is a respected dervish in an Islamic monastery in eighteenth century Bosnia. He learns his brother Harun has been arrested by the Ottoman authorities but he struggles to determine exactly what happened and what he should do. He narrates the story as a kind of elaborate suicide note “from a need stronger than benefit or reason” and regularly misquotes (or misunderstands) the Quran, the sacred scriptures of his faith. Slowly the Sheikh starts to probe and question society, power and life in general. Speaking the truth leads to his being physically assaulted in the streets and even arrested briefly. Ultimately he fights and challenges the injustice of the world by employing deceit which succeeds at the expense of innocent life. Nuruddin replaces the old Kadı but is in turn corrupted by the need to uphold the original deceit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontraditional_Love"title="Nontraditional Love">
The scene is the twenty-third century. USA. "Nontraditional Love" describes a homosexual world in which mixed-sex marriages are forbidden. The homosexual society is intolerant of dissidents. Intimacy between the sexes is rejected. World history and the classics of world literature, such as Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Dumas... have been falsified in order to support the ideology of this opposite world.At the heart of the novel is a love story between a man and a woman who are forced to hide their feelings and pass as homosexuals.After Robert Marcus' secret wife Liza abandoned him for another man, he decides to make a radical change in life and become a normal gay man. His first male partner should have been Jacob Stein, a retired policeman, but during their first date Jacob dies.Is it a murder or an accident? The FBI begins an investigation and accuses Robert of killing Jacob. The situation becomes complicated because Jacob Stein in his youth made the fateful mistake by having sex with a woman and Liza is Jacob's daughter...The plot follows Robert Marcus, a heterosexual who has a clandestine affair with Liza. They hide from authorities by feigning marriage to the same gendered persons of another couple. All four live in a two family house. At night, they secretly change rooms to sleep their lovers while carrying on as homosexual couples during the day. Normal reproduction is also illegal, but the couples pretend to have artificially inseminated children, the boy being raised by the men and the girl being raised by the women. After a while Liza leaves this arrangement. Robert tries to make a go of converting to being homosexual to make life easier for himself. He meets an older man who dies in his bed. Robert is accused of murder, confirming that heterosexuals are a menace to society. The rest of the book follows Robert in a riveting 1984-Kafkaesque experience.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Disreputable_History_of_Frankie_Landau-Banks"title="The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks">
Frankie Landau-Banks is a sophomore at Alabaster Prep when she encounters the Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds, an all-male secret society. Since she is a girl and thus cannot join, she feels left out of the society. When one of the leaders, Alpha, leaves school for a few days, she seizes the opportunity to direct the Basset Hounds in several pranks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Died"title="The Girl Who Died">
The Twelfth Doctor and Clara are taken to a village by some Vikings. The Doctor claims to be Odin, but the villagers are not fooled, as a figure also claiming to be Odin appears in the sky, offering to take the warriors to Valhalla. A squad of warriors in armoured suits materialise, shooting the Vikings with weapons that appear to disintegrate them. Clara and Ashildr, a woman from the village, are also struck. The squad soon disappears.Clara and Ashildr find themselves on a spacecraft with the other Vikings. The men are killed and drained of their adrenaline and testosterone, while Clara and Ashildr meet Odin, the leader of the Mire species that pride themselves on their merciless conquests. Before Clara can stop her, Ashildr declares war on the Mire, and Odin grants them 24 hours to prepare. On Earth, Clara brings the Doctor up to speed. He recognises the villagers are too weak to fight, and devises a plan using Ashildr's storytelling skills and a supply of electric eels.When the Mire arrive, they find the villagers celebrating. The Mire's confusion gives the Doctor time to stun them with electricity and pull one of the helmets off with an electromagnet. The Doctor modifies this and has Ashildr wear it, allowing her to envision an articulated puppet as a dragon, which is broadcast to the other Mire and scares them off. Odin vows to attack again, but the Doctor threatens to send video footage of the rout captured by Clara's phone to the universe unless they leave Earth. Odin and the Mire peacefully depart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_Who_Lived"title="The Woman Who Lived">
Alone and on the trail of an alien artefact, the Twelfth Doctor interrupts a highwayman known as "the Knightmare" carrying out a highway robbery of Lucie Fanshawe in 1651 England. The Doctor finds the artefact in the coach's luggage but the vehicle drives off before he can take it. The Doctor finds that the robber is Ashildr, the Viking girl he made immortal. Over her 800 years of everlasting life, she has lost many of her memories and has isolated herself in order to avoid the pain of losing loved ones. The Doctor learns that she has renamed herself "Me" due to her loneliness. He also discovers that Me previously had three children, all of whom she lost to the Black Death.Me and the Doctor steal the artefact from Lucie's house, flee by climbing out of the chimney and escape an ambush by a rival highwayman, Sam Swift. The next morning, the Doctor meets Me's ally Leandro, a leonine alien stranded on Earth who uses the artefact to open portals into space. In return for Me tricking the Doctor into helping him, Leandro has agreed to let her come with him to travel the galaxy. For the portal to be activated, the artefact requires another person's death. Two pikemen, unaware that Me is the Knightmare, arrive to announce that the Knightmare is reported to be in the area and Sam Swift is about to be hanged at Tyburn. Me hands the Doctor over to them, claiming that he is the Knightmare's accomplice and sets off to use Swift's death to activate the artefact.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_in_the_Spider's_Web"title="The Girl in the Spider's Web">
Computer scientist Frans Balder abandons a prestigious job in Silicon Valley and returns to Sweden to take custody of his autistic son August. Balder is informed by several law enforcement agencies that he is in danger from a criminal organization who call themselves the "Spider Society", but he ignores their warnings, preferring to focus on his neglected son. August exhibits savant syndrome; he produces drawings of impressive veracity and demonstrates facility with numbers. Meanwhile, one year since "Millennium" magazine's scoop on The Section, the publication has stagnated and is in danger of losing creative control to outside investors. Balder's former associate, Linus Brandell, tells Mikael Blomkvist about Balder and his tumultuous history, mentioning that some of his activities were aided by Lisbeth Salander.Spurred by a childhood memory, Salander attempts to track down someone from her past, leading her to the Spider Society. She helps a group of hackers gain access into NSA servers, much to the fury of the agency's top cyber security agent, Edwin Needham. NSA agent Alona Casales and SÄPO agent Gabriella Grane are given the task of pursuing Salander and the Spider Society, which are a group of elite Russian criminals led by an individual named "Thanos". Grane calls Balder with concerns about his safety, and Balder hires Milton Security for protection. He also reaches out to Blomkvist, hoping to confess his concerns to a respected journalist. Blomkvist agrees to meet him, but as he arrives, an assassin, self-identified in the narration as Jan Holtser, kills Balder. Blomkvist reaches out to Salander, hoping to harness her talents to the investigation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Should_Be_More_Dancing"title="There Should Be More Dancing">
Margery Blandon is a principled woman, who has led her life with rule. But now in her seventies, she is waiting to die on the 43rd floor of the Tropic Hotel. As she waits for her death, she reflects back on her life and tried to find what and where things went wrong.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Shadowhunter_Academy"title="Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy">
Simon Lewis, who has been a mundane in City of Bones, then a vampire from the middle of City of Ashes till almost the end of City of Heavenly Fire has been stripped of his memories by a Greater Demon in the final volume of The Mortal Instruments. He isn't sure who he is anymore and therefore, in order to retrieve his memories, he makes a decision of becoming a Shadowhunter. To become a Shadowhunter, he must first train like a Shadowhunter and he visits the Shadowhunter Academy in order to retrieve his memories.This book contains characters not only from The Mortal Instruments but also from The Infernal Devices and reveals much of the unknown history of some famous shadowhunters like Michael Wayland, Stephen Herondale and Robert Lightwood. Simon learns about the history of Shadowhunters through guest lecturers like Jace Herondale, Tessa Gray etc.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_Park"title="December Park">
The novel takes place over the course of one year, 1993-1994, and focuses on a group of friends growing up in a small bayside community called Harting Farms, Maryland, located on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. The novel is narrated by 15-year-old Angelo "Angie" Mazzone, who relays the story of a child abductor and murderer who has been plaguing his hometown called the Pied Piper by local police. When the novel opens, Angie and his two best friends, Scott Steeple and Peter Galloway, witness local police extricating the body of a dead girl from the woods that surrounds December Park, a local suburban park. Later, they inform their friend Michael Sugarland of what they saw, and each boy is affected by the event in a different way. Later, Angie befriends his new neighbor and classmate, the awkward Adrian Gardiner, and introduces him to his circle of friends. When Adrian learns of the Piper and the girl found in the woods, he confesses that he recently discovered a heart-shaped locket near where the body was found which must have belonged to the girl. From there, the five friends make a pact, agreeing to continue searching for clues as to the identity of the Piper, who continues his abductions throughout the course of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penpal_(novel)"title="Penpal (novel)">
"Penpal" is told via a series of non-linear recollections by an anonymous narrator trying to make sense of mysterious events that happened to him during his childhood, the truth of which have been kept from him by his mother all his life.As a boy in kindergarten, the narrator becomes best friends with another student named Josh. One day, their class conducts a penpal experiment, in which the children tie self-addressed letters to balloons and send them off; as the children receive responses, their teacher tracks how far their balloons went on a state map in the classroom. While most of the children get letters back, the narrator starts to believe his balloon got lost, until he receives an envelope containing a single poorly shot Polaroid photo. Over the school-year, he will receive over 50 other pictures, all without any letter. Soon after, he realizes that the pictures are all of himself and his mother, which prompts her to call the police.The narrator recalls a series of disconnected events which, while innocuous to him as a child, take on sinister new meaning from an adult perspective: a neighborhood snowcone customer once returned the same dollar bill to the narrator he'd included in his initial penpal letter; while out playing in a ditch with Josh, the narrator became aware of strange clicking noises he later identified as camera flashes; the narrator once found a strange drawing in a pair of shorts he'd left by the riverside containing a depiction of himself aside a much larger man; one of the narrator's elderly, Alzheimer's-stricken neighbors was presumably murdered shortly after claiming her long-dead husband had returned home and was living with her again. In an incident that particularly stands out in the narrator's memory, he recalls awakening in the woods one night in his pajamas and finding his way back home to discover the police looking for him; he later discovered a letter on his bed stating his intentions to run away, although the narrator notes that his name was misspelled. Shortly after this incident, the narrator's mother discovers something in the house's crawlspace that prompts her to sell the home and move.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exploding_Detective"title="The Exploding Detective">
To help differentiate himself from the rest of the private detectives in Central City, Frank Burly decides he needs a gimmick to attract customers. He purchases a refurbished World War II jet pack that was part of a Nazi plot to conquer Heaven in the afterlife and outfits it with booster rockets that he bought from a women's fashion magazine. Calling himself "The Flying Detective," he begins recklessly streaking across the skies of Central City and crashing into buildings. In fact, the citizens of Central City see him crash, burn and explode so often that they begin to suspect the hapless detective possesses super powers that protect him from serious injury.At the same time, a bizarre new crime wave hits the city. An army of robots led by Napoleon commit a series of robberies in the industrial district, stealing chemicals and other raw materials. Frustrated, the mayor and the chief of police approach Frank Burly about becoming the city's patron super hero. In exchange for $1,500 a week, Burly agrees to don a cape and tights and fly through the city in the name of justice and goodness. However, he soon finds he has bitten off more than he can chew when Napoleon turns out to be a robot and the real mastermind behind the crime wave unleashes his assassin robots against the Flying Detective.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Company_(Ehrlichman_novel)"title="The Company (Ehrlichman novel)">
The protagonist is Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) William "Bill" Martin, a longtime CIA agent who was appointed DCI by Democratic President Esker Scott Anderson. Anderson, as vice president, succeeded William Curry, who was killed in a crash of Air Force One in the early 1960s. Martin's friendship with Anderson dates from the 1950s, when he was a lower-level agent and Anderson held a great deal of power as Senate Majority Leader.As Deputy CIA Director, Martin was responsible for planning an undercover invasion of the Dominican Republic by emigres trained and supported by the U.S. However, President Curry, worried about negative repercussions from the invasion, ordered the murder of a priest who led the rebel movement, in order to ensure the invasion's failure. CIA Inspector General, Major-General Antonio Primula, wrote a report blaming Martin, then-DCI Horace McFall and, in part, President Curry for the invasion's failure, and recommending the firing of McFall and Martin. After Curry's death, Anderson appointed Martin as DCI and promised to keep the Primula report secret, in return for Martin's loyalty.Anderson becomes seriously ill during his elected term and declines to run for a second, leaving his Vice President Ed Gilley as the Democratic nominee. Despite Martin's hard work behind the scenes to help elect Gilley, he is defeated by Republican Richard Monckton. Martin sees Monckton, a longtime political enemy of Curry and Anderson, as a threat to himself and the CIA.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Monk_in_Outer_Space"title="Mr. Monk in Outer Space">
Brandon Lorber, CEO of Burgerville, a national fast-food chain, is found in his office, shot three times à la the Mozambique Drill. Natalie Teeger and Adrian Monk respond to the call. Captain Stottlemeyer introduces them to an old friend, an ex-cop named Archie Applebaum, who now works as a security guard, and who found the body. Lieutenant Disher tells them that the M.O. indicates a professional killer. As Archie said he never heard anything, the killer probably used a silencer. The killer obscured his face while on security cameras.Monk concludes Brandon Lorber died of a heart attack, since Lorber's shirt is wrinkled from grabbing at his chest. Lorber was dead for several minutes when he was shot; there would have been more blood present if his heart was still functioning. Since it's not a homicide, Stottlemeyer appoints Disher head of a "Special Desecration Unit" to take over the case.Natalie stays with his brother Ambrose because he is having his carpet replaced. The next morning, Monk and Natalie arrive at a crime scene outside the San Francisco Airporter Motor Inn. Conrad Stipe, creator of the cult science fiction TV series "Beyond Earth", was shot and killed climbing out of a taxi while arriving at a "Beyond Earth" convention. Surveillance cameras around the parking lot have caught the shooter, dressed as Mr. Snork, one of the protagonists of the show.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_&amp;_Silk"title="Iron &amp; Silk">
Salzman, a member of the Yale-China expedition crew, is offered a position to teach English at the Changsha Medical University for two years. While he is there, he learns Chinese martial arts of many different kinds. He studies from the martial arts master Pan Qingfu.He encounters political activists, travels, and deals with many different kinds of people, some of them very traditional.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee_in_Oz"title="Yankee in Oz">
The story begins with Thomas P. "Tompy" Terry, an athlete and musician son of a physicist, star drummer in his marching band at Pennwood prep in fictional small town, Pennwood, Pennsylvania, swept away by then-fictitious Hurricane Hannah on his way to the Labor Day parade.He lands on the shore of Winkie Lake, where he meets Yankee, the first American dog in space, a bull terrier delighted at his newfound ability to talk.The nearest town is Wackajammy, in the northeastern part of the Winkie Country, which is the breadbasket of the West. The King, Jackalack, believes that Tompy and Yankee are there to fulfill a prophecy to rescue their princess, his aunt, Doffi, who instructs all of the bakers of the town, who refuse to do any work without her present. Yammer Jammer, the king's adviser, using a book called the "Mind Reader" determines that the two have no intent to do the search when they leave, and locks them in prison. Yankee is able to dig out during the night and get the key, and when they leave, they steal the "Mind Reader".Though determined to get home, Yankee in particular wishes to rescue the princess anyway. They next encounter an anteater, a town of powdered and packaged workaholic people, Tidy Town, whose king wants to force them to be listeners, cross into the Gillikin Country with the aid of Tim Ber the Trav-E-Log, meet a kindly but private woodsman named Axel, and a village of pleasant people with luminescent paper lanterns for heads who are active only at night.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sterkarm_Handshake"title="The Sterkarm Handshake">
A British corporation creates a Time Tube back to the 16th Century Scottish-English border, initially planning to exploit its untouched mineral resources. The 21st-century travellers represent themselves as magical Elves, and attempt to win the co-operation of the local clan, the Sterkarms."The Sterkarm Handshake" deals with a British corporation, the FUP, who create a Time Tube back to the 16th Century Scottish-English border, initially to exploit its then untouched mineral resources of gold and oil, though they later plan a tourist resort. They fatally underestimate the natives. A local clan, the Sterkarms, are welcoming at first, regarding the 21st-century travellers as magical Elves because of their medicine and technology, but increasingly refuse to cooperate. The clansmen, who have always lived by plunder, begin robbing the FUPs, which leads to the FUP's power-hungry boss kidnapping the only son of the Sterkarm chieftain. The Sterkarms' retaliation is savage.A young 21st-century anthropologist, Andrea Mitchell, who lives with the Sterkarms as a translator and liaison, finds her loyalties divided when she falls in love with Per Sterkarm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nobodies_(novel)"title="The Nobodies (novel)">
Fern Drudger is a child who has the ability to shake things out of books. But, lately, only Diet Lime Fizzy Drinks seem to pop out of them. The Fizzy Drinks always have messages from a mysterious group called the Nobodies. As it turns out to be, Nobodies are people or animals that are shaken out of books and haven't been returned yet to their homes inside the books. The Nobodies seem to have a terrible enemy, and they say that Fern is the only one who can save them.Fern, now reunited with her real parents, is sent off to Camp Happy Sunshine Good Times, a camp for young Anybodies. Anybodies are people who can transform themselves or others into different objects through hypnotism. At the camp, Fern meets Mary Stern, the counselor for girls. However, it turns out that the counselors and director of the camp seem to have deadly secrets. Camp Happy Sunshine Good Times has strict rules, and Fern easily breaks one of them. When she receives her punishment, Fern discovers that she is destined to help the Nobodies, who are trapped by the evil Mole, or BORT. BORT is a giant mole who had trapped a family of Nobodies in a Diet Lime Fizzy Drinks factory in a basement at the Avenue of Americas. The Mole can only be shrunk down to the size of normal mole when it touches water. Fern must somehow get BORT to touch water and bring peace to the second earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_and_Tomorrow_(novel)"title="Tomorrow and Tomorrow (novel)">
Originally, Drake is a professional musician, with minor celebrity. When his wife Ana is diagnosed with an unspecified incurable brain disorder, Drake exhausts every option attempting to cure her. Only then does he decide to have her body cryogenically stored, in the hopes future generations will discover an effective treatment. However, Drake is extremely cautious, and in case the future culture doesn't care about her plight, he has himself frozen as well. Furthermore, he devotes all his energies for a decade before his freezing to becoming an expert primary source on the musically notable people of his era. He correctly assumes that if you become the world's foremost expert in any subject, eventually someone will want to write a book on that exact subject. At that time the hypothetical future writer will want to awaken Drake, and he can in turn awaken his wife, if treatment is available. He is awakened in the year 2512. Although society is vastly different, no cure for Ana yet exists. He spends six years apprenticed to a musical historian to pay for his reviving costs and to gain a foothold in this new world.Drake is continually laid dormant and revived, progressively later into the future, all the way until the time of the Big Crunch. Human civilization alters radically over the eons, but Ana's mangled brain proves an extremely difficult problem. Despite the incomprehensible changes surrounding in each successive awakening, Drake never loses sight of his mission.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoMa_(novel)"title="SoMa (novel)">
Raphe is a casualty of the dot-com collapse, a former website designer now forced to work as a clerk at a mailbox shop in order to make ends meet. He discovers the shop is actually a front for a scam. His exposure to this seedy underground sparks his curiosity and eventually leads him on a journey into some of the more bizarre subcultures of San Francisco. Through a series of intense personal encounters, he realizes he’s not quite the man he thought he was.Lauren (Lolly) is a take-no-prisoners woman drawn to the city to find the type of man she can’t find in the suburbs. She discovers the hunt for love is far more complicated than she expected, especially when looking in all the wrong places.Mark Hazodo is a rich video-game entrepreneur whose love of games extends into a sordid secret sex life filled with extremes.The journeys of these three main characters intersect, overlap and eventually collide with outrageous, provocative and sometimes disturbing consequences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sailor_Dog_(book)"title="The Sailor Dog (book)">
Scuppers the dog has an irresistible urge to sail the sea. His little gaff-rigged sailing boat hardly looks seaworthy, with colorful patches on its sails. Though not a luxurious boat, Scuppers keeps it neat and "ship-shape." He has a hook for his hat, his rope, and his spyglass. Unfortunately, Scuppers gets shipwrecked after a big storm. Being a resourceful dog, he soon makes a house out of driftwood.Eventually, Scuppers repairs his ship and sails away, arriving at a seaport in a foreign land. The street scene is straight from a canine Kasbah. There are lady dogs dressed in full-length robes with everything but their eyes, paws, and tails covered, balancing jars on their heads. Scuppers needs new clothes after all his travels. He tries on various hats and shoes of different shapes and colors.Life at sea soon calls Scuppers back to his boat. After stowing all his gear in its right place, he is back "where he wants to be — a sailor sailing the deep green sea."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Light"title="Lost Light">
"Lost Light" is the first novel set after Bosch retires from the LAPD at the end of the prior story. Having received his private investigator's license, Bosch investigates an old case concerning the murder of a production assistant on the set of a film. The case leads him back into contact with his ex-wife Eleanor Wish, who is now a professional poker player in Las Vegas, and Bosch learns at the end that he and Eleanor have a young daughter.The poem referenced in this work is from Ezra Pound's "Exile's Letter:"&lt;poem&gt;What is the use of talking, and there is no end of talking, There is no end of things in the heart.&lt;/poem&gt;
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Work_(novel)"title="Blood Work (novel)">
After receiving a heart transplant, retired FBI criminal profiler Terrell "Terry" McCaleb is contacted by Graciela Rivers, the sister of his donor Gloria, and asked to investigate her death, which occurred during an unsolved convenience store robbery. McCaleb had become a minor celebrity as the head of the FBI task force on the "Code Killer", a Los Angeles-based serial killer (similar to the Zodiac Killer) who always signed his notes with the code "903 472 568", but he is now living on his fishing boat and has been inactive to prevent rejection of his new heart (to the extent that he cannot even drive). He reluctantly agrees to help Graciela but finds the police handling the case to be extremely hostile. However, he is able to match the style of another killing to Gloria's and gets a copy of the files for both cases from Jaye Winston, the sheriff's deputy on that case. He surprisingly discovers that the call reporting Gloria's shooting was placed slightly prior to the actual shooting, leading him to suspect that Gloria was targeted for murder. He interviews the only witness to the second crime, a man called James Noone, but fails to learn much.As he continues to investigate, with Winston's support but against the wishes of his doctor, he finds that the two cases plus a third case are linked through the use of a common gun and a common line said by the killer after the shooting, "Don't forget the cannoli" from "The Godfather". He then learns that the first two victims had McCaleb's blood types and were on a list of people who had previously donated blood. If the victims died, McCaleb would benefit from their death as a potential organ recipient. Because of this, the police on Gloria's case focus on him as the possible killer and get a search warrant for his boat. Then, the real killer begins to plant evidence implicating McCaleb on his boat, expecting the police to find it, but McCaleb finds and then conceals the most incriminating evidence. Examining the facts again, McCaleb realizes that the distinctive attribute of the "Code Killer" was that the nine-digit identifying code did not include a one, and that "Noone" ("no one") is actually the Code Killer. By following the contact information on Noone, McCaleb and Jaye Winston find the Code Killer's files, which prove that he had deliberately killed three people to get McCaleb a new heart. Although McCaleb is thus cleared, the fact that Gloria's death was directly due to his illness creates a rift in his increasingly personal relationship with Graciela and her nephew Raymond, Gloria's son.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7th_Heaven_(novel)"title="7th Heaven (novel)">
Lindsay is confronted by two cases.We meet thugs called Pidge and Hawk whose idea of fun is burning people alive.They kill three couples until they try the big one in the house of a senator, Campion, whose son has recently disappeared.Campion reacts, though, and kills Hawk. Pidge flees but after some search led by Boxer and her team, they find a lead in the college they attended together with the kids of the victims; they were some sort of geniuses who wanted to try the perfect murder without being caught, inspired by a novel "The 7th Heaven".After a final confrontation at his house, Pidge, too, is captured and incarcerated.The parallel story concerns the same Michael Campion, son of a famous politician, who was reported missing but now he's been said to have visited a prostitute - Junie Moon - right before his disappearance.Junie Moon is interviewed by the police and confesses Campion died in her arms and then, caught by panic, she had called her boyfriend and decided to dismember him and throw him away in plastic bags.Junie is taken to court and tried but found not guilty.In the meantime, a creepy wannabe writer, Twilly, stalks Yuki Castellano, who had represented the People in the trial and tells her he knows who killed Campion and tries to kill Yuki, too; he's caught in the act, though, and he reveals he knew Campion left Junie Moon alive and he had asked her to make up the whole story in order to write a book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_Falls"title="Salem Falls">
Jack is a highly educated high school teacher at a private school for girls in New England. However, he is falsely accused of committing statutory rape with one of his students. Following his lawyer's advice, he accepts a plea bargain for a lesser charge and is sentenced to eight months in prison. Jack's mother refuses to believe his claims of innocence and abandons him.After serving his sentence, Jack wants to have a fresh start, which he finds when he wanders into a diner in Salem Falls, New Hampshire. Without disclosing his past, he is hired as a dishwasher. He begins a romantic relationship with Addie Peabody, the woman who operates the diner with her father, Roy. At the time, she is still mourning the death of her young daughter, Chloe, who died from bacterial meningitis at age six. Under law, he is required to register with the local police as a convicted sex offender. As this is public record, the entire town becomes aware of his past. However, Addie does not change her attitude toward him.Simultaneously, the novel focuses on local teenage girls who experiment with Wicca: disturbed Gillian, the daughter of Amos Duncan a prominent businessman; Chelsea; Whitney; and Meg. One night, after a fight with Addie, Jack accidentally stumbles upon them in the woods while they are celebrating the Wiccan holiday of Beltane. He is accused of sexually assaulting Gillian. Due to his intoxicated state at the time, he is unable to recall exactly where he was that night.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flame_and_the_Flower"title="The Flame and the Flower">
The novel is set at the turn of the 19th century. After Heather Simmons, a penniless orphan, kills a man named William Court who was attempting to rape her, she flees the scene. Near the London dockside, two men, who mistake her for a prostitute, seize her and escort her onto a ship. Heather believes she has been arrested for murder. Unaware of the misconceptions on both sides, the captain of the ship, Brandon Birmingham, rapes Heather. When he does so, he ruptures her hymen and realizes she was a virgin and, therefore, probably not a prostitute. Heather cries herself to sleep and a confused Brandon sleeps next to her. The next morning Heather wakes up and Brandon, awakened by her movement, rapes her a second time. Afterwards, when Brandon asks her why she would sell her virginity on the streets, she tearfully tells him that she was merely lost. Afraid that Heather will tell others what he has done, Brandon tries to bribe Heather by offering to set her up in an affluent house as his mistress. She angrily declines. An angry Brandon then takes Heather hostage and rapes her a third time. Afterwards Heather goes back to sleep. When she awakens again she is allowed to bathe and has breakfast with Brandon. Brandon then attempts to rape her a fourth time but is interrupted when his crewman calls him away on business. When Brandon leaves the ship, Heather manages to escape his ship and flees back home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_Alien_(Sawyer_novel)"title="Illegal Alien (Sawyer novel)">
An alien spacecraft arrives on Earth, contact is established, and the two peoples begin to learn about each other. Frank Nobilio, Science Advisor to the American president, and Cletus Calhoun (a Tennessee hillbilly popularizer of science, somewhat like Carl Sagan), are the two main ambassadors to the aliens (who call themselves Tosoks). The Tosoks explain that their ship was damaged in the Kuiper belt (during initial attempted repairs, one of the eight Tosoks died), and they are assured that humans can provide or build the tools necessary to fix it. This will take about two years. Things go well for over a year, with the Tosoks taking a tour of the major civilized countries of Earth, during which they view and are impressed by the August 11, 1999, total solar eclipse.Then Cletus Calhoun is found dead, under circumstances that place one of the aliens, Hask, under suspicion. Calhoun bled to death when his leg was completely severed with a tool unknown to human forensic pathologists; also, his jaw, one eye, and his appendix have been removed and are never found. Hask appears while the police are investigating and, in the Tosok fashion, has shed his skin; it is speculated that he did so in order to hide any tell-tale blood splatters. Hask is arrested for murder, and the remainder of the novel concerns Hask's trial in a Los Angeles, California court.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Dog_on_Earth"title="The Last Dog on Earth">
Logan Moore is a troubled 14-year-old boy living with his mother Marianne and stepfather Robert in Newburg, Oregon. Logan does not get along well with Robert or his mother, and holds a grudge against his biological father for leaving when he was young. After an incident at a barbecue, Robert decides to purchase a Labrador Retriever in order to teach Logan responsibility. Eager to rebel against his stepfather, Logan convinces his mother to adopt a dog from an animal shelter. He plans to choose an ugly dog and teach it destructive behavior. At the shelter, Logan encounters a young female mutt who immediately takes a liking to him. Logan adopts the dog and names her Jack after Robert's former dog.Meanwhile, a new prion disease named Psychotic Outburst Syndrome (or POS) is affecting dogs, causing friendly pets to become violent. Officials struggle to control the disease and immediately terminate any dogs that catch it. Humans soon begin to contract the disease.Logan quickly bonds with Jack and values her as his only friend. After getting into trouble while attempting to protect her, Logan is sent to boot camp while Jack remains at home. Both he and Jack manage to escape, find each other, and begin traveling together. During their journey, they encounter another dog called White Paws: Jack's brother who has become infected with POS. White Paws attacks Jack and severely wounds her before dying. Logan worries that Jack may have contracted the disease through contact with White Paws. The pair continue their journey until they reach the town of Dayville. Logan faintly remembers that his biological father lives in the town and decides to find his father and confront him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_I_Was_Young_in_the_Mountains"title="When I Was Young in the Mountains">
The book tells the story of the main character's youth in West Virginia, in the Appalachian Mountains. The book is based on Rylant's real life growing up in West Virginia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_of_the_Mists"title="Vampire of the Mists">
The story concerns Jander Sunstar, an elf vampire who, despite his affliction, attempts to remain as good as possible. On a trip to Waterdeep to drink the blood of patients of a mental hospital there, Jander falls in love with an inmate who introduces herself as Anna. For about one hundred years the immortal vampire visits Anna regularly, and Anna seems to be similarly ageless. Anna begins to become ill, and Jander, afraid of losing her, tries to turn her into a vampire. Anna refuses. In her last moments of life, when Jander asks her what ruined her mind, she answers "Barovia."In a rage, Jander kills every last occupant of the asylum, and is transported to the Demiplane of Dread. There, he has his fortune told by a Vistani gypsy before befriending Count Strahd Von Zarovich. The predictions made by the fortune-teller all prove to be true later in the book, sometimes in multiple ways. After a very long period of time spent in Barovia, Jander discovers that the woman he knew as Anna was in truth Tatyana, wife of Strahd's Brother, Sergei, and the woman who drove Strahd to murder his own family. She escaped the castle as it entered the demiplane, but lost her mind in the process. Shocked, Jander bands together with a local cleric and a young thief, to the end of killing Strahd. They fail, though the severe damage they inflict on him forces him into an extended healing cycle thereby limiting the speed with which he increased in power as a spell-caster. To that end, Jander somewhat succeeded, at least for the time being, and more so prevented Strahd further access to any more of his own knowledge when he walks into the sunlight for his final death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firecrackers._A_Realistic_Novel"title="Firecrackers. A Realistic Novel">
During 1924, a blasé coterie of pleasure-seeking sophisticates are inordinately excited by a handsome and athletic newcomer to their social circle, Gunnar O'Grady, "a youth with the appearance of a Greek Adonis." Alternately seeking and avoiding their attentions, this enigmatic individual drifts through a series of menial vocations including furnace repairman, florist, waiter, and acrobat.O'Grady becomes an object of sexual fascination to many within the circle, including a precocious young girl, a thrill-seeking wife, and a bored husband. Tensions escalate as various persons within the coterie vie for O'Grady's companionship, and O'Grady finds his own desires stymied.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Priory_Murders"title="The White Priory Murders">
Marcia Tait is a Hollywood star who has come to England to make a historical film. She is found beaten to death in the Queen's Mirror pavilion, the 17th-century trysting place of King Charles II and his mistresses. The problem is particularly puzzling because the pavilion is surrounded by newfallen snow, with only one set of footprints leading to it and none leading away. The suspects include a man who thought he was marrying her — and her husband, whose marriage was unknown to all.Sir Henry Merrivale lends a hand to Inspector Masters in the investigation, but is too late to stop the second murder before Merrivale solves the case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_Things_(novel)"title="Transparent Things (novel)">
This short novel tells the story of Hugh Person, a young American editor, and the memory of his four trips to a small village in Switzerland over the course of nearly two decades.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Armourer's_House"title="The Armourer's House">
The story revolves around a 10-year-old girl named Tamsyn, who has been orphaned and is being raised by her uncle, a shipowner in Bideford. She is brought to live in London by another uncle, who works as a swordsmith, or armourer, being the owner of the house after which the novel is titled.Tamsyn is a dark-complected girl, contrasting with the entirely red headed family which has taken her in; showing Sutcliff's reoccurring themes of outsiders, belonging, red heads, and light vs. dark. She is homesick for her West Country life, but slowly adapts to London city life and being part of a larger family. Through the novel she witnesses Morris dancers on May Day; visits the market in Cheapside, the Billingsgate Fish Market, and the Royal Dockyard in Deptford. She watches King Henry VIII and his current queen Anne Boleyn proceed up the Thames in his royal barge, transiting from his palace in Greenwich to his palace in Westminster. The mother of the house tells them the tale of Tam Lin on Halloween, which parallels the theme of a girl who struggles to pursue her dreams.She watches tall ships at the docks, consistently showing a strong interest in sailing, which she shares with one of the Armourer's sons, Piers. Both Piers and Tamsyn dream of sailing away and exploring the word, adventuring with the backdrop of the Age of Exploration. Piers is restrained by being bound as an apprentice to his father, while Tamsyn is restrained by being a girl.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Lilacs"title="Under the Lilacs">
Bab and Betty, two little girls, are having a tea party with their dolls when an unknown dog appears and steals their cake. The girls find the dog, Sancho, along with his owner Ben Brown, a run-away from the circus who is hiding in their play barn in a carriage. They discover that Ben is a horse master and when he is taken in by the Moss', they get him a job on a neighboring farm. It is there that he can work with horses and drive cows. Ben eventually finds out that his father, who he loved dearly, was dead. A neighbor, Miss Celia, helps him through his grief and he moves in with her and her brother Thornton who is fourteen. He has a job, and a family, and an opportunity for education. Ben has a wonderful life now, but his life in the circus was full of adventure and excitement which is a struggle for Ben. Many adventures and summer-happenings go on in Celia's house, as Ben slowly finds his place among his friends. Sancho gets lost and later is found by Betty with his tail cut off. Sancho's temper is therefore affected forever prompting him to be unfriendly to tramps and strangers, Ben is accused of stealing, Miss Celia gets hurt and Ben takes a wild ride on her horse, Lita. They have an archery competition, where Ben emerges as the winner almost beaten by Bab. In the end Ben's father is revealed to be alive and he comes home. There they both settle down.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life's_Lottery"title="Life's Lottery">
"Life's Lottery" opens speculating on the question of free will and predestination. The reader is invited to decide for themselves which philosophy to follow in reading the book and then is presented with Keith's birth in England on October 4, 1959. Keith is raised in England by a successful banker and has, as the author points out, "been dealt a better hand than many". The boy is spoiled by his parents and enters primary school shy and timid. The book offers its first choice on the first day, when Keith is confronted and teased by a gang. The consequences of the choice – "Napoleon Solo or Illya Kuryakin?" – set Keith on a path that determines his lifelong friends, enemies, and opportunities.Following this key point, the plot paths diverge wildly, and range from Keith winning the lottery, becoming a distinguished novelist, making a bomb threat, having an incestuous affair, committing a murder, and making a deal with the Devil.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Jack"title="Mississippi Jack">
In "Mississippi Jack", the fifth installment in the Bloody Jack series, the intrepid Jacky Faber, having once again eluded British authorities, heads west, hoping that no one will recognize her in the wilds of America. There she tricks the tall-tale hero Mike Fink out of his flatboat, equips it as a floating casino-showboat, and heads south to New Orleans, battling murderous bandits, British soldiers, and other scoundrels along the way.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_of_the_Heart"title="Desert of the Heart">
Evelyn Hall is an English professor from the University of California. She arrives in Reno to establish a six-week residency to attain a quick divorce, which Nevada was known for at that time. After being married for 15 years, she is overwhelmed with guilt for feeling as if she is ruining her husband's mental health. While in Reno, she stays in the guest home of Frances Packer with other women awaiting their divorces. Frances also lives with Walter, her 18-year-old son and her late lover's 25-year-old daughter, Ann Childs. Evelyn and Ann are startled at how alike they are in appearance, despite their 15-year age difference.Ann works as a change operator at a local casino and as a relatively successful cartoonist. Ann is revealed to reject significant relationships in her life, and although she is romantic with both men and women, she refuses to become attached to anyone. She is ending a relationship with her boss, Bill, that was significant enough to make her friends believe they were to be married. Ann's best friend is Silver, who works with her at the casino as a dealer, and is also a sometime lover.Evelyn and Ann begin a friendship that evolves into a romantic relationship in which Evelyn must deal with her guilt after being asked by her husband's doctor to divorce him for his own good. Despite the symptoms of his deep and chronic depression, Evelyn takes the responsibility for the failure of the marriage and his depression upon herself, but after divulging how caustic she is to Ann, she is relieved to realize that the responsibility is not hers to take. Ann must subsequently deal with committing to a relationship wholeheartedly. Being employed by the casino, she is rather well-paid, but is stifled within the atmosphere there, though she continues to work despite her abilities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat_and_the_King"title="The Cat and the King">
Mixing fact and fiction, the Duc de Saint-Simon recounts three episodes in which he and his wife involve themselves in the notorious schemings of King Louis XIV's Versailles. Throughout, the famous courtier's attitudes toward the King and court shift. In the first story, the young Duc, appalled at the King's calculating matches of his illegitimate offspring with prominent aristocrats, works to subvert the wedding of one of Louis' nephews, but is thwarted when his adversaries threaten to expose the homosexuality of both the King's brother and the narrator's patron, the Prince de Conti. In the second, Saint-Simon is maneuvered into acting as messenger between Conti (who is briefly King of Poland in 1697) and Conti's mistress, Madame la Duchesse. In this the Duc is subverted by his own wife's schemings. Finally, in later years, rumors of incest are deployed by both sides in a struggle to determine which of two ill-pedigreed "princesses" will be matched with one of the King's legitimate grandsons. The high-minded Saint-Simon emerges from these intrigues disillusioned ("We had all...been made part of the Versailles system"), but resolves (after the King's death) to record the monarch's "great style" and quest for glory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Luggage_(adventure_book)"title="Lost Luggage (adventure book)">
When the TARDIS goes missing in a busy spaceport, the Doctor and you must race against time and across space to find it, before the Doctor's incredible spaceship is lost forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_Circus_(novel)"title="Soul Circus (novel)">
The novel follows private investigators Derek Strange and Terry Quinn as they work on several cases in Washington DC. Strange's main case is to provide evidence for the defense lawyers of drug lord Granville Oliver. Two secondary cases involve the disappearance of women.Strange is working on the defence of Granville Oliver. Oliver has been charged with the murder of his uncle and faces the death penalty. Strange is trying to locate Devra Stokes who can discredit the testimony of the prosecution's witness Phillip Wood. He learns that Stokes is working in a beauty salon paid for by Wood's successor Horace McKinley. She refuses to testify. Quinn is working on a separate case for his girlfriend. He believes a group of young men have the information he needs but is unable to get them to talk to him.Dewayne Durham and Horace McKinley are considering eliminating one another's organizations to cut down on competition. McKinley's enforcers James and Jeremy Coates perform a drive-by shooting on Jerome Long and Alante Jones as they deal drugs for Durham. Durham is forced to respond and instructs Long to kill the Coates brothers. McKinley learns that Stokes talked to Strange and tries to intimidate her by sexually assaulting her. Stokes is enraged by his actions and decides to testify.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imperial_Presidency"title="The Imperial Presidency">
"The Imperial Presidency" examines changes in the extent of executive power, particularly in the context of war, from the establishment of the United States through the presidency of Richard Nixon. It discusses how the applications of the Constitutional authority to declare war given to Congress and the Constitutional authority to conduct foreign policy and act as commander-in-chief given to the president have evolved since the government's inception, creating a dangerous imbalance in the separation of powers. The book argues that throughout US history, the office of the president gradually appropriated authority exceeding that which was granted to the presidency by the Constitution, resulting in a concurrent erosion in congressional authority. "The Imperial Presidency" identifies a pattern of presidents during critical points in history setting policies and taking actions that were arguably the province of Congress, to be followed by a return to "normalcy" when the crisis had passed. Schlesinger presents James K. Polk's deployment of troops to the disputed area between Texas and Mexico, leading to the Mexican–American War, as the first example of a president exploiting the ambiguity of war-making powers in the Constitution. Another example he gives is Abraham Lincoln and his executive orders and actions during the American Civil War, such as the suspension of habeas corpus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(Bova_novel)"title="Mercury (Bova novel)">
Mance was the chief visionary and engineer behind the skytower, a super space elevator which ran from Ecuador all the way into low Earth orbit. When religious fundamentalists and agents of the scheming Yamagata Corporation sabotage the skytower, however, millions are killed; Mance is faced with his own guilt for the tragedy and sees himself as ostensibly responsible. He is arrested and put on trial. Things turn out even worse for Mance when his friends, bioengineer Victor Molina and Rev. Elliott Danvers, abandon him, and he is exiled to a life of hard work and misery in the Asteroid Belt, far from his beloved wife Lara—upon whom the double-crossing Victor Molina had always harbored designs. For a time, he escapes his fate in the Belt by being inducted into the crew of an ore hauler, where for a while he contemplates his life and comes to the conclusion that he was set up.Ultimately he falls for the captain's beautiful young daughter Addie. When the same forces responsible for the destruction of the skytower destroy the freighter, Mance manages to survive by having been outside, tethered to the ship as punishment from the captain for having been caught with his daughter. Rescued against all odds, Mance is brought to the moon to recuperate, where he is able to assume the identity of the ship's late first officer, Dante Alexios, by undergoing extensive nano reconstruction to make him appear outwardly identical to Dante Alexios.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hercules_Text"title="The Hercules Text">
The story emphasizes the various characters' reactions to the event, according to their specific scientific backgrounds. Examples include a priest's speculations on the implications for religion, a psychologist's theorizing about the aliens' psyches, the scientists' consideration of the implications of the new knowledge for their own specialties, and the president's concern for the implications for national defense.The novel is set in an ongoing Cold War scenario. Unlike typical first contact stories, there is no dialogue between the senders of the message and mankind, as the received radio signals have traveled through space for one and a half million years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Wolfings"title="The House of the Wolfings">
"The House of the Wolfings" is a romantically reconstructed portrait of the lives of the Germanic Gothic tribes, written in an archaic style and incorporating a large amount of poetry. Morris combines his own idealistic views with what was actually known at the time of his subjects' folkways and language. He portrays them as simple and hardworking, galvanized into heroic action to defend their families and liberty by the attacks of imperial Rome.Morris's Goths inhabit an area called the Mark on a river in the forest of Mirkwood, divided into the Upper-mark, the Mid-mark and the Nether-mark. They worship their gods Odin and Tyr by sacrificing horses, and rely on seers who foretell the future and serve as psychic news-gatherers.The men of the Mark choose two War Dukes to lead them against their enemies, one each from the House of the Wolfings and the House of the Laxings. The Wolfing war leader is Thiodolf, a man of mysterious and perhaps divine antecedents, whose ability to lead is threatened by his possession of a magnificent dwarf-made mail-shirt which, unknown to him, is cursed. He is supported by his lover the Wood Sun and their daughter the Hall Sun, who are related to the gods.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven_Eyes"title="Heaven Eyes">
The story focuses on three children who run away from their orphanage and are rescued by Heaven Eyes, a strange, innocent child with webbed hands and feet. The sole survivor of a shipwreck, Heaven Eyes was rescued by the elderly caretaker of a gigantic old printing press and storage building. He raises her lovingly and she calls him her Grandpa
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Pavement"title="Angel Pavement">
The prologue depicts the arrival in London of Mr Golspie, who has come by steamship from an unnamed Baltic country. He discusses his immediate plans with the crew.The first chapter contains a detailed description of a fictional street in the EC postcode area called Angel Pavement, and the employees at Twigg &amp; Dersingham. Business has not been good, and Mr Dersingham is trying to decide whom to sack. Mr Golspie arrives with a dispatch case containing a sample book of veneers and inlays, and asks to see Mr Dersingham. After a short delay, he is admitted to Mr Dersingham's office, and there is a long discussion, after which both men leave mysteriously. Mr Smeeth is baffled, especially when Mr Dersingham rings up and tells him to sack their senior traveller, Mr Goath.The second chapter introduces the tobacconist T. Benenden, and shows Mr Smeeth's family and home life. The next morning, Dersingham still has not returned to the office, and during lunch Mr Smeeth hears an unpleasant story about the failure of an umbrella firm called Claridge &amp; Molton. He wonders if Mr Dersingham's absence indicates that they are all about to lose their jobs. But at five, Mr Dersingham returns and informs Mr Smeeth that the newcomer has offered a cheap supply of veneers from the Baltic, and their immediate future is assured. The next evening, Mr Golspie takes Mr Smeeth out for a drink at the "White Horse", and tells him he ought to ask for a rise.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mad_King"title="The Mad King">
Set in the fictional European kingdom of Lutha, the protagonist is a young American named Barney Custer, of Beatrice, Nebraska, who is the son of an American farmer and a runaway Luthan princess, Victoria Rubinroth. Unaware of his royal blood, much less that he is a dead ringer for his relative Leopold, the current king of Lutha, Barney visits Lutha on the eve of the First World War to see for himself his mother's native land. As he arrives in Lutha, King Leopold has just escaped from his ten years' imprisonment at the hands of his scheming uncle, Prince Peter of Blentz. Much to his own and everyone else's confusion, Barney is naturally mistaken for the king, leading to numerous complications.Barney meets and falls in love with Princess Emma Von Der Tann, Leopold's promised bride, and then becomes intimately involved in Luthan affairs, working to help the king and ultimately allowing himself to be proclaimed as king while impersonating Leopold to prevent Prince Peter from seizing the throne. He finally succeeds in foiling Peter's plans to become king himself by rescuing and fighting for the real king. Unfortunately, after his coronation, King Leopold discovers the shared love between Barney and Princess Emma, and Barney is forced to leave Lutha, mimicking the flight of his father years earlier, though his father left with a princess—Barney has only a soldier. Thus ends part one.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grass-Cutting_Sword"title="The Grass-Cutting Sword">
The tale is a postmodern interpretation of the Japanese folk-tale of "Ame-no-Murakumo-no-Tsurugi" ("Heaven's Cloud-Gathering Sword"), which is taken from the collection of folk-lore in the "Kojiki". The action shifts between the journey of the storm-god Susanoo who has been banished to earth in human form by his sister, the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, as he attempts to slay the eight-headed serpent Yamata-no-Orochi. Valente also portrays the serpent's side of the story with a twist; the tale told by Orochi is intercut or added to by the seven maidens who have been sacrificed to the monster.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_God"title="Arrow of God">
The novel is set amongst the villages of the Igbo people in colonial Nigeria during the 1920s. Ezeulu is the chief priest of the god "Ulu", worshipped by the six villages of Umuaro. The book begins with Ezeulu and Umuaro fighting against a nearby village, Okperi. The conflict is abruptly resolved when T. K. Winterbottom, the British colonial overseer, intervenes.After the conflict, an indigenous African Christian missionary, John Goodcountry, arrives in Umuaro. Goodcountry begins to tell the villages tales of Nigerians in the Niger Delta who abandoned (and battled) their traditional "bad customs" in favour of Christianity.Ezeulu is called away from his village by Winterbottom and is invited to become a part of the colonial administration, a policy known as indirect rule. Ezeulu refuses to be a "white man's chief" and is thrown in prison. In Umuaro, the people cannot harvest the yams until Ezeulu has called the New Yam Feast to give thanks to Ulu. When Ezeulu returns from prison, he refuses to call the feast despite being implored by other important men in the village to compromise. Ezeulu reasons to the people and to himself that it is not his will but Ulu's; Ezeulu believes himself to be half spirit and half man. The yams begin to rot in the field, and a famine ensues for which the village blames Ezeulu. Seeing this as an opportunity, John Goodcountry proposes that the village offer thanks to the Christian God instead and they may harvest what remains of their crops with "immunity".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_of_the_People"title="A Man of the People">
"A Man of the People" is a first-person account of Odili, a school teacher in a fictional country closely resembling post-colonial Nigeria. Odili receives an invitation from his former teacher, Chief Nanga, who is now the powerful but corrupt Minister of Culture. As Minister, Nanga's job is to protect the traditions of his country especially when he is known as "A Man of the People". Instead, his position is used to increase his personal wealth and power that proves particularly alluring to Odili's girlfriend; she cheats on him with the minister. Seeking revenge, Odili begins to pursue the minister's fiancee.Odili agrees to lead an opposition party in the face of both bribes and violent threats. Then there is a military coup.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Milton_Lumky_Territory"title="In Milton Lumky Territory">
It's 1958 and Bruce Stevens is a buyer for a national warehouse chain who passes through his hometown of Montario, Idaho whilst en route to Boise on business. His reason involves hormones more than nostalgia, however, as a one-time girlfriend named Peg lives there now. It is at a party at her place where he meets, and quickly falls into a relationship with, a strangely familiar older woman who turns out to be one of his former, and least favorite, elementary school teachers, Susan Faine. She simultaneously hires him on as manager of her typewriter shop. Travelling salesman Milton Lumky informs Bruce of a warehouse full of imported, Japanese-made surplus typewriters, and so Stevens drives to Seattle to see this potential bounty for himself. He belatedly discovers that the typewriters all have Spanish language keyboards, and so he tries to pass these hot potatoes down along the line to his former warehouse employer. He reveals his nefarious intentions to Susan, who passes the information onto the warehouse chain which nevertheless decides to take them off his hands at a fair but unprofitable price for Bruce. He then enters a period of waffling and indecision, ultimately deciding to try altering all of the machines himself and selling them at the shop. Returning to Boise he informs Susan of his decision and sets to work, only to return the next morning to find that Susan has fired him and all of the typewriters are being loaded into a truck by one of his former co-workers at the warehouse chain. Distraught by this turn of events he rents a room and recalls one of his first encounters with Susan as his fifth grade teacher which evolves into a day dream about the pair opening up shop in Montario and ultimately moving to Denver following the purchase of an expanded facility there and living happily ever after.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Whose_Teeth_Were_All_Exactly_Alike"title="The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike">
Sometime between 1958 and 1962, Leo Runcible, a liberal Jew, is working in the real estate field. On learning that Walt Dombrosio, Leo's neighbor, has had a Black visitor to his house in a "lily-white" suburb of Marin County, California, potential purchasers interrogate Runcible about the matter and ultimately incur his wrath over their narrow-minded bigotry. He thereby fails to close the deal and forfeits their friendship and a precious commission as well.But according to Leo's tortured logic it is Walt who's at fault for this unforeseen little debacle. So in retaliation Runcible opportunistically reports Dombrosio's later episode of drunk driving, leading to the loss of the latter's motor vehicle operator's license for a period of six months.Walt's wife Sherry then drives him to and from work every day, eventually landing a job working alongside her husband. Walt, however, being as he is an insecure, misogynistic, manipulating headcase, quits his own position over this incident and continues to fume over it as the weeks and months roll by. He eventually humiliates and manhandles his wife in front of their neighbors as a prelude to forcefully impregnating her with an unwanted child which she unsuccessfully threatens to abort.At the same time, Runcible has found what he believes to be Neanderthal remains in Carquinez, Marin County, and envisages rising property prices due to incipient archaeological interest and the avalanche of media coverage that naturally follows. As it turns out, however, Dombrosio is the culprit who modified and planted the modern human remains there to begin with. They are a legacy of the local 'chuppers' who developed facial, cranial and spinal deformations as a supposed result of the pollution of the local water supply.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humpty_Dumpty_in_Oakland"title="Humpty Dumpty in Oakland">
In 1960, 58-year-old Jim Fergesson decides to sell his Oakland-based auto repair business and retire. This threatens to greatly inconvenience his business tenant, used car salesman Al Miller, who rents a lot from Fergesson to sell his battered but superficially reconditioned old jalopies. Chris Harmon, an entrepreneur, advises Fergesson to invest in a new super-garage located in Marin Country Gardens. Jim takes a fall in the mud and has a minor heart attack during a visit to the property to personally verify its existence. Miller is convinced that Harmon is corrupt and makes an amateurish attempt at blackmailing him over his alleged (then-illegal) sale of salacious audio recordings. At the same time Al enters employment with Harmon as a curiously unqualified salesman of Classical Music. This, as it turns out, was an innocent administrative error. Al's actual assignment now involves the mass marketing of Barbershop Music. He sees conspiracies, machinations and double-dealings where there are none and strives mightily, but ultimately fails, to disrupt the final contract-signing between Fergesson and Harmon by playing on old Jim's paranoia. The strain of it all takes its toll on a recently injured, weakened, ailing Fergesson and he dies later that night at home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_and_the_Glimmung"title="Nick and the Glimmung">
Nick, his family, and cat Horace leave Earth in 1992, because pet ownership has been criminalised on that world. Arriving at their new home, Plowman's Planet, the family encounter a series of mishaps at the hands of the planet's varied indigenous inhabitants. A wub carries their luggage, but eats a map, while werjes attack Horace, but their family befriend the aliens, leading to a gift, which turns out to be a history of Plowman's Planet itself. They make the acquaintance of the non-indigenous alien Glimmung, who secures travel for them in return for his lost history of their adopted world. The Graham family encounter duplicates of themselves, and trobes steal Horace. Nick tries to find his pet, but locates their driver, slain in a car accident, and still possessing the book. Nick has it copied, wounding the Glimmung, who rediscovers it. Nick then finds Horace with a Nick duplicate, and the cat chooses his original owner over the simulacrum.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wintle's_Wonders"title="Wintle's Wonders">
As the book begins, Rachel Lennox and her adopted sister Hilary are living with Rachel's mother. Rachel's father, George Lennox, was a budding film star, but died just as his career was taking off, when the children were seven. As a result, the family is not well off; they must take in boarders to make ends meet. Hilary's mother was a dancer, and so Rachel and her mother are determined that Hilary will also become a ballerina. Hilary does have a talent for ballet, but is not at all interested in it.Their mother dies when the girls are ten, just before Hilary's audition for the Royal Ballet School, and the girls go to live with their Uncle Tom (their father's brother), his wife Cora Wintle, and their daughter, Dulcie. Aunt Cora runs a dancing school to teach girls how to perform in troupes for pantomimes, musicals and reviews; the troupes are referred to as "Mrs Wintle's Little Wonders". Dulcie, who is almost a year older than Rachel and Hilary, is very attractive and a talented dancer, but also very spoiled by her mother.Mrs Wintle originally intends to take only Rachel, as she is a blood relative, but she decides to keep Hilary also, when she realises how talented a dancer Hilary is. Rachel is horrified by the type of dancing taught at Mrs Wintle's school, which includes tap, musical comedy, and acrobatics, and remains determined that Hilary will continue with her ballet. Rachel must also train as a Little Wonder, and though she works hard, she has no talent for the dancing required of the "Wonders". However she does excel in ordinary lessons, and at their additional elocution and acting lessons, which puts her in competition with her cousin Dulcie without it coming to light for most of the book. Mrs Storm, their tutor, decides to teach Rachel extra elocution, because it makes her happy. Hilary continues dancing and throughout the book enjoys acrobatics in particular. Although Rachel bribes her with money to finish ballet, which seems to work Hilary also continues to excel at acrobatics. This continually makes Rachel upset.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Upon_a_Time_in_the_North"title="Once Upon a Time in the North">
Lee Scoresby, a 24-year-old young Texan aeronaut, and his dæmon, the jackrabbit Hester, make a rough landing in Novy Odense, a harbour town on an island in the White Sea, in Muscovy. After paying for the storage of their balloon, Lee and Hester make their way into town, where Lee notes with surprise the presence of bears: some working, some just loitering about. He enters a bar to get something to eat and drink, and falls into conversation with a local journalist, Oskar Siggurdson, who explains that an election for Mayor of Novy Odense will take place later in the week. Siggurdson tells Lee that the overwhelming favourite — not the incumbent mayor, but a man called Ivan Dimitrovich Poliakov — has as a central policy a campaign to deal with the bears which hang around the town. Oskar mentions that the bears, once a proud race, now rank as "worthless vagrants". Lee learns with amazement that these bears are intelligent, can speak, and make and wear their own armour, though laws make it illegal for the bears to wear their armour in Novy Odense. At this point Lee intervenes in a conflict elsewhere in the bar, preventing the barkeeper from beating a drunk Dutch captain called van Breda, who has a ship tied up in the harbour but does not have permission to load his cargo and leave. Lee and van Breda get thrown out of the bar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torchlight_to_Valhalla"title="Torchlight to Valhalla">
Morgen Teutenberg is an introverted 21-year-old woman nursing her dying father Fritz, who is a painter. She is developing a novel with her father's assistance. Out walking one day, she meets a very handsome young man, Royal St. Gabriel, a pianist who is quite taken with her. Royal pursues her romantically despite Morgen's lack of enthusiasm. Fritz dies very soon after Morgen meets Royal, and she is devastated by his loss and nonplussed by Royal's attention, not seeming to welcome it, but flattered by his gentlemanly manners and thoughtfulness. He buys her a radio and has it delivered to her house with a letter telling her when to tune in to a station. When she does, she hears a composition he has written for her that she imagines describes her perfectly. For five months they have a friendship characterized by Royal's unabashed love for Morgen, and her not sure how to tell him that she is grateful for his friendship, but does not want to pursue anything deeper with him.On Christmas Eve, overwhelmed with missing her father again, she turns to Royal and they sleep together. Royal is overcome with gratitude, not believing she has given herself to him at last, but Morgen does not enjoy the experience and realizes she went to him out of loneliness. She tells him this and he is hurt by it. He travels frequently and leaves her again, unsure of how to reach her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_the_Living_(novel)"title="Land of the Living (novel)">
One day, Abbie Deveraux wakes up in the dark to find she has been kidnapped and tied to a chair. She can't remember how she got there, all she knows is her loved ones may be looking for her and she wants to escape this prison. She manages to escape. Going back to her friends and boyfriend she realises that her last few days with them had been strange. Ending her relationship with her boyfriend and quitting her job, she couldn't remember any of this, not even the fact that she had been seeing someone else. As well as this her friends don't believe her kidnapping and being tied up. In a fear that he knows everything about her, where she lives, where she goes, she wants to trace back her steps of what she had done the days before she had disappeared. In an attempt for him not to find her, she changes her image and style. But the mysterious incident continues to haunt her, she can't think of anything else other than getting the man who had tormented her and to find the other girls that he mentioned he had killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragon's_Teeth"title="The Dragon's Teeth">
An eccentric millionaire, Cadmus Cole, visits the newly founded offices of "Ellery Queen, Confidential Investigations", in a rare incidence of disembarkation from his yacht. The investigation company is actually the brainchild and sole responsibility of Ellery's partner, "Beau" Rummell, an established private eye. The eccentric Mr. Cole pays $1,500,000 as a retainer to hire Ellery Queen for an investigation—the details of which he refuses to divulge, saying only "You'll know when the time comes." Upon his departure, he leaves behind a well-chewed fountain pen with which he's signed the retainer cheque. Almost immediately, Ellery's appendix bursts, and Cadmus Cole is reported dead and buried at sea. Rummell, in the guise of Ellery Queen, begins to investigate both the circumstances of Cole's death and his heirs; he soon meets two beautiful young women and the case becomes complicated by romance and the appearance of a claimant under the will. When the claimant is murdered, and Rummell married to one of the beauties, the real Ellery Queen must take a hand and solve the case, using the vital clue of the chewed fountain pen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winter_of_Frankie_Machine"title="The Winter of Frankie Machine">
Frank Machianno, a retired San Diego mafia hitman, cut his ties with the Mafia many years ago. However, one day, his past catches up with him as the boss of Los Angeles family calls in for a past favor. Frank must oversee a meeting between the Detroit Combination and the Los Angeles crime family. Unfortunately, the meeting is revealed to be a "set-up", a scheme to kill Frankie. Someone from Frank's past wants him dead, and Frank has to find out why, how, and when. The problem is that the list of candidates is sizable, and Frankie is rapidly running out of time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calamity_Town"title="Calamity Town">
Ellery Queen moves into the small town of Wrightsville, somewhere in New England, in order to get some peace and quiet so that he can write a book. As a result of renting a furnished house, he becomes peripherally involved in the story of Jim Haight and Nora Wright. Nora's father is president of the Wrightsville National bank, "oldest family in town", and when the head cashier Jim Haight became engaged to his daughter Nora, he built and furnished a house for them as a wedding present. That was three years ago—the day before the wedding, Jim Haight disappeared, the wedding was called off, and the jinxed house became known as "Calamity House". Ellery rents it, just before the return of Jim Haight, and the wedding is soon on again. Ellery finds some evidence that Jim is planning to poison Nora and, after the wedding, she does display some symptoms of arsenic poisoning. But it is Jim's sister Rosemary who dies after drinking a poisoned cocktail. Jim is tried for the murder and it is only after some startling and tragic events that Ellery reveals the identity of the murderer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Was_an_Old_Woman_(novel)"title="There Was an Old Woman (novel)">
Mrs. Cornelia Potts is the elderly matriarch of the Potts family, and their large fortune was earned by the manufacture of shoes, so when a murder mystery takes place at their New York estate, it's not surprising that the newspapers refer frequently to "the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe". Cornelia has had two husbands—one deceased, one living in the household—and three children by each. Her children by her first husband are all extremely eccentric. Thurlow Potts engages in dozens of lawsuits to protect the family honor; Louella believes herself to be a great chemist and inventor, a sentiment shared by no one else; and Horatio, an adult, is determined to live the lifestyle of a child of six. By contrast, her other three children by her second husband are relatively sane—the twins Robert and Maclyn, who run the business, and the beautiful Sheila. Thurlow's lawyer Charley Paxton is engaged to Sheila and invites Ellery Queen to dinner at the Potts mansion to meet the family. Thurlow challenges Robert to a duel, using revolvers from which the bullets have been carefully extracted but, when the duel is fought, Robert is shot dead because the bullets have been returned to the gun. Next, his twin Maclyn is shot in his bed, and the body is found with whip marks on his face next to a dish of broth. As Ellery postulates that the murders are somehow tied to the nursery rhyme, the next death is that of the Old Woman herself. She dies of heart failure and leaves behind a confession to the first two murders. It is only at the marriage of Charley and Sheila that Ellery finally realizes the truth of the bizarre events and unmasks the real criminal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murderer_Is_a_Fox"title="The Murderer Is a Fox">
Ellery Queen investigates a murder that took place a number of years ago and has blighted the present-day lives of members of the Fox family. For the twelve years following the death of Davy's mother Jessica, and the trial of his father, Davy Fox has suffered inner torture. Davy knew he loved his wife ... as well as he knew he was going to kill her. He didn't know just when it was going to happen – but when a man is born to be a murderer, it's only a matter of time before he claims his birthright. Love turns out to be a matter of life and death – and it's up to Ellery Queen to make the choice!"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Days'_Wonder"title="Ten Days' Wonder">
Howard Van Horn, son of millionaire Diedrich Van Horn, comes to Ellery Queen with the request that Ellery investigate what Howard has been doing during a recent bout with amnesia. The trail leads to the small New England town of Wrightsville and what seems to be a love triangle with Howard's stepmother, the beautiful young Sally, from the "wrong side of the tracks" in class-conscious Wrightsville. A series of small and unusual crimes over the next nine days seem to be committed by Howard during amnesiac blackouts, and Ellery Queen suddenly realizes the bizarre pattern that underpins the series of crimes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_of_Many_Tails"title="Cat of Many Tails">
A strangler is killing Manhattanites, seemingly at random. The only common thread is the unusual silk cords that are used for the killings; blue for men and pink for women. Other than that, the victims come from all social classes and backgrounds, ethnicities, races, neighbourhoods, etc. The city is in a panic. Ellery Queen forms together a small group of people related to some of the victims, and some consultants, and works to determine the killer's reason for selecting these particular victims. When he finally realizes the thread that connects the victims, the murderer is revealed and peace returns to the city.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double,_Double_(Ellery_Queen_novel)"title="Double, Double (Ellery Queen novel)">
Ellery Queen investigates a series of murders that seem to be related by an old rhyme: "Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, ..."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Evil"title="The Origin of Evil">
The beautiful young Laurel Hill asks Ellery Queen to investigate a series of unusual anonymous gifts that have been received by her father, Leander Hill, half of Hill and Priam, Wholesale Jewelers. Roger Priam is Leander's partner, who uses a wheelchair. The latest gift, a dead dog with a mysterious note in a silver casket around its neck, has caused Leander to have a heart attack and die. Now Roger Priam (and his sultry wife Delia, who attracts Ellery like a carnivorous plant) has started to receive unusual anonymous gifts as well. Delia's nudist son Crowe, who is Laurel's boyfriend, and a cast of servants, are also on the scene. The mysterious gifts include some poisoned tuna fish salad, a green alligator wallet, a burned book and a bundle of worthless stocks and bonds, all accompanied by cryptic and ominous notes, and it seems as though they date back to a mysterious and possibly violent incident in the past of both Hill and Priam that gets them started in the wholesale jewelry business. Ellery Queen works out the significance of the series of gifts and the link that connects the notes and arranges a dramatic surprise that traps the criminal—although the true criminal is not known until the final moments of the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_as_Rain"title="Right as Rain">
The novel follows private investigator Derek Strange as he works on several cases in Washington DC. Strange's main case is to investigate the death of Chris Wilson. Strange focuses on ex-cop Terry Quinn who shot Wilson. Both were police officers and the shooting led to Quinn's discharge from the police department. The shooting was high profile and characterised as racially motivated; Quinn is caucasian while Wilson was African American. Quinn becomes involved in the investigation himself as he is desperate to clear his conscience.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Drink_Before_the_War"title="A Drink Before the War">
Private Investigators Kenzie and Gennaro are tasked to retrieve missing documents by a trio of politicians. The trail leads them into the midst of a gang war and reveals an act of child abuse. Kenzie struggles with memories of his own past while Gennaro deals with her abusive marriage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Christopher_and_Goldilind_the_Fair"title="Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair">
Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair, set in the forested land of Oakenrealm, was Morris' reimagining and recasting of the medieval Lay of Havelock the Dane, with his displaced royal heirs Christopher and Goldilind standing in for the original story's Havelock and Goldborough.In contrast to his source, Morris emphasizes the romantic aspect of the story, giving a prominent place to the heroine's misfortunes and bringing to the forefront the love story between her and the hero; the warfare by which the hero regains his heritage is relegated to a secondary role. Also unlike both the source and most of Morris's other fantasies, there is little or no supernatural element in this version of the story.Christopher is portrayed as initially ignorant of his true identity, leading to an emotional conflict between the protagonists to reconcile their mutual love and attraction with what they believe to be the profound disparity in their social status and shame of their forced marriage. This situation is resolved when the two fall in with Jack of the Tofts, who gives refuge to Christopher after his sons rescue the hero from an assassination attempt by a servant of the usurper Earl Rolf.Jack informs Christopher of his true station and gathers together an army to help him challenge the usurper. When the hosts meet, the commander of Rolf's forces, Baron Gandolf of Brimside, challenges Jack to single combat, but Christopher claims the honor from Jack and proves his worth by defeating the opposing champion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King_Is_Dead_(novel)"title="The King Is Dead (novel)">
Munitions maker King Bendigo is the wealthiest man alive, and what the King wants, the King gets. What he wants is the investigative powers of Ellery Queen and his father, New York homicide detective Richard Queen, in order to investigate some threatening letters. Bendigo has an enormous security apparatus in place that is capable of dealing with threats that involve sovereign governments, but these threats are more personal. Ellery and his father are transported to the Bendigo private island and soon determine that the threats originate within the King's family. The King has two brothers, his assistant Abel and drunken sot Judah, and the King's beautiful wife Karla completes the list of suspects. Judah makes little secret of the fact that it is he who has originated the threats; he announces that he will shoot King at exactly midnight on June 21. At that time, King is locked in a hermetically sealed room accompanied only by his wife; Judah is under Ellery's observation and armed only with an empty gun. At midnight, Judah lifts the empty gun and fires—and King falls back, wounded with a bullet. Karla falls under suspicion but no gun is found on her person or anywhere in the room; similarly, Judah cannot have had a bullet in his possession, having been searched repeatedly. When Ellery learns that the Bendigo family is originally from his familiar haunt of Wrightsville, he travels there for an investigation of the King's early life. Upon his return to the private island, he solves the crime and dramatic and deadly effects follow in short order.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scarlet_Letters"title="The Scarlet Letters">
Dirk and Martha Lawrence are apparently not the happiest couple in New York, despite her millions of dollars and his fairly successful mystery-writing career. Martha asks for a secretive meeting to get Ellery Queen's advice because Dirk's violent jealousy is causing problems in her life—but Dirk shows up suspecting the worst and punches Ellery into unconsciousness. Dirk apologizes the next day, telling the story of how his father had killed his mother's lover, thereby causing his over-reaction. Ellery's secretary and inamorata Nikki Porter urges him to stay involved in the situation and Nikki moves in with the Lawrences to keep an eye on things (and act as Dirk's secretary on a stalled book). Nikki soon reports that Martha actually is having a series of clandestine meetings with romantic actor Van Harrison. The meetings are arranged with innocuous envelopes that look like advertising, but with Martha's name and address written in scarlet typewriter ink. Also, the envelopes contain only a day, time and a sequential letter of the alphabet—a code that is soon linked to a New York Guidebook. By the time the meetings have progressed from "A" through to "W", Dirk has found out about the affair and followed Martha to Van's home in the suburb of Darien. He breaks in, confronts the pair and shoots them both, seriously wounding Martha, who nearly dies. Van Harrison has just enough time before he dies to leave a dying clue—using his own blood, he writes an "X", then a "Y" on the wall, and dies. Ellery must consider the significance of this dying message and finally solves it, just as Dirk's murder trial is about to conclude. After Ellery gets a private conversation with the judge, a criminal then receives justice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Village"title="The Glass Village">
Aunt Fanny Adams, famed artist, is the most notable citizen of the tiny New England town of Shinn Corners. A noted proponent of the naturalist school ("I paint what I see") who only began painting at age eighty, her income props up the local church, school, and almost everything else in town. When she is found murdered, suspicion immediately falls on a passing tramp named Josef Kowalczyk, and a planned lynching is nearly successful. It takes the combined efforts of the town's second-most-notable citizen, Judge Shinn, and his house guest, Major Johnny Shinn, to insist upon a trial by jury. Empaneling a jury takes every eligible citizen in the village, counsel and witnesses alike, and so the trial would never withstand legal scrutiny. But Judge Shinn and Major Shinn's investigation reveals a trail of circumstantial evidence that leads to another potential killer before the mock trial's conclusion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uncommon_Reader"title="The Uncommon Reader">
The title's "uncommon reader" (Queen Elizabeth II) becomes obsessed with books after a chance encounter with a mobile library. The story follows the consequences of this obsession for the Queen, her household and advisers, and her constitutional position.The title is a play on the phrase "common reader". This can mean a person who reads for pleasure, as opposed to a critic or scholar. It can also mean a set text, a book that everyone in a group (for example, all students entering a university) are expected to read, so that they can have something in common. "The Common Reader" is used by Virginia Woolf as the title work of her 1925 essay collection. Plus a triple play – Virginia Woolf's title came from Dr. Johnson: "I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be generally decided all claims to poetical honours."In British English, "common" holds levels of connotation. A commoner is anyone other than royalty or nobility. Common can also mean vulgar, as "common taste"; mean, as "common thief"; ordinary, as "common folk"; widespread, as in "common use"; or something for use by everyone, as in "common land".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arcanum_(novel)"title="The Arcanum (novel)">
The year is 1919 and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle must investigate the murder of his mentor (and founder of "The Arcanum"), Konstantin Duvall. To do so he must reunite the scattered members of the Arcanum: Harry Houdini, H. P. Lovecraft, and voodoo queen Marie Laveau. Doyle finds himself embroiled in a story of war as old as time itself, for possession of the world’s most powerful—now missing—artifact: the Book of Enoch, the chronicle of God’s mistakes, within whose pages lie the seeds for the end of everything. Peopled with the twentieth century’s most famous—and infamous—figures, the stakes go beyond the realm of humankind—into the divine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Caravans"title="Two Caravans">
A crew of migrant workers from three continents are forced to flee their English strawberry field for a journey across all of England in pursuit of their various dreams of a better future.The story centres on a group of migrant workers who hail from Eastern Europe, China, Malaysia and Africa and have come to Kent to harvest strawberries for delivery to the supermarkets, and end up living in two small caravans, a men's caravan and a women's caravan. They are all seeking a better life (and in their different ways they are also, of course, looking for love) and they've come to England, some legally, some illegally, to find it.They are supervised by Farmer Leapish, a red-faced man who treats everyone equally except for the Polish woman named Yola, the boss of the crew, who favours him with her charms in exchange for something a little extra on the side. But the two are discreet, and all is harmonious in this cozy vale – until the evening when Farmer Leapish's wife comes upon him and Yola and in retaliation she runs him down in her red sports car. By the time the police arrive the migrant workers (and a dog called Dog) have piled into one of the trailer homes and quickly leave their arcadia, thus setting off on a journey across the length and breadth of England.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saints_of_Big_Harbour"title="Saints of Big Harbour">
In "Saints of Big Harbour", Coady portrays a small community of Cape Breton Island, found off the coast of Nova Scotia. The book focuses on the perspectives of the main character, Guy Boucher, a fatherless Acadian teenager, and of those who surround him: his alcoholic uncle Isadore, a quietly wise girl named Pam, his draft-dodger English teacher and a group of boys stuck in emotional adolescence. As the story unfolds it becomes clear that Guy lives in a community firmly characterized by clichés of gender, beauty, strength, family and love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_rade"title="En rade">
Very little happens in this avowedly anti-Romantic work. Jacques Marles seeks refuge from his Parisian creditors with his wife Louise in a dilapidated bungalow in the village of Longueville, France. Far from finding contentment in an idyllic summer landscape, the couple discover the countryside is grotesque and diseased. The local farmers are greedy, cunning, and obsessed with money. The novel documents the petty irritations and disappointments of the Marleses' day-to-day existence as well as their explorations of the ruined chateau and garden. Interspersed with these realistic descriptions are three dream sequences, recounting Jacques' erotic fantasies in a highly Decadent style.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Sky"title="China Sky">
Dr. Gray Thomison is the resident doctor in charge of a hospital in Chen-li, China. Dr. Sara Durand is an American in charge of the women's ward and is secretly in love with Dr. Thomison. They are committed to helping their patients, and they admire the Chinese people and their culture.During an air raid. Dr. Durand and Siu-mei, a young Chinese intern, evacuate patients and babies from the women's hospital. Sara is in charge of the hospital while Gray is away fund-raising in America. Dr. Durand stays in the women's ward with the terminal patients and those who cannot be moved, while Dr. Chung, a young Chinese doctor just out of American medical school, tends patients in the men's ward.Dr. Thomison brings his new wife, Louise, to Chen-li. She does not enjoy living in China and considers herself superior to the native Chinese, preferring the company of English-speaking men from nearby Treaty Port, including Harry Delafield, an English businessman.Chen-ta, the leader of the local guerrillas, brings Yasuda, an injured Japanese prisoner, to the hospital and asks Dr. Durand to operate on him. Dr. Chung assists and gives blood for Yasuda. Dr. Chung believes the Japanese will win the war, so he makes friends with Yasuda and enlists his younger brother, Chung Third, to join Chen-ta's guerrillas to gather information for the Japanese. Chung convinces Louise to assist him, which leads to her loyalty being questioned by others in the hospital. Through her intervention, the Japanese stop bombing the hospital. The citizens of Chen-li stop coming to the hospital because it is not suffering the same fate as the rest of the town.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_Peking"title="Letter from Peking">
In September 1950, Elizabeth MacLeod is living in her childhood farm home in Raleigh, Vermont, with her 17-year-old son Rennie. The mailman arrives three mornings each week, and each time Elizabeth hopes for a letter from her husband Gerald in China, where she lived with him until Rennie was twelve. They lived in Peking until the war with Japan, then escaped to Chungking. She and her husband are very much in love, but Gerald, a Eurasian, sent her and Rennie to America because the communist uprising in China made it dangerous for white people. He is half Chinese and chose to stay in his own country.Gerald rarely writes because communication with westerners is banned by the Communists. Letters must be smuggled out. Today her husband writes, "Whatever I do now, remember that it is you I love." The letter continues. She locks the letter in her desk. This is the first letter from Gerald in three months. It is mailed from Hong Kong. It is the last letter from him.Elizabeth takes care of her son and the farm. Her parents are long dead. Matt Greene helps take care of the farm. Elizabeth is aware of an American prejudice against the Chinese, and her son is one-quarter Chinese. She misses her husband very much.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tenth_Circle"title="The Tenth Circle">
When freshman Trixie Stone accuses her ex-boyfriend, Jason Underhill, of raping her at a party, students and townspeople, alike, are quick to take Jason's side when he claims that their intercourse was consensual. Trixie's parents, Daniel, a mild-mannered comic book artist from a rough upbringing, and Laura, a college professor having an affair with one of her students, become involved, and Jason, whose life is supposedly ruined by Trixie's accusation, leaps from a bridge, dying by suicide. Although Jason's death was first presumed to be suicide, Trixie is quickly turned to as a suspect, accused of pushing Jason off the bridge. Trixie then flees to the Yup'ik region of Alaska where her father grew up. Daniel and Laura eventually find Trixie in Alaska.At the end of the novel, Laura confesses to Daniel that she was present when Jason died. Jason, who was intoxicated, lunged at Laura because her daughter Trixie was ruining his life. Laura pushed Jason off the bridge but he held onto her. Laura reached to his hand, but then let go, thus revealing that Trixie is innocent, but Laura is not. The novel concludes with the final chapter with Daniel's latest comic, showing a father reunited with his daughter, after saving her from the depths of hell. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Gardener"title="The Night Gardener">
Set in the 1980s, a trio of murders is linked to a single suspect. All three victims have palindromic first names and are found shot through the head in community gardens. The media dubs the crimes the "palindrome murders". TC Cook was the lead investigator at the time, and two young officers, Gus Ramone and Doc Holiday, were with him at the third crime scene. 20 years later Cook is retired, and Holiday has left the police force. Ramone is a veteran homicide detective and becomes involved in a case which has all the hallmarks of a palindrome murder. Also realizing the similarities, the others are again drawn into the investigation.The novel opens in 1985 at the scene of the discovery of a third victim of the "Night Gardener" so called by the homicide investigators, and establishes Cook as the lead investigator with Ramone and Holiday as rookies. All three victims of the killer were found in community gardens, shot in the head after being similarly assaulted.Twenty years later Holiday has left the force and Ramone has become a homicide detective. Ramone is working with his squad on the murder of Jacqueline Taylor. They manage to arrest and extract a confession from her boyfriend Tyree Williams which is backed by physical evidence. At home Ramone enjoys a happy family life and tries to mentor his son through the prejudices of his new school.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coffee_Trader"title="The Coffee Trader">
The year is 1659. Miguel Lienzo is in financial trouble as a result of some trades in sugar that have gone poorly. He is being pursued by his creditors and is looking for a way out of his current problems. His friend Geertruid persuades him to invest in coffee, a little-known commodity in Europe. After trying coffee for himself at a Turkish coffee house, he is convinced that there could be a market for the beverage in Europe. He devises a scheme to manipulate the price of coffee by buying up as much as possible on several exchanges around Europe simultaneously. Miguel gets Geertruid to front the money for the initial purchases, and he arranges for most of the foreign trades, ordering 90 barrels of coffee through an Amsterdam broker named Isaiah Nunes.Meanwhile, Miguel is living with his younger brother Daniel and his young wife, Hannah, who is pregnant. Miguel owes money to Daniel as well as to other creditors, but his coffee scheme will take months to pay off, and he is on the verge of losing more money on some bad investments in a brandy futures contract. His long-time enemy Solomon Parido approaches him with overtures of friendship and an offer to connect Miguel with a buyer for the brandy futures. Though skeptical, Miguel goes through with the trade, only to see the price of brandy rise just before close of trading. While the trade mitigated Miguel's potential losses, it cost him money he might have earned if he had retained them. On the advice of Alonzo Alferonda, Miguel is able to earn a significant profit on whale oil futures, which costs Parido considerably and enables Miguel to pay off many of his debts and regain some standing in the community.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Secret_Atlas"title="A Secret Atlas">
Qiro Anturasi, Royal Cartographer of Nalenyr, had been instrumental for his family's reputation as the most reliable map-charter in the known world. Merchants and princes all sought his clan's maps, even as the House of Anturasi continued sending out expeditions to expand their wealth of information, surveying unmapped territories, making detail notes of fauna, flora and geography.The Anturasi had been vital to Nalenyr's growing wealth and rise in power. Considered a crucial state treasure that must not fall into the wrong hands, Qiro was confined, on orders and under protection of the Naleni princes, to his estate Anturasikun in Moriande, capital of Nalenyr. There, he continued to oversee his clan's map-making enterprise, training the scions of the clan into the family trade, ruthlessly subjecting them to rigorous training and demands, for more than half a century.Now, the family stood poised on the brink of a historical breakthrough event which could catapult their standing further and beyond the imagination of rival map-makers. Intertwined with their mission were the political ramifications for Nalenyr, the aggressive northern state of Deseiron, and Helosunde which served as buffer between the two former powers. Much of Helosunde had been under Desei occupation, and Nalenyr provided Helosundian refugees sanctuary and support to confound Desei designs on Nalenyr.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babar's_Museum_of_Art"title="Babar's Museum of Art">
As the elephants in Celesteville took to motoring, the city's train station lost its original purpose. Queen Celeste decided to convert the station into an Art museum to showcase all the artworks she and Babar had collected over the years.When the museum was opened, the adult elephants patiently explained to the young elephants different perspectives on art appreciation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blacker_the_Berry_(novel)"title="The Blacker the Berry (novel)">
Born in Boise, Idaho, Emma Lou Morgan is an African-American girl who has extremely dark skin. Her mother's family have lighter skin that shows European ancestry; the "blue-black" hue came from her father, who left her and her mother soon after her birth. Believing that her color will reduce her marriageability, her mother's people try to help her lighten her skin with bleaching and commercially available creams, but nothing works. When her mother says "a black boy could get along but a black girl would never know anything but sorrow and disappointment," Emma Lou wishes she had been a boy. The only "Negro pupil in the entire school," she feels extra conspicuous at graduation among the white faces and white robes.Emma Lou's Uncle Joe encourages her to go to the University of Southern California (USC), where she'll be among black students, and he encourages her to study education and move South to teach. He believes that smaller towns like Boise "encouraged stupid color prejudice such as she encountered among the blue vein circle in her home town." Emma Lou's maternal grandmother was closely associated with the "blue veins", black people whose skin was light enough to show veins. Uncle Joe thought life would be better for Emma Lou in Los Angeles, where people had more to think about.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_(novel)"title="Boston (novel)">
Chapter 1: The Runaway GrandmotherThe summer of 1915. The Thornwell estate outside of Boston. Cornelia Thornwell, aged 60, is suddenly widowed after 40 disappointing years of marriage: "she had lived, a prisoner in a cell." (31) The family is patrician and powerful, part of New England's economic and cultural elite. Her 3 daughters, all married to millionaires, squabble over their inheritances during funeral preparations. They continue their disputes as relations and retainers assemble for the reading of the will. Cornelia sees their behavior as "the revelation of hidden natures." "Trembling with excitement," (32) she pens a farewell note declaring herself a "runaway grandmother" (33) and asking the family not to pursue her. She leaves by a back stairway.Chapter 2: Plymouth RockCalling herself Mrs. Cornell, Cornelia finds work at a cordage plant in Plymouth, a town not far from Boston. She learns how hard factory work is and how hard the life of the poor. She boards with the Brini family and becomes friends with their other boarder, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, an Italian immigrant ditch digger, atheist, anarchist, and pacifist. She first thinks his political beliefs naive, "a dreamer of dreams, so simple of mind as to have no conception of the odds against him," (56) especially his opposition to reformers and all organizations, even unions. Early in 1916, shortly after a public meeting Vanzetti and his anarchist comrades hold to promote their ideas, a spontaneous strike breaks out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Was_a_Rat!_or_The_Scarlet_Slippers"title="I Was a Rat! or The Scarlet Slippers">
One evening, at the home of the cobbler old Bob and his washerwoman wife Joan, there is a knock at the door. Bob opens the door and sees a little boy in a torn and stained page's uniform. When asked "who are you?", the boy replies "I was a rat". Bob and Joan have no children and they take care of the boy by providing food and a bed. The boy was unable to eat with a spoon, and during his first evening he tore his sheets and blankets into strips. However, Bob and Joan were patient and the boy was a quick learner who, wanting to please them, carefully followed their instructions. When he spots a photograph of Princess Aurelia, the prince's fiancée, in the newspaper, he appears to recognise her as 'Mary Jane'.Joan calls the boy "Roger", the name Bob and Joan would have used for their son. Bob and Joan take Roger to the City Hall to find how to return Roger to his proper home. An official declares that there are no lost children in the city, then notices that Roger has eaten a pencil belonging to the City Council. Bob and Joan take Roger to the orphanage, the police station, and the hospital, but no one can help locate Roger's home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_Nathan_Brazil"title="The Return of Nathan Brazil">
A viral species named the Dreel, originating from outside the Milky Way galaxy, invades human territory. The central human government, known as the Com, attempts to fight back, but finds that their resources are inadequate to repel the invaders. In desperation, the records of the work of Gilgram Zinder (who had discovered the superimposed Markovian reality and built the sentient supercomputer Obie to manipulate it) are unsealed and his work is reproduced. Lacking the time to develop the technology fully, the Com builds ships called Zinder Nullifiers, which simply erase the contents of the space that they are pointed at. When they make the final stand against the Dreel invasion fleet, the Nullifiers are switched on and left on, obliterating the Dreel fleet. However, something unexpected then occurs, as the void in space begins to grow, erasing everything in its path from existence.At this point, Mavra Chang and Obie are reintroduced. It has been over 700 years since Obie faked his destruction and ran away with Mavra, and they are currently in another galaxy trying to positively influence the development of an intelligent civilization. Obie senses the malfunction in the Well World when the anomaly forms and begins to expand. He travels to the Well World, determines that it is broken and requires repair. He determines that the only person able to effect such repair is Nathan Brazil, but notes that the Well should have summoned Brazil to fix the malfunction. Obie recalls that Brazil was suffering from memory loss the last time he journeyed to the Well World; worried that this may have recurred, he and Mavra set out to locate Brazil.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rachel_Papers_(novel)"title="The Rachel Papers (novel)">
"The Rachel Papers" tells the story of Charles Highway, a bright, egotistical teenager (a portrait Amis acknowledges as autobiographical) and his relationship with his girlfriend in the year before going to university. Narrated by Charles on the eve of his twentieth birthday, the novel recounts Charles's last year of adolescence and his first love, Rachel Noyes, whom he meets in London while studying for his entrance exams into Oxford. Charles meets Rachel at a party and vows to win her over with his wit and wisdom. Unfortunately, she is seeing an American visiting student named DeForest, and Charles must employ a variety of meticulously calculated schemes to steal her away.The title is an allusion to one subset of notes that Charles works on diligently throughout the novel – detailed instructions on everything from how to convince his Oxford don of his brilliance, to how to pick up and seduce girls. Instead of studying for his exams, Charles pours most of his time into these narcissistic chronicles, and after he meets Rachel, "The Rachel Papers" become the primary outlet for his neurotic brilliance. Gradually, however, these notes evolve beyond a set of conniving machinations geared toward getting Rachel into bed with him, and into a sincere story of their brief but passionate romance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defining_Dulcie"title="Defining Dulcie">
The story follows 16-year-old Dulcie Morrigan Jones through journeys and trials. Her mother moves them both from Connecticut to California after Dulcie's father dies an accidental death. However Dulcie is unimpressed by this level of life change and seeks to solve this problem by stealing her father's old pick-up truck, setting out across America heading for her former home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bell_for_Adano_(novel)"title="A Bell for Adano (novel)">
The novel is set during the 1943 Allied occupation of the fictional Italian coastal town of Adano (based on the real city of Licata). The main character, Major Victor Joppolo, is the temporary administrator of the town during the occupation and is often referred to by the people of Adano as Mister Major. Joppolo is an idealistic Italian-American who wants to bring justice and compassion to Adano, which has been hardened by the authoritarian Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini.When Major Joppolo arrives at Adano, he immediately asks the people of the town what they need the most. The first spokesman of the town tells Joppolo that they are in great need of food for some people have not eaten in days. The second spokesman of the town argues that the town's immediate necessity is a new bell. Joppolo is touched by the story of a 700-year-old bell that was taken away from the town by the Fascists. Mussolini had ordered that the bell be removed from the town and be melted to make weapons for the war. The people were greatly attached to the bell. To them, the bell was a source of pride and unity. Joppolo immediately sees the importance of the bell and makes persistent attempts to locate the bell.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lives_of_the_Monster_Dogs"title="Lives of the Monster Dogs">
A group of elegant monster dogs in top hats, tails, and bustle skirts become instant celebrities when they come to New York in 2008. Refugees from a town whose residents had been utterly isolated for a hundred years, the dogs retain the nineteenth-century Germanic culture of the humans who created them. They are wealthy and glamorous and seem to lead charmed lives – but they find adjusting to the modern world difficult, and when a young woman, Cleo Pira, befriends them, she discovers that a strange, incurable illness threatens them all with extinction. When the dogs construct their dream home, a fantastic castle on the Lower East Side, and barricade themselves inside, Cleo finds herself one of the few human witnesses to a mad, lavish party that may prove to be the final act in the drama of the lives of the monster dogs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_in_the_Sun"title="A Fire in the Sun">
Taking place some months after the events described in "When Gravity Fails", Marîd Audran, once a small-time hustler on the streets of the decadent Budayeen, finds himself as one of the lieutenants of Friedlander Bey or "Papa", the most influential man in the city. With his independence taken from him and being stationed as a liaison between Bey and the local law enforcement under the supervision of Sergeant Hajjar, Audran is forced to pair up with his colleague Jirji Shaknahyi in order to track down yet another serial killer who likes to remove some of the internal organs of their victims.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Midnight"title="Red Midnight">
12-year-old Santiago Cruz, a Kekcíhi "campesinos indigenous", escapes from his destroyed village, Dos Vías, Guatemala, on May 18, 1981, with his four-year-old sister, Angelina, at midnight, after his mother pushes her into his arms and wakes him up. His entire family has been killed by soldiers, and he runs as far away as he can. His Uncle Ramos gives him a map and compass and instructs him to sail away in his cayuco to the United States, to escape the civil war and hopefully find a better life. The boy and his sister (Angelina) find a horse and ride it into the nearby village of Los Santos, where everyone has also been killed and burned. They continue into a city and sneak a ride in a maize truck. They then sneak a ride on the back of a manure truck that a drunk rebel soldier is driving. To keep the truck from crashing because of the intoxicated driver, they put horse dung into the gas tank and escape when the truck breaks down. They then walk down to Lake Izabal and sleep at their Uncle Ramos's house. In the morning, Enrique, a friend of Ramos, finds the children. They tell him what has happened, and Enrique and his wife, Silvia, give them food for the journey. Enrique tells them everything he knows about the dangerous journey, and ride in the cayuco with them until they reach the opening to the sea. At the entrance to El Golfete, they sneak beside the shore past a military boat. Enrique leaves and Santiago and his sister sail into the ocean. They have little food, and soon go hungry and thirsty, with itches and blisters all over their bodies. They encounter tourists, pirates, many violent storms, and a shark. They encounter a river of garbage, which Santiago uses to make an amateur windshield among other spare parts to fix his cayuco, and finds Angelina a broken plastic doll. They once nearly sailed into an inland bay on the border of Belize and Mexico, and then sailed into the open Gulf. Santiago makes notches in his cayuco every dawn with his machete, as it should only take twenty to make it. They attempt to catch fish, but often fail or have to steal fish from fishing nets from a ship. They encounter a large storm, which causes the mast to fall directly on Santiago's head, and makes them lose the water pail. They experience diarrhea and sores, and almost lose hope of making the journey. They had expected to arrive in twenty days, but several more pass with no land in sight. One day, a tropical storm's eye passes over them, and they lose everything except the cayuco. As the storm passes, they land in a large city in Florida and are taken to a hospital. They tell a nurse who can speak Spanish about their journey. They are bandaged, Angelina's doll is fixed, and they are shown on television and are fed food. They are told they will not be deported because they are children and the media has widely publicized how they have suffered so much.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundays_at_Tiffany's"title="Sundays at Tiffany's">
The book opens with Jane Margaux and her imaginary friend, Michael, spending a Sunday at the St. Regis Plaza in New York City eating ice cream together, which they do every Sunday. Michael is an imaginary friend who is randomly assigned to children who need extra support and guidance. However, he is called away from the children when they become nine years old, at which point they will forget about the existence of their "friend" by the next day of their ninth birthday. Jane needs extra attention because her mother, Vivienne Margaux, a Broadway producer, spends too much time with work and shopping for her many new husbands, but spends every Sunday at Tiffany's with her daughter.The next day is Jane's 9th birthday party, which coincides with her mother's production's opening night. The cast and crew sing "happy birthday" to her, but her mother forgets about her and her father leaves quickly with his girlfriend. Jane is comforted by Michael, who tells her he must leave now that she is nine. He promises her that she will forget about him.Twenty-one years later, Jane, who is now in her thirties and has not yet forgotten about Michael, lives in New York and works closely with her mother, who is now very controlling. Jane has produced a small, low-budget play called "Thank Heaven", based on her childhood with Michael. The play was an overnight hit, and now Jane is in the works of making a movie based on it. Her boyfriend, Hugh McGrath (who played Michael on Broadway), wants the leading role in the movie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_(Seneca)"title="Oedipus (Seneca)">
## Act One.The play opens with a fearful Oedipus lamenting a vicious plague which is affecting Thebes, the city over which he rules. People are dying in such huge numbers that there are not enough of the living to ensure that each of the victims is cremated. He also mentions a prophecy that he had received from Apollo before he came to Thebes that he would kill his father and marry his mother. He had thus fled the kingdom of his father Polybus. However, Oedipus is so disturbed by what is occurring in Thebes that he even considers returning to his home city. But Jocasta strengthens his resolution, and he stays.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2666"title="2666">
The novel is substantially concerned with violence and death. According to Levi Stahl, it "is another iteration of Bolaño's increasingly baroque, cryptic, and mystical personal vision of the world, revealed obliquely by his recurrent symbols, images, and tropes". Within the novel, "There is something secret, horrible, and cosmic afoot, centered around Santa Teresa (and possibly culminating in the mystical year of the book's title, a date that is referred to in passing in "Amulet" as well). We can at most glimpse it, in those uncanny moments when the world seems wrong."The novel's five parts are linked by varying degrees of concern with unsolved murders of upwards of 300 young, poor, mostly uneducated Mexican women in the fictional border town of Santa Teresa (based on Ciudad Juárez but located in Sonora rather than Chihuahua) though it is the fourth part which focuses specifically on the murders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luck_in_the_Shadows"title="Luck in the Shadows">
Alec of Kerry, a young hunter who has recently been orphaned, is taken prisoner under the false charge of spying. He ends up sharing a cell with Seregil, a seemingly youthful spy and noble from the exotic city of Rhiminee, who has the ability to assume various guises and trick his way out of tight situations. The two escape together, and Seregil, motivated by something he does not entirely understand, takes Alec on as his apprentice in thieving, spying and trickery. They head south towards Rhiminee, where Seregil will report on his mission to the wizard Nysander, the head of a covert group of spies known as "Watchers."But along the way, Seregil falls ill under the influence of a mysterious magic. Alec is forced to navigate their way south on his own, testing his limited resources and knowledge of the world outside his rustic homeland. When the cause of Seregil's illness finally becomes known (an ordinary wooden disk imbued with a powerful curse) it is almost too late to save his life. In his unconscious state, Seregil experiences visions of a dark entity known as the "Empty God," foreshadowing the designs of the evil Duke Mardus, who wishes to obtain the god's power for himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_(Provoost_novel)"title="Falling (Provoost novel)">
Anne Provoost's novels are invariably related from the point of view of a young person caught up in problems of adult making which they have difficulty comprehending. In this case, the teenage Lucas is taken on a long summer visit to his late grandfather’s home in the Ardennes by his mother. He has been brought up by her in ignorance of the fact that during World War II his grandfather had informed on the nuns in the local convent who were harbouring Jewish children. He is therefore at a loss to understand the conflicting attitudes he encounters in the town. He is particularly targeted by the political activist Benoit, for whom his grandfather was a hero, and persuaded to take reluctant part in a couple of right-wing actions against the Moroccan immigrants who have taken over a run-down quarter of the town.In the meantime he has befriended the young American-born Caitlin, who dreams of becoming a dancer. She is in fact the daughter of one of the children betrayed by his grandfather, all of whom had survived Auschwitz. She also stands for liberal attitudes and as an outsider too is not tainted by the small-town narrow mindedness from which Lucas has to suffer. Just as he is preparing to commit himself to Caitlin and what she stands for, she is involved in a crash and Lucas is only able to rescue her from the burning car by sawing off her trapped foot. At first he is treated as a hero, but Benoit, fearing denunciation by Lucas, uses his position as a journalist to question his actions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ice_Palace_(novel)"title="The Ice Palace (novel)">
The vivacious 11-year-old Siss lives in a rural community in Norway. Her life is changed when a quiet girl, Unn, moves to the village to live with her aunt after the death of her unmarried mother. Siss and Unn can't wait to meet. They finally do, at Unn's house. They talk for a while, Unn shows Siss a picture from the family album of her father, then Unn persuades Siss that they should undress, just for fun. They do, watching each other, and Unn asks whether Siss can see if she is different. Siss says no, she can't, and Unn says she has a secret and is afraid she will not go to heaven. Soon they dress again, and the situation is rather awkward. Siss leaves Unn and runs home, overwhelmed by fear of the dark.Unn does not want to feel embarrassed when meeting Siss the next day, so she decides to skip school and instead goes to see the ice castle that has been created by a nearby waterfall. Ice castles are normal in cold winters, when the water freezes into huge structures around waterfalls. Unn climbs into this ice castle, exploring the rooms baffled by its beauty. In the 7th room she gets disoriented and cannot find her way out. She dies of hypothermia. Her last word is "Siss".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salaam,_Paris"title="Salaam, Paris">
The novel is based on a story of a Muslim girl named Tanaya Shah; a young Indian girl mesmerized by western culture. She was raised by her mother and grandfather, as her father abandoned Tanaya's mother when Tanaya was a young child. Tanaya's grandfather treated Tanaya with the utmost respect. He treated her like his own daughter, but Tanaya still felt that she was neglected.Because Tanaya's mother was abandoned, Tanaya's grandfather (Tanaya's mother's father) would remain extremely cautious of Tanaya's roundabouts. This became difficult for Tanaya, as she wanted to explore the world outside of Mahim; place she Tanaya was born and raised. Adding to this, Tanaya was born in a family where women had the best facial features. This was true for all women in her family, except for her mother. As the story progresses, we learn that Tanaya's mother was thought to have been abandoned because of this lacking feature. Unfortunately, Tanaya's mother was well aware of this fact, and thus hated Tanaya. Over the years, her mother had become sarcastic and cruel towards Tanaya. This was one of the reasons that Tanaya was more attached to her grandfather.Getting back to Tanaya's fantasy of the western culture; like every young girl, Tanaya was also amazed by the glossy magazines that portrayed women in a stylish way. Tanaya with her best friend, Nilu, would read all western magazines, especially, "Teen Cosmo." In private conversations with Nilu, she would often confide about leaving Mahim to Paris. She wanted to become like one of the models. However, modeling was not her passion. All she wanted was freedom, and a new change in her life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonsdale"title="Dragonsdale">
The novel takes place in a fictional location called the Isles of Bresal which are protected by a bank of mist called The Veil. On Bresal there are stables that train dragons. Cara, the protagonist, cleans dragons for the stable Dragonsdale. Many children attend Dragonsdale to learn to train dragons and take them to competitions, but Cara is forbidden to ride any dragon even though her father is the head of Dragonsdale.This is because her mother had died in an accident during a flight with dragons, and her father, Huw, couldn't afford to lose Cara as well. However, Cara is allowed to help clean the dragons, and she has a favorite one called Skydancer. She ends up having to train a young farm boy called Drane to muck out the stables and do all the things she does. But all is not what it seems about him as Cara and Drane slowly become better friends. Now, many children at Dragonsdale are preparing for the dragon riding competitions. Although Cara cannot participate in it, she supports her friends Breena and Wony.Cara is still determined to convince her father to let her ride dragons and one day go to the competitions with Skydancer. "Dragonsdale" follows Cara as she goes through obstacles, such as an arrogant child called Hortense, who is constantly making Cara mad, and finally achieves her goal when she buys Skydancer, but she loses control and declares he must be destroyed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thursday's_Child_(Hartnett_novel)"title="Thursday's Child (Hartnett novel)">
Harper Flute is an adolescent girl living with her family in Australia during the depression. Harper Flute's little brother Tin was born on Thursday and he has far to go.Harper starts out by saying how she and Tin go out to the creek, and start watching fish. Harper soon catches one out of the creek, and she tries to search for Tin to let him see it. She notices that he's gone and starts crying out to her house. Her dad, whom she calls Da, comes out and starts searching all over for Tin, and they eventually find him in the mud. Harper notices that he dug his way out, but she won't tell anyone about this special event.Back at the house, Audrey, her older sister, scolds Harper for letting him get away like that. Mrs. Murphy, the neighbor, starts worrying about Tin and starts talking about the new baby.Later on in the book, her mother, whom she calls Mam, is pregnant and gives birth to a new baby boy named Caffy. Tin is considered Da's "little pet", and Harper notes how she, her older brother, Devon, and Audrey aren't pets, but they aren't nothing. She remarks how Caffy is nothing to Da though.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_(novel)"title="Surrender (novel)">
Seven-year-old Anwell lives in a prestigious but coldly distant family with a mother who is always sick and a father who punishes him with physical abuse. Anwell has no friends and is on a very tight leash. He is sitting in the back yard one day when he meets wild boy his age named Finnigan, his alter-ego or second personality. Anwell now named Gabriel is never ready to be angry and never to fight. Finnigan always ready be angry and to fight. If Gabriel (Anwell) wants revenge or anything bad done, he asks Finnigan to do it for him.Finnigan becomes Anwell's only friend, and Anwell confides in him what he has never told anyone else, of how he accidentally killed his handicapped older brother Vernon. His brother, though he was three years older than Anwell, "was never the elder of us". His parents, disgraced and humiliated by Vernon, refuse to take care of him, leaving Anwell to do the job at the young age of seven. Enjoying his task, Anwell routinely feeds, washes, and entertains his brother. One Sunday, while his father is out to church and his mother is sleeping due to a migraine, Anwell is again taking care of Vernon. When Anwell is trying to feed Vernon, he refuses, would not stop crying, and scratches Anwell on his cheek, drawing blood. Out of frustration, and anxiety their mother will wake up and be irate, Anwell puts fabric in Vernon's mouth to quiet him and throws his brother in a refrigerator.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exile_Kiss"title="The Exile Kiss">
Married to Indihar, though from his perspective in name only, Marîd Audran gets invited to a reception at the palace of the amir of the city. Shaykh Mahali, the amir, thus wishes to end the rivalry between Friedlander Bey and Reda Abu Adil, two of the most powerful men in the city. Both Audran and Bey, or "Papa" as he's known in the Budayeen, become suspicious when their sworn enemy Abu Adil designates Audran as an officer of the "Jaish", an unofficial militia working for Abu Adil.However, it is not until after the party that Abu Adil's scheme unfolds: Audran and Bey are put under arrest by Lieutenant Hajjar and charged with the murder of a police officer named Khalid Maxwell. They're sentenced on-the-spot into exile, never to return to the city under pain of death. Left to die amongst the burning sands of a vast desert, their luck finally turns as they are rescued by a Bedouin tribe of Bani Salim, allowing them to start planning the vengeance they'd exact upon Abu Adil and prove their innocence— if they ever make it back to the city alive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness,_Tell_Us"title="Darkness, Tell Us">
While attending a party thrown by one of their English professors, six college students use a Ouija board to contact a spirit that identifies itself only as 'Butler'. Butler promises the six a treasure if they will go to a remote mountain location called Calamity Peak. The professor, who knows from experience that messing around with the supernatural can be dangerous, attempts to dissuade them, but the kids steal the board and set off for the mountain anyway. Once they arrive they are menaced by a machete-wielding killer, and soon begin to wonder if Butler might be trying to harm them. After discovering that the Ouija board is missing, the professor, along with her lover, sets out to rescue her. Soon, it was revealed that Butler is actually the mother of one of the students, Angela. The book contains frankly supernatural elements alongside the more realistic horrors common to Laymon's work (including homicidal maniacs, rape, and childhood sexual abuse).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Romance_of_the_Halifax_Disaster"title="A Romance of the Halifax Disaster">
Vera Warrington and Tom Welsford enter the narrative while floating and flirting on the Saint Lawrence River. Years later, Vera is engaged to the wealthy William Lawson and has not heard from Tom. Shortly before the explosion, Tom returns to Halifax, Nova Scotia, for orthopaedic surgery for a war wound. Tom is still in hospital when the disaster occurs. As a volunteer with the Voluntary Aid Division, Vera darts to the hospital only in time to witness Will's death and her liberation from the marriage which was to occur later that day. Now free, Vera finds Tom in a hospital bed and accepts his proposal: the last line of the book belongs to Vera, agreeing to marriage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendon_Chase"title="Brendon Chase">
The novel is based around the Hensman brothers, Robin, John and Harold, who spend eight months living as outlaws in the forest of Brendon Chase. As in much British children's literature of the era, their parents are absent, living in India, at the time part of the British Empire. They are cared for by their Aunt Ellen, a strict and somewhat cold spinster. At the end of the Easter holidays, Harold falls ill with the measles, so Robin and John are unable to return to boarding school. They decide to run away and fend for themselves, taking some food from their aunt's house, and also taking a rifle and ammunition so they can survive in the wild.Despite continued attempts to catch them, usually by Police Sergeant Bunting and the Reverend Whiting, the three brothers - Robin and John are joined by Harold when he recovers from his illness - prove sufficiently quick-witted and ingenious to evade capture for eight months, surviving on what they can kill and on supplies occasionally taken from other sources. In the book Robin is known as "Robin Hood", John as "Big John" and Harold as "Little John".In the later part of their time living in the wild, the boys - who by this time have long been wearing rabbit skins, their clothes having worn out - encounter an eccentric elderly charcoal burner called Smokoe Joe, who becomes a close friend. When Smokoe Joe is seriously injured, one of the boys saves his life by running for the doctor, thereby risking capture. After a Christmas spent with Smokoe Joe in his hut, the boys are 'run to ground' when the doctor, who has kept their secret until that moment, arrives with their father who has returned, and the story ends there in the forest. The bear that had escaped in the forest near the end of their adventure settles down to hibernate for the winter in the hollow oak tree where they had lived.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_of_Eagles"title="Victory of Eagles">
As the novel begins, William Laurence is gaoled aboard , imprisoned against Temeraire's good behavior. Whilst aboardship, he joins the crew in fighting off the Grande Armée, who supported by the Armée d'Air are attempting to invade Great Britain. They succeed, and Laurence is reported to have been killed in action when "Goliath" is sunk. Temeraire, languishing at the breeding grounds at Pen y Fan, receives this intelligence and loses any desire to remain quiet and well-behaved. Instead, fired partially by patriotism and partially by vengeance, he organizes the many unharnessed dragons of the breeding ground into a militia, using promises of prizes as an enticement. Enlisting the breeding grounds' (human) supervisory staff as logistical support, he and the other dragons strike south to do what they can against Napoleon Bonaparte. This, of course, results in a merry chase: Laurence, who did not perish aboard "Goliath", is mustered by Tharkay, now commissioned in the Aerial Corps, to bring Temeraire back under harness, and he arrives at Pen y Fan perhaps half a day after the dragons move out. The two are reunited outside of Harlesden, where Temeraire has already staged and won a decisive victory against a group of Marshal Lefebvre; in fact, Laurence is intercepted by a courier who is seeking out the commander of the militia (that is, Temeraire) with a colonel's commission.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spider's_Thread"title="The Spider's Thread">
Shakyamuni is meandering around Paradise one morning, when he stops at a lotus-filled pond. Between the lilies, he can see, through the crystal-clear waters, the depths of Hell. His eyes come to rest on one sinner in particular, by the name of Kandata. Kandata was a cold-hearted criminal, but had one good deed to his name: while walking through the forest one day, he decided not to kill a spider he was about to crush with his foot. Moved by this single act of compassion, the Buddha takes the silvery thread of a spider in Paradise and lowers it down into Hell.Down in Hell, the myriad sinners are struggling in the Pool of Blood, in total darkness save for the light glinting off the Mountain of Spikes, and in total silence save for the sighs of the damned. Kandata, looking up by chance at the sky above the pool, sees the spider's thread descending towards him and grabs hold with all the might of a seasoned criminal. The climb from Hell to Paradise is not a short one, however, and Kandata quickly tires. Dangling from the middle of the rope, he glances downward, and sees how far he has come. Realizing that he may actually escape from Hell, he is overcome by joy and laughs giddily. His elation is short-lived, however, as he realizes that others have started climbing the thread behind him, stretching down into the murky depths below. Fearing that the thread will break from the weight of the others, he shouts that the spider's thread is his and his alone. It is at this moment that the thread breaks, and he and all the other sinners are cast back down into the Pool of Blood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_One_Look_(novel)"title="Just One Look (novel)">
After picking up her two young children from school, Grace Lawson looks through a newly developed set of photographs. She finds an odd one in the pack: a mysterious picture from perhaps twenty years ago, showing four strangers she can't identify. But there is one face she recognizes—that of her husband, from before she knew him. When her husband sees the photo that night, he leaves their home and drives off without explanation. She doesn't know where he's going, why he's leaving, or whether or not he's ever coming back. Nor does she realize how dangerous the search for him will be. There are others interested in both her husband's past and that photo, including Eric Wu, a fierce, silent killer who will not be stopped from finding his quarry, no matter who or what stands in his way.Her world turned upside down, filled with doubts about her herself and marriage, Grace must confront the dark corners of her own tragic past as she struggles to learn the truth, find her husband, and save her family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughter_of_Earth"title="Daughter of Earth">
The novel begins in the 1890s with the Rogers family farming in Missouri. Though they are poor, Marie is unaware of this and enjoys her childhood for the most part. She does suffer physical abuse at the hands of her mother who believes that Marie lies. Marie's parents’ marriage is not a happy one; Marie's father wishes to make more money by leaving the farm and moves the reluctant family in order to obtain work cutting wood. The family bounces back and forth between John Rogers's temporary jobs and life on the farm.Marie's Aunt Helen comes to live with the family and works doing laundry for wealthy women. As a working woman, she is respected on the same level as John Rogers. Marie attends school regularly and becomes one of the smartest in her class. When she attends the birthday party of one of the wealthier students, Marie is made aware of class difference. She sees that not everyone lives as she does, and she is humiliated.When John discovers Aunt Helen is working as a prostitute he kicks her out of the house. Elly and Marie are left to support the family when John leaves them again. Marie begins stealing to keep the family fed and clothed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lucky_Star_(novel)"title="My Lucky Star (novel)">
Gilbert Selwyn's mother has remarried once more—this time to a successful but aging Hollywood producer. Gilbert, ever the schemer, lifted a few plot points from "Casablanca" (i.e., plagiarized the entire film and put a new title on it) and convinced his new stepfather to promote the script to actor Stephen Donato's producer. Gilbert convinces his friends, Philip Cavanaugh and Claire Simmons, to move to Hollywood to help him rewrite the script. They quickly uncover his deception. But since Gilbert told the studio executives that the script was mostly Philip and Claire's, they must help rewrite the screenplay or else find any chance of a career ruined.Claire refuses to go along with the stunt, but Gilbert offers her the chance of a lifetime: Gilbert's agent, having heard of their success selling a screenplay, has offered the trio a chance to write actress Diana Malenfant's new film. The movie will be the first time Diana and her son, Stephen Donato, have acted together on screen since Stephen was 10, and it may prove the jump-start to Diana's career which she's been searching for.Gilbert is able to wrangle an appointment with Diana Malenfant, who is not particularly interested. But Lily, her drunken and estranged sister, is writing a tell-all book. Philip convinces Diana and Stephen that he has a job assisting Lily with her memoirs, and that he could find out what Lily intends to say in her book. Shrewdly, Diana agrees to hire Gilbert, Philip and Claire to write her new film while Philip spies on Lily.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right"title="The Art of Being Right">
The following lists the 38 stratagems described by Schopenhauer, in the order of their appearance in the book:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sunrise_Lands"title="The Sunrise Lands">
Ingolf Vogeler, a mercenary from the Republic of Richland arrives in Mackenzie lands in the Willamette River region of Oregon. He is being stalked by soldiers from the Church Universal and Triumphant (known as Cutters), which is located in Paradise Valley, Montana, and controls parts of Montana and Wyoming. Ingolf arrives in a tavern run by Tom Brannigan, and during the night, is attacked by these soldiers. As he is attacked, Rudi Mackenzie, Mathilda Arminger, Odard Liu, and the twins Ritva and Mary Havel join the fray. Odard and Rudi kill several assassins until Rudi shouts to take one alive. The assassins realize they can't escape and commit suicide before the party can react. Odard and Rudi break the door that Ingolf is hidden behind, and take him to a hospital. Ingolf is saved, and he relates his tale to the Mackenzies.It turns out that he had traveled to Nantucket with his mercenary company during an expedition to collect pre-Change relics. Along with two mercenary scouts (Kaur and Singh) and Kuttner, a guard of the bossman of Iowa travelling with the company, Ingolf saw a vision that told him to: "Travel from sunrise to the sunset, and seek the Son of the Bear Who Rules. The Sword of the Lady waits for him."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woods_Are_Dark"title="The Woods Are Dark">
The plot concerns two groups of people, a family and a pair of college students, who are kidnapped after stopping in a small California town and taken into the forest to be sacrificed to a group of mysterious creatures, called "Krulls", who roam the surrounding wilderness. The identity of the Krulls, and their relationship to the town of Barlow, are revealed gradually over the course of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Sun_(novella)"title="Dark Sun (novella)">
Following the previous book 'Mad Dogs', Greg "Rat" Rathbone is on an undercover mission to befriend the son of notorious activist, Kurt Lydon, and change the plan of his nuclear system. Rat is soon invited to a sleepover by Lydon's son George and after defeating a group of bullies in a fight earns further popularity from George and his overweight Chinese friend, Zhang.Back at campus, Lauren Adams, Jake Parker and Andy Lagan are forced to do physical training on the assault course after messing around in front of a guest speaker. Although overseen by volunteers James Adams and Bruce Norris, Andy is severely injured but still takes part in the mission, posing as Rat's Scottish cousin.At the sleepover, Rat and Andy sedate George, Zhang and Lydon's wife and begin hacking into Lydon's laptop but are interrupted by George's older sister, Sophie. She badly injures Rat by breaking a vase over his head. After a vicious struggle, the boys sedate her and finish the job.The book ends with Lydon and several other suspects being imprisoned and a new library being opened on campus on World Book Day.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Manuel_Bueno,_Mártir"title="San Manuel Bueno, Mártir">
The novel tells the story of the local Catholic Priest (Don Manuel) in fictional Valverde de Lucerna, Spain as told through the eyes of Angela, one of the townspeople. Throughout the course of the story Manuel is adored by the people of the town. He is constantly in the service of the townspeople. He refrains from condemning anyone and goes out of his way to help those whom the people have marginalized. Instead of refusing to allow the holy burial of someone who committed suicide, Don Manuel explains that he is sure that in the last moment, the person would have repented for their sin. Also, instead of excommunicating a woman who had an illegitimate child, as the Catholic Church would have done, Don Manuel arranges a marriage between the woman and her ex-boyfriend, so that order will return to the town, and the child will have a father figure. The people of the town consider him their "Saint" because of all of the good deeds he does.Angela, after a brief stint away for education, returns to the town to live with her mother where she continues to be amazed at Manuel's devotion.Lazarus, Angela's brother, later returns from the New World, disgusted with the mental and physical poverty he finds in the town. He too is amazed at Manuel's devotion but believes that "He is too intelligent to believe everything he teaches." It is clear that Lazarus does not have a sense of faith. Angela's and Lazarus's mother passes away. On her death bed she makes Lazarus promise to pray for her—he swears he will. Her dying wish is that Manuel can convert him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_of_the_Cay"title="Timothy of the Cay">
The book discusses Timothy's life before the events of "The Cay," when he was living in "Back O' All," the poorest section of what was then the squatter's village of Charlotte Amalie, on the then Danish-held United States Virgin Island of St. Thomas (of which Virgin Island it is now the capital), and Phillip Enright's life after the same events. The theme to this story is making dreams a reality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Skyfire_Puzzle"title="The Skyfire Puzzle">
Frank and Joe Hardy are on a stakeout in Okefenokee Swamp with their father Fenton, using their van of computer and surveillance equipment. Fenton is chasing industrial saboteurs who nearly kill him and Chet Morton. The head of security at Kennedy Space Center, Harry Stone, is baffled by a series of accidents involving the Space Shuttle "Skyfire". Frank, Joe, Chet, Stone and his daughter Suzanne head to Cape Canaveral, where they meet Nat Cramer from Starglass Corporation and his security man, Pete McConnel. Starglass developed the "Longeye" radio telescope, which is to be placed in orbit by "Skyfire". Maxwell Grant, deputy director of operations, offers the young people the chance to fly on "Skyfire."Frank, Joe and Chet train for the shuttle mission and help Stone and his aide, Lew Gorman, investigate the accidents. Occurrences indicate that someone wants the Hardys off the case: Fenton is attacked by gunmen; a masked man makes a centrifuge run wild with Joe; a caller summons the young people to a trap meeting; and hallucinogenic crystals are placed in Chet's air hose during neutral buoyancy training, causing him to attack Frank. McConnel is apparently shot by terrorist Franz Schacht, who is linked by a fingerprint.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasing_the_Dime"title="Chasing the Dime">
After receiving a new phone number, Henry Pierce, the head of a nanotechnology firm Amedeo Technologies, begins to receive mysterious calls from men looking for a woman named Lilly. Pierce's company is working to create a molecular computer the size of a dime. Multiple other companies are involved in a race to this achievement. Pierce and his partner Charlie Condon have been preparing a presentation of their invention for a potential investor. At the same time, Pierce has recently been dumped by his girlfriend due to the distance caused by his work. After receiving more calls, Pierce decides to look into their origin to distract himself from his problems.After getting the name of a website from one of the callers, Pierce discovers that Lilly is an escort available to purchase on a website titled L.A. Darlings. Visitors of the website have been attempting to contact her with her now out-of-date number. When his attempts to contact Lilly are futile, he calls another escort who partners with her, Robin. She tells him that she has not heard from her in a long time and hangs up on Pierce after seeing him as suspicious. Learning that the website is hosted by a company named Entrepreneurial Concepts Unlimited, ran by a man named Billy Wentz, Pierce visits its office in the morning. He finds Lilly's address, which is listed as a post office box. He enlists his personal assistant to call the post office and imitate Lilly to receive the true address. Pierce travels to the address, a bungalow in the suburbs. He enters through an unlocked door and finds rotting food and stacking mail from Lilly's mother. Pierce asks his friend from college Cody Zeller, a white hat hacker, to find what he can on Wentz. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderhead_(Preston_and_Child_novel)"title="Thunderhead (Preston and Child novel)">
Anthropologist Nora Kelly finds a letter that was written sixteen years ago, but mysteriously sent to her only recently. The letter is written by her father, long believed dead. The letter states that he had found the lost city of gold, Quivira. Kelly organizes an expedition into a harsh, remote corner of Utah's canyon country. A portion of the team learns that the city of Quivira held not gold, but micaceous, golden colored pottery, and that it also was a center for an Aztec death cult, which had enslaved the native Anasazi people. The Aztec rulers used black magic, aided by a powder of the fungus "Coccidioides immitis" which could kill by causing coccidioidomycosis. Kelly's teammate, Sloane, attempts to kill Kelly to be the sole person who can claim the find, not suspecting what Kelly has learned about the fungal infection, and neither parties realizing until very late that they are being tracked by contemporary practitioners of the cult, who have enhanced their ability to stalk and fight with traditional hallucinogens such as psilocybin, mescaline, and datura.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_April"title="Broken April">
Gjorg Berisha, a 26-year-old Albanian man living on the country's high plateau, is forced to commit a murder under the laws of the Kanun to avenge his brother. As a result of this killing, his own death is sealed; he is to be killed by a member of the opposing family.The novel concerns about the centuries-old tradition of hospitality, blood feuds, and revenge killing in the highlands of north Albania in the 1930s.Reading "Broken April" it is easy to understand why and with what strength Ismail Kadare is passionate about tragedy and its two most prominent representatives, Shakespeare and Aeschylus. "Friendship, loyalty, and feud are the wheels of the mechanism of ancient tragedy, and to enter into their mechanism is to see the possibility of tragedy." 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrior's_Refuge"title="Warrior's Refuge">
The book opens with a short summary of the past events of the previous book, "The Lost Warrior". Coming to the current time, Graystripe and his traveling companion, Millie, can see Highstones in the distance. As they are traveling through a corn field, a combine pursues them. Graystripe and Millie are separated as they flee from the monster. Graystripe manages to get to a nearby barn, and asks for help from the cats inhabiting the barn. The barn cats agree to help Graystripe find Millie. They find Millie and learn the hard corn leaves cut and damaged Millie's eyes. Graystripe and Millie are allowed to stay until she recovers. Husker, one of the barn cats explains to the two cats that they used to live in the nearby Twoleg nest (human house). Unfortunately, the Twolegs (humans) died, and a new family moved in. The new residents disliked the cats, so they were chased out. They had lived in the barn ever since and had to deal with the Twoleg's dogs.Graystripe and Millie face the pet dogs of the family after they wander into the barn. Millie can speak dog and is able to send the dogs away. The barn cats are amazed by Millie's ability and she teaches them how to speak dog. A few days later, Millie and Graystripe see a Twoleg kit in pursuit of a frog. She approaches dangerously close to the edge of a pond, almost falling into it. Graystripe manages to catch the child's attention and lead her away. The Twoleg's parents are very grateful to the cats. Over time, the Twolegs accept the barn cats as well and even adopt them as their kittypets through a plan of Graystripe's. The two travelers continue their route towards home. However, when they arrive at the forest, they find the territory is destroyed and ThunderClan is gone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_at_Night"title="The World at Night">
The story takes place in and around Paris between May 1940 and June 1941. "Jean Casson" is a French motion-picture producer who specializes in gangster films and who possesses no political views to speak of. When the Germans defeat and conquer his country, Casson at first tries to continue his life and career as if nothing had happened. But that proves impossible; when the Germans arrest a few of his friends and associates Casson finds himself helping others to hide or escape. He is seen talking to questionable people, and before long his line is tapped and his movements followed. Eventually Casson must choose between a life of resistance or no life at all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Justice_(novel)"title="Blind Justice (novel)">
Young Jeremy Proctor, recently orphaned, is taken in as ward by blind Sir John Fielding, Magistrate of the Bow Street court and organizer of London's first police force. When Sir John investigates the apparent suicide of Lord Goodhope, it is Jeremy's eyes which note the crucial clue.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fairy_Gunmother"title="The Fairy Gunmother">
The novel is set in the modern Parisian quarter of Belleville. It starts with the dramatic death of a policeman, shot by a "grannie" he was trying to help, and witnessed by at least four others who conveniently forget all details of what they see. The inspector Van Thian goes undercover as a Vietnamese old woman to investigate. Three other investigations follow: one into the attempted murder of a young woman, another into the serial killings of small old women in the district, and a third into drug trafficking by old men. Benjamin Malaussènne, professional scapegoat, quickly becomes suspect number one of all four investigations, owing to the numerous children of his prolific mother he lives with, the various old men with obsolete talents that he shelters, and his repeated abortive romantic affairs. Like all novels in the Malaussène saga, the setting is anything but conventional, the streets of Paris brimming with immigrants in open celebration of their diversity, the situations rarely Gallic yet authentically Parisian.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_(novel)"title="The Ghost (novel)">
Most of the action takes place on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, where former British Prime Minister Adam Lang has been holed up in the holiday home of his billionaire American publisher to turn out his memoirs on a deadline. Lang's former aide, Mike McAra, was struggling to ghost-write Lang's memoirs. However, McAra drowned when he apparently fell off the Woods Hole ferry. The fictional narrator of "The Ghost", whose name is never given, is hired to replace him. His girlfriend walks out on him over his willingness to take the job: "She felt personally betrayed by him; she used to be a party member". The narrator begins to suspect foul play over McAra's death.Meanwhile, Lang is accused by his enemies of war crimes. A leaked memorandum has revealed that he secretly approved the capture and the extraordinary rendition of British citizens to Guantanamo Bay to face interrogation and torture. Richard Rycart, Lang's disillusioned and renegade former foreign secretary (loosely based on Robin Cook), who before and during his early days in office made much of his wish to adopt an "ethical" foreign policy, is now at the United Nations in a position to do his former boss serious damage. Lang thus appears in imminent threat of indictment at the International Criminal Court.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_Grub_Street"title="Murder in Grub Street">
A printer and his household are horrifically slaughtered, and a mad poet is caught red-handed at the scene. But Sir John doubts that the real culprit has been found. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watery_Grave_(novel)"title="Watery Grave (novel)">
When the captain of a British warship falls overboard and drowns, a Naval court martial is convened to investigate a charge of murder. Sir John is petitioned by an old friend to aid in the investigation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_We_Believe_but_Cannot_Prove"title="What We Believe but Cannot Prove">
The essays cover a broad range of topics, including evolution, the workings of the human mind, and science itself. A common focus of responders are the issue of extra-terrestrial life and the question of whether humanity has a supranatural element beyond flesh and blood. Among the more esoteric topics is the question of cockroach consciousness.A pervasive theme, according to "Publishers Weekly", is the discomfort responders felt in professing unproven beliefs, which Publishers Weekly declared "an interesting reflection of the state of science". The question inspired implicit or explicit reflection in a number of responders about the scientific method's reliance on observable, empirical and measurable evidence, with a good many of what "The Observer" points out as largely American responders defending against "a return to an age of uncertainty in which creationism and intelligent design hold sway in the public mind". "What's really at stake here", "Wired" said in its review, "is the nature of 'proof' itself".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lust,_Caution_(novella)"title="Lust, Caution (novella)">
During the Japanese occupation of China, Wang Chia-chih (Wang Jiazhi), a young former actress and drama student, along with other radical Cantonese students take on a dangerous mission to disrupt the Wang Jingwei regime. He is the man who will negotiate and collaborate with the invading Japanese forces to form a government in China. The radical group plans to assassinate Mr. Yee (Yi), a co-collaborator of Wang Jingwei. Chia-chih is assigned a role to disguise as the wife of Mr. Mai, a Hong Kong businessman who is made bankrupt with the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the fall of Hong Kong. Her task is to seduce Mr. Yee and facilitate the ambush.Initially, the student conspirators plan to assassinate Mr. Yee during his stay in Hong Kong. However, the Yees unexpectedly have to leave for Mainland China. The group is disbanded due to a lack of funds and the low chance of Mr. Yee to be close in proximity. During this period, the female student conspirators denounce Chia-chih as a whore because of her sexual relations with Liang Jun-sheng, who is tasked to train Chia-chih as a seductress. The mission resumes after Wu, a member of the anti-Japanese underground resistance in Shanghai, offers to sponsor its continuation in Shanghai.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Climbs"title="Emily Climbs">
Emily Byrd Starr longs to attend Queen's Academy to earn her teaching licence, but her tradition-bound relatives at New Moon refuse. She is instead offered the chance to go to Shrewsbury High School with her friends, on two conditions. The first is that she board with her disliked Aunt Ruth, but it is the second that causes Emily difficulties. Emily must not write (aside from schoolwork) during her high-school education. At first, Emily refuses the offer, unable to contemplate a life without any writing. Cousin Jimmy changes the condition slightly, saying that she cannot write anything that is not true, meaning she must not write stories for the duration of her high school education. Emily does not think this much of an improvement but it turns out to be an excellent exercise for her budding writing career. Emily clashes with the ever-suspicious Aunt Ruth, who must know all but rarely believes it. After more than a year of Aunt Ruth's disrespect and arbitrariness, Emily walks the seven miles back to New Moon in the dead of night, only to walk back after fully venting her feelings to Cousin Jimmy. Emily's friendship with Ilse Burnley is tested by Evelyn Blake, the school's would-be writer, who is jealous and condescending. Emily vanquishes her once and for all when she finds physical proof that Evelyn plagiarized an old poem to win a school contest. Rather than tell everyone about it, Emily only shows the evidence to Evelyn who admits she did it so her father would allow her to take a trip to Vancouver if she won.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conch_Bearer"title="The Conch Bearer">
Anand is a twelve-year-old boy who lives in modern India. A believer in fairy tales and magic, he used to go to school until his family could no longer afford to pay for his lessons. His father had left two years before the start of the story. His sister, Meera, on the other hand, had been hurt mentally when she witnessed a murder. Thus, Anand and his mother had been forced to work.Anand has been employed by a tea shop owner, Haru, who is frequently displeased with Anand's work and pays very little. One day, the shop is visited by an old man, whom Haru assumes to be a beggar. Ordered to take the beggar out of Haru's shop, Anand gently guides the old man out and, feeling sympathetic, gives the old man his lunch of stale pooris and weak tea.Later that night, Anand finds the old man at his door. The man, who introduces himself as Abhaydatta, tells his story of a group of Healers, known as the brotherhood, who wield magic in a place called the Silver Valley, hidden deep within the Himalayas. He also reveals that a powerful magical item, the Conch, has been stolen from the brotherhood by one of its members, Surabhanu. This resulted in the weakening of the Brotherhood; therefore, they have sent four pairs of Healers to search for the conch. Abhaydatta and his partner have, in fact, retrieved the conch; however, his partner died buying Abhaydatta time to escape from Surabhanu.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_of_Pascual_Duarte"title="The Family of Pascual Duarte">
The first-person narrator-protagonist Pascual Duarte, while awaiting execution in the condemned cell, tells the story of his family life and his homicidal past, culminating in matricide. He claims, amongst other things, that Fate is controlling his life and whatever he does nothing will ever change.As aforementioned, the book could be said to explore a Spanish version of Existentialism: as in Albert Camus's "L'étranger", Pascual is seen by society as an outsider, unable or unwilling to follow its norms. His autobiographical tale shows some of the tremendously harsh peasant reality of rural Spain up to the beginning of Franco's regime.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Companions"title="The Good Companions">
The novel is written in picaresque style and opens with the middle-aged, discontented Jess Oakroyd in the fictional Yorkshire town of Bruddersford. He opts to leave his family and seek adventure "on t'road". (Throughout the novel Priestley uses dialect for all non-RP speakers of English.) He heads south down the Great North Road.Intertwined with the story of Oakroyd's travels are those of Elizabeth Trant and Inigo Jollifant, two similarly malcontented individuals. Miss Trant is an upper-middle-class spinster and Jollifant is a teacher at a down-at-heel private school. All three ultimately encounter one another when a failing concert troupe ('The Dinky Doos') are disbanding as a result of their manager's running off with the takings. The independently wealthy Miss Trant, against the advice of her relatives, decides to refloat the troupe, now known as The Good Companions. Inigo plays piano and writes songs, Oakroyd is the odd-job man and the troupe has also been joined by Mr Morton Mitcham (a travelling banjo player and conjuror whom Inigo met earlier on his own odyssey). The other members of the troupe are comedian Jimmy Nunn, song-and-dance man Jerry Jerningham, singers Elsie Longstaff, Courtney (aka Joe) Brundit and Joe's wife (referred to as Mrs Joe) and singer-comedienne Susie Dean. The troupe have various adventures round the shires of middle England.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Disinherited"title="The Disinherited">
Monkey Nest Camp"The Disinherited" is heard through the voice of Larry Donovan, a young boy, growing up in the Monkey Nest coal mine camp. It is a difficult life, and after Larry's brother Dan starts working in the mines, Larry's father prods Larry to do well in school so he too won’t have to go into the mines. Larry makes many observations about the differences between miner families and other families, especially farmer Ben Haskins and his daughter Bonny Fern. Larry throws a dirt clod at Bonny Fern's head one day and the next tries to give her a flower. She calls him “camp trash” and Ben chases Larry away.Larry also distinguishes differences between the miners themselves. His father and his father's friend, “Frenchy” are both educated. So is Lionel Stafford, but Larry's father doesn’t get along with Mr. Stafford. Lionel flaunts his education whereas Larry's father does not.One day the mine owner, Edward Stacpoole, comes to the mine with his wife and son. The son pushes Larry's sister, Madge, into a mud puddle and taunts her.Dan is hurt in a mining accident and dies three days later. Frenchy also dies in a separate mining accident.The camp miner's go on strike, and Larry's father meets unsuccessfully with Mr. Stacpoole to negotiate. One night during a storm a strikebreaker knocks on the Donovan's door seeking shelter. Tom punches him in the mouth and sends him away. Tom tells his children never to become scabs. Eventually, the miners go back to work.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Orc's_Rage"title="Red Orc's Rage">
Jim Grimson is a troubled youth undergoing therapy in a psychiatric hospital who is encouraged to role-play Red Orc, a character in a science fiction novel. Jim finds himself actually transported to the fictional World of Tiers, entering the mind and body of the character he role-played in the hospital. In the World of Tiers Red Orc/Jim struggles with an abusive father, a situation mirroring his real-world problems The character has Oedipal issues with his father, an unemployed crane operator in the fictional "Belmont City", somewhere near Youngstown, Ohio. The steel mills are closing permanently and the family is facing a bleak economic future. Jim struggles with class-issues at his high-school. In academics, athletics, and student society he is a non-achiever, recapitulating his father's position in the adult world. His only outlets are science fiction, the fantasies invented by his grandfather and some bizarre hallucination which occasionally intrude into his world.After a prank with an outhouse goes awry, Jim is arrested. He appears in court and is ordered to undergo a course of psychiatric evaluation and treatment in Wellington Hospital. While there he comes under the care of Dr. R. Lars Porsena. (This name is a play on "A. James Giannini". In most of Farmer's novels the protagonist's name or initials are a play on his or his collaborator's name).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monster_Bed"title="The Monster Bed">
## Introduction.The introduction starts the book in the setting of a small picnic of a human and his dog. The human is apparently telling the reader to not venture into the Withering Wood, a forest of trees rumored to have legendary creatures such as "hairy trolls, nasty gnomes, and scary pixies and fairies."The book then changes setting into inside the forest, where we see a small monster named Dennis and his mother, showing that Dennis was very polite for a young monster. It describes Dennis's fear of humans, which leads to the next part of the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coroner's_Lunch"title="The Coroner's Lunch">
Despite a total lack of training, an utter dearth of experience and a complete absence of inclination, Dr. Siri Paiboun has just been appointed state coroner for the Lao People's Democratic Republic. It's 1976, the royal family has been deposed, the professional classes have fled and the communists have taken over. And 72-year-old Siri - a communist for convenience and a wry old reprobate by nature - has got the coroner's job because he's the only doctor left in Laos.But when the wife of a Party leader is wheeled into the morgue and the bodies of tortured Vietnamese soldiers start bobbing to the surface of a Laotian lake, all eyes turn to the new coroner. Faced with official cover-ups and an emerging international crisis, Siri will be forced to enlist old friends, tribal shamans, forensic deduction, spiritual acumen and some good old-fashioned sleuthing before he can discover quite what's going on...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four-Gated_City"title="The Four-Gated City">
"The Four-Gated City" is set in post Second World War Britain. Martha is in London as the 1950s begin. She "is integrally part of the social history of the time - the Cold War, the Aldermaston Marches, Swinging London, the deepening of poverty and social anarchy". The volume "ends with the century in the grip of World War Three". In the year 1997, Martha dies on a contaminated island off the northwest coast of Scotland. Most of the people of Britain have died before her, in 1978, of multiple afflictions: bubonic plague, nerve gases, nuclear explosions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tide_Knot"title="The Tide Knot">
Sapphire, Conor, and their mother have moved to St Pirans with Roger, leaving behind their cottage by the sea, where their dad disappeared two years ago. Conor has adapted to this new life, but Sapphire cannot. She is withdrawn and restless, and her only relief is the underwater world of Ingo. She goes there more frequently, even without Conor, who has given up going, and prefers his life in the air.A new couple are living in their old house. The woman on crutches has the look of Ingo on her face but does not know of the world beneath the sea. The Lady- Gloria asks a lot of questions and they talk a lot. The lady would like to see Sapphire again so they can go to the cove.One evening Sapphire takes her beloved dog Sadie for a walk along the sea, but the call of Ingo is too strong, so she leaves Sadie up on the pavement and dives in. Faro is there. She only stays a minute but when she goes back to Sadie her dog seems shaken and ill.Sapphire's mother says not to worry: the dog will be fine. Sapphire skips school and takes her dog to see Granny Carne, a magical old lady. She phones home from Granny Carne's and tells her mother she's staying over and won't be back till morning. That night, Sapphire hears her dads voice and follows it to a deep pond. Sapphire sees her dad but in mer. He tells her that the tide knot is loose, but he can't stay long and leaves shortly after. The next day her dog is healed but Sapphire is in trouble with her mother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_Click_Snap"title="Click Click Snap">
"Click Click Snap" is written in first person prose. In the book, Sean McGowan travels through Athens, Ephesus, Bent Jbail, Beirut, Damascus, The West Bank, Petra, and Cairo; completing the eight chapters of the book, respectively. Its diverse (and, arguably, scattered) topics mainly include the neuroscience of art, war, belief, racism.Unusually, each chapter is written as a self-sustaining joke, where more serious topics seemingly arise incidentally. Specific incidences include urinating on the Temple of Artemis to illustrate the benefits of biological satisfaction and stealing a federal election ballot at gunpoint during the 2007 elections in Syria to show "...even though there is such a thing as a ballot with only one name on it, there is no such thing as a clear choice."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deep_(Dunmore_novel)"title="The Deep (Dunmore novel)">
A devastating flood has torn through the worlds of Air and Ingo, and now, deep in the ocean, a monster is stirring. Mer legend says that only those with dual blood—half Mer, half human—can overcome the Kraken that stirs in The Deep.Sapphire must return to the Deep, with the help of her friend the whale, and face this terrifying creature - and her brother Conor and Mer friend Faro will not let her go without them. Those with pure Mer blood cannot go to the Deep.Sapphire has moved back into the cottage by the cove, and is visiting Ingo all the time. When she is summoned to an assembly of the Mer she learns that the Kraken, a creature with the power to destroy their world, has awakened. Sapphire makes a deal with the Mer: if she and Conor help put the Kraken back to sleep their father will have the choice to leave Ingo. Ervys, a spokesperson (self-proclaimed leader, which the Mer do not have, as it causes problems) for the Mer, is outraged by this deal but gives his approval so the Mer will be safe. Sapphire, Conor and Faro (Faro should not be able to go to The Deep, but in Saldowr's mirror, he sees that he is not pure Mer, but part Human) go into the Deep with the help of the whale (that saves Sapphire from the Deep in "The Tide Knot") to find the Kraken, and put him to sleep. It is not revealed what the Kraken really is, but it is clearly a shapeshifter. After a battle of minds, Sapphire manages to get the Kraken to sleep, and with Conor and Faro she goes back to the Mer to tell them the good news. Ervys is still furious especially when Faro asks Sapphire to make the crossing of Ingo with him. She agrees, but only on the condition that Conor may go too. Faro counters by insisting that his sister will also go. Although Sapphire does not want Elvira and Conor together, she agrees.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymorph_(novel)"title="Polymorph (novel)">
"Milica Raznakovic" is the principal alias employed by the protagonist, a shape-changer or "polymorph". Living in a recession-hit future New York, she spends her time partying anonymously, each night in a different body, enjoying casual sex and absolutely no personal attachments. She believes herself to be unique. However, one night she meets another polymorph: older, malicious and much more powerful than herself. The brief and ultimately hostile encounter leads her to place herself in danger by attempting to determine the newcomer's objective, which somehow involves a wealthy industrialist. In the process of her investigation, she finds it necessary to seek an ally, reaching out to her last one-night stand, a young man she would normally not have sought out again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Ranch_Living"title="Modern Ranch Living">
The novel concerns the connection between a pair of very different loners during a hot summer in Arizona.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seize_the_Night_(novel)"title="Seize the Night (novel)">
"Seize the Night" begins a few months after "Fear Nothing". It starts with Chris and his dog Orson happening upon Chris's ex-girlfriend, Lilly Wing, whose son Jimmy has just disappeared. Chris swears to Lilly he'll find Jimmy, and departs with Orson to begin the search. The trail leads them to Fort Wyvern, the abandoned military base Chris likes to explore. They search the base, but soon become separated, and Orson goes missing. Fearing for his dog's well-being, along with that of Jimmy, Chris calls his best friend Bobby Halloway to join him in the search and then sends his current girlfriend Sasha Goodall to Lilly's house to console her. Soon after calling them, Chris sees about thirty or so of the rhesus monkeys encountered towards the end of "Fear Nothing" and takes refuge from them in a nearby bungalow. The monkeys follow him in, and he is saved from being found by Bobby's arrival.Bobby and Chris search the base, but find nothing except a few strange devices and rooms. After leaving, they stop by Lilly's house. Sasha and Chris head to their place, while Bobby heads off to Lilly's mother-in-law Jenna, to bring her back to Lilly's.The next day, Chris calls Manuel Ramirez, the acting chief of police, to give him information about Jimmy Wing's kidnapper's vehicle. Getting no answer, he leaves a message for Manuel to call him after noon. Bobby stops by a bit later to say that Jimmy is not the only child missing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George's_Secret_Key_to_the_Universe"title="George's Secret Key to the Universe">
The main characters in the book are George Greenby, Susan Bellis, Eric Bellis, Annie Bellis, Dr. Reeper, and Cosmos, the world's most powerful computer. Cosmos can draw windows allowing people to look into outer space, as well as doors that act as portals allowing travel into outer space. Written like a story, it aims to describe various aspects of the universe in a manner that is accessible to children and others new to the topic. It starts by describing atoms, stars, planets, and their moons. It then goes on to describe black holes, which remains the topic of focus in the last part of the book. At frequent intervals throughout the book, there are pictures and "fact files" of the different references to universal objects, including a picture of Mars with its moons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_&amp;_Single"title="Single &amp; Single">
Like many of Le Carré's novels, the narrative begins in the "in medias res" style, midway through the events which have precipitated the opening scene.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebody_(novel)"title="Homebody (novel)">
"Homebody" is the story of Don Lark who moves into an old house and is forced to deal with the supernatural forces that live in it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saints_(novel)"title="Saints (novel)">
The book opens up in 1829 with the desertion of the eight-year-old Dinah and her family by Dinah's father, John Kirkham. After enduring many of the horrors of Industrial Revolution England, Dinah's family begins to prosper. Dinah, her mother Anna, and her brother Charles, are converted to Mormonism. But Dinah's elder brother, Robert, as well as her husband, Matthew, do not convert, leading to a permanent schism in the family. The Mormon Kirkhams emigrate to Nauvoo, where the Mormons are building a city.In Nauvoo, Dinah—who had to endure an unthinkable sacrifice to come to America—becomes the inspiration for the other women of Nauvoo. She is regarded by many as a Prophetess, and, despite not having the priesthood, bestows blessings on others. She also finds herself drawn to the prophet of the Latter Day Saint Church, Joseph Smith. He teaches her that her husband in England had proven himself unworthy of her by his rejection of the Gospel and by forcing her to choose between God and husband. Joseph introduces Dinah to the still-covert practice of plural marriage, and they are sealed for eternity as husband and wife. Forced to keep secret her eternal union to Joseph causes strains on her relationships with the other women of the town, particularly Emma Smith, Joseph's first wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brief_Wondrous_Life_of_Oscar_Wao"title="The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao">
## Main narrative.Oscar de León (nicknamed Oscar Wao, a bastardization of Oscar Wilde) is an overweight Dominican growing up in Paterson, New Jersey. Oscar desperately wants to be successful with women but, from a young age, is unable to find love, largely because he is a nerd obsessed with science fiction and comic books. His great fear is that he will die a virgin.After high school, Oscar attends Rutgers University. His sister's boyfriend Yunior (the narrator of much of the novel) moves in with Oscar and tries to help him get in shape and become more "normal". After "getting dissed by a girl", he attempts to kill himself by drinking three bottles of liquor and jumping off the New Brunswick train bridge. He survives the fall but is seriously injured.Oscar recuperates and graduates from Rutgers. He substitute teaches at his former high school and dreams about writing an epic work of science fiction. Eventually, he moves to the Dominican Republic and falls helplessly in love with Ybon, a sex worker who lives near him. Ybon is kind to Oscar but rejects his frequent romantic overtures. Ybon's boyfriend, a violent police captain, becomes jealous of Oscar and sends two goons who kidnap Oscar, take him to the sugarcane fields, and beat him into a coma. Oscar's family takes him back to the United States to heal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_E-mail_Mystery"title="The E-mail Mystery">
Nancy is the daughter of a lawyer. When someone starts making email maneuvers to take destabilize the law firm of her father, Nancy investigates the web to find the perpetrator.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nightrunner_Series"title="The Nightrunner Series">
## "Luck in the Shadows".Seregil stumbles into the rescue of Alec, a poor orphaned hunter. After hiring Alec to guide him through the Northern Lands, Seregil notes Alec's quick learning ability and fast hands, and offers him a job as his apprentice. Alec, though wary of Seregil at first due to a distressing amount of secrecy and suspicion that he is becoming a thief or spy, accepts the offer. They fall into a mystery that involves the fast deterioration of Seregil's mind and sanity, and Alec must find a way to save his new teacher and friend. Alec manages to deliver Seregil into the hands of Nysander, a wizard of Skala, but the mystery only deepens. At the same time, a traitorous plot against the Queen seems to be unfolding, and Seregil must solve it quickly before he is found guilty of treason himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chike_and_the_River"title="Chike and the River">
It is the story of a Nigerian boy called Chike who leaves his village, Umuofia, to go and stay with his uncle in the big city of Onitsha.He has a lot of friends that made him thrilled when he meet and he was the only child to survive crossing the river.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebekah_(novel)"title="Rebekah (novel)">
"Rebekah" follows the story of Isaac through the eyes and perspective of Rebekah. The story-line does not deviate from the story told in Genesis, but Card does add details and characters of his own invention.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Foxes"title="Black Foxes">
## Section 1.21-year-old Lord Tyrone Sully inherits his parents' wealth when his father dies in a bull-related accident, and his mother, wishing to join him, suicides. Depressed, he decides to leave with Oscar to buy a horse in Black Chest. Everything starts to go wrong when his uninvited cousin, Silke turns up and Oscar invites her to join them.On the long road to the horse auction, Oscar and Silke fall for each other, to Tyrone's annoyance. He says nothing and helps both of them for the sake of his friend. He meets Lord Silverdale, a hated childhood friend who he recovers to be a cheat.Oscar's stable boy, Grundy buys him a horse and they travel back to Tyrone's house, Wylde Hide. On the way back, he finds Silverdale waiting for him in a bar. Silverdale shoots Tyrone below the heart. Oscar, with quick thinking, draws out his gun and shoots Silverdale straight in the heart. Silverdale dies, while Tyrone lives, fighting for his life. He eventually heals and returns home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redeeming_Love"title="Redeeming Love">
The story starts off in New England, 1835. Sarah, a beautiful young girl, meets her father, Alex Stafford, for the first time. Six-year-old Sarah learns that she is the product of Stafford's adulterous affair with her mother, Mae. Mae was urged to abort the child, but refused to do so, and her decision separated the two and left Mae depressed. Sarah begins to think that she is to blame, but she hopes Alex never comes back.Later that year, Mae's maid Cleo begrudgingly takes Sarah with her on a trip to the seashore so that Mae can have a private visit with Alex. Cleo takes Sarah with her to a popular brothel where Cleo is well-known and has a male companion. After getting drunk she agrees to sleep with him while Sarah waits in the hall. After this man leaves her heartbroken again, a half-drunk Cleo tells a frightened Sarah "God's truth:" that no man ever cares for a woman and all they want is sex. Mae and Sarah then move to a shack on the docks, where Mae takes up prostitution to make ends meet. She gains a reputation known all over town, and Sarah is forced to suffer the rejection of the townspeople because of it. Through this experience, Sarah learns to mask her emotions and replace them instead with a hard exterior.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Magorium's_Wonder_Emporium_(novel)"title="Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium (novel)">
When a young pianist named Molly Mahoney inherits a magical toy store from her eccentric 243-year-old boss, Mr. Magorium, she struggles with self-doubt. But through the friendship of a charismatic little boy named Eric Applebaum and a buttoned-up accountant named Henry Weston, she learns to believe in herself, and finds that she does possess enough magic to run Mr. Magorium's shop by finding herself in places she's never imagined.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reincarnation_(novel)"title="Reincarnation (novel)">
In the first setting of the story the female protagonist is a Cro-Magnon (more developed caveman), and the male protagonist is a Neanderthal, man a little behind Cro-Magnon in evolution, thus unable to capture the concept of speech. The female, May, is ready to get married soon, and will be linked to Lenar by her deity, the Great Mother. The male, Kye is hunting with his group. They meet each other near the cave that May visits when they spot a green rock. They struggle over the stone. May wanted it so that she could have her own ranking within her tribe, to be able to not marry an insensitive tribesman, Lenar, the first antagonist in the book. Kye wants it so that he may redeem himself within his tribe, for he had run away from a fight.The second antagonist is revealed through the perspective of Lenar as a female in his and May's tribe, Sha, who would gladly marry Lenar and has red curls which are passed down to her next lives.Future incarnations inherit May's singing, struggle with ranking in social groups, and that she is religious, and Kye's incarnations inherit aching head injuries. The incarnations also happen to be different in ethnicity like May and Kye.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dangerous_Days_of_Daniel_X"title="The Dangerous Days of Daniel X">
Twelve years after the murder of his parents, fifteen-year-old alien Daniel X has taken up the task of his parents as Defender of Earth. In the sewers of Portland, Oregon, he defeats number 19 on the List of Alien Outlaws on Earth, Orkng Jllfgna, in hopes of working his way up to number 1: The Prayer, the alien who murdered Daniel's parents.Daniel then leaves to go to Los Angeles in search of number 6 on his List, Ergent Seth. While traveling, he spends a night in the woods, camping with the "friends" he conjured up with his powers: Joe, Willy, Emma, and Dana.The next day, Daniel arrives in LA. With the help of his "family", which he created, he rents a house. The next day, Daniel decides to go to school, a first in his life. At the end of the day, he bumps into Phoebe Cook, who is also new to the school.Daniel decides to search the city for clues about the whereabouts of Seth, and stumbles in upon a child-slave and drug-dealing operation.The following day after school, Daniel walks Phoebe to his house, which he finds destroyed. Soon after, he is contacted by Seth, who again warns him to leave LA.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Boy"title="First Boy">
Dragged into the political turmoil of a presidential election year, fourteen-year-old Cooper Jewett, who has run a New Hampshire dairy farm since his grandfather's death, stands up for himself and makes it clear whose first boy he really is. Cooper never knew his parents and his birth certificate is blacked out. Who is Cooper Jewett really? Nobody knows.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Autonomy"title="Energy Autonomy">
In the book Scheer discusses that for the past two hundred years industrial civilization has relied predominantly upon fossil fuels, which are abundant and cheap but also have adverse social and environmental effects. Scheer argues that it would be more beneficial if they transition to renewable energy and distributed, decentralized energy generation, as this is a model that has already been proven to be successful. Much progress with renewable energy commercialization has already been made in Europe where the renewable energy industry is a multi-billion Euro industry with high growth rates.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Cold_(Swindells_novel)"title="Stone Cold (Swindells novel)">
After Link's father abandons his family for a receptionist, Link's mother finds a new boyfriend, Vince. A rather unappealing character and a new stepfather, eventually forces Link out of the house. Link, now homeless, decides to travel to Camden, London. Here he meets Ginger, a streetwise homeless man, who takes him under his wing. Link and Ginger work together and become friends. Along all of this, a man nicknamed Shelter is busy with his own task. An ex-army member, dismissed for 'medical reasons' that weren’t obvious, he is convinced that he must 'clear' the streets of the homeless, or dossers. He begins abducting and murdering victims, hiding them under the floor of his room and dressing them in army clothes.One day, Ginger decided to meet his old friends. Link waited for him, yet he never returned. Shelter had abducted him, telling him that Link was at his apartment, badly injured. Ginger fell for it and was murdered.Distressed by Ginger's absence, Link finds the company of a mysterious young woman named Gail. They 'dossed' together and began to figure out the strange things that were happening. They eventually traced them to an old man, Shelter. Gail always spent ages in the telephone box, so Link left for a couple of minutes and searched for Shelter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_(novel)"title="Wolf (novel)">
Cassy is a teen-age girl who lives with her father's mother. Her grandmother and her mother both maintain silence about her father. One night she is awakened by mysterious footsteps. The next day, as always when the footsteps are heard, she is sent away to live with her lovely but feckless mother, Goldie, who is squatting in London. Mother, her partner, and his teenage son "make a living with innovative programs for schools: combinations of fact and fiction, drama and story, skillfully blended to challenge stereotypes and spark original thinking." Now they are producing a play about wolves, and they encourage Cassy to become involved. Cassy does her best to adjust to the new way of life, which is challenging in several ways. She cannot escape a sense of dread, a feeling that she is being stalked. Her nightmare is Red Riding Hood "recast by her own fears".Eventually she learns the secret she has been protected from all her life: her father is a notorious terrorist, a bomber in the Irish Republican Army.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulku_(novel)"title="Tulku (novel)">
Thirteen-year-old Theodore lives in a remote region of China at his father's mission. When the violence of the Boxer Rebellion finally reaches them, Theodore escapes alone from its destruction. He soon becomes one companion of a formidable Englishwoman, "painted, blasphemous, gun-toting Mrs Jones". She is an amateur botanist and a former actress with an entourage.The party flees bandits into Tibet and take refuge at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. Theodore is briefly seen to be the Tulku, a great lama reincarnated; then the recently conceived child of Mrs Jones and her Chinese lover is identified as the one. Theodore is exposed to the "magnetic, repugnant rituals of Buddhism" and develops as a "whole, willing Christian". Mrs Jones is recruited to remain on site and the boy finally returns to England with the fruit of her botanical expedition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beast_(Kennen_novel)"title="Beast (Kennen novel)">
Stephen is a 17-year-old foster child living on the edge of the law. He has moved from family to family, all the time guarding a great secret. He harbors a huge crocodilean beast, ferocious from birth, bequeathed to him by his criminal father when Stephen was a child. "Beast" tells the story of his murderous intents toward this monster and his growing relationships, as well as frequently reliving his childhood through flashbacks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodline_(Wilson_novel)"title="Bloodline (Wilson novel)">
The novel begins a bit after Gia and Vicky recover from the accident brought by the yenceri. Gia, as always persuades Jack to do some fix-its, on the condition that he does not risk too much. The persuasion was followed when a middle-aged woman named Christy Pickering asks for Jack's help. Jack finds that Christy has been having a problem with her daughter Dawn, she is dating a man Jerry Bethlehem, about twice her age (or as Christy puts it: "Old enough to be her father"). The problem is actually with her PI who has just disappeared. Along the way of looking into Bethlehem life, Jack begins to realize a connection between Bethlehem and the leader(Hank Thompson) of a new movement called the Kickers. It seems that both Hank and Jerry went to the same criminal institute known to take extremely violent criminals, the Creighton Institute. Further investigation leads Jack to finding the detective murdered in ways of a water torture. Jack later finds that not only are Hank and Jerry related by Creighton but also by the newfound mysterious oDNA found there. It comes to Jack that the 'o' stands for the wrong side of his life, the Other. He also finds that Jerry is not his real name, it is actually Jeremy Bolton, a sociopath who was captured for a crime far down in Atlanta, GA: the Atlanta Abortion Murders. After getting Dawn pregnant he starts acting differently, showing his true self to her. Upon finding out of her daughters pregnancy, Christy is found dead, presumed suicide by slashing her wrists. Before her death, Jack investigates on the whereabouts of Dawn's father who has never been mentioned by Christy, only to be enlightened with the truth that Dawn is a rape-baby. Further investigation in the oDNA it is realized that Hank, Moonglow(Christy), and Jeremy are all the children of the mysterious oDNA filled Jonah Stevens. As all the pieces come together Jack finds the final piece revealing a dark secret, Jeremy is Dawn's father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Edge_(novel)"title="The Edge (novel)">
The story begins in London as Danny and his mother, Cathy Mangam, are fleeing from Chris Kane, Cathy's cruel boyfriend. Chris pursues the pair to the local tube station, but they manage to escape to an area of the country known as "the Edge", where Danny's grandparents, Joan and Harry, live.At first, Harry refuses to accept Danny, as he not only has mixed parentage but is also the result of an unplanned teenage pregnancy. As the book progresses, however, Harry grows to accept Danny as his grandson.At school, Danny befriends and later dates a girl called Nikki. This causes trouble for Danny, because she is also loved by another teen called Steve Parker, who is a racist bully. Nikki warns Danny not provoke Steve; it is implied that Steve and his gang had been responsible for an arson attack on a store with coloured owners. Nonetheless, Danny enters an altercation with Steve and his gang and is saved by a man named Des, who is revealed to be Danny's real father.Meanwhile, Chris, being highly possessive, continues to search for Cathy and Danny. Though Cathy initially is able to conceal their hiding place from him, a newspaper article eventually gives Chris a clue. After deducing where they are hiding, Chris makes his way to Danny's grandparents' house and shows up one day at Danny's new school. After pursuing Danny back to their house, Chris attempts to kidnap Cathy by force. During the struggle, the police arrive; Chris is arrested and imprisoned. Following this, the novel concludes with Danny having a happy family and a pleasant life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomwyte"title="Doomwyte">
The magpie Griv, resting from a storm just outside a window, listens to the story the young mouse Bisky is telling, about how his ancestor Gonff the Mousethief stole four great jewels from the Great Doomwyte Idol. However, the listeners, all fellow youngsters and Dibbuns, disbelieve the story. The young Redwallers have a pillowfight which the squirrel Dwink (who was especially sceptical of Bisky's tale) started. Griv leaves for the lair of the Doomwytes, of which she is a member, and tells the Wytes' leader, Korvus Skurr, about the jewels.Bisky and Dwink are caught in their fight by the infirmary keeper Brother Torilis, who reports them to Abbot Glisam. While reporting to Abbot Glisam, Bisky tells him of his story. Samolus Fixa, a relative of Bisky's, overhears them and confirms to Glisam that there is truth in Bisky's story. Samolus, Bisky and Dwink dig through the Abbey records in the gatehouse, coming upon the journal of Lady Columbine (Gonff's wife), Dinny (Gonff's friend) and Gonff himself. All three tell a similar account of Gonff stealing the jewels and offering them to Columbine, who refuses to have them because they have seen too much evil. Gonff then composes riddles to the location of the jewels.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Fun_and_Games_until_Somebody_Loses_an_Eye"title="All Fun and Games until Somebody Loses an Eye">
Jane Fleming, a 46-year-old housewife and grandmother, lives a quiet life in suburban East Kilbride. All that changes when her son, Ross, who works in the arms industry, is forced into hiding when his latest research attracts unwanted attention. Aided by the mysterious Bett, Jane must confront drug dealers, assassins and ruthless arms dealers in order to save her son.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Big_Boy_Did_It_and_Ran_Away"title="A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away">
Anti-terrorist forces are put on alert when it is learned that the notorious international terrorist the Black Spirit plans to attack on an unknown British target on Saturday, September 6. The Black Spirit is an ingenious terrorist-for-hire known for his clever, often indirect means of achieving destruction; the terrorist organizations that hire him then claim the hit. He himself, however, claims his kills by leaving a literal "calling card," an image of the comic figure Rank Badjin by the Glasgow cartoonist Bud Neill.Meanwhile, 30-something Raymond Ash is struggling to cope with the banality of his new life, having sold his video game shop and decided to settle down with his wife, a new baby, and a new career as an English teacher in Glasgow. While visiting Glasgow airport he sees his college friend Simon Darcourt, who supposedly died when terrorists blew up an airliner a few years before. He has no idea that Darcourt is in reality the Black Spirit. Darcourt for his part sees Raymond and decides to settle an old score with him by incorporating him into his terrorist plot.Raymond ends up being abducted by Darcourt's terrorists, along with a couple of 13-year-old boys from his school (whose presence is unknown to the gang). Raymond escapes, then finds himself aiding Glasgow policewoman Angelique de Xavia in a valiant attempt to foil their plot, the two being the only people with a chance of reaching the site of the attack in time – the (fictional) Highlands hydroelectric plant at Dubh Ardrain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_Freshmen_Never_Lie"title="Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie">
Scott Hudson enters J.P. Zenger High as a freshman, along with his three best friends, Mitch, Patrick, and Kyle, and quickly realizes that it is very different from middle school. Scott gets put into advanced classes, including an Honors English class which, despite the amount of homework, is his favorite class and his English teacher, Mr. Franka, becomes a mentor to him. Scott finds out that he is not in classes with any of his friends since he is carrying all honors and college prep classes. He tries his best from the very start to get the attention of Julia Baskins, a girl who was in his kindergarten class and has become very attractive over the summer. Because of her beauty she quickly blends in with the popular girls and is attracted to the football players who are often bullying Scott. Scott also finds himself connected to another classmate named Louden, who is better known as Mouth.Scott tries every attempt to get Julia's attention such as joining the school paper, because he thinks that she is part of the staff, only to discover that she has just written a single column for the paper. He then runs for student council, after finding out that Julia is also running as well, and wins a seat, only to find out that she has not won. As a result, Scott resigns from his position on the student council, making Julia the new council member. He also auditions for the school play and is selected as a member of the crew, thinking that Julia would be in the play. However, Julia has not been selected as a member of the cast or crew. Soon, a new girl named Lee arrives at school, who wears face pins and weird clothes, and has wildly colored hair. Both soon realize that they share the same interests, but Scott cannot get past his crush on Julia. He also makes friends with a senior named Wesley. Though the two share some interests, they have little in common. Then to put the cherry on top of all this excitement going on in his life, his mother announces that she is pregnant. He copes with all of this by creating a tip book for his soon-to-be baby sibling to help him, or her, survive high school when they get to it. In his entries to the baby, he often shows disdain by using degrading terms to talk to it such as "Smelly" or "Blob of unformed goo". He writes it so he can try to be a good older brother to this new baby, since Scott's own brother was rarely present.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily's_Quest"title="Emily's Quest">
Emily Starr is now seventeen and a high school graduate. The residents of New Moon consider her an adult and allow her much more freedom. Emily and Teddy Kent have been friends since childhood, and as Teddy is about to leave for two years to further his education as an artist, Emily believes that their friendship is blossoming into something more. On his last night at home, they vow to think of each other when they see the star Vega of the Lyre.During the next two years, Emily grows as a writer and learns to deal with the loneliness of having her closest friends gone (Ilse and Teddy to Montreal, and Perry to Charlottetown), life at New Moon changes. Mr. Carpenter, Emily's most truthful critic and favourite teacher dies (warning Emily, even as he dies to "Beware --- of --- italics."). Her budding career as a writer begins to flourish to the point that the Murray clan finally accept her profession. She becomes closer to Dean Priest, even as she fears he wants love when she only has friendship to give. Worst of all, Emily and Teddy become distant as he focuses on building his career and she hides her feelings behind pride.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weep_Not,_Child"title="Weep Not, Child">
Njoroge, a little boy, is urged to attend school by his mother. He is the first one of his family able to go to school. His family lives on the land of Jacobo, an African made rich by his dealings with white settlers, namely Mr. Howlands, the most powerful land owner in the area. Njoroge's brother Kamau works as an apprentice to a carpenter, while Boro, the eldest living son, is troubled by his experiences while in forced service during World War II, including witnessing the death of his elder brother. Ngotho, Njoroge's father and a respected man in the surrounding area, tends Mr. Howlands' crops, but is motivated by his passion to preserve his ancestral land, rather than for any compensation or loyalty.One day, black workers call for a strike to obtain higher wages. Ngotho is ambivalent about participating in the strike because he fears he will lose his job. However, he decides to go to the gathering, even though his two wives do not agree. At the demonstration, there are calls for higher wages. Suddenly, the white police inspector brings Jacobo to the gathering to pacify the native people. Jacobo tries to put an end to the strike. Ngotho attacks Jacobo, and the result is a riot where two people are killed. Jacobo survives and swears revenge. Ngotho loses his job and Njoroge’s family is forced to move. Njoroge’s brothers fund his education and seem to lose respect for their father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Pip"title="Mister Pip">
The novel is the story of a girl caught in the throes of war on the island of Bougainville. Matilda survives the war through the guidance of her devoted but strict Christian mother and her white teacher Mr Watts, and also, more importantly, through her connection with the fictional Pip, the protagonist of Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations". Pip helps Matilda maintain a desire to live, especially after her mother, Mr Watts, and her island home all cease to exist.The novel opens with a colourful description of Watts, whom the children call Pop-Eye (The first line of the book being: 'Everyone called him Pop Eye') due to his eyes that "stuck out further than anyone else's". He is married to Grace, a native of Bougainville, which explains why he remains long after most white men had abandoned the island. With military tension rising and the schoolroom growing over with creepers, Watts decides to take on the task of educating the children. Despite his claim to be limited in intelligence, he introduces the students to one of the greatest English authors, Charles Dickens.Dolores, Matilda's overzealous Christian mother, expresses an extreme distrust of the teacher and his curriculum. She does everything in her power to ensure that her daughter's mind is not polluted by the strange white man, including making weekly visits to the classroom. She even goes as far as stealing and hiding Watts's "Great Expectations" book, an action that causes immense trouble when "Redskin" soldiers enter the village and find Pip's name carved in the sand. It is Matilda who wrote his name, and it is her guilt that makes her empathise with her mother, who refuses to give up the book as evidence that Pip is not a rebel but a fictional character. Convinced that Pip must be a spy who has been hidden from them, the soldiers destroy the houses. All they leave behind are smoking fragments of the village's former life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_or_Persons_Unknown_(novel)"title="Person or Persons Unknown (novel)">
Women of the street are being brutally murdered in Covent Garden, and Sir John is baffled. Worse, one of the Fieldings' acquaintances becomes the prime suspect.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_of_Mutiny"title="Moon of Mutiny">
Fred Halpern, a young man with a gift for mentally calculating trajectories and orbits is expelled from the Goddard Space Academy a week before graduation due to his long history of insubordination and lack of discipline. Because of a foolish attempt to land on the Moon in a stolen rocket which caused him to be trapped and the subsequent death of one of his rescuers, he is ostracized by the space community. When given a final chance to show he has grown up, he questions his motives and wonders if he can escape his past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_(novel)"title="Venus (novel)">
Martin Humphries is the head of the giant Humphries Space Systems and at his 100th birthday party announces a prize of ten billion dollars to anyone who can recover any remains of his eldest son Alex. Alex was killed two years previously on a mission to Venus. Van Humphries, Martin's son and younger brother to Alex takes up the challenge despite, and because of, a mutual dislike between son and father.Van assembles a ship and crew and heads off to Venus, shadowed by the mysterious Lars Fuchs. Upon entering the Venusian atmosphere they find the clouds are alive with bacterial life which, unfortunately, takes a liking to the ship. The ship is soon in trouble as it is eaten away by the bacteria. Van's more conservative ship is quickly eaten away by the bacteria, while Lars's bulky ship manages to survive. Van is rescued by Lars Fuch's ship but most of his crew are lost.Van finds Lars a brutal yet intelligent man who rules his ship with a rod of iron. The heat builds as they descend through the Venusian atmosphere. Lars has to deal with mutiny and they find out that Lars Fuchs is Van Humphries' real father. At the end of the novel the intense heat, Lars's and Van's health and volcanic activity conspire to produce a climactic finale, in which a sulfur-based lifeform is revealed to exist on Venus. Alex's remains are recovered and the money claimed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agaguk"title="Agaguk">
This novel is a story of cultural conflict between the Inuit of Northerns Quebec and white men, set in the 1940s. It is told from the perspective of the main character Agaguk, an Inuk man. Agaguk diverges from his tribe with a woman named Iriook. Through their journeys, Yves Thériault explores Agaguk's mastery of nature as well as the general relationship between the Inuit and the tundra. Furthermore, by describing the conflicts with the white men, the themes of alcoholism, assimilation as well as economic and judicial injustice are thoroughly explored. The personal aspect of the novel also allows for an intriguing analysis of Agaguk and his behaviour towards his wife in particular.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wheel_of_Darkness"title="The Wheel of Darkness">
This novel picks up shortly following the events depicted in "The Book of the Dead".Agent Pendergast and his ward, Constance Greene, are studying in Tibet with Buddhist monks; they are recuperating from the events depicted in the novel "The Book of the Dead". An artifact is stolen from the monastery, and the monks ask if Pendergast can retrieve it. Pendergast pursues the thief and artifact through China, Rome, and London. He finds that the original thief was killed and the artifact stolen by someone else. He and Constance track the killer to a new luxury ocean liner, the Britannia which is headed to New York City.Aboard the ship, Pendergast quickly eliminates all but a few possible suspects. He coerces the ships' guards to help him in exchange for helping them stop cheaters at the casino on the ship. The killer is murdering random people on the ship and everyone is panicking. There is also a mysterious shadow thing being sighted and causing inevitable panic. The captain refuses to go to the nearest port, which creates more problems.Fearing the loss of a life over the loss of profit, the crew mutinies and puts a female commander in charge. Pendergast locates the artifact's thief. However, he actually looks at it and undergoes a mental change. It brings out his "evil side"; where he doesn't care about anyone but himself and he thinks that humans are pathetic and should be cleansed. Meanwhile, the new captain has tricked the crew out of the bridge and locked it down. She aims for 'Carrion Rock', a land mass that will easily sink the ship. It is later revealed she herself had looked at the artifact and had decided to kill everyone on board as revenge for not being promoted to what she believes is her rightful position.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends,_Lovers,_Chocolate"title="Friends, Lovers, Chocolate">
Isabel Dalhousie is in her early forties and lives alone in Edinburgh. Due to an inheritance from her late mother, she can work for a nominal fee as the editor of the "Review of Applied Ethics". Her closest friends are her niece Cat, a young woman who runs a delicatessen; her housekeeper Grace, who is outspoken and interested in spiritualism; Cat's ex-boyfriend Jamie, a bassoonist to whom Isabel has been secretly attracted ever since they met; and Brother Fox, an urban fox who lives in Isabel's garden.When visiting Cat's delicatessen one lunchtime, Isabel meets Ian, who has recently had a heart transplant, and seems to have gained the memories of the heart's former owner, particularly the memory of a sinister-looking man with hooded eyes and a scar on his forehead. Ian is worried that this man may have killed the original owner of the heart, and Isabel decides that they have a moral duty to try to find out more.Later, Cat tells Isabel that she is about to receive a visit from Tomasso, an Italian whom Cat recently met at a friend's wedding. Cat suggests that he and Isabel, being of similar age, should go out to dinner. Isabel dismisses the idea, thinking of Jamie. Later that evening, she is shocked when Jamie tells her that he is having an affair with a married woman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Careful_Use_of_Compliments"title="The Careful Use of Compliments">
After her son, Charlie's, birth Isabel feels that her life has hit a happy (or happier) patch. Deciding that she may bid for a painting at auction, she visits the showroom, where she has arranged to meet Jamie (her son's father). Jamie proposes but Isabel says that she thinks they should wait, half-hoping that Jamie will press his case. She is a little disappointed when he agrees with her, but accepts that they have made the correct decision.To her distress, she learns that the editorial board of the "Review of Applied Ethics", which she edits, has decided to replace her, an action that she effectively reverses although not without her usual philosophical qualms and musings.Meanwhile, she becomes interested in the life and recent death of Andrew McInnes, an artist most of whose paintings feature the island of Jura and who was lost in a boating accident there some years previously. Travelling with her fiancé, Jamie, and Charlie to the place of his loss she discovers new information about a more recent painter who was painting similar scenes. Her investigations into a possible art fraud unearth something quite unexpected.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Mirror_(book)"title="Magic Mirror (book)">
"Magic Mirror" is a story about the problems of a mythical family. Although the family is presented as a medieval royal family, their problems reflect present-day concerns and modern world artifacts appear in the pictures.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precaution_(novel)"title="Precaution (novel)">
"Precaution" is set in the spring of 1815 in Northamptonshire, England. It follows the relationship of Emily Moseley and George Denbigh.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Secrets_(novel)"title="The Book of Secrets (novel)">
In Dar es Salaam in the late 1980s, a retired school teacher named Pius Fernandes was given an English language diary by one of his former students, now a shopkeeper. The diary entries, written between 1913 and 1914, are an account written by Alfred Corbin, Assistant District Commissioner, a low ranking colonial official sent to the small town of Kikono. While there, Corbin becomes intrigued by a young woman named Mariamu whom he saves from an exorcism. Before she is married, Mariamu also briefly nurses Corbin when he is stricken with blackwater fever. After her marriage, Mariamu's husband, believing that Mariamu is not a virgin, accuses Corbin of sleeping with her.The narrative then shifts to Mariamu's husband Pipa. Initially enraged at the thought that Mariamu was not a virgin when they married, he gradually grows to accept and love her. When their son Ali Akber Ali is born and has fair skin and grey eyes, their marriage becomes strained again. Meanwhile, World War I has reached the small town of Kikono and Pipa is enlisted as a messenger, first by Corbin on behalf of the English and later by the Germans. After being arrested by the English as a messenger for the Germans Pipa returns home only to find that Mariamu has been raped and murdered. After her death Pipa discovers that she had stolen Corbin's diary. Pipa believes that the diary holds the secret to Ali's paternity, but since he cannot speak English, and is illiterate, he is unable to read its secrets.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonsbane"title="Dragonsbane">
A witch, Jenny Waynest, and lord, John Aversin, who live in the decaying Northlands are approached by a young southern noble, Gareth, who requests they slay a dragon in the capital city of Bel to the south. The pair agree on the condition the king send troops to the north to fend off bandits. On arriving, it is revealed that Gareth is not a mere noble, but the prince of the realm seeking aid against the wishes of his father. The dragon is revealed as Morkeleb the Black, an ancient and powerful dragon, now inhabiting the caverns of the gnomes. In addition, the sorceress Zyerne is revealed to hold the king in her power, dominating him with the goal of capturing the power of the Stone in the heart of the gnomish Deep. John is persuaded to kill Morkeleb, with Jenny's assistance, but is himself wounded and Jenny is forced to save the dragon's life in exchange for that of John's. In saving Morkeleb's life, Jenny's weak powers are much augmented, allowing her to confront Zyerne but also tempting her to transform into a dragon and abandon the concerns of humanity. Zyrene enters the Deep, attempting to claim its magic, but is defeated when the Stone is destroyed by John, Jenny and Morkeleb. Jenny accepts Morkeleb's offer to transform into a dragon, but later returns to the North, unable to live without her humanity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_My_Girlfriend_Doesn't_Know"title="What My Girlfriend Doesn't Know">
"What My Girlfriend Doesn't Know" picks up where the previous novel ended, with Robin unable to believe he has a girlfriend. Due to the dynamics of high school social interaction, Sophie is ostracized by her friends because she chose the school loser as her boyfriend. This is familiar territory for Robin, but new to Sophie. To make matters worse Robin is accepted into a special figure drawing class at Harvard University where he is readily accepted by the other art students. He is amazed to realize they do not care that he is “only” a high school student or that he is an outcast in school. Sophie is able to eventually reconcile with her friends once they realize she can only be happy dating Robin. One of the girls in Robin's drawing class, Tessa, falls for him as well, and he is conflicted about being attracted to two girls at once, especially since Tessa is a “college woman” (though when the art class indulges in vodka Jell-O shots she reveals she's a minor genius, only sixteen years old and accepted into Harvard after skipping several grades in school). Sophie discovers Robin and Tessa made out at the party, temporarily dumps him, but relents when he admits his stupidity and that he does not know how to properly operate in social interactions with anyone, especially girls.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_(Preston_novel)"title="Blasphemy (Preston novel)">
Isabella, a powerful particle accelerator, has been constructed in Red Mesa in the remote Arizona desert, the most expensive machine ever built by science. The project is staffed by a team of twelve scientists, under the leadership of charismatic Nobel Laureate Gregory North Hazelius. The team consists of Kate Mercer, Hazelius's second-in-command; chief engineer and designer of Isabella Ken Dolby; Russian software engineer Peter Volkonsky; cosmologist Melissa Corcoran; senior intelligence officer and security guard Tony Wardlaw; psychologist George Innes; quantum electrodynamicist Julie Thibodeaux; electrical engineer Harlan St. Vincent; Michael Cecchini, the Standard Model particle physicist; computer engineer Rae Chen; and mathematician Alan Edelstein. When the team supposedly encounters a problem with the machine, they appear to be covering something up and not reporting all the true facts to their superiors, even after Voldonsky suddenly dies in what appears to be a suicide. Ex-CIA agent Wyman Ford is tapped to go to Arizona in an undercover role as an anthropologist, and finds out what's really going on with the project. He is reluctant to undertake the mission, having had a previous relationship with Mercer while in college and being consistently warned of Hazelius's almost seductive charisma. Once there, Ford discovers the scientists have made a discovery that apparently not only demonstrates the existence of God, but communications with it reveal it to be far grander and deeper than anything found in the conventional religions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_of_het_klein_insectenboek"title="Erik of het klein insectenboek">
Erik Pinksterblom is a little nine-year-old boy who lies in bed at night, worried about a test about insects he has to perform at school tomorrow. Suddenly the paintings in his bedroom come alive, including one depicting a meadow full of insects. Erik climbs into the painting where he meets several talking insect characters.First he meets a snobbish and rich family of wasps. Erik unintentionally gives offence when he recites a poem about the "busy bee" – it turns out the wasps despise bees, because they work for people. After dinner Erik joins the wasps in playing some music, using flies as string instruments, but he's forced to leave the party early when Erik accidentally causes the house fly he was playing to die.A bumblebee who claims to be a philosopher brings him to a hotel, made from a huge snail's house. Erik surprises everybody by reciting interesting facts about insects he read in a natural history book. While all the insects are amazed they are also scared often doing anything if it's not reported in the book. Erik can comfort them by telling them they just have to follow their natural instincts.In one of the hotel rooms a caterpillar changes into a butterfly. Together, he and Erik leave the hotel. Later the butterfly meets a female butterfly with whom he falls in love. Erik helps him write a poem for her and eventually the couple gets married, leaving Erik alone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Angel"title="Falling Angel">
Johnny Favorite, a popular crooner before and during the Second World War, has not been seen or heard of since he was critically wounded during a 1943 Luftwaffe raid on Allied forces in Tunisia. In 1959, private investigator Harry Angel is hired to locate him on behalf of a mysterious client who calls himself Louis Cyphre. During his investigation, Angel finds himself enmeshed in a disturbing occult milieu.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shosha_(novel)"title="Shosha (novel)">
The main character is aspiring author Aaron Greidinger who lives in the Hasidic quarter of the Jewish neighborhood of Warsaw during the 1930s."I was an anachronism in every way, but I didn't know it, just as I didn't know that my friendship with Shosha [..] had anything to do with love."Aaron had many love affairs with women, but the only woman he truly loved was Shosha, his childhood friend. Shosha was struck by a sleeping disease and had since barely grown physically and was mentally retarded. Aaron lived his childhood on 10 Krochmalna Street, and lost the sight of her as he moved away and she moved from no. 10 to no. 7.Hitler is in power in Germany and is set to annihilate the Jews in Poland while in Russia, Stalin rules with his deadly terror, so the only voluntary exit that many of the characters in "Shosha" perceive for themselves is suicide. Although Aaron is offered the opportunity to leave the threat of death — as others, from Hassidics to Hedonists, do — he turns down the chance to escape, for his love for Shosha and chooses to stay in Poland. Death is the cloud that hangs over the characters in "Shosha". As writer whose main medium is language, the book opens by explaining that Aaron was brought up on three "dead" languages: Hebrew, Aramaic and Yiddish.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_at_Night"title="Dave at Night">
Dave Caros, a teenager troublemaker, lost his mother during his birth. More recently, his father dies after falling off a roof of a house he was helping to build. Always having lived under the shadow of his older brother Gideon, he is abandoned by his stepmother Ida while Gideon goes to live with his uncle. Ida sends Dave to a Hebrew orphanage, the Hebrew Home For Boys.When Dave first arrives at the orphanage, he absolutely hates it. The bedrooms are cold, the food is awful (and is often stolen by bullies) and the superintendent, Mr. Bloom (nicknamed Mr. Doom) is abusive and hits the boys with a yardstick. Mr. Doom takes the only thing Dave has left from his father, a wood carving of his family boarding Noah's Ark. However, Dave enjoys the art lessons and explores his talented, creative side.Sick of the austere lifestyle, Dave sneaks out of the orphanage in the middle of the night and roams the streets of Harlem. He finds a nearby party and bumps into Solly, an old man who 'reads cards' to get money. He enters the party with Solly and discovers a whole new world of jazz music, money and glamour—the Harlem Renaissance. Dave even meets Irma Lee, a girl to whom he is quickly attracted to although the book does not make it clear if its romantic or not. However, Dave needs to return to the orphanage every morning, but this new lifestyle isn't always what it seems.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodosia_and_the_Serpents_of_Chaos"title="Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos">
Theodosia Throckmorton, a clever and shrewd girl of sorts, has the harrowing and busy work of nullifying curses in her father's museum, where the darkest spells abound. However, it is delicate work, and time is running out for her to set things right. A crate arrives from Theo's mother in Egypt, which contains a cursed statue of Bastet. While transferring the curse from the statue to a wax figure, she becomes distracted and redirects it into her cat, Isis. Her hands are full enough when her mother returns from the tombs of Egypt, bringing countless cursed valuables and antiquities with her. While picking her mother up at the train station, Theodosia catches a street urchin named Sticky Will trying to pick her father's pocket. He informs her that someone is following her mother. Theo tells him she will be at the station tomorrow and he can tell her more about the man then. Back at the museum, they unload Theo's mother's trunks. Theo senses the curses on the artifacts. The most powerful is a gem called the Heart of Egypt, with the power to topple the whole of Great Britain and the entire British Empire.The next day, her brother Henry returns from boarding school. The Heart of Egypt is stolen, and Theo suspects someone from the British Museum and investigates, Henry tagging along without her consent. A Mr. Tetley is acting suspiciously, and they decide to follow him. While traveling through the Seven Dials, they meet Will and witness a man taking the Heart from Tetley, then the same man is stabbed in a churchyard. Theodosia hears the man mumble "Som set hoo", or "Somerset House". He tells Theo to speak to Wigmere, only Wigmere. She sends Henry and Will to Somerset House while she struggles to keep the man alive using her amulets. Will and Henry bring help, and Theo is introduced to Lord Wigmere, head of the Antiquarian Society and The Brotherhood of Chosen Keepers, a group dedicated to nullifying curses. Theodosia is relieved to know there are others like her, but disturbed that no one else can sense the curses the way she can. Henry and Will are not told the true nature of the Keepers, although Will is taken on as a message boy later on. Theo is also angry that Wigmere may suspect her mother of stealing the Heart of Egypt, as she works closely with Count Von Braggenchnot, head of the Serpents of Chaos who will do anything to rain plague and pestilence down on England.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_in_the_Mirror"title="Martha in the Mirror">
Castle Extremis - whoever holds it can control the provinces either side that have been at war for centuries. Now the castle is about to play host to the signing of a peace treaty. But as the Doctor and Martha find out, not everyone wants the war to end.Who is the strange little girl who haunts the castle? What is the secret of the book the Doctor finds, its pages made from thin, brittle glass? Who is the hooded figure that watches from the shadows? And what is the secret of the legendary Mortal Mirror?The Doctor and Martha don't have long to find the answers-an army is on the march, and the castle will soon be under siege once more...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Many_Hands"title="The Many Hands">
The book opens with the mysterious arrival of a baby in Edinburgh, 1773. The scene shifts to the city fifteen years earlier.The Doctor and Martha are confronted by the walking dead, first a solitary figure which attacks a stagecoach containing Benjamin Franklin, then by an army of the creatures rising from the putrid waters of the Nor' Loch. The British soldiers under Captain McAllister who have arrested the Doctor find themselves following his lead. Part of this is the soldier's desire to save innocent civilians endangered by the creatures.Meanwhile, at the Surgeon's Hall, Martha has met a couple of physicians, Alexander Monro, senior and junior, who apparently brought the first corpse back to life. They lock her in a small room with dozens of hands, disembodied but disturbingly active.The Doctor deduces the presence of a modular alien and discovers its sinister intentions.Benjamin Franklin reappears in the final chapter, set in 1771, meeting Alexander Monro, who reclaims the hand he gave Franklin years before, the last one on Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowglobe_7"title="Snowglobe 7">
Snowglobe 7 is set in 2099 when the world's global warming has become a great problem. Snowglobe 7 was one of the buildings set up to contain sheets of ice to preserve them against global warming. It is situated in Dubai. Due to Snowglobes being extremely expensive to maintain, many were sold off as visitor attractions. Snowglobe 7 was one of only three left that were purely scientific. The section of ice within it, unknown to the Humans, contained the last Gappa, bizarre, blood-thirsty aliens that look like a cross between a spider and a monkey with a massive, fleshy nose. While Martha tries to help with an unknown disease spreading through the dome, the Doctor investigates. The Gappa killed some humans on maintenance and used their bodies as hosts for future Gappa. Service robot Twelve collapsed several of the tunnels in the ice of Snowglobe 7 in an attempt to kill the Gappa, but failed. The Doctor detonated the engine of a ship that had crashed in the ice thousands of years ago, killing the Gappa but destroying the Snowglobe and melting the ice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Storm"title="Deep Storm">
In the prologue, three workers – Kevin Lindengood, Fred Hicks, and John Wherry – are operating the rig on the Storm King oil rig in the North Atlantic, off the coast of Greenland. When the equipment begins malfunctioning, Wherry orders everything to be shut down. However, even after Lindengood shuts off the electromagnet, a series of strange signals are still being transmitted to their devices.Twenty months later, Former naval doctor Peter Crane is sent to investigate a mysterious illness that has broken out on the rig. He meets Dr. Howard Asher, who hints at a fantastic secret being discovered. Government officials transport him to a massive, 12-level facility run by the United States military. He receives a confidential envelope that explains how the military has discovered Atlantis. As he is brought down into the facility, codenamed Deep Storm, he discovers that nearly a quarter of the staff have been acting strangely within the last few weeks. Working alongside the psychiatrist Dr. Roger Corbett and the chief military doctor Michele Bishop, Crane is witness to one of these incidents; a worker named Randall Waite suddenly grabs a hostage after screaming about "voices" in his head, then eventually stabs himself in the neck with a screwdriver. After interviewing some of the patients there, and finding many of the symptoms including sleeplessness, lack of focus, nausea, and psychological effects such as changes in personality, Crane realizes that there must be some kind of unifying basis to all of them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ice_Limit"title="The Ice Limit">
Meteorite hunter Nestor Masangkay arrives on Isla Desolación, an island near Cape Horn in Chile, tracking a possible meteorite. Using a tomographic scanner, Masangkay confirms that not only is there a meteorite present under the ground, but that it is incredibly massive. Excited, Masangkay digs down to unearth a small portion of the meteorite and is subsequently killed in a flash of light.Some months later, Masangkay's equipment is recovered by a Yaghan native and eventually makes its way to New York billionaire Palmer Lloyd, a collector of rare and exotic archaeological artifacts. Wanting the meteorite for his soon-to-be-opened museum, Lloyd hires Masangkay's former partner, Sam McFarlane, to confirm the meteorite's existence and assist in its recovery. He also hires Effective Engineering Solutions, Inc., a high-priced "problem solving" firm, to design a plan for the unprecedented task of recovering and transporting what has been confirmed by McFarlane to be the largest meteorite ever discovered.Eli Glinn, the president of EES, puts together a comprehensive plan to effect the recovery, accounting for literally every complication he deems possible. To effect this plan he composes a team to augment Lloyd's personnel, notably including Rachel Amira, EES's brilliant yet grating mathematics expert, and Sally Britton, an out-of-work supertanker captain whose last ship crashed while she was drunk and on duty. Despite Britton's public image as a dangerous alcoholic, analysis by EES has led Glinn to peg her as professional, talented, and motivated never to fail again. After meeting her in person, Glinn finds himself becoming attracted to her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennie_(novel)"title="Jennie (novel)">
Jennie is a chimpanzee, living in the 1970s. Naturalist Dr. Hugo Archibald delivers Jennie from her dying mother in the Cameroons and brings her home to his American family. His young son, Sandy, becomes extremely attached to Jennie, but Archibald's daughter, Sarah, resents the chimp. Jennie, through her learning of ASL (American Sign Language), starts to converse and interact with the humans around her. Eventually, Jennie goes to a wildlife preserve where she cannot function.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mists_of_Dawn"title="Mists of Dawn">
Dr. Robert Nye, a nuclear physicist working at White Sands Missile Range has finally finished his space-time travel machine after 20 years of research. On the eve of its maiden voyage to Ancient Rome, Dr. Nye's nephew Mark is trapped inside and sent back in time to the year 50,000 BC when a nearby rocket test explosion sends him careening into the controls. When Mark arrives at his destination he must survive the two weeks it takes the space-time machine to recharge for the return trip with nothing but a few matches, a pocket knife, and a 6-shot .45 revolver.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Far_Country_(novel)"title="A Far Country (novel)">
The book follows the career of Hugh Paret from youth to manhood, and how his profession as a corporation lawyer gradually changes his values.The title is a reference to the Parable of the Prodigal Son, where Luke 15:13 (KJV) provides that the son went "into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_in_a_New_Key"title="Philosophy in a New Key">
"Langer elaborates her thesis in freshly conceived and interesting studies contained in chapters treating of the logic of signs and symbols, a comparison of discursive and presentational forms ofsymbolism (perhaps the heart of the book), verbal language, life symbols as the roots of sacrament and myth, the significance of music, the genesis of artistic import, and the fabric of meaning."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fireball_(novel)"title="Fireball (novel)">
In the year AD 1981, British boy Simon meets his visiting American cousin Brad, but they do not get along, Simon finding Brad to be conceited, but knowledgeable enough to justify his conceit.The two boys are drawn towards a mysterious glowing ball, which instantly transports them to what appears to be more than a thousand years back in history. After some time they realise that they have travelled not to the past but to an alternative Earth also in the year 1981, but one with a different history - the Roman Empire under Flavius Claudius Julianus Augustus, aka Julian the Apostate or Julian the Philosopher, was successful in his AD 363 Persian Campaign. The victory led stability under Pax Romana, and in turn led to general stagnation of the civilised world, a subsequent absence of major technological development, as there was no motivation for change.The boys are separated to be sold as slaves. Brad is able to make use of his knowledge of Latin to persuade a Roman Christian to purchase his freedom. It is revealed that the Emperor Julian survived instead of dying on the Persian Campaign, Christianity never became the state religion. The religion was allowed, but it is still a small minority religion. By evidence of his modern wrist-watch, Brad convinces the Bishop that the boys come from a different and more technologically advanced world. The opportunistic Brad offers to help the Pope raise an army to overthrow the Roman authorities, ostensibly to cease oppression of the Christians, but mainly, in return for power, status and wealth for the cousins to rise in the new realms. Simon goes along with the plan because he wants to free the slaves and promote equal status for non-Romans, and because he has fallen in love with a high-born girl.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Found_Land_(Christopher_novel)"title="New Found Land (Christopher novel)">
In the first novel, "Fireball", Simon and Brad are cousins who are mysteriously transported to an alternate history Earth, where the Roman Empire did not break up and Europe remains in pre-Dark Ages technology. In an attempt to improve their status in the new realm, Simon and Brad aid the Christian Church, which is oppressed, to launch a coup by introducing the stirrup and the longbow. The coup succeeds, but the boys did not anticipate the Church as a state power would force everyone in the Empire to convert or die. At the end of the first book, they sail away to the New World, which in the realm, was not discovered yet by the Old World.At the beginning of this novel, they managed to reach the American continent safely. They are received warmly enough by the native tribes in North America, but soon find themselves yearning for more advanced civilizations.However, after they attempt to sail down the coast to warmer waters as winter sets on, they are captured by Vikings. In this parallel world the Vikings were introduced to the Latin language and instead of dying out, they have colonized the American continent. Brad, Simon, and their companions Bos and Curtius are greeted warmly by the Vikings and believe they can live here permanently, only to realize that they are to be sacrificed. They escape, but Curtius is killed in the fighting as they leave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Dance_(novel)"title="Dragon Dance (novel)">
At the end of "New Found Land", Simon and Brad are in North America where they are captured by sailors from the Far East.When they awaken after losing consciousness during the capture, they find themselves aboard a Chinese junk crossing the Pacific Ocean. The junk is a paddle steamer that sails without human intervention. The crew have apparently put themselves into hibernation, indicating that they are accustomed to the trip and are expecting an uneventful journey.On their arrival in China they are taken to the Imperial Court, where the boys display their knowledge of modern technology. They are befriended by the young emperor, Cho-tsing, but sent away later at the command of the Dowager Regent. They are then taken in by Bei Pen, a follower of the laws of Bei-Kun. There, Brad becomes besotted with Bei Pen's companion Li Mei and becomes estranged from Simon.Unlike the other civilizations that they have encountered, which remain at a pre-Dark Ages technological level, the Chinese have continued their technological innovations and have come up with new inventions, even though their social development has stagnated.Simon is sent to the north to serve the general of the powerful Northern Army in charge of resisting nomadic barbarians.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_Men_of_Saturn"title="Missing Men of Saturn">
Dale Sutton, a recent graduate from the Space Academy, is assigned to the "Albatross", a decrepit old spaceship. When the "Albatross" is assigned to explore the mysterious ringed planet Saturn, Dale remembers the story of Captain Dearborn who had commanded the first and last mission to Saturn. When the "Albatross" reaches Saturn's moon Titan, the superstitious fears of the crew are realized as equipment begins to disappear, and eventually people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Jockey_(novel)"title="Rocket Jockey (novel)">
The Armstrong Classic is a rocket race throughout the inhabited solar system and has become the driving force for the advancement of rocket and space technologies. It is extremely dangerous, and there are always fatalities, but it is regarded as the trial that proves the merit of a prospective spaceman. It is said that "only a fool would enter such a race, and only a genius or a Martian could win". In a twist of fate, a young man, Jerry Blaine is kicked out of the Space Institute at his brother's request to help him get ready for the 18th Armstrong Classic. When his brother is injured in a fueling accident, Jerry must take over command of the "Last Hope" and try to win the Classic for earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadium_Beyond_the_Stars"title="Stadium Beyond the Stars">
Steve Frazer, a champion spacesuit racer on Earth's Olympic team, is headed to the center of the galaxy with the rest of the Earth team on board the "Hellas". When they intercept a mysterious derelict spaceship, Steve volunteers to investigate. Once on board the ship, he discovers evidence of a non-human intelligence that seems to communicate through telepathy. Upon his arrival back to the "Hellas" Steve tells the others what he found, but no one believes him. Disqualified from competition on false charges, Steve realizes that he has become mixed up in a deadly game of interstellar intrigue.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_to_Luna"title="Rocket to Luna">
Ted Baker is beginning his fourth year at the Space Academy, which is to take place on the Earth orbiting space station. On his trip to the station from Earth, he is accompanied by a recent graduate of the Academy, Jack Talbot, who is to be part of the first expedition to the Moon as a backup member. On arrival at the station, Ted discovers that Jack's collarbone was injured during the launch to the station. Fearing that Jack's injury could endanger the other men on the expedition, he confronts Jack about his injury. Jack refuses to give up his chance at glory, forcing Ted into a physical confrontation. Jack is knocked unconscious, and Ted hurriedly boards the moon rocket to inform the expedition of Jack's injury. Unfortunately, the countdown has already begun, and cannot be stopped. Ted is now the fifth man of the expedition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_in_Death"title="Origin in Death">
When Lt. Eve Dallas and Detective Delia Peabody are called to the murder scene of Dr. Wilfred B. Icove Sr., things already don't make sense. Dr. Icove was renowned as a sainted genius of cosmetic and reconstructive surgery, and no one, not even his son Wilfred Icove Jr., benefits from his death. What's even stranger are the security disks that reveal a woman (with initials DNA) walking into Icove's office, killing him with a single stab in the heart and walking out again.When Dr. Icove Jr. is killed in the same way, Eve begins looking for another mystery woman, while her husband Roarke begins investigating an organization run by the Icoves and their partner, Dr. Jonah Wilson. Soon, they uncover a secret world inside a private school of young girls and women, created by the Icoves and Wilson. A world of children by design, where people aren't born, but cloned.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_in_Death"title="Memory in Death">
Following the events in Origin in Death, Lt. Eve Dallas only wants a break as Christmas nears, but her past is coming back to haunt her. A television news special about her and her husband Roarke's involvement in the destruction of the Icove center airs on national television, and in Texas, catches the eye of Trudy Lombard, who promptly comes to New York City with her son and her daughter-in-law. Lombard shows up at Eve's office, and Eve remembers everything about her.Eve was taken in by Lombard, after she killed her father. Lombard was an abusive woman, who often made Eve go without food, clean the floors with a toothbrush, locked her in her bed room without light, and scrubbed her skin raw in ice cold baths, all the time telling her she deserved it because she was a 'filthy' little girl who'd already 'engaged in sexual relations' (referring to the beatings and rape committed by Eve's father) before the age of ten.Eve realizes Lombard wants something, and her suspicions come true when Lombard tries to blackmail Roarke for $2 million. Roarke refuses and tell her to go back to Texas. The day after, Lombard is found dead. At first it seems like a classical murder; Lombard has been hit on the head by a blunt murder weapon and articles of clothing, her purse, and her tele-link are missing. Eve Dallas however, who is familiar with Trudy Lombard, does not believe it to be so clear a homicide, and Trudy Lombard's daughter in law, Zana Kline, seems too innocent to not have a hand in the murder; however, because there is no evidence pointing to her, Eve becomes extremely frustrated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Raven's_Knot"title="The Raven's Knot">
In Glastonbury, there are two mysterious deaths and the women of the town are falling ill, and strange crow dolls are appearing in their houses. Back in London, Neil Chapman living in the Wyrd Museum (a strange building owned by the three mysterious Webster sisters) once more enters the 'Separate Collection,' and discovers a stuffed raven that has come back to life. Then one of the Webster sisters go missing, along with Edie Dorkins, the elfin girl brought out of the past to carry on the sisters' work.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fatal_Strand"title="The Fatal Strand">
The final chapter in the Wyrd Museum Trilogy sees Neil Chapman and Edie Dorkins returning exhausted following the events of the previous book at Glastonbury Tor, only to find all is not well at the museum. Having lost one of her sisters, Ursula is behaving suspiciously. The museum knows it is being violated and its past reincarnations blur together with the present, putting all those inside in danger. A final battle for the future of the world is coming, and the Wyrd museum is at the centre of the battleground, but it still has some help to give.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_to_Die"title="1st to Die">
The prologue introduces the main character Inspector Lindsay Boxer, San Francisco P.D., who is in a depression and holding a gun to her head as a result of losing a love interest in a case called "The Honeymoon Murders".Book One begins with David and Melanie Brandt, freshly married, in their hotel room at the Grand Hyatt. A man outside the door calls "Champagne" and David opens the door. The man, Phillip Campbell, then violently kills the bride and groom and immorally brutalizes the corpse of Melanie. The book then cuts to Inspector Lindsay Boxer in her general practitioner's office. The doctor, Dr. Roy Orenthaler, tells Lindsay that she has a rare, and deadly, blood disease called Negli's aplastic anemia. Throughout the book, Lindsay struggles with the physical side-effects of getting blood transfusions for Negli's and the emotional aspect of having a life-threatening disease. During the appointment, she is called to the crime scene of a double murder at the Grand Hyatt. In that scene she is introduced to Cindy Thomas, covering the story. The second pair of bodies are found, and after Lindsay is told she has a new partner due to the sensitivity of the case, Cindy, Lindsay, and medical examiner Claire Washburn join forces to attempt to solve the case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unicorn_Girl"title="The Unicorn Girl">
Michael is watching Chester's band performing in San Francisco in the 1960s, where he meets the girl of his dreams, Sylvia. She tells Michael she needs help finding her unicorn, Adolphus. After Michael and Chester get to know her, Sylvia explains that she lost Adolphus after she had gotten off of the train. Chester and Michael remember that the last train in their area ran 6 years ago.Sylvia explains that she is from the circus and her crew is looking for Adolphus. She got separated from them after she took a winding road. Sylvia asks Chester to play "Barkus is Willing" while she calls Adolphus because he is fond of woodwind music.When Sylvia sees cars, she doesn't know what they are. Chester and Michael start to wonder if time travel is involved in how Sylvia came to be with them. While searching by a forest, they meet Sylvia's circus friends - Ronald, Arcturian, and Dorothy. The groups decide to split up to search for Adolphus.Sylvia reveals she is from 1936. While in the forest they see a UFO. As it's beginning to move closer, they run away. The UFO disappears in sections and the whole group goes through a blip.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_(Kellerman_novel)"title="Monster (Kellerman novel)">
The mutilated body of an aspiring actor is found in the trunk of a car parked near an industrial area. Weeks later, another body appears in similar condition at another location. This time, the body is a female psychologist, who was working in a state facility for psychotic criminals. One similarity of the mutilations is obvious. The eyes were targeted. The case goes to LAPD detective Milo Sturgis, assisted by Dr. Alex Delaware, an old friend and psychological consultant.The two find out that similar eye mutilations were infamously performed in the case of a family mass murder some years ago, and the culprit is now in the same facility where the female doctor worked. The media had described him simply as a "monster" following his arrest. Facing him, Milo and Alex find the "monster" in a deteriorated condition locked within a highly secured cell. To add to the drama, the detectives get a tip-off that the killer, who hardly speaks, had said something that implied knowledge of the doctor's mutilated eyes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Man"title="The Blue Man">
Steve Forrester is a teenager who goes to live for a summer with his aunt and uncle, who run a rural motel.On his first day running the desk by himself, a strange man checks in, dressed in a scarf, hat, trench coat and gloves, unusual attire for summer. The light on the desk starts to flicker as the man signs in with an illegible scrawl. Later, Steve brings a towel to the stranger's room and sees something that launches him on an unusual and singular adventure: the man's skin is bright blue and he seems to be draining energy from a nearby lamp.After his uncle is seemingly murdered by the fleeing Blue Man (who appears to possibly be of alien origin), Steve sets out on a cross-country search for justice and revenge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrior_Scarlet"title="Warrior Scarlet">
The story centres on Drem, a young boy who dreams of becoming a warrior and earning the right to wear a kilt of 'Warrior Scarlet' but fears his crippled right arm will prevent this. To pass the test of manhood, he must kill a wolf on his own; those who fail are expelled from the tribe and sent to the 'Half People' who herd sheep on the South Downs.Drem lives with his elder brother Drustic, grandfather, mother and a girl named Blai, abandoned years before by a travelling bronzesmith. He teaches himself to compensate for his disability and at the age of 12 goes to the 'Boys House' to learn how to be a warrior; while there, the Chieftain's son Vortrix becomes his friend and blood brother. At 15, the boys undertake their 'Wolf Slaying' but when it is Drem's turn, he slips and is nearly killed, surviving only when Vortrix wounds the wolf, which escapes.As a result, he is sent to the Half People, only meeting his former friends when they provide the Wolf Guard to protect the sheep. One evening towards the end of winter, Drem sets out to rescue an old shepherd named Doli, who went searching for a lost sheep; he finds him but is attacked by three wolves, including the same one he failed to kill during his Wolf Slaying. This time he succeeds, although badly wounded, and is saved only by the arrival of the Wolf Guard. When Drem recovers, he learns that since it was the same wolf and wounded him in the same place, his previous failure has been wiped clean; he has succeeded and later undergoes the initiation ceremony whereby boys become warriors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Scoundrels"title="Land of Scoundrels">
The action takes place in the Ural region in 1919. The main protagonist is gangster Nomakh who is shown as a romantic rebel and anarchist hating "those getting fat on Marx". In past he held revolutionary ideas in hopes of liberation of mankind, these aspirations (in their peasant interpretation) were close to Yesenin himself. In the poem Nomakh expresses many of Yesenin's own deep thoughts on love for rebellion and hatred for the unnatural and 'un-Russian' order imposed on Russia by Bolshevik commissars. His adversary Rassvetov (from Russian "rassvet", the raise of new day) is a commissar and his portrait is bleak and schematic comparing to character of Nomakh. Aside from their juxtaposition, one character trait unifying both Nomakh and Rassvetov is their unscrupulousness. Nomakh talks of many gangs multiplying in Russia and of growing ranks of disillusioned rebels ready to kill and plunder. He is full of disregard and contempt to "sheep for whom the shepherd is nurturing knives". This is matched by Rassvetov's amorality who before the revolution participated in gold trading stings on Klondike and whose paramount aim is his own survival. Rassvetov is convinced that fraud is acceptable as a mean to redistribute wealth from rich to poor. He dreams of a "steel enema for the whole of Russia" that will transform and modernize the country.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Dunn_and_the_Anti-Gravity_Paint"title="Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint">
Through a mishap in Professor Bulfinch's laboratory, Danny accidentally creates an anti-gravity paint. In time, the government constructs a spaceship which uses the paint as a propulsion system. The spaceship is launched prematurely after Danny and Joe follow Professor Bullfinch and Dr. Grimes on a tour of the ship. A mechanical failure dooms the four to a trip out of the Solar System unless they can repair the ship. Should they fail in this, they will drift too far from the Sun and freeze to death.The book was published in 1956, one year before the start of the Space Age. It explores the aspects of actual space exploration versus science fiction. Danny's teacher, in an effort to get him to stop daydreaming about space adventures, makes him write repeatedly "Space travel is at least one hundred years away". After his teacher congratulates Danny for his spaceflight, he gives her the punishment assignment which he worked on while on board, and she says she will keep it as a souvenir.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Dunn_and_the_Homework_Machine"title="Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine">
Professor Bullfinch has created a new design of computer in which the government may be greatly interested. He has to go away and leaves Danny Dunn the responsibility of continuing the process of programming data files into it. After using the computer to answer a question for his new friend, neighbour Irene Miller, he gets the idea to have the computer prepare homework. With his friend Joe Pearson and with Irene, they program the contents of textbooks into the computer. They have some success with the machine before it is sabotaged. Danny figures out what is wrong with the machine and corrects the problem. Danny's teacher also learns about the machine, and gives a special challenge to the Homework Champions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Dunn_and_the_Weather_Machine"title="Danny Dunn and the Weather Machine">
Danny accidentally discovers that an ionic transmitter Professor Bulfinch has been working on can be used to create miniature rainclouds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Dunn_on_the_Ocean_Floor"title="Danny Dunn on the Ocean Floor">
Another accident in Professor Bulfinch's laboratory, instigated by Danny, results in the creation of a transparent, resilient material. The material proves useful in creating a bathysphere, and Professor Bulfinch, along with his friend Dr. Grimes, Danny, Joe, and Irene, descend into the Pacific Ocean on an experimental voyage. Unfortunately, the bathysphere's pilot is rendered unconscious, and the bathysphere becomes trapped in a cave. On their journey, the submarine is examined by a giant squid and attacked by a large shark.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Dunn_and_the_Fossil_Cave"title="Danny Dunn and the Fossil Cave">
Danny and his friend Joe Pearson discover the entrance to a cave in the woods near their home. Professor Bulfinch has just invented a portable x-ray machine, and he, along with his geologist friend Dr. Tresselt see an opportunity to use the device in the cave. The two adults, along with Danny, Joe, and Irene, enter the cave on an expedition. They make an astonishing discovery, but they encounter a significant problem which prevents them from leaving the cave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Universe_(novel)"title="Dark Universe (novel)">
The Survivors live deep underground in a world of complete darkness, divided into two clans, one living in the Lower Level and one in the Upper Level. Their legends tell of the Original World where man lived alongside the Light Almighty (a concept of which they can no longer conceive) and away from the ultimate evil, Radiation, with its two Lieutenants the Twin Devils Cobalt and Strontium. The Lower Level Survivors venerate a relic known as the Holy Bulb. ""So compassionate was the Almighty" (it was the Guardian of the Way's voice that came back [to Jared] now) "that when He banished man from Paradise, He sent parts of Himself to be with us for a while. And He dwelled in many little vessels like this Holy Bulb"."Jared is the son of the Prime Survivor, the leader of the Lower Level clan. He is himself due to become a Survivor (i.e. an adult clansman), but Jared is too busy with his quest to find Light. He rationalizes that to find distant Light he must first locate its opposite, Darkness, which is near and "abounds in the worlds of men!" He goes on to theorize that:"Darkness must be something real. Only, we can't recognize it."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Dunn,_Time_Traveler"title="Danny Dunn, Time Traveler">
Professor Bullfinch's experiment with a time travel invention is being secretly observed by Danny, Joe, and Irene. The youngsters are startled by the appearance of a second Joe. During the following confusion, the time travel device transports them all into the past. Aided by Benjamin Franklin, the Professor works to return them to their present. While in the past, the youngsters explore the society of American life under British rule, only to find one of their number in danger of being marooned in the past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Dunn_and_the_Automatic_House"title="Danny Dunn and the Automatic House">
Professor Bullfinch develops the "House of the Future" in which all controls are automatic, and plans to debut it at an upcoming Science Fair. This includes temperature controls and other standard functions, but also items such as washing machines, food preparation and normal housework. Danny, Irene and Joe, as well as Irene's toddler cousin, go to explore the house and become trapped inside, as the locks were automated to have security settings to seal the house until the Professor's introduction. Danny and his friends learn that in addition to the automated locks, everything is only a fake sample and the windows cannot be broken. They are trapped inside with no food or telephone, and the Fair does not open for three days!
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Dunn_and_the_Swamp_Monster"title="Danny Dunn and the Swamp Monster">
Professor Bullfinch and Doctor Grimes take Danny and his friends to the beginning of the Nile River in Africa to investigate local legends of a swamp monster. Despite unforeseen calamities, a new, rare species of electric catfish is discovered..
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Dunn_Scientific_Detective"title="Danny Dunn Scientific Detective">
Professor Bullfinch and Doctor Grimes are working on more scientific ways to fight crime. Danny is facing an issue at school and needs to borrow the equipment to solve the school mystery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Dunn_and_the_Universal_Glue"title="Danny Dunn and the Universal Glue">
Professor Bullfinch develops a glue which is stronger than any known glue. He christens it "Irenium" in honor of Danny's friend and neighbor Irene. The Blaze Chemical Company, which built a factory after draining a swamp, has leaked a chemical into the water which may cause the local dam to break. Danny, Joe and Irene use a can of Irenium to patch up the dam. In a subplot, Danny also uses the glue as a form of protest against Mr. Blaze by placing it on the backseat of his vehicle, causing Mr. Blaze to be stuck to the seat and having to cut his trousers apart, resulting in a humorous event where an angered Mr. Blaze appears at a town meeting to voice concerns over his chemical company wearing a blanket over his legs, giving the appearance of a kilt. Danny's mother, Mrs. Dunn, who originally protested the draining of the swamp, gives Danny a stern rebuke that the prank was immature and counterproductive, and that Danny is now required to make restitution, meaning he is now in debt to Mr. Blaze to pay for a new pair of men's trousers. Danny humbly sends a letter to Mr. Blaze with all the cash he has on hand, apologizing for what he did with the promise to work out a payment plan. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Red_Schoolbook"title="The Little Red Schoolbook">
The book encourages young people to question societal norms and instructs them on how to do this. Out of 200 pages, it includes 20 pages on sex and 30 on drugs, including alcohol and tobacco. Other topics included adults as "paper tigers", the duties of teachers, discipline, examinations, intelligence, and different schools.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Dunn_and_the_Voice_from_Space"title="Danny Dunn and the Voice from Space">
Professor Bullfinch has created a radio telescope ("dish") for the government which will try to determine if extraterrestrials are trying to contact Earth. When Danny sneaks into the observatory, he hears non-random sounds coming from space. He then must figure out how to translate the sounds.The observatory described in the book is similar to the real life SETI project, which Carl Sagan would also use later in his novel "Contact".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flour_Babies"title="Flour Babies">
The story centres around Simon Martin, a pupil in class 4C at an unnamed school. 4C is the class reserved for the school's worst students. As it so happens, a new student has arrived at the school, and, by sheer coincidence, his name is Martin Simon. The two boys are the complete antithesis of each other – Martin Simon passed all his science exams with flying colours, reads voraciously and even speaks and reads French fluently. The class teacher, Mr. Cartright, sends the boy to Dr. Feltham's class, and Simon, who had been sent there by accident, soon arrives. The class are choosing their options for their contribution to the school Science Fair. They wish they could work on one of the most exciting experiments – The Exploding Custard Tins, Soap Factory, or Maggot Farm, for example – but these have been reserved for those who passed their science exams. As a result, 4C have ended up having to choose between a series of boring experiments. First they have to choose a topic – their options are consumer studies, textiles, child development, nutrition, and domestic economy. Simon Martin is given the task of pulling a voting slip out of a tub; Martin Simon's slip comes out, and the topic he has chosen is "child development".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sky_People"title="The Sky People">
In the alternate universe, life exists on Venus and Mars. Because of the discovery, the United States and the Soviet Union have poured all of their resources into space exploration and sent their best and brightest to colonize Venus and Mars. Although there have been a few outbreaks of hostilities on Earth, an uneasy détente exists in space between the Americans and the Soviets, who are struggling for supremacy and supported by their respective allies. The European Union is also anxious not to be excluded from the neocolonial race but is far behind the other powers.In 1962, the Soviets drop planetary probes on Venus and discover people, both humans and Neanderthals, on the planet. Crewed flights by the Soviets and later by the Americans establish bases on the planet (the American one is named Jamestown, the Soviet one Cosmograd) and find other familiar species, including dinosaurs. Both fauna and flora are strangely similar to those from Earth's past.In 1988, Lieutenant Marc Vitrac, a Ranger in the US Aerospace Force, has been on the planet for a year. Born in a Cajun family amidst the Louisiana bayous, his primary function is exploration of the vast wild lands, but at the beginning of the novel, he is tapped to welcome newcomers to the colony.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Man_Little_Man"title="Little Man Little Man">
TJ recounts what he experiences while playing ball outside.TJ plays ball with his friends outside; he grazes his knee, then hurts his buttocks. A police car drives by, looking for a man; they run away. TJ's father then invites WT over for cocoa. Later, TJ goes shopping for Miss Lee, under the aegis of WT. TJ is then summoned by Miss Beanpole; she wants him to go shopping for her; he goes with his three friends. They go to a store whose owner is Puerto Rican. On the way back, while playing ball again, WT hurts his foot and starts bleeding - a bottle fell down from a window and the shards hurt him. They go to Mr Man's and Miss Lee covers up his gash, starts crying, then gives him a Pepsi Cola. In the end, Blinky dances to Mr Man's record, to the delights of Miss Lee and Mr Man.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadkidsongs"title="Deadkidsongs">
The plot centers on Gang, a gang of four boys who play War, led by "the Best Father". All boys envy Andrew for having such a nice dad, while Paul's father is considered "the worst father", a reputation he was never able to shake off, after having told off Andrew's father for neglecting an accident that involved Matthew falling out of a tree.However, their revenge on Paul's father has to make way quickly for a much more serious operation. When Matthew dies of meningitis, and Andrew's father mentions the fact that Matthew's grandparents did not take him to the doctor's in time, the three boys decide to take revenge on them, blaming them for the death of their gang member.Matthew's grandparents, who became substitute parents for him and his sister Miranda, when their parents died in a car crash, are touched by the boys' helpful attitude towards them, and welcome them in their home, not knowing that they're the worst enemy they'll ever know.By then, Andrew, Paul and Peter have started calling them "the Dinosaurs", and their only goal is to "have them extinct by Christmas". A horrific battle ensues, and while Andrew and Paul start fighting for the leadership of Gang, things get out of control.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finding_Myself"title="Finding Myself">
The plot centers on Victoria About, a prolific female English writer, who has invited some of her friends and relatives to come and stay at a seaside house she has rented in Southwold. The only condition is the fact that they all have to allow her to watch them and to turn all she sees and hears into her next novel, "From The Lighthouse". Clearly inspired by Virginia Woolf, Victoria drafts a synopsis with things (such as rows &amp; relationships) that will happen during the month. But as summer holiday starts, Victoria is not pleased with the general boredom and carefree conversations that happen in the house.Little does she know that when the guests discover she has hidden spycams all over the house, and when she gets trapped in the attic by all her friends and relatives, her life and her book start to take a twist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Visitation_of_Spirits"title="A Visitation of Spirits">
## Horace's plot (1984).Horace Cross is a gay black teenager from Tims Creek, a fictionalized rural town set in what is presumably North Carolina. He is fascinated by science and comic books, and his family is convinced that he is going to make them proud. Horace grows up in a fundamentalist Baptist family who condemn homosexuality, forcing Horace to stay in the closet and constantly wrestle with his own identity. The story starts with an internal dialogue about Horace's desire and quest to turn himself into a bird. When his ritual for this transformation fails, he is apparently possessed by a demon.Armed with his grandfather's gun and almost naked, he walks around his hometown, experiencing flashbacks and revelations which tell the story of his life, his struggles with homosexuality, and the failures of his closest friends and family to save him from his fate. The night ends in a confrontation with his second cousin, James (Jimmy) Greene, at Tims Creek Elementary School. Jimmy attempts to talk Horace out of using the gun, but by then Horace is too far gone and promptly shoots himself before Jimmy's eyes.Randall Kenan utilizes a postmodern narrative structure, in which the sequential order of the novel's plot is rearranged, namely in an intertwining of Horace's night of hallucinations and reflections from both Ezekiel and Jimmy approximately a year later.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freehold_(novel)"title="Freehold (novel)">
In the future Earth has become an oppressive society with pervasive bureaucratic regulation by a global United Nations. Kendra Pacelli is a logistics non-commissioned officer in the UN Protection Force (UNPF) until she is implicated in a scheme that involved stealing millions of dollars worth of materiel from the Protection Force. The UN Investigators are notorious for brutal interrogations of prisoners and exoneration is unlikely even though she is innocent. Warned by a friend, she decides to seek asylum with the Freehold of Grainne, which is independent of UN control.Kendra moves to the colony, though due to the expense of her transit she must enter the colony’s indenturing program. Kendra slowly becomes acclimated to the totally free market society of Freehold. Differences she must deal with include total lack of regulation of anything, pervasive personal firearms ownership, relaxed mores regarding sex and dress, voluntary taxation, almost nonexistent crime, and minimal government infrastructure.The total lack of regulation on commerce causes the UN to impose sanctions on Freehold due to safety concerns which causes Kendra to be laid off from her initial job and enlist in Freehold's military. She is required to go through basic training before she is assigned a billet as a corporal. Her superior sends her to noncommissioned officer training after a short time, believing that war with Earth is imminent and unavoidable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quincunx"title="The Quincunx">
The novel begins in London with a secret meeting between two legal men. A bribe reveals the confidential details of a correspondent who is the link to a vital hidden document. Meanwhile, young John Mellamphy is growing up in the remote countryside with his mother Mary, ignorant of the name of Huffam. Gradually it becomes clear that they are threatened by the search for the document.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack,_Knave_and_Fool"title="Jack, Knave and Fool">
Sir John treats his household to a performance of Händel's music, but murder introduces a discordant note. Meanwhile, a runaway reprobate and a bodiless head present other problems to the magistrate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greed_(Jelinek_novel)"title="Greed (Jelinek novel)">
The novel tells the story of a policeman who kills a 15-year-old girl while she is performing fellatio and then dumps the body in a lake.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Danny_Meadow_Mouse"title="The Adventures of Danny Meadow Mouse">
Danny begins his tale regretting the length of his tail until he is corrected by Mr. Toad. Then he has a series of stalkings by Reddy and Granny Fox. He is captured by Hooty the Owl and escapes mid-flight to Peter Rabbit's briar patch. Peter goes to Farmer Brown's peach orchard and gets caught in a snare and barely escapes himself. Finally Danny gets trapped in a tin can and must use his wits to escape Reddy Fox again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Story_(book)"title="Our Story (book)">
"Our Story" is an autobiography by the Kray Twins, assisted by their ghostwriter, first published in 1988. The twins were notorious East End underworld gang leaders during the "swinging" sixties. This book tells their story from their humble beginnings in Bethnal Green to their life imprisonment in 1969, largely in their own words.The hardback and the Pan paperback versions contain 16 pages of black and white photographs of the twins and their friends, associates and enemies/victims.The book's Foreword and its "A Final Word" are authored by Fred Dinenage.Thirteen Chapters are ghostwritten with the twins, jointly and individually. Reg and Ron Kray are credited as the authors of: 1. Memories of an East End Childood; 2. Crime and Punishment; and 8. The Women We Loved. Reg nominally authors: 3. The Swinging Sixties; 6. The Last Supper - the Killing of Jack McVitie; 9. Life in Parkhurst; 11. Life in Gartree; and 13. Just a Thought. Ron nominally authors: 4. The Killing of George Cornell; 5. The Truth about the Mad Axman (i.e. Frank Mitchell); 7. The Trial and the Traitors; 10. Life in Broadmoor ... 'Without my drugs I go mad'; and 12. Poetry and Painting.According to a later edition, Ron Kray died in Broadmoor Hospital in 1995, while Reg was released on compassionate grounds in 2000, only to die of cancer in that October. Reg Kray approached their ghostwriter Dinenage to help them tell their story, because Reggie had admired the journalist's Television South's sports and documentary programmes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Djinn_(novel)"title="Djinn (novel)">
In many ways, "Djinn" resembles a detective fiction novel; yet at the same time, it is difficult to class as such. It tells the story of Simon Lecoeur, a thirty-year-old man, who allies himself with an American woman named Jean (Djinn) to act as a counteragent to technology. Djinn/Jean seems to lead Simon on a wild chase through Paris, but as with many of Robbe-Grillet's other works, all is not as it appears.The plot of "Djinn" is surrounded by a frame story, a technique that Robbe-Grillet also employed in his novel "Dans le Labyrinthe" (1959). The police search the home of the narrator, supposed to be Simon Lecoeur, and find the manuscript lying on the desk. The manuscript is named "Le Rendez-vous" ("The Appointment"), which differs from the name of the novel.The Prologue opens with what we assume to be a police report. Simon Lecoeur has been reported missing for several days, so the authorities break into his apartment where they find a manuscript lying on the table. The contents of the manuscript are revealed in the following chapters.The narrator, responding to a newspaper ad, goes to a deserted industrial park to meet his potential boss, Jean. The narrator assumes that Jean is a man and sees him at the end of a building dressed in a coat, hat, and dark glasses. "Monsieur Jean" turns out to be an American woman. Djinn/Jean asks the narrator to join her social cause, and as proof of his fidelity, she asks him to meet someone at the Parisian train station, the Gare du Nord. The narrator stops at a café on his way to the train station. There, a young student tells him that he is going to be late and suggests a short-cut. The narrator assumes that this woman is one of Djinn/Jean's agents, as she seems to know who he is and where he is going.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Disunited_States_of_America"title="The Disunited States of America">
The story takes place in the 2090s and concerns two outsiders caught up in a war between Ohio and Virginia: a young girl from California visiting relatives with her grandmother, and a boy from our world's Crosstime Traffic trading firm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Among_the_Missing_(novel)"title="Among the Missing (novel)">
The novel takes place in Sierra County, California, primarily around the Silver Lake area. The story begins with a man and woman visiting a section of the Silver River referred to as 'the Bend', apparently with the intention of engaging in a romantic tryst. The next day, the woman's decapitated body is discovered by a young couple, Bass and his girlfriend Faye. Sheriff Rusty Hodges and his daughter-in-law, Deputy Mary "Pac" Hodges, are called in to investigate.The pursuit of the killer leads to a complicated series of events involving Merton (a homosexual drug dealer who was seen running from the scene of the crime), the dead woman's husband, and a revenge scheme involving two of the main characters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English,_August"title="English, August">
The posting starts off as a tremendous culture shock for Agastya, a city boy. However, it eventually becomes one long philosophical journey and a process of self discovery. Written by a civil servant, the novel manages to capture the essence of an entire generation of Indians, whose urban realities jar in sharp contrast to that of rural India.Agastya Sen's sense of dislocation is only compounded by his extreme lack of interest in the bizarre ways of government and administration, while his mind is dominated by the "Meditations" of Marcus Aurelius and images from his previous urban life. His work in Madna would ideally require him to be a devoted servant of the people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_of_the_Black_Rose"title="Knight of the Black Rose">
On the fabled world of Krynn, Lord Soth finally learns that there is a price to pay for his long history of evil deeds, a price even an undead warrior might find horrifying. Dark powers transport Soth to Barovia, and there the death knight must face the dread minions of Count Strahd Von Zarovich, the vampire lord of the nightmare land. But with only a captive Vistani woman and an untrustworthy ghost for allies, Lord Soth soon discovers that he may have to join forces with the powerful vampire if he is ever to escape the realm of terror. Knight of the Black Rose is the second in an open-ended series of Gothic horror tales dealing with the masters and monsters of the Ravenloft dark fantasy setting.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_of_the_Dead_(novel)"title="Dance of the Dead (novel)">
The story follows the adventures of Larisa Snowmane, a dancer who travels across the land of Ravenloft by ship. The captain of the ship has evil intentions, however, and the ship comes to land at an island full of zombies. Larisa, along with some of the living inhabitants of the island, must perform a magical dance called the Dance of the Dead to save herself from the captain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapestry_of_Dark_Souls"title="Tapestry of Dark Souls">
An order of monks are tasked to keep safe an object of unspeakable evil. The object, a tapestry, lures those of evil intentions to its threads, absorbing them. The order of monks, The Guardians, are the only line of defense against the tapestry's power. However, when a couple mysteriously arrive in the land known as Markovia they are drawn to the tapestry. After successfully stealing the tapestry, the couple make their way to the neighboring country of Tepest. Upon arriving the wife, Leith, finds out that her husband, Vhar, stole the tapestry. She becomes possessed by it, almost killing her husband and escapes to try to return the tapestry, but not before it consumes Vhar. As she makes her way back, she encounters a wolf which bites her. Even with the bite, she manages to make it back, but the tapestry has other plans for her. With the help of the Guardians, she recovers. She returns to Tepest and discovers she is pregnant. After a horrific experience, she runs to the safety of the Guardians and after having her child, she vanishes. The child, Jonathan, may be the Guardians only chance of controlling and stopping the tapestry. However, he may be the one to release its evil into the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_of_Fear"title="Carnival of Fear">
In a centuries-old grand carnival in the realm of l'Morai run by the Puppetmaster, the apparent murder of a carnival dwarf leads to a trial to find the killer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enemy_Within_(novel)"title="The Enemy Within (novel)">
Sir Tristan Hiregaard periodically transforms into Malken, an evil beastly creature who controls a large criminal empire. Tristan is terrified by these transformations, and sets out to destroy his evil side.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_My_Honor"title="On My Honor">
Tony first wanted to go to the Starved Rock Cliff to climb but Joel disagrees as someone died last year when he tried climbing it. When Joel is told by his father not to go beyond Starved Rock and to turn back if they get tired, Joel promises, "On my honor." Joel and Tony are best friends despite their different characteristics. Tony, however, changes his mind and goes swimming in the river by Starved Rock. Joel does not want anyone to get hurt, yet he also does not want to seem like a coward in front of Tony. Joel suggests a swimming race in a forbidden, treacherous river, although Tony might not be a good swimmer. Joel ends up winning the race, but when he turns to look back at Tony, he finds that he has disappeared. Tony has drowned in the river they were told never to swim in as he could not swim. Joel tries to find Tony in the river but is unable. Joel calls a nearby car over, and the people inside try to help, but they cannot find Tony. Then the cops come to investigate the death of Tony. Joel lives with the horrible secret until Joel and Tony's families, plus the police, find out. Joel decides to confess what has happened. Joel's father also feels the blame for Tony's death. He tries to comfort Joel to sleep once the cops leave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floodgate_(novel)"title="Floodgate (novel)">
A mysterious terrorist organization known as the "FFF" has detonated a mine which bursts dykes in the Netherlands and caused massive flooding of Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport. Unless their demands are met (i.e. immediate withdrawal of all British military forces from Northern Ireland), they threaten to detonate more mines, flooding Holland beneath a wall of water from the North Sea.Colonel van de Graaf, the Amsterdam Chief of Police, puts Detective Lieutenant Peter van Effen, a man with a sardonic sense of humor and many hidden talents, in charge of the investigation. Lieutenant van Effen is also an undercover operative with connections to a Dutch criminal gang; posing as a criminal explosives expert and with the help of fellow undercover officers Vasco (as a corrupt Dutch Army officer) and George (as a black market arms dealer), he sets out to infiltrate the FFF and sabotage their plans one way or another. Matters, however, take an unexpected and dangerous turn when van Effen's sister Julie and Annemarie Meijer (an undercover policewoman and the daughter of a powerful Dutch industrialist) are kidnapped and held hostage by the FFF.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Documents_in_the_Case"title="The Documents in the Case">
This is an epistolary novel, told primarily in the form of letters between some of the characters, using the multiple narrative technique associated with Modernist novelists of the period. This collection of documents—hence the novel's title—is explained as a dossier of evidence collected by the victim's son as part of his campaign to obtain justice for his father.Novelist John Munting shares, with former public school contemporary and talented painter Harwood Lathom, a rented top floor flat in respectably suburban Bayswater, London. The landlord and downstairs neighbour, Harrison, is a staid, middle-aged widower who has remarried. His new wife Margaret is younger, attractive, passionate and self-absorbed. Lathom and Mrs Harrison begin an affair, the husband suspecting nothing, and Lathom paints a remarkable portrait of her. Creeping downstairs to meet his mistress one night, Lathom encounters the Harrisons' neurotic live-in spinster companion, Agatha Milsom, who mistakes him for Munting in the dark and makes accusations of assault. Faced with Harrison's furious reaction and glad of an excuse to leave a distasteful situation, Munting moves out and marries his fiancée. Lathom departs for Paris and his portrait of Mrs Harrison, exhibited at the Royal Academy, makes his reputation on the London art scene.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inheritance_(Paolini_novel)"title="Inheritance (Paolini novel)">
The Varden attack the Empire city of Belatona. In the battle, Saphira, Eragon's dragon, is nearly killed by a Dauthdaert, a spear from the Dragon Wars that can bypass magical wards and kill dragons. Belatona is captured by the Varden, and an alliance is later formed between the Varden and the werecats.Afterwards, Eragon's cousin Roran is sent on a mission to capture Aroughs, which he succeeds at using unconventional tactics. Roran rejoins the Varden at Dras-Leona, which proves difficult to take, as it is under protection by Murtagh and his dragon Thorn. Jeod finds information about a possible entrance to the city via an incomplete sewer system under it.Eragon, Arya, Angela, the werecat Solembum, and an elf named Wyrden enter this sewer system, to sneak into the city and open the gates. However, the mission goes awry, as the tunnels are used by the priests of Helgrind, who separate the group, slay Wyrden, and capture Eragon and Arya. The priests worship the Ra'zac, and attempt to feed Eragon and Arya to Ra'zac hatchlings, although Angela and Solembum save them. Eragon is then able to open the city gates and defeat Murtagh and Thorn, allowing the Varden to take the city. As Eragon and Arya become drunk to celebrate their victory, Murtagh and Thorn attack their camp and capture Nasuada. In her absence, Eragon is appointed as the leader of the Varden, as they march on to Urû'baen, the capital of the Empire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Elephant_Chase"title="The Great Elephant Chase">
Tad Hawkins is 15 years old and lives in the fictional Pennsylvania mining town of Markle. After his mother died in childbirth, he was taken in by his overbearing aunt, who treats him as an unpaid servant, existing only to be bossed around and humiliated by Mr Jackson, the lodger, and Esther, the hired help. Tad's life is changed when he gets caught up in a crowd on their way to see a travelling elephant show which has just arrived in town. After witnessing the "miracle cure" of a young crippled girl by the elephant keeper, he spots Esther and Mr Jackson in the crowd and hides in the elephant's trailer. Before he can escape, Khush, the elephant, is loaded into the trailer and Tad is on his way to another town. When Tad is discovered by Michael Keenan, the elephant keeper, he discovers that the cripple who was cured in Markle is in fact Keenan's younger daughter, Cissie. Keenan offers Tad a job looking after Khush to keep him from exposing the scam. Tad takes to life with Khush and the Keenans. However, Tad is not the only person to have discovered the scam. Mr Jackson and Esther are on the Keenans' tail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_of_Death"title="River of Death">
In 1945, with the Allies approaching, two German officers ransack a monastery in Greece and make plans to escape with the loot. One of the Germans is left behind by his partner, while the other escapes by submarine from Wilhelmshaven. Twenty years elapse. A wealthy millionaire, Smith, hires Hamilton, allegedly an expert on the jungle, to lead him to the ruins of a lost Indian civilization recently discovered in the wilderness of the Amazon jungle in Brazil. The entourage faces giant anacondas, giant spiders (only mentioned in a conversation), cannibalistic natives, and so on, discovering a settlement of Nazi war criminals and their descendants, living as if the Third Reich had never ended. It is soon clear that Smith's real purpose has little to do with archaeology, and more to do with revenge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrift_in_Soho"title="Adrift in Soho">
The story opens in the late summer of 1955. Nineteen-year-old Harry Preston, having been granted an early discharge from national service with the RAF, moves to London from a small English provincial town to find life and adventure. Fancying himself as a writer, he drifts towards the central district of Soho, and soon enough he is included in the destitute but creative environment of the new Beat Generation. Harry meets an out of work actor, James Street. Street introduces Harry to the bohemian way of life and the novel recounts their misadventures. Harry travels upwards through this new world of wannabe artists, poets and writers, that have set up camp in the bohemian and not so posh 50s Soho and Notting Hill, he begins to slowly understand his role in this world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawitch"title="Seawitch">
Lord Worth, ruthless and fabulously wealthy, has made a lot of enemies in the oil business. His new offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, named "Seawitch", is one of the biggest in the world, and will put his competitors out of business. To destroy it and therefore be able to inflate the price of oil at will, the competitors get together and send one man to deal with Lord Worth. The villain has a personal score to settle with Worth and kidnaps him and his daughters. But Lord Worth's daughters are betrothed to the protagonists, Mitchell and Roomer, two former police detectives, now private investigators. They set trying to save Worth and his daughters from certain death, as the villain intends to leave them on "Seawitch" when he destroys it with a stolen nuclear weapon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Dream"title="Dark Dream">
Dark Dream tells the story of Falcon and Sara. Sara is Falcon's lifemate; he has returned to his homeland to meet the now Prince Mikhail Dubrinsky &amp; his lifemate Raven (hope of their species) in the thought of ending his barren existence little did he know life more for him. Who has sought his true love for centuries, for only she can save him from becoming a vampire, a beast driven to kill and destroy. When he rescues Sara Marten from a gang of street punks, he knows he has found the woman he has sought all his life .Sara has spent fifteen years hiding from a vampire who destroyed her family when she was a girl. At first, she believes Falcon to be him, or something like him. When she learns the truth, she accepts what must be, but holds off on committing to him until the children she has been rescuing and caring for are safe. Will she be able to escape the one who wants her death and give her love to her destined mate before he becomes a monster equal to the one hunting her?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_William's_Luck"title="Just William's Luck">
The Brown family are exasperated by William, and Emily the maid is tired of being ordered about.Meanwhile, William is in the old barn with Henry and Douglas, in a make-believe game of 'The Knights of the Round Table', when Ginger arrives on a fabulous bicycle. The Outlaws
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bloody_Red_Baron"title="The Bloody Red Baron">
The book takes place during World War I and explores the Diogenes Club's efforts to investigate Germany's attempt to make powerful, undead fliers. Heading up the German operations are the likes of Rotwang, Doctor Caligari and Doctor Mabuse. One of their more successful efforts is an undead flier known as the Red Baron. The story also features Edgar Allan Poe as a vampire writer assigned to ghostwrite the Red Baron's autobiography.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wednesday_Wars"title="The Wednesday Wars">
Holling Hoodhood is a seventh grader during the 1967–1968 school year. In his school, the student body is largely divided between Catholics and Jews, and every Wednesday both groups go to their separate churches for religious classes. Holling, a Presbyterian, has no religious class to attend, therefore he is forced to remain at class with his teacher, Mrs. Baker.Holling is convinced that Mrs. Baker resents him for this. This suspicion is compounded when she begins having him read Shakespeare. As he begins to enjoy the plays, though, he also begins to understand Mrs. Baker, whose husband, he learns, is stationed in Vietnam.The story's main focus is on Holling's struggle to get out from his overbearing father's shadow. Mr. Hoodhood is an ambitious, social climbing, and at times, cutthroat architect who is determined that Holling should take over the business when he retires. In fact, Mr. Hoodhood believes that nothing is more important than their family business and ensuring that it flourishes. Because of this, all of the Hoodhoods must be on their best behavior at all times. Whenever Holling brings up a particular person, his father breaks down who the person is, as well as their status; if they're someone who owns a business, Mr. Hoodhood demands Holling to be respectful at all times. This causes a strained relationship between Holling and his father. Holling ultimately finds an ally in his older sister, Heather, and eventually comes to understand that Mrs. Baker is also trying to help him learn to be his own person.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Dracula"title="Anno Dracula">
The interplay between humans who have chosen to "turn" into vampires and those who are "warm" (humans) is the backdrop for the plot which tracks Jack the Ripper's politically charged destruction of vampire prostitutes. The reader is alternately and sympathetically introduced to various points of view. The main characters are Jack the Ripper, and his hunters Charles Beauregard (an agent of the Diogenes Club), and Geneviève Dieudonné, an elder French vampire (a similar version of Dieudonné appeared in Newman's trilogy of novels, written under the pseudonym Jack Yeovil, for the Warhammer Fantasy universe).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_Cha_Cha_Cha"title="Dracula Cha Cha Cha">
In 1959, several of the world's notable vampires gather in Rome for the wedding of Count Dracula. Nefarious schemes are afoot and being investigated by British Intelligence, the Diogenes Club, and several others, including a British spy on the trail of a sinister madman with a white cat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Wild_Ride_Through_the_Night"title="A Wild Ride Through the Night">
The story begins with 12-year-old Gustave, captain of the "Aventure" as he attempts to escape the deadly Siamese Twins Tornado. When the storm finally catches up with his crew, everyone is killed except Gustave, who meets Death, and his crazy sister Dementia. After the wicked siblings play dice for Gustave's soul, Death gives him six seemingly impossible tasks in order to stay alive. In one night, he must face six giants, rescue a damsel in distress from the clutches of a dragon, make himself conspicuous amidst a forest of evil spirits, encounter the Most Monstrous of all Monsters, and even meet himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Gate_(MacLean_novel)"title="The Golden Gate (MacLean novel)">
A team of criminals led by mastermind Peter Branson kidnaps the President of the United States and his two guests from the Middle East, a prince and a king, on San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, in a masterfully conceived and clockwork-timed operation. Branson and his men block off both ends of the bridge, wire it with explosives, and demand half a billion dollars and a full pardon for themselves. Any rescue attempts will result in the detonation of the explosives, which will kill the President (and his guests) and destroy the Golden Gate Bridge.However, Branson is an egomaniac, and he cannot resist attention from the media. So he invites the press to stay on the bridge and cover the story. Aware that the FBI will have placed agents among them, he takes the precaution of searching them and removing the armed ones. However, Hagenbach (the FBI's dour but extremely adept head agent) has an ace in the hole: a hand-picked special agent, Paul Revson, who was equipped with only a camera. Allowed to remain on the bridge, Revson sets out to foil Branson's plans and rescue the President.With the help of a doctor and a female journalist, Revson gets a message to his superiors, suggesting various courses of action: supplying drugged food to the terrorists, placing a submarine under the bridge, and trying to neutralize the terrorists' equipment with a laser beam. He also arranges for several carefully disguised weapons and gadgets to be smuggled to him. Working on both ends, Revson, Hagenbach, and those working with them unleash their own carefully conceived plans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_Hunter_D_(novel)"title="Vampire Hunter D (novel)">
It is the year 12,090 A.D. The world has all but ended, ravaged in a firestorm of man's wars and madness. But from the wreckage, a few humans manage to survive- a few humans... and something else.Doris Lang knew what her fate would be when the vampire lord Count Magnus Lee bit her: an agonizing transformation into one of the undead, doomed to be stalked by her fellow villagers or cursed to become the bride of the unholy creature and face an eternity of torment, driven by the thirst for human blood. There was but one option left, and as she watched him ride in from the distance she knew there was hope. Salvation... from a vampire hunter named D.Magnus has his own problems. His beautiful daughter Larmica refuses to let a human into her family. Enlisting the help of Garo, a werewolf retainer, she attempts to kill Doris before the wedding, only to find D standing against her.Greco Rohman, son of the chief, wants Doris for himself. The same goes for the skilled fighter Rei-Ginsei and his Fiend Corps. Both men are eager to eliminate D, as his skills and Doris' favor make them see him as a threat. Doris knows she isn't the only one in trouble - her younger brother is perceived as her weakness, and more than one person is willing to use him as leverage against her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuffle_Bunny_Too"title="Knuffle Bunny Too">
In the book, young Trixie Willems realizes that her classmate Sonja has the same type of "Knuffle Bunny" toy rabbit that she does. When the jealous girls begin arguing, their teacher, Mrs. Greengrove confiscates the stuffed bunnies, returning them at the end of the school day. At 2:30 A.M, Trixie realizes that her teacher has given her Sonja's Knuffle Bunny, and asks Mo to call Sonja's house to exchange toy rabbits. The two girls immediately become friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Omaha"title="The Road to Omaha">
Several years after the events of "The Road to Gandolfo", the Hawk has discovered a long-forgotten treaty between the US government and a tribe of Native Americans. This treaty granted the tribe a vast area of land that has since become Omaha, Nebraska, and includes the home of the Strategic Air Command at Offutt Air Base. Posing as a member of the tribe, the Hawk plans to bring suit against the United States and force it to give the land to the tribe. To further this goal, he ropes Devereaux (now retired from the military) into representing the tribe in court.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_in_Landscape"title="Girl in Landscape">
Pella Marsh is the only daughter and eldest child in a family that is leaving behind New York City, in a near-future where the Earth has sustained severe damage from climate change. Before they can leave, Caitlin, Pella's mother, dies of a brain tumour, leaving Clement, her ineffectual father, to try to care for Pella and her brothers, Raymond and David.After twenty months of cryogenic suspended animation, the Marshs reach the Planet of the Archbuilders. This oceanless planet is inhabited by an advanced alien species known only as the Archbuilders, who are hermaphrodites. They built the complex and beautiful arch-like structures that dominate the terrain, terraformed their planet to provide a controlled climate, and used bioengineering to create several varieties of readily grown "potatoes" for a constant food supply. The Archbuilders themselves are furry and scaled creatures, with frond-like tentacles. There are also small, nearly invisible animals called "household deer," which inhabit most every corner of the region without much obvious impact. Despite their apparent lack of high technology, the Archbuilders are skilled communicators, and have twenty thousand indigenous languages on their world. They also rarely give birth, implying considerable longevity.Like the other colonists, Pella is instructed to take acclimatisation pills, ostensibly to ward off indigenous Archbuilder viruses, but, because of her father's new plans for the humans in living with the world, she does not take them—much to the chagrin of the enigmatic resident Efram Nugent. After some time, rather like Ethan Edwards and Debbie in "The Searchers" (1956), Efram and Pella develop a love/hate relationship as she resists his misanthropic and speciesist attitudes toward both his fellow colonists and the Archbuilders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Story_(Kray_book)"title="My Story (Kray book)">
This book is the follow-up to the jointly written "Our Story" (1988) by both Ronnie and Reggie Kray.In "My Story", Ronnie describes in his own words the murders of Jack "the Hat" McVitie and George Cornell, his bisexuality, and his feelings about spending 11 years in Parkhurst followed by his later years in Broadmoor Hospital for the criminally insane. Also included is a chapter written by Ronnie's wife, Kate Kray, and 21 photographs depicting the young Krays, their family, friends, and victims.Quote from book: "They were the best years of our lives. They called them the swinging Sixties. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were the rulers of pop music, Carnaby Street ruled the fashion world... and me and my brother ruled London. We were fucking untouchable..." - Ronnie Kray.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_in_Death"title="Conspiracy in Death">
Lt. Eve Dallas and her assistant, Delia Peabody, are called to a crime scene by Officer Ellen Bowers and Officer Troy Trueheart. A homeless man is killed, and his heart is removed with the skill of a surgeon. Dallas and Peabody both know a serial killer is preying on the city sidewalk sleepers. All of the city's resources, including Eve's billionaire husband Roarke, give her no solid leads, except a free clinic run by a noble and an honest doctor, Dr. Louise Dimatto. Soon though, three are dead, and Eve is running out of time.Unfortunately for Eve, trouble is also coming from within the police force. Officer Ellen Bowers is deranged and obsessed with Eve. She obsessively writes a journal about all the terrible things that she believes Eve has done. One night, going home to her apartment, still obsessing, Bowers is attacked and killed.The blame is quickly placed on Eve, who is stripped of her badge and goes into a deep depression. Only her husband Roarke can bring her back and help her figure out why four people are dead and what the terrible jealousy was that motivated these murders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_(novel)"title="Federation (novel)">
The first half of the novel involves three parallel arcs. In one arc, Zefram Cochrane has just completed the first warp speed voyage, a solo journey to Alpha Centauri and back. His is the first successful crewed flight beyond the Sol system. His benefactor and backer, Micah Brack, exploits the warp drive to help humanity burst into the stars and safeguard the future of the race, which he foresees disaster for because of the "Optimum Movement", perfectionists who are trying to perfect Khan Noonien Singh's failed attempt to unify and improve humanity.A second arc covers James Kirk and his crew, just after the successful conference on admitting Coridan into the Federation. Kirk is hauled onto the carpet by a Starfleet admiral demanding that he explain a subspace message showing "dead" Commissioner Nancy Hedford. Kirk discovers that Cochrane was kidnapped from his and Nancy's home at Gamma Canaris.A third arc covers Jean-Luc Picard and his crew, just after dropping off Sarek of Vulcan to another ship for his voyage home from the Legaran home world. A Ferengi ship leads them to a Romulan ship, whose commander is giving Picard what appears to be a section of a Borg ship, but with a Preserver artifact incorporated into it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Firing_Offense"title="A Firing Offense">
Nick Stefanos is a marketing executive for electrical goods chain Nutty Nathan's. When a stock boy from the company disappears he is convinced to locate the boy by his grandfather.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Circle_of_Paradise"title="The Final Circle of Paradise">
Ivan Zhilin, posing as a writer working on a novel, visits a seaside resort city to investigate a series of mysterious deaths. Zhilin's role as an undercover agent becomes apparent to the reader only gradually and is not brought into the open until the final chapters of the novel.While being given a tour of the city, a tourism official tells Zhilin that he will get no work done, as he will be distracted by the "twelve circles of paradise" found in the city. These include the Fishers, which provide thrill seekers with situations of extreme and potentially fatal terror, the Shivers, which electronically induce pleasurable dreams to large crowds of people, and the Society of Patrons of Arts, who procure priceless works of art and ritualistically destroy them. The culture of this city has become utterly decadent, the product of an age of universal affluence. Zhilin refers to the present state of the world as "the age of the boob" where the highest priority is placed on orgiastic pleasure and staving off boredom, to the neglect of culture, education and scientific progress. The authors express the Marxist perspective in the scene of an argument between Zhilin and a third-world revolutionary:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick's_Trip"title="Nick's Trip">
Nick Stefanos is a bartender at a neighborhood place called "The Spot". His high-school friend Billy Goodrich asks him to search for his missing wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Starbucks_Saved_My_Life"title="How Starbucks Saved My Life">
Michael Gates Gill had it all by his fifties: a mansion in the suburbs, a wife and loving children, a six-figure salary, and an Ivy League education. Within a few years, he lost his job, got divorced, and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. With no money or health insurance, he got a job at Starbucks.An unexpected teacher opens his eyes to what living well really looks like. She is a young African American, the daughter of a drug addict; he is used to being the boss but reports to her now. For the first time in his life he experiences being a member of a minority trying hard to survive in a challenging new job. He learns the value of hard work and humility, as well as what it truly means to respect another person.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrest_Gump_(novel)"title="Forrest Gump (novel)">
Forrest Gump, named after Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest, narrates the story of his life. The author uses misspellings and grammatical errors to indicate the character's Southern accent, education, and cognitive disabilities. While living in Mobile, Alabama, Forrest meets Jenny Curran in first grade and walks her home. They become the best of friends.By the time Forrest is sixteen years old, he is 6' 6" (1.98 m), 242 pounds (110 kg), and plays high school football. Miss Henderson, with whom Forrest is infatuated, gives him reading lessons. He reads Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and two other books that he does not remember. While he enjoys the books, he does not do well on tests.He gains popularity as a football player, making the All State team. When Forrest is called to the principal's office, he meets noted university coach Bear Bryant, who asks if he'd considered playing college football. After high school, Forrest takes a test at a local army recruitment center, and is told he is "Temporarily Deferred."Forrest and Jenny meet again at the University of Alabama and play together in a folk music band at the student union, covering songs by such singers as Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Peter, Paul and Mary. After one semester, Forrest flunks out of the university. He and his friend Bubba are drafted into the Army, but Bubba dies in the Vietnam War. Forrest is wounded and meets Lieutenant Dan, who has lost his legs, in the infirmary. Dan tells Forrest the he feels Forrest is destined for something great.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Lonely_Night"title="One Lonely Night">
After having been berated by a little judge because of killing somebody who needed knocking off bad, licensed investigator Mike Hammer goes for a walk to contemplate this humiliation on a rainy night in Manhattan and comes across a terrified woman and her pursuer on a bridge. Mike kills the man but the woman, terrified, jumps to her death from the bridge. Both the man and the woman possessed oddly shaped green cards with the edges cut off at odd angles. Hammer's friend in the police department, Captain of Homicide Pat Chambers, identifies them as membership cards for the local Communist Party. Mike attends a meeting and is mistaken for a Soviet MGB spy.Next day, Chambers tells Hammer that Lee Deamer, a political candidate running on an anti-corruption ticket has an insane twin brother named Oscar who is causing problems and asks Hammer to investigate; but when Hammer goes to Oscar's address, Oscar runs off and throws himself in front of a train, leaving his body unrecognisable.Lee Deamer tells Hammer that Oscar was trying to blackmail him with documents, now missing, and asks Hammer to recover the documents. Hammer, hindered by the Communists, eventually works out where the stolen papers are and retrieves them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Kill"title="The Big Kill">
Drinking at a seedy bar on a rainy night, Hammer notices a man come in with an infant. The man, named Decker, cries as he kisses the infant, then walks out in the rain and is shot dead. Hammer shoots the assailant as he searches Decker's body. The driver of the getaway car runs over the man Hammer shot to ensure that he won't talk. Hammer takes care of the child and vows revenge on the person behind the deed.Next morning Mike awakens to the telephone ringing and to find the kid making a play for Mike's .45. After getting an elderly retired nurse from downstairs to look after the kid, Mike visits friend and police chief Pat Chambers, who reads a report to Mike about the kid's father William Decker, an ex-con gone bad. William pulled a robbery on Riverside Drive the same night prior to his murder by ex-con Arnold Basil, a stooge for Lou Grindle. After leaving Pat, Mike heads on over to the East Side where William lived and meets superintendent John Vilecks and the local Father who said that William was playing it straight and left a will to take care of the kid. William's only visitor was fellow dock worker Mel Hooker. Mike heads on over to Riverside Drive, the site of the robbery to meet Marsha Lee an ex-Hollywood actress who was hurt in the robbery. Marsha thinks the robbery was really planned for the apartment above hers since she had nothing of real value to steal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_Me,_Deadly"title="Kiss Me, Deadly">
Chapter 1:Speeding down a mountain road coming back from Albany, New York, PI Mike Hammer almost runs over a woman hitch hiking in the middle of the road. After Mike's car skids to a stop, she gets in the car and they drive to Manhattan only later to be run off the road by gangsters. The gangsters torture the woman for information, which she fails to tell them. They kill her and knock Mike semi-unconscious, and then stuff them both into Mike's car and push the car over a cliff.Chapters 2-6: Recovering in the hospital, Mike wakes to the sound of Velda's voice. After his release from the hospital, Mike meets with the FBI. Mike learns from Pat Chambers that the woman, Berga Torn, was the mistress of Carl Evello. She was to testify at a committee hearing after she was released from the sanitarium.Velda's visit to Mike brings bad news: His PI licence was revoked by the Feds. Pat gives Mike the address of Berga Torn in Brooklyn. Berga had a roommate named Lily Carver, who just moved out of the apartment. Mike gets Lily's address from the superintendent and heads to her place.Protecting herself with a hand gun, Lily lets Mike inside her apartment. Lily was scared to death with all the strangers confronting her with questions about Berga, but Lily doesn't know a thing. After Lily calms down, Mike tells her to get her things together and come to his place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Hunters"title="The Girl Hunters">
Hammer has been a drunk living in gutters around New York City for the past seven years. Hammer's secretary and fiancée, Velda, is believed to be dead after a botched protection job involving a Chicago socialite and her new husband. Then, Hammer is apprehended and taken to an undisclosed location, where he is interrogated by former friend Captain Pat Chambers. Chambers, who blames Hammer for Velda's death, pummels him repeatedly, but slacks off. Richie Cole, a dock worker, is dying of severe gunshot wounds at City General Hospital and has insisted on talking to Hammer exclusively to reveal the identity of his killer. Hammer, upon interviewing the victim, discovers that Velda is still alive and facing execution by a top level Soviet assassin dubbed "The Dragon," her only chance being Hammer finding her first. The man tells Hammer that he has left clues to her location, but dies immediately afterwards.The alarming news causes Hammer to sober up and prepare to go out on his own, despite being out of commission. He soon discovers the pressure is on from Pat to discover the killer's identity. Despite many threats, Hammer successfully brushes off Chambers, but then finds himself being muscled by a Federal Agent named Art Rickerby. Rickerby reveals to Hammer that Richie Cole was a field agent and his former protégé. In order to gain information and gun carrying privileges, Hammer makes deals with Rickerby, the condition being that Hammer brings him the Dragon alive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caravan_to_Vaccarès"title="Caravan to Vaccarès">
From all over Europe, even from behind the Iron Curtain, Gypsies make an annual pilgrimage to the holy shrine of their patron saint, Saint Sarah, in the Provence region of southern France. But something is different about this year's gathering, with many suspicious deaths. Cecile Dubois and Neil Bowman, a British agent, decide to investigate.Eavesdropping, Bowman discovers that a man named Gaiuse Strome is financing the gypsies, and his suspicions on the real identity of Strome centre on a highly wealthy aristocrat, distinguished folklorist and gastronome, Le Grand Duc Charles de Croytor, whose girlfriend Lila Delafont is a friend of Cecile. As they follow the caravan, Bowman and Cecile find that their lives are in danger many times in an effort to uncover the secret the gypsies are so determined to hide, and before long are running for their lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_Girl_and_the_Man_Who_Followed_the_Sun"title="Bird Girl and the Man Who Followed the Sun">
Jutthunvaa' is called Bird Girl. She and Daagoo (Snow grouse) are members of two different clans of the people of the Gwich'in, belonging to the Athabaskan tribes. The two young people want to be free. So both sets out, each for itself, through the country. Their parents disapprove of such useless, inappropriate trips. Once Bird Girl and Daagoo meet in the back country. From this point their paths diverge.With reluctance, Daagoo goes with the hunters of his clan on a caribou hunt. After the hunt, the wandering Daagoo finds all hunters to whom also his father counts murdered. The murderers are, to Daagoo's view, invaders from the north - Inupiat, called by the Gwich'in Ch'eekwais (Inuit). Daagoo reflects and hurries to the rest of his clan, who are still alive. He leads the women, old men and children out of danger. Daagoo practices hunting with the boys in the new camp. When the clan's survival is finally secured, Daagoo has realized his dream. He leaves the icy regions of his home and moves southward to the Land of the Sun.Meanwhile, the parents of Bird Girl want to marry her off. Defiantly, she escapes because she wants to prevent the dreaded pregnancy. Bird Girl would like to fight through on her own initiative. Bird Girl finds a faraway cave and puts away winter provisions—only there is no caribou meat. Bird Girl goes on a caribou hunt. Bird Girl is overpowered by a Ch'eekwai man, whose father was killed by Gwich'in, and is kidnapped northwards. As a slave, Bird Girl must bend to the will of her torturer and becomes pregnant. The newborn child, a boy, is taken away from her and is raised by a young Ch'eekwai woman. The three brothers of Bird Girl never give up the search for their sister in the following polar summers. During one of their expeditions in the north they are murdered by Ch'eekwais. When the murderers play football with the heads of the beaten brothers for all the world to see, it is the last straw. Bird Girl takes revenge. At night she plugs the smoke holes of the Ch'eekwai dwellings, and all the sleeping Ch'eekwai suffocate, even her own son. This had turned away from the mother. Bird Girl moves home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Blowdown"title="The Big Blowdown">
In 1940s Washington, Pete Karras is betrayed by his friend Joe Recevo and disabled by his former employer Mr. Burke. Karras takes up a job in Nick Stefanos' diner but when Burke's protection racket threatens Stefanos, Karras resists and ultimately gets his revenge.The book opens with a gravely injured Peter Karras in a D.C. hospital in 1946. The plot flashes back to Karras and his friends as children in 1933. Karras gets into a fight with a group of African-American boys and his opponent, Junior Oliver, earns his grudging respect. Next the story jumps to 1944 and the Philippines theatre of World War II. Karras kills his first man and one of his childhood friends, Billy Nicodemus, is killed. Next the book returns to 1946 and we learn Karras has married Eleni, and how he came to be injured. Karras flippant attitude upsets his superior Mr. Burke and when Karras fails to collect a debt from another Greek Burke decides to have him punished. He instructs Recevo to betray his friend Karras. Burke dispatches his enforcer Reed to assault Karras after Recevo sets him up. Reed beats Karras with a baseball bat.When promiscuous Lola disappears in 1948 after moving to Washington her brother Mike Florek decides to search for her. Eventually Florek takes a job at Nick Stefanos' diner in 1949. Karras is now working there as a chef. Jimmy Boyle, now a beat cop, has become peripherally involved in the investigation of the murder of several prostitutes by a serial killer. Karras correctly suspects that Lola has become a prostitute and aids Florek in his search. Lola's madam Lydia is murdered by the killer and Lola witnesses the crime. Boyle locates Lola for Karras and Karras and Florek extract her from Morgan's brothel. Karras lets Florek and Lola leave town.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Crusader"title="The Dark Crusader">
Eight top-level scientists and their wives disappear after responding to newspaper advertisements for specialists in different areas of modern technology, so when a ninth advertisement appears, Agent John Bentall is recalled to London from a mission in Turkey by his superior, Colonel Raine. The advertisements offered high rates of pay to applicants who were married, had no children and were prepared for immediate travel. Bentall, a physicist who specialized in solid rocket fuels and is presently working for the British government on counter espionage, is paired with Marie Hopeman, a secret agent posted in the same job as Bentall in Turkey, assigned to pose as his wife. All eight scientists had disappeared in Australia or en route there, and Bentall and Hopeman find themselves kidnapped at a hotel in Fiji. They escaped from the kidnappers to the island of Vardu, a remote coral atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, which is currently home to Professor Witherspoon, a noted archaeologist. The island has no radio transmitter and the next boat is scheduled to arrive in three weeks. Bentall finds Dr. Witherspoon somewhat sketchy. Later, Bentall discovers Witherspoon is actually LeClerc, the mastermind behind a plot to steal a British missile, the "Dark Crusader" and send it to Australia for nefarious purposes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Nights_on_Air"title="Late Nights on Air">
After being fired from his latest television job, a disgraced Harry Boyd returns to his radio roots in the northern Canadian town of Yellowknife as the manager of a station no one listens to, and finds himself at the center of the station's unlikely social scene. New anchor Dido Paris, both renowned and mocked for her Dutch accent, fled an affair with her husband's father, only to be torn between Harry and another man. Wild child Gwen came to learn radio production, but under Harry's tutelage finds herself the guardian of the late-night shift. And lonely Eleanor wonders if it's time to move south just as she meets an unlikely suitor. While the station members wait for Yellowknife to get its first television station and the crew embarks on a life-changing canoe expedition, the city is divided over a proposal to build a pipeline that would cut across Native lands, bringing modernization and a flood of workers, equipment and money into sacred territory. Hay's crystalline prose, keen details and sharp dialogue sculpt the isolated, hardy residents of Yellowknife, who provide a convincing backdrop as the main cast tromps through the existential woods.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Good_House"title="A Good House">
The story starts in 1949 in the small town of Stonebrook, Ontario, near Lake Huron and is about the Chambers family and starts in a hopeful era of post-World War II. Bill is an ex-Navy veteran who had been injured losing three fingers of his right hand in the war and he has three children with his wife Sylvia; Patrick, Daphne, and Paul. Daphne, when 12 years old, meets an accident in 1952 which deforms her face permanently and asymmetrically while performing acrobatics in a circus on trapeze. In 1955, Sylvia dies of cancer when aged 40 and Bill later marries Margaret. Margaret and Bill used to be co-workers at a hardware store. Margaret raises the three children and keeps the family together and has a daughter Sarah together with Bill.The eldest brother Patrick becomes a lawyer, the youngest Paul gains popularity in hockey but eventually marries early, fathers an imperfect child and becomes a farmer. Daphne chooses an odd path for the time and becomes a single mother of two daughters. Paul dies at an early age. Bill steps into his old age not very gracefully suffering with dementia but Margaret still keeps the family in control. As time passes the novel travels till 1997 and the nuclear family diverges yet keeps meeting together to share happy and sad times.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Whaleboat_House"title="The Whaleboat House">
Little has changed in Amagansett since the first settlers arrived there some 300 years earlier, but the discovery of the body of Lillian Wallace, a New York socialite, by a local fisherman named Conrad Labarde, shatters the apparent stability and threatens to tear the close-knit community apart.Labarde (a second generation French Basque recently returned from the war in Europe), and Tom Hollis (a recently divorced former New York police detective posted to the area after his attempt to expose corruption resulted in the death of a colleague), are drawn to investigate Lillian's death, even though it appears to have been a tragic accident. They both have their own separate reasons to suspect that there is more to the death than meets the eye, and that it may have been the result of foul play.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breath_(novel)"title="Breath (novel)">
The novel is set in a small Western Australian logging village named Sawyer, near the fictional coastal town of Angelus, which has featured in several of Winton's works, including Shallows and The Turning. It is narrated by Bruce "Pikelet" Pike, a divorced, middle-aged paramedic, and takes the form of a long flashback in which he remembers childhood experiences of friendship with another boy, of surfing under the mentorship of an older surfing champion, and of repeated statutory rape by the older surfer's wife. The main events of the novel takes place in the 1970s.Before the main events of the story take place, the opening chapter depicts a scene of two paramedics responding to an emergency call. The older paramedic, who is the narrator, immediately recognises that the boy that they have been called to help is dead as a result of hanging himself. The paramedic consoles the disconsolate mother who asks him how she will explain his death. After leaving, the younger paramedic says that it was the first suicide she had encountered, but the narrator says that it was not a suicide, without explaining that it had been an accident resulting from an autoerotic asphyxiation.The story then shifts to the narrator's childhood. The narrator, Bruce "Pikelet" Pike, recounts his boyhood friendship with Ivan "Loonie" Loon. They first meet when eleven-year-old Pikelet stumbles across Loonie pretending to drown in a river in order to frighten a young family sitting nearby. The boys bond over their love for dangerous stunts, despite being the polar opposites of each other. They form a tight friendship and spend the majority of their time together. The two boys witness a group of young men surfing a gigantic wave and are inspired to pick up surfing as a hobby. They then meet a professional surfer named Bill "Sando" Sanderson, who encourages them to pursue this ambition and offers to teach them both how to surf. The trio bond quickly and the boys are constantly over at Sando's house, which is a treehouse in the middle of the Australian bush, shared by Sando's American wife Eva Sanderson.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Frontier_(novel)"title="The Last Frontier (novel)">
Michael Reynolds, MacLean's protagonist, is a British secret agent on a wintertime mission inside Hungary at the height of the Cold War. Reynolds must rescue Professor Jennings, an elderly British scientist who is held by the communist government against his will. Reynolds is no James Bond and does not have any fancy gadgets but he is highly resourceful. His biggest advantages against the sometimes cruel and highly efficient Hungarian Secret Police are an ability to make commonsense on-the-spot decisions and the heroic help of friends in the Hungarian underground. Reynolds hooks up with the mysterious Jansci and his friend “the Count” and they strive to transport the professor over the border and back to England. The plot has the twists, turns, and betrayals in which MacLean specialized, and Reynolds realizes that he has only one chance to escape with Jennings before he is captured and killed by the Hungarian secret police.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partisans_(novel)"title="Partisans (novel)">
During the Second World War, Pete Petersen, a Yugoslavian agent with an unlikely name, and his team of compatriots cross war-torn Yugoslavia to deliver a secret message and unmask a double agent.It is not clear who Petersen is actually working for, as the plot meanders through the confusion of Yugoslavia's three-way civil war, with Communist Partisans, the Serb royalist Chetniks and the Croatian fascist Ustashe fighting as much against each other as against their Italian and German occupiers. Everyone's loyalties are uncertain. Obviously, the sardonic Petersen is not working for the Nazis, but what about those with him?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilldiggers"title="Hilldiggers">
The novel describes the initial diplomatic contact between the Polity (an AI governed interstellar empire) and the isolated planets of Sudoria and Brumal who had been at war for nearly a century. The inhabitants of these two hostile worlds had to make many changes to their bodies and societies in order to survive, rendering their appearances and attitudes quite different from that of a 'standard' human of the time.Contact is being made officially by Consul Assessor David McCrooger, a hooper-cum-diplomat from the planet Spatterjay, while the system is secretly observed by a Polity surveillance drone named Tigger.The Sudorians have also discovered an alien artifact they have nicknamed the "Worm". Research on this artifact enabled the Sudorians to make many technological advances that eventually gave them the upper hand in the conflict, allowing them to win the war with Brumal.Following the war, the Brumellians were nearly completely wiped out. Over time, the causes of the war began to be questioned in Sudoria as many of the justifications that had been taken for granted started to be doubted.Much of the story revolves around a conflict between two Sudorian factions; Fleet, who were once the dominant faction during the war, responsible for Sudoria's defence and navy, including the Hilldiggers, and the Orbital Combine, a large alliance of spacestations and other facilities orbiting around Sudoria, who both study and contain the Worm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Abbey"title="Nightmare Abbey">
Insofar as the novel may be said to have a plot, it follows the fortunes of Christopher Glowry, a morose widower who lives with his only son Scythrop in the isolated family mansion, Nightmare Abbey, in Lincolnshire. Mr Glowry's melancholy leads him to choose servants with long faces or dismal names such as Mattocks, Graves and Skellet. The few visitors he welcomes to his home are mostly of a similar cast of mind, with the sole exception of his brother-in-law, Mr Hilary. The visitors engage in conversations, or occasionally monologues, which serve to highlight their eccentricities or obsessions.Mr Glowry's son Scythrop is recovering from a love affair which ended badly. A failed author, he often retires to his own quarters in a tower to study. When he leaves them, he is distracted by the flirtatious Marionetta, who blows hot and cold on his affections. A further complication arises when Celinda Toobad, fleeing from a forced engagement to an unknown suitor, appeals to Scythrop for shelter and he hides her in a secret room. The change in Scythrop's demeanour spurs on Marionetta to threaten to leave him forever, and he is forced to admit to himself that he is in love with both women and cannot choose between them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternity_in_Death"title="Eternity in Death">
Tiara Kent lights several candles in her room, and turns off her security system. She drinks a special "potion", and prepares for her mystery man to arrive. The next morning, Lt. Eve Dallas, and Delia Peabody are called to Tiara's apartment. The man she invited bit her in the neck, and drank her blood as she bled out, and Peabody recognises the murder as one perpetrated by a vampire.Eve and Peabody talk to Tiara's friend, Daffy Wheates, who informs them Tiara was going to an underground vampire club, called Bloodbath, and had in fact met a man. Eve heads to see Iris Francine, and then Dr. Charlotte Mira, but is accompanied by her billionaire husband Roarke, who is curious himself about the vampire murder.Iris is unable to tell Eve much of anything, and Dr. Mira is only able to say that the killer believes he is a vampire, that he tried to turn Tiara into one, and he will continue trying until he gets it right. The tox report reveals that the "potion" Tiara drunk, was a mixture of hallucinogens, tranqs, date rape drugs, and human blood. Detective Ian McNab is called in to help with the investigation, not because of what he can contribute, but because he thinks vampires are cool. They head off to the club, and Eve discovers Peabody is now wearing a cross, to ward of vampires. Eve gets irritated, and makes Peabody repeat "Vampires don't exist" over and over again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeps_(novel)"title="Creeps (novel)">
Wayne is a teenager growing up in a dysfunctional home. His father is an alcoholic and his mother keeps threatening to desert him all. He can't escape his home life in school either, as Wayne is constantly bullied by his schoolmate Pete "The Meat". One morning he's rescued by Marjorie, a teen girl dealing with her own problematic home life, and the two begin to befriend one another. However even as the two seek solace in one another, Pete has decided to take matters into his own hands and find a way to torment not only Wayne but Marjorie as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_God"title="Calculating God">
Thomas Jericho, a paleontologist working at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, makes the first human-to-alien contact when a Forhilnor, a spider-like alien from the third planet of the Beta Hydri system arrives on Earth to investigate Earth's evolutionary history. The alien, Hollus, has come to Earth to gain access to the museum's large collection of fossils, and to study accumulated human knowledge in order to gather evidence of the existence of God. It seems that Earth and Hollus' home planet, and the home planet of another alien species traveling with Hollus, all experienced the same five cataclysmic events at roughly the same time. Hollus believes that the universe was created by a god, to provide a place where life could develop and evolve. Thomas Jericho is an atheist who provides a balance to the philosophical discussion regarding the existence of gods.At the end, the star Betelgeuse goes supernova, threatening all life within hundreds of light-years with radiation. One of several dead civilizations discovered by the explorers may have deliberately induced the supernova in order to sterilize the stellar neighborhood. This was presumably done in order to protect the virtual reality machinery which now housed all of their personalities. According to a theory of Thomas's, several worlds exist where the inhabitants uploaded themselves into machines instead of exploring the nature of the universe and gods.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espresso_Tales"title="Espresso Tales">
The novel continues to follow Pat Macgregor, a student who has taken a second gap year and who is unsure about her future direction, and the lives of her friends, roommates and fellow tenants at 44 Scotland Street.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Friendly_Persuasion"title="The Friendly Persuasion">
"The Friendly Persuasion" has as its common theme linking the fourteen chapters (only two of which, "A Likely Exchange" and "First Day Finish" are otherwise connected) the effects of the Quaker religion on members of a family and their interaction with their neighbors. West uses rich descriptives of geography and setting to bring out the dignity and strength of her characters. However her stated purpose in telling their story is to present descriptions of "real life" and "reality" as she understands them, not to elucidate the religion, stating that the Birdwells are characters "who happened to be Quaker" rather than personifications of Quaker traits.Three stories ("Shivaree Before Breakfast," "Lead Her Like a Pigeon,"and "Homer and the Lilies") were based on recollections of West's mother (Grace) from her own girlhood. Family stories about her great-grandfather were the source for three others ("Music on the Muscatatuck,"A Likely Exchange," and "First Day Finish"). Although not connected to her own family or Quakers, "The Pacing Goose" was based on an actual incident chronicled in a compendium of early Indiana court cases.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnosaur_(novel)"title="Carnosaur (novel)">
Set in a rural village near Cambridgeshire, England, the novel opens at a chicken farm which is attacked one night by a mysterious creature, leaving both the farmer and his wife dead. A story circulates that the killer was a Siberian tiger that had escaped the private zoo of an eccentric lord named Darren Penward. A reporter named David Pascal investigates the carnage, and notices that the blood-stained room where the attack occurred has been thoroughly cleansed in a seeming attempt at covering the killer's footprints. A few days later, the creature attacks a stable, killing a horse, the keeper, and her daughter, leaving one survivor, an eight-year-old boy. Pascal arrives at the scene, only to find Penward's men already there, towing a concealed animal with a helicopter. Pascal interviews the boy, who reveals that the killer was not a tiger, but in fact a dinosaur. After unsuccessfully trying to interview Penward's men, Pascal moves on and begins a sexual relationship with Penward's nymphomaniac wife, who eventually takes him into her private quarters.From there, Pascal enters the zoo, only to discover that it's filled with dinosaurs. He is captured and given a tour of the establishment. He sees a variety of different species, mostly carnivores, including the dinosaur that had escaped earlier which is identified as a "Deinonychus", a sexually-frustrated "Megalosaurus", and an adolescent "Tarbosaurus". Penward explains that he recreated the dinosaurs by studying the DNA fragments found in fossils, then using them as a basis for restructuring the DNA of chickens. He goes as far as saying that he intends to let his dinosaurs loose in remote areas of the world where they could flourish and eventually spread after what he considers an inevitable Third World War. Pascal is imprisoned, only to be rescued by Lady Penward, but only after promising that he permanently commit to her. As they make their escape, Pascal notices that his ex-girlfriend Jenny Stamper, also a reporter, has been caught in the act of infiltrating Penward's zoo as well. Enraged at his insistence on helping her, Lady Penward releases the dinosaurs and other animals present in the zoo. In the chaos, the "Tarbosaurus" destroys Penward's helicopter and heavy machine gun before it can get in the air. The "Deinonychus" pursues Pascal and Jenny through Penward's museum, with the two getting away when it is tricked into attacking its own reflection due to perceiving it as a threat much like a bird. The "Tarbosaurus", driven by equating the smell of mammals with easy food, further destroys the premise by bashing down numerous fences and gates, chasing the protagonists down before battling a pride of lions. The couple manage to reach Pascal's car and flee the property, with the "Tarbosaurus" in pursuit down the road. Sir Penward is gored in the leg by an escaped bull (one of several he kept as food for the dinosaurs) and captures his insane wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joker_in_the_Pack"title="Joker in the Pack">
The novel describes the student life of Shekhar Verma, a middle class boy who grows up in the post liberalization era in India. Shekhar is described as a typical boy growing up in urban India - focused on Bollywood and Cricket. As he becomes older and faces board exams, he is pressured by his parents, relatives and neighbors to take life seriously and to consider pursuing a career in information technology. In order to achieve this goal, he decides to pursue his graduation in Information Technology but is disheartened when the IT bubble bursts and salaries plummet. Shekhar then trains his eyes on the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), in the hope that an MBA from an IIM would help him get his dream job. The book describes in detail Shekhar's life at IIM Bangalore and introduces various personalities that make up life there. Shekhar is shown to mature as the book progresses, ultimately questioning the choices he has made, which though make him successful as per society's expectations, leave him confused about what he really wants in life..
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Children_Fail"title="How Children Fail">
In "How Children Fail," John Holt states that children love to learn but hate to be taught. His experiences in the classroom as a teacher and as a researcher brought him to conclude that every child is intelligent. However, children become unintelligent because they are accustomed by teachers and schools to strive only for teacher approval and the “right" answers and consequently forget everything else. There, children see value not in thinking, discovery, and understanding but only in playing the power game of school.Children believe that they must please and obey the teacher, the adults, at all costs. They learn how to manipulate teachers to gain clues about what the teacher really wants. Through the teacher's body language, facial expressions and other clues, they learn what might be the right answer. They mumble, straddle the answer, get the teacher to answer their own question, and take wild guesses while waiting to see what happens, all in order to increase the chances for a right answer.When children are very young, they have natural curiosity about the world, trying diligently to figure out what is real. As they become "producers" rather than "thinkers," they fall away from exploration and start fishing for the right answers with little thought. They believe that they must always be right and so quickly forget mistakes and how the mistakes were made. They believe that the only good response from the teacher is a yes and that a no is a defeat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Heaven_(novel)"title="Cold Heaven (novel)">
The novel is set in Nice, New York and Carmel, California. The plot concerns a lapsed Catholic, Marie Davenport, who is about to leave her husband Alex for her lover, Daniel, when Alex is apparently killed in a boating accident and then seems to have risen from the dead. The novel details Marie's dilemma in confronting this apparent miracle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Guide_to_the_Perplexed"title="A Guide to the Perplexed">
The novel is presented in the form of unfinished memoirs of one Professor Gunther Wünker, born in Ramat Gan, Israel in the 1960s, an anti-Zionist and the founder of the philosophical school of 'Peepology' (the science of peep-show voyeurism). The novel takes place in a fictitious near-future period, some 40 years after the State of Israel is dismantled and replaced with the State of Palestine. The novel excoriates what it calls exploitation of The Holocaust for propaganda purposes designed to shield Israel from scrutiny for its "transgressions" against the Palestinians. The perplexed is defined as "the unthinking chosen" who "cling to clods of earth that don't belong to them".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_Hours"title="Odd Hours">
After leaving the monastery in the previous book, Odd found a place to stay in Magic Beach with a retired actor. While out for a walk one morning, he finds a woman whom he had been seeing in his dreams; a young, pregnant woman who calls herself Annamaria. After being assaulted and nearly killed by a large man with two henchmen in tow, Odd is separated from Annamaria, though he uses his psychic magnetism to find her. Once he finds her they decide they need to leave immediately, but while making preparations to do so they hear a car door slam. They manage to find a spot to hide until after the men who had been chasing them leave. With the men now gone, Odd and Annamaria set out walking. On their walk, they encounter a large pack of coyotes that Annamaria somehow persuades to leave. After leaving Annamaria with a trusted friend, Odd flees to a local church where he is subsequently turned over to the sheriff of Magic Beach, but not before he hides his ID in a church pew. The sheriff, a man who seems to have many personalities, believes Odd is a government agent who has come to spy on his operation: the delivery and shipment of multiple nuclear weapons to terrorist groups inside the US via the Magic Beach harbor. Odd manages to convince the Sheriff that he is a government experiment gone wrong and that he is willing to be bribed in order to look the other way. While the sheriff is setting up a transaction to buy his loyalty Odd manages to enrage the spirit of Frank Sinatra, who began accompanying him after the departure of Elvis. The rage caused by his spirit creates a violent whirlwind, and in the confusion Odd is able to escape from the police department.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Company_of_Cheerful_Ladies"title="In the Company of Cheerful Ladies">
Mma Ramotswe and her new husband settle down to married life with their foster-children, but problems are piling up. The tenant of Mr JLB Matekoni's house is running an illegal drinking den. Then Charlie, the apprentice, gets entangled with a wealthy married woman. Mma Ramotswe accidentally knocks a man off his bicycle with her van, as she sees Charlie entering the expensive car driven by a wealthy woman. Mr Polopetsi was not injured, but Mma Ramotswe learns his story; he has been unemployed following a spell in prison after what appears to have been a miscarriage of justice. She gets his bike fixed by the apprentice and then Mma Ramotswe persuades her husband to employ him out of guilt and sympathy. He proves an asset to the garage and to the detective service. Mma Ramotswe's violent ex-husband Note Mokote reappears and demands money from her.Mma Ramotswe is shaken deeply as she realizes she never got a divorce from Mokote years ago, threatening her new marriage. Check in hand, she drives to his mother's home to deliver it. Note is not there. His mother tells her that Note was married to another woman at the time of her marriage to Note, and had a child with that wife. This takes the weight off Mma Ramotswe, as she realizes he was the bigamist, and they were never legally married. When he appears at her office, she faces him herself, no longer shaking in fear at his violence, with two decent men in her life waiting in the background as the conversation proceeds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Towers_of_Trebizond"title="The Towers of Trebizond">
The book is partly autobiographical. It follows the adventures of a group of people – the narrator Laurie, the eccentric Dorothea ffoulkes-Corbett (otherwise Aunt Dot), her High Anglican clergyman friend Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg (who keeps his collection of sacred relics in his pockets) – travelling from Istanbul (or Constantinople as Fr. Chantry-Pigg would have it, or Byzantium as Laurie would have it) to Trebizond. A Turkish feminist doctor attracted to Anglicanism acts as a foil to the main characters. On the way, they meet magicians, Turkish policemen and juvenile British travel-writers, and observe the BBC and Billy Graham on tour. Aunt Dot proposes to emancipate the women of Turkey by converting them to Anglicanism and popularising the bathing hat, while Laurie has more worldly preoccupations. Historical references (British Christianity since the Dissolution of the Monasteries, nineteenth-century travellers to the Ottoman Empire, the First World War, the Fourth Crusade, St. Paul's third missionary journey, Troy) abound. The geographical canvas is enlarged with the two senior characters eloping to the Soviet Union and the heroine meeting her lover in Turkey, and then her semi-estranged mother in Jerusalem. The final chapters raise multiple issues such as the souls of animals, and culminate in a fatal accident and its aftermath.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Nachsommer"title="Der Nachsommer">
This first-person narrative describes the main character Heinrich's maturation in the regimented household of his father and his subsequent encounter and involvement with the owner of the Rosenhaus, the home, and part of the estate, of a wise, but mysterious older man who becomes a mentor to Heinrich.Heinrich accepts his regimented upbringing without criticism. His father is a merchant who has planned out Heinrich's early education at home in the minutest detail. When it is time for Heinrich to head out on his own, his father allows his son to choose his own path. We are told that his father is a man of great judgement, as is his mother a model of the matronly virtues. Heinrich's narration is understated. His retrospective examination of his personal development is presented with what seems to be humility, objectivity and emotional distance.Heinrich becomes a gentleman natural scientist exploring Alpine mountains and foothills. He is interested in the geology, flora and fauna of the region. On one of his hiking excursions, Heinrich attempts to avoid what he believes will be a dousing by an approaching thunderstorm. Going off the main highway, he approaches the almost fairy-tale like residence of the man of mystery, Freiherr von Risach. The Rosenhaus is the center of Risach's carefully ordered world devoted to art and gardening, among other things.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eternal_Lover"title="The Eternal Lover">
A cliff-dwelling warrior of 100,000 years ago, Nu, is magically transported to the present, falls in love with Victoria Custer of Beatrice, Nebraska, the reincarnation of his lost lover Nat-ul, and the two are transported back to the Stone Age. The story is set in Africa, and the present-day sequences include Victoria's brother Barney Custer, protagonist of Burroughs's Ruritanian novel "The Mad King", as well as Burroughs's iconic hero Tarzan from his Tarzan novels.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cave_Girl"title="The Cave Girl">
## Part One.Blueblooded mama's boy Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones is swept overboard during a South Seas voyage for his lifelong ill health. He finds himself on a jungle island. His bookish education has not prepared him to cope with these surroundings, and he is a coward. He is terrified when he encounters primitive, violent men, ape-like throwbacks in mankind's evolutionary history. He runs from them, but when he reaches a dead end, he successfully makes a stand, astonishing himself. While keeping the hairy brutes at bay, he meets a beautiful girl, Nadara, also on the run. In an uncharacteristic gesture, he saves her from the grasp of one ape-man during their escape. He is shocked that she believes him a hero, mistaking his frightened screams for war cries. She calls him Thandar, meaning "the brave one". She teaches him the language, how to swim, how to fish, and basic woodcraft, as he begins to realize that he does not know everything. However, Nadara warns him that a newcomer to her tribe must fight the strongest men, who have killed many. When they reach her home village, he is horrified to see that despite her appearance, her tribe seems to be cavemen from the Paleolithic era, not much better than the first tribe. In order to avoid death at the hands of the tribal bullies, he vanishes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinx_(Cabot_novel)"title="Jinx (Cabot novel)">
Jean "Jinx" Honeychurch is a sixteen-year-old girl from Iowa. Being certain that she was born with bad luck, she goes to stay with her Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Ted in Manhattan, New York because her ex-boyfriend is stalking her.Her cousin Tory is convinced that Jean must join her coven of witches to add to their power. Jean denies being a witch, and refuses to join them. This angers Tory, causing her to seek payback. Jean also meets a guy both she and Tory have affection for, Zack. This along with the witch thing puts Tory in a blind rage and she decides to plot against Jinx in more ways than the walls of the preppy Chapman, where they all attend high school. At a school dance Tory flies Jean's ex to town, which sends Jean into a panic attack. She then returns home and Tory ties Jean up to cut her and drink her blood and take Jean's powers. Zack comes out and rescues Jean, who exposes Tory for what she really is. Then Tory is sent to boot camp and Jean and Zack end up dating.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_Friends_(novel)"title="Circle of Friends (novel)">
In the fictional small Irish town of Knockglen in 1950, an unlikely friendship blossoms between ten-year-old Bernadette 'Benny' Hogan – an overweight, big-hearted, only child of a local merchant – and wiry orphan Eve Malone, raised from birth by nuns in a Catholic convent after her late mother's upper-class Protestant family rejected her. The friendship endures into their teens, as they both attend University College Dublin. There their loyalty to each other is tested by the introduction of more students to their circle, including rugby player Jack Foley and the beautiful and ambitious social climber, Nan Mahon. Benny surprises everyone by winning the heart of the handsome Jack, but things turn sour when Nan attempts to use Eve's family connections to her own advantage. When her plan to snare Eve's wealthy cousin Simon Westward goes awry, Nan is forced into a new plan, one which will break Benny's heart.A key subplot involves the future of the Hogan family business, Hogan's Gentlemen's Outfitters, thrown into turmoil when Benny's father dies suddenly. Forced to abandon his plan to marry into the business, the efficient but unpleasant Sean Walsh demands a partnership, but Eddie Hogan dies before the agreement is signed. Benny reluctantly plans to honour the agreement; however, when she looks more closely at the business accounts, it reveals Sean may not be the model employee he seems.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_This_World_(Watt-Evans_novel)"title="Out of This World (Watt-Evans novel)">
The premise of the novel is that parallel universes do exist. Some have intelligent non-human life, while others are populated by English-speaking humans. Prior to the events of the novel, one such reality is overrun by a malevolent force known as Shadow. The World of Shadow is a typical high fantasy realm where magic exists and men fight with sword and sorcery. Although pockets of resistance against Shadow exist, their reality has all but been conquered by evil. Another reality, the Galactic Empire, soon finds that they are being invaded by minions who serve Shadow, and declare war. The Galactic Empire is depicted as a science fiction realm of yester-year, akin to Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers. Many planets are colonized by the technologically advanced Empire, and telepaths serve in their military forces. Once the conflict with Shadow began, the Empire uses their telepaths to establish contact with the World of Shadow. The World of Shadow, in turn, use magic to stay in contact with the Galactic Empire. Although both realities share a common enemy, little progress is made in the way of a true alliance due to vast cultural differences. The Empire view the people of Shadow as brute barbarians who could be of no use in a real war, while the people of Shadow consider the Empire and their fascist ways as "possbly the lesser of two evils".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Empire_of_Shadow"title="In the Empire of Shadow">
A group from this world is trapped in a science fiction universe. Before the galactic government will send them home, they must agree to travel back to the fantasy universe first, in order to assess the power of the evil wizard who runs the place and any potential risks posed to the galactic empire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reign_of_the_Brown_Magician"title="The Reign of the Brown Magician">
By defeating the powerful wizard who runs a fantasy universe, a man from this world gains all of her powers. He sets about using these powers for the good of the world he is now effectively the ruler of and to fix what went wrong in the previous books. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_(Doyle_novel)"title="Flood (Doyle novel)">
In 1953, the East coast of England was struck by one of the worst storms of the century. In response to this, the Thames Flood Barrier was opened in 1984, to protect London from the danger. However, global warming has resulted in rising sea levels, higher waves and more frequent extreme weather. Londoners have become complacent, thinking that the flood barrier will protect them. The events will prove them wrong.The Prime Minister is out of the country, leaving the Deputy Prime Minister and Home Secretary Venetia Maitland in charge. As the danger signs mount up, officials at all levels of the government are reluctant to take the necessary precautions, relying on margins of error, earlier missed predictions and fearing the consequences of an unnecessary evacuation.A storm rages over the north of Britain, a troop carrier founders in the Irish Sea, flood indicators go off the scale, the seas are mountainous and a spring tide is about to strike the East Coast. Air-sea rescue and military personnel struggle to save lives all down the coast. The worse is yet to come. When the storm reaches the south the two forces of wind and tide will combine and send a huge one-in-a-thousand tidal surge up the Thames.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bébo's_Girl"title="Bébo's Girl">
Mara, a young woman from Monteguidi, a small town in the Val d'Elsa, who, in the aftermath of the Liberation, meets the partisan Bube, hero of the Resistance, and falls in love with him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_Men"title="Nude Men">
"Nude Men" is about a twenty-nine-year-old man who is sexually pursued by a "precocious 11-year-old... who makes Lolita look like a Girl Scout."The novel explores the man's horror at his own attraction, and recounts his efforts at resisting her persistent advances.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cop_Hater"title="Cop Hater">
The city has surrendered to a heat wave in July 1956. When detective Mike Reardon is on the way to work on the nightshift, he is murdered from behind with a .45 caliber handgun. As Steve Carella and his colleagues from the 87th Precinct are looking for their friend's killer, they have no idea that this is just the beginning of a series of police murders.David Foster is the next victim, at the entrance of his apartment, where the killer has left behind a footprint at the crime scene. Steve Carella and Hank Bush question the family and wives of the deceased, as well as some suspects, but to no avail. A few nights later the unknown killer ambushes and murders Det. Hank Bush. Bush fought back however and shot and wounded the murderer. Steve Carella fears he will be the next target if he fails to stop him.When Carella is leaving the precinct, he finds a reporter, Savage, waiting for him. He asks Carella his thoughts on who the killer might be, stating that everything is off the record. Carella reveals that - due to the evidence collected from Bush's murder - the police now knows certain attributes of the killer, i.e. weight, profession, and build. Carella leaves telling Savage that he is going on a date with his girlfriend, Teddy. The next day we find out that Savage has published the conversation between him and Carella, including Teddy's name and address.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince_and_the_Pilgrim"title="The Prince and the Pilgrim">
The Prince, the protagonist, is named Alexander. His father, Prince Baudouin, is murdered by the king of Cornwall, King March. When Alexander comes of age, he sets out to Camelot to seek justice from King Arthur and to avenge his father's death.The Pilgrim is named Alice. She rescues a young French nobleman who has in his possession an enchanted silver cup. The chalice may be the mysterious and much-sought-after Holy Grail.Prince Alexander is diverted in his quest by the enchantments of Morgan le Fay, the seductive but evil sorceress. She persuades him to attempt a theft of the cup so that she can gain power over King Arthur and his court. Alexander's search for the mysterious cup leads him to Alice. Together the prince and the pilgrim find what they have really been seeking: love.The tale is a self-contained novel taking place during Arthur's reign (possibly during the events in "The Last Enchantment"), and does not continue the story of "The Wicked Day". It covers the time before Merlin the Enchanter's defeat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Love_(novel)"title="Hard Love (novel)">
John, who can be mean since his parents' divorce six years ago, and Marisol, who has recently come out as a lesbian, meet through their interests in writing zines, into which they pour their life stories. As the story begins, John wonders what it would be like to meet one of his favorite zine writers, Marisol. From her personal biography, she describes herself as a "Puerto Rican Cuban Yankee Lesbian." John meets Marisol at a magazine rack on a Saturday when he asks her for coffee. Over time they start to spend more time together and she teaches him the ways of the zine writer. After Marisol tells John that she likes him, he is very surprised. No one had ever told him that they liked him, and he falls in love with her. Marisol doesn't know how to let him down, without losing her new best friend. Throughout the story, John and Marisol try to keep their friendship intact through writing zines together. While John is spending time with his divorced father, he starts to ask questions about Al, the man his mother is marrying. John gets angry and throws a tantrum. Seemingly childish, the outburst becomes a topic for his writing, which he asks Marisol to read, instead of discarding it as he usually would have. As the two friends share more about their lives, John begins to think about his own sexuality. He believes he might be straight, perhaps because he develops feelings for Marisol.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Dancer"title="Star Dancer">
The druids have prophesied that the one born in the middle of an untimely meteorite shower will avert a great evil, but they are looking for a boy who will grow into a mixture of war hero and super-magician.Instead there is one baby girl, Tegen, born at the right time, and a boy, Griff, who has Down syndrome, who is born just as the stars were fading.The book explores how these two children grow up together, discovering their individual destinies, but it also shows how much they need each other to become who they were meant to be in a harsh and unforgiving world.Tegen is the Star Dancer, but she needs Griff’s honesty and kindness to stand against the druids who aren’t evil, but are fixed in their habits.Griff needs Tegen to stand against his cruel mother who abandoned him at birth.As the story unfolds, Derowen, an evil-minded ‘wise-woman’ connives with a young handsome druid who believes he should be the Star Dancer. They plot to destroy Tegen by stealing her magic, and setting her up to fail so together they can seize power.With dark spells they disturb a demon from the depths of funeral caves under the Mendip Hills and Tegen has to face her nemesis at last.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Hall_(novel)"title="Ruth Hall (novel)">
The autobiographical novel can be divided into three phases: Ruth's happy marriage, impoverished widowhood, and rise to fame and financial independence as a newspaper columnist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Steam_House"title="The Steam House">
## Part 1.In the summer of 1866, in Aurangabad, the British colonial government announces a bounty on the head of Nana Sahib, who is supposed to be hiding in that presidency. Nana Sahib, disguised as a sage, stalks and kills the man who claims to know face of Nana Sahib. Nana Sahib escapes from Aurangabad the same night and, taking his brother Bala Rao and followers, hidden in Ajanta and Ellora caves respectively, retreats to the Vindhiyanchal mountains to hide from colonial forces.Nana Sahib, along with his brother and followers, hides in various small fortresses called "Pals," and mostly inside "Pal of Tandil." His brother Bala Rao, who is extremely similar to Nana sahib in physical appearance, inquires about the inhabitants of the fortress and learns from locals that none except local outlaws, insurgents and a mad woman knows about the place. The mad woman is known as Rowing Flame as she carries a burning torch and roams the wilderness in the valley of Narmada. The locals respect the mysterious lady and feed and cloth her. From this hiding place, Nana Sahib launches an underground movement and secretly visit local chieftains for persuading them for an uprising.Meanwhile, in Calcutta, a group of Europeans is planning for a voyage through India. The group consist of Banks, a railroad engineer; Maucler, the French adventurer and narrator for most of the story; Captain Hood, a hunter craving his "half century" of tigers, retired Colonel Sir Edward Munro, whose motive behind joining this expedition is to find and kill Nana Sahib to avenge his wife, who supposedly died in the Cawnpore massacre. Servants accompanying them include Sergaent McNeil, Munro's faithful servant; Fox, the faithful servant of Captain Hood and fellow hunter, who has killed 37 tigers; Monsieur Parazard; a Negro cook of French origins; Storr, a British Engine driver; Kilouth, an Adivasi coal shoveler and Gotimi, the faithful Gurkha servant of Colonel Munro.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginning_Place"title="The Beginning Place">
The narrative focuses on the journey of the two main characters from adolescence to adulthood in two alternate worlds, the real world and the idyllic Tembreabrezi.The story is told in alternating chapters from two starkly alternating viewpoints: that of Irene Pannis, and of Hugh Rogers. They live in the suburbs of an unnamed US city, in difficult circumstances and with troubled families. They independently discover a place hidden in a local wood, where time flows much more slowly than in the outside world and it is always evening, a "threshold" between their own world and another; though Hugh finds it first within the story, Irene has already been visiting the other world for some years. She has another life there in the town of Tembreabrezi, an adoptive family of sorts, and has learned the local language. Both Irene and Hugh love the "beginning place", the threshold; they feel a sense of belonging and home there that they lack elsewhere in their lives.As Hugh stumbles upon the beginning place, Irene discovers that something is wrong in Tembreabrezi; the paths which connect the town with the rest of the country are closed somehow, and no one can reach or leave the town except for her. The closing is not material but emotional; the townsfolk are struck by a desperate fear which will not allow them to move beyond the town limits. Despite her anger with Hugh, and her resentment of his disturbance of her hidden sanctuary, they find that they must work together; she has had increasing trouble in passing through the gateway into the other place, while he cannot always cross back into the 'real' world. By travelling together they can pass back and forth through the gateway at will, and so they return to Tembreabrezi together. Hugh is welcomed in the town as the hero for whom they have waited; Irene is jealous, wanting desperately to win the admiration and respect of the townsfolk and especially the Mayor or Master, Sark, whom she has loved for a long time. Hugh is largely unaware of her feelings, but wants to complete the quest to become worthy of the Lord of the Manor's daughter Allia. In the end, they embark together on a mission to save the town and reopen the roads. Together they track down the monster that brings the fear and Hugh kills it. He is injured in the fight, but Irene helps him to keep going until they can reach the gateway back to their own world. On the other side, the trust and the love they have discovered together opens a different sort of gateway, providing them with a possible future together that avoids the destructive patterns of their own families.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Piratica_Series"title="The Piratica Series">
The novel takes place in a world somewhat parallel to Earth, in the year Seventeen-Twelvety, which is equivalent to approximately 1802 in Earth years. The main character is sixteen-year-old Artemesia Fitz-Willoghby Weatherhouse, who is an amnesiac student at the Angels Academy of Young Maidens. On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, while practising deportment, she tumbles down the stairs and hits her head on the banister, restoring her memories from six years previous – of her life aboard a pirate ship led by her mother, Molly Faith, more commonly known as Piratica, until a misfired cannon caused Molly's death and Artemesia's amnesia.Her sudden change in behaviour and into men's clothing due to the restoration of her memories convince her teachers and fellow students that she is mad, and she is locked in a room for safety. She quickly escapes up the chimney and sets off to locate her mother's former crew members. On the way she meets Felix Phoenix, a traveller, and forces him to trade clothes with her. She locks him in a sooty, abandoned house and continues on her way.From there, she locates some of her mother's old 'crew' and commandeers a ship. When she meets them they all think it is her mother Molly. She finds out that they advertise coffee and have a small ship. Heading out the stop at a town where they show her a theatre. They then explain to her that her mother and themselves were only actors and not pirates. Confused Art makes a plan to become the REAL Piratica, and sail the seas. She holds by her mother's (stage) code of honour- she steals by guile and trickery, and never takes a life. When stealing a boat Felix Phoenix joins them. Together they set out to find a mysterious treasure isle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/101_Ways_to_Bug_Your_Teacher"title="101 Ways to Bug Your Teacher">
The story opens with Steve (Sneeze), Hiccup, Goldie, Ace, and Pierre working on their Egyptian history projects. Their teacher, Ms. Pierce (Fierce), has an unusual way of assigning punishments to her students: "the death roll" which is a form of classroom management. Steve's parents tell him that they have already talked to the principals from both schools, so they want him to skip eighth grade and go straight to high school. There are two reasons that Steve doesn't want to go to high school. One reason is that he doesn't want to leave his only friends, that understand him, behind at middle school. The other reason is that Steve thinks he's lost his feel for inventing and he's pretty much giving up on himself. When Hayley confronts him, he kisses her. Sneeze enters the Inventors Club, and his mom has a baby named Alyssa Marie Wyatt, who inherits his terrible allergies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Fine_Day_in_the_Middle_of_the_Night"title="One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night">
Gavin Hutchinson, purveyor of non-threatening holidays to the British masses has organised a reunion for his old school classmates. The reunion will take place on his latest project - a unique "floating holiday experience" on a converted North Sea oil rig, a haven for tourists who want a vacation in the sun but without the hassle of actually interacting with any foreigners. And what better way to test out his venture than to host a fifteenth-year high school reunion, the biggest social event of his life... except no one remembers who Gavin is.Gavin may have been a non-entity while at school in Auchenlea, but now that he's made his fortune, he's looking forward to lording it over his old classmates, especially now he's having an affair with Catherine O'Rourke, PR specialist and one-time pin-up for his male classmates at St Michael's.Meanwhile, Gavin's wife, Simone Draper, remains much more memorable to those from Auchenlea than her husband. She is fed up with his philandering and aims to use the evening to publicly embarrass Gavin by announcing her plans to take the twins and leave him. Intent on ruining Gavin's evening, she's also added two extra names to the guest list - Hollywood star, famous comedian (and the recently suicidal) Matt Black, as well as class bampot, though now reformed artist, David "Dilithium Dave" Murdoch.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veniss_Underground"title="Veniss Underground">
"Veniss Underground" alludes in several places to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Like Orpheus, Shadrach descends into the underworld to retrieve his love, Nicola, but here from a cyborg hell, where genetic engineering and DNA splicing create fantastic and horrific creatures. Parallels also exist with Dante's "Inferno". Throughout the novel the idea of heaven and hell come into play. Nick looks into the chaotic world in which he tries to find purpose through what is called living art. Nick journeys into the underworld and makes a deal with the "devil", also known as Quin. As the story progresses, the reader takes on the second person perspective of Nicola and is introduced to a meerkat whom Nicola names Salvador. Salvador (an assassin meerkat sent by Quin) attacks Nicola but she incapacitates him. Nick arrives at Nicola's door and chokes her till she is near death and sent to an organ bank in the underworld. Shadrach comes into play in the third person point of view and takes the initiative of finding his lost love Nicola in the underworld. He finds Salvador injured at Nicola's apartment and cuts off the meerkat's head and attaches it to a plate and renames him John the Baptist. After, with the help of Dr. Fergusen, he finds a partially mutilated Nicola in an organ bank under a pile of miscellaneous body parts guarded by a naked troll. He carries Nicola through the tunnels back to his childhood home and finds a creation of Quin named Candle. Candle leads Nick to the Psyche witch named Rafter. After Rafter decides to try to salvage Nicola, Shadrach takes the action of venturing deeper into the underworld to kill Quin. He finds Nick, now transformed into a piece of living art, being attacked by some in the garbage re-cycling facility. Nick takes Shadrach lower and tells him how to get to Quin by jumping off a moving train with a parachute. Nick pushes Shadrach out of the train only to be shot by Shadrach as he falls. Shadrach manages to open his chute yet he hits the ground hard. Later, he wakes by a beach and an ocean and kicks over a skull where he finds another creation of Quin's called the Gollux. The Gollux tells him the truth while John the Baptist lies, the Gollux leads Shadrach to a ray-like creature named the saylber which Shadrach rides across the ocean and into Quin's world which is actually a very large minnow named the leviathan. He kills Quin and the remote and the whole place explodes. Shadrach climbs up the cliffs back to the subway level. Shadrach retrieves Nicola and takes her to the surface where they are both on a bridge staring at the city which is called Veniss.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Respectful_Prostitute"title="The Respectful Prostitute">
## Setting.Lizzie moves to the south of the United States. She is on a train when four white men harass her. Two black men defend her, and a fight ensues. In the fight, Thomas kills the black man that was with The Negro. He is arrested. He is a nephew of the rich Senator Clarke. The Negro escapes, and the other white men spread the rumour that he had raped Lizzie, so that Thomas shooting the other black man would become acceptable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Named"title="The Named">
"The Named" opens with a prologue in which two children, Sera and Ethan, are running to witness a rare flower bloom. Ethan, at age four, recognizes his older sister's love for all things strange and otherworldly, and loves being included in her wonder. The moment of wonder is ruined by the appearance of a monster, Marduke, who murders 10-year-old Sera. Ethan's scream marks the transition from the prologue to the first chapter, where 16-year-old Ethan laments the recurring nightmare he has about the death of his sister twelve years before.Ethan's life changed drastically after the death of his sister; his parents, Laura and Shaun, are mere shells of themselves. Laura suffers from severe depression while Shaun exists in a state of perpetual numbness. His only solace is his position in The Guardians of Time, a group of soldiers organized by the immortal Lorian, whose sole purpose is to defeat the goddess Lathenia and her Order of Chaos. The Order's soldiers exist to alter the course of history in order to benefit their goddess; the more chaos created in the past increases her strength in the present. Ethan and his friend and mentor Arkarian spent the majority of the twelve years since Sera's death in training and going on missions to the past to stop the Order from derailing history. Ethan and Arkarian are not only members of the Guard, but also Named by an ancient prophecy that predicts the final battle between the Guard and the Order.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Apollo"title="Beyond Apollo">
The novel's protagonist is Harry M. Evans, the lone survivor of the disastrous first crewed expedition to the planet Venus. Evans provides details of the doomed expedition as a novel in progress, and he proves to be a remarkably unreliable narrator, constantly changing the particulars of his story as it progresses. It quickly becomes apparent to the reader that he may be completely insane, as a feeling of deep (and comical) paranoia underlies Evans's descriptions of the absurd conversations that ensue with the Venusian inhabitants. There is some indication that Evans could very well have murdered his fellow crewmember. The novel ends with a publishing house offering to purchase the rights to Evans's outlandish tale.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lake_(Yasunari_Kawabata_novel)"title="The Lake (Yasunari Kawabata novel)">
Beginning in Karuizawa, the novel alternates between the now middle-aged Momoi and recurring memories of a lake from his hometown, and his interactions with a number of women, beginning with a relative and the uncomfortable circumstances surrounding a death in his family. The novel then explores his connection to a woman who loses a purse full of several years' worth of money earned as a lover to an older man as well as a relationship with a student, Hisako, when Momoi is a teacher, a relationship that begins with a somewhat odd-request for a good cure for a foot condition Momoi suffers from and then examines the circumstances of Hisako's family, who are well-off in the immediate post-war era. Finally, the now middle-aged Momoi follows a young girl during a summer period leading up to a festival and crosses path with a woman closer to his age.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocheworld"title="Rocheworld">
A small group of civilian and military personnel carries out humanity's first crewed mission to another star system. They embark on a one-way exploratory mission to Barnard's Star, where planets have been discovered by a robot probe. They travel in a laser-driven light sail spacecraft christened Prometheus. The journey lasts 40 years, but the crew uses a drug called "No-Die," which slows their aging process, whilst lowering their effective I.Q. and emotional state to that of small children. They arrive only a decade physically older than when they left. They are cared for during this period by the ship's AI computer.At Barnard they begin their exploration, moving around the system and deploying various robot probes. Part of the crew then uses a lander to visit the double planet Rocheworld, which consists of a solid-surface lobe they call Roche (French for rock as well as the name of the French mathematician who worked on Roche limits) and an ammonia/water-covered lobe they call Eau (French for water). A subset of the landing party journeys to Eau in the space-plane Dragonfly, which was carried on the lander. Over Eau the Dragonfly is caught in a violent storm that forces it to ditch. Unable to take off, the crew uses the plane's lift fans as propellers to make their way to the inner pole of the double planet, where the gravitation from Roche will help them to break free and return to the lander.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_Creation"title="The Day of Creation">
The main character of the novel is the World Health Organization doctor John Mallory who, six months after his arrival in Central Africa, finds that intense guerrilla activity has left him without patients. He devotes himself, instead, to the task of bringing water to the region, with dreams of setting the Sahara in flower. When he accidentally manages to achieve his task by creating a river, he becomes prey of an increasingly delirious spiral of fantasies, starting to identify himself with the new river that he has dubbed "Mallory". Obsessed, he decides to go up the river in order to "kill" its source, together with a teenaged African girl, whom he considers a sort of spirit of the waters, and other characters including a half-blind British documentary filmmaker and two ruthless local chieftains trying to take advantage of the new prosperity brought by the water.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Way_of_the_Peaceful_Warrior"title="Way of the Peaceful Warrior">
Dan is a world-class trampolining gymnast attending college at the University of California, Berkeley. The story begins when Dan experiences a series of nightmares, where he is in a dark lane. In front of him is Death, about to claim his life, when an old man appears out of nowhere and confronts Death. One particular night, Dan heads out to an all night gas station, where he meets the same old man from his dreams.Dan, nervous, leaves immediately, but as he turns back, he sees the man standing on the roof. Surprised that he could move so quickly, Dan strikes up a conversation with the old man, and calls him Socrates. Dan begins to meet Socrates on a regular basis, and is interested in his philosophy.Socrates ridicules Dan, pointing out that he is trapped in the illusions created by his mind, causing Dan so much trouble. Dan keeps a diary and is surprised that his mind is so troubled, that he is used to it. Dan demands Socrates to teach him. Socrates begins his initiation, by showing Dan visions of his whole life; his purpose; the world and "re arranges" the young man's mind. Socrates tells Dan that he should eliminate attachments and live in the present, but warns him that it would be a painful journey. Dan becomes besotted with Socrates's other protégée, a mysterious girl named Joy, who keeps turning up, unpredictably.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who?_(novel)"title="Who? (novel)">
An explosion resulting from an experiment gone awry rocks an Allied research facility near the border with the Soviet Bloc. A Soviet team abducts Lucas Martino, a leading Allied physicist in charge of a secret, high-priority project called K-88.Several months later, under American pressure, the Soviet officials finally hand over an individual, claiming that he is Martino. The man has undergone extensive surgery for his injuries. He has a mechanical arm that is more advanced than any produced in the West. More importantly, his head is now a nearly featureless metal skull, a kind of extreme craniofacial prosthesis. A medical evaluation reveals that several of the man's internal organs are also artificial. His biological arm and its hand's fingerprints are identified as Martino's, but this may be the result of an arm and hand transplantation. The Allies are suspicious that the Soviets have sent them a technologically altered spy and are holding the real Martino for further interrogation.The struggle to determine the man's true identity is the novel's central conflict. In the end, Shawn Rogers, the agent given the task, is unable to reach a conclusion. The man is released, but kept under surveillance and barred from working on physics projects. Later, when progress bogs down on the K-88 project, Rogers is sent to ask him to come back to work. The man refuses to go, and when finally asked directly if he is Lucas Martino, says simply "No": a reply that will later be seen as trenchantly mordant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_and_Mouse_(novella)"title="Cat and Mouse (novella)">
The narrator describes the character "The Great Mahlke" from their youth together through to Mahlke's disappearance near the end of the Second World War. Much of the action of the story is on a half-submerged sunken minesweeper of the Polish Navy, on which the narrator, Mahlke and their friends meet each summer. Mahlke explores the shipwreck by diving through a hatch, and with his ever-present screwdriver salvages various items (information plaques, objects left behind by the crew, and even a gramophone) to sell or collect for himself.Over the course of the novella Mahlke steals a Knight's Cross from a visiting U-boat captain and is expelled from school. He joins a Panzer division and receives a Knight's Cross thanks to his successes in battle. Returning to the school from which he was expelled, however, the principal forbids him from making a speech to the students, on the grounds of his former disgrace.The narrative in the story is often fairly incoherent. For instance, the timeline of the narration is often treated flexibly, moving from the narrator's perspective to different points within his memory of the events. There is also disunity about whether Mahlke is addressed in the second- or third-person, with Grass sometimes changing the form of address within a single sentence, possibly indicating the narrator's inability to remove his own emotions and feelings of guilt from an objective account of Mahlke.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crown_of_Dalemark"title="The Crown of Dalemark">
The book is set in two parallel times; the present-day Dalemark, and the time of Mitt ("Drowned Ammet") and Moril ("Cart and Cwidder"), some 200 years in the past. Mitt, who has recently escaped from the South and met Moril in North Dalemark, finds himself embroiled in a race to find an heir to the throne of Dalemark, which has lain empty for over 200 years, and gets mixed up in the machinations of a number of powerful forces.Maewen, a girl from present-day Dalemark, is transported by magic back in time to assist with the restoration of the royal line. In ancient Dalemark, Noreth Onesdaughter, a twin likeness of Maewen and apparently descended directly from the ancient kings of Dalemark, asks people to accompany her on her quest to become Queen. Unfortunately, just before she goes to meet her followers, she disappears. Maewen is drafted to replace her, and she has to lead Noreth's followers, collect the four tokens that will prove her right to the throne, and convince everyone that she is Noreth, all the while hearing mysterious voices in the air.Maewen sets out on her quest for the ancient crown of Dalemark with a small band of followers from the previous books in the series: Moril, Mitt, Navis Haddsson (a refugee nobleman from the South, see "Drowned Ammet"), Wend (the ancient magician-singer Tanamoril, Osfameron or Duck: see "The Spellcoats"), and Hestefan the Singer (who is eventually exposed as the evil Kankredin's agent and the murderer of Noreth). When they finally receive the crown from the One, the supreme god-like power of Dalemark, it is not Maewen who receives it – but Mitt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breath,_Eyes,_Memory"title="Breath, Eyes, Memory">
"Breath, Eyes, Memory" was Danticat's first novel, published when she was only twenty-five years old. As she has recounted in interviews, the book began as an essay of her childhood in Haiti and her move as a young girl to New York City.The novel is written in a first person narrative. The narrator, Sophie Caco, relates her direct experiences and impressions from age 12 until she is in her twenties. Sophie is the product of a violent rape and is raised by her loving aunt in a village near Port-au-Prince for 12 years. At this point, Sophie is unexpectedly summoned by her mother, who lives in Brooklyn having gained asylum and immigrated to the United States. Living with her mother in New York, Sophie discovers the trauma her mother endures inclusive of violent nightmares reminiscent of her experience prior to fleeing Haiti.The major conflict of the novel is the main character's battle with her inner self. Because she is a child of rape (her mother had been raped at the young age of 16 by an unknown man), she is a reminder to her mother of the wounds that had been inflicted on her. Her mother as a result of the rape remained this wounded but very resilient woman. Her mother came to resent her own self and body and constantly has nightmares about the rape. She grows into a woman who fights a battle with herself as a woman, wife, mother, as well as daughter. She is also in turn fighting the weight of her inheritance, as well as her mother's past experiences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rifles_for_Watie"title="Rifles for Watie">
Jefferson Davis Bussey marches off to Leavenworth from Linn County, Kansas in 1861, on his way to join the Union volunteers. He is off to fight for the North, his zeal having been fueled by reaction to the guerilla war of "bushwhackers" that was taking place in eastern Kansas. However, Stand Watie is on the side of the South. We meet many soldiers and civilians on both sides of the war, including Watie's raiding parties, itinerant printer Noah Babbitt and, in Tahlequah, Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) the beautiful Cherokee girl, Lucy Washbourne. During an undercover mission, Jeff finds that Captain Asa Clardy of the Union Cavalry is smuggling new Spencer rifles to the Indian forces of Stand Watie.Jeff winds up fighting for both the North and the South (while on a special undercover mission) during the conflict while making friends on each side. The book is also notable for the detailed depiction of contemporary Cherokee life in Indian Territory, including various tribal political factions. Keith portrays the difficulties Jeff Bussey faces in choosing one side or the other in the midst of huge conflicts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Junes"title="Three Junes">
"Three Junes" follows the McLeods, a Scottish family, throughout their lives and relationships. Its members are Paul and Maureen, and their sons: Fenno, and twins David and Dennis. At the opening of the book, Paul is on a tour of Greece, Maureen has died from lung cancer, and Fenno is running a bookstore in New York City. Other important characters include Malachy, Fenno's friend who is a music critic and suffering from AIDS, and Fern, an unwed pregnant woman, whom Paul formerly met on his trip to Greece, trying to recover from his wife's death. Finally, another important character of the book is Tony, a photographer, who is a house-sitter, never living in the same house for more than a few months. He is a catalyst in the narrative development of Fern and Fenno. He is an old friend with Fern and he develops a tumultuous relationship with Fenno.The novel is written in three parts, using the flashback technique. The first takes place in 1989 and is told from Paul's perspective; the second, in 1995 and from Fenno's point of view; the third, in 1999 and from Fern's perspective. As Julia Glass has said herself, the book should be viewed not as a trilogy but rather a triptych – elements that may seem small in one section play a large role in another, like a triptych, rather than a consecutive series of novels in a trilogy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Labyrinth"title="The Magic Labyrinth">
The book begins with the Mysterious Stranger, known as X, the renegade Ethical (one of the Riverworld's creators) who posed as the engineer Barry Thorn on the airship "Parseval" and there murdered Milton Firebrass and several others, all of whom were fellow Ethicals. He is now posing as a Mayan named Ah Qaaq, in the company of the Chinese poet Li Po. Through his internal reverie he reveals that his identity was discovered by Monat Grrautut, the director of the Riverworld project, who recalled 'X' to the Dark Tower to be judged. Against this, 'X' used a remote command to kill all the inhabitants of the tower and stop the resurrections of Riverworld's inhabitants. His reverie when the left bank's 'grailstones' (supplying food and stimulants) fail to operate and are not mended by the Ethicals, who are either dead or confined (like 'X' himself) to the river. After the grailstones fail, the inhabitants of the left bank invade the right for resources, and half of humanity dies in the conflict.Concurrently, protagonist Richard Burton and his friends have joined the crew of King John's ship, the "Rex Grandissimus", where Burton, masquerading as a Dark Age British warrior, becomes King John's security chief. One day Tom Mix, Jack London, and Peter Jairus Frigate apply to join the crew; and Burton, recognizing Frigate, attacks him as a spy for the Ethicals. Realizing his mistake, Burton allies himself with Frigate, Mix, and London. Meanwhile, the Ethical Monat Grrautut has boarded Sam Clemens' ship, where he is murdered by the renegade Ethical.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Agent_of_Terra"title="Secret Agent of Terra">
Planet 14 was just a speck on a spacial stereo map, just a world inhabited by a group of barbaric refugees. But to Belfeor, it was instant cash. All he needed was an iron hand and a means to dig out its radioactive resources for export to his own world. To Maddalena it was a final exam: this would be her last chance to prove herself worthy of Corps Galactica membership. To Saikmar, it was a nation and a people stolen from him by cruel treachery. To Gus Langenschmidt, it was part of a job he had, watching the skies and helping men who were being enslaved. But how do you help people who don't know you exist and who must not be told?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism_and_Nationalism_in_the_Third_World"title="Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World">
"Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World" begins by introducing the countries it selects to focus on: Egypt, Iran, Turkey, India, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia. Kumari analyses how the common history of colonial rule has shaped these countries through similar experiences but also points out the differences in their belief systems: Egypt, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan share Islamic history; India and Sri Lanka err towards beliefs based on Buddhism; Chinese, Japanese and Korean ideals are rooted in Confucius’s philosophy and the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia have been dominated by both: Indian and Chinese influences. The distinction in ideologies is important, Kumari suggests, because it’s shaped the approaches towards their liberation efforts and the means through which women mobilized to contribute to national liberation efforts.Kumari explores how the expansion of capitalism through colonisation in these societies led to the creation of a class of ‘local bourgeoise’- commission agents, allies of the settlers, traders who were unsatisfied with the terms of asymmetric trading relations and intellectuals and professionals who had studied abroad or at modern schools. The emergence of this new class of locals prompted a rise in nationalist ideas in retaliation to the occupation and economic exploitation of imperialist powers, leading to a rise in early ideas of women’s emancipation. She discusses the common strategies through which self-rule was achieved; modernization of societies, demolition of conventional structures such as the ruling monarchies and religious institutions, and lastly, imbuing masses with nationalist sentiments.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gods_of_Riverworld"title="Gods of Riverworld">
This book concludes the chronicles of the adventures of such diverse characters as Sir Richard Burton, Alice Pleasance Liddell, Aphra Behn and Tom Turpin through a bizarre afterlife in which every human ever to have lived is simultaneously resurrected along a single river valley that stretches over an entire planet.Although Farmer's 1980 novel "The Magic Labyrinth" was originally intended to be the last in the series, Farmer continued it in this novel, which picks up with the characters who have just arrived in the alien-built tower at the headwaters of the river from which this constructed world gets its name; they must decide how to use the resurrection machinery they now control, and also solve the mystery of the murder of the mysterious stranger.It is revealed that the Ethicals have been recording humanity since about 97,000 BC.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Telling"title="The Telling">
Sutty, a woman of mixed India/British ancestry, travels from Earth to the planet Aka to provide observations as an outside observer. On Aka, all traditional customs and beliefs have been outlawed by the state. There Sutty experiences and tells of the conflicts there between the Corporation, a repressive state capitalist government, and the native people who resist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Martin_(novel)"title="Daniel Martin (novel)">
"Daniel Martin" is the story of a Hollywood screenwriter who returns to his native England when a friend from university asks to see him before he dies. With flashbacks to his childhood in the 1940s and time at university in Oxford, a tale of frustrated love emerges. The dying man (Anthony) asks him to look after his wife Jane. Daniel had, in fact, married Jane's sister, despite loving Jane and having spent one night with her.While in England, Daniel improves relations with his daughter (Caro) and his estranged wife (Nell). Then Daniel and Jane go on a cruise visiting Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon; and the two fall in love again. Daniel breaks up with his Scottish girlfriend, and the two lovers are reunited at the end of the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceberg_(Cussler_novel)"title="Iceberg (Cussler novel)">
Dirk Pitt is summoned from his vacation on the sunny beaches of California and sent to the Arctic when an iceberg is discovered that contains the remains of a missing luxury yacht. The yacht was on its way to a top-secret meeting with the White House; now the entire crew is dead, incinerated at their posts. This discovery sets Pitt on a deadly adventure as he tries to stop a multi-millionaire madman from upsetting the balance of world power and possibly causing the collapse of the world's economy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartimaeus_Sequence"title="Bartimaeus Sequence">
## "The Amulet of Samarkand".The first book in the trilogy, published 2003, introduces Nathaniel as the gifted 12-year-old apprentice of a middle-aged mid-level magician, Arthur Underwood. He assumes his magician name, John Mandrake, to protect him from rivals who would wish to harm him. When the magician Simon Lovelace cruelly humiliates Nathaniel in public, Nathaniel decides to take revenge by stealing Lovelace's most powerful possession, the Amulet of Samarkand, which makes the wearer invulnerable to magic. Unknown to his tutor, he begins the study of advanced magic in order to summon the djinni Bartimaeus and enslave him. Bartimaeus soon overhears Nathaniel's birth-name, which greatly reduces Nathaniel's control over him, because demons can then cast counterspells. Things soon get out of hand and Bartimaeus and Nathaniel find themselves caught in the middle of magical espionage, murder, blackmail, and revolt. Together, the two of them defeat Lovelace and his most powerful demon, Ramuthra, who was last seen destroying an entire nation. These actions ended an uneasy truce between the young magician and Bartimaeus, resulting in the demon returning to whence he came. Nathaniel and Bartimaeus are stuck in a terrifying flood of revenge and murder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Memory_of_Light"title="A Memory of Light">
In the prologue, the armies of the Westlands assemble in preparation for "Tarmon Gai'don", as do the forces of the Shadow. The Forsaken Demandred stages a raid on the city of Caemlyn, sending Trollocs to capture the cannons, developed jointly by Matrim Cauthon, Queen Elayne Trakand, and the Illuminator Aludra. Talmanes Delovinde and the Band of the Red Hand launch their own counter-attack and successfully exfiltrate the cannons out of the city, but Caemlyn is lost.The Light is bolstered by people coming from all over the world to fight, sensing the end of all things, while the Shadow welcomes a new Forsaken: Mazrim Taim, now called "M'Hael".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aspern_Papers"title="The Aspern Papers">
A nameless narrator goes to Venice to find Juliana Bordereau, an old lover of Jeffrey Aspern, a famous and now dead American poet. The narrator presents himself to the old woman as a prospective lodger and is prepared to court her niece Miss Tita (renamed "Miss Tina" in later editions), a plain, somewhat naive spinster, in hopes of getting a look at some of Aspern's letters and other papers kept by Juliana. Miss Tita had denied the existence of any such papers in a letter to the narrator and his publishing partner, but he believes she was dissembling on instructions from Juliana. The narrator eventually discloses his intentions to Miss Tita, who promises to help him.Later, Juliana offers to sell a portrait miniature of Aspern to the narrator for an exorbitant price. She doesn't mention Jeffrey Aspern's name, but the narrator still believes she possesses some of his letters. When the old woman falls ill, the narrator ventures into her room and gets caught by Juliana as he is about to rifle her desk for the letters. Juliana calls the narrator a "publishing scoundrel" and collapses. The narrator flees, and when he returns some days later, he discovers that Juliana has died. Miss Tita hints that he can have the Aspern letters if he marries her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streams_of_Silver"title="Streams of Silver">
Following the events of "The Crystal Shard", Bruenor leads his friends Drizzt Do'Urden, the barbarian Wulfgar, and a surprisingly enthusiastic Regis, on a quest to reclaim Mithril Hall, the ancient stronghold of his clan. However, Regis has an ulterior motive for coming along; namely to elude the dangerous assassin Artemis Entreri, sent by Pasha Pook of Calimshan to recover the magical ruby that Regis stole from him.Just as the companions are setting out, Entreri arrives in Ten-Towns, soon locating Regis' abandoned home and finding Catti-brie there. The young woman finds herself hopelessly outmatched and paralyzed by fear, telling him all about Regis and the companions' quest. Entreri allows her to live, confident that she will not dare to interfere with his plans. Afraid for her friends, and desperate to regain her honor, she follows after both the companions and Entreri, hoping to warn her friends. On the way to Luskan, Entreri realizes that he is being followed and captures Catti-brie again, this time taking her along as a prisoner to use against the companions.Meanwhile, the companions reach Luskan, and seek out a map of the Northlands to aid in their quest. However, Dendybar the Mottled — an ambitious wizard from the Hosttower of the Arcane — has heard of the Crystal Shard and believes that Drizzt still possesses it, and plots to take it for his own ends. He forges an uneasy alliance with Entreri so that both may achieve their goals, and sends his apprentice Sydney with Entreri, along with his golem (Bok) and a soldier named Jierdan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Halfling's_Gem"title="The Halfling's Gem">
The dark elf Drizzt Do'Urden and Wulfgar the barbarian race to Calimport to rescue their friend Regis—who is being held as a captive, along with Drizzt's magical panther Guenhwyvar, by Artemis Entreri—and his stolen gem from the vengeance of Pasha Pook, Regis's former boss whom Regis betrayed by stealing his hypnotizing gem. While Drizzt and Wulfgar's chase continue, it is shown to us that Bruenor is not dead. It turns out that after Bruenor jumped onto the back of Shimmergloom, he survived the fall and fire due to having hold of Drizzt's scimitar, Icingdeath. Having been invulnerable to the fire, besting the dragon, he crawled back to the surface. Breunor then fails to sneak past the duergar and fights through scores of them before facing off against a giant spider. Lady Alustriel finds the poisoned and near-dead dwarf, heals him back to health, reunites him with Catti-brie and sends both of them after Drizzt and Wulfgar by supplying them with a burning chariot. Meanwhile, Drizzt and Wulfgar are on the sea, chasing Entreri by boat with the help of his good Captain Deudermont. In the middle of a fight with pirates, Bruenor and Catti-brie arrive and "The Companions of the Hall" are united once again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Shard"title="The Crystal Shard">
Even in the remote far northern region of Icewind Dale, the renegade dark elf ranger Drizzt Do'Urden is not fully accepted, except by the dwarves whom he had eventually befriended. He roams the tundra, hunting down yeti and giants that threaten the Ten Towns of Icewind Dale. When the Dale's native barbarians band together to slaughter the people of Ten-Towns, whom they view as invaders, Drizzt, with his drow stealth and ranger's knowledge of the terrain, discerns their plan and relays the information to his friends, the halfling Regis and the dwarf Bruenor. Regis, on the council of Ten-Towns, uses persuasion and a magical hypnotic ruby pendant to convince the stubborn leaders of the towns to work together to thwart the barbarian attack.Because of the warning and their unified efforts, Ten-Towns and the dwarves successfully repel the barbarian attackers. Drizzt personally meets the barbarian king, Heafstaag, in combat. He wounds Heafstaag many times, including a stab to the stomach that should have been fatal, but the king manages to survive and escape after wounding Drizzt. Meanwhile, Bruenor clashes with a young barbarian standard bearer, who breaks the shaft of his banner over the dwarf's head to no effect. Bruenor then slams the youth with his shield, rendering him unconscious. After the battle, Bruenor saves him from being killed in cold blood by the townspeople, instead taking the young man, Wulfgar, son of (the late) Beornegar into his care. Bruenor also defends the wounded and unconscious Drizzt, slamming Kemp to the ground and breaking the nose of his lieutenant when he finds them kicking the injured drow. Bruenor tells the people of Ten Towns that if not for Drizzt Do'Urden, they would now be dead, which grants Drizzt a measure of acceptance and respect in Icewind Dale.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_Time"title="Axis of Time">
In 2021, a radical Islamic terrorist movement has declared a global jihad against the West and established a Caliphate in Indonesia, initiating a wholesale slaughter of Chinese nationals there. In response, a US-led multinational task force of advanced warships and submarines sails to Indonesia to launch a counterattack against the Caliphate forces and retake the archipelago. With the fleet is a research vessel, the "Nagoya", which is testing top-secret weapons and stealth systems that use the latest developments in quantum physics.As the task force lies at anchor off the coast of East Timor preparing for deployment, the "Nagoya" conducts a full-scale test of its new systems but there is a catastrophic accident—the experiment generates a massive rift in the time-space continuum, completely destroying the "Nagoya" and sending most of the fleet back in time to 1942.Many of the 2021 ships materialize in the middle of the US fleet that is steaming to engage the Japanese at the Battle of Midway, including one vessel which materializes into the structure of a 1942 ship, with horrific results. When the mystery fleet suddenly appears, the Americans mistake them for the enemy (due to the presence of Japanese vessels in the 2021 fleet) and they begin firing on them. With the crews of the 2021 fleet rendered helpless by "transition sickness", the computerized battle systems on their ships automatically activate, inflicting heavy damage and thousands of casualties on the 1942 fleet until the two forces work out what has happened and halt the battle. As the nature of the event dawns on the two fleets, the two commanders strike an uneasy truce and the combined fleet heads back to Pearl Harbor. The Americans then launch an intensive study into the 2021 fleet's futuristic computer and weapons technology, as well as the wealth of historical information which describes their own future – although many items of technology from the future fleet are stolen by unscrupulous sailors from 1942 and sold to the criminal underworld.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designated_Targets"title="Designated Targets">
In the story, it is September 1942, four months after the Transition. A cease-fire has been signed between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, and the dictators have re-established their June 1941 borders. Both nations are 'cooperating' in various areas of research (particularly rocketry) at the newly built Demidenko research facility in Ukraine. Thanks to the foreknowledge granted by the Transition, Hitler and Stalin have purged their military and party ranks of traitors (real and imagined) that have been revealed from our history but not without problems: the arrest of Field Marshal Rommel sparks off a mutiny of the Afrika Korps that throws the entire North African front into chaos.Most of the German war machine shifts to "Operation Sea Dragon": the invasion of Britain. Meanwhile, in the Pacific, the Japanese have conquered New Guinea and the nearby island chains, and are battling Allied forces (reinforced with troops from the Multinational Force) along the Brisbane Line in Australia.In the United States a "Special Administrative Zone" has been carved out within the San Fernando Valley of California. Within "the Zone", the laws of the United States as of 15 January 2021 apply and it becomes an enclave for the 21st Century personnel. Many of the Multinational Force members work in various technological areas and thousands of contemporary females and non-whites are clamouring to join their ranks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blubber_(novel)"title="Blubber (novel)">
The story takes place in Radnor, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia.The entire class ostracizes Linda. Although she is not the heaviest student in their class, Wendy and her best friend and sidekick Caroline are Linda's chief tormentors and bully her both physically and psychologically (forcing her to say things such as "I am Blubber, the Smelly Whale of Class 206"). As a member of Wendy's clique, Jill participates in the bullying without remorse, though Wendy and Caroline are usually the instigators. Linda confronts Jill and threatens her with revenge after one incident, but Jill dismisses the threat, confident of her status and protection as one of Wendy's circle.Jill and her friend Tracy play a prank on their grouch of a neighbor, Mr. Machinist, on Halloween, stuffing raw rotten eggs into his mailbox, but are later identified from a photo taken by Mr. Machinist and are made to rake the leaves in his backyard as punishment. While raking, Jill and Tracy find they need to use the restroom. They urinate all over Mr. Machinist's trees as a sort of payback.Remembering Linda's threat, Jill suspects that "Blubber" was the one who tattled on her and Tracy; Tracy, however, suspects Wendy and Caroline, which infuriates Wendy. To appease Wendy, Jill suggests that the class hold a mock trial for Linda (with Wendy, naturally, as judge, and a jury made up of several classmates). To this suggestion, Tracy remarks that she thinks Jill is scared of Wendy. Jill soon realizes that Tracy is right.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_God_Pan"title="The Great God Pan">
Clarke agrees, somewhat unwillingly, to bear witness to a strange experiment performed by his friend, Dr. Raymond. The ultimate goal of the doctor is to open the mind of a patient so that they may experience the spiritual world, an experience he notes the ancients called "seeing the great god Pan". He performs the experiment, which involves minor brain surgery, on a young woman named Mary. She awakens from the operation awed and terrified but quickly becomes "a hopeless idiot".Years later, Clarke learns of a beautiful but sinister girl named Helen Vaughan, who is reported to have caused a series of mysterious happenings in her town. She spends much of her time in the woods near her house, and takes other children on prolonged twilight rambles in the countryside that disturb the parents of the town. One day, a young boy stumbles across her "playing on the grass with a 'strange naked man,"; the boy becomes hysterical and later, after seeing a Roman statue of a satyr's head, becomes permanently feeble-minded. Helen also forms an unusually close friendship with a neighbour girl, Rachel, whom she leads several times into the woods. On one occasion Rachel returns home distraught, half-naked and rambling. Shortly after explaining to her mother what happened to her (never revealed in the story), Rachel returns to the woods and disappears forever. Clarke relates these events in a book he is writing entitled "Memoirs to Prove the Existence of the Devil".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malone_Dies"title="Malone Dies">
Malone is an old man who lies naked in bed in either asylum or hospital—he is not sure which. Most of his personal effects have been taken from him, though he has retained some: his exercise book, brimless hat, and pencil. He alternates between writing on his own situation and on that of a boy named Sapo. When he reaches the point in the story where Sapo becomes a man, he changes Sapo's name to Macmann, finding Sapo a ludicrous name. Soon after, Malone admits to having killed six men, but seems to think it's not a big deal, particularly the last: a total stranger whom he cut across the neck with a razor.Eventually, Macmann falls over in mud and is taken to an institution called St. John's of God. There he is provided with an attendant nurse: an elderly, thick-lipped woman named Moll, with crosses of bone on either ear representing the two thieves crucified with Jesus on Good Friday, and a crucifix carved on her tooth representing Jesus. The two eventually begin a stumbling sexual affair, but after a while she does not return, and he learns that she has died.The new nurse is a man named Lemuel, and there is an animosity between the two. Macmann (and sometimes Malone drifts into the first-person) has an issue with a stick that he uses to reach things, then Lemuel takes it away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosala_(novel)"title="Kosala (novel)">
The story unfolds during the 1950s in Khandesh (a region in Central India), and in Pune. Using the autobiographical form, "Kosala" narrates the life-story of Pandurang Sangvikar, a young man of 25, in six sections.Pandurang is the son of a well-to-do farmer from Sangvi, a village in Khandesh. His family includes his parents, his grandmother, and his four sisters. Pandurang's relationship with his father is a difficult one, and they have been estranged since Pandurang was a boy. His father, who typifies the patriarchal family head, beats his son in childhood for wandering around in the company of his friends. He does not allow the young boy to learn to play the flute, or to perform in his school's plays. Pandurang considers his father excessively money-minded, materialistic, selfish, unscrupulous, and dictatorial. In sharp contrast to his relationship with his father, Pandurang loves his mother and his sisters dearly.After passing his local school's matriculation examination, Pandurang moves to Pune to attend college. While studying, Pandurang lives in a hostel. He decides to make the most of college life, and becomes the secretary of the college debating society, prefect of the hostel, and directs a play at the college Annual Day function. Out of kindness, he gives responsibility for the management of the hostel mess to one of his poor friends. But, although Pandurang tries to help everyone around him, he ultimately discovers that his friends are using him. Finally, when he fails his exams badly and his financial position deteriorates, his father becomes angered by Pandurang's lifestyle. Pandurang learns a lesson: that good deeds do not count for much in life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpio_Illusion"title="The Scorpio Illusion">
Tyrell Hawthorne was a naval intelligence officer - one of the best - until the rain-swept night in Amsterdam when his wife was murdered, an innocent victim. Now Hawthorne has been called out of retirement for one last assignment. For he is the only man alive who can track down the world's most dangerous terrorist. Amaya Bajaratt is beautiful, elusive, deadly - and she has set in motion a chilling conspiracy that a desperate government cannot stop. With the life of the president hanging in the balance, Hawthorne must follow Amaya's serpentine trail to uncover the sinister network that exists to help this consummate killer. And Hawthorne must discover the shattering truth behind the Scorpio Illusion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brisingr"title="Brisingr">
## Setting and characters."Brisingr" begins about three days after the events in "Eldest" conclude. It continues the story of the "Inheritance Cycle" and takes place on the fictional continent of Alagaësia during a struggle for power as the small country Surda and a rebel group called the Varden attempts to overthrow the larger Empire. They are supported mainly by elves, dwarves, and Urgals, but the Empire is populated with large numbers of humans, who far outnumber Surda and its allies. The "Inheritance Cycle" focuses on the story of a teenage boy named Eragon and his dragon Saphira. Eragon is one of the few remaining Dragon Riders, a group that governed Alagaësia in past times but were almost destroyed by a Rider named Galbatorix, who took control of the land. Galbatorix's greatest fear is that a new Rider will rise up and usurp his position as king of the Empire, Galbatorix's shade, Durza, knows a dragon egg went to the spine, so he sends the Ra-Zac to investigate, causing Eragon to lose his home, and have to flee with a storyteller named Brom."Brisingr" is told in third-person from the perspectives of multiple primary protagonists. These characters include the humans Eragon, Roran, and Nasuada, and the dragons Saphira and Glaedr. The humans Galbatorix and Murtagh return as antagonists, along with Murtagh's dragon, Thorn. The Ra'zac return for a minor antagonist role, and Varaug, a Shade, also appears for a main antagonist role. Many minor characters reprise their roles in "Brisingr" from previous installments of the "Inheritance Cycle", including the elves Arya, Islanzadí, and Oromis; the dwarf Orik; the humans Angela, Katrina and Elva; and the dragon Glaedr.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Underpants_and_the_Attack_of_the_Talking_Toilets"title="Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets">
George and Harold got out of their fourth-grade gym class and found that Jerome Horwitz Elementary School is planning on hosting its second annual Invention Convention, with the prize being the recipient(s) becoming the principal for a day. Upon seeing the poster for it, George and Harold think to themselves what it would be like to be principals for the day, but Mr. Krupp bans George and Harold from the convention this year and puts them in study hall all day, because last year's Invention Convention was ruined by them applying a body heat activating glue made of rubber cement and concentrated orange juice they invented on everyone's seats except their own.While getting ready to secretly sabotage everyone's inventions after thinking it isn't fair, the two boys run into Melvin Sneedly, who is busy working on his invention, the PATSY 2000, a photocopier that can make a simple two-dimensional image come alive. He demonstrates by putting in a photo of a mouse; out comes a real one, going on the floor. George and Harold assume Melvin put the real mouse in earlier, but they make a deal in which George and Harold promise to not sabotage Melvin's invention, as long as he doesn't report them. Because of George and Harold's pranks, the convention has to be called off, confusing Mr. Krupp as he knows that he put George and Harold in study hall himself and Melvin then breaks George and Harold's promise and tattles on them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Underpants_and_the_Invasion_of_the_Incredibly_Naughty_Cafeteria_Ladies_from_Outer_Space_(and_the_Subsequent_Assault_of_the_Equally_Evil_Lunchroom_Zombie_Nerds)"title="Captain Underpants and the Invasion of the Incredibly Naughty Cafeteria Ladies from Outer Space (and the Subsequent Assault of the Equally Evil Lunchroom Zombie Nerds)">
Zorx, Klax and Jennifer, three evil extraterrestrials, land on the rooftop of Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, but people don't realize this UFO is on the roof of the school, allowing them to spy on them. Meanwhile, George and Harold mess with their science teacher, learning about the reaction of mixing baking soda and vinegar. They then make the cafeteria ladies a fake cupcake recipe, disguised as "Mr. Krupp's Krispy Krupcakes" for Principal Krupp's "birthday". The lunch ladies decide to surprise Mr. Krupp and make cupcakes for the entire school and the school is flooded with sticky green goop.A day after, as the school is cleaned, the lunch ladies show Mr. Krupp about the mess, who gets very mad when he hears that they did it for his birthday. ("But it wasn't even my birthday!") Agitated, the lunch ladies blame George and Harold, but Mr. Krupp needs proof to punish them. Furious from past agitations by these two students, these lunch ladies soon resign. About 10 seconds after, the aliens come in, very badly disguised as humans and Mr. Krupp hires the three, due to them having no experience, credentials, or references. For the boys' antics, Mr. Krupp eliminates cafeteria privileges from them and requires them to eat lunch in his office where he can keep an eye on them, much to this surprise (believing they got in trouble for something they "didn't" do). The day after, while Mr. Krupp has a banana, both boys made unique sandwiches and other food so junky and disgusting, Mr. Krupp feels like he'll get sick and exits his office for some fresh air.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Underpants_and_the_Perilous_Plot_of_Professor_Poopypants"title="Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants">
At the southwest of Greenland, a scientist from the fictional country of New Swissland (with a foreign culture where everyone has a silly name) named Professor Pippy P. Poopypants goes to the United States to demonstrate how his Shrinky-Pig 2000 and Goosy-Grow 4000 can help the world by reducing garbage and increasing food, but everyone laughs at Poopypants' silly name rather than taking him seriously.Meanwhile, the whole school is going to a pizza place called Piqua Pizza Palace, George and Harold decide to rearrange the letters on the nearby sign during the wait to get on the bus, but Mr. Krupp catches the boys and bans them from the school field trip, tasked with cleaning the teacher's lounge for the rest of the trip. However, the boys get their revenge by "modifying" things around in the teachers' lounge. After the trip, the teachers fall into George and Harold's trap and get largely covered in powder paste and Styrofoam pellets. The teachers run out of the lounge in horror, causing Mr. Fyde, the science teacher, to witness the teachers covered in these items and believe they're abominable snowmen.Mr. Fyde resigns the next day, believing he's losing his sanity due to the incident the other day and having a dream by being eaten by a talking toilet, hearing cats and dogs in the classroom, then imagined that the school flooded with green goop, and seeing Captain Underpants, eventually leading to Mr. Fyde resigning in the Piqua Valley Home For The Reality-Challenged prompting Mr. Krupp to find a new science teacher.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Underpants_and_the_Wrath_of_the_Wicked_Wedgie_Woman"title="Captain Underpants and the Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman">
Ms. Ribble announces that she is going to retire at the end of the school year and forces everyone to make happy retirement cards for her, but George and Harold make a Captain Underpants comic with her as "The Wicked Wedgie Woman" instead, and they got sent to Mr. Krupp's office for that. The boys are assigned to pass out the "Friday Memo", which they do with several humorous changes. They later convince Mr. Krupp to sign a blank retirement card, but later, having found out about their comic (and catching them changing a sign), he puts them in detention. Harold defiantly refuses to give Ms. Ribble the card, causing Mr. Krupp to seize it and plan to deliver it himself. At Ms. Ribble's retirement party (which everyone was forced to go to), Mr. Krupp hands over the letter, where it is revealed that Harold made it look like a marriage proposal from Mr. Krupp, having used reverse psychology to get Mr Krupp to deliver it. Having fallen into a state of catatonia because of the proposal (only saying "B-B-Bubba-Bobba. Hob-Hobba-Hobba-Wah-Wah!"), Mr. Krupp remains indifferent to the following chaotic school week. (The week involves none of the kids showing up on Monday, all the kids wearing their pajamas to school and picking their noses on Tuesday, some of the girls drawing a mustache on their faces with a permanent marker and taping egg salad sandwiches to their heads on Wednesday, kids having a food fight in the lunchroom and the football team wrecking the teachers' lounge on Thursday and every single kid wearing bumblebee costumes to school and making silly faces in yearbook photos on Friday.) At the wedding, just before they get married, Ms. Ribble breaks up with Mr. Krupp because he has a funny-looking nose (ironically, they both have the same nose shape). When Mr. Krupp says George and Harold tricked them, the boys run as Ms. Ribble goes into a blood-crazed rage and chases after them, causing the food on the tables to go flying into the guests (all the students and teachers) and causing the wedding cake to fall on her, though George and Harold are able to escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Underpants_and_the_Big,_Bad_Battle_of_the_Bionic_Booger_Boy"title="Captain Underpants and the Big, Bad Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy">
## Part 1: "The Night of the Nasty Nostril Nuggets".Ms. Ribble's fourth-grade english class are having demonstration speech day. The first two boys got a D-, Stephanie Yakoff and Jessica Gorgon tried to cook in pop-up toaster. Then, George and Harold show off the "Squishy"; two ketchup packets under the bumps of a toilet seat which will squirt the ketchup on whoever sits on the seat. But Melvin then forces everyone to watch his demonstration, the "Combine-o-Tron 2000", which he uses to combine his hamster Sulu with a bionic hamster body he built. Melvin orders Sulu to do some tricks for the class, but the hamster is unaware of what happened, causing Melvin to threaten to spank him. Sulu's "instincts" kick in and cause him to spank Melvin himself using his new bionic powers, causing Melvin to harshly disown Sulu. After watching the scene, George and Harold adopt Sulu, who happily joins the two. Meanwhile, Ms. Ribble uses a Squishy on an already grumpy Mr. Krupp, who believes that George and Harold are responsible, additionally seeing other squishy victims. When Mr. Krupp finds them in the lunchroom, Melvin almost immediately tattles on the boys and Mr. Krupp sends them to detention, causing them to make a libelous Captain Underpants comic starring Melvin as a dumb tattletale.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_(Crace_novel)"title="Quarantine (Crace novel)">
Set in the Judean desert, 2000 years ago, it features seven main characters:When "Quarantine" begins, the trader, Musa, is suffering from a fever in his tent in the open scrubland on the way to Jericho. There, he and his wife Miri are abandoned by their caravan, who believe him to be on the verge of death.They see a group of four travellers, some distance apart, heading in their direction. The travellers are on their way to find shelter for 40 days and 40 nights – the 'Quarantine' of the title.At night, a fifth traveller, some distance behind the first four, visits Musa in his tent. The following morning, Musa awakes to find that his fever has broken and his strength is restored. The fifth traveller, it transpires, is the young Jesus, who takes up occupancy of a hard-to-reach cave set in a hillside.Musa turns the situation to his advantage, convincing the travellers that the lands are his lands, and he their landlord.The group try in turns to coax Jesus from his cave. Convinced he is being tested by Satan, Jesus abides by his quarantine, refusing to take food or water.A series of power struggles ensues, in which Musa asserts his dominance over Aphas, Shim, his wife and eventually by raping Marta during a stormy night, having feigned illness to get her on her own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hill_of_Dreams"title="The Hill of Dreams">
The novel recounts the life of a young man, Lucian Taylor, focusing on his dreamy childhood in rural Wales, in a town based on Caerleon. The Hill of Dreams of the title is an old Roman fort where Lucian has strange sensual visions, including ones of the town in the time of Roman Britain. Later, the novel describes Lucian's attempts to make a living as an author in London, enduring poverty and suffering in the pursuit of art and history.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibong_Adarna"title="Ibong Adarna">
King Fernando and his wife Queen Valeriana rule the Kingdom of Berbanya and have three children: Don Pedro, Don Diego, and Don Juan. King Fernando falls severely ill after growing despondent over a dream he had one night of Don Juan, his most favored son, being murdered by two traitors. His constituents are unable to cure him, so he sends his eldest son, Don Pedro, to search for the "Ibong Adarna", a mythical bird, after an old doctor revealed that the bird's marvelous songs could cure the king's mysterious illness. After three months of wandering through forests and thickets, Don Pedro arrives at a golden tree, "Piedras Platas", and falls down at its foot due to fatigue, unaware that the bird roosts there for the night. By nightfall, Don Pedro is lulled into a deep sleep after the bird sings the first of its seven songs with a sweet melody, and is turned into stone after the bird excretes on him after the seventh song.With the disappearance of Don Pedro, King Fernando then sends his second son Don Diego to search for the bird. Don Diego undergoes the same hardships (but ventures for five months, two more than Don Pedro) and meets the same fate as his older brother. After three whole years without hearing any more news, Don Juan, the youngest son is (unwillingly, by King Fernando) sent forth also. Don Juan, however, has the fortune to meet on his way an old hermit who is impressed by the virtues and good manners of the young prince. The old hermit, knowing the mission on which Don Juan embarks, puts him on guard against the treacheries of the bird.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_the_Flood_(novel)"title="After the Flood (novel)">
Jersild used his medical knowledge of the long-term effects of a nuclear holocaust to great effect in this novel, which relates the adventures of a young man dumped on the island of Gotland some 30 years after a worldwide nuclear catastrophe. Humanity is about to go out with a whimper. The only inhabitants of the island are a band of aging convicts and a handful of religious women, also advanced in years, plus a few hermits. The economy is reduced to barter and plunder and the only medical care is provided by an ex-baseball player, who becomes the reluctant mentor of the protagonist. A ray of hope is introduced in the story with the arrival of a young Finnish woman, but it all ends in misery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghosts_of_N-Space"title="The Ghosts of N-Space">
Sarah Jane Smith and her co-worker Jeremy Fitzoliver are on holiday in Sicily when they meet the Brigadier. The Brigadier is trying to help his Uncle Mario, who is being threatened by a mobster named Vilmio. Mario is also trying to deal with the ghosts that have been sighted in his castello. The Brigadier asks the Doctor to investigate the hauntings and determine their source. The Doctor reveals that the ghosts are "N-Bodies", or the souls of the deceased who have not yet left the physical plane. The ghosts are gathering around Mario's castello due to a fracture in the N-Space barrier; if the barrier were to fail, Earth would be overrun with the monsters that inhabit N-Space.The Doctor travels back to the 19th and 16th century in an attempt to locate the cause of the fracture. In the past he discovers that Vilmio is actually an alchemist called Vilmius who has discovered a method for extending his lifespan; now that he is nearing the end of his life, he wants to use the power of N-Space to give himself true immortality. He also plans to control the monsters in N-Space and use them to rule the world. Vilmius has been waiting centuries for a specific astrological conjunction to occur, which is scheduled to occur in the next few days.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_and_the_Pescatons"title="Doctor Who and the Pescatons">
## Part 1.The Doctor and Sarah Jane arrive on a beach by the Thames Estuary at night, and discover a metallic seaweed there. The Doctor consults with Professor Emerson, who says that three expeditions to recover a recent meteorite from the bottom of the estuary have all vanished. The Doctor goes diving and is attacked by something that wraps itself around him, but then lets him go. The meteorite is really a wrecked spaceship buried under the estuary. The Doctor believes it is a Pescaton ship. The Pescatons are carcharhinidae, or deep water sharks. The experts scoff at this, until one comes out of the Thames and makes its way to London Zoo in search of salt water. The Doctor confronts it in the Aquarium, where it dies and disintegrates. That night, more meteorites land in the Thames.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlander_(novel)"title="Outlander (novel)">
In 1946, after working apart during the Second World War, former British Army nurse Claire Randall and her husband Frank Randall, a history professor, go on a second honeymoon to Inverness, Scotland. Frank conducts research into his family history and Claire goes plant-gathering near standing stones on the hill of Craigh na Dun. Investigating a buzzing noise near the stones, she touches one and faints; upon waking, she encounters Frank's ancestor, Captain Jack Randall. Before Captain Randall can attack her, he is knocked unconscious by a highlander who takes Claire to his clansmen. As the Scots inexpertly attend their injured comrade Jamie, Claire uses her medical skill to set Jamie's dislocated shoulder. The men identify themselves as members of Clan MacKenzie, and Claire eventually concludes that she has traveled into the past. She represents herself as an English widow who is traveling to France to see her family. The Scots do not believe her and take her to Castle Leoch, where Claire searches for a way to return to her own time.The highlanders of 1743 see Claire as a "Sassenach", or "Outlander", ignorant of Gaelic culture. Her medical skills eventually earn their respect; but the clan chieftain, Colum MacKenzie, suspects her of being an English spy. Colum sends her with his brother, Dougal, to collect rents; on the way he also solicits donations for the Jacobites, overseen by Ned Gowan, a lawyer from Edinburgh who is working for the Clan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Heroes_and_Tombs"title="On Heroes and Tombs">
Nineteen-year-old Martín Castillo is a boy from Buenos Aires trying to find his path in life. He meets and falls in love with Alejandra Vidal Olmos, who with her father Fernando represents the "old", post-colonial and autochthonous Argentina, which is seen mutating amid a strange and unsettling "new" world. The novel gives an evocative portrait of the city of Buenos Aires and its people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romulus,_My_Father"title="Romulus, My Father">
Romulus Gaita fled his hometown of Markovac in 1935 at the age of 13. He worked as a farmer apprentice until he was 17, after which he moved to Austria and eventually migrated to Australia on an assisted passage in 1950 at the age of 28, with his young wife Christine and their four-year-old son Raimond soon after the end of the Second World War. Romulus and his family were transferred to Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre, a camp near Wodonga. Romulus was then sent to Baringhup on the Loddon River, where he met two Romanian brothers Pantelimon (known as Hora) and Mitru.The Gaițăs then moved to a farmhouse called Frogmore, where they lived for the next ten years, and where Raimond spent most of his childhood.Christine did not stay at Frogmore to take on the responsibility as a wife and mother. She had an affair with Mitru and moved to Melbourne to be with him. As a result of the affair, they had two daughters. Mitru committed suicide before the birth of the second child. Christine later also committed suicide. Both the daughters of Christine and Mitru were adopted. Raimond is reminiscent that indeed, Christine may have had a mental illness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Women_of_Brewster_Place_(novel)"title="The Women of Brewster Place (novel)">
The women of Brewster Place are "hard-edged, soft-centered, brutally demanding, and easily pleased". Their names are Mattie Michael, Etta Mae Johnson, Lucielia "Ciel" Turner, Melanie "Kiswana" Browne, Cora Lee, Lorraine, and Theresa. Each of their lives are explored in several short stories. These short stories also chronicle the ups and downs many Black women face.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King's_Stilts"title="The King's Stilts">
"The King's Stilts" tells the story of King Birtram of Binn, who dedicates himself to safeguarding his kingdom, a low-lying land surrounded by high water that is held back by a ring of dike trees. Unfortunately, the dike trees are the favorite food of a species of pest-birds called "nizzards"; the kingdom always faces the risk that the nizzards might compromise the dike-tree barrier and cause catastrophic flooding. The King's administration maintains a legion of Patrol Cats to keep the nizzards at bay; King Birtram sees to their care personally. When not attending to his royal duties, the King enjoys himself by frolicking in the streets on his red stilts, which most of his subjects note with amused acceptance.One day, his minister Lord Droon, secretly a gloomy scoundrel who despises his King cavorting with such undignified happiness, plots to capture the stilts, persuading the King's page boy Eric to steal and hide the stilts. Deprived of his amusement, the King grows depressed and begins to neglect his duties. As a result, the Patrol Cats become less vigilant, and soon the nizzards make headway in eating away the dike trees. Seeing the results of his actions, Eric resolves to return the stilts to the King and succeeds in doing so despite Lord Droon's efforts to stop him. King Birtram, his personal morale restored, finds the energy to mobilize the Patrol Cats to fight off the nizzards and save the kingdom. Lord Droon is arrested and punished with a restricted diet consisting entirely of nizzard cooked in various ways. Eric is rewarded with his own pair of red stilts, and joins the King on his outings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Lady_Godivas"title="The Seven Lady Godivas">
The book recounts in prose the tale of seven Godiva sisters, none of whom ever wear clothing. The explanation for their nakedness, even when walking in snow, is that "they were simply themselves and chose not to disguise it."The story opens with the sisters' father, Lord Godiva, deciding to leave for the Battle of Hastings (1066) on horseback. This upsets the sisters, as horses are wild and untamed animals. Sure enough, before Lord Godiva even manages to leave the castle walls, he is flung from his horse and killed. As a tribute to their father's fate, the Godiva sisters agree to never marry—despite the fact that each is courting one of seven brothers named Peeping—until they can warn their countrymen of the dangers of horses. The book then follows the sisters as they set out on individual quests for "horse truths", which turn out to be well-known sayings involving horses.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McElligot's_Pool"title="McElligot's Pool">
The story begins with a boy named Marco fishing in a small, trash-filled pond known as McElligot's Pool. A local farmer laughs at the boy and tells him that he will never be able to catch anything. Nevertheless, Marco holds out hope and begins to imagine a scenario in which he might be able to catch a fish.First, he suggests that the pool might be fed by an underground brook that travels under a highway and a hotel to reach the sea. Marco then imagines a succession of fish and other creatures that he might catch in the sea and therefore the pool. He imagines, among others, a fish with a checkerboard stomach, a seahorse with the head of an actual horse, and an eel with two heads. When Marco is done imagining, he tells the farmer, "Oh, the sea is so full of a number of fish, if a fellow is patient, he "might" get his wish!"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartholomew_and_the_Oobleck"title="Bartholomew and the Oobleck">
The book opens with an explanation of how people in the Kingdom of Didd still talk about "the year the King got angry with the sky," and how Bartholomew Cubbins, King Derwin's page boy, saved the kingdom. Throughout the year, Bartholomew sees the king getting angry at rain in spring, sun in summer, fog in autumn, and snow in winter because he wants something new to come down from the sky. The king gets the idea that he can rule the sky, being the king, and he orders Bartholomew to summon the Royal Magicians, who announce that they can make a substance called oobleck, which will not look anything at all like the regular weather. That evening, the magicians make the substance at their mystic mountain Neeka-tave, and release it into the air. The next morning, the oobleck starts falling from the sky. When the King sees it, he is overjoyed. He declares the day a holiday and orders Bartholomew to tell the Royal Bell Ringer to announce the occasion but the bell will not ring; the oobleck turns out to be both gelatinous and adhesive, and it has gummed up the bell. When Bartholomew sees a robin trapped in her nest by the oobleck, he decides to warn the kingdom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrambled_Eggs_Super!"title="Scrambled Eggs Super!">
At the beginning of the story, Peter T. Hooper brags to his sister, Liz, in his mother's kitchen about what a good cook he is. He tells the story of how, when he became fed up with the taste of regular scrambled eggs using hen's eggs, he decided to scramble eggs from other birds. He tells of how he travelled great distances and discovered a variety of exotic birds and their eggs.He explains his criteria for choosing some eggs, because of their sweetness, and avoiding others. He takes the eggs home but decides that he still needs more, and he calls on the help of some of his friends from around the world, including a "fellow named Ali". After each bird Peter finds he states the phrase..."Scrambled Eggs Super Dee Dooper Dee Booper Special Deluxe a la Peter T. Hooper".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_I_Ran_the_Circus"title="If I Ran the Circus">
Behind Mr. Sneelock's ramshackle store, there's an empty lot. Little Morris McGurk is convinced that if he could just clear out the rusty cans, the dead tree, and the old cars, nothing would prevent him from using the lot for the amazing, world-beating, Circus McGurkus. The more elaborate Morris' dreams about the circus become, the more they depend on the sleepy-looking and innocent Sneelock, who stands outside his ramshackle store sucking on a pipe, oblivious to the fate that awaits him in the depths of Morris's imagination.Sneelock does not yet know that he will have to dispense 500 gallons of lemonade, be lassoed by a Wily Walloo, wrestle a Grizzly-Ghastly, and ski down a slope dotted with giant cacti. But if his performance is up to McGurkian expectations, then "Why, ladies and gentlemen, youngsters and oldsters, your heads will quite likely spin right off your shouldsters!" And Sneelock won't mind it one bit because he likes to help out. But by the end of Morris's fantasy, Sneelock is casting a disapproving eye at him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You!"title="Happy Birthday to You!">
It deals with a fantastic land called Katroo, where the Birthday Bird throws the reader an amazing party on their special day. It consists of a running description of a fantastical celebration, narrated in the second person, of the reader's birthday, from dawn to late night.The celebration includes fantastical and colorful gifts, foods and a whirl of activities all arranged by the Birthday Bird for the reader's birthday. It focuses on the reader's self-actualization and concludes with the happy and exhausted reader falling blissfully asleep. A popular Seuss paragraph in this book reads: "Today you are you, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is youer than you."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Had_Trouble_in_Getting_to_Solla_Sollew"title="I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew">
As the story opens, the protagonist lives a happy and carefree life before tripping over a rock one day and being bitten and stung by various creatures. A passing traveler says that he is bound for the trouble-free city of Solla Sollew, "where they never have troubles; at least very few", so the protagonist joins him. The journey itself is beset by many more troubles, including a draft animal that falls sick, a bus that breaks down, a flood and a general who conscripts the protagonist into his army. The army retreats during battle, leaving the protagonist alone against a pack of wild Poozers. Escaping into a dark tunnel, the protagonist suffers numerous further mishaps before finally reaching an exit door that opens near Solla Sollew.The protagonist discovers that Solla Sollew is surrounded by a wall with only one door. The doorman apologizes that he cannot open it, because a Key-Slapping Slippard recently nested in the key hole. Since the city no longer needs a doorman, he has decided to set off for yet another untroubled city that he has heard about. The protagonist declines to go with him and instead returns home, determined to face troubles rather than run away from them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Did_I_Ever_Tell_You_How_Lucky_You_Are?"title="Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?">
The text consists of a series of descriptive poems, fictively told to an unnamed listener by a wise old man. The man describes a variety of whimsically wretched characters and unfortunate situations, in comparison with which the listener might be considered exceptionally fortunate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_of_Me_and_Other_Stuff"title="The Shape of Me and Other Stuff">
This book is done entirely in silhouette, exploring the different shapes of objects.The characters of two children, a boy and a girl are in dialogue about shapes. The two exchange their thoughts on how different shapes and objects are from each other. They exchange ideas of how big and small some objects are. In the end, they reach a realisation that no shape is exactly the same as the other. They even try to imagine themselves in different shapes (bodies). They also conclude by being content with the way they are shaped. This suggests that they would not be happier in any other shape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh,_the_Thinks_You_Can_Think!"title="Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!">
The book begins with a reader thinking about colors or animals that she knows, like birds, or horses, but as quickly as page three he asks the reader to think of something completely made up; a GUFF! A Guff is a sort of puffy fluff. Next he thinks up a dessert! Of all the made up things in this image the focus is on the dessert. Other than that it is beautiful and has a cherry on top! After thinking of colors and known animals, then made up animals and made up dessert he moves on to made up activities, like Kitty O’Sullivan Krauss’s balloon swimming pool! After Seuss presents the reader with various things to think up, he then moves on to questions the reader should ask herself. Such as, how much water can fifty elephants drink or what would you do if you met a JIBBOO? There is no explanation for what a JIBBOO is, we just get a sketchy image leaving us to wonder and think up a story for the JIBBOO.In typical Seuss fashion things get busier and more colorful at the end. He fills the page with many crazy creatures and much activity when he asks the reader why so many things go to the right. This causes the reader’s eyes to scan the page taking in every detail until she is finally willing to turn the page. The final page is a busier and more colorful version of the first page, with bird-like creatures walking along a curved path, breaking the laws of gravity just as the text breaks the rules of reading left to right.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat's_Quizzer"title="The Cat's Quizzer">
In the beginning of the book, the Cat in the Hat introduces the reader to Ziggy and Zizzy Zozzfozzel, saying that they both got 100%, but got every answer "wrong", and then asks the reader the recurring question "are you smarter than a Zozzfozzel"? The questions in the book range from simple queries to questions difficult enough to wear the Cat out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Can_Read_with_My_Eyes_Shut!"title="I Can Read with My Eyes Shut!">
The Cat in the Hat shows his protégé, Young Cat, that while reading with one's eyes closed can be amazing, it can be a strain. When one reads with their eyes open, they will be able to learn a large amount of wonderful things, some of which are shown through illustrations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_Say_Can_You_Say?"title="Oh Say Can You Say?">
## Introduction.In the introduction, Hooey the parrot reads from a copy of "Oh Say Can You Say" and states that the words in it are all phooey, and when one says them, one's lips will make slips and backflips, and one's tongues may end up in St. Looey.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You're_Only_Old_Once!"title="You're Only Old Once!">
The book follows an elderly man on a visit to the Golden Years Clinic, where he endures long waits and bizarre medical tests.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy-Head_Mayzie"title="Daisy-Head Mayzie">
The book is about a warmhearted schoolgirl named Mayzie McGrew who one day suddenly sprouts a bright white daisy from her head. It causes alarm in her classroom, family, and town, until an agent makes her a celebrity. Mayzie becomes overwhelmed and distraught over the situation and runs away. The Cat in the Hat, who serves as the narrator to this story, helps Mayzie to understand her problem. He persuades her to go back home, and the daisy eventually goes away, popping up back again on occasion. The book has a mini-song titled "Daisy-Head Mayzie" which her classmates chant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wandering_Jew_(Sue_novel)"title="The Wandering Jew (Sue novel)">
The story is entitled "The Wandering Jew", but the figure of the Wandering Jew himself plays a minimal role. The prologue of the text describes two figures who cry out to each other across the Bering Straits. One is the Wandering Jew, the other his sister, Hérodiade. The Wandering Jew also represents the cholera epidemic— wherever he goes, cholera follows in his wake.The Wandering Jew and Hérodiade are condemned to wander the earth until the entire Rennepont family has disappeared from the earth. The connection is that the descendants of the sister are also the descendants of Marius de Rennepont, Huguenots persecuted under Louis XIV by the Jesuits. The brother and sister are compelled to protect this very family from all harm. After this first introduction, the two appear only very rarely.The Rennepont family is unaware that these protective "éminences grises" exist, but they benefit from their protection in various ways, be it by being saved from scalping by the Native Americans, or from languishing in prison.The Rennepont family lost its position and most of its wealth during the French persecution of the Protestants (after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685). A small fortune was given to a Jewish banker immediately before the Renneponts dispersed all over Europe and Asia, and this fortune has grown into a huge sum, through the miracle of compound interest. In 1682, the Rennepont family members each got a bronze medal telling them to meet back in Paris 150 years later, at which time the fortune will be divided among the surviving members. So much time has passed, however, that almost none of the still-living Renneponts have any idea why they need to come to Paris. They nevertheless set out from India, Siberia, America, France, and elsewhere to make their way to rue Saint-François No. 3 in Paris by 13 February 1832.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerland_(novel)"title="Summerland (novel)">
The story begins on a small island off the coast of Washington called Clam Island. The central character, Ethan Feld, is on one of the island's baseball teams despite being terrible at the game. He encounters a gracious werefox, Cutbelly, who explains the Lodgepole, a giant tree connecting all worlds, to the ignorant Ethan. Cutbelly explains that Coyote is planning to destroy the Lodgepole, an event called "Ragged Rock", by destroying Murmury Well. He takes Ethan to the Summerlands where they meet small Indian-looking people called ferishers. Coyote captures Ethan's father and forces him to create another batch of 'picofiber' to form the hose with which he is going to poison Murmury Well. Ethan enters the Summerlands with fellow baseball team members Thor Wignutt and Jennifer T. Rideout, in pursuit of his father and to prevent Ragged Rock. On their travels through the Summerlands, the three assemble a baseball team and play their way across the land, meeting players from legend and literature, and a couple from their own world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_Out_of_Time"title="The Shadow Out of Time">
"The Shadow Out of Time" indirectly tells of the Great Race of Yith, an extraterrestrial species with the ability to travel through space and time. The Yithians accomplish this by switching bodies with hosts from the intended time and place. The story implies that the effect, when seen from the outside, is similar to spiritual possession. The Yithians' original purpose was to study the history of various times and places, and they have amassed a "library city" that is filled with the past and future history of multiple races, including humans. Ultimately the Yithians use their ability to escape the destruction of their planet in another galaxy by switching bodies with a race of cone-shaped plant beings who lived 150 million years ago on Earth. The cone-shaped entities (subsequently also known as the Great Race of Yith) lived in their vast library city in what would later become Australia's Great Sandy Desert ().The story is told through the eyes of Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, an American living in the first decade of the 20th century, who is "possessed" by a Yithian. He fears he is losing his mind when he unaccountably sees strange vistas of other worlds and of the Yithian library city. He also feels himself being led about by these creatures and experiences how they live. When he is returned to his own body, he finds that those around him have judged him insane due to the actions of the Yithian that possessed his body. While he was experiencing a Yithian existence in Earth's ancient past, the Yithian occupying his body was experiencing a human one in the present day.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Whispering_Statue"title="The Whispering Statue">
Nancy, Bess, and George encounter a troublesome stray terrier on their way to the opening festivities of a new park and recreation complex in River Heights. The terrier grabs the handbag of one of the guest speakers and loses it in a nearby pond. Nancy helps groundskeepers retrieve the handbag and uses the notes found inside to prompt the nervous speaker during her address. She also finds a mysterious personal ad in the handbag. In a casual observation, the "clubwoman," a Mrs. Owen, tells Nancy about a statue on a deserted seaside estate. The statue, known as "The Whispering Girl," bears an uncanny resemblance to Nancy. As it turns out, Nancy is bound for that very area with her father and her friends Bess and George. Reluctantly, Nancy decides to keep the terrier for a little while, dubbing him Togo (after a famous Alaskan husky, who in turn was named after a Japanese admiral). Togo follows her to the train station, and she has no choice but to bring him to Sea Cliff with her. On the train, the girls observe a strange elderly woman identified as a Miss Morse, and they suspect a man who has just approached the woman is trying to swindle her. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splendeurs_et_misères_des_courtisanes"title="Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes">
Lucien de Rubempré and the self-proclaimed abbey Carlos Herrera (Vautrin) have made a pact, in which Lucien will arrive at success in Paris if he agrees to follow Vautrin's instructions blindly. Esther van Gobseck throws a wrench into Vautrin's best-laid plans, however, because Lucien falls in love with her and she with him. Instead of forcing Lucien to abandon her, he allows Lucien this secret affair, but also makes good use of it. For four years, Esther remains locked away in a house in Paris, taking walks only at night. One night, however, the incredibly rich banker Baron de Nucingen spots her and falls deeply in love with her. When Vautrin realizes that Nucingen's obsession is with Esther, he decides to use her power as a tool to help advance Lucien by extrapolating the maximum amount of money from the Baron as possible.The plan is the following: Vautrin and Lucien are 60,000 francs in debt because of the lifestyle that Lucien has had to maintain. They also need one million francs to buy the old Rubempré land back, so that Lucien can marry Clotilde, the rich but ugly daughter of the Grandlieus.Things don't work out as smoothly as Vautrin would have liked, however, because Esther commits suicide after giving herself to Nucingen for the first and only time (after making him wait for months). Since the police have already been suspicious of Vautrin and Lucien, they arrest the two on suspicion of murder over the suicide. This turn of events is particularly tragic because it turns out that only hours before, Esther had actually inherited a huge amount of money from an estranged family member. If only she had held on, she could have married Lucien herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Mervyn"title="Arthur Mervyn">
Dr Stevens meets Arthur Mervyn, who has yellow fever, and invites Mervyn to stay with him until he recovers. One Mervyn is better, Dr Stevens's friend Mr Wortley recognises Mervyn and reacts with displeasure. Mervyn begins to recount his history in an effort to clear his name in the eyes of Dr. Stevens. This takes up most of the book.Mervyn was brought up on a farm in Philadelphia. His father married again and Mervyn did not get on with his stepmother, so left for the city. He loses his money on the way and starts begging in the city. He is locked in a dark room by someone he meets, Wallace, but escapes. He then meets Welbeck, a thief and a forger, who wants Mervyn to work for him, but Mervyn escapes and is helped by Susan Hadwin. In return, he helps Wallace whom he had met earlier and who is Susan's fiancé and has yellow fever. As a result, Mervyn is infected. This takes the story to the point where Mervyn is rescued by Dr Stevens.After he gets better, Mervyn insists on returning to Susan Hadwin's farm to make sure everyone is safe. He doesn't return for weeks. Eventually he summons Dr Stevens to the debtors' prison to tend to Welbeck, wh is ill there. Before Welbeck dies, he gives Mervyn about 40,000 pounds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herland_(novel)"title="Herland (novel)">
The story is told from the perspective of Vandyck "Van" Jennings, a sociology student who, along with two friends, Terry O. Nicholson and Jeff Margrave, forms an expedition party to explore an area of uncharted land rumored to be home to a society consisting entirely of women. The three friends do not entirely believe the rumors because they are unable to think of a way how human reproduction could occur without males. The men speculate about what a society of women would be like, each guessing differently based on the stereotype of women which he holds most dear: Jeff regarding women as things to be served and protected; Terry viewing them as things to be conquered and won.When the explorers reach their destination, they proceed with caution, hiding the biplane they arrive in, and trying to keep themselves hidden in the forests that border the land. They are quickly found by three young women who they realize are observing them from the treetops. After attempting to catch the girls with trickery, the men end up chasing the young women towards a town or village. The women outrun them easily and disappear among the houses, which, Van notes are exceptionally well made and attractive. After meeting the first inhabitants of this new land (which Van names "Herland") the men proceed more cautiously, noting that the girls they met were strong, agile, and completely unafraid. Their caution is warranted, because as the men enter the town where the girls disappeared, they become surrounded by a large group of women, who march them towards an official-looking building. The three men attempt an escape, but are swiftly and easily overpowered by the large group of women and eventually anesthetized.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogsong"title="Dogsong">
Inspired by the Eskimo shaman Oogruk, Russel Susskit takes a dog team and sled to escape the modern ways of his village and to find his own "song" of himself, hating the sound of snowmobiles and his father's coughing in the morning. He travels across ice floes, tundra, and mountains, haunted along the way by a dream of a long-ago self whose adventures parallel his own. Reality melds with the dream when he finds an Eskimo girl named Nancy, who has run away from her village after becoming pregnant. Circumstances require him to provide for himself and the girl in a harsh and unforgiving land. Russel sets out looking for food, for Nancy and himself, after Nancy gives birth to a still-born baby.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellaluna"title="Stellaluna">
In a forest far away, a mother fruit bat has a new baby, and names her Stellaluna. One night, an owl attacks the bats, knocking Stellaluna out of her mother's embrace, and she falls into the forest below. Soon the baby bat ends up in a sparrow's nest filled with three baby birds named Pip, Flitter and Flap. The mother bird will let Stellaluna be part of the family only if she eats bugs, does not hang by her feet and sleeps at night.When the birds grow, they learn to fly. When Stellaluna and the birds are out playing, it gets dark and the birds go home without her because they will not be able to see in the dark. Stellaluna keeps flying, but when her wings hurt, she stops to rest. When she does, she hangs by her thumbs. Soon other bats come, and one asks Stellaluna why she is hanging by her thumbs. As she tells the other bats her story, Mother Bat reunites with her and Stellaluna finally understands why she is so different.Excited about learning how to be a bat, Stellaluna returns to Pip, Flitter, and Flap in order to share her new experiences. They agree to join Stellaluna and the bats at night, but find they are unsuited to flying at night and nearly crash. Stellaluna rescues them and the four of them decide that while they may be very different, they are still friends and family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merlin_Conspiracy"title="The Merlin Conspiracy">
In a parallel universe, Roddy (a.k.a. Arianrhod), daughter of two magicians who serve the King of Blest, has traveled with "the King's Progress" her entire life. The King's Progress is a mobile Court that continuously roams the Islands of Blest (our England) to contain and control the natural magic in the world. Roddy and her best friend, Grundo, uncover a sinister plot involving Grundo's mother and the new "Merlin" – the magical governor of Blest – to take over the throne and the magic of the universe. When Roddy and Grundo try to warn the adults around them of the plot, they are not believed, and Roddy ends up making a spell to ask help of someone from another world – unfortunately, the only person she manages to find is Nick.Nick Mallory (a.k.a. Nichothodes Koryfoides) is a boy living in our own England who dreams about becoming a magid and travelling to other worlds. A magid is a sort of magical policeman who travels between worlds and helps people. Nick finds himself accidentally wandering the dark paths between the worlds, where he finds Roddy and then the powerful magician Romanov. Nick finally makes his way to Blest when he finds Maxwell Hyde, Roddy's grandfather, who is a magid. But Grundo's mother and the fake Merlin have been kidnapping all the most powerful witches and wizards in Blest – including Maxwell Hyde and both of Roddy's parents – and it is up to Nick, Roddy and Grundo to raise the land and stop the plot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ambler_Warning"title="The Ambler Warning">
Inside a little-known and seldom visited psychiatric facility, Parrish Island, the government stores former intelligence employees whose psychiatric state make them a danger to their own government; people whose ramblings might endanger ongoing operations or prove dangerously inconvenient.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apocalypse_Watch"title="The Apocalypse Watch">
In the Hausruck Hills in Austria, CIA agent Harry Latham attempts infiltrating a secret training airfield belonging to the "Brüderschaft der Wacht" (The Brotherhood of the Watch), a Neo-nazi movement gradually building a renaissance of the Nazi ideology across Europe. However, he's exposed and captured, and the Brotherhood's chief surgeon, Dr. Gerhardt Kroeger, performs a microchip implant experiment on Harry in an attempt to make him a controllable double-agent.In Paris, the suicidal act of deranged World War II veteran Pierre Jodelle in a theater draws the attention of Drew Latham, Harry's younger brother and an agent for the United States Department of Consular Operations, whom believes Jodelle might have uncovered a potential Neo-nazi network in France, being his best clue to find his missing brother. After suffering an attempt on his life, Drew is put under the protection of the Deuxième Bureau under Director Claude Moreau, on a request from Drew's superior officer, Director Wesley Sorenson. As Drew continues his investigation, he's also assisted by Stanley 'Stosh' Witkowski, a Cold War veteran and Chief of Security for the US Embassy in Paris, and Karin De Vries, a linguistics expert and records specialist (and an unofficial black ops agent). Sudden and unexpectedly, Harry makes contact with the CIA weeks later, providing an explosive, suspicious incriminating list involving high-profile personnel, from politicians to celebrities, that he acquired under the alias 'Alexander Lassiter' - In fact, this is a move by the Brotherhood itself to provoke discord amongst the world's nations, removing strategic personnel to be replaced with the Brotherhood's homegrown sleeper agents, the Sonnenkinder, who'd "pave the road for the Fourth Reich". Drew and Harry meet each other at the Paris airport, but suddenly are targeted by the Brotherhood's assassins in a blitzkrieg attack. Though Drew survives, Harry is a confirmed kill.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Janson_Directive"title="The Janson Directive">
Paul Janson is an ex-Navy SEAL and former member of a U.S. government covert agency called Consular Operations. He is haunted by his memories of the Vietnam War and his brilliant commander and mentor, Alan Demarest. Unfortunately, Demarest was also a sadistic psychopath who loved to toy with the lives of both friend and foe; he arranged for Janson to be captured and tortured by the Viet Cong. Janson eventually escaped and provided evidence of war crimes, which led to Demarest's execution.Janson now makes his living as a corporate security consultant who is so much in demand that he can pick and choose which jobs he takes. After a mysterious woman makes contact with him while Janson is waiting for a plane, he finds himself taking on a job to repay a debt. She asks Janson to rescue her boss, the Nobel Peace Laureate visionary and billionaire, Peter Novak, who has been taken hostage by a militant organization which intends to kill him.But when the rescue goes horribly wrong, Janson finds himself the target of a "beyond salvage" termination directive (the directive of the title) issued from the highest levels of the U.S. government. Meanwhile, several senior U.S. government officials are assassinated. Janson is then faced with the difficult question of finding out who wanted to frame him for Novak's death, while dodging bullets from his former comrades at Consular Operations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Were_Orphans"title="When We Were Orphans">
The novel is about an Englishman named Christopher Banks. His early childhood was lived in the Shanghai International Settlement in China in the early 1900s, until his father, an opium businessman, and his mother disappear within a few weeks of each other when the boy is about ten years old. Christopher is sent to live with his aunt in England. He becomes a successful detective; now he will turn his skills to solve the case of his parents' disappearance. Though he knows a young woman named Sarah (also orphaned at age ten), Christopher never marries; he adopts an orphaned girl in England named Jennifer. His fame as a private investigator soon spreads, and in 1937 he returns to China to solve the most important case of his life. The impression is given that if he solves this case, a world catastrophe will be averted, but it is not apparent how. As Christopher pursues his investigation, the boundaries between life and imagination begin to evaporate.At this time in China, Christopher is caught up in the Second Sino-Japanese War battles, which reach into the foreigners' enclave of Shanghai. Through an old detective, he locates the house at which his parents may have been held. Though the disappearances happened a quarter-century earlier, Christopher believes that his parents will be there, a notion supported by the present occupants of his old home who assume Christopher's family will be reunited in their home. On his way, he enters a war-torn police station belonging to the Chinese. After convincing them of his neutrality, he persuades the commander to direct him to the house of his kidnapped parents. After a while the commander refuses to take Christopher further, so he goes alone. Throughout all this, he appears to disregard the commander's words that what he is doing is dangerous, and even appears to be rude to him. He meets an injured Japanese soldier who he believes is his childhood friend Akira. They enter the house only to find out that his parents are not there. Japanese soldiers enter and take them away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hover_Car_Racer"title="Hover Car Racer">
Jason Chaser is an independent hover car racer, who along with his autistic adoptive little brother—known only as the Bug—are competing in regional races, with hopes of reaching the Pro circuits, but in reality have little chance of doing so.During a local derby, Scott Syracuse (representing the International Race School) is impressed with Jason's skill, and despite damage to the "Argonaut" placing them last, offers him a position at the IRC for the next season. Jason accepts, and he and the Bug find themselves in Tasmania (now a privately owned training school) along with some of the best student hover car racers in the world. Jason is paired with independent Mech Chief Sally McDuff, who will look after their equipment and pit crew, including a robot named "Tarantula" which will perform most of the actual pit work—changing the magneto drives which enable the hover cars to function, the compressed gas for steering, and the coolant to prevent the magneto drives from melting.During the first few races, Jason is outclassed and bullied—both on and off the track—by the other racers who all consider him inferior—the perfect Xavier Xonora, his own teammates Washington and Wong, and Barnaby Becker, who Jason already knew from earlier races. Even the equipment seems to be against them as they—and the only female racer Ariel Piper—suffer more than their fair share of faulty mag drives, substandard coolant, and failures on the part of Tarantula. Despite this, and due to their natural talent they begin to rise in the rankings, until it becomes apparent that they both have a chance of becoming two of the top four rated racers who will be invited to take part in the New York Masters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brightonomicon"title="The Brightonomicon">
The novel is set in Brighton, and concerns the grand high magus Hugo Rune (AKA The Reinventor of the Ocarina, the Mumbo Gumshoe, the Hokus Bloke, the Cosmic Dick, the Guru's Guru, the Perfect Master, the Lad Himself) and his quest to solve the mystery of the Brighton zodiac, with the aid of his amnesia-struck assistant, Rizla (revealed at the conclusion of the novel to be Jim Pooley of The Brentford Trilogy). They are opposed in the novel by Rune's arch foe, the evil Count Otto Black.The following cases are featured:-
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangover_Square"title="Hangover Square">
Set against the backdrop of the days preceding Britain declaring war on Germany, the main character is George Harvey Bone, a lonely borderline alcoholic who has a form of dissociative identity disorder, referred to in the text as a "dead mood". An alternative diagnosis is temporal lobe epilepsy. He is obsessed with gaining the affections of Netta, a failed actress and one of George's circle of acquaintances with whom he drinks. Netta is repelled by George but, being greedy and manipulative, she and a mutual acquaintance, Peter, shamelessly exploit George's advances to extract money and drink from him.During his disordered episodes, he is convinced he must kill Netta for the way she treats him. Upon recovering from these interludes, he cannot remember them. However outside these he embarks on several adventures, trying in vain to win Netta's affections, including a would-be romantic trip to Brighton which goes horribly wrong: Netta brings Peter along, and also a previously unknown man with whom she has sex in the hotel room next to George's.Apart from being a source of money and alcohol, Netta's other reason for continuing to associate with George is because of Johnnie. He is one of George's long-time friends who works for a theatrical agent, and Netta hopes that through him she will get to meet Eddie Carstairs, a powerful figure in the theatre. However, in a final reversal of fortune it is George, not Netta, who ends up attending a party amongst the theatrical great and good whilst Netta is cast aside by Eddie who — unlike George — has immediately seen her for the unpleasant person she is. George suddenly realises what it is like to be surrounded by people who are interested in him as a person rather than for what he can provide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS,_I_Love_You_(novel)"title="PS, I Love You (novel)">
Holly and Gerry are a married couple who live in Dublin. They are deeply in love, but they fight occasionally. By winter that year, Gerry suddenly dies of a brain tumor and Holly realizes how much he means to her as well as how insignificant their arguments were.Deeply distraught, Holly withdraws from her family and friends out of grief until her mother calls her informing her of a package addressed to her. Within the package are ten envelopes, one for each month after Gerry died, containing messages from him, all ending with "P.S. I Love You". As the months pass, each new message fills her with encouragement and sends her on a new adventure. With Gerry's words as her guide, Holly slowly embarks on a journey of rediscovery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnels_of_Blood"title="Tunnels of Blood">
This story introduces Gavner Purl, a full vampire and an old friend of Mr. Crepsley. Gavner Purl is a Vampire General. Gavner Purl is shocked to discover Darren a half-vampire. Mr. Crepsley wants to talk to Gavner Purl alone in secrecy. After the meeting, Gavner walks with Darren for a while, revealing to him that Mr. Crepsley was a Vampire General and was about to be invested as a Vampire Prince, who is a leader of the Vampire Clan. He also lets slip that Mr. Crepsley is going to leave the Cirque and finally binds Darren to secrecy regarding all these facts. A day or so later, Mr. Crepsley does inform Darren that he must leave and Darren has to accompany him to some place. He suggests that Evra can come with Darren as if on a "vacation" and to help him keep Darren out of mischief as Mr. Crepsley pointed out incidents regarding Madam Octa and Sam Grest.They go to the city and get a disguise made for Evra and in the night while Mr. Crepsley goes out on mysterious excursions, in the day, Darren and Evra enjoy themselves. When looking for a Christmas gift for Evra, Darren comes across Debbie, a girl from the Square, where they were staying. The two begin dating and like each other very much.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathilukal"title="Mathilukal">
Basheer, who is jailed for writing against the ruling British, befriends his fellow-inmates and a considerate young jailor. One day, Basheer hears a woman's voice from the other side of the wall – the women's prison. Eventually the two jailbirds become lovebirds. They exchange gifts, and their hearts, without meeting each other. Narayani then comes up with a plan for a meeting: they decide to meet at the hospital a few days later. But before that, Basheer is released, unexpectedly. For once, he does not want the freedom he had craved for. The novel ends with Basheer standing outside the prison with a rose in his hand saying, "outside is an even bigger jail."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Descent"title="Direct Descent">
Set in the far future, it consists of two stories about how the peaceful Archivists of the library planet Earth have to deal with warmongers arriving and trying to exploit knowledge for power. It contains a lot of pictures and is aimed at children or adolescents.&lt;br&gt;
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aquitaine_Progression"title="The Aquitaine Progression">
Joel Converse is a lawyer, having previously been a fighter pilot in the Vietnam War. Because of his wartime experiences with Command Saigon, in the form of a psychopathic general named "Mad" Marcus Delavane, he is chosen to thwart a cabal of former generals bent on world domination.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_10"title="Richter 10">
There are four defining episodes in the story, and a variety of subplots and minor threads — many of them unrelated to the main story. The story begins late in the 20th century, and tracks the life of the main protagonist, Lewis Crane. The first of four episodes opens the story. An earthquake in California in the late 20th century has left seven-year-old Lewis Crane a crippled, homeless orphan.The second major episode shows Crane as an adult, world's foremost earthquake expert, a Nobel laureate, ruthless scientist, and entrepreneur dedicated to relieving the misery of those affected by earthquakes. He is also the moving force behind Foundation, an organization whose purpose is to further scientific research on earthquakes. Foundation has just perfected the technology to predict earthquakes to within minutes of due time, intensity, and geographical areas that will be affected. His first prediction is for Sado island in Japan—according to him, most of the island will be destroyed, as will the inhabited village of Aikawa.Local authorities not only ignore his warnings, but vilify him. On the predicted day of the earthquake, Crane has collected a lot of media and relief organizations to cover the event. Many of them are on a small part of the island that will be safe, according to the prediction, while others are covering the event from the air. Directly before the predicted time, the mayor of Aikawa arrives with police to arrest and deport Crane as a fear-monger; at that moment, the earthquake hits. By the time the dust settles, Crane's predictions have come true.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enemy_of_My_Enemy_(Michael_book)"title="The Enemy of My Enemy (Michael book)">
In the book Michael examines the positions of neo-Nazi and Islamist groups on American foreign policy, the media, modernity, and the so-called New World Order. Both camps share a "fervent anti-Semitism, accompanied by strong pro-Palestinian views, anger over Israel's influence on American policymakers, and opposition to the Iraq War and the U.S. presence in the Middle East."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_(Goldman_novel)"title="Brothers (Goldman novel)">
In the sequel, Henry David "Hank" Levy (nicknamed "Doc" and "Scylla"), brother of "Marathon Man"'s protagonist Thomas Babington "Tom" Levy (a.k.a. "Babe"), survives his stabbing. The plot concerns an effort to instigate World War III by means of simultaneous, worldwide terrorist attacks, which Scylla attempts to stop. Scylla's job is to kill American scientists who made three inventions meant to give the United States a military advantage against the Soviet Union. There are two factions in the U.S. government, the Bloodies, advocating war, and Godists, who wish for more peaceful methods.Scylla initially convalesces on an island, as he had been in recovery for a decade. He later goes to New York State, both New York City and Upstate New York. At Princeton University he kills "Arky" Vaughan, who made the suicide chemical, while in New York he kills Milo Standish, who created a chemical that makes other people do his wishes.After "Ma" Perkins, the spy who helped him recover, is murdered, Scylla goes to London. Scylla initially only knows of two inventions, but learns about the third after Ma's death. Scylla kills the Blonde, Perkins's killer, and Division head Beverage dies from suicide after Scylla confronts him.The final invention is exploding children made to kill important politicians and scientists to goad major world powers into attacking each other so the United Kingdom, left standing, could rule the world. Beverage had already sent exploding children, but they largely detonate prematurely and the mutual retaliation fails to materialize. However Babe's wife, Melissa, dies after a cache of children explode in her workplace in the UK; she had been sent there ostensibly to fine-tune speech of amusement park props. Scylla was tricked into destroying the cache thinking it was the only major cache, and he was unaware she was there; Beverage knew she would be there. When Babe and Scylla meet, they embrace and cry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sleepwalkers_(Broch_novel)"title="The Sleepwalkers (Broch novel)">
## 1888: Joachim von Pasenow.The first part, set mostly in Berlin and an unnamed eastern province of Prussia, concerns an unsure young aristocrat and army officer, Joachim von Pasenow. He wavers between his romantic devotion to a Czech prostitute Ruzena Hruska and his duty which is to court Elisabeth von Baddensen, the heiress of a neighbouring landowner and his social equal. In his secret liaison with the earthy Ruzena he finds emotional and sexual fulfilment, while Elisabeth is delicate and distant. Adrift among doubts and hesitation, he finds refuge in symbols from the past, such as the honour code of the nobility and the teaching of the Lutheran church. Adhering to these leads him into a loveless marriage with Elisabeth. On their wedding night, the hesitations both feel lead them to postpone consummation.Almost all the decisions and actions of Joachim, Ruzena and Elisabeth are manipulated by his diabolical friend, a successful worldly businessman called Eduard von Bertrand who, for his evident lack of comprehension for old values, Joachim never trusts fully.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowl_(novel)"title="Cowl (novel)">
The novel follows Polly, an ordinary homeless teenager from the near future and Tak, a cyborg soldier programmed for obedience to his superiors. Tak is tasked to retrieve a "tor", a biological time machine, but it attaches itself to Polly and wrenches her back in time throughout history toward the eponymous Cowl. She meets several major figures in British history but is no closer to discovering the secret behind the tor which is leeching off her energy and life. Meanwhile Tak runs into Traveler, a time traveler, who shows him the future of the human race where the dominant Heliothane race is threatened by the Umbrathane uprising and the battles are being fought throughout time itself. Cowl, a Heliothane weapon is a human male that was genetically engineered to be the perfect specimen of human evolution. However he is also on the run from the Heliothane Dominion, which considers him their enemy after he slaughters the station he was born at. In an attempt to stop the rule of the dominant Heliothanes, Cowl travels back into pre-history with an incomprehensibly massive multidimensional creature called the Torbeast. The Heliothane theorize that Cowl intends to destroy the human race and supplant them with the Umbrathane checking on his progress by having the Torbeast send its parasitic scales into the future which drag its victims back to Cowl.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arch_of_Triumph_(novel)"title="Arch of Triumph (novel)">
The novel is set in Paris, in 1939. Despite having no permission to perform surgery, stateless refugee Ravic, a very accomplished German surgeon, has been “ghost-operating” on patients for two years on the behalf of two less-skillful French physicians.Unwilling to return to Nazi Germany, which has stripped him of his citizenship, and unable to exist legally anywhere else in pre-war western Europe, Ravic manages to hang on. He is one of many displaced persons, without passports or any other documents, who live under a constant threat of being captured and deported from one country to the next, and back again.Ravic has given up on the possibility of love, but life has a curious way of taking a turn for the romantic, even during the worst of times. He cautiously befriends an actress . . .
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_Fine_Myth"title="Another Fine Myth">
Skeeve, a magician's apprentice and wannabe thief from the dimension Klah, tries to learn the basics of magic from Master Magician Garkin for several months but to no avail. Skeeve can do little more than float a feather or light a candle using magic. Wanting to convince Skeeve that being a thief is not as good as being a magician, Garkin summons a demon. During the summoning an assassin barges into the hut, and Garkin and the assassin kill each other. Skeeve is left alone with the demon. To Skeeve's surprise the demon politely introduces himself as Aahz. Aahz explains that demon is slang for Dimension Traveler. He further explains that there are thousands of dimensions with different races in them, and that he is from the dimension of Perv, making Aahz a Pervect, while Skeeve is a Klahd. Aahz is a master magician like Garkin but loses his magical powers during the summoning ritual (due to a practical joke played on him by Garkin) and becomes stranded in Klah. Aahz volunteers to take Skeeve on as his apprentice and teach him magic.The pair then embark on a series of misadventures as they try to evade more assassins trailing Skeeve. They decide to confront Isstvan, a dangerous Master Magician who plans to conquer all the other dimensions. Along the way they meet, and swindle, a demon hunter named Quigley. They encounter the assassins, and are saved by Skeeve's new magic. With information from the assassins they encounter Frumple, a merchant who transports them to the dimension of Deva (where the Deveels, master bargainers, live) so they can visit the Bazaar to find something to use against Isstvan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_Ward"title="Cancer Ward">
## Overview.The plot focuses on a group of patients as they undergo crude and frightening treatment in a squalid hospital. Writer and literary critic Jeffrey Meyers writes that the novel is the "most complete and accurate fictional account of the nature of disease and its relation to love. It describes the characteristics of cancer; the physical, psychological, and moral effects on the victim; the conditions of the hospital; the relations of patients and doctors; the terrifying treatments; the possibility of death." Kostoglotov's central question is what life is worth, and how we know if we pay too much for it.The novel is partly-autobiographical. Like Solzhenitsyn, Kostoglotov is a former soldier and GULAG prisoner in hospital for cancer treatment from internal perpetual exile in Kazakhstann. In a chapter called “The Root From Issyk-Kul,” Kostoglotov’s doctor discovers a vial of dark fluid in his bedside table, prompting Kostoglotov to explain the contents are an extract of a root used by natural healers in Russia to cure cancer. Solzhenitsyn ingested the same root extract before his cancer went into remission. Kostoglotov is depicted as born in Leningrad, Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk.Bureaucrats and the nature of power in Stalin's State are represented by Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov, a "personnel officer," bully, and informer. The corrupt power of Stalin's regime is shown through his dual desires to be a "worker", and achieve a "special pension." He is discomfited by signs of a political thaw, and fears a rehabilitated man he denounced 18 years ago (to obtain the whole apartment they shared) will seek revenge. He praises his arrogant daughter, but severely criticizes his son for showing stirrings of humanity. After he is discharged, he believes he is cured, but the staff privately give him less than a year to live; his cancer cannot be rooted any more than the corruption of the 'apparatchik' class to which he belongs. At the end, Rusanov's wife drops rubbish from her car window, symbolising the carelessness with which the State treated the country. The clinic staff frequently mislead the patients about the severity of their disease, and often discharge patients they cannot help, so the number of dead patients is kept to a minimum. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_His_Steps"title="In His Steps">
"In His Steps" takes place in the railroad town of Raymond, located in Topeka, Kansas. The main character is the Rev. Henry Maxwell, pastor of the First Church of Raymond, who challenges his congregation to not do anything for a whole year without first asking: "What Would Jesus Do?" Other characters include Ed Norman, senior editor of the "Raymond Daily Newspaper", Rachel Winslow, a talented singer, and Virginia Page, an heiress, to name a few.The novel begins on a Friday morning when a man out of work (later identified as Jack Manning) appears at the front door of Henry Maxwell while the latter is preparing for that Sunday's upcoming sermon. Maxwell listens to the man's helpless plea briefly before brushing him away and closing the door. The same man appears in the church at the end of the Sunday sermon, walks up to "the open space in front of the pulpit," and faces the people. No one stops him. He quietly but frankly confronts the congregation—"I'm not complaining; just stating facts."—about their compassion, or apathetic lack thereof, for the jobless like him in Raymond. Upon finishing his address to the congregation, he collapses, and dies a few days later.That next Sunday, Henry Maxwell, deeply moved by the events of the past week, presents a challenge to his congregation: "Do not do anything without first asking, 'What would Jesus do?'" This challenge is the theme of the novel and is the driving force of the plot. From this point on, the rest of the novel consists of certain episodes that focus on individual characters as their lives are transformed by the challenge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarhead_(book)"title="Jarhead (book)">
"Jarhead" recounts Swofford's enlistment and service in the United States Marine Corps during the Persian Gulf War, in which he served as a Scout Sniper Trainee with the Surveillance and Target Acquisition (STA) Platoon of 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines.Like most of the troops stationed in the Middle East during the Gulf War, Swofford saw very little actual combat. Swofford's narrative focuses on the physical, mental and emotional struggles of the young Marines.One of the through lines of his first-person account involves the challenge of balancing the art and science and mind-set of the warrior with one's own basic sense of humanity. Swofford admits to a sense of disappointment, frustration and emptiness that comes in the wake of ultimately being cheated of any real combat experience by a war that, for many American Marines at least, has ended all too quickly after enduring many months of grinding, anticlimactic suspense. And yet there have been the numerous encounters with poignant, eerie tableaux of dead Iraqi soldiers who'd been killed so quickly where they sat so as to appear to have been deliberately posed, like store-display mannequins, in their final moments of life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Old-Fashioned_Girl"title="An Old-Fashioned Girl">
Polly Milton, a bright 14-year-old country girl, visits her friend Fanny Shaw and her wealthy family in the city for the first time. Poor Polly is overwhelmed by the splendor at the Shaws' and their urbanized, fashionable lifestyles, expensive clothes and other habits she has never been exposed to, and, for the most part, dislikes. Fanny's friends ignore her because of her different behavior and simple clothing, Fanny's brother Tom teases her, and Fan herself can't help considering her unusual sometimes. However, Polly's warmth, support, and kindness eventually win the hearts of all the family members, and her old-fashioned ways teach them a lesson they would never forget.Over the next six years, Polly visits the Shaws every year and comes to be considered a member of the family. Later, Polly comes back to the city to become a music teacher and struggles with professional issues and internal emotions. Later in the book, Polly finds out that the prosperous Shaws are on the brink of bankruptcy, and she guides them to the realization that wholesome family life is the only thing they will ever need, not money or decoration.With the comfort of the ever-helpful Polly, the family gets to change for the better and to find a happier life for all of them. After being rejected by his fiancée, Trix, Tom procures a job out West, with Polly's brother Ned, and heads off to help his family and compensate for all the money he has wasted in frivolous expenditures. At that point in the book, we see that Polly and Tom seem to have developed strong feelings for one another.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargirl_(novel)"title="Stargirl (novel)">
The book begins with a brief introduction to the main character, Leo, at an early age, which is followed by his move from his home state of Pennsylvania to Arizona when he is 12. Before the move, his Uncle Pete gives Leo a porcupine necktie as a farewell present, inspiring him to collect more like it. After his birthday and collection of porcupine neckties are mentioned in a local newspaper when he's 14, Leo receives a second porcupine necktie, left anonymously.The story picks up two years later with the arrival of Stargirl Caraway at Leo's school, Mica High. Leo learns that up until this point, she has been homeschooled, but even that doesn't seem to excuse her strange behavior; for example, she comes to school in strange outfits—kimono, buckskin, 1920s flapper clothes, and pioneer clothes. She also brings a ukulele to school every day, as well as her pet rat, Cinnamon. She is so different that at first, the student body does not know what to make of her. Hillari Kimble, a well known and somewhat popular girl at Leo's school, declares that Stargirl is a fake, and speculation and rumors abound.One of Stargirl's quirks is singing happy birthday to students when it is their birthday, bringing her ukulele to school to do so. When Hillari orders Stargirl not to sing to her on her birthday, Stargirl sings Hillari's name but directs the song to Leo and mentions in front of everyone that she thinks he is cute. Though at first rejected by most of the students, Stargirl gains a measure of popularity and is asked to join the cheerleading squad after she succeeds in getting the crowd excited about the school's losing football team while cheering for them at a game. Students mimic her behavior, and at lunch, she no longer sits alone. Her antics on the squad spark a boom in audience attendance at sporting events.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fattypuffs_and_Thinifers"title="Fattypuffs and Thinifers">
Edmund and Terry find the entrance through the Twin Rock, where a long escalator descends into the bowels of the earth. The underground region is illuminated by large balloons filled with a blue, dazzling gas, which float in the underground sky.At the bottom of the escalator a narrow quay, "Surface-by-the-Sea", borders a large gulf. Edmund and Terry are separated here. Edmund is taken to Fattyborough, the capital of the Fattypuff kingdom, on the ship "Fattiport", while Terry is ordered to board the steel vessel "Thiniport" for Thiniville, capital of the Thinifer Republic.Edmund soon assumes an important position in the administration of Fattypuff, whose inhabitants are friendly, happy, and who live only for drinking and eating. Everything there is round and cushioned; the architecture is domes and baroque. Terry also rises through the ranks quickly in the land of the Thinifers, workaholics all, who scarcely eat, and who rush to and from their country, which is all high, sharp spires and thin railway cars.For centuries Fattypuffs and Thinifers have been mortal enemies, having fought one another already in the "War of the Captive Armies". Their main source of tension lies over ownership of an island in the gulf that separates the countries, and what to call it - the Fattypuffs prefer "Fattyfer," the Thinifers "Thinipuff." Negotiations, in which Edmund and Terry participate, are unsuccessful, and the countries go to war. The Thinifers emerge as the victors, and annex the Fattypuff kingdom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invitation_to_a_Beheading"title="Invitation to a Beheading">
The novel takes place in a prison and relates the final twenty days of Cincinnatus C., a citizen of a fictitious country, who is imprisoned and sentenced to death for "gnostical turpitude." Unable to blend in and become part of the world around him, Cincinnatus is described as having a "certain peculiarity" that makes him "impervious to the rays of others, and therefore produces when off his guard a bizarre impression, as of a lone dark obstacle in this world of souls transparent to one another." Although he tries to hide his condition and "feign translucence," people are uncomfortable with his existence, and feel there is something wrong with him. In this way, Cincinnatus fails to become part of his society.While confined, Cincinnatus is not told when his execution will occur. This troubles him, as he wants to express himself through writing "in defiance of all the world's muteness," but feels unable to do so without knowledge of how long he has to complete this task. Indifferent to the absurdity and vulgarity around him, Cincinnatus strives to find his true self in his writing, where he creates an ideal world. Taken to be executed, he refuses to believe in either death or his executioners, and as the axe falls the false existence dissolves around him as he joins the spirits of his fellow visionaries in "reality."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_(novel)"title="Julian (novel)">
Julian was the last direct relative of Constantine the Great to take up the purple, his father being Constantine's half-brother. As emperor, he attempted to destroy the influence of the Christian church. His goals were to bring back firstly the worship of the old Roman pantheon, secondly other religions including Judaism (he attempts to restore the Jewish Temple), and thirdly - with special emphasis upon the growing crisis on Rome's frontiers - Mithraism, a mystery religion that had been popular among Roman soldiers.The book takes the form of the correspondence between two Hellenistic pagans, Libanius, who is considering writing a biography of Julian, and Priscus, who possesses Julian's personal memoir. Christianity has, by this stage, become the official religion of the Roman Empire (as decreed by the emperor Theodosius), with rioting and inquisition causing extreme violence between traditionalists and Christians, and even between Christian sects. Only thirty years after the novel took place, the city of Rome would be sacked by the Goths.The memoir relates Julian's life from the time so many members of his family were purged by his cousin, the emperor Constantius II (whom he succeeded on the throne), his "exile" to libraries as a child, and his subsequent negative childhood experiences with Christian hypocrisy and conflict over dogma (see Arianism). As he matures, a rift forms between Julian and his disturbed half-brother Constantius Gallus, who is made Caesar (heir to the purple) by Constantius II; Julian claims, for his safety, to have no interest but philosophy, so he undertakes a journey to Athens to study under the city's greatest teachers. Here, he first sees Libanius, the book's narrator, and has an affair with a female philosopher, Macrina. He also comes to know some of the early Church Fathers in their formative years, including the agreeable Basil of Caesarea and the abrasive and dishonest Gregory of Nazianzus. Julian becomes a lector, a minor office in the Christian church, but he continues to learn about the traditional religions: he studies Neoplatonism in Asia Minor under Aedesius, and is initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries in Athens (which he would later try to restore).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_(Wallace_novel)"title="The Man (Wallace novel)">
"The Man" was written before the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. It depicts a political situation in which the office of Vice Presidency is vacant due to the incumbent's death. While overseas in Germany, the President and the Speaker of the House are in a freak accident; the President is killed, the Speaker of the House later dies in surgery. The Presidency then devolves onto Douglass Dilman, the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, a black man earlier elected to that office in deference to his race. Dilman's presidency is challenged by white racists, black political activists, and an attempted assassination. Later, he is impeached on false charges for firing the United States Secretary of State. One of his children, who is "passing" for white, is targeted and harassed. At the end of the book, the protagonist—though having credibly dealt with considerable problems during his presidency and gained some popularity—does not consider running for re-election.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil!"title="Oil!">
James Arnold "Dad" Ross and his son, James Jr. ("Bunny") are introduced as they drive through southern California to meet with the Watkins family, who are leasing out some oil property they own. They find out that the family is deadlocked about how the properties and proceeds should be divided. While Dad and Bunny go quail hunting on the Watkins' goat ranch, they find oil. At Bunny's urging, Dad tries to prevent the elder Watkins from beating his daughter Ruth, trying to convince them that he has received a "third revelation" which prohibits parents from beating their children. The plan backfires when Eli, Ruth's brother, interjects himself into the discussion and claims that "he" has received the revelation.As drilling begins at the Watkins ranch, Bunny begins to realize his father's business methods are not entirely ethical. After a worker is killed in an accident and an oil well is destroyed in a blowout, Dad's workforce goes on strike. Bunny is torn between loyalty to Dad and his friendship to Ruth and her rebellious brother Paul, who support the workers. Paul is drafted into World War I and, when the conflict is over, remains in Siberia to fight the rising Bolsheviks. Back home, Bunny enrolls in college, and he becomes increasingly involved with socialism through a classmate, Rachel Menzies. Paul returns home and tells of his travels, explaining he has become a communist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amulet_of_Samarkand"title="The Amulet of Samarkand">
In an alternate London where the British Empire dominates the world through control of magic, and commoners are governed by the ruling class of magicians, five-year-old Nathaniel begins an apprenticeship to magician Arthur Underwood, Minister of Internal Affairs.At the age of ten, Nathaniel is presented to a gathering of magicians including the formidable Simon Lovelace, who dismisses Nathaniel's talents and humiliates him. Embittered toward Underwood, Nathaniel plots revenge. Through a scrying glass, Nathaniel sees Lovelace receive a package containing the powerful Amulet of Samarkand. Lovelace plans to use the Amulet to seize control of the government.Days after his twelfth birthday, Nathaniel summons the djinn Bartimaeus and charges him to steal the Amulet. Bartimaeus, ordered to spy on Lovelace, travels to the magician Sholto Pinn's curio shop. He learns the Amulet had been under government protection. Bartimaeus' presence is discovered and he is detained in the Tower of London. Underwood confiscates Nathaniel's summoning paraphernalia, and is called to the Tower to interrogate Bartimaeus. At the Tower, Bartimaeus is unsuccessfully interrogated by Pinn and Jessica Whitwell, Minister of Security. Bartimaeus escapes and flees, unwittingly leading Lovelace to the Underwood house. Lovelace threatens Underwood and discovers the Amulet in his study. Nathaniel reveals himself as the thief, but his master encourages Lovelace to kill his apprentice instead of him. Lovelace's spirits destroy the house; the Underwoods perish but Bartimaeus saves Nathaniel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Number_Devil"title="The Number Devil">
Robert is a young boy who suffers from mathematical anxiety due to his boredom in school. His mother is Mrs. Wilson. He also experiences recurring dreams—including falling down an endless slide or being eaten by a giant fish—but is interrupted from this sleep habit one night by a small devil creature who introduces himself as the Number Devil. Although there are many Number Devils (from Number Heaven), Robert only knows him as the Number Devil before learning of his actual name, Teplotaxl, later in the story.Over the course of twelve dreams, the Number Devil teaches Robert mathematical principles. On the first night, the Number Devil appears to Robert in an oversized world and introduces the number one. The next night, the Number Devil emerges in a forest of trees shaped like "ones" and explains the necessity of the number zero, negative numbers, and introduces "hopping", a fictional term to describe exponentiation. On the third night, the Number Devil brings Robert to a cave and reveals how "prima-donna" numbers (prime numbers) can only be divided by themselves and one without a remainder. Later, on the fourth night, the Number Devil teaches Robert about "rutabagas", another fictional term to depict square roots, at a beach.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_Not_the_End_of_the_World"title="It's Not the End of the World">
Karen Newman feels like her world is coming undone and has soured on the idea of marriage. In her diary, she gives each day a letter grade; lately, her days have not been graded higher than a C-minus. She is overjoyed to learn that her sixth-grade teacher will be Miss Pace, who is nice and popular, but when the first day of school comes, she is crushed to find that Miss Pace, after getting married over the summer and is now Mrs. Singer, has become what Karen describes as a "witch". Worse yet, her parents, Bill and Ellie, who have been quarreling more and more each day, announce that they are splitting up. Bill moves out of the family home and plans to go to Las Vegas to file for divorce, much to Ellie's delight and Karen's consternation.When Karen's older brother, Jeff, finds out that Bill is going to Las Vegas, he argues with Ellie and runs away. Bill postpones his trip to Las Vegas to help find him, which, instead of bringing him closer to Ellie, causes him to quarrel with her even more violently than before. Jeff eventually returns on his own, ending the crisis, but not the animosity. Karen tries every possible way she can think of to stop the divorce from happening, including sending anniversary cards and feigning illness, but her efforts are ultimately fruitless. She does this because there is a streak run by her family for not getting a divorce. She does not want to let her grandparents down. At the end, she decides that, in spite of the impending divorce, things will get better. Her last diary entry in the book has her giving the day a B-plus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Dreams"title="Gravity Dreams">
The novel is set in the year 4512, when humans have achieved spaceflight faster than the speed of light, along with nanotechnology. Gravity Dreams centers around main character, Tyndel, who was raised in Dorcha, whose culture uses the philosophy of Dzin as a means of social control. Dzin preaches that what you see is, and not to ask questions that a scientist normally would. Tyndel is a master of Dzin. One day he is attacked and infected with nanites. This brands him as a 'Demon' because Dorcha has rejected technology, as the cause of a major ecological collapse centuries before.After escaping from prison, Tyndel returns to his wife, and sees her killed by the people who he thought were meant to protect her. After taking revenge by killing the man who infected him with the nanites, Tyndel flees north to the "Demon Nation" of Rykasha, which still retains high technology and uses nanites.He is taken to a medical facility after experiencing weird lights across his vision, and told that he was infected with an ancient strain of nanites that would have killed him. They are replaced with more balanced nanites adjusted to his system. He is introduced to his handler Cerrelle, who explains that it is her duty to help him adjust to their society and become a productive citizen so that he can repay his debt for their help.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Adventures_of_Santa_Claus"title="The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus">
As a baby, Santa Claus is found in the Forest of Burzee by Ak, the Master Woodsman of the World (a supreme immortal) and placed in the care of the lioness Shiegra, but he thereupon is adopted by the Wood Nymph, Necile.Upon reaching young adulthood, Claus is introduced by Ak to human society, wherein he sees war, brutality, poverty, child neglect, and child abuse. Because he cannot reside in Burzee as an adult, he settles in the nearby Laughing Valley of Hohaho, where the immortals regularly assist him, and Peter Knook gives him a little cat named Blinky.In the Laughing Valley, Claus becomes known for kindness toward children. On one occasion, his neighbors' son Weekum visits him; Claus, having made an image of Blinky to pass the time, presents him with the finished carving, calling it a "toy". Soon, the immortals begin assisting him in the production of other carvings: the Ryls coloring the toys with their infinite paint pots (the first toy was not colored). When he makes a clay figure reminiscent of Necile, he proclaims it a "dolly" to evade naming Necile to the children ("doll" results when children shorten the name). Claus presents the first one to Bessie Blithesome, a local noblewoman, after consulting with Necile and the Queen of the Fairies about whether he should give toys to wealthy children. Later dolls resemble Bessie herself and, later still, counterfeit infant girls.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People_of_Sparks"title="The People of Sparks">
The story resumes after the evacuation of Ember, an underground city, which has been cut off from the surface for more than 200 years. The 400+ refugees from the city cannot return, as the city's resources are nearly depleted, and have no idea how to survive on the surface. After following a road for three days, they arrive at the village of Sparks, exhausted and hungry. The leaders of this village, Mary, Ben, and Wilmer, reluctantly agree to take in the refugees for 6 months, theoretically long enough to teach them to survive independently. They are allowed to stay in the abandoned and decrepit Pioneer Hotel. Tick Hassler, a former hauler of carts in Ember, organizes a series of projects intended to improve their quality of life and chances for the future, but which tend to be more grandiose than practical.Concern soon arises about whether there is adequate food for everyone in Sparks; if food stocks are insufficient for the winter, it would be disastrous for both groups. The Emberites have little knowledge of the surface (having been deliberately deprived of such knowledge at the founding of the city, so they would not try to leave), and their ignorance annoys the people of Sparks. Torren, an unhappy boy from Sparks, destroys a large amount of tomatoes in a furious rage, and then decides to accuse an Emberite (Doon) of the act to further build hatred between the two people. Vandalism against the people of Ember heightens the anger on both sides. The resultant reduction in the quality and quantity of food provided to Emberites only makes them angrier. Sparks' leaders vote 2-1 to stop having Emberites in homes for meals, as was the policy before, and instead have them pick up food to eat elsewhere. Then, Ember's people learn that they will be ejected from the village in the middle of winter, which they had not understood. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Sharer"title="The Secret Sharer">
As dusk begins to fall, the unnamed narrator of the story, the new Captain of a British vessel currently anchored at the mouth of the Meinam River in the Gulf of Siam, stands on the deck of his ship before joining his crew for supper. The time is approximately eight o'clock.At supper, the Captain remarks that he saw the masts of a ship anchored amongst some nearby islands. The Chief Mate explains that the ship to which the Captain is referring is probably another English one, waiting for a favorable tide to sail home. The Second Mate elaborates: the ship is the "Sephora", from Liverpool, and is bound home from Cardiff with a cargo of coal, which he had learned from the skipper of a tugboat who had previously come aboard to fetch the Captain's letters.The Captain makes a magnanimous gesture by offering to take the anchor watch himself until one o'clock, after which time he will get the Second Mate to relieve him. Again alone on deck, the Captain meditatively smokes a cigar and again considers his own "strangeness" to the ship and its command, and his unfamiliarity with the crew. The rest of the crew sleeps soundly.The Captain notices that the rope side ladder, hung over the side of the ship to accommodate the skipper of the tugboat, has not been brought in. As he begins to pull it, he feels a jerk at the other end and curiously looks over the rail into the sea. He sees a naked man floating in the water and holding the end of the ladder. The man introduces himself as Leggatt. He has been in the water since nine o'clock, which makes the Captain consider his strength and youth. Leggatt climbs up the ladder and the Captain rushes to his cabin to fetch him some clothes. The Captain learns that Leggatt was until recently the chief mate of the "Sephora", having been stripped of the title after he accidentally killed a fellow crewman while trying to repair the ship's foresail during a storm. The Captain tells Leggatt that they should retire to his cabin so as not to be discovered by his own Chief Mate. The Captain hides Leggatt in his cabin, returns to the deck, summons the Chief Mate to take over the anchor watch, and then returns to his cabin.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spellcoats"title="The Spellcoats">
Tanaqui is a young woman. She resides in a small town called Shelling. She and four siblings look different from the rest of the townsfolk. Their family has three idols—the so-called Undying. The country is invaded by Heathens. They are the ancestors of the people of Dalemark in the other three novels. Tanaqui and her siblings flee to avoid being killed by the people of their own village; they physically resemble Heathens.The Spellcoats is not a diary, nor is it "told" as many stories are. It is woven. Tanaqui weaves a story into a "spellcoat" that she weaves.The first spellcoat tells of how the five siblings (Gull, Robin, Hern, Tanaqui and Duck) traveled downriver on their boat. First, they encounter the mysterious magician Tanamil, then the Heathen king Kars Adon, and finally, at the sea, the evil mage Kankredin, whose aim is to take over the power of the river by taking over the five children's souls. The second spellcoat tells how they escape from Kankredin, but then the five siblings are captured by their own King, "the king of the natives." This king has lost his kingdom. He is bivouacking with the remains of his army trying to avoid the Heathens. The King confines the children because he needs one of the children's idols to assist him. Tanaqui continues to weave during her confinement with the King, she realizes that the spellcoats that mages wore gave them powers that were woven into their spellcoats. This convinced her that the words woven into spellcoats will have the power to defeat Kankredin.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nitrogen_Fix"title="The Nitrogen Fix">
The family is allied with an alien, an octopus-like being, who can survive in the new atmosphere. Humans must live in shelters with oxygen-generating plants, or use suitable breathing equipment. Some of Earth's original life forms have mutated to survive in the changed atmosphere. Since almost no metals can exist in the corrosive atmosphere, any technology is based on ceramics or glass.Some humans are suspicious of the aliens, and even blame them for the change to the atmosphere, since they seem to be adapted for it. The family have an almost fatal encounter with a group of such people, who are holding another alien hostage. However, the two aliens are able to pool memories biochemically, so that they become the same personality in two bodies. Their combined knowledge and skills help the humans to escape.At the end the aliens reveal that they are basically tourists or scientists, and they travel from one system to another over thousands of years. Atmospheres "mature" when the nitrogen absorbs all the oxygen, the cause being the inevitable evolution of bacteria that use gold to catalyze the reaction. It is hinted, but not stated outright, that human mining of gold triggered this reaction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_Planet_(novel)"title="Rogue Planet (novel)">
The story takes place a few years after the events of "Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace". Young Anakin Skywalker chafes under his new life as a Jedi apprentice. He sneaks away from Obi-Wan Kenobi to participate in and gamble on deadly flying games. This is interrupted by a "Blood Carver" assassin.The Jedi Council decides Anakin would be best served to send him with Obi-Wan to investigate the remote world of Zonama Sekot, a world that produces organic spacecraft. A Jedi has gone missing on Sekot.A battle squadron pursues the two Jedi; it is headed by a weapons designer that has already blueprinted the Death Star. Commander Tarkin, the future Grand Moff Tarkin becomes involved as well.Blood Carver assassins appear again, the Jedi grow their own ship and no less than two fleets threaten the planet.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_from_an_Empty_Cup"title="Tea from an Empty Cup">
"Tea From an Empty Cup" is at its core a tightly plotted detective novel.The story revolves around near mythical Japan, which has been destroyed in a vaguely described natural cataclysm several decades before the story opens. The generation that remembers "Old Japan" appears to have passed on. A virtual version of Japan has become a sort of holy grail for a core group of artificial reality addicts. Artificial Reality, or "AR", like "post-apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty" has become immensely popular in an increasingly dreary overcrowded world, not just as a game, but as a way of life. AR is not just a way of life, it turns out, but also of death, as homicide detective Dore Konstantin discovers when she is called upon to investigate the death of a young man in an artificial reality parlour (think video arcade with a full wired body suit) and discovers he died the same way in the game as in reality. She therefore decides to investigate this young man's life within the artificial realities he frequented, even though the legal precedents already established mean that nothing she discovers is admissible as evidence because "Everything is a Lie" in AR. In the process she stumbles onto something far more complicated than a mere murder case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Technicolor_Time_Machine"title="The Technicolor Time Machine">
The narrative revolves around the efforts of a mediocre film director to save his job, his livelihood and, incidentally, the studio he works for. To do this, he enlists a mad scientist, the crooked studio owner, a jazz tuba player, a cowboy, two fabulously stupid movie stars, and a real live ocean-crossing Viking. He ends up making history, but in a way he never dreamed of.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_(novel)"title="Monument (novel)">
A nondescript spacer with little education named Cerne Obrien finds a cache of extremely valuable "retron crystals", but crashes on an idyllic planet before he can sell them. The planet has a single continent, inhabited by humans with a Polynesian culture. The natives live contented lives, hunting a sea creature called the koluf, which constitutes almost their entire diet. Obrien uses his surviving technology to rid the area of several dangerous animals, and eventually marries. The natives come to call him the "Langri", a title of deep respect.Obrien lives a peaceful life, watching his descendants grow up, but as he ages, he begins worrying about the future. Unscrupulous developers would inevitably attempt to turn the planet into a resort and marginalize the natives. Obrien could handle them if they arrived soon, but he cannot live forever.He has bright young people sent to him. He begins to teach them "the Plan". It is difficult to teach the non-technological natives all they need to know, as they have little concept of modern galactic society, but he manages it. His best pupil is a young man named Fornri.Even as Obrien lies dying, a developer called Wembling arrives to illegally prospect for minerals. The people, led by Fornri, put the Plan into effect. They first capture Wembling and his men, and the crews of four scout ships sent to find Wembling. The Navy eventually arrives, and a treaty is signed recognizing the planet under the name Langri. The people of Langri fine the Federation for illegal landings and hire a law firm, as specified in the Plan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_Education_(novel)"title="Higher Education (novel)">
The novel starts in a future dystopian earth where the United States has become a woefully inefficient bureaucratized nation. The public school system is primarily interested in promoting self-esteem rather than learning. For example, the vast majority of public high school graduates are illiterate, and end up in "the pool"; an endless crowd of unemployable youths depending on government assistance or crime for survival. The book is told from the perspective of the main character, a high school student named Rick who quickly finds himself expelled after a practical joke goes wrong.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_Redux"title="Rabbit Redux">
"Rabbit Redux" finds former high-school basketball star Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom working a dead-end job as a Linotype operator at the local printing plant. Thirty-six, he feels that he is quickly approaching middle age and irrelevance, a fear he sees reflected in the economic decline of his hometown, Brewer, Pennsylvania. When his wife leaves him for an eccentric Greek man named Charlie Stavros, Harry and his thirteen-year-old son Nelson are at a loss.Seeking to fill the void left by Janice, Harry starts a commune, composed of himself; Nelson; Skeeter, a cynical, drug-dealing African-American Vietnam vet with messianic delusions; and Jill, a wealthy, white, runaway teenager from Connecticut. While Skeeter keeps Jill in sexual thrall to him with heroin, Harry and Nelson are both drawn to Jill for the different things she represents to them: lost innocence and sexual conquest for Harry, and first love and coming of age for Nelson. Against the backdrop of the Summer of Love, Harry, Skeeter, and Jill do drugs, have sex, and debate religion, race relations, and other political issues of the 1960s while Nelson attempts to romance Jill. The activities at Harry's house upset his middle-class, conservative neighbors, one of whom sets fire to the house in an attempt to put an end to the commune. Jill, high on heroin, burns to death. Though Harry is initially disturbed, the nihilistic Skeeter convinces him to forget about it; Harry nonetheless worries about the effect it may have on Nelson.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santorini_(novel)"title="Santorini (novel)">
While on station in the Aegean Sea under the guise of a hydrographic survey mission, the crew of Royal Navy electronic intelligence vessel HMS "Ariadne" witnesses two disasters at once, a mysterious strategic bomber crashing into the sea and a large pleasure yacht on fire and sinking. The plane turns out to have been loaded with nuclear weapons, and the survivors rescued from the yacht (who include a wealthy Greek tycoon) appear somehow connected with the plane's destruction. With potential saboteurs aboard, Commander Talbot and the crew of the "Ariadne" must raise the one activated weapon before it can explode, setting off the others by sympathetic detonation and causing the nearby volcano of Santorini to explode in a tremendous eruption which would bring on a devastating tsunami and possibly a worldwide nuclear winter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deer_and_the_Cauldron"title="The Deer and the Cauldron">
The story centres on a witty, sly, illiterate and lazy protagonist, Wei Xiaobao, who was born to a prostitute from a brothel in Yangzhou in the early Qing dynasty (1654–1689). The teenage scamp makes his way from Yangzhou to the capital, Beijing, through a series of adventures. In Beijing, he is kidnapped and taken to the imperial palace, where he impersonates an eunuch. While in the palace, Wei Xiaobao bumbles his way into a fateful encounter with the young Kangxi Emperor, the ruler of the Qing Empire, and develops an unlikely friendship with him.One day, Wei Xiaobao is captured by some martial artists and taken out of the palace. He meets Chen Jinnan, the leader of the Tiandihui ("Heaven and Earth Society"), a secret society aiming to overthrow the Qing dynasty, and becomes Chen's apprentice. He also becomes one of the society's branch leaders and agrees to serve as their spy in the palace. Later, he is taken captive by another group of fighters, who bring him to Mystic Dragon Island, where the sinister Mystic Dragon Cult is based. Unexpectedly, he becomes the cult's White Dragon Marshal by flattering its leader, Hong Antong.Wei Xiaobao makes a number of seemingly impossible achievements through sheer luck, cunning, and the use of unglamorous means such as cheating and deceiving. First, he assists the Kangxi Emperor in ousting the autocratic regent, Obai, from power. Second, he discovers the whereabouts of the missing Shunzhi Emperor, who has been presumed dead, saves him from danger, and helps him reunite with his son, the Kangxi Emperor. Third, he eliminates the Mystic Dragon Cult by stirring up internal conflict, which leads to the cult's self-destruction. Fourth, he weakens the revolt staged by Wu Sangui by bribing Wu's allies to withdraw, thereby allowing Qing imperial forces to crush the rebels easily. Finally, he leads a campaign against the Russian Empire and helps the Qing Empire reach a border treaty with its northern neighbour. Earlier on, he met the Russian regent, Sophia Alekseyevna, and helped her consolidate control over the Russian Empire during an uprising. In the process of accomplishing these tasks, he also recommended talents to serve the Qing government, one of whom is Shi Lang, the admiral who led the successful naval campaign against the Kingdom of Tungning in Taiwan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Ancient_Wonders"title="Seven Ancient Wonders">
Around 4,500 years ago, the capstone upon the summit of the Great Pyramid of Giza absorbed the energy released by the Tartarus Rotation (a monstrous sunspot that occurs every 4,000–4,500 years), and saved the earth from major flooding and catastrophic weather. This capstone was later divided up by Alexander the Great with one piece hidden in a booby-trapped location within each of the other seven wonders of the world. If and when they are reunited and replaced on the capstone during another solar event, they can bring 1,000 years of peace or power for the nation which possesses them.In 2006, seven days before this sunspot is again due, the pieces are still divided, and three teams are trying to reunite them: Two for their own gain; one from Europe (representing the Catholic Church); and the other is CIEF, the Commander-in-Chief's In Extremis Force (an American force covertly representing the power of the Freemasons). The third team is an alliance of a group of 'small nations' called the Alliance of Minnows (consisting of members from Canada, Australia, Ireland, United Arab Emirates, Spain, Jamaica, New Zealand, and later Israel), led by Jack West Jr, trying to reunite the capstone for nobler reasons. This team and the European team each also possess a child—one of the only two people who can read the "Word of Thoth", a special hieroglyphics system used in the booby-traps. (The other person is her twin, Alexander, who is being brainwashed by the Vatican.)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golem's_Eye"title="The Golem's Eye">
Like the rest of the "Bartimaeus Trilogy", "The Golem's Eye" is set in somewhat modern-day London in an alternate history in which magic is commonplace and magicians are an accepted part of society; in fact, most magicians are in positions of power. They comprise the government, and commoners are treated as inferior. The main character is Nathaniel, a magician who works for the government in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. His (unwilling) partner is the wisecracking spirit Bartimaeus. Together they embark on a quest to discover the secret behind the commoners' resistance to magic and the mysterious beast that is stalking the city of London. The beast is revealed to be an invulnerable clay golem created by a coterie of magicians in an attempt to discredit and undermine the government.Two years after the events of the first novel, Nathaniel (alias John Mandrake) serves in London’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, working to eliminate the anti-magician Resistance. Under pressure from his superiors, he summons his former servant, the djinn Bartimaeus. Though furious that Nathaniel has broken their bargain – having sworn never to summon him again in return for the djinn never divulging Nathaniel’s birth name – Bartimaeus agrees to six weeks of service if he will not be sent to the ongoing North American war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemy's_Gate"title="Ptolemy's Gate">
Three years have passed since the magician Nathaniel (otherwise known as John Mandrake) helped prevent an attack on London that would have been cataclysmic for its magicians and commoners. Now an established member of the British Government, he faces unprecedented problems: foreign wars are going badly, Britain's enemies are mounting attacks close to London, and rebellion is fomenting among the commoners. Increasingly distracted with other affairs, Nathaniel is treating Bartimaeus worse than ever.The British Empire is falling apart. Many commoners are unhappy with the current government, though none of the commoners claim responsibility for the status quo. The magician's demons are being assaulted by the children's natural abilities to see and resist the demons. Some commoners advocate slow reform, while others advocate open revolt, while still others say the commoners should learn how to summon spirits of their own to combat those spirits belonging to the magicians. "Ptolemy's Gate" concludes with a council of surviving magicians and important commoners trying to work out a government that is beneficial to everyone.Kitty Jones eventually unearths the reason why humans and spirits are locked into the endless cycle, that humans do not understand the nature of djinni and summon them only as powerful, but dangerous, slaves, not equals. This theory is confirmed by Bartimaeus who states that his greatest master, Ptolemy, was the only human who treated his servants as equals and tried to build a bridge between djinni and humans. However, Ptolemy misguidedly believed many others would follow in his footsteps.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombaiyer_Bombete_(film)"title="Bombaiyer Bombete (film)">
Lalmohan Ganguly, alias Jatayu − Friend of Feluda − gets invited to Mumbai (previously Bombay) to watch the shooting of a film based on a novel written by him, "Bombaiyer Bombete". His old friend of Garpar road, Pulak Ghoshal (Paran Bandyopadhyay), is the director. Feluda and Topshe accompany him.One day prior to the journey, a mysterious film producer named Sanyal visits Jatayu and conveys that he intends to make a film on the same novel on which Pulok Ghoshal is making a film. Jatayu tells him that the novel is sold, and thus Sanyal leaves. However, Sanyal requests him to handle a packet to one of his allies at the Mumbai airport, to which Jatayu agrees.Once in Mumbai, a man comes to pick up the parcel (Rajatava Dutta), and by mistake, Jatayu gives him another parcel, which contained a copy of his novel. The man goes to a multistory building and gets attacked in the elevator by another man. He kills the assassin, and drops a piece of paper near the body. Feluda and team check in a hotel, where they are told by Pulak about the murder, and the trio meet inspector Patwardhan (Anjan Srivastav).Inspector Patwardhan tells them that a necklace of Nana Sahib has been stolen from Nepal and that it may be smuggled in India by unknown smugglers. Next day at the beach, Feluda finds out through a newspaper clipping that the piece of paper contained Jatayu's description. The trio next meet the producer of the film Mr. Gorey (Ashish Vidyarthi). Pulak Ghoshal the director further introduces them to Victor Perumal (Rajesh Sharma), a martial artist from Japan, who is the stunt coordinator for the film.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandingo_(novel)"title="Mandingo (novel)">
"Mandingo" takes place in 1832 on the fictional plantation Falconhurst, located close to Tombigbee River near Benson, Alabama. Warren Maxwell is the elderly and infirm owner of Falconhurst and he lives there with his 19-year-old son, Hammond. Falconhurst is a slave-breeding plantation where slaves are encouraged to mate and produce children ("suckers"). Because of the nature of the plantation, the slaves are well fed, not overworked, and rarely punished in a brutal manner. However, the slaves are treated as animals to be utilized as the Maxwells wish. Warren Maxwell, for example, sleeps with his feet against a naked slave to drain his rheumatism.Although Hammond keeps a "bed-wench" for sexual satisfaction, his father wishes him to marry and produce a pure white heir. Hammond is skeptical and is not sexually attracted to white women. Despite his misgivings, he travels to his Cousin Beatrix's plantation, Crowfoot, and there meets his 16-year-old cousin, Blanche. He asks Blanche's father, Major Woodford, permission to marry her within four hours of meeting her. After receiving the Major's permission, Hammond and Charles Woodford, Blanche's brother, travel to the Coign plantation where Hammond purchases a "fightin' nigger", Ganymede (aka Mede), and a young, female slave named Ellen. Later, Hammond reveals his love for Ellen, despite his intentions to wed Blanche.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Families_Are_Psychotic"title="All Families Are Psychotic">
The novel is the tale of the Drummond family from Vancouver gathering together to watch Sarah Drummond's space shuttle blast off at the Kennedy Space Center. The Drummonds are a group of misfits with a wide array of personal foibles and intricacies. The novel's plot is the tale of events that reunite the Drummond family after many years of estrangement.Several plot points of the book include geriatric HIV, armed robbery, death in Walt Disney World, pharmaceutical drug lords, black market baby sales, Daytona Beach, and suicide attempts.Early in the book the men of the family travel to nearby Walt Disney World where they receive a package destined for the Bahamas containing a letter written by Prince William stolen from Princess Diana's casket. The men start to travel to the Bahamas to deliver their package, but everything and anything happens to them on the way.The novel is told in a similar style to "Miss Wyoming", with many plot flashbacks. However, the focus in this novel is on the temporally linear plot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Country_for_Old_Men_(novel)"title="No Country for Old Men (novel)">
The plot follows the interweaving paths of the three central characters (Llewelyn Moss, Anton Chigurh, and Ed Tom Bell) set in motion by events related to a drug deal gone bad near the Mexican–American border in remote Terrell County in south-west Texas.In 1980, while hunting pronghorns, Llewelyn Moss stumbles across the aftermath of a drug deal gone awry that has left everyone dead, save a sole badly wounded Mexican who pleads with Moss for water. Moss responds that he does not have any and searches the rest of the vehicles, finding a truck full of heroin. He searches for the "last man standing" and finds him dead some distance off under a tree with a satchel containing $2.4 million in cash. He takes the money and returns home. Later, however, feeling remorse for leaving the wounded man and simultaneously desiring to know more of the circumstances surrounding the deal gone wrong and the money, he returns to the scene with a jug of water, only to find that the wounded man had since been shot and killed. When Moss looks back to his truck parked on the ridge overlooking the valley, another truck is there. After being seen, he tries to run, which sparks a tense chase through a desert valley. This is the beginning of a hunt for Moss that stretches for most of the remaining novel. After escaping from his pursuers, Moss sends his wife, Carla Jean, to her grandmother in Odessa, Texas, while he leaves his home with the money.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trials_of_Death"title="Trials of Death">
Darren Shan is about to take the Trials of Initiation, a series of tests that vampires were forced to take part in during years gone by, to prove himself to the Princes. Currently, it is only used for vampires who want to become a general, or for those who wish to demonstrate their strength. However, Darren Shan is required to endure the trials to earn the respect of the entire vampire race for his mentor Mr. Crepsley's 'impulsive' decision to turn him. Darren is mostly trained by the games master of the Mountain, Vanez Blaze. For the first trial, he must escape from a maze that is filling with waterwhilst dragging a stone weighing half of his body weight. The second trial Darren must complete is The Path of Needles, a barefoot journey through one of the mountains many caverns littered with stalagmites and stalactites, all of which are razor sharp and could fall at any second. Luck is on Darren's side as the Festival of the Undead takes place right after his second trial. During this three-day period no official business can take place meaning he gets a five-day rest before his next trial. Suffering from a lot of cuts, notably on his hands and back, he finds it hard to enjoy the festival. A veteran vampire and Larten Crepsley's mentor, Seba Nile, asks to meet with him later as he has a cure for his discomfort. They go to a cavern deep inside the mountain which is covered in spider webs and Darren soon realizes that it is full of hundreds of thousands of spiders. Seba breaks up the cobwebs and applies them to Darren's cuts which he says helped immediately.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mark_(novel)"title="The Mark (novel)">
His Excellency Global Community Potentate Nicolae Carpathia has been resurrected and indwelt by Satan himself. He plans to remodel his offices and add two floors to his palace, including a glass ceiling. He also demands that the people of the Global Community (GC) worship him. Statues of himself are erected for worship. He introduces Viv Ivins to the senior staff and tells them of the loyalty mark program. The Antichrist declares that every single person on earth must receive his mark of loyalty and worship his image or lose their head to the loyalty enforcement facilitator. David Hassid finally finds out that his fiancée Annie Christopher has been killed by lightning called down by GC Supreme Commander and False Prophet Leon Fortunato. David passes out in the heat after the "funeral" while looking for Annie. He awakes to find himself tended by Hannah Palemoon, a nurse and a believer. She is added to their ranks and helps to plan their escape before the mark.Albie and Rayford Steele run across Steve Plank, under the alias Pinkerton Stephens, at Boulder, CO, where Hattie has been taken. Steve tells them his conversion story; he became a believer during the Wrath of the Lamb Earthquake, surviving but losing much of his body. He now wears prosthetic body parts and uses a wheelchair. The three then carry out the incredible rescue of Hattie Durham, who finally becomes a believer. Before they rescue her, she tries to hang herself in her room.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rising_(LaHaye_novel)"title="The Rising (LaHaye novel)">
"The Rising" is Prequel 1 of 3 in the books leading up to the events mentioned in "Left Behind" itself. It focuses 32 years before the main "Left Behind" series starts.Marilena Carpathia has only one dream: to be a mother. So when a mysterious clairvoyant promises the fulfillment of this dream, Marilena does not hesitate. Through genetic engineering and the power of the Prince of Darkness himself, Marilena is about to become a chosen vessel, an exact contrary to the Virgin Mary, one who will unknowingly give birth to the greatest evil the world has ever known.Halfway around the world, God's plans are subtly being carried out too. Young Ray Steele is determined to avoid one day taking over the family business. Instead, Ray sets his heart on becoming a pilot.Soon Carpathia and Steele's lives will intersect. And good and evil will clash in an explosion that will shake the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterland_(novel)"title="Waterland (novel)">
Tom Crick, fifty-two years old, has been history master for some thirty years in a secondary school in Greenwich. As the world sets its clocks according to Greenwich Mean Time, this is a place where time begins. Tom has been married to Mary for as long as he has been teaching, but the couple have no children. The students in Tom's school have grown increasingly scientifically oriented, and the headmaster, a physicist, has little sympathy for Tom's subject. One of Tom's students, Price, questions the relevance of learning about historical events. The youth's scepticism causes Tom to change his teaching approach to telling tales drawn from his own recollection. By doing so, he makes himself a part of the history he is teaching, relating his tales to local history and genealogy. The headmaster, Lewis, tries to entice Tom into taking an early retirement. Tom resists this because his leaving would mean that the History Department would cease to exist and would be combined with the broader area of General Studies. Tom's wife is arrested for snatching a baby. The publicity that attends her arrest reflects badly on the school, and Tom is told that he now must retire. In response, he uses his impending forced retirement as an excuse to recount a story to his students. The pivot of "Waterland" focuses on both the past in 1943, and the present time thirty years after – all related through the eyes of Tom as an adolescent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangling_Man"title="Dangling Man">
Written in diary format, the story centers on the life of an unemployed young man named Joseph, his relationships with his wife and friends, and his frustrations with living in Chicago and waiting to be drafted. His diary serves as a philosophical confessional for his musings. It ends with his entrance into the army during World War II, and a hope that the regimentation of army life will relieve his suffering. Along with Bellow's second novel "The Victim", it is considered his "apprentice" work.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_the_Old_Breed"title="With the Old Breed">
Sledge's memoir gives a firsthand perspective on the Pacific Theatre. His memoir is a front-line account of infantry combat in the Pacific War. It brings the reader into the island hopping, the jungle heat and rain, the filth and malaise, the fear of potential banzai attacks, and the hopelessness and loss of humanity that characterized the campaign in the Pacific. Sledge wrote starkly of the brutality displayed by Japanese soldiers during the battles and of the hatred that both sides harbored for each other. In Sledge's words, "This was a brutish, primitive hatred, as characteristic of the horror of war in the Pacific as the palm trees and the islands."Sledge describes one instance in which he and a comrade came across the mutilated bodies of three Marines, butchered and with their severed genitals inserted into their mouths. He also describes the behavior of some Marines towards dead Japanese, including the removal of gold teeth from Japanese corpses (including, in one case, from a severely wounded but still living Japanese soldier), as well as other macabre trophy-taking. He details the process and mechanisms that slowly strip away a combat infantryman's humanity and compassion, in a manner accessible for a general audience.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_of_the_Prophet"title="Rose of the Prophet">
The Rose of the Prophet series is set in Sularin, a fictional world ruled by a slate of twenty gods, each a facet of the central god, Sul. In the normal course of events, common to fantasy literature, the values of the gods balance each other out; however, as the series begins, the gods have turned away from the Sul and the world is in peril of falling apart. Each god is worshipped by people on the mortal realm and their strength corresponds with the strength and faith of their people. At the start of the series, each god and their foil rule over certain areas in the mortal realm.One god in particular, Quar, the god of city dwellers in a Middle Eastern style land, has decided to move to seize more and more power. Akhran, the foil of Quar, learns of Quar's ambitions and warns the rest of the gods because upsetting the balance will affect them all. The other gods mostly ignore him, unconcerned because Quar's mortal domain is far away from their own. Akhran does not have the safety of distance and decides to take his own precautions and orders the djinns of the Sheiks of the two largest nomadic tribes to marry off their children to unite the tribes. Unfortunately for all involved, the two largest tribes have had years upon years of animosity and hate each other with a passion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victim_(novel)"title="The Victim (novel)">
Asa Leventhal's wife Mary has left the city for a few weeks in order to help her elderly mother move from Baltimore to her old family home in the South. While she is away, Leventhal must take of many tasks of caring for himself which his wife would ordinarily undertake for him. The action of the story begins when Leventhal is at his job as a copy-editor and receives a frantic phone call from his sister-in-law. She tells him that his nephew is terribly ill and that she desperately needs his assistance. During their conversation we learn that Asa's brother Max is a negligent husband and father who has practically abandoned his wife and two sons for itinerant work in Texas. His family subsists on the money he sends to them.On his way to his brother's apartment, Leventhal reflects on the annoyance of being disturbed at work and the shameful treatment which Max is visiting upon his young family. But these reflections quickly take on a tone of self-reproach as Leventhal briefly admits to himself that he has allowed his obligation to this extended family to lapse inexcusably. Throughout the novel, Leventhal flirts with the possibility of widening his arc of responsibility to include humans other than himself and his wife. Usually, however, he finds a way to preserve his positive image of himself and to shirk responsibility for others.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_or_Die"title="Double or Die">
The story's prologue is set in Highgate Cemetery, where Professor Alexis Fairburn, an Eton beak (Professor), is tracing a tombstone when he is kidnapped by Wolfgang and Ludwig Smith. Fairburn manages to leave the piece of paper with which he was tracing. The story itself starts with young James Bond and his friend, Perry Mandeville (leader of the Danger Society), reminiscing the previous day's events.Out of the blue, a letter to Pritpal from Fairburn comes, regarding Fairburn's resignation from Eton. To House Master Codrose and Headmaster Elliot, the "mistakes" are due to Fairburn's scatterbrained personality and eccentricity, but Pritpal soon realises that the mistakes were there for a reason. James and Pritpal work towards trying to decipher them - the first of them are easy - some wrong names in the letter (Luc Olivier and Speccy Stevens) translate into "Solve seven cryptic clues."However, they have to get several photographs of the letter, which has been confiscated by Cecil Codrose, before they can continue. Eventually, they get it and continue. They determine from the second clue that they have to solve the puzzle of a certain crossword in the next "The Times" and eventually determine that "Gordian Knot" means that they must meet a man nicknamed "Gordius," who is coming to Pritpal's next Crossword Society meeting. James decides to come along to the meeting, but all the man does is play a game of Hearts, during which James wins five pounds. The man gives his name as Ivar Peterson, who is a professor at Cambridge University. However, James and Pritpal do not believe him. James arranges with Perry to go to Cambridge University during Perry's father's birthday leave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evening's_Empire"title="Evening's Empire">
The book follows the travels of a man to the small town of Evening, Oregon, where his beloved wife was killed in a freak accident the year before. The novel relies heavily on surrealism and a lolling suspense that is never realized in any sort of actual climax. Nonetheless, the book retains a small following of fans that greatly admire its "mature" style and few reviewers have considered it a poor effort.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_About_Diamonds"title="The Truth About Diamonds">
The novel tells the story of Chloe Parker, a woman in her early 20s who had been adopted at the age of seven by a music superstar and his wife, and who now associates with Hollywood celebrities. What had followed was a wild childhood distinguished by parties with movie stars and rock idols, run-ins with the press and the police, and a subsequent stint in rehab.When Chloe shoots to instant fame as a spokesmodel for a national ad campaign, her long-lost birth father appears out of nowhere, her best friend betrays her, and she has to struggle to keep it all together—her sobriety, her friendships, and her integrity—despite the betrayals of those around her. Ultimately, Chloe comes spectacularly into her own, achieving stardom in her own right and finding true love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roseanna_(novel)"title="Roseanna (novel)">
A young woman is found dead in the Göta Canal, molested and murdered. The case is almost instantly cold: nobody can identify her and where and by whom she was killed. Then a stroke of luck: through Interpol her identity is ascertained; she is Roseanna McGraw, an American tourist who was taking a boat trip in southern Sweden. A meticulous investigation determines that she was murdered aboard the boat by a fellow passenger. Evidence is lacking, but after the suspect is observed at length, a sting operation of questionable ethical status (Beck's own opinion) results in the suspect, a sexual deviant, attacking a female police officer and being arrested.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enchanted_Castle"title="The Enchanted Castle">
The enchanted castle of the title is a country estate in the West Country seen through the eyes of three children, Jerry, Jimmy, and Kathy, who discover it while exploring during the school holidays. The lake, groves and marble statues, with white towers and turrets in the distance, make a fairy-tale setting, and then in the middle of the maze in the rose garden, they find a sleeping fairy-tale princess.The "princess" tells them that the castle is full of magic, and they almost believe her. She shows them the treasures of the castle, including a magic ring she says is a ring of invisibility, but when it actually turns her invisible she panics and admits that she is the housekeeper's niece, Mabel, and was just play-acting.The children soon find that the ring has other magical powers such as making the "Ugly-Wugglies" (Guy Fawkes style dummies they had made to swell the audience at one of their play-performances) come to life. They eventually discover that the ring is actually granting their own wishes, and that the disturbing results stem from their failure to specify those wishes precisely."The Enchanted Castle" was written for both children and adults. It combines descriptions of the imaginative play of children, reminiscent of "The Story of the Treasure Seekers", with a magic more muted than in her major fantasies such as "The Story of the Amulet".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_(Cook_novel)"title="Invasion (Cook novel)">
From the icy vastness of outer space, an alien virus arrives on earth contained in a tiny black disk. Those who pick up the disk are infected by the virus which spreads rapidly with flu like symptoms. The first human to pick up the disk and be infected is Beau Stark, an ambitious 21-year-old young man. The virus starts by giving him flu like symptoms but within a few hours he is not only free of the symptoms but also infused with new energy and power. His girlfriend Cassy notices major personality changes and an obsession with environment. The man who was all for banning big dogs in the city suddenly acquires one and proceeds to infest it. The virus apparently infects all life forms on earth. Meanwhile, the first invasion &amp; infestation having succeeded the disk sends a signal, inviting millions more disks to come. Those who handle the disks receive a sting, soon followed by flu-like symptoms and ending in what could be called "zombie assimilation" into an alien collective consciousness with Beau being the leader.Cassy however shares her fears of Beau's changing personality with their mutual friend and her ex-boyfriend Pitt, who is a medical student and concerned after witnessing a sudden upsurge in deaths of people, suffering from chronic diseases such as diabetes. He takes Cassy to meet his senior Dr. Shiela who is also concerned about the preventable and unexplained deaths and surging number of flu cases. Cassy also tells them about personality changes reported in some people by one of her students, Jonathan. Jonathan introduces the group to his parents Nancy &amp; Eugene, a virologist and a physicist. Jesse, a cop, also comes in contact with the group when he accompanies a colleague suffering sudden seizures to the hospital.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chaos_(novel)"title="Operation Chaos (novel)">
In an alternate world, where the existence of God has been scientifically proven and magic has been harnessed for the practical needs of the adept by the degaussing of cold iron, the United States is part of an alternative Second World War in which the enemy is not Germany but a resurgent Islamic Caliphate, which has invaded the United States. Werewolf Steven Matuchek and witch Virginia Graylock meet on a military mission to stop the invading Islamic army from unleashing a secret superweapon, a genie released from a bottle in which it had been sealed by King Solomon. Together, they fight against the demon and incidentally fall in love with each other. After the end of the war (an Allied victory as in our World War II, but US forces remain in occupation of former enemy lands for much longer) the two of them continue and deepen their liaison and have various additional adventures (which were originally published as a series of independent stories). Among other things they stop an elemental summoned as a student prank which had gone amok, confront a succubus/incubus on their honeymoon, and enter the Hell dimension to save their daughter (who has been kidnapped and taken there, with a changeling left in her crib in her place).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Nation"title="Monster Nation">
The Colorado Army National Guard is called in to investigate a strange epidemic at ADX Florence. Its soldiers struggle to contain the disease before it overruns the United States, and search for a mysterious woman who may be vital to the solution.The novel begins with a mysterious woman in California being bitten on the street by a random man who walks up to her. She runs into the nearest establishment, an oxygen bar and proceeds to get high while waiting for the police to show up. The police arrive and take her to the hospital where a zombie outbreak is occurring. Although restrained, she manages to convince a nurse to let her go, who is then consumed by zombies.While this is occurring, we are also introduced to two additional characters, Captain Bannerman Clark and Dick Walters. Captain Bannerman Clark is in the Colorado Army National Guard and is the Rapid Assessment and Initial Detection Officer in Charge, making him the always ready first man on the scene of any major disaster, trained to get the best intelligence on the situation and report to others who will take over. He is called away from enjoying a steak dinner alone to investigate an outbreak of what is believed to be a biological weapon at a prison in Colorado which spread from the prisoners to the guards, causing them to become perceived cannibals. The warden of the prison had travelled to California and had succumbed to the biological agent there, biting and infecting a young woman. Clark then goes to California to assess the damage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Confusions_of_Young_Törless"title="The Confusions of Young Törless">
Musil's novel is ostensibly a "Bildungsroman", a story of a young disoriented man searching for moral values in society and their meaning for him.The expressionistic novel, based on Musil's personal experiences at a boarding school in Hranice (in Austria-Hungary, now in the Czech Republic) was written according to Musil "because of boredom". In later life, however, Musil denied that the novel was about youthful experiences of his own. Due to its explicit sexual content, the novel at first caused a scandal among the reading public and the authorities of Austria-Hungary.Later, various prefigurings of Fascism were identified in the text, including the characters of Beineberg and Reiting, who seem to be orderly pupils by day but shamelessly abuse their classmate psychologically, physically and sexually by night.In 1966, the German director Volker Schlöndorff made the film "Der junge Törless" based on the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Island_(Wellington_novel)"title="Monster Island (Wellington novel)">
"Monster Island" takes place in Manhattan one month after New York City has been completely overrun by the undead.A former UN employee named Dekalb, whose daughter is being held by a warlord in Somalia in exchange for his assistance, enters the zombie-infested island with a band of East African child soldiers in order to retrieve precious AIDS medication for the warlord. After surviving numerous zombie attacks, the group encounters Gary Fleck, an undead medical student who has managed to retain a high level of consciousness and self-control unlike other zombies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_the_Mews"title="Murder in the Mews">
## Murder in the Mews.Japp asks Poirot to join him at a house in Bardsley Garden Mews where a Mrs Barbara Allen shot herself the previous evening – Guy Fawkes Night – the moment of death being disguised by the noise of fireworks. Once there, they find that the doctor thinks there is something strange about the death of the fine lady, a young widow. Mrs Allen was found by a housemate, Miss Jane Plenderleith, who had been away in the country the previous night. The victim was locked in her room and was shot through the head with an automatic, the weapon being found in her hand. However, the doctor points out that the gun is in her right hand while the wound is above the left ear – an impossible position to shoot with the right hand. It looks as if this is a murder made to look like suicide – and by an unusually incompetent murderer with a very low estimation of the intelligence of police investigators. They interview Miss Plenderleith and find out that Mrs Allen was engaged to be married to Charles Laverton-West, an up-and-coming young MP but, although the pistol was the dead lady's, she cannot think of a reason why she should use it to commit suicide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawing_Blood"title="Drawing Blood">
The novel concerns Trevor McGee, a comic book artist and sole survivor of a family murder-suicide, and Zachary Bosch, a bisexual hacker, and their arrival at McGee's old family home in Missing Mile, North Carolina, a fictional town featured in Brite's previous novel, "Lost Souls".Twenty-five-year-old Trevor McGee is haunted by an event in his past in which his underground artist father, Bobby, brutally murdered Trevor's mother and younger brother with a hammer before killing himself, leaving Trevor alive. Young Trevor was placed in an unhappy state home, where he discovered his own talent for drawing but remained alone, obsessed with the question of why he was allowed to live. Now as an adult, he travels back to Missing Mile, North Carolina, to search for answers in the abandoned house where the murders took place.In New Orleans, Zachary Bosch is a nineteen-year-old computer hacker on the run from the law after his online misdeeds attract the notice of the FBI. Traveling through the South, he too finds himself in Missing Mile, where he meets and falls in love with Trevor. The two young men slowly become more entwined, even as Zach starts to questions Trevor's grip on reality. Their love affair culminates when one night, while tripping on psilocybin mushrooms, Trevor has an out-of-body experience where he is propelled into the past and speaks to his father on the night of the murders. He realizes that somehow the presence of his adult self in the past caused his father to spare the life of five-year-old Trevor, meaning that he is the cause of his own endless quest. Upon waking, Trevor attempts to murder Zach, but Zach manages to talk him down until Trevor breaks his own drawing hand in order to keep himself from harming Zach.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burial_at_Thebes"title="The Burial at Thebes">
Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus King of Thebes, Greece, learns that her two brothers Polyneices and Eteocles have killed each other fighting on different sides of a war. Creon, Antigone's uncle and newly appointed King of Thebes, buries Eteocles, who fought on the Theban side of the war, hailing him as a great hero. He refuses to bury Polyneices, proclaiming that any who attempt to defy his wishes will be made an example of, on the grounds that he was a 'traitor' fighting on the opposing side in the war. The play opens with Antigone and her sister Ismene discussing what action to take in response to Creon's new law against the burial of their brother. Antigone is reactive, arguing that Creon is breaching Divine Law by denying burial to Polyneices. Despite Ismene's pleading, Antigone heads off alone to enact the burial rites both for her own glory and for the preservation of her brother's soul.Antigone is caught defying her uncle's orders, and is punished severely despite being engaged to Creon's son Haemon. She is sealed within a tomb and left to die. After a visit from the oracle Tiresias warning of the consequences, Creon eventually repents, but by then she has killed herself and is followed in death by Creon's own son and wife, both of whom commit suicide. Creon's isolation is complete and he ends the play a broken and lonely man.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myron_(novel)"title="Myron (novel)">
Myra Breckinridge, the transsexual who terrorized Hollywood with dildo-rape and lesbianism, has transformed back into her former self, the literally and figuratively castrated Myron.One night, while watching the movie "Siren of Babylon" on the late show, he/she is transported to the set of the 1948 film through the television. It's Myra's dream come true, and Myron's nightmare. As Myron tries to adapt to life inside an endlessly repeating B-movie, Myra slowly starts creeping her way back into Myron's head, making a connection with a gay member of the community to obtain dresses and wigs. Her lapses back into Myron's personality are strongly encouraged by a character slyly based on Norman Mailer (though at one point he drunkenly hits on Myra), while most of the others on the set seem to prefer Myra to Myron. She attempts to castrate a crew member, then tries to castrate herself and partially succeeds in acquiring silicone implants. While Myron desperately searches for a way off the set (running into Richard Nixon along the way, who is considering taking up residence in "Siren of Babylon" in order to escape the Watergate hearings), Myra wants to stay permanently.Eventually, Myra/Myron trades places with Maria Montez, the star of the film. Myra is ecstatic and Myron disappears entirely from the narrative for a time. But when Montez, inhabited by Myra, coincidentally meets the 1948 Myron (who at this point is a child, possessed by the soul of a perplexed Maria Montez) their respective personalities are restored to their original bodies, returning Myron at once to his living room in 1970s California. The changes wrought by Myra's running amok on the set of "Siren of Babylon" continue to influence the present and the book ends with a former cowboy actor in the film, now a transsexual, being elected Republican governor of Arizona.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_in_Amber"title="Dragonfly in Amber">
## Scotland, 1968.Claire Randall has returned to her own time, where she has been living for 20 years with her husband Frank. Following his death, she brings her daughter, Brianna, to the home of the Randalls' old friend, Reverend Reginald Wakefield. There, Claire hopes the Reverend's adopted son, Roger, can help her discover what happened to the men of Lallybroch after the Battle of Culloden. Roger, using his Oxford credentials to obtain information, finds proof that the men of Lallybroch returned home safely. He accompanies Claire and Brianna to an old churchyard, looking for the grave of Jonathan Randall, Frank's ancestor, but also finds Jamie Fraser's gravestone: it is part of a "marriage stone", showing Claire's name but no date. Claire reveals Brianna's true paternity to her and Roger. Brianna angrily denies her mother's story, but Roger is fascinated, and Claire recounts her time after the events of "Outlander".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hart's_Hope"title="Hart's Hope">
"Hart's Hope" begins by describing the state of Burland: ruled by tyrannical king Nasilee, damaged young princess Asineth, and bloody martial law. While all four gods dislike Nasilee, only the god named God takes action, by raising up the young Count of Traffing, Palicrovol, to overthrow the King. He is assisted by Zymas, Nasilee's former right-hand man and general. Palicrovol kills the king and, to cement his new rule, marries and publicly rapes the twelve-year-old Asineth. He then sends her away with his ally Sleeve, an albino wizard. He then sends for the Flower Princess, whose nearly unpronounceable name (Enziquelvinisensee Evelvenin) is rarely used and whose hand he secured during his bid for power; she is the most beautiful woman in the world, because she will never lie. These events are described by the narrator of the story, who is addressing Palicrovol directly and begging him to "no longer seek the death of the boy Orem"; despite the use of the pronoun "I", the narrator's identity is withheld from the reader.Unknown to Palicrovol, Asineth has conceived, and bears the child for a ten-month term—noted with consternation by a local priestess of the Sister. Sleeve, who being a man knows nothing about the customs of the Sisters, begins to research this phenomenon; unbeknownst to him, Asineth is duplicating his reading and, being a woman, understands a great deal more of it. She employs the most terrible sacrifice possible: her own daughter. Made immensely powerful by this hateful decision, she overthrows the gods and the city of Hart's Hope, setting Palicrovol in place as a humiliated (and continually tormented) puppet ruler. She steals the Flower Princess's face and body and keeps Sleeve, Zymas and the Flower Princess as her personal pets in altered forms, along with her collection of enslaved gods—the Hart a pile of bones beneath the castle, the god named God a blind slave scrubbing floors, and the Sweet Sisters sundered and sold out as whores. She renames herself Queen Beauty and rules with omnipotent power from the capital city, while all her toys—Palicrovol, Sleeve, Zymas and the Princess—are kept immortal for three hundred years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autobiography_of_an_Ex-Colored_Man"title="The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man">
The novel begins with a frame tale in which the unnamed narrator describes the narrative that follows as "the great secret of my life." The narrator notes that he is taking a substantial risk by composing the narrative, but that it is one he feels compelled to record, regardless. The narrator also chooses to withhold the name of the small Georgia town where his narrative begins, as there are still living residents of the town who might be able to connect him to the narrative.Throughout the novel, the adult narrator from the frame interjects into the text to offer reflective commentary into the events of the narrative.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Sleep"title="Hot Sleep">
The book follows Jason Worthing, also known as Jazz, who is a boy growing up on Capitol, the capital planet of the Empire. Jas has "the swipe", which is a genetic trait that allows for telepathy. The swipe is feared in the Empire, so those who possess it are executed. After being found out as a swipe, Jas tries to escape, which leads to his capture by Abner Doon, who helps him rise to prominence as a space pilot. Eventually, Abner sends Jason away as the head of a colony so that the swipe would become more widespread, but when his ship reaches the planet he is attacked, and the memories of all but one of the 333 colonists are destroyed and two-thirds of the colonist are killed or damaged beyond awakening. Jason prevails, however, leading to the survival of the colony, which he visits every several years, being on Somec the rest of the time. Eventually, Abner Doon comes and sees how Jason has done, and after Doon leaves, Jason takes his ship to the bottom of the ocean.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysteries_of_Udolpho"title="The Mysteries of Udolpho">
"The Mysteries of Udolpho" is a quintessential Gothic romance, replete with incidents of physical and psychological terror: remote crumbling castles, seemingly supernatural events, a brooding, scheming villain and a persecuted heroine.Modern editors note that only about a third of the novel is set in the eponymous Gothic castle, while tone and style vary markedly between sections of the work, to which Radcliffe added extended descriptions of exotic landscapes in the Pyrenees and Apennines, and of Venice, none of which she had visited. For details she relied on travel books, which led her to make several anachronisms. The novel, set in 1584 in Southern France and Northern Italy, explores the plight of Emily St. Aubert, a young French woman orphaned by the death of her father. She is imprisoned in Castle Udolpho by Signor Montoni, an Italian brigand who has married her aunt and guardian Madame Cheron. He and others frustrate Emily's romance with the dashing Valancourt. Emily also investigates a relationship between her father and the Marchioness de Villeroi, and its connection to Castle Udolpho.Emily St. Aubert is the only child of a landed rural family whose fortunes are in decline. Emily and her father share a notably close bond in a shared appreciation for nature. They grow still closer after her mother's death from illness. She accompanies him on a journey from their native Gascony, through the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean coast of Roussillon, over many mountainous landscapes. During the journey, they encounter Valancourt, a handsome man who also feels an almost mystical kinship with the natural world. Emily and Valancourt fall in love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fairy_Tale_of_New_York"title="A Fairy Tale of New York">
Cornelius Christian is an American expatriate who arrives back in his native New York City from Ireland. His wife became ill and died aboard ship, and, with limited resources, he agrees to take a job in a funeral home owned by Clarence Vine, a wealthy businessman and mortician, in order to pay for his wife's funeral and interment. As a New York native originally from the Bronx he meets people from his past, gets himself into difficult situations with his landlady, his first girlfriend, Charlotte, his clients, dead and alive, and his co-workers at the Funeral Home and his boss. In one episode he meets Fanny Sourpuss whose husband has just died. She is a very rich widow who begins an on-off relationship with Cornelius. After a while he tries his hand at preparing corpses himself, and his first attempt is greeted with horror by the dead man's widow who, making a scene, causes him to insult her and storm off, presuming that he is fired. Cornelius, is, however, very adept at fisticuffs, and deals expeditiously with Fanny's ex-husband (who is stalking her), her doorman, and in situations such as when he is lured into a clip joint by a prostitute and has to fight his way out. Eventually this predilection for violence catches up with him. He runs into Charlotte, his first girlfriend. He finds another job with a spark plug manufacturer named Mott who hires Cornelius to work in his idea room where Cornelius makes a nuisance of himself. Fanny, whom he seems to love, has developed cancer, and takes a train to Minnesota (presumably to the Mayo Clinic).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Break_with_Charity"title="A Break with Charity">
The story begins with a girl named Susanna English. She is the second child of three, Mary and her brother at sea, William. She desperately wants to join an inner circle of girls who meet every night at the Reverend's house. The leader of the girls, Ann Putnam, is going to set off a torrent of false accusations leading to the imprisonment of innocent people in Salem. She names people her mother disliked as witches, and the elders of Salem believe them. Ann tells Susanna everything about their plan, but if Susanna tells anyone, Ann will name Susanna's parents as witches. Susanna must choose between keeping quiet and breaking charity (that is, telling tales), risking her family being named as witches. Later on, the afflicted girls accuse Susanna's mother and father of being witches, even though she told no one about what Ann said to her. Susanna then starts to believe in witches until her future husband, Johnathon gets her to meet an accused witch so she can see they are fake. She finally tells Joseph, Ann's uncle, leader of the "non-witch 'believers" what she knows, and together, they put a stop to it with help from powerful people (like magistrates). Fourteen years later she returns to hear Ann Putnam apologize for all the innocent people imprisoned, or hanged. This story is based on true happenings of 1692.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_People"title="The Secret People">
The Sahara is being flooded to create a new sea when the protagonist of the novel, Mark Sunnet, crashes his private rocket plane into an island of what is currently little more than a large lake. He soon finds himself and companion Margaret Lawn, and a stray cat that they call Bast, sucked into a cavern in which they are promptly captured by mysterious pygmies.The diet of little people is centred on large fungi. The captives speculate that stories that reached the surface of the little people and their giant mushrooms may have led to the myth of gnomes.Sunnet finds that a tiered community has evolved in the caverns, the pygmies inhabiting a large underground collection of natural and artificial caverns and tunnels, and the captured humans are deliberately isolated in a subsection of the caverns. He is also surprised to learn that family life exists there. "Natives", children of captured humans who were born underground and lived all their lives in the caverns are generally happy with their life and have no wish to escape.By virtue of being accompanied by Bast, the pygmies consider Margaret to be divine and isolate her in a separate area of the caverns.Most of the captured humans wish to escape by trying two different methods. One by tunneling up at an angle to try to break through to the surface and another horizontally in the hope of intersecting a pygmy tunnel or cavern from which to make their way to the surface.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_(novel)"title="The Girl (novel)">
It tells the story of a nameless girl from rural Minnesota who works in a bar in St. Paul. Clara, a fellow waitress working as a prostitute on the side, takes the girl under her wing as she learns the rudimentaries of love and sex, but also of rape, prostitution, abortion, and domestic violence. Along with the bar-owner Belle and the labor organizer Amelia, Clara and the girl watch their unemployed men self-destruct one by one under the grinding conditions of the Depression. Impregnated by her lover Butch, the girl secretly defies his demand that she get an abortion, hoping that the money from a bank robbery will enable them to get married. However, Butch and three other men are shot and killed during the crime, and the girl, dependent on state assistance during her pregnancy, is forced into a relief maternity home where sterilization after delivery is routine. Amelia rescues the girl before she has her baby, but fails to save Clara from state-mandated electric shock treatments that shatter her health and her sanity. The novel ends with the climactic conjunction of three dramatic events: a mass demonstration demanding "Milk and Iron Pills for Clara," Clara's death scene, and the birth of the girl's baby. The novel closes as an intergenerational community of women vow to "let our voice be heard in the whole city" (130). Link text
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deverry_Cycle"title="Deverry Cycle">
## The Deverry Saga.The first four books have two major plot threads: the quest of the immortal sorcerer Nevyn to fulfill an ancient oath, and a complex plot by a cabal of sorcerers from Bardek to plunge Deverry into war. The past-life flashbacks deal with several of Nevyn's failed attempts to fulfill his oath and with the beginnings of the Time of Troubles, a decades-long period of civil war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Civilization"title="Beyond Civilization">
Within the main body of "Beyond Civilization", each page contains its own chapter-like heading and a few paragraphs exploring the topic of that heading. The book as whole is divided into seven parts:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_Reunion_(novel)"title="Class Reunion (novel)">
The novel is about 43-year-old Dr. Ernst Sebastian, a lawyer who works as an "Untersuchungsrichter" (investigating judge) in the fictional town of Sankt Nikolaus during 1927. One Saturday afternoon a middle-aged man called Franz Adler, who has been arrested for the murder of a prostitute, is brought before him. During the interview—a preliminary hearing during which the two men are alone in Sebastian's office—Sebastian recognizes Adler as his old classmate, who attended the secondary school in Sankt Nikolaus, which was then in Austria-Hungary, for two years when they were both 16 and 17. Adler, however, who appears to him fearful and beaten by life, does not seem to recognize the judge, and Sebastian decides to postpone any private talk with Adler till the following Monday.As it happens, that same Saturday night Sebastian attends a class reunion (the "Abituriententag" of the title) occasioned by the 25th anniversary of his "Matura" (Class of '02), a meeting he knows he will regret going to as it will bring back both a plethora of unpleasant memories and a confrontation with the bourgeois self-satisfaction of his former classmates.That night, Sebastian does not go to sleep. Rather, upset by his chance meeting with Adler and the enervating talk at the class reunion, he sits down at his desk and writes down a confession in shorthand, which on the following morning turns out to be indecipherable to everyone including himself—except to the reader, who can read Sebastian's confession as the middle part of the novel).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax_from_Sarajevo"title="Fax from Sarajevo">
With the beginning of the Bosnian War in early 1992, Ervin Rustemagić, his wife Edina, and children Maja and Edvin have just returned to their home in the Sarajevo suburb of Ilidža after an extended trip to the Netherlands.By April the city is under siege — the Serbs have closed the roads and are killing anyone who tries to escape the Sarajevo area. With he and his family spending every day terrified of the shelling, and often hiding in their basement to avoid the bombs, Rustemagić has to debate the safety of taking his son to the hospital to deal with his high fever.Shortly thereafter, a Serbian tank rumbles through their neighborhood — Rustemagić's home and the SAF offices are destroyed. More than 14,000 pieces of original art were lost in the flames. Barely escaping with the clothes on their backs, Rustemagić and his family first find shelter in a half-destroyed building. The next day they find shelter in an apartment building in Dobrinja.Over the months that follow the Rustemagićs are reduced to living in near-primitive conditions. Broken water pipes lead to days standing in line hoping to fill plastic jugs with water rations. Electricity and cooking fuel are scarce, and children trying scavenge for fuel are the targets of Serbian snipers (who are promised a cash bonus for every kill).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Staircase_(novel)"title="The Staircase (novel)">
Lizzy Ender's father dumps her at a Santa Fe convent after her mother died on the Santa Fe Trail. A Methodist, Lizzy is an outcast in the school who can't comprehend the dedication to Catholicism. She thinks the nuns who pray to Saint Joseph for help to finish their choir loft (which doesn't have a staircase) are crazy. She befriends an unemployed carpenter and suggests he build the staircase. Her classmates are furious as they were waiting for a miracle to occur. The carpenter, named Jose, proceeds to build the staircase in a matter of weeks armed with three simple tools and his faith. After building the staircase, Jose disappears and Lizzy decides to leave the convent to live with her father, who was currently living on a ranch in Texas.This story is based on the real legend of the miracle occurring at the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where an unnamed man (said to be Saint Joseph) built a staircase. The circular staircase made two complete revolutions lacking both nails and a center support.A version of this story was done as the 1998 television movie "The Staircase" starring William Petersen (as Joad), Barbara Hershey (as Mother Madalyn), and Diane Ladd (as Sister Margaret).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Easter"title="Black Easter">
In the first book, a wealthy arms manufacturer, Dr. Baines, comes to a black magician, Theron Ware. Initially Baines tests Ware's credentials by asking for two people to be killed, first the Governor of California, Rogan (Reagan was governor at the time of writing) and then a rival physicist. When this is accomplished to Baines' satisfaction, Baines reveals his real reason: he wishes to release all the demons from Hell on Earth for one night to see what might happen. The book includes a lengthy description of the summoning ritual and a detailed (and as accurate as possible, given the available literature) description of the grotesque figures of the demons as they appear. Tension between white magicians (who appear to have a line of communications with the unfallen host in Heaven) and Ware is woven over the terms and conditions of a magical covenant that is designed to provide for observers and limitations. "Black Easter" ends with Baphomet announcing to the participants that the demons can not be compelled to return to Hell: the war is over and God is dead."The Day After Judgement", which follows in the series, develops and extends the characters from the first book. It suggests that God may not be dead, or that demons may not be inherently self-destructive, as something appears to be restraining the actions of the demons upon Earth. In a lengthy Miltonian speech at the end of the novel, Satan Mekratrig explains that, compared to humans, demons are good, and that if perhaps God has withdrawn Himself, then Satan beyond all others was qualified to take His place and, if anything, would be a more just god. However, the defeat of Satan is complete. He cannot take up this throne and must hand the burning keys to man, as this is the most fell of all his fell damnations. He never wanted to be God at all, and so having won all, all has he lost.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_Mind_of_Mars"title="The Master Mind of Mars">
In this novel Burroughs shifts the focus of the series for the second time, the first having been from early protagonists John Carter and Dejah Thoris to their children after the third book. Now he moves to a completely unrelated hero, Ulysses Paxton, an Earthman like Carter who like him is sent to Mars by looking at the red planet in the sky.On Mars, Paxton is taken in by elderly mad scientist Ras Thavas, the "Master Mind" of the title, who educates him in the ways of Barsoom and bestows on him the Martian name Vad Varo. Ras has perfected techniques of transplanting brains, which he uses to provide rich elderly Martians with youthful new bodies for a profit. Distrustful of his fellow Martians, he trains Paxton as his assistant to perform the same operation on him. But Paxton has fallen in love with Valla Dia, one of Ras' young victims, whose body has been swapped for that of the hag Xaxa, Jeddara (empress) of the city-state of Phundahl. He refuses to operate on Ras until his mentor promises to restore her to her rightful body. A quest for that body ensues, in which Paxton is aided by others of Ras' experimental victims, and in the end he attains the hand of his Valla Dia, who in a happy plot twist turns out to be a princess.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushing_Ice"title="Pushing Ice">
"Pushing Ice" begins in the distant future, where the elected rulers of the "Congress of the Lindblad Ring" gather to decide on a suitable ceremony to honour a woman they consider responsible for the technological advancement and territorial expansion of the future human race, Bella Lind. To explain her role, the chronology is then pushed back to the early days of humanity's crewed exploration of the Solar System, where it is explained that Lind is the captain of the "Rockhopper," a spacecraft used for mining cometary ice. While on a routine mission, Lind is informed that Saturn's moon Janus has deviated from its normal orbit, and is accelerating out of the Solar System. The "Rockhopper," deemed the only ship capable of catching up to Janus, is asked to undertake the task of pursuing the moon, sending back as much information as possible before being forced to turn back by the limitations of fuel and supplies. However, on their approach to the moon, revealed to be a camouflaged alien spacecraft, Lind and her crew are caught in the field of the ship's inertialess drive, causing them to travel farther and faster than expected, and beyond their capacity to return to Earth. Realising their predicament, the crew decide to land on the moon and attempt to survive the flight out of the Solar System, wherever it may take them. Eventually it becomes apparent that the ship is heading towards Spica, a close binary pair in the constellation of Virgo.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Recognitions"title="The Recognitions">
The story loosely follows the life of Wyatt Gwyon, son of a Calvinist minister from rural New England; his mother dies in Spain. He plans to follow his father into the ministry. But he is inspired to become a painter by "The Seven Deadly Sins", Hieronymous Bosch's noted painting which his father owned. Gwyon leaves New England and travels to Europe to study painting. Discouraged by a corrupt critic and frustrated with his career, he moves to New York City.He meets Recktall Brown, a capitalistic collector and dealer of art, who makes a Faustian deal with him. Gwyon is to produce paintings in the style of 15th-century Flemish and Dutch masters (such as Bosch, Hugo van der Goes, and Hans Memling) and forge their signatures. Brown will sell them as newly discovered originals. Gwyon becomes discouraged and returns home to find that his father has converted to Mithraism and is preaching his new ideas to his congregation, whilst steadily losing his mind. Back in New York, Gwyon tries to expose his forgeries. He travels to Spain where he visits the monastery where his mother was buried, works at restoring old paintings, and tries to find himself in a search for authenticity. At the end, he moves on to live his life "deliberately".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_series"title="Tomorrow series">
Ellie Linton goes out camping in the bush for a week with her friends Homer, Lee, Kevin, Corrie, Robyn, and Fiona 'Fi'. They find a way into a large, vegetated sinkhole in a remote area of bush the locals call "Hell", and camp there for the week. During this time they see large numbers of planes flying through the night without lights, and though it is mentioned in conversation the following morning, they think little of it.When they return home they find that all the people are missing and their pets and livestock are dead or dying. They come to realise that Australia has been invaded and their family and friends have been taken prisoner. Avoiding capture by enemy soldiers in their hometown of Wirrawee and picking up one of their school friends Chris, the group return to Hell. After short period of recovery they start making plans to fight back.Over the course of the first three books in the series, the group succeeds in destroying a bridge that leads into Wirrawee, an enemy convoy, several houses that are being used by the enemy as a center of operations, and a nearby strategic harbour. However, Corrie and Chris are killed during this time. After the harbour raid, the surviving members of the group are eventually captured and placed in a maximum security prison in the nearby city of Stratton. During an air-raid by the Royal New Zealand Air Force the group escapes but Robin is killed while doing so. They encounter a downed RNZAF pilot and arrange to be evacuated to New Zealand.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Has_Risen"title="The Wind Has Risen">
The story is divided into a prologue and four chapters:The first person narrator cites from Paul Valéry's poem "Le Cimetière marin" ("The wind has risen; we must try to live") when a strong wind occurs, while Setsuko, a woman he has just met this summer and who resides at the same hotel, is working on a painting. Setsuko announces that her father will soon arrive at the hotel, which will put an end to their walks. After Setsuko's and her father's departure, he returns to his work as a writer which he had abandoned during the time he had spent with her. Autumn has set in, and the protagonist muses how this encounter has changed him.Two years later, the protagonist visits Setsuko, to whom he has become engaged in the meantime, and her father in their suburb home. Her studio has been turned into a sickroom, as Setsuko has fallen ill with tuberculosis. The father has contemplated the idea of sending her to a sanitarium, and is glad when his future son-in-law offers to accompany his daughter. Setsuko, who had felt weak lately, tells her fiancé that thanks to him her will to live has returned. Her words remind him of the line from Valéry's poem. Later, the sanitarium's director, who happens to be an acquaintance of the narrator, examines Setsuko and declares that a stay of one to two years will most likely cure her. Yet in a conversation between the director and the protagonist, it is implied that her condition is far more serious. At the end of the chapter, he and Setsuko take off for the sanitarium. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deenie"title="Deenie">
"Deenie" chronicles the life of 13-year-old Wilmadeene "Deenie" Fenner, whose mother, Thelma, is determined to have her become a model. At the same time, Deenie's 16-year-old sister, Helen, who is academically proficient, is being pushed by Thelma to keep her grades up so that she can eventually become a doctor or a lawyer. One day, Deenie is diagnosed with scoliosis, and is prescribed a body brace to wear for the next four years. At the same time, Helen has fallen in love with Joe, a charming and romantic young gentleman who works for the Fenners' family business, a gas station. Thelma, upset that her plans for her daughters are coming undone, has Joe fired and exhorts Deenie to resume the pursuit of a modeling career once she stops wearing the back brace. Fearful that Helen hates her because Thelma's excuse for letting Joe go was because of the family's doctors' bills, Deenie is astonished to learn that Helen refuses to blame her for Joe's departure, and the sisters close ranks.Though initially upset at having to wear the body brace, Deenie eventually resigns herself to her fate. She finds herself at peace with the idea of not becoming a model, and, inspired by her experience, begins to ponder a future career as an orthopedist, concluding that she never really wanted to be a model anyway. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dweller_on_Two_Planets"title="A Dweller on Two Planets">
In its introduction, Oliver claims that the book had been channeled through him via automatic writing, visions and mental "dictations", by a spirit calling himself Phylos the Thibetan who revealed the story to him over a period of three years, beginning in 1883.Concerning itself with Atlantis, it portrays a first person account of Atlantean culture which had reached a high level of technological and scientific advancement. His personal history and that of a group of souls with whom Phylos closely interacted is portrayed in the context of the social, economic, political and religious structures that shaped Poseid society. Daily life for Poseidi citizens included such things as antigravity powered air craft and submarines, television, wireless telephony, aerial water generators, air conditioners and high-speed rail. The book deals with deep esoteric subjects including karma and re-incarnation and describes Phylos' final incarnation in 19th century America where his Atlantean karma played itself out. In that incarnation (as Walter Pierson, gold miner and occult student of the Theo-Christic Adepts) he travelled to Venus/Hysperia in a subtle body while his physical form remained at the temple inside Mount Shasta. Describing his experience with the Hesperian adepts, Phylos relates many wonders including artworks depicting 3D scenes that appeared alive. He saw a voice-operated typewriter and other occult and technical power. Some devices mentioned have become reality (such as the TV and the atomic telescope).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Day_with_Wilbur_Robinson"title="A Day with Wilbur Robinson">
"A Day with Wilbur Robinson" follows the story of a boy who visits an unusual family and their home. While spending the day in the Robinson household, Wilbur's best friend joins in the search for Grandfather Robinson's missing false teeth and meets one wacky relative after another.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Went_Up_in_Smoke"title="The Man Who Went Up in Smoke">
The novel, set in the 1960s, is about a Swedish journalist called Alf Matsson, who disappeared without a trace in Hungary. He was commissioned by a Swedish newspaper to fly to Budapest to conduct an interview with a boxer and report on political events. Since Matsson has not reported for a week, the hotel he is staying in reports to the case to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However, the case must be handled discreetly because the Ministry fear political entanglements. The Stockholm police is tasked with finding the missing reporter, and send Martin Beck, who sacrifices his vacation to go to Budapest.Beck finds in the Budapest Hotel that Matsson left the hotel without a passport and luggage on the day of his arrival, and since then has been unseen. The Hungarian police are not willing to do much, but Martin Beck then meets a Hungarian policeman who helps him with the case. Since there is neither evidence nor any trace of Matsson, Beck does not know what to do. But one night he is attacked on the riverside by unknown people. He survives thanks to the Budapest Police and the perpetrators are caught.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Three"title="The Book of Three">
The youth Taran lives at Caer Dallben with his guardians, the ancient enchanter Dallben and the farmer and retired soldier Coll. Taran is dissatisfied with his life, and longs to become a great hero like the High Prince Gwydion. Due to the threat posed by a warlord known as the Horned King, servant of the evil Arawn Death-Lord of Annuvin, Taran is forbidden from leaving the farm and charged with the care of Hen Wen, the oracular white pig. When Hen Wen inexplicably panics and escapes, Taran follows her into the Forbidden Forest. After a long, fruitless chase, he is attacked by a host of horsemen galloping toward Caer Dallben, led by the Horned King himself. Taran manages to escape, but drops, wounded, to the ground. He awakes to find his wound treated by none other than Gwydion, the crown prince in Prydain's ruling House of Don, who has been travelling to Caer Dallben to consult Hen Wen. Gwydion, determined to find the pig, takes Taran along with him. Guided by Gurgi, a hairy humanoid living in the forest, they reach the Horned King's camp, and learn that his target will be Caer Dathyl, the home castle of the House of Don. Gwydion determines to warn the royal court, but the group is attacked by Arawn's undead Cauldron-Born soldiers, who capture Gwydion and Taran, and take them to Queen Achren in Spiral Castle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auriol_(novel)"title="Auriol (novel)">
Prologue (1599): Auriol Darcy is surprised attempting to remove the heads of two traitors from the Southwark Gateway of Old London Bridge. He is injured by the warder, Baldred, and carried to the house of Dr Lamb, an alchemist and Auriol Darcy's grandfather, who is assisted by his faithful dwarf Flapdragon. Lamb, on the point of discovering the elixir of life, has a seizure and dies as his ungrateful grandson consumes the draught.Book the first 'Ebba' (1830): Two varmints, Tinker and Sandman, waylay a gentleman in a fantastical ruined house in the Vauxhall Bridge Road in London, but they are surprised and he is carried unconscious to the house of Mr Thorneycroft, a scrap-iron dealer. While he convalesces and falls in love with Ebba, the iron-dealer's daughter, Tinker and Sandman and their associate Ginger (a 'dog-fancier' who steals dogs and resells them) discover in the gentleman's pocket-book the private diary of a man who has lived for over two hundred years, and has committed nameless crimes. Auriol (for it is he) seeks to dissuade Ebba from her love, for he bears an awful doom. A tall sinister stranger has Auriol in his power, and employs a dwarf (who is Flapdragon) to recover the pocket-book. The stranger confronts Auriol and informs his that Ebba must be surrendered to him according to their contract. Auriol refuses, but Ebba is snatched from him, and he is imprisoned, during a nocturnal assignation at a picturesque ruin near Millbank Street. Tinker, Sandman and Ginger offer their services to Mr Thorneycroft to attempt her rescue. Ebba is conveyed to a mysterious darkened chamber where the stranger demands that she sign a scroll surrendering herself body and soul to him. She calls to heaven for protection: in the darkness a tomb is revealed and opened by menacing cowled figures, and Auriol is brought forth. Ebba hurls herself into the tomb to precede him and save him, but then re-emerges silent and cowled to sign the scroll.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPod"title="JPod">
"JPod" is an avant-garde novel of six young adults, whose last names all begin with the letter 'J' and who are assigned to the same cubicle pod by someone in human resources through a computer glitch, working at Neotronic Arts, a fictional Burnaby-based video game company. Ethan Jarlewski is the novel's main character and narrator, who spends more time involved with his work than with his dysfunctional family. His stay-at-home mother runs a successful marijuana grow-op which allows his father to abandon his career and work as a futile movie extra. Ethan's realtor brother Greg involves himself with Asian crime lord Kam Fong who serves as the plot's crux of character connection.The JPod staff are required to insert a turtle character based on Jeff Probst into the skateboard game that they are developing as 'BoardX'. The marketing manager, Steven Lefkowitz, mandates the turtle's addition to the game because he is trying to please his son during a custody battle. "JPod" is then drastically challenged and changed when Steve goes missing and the new executive replacement declares that the game will be changed yet again. Upper management decides to change Jeff the turtle for an adventurous prince who rides a magic carpet. The game is then renamed "SpriteQuest". The JPodders, upset that they would not be able to finish their game, decide to sabotage SpriteQuest by inserting a deranged Ronald McDonald. They do this by creating a secret level where Ronald works malevolence, thus creating, in their opinion, a culturally-suitable game for the target market.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Foul's_Bane"title="Lord Foul's Bane">
Thomas Covenant is a young author whose world is turned upside-down when he is diagnosed with leprosy. After six months' treatment, he returns home to find himself divorced by his wife Joan and outcast from his community. On a rare trip into town, he is accosted by a beggar. Disturbed by the encounter, Covenant stumbles into the path of an oncoming police car and is rendered unconscious.He wakes to find himself in "the Land", a classic fantasy world, where he meets the evil Cavewight Drool Rockworm and Lord Foul the Despiser. Foul prophesies that he will destroy the Land within 49 years; however, if Drool isn't stopped, this doom will come to pass much sooner. He tells Covenant to deliver this message to the rulers of the Land.Covenant meets a girl named Lena, who uses a special mud called hurtloam to heal the injuries from his fall and cure his leprosy. Covenant's loss of two fingers on his right hand makes Lena think he is the reincarnation of ancient hero Berek Halfhand. Believing himself to be in the grip of a dangerous delusion, and overwhelmed by his newfound sense of health and vitality, he rapes Lena. Covenant delivers the message of Lord Foul to the Lords. Despite the obvious danger, the Lords decide to make an effort to wrest the powerful Staff of Law from Drool's evil grasp. Rather than waging an all-out war, the Council sends four Lords and a band of forty warriors to attempt to infiltrate Drool's lair at Mount Thunder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hamlet"title="The Hamlet">
The novel follows the exploits of the Snopes family, beginning with Ab Snopes, who is introduced more fully in Faulkner's "The Unvanquished". Most of the book centers on Frenchman's Bend, into which the heirs of Ab and his family have migrated from parts unknown. In the beginning of the book Ab, his wife, daughter, and son Flem settle down as tenant farmers beholden to the powerful Varner family.As the book progresses, the Snopeses move from being poor outcasts to a very controversial, if not dangerous, element in the life of the town. In contrast, V.K. Ratliff stands as the moral hero of the novel. Faulkner uses the eccentricities of the Snopeses to great comic effect, most notably in his description of Ike Snopes and his carnal inclinations toward a cow.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Complicated_Kindness"title="A Complicated Kindness">
The novel is set in a small religious Mennonite town called East Village, a fictionalized version of Toews' hometown of Steinbach, Manitoba. The narrator is Nomi Nickel, a curious, defiant, sardonic 16-year-old who dreams of hanging out with Lou Reed in the "real" East Village of New York City. She lives alone with her doleful father, Ray Nickel, who is a dutiful member of the Mennonite church. Nomi, on the other hand, is inquisitive by nature and her compulsive questioning brings her into conflict with the town's various authorities, most notably Hans Rosenfeldt, the sanctimonious church pastor.As the story unfolds, it is revealed that Nomi's irreverent older sister Tash left town three years earlier with her boyfriend, Ian, and that Nomi's mother, Trudie, also left, though under more mysterious circumstances. Nomi is fiercely loyal to her father, and she comes to decide that she must stay in East Village for his sake.Nomi senses that when she graduates from high school, all she'll be expected to do is work at the chicken processing plant and marry a boy from the community and become "good." She develops a relationship with Travis, who in the end is not the person he appears to be. She visits her good friend Lydia in the hospital, where she gets into confrontations with hospital staff. At school, she is met with obfuscation and anger by Mr. Quiring and other teachers and administrators. When Nomi lashes out in action or outrage, she is ignored or negated. Nomi's tragedy is the slow realization that not only will she fail to bring her family together, but she will also have to change her nature to find a place in the town she loves. In the end, her father Ray makes a heroic sacrifice so that she can be free.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slave_Dancer"title="The Slave Dancer">
It is the beginning of 1840 in New Orleans. In the rain, drunken riverboat workers and slaves alike are celebrating. Jessie Bollier lives in the area with his mother and sister. One evening while he is walking home, Jessie is kidnapped. After he is captured, he is taken to the ship 'The Moonlight', a slaver. During the crossing to Africa, Jessie tries to learn as much about the ship and the way things are done there as he can. The captain, Cawthorne, seems mad, the first mate, Nicholas Spark is cruel, and the sailors are concerned solely with making money through the slave trade. When they get to Africa they travel the coast and the captain uses a small boat to go and meet with the African chiefs who are selling people into slavery.Jessie cannot believe the treatment of the enslaved people that he observes. Once they are taken onto the ship, they are packed as tightly as possible into the hold, ending up on top of one another. Whenever a slave becomes ill they are thrown overboard at once so that the illness will not spread to other slaves. Many of them are still alive when they are tossed into the water, where they are eaten by sharks or drown. Jessie is shocked by what is going on, but tries to keep himself focused on staying alive and getting home to his family, if he ever will. As the journey to America continues, Jessie realizes how much he hates everything around him, including the slaves, as they represent his own enslavement on the ship. He refuses to play the fife and goes to his quarters. He is immediately taken back on deck and flogged for being disobedient. The flogging only makes him think more about everything that is going on around him. He sees the sailors with the same lack of pity they have for the slaves. He hates himself for playing the fife and being part of the entire situation. The journey continues and conditions worsen. The crew is drunk much of the time, the ship dirty, and discipline lax. A slave attacks Nicholas Spark, one of the ship's mates, and Spark shoots and kills him. The only concern the sailors show is for the loss of the profit that the sale of the slave would have brought them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kydd_(novel)"title="Kydd (novel)">
The story: The year is 1793. Europe is ablaze with war. The Prime Minister, William Pitt the Elder, is under pressure to make an active move at sea from the highest authority in the realm; George III had appointed Pitt as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, a position whose incumbent was responsible for the coastal defences of the nation. In response to the pressure, despatches a squadron to appear off the French coast. To man the ships, ordinary people must be press-ganged. Thomas Paine Kydd, a young wig-maker from Guildford, is seized, taken across the country to Sheerness and the great fleet anchorage of the Nore to be part of the crew of the fictional 98-gun line-of-battle ship "Duke William".The ship sails immediately and Kydd quickly has to learn the harsh realities of shipboard life fast; but despite all that he goes through in danger of tempest and battle he comes to admire the skills and courage of the seamen — taking up the challenge himself to become a true sailor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daggerspell"title="Daggerspell">
Events are listed here not in chronological order, but in the order they were originally presented in the novel.The sorcerer Nevyn sees an omen indicating that a person whose destiny is intertwined with his own has been reborn, and sees the infant Jill in a vision.Jill, a seven-year-old girl who sometime has precognitive dreams, loses her mother Seryan to a fever. Because her father, Cullyn, is a mercenary soldier – known as a "silver dagger" for the weapon he carries – and visits irregularly, Jill is taken in by a local tavern owner. Cullyn arrives in Jill's village a month later. Finding Seryan dead, he decides to take Jill with him on his wanderings, which he calls "the long road.”For seven years, Nevyn has been searching for Jill, with nothing more than luck and intuition to guide him. He finds a clue when he meets the ten-year-old lord Rhodry Maelwaedd, and sees that the boy's destiny is linked with his and Jill's.Galrion, a prince of Deverry, has secretly begun studying sorcery. He begins to fall in love with its power, and out of love with his betrothed, Brangwen of the Falcon clan. Galrion considers breaking his betrothal so that he will have more time to devote to the study of sorcery. Galrion's father, King Adoryc, is infuriated when he discovers that his son has been studying sorcery, and puts Galrion under house arrest, though the prince escapes by a ruse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Point_Someone"title="Five Point Someone">
The book is narrated by Hari, with some small passages by his friends Ryan and Alok, as well as a letter by Hari's girlfriend Neha Cherian. It deals with the lives of 3 friends, whose elation on making it to one of the best engineering colleges in India is quickly deflated by the rigor and monotony of the academic work. Most of the book deals with two plot lines. One is the numerous attempts by the trio to cope with and/or beat the system. The other being Hari's fling with Neha, who just happens to be the daughter of Prof. Cherian (the domineering head of the Mechanical Engineering department of their college). It occasionally takes some dark turns, especially as it pertains to the families of the protagonists. Most of the action, however, takes place inside the campus. The characters, led by the ever-creative Ryan, frequently lament over how the internationally lauded IIT system has stifled their creativity by forcing them to value grades more than anything else. Uninspiring teaching and numerous assignments add to their woes, though the boys do find a sympathizer in Prof Veera.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tenth_Man_(novel)"title="The Tenth Man (novel)">
The story begins in a prison in occupied France during the Second World War. It is decreed that one in every ten prisoners is to be executed; lots are drawn to decide who will die. One of the men chosen is a rich lawyer. He offers all his money to anyone who will take his place. One man agrees. Upon his release from prison the lawyer must face the consequences of his actions.The story comprises four parts. In Part I, set in prison, the occupying German guards issue a decimation order to the thirty inmates. One of the three chosen by drawing lots is a rich lawyer named Chavel. Chavel becomes hysterical and desperately offers his entire wealth to any man willing to die in his place. A young man, Michel Mangeot, known as Janvier, who is dying of tuberculosis, accepts his offer and is executed as Chavel in the morning.In Part II, the war is over and Chavel is alive and free, but virtually destitute. He returns to the house he sold for his life and finds it occupied by Janvier's mother and sister, Thérèse. Assuming the false name Charlot, he becomes their servant.Part III sees the arrival of an impostor, named Carosse, who claims to be Chavel. Carosse attempts to denounce Charlot, win the favour of Thérèse and stake a claim on the property.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Matter_of_Honour"title="A Matter of Honour">
In 1966 disgraced British colonel Gerald Scott bequeaths a mysterious letter to his only son, Adam Scott.The "item in question" that Adam's father's letter leads him to acquire from a safe deposit box in Switzerland is a precious Russian Orthodox icon made long ago for the Russian tsars which by misadventure came into the possession of Hermann Göring sometime in the 1930s. Following the Second World War Göring wanted Scott's father (one of his jailers at Nuremberg) to have it in token of his kind treatment and because Göring realized Scott's father would be unfairly blamed for his pre-execution suicide.But the icon contains something that even Göring did not dream of: the only official Russian copy of a secret codice to the Alaska Purchase treaty by which the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867. "Seward's Folly" turns out to have not been a true purchase at all, but a 99-year lease akin to the British hold on Hong Kong, with a right of return to Russia (now part of the Soviet Union) if they can only retrieve their copy before the lease deadline, only days away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rivers_of_Zadaa"title="The Rivers of Zadaa">
This story takes place mainly on a territory called Zadaa. There will be two main tribes here: The Rokador and the Batu. The Rokador live in tunnels and are fair-skinned, while the Batu are dark-skinned and live in a sunbathed city called Xhaxhu in the desert. For years, the Rokador have relied on the Batu to protect them from other savage tribes on Zadaa, and the Batu have relied on the Rokador to provide them with water. But the Rokador seem to be holding back the water, causing all the Batu to starve.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonchild_(novel)"title="Moonchild (novel)">
A year or so before the beginning of World War I, a young woman named Lisa la Giuffria is seduced by a white magician, Cyril Grey, and persuaded into helping him in a magical battle with a black magician and his black lodge. Grey is attempting to save and improve the human race and condition by impregnating the girl with the soul of an ethereal being — the moonchild. To achieve this, she will have to be kept in a secluded environment, and many preparatory magical rituals will be carried out. The black magician Douglas is bent on destroying Grey's plan. However, Grey's ultimate motives may not be what they appear. The moonchild rituals are carried out in southern Italy, but the occult organizations are based in Paris and England. At the end of the book, the war breaks out, and the white magicians support the Allies, while the black magicians support the Central Powers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wright_3"title="The Wright 3">
Calder's friend Tommy Segovia, who moved away a year before, has moved back to Hyde Park, Chicago. He is immediately jealous of Calder and Petra as they received the "glory" of saving a Vermeer painting in the previous book ("Chasing Vermeer"). Tommy feels that he deserves something as well. In his first new day of class, Ms. Hussey announces that the world-famous Robie House is soon to be demolished, which she considers to be murder. The class takes a field trip to the house, and both Calder and Petra discover that there are many secrets concerning the building that they were not aware of. After Tommy learns to tolerate Petra, the three (who call themselves 'The wright 3') work to save the house, even breaking into it toward the end. Tommy finds a fish talisman in the Robie House garden and realizes it is worth a lot of money. Finally, after saving their own lives against a band of robbers in the Robie house, they manage to save that of the house.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Professor,_the_Banker,_and_the_Suicide_King"title="The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King">
The highest stakes poker match of all time was played over the course of a few years, between Andrew Beal and a group of professional poker players called "The Corporation." The group included Ted Forrest, Jennifer Harman, Minh Ly, Doyle Brunson, Todd Brunson, Howard Lederer, David Grey, Chip Reese, Gus Hansen, Phil Ivey, Barry Greenstein, Lyle Berman and others. Many of them kept their identities anonymous, or were part of the group at different points.Ted Forrest, a professional poker player, was driving outside of Las Vegas when he called the Bellagio poker room. The personnel in the poker room informed him the highest game is $10,000-$20,000. He went to the poker room and sat down with his last $500,000. He played against Chip Reese and Andy Beal. Forrest had lost $400,000 without playing a single hand, and questioned why he was there.Beal first visited the Bellagio poker room in February 2001. He enjoyed the atmosphere and met professional poker players, such as Todd Brunson. He ended up winning over $100,000, crediting it to luck. Beal decided to study the game and face top players.He returned to Las Vegas and played heads-up with professionals for the highest stakes. Top professional poker players decided to pool their money with everybody who they thought could play the game against Beal. Beal began his match with Chip Reese, then Ted Forrest sat down. Down to his last $100,000 Forrest makes a comeback and wins $1.5 million. He is then asked to join the group and nobody else sits down besides Beal and his selected opponent, who alternates.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Foxes"title="Prince of Foxes">
Andrea Zoppo, an Italian peasant schooled in the arts and versed in the ways of nobility during his University years, conceals his old identity during the French invasion of Florence, and becomes Andrea Orsini, a bastard member of a dead Neapolitan junior branch of the great house of Orsini. Having made his name with the French forces, he takes service with Cesare Borgia, with dreams of uniting Italy to stop the depredations of foreign adventurers and the manipulations of France and the Holy Roman Empire. However, his love of Lady Camilla of the Bagliones and respect for her husband Lord Varano of Citta del Monte derail those plans when he is sent to their court to take the city by treachery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_It_Courage"title="Call It Courage">
The book "Call It Courage" is a novel of 116 pages. It is about a boy who tries to overcome his fear of the sea."Call It Courage" is a story set in the Pacific Islands. It chronicles the journey of Mafatu, the son of the chief of Hikueru Island, Tavana Nui. Mafatu is afraid of the sea due to witnessing his mother die while he was a young child, which makes him a shame to his father, and referred to as a coward among his tribe. Mafatu takes a dugout canoe and sets sail into the ocean without knowing where he will end up. He is caught in a storm and the canoe is lost. He lands on a deserted island and learns to hunt and fish for himself, along with his companions Uri, a small yellow dog, and Kivi, an albatross.Soon Mafatu finds a sacrificial altar built by cannibals from a neighboring island. Mafatu realizes he has inhabited the island for about a week and begins designing his escape by making a canoe. He gathers things he will need to survive a trip across the ocean. He finds a spearhead on the terrible altar and, after attaching it to a shaft, uses it for hunting and defense.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Family"title="His Family">
"His Family" tells the story of a middle-class family in New York City in the 1910s. The family's patriarch, widower Roger Gale, struggles to deal with the way his daughters and grandchildren respond to the changing society. Each of his daughters responds in a distinctively different way to the circumstances of their lives, forcing Roger into attempting to calm the increasingly challenging family disputes that erupt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voss_(novel)"title="Voss (novel)">
The novel centres on two characters: Voss, a German, and Laura, a young woman, orphaned and new to the colony of New South Wales. It opens as they meet for the first time in the house of Laura's uncle and the patron of Voss's expedition, Mr Bonner.Johann Ulrich Voss sets out to cross the Australian continent in 1845. After collecting a party of settlers and two Aboriginal men, his party heads inland from the coast only to meet endless adversity. The explorers cross drought-plagued desert, then waterlogged lands until they retreat to a cave where they lie for weeks waiting for the rain to stop. Voss and Laura retain a connection despite Voss's absence and the story intersperses developments in each of their lives. Laura adopts an orphaned child and attends a ball during Voss's absence.The travelling party splits in two and nearly all members eventually perish. The story ends some 20 years later at a garden party hosted by Laura's cousin Belle Radclyffe (née Bonner) on the day of the unveiling of a statue of Voss. The party is also attended by Laura Trevelyan and the one remaining member of Voss's expeditionary party, Mr Judd.The strength of the novel comes not from the physical description of the events in the story but from the explorers' passion, insight and doom. The novel draws heavily on the complex character of Voss.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirt_Music"title="Dirt Music">
Georgie, the heroine of the book, becomes fascinated while watching a stranger attempting to poach fish in an area where nobody can maintain secrets for very long; disillusioned with her relationship with the local fisherman legend Jim Buckridge, she contrives a meeting with the stranger and soon passion runs out of control between two bruised and emotionally fragile people.The secret quickly becomes impossible to hide, and Jim wants revenge, whilst the poacher hikes north via Wittenoom (out of respect for his father who died of mesothelioma in the town) and Broome to an island off the remote coast of Kimberley beyond Kununurra to escape a confrontation. His subsequent struggles to survive in the hostile environment, knowing that he must try to literally cover his tracks, give this book its gripping denouement.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_on_Bird_Street"title="The Island on Bird Street">
Alex (the main character) is an 11-year-old Jewish boy living in a Ghetto in German-occupied Poland during World War II with his father and their friend, Boruch. German soldiers come into the Ghetto and send people into trains to be taken away (most likely to death camps). Alex and his father get separated, and soon Alex has to learn how to kill time in the empty ghetto by himself. As it turns out the ghetto is not entirely empty, and that is where he comes across various people, from neighbors to robbers, some of whom even try to help him. He finds himself in an abandoned, bombed out building on Bird Street (Ptasia street) where he seeks refuge. The only thing he has to pass the time away with is his pet mouse Snow, the novel "Robinson Crusoe" and other books, and a small air vent grate overlooking the town. He has to hunt for food on his own and still stay hidden from soldiers. It is a great test for Alex to see if he can make it through tough conditions, and also wait for the arrival of his father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brief_and_Frightening_Reign_of_Phil"title="The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil">
The story focuses on the border disputes between the countries of Inner and Outer Horner, the former of which is "so small that only one Inner Hornerite at a time could fit inside, and the other six Inner Hornerites had to wait their turns to live in their own country while standing very timidly in the surrounding country of outer Horner."Phil, an embittered Outer Hornerite, decides that the puny Inner Hornerites do nothing but stand around very close together solving math proofs all day, and have to stretch one at a time every morning. Seen as an evil threat to the leisure of the five Outer Hornerites, they are understood as abusing the vast good will that they have received courtesy of the Outer Hornerites. As they stand in the short-term residency zone in Outer Horner, they wait their turn to reenter their country. So Phil, gaining the support of the other Outer Hornerites and hiring two giants as his personal policy enforcers, begins to tax the Inner Hornerites for staying in his country. He settles in the end to accept the disassembling of the Inner Hornerites as sufficient payment. The story chronicles Phil's tyrannical rise to power and his attempted Inner Hornerite genocide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_Last_Man_(Shaara_novel)"title="To the Last Man (Shaara novel)">
The novel is based on the arrival of General John J. Pershing with American troops on the Western Front in 1917. Moving in a new direction from Shaara's previous novels, the book focuses not only on generals but also on the everyday American doughboys, including the experiences of a character named Roscoe Temple, and a chapter about a new British recruit who refills the ranks, only to be killed during an attack on the German trenches several hours later.The book also profiles aviation aces such as Germany's Manfred von Richthofen and America's Raoul Lufbery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drowned_Wednesday"title="Drowned Wednesday">
Picking up after the events of "Grim Tuesday", Arthur discusses Drowned Wednesday's invitation to meet for lunch with Leaf while he is hospitalized. The two are skeptical as to whether Wednesday can be trusted, but then the hospital room is suddenly filled with water and the two find themselves transported to the Border Sea, Wednesday's domain. Leaf and Arthur are separated when Leaf is picked up by the "Flying Mantis," a large ship, and Arthur is left behind. Arthur uses the Mariner's medallion to summon help but his call goes unanswered. A buoy marking the pirate Elishar Feverfew's treasure floats toward him, which Arthur opens. His hand is then marked with a bloody red color, the Red Hand, which he later learns is a spell created by Feverfew so that he may identify who has touched his treasure.Arthur is eventually picked up a scavenging ship called the "Moth". On board, Arthur (going by the name of Arth) is introduced to Sunscorch, the First Mate, and to Captain Catapillow. As they travel through the Border Sea, the "Moth" is attacked by Feverfew's ship, the "Shiver". Sunscorch commands Dr. Scamandros, an Upper House Sorcerer and the ship's navigator, to open a transfer portal to elsewhere in the Secondary Realms. Scamandros' spell fails and he accuses Arthur of interfering with his magic. He advocates for throwing Arthur overboard, but Arthur shows them the Mariner's medallion and the crew agrees to keep him. With Arthur's help, the "Moth" successfully travels through a transfer portal to a safe spot. Arthur asks Scamandros to find out what happened to Leaf and using sorcery, Scamandros reports that Leaf has been conscripted to work on the "Flying Mantis" but is otherwise safe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spook's_Apprentice"title="The Spook's Apprentice">
Tom Ward has lived his whole life in the County (loosely based on the English county of Lancashire). Because he is the seventh son of a seventh son and thus has the ability to see ghosts and fight other supernatural beings, his parents have apprenticed him to the Spook, a cloaked man named John Gregory (because only seventh sons of seventh sons have the aforementioned abilities, all spooks are seventh sons of seventh sons). Tom's mother, referred to as Mam, sent a letter to the Spook shortly after Tom's birth alerting him to his status as a seventh son of a seventh and promising that Tom would be "the best apprentice [the Spook will ever have, who will] also be [his] last." The Spook travels the County fighting troublesome creatures such as boggarts, ghosts, ghasts, and witches for the people who need these things gone. Tom will have to learn how the Spook fights "the Dark", so that he may one day become a Spook as well.The Spook tells Tom that most of his other apprentices have failed due to their being cowardly, disobedient, or unluckily killed. It is revealed that one of the deceased was Billy Bradley, who had his finger bitten off and died from loss of blood while fighting a particularly dangerous boggart. Tom goes to live in the Spook's house in Chipenden. This house is protected from unwanted visitors by a boggart, with whom the Spook has made a contract. The contract states that as long as the roof is standing, the boggart must guard the home and kill intruders (as well as cook and clean for the Spook and his apprentices). It kills any visitors not invited in by the Spook (such as his apprentices), and as such potential clients wait outside and alert the Spook via a bell system. The boggart is promised in return the blood of creatures in the home after dark, as well as any hostile creatures of the dark. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ferguson_Rifle"title="The Ferguson Rifle">
The main character, Ronan Chantry, who is of Irish ancestry, is going into the West away from his troubles. Chantry's wife and son are dead, burned to death in the fire that consumed his home, for which he is blamed. He takes with him a Ferguson rifle, given to him by Major Ferguson himself. He meets up with an outfit of trappers after crossing the Mississippi River.Although never stated directly, Chantry quickly becomes the leader of the group. Main members of the group are an Irishman, Davy Shanagan, and Solomon, who by the end of the book is revealed to be very well known throughout the wilderness. Early on the outfit's journey west, they encounter the Spanish Captain Fernandez accompanied by Ute Indians. The Captain attempts to arrest the outfit for trespassing on Spanish colonies. The outfit informs him that the land was bought under the Louisiana Purchase.That night it is believed that Captain Fernandez attacks them but fails with two Utes being killed. The outfit presses on. Another night Chantry hears gunshots ring out in the distance after being awakened by a wolf who was trying to steal bacon. The next morning Chantry discovers the dead body of a man in a Mexican uniform. He searches the body and recovers a medallion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Followed_Ripley"title="The Boy Who Followed Ripley">
A 16-year-old American boy calling himself Billy approaches Tom Ripley in the French village near the latter's residence, asking for a job. Ripley agrees to give him a small amount of gardening work and puts him up in the guest room, but he believes that he recognizes the youth from a newspaper. Further investigation reveals that "Billy" is actually Frank Pierson, the son of a recently deceased American tycoon who has fled the United States. Frank soon confesses to Ripley that he did in fact murder his own father by pushing him off a cliff. Ripley recognizes a kindred spirit in Frank, discovering that he deliberately sought him out for advice after learning of his questionable reputation. Ripley commissions a false passport for Frank and they travel to West Berlin, where they stay with a friend of Ripley's erstwhile partner in crime, Reeves Minot.Frank is kidnapped while strolling through a wooded area in West Berlin. Ripley communicates with the Pierson family and with a private detective the family has sent to Paris. The Piersons wire the ransom to West Berlin, and Ripley takes it to an appointed drop-off point where he impulsively kills one of the kidnappers. The other three drive off. Ripley returns with the money and arranges a rendezvous at a gay bar, which he infiltrates by dressing in drag. He identifies the kidnappers, who again leave empty-handed, and follows them back to the flat where they are keeping the boy. Ripley scares the amateur thugs into dashing out of the apartment, and he single-handedly rescues the semi-conscious hostage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfway_Across_the_Galaxy_and_Turn_Left"title="Halfway Across the Galaxy and Turn Left">
The novel tells the tale of the planet Zyrgon, ruled by the galactic police called The Law-Enforcers. They are after Mortimer, who has cheated the government lottery for the 27th time in a row. His family is governed by the youngest daughter, 12-year-old X, who wants to save her father from the detention centre.The family also includes Mother, who would rather design clothing and leave all worries to her daughter X. The oldest sister Dovis is a cosmic flier who writes poetry and levitates. The youngest is a boy genius, Qwrk who is a professor at age 8.X is the lead character: a stressed girl who has to balance between strange Earth customs such as school and her duty to take care of her family.Zyrgonians have special powers such as levitation, simulations, and kinetics. They love gambling and live on an ultra-modern and dystopian planetoid.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_All_Costs_(Weber_novel)"title="At All Costs (Weber novel)">
Because the actions of the High Ridge government in "War of Honor" led to the Republic of Haven successfully attacking key Alliance shipyards, the Star Kingdom of Manticore finds itself disadvantaged in the ongoing war, with at least two years before any significant new construction may begin. Admiral Honor Harrington is placed in command of Eighth Fleet, the Manticoran Alliance's primary offensive force.Strategically, the Eighth Fleet plans to instill enough operational caution and sensitivity to losses in Haven to force redeployments of starships in defensive postures, reducing Haven's offensive resources. To expedite this, they are assigned most of Manticore's cutting-edge war-fighting hardware, including the new "Apollo" self-guided missile system, which gives Manticoran missiles a massive range advantage over their Havenite counterparts, and "Keyhole" platforms that increase the efficacy of their own counter-missiles. Their first two raids frighten the Havenite populace somewhat, but on the third, at Solon, a defensive ambush led by Admiral Javier Giscard is waiting for them. Honor is sorely trounced, losing several ships and being forced to abandon a vessel captained by her best friend, Admiral Michelle "Mike" Henke, Countess Gold Peak; Henke is believed killed in action, but survives and is captured as a POW.Honor continues to work closely with Hamish Alexander, now First Lord of the Admiralty, on the military and political challenges facing the Alliance, and they fall into the very romantic relationship the High Ridge government tried to insinuate during "War of Honor". She and Hamish are married and conceive a son, Raoul, who is "tubed" while his mother goes into combat and is born before the end of the novel. Emily, assisted by Honor's mother Allison, a leading geneticist, also becomes a mother with Hamish.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_Bearer"title="The Light Bearer">
The fictional protagonists are a proto-Germanic tribeswoman, Auriane, daughter of a Chattian war leader; and Marcus Arrius Julianus, a Roman senator and imperial advisor whose character and circumstances are loosely based on the Roman philosopher Seneca, as well as another contemporary in the reign of Nero, Stoic philosopher and statesman Helvidius Priscus, a man known for his outspokenness in public life. Rome’s interference in tribal affairs compel Auriane to take the warrior’s oath and lead her father’s retinue after his death. In Rome, Stoic humanist Marcus Julianus reaches the highest levels of government, where he is taken into the confidence of the Emperor Domitian. Through political maneuvering, he attempts to check the excesses of the increasingly corrupt Emperor Domitian. Auriane is captured in Domitian's Chattian War and taken to Rome. As Domitian's reign of terror begins, Julianus orchestrates a plot to assassinate the Emperor; here the author has inserted a fictional character into a gap left by history. The Emperor Domitian, who according to Suetonius, was fond of pitting women against dwarfs in the arena, condemns Auriane to a gladiatorial school. Here Auriane discovers the tribesman who betrayed her people in war. As Julianus’ assassination plot reaches its conclusion, Auriane must carry out the tribal rite of vengeance in the Colosseum.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Damnation_of_Theron_Ware"title="The Damnation of Theron Ware">
## Part I.The congregation of The First Methodist Episcopal Church of Tecumseh sits in their exquisite sanctuary, awaiting the decision of whom they are going to appoint as the new pastor for their church. The members of the congregation regard their time at the church with such high importance that they pay hundreds of dollars to rent the front pews. When the new pastor is announced, Abram G. Tisdale, members of the congregation began leaving upset and selling their pews for sixty dollars. The man they wanted to be appointed, Theron Ware, was appointed to the church in Octavius. After the ceremony, Theron and his wife are disappointed, but Theron tells her there is nothing more they can do.In their new home in Octavius, the Wares are surprised that the milk delivery boy informs them that they will be pressured by the congregation to not have milk delivered on Sundays. Theron reminisces about how he arrived in Octavius. A young minister who changed his first parish in Tyre into an over-capacity congregation, met his wife Alice in Tyre and had a quick marriage. However, the Wares found themselves eight hundred dollars in debt, not knowing how to budget the church and their own lives. As they trimmed down the spending both in the church and in their personal lives, by selling possessions and their piano, the clergy once again began to dwindle. Their third year at Tyre, a man named Abram Beekman gave them a loan. Theron, determined to show that he could do better in a bigger congregation, went to the conference at Tecumseh to prove his abilities, only to be placed in Octavius.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Friday"title="Lady Friday">
## Background.Arthur Penhaligon is a young boy who has gotten involved with the 'House', a magical world. This world comprises seven parts, each containing a 'Key' (powerful magical objects) and a part of the 'Will' (a being that holds the wish of the absent 'Architect'), under control of a villainous 'Trustee'. Arthur is on a quest to defeat the 'Trustees' and fulfill the 'Will'.In the preceding four books, Arthur has captured four parts of the House.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shame_of_the_Cities"title="The Shame of the Cities">
Steffens' first article in "The Shame of the Cities" is "Tweed Days in St. Louis", published in October 1902. Steffens discusses Circuit Attorney Folk's efforts to clean up the city's corruption. Bribery, Steffens noted, had become commonplace in city government by the turn of the century. Responding to public concerns about corruption, the local Democratic Party put together a "reform" ticket, though this was "[s]imply part of the game", rather than out of a sincere desire to reform. Folk, however, took his duties seriously. He launched an investigation into the city's corruption after seeing a newspaper article which claimed that a bribe fund had been set up in a local bank to pay off city legislators who helped pass a streetcar bill. Folk found the bribe money in the bank, and began indicting participants in the bribery plot, leading a few of them to flee the state or the country. As he began to win convictions, other men involved in corruption decided to testify against their associates. Steffens concludes the article by claiming that "In all cities, the better classes—the business men—are the sources of corruption"; Folk, he notes, "has shown St. Louis that its bankers, brokers, corporation officers,—its business men are the sources of evil". Furthermore, he warns, "what went on in St. Louis is going on in most of our cities, towns, and villages. The problem of municipal government in America has not been solved".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_on_the_Balcony"title="The Man on the Balcony">
At the beginning of the book Beck goes to a peaceful mission with colleague Ahlberg in Motala. His colleagues are meanwhile looking for a handbag robber who makes the Stockholm parks unsafe. In the same park, which hosted his last robbery, a child's body is discovered soon after by two tramps. The 9-year-old girl has been abused and strangled. Shortly thereafter, another child befalls the same fate. As Beck returns, the machinery of the police investigation is already running.The police are initially lacking any clues as the abduction of the second girl was only viewed by a three-year-old boy. Only an elderly exhibitionist is briefly detained, but has nothing to do with the murders.Only a coincidence brings the investigation continues: Gunvald Larsson, who first appears in this novel, has telephoned at the very beginning of the investigation with an elderly lady who complained about a man in an opposite flat, standing all day on his balcony and looking at the road and playing with the children, among others. After Martin Beck recalled this call; with difficulty the note written by Larsson is found and by a mixture of obstinate investigating and the coincidence that the caller had the common name Andersson is the killer found, just before he can attack a child again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Probe!"title="Night Probe!">
The world is in the throes of an energy crunch and the United States is on the brink of financial disaster. Desperate to find any solution that can save the nation from national bankruptcy, the President of the United States looks to Dirk Pitt and NUMA to pull off an audacious double salvage operation.It is 1989 and the United States is in an economic decline because "From Franklin Roosevelt on, every chief executive has played a game of tag, pinning a multiplying financial burden on the office of his successor" (said by the POTUS in part 1), and by increasing scarcity of oil.CIA estimates put the depletion of the Middle East oilfields at just two years away. The total worldwide demand for oil is more than 50% of estimated supplies and while nuclear and other alternative energies are trying to make up the difference they are coming up short. Canada is now the exclusive supplier of electricity to several states in the Northeastern U.S. after investing billions in a massive new hydro-electric power plant in Quebec. To make matters worse, a top-secret experimental sub developed by NUMA has recently discovered a stratigraphic trap, potentially the richest kind of oil deposit, which lies just across the border in the territorial waters of Quebec.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burning_City"title="The Burning City">
The first and last parts of the novel are set in Tep's Town, on the site of modern Los Angeles. The town consists of three classes: the Lords, the ruling class, who live in a separate area of the town; the kinless, essentially a slave class forbidden to carry weapons, descendants of a people conquered by the allied ancestors of the Lords and the Lordkin; and the Lordkin, proud, uneducated, undisciplined and indolent knife fighters organised into street gangs, who live by "gathering" whatever they wish from the kinless. The Lords supervise the kinless and placate the Lordkin. The kinless are unarmed and untrained in the use of weapons, and cannot resist the Lordkin. Some leave the town, but the surrounding vegetation is malevolent. The town is the base of a fire god, Yangin-Atep, who possesses the Lordkin every few years to burn the town down and rape any kinless woman they can catch.The main character, Whandall, is an 11-year-old Lordkin boy severely beaten unto scarring and broken bones by Lordsmen (police) for associating with a Lord girl and illegally entering the segregated Lord's Hills. As an adult he becomes a product of his culture — a thief, a rapist, and a murderer, but, strangely, not without regret, not without honor, and not without the reader's sympathy. He teams up with an ex-Atlantis wizard and some kinless and they escape from the city. Beyond the city they find traders and Whandall founds a successful trading empire. Eventually, he returns to the city to establish a trade route there, and defeats Yangin-Atep.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Wyoming_(novel)"title="Miss Wyoming (novel)">
The novel is the story of John Johnson and Susan Colgate. It begins with a meeting between Susan and John after their yearlong absences from the world, and then progresses to tell the stories of their disappearances through flashbacks. The flashbacks have no temporal order. Each chapter is a different flashback, intermixed with chapters of temporally present plot.The novel tells their stories, the stories of the characters that they encounter, and the story of their lives after they meet. The novel is written in the third person.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinderseele"title="Kinderseele">
One day Emil Sinclair, an eleven-year-old boy, returns from school and as nobody is at home he goes upstairs into his father’s room where he steals sugared and dried figs out of his dad’s chest of drawers. Although he has pangs of conscience and thinks a lot about his deed, he does not confess it to his father. Sinclair pretends to have bought the figs at the cake shop in Calw. That is why his father punishes him by taking him there; but before entering the shop, the boy tells that he did not get them there. At home he finally admits that he stole the figs. The book ends with the phrase: "Als ich im Bett lag, hatte ich die Gewissheit, dass er mir ganz und vollkommen verziehen habe – vollkommener als ich ihm." ("As I lay in bed I had the certainty that he had completely forgiven me - more completely than I had him.")Hesse himself made a comment on his book in a letter to his sister Adele, in which he stated that the way described in "Kinderseele" was one of extremely straight psychology and love of truth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hazard_of_New_Fortunes"title="A Hazard of New Fortunes">
The title "A Hazard of New Fortunes" is a reference to William Shakespeare's "King John". "King John" portrays the themes of uncertainty, change, and violence, all of which are also important to "A Hazard of New Fortunes".The book, set in late 19th-century New York City, tells the story of Basil March, an affable literary man who provides the main perspective throughout the story. March takes a senior job at a New York magazine and eventually finds himself in the middle of a fierce dispute between his beloved old mentor and the magazine's wealthy owner. At the beginning of the book, March is residing in Boston with his wife and children. Then he is persuaded by his entrepreneurial friend Fulkerson to move to New York to help him start a new magazine, where the writers benefit from a primitive form of profit sharing. After some deliberation, the Marches move to New York and begin a rather extensive search for a perfect apartment. After many exhausting weeks of searching, Basil finally settles on an apartment full of what he and his wife refer to as "gimcrackery" — trinkets and decorations that do not appeal to their upper-middle-class tastes. While in New York, March renews the acquaintance of Berthold Lindau, a German-born intellectual who taught March the German language decades earlier. A strong abolitionist, Lindau fought in the American Civil War and lost a hand. He is now an elderly, impoverished widower. Though Lindau is still as warm-hearted and idealistic as ever, his socialist views often cause him to speak bitterly about what America has become under capitalism. March worries that people who do not understand the old man will misjudge him as unpatriotic or violent. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Haj_(novel)"title="The Haj (novel)">
The book begins in 1922. The title character is Ibrahim, who becomes the chieftain of a fictitious Palestinian village in that year. He is friendly with Gideon Asch, the Haganah leader who watches over the nearby kibbutz. ("He respected a fairness in Gideon that he was not able to practice himself.") But Ibrahim rejects "Gideon's offers of aid and friendship."In his "New York Times" review, Anatole Broyard wrote that "The other 'good' Arab character, as Mr. Uris has it, is Dr. Nuri Mudhil, a badly crippled archeologist. He, too, despairs of traditional Arab attitudes. 'We are a people living in hate, despair and darkness,' Mudhil says. 'The Jews are our bridge out of darkness.As depicted in the book, in 1947, in the runup to the Arab-Israel War of 1948, Arab nations spread false rumors of Jewish atrocities to cause mass flight. "Kirkus Reviews" recounted in its review that in the novel, "the women of Ibrahim's family are raped by rival Arab henchmen. And though the family survives, thanks to Gideon and a 'very sympathetic' Irgun officer, their arrival in Arab territory on the West Bank is greeted by Arab disdain, neglect, cruelty."The books ends as "Ibrahim slips back into primitivism" and kills his daughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Promises_in_the_Wind"title="No Promises in the Wind">
Josh's main talent lies in the piano, having been taught by his mother. He and his friend Howie are praised by their teacher, Miss Crowne. However, tired of the continual ridicule and temper of his father, he decides to leave Chicago and find a living on his own. His mother, Mary, supports his decision against her will, realizing that Josh's conflicts with his father, Stefan, and their entire family's lack of food would eventually lead to deeper problems.Howie convinces the reluctant Josh to bring his brother Joey along, which later turns out to be a good decision. With the hope that their musical talents can earn them a living, they set out. Howie brings his banjo, and Joey is a great singer. On the first day, Joey's singing combined with Howie's talented playing allows the trio to gain 78 cents. Josh realizes Joey's importance and no longer regrets bringing him along.However, while trying to get to Nebraska by riding on a freight train, a tragedy falls upon the trio. Howie, while running alongside a train which the brothers had already boarded, is struck by a train coming from the opposite direction. Though quite grieved, Josh and Joey continue, even declining the hospitality of a kind man. The two manage to survive by begging, despite Josh's humiliation at doing such a thing. Finally, in a stroke of luck, the two receive the warmth of a woman who persuades Joey to write home to their mother. They also become acquainted with Lonnie Bromer, a truck driver. Lonnie lost a child named David who would be as old as Josh if he were alive. Lonnie brings the brothers to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. There, Josh and Joey receive a job at a carnival run by Pete Harris. Lonnie leaves the two with his address and they promise that they will write to him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Tower"title="Burning Tower">
The three main characters are Sandry, a Lord of Tep's Town, Sandry's cousin Regapisk, also a Lord, and Burning Tower, a daughter of Whandall, the main character of the previous book. Regapisk is an incompetent Lord and his family arrange for him to be shanghaied to become an oarsman on a coastal ship. Sandry and Burning Tower are romantically linked throughout the book.Large flightless birds attack trading caravans, but Sandry fights them off. He is sent by the Lords with the caravan, of which Burning Tower is also a part, to discover the source of the birds. They travel to the southern city of Condigeo and then to Crescent City, defeating terror bird attacks along the way. In Crescent City, they are joined by Regapisk, who has escaped from his ship. The three of them travel on to the high-magic city of Aztlan, where Regapisk redeems himself.The authors researched Aztec culture for the book, and many aspects of the culture depicted in the book are based on that research. This is explained in a brief note at the end of the book. Also mentioned is that within the described timeline, the terror birds continued to exist until long after humans spread through the Americas; this is based on the North American phorusrhacid "Titanis walleri" (but see McFadden "et al." 2007).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warday"title="Warday">
Strieber is in New York City in October 1988 when it is attacked by Soviet nuclear weapons. He experiences the initial blast while riding a bus, and witnesses the flooding of the subway system by a tsunami in the wake of a nuclear detonation at sea. Strieber is reunited with his family at his son's school and shelters there, but experiences radiation sickness. Upon his recovery, he and his family leave New York for San Antonio which they soon discover was destroyed as well. They eventually settle in Dallas, where he becomes a farmer.Five years later, Strieber and Kunetka decide to document the effects of Warday on the United States; they travel first through devastated southeast and southwest Texas. They then visit the new nation-state of Aztlan in the former American Southwest, and conduct interviews with its foreign minister and citizens. They then conduct interviews while trying to evade the omnipresent police in Los Angeles, California. California, physically not touched by the attack, has become a self-governing, authoritarian police state which treats outsiders as "illegal immigrants." In San Francisco they reunite with an old friend of Strieber's, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, but then are captured, arrested, and sentenced to years of hard labor in prison.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Sympathy"title="The Power of Sympathy">
The opening letters between Thomas Harrington and Jack Worthy reveal that Thomas has fallen for Harriot Fawcet, despite the reservations of his father. Harriot resists Thomas's initial advances, as he intends to make her his mistress; readers also find that Jack encourages Thomas to abandon his licentious motives in favor of properly courting Harriot. However, when Thomas and Harriot become engaged, Eliza Holmes becomes alarmed and exposes a deep family secret to Thomas's sister Myra: Harriot is in fact Thomas and Myra’s illegitimate half-sister. Mr. Harrington's one time affair with Maria Fawcet resulted in Harriot's birth, which had to be kept a secret to maintain the family’s honor. Thus, Eliza’s mother-in-law, the late Mrs. Holmes, took Maria, Thomas and Harriot into her home. After Maria’s death, Harriot was raised by a family friend, Mrs. Francis.Upon receiving the news of this family secret, Harriot and Thomas are devastated, as their relationship is incestuous and thus forbidden. Harriot falls into a grief-stricken consumption (a condition now referred to as tuberculosis), from which she is unable to recover. Thomas spirals into a deep depression and commits suicide after learning of Harriot's death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_an_African_Farm"title="The Story of an African Farm">
The novel details the lives of three characters, first as children and then as adults – Waldo, Em and Lyndall – who live on a farm in the Karoo region of South Africa. The story is set in the middle- to late-19th century – the First Boer War is alluded to, but not mentioned by name. The book is semi-autobiographical: in particular, the two principal protagonists (Waldo and Lyndall) display strong similarities to Schreiner's life and philosophy.The book was first published in 1883 in London, under the pseudonym "Ralph Iron". It quickly became a best-seller, despite causing some controversy over its frank portrayal of freethought, feminism, premarital sex and pregnancy out of wedlock, and transvestitism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_Souls"title="The War of Souls">
## Background.The world of Krynn became a very different place with the disappearance of the gods. Dragons, much larger and more malicious than any native to Krynn, appeared and claimed much of the continent of Ansalon, calling themselves Dragon Overlords. Most of the native dragons are either dead or enslaved. The metallic dragons have disappeared. With the loss of the gods comes the loss of magic, and the Wizards' Conclave had been disbanded years ago. Although sorcery, discovered by Palin Majere, was adopted, it is slowly fading for reasons unknown. Everyone, including the Dragon Overlords, experience the effect. The Knights of Takhisis, with the loss of their Queen, became the Knights of Neraka, a somewhat less honorable outfit than their predecessors, led by Lord of the Night Morham Targonne. Goldmoon, one of the few remaining Heroes of the Lance, has established the Citadel of Light on the island of Schallsea. In the elven realm of Qualinesti, Gilthas, the "puppet king", rules only in title, while the nation is truly run by the occupying Knights of Neraka. Their cousins, the Silvanesti, have banished their heir, Silvanoshei, his mother, and his father. With the gods gone, the time period, fittingly, is known as the "Age of Mortals" as said by Fizban in chapter 32 ("title: Rain. Autumn. Farewell.")
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Border_Legion"title="The Border Legion">
It tells the story of a cold hearted man named Jack Kells who falls in love with Miss Joan Randle, a girl his legion has taken captive near the Idaho border.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yacoubian_Building"title="The Yacoubian Building">
The novel described the Yacoubian Building as one of the most luxurious and prestigious apartment blocks in Cairo following its construction by Armenian businessman Hagop Yacoubian in 1934, with government ministers, wealthy manufacturers, and foreigners residing or working out of offices there. After the revolution in 1952, which overthrew King Farouk and gave power to Gamal Abdel Nasser, many of the rich foreigners, as well as native landowners and businessmen, who had lived at the Yacoubian fled the country. Each vacated apartment was then occupied by a military officer and his family, who were often of a more rural background and lower social caste than the previous residents.On the roof of the ten-story building are fifty small rooms (one for each apartment), no more than two meters by two meters in area, which were originally used as storage areas and not as living quarters for human beings, but after wealthy residents began moving from downtown Cairo to suburbs such as Medinet Nasr and Mohandessin in the 1970s, the rooms were gradually taken over by overwhelmingly poor migrants from the Egyptian countryside, arriving in Cairo in the hopes of finding employment. The rooftop community, effectively a slum neighborhood, is symbolic of the urbanization of Egypt and of the burgeoning population growth in its large cities in recent decades, especially among the poor and working classes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prentice_Alvin"title="Prentice Alvin">
After being released from his time with Ta-Kumsaw, an Indian leader who taught Alvin the ways of Indian people, the young boy sets out to start his apprenticeship as a Smith in the town where he was born.While there he meets a young half-black boy by the name of Arthur Stuart, the son of a slave and a slave-owner who has been adopted by the owners of the local guesthouse.Another new friend comes in the form of Miss Margaret Larner, who he later discovers to be the "torch" who helped him to be born so many years ago, and with whom he has been strangely linked since that day.Eventually, Alvin is forced into helping Arthur to escape some slave-hunters, something that requires him to slightly change Arthur's DNA enough to prevent the hunters' knacks from identifying the runaway child.Alvin also creates a plow of living gold, which is bestowed with magical properties, as his journeyman piece to release himself from his apprenticeship as a Smith (and also as a Maker).The story ends with Alvin and Arthur leaving the town and returning to Alvin's home in the west.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodbye_to_Berlin"title="Goodbye to Berlin">
After relocating to Weimar-era Berlin in order to work on his novel, an English writer explores the decadent nightlife of the city and becomes enmeshed in the colorful lives of a diverse array of Berlin denizens. He acquires modest lodgings in a boarding house owned by Fräulein Schroeder, a caring landlady. At the boarding house, he interacts with the other tenants, including the brazen prostitute Fräulein Kost, who has a Japanese patron, and the decadent Sally Bowles, a young English flapper who sings tunelessly in a seedy cabaret called "The Lady Windermere". Due to a mutual lack of funds, Christopher and Sally soon become roommates, and he learns a great deal about her sex life as well as her coterie of "marvelous" lovers.When Sally becomes pregnant after a brief fling, Christopher facilitates an abortion, and the painful incident draws them closer together. When he visits Sally at the hospital, the hospital staff assume he is Sally's impregnator and despise him for forcing her to have an abortion. Later during the summer, Christopher resides at a beach house near the Baltic Sea with Peter Wilkinson and Otto Nowak, a gay couple who are struggling with their sexual identities. Jealous of Otto's endless flirtations with other men, Peter departs for England, and Christopher returns to Berlin to live with Otto's family, the Nowaks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Berlin_Stories"title="The Berlin Stories">
## "Mr Norris Changes Trains".While traveling on a train from the Netherlands to Germany, British expatriate William Bradshaw meets a nervous-looking man named Arthur Norris. As they approach the frontier, Bradshaw strikes up a conversation with Norris, who wears an ill-fitting wig and carries a forged passport. After crossing the frontier, Norris invites Bradshaw to dinner and the two become friends. In Berlin, they see each other frequently. Over time, several oddities of Norris's personal life are revealed, one of which is that he is a masochist. Another is that he is a communist, which is dangerous in Hitler-era Germany. Other aspects of Norris's personal life remain mysterious. He seems to run a business with an assistant Schmidt. Norris gets into more and more straitened circumstances and has to leave Berlin.Norris subsequently returns with his fortunes restored and apparently conducting communication with an unknown Frenchwoman called Margot. Schmidt reappears and tries to blackmail Norris. Norris uses Bradshaw as a decoy to get an aristocratic friend, Baron Pregnitz, to take a holiday in Switzerland and meet "Margot" under the guise of a Dutchman. Bradshaw is urgently recalled by Ludwig Bayer one of the leaders of the communist groups, who explains that Norris was spying for the French and both his group and the police know about it. Bradshaw observes they are being followed by the police and persuades Norris to leave Germany. After the Reichstag fire, the Nazis eliminate Bayer and most of Norris's comrades. Bradshaw returns to England where he receives intermittent postcards from Norris, who has fled Berlin, pursued by Schmidt. The novel's last words are drawn from a postcard that Norris sends to Bradshaw from Rio de Janeiro: ""What" have I done to deserve all this?"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Peeve_(novel)"title="Pet Peeve (novel)">
Goody Goblin, the only nice male goblin, goes to see the Good Magician Humphrey so he can get his question answered. As the Magician charges a year's service or the equivalent, Goody has to find a good home for a pet peeve. The pet peeve is a very annoying bird who can mimic the voice of the person carrying it.Goody starts out with the bird and Hannah Barbarian, whose service is to accompany the goblin on the quest and protect him. Throughout the journey, we discover that Goody is nice because he had to take reverse wood and disguise himself as a girl to avoid being captured by an invading goblin tribe. He was also married, but his wife is dead because she was fated to die young.On the trip, Goody and Hannah meet various people. They all refuse to adopt the pet peeve, or in the case of Princesses Melody, Harmony, and Rhythm, are not allowed to by their mother. Goody and Hannah travel to Robot World, one of the moons of Princess Ida, and bring back some robots to live in Xanth. Unfortunately, the robots decide to take over Xanth, which means all of Xanth must unite to fight the menace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Notebook"title="The Golden Notebook">
"The Golden Notebook" is the story of writer Anna Wulf, the four notebooks in which she records her life, and her attempt to tie them together in a fifth, gold-coloured notebook.The book intersperses segments of an ostensibly realistic narrative of the lives of Anna and her friend Molly Jacobs as well as their children, ex-husbands and lovers—entitled "Free Women"—with excerpts from Anna's four notebooks, coloured black (of Anna's experience in Southern Rhodesia, before and during World War II, which inspired her own best-selling novel), red (of her experience as a member of the Communist Party), yellow (an ongoing novel that is being written based on the painful ending of Anna's own love affair), and blue (Anna's personal journal where she records her memories, dreams, and emotional life).Each notebook is returned to four times, interspersed with episodes from "Free Women", creating non-chronological, overlapping sections that interact with one another. This post-modern styling, with its space for "play" engaging the characters and readers, is among the most famous features of the book, although Lessing insisted that readers and reviewers pay attention to the serious themes in the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe's_Havoc"title="Sharpe's Havoc">
During a general British and Portuguese retreat from the French after the First Battle of Porto, Captain Hogan orders Lieutenant Richard Sharpe and his men to help find and escort to safety 19-year-old Englishwoman Kate Savage, the daughter of a recently deceased prominent port merchant. For some unknown reason, she ran away from her home in Oporto. Hogan also tells Sharpe to "keep a close eye" on Colonel James Christopher, who has been staying with the Savages and was the one who requested help in retrieving her. After Horgan leaves, however, Christopher dismisses Sharpe and his men.Sharpe and his detachment, orphaned from the 95th Rifles, are trapped when the French seize Oporto, but are unexpectedly saved by a small detachment of Portuguese soldiers led by Lieutenant Jorge Vicente, a law student in civilian life. Despite his hatred of lawyers, Sharpe gradually comes to respect Vincente.Christopher was sent by the British Foreign Office to Portugal to evaluate the situation in Portugal. He has instead decided to use the situation to enrich himself. French Marshal Soult would like to declare himself King of Portugal, but his royal ambition does not sit well with many of his officers. Christopher contacts and encourages the potential mutineers, but intends to betray them to Soult. Just in case the French do not conquer Portugal, he also "marries" Kate in a sham ceremony for her substantial inheritance, despite already having a wife in England.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_Flora's_Family"title="Mama Flora's Family">
The young Flora meets the wealthy Lincoln Flemming at a dance one night. Lincoln wants her to come care for his elderly grandmother Nana at his home, to which she agrees. Eventually Flora becomes sexually involved with Lincoln and believes the two of them to be romantically involved. After experiencing him shun and shame her in front of his rich contemporaries, Flora begins to feel used and refuses to sleep with him anymore. This prompts her to become evicted from the house. Flora later discovers that she is pregnant with Lincoln's child, which prompts his wealthy family to bribe her into leaving Mississippi to avoid scandal. Flora takes the offer, planning to go to Memphis, Tennessee. She gives birth to a boy and names him Luke, but is forced to give the baby to the Flemmings to raise.Flora then travels by train to the city, but is instead directed by a fellow passenger to go to the small town of Stockton under the advice that a young woman such as her should not go into the city alone. Once there, she gains employment and shelter through the Reverend Jackson.While living in Stockton Flora meets and falls in love with Booker Palmer. The two marry, have a son named Willie, and Booker becomes a sharecropper soon after they marry. Booker experiences financial difficulties, which force him to steal cotton from other farmers. During one of his nightly runs, he is shot and killed. Flora later buries Booker, but only after remaining with his body all night. Shortly thereafter Flora receives news that her sister Jossie is ill and dying. Flora travels to her sister and ends up taking her niece Ruthana back with her to raise as her own daughter. Throughout the 1930s Flora raises both Willy and Ruthana in Stockton, but when Willie gets into a fight with some White boys he's forced to escape to Chicago where Ruthana's father lives. Once there, Willy stays with Georgy, who shows him the area and finds Willy a job. One night Willy ends up gambling and smoking marijuana, which causes him to lose his home. Willy moves into a basement with his friend Josh, who is later arrested for dealing drugs. During all of this time Willy continues to write his mother, cousin, and his girlfriend Ernestine, but lies and tells them that everything is fine. Later at the outbreak of World War II, Willy joins the army and upon his return he proposes to his girlfriend. The two marry, move to Chicago, and have three children.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_the_Circle_Be_Unbroken"title="Let the Circle Be Unbroken">
The Logan family goes through hard times trying to raise their children the correct way. T.J. Avery, Stacey's friend, is accused of murdering a white man, Jim Lee Barnett. Although he is innocent, he is tried by an all-white jury and convicted. Stacey does everything in his power to help his friend, but in the end, T.J. is sentenced to death.A man makes a file to join blacks and whites together so the cotton fields can be shared. The union does not succeed and the man who wanted to start it is beaten. Some people are told that they need to pull up the acres that were already planted because they planted too much. The plantation owners lied, claiming the government ordered it, but the plantation owners did it in order to receive money that was supposed to go to the sharecroppers.Mama's cousin Bud's daughter Suzella, who has a black father and a white mother, lives with the Logans. Suzella is venerated for being attractive and mixed, making her seem like a prize to all the males in the town because she is technically black and therefore accessible, but still has the lighter skin, hair, and eyes; she can be assumed as white. Suzella struggles with identity issues that put a strain on her relationships with others. She catches the eye of Stuart Walker, a white boy who flirts with pretty colored girls to start trouble. When Stuart approaches her he genuinely respects her, assuming she is white. This takes a great toll on Stacey; he believes he must take care of his family before they lose their land. He and his best friend Moe run away to a sugarcane field to work. With the help of Mr. Jamison, a white lawyer who is kind and fair to black people, Mama, Papa and Caroline Logan (Big Ma) contact police stations in the next couple of towns. They address the letters in Mr. Jamison's name so that when the sheriffs receive the letters they will respond. Mr. Jamison says that if they see a black family name on the letters they probably will not respond. Seven months later, they find Stacey several hours away, jailed in a small town in Louisiana. Stacey and Moe were accused of stealing which put them in jail, where they became ill. While Stacey was at the cane field a pole rolled over his foot and broke it. Before they drive home, they stop by the house of a lady who took care of Stacey and Moe while they were in jail and thank her. They stay the night there and the next morning return home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westmark_(novel)"title="Westmark (novel)">
It is a complicated and politically dangerous period in Westmark. The country's ruler, King Augustine IV, has slipped into dementia, depression and illness since the supposed death of his only child, Princess Augusta, over six years ago. Despite the efforts of the queen, Caroline, and the court physician, Dr. Torrens, the King is increasingly manipulated by his chief minister, Cabbarus, who has designs on the throne. While the ill king is kept distracted by a series of mystics and charlatans who claim to be able to speak to his dead child, Cabbarus increases his control over Westmark, restricting freedoms and abusing the king's powers.Young Theo, an orphan, has been raised in a small town, Dorning, by a printer named Anton. After the pair accepts a job from a travelling salesman they are investigated by Cabbarus' men, who declare their job illegal and proceed to destroy their press. In the ensuing scuffle and chase, Theo attacks a soldier and Anton is shot and killed.With no one else to turn to, Theo takes to the countryside, eventually meeting up with the men who hired him and Anton for the printing job: Count Las Bombas, a con artist, and his dwarf driver/partner Musket. Theo joins up with them, rather reluctantly, and ends up participating in their money-making schemes. They eventually discover a girl named Mickle, a poor street urchin, who has a talent for throwing her voice and mimicry. The count builds a charade around Mickle, dressing her up as the Oracle Priestess and putting her on display, claiming that she can speak to the spirits of the dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Man_(Carr_novel)"title="The Hollow Man (Carr novel)">
Professor Charles Grimaud's meeting with friends at a London tavern is interrupted by the illusionist Pierre Fley, who threatens Grimaud and warns of an even more dangerous brother who seeks Grimaud's life. Grimaud tells him to send his brother and be damned.A few nights later, a visitor concealing his identity with a false face arrives at Grimaud's house and is shown up to his study by the housekeeper, Mme Dumont. Grimaud's secretary, positioned with a view of the study door, sees Grimaud greet the visitor and let him in; he continues to watch until a shot is heard. Inside the room, Grimaud is found to be dying; but neither visitor nor weapon can be found, and there is unbroken snow outside the only window. On his deathbed, Grimaud makes a confusing statement stating that his brother was responsible.Gideon Fell discovers that before Grimaud settled in London he was known as Koroly Grimaud Horváth, and that he had two brothers, one of whom now calls himself Fley. The three had, years earlier, tried to escape a Transylvanian labour camp by faking their own deaths and being buried alive in their coffins.A newspaper reports that minutes after Grimaud's shooting witnesses saw Fley walking alone down a snow-covered cul-de-sac, and heard a voice shout "The second bullet is for you!" followed by a gunshot. Fley is found dead in the snow with the revolver that killed him (and Grimaud) lying nearby. There are no tracks in the snow but his.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_(novel)"title="Money (novel)">
"Money" tells the story of, and is narrated by, John Self, a successful director of adverts who is invited to New York City by Fielding Goodney, a film producer, to shoot his first film. Self is an archetypal hedonist and slob; he is usually drunk, an avid consumer of pornography and prostitutes, eats too much and, above all, spends too much, encouraged by Goodney.The actors in the film, which Self originally titles "Good Money" but which he eventually wants to rename "Bad Money", all have some kind of emotional issue which clashes with fellow cast members and with their roles — the principal casting having already been done by Goodney. As examples: the strict Christian Spunk Davis (whose name is intentionally unfortunate) is asked to play a drugs pusher; the ageing hardman Lorne Guyland has to be physically assaulted; the motherly Caduta Massi, who is insecure about her body, is asked to appear in a sex scene with Lorne, whom she detests.While in New York, Self is stalked by "Frank the Phone", a menacing misfit who threatens him over a series of telephone conversations, apparently because Self personifies the success Frank was unable to attain. Self is not frightened of Frank, even when he is beaten by him while on an alcoholic bender. (Self, characteristically, is unable to remember how he was attacked.) Towards the end of the book Self arranges to meet Frank for a showdown, which is the beginning of the novel's shocking denouement. "Money" is similar to Amis's five-years-later "London Fields" in having a major plot twist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_It_as_It_Lays"title="Play It as It Lays">
The novel begins with an internal monologue by the 31-year-old Maria Wyeth, followed by short reminiscences of her friend Helene, and ex-husband, film producer Carter Lang. The further narration is conducted from a third-person perspective in eighty-four chapters of terse, controlled and highly visual prose typical of Didion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sot-Weed_Factor_(novel)"title="The Sot-Weed Factor (novel)">
The novel is a satirical epic of the colonization of Maryland based on the life of an actual poet, Ebenezer Cooke, who wrote a poem of the same title. "The Sot-Weed Factor" is what Northrop Frye called an "anatomy"—a "work resembling a Menippean satire, or one in which a mass of information is brought to bear on the subject being satirized, usually a particular attitude or type of behaviour." The fictional Ebenezer Cooke (repeatedly described as "poet and virgin") is a Candide-like innocent who sets out to write a heroic epic, becomes disillusioned and ends up writing a biting satire.The novel is set in the 1680s and 90s in London and on the eastern shore of the colony of Maryland. It tells the story of an English poet named Ebenezer Cooke who is given the title "Poet Laureate of Maryland" by Charles Calvert. He undergoes many adventures on his journey to Maryland and while in Maryland, all the while striving to preserve his innocence (i.e. his virginity). The book takes its title from the grand poem that Cooke composes throughout the story, which was originally intended to sing the praises of Maryland, but ends up being a biting satire based on his disillusioning experiences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Simoqin_Prophecies"title="The Simoqin Prophecies">
The story begins in the expected year of the rakshas Danh-Gem's return. Asvin, prince of Avranti is sent on an Aswamedh, a journey supposed to bring him fame and glory. But as soon as he reaches the forest, his guards turn on him and tell him that he would be executed at sunset. This is in accordance with the laws of the secret brotherhood, which ensured that all younger princes of Avranti who were too eager for glory would be dealt with this way. However he is rescued by the Silver Dagger and his men, on the orders of the Chief Civilian of Kol, who wanted him to be the prophecised hero.In Kol, the Chief Civilian is very worried about the sudden emergence of the of Imokoi along with their city asur cousins. Also the under their lord Bjorkun are planning something. Manticores have been seen in the forest. It is later revealed that this is a plot to bring back Danh Gem, instigated by Bjorkun and Bali, later on joined by the asur king Leer, and Omar of Artaxerxeia. This group is called the secret Brotherhood of Renewal, dedicated to bring Danh-Gem back.The spellbinders notice that magical levels all over the world are rising. Maya, a powerful spellbinder discovers that her best friend Kirin is in fact a ravian. Kirin himself had discovered this fact only a short while back and remembers that he is actually over two hundred years old. He recalls his memories back from his earlier days when he lived in the forest with a roving band of ravian warriors. Then he remembers the day the ravians had departed from the world. Somehow he was turned into stone at that time and didn't remember anything until Spikes, a pashan unlike any other, caused him to wake up. This is a great mystery which Maya is determined to solve.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manticore's_Secret"title="The Manticore's Secret">
The book begins initially by showing the return of the ravians to the world, which they now call Obiyalis. The vamans loyal to the ravians (called the rebel union of marginal labour) and Manticore open the ravian portal to this world. Three champions of the ravians, Myrdak, Peori and Behrim, promptly kill the vamans so as to make sure there are no traitors to inform the world of the return of the ravians.Meanwhile in the newly constructed dark tower of Izakar, Kirin is facing trouble. Most of his council of rakshases are issuing mad orders in his name, while all he wanted was to stop the war. Aciram warns Kirin of the return of the ravians and their plan to take over the earth. It seems that they are more dangerous to the humans now than to the dark lord. Nasud, a cousin of Kirin, grows tired of Kirin's peace efforts and declares a kin strife. Kirin kills him with a lightning bolt.Meanwhile in Kol, a secret society of the shapeshifters, called the Rainbow Council, prepare to battle against the mind-controlling foes who threaten history. Many Hero and villain guilds are formed in Kol in the wake of Kirin's ascension as dark lord. Arathognan (or Thog the barbarian) was one of these. In one of these encounters, Thog kills four jaykinis who were trying to eat children. However he notices that he is being followed by a mysterious girl, later revealed to be Peori.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_Stained_with_Royal_Blood"title="Sword Stained with Royal Blood">
The novel is set in China towards the end of the Ming dynasty. The protagonist, Yuan Chengzhi, is the son of Yuan Chonghuan, a patriotic general who had been wrongly put to death by the Chongzhen Emperor. After his father's death, Yuan was brought to the Mount Hua Sect, where he was trained in martial arts by the sect's leader, Mu Renqing. Once he has grown up, he leaves Mount Hua in search of adventure. Serendipitous incidents lead him to discover the Golden Serpent Sword and a martial arts manual which once belonged to Xia Xueyi, a long-dead enigmatic swordsman. Yuan inherits Xia's possessions and skills and becomes a powerful swordsman.Yuan wanders around the land and meets Wen Qingqing, a young maiden from a family of brigands. Wen is actually Xia Xueyi's daughter and she follows Yuan after being expelled from her family. Although Yuan initially wanted to seek redress for his father, he eventually joins Li Zicheng's rebellion to overthrow the corrupt Ming government. He helps the rebels retrieve the gold robbed by the Wen family, sabotages a battery of cannons supplied to the Ming army by foreigners, and finances the rebellion with part of the treasure he discovered in Nanjing. Yuan also befriends several martial artists, who pledge allegiance to him out of respect for his heroism. He organises his followers to form a militia and they pledge to serve and defend the Han Chinese nation from internal and external threats.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Pretty_Pony"title="My Pretty Pony">
An elderly man, his death rapidly approaching, takes his young grandson up onto a hill behind his house and gives the boy his pocket watch. Then, standing among falling apple blossoms, the man also "gives instruction" on the nature of time: how when you grow up, it begins to move faster and faster, slipping away from you in great chunks if you don't hold tightly onto it. Time is a pretty pony, with a wicked heart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Solution_(novel)"title="The Final Solution (novel)">
Although the plot of the story is modelled on the classic ratiocination stories of Conan Doyle, there are two separate mysteries in the book, only one of which the Holmes character is able to solve by the end. The story opens with the description of a chance encounter between the old man and the young boy Linus Steinman, who, we find out moments later, is a German-Jewish refugee staying with a local Anglican priest and his family. Because the parrot sitting on the boy's shoulder is in the habit of rattling off German numbers in no obvious order — "zwei eins sieben fünf vier sieben drei" ("two one seven five four seven three") — the old man quickly deduces the boy's reason for being in England. After we are introduced to the priest, his wife, son and two lodgers sitting at dinner, we find out that the numbers may have some significance. One lodger speculates that the numbers are a military code of some kind and seeks to crack it. The other lodger, a Mr. Shane, from the British foreign office, pretends at dinner not to even notice the bird, which the family and Linus call Bruno. But because everyone else around the table is intensely interested in it, Shane's behavior only heightens their suspicions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diary_of_Miss_Idilia"title="The Diary of Miss Idilia">
Idilia Dubb is a 17-year-old Scottish girl who disappears during a holiday, while on a family trip to Germany in 1851. After a lengthy search fails to find her, her parents return home. In 1860, workmen at Lahneck Castle discover her remains at the top of a tower. Lying next to her skeleton is a diary in which she has recorded the horrors of her final days, after a wooden staircase collapses, leaving her trapped at the top of the tower without food or water.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_of_Jonah_Boyd"title="The Body of Jonah Boyd">
The crucial starting point of all following events is the Wrights’ annual Thanksgiving dinner in 1969, when author Jonah Boyd, the new husband of Mrs. Wright's friend Anne, accidentally loses his notebooks including his almost finished novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Weather_(Wodehouse_novel)"title="Heavy Weather (Wodehouse novel)">
With the Hon. Galahad's reminiscences removed from the market, publisher Lord Tilbury is anxious to get hold of the manuscript, while Lady Constance Keeble and Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe want to lay hands on it for quite other reasons. Lord Emsworth fears that Parsloe-Parsloe is out to spoil his prize pig Empress of Blandings' chances at the forthcoming county show, and keeps detective Pilbeam on hand to keep watch. Meanwhile, Sue Brown is anxious to hide her old friendship with Monty Bodkin from her jealous fiance Ronnie Fish, giving his mother Lady Julia a chance to talk him out of the unsuitable marriage...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Many_a_Summer"title="After Many a Summer">
The action revolves around a few characters brought together by a Hollywood millionaire, Jo Stoyte. Each character represents a different attitude toward life. Stoyte, in his sixties and conscious of his mortality, is desperate to stave off death. Stoyte hires Dr. Obispo and his assistant Pete to research the secrets to long life in carp, crocodiles, and parrots. Jeremy Pordage, an English archivist and literature expert, is brought in to archive a rare collection of books. Pordage's presence highlights Stoyte's shallow attitude toward the precious works of art that he affords himself. Other characters are Virginia, Stoyte's young mistress; and Mr. Propter, a childhood acquaintance of Stoyte's who lives on a small nearby farm and works to improve the lot of the mistreated and underpaid laborers Stoyte had working for him. Mr. Propter believes:... every individual is called on to display not only unsleeping good will but also unsleeping intelligence. And this is not all. For, if individuality is not absolute, if personalities are illusory figments of a self-will disastrously blind to the reality of a more-than-personal consciousness, of which it is the limitation and denial, then all of every human being's efforts must be directed, in the last resort, to the actualisation of that more-than-personal consciousness. So that even intelligence is not sufficient as an adjunct to good will; there must also be the recollection which seeks to transform and transcend intelligence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_Rizka"title="Gypsy Rizka">
Rizka is a gypsy who lives just outside a town in a vardo and waits for the return of her gypsy father after the death of her mother. She has Big Franko looking out for her and the company of her cat Petzel. Throughout the story, she experiences numerous adventures helping out friends and folks in town as well as outwitting local town official Sharpnack, who will do anything to get rid of Rizka.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifty_Year_Sword"title="The Fifty Year Sword">
Chintana, a seamstress in East Texas, finds herself responsible for five orphans who are not only captivated by a storyteller’s tale of vengeance but by the long black box he sets before them. As midnight approaches, the box is opened, a fateful dare is made, and the children as well as Chintana come face to face with the consequences of a malice retold and now foretold.Much like Danielewski's previous works, "The Fifty Year Sword" uses unusual formatting and color throughout. Five different colors are used for quotation marks in order to signal which character is speaking.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_of_Eagles"title="Flight of Eagles">
Jack Kelso, an American ace pilot in World War I, is shot down and nursed back to health by a German nurse, Baroness Elsa von Halder. They marry and return to America after the war. After Jack is killed in a car accident, Elsa returns to Germany with their eldest son Max, who assumes the title of Baron von Halder. Harry, his identical younger (by ten minutes) brother, remains with his grandfather, millionaire Abe Kelso.Inspired by their father's example, both brothers become ace and much decorated pilots in opposing forces. Max joins the Luftwaffe and Harry, after fighting in Finland, returns to England, joining the Royal Air Force as a 'Finn'.The brothers rise in rank and number of 'kills', occasionally hearing of the others exploits. They actually meet again in the skies and, when Harry is shot down, Max summons an English rescue boat using his airborne radio.Elsa continues her social climbing amongst the Nazi elite, although Max warns her of the potential danger. Harry becomes a special duties pilot and crashes in France whilst landing a French Resistance leader. He is captured by the Germans and imprisoned at a local chateau, where he and Max finally meet face to face.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kestrel"title="The Kestrel">
Theo is traveling through Westmark, learning about the country of which he will soon be Prince Consort. He is not surprised to find great poverty: Mickle - now known as Princess Augusta - could have told him that from her years on the street. His friend Florian could have told him about the aristocracy's graft and corruption. But neither could have foreseen a loaded pistol in the practiced hand of the assassin Skeit. The echoes of that shot ring from the muskets and cannons of a Westmark suddenly at war - a war that turns simple, honest men into cold-blooded killers, Mickle into a military commander, and Theo himself into a stranger.As set up in Westmark, Theo and Mickle are in love. A corrupt general is in a cabal with a rival country, and plans to surrender after a token resistance, allowing a country with a more aristocratic government to replace the more populist Mickle who is seen as too close to revolutionaries like Florian. However, although the general surrenders, his soldiers refuse to, and the nominal resistance becomes a full-blown war as the people fight to determine their own destiny.Similar to how the aristocratic powers of the time invaded France to restore the aristocracy, here a foreign country is meddling in the internal affairs of Westmark. And just as France repelled the great powers with an army led by the people and of the people, the Westmark forces run by Florian, and his lieutenants, Theo — now the eponymous Kestrel — and Justin, fight to preserve the country. But becoming a general, a tradesman in blood and death, costs the artistic and conscientious Theo a great deal. He has to cut off pieces of himself in the service of a more pressing need.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_(novel)"title="Voyager (novel)">
## 1746."Voyager" opens on the battlefield at Culloden, where Jamie Fraser finds himself gravely wounded and his rival Jack Randall dead. Jamie is carried to a nearby farmhouse where 18 Highland soldiers have sought refuge after the battle of Culloden. Harold Grey, Earl of Melton, arrives as representative of the Duke of Cumberland and announces the survivors will be shot. As each man is led outside to be executed, Melton takes his name for the records. At Jamie's turn, Melton recognizes him as famed Jacobite “Red Jamie”, but is forbidden to execute him because Jamie spared his younger brother, Lord John Grey, during the Battle of Prestonpans, and he sends Jamie home to die of his wounds.When the English scour the country for Jacobite rebels, Jamie hides in a cave near Lallybroch. He visits his sister, Jenny, and her family once a month to shave, wash, and hear news. By invoking a deed of sasine, Jamie signs Lallybroch over to Jenny’s eldest son, also called Jamie, to prevent the English from seizing their home as the property of a traitor. For a brown wool cap he wears to cover his distinctive red hair, Jamie becomes a Scottish legend, the “Dunbonnet”, and arranges to have himself be captured, whereby his tenants claim the reward and prevent famine among themselves. At Ardsmuir Prison, Jamie becomes the leader of the prisoners under the nickname "Mac Dubh". At Ardsmuir, Jamie meets Lord John Grey again as the new governor of the prison. Lord John's predecessor tells him that he invited Jamie to dinner once a week to discuss the other prisoners and suggests that Lord John continue the custom, which he does. John believes that Jamie knows the whereabouts of the French gold allegedly sent to Bonnie Prince Charlie. When the prison is fully renovated, the Crown transports the prisoners to America and uses the former prison as an army barracks; but John has Jamie sent to Helwater in the Lake District, the stud farm of Lord Dunsany, as a groom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drums_of_Autumn"title="Drums of Autumn">
The heroine of the bestselling "Outlander", Claire, returns in "Drums of Autumn", reunited with her husband Jamie Fraser and facing a new life in the American colonies. As the preceding novel, "Voyager", concluded with Jamie Fraser and his wife Claire shipwrecked on the Georgia coastline in 1766 —and happy to be out of Scotland—"Drums of Autumn" picks up where "Voyager" left off.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fiery_Cross_(novel)"title="The Fiery Cross (novel)">
Claire, the heroine of "Outlander", figures in "The Fiery Cross" as a reluctant oracle and wife to Jamie Fraser, her 18th-century partner, and faces the politics and turmoil of the forthcoming American Revolution. As the preceding novel, "Drums of Autumn", concluded with Jamie Fraser and his wife Claire helping their daughter and new son-in-law, from the 20th century, settle into life on Fraser's Ridge, "The Fiery Cross" picks up the storyline exactly where it was left—with Brianna Ellen Randall Fraser and Roger Mackenzie about to make their nuptials official and baptize their son Jeremiah. With the American Revolution only a few years away and unrest brewing, Jamie is called to form a militia to put down the beginnings of rebellion in North Carolina, and risk his life for a king he knows he must betray soon. Gabaldon delivers the endings to several strands of storyline she had woven through "Drums of Autumn"; mysterious plots and characters are revealed and by the end, the Frasers and their family are poised on the edge of war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Breath_of_Snow_and_Ashes"title="A Breath of Snow and Ashes">
Claire is the wife of Jamie Fraser, her 18th century husband, and facing the politics and turmoil of the forthcoming American Revolution. The preceding novel, "The Fiery Cross", concluded with political unrest in the colonies beginning to boil over and the Frasers trying to peacefully live on their isolated homestead in the foothills of North Carolina. Jamie is suddenly faced with walking between the fires of loyalty to the oath he swore to the British crown and following his hope for freedom in the new world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deltora_Quest_2"title="Deltora Quest 2">
In the series, King Lief must find out how to save his kingdom. Although he has defeated the enemy, Deltora is rotting away - the Shadow Lord had taken thousands of Deltorans as slaves back to the Shadowlands. Lief and his friends must re-unite three pieces of the magical Pirran Pipe - the only thing the Shadow Lord fears - to save his people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Approaching_Storm"title="The Approaching Storm">
The Galactic Republic is decaying, even under the leadership of Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, who was elected to save the galaxy from collapsing under the forces of discontent. On the tiny but strategic planet of Ansion, a powerful faction is on the verge of joining the growing Separatist movement. The urban dwellers wish to expand into the prairies outside their citiesthe ancestral territory of the fierce, independent Ansion nomads. If their demands are not met, they will secedean act that could jump-start a chain reaction of withdrawal and rebellion by other worlds of the Republic.At the Chancellor's request, the Jedi Council sends Kenobi and fellow Jedi Luminara Unduli to resolve the conflict and negotiate with the elusive nomads. Undaunted, Kenobi and Unduli, along with their Padawans Skywalker and Barriss Offee, set out across the wilderness. Many perils lie waiting to trap them. The Jedi will have to fulfill near-impossible tasks, befriend wary strangers, and influence two great armies to complete their quest, stalked all the while by an enemy sworn to see the negotiations collapse and the mission fail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tramp_Abroad"title="A Tramp Abroad">
The first half of the book covers their stay in south-western Germany (Heidelberg, Mannheim, a trip on the Neckar river, Baden-Baden and the Black Forest). The second part describes his travels through Switzerland and eastern France (Lucerne, Interlaken, Zermatt, Chamonix and Geneva). The end of the book covers his trip through several cities in northern Italy (Milan, Venice and Rome). Several other cities are touched and described during their travels, as well as mountains such as Matterhorn, the Jungfrau, the Rigi-Kulm and Mont-Blanc.Interleaved with the narration, Mark Twain inserted stories not related to the trip, such as "Bluejay Yarn", "The Man who put up at Gadsby's" and others; as well as many German Legends, some invented by the author himself.Six appendices are included in the book. They are short essays dedicated to different topics. The role of "The Portier" in European hotels and how they make their living, a description of Heidelberg Castle, an essay on College Prisons in Germany, "The Awful German Language", a humorous essay on German language, a short story called "The Legend of the Castle" and a satirical description of German newspapers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plowing_the_Dark"title="Plowing the Dark">
Taimur Martin, the prisoner of war, spends five years analyzing and replaying his life while trapped in a single room. He has little outside contact. He occasionally exchanges words with his captors, and for a short interlude he is able to communicate with nearby prisoners using a tapped Morse code. He reads a book called "Great Escape". He spends most of his time thinking about his life and relationship with his girlfriend Gwen. When his story resumes after he is released, he has a child and a wife, and much time has gone by.In the second narrative, a virtual reality machine ("The Cavern"), is being built by workers at the Realization Laboratory. The main characters are Adie Klarpol, an artist who no longer does original work; Stevie Spiegel, an engineer-turned-poet-turned-programmer; Ronan O'Reilly, an econometrician who hopes to predict the outcome of world events; and Jack "Jackdaw" Acquerelli, a young computer programming wizard. They are attempting to recreate the world inside a three-walled room. They create a completely immersing experience, but near the end Adie realizes that the technology will be used by the military. She has to reconcile with herself, but ends up creating another room which recreates the destruction and rebuilding of civilization. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Watch"title="Dark Watch">
The story begins with a group of Russian scientists sent in search of ore, which they find. When greed overcomes them, one of them kills the others to disguise the find. The story brings in aspects of modern-day piracy, slavery and human smuggling and how these seemingly different events are related to the Russians and Chinese with the ore mining.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Strange_Manuscript_Found_in_a_Copper_Cylinder"title="A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder">
The main story of the novel is the narrative of the adventures of Adam More, a British sailor shipwrecked on a homeward voyage from Tasmania. After passing through a tunnel of volcanic origin, he finds himself in a "lost world" of prehistoric animals, plants and people sustained by volcanic heat despite the long Antarctic night.A secondary plot of four yachtsmen who find the manuscript written by Adam More and sealed in a copper cylinder forms a frame for the central narrative. They comment on More's report, and one identifies the Kosekin language as a Semitic language, possibly derived from Hebrew.In his strange volcanic world, More also finds a well-developed human society which in the tradition of topsy-turvy worlds of folklore and satire (compare Sir Thomas More's "Utopia", "Erewhon" by Samuel Butler, or Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Herland") has reversed the values of 19th century Western society: wealth is scorned and poverty is revered, death and darkness are preferred to life and light. Rather than accumulating wealth, the natives seek to divest themselves of it as quickly as possible.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Laughing_Policeman_(novel)"title="The Laughing Policeman (novel)">
A gunman shoots the passengers of a bus with a sub-machine gun, killing eight people, including Detective Åke Stenström, and wounding one. After a painstaking investigation, Detective Beck and his team come to suspect that the mass killing is designed to hide the true target, Stenström himself, who was spending his free time unofficially investigating the murder of a Portuguese prostitute sixteen years earlier in an attempt to solve the case and demonstrate his skills to his older police comrades. Beck must now complete Stenstrom's work by solving the earlier murder in order to identify Stenstrom's killer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marlows_and_the_Traitor"title="The Marlows and the Traitor">
Taking an early morning walk in a fierce storm, Peter Marlow is deliberately snubbed by one of his teachers from Dartmouth Naval College, Lewis Foley, who is spending the Easter holidays in the fishing village of St-Anne's-Byfleet. Later, he and his sister Nicola, follow an irresistible sign to a place called Mariners. Mariners turns out to be a deserted house complete with its own crow's nest and a sign to Foley's Folly Light.Nicola discovers from one of her fishermen friends, Robert Anquetil, that Lewis had grown up in the village and that Mariners belongs to his family. Anquetil warns her not to go near the house again. However, when she returns to the hotel where the Marlows are staying, she finds that Peter has already told the others and that they are planning a trip that afternoon. Reluctantly, Nicola agrees to go along with them.The children enter the house and go exploring. While Nicola, Peter and Lawrie go down to the cellars, Ginty agrees to keep guard. But when she hears a noise she panics and follows them down the stairs. Peter has found some microfiche which seems to show details of Naval secrets. A man enters the cellars and the girls are afraid, but Peter recognises him as Lewis Foley and starts to tell him about the secrets he has found.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falconer's_Lure"title="Falconer's Lure">
"Falconer's Lure" introduces Patrick Merrick, a key character in most of the ensuing Marlow books. Living on the neighbouring estate he was a childhood friend of Peter Marlow before WWII. He has spent the last two years at home, recovering from serious injuries sustained by falling off a cliff in search of baby falcons. The dangers of falconry, as well as its thrills, its demands and its sorrows are made very evident. The reader, like Nicola Marlow, is entranced by the falcons and Patrick's evident expertise.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Restraint_of_Beasts"title="The Restraint of Beasts">
The novel starts with a phone call, "Mr McCrindle's fence has gone slack", and sees the three main characters duly dispatched to the scene of Tam and Richie's previous job, which they have left in a hurry. The ensuing Kafkaesque incidents set the tone for the rest of the novel, where Tam, Richie, and the narrator find themselves "sent off" to England in work-related "exile".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendent_(novel)"title="Transcendent (novel)">
The story alternates between two timelines: the world of Michael Poole in the year 2047, and that of Alia, a posthuman girl who lives approximately half a million years in the future.Engineer Michael Poole is recovering from the death of Morag, his pregnant wife. Poole works as a consultant designing space propulsion systems, and dreams of being able to one day explore the stars. However, there are more pressing matters; humanity faces a serious bottleneck, with the Earth reeling from the effects of anthropogenic climate change and resource depletion; automobile production has all but ceased, except for hydrogen-based mass transit, and air travel is limited to the very rich. Due to climate change, the oceans have become dead zones, with rising sea levels and severe weather displacing millions.While working in Siberia, Michael's son Tom is injured by an explosion of methane gas from previously frozen hydrates, suddenly released from the now-melting tundra. Michael begins to research whether this is an isolated incident or the beginning of something more serious. With the help of an artificial sentience named Gea, he discovers that a potential release of all such frozen greenhouse gasses could destabilise the environment enough to make the Earth untenable for human habitation, in a repeat of the Permian extinction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Quest"title="Star Quest">
"In a universe that had been ravaged by a thousand years of interplanetary warfare between the star-shattering Romaghins and the equally voracious Setessins, there seemed now but one thing that might bring the destruction to an end. That would be the right catalyst in the hands of the right people. The right catalyst could well be the individualist rebel, Tohm... he who had once been a simple peasant and who had been forcibly changed into a fearfully armored instrument of mechanical warfare—the man-tank Jumbo Ten. But the right people? Could they possibly be the hated driftwood of biological warfare—those monsters of a cosmic no-man's land—the Muties?"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outside_Providence_(novel)"title="Outside Providence (novel)">
Largely an autobiographical tale, the novel revolves around Timothy "Dildo" Dunphy, a ne'er-do-well from the city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, which borders Providence. After Dunphy falls in with a bad element at home, his father, a widower, exiles him to the fictional Cornwall Academy (a thin guise for Kent School located near Kent, Connecticut).Over time, Dunphy struggles with issues including class structure, loyalty, first love, and his ongoing issues with his father. Dunphy finds that his fellow prep-school students merely represent a wealthier, more polished class of delinquent than the friends he has left at home.The novel was Farrelly's fledgling effort, and served as his thesis when he graduated from the creative writing program at Columbia University.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusions_(Bach_novel)"title="Illusions (Bach novel)">
"Illusions" revolves around two barnstorming pilots who meet in a field in the Midwestern United States. The two main characters enter into a teacher-student relationship that explains the concept that the world that we inhabit is illusory, as well as the underlying reality behind it:Donald William Shimoda is a messiah who quits his job after deciding that people value the showbiz-like performance of miracles and want to be entertained by those miracles more than to understand the message behind them. He meets Richard, a fellow barnstorming pilot. Both are in the business of providing short rides—for a few dollars each—in vintage biplanes to passengers from farmers' fields they find during their travels. Donald initially captures Richard's attention when a grandfather and granddaughter pair arrive at the makeshift airstrip. Ordinarily it is elders who are cautious and the youngsters who are keen to fly. In this case, however, the grandfather wants to fly but the granddaughter is afraid of flying. Donald explains to the granddaughter that her fear of flying comes from a traumatic experience in a past life, and this calms her fears and she is ready to fly. Observing this greatly intrigues Richard, so Donald begins to pass on his knowledge to him, even teaching Richard to perform "miracles" of his own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hermaphrodite"title="The Hermaphrodite">
Laurence narrates the story. Though Laurence is intersex and as a child displays normative gender characteristics of both sexes, his unsettled father, Paternus, decides to raise Laurence as a male. Sent away college, he excels in his studies, particularly in writing poetry that inflames the passions of an older widow, Emma. Laurence is not attracted to her and displays asexual tendencies. On the night of his graduation, Emma professes her love for him. When informed that Laurence is intersex, she goes into a deep state of shock and soon dies.Laurence reacts with great emotion and returns home to his cold father. Paternus now displays how Laurence's condition repulses him and expresses his regret that Laurence will never father a male heir. He offers Laurence his inheritance in a premature bulk sum, if he will agree to allow Paternus to disown him. Laurence vehemently rejects the offer, instead offering the money to his younger (and gender-neutral) brother, Phil, in the hope that his brother will share the estate with him upon their father's death.At one point Laurence hears two men compare him to the "lovely hermaphrodite" in the sculpture collection of the Villa Borghese, the Sleeping Hermaphroditus.Laurence (also called Laurent) lives most of his life as a man and then spends a period living as a woman. Both men and women fall in love with him and he responds to both. He explains how he has chosen to favor men or women: "When I wished to trifle, I preferred the latter. When I wished to reason gravely, I chose the former."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_the_World_(novel)"title="Master of the World (novel)">
Set in the summer of 1903, a series of unexplained events occur across the Eastern United States, caused by objects moving with such great speed that they are nearly invisible. The first-person narrator, John Strock, 'Head inspector in the federal police department' in Washington, DC, travels to the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina to investigate. He discovers that all the phenomena are being caused by Robur, a brilliant inventor. (He was previously featured as a character in Verne's "Robur the Conqueror.")Robur has perfected a new machine, which he has dubbed the "Terror." It is a ten-meter long vehicle, capable of operating as a speedboat, submarine, automobile, or aircraft. It can travel at the (then) unheard of speed of 150 miles per hour on land and at more than 200 mph when flying.Strock tries to capture the "Terror" but instead is captured himself. Robur drives the strange craft to elude his pursuers, heading to the Caribbean and into a thunderstorm. The "Terror" is struck by lightning, breaks apart, and falls into the ocean. Strock is rescued from the vehicle's wreckage, but Robur's body is never found. The reader is left to decide whether or not he has died.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kipps"title="Kipps">
The eponymous character is Arthur "Artie" Kipps, an illegitimate orphan. In Book I, "The Making of Kipps", he is raised by his aged aunt and uncle, who keep a little shop in New Romney on the southeastern coast of Kent. He attends the Cavendish Academy, "a middle-class school", not a "board school",) in Hastings in East Sussex. "By inherent nature he had a sociable disposition", and he befriends Sid Pornick, the son of a neighbour. Kipps also falls in love with Sid's younger sister, Ann. Ann gives him half a sixpence as a token of their love when, at 14, he is apprenticed to the Folkestone Drapery Bazaar, run by Mr Shalford.The Pornicks move away and Kipps forgets Ann. He becomes infatuated with Helen Walshingham, who teaches a woodcarving class on Thursday nights. Chitterlow, an actor and aspiring playwright, meets Kipps by running into him with his bicycle, and they have a drunken evening together that leads to Kipps being "swapped" (dismissed) from his job. Chitterlow then brings to his attention a newspaper advertisement that leads to an unexpected inheritance for Kipps from his grandfather of a house and 26,000 pounds.In Book II, "Mr Coote the Chaperon", Kipps fails in his attempt to adapt to his new position in the social hierarchy of Folkestone. By chance he meets a Mr Coote, who undertakes his social education. That leads to renewed contact with Helen Walshingham, and they become engaged. However, the process of bettering himself alienates Kipps more and more, especially since Helen makes it clear that she wants to take advantage of Kipps's fortune to establish herself and her brother in London society. Chance meetings with Sid, who has become a socialist, and then with Ann, who is now a housemaid, lead Kipps to abandon social conventions and his engagement to Helen, and marry his childhood sweetheart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Forests_of_the_Night"title="In the Forests of the Night">
The book is set in and around the author's home town of Concord, Massachusetts and in the realm of Nyeusigrube. The book centers around Risika who born in 1684 as Rachel Weatere, a God-fearing seventeen-year-old who lived with her father, half-sister, Lynette, and her twin brother, Alexander. Alexander lives in fear as he believes he is of the Devil as he is able to hear people's thoughts and cause things to happen, including manipulating fire, causing him to inadvertently burn his sister Lynette. Aware of her twin brother's powers and his dislike for them, Rachel tries to do her best to comfort him. One day, an unknown stranger appears at their home, who is later revealed as Aubrey and gives Rachel a black rose, which pricks her finger, drawing blood. That night, Rachel hears her twin creep past her room and she follows him to find him confronting two vampires, Ather and Aubrey, who had come to transform Rachel against her will into a vampire to get back at Alexander for interfering with Ather when she tried to feed on Lynette. In an attempt to stop Ather from harming her brother, Rachel confronts Ather but Aubrey grabs her brother and drags him off, while exposing a knife. Rachel tries to go after them but Ather grabs her instead and begins her transformation into a vampire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_It_Girl_(novel)"title="The It Girl (novel)">
After being kicked out of her former school, Jenny Humphrey enrolls at the posh Waverly Academy located in Upstate New York. Jenny hopes to leave her unsophisticated past behind and reinvent herself. She meets her new roommates Callie Vernon and Brett Messerschmidt, two of the most popular girls on campus. Jenny occupies the third bed in the triple that used to belong to Tinsley Carmichael, who was expelled the previous year for getting caught with Ecstasy on campus.Jenny attends the first party of the year, unaware of the gossip already swirling about her. She accepts an invitation from charmingly sloppy Heath Ferro to go into the school chapel alone. Jenny allows Heath to kiss her, but is dismayed when he passes out in her lap. Jenny walks him to his dorm and leaves, but the next day, Heath brags about having had sex with her in the chapel.Callie's relationship with her boyfriend Easy Walsh has hit a rut. Callie invites him to her room, unaware Jenny is also there, trying to sleep. Jenny is discovered and a frustrated Callie leaves to go to the bathroom. Easy is surprised at his attraction to Jenny, but their conversation is interrupted by the dorm supervisor's husband, Mr. Pardee. Realizing she could be expelled for having Easy in her room, Callie convinces Mr. Pardee that Easy was visiting Jenny and not her. Easy and Jenny are each called in separately to meet with their student advisor, Eric Dalton, who decides the matter will be resolved in a disciplinary hearing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatooine_Ghost"title="Tatooine Ghost">
The deaths of Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine, and victory at the Battle of Endor by no means spelled the end of the Empire. In the aftermath, the New Republic has faced a constant struggle to survive and grow. And now a new threat looms: a masterpiece of Alderaanian art, lost in transit after the planet's destruction, has resurfaced on the black market. Offered at auction, it will command a handsome price . . . but its greatest value lies in the vital secret it conceals—the key to a code used to communicate with New Republic agents deep undercover within the Empire. Discovery of the key by Imperial forces would spell certain disaster. The only option is recovery—and Han Solo, Leia Organa Solo, Chewbacca, and C-3PO have been dispatched to Tatooine to infiltrate the auction.But trouble is waiting when they arrive: an Imperial Star Destroyer is orbiting Tatooine on the lookout for Rebels; a mysterious stranger at the auction seems to recognize Leia; and an Imperial officer's aggressive bidding for the Alderaanian painting could foil the Solos’ mission. When a dispute erupts into violence, and the painting vanishes in the chaos, Han and Leia are thrust into a desperate race to reclaim it before Imperial troops or a band of unsavory treasure-peddlers get there first.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansfield_Park"title="Mansfield Park">
Fanny Price, at the age of ten, is sent from her impoverished home in Portsmouth to live with the family at Mansfield Park, the Northamptonshire country estate of Sir Thomas Bertram. Lady Bertram is her aunt. The Bertrams have four children – Tom, Edmund, Maria and Julia – who are all older than Fanny. There she is mistreated by all but Edmund. Her other aunt, Mrs Norris, the wife of the clergyman at the Mansfield parsonage, makes herself particularly unpleasant to Fanny.When Fanny is fifteen, Aunt Norris is widowed and the frequency of her visits to Mansfield Park increases, as does her mistreatment of Fanny. A year later, Sir Thomas leaves to deal with problems on his plantation in Antigua, taking his spendthrift eldest son Tom. Mrs Norris, looking for a husband for Maria, finds Mr Rushworth, who is rich but weak-willed and considered stupid. Maria accepts his proposal for his money.The following year, Henry Crawford and his sister, Mary, arrive at the parsonage to stay with their half-sister, the wife of the new incumbent, Dr Grant. With their fashionable London ways, they enliven life in Mansfield. Edmund and Mary then start to show interest in one another.On a visit to Mr Rushworth's estate, Henry flirts with both Maria and Julia. Maria believes Henry is in love with her and so treats Mr Rushworth dismissively, provoking his jealousy, while Julia struggles with jealousy and resentment towards her sister. Mary is disappointed to learn that Edmund will be a clergyman and tries to undermine his vocation. Fanny fears that Mary's charms are blinding Edmund to her flaws.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_(novel)"title="Sahara (novel)">
In 1865, a week before the surrender of Confederate forces of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate Navy ship "CSS Texas" is being loaded at a dock with crates supposedly filled with documents. The ship's captain, Mason Tombs, has been ordered to take the ship past a Union blockade and to any neutral harbor where she should dock until summoned by a courier. At the last minute the secretary of the Confederate navy and an admiral arrive and mention that he will be taking a prisoner on board. Tombs is shocked when the prisoner arrives under heavy guard with Confederate soldiers in Union uniforms - a prisoner who appears to be Abraham Lincoln.The ship gets under way and is battered by the Union navy while trying to run the blockade, until Tombs brings the prisoner onto the deck, and the Union soldiers stop firing and salute.In 1931, Kitty Mannock is flying over the Sahara in quest of a new aviation record. A sand storm fouls her carburetors and she is forced to land in the desert. She manages to touch down on level ground, but the plane reaches the edge of a ravine and tips over. A search is launched, but she is never found.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Cowboy_(novel)"title="Midnight Cowboy (novel)">
The book opens with would-be gigolo Joe Buck leaving Houston to seek his fortune back east, chasing his dream of becoming a hustler for sex-starved rich ladies in New York City. Dim-witted, naïve, but strapping and handsome, Joe has spent the past two years cultivating a cowboy persona and saving up his dishwashing wages for a brand new cowboy wardrobe.The book recounts the events of his life that lead up to this point. Born out of wedlock, Joe is abandoned by his mother at the age of 7. He is raised in Albuquerque by his grandmother Sally Buck, a flirty blonde hairdresser who takes care of his needs but emotionally neglects him in favor of an endless string of boyfriends. One of those boyfriends, the cowboy Woodsy Niles, is the closest thing Joe has to a father figure, but he too exits Joe's life forever once his relationship with Sally ends. Joe grows up profoundly isolated and lonely, desperately wanting but clueless on how to form connections with other people. When Joe is 17, he loses his virginity to Anastasia Pratt, a promiscuous schoolgirl who would regularly take on six boys at a time in a movie theater storeroom, each boy patiently waiting in line for his turn. Joe is the first boy she enjoys having sex with, leading to a secret relationship that is squelched when one of the other boys alerts Annie's father to her sexual activities out of jealousy. Annie is swiftly institutionalized, and the unsavory rumors surrounding Joe's involvement only serve to depress and alienate him. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wedding_(Steel_novel)"title="The Wedding (Steel novel)">
Allegra Steinberg, daughter of movie producer Simon Steinberg and television writer Blaire Scott, is a successful entertainment lawyer who seems to have the perfect life. She has a satisfying career and is surrounded by people she loves, including her boyfriend, Brandon, her sister Samantha, an aspiring model, and her best friend, Alan Carr, a Hollywood heartthrob.While on a business trip in New York City, she meets writer Jeff Hamiliton, and although there is chemistry between the pair, Allegra does not pursue the attraction. However, after she discovers that Brandon has been cheating on her, she meets up with Jeff, and before long, the couple is engaged and planning a wedding at her parents Bel Air home.As their September ceremony looms, Allegra finds herself faced with many business, romantic and personal problems, including a pregnancy in the family, the death of a client and the return of her father. The wedding becomes a chance for forgiveness, hope and reconciliation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Valley_of_the_Lost"title="The Valley of the Lost">
After having reached the Maze of the Beast and finding the amethyst, they continue their journey off to the Valley of the Lost to retrieve the seventh and final gem, the diamond. The seven gems are the lost gems from the Belt of Deltora, which had been stolen by the Shadow Lord to overthrow Lief's country, Deltora. The three travel along the river Tor, passing villages that have been raided by pirates. When they stop for a rest, they see a pirate ship. Realizing that it was the ship that a boy named Dain was captured aboard upon, they steal a rowboat in an attempt to rescue him. After Dain and a polypan climb into their boat, the polypan rows against the flooding currents of the river away from the pirates and toward shore. The polypan jumps out of the boat before the boat reaches the shore, and Lief, Barda, Jasmine, and Dain are floating adrift the violently overflowing river. They drift over a sand bar and arrive at the edges of Tora, a great city that Dain had been trying to travel to. They enter the city, and Dain is significantly weakened by the magic of the purifying entrance. They meet two Resistance members, Doom and Neridah after finding the city deserted. Neridah travels with the trio to the Valley of the Lost to find the seventh gem. Upon entering the valley, they meet the Guardian, who doesn't use physical force, but games to protect the diamond. The Guardian enchants them to enter his castle, and asks them to play a game with him for the diamond. The winner of the game will keep the diamond, but the loser will have to be kept in the valley forever. Scared by this, Neridah runs away, leaving the three behind to play the game. Lief, Barda, and Jasmine manage to find all of the clues and guess the name before the time is up, and realize that the Guardian's name is Endon, the king of Deltora. They also find out that Doom had been there before and won the game, but did not take the gem because of his shock when he realized that the Guardian was actually the king. Lief, Jasmine, and Barda find out the gem is not the real diamond, and leave the castle to find Neridah had stolen it. The diamond curses those who gain the gem by theft, and Neridah dies by tripping on a rock and drowning in a stream. After the trio retrieves the gem, the Valley of the Lost disappears and all of the creatures in it are replaced by people, who reveal themselves to be the people of Tora. They had been turned into their form because they broke a vow that they had sealed by magic by turning King Endon away when he sought refuge with them, as they had no wish to draw the Shadow Lord's forces to them but did not consider the consequences of this action. The Guardian turns into Fardeep, a mere man from Rithmere, but not Endon. The name Endon was actually the Shadow Lord's idea, and was intended to trick any winners of the game. Knowing that they have all seven gems, the three travel with Dain back to Del to find the king who will put on the Belt to banish the Shadow Lord from Deltora.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maze_of_the_Beast"title="The Maze of the Beast">
Lief, Barda, and Jasmine had retrieved the emerald from Dread Mountain. They travel along the River Tor to get to the Maze of the Beast, where they will get the amethyst. The gems they are taking are part of a Belt of Deltora, which will defeat the Shadow Lord that has invaded Deltora. During their travel, they encounter a pair of children nearly drowning in a stream. They save the children, but they reveal themselves to be Ols, creatures created by the Shadow Lord that can transform themselves to become another living creature. These creatures overrun the west side of Deltora to keep the gems hidden. Just before Barda is about to die, a boy Dain attacks the Ols and saves them. In the process, Dain injures his arm and several ribs. This causes Lief to sympathize for the boy, and take him to the Resistance, a group of people who rebel against the Shadow Lord. Arriving at the entrance to the Resistance's hideout, Dain faints from the pressure and forces the three to guess the password before they are marked as Ols and killed. Lief finds a note and realizes that the password is the first letter of every word on the note. They enter the Resistance and Doom, a man they have encountered before, tests them by putting them in a prison for three days. The test is supposed to find out if they are Ols because Ols can only hold their shape for three days. As three days pass, Doom does not let up and keeps them imprisoned. Dain frees them from the cave in exchange for their agreeing to take him to Tora. When Lief, Barda, and Jasmine reveal that they are not going to Tora, they split apart to make them less recognizable. Lief, Dain, and Barda take a boat that takes them down the river to the Maze of the Beast. They realize that Jasmine was also on the boat. The boat is raided by pirates, and Dain is taken prisoner. After reaching the Maze, Barda is revealed to be an Ol by the real Barda. Unfortunately, they are captured by pirates and are dumped into the Maze. After finding the location of the gem, Barda and Jasmine separate from Lief to lead the Beast away and Lief stays to carve the gem out of a column. They regroup when Lief was done, and escape the cave through a blowhole. The blowhole blows just after they escape, which takes the life of two pirates. The three then start off their journey to the Valley of the Lost.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_(Hamsun_novel)"title="Hunger (Hamsun novel)">
The novel's first-person protagonist, an unnamed vagrant with intellectual leanings, probably in his late twenties, wanders the streets of Norway's capital, Kristiania (Oslo), in pursuit of nourishment. Over four episodes he meets a number of more or less mysterious persons, the most notable being Ylajali, a young woman with whom he engages in a mild degree of physical intimacy.He exhibits a self-created code of chivalry, giving money and clothes to needy children and vagrants, not eating food given to him, and turning himself in for stealing. Essentially self-destructive, he thus falls into traps of his own making, and with a lack of food, warmth and basic comfort, his body turns slowly to ruin. Overwhelmed by hunger, he scrounges for meals, at one point nearly eating his own (rather precious) pencil and his finger. His social, physical and mental states are in constant decline. However, he has no antagonistic feelings towards 'society' as such, rather he blames his fate on 'God' or a divine world order. He vows not to succumb to this order and remains 'a foreigner in life', haunted by 'nervousness, by irrational details'.He experiences an artistic and financial triumph when he sells a text to a newspaper, but despite this he finds writing increasingly difficult. At one point in the story, he asks to spend a night in a prison cell, posing as a well-to-do journalist who has lost the keys to his apartment. In the morning he cannot bring himself to reveal his poverty or even partake in the free breakfast provided to the homeless. Finally, as the book comes to a close, when his existence is at an absolute ebb, he signs on to the crew of a ship leaving the city.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysteries_(novel)"title="Mysteries (novel)">
The community of a small Norwegian coastal town is shaken by the arrival of eccentric stranger Johan Nagel, who proceeds to shock, bewilder, and beguile its bourgeois inhabitants with his bizarre behavior, feverish rants, and uncompromising self-revelations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roderick_Hudson"title="Roderick Hudson">
Rowland Mallet, a wealthy Bostonian bachelor and art connoisseur, visits his cousin Cecilia in Northampton, Massachusetts, before leaving for Europe. There he sees a Grecian figure he thinks is a remarkable work of art. Cecilia introduces him to the local sculptor, Roderick Hudson, a young law student who sculpts in his spare time. Mallet—who loves art but is without artistic talent himself—sees an opportunity to contribute: he offers to advance Roderick a sum of money against future works which will allow Roderick to join him in moving to Italy for two years. Mallet believes that in Rome, Roderick will be exposed to the kind of artistic influences which will allow his natural talent to fully mature. Roderick is galvanized by the offer, but he fears his highly protective mother's disapproval and urges Mallet to meet with and reassure her. Mallet does so, eventually overcoming the woman's doubts. At the meeting, Mallet is also introduced to Mary Garland, a distant poor cousin of the Hudsons who has been living with them as a companion to Mrs. Hudson. Mallet finds himself unexpectedly attracted to the young woman—to her simplicity, her lack of affectation, her honesty. During a farewell picnic attended by many of the Hudsons' friends and family, Mallet realizes he has fallen in love for the first time in his life. But, because of his natural reserve and imminent departure for two years, he fails to declare his feelings, yet still harbors hopes that something may yet come of the relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_of_Our_War"title="The Year of Our War">
The novel is set in the Fourlands, a country in danger of being overrun by large hostile Insects, and follows the exploits of Jant, also called "the Messenger" or "Comet". As a half-breed of two humanoid species Jant is the only person who can fly, which makes him an indispensable part of the Emperor's Circle of about 50 immortals, an elite group of (mostly) warriors who do not age (but, despite the name, are capable of being killed).So far, four sequels has been published: "No Present Like Time" (2005), "The Modern World" (2007), "Above the Snowline" (2010) and "Fair Rebel" (2016).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Present_Like_Time"title="No Present Like Time">
The novel is set in the Fourlands, a country in danger of being overrun by large hostile Insects, and follows the exploits of Jant, also called "the Messenger" or "Comet". As a half-breed of two humanoid species Jant is the only person who can fly, which makes him an indispensable part of the Emperor's Circle of about 50 immortals, an elite group of (mostly) warriors who do not age (but, despite the name, are capable of being killed).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howards_End"title="Howards End">
The Schlegels had briefly met and befriended the Wilcoxes when both families were in Germany. Helen, the younger Schlegel daughter, visits the Wilcoxes at their country house, Howards End. She is attracted to the younger Wilcox son, Paul, and they become engaged in haste but soon regret their decision, breaking off the engagement by mutual consent.Not long after, the Schlegel sisters attend a concert featuring a performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Helen is so entranced by the images the music creates in her mind that she leaves, inadvertently taking an umbrella that belongs to Leonard Bast. Margaret gives Leonard her card and invites him to come with her after the concert to retrieve the umbrella. Once there, Leonard is embarrassed by the shabby quality of his umbrella and quickly departs. Later that year, the Wilcoxes move to London, taking an apartment close to the Schlegels' house. Margaret befriends the Wilcox matriarch, Ruth. Howards End is Ruth's most prized possession; she feels a strong connection to the old house, which is not shared by her husband and children. Ruth becomes quite ill and, perceiving Margaret as a kindred spirit, on her deathbed writes a note leaving Howards End to Margaret. The note causes great consternation to the widowed Henry Wilcox. He and his children burn it without telling Margaret about her inheritance. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molloy_(novel)"title="Molloy (novel)">
On first appearance the book concerns two different characters, both of whom have interior monologues in the book. As the story moves along the two characters are distinguished by name only as their experiences and thoughts are similar. The novel is set in an indeterminate place, most often identified with the Ireland of Beckett's birth.The majority of Part One is made up of Molloy's inner musings interspersed with the action of the plot. It is split into two paragraphs: the first is less than two pages long; the second paragraph lasts for over eighty pages. In the first we are given a vague idea of the setting Molloy is writing in. We are told that he now lives in his mother's room, though how he arrived there or whether his mother died before or during his stay is apparently forgotten. There is also a man who arrives every Sunday to pick up what Molloy has written and bring back what he had taken last week returning them "marked with signs" though Molloy never cares to read them. He describes that his purpose while writing is to "speak of the things that are left, say [his] goodbyes, finish dying." In the second paragraph he describes a journey he had taken some time earlier, before he came there, to find his mother. He spends much of it on his bicycle, gets arrested for resting on it in a way that is considered lewd, but is unceremoniously released. From town to anonymous town and across anonymous countryside, he encounters a succession of bizarre characters: an elderly man with a stick; a policeman; a charity worker; a woman whose dog he kills running over it with a bike (her name is never completely determined: "a Mrs Loy... or Lousse, I forget, Christian name something like Sophie"), and one whom he falls in love with ("Ruth" or maybe "Edith"); He abandons his bicycle (which he will not call "bike"), walks in no certain direction, meeting "a young old man"; a charcoal-burner living in the woods, whom he attacks and savagely beats.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Changing_Land"title="The Changing Land">
The novel picks up several months after the events in the last chapter of "Dilvish, the Damned". The Castle Timeless, one of several fortresses belonging to Dilvish's arch-enemy, Jelerak, is currently inhabited by the "mad" Old One Tualua. Tualua is undergoing one of the "changes" common to his kind, which in this case causes the land surrounding the castle to be subject to all sorts of chaotic, unpredictable, and often-deadly effects. A number of wizards, hoping to tap into Tualua's vast power, attempt to pass through this maelstrom and reach the castle. Watching events from the outside are members of the Society of Magic.Dilvish, determined to avenge himself against Jelerak, appears and attempts to breach the magical barriers, hoping to find his arch-enemy inside. Accompanied by his companion Black, a demon-like being in the shape of a black metal horse, they rescue a wizard, Weleand, from being drowned in an acid pit. Soon after they meet a young Elven girl, Arlata, frozen by one of magical winds. Weleand unfreezes her by transferring the condition to Black, and escapes. Dilvish is then captured by one of the caretakers of the castle, Baran of the Extra Hand, and thrown into the dungeon with several captured wizards.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe's_Tiger"title="Sharpe's Tiger">
Richard Sharpe is a private in the 33rd Regiment of Foot in the British army. The British invade Mysore and advance on Tippoo Sultan's capital city of Seringapatam. Sharpe is contemplating desertion with his paramour, half-caste army widow Mary Bickerstaff, due to his sadistic company sergeant, Obadiah Hakeswill. Hakeswill lusts after Mary, so he provokes Sharpe into hitting him before witnesses, company commander Captain Morris and Ensign Hicks. Sharpe is court-martialled; Lieutenant William Lawford, who is supposed to act as his defender, is absent and Sharpe is given the virtual death sentence of 2,000 lashes. However, the regiment's commander, Colonel Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington), halts the punishment at 202 lashes. Lawford has been offered an extremely dangerous mission and has requested Sharpe. Sharpe agrees to go along if he is made a sergeant if they are successful.Lawford and Sharpe pose as deserters to try to rescue Colonel Hector McCandless, Lawford's uncle and chief of the British East India Company's intelligence service. Sharpe's flogging inadvertently makes their cover story more plausible. Sharpe quickly takes charge and brings Mary along, to protect her from Hakeswill and because she speaks several of the native languages. They are soon captured by scouts from Tippoo's army and taken to Seringapatam where they meet Colonel Gudin, a French military adviser to Tippoo. During their interrogation, the Tippoo enters and orders them to load muskets. He then orders Sharpe to shoot a British prisoner, Colonel McCandless; he does, having noticed that the "gunpowder" he has been given is fake. The musket does not fire. After covertly telling McCandless that he is a spy, he is told by McCandless that the British must not attack the seemingly weakest portion of the city walls. (It is later revealed that Tippoo has had mines buried there to blow up the British when they enter the trap.)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe's_Triumph"title="Sharpe's Triumph">
Sergeant Richard Sharpe and a small detachment arrive at an isolated East India Company fort to transport 80,000 recovered rounds of stolen ammunition to the armory at Seringapatam. While Sharpe and his men rest, a company of East India Company sepoys arrive under the command of Lieutenant William Dodd. Dodd abruptly has his men massacre the unsuspecting, outnumbered garrison. Sharpe is wounded and feigns death, allowing him to escape Dodd's determination to leave no witnesses.Back in Seringapatam, Sharpe's friend, Colonel McCandless, whom Sharpe met four years earlier during the siege of Seringapatam ("Sharpe's Tiger"), questions him about Dodd. Dodd deserted the East India Company, taking with him his sepoys, and McCandless has been tasked with bringing him to justice, lest it give others similar ideas. McCandless orders Sharpe to accompany him since he can identify Dodd.Dodd joins Colonel Anthony Pohlmann, commander of Scindia's army, at the city of Ahmednuggur and is rewarded with a promotion to major and command of his own battalion. Since the Mysore Campaign, the British have been pushing further north into the Maratha Confederacy's territory. Scindia is one of the Maratha rulers who have decided to resist the British advance. Scindia orders Pohlmann to assign a regiment to defend Ahmednuggur, so Pohlmann gives Dodd command of the unit and instructions to inflict casualties on the British, but most importantly, withdraw and keep the regiment intact, as the city cannot be held.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe's_Fortress"title="Sharpe's Fortress">
In 1803, Arthur Wellesley's British and sepoy army is in pursuit of the Mahrattas in western India, having beaten them in the Battle of Assaye. Ensign Richard Sharpe, newly made an officer, is beginning to wish he had remained a sergeant, as most of his fellow officers look down upon him, including Captain Urquhart, his commanding officer. Urquhart suggests he sell his commission if he is not happy.Manu Bappoo, the younger brother of the Rajah of Berar, decides to turn around and fight the British again, with his best unit, composed of Arab mercenaries, leading the charge, but he is again routed. During the fighting, Sharpe is impressed by the bravery of a teenage Arab boy, Ahmed, and saves his life when the boy is surrounded. Ahmed becomes his servant.After the battle, Urquhart recommends Sharpe transfer to the 95th Rifles, an experimental unit, though nothing can be done while the war rages on. For the moment, he assigns Sharpe to assist Captain Torrance, in command of the baggage train. The army is short of many desperately needed supplies, and Sharpe soon discovers why. Lazy and deeply in debt, Torrance has been selling them to the merchant Naig, with the assistance of Sharpe's old nemesis, Sergeant Hakeswill. When Sharpe finds many of the stolen supplies in Naig's tent, Torrance has his associate hanged immediately to avoid being implicated. Jama, Naig's brother, is not pleased, so Torrance agrees to betray Sharpe into his hands. Hakeswill is only too glad to waylay Sharpe; besides their mutual hatred, he rightly suspects that Sharpe has a fortune in jewels looted from a dead enemy ruler.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe's_Prey"title="Sharpe's Prey">
The year is 1807, and Richard Sharpe is at a very low point in his life. His beloved aristocratic lover, Lady Grace Hale, died in childbirth, along with their newborn son. Her family's lawyers then took all of Sharpe's wealth (loot he obtained in India), claiming it was Grace's, so it reverts to her family. Destitute and relegated to the menial job of quartermaster, Sharpe is on the streets of London, contemplating leaving the army.First though, he revisits the foundling home where he was raised to get his revenge. He robs and kills Jem Hocking, his childhood tormentor.Then a former commanding officer, Major General David Baird, finds him in a pub. Captain John Lavisser was assigned a bodyguard for a secret mission to Copenhagen, but the bodyguard was killed, supposedly by a common footpad, and a replacement is needed immediately. Baird persuades Sharpe to take the job. Lavisser does not want a bodyguard since he already has a hulking servant and ex-footpad named Barker, but orders are orders. Lord Pumphrey of the Foreign Office gives Sharpe (but not Lavisser) a contact in case he runs into trouble.Denmark is neutral, but has a powerful fleet. Napoleon wants it to replace the ships France lost at the Battle of Trafalgar, and Britain is equally determined to see to it that does not happen. Lavisser's task is to bribe the Danish crown prince to hand over the fleet for safekeeping. (Lavisser's grandfather is the prince's chamberlain, and they are also related by marriage.) If that fails, the British will have to seize the ships by force.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe's_Rifles"title="Sharpe's Rifles">
Sharpe's battalion, acting as rearguard to the British Army in its retreat to Corunna, are cut down by a squadron of French regular cavalry. Sharpe takes up Captain Murray's heavy cavalry sword after Murray dies and takes command of the surviving riflemen (from the 95th Rifles). However, the men do not want to follow him. Their leader, Patrick Harper, and Sharpe fight, but they are interrupted by the arrival of Spanish Major Blas Vivar and his men.Vivar invites the British to travel with him to escort them back to Portugal, but does not reveal his hidden agenda. The Spanish commoners hate the French invaders, but are dispirited and need something to rally around. In the course of the journey, Sharpe begins to gain the respect of his men, especially when his ability as a soldier gets them through a French ambush. Travelling on, they meet the Parkers, a Methodist couple, and their niece Louisa who Sharpe falls in love with, though it does not work out. Sharpe learns from a map the Parkers possess that Vivar is not taking them home at all and after a confrontation falls out with Vivar and takes his men home.On their way back, they are attacked by a French detachment led by Pierre D'Eclin and Vivar's pro-French brother, who had earlier been pursuing Vivar. Vivar comes to the rescue and helps them escape, though Louisa's aunt and uncle are captured and later sent home, being civilians.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe's_Trafalgar"title="Sharpe's Trafalgar">
In 1805, Richard Sharpe is to sail to England from India aboard the East Indiaman "Calliope" to join the 95th Rifles. He is swindled after purchasing supplies for the voyage. After finding out, he gets not only his money back, but also helps fellow victim Royal Navy Captain Joel Chase do the same, saving Chase from great financial embarrassment. Chase wants to show his gratitude, but is under orders to destroy a French 74 named the "Revenant" that is raiding the Indian Ocean.The "Calliope"s passengers include the lovely, young Lady Grace Hale and her much older husband, Lord William Hale. Sharpe is also astonished to find aboard Anthony Pohlmann, a renegade and former Maratha warlord (defeated by Arthur Wellesley in "Sharpe's Triumph"), traveling under a false identity – Baron von Dornberg – but sees no reason to denounce his former foe.Peculiar Cromwell, captain of the "Calliope", spots the jewels (looted from an Indian ruler) Sharpe has sewn into his clothing and insists that Sharpe leave them with him for safekeeping, to avoid tempting his crew.Sharpe becomes obsessed with Lady Grace, but his attempts to become better acquainted are unsuccessful, at first. However, she later questions him in private about "Dornberg"; while Cromwell and Dornberg denied knowing each other, she has observed them conversing frequently. Sharpe protects Dornberg as best he can. When Lady Grace gets up to leave, a sudden movement of the ship causes her to stumble, and Sharpe ends up with his arm around her waist. They eventually become secret lovers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe's_Eagle"title="Sharpe's Eagle">
It is July 1809. During the Talavera Campaign, Sir Arthur Wellesley's army has entered Spain to confront Marshal Victor. Richard Sharpe and his small group of thirty riflemen, separated from their regiment during the retreat from Corunna, are attached to the newly arrived South Essex Regiment. Commanded by the cowardly and bullying Lieutenant Colonel Sir Henry Simmerson, the South Essex is a raw, inexperienced unit that has been drilled mercilessly with frequent use of the lash.Sharpe takes it upon himself to shape the inexperienced and poorly trained redcoats into soldiers. He comes into conflict with Simmerson; his nephew, the arrogant Lieutenant Christian Gibbons; and Christian's friend, Lieutenant John Berry. The situation is further complicated by the rivalry that emerges between Sharpe and Gibbons for the affections of Josefina Lacosta, a Portuguese noblewoman who ran away from her husband after he took a mistress. Only two of the South Essex officers appear to have any real experience: Captain Lennox, a veteran of the 78th Highlanders' action at the Battle of Assaye, where Sharpe himself won his commission; and Captain Thomas Leroy, an American Loyalist who was forced to flee his homeland after the American War of Independence.From Talavera, General Wellesley dispatches the South Essex, alongside Sharpe's riflemen and Major Michael Hogan's engineers, to blow up the bridge at Valdelacasa, so as to protect the army's flank as they march. They accompany a Spanish regiment of equal number, the Regimento de la Santa Maria, the seemingly straightforward mission becomes a disaster when both Simmerson and the Spanish unnecessarily cross the bridge due to pride, and then try to engage four squadrons of French dragoons. Due to a combination of arrogance, poor training and incompetence, the two regiments are routed by the French, with hundreds of men killed and wounded, Lennox fatally wounded by the enemy, and the loss of the King's Colours. Sharpe, however, distinguishes himself during the skirmish by saving the South Essex's own colours and capturing a French cannon. As a dying request, Lennox asks Sharpe to take a French Imperial Eagle, "touched by the hand of Napoleon" himself, so as to erase the shame of losing the King's Colours.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_(novel)"title="The American (novel)">
In 1868, Christopher Newman, an American businessman, visits Europe on a Grand Tour. Having worked for a living since age ten (interrupted by service in the Union Army during the American Civil War), he has made a large fortune and retired in his thirties, and is now looking to settle down and get married.At the Louvre in Paris he watches a painter named Noémie; he offers to buy the copy she is making, and meets her father, M. Nioche. About the same time a mutual friend introduces Newman to Claire de Cintré, a young widow. Newman hires M. Nioche to teach him French and the two become friendly; Newman, learning that M. Nioche worries about his daughter's future since he is poor, says that he will buy enough paintings from Noémie to give her a respectable dowry. Meeting Newman at the Louvre the next day, though, Noémie frankly tells him that she has no talent and her paintings are worthless. She scorns the men she could marry even with a dowry, and hints that she would prefer a more exciting life. Newman either doesn't understand the hint or ignores it, and he leaves her to her work. He pays a visit to the Bellegarde estate, where he meets Claire's two brothers: the cheerful Valentin and the aloof Marquis de Bellegarde, who coldly rebuffs him. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Chocolate_Bunnies_of_the_Apocalypse"title="The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse">
Jack is all set to discover the city beyond his small town. He meets a farmer on his way who warns him against going to the city. Jack however turns a deaf ear and continues his journey. The farmer tries to kill him for his meal, but Jack eventually escapes with his horse, leaving the hungry farmer in the pit.When he reaches the city he realises that it is populated by toys. He meets a wooden chef at a bar, and realises his horse has been stolen. Jack sets out to search for his horse, but he is hit by someone unknown and he faints on the ground. He is awoken by a teddy bear, Eddie, who is a private detective and the assistant of Bill Winkie (Wee Willie Winkie). Eddie offers Jack partnership in his detective firm, as Bill Winkie is missing.Jack is still shaken by the fact that toys can actually talk and walk and feel like humans, but eventually he comes on terms with it. Eddie informs him that something is wrong in Toy City - someone is killing the rich and famous PPPs: Preadolescent Poetic Personalities.These PPPs have become rich due to the royalties they receive for their poems, like Humpty Dumpty, Little Miss Muffet, Mary Mary Quite Contrary and Old King Cole. While on their quest to find the murderer, several PPPs are killed. Humpty Dumpty is boiled with a lens above his pool, Bill Winkie – cheated out of the rights to his nursery rhyme by the writer, but a natural detective – simply vanishes while investigating the case, Little Boy Blue is pierced with his crook – the crook impaling him in the rear and exiting through his mouth, Jack Spratt is fried in his ex-wife's diner, Little Tommy Tucker explodes when a bomb is dropped down his throat as he sings a high note, Little Jack Horner is stuffed with jam and Mother Goose is slit open. In all the cases the only clues are hollow chocolate bunnies left at the scene.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witches_of_Chiswick"title="The Witches of Chiswick">
Working in a dystopian 23rd century, William Starling finds a painting, The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke by Richard Dadd from the 19th Century with the image of a digital watch hidden within it. William takes a drug which confers the ability to tap into ancestral memories. After learning of events occurring in the 19th century, William and Tim are attacked by a Babbage robot sent from the past, and William escapes to the past via the robot's time machine.Stuck in the 19th century in Victorian London, William is greeted by Hugo Rune, who explains to Will that he is his direct descendant. Will learns that 19th Century history is a lie: Charles Babbage's difference engine was a huge success, providing the growing British Empire with robots, digital watches, airships, and even the first rocket to the moon.After returning to London, Will and Hugo take on a case for Sherlock Holmes - to discover the identity of Jack the Ripper to learn more about the witches' cabal. Hugo becomes the Ripper's next victim. Will finds a box in Hugo's trunk containing Barry, the Sprout Guardian. Will uses Barry to return to the future to enlist the aid of Tim.Will and Tim return to the past, meeting an invisible H.G. Wells, the Elephant Man, the Brentford Snail Boy, and another Will from an alternate future. After finding Hugo's true residence in the Buttes Estate, Will and Tim set out to save the 19th Century and the future from the influence of the Witches of Chiswick.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_of_Impact_(Stephen_Hunter_novel)"title="Point of Impact (Stephen Hunter novel)">
"Point of Impact" revolves around a former Vietnam War sniper named Bob Lee Swagger or Bob "the Nailer". This character is loosely based upon the real Vietnam War sniper and U.S. Marine Corps legend Carlos Hathcock.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Horse_Coming"title="Pale Horse Coming">
In 1951, Arkansas attorney Sam Vincent is hired by Davis Trugood, a Chicago lawyer, to verify the death of the Trugood's client's manservant in Thebes, Mississippi, a desolate shantytown cut off from civilization and surrounded by swampland and seemingly impenetrable piney woods. While in Thebes, Sam is roughly arrested for challenging the legality and authority of Thebes' law enforcement and is imprisoned by the local Sheriff.Earl Swagger travels to Thebes with the intent of rescuing Sam after he fails to hear from his friend for several weeks. He succeeds in securing Sam's freedom but is himself captured and incarcerated as the only white man among the inmates of the nearby Thebes penitentiary, a former timber plantation and current forced labor camp for negro convicts and run by ruthless and inhumane white supremacists. The mysterious and unnamed warden instructs his jailers to torture Earl, suspecting him to be a federal investigator interested in the secret workings of the camp. The other inmates apply their acquired hatred of white men to Earl, who must defend himself not only from the guards, but also from his fellow prisoners.Earl escapes by faking his death with the help of an old prison trusty, promising to return and destroy the prison and the evil it represents. He assembles a group of six legendary gunmen (who are based on Elmer Keith, Jack O'Connor, Audie Murphy, Charles Askins, Bill Jordan, and Ed McGivern) with the promise of real action for a just cause and readies them for an assault on Thebes. (Counting Swagger, that brings the number of gunmen to seven, a probable allusion to both "The Magnificent Seven" - a classic Western film - and Aeschylus' play "Seven Against Thebes".) While Earl makes his plans, the inmates at Thebes start to pass along the mysterious phrase, "Pale Horse Coming." Seeking to quell the inmates' stirrings and avoid a potential rebellion, the prison's tyrannical captain of the guards systematically tortures the prisoners in an effort to learn the origins of the phrase.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_(novel)"title="Execution (novel)">
Based in part on McDougall's experience as an officer with Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, "Execution" follows the fictional Canadian 2nd Rifles Brigade during the Italian Campaign of 1943. Led by the flamboyant Brigadier Ian Kildare (a modern miles gloriosus, or braggart soldier), the Canadians invade Sicily where they meet with little resistance from the Italian Army, composed mostly of hapless conscripts who want no part in the war.Despite Kildare's strict orders for his men to shoot Italian deserters on sight, the Canadians take kindly to a pair of buffoonish Italian deserters, more notable for their culinary skills than military prowess. Impetuously, Kildare orders the Canadians to execute the Italians. The Canadians are caught between the obligation to follow orders and the sense that executing the two Italians in cold blood is ethically unjustifiable—not to mention it being a violation of the Geneva Convention. The brutal execution of the two Italians forces the Canadians to confront the ethics of warfare, now that "the enemy" is no longer a distant and faceless target. Major Bunny Bazin, the most battle-hardened and philosophical of the Canadians, voices the novel's central theme when he states that "execution is... the ultimate degradation of man." Here the term "execution" works both literally (the killing of the Italians as a brutal act) and as a metaphor (war as a form of mass execution).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_and_the_Starcatchers"title="Peter and the Starcatchers">
In 19th century London, orphaned boys Peter, James, Thomas, Prentiss, and Tubby Ted are shipped out on the decrepit ship "Never Land". While searching for food, Peter encounters a mysterious trunk and its guardian, Molly Aster, a girl about his age. Meanwhile, the feared pirate Black Stache hears of a similar trunk containing a great treasure on board another ship, the "Wasp". Black Stache manages to run down and board the "Wasp", and Leonard Aster, Molly's father, attempts and fails to escape with the trunk. Black Stache opens the trunk only to find it filled with sand. Black Stache and Aster realize that the trunk is a decoy and the actual treasure is on board the "Never Land". Aster jumps overboard and escapes. Molly confides to Peter that the trunk contains "starstuff," magical dust of extraordinary power that falls from the heavens. Molly's family is revealed to be members of a secret society known as the Starcatchers, who are tasked with keeping Starstuff out of the wrong hands. Molly enlists Peter to assist in throwing the trunk overboard before Black Stache arrives.Black Stache and his men race against a monster storm to intercept the "Never Land". Attempting to dispose of the trunk with Molly, Peter is thrown overboard just as the storm hits. Having come into contact with Starstuff from the trunk, Peter flies back and hurls the trunk overboard. Molly and the orphans escape the "Never Land" and wash up on a nearby island. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lungbarrow"title="Lungbarrow">
His mind occupied with thoughts of his coming regeneration, the Doctor accidentally returns to Gallifrey and the House of Lungbarrow, where for over 673 years his 44 cousins have been trapped, but mysteriously only six of them are still left. Meanwhile, Chris Cwej is having strange dreams of the past, when the family cast the Doctor out. The Doctor is accused of the murder of the head of the House, but he finds many allies in the form of former companions Ace, Romana, K-9 Mark I, K-9 Mark II and Leela, who have become embroiled in a Celestial Intervention Agency plot to overthrow Romana's presidency. The secrets of the past are catching up to the Doctor—in particular, the secret that links him to a figure from Gallifreyan history known only as the Other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramona_the_Pest"title="Ramona the Pest">
Ramona Quimby is excited because she is starting kindergarten. She is a year older than in "Beezus and Ramona" and trouble still seems to follow her. Although Ramona does not mean to be a pest, she still manages to create trouble without trying to. Miss Binney is her teacher, and Ramona likes her a lot, especially when she praises Ramona's interesting drawing and nice fat letter 'Q's. There's a girl in her class named Susan with long, springy curls. Ramona really wants to pull on one of those curls and watch it bounce back and forth, but when she finally does she gets sent to the bench until recess is over. Another new person in her class is Davy. Ramona chases him at recess, trying to catch and kiss him, which she finally manages to accomplish when she participates in the Halloween parade when she is "the baddest witch in the world."Ramona tries to do her best in kindergarten but it isn't easy, especially during seat work, when she has to sit quietly and keep her eyes on her own work. She's just too interested in seeing what everyone else is doing. Still, kindergarten is going well until the day the substitute teacher arrives. Ramona won't go to class without Miss Binney, so she hides behind the trash cans with Ribsy the dog. When Beezus finds her and takes her to the principal's office Ramona is forced to go to class anyway.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Crown"title="Lucy Crown">
Lucy, an orphan, marries Oliver, a successful but frustrated businessman. Oliver's ambitions are thwarted when his father dies and Oliver is forced to run the family business. He proves to be a controlling husband. Lucy, who suffers from self-esteem issues, is intimidated by him and gives up her career aspirations.In the summer of 1937, Oliver leaves Lucy (now age 35) and son Tony (age 13) alone at a lake resort for several weeks while he attends to business. During Oliver's absence Lucy is pursued by Jeffrey, a Dartmouth College undergraduate they have hired to be a companion for Tony. She resists Jeffrey's advances but they eventually begin what Lucy regards as a casual affair. Tony sees them having intercourse and tells his father, who confronts the couple. Lucy and Oliver remain married, but she insists that she will have nothing further to do with her son. Tony becomes embittered and cuts off all contact with his mother. Lucy's deliberate act of infidelity and betrayal leads to the disintegration of her marriage and complete estrangement from her son.During World War II, Tony is unable to serve in the military due to poor health. Oliver joins the U.S. Army and is away from home for several years. Lucy embarks on a series of affairs with other men during Oliver's absence. Before leaving for combat in Europe, a despondent Oliver attempts to explain his frustrations and unhappiness to his son:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princess_Casamassima"title="The Princess Casamassima">
Amanda Pynsent, an impoverished seamstress, has adopted Hyacinth Robinson, the illegitimate son of her old friend Florentine Vivier, a French woman of less than sterling repute, and an English lord. Florentine had stabbed her lover to death several years ago, and Pinnie (as Miss Pynsent is nicknamed) takes Hyacinth to see her as she lies dying at Millbank prison. Hyacinth eventually learns that the dying woman is his mother and that she murdered his father.Many years pass. Hyacinth, now a young man and a skilled bookbinder, meets revolutionary Paul Muniment and gets involved in radical politics. Hyacinth also has a coarse but lively girlfriend, Millicent Henning, and one night they go to the theatre. There Hyacinth meets the radiantly beautiful Princess Casamassima (Christina Light, from James' earlier novel, "Roderick Hudson").The Princess has become a revolutionary herself and now lives apart from her dull husband. Meanwhile, Hyacinth has committed himself to carrying out a terrorist assassination, though the exact time and place have not yet been specified to him. Hyacinth visits the Princess at her country home and tells her about his parents. When he returns to London, Hyacinth finds Pinnie dying. He comforts her in her final days, then travels to France and Italy on his small inheritance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bostonians"title="The Bostonians">
Mississippi lawyer and Civil War veteran, Basil Ransom, visits his cousin Olive Chancellor in Boston. She takes him to a political meeting where Verena Tarrant delivers a feminist speech. Ransom, a strong conservative, is annoyed by the speech but fascinated with the speaker. Olive, who has never before set eyes on Verena, is equally fascinated. She persuades Verena to leave her parents' house, move in with her and study in preparation for a career in the feminist movement. Meanwhile, Ransom returns to his law practice in New York, which is not doing well. He visits Boston again and walks with Verena through the Harvard College grounds, including the impressive Civil War Memorial Hall. Verena finds herself attracted to the charismatic Ransom.Basil eventually proposes to Verena, much to Olive's dismay. Olive has arranged for Verena to speak at the Boston Music Hall. Ransom shows up at the hall just before Verena is scheduled to begin her speech. He persuades Verena to elope with him, to the discomfiture of Olive and her fellow-feminists. The final sentence of the novel shows Verena in tears – not to be her last, James assures us.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_for_the_Money_(novel)"title="One for the Money (novel)">
Stephanie Plum, laid off from her job as a lingerie buyer for a Newark department store, applies for a filing job with her cousin Vinnie, a bail bondsman. Vinnie's assistant, Connie, tells her the job is taken, but suggests she works as a bounty hunter, apprehending clients who have failed to appear for their court dates. Stephanie is excited to learn that Joe Morelli, a Trenton vice cop and onetime sexual acquaintance of hers, is FTA and facing charges for murder one. Vinnie initially refuses to give her a job, but Morelli's bounty is $10,000, which Stephanie desperately needs, so she blackmails Vinnie into employing her, by threatening to expose his "addiction to kinky sex" to his unsuspecting wife.Staking out Morelli's apartment, Stephanie follows his cousin, Mooch, to Morelli's hideout and finds him quickly, but is humiliated when he laughs off her demand that she come with him, pointing out (correctly) that she has neither the equipment nor the training to apprehend an unwilling fugitive. Connie puts her in touch with Vinnie's "star" bounty hunter, Ricardo Manoso, a.k.a. "Ranger", who gives her a crash-course in bounty hunting. He also buys Stephanie her first gun, a compact Smith &amp; Wesson revolver, and fills her in on Morelli's alleged crime: shooting an unarmed man, Ziggy Kuleska, at the apartment of a prostitute, Carmen Sanchez. Morelli claims that Ziggy was armed and Morelli shot him in self-defense, but no gun was recovered at the crime scene. Stephanie's friend, police officer Eddie Gazarra, advises her that Morelli is likely going around Trenton, trying to find witnesses who will clear his name, so her best bet at finding him is to follow the same trail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_for_the_Dough"title="Two for the Dough">
Stephanie Plum is still an inexperienced bounty hunter, so her boss and cousin Vinnie gives her an easy case: apprehend local boy Kenny Mancuso, accused of shooting his best friend in the knee and then jumping bail. Because Kenny is the black sheep cousin of vice cop Joe Morelli, Morelli is on Kenny's trail as well. There's also a case of 24 missing caskets competing for Stephanie's time. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_to_Get_Deadly"title="Three to Get Deadly">
Stephanie Plum is a streetwise Jersey Girl who ended up as a bounty hunter by chance (and family connections). When a kind, old candy store owner (Uncle Mo) goes FTA (failure to appear) after being arrested for carrying a concealed weapon, Stephanie reluctantly agrees to go after him.Stephanie is on the trail of beloved Moses Bedemier, a mild-mannered man who runs an ice-cream parlor/candy store in the Burg. Mo is an upstanding citizen with ties to almost every family in Trenton. He gets ticketed by an overly-excited, fresh-out-of-the-academy cop for carrying a concealed weapon, and then fails to appear for his court date. No one wants to help Stephanie haul "Uncle Mo" (as he is widely known) to jail, so her apprehension work is frustratingly slow. "Mo would never do anything wrong," is the standard refrain from all the Burg's residents when Stephanie questions them.Since her neighbors and family refuse to help her, she calls on her mentor Ranger, her sidekick (and aspiring bounty hunter) Lula, and Joe Morelli, vice cop and former lover. As she investigates, Stephanie confides to Morelli that something feels wrong about Mo - everyone loves him for his profession, but no one seems to know anything about his private life, and a concealed weapons charge is not serious enough for him to go on the run.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tain_(novella)"title="The Tain (novella)">
The story follows Sholl, a man living in London soon after a convulsive onslaught by unearthly beings. Through introspective monologue on both sides of the fight, the reader learns of the history of the attacking "imagos" and "vampires", and the reasons behind the invasion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ancestor_Cell"title="The Ancestor Cell">
Following on from the events of "The Banquo Legacy", the Time Lords have cracked the base code the Eighth Doctor programmed into Compassion's randomiser, and intercept her at her next destination. Threatened with enslavement, Compassion activates her built in weapons system and destroys the approaching WarTARDISes, while the Doctor fights for control of her navigation systems. The resulting "hiccup" expels Fitz and the Doctor into the vortex. The Doctor is captured while escaping from the Edifice, a massive bone structure that has appeared in the skies above Gallifrey, and taken to Gallifrey, where he is accused of being an agent of Faction Paradox. The Doctor is forced to aid the Time Lords in the capture of Compassion to aid in the forthcoming War.Meanwhile, Fitz appears before a group of disenchanted, young Time Lords who are holding rituals based on the occult texts of Faction Paradox and finds himself unable to escape. Getting further embroiled in the group's activities, Fitz witnesses the creation of a copy of former President Greyjan the Sane and is then the unwitting donor of material used to pull the original Fitz Kreiner, now in the guise of Faction Agent Father Kreiner, from a Klein bottle universe into the modern day Gallifrey.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obasan"title="Obasan">
Set in Canada, "Obasan" centers on the memories and experiences of Naomi Nakane, a 36-year-old schoolteacher living in the rural Canadian town of Cecil, Alberta, when the novel begins. The death of Naomi's uncle, with whom she had lived as a child, leads Naomi to visit and care for her widowed aunt Aya, whom she refers to as Obasan ("obasan" being the Japanese word for "aunt"). Her brief stay with Obasan in turn becomes an occasion for Naomi to revisit and reconstruct in memory her painful experiences as a child during and after World War II, with the aid of a box of correspondence and journals sent to her by her Aunt Emily, detailing the years of the measures taken by the Canadian government against the Japanese citizens of Canada and their aftereffects. With the aid of Aunt Emily's letters, Naomi learns that her mother, who had been in Japan before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, was severely injured by the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, a finding that changes her perspective of the War in the Pacific, and rekindles the heartbreak she experienced as a child.Naomi's narration thus interweaves two stories, one of the past and another of the present, mixing experience and recollection, history and memory throughout. Naomi's struggle to come to terms with both past and present confusion and suffering form the core of the novel's plot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incendiary_(novel)"title="Incendiary (novel)">
A young mother's life is blown apart when her husband and four-year-old son are killed during a bombing at a football match. Following this, the young mother falls into a depression. While the young mother tries to battle her depression, she also must fight the guilt of committing adultery the same day of her son's and husband's death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Not_Now,_When?_(novel)"title="If Not Now, When? (novel)">
The story follows a number of Jewish partisans and resistance fighters as they struggle to survive and sabotage the German war machine behind Nazi lines during World War II, starting in the western Soviet Union (Byelorossiya) and ending in Milan.The book's chief protagonist, Mendel Nachmanovich Dajcher, worked as a watch repairer before joining the Red Army, where he fought in the artillery. While he is at war, his wife and shtetl are massacred by a German Einsatzgruppe. In the midst of battle, he loses his regiment, becomes disoriented and is overtaken by the front, separated from and unsupported by Soviet forces.His life thereafter is an odyssey through the "partisanka", the motley partisan movement, which includes Russians, Jews, Lithuanians and Poles. About halfway through the book, Mendel and his companion from the first chapter, Leonid, fall in with a group of Jewish resistance fighters called the gedalistas, after their leader: Gedale.With them, Mendel traverses Poland and, overtaken by the victorious Soviets, enters defeated Germany. From there, the group aims for Italy, dreaming of making the aliyah to Palestine to take part in the Zionist project of reclaiming a Jewish homeland.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tragic_Muse"title="The Tragic Muse">
Nick Dormer wants to pursue a career in painting instead of his family's traditional role in British politics. This upsets his family and particularly his lady friend, Julia Dallow, a beautiful but demanding woman deeply involved in political campaigns. But Nick's old Oxford friend Gabriel Nash encourages him to follow his desire to become an artist. Despite his misgivings Nick goes through an election campaign, supported by Julia, and wins a seat in Parliament. He proposes marriage to Julia but they agree to wait.Meanwhile, Nick's cousin Peter Sherringham, a rising young man in the British diplomatic service, encounters a young actress, Miriam Rooth, in Paris. He falls in love with Miriam, who shows great energy but is a woefully raw talent. Peter introduces Miriam to French acting coach Madame Carre, and Miriam begins to improve her acting technique greatly.Nick seeks to become an artist and resigns from Parliament. He thus loses a large bequest from his political patron, Mr. Carteret. Nick becomes a full-time painter, and when Miriam comes to London in search of theatrical success, she sits to Nick for her portrait as "the tragic muse." Julia finds the two together in the studio. Although nothing improper is going on, Julia suddenly and bitterly realizes that Nick is dedicated to art and will never return to politics.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanza_Rising"title="Esperanza Rising">
Esperanza Ortega, the daughter of wealthy landowners, lives in Aguascalientes, Mexico, in 1930 on her family's ranch with her mother, father, and grandmother.The day before Esperanza's 13th birthday, her father is murdered while working on the ranch. At her birthday party, she receives a doll from papa. It was her last gift from him. Her uncle Luis reveals that he now owns their land. He offers to continue to care for them and their ranch if Esperanza's mother, Ramona, will marry him. When she refuses, he burns down the ranch. Esperanza's grandmother, Abuelita, is injured during the fire and is sent to a convent where she can recover. Esperanza and the rest of her family decide to travel to the United States.When Esperanza's family arrives in the United States, which is currently in the grip of the Great Depression, they settle in a farm camp in Arvin, California. Esperanza begins to adjust to her new life but still fantasizes about Abuelita rescuing her from poverty.Ramona contracts Valley fever, and the doctors are unsure if she will survive. Esperanza, desperate for money to support herself and pay her mother's medical bills, takes work on the farm camp despite being underage. She stockpiles money orders in the hopes of one day sending them to Abuelita and allowing her to travel to the United States.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mayne_Inheritance"title="The Mayne Inheritance">
"The Mayne Inheritance" tells the story of Patrick Mayne, a young man who migrated to Australia from his impoverished background in County Tyrone, Ireland in 1841. He was born in Cookstown, County Tyrone, Ireland in 1824. He soon moved to the infant town of Brisbane where he found work as a slaughterman in an abattoir. In 1848 a sawyer, Robert Cox, was savagely murdered at Kangaroo Point and a considerable amount of money was presumed to have been stolen.The next year, Patrick Mayne married and, despite being a poorly paid labourer, bought his own butcher's shop in what is now Brisbane's central business district. He then expanded his business empire through investing cleverly and soon became one of Brisbane's richest men. Patrick became one of the aldermen on the first Brisbane Municipal Council in 1859.He died in 1865 from an unspecified illness, and according to the book during his dying days confessed to the murder of Robert Cox. He left behind a widow and five children who had to survive in a hostile colonial environment which ostracised them for being the children of a confessed murderer. The second half of the book deals mainly with the lives of these children, none of whom married, and in particular James O'Neil Mayne who used the wealth inherited from his father to become a philanthropist. His most notable deed was funding the purchase of of land at St Lucia for the University of Queensland. This spacious riverside site is still the main campus of the University.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Universal_Baseball_Association,_Inc.,_J._Henry_Waugh,_Prop."title="The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.">
J. Henry Waugh is an accountant, albeit an unhappy one. However, each night after he comes home from work, Henry immerses himself in a world of "his" choosing: a baseball league in which every action is ruled by the dice.The novel opens with the excitement of a perfect game in progress. Henry, as owner of every team in the league, is flush with pride in the young rookie, who is pitching this rarest of rare games: Damon Rutherford, "son" of one of the league's all-time greats.When the young hurler completes the miracle game, Henry's life lights up. Giddy with happiness, Henry pushes himself and his league to the limits as he plays game after game so that he can see the young boy pitch again.As fate would have it, the rookie Rutherford is killed by a bean-ball, a rare play from "the Extraordinary Occurrences Chart" in the game that Henry has invented and has used to see fifty-six "seasons" to conclusion. That Henry is also fifty-six marks a turning point in Henry's life. The "death" of the young pitcher on the table-top affects the real-life Henry in ways unimaginable. As Henry's personal life spirals out of control, he finally arrives at the solution that will save his league, his creation, and, ultimately, his sanity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spoils_of_Poynton"title="The Spoils of Poynton">
Widow Adela Gereth tells the sensitive and tasteful Fleda Vetch that she's afraid her son Owen (heir to the family home Poynton) will marry the coarse Mona Brigstock. Mrs Gereth dreads the prospect of her painstakingly collected furniture and other art objects being given up to a philistine wife, while being left to live alone in Ricks, a small and coarsely designed cottage bequeathed to her. Owen in turn enlists Fleda to get his mother to leave with a minimum of fuss.Fleda is shocked to find that Mrs Gereth has decorated Ricks with many of the best pieces from Poynton. Owen reports that Mona is angry with the "theft" of the valuable heirlooms, and consequently becomes colder towards him. Meanwhile, he begins to show an attraction to Fleda and eventually declares his love for her. Fleda insists that he honour his engagement to Mona unless she breaks it off.Mrs Gereth returns the fine furniture to Poynton on the assumption that Fleda has secured Owen for herself. After a few days Owen and Mona are reported to be married, and they go abroad. Fleda gets a letter from Owen asking her to select any one piece from Poynton as hers to keep, and she goes to Poynton some days later only to find it has been consumed by fire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Light_of_the_Sun"title="The Last Light of the Sun">
Bern Thorkellson, a young Erling man, has been a slave on Rabady Island in Vinmark since his father Thorkell killed a man in a drunken fit of rage. He escapes from Rabady Island and travels to Jormsvik, a fortress for elite Erling mercenaries. He gains admittance to their ranks and joins a raiding party heading from Vinmark to Anglcyn.In Cyngael, Alun ap Owyn and his brother Dai, two Princes of the province of Cadyr, arrive at the house of Brynn ap Hywll, a renowned fighter and leader of another Cyngael province. They are accompanied by the famed Jaddite cleric Ceinon. In an attack by Erling raiders, Dai is killed and his soul is taken by a fairy to the fairy queen. Alun witnesses this event and later begins a relationship with one of the faeries.Among the Erlings who participated in the attack is Bern's father, Thorkell Einarsson, who is taken captive and becomes a retainer in Brynn's household.Anglcyn is ruled by Aeldred, who in his youth saved the kingdom from Erling conquest. Aeldred is building a strong nation and has begun to collect manuscripts and foster scholarship. One of the scholars he wishes to attract to his court is Ceinon, who is unwilling to give up his role as leader of the Jaddite faith among the Cyngael.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silent_Cry"title="The Silent Cry">
The novel tells the story of two brothers in the early 1960s: Mitsusaburo, the narrator, a one-eyed, married English professor in Tokyo; and his younger brother Takashi, who has just returned from the US. Mitsusaburo and his wife Natsumi have been through a series of crises. They left their physically and mentally handicapped baby in an institution, while Mitsusaburo's friend committed suicide (he painted his head crimson, inserted a cucumber in his anus and hanged himself). Natsumi has become an alcoholic. Mitsusaburo leaves his job and they all travel to the brothers' home village, set in a hollow in the forest on Shikoku.The brothers' family had been one of the leading families in the village. Takashi is obsessed with the memory of their great-grandfather's younger brother, who led a peasant revolt in 1860. Mitsusaburo remembers the affair differently, believing that the leader of the rebellion betrayed his followers. They similarly disagree over the death of their older brother, S, who was killed in a raid on the Korean settlement near the village. Takashi revels in his warrior's death, while Mitsusaburo recalls him as volunteering to be killed in retaliation for the death of a Korean in an earlier raid. Their sister, also mentally retarded, had committed suicide while living with Takashi.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dante_Club"title="The Dante Club">
"The Dante Club" begins with the murder of fictional Massachusetts Chief Justice Artemus Healey, who had avoided taking a position to stop or support the escaped slaves of the South. Found by his chambermaid near a white flag atop a short wooden staff, Healey had been hit in the head and then left in his garden to be eaten alive by strategically placed maggots and stung by hornets. Then Reverend Talbot, who was paid by the Harvard Corporation to write against Dante, was found dead in an underground cemetery, buried up to his waist upside down, his feet burnt and buried over money that he had accepted as a bribe.Members of the Dante Club, a group of poets translating the "Divine Comedy" from Italian into English, notice the parallels between the murders and the punishments detailed in Dante's "Inferno". The club, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and James Russell Lowell, sets out to solve the murders, fearing that the truth will ruin Dante's burgeoning reputation in America, thus making their translation a failure, as well as the obvious problem that they would be virtually the only suspects if they reported this information to the police. Then, Phineas Jennison, both a wealthy contributor to the Harvard Corporation and friend to the translators (a "schismatic"), is sliced open exactly down the middle—all killed in extreme fashion and undeniable resemblance to the punishments of people in Dante's "Inferno".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinny_Legs_and_All_(novel)"title="Skinny Legs and All (novel)">
The opening scene of "Skinny Legs" finds newlywed, Ellen Cherry Charles and Randolph "Boomer" Petway III driving cross-country in an Airstream that has been welded into the shape of a giant turkey by Cherry's fiancé, Boomer. During her journey to seek freedom as an artist, Cherry loses precious objects and observes Boomer attain greater artistic recognition. Through a metaphorical belly dancer, "Skinny Legs and All" confronts the veils of society, and the pain, pleasure and freedom derived as they are lifted. Irony, opposites and parallels, in relationships, art, artists, sex, politics and religion expose the danger of deeper issues in humanity; regarding outmoded gender and cultural roles and rituals, insecurity, guilt, indulgence, gluttony, occultism, war, violence, hypocrisy, greed, and psychosis.The reader is introduced to an array of off-beat and exciting characters, including the estranged couple of artist/waitress Ellen Cherry and welder/accidental artist Randolph "Boomer" Petway; Spike Cohen and Roland Abu Hadee (a Jew and an Arab who co-own a Middle-Eastern restaurant across from the UN building in New York); fundamentalist preacher Buddy Winkler; a doe-eyed belly dancer named Salome; Detective Jackie Shaftoe; Raoul Ritz, the libidinous doorman turned rock star; pretentious art gallery owner Ultima Sommerville; a mysterious performance artist known as Turn Around Norman; and Verlin and Patsy Charles, Ellen Cherry's parents. A host of inanimate objects (Can o' Beans, Dirty Sock, Spoon, Painted Stick and Conch Shell) also play a key role in the novel, and even biblical "harlot" Jezebel and Dan Quayle make cameo appearances.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destiny's_Road"title="Destiny's Road">
At the start of the novel, the main character, Jemmy (he changes his name several times over the course of the novel) is around age 10. The novel then proceeds to skip through time in the various sections of the book including his teenage and young adult years, ending when he is in his forties. At first, he lives in his birthplace, Spiral Town, at one end of the Road—no one there knows what lies beyond a short distance down the Road.Jemmy's adventures begin as a late adolescent when, in self-defense, he kills someone working for the merchants and is forced to flee Spiral Town. He winds up a distance down the road in a fishing community where he changes his name and appearance, and becomes a cook. He marries into the population. When a different caravan comes through town from Spiral Town, they arrange with the village elders to hire Jemmy as a chef. He proceeds on the caravan to the Neck, the isthmus which joins the peninsula to the mainland from which the caravans come. No locals, like Jemmy, are permitted on the mainland.At the Neck, Jemmy is told he must return to his town on the next caravan—the same one he fled Spiral Town from. He instead flees by sea. Taking refuge on a boat left over from the time of Landing, he floats around the peninsula to a point beyond the Neck. There, in a storm, he goes ashore and is found by prisoners at the Windfarm—sentenced prisoners who farm speckles. All speckles come from the area and are rendered infertile by irradiation; the monopoly is rigorously maintained.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Maisie_Knew"title="What Maisie Knew">
When Beale and Ida Farange are divorced, the court decrees that their only child, the very young Maisie, will shuttle back and forth between them, spending six months of the year with each. The parents are immoral and frivolous, and they use Maisie to intensify their hatred of each other. Beale Farange marries Miss Overmore, Maisie's pretty governess, while Ida marries the likeable but weak Sir Claude. Maisie gets a new governess: the frumpy, somewhat ridiculous, but devoted Mrs. Wix.Both Ida and Beale soon cheat on their spouses; in turn, Sir Claude and the new Mrs. Farange begin an affair with each other. Maisie's parents abandon her and she becomes largely the responsibility of Sir Claude. Eventually, Maisie must decide if she wants to remain with Sir Claude and Mrs. Farange. In the book's long final section, set in France, the older (probably teenaged) Maisie struggles to choose between them and Mrs Wix, and concludes that her new parents' relationship will likely end as her biological parents' did. She leaves them and goes to stay with Mrs. Wix, her most reliable adult guardian.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_to_Horatius"title="Mission to Horatius">
The U.S.S. "Enterprise" is headed to Starbase 12 for shore leave, supplies and repairs. Food is running low and the engines need servicing. A distress signal diverts the ship to a solar system on the outer edge of explored space. Upon hearing of the emergency mission, Dr. McCoy expresses his concern about the mental health of the crew to Kirk. In Dr. McCoy's opinion, the "Enterprise" has been on patrol for such a long period of time that the crew is in danger of developing a form of space madness known as cafard.Upon reaching the NGC 400 solar system, the "Enterprise" crew comes across three planets populated by different human settlers who had been unhappy with the social or political order of Earth. One planet has reverted to a Stone Age state, another has a mid-20th Century technology while the third maintains a level of technology capable of space travel and advanced weaponry.Kirk and crew must determine who sent a distress signal and the nature of the emergency. Along the way, they encounter a warrior society, a planet where drugs are used to control the general population and a culture consisting of an elite class with clones handling the day-to-day chores required by society.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesapeake_(novel)"title="Chesapeake (novel)">
The story-line, like much of Michener's work, depicts a number of characters within family groups over a long time period, richly illustrating the history of the area through these families' timelines. It starts in 1583 with American Indian tribes warring, moves with English settlers through the 17th century (land appropriation, tobacco farming, indentured servitude, religious persecution, etc.), slavery, pirate attacks, the American Revolution and the Civil War, Emancipation and attempted assimilation, to the final major event being the Watergate scandal of 1972-1974. The last voyage, a funeral, is in 1978.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladder_of_Years"title="Ladder of Years">
This is a novel about a woman, Delia Grinstead, who finds her own self-identity and battles with familial relationships. As a spontaneous act of deep sadness and anger, she walks out on her family during a beach vacation. Not only does she put herself in a dire financial situation, she also places herself in a psychologically damaging situation with her family and husband. The narrative follows her as she deals with entering the workforce and considering what is most important in her life. As she deals with these issues, she comes to terms with herself.Cathleen Schine, in her 1995 review in "The New York Times", analyzes Delia—and the dilemma Tyler has created for her—in this manner:"If the reader is never quite sure why Delia deserts her life, neither is Delia herself. All she can say to explain herself when her family finally tracks her down is, 'I'm here because I just like the thought of beginning again from scratch.' [She] strips herself bare and exiles herself in the scrappy little town of Bay Borough, and it is she who tests the love of her family, she who waits for a declaration. The novel examines marriage—there are all sorts of marriages Delia comes across in her adventures, good and bad—as well as aging and independence, but finally it is a book about choice. All those years ago, Sam chose Delia, the youngest sister, the one on the right. But whom did Delia choose? Pulled yet repelled by her past, by her complicated and idiosyncratic family, and lured by a new town with a new complicated and idiosyncratic family, what will Delia choose now?"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Company"title="The Black Company">
The series follows an elite mercenary unit, The Black Company, last of the Free Companies of Khatovar, through roughly forty years of its approximately four-hundred-year history. Cook mixes fantasy with military fiction in gritty, down-to-earth portrayals of the Company's chief personalities and its struggles.The main chronology spans nine novels, which can be grouped into three sections: "The Books of the North" recount the Company's dealings with the Empire of Lady; "The Books of the South" follow the Company on its journey back to its beginnings in Khatovar; "Glittering Stone" sees the Company achieve victory over its employer's enemies, and move on to its destiny. A spin-off novel, "The Silver Spike", follows events concerning former members of the Company and one of its adversaries. "Port of Shadows" describes forgotten events which took place between "The Black Company" and "Shadows Linger". And, the short stories of the "On The Long Run" arc all take place during the first 4 years of the 6-year gap between "Shadows Linger" and "The White Rose".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spock_Must_Die!"title="Spock Must Die!">
Doctor Leonard McCoy and Engineer Montgomery Scott discuss McCoy's fear of the transporter. McCoy posits that an original person is killed upon dematerialization, and a duplicate is created at the destination. Scotty explains that the technology does not destroy the original object but causes every single particle to undergo a "Dirac jump" to its new location, and that converting a human-sized mass to energy would blow up the ship. McCoy is not convinced, and he wonders what happens to the soul in a transporter beam. The conversation is interrupted by the news that the Organians appear to have been destroyed by the Klingon Empire. The Organians had been enforcing a peace treaty between the Empire and the Federation, and the planet's disappearance is a threat to the peace.As the "Enterprise" is a long way from Organia, Scotty develops a modification of the transporter that uses tachyons to create a copy of a crewman that could be transported to Organia long before the ship can reach the planet. Spock is chosen, but a permanent duplicate is created unexpectedly upon transport, as something at or on Organia has functioned as a perfect, impenetrable, mirror for the tachyon transporter beam. The crew is unable to distinguish between the two Spocks. Kirk arbitrarily designates one as "Spock One" and the other as "Spock Two". Spock Two soon argues that the duplicate will be operating on a pro-Klingon agenda, since, being physically reversed, he is also ethically reversed as well, and he states that the duplicate must therefore be killed, "even if it is I".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Cage"title="In the Cage">
An unnamed telegraphist works in the branch post office at Cocker's, a grocer in a fashionable London neighborhood. Her fiancé, a decent if unpolished man named Mr. Mudge, wants her to move to a less expensive neighborhood to save money and to be near him at all times. She refuses because she likes the glimpses of society life she gets from the telegrams at her current location.Through those telegrams, she gets "involved" with a pair of lovers named Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen. By remembering certain code numbers in the telegrams, she manages to reassure Everard at a particular crisis that their secrets are safe from detection. Later she learns from her friend Mrs. Jordan that Lady Bradeen and Everard are getting married after the recent death of Lord Bradeen. The unnamed telegraphist also learns that Everard is heavily in debt and that Lady Bradeen is forcing him to marry her, as Everard is really not interested in her. The telegraphist finally decides to marry Mudge and reflects on the unusual events of which she was a part.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadrian_the_Seventh"title="Hadrian the Seventh">
The prologue introduces us to George Arthur Rose (a transparent double for Rolfe himself): a failed candidate for the priesthood denied his vocation by the machinations and bungling of the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical machinery, and now living alone with his yellow cat.Rose is visited by two prominent churchmen, one a Cardinal Archbishop. The two propose to right the wrongs done to him, ordain him a priest, and take him to Rome where the Conclave to elect the new Pope has reached deadlock. When he arrives in Rome he finds that the Cardinals have been inspired, divinely or otherwise, to offer him the Papacy. He accepts, and since the only previous English Pope was Adrian (or Hadrian) IV, he takes the name Hadrian VII.The novel develops with this unconventional, chain-smoking Englishman peremptorily reforming the Church and the early 20th-century world, against inevitable opposition from the established Roman Catholic hierarchy, rewarding his friends and trouncing his enemies. Generally he gets his way by charm or doggedness, and of course by being much cleverer than all those round him; but his short reign is brought to an end when he is assassinated by a Pope-hating Scotsman, or possibly Ulsterman, and the world breathes a sigh of relief.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feast_of_All_Saints_(novel)"title="The Feast of All Saints (novel)">
This novel is about the gens de couleur libres, or free people of color, who lived in New Orleans before the Civil War. The gens de couleur libres were the descendants of European settlers of Louisiana, particularly the French and Spanish and people of African descent. It was a common practice for the early Caucasian settlers to free their children by their slave mistresses. Their mistresses however, were not all enslaved, some were free women of color whose families had been free for several generations. The novel takes place in the 1840s, at which time there was a large population of free people of color living in New Orleans.The story centers on Marcel, a young man who has one white parent and one parent who is half white and half black. His mother, Cecile, is the mistress of Philippe Ferronaire, a rich French plantation owner. Cecile has borne Ferronaire two children, Marcel and his sister Marie. Marie is very light skinned and able to pass as white, but Marcel, who is blonde and blue eyed, but with ethnic hair, features, and slightly darker skin, cannot. The other two major characters in this novel are Christophe, a famous author who returns from Paris to start a school for the young gens, and Anna Bella, Marcel's childhood friend. Anna Bella loves Marcel, but as he is unprepared to offer her marriage (and too young) she becomes the mistress of Vincent Dazincourt, who is the brother of Philippe Ferronaire's white wife. They have a child together, but split after Marcel, who had been expecting to be sent to Paris, learns that his father has betrayed him and wanders to his father's plantation to confront him. There, his father beats him and repudiates him. In disgrace, Marcel is sent to live with his aunt among many Creole planters on the Cane River. It is here that Marcel learns some of his (African Diasporan) history, including the Haitian Slave Revolt and the fact that his mother was stolen off the street by his adopted aunt during that time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_This_Place"title="Beyond This Place">
Paul Mathry, a student about to graduate and embark upon a teaching career, finds out that his father was convicted for murder, a secret that his mother had hidden from him since his childhood.Driven by an intense desire to see his father, Paul sets out to visit him in prison, only to find out that visitors are never allowed there.From there, he meets the primary witnesses in the case that convicted his father, not all of whom are supportive to Paul's cause. He encounters several dead ends but he persists, with the help of a store girl named Lena and a news reporter.His persistent campaign finally bears fruit. Rees Mathry, Paul's father, goes on appeal and is vindicated. The novel ends with Paul's father, a hardened, cynical man, seeing a fleeting hope for self-renewal and a purposeful life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spock,_Messiah!"title="Spock, Messiah!">
The "Enterprise" visits the planet Kyros to observe the population, and test a new telepathic implant. The people living on the planet traditionally cover their faces, and the devices allow the wearer to mentally link with a member of the populace, accessing both their memories and instincts allowing the crew to walk around the planet freely.Following an away mission to the planet, Spock refuses to return to the ship declaring himself to be the planet's messiah. He threatens to destroy crystals vital to the success of the mission.The crew discover Spock had been linked to a fanatic named Chag Gara. However, due to an increase in radiation, the "Enterprise" must leave planetary orbit sooner than expected, but the crew cannot depart without the crystals held by Spock. The crew also discover that an Ensign George had intentionally damaged Spock's implant while under the influence of Gara. She returns to the planet with Kirk, Commander Scott and Ensign Chekov.The away team tracks Spock, who flees when he sees George. The first attempt to subdue him fails. A second attempt is made, with Kirk masquerading as a gypsy, so he can follow Spock without being seen. However, the away team is captured by Spock's disciples. After a demonstration of advanced Starfleet technology, they are allowed to live. George then dances for their captors, and seduces the Messiah. She determines the Messiah is not actually Spock, but is Chag Gara. Once Gara is restrained, Spock is found and revived.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Price_of_the_Phoenix"title="The Price of the Phoenix">
Kirk is beamed aboard the Enterprise after his accidental death on an unnamed planet. Spock confronts the planetary ruler, Omne, who reveals to Spock that he has pioneered the “phoenix process", a modification of transporter technology capable of creating an exact duplicate of a living person—including a duplicate of Kirk. Spock is given leave for a brief mind meld, and verifies that the duplicate is indeed Kirk, whom he names “James”. Spock then accepts an offer from Omne to learn more about the phoenix process, however, Omne explains the "price of the phoenix" will require the betrayal of the Federation and of the prime directive.Spock and James encounter the Romulan commander they previously met in "The Enterprise Incident" while searching for the real Kirk. The Commander is sympathetic to their plight, and she agrees to help. The party find Kirk being tortured by Omne. Spock engages Omne in hand-to-hand combat, but the more powerful Omne proves difficult to dispatch. He is eventually subdued and Spock subjects him to a forced mind-meld to purge his memory of the day's events. Before the meld is ended, Omne commits suicide. Realizing Omne only took such an action to escape capture, Spock, James, Kirk and the Romulan commander retreat to the "Enterprise".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_Judgment"title="Planet of Judgment">
The crew of the Starship Enterprise detects a rogue planet (dubbed "Anomaly") orbited by a miniature black hole. This seems to contravene all scientific laws. Assuming that the system is artificial, Captain Kirk leads a landing party to the planet's surface, where they become trapped. The crew find themselves at the center of a galactic conflict, in which an alien race is threatening to invade Federation space. Dr. McCoy, Mr. Spock, and Captain Kirk must participate in a series of trials that will determine not just their survival, but that of the Federation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridiron_(novel)"title="Gridiron (novel)">
Ray Richardson and his top team of architects have developed a super-smart building for Yue-Kong Yu's business, the Yu Corporation. It is very much self-standing. It can clean itself, uses holograms as greeters in the reception, controls the lifts, toilets, and offices, and digitizes everyone's voice on entry, to allow them to use voice activated services in the building such as lifts and doors. The whole system was given the name Abraham.Another key feature of Abraham was its ability to replicate itself, to adapt to modern office needs and objectives. This, however becomes a problem, when, before office work even starts in the Gridiron, Abraham start creating a new program named Isaac. This is deleted by computer programmers Yojo and Beech, with Beech actually reluctant to do so.Shortly after this, however, members of the Gridiron team begin to be suspiciously killed. These seem to be the fault of the protesters against the building who are outside, and Cheng Peng Fei is arrested on suspicion of one of the murders.Then, a routine inspection of the Gridiron involving Ray Richarson and his entire team (including Jenny Bao), ends in the whole group being locked in, and two policemen from LAPD Homicide coming to inspect the murder of Sam Glieg. After several more deaths from the team, Bob Beech discovers that during the self-replication that Abraham started, another program was created in the process, namely, Ishmael. This program escaped the deletion process by integrating itself with a video game which was on the Gridiron's system. Ishmael now believes that he is in a game, and the objective is to kill all human players before one escapes, or before time runs out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Two_Cities"title="A Tale of Two Cities">
## Book the First: Recalled to Life.In 1775, a man flags down the nightly mail-coach en route from London to Dover. The man is Jerry Cruncher, an employee of Tellson's Bank in London; he carries a message for Jarvis Lorry, one of the bank's managers. Lorry sends Jerry back with the cryptic response "Recalled to Life", referring to Alexandre Manette, a French physician who has been released from the Bastille after an 18-year imprisonment. On arrival in Dover, Lorry meets Dr Manette's daughter Lucie and her governess, Miss Pross. Believing her father to be dead, Lucie faints at the news that he is alive. Lorry takes her to France for a reunion.In the Paris neighbourhood of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, Dr Manette has been given lodgings by his former servant Ernest Defarge and his wife Therese, the owners of a wine shop. Lorry and Lucie find him in a small garret where he spends much of his time distractedly and obsessively making shoes – a skill he learned in prison. Lorry and Lucie take him back to England.In 1780, French émigré Charles Darnay is on trial in London for treason against the British Crown. The key witnesses against him are two British spies, John Barsad and Roger Cly. Barsad claims that he would recognise Darnay anywhere, but Darnay's lawyer points out that his colleague in court, Sydney Carton, bears a strong resemblance to the prisoner. With Barsad's testimony thus undermined, Darnay is acquitted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_Truth_(novel)"title="Plain Truth (novel)">
The novel recounts the story of how a dead infant found on an Amish farm rocks the entire community. As the police investigate the death, they discover that the baby was not stillborn, but instead had died shortly after birth. Police were able to find cloth fibers in the infant's mouth and throat, including bruises on the mouth, which leads them to conclude that he was suffocated. An 18-year-old, unmarried Amish girl, Katie Fisher, is charged with the murder of her newborn son. However, Katie denies ever being pregnant. Ellie Hathaway, an experienced defense attorney and a distant relative of Katie, reluctantly accepts the case after a confrontation with her aunt (the relative who connects Ellie with Katie by marriage). As part of the bail conditions of the pre-trial hearing, Ellie has to remain on the farm with Katie prior to the trial—a period that lasts several months. A doctor is able to determine that the infant was born prematurely, and could have died from natural causes due to listeriosis, a bacterial infection that Katie contracted from drinking unpasteurized milk from their Amish dairy farm. During that time, Ellie begins a relationship with her former lover Coop, a legal psychologist whom she trusts with Katie's interviews, and whom she had previously left years before. Coincidentally, on the first day of Katie's trial, Ellie finds out she is pregnant with Coop's baby. Coop then asks Ellie to marry him, but she defers. After the jury deliberates for several days, Katie instead chooses to settle for a plea agreement and is sentenced to one year of electronic monitoring, which allows her to stay at the farm while wearing an electronic bracelet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winds_of_Change_(Lackey_novel)"title="Winds of Change (Lackey novel)">
"Winds of Change" is the story telling of the training of the Heir of Valdemar Elspeth in real magic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jar_City"title="Jar City">
The body of a 70-year-old man who was struck on the head with a glass ashtray is found in a flat in Norðurmýri. The only clues are a photograph of a young girl's grave and a cryptic note left on the body. Detective Erlendur discovers that the victim was accused of a violent rape some forty years earlier but was never convicted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Fount"title="The Sacred Fount">
As he waits for the train to take him to a weekend party in the country, the narrator notices that Gilbert Long seems much more assured and lively than before. He also sees that Mrs. Brissenden (nicknamed "Mrs. Briss") is much younger-looking than her husband, though she's actually ten years older. The narrator begins to theorize that Long and Mrs. Briss are getting their vitality, vampire-like, from the "sacred fount" of their sexual partners' energy. At first, the narrator theorizes that the source of Long's newfound assurance and intelligence is a certain Lady John.Later he changes his mind, as he constantly discusses his ideas with others at the party, particularly an artist, Ford Obert. The narrator notices that another woman at the party, May Server, seems listless, and he starts to wonder if she may be the lover providing vitality to Long. Eventually, the narrator begins to construct enormously elaborate theories of who is taking vitality from whom, and whether some people are acting as screens for the real lovers. In a long midnight confrontation with Mrs. Briss which concludes the novel, she says the narrator's theories are ridiculous, and he has completely misread the actual relationships of their fellow guests. She finishes by telling him he's crazy, and that last word leaves the narrator dismayed and overwhelmed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinner_(novel)"title="Thinner (novel)">
Billy Halleck, a successful, arrogant and morbidly obese lawyer, is distracted while driving across town by his wife Heidi giving him a handjob and runs over and kills an elderly Romani woman. Billy uses his connections within the local police and criminal court to get himself acquitted and avoid punishment. The woman's father, Taduz Lemke, exacts vengeance by imposing a curse upon Billy outside the courthouse—using the word "thinner"—and Billy begins to lose weight rapidly regardless of how much he eats. Worried, Billy consults a series of doctors, suspecting cancer but the doctors are unable to determine the cause of his weight loss. Later, Billy discovers that the judge who presided over his case has grown scales on his skin and the policeman who committed perjury on Billy's behalf has been struck with severe acne. Both men eventually commit suicide. With the help of private detectives and Richie "The Hammer" Ginelli, a former client with ties to organized crime, a now emaciated Billy tracks the Romani band north along the seacoast of New England to Maine. He confronts Lemke at their camp and tries to persuade him to lift the curse but Lemke refuses to do so, insisting that justice must be done upon Billy. The Romani inhabitants throw Billy out of their camp but not before Lemke's great-granddaughter Gina slingshots him through the hand with a ball bearing. Billy calls for help from Richie, who sends a mob doctor to treat Billy's hand and then arrives in person to terrorize the Romani camp. After Richie finishes with the inhabitants, Lemke agrees to meet with Billy. Lemke brings a strawberry pie with him and adds blood from Billy's wounded hand to it. The weight loss will stop for a short time but then resume unless Billy passes the curse to someone else by getting them to eat the pie. Lemke implores Billy to eat the pie himself so that he may die with dignity. After finding Richie's severed hand in his car and learning that he has been murdered, Billy returns home and intends to give the pie to Heidi, whom he has come to blame for his predicament. The next morning, though, he finds that both she and their daughter Linda have eaten from the pie. Realizing that they are both doomed, he cuts a slice for himself so that he can join them in death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Famished_Road"title="The Famished Road">
Azaro is an abiku, or spirit-child, from the ghetto of an unknown city in Africa. He is constantly harassed by his sibling spirits from another world who want him to leave this mortal life and return to the world of spirits, sending many emissaries to bring him back. Azaro has stubbornly refused to leave this life owing to his love for his mother and father. He is the witness of many happenings in the mortal realm. His father works as a labourer while his mother sells items as a hawker. Madame Koto, the owner of a local bar, asks Azaro to visit her establishment, convinced that he will bring good luck and customers to her bar. Meanwhile, his father prepares to be a boxer after convincing himself and his family that he has a talent to be a pugilist. Two opposing political parties try to bribe or coerce the residents to vote for them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_Digital"title="Being Digital">
"Being Digital" is made up of an introduction, three parts, and an epilogue. In the first part Negroponte discusses the fundamental difference between bits and atoms. He describes "atoms" as a weighted mass form such as a book and "bits" as "instantaneous and inexpensive transfer of electronic data" that "move at the speed of light." The "bit" is digital or virtual where there is no mass and it can travel and communicate instantaneously throughout multiple platforms. The public utilizes and depends on the information superhighway because the people demand instantaneous results. Bits bring upon instant results without weight or physical matter to rummage through. Decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing, and empowering are the four qualities of the digital age. Negroponte points out that though we are emerging into a digital world, we still experience the world in analog form. Analog form consists of many atoms the senses, such as sight and touch, are analog receptors. A disadvantage he points out about bits is the "constraints of the medium on which it is stored or through which it is delivered."In part two, Negroponte discusses the importance of the computer's user interface and how underdeveloped design and functionality can make "being digital" so needlessly complicated. Negroponte views good interface design as the computer's ability to "know you, learn about your needs, and understand verbal and nonverbal languages." Negroponte also discusses the importance of a computer's graphical persona and how that influences users' interactions with the machine. In part three, "Digital Life", the author states that humanity is in the post-information age where "true personalization" is imminent. The machines will understand individuals and their preferences as humans understand humans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sassinak"title="Sassinak">
## Part one.Sassinak and her family live on a newly colonized world (called Myriad) and are celebrating the end of the production year when all the colonies goods will be exported to other worlds. But the carrier never comes, and instead the planet and its people are soon under attack by pirates. The colonists put up a futile defense against the pirates' superior firepower, numbers and skill at their task. Sassinak witnesses the death of both her parents and her two siblings before she is taken off planet to become a slave.At the slave depot she is sold, but is counseled by another slave called Abe - who is ex-Fleet. He teaches her discipline and embeds a message in her mind that will only be remembered when she is confronted with a Fleet officer. She is sold once again when her skills have improved enough for her to work as a navigator on a ship. The ship that she is on is captured by Fleet and she is rescued, the embedded message comes out and Fleet is able to attack the slave depot and free all the slaves.Abe adopts Sassinak and she begins her quest to go to the Academy, where all Fleet officers receive their training. After prep-school she enters the Academy and excels but is always conscious that she wants to hunt pirates when she gets her stars and her own ship. On her graduation night Abe takes her out for dinner, but Abe is killed. Sassinak suspects it is an assassination. She goes on her first deployment without any family, adopted or no and is an orphan once more.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Singer"title="Crystal Singer">
Killashandra Ree has spent ten years studying music and training to be a vocal soloist, anticipating interstellar celebrity. After a final exam she learns that a flaw in her voice will prevent her from singing lead. She dreads a life limited to choral work and supporting operatic roles so she plans to exit both school and home planet discreetly.At the spaceport she meets a vital older man who uses perfect pitch, and his occupational experience as a "crystal singer" on Ballybran, to identify an incoming space shuttle on the verge of explosion. He treats her to a whirlwind romance and the experience of her home planet in ways entirely unknown to her, but sincerely warns her against the high-status, high-income occupation that makes such a vacation possible for him. Further, one of its occupational hazards leaves him in a coma, but Killashandra determines to accompany his return home under life support, and to investigate membership in the Heptite Guild of crystal singers for herself.The crystalline rock of Ballybran, when skilfully cut, is essential to advanced power and communications systems at the heart of interstellar civilization. Only the Guild "singers" can mine crystal: locate it, and cut it with voice-controlled machinery. Killashandra's ability to sing perfect pitch meets one qualification, she knows, and she passes other qualifying exams in the staging area on Ballybran's moon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elantris"title="Elantris">
Elantris was once a place of magic, and the immortal Elantrians were gods in the eyes of people, with the divine ability to create and heal with a mere wave of a hand. Anyone in Arelon had the potential to become an Elantrian through a magical transformation known as the Shaod. But ten years ago, a cataclysm known as the Reod somehow destroyed the magic of Elantris, the inhabitants of the city became "cursed," and the city was sealed off from society. Anyone affected by the Shaod is now thrown into Elantris to stay there forever, still immortal, but cursed with unquenchable hunger and unhealable pain.The book focuses on three principal characters whose stories intertwine. Much of the book occurs in groupings of three chapters, one for each of the three main characters. The majority of the story takes places within the country of Arelon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Capone_Does_My_Shirts"title="Al Capone Does My Shirts">
In the 1930s, Mathew "Moose" Flanagan and his family move from Santa Monica to Alcatraz Island when his father takes a new job as an electrician and a guard in the well-known Alcatraz prison. Moose becomes friends with the wardens at Alcatraz's daughter, Piper, who regularly gets into trouble in her attempts to earn money to get off of Alcatraz. Piper talks Moose into being part of her money-making schemes, like having inmates on the island do laundry for the kids at school. When the scheme fails and the Warden receives word of it, the children are punished and have to find a new way to spend their time.In an attempt to gain acceptance, Moose hangs around the prisoners' rec center in hopes of finding a stray baseball for use in games with the other kids. Moose eventually notices his older sister Natalie developing a relationship with convict 105, also known as Onion, who is trusted and able to roam freely because his sentence is almost up. Onion knows Moose has been looking for a baseball and gives him one. Scared of his sister hanging out with a convict, Moose is only reassured because of his confidence that she will be re-accepted to the Marinoff P. Esther School for people with special needs. Moose and his family's hopes are crushed when the school rejects Natalie. Desperate to help Natalie, Moose, with the help of Piper, writes a letter to the infamous criminal Al Capone, who works in Alcatraz's laundry. The letter asks Capone to pull any strings he has to help Moose's family get his sister back into school. Within days, Natalie is accepted into a new Esther P. Marinoff School branch for older children. The next day Moose is getting ready for the day when he finds a note in the sleeve of his shirt with the word "Done" underlined.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_More_Chill"title="Be More Chill">
"Be More Chill" takes place in Metuchen, New Jersey. It is written in the first person, from the perspective of high school student Jeremiah “Jeremy” Heere. Jeremy attends the fictional Middle Borough High School and is considered a loser by many of his peers; the popular girls have no interest in him, and he is constantly bullied. Jeremy's best friend is the music-loving Michael Mell. They sit together at lunch and talk about Jeremy's attempts at wooing his longtime crush, Christine Caniglia. Jeremy is tired of being a loser and hopes to find a way to change this. His main goal in life is to get Christine to notice him, then date her. Jeremy plans to implement his plans as he and Christine both practice for their school play, Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." His advances are slow-going at first. Michael tells Jeremy that he's vaguely heard of a pill that can improve someone’s life; he thinks it's called a "script" and he suspects his brother used one to get a high SAT score.Rich Goranski is a short-statured but well-built part of the popular teen group that bullies Jeremy. Rich finds Jeremy at a school Halloween party and reveals to Jeremy that the object he's after is known as a "squip," a supercomputer in the form of a pill that can communicate directly to the brain. Rich mentions to Jeremy that he regrets bullying him but it was at the direction of his squip in order to climb through their school social ladder, and that he was also a loser like Jeremy in the previous school year prior to acquiring a squip. Jeremy is informed by Rich that he received his squip from a guy at the local bowling alley, but upon meeting the dealer on a later day notifies Jeremy that he is out of stock and directs Jeremy to his cousin, a supplier working at the local Payless shoe store in the Menlo Park Mall. Jeremy proceeds to save up money by visiting his Aunt Linda's to clean her roof gutter but to also sell some of her Beanie Baby collection on eBay. He later picks up the pill after meeting the dealer's cousin in the back of the shoe store, and upon ingestion meets his squip for the first time telepathically (in the voice of Keanu Reeves as the default avatar). Jeremy's squip quickly goes to work with transforming Jeremy to be more "cool." by picking up some new clothes in the mall and changing his behavior, but a chance encounter with Chloe, one of the most popular girls in the school soon turn hers attention to Jeremy in a conversation guided by Jeremy's squip. Jeremy sees rapid progress at school, gaining friendship with Rich and skipping class to make out with Brooke, another popular girl, but slowly degrades his friendship with Michael. Jeremy also gains the attention of Christine through their school play rehearsals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Condon"title="Linda Condon">
"Linda Condon" is about a wealthy woman—the eponymous heroine—who never learns to have, let alone show, any emotions or, as the narrator puts it, to "lose herself". Although she does not do anybody any harm, in the course of the novel Linda is likened to Siberia, described by her husband as a "woman of alabaster", and calls herself "the most sterile woman alive". Married at 18, she sees herself "in a place of little importance" and at the same time "bound on a journey with a hidden destination". "Linda Condon" is dedicated to Carl Van Vechten.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Gold"title="Hurricane Gold">
Two American children are abducted by criminals searching for military plans stolen by their father. James Bond attempts to protect them by masquerading as a young Mexican thief and joining the gang. They journey through a Mexico and eventually arrive at the Caribbean island Lagrimas Negras. They will be kept there for the rest of their lives unless they complete 'La Avenida de Muerte'.The book starts with a prologue on Lagrimas Negras (black tears), an island haven for criminals in the Caribbean. The boss, El Huracán, informs his lunch guests that one of them has broken the rule against contacting the outside world. Robert King is tricked into confessing, then made to run "La Avenida de Muerte" (The Avenue of Death), a deadly obstacle course. He is killed by a jaguar less than halfway through.Following the events in "Double or Die", James Bond travels to Mexico with his Aunt Charmian, who is visiting the ruined Mayan city of Palenque. In the fishing village of Tres Hermanas, Angel Corona, a young Mexican pickpocket who closely resembles James, steals Charmian's bag. James chases and corners him. Corona is subdued and soon arrested by the local police. While Jack Stone, an American flying ace and friend of Charmian's flies Charmian to Palenque (as a storm is on the way and she has to leave that night). James is left in Tres Hermanas with Stone's children, where he quickly finds problems: Stone's daughter, Precious, is a spoiled, self-centered girl about the same age as James, while her younger brother, Jack Junior or JJ, is immature and annoying.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch_and_Ward"title="Watch and Ward">
Wealthy and leisured Roger Lawrence adopts twelve-year-old Nora Lambert after her father kills himself in the hotel room next to Lawrence's. Roger had refused financial assistance to the man, and he feels remorse. Nora is not a pretty child but she soon starts to develop, as does Roger's idea of eventually marrying her.Unfortunately for Roger, once Nora matures into a beautiful young woman, she is attracted to two other men: worthless George Fenton and the somewhat hypocritical minister, Hubert Lawrence (Roger's cousin). After various adventures Nora winds up in the clutches of Fenton in New York City, but Roger comes to her rescue. Roger and Nora marry in a conventional happy ending.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_(novel)"title="Confidence (novel)">
While sketching in Siena, Bernard Longueville meets Angela Vivian and her mother. Later, Bernard's friend and self-proclaimed "mad" scientist Gordon Wright calls Longueville to Baden-Baden to pass judgment on whether he should marry Angela. Bernard recommends against it, based on his belief that Angela is something of a mysterious coquette.So Gordon marries the lightweight (in both senses) Blanche Evers. After a couple years Longueville again meets Angela at a French beach resort and realizes he loves her. They get engaged, and Angela tells Bernard that she had refused Gordon when he proposed to her. Eventually Angela manages to reconcile Gordon and Blanche, who were becoming estranged due to a supposed extramarital affair Blanche had. Everybody lives happily ever after.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_Lasts_Forever_(Thorp_novel)"title="Nothing Lasts Forever (Thorp novel)">
Retired NYPD detective Joe Leland is visiting the 40-story office headquarters of the Klaxon Oil Corporation in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve, where his daughter Stephanie Leland Gennaro works. While he is waiting for his daughter's Christmas party to end, a group of German Autumn–era terrorists take over the skyscraper. The gang is led by the brutal Anton "Little Tony the Red" Gruber. Joe had known about Gruber through a counter-terrorist conference he had attended years prior. Barefoot, Leland slips away and manages to remain undetected in the gigantic office complex. Armed with only his Browning Pistol and in communication with Los Angeles Police sergeant Al Powell and his belligerent supervisor, Dwayne Robinson. Leland fights off the terrorists one by one in an attempt to save the 74 hostages, his daughter and grandchildren.After executing the CEO of the Klaxon building, Mr. Rivers, Gruber and the terrorists proceed to steal documents that will publicly expose the Klaxon corporation's dealings with Chile's junta. They also intend to deprive Klaxon of the proceeds of the corrupt deal of $6,000,000 in cash by attempting to access a safe. Leland interferes with this plan by stealing explosives and progressively killing terrorists and receiving multiple injuries in the process.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killobyte"title="Killobyte">
The novel cuts between Walter Toland, a former police officer, and Baal Curran, an angst-ridden teenage girl. Both are playing Killobyte from their own home, hooked to the network through a telephone modem. Walter notices Baal's name on a list and initially assumes she is a man. Indeed, each of them first poses as the other sex.Walter is learning the game as he goes, having neglected to read the instruction manual. He narrowly survives attacks by gunslingers, snakes, and runaway vehicles. Each time he destroys an enemy, he receives a point, and a door to a new setting appears. Eventually he must solve a more complicated problem when he finds himself in a women's prison, evading execution and a possible mole.In the meantime, Baal enters a fantasy setting in which a knight must rescue a princess from an evil sorcerer in a castle guarded by a dragon. She first goes through the adventure as the knight and fails. When she tries again, this time in the role of the princess, Walter has entered the setting as the sorcerer. He captures Baal under the ruse that he is the hero, but when she makes sexual advances at him, he tells her the truth, too honourable to take advantage of her even if it is only within a game.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aunts_Aren't_Gentlemen"title="Aunts Aren't Gentlemen">
Concerned by pink spots on his chest, Bertie goes to see E. Jimpson Murgatroyd, the Harley Street doctor recommended by his friend Tipton Plimsoll (who himself saw Murgatroyd for spots in "Full Moon)". On the way, Bertie sees Vanessa Cook, a headstrong girl he once proposed to but no longer wants to marry, leading a protest march. She is with her fiancé Orlo J. Porter, an acquaintance of Bertie's. Orlo and Vanessa are unable to marry since Vanessa's father, the trustee of Orlo's inheritance, refuses to give Orlo his inheritance because Orlo is a communist.Bertie finds Major Plank (who was told that Bertie is a thief called Alpine Joe in "Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves") in the doctor's waiting room, though Plank does not recognize Bertie. Murgatroyd tells Bertie that the spots will go away, but recommends that Bertie get fresh air and exercise in the country. Bertie's Aunt Dahlia is going to Eggesford Hall, the home of her friend Colonel James Briscoe in the town of Maiden Eggesford in Somerset, near the seaside resort of Bridmouth-on-Sea, and gets a cottage called Wee Nooke for Bertie there. Jeeves is disappointed that they must cancel their upcoming trip to New York, but has the consolation that he will see his aunt in Maiden Eggesford.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_(novel)"title="Mike (novel)">
The first half of the story, found in "Mike at Wrykyn", introduces Michael "Mike" Jackson. Mike is the youngest son of a renowned cricketing family. Mike's eldest brother Joe is a successful first-class player, while another brother, Bob, is on the verge of his school team. When Mike arrives at Wrykyn himself, his cricketing talent and love of adventure bring him success and trouble in equal measure.The second part, also known as "Enter Psmith" or "Mike and Psmith", takes place two years later. Mike, due to poor academic reports, is withdrawn from Wrykyn by his father and sent to a smaller school called Sedleigh. On arrival at Sedleigh, he meets the eccentric Rupert Psmith, another new arrival who has arrived from Eton. The two become friends and decide not to play cricket, instead participating in other school activities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psmith_in_the_City"title="Psmith in the City">
Mike Jackson, cricketer and scion of a cricketing clan, finds his dreams of studying and playing at Cambridge upset by news of his father's financial troubles, and must instead take a job with the "New Asiatic Bank". On arrival there, Mike finds his friend Psmith is also a new employee, and together they strive to make the best of their position, and perhaps squeeze in a little cricket from time to time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psmith,_Journalist"title="Psmith, Journalist">
The story begins with Psmith accompanying his fellow Cambridge student Mike to New York on a cricketing tour. Through high spirits and force of personality, Psmith takes charge of a minor periodical, and becomes embroiled in a scandal involving slum landlords, boxing and gangsters – the story displays a strong social conscience, rare in Wodehouse's generally light-hearted works.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reverberator"title="The Reverberator">
George Flack is the Paris correspondent for an American scandal sheet called "The Reverberator". Francie Dosson, a pretty but not always tactful American girl, confides to Flack some gossip about the Proberts, the Frenchified (but originally American) family of her fiancé, Gaston Probert.Predictably, to everybody except Francie, the nasty gossip winds up in "The Reverberator", much to the horror of the stuffy Proberts. Francie makes no attempt to hide her role in giving Flack the juicy details. Gaston is initially dismayed by his fiancée's indiscretions. But with the somewhat surprising support of his sister Suzanne, he decides to accept Francie, who never tries to shift the blame to Flack. Gaston stands up to the outraged members of his family and marries his fiancée.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_House"title="The Other House">
Julia Bream dies after giving birth to her only child, a daughter named Effie. Julia had a horrible stepmother, so she extracts a promise from her husband Tony never to marry again as long as Effie is alive. Several years pass. Julia's childhood friend Rose Armiger is in love with Tony though she is ostensibly engaged to Dennis Vidal. Tony has grown close to Effie's nanny, Jean Martle, who is herself pursued by Tony's neighbor, Paul Beever. After Jean rejects Paul's marriage proposal, Rose takes Effie on a walk. She returns without Effie, claiming to have left her with Jean. Later Effie's body is found, having drowned in a stream near the home.Eventually, Rose confesses to drowning the child but everyone decides to conceal the crime. Family physician Dr. Ramage convinces the authorities that Effie died of natural causes and Rose is sent off with Dennis Vidal, all becoming, legally, accessories after the fact to murder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_Dance_Dance_(novel)"title="Dance Dance Dance (novel)">
It is four years passed when the narrator hunted after the elusive sheep and his friend, The Rat. The Dolphin Hotel and missing girlfriend with perfect ears is still on his mind.The narrator recounts how for six straight months, following "A Wild Sheep Chase", he did no work and had little social contact of any kind; actively avoiding people. The days were a mix of drinking, sleeping, cooking himself meals and only going outside his apartment to stores for the most minimal of goods before returning home again, usually at night. No newspaper or television. The narrator's former business partner was now doing well in his new business venture. And the narrator's ex-wife was now happily remarried. Not to the man she had left the narrator for in "A Wild Sheep Chase", but a new man who wanted a family. The narrator then began working again, getting a strong foothold into copywriting. Gradually growing in demand until he was enjoying a fair amount of economic success. His savings account swell, business demand increases astronomically due to his efficiency, and he buys a new car. The narrator is even able to date again. Finding limited success for a few months with another woman until she abruptly ends the relationship (no reason is stated). 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_(Bukowski_novel)"title="Hollywood (Bukowski novel)">
Adopting the stylized alter-ego, Henry 'Hank' Chinaski, a character used in previous novels, this book relates his experiences of working with a director, finding financial backing, losing financial backing, writing the screenplay and finally completing the film, "Barfly". The seemingly preposterous exchanges and occurrences within these pages leave the reader with the conviction that Hank Chinaski's life was truly stranger than fiction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_Dardentor"title="Clovis Dardentor">
The novel tells the story of two cousins, Jean Taconnat and Marcel Lornans, travelling from Cette, France, to Oran, Algeria, with the purpose of enlisting in the 5th regiment of the "Chasseurs D'Afrique".Sailing to Oran aboard the "Argelès", they meet Clovis Dardentor, a wealthy industrialist. Jean and Marcel, whose desire to travel to Africa arises from their pursuit of financial independence, find out that Clovis —an unmarried man, with no family— has left no heirs to his fortune.Yet Marcel, well-versed in the Law, knows that any person who were to save Clovis' life either from a fight, from drowning, or from a fire, would have to be adopted by Clovis. The cousins come to a plan: They will find a way to save Clovis' life, so that he will indeed be legally required to adopt them.Clovis saves the cousins' lives: Marcel is saved from a fire, and Jean is saved from drowning.Eventually, while Jean continues to look for the opportunity to save Clovis' life, Marcel falls in love with Louise Elissane, the prospective daughter-in-law of one of Clovis' acquaintances, the unpleasant Desirandelle family. Louise becomes a key character in the novel, for it is she who saves Clovis Dardentor's life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-Kzin_Wars"title="Man-Kzin Wars">
There are a total of four Man-Kzin Wars, as well as major and minor "Kzinti incidents". The First War began circa 2367. By this time, Human space was in the middle of the "Long Peace". ARM, the United Nations security forces, has completely suppressed all "dangerous" technologies, histories, mental illnesses, and media, leading to not only an end of the war and almost all violent crimes, but a change in society so vast that most people have a difficulty even conceptualizing such things.The U.N.'s reach was limited to Earth, however. There were a number of other colonies in space, the most important being the Asteroid Belt, Wunderland, We Made It, Jinx, and Plateau.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Head_of_Kay's"title="The Head of Kay's">
Fenn is the head of Kay's, the most unruly house in Eckleton. He tries to keep order, but is hindered by Mr Kay, who is demanding and critical of Fenn. Fenn is a skilled cricketer and admired by the members of his house for almost single-handedly getting his house's cricket team into the finals of the inter-house cricket cup. Mr Kay is uninterested in the cup and keeps Fenn from playing for part of the final match after Fenn argued with him. This results in a loss for Kay's, which upsets the members of the house. Mr Kay oversees a school concert at the end of the term, and Fenn is one of the performers. He plays a lively song which causes the students, especially the members of Kay's, to loudly stamp their feet, angering Mr Kay. He tries to restore order, but the students continue stamping and abruptly start leaving after Fenn has finished playing. The concert is prematurely brought to an end. The incident increases Mr Kay's disapproval of Fenn. Fenn expects there will be more trouble between him and Mr Kay next term.During the summer holidays, Fenn plays cricket while his friends Kennedy and Jimmy Silver, who are both members of Blackburn's House, go to an army-style camp. An unpleasant member of Kay's named Walton makes trouble at the camp. They all return to school when the next term starts. Kennedy enjoys being a prefect in Blackburn's House, which is much more unified than Kay's. He is dismayed to learn he has been appointed the head of Kay's in place of Fenn, due to Mr Kay's disapproval of Fenn. The members of Kay's, already disorderly, resent Kennedy taking Fenn's place, and make Kennedy's task of keeping order even harder. Fenn and Kennedy are both irritated by the situation, and they have a falling-out. Walton is the leading troublemaker in Kay's, and Kennedy decides the only way to stop him is by winning a fight against him. They follow the rules of boxing and Jimmy acts as timekeeper, but Walton cheats by injuring Kennedy with an illegal hit. Jimmy tries to stop the fight, but Kennedy perseveres, and defeats Walton. His victory makes Kay's less rebellious, though the house is still as unruly as when Fenn was the head of the house.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Among_the_Chickens"title="Love Among the Chickens">
The novel is narrated by Jeremy Garnet, an author and old friend of Ukridge. Seeing Ukridge for the first time in years, with a new wife in tow, Garnet finds himself dragged along on holiday to Ukridge's new chicken farm in Dorset. The novel intertwines Garnet's difficult wooing of a girl living nearby with the struggles of the farm, which are exacerbated by Ukridge's bizarre business ideas and methods.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince_and_Betty"title="The Prince and Betty">
Young American John Maude is forced to find employment when he falls in love with Betty Keith, a high society girl. (In the novel, she is called Betty Silver.) Maude accepts an offer to travel to the tiny island country of Mervo, where he is hired by millionaire Benjamin Scobell who is planning to build a casino there that will rival Monte Carlo. Scobell wants Maude to impersonate the missing Prince of Mervo as an attraction for his casino. Scobell also wants John to marry his stepdaughter, who coincidentally turns out to be Betty Keith. When Betty accuses John of being an impostor, John shuts down the casino and tries to stage a revolution that will make Mervo a democratic state. The natives do not go along, but the President of Mervo returns to operate the casino personally, and Betty and John head off to America together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outcry"title="The Outcry">
To cover the gambling debts of his daughter Kitty Imber, the widowed Lord Theign is planning to sell his beautiful painting "Duchess of Waterbridge" by Sir Joshua Reynolds to American billionaire Breckenridge Bender. Hugh Crimble, a young art critic, argues against the sale, saying that Britain's art treasures should stay in the country. He is supported by Theign's perceptive daughter, Lady Grace. When the newspapers get wind of the potential sale of the Reynolds, they raise a patriotic outcry, which delights Bender.Meanwhile, Crimble has found another painting in Theign's collection that he suspects is a rarity by Mantovano. (James thought this artist was a fiction, but it later turned out that there really was an obscure painter of that name.) Eventually, Crimble's hunch about the Mantovano turns out to be correct. Theign decides to donate the Mantovano to the National Gallery and not to sell the Reynolds to Bender. His friend Lady Sandgate also donates her family's Sir Thomas Lawrence painting to the Gallery, which unites her and Theign.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teacher_Man"title="Teacher Man">
The memoir describes Frank McCourt's pedagogy, which involves the students taking responsibility for their own learning, especially in his first school, McKee Vocational and Technical High School, on Staten Island in New York City. On the first day he nearly gets fired for eating a sandwich, which a boy had thrown in front of his desk, and the second day he nearly gets fired for joking that in Ireland, people go out with sheep after a student asks them if Irish people date. Much of his early teaching involves telling anecdotes about his childhood in Ireland in response to questions from his students, which incidents were mainly covered in his earlier books "Angela's Ashes" and "'Tis". He explains the continuing effort of adolescents to divert him from the lessons he wants to teach; he slowly realizes the stories can be part of teaching English, as the stories have structure just like the novels the students are reading, and he uses the stories to segue into the course material. It benefits him to verbalize his upbringing and hear the reactions of the students, a topic he expected to leave behind him when he sailed to America.McCourt then teaches English as a Second Language, and also a class of predominantly African-American female students, whom he took to a production of "Hamlet". He writes about his teacher certification test when he was asked about George Santayana, of whom he was ignorant, but later gives an excellent lesson to a class on the war poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, whose poems he knew well. Other highlights include his connection between how a pen works and how a sentence works; he did not feel strong in the topic of diagramming sentences, but did want to get across the basics. The school administration was impressed with this idea and some of the students grasped the point. His use of realia such as using students' forged excuse notes as a segue to writing with scenarios is another highlight of his teaching style, keeping the students involved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riceyman_Steps"title="Riceyman Steps">
The story takes place in 1919–1920, just after the First World War, and is divided into five parts. It deals with the final year in the life of its main character, Henry Earlforward, a miser with a slight limp, who keeps a second-hand bookshop in the Clerkenwell area of London, at Riceyman Steps. Henry harbours a secret passion for Violet Arb, a widow who inherits a neighbouring confectionery shop. When Henry tries to woo Violet, the widow realizes that they share the same charwoman and maid servant in the simple, loyal Elsie Sprickett.When Elsie’s boyfriend, the shell-shocked war veteran Joe, loses self-control and runs after Violet with a carving-knife at her shop, Henry gallantly intervenes after Violet approaches Henry for help. Violet, who sees in Henry a financially secure future, finally decides to marry him after a short courtship. Joe, meanwhile, disappears after writing a letter to Elsie that he will come for her when he has recovered from his traumatic disorder.Henry's parsimony drives the married couple into an increasingly wretched existence. He is aghast, for example, when Violet spends fourteen pounds vacuuming his dusty shop as a wedding present. He begins eating less and less, even forgoing meat for cheese, and refuses to go to the hospital to treat his undernourishment when the doctor and his wife insist that he does. All the while Elsie stands devoted to the couple, despite having problems of her own—she pines secretly for Joe, and pilfers food to binge eat at night.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ivory_Tower"title="The Ivory Tower">
Graham ("Gray") Fielder returns from Europe to the wealthy resort of Newport, Rhode Island, to see his dying uncle Frank Betterman. Rosanna Gaw, the daughter of Betterman's embittered ex-partner Abel Gaw, is also at Newport. She has succeeded in bringing about a partial reconciliation between the two elderly men.Gaw and Betterman both die, and Fielder receives a large inheritance from his uncle. Gray is inexperienced at business, so he entrusts the management of the fortune to the unscrupulous Horton Vint. At this point the novel breaks off. From his extensive notes it appears that James intended Vint to betray Fielder's trust much as Kate Croy did with Milly Theale in "The Wings of the Dove". Fielder would then magnanimously forgive Vint, but it is not certain if he would marry Rosanna, who may be in love with Gray.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sense_of_the_Past"title="The Sense of the Past">
Young Ralph Pendrel of New York City has written a fine essay on the reading of history. The essay so impresses a distant English relative that he bequeaths an 18th-century London house to Ralph. Pendrel goes to London and explores the house thoroughly. He feels himself going back in time as soon as he crosses the threshold. He finds a portrait of a remote ancestor, also named Ralph Pendrel. The portrait comes alive and the two men meet.Later, the modern-day Pendrel goes to the U.S. ambassador in London and tries to tell him of these strange occurrences. He then returns to the mysterious house, steps across the threshold, and finds himself in the early 19th century. At this dramatic juncture, the part of the novel that James wrote in 1900 breaks off. James resumed the novel in 1914 with scenes of Ralph meeting his ancestor's relatives, as he has taken the other's place. He finds that he is engaged to one of those relatives, Molly Midmore, but realizes that he is attracted to her sister Nan. He also meets Molly's mother and unpleasant brother, and Nan's suitor, Sir Cantopher Bland.The novel breaks off completely here. James left extensive notes on how the novel would continue: Nan would eventually realize that Ralph is actually a time-traveller from the future; she would sacrifice her own happiness to help him return to his own time and to Aurora Coyne, a woman who had previously rejected Ralph but would now accept him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Fools_(Russo_novel)"title="Ship of Fools (Russo novel)">
The story is told by the reserved Bartolomeo Aguilera whose cunning and bravery contribute to the outcome of the novel. Born with physical defects, he has integrated prosthetic material into his body as compensation. Bartolomeo is a close friend and advisor of the Argonos' captain, Nikos.Within the first few chapters it is clear that Nikos is in an increasingly dangerous situation and that tensions on the ship are beginning to rise. Niko's credibility as captain is declining and many are ready for a new leader. Nikos informs Bartolomeo of news which may help to improve or reduce Nikos' position. While the Bishop's previous failed landing helped to place Nikos in good light, there seems little to improve Nikos' ordeal. A planet suitable for human life has been discovered. It is a short distance away and therefore a landing can be attempted, but more importantly, a signal has been sent from the planet. It is a basic signal offering no information as to who sent it or why. Nikos asks Bartolomeo to join the team which is to land on the planet, which the Bishop names Antioch.The team consists of representatives of the Executive Council, Bartolomeo included, and of the different classes on the ship. The crew, along with harvesters which are to collect and process materials for the Argonos, descend on the planet. They soon discover that Antioch appears to have been settled by humans at one time, but it has been deserted for a long time—decades, if not centuries. Although the team visits only a handful of the city-complexes, there are presumably numerous cities around the planet. All of them contain enigmatic and crumbling structures.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swoop!"title="The Swoop!">
"The Swoop!" tells of the simultaneous invasion of England by several armies — "England was not merely beneath the heel of the invader. It was beneath the heels of nine invaders. There was barely standing-room." — and features references to many well-known figures of the day, among them the politician Herbert Gladstone, novelist Edgar Wallace, actor-managers Seymour Hicks and George Edwardes, and boxer Bob Fitzsimmons.The invaders are the Russians under Grand Duke Vodkakoff, the Germans under Prince Otto of Saxe-Pfennig – the reigning British monarch of the day was Edward VII of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha — the Swiss Navy, the Monegasques, a band of Moroccan brigands under Raisuli, the Young Turks, the Mad Mullah from Somaliland, the Chinese under Prince Ping Pong Pang, and the Bollygollans in war canoes.The initial reaction to the invasion is muted. "It was inevitable, in the height of the Silly Season, that such a topic as the simultaneous invasion of Great Britain by nine foreign powers should be seized upon by the press", but the English are far more interested in cricket and one newspaper placard announces "Surrey Doing Badly" (at cricket), ahead of "German Army Lands in England". And when the Germans begin shelling London — "Fortunately it was August, and there was nobody in town." — the destruction of nearly all the capital's statues, the reduction of the Albert Hall to a heap of picturesque ruins, and the burning of the Royal Academy, earn Prince Otto a hearty vote of thanks from the grateful populace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gentleman_of_Leisure"title="A Gentleman of Leisure">
The action begins with bachelor Jimmy Pitt in New York; having fallen in love on a transatlantic liner, he befriends a small-time burglar and breaks into a police captain's house as a result of a bet. The cast of characters head to England, and from there on it is a typically Wodehousean romantic story, set at the stately Dreever Castle, overflowing with imposters, detectives, crooks, scheming lovers and conniving aunts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Dimension_(book)"title="The Fourth Dimension (book)">
"The Fourth Dimension" teaches readers about the concept of a fourth spatial dimension. Several analogies are made to "Flatland"; in particular, Rucker compares how a square in Flatland would react to a cube in Spaceland to how a cube in Spaceland would react to a hypercube from the fourth dimension.The book also includes multiple puzzles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violin_(novel)"title="Violin (novel)">
The book is set in numerous places, including Vienna, New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro. The novel tells the story of three people: a middle-aged woman yearning to become a musician, a ghostly violinist, and the ghost of Beethoven.The story begins with Triana, who apparently becomes insane due to the death of her second husband, Karl, who had AIDS. Her first husband was Lev, with whom Triana had a daughter. Stefan, the ghost, appears the day Karl dies and plays his Stradivarius (s long Strad) (apparently also a ghost). Triana secludes herself in her house for several days without informing anyone of Karl's death.The book tells the story of both Triana and Stefan. Stefan takes Triana in a travel through time, visiting scenes from his life and his afterlife in an attempt to reclaim his violin, which had been taken by Triana. Stefan had many mentors including Beethoven and Paganini, but it is Beethoven whom Stefan cherished the most. After Stefan's story is "told" Triana returns to her rightful time but not to New Orleans where the story began but to Vienna, and now seemingly possessing a talent to improvise in the violin.The ghost of this great musician is shown about two times in the novel, the first one in a scene where Stefan's house in Vienna is burning, and the second one almost at the end where Beethoven appears in modern Vienna in the hotel room where Triana was staying.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Kimble"title="Mrs. Kimble">
Born in 1929, Ken Kimble is raised the son of a pastor in Missouri and becomes a minister like his father. While working as a chaplain in a Bible college in Richmond, Virginia he feels attracted to Birdie Bell, one of his female students. Ken, who is 32, marries the 19-year-old Birdie on the spot. The Kimbles have two children, Charlie and Jody. Soon after he is forced to resign over an alleged affair, Ken disappears with Moira Snell, one of his students.It takes Birdie many years to get over her husband's desertion. Only at the end of the novel, when she is 51, does Birdie find some solace with Curtis Mabry, her teenage sweetheart.In 1969, at the age of 40, Ken moves to Florida with Moira, where he finds work as a gardener. When he and Moira break up after a few months, he takes a room with Joan Cohen, a rich professional woman of Jewish descent about his own age. They soon become lovers and Joan sees Ken as her last chance at happiness, especially now that one of her breasts has been removed due to breast cancer. Ken pretends to have a Jewish background and, after getting married under Jewish law, starts working as a real estate broker.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crippled"title="Crippled">
In 2010, the UK Cameron–Clegg coalition government began an austerity programme that reduced public spending. In the introduction, Ryan comments on its disproportionate effect on disabled people, and the tabloid media's focus on "benefits scroungers" that demonised them. Though Theresa May claimed in 2018 that "austerity is over", her government continued implementing cuts. Ryan gives an example of Jimbob, who is confined to his bedroom for almost all of the day as he can only afford to heat one room of his house.The first chapter—"Poverty"—describes Susan's life in austerity. By 2013, new bedroom tax, council tax and social care bills saw her enter debt for energy bills, so she stopped using heating or her oven. By 2017, she could not afford to leave the house or buy the puréed specialist meals she required with her digestive condition. She was continuing to pay back a payday loan to replace a freezer for medication. In 2018, 4million adults in the UK lived in poverty and in 2017, a fifth of disabled adults regularly skipped meals or limited their diet—these figures increased in the 2010s. While money from disability benefits was reduced, Bessie had her benefits removed through means testing, despite being unable to work due to agoraphobia. Around half of disabled people subject to means testing had benefits stopped or removed. A combination of welfare cuts by 2018 saw disabled people losing an average of £4,400 per year, with 200,000 people losing at least £15,000 per year. However, the welfare state has not always been in decline since its inception from the 1940s to the 1960s: for instance, disabled activists secured the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 and the establishment of the Disability Living Allowance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lorax"title="The Lorax">
A boy living in a polluted area wanders down the Street of the Lifted Lorax and visits a strange, reclusive man known as the Once-ler. The boy pays the Once-ler fifteen cents, a nail, and the shell of a great-great-great-grandfather snail to hear the story of how the Lorax was lifted away. The Once-ler tells the boy that many years ago, he arrived in a beautiful valley containing a forest of Truffula Trees and a range of animals. Having long searched for such a tree as the Truffula, he cut one down and used its foliage to knit an incredibly versatile garment known as the Thneed. A strange creature known as the Lorax emerged from the tree's stump and voiced his disapproval of both the tree's sacrifice and the Thneed itself. After a man bought the Thneed for $3.98, the Once-ler, ignoring the Lorax's protests, called his relatives and asked them to come and help him with his new business. The Once-ler's small shop soon grew into a large factory, and new vehicles were built to log the Truffula forest and ship out Thneeds. As time passed, the area became choked with pollution, and the Lorax was forced to send the animals away to find more hospitable habitats. The Once-ler was unrepentant and told the Lorax that he would continue "biggering" his operations, but at that moment, one of his machines felled the last Truffula Tree. Without raw materials, the factory closed down and the Once-ler's relatives left him. The Lorax sadly lifted himself into the air and disappeared through a hole in the smog, leaving behind a stone platform engraved with the word "UNLESS." The distraught Once-ler punished himself with years of self-imposed exile, pondering the Lorax's message. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meyebela,_My_Bengali_Girlhood"title="Meyebela, My Bengali Girlhood">
This autobiographical book tells Nasrin's story from birth to adolescence. The Bengali term "Meyebela" means "girlhood". The book has been banned in Bangladesh because "its contents might hurt the existing social system and religious sentiments of the people."The book is very frank about her father and mother. Her father is described by Nasrin as rude and tyrannical. Nasrin was also sexually exploited by two of her family elders (uncles). She also said: "When I was at the hospital (in Dhaka), I treated so many seven- or eight-year-old girls who were raped by their male relatives, some 50 or 60 years old. I treated them, and I remembered when I was raped."Nasrin has in this and in her other books written about women rights in Bangladesh: "Girls suffer, especially in Muslim countries," she said. "I could not go out and run in the fields. I was supposed to stay home to learn how to cook, to clean. Women are not treated as human beings. They are taught for centuries that they are slaves of men." 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan!"title="Vulcan!">
Ion storms have caused the boundaries of the Neutral Zone between the Federation and Romulans to shift. The planet Arachne IV, inhabited by a strange ant-like race, could be lost to the Federation due to the changes in space. However, Mr. Spock goes on a death-defying assignment into a war of ant-like creatures along with a scientist who dislikes Vulcans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Outrun_Doomsday"title="To Outrun Doomsday">
The novel concerns "Lucky" Jack Waley, a computer salesman and conman unfortunate enough to be aboard the starship "Bucentaure" when the engine blows. He crashlands on the planet Kerim, a planet where anything you ask for from the mysterious Pe'Ichen is instantly manufactured before your eyes. Anything trivial. No food, no houses. And for the current generation, no children.Jack connects up with a variety of rogues to try to save the day, only to discover that Pe'Ichen is an ancient computer with miraculous powers, designed to keep order in the lives of the Kerimites, providing them with their every need. Pe'Ichen, however, has determined that a) the sun will explode in 56 years, and b) that there is no such thing as life on other planets.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strega_Nona"title="Strega Nona">
Set in Calabria, in southern Italy, the book focuses on the exploits of Strega Nona. She is a sort of wise Woman and witch doctor noted throughout her home village for her numerous successful remedies. She helps her fellow villagers with their troubles, most notably by curing headaches, helping single women find husbands, and ridding people of warts.Because she is getting old, Strega Nona employs the assistance of a young man named Big Anthony to do the household chores. Knowing that he pays little attention, Strega Nona informs Big Anthony of his duties carefully and clearly, adding only one restriction - never to touch her magic pasta pot. Big Anthony complies, but one night he secretly observes Strega Nona singing a spell to the magic pasta pot to produce large amounts of cooked spaghetti noodles; the man is impressed, but unfortunately, he fails to notice that she blows kisses to the pot three times to stop the pasta production.Big Anthony tries to share his discovery with the townsfolk the next day, but he is laughed at and disbelieved. He vows to one day impress them by making the pasta pot cook by himself. He gets his chance two days later when Strega Nona leaves to visit her friend Strega Amelia and leaves the house in his care. The moment she is gone, Big Anthony gets out the pasta pot and successfully conjures up large amounts of pasta, which he then serves to the townsfolk. However, since Big Anthony cannot stop the pot from cooking, the spaghetti gradually cover Strega Nona's house and nearly floods the entire town. Disaster is averted when Strega Nona returns and immediately blows the three kisses to stop the pot's cooking.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hound_of_Death"title="The Hound of Death">
## The Hound of Death.William P. Ryan, an American journalist, is having lunch with a friend called Anstruther when he hears that the latter is about to visit his sister in Folbridge, Cornwall, at her house called "Treane". Ryan has heard of the place, and tells a story from the recent First World War when he heard of a German attempt to take over a convent during the Rape of Belgium. As soon as the soldiers entered the building it blew up, killing them all. It was proven that the soldiers had no high explosives on them, and speaking with the locals afterwards Ryan was told of one of the nuns having miraculous powers: she brought down a lightning bolt from heaven that destroyed the convent and killed the Germans. All that was left of the building were two walls, one of which had a powder mark in the shape of a giant hound. This scared the local peasants who avoided the area after dark. The nun in question survived and went with other refugees to "Treane" in Cornwall, and Anstruther confirms that his sister did take in some Belgians at the time. In Cornwall, Anstruther finds out from his sister that the nun, Marie Angelique, is still in the area. She has constant hallucinations and is being studied by a local, new, young doctor by the name of Rose, who intends to write a monograph on her condition. Anstruther meets Rose and persuades him to let him meet the young nun.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Bounce_(novel)"title="The Big Bounce (novel)">
Jack Ryan, a drifter and small-time delinquent, arrives at the Thumb area of Michigan as a seasonal farm laborer, picking pickles for food tycoon Ray Ritchie. He soon gets involved with Nancy, a young seductress, currently Ray Ritchie's girlfriend, though she is also cheating on him with another man, Bob Jr. For a while, Ryan and Nancy get their thrills smashing windows and breaking and entering, but Ryan soon gets a shot at settling down with the help of justice of the peace Mr. Majestyk, who hires Jack as a handyman at his beach resort. When Nancy grows bored with housebreaking and burglary and conceives a plan to steal the laborers' payroll, Ryan must choose between following her in her chase for "the big bounce" or the stability of an honest life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strode_Venturer"title="The Strode Venturer">
Geoffrey Bailey returns to London, leaving behind a career in the Royal Navy and a ruined marriage in Singapore. He becomes involved in the affairs of the Strode Shipping Company, the company which ruined his father's shipping firm, with a job offer to locate the black sheep of the Strode clan, Peter Strode, who was last seen in Aden. Bailey eventually locates Peter Strode in Addu, in the southern Maldive Islands, where he is obsessed with helping the nascent Addu People's Republic against the Maldive government, and with relocating an uninhabited island in the southern Indian Ocean which is rich in manganese deposits which can both help the Adduan people and the financially failing Strode Shipping Company. However, the ruling Strode brothers have other plans, which do not necessarily include the return of either Peter Strode or Bailey to London. In addition to the dangers of volcanic islands and the unexplored ocean, Bailey must also face the dangers of boardroom politics and financial warfare in civilised London."The Strode Venturer" is notable for strong characterization and the exploration of such themes as family honour, the bounds of loyalty and man's relationship to nature, themes which would continue in Innes' later works.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_to_Scorpio"title="Transit to Scorpio">
The novel features the story of Dray Prescot, an English sailor of Lord Nelson's navy, and his miraculous teleportation to the planet Kregen. There he is trained as an agent for the mysterious Savanti, an apparently benevolent secret society devoted to improving the lot of humanity among the many intelligent species of Kregen. Among the benefits conferred on him is immersion in an apparently miraculous pool, Kregen's equivalent of the Fountain of Youth, which heals all wounds and confers a greatly extended lifespan on the bather. During Prescot's sojourn among the Savanti an offhand reference is made to the continent of Gah in Kregen's opposite hemisphere, whose distasteful customs are an obvious dig at another sword and planet series, the Gor series of John Norman.Prescot falls from grace among his hosts for supplying forbidden aid to Delia, princess of the island empire of Vallia, who has been brought to the Savanti as an injured supplicant. Defying their decision not to help her, he takes her to the healing pool and cures her. In consequence, he is banished back to Earth. While Prescott spends five years on Earth only a day has passed for Delia, as he later learns.Later, he is returned to Kregen through the agency of the Star Lords, an even more mysterious group of apparently god-like beings, whose motivations are unknown, but apparently in opposition to the human Savanti. Prescot becomes a pawn in the Star Lords' schemes, sent willy-nilly to various locations on the planet to serve their ends and capriciously returned to Earth when his task is done or he manages to offend them. Despite this handicap he usually rises to a position of power in whatever society he is thrust into. Thrown back into contact with Delia, he is even able to renew and further his relationship with her. He eventually becomes the leader of the clansmen of Felschraung and Lord of Strombor in the city of Zenicce and learns that Delia of Delphond is in reality the daughter of the Emperor of Vallia, a powerful island nation. At the moment of triumph however he is returned to Lisbon on Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balthasar's_Odyssey"title="Balthasar's Odyssey">
Before the dawn of the apocalyptic 'Year of the Beast' in 1666, Balthasar Embriaco, a Levantine merchant, sets out on an adventure that will take him across the breadth of the civilised world from Constantinople, through the Mediterranean, to London, shortly before the Great Fire.Balthazar's urgent quest is to track down a copy of one of the rarest and most coveted books ever printed, a volume called "The Hundredth Name"; its contents are thought to be of vital importance to the future of the world. There are ninety-nine names for God in the Koran, and merely to know this most secret hundredth name will, Balthasar believes, ensure his salvation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PopCo"title="PopCo">
It tells a story of twenty-nine-year-old Alice Butler, a quirky, fiercely intelligent loner with an affinity for secret codes and mathematics. She works for the huge toy company named PopCo, where she creates snooping kids' kits - KidSpy, KidTec and KidCracker. At the company conference Alice and her colleagues are brought into developing the ultimate product for the teenage girls.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Honest_Thief"title="An Honest Thief">
The story opens with the narrator taking in a lodger, an old soldier named Astafy Ivanovich, at his apartment. One day, a thief steals the narrator's coat, and Astafy pursues him unsuccessfully. Astafy is dismayed by the theft and goes over and over the scenario. The narrator and Astafy share a distinct contempt for thieves, and one night Astafy tells the narrator a story of an honest thief that he had once known.One night in a pub, Astafy Ivanovich happened upon Emelyan Ilyitch. The two knew each other previously, but from the look of his tattered coat, Emelyan had fallen on hard times. He was aching for a drink but had no money. Astafy, moved by Emelyan's pathetic position, had bought him a drink. From then on, Emelyan followed Astafy everywhere, eventually even moving into his apartment. Astafy did not have much money himself, but he allowed Emelyan's imposition because he was very aware that his drinking was a terrible problem. Emelyan would not stop his drinking, however, and even though he was quiet and not disruptive when he was drunk, Astafy could see that Emelyan would never be able to support himself with such a habit. Astafy urged him to stop drinking, but to no avail. Eventually, Astafy effectively gave up on him and moved, never expecting to see Emelyan again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daughter_of_Time"title="The Daughter of Time">
Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant (a character who also appears in five other novels by the same author) is feeling bored while confined to bed in hospital with a broken leg. Marta Hallard, an actress friend of his, suggests he should amuse himself by researching a historical mystery. She brings him some pictures of historical characters, aware of Grant's interest in human faces. He becomes intrigued by a portrait of King Richard III. He prides himself on being able to read a person's character from his appearance, and King Richard seems to him a gentle, kind and wise man. Why is everyone so sure that he was a cruel murderer?With the help of other friends and acquaintances, Grant investigates Richard's life and the case of the Princes in the Tower, testing out his theories on the doctors and nurses who attend to him. Grant spends weeks pondering historical information and documents with the help of Brent Carradine, a likable young American researcher working in the British Museum. Using his detective's logic, he comes to the conclusion that the claim of Richard being a murderer is a fabrication of Tudor propaganda, as is the popular image of the King as a monstrous hunchback.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crocodile_on_the_Sandbank"title="Crocodile on the Sandbank">
Amelia Peabody is left a wealthy orphan after the death of her studious father, who has left her everything in his will because she is the only one of his children who shared his interests, namely history and archaeology. The inheritance enables her to travel abroad in order to follow her enthusiasm for antiquities.Amelia, a determined and unorthodox English woman, supports women's suffrage and believes she will never marry. (She's convinced she is unattractive and will neither submit to a man nor rule one.) In Rome she meets the destitute Evelyn Forbes, whose titled family have cast her off after she eloped with, then was abandoned by, an Italian art teacher. Amelia takes Evelyn under her wing and employs her as a companion. They travel together to Egypt, where they encounter the Emerson brothers, Radcliffe and Walter, archaeologist and philologist respectively, and where Amelia falls in love with pyramids.Amelia and Evelyn decide to travel up the Nile, stopping at various sites along the way. When they reach Amarna, they discover the Emersons excavating the city which for a while was the capital of Egypt under the mysterious Akhenaten.Amelia and Radcliffe Emerson loathe one another on sight, but after he is taken ill and she helps to keep his excavation going, they grudgingly begin to respect one another. Evelyn is attracted to Walter, but is convinced "she" will never marry because of her soiled reputation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashfire_(novel)"title="Flashfire (novel)">
The Confederation of Human Worlds comprises about two hundred semi-autonomous settled worlds. Some of those worlds are rich and powerful, others are not. A coalition of a dozen lesser worlds, tired of being second class citizens, decides to secede from the Confederation. What they do not know is the threat of an alien species known as the Skinks hangs over the entire confederation. The Skink Threat is top secret, no citizens know of them. Ever since the discovery of these aliens, the Confederation has beefed up its defences on the out lying colonies. On Ravenette, one of the Coalition worlds, protesters gather at the main gate of the Confederation army base. Someone unknown shoots into the crowd, killing a protester and setting off a bloody riot that kills many civilians and soldiers. The Coalition started the riot and provoked the soldiers even though the soldiers did not shoot into the crowd, news networks say otherwise. The Coalition declares war, and brings all its military might against the Confederation forces on Ravenette—banking on the likelihood that they will achieve victory before reinforcements arrive, and that the Confederation will agree to negotiate a peaceable parting. They guessed wrong. An army division and 34th FIST are soon on the scene, holding the line until more reinforcements arrive. But matters get worse when General Jason Billie is given command of the Confederation forces. General Billie not only has no combat command experience, he hates Marines.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangfire"title="Hangfire">
Three Marines of Company L are sent on a secret mission to the mob-controlled resort world of Havanagas. Lance Corporals Claypoole and Dean – under the command of Corporal Pasquin – are to find proof of mob control — proof that Confederation law enforcement agents have not been able to secure — so that the gangsters can be brought to justice.Brigadier Sturgeon, the FIST commander, ostensibly goes on leave. Instead of vacationing he travels to Marine Corps Headquarters on Earth to find out why 34th FIST seems to have been quietly "quarantined," with nobody being rotated out of the unit, even though it is considered a hardship post. This potentially career-endangering "back channel" trip reveals some very scary facts.In the third plotline the Skinks visit a world only partially explored by humans and find a pre-technological sentient race. The Skinks immediately take captives to use as laborers. The planet is apparently a staging base for the Skinks' invasion of Kingdom, a human occupied world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom's_Fury"title="Kingdom's Fury">
34th FIST has been reinforced by the 26th FIST, now that the Confederation is aware that this is a full scale Skink invasion. With the reinforcements, the Marines are now able to go off the defensive and take the battle to the Skinks. The Skinks have been using a devastating weapon never before seen by the Confederation armed forces, but in this book the Navy figures out what the weapon is, a Rail Gun. There doesn't appear to be a true defense, but at least there is now a warning when it is about to be used. The Fist Marines launch a major operation where the Skinks have made a stronghold in the swamps on Kingdom. Meanwhile, Skink Battle Cruisers are on their way to Kingdom. Having been pushed back from their swamp on Kingdom the Skinks launch a diversion cover their retreat to the Skink fleet. Up to this point in the Starfist series there have been no portrayals of space Naval battles, but this omission is now rectified. The Marines and Confederation Navy drive the Skinks off world and push them back to the planet "Quagmire" where they used its natives as slaves and used the planet as a staging area to invade Kingdom. The 26th and 34th Fist Marines then go to Quagmire and Kill most of the Skinks there, with the help of the Natives. Also, Marine General Aguinaldo is promoted to come up with an Anti Skink task force. He has the entire military at his disposal. There is also a subplot involving the government of Kingdom, as one of the more powerful figures among the Kingdomites takes advantage of the distraction caused by the extensive combat to overthrow the theocracy and establish a fascist-style government.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillar_of_Fire_(novel)"title="Pillar of Fire (novel)">
Set in ancient Egypt the narrative is based on the notion that Moses and the Pharaoh Akhenaten were one and the same. Narrated in the third person from the viewpoint of a Hittite slave girl, the novel juxtaposes the Exodus story with the events in the Egyptian court. Sholars generally do not recognize the biblical portrayal of the Exodus as an actual historical event,
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Tent_(Diamant_novel)"title="The Red Tent (Diamant novel)">
Dinah opens the story by recounting for readers the union of her mother Leah and father Jacob, as well as the expansion of the family to include Leah's sister Rachel, and the handmaids Zilpah and Bilhah. Leah is depicted as capable but testy, Rachel as something of a belle, but kind and creative, Zilpah as eccentric and spiritual, and Bilhah as the gentle and quiet one of the quartet.Dinah remembers sitting in the red tent with her mother and aunts, gossiping about local events and taking care of domestic duties between visits to Jacob, the family's patriarch. A number of other characters not seen in the biblical account appear here, including Laban's second wife Ruti and her feckless sons.According to the Bible's account in Genesis 34, Dinah was "defiled" by a prince of Shechem, although he is described as being genuinely in love with Dinah. He also offers a bride price fit for royalty. Displeased at how the prince treated their sister, her brothers Simeon (spelled "Simon" in the book) and Levi treacherously tell the Shechemites that all will be forgiven if the prince and his men undergo the Jewish rite of circumcision ("brit milah") so as to unite the people of Hamor, king of Shechem, with the tribe of Jacob. The Shechemites agree, and shortly after they go under the knife, while incapacitated by pain, they are murdered by Dinah's brothers and their male servants, who then return with Dinah.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Leap"title="The Leap">
Everyone says that Max has drowned, but Charlie thinks differently: she was in the mill-pool with him, and knows exactly what she saw. When she begins to see him in her dreams, her hopes are raised. It seems the reunion she craves is possible. But where exactly is Max leading her? And will she be able to return? 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth_and_Claw_(novel)"title="Tooth and Claw (novel)">
The book's plot is similar to that of a Victorian romance – specifically, Anthony Trollope's novel "Framley Parsonage" – with the obvious difference that the protagonists are not human beings but dragons. The novel begins with the death of the patriarch of a family of dragons and follows the lives of his children, along with other characters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gatekeeper_(novel_series)"title="The Gatekeeper (novel series)">
While Giles is in Manhattan for a librarian's meeting, the Scooby Gang finds that Sunnydale is suddenly overrun by demons. Meanwhile, Giles' hotel room in Manhattan is ransacked and he gets assaulted, which leads to him ending up in the hospital. Michaela Tomasi, a fellow Watcher, tries to warn him of something but disappears. Eventually Giles makes it back to Sunnydale. There they discover that portals from another realm are opening in Sunnydale which caused the drastic increase in the demon population. Giles figures that there must be something wrong at the Gatehouse, a huge mansion that is infested with demons but kept under control by Jean-Marc Regnier, a wizened sorcerer called the Gatekeeper. Giles, Buffy, Xander and Cordelia fly to Boston where the Gatehouse is located, while Willow, Oz and Angel remain in Sunnydale to ward off demons and the Sons of Entropy that seem to be stalking the Slayer. After Angel captures two Sons of Entropy, he learns, by beating them, that their boss, Il Maestro, is planning on opening the gates to other dimensions to let the demons run loose on the earth with the sons of Entropy as their kings and their immediate plan is to take over the Gatehouse in order to do this.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Want_of_a_Nail_(novel)"title="For Want of a Nail (novel)">
"For Want of a Nail" opens in 1763, after the end of the Seven Years' War. Attempts by the British government to impose direct taxation on the American colonies provokes resistance by the colonists, which flares into open rebellion in 1775. After driving British troops from Boston and declaring independence, the American rebels suffer a series of reversals and lose control of New York City, Albany, and Philadelphia by the end of 1777. The point of divergence from actual history occurs in October 1777, when British General John Burgoyne defeats American Generals Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold at the Battle of Saratoga. Conciliationists gain control of the Continental Congress in 1778 and negotiate a truce that re-establishes British control.In 1780, seeking to prevent further rebellion, the British Parliament passes the Britannic Design, a bill that reorganizes the North American colonies into the partially self-governing dominion called the Confederation of North America (CNA). However, many former rebels refuse to submit to British rule, and an exodus of pro-independence colonists to the Texas region of New Spain takes place. The ex-Patriots in Texas organize themselves as the State of Jefferson, after the executed author of the Declaration of Independence. Though the French Revolution is averted, war erupts between Britain and France in 1795, and Spain is drawn into the conflict on the side of the French. Both Jefferson and the CNA use the situation as a pretext to invade Spanish territory, and the CNA absorbs both the Florida and Louisiana territories while the Jeffersonians expand to the northern banks of the Rio Grande. Mexico gains its independence in 1805 and immediately descends into chaos and civil war. The Jeffersonians eventually become involved, and a Jeffersonian army under Andrew Jackson captures Mexico City in 1817. By 1819, Jackson manages to engineer the merger of Jefferson and Mexico as the United States of Mexico (USM), and in 1821, he wins election as the new country's first president.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(novel)"title="Cell (novel)">
Clayton Riddell, a struggling artist from Maine, has just landed a graphic novel deal in Boston when "The Pulse", a signal sent out over the global cell phone network, suddenly turns every cell phone user into mindless zombie-like killers. Clay is standing in Boston Common when the Pulse hits, causing chaos to erupt around him near an ice cream truck. Civilization crumbles as the "phoners" attack each other and anyone in view.Amidst the chaos, Clay is thrown together with middle-aged Thomas McCourt and fifteen-year-old Alice Maxwell; the trio escapes to Tom's suburban home as Boston burns. The next day, they learn the "phoners" have begun foraging for food and banding together. Clay is still determined to return to Maine and reunite with his young son, Johnny. Having no better alternatives, Tom and Alice come with him. They trek north by night across a devastated New England, having fleeting encounters with other survivors and catching disturbing hints about the activities of the phoners, who still attack non-phoners on sight.Crossing into New Hampshire, they arrive at the Gaiten Academy, a prep school with one remaining teacher, Headmaster Charles Ardai, and one surviving pupil, Jordan. The pair show the newcomers where the local phoner flock goes at night: they pack themselves into the Academy's soccer field and "switch off" until morning. It is clear the phoners have become a hive mind and are developing psychic abilities. The five survivors decide they must destroy the flock and, using two propane tankers, they succeed in doing so.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisey's_Story"title="Lisey's Story">
"Lisey's Story" is the story of Lisey Landon, the widow of a famous and wildly successful novelist, Scott Landon. The book tells two stories—Lisey's story in the present, and the story of her dead husband's life, as remembered by Lisey during the course of the novel.It has been two years since the death of famous author Scott Landon, and his widow Lisey (pronounced ) is still in the process of cleaning out her husband's writing area. Over the past two years many academics have come to her hoping to find some piece of writing she might have missed, like an unpublished manuscript. Lisey has sent each away in their turn explaining that she's still working through the clean up, although her lack of progress speaks more to procrastination. Her mentally fragile sister Amanda spends a day with her, searching through stacks of books and magazines to earmark any pictures where Lisey appears or is mentioned. Lisey begins to relive her past, starting with the time she saved Scott from being fatally shot by an insane fan. She often stops herself mid-reminiscence to avoid uncovering terrifying memories.After Amanda discovers that her ex-husband has remarried and is moving back to town she slices open her hands and slips into catatonia. Before admitting Amanda to an institution Lisey hears her sister speaking in Scott's voice, telling her he has created a "bool" hunt with a prize at the end.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No._1_Ladies'_Detective_Agency_(novel)"title="The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (novel)">
Mma Ramotswe sits in her office, the Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency. She has a secretary, and she has clients. She is in Gaborone the capital of Botswana, a place of which she is proud.She is the only child of Obed Ramotswe, a man who worked long years in the mines in South Africa, until one day he witnessed a crime, and knew he had to leave the mines. He had married a year or two earlier, and their daughter was born in Mochudi. He was wise with the money he earned in the mines, using it to buy cattle and slowly grow his herd, watched by a cousin while he was in the mines. Not long after he returned, his wife died. A cousin, left by her husband because she was barren, came to help him raise his daughter Precious. The cousin taught her well, caring for her until a second man asked her to marry him, when Precious is about 10 years old. Precious continues at school until she is 16. Her father wants her to pursue more education, but she wants to stop school and does. She itches to see new places. She lives with her cousin and cousin's husband. He has a business running buses, and is doing well. She takes a job in the firm, and uncovers thievery by another employee, defrauding the company. Each weekend she takes a bus home to Mochudi to see her father. On one bus trip she meets a boy, a musician named Note Mokote. Soon he proposes marriage to her, going to her father for his permission. Precious is already pregnant at the marriage, but Note is not pleased at being a father. He beats his wife as part of his lovemaking, for any reason. Once she must see a doctor for treatment after a beating. On return home, he has left her. Her child lives only for five days. She heads back to Mochudi to be with her father until he dies from the lung disease he got in the mines, just after she is 34. Her father's herd is large, and the price was good. She sells some of the good herd of cattle to set up her office in Gaborone and buy a house there. The house is on Zebra Drive. The office is well-located.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Nine_to_Nine"title="From Nine to Nine">
Stanislaus Demba, an honest, well-intentioned student with little money at his disposal, is desperately in love with Sonja Hartmann, an office girl easily impressed by young men with money—a superficial young woman who, by common consent, is not worthy of his love and adoration. When Demba learns that Sonja is about to go on a holiday with another man, he tries to sell some valuable old library tomes which he has borrowed but never returned to a shady antiques dealer so that he can offer Sonja a more expensive trip. The prospective buyer of the books, however, calls the police, and Demba is arrested. While he is being handcuffed Demba jumps out of an attic window and makes his escape.It is nine o'clock in the morning, and Demba embarks on his odyssey by furtively wandering around the streets of Vienna while hiding his handcuffed hands under his overcoat. His two immediate aims now are (a) to get rid of his handcuffs by some means or other without being caught by the police and (b) to raise the money necessary for a trip to, say, Venice, Italy. People who realize that he is unwilling to show his hands either believe he is some kind of freak with a deformity or a dangerous criminal carrying a pistol. Throughout the first part of the novel, Demba repeatedly refers to "his hands being tied", but everyone—including the majority of readers—assumes that he is speaking metaphorically.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Watch_That_Ends_the_Night"title="The Watch That Ends the Night">
George and Catherine Stewart share not only the burden of Catherine's heart disease, which could cause her death at any time, but the memory of Jerome Martell, her first husband and George's closest friend. Martell, a brilliant doctor passionately concerned with social justice, is presumed to have died in a Nazi prison camp. His sudden return to Montreal precipitates the central crisis of the novel. Hugh MacLennan takes the reader into the lives of his three characters and back into the world of Montreal in the thirties, when politics could send an idealist across the world to Spain, France, Auschwitz, Russia, and China before his return home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Were_the_Mulvaneys"title="We Were the Mulvaneys">
Michael and Corinne Mulvaney are the parents of four children: Michael Jr., Patrick, Marianne, and Judd. Living in a picture perfect farm in upstate New York, the Mulvaneys own a successful roofing company; Michael Mulvaney is considered a serious businessman. Corinne is a bubbly, earthy mother, whose life revolves around the family unit. For nearly twenty years the Mulvaney clan thrives, admired throughout the small town of Mt. Ephraim for being a model family.On St. Valentine's night 1976, after prom, Marianne Mulvaney goes to a party where she becomes intoxicated and is raped by an upperclassman, whose father is a well-respected businessman and friend of Mr. Mulvaney.Marianne's rape is the beginning of a tumultuous fifteen-year period. Her father, lost and angry, does not understand why his daughter will not press charges against her attacker. He can no longer look at his daughter the same way and sends her to live with a distant relative of Corinne's in Salamanca, New York. Marianne, moving haphazardly from place to place, continues to wait for her father to call on her, but he never does.Michael Mulvaney Sr.'s casual drinking turns into full-fledged alcoholism. Gradually, his reputation as a respected businessman disintegrates. The Mulvaneys are forced into bankruptcy and must sell the farm. Eventually, Corinne and Michael split up. For the other family members, things continue to get worse. All three of the Mulvaney boys leave home angrily, never to return. One of them "executes justice" on his sister's rapist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Know_This_Much_Is_True"title="I Know This Much Is True">
The novel takes place in Three Rivers, Connecticut, in the early 1990s. Dominick Birdsey's identical twin, Thomas, suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. With medication, Thomas is able to live his life in relative peace and work at a coffee stand, but occasionally he has severe episodes of his illness. Thinking he is making a sacrificial protest that will stop the Gulf War, Thomas cuts off his own hand while at a public library. Dominick sees him through the ensuing decision not to attempt to reattach the hand, and makes efforts on his behalf to free him from what he knows to be an inadequate and depressing hospital for the dangerously mentally ill.In the process, Dominick contemplates his own difficult life as Thomas's brother, his marriage to his gorgeous ex-wife, which ended after their only child died of SIDS, and his ongoing hostility toward his stepfather. Dominick also displays classic symptoms of PTSD, as a result of stressors in his adult life. First in Thomas's interests, and then for his own sake, he sees a therapist, Dr. Rubina Patel, a psychologist employed by the hospital. She helps Dominick come to understand Thomas's illness better and the family's accommodations or reactions to it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_the_Quake"title="After the Quake">
## "UFO in Kushiro".Komura, an early-thirties salesman living in Tokyo, comes home from work five days after the quake to find that his wife of five years has left him. She leaves a note saying that living with him is like living with a "chunk of air" and that other women would be lucky to be with him down the road. About a week later, he takes a week-long leave of absence. Before he leaves work that day, his friend Sasaki asks him if he would like to take an all-expenses-paid trip to Kushiro to deliver a small package to Sasaki's sister Keiko; he says yes.At the airport, he is greeted by Keiko and her friend Shimao. After a slight confusion regarding Keiko thinking that his wife has died rather than left him, they go to a noodle house for a meal. There, the two women tell him the story of how a woman left her husband after a UFO sighting. Afterwards, the three go to a love hotel; Keiko knows the owner and says he can stay there for the duration of his trip. After taking a bath, he finds that Keiko has left, leaving him and Shimao alone. He asks Shimao about a "bear story" he heard them mention earlier; she tells him the story: when Shimao was in high school, she and her boyfriend had sex in the woods and they perpetually rang a bell during intercourse to keep bears away. After finishing the story, she goes to take a bath.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sati_(novel)"title="Sati (novel)">
Michael is a trucker who picks up a blonde, blue-eyed, young female hitchhiker, Sati, in the Arizona desert. Sati claims that she is God, to Michael's disbelief, and sets out to prove this by spreading this message through organized meetings, and convinces many people of her divinity. She is challenged numerous times, once by a fundamentalist preacher, but emerges unscathed in his claims. Meanwhile, Michael sets out to find out where this "Sati" came from, only to find nothing. The book opens as such:"I once knew this girl who thought she was God. She didn't give sight to the blind or raise the dead. She didn't even teach anything, not really, and she never told me anything I probably didn't already know. On the other hand, she didn't expect to be worshiped, nor did she ask for money. Given her high opinion of herself, some might call that a miracle. I don't know, maybe she was God. Her name was Sati, and she had blonde hair and blue eyes."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Then_Again,_Maybe_I_Won't"title="Then Again, Maybe I Won't">
Eleven-year-old Tony Miglione lives with his hardworking extended family in a working-class neighborhood in Jersey City. After Tony's family experiences a major increase in wealth due to his father's successful sale of his electronics invention, the family relocates to the fictional upper-class community of Rosemont, New York. His mother becomes absorbed with climbing the social ladder in her new, wealthier neighborhood, while his maternal grandmother becomes angry and withdrawn when she is no longer allowed to cook for the family as she loves to do. Tony's older brother, Ralph, a new father who was previously a well-respected junior high school teacher, gives up teaching to make more money working for Tony's father, causing Tony to feel that his brother is 'selling out'.Tony meets a neighbor, Joel Hoober, a boy his own age. While Joel's manners impress Mr. and Mrs. Miglione, Tony sees Joel's true colors in private: he secretly engages in misbehaviors such as prank calls, underage drinking, hiding issues of "Playboy" magazine under his bed, and shoplifting, and encourages Tony to participate as well. Joel also has an older sister, Lisa, who is 16 years old and beautiful. Her bedroom window faces Tony's, and Tony soon notices that she does not bother to close her blinds when dressing and undressing; this leads Tony to ask his parents for a pair of binoculars for Christmas – "for birdwatching", he tells them. (Note: publishers seemed to feel this was an important plot point, as a number of variations of the cover art for this novel feature Tony holding a pair of binoculars.)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannery_Row_(novel)"title="Cannery Row (novel)">
"Cannery Row" has a simple premise: Mack and his friends are to do something nice for their friend Doc, who has been good to them without asking for reward. Mack hits on the idea that they should throw a thank-you party, and the entire community quickly becomes involved. Unfortunately, the party rages out of control, and Doc's lab and home are ruined—and so is Doc's mood. In an effort to return to Doc's good graces, Mack and the boys decide to throw another party—but make it work this time. A procession of linked vignettes describes the denizens' lives on Cannery Row. These constitute subplots that unfold concurrently with the main plot.Character include Lee Chong, the operator of the neighborhood grocery store, "Lee Chong's Heavenly Flower Grocery"; Doc, a marine biologist at Western Biological Laboratories, based on Steinbeck's friend Ed Ricketts, to whom Steinbeck dedicated the novel; Dora Flood, the owner and operator of the Bear Flag Restaurant; Mack, leader of a group of men called Mack and the boys; Hazel, a young man livnig with Mack and the boys in the Palace Flophouse; Eddie, a part-time bartender living at the Palace Flophouse, who supplies the boys with "hooch" left in patrons' glasses at Ida's Bar; and an enigmatic figure known as "the Chinaman".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almayer's_Folly"title="Almayer's Folly">
"Almayer's Folly" is about a poor businessman who dreams of finding a hidden gold mine and becoming very wealthy. He is a white European, married to a native Malayan; they have one daughter named Nina. They live in the village of 'Sambir', actually Tanjung Redeb in the Berau Regency of the East Kalimantan province, Indonesia. He fails to find the goldmine, and comes home saddened. Previously, he had heard that the British were planning to conquer the Pantai River (Berau River in reality), and he had built a large, lavish house near where he resided at the time, in order to welcome the British, with whom he hopes he could trade. However, the conquest never took place, and the house remained unfinished. Some passing Dutch seamen had called the house "Almayer's Folly". Now, Almayer continually goes out for long trips, but eventually he stops doing so and stays home with his hopeless daydreams of riches and splendor. His native wife loathes him for this.One day, a Malayan prince from Bali, Dain Maroola, comes to see Almayer about trading, and while there he falls in love with Nina. Mrs. Almayer keeps arranging meetings between Nina and Dain. She wants them to marry so her daughter could stay native, because she is highly distrustful of white men and their ways. Dain leaves but vows to return to help Almayer find the gold mine. When he does return, he goes straight to Lakamba, a Malayan Rajah, and tells him that he found the gold mine and that some Dutchmen had captured his ship. The Rajah tells him to kill Almayer before the Dutch arrive because he is not needed to find the gold now. The following morning, an unidentifiable native corpse is found floating in the river, wearing an ankle bracelet very similar to Dain's. Almayer is distraught because Dain is his only chance to find the mine. The corpse is actually that of his slave, who had died when his canoe overturned. Mrs. Almayer suggests that Dain put his anklet and ring on the body.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seedling_(novel)"title="Seedling (novel)">
A particularly rough MAT-TRANS jump takes Ryan Cawdor and his friends to a clean, almost immaculate arrival chamber. A cautious exploration of the nearby control room shows it to be similarly clean, free of dust or any form of decay. It is only when Doc Tanner discovers a cup of recently brewed, sweetened coffee that the companions realize the room may have been recently used. Instead of the usual blast doors, the room's exit appears to be some form of airlock; nearby readouts indicate the outside air pressure is very low. Ryan cautiously opens the exterior door in the hopes that the equipment is simply malfunctioning, only to pass out from a sudden drop in oxygen levels. J. B. Dix pulls him to safety before he succumbs, and shuts the airlock door. The demonstrated lack of atmosphere, combined with a lifeless desert view through the airlock portal and mention of "NASA-SEC" on warnings above it, lead all the companions to the same unstated conclusion: they are on another world. Seeing something through the portal that alarms him, Ryan orders his friends into the MAT-TRANS chamber to make another jump. When pressed for what prompted the reaction Ryan can only say he saw something gigantic and alive underneath the desert sand.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guard_of_Honor"title="Guard of Honor">
The novel begins with seven characters flying to Ocanara Army Air Base, Florida, after a daylong visit to Sellers Field, Mississippi, aboard an AT-7 navigation trainer. It concerns the activities of a fictional administrative command named Army Air Forces Operations and Requirements Analysis Division, acronymed AFORAD. This organization is a fictional amalgamation of its real-life counterparts, the office of the Assistant Chief of Air Staff for Operations, Commitments, and Requirements (OC&amp;R) and the organizations in Florida that OC&amp;R supervised, the Army Air Forces Tactical Center (AAFTAC), and the Army Air Forces Board.The beginning segment, the shortest of the novel, introduces the major characters and their traits by examining their reactions to a minor subplot of the handling of the querulous base commander at Sellers Field: an old Regular Army colonel who is an alcoholic. Much of the chapter is spent examining Colonel Ross' thoughts while he perfunctorily reviews his seemingly routine daily paperwork, which he has brought with him on the brief visit.Two memoranda foreshadow major incidents in the storyline: the arrival of officers of Project 0-336-3, a group of African-American pilots slated to form a bombardment squadron; and an ever-expanding grandiose plan by another problem colonel (this one General Beal's own Executive Officer) to hold a surprise birthday parade ceremony for General Beal on Saturday using numerous military aircraft and troops in a flyover.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonflame"title="Dragonflame">
Aria joins the sinister Cult of the Last Circle, an underground dragon community led by the evil Scarn. Scarn worships the Flame, which he believes has been sent to replace the charm lost from the world. After rescuing Aria from the Cult, Fortune escapes with his friends across the sea to Ocea. Scarn gives chase using the power of the Flame to travel great distances as if by magic.Meanwhile, Aria's son Wyrm (who has no wings) has set out on a pilgrimage around the world. There is a comet in the sky and Wyrm is obsessed with the Day of Creation. Along the way he encounters a tribe of 'natural faeries' who have lost both their magic and their wings - these are actually cavemen. Later Wyrm uncovers some ancient charm that enables him to grow wings, and he sets out for the Last Circle.Eventually, all the dragons meet in a huge crater in Ocea (the Last Circle) where a great battle ensues between Scarn's dragons (mutated by the evil power of the Flame) and Fortune's new allies, the mirror-dragons. At the climax of the battle, Scarn escapes. The comet drops from the sky and hits the crater. Everyone escapes except Wyrm, who is transformed from a single dragon into millions of birds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonstorm"title="Dragonstorm">
The survivors from Dragoncharm have established a new dragon community on the island chain of Haven. Dragonstorm opens as Brace, Cumber and an ex-charmed dragon called Thaw lead an expedition to rescue the dragons still trapped in the canyon at Aether's Cross. Fortune and Gossamer remain on Haven, with their new daughter Aria. Fortune and his allies battle to prevent the community being split apart by the renegade Hesper.Meanwhile, the basilisk Ocher is seeking out his lost companions. Once gathered, the six basilisks - known as the Deathless - plan one last wielding of charm to bring about their own destruction.Brace and Cumber reach an ancient citadel built by the basilisks and inhabited by a blind ex-charmed dragon called Archan. The citadel's towers are mobile in time, constantly fading in and out of past, present and future. Archan seduces Thaw and imprisons the others. She has learned about the basilisks' plans and is scheming to steal their immortality.The basilisks are gathering what is left of the world's magic. A giant river of charm forms in the sky, flowing to the north pole, which the dragons call the Crest of the World. Hesper taps into this charm and convinces many of the Haven dragons that the magic is back. The community splits apart as the river of charm causes a great storm. The whole world starts changing shape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_and_Sky"title="Stone and Sky">
The book, as well as its sequels, follows the adventures of British historian and naturalist Jonah Lightfoot, who is caught in the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. The blast transports him and American runaway Annie West into a vertical world consisting of a seemingly infinite wall populated by crumbling civilisations, weird creatures, and sentient dragons. No one knows where the wall begins or ends, and no one dares to climb to its top or fall to its base.This world is called Amara, and it is a place deeply entwined with our own world. Throughout the books Jonah and his companions traverse the world and uncover its many mysteries. The true nature of Amara is fully revealed in the second book of the trilogy, Stone and Sea.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_and_Sun"title="Stone and Sun">
In this final tale of Amara, the nineteenth-century historian Jonah meets a man from his own world; one Tom Coyote, who originates from the year 1980. Along with Coyote, the bizarre group of companions (including a wood-spirit inhabiting a flying boat, a once-immortal basilisk, and several others who are mostly human) ascend the world-sized monolith of Amara to find what awaits at the top, and each of them prepare to face their own demons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Alice_(novel)"title="Black Alice (novel)">
During the 1960s, in Virginia, while the blacks fight for their civil rights, a young white girl is kidnapped in Baltimore. Little Alice Raleigh, eleven years and blonde like corn, and heiress of an immense fortune, is held for a ransom of a million dollars. Her kidnappers, trying to make her invisible to the police officers and the federal agents searching for her, manage to brown her skin and her hair. They sequester her under an assumed name in a house held by an old black woman, near Norfolk, which turns out to be a house of prostitution.Slowly, Alice adapts herself to this surprising life amidst the black culture of the time period, completely new for her; at no point in the book is the young Alice made to participate in prostitution, and in fact Alice only has a vague idea of what goes on in behind closed doors in the house.She eventually discovers that her father is the real instigator of her kidnapping, in essence intending to embezzle money from himself that he can then spend without being traced by government offices. In the end, Alice is freed and returns to her former life, after denying knowledge of her father while still disguised as a black child and seeing him punished for his misdeed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Christopher_Chant"title="The Lives of Christopher Chant">
The novel tells the story of Christopher Chant's childhood in a magic filled Victorian style era. Although both of his parents are powerful practitioners of magic, the two are constantly at loggerheads; his father (an enchanter, the strongest type of magic-user) is entirely devoted to his work, to such a degree that the young Christopher is afraid that he would not recognise him should the two meet in public. On the other hand, his mother (a sorceress, the second-strongest type of magic-user) is a social climber, and is apparently only married to his father for his social connections. Christopher finds solace in his uncle Ralph, but due to his travelling job they rarely see eachother. The only escape that Christopher has is through his dreams, in which he is able to escape to other worlds. While he is not the only person with this ability, seemingly no one is able to do it so easily as he. Christopher is able to bring items with him into the real world, and after one of his many nannies discovers his hoard of items and accuses him of stealing, he tells Uncle Ralph of his power. Uncle Ralph is intrigued by this and has Christopher go on a 'test' to see what he can bring back. In the place between worlds, which takes the form of a valley, Christopher meets Tacroy who is supposed to guide him on his uncle's orders, however the two discover that whilst Tacroy is projecting his mind there Christopher is physically going into the other worlds; something which is impossible. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like_Water_for_Chocolate_(novel)"title="Like Water for Chocolate (novel)">
"Like Water for Chocolate" is divided into 12 chapters, one for each month of the year, and each chapter comes with a Mexican recipe that correlates to a specific event in the protagonist's life.Tita de la Garza, the protagonist, is 15 years old at the beginning of the novel. She lives on a ranch near the Mexico-United States border with her domineering mother, Mama Elena, her older sisters Gertrudis and Rosaura; Nacha, the ranch cook; and Chencha, the ranch maid.Pedro Muzquiz is their neighbor, with whom Tita falls in love at first sight at a family Christmas party. The feeling turns out to be mutual, so Pedro asks Mama Elena for Tita’s hand in marriage. Unfortunately, she forbids it, citing the de la Garza family tradition that the youngest daughter (in this case, Tita) must remain single and take care of her mother until she (Mama Elena) dies. She suggests that Pedro marry Tita's eldest sister, Rosaura, instead. In order to stay close to Tita, Pedro decides to follow this advice.Tita has a deep connection with food and cooking thanks to Nacha, who was Tita's primary caretaker growing up. Her love for cooking also comes from the fact that she was born in the kitchen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unseen_(Buffy/Angel_novel)"title="Unseen (Buffy/Angel novel)">
Salma de la Navidad, a friend of Willow's, is having problems: her brother Nicky has disappeared and is believed to be joining a local Sunnydale gang called the Latin Cobras. Salma's also got a black shadowy nothingness that Buffy can sense but can barely fight. Meanwhile, in LA, Angel is tied down by a case where his client is wrongfully accused of murder by crooked cops while Cordelia discovers a pack of pre-teens who revere vampires and have been promised eternal life by a vampire. Buffy's work takes her to LA along with Willow to the de la Navidad household where the same black shadow continues to attack Salma. When Salma suddenly disappears as does Kayley (one of the vampire lovers) everyone knows that something is up. After an explosion of oil fields, caused by Nicky, in Sunnydale, Riley rushes to LA where himself, Buffy and Angel have to work together to solve the disappearances and to calm down the gang warfare going on in LA.In Los Angeles, Angel and Buffy compares notes and realize that both of them are dealing with cases of missing teenagers - most of them are children of the rich and powerful. Coincidence? They don't think so. But when Buffy checks in with Giles, she learns that prime time doomsday has hit Sunnydale, taking precedence over the gang warfare in LA.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Island_(Buffy/Angel_novel)"title="Monster Island (Buffy/Angel novel)">
Doyle's pure-blood Brachen demon father Axtius is the General for the Coalition of Purity which believes that all half-blood demons should be banished, leaving only the pure-bloods on Earth. Both Angel and Buffy are dealing with this threat in their respective cities when Buffy's team learns that General Axtius plans to attack a half-blood demon safe haven island near Los Angeles. Uprooting the Scooby Gang, Buffy and the rest of them travel quickly to Los Angeles to help Angel deal with the increasing problem. Unfortunately, the demons on the island who are in need of saving seem to be skeptical about having vampires as well as the Slayer on their island and they must be convinced that it's for their benefit before General Axtius and his troops launch a full-fledged attack on the island.In their final confrontation on the island, Angel defeats Axtius when unarmed despite Axtius wielding a powerful mystical weapon, taunting the Brachen by saying that he would have been ashamed of Doyle's very human act of sacrifice and redemption. Having been defeated by Angel, Axtius is subsequently incinerated by his former second-in-command for his failure to destroy the island.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_(Buffy/Angel_novel)"title="Heat (Buffy/Angel novel)">
Buffy and Angel both battle the same ancient evil, a Possessor who was once Qin, First Emperor of China. As a Possessor, Qin's body loses its temperature fast and he is forced to jump from body to body through the ages, rendering him immortal. In present-day Sunnydale and Los Angeles, Qin is attempting to usher in the Year of the Hot Devil and drive humans out of his dimension by resurrecting an ancient dragon frozen in ice from centuries before.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Rain"title="Halloween Rain">
Xander and Willow warn Buffy not to go out on Halloween if it's raining. According to the premise of the book, the rain in Sunnydale is magical on Halloween, and if it lands on a scarecrow it will animate and hunt down the Slayer. While at a Halloween party at the Bronze, Buffy is forced to go to the cemetery to fight vampires. She eventually encounters the reanimated scarecrow.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_I_Survived_My_Summer_Vacation"title="How I Survived My Summer Vacation">
## Dust.Buffy continually sees the death of everyone she touches while she heads out to LA to spend summer vacation with her dad. She must come to terms with her own death before the deaths of others will disappear from her mind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blooded"title="Blooded">
Chirayoju, an ancient Chinese vampire, and Sanno, a Japanese Mountain King, have been fighting for years. Their spirits were imprisoned in a sword by a curse. The sword arrives in Sunnydale and while viewing the Japanese exhibit at the museum Willow becomes possessed by the spirit of Chirayoju and Xander, later on, becomes possessed by the spirit of Sanno. Buffy must figure out a way to stop the two spirits without killing her own friends. During the final battle, when the fight takes an ugly turn, Buffy must also keep her own spirit alive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sins_of_the_Father_(Buffy_novel)"title="Sins of the Father (Buffy novel)">
Buffy's old boyfriend from Hemery High in LA, Pike, makes a surprise appearance in Sunnydale, much to the everyone's shock, particularly Buffy's. Only Pike hasn't come to catch up with Buffy; he's being pursued by a rock demon known as Grayhewn. Pike had originally killed the demon's mate after it had killed his friend and now the demon wants Pike dead in the most painful way possible. As soon as Pike makes his appearance though, Buffy struggles to deal with her old feelings for Pike as well as her love for Angel, creating nothing but confusion within herself. Meanwhile, Giles appears to be dating a new teacher named Miss Blaisdell. But since Giles has been seeing her, he seems to waver in and out of consciousness and doesn't appear to care at all about Buffy or her struggles. Miss Blaisdell, as it turns out, is working for a man from Giles' past, a man from his very personal past, who wants nothing more than to painfully torture the Watcher and make him suffer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_of_the_Hunt"title="Child of the Hunt">
Lately Sunnydale, California has been missing kids, some of them have run away while others seem to have been kidnapped. There have also been attacks by little vicious creatures that completely mutilate their victims by simply biting through their prey. Also in town is a Renaissance Faire and the gang decides to pay it a visit. One visit is enough though because something is slightly off about the faire, everything seems evil and this one boy named Roland is continuously picked on, and not for fun either.After some research and a couple of run-ins with some small attackers, Angel and Rupert Giles discover that a group of mystical beings called the Wild Hunt are in town to claim the souls of humans. Angel warns Buffy Summers not to look at them as if she does they will steal her soul and she will be forced to ride with the Hunt. Buffy hides Roland out in her basement to save him from the nasty Faire people. The next night Buffy comes home to find Roland stolen away by the Wild Hunt. Giles informs Buffy that the Wild Hunt is run by the Erl King, lord of the Wild Hunt, and that Roland is his son and the heir to the Erl King title even though Roland is disgusted by the Hunt. Buffy and the gang rush in to rescue Roland but their attempt to do so is of no use. To free her friend Buffy agrees to be bound by the oath of the Erl King in which she loses all willpower to fight against him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo_(Buffy_novel)"title="Paleo (Buffy novel)">
A student named Kevin Sanderson transfers to Sunnydale High and he's extremely lonely until a lecture is given to his class by a man named Daniel that works for Sunnydale's Museum of Natural History. Kevin immediately considers Daniel to be his mentor as they both thoroughly enjoy palaeontology. Unfortunately Daniel's goal is not at all the same as that of Kevin, who is just trying to fit in. Daniel has found some manuscripts which will help him resurrect dinosaur eggs, and Kevin seems to be the only person with the appropriate eggs. Meanwhile, Oz is getting an offer from a woman named Alysa Bardrick to help run their band. She wants to be their manager but the band members of Dingoes Ate My Baby are still unsure as to her intentions. Soon, Daniel and Kevin's ritual goes very badly and prehistoric dangers literally stalk the halls of Sunnydale High.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evil_That_Men_Do_(Buffy_novel)"title="The Evil That Men Do (Buffy novel)">
After a vicious shooting spree by Brian Dellasandro, a straight A student, the town of Sunnydale goes into a state of shock, though not one everyone would expect; they turn on each other and become nasty. At the same time, Helen, an ancient vicious vampire over 1500 years old, has come to Sunnydale. She has hunted and killed every single Slayer she has ever met in her life, and Buffy is next on her list. Helen and her lover, Julian, have come to Sunnydale to raise Meter, a goddess of destruction, and to do that they need the heart of the Slayer and the ashes of the Emperor Caligula from way back when in 47 A.D. The urn, containing his ashes, has arrived in Joyce's gallery, and is later stolen.After a run-in with Helen, Buffy learns that Angelus and Helen used to be paramours in the 19th century, but that it ended when he regained his soul. Angel explains to her about Helen's past and how she came to hunt down Slayers.Buffy and her friends are captured and suited up on the night of Meter's ascension. They are led onto a battleground where Buffy must stay alive against dozens of opponents as well as her friends who have been infected by the Potion of Madness in order to prevent Meter from rising.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Deck"title="Doomsday Deck">
Joyce Summers is running a local art show for people from around the United States. A girl named Justine shows up the first day to sign in and Xander is immediately attracted to her. She offers to do a Tarot reading for him which he agrees to. Once Xander has touched her magickal deck he comes under her control and has no will of his own. Justine is building a powerful deck of Tarot cards which will allow her to control the fate of the world with the help of the goddess Kali, who, in return, wants ultimate peace on Earth. Only Justine doesn't realize what ultimate peace is and she's come to Sunnydale to collect the last four people she needs to complete her deck of cards. Once her deck has been completed the four people remaining needed for the deck will die like the other eighteen she's used to make the deck. Buffy must figure out how her friends are being controlled and find a way to fight herself out of the power of Justine's Tarot cards.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortal_(Buffy_novel)"title="Immortal (Buffy novel)">
Veronique is an immortal vampire that continues to return in the body of a newly dead person every time she has been staked. However, she wants to become truly immortal by summoning an ancient demon called the Triumvirate. And of course her choice spot to do so would be in Sunnydale, especially with the extra magical vibes emanating from the Hellmouth. Unfortunately, while Buffy is trying to keep Veronique's vampire henchmen at bay, she also has to deal with the fact that her mother is sick in the hospital. There's a chance that she has cancer, but they won't know for sure until they've performed surgery on her. Buffy has to decide where she's needed most: with her mother, or to stop the end of the world. Buffy and her friends battle Veronique and the Triumverate with help from Lucy Hanover and other spirits who possess them as the Triumverate need to drain the life-force of nearby souls. Without being able to do so, they revert into their hatchling forms and are killed. With them dead, Veronique loses her immortality and is killed by the last of the hatchlings before it dies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_of_Persuasion"title="Power of Persuasion">
When dead guys start turning up as soon as the Moon family appears in Sunnydale Buffy knows that something is wrong. Mo, the mother, and her two daughters, Calli and Polly, all go to Sunnydale High. Within several days Calli and Polly have attracted a huge crowd of females. The Moons are trying to create a "Womyn Power" group at the school that basically detests guys for even living. Willow gets pulled into the group and Buffy resolves to stop the Moons before they brainwash all the girls and turn all the guys into blithering idiots.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenant_(Buffy_novel)"title="Revenant (Buffy novel)">
A Chinese gang arrives in Sunnydale, which begins committing criminal acts across the town. Immediately, racial tension begins to increase; one of Willow's friends, Jia Li, is especially subjected to the effects. She discovers that her brother, Lok, is delving into the occult, in order to learn more about their great-grandfather's death in Sunnydale many years prior. Coinciding with these events, a man named Zhiyong tries to resurrect some men who died in a cave many years prior in order to raise Sharmma, a demon who would give him power in return. A beautiful warrior named Shing arrives on the scene at the same time; apparently, she's just as strong as Buffy. Xander feels an immediate attraction for her, but there's something about her that he doesn't know.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrecting_Ravana"title="Resurrecting Ravana">
It's midterm exam time at Sunnydale High School and tensions are rising high in the usual group. Particularly between Buffy and Willow who seem to have some sort of unspoken dislike of the other. Meanwhile, horrible murders have been occurring throughout Sunnydale; two close friends end up dead, one kills the other and then the murderer ends up as a pile of bones. The murders also coincide with the arrival of a large group of demons called the Rakshasa who seem to have a sort of wicked control over their victims. As Buffy and Willow become more and more violent towards each other, Giles does some research which indicates that the Rakshasa are in town to help with the resurrection on an ancient Hindu demon called Ravana. And when Giles spots Ethan Rayne in town, he knows that something chaotic is at hand.Characters include: Buffy, Joyce, Giles, Xander, Angel, Cordelia, Willow, Oz, and Ethan Rayne. Cordelia's web page in the book is www.shrew.com
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Chaos"title="Return to Chaos">
When four Druids arrive in town everyone knows that something is going on. Three of the Druids are brothers and the other is their uncle. They're in town to try a spell on a certain night to close the gateway in the Hellmouth so that demons would not be allowed to pass through. They'd done it a year before with their father but the spell was not completed and the brothers lost their father in the midst of the spell. Giles is a little put off by the uncle and feels that he's not being told everything that he should know. Also gathering is a large community of vampires run by Eric and his apprentice Naomi, who has been playing nasty tricks with Cordelia's mind by hypnotizing her. Things start to go wrong; magic appears everywhere and the brothers turn against their uncle. On the night of the spell Buffy must manage to fix the spell or deter the uncle from his task as well as figure out what is going on with Eric and his gang.Characters include: Buffy, Joyce, Giles, Xander, Cordelia, Willow, Oz and Angel. Drusilla is found to be a user of a spell that would explain her ease in killing Kendra.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visitors_(Buffy_novel)"title="Visitors (Buffy novel)">
Buffy notices that, while patrolling, she's being stalked by a demon that emits a high pitched giggle. After discussion and research with Giles, they discover that Buffy's being stalked by a 'Korred'; a nasty hairy beast that feeds on peoples life forces by making them dance to his magical song until they die. The Korred is particularly attracted to Buffy because of her Slayer aura. Buffy must stop the Korred before he makes her dance to her death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unnatural_Selection_(Buffy_novel)"title="Unnatural Selection (Buffy novel)">
Willow is baby-sitting one night when suddenly the baby she's taking care of changes into an evil faerie and tells her that she needs to work harder to save Weatherly Park from being converted into an amusement park. The faerie then attacks Willow before vanishing. After some research, Giles discovers that the fairy is a Russian variety called the domovoi, apparently hiding out beneath Weatherly Park. The faeries also have plans for Willow; they need the blood of a witch in order to resurrect the Homestone which will renew the faeries' strength.Characters include: Buffy, Joyce, Giles, Xander, Angel, Cordelia, Willow, and Oz. First original Buffy novel not to feature Sarah Michelle Gellar on the cover.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Water_(Buffy_novel)"title="Deep Water (Buffy novel)">
After an oil spill on a nearby Sunnydale beach, Willow discovers a 'selkie'; that is, a girl that can turn into a seal with her sealskin. The selkie, dubbed Ariel by the gang, cannot return to the ocean because her sealskin was damaged by the oil spill. Willow's trying to find a spell to clean it. At the same time, mermaid-like creatures called merrows have come ashore in search of food and the vampire population gets territorial and try to kill the merrows. Buffy and the gang get stuck in the middle of a turf war while trying to save Ariel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Be_Monsters_(Buffy_novel)"title="Here Be Monsters (Buffy novel)">
After Buffy kills twin teenage vampires, their vampire mother steps in to seek revenge for the death of her sons. The mother summons the goddess of Balance and Buffy is faced with a trial in order to save her life as well as her mother's. In this trial, Buffy discovers what she fears most and her love for her mom must triumph over the vampire mother's love for her dead sons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Fours"title="The Book of Fours">
Taking place during "Buffy"'s third season, Faith and Buffy are the current Slayers. When mayhem caused by tidal waves and burning forests begin to erupt in Sunnydale as well as vicious attackers appearing with ceremonial axes, the gang knows that something is up. A woman named Cecile Lafitte has sent her Servants to kill the Slayers with special axes, Faith being the Slayer of Fire and Buffy being the Slayer of Air. Each Slayer has a special axe made to destroy the Slayer of that particular element. There are four axes in total; air, fire, water and earth. Should Faith and Buffy both be killed then it's believed that the line of Slayers would die out forever. Cecile wants to bring forth the Gatherer, and the only way to do so is to have the Slayers killed, which would feed the demon enough power to bring him forth into the world. Meanwhile, Willow ends up in the hospital with major brain trauma while Giles figures they need answers from the Watcher of the Slayer that preceded Buffy, India Cohen.During the final confrontation with the Gatherer, Willow and Cordelia briefly serve as hosts for India (the Slayer of Water) and Kendra (the Slayer of Earth) respectively. Eventually with the help of the spirits of the former Slayers, Lucy Hanover and the spirits that live in the woods where the battle takes place, the group defeats the Gatherer and destroys it by each absorbing parts of its soul. Buffy also decapitates Cecile with the axes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/These_Our_Actors"title="These Our Actors">
Even though Buffy decided to drop drama class to concentrate on her slaying and taking care of Dawn, Willow still decided keep the class on her course list. She becomes engrossed in it, especially when the teacher, Professor Addams, begins discussing rituals and chants involved in old dramatic works. Unfortunately, the professor, realizing that Willow has some power of her own, decides to use her for his own ends. He needs to locate a particularly powerful book used to summon the Fates, which he believes is located somewhere in Sunnydale. Spike and Willow realise that the professor is actually the father of Spike's mortal love interest, Cecily, who is attempting to use the power of the fates to resurrect his daughter after he accidentally killed her due to Spike's actions in his early days as a vampire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempted_Champions"title="Tempted Champions">
A young, vicious and beautiful woman named Celina comes to Sunnydale and there's nothing but an uproar caused by her appearance. She's a deadly fighter that is willing to kill both humans and vampires alike. Upon her arrival in Sunnydale, she scares Anya, demanding to know where the Slayer is. As Buffy becomes involved in a short battle with Celina at sunrise, she realizes that she's in way over her head as Celina's method of fighting is far superior to her own. Meanwhile, Anya wrestles with her humanity and realizes that a lot of pain can come from being human and no longer immortal. D'Hoffryn offers her back her demonhood and she must decide which path is right for her. Buffy, after her encounter with the violent Celina, has Giles research who this mysterious woman is to better prepare her for the next time they meet. Unfortunately, the news of what Celina actually IS, is a lot more shocking than Buffy had expected.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Things_(novel)"title="Little Things (novel)">
Ever since her mother's death, Buffy has been having problems keeping herself and Dawn living together peacefully, and the lack of money is affecting both of them. When Buffy suddenly develops an acute toothache, with no dental insurance, she can't afford to have it fixed. She must bear through the pain and keep it a secret from her friends while the town of Sunnydale becomes terrorized by miniature vampires. The miniature vampire fairies are led by Queen Mab who has come to Sunnydale with her troop in order to hunt down Anyanka. Back in the day, Anyanka was accidentally involved in turning these fairies into vampires and Queen Mab wants revenge on this act. Unfortunately, Buffy has to figure out how to kill vampires that are smaller than her palm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossings_(Buffy_novel)"title="Crossings (Buffy novel)">
While at the theater for a Star Trek marathon with Anya, Xander recognizes a friend of his, from the arcade, enter the theater and begin threatening and beating humans in a very demonic way. Upon further inspection, Xander learns that his friend, Robby, was involved in total immersion VR video game beta testing. But the testing was a little too secretive, according to Robby's girlfriend. Meanwhile, Buffy and Dawn are having issues with one another, and Buffy doesn't know how to deal with being Dawn's new "mom" after the recent death of their own mother. After much research concerning the bizarre video game tests, and the appearance of a man named Bobby Lee Tooker, the group discovers that the video game isn't so much a video game, as much as it is another dimensional portal while the human bodies are being taken over by demons. Buffy needs to find a way to get these beta testers (including a very reluctant Xander) back into the real world and destroy the evil demon who's using the testers to conjure a powerful being.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Sixteen_(Buffy_novel)"title="Sweet Sixteen (Buffy novel)">
Buffy has a run-in with a couple demons at store while a gangly blonde girl watches on. Afterwards Buffy tries to talk to her but she runs off, faster than Buffy can catch her. Meanwhile Dawn has befriended a girl named Arianna at her school. Arianna has no friends and an abusive mother and has always longed to become a heroine. After it becomes clear that Arianna is the exceptionally strong girl that Buffy ran into, the gang tries to find out where Arianna's powers are coming from. Meanwhile, a demon called Aurek is searching for his daughter Arianna who is to become the Reaver, a being used for mass destruction of the dimensions. He finally locates her and tries to convince her that all humans are against demons. Just as Arianna starts to befriend Buffy, she then begins to pull away. Fearing that Buffy will just kill her in the end. Arianna has to make a decision on whether or not to keep her humanity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_War"title="Wisdom of War">
Two strange breeds of sea creatures are beginning to appear in Sunnydale, and none of them appear to be all too friendly. The Moruach and the Aegeirie are their names, the latter being followers of the immense sea beast Aegir who was once captured by the Moruach but later set free. As soon as Buffy is beginning to discover these creatures, the Watcher's Council steps in with a team with Quentin Travers leading the way. When Buffy does not agree to slay all the demons until she knows more about them and what they're doing in Sunnydale, Travers has Faith released from jail in Los Angeles for a temporary time in order to eradicate the demons in Sunnydale. Buffy begins to question her decision as well as her actions when innocent humans, including some of her friends, begin to transform into Aegir followers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_Fear"title="Mortal Fear">
Something new has swept into the lives of the Scooby Gang, but all through different sources as they try to find acceptance with other people outside their tight knit slayage group; Xander with his co-workers, Willow with her professor at university and Dawn with a new group of not so strait-laced friends. Meanwhile, Buffy is being sent on random missions by a man that goes by the name of Simon. He wants her to retrieve parts of a mystical sword and put them together, but he refuses to say why or who he even is. When her friends suddenly start to turn against her, Buffy has to figure out how the sword and Simon ties into all the odd goings-on in Sunnydale.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_of_Feeling"title="The Man of Feeling">
"The Man of Feeling" details the fragmentary episodes of the life of Harley which exist within the remains of a manuscript traded to the initial narrator of the novel by a priest. The novel itself begins with these two latter figures hunting, whereas the manuscript is missing the first ten chapters and approximately thirty others at various locations throughout the manuscript's entirety.As a young boy, Harley loses his parents and is assigned several guardians who constantly disagree with each other. They do however agree that he should make an effort to acquire more wealth, and so they urge him to make an old distant relative amiable towards him to claim some inheritance. Harley fails in this endeavour, as he doesn't cooperate with the relative's attempts to warm to him.Harley is then advised to acquire a patron; to sell his vote at an election for a lease of land. His neighbour Mr. Walton gives him a letter of introduction, and he leaves home (and Miss Walton) for London. He meets a beggar and his dog on the way, and after donating to them, hears the fortune-telling beggar's story.In the following (missing) chapters, Harley formally visits the baronet Mr. Walton recommended him to, because when the narrative continues, Harley is calling on him for the second time. The baronet however is away from London, and Harley meets another gentleman named Tom. They go for a stroll and then dine together, discussing pensions and resources with two older men.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Stop_(novel)"title="Non-Stop (novel)">
The novel's protagonist, Roy Complain, lives in a culturally-primitive tribe on a massive generation ship which has descended into a uncivilized state. The ship is overgrown by vegetation and the inhabitants have clustered into warring tribes. In Roy's tribe, curiosity is discouraged, and life is solitary, poor, and short. With a small group, he leaves his home and ventures into uncharted territory in the ship. The consequent discoveries will change his perception of the entire universe.Complain's small tribe roam nomadically through corridors overrun by vegetation. After his wife is kidnapped, a tribal priest, Marapper, encourages Complain to join a furtive expedition into the unexplored corridors. It is Marapper's belief that they are all living on board a moving spacecraft and that if they can reach the control room, they will gain command of the entire gargantuan vessel.On their journey, the group encounters other tribes of varying levels of sophistication. Complain is also briefly captured by humanoid 'Giants' of legend, who release him with no explanation. Complain's party eventually join the more sophisticated society of the 'Forwards'. Here, they learn that the space-craft is a multi-generational starship returning from a newly colonised planet in the Procyon star system. In a previous generation, the ship's inhabitants had suffered from a pandemic because of an alien amino acid found in the waters of the Procyon planet. Law and order began to collapse, and knowledge of the ship and its purpose was eventually almost entirely lost throughout the vessel. Since the 'Catastrophe', 23 generations have passed so far.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_in_Ordinary_Time"title="Songs in Ordinary Time">
A novel set in a small town in Vermont in 1960 offers the story of lonely and vulnerable Marie Fermoyle, her three children, and a dangerous con man.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heart_of_a_Woman"title="The Heart of a Woman">
The events described in "The Heart of a Woman" take place between 1957 and 1962, beginning shortly after the end of Angelou's previous autobiography, "Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas". Angelou and her teenage son Guy have moved into a houseboat commune in Sausalito, California. After a year, they move to a rented house near San Francisco. Singer Billie Holiday visits Angelou and her son there, and Holiday sings "Strange Fruit", her famous song about the lynching of Black men, to Guy. Holiday tells Angelou, "You're going to be famous. But it won't be for singing." In 1959, Angelou and Guy moved to New York City. The transition is difficult for Guy, and Angelou is forced to protect him from a . No longer satisfied with performing in nightclubs, she dedicates herself to acting, writing, political organizing, and her son. Her friend, novelist John Killens, invites her to join the Harlem Writers Guild. She meets other important African-American artists and writers, including James Baldwin, who would become her mentor. She becomes a published writer for the first time.Angelou becomes more politically active and participates in African-American and African protest rallies, including helping to organize a sit-in at the United Nations following the execution of Patrice Lumumba, the ousted prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She meets Malcolm X and is struck by his good looks and magnetism. After hearing Martin Luther King Jr. speak, she and her friend, activist Godfrey Cambridge, are inspired to produce a successful fundraising event for King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) called "Cabaret For Freedom". King names her coordinator of SCLC's office in New York. She performs in Jean Genet's play "The Blacks", with Roscoe Lee Brown, James Earl Jones, and Cicely Tyson.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rapture_of_Canaan"title="The Rapture of Canaan">
Adolescent Ninah lives in a strict fundamentalist Christian community (The Church of Fire and Brimstone and God's Almighty Baptizing Wind) led by her grandfather Herman. The community is governed by a series of strict rules covering everything from drinking to speaking to people outside of the community, with punishments ranging from sleeping on stinging nettles to spending a night in a grave.Despite the rules, Ninah cannot stop herself from falling in love with James, a boy a year older who is also her nephew by marriage. The community allows Ninah and James to become "prayer partners" in order that they can spend time with one another in the hopes of a future marriage. James and Ninah pray for Jesus to speak through them in order to help them defeat their attraction for one another, but eventually, their physical attraction is too strong, and Ninah becomes pregnant. James, fearing punishment from the community, commits suicide. Ninah insists that Jesus, rather than James, is the father of the baby.During her pregnancy, Ninah mulls over her feelings toward God and decides that her experience of God's love is closer to her feelings toward James than to the attitude of her church. However, when the baby is born with its palms attached in an attitude of prayer, the entire community is convinced that baby Canaan is the new Messiah.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stones_from_the_River"title="Stones from the River">
The novel begins when Trudi Montag, protagonist, is born to Gertrude Montag, a mentally-tormented woman, and to Leo Montag, a newly-returned veteran of the First World War who runs a pay-library in the fictional river-side town of Burgdorf on July 23, 1915. Until Trudi is four years of age, Gertrude rejects Trudi as her daughter because Trudi is a zwerg, or a dwarf. After a miscarriage and due to increasing levels of insanity, Leo admits Gertrude to an asylum where she catches pneumonia and dies.At age 5, Trudi begins to hang from doorframes, hoping to grow. She also becomes friends with a boy, George Weiler, whose mother dresses him in girls' clothing; their friendship is short-lived.At ages 6 through 8, Trudi goes to school and faces severe social ostracization from both her classmates and her nun-teachers. Despite this, she excels in school and develops an aptitude for history. Her father buys her a dog, called Seehund, to provide her with a close companion in the absence of a sibling. Seehund attracts the attention of a classmate, Eva Rosend, and she and Trudi become friends in secret, bonding over their mutual deformities: Trudi's dwarfism and Eva's large port-wine stain. When Eva denounces Trudi, Trudi tells a townsperson of Eva's birth defect; this begins a pattern for Trudi. Having learned the power of secrets, she begins cultivating them in the townspeople and spreading them like seeds for her own benefit and, on occasion, revenge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_the_Heart_Is_(novel)"title="Where the Heart Is (novel)">
"Where the Heart Is" follows the lives of Novalee Nation, Willy Jack Picken, and their daughter Americus Nation for a period of seven years in the 1980s and early 1990s. Above all, the book dramatizes in detail the tribulations of lower-income and foster children in the United States.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwives_(novel)"title="Midwives (novel)">
On an icy winter night in an isolated house in rural Vermont, a seasoned midwife named Sibyl Danforth takes desperate measures to save a baby's life. She performs an emergency cesarean section on a mother she believes has died of a stroke. But what if Sibyl's patient wasn't dead—and Sibyl inadvertently killed her?Midwives tells the story of Sibyl Danforth from the point of view of her young daughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River,_Cross_My_Heart"title="River, Cross My Heart">
After the Potomac River claims the death by drowning of eight-year-old Clara Bynum, her family leave the rural world of North Carolina in search of a better life among friends and relatives in Georgetown, Washington, DC. They seek to come to terms with their loss.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_of_Pearl_(novel)"title="Mother of Pearl (novel)">
Set in Petal, Mississippi, a small town at the close of the 1950s, this novel tells the story of the 28-year-old Even Grade, a black man who grew up an orphan, and Valuable Korner, a 15-year-old white girl, who is the daughter of the town prostitute and an unknown father. They are both separately seeking the family, love, and affection they had not had before, until their paths cross owing to their common acquaintance of loner mystic Joody Two Sun.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pilot's_Wife"title="The Pilot's Wife">
The novel is about Kathryn Lyons, whose husband, Jack Lyons, dies in a plane crash over the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Malin Head, Ireland. As she and her daughter Mattie try to cope with this sudden loss, she finds herself bombarded by the press. While she and the airlines try to find the reason for the crash, she slowly unravels a series of secrets her husband has kept from her until she realizes that he lived a double life she never knew about.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewel_(novel)"title="Jewel (novel)">
The year is 1943 and life is good for Jewel Hilburn, her husband, Leston, and their five children. Although there's a war going on, the Mississippi economy is booming, providing plenty of business for the hardworking family. Even the news that eldest son James has enlisted is mitigated by the fact that Jewel, now pushing 40, is pregnant with one last child. Her joy is slightly clouded, however, when her childhood friend Cathedral arrives at the door with a troubling prophecy: "I say unto you that the baby you be carrying be yo' hardship, be yo' test in this world. This be my prophesying unto you, Miss Jewel."When the child is finally born, it seems that Cathedral's prediction was empty: the baby appears normal in every way. As the months go by, however, Jewel becomes increasingly afraid that something is wrong with little Brenda Kay—she doesn't cry, she doesn't roll over, she's hardly ever awake. Eventually husband and wife take the baby to the doctor and are informed that she is a "Mongolian Idiot," not expected to live past the age of 2. Jewel angrily rebuffs the doctor's suggestion that they institutionalize Brenda Kay. Instead, the Hilburns shoulder the burdens—and discover the unexpected joys—of living with a Down syndrome child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drowning_Ruth"title="Drowning Ruth">
Amanda and Mathilda are two sisters who live in rural Wisconsin. While Mathilda is petite, well-liked, pretty, and adventurous, Amanda is tall, clumsy, awkward, and serious. When Mathilda marries Carl, Amanda feels betrayed and leaves to go to nursing school. Meanwhile, Mathilda and Carl are married and living together on a small island near the family farm. They are happy there, and welcome their child, Ruth, into the world. A short time later, however, Carl begins to feel trapped, enlists in the army and is sent away to France. Mathilda is devastated and angry at his departure and decides to move back to the mainland and into the old house of her late parents. Amanda begins to feel agitated and upset. She's also frequently ill and has become a nervous wreck. Amanda is persuaded to take a rest from her nursing job, and travels back to the family farm to stay with her sister and niece. The three grow close, and Amanda begins to see Ruth as their child, becoming very protective of her. After living in the farm house for a while, Amanda persuades Mathilda to move back to the island. Hesitant at first, Mathilda soon agrees, and the three of them go to the island.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gap_Creek"title="Gap Creek">
"Gap Creek's" main character is a young girl, Julie, who does everything she possibly can to help her family and her new husband, Hank. Julie works hard to help her family when they need it, some even say she works as "hard as a man." Her family depends on her to milk the cows, slaughter the hogs, and nurse the dying. As a teenager, Julie witness her young little brother die in her arms from a seizure, a year later he father dies from chest consumption. After the death of the two men her life, 17-year-old Julie marries Hank Richards and moves to Gap Creek in South Carolina where they meet Mr. Pendergast and set up an arrangement so they can live there. Julie has to do the laundry and the housekeeping while Hank works outside of the house. Towards the end of the 19th century, the couple experiences the most complicated scenarios they could have ever imagined through floods, fires, drunks and busybodies who wander around their house and neighborhood. While pregnant, Julie finally sees the true side of Hank, having lost his job, she saw how immature he was and how hot-tempered he was. When the couple was going through a tough time, being short on money and all, Julie goes into labor early giving birth to a premature baby girl who she named Delia. A couple of days later, Delia passes away, leaving Julie depressed and lonely. The couple pulls through towards the end with the help of the church and their religion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icy_Sparks"title="Icy Sparks">
The story focuses on a grown-up Icy Sparks recounting her childhood and adolescence struggling with accusations of Tourette's Syndrome.The novel begins with Icy Sparks, a 10-year-old girl living in a mountainous region of Eastern Kentucky with her grandparents throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Icy is alienated by her peers and often shunned and pitied by the adults in her town. One day Icy suddenly begins to experience tics, croaks, and physical spasms. Soon after these seemingly uncontrollable "secrets" begin, Icy goes down into her grandparents' root cellar to let out her tics, in an effort to hide the condition from her grandparents. Finally, Icy tells one of her few friends, Miss Emily Tanner, a local store owner who is also an outcast from society at 300 pounds. Icy's elementary school teacher tries putting her in a solitary classroom, but even that doesn't work. Her grandparents have Icy admitted to a mental institution for observation.Even in the institution, Icy is an outcast. Though she sees herself as less mentally ill in comparison to some of her peers there, she is nonetheless tormented by one of the hospital workers. Icy is able to befriend a second worker, though she really just wants to go home to her grandparents. When she is finally allowed to leave, she stays in her house or on the surrounding property and does not venture out in public very often.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Ruth_(novel)"title="The Book of Ruth (novel)">
An awkward midwest girl, Ruth, is growing up in the small town of Honey Creek, Illinois. Elmer, her father, left the family when she was ten, leaving her mother, May, feeling bitter. May is unhappy with and disappointed in Ruth because she is nothing like her shining brother, Matt, who is a mathematical genius with a scholarship to MIT. Their mother is crushed when Matt moves away to Boston after graduation and is left with Ruth, who takes a job at the local dry cleaner shop. Ruth's one confidant is her mother's sister, and Aunt, who is worldly and kind, and recognizes that Ruth is a sensitive observant young woman. Ruth's Aunt continues a relationship with both Ruth and Matt over the years, and provides Ruth with a glimpse into what life could be like as an independent middle class woman.One hot night at the local lake, Ruth meets Ruby Dahl, a local ne'er do well. When Ruby later takes Ruth out on a date, he takes advantage of her naiveté, but Ruth continues to see him and after several dates they decide to get married. Ruby moves in with Ruth and May, and May's oppression and Ruby's stubborn laziness frequently clash. Ruth's life is bleak and somber, and even the birth of her son fails to bring the joys Ruth expected. Seasonally, winter brings on bitter cold, both in the weather and in the emotional standoffs in the Grey-Dahl house. Ruby, who has descended into alcoholism and frequent drug use, begins acting more erratically.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalon_High"title="Avalon High">
Ellie Harrison has just moved to Annapolis, Maryland. Her new school, Avalon High, seems like a typical high school with the stereotypical students: Lance the jock, Jennifer the cheerleader, Marco, the bad boy/desperado, and Will, the senior class president, quarterback, the student every girl wants and all around good guy. But not everyone at Avalon High is who they appear to be, not even Ellie herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_Trilogy"title="Void Trilogy">
## "The Dreaming Void".What was formerly believed to be a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way is revealed to be an artificial construct, known as the Void. Inside, there is a strange universe where the laws of physics are very different from those we know. It is slowly consuming the other stars of the galactic core—one day it will have devoured the entire galaxy.In AD 3320, a human member of the Commonwealth, Inigo, begins to have dreams of the wonderful existence inside the Void. His dreams inspire the disaffected, who desire to travel into the Void, where their every wish will be fulfilled. By AD 3456, the pseudo-religious Living Dream movement exceeds 5 billion members, organizing the followers into a powerful political force. Other star-faring species fear their migration will cause the Void to expand again thus devouring the galaxy. They are prepared to stop the pilgrimage fleet no matter what the cost.The Dreaming Void is broken into two distinct sections. The first follows Edeard, a young boy who lives inside the Void on a planet called Querencia, the subject of Inigo's dreams.Edeard, an orphan and apprentice, lives in Ashwell, a town in Rulan province. A gifted psychic, Edeard is trained by Master Akeem in crafting and modding. Initially a loner, Edeard comes to prominence in his village after designing an alternative pump mechanism for the local well. Unfortunately Edeard's luck changes for the worse after Ashwell is raided by bandits. Forced to flee, Edeard joins the local caravan and travels to Makkathran the capital of Querencia. In Makkathran, Edeard joins the constables and after a brutal couple of months in training, Edeard graduates. Upon graduating Edeard is promoted to the commander of his Squad. Edeard makes little progress battling the rigid and backward judicial system of Makkathran; His first real break is when his squad overcomes a trap set by the local gang. Edeard walks on water chasing Arminel the leader of the gang. A testament to his growing psychic abilities, Edeard's stunt earns him the title of Waterwalker, and he becomes an instant star in Makkathran.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hounds_of_the_Morrigan"title="The Hounds of the Morrigan">
In a Galway bookshop, Pidge buys a book called "A Book of Patrick's Writing" and accidentally frees an evil serpent, Olc-Glas, from inside it. Pidge and his five-year-old sister, Brigit, are then caught up in a battle between good (the Dagda) and evil (the Morrigan). Talking animals and other figures from Celtic mythology help them, and they travel to Tír na nÓg.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Operated_Jew"title="The Operated Jew">
A young Jewish doctor is caused by antisemitic pressures to escape his Jewishness, which he seeks to do by submitting himself to violent and painful ethnic plastic surgery. He has stereotypical Jewish features: black curly hair, oily skin, thick lips, a large hooked nose, an effeminate voice, poor posture, and orthopedic impairments. He arranges to have all of his bones straightened out, his hair dyed blonde, and his larynx altered to change his voice. He is then placed in a bathtub and given a blood transfusion by pure Aryan virgins. Having been seemingly cured of his Jewishness, the doctor marries a blonde German woman. However, just as he is about to deliver a speech at his wedding, his voice takes on a high pitch and all of his previous Jewish features resurface. He eventually becomes a gelatinous puddle on the floor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diary_of_a_Chambermaid_(novel)"title="The Diary of a Chambermaid (novel)">
The novel presents itself as the diary of Mademoiselle Célestine R., a chambermaid. Her first employer fetishizes her boots, and she later discovers the elderly man dead, with one of her boots stuffed into his mouth. Later on, Célestine becomes the maid of an upper class couple, Lanlaire, and is perfectly aware that she is entangled in the power struggles of their marriage. Célestine ends by becoming a café hostess, who mistreats her servants in turn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alamut_(Bartol_novel)"title="Alamut (Bartol novel)">
The novel is set in the 11th century at the fortress of Alamut, which was seized by the leader of the Ismailis, Hassan-i Sabbah or "Sayyiduna" (سیدنا, "Our Master"). At the start of the story, he is gathering an army for the purpose of attacking the Seljuk Empire, which has taken over possession of Iran. The story opens from the point of view of Halima who was purchased by Hassan to become a houri. The story commences with the journey of young ibn Tahir, who is, according to his family's wish, intending to join the Alamut garrison. There, he is appointed to the squad of the most valiant soldiers, named the "fedai" (فدائی). "Fedai" are expected to obey orders without demur and forfeit their lives if necessary. During their demanding training, they come to be convinced that they shall go to heaven immediately after their death if they die in the line of duty. Meanwhile, Halima joins the other houris in the garden which Hassan has been building, the young girls are educated in various arts by the leader of the houris and confidant to Hassan, Miriam. Hassan managed to achieve such level of obedience by deceiving his soldiers; he gave them drugs (hashish) to numb them and afterwards ordered that they be carried into the gardens behind the fortress—which were made into a simulacrum of heaven, including "houris". Therefore, "fedayin" believe that Allah has given Hassan the power to send anybody to Heaven for a certain period. Moreover, some of the "fedayin" fall in love with "houris", and Hassan unscrupulously uses that to his advantage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Manager"title="The Night Manager">
Jonathan Pine, a former British soldier, is a night manager at a hotel. Pine has a complex character with a military background and schooling at the Duke of York's Royal Military School in Dover. We first meet him in that capacity at the Hotel Meister Palace in Zurich. He is on duty when the "worst man in the world", Richard Onslow Roper, arrives with his entourage on a cold, blizzardy night. Roper is a billionaire criminal who traffics illegal arms and drugs. The novel is about Pine's preoccupation with undoing Roper's criminal enterprise, which began earlier, in Cairo, where Pine was working as the night manager at the luxurious Queen Nefertiti hotel.One night in Cairo, Pine met Sophie, a French-Arab woman, the mistress of the hotel owner, Freddie Hamid, who had ties to Roper. Sophie characterised Roper as "the worst man in the world". She provided Pine with incriminating documents, asking him to forward them to the Egyptian authorities. Pine did so but disregarded her warning that Roper had ties to British intelligence. He forwarded copies to a friend with MI6. A short time later, Sophie was murdered.Several years later, Pine is working in Switzerland. He is approached by ex-SIS Chief Leonard Burr and his senior civil servant backer Rex Goodhew, who have set up a small counter arms-proliferation office and are planning an elaborate sting operation against Roper. Eager to avenge Sophie, Pine agrees to go undercover to infiltrate Roper's vast criminal empire. All the while, however, the operation is jeopardised by an inter-agency turf war within the intelligence community, with a suspicion that collusion with Roper is taking place somewhere.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Woman_of_the_Iron_People"title="A Woman of the Iron People">
"A Woman of the Iron people" is divided into two parts. The first primarily deals with Lixia's growing understanding and involvement with life on the planet. Soon after arriving on the planet she meets Nia and starts to pick up the "language of gifts", which is a sort of trade language, from her. They leave their current location and journey west, meeting Derek and the Voice of the Waterfall along the way.The second part of the novel deals primarily with the question of intervention. The various factions of humans, most of whom are still in space, disagree as to how much the humans should intervene on the planet. Questions are raised about the policy of intervention.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Men_Are_Mortal"title="All Men Are Mortal">
The beautiful, successful, but also vain and egotistical actress Regine meets the strange Italian Raymond Fosca in France in the 1930s. At first he is reluctant to make her acquaintance, but then he seems to fall in love with Regine and soon reveals his secret to her: he is immortal. Regine does not understand the dimension of this revelation and at first only thinks about how she herself could attain immortality through the Romance with him - in his memory. Fosca then withdraws from her, but when she seeks him out and confronts him, he tells her his story.Born the son of a patrician in the (fictional) 13th-century northern Italian town of Carmona, the world presents itself to Fosca as a mixture of violence and intrigue: While in the city the influential families fight for supremacy, this struggle is repeated in the outside world as a permanent state of war between the city-states and small states of Italy at the time and their ever-changing constellations of alliances. Neither the respective rulers nor their subjects achieve any real progress. Fosca gets the impression that these battles only go on endlessly because neither party has the time to permanently consolidate the power and rule it has won - and so the desire arises in him for a life that will last forever and thus give him the decisive advantage. In return for his pardon, he receives a magic potion from a beggar in his hometown who has been sentenced to death. After trying it on a mouse, he drinks it himself and promptly becomes immortal - but the hoped-for success does not materialize. Again and again a new opponent rises up; even his own son (when he has long since become an adult and wants to inherit the regency from his father) finally fights him, and Fosca kills him himself. Despite this, he does not want to give up and initially fights on for two centuries, but never gets beyond his role as lord of the city of Carmona.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off_on_a_Comet"title="Off on a Comet">
The story starts with a comet called Gallia, that touches the Earth in its flight and collects a few small chunks of it. The disaster occurs on January 1 of the year 188x in the area around Gibraltar. On the territory that is carried away by the comet there remain a total of thirty-six people of French, English, Spanish and Russian nationality. These people do not realize at first what has happened, and consider the collision an earthquake.They first notice weight loss: Captain Servadac's adjutant Ben Zoof, to his amazement, jumps high. Zoof with Servadac also soon notice that the alternation of day and night is shortened to six hours, that east and west have changed sides, and that water begins to boil at , from which they rightly deduce that the atmosphere became thinner and pressure dropped. At the beginning of their stay in Gallia they notice the Earth with the Moon, but think it is an unknown planet. Other important information is obtained through their research expedition with a ship, which the comet also took.During the voyage they discover a mountain chain blocking the sea, which they initially consider to be the Mediterranean Sea and then they find the island of Formentera (before the catastrophe a part of the Balearic Islands), where they find French astronomer Palmyrin Rosette, who helps them to solve all the mysterious phenomena. They are all on a comet which Rosette discovered by a year ago and predicted to be on a collision course with Earth, but no one believed the astronomer, because a layer of thick fog at the time prevented astronomical observations in other places.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coming_of_Bill"title="The Coming of Bill">
In New York, Mrs. Lora Delane Porter, domineering writer of books about eugenics and germs, drives too fast and hits George Pennicut, whose leg is injured. George is a man-of-all-work employed by Kirk Winfield, an amiable though unsuccessful artist who lives on modest private means. Kirk carries George into his apartment and calls in a doctor. George will recover completely after a couple of days. Mrs. Porter notices that Kirk is healthy and physically fit, and decides he should marry her niece Ruth Bannister, daughter of wealthy financier John Bannister. Ruth believes in her aunt's views on eugenics, in contrast to her brother Bailey Bannister, John Bannister's son and junior partner, who thinks Mrs. Porter is a bad influence on Ruth. Mrs. Porter introduces Ruth to Kirk, and they fall in love. Percy Shanklyn, an unemployed actor who borrows money from Kirk, does not want him to marry Ruth, so he tells Bailey about Kirk and Ruth. Bailey suspects Mrs. Porter's interference. He objects to Mrs. Porter and Ruth that Kirk is a nobody and an outsider. He also confronts Kirk, but inadvertently reveals to him that Ruth returns his feelings. Kirk's friend Steve Dingle, self-described roughneck and retired boxer who is employed as physical instructor for the Bannisters, advises him to elope with Ruth to avoid trouble with her controlling father. Mr. Bannister rejects Ruth after she marries Kirk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Damsel_in_Distress_(novel)"title="A Damsel in Distress (novel)">
Lady Maud Marsh, daughter of the widowed 7th Earl of Marshmoreton, is in love with Geoffrey Raymond, whom she met the previous summer in Wales. Maud has not revealed the man's name to her aristocratic family but has admitted that he is a penniless American. Her family, led by Lord Marshmoreton's haughty sister, Lady Caroline Byng, disapprove of the match and will not allow Maud to leave their home of Belpher Castle in Hampshire, in order to keep her from seeing the man. Lady Caroline wants her step-son, Reginald "Reggie" Byng, to marry Maud, though unbeknownst to her, Reggie is actually in love with Lord Marshmoreton's secretary, Alice Faraday. Lord Marshmoreton meekly listens to his sister, and to Alice, who is insistent that he write the history of his family, though he only wants to tend to his rose garden.In London's Piccadilly, George Bevan, a bored and lonely American composer of successful musical comedies, sees a pretty girl in brown and laments that he has no justification to approach her, thinking that if only they were in the Middle Ages, he could approach her as a hero offering assistance to a damsel in distress. Depressed, George hails a taxicab, and is surprised when the girl in brown jumps into the cab and asks George to hide her. George wastes no time helping her hide from a stout, disagreeable, well-dressed young man. The man becomes angry and distracted when George knocks his silk hat off, allowing George and the girl to escape, but she soon disappears. George has fallen in love with her, though he does not know her name. Thanks to a newspaper report about the disagreeable young man (who spent the night in jail after punching a policeman), George discovers that the girl in brown was Lady Maud Marsh of Belpher Castle. He is not aware that she had sneaked off to London hoping to see Geoffrey.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultana's_Dream"title="Sultana's Dream">
It depicts a feminist utopia (called Ladyland) in which women run everything and men are secluded, in a mirror-image of the traditional practice of "purdah". The women are aided by science fiction-esque "electrical" technology which enables laborless farming and flying cars; the women scientists have discovered how to trap solar power and control the weather. This results in "a sort of gender-based Planet of the Apes where the roles are reversed and the men are locked away in a technologically advanced future."There, traditional stereotypes such as “Men have bigger brains” and women are "naturally weak" are countered with logic such as "an elephant also has a bigger and heavier brain" and “a lion is stronger than a man” and yet neither of them dominates men. In Ladyland crime is eliminated, since men were considered responsible for all of it. The workday is only two hours long, since men used to waste six hours of each day in smoking. The religion is one of love and truth. Purity is held above all, such that the list of "sacred relations" ("mahram") is widely extended.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_the_Lightning"title="Catch the Lightning">
The first half of "Catch the Lightning" takes place in an alternate Los Angeles on Earth in a time similar to the late 20th century. The main character is Tina Pulivok, a seventeen-year-old Maya girl living in East L.A. She has relocated to Los Angeles and is living on her own while she works as a waitress. The hero, Althor Selei, a cybernetically enhanced Jag fighter pilot, is thrown into the alternate universe when his star fighter malfunctions. Tina meets Althor late at night when she is returning home from work, and he is trying to figure out why he ended up on a planet that bears little resemblance to the Earth he expected. After Althor helps Tina escape an incident of gang violence, the two become fugitives.Tina is an empath. She is aware she is different but has no name for her abilities and is afraid to tell anyone about what she experiences. Althor is a member of the Ruby Dynasty, and as such he is heir to the throne of an interstellar empire called the Skolian Imperialate. He is also a Rhon psion and can read moods, sometimes even thoughts, from other people. He and Tina share an immediate attraction, in part based on their abilities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Harmonic"title="Spherical Harmonic">
"Spherical Harmonic" is a first person narrative told from the viewpoint of Dyhianna Selei. Although an elected Assembly governs the Imperialate, in ages past the Ruby Pharaoh ruled as absolute sovereign. Selei is the descendant of the ancient pharaohs, and is considered the titular ruler of modern Skolia. "Spherical Harmonic" takes place following the Radiance War, a conflict fought between the Imperialate and the Eubian Concord, an empire ruled by a rigid caste of narcissists called Aristos. The Eubian economy is based on slave trade, which the Aristos seek to expand to the Imperialate.Just prior to the opening scene of "Spherical Harmonic", Dyhianna Selei escapes a Eubian military force by stepping into a Lock, a singularity that defines the boundary between two universes. In mathematical terms, she has entered an alternate dimension defined by the functions known as spherical harmonics. As the book opens, she is "coalescing" on a moon called Opalite. She reforms in partial waves that transfer her from one universe to the other. Some prose in the book is written in the shape of the sinusoidal functions found in the spherical harmonics.As Selei fades in and out of existence, in danger of disappearing, she slowly recovers her memories about her identity and history. She manages to activate an emergency protocol secretly established on the moon for her protection. As a result she is found by Jon Casestar, an admiral in the Skolian Fleet, and Commander Vaz Majda, an elite fighter pilot who is also her sister-in-law. Once aboard an ISC battle cruiser, Selei strives to reunite the Ruby Dynasty and find out what has happened to her people. The book follows her attempts to resurrect the Skolian military and government.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Henry"title="Green Henry">
"Green Henry" details the life of Heinrich Lee from childhood through his first romantic encounters, his fledgling attempts at becoming a painter in Munich, and his eventual installation as a chancery clerk. The story gets its name from the color that Heinrich affected in dress.Heinrich is a Swiss burgher's son, brought up too tenderly by a widowed mother. After youthful pranks and experiences, and a not altogether justified dismissal from school, he idles away some time in his mother's village. He determines to be a painter, and goes to Munich's artistic Bohemia. From there, he finds his way to a count's mansion, and then he returns home to his dying mother and an all-too-tardy and brief repentance.The much revised second version has Heinrich abandoning art to enter the civil service. This experience affords occasion for extended political reflections. The tone of the reminiscences makes it clear that Keller would have the reader understand that Heinrich has lived through and risen out of his instability and irresolution and sees life steadily and cheerfully at last.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth_(novel)"title="Labyrinth (novel)">
When Dr Alice Tanner, who works as a volunteer at the archaeological site of Pic de Soularac, in France, discovers two skeletons in a long-hidden cave in the hillside, she unearths a link with an horrific and brutal past. However, it is not just the sight of the shattered bones that makes her uneasy; there is an overwhelming sense of evil in the tomb that Alice finds hard to shake off, even in the bright French sunshine. Puzzled by the words carved inside the chamber and the representation of a labyrinth, she finds an exact representation of it on the underside of the ring she found in the cave.Alice has an uneasy feeling that she has disturbed something that was meant to remain hidden. She finds a connection to the nightmares she had been having since childhood and discovers that the cave was related to her past.Eight hundred years ago, on the night before a brutal civil war ripped apart Languedoc, three books were entrusted to Alaïs, a young herbalist and healer, the daughter of the steward of Carcassona. Although she cannot understand the symbols and diagrams the books contain, Alaïs knows her destiny lies in protecting their secret at all costs. The books contain the secrets to the Holy Grail. Alice later discovers that she is Alaïs's descendant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deviant_Strain"title="The Deviant Strain">
The TARDIS lands the Doctor, Rose and Jack at an abandoned Soviet naval base. However, something is still lurking — something which is treating all humans, including Rose and Jack, as prey. But as the Doctor investigates further, he uncovers an experiment years in the making.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_Human_(novel)"title="Only Human (novel)">
The presence of a Neanderthal on present-day Earth alerts the Doctor, Rose and Jack to the fact that someone is meddling with time. In order to learn the truth, they must travel back 28,000 years, where they meet humans of the past and future — and something far, far worse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Salty_Piece_of_Land"title="A Salty Piece of Land">
Tully Mars, a 40-something guide at the Lost Boys Fishing Lodge resort, takes trips around the Caribbean and is also put in charge of fixing an old lighthouse.In this novel Buffett connects stories of science fiction (Captain Kirk), fantasy (The Lost Boys), and drama (Clark Gable) into a single Caribbean-themed epic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(Barth_novel)"title="Chimera (Barth novel)">
## "Dunyazadiad".The Dunyazadiad is a retelling of the framing story of Scheherazade, the famed storyteller of the One Thousand and One Nights. The story is told from the point of view of Scheherazade's younger sister Dunyazade. Its characterization as metafiction can be understood as a result of the use of several literary devices, most notably the introduction of the author as a character and his interaction with Scheherazade and Dunyazade. The author appears from the future and expresses his admiration for Scheherazade and the 1001 Nights as a work of fiction, of which Barth's Scheherazade has no knowledge. Realizing that he has appeared to Scheherazade on the eve of her first encounter with Shahryar, and seeing her without a solution to her predicament, the author himself suggests the stratagem of using a chain of interrupted stories to forestall her execution, and offers to tell her a new story every day with which to regale the king the following evening. Taking the author for a genie, Scheherazade agrees.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_of_Three_(novel)"title="Power of Three (novel)">
The story begins when two Lyman siblings, Orban and Adara, accidentally revert a shapeshifted bird on an English moor back into a small Dorig. The Dorig is holding an exquisitely moulded collar, which in Lyman and Dorig culture are used to store protective magic. When Orban tries to take the collar, the Dorig says he is the son of the Dorig king, and will curse the collar before giving it up. Orban kills the Dorig and takes the collar anyway, and as the Dorig dies he binds a curse to the collar by the three Powers – the Old Power, the Middle Power and the New Power.Orban grows up to be chief of the Otmound mound. Adara marries Gest, chief of the Garholt mound, and has three children: Ayna, Gair, and Ceri. At a young age, Ayna and Ceri discover they have powerful magical talents called "Gifts" – Ayna has precognition, and Ceri can find anything when asked. Gair, the middle child, becomes increasingly gloomy when he fails to develop a Gift.When Gair is twelve, the Dorig – at war with the Lyman ever since Orban killed the prince – flood the Otmound mound. The Otmounders move into the Garholt mound, bringing with them bad luck which gets worse and worse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirsty_(novel)"title="Thirsty (novel)">
The story is set in the town of, and in the areas surrounding, Bradley, Massachusetts. A vampire lord, Tch'muchgar, is magically imprisoned in isolation at the bottom of the town reservoir. The townsfolk performs rituals at the annual The Sad Festival of Vampires to maintain the bonds holding Tch'muchgar prisoner.Early in the book the young "hero", Chris, witnesses a vampiress being lynched. Soon after, he starts to feel a strange sensation — a growing thirst for blood. Chris later notices that his friend Tom is casting a reflection on the water of the reservoir but Chris himself has no reflection. He realizes that he must be suffering from vampirism. Chris is afraid to tell anyone, even his friends, because vampires are killed immediately upon being discovered.Chris is soon confronted by a mysterious person dressed in black, who introduces himself as Chet the Celestial Being. Chet says that he serves the Forces of Light, and that he can cure Chris of his vampirism. But first Chet must place a holy object, The Arm of Moriator, with Tch'muchgar. Once activated, the Arm cannot be moved or deactivated by evil beings. Chet explains that if Tch'muchgar tries to escape from his prison, the Arm will cause him to become trapped between worlds, just like "opening an elevator between floors".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylark_Three"title="Skylark Three">
"Skylark Three" (1948) is the second book in the "Skylark" series and is set a year after the events of "The Skylark of Space", during which year antagonist Marc "Blackie" DuQuesne has used the wealth obtained in the previous book to buy a controlling interest in the story's 'World Steel Corporation', a large company known for its ruthless attitude. When the story begins DuQuesne announces a long absence from Earth, to find another species more knowledgeable than the Osnomians allied with protagonist Richard Seaton. Shortly thereafter, DuQuesne and a henchman disappear from Earth. DuQuesne, by now aware of the 'Object Compass' trained on him, travels far enough to break the connection, then turns toward the 'Green System' of which Osnome is a part. Seaton discovers this, but is distracted by attempts to master a "zone of force": essentially a spherical, immaterial shield, with whose present form Seaton is dissatisfied for its opacity and impenetrability even by the user.Seaton is then requested by his allies Dunark and Sitar, the crown prince and prince's consort of Osnome, to repel invasion by the natives of planet 'Urvan', Osnome's neighbor; whereupon Seaton and his millionaire sponsor, Martin Crane, accompanied by their wives and Crane's valet Shiro embark in the spaceship "Skylark II" to obtain the necessary minerals. Near the Green System, they are attacked by the hitherto-unseen natives of the planet 'Fenachrone', whose weaponry surpasses any known to Seaton or the Osnomians. Having used the 'zone of force' at first to conceal himself, and then to destroy the Fenachrone battleship, Seaton captures a leading crew-member, who reveals (upon interrogation) that the Fenachrone intend conquest of the entire Milky Way Galaxy, and eventually of the Universe, and that a message is already in progress toward the Fenachrone capital to summon aid. Discovering that Dunark and Sitar survived the destruction of their spaceship, the "Skylark II" tows the remnants of both vehicles to Osnome, where Seaton forces a peace treaty between Osnome and Urvan. Meanwhile, DuQuesne and his aide have also interrogated a Fenachrone and plan to capture an entire Fenachrone battleship for personal use.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_of_Venus"title="Pirates of Venus">
## Chapter 1.Carson NapierWhen the author receives a letter saying a woman in white will come to him on the night of the thirteenth, he dismisses it as nonsense. Jason Gridley calls, and the author visits him to discuss the latest news about von Horst, Tarzan, David Innes, Captain Zuppner and Abner Perry in Pellucidar. The woman appears on the thirteenth, walking through a closed door. She tells him "he" awaits a reply. Aided by his secretary Ralph Rothmund, the letter is found and a reply is sent. A few days later Carson Napier shows up at Tarzana, telling the story of his life including how he grew up in India, learning telepathy from the Hindu mystic Chand Kabi, how he lived with his mother's grandfather John Carson, and how he lost his mother. Revealing an intent to fly a rocket to Mars, he fades from view only to enter through the door again. He used telepathy for the meeting to ascertain they can uphold telepathic communication so the author may become the medium through which he tells the story of his adventures. Before returning to his rocket on Guadalupe Island, Napier leaves the author in charge of his personal fortune.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of_the_Slayers"title="Queen of the Slayers">
Following the Hellmouth's closure, hundreds of potential slayers have been awakened. Buffy Summers hoped that overturning the Slayer's self-sacrifice would result in her earning some relaxation following seven years of fighting. However, the victory is short-lived. Dark forces are arising to fill the gap left by the First.Willow's magical spell which sent slayer essence across the world has resulted in girls everywhere discovering a new power. The Scoobies travel to Europe. In London, Giles races to reorganize the remnants of the Watchers Council, hoping to overcome the shortcomings of its previous incarnation. Buffy, Xander, Willow, Dawn, and Dawn's new best friend, a young slayer named Belle travel to Rome to train new Slayers that are drawn to the infamous Immortal, Buffy is attracted to the Immortal, an ambiguous yet charismatic character, who she does not fully trust during the whole novel. They soon hear of an unknown "Queen of the Slayers" who is getting a number of the fresh slayers to form a mystical army. This likely evil seems determined to claim the slayer essence for herself, and viciously and cruelly murders any Slayers that don't cooperate with her and betray Buffy.Faith and Robin Wood take a group of Slayers to the Hellmouth in Cleveland, which has gone supernova with evil, to stabilize the hell there. They face many casualties, and experience strange projections of The Legion of Three, three deadly Hellgods.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spark_and_Burn"title="Spark and Burn">
Spike was born in the nineteenth century as a gentle, intellectual boy named William. As a young adult, he meets a woman called Drusilla, a mysterious vampire. William eventually becomes Spike.He travels Europe with a band of vicious vampires, Dru, Darla, and Angelus. They show him his new existence, and from them he finds out about that most serious of enemies to vampires, one girl in all the world chosen to fight the vampires and the forces of darkness, the Slayer.Having found a soul in Africa in the twenty-first century, Spike is tormented by the first evil and the guilt of his vampiric evils. He recalls many of the events that would lead him to the madness in the hell-influenced basement of the new Sunnydale High School.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_Me_in_Mind_(novel)"title="Keep Me in Mind (novel)">
Ethan Rayne comes back to Sunnydale and releases an evil sorcerer from Bavaria who had been imprisoned since the Middle Ages. At the same time Buffy seems to be finding herself up against a number of old adversaries out for revenge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Suicide_King"title="The Suicide King">
A number of student suicides has been taking place at Sunnydale High, shaking the community. Then the new grief counselor ends up killing himself, the Scoobies suspect that there is something supernatural to blame. Soon one of them shows suicidal signs and Buffy must race against time to defeat the ancient "Suicide King".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Lord_of_Derkholm"title="Dark Lord of Derkholm">
A fantasy world is dominated by its destructive tourist industry. "Mr. Chesney's Pilgrim Parties" arrange for annual group tours, evidently from our world, to experience all the cliches: wise Wizard Guides, attacks from Leathery-Winged Avians, the Glamorous Enchantress, the evil Dark Lord. It is a devastating show: farmlands are laid waste, people slain, and so on.The head of Wizards University, Querida, determines a way to end the tours. The apparently incompetent wizard Derk will be the next Dark Lord, and son Blade the Wizard Guide for the final tour. Querida overcomes objections all around and the plan is underway.The Wizard Derk has seven children with his wife the Enchantress Mara: Shona and Blade, the former being the older; Kit (black with gold eyes), the oldest griffin and a magic-user; Callette (brown with green-grey wings), who makes all 126 of the Dark Lord's "gizmos" with Mr. Chesney's world's technology; Don (gold), who is a rather forgotten griffin who doesn't really do much special; Lydda (gold), who is a great cook (her food is called "godlike snacks" by the rest of the family") and long-distance flier who plants the Dark Lord's "clues" that lead to his lair; and Elda (also gold), the youngest, with the most cat cells, and who is discovered to be a strong magic user as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Wizardry"title="Deep Wizardry">
Nita's family goes on vacation with Kit and his dog, Ponch, to the South Shore of Long Island. While swimming in the ocean at night, Nita encounters a dolphin (nicknamed 'Hotshot'), and Kit reports the local rocks' memory of disaster. In the following night, they are carried by the dolphin to a nearby beach, where they see a pack of sharks attacking a humpback whale wizard named S'reee, whom they rescue. Nita heals S'reee, and Nita and Kit return to shore. From S'reee, they hear of a 'Song of the Twelve', in which twelve cetacean wizards were tempted by the Lone Power to embrace entropy; and of the Twelve, three whales accepted this, three were undecided, and three rejected it. A Tenth whale, the Silent Lord, instead sacrificed herself, and was eaten by the Master Shark. This action bound the Lone Power for a time, and succeeding Songs (re-enacting the first) have kept it bound. Upon learning of an absence of wizards willing to join the Song, Nita volunteers herself as the Silent Lord, not knowing the implications; whereafter S'reee takes Nita and Kit to find other whales for the upcoming Song. Nita, having shared blood with S'reee while healing her, becomes a humpback whale without external aid, while Kit is given a 'whalesark' (a cloak containing the 'character' of a particular species) changing him into a sperm whale.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Wizardry"title="High Wizardry">
When Dairine, Nita's younger sister, finds Nita's copy of the Wizard's manual, she then proceeds to take the Wizard's Oath. Dairine is given her Wizard's manual in the form of a computer, which Dairine nicknames "Spot." Dairine uses her new power to travel to Mars, then to the Crossings, where she is attacked by agents of the Lone Power. When she uses a worldgate to flee, assisted by an unnamed man she meets in a bar, she finds herself on a giant planet consisting entirely of silicon. In the meantime, Nita and Kit discover she is missing and chase after her. Dairine awakens the massive computer embedded in the planet and gets to work designing and naming 'mobiles' after the planet begins to create quicklife (computer-based) creatures. She names them in a variety of ways ranging from computer programs to Star Wars characters.The Lone Power overshadows a mobile and stirs up animosity against Dairine, convincing a number of them to support him instead. Nita and Kit arrive in time to help her, assisted by the macaw Machu Picchu (Peach), who reveals herself as the One's Champion incarnate. With Peach's assistance, the Lone Power is defeated by stopping the universe from expanding. The resulting light that explodes as a result of this destroys the Lone Power. The Lone Power then returns to "home" with one of the Powers That Be. As he leaves, he tells Kit and Nita to destroy the "shadows" of him that remain. The universe continues to expand and Nita, Kit and Dairine return to their home, where Dairine's computer sprouts legs and follows her upstairs as Nita and Kit talk to their parents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McTeague"title="McTeague">
McTeague is a dentist of limited intellect from a poor miner's family, who has opened a dentist shop on Polk Street in San Francisco (his first name is never revealed; other characters in the novel call him simply "Mac."). His best friend, Marcus Schouler, brings his cousin, Trina Sieppe, whom he is courting, to McTeague's parlor for dental work. McTeague becomes infatuated with Trina while working on her teeth, and Marcus graciously steps aside. McTeague successfully woos Trina. Shortly after the two have kissed and declared their love for each other, Trina discovers that she has won $5,000 (roughly $166,000 in 2022 values) from a lottery ticket. In the ensuing celebration Trina's mother, Mrs. Sieppe, announces that McTeague and Trina are to marry. Marcus becomes jealous of McTeague and claims that he has been cheated out of money that would have been rightfully his if he had married Trina.The marriage takes place, and Mrs. Sieppe, along with the rest of Trina's family, moves away from San Francisco, leaving her alone with McTeague. Trina proves to be a parsimonious wife; she refuses to touch the principal of her $5,000, which she invests with her uncle. She insists that she and McTeague must live on the earnings from McTeague's dental practice, the small income from the $5,000 investment, and the bit of money she earns from carving small wooden figures of Noah's animals and his Ark for sale in her uncle's shop. Secretly, she accumulates penny-pinched savings in a locked trunk. Though the couple is happy, the friendship between Marcus and McTeague deteriorates. More than once the two men come to grips; each time McTeague's immense physical strength prevails, and eventually, he breaks Marcus's arm in a fight. When Marcus recovers, he goes south, intending to become a rancher; before he leaves, he visits McTeague, and he and McTeague part apparently as friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princess_Bride_(novel)"title="The Princess Bride (novel)">
In a Renaissance-era world, a young woman named Buttercup lives on a farm in the country of Florin. She abuses the farm hand, Westley, calling him "farm boy" and demands that he perform chores for her. Westley's response to her demands is always "As you wish." She eventually realizes that what he is saying is, "I love you." After Buttercup realizes that she loves him and confesses her feelings, Westley goes to seek his fortune so they can marry. Buttercup later receives a letter that the Dread Pirate Roberts attacked Westley's ship at sea. Believing that Westley is dead, since the Dread Pirate Roberts is famous for not taking captives, Buttercup sinks into despair. Years later, she reluctantly agrees to marry Prince Humperdinck, heir to the throne of Florin.Before the wedding, a trio of outlaws — the Sicilian criminal genius Vizzini, the Spanish fencing master Inigo Montoya, and the enormous and mighty Turkish wrestler Fezzik — kidnap Buttercup. A masked man in black follows them across the sea and up the Cliffs of Insanity, after which Vizzini orders Inigo to stop the pursuer. Before the man in black reaches the top of the cliff, a flashback of Inigo's past reveals that he is seeking revenge on a six-fingered man who had killed Inigo's father. When the man in black arrives, Inigo challenges him to a duel. The man in black wins the duel but leaves the Spaniard alive. Vizzini then orders Fezzik to kill the man in black. A flashback showed Fezzik as a lonely boy who was "accepted" by Vizzini. His conscience compelling him to fair play, Fezzik throws a rock as a warning to the man in black and challenges him to a wrestling match. The man in black accepts the challenge and chokes Fezzik until the giant blacks out. The man in black then catches up with Vizzini and proposes a Battle of the Wits, challenging Vizzini to guess which of two cups of wine is poisoned with iocane powder. They drink, and Vizzini dies. The man in black then explains to Buttercup that he had poisoned both cups, having built up an immunity to iocane powder beforehand.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schism_(novel)"title="Schism (novel)">
The novel takes place about 25 years after the events in the previous novel, "Skyfall (novel)". Eldrinson Valdoria and his wife Roca Skolia live happily on his homeworld Lyshriol and have ten children. Some of them have already left home, like the second oldest son Althor who is training to become a Jagernaut, or the firstborn Eldrin who at the request of the Skolian Assembly had to marry his aunt, the Ruby Pharaoh Dyhianna Selei.The sixth of the Valdoria children, 16-year-old Sauscony (Soz), wants to enter the Military academy to become a Jagernaut like her brother. But Eldrinson has other plans – he would rather prefer to see his "little girl" living safely on Lyshriol, married to a local landlord. When she disobeys, he disowns both her (for leaving) and Althor (for taking her off-world). Though he regrets his harsh words immediately, he has no chance to take them back. Soon after, his teenage son Shannon, unhappy about the family discord, runs away from home.The book is told from the perspective of several main characters – young Soz during her military training; Shannon searching for his lost kin, the mystic Blue Dale archers; and their father Eldrinson, being captured, crippled, and nearly tortured to death by a sadistic Aristo who infiltrated Lyshriol to destroy the Ruby Dynasty.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyfall_(novel)"title="Skyfall (novel)">
It is a turbulent time for the Skolian Empire. Kurj is trying to lead his people into war with the Traders, a more massive empire. He uses his powerful connections to control his mother who is attempting to sway the Assembly otherwise. The book begins with Roca, in hiding, trying to get to the Assembly meeting. During her voyage, she ends up stranded on a planet known as Skyfall. There, on a planet once part of the Ruby Empire but now antiquated in its technology, she meets Eldrinson Valdoria, and due to extreme weather and lack of incoming ships, she is stranded there for approximately one year. During that time she falls in love with Eldrinson and becomes pregnant.The novel also periodically shifts to describe the perspective of Kurj, a Primary (top ranking) Jagernaut (most feared warriors of the Skolian Empire) and grandson of the ruling couple of Skolian Empire, Pharaoh Lahaylia and Imperator Jarac. Kurj is obsessed with stopping the slave-driven empire of the Traders. But when his mother escapes his clutches, he fears the worst, and spends much of the novel obsessing over finding her instead. We also learn of some of the horrors from his past, giving meaning to his stoic nature.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Penelopiad"title="The Penelopiad">
The novel recaps Penelope's life in hindsight from 21st-century Hades; she recalls her family life in Sparta, her marriage to Odysseus, her dealing with suitors during his absence, and the aftermath of Odysseus' return. The relationship with her parents was challenging: her father became overly affectionate after attempting to murder her, and her mother was absent-minded and negligent. At fifteen, Penelope married Odysseus, who had rigged the contest that decided which suitor would marry her. Penelope was happy with him, even though he was mocked behind his back by Helen and some maids for his short stature and lesser developed home, Ithaca. The couple broke with tradition by moving to the husband's kingdom. In Ithaca, neither Odysseus' mother Anticleia, nor his nurse Eurycleia, liked Penelope but eventually Eurycleia helped Penelope settle into her new role and became friendly, but often patronising.Shortly after the birth of their son, Telemachus, Odysseus was called to war, leaving Penelope to run the kingdom and raise Telemachus alone. News of the war and rumours of Odysseus' journey back sporadically reached Ithaca and with the growing possibility that Odysseus was not returning an increasing number of suitors moved in to court Penelope. Convinced the suitors were more interested in controlling her kingdom than loving her, she stalled them. The suitors pressured her by consuming and wasting much of the kingdom's resources. She feared violence if she outright denied their offer of marriage so she announced she would make her decision on which to marry once she finished her father-in-law's shroud. She enlisted twelve maids to help her unravel the shroud at night and spy on the suitors. Odysseus eventually returned but in disguise. Penelope recognised him immediately and instructed her maids not to reveal his identity. After the suitors were massacred, Odysseus instructed Telemachus to execute the maids who he believed were in league with them. Twelve were hanged while Penelope slept. Afterwards, Penelope and Odysseus told each other stories of their time apart, but on the issue of the maids Penelope remained silent to avoid the appearance of sympathy for those already judged and condemned as traitors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Consciousness"title="Understanding Consciousness">
Part 1 reviews the strengths and weaknesses of all currently dominant theories of consciousness, in a form suitable for undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers, focusing mainly on dualism, physicalism, functionalism and consciousness in machines. Part 2 gives a new analysis of consciousness, grounded in its everyday phenomenology, which challenges presuppositions that form the basis of the dualism versus reductionist debate. It also examines the consequences for realism versus idealism, subjectivity, intersubjectivity and objectivity, and the relation of consciousness to brain processing. Part 3 gives a new synthesis, with a novel approach to understanding what consciousness is, and a novel approach to what consciousness does that pays particular attention to the paradoxes surrounding the causal interactions of consciousness with the brain. It also introduces reflexive monism, an alternative to dualism and reductionism that aims to be consistent with the findings of science and with common sense.Both reductionism and dualism are guilty, Velmans asserts, of not paying enough attention to the "phenomenology" of consciousness, the condition of "being aware of something". Reductionism, for example, attempts to reduce consciousness to being a state of the brain; thus consciousness is nothing more than its neural causes and correlates. This, Velmans says, is guilty of breaking Leibniz's assertion that, in order for A to be identical to B (that is, for consciousness to be a state of the brain), the properties of A must also be the properties of B. Velmans here argues that the subjective, phenomenal experience of consciousness is entirely unlike the neural states of the brain, and thus may not be reduced to them; that is, the phenomenal properties of consciousness are not identifiable with the physical brain states that arguably cause them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dogs_of_War_(novel)"title="The Dogs of War (novel)">
## Prologue.In 1970, Anglo-Irish mercenary Carlo Alfred Thomas "Cat" Shannon and his four fellow mercenaries – German ex-smuggler Kurt Semmler, South African mortar expert Janni Dupree, Belgian bazooka specialist "Tiny" Marc Vlaminck, and Corsican knife-fighter Jean-Baptiste Langarotti – leave a West African war they have lost, saying their goodbyes to the general who had employed them for the past six months. While the general and his people leave for exile in one plane, Shannon, his men and a group of nuns with their orphan charges fly out for Libreville in another, piloted by a South African mercenary. After a six-week "House arrest" in a hotel, the mercenaries are flown to Paris, where they part company.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizard's_Dilemma"title="The Wizard's Dilemma">
Nita and Kit start to fight about the solution to the pollution in Jones Inlet, leading Nita to start to work on her own for a while. In the meantime, Nita's mother falls ill and is taken to the hospital with a brain tumor.Meanwhile, Kit finds out that his dog, Ponch, is able to create universes out of nothing, bringing in a lot of research possibilities where they can explore. Nita begins to practice with kernels - magical "software" that describes and reflects the surrounding area- in order to try to save her mother's life.While practicing, Nita meets a wizard named Pralaya who might be able to join her in saving her mother's life. She then discovers that the wizard may be overshadowed by the Lone Power, making it a dangerous prospect for them to work together. She discusses it with Kit, who decides to help her as well.While her mother is in surgery, Nita enters her body with Pralaya and begins to search for the kernel in order to kill the cancer, leaving Kit behind. Kit, using the universes Ponch creates, is able to also enter Mrs. Callahan's body to aid Nita and her mother. He helps her undo the deal she was in the process of making with the Lone Power for her mother's life, but she is still unable to eliminate all of the cancer. As the Lone Power is gloating in his anticipated victory, Nita's mother is able to take control of the kernel and defeat the Lone Power. She realizes that if she were to cure herself, she would be starting down a path at the end of which nothing would matter to her except extending her life, so she chooses to live out what life is left to her in love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard's_Holiday"title="Wizard's Holiday">
When Nita's sister Dairine signs up for an intragalactic exchange program without permission, their local advisors transfer the mission to Nita and Kit. The destination seems to be an ideal planet, and they are hoping for a vacation. Meanwhile, the aliens who arrive at Dairine's house appear to be very "alien". However, Nita's dreams become nightmarish and the planet Alaalu turns out to be hiding a dark secret: an avatar of the Lone Power has been trapped in this dystopia since their people refused Its gift of entropy. While this may have prevented deterioration to war, crime and natural disasters, among other things, it also prevented such change as evolution, and the Alaalu people are trapped in their current stage of existence when they have the potential to be free of it. It becomes the young wizards' job to convince the Alaalu wizard and her people to accept this change, inevitably setting the Lone Power free.On Earth, the wizards at Dairine's place have become aware that their Sun is in danger of flaring up to the point of scorching their planet. However, one of the visitors comes from a planet where he is a guardian against the recurrence of such a disaster, and recognizes it in time for them to save the Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeelee_Sequence"title="Xeelee Sequence">
The overarching plot of the Xeelee Sequence involves an intergalactic war between humanity and the Xeelee, and a cosmic war between the Xeelee and the Photino Birds, with the latter two being alien species that originated in the early universe. The technologically advanced Xeelee primarily inhabit supermassive black holes, manipulating their event horizons to create preferable living environments, construction materials, tools, and computing devices. The Photino Birds are a dark matter-based species that live in the gravity wells of stars, who are likely not aware of baryonic life forms due to dark matter's weak interactions with normal matter. Due to the inevitable risk of their habitats being destroyed by supernovae and other consequences of stellar evolution, the Photino Birds work to halt nuclear fusion in the cores of stars, prematurely aging them into stable white dwarfs. The resulting dwarfs provide them with suitable habitats for billions of times longer than other types of stars could, but at the expense of other forms of life on nearby planets. The Photino Birds' activities also effectively stop the formation of new black holes due to a lack of Type II supernovae, threatening the existence of the Xeelee and their cosmic projects.After overcoming a series of brutal occupations by extraterrestrial civilizations, humanity expands into the galaxy with an extremely xenophobic and militaristic outlook, with aims to exterminate other species they encounter. Humans eventually become the second-most advanced and widespread civilization in the Milky Way galaxy, after the Xeelee. Unaware of the Photino–Xeelee war and the existential ramifications of what is at stake, humanity come to the (unwarranted) conclusion that the Xeelee are a sinister and destructive threat to their hegemony and security. Through a bitter war of attrition, humans end up containing the Xeelee to the galactic core. Both humans and the Xeelee gain strategic intelligence by using time travel as a war tactic, through the use of closed timelike curves, resulting in a stalemate for thousands of years. Eventually, humanity develops defensive, movable pocket universes to compartmentalize and process information, and an exotic weapon able to damage the ecological stability of the core's supermassive black hole. Minutes after the first successful strike, the Xeelee withdraw from the galaxy, effectively ceding the Milky Way to fully human control. Humanity continued to advance technologically for a hundred thousand years afterwards, then attacked the Xeelee across the Local Group of galaxies. However, despite having annoyed the Xeelee enough to give up activities in the Milky Way, humans, having become an extremely powerful Type III civilization themselves at this point, prove only to be a minor distraction to the Xeelee on the whole, being ultimately unable to meaningfully challenge their dominance across the universe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_and_the_Puppet"title="The Woman and the Puppet">
During the carnival in Seville, the Frenchman André Stévenol meets and falls under the spell of Concepción 'Conchita' Pérez, a young Andalusian woman. His friend, don Mateo Diaz warns him off by describing his own history with the woman – a history of being repeatedly attracted and then rebuffed by her. Conchita continually flirted with other men to torture don Mateo. On each occasion he was made to feel guilty for his jealous thoughts and actions towards her, until he realised finally that he had been her puppet for fourteen months and in an explosion of passion he beat her. She then astonished him by declaring the violence a sign of the strength of his love and came to his bed. She was a virgin. Although the two then started living together, she continued her flirtatious behaviour towards other men and simultaneously became very possessive. Don Mateo left the country and travelled for a year to escape her.The novel has a short epilogue, described as the moral of the piece. The Frenchman accidentally meets Conchita again, and they spend the night together. The next morning, as Conchita packs her bags for Paris, a note is received from don Mateo asking to be taken back into Conchita's good graces.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe's_Gold"title="Sharpe's Gold">
General Wellington orders Richard Sharpe to find out what happened to Claud Hardy, one of Major Michael Hogan's exploring officers, who was sent to locate Spanish gold thought to be in the (fictional) hamlet of Casatejada, and to retrieve the gold himself through any means necessary, as Wellington's army is in desperate need of funds.Sharpe sets off with his small company and links up with Major Kearsey, another of Hogan's exploring officers. Kearsey makes it clear that he believes that the gold belongs to the Spanish and the purpose of the mission is to return it to them. They meet the local partisan commander El Catolico, who delights in torturing French prisoners to death.When Kearsey is captured by the French, Sharpe decides to go into the town and rescue him, as the partisans trust the major. They succeed, at the cost of a few of their own men, and free not only Kearsey, but also Teresa Moreno and her brother Ramon. The Spanish guerrillas soon enter the town, and they surprise Sharpe as he searches for the gold.El Catolico admits knowledge of the gold and strongly implies the British intend to take possession of it rather than merely escort it to the Spanish in Cadiz. He claims to Sharpe and Major Kearsey that he witnessed the French take the gold and capture Captain Hardy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Monk_and_the_Dirty_Cop"title="Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop">
Adrian Monk and Natalie Teeger stop by the local university to investigate an apparent open-and-shut self-defense case. Professor Jeremiah Cowan was giving a class when a gunman burst into the room and pointed a gun at him. Cowan shot the intruder before the intruder could shoot.The dead man was Ford Oldman, who had apparently made several threats against Cowan in the past. Monk explains to Captain Stottlemeyer and Lieutenant Disher how Cowan staged the scene, but before he can explain Cowan's motive, Natalie cuts him off, since the department hasn't paid Monk for his consulting.Later that day, Stottlemeyer calls Natalie to say that he has Monk's check at the station. Arriving at the station, they notice that the San Francisco Police Department is making large budget cuts. It starts when Disher asks if they can break a $20 so he can get a cup of coffee from the machine, which the OCD-ridden Monk isn't willing to do. Stottlemeyer asks Monk to accompany him to the Conference of Metropolitan Homicide Detectives, which this year is being held in San Francisco. At the conference, Stottlemeyer reveals several things, including Monk's case clearance rate. After, the captain thinks Paul Braddock, the moderator (and a detective from Banning, California), used to work for the SFPD until Stottlemeyer threatened to expose his abusive methods to Internal Affairs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ashram"title="The Ashram">
Jonathan Kingsley tries to save himself from suicidal thoughts after the death of his wife by travelling to a Himalayan spiritual hermitage, known as an Ashram, to provide him peace through volunteer work.As the doctor searches for an excuse to keep on living, Seeta struggles to keep her own husband alive, both out of love and for her own safety. The townspeople of Baramedi, bowing to the wishes of a local landowner (nicknamed Satan), have decided that when her husband dies, Seeta should climb onto a burning pyre to burn with his body. This practice of suttee, out of use for many years, brings Jonathan to her town in an effort to save her, but when he arrives at the pyre, he realizes there is more to his journey, and that the woman's safety is intricately tied with his own spiritual salvation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grass_Harp"title="The Grass Harp">
The story begins with Collin Fenwick losing his mother, and then his father, and moving into his aunts' (Dolly and Verena) house. Catherine, the servant, also lives in the house and gets along, for the most part, only with Dolly. Dolly is famous for her medicine, which she makes by going out into the woods with Catherine and Collin and randomly picking plants. They then go to an old treehouse, which is propped up in a Chinaberry tree. One day, after Dolly has an argument with Verena (Verena wants to mass-produce Dolly's medicine), Dolly, Collin, and Catherine leave their home and start walking. They go to the treehouse in the Chinaberry tree, and decide to camp out there. Verena, meanwhile, informs the sheriff of her sister's disappearance; the Sheriff organizes a search party, and eventually arrests Catherine. During the course of the novel, others come to live in the treehouse, such as Judge Cool and Riley Henderson. In a climactic event, a confrontation among the search party and the residents of the tree house leads to Riley getting shot in the shoulder. After Judge Cool discusses the situation, everyone agrees that it was a pointless struggle, and old relationships are invigorated once again. Many people leave as friends. The story ends with how a "grass harp, gathering, telling, a harp of voices remembering a story."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Little_Wolves_and_the_Big_Bad_Pig"title="The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig">
The story features three anthropomorphic wolves who build four houses using different types of materials: bricks, concrete, steel, and flowers. A big bad pig tries to destroy the houses made of bricks, concrete, and steel by huffing and puffing, but fails, so he finds a way to destroy those houses by using a sledgehammer for the bricks, a pneumatic drill for the concrete, and dynamite for the steel. However, when the pig tries to blow down the flower house, he smells the fragrant flowers, and has a change of heart. The pig then becomes a good pig, and he and the wolves live happily ever after as friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voices_from_the_Gathering_Storm"title="Voices from the Gathering Storm">
A collection of essays that discuss social, cultural, and technological factors contributing to our environmental predicament. It proposes the need for a change in the religion of consumption, a change in our definitions of progress and success from increased consumption to increased stewardship of our diminishing resources and shrinking planet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norstrilia"title="Norstrilia">
## Setting.The planet "Old North Australia", or simply "Norstrilia", is the only planet in the Instrumentality of Mankind fictional universe which produces the precious immortality drug "stroon", which indefinitely delays aging in humans. Stroon (or the "Santaclara drug") is harvested from the huge diseased sheep the Norstrilians raise, and has resisted all attempts at artificial synthesis. Since the Norstrilians have a monopoly, stroon sells for astronomical prices, and Norstrilia is fabulously wealthy (wealthier than any other single planet). To safeguard their archaic way of life (resembling Australian ranchers with a British cultural inheritance), the Norstrilians are forced to develop the most advanced defense force and weaponry known (for example, Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons); to protect their culture, imports from other worlds are taxed at rates exceeding 20 million percent, reducing what would be a staggering fortune on another planet to humble penury on Norstrilia itself. They are also forced to cull their young in order to prevent overpopulation (only those who pass the test of the "Garden of Death" are allowed to enter adulthood).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_Revolutions"title="Only Revolutions">
The story alternates between two different narratives: Sam and Hailey, and Hailey and Sam, wild and wayward teenagers who never grow old. With an evolving stable of cars, the teenagers move through various places and moments in time as they try to outrace history.As the story proceeds, one can note that many events are perceptual and not certain. By reading both stories some sense can be made from this poetic styled puzzle. The words written are a vague mix of poetry and stream of consciousness prose. Both Hailey and Sam depict their feelings as well as ideas and thoughts towards one another.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe's_Battle"title="Sharpe's Battle">
While lost near the Spanish-Portuguese border, Sharpe and his company surprise a group of French soldiers in unusual grey uniforms, caught in the act of raping a teenage Spanish villager. They kill some Frenchmen and take two prisoner. During a parlay, their leader, Brigadier-General Guy Loup, offers to give Sharpe safe passage in exchange for the men, but Sharpe, appalled by the rape and massacre of the other villagers, including children, orders the prisoners shot. (Loup reveals that he counters the atrocities committed by Spanish guerrillas by having his men commit more heinous ones.) Loup swears to avenge them.Back at headquarters, Sharpe is informed by Major Michael Hogan that the Real Compania Irlandesa, the royal bodyguard of the captive King of Spain, have been sent to join Wellesley's forces. As the British wish for Wellesley to be appointed Generalissimo of the Spanish Armies, it is imperative that the unwanted soldiers be treated with honour, though they are composed of Irish exiles and their descendants (who have no love for the British due to their occupation of Ireland) and have no combat experience. Wellesley assigns Sharpe to encourage them to desert by taking them to a fort close to the French and drilling them mercilessly. There Sharpe also has to deal with former Wagon Master-General Colonel Claude Runciman, a grossly fat and indolent man.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King's_Fifth"title="The King's Fifth">
The story takes place in a time when the Spanish adventurers, known as Conquistadors, colonised the New World of the Americas, in search of the mythical gold treasures of the dethroned Native Americans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunes_for_Bears_to_Dance_To"title="Tunes for Bears to Dance To">
11-year-old Henry Cassavant moves with his parents to a new town to escape from the memories of Henry's older brother Eddie, who was hit and killed by a car. Henry contributes to his family by working at a grocery store for Mr. Hairston, a deceptive old man who makes rude and racist comments about the townsfolk that would walk by his store. Despite his gruffness, Mr. Hairston appears to have a special liking for Henry, occasionally giving him candy bars.Every day, Henry watches an old man leave the "crazy house" near his apartment and disappear down the street. Henry is very curious about what the old man does but cannot follow him because he is recovering from a fractured knee and is on crutches. The day after his leg is healed, Henry follows the old man to an art center, where he meets him in person. From George Graham, the supervisor of the center, Henry learns the old man, Mr. Levine, is a Holocaust survivor who lost his family to the SS. Mr Levine goes to the art center every day to carve out a model of his old hometown, complete with carvings of all the people he had lost, including his wife and children.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somnium_(novel)"title="Somnium (novel)">
The story begins with Kepler reading about a skillful magician named Libussa. He falls asleep while reading about her. He recounts a strange dream he had from reading that book. The dream begins with Kepler reading a book about Duracotus, an Icelandic boy who is 14 years old. Duracotus' mother, Fiolxhilde, makes a living selling bags of herbs and cloth with strange markings on them. Duracotus is sold by Fiolxhilde to a skipper after cutting into one of these bags and ruining her sale. He travels with the skipper for a while until a letter is to be delivered to Tycho Brahe on the island of Hven (now Ven, Sweden). Since Duracotus is made seasick by the trip there, the skipper leaves Duracotus to deliver the letter and stay with Tycho.Tycho asks his students to teach Duracotus Danish so they can talk. Along with learning Danish, Duracotus learns of astronomy from Tycho and his students. Duracotus is fascinated with astronomy and enjoys the time they spend looking at the night sky. Duracotus spends several years with Tycho before returning home to Iceland.Upon his return to Iceland, Duracotus finds his mother still alive. She is overjoyed to learn that he is well-studied in astronomy as she too possesses knowledge of astronomy. One day, Fiolxhilde reveals to Duracotus how she learned of the heavens. She tells him about the daemons she can summon. These daemons can move her anywhere on Earth in an instant. If the place is too far away for them to take her, they describe it in great detail. She then summons her favorite daemon to speak with them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_to_Pakistan"title="Train to Pakistan">
Mano Majra, the fictional village on the border of Pakistan and India in which the story takes place, is predominantly Muslim and Sikh. Singh shows how they lived in a bubble, surrounded by mobs of Muslims who hate Sikhs and mobs of Sikhs who hate Muslims, while in the village they had always lived together peacefully. Villagers were in the dark about happenings of larger scope than the village outskirts, gaining much of their information through rumor and word of mouth. This made them especially susceptible to outside views. Upon learning that the government was planning to transport Muslims from Mano Majra to Pakistan the next day for their safety, one Muslim said, “What have we to do with Pakistan? We were born here. So were our ancestors. We have lived amongst [Sikhs] as brothers” (126). Juggut Singh, a local Sikh tough, has a Muslim lover Nooran, who leaves for the refugee camp. After the Muslims leave to a refugee camp from where they will eventually go to Pakistan, a group of religious agitators comes to Mano Majra and instills in the local Sikhs a hatred for Muslims and convinces a local gang to attempt mass murder as the Muslims leave on their train to Pakistan. Juggut, knowing Nooran is in one of the rail-cars, acts on instinct and sacrifices his life to save the train.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Monk_Goes_to_Hawaii"title="Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii">
Natalie Teeger is invited to be the maid of honor at the wedding of her best friend Candace in Hawaii. Feeling he cannot cope without her for even a day, her boss Adrian Monk gets a seat on her flight to Hawaii, using Doxinyl (an OCD-control drug that also disables Monk's detecting skills, first seen in "Mr. Monk Takes His Medicine") to suppress his fear of flying.Candace drives them to the Grand Kiahuna Poipu resort in Poipu. At the wedding, Monk's Doxinyl wears off and he exposes that Candace's fiancé Brian Galloway is already married, and has been planning to travel back and forth between his two families. Furious and mortified, Candace storms out. With the wedding canceled, Monk is eager to go home, but their booking is for a week, and Natalie plans to enjoy it.Monk and Natalie stumble upon a police investigation at one of the resort's bungalows. The local Kauai police lieutenant, Ben Kealoha, tells them that elderly Helen Gruber was sitting in her hot tub when a coconut fell from a palm tree and struck her on the head, knocking her out, after which she drowned. Monk declares it to be murder, since the coconut has a soft spot from having rested on the ground. He says Gruber was killed in the bungalow, not the hot tub, since she is not wearing any suntan lotion. Lance Vaughan, Helen's husband who is thirty years her junior, was on a snorkeling trip at the time she was killed, and has video footage to prove it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scarlatti_Inheritance"title="The Scarlatti Inheritance">
In Washington during World War II, word is received that an elite member of the Nazi High Command is willing to defect and divulge information that will shorten the war. But his defection entails the release of the ultra-top-secret file on the Scarlatti Inheritance – a file whose contents will destroy many of the Western world's greatest and most illustrious reputations if they are made known. From there, the book takes itself back a few decades, and tells the story of a corrupt American soldier, his billionaire mother, and an agent working for one of the smallest secret service departments in the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fate_Totally_Worse_than_Death"title="A Fate Totally Worse than Death">
Danielle, Brooke and Tiffany are planning an evil welcome to Cliffside High for Helga, the ravishing exchange student from Norway—until they realize that something ghastly is happening to them, something they'd no doubt describe as...'a fate totally worse than death!'
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_(short_story_collection)"title="Birthday (short story collection)">
The book consists of three short stories occurring each in a different timeframe, and are all related to the "Ring" universe:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_and_Fog"title="Blood and Fog">
Spike and the current Slayer of 1888 form an alliance to battle "Jack the Ripper", a prostitute-murdering madman. It is learned Jack is not at all human. The alliance fails and Jack survives to come to Sunnydale in the modern day. He has plans, and using a mystical fog, he desires to kill more of the human race, which he hates.Soon, the fog does arise, which is used as cover as a demon army rampages through the streets of Sunnydale. The threat is neutralized; unfortunately there are heavy citizen casualties.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_of_Souls_(Buffy_novel)"title="Carnival of Souls (Buffy novel)">
A traveling carnival arrives in Sunnydale. It seems the carnival might be another victim of Sunnydale's weirdness. Nobody seems to be able to remember it arriving despite the many old-style wagons, the numerous performers, and horse-drawn carts. The creepy calliope music seems almost to beckon out to people. Also nobody who goes into Hall of Mirrors comes out exactly the same as they were to start with. Inspired by a pair of once-homely twins now parading around the school like divas, the Scoobs decide to investigate the carnival. It's soon clear that entering comes at a cost above the price of admission. Willow becomes consumed by envy, Cordelia gets greedy, and Xander finds himself overtaken with gluttony. Angel is revealing a dangerous new persona, whilst anger rises in Rupert Giles. More serious still, Buffy's pride starts to threaten those she cares about.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Train_(novel)"title="Night Train (novel)">
This book is told from the perspective of Detective Mike Hoolihan, a female detective who is charged with the task of finding the motivation for Jennifer Rockwell's suicide (she shot herself in the head three times, supposedly). Jennifer, a beautiful astrophysicist with a seemingly perfect life seems to have had no reason to kill herself. Thematically, the book touches on cosmology and chaos theory, and their relation to the human condition as a possible motive for suicide.Hoolihan is a recovering alcoholic and former homicide detective who lives with an obese man named Tobe in an unnamed American city. She reveals that she had been sexually abused as a child, revolted violently against the abuse at the age of ten, and then pursued a number of affairs with abusive or unworthy men. Despite her disadvantages, she becomes a successful detective before her illness forces her to accept less demanding work seizing assets from criminals. Her experiences lead her to examine gender roles in police work.Her former boss, mentor and personal friend "Colonel" Tom Rockwell, asks her to investigate the apparent suicide of his daughter Jennifer who, as a beautiful, intelligent, cheerful, popular woman, had no obvious reason for taking her own life. Rockwell suspects Jennifer's lover Trader Faulkner, a distinguished academic, of murdering Jennifer. Hoolihan attempts to pressure Faulkner into confessing, but fails. She discovers that Jennifer was taking lithium, met a philandering salesman in the bar of a local hotel, and made uncharacteristic mistakes at work shortly before her death. Hoolihan then deduces that these factors are merely "blinds" - or clues - deliberately planted by Jennifer for the benefit of an investigation at the behest of her father. Hoolihan concludes that these blinds are meant either to provide the less astute investigator with a sense of "closure", or to indicate a greater bleakness, or nihilism. After breaking down while attempting to communicate her findings to Rockwell - who immediately expresses his concern - Hoolihan heads for the nearest bar, knowing that the alcohol will kill her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackout_(Buffy_novel)"title="Blackout (Buffy novel)">
It is 1977, the summer of a brutal blackout, the time of the Son of Sam murders, and a period of brutal fiscal disaster for New York City. The slayer Nikki Wood fights against the forces of darkness and also tries to protect her son, Robin. Meanwhile, Spike and Drusilla arrive in the city hoping to hunt down a slayer, not without the local vampire community soon discovering of their arrival.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates!_In_an_Adventure_with_Scientists"title="The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists">
The book is set in 1837, and follows the adventures of "The Pirate Captain" and his crew of unorthodox pirates. They meet a young Charles Darwin and Mister Bobo, a highly trained and sophisticated "man-panzee", who have been exiled from London by a rival scientist. Having sunk the "Beagle", which he believed was a Bank of England treasure ship thanks to a tip-off from Black Bellamy, the Pirate Captain agrees to take Darwin home and help him defeat his enemies and the very evil and angry Queen Victoria.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dying_Days"title="The Dying Days">
In the year 1997, Bernice Summerfield is recovering from the breakdown of her marriage at the Doctor's house on the fictional Allen Road near Adisham in Kent. To her surprise, when the TARDIS arrives it is the Eighth Doctor that steps out. Before Benny can come to terms with the change, a helicopter crash lands nearby, carrying soil samples from Mars and a prisoner, astronaut Alex Christian, who has been incarcerated since he killed the crew of a British Mars mission. Or so everyone thought. In reality, his crew were killed by Ice Warriors and his imprisonment was part of a deal negotiated between the British government and the Martian authorities. Since then, there have been no further missions to Mars, but now Britain has sent a new mission back to the planet. British astronauts land on Mars where they intrude on the tomb of an Ice Lord. The Ice Warrior Xznaal arrives on Earth with the pretence of vengeance, but is secretly in league with the British Science Minister, Lord Greyhaven. When the Eighth Doctor interferes with their plans, Xznaal releases a deadly weapon known as the Red Death. This apparently kills the Doctor, leaving Bernice and the Brigadier to deal with the invading Ice Warriors…
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_(novel)"title="Wizard (novel)">
"Wizard" takes place in 2100, seventy-five years after the events in "Titan". Cirocco has become an alcoholic, apparently due to the strain of being the "Wizard". Gaby Plauget has taken up the slack, carrying out special projects for Gaea such as building the Circum-Gaea Highway, in return for which she gets some of the benefits Cirocco enjoys, including apparently perpetual youth. Gaea herself is bored, spending her time in the hub with her sycophants and watches old movies. Gaea provides miracle cures to those who come to her from Earth and prove themselves worthy by doing something "heroic" – for example, travel once round the circumference of the great wheel. This provides Gaea with entertainment, as she arranges hazards for them to overcome or die trying; and by providing cures for diseases, Gaea proves her value to humanity so that they do not turn on her and destroy her.Chris Major and Robin the Nine-Fingered are two pilgrims looking for a cure. Chris suffers from psychotic episodes which are often accompanied by paranormal "luck". Robin is a member of a group of latter day witches living in an O'Neill orbital habitat who has a strange epilepsy that only manifests in gravity higher than the Moon's. She claims that she bit off one of her fingers to drive away the fits, though it is later revealed she cut it off. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_(novel)"title="Demon (novel)">
"Demon" takes place in the years 2113 through 2121, thirteen to twenty-one years after the events of "Wizard". Earth is in the grip of a protracted nuclear war, possibly started by Gaea herself. Some survivors are rescued by mysterious pods called "mercy flights" that bring them to Gaea. They are cured of all their physical ills, but still mentally damaged from the war, they are dumped in the twilight city of Bellinzona in Dione, an anarchic place where the local brain is dead, Gaea has limited control, and criminals run the show. Due to the war, humankind's future is now in the wheel, and at the mercy of its senile ruler.Cirocco Jones has become a fugitive and resistance leader, supported by the Titanides, who call her the "Captain," and the Angels, who call her the "Wing Commander". The increasingly demented and film-obsessed Gaea has replaced the Avatar that Jones destroyed at the end of "Wizard" with a replica of Marilyn Monroe. She spends her time in a traveling film festival of her own making, called "Pandemonium", where she is attended by various humans and many bizarre creatures of her own creation, such as living film cameras.Gaea has developed "deathsnakes", which infest and reanimate the corpses of humans and other creatures who die in the wheel. Leading these zombies are horrifying beings called "Priests:" undead field commanders made by Gaea from parts of her human victims.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wayward_Bus"title="The Wayward Bus">
No single character dominates "The Wayward Bus". The viewpoint shifts frequently from one character to another, often taking the form of internal monologue so that we are experiencing a given character's thoughts. Much of the novel's length is simply devoted to establishing and delineating the various characters.This novel takes place firmly within the "Steinbeck country" of California's Salinas Valley (although the three primary locations described are all fictional): most of the narrative occurs at Rebel Corners, a crossroads 42 miles south of a San Ysidro, California that is described as being north of Los Angeles. Juan Chicoy (half-Mexican, half-Irish) maintains a small bus, nicknamed "Sweetheart". He earns his living as a mechanic, and by ferrying passengers between Rebel Corners and San Juan de la Cruz. The larger Greyhound Bus Company serves both of those locations on separate routes, but does not have service connecting the two.Juan and his wife Alice also own a small lunch counter at Rebel Corners. The Chicoys supplement their income by selling food, coffee and candy to people who pass through on the bus route. Rebel Corners is such an obscure place that nobody actually lives there except for the Chicoys and their employees of the moment. Alice is devoted to her marriage but is in all other ways a deeply unhappy woman, who despises and distrusts all other women.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Ultimate_Truths"title="The Book of Ultimate Truths">
The book begins with Cornelius hired by the mysterious Arthur Kobold, who claims to represent a publishing firm wishing to print a complete copy of "The Book of Ultimate Truths", a set of great secrets discovered by Hugo Rune, but suppressed by unknown forces. Cornelius and his schoolfriend Tuppe set out to find the book. They encounter the evil Campbell, who is also seeking to retrieve the lost book, to allow him to return to the Forbidden Zones, areas of the world hidden from humanity (excepting London taxi drivers). The two heroes retrieve the book and return to the Murphy home in Brentford, only to find the Campbell is waiting there for them. It is revealed the Campbell is Cornelius' half-brother, and that their father is Hugo Rune. The Campbell escapes with the key to the Forbidden Zones, a re-invented ocarina. Cornelius and Tuppe pursue him to the nearest entrance to the Zones, but the Campbell's plans are foiled by the arrival of a large gathering of a cult devoted to Hugo Rune. The ocarina is destroyed, as is the Campbell.Arthur Kobold presents Cornelius with a large cheque as an advance against royalties from the publication of the book. The cheque is revealed to be a trick - Arthur Kobold was in fact working for the denizens of the Forbidden Zones all along. Seemingly foiled, Cornelius then realizes that the map of their journey forms a schematic for the creation of another re-invented ocarina, and along with a London A-Z map showing the locations of the entrances to the Forbidden Zones the heroes are left plotting their next adventure into the unknown.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogs_Don't_Tell_Jokes"title="Dogs Don't Tell Jokes">
Gary Boone (who calls himself "Goon") is the self-proclaimed clown of his seventh-grade class. He never stops joking, despite the fact that nobody laughs much, and he has no real friends at school. Entering a talent contest as a stand-up comedian forces him to look more closely at the effect his humor has on others and on himself. His old friends support him and help him with his routine. Throughout the book, he is deciding whether or not he should compete. At one point, he even quits but then, rejoins. Later, Gary becomes upset with his image and tries to change himself. He befriends Joe, a popular kid in his class, and spends time playing football with him. He also starts to collect baseball cards. He tells his parents about this and instead of telling him to be himself, like he expected, they encourage the change and offer him $100 if he doesn't tell a joke for three weeks, which is the night of the talent show.Gary is a nervous wreck on the night of the talent competition. He is not in the program because he quit (then rejoined). His friend, Joe, makes sure he can compete. But he is placed last. When it is Gary's turn, he wets his pants due to his nervousness and excitement. He makes a mistake during the beginning, and soon he forgets his routine. Luckily, two kids who have picked on Gary (referred to as his "fan club"), come and spray water and throw pies at him. This allows Gary to start over, not to mention earning a few laughs. His comic routine runs smoothly and he manages to surprise the audience by showing them his newly shaved head. Gary wins the first prize of $100 and the respect of his classmates.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier_in_the_Rain"title="Soldier in the Rain">
Sergeant Eustis Clay (Steve McQueen) cannot wait to finish his peacetime service and move on to bigger, better things. He is a personal favorite of Master Sergeant Maxwell Slaughter (Jackie Gleason), a career soldier who is considerably brighter than Eustis, but enjoys his company and loyalty. Slaughter is wired into all the perks, back channels, and supply sources an army base can provide, which filter through his nearly autonomous cabin hub.Clay becomes involved in a number of schemes and scams, including one in which he will sell tickets for soldiers to watch private Meltzer (Tony Bill) purportedly run a three-minute mile. He inconveniences Slaughter more than once, and in one case has a traffic mishap that requires him being bailed out of jail.Determined to tempt Slaughter with the joys of civilian life before his hitch is up, Clay fixes him up on a date with the much younger woman, not-too-bright Bobby Jo Pepperdine (Tuesday Weld). At first, Slaughter is offended, but gradually he sees another side of Bobby Jo, finding that they have a mutual fondness for crossword puzzles. Clay and Slaughter golf together and begin to enjoy the good life.One night, Clay is devastated to learn of the death of his dog Donald. A pair of hated rivals use their status as military policemen to lure Clay into a barroom brawl, where he is being beaten two-against-one before Slaughter angrily comes to his rescue. Together, they win the fight, but the middle-aged, overweight Slaughter collapses from the effort.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decipher_(novel)"title="Decipher (novel)">
Set in the year 2012, a series of seemingly unrelated events take place, which during the course of the story all become interconnected.In Antarctica, an oil drilling venture is taking place by fictitious oil company Rola Corp. It is an unstable time in the region because the US and China are at loggerheads over mineral and oil rights, and the geopolitical landscape is dicey. The drill ship does not strike oil, but does discover a very hard form of diamond which turns out to be Carbon 60. Not only that, but the samples they retrieve have hieroglyphic writing on them.Meanwhile, the US military has been monitoring unusually high solar flare activity and are worried about its effect on their fleet of satellites. While observing Chinese military maneuvers in Antarctica, the spy satellite picks up a highly unusual energy signal emanating from two miles beneath Antarctica's ice sheet.When the US military and Rola Corp. pool their resources it is discovered that not only is the diamond-type material reactive to the sun, but the time of the energy pulses under the ice in Antarctica, match the timing of flare activity from the Sun.A team of scientists are assembled to unravel the mystery. From Richard Scott, a linguistic Anthropologist, to Jon Hackett a Complexity Physicist. The team soon discover that the same energy signature from Antarctica is being detected by satellites from ancient monuments all over the Earth. From the Amazon jungle to Egypt and China. Inspired by stories of the ancient flood of Noah, Scott embarks on the mammoth task of deciphering the mysterious language found on the material, and comparing what it has to say with the ancient myths and legends of floods from all around the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Flesh"title="Live Flesh">
The novel's protagonist is Victor Jenner, sent to prison for shooting and crippling a police officer after an attempted rape. At his trial and afterwards he claims that his actions were unintentional and somehow provoked by his victim. But there may have been other reasons for his attack of which even he was unaware. Ten years later, Jenner is released from prison and has to find himself a new life, with the reduced resources produced by ten years' incarceration and the handicap of a significant criminal record. He discovers that it is all too easy to slip back into the old one.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fatal_Inversion"title="A Fatal Inversion">
In the process of burying a beloved dog in the animal cemetery of Wyvis Hall, a beautiful Suffolk country house, the owner unearths the skeletons of a dead woman and baby. The horrific discovery challenges the buried memories and guilt of a small group of young people who, 10 years earlier, spent the broiling Summer of 1976 in a self-indulgently irresponsible idyll at Wyvis Hall, unexpectedly inherited by one of their number. Slowly the facts emerge and the past catches up with them. But which woman is dead? And whose child?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sirian_Experiments"title="The Sirian Experiments">
The Sirian Empire, centred in the Sirius star system, has advanced technology that made their citizens effectively immortal (barring accidents) and sophisticated machines that did almost everything for them. But this technology came at a price: many Sirians became afflicted with "the existentials", a debilitating malady that left them feeling worthless and with no reason to exist. To overcome this problem and give its people "something to do", Sirius embarked on a conquest of space and colonised many planets. But they also encroached on territory of the superior Canopean Empire that led to a costly war, which Canopus won. As a gesture of reconciliation, Canopus returned all the captured Sirian territory and invited Sirius to jointly colonise a new and promising planet called Rohanda (an allegorical Earth). Canopus took the northern continents and gave Sirius the southern continents.Ambien II, one of the Five who run the Sirian Colonial Service and also govern the Sirian Empire, represents Sirius on Rohanda. She sets in motion a series of bio-sociological and genetic experiments where large numbers of primitive indigenous people from Sirian colonised planets are space-lifted to Rohanda and adapted there for work elsewhere in the Empire. In the north, Canopus nurtures Rohanda's bourgeoning humanoids and accelerates their evolution. They also put a Lock on the planet that links it to the harmony and strength of the Canopean Empire. Canopus keeps Ambien II updated with reports of all their work, but she is suspicious of Sirius's former enemy, seeing them as a competitor rather than a partner, and is unable to correctly interpret them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marriages_Between_Zones_Three,_Four_and_Five"title="The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five">
The story opens when the Providers, the invisible and unidentified rulers of all the Zones, order Al•Ith, queen of the peaceful paradise of Zone Three, to marry Ben Ata, king of the militarised and repressive Zone Four. Al•Ith is repulsed by the idea of consorting with a barbarian, and Ben Ata does not want a righteous queen disturbing his military campaigns. Nevertheless, Al•Ith descends to Zone Four and they reluctantly marry. Ben Ata is not used to the company of women he cannot control, and Al•Ith has difficulty relating to this ill-bred man, but in time they grow accustomed to each other and gain new insights into each other's Zones. Al•Ith is appalled that all of Zone Four's wealth goes into its huge armies, leaving the rest of its population poor and underdeveloped; Ben Ata is astounded that Zone Three has no army at all.The marriage bears a son, Arusi, future heir to the two Zones. Some of the women of Zone Four, led by Dabeeb, step in to help Al•Ith. Suppressed and downtrodden, these women relish being in the presence of the queen of Zone Three. But soon after the birth of Arusi, the Providers order Al•Ith to return to Zone Three without her son, and Ben Ata to marry Vahshi, queen of the primitive Zone Five. Al•Ith and Ben Ata have grown fond of each other, and are devastated by this news.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Representative_for_Planet_8"title="The Making of the Representative for Planet 8">
Planet 8 is a small world that was colonised by the benevolent galactic empire Canopus and populated with a new species created from the stock of four different species originating on several other Canopean planets. Planet 8 has a warm temperate climate and, under Canopus's skilled guidance, the inhabitants live comfortably and at peace with themselves and their world.One day Canopus instructs them to build a huge wall, to exact Canopean specifications, right around the girth of the planet. The construction takes the inhabitants years to complete, and when it is finished, Canopus tells the planet's representatives, leaders of each of the planet's main disciplines, to relocate all settlements north of the wall to the south. Canopus informs everyone that unfortunate interstellar "re-alignments" have taken place and that Planet 8 will soon experience an ice age. After a while temperatures start to drop and the climate begins to change. Glaciers form in the north and slowly advance towards the wall. Canopus, however, assures Planet 8 that Canopus has a new home for them, a peaceful and prosperous world called Rohanda (the subject of the first book in this series, "Shikasta"), and that when it has reached a certain level of development, Canopus will space-lift the inhabitants of Planet 8 to Rohanda. This fills the people of Planet 8 with hope as they are forced to adapt their lifestyles to cope with this new and unfamiliar climate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidetracked_(novel)"title="Sidetracked (novel)">
In the sweltering Swedish summer of 1994, a sadistic serial killer begins preying on elderly, successful men, violently slaughtering them with an axe before collecting their scalps as trophies. Meanwhile, Wallander witnesses a young woman from the Dominican Republic set herself on fire, and must also cope with his increasingly despondent father, who's determined to make one final trip to Italy. As he investigates the two cases, the Ystad detective uncovers a sinister link to prostitution rackets and the white slavery trade.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_(novella)"title="Typhoon (novella)">
Captain MacWhirr sails the "SS Nan-Shan", a British-built steamer running under the Siamese flag, into a typhoon—a mature tropical cyclone of the northwestern part of the Pacific Ocean. Other characters include the young Jukes - most probably an alter ego of Conrad from the time he had sailed under captain John McWhirr - and Solomon Rout, the chief engineer. While Macwhirr, who, according to Conrad, "never walked on this Earth" - is emotionally estranged from his family and crew, and though he refuses to consider an alternative course to skirt the typhoon, his indomitable will in the face of a superior natural force elicits grudging admiration.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perilous_Gard"title="The Perilous Gard">
The "Perilous Gard" takes place in England during the 1550s. The lead character, Kate Sutton, is a lady-in-waiting to Princess Elizabeth (the later Queen Elizabeth I of England). Her sister, Alicia, inadvertently gets her exiled to a castle named Elvenwood Hall, also known as the Perilous Gard, where she finds that the daughter of Sir Geoffrey Heron, the master of the hall, vanished under mysterious circumstances that implicate his brother, Christopher Heron. Kate soon discovers that, although the seeming death of little Cecily was an accident, Christopher is still so overwhelmed with grief that he has exiled himself from castle life. When Kate learns of the local villagers' fears that the "Fairy Folk" will kidnap their children, she guesses that Cecily might not be dead after all. She tells Christopher of her suspicions, and he, unbeknownst to Kate, comes up with a desperate plan to save Cecily. Meanwhile, Kate stumbles into the underground world of the Fairy Folk, who intend to use Christopher's desperation to their own advantage. The Fairy Folk are ruled by the Lady in Green, who believes that only a sacrifice can help her people hold their own against the advancing modern world.Kate detests the Lady in Green at first, but the two of them have much in common. Both are strong-willed, highly independent, and capable of enormous self-discipline. Kate's refusal to be drugged or manipulated in other ways soon gains her a measure of respect among the Fairy Folk. Little by little she gains knowledge of their underground kingdom, while her view of the Lady in Green gradually changes. Kate begins to understand and even to respect the Lady in Green. In the end, however, Kate chooses to leave the Fairy Folk in order to save Christopher, destroying the fairy kingdom in the process. Christopher then takes Cecily to London to live with his sister Jennifer. When Christopher returns he proposes to Kate, and she accepts. Kate is granted freedom when Queen Elizabeth I ascends the throne.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grendel_(novel)"title="Grendel (novel)">
In the opening scene, Grendel briefly fights with a ram when frustrated with its stupidity. He then mockingly asks the sky why animals lack sense and dignity; the sky does not reply, adding to his frustration. Grendel then passes through his cave and encounters his mute mother before venturing out into the night where he attacks Hrothgar's mead hall, called "Hart" in "Grendel". Later, Grendel reminisces about his early experiences in life, beginning with his childhood days of exploring the caves inhabited by him, his mother and other creatures with which he is unable to speak. One day, however, he arrives at a pool filled with firesnakes, which he enters. Upon exiting, he eventually becomes wedged and trapped in a tree. Helpless, he eventually falls asleep, only to wake surrounded by humans. Although Grendel can understand the humans, they cannot understand him and they become frightened, which leads to a fight between Grendel and the Danish warriors, including Hrothgar. Grendel is barely saved from death at the hands of the humans by the appearance of his mother.During Hrothgar's rise to prominence, a blind poet appears at the doors of Hart, whom Grendel calls "the Shaper". He tells the story of the ancient warrior Scyld Shefing, which enraptures and seduces Grendel. The monster reacts violently to the power the beautiful myth has on him and flees. Grendel continues to be enraptured by the tales. After seeing a corpse and two lovers juxtaposed, he drags the corpse to Hart, bursting into the hall and begging for mercy and peace. The thegns do not comprehend his actions and see this as an attack, driving him from the hall. While fleeing the men, he curses them, yet still returns later to hear the rest of the Shaper's songs, half enraptured and half enraged.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Muddle-Headed_Wombat"title="The Muddle-Headed Wombat">
The Muddle-Headed Wombat books follow the Muddle-Headed Wombat and his friends, a good-natured, practical female mouse and a vain, neurotic male tabby cat. The characters call each other simply Wombat, Mouse and Tabby. The idea for the character arose when Park's daughter made the comment that "I don't think there's anyone in the world I'm smarter than."Wombat's speech is peppered with malapropisms and spoonerisms, e.g. "treely ruly" for "really and truly", "lawn the mow" for "mow the lawn" and "Cindergorilla" for "Cinderella". He has a bicycle with red wheels, of which he is intensely proud and which he anthropomorphises, e.g. complaining that it bit him when he accidentally injured himself trying to repair it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_Wild_(novella)"title="Running Wild (novella)">
Pangbourne Village is an estate for the upper middle class, protected by security fences and discreet guards. Its ten families are wealthy, respectable, 40-something couples with adolescent children on whom they lavish everything money can buy.One morning it is discovered that all the adult residents have been killed and the children have disappeared without trace. Dr Richard Greville of Scotland Yard puzzles over the scanty evidence: it gives no leads to the identity of the murderers and kidnappers. No demands for ransom are received. No terrorist group claims responsibility.The reader soon realizes that the missing children are also the missing murderers. Their controlled upbringing has left them no way to establish their own identities except by rebelling into criminal savagery. However, in a tradition of obtuse policemen going back to Inspector Lestrade in the Sherlock Holmes stories, Greville resists drawing this obvious conclusion - until the children strike again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy_(novel)"title="Alchemy (novel)">
Roland, a 7th former who has been caught shoplifting, is given an unusual assignment: to spy on a mysterious girl in his class who is studying alchemy. Jess Ferret is an eccentric girl who likes playing with words. However, an enemy from the boy's past wants the girl's power and is using him for information. Roland eventually finds out that he is not unlike Jess and her abilities, but gets them both into a situation which endangers their lives."Alchemy" has similar themes to two other books by Mahy, "The Changeover" and "The Haunting".The book won the senior fiction section of the 2003 New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_in_Tears"title="End in Tears">
When a lump of concrete is thrown from a bridge and into passing traffic one dark night, the wrong motorist dies. The killer soon rectifies his mistake, however, and Inspector Wexford finds himself under attack from the local press because of his 'old-fashioned' policing methods. Meanwhile, the difficult relationship he shares with his daughter Sylvia takes on new dimensions, as the case makes him ponder the terrible possibility of losing a child...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mem_and_Zin"title="Mem and Zin">
It tells the tragic story of two young people in love. Mem, a young Kurdish boy of the "Alan" clan and heir to the "City of the West", who falls in love with Zin, of the "Botan" clan and the daughter of the governor of Botan. Their union is blocked by "Bakr" of the Bakran clan, who is Mem’s antagonist throughout the story and is jealous of the two star-crossed lovers. Mem eventually dies during a complicated conspiracy by Bakr. When Zin receives the news, she collapses and dies while mourning the death of Mem at his grave. The immense grief leads to her death and she is buried next to Mem in Cizre. The news of the death of Mem and Zin spreads quickly among the people of Jazira Botan. When Bakr's (Beko) role in the tragedy is revealed, Tacdîn, the best friend of Mem, kills him. Bakr (Beko) will be buried next to Mem and Zin's graves. Because before dying, Mem gives his testimony and says that "It was because of Beko that we could not come together, so I want him to witness our love, If he dies, bury him next to me and Zîn". However, a thorn bush, nourished by the blood of Bakr, grows out of his grave: the roots of malice penetrate deep into the earth among the lovers’ graves, thus separating the two even in death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_1914_(novel)"title="August 1914 (novel)">
The plot primarily follows Colonel Vorotyntsev, a General Staff officer sent by the Grand Duke's (supreme commander, Russian Army) headquarters to the Russian Second Army invading East Prussia under command of General Alexander Samsonov. Vorotyntsev has been sent to find out exactly what is happening with the Second Army; a second General Staff colonel has been sent to the First Army with the same mission. Distances were so great, communications so poor, and the Russian Army so badly prepared for war, Vorotyntsev was sent to find out all he could about conditions at the front and then report back to the Grand Duke. By August 26, the opening day of the 4-day Battle of Tannenberg, Vorotyntsev comes to realize that he cannot return to his headquarters in time to make any difference in the outcome of the battle, and stays with the Second Army to help out where he is able to. Numerous side plots involving other characters, both on the battlefield and elsewhere, fill out the novel. The unprepared army's failures mirror those of the Tsarist regime. A famous episode in the earlier version of the novel narrates the state of mind of General Samsonov, the Russian commander, after his disastrous defeat in what came to be known as the Battle of Tannenberg. Samsonov, tormented by the scale of the defeat and his fear of reporting this failure to the Tsar, eventually commits suicide. His body is found by a German search party, a bullet wound in his head and a revolver in his hand.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dying_Animal"title="The Dying Animal">
Kepesh is fascinated by the beautiful young Consuela Castillo, a student in one of his courses. An erotic liaison is formed between the two; Kepesh becomes obsessively enamored of his lover's breasts, a fetish developed in the previous novels. Despite his fevered devotion to Consuela, the sexually promiscuous professor maintains a concurrent affair with a previous lover, now divorced. He is also reluctant to expose himself to the scrutiny or ridicule that might follow from an introduction to Consuela's family. It is implied that he fears such a meeting would expose the implausible age gap in their relationship. Ultimately, Kepesh limits their relationship to the physical instead of embarking upon any deeper arrangement.In the end, Kepesh is destroyed by his indecisiveness, the fear of senescence, his lust and jealousy. Consuela never subsequently finds a lover who can show the same level of devotion to her body as Kepesh had. After some years of estrangement, she asks him to take nude photographs of her because she will be losing one of her breasts to a life-saving mastectomy.Most editions display a cover picture, "Le grand nu" (1919) by Amedeo Modigliani. In the novel, Consuela sends Kepesh a postcard depicting "Le grand nu", and Kepesh surmises that the figure in the painting is her alter ego.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_to_Score"title="Four to Score">
Stephanie is infuriated to learn that her boss/cousin, Vinnie, has hired her arch-rival Joyce Barnhardt as another bounty hunter. Vinnie tells her to "be professional" and focus on tracking down her latest FTA: Maxine Nowicki, a waitress accused of stealing her ex-boyfriend's car and jumping bail.Eddie gives Stephanie a coded message from Maxine, that references some "property", and explains that Maxine has some embarrassing love letters he once wrote to her, and promises Stephanie an extra $1,000 to let him talk to Maxine before she delivers her to the cops, which Stephanie agrees to. Looking for help cracking the codes from her neighbors, one of them steers her to a nephew, Salvatore Sweet, who has a knack for such things. "Sally" is an aspiring rock musician who made his big breakthrough performing in drag.With Sally's help, Stephanie decodes the message, which leads her to the second, and third, and so on. Maxine's trail takes Stephanie and her hangers-on—Sally, former-prostitute-turned-backup Lula, and even Stephanie's Grandma Mazur—all over Trenton, to Point Pleasant, and even to Atlantic City. Stephanie encounters Maxine several times, but never manages to capture her. Along the way she interviews Maxine's mother and her friend Margie, learning that someone else has been visiting them and demanding Maxine's whereabouts, going so far as to scalp Mrs. Nowicki and cut off one of Margie's fingers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Five_(novel)"title="High Five (novel)">
The only Failure-to-Appear (F.T.A.) Vinnie has for Stephanie is so minor league (Briggs), that she focuses her attention on the mysterious disappearance of her Uncle Fred instead. Mabel gives Stephanie some photos she found in Fred's desk of half-opened garbage bags, containing dismembered human body parts. She insists the photos are recent, and very unusual for Fred. Stephanie sees enough to identify the body as a woman's, and gives duplicates of them to her on-again/off-again boyfriend, Detective Joe Morelli, who passes them on to the sergeant in charge of the case. Mabel tells Stephanie that Fred had been furiously pursuing RCG Waste Haulers to get his $2 back because they skipped picking up garbage at his house one time. RCG (Ruben, Grizolli, and Cotell) had refused to refund him, because his payment wasn't in the system - they demanded to see his cancelled check. He was on his way to bring a copy of that to RCG when he disappeared.While Stephanie is starting to look into Fred's activities, Bunchy shows up, mysteriously demanding that Stephanie find Fred for him. Since the Fred mystery is on her own personal time, Stephanie is facing financial hardship and out of desperation she takes a job with Ranger's security company to make ends meet. Ranger assures her the jobs are morally justifiable, if not entirely legal, but Stephanie is (again) over her head while tagging along with Ranger's men. The activities start with "Interior decorating" -forcibly evicting the occupants of a drug den in a slum apartment building - which ends up in an explosion when the main being evicted is shot by an old lady in a pink nightgown, and the explosives he has attached to himself go off. Further activities include chauffeuring a sheikh; and distracting a deadbeat in a bar while his car is repossessed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Up_(novel)"title="Seven Up (novel)">
Stephanie's latest quarry is Eddie DeChooch, a septuagenarian semi-retired mobster who was arrested for smuggling cigarettes into New Jersey from Richmond, Virginia. Stephanie finds him in a state of abject depression at his home, but he eludes her and, while searching the house for clues, Stephanie finds a dead body in his shed, an elderly woman named Loretta Ricci, shot multiple times.Stephanie soon learns that she is not the only one searching for DeChooch; two Mafia types, Benny and Ziggy, are following her around and making themselves at home in her apartment, while her boyfriend, police detective Joe Morelli, wants to question DeChooch about the dead woman in his home. At the same time, Stephanie's friend "Mooner" is worried because his friend and roommate, Dougie Kruper, has disappeared.At home, Stephanie's dinner with her family is interrupted by the surprise appearance of her older sister, Valerie, with her two young daughters, whose "perfect" life in California came to an abrupt end when her husband abandoned her for their teenage babysitter. Over the next few days, Valerie proposes a number of radical schemes to get her life back under control, ranging from following Stephane's example as a bounty hunter to becoming a lesbian.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Six"title="Hot Six">
The prologue begins at the point where "High Five" ended, revealing who Stephanie picked: Ranger or Joe Morelli.Five months later...Stephanie's latest FTA, Carol Zabo, is attempting to avoid jail-time by jumping off a bridge to drown herself. Stephanie talks her down by promising to persuade the man who reported her not to press charges.Returning to the bonds office, Stephanie is handed a nightmare assignment: Ranger has gone FTA, and Stephanie has to track him down. Apart from her attraction to and respect for Ranger, Stephanie knows that his skills as a bounty hunter are far beyond hers. Ranger was scheduled to appear in court for a minor charge of carrying a concealed weapon, but he is also wanted for questioning related to a fire in an office park, where Homer Ramos, the son of notorious international arms dealer Alexander Ramos, was killed. Stephanie is afraid Ranger might be suspected of murdering Homer, and even more afraid that he might have actually done it.To complicate matters, Stephanie also has to deal with:Ranger makes contact with her (without giving her the opportunity to capture him) and asks her to do surveillance on the Ramos family's properties in Jersey. When she drives past the Ramos compound in Deal, she is surprised when Alexander, the Ramos patriarch himself, jumps into her car alone and offers her $20 to drive him to a bar so he can smoke without interference. Over drinks, Stephanie pretends to recognize Alexander from news coverage and expresses her condolences over Homer's death. Alexander is dismissive, saying Homer was "stupid and greedy", and caused his own death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Eight_(novel)"title="Hard Eight (novel)">
Stephanie is asked by her parents' next-door neighbor, Mabel Markowitz, to find her granddaughter, Evelyn and great-granddaughter, Annie, who have disappeared. During a messy divorce with her ex-husband, Steven Soter, Evelyn was forced to post a child custody bond, and Mabel used her house as collateral. If Evelyn is not found, then the bond company will foreclose on her house, and the money will be forfeited to Steven. Mabel asks for Stephanie's help, since as a bounty hunter she is the closest thing Mabel knows to a detective. Stephanie is unable to refuse, even though she is not a private investigator.After interviewing Evelyn's bondsman, Les Sebring, and Steven Soter, Stephanie is baffled; Steven was domineering and abusive, and Evelyn had no friends or other family members she might go to in an emergency, and no one has any idea where she might have gone. Steven seems to be less concerned about Annie's well-being than he is eager to get his hands on the bond money.While snooping through Evelyn's apartment, Stephanie encounters her landlord, a local crime boss named Eddie Abruzzi. He warns Stephanie that if she knows where Evelyn is, she should tell him, or else he will "declare war" and she will be "the enemy." Stephanie's mentor, Ranger Manoso, explains to her that Abruzzi is an avid wargamer, and tends to frame everything in quasi-military terms.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_Nines_(novel)"title="To the Nines (novel)">
Stephanie Plum is a bounty hunter and amateur detective, who with a combination of luck and intuition usually gets the job done (though often by accident). She's got all the normal concerns in life: the rent, her family, men; yet all of her concerns are topped by the minor fact that someone is usually trying to kill her.Stephanie's cousin and boss, Vinnie, has written the visa bond for Samuel Singh, an Indian immigrant working temporarily in New Jersey. Now he has gone missing, and his landlord, Mrs. Apusenja, insists that Vinnie track him down. She claims Singh is engaged to her daughter, Nonnie, but Nonnie appears more concerned for her dog, "Boo," who went missing at the same time.Partnered with Ranger, Stephanie begins with TriBro, Singh's workplace, owned by three brothers, Andrew, Bart and Clyde Cone. While Andrew is helpful and Clyde is very enthusiastic about the case, Bart Cone gives Stephanie the creeps. Her boyfriend, Joe Morelli, does a background check and finds that Bart Cone was a suspect in the unsolved murder of a woman named Lillian Paressi. Circumstantial evidence tied him to the crime scene, but the indictment was dismissed when the DNA evidence proved negative.After returning home from TriBro, Stephanie is unnerved to find a bouquet of white carnations and red roses, accompanied by photographs of a murdered woman. She also receives some rather creepy emails.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Big_Ones"title="Ten Big Ones">
Stephanie and Lula happen to be waiting outside a deli when a young man in a red Devil mask runs outside after robbing it, only to find that his getaway bicycle's tire is flat, Lula having shot it while trying to disprove Stephanie's doubts about her marksmanship. "Red Devil" throws a Molotov cocktail into the store, but the owner throws it back before it explodes, accidentally destroying Stephanie's latest car. Her boyfriend, police detective Joe Morelli, warns her that gang activity in Trenton is worsening, and "Red Devil"'s gang, the "Comstock Street Slayers", may decide to target her, especially if he believes Stephanie can identify him without his mask.By coincidence, Stephanie is driving her latest FTA, Salvatore "Sally" Sweet, and her Grandma Mazur, to the police station, when she notices Red Devil and several gang cohorts at a fast food drive-through. She calls the police, but the gang opens fire with automatic weapons, wounding her friend, Officer Eddie Gazzara, though not seriously. Furious and terrified in equal measure, Stephanie tries to think of a way to neutralize the gang, especially since she refuses Morelli's attempts to keep her under house arrest at his home.Stephanie's mentor, former Special Forces soldier and bounty hunter Carlos "Ranger" Manoso, loans Stephanie the use of a truck from his security company's fleet. On a whim, she follows the truck's GPS system to its previous location, which turns out to be a high-security office building with a luxurious apartment on the top floor, where Stephanie decides to wait out the crisis, at least until Ranger returns from his out-of-state trip. Although she feels that she and her family members are safe for the time being, she can't relax until the gang is no longer a threat to her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleven_on_Top"title="Eleven on Top">
Stephanie Plum has had enough - enough of grappling with fugitives in garbage piles, enough of being constantly shot at, and enough of having her cars blown up on a semi-regular basis. So she quits her job as a bail enforcement agent and resolves to get a normal job and a normal life. However, events conspire against her. Her three attempts at a normal job - working at a button factory, the Kan-Kleen Dry-Cleaning Service, and serving fast-food chicken at Cluck-in-a-Bucket - all end in disaster, partly because someone is, once again, attempting to kill her. It's someone she knows, and someone who knows her too well, but, as her on-again/off-again boyfriend, cop Joe Morelli points out, she's made a lot of enemies.At the same time, Stephanie is trying to avoid having to wear an eggplant-colored gown as maid of honor at her sister Valerie's upcoming wedding. The wedding itself hits a snag when Valerie's hapless fiancé, lawyer Albert Kloughn, makes an insensitive remark about her weight at a family dinner, and she vows not to get married unless she can lose at least sixty pounds in less than ten days.Stephanie becomes convinced that the man stalking her is Spiro Stiva, the fugitive son of the Burg's favorite undertaker, Constantine. Spiro disappeared when Stephanie and her Grandma Mazur inadvertently burned down the Stiva funeral home in "Two for the Dough", and now it looks like Spiro is back for revenge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One,_No_One_and_One_Hundred_Thousand"title="One, No One and One Hundred Thousand">
Vitangelo Moscarda discovers by way of a completely irrelevant question that his wife poses to him that everyone he knows, everyone he has ever met, has constructed a Vitangelo "persona" in their own imagination and that none of these personas corresponds to the image of Vitangelo that he himself has constructed and believes himself to be. The reader is immediately immersed in a cruel game of falsifying projections, mirroring the reality of social existence itself, which imperiously dictate their rules. As a result, the first, ironic "awareness" of Vitangelo consists in the knowledge of that which he definitely is not; the preliminary operation must therefore consist in the spiteful destruction of all of these fictitious masks. Only after this radical step toward madness and folly in the eyes of the world can Vitangelo finally begin to follow the path toward his true self. He discovers, though, that if his body can be one, his spirit certainly is not. And this Faustian duplicity gradually develops into a disconcerting and extremely complex multiplicity. How can one come to know the true foundation, the substate of the self? Vitangelo seeks to catch it by surprise as it shows itself in a brief flash on the surface of consciousness. But this attempt at revealing the secret self, chasing after it as if it were an enemy that must be forced to surrender, does not give the desired results. Just as soon as it appears, the unknown self evaporates and recomposes itself into the familiar attitudes of the superficial self. In this extremely modern "Secretum" where there is no Saint Augustine to indicate, with the profound voice of conscience, the absolute truth to desire, where desperation is entrusted to a bitter humour, corrosive and healing at the same time, the unity of the self disintegrates into diverse stratifications. Vitangelo is one of those "...particularly intelligent souls ...who break through the illusion of the unity of the self and feel themselves to be multiform, a league of many Is..." as Hermann Hesse notes in the "Dissertation" chapter of "Steppenwolf".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Left_My_Sneakers_in_Dimension_X"title="I Left My Sneakers in Dimension X">
"I Left My Sneakers in Dimension X" continues the adventures of Rod and the crew of the Galactic Patrol ship "Ferkel". When villainous BKR's friend Smorkus Flinders crosses over from Dimension X, he captures Rod and his bratty cousin Elspeth, taking them back to his home to use as bait for the crew of the "Ferkel" as revenge for them imprisoning BKR. Rod and Elspeth are rescued by Captain Grakker and his crew, but during the escape from Castle Chaos, the "Ferkel" is damaged enough that all must abandon ship. Without their spacecraft, our heroes are stranded.Following the strange disappearance of their friend Snout, the seven remaining gain help in the form of Galuspa, one of the race of Shapeshifters that are native to Dimension X. With his help, they are taken to the Valley of the Shapeshifters to see the Ting Wongovia. During their journey, Rod gains a new companion: a furry little creature called a Chibling, which bonds to him. Also during this time, and the time spent waiting in the Valley, Rod sees that another of the crew, Tar Gibbons, is watching him. Later, the Tar asks Rod to become his "Krevlik", or apprentice. Rod accepts, and begins training under his new teacher in the ways of martial arts. During the wait, Rod learns that BKR was handed off to the "Merkel", one of the "Ferkel's" sister ships, to be delivered to prison, and that the crew of the "Ferkel" readily jumped in to save them despite knowledge that they were headed into a trap.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Search_for_Snout"title="The Search for Snout">
"The Search For Snout" picks up where the previous book left off. Introducing the crew of the Galactic Patrol vessel "Ferkel" to his earthling mother proves to be as difficult as predicted, and explaining that he's going with them to find his semi-alien father is an even harder task. But the real trouble starts when they find out that BKR (the pain-loving alien psycho antagonist) is on the loose, having taken control of the "Ferkel's" sister ship "Merkel" while the ship was delivering him to prison. The crew of the "Ferkel" has been ordered to seek out their enemy and recapture him.After they question Smorkus Flinders (a muscle-bound alien from Dimension X) and learn something of BKR's current plan, Rod is contacted again by his friend Snout, master of the mental arts. Partly inspired by this contact, Grakker (the ship's commander) decides to break off from the Galactic Patrol and head for the Mentat instead, the school where Snout became a master of the Mental Arts (incidentally, the building is one big PLANT). There, he hopes to find a clue that could lead them to their fallen friend. During the journey, Grakker reveals some of his past, including how he got to know both Snout and BKR. Smorkus Flinders, having escaped from his suspended animation pod, manages to capture the entire crew... except for Elspeth (Rod's all-human cousin), who stowed away and was also in suspended animation as punishment. She manages to stop Smorkus and rescue the others. Also as a result of the battle, Rod's chibling (a small furball from dimension X) is injured from being thrown into a wall.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliens_Stole_My_Body"title="Aliens Stole My Body">
"Aliens Stole My Body" concludes the four-book series. After the departure of Selima Khan, the group characters from "The Search for Snout" splits up into three groups, Rod and Seymour head for the planet Kryndamar, along with Snout, Elspeth, and Madam Pong (the Diplomatic Officer of the Ferkel). Meanwhile, Grakker and Phil (the sentient plant who serves as the Ferkel's science officer) leave to re-establish contact with the Galactic Patrol, and Ah-Rit heads off with Tar Gibbons in an attempt to reclaim Rod's body from BKR.While on Kryndamar, Rod begins training his mind with Snout, and later gains a few new allies: the intergalactic pet trader Mir-Van; his family; and his business partner Grumbo. They also encounter one of BKR's henchmen; from him, they learn that BKR has already discovered their deception: Rod's brain is empty. BKR still plans to use it as bait, and he intends to capture Rod's mom and younger twin siblings from Earth, to serve as more bait.After arriving on Earth and locating Rod's family, the entire group (sans Grumbo, Mir-Van, and his family) are captured by BKR and his gang (including the traitorous Arly Bung) in the Merkel. The captives, along with Grakker, Phil, and Selima Khan, who are captured shortly before they were to leave the solar system, are taken to BKR's headquarters. There, the entire group is joined by Ah-Rit and Tar Gibbons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil's_Arithmetic"title="The Devil's Arithmetic">
Hannah Stern is a Jewish preteen girl living in the present day. She is bored by her relative's stories about the past, is not looking forward to the Passover Seder, and is tired of her religion. When Hannah symbolically opens the door for the prophet Elijah, she is transported back in time to a shtetl on the Polish/German border in 1942, during World War II. Hannah is not immediately aware of the time period.At that time and place, the people believe she is Chaya Abramowicz, who is recovering from cholera, the fever that killed Chaya's parents a few months ago. The strange remarks Hannah/Chaya makes about the future and her inability to recognize Chaya's aunt Gitl and uncle Shmuel are blamed on the fever.At Uncle Shmuel's wedding, the Nazis come to transport the entire population of the village to a death camp near Donavin, and only Hannah knows all the terrors they will face: starvation, mistreatment, forced labor, and finally execution. Hannah and the other women are stripped, shaved, and tattooed with a number. Hannah and the other women are forced to dig trenches in the camp. Hannah struggles to survive at the camp, with the help of a girl named Rivka. Uncle Shmuel and some other men try to escape; the men are caught and then shot as everyone watches. Fayge, who was going to be married to Shmuel, is killed because she runs to Shmuel when he is about to be shot with the men that were caught. Yitzchak escapes and lives in the forest with the partisans, fighting the Germans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kajko_and_Kokosz"title="Kajko and Kokosz">
Main characters in the series include castellan Mirmił, hypochondriac ruler of the village of Mirmiłowo, where Kajko and Kokosz serve as warriors; Lubawa, dominating wife of Mirmił; small dragon Miluś; benevolent witch Jaga; her husband, the good robber Breakbone (Łamignat) and the antagonists of the series: military knight order of Knaveknights ("Zbójcerze"), based on the Teutonic Knights, led by Hegemon, with his second in command, Hitler-like Corporal and Schweik-like Loser ("Oferma"). The stories are written in a tongue-in-cheek manner and contain light satirical elements, usually puns concerning the reality of living in Communist-ruled Poland with characters sometimes mentioning labour unions, bureaucracy, commodity shortages, and similar themes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseman,_Pass_By"title="Horseman, Pass By">
Seventeen-year-old Lonnie lives on a Texas ranch with his grandfather Homer Bannon, Homer's wife Jewel, and her adult son Hud. While a good cowboy, Hud does whatever he wants, regardless of others. They also have a new worker, Jesse, and a cook Halmea, a friendly African-American woman who is treated respectfully by Homer. Hud is nasty towards her, and Lonnie tries to be nice to her; both of them are attracted to her but she is uninterested.The prologue briefly explains life on the ranch and the backstories of everyone there.One day, one of Homer's young heifers dies suddenly. The dead animal is found to have foot-and-mouth disease, and it has spread to the rest of the herd. All cattle on the ranch are led into a deep pit dug by bulldozers. They are shot and buried.During this time, Hud rapes Halmea, causing her to leave. Lonnie and Halmea shoot at him but miss. Halmea tries to kill him, but Lonnie just wants to scare him, to no avail. Lonnie goes to the town rodeo, only to see his friend Hermy get seriously hurt in a bull riding accident when a bull stomps on and shatters his chest. Lonnie heads back to the ranch with Hud in a car behind him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Esclusa"title="L'Esclusa">
The story itself is set in a small village in Sicily.The protagonist Marta Ajala feels "excluded" from the society in which she lives because of having catastrophically lost the position and status that she had been assigned in the order of things: the position of a submissive and bored housewife who never quite felt at ease in her role, but who had achieved respect in society because of it. It is a role that she does not regret losing but whose sudden and violent loss has thrown her into a dramatic situation: she has been kicked out of her home by her husband, who caught her by surprise in the act of reading a letter from someone who has been courting her but whose advances she has always rejected.The precipitous decision of the husband overwhelmed with rage; the attitude of Marta's father who, even while knowing that his daughter is innocent, totally supports her husband's decision out of a misbegotten sense of masculine spiritual solidarity and ends up dying of shame; the submissive suffering of the mother and sister, constantly ready, in order to conform to traditional convictions, to counsel her surrender and obedience; the choral malevolence of the villagers, taking advantage of a religious procession that is passing by under their windows to publicly jeer and shout names at her, are the elements of a minutely described painting, in the manner of realism, which illustrates the closed mentality of the village.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_(novel)"title="Gateway (novel)">
Gateway is an asteroid hollowed out by the Heechee, a long-vanished alien race. Humans have had limited success understanding the left-behind bits of Heechee technology found there and elsewhere. The Gateway Corporation administers the asteroid on behalf of the governments of the United States, the Soviet Union, the New People's Asia, the Venusian Confederation, and the United States of Brazil.Nearly a thousand small, abandoned starships are located at Gateway. By extremely dangerous trial and error, humans have partially learned how to operate them. The controls for selecting a destination have been identified, but nobody knows where a particular setting will take the ship, how long the trip will last, or even if enough fuel is available to get back. Those who choose to risk their lives cram the limited space with equipment and hopefully enough food for the trip, but sometimes it is not enough, and they have to resort first to cannibalism, and if that is not enough, to suicide. Attempts at reverse engineering to find out how the ships work have ended only in disaster, as has changing the settings in midflight. Most settings lead to useless or lethal places. A few, however, result in the discovery of new Heechee artifacts and habitable planets in other star systems, making the crews extremely wealthy. The vessels were made in three standard sizes, which can hold a maximum of one, three, or five people. Some "threes" and many "fives" are armored. Each ship includes a lander to visit a planet or other object if one is found.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon's_Shadow"title="The Moon's Shadow">
After ascending the Carnelian throne, 17-year-old Eubian Emperor Jaibriol III is busy accomplishing many different goals—beginning peace talks with Skolian Imperialate, escaping death during several assassination attempts and marrying his beautiful, tricky and dangerous finance minister Tarquine Iquar. Above all, he has to hide from his Aristo fellows, that he is in fact a Rhon psion, for if his secret is ever revealed, he would face the fate of an enslaved provider.This novel overlaps with "Ascendant Sun" which tells the events after Radiance War from the point of view of new Skolian Imperator Kelric Valdoria and "Spherical Harmonic" which tells the events after Radiance War from the point of view of Pharaoh Dyhianna Selei. "The Radiant Seas" tells the story of Jaibriol's childhood on the planet Prizma and the course of Radiance War. "The Ruby Dice" is the next book in the chronology of the saga to include Jaibriol III as a main character, followed by "Carnelians".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascendant_Sun"title="Ascendant Sun">
The book begins just after Kelric has escaped the planet of Coba, where he had been held prisoner for over 18 years. Forced to land because of his ships short fuel supply, Kelric takes up a lucrative job as the spaceship Corona's tactical officer under the command of Jafe Maccar, only to be captured by his people's enemies, the Eubians. An Aristo Taratus sells Kelric in an auction to Tarquine Iquar, Minister of Finance. Kelric discovers his mixed feelings for Tarquine, even though he is made to be her slave and provider. Not long after his enslavement, Kelric makes a bold escape, which although successful, cripples his health significantly.Instead of immediately heading home, Kelric heads to the captured Lock, an ancient device made by the original Ruby Empire some 6000 years ago which fell into the Eubians possession during the Radiance War. There, he deactivates the mechanism and meets Jaibriol III, new emperor of the Eubian Empire, whom he immediately suspects to be a psion. Jaibriol proposes peace talks between Eube and Skolia.He manages to make it to another planet, where he meets his future wife Jeejon. Together, they are able to gain passage off world, to Earth. The book's climax is Kelric reuniting with his parents on Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silkworm"title="The Silkworm">
Several months after solving the Lula Landry case, Cormoran Strike is asked by Leonora Quine to locate her novelist husband Owen, a former literary genius whose attempts to recreate his past success have failed. Owen disappeared around the same time his latest book, "Bombyx Mori", was leaked. The book has been deemed unpublishable due to its mixture of sexual assault, torture, and cannibalism as well as its slanderous depiction of the people in Owen's life. In addition to Leonora, Strike sets out interviewing the other people portrayed in the manuscript: Owen's lover Kathryn Kent, protégée Pippa Midgley, agent Elizabeth Tassel, editor Jerry Waldegrave, publisher Daniel Chard and former friend Michael Fancourt. The suspects, however, soon turn on one another, accusing and counter-accusing each other of killing Owen and ghost-writing "Bombyx Mori".As the investigation commences, Strike's relationship with Robin Ellacott gradually deteriorates, as she feels neglected by him and he feels unwilling to put her in a position where she is forced to choose between her job and her fiancé Matthew. The animosity is tempered when Strike finds Owen's body, which has been mutilated, doused in acid and posed to resemble the ending of "Bombyx Mori". Metropolitan Police later arrest Leonora for the murder, prompting Strike to set out clearing her name. Robin, meanwhile, strains her relationship with Matthew after she almost misses his mother's funeral to help Strike and gets caught telling a lie. She later confronts Strike about his intentions only to be warned that she will be asked to do things Matthew will not like if she becomes an investigator.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quantum_Rose"title="The Quantum Rose">
"The Quantum Rose" is a retelling of the "Beauty and the Beast" folktale in a science fiction setting. In the novel, Kamoj Argali, the governor of an impoverished province on the backward planet Balumil, is betrothed to Jax Ironbridge, ruler of a wealthy neighboring province, an arrangement made for political purposes to save her province from starvation and death. Havyrl (Vyrl) Lionstar, a prince of the titular Ruby Dynasty, comes to Balimul as part of a governmental plan to deal with the aftermath of an interstellar war. Masked and enigmatic, he has a reputation as a monster with Kamoj's people.Lionstar interferes with Kamoj's culture and destabilizes their government by pushing her into marriage with himself. In the traditional fairy tale, Belle must save her father from the prince transformed into a beast; in "The Quantum Rose", Kamoj must save her province from the prince in exile. The book deals with themes about the physical and emotional scars left on the survivors of a war with no clear victor. As such, it is also a story of healing for the characters Kamoj and Lionstar.The second half of "The Quantum Rose" involves Lionstar's return to his home world with Kamoj, where he becomes the central figure in a planet wide act of civil disobedience designed to eject an occupying military force that has taken control of his planet. Both the world Balimul in the first half of the novel and the world Lyshriol in the second half fall into the lost colony genre of literature in science fiction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_to_Pay_in_the_Backlands"title="The Devil to Pay in the Backlands">
"Grande Sertão: Veredas" is the complex story of Riobaldo, a former jagunço (mercenary or bandit) of the poor and steppe-like inland of the Rio São Francisco, known as Sertão, of the states of Minas Gerais and Bahia in the dawn of the 20th century. Now an old man and a rancher, Riobaldo tells his long story to an anonymous and silent listener coming from the city. The book is written in one long section, with no section or chapter breaks.Riobaldo is born into a middle-class family and, unlike most of his contemporaries, receives an education. This enables him to begin his career as a tutor to a prominent local rancher, Zé Bebelo, and he watches as Zé Bebelo raises an army of his own jagunços to stamp out several of the local bandit gangs. Instead, for reasons that are never fully clear—apparently a desire for adventure—he disappears from the ranch and defects to the side of the bandits under the leadership of Joca Ramiro. Due to his excellent aim, Riobaldo becomes a valued member of the band and begins to rise in stature. In the course of the events Riobaldo gets acquainted with Diadorim, revealed later to be someone from his past who used the name, "Reinaldo". Diadorim is a young, pleasant and ambivalent fellow jagunço. The two start a profound friendship, with Diodorim exerting an unusual attraction in Riobaldo. Throughout the book it is hinted that Diadorim is Joca Ramiro's nephew or illegitimate son.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Getaway_(novel)"title="The Getaway (novel)">
Carter "Doc" McCoy, an expert criminal who was recently released from prison on a pardon, plans to commit a bank robbery with three accomplices. One is his wife Carol, a former librarian who was charmed by Doc's ruthlessness and immorality and thus became his partner-in-crime; she is waiting with their getaway car. The other two are the thuggish Rudy Torrento and the naive Jackson, both of whom are discussing the group's planned escape route: they intend to travel first to California, where they are to stay at a tourist camp Rudy knows while the heat dies down, and then intend to sneak across the Mexican border to go to a mysterious sanctuary for criminals run by a man called El Rey ("The King").The bank's guard opens the door to prepare for the day, at which point Doc shoots and kills him from across the street. Rudy and Jackson hide the guard's body, then lie in wait as the other three members of the bank staff arrive for work, tying up each in turn. They steal about $250,000 ($ million today), at which point Rudy kills Jackson in order to increase his share of the proceeds. Doc starts a fire so they can escape while everyone is distracted. Rudy, guessing that Doc will try to kill him, pulls a gun, but Doc shoots first, seemingly killing Rudy, then meets up with Carol.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_May"title="Missing May">
The novel is set in present-day West Virginia. The protagonist is Summer, an orphaned child who has been passed from one apathetic relative to another. At age six, she meets her Aunt May and Uncle Ob. The kindly old couple notices that, although Summer is not mistreated, she is virtually ignored by her caretakers and decide to take Summer home to their rickety trailer home in the hills of the Appalachian mountains. Summer thrives under their care, feeling that she finally has a home.Six years after Summer moves in, Aunt May dies suddenly in the garden. Summer must cope with her own grief while worrying about Uncle Ob, who is overwhelmed by the thought of living without his beloved wife. Uncle Ob decides to try contacting May's spirit, after he experiences the sensation that she has tried to communicate with him. He is assisted in this endeavor by Cletus Underwood, a classmate of Summer's, who provides information on a supposed spirit medium of some renown. Summer views his ideas with some skepticism, but is willing to try anything that might alleviate her uncle's sorrow. The three take a roadtrip to meet with the medium, only to discover that she had recently died. Uncle Ob is initially crushed by this news, and Summer fears that this disappointment was the last blow to his will to live. However, on the return trip, Uncle Ob suddenly snaps out of his depression, deciding to continue living on for Summer's sake.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trumpeter_of_Krakow"title="The Trumpeter of Krakow">
## To Kraków.After seeing a spy lurking around his house in Ukraine, Andrew Charnetski hastily removes his family to a safe location. While away, Peter of the Button Face, acting under the orders of Ivan III of Russia, burns the Charnetskis' village to the ground in search of the "Great Tarnov Crystal", a mysterious Tarnov crystal that has caused many wars over the millennia and had, a few centuries previously, been entrusted by the city of Tarnów to the Charnetski family for safeguarding until its discovery by others, at which time it was to be given to the current king of Poland.Realizing that someone must have been after the crystal, and finding himself homeless, Andrew takes his family to Kraków, where his cousin Andrew Tenczynski lives, in order to give the crystal to King Kazimír Jagiełło. However, upon his arrival he finds that Tenczynski has been murdered and that his estate is under the control of Elizabeth of Austria, the queen of Poland. Destitute, Charnetski camps his family in the middle of the city for the day.Charnetski's fifteen-year-old son Joseph explores the city, passing the Church of Our Lady St. Mary, from which a trumpeter plays an unfinished song called "the Heynal" [in Polish: "Hejnał mariacki"] four times every hour, once to each direction (north, east, south, and west). Joseph ends up saving an alchemist named Nicholas Kreutz and his niece, Elżbietka, from a wolfdog (even though the book said a dog). Kreutz offers Joseph and his family an apartment just below his on the unsavory Street of the Pigeons, a street near Kraków University where scientists and magicians often live.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_(novel)"title="Tokyo (novel)">
The story is about a young woman (nicknamed 'Grey' by a fellow mental hospital patient) who is obsessed with the 1937 Japanese invasion of Nanking, also known as the Rape of Nanking. She travels to Japan in order to find a professor said to have rare footage of the massacre detailing an event that she could not otherwise prove occurred. The professor decides that he will only show her the tape if she was to procure an unknown ingredient of Chinese medicine from the local Yakuza group. After being recruited into a host club, Grey finds her chance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treatment_(novel)"title="The Treatment (novel)">
A husband and wife are discovered imprisoned in their own home near Brockwell Park in South London. It is a hot summer and they are badly dehydrated. They have been bound and beaten, and the husband seems close to death. Rory Peach, their 8-year-old son, is missing. Detective Inspector (DI) Jack Caffery is one of the police team. The disappearance of the boy rekindles memories in Caffery of his brother Ewan, who was abducted as a 9-year-old and never seen again.Caffery tries to find the boy at the same time as helping his girlfriend cope with having been sexually assaulted. He follows clues that might allow him to find out Ewan's fate. Patterns of child sexual abuse start to emerge, and Caffery tracks down a young man who was abused in the same park many years earlier as a child. Caffery is convinced that the attacker will be targeting another family. Rory's body is discovered, with evidence of sexual attack, but the DNA from semen is found to be that of Rory's father Alek. The case is turned on its head, and confusion is added when bite marks on the boy's shoulder do not match Alek's dental pattern. Caffery understands that Peach was forced to sodomise his son.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birdman_(novel)"title="Birdman (novel)">
Caffery gets involved in the frightening case of five murdered women whose mutilated corpses are found in the outskirts of London. His investigation yields a treasure trove of abominations. Caffery knows his department is looking in the wrong place for the perpetrator, but he cannot guess at the forces he is up against, or the true darkness of a killer's heart. The manhunt builds as a killer is cornered. The sequel is "The Treatment".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Corridor"title="The Black Corridor">
Ryan is a tough-minded British businessman appalled by the breakdown of society at the end of the 20th century. He feels that he is one of the few sane men in a world of paranoiacs.With a small group of family and friends, he has stolen a spaceship and set out for Munich 15040 (Barnard's Star), a planet believed to be suitable for colonisation. Now he keeps watch alone, with his 13 companions sealed in cabinets designed to keep them in suspended animation for the many years of the journey. He makes a daily report on each one: it is always 'Condition Steady'.Ryan is tormented by nightmares and memories of the violence on Earth; he starts to fear he is losing his grip on reality. The shipboard computer urges him to take a drug that eliminates all delusions and hallucinations; but he is strangely reluctant to use this drug.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh,_Play_That_Thing"title="Oh, Play That Thing">
Having fallen foul of his erstwhile comrades in the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Henry escapes to America. In New York City, he becomes involved in advertising, pornography and bootlegging. After stepping on the toes of the Mob, Henry heads for Chicago, where he becomes the manager and partner-in-crime of Louis Armstrong. He becomes reunited with his wife and daughter, and, much to his dismay, the IRA.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study"title="The China Study">
"The China Study" examines the link between the consumption of animal products (including dairy) and chronic illnesses such as coronary heart disease, diabetes, breast cancer, prostate cancer, and bowel cancer. The book is "loosely based" on the China–Cornell–Oxford Project, a 20-year study which looked at mortality rates from cancer and other chronic diseases from 1973 to 1975 in 65 counties in China, and correlated this data with 1983–84 dietary surveys and blood work from 100 people in each county.The authors conclude that people who eat a predominantly whole-food, vegan diet—avoiding animal products as a source of nutrition, including beef, pork, poultry, fish, eggs, cheese, and milk, and reducing their intake of processed foods and refined carbohydrates—will escape, reduce, or reverse the development of numerous diseases. They write that "eating foods that contain any cholesterol above 0 mg is unhealthy." The book recommends sunshine exposure or dietary supplements to maintain adequate levels of vitamin D, and supplements of vitamin B12 in case of complete avoidance of animal products. It criticizes low-carb diets, such as the Atkins diet, which include restrictions on the percentage of calories derived from carbohydrates The authors are critical of reductionist approaches to the study of nutrition, whereby certain nutrients are blamed for disease, as opposed to studying patterns of nutrition and the interactions between nutrients.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolutely_Normal_Chaos"title="Absolutely Normal Chaos">
Mary Lou Finney is more than excited about her assignment to keep a journal over the summer. Not only does she have to keep a journal, but she must read the Odyssey. The Odyssey is continuously referenced within her own writing. She adds her own comments about the Odyssey that reference to her own life. As the novel unfolds, Mary Lou's cousin, Carl Ray stays with her family. Carl Ray does this in order to look for a job. As the novel progresses, Mary Lou learns about Carl Ray's difficulties in life and how he has struggled. After discovering this information, Mary Lou finds it easier to examine her struggles with her family, her friends, and herself.Sharon Creech stated that the inspiration for this story was an occasion when, "I'd been living overseas (England and Switzerland) for about ten years, and I was sadly missing my family back in the States. I thought I'd write a story about normal family chaos and that's how this began, with me trying to remember what it was like growing up in my family. Writing the story was a way for me to feel as if my family were with me, right there in our little cottage in England.".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_the_Shelter"title="Out of the Shelter">
Timothy Young, at five, enjoys having to go to his neighbor's shelter during the Blitz, partly because he gets to sleep with his friend Jill. However, Jill and her mother are killed in an air raid. Timothy spends some of the war in the country before he and his rather narrow-minded Catholic parents return to their lower-middle-class neighbourhood in London. He sees his sister Kath, who is eleven years older, only on her rare visits home, as she is now working in Germany with the occupying forces.In 1951, he faces a decision of whether to apply his mathematical and artistic talent to an apprenticeship as a draughtsman or to the study of architecture at university. Kath invites him to visit her in Heidelberg during the summer. After some trepidation, he agrees. The boat and train journey is highly unpleasant, but he is befriended by a young American man with unconventional views, Don Kowalski. Kath's life in Heidelberg is far more luxurious than anything Timothy knew in England, where some basic foods are still rationed and economic growth is slow. He joins in the good meals, games, and pleasure trips Kath has with her fun-loving friends, especially two Americans, Greg and Vince. Timothy lives surreptitiously in an empty room in a woman's hostel. When he spends a day with Rudolf, the young German porter of Kath's residence, and his family, he sees the much lower German standard of living and deals with his conflicted feelings about the Germans. He also visits an American family with boys his own age and the American school where Don teaches, but doesn't get along well there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_News"title="Paradise News">
The story begins with Bernard, a laicised Catholic priest, escorting his unwilling father Jack to Hawaii at the request of his aunt Ursula, who is dying of cancer. On the day after arrival, Jack is hit by a car and sent to hospital. Bernard spends much time travelling between Jack's bedside and Ursula's nursing home, and through this, gets the opportunity to discover their past. Ursula, always portrayed as the selfish black sheep, had been sexually abused as a child by her oldest brother Sean, who was venerated as a hero by the family for his death in the war. Ursula explains to Bernard that the experience ruined her marriage and her life. She wants Jack's apology for Jack knew of the abuse but kept silent. In the midst of this, Bernard strikes up a tentative relationship with Yolande Miller, the driver of the car that hit his father. Bernard's gradual sexual awakening parallels Ursula's struggle with her illness.The narrative switches between third-person prose, Bernard's diary, a long letter from Bernard to Yolande, and postcards and notes sent from Hawaii by various characters encountered by Bernard and Jack on the plane journey from England, concluding with a letter from Yolande to Bernard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Truths_(novella)"title="Home Truths (novella)">
The story mainly focuses on Adrian Ludlow, a half-retired writer, interviewed by Fanny Tarrant, a journalist famous for sarcastic portrait of her interviewees.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusions_of_Grandma"title="Delusions of Grandma">
The book is about Cora Sharpe, a Hollywood screenwriter who is eight-and-a-half months pregnant by her boyfriend, an attorney named Ray, a relationship that has gone wrong. Concerned that she will not survive labor, Cora begins to write long letters to her unborn child. As she writes, she begins to recall the events that led to her current situation.Her relationship with Ray became more complicated by the arrival of his mother, who came to live with them to recuperate from breast surgery. Cora's friend and co-writer, Bud, who has bipolar disorder, then moves in with them. When another friend, William, who is in the final stages of dying of AIDS, moves in, Ray decides that Cora's efforts to care for William during his final days on earth signals that he, Ray, is not her top priority in life.As things get out of control, Cora returns home to her mother, a retired musical comedy star, and Bud follows. There is an in-depth look at the heartfelt expectations of Cora's zany mother, the show-bizzy grandma-to-be. Cora and Bud then join her mother in an inexplicable and madcap scheme to kidnap Cora's grandfather, who is stricken with Alzheimer's, from his nursing home and take him back to his hometown of Whitewright, Texas.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gojiro"title="Gojiro">
The earliest event is the striking of a comet into the earth 65 million years ago, at the Encrucijada Valley site as the first nuclear test later occurs. A small lizard witnesses and survives this event, and carries on his line. This lizard is revered as the heroic Varanidid by Gojiro's lizard homeland, though they forget what exactly he did. He is also the precursor of the reptilian creator-beast revered by the dying Monongae clan that lived in the same location before the nuclear tests occurred. The remains of the dead dinosaurs form fossil fuels which pool under the valley.Much later, in the 19th century, Joseph Prometheus Brooks is born to a large middle American family, his father a severe and religious man. Joseph's mother recognizes his genius and manages to have him sent away at a very young age to the university of Göttingen in Germany, where he meets his future collaborator in nuclear physics, Victor Stiller. When he returns home on holiday, he finds that his father has burned the entire rest of the family to death, along with their home, believing that existence is an affront to God. Some time later, the last few members of the Monongae clan send supplications of help to the beast who lives inside the Earth to help them, and charge the youngest member, Nelson Monongae with reawakening him. That same night, he encounters Joseph Brooks' future wife Leona, who soon has visions of past and future events, including the striking of the comet, and an incomplete vision of an adult Joseph Brooks holding an object and looking at something. She travels to Germany, where she finds Joseph playing clarinet in and underground jazz club, having become disaffected by the university. They marry and travel to the United States, along with Victor Stiller, when WWII breaks out, Joseph and Victor becoming the premier nuclear scientists of the American war effort. Leona becomes pregnant nine months before the first nuclear test, a couple of years before 1945. Joseph intends the nuclear test to cause such vast destruction that it calls the attention of the creator of the world to Earth. Leona and Joseph's daughter, Sheila Brooks, is born on the day of the test, and Leona dies, having come too close to the blastwave in an attempt to witness God's manifestation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_House_(novel)"title="Open House (novel)">
Throughout the 20 years of her marriage, Samantha Morrow has been content with her life, though she knows it isn't perfect. She has a nice home, a great son, and a husband she loves. But everything is turned upside down when her husband, David, tells her he wants out of their marriage. His rapid departure on the heels of this announcement leaves Sam horribly shocked, utterly confused, and oddly obsessed with Martha Stewart. Her initial reaction is to go on a spending spree, charging thousands of dollars worth of merchandise at Tiffany's to her husband's credit card. But when reality sets in and her husband cuts her off, she realizes that if she wants to keep the house she loves and make a home for herself and her son, she's going to have to generate some income.Her first solution to this dilemma is to find a couple of roommates. Between the finished portion of the basement and the extra bedroom upstairs, Sam figures she can take on two boarders and mitigate a large portion of the mortgage payment. She finds her first boarder quickly—the septuagenarian mother of an acquaintance—and is delighted. Lydia Fitch is quiet, clean, concerned, friendly, and more than eager to play grandmother to Sam's son, Travis. Which is just as well, since Sam's own mother doesn't quite fit the bill. In fact, Sam's mother has made a career out of dating since the death of her husband two decades ago and is now determined to fix Sam up as soon as possible—a plan with foreseeable disasters written all over it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criss_Cross_(novel)"title="Criss Cross (novel)">
This story takes place in Seldem, during spring and summer. It follows the criss-crossing stories of a group of middle-school children. A necklace plays a significant part in all of the criss-cross moments, helping the characters in the book to find their true selves, giving the novel a touch of magic realism. Debbie usually spends time with her four friends, Patty, Hector, Lenny, and Phil. A typical summer for them would be to hang around town and sit in Lenny's dad's pickup truck, listening to the radio. During this summer vacation, however, Debbie moved into the front of their family parlor, and she has her own room. She then gets a job helping an elderly woman. She meets her boss' grandson, Peter, and they share a quick, romantic week together. Soon after he leaves back to his town in California. All of the friends go through their own changes throughout the summer and each grow in their own way. In the end, to tie up their summer, they all have a block party, and are now more mature, and use their new knowledge to move along in life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Man_Friday"title="No Man Friday">
A British rocket, developed at minimal cost and kept secret from officialdom, lifts off from the Woomera rocket range on a mission to Mars. During the voyage, an accident in the airlock kills the entire crew except for engineer Gordon Holder, the novel's narrator, who was returning from an EVA and still in his space suit.The rocket reaches Mars but crash-lands. There, Holder learns how to produce oxygen and water, also discovering more about Martian species and nourishment. Eventually, he starts cooperating with the titanic inhabitants of the planet to survive. After fifteen years, an American mission lands, thinking themselves the first to reach Mars. Holder contacts the Americans, and then tries to return to the dominant Martian beings, but is prevented from reaching them. He returns to Earth with the Americans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Night_@_the_Call_Center"title="One Night @ the Call Center">
The book begins with a frame story recounting a train journey from Kanpur to Delhi. During the journey, the author meets a beautiful girl who offers to tell him a story on the condition that he has to make it his second book. After a lot of hesitation, the author agrees. The story is about six people working in a call center and relates the events that happen one night when get a phone-call from 'God'. Claimed to be based on a true story, the author uses Shyam Mehra (alias Sam Marcy) as the narrator and protagonist, who is one among the six call center employees. Shyam loves but has lost Priyanka, who is now planning an arranged marriage with someone else, Vroom loves Esha, Esha wants to be a model, Radhika is in an unhappy marriage with a demanding mother-in-law, and Military Uncle wants to communicate with his grandson. They all hate Bakshi, their cruel and somewhat sadistic boss.To cheer themselves up, all the lead characters of the novel decide to go to a night club. After enjoying for a while, they leave back for the office. While returning, they face a life-threatening situation when their vehicle crashes into a construction site hanging over a mesh of iron construction rods. As the rods began to yield slowly, they start to panic. They are unable to call for help as there is no mobile phone network at that place, but Shyam's mobile phone starts ringing. The phone call is from God, who speaks modern English. He speaks to all of them and gives them suggestions to improve their life, and advises them on how to get their vehicle out of the construction site. The conversation with God motivates the group to such an extent that they get ready to face their problems with determination and motivation. Meanwhile, Vroom and Shyam hatch a plan to throw Bakshi out of the call center and prevent the closing of the call center, whose employees are to be downsized radically. When they return to the call center, they carry out their plan successfully. At the end, each character has fixed a part of their life, and the author invites readers to identify aspects of themselves and their lives that they would like to change.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flivver_King"title="The Flivver King">
On Bagley Street in the city of Detroit, Little Abner Shutt begins the story by explaining to his mother that "there's a feller down the street says he's goin' to make a wagon that'll run without a horse." The man is Henry Ford. The story follows the progress and growth of Ford Motor Company through the perspective of a number of generations of a single family."The Flivver King" demonstrates the effects of scientific management in factories. The Ford factory began with very skilled workers. Through a process of breaking the skilled job down into simple steps, they were able to hire lower wage, less skilled individuals to do the work. "The Flivver King" explains how the Ford Company used scientific management to replace skilled workers while successfully increasing production.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_of_the_Wind"title="The Shadow of the Wind">
The novel is actually a story within a story. The novel opens in the 1940's with the protagonist, Daniel, a boy whose father owns a bookshop in Barcelona. One day, his father takes him to the Cemetery of Forgotten books - a secret labyrinthine library that houses rare and banned books. Daniel is drawn to one called "The Shadow of the Wind" by Julian Carax and takes it home with him. Daniel quickly reads and falls in love with the story. He soon discovers that the book's mysterious author, Carax, has gone missing along with every other copy of "The Shadow of the Wind" and most of his other works. Daniel then sets out to find out what happened to the author and his books. When word gets around that Daniel possesses the only known copy of "The Shadow of the Wind," he receives an inquiry from Gustavo Barcelo, a rare bookseller and expert on Carax who wishes to purchase it. Daniel refuses to sell it, but soon falls in love with Barcelo's blind niece, Clara, and begins to pay frequent visits to read "The Shadow of the Wind" to her. However, she is several years older and does not reciprocate his feelings. His possession of the book also attracts the attention of a mysterious stranger with a badly burned and disfigured face named Lain Coubert (the name of the character of the devil in the book) who is also trying to get his hands on it. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanoni"title="Zanoni">
Zanoni has lived since the Chaldean civilisation and is a timeless Rosicrucian brother and cannot fall in love without losing his power of immortality. But he falls in love with Viola Pisani, a promising young opera singer from Naples. Who is the daughter of Pisani, a misunderstood Italian violinist. An English gentleman named Glyndon loves Viola as well, but is indecisive about proposing marriage and then renounces his love to pursue occult study. The story develops in 1789, during the French Revolution. His master Mejnor warns him against a love affair but Zanoni does not heed. He finally marries Viola and they have a child. As Zanoni experiences an increase in humanity, he begins to lose his gift of immortality. He finally dies in the guillotine during the French Revolution.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamsnake"title="Dreamsnake">
The novel opens with Snake coming to a nomadic tribe to treat a boy, Stavin, who has a tumor. While her cobra Mist manufactures an antidote in her venom glands, she leaves Grass, the dreamsnake, with Stavin to help him sleep. One of the nomads, Arevin, helps Snake control Mist as the cobra undergoes convulsions through the night, despite the terror that snakes hold for his people. She returns to Stavin in the morning to find that his parents have mortally wounded Grass, afraid he would hurt the boy. Despite her anger, she allows Mist to bite Stavin and inject the antidote. The leader of the nomads apologizes to Snake, and Arevin asks her to stay with them, but Snake explains that she needs a dreamsnake for her work and must return home and ask for a new one. She expresses fear that the other healers will take her snakes and cast her out instead. As she leaves, Arevin asks her to return someday.Snake stops at an oasis, where she is asked to help Jesse, a woman who has injured herself falling off a horse. Jesse's partner Merideth takes Snake to their camp, leaving Snake's baggage at the oasis. Snake finds that Jesse has broken her spine, leaving her paralyzed, something Snake cannot heal. Merideth and Alex, a third partner, convince Jesse that they should return to Center, where Jesse is from, in the hope that the off-worlders may be able to help her. Wandering around near the camp, Snake sees the body of Jesse's horse and realizes the area it fell is radioactive; Jesse had lain there long enough to have fatal radiation poisoning. Snake offers to let Mist bite Jesse and relieve her pain; Jesse accepts, and Merideth and Alex bid her farewell. Before she dies, Jesse tells Snake that her family is indebted to Snake and could help her get another dreamsnake from another planet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Potter"title="Israel Potter">
When Israel Potter leaves his plow to fight in the American Revolution, he is immediately thrown into the Battle of Bunker Hill, where he receives multiple wounds. However, this does not deter him, and after hearing a rousing speech by General George Washington, he volunteers for further duty, this time at sea, where more ill fortune awaits him. Israel is captured by the British Navy and taken to England. Yet, he makes his escape, and this triggers a series of extraordinary events and meetings with remarkable people. Along the way, Israel encounters King George III, who takes a liking to the Yankee rebel and shelters him in Kew Gardens; Benjamin Franklin, who presses Israel into service as a spy; John Paul Jones, who invites Israel to join his crew aboard "The Ranger"; and Ethan Allen, whom Israel attempts to free from a British prison. Throughout these adventures, Israel Potter acquits himself bravely, but his patriotic valor does not bring him any closer to his dream of returning to America. After the war, Israel finds himself in London, where he descends into poverty. Finally, fifty years after he left his plough, he makes his way back to his beloved Berkshires. However, few things remain the same. Soon, Israel fades out of being, his name out of memory, and he dies on the same day the oldest oak on his native lands is blown down.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Latham_Diaries"title="The Latham Diaries">
The book is an abridgement of Latham's personal diary, from his election to the Australian House of Representatives in 1994 until his retirement in 2005. He has claimed that the book is not intended to discredit the ALP but rather to correct the record for the benefit of his sons. He alleged that the media has not accurately portrayed him during his time in Parliament.Latham frequently refers to his belief that in the 10 years between the ALP losing office in 1996 and publication of the "Diaries", Labor failed to respond to major changes in Australian society, wrought by globalisation and the policies of the Keating and the Howard governments. Latham claims that under the leadership of both Kim Beazley and Simon Crean, the party has failed to develop new and innovative policies and has either looked backwards and inwards for ideas or taken a purely-negative position with government initiatives.Latham reiterates his belief, expounded in earlier books such as "Civilising Global Capital" (1998) that the ALP should reject many of its traditional policies, such as protectionism and the welfare state, but instead focus on the expansion of social capital. Those views and Latham's frustrations with the development of party policy over time, are shown in his entry for August 12, 1999:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialite_Evenings"title="Socialite Evenings">
Karuna, the main protagonist and narrator is caught up in a drab, boring life that she seeks to escape by writing memoirs. Her memoirs are successful and she achieves a measure of fame and pride in herself as she becomes an active socialite and eventually uses her newfound prominence as a celebrity to get herself a position as an advertising copywriter and creator of a television series.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worthing_Chronicle"title="The Worthing Chronicle">
Jason Worthing and one of his descendants, Justice, go to a small village on a backward world to get a boy named Lared to write a book for them. This book is about why Abner Doon destroyed the empire and the planet Capitol and why Jason's descendants destroyed the planet Worthing. It also explains why people all over the settled part of the galaxy are no longer being protected by "God" from pain and hardship."The Worthing Chronicle" is an expansion of Card's first novel, "Hot Sleep".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_the_Line"title="Up the Line">
Jud Elliott II is a failed Harvard history masters student in 2059. Bored with his job as a law clerk, he takes up a position with the Time Service as a Time Courier. After an introductory course, Jud shunts up and down the time line ("up the line" is travel into the past; "down the line" is forward time travel, but only to "now-time," Jud's present of 2059) as a guide for tourists visiting ancient and medieval Byzantium/Constantinople.Jud's problems include not only stupid tourists, but also greedy and mentally unstable colleagues who attempt to cause various types of havoc with the past. He is forced to break the rules in order to patch things up without drawing the attention of the Time Patrol.When he meets and falls in love with the 'marvelous transtemporal paradox called Pulcheria' - his own multi-great grandmother - Jud succumbs to the lure of the past, creates irreparable paradoxes, and faces the inescapable clutches of the Time Patrol.Silverberg's narrative includes some cleverly worked out details about the problems of time-travel tourism. For example, the number of tourists who over the years wish to witness the Crucifixion of Jesus has increased the audience at the event from the likely dozens to hundreds and even tens of thousands. Time-tour guides re-visiting the same event must also take care not to scan their surroundings too closely, lest they make eye contact with themselves leading another tour party.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_as_Gold_(novel)"title="Good as Gold (novel)">
Bruce Gold, a Jewish, middle-aged university English professor and author of many unread, seminal articles in small journals, residing in Manhattan, is offered the chance for success, fame and fortune in Washington D.C. as the country's first ever Jewish Secretary of State. But he must face the consequences of this, such as divorcing his wife and alienating his family, the thought of which energizes him and makes him cringe at the same time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trollslayer"title="Trollslayer">
## Geheimnisnacht (Night of Secrets).The first chapter finds the adventurers shortly after meeting for the first time and leaving Altdorf together. They are kicked off the coach they were riding on because of Gotrek's comments toward the coach driver and especially his wife. As they continue to travel on foot, they are nearly run down by a black coach, and Gotrek vows to find it and hurt the driver. They reach the Standing Stones Inn, and are able to make their way through the barred door to learn of how on Geheimnisnacht a coven who are based in the Darkstone Ring steal children and other people for sacrifices. They learn that the son of the innkeeper, Gunter, and his wife have both disappeared, and so they vow to find the Darkstone Ring and destroy the coven and save Gunter and his wife. After finding the path to the Ring, they come across a rotting cultist who chants gibberish before being felled. They finally come across the Ring and coven and discover that the leader of the coven is the driver of the Black Coach. They listen in for a while and learn that it is dedicated to Slaanesh, Lord of Pleasure. They finally attack and destroy the coven as they intended to sacrifice a stolen baby, and in the aftermath they discover that Gunter and his wife were both cultists, and so are both dead. They rescue the baby, and move on... This story is frequently alluded to by Felix later in the series, as it was his first true glimpse at Chaos.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jade_Peony"title="The Jade Peony">
"The Jade Peony" is divided into three sections, with a different child of the Chen family narrating his or her experience growing up in Vancouver's Chinatown in the early 1930–40s. Throughout the novel, the children's grandmother and family matriarch, Poh-Poh or Grandmama(the "Old One"), influences them with her own life experience and passes to them their cultural heritage of the "old ways" of China that they must maintain and balance with assimilating into the new world culture. The three children are Jook Liang or "Liang-Liang", followed by Jung Sum, and finally Sek-Lung or "Sekky".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patchwork_Girl_(hypertext)"title="Patchwork Girl (hypertext)">
Jackson's "Patchwork Girl" tells the story through illustrations of parts of a female body that are stitched together through text and image. The narrative of the story is divided into five segments, titled: "a Graveyard", "a Journal", "a Quilt", "a Story", and "&amp; broken accents." The goal of the piece is to not only make the reader realize the structure of the Patchwork Girl as a whole but also realize all the pieces that must be "patched" together in order to create one unified structure. Each segment leads down a trail that takes the story in multiple directions through various linking words and images. Jackson uses recurring graveyard imagery in order to continually invite the reader to resurrect Mary Shelley's monster.In Mary Shelley's original, Victor Frankenstein begins the creation of a female companion for his monster, but destroys the second effort prior to completion. In Jackson's version, the female monster is completed by Mary Shelley herself. The woman and her creation become lovers; the creature then travels to America, where she pursues a variety of adventures before disintegrating after a 175-year lifetime. Individual sections also explore the lives of some of the women whose corpses contributed body parts to the creature. The work is an oft-cited example of cyberfeminism—"If you want to see the whole," one passage reads, "you will have to piece me together yourself." Furthermore, Jackson's use of hypertext "enables us to recognize the degree to which the qualities of collage—particularly those of appropriation, assemblage, concatenation, and the blurring of limits, edges, and borders—characterize a good deal of the way we conceive of gender and identity."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_the_Sudden"title="Sam the Sudden">
Sam Shotter, having failed to please his uncle John B Pynsent in business, is sent to England to work for Lord Tilbury, who hopes to complete a business deal with Pynsent. To avoid being trapped in Tilbury's company, Sam opts to join his old pal "Hash" Todhunter, cook on a tramp steamer, for the trip over. On the way, he shows Hash a photo, found on a wall in a remote Canadian log cabin, of a woman with whom he has fallen in love without even knowing her name.Arriving in England looking rather bedraggled after his trip, Sam finds Hash has borrowed all his cash to place a bet on a dog. It is the night of the Wrykyn Old Boys' dinner, and in town he runs into first Claude Bates, who, fearing Sam may be begging, flees, and later Willoughby Braddock, an old friend. Braddock is staying with Kay Derrick and her uncle Mr Wrenn while his house is decorated, and takes Sam back there, but wanders drunkenly off when they arrive; Sam is mistaken for a burglar by Claire Lippett, the maid, and ends up sleeping in the empty house next door. During the night, Sam is disturbed by someone in the hallway with a torch.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Small_Bachelor"title="The Small Bachelor">
On the roof of the Sheridan Apartment House, near Washington Square, New York, is a "small bachelor apartment, penthouse style", and the small bachelor who owns it is amateur artist George Finch, who is rich due to an inheritance. He falls in love with Molly Waddington at first sight, but is too shy to approach her until he retrieves her dog. George's authoritative friend J. Hamilton Beamish, author of self-help books, is helping mild-mannered policeman Garroway become a poet. Garroway recognizes George's valet, Frederick Mullett, an ex-convict who served time for burglary, though Mullett is now reformed. Mullett is engaged to former pickpocket Fanny Welch, who is somewhat less reformed.George is invited into Molly's home by her father, Sigsbee H. Waddington; Mr. Waddington, who has been influenced by Western films and novels, longs to go out West and takes a liking to George, since George is from East Gilead, Idaho. Though once wealthy, Mr. Waddington cannot afford to go out West because he is now financially dependent on his rich wife, Molly's step-mother, socially ambitious Mrs. Waddington. She dislikes George, believing his morals are suspect because he lives in an unconventional artist neighborhood, and wants Molly to marry the tall and handsome Lord Hunstanton. However, Molly finds Lord Hunstanton stiff and loves George. Hamilton Beamish gets help for George from Madame Eulalie, Mrs. Waddington's palmist and fortune teller, who tells Mrs. Waddington that disaster will strike if Molly marries Hunstanton. Beamish also falls in love with Madame Eulalie. Molly gets engaged to George, though Mrs. Waddington still dislikes him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Them_All_My_Days"title="To Serve Them All My Days">
David Powlett-Jones, a coal miner's son from South Wales, has risen from the ranks of the South Wales Borderers and been commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in World War I after serving three years in the front-line trenches. In 1918, after being injured and shell-shocked, he is employed to teach history at Bamfylde School, a fictional public school in North Devon.Under the tutelage of Headmaster Algy Herries, who views him as a possible successor, David discovers a vocation in teaching. He swiftly earns the respect of many of his colleagues and forms a close friendship with the curmudgeonly English master, Ian Howarth, and with several students of unique personality and talents. He clashes with Carter, an ambitious science master and Commanding Officer of the school's Officer Training Corps (OTC), whose actual military service was embarrassingly brief, cut short for medical reasons. Following the Armistice, the two men disagree on whether or not the school should erect a war memorial; David loses the argument but wins the respect of Brigadier Cooper, one of the school governors.In 1919 David marries a young nurse, Beth Marwood; shortly afterwards, they have twin daughters, Joan and Grace. Five years later, Beth and Joan are killed in a road accident; Grace is badly injured and requires many months of rehabilitation before returning home. After encouragement from one of his pupils, a distraught David contemplates life without Beth, and he carries on for the sake of Grace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcerer's_Apprentice_(Augiéras_novel)"title="Sorcerer's Apprentice (Augiéras novel)">
The novel is set in the Sarladais (the Dordogne region of France). An adolescent boy is sent to live with a 35-year-old priest, who becomes his teacher and spiritual mentor, and exerts a powerful control over the boy. He abuses him physically and sexually, but the boy willingly accepts his 'punishment.' The boy falls in love with a slightly younger, and very beautiful boy, meeting in secret and having sex.This disturbing story is much more than a tale of a sexually violent predator. The adolescent himself experiences sexual activity with the other boy, but this relationship is one of genuine love and affection, rather than the coercive, harmful abuse he is subjected to by the priest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_Burial"title="Sky Burial">
The book involves a Chinese woman, Shu Wen, retelling her life in Tibet to Xinran in a tea shop in Suzhou.In the 1950s, as China revels in its unification under Communism, Shu Wen, a doctor, marries a military doctor who gets orders to go into Tibet to subdue the Tibetan people and bring them under Chinese rule. The reputation of the Tibetans from the Chinese government paints them as sympathetic and welcoming, but gradually she learns of their resistance to subjugation. She is informed that her husband has gone missing, and against the wishes of her family and friends, she leaves her comfortable life in Suzhou to join the Army and search for him in Tibet.Her unit encounters a Tibetan woman near death in the highlands, and Shu Wen decides to treat the woman and take her away from her soldiers, who suspect she is a scout or a resistance fighter. The two women are soon separated from the regiment. Without supplies and knowledge of the language, she wanders, trying to find her way until, on the brink of death, she is rescued by a family of nomads under whose protection she moves from place to place with the seasons. During these 30 years she learns the Tibetan way of life and gradually loses her sense of Chinese identity, while quietly hoping for news of her husband's fate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe's_Company"title="Sharpe's Company">
The British Army attacks Ciudad Rodrigo, a fortress guarding the northern path into Spain. Sharpe and Harper lead an assault on the French. Unfortunately, Sharpe's commander and friend, Colonel William Lawford, is severely wounded when a mine is detonated. He loses an arm and retires from his post as commander of the South Essex regiment, losing Sharpe a friend and ally.Sharpe's situation only gets worse when his old enemy, Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill, joins the company. Hakeswill hates Sharpe with a vengeance and plans to kill him.Meanwhile, Sharpe's lover Teresa Moreno arrives, informing Sharpe that she has given birth to his daughter Antonia, and that she is living in Badajoz. Sharpe promises her that he will protect her when the British Army attacks the city. He is also reunited with his former Lieutenant, Robert Knowles, who is now a captain of a fusilier company. Knowles also vows to protect Teresa.Later, Hakeswill encounters Teresa in a stable. He attempts to rape her, but she fights him off, slashing his face and wrist. Sharpe and Harper enter the stable, and Harper brutally beats Hakeswill. Hakeswill vows revenge on Harper and to have Teresa.Then Lawford's replacement, Colonel Brian Windham arrives, as well as Captain Rymer, who has purchased his captaincy, via the commission of the late Captain Lennox, a normal practice in the British Army. Meanwhile, Sharpe's promotion to captain is finally rejected; the long delay in the verdict was due to being confused with another officer who died. Sharpe desires to join the Forlorn Hope so that, despite the high chance of death, he may be promoted again, and so that, should he die, Antonia can be proud of her father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turn_(novel)"title="The Turn (novel)">
The story is divided into thirty very short chapters which permit the author to rapidly change situations and environments, bringing alternatively to the forefront the different subjects involved in the singular plan conceived by Marcantonio Ravì, the cause of odd and unpredictable events. This overweight, tenacious father of Stellina has an "idee fixe" which will, he believes, bring about the happiness of his daughter: establish a "turn". That is to say, he will give her over as wife to the aging and well-off Don Diego Alcozèr, and then, after his death, consign her, fabulously wealthy and contented, to her desperate but dirt poor admirer Pepè Alletto. Marcantonio is so convinced of the efficacy of this idea that he goes around the city talking about it to everyone in order to get their consent, obstinately insisting that he's right with the comic intercalation "ragioniamo!" (let's reason about this!). But the majority of the people he meets, as soon as they hear the name of the decrepit Alcozèr, "spit out a laugh." The proposition of the plan dominates the first chapter with the agitated figure of Marcantonio Ravì. His son-in-law "in pectoris" Diego Alcozèr, sprightly old man, widower of four wives and gaudy dandy with his "small watery furtive bald eyes", having already been "a conqueror of dames in crinoline from the epoch of Ferdinand II king of the Two Sicilies", emerges in the second chapter, where he excitedly chats with his future father-in-law about preparations for the surrender of Stellina. To these two "human stains" a third is added in the following chapter in which Pepè Alletto, the beneficiary of the "turn", takes the fore. What strikes the reader as curious is the fact that Marcantonio Ravì's plan takes him completely by surprise; in reality he it not a true "desperate admirer". He likes Stellina, but because of his lack of courage and his precarious economic conditions, he would never have dared to even think of marrying her. He is incapable of choosing and must always depend on the choices of others.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Underpants_and_the_Preposterous_Plight_of_the_Purple_Potty_People"title="Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People">
George Beard, Harold Hutchins, Sulu, and Crackers have now ended up in an alternate universe in Melvin's time machine, where the whole world is the opposite of their normal world (instead of being perched up in a tree in the Cretaceous Period of the Mesozoic Era). For example, Melvin Sneedly is dimwitted and struggling to comprehend a simple children's book (which contains content considered offensive in the normal universe), the teachers are nice, the school is better, all the previous villains are good, normal citizens, and Mr. Krupp is nice and has a sense of humor (Like Captain Underpants does). George and Harold soon see evil versions of themselves and learn through one of their evil twins' comics that they had turned their Mr. Krupp into an evil supervillain named Captain Blunderpants (who acts like Mr. Krupp). Sulu and Crackers are kidnapped by Evil George and Evil Harold and are hypnotized to be evil, and then ordered to destroy George and Harold. Sulu immediately attacks, but Crackers does the opposite and saves them (due to secretly being female). George, Harold, and Crackers are able to escape to their normal dimension and head to the treehouse, unaware that Nice Mr. Krupp, Sulu, Evil George and Evil Harold came with them (due to standing too close to the machine). Evil George and Evil Harold transform Nice Mr. Krupp into Captain Blunderpants by getting water on his head. Meanwhile, George and Harold decide to head back to the other dimension to rescue and de-hypnotize Sulu and take the 3D Hypno-Ring and Extra-Strength Super Power Juice just in case. However, Mr. Beard stops George and Harold from leaving the house and forces them to come inside as it is Grandparent's Day so they can eat dinner with George's Great-Grandmother and Harold's Grandfather at George's house. While George and Harold try to explain to Mr. Beard they need to leave, George and Harold's grandparents unknowingly drink the rest of the Extra-Strength Super Power Juice while reading a comic George and Harold wrote.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_Dreams"title="Canal Dreams">
The plot is fairly simple. In the first half, when the ship is stranded but unharmed, the mood is bucolic and philosophical, and the main challenge Hisako has is to pass the time in a tropical lake. She has an affair with one of the ship's officers and they go scuba diving together. She practises the cello.She is worried about the future, and has violent nightmares and flashbacks to her early life in Japan.She also spends time with the other passengers, among them a South African engineer and an erudite Egyptian.In the much darker second half, the book becomes an almost "Die Hard"-like thriller. Guerrillas (who turn out to be agents provocateur) take over the ship. The rebels kill everybody aboard except Hisako and rape her. She avenges herself, killing the pirates. The violence of the rebel takeover and of Hisako's revenge is described very graphically.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_of_Stone"title="A Song of Stone">
Abel and Morgan, an aristocratic couple, live in a small castle in an indeterminate place and time of civil war. They decide to abandon their home and join a trek of refugees seeking safety. A group of irregulars, led by a woman called "The Lieutenant" (or "Loot"), stops them and takes them back to the castle, which the irregulars fortify as a base. They loot the castle, and Morgan is seduced by the Lieutenant. A rival faction attacks the castle with artillery and Abel is taken along with the fighters on a counter-attack. When they return, Abel almost shoots the Lieutenant and there is a violent and nihilistic ending."A Song of Stone" tells the frightening story of what happens when the normal rules of society break down. Themes of decadence, violence and war are intertwined with the lives of the rather pompous but lyrical disgraced aristocrat Abel, his partner Morgan, the ruthless Lieutenant and her soldiers with names like "Psycho", "Karma" and "Deathwish".The story is told by Abel, an unreliable narrator. Abel describes Morgan's actions in the second person, mostly when she is in his direct view.As the invaders systematically loot and destroy Abel's family's ancestral home, Abel seems ambivalent to what is happening. Later, when the Lieutenant suggests a memorial for Abel's lifelong family retainer, who has just been killed, Abel and the reader realise that he does not know the servant's surname.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_Holiday_(novel)"title="Winter Holiday (novel)">
Brother and sister Dick and Dorothea Callum meet the Swallows and Amazons during the winter beside the lake. Whilst observing the stars from an isolated barn, Dick and Dorothea encounter the other children and shortly become firm friends. They become part of the group, and join in their play of Arctic expeditions. The holiday is extended when leader Nancy Blackett catches mumps and the group is quarantined and cannot return to their boarding schools. Initially, while waiting for snow to fall, the children embark on a series of adventures ranging from rebuilding an igloo to building an ice sled. Dick displays heroism by rescuing a sheep belonging to Farmer Dixon stranded on an ice-covered ledge, thus gaining his gratitude and earning them a sledge of their own.There is a heavy snowfall followed by a prolonged period of freezing weather and, unusually, the lake freezes over, providing an excellent opportunity for an expedition to the point at the head of the lake that they have named the "North Pole". However, plans go awry when the Ds set out earlier than expected due to a misunderstanding over a signal flag. When a blizzard blows up and the Ds are missing, a rescue party is organised consisting of the Swallows and Peggy, one of the Amazons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damaged_Goods_(Davies_novel)"title="Damaged Goods (Davies novel)">
The novel is set in Britain in 1987, and involves the Seventh Doctor and his companions Chris Cwej and Roz Forrester living on a working-class council estate while attempting to track down an infinitely powerful Gallifreyan weapon before it falls into the wrong hands. A young boy living on the estate, Gabriel Tyler, appears to be the focus of strange powers, and also for the attentions of Eva Jericho, whose own grievously ill young son seems to be linked to Gabriel in some way, through a secret Gabriel's mother Winnie has long tried to hide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godless_(novel)"title="Godless (novel)">
Frustrated with his parents' Catholic religion, agnostic-going-on-atheist Jason Bock invents a new god—the water tower. He recruits an unlikely group of worshippers, including: his snail farming best friend, Shin; incredibly ordinary Dan Grant; cute-as-a-button Magda Price; and violent, unpredictable Henry Stagg. As the Chutengodian religion grows, it takes on a life of its own. While Jason struggles to keep the faith pure, Shin obsesses over writing their bible as Henry schemes to make the faith even more exciting—and dangerous. As a result, when the Chutengodians hold their first mass atop the dome of the water tower, things go from dangerous to deadly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Gone"title="Summer Gone">
The book deals with the life of Bailey Newling and his three lost summers. It tells the story of a divorced Bailey and his young son Caz, where on one fateful canoe trip, they share a remarkable night of truth and love.Macfarlane set this novel among the cottage country in northern Ontario, the Waubano Reaches. Bailey, nicknamed Bay, tells of the three summers in his life: the summer he was 12 and attended the camp where he met his camp instructor Peter Larkin, the summer where he, his wife Sarah and 6-year-old son rented a cottage near his old campsite and, the summer where he and his 12-year-old son shared their extraordinary night.Macfarlane uses a notable technique in the writing of "Summer Gone", where he would start the story of one summer and drift into another. It may start with Bay telling of his tale at camp and then shift onto another thought which may have occurred decades later involving his wife or his son. This technique ties all of Bay's summer stories together into one when he tells it to his son. The narration of this story is told by Caz's half brother, from a one-night stand of Bailey's, as an adult, retelling what Caz had told him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Passionate_Pilgrim"title="A Passionate Pilgrim">
The narrator meets fellow American Clement Searle at an old-fashioned London inn. Searle has long wanted to settle in England to escape what he considers his arid life in America. But he is physically ailing, and he's also depressed because his lawyer cannot uphold his claim to a share in a country estate currently owned by Richard Searle, a distant relation. Clement and the narrator visit the estate, where they meet the ethereal Miss Searle, who supports Clement's cause.They also meet Miss Searle's brother Richard, who is at first suspicious and then outright hostile and combative toward Clement. Upset by the conflict Clement and the narrator travel to Oxford, where they help a gentleman, Mr Rawson, down on his luck to travel to America. Clement is now very sick and sends for Miss Searle. She responds to his call and tells him that her brother has been thrown from a horse and killed. Clement might now have a real chance for a share of the estate, but the opportunity comes too late for him. He dies and is buried in the England which proved so inhospitable to him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Utmost_for_His_Highest"title="My Utmost for His Highest">
"My Utmost for His Highest" is broken down into 366 sections for each day of the year, meant to be read daily for inspiration. The book was published after Oswald's death in 1917, with his wife Gertrude Hobbs compiling the passages after his death from her shorthand notes.The devotionals in the book cover a range of subjects, from what a person should pray for to reflections on the follower's daily activities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_She_Climbed_Across_the_Table"title="As She Climbed Across the Table">
Lack is an emptiness created in a particle collider. Professor Soft theorized that the experiment would replicate the Big Bang and opened a wormhole to a microscopic universe and that this wormhole would close shortly after it was created, leaving the new universe attached to reality. The wormhole however is not accompanied by any events to indicate it is a physical object and so it is named Lack. Lack is characterized by its inexplicable preferences, as some particles and objects enter the space where Lack should be and fail to appear on the other side. Professor Alice Coombs is the first to discover that Lack only absorbs certain items. It takes her keys, but not a paperclip. Its only consistent property seems to be that, when Lack refuses an object once, it would forever refuse to consume that object.The physicists in Coombs's lab become obsessed with Lack, which appears to have its own personality and preferences. Alice develops a personal relationship with the artificial intelligence that they have created, while Philip becomes jealous of their relationship.Philip begins to get involved after B-84, a laboratory animal (cat) enters Lack. This consumption of B-84 causes a campus wide protest. In an attempt to impress Alice, Philip breaks up the protest by giving a speech about how a single cat being destroyed is minimal and their efforts would better spent on larger problems in the world. Instead of impressing Alice, she becomes defensive of Lack and locks herself in its chamber.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dusklands"title="Dusklands">
The first story, "The Vietnam Project", relates the gradual descent into insanity of its protagonist Eugene Dawn. Eugene works for a U.S. government agency responsible for the psychological warfare in the Vietnam War. However, his work on mythography and psychological operations is taking a heavy toll on him; his fall culminates in him stabbing his own son, Martin.The second story, "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee", which takes place in the 18th century, is an account of a hunting expedition into the then "unexplored" interior of South Africa. After crossing the Orange River, Jacobus meets with a Namaqua tribe to trade, but suddenly falls ill. He is attended to by the tribe and gradually recovers, only to get into a fight for which he is expelled from the village. His last slave dying on the way home, he returns alone and later organizes a punitive expedition against the Namaqua. The narrative concludes with his execution of the slaves that deserted him on the previous journey and the massacre of the tribe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nargun_and_the_Stars"title="The Nargun and the Stars">
The story is set in Australia, and involves an orphaned city boy named Simon Brent who comes to live on a 5000-acre sheep station called Wongadilla, in the Hunter Region, with his mother's second cousins, Edie and Charlie. In a remote valley on the property he discovers a variety of ancient Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime creatures. The arrival of heavy machinery intent on clearing the land brings to life the ominous stone Nargun. The Nargun is a creature drawn from tribal legends of the Gunai or Kurnai people of the area now known as the Mitchell River National Park in Victoria. Other creatures featured in the story include the mischievous green-scaled water-spirit Potkoorok, the Turongs (tree people) and the Nyols (cave people).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_regenta"title="La regenta">
The story is set in Vetusta (Spanish stands for "antiquated", "extremely old", a provincial capital city, very identifiable with Oviedo, capital of Asturias – especially since it is said that two monks, Nolan and John, founded the city, this being Oviedo's mythical genesis), where the main character of the work, Ana Ozores "La Regenta", marries the former prime magistrate of the city, Víctor Quintanar, a kind but fussy man much older than she. Feeling sentimentally abandoned, Ana lets herself be courted by the province casanova, Álvaro Mesía. To complete the circle, Don Fermín de Pas (Ana's confessor and canon in the cathedral of Vetusta) also falls in love with her and becomes Mesía's unmentionable rival. A great panorama of secondary characters, portrayed by Clarín with merciless irony, completes the human landscape of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_the_Fatalist"title="Jacques the Fatalist">
The main subject of the book is the relationship between the valet Jacques and his master, who is never named. The two are traveling to a destination the narrator leaves vague, and to dispel the boredom of the journey Jacques is compelled by his master to recount the story of his loves. However, Jacques's story is continually interrupted by other characters and various comic mishaps. Other characters in the book tell their own stories and they, too, are continually interrupted. There is even a "reader" who periodically interrupts the narrator with questions, objections, and demands for more information or detail. The tales told are usually humorous, with romance or sex as their subject matter, and feature complex characters indulging in deception.Jacques's key philosophy is that everything that happens to us down here, whether for good or for evil, has been written up above ("tout ce qui nous arrive de bien et de mal ici-bas était écrit là-haut"), on a "great scroll" that is unrolled a little bit at a time. Yet Jacques still places value on his actions and is not a passive character. Critics such as J. Robert Loy have characterized Jacques's philosophy as not fatalism but determinism.The book is full of contradictory characters and other dualities. One story tells of two men in the army who are so much alike that, though they are the best of friends, they cannot stop dueling and wounding each other. Another concerns Father Hudson, an intelligent and effective reformer of the church who is privately the most debauched character in the book. Even Jacques and his master transcend their apparent roles, as Jacques proves, in his insolence, that his master cannot live without him, and therefore it is Jacques who is the master and the master who is the servant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Them_Bones_(novel)"title="Them Bones (novel)">
The plot is built around three separate but interconnected stories woven through the novel. The first is set in 1929, where archaeologists in Louisiana excavating a mound of the Coles Creek culture encounter the skeleton of a horse, a seeming impossibility as the mound predates the re-introduction of the horse to North America. The mystery deepens when one of the archaeologists discovers something in the mound even more anachronistic: a corroded brass rifle cartridge.The second is the first-person narrative of Madison Yazoo Leake, a soldier in the United States Army and a member of the "Special Group" being sent back in time to 1930s Louisiana in an attempt to stop the destruction of the human race in a nuclear war. However, while Leake arrives at the target site, it is in a world where Arabs explored America, the Roman Empire never existed, and the Aztec empire extended to the Mississippi. The only member of his team to arrive at this destination, he soon establishes contact with a group of mound-builders who gradually befriend him.The final narrative is based on the diary entries of Warrant Officer Smith, another member of the Special Group. She arrives with the rest of the team of military and CIA personnel in what apparently is their timeline, only hundreds of years earlier than intended. Through her diary entries and the count of those members present for duty the story of their interactions with the local natives in their pre-Columbian world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Monday"title="Mister Monday">
Twelve-year-old Arthur Penhaligon is experiencing a severe asthma attack at school when two mysterious men, Mister Monday and his butler Sneezer, appear in front of him. Sneezer convinces Monday to give Arthur his Minute Key in order to fulfill Monday's directive from the Architect. Although Monday is skeptical, Sneezer argues that Arthur will die shortly and the Key will then be returned to Monday. However, Arthur is saved when school officials arrive with help. Sneezer and Monday disappear, leaving a small book in their place, which Arthur takes.Arthur spends a week in the hospital and is visited by his new friends Leaf and her brother Ed. Leaf confirms that she also saw Monday and Sneezer, and Ed adds that he saw dog-faced men digging up the school field looking for something. Arthur realizes that they are looking for his Key. Once back at home, Arthur uses the Key to open the book, "The Compleat Atlas of the House and Immediate Environs," which describes the House and its environs. That night he is attacked by the dog-faced men that Ed saw, described as "Fetchers" by the Atlas. The Key protects Arthur by bringing his ceramic Komodo dragon to life to fend off the Fetchers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thank_You,_Jeeves"title="Thank You, Jeeves">
After a falling-out concerning Bertie's relentless playing of the banjolele, Jeeves leaves his master's service and finds work with Bertie's old friend, Lord "Chuffy" Chuffnell. Bertie travels to one of Chuffy's cottages in Somersetshire to practise the banjolele without complaints from neighbours. Chuffy hopes to sell his dilapidated manor to the rich J. Washburn Stoker. Mr Stoker plans to rent out the property to the famous "nerve specialist" (or, as Bertie prefers, "loony doctor") Sir Roderick Glossop, who intends to marry Chuffy's Aunt Myrtle. Chuffy has also fallen in love with Mr Stoker's daughter, Pauline Stoker, a former fiancée of Bertie, but feels unable to propose to her until his finances improve.Bertie plans to kiss Pauline in front of Chuffy to spur Chuffy to propose. However, it is Mr Stoker who sees the kiss. A fight between Mr Stoker's son Dwight and Chuffy's cousin Seabury divides the Chuffnells and Stokers. Mr Stoker returns to the yacht in which he and his family are staying. Thinking Bertie and Pauline are still in love, Stoker keeps Pauline on board to keep her from him. Chuffy writes a love letter to Pauline, which Jeeves smuggles aboard the yacht by briefly entering Mr Stoker's employ; Pauline is so moved that she swims ashore to Bertie's house, planning to visit Chuffnell Hall in the morning. Bertie lets her sleep in his bed while he tries to sleep in the garage. Unfortunately, he is seen by Police Sergeant Voules, who informs Lord Chuffnell. Chuffy, thinking Bertie is intoxicated, takes him back up to his bedroom. Seeing Pauline there, Chuffy assumes she and Bertie have resumed their romantic relationship. Chuffy and Pauline argue, and return to their respective homes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eyes_of_the_Overworld"title="The Eyes of the Overworld">
Cugel is easily persuaded by the merchant Fianosther to attempt the burglary of the manse of Iucounu the Laughing Magician, which is filled with precious magical items. Caught by Iucouno's trap, Cugel agrees that in exchange for his freedom he will undertake the recovery of a small hemisphere of violet glass, a magic "Eye of the Overworld", to match one already in the wizard's possession. A small sentient alien entity of barbs and hooks, named Firx, is attached to Cugel's liver to encourage his "unremitting loyalty, zeal and singleness of purpose". Firx's only form of communication with its host is to cause pain to his liver if Firx senses that Cugel is lapsing in his mission and his return home. Iucounu then uses a spell to transport Cugel via flying demon to the isolated Land of Cutz, which is very far away.There, Cugel finds two bizarre villages, one occupied by wearers of the magic violet lenses, the other by peasants who work on behalf of the lens-wearers, in hopes of being promoted to their ranks. The lenses cause their wearers to see, not their squalid surroundings, but the Overworld, a vastly superior version of reality where a hut is a palace, gruel is a magnificent feast, and peasant women are princesses — "seeing the world through rose-colored glasses" on a grand scale. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phallos_(novella)"title="Phallos (novella)">
As does Delany's Return to Nevèrÿon series, "Phallos" uses a frame story — a double frame, in fact. First a brief trio of paragraphs tells of an African-American, Adrian Rome, whose adolescent encounter with the book leads to his adult attempt, a decade later, to find a copy. Finally he settles for an on-line synopsis posted by one Randy Pedarson of Moscow, Idaho. The second frame is more complex: it concerns the fictive editor Randy Pedarson, presumably of Moscow, and his relations with two graduate students, Binky and Phyllis, also enthusiasts of the novel, at the university there. According to Pedarson's posting, as far as Pedarson can tell, an anonymous gay pornographic novel, "Phallos" (one of Pederson's three favorites: the other two are John Preston's "Mr. Benson" and William Talsman’s "The Gaudy Image" — both of which are known for their better-than-average writing), was published in 1969 by Essex House of West Hollywood, California. While the anonymous introduction to that volume suggests that "Phallos" was known to numerous literary gay men of the past, from the 18th-century advocate of Greek beauty, Johanne Joaquim Winkelmann, through the 19th century Oxford aesthetician and novelist Walter Pater, to the historian John Addington Symonds (whose seven-volume "The Renaissance in Italy" [1875-86] acted as a sort of counterbalance to Pater’s brief single volume [of 1873/75], "The Renaissance", still widely read and quoted today), and moving on to such characters as Baron Corvo (pseudonym of Frederick Rolfe) and sex researcher Havelock Ellis, Pederson concludes that all this is simply the kind of bogus folderol that accompanies so much of the pornography published in that licentious decade, as an attempt to legitimize it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nights_at_the_Circus"title="Nights at the Circus">
## London."Nights at the Circus" begins with American journalist Jack Walser interviewing Sophie Fevvers in her London dressing room, following her performance in the circus which employs her. Fevvers claims to have been left as a baby in a basket on the doorstep of a brothel. Until she reached puberty she appeared to be an ordinary child, with the exception of a raised lump on each shoulder; as she begins menstruating, however, she also sprouted complete wings. As a child, she posed as a living statue of Cupid in the reception room of the brothel, but as an adolescent, she is now transformed into the image of the "Winged Victory" holding a sword belonging to Ma Nelson, the madam of the brothel. This stage of Fevvers' life comes to an abrupt end when Ma Nelson slips in the street and falls into the path of a carriage. The house and its contents are inherited by her pious brother who plans to convert it to a house for fallen women, but Ma Nelson's employees burn the place down and go their separate ways.Fevvers continues her story, although doubt is cast on the veracity of her narrative voice throughout. She and Lizzie, she tells Walser, next move in with Lizzie's sister and help run the family ice cream parlour. However, when the family falls on hard times Fevvers accepts an invitation from the fearsome Madame Schreck. This lady puts Fevvers on display in her exclusive combination of freak show and brothel, along with several other women with unique appearances. After some time Madame Schreck sells Fevvers to a customer, "Christian Rosencreutz", who wishes to sacrifice a winged 'virgo intacta' in order to procure his own immortality. Fevvers narrowly escapes and returns to Lizzie's sister's home. Soon after their reunion, she joins Colonel Kearney's circus as an aerialiste and achieves enormous fame. The London section concludes with Walser telling his chief at the London office that he is going to follow Fevvers, joining the circus on its grand imperial tour.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilgrimage_to_Hell"title="Pilgrimage to Hell">
A major character of the saga who appears in this novel is the Trader, who referenced in future novels. It also brings Doc Tanner (a senile-sounding gentleman with knowledge of pre-war America) to the group, and gives us our first glance at one of the series' long running mutant menaces : Stickies.This book also introduces the Redoubts, in particular the Cerberus Redoubt, and the MAT-TRANS teleport chambers that are a major plot device driving the series.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valiant_(novel)"title="Valiant (novel)">
Valerie Russell, a high school student, discovers that her single mother and her boyfriend, Tom, are having an affair. Val runs away to New York City and meets up with a group of teen-squatters, including Lolli (as in lollipop), Dave, and Luis. Val earns the nickname "Prince Valiant" after she helps a drag queen locate her shoe.She soon learns about the group's contact with a troll, Ravus, who lives beneath a bridge, as in the fairy tale "Three Billy Goats Gruff". Ravus makes "Never", which faeries in exile take in order to resist iron. These exiles are dispersed throughout the city, and Dave and Luis must deliver the glamour to them. Never can be used as a highly addictive drug by humans, who can then use magic for a short time. Lolli and Dave introduce Val to "Nevermore", as they call it, and she, like the other squatters, is soon hooked.Ravus, despite Val's first impressions, is much kinder than he appears. He begins to teach her swordplay and the bond between them strengthens. Val's mounting problems and addiction take a nasty turn, and the trust Ravus has in her is threatened.Many of the Seelie court exiles are being poisoned and Ravus is blamed. When Val's friend Ruth arrives, attempting to convince Val to come home, Val agrees, but not before saying goodbye to Ravus. She cannot find him in his alcove, so she finds Ruth, Lolli and Luis by Belvedere Castle. Luis, making sexual advances toward Lolli very unexpectedly, informs her Dave has angrily stormed off. A tree-spirit faerie leads Val to a festival by the water, where faeries and humans called "sweet tooths" run around freely. Ravus arrives, and delirious and half-starved, Val kisses him. Mabry arrives as well, and Val realizes she is the one who killed all the Fey. She tries to tell Ravus but Mabry cuts in, telling Ravus Val has been stealing his potions, and she flees as he becomes enraged.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_Incognito"title="Villa Incognito">
The novel is set in the present day. Its title refers to a house in Laos inhabited by three American Air Force pilots who have been missing since the Vietnam War. Following the arrest of one of the MIAs, for trafficking drugs while dressed as a priest, the novel depicts American life in a post-9/11 context through the involvement of the two sisters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Fred_in_the_Springtime"title="Uncle Fred in the Springtime">
In London, Pongo Twistleton is having money troubles, and his wealthy friend Horace Pendlebury-Davenport is in trouble with his fiancée, Pongo's sister Valerie, for hiring Claude "Mustard" Pott to trail her during the Drones Club weekend at Le Touquet. Horace having refused to loan him money, Pongo resolves to call on his Uncle Fred, 5th Earl of Ickenham, for assistance.Meanwhile, at Blandings, Horace's uncle Alaric, Duke of Dunstable, as well as demanding eggs to throw at whistling gardeners, has taken it into his head that the Empress needs some fitness training, and Lord Emsworth needs help. In the absence of his trusty brother Galahad, Emsworth calls on Gally's old friend Uncle Fred for assistance in stopping the Duke from taking his prized pig.Horace, having fallen out with his cousin Ricky Gilpin over Gilpin's fiancée Polly Pott, daughter of Mustard, inadvertently makes trouble for Pongo by being dressed as a Zulu rather than a Boy Scout during a round of the "Clothes Stakes", run by Pott at the Drones. Pongo’s mistaken bet loses all his money, adding to his already large debt. Uncle Fred ponders how to get Polly into Blandings to court her prospective uncle-in-law; Fred thinks the Duke will like her and ignore her background if they meet in a neutral situation. Emsworth creates an opening by insulting Sir Roderick Glossop by calling him a name from their school days, Pimples; Glossop then refuses to come to Blandings to analyse the increasingly loopy Duke of Dunstable, as Emsworth’s sister Connie has requested.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_the_Fair_Country"title="Rape of the Fair Country">
The plot concerns the Welsh iron-making communities of Blaenavon and Nantyglo in the 19th century. The action is seen through the eyes of young Iestyn Mortymer who grows up in times of growing tensions between ironmasters and trade unionists. In 1826, when the book starts, Iestyn is eight years old and already beginning work at the Garndyrus furnaces near Blaenavon. His sister Morfydd has strong feelings about women and children working in mines and ironworks. She sympathises with the Chartist movement and condemns the action of the militant Scotch Cattle groups. In this she is in opposition to Hywel Mortymer, their conservative father who later begins to question his own loyalty to the ironmaster.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enoc_Huws"title="Enoc Huws">
The story is a social comedy and concerns the activities of the villainous Captain Trefor, a con artist who convinces investors to speculate on lead mining schemes and pays himself a generous salary from the proceeds. After being abandoned by most of his previous investors, Trefor sets his sights on the naïve but successful shopkeeper Enoc Huws, who is in love with Trefor's daughter, Susan, and sees investing in Trefor's scheme as an opportunity to get close to her.Sub-plots follow Enoc as he fights off the unwanted affection of his housekeeper, and a group of chapel elders wishing to appoint a new minister. The novel is set in the same nameless town as Owen's earlier novel Rhys Lewis, and features a few of the same characters, though it is not in any real sense a sequel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_London_Life"title="A London Life">
Laura Wing, an impoverished American girl, is visiting her sister Selina Berrington in London. Selina's husband Lionel, boorish and often drunk, is preparing to divorce his wife for her adultery with Charlie Crispin. Laura challenges Selina about her affair and doubts Selina's protestations of innocence. Lady Davenant, an elderly friend of the family, counsels Laura not to take her sister's marital troubles so hard.Laura meets a pleasant but boring American named Wendover, who becomes a suitor. Eventually, after a tempestuous and (for the reader) entertaining scene at the opera, Selina leaves her husband and goes to Brussels with Crispin. Laura spurns Wendover's marriage proposal and pursues her sister to Brussels, where she accomplishes nothing. Laura finally goes back to America, where Wendover follows her though there is no assurance as to how their future will play out. The story ends with a reminder that the case of "Berrington v. Berrington and others" is upcoming in the courts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Man_(novel)"title="The Fifth Man (novel)">
The first crew to land on Mars discovers signs of microbial life—and might be dealing with a threat from much larger forms of life.Eight months into their stay on Mars, the life-sciences specialist discovers a microbial fossil. Subsequent to this, the crew begin to suffer various mishaps, including damage to mission property and direct attacks upon themselves. Complicating the situation is the apparent psychiatric breakdown of the mission commander and his definite attempts to injure or kill his fellow crewmembers.On Earth, the Mars Mission Director, working with an agent of the FBI, races to discover who sabotaged the mission before the crew even arrived on Mars—and who might be trying to strand the crew on Mars now that they're on it. He is shocked to discover that his own Flight Director committed the initial sabotage—he was trying to seed Mars with a bacterium that would be taken as evidence of life on Mars, thus ensuring continued funding of Project Ares, the official name for the program.But when the life-sciences specialist falls ill from an actual microbial infection—from live bacteria which she has subsequently discovered—the mishaps multiply, with a corresponding increase in the physical danger to the crew. Someone "other than" the Flight Director is responsible for this. At the very end, that someone is revealed to be a NASA engineer who fears that the crew, now on their way back to Earth, are bringing back a germ that could potentially kill millions of people—this although the crew clearly showed that the germ was sensitive to the antibiotics they had carried with them. The mission ends with the psychiatrically challenged commander sacrificing his own life to save the rest of the crew—and the marriage of the two mission specialists aboard their Earth Return Vehicle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_(Olson_and_Ingermanson_novel)"title="Oxygen (Olson and Ingermanson novel)">
The first crewed ship to fly to Mars suffers damage from an in-space explosion, which severely limits the crew's oxygen supply, forcing them to make some hard, lifeboat-like choices to stay alive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tenants_of_Moonbloom"title="The Tenants of Moonbloom">
The story documents the emotional awakening of Norman Moonbloom, an isolated, apathetic man in his thirties who, having recently ended a career as 'perpetual student', is now reluctantly in the employ of his brother Irwin as a property agent. Irwin's tenants occupy a series of dilapidated apartments in some of the poorer areas of Manhattan, and Norman's life consists of attempting to collect their rent while constantly making them empty promises about much-needed repairs.At first, Moonbloom resolutely insulates himself against his troublesome tenants, with their incessant complaining and idiosyncratic ways. Little by little, however, his defenses begin crumbling as they talk to him, argue with him, and impart to him their secrets and hopes. These unaccustomed intimacies bring on a seismic shift in Norman's personality, eventually inspiring him to defy his brother (who wants the apartments left exactly as they are) by undertaking all the promised repairs himself. As he goes from apartment to apartment, painting, plastering, and further immersing himself in his tenants' lives, the meek little rent collector finally comes to life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inexcusable"title="Inexcusable">
The novel covers a young man's own perspective on being accused of rape, starting at the moment of accusation and jumping back through an unreliable narration of events, in which he seems himself as a good guy doing what is understandable.The novel begins with Keir arguing with Gigi about the events which occurred the night before. It continues with Keir's first-person narration of his senior year in high school. Keir is crushed when he learns that Gigi has accused him of rape. He goes on to tell Gigi that he loves her, and would never do such a thing. The novel never mentions Gigi's point of view, so her feelings and thoughts are not taken into consideration through the use of dialogue.As the novel unfolds, Keir becomes more unpopular because of his substance abuse, school behavior, and his infamous tackle on the football field giving him the nickname "Killer." Keir's self-image dissipates after he accidentally paralyzes an opponent, participates in bullying classmates, and then tries cocaine. First, he leans on Gigi because she listens to him and doesn't judge him. Once he learns about Gigi and her new boyfriend, he is angry and leans on his two sisters, Fran and Mary. Keir's older sisters have mixed feelings about his behavior. He leans on Fran the most because she sees the "good" in Keir despite his terrible actions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Angelo"title="Albert Angelo">
"Albert Angelo" tells the story of Albert Angelo, a substitute teacher who longs to be a professional architect. He has had to resort to teaching to make ends meet, as he is not an accomplished enough architect to make a living from it. Living in a flat in Angel in London, he finds himself teaching in increasingly tougher schools, and part of the story concerns his struggle with difficult pupils in class, mirroring Albert's struggle with life in general. Through the reproduction of some of their essays, we also learn the pupils' opinions of Albert and their attitudes towards him, which are often hilarious.Albert devotes much thought to his ex-girlfriend Jenny, with whom he is still very much in love and who he feels betrayed him. He reminisces about her frequently. His friend Terry, whom he accompanies to late-night cafes, was also 'betrayed' by a woman, and their friendship is built upon this common experience.The story is at times humorous and at others incredibly serious. As is usual in a Johnson novel sexuality is openly and frankly discussed. Johnson's writing technique allows us to view Albert's character from many angles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Face_(Koontz_novel)"title="The Face (Koontz novel)">
The main plot of the story follows Ethan Truman, an ex-cop who now works as the head of security for the most famous actor in Hollywood, Channing Manheim, a.k.a. "The Face." Ethan is trying to track down the sender of several gruesome "messages" that were received in black boxes. Ethan now has six black boxes to figure out what the contents of the boxes mean. After chasing down leads and tracking the "ghost" of his dead friend Duncan "Dunny" Whistler (technically, Dunny is not a ghost, as he came back to life in the morgue), Ethan finally uncovers the plot and races to stop the kidnapping of Manheim's son, Aelfric.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neighbors_(novel)"title="Neighbors (novel)">
Earl Keese is a middle-aged, middle-class suburbanite with a wife, Enid, and teenage daughter, Elaine. Earl is content with his dull, unexceptional life, but this changes when a younger, less sophisticated couple, Harry and Ramona, move in next door. Harry is physically intimidating and vulgar; Ramona is sexually aggressive, and both impose themselves on the Keese household. Their free-spirited personalities and overbearing and boorish behavior endear them to Enid and Elaine, but Earl fears that he is losing control of his life and his family. Over the course of one night, the antagonism between Earl and his new neighbors escalates into suburban warfare.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galahad_at_Blandings"title="Galahad at Blandings">
Lord Emsworth's idyllic demesne, Blandings Castle, is as usual overrun with overbearing sisters, overefficient secretaries, and the lovestruck; even worse, an alleged old flame has appeared, determined to put an end to the Earl's peaceful, pig-loving existence. All Gally's genius is required to sort things out satisfactorily...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Mother_Normal"title="House Mother Normal">
The novel is set in a nursing home. It follows part of a typical day for a group of elderly people, both male and female. Their thoughts, memories and opinions of each other and the House Mother (head matron) are explored as they go about their activities, from playing pass-the-parcel to dancing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Enemy_Number_Two"title="Public Enemy Number Two">
After being kept behind in detention by his unpleasant French teacher, Mr Palis, Nicholas Simple (also known as "Nick Diamond") is visited by Chief Inspector Snape of Scotland Yard and his assistant, Boyle. They ask Nick if he would like to go to Strangeday Hall, an institution for criminals aged under 18, and befriend inmate Johnny Powers, a gang leader known as "Public Enemy Number One" following his recent conviction and 15-year prison sentence for armed robbery. They want Nick to find out the true identity of an unknown master criminal who controls all the buying and selling of stolen goods in London, known only as "the Fence". Nick refuses their offer and the police leave.Soon afterwards, Nick visits Woburn Abbey on a school trip, but is framed for attempting to steal the Woburn Carbuncles, and despite his attempts to evade police, is arrested and sentenced to 18 months at Strangeday Hall. He has to share a cell with Johnny Powers - just as Snape and Boyle wanted, and no doubt arranged, to happen. Soon after he arrives, Snape and Boyle visit Nick and reveal that they arranged to have Nick framed. Nick manages to gain Johnny's trust after he saves Johnny from being killed by three followers of a notorious London gangster known as Big Ed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Klim's_Underground_Travels"title="Niels Klim's Underground Travels">
The novel starts with a foreword that "assures" that everything in the story is a real account of the title character's exploits in the Underworld. The story is set, according to the book, in the Norwegian harbor town of Bergen in 1664, after Klim returns from Copenhagen, where he has studied philosophy and theology at the University of Copenhagen and graduated magna cum laude. His curiosity drives him to investigate a strange cave in a mountainside above the town, which sends out regular gusts of warm air. He ends up falling down the hole, and after a while he finds himself floating in free space.After a few days of orbiting the planet which revolves around the inner sun, he is attacked by a gryphon, and he falls down on the planet, which is named Nazar. There he wanders about for a short while until he is attacked, this time by an ox. He climbs up into a tree, and to his astonishment the tree can move and talk (this one screamed), and he is taken prisoner by tree-like creatures with up to six arms and faces just below the branches. He is accused of attempted rape on the town clerk's wife, and is put on trial. The case is dismissed and he is set by the Lord of Potu (the utopian state in which he now is located) to learn the language.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Extraordinary_Adventures_of_Private_Ivan_Chonkin"title="The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin">
On the eve of World War II, Ivan Chonkin, the most dispensable soldier, is sent to guard a disabled military plane that crash landed on a kolkhoz (collective farm). Forgotten by his command, he earns favors of a nearby kolkhoznik woman Nyura and moves in with her. Nyura's cow eats the patch of experimental tomato-potato hybrids of the local mad genius agronomist Gladyshev, and in a retaliation the latter sends an anonymous note to NKVD that Chonkin is a deserter.When NKVDists come to arrest Chonkin, he, being a Good Soldier, refuses to leave the post, and arrests the NKVDists himself. Only after several days is the fact of missing secret police noticed, and the "raion" Party leader is told via phone that they have been arrested by "Chonkin and his "baba" (woman)", which he mishears as "Chonkin and his "banda" (gang)".A regiment is sent against "Chonkin's gang", but Chonkin successfully fends them off until they use artillery. When general Drynov incredulously learns that Chonkin single-handedly (with his "baba") was holding off the whole regiment, he declares Chonkin a hero and awards him an order taken off his own chest. When the NKVD lieutenant shows the order for Chonkin's arrest, Drynov shrugs and tells them to carry out their duty, at which point Chonkin is arrested and carried off in the back of the truck to the "Right Place", leaving Nyura on her knees on the road weeping after Chonkin as the scene closes. The book ends with the joke on Gladyshev, whose misunderstanding of evolution (that monkeys became man through labor and intelligence) has been thoroughly unsettled by Chonkin's question why horses do not become men if they work harder than men do, finds a note attached to the bottom of a hoof of his dead horse which had earlier disappeared. Supposing the horse had evolved and written the note, he is spooked and crosses himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleaxe_(novel)"title="Battleaxe (novel)">
The first characters introduced are two unnamed women in mortal peril, one who is pregnant and one who has just given birth. The pregnant one is trying desperately to reach shelter during a snowstorm. She is an outcast of her people, the Avar, because she has decided to carry her child, conceived during a festival and considered an abomination, to term. A group of demonic creatures, skraelings, watch as her unborn child brutally eats his way out of her womb, killing her. The monsters are delighted and decide to adopt the hateful child.The second woman had given birth to an illegitimate child two days before, who she believes is dead. The child was illegitimate, and she is of high-born, perhaps noble, birth. After giving birth, she is taken and dumped in the freezing cold mountains to die.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_of_Sunken_Places"title="The Game of Sunken Places">
The book follows the story of two boys in their teen years, named Brian and Gregory (who are friends, but complete opposites) who visit a mansion in Vermont owned by Gregory's Uncle Max. Uncle Max is a strange and weird character who uses complicated words from the past such as "effluents" that is very much like an Edwardian-era aristocrat. The two boys uncover the board of the Game of Sunken Places in the nursery and unintentionally set the game into motion. They also meet Gregory's cousin Prudance, a girl from the area. Thus they become involved in an age-old ritual conflict between enchanted supernatural races.Once they go out into the woods and begin playing the game, they meet unlikely allies such as Kalgrash the troll and work together to accomplish all the challenges using the game board as a map. In the final challenge, Gregory is about to win and Brian is being strangled by Jack Stimple. By believing that Jack was their opponent, the two almost fell into his trap. Jack was not playing the game at all. Gregory was the player for the Thusser Hordes and was about to win when Brian stopped him. Jack Stimple was meanwhile being dragged away by monks for strangling Brian. Gregory trusts Brian, and lets him win the game and so another battle had been won in the name of the Norumbegans. Prudance is the one who actually came up with the idea of The Game in the first place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avenger_(Shatner_novel)"title="Avenger (Shatner novel)">
The Federation must contain a "virogen" (plague) that is killing plant life, damaging animal young, and killing people on several vital systems that collectively supply food for the entire Federation. "Avenger" opens with the Federation trying to maintain a strict quarantine to contain the spread of the virogen as the Federation's reserves run low. The "Enterprise"-E is assigned to a blockade of the Alta Vista system, home to the Gamrow Station, a research facility designed to house about 60 scientists which is temporarily being used as a refugee camp for 1400 people. Captain Jean-Luc Picard and his crew attempt to stop a shuttlecraft, piloted by a Vulcan called Stron and a pregnant human woman, from fleeing the quarantined system, but the two appear to commit suicide by trying to jump into warp while caught in the "Enterprise"-E's tractor beam. Picard, however, knowing that Vulcans believe suicide to be illogical, is unconvinced that the couple actually died in the warp core explosion.Meanwhile, on the once-verdant planet of Chal (first referenced in The Ashes of Eden), a mysterious stranger walks through the desolation towards a Starfleet medical outpost. He meets with the commanding officer, Christine McDonald, and requests the location of the burial place of a native woman named Teilani. He discovers, with Christine's help, that Teilani is not dead, not yet, but will be soon with the virogen quickly working through her body. He goes to her and prepares an unusual herbal tea with dried leaves and hot water. Commander McDonald and the outpost's doctor, Andrea M'Benga, look on in amazement as Teilani begins to miraculously recover. The stranger reveals to M'Benga that the leaves are Trannin leaves, native to the Klingon home planet. Christine determines to send a message to Starfleet, announcing that a way to combat the virogen has been found. Christine's suspicions of the stranger's identity are aroused when Teilani calls the stranger "James." Her suspicions are further confirmed when she finds a plaque that the stranger had used as a tray for the tea, emblazoned with the name and number of the starship "Enterprise" from eighty years in the past. Christine confronts the stranger with her belief that he is actually James T. Kirk, which he does not deny, insisting that she only refer to him as "Jim," and that she reveal his real identity to no one. It is later revealed Kirk was saved by a fortuitous last-minute Borg transporter beam-out. Flung to another galaxy entirely, he materializes on a planet which is used as a dumping ground for the detritus of failed Borg missions. At the verge of death, on a planet near a galactic core, Kirk is discovered by beings who were able to release themselves from Borg assimilation. His body is purged of the Borg nanites which had been killing him, and after two years of working, living, and learning from, and with, the survivors, he discovers a Borg scout ship which he uses to return to the planet Chal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ashes_of_Eden"title="The Ashes of Eden">
The novel opens with Ambassador Spock on planet Veridian III following the events of "Star Trek Generations". He is standing at the site where Captain Jean-Luc Picard had buried Captain James T. Kirk, paying final respects to his fallen friend.The story then flashes back six months before Kirk was believed to have been 'killed' on the maiden voyage of the U.S.S. "Enterprise NCC-1701-B".Kirk is having trouble coping with retirement on Earth as the U.S.S. "Enterprise NCC-1701-A" is decommissioned for war games. Kirk is having difficulties finding ways to spend his spare time and finds it distasteful that Starfleet cadets are using holodeck simulations of his 'adventures' in training, insisting "they were just my job." Kirk later attends a party at Starfleet Headquarters with his old friends Spock and 'Bones' McCoy, where they are disappointed to learn that the post of Supreme Commander-in-Chief has been awarded to Admiral Androvar Drake (a former colleague of Kirk who has no qualms about cruelly mocking him). Kirk spots a mysterious young alien woman at the party, but doesn't get a chance to talk to her.Meanwhile, Chekov and Uhura are working undercover with a Starfleet Intelligence operative named Jade in Klingon territory. When Jade manages to obtain some information about something called the "Chalchaj 'Qmey", she betrays Chekov and Uhura, leaving them to die in a shuttle bay. Luckily, they are rescued by Sulu aboard the "Excelsior" (who have been secretly monitoring them during their mission) and, feeling they can no longer trust Starfleet Intelligence, return to Earth to report to Drake.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracebridge_Hall"title="Bracebridge Hall">
As this is a location-based series of character sketches, there are a number of individual plots. The tales centre on the occupants of an English manor (based on Aston Hall, near Birmingham, England, which was occupied by members of the Bracebridge family and which Irving visited).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grim_Tuesday"title="Grim Tuesday">
Set immediately after the events of Mister Monday, Dame Primus informs Arthur that six months have passed in the House since he left and Grim Tuesday, the second of the Morrow Days, has found a loophole in the Trustees' agreement to conquer the Lower House. Dame Primus tells Arthur that he must return to the House to restore order.With help from Leaf, Arthur returns to the House and travels to the Far Reaches, a vast and expansive cavern filled with forges and a large spring of Nothing, which are used to create and ship out the supplies that maintain the House's various functions. However, Tuesday's greed has grown such that he dug out the spring even further, creating a highly toxic and unstable massive pit that threatens the foundation of the House. Nevertheless, Tuesday continues to plunder the pit and the Secondary Realms for more wealth, which he then hoards in his Treasure Tower.Upon his arrival, Arthur is mistaken for one of Tuesday's indentured servants and forced to work in the pit, where he meets Japeth, who provides information about the Far Reaches. Suzy Turquoise Blue finds them and takes them to Tuesday's tower, which holds the second Will fragment and the Second Key. The three decide that Japeth will take Suzy's vehicle to catch up with the work gang while Arthur and Suzy break into the tower. They reach the tower by crossing the ceiling of the Far Reaches, only to find that the tower is surrounded by a giant glass pyramid. Soot, a large mass of Nothing that used to be Tuesday's eyebrow, gives them a diamond to cut through the glass pyramid, in exchange for helping it into the Treasure Tower so Soot can consume Tuesday's treasures.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Moon_(novel)"title="Full Moon (novel)">
Clarence, 9th Earl of Emsworth, is forced to play host to his younger son Freddie, while two of his nieces, Prudence Garland and Veronica Wedge are romantically entangled with, respectively, Gally's godson Bill Lister and American millionaire Tipton Plimsoll. Complications ensue when the near-alcoholic Tipton thinks that Bill's gorilla-like face is an apparition brought about by too much drink; Lister, purporting to be a notable artist named Landseer, is commissioned to paint the portrait of Emsworth's prize pig, the Empress of Blandings; and the valuable necklace of Freddie's wife, Aggie, goes missing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_John"title="Onion John">
Onion John is an unusual man: a European immigrant who lives in a hut made of stone and furnished with bathtubs. He befriends young Andy Rusch, the only person in Serenity who can understand his speech. As Andy comes to know Onion John (so named because he grows the best onions in town, and eats them like apples), he finds that the man believes some odd things. In Onion John's world, friendly spirits live in the clouds, and evil spirits can be banished by smoking them out. His needs are few, since the townspeople are happy to give him castoff clothing after someone dies, and he earns a little money by doing odd jobs around Serenity. Andy and his friends are always happy to go along with whatever Onion John says.Life turns upside-down for Onion John when Andy's father decides to get the Rotary Club to build Onion John a new modern home, complete with electricity, running water, stove, and only one bathtub. The whole town signs on, committees are created, and the house goes up on the site of John's old stone hut. Almost immediately after moving in, John, unused to modern appliances, leaves newspaper on the stove. The ensuing fire destroys the house. Mr. Rusch is determined to rebuild the house, never noticing that Onion John was uncomfortable and unhappy in his new surroundings. He wants to fumigate the whole town. Andy suggests to Onion John that for the people of Serenity to leave him alone, he should run away from town. However, Andy wants to run away with him. Onion John eventually leaves the town of Serenity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_in_the_Morning_(Smith_novel)"title="Joy in the Morning (Smith novel)">
Annie is 18 and Carl 20. Although both of their families are against their marriage, the couple weds anyway. They move into a rented room near the college campus where Carl is enrolled in law school. The novel deals with the first years of a couple who married young, Carl’s struggle to continue and keep up with his studies while he supports a spouse, and Annie’s struggle to learn the basic housekeeping skills then expected of a wife, contribute to their income despite her job skills, and attempts to better herself through education.The college dean, initially skeptical of his student’s youthful marriage, approves of their willingness to work and bear their hardships, and befriends them. He offers helps from time to time, encouraging Annie to audit classes and finds a job for Carl that better accommodates his class schedule. Annie befriends various townspeople, such as the grocer and florist. She audits a college writing class and tries to improve her education, and finds a job working in a dime store. The young couple manages to get by until Annie falls pregnant. Carl’s overbearing mother disapproved of their courtship and marriage, accusing Annie of promiscuity. Annie’s mother accused her of eloping over pregnancy, so Annie keeps it secret for awhile. The Dean helps Annie get medical care for free at the university’s teaching hospital.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_in_the_Morning_(Wodehouse_novel)"title="Joy in the Morning (Wodehouse novel)">
The novel opens with a brief flashforward of Bertie and Jeeves driving home, with Bertie remarking that there is an expression, something about Joy, that describes what he has just been through. Jeeves helpfully supplies the phrase, "Joy cometh in the morning". Bertie proceeds to narrate the events that occurred.Jeeves wants to go fishing at the village of Steeple Bumpleigh, but Bertie refuses because his fearsome Aunt Agatha and her second husband, the irascible Lord Worplesdon, live there at Bumpleigh Hall. Bertie makes it up to Jeeves by buying him a gift, a new edition of the works of Spinoza. In the bookshop, Bertie meets Florence Craye, Worplesdon's daughter, a serious, intellectual woman to whom Bertie was once engaged. She mistakenly thinks that Bertie is trying to improve his mind by reading Spinoza and her own book "Spindrift" that the bookshop keeper mistakenly gives him. Shortly afterwards, Bertie meets his college friend D'Arcy "Stilton" Cheesewright, who is engaged to Florence. Meanwhile, Jeeves has been consulted by Worplesdon, who wants to arrange a clandestine meeting with an American businessman, Chichester Clam. Jeeves suggests that Bertie stay at a cottage (called Wee Nooke) in Steeple Bumpleigh, where the two businessmen could meet in secret. Bertie is incensed but calms when he learns there is a fancy-dress ball and that his Aunt Agatha is away from Bumpleigh Hall. She does, however, instruct Bertie to pick up and deliver a brooch as a birthday present for Florence, her step-daughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunwing_(novel)"title="Sunwing (novel)">
## Part I.Shade, Marina and their friends in the Silverwing colony fly in the middle of the winter in hopes of finding Shade's father, Cassiel. The bats find a Human building, and fly inside, thinking that Cassiel might be there. Inside, they find an artificial forest filled with many other kinds of bats. The Silverwings discover that they cannot escape and that Cassiel is not there. Panic arises when several bats disappear, including Shade's friend, Chinook. Shade and Marina escape by way of a river that runs through the forest and find another artificial forest, this one filled with owls.Upon arriving in the other dome, Shade and Marina befriend Orestes, a boreal owl and the son of the owl king. Owls begin to disappear, as well, and Shade discovers that humans are experimenting on them. Shade has a run-in with Goth, whom he is surprised to find alive, let alone in the same facility. Eventually, Shade, Orestes and Goth are captured by the humans while Marina escapes. The humans shave a patch of Shade's fur, attach a disc to his belly and a stud to his ear, and put him in an airplane flying south. Inside, he finds Chinook, who is confused about the purpose of the metal discs and studs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Forgotten_(novel)"title="Not Forgotten (novel)">
Los Angeles is being struck by a crime wave. There seems to be no link between the victims and their cause of death - burning from the inside out. Supernatural powers seem to be involved.Angel investigates the deaths, and Cordelia tries to find a band of child thieves. Both searches lead in the same direction - a rich slumlord who is imprisoning the children's immigrant parents.Angel, Doyle, and Cordelia all have difficulties in L.A., but they realize it's much harder for these immigrants. Angel hopes to help before it is too late.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_to_the_Ground"title="Close to the Ground">
After saving a young woman from her rogue bodyguards, Angel is hired by a big Hollywood studio head, Jack Willitts, to guard the girl in question; his daughter, Karinna. Angel is persuaded when his co-workers point out there is rent to deal with, and Cordelia even convinces Jack to give her a job (Unfortunately, it is as a tour guide rather than an actress).Angel takes Karinna to several popular nightspots, writing her off as a spoiled brat. Cordelia believes Angel is getting too close to the case, but the situation soon worsens. Karinna gets into trouble while Angel and company are being tracked by an unknown creature, trying to destroy anything getting in its way.Angel eventually finds himself trapped in a supernatural struggle for power and immortality, as an Irish magician, Mordractus, reveals that he has been tracking Angel. Mordractus is attempting to summon a powerful demon, but the spells are draining his life energy, and he will soon die unless a way of surviving is found. Knowing that Angel is immortal, yet retaining a soul, Mordractus attempts to steal Angel's 'essence' to allow him to duplicate that feat, but Angel escapes and Mordractus is banished to Hell.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_Trade"title="Soul Trade">
Angel, better than most, understands the importance and meaning of the soul. Angel's soul have driven him on his journey of redemption. Now Angel discovers those who would pay for a soul.Doyle, Cordelia, and Angel find a girl whose soul has been taken away from her. It seems a soul trade is developing its own black market; the soul is an item of wealth to gamblers, junkies, and others in L.A.'s vast underworld. The soul of an innocent girl is a desirable item... until Angel appears on the scene, with a soul that is- literally- one-of-a-kind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redemption_(Angel_novel)"title="Redemption (Angel novel)">
A wealthy actress, Whitney Tyler, requests the help of Angel, Cordelia, and Doyle. She plays a vampire on a popular TV show, and a small number of viewers seem to believe she is actually a real vampire and have made attempts to kill her.Doyle is pleased the case isn't relying on painful visions and Cordelia is starstruck, but Angel is confused; Whitney resembles someone he knew two centuries earlier.The attempts to kill Whitney continue, while Angel, Doyle and Cordy discover a symbol that links the attackers to an ancient battle. Angel must put the pieces together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakedown_(Angel_novel)"title="Shakedown (Angel novel)">
Doyle has a vision of a seismic shift, and everyone's guard goes up. After investigation, Angel is led to a group of Serpentine demons who live locally in a wealthy and private community. Despite close associations with telemarketing, this group of 'monsters' seems harmless and has no enemies, yet it has become the target of a clan of underground quake demons. The quake demons can reduce living things to a crushed mess.Cordy and Doyle are dubious of their new clients, but Angel soon finds out he has much in common with this community.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Noir"title="Hollywood Noir">
A decayed corpse at a Hollywood construction site appears to be a harbinger of more supernatural evil. Meanwhile, Doyle has a vision which leads him to a strange address. He, Angel and Cordelia start tracking a cigarette girl, Betty McCoy. Mike Slade, a new P.I. in town, is also tracking this girl. He dresses and acts behind the times, yet his agenda is modern, and he opposes local officials. Angel and his team soon find their research leads them to Slade. They must piece together a story involving the cigarette girl, a water commissioner, and a host of disappearing demons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(Angel_novel)"title="Avatar (Angel novel)">
Cordelia suggests beginning a Web site for their detective agency, but Angel is hesitant—as Doyle points out, "people in trouble want to interface with a face." Meanwhile, the police discover a trail of corpses across the city. The only connection between these victims (apart from the cause of death) is their hobby of online chatting. It seems a techno-savvy demon must be on the prowl, hoping to complete a ritual going even beyond a World Wide Web.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Here_to_Eternity_(novel)"title="From Here to Eternity (novel)">
In February 1941, Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt, nicknamed "Prew", reports to his new posting at G Company, a US Army infantry unit stationed at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. Prew is a career soldier (a "thirty-year man") with six years' service, an excellent bugler, and a former boxer. He was transferred from his last unit, a Bugle Corps, with a reduction to the lowest rank after complaining that a less skilled bugler, who was a friend (possibly a romantic partner) of the Chief Bugler, had been made First Bugler over him.G Company's commanding officer is Captain Dana "Dynamite" Holmes, the regimental boxing coach, who chose Prew for his unit because of Prew's past history as a talented welterweight boxer. Holmes thinks that winning a boxing championship will greatly help his chances for promotion and concentrates on building a strong team, offering incentives such as promotions to men who box well. However, Prew swore off boxing after accidentally blinding his sparring partner and even transferred out of a past regiment to get away from boxing. Prew refuses to box for Holmes' team, resulting in his being given "The Treatment" by his platoon guide Sergeant Galovitch and others. "The Treatment" is a daily hazing ritual in which Prew is constantly singled out for extra drill exercises, unwarranted punishments, and undesirable work assignments in hopes of breaking him down through exhaustion. Despite the abuse, Prew stubbornly refuses to change his mind about boxing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruled_Britannia"title="Ruled Britannia">
Shakespeare, actor and renowned playwright, is contacted by Nicholas Skeres on behalf of members of an underground resistance movement who are plotting to overthrow the Spanish dominion of England and restore Elizabeth I to the throne. To do this, they employ Shakespeare himself, tasking him to write a play depicting the saga of Boudicca, an ancient Iceni queen who rebelled against the Roman invasion of Great Britain in the 1st century A.D. The conspirators hope that the play will inspire its audience, Britons once again under the heel of a foreign enemy, to overthrow the Spanish.The plan is complicated by the Spaniards who, also recognizing Shakespeare's talents, commission him to write a play depicting the life of King Philip II of Spain and the Spanish conquest of England. Now Shakespeare must write two plays—one glorifying the valor of England, the other glorifying its conquest and return to the Catholic Church—at the same time. There is also a subplot of the exploits of the skirt-chasing Spanish playwright and soldier Lope de Vega, who is tasked by his superiors in the Spanish military hierarchy to keep an eye on Shakespeare and while he does so flirts from woman to woman. De Vega even acts in Shakespeare's "King Philip".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Altar_of_the_Dead"title="The Altar of the Dead">
Aging George Stransom holds sacred the memory of the great love of his life, Mary Antrim, who died before they could be married. One day Stransom happens to read of the death of Acton Hague, a former friend who had done him a terrible harm. Stransom starts to dwell on the many friends and acquaintances he is now losing to death. He begins to light candles at a side altar in a Catholic church, one for each of his Dead, except Hague.Later he notices a woman who regularly appears at the church and sits before his altar. He intuitively understands that she too honours her Dead, and they very gradually become friends. However Stransom later discovers that her Dead number only one: Acton Hague. Hague had wronged her too, but she has forgiven him. When his friend realises Stransom's feelings about Hague, she declares that she can no longer honour Hague at Stransom's altar. Stransom cannot bring himself to resolve the issue by forgiving Hague and adding a candle for him. This disagreement drives the two friends apart. Stransom's friend ceases visiting the altar, and Stransom himself can find no peace there.Months later, Stransom, now dying, visits his altar one last time. Collapsing before the altar, he has a vision of Mary Antrim, and it seems that Mary Antrim is asking him to forgive Hague: "[H]e felt his buried face grow hot as with some communicated knowledge that had the force of a reproach. It suddenly made him contrast that very rapture with the bliss he had refused to another. This breath of the passion immortal was all that other had asked; the descent of Mary Antrim opened his spirit with a great compunctious throb for the descent of Acton Hague."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mating_Season_(novel)"title="The Mating Season (novel)">
Bertie's overbearing Aunt Agatha orders him to go to Deverill Hall, King's Deverill, Hants., to stay with some friends of hers and perform in the village concert. Jeeves, who knows about Deverill Hall because his uncle Charlie Silversmith is the butler there, says that Esmond Haddock, his aunt Dame Daphne Winkworth, four other aunts, and Dame Daphne's daughter Gertrude Winkworth live there. Bertie's friend Gussie Fink-Nottle will also go there. Gussie is upset because his fiancée Madeline Bassett was supposed to accompany him, but had to visit a friend, Hilda Gudgeon, instead.Another friend of Bertie's, Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, an actor, wants to marry Gertrude. However, the aunts disapprove of actors. Catsmeat thinks Esmond is wooing Gertrude and asks Bertie to keep them apart. In exchange, Catsmeat will keep Gussie from brooding about Madeline; Bertie does not want Gussie and Madeline to split up because Madeline is resolved to marry Bertie if she does not marry Gussie. Bertie is also visited by Catsmeat's sister, Corky, who is arranging the village concert and wants Bertie to play Pat in a comedic Pat-and-Mike crosstalk act. Corky loves Esmond but won't marry him until he stands up to his domineering aunts, who disapprove of Corky because she is an actress. She believes Esmond has moved on to Gertrude. While drunk, Catsmeat makes Gussie wade through the Trafalgar Square fountain, and Gussie is sentenced to fourteen days in jail. To keep Madeline from learning about this, Jeeves suggests Bertie stay at Deverill Hall pretending to be Gussie. Bertie does so, taking Corky's dog Sam Goldwyn (a reference to film producer Samuel Goldwyn) with him at Corky's request.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruja_(novel)"title="Bruja (novel)">
L.A. is shocked when a woman attacks a priest. The woman had just confessed to the priest that she had murdered her own son. Meanwhile, Angel and Co. get reports of a woman fighting with teens across L.A. The woman appears to be everywhere, a 'bruja' - a witch. She may be an embodiment of "La Llorona," known in Spanish lore as the "Weeping Woman."The priest soon goes into a coma, but Angel Investigations is busy with other matters: Doyle has a vision of a young mother and her son in danger at the docks. Meanwhile, Cordelia's looking for a big-shot producer's missing wife. Angel must find the connections between the missing wife and recent events.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Summoned"title="The Summoned">
Doyle's at the supermarket when his latest vision comes. He sees images of fear, fire, death, and an ornately engraved old amulet. The Powers That Be are not being too specific. When Doyle awakens an anxious young woman named Terri Miller is helping him.Terri is a shy woman from a small town, and new to Los Angeles. Soon after meeting Doyle, who disappears without saying thank-you, a charismatic man invites her to meet him at a club to which he belongs.Meanwhile, Angel and his team are investigating a murderer who seems to be burning his victims beyond recognition. Several of the dead are connected to Terri's newfound friends, and Cordy suddenly finds herself with an amulet that seems very familiar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_(Angel_novel)"title="Image (Angel novel)">
Cordelia Chase has a vision of a child being attacked by a squidlike demon. Meanwhile, Gunn is trying to rescue a young artist; the artist's studio is being attacked by vampires. Cordelia goes to investigate the mansion from her vision. She soon finds herself surrounded by baby products, portraits, and chased by a tentacled monster.When Angel arrives on the scene, he is surprised to discover that he recognizes some of the portraits. He holds distant memories of him and Darla spending a night with storytellers and artists. Angel reveals that he and Darla were present at the party where Mary Shelley was inspired to write "Frankenstein"; indeed, they witnessed the event that gave Mary the initial idea.An old evil is trying to use a painting to preserve the life of its body, which, in the terms of the story, inspired the novel "The Picture of Dorian Gray". In their efforts to save a child the villain is focused on, Team Angel will learn not to judge everything by its image.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haunted_(Angel_novel)"title="Haunted (Angel novel)">
Cordy's finally getting a big break—she will be a contestant on some "reality programming". She must spend five days and four nights in an apparently haunted house. Living with a ghost and catching demons for a living, she sees this as an easy challenge. However, there is more going on than Cordy knows. In a vision on her first night, she sees one of the applicants who didn't make it to the show. She secretly communicates the scenario to Angel and Co., who are instantly on the case.Angel, Wesley and Gunn search for the missing actress as supernatural activity at the house increases. Soon, Wolfram &amp; Hart also get involved and Cordelia is forced to consider her priorities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_to_the_Sun"title="Stranger to the Sun">
Wesley opens a strange package that arrives by special delivery, which instantly sends him into a slumber. It seems likely he is the victim of a spell. Angel leaves with Gunn to investigate. They discover that other people who might be able to assist, such as magick-shop owners, have also fallen victim exactly like Wesley.Meanwhile, Cordy is struggling to research without Wes available. She soon begins to uncover a plot to plunge Earth into eternal darkness, so that vampires might rule over humans. Wesley is in the midst of a horrifying nightmare. If he cannot awaken, humankind may be in for a struggle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vengeance_(novel)"title="Vengeance (novel)">
L.A. is divided between the haves and the have-nots. Those in luck seem to have tanned good looks, toned bodies, riches and more. Some have-nots are beginning to grow tired of it.Lily Pierce is a motivational speaker who founded New Life Foundation, an organization sweeping across the country. Its mantra is: "Erase doubt. Erase fear. Become pure of purpose. Perfect in execution. Attain your dreams." Cordy's not impressed with Lily's message, but she doesn't suspect Lily is holding a secret of epic proportions. Wolfram &amp; Hart puzzlingly soon want Angel's help to stop the insanity, but is Lily's hope of a perfect world tempting to Angel?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endangered_Species_(novel)"title="Endangered Species (novel)">
Cordelia has become used to being shaken by visions of horror, thanks to the Powers That Be. However, she is especially disturbed to see a vision of Faith being hunted in prison by the supernatural. Chaz Escobar, a game hunter, soon arrives at Angel Investigations looking for his wife Marianna, a vampire. He had hoped to cure her vampirism on a distant small island, but she escaped. He thinks she might be the monster harassing Faith.When Faith's out of jail it seems she may fall into Marianna's claws, but Angel's team and Chaz are off to the island to save her. Chaz's goal is to rid the world of all vampires, and Angel realises this may be a chance to right all his wrongs.This novel features a flashback to shortly after Angel fled from Darla when she attempted to make him feed on an innocent baby to prove himself. Making contact with a sorcerer, Darla attempted to have him remove Angel's soul, but the man refused, sensing that Angel's soul didn't "want" to be separated from his body, and noting that he had the potential to become a good person despite his vampire status.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressions_(Angel_novel)"title="Impressions (Angel novel)">
It seems a quiet day at Angel Investigations until a desperate man arrives, chased by a demon. The gang kills the monster, which decomposes as soon as it dies. The man seems to have fallen victim to a stolen identity scam; he's been approached by a false Angel and is now distrustful of the real thing, so does not want to give up the ancient stone he's found.Angel's worried by the notion of an impersonator, but Cordy's just curious why he didn't impersonate more worthy celebrities. Meanwhile, Lorne reports some bad mojo from Caritas, and needs help. Something is getting under local demons' skins, and even bothering Angel, heightening the aggression of normally rather pacifistic demons.As their research continues, Cordelia and Fred learn that the Angel-impersonator- a photography student called David who saw Angel in action during his early days in Los Angeles- is impersonating Angel for no reason other than the power trip he gets when defeating demons, and doesn't truly understand the reasons why Angel does what he does. The stone that David's client possesses is later revealed to be the burial stone of a race of demons whose nature causes them to disintegrate upon death caused them to start using the stones as a memorial, the stones 'recording' their feelings at the moment of death. The stone the client possesses contains the rage and hostility of an honoured warrior who recently died in battle; in their home dimension, the stone's 'emissions' would normally be controlled by various spells, but without those spells the emotions are spilling out and 'infecting' every demon in the area.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fearless_(Angel_novel)"title="Fearless (Angel novel)">
The characters of Angel Investigations are shocked to find themselves euphoric after a long night they cannot remember. Their clothes are bloody and torn, their bodies bruised, but their memories of the previous evening are hazy. They soon determine that they've been affected by demon pixie dust.Angel, however, finds his superhuman healing failing him, and seems to be recovering at the rate of an average human. Unable to confide in his friends, Angel finds himself keeping secrets and collaborating with demons. If his friends go looking for another high in a battle of fearlessness, Angel is unsure if he can protect them.Characters include: Angel, Cordelia, Wesley, Gunn, Fred, and Lorne
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_(Angel_novel)"title="Sanctuary (Angel novel)">
Angel and Co. are enjoying some downtime at the karaoke bar Caritas when a loud explosion occurs. The gang and the rest of the bar are attracted outside. A building nearby is on fire. It seems that it may have been a diversionary tactic to distract from a drive-by shooting. When the smoke clears, Fred has gone missing.It seems Fred has been kidnapped, so Team Angel questions everyone nearby. Around a dozen demons were direct eyewitnesses, but each one has a different story. Whether it was gangs, monsters, or a runaway Fred, the team soon realize demons do not make the most reliable eyewitnesses.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Mirror_(Angel_novel)"title="Dark Mirror (Angel novel)">
A series of perfect clones of members at Angel Investigations are lurking in the city, planning to kill the originals. Team Angel must find out where the replicas are coming from and why, before the murder spree hits the whole city. Thanks to Wesley's research, the gang realise that they are facing the 'Seven Sinners', dimension-jumping demons who travel to other worlds, steal the negative aspects of the souls of some of the greatest heroes of that world, and subsequently gain power by killing the originals and absorbing their souls into their power source. Once they have been copied, only the original can kill 'their' Sinner, with other attempts simply incapacitating the Sinners until they can regenerate. The Sinners have targeted Angel Investigations with the intention of duplicating Angel, as they feel that only Angelus would possess the necessary skills to lead them in their destruction of this world. However, the final seven clones- consisting of Angelus, Lorne, Wesley, Connor, Fred, Gunn, and Lilah- are all killed by their templates, Angel subsequently destroying their power source.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitary_Man_(novel)"title="Solitary Man (novel)">
The widow Mildred Finster has been a fan of "cozy" mystery novels for years. At the age of seventy-one she decides she would like to become a real private detective. She finds a business card for Angel Investigations and likes the name.Team Angel is busy with its own personal problems, and has little time to deal with Mildred offering her services. Later a truckload of valuable antiquities is stolen and they assume a simple theft. The arrival of ruthless killers from afar soon gets the attention of the gang.They must cope with being followed everywhere by a well-meaning old lady, fight off poltergeists, and try to set aside their personal differences (at least temporarily) so that they can overcome the supernatural foe which is responsible for a centuries-old mystery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_and_Death_(novel)"title="Love and Death (novel)">
Huge numbers of demon-killers are descending upon L.A., provoked by outspoken radio host Mac Lindley. They plan to rid the city of demons as rapidly and violently as possible.Angel Investigations is finding these angry mobs more of a hindrance than a help. Cordy knows bits and pieces but Angel Investigations is focusing on solving a case of a family who came to Los Angeles from Iowa; they were murdered together as Angel raced to try to save them.Soon Lorne is attacked and Connor goes missing. Angel realizes that the demon-hunters cannot tell the difference between a good demon and a bad one. None of them are safe from the crazy pack of do-gooders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolith_(novel)"title="Monolith (novel)">
Like other parents, Angel wishes he could understand his son, Connor. But father-son bonding time is short because Angel is overworked, Connor is embarrassed by his father's blood-drinking, Hyconian demons are running rampant across L.A. - and a huge monolith suddenly appears on Hollywood Boulevard.Nobody understands this massive rock. It has two demon faces carved into it. The news stations assume it is a clever publicity stunt for a newly released movie, and religious extremists worry that it might be a sign of the impending apocalypse. As the staff of Angel Investigations tries to understand what the rock means, it soon becomes clear that Connor and Angel will have to work together for survival.Characters include: Angel, Cordelia, Wesley, Gunn, Fred, Lorne and Connor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(Angel_novel)"title="Nemesis (Angel novel)">
One of Fred's old friends from graduate school contacts her for help at a big scientific facility. Fred has conflicted feelings about her past, and the life she might be able to lead independent of demons. However on the night they are supposed to meet, her friend is shot down, a seemingly innocent victim of a misdirected hit.Angel and the others wish they could help Fred, but are needed to investigate a series of murders among a group of wizards. The wizards are the only ones standing against an apocalyptic breach; they are literally holding the walls of reality together from more-deadly worlds. Fred leaves the investigation and takes the place of her friend as researcher to try to uncover her murder. Soon the supernatural and the scientific research collide, and Fred realizes she might be the only one who can stop the coming end-time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_the_Dead_(Angel_novel)"title="Book of the Dead (Angel novel)">
Wes has loved books since childhood. When a former colleague, Adrian O'Flaherty, arrives in town and invites him to a secret auction of rare occult books, Wes immediately agrees.However Adrian wants more than dusty old books at the auction. He wants revenge. Before the Watchers' Council was blown up (seen in 'Never Leave Me'), Rutherford Sirk took a number of rare books from the Council's libraries and killed the librarian who was Adrian's father.Wes buys a number of old books at the auction including one of the most famous books of magick, "The Red Compendium", which is infamous for absorbing those who read it. Wes has always been a sucker for literature and soon finds he can't put it down even if he wants to.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Law_and_the_Lady_(novel)"title="The Law and the Lady (novel)">
Valeria Brinton marries Eustace Woodville despite objections from Woodville's family; this decision worries Valeria's family and friends.Just a few days after the wedding, various incidents lead Valeria to suspect her husband of hiding a dark secret in his past. She discovers that he has been using a false name, "Woodville", when his true surname is "Macallan". Eustace refuses to discuss it, leading them to curtail their honeymoon and return to London where Valeria learnsthat he was on trial for his first wife's murder by arsenic. He was tried in a Scottish court and the verdict was 'not proven' rather than 'not guilty'. This implies that though Eustace is guilty, the jury did not have enough proof to convict him.Valeria sets out to save their happiness by proving her husband innocent of the crime. In her quest, she comes across the disabled character Miserrimus Dexter, a fascinating but mentally unstable genius, and Dexter's devoted female cousin, Ariel. Dexter will prove crucial to uncovering the disturbing truth behind the mysterious death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Defense"title="The Defense">
The plot concerns the title character, Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin. As a boy, he is considered unattractive, withdrawn, and an object of ridicule by his classmates. One day, when a guest comes to his father's party, he is asked whether he knows how to play chess. This encounter serves as his motivation to pick up chess. He skips school and visits his aunt's house to learn the basics. He quickly becomes a great player, enrolling in local competitions and rising in rank as a chess player. His talent is prodigious and he attains the level of a Grandmaster in less than ten years. For many years, he remains one of the top chess players in the world, but fails to become a world champion.During one of the tournaments, at a resort, he meets a young girl, never named in the novel, whose interest he captures. They become romantically involved, and Luzhin eventually proposes to her.Things turn for the worse when he is pitted against Turati, a grandmaster from Italy, in a competition to determine who would face the current world champion. Before and during the game, Luzhin has a mental breakdown, which climaxes when his carefully planned defense against Turati fails in the first moves, and the resulting game fails to produce a winner. When the game is suspended Luzhin wanders into the city in a state of complete detachment from reality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comus_(Milton)"title="Comus (Milton)">
The plot concerns two brothers and their sister, simply called "the Lady", lost in a journey through the woods. The Lady becomes fatigued, and the brothers wander off in search of sustenance.While alone, she encounters the debauched Comus, a character inspired by the god of revelry (, "Kōmos"), who is disguised as a villager and claims he will lead her to her brothers. Deceived by his amiable countenance, the Lady follows him, only to be captured, brought to his pleasure palace and victimised by his necromancy. Seated on an enchanted chair, with "gums of glutinous heat", she is immobilised, and Comus accosts her while with one hand he holds a necromancer's wand and with the other he offers a vessel with a drink that would overpower her. Comus urges the Lady to "be not coy" and drink from his magical cup (representing sexual pleasure and intemperance), but she repeatedly refuses, arguing for the virtuousness of temperance and chastity. Within view at his palace is an array of cuisine intended to arouse the Lady's appetites and desires. Despite being restrained against her will, she continues to exercise right reason (recta ratio) in her disputation with Comus, thereby manifesting her freedom of mind. Whereas the would-be seducer argues appetites and desires issuing from one's nature are "natural" and therefore licit, the Lady contends that only rational self-control is enlightened and virtuous. To be self-indulgent and intemperate, she adds, is to forfeit one's higher nature and to yield to baser impulses. In this debate the Lady and Comus signify, respectively, soul and body, ratio and libido, sublimation and sensuality, virtue and vice, moral rectitude and immoral depravity. In line with the theme of the journey that distinguishes Comus, the Lady has been deceived by the guile of a treacherous character, temporarily waylaid, and besieged by sophistry that is disguised as wisdom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swallowdale"title="Swallowdale">
Returning to Wild Cat Island for their second summer holiday by the Lake, the Swallows find the Amazons and Captain Flint suffering from "native trouble". Great Aunt Maria has come to stay and she is a stickler for "proper" behaviour, demanding that the Amazon pirates act like "young ladies" who are on hand and on time for meals. Despite this, Nancy and Peggy escape the Great Aunt and arrange a rendezvous with the Walkers but on the way the "Swallow" hits Pike Rock and sinks. All are saved and the boat salvaged but she needs repairing, so camping on the island is impossible. "Captain" John of the Swallows learns some valuable life lessons about following his instincts while commanding a ship, and has time to reflect on the accident while he fashions a new mast for Swallow. An alternative to camping on Wild Cat Island presents itself when Roger and Titty find a beautiful hidden valley, "Swallowdale", up on the moors above the lake.The Swallows discover a secret cave in Swallowdale, a trout tarn, the "knickerbockerbreaker", and enjoy new adventures of lakeland life. They meet local woodcutters and farmers, see a hound trail, and trek across the moors. The Amazons are only able to escape at intervals, and are punished for getting home late by being made to memorize and recite poetry. Eventually the Great Aunt leaves and the Swallows and Amazons mount an expedition to sleep under the stars on the summit of nearby commanding hill "Kanchenjunga" (in reality The Old Man of Coniston). While there, they discover a box with a small coin left by the Blackett's parents and uncle on climbing the "Matterhorn" thirty years earlier.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Time_to_Run"title="A Time to Run">
The story is set in the present day, with significant flashbacks to times beginning in the early 1970s. The protagonist is Ellen Fischer, a liberal senator from California. She is preparing for a difficult legislative battle over the conservative president's nomination of a deeply conservative female judge to the Supreme Court. Amid numerous particulars of the informal and formal governmental process in the United States, Boxer unfolds her heroine's dilemma and her past simultaneously. The dilemma is presented by a journalist, Greg Hunter, with pronounced right-wing views. Hunter is a figure from the senator's past. They had been lovers while he was in college; he lost her to his roommate, Joshua Fischer. Joshua later dies in the middle of a campaign for Senate; Ellen steps into his place and wins, launching her political career. Now, Hunter has returned, bringing with him information that could derail the judicial nominee's appointment. Fischer is buffeted by new revelations about Hunter and a well-founded distrust of his motives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_Sixty_Fathers"title="The House of Sixty Fathers">
The story is set during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Japan has invaded China, and the Japanese attack the village where young Tien Pao and his family live. The family flees upriver in an abandoned sampan to the town of Hengyang. While the boy's parents go to a nearby American airfield to seek work with his younger sister, Tien Pao spends the day taking care of the sampan as well as three ducklings and the family pig, named Glory of the Republic. During a rainstorm, while Tien Pao is asleep, the sampan breaks loose from its moorings. Tien Pao is swept down the river. After a night in the raging waters, the storm abates, and Tien Pao finds himself floating in the area where his village used to be. He releases the ducklings in the river and heads for higher ground with his pig. He must travel over high mountains and through dangerous Japanese occupied territory to reach Hengyang.As he journeys home, Tien Pao begins to starve and suffer from exhaustion. He witnesses terrifying scenes of violence. Once, he sees a plane strafe a Japanese military convoy, only to be shot down over the forest. Sitting on a big rock, Tien Pao watches the entire skirmish. He later comes upon the injured American pilot (whom he had met before during his stay at Hengyang river) and helps the man return to his unit. The American pilot is a member of the Flying Tigers, and the sixty men in the unit become the "sixty fathers" who care for Tien Pao. Tien Pao exhibits a strong will to continue to try to find his parents, an incredibly difficult task; with the help of the American pilot he finds an airfield similar to the one his parents once worked on. The pilot only wishes to show Tien Pao an airfield but Tien Pao finds his mother and is at last reunited with his family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warlord_of_the_Air"title="Warlord of the Air">
The novel is transcribed by 'Michael Moorcock' (the author's fictional grandfather) in 1903. Holidaying at the remote Rowe Island, he befriends Oswald Bastable, an ex-soldier stowaway who seems confused and disoriented beyond what could be explained by his opium addiction, and who is tormented by great guilt from an action he performed in his past. Bastable agrees to tell Moorcock the story, and begins his narrative with his experiences in North East India in 1902, sent as part of a British expedition to deal with Sharan Kang, an Indian high priest at the temple of Teku Benga, a mysterious and seemingly supernaturally powerful region. After a confrontation with Kang and his men, Bastable finds himself lost and alone in the caves around the 'Temple of the Future Buddha', where he is assaulted by a mysterious force and knocked into unconsciousness.When he awakes, and escapes the caves, the Temple is in ruins, as if a great amount of time has passed. He is soon found and picked up by a massive airship, where he learns that it is in fact the year 1973, but not the one that the reader would recognise. In this alternate future, the First World War never happened, and the colonial powers continue to assert dominance over their empires—for example, India remains a British territory, though Winston Churchill had been viceroy in this alternate future as well as in Bastable's own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barabbas_(novel)"title="Barabbas (novel)">
Jesus is crucified on Mount Golgotha. To the side of the crowd stands Barabbas. A violent man, a brigand, and a rebel, he cannot muster much respect for the resignation of the Man who died in his place. He is skeptical about the Holiness of Jesus, but he is also fascinated by His sacrifice. He seeks out different followers of Jesus in trying to understand Him, but finds that their exalted views of Jesus do not match his down-to-earth observation of Him. More important, since Barabbas has never been the recipient of love (the cornerstone of the Christian faith), he finds that he is unable to understand love and, hence, unable to understand the Christian faith. He says that he "wants to believe," but for Barabbas, understanding is a prerequisite for belief, so he is unable to.Enslaved, shackled to another man named Sahak, and condemned to work in the notoriously life-shortening and infernal copper mines of Ancient Rome, Barabbas has an extraordinary crisis of faith, the exact nature of which is elucidated in the final portion of the novel. Barabbas's ultimate loyalties lie with the opaque, remorseless void that fed and surrounded his former life, manifested in the darkness of the night of his execution, which he surrenders himself to with his final breath.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wives_of_Bath"title="The Wives of Bath">
In late 1963, Mary 'Mouse' Bradford is sent to boarding school by her unsympathetic father and jealous stepmother. There, she meets the rebellious Paulie, and together they embark upon a quest to discover what, fundamentally, separates men from women.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Princesses_of_Bamarre"title="The Two Princesses of Bamarre">
Princess Adelina "Addie" is fearful and shy. Princess Meryl is bold and brave. They are sisters, and they mean the world to each other. Bamarre is plagued by a fatal disease called the Gray Death, which has three stages: Weakness, Sleep, and then Fever. While the weakness may last for hours to weeks, the sleep always lasts nine days, and the fever always lasts three. Bamarre also has specters, which lure travelers to their deaths unless exposed, sorcerers, ogres, dwarves, elves, gryphons, dragons, and fairies. Fairies, however, have not been seen since Drualt, Bamarre's greatest hero and subject of myths, went up to visit them after the tragic death of his sweetheart Freya.The two princesses strike up a friendship with Rhys, the apprentice sorcerer helping their father. Soon after, Princess Meryl is suddenly struck ill with the Gray Death. Princess Addie has trouble coming to terms with the fact that Princess Meryl is going to die, while her elder sister tries in vain to prove her theory that the Gray Death might be cured if the person who is ill refuses to be sick, running when weak, staying awake when tired, etc. Since a prophecy from a long ago specter states that
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Czar's_Madman"title="The Czar's Madman">
This historical novel is about a Livonian nobleman, , who has married a peasant girl named Eeva to prove everyone that good men are equal before nature, God and ideals. Eeva's brother Jakob analyses von Bock's life throughout his journal and tries to figure out if the nobleman is truly mad as everyone seems to believe. "The Czar's Madman" is arguably one of the best-known Estonian novels in the world.The story is written in diary form, describing the impact of revolutionary thinking on the part of a family member.Aristocrat Timotheus von Bock (the diarist's brother in law) writes a letter to the Czar criticising the way in which the Czar's family runs the country. He justifies this act by an oath made to the Czar to give an honest appraisal of the situation.Von Bock is imprisoned as a traitor (although the reason for his imprisonment is kept secret, as is the letter) for 9 years before being released into house arrest on the basis that he is 'mad'.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Be_Dragons"title="Here Be Dragons">
"Here Be Dragons" is the first of Penman's trilogy about the medieval princes of Gwynedd and the monarchs of England. England's King John uses his out-of-wedlock daughter Joanna as a negotiating tool by marrying her to the Welsh noble Llewelyn to avoid war between England and Wales.Joanna and Llewelyn's marriage is marred by resentment from Llewelyn's illegitimate son, Gruffydd. Joanna gives birth to two legitimate children, Elen and Dafydd. Growing animosity between the English and Welsh results in Joanna having to act as a diplomatic intermediary between her husband and her father, and the situation deteriorates when Gruffydd is taken hostage by John and narrowly escapes execution. Joanna becomes determined that her own son, Dafydd, will be his father's heir as ruler of Gwynedd, disregarding the Welsh law that all sons should receive equal shares of their father's inheritance. Family disagreements lead Joanna into an affair with William de Braose, who is several years her junior and whom she has met earlier in the story when he was a hostage in Llewelyn's household. Their affair is discovered and William is executed. Joanna is placed in secluded captivity, but at the end of the book Llewelyn comes to find her and offers her forgiveness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nightmare_Fair"title="The Nightmare Fair">
The TARDIS falls through a time well, landing in modern-day Blackpool at an amusement fair. The Doctor and Peri, finding nothing else amiss, start to enjoy the fair's attractions. They are separated on an amusement ride; the Doctor's car is directed into the depths of the fair, while Peri encounters Kevin, a teenaged-boy looking for his brother who is missing but had last been seen at the fair weeks ago. The two are also eventually captured and brought to a prison where the Doctor has also been caged.They discover their captor is the Celestial Toymaker, who has been stuck on Earth for several millennia, tricking a few unsuspecting humans into playing games with him and losing, become his perpetual servants. The Toymaker created the time well to bring the Doctor here, and added elements to the fair to help capture the Doctor. The Toymaker is on the verge of completing his "great work": an arcade game that feeds on the souls that lose to it, which then can generate powerful creatures with which the Toymaker plans to take over Earth. He is prepared to have the game mass-produced in America to complete his plan. The Doctor, who knows that the Time Lords do not fully know who or what the Toymaker is, learns that he is a powerful psychic being from another dimension where time moves much slower, giving him his seemingly immortality. Knowing that he cannot hurt the Toymaker physically, he works with Peri, Kevin, a Venusian engineer and a human android who is also one of the Toymaker's captives, to construct a device to disrupt the Toymaker's psychic field. The Doctor then traps him in a time field of his device that prevents the Toymaker from being able to control anyone outside of it and that will last forever. The other creatures captured by the Toymaker are freed, including Kevin's brother. The Doctor decides to return with Peri back to enjoy the fair a bit more.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_There_Be_Dragons"title="Here There Be Dragons">
In an isolated kingdom, people do not travel abroad because the kingdom is surrounded by high mountains and because they think there are ferocious dragons beyond the mountains. They think there are dragons because the royal cartographer, Mr. Gibberling, does not know what is beyond the mountains so in the blank areas on the edges of his maps he writes "HERE THERE BE DRAGONS".The king wants fireworks for his daughter's birthday party, but the fireworks maker dies without passing on his skills to another. The king consults with his four advisers. The first adviser comes up with the idea of importing a medium-sized dragon with colored lights for the party. The king thinks this is a splendid idea and after some discussion the first three advisers assign the dragon hunting job to the fourth adviser, a young man named William.William goes on a quest to find such a dragon, but all he captures is a lizard named Bell. The lizard promises William that he will produce a medium-sized dragon with colored lights for the party. At the party, however, Bell transforms himself into a huge, menacing, fire-breathing dragon named Belkis. The dragon, it turns out, is interested in only one thing—Mr. Gibberling's practice of writing "HERE THERE BE DRAGONS" on his maps. He says that there are very few dragons, they wish to be left alone, and disguise themselves as innocuous animals such as lizards to avoid humans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here,_There_Be_Dragons"title="Here, There Be Dragons">
John, Charles, and Jack are three Oxford scholars united by the death of Stellan Sigurdsson, John's mentor, who thereafter receive "The Imaginarium Geographica", which records mythical and fictional locations. When pursued by the anthropophagous, plural Wendigo, they are rescued by Bert, with whom they travel aboard the ship "Indigo Dragon" (captained by Bert's daughter Aven), to Avalon, and then to Paralon, the capital of the "Geographica"'s 'Archipelago of Dreams', where they discover this Archipelago in an interregnum and discover that its social order can be restored by a descendant of Arthur Pendragon. Desirous of obtaining the royal 'Ring of Power', and thus the kingship, is the 'Winter King' (Mordred). Upon a visit to shipbuilder 'Ordo Maas' (Deucalion), the protagonists learn that the Winter King is using Pandora's Box to create the wraithlike 'Shadow-Born', his principal servants, from the citizens of lands conquered by himself. Fearing that the Winter King may gain an advantage by possession of the "Imaginarium Geographica", they visit its author, the Cartographer of Lost Places, in his refuge, the Keep of Time, where they discover that their servant 'Artus' is a descendant of Arthur. Knowing this, they challenge the Winter King to pitched battle, wherein the still-loyal Elves, Dwarves, and Centaurs etc. oppose Shadow-Born, Trolls, and Goblins while Charles and the badger 'Tummeler' close Pandora's Box in secret. On the battlefield, Jack accidentally causes the death of Captain Nemo, while John and Artus approach the 'Ring of Power' (a ring of standing stones resembling Stonehenge) to summon the Archipelago's dragons, who rout the enemy. Mordred is cast from the Edge of the World by the dragon Samaranth. Upon return to their own world, John, Jack, Charles, and Bert are identified as J.R.R Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and H.G. Wells.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_Death_(1995_film)"title="Sudden Death (1995 film)">
Darren McCord is a French Canadian-born firefighter for the Pittsburgh Bureau of Fire now serving as the fire marshal for the Pittsburgh Civic Arena, after being unable to save a young girl from a house fire two years prior. During the 1995 Stanley Cup Finals between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Chicago Blackhawks (a fictional rematch of the 1992 Stanley Cup Finals), a group of terrorists take the Vice President of the United States and several other VIPs hostage in a luxury suite. Secret Service operative Joshua Foss has the arena wired with explosives, and plans to blow it up at the end of the game, while having hundreds of millions of dollars wired into several off shore accounts.Darren takes his son Tyler and daughter Emily to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals as a birthday gift for Tyler. A spat between brother and sister causes Emily to run off before getting kidnapped by Carla, the sole female member of the terrorists (who is disguised as the local mascot Iceburgh after killing the original performer). Carla places Emily in the suite with the other hostages about to be executed. Not wanting his son to go missing, Darren orders Tyler to stay in his seat while he goes searching for Emily. Carla is about to kill Darren, but he evades her attacks in a fight and kills her. Afterward, Darren asks for a security guard's help, but the guard is another terrorist in disguise and reveals their criminal operation before being killed by Darren. Now aware of the situation, Darren finds a mobile phone in the executive offices and uses it to contact Secret Service Agent Matthew Hallmark; Hallmark advises Darren to stand by while the agents take charge. He angrily refuses, saying that he will handle this himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_in_History"title="The City in History">
Mumford argues for a world not in which technology rules, but rather in which it achieves a balance with nature. His ideal vision is what can be described as an "organic city," where culture is not usurped by technological innovation but rather thrives with it. Mumford contrasts these cities with those constructed around wars, tyrants, poverty, etc. However, the book is not an attack on the city, but rather an evaluation of its growth, how it came to be, and where it is heading, as evidenced by the final chapter "Retrospect and Prospect."Mumford notes apologetically in his preface that his "method demands personal experience and observation," and that therefore he has "confined [him]self as far as possible to cities and regions [he is] acquainted with at first hand."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Midwife's_Apprentice"title="The Midwife's Apprentice">
In medieval Europe, a homeless orphan girl who has no name, and can recall being named Brat, attempts to nestle in a warm dung heap on a cold night. She wakes up to the taunts of village boys, and the words of the harsh and uncaring Jane Sharp, the local midwife. Jane takes the girl on as her apprentice and renames her "Beetle," but does not teach Beetle about midwifery for fear of competition.Beetle learns what she can anyway, and starts to grow as a person through various experiences. She even has a chance to claim a new name, Alyce, after being mistaken for another girl with the same name. Alyce befriends a homeless, orphaned boy, who -with some prompting- names himself Edward after the King. She tells him to go to a local manor to get food and a job. Jane helps a woman in labor with the help of Alyce, and word arrives the Lady of the Manor is in labor. Jane abandons the new mother to Alyce's care to the Lady. Alyce is kind to the woman and successfully delivers the baby, and the grateful parents pay her and name the child "Alyce Little." Soon after, a woman's son comes to Alyce asking her to deliver her baby. This is a more difficult birth, and Alyce is overwhelmed by her inability to help. Jane sweeps in and completes the job, and Alyce flees with her cat, not wanting to endure the shame.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prathapa_Mudaliar_Charithram"title="Prathapa Mudaliar Charithram">
The story is a loose collection of events and narratives centered on a naive but good-natured hero and his life and adventures. It begins in a typical forward caste family setting, with the young Prathapa Mudhaliar, from Tuluva Vellala Mudaliar family of Arcot indulging in hunting and enjoying himself. The plot also introduces the heroine as a rather intelligent and morally upright girl who marries the hero through a myriad of events.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingersmith_(novel)"title="Fingersmith (novel)">
## Part one.Sue Trinder, an orphan raised in "a Fagin-like den of thieves" by her adoptive mother, Mrs Sucksby, is sent to help Richard "Gentleman" Rivers seduce a wealthy heiress. Posing as a maid, Sue is to gain the trust of the lady, Maud Lilly, and eventually persuade her to elope with Gentleman. Once they are married, Gentleman plans to commit Maud to a madhouse and claim her fortune for himself.Sue travels to Briar, Maud's secluded home in the country, where she lives a sheltered life under the care of her uncle, Christopher Lilly. Like Sue, Maud was orphaned at birth; her mother died in a mental asylum, and she has never known her father. Her uncle uses her as a secretary to assist him as he supposedly compiles a dictionary, and keeps her to the house, working with him in the silence of his library.Sue and Maud forge an unlikely friendship, which develops into a mutual physical attraction. After a time, Sue realises she has fallen in love with Maud, and begins to regret her involvement in Gentleman's plot. Deeply distressed, but feeling she has no choice, Sue persuades Maud to marry Gentleman, and the trio flee from Briar to a nearby church, where Maud and Gentleman are hastily married in a midnight ceremony.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathasaritsagara"title="Kathasaritsagara">
The "Kathāsaritsāgara" is a large work. Each book comprises a number of stories loosely strung together, by being narrated for the recreation or information of the same individuals, or arising out of their adventures. These are Udayana, king of Kosambi, and his son Naravahanadatta. The marriage of the latter with various damsels of terrestrial or celestial origin, and his elevation to the rank of king of the Vidyadharas, a class of heavenly spirits, are the leading topics of most of the books; but they merely constitute the skeleton of the composition, the substance being made up of stories growing out of these circumstances, or springing from one another with an ingenuity of intricacy which is one of the great charms of all such collections.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bec_(novel)"title="Bec (novel)">
When a "simple child" named Bran who can run incredibly fast comes to Bec's demon-besieged rath, she and a small consignment of warriors go with him, including the chief's son, Connla, who is "largely untested" in battle; Goll, an old warrior; Lorcan and Ronan, two teenage twins; Fiachna the blacksmith; and Orna, a female warrior. During the journey, the group is attacked by demons, but luckily manage to hide near some ancient lodestones which protect them with powerful Old Magic. Eventually, Bran leads them to a crannóg, where everyone is dead except a druid, Drust. The druid tells them about a tunnel to the demons' world, and how he aims to destroy it. They go with him.The group finds some horses which help them reach their destination in time, but Fiachna is soon abandoned after his wound becomes life-threatening.Bec manages to force Bran through the closing tunnel at the last moment with the last of her magic, but is trapped as a result. Soon after, Lord Loss appears and tells Bec that when she appeared to absorb power from him several days earlier, Lord Loss had actually intended for that to happen so that she could close the tunnel. This is because Lord Loss is unique among demons, in that instead of wishing to slaughter all the humans in the world, he actually prefers to prolong the suffering for as long as possible. If the tunnel had remained open, countless other demons would have passed through and destroyed all of mankind within a matter of weeks, which would have ruined Lord Loss' "sport". After telling Bec this, Lord Loss reminds her of the geis that he had placed on her, and that he is bound by his word to kill her. Lord Loss sets his familiars upon Bec, and without any magic to defend herself with, she is easily overwhelmed and killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe's_Sword"title="Sharpe's Sword">
French Colonel Philippe Leroux and Captain Paul Delmas are fleeing from the King's German Legion toward Sharpe's Light Company. Leroux has extracted the secret identity of El Mirador, Britain's most important spy in Spain, from a priest he tortured. Leroux kills Delmas and assumes his identity and then allows himself to be captured by Sharpe and his men, knowing that the British would never exchange an imperial colonel. Sharpe covets Leroux's sword, a finely crafted, superbly balanced Klingenthal heavy cavalry sword. As Captain Delmas, Leroux gives his parole to Major Joseph Forrest. Whilst he is being escorted back to Wellington's headquarters, he kills his escort and escapes on horseback towards Salamanca. Lieutenant Colonel Windham pursues Leroux on horseback, but Leroux kills him. He gains sanctuary in one of the three French-controlled forts outside Salamanca, after Father Curtis protects him from the locals.Sharpe confronts Curtis, who explains that the Frenchman is in fact Leroux, and that he was protecting the city's residents against Leroux's revenge if the city were to be recaptured by the French. Sharpe takes an instant dislike to Curtis, whom he thinks is sympathetic to the French. In Salamanca, Sharpe is introduced to the breathtakingly beautiful Marquesa de Casares el Grande y Melida Sadaba, and to Captain Lord Jack Spears. Wellington's army arrives at Salamanca as part of their manoeuvring against Marshal Marmont's army. Major Michael Hogan is both disturbed and relieved when Sharpe gives him a list Leroux dropped; the list was stolen from Hogan and contains the names of many of his spies. Many of them have recently been tortured and killed by Leroux.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludmila's_Broken_English"title="Ludmila's Broken English">
The novel follows two initially separate narratives set in the United Kingdom and Eastern Europe. Recently separated – at the age of 33 – conjoined twins Blair Albert and Gordon-Marie "Bunny" Heath struggle to cope with life in a post-globalisation and fully privatised London. Meanwhile, Ludmila Derev, an impoverished young woman living in the war-torn Southern Caucasus, leaves her mountain home to meet up with her boyfriend in the region's major town and send money back to her family. However, things start to go wrong and she ends up with her picture on a Russian Brides website. Slowly her life and those of the twins are drawn together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ear,_the_Eye_and_the_Arm"title="The Ear, the Eye and the Arm">
In Zimbabwe in the year 2194, Chief of Security General Matsika leads a battle against the gangs which terrorize the nation. His three children, Tendai, Rita, and Kuda, are kept in a fortified mansion to ensure their security. Seeking adventure to earn the Scout Badge, they escape the house with the help of the Mellower, a praise singer employed by their parents. The children then find themselves in the busy streets of Mbare Musika, where they are kidnapped and taken to Dead Man's Vlei, the lair of the She Elephant, a child trafficker. There, they are forced to work in the plastic mines. Their parents enlist the help of the Ear, the Eye, and the Arm, three mutant detectives. Ear has super-sensitive hearing; Eye has hawk-like vision; Arm has empathic powers which allow him to sense others' feelings and see into their souls.Tendai realizes that the She Elephant is planning to sell them to the Masks, a gang who have evaded General Matsika's efforts to combat crime. The siblings escape to Resthaven, an independent country within Zimbabwe which aims to retain traditional African culture. Eventually, the children are banished from Resthaven.The children seek help from the Mellower's mother, Mrs. Horsepool-Worthingham, who takes them into her care. Tendai discovers that the Mellower's mother is holding them for ransom. The She Elephant again captures the children and takes them to one of the Masks' secret lairs. The Masks take the children to the Mile-High MacIlwaine, a skyscraper which houses the Gondwannan Embassy, the real headquarters of the Masks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagarism"title="Hagarism">
Cook and Crone postulate that "Hagarism" started as a "Jewish messianic movement" to "reestablish Judaism" in the Jewish Holyland (Palestine), that its adherents were first known as "muhajirun" rather than Muslims, and that their hijra (migration) was to Jerusalem rather than Medina. Its members were initially both Jewish and Arab but the Arabs' increasing success impelled them to break from the Jews around the time of Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan in the late seventh century. They flirted with Christianity, learning a respect for Jesus as prophet and Mary as Virgin, before asserting an independent Abrahamic monotheist identity. This borrowed from the Jewish breakaway sect of Samaritanism "the idea of a scripture limited to the Pentateuch, a prophet like Moses (Muhammad), a holy book revealed like the Torah (the Quran), a sacred city (Mecca) with a nearby mountain (Jabal an-Nour) and shrine (the Kaaba) of an appropriate patriarch (Abraham), plus a caliphate modeled on an Aaronid priesthood."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girls_on_Film_(novel)"title="Girls on Film (novel)">
After rejecting Ben, Anna tries to focus on her studies at Beverly Hills High. She and Sam partner up on an English project to create a short film based on "The Great Gatsby". They agree to film their project at V's, an exclusive spa and resort in the Ojai desert. Anna writes the screenplay, which impresses Sam and she begins to develop a crush on Anna, much to her confusion. At school, Adam asks Anna out on a date and she agrees, in hopes of getting over Ben, who continues to send grand romantic gestures.Anna's older sister Susan arrives in Los Angeles and takes up residence at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Anna is concerned, especially since Susan claims to have checked out of rehab early but Susan brushes off her concerns. Susan meets Cammie, Dee, and Sam at the hotel and they all agree to join Sam and Anna at V's for the weekend.Anna meets with her father's girlfriend, Margaret Cunningham, at her new entertainment agency that she co-founded with Clark Sheppard, Cammie's father. Anna accepts an after-school internship with Margaret and her first assignment is to escort a screenwriter to an upcoming industry party. When Margaret learns that Susan knows the screenwriter, she encourages Anna to bring Susan to the party as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blonde_Ambition_(novel)"title="Blonde Ambition (novel)">
Ben and Anna are now officially together but their reunion is interrupted when Jonathan, Anna's father, calls back Anna to bid farewell to her sister Susan, who has decided to enroll back into rehab. Anna. Anna considers their farewell to be intimate and is surprised when Ben tags along though she does not voice her displeasure. Back at Apex, Margaret informs Anna that leaving an industry party to take a drunk Susan home was unacceptable and is about to fire her when Clark Sheppard intervenes. He takes Anna as his intern and assigns her to work on the new hit soap opera "Hermosa Beach". Anna meets the young and charming co-executive producer Danny Bluestone and enjoys working on a TV set, despite the unfamiliar terms and erratic actors. Ben gets jealous of Anna spending time with Danny and the Percys' driver Django and Anna becomes concerned that Ben is neglecting his studies at Princeton. After a heart to heart, the two break up again and Ben reluctantly returns to Princeton.Meanwhile, Cammie feels increasingly deserted by her friends: Dee is enamored with her new boyfriend Stevie while Sam seems to be showing interest in Adam Flood. To further her dismay, her step-mother announces that her daughter, Mia, will be moving in. Cammie initially hates Mia, a secretive fourteen-year-old Valley girl, but takes her out shopping in order to not feel alone. Cammie kisses Adam at a party in an attempt to punish Sam but is pleasantly surprised at their chemistry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_Cool_One_(novel)"title="Tall Cool One (novel)">
At the beginning of the novel, Anna is at the beach with Danny, the producer she met while interning for Clark Sheppard on Hermosa Beach, learning to surf but can't seem to get it. The two end up having a conversation about one-night stands. Dan claims Anna isn't the type to have one but Anna claims that she would and that she doesn't think casual sex is bad even though she has only had sex with Ben, who has returned to Princeton. Her relationship with him is not certain between both of them but Anna thinks that them two have broken up or at least, are on a break.Once Anna returns home she finds her mother "and" father on the couch in her father's house in Los Angeles having a drink. She finds this shocking because since the divorce, her parents couldn't stand to be in the same room. Her father explains that her sister Susan is coming out of rehab and that her doctor suggested that they meet her as a whole family.Sam is also having her own family problems as her new stepmother Poppy has taken over the whole house to prepare for Sam's soon to be sister, Ruby Hummingbird. To Sam's further dismay, Dee has become fast friends with Poppy and even moves in to help with the baby preparations, causing Sam to feel ignored. She joins Anna at Las Casitas, not caring that the whole Sharpe family is supposed to appear on The Tonight Show together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_in_Black_(novel)"title="Back in Black (novel)">
The A-List crew, consisting of Sam, Anna, Dee, Parker, Adam, and Cammie decide to forgo the Spring Break school sponsored trip to Washington D.C. in favor of heading over to Las Vegas instead. Anna misses Ben, who is away at school, and she impulsively invites him to join her and their friends in Vegas too. She also mentions the trip to her best friend from New York, Cyn Baltres, who is impressed with the way Anna has reinvented herself.Parker Pinelli is worried because he is secretly poor and doesn't have enough money to cover the expenses for their luxurious get away but refuses to confide in any of his friends, fearing they'll kick him off the A-list if they knew the truth. He tries to gamble but is unsuccessful as the Las Vegas laws forbid minors from collecting any winnings so he hooks up with a series of wealthier and older women to cover his costs. No one in the group notices and figure Parker is just a lady killer and decide to kick off their break with a "tacky showgirl outfit contest". The girls eagerly participate although Cammie sneaks away to an undisclosed location which causes Adam to worry that she is cheating on him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Short_Reign_of_Pippin_IV"title="The Short Reign of Pippin IV">
"Pippin IV" explores the life of Pippin Héristal, an amateur astronomer in 1950s France, who is suddenly proclaimed the King of France. Unknowingly appointed to give the Communists a monarchy to revolt against, Pippin is chosen because he was descended from the famous king Charlemagne. Unhappy with his lack of privacy, alteration of family life, uncomfortable housings at the Palace of Versailles and his lack of power as a constitutional monarch, the protagonist spends a portion of the novel dressing up as a commoner, often riding a motorscooter, to avoid the constrained life of a king. Pippin eventually receives his wish of dethronement after the people of France enact the rebellion Pippin's kingship was destined to receive. He returns to his home in Paris to find that nothing has really changed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airman_(novel)"title="Airman (novel)">
The book begins with the Paris World's Fair of 1878, which Declan Broekhart and his wife, Catherine, are attending. They are there mainly to take a ride in a new hot air balloon. While they are in the air, along with one Victor Vigny, the balloon is shot at by men from the ground. During the forced landing, Conor Broekhart is born, flying over Paris.It is 1887. Conor and his family live on the sovereign Saltee Islands, off the Irish coast, which are ruled by King Nicholas Trudeau. Nicholas is a progressive leader who is helping the islands adapt to the industrialized world.When a dangerous fire traps young Conor and his friend Isabella (the king's daughter) on top of a tower's roof, he saves both their lives by making a makeshift glider to fly them to safety. He is obsessed with building a "flying machine". Unfortunately, the head of the island's guards, Marshall Hugo Bonvilain, conspires to overthrow Nicholas and seize control of the Saltees. His goal is to turn the islands into a market for the diamonds mined by inmates on the prison island, Little Saltee. Despite Conor's attempt to intervene, Nicholas and Victor are killed by Marshall Bonvilain. Marshall Bonvilain takes control of the islands and tells his subjects that Victor conspired to kill King Nicholas and Conor tried to save the King, but died in the effort. Conor, however, does not know this, and instead thinks that Bonivilain has told his family that he was involved in the plot to kill the King. Conor is thrown into jail on Little Saltee, under the alias Conor Finn. His family and friends believe he is dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_God_(novel)"title="Children of God (novel)">
Father Emilio Sandoz is a Jesuit priest who has returned to Earth and is recovering from his experiences on the planet Rakhat (detailed in "The Sparrow"). He is exposed to Father General Vincenzo Giuliani's organized crime "family", the Camorra. At a christening celebration, he meets Celestina, aged four, and her mother Gina, a divorcee with whom Emilio begins to fall in love. Emilio is released from the priesthood. He trains the second Jesuit expedition to Rakhat, composed of Sean Fein, Danny Iron Horse, Joseba Urizarbarrena, and John Candotti, in the K'San (Jana'ata) and Ruanja (Runa) languages. Sandoz refuses to go. Gina is about to go on vacation, after which Emilio plans to marry her.Unfortunately, while Gina is on vacation, Emilio is beaten and kidnapped by Carlo, Gina's ex-husband and Celestina's father. Emilio is kept in a constantly drugged state on Carlo's ship, the "Giordano Bruno". They are actually working for the Jesuits and the Vatican, who want Sandoz to return to Rakhat. It is extremely important that the Jesuits put right (as much as possible) what they destroyed on Rakhat; the massacre of the first landing party and the violent revolution of the Runa serving class that followed, have caused a rift between the Society of Jesus and the rest of the Catholic Church. In fact, the Jesuit order has all but vanished.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordbird"title="Swordbird">
The story begins with Turnatt, an evil tyrant hawk and lord of Fortress Glooming, watching the construction of his fortress. Farther in the forest of Stone-Run are two tribes: the Bluewingle tribe of the blue jays and the Sunrise tribe of the cardinals, which are at war with each other, each accusing the other of stealing their eggs and food, not knowing that this is actually the work of Turnatt.A member of the Bluewingle tribe, a female blue jay named Aska, meets a robin named Miltin, a slave at Fortress Glooming, who warns her of Turnatt. Aska leaves and tells the two tribes of Turnatt.The groups make amends in time for the Bright Moon Festival, during which the Flying Willowleaf Theater arrive and help celebrate by telling the legend of Swordbird, a giant dove-like bird of peace with magical powers. The celebration is cut short when a group of Turnatt's soldiers attack, attempting to capture and enslave the two tribes and the members of the Flying Willowleaf Theater.The tribes manage to defeat the soldiers and decide to summon Swordbird, thinking that he is the only one with the power to defeat Turnatt, using his Leasorn Sword. The only problem is that Swordbird can only be sumonned by a song and one of the Leasorn Gems, which are said to be crystallized tears of the Great Spirit. There are only seven Leasorn Gems in the world, with an eighth one in Swordbird's blade. All hope seems lost until a recently escaped Miltin tells them that his tribe has one of the Leasorn Gems. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Suns"title="House of Suns">
The novel is divided into eight parts, with the first chapter of each part taking the form of a narrative flashback to Abigail Gentian’s early life (six million years earlier, in the 31st century), before the cloning and the creation of the Gentian Line. Each subsequent chapter is narrated from the first-person perspective of two shatterlings named Campion and Purslane, alternating between them each chapter. Campion and Purslane are in a relationship, which is frowned upon, even punishable, by the Line.The primary storyline begins as Campion and Purslane are roughly fifty years late to the 32nd Gentian reunion. They take a detour to contact a posthuman known as ‘Ateshga’ in hopes of getting a replacement ship for Campion because his is getting old (several million years old). After being tricked by Ateshga, Campion and Purslane manage to turn the tables on him and leave his planet with a being he had been keeping captive, a golden robot called Hesperus. Hesperus is a member of the "Machine People", an advanced civilization of robots, and supposedly the only non-human sentient society in existence. The two shatterlings hope that the rescue of Hesperus will let them off the hook for their lateness, as returning him to his people (who will be at the reunion as guests of other shatterlings) will put the Gentian Line on good terms with the Machine People.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growing_Up_Brady"title="Growing Up Brady">
In "Growing Up Brady", Williams discusses his childhood, the production of the 1969–1974 ABC sitcom "The Brady Bunch", his relationship with co-star Maureen McCormick, disputes between series star Robert Reed and creator-producer Sherwood Schwartz, and various "Brady Bunch" spin-offs. An episode guide to the series is also included, as well as three negative critiques from Reed of the episodes "The Impractical Joker" and "And Now a Word From Our Sponsor" (both 1971), and "The Hair-Brained Scheme" (the series finale from 1974, in which Reed refused to appear).Two editions of the book exist: the first edition details his "Brady" co-stars attending his 1990 wedding to Diane Martin; that marriage ended in divorce two years later; the second edition, published several years later, replaces the references to Martin with his impressions of the feature films "The Brady Bunch Movie" and "A Very Brady Sequel", and reflections on Reed's death in 1992 due to cancer and the subsequent media frenzy over the news that Reed had been diagnosed as HIV positive (misreported as AIDS) prior to his death. A third edition was printed in 2000.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Place_of_Execution"title="A Place of Execution">
The novel has two parallel storylines; the first, set in 1963, follows Detective Inspector George Bennett, who attempts to locate a missing girl in Derbyshire. The second, set in the present day, follows journalist Catherine Heathcote, whose plans to publish a story of the investigation are derailed when Bennett inexplicably stops cooperating and she attempts to find out why.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_of_Dune"title="Paul of Dune">
The book is divided into seven sections, which alternate between Paul Atreides's youth before the events portrayed in "Dune", and the early period of his Fremen jihad between "Dune" and "Dune Messiah".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Masks"title="Death Masks">
Harry shares a TV panel with a Vatican priest, Father Vincent, and São Paulo University Professor Don Paolo Ortega, a disguised Red Court Vampire noble. Father Vincent hires Dresden to recover the stolen Shroud of Turin while Ortega challenges Harry to a duel to end the war between the White Council and the Red Court. After the show concludes, Dresden is attacked by the Denarian Ursiel, a fallen angel attached to a mortal host. Michael Carpenter and two other Knights of the Cross, Shiro and Sanya, rescue him and ask him to drop the Shroud investigation, but Dresden refuses.Dresden tracks the Shroud to a boat, but is captured by the thieves. Deirdre, another Denarian, attacks the boat and kills one of the thieves. Dresden fools her into taking a decoy safe rather than the Shroud itself. The surviving thief, Anna Valmont, flees with the Shroud. Dresden's onetime lover, Susan Rodriguez, escorts him to a high society art sales charity event run by Johnny Marcone, where the Shroud will likely be sold. The sale is interrupted by the Denarians, who seize the Shroud and kidnap Dresden.Nicodemus, leader of the Denarians, pressures Harry to join with the Denarian Lasciel or die. Dresden refuses. Shiro arrives and trades himself for Dresden. Dresden is almost re-captured, but Susan, enhanced in battle by her semi-vampire status, helps him escape. She reveals that she is working with The Fellowship of St. Giles, an organization of half-turned humans resisting the vampire Courts. Harry deduces that Father Vincent is a Denarian imposter, and the real priest is the murder victim he is investigating for Murphy. With the Knights, he captures the imposter and forces him to reveal that Nicodemus plans to use the Shroud to create a deadly plague curse at O'Hare Airport, an international travel hub.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Red_Horse_Cavern"title="The Legend of Red Horse Cavern">
Apache Will Little Bear Tucker and his friend Sarah Thompson spot a treasure chest, get held captive by the villains and later escape. After Sarah is recaptured, Will rescues her, they solve the legend of Red Horse and Will disposes of a villain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodomonte's_Revenge"title="Rodomonte's Revenge">
It features Brett and Tom who are playing the new virtual reality game, "Rodomonte's Revenge", but when the computer infiltrates their minds the game transforms into something dangerously real. It was published on November 1, 1994 by Yearling.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_Fire_Mountain"title="Escape from Fire Mountain">
This story features a thirteen-year-old by the name of Nikki Roberts who hears a cry for help over her CB radio. After hearing this, she sets out to rescue them. They were caught in the middle of a forest fire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_of_Water_(novel)"title="The Shape of Water (novel)">
Silvio Luparello, an engineer, developer and aspiring politician from an aristocratic construction family, dies of a heart attack while having sex with his nephew and lover Giorgio at his beach house. The nephew panics, and, wanting to protect his uncle from the embarrassing circumstance of his death and not trusting himself to be able to move his uncle's body due to his epilepsy, calls his uncle's friend and political crony Attorney Rizzo for help. Rizzo assures the nephew he will take care of it, but then, instead of trying to help, attempts to take advantage of the situation and betrays his friendship with Luparello by attempting to use his death to gain leverage over his political opponent, Secretary Cardamone. This he does by attempting to cast Cardamone's Swedish daughter-in-law Ingrid as Luparello's lover and implicating her in his death – at the scene of a seamy outdoor brothel.The film version starts off the morning after the death at the outdoor brothel, with two surveyors working as garbage collectors. They discover the body and contact Attorney Rizzo in an attempt to curry favor with him and maybe get proper surveyor's jobs by giving him the chance to move Luparello's body in order to avoid the embarrassment of Luparello being found at the outdoor brothel, dead with his pants down. Rizzo rebuffs the garbage men, much to their surprise, as he is known to be Luparello's friend and ally.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terracotta_Dog"title="The Terracotta Dog">
The story starts off with "Tano Il Greco", a tired mafia boss, making a deal with Montalbano to stage his arrest in order for him to save face. The arrest causes Montalbano to have to appear at a press conference and be considered for promotion, both of which he does not appreciate. At the same time there has also been a seemingly unrelated and mysterious theft of a grocery store delivery truck; the truck is discovered the next morning, abandoned, with the stolen goods still within and intact.An old man, Misucara, who was witness to the robbery, then dies in a suspicious accident, but not before passing on an odd bit of information to the inspector: that the grocery store owner's car was parked nearby during the time of the robbery. When Tano ends up dying at the hands of mafia rivals during a police transfer, he passes on information to Montalbano that leads the inspector and his team to search for a secret cave used as a black market goods store during World War II and now used for smuggling arms for the mafia, in which the grocery store owner was complicit.Montalbano notices that the inside of the cave is not symmetrical and figures out there must be a secret room, where he discovers the bodies of two young lovers, carefully arranged in what appears to be some kind of ancient ritual guarded by a terracotta dog. Learning that the bodies were placed sometime around the allied invasion and devastating bombing of the island at the end of World War II, Montalbano interviews local residents from that time to try to piece together who the young couple were, why they were killed and why they were ritually buried.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Snack_Thief"title="The Snack Thief">
During a night off the coast of Vigàta a fishing boat from Mazara del Vallo, called "Santopadre", is intercepted and machine-gunned, apparently in international waters, by a Tunisian patrol boat. The exploded shots kill a Tunisian sailor who was on board the Italian boat. On the same day the former merchant Aurelio Lapecora is stabbed in a lift and Karima Moussa, a beautiful Tunisian cleaning lady, suddenly disappears.Montalbano discovers that the girl also worked in the office of the murdered merchant whose she was lover and that she had a son, François, who also disappeared with her. Thanks to the help of the elderly Aisha, an acquaintance of Karima, Montalbano also finds a savings account owned by the girl with deposited five hundred million lire, a sum too high for a young immigrant who should have had only what she received from her humble work.While returning to the police station from the visit to the house of Karima, Montalbano sees in front of a primary school a small group of mothers who complain with a policeman of some thefts of snacks, which accuse a small foreigner child. Montalbano realizes that he's François: lurking with his girlfriend Livia and his men, he manages to take the little Tunisian who had taken refuge in an abandoned house. Livia, in reassuring the child brought home by Montalbano to protect him, will feel the birth of his maternal instinct and the desire to form a more intense union with Salvo, adopting the child. The commissioner will join the project of Livia but in the meantime the investigations are complicated by the secret services and the slimy figure of Colonel Lohengrin Pera.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Lessons"title="Magic Lessons">
When a golem pulls Reason into New York, she calls Danny Galeano, Jay-Tee's eighteen-year-old brother, for help. Danny allows Reason to stay with him while she tries to trace the golem, although her feelings for him grow until she eventually sleeps with him, despite Danny continually saying that it is not right. Meanwhile, Jay-Tee nearly dies while running, and Tom is forced to give her some of his magic.Reason, who is 15 finds out that she's pregnant with Danny's baby and is happy, because her own mother was pregnant with Reason at 15.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Land_(Taylor_novel)"title="The Land (Taylor novel)">
"The Land" follows the life of Paul-Edward Logan. Paul is the child of a white man and a woman with Black and Native American ancestry. Paul has three entries from Paul's journal, after the main story ends. The dialogue uses the Southern dialect from the 1870s and 1880s.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_or_Madness"title="Magic or Madness">
The three main characters are Reason Cansino, Sarafina Cansino and Esmeralda Cansino. Reason and her mother Sarafina have been on the run from her grandmother Esmeralda for fifteen years staying in one place for seldom more than a few months. Her whole life Reason has been brought up with a hate for Esmeralda who believes in the practicing of magic and horrifying ritual. Only once does she recall being within her grasp but now Sarafina has had an unexpected mental breakdown, and Reason is forced back to the one place she never thought she would go back to. But after finding a portal within Esmeralda's house she starts to question her mother's beliefs and face the truth, that magic is real.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarlet_Feather"title="Scarlet Feather">
The novel follows the fortunes of Cathy Scarlet and her college friend, Tom Feather, who set up a catering business together (the 'Scarlet Feather' of the title). The two are close, but not romantically involved - Cathy is married to Neil Mitchell, the son of the wealthy household where her mother Lizzie used to scrub floors, and Tom is in a relationship with beautiful Marcella, who dreams of being a model. Neil's mother Hannah, against the marriage of her son to the cleaner's daughter, makes life hard for Cathy, while Marcella's ambitions come between her and Tom. There is also a growing distance between Cathy and Neil due to the pressures of Neil's high-profile law career, and Cathy's realisation that her husband sees the business as a hobby.A key subplot is the arrival of Neil's twin nephew and niece Simon and Maud, whose alcoholic mother and errant father have virtually abandoned them. With Hannah unwilling to allow the children to stay with her and her husband, they are unofficially adopted by Cathy's parents, Lizzie and Muttie, who live in St. Jarlath's Crescent in a far less affluent part of town, but show the children real love for the first time. The twins' older brother Walter reappears in their lives periodically, usually causing trouble, including robbing and vandalizing the Scarlet Feather premises. When the insurance company suspects an inside job, Cathy and Tom are potentially ruined. The pair's battle for survival, and its impact on their respective relationships, is the key theme for the second half of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdigris_Deep"title="Verdigris Deep">
The story starts when Ryan, Chelle and Josh stranded without their bus fare home. Josh climbs into an old wishing well and retrieves some blackened coins. The next day, odd things begin to happen. Ryan sees a watery face in the mirror, and finds white lumps on his hands. Light bulbs explode in Josh's house, and Chelle's babbling becomes shockingly strange.Ryan has a vision of the well witch, and understands from her gargled words that, because they took the coins, they are now in her service. She has given each of them powers so that they can find other wishers, discover their wishes and help grant them. She also gives him the name of a nearby village. In the village, they realize that Chelle is speaking aloud the thoughts of a tea-shop man, Will Wurthers. They guess that he wished for a Harley-Davidson and persuade him to enter a competition to win at the fete where the winner of the motorcycle is to be announced, they hear the thoughts of an unhappy mime who wishes (they think) for fame. In their attempt to grant his wish they inadvertently cause a riot at the fete. Then they learn that Will has been badly injured in an accident. When Chelle overhears the thoughts of someone wishing for bloody revenge she gets frightened, and she and Ryan decide they should not grant any more wishes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cugel's_Saga"title="Cugel's Saga">
The story begins on Shanglestone Strand, a desolate beach far to the north of Almery, where Cugel had been dumped at the end of "The Eyes of the Overworld" by a winged demon after he mispronounced the spell intended to inflict the same fate on his nemesis, Iucounu the Laughing Magician. Avoiding the village of Smolod, the scene of his first adventure in "The Eyes of the Overworld" and where "memories are long", Cugel heads down Shanglestone Strand and arrives at Flutic, a manse owned by the avaricious Master Twango, whose business is salvaging the scales of an Overworld entity named Sadlark from a miry pit in his back garden. The scales are sold to the firm of Soldinck and Mercantides, who trans-ship them to a customer in Almery. Taking employment at Flutic, through sheer luck Cugel obtains the Pectoral Skybreak Spatterlight, the most valuable of all the scales, as it constitutes Sadlark's central node of force, or "protonastic centrum". The Skybreak Spatterlight, which absorbs every living creature with which it comes into contact, imprisoning them in limbo, is central to the plot of the novel since it is coveted by none other than Iucounu, the mysterious final customer for the scales, who believes himself to be Sadlark's avatar and is trying to reconstruct the Overworld entity scale by scale. (Chapter I.1)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Broken_Spears"title="The Broken Spears">
The monograph "Broken Spears" is structured through three distinct sections: the first is the overall introduction that León-Portilla uses to provide background for the content of the book. He describes Aztec cultural life amongst the Nahua peoples, the importance of translators that spoke Nahuatl, and the struggle of accounts that were written by eyewitnesses well after the Spanish conquest of Mexico. León-Portilla prefaces the sources he chose for the book with not only background on the events but descriptions and background information on the sources themselves. While the second and third sections follow chronologically, the first section depicts the Azteca and their initial reactions to the omens that are attributed to local Aztec mystics after the conquest that heralded the Spanish arrival.The following sections break down the role of the proceeding war, then the effect of disease and war upon the Aztecs. León-Portilla's concise historical context and Ángel María Garibay's translations of Nahuatl passages lead into the second section of the monograph: the Aztec’s campaign against the Spanish and their defeat by a wide variety of causes, from both military conquest and disease, that is portrayed from the point of view of the natives. A notable example of "Broken Spears" narrative is the exclusion of native forces allied with the Spanish Conquistadores in Mexico, as well as the influence and importance of translators, such as La Malinche.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_Rush"title="Soul Rush">
In the book, Collier describes her experiences with recreational drug use, including marijuana and LSD, and then her introduction to Eastern spirituality through life on an ashram. At age sixteen, Collier had become friends with Abbie Hoffman, then moved to live first on a commune and later a Divine Light Mission ashram. The book describes her initiation to the Techniques of Knowledge of Guru Maharaj ji (also known as Prem Rawat) and her experiences in the organization.Years later, in an interview published in 2001 in "Fast Company" magazine, Collier stated that "At the ashram, we did things like staying up all night and meditating, things that taught us how to focus our minds". Skills that she still applies in stressful business situations, and that "drawing on those experiences has definitely helped me maintain perspective."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_&amp;_Bones_(novel)"title="Skin &amp; Bones (novel)">
Cody Chang sells such unusual items as animal skulls, fish skeletons and reptile skins at his shop Skin &amp; Bones in San Francisco. He calls on the Hardy Boys to investigate when the shop is ransacked. Frank and Joe suspect a criminal is trying to get revenge on Cody's policeman father by breaking his son's business down, but they have their work cut out to prove it.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shifting_Sands"title="The Shifting Sands">
The three go on their way towards the Shifting Sands from the City of the Rats when they spot an Ak-Baba in the sky. In order to hide from it, they dive under the River Broad and hide under their cloak. Surprisingly, they are aided by the fish of the river as well, which are rather intelligent. Later, once the threat has passed, they pass by an apple farm owned by an eccentric old woman known as Queen Bee. Hungry and tired, they decide to steal and eat from the apple orchard. Queen Bee reveals that she is not actually a fragile old woman, but a dangerous threat because of the bees that she hides under her shawl. The trio are promptly chased off by her deadly bees for stealing.After some time on the road, they reach the town of Rithmere and started hearing about a competition called the Rithmere Games. Thinking they can win some money from it, they attempt to enter. But there is an entrance fee of one silver coin, and they have no money whatsoever. Lief, Jasmine, and Barda decide to let the operator of a game called Beat the Bird borrow Kree to spin the wheel thirty times, for a coin. In Beat the Bird, a bird would spin a wheel after a silver coin was paid. If the wheel lands on a number, the better is paid that number of silver coins. But if the wheel lands on a bird, the better only receives a worthless wooden bird figurine. After thirty turns, Kree senses something is amiss and pulls the table sheet, which reveals that the operator is controlling the wheel through the use of a pedal. The cheating operator then flees, leaving the coins that have fallen off the table sheet to the crowd. Lief, Barda, and Jasmine attempt to take some of the coins, but all that is left is a wooden bird.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den_mörka_sanningen"title="Den mörka sanningen">
Scene of the novel is Norway in year 1911. Nineteen-year-old shopkeepersdaughter Cornelia Weding has lived with a terrifying and inexplicable memory since the age of five. She has tried to deny it, but it comes back recurrently into her mind in the shape of feelings, words and nightmares. In the memory fragments she wanders as a child alone in the hard of night-time and dark forest and searching for something or the enormous and frightening figures in the black capes stays round her baby bed and threaten to kill her if she would remember.As her misfortune, her beloved childhood friend will marry her beautiful and evil cousin. When she takes a trip to their weddings her stepmother's childhood home, she realizes that she has returned to the place where the dark mystery happened fourteen years ago...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_in_the_Attic"title="The Fox in the Attic">
The novel opens in 1923. The protagonist, a young Welsh aristocrat named Augustine Penry-Herbert, discovers the body of a young girl and is incorrectly suspected of having something to do with her accidental death. Augustine decides to leave England and visit distant relations in Germany. He falls in love with his cousin Mitzi amidst the rise of Nazism, including the Munich Putsch. At the end of the novel, Mitzi, who has lost her sight, enters a convent and Augustine returns to England.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scarlet_Plague"title="The Scarlet Plague">
The story takes place in 2073, sixty years after an uncontrollable epidemic, the Red Death, has depopulated the planet. James Smith is one of the survivors of the era before the scarlet plague hit and is still left alive in the San Francisco area, and he travels with his grandsons Edwin, Hoo-Hoo, and Hare-Lip. His grandsons are young and live as primeval hunter-gatherers in a heavily depopulated world. Their intellect is limited, as are their language abilities. Edwin asks Smith, whom they call "Granser", to tell them of the disease alternately referred to as scarlet plague, scarlet death, or red death.Smith recounts the story of his life before the plague, when he was an English professor. In 2013, the year after "Morgan the Fifth was appointed President of the United States by the Board of Magnates", the disease came about and spread rapidly. Sufferers would turn scarlet, particularly on the face, and become numb in their lower extremities. Victims usually died within 30 minutes of first seeing symptoms. Despite the public's trust in doctors and scientists, no cure is found, and those who attempted to do so were also killed by the disease. The grandsons question Smith's belief in "germs" causing the illness because they cannot be seen. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Candle_in_the_Wind"title="The Candle in the Wind">
The story begins with Mordred and Agravaine, both discontented. Mordred hates his father, King Arthur, and Agravaine hates Sir Lancelot. Their views are not shared by Gawaine, Gareth, or Gaheris. The relationship of Lancelot and Guinevere has gone on for some time, and everyone in the court knows of it. No one, however, publicly speaks of it, as the law would require Lancelot to be killed and Guinevere to be burned at the stake.In order to wreak their revenge Mordred and Agravaine decide to go to the king and charge the Queen with adultery. Troubled by this, King Arthur agrees to leave on a hunting trip to give the knights a chance to catch the Queen with Lancelot, although he does say that if they are caught, he hopes that Lancelot will be able to kill all witnesses and adds that if the two fail in backing their claims, he will see to it that they are pursued by the law themselves.At the same time Arthur confesses to Guinevere and Lancelot a terrible secret: when Mordred was born, Arthur had been told by many people that the child would be evil, as a result of the incest. Pressured, the king commanded all babies born in the approximate month that Mordred would be born to be placed on a boat, which was then sunk. Mordred managed to survive, however, and Arthur lived with the guilt of causing the death of the other babies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voice_of_the_Violin"title="The Voice of the Violin">
It is one of those black days that afflict Montalbano, who becomes intractable when the weather is bad. On his way to a funeral, Montalbano's driver avoids what seems to be a suicidal chicken, making the car skid and hitting another car parked in front of a villa. The inspector leaves a note under the windshield wiper of the damaged car to warn the owner. Since his colleague complains about the blow he received, the two go to the hospital. On the way back - it has now become too late for the funeral ceremony - the inspector notices that the damaged car has remained where he left it with the ticket still in the windshield wiper.Finding the damaged car still where it was the next morning, Montalbano forces the door of the villa which has signs of being inhabited but appears deserted. He wanders through the various rooms until in a bedroom a gruesome scene appears in the eyes of the inspector: a young woman, blonde and beautiful, completely naked, lies dead in her bed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excursion_to_Tindari"title="Excursion to Tindari">
The story takes place between Vigàta and picturesque site of Tindari, a promontory of historical and archaeological beauty. Montalbano is investigating the mysterious bond that unites a couple and an unrelated man in the same violent death. Thanks to his unique professional insight, and perhaps even more to his feelings as a sensitive man, Montalbano successfully concludes the investigation, moving inbetween the boundaries set by the world of tradition and that of modernity. In his fifties, examining his life and a future that seems to be saturated with senseless technology and hopeless inhumanity, with corruption and globalisation rendering everything shapeless, Montalbano feels out of place and lonely.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scent_of_the_Night"title="The Scent of the Night">
Inspector Montalbano must track down a lost financial manager who seems to have absconded with all of his clients' money. Along the way, he encounters a lovelorn secretary who believes her boss could do no wrong.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pity_Is_Not_Enough"title="Pity Is Not Enough">
"Pity Is Not Enough" follows the Trexlers' history after the American Civil War and before World War I. While the main narrative focuses on the Trexler family, the chronology is often disrupted by inter-chapters focusing on Victoria's childhood.Victoria recalls her mother, Catherine, telling the story of her unfortunate brother Joe Trexler, a man who had left his family's home in Philadelphia to work as a carpetbagger in Reconstruction-era Georgia. When trouble began to hound him, he escaped first to Canada, where he made acquaintances with the Governor of Georgia, and then returned home for a short while. He manages to escape from the local law by moving again, this time to the west where he joined the gold rush in the Black Hills in Dakota Territory.Future promises of financial success do not become fruitful for Joe or for the majority of his family. His favorite sister Catherine dies relatively young, his two other sisters marry failures who are unable to support them properly, and his younger brother, Aaron, becomes a moderate success but is relatively unhappy. His youngest brother, David, does have some success. Over time Joe slowly falls into dementia. Victoria eventually comes to the conclusion that her Uncle Joe's failure, like her father's failure in business, is not due to personal shortcomings, but to capitalist economic forces beyond their control.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Holly_and_Ivy"title="The Story of Holly and Ivy">
St. Agnes orphanage has closed for Christmas, and all the children except Ivy have been dispatched to various homes for the holiday. Miss Shepherd, the head of the home, cannot take Ivy home with her, so she decides to send her to an infants' orphanage, a train ride away. Ivy suggests that she could instead go to her grandmother in Aylesbury, a surprising inspiration, since she has no grandmother. This inspiration is a primary theme of the story, which begins, "This is a story about wishing."Ivy is put on a train. She tells travelers she will be visiting her grandmother in Aylesbury. When they respond knowingly to that, she says, "Then...there is an Aylesbury." She gets off there and begins to explore, enjoying the Christmas Eve in the town and looking for her grandmother.A beautiful new Christmas doll named Holly is standing in the display window of Mr. Blossom's toy store, wishing for a little girl to come and take her home. The toy owl next to her, Abracadabra, treats her with undisguised contempt, and suggests that, since no one will want Holly after the holiday, she will wind up spending the year in the back room with him.Mrs. Jones, who lives a few blocks from the toy store, suggests to her husband, a police officer that they have a Christmas tree that year. Her husband refuses, saying that it would be a waste of money since they have no children to enjoy it. Despite his words, Mrs. Jones buys a Christmas tree and decorates it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Overlook"title="The Overlook">
Evidence mounts that the murder of Stanley Kent is part of a terrorist plot to build and deploy a dirty bomb, justifying the FBI's moves to push the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and Bosch to the sidelines. Refusing to be sidelined, Bosch aggressively works around the FBI in order to track down Kent's killers, much to the chagrin of his young, inexperienced partner, who sees his career at the LAPD jeopardized by Bosch's actions. The FBI agents, including Rachel Walling, view Bosch as endangering their attempts to retrieve the missing cesium and to track down known terrorists. Relying on instinct and experience, Bosch pursues his line of inquiry, ultimately succeeding in solving the murder and recovering the cesium.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_Song"title="Sword Song">
Alfred, King of Wessex, has Uhtred of Bebbanburg build one of the fortified towns that make up Alfred's system of defence. After ambushing a band of raiders, Uhtred learns that two powerful Norse earls, Sigefrid and Erik Thurgilson, allied with Uhtred's treacherous former friend Haesten, have occupied nearby Lundene. When he informs Alfred, he is given the task of collecting a force strong enough to take the city back, then handing it over to his cousin Æthelred.Haesten invites him to a meeting across the Temes in Mercia. Haesten takes Uhtred to a graveyard, where a corpse rises from the earth to tell Uhtred that the Fates have decreed he is to be King of Mercia. Torn between his oath to Alfred, whom he dislikes, and the temptation to become a king in his own right, he listens to Haesten and the Thurgilson brothers proposition: if Uhtred convinces his foster brother Ragnar of Northumbria to bring his men to join them in attacking first East Anglia, then Mercia and finally Wessex, then Uhtred will receive Mercia, while Sigefrid gets Wessex and Haesten East Anglia.Uhtred ponders this offer while Sigefrid invites him to watch the crucifixion of some Christian prisoners. Uhtred recognizes one as his old comrade-in-arms, the Welshman Father Pyrlig. Knowing Pyrlig to be an experienced fighter, Uhtred tricks Sigefrid into promising the prisoners freedom if Pyrlig beats him in single combat - which he promptly does. Uhtred, Pyrlig and the other prisoners leave Lundene. Pyrlig tells Uhtred that the corpse was a trick, a living man put into a grave with a reed to breathe through. Uhtred swears to Pyrlig to keep his oath to Alfred.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudine_at_St.Clare's"title="Claudine at St.Clare's">
When Pat and Isabel arrive at school, they are surprised to meet a new matron and her daughter, Eileen. Then, French teacher Mam'zelle introduces Claudine, her niece, who will be joining them for this term. Alison O'Sullivan, the twins' rather silly, 'feather-headed' cousin, meets and befriends Angela, who is rich, beautiful and well dressed. Soon, Alison is completely under the spoilt, snobbish Angela's spell. The new Matron's daughter Eileen is a reserved girl who is later identified as a sneak. Pauline is soon discovered to be a snobbish and conceited girl who continuously brags about her family's 'wealth'.During the inevitable midnight feast the girls find themselves in trouble when Matron is spitefully locked for hours in a broom cupboard by Claudine while they were having the feast. She is furious to find that she is released by her daughter, and thinks that she was with the other girls, while actually she was speaking with her brother Eddie, who lost his job but doesn't dare to tell his mother. Eileen is in trouble.Pauline suffers a worse fate than Eileen when her mother visits unexpectedly and is happened upon by Alison and Angela, who mistake the poor, worn-out woman for one of the cooks. Pauline, like Eileen, is exposed as working class. Angela is scornful to discover that all Pauline's boasts of wealth are lies, and that she is ashamed of her lower-class background.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop._1280"title="Pop. 1280">
"Pop. 1280" is the first-person narrative of Nick Corey, the listless sheriff of Potts County, the "47th (out of 47) largest county in the state". He lives in Pottsville which has a population of "1280 souls". The story takes place about the time of the Russian Revolution, in 1917-1918.Sheriff Nick Corey presents himself as a genial fool, simplistic, over-accommodating, and harmless to a fault, given he is Pottsville's sole lawman. In reality, he is a clever psychopath able to manipulate people by appealing to their worst instincts and to get away with multiple murders.The novel begins with Nick visiting Ken Lacey, the sheriff of a nearby county. Nick visits Sheriff Lacey ostensibly to ask for advice as he has in the past. Nick has two pimps in charge of a whorehouse on the river at the edge of town who regularly insult and abuse him. Nick asks Lacey what to do about them and Lacey mocks and belittles Nick including literally kicking him in the behind multiple times. Lacey finally explains that he is doing all this to show Nick that when someone hurts you, you need to hurt them back twice as hard, finishing with the boast that if any pimps tried to disrespect him, he would shoot them dead on the spot. In the process of suffering the abuse of Lacey and his deputy Buck, Nick realizes that Buck harbors ill will towards Sheriff Lacey as well. He manipulates Lacey to have Buck see him off at the train station and has a discussion with Buck before heading back home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witch_of_Portobello"title="The Witch of Portobello">
As the book begins, Athena is dead. How she ended up that way creates the intrigue sustaining the book. The child, Sherine Khalil renames herself Athena after her uncle was discussing with her mother on how her real name will betray her origins and something like Athena gave nothing away. As a child, she shows a strong religious vocation and reports seeing angels and saints, which both impresses and worries her parents.She goes into a London University to pursue Engineering at the age of 19, but it's not what her heart wanted. One day she just decides that she wanted to drop out of college, get married and have a baby. Here, the author mentions that this might be due to the fact that she was abandoned herself and wants to give all that love she could to her child which she didn't receive from her birth mother. Two years later, her marriage falls apart because they are facing too many problems due to their young age and lack of money or mostly because he felt that she loved only the child and used him to get what she wanted. A very interesting quote she uses is "From Ancient Greece on, the people who returned from battle were either dead on their shields or stronger, despite or because of their scars. It's better that way: I've lived on a battlefield since I was born, but I'm still alive and I don't need anyone to protect me."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Epicurean"title="The Epicurean">
The narrative begins with Alciphron's election to the leadership of the "school" or "sect" of Epicurus. He has a flash of insight indicating to him that "eternal life" awaits him in Egypt. Unsure of its meaning, he decides to pursue this premonition.He travels there and undergoes various adventures, including initiation into the mysteries of the state religion, in pursuit of the beautiful priestess Alethe. She, a crypto-Christian, escapes the mystery rites with Alciphron, and they journey together along the Nile into Upper Egypt, heading for a Christian monastery, which is run by a follower of Origen.Alciphron endures initiation into the Christian religion in hopes of remaining with Alethe. An imperial edict soon establishes the persecution of all Christians who will not renounce their faith, and Alciphron's companions, including Alethe, are captured and killed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_Park_(novel)"title="Echo Park (novel)">
In 1993, Harry Bosch and his partner Jerry Edgar caught the Marie Gesto case. Marie was a young equestrian who went missing. Her car and clothing turned up in an apartment garage but her body was never found. Bosch and Edgar had pegged a likely culprit – Anthony Garland, the son of wealthy and powerful industrialist Thomas Rex "T-Rex" Garland. The younger Garland had dated a woman who closely resembled Gesto and had broken up with him due to his temper; she also had lived in the apartment where Gesto's car was found. However, despite several rounds of questioning Anthony Garland, a part-time security guard at one of his father's oil facilities, detectives never found enough evidence to charge the suspect and the case went cold. Bosch had worked Gesto case as time allowed, calling her parents several times a year so they knew their daughter was not forgotten.In the 13 years since the Gesto case went cold, Bosch had retired from the LAPD and worked as a private investigator for three years but returned to the force because things didn't work out the way he thought they would in retirement. Now, nearing 60, Bosch is working in the prestigious Open-Unsolved Unit at Parker Center, going over cold cases with his most recent partner, Kizmin "Kiz" Rider. A serendipitous traffic stop in L.A.'s Echo Park neighborhood nabs Raynard Waits, a man with body parts in his van on the floorboard in front of the front seat. Detective Freddy Olivas is working the case and Richard O'Shea is the prosecutor assigned. Soon Waits has confessed to a string of slayings involving prostitutes and runaways, as well as to two earlier murders: one of pawnshop owner Daniel Fitzpatrick during the 1992 riots, the other of Marie Gesto. When the Gesto case files are reexamined, it seems that Waits had called the police shortly after the murder, pretending to be a tipster, but Bosch and Edgar never followed up on the tip. Without this costly error, Waits could have been implicated within a week of Gesto's disappearance and never gone on to kill more victims.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_Stealing_Horses"title="Out Stealing Horses">
The events in this story are revealed to the reader out of chronological order. The following is a reconstruction of the timeline of the events in the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner_of_Zhamanak"title="The Prisoner of Zhamanak">
Word comes to the Terran spaceport of Novorecife that anthropologist Alicia Dyckman, off studying the culture of the tropical Khaldoni nations, has been imprisoned in Zhamanak, one of these realms, by its "Heshvavu" (king) Khorosh. Diplomat Percy Mjipa, currently between consular assignments, promptly volunteers to rescue her.Mjipa travels by ship to Kalwm, the much-shrunken remnant of the ancient Empire of the Triple Seas, whose mad king Vuzhov is attempting to build a tower to reach the heavens. From there he attempts to reach Zhamanak by road through the intervening realm of Mutabwk. Mutabwk's scholarly king Ainkhist refuses him passage unless he does him the service of obtaining a copy of Vuzhov's jealously-guarded genealogy, which he desires as a source for a history he is writing of the Khaldoni kingdoms. Perforce returning to Kalwm, Mjipa is unexpectedly granted a copy of the chart in return for serving as a witness for the prosecution at the heresy trial of Doctor Isayin, a local philosopher charged with teaching the world is round. Expected to support the Khaldoni religion's flat world theory, Mjipa uncomfortably commits the requisite perjury, salving his conscience by telling himself the proceedings are fixed against Isayin anyway.With passage through Mutabwk now open to him, Mjipa finally reaches Zhamanak. However, Khorosh's only response to his demand that Dyckman be freed is to imprison him with her. He learns that Khorosh regards the alien Terrans as enemies, and that the purpose of their incarceration is to study them. More specifically, now that the king has two of them, he wants to see how they mate. Mjipa, who is married, indignantly refuses, and Alicia, while not sharing his qualms, is also disinclined to perform to satisfy their captor's curiosity. In the course of a long incarceration, they get to know each other, and at times their resolve weakens, but their incompatible personalities help keep them honest; Mjipa being stiff-necked and duty-driven, and Alicia strong-willed, hectoring and opinionated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Luna"title="Eva Luna">
The story is told from Eva's first-person point of view. In some sections Eva narrates Rolf Carlé's life. The story opens as Eva describes her mother's life, and how her mother (Consuelo) ended up working for a Professor. One day, the professor’s Indian gardener is bitten by a snake and whilst on his deathbed, Consuelo makes love to him, thus conceiving Eva. Miraculously, Eva's father recovers. Eva's mother then dies after choking on a chicken bone and leaves Eva to fend for herself. After the Professor dies, Eva moves on and eventually stumbles upon Huberto Naranjo, who places her in the care of La Señora, the owner of a brothel.After living in harmony for a few years, a new police chief moves in and immediately storms the brothel. Eva is forced to flee and is eventually found by Riad Halabí, a man with a cleft palate. Eva moves to Agua Santa with Halabí and settles into her new life, living with Riad and his wife, Zulema. After a few years, Riad's cousin Kamal moves in to live with them. Zulema is instantly infatuated with Kamal and when Riad goes on a trip, she seduces him, after which Kamal immediately leaves. Eventually Zulema loses interest in life and commits suicide by shooting herself in the mouth. After Eva is detained on suspicion of murdering Zulema, Riad bribes the police to release Eva. Eva and Riad realize that she must leave to escape the rumors, but before she leaves they share one night of passion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Loop"title="The Pirate Loop">
After escaping from over-eager serving robots in Milky-Pink City, Martha asks the Doctor about the Starship "Brilliant", which mysteriously disappeared. He agrees to investigate, but the TARDIS crashes on arrival and Martha is knocked out. She wakes in the ship's engine room, where she and the Doctor are led to the starship's experimental drive by the slave-like mechanics, who have small holes instead of mouths. The Doctor realises that the starship's experimental drive works by skipping out of space-time. However, it has become stalled, putting it at risk of exploding. They attempt to contact the captain, but find that the door out of the engine rooms is blocked with a membrane like scrambled egg. The Doctor notes that it separates regions where time flows at different rates, and uses his sonic screwdriver to allow them to pass through. Martha emerges by herself and meets the robot Gabriel, the ship's steward. He escorts her to the cocktail lounge, where she is befriended by Mrs Wingsworth, an egg-shaped alien.Martha learns that the ship has been invaded and asks Gabriel to warn the Doctor, but three badger-faced space pirates enter and disintegrate him. Two of the badgers, Dashiel and Jocelyn, leave to scout out the ship, leaving the third badger, Archibald, to guard the prisoners. He is amazed at the canapés which Martha offers to him, as he was raised on recycled food, and she convinces him to share the food with the passengers. Dashiel and Jocelyn return, having been unable to find either the ship's drive or their comrades. They try some of the food and are similarly impressed, with Martha noting that the canapés are mysteriously replenished. Dashiel disintegrates Mrs Wingsworth after she expresses her scorn at their lack of culture. Martha grabs Jocelyn's gun after she shoots another passenger, but she is startled when Mrs Wingsworth enters the room, allowing Archibald to take the gun. Dashiel shoots at Martha, but she shields herself with the canapé tray, which reflects the shot at Jocelyn and kills her. Martha runs back to the engine room door, pursued by Archibald. She hits him with the tray, but she dies when he stabs her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_Superman!"title="It's Superman!">
In Smallville, Kansas, of 1935, Clark Kent is interviewed by the local sheriff over the death of a wanted man that Clark confronted at the local movie theatre. They believe the man died from his handgun firing backwards, but Clark and his father, Jonathan Kent, know the real truth: the man fired his gun at Clark, and the bullet bounced off Clark's forehead, killing the wanted man instead. Clark is scared over what he is becoming, with his father providing no answers to his questions. To make matters worse, Clark's beloved mother, Martha Kent, dies of a terminal illness not soon after. In Manhattan, Willi Berg storms out from his girlfriend, Lois Lane's, apartment over an argument concerning getting his camera from the pawn shop, so he decides to steal it. Arriving, he discovers several men dead, and gets wounded by the gang when he tries to escape after seeing the face of their leader: Lex Luthor, New York's leading Alderman. Lex frames Willi for the murders, with no one believing Willi's truth of the events. A henchwoman attempts to murder Willi at the hospital when she is stopped by federal agents, led by Meyer Lansky. With their help, and Lois's, Willi goes on the run, finding himself in Smallville as a member of the WPA. He meets Clark, now a reporter for the "Smallville Herald Progress", and befriends him after he shows off his superspeed. After solving the crime of a kidnapped child that ends tragically, Clark quits the paper and Willi proposes for them to leave Smallville and travel. Because he wants to see what else is out there, Clark agrees.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wideacre"title="Wideacre">
Beatrice Lacey is the daughter of the Squire of Wideacre, an estate situated on the South Downs, centred around Wideacre Hall. Devoted to her father, at the age of five years she falls in love with the estate and decides to stay there forever. At 11, her dreams are shattered when she learns that her absent brother Harry will inherit the estate, and that she be married off and leave. Young Beatrice begins an affair with Ralph, the gamekeeper's son, who lives with his mother, Meg, a village witch, in a cottage on the estate. Harry returns and discovers them entwined, ending the relationship. Threatened by Harry's presence, Beatrice agrees without thinking to a plan Ralph reveals to take the estate for the two of them. She realises too late what it is Ralph has planned, but before she can stop him Ralph murders her father and makes it look like a riding accident. Enraged by the sight of her father's corpse whom she loved so much, she feels guilty, and is afraid that if Ralph were caught he would associate with her. Beatrice decides she cannot allow him to continue living on Wideacre. She lures him over a mantrap and leaves him for dead. To her dismay, she later discovers that he has escaped—maimed but alive—with his mother's help. Knowing he will someday seek revenge, Beatrice becomes more callous, manipulative and ruthless.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_(von_Ziegesar_novel)"title="Lucky (von Ziegesar novel)">
Jenny Humphrey has attended some crazy parties at Waverly Academy, but none as hot as the bash at Miller farm, where the antique red barn went up in flames. "Literally". So, when Dean Marymount announces that someone will be held responsible and expelled from Waverly, it's every owl for him and herself.Tensions are rising, rumors are flying, and pretty soon, everyone is a suspect. Jenny worries about her adorable, shaggy-haired new crush, Julian, whose silver engraved Zippo was found at the crime scene. Callie is petrified she and Easy will both get kicked out because they were in the barn together when the blaze began. And Tinsley knows she'll take the heat for organizing the wild soirée in the first place. Luckily she's come up with a crafty way to keep from getting in trouble: blaming Jenny. But, unfortunately, Julian and Jenny get "closer than ever." When "things can't get any better," Jenny finds out the only reason Julian even met her is that he was hooking up with Tinsley Carmichael, which causes Jenny not to trust him.Easy becomes very suspicious of Callie because of her comments about Jenny starting the fire. Kara and Brett's relationship goes public, and Brett figures out she still loves Jeremiah, and Kara and Heath hook up and become a couple. Shockingly, Tinsley's plan works, but it also backfires. Easy finds out that Callie had something to do with the intent to kick Jenny out and tries to rescue Jenny. Unfortunately, Callie and Easy's relationship is over—Easy was put off by Callie's plot to get Jenny out, which he discovered when Tinsley texted Callie-and Jenny still hasn't forgiven Julian for lying to her. Easy supposedly pays off Old Lady Miller, whose barn burned down, and Jenny is rescued and returned to Waverly. Old Lady Miller said that her cows caused it and not Jenny. Jenny admits to setting the barn on fire (and gets expelled) just because she can't take everyone's accusations, dirty looks, and rumors. However, Jenny is admitted back into Waverly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl,_Missing"title="Girl, Missing">
Curious about her birth parents, fourteen-year-old Lauren Matthews goes on a website called Missing-Children.com and finds an American girl named Martha Lauren Purditt, who went missing less than two months before Lauren was adopted. A few days later, she finds a diary containing details about her adoption and the name "Sonia Holtwood". After persuading her family to go on a holiday to America, Lauren and her friend James (AKA "Jam") sneak off and meet with Taylor Larsen, the owner of the agency which handled Lauren's adoption. He refuses to show Lauren her adoption file, but when Lauren mentions Sonia Holtwood, Taylor tells Lauren she was looked after by Sonia before she was adopted.Lauren and Jam set out to find Sonia. They run into a female police officer named Suzanna Sanders, who gives them a ride in her car and offers them orange juice. Once in the car, Lauren and Jam begin to feel sleepy. Hours later, they wake up and find that their phones and belongings have been taken away. They ask Officer Sanders where they are and demand to be let out of the car. She reveals she is Sonia Holtwood and the orange juice was drugged. Sonia dumps them in the middle of nowhere and takes off with their phones and belongings. They are rescued by a man called Glane, who takes them to Boston, where he works. Lauren discovers that Martha's parents were Annie and Sam Purditt, who live in Evanport. Glane offers to take her there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Box"title="The God Box">
Paul is the perfect teenager: a beloved son, an attentive boyfriend, a good friend, he is perfect in anything he wants to achieve. When he is a teenager, Paul starts to have “strange” feelings for other guys, but feelings that he doesn't want to acknowledge. So he continues to live a seemingly perfect heterosexual life by dating his girlfriend Angie, and being very active in their local church community. When Paul is a senior in High School, a new student named Manuel transfers in. Manuel is the first openly gay teen anyone in their small town has ever met, and yet he says he's also a committed Christian. Paul's friendship with Manuel causes him to reconsider some of the things in his life. Such as re-interpreting the Bible's passages on homosexuality, and ending his romantic relationship with Angie. While at the movies one day, Paul freaks out after he and Manuel almost touch hands. Causing him to take off in his car. Paul is later shocked when he learns that Manuel was attacked up by two of their male classmates while walking home from the movie, and is now in a coma. He realizes during this hard time that he needs to accept himself, and comes out to his family and friends. When Manuel wakes up, he and Paul declare their love for each other and kiss. The story ends with Paul deciding to defer his first year of college in order to help with Manuel's physical therapy, and the two going to prom together with the school's newly-formed GSA.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briar_Rose_(novel)"title="Briar Rose (novel)">
The book is divided into two parts, the "home", and the "castle". The ending is part of the "home" section, returning after the castle.The story is based around the German fairy tale of "Briar Rose" ("Sleeping Beauty") which is told by "Gemma", an elderly woman, to her three granddaughters. She tells this to the children almost all the time and it is the only bedtime story she ever tells. The times when "Gemma" tells the story are flashbacks and alternate between the present-day story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_at_La_Fenice"title="Death at La Fenice">
A world-famous German opera conductor has died at La Fenice, and Commissario (Detective) Guido Brunetti pursues what appears to be a murder investigation without leads.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muna_Madan"title="Muna Madan">
"Muna Madan" follows the life of Madan, a Chhetri man from Kathmandu who leaves Muna, his wife, to go to Lhasa to earn a fortune. He is cautioned against leaving by both Muna and his elderly mother, but he decides to leave anyway. While he initially intends to spend just a few weeks in Lhasa, he spends a longer time there, becoming entranced by the city's beauty. He finally sets off for Kathmandu but falls sick with cholera on the way. His travelling companion, Ram, returns to Kathmandu and tells Muna that her husband has died.But Madan is rescued by a 'Bhote', a Tibetan man. Tibet is called 'Bhot' in the Nepali language, drawn from the classical Tibetan name for Tibet, Bod. The Tibetan nurses Madan back to health, leading Madan to realize that men are great not because of their castes but because of their hearts. In the Nepali Hindu caste system, a Tibetan, as a meat-eating Buddhist, would have been considered 'untouchable' by devout Hindus. The couplet uttered by Madan while touching the Tibetan's feet, a sign of great respect in Khas Nepali culture, has since taken on the status of modern proverbs, often uttered by Nepalis in their daily speech: 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Testament_(Lustbader_novel)"title="The Testament (Lustbader novel)">
The book is about Braverman Shaw, whose father, Dexter Shaw, is killed by an explosion. After his death, Braverman, or Bravo to his friends, finds out that his father was a member of the Gnostic Observant, a group who possess a very old secret of Jesus Christ. Bravo has to find the secret and keep it hidden from their sworn enemies, the Knights of Saint-Clemens. His father left behind a maze, which Bravo has to solve to find the secret. During his journey, he is attacked by the Knights multiple times, and they are closer than he thinks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Nut"title="The Computer Nut">
Kate Morrison, the title character, is receiving messages on her computer purportedly from an extraterrestrial, BB-9, who claims he can monitor and control all computers on Earth. At first, she and her friend Linda investigate the communication as a prank; their suspects are Willie Lomax and Frank Wilkins.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riptide_(novel)"title="Riptide (novel)">
The novel begins in 1971 and introduces main character Malin Hatch and his older brother Johnny Hatch. In search of something to do with their summer day, Malin suggests that the two explore Ragged Island, an island owned by the Hatch family. Ragged Island is strictly off limits to the boys, because of its ability to "destroy" those who come in contact with it. The Hatch brothers ignore their father's demand to stay away from the island and set off for it. Once the boys make it to the island, a terrible accident takes place, that Malin will struggle with for the next 25 years.Twenty five years later, Dr. Malin Hatch is approached by Gerard Neidelman, a self-proclaimed recovery specialist (a euphemism for treasure hunter), who claims to know who designed the pit, and, therefore, holds the key to unearthing the treasure. Hatch is at first skeptical of Neidelman's claim, but at length allows him to dig on the island.Once on the island, things do not go as planned. Mysterious accidents, illnesses and computer problems plague the salvage team, and it is discovered that the architect of the "Water Pit" is more clever than anyone realized.It also is revealed that the artifact, St. Michael's Sword, is in fact radioactive. This accounts for both the mysterious deaths of Red Ned's crew and for the computer glitches the team is having.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Finishing_Stroke"title="The Finishing Stroke">
The story begins in the first week of January 1905, with a brief account of a tragic accident and its bizarre aftermath, including a cover-up.The action then shifts to the waning days of 1929. Shortly after the publication of his first novel, "The Roman Hat Mystery", fledgling author/sleuth Ellery Queen is invited to an elaborate house party that will last through the Twelve Days of Christmas. The party includes a number of people connected to a wealthy young man whose birth was mentioned in the 1905 section. The man is about to come into a large inheritance on his birthday, Jan. 6, 1930.In the days leading up to the man's birthday, a number of strange little gifts are left anonymously for him, as well as doodles and confusing, ominous notes with Christmas-themed verses. Soon the notes contain outright threats. By the time the party is over, there have been two separate murders in the mansion, but Queen and the police cannot solve either of them, and are lucky even to conclusively identify the victims. The investigation does uncover some facts about the 1905 cover-up, but the murders and the threats remain unexplained at the case goes cold, and it is not even clear if they are connected.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Franchise_Affair_(novel)"title="The Franchise Affair (novel)">
Robert Blair, a local solicitor, is called on to defend two women, Marion Sharpe and her mother, who are accused of kidnapping and beating a fifteen-year-old war orphan named Betty Kane. Set in Milford, the novel opens with the Sharpes about to be interviewed by local police and Scotland Yard, represented by Inspector Alan Grant (who is the protagonist of five other Tey novels). Marion calls Blair and, although his firm does not do criminal cases, he agrees to come out to their home, "The Franchise", to look out for their interests during the questioning.Betty's account is that during the Easter holidays, she went to stay with her aunt and uncle, the Tilsits, near Larborough. After a week, she wrote to her adoptive parents, the Wynns, to say she was enjoying herself and would spend another three weeks with the Tilsits. Then one evening, waiting for a bus, the Sharpe women approached her in their car and offered her a lift. They took her to the Franchise, demanded that she become a domestic worker, and, upon her refusal, imprisoned her in the attic. Betty alleges that they starved and beat her until she escaped.When Blair meets Marion and Mrs. Sharpe, who are sensible and forthright, he believes them innocent, and he distrusts Betty. Yet Betty does have bruises from a beating, and she describes items and rooms inside the Franchise accurately.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaskilintu"title="Vaskilintu">
A Finnish noblegirl with abilities of casting spells, Terhen of Arantila, gets mingled with royalty of Sweden, and follows in a retinue to the Court of Novgorod in Russia, where the sister of the Swedish King is to marry the Grand Duke of Novgorod (Kievan Rus). Along the journey to Novgorod an accident happens and Terhen replaces a young Swedish princess Thorgerd. The young girl has odd experiences when she meets Finno-Ugric tribe Muroma along her travel.Years go by, and the Grand Duke of Novgorod allows a Roman (Greek) dignitary Skleros, envoy of the Emperor of Byzant, to marry the young lady. Her new Greek name is despoina Theodora Hyperborea.In Constantinople, Theodora (a rising Imperial lady-in-waiting) gives birth to two sons, Georgios to her first husband Skleros, and Juvalos ('Olaf'), with her Varangian lover Eirik Väkevä, a Swedish noble.The widowed Theodora is sent to steward Anna Jaroslavna, daughter of the Grand Duke of Kievan Rus, throughout Europe to her future husband King Henry I of France. Theodora has strange experiences when she meets Magyar tribes along her journey. She possesses the ability to stop bleeding when necessary, and cast weather spells.In France Theodora marries a brutal Norman knight Roger of Meilhan, and settles in his small castle in Normandy. Her teenage son, Greek count Juvalos has to flee the vile stepfather.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_Kiss"title="Spider Kiss">
A seemingly shy and humble country boy named Luther Sellers is discovered to have a magnificent voice and mesmerizing stage presence. He is given the stage name Stag Preston and after a short time on the "Chittlin' Circuit" becomes a major rockabilly music star under the tutelage of a manager who seems to be patterned after Elvis Presley's manager, "Colonel" Tom Parker. Over time Luther's success goes to his head and his "Aw, shucks..." demeanor simply becomes a gimmick used to keep his fans, whom he secretly despises, believing that he hasn't really left his country roots and humble upbringing.In reality Stag lives up to his stage name, using his fame and seductive powers to lure any woman he can into his bed, leaving broken hearts and scandals everywhere he goes. The latter are all tidied up by his money-grubbing manager, who doesn't want anything to taint his cash cow. Meanwhile, Stag's growing megalomania eventually has him treating everyone around him like dirt and becoming harder and harder to work with. Eventually he is entangled in a scandal that takes all their power to cover up, and sets into motion the events leading to Stag's downfall.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Days_of_His_Grace"title="The Days of His Grace">
Duke Rodgaud—cousin of Bertold, castle in Forojuli (contemporary name, Cividale, Italy), starts a rebellion against King Carolus, that is quickly put down. He is executed by the Franks in Papia, summer, 776. Angilperta (“Angila”), the daughter of Rodgaud and Giseverga, is loved by the three Lupigi boys. She cannot be found during the rebellion, but becomes post-rebellion the wife of the Lord of East Burgundy, Gunderic, her name becoming Landoalda. She has Radbert as a lover, has two children, Landoald and Gisertruda, who die young, and a third child, Radaberta is given away. Gunderic imprisons her in the castle tower for seven years, after which Perto comes with an order from King Carolus to let her return to Forojuli. She dies on that trip back to her childhood home.Bertold Lupigi, cousin of Duke Rodgaud. The family name, Lupigi comes from wolf, loup. He disappears in the rebellion and is found in a dungeon. He is freed from prison, post-rebellion, in 793, but is killed by an avalanche. Perto, son of Liuta and Bertold, is 16 years old at the novel's beginning, the youngest of three brothers. He loves Angila. He is also named Johannes Lupigis, more so as the novel progresses. During the rebellion, he manages to escape the Franks who kill his friend Sinauld. He visits Angilperta with Agibert in the autumn of 783, and sleeps with Angilperta. Late autumn 783 he arrives in Aquisgranum, where there is a royal college. He meets King Carolus and decides he is “indeed great.” Perto goes to Totonisvilla where his brother Warnefrit is in prison, but is seized by guards as he leaves the prison. In prison for three and a half years, in total darkness of the prison cell, he creates a vision of a flowering bush. Then he dines with the Devil, who tempts him. He is released from jail at the age of 31 and goes to Aquisgranum where his Uncle Anselm explains the reasons for his imprisonment. He becomes part of King Carolus's Court again, and eventually gets an order allowing Angilperta to return to her childhood home. Warnefrit, the son of Liuta and Bertold, the oldest of three brothers, likes relations with slave women. He becomes engaged to Angila. All of chapter 16 is his angry and frustrated monologue as heir to his father. He disappears in the rebellion and is found in a dungeon, where he remains for over ten years post-rebellion. His brother Perto comes to get him from prison, though he does not recognize Perto. Eranbald brings Warnefrit to Gudneric, where Angilperta is, and they all dine together though Warnefrit does not seem to recognize Angilperta. Healthy again, he defends the kingdom against Huns.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogland"title="Dogland">
The novel is told from the perspective of an adult called Christopher Nix who recounts the story of his family's move to Florida from New Orleans when he was four. The purpose of their move is so that his father can open a tourist attraction that exhibits every breed of dog recognized by the American Kennel Club. The story focuses on his father's "color-blind" approach to racial segregation and various controversies that occur in his life because of it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sinister_Pig"title="The Sinister Pig">
Not long after Carl Manken leaves Washington D.C. to investigate an issue in the news, his murdered corpse is found on the edge of the Checkerboard part of the Navajo Reservation, near the Apache Jicarilla Reservation. Soon, his vehicle is found on the Jicarilla Reservation. Each use of Manken's credit card is monitored by the issuer, a high-level intervention that sends Sgt. Chee and FBI Agent Osborne to retrieve the card from the workmen using it after finding it in trash they picked up. In Washington D.C., the newsworthy issue is the large amount of royalties never paid to the tribes who own the land providing natural resources, including oil, natural gas and coal; the tribes are suing the Department of Interior.Bernadette Manuelito is on routine surveillance in her new position as a US Customs Patrol Officer, when she finds the Tuttle ranch in the boot heel of New Mexico, where a truck with Mexican license plates enters. She investigates, taking photos of the exotic wildlife and the construction project underway, described as a pump for water for the oryxes and ibexes. She shares the prints of her photos with Sgt. Chee, who in turn shares them with Lt. Leaphorn. One of the trucks in her photos is from Seamless Weld of El Paso, Texas, the same company that the dead man reported as his employer on the rental car form. Her boss, Ed Henry, takes the negatives and other set of prints, while taking a photo of her and telling her to leave the ranch alone. On her first successful solo netting, taking in a group of illegal aliens, the brother-in-law in the group recognizes Manuelito from photos circulating among the drug dealers in Sonora, with word to kill her. Her roommate Mrs. Garza calls Leaphorn with this information, because Manuelito will not call Chee. Leaphorn finds that the pathway of the unused pipeline from the now disused Mexican copper mine passes right through the Tuttle ranch, shown on an old map when the smelter was active. He figures the work recently done at each place is to get the pipeline working again, either to divert natural gas or oil southbound, or to bring in drugs, northbound. The Tuttle ranch is a lease on BLM lands, giving Dashee authority to be there; he and Sgt. Chee head for the ranch directly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erak's_Ransom"title="Erak's Ransom">
Skandian Oberjarl Erak Starfollower becomes tired of paperwork. He decides to go on one last raid to the desert country of Arrida. His raiding party walks into an ambush and is captured; Erak's crew are eventually released in order to obtain a ransom for Erak, who is left behind. Meanwhile, at Castle Redmont, senior Ranger Halt and diplomat Lady Pauline are getting married. During the wedding after-party, Svengal, Erak's first mate, appears. In a small meeting with Ranger Will and the knight Horace, he reveals Erak's kidnapping, and also tells them that Erak thinks he was betrayed by a small congregant of Skandian dissenters located in Hallasholm who seek to depose him under the leadership of Toshak, a Jarl who was once of follower of the executed Slagor, the treacherous Skirl who, in "Oakleaf Bearers", sought to kill CassandraPrincess Cassandra begs her father, King Duncan to supply the money for Erak's release. Duncan agrees, but is unable to go himself as he is in talks with the Hibernian kings. Cassandra eventually volunteers herself, much to Duncan's chagrin. Will, Cassandra, Halt, Svengal, Horace, the ranger Gilan as well as thirty of Erak's men go to deliver the ransom, which delights Cassandra. As they travel, Cassandra and Will rekindle the friendship they somewhat lost in "Oakleaf Bearers" and Gilan offers Will advice as the young apprentice worries about how he will fare without Halt's guidance. Once in Arrida, they learn from Arridi leader Seley el'then that Erak had been sent to Mararoc, a fort in the desert. The party, guided by Seley el'then and his men, head to Mararoc.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gift_(Croggon_novel)"title="The Gift (Croggon novel)">
"The Gift" (also published as "The Naming") begins with Maerad, in "Gilman's Cot" as a slave, where she has been for many years, with few memories of her former life, her mother having died several years before. She is discovered by Cadvan, one of the great mystics known as 'Bards', who reveals to her that she, like him, possesses "the Gift" shared by all of these, by which she is able to command nature to do her will. Cadvan soon discovers that her mother was the leader of the First Circle of the destroyed School of Pellinor, of whom it was previously assumed that there were no survivors. Knowing this, Cadvan decides to help her escape, believing that it might not be by means of random chance that he came upon the only known survivor of Pellinor.When Cadvan finds that Maerad's Gift is unusually powerful for one never formally taught, he begins to suspect of her more significance than he had before. He takes her to the School of Innail, to make the presence of a survivor from Pellinor known and to make Maerad a Minor Bard of Pellinor. During their time there, Maerad obtains knowledge of a long-forgotten prophecy concerning the 'Foretold One' who will defeat the Nameless One. This Nameless One is a corrupt political leader, formerly called Sharma, who discarded his own true name in order to become immortal. Twice has he attempted to conquer the land of Edil-Amarandh, and he has twice been vanquished. His last bid for power is the one in which the Foretold One, "Elednor", will defeat him, leaving him dead or helpless forever. Maerad's own history, being coincident with that of the Foretold One, implies that she is Elednor, although Maerad does not immediately embrace the idea.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuulihaukka"title="Tuulihaukka">
The story follows two young people who briefly meet in the beginning stages in southwestern Finland and towards the end, they end up to Calabria, Southern Italy. Meanwhile, they both travel separately through Europe.The eponymous Kestrel, Juvalos Skleros Gerakis, aka Olaf Falco, owner of the ship Tuulihaukka (= kestrel, 'wind falcon'), a young man, returns from Viking treks to meet his parents at Arantila manor in southwestern Finland, and finds them slaughtered by the neighboring manor's fortune-hunter younger son and his greedy allies.After taking a revenge, Juvalos leaves with his ship, venturing to Normandy to meet his brother-in-arms and childhood friend Odo. Odo's sister Adela has grown into a beautiful woman, and is newly widowed. Olaf-Juvalos falls madly in love with her. They marry and embark to southern Italy where the Falco intends to serve Duke Robert Guiscard. Adela faithfully follows Juvalos on his travels.Meanwhile, a young noblegirl Aure 'Nukuttaja' (Sleepmaker) of Launiala manor from southwestern Finland, abducted after left unprotected by her family, leaves with her restless brother Lyy, to seek to the Varangian guard of the Emperor of Byzant. They settle a household in Constantinople, where Aure gets fame with her natural ability to calm and soothe sick people with singing, thus the name Sleepmaker. Lyy becomes drungarios, an officer in the Imperial Army. They travel with the Great Imperial Army, including a travel to the Battle of Manzikert in Armenia. They meet Juvalos and his Norman army and retreat together the long journey back to Efesos, on the Mediterranean coast. Aure and Juvalos experience romantic encounters with each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travels_in_the_Scriptorium"title="Travels in the Scriptorium">
An old man is disoriented within an unknown chamber and has no memory about who he is or how he has arrived there. He tries to understand something from the relics on the desk, examining the circumstances of his confinement and searching for reasons and a method to exit.Determining that he is locked in, the man — identified only as Mr. Blank — begins reading a manuscript he finds on the desk, the story of another prisoner, set in an alternate world the man doesn't recognize. Nevertheless, the pages seem to have been left for him, along with a haunting set of photographs. As the day passes, various characters call on the man in his cell — vaguely familiar people, some who seem to resent him for crimes he can't remember — and each brings frustrating hints of his identity and his past. All the while an overhead camera clicks and clicks, recording his movements, and a microphone records every sound in the room. Someone is watching.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Battle"title="The Secret Battle">
The novel follows the career of a young officer, Harry Penrose, written from the viewpoint of a close friend who acts as narrator. A sensitive, educated young man, Penrose had enlisted in the ranks in 1914, immediately after completing his second year at Oxford. After six months in training he had been prevailed upon by his relatives – like most educated volunteers – to take a commission as an officer.Penrose slowly asserts himself; the war takes a toll on his personality, but he begins to live up to his early dreams of heroism. However, his creeping self-doubt grows by degrees; he is reassigned from his post as scouting officer once on the Somme, knowing he cannot face another night patrol, and earns the wrath of his commanding officer – an irascible Regular colonel – over a trivial incident. The colonel piles difficult, risky work on him – remarking to the narrator that "Master Penrose can go on with [leading ration parties] until he learns to do them properly" – and Penrose submits, working doggedly to try to keep from cracking. After a long period of this treatment, by the winter of 1916, Penrose's spirit is worn down; when the narrator is invalided home with an injury in February 1917, his last support is gone. He is wounded in May at Arras – a friend remarking in a letter that "you'd have said he wanted to be killed" – and they meet again in London in November. Penrose has been offered a safe job in military intelligence; he comes within a moment of taking it, but at the last minute resolves to return to France.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisk_(novel)"title="Frisk (novel)">
Frisk is narrated by Dennis, who had a troubled childhood. In 1969, aged 13, he was regularly allowed to read pornographic magazines and was particularly affected by snuff pornography, but he later learns that the pictures were faked. He recognises that Henry, now aged 17, was the 13/14-year-old boy portrayed in the pictures.Dennis is gay and a drug-taker and is devastated when his boyfriend Julian leaves him to go to France. Dennis takes up with Julian's younger brother Kevin. The boy is psychologically troubled, yet 18-year-old Dennis involves him in drugs and starts a sexual relationship.In 1989, Julian receives a letter from Dennis describing how he embarked on a sadistic killing spree in Amsterdam. The descriptions in the letter are explicit and the torture and sadism are described in graphic terms. Dennis then meets with two Germans, tells them what he has done, and they join forces to commit a series of random, motiveless murders. One of the serial killer's most recent victims was an 11-year-old boy, whom they tortured before mutilating and murdering in Dennis’ home, a converted windmill, two weeks before the letter was written.Julian travels to Amsterdam with Kevin to find out if the murders in the letters are true or just a cruel fantasy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singing"title="The Singing">
Maerad and Cadvan have returned to Innail. Maerad has realised that she has been carrying the runes of the Treesong (the magical, ancient song through which it is believed the Speech came into being) with her the whole time - on her lyre. Maerad believes it is imperative that she find her brother soon, as she senses he has a part to play in the Treesong as well. After spending time resting and catching up with old friends they attempt to leave, only to be forced back to discover themselves in a besieged Innail It is supposed to be the doing of the Landrost, a minor elidhu who is collaborating with Sharma/the Nameless One. None of the occupants are able to leave because of an unnatural snowstorm that brings extreme and fatal cold. Maerad is able to locate the Landrost's attacks, and the bards of Innail are able to hold it back. After witnessing much destruction and facing near-death, Maerad merges into her Elidhu being to destroy the Landrost She is able to strip the Landrost to almost nothing. She is saved by a combination of Arkan, the Winterking, taunting her, and Cadvan calling her her Truename, Elednor. Maerad is now also known as 'the Maid of Innail' and is bedridden for many days.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Beats_the_Devil"title="Carter Beats the Devil">
This novel is a fictionalised biography of Charles Joseph Carter. The main character, Carter, is followed through his career, from his first encounter with magic to his last performance. Along the way he encounters many historical figures, including fellow magicians Harry Houdini and Howard Thurston, United States President Warren G. Harding, BMW founder Max Friz, the Marx Brothers, business magnate Francis Marion "Borax" Smith, then inventor of electronic television Philo Farnsworth, and San Franciscan madams Tessie Wall and Jessie Hayman.Most of the novel centres on the mysterious death of President Harding, who dies shortly after taking part in Carter's stage show. President Harding apparently knew of many serious scandals that seemed likely to bring down the establishment and it seems certain that he was assassinated by persons and methods unknown. Much of Carter's past is shown in the form of flashbacks as U.S. Secret Service Agent Griffin investigates the magician as a suspect.The flashbacks chart Carter's early career including his first encounter with a magic trick, shown to him by "the tallest man alive", Joe Sullivan (also an actual, if obscure, historical figure) in a fairground sideshow, his first paid performance for Borax Smith, his rivalry with the magician "Mysterioso", his first meeting with Harry Houdini who bestows the title "Carter the Great" on him, and Carter's marriage to Sarah Annabelle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Meetings"title="House of Meetings">
The novel centers on the modern-day (2004) recollections of the unnamed narrator/protagonist of his time spent in an Arctic gulag and the years that followed. The recollections are presented in the form of a memoir sent to the narrator's American stepdaughter, Venus. One of the primary plot elements is the complex relationship between the protagonist and his younger half-brother, Lev, who later joins him in the camp. Through many difficult revelations and trials, they eventually survive the harsh conditions of the camp and then must face a further challenge: re–acclimatizing to everyday life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_(Baxter_novel)"title="Emperor (Baxter novel)">
A mysterious prophecy from the future shapes the destiny of a family through four centuries of the Roman occupation of Britain. The story begins in 4 BC and incorporates such later events as the building of Hadrian's Wall and an attempted assassination of Constantine I. It ends in AD 418.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Juca-Pirama"title="I-Juca-Pirama">
The poem tells the story of a Tupi warrior who is captured by an enemy, cannibal tribe – the Timbiras. As he is about to be killed and offered in sacrifice, he begs for mercy in order to be freed and return to his home, where his old, sick and blind father waits for him. The Timbiras then allow the Tupi warrior to go.The warrior reunites with his father. After smelling the sacrificial paint on his son's body and hearing that he was let go, his father demands they head back to the Timbiras' tribe in order for them to continue the sacrifice ceremony. However, the "cacique" (chief) of the Timbiras tells the old man that they no longer want the Tupi warrior to be sacrificed, since he begged for mercy and thus is a coward. Angered, the old man curses his son, saying that he is the disgrace of the Tupi tribe. The son cannot stand his father's hate, and suddenly wages war all alone against the whole Timbira tribe. The old man listens to his son's war screams and realizes that he is fighting with honor.The battle is only finished when the Timbira "cacique" recognizes the valor of his enemy and says:
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Harper"title="Dragon Harper">
Similar to "" and "Nerilka's Story" (near the end of the Sixth Pass), this book is set in a time of a pandemic that threatens human life on Pern (just before the third return of Thread, or Third Pass).The story focuses on the character Kindan, featured in "Dragon's Kin", who has taken a position as an apprentice at the Harper Hall. In the school-like setting, Kindan has to deal with a bully, a blossoming forbidden relationship, and his role as a protector for new female apprentices after the Masterharper breaks the former taboo against female harpers. The book then deals with an influenza-like pandemic that threatens the lives of holders, as the Weyrs must maintain a quarantine to keep their rosters healthy enough to fight the next Threadfall.The story additionally explains the loss of many of the records kept prior to, during and after colonization, further reducing the Pernese connection with its off-planet origins.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savage_Messiah_(novel)"title="Savage Messiah (novel)">
The story begins with the revelation that Wulfgar, half brother to both Tristan and Shailiha, lives but is horribly scarred. He returns to the Citadel, where his wife and unborn child await, and he can plan his revenge. Meanwhile, the Orb of the Vigors is damaged and is literally burning a path across Eutracia. Tristan and his Conclave set out to stop the Orb and Wulfgar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Road_Ends"title="When the Road Ends">
Twelve-year-old Mary Jack is in the foster home of a conscientious but clueless Episcopal priest, Father Matt, and his selfish troubled wife Jill. Also in their care is the silent Jane, a seven-year-old girl who had been abused. The house becomes further troubled by the introduction of an Adam, age 14; but when Matt's injured sister comes to live with them, Jill threatens to leave. In order to save his marriage, Matt sends the children and his sister to live in a cabin in the mountains, supposedly with the help of a mean housekeeper who abandons them. They are forced to work together and become a family, with Mary Jack becoming the reluctant "adult" while still trying to reclaim her own childhood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_Image_(novel)"title="Mirror Image (novel)">
When Victoria's reputation is seriously at risk the only way to retrieve it is by marrying the handsome lawyer Charles Dawson, who also works with the girls' father, Edward Henderson. Olivia is inclined to stay and help their father, who is ill, but Victoria needs her the most when her marriage seems to be failing. It is not helped by Charles's 10-year-old son, Geoffrey, who is still distraught after losing his mother Susan, Charles' first wife, on the "Titanic".When Victoria proposes an unthinkable plan, Olivia is forced to accept, leaving her with a marriage she never thought she could have and her sister going off to help in France, when World War I is in full throttle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wolves_of_Willoughby_Chase"title="The Wolves of Willoughby Chase">
The story is set at Willoughby Chase, the grand home of Sir Willoughby and Lady Green and their daughter Bonnie.Due to Lady Green's ill health, Bonnie's parents are taking a holiday in warmer climates touring the Mediterranean by ship, leaving her in the care of a newly arrived distant fourth cousin, Letitia Slighcarp. Also, due to arrive is Bonnie's orphan cousin Sylvia, who lived in London with Sir Willoughby's impoverished but genteel older sister Jane, coming to keep her cousin company in her parents' absence. Sylvia is nervous about the long train ride into the snowy countryside, especially when wolves menace the stopped train, but once she arrives, the cousins become instant friends. The robust and adventurous Bonnie is eager to show Sylvia the delights of country life, and they embark on an ice-skating expedition almost immediately. Although the adventure ends on a scary note—the girls are chased by the ever-present wolves—all is well thanks to Simon, a resourceful boy who lives on his own in a cave, raising geese and bees.The girls soon learn that the blissful existence they anticipate together is not to last. With the help of Mr. Grimshaw, a mysterious man from the train, Miss Slighcarp takes over the household, dismissing all but the most untrustworthy household servants, threatening to arrest those who defy her, wearing Lady Green's gowns and tampering with Sir Willoughby's legal papers. This is the cause for Bonnie to continuously lose her temper. Bonnie and Sylvia also overhear ominous hints about their parents' ship, which has sunk, perhaps intentionally. Bonnie and Sylvia are not without allies: James, the clever footman, who spies on Miss Slighcarp for the girls; Pattern, Bonnie's loving and beloved maid; and the woodcrafty Simon. With their friends, the girls plan to alert the kindly and sensible local doctor to the crimes of Miss Slighcarp and Mr. Grimshaw, but Miss Slighcarp foils the scheme and sends them to a nearby industrial town, to a dismal and horrid orphanage run by the even more horrid Mrs. Brisket and her pretentious, spoiled, unscrupulous and abusive daughter, Diana.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_Above_the_World"title="Up Above the World">
In the middle of their journey Dr Slade and his wife have a chance encounter with an important looking lady who tells them that she is going to visit her son. Arriving by ship at a provincial town in an unnamed Latin American country, they find that accommodation is sparse, and so Mrs Slade agrees to share a room with her at some seedy hotel for just one night. During that night, the lady is murdered with an injection of curare, but when the Slades leave very early the next morning to catch a connection, Mrs Slade erroneously believes the woman lying next to her is still fast asleep.A few days later, in another town, they read in the paper that the hotel burned down immediately after they had left and that the woman died in the fire. No one suspects the real reason, arson, which was committed to cover up the murder. This is when Dr and Mrs Slade make the acquaintance of Grove Soto, a charming and seemingly rich young man who offers them his hospitality. When it turns out that the recently deceased woman was his mother and Soto feigns shock at her premature death, the Americans have no idea that it was actually him who had her killed out of greed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Kali"title="The Age of Kali">
The book is a collection of essays collected through almost a decade of travel around the Indian subcontinent.It deals with many controversial subjects such as Sati, the caste wars in India, political corruption and terrorism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Banks_of_Plum_Creek"title="On the Banks of Plum Creek">
Having left their little house on the Kansas prairie, the Ingalls family travels by covered wagon to Minnesota and settles on the banks of Plum Creek. Pa trades two ponies for a dugout and a stable. Later, Pa trades for two new horses as Christmas presents for his family, which Laura and her sister, Mary name Sam and David. Pa soon builds a new, above-ground, wooden house for his family, trusting that their first crop of wheat will pay for the lumber and materials.Now that they live near a town, Laura and Mary go to school for the first time. There they make friends, and also meet the town storekeeper's daughter, Nellie Oleson, who makes fun of Laura and Mary for being "country girls." Laura and Mary attend a party at the Oleson's home. There, Nellie acts selfishly and grabs the biggest piece of cake. Later, Ma has Laura and Mary invite all the girls (including Nellie) to a party at their house to reciprocate where Nellie is mean to Jack, the Ingalls’ dog, and speaks mean to Ma so her legs get covered with "bloodsuckers" (leeches) in return for what she did. The Ingalls go through very hard times when locusts decimate the much-anticipated wheat crop, and lay so many eggs that there is no hope of a crop the following year. For two harvest seasons, Pa is forced to walk east to find work on farms that escaped the Locust Plague of 1874. Laura and her sister have to quit school because it closed when the locusts arrived.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainforest_(novel)"title="Rainforest (novel)">
Mo Singleton grows up in rural Sussex as the only child of John Singleton, a scientist and university lecturer, and Marjorie, a housewife. When Mo is still quite young, her father confides in her by telling her that he is betraying his incompetent and simplistic wife with a colleague at the university. Up to her father's premature death at 45 and beyond, Mo is able to keep their secret without once meeting her father's lover.Following in his footsteps, Mo studies biology and moves to London, where she gets a job at a university. She enjoys teaching first-year students, especially challenging their faulty assumptions about nature and explaining to them what man's role in the big cycle of things really is. She visits her widowed mother in the country every once in a while and spends pleasant weekends with her, has a satisfactory relationship with her boyfriend Luke, a biochemist, and has started making plans for, and is very much looking forward to, her research project which will take her to an isolated spot in the tropical rainforest that covers large parts of the island of Borneo.When, shortly before her departure, she meets Joe Yates, who has been hired as her replacement for the six-month period she will be gone, Mo is both appalled and attracted by his directness but rejects his overt sexual advances as well as his fatalistic philosophy of life. In Borneo, she behaves very professionally, fervently believing that through her academic work she will increase the sum total of human knowledge about the tropical rainforest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_Felix_Krull"title="Confessions of Felix Krull">
The novel is narrated by the protagonist, an impostor and adventurer named Felix Krull, the son of a ruined Rhineland winemaker. Felix avoids military service and makes his way to France, where he takes a job in a prestigious hotel, first as an elevator operator, then as a waiter. Deftly using his natural charm, good looks, and subtle intelligence, the young man easily wins the heart of a rich writer, as well as part of her money. Later, Krull meets the young Marquis de Venosta and undertakes to help him in his love affairs; he substitutes for the Marquis on a trip around the world. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plague_Court_Murders"title="The Plague Court Murders">
Ken Blake is approached by an old friend, Dean Halliday, who tells the story of his family estate, Plague Court. Halliday explains that the house is haunted by the ghost of the original owner, Louis Playge, a hangman by profession. Halliday invites Blake and Chief-Inspector Humphrey Masters to Plague Court to take part in a seance, run by psychic Roger Darworth and his medium Joseph.However, Darworth is a fake, being monitored by the police. The night of the seance, Darworth locks himself in a small stone house, behind Plague Court, while the seance proceeds. When Masters and Blake go to get him, he has been stabbed to death, with the dagger of Louis Playge.But all the doors and windows are bolted and locked, and thirty feet of mud surrounds the house, unbroken—and all the suspects have been holding hands in the seance.The only one who can solve the crime is locked room expert Sir Henry Merrivale.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bridge_to_Wiseman's_Cove"title="A Bridge to Wiseman's Cove">
When Carl Matt's mother, Kerry Matt, disappears, his sister Sarah sends him and his brother Harley to Wattle Beach to live with their Aunt Beryl. Aunt Beryl doesn't want them to stay with her and after numerous encounters with the police she says Carl has to get a job to pay his Aunt. He later is rejected. He learns this is because his grandfather had an accident that crippled Skip for life, and accidentally killed his son. After some consideration, Skip reluctantly lets Carl work on the barge.After numerous events that boost the popularity of Skip's barge, it is eventually revealed that a bridge will be built and therefore put all barges out of business.In the end, it is discovered that Kerry Matt died in a bus accident when she was trying to get home to her children, Sarah, Harley and Carl. Once this is unearthed, Carl returns home to find that Aunt Beryl has run off in true Matt spirit to join her boyfriend, Bruce. Because Carl has nowhere else to stay, Joy Duncan invites him to come and live with them at Wiseman's Cove with his brother, Harley, who has already claimed the Duncans as his surrogate family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Life_of_Grange_Copeland"title="The Third Life of Grange Copeland">
As a poor sharecropper, Grange is virtually a slave; in cotton-era Baker County, Georgia, the more he works, the more money he ends up owing to the man who owns the fields he works and the house he lives in. Eventually life becomes too much for him and he runs away from his debts to start a new life up North, leaving his family.After declining a loan from a white landowner which he knows he can't pay back, Brownfield begins to head North on foot to follow in his father's footsteps. Brownfield is led to a woman named Josie who owns and operates a lounge/brothel called the Dew Drop Inn (in some printings, the Dewey Inn). Brownfield winds up sharing a bed with Josie, her daughter Lorene, and Josie's deceased sister's daughter Mem. Brownfield takes a liking to Mem and eventually marries her under the disapproving Josie's nose.Brownfield beats and eventually kills Meme (sometimes printed as "Mem") and is jailed for an arbitrary seven years. Grange finds the North unfulfilling and returns to Baker County, which is the only place he knows of as home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Criminal_Reason"title="Critique of Criminal Reason">
Years after Immanuel Kant published his "Critique of Pure Reason" but now rumours say that the philosopher is about to release another book. This book will be different than all others because it will examine the concept of serial killers.Meanwhile the German city of Königsberg, where Kant lives, is gripped by a series of murders. Prosecutor Hanno Stiffeniis is ordered by King Frederick William III himself to investigate the crimes and bring the murderer to justice. Stiffeniis is aided in his quest by Immanuel Kant, as well as a local police sergeant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Star_(novel)"title="Fire Star (novel)">
Tension is rising at the Pennykettles as Lucy is suddenly kidnapped by a long-forgotten rival. This 'rival' wishes to raise the ancient dragon Gawain from his stone-laden resting place. Over time Lucy is there, she goes through extreme changes. Gwilanna knew this would happen as Lucy began to look like Guinevere, her ancestor.After a sudden bear attack and the news about Lucy, David returns home to help Liz overcome this rough time. In the middle of a serious conversation with Liz, David receives a heartbreaking phone call. He has just learned Zanna, his girlfriend, has just been taken by bears. Under all this pressure, David breaks down. Liz soothes him in dragonsong, the ancient soothing method Guinevere used on the ancient dragon Gawain.While David is home, Grockle suddenly awakens to find the window opened. Curious as he was, he flies out of the window. Nobody could prevent it, even David. Lucy is not having a good time at all. She decides to explore the cave of Gawain when Gwilanna leaves one day. She pushed around and discovers a secret hideaway she thinks her ancestor, Gwendolen, used. Eventually, she falls asleep by the bones of Gwendolen and a bear that guarded her. An old female bear ventures into the cave to hibernate, down into the hideaway, and decides to follow the dead bear's example. She guards Lucy as she sleeps.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fire_Eternal"title="The Fire Eternal">
In the Arctic: Slowly the ice is changing; bears are starving; dragons are rising; and the souls of the Inuit dead are haunting the skies. The spirit Gaia, goddess of the Earth, is restless, aching to bring her might down upon these changes. But all living things may suffer if she does. As the weather grows wilder and the ice caps melt, all eyes turn from the north to David's daughter, Alexa. She is the key to stopping it . . .But can one girl save the world from the forces of evil or will she disappear like her father?The book opens with a short chapter about how the Earth, Gaia, is beginning to get restless, and then goes to explain Zanna's sadness about David being gone. She gives the invisible and shapeless dragon G'lant, which David gave to her at the end of Fire Star, to her daughter Alexa. Since David's apparent death, Zanna has been trying to get back on her feet. She bought a New Age shop called the Healing Touch and is living with the Pennykettles in David's old room. While Zanna is at her shop one night, Lucy sneaks into her room, and steals a letter that Zanna wrote to David. Every year on Valentine's Day, the day that David died, Zanna writes a letter to David telling him all of the events that are going on in the house. When Lucy reads the letter, she feels the need to do something to tell the world that David is not dead. So she writes an E-mail to a man named Tam Farell, whose role is not yet revealed, telling him to go the Healing Touch and ask for Zanna.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pig_Scrolls"title="The Pig Scrolls">
After all the Olympian gods go missing, Sibyl has a premonition in which the sun god Apollo tells her to find "the talking pig". Sibyl then sets out looking for the talking pig, Gryllus. She finds him first at an auction where she buys him for 200 drachmas then Gryllus runs away and he winds up at Big Stavros's Kebab bar where he is forced to entertain customers and where Sibyl takes him back. Together they set off for the temple at Delphi. Apollo informs Sibyl that she and Gryllus must find a goatherd boy living on top of a mountain. Once Sibyl and Gryllus find the goatherd, (who turns out to be the god Zeus) they set off once more for Apollo's temple at Delphi. It is there that Gryllus, the talking pig, must save the world from utter destruction.Additional: What the author had to say about his work:“I got the idea for The Pig Scrolls when I was rereading Homer's Odyssey and found myself more interested in some of the non-heroic characters in the background. Working on the book gave me a chance to revisit a world I have always loved—that of ancient mythology and history. And, of course, in order to research the character of Gryllus fully, I was forced to eat a huge number of pies.”
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swords_of_Zinjaban"title="The Swords of Zinjaban">
Fergus Reith, the main Terran tour guide on Krishna, is at the spaceport of Novorecife to meet his latest clients, the advance party for Cosmic Productions. Cosmic is an earthly motion picture company planning to shoot the first movie on the planet, a gaudy swashbuckler to be titled "Swords Under Three Moons". Fergus is surprised to find among the party his ex-wife Alicia Dyckman, who left Krishna twenty years before; she in turn is surprised to find him the father of a teenage son, Alister, by a later wife now deceased. Fergus learns Alicia has undergone psychotherapy to correct the personality flaws that had doomed their marriage, and that moreover she is the one who recommended his services to the film company.Alicia introduces Fergus to her colleagues, Cyril Ordway and Jacob White, and soon the two are squiring them around the local realms to scout filming locations and hire locals as extras, including a company of soldiers for the battle scenes. In addition to the usual complications of mediating between egocentric Terrans and temperamental Krisnans, the ex-lovers warily attempt to sort out their feelings for each other, a task rendered all the more difficult because others are also interested in Alicia—and they keep running into Fergus’ old flames at awkward moments!
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Cross_(novel)"title="Double Cross (novel)">
Four years prior to the beginning of the story, Kyle Craig is sent to prison for his crimes in "Roses Are Red" and "Violets Are Blue" and swears revenge upon Detective Alex Cross, who was responsible for his capture. In the present day, Alex Cross is on a date with police officer, Brianna 'Bree' Stone, when they are interrupted by the news of crime-writer author Tess Olsen's death. Upon arriving in Washington, D.C., Alex decides to help, even though he is no longer a detective. The investigators find a Hallmark greeting card and a tape featuring the killer throwing Olsen from a balcony in her apartment. In the video, the killer turns toward the camera and says "In your honor." Alex, Bree, and John Sampson, Alex's best friend and co-worker, discover that the footage of the murder was used twice. Later, the murderer goes to a play and kills Matthew Jay Walker, an actor, and posts videos of his murders on the internet. Alex realizes that the murderer wants an audience, and therefore is nicknamed "DCAK" (an abbreviation of "DC Audience Killer"). At his psychology practice, Alex talks to Sandy Quinlan, a sex-crazed woman and meets another patient, Anthony Demao. Anthony is a war-veteran who killed his partner, Matthew, after Matthew had ordered him to due to his terminal health.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bones_of_Zora"title="The Bones of Zora">
Fergus Reith, prime Terran tour guide on the planet Krishna, finds himself between tours and on a somewhat different job, working with Aristide Marot, a French paleontologist out to unravel the mysteries of Krishnan vertebrate evolution. Marot is particularly interested in the era when life first emerged from the seas; as Krishna's surface is mostly land and its bodies of water are separated from each other, he theorizes the planet's animal species could have multiple origins.Fergus guides Marot to the most promising fossil-bearing site, near the town of Kubyab on the banks of the upper Zora River in the Dashtate of Chilihagh. There they find a rival, Marot's competitor Warren Foltz, who is fanatically attached to a rival theory and is not averse to destroying contrary evidence. Moreover, Foltz is being assisted by xenologist Alicia Dyckman, to whom Fergus had formerly been wed in a stormy marriage culminating in divorce. The cause was Alicia's contentious and overbearing personality; convinced she always knew best, she had interfered with Fergus's tours to the point that he had finally barred her from participating.Miserable, at an emotional low ebb, and exploited by Foltz, Alicia now regrets having left Fergus, but their jobs keep them in continued opposition. Reith's scientific adventure is thus beset by skullduggery, violence, and tempestuous personal relations. Blessed with beginner's luck, he actually discovers a fossil supporting Marot's theory, which Foltz endeavors to hijack and break up.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattail_Moon"title="Cattail Moon">
Julia Foster gets a chance to break away from her domineering mother for a while by moving from Seattle to a small village in the Cascades called Moon Valley, to live with her father and grandmother. While trying to decide on the course of her life, especially whether she can have a career in music despite her mother's disapproval, she happens on a mysterious figure of an old-fashioned girl at night in the marsh by her house. And she meets Luke, a boy whose fate is tied to the girl in ways he doesn't want to explain to Julia, even though a true affection is blossoming between them. Julia must find the strength to make decisions about herself, her mother, and Luke, and investigating the mystery of the ghost of the marsh may be the way to sort things out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Books_of_the_Dream_Eaters"title="The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters">
The book follows three main characters, Miss Celestial "Celeste" Temple, Cardinal Chang, and Captain-Surgeon Abelard Svenson, as they attempt to thwart the mysterious plot of a sinister cabal. There are ten chapters in the book, and each is from the point of view of one of the main characters. Chang and Svenson get three chapters each and Miss Temple gets four (the novel both starts and ends from her point of view).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer,_Go_Home!"title="Pioneer, Go Home!">
The Kwimper family of Cranberry County, New Jersey is on a vacation in Columbiana when their car runs out of gas. Somewhere along the way, the Kwimpers had made a wrong turn and ended up on an unfinished highway. While waiting for assistance to arrive they set up shacks on the side of the road.The Kwimper clan consists of Pop Kwimper who has lived his entire life off government welfare programs such as unemployment compensation and Aid to Families with Dependent Children, his happy-go-lucky son Toby Kwimper (whose "Strength is as the strength of ten because his heart is pure"), adopted identical twins Eddy and Teddy that nobody can tell apart (and whose parents "tried to beat a train to a crossing and only came out tied"), and the family babysitter Holly Jones.When confronted by state officials and treated poorly Pop Kwimper decides that the family will settle on the side of the highway permanently. Pop learns of old homesteading statutes in the state and determines that he has a legal right to occupy the land.The novel revolves around the family's comical battles with the government, as they establish their lives on the untitled land and are eventually joined by other pioneers. The family also contends with meddling social workers, their own poverty, a hurricane, and a group of gangsters that tries to squat on nearby land to run an illegal casino.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_March_into_Darkness"title="A March into Darkness">
The story tells of Prince Tristan, as he is summoned by the Heretics to join them beyond the Tolenka Mountains. It is there they promise to help him discover his destiny. To help spur the prince along they send Xanthus, a binary being (half-man, half darkling), to torture the citizens of Eutracia until Tristan agrees to go.Meanwhile, Serena plots her revenge against those who worship the Vigors. She personally plans to kill Tristan for the death of her husband Wulfgar and their stillborn daughter, Clarice. With the help of the Heretics, to whom she is now able to commune with, Serena sets a plan into motion that will rock the Conclave to its very core.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igraine_the_Brave"title="Igraine the Brave">
Igraine lives in an old castle with her family, magicians who possess powerful books of magic. Her older brother Albert is following in the family line, but Igraine plans to be a knight one day, even though she feels there is not much adventure to be had at home these days. Her ancestors, though, had warded off many attempts to steal the books of magic.On her 12th birthday, Igraine's parents give her a magical suit of armor, but in the process, they are turned into pigs by mistake. Matters get worse when the next-door Baroness's castle is taken over by Osmond the Greedy, who wants to take the magical books so he can overthrow the king. Igraine and her brother must find a way to defend the castle from Osmond's siege while keeping their parents' condition secret and searching for the missing ingredient for their restoration to human form. Albert handles the castle's magical defenses while Igraine leaves to find the missing ingredient. She finds the ingredient and some assistance, in the form of the Sorrowful Knight of the Mount of Tears, who not only agrees to help her return home but also begins teaching her about the rules of chivalry, and eventually helps Igraine and her family end the siege.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beginning_with_a_Bash"title="Beginning with a Bash">
It's a cold winter in Boston, and Peters's secondhand bookstore has a sign that says "Come in and browse -- it's warm inside". The sign attracts the attention of Martin Jones, who's not only chilly but being chased by the police because his former boss, Professor North, has accused him of stealing $50,000 from the Anthropology Society. Inside the bookstore, he meets a former teacher from his days at Meredith Academy; Leonidas Witherall, "the man who looks like Shakespeare", who had lost all his money in the stock market crash of 1929, and become the bookstore's janitor. The bookstore's new owner is a pretty young redhead of Jones's acquaintance. After the departure of a book thief and a car accident outside, Professor North's body is discovered in the religion section. Witherall and company—which soon includes a wealthy Boston dowager, North's sassy maid Gert, and Gert's mobster boyfriend Freddy—spend the evening tracking down clues to the murderer's identity and trying to stay out of the clutches of Freddy's rival gang. Under Witherall's supervision, the group solves the murder and forces a confession from the murderer just in time to save Jones from the police.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cut_Direct"title="The Cut Direct">
It's a snowy day in Dalton (a New England town near Boston) and someone's trying to run over Leonidas Witherall, "the man who looks like Shakespeare". He's saved by brassy young Margie and her muscular boyfriend Cuff, but he promptly escapes them and is knocked down by another car. When he awakens, he's in the home of Bennington Brett, a former pupil, who is sitting stabbed in front of him. Witherall assembles a crew including the dead man's secretary, the lovely Miss Dallas Tring, two neighbors, Stanton Kaye, and dotty housewife Mrs. Price (who owns the fatal carving knife), whose new maid is Margie. Together, the group races around Dalton in pursuit of clues and suspects, comes dangerously close to the second murder, and resolves matters by delivering the criminals to the police complete with confessions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Steal"title="Cold Steal">
It's a winter day in Dalton (a New England town near Boston) and Leonidas Witherall, "the man who looks like Shakespeare", is returning to his new house, which he's never seen. He's inherited money from an uncle and toured the world, and left plans for his home to be built while on his travels, but now he must return home and produce the next volume of the adventures of Lieutenant Haseltine. On the train to Dalton, he meets a mousy woman named Miss Chard (known to all as Swiss Chard) and a beautiful young woman with a brown paper package and a secret. His new home proves a delight, and it includes a kitchen filled with red appliances, a library with ladders, and a garage complete with the pickaxed corpse of Medora, the crabby next-door neighbor. Leonidas assembles a gang of assistants, including dotty housewife Cassie Price and former car thief Cuff (who has reformed and joined the police force). Together, they defend Witherall's new red refrigerator against thieves, track down the missing envelope of money and bring the murderer to justice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Left_Leg"title="The Left Leg">
It's a winter day in Dalton (a New England town near Boston) and Leonidas Witherall, "the man who looks like Shakespeare", is stepping off a bus after having been accused of bothering a beautiful young woman in a scarlet wimple (who promptly becomes known as the Scarlet Wimpernel). He takes refuge in a hardware store run by a former student, Lincoln Potter. Potter is inclined to be helpful, until the Wimpernel's purse is discovered in Witherall's pocket and Witherall is incautious enough to admit that he saw Potter's cash register being emptied by a man in a green satin suit carrying a small harp. He heads for the home of a former teaching colleague, Marcus Meredith, and finds him murdered—and missing his artificial left leg. Potter is enlisted by Witherall for help in solving the murder, along with intrepid housewife Topsey Beaton. Together they deceive an entire rummage sale, enlist the Scarlet Wimpernel to play a role, find the man in green satin, locate the left leg, and solve the murder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Chest"title="The Hollow Chest">
It's Egg Day in Dalton (a New England town near Boston) and Leonidas Witherall, "the man who looks like Shakespeare", returns home from shepherding some students on an Egg Day outing to find his house ransacked, his safe open, and a beautiful blonde bound and gagged on his bed. While he's distracted by the police, she escapes. Then a wealthy neighbor asks him to run an unusual errand, promising his school an endowment if he does so—in full evening dress, he meets the blonde on a Dalton corner and relieves her of a hollow chest that looks much heavier than it is. Moments later, he discovers a bludgeoned body in a nearby car. He enlists the assistance of plucky Luzzy Jenkins and oafish soldier Goldie to investigate, among other things, the affairs of Goldie's general, a horse named George, a blonde named George, a bank president and a young student named Threewit. Together they explain all the bizarre coincidences and solve the murder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_for_Record"title="File for Record">
It's a rainy day in Dalton (a New England town near Boston) and Leonidas Witherall, "the man who looks like Shakespeare", is off to Haymaker's Department Store to retrieve his umbrella at the Lost and Found. When he enters the Lost and Found department, he's knocked unconscious and awakens in a horse-drawn bakery cart filled with French bread. While answering a call for his services as an air raid warden, he decides to call on Mr. Haymaker himself to complain, only to find Haymaker stabbed with a samurai sword. He enlists the assistance of Constance "Pink" Lately, a housewife clutching a Lady Baltimore cake, Jinx the red-headed Haymaker's elevator girl, and many of the participants in a "Victory Swap Meet" to track down an embezzler, a code thief and a murderer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Ernest_(novel)"title="Dead Ernest (novel)">
Leonidas Witherall, "the man who looks like Shakespeare", is writing the final words of the latest adventure of Lieutenant Hazeltine when his housekeeper Mrs. Mullet interrupts to offer her "candied opinion". The next interruption is two men who deliver an unwanted deep freeze and leave, followed by a blonde in an evening gown and an orchid corsage who mistakenly serenades him with "Happy Birthday". The deep freeze proves to contain the dead body of Ernest Finger, the French teacher at Meredith's Academy, which Witherall has recently inherited. Witherall musters an unlikely gang of associates, including Sonia Mullet, her boyfriend and half the Finger family, to trace the trail of the moving Finger corpse and identify the murderer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Clew"title="The Iron Clew">
Leonidas Witherall, "the man who looks like Shakespeare", is writing the latest adventure of Lieutenant Hazeltine when his housekeeper Mrs. Mullet interrupts to offer her "candied opinion". He then prepares to leave for a dinner to which he's been invited in his persona as a bank director, held at the home of banker Fenwick Balderston, when he notices that a brown-paper parcel of bank papers has disappeared. Upon arrival at Balderston's, he finds the banker has been bashed with a bronze bust of Shakespeare. Assisted by plucky housewife Liz Copley and gang of other assistants, Witherall races around the town of Dalton and tracks down a missing dinosaur footprint, a copy of "Tamerlane", the bank documents and the murderer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_at_the_New_York_World's_Fair"title="Murder at the New York World's Fair">
Mrs. Daisy Tower is 67, the widow of a former governor, and for the last year has undergone the untender attentions of her nephew Egleston and his overbearing wife Elfrida during her convalescence from pneumonia and a broken hip. That might explain why she stows away in a laundry truck headed for Boston, but it doesn't really explain how she finds herself confronting a dead body aboard the private train of art collector Conrad Cassell, en route to the New York World's Fair. She and her fellow passengers find themselves in a screwball comedy fix, set against the pageantry of opening day under the shadow of the Fair's spectacular trylon. Daisy must not only identify the corpse and the murderer, but save the Fair from destruction by a maniac—and find a way to get Egleston and Elfrida out of her hair.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Favor"title="Small Favor">
One year after the events in "White Night", Dresden is confronted by Queen Mab calling in one of the favors owed her by Harry: that he be her "Emissary," and protect John Marcone. Despite repeated attacks by gruffs—soldiers in service of Summer—he tracks Marcone's movements across the city. He finds Hendricks and Ms. Gard at one of Marcone's safe houses, having survived an attack by the Denarians, whom he learns have abducted Marcone. Ms. Gard formally requests that the White Council file an objection to the abduction of one signatory of the Unseelie Accords by another. Luccio, captain of the Wardens, agrees to bring in the Archive (a twelve-year-old girl Harry named "Ivy") as a neutral party.Dresden meets Murphy at McAnally's. After he updates her, a huge gruff enters to challenge Dresden to a duel, and is saved by Murphy invoking her duties as a law officer. While Thomas is distracting the gruffs, Dresden confronts Ms. Gard and convinces her to tell him of a case of blood samples kept in a locker at Union Station. Harry and Michael are attacked at Union station by Winter minions and the elder gruff but recover the samples. Grievously wounded, the elder gruff leaves, warning Dresden that the eldest brother gruff will kill him. Harry also meets up with Ivy the Archive, her bodyguard Kincaid, and Warden Captain Luccio, who retreat to the safety of Dresden’s warded apartment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hand_in_the_Glove"title="The Hand in the Glove">
Theodolinda "Dol" Bonner is half of the Bonner and Raffray Detective Agency. She claims to have been "inoculated against" men and has no use for them, even her perennial suitor, newspaperman Len Chisholm. Her business partner, Sylvia Raffray, doesn't know much about detection but is the firm's financial backer. As the story begins, Len has just been fired from his job at the instigation of Sylvia's guardian, financier P.L. Storrs, who also controls Sylvia's money for the next six months and thus insists that she withdraw her financial support of the detective agency.Strangely, Storrs asks Dol Bonner to join a house party at his place in the country. Other family members present are Storrs' wife Cleo, who "goes in for cults", and his daughter Janet, who is plain, quiet and writes poetry. Sylvia's fiance Martin, who is a neighbor, and his friend Professor Zimmerman have joined the party, and George Ranth, of the "League of the Occidental Sakti", is Mrs. Storrs' guest and financial parasite.Storrs' problem is that Ranth is pressuring Mrs. Storrs to let him marry Janet and thus become Storrs' heir. He hires Dol to discredit Ranth in Mrs. Storrs' eyes, and proposes that she pretend to be investigating the killing of some pheasants at Martin's estate as a cover story. Dol accepts the task and arrives at the Storrs estate, but before she gets too deeply involved in the task, she comes across the murdered body of her host and employer, who has been brutally strangled with wire and hung from a branch. She soon recognizes that in order to commit the murder, the murderer must have worn heavy gloves to avoid cutting his hands with the wire. She immediately searches the house for the gloves, dodging the police, and finds them—bizarrely, concealed inside a watermelon in the garden.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Land_of_the_Silver_Apples"title="The Land of the Silver Apples">
Jack and his companions take Lucy to a shrine where the demons she is believed to harbor may be cast out, but things go badly wrong. Lucy is abducted by the Lady of the Lake and Jack must follow her underground to the lands of the hobgoblins and elves. He meets Thorgil again and, with her and a new friend, Pega, must face tests beyond anything they can imagine. They must learn to see through the enchantments of the elves (who are the fallen angels) and to face still darker powers in the underworld.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggs_(novel)"title="Eggs (novel)">
Nine year old David Limpert's mother, Carolyn, slips on a wet floor without a wet floor sign, falls down the stairs, and dies. David's family, consisting of his grandmother Margaret, his father, and himself, moves from Minnesota to Perkiomen Township, Pennsylvania. He becomes quiet, sensitive, and attached to an idea that if he follows every law and rule (some of which he arbitrarily created) perfectly, then his mother may come back. David's father, a sales manager, only comes home on the weekends; so he is raised by his loving grandmother, who he disrespects and ignores completely. David's grandmother takes him to an Easter Egg hunt, much to his disappointment. While hunting for eggs, he finds a beautiful girl resting underneath the leaves by some trees. When David asks if she's dead, she makes no response. Believing she really is dead, he starts talking about himself. Eventually he leaves, thinking a newspaper will carry the news of her death. However, it turns out the girl is alive - she is a thirteen year old named Primrose Dufee, who defies all rules. She has no father but a fortune-telling mother. In a short time, the two children become great friends. Primrose lives in a 1977 van instead of a home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragon_Waiting"title="The Dragon Waiting">
The novel is a fantasy alternate history combining vampires, the Medicis, and the convoluted English politics surrounding Edward IV and Richard III. The book also fictionalizes the fate of the Princes in the Tower.Edward IV is on the throne of England, but in this alternate world, medieval Europe is dominated by the threat from the Byzantine Empire. During the 4th century CE, Julian the Apostate reigned longer than he did in our world, succeeded in displacing Christianity and reintroduced religious pluralism within the Roman Empire, resulting in the subsequent disappearance of Islam as well. Without any cohesive threat from the east, presumably Byzantium was able to survive, consolidate its authority and expand.Sforza, the Vampire Duke, marshals his forces for his long-planned attack on Florence, and Byzantium is on the march. Gregory, a mercenary, Dimi, the exiled heir to the Byzantine throne; Cynthia, a young physician forced to flee Florence, and Hywel, a Welsh wizard, nephew of Owain Gly Dwr, seem to have no common goals but together they wage an intrigue-filled campaign against the might of Byzantium, striving to secure the English throne for Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and make him Richard III.This succeeds, and Richard III goes on to win the Battle of Bosworth in this alternate universe, killing Henry Tudor and ensuring that he never becomes Henry VII as he did in the reality. At that point, the book ends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Cat"title="Mountain Cat">
Delia Brand, the protagonist, is a beautiful young woman living in tiny Cody, Wyoming. Delia is determined to avenge the tragic deaths of her parents; her prospector father's by shooting and her mother's suicide from grief. When she believes she knows the culprit, she buys some cartridges and announces her intention to shoot a man. After discussing her intentions with her uncle Quinby Pellet, the town taxidermist, Delia goes to visit her sister, Clara.Clara Brand is secretary to Dan Jackson, who runs a grubstaking business for local prospectors, and has just lost her job. In the middle of Delia's argument with Dan, she hears noises outside the office and discovers that Quin has been knocked unconscious by someone whom he hasn't seen. After dealing with the doctor and the police, Delia returns to her car to find that her gun and cartridges have been stolen.Dan Jackson's father-in-law Lem Sammis is Delia's godfather, Delia goes to see him and his brassy wife Evelina to get Clara's job back. Lem agrees and gives Delia a note to Dan to say so. When Delia returns to the office to confront Dan once again, she finds him dead and is arrested for his murder, due to her earlier incautious statements.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Far_Shore_of_Time"title="The Far Shore of Time">
American government agent Dan Dannerman has been imprisoned, tortured, and repeatedly duplicated by his jailers, the "Beloved Leaders", a species that enslaves or destroys the other species they meet. "The Far Shore of Time" opens with the "Horch", rivals of the Beloved Leaders, occupying the zoo planet where Dannerman is being held captive. Dannerman is rescued, although initially the Horch treat him in much the same way the Beloved Leaders did: keeping him isolated and under interrogation. Eventually he is treated as a guest, given medical attention, and begins to make friends among the other freed prisoners.Dannerman recovers from his ordeal and learns more about the Horch, the Beloved Leaders, and other species involved in their war. He collects information and technology, while looking for an opportunity to return to Earth and warn humanity about the coming of the Beloved Leaders. When Dannerman is asked to assist in preparing one of the former prisoners to infiltrate the Beloved Leaders he sees an opportunity to return home. He presents the plan to the Horch, and although they do not agree to it he is able to bluff his way through. He ends up back on Earth aboard one of the stealth submarines that the Beloved Leaders have placed on Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Run_(novel)"title="On the Run (novel)">
When Ben's cousins, whom he lives with, are unwell, he is forced to spend the summer with his father and stepmother-to-be. They live in London and have little time to spend with Ben. So Ben decides to explore the gardens of the terrace houses in his street. He walks along the walls connecting all the houses until he comes to one covered in jagged glass. Ben then falls into the garden and meets Thomas, a young boy from Tiga, who is being kept in London, while his father, Chief Okapi, is exiled there. When Ben discovers a plot to kidnap Thomas, he, Thomas and Lil (a friend of Thomas) decide to run away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lincoln_Lawyer"title="The Lincoln Lawyer">
Moderately successful criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller operates around Los Angeles County out of a Lincoln Town Car (hence the title) driven by a former client working off his legal fees. While most of his clients are drug dealers and gangsters, the story focuses on an unusually important case of wealthy Los Angeles realtor Louis Roulet, accused of assault and attempted murder. At first, he appears to be innocent and set up by the female "victim".Roulet's lies and many surprising revelations change Haller's original case theory. He reconsiders the situation of Jesus Menendez, a former client serving time in San Quentin State Prison after pleading guilty to a similar and mysteriously related crime.Haller outmaneuvers Roulet (revealed to be a rapist and murderer) without violating ethical obligations, frees the innocent Menendez, and continues in legal practice. He also conducts much self-examination and acquires some emotional baggage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur's_Teacher_Trouble"title="Arthur's Teacher Trouble">
On the first day of school, Arthur and his classmates are given homework by a gay teacher Mr. Ratburn, leaving them distraught. Later, the principal, Mr. Haney, announces that there will be a Spellathon in the coming weeks. One day, Mr. Ratburn tells the class to study hard for a test to see who will qualify as representatives for the Spellathon. Eventually, Arthur and The Brain end up being chosen and are given lists of words to study. On the day of the Spellathon, the representatives of each class are eliminated one by one until Arthur is the only one left. He manages to win the trophy after spelling "Preparation" correctly. In the end, Mr. Ratburn announces to the audience that he will be teaching Kindergarten, much to D.W.'s dismay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_Girl_Out_(novel)"title="Odd Girl Out (novel)">
Laura Landon is a sheltered freshman at a fictional university in a midwestern town. Intensely shy and introverted, she is drawn to the president of the student union, Beth Cullison. Beth is outgoing and friendly, experienced socially (with men, particularly) but feels a void in her life. She doesn't understand how the other girls are so fulfilled by the men in their lives, despite having tried. Every time she allows herself to be intimate with one, she breaks it off out of disappointment.Beth shares a room in the sorority house with Emmy, and convinces Laura to pledge the sorority. Feeling a pull to Beth, Laura delights in her presence and experiences jealousy and confusion in her attachment to the older woman. They go on dates together to movies and plays, and Beth considers Laura something of an enigma, unsure of how to reach out to her to get to know her well. Laura finds herself especially jealous of Beth's most recent beau, Charlie, who to Beth's surprise, has awoken some new feelings in her. Laura is often so at odds with her unemotional upbringing conflicting with the intensity of the emotions she experiences for Beth that she practices self-injury.Beth begins to realize what effect she has on Laura and teases her good-naturedly to watch what happens to her, but Beth is taken back by Laura's intense attraction and love for her and they begin an affair. This is compounded by her escalating relationship with Charlie, who is frustrated with Beth's vacillating between affection for him and her guilt for hurting Laura.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Woman"title="I Am a Woman">
One year after leaving college, Laura Landon is exhausted by living with her harsh, judgmental father, who perceives that she failed out of school. Laura leaves home in the middle of the night and goes to New York City. She gets a job as a secretary in a medical office and lands an apartment with a roommate — Marcie. Marcie is young and very impulsive, but vivacious and puts Laura at ease. Laura moves into the apartment in Greenwich Village with a vague gnawing excitement in her.Laura and Marcie develop a routine and Laura learns her new job. Marcie is constantly fighting with her ex-husband Burr, who comes around frequently to date Marcie, and in between fights, they sleep together. Finding that Laura tempers Marcie a bit, she insists that she will only date Burr if Laura is with her — which confounds Laura as she recognizes that she is attracted to Marcie and intensely dislikes Burr. Burr brings along a friend, Jack Mann, and they double date one evening. As a joke, he explains, Jack takes them to a gay bar in Greenwich Village and watches their reactions. Jack is an alcoholic, but is good-natured and has a self-deprecating sense of humor. Laura is intrigued by him, and his friends laugh at him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_Shadows"title="Women in the Shadows">
Laura Landon has been living with her lover, a tough and strikingly handsome butch named Beebo Brinker, for two years. Their relationship has deteriorated and both are frustrated, even after a party for their anniversary where Beebo remarks that hardly any couples make it together for as long as they have. The chapters begin with Laura's diary entries asking herself why they all drink and fall into relationships they know will be ruined. Their mutual friend, Jack Mann, watches as Beebo descends into alcoholism and Laura becomes interested in another woman.Tris Robischon, an East Indian dancer, is exotic to Laura, with a fascinating accent and story. Soon Laura begins taking lessons from her. Jack, disheartened once more after Terry, his boyfriend, has left him, begins to try to convince Laura to marry him, to which she responds in consternation since both are gay. Laura returns home from visiting Tris to discover Beebo's dog brutally slaughtered and Beebo bruised and battered from being raped, Beebo claims, by some hoodlums who found out she was a woman. Laura tends to Beebo for weeks after, but knows her heart is not in it.Laura's lessons with Tris turn more intimate as Beebo refuses to go to work and drinks constantly instead. Fueled by boredom and alcohol, Beebo becomes controlling and suspicious of Laura, and when Tris visits unexpectedly, Beebo assaults Tris and later hits Laura in a rage, after which Laura leaves her. Laura goes to Jack, not knowing where else to turn. Jack proposes an atypical marriage to her: they would live together and perhaps have children, but they would never sleep together, and both could have their affairs if they wanted, but quietly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girls_of_Riyadh"title="Girls of Riyadh">
The novel describes the relationship between men and women in Saudi Arabia. "Girls of Riyadh" tells the story of four college-age high class friends in Saudi Arabia, girls looking for love but stymied by a system that allows them only limited freedoms and has very specific expectations and demands. There's little contact between men and women—especially single teens and adults—but modern technology has changed that a bit (leading to young men trying everything to get women to take down their cellphone numbers). The Internet is also a new medium that can't contain women and their thoughts like the old system could, and the anonymous narrator of the novel takes advantage of that: she presents her stories in the form of e-mails that she sends out weekly to any Saudi address she can find. Sex is described in this novel and the various ways it is thought of before and after marriage. Engaging in pre marital sex in the novel has negative consequences for some of the characters who face rejection as a result. The novel also features instances of arranged and failed marriages and discusses the gamble a Saudi woman takes when entering into one. Most of its 50 chapters begin with quotes from Arabic culture and sources. For example, journalists, poets, literature, songs, and the Qur'an. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Wood_(novel)"title="Holy Wood (novel)">
Describing the plot of the novel itself, Manson said: "The whole story, if you take it from the beginning, is parallel to my own, but just told in metaphors and different symbols that I thought other people could draw from. It's about being innocent and naive, much like Adam was in Paradise before they fall from grace. And seeing something like Hollywood, which I used as a metaphor to represent what people think is the perfect world, and it's about wanting — your whole life — to fit into this world that doesn't think you belong, that doesn't like you, that beats you down every step of the way, fighting and fighting and fighting, and finally getting there, everyone around you are the same people who kept you down in the first place. So you automatically hate everyone around you. You resent them for making you become part of this game you don't realize you were buying into. You trade one prison cell for another in some ways. That becomes the revolution, to be idealistic enough that you think you can change the world, and what you find is you can't change anything but yourself."Manson has also stated that there is a character "that's very much a take on Walt Disney," who was a big inspiration in the writing of both the book and its accompanying album. In describing the setting, he compared Holy Wood, the place, to Disney World: "I thought of how interesting it would be if we created an entire city that was an amusement park, and the thing we were being amused by was violence and sex and everything that people really want to see."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Patricide"title="The Patricide">
The novel takes place in 19th century Georgia, when it was occupied by the Russian Empire. It is the love story of Iago, a peasant boy, and Nunu, a beautiful young woman. Nunu's mother died early, and since her father (a member of the coalition army in the Shamil rebellion) is too poor to care for her, she lives with her uncle's family. They disapprove of her match with Iago, as they consider him a mere Plebe. Instead, they are sympathetic towards Grigola, the tyrannical village governor appointed by the Russians. Grigola is married, but in love with the beautiful Nunu. He convinces her family that his brother would like to wed her, though Grigola intends to keep Nunu as his own mistress.To get Nunu, Grigola realizes that he has to get rid of Iago first. Grigola accuses him of stealing state property and gives orders to lock him up in the Ananuri fortress. He then kidnaps and rapes Nunu. Koba, Iago's best friend, witnesses the kidnapping. He fights through Grigola's men to rescue Nunu, but he is too late. Koba swears revenge against Grigola for his shameful behavior.Koba and another friend break Iago out of jail, and they all decide to flee to the Northern Caucasus and hide in Chechnya, since Russian police and Cossacks are looking for them all over Georgia. Despite the fact that many Georgians were fighting on the Russian side, Shamil receives them and offers protection. The author portrays Chechens as free men who fight for their freedom, in contrast to the Georgians, who were kept on a short leash by people like Grigola, unable even to hold town meetings (a tradition since the Middle Ages).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Cream_(novel)"title="Irish Cream (novel)">
The novel continues the story of Dermot Michael Coyne and his wife, Nuala Anne McGrail. They now have three children: Mary Margaret (called "Nelliecoyne"), Michael Dermod (called "The Mick"), and Socra Marie (often referred to, in Dermot's personal narration, as the "Tiny Terrorist" or some variation on that title). They also have two dogs, named Fiona and Maeve.Dermot and Nuala decide to employ Damian Thomas O'Sullivan, the youngest son of John Patrick "Jackie" O'Sullivan, as a caretaker for their dogs. However, upon employing Damian, Dermot and Michael find out that Damian is on probation for allegedly running over a man in a traffic collision, and that Damian is also generally disliked by his entire family. Dermot and Nuala become determined to prove Damian's innocence, much to the contempt of John O'Sullivan, who treats Damian as inferior because Damian chose to be a painter rather than pursue a more serious profession.Throughout the novel, Dermot reads the journal of Reverend Richard James Lonigan, a nineteenth century priest in Donegal. Lonigan dealt with two stressful issues in his life: strained relations between the Irish citizens of Donegal and the British officials who patrolled the area; and a strong attraction to his housekeeper, a widow named Mrs. O'Flynn. In the journals Lonigan wrote that one man in Donegal was killed and another was wounded, both by gunshot. In both cases the assassin is not revealed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tenderness_of_Wolves_(novel)"title="The Tenderness of Wolves (novel)">
Structurally, "The Tenderness of Wolves" is divided into four parts: “Disappearance”, “The Fields of Heaven”, “The Winter Partners”, and “The Sickness of Long Thinking”.The novel opens with the discovery of the murder of a French trapper and trader named Laurent Jammet. Mrs. Ross, the protagonist and first-person narrator of the novel, finds the mysterious trapper in his isolated cabin on the outskirts of settlement called Dove River. Mrs. Ross brings the murder to the attention of the town's magistrate, Andrew Knox, who then calls upon the Hudson's Bay Company to investigate the murder. This brings three men from the Company to Dove River: Mackinley, the leader, Donald Moody, an accountant, and Jacob, a native guide who works for the company and who has named himself Moody's personal protector. Mrs. Ross’ son, Francis, also goes missing on the day that Jammet is found.News of Jammet's unfortunate end travels south as well, bringing it to the attention of Thomas Sturrock, a former journalist and retired searcher whose talents have endeared him to many Indian tribes. His interest in Jammet concerns not so much the man himself but what he possessed. Specifically, Jammet had a small bone tablet with unidentified markings on it in which Sturrock was extremely interested. Sturrock did not have the funds, at the time, to buy it from Jammet, who promised to keep the tablet safe until Sturrock could afford it. Once he hears of the murder, however, Sturrock sets off for Dove River, hoping to discover the fate of the tablet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai_Lung's_Golden_Hours"title="Kai Lung's Golden Hours">
As with other Kai Lung novels, the main plot serves primarily as a vehicle for the presentation of the gem-like, aphorism-laden stories told by the protagonist Kai Lung, an itinerant story-teller of ancient China. In "Kai Lung's Golden Hours" he is brought before the court of the Mandarin Shan Tien on charges of treason by the Mandarin's confidential agent Ming-shu. In a unique defense, Kai Lung recites his beguiling tales to the Mandarin, successfully postponing his conviction time after time until he is finally set free. In the process he attains the love and hand of the maiden Hwa-Mei.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_of_Our_Thursdays_is_Missing"title="One of Our Thursdays is Missing">
Literature detective Thursday Next, who has the ability to travel between the RealWorld and the BookWorld, disappears before stopping a genre war. Her BookWorld counterpart, Thursday Next, receives a call from the BookWorld Policing Agency because an unknown book narrative is falling from above. The written Thursday Next and Sprockett, a mechanical butler, attempt to discover the reason for the falling narrative and find the RealWorld Thursday Next, while The Men in Plaid try to stop them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_a_Woman"title="Journey to a Woman">
Beth Ayers is stifled and bored by her role as California housewife. Her husband, a successful businessman named Charlie, is frustrated with her lack of affection towards their two children and her unwillingness to tell him why she's unhappy after being married for nine years. Beth becomes intrigued by a casual acquaintance named Vega Purvis, a chic modeling instructor who is physically ravaged by various illnesses, alcohol, and cigarettes. Vega's modeling business in decline after a vaguely detailed scandal. Beth knows Vega is a lesbian and connects her sexuality with Beth's own recurring dreams about Laura Landon, a girl with whom she had an affair in college. Vega calls Beth one evening and asks her to come to a hotel, where Vega shows her the scars that cover her body. Vega becomes emotionally dependent upon Beth over the next several months, as Beth becomes more possessed by the idea of finding Laura once more.Beth begins a correspondence with Nina Spicer, the author of several lesbian books she has been reading. After Beth and Charlie separate, Beth returns to Chicago in search of Laura, who she hasn't contacted in nine years. She learns from Laura's father that she left for New York City many years before. There, Beth and Nina team up to look for Laura in Greenwich Village's gay bars and nightclubs. Nina tests Beth to see whether she's really a lesbian or simply curious, while Beth uses Nina to get to Laura. Beth and Nina eventually sleep together. Afterwards, Beth learns that Vega has been committed to a mental hospital. Tired of Nina's games, Beth ventures to the bars to find Laura herself and finds Beebo Brinker, who is astounded to see her after considering Beth a rival for Laura's affections when they were together years ago.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stone_of_Laughter"title="The Stone of Laughter">
The novel opens with Khalil, the protagonist, and Naji, a friend, heading to Khalil's room to talk. They discuss the possibility of Naji moving to Saudi Arabia to live with his sisters. The audience learns that Khalil is romantically attracted to Naji, as he repeatedly secretly admires him. As they progress down the streets of Beirut, the narrative digresses to describe the state of things there. It is revealed that people are fleeing the city in droves and are not coming back.The next chapter begins with Khalil ritualistically cleaning and straightening his room. He always does this after battles in the streets. Some time has passed since the opening conversation, and Naji decided to leave the area. Khalil visits Naji's abandoned apartment, which he was asked to look after. As Khalil cleans up glass, we learn that Naji and his mother claim that they plan to come back. Khalil does not believe them.Naji is supposed to come over for a visit with Khalil, but he doesn't come. After waiting for a long while, Khalil decides to visit another friend, Nayif. Nayif is having a small party with friends that he knows from his job at a newspaper. We learn that Nayif is involved in a political party.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beebo_Brinker"title="Beebo Brinker">
Jack Mann finds Beebo Brinker (real name Betty Jean — she was unable to pronounce it as a child) wandering the streets of New York City's Greenwich Village. Beebo is 18 years old, tall and handsome, vacillating between overconfidence and vulnerability after leaving her family's farm in Wisconsin. Beebo is clearly welling up with a terrible secret that forced her to move east, and guilt that comes with leaving her father alone.Jack helps Beebo get a job delivering pizzas (one of the advantages is that she can wear pants) for Pete, who is a little creepy, and his wife who cooks. Jack also allows Beebo to live with him until she gets on her feet, and allows her the time and space to ask the questions he knows she needs to ask. When she admits her frank admiration for a woman she sees, Jack tells her about lesbians, and she reacts with obvious fascination. He escorts her to several gay bars in the Village where she is astonished and touched by what she recognizes in herself.After being treated cruelly by a vindictive woman playing a game with Pete, Beebo happens upon Paula one evening at her apartment, and it is Paula who verifies Beebo's sexuality. She is roused a couple days later to make a delivery to the apartment of an outrageous movie star, Venus Bogardus, who lives with her lonely teenaged son whom Beebo befriends. Beebo is infatuated and unnerved by Venus, who proposes that Beebo join them to return to California as company for her son — and to bridge the gap between them. Venus, in turn, divulges her past loves with men and women and seduces Beebo.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_on_the_Rhine"title="Fox on the Rhine">
The book begins on July 20, 1944, when Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg successfully bombs the "Wolfsschanze" during a military conference and later executes Operation "Valkyrie" in Berlin. However, his decision to signal Adolf Hitler's death to other conspirators by code buys enough time for SS "Reichsführer" Heinrich Himmler to launch his own countercoup, Operation "Reichssturm". While the Allies work to break out of Normandy through Operation Cobra, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel recovers from the injuries that he suffered during a real-life strafing run three days before the Stauffenberg coup. Himmler appoints him as commander of all German forces in Western Europe, under the watch from the SS, after Field Marshal Günther von Kluge dies in an air attack. He also believes that Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel's mention of Rommel as a possible conspirator holds no weight.Back in Berlin, Himmler takes charge of the German government and sends Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Wehrmacht Colonel Gunther von Reinhardt to negotiate a peace treaty with the Soviet Union. The plan, Operation "Carousel", calls for Germany to shift troops from the Eastern Front to the Western Front and to leave Eastern Europe and Scandinavia to the Soviets. The Nazis also agree to share missile technology with Moscow. The sudden implementation of the treaty angers the Allies, who promptly shift naval forces from the Pacific to the European Theater of Operations. Meanwhile, Rommel organizes a counterattack at Abbeville against the American 19th Armored Division by using units recovered from the Normandy front. He also orders the 19th Army to evacuate southern France ahead of Operation Dragoon and regroup at the Westwall.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wounded_Sky"title="The Wounded Sky">
The "Enterprise", equipped with a radical new "inversion drive" which allows the ship to bend spacetime and transit immense distances instantly, is sent on a mission to the Magellanic Clouds just outside the Milky Way, in order to place navigation beacons for future extra-galactic voyages using the new technology.The inversion drive is a product of the "creative physics" practiced by the natives of the Hamal star system, a race of crystalline spider-like beings. The chief designer of the drive is aboard, advising Captain Kirk, as the "Enterprise" makes its first "jump", after outmaneuvering a Klingon squadron which was sent to capture the new technology. Unknown to anyone on the starship, however, the use of the drive destabilizes spacetime itself on a fundamental level, creating a rift or tear through which another, external universe penetrates and begins to mix with the "Enterprise"s own, with rapidly spreading, potentially fatal consequences for all life everywhere.The denouement of the novel follows as Captain Kirk and the "Enterprise" crew, experiencing bizarre, dream-like experiences of other times and worlds during the use of the drive, realize that something is dreadfully amiss. Arriving near the rift and observing the destruction it inflicts on nearby star systems, they discover that the price for traveling distances that would take centuries to cover with warp drive may be the loss of their own universe. Deliberately using the drive one, final time, they cross the "boundary" between external "reality" and their own collective inner consciousness, where they must together draw on mental, emotional and spiritual strengths to heal the wound that they have caused.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Match_(novel)"title="Perfect Match (novel)">
The story begins with a prologue, in which an unnamed female character enters a courtroom and inexplicably shoots and kills the defendant after shooting him four times as he approaches his defense attorney. The shooter is revealed to be the York County, Maine, Assistant District Attorney, Nina Frost, and the defendant is Father Szyszynski. At the time of the trial (and shooting), Nina believed that Father Szyszynski had sexually abused her five-year-old son, Nathaniel, who confides via verbal accusation that Father "Glen" Szyszynski molested him. Further, laboratory tests confirmed that Father Szyszynski's bodily fluids were found in the child's underpants. It is later revealed that Nina had killed the wrong man, and a visiting priest named Father Gwynne, not Father Glen, had molested Nathaniel. However, Fathers Gwynne and Szyszynski shared the same DNA because Father Szyszynski had a bone marrow transplant from Father Gwynne (being that they were half brothers), leading to the belief that the semen on Nathaniel's underpants belonged to Szyszynski. Although this fact was entered into evidence at Nina's own murder trial, after which the jury could not reach a verdict, the judge ultimately ruled that Nina's reasons were justified. As such, Nina was found not guilty of murder. However, under Maine jurisprudence, Nina was found guilty of manslaughter because the judge believed she was under the influence of a reasonable fear or anger brought about by reasonable provocation. Nina was sentenced to 20 years in prison, but this sentence was suspended.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Contortionist's_Handbook"title="The Contortionist's Handbook">
John Dolan Vincent is a talented young forger with a proclivity for mathematics and drug addiction. In the face of his impending institutionalization, he continually reinvents himself to escape the legal and mental health authorities and to save himself from a life of incarceration. But running turns out to be costly. Vincent's clients in the L.A. underworld lose patience, the hospital evaluator may not be fooled by his story, and the only person in as much danger as himself is the woman who knows his real name.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dermaphoria"title="Dermaphoria">
Eric Ashworth awakens in jail, unable to remember how he got there or why. All he does remember is a woman's name: Desiree.Bailed out and holed up in a low rent motel, Eric finds the solution to his amnesia in a strange new hallucinogen. By synthesizing the sense of touch, the drug produces a disjointed series of sensations that slowly allow Eric to remember his former life as a clandestine chemist. With steadily increasing doses, Eric reassembles his past at the expense of his grip on the present, and his distinction between truth and fantasy crumbles as his paranoia grows in tandem with his tolerance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_Theory"title="Demon Theory">
On Halloween night, following an unnerving phone call from his diabetic mother, Hale and six of his med school classmates return to the house where his sister disappeared years ago. While there is no sign of his mother, something is waiting for them there, and has been waiting a long time. Written as a literary film treatment littered with footnotes and experimental nuances, Demon Theory is even parts camp and terror, combining glib dialogue, fascinating pop culture references, and an intricate subtext as it pursues the events of a haunting movie trilogy too real to dismiss. There are books about movies and movies about books, and then there’s Demon Theory – a refreshing and occasionally shocking addition to the increasingly popular “intelligent horror” genre.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fast_Red_Road"title="The Fast Red Road">
"The Fast Red Road—A Plainsong" is a gleeful, two-fisted plundering of the myth and pop- culture surrounding the American Indian. It is a novel fueled on pot fumes and blues, a surreal pseudo-Western, in which imitation is the sincerest form of subversion. Indians, cowboys, and outlaws are as changeable as their outfits; horses are traded for Trans-Ams, and men are as likely to strike poses from Gunsmoke as they are from Custer’s last stand. Pidgin, the half-blood protagonist, inhabits a world of illusion—of aliens, ghosts, telekinesis, and water-pistol violence, where TV and porn offer redemption and the Indian always gets it in the end. His attempts to reconcile his father's death with five hundred years of colonial myth-making lead him to criss-cross a wasted New Mexico, returning compulsively to his hometown of Clovis, the site of his father’s burial.Accompanied by car thief Charlie Ward, he evades the cops in a top-down drag race, tearing through barriers “Dukestyle.” The land they travel seems bent with fever—post-apocalyptic —as though the end has arrived and no one noticed. Its occupants hawk bodies and pastel bomb shelters, wandering a bleak hallucination of strip joints, strip malls, and all-you-can-eat-beef-fed-beef stalls. They speak a dialect of disposable nicknames and truncated punch lines—slang with an expiration date. Pidgin strays through bars and junkyards, rodeos, and carnivals, encountering the remnants of the Goliard tribe. There’s the mysterious Mexican Paiute, Uncle Birdfinger, checkout-girl Stiya 6—the reincarnation of Pidgin’s mother—and media-queen Psychic Sally, who predicts the group’s demise. Each plays a part in the search, eventually placing Pidgin in a position to rewrite history.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_Me,_Judas"title="Kiss Me, Judas">
During his first night out of a mental institution after suffering a nervous breakdown, Phineas Poe is picked up by a prostitute named Jude. She drugs him and removes his kidney and leaves him in a hotel bathtub full of ice with a note on the counter that reads, "If you want to live, call 9-1-1." Phineas, an ex-police officer who had recently been searching for information against the Denver Police Department's Internal Affairs Unit, later finds out that his kidney was actually replaced by a bag of heroin. While searching for his missing kidney, Phineas finds love in his attacker, while he evades the angry Denver police and tries to unlock the secrets behind his wife's recent death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary,_called_Magdalene"title="Mary, called Magdalene">
As a woman in the Bible, Mary Magdalene's story is not recounted as fully as that of some of the males associated with Jesus. The novel presents a new view of Mary Magdalene – a female apostle who was the first of Jesus' followers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Knight"title="Summer Knight">
Mab, the Winter Queen of the Sidhe, has purchased Dresden's debt from his fairy godmother, Leanansidhe. She tells Dresden he can pay off his debt by doing three favors. The first favor is for him to find the murderer of the Summer Knight Ronald Reuel and recover his stolen mantle. Dresden refuses her request, but is forced by the White Council to accept the role of her Emissary as his Trial, else be stripped of his title of wizard and handed over to the Red Court vampires as a peace offering.Dresden is visited by Elaine, his former lover, now the Emissary of the Summer Court, indebted to Aurora, the Summer Lady. Dresden goes to Reuel's funeral, looking for a group of teenage half-human/half-Fae changelings who were Reuel's friends, but they flee and attack, believing him to be in service to Winter. An interview with the sadistic Winter Lady, Maeve, convinces him that she did not kill the Summer Knight.The changelings ask Dresden to find their friend Lily, and he agrees. He discovers a gravely wounded Elaine and takes her to the Summer Lady. Aurora heals Elaine, but is not forthcoming with any details on Reuel's murder or Lily's disappearance. She explains that the death of the Summer Knight and the theft of his mantle of power shifted the power balance in favor of Winter, driving the Summer Court to attack Winter at Midsummer before their power fades.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_Hunt"title="The Mother Hunt">
A baby is left in a young widow's vestibule, along with a note implying that her late husband is the baby's father. The widow hires Nero Wolfe to identify and locate the baby's birth mother.Throughout the Wolfe "oeuvre", Archie's main romantic interest is Lily Rowan, a Manhattan socialite and heiress who, after an incident in a bull pasture, nicknames Archie "Escamillo." But Stout portrays their relationship as two close friends who share an intimacy of long standing, rather than one of exclusivity. Stout makes it clear that Archie has other romances. One with Phoebe Gunther, in "The Silent Speaker", has an exceptionally powerful spark. In "The Mother Hunt", Stout for the first time makes unambiguous an affair between Archie and another major character.In a rare physical outburst, Wolfe becomes so angry and frustrated at one point that he throws his suit jacket at Archie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sea_So_Far"title="A Sea So Far">
After the devastating San Francisco earthquake of 1906, two girls' lives become connected. Kate Keely is the orphaned daughter of a newspaper reporter father and an Irish immigrant mother, living close to poverty with an aunt until their home was destroyed by the earthquake. They move to a boardinghouse the aunt purchases with a friend, and there Kate learns of an opportunity to go to work as the companion to Jolie Logan. Jolie's father is a wealthy physician and her mother died in the earthquake. Suffering from a history of scarlet fever and the loss of her mother, Jolie is sickly and depressed and her father thinks a companion would lift her spirits and that together they could travel. Kate sees this position as an easy source of income and, more importantly, a chance to visit her mother's fabled Ireland. Together the girls do travel across country and then to Ireland, and become more than friends, and learn more of life than they expected.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Scourge_of_Screamers"title="A Scourge of Screamers">
The story revolves around a spaceflight engineer working for "SecBu", the former United Nations Security Bureau which is the only remaining government after a nuclear exchange eliminated all national governments two years before. The exchange is said to have been caused by a Russian who "went Screamie" while at the controls of the missiles on a nuclear submarine. The Screamies is a new disease afflicting people at random around the world. Victims collapse, screaming at visions only they can see.Strange people plotting against SecBu are revealed to be aliens. SecBu begins a campaign blaming the Screamies on the aliens. The truth however, is much more complex. Earth is emerging into a field of radiation which allows the mind to perceive the world in incredible detail at levels from the microscopic upward. The effect is like that of having functioning eyes, but being raised in darkness until suddenly emerging into daylight (a theme explored also in Galouye's first novel, "Dark Universe").It eventually becomes clear that SecBu is run by people who conquered the Screamies, and are bent on using their enhanced perceptions to gain and hold power. The protagonist is tempted by the power brokers at SecBu, who need his skills, while a close friend sides with the aliens who are attempting to help mankind learn to live with the new perception.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_(novel)"title="Laura (novel)">
Like Wilkie Collins' novel "The Woman in White" (1859), "Laura" is narrated in the first person by several alternating characters. These individual stories all revolve around the apparent murder of the title character, a successful New York advertiser killed in the doorway of her apartment with a shotgun blast that obliterated her face.Detective Mark McPherson, assigned to the case, begins investigating the two men who were closest to Laura: her former lover, a narcissistic middle-aged writer named Waldo Lydecker, and her fiance, the philandering Shelby Carpenter. As he learns more about Laura, Mark – not the most sentimental of men – begins to fall in love with her memory. When Laura turns out to be very much alive, however, she becomes the prime suspect.The novel has some autobiographical elements; Caspary, like Laura, was an independent woman who earned her living as an advertiser and who struggled to balance career and romance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burndive"title="Burndive">
Ryan Azarcon lives in a fishbowl. He is the son of the infamous Captain Cairo Azarcon, of the deep space carrier ship "Macedon" and Songlian Lau, Austro Station's head of publicity. Because of his combination of good looks and influential parents, Ryan is constantly watched by the media.After going to college for three years on earth and witnessing a horrifying terrorist attack related to the war between Earthhub and the striviiric-na in deep space, Ryan develops post traumatic stress disorder, drops out of school and returns to Austro, where he quickly begins doing drugs.However, when Captain Azarcon destroys the pirate ship "Genghis Khan" and begins to make peace with the striviiric-na, Ryan finds himself in danger. After a failed assassination attempt in a club on New Years Day which leaves many people dead or injured, Ryan finds himself trapped in his home for his own safety- at which point his father comes for him, taking him aboard his ship.Ryan is immediately caught in the middle of the war, the peace, and the effects thereof. The truth about his father's mysterious past, as a protégé of the pirate captain of the "Genghis Khan", Vincenzo Falcone emerges.Earthhub factions, particularly the Family of Humanity, are against the peace. This extremist group eventually has Ryan's mother assassinated. The "Macedon" returns to Austro for her funeral, where another assassination attempt nearly kills Ryan. Captain Azarcon subjects Austro to martial law illegally to save him, and is forced to flee to the striviiric-na section of space.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cagebird_(novel)"title="Cagebird (novel)">
The novel begins with Yuri Terisov, the jaded former protégé of the infamous dead pirate, Captain Vincenzo Falcone, and the Captain of the pirate ship "Kublai Khan" in prison on earth, where his is approached by Black Ops agent Andreas Lukacs. Lukacs offers to free Yuri from prison in exchange for his help in infiltrating the pirate network, which Yuri agrees to in exchange for the protection of his cellmate Stefano Finch.Yuri fakes his own death and his is smuggled out of prison with Finch to Pax Terra, the station orbiting above the earth, where he is picked up by his ship. He finds, however, that his ship has been taken over by his Lieutenant Taja Roshan and is first forced to kill her taking back his ship.Once that is done, he contacts Falcone's former Lieutenant, Caligtiera, about the Black Op's offer, who proposes that together they destroy the Earthhub Military Carrier "Archangel". Yuri finds that he cannot bring himself to do this and informs the "Macedon" of his plans. He destroys his ship and kills Lukacs, who had intended to use the pirate to gain power, then flees to the "Macedon" whose crew includes two of Falcone's other protégés.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goose_Girl_(novel)"title="The Goose Girl (novel)">
When crown princess Anidori-Kiladra Talianna Isilee was born, she did not open her eyes until her aunt held her. The woman became her nursemaid and constant companion, nicknaming her Ani and telling her stories about three gifts people have: people-speaking, animal-speaking, and nature-speaking. The aunt has the second ability, and teaches Ani to speak with birds, mainly swans. Ani grows to be more comfortable at the pond than in the palace. When her aunt leaves, Ani is forced to abandon her unique talent. At age sixteen, she devotes herself to preparing to be the next Queen of Kildenree, but finds solace in communicating with her horse, Falada. After her father dies, Ani's mother tells her that, instead of becoming queen, she is to travel to the kingdom of Bayern and marry their crown prince. During the journey, half of the royal guards mutiny and attempt to kill the princess and replace her with Selia, Ani's lady-in-waiting; but Ani flees, leaving behind Falada.After days of walking in the forest and recovering from near starvation, Ani assumes the alias of "Isi," and travels into the capital of Bayern. She soon discovers that Selia has assumed the role of princess. Ani finds a job tending the king's geese, and lives among other animal workers to whom she tells stories. After a few hiccups, she learns to use her animal-speaking skills to communicate with the geese. In this time, she slowly discovers her nature-speaking ability: understanding and eventually manipulating wind. Ani also befriends a royal guard named Geric, and soon they begin to develop romantic feelings for each other. One day, Ani's best friend, Enna, discovers her secret identity and swears to help her reclaim the throne when the time comes. Geric tells Ani that the execution of Falada has been planned; she tries to rescue him, but is too late. He later sends her a letter saying he will be unable to see her anymore. Ani continues life as the goose girl, and uses her animal-speaking and wind-speaking abilities to save her geese from thieves. She then learns that Selia has spread a rumor that Kildenree is planning to attack Bayern. Ungolad, Selia's most loyal guard, hunts Ani down and stabs her in the back. She narrowly escapes and flees to the forest, where she heals. It is here that she discovers one of her loyal guards, Talone, has survived, and he accompanies her back to the kingdom. When she returns, Enna had told the other animal workers Ani's secret, and they rally behind her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enna_Burning"title="Enna Burning">
Enna has returned to the forest to live with her elder brother, Leifer. After finding a vellum scroll, Leifer learns the secret of 'fire-speaking', the ability to control the element of fire. However, he is unable to control the power when he is enraged, frightening Enna. When the neighboring country of Tira invades Bayern, and Enna and her friends - Razo, Finn, and Isi (Princess of Bayern) - travel to the battlefront, and Leifer joins them. In their first battle, he uses his power to set fire to enemy troops and becomes consumed by his power, incinerating himself from the inside. Enna finds Leifer's body black and charred, but the vellum untouched. She disregards warnings from Isi about the potential dangers of fire-speaking and learns it. Meanwhile, her friendship with Finn becomes strained by their potential romantic feelings for each other. Frustrated and confused, she rides away from camp one night and accidentally encounters Tiran soldiers. She lights a fire to escape.Bayern decides to put on a mock battle between a Tiran prisoner and one of their own soldiers to predict the outcome of the war. Finn volunteers, but comes close to death during the fight until he is saved by Enna, who burns the hilt of the prisoner's sword. Because of her interference, Finn succeeds; and Enna takes this as a sign that Bayern will fall unless she uses her powers to end the war. She makes a series of rules for herself which she hopes will allow her to fight in the war without meeting the same fate as her brother. Next, she tells Razo and Finn about her power and asks them to accompany her on a series of raids and keep her in check. Enna quickly finds she is unable to control her use of fire; she even tries to burn Isi when confronted by her. Feeling the call of the fire, she runs away to an enemy village and is captured. There, Captain Sileph of Tira uses herbs to drug Enna so that she can't use her power of fire to escape. He tries to brainwash her into teaching him the secret of fire and burning for Tira. Razo and Finn try to rescue her, but are captured during their attempt. Enna gradually gives in to Sileph's persuasive speeches, eventually falling in love with him; but after overhearing him speak to another Tiran, Enna learns that Sileph has been manipulating her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austenland"title="Austenland">
"Austenland" tells the story of 32-year-old Jane Hayes, an average New York woman who secretly has an unhealthy obsession with Mr. Darcy from the BBC adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice". Jane accidentally reveals her secret to her great aunt Carolyn, who dies shortly after their conversation. In her will, Carolyn leaves Jane a trip to a Jane Austen–themed getaway destination. She decides to go, planning to give up dating for good afterwards. Once Jane arrives at Pembrook Park in the English countryside, she is bombarded with the complex rules of Regency era society. The proprietress, Mrs. Wattlesbrook, is eager to preserve these rules at Pembrook Park and makes it clear that Jane–who didn't pay for the trip herself–is not their usual type of customer. She becomes "Miss Jane Erstwhile" and meets Aunt Saffronia and Lord Templeton, her pretend aunt and uncle, respectively. "Miss Charming" and two gentlemen actors, Colonel Andrews and Mr. Nobley, are the other guests in the house. Andrews is jolly and flirtatious, while Nobley is brooding and arrogant. Jane also meets Theodore, the gardener, whose real name is Martin Jasper. He breaks Mrs. Wattlesbrook's rules to speak to her. As the days go by, Jane doubts her ability to keep up the act and begins to feel like an outsider. She finds Martin in the servant's quarters and they begin a new romance, but he cuts her off after worrying his involvement with her will cost him his job.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Molly_of_Scotland_Yard"title="Lady Molly of Scotland Yard">
The book contains all twelve Lady Molly adventures and is narrated by Lady Molly's assistant Mary Granard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Academy"title="Princess Academy">
Miri is a fourteen-year-old girl from Mount Eskel, an isolated territory of Danland, who has never been allowed to work with the rest of the villagers in the quarry that keeps the community alive. The quarry workers cut linder (a fictional type of expensive stone), which they sell to the lowlander traders for food and other necessities. Because her father refuses to allow her to work in the quarry, she feels like an outcast in the community and cut off from the culture focused around a shared working life. However, Miri helps by bargaining with the traders. She is very close to her father and her sister, Marda, as well as a boy named Peder, for whom she harbors feelings.One day, a messenger from the king unexpectedly arrives in the village and announces that the nation's priests have determined that, despite the lack of education provided for the villagers and the prejudice that exists between the mountain villagers and the lowlanders, the crown prince's future bride will come from Mount Eskel. A "princess academy" is established nearby to train the potential princesses, with compulsory attendance for every girl age twelve to eighteen. At the end of the year, the prince will meet the girls and choose his princess from among them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Secrets"title="River Secrets">
The story begins as the main character, Razo, watches a meeting. The king and queen of Bayern speak with a Tiran ambassador and agree they should exchange ambassadors to promote peace between the two countries. After the reception, Razo is chosen among other soldiers from Bayern's Own to join the ambassador in Ingridan, the Capital of Tira. Razo experiences self-doubt and believes their captain only chose him because of his participation in the war against Tira. In winter, the ambassador, Lady Megina, and twenty of Bayern's Own leave for Tira. On the way, Razo finds a burned body hidden in the trees near a river. After talking with Captain Talone, they guess Enna might be burning again—either that, or the burner might be from Tira, because the body was placed where it could be easily seen by the Tiran escort group led by Captain Ledel. When the party arrives at Ingridan, they are taken to Thousand Year's Palace, where they are introduced to Lord Belvan and Lady Dasha, their host and hostess.Razo finds more burned bodies and still does not know who the burner is. After being beat up by one of Ledel's soldiers, Tumas, he goes to Talone requesting to be sent home. Talone rejects his plea, and asks him a series of questions. After Razo answers them all correctly, Talone tells Razo he has excellent observation skills, and gives him the job of spying to find the murderer. Razo proceeds to watch and spy on everyone. A week passes, and the Tiran party challenges Bayern's Own to a mock sword fight. Razo is humiliated with defeat, and the Tiran soldiers mock him. Then Finn speaks up and tells them to challenge Razo with a long-ranged weapon, his sling to their spears. Razo hits every target and discovers that he is the best sling Bayern had.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_(novel)"title="The Fog (novel)">
John Holman is a worker for the Department of the Environment investigating a Ministry of Defence base in a small rural village. An unexpected earthquake swallows his car releasing a fog that had been trapped underground for many years. An insane Holman is pulled up from the crack, a product of the deadly fog.Soon the fog shifts and travels as though it has a mind of its own, turning those unfortunate enough to come across it into homicidal/suicidal maniacs who kill without remorse, and often worse. Respectable figures including teachers and priests engage in crimes ranging from public urination to paedophilia. A Boeing 747 pilot is also driven insane and crashes the aircraft into the Post Office Tower (now BT Tower) in London.Soon a bigger problem is discovered – the fog is multiplying in size and nothing seems to be able to stop it. Entire villages and cities are in danger and the only chance left is to use the treated and immunized John Holman to take on the fog from the inside where who knows what awaits him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tangled_Skein"title="The Tangled Skein">
In "The Tangled Skein", Queen Mary is characterized as a loving woman with a strong sense of justice.The "tangled skein" arises from Mary's love for the fictional character Robert d’Esclade, fifth Duke of Wessex, said in this book to be the people's choice as King Consort. Wessex is chivalrous and charming, but semi-betrothed to Lady Ursula Glynde, whom he has not seen since her infancy. Wessex is repelled by the idea of having his wife thrust upon him and purposely avoids Lady Ursula. Unknown to Wessex, the Queen jealously guards him against Ursula, who is extremely beautiful.As soon as she realizes the Queen is keeping her away from Wessex, Ursula is angered. She believes she loves Wessex, for his nobility and goodness, and she is invested heavily in the betrothal. On her father's deathbed, Ursula promised to go into a convent if she did not marry Wessex. Although Ursula does not want to lose her independence by marrying, she seeks to frustrate the Queen's plans and make Wessex notice her; however, the arrival of Cardinal de Moreno, and his henchman Don Mignel, Marquis de Saurez, shifts the scene.The Cardinal is in England to negotiate the marriage between Philip II of Spain and Mary. To end the Queen's love for Wessex, the Cardinal tries to marry Wessex and Lady Ursula. But when the Queen discovers the ruse, she declares that his Eminence should leave England immediately; she will not marry Philip. Then the Cardinal has to set to work to part the lovers, a far more difficult and intricate business than bringing them together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_a_Thousand_Days"title="Book of a Thousand Days">
Dashti, a mucker from steppes of the Eight Realms, begins a diary as she looks for a job after her mother dies of illness. Eventually, she finds and accepts a position as the new maid of Lady Saren, the youngest child of the lord of Titor's Garden. Saren has defied her father's declaration that she will marry Lord Khasar of Thoughts of Under and revealed that she is engaged to the young Khan Tegus of Song for Evela. To tame his daughter, Saren's father shuts her and Dashti, the only maid willing to accompany Saren, in a tower far away from his city and surrounded by guards. He claims he will only release them after seven years, or if Saren will relent and marry Khasar.While isolated from the rest of the world, Dashti realizes the fragility of Saren's mind and heart and does her best to soothe Saren through stories and songs. When Khan Tegus visits them, Saren unexpectedly refuses to speak with him and orders Dashti to impersonate her. As Tegus cannot see into the tower, Dashti reluctantly agrees and a friendship develops between them when he returns for several more visits, including one where he gives Saren a cat whom Dashti names "My Lord." However, Lord Khasar also arrives at the tower and begins harassing them, performing cruel acts to torture and upset them. The guards around the tower fail to respond to the girls' cries and My Lord disappears from the tower during a night when they hear the howls of a wolf, causing the rats to infest the tower. Khasar's appearances cause Saren to become withdrawn from deep-seated fear, in spite of Dashti's efforts. As their food storages dwindle, Dashti finds a weakened portion of the tower where the rats have entered and breaks through the wall to freedom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bride_of_the_Plains"title="A Bride of the Plains">
The story is set in Hungary and the scene is laid in a village close to the Maros. The sharp, cracked sound of the Elevation bell breaks the silence of the summer morning. The good Pater Bonifacius is saying Mass: he, at any rate, is astir and busy with his day’s work and obligations. Surely it is strange that at so late an hour in mid-September, with the maize waiting to be gathered in, the population of Marosfalva should be still absent from the fields! Hej ! But, stranger, what would you ? Such a day is-this Fourteenth of September. What ? You did not know it? The Fourteenth of September, the ugliest, blackest, most God forsaken day in the whole year! What kind of a stranger are you if you do not know that?On this hideous day all the finest lads in the village are taken away to be made into soldiers by the abominable Government? Three years! Why, the lad is a mere child when he goes-one-and-twenty on his last birthday, bless him! still wanting a mother’s care of his stomach, and a father’s heavy stick across his back from time to time to keep him from too much love-making.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trading_Up_(novel)"title="Trading Up (novel)">
Janey Wilcox's flagging career was revived when, in the closing pages of "Four Blondes", she accepted a contract with Victoria's Secret. "Trading Up" stars a slightly older and wiser Janey Wilcox, one who is determined to make it to the top.Wilcox begins the novel as an older but still quite popular lingerie and runway model whose aspirations now include breaking into show business. Fortunately, the New York social scene is dominated by powerful media mogul/starlet couples. Spending a summer in the Hamptons, Janey Wilcox befriends Mimi Kilroy, wife of media mogul George Paxton. Kilroy introduces her new model friend to Selden Rose, an up-and-coming CEO of cable television network MovieTime. At first Janey is uninterested in Selden and is instead enamored with Zizi, a young Argentinian polo player with model looks and the countenance of a member of the European elite. Only in an attempt to attract Zizi does she begin dating Selden.Janey and Selden are quickly married, while Zizi begins an affair with Mimi.Janey continually struggles with her torrid past as a consummate seducer of powerful men and is known in many circles as a semi-prostitute. Determined to become a movie producer, Janey attempts to maneuver her way to the top of the New York social scene by any means necessary, including using her younger sister and her brother-in-law, a popular rock star, for her own ends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stone_Monkey"title="The Stone Monkey">
As the US Coast Guard moves to intercept a ship off the coast of New York, which had departed from St Petersburg carrying around 30 Chinese illegal immigrants, the leader of the ship, a notorious human smuggler and hitman named Ghost, decides to ignite a bomb, causing the ship to sink, as he escapes himself by means of a life-raft. A group of immigrants escape on a second life-raft, some of whom fall over within meters from the shore. One of them drowns, two are pursued and killed by Ghost, and a shot is fired by Ghost against another. The remaining ten, namely, the Chang and Wu families, who were dissidents and supporters of the 1989 riots in China, run into Chinatown of New York using a stolen van. Ghost meets with a local accomplice, but he drives off by himself, abandoning Ghost. Amelia Sachs, upon racing to the scene, finds a man with a gun-shot wound clinging to the rocks near the shore, and helps to rescue him. The man claims to be Dr John Sung, a well-known dissident and supporter of democracy. After being taken to the hospital, he requests asylum and is easily granted release pending the hearing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Jolly_Roger"title="Under the Jolly Roger">
After leaving Lawson Peabody, a boarding school in Boston, Jacky joins the whaling ship, the "Pequod", as a companion to the Captain's wife, a teacher for the Captain's son, and as the cook's helper. Jacky leaves the ship when it arrives in London and searches for Jaimy. She goes to Jaimy's house on Nine Brattle Lane, where Jaimy's mother threw Jacky out and told her Jaimy was no longer in love with her. She is confused until the family maid, named Hattie, tells her not to believe her and that Jaimy will be at the races at Epsom Downs. Jacky sets off to find him. In the meantime, Jacky visits her old gangs kip under the Blackfriar's bridge. She doesn't recognize any of the kids and they tell her what happened to the other members of the gang. They tell her a former member, Judy was hired to be a helper to an older woman, and despite her promises, has not come back to help the gang. Thinking that was odd, Jacky goes to visit her and discovers Judy is being forced to work at a wash house for a terrible man. Jacky saves Judy. Jacky takes Judy in as her maid and buys her all new clothes. Jacky dresses as a jock in order to get into a racetrack, where Jaimy is. She sees Jaimy with his cousin Emily and mistakenly thinks that Jaimy has replaced her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_May_Care_(Faulks_novel)"title="Devil May Care (Faulks novel)">
The story is set in 1967. Bond is instructed by his superior, M, to investigate a man named Dr Julius Gorner, and his bodyguard, Chagrin. Bond is warned that his performance will be monitored and that a new 00 agent is waiting in the wings if his actions go awry.Bond flies to Imperial Iran (Persia) to investigate. Gorner owns factories and produces legitimate pharmaceuticals; however, MI6 suspects he has other motives. During Bond's investigation he identifies Gorner due to a deformity of his hand, and establishes Gorner's complicity in a scheme to not only flood Europe with cheap drugs but also to launch a two-pronged terrorist attack on the Soviet Union, whose retaliation will subsequently devastate the UK. The attack is to be made using a stolen British airliner, earlier hijacked over Iraqi airspace, and an ekranoplan. Bond is assisted in his investigation by Scarlett Papava (whose twin sister Poppy is under Gorner's emotional spell), Darius Alizadeh (the local head of station), JD Silver (an in-situ agent), and Felix Leiter.Bond is eventually captured by Gorner in the heroin plant, who explains that Bond is to be used as bait during a drugs delivery across the Afghan desert, and should he survive an expected ambush, is to fly the captured airliner into the Russian heartland. Bond would be identified as British upon its destruction, increasing the evidence against the British Government. Bond survives the predicted Afghan attack and plots an escape attempt, which sees Scarlett get away due to Bond surrendering himself as a diversion. In the morning he is taken aboard the aeroplane. Before the airliner can bomb the Soviets, with the aid of the airliner's pilot and Scarlett (who had been hiding on board), Bond regains control of the aeroplane and crashes it into a mountainside after parachuting to safety.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_of_Fire"title="Blade of Fire">
"Blade of Fire" takes place 20 years after the first novel. The story follows Thirrin's and Oskan's (now married) new efforts to repel the imposing threat of Imperial invasion, yet again at the hands of Scipio Bellorum and his bloodthirsty sons, Octavius and Sulla.But this time, they have the help of their five children: Cressida, the Crown Princess and military extraordinaire; Eodred and Cerdic, the twin warrior princes; Charlemagne (Sharley), stricken with polio at a young age, and much to his chagrin, cannot be a warrior; and finally Medea, the dark daughter and the only inheritor to her father's gift.A burning hatred for Charlemagne causes Medea to turn against her family. Early on in the book Oskan has a prophecy about Sharley. About a week or two later Sharley is sent off into exile to be Prince Regent to the exiles. Maggie, his tutor, goes with him. He is sent to the Southern Continent where he makes some unexpected allies and friends. This includes the Desert People (he befriends the Sultan's son) and the Lusu people of Arifica.Maggie falls ill on the journey to the Sultan's palace and is sent to stay in oasis where he recovers. On the journey to Lusuland, an unexpected storm comes but the spirits of the desert (the blessed women) save them from harm. On the sea voyage back to Icemark the fleet of Lusu people and the desert people are attacked by the Empire's biggest allies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_a_Kingdom"title="Fall of a Kingdom">
When the Hrum army arrive in the country of Farsala, a war is started, and just three people can stop it.Kavi is a peasant peddler selling bronze goods plated in gold and he holds a grudge against the deghans. When he was a young apprentice to a man in the city of Mazad, a deghan came in looking for a remarkable sword and is willing to pay an astronomical price for it, but does not have the money with him. Kavi grabs for the sword, but the deghan pulls and scars his right hand. A year later, the deghan returns for the swords pay, and throws in a bonus amount "For his troubles". The cut cripples him with an injury that still pains him years later. While Kavi is running from a city where he is found to be selling false gold items, he is caught up in High Commander Merahb's plan. He is to visit the cottage where Soraya is staying to supply her with the goods and news that a deghass is accustomed to, and he is to do it like an obedient peasant should. But while he is on his usual rounds of the northern mining towns selling second rate iron goods to the country folk, he is captured by Hrum scouts who have infiltrated Farsala unknown. To save his own life Kavi agrees to turn traitor to Farsala and spy for the Hrum. He also believes that the Hrum will be better rulers of Farsala than the deghans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Children_of_Schewenborn"title="The Last Children of Schewenborn">
The plot is set within the framework of a Cold War scenario very similar to the geopolitical situation at the time of writing. It is told from the perspective of Roland, a 12-year-old boy from Bonames (a district of Frankfurt), who travels with his parents and sisters to visit his grandparents in Schewenborn.During their journey, they are surprised by a nuclear attack. As emergency response systems fail to activate and no humanitarian aid reaches them, the survivors have to assume that the whole of Germany, or even the entire civilized world, may have been destroyed. During the course of the next few months, it becomes clear that Frankfurt, Berlin and major German cities, as well as the adjacent Netherlands and Czechoslovakia were also targeted, given the arrival of of seriously burnt and radiation-scarred refugees from those areas. The question of whether this is actually the truth is only resolved by the end of the novel.The family finds refuge in the house of the grandparents, who were in Fulda at the time of the nuclear explosion and presumably died there. Shortly afterwards, Roland's mother takes in a young brother and sister who had been made orphans by the bombs.The later chapters of the story describe the weeks, months and years after the nuclear attack, and are almost exclusively set in Schewenborn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_Lemons"title="Bitter Lemons">
The book is alternately comic and serious, charting Durrell's experiences on Cyprus and the people he met and befriended, as well as charting the progress of the Cypriot "Enosis" (union with Greece and freedom from British rule) movement, which plunged the island into chaos and violence. Comic moments include Durrell's successful house-buying adventure, and the visits of his mother and brother, naturalist Gerald Durrell. Durrell settled in the village of Bellapais (deliberately spelt "Bellapaix" by Durrell to evoke the old name Paix), which is now part of the Turkish-controlled north.During his stay, Durrell worked first as an English teacher at the Pancyprian Gymnasium, where several of his female students reportedly fell in love with him:Invited to write an essay on her favourite historical character, [Electra] never failed to delight me with something like this: 'I have no historical character but in the real life there is one I love. He is writer. I dote him and he dotes me. How pleasure is the moment when I see him came at the door. My glad is very big.'Eventually, however, "the vagaries of fortune and the demons of ill-luck dragged Cyprus into the stock-market of world affairs" and as Greek Cypriot armed groups emerged demanding an end to British rule in Cyprus. Inter communal violence between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots ensued, with Greek Cypriot nationalists wanting union with Greece. Durrell accepted a job as press advisor to the British governor. Durrell was not enamoured with the Greek Cypriot militants, however, and felt that they were dragging the island to a "feast of unreason" and that "embedded so deeply in the medieval compost of religious hatreds, the villagers floundered in the muddy stream of undifferentiated hate like drowning men." The account ends with him fleeing the island without saying goodbye to his friends, approaching the "heavily guarded airport" by taxi in conversation with the driver who tells him "Dighenis, though he fights the British, really loves them. But he will have to go on killing them—with regret, even with affection."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sheaf_of_Bluebells"title="A Sheaf of Bluebells">
Many French aristocrats exiled during the revolution have been presenting petitions to enable them to return to France under the conditional amnesty granted to them by the newly crowned Emperor.Amongst them are a petition signed by Mme.la Marquise de Mortain and her son, Laurent (aged twenty-one years), and one signed by M. le Comte de Courson for himself and his daughter, Fernande.Fernande is Laurent's cousin and is promised in marriage to himNapoleon, in a lenient mood, grants their return and allows them to retake possession of their chateaux and any remaining land that had not been sold by the State.Mme la Marquise, however, has an older son from a previous marriage still resident in France, Ronnay de Maurel was only four years old when his father died, but an uncle brought him up. This uncle, Gaston de Maurel is a solid republican patriot, if ever there was one, with nothing of the aristo about him at all. Gaston eats peas with his knife and wears sabots and a blouse ... he even voted for the death of the king.Ronnay works in the foundries where he employs five thousand men and as a result he is now one of the richest men in France. Yet despite their fortune, he and his uncle live like peasants using only a couple of rooms in the sumptuous chateau that is now being returned to his mother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_in_Stubble"title="Fire in Stubble">
The book centres on the love life of Rose Marie, the only daughter of M. Legros, tailor-in-chief to His Majesty the King of France. As an infant Rose was espoused to Rupert Keyston, a mere child himself at the time. Over the years Rupert's position has changed from one of poverty and obscurity to one of wealth, and he now holds the honorable position of the Earl of Stowmaries. Rupert has not seen his child-bride since his espousals, and on reaching manhood conceives a dastardly plot to free himself from the unwanted union by persuading his cousin Michael to impersonate him when he is finally called upon to ratify his engagement, and claim his bride. Once this has happened, he fully intends to get his marriage annulled, on the score of his wife's unfaithfulness with his cousin.The mock nuptials are concluded with a dance in the workshop of M. LegrosThe couples fell back one by one, panting against the wall, while only one pair remained in the centre, now twirling and twirling in a cloud of dust. The man's head 'was bent, for he was over tall, and towered above every one else in the room. He was a head taller than she was, but he looked straight down at her, as he held her, straight into her eyes-those beautiful blue eyes of hers, which he had thought so cold.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_(novel)"title="Seeing (novel)">
"Seeing" is set in the same unnamed country featured in "Blindness." The story begins with a parliamentary election, in which the majority (83%) of the populace cast blank ballots. The first half of the story focuses on the struggles of the government and its various nameless members as they try to simultaneously understand and destroy the amorphous non-movement of blank-voters. Some of the characters from "Blindness" appear in the second half of the novel, including 'the doctor' and 'the doctor's wife', and the 'dog of tears' now with the name, Constant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_I_Wake_(Wiersema_novel)"title="Before I Wake (Wiersema novel)">
The novel is set in Victoria, British Columbia. A car accident leaves three-year-old Sherry Barrett in a coma. As her parents struggle to deal with the aftermath of the accident, word spreads that anyone who comes into contact with her will be miraculously cured of illnesses. As interest in Sherry intensifies, she becomes the focus of attention not only from pilgrims seeking healing, but of religious figures who accuse the Barretts of exploiting their daughter for gain. There is a fantastical aspect to some of the characters who intrude into the lives of the Barretts, and even Henry Denton, the driver of the vehicle that struck Sherry, trying to deal with his remorse, becomes trapped in limbo, which in this case is found in the Victoria Public Library.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_Ship"title="Rogue Ship">
Centaurus is the destination of the space ship "The Hope of Man". It has been traveling through space for almost twenty years, and still has nine years of flight remaining. For many on board the craft, Earth has become a vague memory, while for others it is a mere dot in the vast starry reaches of space. Restlessness is evident everywhere; the people want to return to a place they know is inhabited - not continue to an unknown where life is uncertain. Mutiny seems inevitable. Captain Lesbee (the ship's main officer) knows that mutiny breeds mutiny, but what is more significant is his knowledge of Earth's possible obliteration. The one hope is Centaurus. Now more than ever, there can be no turning back. Order has to be maintained even at the price of human life.After reaching Centaurus and finding it unsuitable for human life, "The Hope of Man" heads towards the next destination, the Alta system. Because the ship is unable to attain light speed it takes decades to travel there. Upon arriving in the system, after mutiny and treachery, "The Hope of Man" is now captained by Browne, a descendant of the ship's original First Officer. "The Hope of Man" enters into orbit around Alta III, but find it already inhabited and come under attack from the occupants. During this time we see a struggle for power by various groups. Control changes quickly from one character to another until the arrival of the ship's owner, Averill Hewitt. The novel concludes with Hewitt in charge and the ship finding many planets to inhabit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_the_Gods_Beloved"title="By the Gods Beloved">
BackgroundMark Tankerville and Hugh Emmett became firm friends whilst at school at St Paul's, their friendship cemented by many afternoons spent at Hugh's house in Hammersmith in the company of his father, one of the greatest archaeologists and Egyptologists of his generation. Mr Tankerville keeps the boys entertained with stories and theories about the people of Ancient Egypt and teaches them how to speak and understand the language of ancient Kamt.When they finish school, Mark goes to Oxford to study medicine while Hugh stays at home to help his father with his research. During this period Mr Tankerville and Mark's Uncle both die.After college Mark is unemployed but living off a small fortune left to him by a distant relative. He still sees Hugh occasionally but his old friend has become more and more distant as he absorbs himself in some 'important work'. Hugh apologies for his behaviour and asks that Mark gives him two years to finish his project and get back to his old self – Mark, as a qualified Doctor, is concerned that Hugh will have worked himself into the grave within two years if he keeps on as he is and makes Hugh promise that he will ask for help if he needs it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_True_Woman"title="A True Woman">
The main character in the book is Louise Harris, a plain but content young woman who leads a life of prosy luxury. Louise gets up every morning and eats a copious breakfast, she walks the dogs, hunts in the autumn, and skates in the winter, just like hundreds of other well-born, well-bred English girls of average means.Loo is an altogether nice person, and so it is that Luke de Mountford, who knows a good thing when he sees it, asks her to be his wife. Luke is heir to his uncle, Lord Radcliffe and therefore deemed a satisfactory match for Louise.However, just when everything seems to be going well, another nephew with a claim to his uncle’s fortune turns up unexpectedly. Luke is forced to reveal to Louise that their financial future may not be as guaranteed as he had hoped.Faced with this seemingly unavoidable situation, Luke is considering setting up an Ostrich farm in Africa as a way of making a living, but he can’t bring himself to inflict such an existence on his darling Loo, who is alwaysso perfectly dressed, so absolutely modern and dainty.When the intruder, Philip de Mountford, is discovered stabbed in a cab, suspicion naturally falls on Luke who certainly has a motive for murder. The head of the Criminal Investigation Department, who happens to be Louisa’s uncle, reveals his evidence before the ensuing trial and allows Colonel Harris to conceal himself in his office while a witness for the prosecution details the points of the evidence he will give at the trial. He also
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Tide_(Thesman_novel)"title="Rising Tide (Thesman novel)">
Kate Keeley has returned from Ireland older and wiser. Her goals are still to move her and her aunt out of the boardinghouse and to open a linens shop. Ellen Flannery hasn't saved her share for the store she planned to be a partner in because she has spent it pursuing the rich, careless Aaron Schuster. But with the help of money from Jolie Logan's father, Kate does find a flat and an empty shop. Finally, Kate and Ellen open their store and pursue the novelty of independent womanhood. At the boardinghouse, Mrs. Flannery is getting sick and the boarders are more demanding than ever, especially the acidic Mrs. Stackhouse and the abandoned Thalia Rutledge. Though they dream of independence, Kate and Ellen realise they will always be tied to family, home, and the lure of romance, such as Kate's finding the travel journal of a mysterious and attractive stranger.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sons_of_Heaven"title="The Sons of Heaven">
The novel brings together the various threads begun during previous volumes. It takes place mostly in the 24th century, over the final 20 years leading up to the Silence in 2355, the point beyond which the future of the Company is unknown.The Botanist Mendoza, disabled and psychologically scarred by the attempts of the Company to destroy her, is dealing with the three incarnations of her lover, whom she first knew as Nicholas Harpole in the 16th century. Two of them are imprisoned in her cyborg mind, while the third, the Victorian secret agent Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, has taken over the body of the latest incarnation, Alec Checkerfield. Edward is showing signs of megalomania. The four of them, along with Alec's artificial intelligence known as Captain Morgan, are hiding in the deep past, hundreds of thousands of years before the present. This is to allow them to recover from their trials and mount their own campaign against the company, for which they laid the foundations in "The Machine's Child".In the 24th century, Facilitator Joseph, having given up his quest for Mendoza after she disappeared, is putting the fix in again. This time it is on behalf of his own foster-father, the Enforcer Budu, who is intent on destroying the Company in his own way. To do this he will revive the army of Enforcers who have slept in Company bunkers for millennia, like heroes out of legend. Strangely, William Randolph Hearst is a necessary part of this plan, even if Hearst would like to be the hero Roland.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spiraling_Worm"title="The Spiraling Worm">
"The Spiraling Worm" consists of seven interconnected tales. Each story features spies and government agents battling terrorists and government conspiracies who wish to release cosmic horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos from their hidden dimensions to destroy the Earth. The seven stories are: 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fire_Pony"title="The Fire Pony">
11-year-old Roy and his big brother, Joe, are on the run from the authorities when they fetch up at the Bar None ranch. Their shared passion for horses soon wins them great respect, and Roy is offered the chance of a lifetime, to break in a wild pony that runs like the desert wind. He is even promised that if he can ride Lady Luck, he can keep her – a dream come true.But Roy knows that Joe has a dangerous secret... a dark obsession that could explode at any time and send Roy's dream, and their whole world, up in smoke.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Swift_Pure_Cry"title="A Swift Pure Cry">
"A Swift Pure Cry" opens a year after the mother of fifteen-year-old Michelle "Shell" Talent dies, leaving her husband and three children to cope with her death. The eldest of the children, Shell is given the responsibility to care for her younger siblings as well as continue attending school as their father changes drastically.When a new priest, Father Rose, comes to their village, Coolbar, Shell begins to believe once again in Jesus and in her mother's spirit. However, her father is also changed by religion; he quits his job to only collect money for church drives, leaving Shell and her family in poverty. At school, Shell's only friends are Declan, the altar boy, and Bridie, another misfit teen. As Shell feels more and more isolated from normal family life, she becomes involved with Declan, who makes her promise not to tell anyone, so he can continue seeing Bridie as well. Unfortunately, Declan abandons both girls for America, leaving Shell pregnant and alone. She manages to hide the pregnancy from her father and gives birth to a stillborn child around Christmas, whom she names Rose, for the priest.Around the same time, another baby is found dead, killed by exposure, and Shell is under suspicion of abandoning her child. The town is in an uproar, as is the rest of Ireland, and Shell finds comfort in Father Rose's help. However, Father Rose believes Shell's father to be the baby's father and the town folk believes that Father Rose is the father. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_(Torchwood)"title="Hidden (Torchwood)">
A secret is buried in the heart of the Welsh countryside and a series of violent deaths that seem to point the finger of blame at Captain Jack Harkness. Can the team solve the riddle in time to prove Jack's innocence?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'48_(novel)"title="'48 (novel)">
The story follows an American pilot, Hoke, who lives alone in the streets, constantly hidden and on the run from a gang of diseased and terminal Blackshirts, afflicted with the 'Slow Death', who attempt to capture him to use his blood to save their leader, Lord Hubble, via a blood transfusion.Desperate to capture Hoke as his life draws nearer to its end, Hubble sends his entire force out to capture the American pilot. Hoke escapes thanks to the aid of three fellow 'ABneg' survivors – two women and a German navigator, shot down over Britain long ago.Hoke, being used to three years alone, detests his saviours and, corrupted by propaganda, is almost unable to contain himself in the presence of the German even though the war has long since ended.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecotopia_Emerging"title="Ecotopia Emerging">
"EE" is mainly a history of the Ecotopian independence movement. The main characters are Vera Allwen, the leader of the Survivalist Party, and Lou Swift, a teenage physicist, along with their families and friends. Other characters are shown briefly as each one decides independently to break with the American status quo and begin living in an Ecotopian (low-tech, sustainable) fashion.Bolinas, California, high school student Lou Swift finds a way to generate electricity cheaply from seawater in a solar cell. However, she doesn’t understand how the cell works. She refuses to publish her results until she understands the science. Because she is determined to make the cell design freely available, she spurns corporate and academic offers to buy the cell design. Meanwhile, spies and burglars try to obtain her notes.Vera Allwen is a California state senator. Angered by an Eastern food corporation’s announcement it would stop selling fresh produce, she and other politicians, artists, and professionals form a new political party. It is decentralized, environmentalist, and populist. They create a platform and name it the Survivalist Party. As the book proceeds, they spread their ideas, coalition with like-minded people, and become a regional political force. Vera’s speeches are reprinted within the text. Some of their ideas come from a short novel called "Ecotopia", and the Party publishes a paper called "The Survivalist Way to Ecotopia." The Party creates a think tank for environmentalist policies. When the Pacific Northwest states pass a special tax on cars to reduce car use, the U.S. Supreme Court overturns it; public outrage along the Pacific coast helps tip the people of the region toward supporting the Survivalist Party.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Dentellière"title="La Dentellière">
Apple's story begins in a village in northern France. Her father has left and her mother works both as a barmaid and prostitute and they live in a noisy roadside apartment. We meet her again at age 18, living with her mother in a suburb of Paris and working at a hair salon near St. Lazare train station. At night mother and daughter watch TV or Apple reads romance novels and magazines. Her first friend in Paris is Marilyn, a 30-year-old redhead who is unsuccessfully modeling her life after a romance novel. She tries to make Apple more like herself, gets her to drink whiskey and wear makeup, but she begrudges Apple's simplicity and the friendship doesn't survive the entrance of Marilyn's next boyfriend.Marilyn abandons Apple while the two friends are vacationing in Cabourg. Apple is left eating an ice cream at a tea shop when Aimery de Béligny shows up. Aimery is initially fascinated by Apple's simplicity. An intellectual from a respectable family, he is different from Apple in every way. Her docile sincerity charms him at first; they live together in his studio in Paris where she expresses her devotion through continuous housework. But such humble tenderness only irritates the student, who thinks the intellectual gap between them is too profound. He breaks up with her and leaves. Apple takes off her rubber gloves, puts away her cleanser and leaves without complaint. She returns to her mother's convinced that she is unworthy and ugly and she loses what interest she had in life. She stops eating and ends up in a mental hospital.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_Sun"title="Probability Sun">
While the human race struggles at war with the Fallers, an advanced alien race, an artifact is discovered which might be the key to a lost science, be a weapon itself, or a doomsday device.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauldron_(Bond_novel)"title="Cauldron (Bond novel)">
## Background.Economic upheaval around the world in the early 1990s becomes an opportunity for France and Germany to consolidate their power in Europe through an alliance called the European Confederation or EurCon. However, it is a continental partnership in name only; France provides the political power with the Germans carrying the economic muscle. The instability and the countries' political differences with the United States causes the dissolution of NATO in 1996.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_(Alfieri)"title="Saul (Alfieri)">
Saul, a brave warrior, was crowned king of Israel at the request of the people and consecrated by the priest Samuel, who anointed him in the name of God. Over time, however, Saul turned away from God and ended up doing various acts of impiety. Then Samuel, by order of God, consecrated a humble shepherd as king: David. He was called to the court of Saul to appease the king's soul with his song, and there he succeeded in obtaining the friendship of Jonathan, son of the king, and the hand of the young daughter of Saul, Micol.However, David generated a strong envy in the king, who saw in him a usurper and at the same time saw his past youth in it. David was persecuted by Saul and forced to take refuge in the lands of the Philistines (and for this accused of treason).The story of the Saul narrates the last hours of the king's life and sees the return of David, who as a brave warrior rushed to the aid of his people at war with the Philistines, despite knowing full well the risk that this could entail for his life. David is ready to be killed by the king, but first he wants to be able to fight with his people.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Shadows"title="Kingdom of Shadows">
The story is set in Europe between April 1938 and July 1939, a time of ever-increasing fear and apprehension throughout the continent. "Nicholas Morath" is an expatriate Hungarian in his forties and the co-owner of an advertising agency in Paris. His uncle, "Count Janos Polanyi", is a high-level functionary at the Hungarian embassy in France. Morath is in fact an amateur spy, sent on one dangerous mission after another at his uncle's behest (laundering money through the Antwerp diamond industry, or spending a week in a Romanian jail, for example). Polanyi tells his nephew little about the reasons for or the results of these excursions, and friction often rises between the two men. But after Polanyi disappears mysteriously, Morath continues his perilous work alone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Indestructible_Man_(novel)"title="The Indestructible Man (novel)">
Captain Karl Taylor is sent to investigate mysterious alien signals from the Moon, but the sights and sounds of the alien “city” he encounters are entirely incomprehensible to human perceptions. Taylor thus orders his people to open fire, apparently fearing that they are under attack. This is the start of a war between the alien Myloki and PRISM, the secret organisation created to fight the invaders. The Myloki attack by transforming ordinary human beings into their puppets; most are merely drone-like zombies known as Shiners, but two are different. One is Captain Taylor, who is sent back to Earth as a walking, indestructible, reanimated corpse, an emotionless killing machine. The other is Captain Grant Matthews, who is killed and duplicated while on a routine escort mission; however, his duplicate is caught and deprogrammed of his Myloki conditioning, and, like Taylor, is found to be literally indestructible.The Doctor and Storm trace Verdana to a private hospice in Barbados, where his body is slowly wasting away, perhaps due to the hours he spent monitoring the Myloki’s unfathomably alien signals during the war. He is bitter that he’s been condemned to this slow death while Matthews, a jumped-up clerk and chauffeur, became immortal; this is why he wrote the book exposing PRISM. He refuses to help track down Matthews, but when he makes a snide comment about Matthews’ rich friends, Storm deduces where Matthews must be. Storm offers to put Verdana out of his misery, but Verdana refuses, determined to cling on to life until the bitter end. As the Doctor and Storm leave the hospice, Storm admits to the Doctor that he was a mercenary for hire before the war; Bishop freed him from a Polish prison and gave him the authority to kill whoever he had to defeat the Myloki.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meadowsweet_(novel)"title="Meadowsweet (novel)">
When their mother died, Olive and Boadicea were sent to live with their mother's sister, Caroline, and her husband Jasper Hemingford on Old Manor Farm. The farm is remote with few neighbours and while Aunt Caroline would have made a wonderful mother, the girls do exactly as they want and have her twisted completely round their thumb. Jasper is a distant figure, spending most of his time in his museum room with his nose stuck in a book or studying his collection and muttering to himself in Latin.It was hardly surprising then that Olive, the elder of the girls, sought to find herself a rich husband who would whisk her away from the lonely farm to the highs of London society, and this she did three years earlier, marrying Sir Baldwin Jefferys, a middle aged gentleman of wealth and position.The story starts in June 1835. Olive has been the subject of society gossip after spending too much time in the company of Lieutenant Jack Carrington of and her reputation has suffered as a result. Sir Baldwin knows the Lieutenant is incapable of vulgar intrigue but Olive has given him the full charm offensive. Enraged as his wife's behaviour, Sir Baldwin has insisted that she must leave London mid-way through the season. Olive in turn accuses him of insane jealously and she agrees, only on the condition that she can spend the month at her childhood home in Thanet.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghosts_(Banville_novel)"title="Ghosts (Banville novel)">
The novel is somewhat unconventional and non-linear in its construction. It begins with a group of travelers disembarking on a small island in the Irish Sea after their ship runs aground. There they stumble upon a house inhabited by Professor Kreutznaer, his assistant Licht, and an unnamed character who figures centrally in the novel and who is referred to only as "Little God." It is later revealed that Little God can be identified with Freddie Montgomery, the narrator of "The Book of Evidence." Much of the latter half of the book focuses on Montgomery's account of his experiences after having been released from prison, his reflections on the crime (the murder of a young woman) he committed, and his continuing struggle with the ghosts of his past and the nature of his perceptions.Kreutznaer's relationship to a painting entitled "The Golden World" by a fictional Dutch artist named Vaublin plays a central role in the novel. The fictional painting is based to a large extent on The Embarkation for Cythera by Watteau. The narrator mentions "Cythera" several times and, to a certain degree, the characters are modelled on those in the painting. It is revealed that Kreutznaer and one of the travellers—a man named Felix—are acquainted with one another, and that Felix had been involved in art forgery. The novel ends with the travellers re-embarking and leaving the island, with many of the central issues and tensions left unresolved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truce"title="The Truce">
The book starts with the departure of the Germans from the camp. The sick were left on their own after the healthy ones were taken on a death march away from the approaching Red Army. As all the services have left the camp, exploration journeys begin in search for food and essential items.When they arrive the Red Army is shocked by the state of the people in the camp and they provide basic medical aid. All remaining inmates are taken to a hospital in the main camp.After the protagonist has regained some strength, he starts a long journey. First to Kraków, then to Katowice where he stays for some time and works as a pharmaceutic assistant.The journey continues after weeks eastwards to Tarnów, Rzeszów, Przemyśl and into Ukraine: Lviv, Ternopil, Proskurov, Zhmerynka. The plan was to go south to Odessa but instead he had to take the train northwards and arrives at Slutsk (Belarus). From there he walks and rides in a horse cart to Starye Dorogi where he lives inside "Krasny Dom" ("Red House") and works as a medical assistant.Then, after weeks, a Russian Marshal, Semyon Timoshenko, came to the displaced persons camp and declared that they can make their way back home now. By train the journey continues southwards and then westwards: Hungary, Slovakia, Austria and Germany. After 35 days of travel since leaving "Krasny Dom" he arrives in his home town Turin, which he had last seen 20 months ago.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnels_(novel)"title="Tunnels (novel)">
The main influence in fourteen-year-old Will Burrow's life is his father, Dr. Burrows, and together they share an interest in archaeology and a fascination for the buried past. When Dr. Burrows begins to notice strange 'pallid men' where they live in Highfield, and then promptly goes missing, Will and his friend Chester go search for him. They discover a blocked passageway behind bookshelves in the cellar of the Burrows home and re-excavated it, finding the passage leads to a door set into the rock, and beyond the door is an old lift that takes them down to another set of doors. A cobblestone street lies beyond, lit by a row of orb-like street lamps; houses that appear to be carved out of the walls themselves flank the street.They are soon captured by the police of the underground community, known as the Colony. In prison, Will is visited by Mr. Jerome, and his son Cal. They reveal Will was actually born in the Colony, and that they are his real family; Mr. Jerome his father, and Cal his younger brother. Will is eventually released from the prison and taken to the Jerome's home, where Will and Cal's Uncle Tam are delighted to see him and inform Will that his adoptive father, Dr. Burrows, was recently there, and had willingly traveled down into the Deeps — a place even deeper in the Earth than The Colony. Will learns that the Styx, the religious rulers of the Colony, are either going to enslave Chester or banish him to the Deeps to fend for himself. Will refuses to abandon his friend, and Uncle Tam formulates a plan for him to rescue Chester and to take him back to the surface.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_Acts_of_Senseless_Violence"title="Random Acts of Senseless Violence">
The novel is told in the form of a fictional diary by the 12-year-old protagonist Lola Hart, and details Lola and her family's experiences in a near-future Manhattan in which violence, rising unemployment, and riots are commonplace in the city, as well as the rest of the United States. As the novel progresses, Lola transforms from a student at one of Manhattan's most privileged private schools to a street-wise gangster as she and her family struggle to survive the despair of a crumbling government and economy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragons_of_the_Highlord_Skies"title="Dragons of the Highlord Skies">
The Dragon Emperor Ariakas devises a plan to corrupt the Knights of Solamnia and sends Dragon Highlord Kitiara uth Matar to tempt a power-hungry knight, Derek Crownguard, with the location of a Dragon Orb, which Ariakas believes the Knights will not be able to control. A disguised Kitiara convinces Derek that Dragon Orbs can be used to help the Knights resist the invasion of their homeland, so Derek, along with fellow knights Brian Donner and Aran Tallbow, sets out to the former seaport of Tarsis to find more information about the Dragon Orbs.Kitiara then travels to the city of Haven to investigate the possible involvement of her friends and family in the death of the Dragon Highlord Verminaard. Kitiara quickly confirms that her former lover, Tanis Half-Elven, and her half-brothers Raistlin and Caramon Majere were involved in Verminaard's death. Kitiara also learns that Tanis is traveling with his former girlfriend, the incredibly beautiful elven princess Laurana, and consumed by jealousy, becomes dangerously obsessed with Laurana.Kitiara travels to Icewall Castle and a rivalry is formed between her and the dark elf wizard, Feal-Thas, the Dragon Highlord of the White Army. She insists Feal-Thas allow the Dragon Orb under his care to be taken by the knights when they arrive, and Feal-Thas insists she first defeats the horrible guardian of the Orb. Kitiara does so and then travels to the city of Tarsis to seek out her former companions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Monk_and_the_Two_Assistants"title="Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants">
Adrian Monk and Natalie Teeger take Julie to the hospital after she breaks her wrist during a soccer game. Monk sees his old assistant Sharona Fleming working as a nurse. She explains that after leaving Monk's employ to remarry her ex-husband, Trevor Howe and move to New Jersey, a friend of Trevor's from Los Angeles sold his landscaping business to Trevor. They moved to Los Angeles and took over the business. However, one of his clients, Ellen Cole, was found bludgeoned to death with a lamp in her house. Evidence suggests Trevor killed Cole when she caught him stealing her jewelry. Sharona has no trouble believing this in light of Trevor's addiction to get-rich-quick schemes, so she and Benjy have moved back to San Francisco, with Benjy staying with Sharona's sister Gail. Sharona would like her old job with Monk back, and there is hostility between her and Natalie. Moreover, after visiting Trevor in prison Natalie is convinced that he is innocent and that he sincerely reformed prior to remarrying Sharona. To save her job, she pressures Sharona and Monk to travel to Los Angeles and investigate Trevor's case.Julie is inspired to rent the space on her cast to local businesses, a marketing technique which she dubs "cast-vertising". A pizzeria, Sorrento's, purchases her cast space and even agrees to pay her a sales commission if enough customers mention the offer printed on her cast, which gives them a discount if Julie is in Sorrento's at the time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_Your_Car!"title="Divorce Your Car!">
In the book Alvord argues that air pollution from cars is directly responsible for damaging the health of humans because of contaminants in pollution and indirectly through the destruction of the environment and contribution to global warming. She also argues that the destruction from oil spills can wreak havoc on entire ecosystems and that purchasing and maintaining a personal automobile is expensive.Alvord proposes alternatives to owning a car such as walking, cycling, and mass transit, and that utilizing these alternatives can save money, raise self-reliance, and promote exercise. She states that by modifying land use, financial policies, and urban infrastructure, efficiency can be increased world wide and society can learn to function without a car in every household. Alvord also claims that the ease of the Internet and decreasing phone prices makes it easier for people to effectively work from home or hold video conferences online, which could save businesses money.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsion_(Hutson_novel)"title="Compulsion (Hutson novel)">
A gang of teenage youngsters is running riot on the streets. Responsible for a number of burglaries and car thefts, the police are at their wits' end trying to put a stop to the gang's activities. Terror and hatred have become part of everyday life for local residents and, just when it seems things cannot get any worse, the gang targets Shelby House – an old people's home. Supervisor Veronica Porter, her two staff and the nine elderly residents become the gang's most vulnerable victims yet as the thugs conduct a hate campaign against them, sending abusive mail, daubing graffiti on walls and shattering windows. The intimidation escalates until Veronica's own father is dragged into the scene of terror when, disturbing some of the gang members burgling his house he is put into a coma. But enough is enough. The senior citizens of Shelby House decide to take the law into their own hands and fight back.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraplane_(novel)"title="Terraplane (novel)">
DryCo has sent two operatives, retired African-American general Luther and his white bodyguard Jake, to post-communist Moscow, where rival multinational corporation Krasnaya dominates Russian society through consumer capitalist mass production of products. However, Luther and Jake discover that Krasnaya has two highly advanced quantum physicists under duress, Oktobriana Osipova and Alekine. The two Dryco mercenaries manage to abduct Oktobriana, but their escape sends them back to 1939 in a conservative alternate history.In this world, Abraham Lincoln was killed by a Baltimore pro-slavery mob in 1861 CE, so the American Civil War never happened, and Theodore Roosevelt abolished slavery in 1907 due to European pressure on J.P. Morgan, who feared loss of his European financial assets. On February 15, 1933, Giuseppe Zangara assassinated Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill died from a car accident in 1931. As a result of Roosevelt's premature death, it is noted that John Nance Garner proved to be a fiscal conservative, leading to a situation where much of the western United States had to threaten civil war to obtain economic relief from the ongoing Depression. As the novel progresses, Alekhine, actually a Krasnaya operative, abducts Joseph Stalin from Moscow, to be transferred to Krasnaya custody and kept in a dacha, in a future which has abandoned communism and uses the image of "Big Boy" as nostalgic consumer iconography.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvissey"title="Elvissey">
In this novel, DryCo is facing problems from a mass religious movement centered on the premise that Elvis Presley was a semi divine figure, who performed miracles for believers in his sect. It decides to resolve this problem by retrieving a younger alternate history Elvis, and bringing him to present day New New York to discredit the posthumous reputation and mythology that now surrounds Elvis.The retrieval team are a married couple, Iz and John. Iz is actually an African American, although cosmetic surgery has led to an uncomfortable masquerade as a "Caucasian" woman in the chosen alternate history. It turns out to be that of "Terraplane", the previous novel in the DryCo quartet, where Abraham Lincoln was prematurely assassinated in early 1861, the American Civil War never took place, and slavery was only abolished by Theodore Roosevelt in 1907. Therefore, this world is backward when it comes to the civil rights movement and racist segregation is still widespread there.In "Terraplane" (1989), it was hinted that the assassination of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by Giuseppe Zangara in 1933, Winston Churchill's death in a car accident in 1931, and the abduction of Joseph Stalin would lead to a Nazi victory in its World War II. However, this envisaged outcome did not transpire. Instead, Leon Trotsky takes advantage of the power vacuum in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, returns from exile in Mexico, and assumes power in his stead. Therefore, there is still a Nazi-Soviet Pact, but Operation Barbarossa does not occur because the USSR rearms to the same extent as Nazi Germany. Moreover, Trotsky declares war on Nazi Germany before it can launch Barbarossa to its east and betray the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1941. In the Pacific theater, the United States defeats Japan in 1946, but they do so through dropping fourteen atomic bombs on the Home Islands, which reduces the nation to an irradiated wasteland. Meanwhile, Hitler is assassinated in 1944, and the new Chancellor Albert Speer signs an armistice with the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union, which leads to an unstable multi polar world due to the inconclusive result of World War II in this world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hork-Bajir_Chronicles"title="The Hork-Bajir Chronicles">
In the Earth year 1968, Aldrea and her family come to live on the Hork-Bajir homeworld after her father – formerly Prince – Seerow, is relieved of duty by Alloran and many other Andalites in 1966, who feel he is no longer fit to command them. This is mainly due to his peaceful philosophy towards the Yeerks, which has resulted in the Yeerks' enslavement of many other species.On the Hork-Bajir homeworld, two Hork-Bajir, Dak Hamee and his friend Jagil Hullan make contact with Aldrea's family, and Aldrea makes friends with Dak. Dak is a seer, meaning he possesses intelligence greater than most others of his species. Aldrea's mother, a biologist, is fascinated with the reptilian, tree-dwelling, peaceful Hork-Bajir, as well as with the other life on the planet. Aldrea herself begins to learn more about Hork-Bajir culture from Dak, and he in turn learns about Andalites.But then tragedy strikes in the form of a Yeerk invasion. Aldrea's entire family is killed, but she escapes—barely—along with Dak. Dak is sickened by his first taste of violence when they are forced to fight Yeerks and Gedd-Controllers. The Yeerks arrive at the enormous tree where the other members of Dak's tribe live, and proceed to enslave every single Hork-Bajir they find.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elfsorrow"title="Elfsorrow">
The Raven travel to a new continent in search of mages to help rebuild the ruined college of Julatsa. However, they find themselves in the midst of a cursed plague that threatens to wipe out the elven race.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Heaven_and_Earth_Changed_Places"title="When Heaven and Earth Changed Places">
The story began during Hayslip's childhood in a small village in central Vietnam, named Ky La. Her village was along the fault line between the north and south of Vietnam, with shifting allegiances in the village leading to constant tension. She and her friends worked as lookout for the northern Vietcong. The South Vietnamese learned of her work, arrested and tortured her. After Hayslip was released from prison, however, the Vietcong no longer trusted her and sentenced her to death. At the age of fourteen, two soldiers threatened to kill her in the forest. Once they arrived, both men decided to rape her instead.She fled to Da Nang where she worked as a maid, a black-market vendor, a waitress, a hospital worker and even a prostitute. While working for a wealthy Vietnamese family with her mother in Saigon, Hayslip had a few sexual encounters with the landlord, Anh, and discovered she was pregnant. She gave birth to a baby son at the age of fifteen. Several years later, she married an American contractor named Ed Munro and gave birth to another son. Hayslip left for San Diego, California in 1970, shortly after her 20th birthday.Hayslip's entire family was torn apart by the war: one brother fled to Hanoi, and did not see his family again for 20 years. Another brother was killed by a land mine. The Vietcong pressured her father to force Hayslip to become a saboteur. Rather than give into the pressure, he committed suicide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/But_Gentlemen_Marry_Brunettes"title="But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes">
The sequel to "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" is also narrated by Lorelei, the bubbly blonde; however, she tells the tale of her friend, Dorothy, a bright talented young woman who grew up in a carnival company; she is discovered by Charlie, who helps her find her way to New York City as a young woman. In New York she is introduced to a broker who is to introduce her to Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., so that she might have a chance at becoming one of the Ziegfeld Follies. The broker is thrown off by Dorothy's unique style and personality and does little to refer her to Mr. Ziegfeld. Dorothy takes matters into her own hands and waits outside Mr. Ziegfeld's office and lands the position without any help. Dorothy marries Lester, a saxophone player from the Follies; she soon finds that marriage is not everything she wanted it to be...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainspring_(novel)"title="Mainspring (novel)">
"Mainspring" is the story of a young clockmaker's apprentice, who is visited by the Archangel Gabriel. He is told that he must take the Key Perilous and rewind the mainspring of the Earth. It is running down, and disaster to the planet will ensue if it's not rewound. From innocence and ignorance to power and self-knowledge, the young man will make the long and perilous journey to the South Polar Axis, to fulfill the commandment of his God.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_from_Rifka"title="Letters from Rifka">
During the Russian Civil War of 1919, Rifka and her family must flee Russia because the Russian army is after one of her brothers for leaving the army; the penalty for that is death for the entire family. She tells her story in a series of letters to a cousin named Tovah who remains behind in Russia, written in the blank spaces of an edition of Pushkin's poetry. Rifka, her parents, and her brothers, Nathan and Saul (who was abusive towards her in the past but changed throughout the course of the novel), escape Russia, hoping to join the three older sons who have been living in America. Along the way, they face many obstacles such as cruel officials, her mom, dad and older brother all catch typhus. They suffer through hunger, theft, and Rifka gets a skin disease, ringworm, which forces her to stay behind in Belgium while her family travels to America. In Belgium people are kind to Jews and she is able to recover from her illness. Once she recovers she can leave Belgium to travel to America to meet her family. She travels to America by a large ship where she befriends and develops romantic feelings for Pieter, a sailor. During the voyage, a dangerous storm occurs, killing Pieter. She arrives to Ellis island where she learns that her skin disease has returned and she can't enter America yet. While she is detained at Ellis Island, she finds she has a talent for nursing others to health. On Ellis island Rifka meets a new friend named Ilya, but he first does not talk to her nor will he eat her LIVA, so everyone thinks he's a simpleton. Once Rifka becomes better friends with him, she discovers that he is very smart. She helps him understand that his uncle is not cruel and wants him to come to America because he loves Ilya, and Ilya reads from Rifka's Pushkin poetry book. He passes the "Test" and makes it to America. Rifka gets over her ringworm, and gets to America to be with her family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behind_the_Curtain"title="Behind the Curtain">
Ingrid lives in a small community called Echo Falls. She's in the school soccer team and is in the drama club. Everything is normal until one day she sees what her dad has been looking at on his computer. On the Jobs.com site. He suddenly starts getting temperamental. Throughout the next few days, Ingrid notices other weird things occurring like her brother starts getting more buff but has strange pimples on his back, and her soccer coach getting switched with another very odd coach, Julia LeCaine. Ingrid starts to try to find out what is happening and in the midst of it, on a random day when she is outside going to the MathFest, she gets kidnapped. She finds herself in the trunk of a car and escapes. But she doesn’t know who tried to kidnap her and if they would try again. Throughout the book Ingrid has to face many mysterious and scary situations to find out what is happening! Guided by her hero, Sherlock Holmes, it's not going to be easy for this 13-year-old!She soon realizes that the new coach, Julia LeCaine, was the one who kidnapped her for money.After she escapes the kidnapping, which happened on the MathFest, a day she was told to show up for she was one of the contestants, barely anyone believes her, and if they did, they had doubts. Luckily, Chief Strade, father of Joey Strade (who is Ingrid's friend/romantic interest) believes her, but cannot act upon it too much, for there are too many holes in her story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rock_Jockeys"title="The Rock Jockeys">
The story is about three young boys, the Rock Jockeys, who set out to climb dangerous Devil's Wall hoping to find the remains of a World War II bomber. Once atop the mountain, they find the bomber and his hidden diary.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_on_Midnight_River"title="Danger on Midnight River">
The story is about Daniel Martin who gets made fun of a lot because he isn't the brightest kid in school. But when he and his classmates get stranded in the wilderness, Daniel saves the day.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forger_(Watkins_novel)"title="The Forger (Watkins novel)">
When David Halifax arrives in Paris in 1939, he finds it a remarkable place, although artists are generally frowned upon and seen as idlers. His classes begin in an atelier, where Halifax is surprised to find only two other students, besides himself, sketching a picture of a nude woman posed on a stool. The teacher, a Russian named Alexander Pankratov, presents himself begrudgingly and carries himself around in an aloof and harshly critical manner yet possesses an unquestioned authority over whomever he meets. The other students introduce themselves, and warn Halifax that Pankratov may be a little deranged because of his eccentricities. The woman on the stool they are sketching is named Valya. She is about the only person who Pankratov seems to allow to do as they please. Later, Halifax learns that Valya is the adopted daughter of Pankratov, who was entrusted with her by his best friend during the Russian Revolution of 1917. Pankratov was an officer in the Tsar Nicholas II's White Army, but did not learn of his defeat until many years later. Valya harbors a deep-rooted dislike for Pankratov, yet displays obedience and praises his artistic genius.Halifax quickly tires of Pankratov's repeated insistence in sketching every day, and seeks time to complete his own works. He is successful in having Fleury sell some of his sketches, but is alarmed when he learns that Fleury has lied to the buyers, selling his reproductions as originals. While the fraud is forgotten, Halifax adapts well to Parisian life. Strangely, Pankratov has taken a liking in Halifax's sketches, and comments well on them. Balard and Marie-Claire reveal that Pankratov has never commended their work before.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hook_'Em_Snotty!"title="Hook 'Em Snotty!">
The story is about Bobbie Walker whose cousin Alex has come from the city to visit their grandpa's ranch, but they take an immediate dislike to one another. When the cousins cross paths with the wild bull Diablo and the nasty Bledsoe boys, they must find a way to get along or it could be the end of them both.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gorgon_Slayer"title="The Gorgon Slayer">
The story is about Warren Trumbull who lives in a world where mythological creatures are a fact and often a nuisance. Warren works for an eight-foot Cyclops, Princey, who runs an agency that specializes in dealing with mythological creature removal. Today Warren and his friend Rick are assigned the task of killing a Gorgon residing in the basement of Helga Thorenson.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive!"title="Captive!">
The story is about Roman Sanchez and his classmates who are kidnapped by masked gunmen and threatened with death unless they are paid ransom money.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Without_Us"title="The World Without Us">
The book is divided into 27 chapters, with a prelude, coda, bibliography and index. Each chapter deals with a new topic, such as the potential fates of plastics, petroleum infrastructure, nuclear facilities, and artworks. It is written from the point of view of a science journalist with explanations and testimonies backing his predictions. There is no unifying narrative, cohesive single-chapter overview, or thesis.Weisman's thought experiment pursues two themes: how nature would react to the disappearance of humans and what legacy humans would leave behind. To foresee how other life could continue without humans, Weisman reports from areas where the natural environment exists with little human intervention, like the Białowieża Forest, the Kingman Reef, and the Palmyra Atoll. He interviews biologist E. O. Wilson and visits with members of the Korean Federation for Environmental Movement at the Korean Demilitarized Zone where few humans have penetrated since 1953. He tries to conceive how life may evolve by describing the past evolution of pre-historic plants and animals, but notes Douglas Erwin's warning that "we can't predict what the world will be 5 million years later by looking at the survivors". Several chapters are dedicated to megafauna, which Weisman predicts would proliferate. He profiles soil samples from the past 200 years and extrapolates concentrations of heavy metals and foreign substances into a future without industrial inputs. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and implications for climatic change are likewise examined.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_Me_(novel)"title="Touch Me (novel)">
"Touch Me" tells the story of a young Australian named Xavier McLachlan, who is in his final year of high school. A keen sportsman, his aim for the year is to be selected in the school Rugby team and help his friends and teammates win the first premiership in twenty years. All is going according to plan until he meets Nuala Magee, an unusual girl with her own agenda; she cross-dresses, and acts in a deliberately confrontational manner towards boys. Xavier is intrigued by her and against the advice of his friends, becomes very close to her, eventually starting a relationship with her. Xavier also befriends a new boy, Alex Murray and this friendship helps Xavier begin to change his ideas about what it means to be a man. The tension between Xavier and his friends begins to isolate him and when he betrays Nuala out of weakness, and a tragedy befalls Alex Murray, he is faced with difficult decisions about who he is and what he holds most dear.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronicles_of_Xan"title="Chronicles of Xan">
Xan is a boy who lived in his village, Hardonbury, in 12th Century England. One morning while he was in a forest nearby, his village is attacked by bandits. He rushes back to his home, only to trip on a root, resulting in the boy being gravely injured. He is taken to Harwood Abbey, where he is nursed back to health by the Benedictine monks. In addition to the physical damage he sustained from his accident, he has lost his memory. But what he fears most of all is what he has thought he has seen lurking around the abbey: the Grim Reaper.In hopes of finding Xan's parents and jogging his memory, a kindly monk, Brother Andrew, brings Xan back to his village, only to find that it was burnt down in the attack and that all the villagers had fled to Clovis, the closest village. In Clovis they meet a farmer who worked with Xan's parents, who tells them that Xan's real name (for Xan is only what they called him at the abbey) is Stephen, and that his parents are dead. The night he returns to the abbey, the other boys show him the "Grim Reaper" outside. Xan, ready to disprove the boys, follows the cloaked figure to the room of a harsh and rough monk, Brother Leo. Later that night the same bandits that attacked Xan's village attack the abbey. However, no one was killed, not even Brother Leo from the Grim Reaper.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disturbing_the_Peace_(novel)"title="Disturbing the Peace (novel)">
A prototypical Yatesian dreamer, John C. Wilder is a bored but successful salesman of advertising space, living in New York City who seeks refuge from the disappointments of his life in alcohol and adultery. He breaks down during a distillers' convention. Lacking sleep and the worse for alcohol upon his return to New York, he threatens his family. His friend, Paul Borg, has him committed to the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital in New York. Upon his release he seeks help from his family, psychiatrists, and AA meetings, all of whom he subsequently rejects. With the encouragement of a mistress, Pamela Hendricks, Wilder renews himself through their common love of movies and the prospect of making a film about his institutionalization. After a group of enthusiastic college students embrace his story and partially film his screenplay, Wilder leaves his family and job to move to Hollywood in the hopes of securing a deal that will complete and distribute the film. The loss of his mistress and the rejection he suffers from producers leads him even deeper into an abyss of paranoid alcoholic delusion. The novel ends with Wilder wandering the streets of Los Angeles, declaring himself to be Jesus Christ (mirroring a delusional incident in Yates's own life), and being recommitted to an institution.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Right_to_Die"title="A Right to Die">
The novel is set against the background of the Civil Rights Act conflict during the early Johnson Administration. At the beginning of the book, Paul Whipple, a black character from the earlier novel "Too Many Cooks" (1938), whose trust Wolfe had gained against a strong West Virginia atmosphere of prejudice, tells Wolfe that Wolfe has since become his hero, and that he has also achieved his dream, stated in the earlier novel, of becoming an anthropologist. He has come, however, to draw upon the favor he did Wolfe 26 years earlier, by asking Wolfe to prevent his son Dunbar Whipple from marrying a rich white girl, Susan Brooke, with whom he is apparently in love. While claiming that he is not opposed, in principle at least, to mixed-race couples, Paul Whipple thinks that sensible rich white girls do not fall in love with poor black men, even if the rich white girl is working for a black civil rights organization in New York, the Rights of Citizens Committee. Wolfe is loath to interfere in the matter, but agrees to at least learn what he can about the true motivations of the socialite girlfriend and why she would be interested in a Negro boyfriend, to settle the debt he owes Whipple. Before the real mystery story gets underway, Stout allows some give and take on the concept of racism being a two-way street: blacks preferring their own as much as whites.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windhaven"title="Windhaven">
## Background.The novel recounts events which occur on the fictional planet Windhaven. Its inhabitants are the descendants of human space voyagers who crash-landed on Windhaven centuries before the events of the book take place. After the crash, the survivors spread out and settled on the many scattered islands of Windhaven's waterworld. In order to preserve tenuous lines of communication across the vast seas, the stranded population constructed mechanically simple gliding rigs from available spaceship wreckage; the gliders could be kept aloft almost indefinitely in Windhaven's stormy atmosphere by their pilots. After centuries of using this practice as the principal means of maintaining social contact among the islands, Windhaven's flyers have developed into a caste superior to the landsmen. Additionally, the flyer caste maintains ownership of the flying rigs — commonly known as "wings" — by keeping them within flyer families, so none of Windhaven's landsmen can aspire to ever wear them. These caste-based differences serve as the impetus for the novel's character-driven narrative.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakheart_Pass_(novel)"title="Breakheart Pass (novel)">
The story begins with a perilous winter railroad journey through the Sierra Nevada in the 1870s in the midst of a blizzard. Aboard the train are Nevada state governor Fairchild and his niece Marica, along with U.S. Army cavalry Colonel Claremont and two carloads of troops. Joining them are U.S. Marshal Pearce, the governor's aide, and Pearce's old Army buddy Major O'Brien. Pearce, a lawman and Indian agent is transporting supposedly dangerous murderer and gunman John Deakin. Their destination is the remote Fort Humboldt deep in the Nevada mountains, whose troops have recently been decimated by a cholera epidemic. (This Fort Humboldt is fictional and has no connection with the Fort Humboldt State Historic Park in California.) Dr. Molyneaux, a tropical disease expert, is also accompanying the group.As the journey continues we slowly learn that all is not what it seems, and that none of the characters is telling the whole truth. MacLean meticulously obliterates the lines defining exactly which characters are the good guys and which are the bad. As the story winds down, the cunningly devious nature of the plan is finally revealed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppet_on_a_Chain"title="Puppet on a Chain">
Paul Sherman is a veteran Interpol Narcotics Bureau agent, used to independent action and blunt force tactics. He is assisted by two attractive female agents, one an experienced operative, the other a rookie. Sherman is in the Netherlands after receiving word about a vicious heroin smuggling ring from a friend. However, the narco-criminals will kill ruthlessly to protect its operation and even before Sherman can leave Schiphol Airport he has already witnessed the gunning down of his key contact, been knocked half-unconscious by an assassin, and tangled with local authorities. "Puppet on a Chain" has the standard twisting plot, local atmospherics, and sardonic dialogue that were Maclean's trademarks as a story-teller. Maclean allows his protagonist to have a bantering sarcastic relationship with his assistants that provides a streak of humor as the plot unfolds. Unfortunately, Sherman's relationship with his assistants is used against him. As his investigation is undermined by betrayal, leaving him constantly a half-step behind his adversaries, Sherman must resort to increasingly violent action to turn the tables. The story culminates in a violent struggle above the streets of Amsterdam to save the life of his surviving female operative, not knowing whether anyone they meet can really be trusted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Babylon_Hotel"title="The Grand Babylon Hotel">
The protagonists are an American millionaire, Theodore Racksole, and his daughter Nella (Helen). While staying at the supremely exclusive Grand Babylon Hotel, Nella asks for a steak and Bass beer for dinner, but the order is refused. To get her what she wants Racksole buys the entire hotel, for £400,000 "and a guinea" (so the previous owner, Félix Babylon, can say that he haggled with the multi-millionaire businessman).Strange things are happening in the hotel. First, Racksolenotices the headwaiter, Jules, winking at his daughter's friend,Reginald Dimmock, while they consume their expensive steak. Hedismisses the headwaiter. The next day Miss Spencer, the pretty,efficient hotel clerk who has been employed there for years,disappears. It appears that she just took her things and left, no one knows when orwhere. And Prince Eugen, a prince regnant of Posen, who was to come tothe hotel and meet his youthful uncle Prince Aribert (he and the nephew are of thesame age), never turns up. Then the body of Dimmock, who was an equerry to the princes, come ahead toprepare for their visit, is found. He was obviouslypoisoned. And soon after, Dimmock's body disappears.The same evening the hotel is having a ball in the Gold Room, hosted by
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_of_the_Plains"title="Wolf of the Plains">
The narrative follows the early life of Temujin, the second son of Yesugei, the khan of the Mongolian "Wolves" tribe. His father is attacked by assassins and soon dies from his injuries. Yesugei's first bondsman, Eeluk, assumes control of the tribe. Fearing the sons of the former khan may contest his leadership when they reach adulthood, Eeluk banishes Temujin's family from the tribe, leaving them to fend for themselves on the harsh Steppes. The expectation was that Temujin's family would perish in the unforgiving winter, but Temujin, along with his mother Hoelun, his four brothers Bekter, Khasar, Kachiun, Temüge, and his baby sister Temulun, survived against all the odds, albeit in poverty. In an argument over food, Temujin kills his older brother Bekter, much to his mother's anguish.After a few years of trading with other wandering families, the family establish a small home. But the Wolf tribe return to the area, and advanced riders, sent by Eeluk to ensure the family had perished, capture Temujin. He is taken back to the tribe where he is tortured, and kept in a pit, in preparation for a ritual murder. He is freed by Arslan and Jelme, father and son wanderers who joined the Wolves after looking for Yesugei, whom Arslan owed a debt. They join Temujin and his family and begin a new tribe, accepting other wandering families into their protection. Temujin assumes the role of khan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_Moon"title="Void Moon">
Cassie Black is an ex-convict who works at a Porsche dealership. She had served five years in prison for conspiring with her previous partner-in-crime, Max Freeling, to steal the winnings of casino visitors while they are asleep. The last plan failed when an undercover agent (later revealed as Jack Karch) posed as the victim, forcing Max to take his own life. Unknown to all, Cassie and Max have a daughter named Jodie, who was born when Cassie served her time in prison. The daughter was put up for adoption and Cassie has been tracking her development silently.When Cassie learns that her daughter will be moving to Paris with her adopted parents in the near future, she decides to return to the trade for the last big pay day. Once she gets hold of the money, she plans to bring Jodie away with her. She approaches Max's half brother, Leo Renfro, for a heist job. Leo assigns her to go back to the Cleopatra, or "Cleo", the casino which Max's failed attempt took place. The victim ("mark") this time is apparently a high roller and a $500,000 reward awaits. Leo is confident of Cassie's capabilities despite her long hiatus, but warns her to avoid being in the mark's hotel room during the period of the "void moon" on the day of action. Max's death, along with other unpleasant things, have occurred during that period. Cassie successfully breaks into the hotel room of the mark in the wee hours of the morning, but is forced to remain hidden in the room during the period of the void moon due to unforeseen circumstances. Later that morning, it is revealed that the mark has been shot dead and the suitcase containing the money had been taken from the safe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Fire_(novel)"title="Wild Fire (novel)">
Welcome to the Custer Hill Club—a men’s club set in a luxurious Adirondack hunting lodge whose members include some of America’s most powerful business leaders, military men, and government officials. Ostensibly, the club is a place to relax with old friends. But one fall weekend, the club’s Executive Board gathers to talk about the tragedy of 9/11—and finalize a retaliation plan, known only by its codename: Wild Fire.That same weekend, a member of the Federal Anti-Terrorist Task Force is found dead. Soon it’s up to Detective John Corey and his wife, FBI Agent Kate Mayfield, to unravel a terrifying plot that starts with the Custer Hill Club and ends with American cities locked in the crosshairs of a nuclear device. Corey and Mayfield are the only ones who can stop the button from being pushed, and global chaos from being unleashed...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Venom_Trees_of_Sunga"title="The Venom Trees of Sunga">
The lead character Kirk Salazar, a second-generation Terran colonist on the planet Kukulkan, is near the end of his education to become a biologist, lacking only field research to complete his studies. Interested in the evolutionary background of the dominant native species, the intelligent reptilian Kukulkanians, he focuses on a related animal species whose habitat is the poisonous "venom trees" on the remote island of Sunga. To reach his destination he joins a tour group headed for the island, among whom are some family friends worried about their daughter, who has joined a band of Terran cult members there. They discover she has become the cult's leader, and Salazar finds himself caught in the crossfire of a power struggle between the cultists and a Terran logging magnate intent on clear-cutting the venom trees. He is able to save his neck and preserve the habitat of his research subjects by an unorthodox use of his findings, a spectacularly unlikely disguise, and a healthy dose of dumb luck.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sold_(McCormick_novel)"title="Sold (McCormick novel)">
Lakshmi is a thirteen-year-old girl living with her family in a small hut in the mountains of Nepal. Her family is desperately poor, but her life is full of simple pleasures, like raising her black-and-white speckled goat, and having her mother brush her hair by the light of an oil lamp. But now the harsh Himalayan monsoons wash away all that remains of the family's crops, Lakshmi's stepfather says she must leave home and take a job to support her family.He introduces her to a charming stranger who tells her she will find her a job as a maid working for a wealthy woman in the city. Glad to be able to help, Lakshmi undertakes the long journey to India and arrives at “Happiness House” full of hope. But she soon learns the horrible truth: she has been sold into prostitution.An old woman named Mumtaz rules the brothel with cruelty and cunning. She tells Lakshmi that she is trapped there until she can pay off her family's debt – then cheats Lakshmi of her meager earnings so that she can never leave.Lakshmi's life becomes a nightmare from which she cannot escape. Still, she lives by her mother's words – “Simply to endure is to triumph” – and gradually, she forms friendships with the other girls that enable her to survive in this terrifying new life. She also teaches herself to read and speak in English through listening to the conversations of people around her and books she manages to take.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrift_on_the_Nile"title="Adrift on the Nile">
The book starts out with Anis Zani, the protagonist, being disciplined by his boss for submitting a blank report. It's revealed that Anis wrote the report under the influence of drugs, which prevented him from realizing his pen was out of ink. Anis and a group of fellow addicts get together every night to smoke keif on a houseboat on the Nile. Samara, a young journalist, visits the group in order to report on them. The tranquility of the group collapses as they begin to argue about topics like love, morality and purpose. The downfall of the group is accelerated when, one night as they are taking a midnight excursion by car, they hit a person and flee the scene.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrod_Jashber"title="Penrod Jashber">
"Penrod Jashber" is more novelistic in form than the preceding books; rather than each chapter standing as a separate story, the bulk of this book has one story arc, of Penrod's pretending to be detective George B. Jashber. Otherwise it is similar: it is written in the same style and takes place at the same time."Penrod Jashber" begins when Penrod's best friend Sam Williams acquires a new pup. The boys squabble about his name, the pup and Penrod's dog Duke rampage through Penrod's house, and as punishment Penrod's parents force him to wear a smelly asafetida bag. Penrod copes with this humiliation by telling tall tales of his exploits to his future girlfriend, lovely Marjorie Jones. Marjorie confesses that the reason she doesn't mind his "asafid'ty" bag is that her mother has made her wear one too.The detective story arc begins when Penrod further immerses himself in fantasy by penning a hilarious bandit epic starring George B. Jashber, the "notted detective." In the first "Penrod" book, he was hard at work on this picaresque adventure novel, with heroic road agent Harold Ramorez menaced by corrupt police detectives. Over time, he comes to see detectives as more interesting, skews the novel toward the exploits of Jashber, and decides to become one. Imitating his movie heroes, he squints his eyes and talks out of the side of his mouth. He paints an office sign in the (empty) stable and acquires an official-looking badge from the cook's nephew who took a mail-order course. To practice, he shadows his school teacher in the evenings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_to_Ground"title="Going to Ground">
Following the events of "Running the Risk", Dax and the other Colas are sent to recover. However, during this time off, Lisa experiences a vision which warns her that Gideon is in deadly peril. She and Dax attempt to rescue him, only to find that he is not actually in any sort of danger - at least not yet. But strange and unexplainable electrical faults are taking place all over the country, and the government seems to think that Gideon's powers are responsible. Now they will stop at nothing to find him and contain the threat they believe he poses. Gideon, Dax, Lisa, and Mia set off across the country attempting to outwit their pursuers while also trying to find the real cause of these electrical events to clear Gideon's name.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyster_(novel)"title="Oyster (novel)">
In Outer Maroo, a fictional town in the outback which doesn't appear on maps, outsiders disappear and there is a queerly pungent smell, the Old Fuckatoo...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Ones_(novel)"title="The Other Ones (novel)">
Bridget Raynes has typical teenage problems—clumsiness, lack of popularity, an unrequited crush, oblivious parents—but they are compounded by her suppressed magical powers, or perhaps her loss of sanity. She sees spirits, especially the quarrelsome "threshold guardian" xiii, reads minds, moves objects by thought, and casts "circles of safety" spells. But her powers inspire more fear than awe in her, and she continues to avoid them just when they are needed most. Her crush Jordan is abandoned in his own home; new girl Althea is being tormented at school while on a secret mission; school bully Woody is growing more dangerous; even the natural world is threatened and threatening. Only her aunt Cait, a rumored witch herself, has any sympathy for Bridget, but she must decide once and for all to accept her powers or not.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Magic_Moon"title="Children of Magic Moon">
The wizard Themistocles appears to Kim and urges him to return to Magic Moon, the land that people travel to when they dream. When the young boy arrives, he finds the magic realm dramatically changed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whatever_Happened_to_Sarah_Jane?"title="Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?">
## Part 1.Sarah Jane receives a puzzle box from a Veron Soothsayer, with the instruction to give it to the person she most trusts. Sarah Jane gives Maria the puzzle box. A meteor is on collision course with Earth, and Sarah Jane has set up, but not yet activated via Mr Smith, a force field to deflect the meteor. The next morning, Maria wakes to find that Sarah Jane and Luke have gone missing, but no one besides Maria knows who Sarah Jane or Luke are. A woman called Andrea Yates has apparently taken Sarah Jane's place. Investigating, Maria finds a 1964 newspaper report, stating that a thirteen-year-old Sarah Jane Smith died after falling off a pier, where she was playing with her friend, Andrea Yates. As Maria watches, the names of the deceased and the survivor on the report switch before her eyes and, at one point, hears Sarah Jane's disembodied voice calling out to her. When Maria goes to Andrea to talk to her about the report, Andrea suddenly panics and unceremoniously shows Maria out before she rushes to her attic, where she takes out a second puzzle box. She now remembers a mysterious hooded figure, who appears and offers to make Maria disappear. After Andrea reluctantly accepts, he dispatches a small alien, a Graske, who captures Maria just after her father, Alan, picks up the first puzzle box (which shielded her from the ripple effects), which Maria dropped during her escape from the Graske. When Alan's ex-wife Chrissie comes round, he discovers she cannot remember their daughter. Meanwhile, Maria escapes from the Graske and finds herself on a beach promenade near two girls. They introduce themselves as Andrea Yates and Sarah Jane Smith.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_the_Gorgon"title="Eye of the Gorgon">
## Part 1.Sarah Jane and her companions investigate claims of sightings of a ghostly nun at Lavender Lawns, the local nursing home. Meanwhile, Maria's mother, Chrissie, moves into her ex-husband Alan's house, but succeeds only in causing further problems with the family. Back at Lavender Lawns, an old lady gives Luke an ancient talisman, which is really the key to a portal in space and time. They find that a group of nuns are hiding an age-old creature, the Gorgon. When Sarah Jane refuses to give the talisman to the nuns, they kidnap Luke and Clyde and take the Gorgon and Maria to Sarah Jane's house where the Gorgon turns Maria's father to stone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warriors_of_Kudlak"title="Warriors of Kudlak">
## Part 1.When "Combat 3000", the new laser-tag centre, arrives near Sarah Jane, a young teenager called Lance Metcalf visits it, where he mysteriously disappears. When Sarah Jane starts investigating, she discovers 24 children have previously gone missing. Meanwhile, Luke tries to master being funny but can't quite do it. He also doesn't understand games. Therefore, Clyde takes Luke to "Combat 3000". Sarah Jane soon discovers that there have been mysterious storms at the time of the disappearances and that Mr Grantham and Kudlak are working for The Mistress, leader of "Combat 3000". Luke and Clyde manage to survive Round One and are challenged to make it to the door to the championships, facing other expert "Combat 3000" players. When Luke and Clyde are very close to the door, they are attacked. Soon, Clyde and Luke manage to escape and are locked in a room where they mysteriously disappear. Meanwhile, Mr Grantham points a gun at Sarah Jane and Maria but Sarah Jane uses her sonic lipstick to help her escape. Maria and Sarah Jane arrive in a different room where they are then confronted by Kudlak.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Boy_(The_Sarah_Jane_Adventures)"title="The Lost Boy (The Sarah Jane Adventures)">
## Part 1.Following on from Alan's discovery of what his daughter, Maria, gets up to with Sarah Jane in "Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?", he threatens to move house again, only to have a change of heart when he sees how upset Maria is. His condition for not moving away, however, is that he is kept up to date with their battles against aliens.The next day, the news report on a family searching for their son, Ashley, who has been missing for five months. However, when a picture of Ashley is shown, it brings a shock, since he looks exactly like Luke. Mr Smith compares their DNA, and confirms that Luke and Ashley are the same person; apparently Luke was not "grown" by the Bane, but was a kidnapped boy. Chrissie calls the police and reports Sarah Jane as a child abductor; Sarah Jane is arrested and the police release Luke into the custody of Ashley's parents, Jay and Heidi, and Sarah Jane kept by the police, only for UNIT to intervene and have her released, although the police order her not to go near Luke again. Depressed, Sarah Jane decides she was wrong to involve children and tells Maria to stay away from her. Mr Smith suggests to her that she have a case to take her mind off things, and she visits a research centre where alien technology is being used to conduct experiments into telekinesis, where she meets an annoying child prodigy, Nathan. That night, when Luke's new parents watch television, they switch over to a channel that glows green and announce to somebody they call "Xylok", that they "have the boy".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eifelheim"title="Eifelheim">
In 1349, Eifelheim, a small town in the Black Forest of Germany, vanished: it ceased to appear on any maps or in any documents, having apparently been abandoned and never resettled by its community. The disappearance is no mystery — the Black Death devastated Europe. But why was the area never resettled, unlike most other depopulated areas? The mystery intrigues cliometric historian Tom Schwoerin, who sets out to solve the puzzle with the help of his partner, theoretical physicist Sharon Nagy. They gradually uncover evidence of an alien crash-landing in the area.The village was originally called Oberhochwald, and then afterwards renamed Teufelheim ("Devil home" in German), which was eventually distorted to Eifelheim. They also learn of the town's priest, Father Dietrich, an educated man who served the town in 1348, as the Black Death arrived in Northern Europe. Dietrich, it appears, acted as humanity's first ambassador, and was the primary liaison between Eifelheim and the aliens who happened to wreck their starship in the woods outside the village.The novel concentrates primarily on the alien encounter in the 14th century, paying special attention to the interplay between Dietrich, a Christian scholar who is fond of Aristotle and metaphor, and the technologically advanced, post-Einsteinian band of otherworldly travelers. The interplay includes two theological questions. The first, "can aliens become Christians?" is answered in the affirmative, as some of them become converts. The second, "where is God when things go wrong?" is more difficult to answer, for both the Germans and the alien Krenken. The Germans are stricken by the Black Death, and the Krenken, who are immune to the disease, but cannot return to their home, require an amino acid not found in earthly organisms. The answer is two-fold: there is always hope, and God's love is expressed to us in the unselfish love of fellow creatures. Dietrich's attempts to understand the science of the Krenken (their view of the solar system, and gravity, is quite different from his) and their attempts to explain it to him, are also an important theme.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gentle_Falcon"title="The Gentle Falcon">
Isabella Clinton is the daughter and only child of a French noblewoman, from the House of Valois, and an English soldier. With her father dead, she is heir to his estate but prefers working in the fields to learning to be a proper noblewoman. This is made clear from her sharp tongue and blunt way of speaking.After the death of her father, it seems that the Black Prince has forgotten Isabella and her mother. It is quite a long time before Isabella is finally summoned to court by King Richard – and when she finally is, it is to be companion to her young kinswoman, Isabella of the House of Valois, "Madame" of France and soon to be Queen of England.It is through Isabella Clinton's eyes that we see the love Isabella of France develops for King Richard. Although only seven years old at her first appearance, the Queen shows maturity for her age – but what happens to her throughout the book causes her great sorrow, even though she does not show it on the outside.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Days_of_Summer"title="Last Days of Summer">
Joey Margolis, a Jewish boy growing up in a tough Italian neighborhood, is burdened with beatings from neighborhood kids, his parents' divorce, and an absent father who repeatedly lets him down. In addition, he is worried about Adolf Hitler's rise in power. Craving a surrogate dad, Joey strikes up a correspondence with Charlie Banks, the third baseman for the New York Giants. That he does so by persistently nagging Charlie sets the tone not just for their ongoing correspondence but for a relationship that will change both of their lives forever.They have many adventures together, as Joey becomes a man and Charlie becomes the dad he never really had. (His father remarried a woman named Nana Bert and they never spend time with him or give him affection-his dad is not a father to him.) The first thing Joey does to get Charlie's attention is write letters to him about how he is dying of incurable diseases and only Charlie hitting a home run will save him. When Charlie doesn't listen, he writes to his on and off girlfriend Hazel McKay, a famous singer and actress in New York. She believes him, and breaks up with Charlie until he helps Joey. Eventually, he tells Hazel he made it all up, and he has another famous friend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Man_(Simmons_novel)"title="The Hollow Man (Simmons novel)">
After the death of his wife Gail, Jeremy Bremen leaves his previous life by burning his home and possessions and embarking on a journey to find peace from the "neurobabble" of humanity. Without his wife's presence Bremen cannot shield himself from the unwanted ability to read minds and hear thoughts.Bremen searches for solitude and isolation from people, which he initially finds; however, as the novel progresses, he is exposed to increasing levels of contact with humanity and horrifying experiences of malicious and violent behaviour.Transposed with Bremen's story is that of another character, Robby, who appears to be narrating and commenting upon Bremen and his wife's life. Robby is severely disabled and unable to communicate as he is deaf, mute, and blind. How he is able to have such familiarity with Bremen is not disclosed until towards the end of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Redd"title="Seeing Redd">
The plot centres on Alyss's new responsibilities as Queen, and the fear in the Wonder landers that Redd has returned. Attacks were made on the queendom by Glass Eyes and it is assumed that Redd has returned, when it is actually King Arch trying to gain control of. When Molly is kidnapped, Hatter must disobey his queen and rescue her. Meanwhile, on Earth, Redd and The Cat form an army, lead it into Wonderland, unite King Arch's people against him, and launch an attack against Alyss. While Hatter and Molly go to the mountains to hide. Alyss also must fight her Aunt Redd but loses her powers and Molly learns that Hatter is her father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tersias"title="Tersias">
The story starts off after Wormwood was destroyed and was sent to the dark side of the moon. Just as London was starting to recover from the disaster, Malachi, a magician, kept a blind boy named Tersias. Tersias was the one that predicted the coming of the comet for he was an oracle. After some time, people began to know about the helpless child's "abilities". Many people wanted to use Tersias' powers for themselves: Malachi, himself; Jonah, a teenage highwayman and his partner, Tara; Solomon, a zealot, who plans on using his experiments (flesh-eating locusts) and Lord Malphas, a keeper of mysterious powers. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatyapuri"title="Hatyapuri">
Disturbed by the heat and humidity of Calcutta in June, (combined with frequent electricity failures) the "Three Musketeers", Pradosh C. Mitter (Feluda), Topshe, and Lalmohan Ganguly (Jatayu) go to Puri for vacation. There they stay in Neelachal Hotel, owned by Lalmohan Babu's landlord's classmate, Shyamlal Barik. In the evening, while strolling on the beach, the trio spot odd footprints on the sand. Later, Lalmohan Babu goes to meet an astrologer, Laxman Bhattacharya, who is presumably gifted with extrasensory perception . Laxman lives in a building called "Sagarika" owned by an elusive man known as D.G. Sen. In the hotel, Shyamlal informs them that Sen's main interest is in collecting manuscripts.Next morning, while strolling on the beach, Topshe and Lalmohan Babu stumble upon a dead body lying on the beach, later revealed to be Rupchand Singh. They tell the news to Feluda, who in turn informs the police. He tells the two of them that he has fixed an appointment with D.G. Sen. While going to Sagarika, they find Inspector Mahapatra, with whom Feluda was acquainted from a previous case. After conversing with Mahapatra regarding the victim Singh—who had come to Puri from Nepal and had been shot dead, but the weapon hasn't been found—the "Three Musketeers" then go to Sagarika and meet Nisith Bose, D.G. Sen's secretary.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_X_(novel)"title="Camp X (novel)">
It is wartime, and nearly-12-year-old George and his 14-year-old brother Jack had moved with their mother to Whitby, Ontario from their farm in the summer of 1943. Their father was off fighting Germany in Africa and Jack and George's mom works for a munitions factory. Their summer was plain. But then, one day, after playing make-believe war they stumbled into a military base. There, their curiosity leads them to the discovery of Canada's Top Secret Military Base for training spies, Camp X. After sneaking around, they are caught by the guards and were forced to sign the Official Secrets Act. They learn much about the camp and are sent off with tasks improving the security. When delivering newspapers one day for Mr. Krum, Mr. Krum kidnaps the brothers for information about the camp. Jack and George are tortured and almost killed, but they learn about the plan to invade Camp X. They get away and warn the Camp X of the attacks that are planned. They risk their lives to warn Camp X.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedelia_(novel)"title="Bedelia (novel)">
Thirty-three-year-old Charlie Horst comes from an old Puritan family which for centuries has been one of the pillars of society in an unnamed small town in Connecticut. Educated at Yale and now working as an architect, he has lived in a grand old house—his parental home—all his life. At the beginning of the novel his domineering mother has been dead for less than a year, and since her death Charlie has gone on a summer holiday to Colorado Springs, has met Bedelia Cochran there, a young childless widow of great beauty, has immediately fallen in love with her, brought her back home and married her.Married life becomes Charlie Horst, so much so that on Christmas Day, 1913, he considers himself "the luckiest man in the world." Bedelia has turned out to be the perfect wife: exceedingly capable of running the household, a brilliant hostess, an obedient and submissive companion in need of protection by a strong man, imaginative, attractive, always well-dressed and well made-up, sexy, and good in bed. At their little Christmas party some of the town dignitaries are present, and everyone enjoys her ladylike ways. On top of it all, Bedelia is several months pregnant, turning Charlie into a proud father-to-be.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anybodies"title="The Anybodies">
Fern has lived all her life with the Drudgers, extremely dull adults who worked at a firm, Beige &amp; Beige. One day, the Beige family, the owners of the firm, visit the Drudger's house. Mrs. Drudger hopes that the Beiges' son, Milton, will one day marry Fern. Three other visitors arrive shortly after. They are the Bone family, Howard, and Mary Curtain, the nurse who delivered the Drudger's baby. Mary confesses that she had accidentally swapped their kids. Fern belonged to the Bone family, and Howard actually belonged to the Drudgers. After the Beiges leave, the Bone and the Drudgers discuss and conclude that they will try unswapping for just the summer and see how it goes.While the Bone drives Fern and Mary Curtain back to his house, Mary Curtain is not really Mary Curtain. She is a man named Marty. He and the Bone tell Fern that they are Anybodies, who can be anybody or anything. The Bone and Marty were once great Anybodies, but they are slowly losing the powers. The only thing that can improve their skills is Fern's dead mother Eliza's book, "The Art of Being Anybody". But no one knows where the book is, for Eliza (a great Anybody) died before she could tell anyone about it. Now, Fern and the Anybodies are in search of the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(Laymon_novel)"title="Island (Laymon novel)">
The novel is structured as a series of journal entries made by Rupert, a young man who finds himself stranded on an island in the Bahamas (along with six other people) when their yacht mysteriously explodes. After an ax-wielding maniac claims the lives of two of the castaways, Rupert and the other survivors are forced to try and outwit the mysterious killer in order to save their lives.Since the concept of the novel is that Rupert is making his journal entries as events happen (with no knowledge as to how future developments in the "plot" will unfold), the reader is left uncertain as to whether any of the book's characters, including Rupert himself, will survive (unlike most first-person narratives, where the survival of the narrator, at least, tends to be a foregone conclusion). The novel plays with these expectations at several points, with Rupert's life constantly being in danger right alongside those of his compatriots.Eventually, the women are captured along with other captive women, and Rupert manages to kill the antagonists, one of whom informs him where the prison cells' key is. Rupert informs the prisoners the key is missing, and starts a sexual relationship with his girlfriend's mother. He feeds the women and keeps them as comfortable as possible, and tells via his journal that one day he may even decide check the key's location.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Games_(novel)"title="Blood Games (novel)">
The novel centres on a group of young women who have been best friends since college. They go on their annual vacation together, each year to a different location of one member of the group's choosing. This year's trip takes them to the Totem Pole Lodge, an abandoned resort that was allegedly the site of a gruesome mass murder twelve years earlier. When one of the women, Helen, mysteriously disappears, her friends begin a search of the resort and the surrounding wilderness in an effort to discover what happened to her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bárðar_saga_Snæfellsáss"title="Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss">
## Section 1.In chapters 1–10, "Bárðar saga", the main character is Bárðr Snæfellsáss. The saga draws on legendary material and "Heimskringla" and contains excerpts from "Landnámabók".Bárðr's mother was human, but his father was half "risi" (giant) and half troll, and he was fostered by Dofri, the "mountain-dweller" of Dovrefjell. By his first wife, Dofri's daughter Flaumgerðr (who also had a human mother), Bárðr had three tall, beautiful daughters: Helga, Þordís and Guðrún. By his second wife, Herþrúðr, who was human, he had six more daughters.Bárðr, his wife and his daughters emigrated to Iceland and came ashore at a lagoon on the south shore of Snæfellsnes which they named Djúpalón; he built himself a farm which he called Laugarbrekka. Þorkell, Bárðr's half-brother from his mother's second marriage to a jötunn, lived at Arnarstapi and had two sons, Rauðfeldr (Red-cloak) and Sölvi. The sons of Þorkell and the daughters of Bárðr used to play together. One day, when there was pack ice along the shore, Rauðfeldr pushed Helga out to sea on an iceberg. She drifted unharmed to Greenland and there found a lover, but Bárðr was infuriated. He pushed Rauðfeldr into the Rauðfeldsgjá ravine and threw Sölvi off Sölvahamar, a high cliff on the coast east of Arnarstapi. Bárðr and Þorkell fought and Þorkell's leg was broken; he moved out of the district.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off_Armageddon_Reef"title="Off Armageddon Reef">
In the 24th century, 8 million people flee to distant Safehold after barely escaping from the destruction of civilization by a genocidal alien foe, the Gbaba. Because the enemy tracked signs of advanced technology to hunt down other emergency colonies, the plan is to enforce a pre-industrial society until the danger passes. Administrator Eric Langhorne, a megalomaniac and neo-Luddite, instead has the colonists' memories erased and replaced with the belief they are the first humans, "Adams" and "Eves," the creations of God upon Safehold with "Archangel Langhorne" anointed as prophet and leader of the Church of God Awaiting. Only by proscribing science as heretical, Langhorne believes, can humanity's safety be assured. Beyond opposing his madness on moral grounds, Pei Shan-Wei holds that eventually Langhorne's religion will collapse, leaving humanity defenseless as it returns to the stars with no memory of the past. Defying Langhorne, she sets up Alexandria, a refuge for knowledge on Safehold's southernmost continent. Tensions rise, before Alexandria is destroyed from space by a hidden kinetic bombardment platform. A retaliatory strike kills Langhorne and many of his followers, but the church remains.Langhorne is established as a Christ-like martyr, while Shan-Wei is demonized, their names becoming common expressions of praise and dismay. The ruined land of Alexandria is cursed as Armageddon Reef. Yet Shan-Wei had a backup plan: the immortal cybernetic avatar of one of the Terran Federation's young military officers, Nimue Alban, who gave her life to allow the Safehold colonists to escape the Solar System. Secreted for centuries away in caverns full of weapons and technology, Nimue awakens, learns of what has transpired, and vows to guide humanity until it is ready to face the Gbaba.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_Schism_Rent_Asunder"title="By Schism Rent Asunder">
Over the course of several months, Nimue Alban, known as Merlin Athrawes, has steered the Kingdom of Charis toward confrontation with Safehold's all-powerful Church of God Awaiting. The combined duties of being the guardian and adviser of King Cayleb of Charis, as well as the inspiration of Charis' burgeoning innovation, are tiring for even an android. Her only escape is space, somewhere nobody else on Safehold can follow her. She remains concerned about the kinetic bombardment platform that "Archangel" Eric Langhorne used to kill her mentor Pei Shan-Wei, and most of her supporters.Planetside, the Kingdom of Charis has been emboldened by its devastating naval victory over the forces sent to destroy it by the Church. Archbishop Mikael Staynair of Charis, who has become the effective Martin Luther of Safehold, declares a schism between the Church of God Awaiting and his see on Charis, accusing the Group of Four, the prelates who control the Church, of being responsible for the sneak attack on Charis. King Cayleb, who has ascended to the throne following his father's death in the attack, is locked in a desperate struggle with the Church. Charis shuts down international maritime trade with well-armed privateers. Meanwhile, the Group of Four set plans into motion to build a force capable of challenging Charis, and in the meantime to attack the Kingdom in any way possible. They order the brutal public execution of the previous Archbishop of Charis, Erayk Dynnys, but Dynnys bravely denounces them before his death. They also declare that Cayleb and Staynair are apostates and enemies of God, which creates domestic problems for Cayleb. Merlin barely manages to prevent the assassination of Staynair at the hands of Charisian church loyalists, who also destroy the Royal College. The Group of Four urge all of the nations loyal to the Church to close their ports to Charisian shipping in an attempt to attack Charis via economic means. In Ferayd, Kingdom of Delferahk, the Church's Office of Inquisition is resisted by Charisian merchants as it attempts to seize docked vessels. The ensuing massacre by the Inquisition pushes Safehold to the brink of Holy War. A Charisian fleet later raids the city in retaliation, burning much of it to the ground after allowing an evacuation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Passage"title="The Final Passage">
The year is 1958. Leila is a 19-year-old woman who has to care for her very sick mother. She has never known her father, and her mother, who is only 40, has even refrained from telling her about him. As her skin is lighter than that of most of the other islanders she believes that she was the product of an affair her mother must have had with a white man. That, she thinks, would also explain her mother's distrust of white people, an attitude she has always tried to pass on to her daughter. Leila has a very good friend in Millie, who is more down to earth and knows much better what she wants to achieve in life.Leila's boyfriend Michael, who is in his early twenties, is an irresponsible young man whose main interests are sex and drink. He does odd delivery jobs on his scooter for his friend Bradeth, but most time of the day the two men can be seen outside one of the small bars getting drunk on beer. Michael has fathered an illegitimate child but has not made any real effort to move in with its mother. Rather, as his own parents are dead, he still lives in his grandmother's house.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingo_(novel)"title="Ingo (novel)">
Ingo is a mermaid who is lost, and she has a flashback of her sister, Sapphire (Sapphy) remembering her father, Mathew Trewhella, showing her the carved Zennor mermaid, who was slashed with a knife a long time ago by an angry human. She had been in love with a human man who eventually swam away with her and became Mer.By an apparent coincidence, the truant man has exactly the same name as Sapphy's father. He is apparently her ancestor. Sapphy is haunted by her father's disappearance because he does not come back from the cove after an argument with her mother. Many people say he ran away with another woman, or has died, but Sapphy and her brother, Conor, who is two years older than she is, refuse to give up hope and secretly promise to never stop looking for him.About a year later, Conor also disappears. Fearing that the same thing that happened to her father has happened to Conor, Sapphy sets out to look for him. She finds him speaking to a mysterious mergirl named Elvira in the water at the nearby cove, and waits until the girl suddenly disappears. When asked about the girl, Conor behaves as if she were never there, and is shocked (and at first doesn't believe) that hours have passed since he went for a "quick" swim.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relentless_(Kernick_novel)"title="Relentless (Kernick novel)">
One Saturday afternoon, Tom Meron, a happily married middle-class man, receives a phone call from his old friend Jack Calley, a high-flying city lawyer whom he hasn't seen or heard from in years. While on the phone, Tom hears Jack being murdered on the line; his last words being the first two lines of Tom's address. Tom, terrified and confused, grabs his children and flees the house. While leaving the neighborhood, he passes a suspicious vehicle heading towards his house. He leaves his children with his mother-in-law and goes to find his wife only to be attacked in her office by a balaclava-clad man wielding an already bloody knife. He is then quickly arrested by the police on suspicion of murder. Tom is questioned about the murder of Vanessa Blake (his wife's work partner), telling him that there was evidence that he was at the crime scene.Meanwhile, Mike Bolt is working into a suicide–murder case of the chief justice and he thinks it might have something to do with Jack Calley because he was his solicitor. He finds out that the last call Jack made was to Tom Meron's landline so he goes to Tom's house to question him. Though Tom has just been released on bail, Mike orders Tom's re-arrest in order to question him. Officers attempt to apprehend Tom after he exits the station, but Tom decides to make a break for it. He manages to get a good way away but pulls up beside him. Thinking it is the police, he turns around (admitting defeat) when he is violently subdued by a man in a baseball cap, and subsequently forced into the back of the car. Tom quickly learns that the two men who kidnapped him mean to question Tom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Snake_and_the_Beautiful_Lily"title="The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily">
The tale begins with two will-o'-the-wisps who wake a ferryman and ask to be taken across a river. The ferryman does so, and for payment, they shake gold from themselves into the boat. This alarms the ferryman, for if the gold had gone into the river, it would overflow. He forces the will-o'-the-wisps to agree to pay him three artichokes, three cabbages, and three onions. The ferryman takes the gold up to a high place, and deposits it in a rocky cleft, where it is discovered by a green snake. The snake eats the gold and becomes luminous, allowing him to observe an underground temple where there is an old man with a lamp which can only give light when another light is present. The snake investigates the temple and finds four kings made of metal: one of gold, one silver, one bronze, and one a mixture of all three.The story then switches over to the wife of the old man, who meets a melancholy prince. He has met a beautiful Lily, but his happiness is prevented by the fact that anyone who touches her will die. The snake is able to form a temporary bridge across the river at midday, and in this way, the wife and prince come to Lily's garden, where she is mourning her fate. As twilight falls, the prince succumbs to his desire for the beautiful Lily, rushes towards her, and dies. The green snake encircles the prince, and the old man, his wife, and the will-o'-the-wisps form a procession and cross the river on the back of the snake.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomed_Queen_Anne"title="Doomed Queen Anne">
The book begins in 1520 in Calais, where Anne is at an event called the "Field of the Cloth of Gold", hosted by Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France. She has no great beauty (olive skin, dark hair and dark eyes in a time when pale-faced blonds were seen as the coveted image), no wealth and no title. She meets up with her older sister Mary, who is a lady-in-waiting in Queen Catherine of Aragon's court, and is rumoured to be the mistress of King Henry VIII of England. The King is tiring of Catherine because she has produced no sons - only a daughter, Mary.Anne's somewhat difficult childhood before the event is outlined. Always ill-favored by her parents, constantly antagonized by her older sister Mary, and disgusted by her own "deformities" (a small sixth finger and mole on her neck) she develops an ambition to rise to the top.Anne, jealous of her sister's rumoured affair when Mary flaunts the fact that she has the King's favor, vows to become the second wife of King Henry VIII. Anne, too, becomes a lady-in-waiting in the Queen's court. When the King tires of Mary, Anne uses her wits to gain the King's heart. While strategically courting the King, Anne manages to persuade Henry to seek an annulment for his marriage to Catherine. When the Pope refuses, he defies the Roman Catholic Church, declares his marriage null and void on his own authority, and marries Anne. Everybody at court hates her, claiming that she is a witch - as her sixth finger and the mole on her neck seem to indicate. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Royals_(book_series)"title="Young Royals (book series)">
The book begins in 1527, when Princess Mary, the daughter of Catherine of Aragon and King Henry VIII, learns she is to be betrothed to the king of France. Life goes well for the Princess until her father meets and falls in love with Anne Boleyn. This prompts him to demand an annulment of his marriage to Catherine, which would make the princess a bastard. Mary's father develops a strong attachment towards Anne Boleyn, who is slowly rising in the ranks as her mother is lowered.Years pass, and Henry grows even colder to his daughter. She is banished, forbidden to see her mother, and is living in constant fear of death once Anne takes the throne and her mother's marriage to the King is declared null and void. She is eventually summoned back to court to serve her baby half-sister, Elizabeth. She continues to fear death at her father's hands. The novel ends in the year 1536, when Anne Boleyn is beheaded, and Henry takes a third wife, Jane Seymour. Things are starting to look up for Mary, because Jane supports her, and her father welcomes Mary back into his life. But as she enjoys herself, Mary's supporters constantly remind her that she is not completely safe, as a part of Anne Boleyn still lingers: Mary's baby half-sister, Elizabeth. Mary is told that Elizabeth will eventually grow up to be her rival to the throne, but Mary argues that Elizabeth is just a child. The book ends with a statement from Mary saying that she had not known that her sister would become her enemy, her nightmare, foreshadowing the future struggles between the two princesses.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Lies_(Moloney_novel)"title="The Book of Lies (Moloney novel)">
A 12-year-old boy wakes up in an orphanage one night with no memory of who he is. The only thing he remembers is his name, Robert.But Robert is not his name, and a little girl called Bea knows this. She was there when Lord Alwyn, a once powerful sorcerer, erased all of his memory using the powerful Book of Lies.He meets Bea, who tells of his name. His real name is Marcel. He encounters the mighty Fergus and the haughty Nicola during his stay at the orphanage, both of whose memories are nothing more than lies.One day a mysterious man called Starkey claims to know the real lives of Nicola, Fergus and Marcel.Upon meeting his mother, imprisoned by the evil usurper King Pelham, he suddenly is not sure. Is Starkey all that he claims to be? Is his mother his real mother? Is King Pelham really evil, or was that a lie as well? Danger lurks at every corner, and Marcel must stop the most feared Mortregis, beast of war, from rising once again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_the_Books"title="Master of the Books">
The book mostly deals with Fergus's attempts to kill Damon, who tracks Damon all over the Mortal Kingdoms. When Marcel puts a curse over Elster to prove that Fergus would never kill his father, the curse backfires on Fergus, putting him in mortal danger, and Marcel journeys to Noam to try and undo the curse. However, along the way, he discovers that Fergus is not the only person that needs Marcel's help.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_the_City"title="Web of the City">
The plot revolves around the character of Rusty Santoro, a member of a fictional Brooklyn street gang. In the novel, Santoro is caught between his meager prospects in the neighborhood and obligations to his gang, The Cougars. Throughout the book he struggles with the prospect of leaving his neighborhood and his gang life behind. The novel depicts street fights, murders, and other realities of gang life in urban areas.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinneret_(novel)"title="Spinneret (novel)">
The novel is set on year 2016 Earth, with several interstellar ships being launched by the US and the EU in the hopes of finding habitable worlds to alleviate the overpopulation of Earth, only to find that while inhabitable worlds exists aplenty, they are all taken by a Commonwealth of alien races. This device allows the author to explain why his colonists are sent to the one world available, devoid of any life form because of its unexplainable lack of metals.Zahn describes briefly the conflicts between the military and civilian parts of the Astra expedition, the latter further divided between scientists and colonists, then introduces the main device of the novel – the planet itself somehow absorbs the metal, leading to equipment literally vanishing into the ground. Soon after the disappearance, what was thought to be a dormant volcano launches into orbit a cable of an unknown material, which turns out to be superconductive, of great tensile strength and with the ability to atomically bond with anything it touches. From this fact the author derives the novel's title: Astra is actually the "Spinneret" of this cable. What once was a resource-less dirtball soon becomes the most popular factory in the galaxy, with several alien races, the UN and the United States all jockeying for rights to the cable, with the colonists stuck in between. Looming over this tableau lies the question of who the Spinners were – or are, why they disappeared, and what they could have used such huge amounts of cable for.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winter_Prince"title="The Winter Prince">
Medraut, the illegitimate son of Artos the king, returns from his travels in Africa and elsewhere to watch over his younger half-brother, Lleu. Though Medraut, a child of incest, can never be High King, Artos knows that Medraut is a far better statesman and fighter than his younger brother; thus, Artos gives Medraut the task of making Lleu fit to be High King, promising Medraut the position of Regent in return.Medraut doesn't know if he loves or hates his brother; even from the beginning, he is disgusted by Lleu's naïve, careless use of power and jealous of Lleu's easy claim to Artos's affection. Their relationship intensifies when Medraut's lessons begin to stick, and Lleu starts to seem a suitable High King. Matters are further complicated by the entrance of Medraut's mother Morgause, whose disturbing similarities to Medraut are revealed even as she tries to slowly poison Lleu. Expecting Medraut's tacit approval of the poisoning, Morgause is unhappily surprised when Medraut protects Lleu and reveals Morgause's treachery to Artos. Artos banishes Morgause from the castle, and Morgause vows to erode Medraut's loyalty to Lleu.At first, Morgause's vow seems an empty threat. But while Lleu becomes more and more competent, an accident strips Medraut of his power and (he thinks) his father's affections. Resentment simmers between Medraut and Lleu, and by the time Morgause visits again, Medraut barely needs a catalyst. He kidnaps Lleu, intending to turn him over to Morgause, who in turn, plans to trade Lleu's life for the throne. But when Lleu steals Medraut's weapons and attempts to escape, the brothers are put in a unique situation; Medraut is ill and weaponless, Lleu is completely lost, and both are stranded in the middle of the woods. Medraut, struggling with regret as well as with his own envious desire to break Lleu's spirit, proposes a sadistic bargain; if Lleu can stay awake and alert for five days straight, Medraut will betray Morgause and lead him back to Camlan. Lleu agrees to the bargain, but as Lleu begins to hallucinate from lack of sleep, Medraut realizes that nothing his brother has said or done should have pushed him to this extreme.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Kings'_War"title="Great Kings' War">
"Great Kings' War" begins near the end of the colder than usual "Winter of Wolves" which has followed the war between Hostigos and its neighbours and the founding of Hos-Hostigos. While Great King Kalvan of Hos-Hostigos (formerly Corporal Calvin Morrison, Pennsylvania State Police) leads wolf and bandit hunts throughout his realm, the archpriests of Styphon's House plot their next move against Kalvan. As spring arrives Kalvan learns through the work of his intelligence officers Klestreus and Skranga that, in addition to the threat from Styphon's House, he must also face the armies of King Kaiphranos of Hos-Harphax, who seeks to regain the princedoms lost to Kalvan the previous year.To meet this two-fronted war Kalvan sends his father-in-law Ptosphes, Prince of Old Hostigos, as well as Princes Balthar of Beshta and Sarrask of Sask to meet the Holy Host of Styphon's House under Grand Master Soton in Beshta while he personally invades Hos-Harphax in the hope of capturing Harphax City and ending the reign of King Kaiphranos.Kalvan's campaign goes very well and he decimates the Harphaxi forces in the Battle of Chothros Heights, killing Crown Prince Philesteus of Hos-Harphax. Kalvan is preparing to press his advantage when he receives news that Ptosphes has been defeated by the Holy Host at Tenabra Town because of the treachery of Balthar of Beshta.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessa_(novel)"title="Tessa (novel)">
"Tessa" is the story of Tessa, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl who has a vivacious imagination but is, in spite of this, a loner. There is a crime or a riddle to solve in that novel, which is typical of Margit Sandemo. The story begins when a burglar makes a wrong phone number. He inadvertently calls Tessa and tells her about his upcoming crime. Tessa plans to check his intentions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ten_Teacups"title="The Ten Teacups">
Chief Inspector Masters receives a note that reads "There will be ten teacups at number 4, Berwick Terrace, W. 8, on Wednesday, July 31, at 5 p.m. precisely. The presence of the Metropolitan Police Is respectfully requested." The note troubles Masters because, two years earlier, he received a similar note that was ignored requesting that the police go to a different location. On the previous occasion a man named William Dartley was found shot dead, in a room with ten very expensive teacups (patterned with a peacock feather motif). The house where Dartley was found had no furnishings in any room, except for the room where his body was found.Masters takes the note to Sir Henry Merrivale, who assumes that Dartley was murdered over the teacups but realizes that that doesn't make sense, because the murderer brought the cups. H.M. then focuses on the second note, finding out that 4 Berwick Terrace is also an empty house. Inspector Masters reports that the day before some furniture was delivered to the house, and he responds by having the house guarded and having a police officer posted outside the newly-furnished room at all times.Masters discovers that a room in the house, a strongroom on the top floor, is going to be a meeting place for a man named Vance Keating and an unknown man or organization. Although Keating doesn't want police protection, Detective-Sergeant Pollard guards the door. At 5 p.m., two gunshots are heard. Pollard rushes into the room where he finds Keating shot dead, with a gun lying beside him. There is a thick layer of dust on the carpet that reveals only Pollard's and Keating's footprints. Pollard notices the window is open, and runs to it, noting that Sergeant Hollis stands directly under the window. Pollard suggests that the killer jumped out the window, to which Hollis's reply is "No one came out this window."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cop_This!"title="Cop This!">
In 1969, in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley a car bomb explodes. Eleven people are slain. The repercussions threaten the stability of the government. Johnny Arnold, a low-level criminal is charged with the crime. This brings a father and son duo in conflict with the state's leaders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ogre_Downstairs"title="The Ogre Downstairs">
When their mother Sally remarries, Caspar and Johnny Brent dislike their new stepfather, Jack McIntyre, though their younger sister, Gwinny, is less judgmental. Jack brings two sons of his own, Douglas and Malcolm, with him and the two sets of siblings do not get along. Tensions are increased by the small house in which the seven live. Jack himself proves to be prone to harsh comments, and Johnny soon dubs him "the Ogre".The Ogre buys chemistry sets, one each for Johnny and Malcolm. It is not too long before the children discover that some of the chemicals have magical properties. Douglas and Malcolm discover this after Johnny accidentally makes Gwinny fly, and a race begins between the two groups to find out which chemicals are magic. Caspar, Johnny, and Gwinny go flying, but the effect wears off away from home. Douglas has had to visit the mysterious store the chemistry sets came from to find out the antidote for a chemical which has turned Malcolm small, and they are able to attract his attention. He assists them in getting home, but the effect wears off again as they approach, which leaves Douglas stranded outside the house. Douglas (the oldest of the boys, perhaps fifteen) is caught by the Ogre, who assumes he has been sneaking out, and strikes him. The Ogre also strikes Johnny and Malcolm later in the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Genius"title="Simple Genius">
Sean King, financially hard-pressed and trying to help his professional and platonic partner Michelle Maxwell, is forced to seek an assignment from his ex-girlfriend Joan Dillinger, a fellow ex-Secret Service agent who runs her own private investigation agency.Joan gives him a case based at a laboratory, investigating the murder of a scientist, Monk Turing. During his investigations, he stumbles on Camp Peary, the CIA training facility which leads him to a more complicated investigation, on which he works together with Michelle, who has attempted suicide after a psychological breakdown. He encounters Turing's autistic daughter, Viggie Turing, who is also extraordinary talented, but is willing to trust only Michelle, and hates Horatio, the psychologist who is treating both her and Michelle.Eventually, Sean and Michelle solve the case, but not before being tortured by their enemies. Sean gains a treasure, but generously shares it with others even though he is in financial difficulties.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballet_Shoes_(novel)"title="Ballet Shoes (novel)">
The book concerns three adopted sisters, Pauline, Petrova and Posy Fossil. Each of the girls is discovered as a baby by Matthew Brown (Great-Uncle-Matthew, known as "Gum"), an elderly, absentminded palaeontologist and professor, during his world travels, and sent home to his practical great niece, Sylvia and her childhood nanny, Nana who live in London, England.Gum embarks upon an expedition of many years and arranges for money to support the family while he is gone. Gum does not return in the promised five years and the money is almost gone. As they have no way to contact or track him down, Sylvia and Nana take in boarders to make ends meet, including Mr. Simpson and his wife, Dr. Jakes and Dr. Smith, a pair of tutors who take over the children's schooling after Sylvia can no longer afford their school fees because of The Great Depression and must pull them out of Cromwell House. Boarder Theo Dane, an impractical dance teacher, arranges for the children to begin classes at the Children's Academy of Dancing and Stage Training.Pauline finds she has a talent and passion for acting while Petrova hates acting and dancing. Posy has a real talent for dancing. When she is about six, Madame Fidolia, a famous and retired Russian dancer, gives Posy private lessons, something she has never done before. As the children mature, they take on some of the responsibility of supporting the household. Much of the drama comes from the friction between the sisters and from balancing their desire to help support the family financially against the laws limiting the amount of time they may spend on stage. When Pauline is picked for a lead part in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" after performing in "The Blue Bird", the early success goes to her head, because of which the producer replaces her with her understudy (although only for a single performance, not permanently as portrayed in the 2007 film). Through this, Pauline learns enough humility to balance her talent, and goes on to play many successful lead parts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vargens_lilla_lamm"title="Vargens lilla lamm">
Sir Svante has five beautiful daughters, but that is pretty much all he has. The emperor's many wars has come at great costs for his people, and Sir Svante's mansion is not much more than a shell. He decides to arrange a big party, inviting all noble bachelors they know. If some of his daughters marry rich men, he will receive sizable dowries, enabling him to restore his mansion to its previous glory. Sir Svante makes an agreement with the mysterious Strelka brothers; two of his daughters, among them the young Svanehvit, barely fourteen, is to marry the brothers and follow them to their country. The Strelka castle has an ominous rumour. There have been numerous unexplained deaths, and some say that one of the brothers killed his first wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Renfield"title="The Book of Renfield">
"The Book of Renfield" works mainly as a companion piece to Stoker's original novel. In some cases, excerpts from the actual book are used but are modified and expanded under the pretense that "Dracula" is nonfiction and that Seward's entries were "edited, and in some instances, rewritten by John L. Seward before he provided them for the use of Mr. Bram Stoker, at the request of Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Harker". As such, whenever the text from "Dracula" is used, it is bolded to differentiate the changes.The book starts with a man discovered outside the ruins of Carfax Abbey, feasting on a rat, whose only form of identification is a handkerchief that reads "R. M. Renfield". He is taken in to Seward's asylum, where his sessions with the doctor reveal fragments of his tragic past and how he came to be Count Dracula's pawn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Fire_(Sansom_novel)"title="Dark Fire (Sansom novel)">
It is 1540 and the hottest summer of the sixteenth century. Matthew Shardlake, believing himself out of favour with Thomas Cromwell, is busy trying to maintain his legal practice and keep a discreet profile. But his involvement with a murder case, defending a girl accused of brutally murdering her young cousin, brings him once again into contact with the king's chief minister – and a new assignment ...The secret of Greek Fire, the legendary substance with which the Byzantines destroyed the Arab navies, has been lost for centuries. Now an official of the Court of Augmentations has discovered the formula in the library of a dissolved London monastery. When Shardlake is sent to recover it, he finds the official and his alchemist brother brutally murdered – the formula has disappeared.Now Shardlake must follow the trail of Greek Fire across Tudor London, while trying at the same time to prove his young client's innocence. But very soon he discovers nothing is as it seems ...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_(novel)"title="Axis (novel)">
"Axis" takes place on the new planet introduced at the end of "Spin", a world the Hypotheticals engineered to support human life and connected to Earth by way of the Arch that towers hundreds of miles over the Indian Ocean. Humans are colonizing this new world — and, predictably, fiercely exploiting its resources, chiefly large deposits of oil in the western deserts of the continent of Equatoria.Lise Adams is a young woman attempting to uncover the mystery of her father's disappearance ten years earlier. Turk Findley is an ex-sailor and sometimes-drifter. They come together when showers of cometary dust seed the planet with tiny remnant Hypothetical machines. Soon, this seemingly hospitable world becomes very alien, as the nature of time is once again twisted by entities unknown.A quasi-religious group of "Fourths" from Earth, led by Dr. Avram Dvali, lives in the desert seeded by falling dust. They've created a child they call Isaac with a Martian upgrade (fatal to adults) that connects him with the Hypotheticals. The Fourth-hunting "Department of Genomic Security" is searching for this group or for a visiting Martian Fourth who disapproves of Isaac's creation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Boring_Ass_Life"title="My Boring Ass Life">
The title is a reference to Smiths frequently used blog. The book's content is from entries Smith has written about on said blog, from mundane daily activities to a series of writings detailing his friend and frequent featured actor Jason Mewes' heroin addiction. Smith also chronicles the making of and release of his seventh film "Clerks II" and describes the filming of his acting roles in "Catch and Release" and "Live Free or Die Hard".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_the_Line_(book)"title="The End of the Line (book)">
Fishing is occurring at an unsustainable rate. Technological advances, political indecisiveness, and commercial interests in the fishing industry have produced a culture where fish stocks are being exploited beyond their capacity to regenerate. Commercial fish may become extinct within our lifetimes.Official figures of global fish stocks have been wrong for several years. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported that the quantity of wild fish caught had increased from 44 million tons in 1950, to 88 million tons in 1990 and 104 million tons in 2000. These figures were official even though the FAO knew they were false, that the catch was actually decreasing. In 1997, the Grand Banks cod fisheries of Newfoundland, Canada, had collapsed. Seventy-five percent of all fisheries were either fully exploited or overfished.Critically endangered species of fish are still allowed to be fished. For example, the bluefin tuna stock is equivalent to the black rhino. However, it is still being illegally caught and sold. Furthermore, there is even an oversupply problem in the current market as technological innovations have allowed entire schools of bluefin tuna to be caught at the same time. In Spain, the catch of bluefish tuna has exponentially decreased: 5000 million tons in 1999, 2000 million tons in 2000, 900 million tons in 2005.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bows_against_the_Barons"title="Bows against the Barons">
Set in medieval England, "Bows Against the Barons" relates the adventures of a peasant boy who becomes an outlaw and joins the band of Robin Hood. Together, they take up arms against the masters of England and fight for the rights of the common people. The protagonist's former master tries to suppress them, but at great cost.The title refers to the primary weapon of the outlaws – the longbow.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Me_If_You've_Heard_This_One_Before"title="Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before">
## High school.Albert was in self-imposed exile at local Bern High. After innumerable racial taunts and slurs, he had no friends. He no longer thought of girls, no longer looked people in the eye, ate lunch alone and got in the habit of carrying an entire day’s text books on his person, so as not to risk visiting his locker, for fear of being stuffed in it by one of the jocks from the lacrosse team.Albert’s clueless Korean-American immigrant parents have traditionally overloaded their hapless son each summer with more activities than he had during the school year. However, when Albert finished his sophomore year in high school, in a rare moment of diplomacy, his parents offered him an alternative...get a summer job.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Journeyer"title="The Journeyer">
Marco is the only heir to the wealthy Polo family of Venice. Unsupervised, he freely roams the streets and canals of the city getting in trouble. When he is falsely accused of murdering the husband of his lover, he is exiled from Venice and travels east with his father and uncle to the court of Kublai Khan, Mongol emperor of the orient. Marco remains in the empire for nearly twenty years and returns home as a wealthy man. His adventures become legendary.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beekeeper's_Apprentice"title="The Beekeeper's Apprentice">
After losing her family in a tragic motor accident in California, fifteen-year-old Mary Russell goes to live with her aunt in Sussex, England. Wandering the Sussex Downs in April 1915, she literally runs across fifty-four-year-old Sherlock Holmes, who has retired from his London practice and keeps bees. The two quickly become fast friends, Russell finding in Holmes a kindred spirit and steadfast teacher and Holmes finding in Russell a quick mind and a worthy apprentice in the art of detecting. By the time Russell enters Oxford University in the autumn of 1917, she is well-versed in Holmes's methods of disguise, tracking, and deduction.At Oxford, Russell reads chemistry and theology, immersing herself in the Bodleian Library and participating on the side in the dramatic society and elaborate pranks. Between terms, Russell solves her first cases as Holmes's apprentice, catching a German spy disguised as a neighbor's butler and apprehending a thief who had burgled the local pub. In August 1918, Holmes is consulted on the kidnapping of Jessica Simpson, the American senator's daughter, and brings Russell, elevating her apprenticeship. The pair journey in disguise as gypsies and trace the missing girl into Wales, where Russell takes initiative in rescuing Jessica, who develops a bond with her. However, Jessica's kidnappers are merely hired hands, and they fail to find the mastermind behind the plot. Russell and Holmes emerge from the case with a stronger sense of partnership, having solidified their mutual trust of each other's instincts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)"title="Blindsight (Watts novel)">
In the year 2082, thousands of large, coordinated objects of an unknown origin, dubbed "Fireflies", burn up in the Earth's atmosphere in a precise grid, while momentarily broadcasting across an immense portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, catching humanity off guard and alerting it to an undeniable extraterrestrial presence. It is suspected that the entire planet has been surveyed in one effective sweep. Despite the magnitude of this "Firefall", human politics soon return to normal.Years afterwards, a comet-surveying satellite stumbles across a radio transmission originating from a comet, subsequently named 'Burns-Caulfield'. This tight-beam broadcast is directed to an unknown location and in fact does not intersect the Earth at any point. As this is the first opportunity to learn more about the extraterrestrials, three waves of ships are sent out: the first being light probes shot out for an as-soon-as-possible flyby of the comet, then a wave of heavier but better-equipped probes, and finally a crewed ship, the "Theseus"."Theseus" is propelled by an antimatter reactor and captained by an artificial intelligence. It carries a crew of five cutting-edge transhuman hyper-specialists of whom one is a genetically reincarnated vampire who acts as the nominal mission commander. While the crew is in hibernation en route, the just-arrived second wave of probes commence a compounded radar scan of the subsurface of Burns-Caulfield, but this immediately causes the object to self-destruct. "Theseus" is re-routed mid-flight to the new-found destination of the signal: a previously undetected sub-brown dwarf deep in the Oort cloud, dubbed 'Big Ben'.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Antarctic_Mystery"title="An Antarctic Mystery">
## Volume 1.The story is set in 1839, eleven years after the events in "Arthur Gordon Pym", one year after the publication of that book.The narrator is a wealthy American Jeorling, who has entertained himself with private studies of the wildlife on the Kerguelen Islands and is now looking for a passage back to the United States. "Halbrane" is one of the first ships to arrive at Kerguelen, and its captain Len Guy somewhat reluctantly agrees to have Jeorling as a passenger as far as Tristan da Cunha.Underway, they meet a stray iceberg with a dead body on it, which turns out to be a sailor from "Jane". A note found with him indicates that he and several others including "Jane's" captain William Guy had survived the assassination attempt at Tsalal and are still alive.Guy, who had talked to Jeorling earlier about the subject of Pym, reveals himself to be the brother of William Guy. He decides to try to come to the rescue of "Jane"s crew. After taking on provisions on Tristan da Cunha and the Falklands, they head South with Jeorling still on board. They also take aboard another mysterious sailor named Hunt who is eager to join the search for undisclosed reasons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After_Judgment"title="The Day After Judgment">
"Black Easter" and "The Day After Judgment" were written with the assumption that the ritual magic for commanding demons, as described in grimoires, actually works.In the first book, a wealthy arms manufacturer comes to a black magician, Theron Ware, with a strange request: he wishes to release all the demons from Hell on Earth for one night to see what might happen. The book includes a lengthy description of the summoning ritual and a detailed description of the grotesque demons as they appear. Tension between Ware and Catholic white magicians arises over the terms and conditions of a covenant that provides for observers and limitations on interference with demonic workings. "Black Easter" ends with Baphomet announcing to the participants that the demons cannot be compelled to return to Hell: the war is over and God is dead."The Day After Judgment" develops and extends the characters from the first book. It suggests that God may not be dead, or that demons may not be inherently self-destructive, as something appears to be restraining the actions of the demons upon Earth. In a lengthy Miltonian speech at the end of the novel, Satan Mekratrig explains that, compared to humans, demons are good, and that if perhaps God has withdrawn Himself, then Satan beyond all others was qualified to take His place and, if anything, would be a more just god.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mutation_(novel)"title="The Mutation (novel)">
While using their aquatic morphs to chase the Yeerks' new Sea Blade, which was after the Pemalite ship, the Animorphs and Ax find themselves beached inside an underwater cavern. The cavern seems to be littered, however, with several different types of air and sea craft, with what appears to be human statues inside. Further inspection by Cassie and Ax reveals that these people were real, and were killed and stuffed for preservation. While attempting to escape and locate Visser Three, whose ship was taken by a strange, humanoid aquatic species, Jake, Cassie, Ax, Rachel, and Marco, all in their natural forms, are captured by these life-forms, who reveal themselves as Nartec. Tobias was on lookout above, and therefore was not captured. The Nartec queen explains that they once were humans who lived above water, and when their city sunk, they began to adapt to underwater life. Ax realizes that radioactivity is what aided their ability to evolve so quickly. He also surmises that the Nartec have inbred for years, except for possible breeding with their captives prior to killing them, so their genetic code is breaking down. After the Nartec queen, Queen Soco, makes it clear that she intends to "preserve" the Animorphs, she permits them to do some sightseeing, but warns them not to try and escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love,_Stargirl"title="Love, Stargirl">
New in town, homeschooled, and feeling rejected by Leo, the 16-year-old narrator of the first book who had fallen under her spell, she is lonely and sad—her "happy wagon," where she keeps stones representing her level of happiness, is almost empty. She befriends Dootsie, a noisy but lovable 6-year-old who takes a shine to Stargirl and wants to switch.Dootsie introduces her to Betty Lou, an agoraphobic elderly woman. She is quite nice and Stargirl soon becomes friends with her as well. They also share a very nice time watching flowers together. With the arrival of autumn, Stargirl's life is affected as she meets several new characters: Alvina, a grumpy young girl who delivers donuts to Betty Lou; Perry, a teen boy who Alvina is falling in love with; and Perry's "harem," The Honeybees.As winter sets in, Stargirl plans a Winter Solstice party, inviting all of the people she has encountered in her new town to celebrate the beginning of winter by joining her at sunrise on her Enchanted Hill, which she now calls Calendar Hill. Stargirl also discovers the truth about Perry, who has been very mysterious about his family and personal life. She learns his mother has a new baby, whom Perry has been trying to support by working several jobs and by resorting to "stealing" to avoid burdening her with feeding him. In the end, Stargirl becomes worried that no one will show up for her solstice party, but is reassured by Archie, her former teacher and friend from Arizona, who arrives to attend her celebration and comforts her with his wisdom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_Wizard"title="Dog Wizard">
The story opens with the exiled wizard Antryg Windrose and his companion Joanna living in California after their escape through the void to Earth, after being condemned to death in the previous book, "The Silicon Mage".The story continues as Joanna is kidnapped from her apartment by a mysterious person wearing the robes of a mage. Antryg is forced to respond to the call of the wizards who condemned them in order to track her whereabouts. After he arrives at the Citadel of Wizards, he realizes that he was brought there for a completely different reason, and that the wizards have no idea where Joanna is or who kidnapped her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Everything"title="The Book of Everything">
The book, set in Amsterdam, relates the tale of a nine-year-old boy named Thomas who see things no one else can, such as invisible hail that "ripped all the leaves from the trees", and tropical fish in the canal. Thomas lives in a family of four: his parents and his sister, Margot. They are not, however, a harmonious family, as their father repeatedly hits their mother, and punishes Thomas by beating him with a wooden spoon. He is a very religious man, but he fears embarrassment and is said to "not belong with people". Thomas writes down everything in his "Book of Everything", a diary which holds his thoughts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_with_a_Pearl_Earring_(novel)"title="Girl with a Pearl Earring (novel)">
Sixteen-year-old Griet has to leave her family home in Delft in 1664 after her father is blinded in an accident. As a tile-painter, her father is a member of the artists’ guild, so employment is found for her as a maid in painter Johannes Vermeer's household. In the strictly stratified society of the time, this is a fall in status because of the bad reputation that maids have for stealing, spying and sleeping with their employers. A further complication is that the Vermeers belong to the grudgingly tolerated Catholic minority while Griet is a Protestant. At their home, she befriends the family's oldest daughter, Maertge, but is never on good terms with the spiteful Cornelia, a younger daughter who takes after her class-conscious mother, Catharina. Griet also finds it difficult to keep on the right side of Tanneke, the other house servant, who is moody and jealous.Griet lives for two years at her employers’ and is only allowed to visit her home on Sundays, where the family circle is breaking up. Her younger brother Frans is apprenticed outside and eventually her younger sister Agnes dies of the plague. But during the early months of her work at the Vermeers', Pieter, the son of the family butcher at the meat market, starts courting Griet. She has been strictly brought up and does not welcome this at first, but tolerates his interest because it is of advantage to her impoverished parents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocent_Traitor"title="Innocent Traitor">
The story starts with her birth in 1537. The daughter of Lady Frances Brandon and Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Suffolk, Jane is seen as a burden by her parents, both of whom resent her for being a girl instead of a boy, and is regularly beaten by her mother.Jane grows up close to her nurse, Mrs. Ellen and is highly educated, to the standards of a princess. After Henry VIII's death and Catherine Parr's marriage to Thomas Seymour, Jane goes to live with the former queen and her husband to further her education while her elders plot her marriage to Edward VI of England.When it becomes clear that the young king will not live long, other plans are made for Jane. John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland, gets the young Edward to proclaim Jane as his successor.He does this by proclaiming his half sisters, Mary and Elizabeth I of England, both bastards and not fit to take the throne. According to Edward's father's will, if all his children were to die without heirs, then the succession to the crown would follow the lineage of his late younger sister, Mary Tudor. Frances, the daughter of Mary, relinquishes her right to the crown in order for it to go to her eldest daughter, Jane, since she had no sons.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abyss_(Yourcenar_novel)"title="The Abyss (Yourcenar novel)">
Zeno, an illegitimate son, is born in the Ligre household, a rich banking family of Bruges. Zeno renounces a comfortable career in the priesthood and leaves home to find truth at the age of 20. In his youth, after leaving Bruges, he greedily seeks knowledge by roaming the roads of Europe and beyond, leaving in his wake a nearly legendary — but also dangerous — reputation of genius due to the works he accomplishes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skydive!"title="Skydive!">
The story is about 13-year-old Jesse Rodriguez who has an exciting job working for his friend Buck at a small flight and skydiving school near Seattle. But he can't wait to turn 16 and finally be able to make his first free-fall jump from a plane.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seventh_Crystal"title="The Seventh Crystal">
The story is about Chris Masters who is having problems with bullies at his school, stealing his lunch money and threatening him. His next biggest problem is a video game called "The Seventh Crystal" which came in the mail with almost no instructions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Creature_of_Black_Water_Lake"title="The Creature of Black Water Lake">
The story is about Ryan Swanner and his mom who have just moved to the mountain resort of Black Water Lake. The locals tell of a giant, ancient creature which lives beneath the lake's seemingly calm surface.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Benders"title="Time Benders">
The story is about Zack Griffin and Jeff Brown who both win trips to a famous science laboratory. There they discover that one of the machines in the lab can "bend" time, and they end up in ancient Egypt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Bringer"title="Fire Bringer">
"Fire Bringer" is the story of Rannoch, a red deer born in 13th-century Scotland. Rannoch is born with a white mark on his forehead resembling an oak leaf, the symbol of the deer god, Herne. To the Herla, as the deer are called among animals, the white mark is the symbol of a prophecy foretelling the birth of a deer with the ability to communicate with all animals who would bring freedom to the Herla.The story begins the night Rannoch's father, Brechin, is murdered, and his mother, Eloin, is forced to become the mate of the Lord of the Herd, Drail. Rannoch is adopted by another doe, Bracken. However, soon Drail decides to kill Rannoch and the other fawns out of fear of the prophecy. When Eloin finds out, she warns Bracken and the other mothers that their fawns are in danger; however, only some of them listen. So Rannoch, Bracken, five other fawns, and their mothers flee Drail's herd and take refuge with another, which they believe will be a place of safety.Soon, however, human hunters attack their new herd. Rannoch helps his friends by drawing off one of the hunters' dogs but is injured in the process, after which the other deer believe him to be dead. Rannoch is found by a human boy who takes him home, where the boy and his mother keep him safe while his leg heals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sweet_Dove_Died"title="The Sweet Dove Died">
Leonora Eyre, an attractive and elegant, but essentially selfish, middle-aged woman, becomes friendly with antique dealer Humphrey Boyce and his nephew James. Both men are attracted to Leonora, but Leonora prefers the young, good-looking James to the more "suitable" Humphrey. While James is away on a buying trip, Leonora discovers to her annoyance that he has been seeing Phoebe, a girl of his own age. Leonora makes use of Humphrey to humiliate Phoebe, and turns out a sitting tenant in order that James can take up a flat in her own house. She does this in an apparent attempt to control his life. While abroad, the bisexual James has begun a relationship with an American, the amoral Ned, who later follows him to London. Ned prises James out of Leonora's grasp, only to reject him for another lover. James attempts a reconciliation with Leonora, but she refuses to give him a second opportunity to hurt her, and settles for the admiration of the less attractive Humphrey.As with all Pym's fiction, the novel contains many literary references, notably to works by Keats, John Milton and Henry James.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_Children"title="The Emperor's Children">
In 2001 in New York City three friends, who all showed signs of brilliance in their youth, reach their 30s without having achieved the promise they showed a decade earlier. Danielle Minkoff is the only one of her friends to hold a steady job, working as a producer for a TV program that makes documentaries. Marina Thwaite is the daughter of a revered literary critic and author Murray Thwaite and his wife Annabel. Years earlier, Marina secured a contract to write a book about children's fashion, and having used up all her advance money and facing a hard deadline, moves back into her childhood home with her parents. Meanwhile, Julius Clarke, a brilliant and witty critic for "The Village Voice," cannot sustain himself with his literary work and is forced to take temporary jobs to supplement his income—which he finds demeaning. At one of his temp jobs, he meets a successful, slightly younger man David Cohen. Juliius seduces him and eventually moves in with him and allows himself to be kept like a housewife. He keeps Marina and Danielle away from David.Meanwhile, Danielle begins two flirtations, one with Ludovic Seeley, an Australian editor who has moved to New York City to start a literary journal "The Monitor" (named after "Le Moniteur Universel") and another with Marina's father Murray, who begins an email correspondence at first using her job and later concern over Marina's unemployment as reasons to keep contacting her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unquiet_Earth"title="The Unquiet Earth">
The Unquiet Earth is a novel written from the perspective of multiple narrators. The three main narrators are Dillon, Rachel, and Jackie who are all family. Dillon is Rachel's younger cousin, and Jackie is most likely their child.The story begins prior to the birth of Jackie and is narrated by Dillon and Rachel, children living on their family land, the Homeplace. From the beginning, Dillon makes claims that he loves Rachel partially because she is the only one who has memories of his father. They both narrate parts of their childhood and the beginning of the novel mainly depicts how their relationship grows and how their love for one another begins. They are first cousins - therefore, their mothers are sisters. The first instance in which their love is really shown is when Rachel falls into a river and Dillon is forcibly restrained by his mother from diving in to save her because of her fear of losing him as well. He is forced to watch Rachel suffer and nearly be swept away by the current, but luckily she was dragged out by the mule she was riding. They rush her home, and Dillon watches through a window as his mother helps a cold and naked Rachel recover.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffball_(novel)"title="Puffball (novel)">
Liffey and Richard, a young London couple who move to the country with the expectation of having children. Their neighbors are Mab and Tucker, a farming family with five children of their own. Mabs, jealous of the newcomers' easy life, sends Tucker to sleep with Liffey while Richard is away, priming her with an herbal aphrodisiac first. She becomes angry, however, when Liffey becomes pregnant and she finds that she herself is suddenly unable to conceive. Incorrectly believing the father of the child might be Tucker, Mabs attempts to abort the child by sneaking herbs into Liffey's tea and food. The unborn child, however, mystically takes charge and gives Liffey directions, saving her life and its own. Once the baby is born, Mabs sees the resemblance to Richard and, now pregnant herself, abandons her anger towards the couple.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possessing_the_Secret_of_Joy"title="Possessing the Secret of Joy">
It tells the story of Tashi, an African woman and a minor character in Walker's earlier novel "The Color Purple". Now in the US she comes from Olinka, Alice Walker's fictional African nation where female genital mutilation is practiced. Tashi marries an American man named Adam then leaves Olinka because of the war. Tashi chooses to go back to Olinka to undergo circumcison because she is a woman torn between two cultures, Olinkan and Western. Instead of feeling free from not having the procedure done as a child, she feels bothered by it. She wants to honor her Olinkan roots and has the operation in her teen years, although it is usually performed on female children. Tashi later sees several psychiatrists because she goes crazy due to the trauma she has suffered before finding the strength to act. The novel is told in many different voices, which are the characters in the novel.The novel explores what it means to have one's gender culturally defined and emphasizes that, according to Walker, "Torture is not culture."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Under_Popular"title="File Under Popular">
The essays in "File Under Popular" tackle the subject of "popular music", what it is, its origins and the political and marketing forces behind it. Cutler charts the history of music and how it was changed by written notation and then recording technology. Three of the essays dwell specifically on individual musicians and groups, namely Sun Ra, The Residents, Phil Ochs and Elvis Presley, but their stories are told within the context of the evolution of music. "Necessity and Choice in Musical Forms" is the first sketch of an analytical theory that shows how memory systems underpin the forms that music can take; part III of this essay is a personnel memoir of Cutler's that explains how his former band, Henry Cow functioned outside the music industry and their involvement in the establishment of Rock in Opposition. The last two essays deal with the development of progressive rock in the United Kingdom, its significance and the politics behind it.Cutler continued his analysis on "popular music" in 1986 in two articles, "Skill, Part 1: The Negative Case For Some New Music Technology" and "Skill, Part 2: Heavy Metal, Punk and the New Wave", published in the "RēR Quarterly" sound-magazine, Volume 1 Number 3 (1986) and Volume 2 Number 2 (1987), respectively. These articles were later reworked by Cutler into a single essay entitled "Skill", which was included in the 1996 expanded Japanese edition of "File Under Popular".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly_(novel)"title="Grizzly (novel)">
The story is about Justin McCallister who loves life on his aunt and uncle's sheep ranch in Montana. Until a grizzly bear begins terrorizing the livestock, injuring Justin's collie, Radar, and killing his pet lamb, Blue.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunder_Valley"title="Thunder Valley">
The story is about Jeremy and Jason Parsons who are left to take care of their grandparents Thunder Valley Ski Lodge while their grandma goes to visit their grandfather in hospital with a broken hip. Strange things begin happening once Grandma leaves, though.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_the_Ruins"title="Curse of the Ruins">
The story is about Sam, his thirteen-year-old twin sister, Katie and their cousin Shala who are trying to find their dad who is lost on a New Mexico ruin while escaping danger from bad guys who want to find a secret map, which their dad left them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_of_the_Hawk"title="Flight of the Hawk">
The story is about Andy who is sent to live with his mysterious grandfather Hawkes after his parents' deaths. Andy soon finds out his grandfather isn't what he seems, but instead is an inventor, and discovers that his parents' deaths may not have been an accident. When Grandfather Hawkes's life is threatened, Andy decides he's not going to lose another person he loves. So using his grandfather's inventions, Andy becomes The Hawk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Testament_of_Oscar_Wilde"title="The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde">
The novel is written in the form of a diary which Oscar Wilde was writing in Paris in 1900, up to his death. The diary itself is completely fictional, as is the detail contained, although the events and most of the characters (such as the characters of Lord Alfred Douglas, Robert Ross and the Earl of Rosebery and his incarceration, at Pentonville, later Reading) are real. In this diary he looks back at his life, writing, and ruin through trial and gaol. Included are fairy tales much like those Wilde wrote, although again these are wholly Ackroyd's invention. The last pages are written in the character of Maurice, Wilde's valet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senrid"title="Senrid">
Senrid is King of Marloven Hess, but in name only because his uncle Tdanerand holds the power. When the Marlovens try to attack the nearby kingdom of Vasande Leror they are defeated by the combined efforts of Vasande Leror's King Leander, his small army, a little bit of magic and a shapeshifting girl named Faline. Senrid's first mission is to get revenge on Leander (and his whining sister Kitty) and Faline. This gets more complicated as many allies of Leander and Faline get involved to try to rescue them. Eventually as magic combines and nearly destroys them in a battle they are thrown off world. When they get back, Senrid must travel and discover whether he wants to join the evil black mages for power or join the white forces of good to help his country.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystic_Masseur_(novel)"title="The Mystic Masseur (novel)">
"The Mystic Masseur" follows the life of Ganesh Ramsumair, a Trinidadian of Indian heritage. As a young man, Ganesh attends a training college for teachers, and after graduation, he begins working as a primary school teacher in the Port of Spain, Trinidad’s capital. However, he quickly loses interest in this profession and returns to his hometown of Fourways, where he learns that his father has just died. Ganesh plans to be either a writer or a professional masseur, and he befriends a local shop owner named Ramlogan. Ramlogan has a 16-year-old daughter named Leela, and Leela and Ganesh soon marry. After the wedding, Ganesh demands a large dowry payment from Ramlogan, which angers the latter.Ganesh and Leela go to live in the small rural village of Fuente Grove, and he befriends a shop owner there named Beharry. Beharry encourages Ganesh to read and become a writer, and Ganesh orders several hundred books by mail to comprise his personal library. He reads the books and makes notes, but Leela becomes frustrated by the lack of progress Ganesh makes with actually writing. She leaves Ganesh and returns to Fourways to live with her father again. Ganesh spends the next five weeks writing an educational text about Hinduism, and when he finishes it, he has hires a print shop to make copies of his book. He brings the book to Leela and Ramlogan, and they are ecstatic that he has written a book. However, Ramlogan becomes furious when he sees that the book is dedicated to Beharry rather than Leela or himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Teahouse_Fire"title="The Teahouse Fire">
Set in late nineteenth century Japan, "The Teahouse Fire" is the story of Aurelia, a young French-American girl who, after the death of her mother and her missionary uncle, finds herself lost and alone and in need of a new family. Knowing only a few words of Japanese she hides in a Japanese tea house and is adopted by the family who own it: gradually falling in love with both the Japanese tea ceremony and with her young mistress, Yukako.As Aurelia grows up she devotes herself to the family and its failing fortunes in the face of civil war and western intervention, and to Yukako's love affairs and subsequent marriage. But her feelings for her mistress seem doomed never to be reciprocated and, as tensions mount in the household, Aurelia begins to realise that to the world around her she will never be anything but an outsider.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion's_Gate"title="The Scorpion's Gate">
A coup in Saudi Arabia topples the sheiks and installs an Islamic government in its place. The weaknesses of the new government, combined with the oil riches of the country, attract attention from all over the world as larger, oil-hungry countries attempt to realign the map of the Middle East.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Duel"title="Crown Duel">
## Part One – Crown Duel.The novel begins in the fictional country of Remalna in Sartorias-deles, where seventeen-year-old Countess Meliara "Mel" Astiar of Tlanth makes an oath to her dying father. She swears in that oath that she and her older brother Count Branaric "Bran" (21) will defend their people from the growing greed of King Galdran. Galdran covets the Tlanth lands for his cruel cousin, Baron Nenthar Debegri, and also seeks to break the Covenant – an ancient pact between humans and the Hill Folk – by resuming the harvest of their valuable "colorwoods". When Mel and Bran learn of these plans, they feel compelled to fulfill their promise and enter into a war ill-prepared and severely outnumbered.Debegri attempts to subdue Tlanth under the pretense of unpaid taxes and for conspiring to break the Covenant. Mel and Bran and their small group of forces – mostly farmers and tradespeople – initially succeed at foiling Debegari with guerilla tactics, such as blockading a stream to flood the enemy's camp. However, the war changes for the worse when the capable Marquis of Shevraeth (25), the heir to the nearby principality of Renselaeus, takes command from Debegari. Shevraeth soon captures Mel and takes her to the capitol of Remalna-city, imprisoning her. Shevraeth tells her that the king orders her to surrender Tlanth's forces or face execution. Mel refuses, and soon escapes imprisonment with the help of their family spy, Azmus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathstalker_Rebellion"title="Deathstalker Rebellion">
Set in a far-future fictional universe, "Deathstalker Rebellion" develops the plot and themes introduced in Deathstalker.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_in_Nature"title="Intelligence in Nature">
The book is divided into eleven chapters, each of which is a recounting of an experience the author had in some remote part of the world. Narby's recounts a journey to the Peruvian Amazon in 2001, and recalls his September 2001 canoe trip with a Matsigenka Indian on the Urubamba River.Narby recounts his meeting Ornithologist Charlie Munn, who recounted his investigation of macaws in the region that consumed clay which binds to the toxic alkaloids in the seeds that form part of the macaw's diet. Munn notes that the birds choose clay which is higher in kaolin content as this is more effective in binding the toxins than other clay. Narby then speculates on whether this is a sign of intelligence, instinct or evolutionary adaptive behaviour, noting that humans are identified as "smart" when they consume the clay, while birds are identified as "instinctive" for the same behaviour.Narby discusses the intelligence of corvidae, that half of the known species of birds have to learn how to sing and learning is a hallmark of intelligence. He claims that, when in a trance, shamans communicate using their minds with animals and plants, drawing parallels with similar behaviour exhibited in religion. He then suggests that scientists and shamans should collaborate to "understand the minds of birds and other animals." Narby also claims that shamans communicate with some entity to negotiate the exploitation of natural resources and that the entity protects plants and animals from reckless and greedy humans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Not_Enough_(novel)"title="The World Is Not Enough (novel)">
"The World Is Not Enough" was adapted by then-current Bond novelist Raymond Benson from the screenplay by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Bruce Feirstein. It was Benson's fourth James Bond novel and followed the story closely, except in some details. For example, Elektra does not die immediately after Bond shoots her; instead, she begins quietly to sing. The novel also gave the Cigar Girl a name: Giulietta da Vinci, and retained a scene between her and Renard that was cut from theatrical release. Also, Bond is still carrying his Walther PPK instead of the newer P99.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_Burning"title="Rome Burning">
Three years after the events of "Romanitas", the Roman Empire is on the brink of war with Nionia (Japan), and plagued by a sequence of mysterious wildfires. Marcus Novius, the young heir to the Roman throne is forced to take charge as Regent when the Emperor Faustus falls suddenly ill. Marcus attempts to recruit Varius as his advisor, but Varius, who is still haunted by the events of the first book (in which he lost his wife and was framed for murder and treason), refuses. While Marcus works to avoid a world war, his lover Una is intent on discovering the truth about his ambitious cousin Drusus's involvement in a conspiracy that almost claimed Marcus's life. Her brother Sulien finds himself caught up along with Varius in a disastrous attack on an arms factory at Veii, just outside Rome. After surviving this and saving Sulien's life, Varius decides to return to political life after all, but Sulien is left with many questions about what happened. Una exposes Drusus's involvement in the murders of Marcus's parents and Varius's wife, although not before he almost kills her.Varius urges Marcus to have Drusus killed but Marcus is reluctant to begin his reign with an extra-judiciary killing, and is content to have Drusus tried for Una's attempted murder as there is no direct evidence for his other crimes. Drusus, however, has formed an alliance with a Roman general, Salvius, who releases Drusus from prison and urges the sickly Emperor Faustus to rethink his decision to allow Marcus so much power. Drusus, who has hitherto never felt much personal resentment of those who have stood in his way, has conceived a passionate hatred of Una, and tries to convince Faustus that she, Sulien, and Varius are a dangerous influence on Marcus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dogs_of_Babel"title="The Dogs of Babel">
The book is narrated by Paul Iverson, a linguist who calls home one day to find out his wife is dead. He is very troubled by this and therefore for the remainder of the book he is trying to teach the only witness of her death, his dog Lorelei, to speak. Throughout the book, Paul uncovers more about his wife's last day and remembers events through their life they led up to it.Paul Iverson called home to find a police officer answering the phone and suggesting him to come home. When he comes home he finds his wife, Alexandra "Lexy" Ransome, dead, fallen from an apple tree. The police declared it an accident, but Paul is bothered by the "anomalies" he finds, such as signs of someone cooking steak, a rearrangement of the book shelf, and the question as to what his wife was doing in the apple tree in the first place. The only witness to her death is their dog Lorelei, and Paul goes on a crusade to teach Lorelei to speak, in order to clear up the mystery. He cites several past attempts as evidence he will be successful, especially the case of Dog J, who was surgically altered by Wendell Hollis, "the Dog Butcher of Brooklyn", so that he could make human sounds. Paul leaves his job at the college, and dedicates his time to this single cause.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopgirl_(novella)"title="Shopgirl (novella)">
Its titular character is 28-year-old Mirabelle Buttersfield, a lonely, depressed Vermont transplant who sells expensive evening gloves nobody ever buys at Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills and spends her evenings watching television with her two cats. She moved to California in an attempt to find herself and fall in love but instead takes medication to fight off depression. Much to her chagrin, she is pursued by Jeremy, a socially inept and unambitious slacker and roadie for a band, and winds up entertaining his advances to avoid being alone. After a middle-aged, womanizing Seattle millionaire named Ray Porter visits her store and sends her a dinner invitation, the two begin to date. She attempts to forge a relationship with him, even though it's clear Porter isn't looking for a long-term commitment. Along the way, the story explores the deeper meaning behind their opposing intentions. Also playing roles in her life are her father, a dysfunctional Vietnam War veteran, and Lisa, her promiscuous, image-obsessed co-worker and voracious rival.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trek_to_Madworld"title="Trek to Madworld">
The receives orders to proceed at maximum warp to Epsilon Delta IV, where 700 colonists are slowly perishing due to radiation poisoning. The journey is interrupted by Enowil, an eccentric being of incredible power, who seizes control of the ship. Also seized are Klingon and Romulan starships.Enowil, requesting aid from all three parties in resolving a purported “private matter,” offers any reward within the scope of his power. Captain Kirk is thus faced with a dilemma: If he opts to decline, both the Romulans and Klingons have the opportunity to acquire a potentially unstoppable weapon, which would disrupt the galactic balance of power. Yet if he chooses to accept, the abandoned 700 colonists on Epsilon Delta IV will most certainly succumb to an agonizing and protracted death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Chouans"title="Les Chouans">
At the start of the novel, the Republican Commander Hulot is assaulted by Chouan forces, who convert dozens of conscripts. An aristocrat, Marie de Verneuil, is sent by Joseph Fouché to subdue and capture the royalist leader, the Marquis de Montauran, also known as "Le Gars". She is aided by a detective named Corentin.Eventually, Marie becomes smitten with her target. In defiance of Corentin and the Chouans who detest her, she devises a plan to marry the Chouan leader. Fooled by Corentin into believing that Montauran loves her mortal enemy Madame du Gua, Marie orders Hulot to destroy the rebels. She discovers her folly too late and tries, unsuccessfully, to save her husband the day after their marriage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Wind"title="The Name of the Wind">
The Kingkiller Chronicle takes place in the fictional world of Temerant, a large continent of which the known part, called the Four Corners of Civilization, is divided into several distinct nations and cultures. Much of the world follows a faith vaguely similar to medieval Christianity. Coexisting alongside the mortal world is the realm of the Fae, a parallel universe inhabited by supernatural creatures which can move between the two realms only when the moon is full. Magic exists in Temerant, too, but obeys a well-defined set of rules and principles that can only be exploited by those who have trained in its professional and scientific use.As the novel begins, the reader hears an old storyteller speaking of a famous old wizard called Taborlin the Great, who was captured by evil beings called the Chandrian. Escaping them, Taborlin fell from a great height—but since he knew the "Name of the Wind", he called it and the Wind came and set him down safely. In later parts of the book, characters are often skeptical of such stories. Some kinds of magic are taught in the university as academic disciplines and have daily-life applications (those who can afford it are able to buy magical lamps, for example, much better than the candles used by poorer people). However, most of the population does not have reliable knowledge of the magical disciplines and many still doubt that magicians can truly call upon the Wind. The Chandrian—whose appearance is supposedly heralded by flames turning blue—are often dismissed as mythical bogeymen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Palace_of_Laughter"title="The Palace of Laughter">
Miles Wednesday, an orphan boy who has recently escaped from the cruel Pinchbucket's orphanage, is the only one who witnesses the arrival of the Circus Oscuro in town one night. He is promptly visited by a tiger with the ability to talk; he considers making Miles his next meal, but leaves him alone after he "smells the circus in him". Miles, who has never even been to a circus before in his life, wonders what he could mean.The next evening, Miles sneaks into the circus to find the tiger and watches some of the show from behind the bleachers. He sees a small girl performing acrobatic stunts fall from the top of the tent and tries to catch her. She sprouts wings, however, and flies to safety. Miles' act of bravery results in him being kicked out by the ringmaster's right-hand man, Ghengis. Miles stays hidden and sees the acrobat, who calls herself "Little", being tied up and taken back to her wagon when the show ends. Miles introduces himself and tries to steal the keys to rescue her, but is caught by the ringmaster, the Great Cortado. Miles pretends that he is interested in joining the circus and steps outside to prepare a "disappearing act". Angered at being tricked and losing one of his stars, Cortado unleashes a monstrous beast called The Null to chase after Little and Miles. The two children barely escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Test_(Applegate_novel)"title="The Test (Applegate novel)">
As the book opens, Tobias discovers Bobby McIntire, a missing child who was hiking through the woods. He leads the boy's father and a search party to his son.Throughout the book Tobias deals with the psychological after-effects of the torture he endured at the hands of the sadistic sub-visser Taylor. He continues to question his own strength and resolve.Taylor, claiming she is now part of the Yeerk Peace Movement, enlists Tobias to try and sabotage the Yeerk Pool. All of the other Animorphs, except for Cassie, who declines on moral grounds, accompany him and Ax as they dig a tunnel to the pool. In order to dig a tunnel to the Yeerk Pool, Tobias and Ax alternate turns in Taxxon morph, which has a nearly uncontrollable constant hunger. However, it is revealed that Taylor has been working for Visser Three, and sets off a gas explosion. Cassie is able to turn off the gas from its control station, injuring several humans in the process. She is once again distraught by the violence she has had to use to save her friends. Taylor is presumably killed in the gas explosion.The book ends with Rachel and Tobias on the beach. She holds his hand and reassures him that he is not weak, encouraging him to let go of the past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Harold_and_the_Gnome_King"title="Sir Harold and the Gnome King">
Harold Shea's wife Belphebe of Faerie suggests he undertake a transdimensional expedition to retrieve his colleague Walter Bayard, who is stranded in the world of Irish mythology. Walter's long absence has put him in danger of losing his tenure at the Garaden Institute that employs both him and Harold as psychologists. A secondary advantage to Belphebe will be to get Harold out of her hair; she is pregnant with their first child, and he is getting on her nerves. Harold prepares for the trip more carefully than on previous occasions, reluctant to risk his life as cavalierly as before now that he has a family. In particular, he replaces the épée he formerly favored with a stronger cavalry saber, and dons a mail shirt for greater protection. To ensure he is able to locate Walter amid the uncertainties of transdimensional travel, he makes the goal of his expedition not Eriu but the Land of Oz, whose rulers are possessed of an artifact "effective as a teletransporter," the Magic Belt of the Gnome King. (De Camp prefers the standard spelling of "gnome" to Baum's idiosyncratic "nome.")As usual, things immediately go wrong. Instead of Oz, Harold ends up in a decidedly more sinister place, the University of the Unholy Names in Dej, a world of vaguely Islamic and Arabic antecedents. There he encounters the student Bilsa at-Tâlib, who enthusiastically suggests a magical contest between them and conjures up a gigantic snake that immediately snaps Harold up. Fortunately, the latter's mail shirt protects him long enough for him to repeat the spell that transports him between worlds, and this time he really does end up in Oz (thankfully "sans" snake).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan's_Glory"title="Vulcan's Glory">
Young ensign Spock, is serving his first mission on the "Starship Enterprise" under Captain Christopher Pike. Spock is having a difficult time dealing with his Vulcan heritage and how it conflicts with his duties as an officer and what he wants personally.Spock becomes involved in a mission to retrieve the 'Vulcan's Glory', a priceless gem thought lost in a spaceship crash. It is soon discovered there is far more to this mission than is readily apparent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobody's_Girl_(novel)"title="Nobody's Girl (novel)">
The story follows 13-year-old Perrine. She first arrives in Paris with her ill mother in a cart with very few possessions pulled by a donkey, Palikare. She stays at the Guillot field, where her mother gets really ill. In order to have enough money for medicine, Perrine sells Palikare, with the help of Grain-of-Salt ( the owner of Guillot fields) to La Rouquerie. Despite all the care, Perrine's mother dies, leaving Perrine as an orphan, so Perrine sets off on foot, almost penniless, to find her relatives in Maraucourt. She makes a friend, Rosalie, who shows the Factories of Mr. Vulfran, and lets her lodge at her grandmother's for a little money. Perrine refrains from letting anybody in Maraucourt know her real name, and uses the pseudonym Aurelie til the end of the book. As Perrine is one of the few people who can speak English, except for Mr. Benndite, she soon comes close to Mr. Vulfran, who eventually lets her stay with him. As the book progresses Mr. Vulfran learns to love Perrine, and it is only in the end where he finds out that Perrine is his own granddaughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ungodly_Farce"title="The Ungodly Farce">
The novel's protagonist is Jesper Fegge, a young jazz enthusiast and wannabe writer who after meeting an American woman named Mabel and hitting his head several times loses his unconscious mind. This means in the book that Jesper can't make any decisions unconsciously anymore and it also gives him the ability to see various outcomes of every decision he makes or doesn't make. So at the beginning of the book he either can take his violin or his typewriter to America because of the size of his bag and this decision affects all his future life. Over the course of the novel Jesper can get married and settle down, found a new religion, get beaten up repeatedly, commit adultery, search for the meaning of life and do various other things. Some of the people with whom he interacts in various paths of his life can also sense their complicated relations with Jesper. In the end he has to choose a path of his life that would do the least harm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_You_Could_See_Me_Now_(Straub_novel)"title="If You Could See Me Now (Straub novel)">
A psychological novel of sexual slayings, lost love, the twisted nature of truth, and of ghosts in the real and figurative sense "If You Could See Me Now" tells the story of Miles Teagarden, a thirty-three-year-old recently widowed English professor from the East Coast of the United States, who in the summer of 1975 returns to the Midwestern town of Arden, Wisconsin, which was once home to his maternal grandmother, now deceased. Miles is struggling to complete his doctoral dissertation in order to keep his position at an unnamed educational institution in the East, and hopes the isolation of the Mississippi River farmland known to him in his youth might aid him in his goal.Teagarden is a troubled man with a tragedy-haunted past, whose personal problems may or may not be of an inwardly serious nature. Throughout his adult life certain people around him have treated him with suspicion and dislike; he has frequently been the object of whispered rumors of an ill-defined nature. Immediately prior to the novel's start he has just lost his estranged wife due to drowning, and finds himself less than welcome upon his arrival in the Wisconsin town in which he intends to spend a summer writing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/These_Happy_Golden_Years"title="These Happy Golden Years">
As the novel begins, Pa is taking Laura 12 miles from home in the dead of winter to her first teaching assignment at Brewster settlement. Laura being only 15 and a schoolgirl herself, is apprehensive as this is both the first time she has left home and the first school she has taught, but she is determined to complete her assignment and earn money to keep her sister Mary at her college for the blind in Iowa.The weather is bitterly cold, and neither the claim shanty where Laura boards or the school can be heated adequately. Some of the children she is teaching are older than her, and she has difficulty controlling them. Worse, she boards with the head of the school board and his unhappy wife, who does not hide her resentment of Laura. Soon Laura comes to dread living under their roof, particularly during the weekends when she can't escape to school. Much to her surprise and relief, Almanzo begins driving the twenty-four miles to and from the school so that she can return home on weekends. With advice from Ma (a former schoolteacher herself), she is able to adapt and become more self-assured, and successfully completes the two-month assignment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmer_Boy"title="Farmer Boy">
The novel is based on the childhood of Wilder's husband, Almanzo Wilder, who grew up in the 1860s near the town of Malone, New York. It covers roughly one year of his life, beginning just before his ninth birthday and describes a full year of farming. It describes in detail the endless chores involved in running the Wilder family farm, all without powered vehicles or electricity. Young as he is, Almanzo rises before 5 am every day to milk cows and feed stock. In the growing season, he plants and tends crops; in winter, he hauls logs, helps fill the ice house, trains a team of young oxen, and sometimes — when his father can spare him — goes to school. The novel includes stories of his brother, Royal, and sisters, Eliza Jane and Alice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonhaven"title="Dragonhaven">
The story is set in the Smokehill National Park, a wildlife preserve for the preservation and study of dragons. The dragons are elusive; evidence of their existence can be found everywhere, but the dragons themselves remain hidden. Young Jake Mendoza, who lives with his father, the owner and director of the park, goes out for his first overnight solo and comes across a dying dragon. The dragon has been fatally injured by a poacher who has breached the security of the wildlife preserve.The fact that a dragon has killed a human, even a poacher, will make life very complicated for Smokehill National Park, which exists in a tough political climate, due to the controversial nature of keeping dragons alive. But what makes life even more complicated for Jake is that he discovers that the dying dragon had been a mother, and that one of her dragonlets is still alive. It is illegal to save the dragon's life, but Jake, having discovered the baby dragon, cannot leave it to die. He takes the dragon home and raises it.However, this creates a controversy. The family of the dead poacher want the dragons at Dragonhaven killed. Jake and the other rangers are trying their best to convince those against the preservation of dragons that the creatures are really peaceful and friendly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Home_(novel)"title="Back Home (novel)">
Twelve-year-old Virginia 'Rusty' Dickinson (so-called due to her auburn hair) is an evacuee returning home to England near the end of World War Two. After having lived in the US since the age of seven, Rusty barely remembers England or her parents, and hasn't met her four-year-old brother Charlie at all. Rusty's an outgoing, confident, creative girl who loves the outdoors and working with her hands.The story opens with Rusty's arrival at the docks in Plymouth where she is greeted by her mother, Peggy. Rusty initially doesn't recognise Peggy who, in turn, is taken aback by how grown-up her daughter is. Rusty is surprised to see how run down the town is, how shabby her mother's clothes are, and shocked by the bombed out buildings they pass. Rusty and Peggy make the journey to the countryside near Totnes where Peggy and Charlie have been living during the war. There Rusty meets Beatie, the old friendly woman who owns the house, Ivy, a young woman whose first husband is missing, presumed dead, and who is now engaged to an American G.I., Ivy's five-year-old daughter Susan, and Charlie. Charlie, who was born while Rusty was in the US, is suspicious and unwelcoming towards his new sister.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juedai_Shuangjiao"title="Juedai Shuangjiao">
Eighteen years ago, a handsome martial artist, Jiāng Fēng (), was injured in a fight and coincidentally saved by the sisters Yāoyuè () and Liánxīng () of Yihua Palace (), one of the deadliest clans in the "jianghu" (martial artists' community). Yaoyue fell in love with Jiang Feng but he rejected her despite her beauty because her arrogance made him feel disgusted. Instead, he fell in love with their servant, Huā Yuènú (), made her pregnant, and fled with her. Jiang Feng's jealous servant, Jiāng Qin (Jiang Biéhè) (), betrayed his master and caused a group of bandits to attack the lovers just when Hua Yuenu had just given birth to a pair of fraternal twin boys.Although Jiang Feng and Hua Yuenu were both killed, their sons were unharmed and subsequently found by Yaoyue and Lianxing. Yaoyue refused to forgive Jiang Feng for scorning her and vowed to take revenge by making his sons destroy each other. The sisters then adopt one of the boys, whom they named Huā Wúquē (). The other boy, who became known as Xiǎoyúér (), was initially saved by his father's sworn brother, Yàn Nántiān (), a powerful swordsman, but later fell into the hands of the Ten Great Villains (), a group of notorious outlaws in the "jianghu". However, the Villains did not harm Xiaoyuer and instead decided to raise him and train him to become the greatest villain in "jianghu" history.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Season_of_the_Sun"title="Season of the Sun">
Tatsuya Tsugawa, a college student who enjoys boxing, meets Eiko when he and his friends pick up some girls. Tatsuya and Eiko start casually dating, and he finds himself emotionally attracted to her, declaring his love by poking a hole through a shoji screen with his penis. Eiko, who is "determined to take from men and give nothing in return", reacts to his love with reticence. One night, while sailing on Tatsuya's boat, the couple makes passionate love, awakening Eiko's feelings for him. After this, Eiko becomes devoted to Tatsuya, resulting in her being jealous of his other casual relationships. Tatsuya starts taking advantage of this to be cruel to her. One day, while sailing with friends, Tatsuya takes the virginity of a university student, while Eiko has sex with Tatsuya's brother, Michihisa. Michihisa informs Tatsuya that he will "take over" Eiko for him because she does not love him anymore, and Tatsuya sells her to him for five thousand yen. When Eiko discovers this arrangement, she pays the money back to Michihisa, as well as three other times when Tatsuya renews it. After a few months, Eiko meets Tatsuya to inform him that she is pregnant with his baby, and he tells her on a whim that it is not a bad idea to have a baby. However, after seeing a newspaper photograph of a boxer holding a baby, he changes his mind and tells her to have an abortion. Because she is already four months pregnant, Eiko has to have a Caesarean operation, and dies four days later from peritonitis. After seeing Eiko's photograph at her funeral, Tatsuya interprets her smile as a challenge and angrily throws a container of incense at it. He then goes to his college gymnasium to box and recalls Eiko asking: "why can't you love me in a more straightforward manner?".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Door_Between"title="The Door Between">
Karen Leith is a novelist whose fictional life and works bear a resemblance to Pearl S. Buck—she was raised in Japan and writes novels that are set there, but lives in Manhattan surrounded by Japanese customs, art and furnishings. She is engaged to marry world-famous cancer researcher Dr. John MacClure. One day, the doctor's daughter, Eva, finds Karen with her throat cut in the writer's Washington Square home. Eva herself has no motive to kill Karen, but the evidence she finds at the scene suggests—even in her own mind—that no one else could have done it. The investigation by Ellery Queen confronts this puzzle and also turns up startling information about a long-vanished relative of Karen Leith. Queen pierces the veil of circumstantial evidence and finds out not only the method of the crime but, most importantly, its motivation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Work"title="The End of Work">
In 1995, Rifkin contended that worldwide unemployment would increase as information technology eliminated tens of millions of jobs in the manufacturing, agricultural and service sectors. He predicted devastating impact of automation on blue-collar, retail and wholesale employees. While a small elite of corporate managers and knowledge workers would reap the benefits of the high-tech world economy, the American middle class would continue to shrink and the workplace become ever more stressful.As the market economy and public sector decline, Rifkin predicted the growth of a third sector—voluntary and community-based service organizations—that would create new jobs with government support to rebuild decaying neighborhoods and provide social services. To finance this enterprise, he advocated scaling down the military budget, enacting a value added tax on nonessential goods and services and redirecting federal and state funds to provide a "social wage" in lieu of welfare payments to third-sector workers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Days_Before_the_Shooting..."title="Three Days Before the Shooting...">
The plot of "Three Days Before the Shooting" revolves around a man named Bliss, of indeterminate race, who is raised from boyhood by a black Baptist minister named Alonzo Hickman. As an adult Bliss assumes a white identity as Adam Sunraider. He becomes a politician and eventually is elected as a United States senator, known for his race-baiting. He is assassinated in the Senate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_Time_(novel)"title="Out of Time (novel)">
Annie Lockwood is going on a school field trip to New York City one year after she has returned to her time in 1995 after meeting Strat. While in New York, she slips back one hundred years into the past, to discover her one true love, Strat, has been put into an insane asylum. Annie learn from Strat's younger sister Devonny that Strat's current predicament is because he continued to insist that Annie was real, even though she mysteriously disappeared and everyone else decided to forget her existence. Annie decides to save Strat and prove that she is real and could travel through time. Annie also learns that Strat's betrothed, his childhood friend Harriet, is suffering from consumption.Annie disguises herself as Devonny and manages to get past obstacles that were in the way, especially Walker Walkley, Strat's former best friend and now antagonist of the book. The two reunite and narrowly escape Walkley, who plans to take over the Stratton fortune. Annie has second thoughts about Strat being with Harriet when she died, mainly because she knew Harriet loved Strat and was betrothed to him and Strat adored her. Strat later explains to Annie that she must go back to her own time and he must stay, no matter how much they love each other. Strat says he would go to Mexico, along with his friends at the insane asylum.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Narrows_(Connelly_novel)"title="The Narrows (Connelly novel)">
While investigating the death of ex-FBI profiler Terry McCaleb at his wife's request, Bosch begins to suspect that notorious serial killer and ex-FBI supervisor Robert Backus, aka The Poet, presumed dead, may have murdered McCaleb. Digging deeper, Bosch follows a lead to Las Vegas that brings him into contact with the FBI. Meanwhile, FBI agent Rachel Walling, who was at one time Backus's protégé in the FBI (as McCaleb had also been) and who has been exiled by the FBI to South Dakota for four years for her role in "The Poet" investigation, is the subject of messages sent by Backus to the FBI. As Bosch and Walling are both outsiders to the main FBI investigation, they eventually join forces. The novel shifts points of view, cutting from Bosch's first-person commentary to the third-person perspectives of Walling and Backus. Bosch meets a neighbor whom he later discovers (in the book "The Closers") to be Cassie Black, the main character of "Void Moon", and he begins a relationship with Walling. He also accepts an offer from his old partner Kiz Rider to rejoin the LAPD under a new chief of police, as a homicide detective in the Open-Unsolved Unit within the department's Robbery-Homicide Division.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elminster_–_The_Making_of_a_Mage"title="Elminster – The Making of a Mage">
"Elminster – The Making of a Mage" covers from his first encounter with magic as a young boy, to his days as a rebel fighter, to his nights as a thief, then on to his life following Mystra. It is the first real insight into why Elminster is "Elminster". It starts with an overview of his tragic childhood, on to his even rougher life growing up trying to hide who he is. Then as a thief he sneaks into a closed temple of Mystra to defile it. He is about to set to his task when he is spotted by a mage but then saved by the Lady of mysteries and given a chance to slay the mage that was to slay him. After he debated with the Goddess over whether or not it is right to use magic he let the mage go. Mystra then helps to hide him from those who might want him to be used in their plots, or just kill him, until he has the power to take his revenge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_Perfect_(novel)"title="Picture Perfect (novel)">
Cassie Barrett is a renowned anthropologist. Cassie wakes up on top of a grave, suffering from amnesia, unable to recall any details about herself or her situation. She is found and taken to the hospital by Will Flying Horse, a half-Lakota Los Angeles police officer, until she is retrieved by her husband, Alex Rivers, a Hollywood celebrity. Cassie returns to her Bel Air mansion, and it appears that she lives a picture perfect life. As memories gradually return to Cassie she recalls the whirlwind romance with Alex in Tanzania, her deep and unconditional love for Alex, and the physical abuse he has inflicted upon her.When Cassie finds a positive pregnancy test in her bathroom, she recalls why she left—to protect her baby. Cassie returns to Will who hides her on the Lakota reservation in South Dakota. Cassie quickly grows to love the Reservation and its people. Meanwhile, Alex's life is beginning to fall apart, although he has won three Oscars; he cannot live and is lost without Cassie. Rumours abound concerning Cassie's disappearance that tarnish his reputation.On the night of the Oscars, Cassie calls Alex to say that she is proud of him. After giving birth to Connor, her son, Cassie calls Alex again and tells him where she is, but says that she will not return home for another month. She makes him promise he will not come after her, but he breaks this promise, and shows up outside the Flying Horses' house two weeks later. They reunite and Cassie tells Alex of their son, Connor. She tells Alex she only left to protect their baby, and that she would never have left otherwise because of Alex. Cassie makes Alex agree that she will return on two conditions: that he see a therapist and not assault her. He agrees and when they are back in Los Angeles his reputation is restored, but only temporarily.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterWorld"title="InterWorld">
Joey Harker is an average high school student living in Greenville. He has trouble finding his way around his own house, let alone the town. On a field trip set by his Social Studies teacher, Mr. Dimas, Joey finds himself lost in the city, and then enters a strange fog; when he emerges, everything has changed. All the cars are brightly coloured, and the police cars are flashing green and yellow instead of blue and red. When he goes back to his home, he discovers that he does not exist anymore; instead, there is a girl named Josephine living there. He runs outside and meets a man wearing a mirrored mask, who introduces himself as Jay. But before Jay can explain anything, three men in grey outfits appear, standing on floating silver disks, all trying to catch Joey using silver nets. Joey runs away, and unintentionally enters the fog again.Afraid of going back to a home where he doesn't exist, Joey decides to go to Mr. Dimas for help. Mr Dimas is shocked to see Joey, telling him that he had drowned last year and that Mr. Dimas himself had pulled Joey's body out of the river. Suddenly a woman called Lady Indigo appears in the room, bewitching Joey into following her. She is joined by two other men. One, called Scarabus, has mystical tattoos all over his body; the other, a man with transparent skin, is called Neville. They move Joey to a flying ship, the "Lacrimae Mundi".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_(novel)"title="Josh (novel)">
14-year-old Josh Plowman arrives in a country town for a week's visit with his great-aunt, the Plowman family matriarch. The city boy from Melbourne is immediately at odds with the Ryan Creek youngsters. His writing poetry and his dislike for hunting make him a target for the local boys. Initial misunderstandings eventually explode into violence. A traditional hero might have faced and fought the bullies but Josh shows a different sort of courage and integrity by choosing to walk away with dignity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ug_(book)"title="Ug (book)">
The book is about a boy named Ug living in the Stone Age who is thought by others to "think too much". He wants to have soft trousers (the trousers he and all the other cavemen wear are made of granite) and believes mammoth skin would be good to use, in the end, he and his father Dug do make the trousers, but after realising they cannot sew them together, they call it a day and leave them. Ug then grows up to be a cave painter as his mother Dugs warned him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_(novel)"title="Miranda (novel)">
The novel tells about ideal civilisation of powerful mages which have invited paranormal skills like telepathy, levitation and mediumism. The Brahmins value anarchy, freedom, peace, free love and anti-work. Their country is organized by Ministry of Love, Ministry of Power and Ministry of Wisdom, and they use a strange substance classified as Nivridium in order to their self-perfect idea. The main plot is the history of love of Polish emigrant Jan Podobłoczny (Lange's own "porte-parole") to the materialization of an ideal woman named Damayanti. A tragic end of their romance comes from clash between physical and spiritual sides of human existence. In the last chapter of the novel, Damayanti sacrifices her body in order to let her spirit fly to higher stage of consciousness.Miranda is a Scottish spiritual medium, who lives in Warsaw. She can contact the soul of Damayanti and materialize the mysterious person of Lenore, who meets Jan Podobłoczny when he is close his death. In the moment when Damayanti dies, Miranda disappears.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latawnya,_the_Naughty_Horse,_Learns_to_Say_&quot;No&quot;_to_Drugs"title="Latawnya, the Naughty Horse, Learns to Say &quot;No&quot; to Drugs">
The plot mainly deals with the title character, Latawnya, the youngest horse in her family. While out playing with her sisters Latoya and Daisy, they come across four other mares: Connie, Chrystal, Jackie, and Angie. They ask Latawnya if she wants to engage in "smoking games" and "drinking games". Latawnya realizes that they want to smoke drugs and drink alcohol, and she joins in. Her sisters catch her with the four "bad" horses and proceed to criticize her for "smoking drugs and drinking," something that their parents tell them not to do. Although Latawnya begs Latoya and Daisy not to tell their parents, they tell on her anyway, resulting in an uncomfortable confrontation with them, as they are disappointed in her experimenting with smoking drugs and drinking. After an intense lecture from her parents (including a scene wherein an old friend of the father horse suffers an overdose after engaging in smoking games and drinking games), Latawnya realizes the error of her ways and promises never to engage in "smoking games" and "drinking games" again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_Limits_(novel)"title="Term Limits (novel)">
Three of Washington's most powerful politicians are executed. The assassins demand that the American government set aside partisan politics and restore power to the people, specifically a balanced budget amendment and term limits for all of Congress. Michael O'Rourke, a U.S. Marine turned Congressman finds out who they are and why they do it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gesture_Life"title="A Gesture Life">
The whole story, told by the first person narrator Doc Hata, consists of flashbacks. The main story line begins from the time he gives up his store in Bedley Run until he meets his adopted daughter again. The sub story lines show the reader about his time during the war, and about his time with a teenage daughter and how difficult it was to raise her.At the beginning of the story, Doc Hata describes his current situation and place of living. He lives in a small but affluent town called Bedley Run, where he is from the first accepted by the other inhabitants as a decent shopkeeper and later revered as the ideal citizen. His previous occupation is revealed to be that of a shop owner, as he formerly owned the pharmacy named Sunny Medical Supply, which he has sold to a young couple from New York. He has difficulty leaving his old life behind him and visits his old store nearly every day.Liv Crawford is introduced, who is a real estate agent and wants him to move and sell his house. Doc Hata thinks a lot about his past in Bedley Run but also about his past experiences in Japan. He gives many insights into his daily routines, such as walking by his old store and going to swim every day in his pool. He thinks a lot about his daughter Sunny and how she arrived when she was a little girl. Later on, it becomes clear that Sunny was adopted and that Doc Hata specifically wanted to a girl, and even bribed the relevant person to get what he wanted. He remembers Sunny playing the piano and the initial problems he had with her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Bones_(Connelly_novel)"title="City of Bones (Connelly novel)">
On New Year's Day, a dog digs up a bone in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles. The dog's owner, a doctor, recognizes the bone as human and calls it in to the police. Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch takes on the case together with his colleague Jerry Edgar and after investigating the matter further, a shallow grave containing the bones of a child, is discovered. Bosch can't let go of the case, a case that brings back memories from his own childhood, and starts an investigation. The only clue that he has to go on is the skateboard found during a search at a suspect's house. The body turns out to have been a 12-year-old boy that has been buried 20 years earlier. To solve the murder, Bosch has to dig through records of cases involving disappearances and runaways dating far back in time. In order to try to solve the crime, Bosch has to chase down possible witnesses and suspects from near and far. After 20 years time, a lot of the details once remembered about the disappearance of the boy are blurred and leads Bosch fumbling in the dark. At the same time, a female rookie named Julia Brasher joins the department. Even though Bosch has been warned not to fall for a rookie, he does and this leads to further complications, both inside and outside of the investigation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Darkness_More_Than_Night"title="A Darkness More Than Night">
Terry McCaleb and Graciela Rivers have married and have an infant daughter named Cielo, and McCaleb's fishing charter business is running full-time on Catalina Island. Nevertheless, sheriff's deputy Jaye Winston brings McCaleb a file involving the ritualistic murder of a suspect named Edward Gunn, and asks McCaleb to take a look at it, as the police have gotten nowhere. As McCaleb analyzes the clues, they seem to point straight toward Harry Bosch, whom McCaleb knows from a previous investigation before his retirement. Bosch is currently a key witness in a separate high-profile murder case involving movie director David Storey, who is on trial for murdering an actress during rough sex and staging her death to look like autoerotic asphyxiation. Author/reporter Jack McEvoy, who wrote "The Poet", is covering the case.After McCaleb alerts the police to Bosch's probable involvement in the murder, Bosch goes to Catalina himself to challenge McCaleb's work and to ask him to re-examine the evidence. Based on a parking ticket that McCaleb finds, he concludes that Bosch may have been set up by Storey in order to discredit his evidence in the court case, but the key evidence in proving that is a post office surveillance tape that was in the process of being erased, and from which nothing usable can be recovered.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_Flight_(novel)"title="Angels Flight (novel)">
Los Angeles Police Department Detective Harry Bosch is assigned to investigate the murder of prominent African-American attorney Howard Elias late on a Friday night on Angels Flight, a funicular railway in downtown L.A. Elias was found shot to death along with a Hispanic woman, Catalina Perez. The detectives from Robbery-Homicide Division who were initially assigned to the case conclude that Perez was an innocent bystander and that Elias was the target. Elias was known for representing plaintiffs in racial harassment and police violence suits against the LAPD, and had a bad reputation in the department. Due to the accuracy of the gunshots used in the crime, Bosch realizes that his fellow police officers are the most likely suspects.Despite the fact that the murders were not in Bosch's precinct, Hollywood Division, Deputy Chief of Police Irvin Irving is forced to remove RHD because many of its detectives are defendants in a case Elias was bringing to federal court. Elias was representing a man named Michael Harris who was recently acquitted of the murder of Stacey Kincaid, the young daughter of a prominent local car dealer. Harris claims that the fingerprint evidence against him was planted, and that detectives from RHD tortured him in an effort to obtain a confession. Irving and Bosch are aware that Elias' death could inflame tensions in South-Central L.A., possibly leading to a repeat of the riots of 1992, especially if his killer was found to be a police officer. Bosch suspects that he is being set up to fail by Irving after one of his rivals, Detective John Chastain of the Internal Affairs Division, is assigned to help him work the case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trunk_Music_(novel)"title="Trunk Music (novel)">
A body found in the trunk of a Rolls Royce seems to have connections with the mob and leads Bosch and his investigation to Las Vegas. It's Harry Bosch's first case after being transferred to the Homicide table. The car was found by a beat cop near the Hollywood Bowl. Harry arrives during a concert. Fireworks are scheduled after the concert. At the encouragement of Fire Chief, and the approval of the Medical Examiner, Bosch arranges for the car to be towed away on a flatbed tow truck. The examination of the car and body are completed in an LAPD building. After the name and address of the victim are discovered, Harry and one of his team goes to interview the wife. He then goes to search a small office the victim maintains at a small studio facility. He gains access to surveillance video of the entrance to the office. The video shows that the office had been broken into and phone bugs were taken out. The team later finds out that a branch of LAPD had placed bugs on the victim's phone without authorization. Bosch is sent to Las Vegas to track down what the victim was doing there and who had contact with him when he was there. Bosch sees video of the poker game the victim was in, and he recognizes one of the other players as a former FBI agent with whom he had an intimate relationship, Eleanor Wish. He tracks her down through the Las Vegas police chief. Bosch spends the night with her. Later, she is pulled into police HQ but Bosch clears her. Fingerprints from the murder victim's leather jacket match those of Luke "Lucky" Goshen, top aide to the Las Vegas mob boss Joseph "Marks" Marconi. In a search of Goshen's home, Bosch finds a hidden handgun. It is determined that the handgun was the murder weapon. Wish is kidnapped by the local syndicate. Bosch finds out where she is being held and frees her. Bosch extradites Goshen but on arrival in Los Angeles Bosch learns that Goshen was an undercover FBI agent whose real name is Roy Lindell, and that the FBI suspects Bosch of planting the gun found at the home of Goshen/ Lindell home. The story continues from there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Coyote"title="The Last Coyote">
Bosch is involved in an incident at work and has been put on involuntary stress leave. He must go through therapy sessions to be able to return to work. This involves talking about the incident and himself with Carmen Hinojos, a police psychologist. Three months ago, Bosch broke up with his girlfriend, Sylvia Moore. Carmen asks Harry to verbalize his mission in life. Harry decides that his mission is to investigate his mother's murder. She had been a prostitute and was strangled when Harry was twelve. He gets the murder book from the police archives and reviews the case. He first goes to visit Meredith Roman, another prostitute who was his mother's best friend at the time. The one real piece of information that Bosch gets from her is something that she did not tell the police: his mother was going to meet Arno Conklin at Hancock Park on the night of the murder. Bosch, with the help of the new cop beat/LA Times reporter, investigates Fox, Conklin, and Conklin's close associate Mittel. He discovers that Fox was killed in a hit and run while distributing campaign literature for Conklin. Conklin had been running for District Attorney. He also learns from an old cop friend that Mittel is now a very successful lawyer and campaign fund raiser. He is currently helping Robert Shepard, a computer tycoon, run for the Senate. On a whim, Harry drives to Mittel's house and ends up attending a fund-raising party. He meets Mittel and, using the name of his boss Pounds whom he cannot stand, asks a waitress at the party to deliver an envelope to Mittel. In the envelope, Harry puts a copy of a newspaper article about Fox's death and circles the names Conklin, Mittel, and Fox. He writes under the article, "What prior work experience got Johnny his job?" Harry checks with the city offices and finds out that only one of the original investigating officers is still alive and that his retirement checks are mailed to a post office box in Florida. So he takes a plane to Florida to speak with the retired detective, Jake McKittrick. He learns from him that at the beginning of the investigation, his senior partner, Eno, was called into the Assistant DA's office and told that Fox was not involved with the murder and he should not be investigated by the department. The only way they could interview him was in Conklin's office in the presence of Conklin and Mittel. After that interview, the investigation went nowhere and was left as an unsolved case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Concrete_Blonde"title="The Concrete Blonde">
Detective Harry Bosch is pursuing "The Dollmaker", a serial killer who uses makeup to paint his victims.He gets a tip from a prostitute that a recent customer of hers, Norman Church, had a large amount of women's makeup in his bathroom.Bosch goes to Church's garage, identifies himself as police, breaks in the door. Church is naked and shaved. Bosch tells him to not move, but Church starts to pull something from under his pillow, and Bosch shoots him.Church had been reaching not for a gun, but his toupee.Bosch is investigated by internal affairs and cleared in the shooting; but, since he did not follow police procedure, he is transferred from the elite Robbery-Homicide Division (RHD) back to the Hollywood table.The makeup is found to match those of nine of the Dollmaker's victims.Four years later, Bosch is sued by Church's widow. Her attorney portrays Bosch as a cowboy and a vigilante, seeking revenge for the unsolved murder of his mother when he was a child.During the trial, the police receive a note, purportedly from the Dollmaker, which leads to the discovery of a new victim killed by someone using the same "modus operandi". Although this victim was encased in concrete, unlike the original eleven victims, all other aspects of the killing are the same, including the signature cross painted on a toenail. Also, this "concrete blonde" victim, along with two other of the original victims, fit a different pattern: that of large-breasted blondes in the local adult entertainment industry who also advertised as high-class prostitutes in the local sex rags. Bosch and his task force suspect that "the Follower" is Detective Mora from Ad-Vice. Mora has ties to the adult video industry, had insider knowledge of the Dollmaker case, and was not at work during the killings not attributed to Norman Church. The task force put Mora under surveillance, and Bosch breaks into Mora's house looking for evidence that he is the Follower. Instead, Bosch finds that Mora has been making pornographic movies with underage children. Mora returns to his house, finds Bosch, and threatens to kill him. The rest of the task force arrives; they search Mora's house and determine that he is not the Follower.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Ice"title="The Black Ice">
In the book, narcotics officer Calexico (named after the place Calexico) Moore's body is discovered on Christmas night in a seedy Hollywood motel, from an apparent suicide. It was rumored that he had been involved in the selling of a new drug called "Black Ice". As the L.A. police higher-ups converge on the scene to protect the department from scandal, Harry Bosch inserts himself into the investigation. The trail he follows leads to Mexican drug gangs operating across the border while he gets attracted to Calexico Moore's widow as the case progresses. The "Black Ice" drug is a fictional drug invented by Connelly for his novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Echo"title="The Black Echo">
The novel centers on Harry Bosch, a Vietnam veteran who served as a "tunnel rat" (nicknamed Hara Kiri Bosch), with the 1st Infantry Division — a specialized soldier whose job it was to go into the maze of tunnels used as barracks, hospitals, and on some occasions, morgues, by the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army. After the war Bosch became an L. A. police detective advancing to the Robbery-Homicide Division. However, after killing the main suspect in the "Dollmaker" serial killings, Bosch is demoted to "Hollywood Division" homicide, where he partners with Jerry Edgar. The death of Billy Meadows, a friend and fellow "tunnel rat" from the war, attracts Bosch's interest, especially when he determines that it may have been connected to a spectacular bank robbery using tunnels. Bosch suspects that the robbers were after more than money and he then partners with the FBI, in particular agent Eleanor Wish, in an attempt to foil their next attack.Season 3 of the Amazon series "Bosch" is loosely adapted from this novel. After Harry captures a suspect, Detective Bosch tells him, "I'm going to make sure you live the rest of your life in the black echo."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier's_Heart_(novel)"title="Soldier's Heart (novel)">
It begins with a 15-year-old named Charley Goddard's Minnesota hometown. Residents are talking about what they think will be a "shooting war." The atmosphere at the town meetings is festive with flags, drums, and patriotic speeches. Everyone assumes that the North will win easily and that the fighting is unlikely to last more than a month or two. As a volunteer army is beginning to form, Charley decides to join, despite his mother's objections. Charley lies about his age and joins the Minnesota Volunteers in what he thinks will be a fun experience that will make him a man. The pay is eleven dollars a month, much more than he makes working on the farms.Charley trains and learns to be a soldier, finding the experience much different from what he had imagined. Upon leaving the camp, the men are treated as heroes even before they leave town, accompanied by cheering and flag-waving. On the train ride to their new camp, Charley meets a slave, who thanks him for what he is doing for the southern slaves.In Charley's first battle, near Manassas Junction, Virginia, in 1861, he is caught in the middle of violent suffering and death. When the battle is over, hundreds of Charley's comrades have been killed in what came to be called the Battle of Bull Run after the name of the creek that ran nearby, or the Battle of Manassas for the junction nearby.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince_of_Mist"title="The Prince of Mist">
Max Carver, son of a watchmaker, has moved with his family from the city to get away from the war. Max's new house was formerly owned by Richard Fleischman, his wife and son. Max experiences mysterious events which have to do with Jacob Fleischman, the son of Richard Fleishman, who had drowned. Over time, Max discovers a sculpture garden near his house, where strange things happen. Max finally makes a friend, Roland. Roland is older than Max, around the age of his sister, Alicia, who is 15. After diving near the wreck, the Orpheus, Max has more and more questions, which will be answered by Victor Kray, grandfather of Roland.Detailed summaryThe story opens in 1943 in an unnamed city. It is mid-June, the day of the protagonist, Max Carver's, thirteenth birthday.Maximilian Carver, Max's father, and an eccentric watchmaker, tells Max and his family that they are leaving their lives in the city, which is suffering a war, to live in a town on the coast.We meet the family: Andrea Carver, Max's mother, and Max's sisters: Alicia, the elder, and Irina the younger. They reluctantly accept their fate, although Max is especially unhappy about having to leave his friends in the city.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chat_Room_(novel)"title="Chat Room (novel)">
A young girl aged 13, Samantha, is extremely lonely after moving from Sydney to Melbourne. Both of her parents work long hours and she starts getting interested in chat rooms, where she meets new friends. While in the chat rooms she stumbles across a guy named Robin. He pretends to be 17, though he is really 27, and makes Sam feel special. He is charming, smart, romantic and good-looking.Robin tells Sam that they have to wait for a while before he can tell her his final secret, which she does not realise is his age. Eventually he lets her know that he is 27, which upsets her. After 10 days of stress and depression, she goes back online and asks to talk to him. He answers her and they confess to liking each other, then they decide to meet. She goes to meet him and finds him attractive. They go for a walk.While Sam is away, Erica, her babysitter, realises Sam is missing and finds the emails from Robin. She calls the police and they set out to find her. Robin is caught and Sam is told what happened. Robin has been to court several times on child sexual abuse charges and has been let go on all charges before now because there was a lack of evidence. Now Robin is taken in by the police and will be sent to prison.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Crocodile"title="The Time Crocodile">
The space zoo isn't like any zoo you've ever visited on Earth. For a start, some of the animals can talk! Explore the zoo and work out who can be trusted and who has a hidden agenda...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corinthian_Project"title="The Corinthian Project">
When the TARDIS lands in an undersea community known as the Corinthian Project, it doesn't take you long to realise there are some very strange things going on. Explore the project and see if you can uncover the truth...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Robots_(adventure_book)"title="War of the Robots (adventure book)">
On a distant world populated by robots, war has been raging for many years. Can you, the Doctor and Martha discover why the robots are fighting and end the war once and for all?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollen_(novel)"title="Pollen (novel)">
"Pollen" is the sequel to "Vurt" and concerns the ongoing struggle between the real world and the virtual world. When concerning the virtual world, some references to Greek mythology are noticeable, including Persephone and Demeter, the river Styx and Charon, and Hades (portrayed by the character John Barleycorn). The novel is set in Manchester.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_to_Pay_(Ellery_Queen_novel)"title="The Devil to Pay (Ellery Queen novel)">
Solly Spaeth is a financier whose machinations with the "Ohippi Hydro-Electric Project" have left a number of people much less wealthy than once they were, including his business partner, Rhys Jardin. Jardin's beautiful daughter Valerie is involved with Spaeth's son Walter. Rhys is so impoverished, he has to sell up his personal property at auction, much to the dismay of his daughter and his long-time servant/valet/trainer, Pink. Walter asks Ellery Queen to sit in on the auction and buy every lot, which is how Ellery becomes involved when Solly Spaeth is found pierced by an ancient sword whose blade has been coated with molasses and cyanide. Suspicion falls on a number of people, including the Jardin household, Solly's son, lawyer and his mistress, the kooky Winni Moon, but Ellery works through alibis and motives and traces the crime back to the murderer. A sub-plot of the novel is that Ellery has been hired to work on a screenplay and has been completely idle for weeks because he can not get in to see studio head Jacques Butcher; Butcher plays a much more prominent role in the next novel, "The Four of Hearts".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_of_Hearts"title="The Four of Hearts">
At the end of the previous Ellery Queen novel, "The Devil to Pay", he was in Hollywood and about to meet studio boss Jacques Butcher. At the beginning of this novel, he does so. Butcher, who is engaged to starlet Bonnie Stuart, hires Queen to work on a screenplay about Bonnie's mother, film legend Blythe Stuart, and her long-running feud with fellow Hollywood veteran Jack Royle. The two were once sweethearts, but their estrangement was bitter, and the feud now extends to their respective children -- Bonnie Stuart and young actor Ty Royle. Surprisingly, Jack and Blythe agree to star in the film about their lives. Even more surprisingly, they suddenly rekindle their old romance and get married in front of fans at a Los Angeles airfield. Then, amid huge publicity, they fly off toward a honeymoon island. But the biggest surprise comes a few hours later, when the newlyweds are found fatally poisoned aboard their plane. Queen must interrupt his script-writing to solve a murder case.Ty and Bonnie vacillate between feuding and a sudden romantic interest, and Queen investigates the mysterious mailings of playing cards that may hold a clue about the killings. His suspicions fall upon the households of Jack and Blythe, and Ty and Bonnie become suspicious of each other. It's only when Queen learns the true meanings of the cards that he solves the case. In the process, he forms a romantic attachment with beautiful gossip columnist Paula Paris, whose agoraphobia keeps her confined to her palatial home, but who has a talent for uncovering secrets that may match Queen's own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Blues_for_Shindig"title="A Blues for Shindig">
Shindig is a young woman who survives the rough streets of London's Soho neighborhood by working in an illegal bar and selling drugs in the alleys.Shindig's daily life is populated by abusers, boozers, losers, crooked cops and gangsters. Yet these seemingly deviant characters look out for one another and Shindig navigates through this underworld with a sense of adventure. Yet, she soon finds herself caught in the middle of a much larger power play.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Angel_Makers"title="The Angel Makers">
During World War I, the men of a Hungarian village leave to fight. In their absence, the women form powerful bonds. Their village is made into a camp for Italian prisoners of war and some women fall for these soldiers. When their men return and begin to mistreat them, the women become murderous in their fight to keep their freedom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cry_of_the_Justice_Bird"title="Cry of the Justice Bird">
In an Africa ravaged by civil war, two women are pulled from a minibus, and are raped and mutilated. Armstrong MacKay, one of the dead women's lover, enters the country to bring her body home. During the festivities of her African wake, Mackay finds out the truth behind her violent death from the other woman's husband.Faced with Africa's weaken government and the ineffective Boromundi legal system, the two men decide to take justice in their own hands and seek out the murders for themselves.Kisasi, the Justice Bird, cries out as the men set out to execute the killers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rasp"title="The Rasp">
Anthony Gethryn, ex-secret service agent, is an occasional "special correspondent" for a weekly newspaper and is assigned to cover the story when a cabinet minister, John Hoode, is found murdered in the library at his country house, battered to death with a wood-rasp. Gethryn recalls his acquaintance with a member of the household and is thus invited to investigate the crime as a kind of "friend of the family". It soon seems as though everyone concerned has a cast-iron alibi for the time of the crime, but Gethryn comes up with an imaginative way for the murderer to have accomplished the deed and established an alibi, and reveals the murderer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_World_(novel)"title="Witch World (novel)">
During World War II, Simon Tregarth rose from a common soldier in the U.S. Army to the rank of lieutenant colonel. In post-war Berlin, he became involved, almost accidentally, in the black market, only to be caught and discharged in disgrace from the Army. He later also managed to anger a powerful criminal organization enough for it to send assassins after him. After months on the run, killing at least two of these assassins, he knows his time is running out.Then Tregarth is contacted by Dr. Jorge Petronius, a man with an amazing reputation for hiding men in dire straits. Petronius recounts a fantastic tale of a stone of power, the Siege Perilous of Arthurian legend, that has the power to open a gateway to a world attuned to the person who sits on it. Disbelieving, but with little to lose, Tregarth gives him all the money he has left, and is transported to a land where magic vies with more mundane swords and bows.He arrives in a nearly empty countryside, just in time to witness a savage hunt: a lone woman being chased down by hounds followed by two horsemen. Tregarth rescues the witch, whom he much later learns is named Jaelithe, and enters the service of her homeland Estcarp, a land ruled by witches and threatened by many enemies. One of these enemies is the land of Gorm, which was bloodily taken over by the far-off, mysterious realm of Kolder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dear_Enemy_(novel)"title="Dear Enemy (novel)">
As "Daddy-Long-Legs" traced Judy Abbott's growth from a young girl into an adult, "Dear Enemy" shows how Sallie McBride grows from a frivolous socialite to a mature woman and an able executive. It also follows the development of Sallie's relationships with Gordon Hallock, a wealthy politician, and Dr. Robin MacRae, the orphanage's physician. Both relationships are affected by Sallie's initial reluctance to commit herself to her job, and by her gradual realization of how happy the work makes her and how incomplete she'd feel without it. The daily calamities and triumphs of an orphanage superintendent are wittily described, often accompanied by the author's own stick-figure illustrations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Passion_Spent"title="All Passion Spent">
"All Passion Spent" is written in three parts, primarily from the view of an intimate observer. The first part introduces Lady Slane at the time of her husband's death. She has been the dutiful wife of a “great man” in public life, Viceroy of India and a member of the House of Lords. Her children plan to share her care between them much as they divide up the family property but, completely unexpectedly, Lady Slane makes her own choice, proposing to leave fashionable Kensington for a cottage in suburban Hampstead that caught her eye decades earlier, where she will live alone except for her maidservant and please herself — for example allowing her descendants to visit only by appointment. Part 1 concludes with Lady Slane's developing friendships with her aged landlord Mr Bucktrout and his equally aged handyman Mr Gosheron.Part 2, shorter than the others, is composed of Lady Slane's thoughts as she muses in the summer sun. She relives youthful events, reviews her life, and considers life's influences and controls, happiness and relationships.Summer is over. Part 3 takes place after Lady Slane has settled into her cottage, her contemplative life, and approaching end. To her initial annoyance, her past life still connects her to people and events. In particular Mr FitzGeorge, a forgotten acquaintance from India who has ever since been in love with her, introduces himself and they form a quiet but playful and understanding friendship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Boots"title="White Boots">
Harriet Johnson has been ill and her doctor arranges for her to take up ice skating in order to build strength in her legs. When she gets to the rink Harriet meets Lalla Moore, a young skater who has been training since she was three years old; Lalla's parents were killed in a skating accident, and her Aunt Claudia is determined that Lalla will be the greatest figure skater in the world. Harriet and Lalla soon become friends and as Harriet is still not well enough for school, it is arranged that she will share Lalla's governess and her various dance and fencing lessons.Harriet soon shows herself to be a talented skater, and she starts to take, and pass, the same skating tests that Lalla does. Lalla, on the other hand, is much more of a performer than a figure skater and starts to have trouble with various figures she needs to learn for tests. Lalla becomes jealous of Harriet and tells her that if she takes and passes her next skating test, Lalla will tell her aunt that she does not want Harriet to have lessons with her any more. Distraught, Harriet pretends to once again be ill while she decides what to do. But when Lalla hears that Harriet is seriously ill, she faints and later explains how nervous, miserable and guilty she feels. Lalla and Harriet go for a holiday together with their families and they talk about their futures. Lalla's coach tells her that she will never be a good enough figure skater to succeed in competitions, but that she could be a fantastic show skater and performer; whereas Harriet has potential to be a great skater one day, as she is better at the figures required to do well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flinx_Transcendent"title="Flinx Transcendent">
In yet another attempt to avoid his destiny, Flinx sets out to become the first human to live on the AAnn homeworld Blasusarr. Disguised in a simsuit to perfectly take on the appearance of a common AAnn, Flinx successfully lives on the desert planet until his cover story unravels. In his escape attempt he befriends a juvenile AAnn from a prominent family. He manages to parlay this friendship into an audience with an AAnn lord who has influence with the AAnn emperor. After slipping into the center of the AAnn government and confronting the emperor, Flinx projects himself and nearly a hundred AAnn lords into the mind of the Great Evil. This convinces the emperor to release Flinx to fight off the Evil. Flinx travels to New Riveria to gather his companion Clarity Held. Clarity decides to accompany Flinx on his quest along with his old friends and mentors Truzenzuzex and Bran Tse-Mallory. Before the group can depart Nur, they are attacked by the Order of Null, who are still bent on killing Flinx to prevent his interference with the Great Evil.Traveling into the Blight, Flinx and his group find the ancient Tar-Aiym weapons platform. After they activate the entire platform, the wave created does little more than superficial damage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_Smoke"title="Tree of Smoke">
Johnson's novel revolves around the associations and interactions with Francis X. Sands, a retired Air Force colonel and war hero, now a CIA official in Southeast Asia. The story is told primarily from the point of view of his nephew, William "Skip" Sands; Infantry Private James Houston and his brother Bill; and Kathy Jones, a Canadian NGO worker. The plot also includes minor but important characters Major Eddie Aguinaldo, a Filipino army officer; Nguyen Hao and his nephew Minh who work for Colonel Sands; Trung Than, Nguyen Hao's Vietcong friend turned double agent; Sergeant Jimmy Storm, a henchman of the Colonel; and a German assassin named Dietrich Fest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Lion_Among_Men"title="A Lion Among Men">
The story opens with an impending battle between the Munchkinlanders and the Emerald City (EC) troops. In the middle of the warzone is the Mauntery which has been a haven for Elphaba, Yackle, Liir, and Candle. Yackle still lives despite losing her eyesight, and longs for death. At her request, the Maunts bury her in their crypt alive with only a few candles and some wine. She is eventually forgotten, but not by all.Elsewhere, a young woman wanders the Land of Oz until her path crosses "the dwarf", whom she calls Mr. Boss, the caretaker of the Clock of the Time Dragon. The Clock has awakened...Back at the Mauntery, Brrr, the Cowardly Lion, and his pet, a Glass Cat that he has nicknamed Shadowpuppet, arrive looking for Yackle. The Maunts claim she is deceased but Yackle rises from the crypt, still alive. Yackle and Brrr begin a game of wits – Brrr demands information on Madame Morrible and in exchange he will tell Yackle about himself.Brrr does not remember his parents or where he is from. He grew up by himself in the Great Gillikin Forest, learning language from the hunters that travel through his forest. One day he meets a soldier, Jemmsy, who's caught in his own hunting trap that was supposed to catch Animals. He implores Brrr to go to Tenniken and get help. Instead, out of fear and the naive belief that since this is the first person he has conversed with, then Jemmsy's a friend and cannot be abandoned, Brrr stays with Jemmsy until he dies, claiming the books that lie beside him and taking Jemmsy's medal for courage to give to Jemmsy's relatives. Thus begins the Lion's unhappy personage as a coward.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twenty-Second_Day"title="The Twenty-Second Day">
A young man, a pianist who hates piano, goes into a stormy relationship with a divorced woman who's older than he is for ten years. This woman, a painter and artistic trainer for children, was his first choice in 26 years of life as a slave for his father's wishes, or maybe it's the cosmic wishes of fate itself, as he might feel as a crushed young man who wished to be anything but being what he is. He received a total shock when the woman dumped him at last, did an abortion for his baby, and tells him that they can't live up the relation they have, because it goes to be crushed, sooner or later.in the final scene, we see the painter watches the TV, we could understand he's witnessing the US forces entering Baghdad, then he begin to prepare his suitcase, which gives us a hint he's going to leave the country.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_I_Was"title="What I Was">
"What I Was" tells the story of a secret friendship between two teenagers, one an unhappy public schoolboy and the other living an independent and isolated life on the beach near the school. It is set on the East Anglian coast in 1962.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Please_Pass_the_Guilt"title="Please Pass the Guilt">
As a favor to Dr. Edwin Vollmer, Wolfe agrees to find information about a case from Vollmer's friend's crisis intervention center. A man with the alias "Ronald Seaver" has attended the clinic, given no information, but spoken of having blood on his hands no one can see. Through trickery, Wolfe and Goodwin learn that this man is actually Kenneth Meer, an employee at the CAN broadcast network. An executive at the network, Peter Odell, has been killed in a bomb attack. Odell's widow believes that one of his rivals murdered him, and hires Wolfe to find proof.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Family_Affair_(novel)"title="A Family Affair (novel)">
A waiter at Rusterman's Restaurant turns up at Wolfe's front door late one night, claiming that a man is going to kill him. Shortly after Archie puts him in one of the spare bedrooms, the waiter dies when a bomb planted in his coat pocket explodes. Wolfe, outraged at the thought of such a violent act taking place in his own house, resolves to find the murderer without sharing any information with Inspector Cramer. Soon Wolfe and Archie find themselves investigating two additional murders: the earlier killing of a customer at Rusterman's, and the subsequent death of the waiter's daughter.For much of the story, Stout leads the reader to believe that the central murder mystery is related to the Watergate scandal. Ultimately, Wolfe discovers that the killer is one of his closest associates, a character who had been appearing in Nero Wolfe mysteries for over forty years."A Family Affair" is an unusual Nero Wolfe mystery in that Archie reveals his (correct) opinion of the killer's identity well before Wolfe does so in the closing chapters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Marble_Cliffs"title="On the Marble Cliffs">
The peaceful and traditional people, located on the shores of a large bay, are surrounded by the rough pastoral folk in the surrounding hills, who feel increasing pressure from the unscrupulous and lowly followers of the dreaded head forester. The narrator and protagonist lives on the marble cliffs as a botanist with his brother Otho, his son Erio from a past relationship and Erio's grandmother Lampusa. The idyllic life is threatened by the erosion of values and traditions, losing its inner power. The head forester uses this opportunity to establish a new order based on dictatorial rule, large numbers of mindless followers and the use of violence, torture and murder.The tale may readily be understood as a parable on national socialism, the evil and "jovial" head forester being Hermann Göring. Others see it as a description of Germany's fight against the threat of Stalinism or communism, the head forester (or "chief ranger") being Joseph Stalin. Following this interpretation the book would have predicted in 1939 the ultimate failure of Germany's imminent war against the Soviet Union. The book was not censored in Nazi Germany, perhaps due to Jünger's significant repute in right-wing circles.Its sharp disapproval of violent masses, as well as its prediction or description of death camps, was noted and helped Jünger's rehabilitation after the Second World War although he had not gone into exile like most anti-Nazi authors. Jünger himself, however, refused the notion that the book was a statement of resistance, describing it rather as a "shoe that fits various feet".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athabasca_(novel)"title="Athabasca (novel)">
When the operations manager of an oil company operating in Prudhoe Bay in Alaska receives a mysterious anonymous threat of sabotage, his superiors call in "Jim Brady Enterprises", a firm of oilfield specialists. Dermott and Mackenzie, tough ex-field managers and now anti-sabotage specialists, arrive, but initial investigations get them nowhere. Then the operations manager is murdered and one of the pump stations in the Trans-Alaska Pipeline is damaged, with further loss of life.Jim Brady himself arrives to direct operations but to no avail. Then the company's operations at the Athabasca Oil Sands in Canada are disrupted and Dermott is nearly killed. Despite assistance by the RCMP and the FBI, suspicions fall on many employees, but nothing can be proved. As bodies and equipment damage mount up, Brady and his two investigators play a hunch and finally expose the men they believe to be responsible. But even they are not the main instigators of the events, as the final chapter of the novel reveals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wreck_of_the_Zanzibar"title="The Wreck of the Zanzibar">
The story unfolds in journal entries and watercolor illustrations made by 14-year-old Laura Perryman in 1907 and 1908. She tells of her life on Bryher, one of Britain's Scilly Isles, where her family's survival depends on the mercy of the elements and the sea. One winter is particularly harsh, with the family's cows sickening and dying, the weather destroying houses and boats, the food stores dwindling and Laura's twin brother, Billy, running away to join a ship's crew. As bleak as Laura's days are, she is gentle enough to protect a sea turtle which might otherwise serve as food, and hopeful enough to dream of rowing in the island gig despite repeated declarations that a girl will never be allowed to handle one of the oars. Laura gets her chance in a dramatic storm and shipwreck, and helps save the island.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butterfly_Lion"title="The Butterfly Lion">
A young boy named Michael runs away from a boarding school and meets an old lady living in a big cottage. She tells him about a boy named Bertie who lived in South Africa. As a boy, Bertie had found an orphaned white lion cub, but was eventually forced to send the lion away to the circus and leave South Africa to attend boarding school in Wiltshire, England.Bertie escapes from his school and meets Millie, and the two become fast friends, flying kites together. He tells Millie all about his life in South Africa, and his white lion cub. When the pair leave school, they continue to write until war breaks out, and a letter arrives from Bertie informing Millie that he has joined the army.Later, when fighting in France in the First World War, he saves two men's lives and is given a Victoria Cross. Millie, who has become a nurse in the hopes of finding Bertie, reads about him in a newspaper and the two are reunited. Together they discover that Monsieur Merlot's circus has closed down, but that the Frenchman lives nearby with the lion.Bertie marries Millie and brings the lion back to England, where they live happily for many years. When the lion dies, Bertie and Millie carve a lion out of the chalk in the hillside in memorial, before Bertie dies himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Horse_(novel)"title="War Horse (novel)">
One day, a man named Ted Narracott buys a young horse for 3 guineas when he was supposed to buy a horse for plough at an auction. Ted's son, Albert, names the horse Joey and grows to love him, protecting the young horse from Ted when he is drunk. While with the Narracotts, Joey also meets a horse named Zoey, who was a source of comfort to Joey, and whose name partially inspired his.Soon, Ted sells Joey to the army in return for money, before Albert can stop him. Albert tries to sign up for the army, but he is too young but promises to come back for Joey. Joey is trained for cavalry service by Corporal Perkins, and Captain James Nicholls is his original rider, leading a unit of mounted infantry. Joey soon befriends Topthorn, a horse ridden by Captain Jamie Stewart. However, during a charge against a group of Germans, Nicholls is killed. Stewart assigns Trooper Warren, a nervous young man who rides heavier but is quite kind, to ride Joey.During another charge, Topthorn and Joey carry Warren and Stewart into the enemy lines, and are the only two of many, but they are captured by the Germans. They use Joey and Topthorn to pull an ambulance cart for the hospital, where the two horses are famous and respected for saving the lives of many. The Germans allow Emilie and her grandfather, who live in a farm near the front lines, to care for Joey and Topthorn. Emilie grows to love Joey and Topthorn like Albert loved Joey, caring for their every injury and feeding them every night. Soon, the Germans move their hospital somewhere else because there was a battle, and Emilie and her grandfather are allowed to keep Joey and Topthorn, who they use for their farm. Topthorn was not bred to plow, but learns quickly from Joey, who has experience from the Narracott farm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pool_of_Twilight"title="Pool of Twilight">
The conclusion of the "Pool" series. Kern, son of Shal and Tarl, and Daile, daughter of Ren, search for the missing Warhammer of Tyr, stolen by the god Bane at the end of the previous novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Android's_Dream"title="The Android's Dream">
The story covers the journey of ex-soldier and State Department employee Harry Creek in his work to acquire a sheep of the Android's Dream breed for the coronation ceremony of an alien race known as the Nidu. The Nidu assert that unless a satisfactory sheep can be provided, the political and diplomatic fallout will cause the Nidu to declare war on Earth—a war Earth will lose badly. The genetically designed breed is very rare and believed extinct after a sect of Nidu intent on deposing the government exterminated all known samples, leading Harry on a chase to find one along with assistance from Brian, an AI based on Harry's childhood friend. The only surviving remnant of the Android's Dream turns out to be Robin Baker, a young lady who is the child of an Android's Dream sheep/human hybrid. At the center of the story is the Church of the Evolved Lamb, whose members recognize that its founding was a total scam, but are devoted to making its prophecies come true anyway.Harry slowly meets and befriends Robin after numerous attempts to capture her (most notably being a daring escape in Arlington Mall). They flee from a group out to kill her to derail the Nidu coronation, and hide on an instellar liner. The Nidu attack the liner to capture Robin, and Harry eventually surrenders on the stipulation that Robin not be harmed before or after the coronation. During this, the Earth government injunct with the Common Confederation courts that Robin Baker is not human, and actually the sole member of her own unique species, and entitled to protection from the CC.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_of_an_Infantry_Officer"title="Memoirs of an Infantry Officer">
Sassoon's account of his experiences in the trenches during World War I, between the spring of 1916 and the summer of 1917, creates a picture of a physically brave but self-effacing and highly insecure individual. The narrative moves from the trenches to the Fourth Army School, to Morlancourt and a raid, then to and through the Somme. The narrator, George Sherston, is wounded when a piece of shrapnel shell passes through his lung after he incautiously sticks his head over the parapet at the Battle of Arras in 1917. He is sent home to convalesce and, while there, arranges to have lunch with the Editor of an anti-war newspaper, the "Unconservative Weekly". He determines to speak out against the war, though this contravenes military regulations and could result in his execution. The book finishes as George Sherston prepares to attend 'Slateford War Hospital' (Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh) after a medical board had decided he was suffering from shell shock. The book portrays Sherston's emotional and intellectual coming of age, as he learns "that he is but one insignificant person caught up in events beyond anyone's comprehension".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodstained_Oz"title="Bloodstained Oz">
1930s dust bowl Kansas natives and an alternate version of the Wonderful Land of Oz collide during a huge dust storm. The Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion may or may not help them on this adventure because the other inhabitants of Oz include vampire flying monkeys, emerald eyed demonic creatures, and other horrors beyond imagination.Down home farm girl Gayle Franklin and her family, escaped convict Hank Burnside, and Roma gypsies Elisa and Stefan along with their infant son Jeremiah, all find themselves face to face with the unbelievable terrors from Oz. The creatures have taken over Oz and now they are threatening to take over Earth too.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Surgeon_(novel)"title="The Surgeon (novel)">
A terrifying new serial killer begins stalking the streets of Boston, using his vast medical knowledge to systematically torture and kill vulnerable women, a modus operandi which has earned him the nickname "the Surgeon". As Jane Rizzoli, accompanied by detective Thomas Moore, works the case, she comes across trauma doctor Catherine Cordell, who almost died in the same fashion at the hands of another psychopath several years before, but killed him before he could kill her. Rizzoli soon establishes a connection between the two cases, concluding that she may be on the trail of a deranged copycat.The story opens up with the death of Elena Ortiz at the hands of the Surgeon, and Thomas Moore is sent to investigate. The murder is tied to another murder by the Surgeon, Diana Sterling, a year previous. Rizzoli and Moore note that both had no contact or connection whatsoever, and are perplexed by these two murders. Meanwhile, the Surgeon begins targeting his third victim, Nina Peyton, and Cordell continues to save lives, starting with Herman Gwadowski. The Surgeon is also starting to get closer and closer to Cordell, who is creating a romantic and sexual connection with Thomas Moore. In the end, Jane manages to save Cordell from the Surgeon, and Moore marries Cordell.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quite_Ugly_One_Morning"title="Quite Ugly One Morning">
## Summary.Jack Parlabane rents a flat from a friend in Edinburgh (which just happens to be opposite a police station), and investigating the unpleasant murder of a gambling medic in the flat below proves too much to resist, the victim mutilated and the crime scene grossly vandalized; the victim, Dr Jeremy Ponsonby, is tied up, missing both his nose and his index fingers, had his throat cut, and the crime scene is covered in urine and faeces and vomit, the latter being from the postman who found the body. Parlabane soon finds himself involved with a number of characters including Darren Mortlake, a hit-man from Essex, Dr Sarah Slaughter, the dead doctor's ex-wife, lesbian with attitude DC Jenny Dalziel, and crooked hospital trust administrator Stephen Lime.The book takes its name from a song from Warren Zevon's 1991 album "Mr. Bad Example". It was followed by the best seller Country of the Blind in 1997 which again involved Jack Parlabane.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholics_(novel)"title="Catholics (novel)">
Most of the action of the novel takes place on an island monastery off the southwest coast of Ireland. It is set in the future, near the end of the twentieth century after the Second Vatican Council. The story tells of a young priest sent by the authorities in Rome to fully implement Church reforms in an Irish monastery that still celebrates the Catholic liturgy according to older rites. The young priest, James Kinsella, is initially opposed by the Abbot of the monastery, who tries to preserve his and his monks' way of life. However, the Abbot eventually recognizes the need for—and inevitability of—change. The novel comes to a head when a confrontation between the Abbot and a senior monk, Matthew, nearly undermines the structure of the monastery. The Abbot is plagued by his own doubts in matters of faith. The novel ends on an ambiguous note as the Abbot prays for the first time in years, but in the face of the abandonment of their traditional way of life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Host_(novel)"title="The Host (novel)">
A species of parasitic aliens called "Souls" have invaded Earth, deeming the humans too violent to deserve the planet. When a Soul is implanted into a host body, the consciousness of the original owner is erased, leaving their memories and knowledge. Wanderer, a Soul, is placed into the body of Melanie Stryder. However, Melanie's consciousness is still alive and begins to communicate with Wanderer mentally. Wanderer's assigned "Seeker" suggests that she could be placed into Melanie to retrieve the memories before disposing of the defective body, but Wanderer makes several attempts to deny her Seeker's wishes. As Wanderer starts to uncover some of Melanie's memories of her younger brother Jamie Stryder and her boyfriend Jared Howe, Melanie gets her to follow a series of landmarks throughout the Arizona desert to find her Uncle Jeb, hoping that Jared and Jamie are with him. By doing so, she would be denying the Seeker Melanie's memories and the humans they would lead her to.When Jeb comes across Melanie's dying body, he realizes what had happened to her but still leads her to his hideout: a network of caves housing more than thirty people. Most of the other humans wanted her to be killed with the exception of Jared and Jamie, and later on Ian O'Shea, who develops feelings for Wanderer. As days pass and she starts to become a part of the community, many of the community members start to trust her with jobs and eventually gave her a teaching role among the colony. She is also given the name Wanda in replacement of the name Wanderer. After tending to a cancer patient one night, Wanda is attacked by Ian's brother, Kyle. After managing to save both herself and Kyle from drowning, the two are taken into the infirmary. Shortly after recovering, Wanda stumbles across a slew of mutilated bodies that cause her to hide by herself in terror for three days. During her time in isolation, Wanda learns from Jeb that the humans are trying to cut Souls out of their hosts in attempt to restore the consciousness and life of the humans but so far each attempt has resulted in a dead body.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Wish"title="The Last Wish">
## "The Witcher".The King of Temeria, Foltest, has offered a reward to anyone who can lift the curse on his daughter, Adda (the result of an incestuous union with his late sister, also named Adda), who was born as a striga, and terrorizes the town every night. Foltest insists that his daughter not be harmed, but grants Geralt permission to kill her if Adda cannot be returned to human form. Geralt is unsure whether Adda can live as a "normal" human even if the curse is lifted.Geralt prepares to spend the night at the old palace which houses the striga. Lord Ostrit, a magnate from Novigrad, tries to bribe Geralt into leaving. Ostrit wants to use the striga as proof of Foltest's inability to rule, convincing Temeria's people to support Novigrad's usurpation of Foltest. Geralt refuses and knocks out Ostrit to use him as bait.Geralt fights and defeats the striga, despite the striga's resistance to silver. Unable to subdue the striga, Geralt seals himself into its crypt, forcing it to spend the night outside its lair, lifting the curse. In the morning, Geralt approaches the seemingly-restored Adda, but the girl attacks him and claws his neck. Geralt binds his wounds and faints, but regains consciousness in the temple, being told that Adda is being cared for by the King and Geralt has earned his reward.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_of_the_Slitheen"title="Revenge of the Slitheen">
## Part 1.Maria and Luke start their new school, but find all is not as it seems. Aided by Sarah Jane and their new friend Clyde Langer, they find the Slitheen, who are enemies of The Doctor, disguised as teachers who have taken control of the technology block and are trying to switch off the Sun. Luke unknowingly gives the Slitheen the code to start the machine, and they start to absorb the power of the Sun. Sarah Jane investigates the company controlling the science block, and Maria, Luke and Clyde investigate the school. Sarah Jane is attacked by a Slitheen who disguised herself as a company secretary, Janine. Luke finds a secret room and is confronted by the Slitheen commander, his headmaster Blakeman, whilst Maria is hiding under a computer desk after being spotted by Jeffrey. Jeffrey removes his human disguise in front of Maria, but the only thing visible to her are his green feet. Maria runs away, and meets up with Clyde, who runs away too. They are rescued by the school genius Carl who then reveals he is, too, a Slitheen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aesthetics_of_Resistance"title="The Aesthetics of Resistance">
Weiss's complex multi-layered 1000 page novel has been called a "book of the century [Jahrhundertbuch]." It can no more be usefully summarized than James Joyce's "Ulysses". By way of introducing "The Aesthetics of Resistance" what follows are the opening paragraphs of an article by Robert Cohen:""The Aesthetics of Resistance" begins with an absence. Missing is Heracles, the great hero of Greek mythology. The space he once occupied in the enormous stone frieze depicting the battle of the Giants against the Gods is empty. Some two thousand years ago the frieze covered the outer walls of the temple of Pergamon in Asia Minor. In the last third of the nineteenth century the remnants of the ancient monument were discovered by the German engineer Carl Humann and sent to Germany. The fragments were reassembled in the specially built Pergamon Museum in Berlin, the capital of Wilhelminian Germany, and were to signal from this point forward the late claims to power of German imperialism. The Pergamon frieze can still be seen in Berlin today. In the fall of 1937 – and here we are at the beginning of Peter Weiss's novel – three young men find themselves before the frieze. Two of them, Coppi and the narrator, whose name is never mentioned, are workers. The third, a sixteen-year-old named Heilmann, is a high school student. Coppi is a member of the illegal Communist Party, Heilmann and the narrator are sympathizers. All three are active in the antifascist resistance. In a lengthy discussion the three friends attempt to interpret the stone figures and events depicted in the frieze in a way which would make them relevant for their own present day struggle. They cannot, however, find Heracles. Other than a fragment of his name and the paw of a lion's skin, nothing remains of the leader of the Gods in the battle against the Giants. The "leader" of 1937, on the other hand, is an omnipresent force, even in the still halls of the Pergamon Museum, where uniformed SS troopers, their Nazi insignia clearly visible, mingle among the museum's visitors. Under the pressure of the present and with their lives in constant danger, the three young antifascists read the empty space in the frieze as an omen, they feel encouraged to fill it with their own representation of the absent half-god. What they envision is an alternative myth in stark contrast to the traditional image of Heracles. From a friend of the Gods, the mighty and the powerful, Heracles is transformed into a champion of the lowest classes, of the exploited, imprisoned, and tortured – a messianic "leader" in the struggle against the terror of the "Führer".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_from_the_Ashes"title="Empire from the Ashes">
The trilogy's protagonist is Colin MacIntyre, who is on a routine training flight over the Moon when it reveals itself to be Dahak, a self-aware space battle planetoid millennia old. MacIntyre and Dahak defeat Dahak's previous enemies and restore a galactic empire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine"title="The Shock Doctrine">
The book is divided into seven parts with a total of 21 chapters.Part 1 begins with a chapter on psychiatric shock therapy and the covert experiments conducted by the psychiatrist Ewen Cameron in collusion with the Central Intelligence Agency. The second chapter introduces Milton Friedman and his Chicago school of economics, whom Klein describes as leading a laissez-faire capitalist movement committed to creating free markets that are even less regulated than those that existed before the Great Depression.Part 2 discusses the use of "shock doctrine" to transform South American economies in the 1970s, focusing on the 1973 coup in Chile led by General Augusto Pinochet and influenced by a prominent group of Chilean economists who had been trained at the University of Chicago in the Economics department, funded by the CIA, and advised by Milton Friedman. Klein connects torture with economic shock therapy.Part 3 covers attempts to apply the shock doctrine without the need for extreme violence against sections of the population. Klein says that Margaret Thatcher applied mild shock "therapy" facilitated by the Falklands War, while free market reform in Bolivia was possible due to a combination of pre-existing economic crises and the charisma of Jeffrey Sachs.Part 4 reports on how Klein thinks the shock doctrine was applied in Poland, China, South Africa, Russia, and the Four Asian Tigers. In Poland she discusses how the left-leaning trade union Solidarity won the country's 1989 legislative elections, but subsequently employed the shock doctrine due to IMF pressure. The section on China discusses the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests, and the liberalization of China's economy. In South Africa she explains that the negotiations to end apartheid resulted in economic policy that went against the core of the Freedom Charter. In Russia she describes how Boris Yeltsin took power after the collapse of the Soviet Union and crafted economic policy that made the Russian oligarchs of 2020 possible. Finally she shows that during the 1997 Asian financial crisis the Tiger Nations were forced to sell off numerous state enterprises to private, foreign companies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reluctant_Queen"title="The Reluctant Queen">
The novel begins in with a prologue, in the year 1485. Anne, the narrator, knows she is dying and has decided to write her memoirs before death slowly takes her. She worries about the fate of her family including that of her husband Richard, the King of England. Richard is severely maligned by his people, and Anne fears that his power and position would be greatly jeopardized after her death. This leads to her reminiscing on happier days.She recalls growing up in the English countryside with her noble family: her father Richard, her mother Anne, and sister Isabel. At the age of five she meets her future husband, eight-year-old Richard Plantagenet who is studying under the tutelage of her father. Richard's brother Edward has recently been proclaimed King by the English people, usurping the throne from mentally unstable King Henry VI and his aloof consort, Margaret of Anjou. Richard enthralls young Anne with tales of his brother and the Wars of the Roses. Anne's father as the Earl of Warwick has played a crucial part in placing Edward on the English Throne, and plans to marry him to French noblewoman, Bona of Savoy, much to his daughter Isabel's chagrin as she secretly wants to be Queen Consort.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Visions_Trilogy"title="Dark Visions Trilogy">
## "The Strange Power".Kaitlyn Fairchild is a psychic teenager who is believed to be a witch. Her power is seeing the future. She is able to visualize her premonitions through drawings, but she often cannot interpret them until it is too late. She is offered a place by Joyce Piper, at a psychic research center known as the Zetes Institute, and after seeing a child get hurt, as foreseen by one of her premonitions, she agrees to go to the Institute with four other teenagers who have powers of their own. She quickly befriends three of the other teens, Anna Eva Whiteraven, Lewis Chao and Rob Kessler, and forms feelings for Rob; the fifth psychic, Gabriel Wolfe is aloof and reluctant to form friendships with anyone except Kaitlyn. While at the Institute, they are tested on their psychic abilities, but a mysterious man warns Kaitlyn that the Institute is dangerous, and even the sullen housekeeper Marisol warns them to get out as soon as possible, after which she goes into coma. The psychics become suspicious and begin to believe the warnings about the Institute. They investigate and find a secret passageway, which contains plans to turn them into psychic weapons to sell to major corporations, and a file about Project Black Lightning, a previous project in which other psychics were tested upon and 'terminated'. The teens almost get caught by the head of the Institute, Mr. Zetes, and Gabriel locks the five of them into a psychic link to save them. The link allows them to 'hear' each other's thoughts and communicate, but they cannot get rid of it afterwards so they try to find a way to break the link, but discover that the only way is for one of them to die. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_Time_Pass"title="Let Time Pass">
Johanna who is a lector at a Danish university gets involved by her colleague professor Jeyde in a time travel experiment. Jeyde has discovered that he can put the time 23 days back. The background to the invention is that Jeyde perceives the time as split up into small sets, among which time stands calm.Jeyde compares his theory with films, where every second 24 still pictures are shown. If you happen to cut the time "tape" the world gets rewound to the previous secure point (which would be 23 days before the moment of the cut). The problem that Jeyde has encountered is that after the time cut neither he nor anybody else can notice that there was a cut because everything that happened between the safe point and the cut is erased from their memories as it never had happened (and theoretically it hasn't happened indeed). He can't even be sure about any event whether it's the first time it's happening or not.To be able to understand the possibilities of his invention better, Jeyde sends Johanna to a psychiatrist who "opens up her mind" so after a time cut she'd be able to remember the destroyed time. When Johanna gets tired of being repeatedly sent by Jeyde back in time (since Jeyde sends back the entire Universe and not just Johanna he doesn't need Johanna's participation or agreement to send her back) she manages to lock Jeyde up in a psychiatric hospital and wants to leave time travelling behind her, but then she suddenly realises how much freedom it can give her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Hands_(novel)"title="Invisible Hands (novel)">
Chief inspector Kristian Wold is assigned to a one-year-old missing persons case. The commission from his superiors is not to be mistaken: a final review before the case is closed. However, Kristian's conscience forces him to comply when Inger Danielsen, mother of the 14-year-old girl who is missing, asks to see him. The meeting holds unexpected consequences for both of them. As Kristian feels obliged to continue an investigation that has so far been fruitless, an emotional tension is ignited between him and the mother. Inexorably, the two are drawn towards each other, in what will become a love affair against all odds, with a disastrous end awaiting.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bear_Went_Over_the_Mountain_(novel)"title="The Bear Went Over the Mountain (novel)">
Arthur Bramhall isolates himself in a forest cabin to write a novel; once it is complete, he goes off to buy champagne in celebration, after first burying the manuscript to protect it from fire. In his absence, a bear digs up his manuscript. The bear reads the manuscript, decides it is good, and brings it to New York City, where he is accepted as a talented author and desirable party guest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamer_(novel)"title="Dreamer (novel)">
Awake, Greg Donner falls in love with the beautiful red-headed Ginny Winters, a woman with a mysterious past. Asleep, Greg dreams of pursuing Ginny through a terrifyingly deserted Chicago. Awake, Richard Iles is confined to a sanatorium in Kentucky and trapped in a turbulent marriage to Ginny Winters. Asleep, Richard dreams he is Greg Donner. And when he next wakes up, he IS Greg Donner. But Ginny has gone. Overall, Quinn regards this work as a love story that depicts certain components of his relationship with his own wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe's_Skirmish"title="Sharpe's Skirmish">
This short story occurs after "Sharpe's Sword" in the summer of 1812. Sharpe and his men escort commissary Major Tubbs to an abandoned Spanish fort where a cache of thousands of muskets has been forgotten in the general French retreat in northern Spain. Unbeknownst to the British, French Major Ducos has authorised a surprise raid to threaten the Duke of Wellington's supply lines and hopefully delay the British pursuit long enough for the French to regroup. To accomplish this, the French first need to secure the fort, which guards a bridge across the Tormes River. However, Sharpe stands in the way, and for the first (but by no means last) time thwarts a scheme involving Ducos.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wool-Pack"title="The Wool-Pack">
Set in the Cotswolds near Burford, Oxfordshire, "The Wool-Pack" begins in 1493 when Nicholas Fetterlock, the twelve-year-old son of a rich wool merchant, learns from his father that he is betrothed to Cecily Bradshaw, the daughter of a rich cloth merchant. Within the guild, Nicholas discovers the work of swindlers who could ruin his father's business. Nicholas, Cecily, and a friend determine to stop them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Load_of_Unicorn"title="The Load of Unicorn">
Benedict, known as Bendy, has been apprenticed by his forward-looking father to the printer William Caxton. This infuriates his mean half-brothers who are scriveners and fear that the new-fangled printing press will drive them out of business. They have secretly waylaid the printer's delivery of new paper and are hiding it. Bendy knows about it but is worried about the consequences of telling, especially as his half-brothers may be involved with Lancastrian rebels.Caxton sends Bendy and another apprentice on a quest to find the complete manuscript of Thomas Mallory's stories of King Arthur. Mallory's stories had been circulating as a series of independent and internally consistent tales, but Caxton believes there is a single manuscript, based on the fact that some of the tales make clear reference to earlier episodes. Bendy's quest proves dangerous as others are also on the trail.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Assassination_Option"title="The Assassination Option">
This novel centers around Capt. James Cronley, the central character of the first novel of the series. Cronley has been promoted to be commander of a new unit in the new Central Intelligence Agency. As the chief of DCI Europe, Cronley has to deal with all sorts of intrigue, much of it involving U.S. government and military personnel unhappy with the creation and power of the new CIA. Cronley and the people working with and for him, have a new mission to bring the family of a Soviet informant out of East Germany and to freedom. In the process Cronley must fend off attempts to undermine his authority. Cronley's mother was a German national and he runs across German relatives and he finds all with them is not what it seems.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ship_of_the_Dead"title="The Ship of the Dead">
Magnus and Alex Fierro travel to the Chase Mansion, where they recover notes scribbled by Randolph at different points of time guarded by a wolf. After reaching Valhalla, Magnus summons a ship gifted by his father Frey. Mallory Keen, Halfborn Gunderson, Thomas Jefferson Jr., Samirah al-Abbas and Alex accompany Magnus, while they plan to pick up Blitzen and Hearthstone along the way. The crew's talk is heard by the Nine Billow Maidens, who take them to the court of Aegir, where they discover Hearth and Blitz are held prisoners. Aegir's eldest daughter recognizes Magnus from his previous encounter with her mother Rán. Upon being threatened, Magnus swears by his troth to defeat Loki in a flyting contest and to avenge Aegir's humiliation, who was previously defeated by the god in a contest. Aegir invites them to escape while he isn't looking, but the crew is attacked by Aegir's nine daughters. They manage to escape with the help of Magnus' grandfather, Njord. Njord reveals Magnus that the only way to defeat Loki is by drinking Kvasir's mead. The crew continue on their journey, with Blitz and Hearth travelling separately to retrieve Bolverk's whetstone.As the crew heads to York, the backstories of the members are revealed. Mallory died disarming a bomb in Ireland; Halfborn died near Jorvik; TJ died after forcefully accepting a hopeless challenge, a trait inherited from his father Tyr. Samirah fasts during the Ramadan season. The crew arrives at York, where they duel with the giant Hrungnir for the location of Kvasir's mead. They get the information that they need: the Kvasir's mead is in Jorvik, also known as Norway in the human realm. The crew goes to Norway, get the Kvasir's mead from Suttung's daughter, Gunnlöð, and kill Baugi. Suttung is killed single-handedly by Halfborn. They also get the information that Naglfar is frozen between Niflheim and Jotunheim. They almost froze to death while travelling to Niflheim. However, they are rescued by Skadi, Njord's ex-wife. Magnus drinks the Kvasir's mead and the crew goes to Naglfar. Magnus competes in a flyting on Naglfar against Loki, but decides not to insult the god. Instead, he expresses the love and trust he has for his crew and pities Loki for his evident loneliness, as even his wife Sigyn abandons him when he shrinks to the size of a nut upon hearing Magnus's words. Loki is imprisoned in a walnut given earlier by Frigg. Magnus and his friends go to Vigridr, the Last Battlefield, and meet the gods who congratulate them for defeating Loki and delaying Ragnarok, for which Magnus is rewarded with a boon from Odin. Magnus asks Odin to lend him his lawyers so that he could convert Randolph's mansion into an orphanage and homeless shelter. He later recounts his adventure to Annabeth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Legendary_Kingdoms"title="The Four Legendary Kingdoms">
Eight years after successfully constructing the Great Machine and preventing the Dark Sun from destroying the earth, Jack West Jr. has retired to his farm in Western Australia. While his adopted daughter Lily—now a twenty-year-old college student—is visiting him, he is called to the Pine Gap military installation to consult on an unusual anomaly detected by its top secret telescopic array. West speculates that the anomaly is a rogue galaxy hurtling across the universe, and that a collision with the Milky Way Galaxy—an apocalyptic event—is imminent. However, before he can draw any further conclusions, the facility is attacked and West is abducted.West awakens in a locked cell and is attacked by a man in a bull-shaped mask resembling a minotaur. West kills the man and escapes the cell to find himself in an arena with fifteen other men, most of whom were prepared for the attack. The group is addressed by a man calling himself Hades, who announces that the sixteen men are the sixteen champions chosen to take part in the Hydra Games. By completing the games, the champions will acquire nine spheres of golden quartz which will unlock a temple within the arena and complete a ritual required to save the world. In order to ensure the champions' loyalty, each man has been implanted with an explosive device and their friends and families held hostage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_Bounds_(McDermid_novel)"title="Out of Bounds (McDermid novel)">
Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie walks the streets of Leith in the small hours. She cannot sleep as her lover and colleague, Phil Parhatka, was killed in the last outing in this series (The Skeleton Road). At night she encounters displaced Syrian refugees in alleyways and under bridges gathered together to try and be a community, as since coming to Scotland, they have nowhere to meet up.In 2016, a group of joyriders crash their stolen vehicle and the driver ends up in intensive care. The DNA of the offender leads Pirie to an unsolved rape/murder of a hairdresser from Partick in 1996. Tina McDonald was on a night out with some friends in Glasgow when she disappeared from the group before being found dead the next morning.A supposed suicide of Gabriel, a Kinross man, also leads to Karen unofficially opening a cold case on a 1994 aircraft crash. The aircraft contained 4 people, the pilot was an MP and one of the passengers was Gabriel's mother. It was always believed that an incendiary device had caused the aircraft to crash and that the IRA were responsible. As Karen digs deeper, she finds more and more and comes to believe that the terrorists were far from responsible.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Heroes_(novel)"title="Little Heroes (novel)">
In the near-future, a music conglomerate called Muzik Inc. hires Glorianna O'Toole, the "Crazy Old Lady of Rock and Roll", who never made it as a rock star but who was present at rock and roll's creation, and two young computer geniuses, to create a fleshless, Artificial Personality rock-and-roll star.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savages_(novel)"title="Savages (novel)">
Ben and Chon are two Americans running a lucrative marijuana operation out of Laguna Beach, California. Their business thrives until members of the Mexican Baja Cartel decide they want to enter the same business. When Ben and Chon resist the Mexicans' demands, the cartel kidnaps "O" (short for Ophelia), the boys' close confidante and frequent bedroom playmate. Ben and Chon conjure schemes to outwit their adversaries and win back O, using everything from improvised explosive devices to masks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_Munchausen's_Narrative_of_his_Marvellous_Travels_and_Campaigns_in_Russia"title="Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia">
An eighteenth-century German nobleman, Baron Munchausen, experiences a series of amazing adventures. He arrives at the Turkish royal court, where he meets the Sultan, steals his whole treasury, and sails away from Turkey.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddy_(Herlong_novel)"title="Buddy (Herlong novel)">
Tyrone "Li'l T" Roberts meets Buddy when his family's car unintentionally hits the stray dog on their way to church. Buddy ends up being the pet dog Li'l T's constantly wanted, until Hurricane Katrina comes to New Orleans and he needs to leave Buddy. After the tempest, Li'l T and his dad return home to discover a group attempting to reconstruct their lives, and Buddy gone. Yet, Li'l T declines to surrender his mission to locate his closest companion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEX_(Olde_Heuvelt_novel)"title="HEX (Olde Heuvelt novel)">
The novel is set in the town of Black Spring, New York (Beek in the original Dutch version), where its inhabitants are routinely terrorized by the ghost of the Black Rock Witch. The witch was formerly a woman by the name of Katherine van Wyler, who was put to death in 1664 and had her eyes and mouth sewn shut after death. She will randomly appear in places throughout Black Spring and the townpeople track her progress via the HEX mobile app, which they use to avoid her as much as possible. The town has several core rules and safeguards in place to ensure that a delicate balance is kept. Two of the most major rules is that no outsiders can ever learn about the Black Rock Witch's existence and her stitches must never be removed. Leaving the town is not an option, as being away for longer than a few days causes townspeople to become suicidal. The townspeople try to make do as best as possible and discourage new people from coming into town, but this is not always successful.Unhappy with this setup, a group of the town's teenagers secretly make plans to broadcast the witch's existence across the world, a move that puts them at risk of severe punishment from the town's council as videotaping the witch is forbidden. Initially the teens are cocky in their recordings, but over time tensions within their group begin to tear them apart and set in motion a terrible set of events that threaten to exterminate the entire town.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bathing_Women"title="The Bathing Women">
"The Bathing Women" focuses on the main character Tiao, a Beijing publisher who on chance begins an affair with the older married actor Feng Jing, her sister Fan and her long term friend Fei, as they grow up in the chaos of The Cultural Revolution. The novel is set simultaneously in the 1960s and 1980s China. The novel confronts the themes of misogyny, gender roles and double standards of Chinese culture.The novel opens with the protagonist Tiao, a successful executive for a Beijing publishing company, entering into an affair with the married actor Feng Jing. Feng Jing is internationally acclaimed for his portrayal of the hardships of the victims of the Cultural Revolution based on his own experiences in a labor camp at the time. Throughout their relationship Feng Jing promises Tiao that he will leave his wife to marry her.The setting of the novel flashes back to a moment in Tiao's youth, in which she witnesses the public denouncement of one of her school's teachers, Tang Jingjing. Ms. Tang had recently had a daughter out of wedlock and is labelled as a "female hooligan". As punishment for her transgression she is given a choice: either reveal the name of the father of her daughter or be forced to consume feces, Ms. Tang not wanting to humiliate her daughter, chooses the latter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Lover_of_Death"title="He Lover of Death">
The novel is set in year 1900. Erast Fandorin looks for a treasure hidden in a basement. The case involves a mysterious lady called Death, whose lovers die under strange circumstances.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_of_the_Sands"title="Rebel of the Sands">
Sixteen-year-old gunslinger and sharpshooter Amani Al'Hiza has the elemental power to control the sands of the desert. An orphan, she itches to leave Dustwalk her dead end home town, the small town where she lives with her aunt, uncle, and cousins. Amani escapes in a Buraqi, to travel across the desert with Jin, a mysterious foreigner. They encounter many dangers along the journey as they defend themselves against mythical creatures such as the "Nightmares" and "Skinwalkers". Along the way, Amani found many secrets about herself, her mysterious foreigner and the Rebel Prince.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apocalypse_Fire"title="The Apocalypse Fire">
Ava Curzon has returned from Baghdad to the British Museum, and is recruited by Britain’s ultra-secretive MI13 intelligence department to assist in recovering the Turin Shroud, which has been stolen by a Russian special forces team. As the chase moves to London, she finds herself on the trail of Oleg Durov, a Russian oligarch, who leads an apocalyptic group of castrati known as the Skoptsy.With the stakes rising, Ava discovers that Durov possesses two of Rasputin’s personal notebooks, in which the Russian mystic left baffling clues. After a brazen attempt on her life, she infiltrates the headquarters of the mysterious Order of Malta in Rome, where the quest becomes infinitely more dangerous. Following up a hunch, she becomes involved with Mexican gang in London smuggling war-looted antiquities from the Middle East, and finds herself playing a lethal game over an ancient Aramaic artefact like none she has ever seen before. After re-establishing contact with Uri, a Mossad assassin, she solves Rasputin’s clues, which lead her to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, where she finds an ancient manuscript hidden by a medieval Knight of Saint John.As the net closes in on her, she solves the riddle of the knight’s manuscript, and is propelled towards the chilling climax, where she must confronts Durov and the Skoptsy at an ancient castle in the south of France. There, she finally comes face to face with the ancient biblical manuscript that has been driving the mystery all along. Finally, in the husk of the ancient Cathar castle of Montségur, where the medieval heretics were burned alive, she has to face Durov, and present him from unleashing his plan of devastation in the Middle East.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_(Alderman_novel)"title="The Power (Alderman novel)">
In a matriarchal society, a gushing male writer writes to an influential author about his fictional account of how the matriarchy came to be. Five thousand years earlier (in our current time), men dominated society, until stories began to emerge of women who possessed an electrical power used first for self-defense, and eventually to attack, torture, even kill.Roxy is an English teenager whose mother is attacked. She manages to defend herself, injuring one attacker, but the other beats her up and kills her mother. Tunde is an aspiring journalist in Nigeria who starts to film women using their emerging power and publishing it online. Margot is a mayor in Wisconsin who discovers her daughter Jocelyn is also developing these powers. Allie is a girl who is raped by her foster father and kills him with her powers before taking refuge in a convent.As the power emerges across the world, Tunde's reputation allows him unique access to Saudi Arabia and elsewhere to document growing turmoil. Allie discovers how to use her powers to heal and becomes an influential religious leader, propagating a matriarchal doctrine. Margot develops training camps for the women to use their powers. As women in Moldova start paramilitary groups, Tatiana, the president's wife, steps in to take over the country. Rival Awadi-Atif develops a rebel army to oppose her. Tunde is nearly raped by marauding women in India. Margot becomes governor by using her powers to silence her male opponent during a debate. A drug called "glitter" enhances the power of women's electricity-generating organs, called skeins. UrbanDox gains influence as an anti-woman activist. Roxy takes over her father's criminal enterprise. Tatiana begins to behave erratically, leading mass killings of men.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srikanta_(book)"title="Srikanta (book)">
Set in sometime between late 19th-century to early 20th century, the story occurs in different regions of British India — Bhagalpur, Patna, Rangoon, Sainthia (Birbhum) and Debanandapur (Hooghly).While living in his uncle's house, Srikanta, a boy, one day, meets Indranath, a boy of his age, during a football match and from that time, they become close friends. Srikanta accompanies Indranath in his daring adventures. Indranath loves and helps with money an outcast woman named Annadadidi, wife of a Romani snake-charmer. Srikanta also comes to close to Annadadidi. Meanwhile Annadadidi's husband dies of snake-bite leaving her alone, one day she disappears from the scene Indranath also goes away one day and is never seen again. In course of time, Srikanta by chance meets a princely friend of his and goes out on a hunting expedition. There in the prince's tent, he meets Piyari, a nautch (dance) girl, who is none other than his old and dear schoolmate. Her real name is Rajlakshmi. She has not forgotten her old love which grows more intense while meeting Srikanta. After leaving the hunting party, Srikanta, the vagabond that he is, joins a group of roving mendicants. During the travelling Srikanta falls ill, and with some difficulty he sends news of his illness to Piyari at Patna, who hurriedly comes with her stepson to him and takes him to Patna. Srikanta spends some days there in the loving care of Piyari, and one day Srikanta takes leave of Piyari and goes to his native village.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Siamese_Cat"title="The Chinese Siamese Cat">
Sagwa, a young cream kitten, lives in the House of the Foolish Magistrate, a greedy man who only makes up rules that help himself. One day, Sagwa falls into an inkwell and accidentally changes one of the Magistrate's new rules. Little did Sagwa know, she would actually alter the fate (and the appearance) of both China, and the Chinese cats forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Orphelin_de_Perdide"title="L'Orphelin de Perdide">
On the dangerous planet Perdide, a father and his four-year-old son, Claude, are trying to escape a swarm of giant hornets. Exhausted, the father managed to send a distress message to his friend Max, but failed to reach him directly, and instructed his son to quickly get into the forest on the hill. Before dying, the father gives his transceiver to Claude and tells him to do what it says. The boy finds himself alone in a strange forest with his only companion the small egg-shaped object.Aboard the ship "The Big Max," the smuggler Max discovers the message from his friend and contact Perdide. Little Claude immediately responds, speaking to his microphone as if it were a person. He then decided to divert its route to Perdide to save the child. His two passengers, Belle and her husband Martin, who have paid a large sum to be taken to the planet Sidoine, protest in vain. Max maintains communication with Claude and instructs him on how to survive in a hostile environment."The Big Max" lands on the beautiful planet, Devil-Ball, where Max joins his old friend Silbad. The aging Silbad has had a metal plate on his head since he was attacked by hornets on Perdide in his childhood, and knows about the dangers of the planet. Touched by the story of Claude, he boards "The Big Max" and spends most of his time telling stories to the child and to protect the dangers of the forest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seafarers_(novel)"title="The Seafarers (novel)">
At the end of World War II, at Portland Harbour, Lieutenant Donald Wolfe is supervising the decommissioning of the motor torpedo boat which he commanded with distinction during the war. The dockyard workers are brought to his vessel in a boat driven by Leading Wren Jean Porter. Each is impressed by the other's practical, no-nonsense approach to their work and they become friends. They part when Donald leaves Portland to lay up his disarmed MTB. After both are demobilised they meet again and Donald discovers that the girl he knew as a boatwoman comes from a well-off family whose social environment is very different from his own. He realises that although they both wish to marry each other, the marriage could not work. They go their separate ways, he to work in an insurance office and she (for something to do, rather than for the money) to learn to be a shorthand typist.But both are dissatisfied with their lives on land and each separately returns to the sea, he to deliver a yacht to England across the Atlantic from Newfoundland and she to deliver a yacht to England from Guernsey. Eventually they meet again on the Hamble and set up a partnership – Wolfe and Porter – to work on boats. They realise that they can now marry, despite her wealthy background, because they earn enough to "keep her in the style she's accustomed to. ... Gumboots and dirty clothes, and Primus stoves, and rough food, and salt water. Not the Savoy Hotel."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devourers"title="The Devourers">
The story, which takes place primarily in Kolkata, is set during the reign of the Mughal Empire in the seventeenth century and extends to modern India. The main character, Alok Mukherjee, is a college professor and historian who happens upon a stranger that tells him a story about shape-shifters that devour human souls in order to survive. The stranger claims that the tale he tells it true, and although Alok is skeptical, he is intrigued and insists on finishing the story. Alok is then enlisted to translate and transcribe a collection of notebooks and texts documented on human skin, through which the rest of the story is told.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Whistler_(novel)"title="The Whistler (novel)">
A mysterious source contacts the (fictional) Florida Board on Judicial Conduct, or BJC, promising information that will reveal the identity and crimes of the most corrupt judge in U.S. history. Investigator Lacy Stoltz is assigned to the case, and takes her sometime-partner Hugo Hatch with her to St. Augustine to meet the source in person. The source is revealed to be a disgraced lawyer from Pensacola named Ramsey Mix.Mix reveals that the corrupt judge is Claudia McDover of Florida's 24th Circuit. Over the course of almost two decades, McDover has aided the local Coast Mafia in their scheme to build a casino in partnership with the Tappacola Indian Nation. Aside from skimming money from the casino, the Coast Mafia has also been responsible for many nearby real estate developments, with any legal problems smoothed over by McDover in exchange for cash payments and condominiums. In addition, the Coast Mafia has staged the murder of Son Razko, a prominent anti-casino member of the Tappacola Nation, and McDover has falsely convicted his right-hand man, Junior Mace, of the crime. Mix has been given this information by an intermediary representing an unknown "mole" close to McDover.When Stoltz and Hatch begin an investigation, the leader of the Coast Mafia, Vonn Dubose, decides to retaliate. Stoltz and Hatch are lured to a remote part of the Tappacola reservation by a tribal member claiming to be a source. Driving away from the uneventful meeting, the duo are deliberately struck head-on by a truck. Hatch is killed and Stoltz is badly injured. This escalation convinces the director of the BJC, Michael Geismar, to ask for help from the FBI. However, the up-and-coming mob lieutenant tasked with killing Hatch and Stoltz left behind evidence at the crime scene and was caught on video at a nearby convenience store. Aided by this evidence and a former Tappacola Nation constable, BJC and FBI investigators find Hatch's killers and offer them reduced sentences in exchange for information against those higher up in the Coast Mafia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transgressors"title="The Transgressors">
"The Transgressors" opens with deputy sheriff Tom Lord riding on a Texas road with the town prostitute Joyce Lakewood. They are lovers and Lord treats her more respectfully than any man Joyce has been with but he refuses to marry her. This leads to them alternately trading insults and flirting. As they argue it is made clear that although he talks like a local with little education, Lord is highly educated. He almost completed medical school when he was forced to drop out to care for his sick father. His father lingered on for years requiring Lord's full-time care and as a temporary way to bring in money Lord took a job as a deputy sheriff. The job turned out to be permanent as by the time his father passed away Lord felt he was too old to return to school and he uses his clownish yokel way of talking to blend in with the rest of the men in the sheriff's office.Joyce and Lord have a minor accident. The look on Lord's face after the accident reminds Joyce of another time he had such an intense look and she remembers a feud he had with Aaron McBride, a supervisor for the Highlands Oil and Gas company. There was oil on land that Lord owned and he signed a contract with McBride to have Highlands drill the oil. However, Highlands swindled him by a loophole in the contract. As a result, Lord waited for an opportunity to take revenge on McBride. When McBride wore a gun on his hip into town Lord confronted him for wearing a gun without a permit. McBride pushed Lord into a storefront. This was the opening Lord was looking for and he quickly pummeled McBride. From that point on McBride was a different man. He never came into Lord's town again but he swore that if he saw Lord outside of Lord's legal jurisdiction he would kill him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Criminal_(novel)"title="The Criminal (novel)">
Everyone in Kenton Hills knows that short-tempered, tongue-tied Bob Talbert wasn't the one responsible for the brutal crime that ended Josie Eddleman's life. Never mind that he was the last one to see her alive. But in a town filled with the likes of an amoral tabloid reporter known only as The Captain, a district attorney who'll do anything for a confession, and Bob's parents, who care as little for Bob as they do for each other, guilt and innocence are little more than a matter of perspective.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Season_in_Purgatory"title="Season in Purgatory">
The novel is set during the Second World War on the island of Mus, which lies in the Adriatic Sea. David Pelham is a junior medical officer in the British Army who volunteers for battlefield medical work and is parachuted onto the island along with a number of British officers and servicemen. Their aim is to aid Tito's partisans in fighting the occupying Germans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_Santo_(novel)"title="Il Santo (novel)">
As a sequel to "Piccolo Mondo Moderno", the novel takes up the story ofPiero Maironi.After a dramatic meeting with Jeanne Dessale, the reformed Maironi (now Benedetto) takes refuge as a monk in a religious community in the mountain village of Jenne and acquires a reputation among the peasants there as a saint who sometimes works miracles of healing. Bendetto calls for a thorough reform of Christian spirituality and thought. Benedetto/Maironi's program of spiritual reform is developed by Fogazzaro from ideas of the Italian philosopher Antonio Rosmini. Benedetto forms with Don Clemente and Professor Giovanni Selva (in whom the critic Jean Lebrec recognizes Friedrich von Hügel, a close friend of Fogazzaro) the nucleus of a latter-day Cénacle who call themselves "Le Catacombe".Benedetto goes to Rome and works among the poor of the Trastevere and Testaccio quarters, but then gains notoriety and becomes enmeshed in clerical and anti-clerical politics. Eventually Benedetto meets with Pope Pius X.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Parade"title="The Night Parade">
Saki Yamamato, a 13-year-old girl, travels with her parents from their home in Tokyo to visit her widowed grandmother in the Japanese countryside for the annual Obon festival. Used to the convenience of always being connected to her friends by cell phone, Saki is horrified when she loses signal in the rural mountain village where her grandmother lives. In an attempt to fit in with a group of local kids, Saki goes to the mountain’s graveyard shrine to ring the sacred bell, and she is plagued with a death curse that she must break in order to save her family and the human world. A series of spirits—a sly kitsune, a legendary tengu, and a talkative tanuki—from the mountain visit her over the next three nights to aid her in her quest to reverse the deadly curse. She must walk in the Night Parade of spirits (aka "Hyakki Yagyō" or the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons) to find someone who can help her undo the curse. Along the way, she learns the importance of family and her heritage and gains a stronger appreciation for her grandmother and her Japanese roots.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rather_Be_the_Devil"title="Rather Be the Devil">
The novel opens and closes with Rebus and his girlfriend, Deborah Quant (a forensic pathologist) dining in a restaurant which is part of the Waldorf Caledonian Hotel. Rebus is reminded of the 1978 murder at this hotel of Maria Turquand, an unsolved case in which Edinburgh bankers and pop stars were suspects. Rebus revisits the case, which becomes intertwined with others more actively pursued by the police in the coming week.DI Malcolm Fox has been promoted to Gartcosh where Police Scotland have the Scottish Crime Campus. Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, DI Siobhan Clarke is investigating the mugging of Darryl Christie, a young gangster who, in "Standing in Another Man's Grave" (2012), stepped into the void created by 'Big Ger' Cafferty's withdrawal from power in Edinburgh. Because HM Revenue and Customs are interested in a shell companies scheme involving Christie and banking scion Anthony Brough, Fox is sent back to Edinburgh to join Clarke's investigation. Then a retired policeman dies, drowned with his hands bound, shortly after talking to Rebus about the Turquand case. This brings a Gartcosh Murder Inquiry Team to Edinburgh, and Fox is asked to join this team as well. Rebus manages to follow both enquiries, and Fox sees to it that Siobhan Clarke comes to the attention of the Gartcosh MIT group, and so the three are again working together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Steal_a_Dog_(novel)"title="How to Steal a Dog (novel)">
Georgina Hayes, her brother Toby, and their parents lived happily in an apartment in Darby, North Carolina until her father leaves their family. Their limited income results in Georgina and her family being evicted from the apartment, and since then, they have lived in their car and in poverty. Her schoolwork and social life both suffer due to this, but she doesn’t tell anyone about the circumstances. She tells her best friend Luanne Godfrey about this and urges her to keep it secret, but soon finds a way to get money and a new place to live after seeing a reward for a missing dog: Steal one, "return it", and claim the reward money, which she hopes to be five hundred dollars. Throughout the novel Georgina also writes down unofficial dog theft rules in her notebook, such as giving the dog water, food, and shelter.After roaming around the neighborhood to search for suitable dogs to steal, Georgina and Toby locate a dog named Willy, who meets several criteria in her rules. She also assumes that Carmella is rich due to the exterior of her house, and that the matter’s surname is on the street the siblings are on. Georgina’s mother manages to get an abandoned house as a temporary home, almost making Georgina abandon her plan, but it is so dilapidated it reinstates her confidence. The house is later boarded up as it turns out the owner did not want anyone there. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_a_Knight"title="Rules for a Knight">
The book is divided into a preface, 20 subsections, and an end poem. Each of the 20 middle sections focuses on a different value or virtue explained in a short tale.Preface – Thomas addresses a letter to his four children on the eve before a battle, fearing he will not survive it. The preface explains how he came as a young man to be the squire of his grandfather, who once served under King Henry V.1. Solitude – recounts the telling of the fable of two wolves by Thomas's grandfather.2. Humility – Thomas remembers a conversation with his grandfather and several other knights on the nature of humbleness, arrogance, and joy.3. Gratitude – a young Thomas suffers from a toothache and complains constantly, annoying his grandfather. When winter comes, young Hawke complains of the cold. His grandfather reminds him that at least his tooth no longer bothers him.4. Pride – Young Thomas learns from his grandfather how to shoot a bow and arrow.5. Cooperation – Young Thomas's grandfather takes on another squire, who outshines Thomas in many tasks. Thomas is plagued by jealousy until the sudden death of the other squire. Upon this tragedy, Thomas realizes that his jealousy of the second squire improved his own skills.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eaters_of_Light"title="The Eaters of Light">
The Twelfth Doctor and Bill, disagreeing about the fate of the Ninth Legion of the Imperial Roman army, travel in the TARDIS along with Nardole to the 2nd century in Scotland to prove the other wrong. Bill goes her own way to find the Legion, while the Doctor and Nardole look for their dead bodies.Bill encounters some of the Legion's soldiers hiding underground, the TARDIS' translation circuits helping her communicate with them. The soldiers are hiding from a "Light Eating Locust" that seems drawn to any light source, killing those in its path. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Nardole discover the boneless corpses of the remaining Legion. They later come across a Pict tribe guarding a cairn and waiting for Kar, their leader and the "Guardian of the Gate". The Doctor impatiently enters the cairn, passing into an interdimensional portal full of creatures feeding off a light source. He comes out seconds later, but finds that more than two days have actually passed. Kar explains that once a generation, a warrior of their tribe goes through the cairn to defeat an "Eater of Light", but with the invading Roman army, she allowed one to escape to fight them. The Doctor warns her that unless they can get the creature back into the portal and close it, more of its kind will escape and consume the sun and all the stars in the universe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Indians"title="Bad Indians">
The memoir’s structure is a Native epistemology that tells a narrative with emphasis on relationships and a circulatory format. Following a loosely chronological order, the book begins in 1770 with the Spanish building a string of missions along the California coast. Through mimicking the “Mission project” as deployed in the California school curriculum and editing excerpts from a coloring book, Miranda recontextualizes how California Missions and American history are taught in schools. She also pulls from her mother’s extensive genealogy records and her grandfather’s cassette tapes in order to tell the stories of her own family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xin_Zhongguo_weilai_ji"title="Xin Zhongguo weilai ji">
In the preface the author apologizes for what is paraphrased in "The Unfinished History of China's Future" by John Fitzgerald as a "rambling quality" due to the inability to put it in a particular genre due to its content, as it was not a historical account, nor was it an orthodox fictional story.The novel begins at the ending and then continues at the beginning of the story; this is called the "flashback technique", a concept that was newly introduced in late Qing China. The novel begins in 1962, or year of Confucius 2513, and shows a 50th anniversary celebration of a Shanghai-based reform movement in which a World Expo and peace treaty signings occur. The celebrated reform movement was the Constitutional Party (xianzhengdang), an umbrella movement of secret society and pro-reform or revolution groups. By 1962 there were three political parties: the Patriotic Self-Government Party (Aiguo zizhidang), the Liberal Party (ziyoudang), and the State Power Party (guoquandang). These three are decentralist, individualist, and centralist, respectively. The "Hungarian Conference" resulted in the 1962 International Peace Conference, held in Shanghai in January of that year, in which China is recognized as the most dominant country on Earth. In the story people in foreign countries, including those in the West, study Chinese to get ahead, and foreign students in China remain in China after the conclusion of their studies, causing brain drain in the West.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_How"title="This Is How">
According to the publisher's synopsis, the book "explores how to survive the 'un-survivable'" in a different way from most self-help books.Burroughs has said that the question he is asked more often than any other is how he survived certain experiences in his life. Burroughs wrote the book as a response to those questions. Burroughs says the book is about crises, how a person must be "absolutely brutally honest" with oneself. Burroughs discusses his own experiences and how he survived them and kept moving forward.Burroughs says he does not believe in powerlessness or self-pity. Burroughs urges people not to wait for someone else to make amends or someone else to help; rather, a person must take responsibility and have a strong understanding that everyone is the author of their own life. Burroughs advocates breaking the "addiction" of dwelling on one's past by focusing on the present and staying busy with physical activities.Burroughs hates the myth that anyone can achieve a dream with hard work and perseverance. He says that without talent and without breaks, it is simply not possible to achieve one's dreams. Instead, a person must avoid self-delusion and concentrate on realistic ambitions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rude_Boy_USA"title="Rude Boy USA">
Mob boss Bernie Banks and his associates—John Leblanc, Ben Berardi, and Jerome Dexter-Dixon are two white and two black men who style themselves after the Rude Boy culture made famous in Jamaica. Operating as a shell investment company supported by illegal activities, the Chimera Group hopes to become as powerful as other crime families and gain respect from the Cosa Nostra. They face internal strife when one of the associates begins dating a former Playboy Club waitress Celia Jones who joins the group through questionable circumstances. Her old occupation follows her into the group by her name, Bunny. Their efforts and push for power also draw the attention of rival Ambrosino family which puts the two groups into a war. In BunnyWine, Bunny (Celia) and John transition out of mob life and rebrands Chimera into a reputable company and attempt to break into politics but is derailed by his former partner in crime Ben Berardi and ambitious New York City prosecutor Mario Pasquale. In the Tide is High, after John's imprisonment and trial he runs for mayor of New York but finds that Mario Pasquale has the same goals as him. Mario pulls all of the stops to derail John's campaign.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessity_(novel)"title="Necessity (novel)">
In "The Just City" a city was created by the time-traveling goddess Athena on the island of Thera prior to its Iron Age volcanic destruction. It was then populated by philosophers and children from all ages of human history and organized on the principles of Plato's "Republic", which turned out not to work so well in practice. In "The Philosopher Kings" the single original city had split into a dozen: five feuding ones on Thera and another eight on other islands where it was discovered that the inhabitants were preaching Christianity to Iron Age Greeks. In large part because of the anachronistic introduction of Christianity, all of the cities were relocated by Zeus to an uninhabited far-off planet in the 26th century, which the cities' inhabitants promptly named Plato."Necessity" begins forty years after these events, on the day the mortal form of the god Apollo, who had chosen to live as a human in the original city, finally dies, and he takes up his divine powers again. That same day also sees the first contact between Plato and wider humanity, as a human spaceship appears in orbit and opens communications. Apollo, however, is more concerned with the disappearance of his sister Athene, who, as it turns out, has gone into the Chaos which exists before and after time, in search of knowledge. The rescue of the wayward goddess involves a great deal of intrigue, time travel, and even alien gods. Walton revisits familiar characters from her previous books (both Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Socrates make an appearance), introduces some new ones and ties up loose ends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Lestat_and_the_Realms_of_Atlantis"title="Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis">
"In my dreams, I saw a city fall into the sea. I heard the cries of thousands", writes Rice, as Lestat de Lioncourt sees visions of a ruined city in his sleep. He and Amel, a spirit Lestat bonded with in the events of the preceding novel, search for the meaning behind the visions of Atlantis, and what it means to the vampires of the world.The novel presents a lengthy procession of Blood Drinkers from previous adventures as they form a united front against a possible adversary in the form of replimoid beings created many millennia ago for one specific purpose: the destruction of Atlantis and its all-powerful ruler – Amel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syd_Sixpence"title="Syd Sixpence">
The narrative follows Syd, an anthropomorphic Australian sixpence, who finds himself on the ocean floor. The book details his search for his friend, Tramline. While in the ocean, Syd meets a family of winkles who subsist on seaweed, encounters a fish who is a magician, and a performing octopus who kidnaps Syd and forces him into a performing circus, from which Syd must plot an escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mountain_Between_Us_(novel)"title="The Mountain Between Us (novel)">
On a stormy winter night, Dr. Ben Payne and writer Ashley Knox are stuck in Salt Lake City International Airport when their flights are canceled. Both are eager to reach their destinations—Ben has patients waiting, and Ashley is to be married the following day. Ben hires a charter plane and offers Ashley a seat, but when their pilot suffers a fatal stroke in flight, the plane crashes, leaving them stranded in the High Uintas Wilderness.Though they survive the impact with injuries (Ben has broken ribs and Ashley suffers a terrible leg fracture), they are faced with harsh weather conditions and the fact that no one knows they are missing. The ordeal leads them to depend on one other for survival, and ultimately brings them closer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonglow_(novel)"title="Moonglow (novel)">
The novel is about the story of the author's (Chabon) grandfather. Throughout the book, the grandfather's name is not referred to.The story is sort of a memoir, jumping around in time. It starts with the narrator stating how his grandfather got arrested.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_Demons"title="Raising Demons">
The book picks up shortly after where "Life Among the Savages" left off. With four children, numerous pets, thousands of books, and countless personal possessions, the narrator realizes with alarm that they have filled up the large house from the previous book and insists they must find a bigger house (to which her husband responds "there "is" no bigger house"). The family at last purchases an enormous old farmhouse on the edge of town, only to learn that it is still occupied by four different families who show no hurry to move out, all while suffering the indignity of a moving company that appears to have stolen all their furniture. The family spends the summer at a home in a resort town while they wait for the house to be vacated. The four children, now older, have developed their own distinctly different personalities: Laurie, the natural leader; Jannie, the romantic conformist; Sally, the stubborn, self-defined imp; and good-natured baby Barry, who seems to regard the rest of his family with wry amusement. With the often indifferent assistance of her husband, the narrator struggles to maintain order and discipline through a series of domestic adventures, even through the heartbreak of realizing her children are growing up.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Rowl"title="Mr. Rowl">
Monsieur Raoul des Sablières, or "Mr. Rowl" as he is known by the 'shop people and such', was wounded and captured at the Battle of Salamanca in 1812. He is on 'parole of honour' in England where he meets and falls in love with the Honourable Miss Juliana Forrest, Lord Fulgrave's daughter. Due to the machinations of Juliana's jealous fiancé, Raoul is considered to have broken his parole and is sent to the prison camp at Norman's Cross. He is persuaded to attempt to escape from the camp, during which a guard is seriously injured and Raoul is unjustly blamed for it. He is therefore sent to a prison ship in Plymouth, from which he escapes disguised as a woman, with the help of money from Juliana.The road on which Raoul (disguised as a Spanish lady to account for his accent) is travelling, becomes blocked by a fallen tree and a fellow passenger, Captain Hervey Barrington - currently without a ship and on half-pay - offers his assistance and invites Raoul to spend the night at his nearby house. Here, Hervey's sister Lavinia discovers Raoul's secret and Hervey locks Raoul in the spare bedroom for the night, intending to turning him over to the authorities in the morning. During the night, Raoul escapes from the bedroom window.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Car"title="The Red Car">
Leah, a young writer, leaves her life in New York for a chance at happiness in San Francisco when her boss, Judy, dies in a fatal traffic accident and leaves her a red sports car.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juino"title="Juino">
Juino follows a narration of Ashok, the male protagonist character of the novel. After all attempts to go abroad to make more money fail, Ashok goes back to his village and started to teach in a school. While teaching in school, he had an acquaintance with a lady named Katha and soon after they fell in love. The story revolves around the scenarios where society is heavily blended with its traditional etiquette.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truevine"title="Truevine">
George and Willie Muse are two brothers growing up in Truevine, part of a sharecropping family that live in a tobacco farming community near Roanoke, Virginia. The two brothers were both albinos, a feature that Willie claimed prompted a circus man to abduct the two children in 1899 while they worked in a field. In the book, Macy notes that it was possible that the children were sent to the circus by their mother, as their albino skin made it unlikely that they would survive long as sharecroppers, but that "if you ask me in my heart, I'm gonna go with [Willie Muse's] story". They performed for years as sideshow attractions where they were cruelly exploited and frequently portrayed as savages from another country or Martians. George and Willie were prevented from contacting their family by their manager, who kept them as modern day slaves, since they were unpaid. The two boys were told that their mother Harriet was dead – a lie, as their mother was still alive and was constantly searching for them. She eventually found the two boys working for the Ringling Brothers Circus and their family was reunited. Harriet successfully sued Ringling Brothers for the treatment of George and Willie. George and Willie resumed performing for the circus in the late 1920s, when they finally received pay for their work. George died in 1972 and Willie died in 2001.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghana_Must_Go_(novel)"title="Ghana Must Go (novel)">
The death of Kweku Sai, a renowned surgeon, in Ghana launches a series of events in his family's life. Although he has left them behind, his wife Fola and their four children—Olu, Kehinde, Taiwo, and Sadie—are left to deal with the repercussions of his passing and reconcile the conflicts he created. In the moment of his death, Kweku takes the audience through the time he did share with his family. From his youngest daughter, Sadie's, birth to the doomed surgery that tanked his career, the first part of the book explores the events that pushed him to leave.Fola is in Ghana when she learns of Kweku’s death, and asks their eldest son Olu to reunite his scattered siblings. Olu lives in Boston, Sadie is in school at Yale, Taiwo lives in New York City and the last they heard Kehinde was living in London. In coming together for the first time in years, they are forced to deal with the pain and obstacles that their father's abrupt desertion brought to their lives. For twins Kehinde and Taiwo, it is evident that they are no longer as close as they were as children and not even Fola knows why.Back in Ghana and living under the same roof, the family is forced to confront the events that have divided their family, and begin to reconnect after years of misunderstanding and unspoken feelings. Olu overcomes his fear of commitment, Sadie finds herself, and Fola learns what happened to Taiwo and Kehinde. The novel ends with the family on the path to healing and forgiveness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dollmaker_(novel)"title="The Dollmaker (novel)">
As the book begins, Gertie Nevels, a Kentucky mountain woman, is struggling to take her sick child down the mountain to see a doctor. She is able to reach the road on the family mule and then to stop a passing car and convince its reluctant occupants to drive her to the doctor’s office. Because her son is in imminent danger of death from suffocation, Gertie performs an emergency tracheotomy. They go to the doctor's office. The boy recovers.During the next part of the book, we get a glimpse of Gertie's life in the mountains, where she is close to her husband Clovis, her five children, her parents, and the community. She is very much at home and fulfilled in this environment, surrounded by nature and connected with the people she loves. She is extremely competent in this mountain life. She thoroughly knows the Bible. Among her many talents is a particular gift for whittling, which she uses to make practical items like ax handles and creative work like dolls. She is gradually carving a sculpture out of a large block of cherry wood, although she does not know if the figure that will eventually emerge will be Christ or Judas.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_vie_compliquée_de_Léa_Olivier"title="La vie compliquée de Léa Olivier">
Lea Oliver has been forced to leave her hometown in order to move with her family to Greater Montreal, which means leaving her friends, boyfriend, and school. She tries to adapt to her new life, only to be faced with new issues such as bullying, the difficulties of a long-distance relationship, and problems stemming from having a popular older brother. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collector_of_Names"title="Collector of Names">
The story is set on the small island in the Mediterranean Sea. Students are coming to party, local pensioners are having their own fun and suddenly there is a child among them asking them for their names. The person who answers him actually gives away his name and identity and sink into the horror of personal annihilation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Sugar_(novel)"title="Queen Sugar (novel)">
Charley Bordelon is a young mother in Los Angeles who has recently been divorced due to a public scandal. After the death of her father, she learns that rather than inheriting his local rental properties, she has inherited a sugarcane farm in St. Joseph, Louisiana, where he was born and raised. Against her mother's wishes, Charley moves to St. Joseph, taking her 15-year-old daughter, Micah, with her and moving in with her paternal grandmother, Miss Honey. Shortly after arriving, Charley learns that her property manager has been neglecting the farm and is about to quit to work an oil rig. She is hard pressed to find another property manager so late in the season but Prosper Denton, a retired farmer recommended by Miss Honey, reluctantly agrees to come out of retirement to help her.Charley's estranged older half-brother, Ralph Angel, a former drug addict and the child of their father's relationship with his high school sweetheart in St. Joseph, returns to town with his son, Blue. Angel is deeply embittered that his father left him nothing, and he also resents Charley for having been raised by a man who essentially abandoned him.Charley struggles to keep the farm going, quickly realizing that it takes more money than was earmarked for maintenance. She believes that wealthy white farmers in the area, such as Jacques Landry and Samuel T. Baron, are conspiring against her and ready to take over the land if she fails. She learns from Miss Honey that her father once worked as a cane cutter on the farm she now owns. In the days of segregation and Jim Crow, he was beaten by an overseer for drinking from a water pail first instead of giving way to the white workers. She renews her determination to keep the farm running, as a way of continuing her father's struggle. She and Denton hire a retired white farmer, Alison Delcambre, to help manage the farm. They recover from a hurricane that flattens the crops.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paloma_Negra_(novel)"title="Paloma Negra (novel)">
The novel is set in Yugoslavia in 1950 under the communist regime. David is an officer who doesn't want to sign killing order for the political prisoners and he is exiled in a small village high in the mountains where rules of its own apply, set up by Michael, head of local band of smugglers. The travelling cinema comes to the village and after one singing Mexican melodrama, younger villagers start to dress like Mexicans and form a musical band. David is amused but the everything soon goes out of hand and David's superiors are coming to see how he is maintaining order in the village.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning_(novel)"title="In the Beginning (novel)">
At the beginning of the novel, David Lurie is a six-year-old boy growing up in the Bronx in the late 1920s. David is a smart and sensitive boy who is frequently ill due to an injury suffered as a newborn: a deviated septum caused by a fall onto the stone steps of their apartment as his parents were bringing him home from the hospital. David's mother and father, both Polish Jews from Lemberg, had emigrated to the United States after the war along with many of their friends, seeking a better life in a country less hostile to Jews. David's mother Ruth was first married to Max's brother David, who was killed in a pogrom following the war, after which Max married Ruth as prescribed by Jewish law. The main character David is often said to resemble his dead Uncle David with his love of reading and sensitive nature.Max, who had been a member of the Polish army only to come home to anti-Semitic persecution, founded a group called the Am Kedoshim Society ("nation of holy people") with many friends who had served with him in the war, with the goal of actively fighting anti-Semites. After the war, Max sought to move all of the members of the society from Poland to America, as well as his and his wife's parents and extended families. The two families resist making such a drastic change and ultimately decide not to leave Poland, but the final member of the Society arrives in America just before the stock market crash of 1929. After the crash, the society's finances are decimated, its members scatter to more affordable areas of New York, and Max sinks into a depression, feeling that he has made a terrible mistake in encouraging everyone to move to a land that is seemingly no longer prosperous. Max eventually recovers and decides to become a watchmaker; beginning with a small watch repair business, he eventually starts a small chain of jewelry stores. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Myth"title="Age of Myth">
Since time immemorial, individuals have worshiped gods they call Fhrey, who are: invulnerable in war, masters of magic, and seemingly immortal. But when a god falls to a human blade, the balance of power between humans and those they thought were gods changes forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monogram_Murders"title="The Monogram Murders">
Poirot is taking a holiday from private-detective work, though in fact he has only travelled to the guest house nearest his London flat; he can even see the flat from the house's parlour window. One evening, while waiting for his dinner in a coffee house he frequents, he is confronted by a distressed young woman who tells him that she is "already dead... or will be soon", but that he absolutely must not pursue her killer. "The crime must never be solved", she pleads.The next day brings news that three seemingly unconnected people have been murdered in their rooms at the Bloxham Hotel, each with a cuff-link placed carefully in their mouths, and engraved with the initials "PIJ". Furthermore, the staff are alerted to the murders and room numbers by a note left at the front desk, reading "MAY THEY NEVER REST IN PEACE. 121. 238. 317." Poirot, enlisted by investigating Scotland Yard officer Edward Catchpool, whom he meets staying at the same guest house, takes the case, and gradually uncovers a complex web of bigotry, hate, and vengeance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Kong_vs._Tarzan"title="King Kong vs. Tarzan">
After capturing King Kong on Skull Island, Carl Denham ferries him across the Indian Ocean, around the continent of Africa, planning to eventually take him to New York City. But trouble befalls the tramp steamer Wanderer, and she is forced to make landfall in Africa, home of Tarzan; whom Denham had met once some years before. Kong escapes and roams the jungles, unintentionally causing havoc amongst its population as he slaughters numerous African wildlife and desecrates the elephant graveyard. Hearing reports of a giant gorilla on the loose, Tarzan investigates and prepares himself. An inevitably climactic showdown in a thunderstorm is joined between the Lord of the Jungle atop a herd of elephants and the King of Skull island with Carl Denham trying to recapture Kong and scheming to do the same to Tarzan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Noise_(book)"title="Black Noise (book)">
In the book, Rose examines rap music and black culture by looking at urban culture politics and rap's racial politics. She also reflects on videos, song lyrics, and interviews with musicians, producers, and other people involved with the rap music industry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malela_Jeev"title="Malela Jeev">
Kanji and Jivi live in Jogipara and Udharia villages near Idar and they belong to different castes. They met each other at the Janmashtami fair and fell in love. They were unable to marry due to coming from different castes. Kanji also has the social responsibility of his elder brother's family. But he finds it difficult to live without Jivi. His friend Hiro suggests having Jivi marry Dhula, the barber in their own village. After a great psychological struggle, Kanji agrees with Hira and get Jivi married to Dhula. But his plan does not bring the expected result. Dhula's suspicious nature, his tyranny, and his poor treatment of Jivi causes Kanji's plan to be unsuccessful. Kanji's God-fearing nature and his indecisive mental state also play a role in his failure. Kanji moves from the village to the city to keep himself away from Jivi. Jivi, meanwhile, is tired of the daily quarrels and beatings and tries to commit suicide. But, by mistake, her tyrannical husband Dhulo loses his life and she falls into an emotional imbalance, yearning for her beloved Kanji. In the end Kanji's worldly love transformed into a spiritual love, and so he comes from the city to be with Jivi.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_Arrow_War"title="Broken Arrow War">
The plot centres around a family of three: Brenat, Teera, and their son, Joel. Who belong to a race thought to have been destroyed. Brenat and Teera believe they will never have children. So when a miracle happens during their bonding on the night of the Blood Moon, they are both extremely happy. However, the baby is sought after by the witch Keres and her master due to their belief that the family are the ones from an ancient legend of creation, meaning the baby could be used to take over the world. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Černí_baroni_(book)"title="Černí baroni (book)">
The novel presents a satirical depiction of the Czechoslovak People's Army not long after the end of World War II. The author focuses on the day-to-day joys and sorrows of soldiers in a technical auxiliary battalion, a forced labour military camp for the internment and re-education of persons considered disloyal to the Communist regime. These units were active between 1950 and 1954. The story takes place at Zelená Hora Castle, in the town of Nepomuk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Man's_Land_(Baldacci_novel)"title="No Man's Land (Baldacci novel)">
The protagonist, John Puller, Jr., a former Army Ranger who served at Iraq and Afghanistan and now works for the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigations Division, is spurred to investigate the unsolved case of his mother's sudden disappearance of thirty years ago when his elderly father, John Puller, Sr. is accused of her murder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gora_(novel)"title="Gora (novel)">
The story mainly revolves around its protagonist, Gormohan alias 'Gora', a ‌staunch Hindu Brahmin. Gora is a young man with a well-built body, good stature, white complexion, and a heavy voice. Because of his physique, he is the head of his circle of friends. Despite not being handsome, Gora is considered attractive because of his heavy speech and high stature. Gora's best friend is Binoybhushan aka Binoy. Binoy is a friendly and handsome young man. He has a special affection for Gora's mother Anandamayi, and regards Anandamayi as his mother as he was orphaned as a child. One day Binoy meets a Brahmo Samaji Paresh Babu and his daughter Sucharita when their wagon crashes outside Binoy's house. Binoy helps them, and starts visiting their house. And then Binoy is introduced to Paresh Babu, his wife Varadasundari, his eldest daughter Lavanya, middle daughter Lalita, and younger daughter Leela. Along with them, he is introduced to Sucharita, the adopted daughter of Paresh Babu, and Satish, Sucharita's real brother. At the time of the story there is an ongoing conflict between the Brahmo Samaj and Hinduism; as Gora is a staunch Hindu who believes in untouchability, he forbids Binoy to meet Paresh Babu and his family. This leads to an argument between the two. Gora accuses Binoy of being attracted to Paresh Babu's daughter, but Binoy denies this. Gora's father Krishnadayal, a good friend of Paresh Babu, one day urges Gora to visit Paresh Babu's house to inquire about his well being. When Gora goes there, Binoy is already present, disappointing and angering Gora. There, Gora is introduced to Haran alias Panu Babu, who is Bengali but has special affection for the British. Haran Babu is a special head of the Brahmo Samaj, and is going to marry Sucharita. Due to Gora's being Hindu, he does not get the same respect at Paresh Babu's house as Binoy did. He gets into an argument with Haran Babu. Sucharita, who earlier saw Gora as inferior because of his fanaticism, supports Gora by not supporting Haran Babu in the debate. Gora is then very angry with Binoy, but due to his special affection for him cannot leave him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Shadows_Fled"title="All Shadows Fled">
In "All Shadows Fled", the malevolent Malaugrym seek the downfall of Shadowdale before the Time of Troubles is passed, while the inhabitants of the valley see this as their opportunity to rid their lands of evil forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Tethyr"title="War in Tethyr">
In "War in Tethyr" a beautiful warrior and her band of adventurers unite the locals against the villains.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Knight_of_Karameikos"title="Dark Knight of Karameikos">
"Dark Knight of Karameikos" follows the chivalrous knight Sir Grygory of Karameikos as he battles the forces of evil which threaten the land of Traldara.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meaning_of_the_21st_Century"title="The Meaning of the 21st Century">
It assesses technological challenges, dangers and opportunities facing the human race. The book lists and proposes solutions for 17 interlocked upcoming "megaproblems". Topics include nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, climate change and terrorism. Martin asserts that many global problems have been worsened by past technologies, but could be addressed by new ones. For example, he advocates for "electronic brain appendages" to help think through to a solution to problems such as global warming.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_and_Turpentine"title="War and Turpentine">
The work of historical fiction reconstructs the life of the narrator’s grandfather, Urbain Martien, before, during and after the First World War – as parts 1, 2 and 3 of the book. The narrator opens with a framing device, purporting to draw upon recollections in notebooks left him by the grandfather. (In an interview, Hertmans asserted that the novel indeed captures the memories of his own grandfather as recorded in a pair of notebooks decades after the war. “He gave me the notebooks a few months before he died, in 1981.” The novel’s narrator left the notebooks unread, until gaining the wherewithal to face the material, and then to re-work them into a work of fiction, some thirty years later—the hundredth anniversary of the war.The main character, Urbain Martien, was raised in a suburban quarter of Ghent during the "belle-époque", and was devoted to his Roman Catholic faith. His father, Franciscus Martien, worked as a fresco painter for parish churches in the Low Countries and finally, in England. Urbain, in turn, acquired an interest in drawing and painting from his father. Urbain's mother, Céline Andries, endured the premature death of her husband, remarried, and saw her son Urbain off to work in a foundry and then, in 1914, off to war. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Field_of_Fight"title="The Field of Fight">
## Current situation.After a short autobiographical account of Flynn's career, "The Field of Fight" paints a gloomy picture of the current state of the struggle against terrorism. Flynn says that he is "totally convinced that without a proper sense of urgency, we will be eventually defeated, dominated, and very likely destroyed". As a result, the United States is in danger of being "ruled by men who eagerly drink the blood of their dying enemies". He warns that "radical Islamists" are intent on "creating an Islamic state right here at home" in the United States by imposing Sharia law, forcing Americans to "live the way the unfortunate residents of the ‘caliphate’ or the oppressed citizens of the Islamic Republic of Iran live today, in a totalitarian state under the dictates of the most rigid version of Sharia."The book argues that the US government is hampered by a lack of intelligence-gathering against its enemies and pays insufficient attention to their ideological motivations. Flynn asserts that the US faces "a working coalition that extends from North Korea and China to Russia, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. We are under attack, not only from nation-states directly, but also from al Qaeda, Hezbollah, ISIS, and countless other terrorist groups." He describes this as "an alliance between radical Islamists and regimes in Havana, Pyongyang, Moscow and Beijing. Both believe that history, and/or Allah, blesses their efforts, and so both want to ensure that this glorious story is carefully told." Flynn argues that this alliance is based on a shared hatred for the United States and "a contempt for democracy and an agreement—by all the members of the enemy alliance — that dictatorship is a superior way to run a country, an empire, or a caliphate". He acknowledges that the idea of an alliance between communist China, North Korea and ISIS/al Qaeda may seem strange, but does not go into detail other than asserting that it exists.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hammer_of_Thor"title="The Hammer of Thor">
The book opens six weeks after the close of the preceding novel, "The Sword of Summer". Magnus Chase meets with Samirah "Sam" al-Abbas and Otis, one of the god Thor's two goats, who inform the heroes that Thor's hammer is still missing. The jötnar are beginning to suspect Thor does not have his weapon to defend Midgard and plan to invade. Magnus returns to Hotel Valhalla to rest and prepare, where he meets Alex Fierro, Sam's newest einherji recruit and a transgender/genderfluid child of Loki. While in Valhalla, Magnus has dreamlike visions of Loki manipulating his uncle Randolph. Loki also tells Magnus about a wedding between Samirah and the giant Thrym in five days, and that Magnus will need to bring the bride-price. Magnus, Sam, and their friends Blitzen and Hearthstone travel to the Provincetown barrow but discover the Skofnung Sword instead of Thor's hammer. Loki appears and tells the quartet, the sword and matching whetstone will be Sam's bride-price. They are reluctant to help Loki, who causes Randolph Chase to wound Blitzen with the sword.Because wounds caused by the sword can only be healed by its whetstone, the four are forced to hunt for this stone. Hearth, Magnus, and a Blitz in stone travel to Alfheim. There, Magnus learns the stone is in the possession of Hearth's father, Alderman. Alderman insists Hearth repay a "wergild" he owes because (in Alderman's view) of not defending his younger brother Andiron of a Brunnmigi, who killed the young boy, before he may take the stone. Magnus and Hearthstone track down a dwarf named Andvari and force him to give them his treasure, which they use to repay Hearth's debt. With the stone, they heal Blitzen. After escaping Alderman, who has been driven insane by Andvari's cursed ring, the trio returns to Midgard. With Alex and Sam, Magnus visits the god Heimdall to locate Utgard-Loki. Rejoining Blitz and Hearth, Magnus's quest group then travels to Utgard-Loki. After completing some tasks to prove their worth, the giant king tells them Thrym has Thor's hammer to be given to the bride as part of the traditional Norse wedding ritual and helps them track Thrym. Utgard-Loki also reveals that, according to Norse rituals, the father of the bride, Loki will receive the Skofnung Sword which can free Loki from his cave. To retrieve the hammer and stop the giants' invasion of Midgard, the quest group must go through with the wedding and deliver the Skofnung Sword to Loki.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_in_the_Mouth"title="Bitter in the Mouth">
Bitter in the Mouth is a story told nonlinearly. The reader is given pieces of the puzzle of Linda’s life, slowly accumulating information until the whole picture can be seen. The novel opens with an epigraph from To Kill a Mockingbird, immediately followed by the title of the first half of the novel—“Confession”—which focuses most heavily on Linda’s childhood. The opening scene introduces Baby Harper, Linda’s beloved uncle. Then Linda recalls the death of her grandmother, Iris. Linda is haunted by the words her grandmother spoke while on her deathbed: “What I know about you, little girl, would break you in two.” In response to this, Linda simply says, "Bitch," a reflection of her tumultuous relationship with Iris that is later revealed to be rooted in Linda's ethnicity. Shortly after, Linda explains her form of synesthesia: she can taste words, both when she says them and when other people say them.We are then introduced to her best friend, Kelly. She and Kelly are neighbors, and become friends after Kelly sends Linda a letter welcoming her to the neighborhood. Kelly is the only person that she tells about her synesthesia. They devise a plan together for Linda to smoke so that the “incomings”—the tastes she senses—are stifled in order for Linda to focus in school. The two share a childhood crush; they both like a boy named Wade, but Kelly calls “dibs” on him so Linda is unable to talk about her feelings toward Wade. Linda and Kelly are also both sexually assaulted by the same person: Kelly’s cousin, Bobby. Kelly’s encounters with Bobby are known fairly early, but Linda reveals the details of her rape slowly as the novel progresses.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We're_Going_on_a_Bear_Hunt"title="We're Going on a Bear Hunt">
A family of four children (plus a baby sister and their dog), are going out to hunt a bear. They travel through grass (Long wavy grass), a river (Deep, cold river), mud (Thick oozy mud), a forest (A big dark forest) and a snowstorm (A swirling whirling snowstorm) before coming face to face with a bear in a cave (A narrow gloomy cave). This meeting causes panic and the children are told by a bird to start running back home, across all the obstacles (see obstacle phrases below), chased by the bear. Finally, the children return to home and lock the bear out of their house. After the bear retreats, leaving the children safe. The children hide under a duvet and saying: "We're not going on a bear hunt again!" (see below). At the end of the book, the bear is pictured trudging disconsolately on a beach at night, the same beach that is shown on a sunny day as the frontispiece. Most of the illustrations were painted in watercolor. However, the six pictures of the family facing each new hazard are black and white drawings.At each obstacle is an onomatopoeic description. Before each obstacle the children chant the refrain:
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_Casket_(novel)"title="Closed Casket (novel)">
Lady Athelinda Playford, author of a popular series of children's mystery novels, summons her children, lawyers, Hercule Poirot, and Scotland Yard detective Edward Catchpool to her home, Lillieoak, in Clonakilty, Ireland. At dinner, she announces a shocking change to her will. She has disinherited her son Harry and daughter Claudia in favor of her charismatic secretary, Joseph Scotcher, who is terminally ill and has only weeks to live. She intends to take Joseph to her own doctor and make all efforts necessary to save his life. Harry's wife Dorro lashes out, while Claudia and her fiancee, Dr. Randall Kimpton, are disdainful. Joseph is alarmed by the change to the will, but spontaneously proposes marriage to his nurse, Sophie Bourlet.That night, everyone hears Sophie screaming and rushes to the scene. Joseph Scotcher has been violently killed. Sophie claims that she has just witnessed Claudia clubbing him in the head as he begged for his life. However, the time does not make sense; Claudia has arrived at the room with the others and has also changed clothes, something she should not have had time for.The inquest into Scotcher’s death reveals that he was already dead of strychnine poisoning before being clubbed in the head. Additionally, he was not terminally ill and was actually in perfect health. Poirot and Catchpool begin investigating the alibis of the dysfunctional family, uncovering various lies. Poirot believes Sophie’s account, although it is seemingly impossible to reconcile with the timeline. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_Societies"title="Sick Societies">
The book challenges the cultural relativism position of some earlier anthropologists. Edgerton enumerates examples of primitive cultures and practices, showing that they have neither been completely happy nor environmentally sustainable. He argues that the vision of primal, naturally adaptive, perfect societies, is a myth. Praising how relativists were instrumental to the development of respect for other peoples and values, he also points out where this can conflict with science. According to Edgerton, the "interpretivist" view that science or Western society cannot, or should not, critically evaluate other societies would be a type of "intellectual onanism".Examples of imperfect pre-colonial indigenous societies are presented, which include instances of superstitious flawed causation that can result in conflict and violence, suboptimal medicine, poor diet, environmental destruction, the subjugation of women, exploitation, slavery, disfunctional relationships and an atmosphere of fear. Edgerton reports on how members of small societies have themselves criticized them, that all societies have their malfunctions and can be evaluated for health.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Summer_Queen"title="The Summer Queen">
Moon Dawntreader Summer, the Summer Queen of the planet Tiamat, struggles to unite the population under her rule. Moon must convince the Tiamatians to rebuild a technologically advanced society from scratch before the return of the Hegemony in 150 years.Reede Kullervo is a biotechnologist and a member of a secret society called The Brotherhood. He is also an expert in the Old Empire’s technology, but he has been unable to successfully recreate the water of life. Kullervo befriends BZ Gundhalinu, then betrays him and steals the faster than light stardrive they created together. Kullervo is kidnapped and enslaved by the Source, a high-level Brotherhood operative.Gundhalinu returns to Tiamat as the new Chief Justice and head of the Hegemonic government. Kullervo also arrives on Tiamat, where he meets Ariele Dawntreader, Moon’s daughter. He realizes he can speak to the mers. Ariele and Kullervo begin a romantic relationship. Tammis Dawntreader, Moon’s son, becomes a sibyl. He marries a woman while simultaneously struggling to accept his own bisexuality, which is forbidden among the Summer clans. Sparks learns that Ariele and Tammis were actually fathered by Gundhalinu. Betrayed, he joins the Brotherhood. Moon and Gundhalinu reestablish their romantic relationship.The Source kidnaps Ariele and Kullervo to blackmail Moon. Sparks rejects the Brotherhood and stages a rescue. Gundhalinu attempts to stop the mer hunts and is arrested for treason. Moon discovers the purpose of the mers: they are meant to maintain the sibyl network. Mer hunting has driven them to the brink of extinction, placing the network in danger.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Coverlet_series"title="Mrs. Coverlet series">
## "While Mrs. Coverlet Was Away".Mrs. Coverlet is suddenly called away by an emergency at a time when the children's father is in New Zealand, leaving the children to spend several summer weeks alone. Plot twists involve the children's decision to conceal that fact that there is no adult in the house, Malcolm's "complicated conscience," and the discovery that Theobold's pet cat is an extremely rare and valuable exotic breed. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_President_(novel)"title="The Last President (novel)">
In 2025 and 2026, after the Gaia-worshipping but environmentally destructive "Daybreak" movement unleashed a nanotech plague and nuclear and EMP attacks, the population of Earth has been greatly reduced and forced back to 19th-century or earlier technology. Two regions, one with its capital in Seattle, Washington and the other with its capital in Athens, Georgia, claim to be continuing the government of the U.S., while semi-independent regions around New York (increasingly fascist), in California (feudal), in Colorado (ostensibly neutral and dedicated to research and communications) and in Texas have some desire to participate in a restored U.S. Much of the Northeast is inhabited by "tribals" who have been mysteriously brainwashed into "Daybreak", but in one of their strongholds, Lord Robert is breaking away from the movement.Despite tensions between the secularist believers in human rights in the Northwest and the fundamentalist Christian theocrats in the South, most of the regions attempt coordinate in a military campaign against the tribals and build up to a Presidential election to reunify the country. However, it turns out that the leaders of those regions were tricked into the campaign by Daybreak because it unifies it with Lord Robert. The U.S. forces are defeated disastrously. One of the leaders in Colorado makes herself president for the sole purpose of dissolving the United States and resigning. She and other survivors of the reunification attempt find refuge in California and the West Indies, which may become centers of the drive to rebuild civilization.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Eye_(novel)"title="Dead Eye (novel)">
Court Gentry goes to the town of Ushkovo in Russia to assassinate Gregor Sidorenko, a Russian crime boss and his former handler who wants him killed after a double cross from an operation in Sudan. Unbeknownst to Gentry, an American private contractor agency, Townsend Government Services, has been tracking him across Europe for a while and has found him while surveilling Sidorenko's house at the time of his assassination. After Gentry kills Sidorenko, Townsend House head Leland Babbitt brings in highly skilled assassin Russell "Russ" Whitlock, code-named Dead Eye, to track Gentry down and kill him.Russ, who operates alone, tracks down Gentry to a hotel in Tallinn, Estonia and informs the Townsend House. An eight-man strike team was then dispatched to kill Gentry, but in a fit of irony, Russ, posing as a bounty hunter coming to help him, warns Gentry of the operation to kill him. They escape the hotel and fight off the pursuing strike team, killing seven of them (the other one was later hospitalized and arrested, others were killed by Russ alone in order to silence them). Russ was wounded in the crossfire, and Court later treats his wound.Russ reveals the truth partially to Court in order to assuage his suspicions. It has been told that he was also in the Autonomous Asset Development Program, which was a secret assassination training program from years ago, as Gentry did. Later, Russ offers to help Gentry in his work as an assassin, which Gentry initially refuses. They later part ways, with Russ giving Gentry his contact number and later Court going to Stockholm, Sweden to lay low for a while.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beetle_Boy"title="Beetle Boy">
"Kirkus Reviews" summarizes the plot as "a young teen searches for his father with the assistance of unusual beetles." The book stars Darkus Cuttle, who moves in with his uncle after his father mysteriously went missing. Lucretia Cutter, the antagonist responsible for Darkus' father's disappearance, tries to kill the intelligent beetles that Darkus befriend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Hostages"title="Blood Hostages">
In "Blood Hostages", a kidnap reveals an uncle's dark past; his teenage rescuers endure a process of self- discovery that reveals royal parentage; a mysterious mentor assembles a company of rogues to aid them; the kids have one of the most powerful magic items in the world; and a demon-god aims to use it to rule the universe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_Undermountain"title="Escape from Undermountain">
In "Escape from Undermountain", a half-orc half-witch hero Artek Ar'talen the Knife, who has a 48-hour quest to rescue a nobleman from a subterranean labyrinth containing countless monsters. He has a small golden box from which a magical gate will appear to transport him and his ward out of Undermountain in their moment of need. For rescuing the nobleman, all crimes that the rogue has committed in the past will be pardoned. During the journey, he makes unlikely allies as they navigate the dangerous labyrinth made by mad wizard Halaster, trying to find a way out, before time runs out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Furious_Masters"title="The Furious Masters">
The calm existence of the small Yorkshire town of Higherfield is shattered when a strange spacecraft crashes nearby. Whilst an avalanche of publicity sweeps in, events take a sinister turn when one of the discoverers of the object becomes insane, and riots and hysteria begin to sweep the country, to the great consternation of the previously unconcerned Prime Minister, who soon finds himself in the thick of the conundrum.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lust_&amp;_Wonder"title="Lust &amp; Wonder">
According to the editor, the book is a memoir "about a man searching for what brings his heart home."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Pebble"title="The Golden Pebble">
Mark Rector is an entomologist who specializes in weevils. His sedate and dull life is unexpectedly disrupted when he travels to a remote village in Cornwall from where his uncle once mysteriously received a piece of gold.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gentle_Madness"title="A Gentle Madness">
The first section of the book features famous book collectors from Antiquities to the modern day. Past collectors mentioned include the likes of Alexander the Great, Petrarch, and Catherine the Great. Modern collectors include people like Aaron Lansky and Charles L. Blockson."A Gentle Madness" also covered Stephen Blumberg, who had stolen over $10 million worth of books from libraries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_Beauties_(novel)"title="Sleeping Beauties (novel)">
In the impoverished town of Dooling, part of the fictional Tri-Counties region of Appalachia, a bizarre murder occurs when two men running a meth lab out of their mobile home are beaten to death by a mysterious woman, who then sets fire to the lab before allowing herself to be arrested by the local sheriff, Lila Norcross. At the same time, reports start coming in of a mysterious sickness spreading across the world, which causes women to fall into a deep sleep, cocooned in a strange material. Dubbed "Aurora", the disease also causes the sleeping women to enter into a homicidal rage, attacking and brutally murdering any adult who tries to open the cocoons.Lila's husband Clint, the chief psychiatrist at the Dooling Correctional Institute for Women, begins noticing Aurora occurring among his patients at the same time that the woman, who is given the name "Eve Black", is incarcerated in the prison. As the disease continues to spread throughout the town, the local women become desperate to keep themselves awake, leading to looting and riots. Lila herself falls victim to the illness, and is replaced by her alcoholic chief deputy, Terry Coombs, who in turn appoints Frank Geary, a former animal control officer with a short temper, as his second-in-command. Clint's superior, Warden Janice Coates, fires one of her guards, Don Peters, for sexual harassment; he drugs her with Xanax, leaving Clint to protect the dwindling number of still-awake female inmates.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphany_Jones"title="Epiphany Jones">
The novel’s protagonist is Jerry Dresden, an employee at the Art Institute of Chicago, who suffers from a porn addiction as well as psychotic depression. Both are the result of the tragic deaths of his little sister and high-flying Hollywood father years earlier. As a result of his psychotic depression, Jerry suffers from psychotic delusions which make him see people who don’t really exist—people Jerry calls "figments". His mundane but stable life is interrupted one day when his colleague at the museum is murdered and a famous painting by Vincent Van Gogh ("Self-Portrait", Spring 1887) is stolen. Returning from work that night Jerry finds the stolen painting in his apartment and the next day he discovers that a woman who he thought was just one of his figments his entire life turns out to be a real person.This former figment tells Jerry her name is Epiphany Jones and admits she stole the painting and killed Jerry's colleague in order to frame him and blackmails him into helping her find someone she is looking for. Left with no choice, Jerry flees with her to Mexico, then Portugal, and finally to the Cannes Film Festival in France as Epiphany, which says the voice of God is speaking to her and telling her what to do, tracks down a sex trafficking ring that caters to the Hollywood elite. Along the way, Jerry discovers Epiphany is not all she seems to be as their journey grows increasingly fraught with danger and he discovers secrets about both their pasts that will change his life forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Divine_and_the_Decay"title="The Divine and the Decay">
Peter Plowart, the leader and co-founder of the right-wing populist New Britain Party has decided to have his party co-founder assassinated due to internal conflicts. He travels to Vachau, one of the Channel Islands, to hold a speech and thus give himself an alibi while the assassination is carried out. On the island he finds a young woman whose self-possession intrigues him and makes him want to conquer her. When the woman finds out about Peter's real reason for staying on the island, she decides that he has to die. A power struggle takes place between the two.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Blast"title="Back Blast">
After five years of being on the run overseas from the Central Intelligence Agency, Court Gentry comes to Washington, D.C., to seek answers about him being burned by the CIA. With Court surfacing in the nation's capital, CIA National Clandestine Service (NCS) head Denny Carmichael, who has been hunting him for five years through the Violator Working Group, organizes a citywide manhunt, fearing that he has come to exact revenge on him for the sanction. Among the new players in the hunt is Suzanne Brewer, a CIA senior officer whose expertise is the security of the agency. Carmichael also enlists the help of Saudi intelligence through its Washington station chief, Murquin "Kaz" al-Kazaz, as well as Court's former team leader from the CIA Golf Sierra paramilitary force, Zack Hightower.Meanwhile, private contractor Townsend Government Services head Leland Babbitt has been attempting to make amends with Carmichael after the botched Gentry operation in Europe months ago. When Carmichael still refuses, Babbitt storms into the nearby United States Capitol building, threatening to leak classified CIA material to the United States Congress, but he was later stopped by Carmichael's foot soldiers and was brought to Langley. In order to prevent him from further whistleblowing top-secret intelligence operations, Carmichael brings Babbitt and his company back into the hunt for Gentry. However, still viewing him as a danger to their operation, Carmichael and his deputy head Jordan Mayes secretly arrange Babbitt's assassination, to be orchestrated by Hightower and later to be blamed on Gentry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Dragons"title="League of Dragons">
Napoleon’s invasion of Russia has been roundly thwarted. But even as Capt. William Laurence and the dragon Temeraire pursue the retreating enemy through an unforgiving winter, Napoleon is raising a new force, and he’ll soon have enough men and dragons to resume the offensive. While the emperor regroups, the allies have an opportunity to strike first and defeat him once and for all—if internal struggles and petty squabbles don’t tear them apart.Aware of his weakened position, Napoleon has promised the dragons of every country—and the ferals, loyal only to themselves—vast new rights and powers if they fight under his banner. It is an offer eagerly embraced from Asia to Africa—and even by England, whose dragons have long rankled at their disrespectful treatment.But Laurence and his faithful dragon soon discover that the wily Napoleon has one more gambit at the ready—one that that may win him the war, and the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Lovers_(novel)"title="Modern Lovers (novel)">
"Modern Lovers" follows Elizabeth, Andrew, and Henry Marx, a family living in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, and their friends Zoe, Jane, and Ruby Kahn-Bennet over the course of a full summer. Elizabeth, Andrew, and Zoe met at Oberlin College in the 1980s and formed a punk rock group called Kitty's Mustache with their mutual friend, Lydia Greenbaum. During this period of time, Elizabeth wrote the lyrics to a song, called, "Mistress of Myself," which the band often played. The band dissolved when Lydia chose to quit school and begin her own music career. Lydia's private rendition of, "Mistress of Myself," was wildly successful, and she soon became a major star, eventually dying of a drug overdose at 27. After Lydia's departure from Oberlin, Elizabeth, Andrew, and Zoe graduated and moved to Ditmas Park, where they began to form families of their own. Her death years later impacted each of them in a unique way.In the present day, Elizabeth is working as a real estate agent, Zoe as the co-owner of a restaurant, Hyacinth, and Andrew is trying to figure out his next career. All three are struggling with middle age. Zoe is frustrated with the lack of passion in her marriage to a woman named Jane, and not for the first time, begins to contemplate divorce. Jane, on the other hand, wishes to work on the relationship instead of giving up. Both are concerned with Elizabeth's not-quite-platonic relationship with Zoe. While working through their marital strife, Zoe and Jane attempt to encourage their daughter, Ruby, a recent high school graduate, to retake the SAT's in order to improve her results enough to get into college. Ruby, completely disinterested, agrees to take an SAT preparatory class. There, Ruby and Henry, Elizabeth and Andrew's son, begin to bond and eventually start to date, developing a fast and furious summer romance. In contrast, through co-managing Hyacinth, Zoe and Jane begin to rekindle their relationship and rediscover their lost passion through their mutual love of food.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Death_of_Jonathan_Wild,_the_Great"title="The Life and Death of Jonathan Wild, the Great">
The book tells the satiric biographical story of an early 18th-century underworld boss, Jonathan Wild, from his birth in 1682 until his execution in 1725. As a thief-taker, Wild's job was to capture criminals and take them to the authorities in order to collect a reward, but he made notorious profit from managing an underground network of malefactors who paid him to avoid being denounced. Fielding's biography of Jonathan Wild allows him to satirize various aspects of English society at the time. It features an interpolated romantic story that is nowhere to be found in other accounts of the historical Wild. It has been argued that this was Fielding's way of rendering the criminal biography of Wild into a novel of the kind that was becoming increasingly popular in his time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Martinican_Woman"title="I Am a Martinican Woman">
## Part 1.The first part of the novel deals with Mayotte's childhood in the village of Carbet in Martinique. She is a mixed-race girl with a twin sister, Francette, although she is separated from her sister at an early age when Francette is sent to be raised by a childless aunt. Mayotte is an adventurous tomboy, and she is the leader of a mixed group of black, white, and metisse children from her school. Mayotte's gang spend their time exploring "the wildest and most dangerous places." Mayotte is also friends with a washerwoman named Loulouze, who is several years older than her. Mayotte's first experience with a biracial relationship occurs vicariously through Loulouze's descriptions of her white lover and the gifts he gives her. The relationship ultimately results in a pregnancy and Loulouze's expulsion from her father's house. She flees to Fort-de-France.When examined for Confirmation, Mayotte fails and is obliged to take classes with the village priest, a handsome white man with whom she falls in love. He is kind to her and occasionally betrays awareness of her childhood crush. Her feelings for the priest inspire her to devote extra time after school to the catechism, so that she can be confirmed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flight_Engineer"title="The Flight Engineer">
## "The Rising"."The Rising" begins in media res during a conflict between two groups, the Commonwealth and an extremist religious group the Mission Of Life Lived In Ecclesia (commonly referred to as "Mollies") and the Mollies' allies, an alien species known as the Fibians. The basis of the conflict is that the Mollies settled an otherwise worthless sector of the galaxy, later discovered to naturally have extremely rich sources of easily obtainable antihydrogen, an energy particle that is required for the high-technology space travel and civilization, and difficult to manufacture artificially.Commander Peter Raeder, formerly a pilot, has been assigned as chief engineer on the new fast carrier ship CSF "Invincible", a smaller carrier type the Commonwealth hopes to use to preserve their dwindling stockpile of antihydrogen for as long as possible. Shortly after launch, Raeder becomes aware that there is a Mollie sleeper agent aboard performing acts of sabotage to prevent the success of the fast carrier design.After several missions and assorted acts of sabotage, Raeder successfully IDs the sleeper and manages to prevent the final sabotage, which would have destroyed the entire ship.A sub-plot involving piloting of a Speed, the in-universe space superiority fighter, is that a pilot requires two flesh-and-blood hands to properly interface with the fighter for battle (Raeder had lost a hand prior to the events of The Rising, and though outfitted with a high-tech prosthetic otherwise indistinguishable from a real hand, cannot make the link, the prosthetic's sensory devices being unable to match the delicacy and precision required for interface). Toward the end of the book, Raeder's engineering staff successfully create an interface device that will work even for Raeder, on the basis that injuries such as Raeder's are becoming more common in the conflict, and losing an experienced pilot for such an injury drastically reduces the Commonwealth's pilot pool.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fero_(novel)"title="Fero (novel)">
A couple, who have a mute, only-child, take a long journey to the Sun temple with the hope that the gift of speech is granted to their child. The trip is an attempt to appease their God. The mother is hopeful at the start of the journey, but the child is lost as the train pulls out of the final station before the destination. In an attempt to stop the train, the father raises his hand to pull the chain but hesitates before doing so. The story is written from the father's perspective, and the reader is only privy to his observations and reactions.The novel is narrated in the first person, beginning with the family's departure and ending before the journey's completion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_Boy_(novel)"title="Lucky Boy (novel)">
Soli, an eighteen-year-old woman, enters the United States illegally from Mexico and an Indian American woman named Kavya struggles to have a baby with her husband, who works in Silicon Valley. The two stories converge around a baby, the "lucky boy".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I'll_Give_You_the_Sun"title="I'll Give You the Sun">
Noah and Jude Sweetwine are twins. As they enter their teen years, they grow apart. This is partly due to their sibling rivalry, as they compete for the attention of their mother, Dianna; and partly due to their struggle to be able to understand their separate identities. Furthermore, both twins want to apply to the same highly competitive art school. On one hand, Noah clearly revels in his artistic talent, while hiding the fact that he is crushing on a neighborhood boy named Brian. On the other hand, Jude is reserved about her art, but she openly welcomes male attention.The early years are written from Noah's point of view. By spying on her, Noah is aware of Jude's artistic abilities. However, he does whatever he can to keep their mother from discovering Jude's gift. One day, Dianna walks in on Noah and Brian, Brian then freaks out because he is still in the closet and ends their relationship. Then Noah discovers his mother having an affair with a local sculptor, Guillermo Garcia. Noah runs away and leaves a drawing of the scene with Guillermo on Dianna's bed. Dianna talks with Noah and says that she is in love with Guillermo and wants to divorce Noah's father. The two fight and Dianna drives away to propose to Guillermo. On the way, she is killed in an automobile accident. Noah seeks Guillermo out to yell at him and lies by saying that his parents were planning to stay together. Furthermore, Noah is under the impression that his application to art school was rejected. He is lost, confused and still obsessed with Brian.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightness_Falls_from_the_Air"title="Brightness Falls from the Air">
In a setup which has been compared to a country house murder mystery, the novel tells the story of sixteen humans who gather on the isolated planet Damiem to witness the passage of a nova front from the Murdered Star; over the course of the book, the truth about the motives of these tourists, the destruction of the star, and the reason for Damiem's isolation are revealed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_of_Feeling"title="The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling">
In the near future, a journalist observes how the world, his daughter, and he himself are affected by "Remem", a form of lifelogging whose advanced search algorithms effectively grant its users eidetic memory of everything that ever happened to them, and the ability to perfectly and objectively share those memories. In a parallel narrative strand, a Tiv man is one of the first of his people to learn to read and write, and discovers that this may not be compatible with oral tradition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gambler's_Anatomy"title="A Gambler's Anatomy">
Alexander Bruno is a gambler who encounters a high school friend, Keith Stolarsky, who has made a fortune in real estate. After their meeting, Keith agrees to pay for an expensive surgery Bruno needs to survive, and later becomes Bruno's romantic rival.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_Cross_the_Magnet_Carter"title="The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter">
The novel chronicles the lives and interactions of two sets of brothers: Eliot and Dwight in Maryland, and B.J. and Randall in Alabama. It begins in 1941, jumps to the late 1950s, and concludes with the climactic events in 1983, followed by an epilogue in 2010.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Console_Wars_(book)"title="Console Wars (book)">
A few years after stepping down as CEO of Mattel, Tom Kalinske is on vacation with his family in Hawaii when he is visited by an old friend, Hayao Nakayama, who offers Kalinske a job as CEO of the American division of a small video game company called Sega. Despite being initially reluctant to take the job as he knows nothing about video games, Kalinske agrees to fly out to Japan, where Nakayama shows him several products being developed by Sega, including their handheld portable system, the Game Gear, and their 16-bit home console, the Sega Genesis. Kalinske is enthralled, especially when he spots a man playing a Game Boy while drinking at a geisha club.However, when Kalinske arrives for his first day as CEO, he finds Sega of America to be in complete disarray: his predecessor, Michael Katz, has driven the firm to near-bankruptcy by overspending on unpopular titles like "James 'Buster' Douglas Knockout Boxing", the company is unable to source third-party games due to Nintendo having exclusive contracts with most developers, and the staff is rife with infighting and finger-pointing. The Genesis, hampered by poor marketing and a shoddy game library, has sold fewer than 500,000 units, only half of the sales needed to keep Sega of America afloat. Taking charge, Kalinske assembles a new leadership team and decides to adopt the "Gillette model", demanding complete control over marketing for the Genesis, which includes replacing the game originally bundled with the Genesis, "Altered Beast", with a new, little-known title, "Sonic the Hedgehog". Sega's Japanese executives politely refuse to authorize his plans, but Nakayama overrules them and gives Kalinske the green light. Following a successful demonstration of "Sonic" at the 1991 Summer Consumer Electronics Show, the newly released Super NES was unable to outsell the Genesis throughout 1991, marking the first time since 1985 that the Nintendo does not dominate the home console market.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_Subjects"title="Impossible Subjects">
In part one, Ngai begins with discussing the implications of immigration restriction in the 1920s by particularly focusing on border patrol and immigration policy which she argues results in a changing discourse about race. In part II, she focuses on migrants from the Philippines and Mexico by discussing their role in the U.S. economy and how they challenged cultural norms about the traditional work force. In part III, Ngai examines the shift of regulations around Japanese-Americans and Chinese-Americans especially their eligibility for citizenship. She uses Japanese internment camps as evidence of their lack of legal and social inclusion in the United States. In part IV, she analyzes the next era in immigration policy which she suggests is embodied in the Hart-Celler Act. She discusses how immigration policy was affected during the years of 1945-1965 by World War II. She concludes part IV by showing how the immigration policies during the time period after 1965 contributed to increased illegal immigration and heightened a seemingly unsolvable problem going forward.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chhinnapatra"title="Chhinnapatra">
Ajay, the protagonist, is a creative writer with a deep sensitivity, and loves Mala. Mala's friend Lila loves Ajay. There are other young men Amal, Arun, Ashok aspiring for the hands of Mala. After the death of Ajay, Mala found a diary written by Ajay. Mala passed through the diary during the train journey.The novel is divided into two sections: the first section contains the diary of Ajay and it uses first-person narrative technique, while the second part is an epilogue written with omniscient point of view with Mala as the protagonist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Gold"title="Iron Gold">
Ten years after their victory over the Golds of the Core Worlds, a new Solar Republic has replaced the tyrannical Society. Darrow of Lykos serves as ArchImperator of the Republic's forces, which are still at war with the Ash Lord, Magnus au Grimmus, and his allies. Darrow's wife Virginia au Augustus governs as the elected Sovereign, but a faction called Vox Populi, led by Dancer, has risen to power in the Senate. Ignoring the Senate's orders, Darrow launches a massive assault on Mercury, wresting the planet from the Ash Lord but with great casualties. When the Senate learns from Darrow's enemy, Julia au Bellona, that he rejected an overture of peace from the Ash Lord, they issue a warrant for Darrow's arrest. Darrow, knowing that the potential truce is a ploy by the Ash Lord that will never come to fruition, escapes with his closest allies on a dangerous mission to assassinate Magnus. Darrow and the Howlers set off to Earth, where they free Apollonius au Valii-Rath and set off to Venus to kill the Ash Lord. They invade his fortress, but find him bedridden. He reveals that his daughter Atalantia is heading to retake Mercury, which is not fully protected.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downers_Grove_(novel)"title="Downers Grove (novel)">
Crystal Methedrine Swanson, known as Chrissie, is a teenager in Downers Grove, Illinois, about to graduate from high school. Her father has disappeared, while her brother has become a heroin addict, and her mother has begun dating a bizarre man. As her graduation nears, Chrissie and her close friend, Tracey, worry about a curse surrounding the high school that has led to multiple students dying each year. After nearly being raped at a party by one of the school's football players and harassed after, she worries she may become the next victim.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bongwater_(novel)"title="Bongwater (novel)">
The novel shifts from first-person narration by David, a marijuana dealer and aspiring filmmaker in Portland, Oregon, to third-person narration by Courtney, his ex-girlfriend who has left Portland and is living in the East Village in New York City, where she has moved into a squat. Prior to leaving, she had caught David's house on fire and left it to burn down.After Courtney leaves, David moves in with their mutual friends, Robert and Tony, a gay couple, and begins dating Mary, a stripper, but still reminisces of Courtney. David and Mary go to visit David's childhood friend Phil, who grows marijuana in the mountains, while in New York, Courtney's friend Jennifer comes to visit and they attend a party in Brooklyn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_Was_All_He_Said"title="Nothing Was All He Said">
The book tells us the story of Ben. He is a seventeen-year-old boy who lives in Ghent and has Asperger syndrome and who gets bullied in school because of this. He considers suicide, but meets a girl online, nicknamed 'Barbie' whom he falls in love with. They set up a meeting and as Ben tries to commit suicide by jumping in front of an arriving train, he gets rescued by Barbie. Together, they fake his suicide and expose his bullies at his funeral. After this, Ben tries to live a normal life..
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_X"title="Orphan X">
The book centers around the character Evan Smoak. At the age of 12, he was enrolled in a top-secret operation known as the "Orphan Program." He is the 24th recruit in the program and is known only as Orphan X. The goal of the program is to train orphans so they can be assassins for government agencies. The program is shut down but Orphan X maintains access to the program's funding and weapons.In his 30s, Smoak begins freelancing as an assassin, using his skills to fight corruption in the form of vigilante justice. For each person he helps, he tells them to pay it forward by giving someone in need of help his phone number. During his adventures, he discovers that former Orphan agents have also begun freelancing and are trying to assassinate him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mask_of_Dimitrios_(novel)"title="The Mask of Dimitrios (novel)">
Mystery writer Charles Latimer meets Colonel Haki of the Turkish police. Haki believes Latimer would be interested in the career of the notorious criminal Dimitrios, whose body has been identified in an Istanbul morgue. Latimer, who is indeed intrigued, begins an independent investigation of the details of Dimitrios' criminal career, and learns some information about it which is more dangerous than he had anticipated. He soon finds himself fighting for his life against a ruthless, capable enemy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Crow's_Devil"title="John Crow's Devil">
Hector Bligh is a preacher in the small Jamaican town of Gibbeah, where his public struggles with alcoholism have earned him the nickname The Rum Preacher. Bligh's congregation tolerates his misbehavior while Bligh overlooks the sins and stray paths of his congregants.This unspoken agreement is broken when a fire-and-brimstone preacher, Apostle York, abruptly appears during mass one day. York violently removes Bligh from the Pulpit and savagely beats him.While Bligh recovers under the care of a villager, York assumes Bligh's congregation, residence, and church. The congregation is drawn to York's lead as he fills the spiritual vacuum left by Bligh's vacant and soft-hearted ministry. Bligh returns to the church only to find that his congregation no longer wants him and York is willing to resort to violence to repel him.The story follows the two men as their conflict grows to biblical proportions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_Sleep"title="Broken Sleep">
The novel has an asynchronous narrative structure that weaves together four major narratives:The narratives are loosely related, linked together if not by chronological time, then by common characters and themes. But the novel hints at another way its four narratives relate to one another—namely that they were collected, compiled, and arranged by one of the novel's secondary characters, Jay Bernes, and given the alternative title "the Book of J." Jay, aka "J," is identified in the novel's back matter as the “Gifter of the Book of J,” while the character Persephone, who mistakenly self-identifies as Moses's niece, claims in the introduction that “auntie jay gave me a gift, the Book of J.” The author Bruce Bauman has also alluded to the Book of J's importance in relation to the novel's religious themes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_Is_the_Enemy"title="Ego Is the Enemy">
"Ego Is the Enemy" puts forth the argument that often our biggest problems are not caused by external factors such as other people or circumstances. Instead, our problems stem from our own attitude, selfishness and self-absorption. In other words, introducing ego into a situation often prevents us from being rational, objective and clear headed. The book does not discuss Freud's ego or egotism as a clinical term but rather ego in a colloquial sense, defined as "an unhealthy belief in your own importance." The book also discusses the difference between ego and confidence, and argues that the solution to the problem of ego is humility, self-awareness, purpose and realism. "Ego Is the Enemy" provides both cautionary tales as well as positive anecdotes about ego, citing numerous historical and contemporary figures including Christopher McCandless, George Marshall, John DeLorean, Larry Page, Paul Graham, Steve Jobs and William Tecumseh Sherman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nix"title="The Nix">
The Nix is an American epic novel in 10 parts that follows community college professor of English, Samuel Andresen-Anderson who is struggling to find meaning in his life in the years following his failure to write a book which he was already paid an advance for. He was abandoned by his mother at a young age. Samuel seeks comfort in junk food, an acerbic inner-monologue, and a Second-Life-style internet game called "Elfscape" and generally struggles to find motivation or self-respect. One day, Samuel discovers that the mother who abandoned him has become a radical leftist activist who is under arrest for assaulting a public figure. When his editor (still after him for the writing for which he was given an advance) persuades Samuel to track down his mother, Samuel must confront and discover the various serpentine, complex, and at times, humorous figures and sub-plots from his youth to arrive. The book captures various periods of his mother's life and touches on many themes including isolation, friendship, love, life purpose, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, feminine oppression, and the digital age.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstructing_Amelia"title="Reconstructing Amelia">
The book begins with Kate discovering that her daughter Amelia, a hard working honor student, has been placed on academic probation after she was caught plagiarizing a paper on Virginia Woolf, Amelia's favorite author. She's asked to pick Amelia up and promises to be at the school, Grace Hall, in twenty minutes, but runs late because of the demands of her job as a lawyer and associate partner at a prestigious law firm. Once at Grace Hall Kate is horrified to discover that her daughter has committed suicide by jumping off the roof and spends the following days in a haze. She eventually returns to work to resume her life, but is stunned when she receives a text saying that Amelia didn't commit suicide. This causes Kate to investigate her daughter's death with the help of an officer named Lew and discover that the text is correct - Amelia did not commit suicide. Further investigation shows that Amelia was also innocent of plagiarism and that the true paper was swapped out with another one as an act of bullying.Through Amelia's narrations and Kate's investigations the reader discovers that Amelia was recruited into the Magpies or "Maggies", a secret society that required her to perform several acts as part of a hazing ritual, which includes taking suggestive photographs in her underwear. She keeps all of this secret from Kate and her best friend Sylvia, especially as Amelia and Sylvia had mutually pledged to not join the Maggies unless both were invited. Prior to this Amelia had told her everything, including her online friendship with Ben, a gay teenager who began texting her earlier that year. As a result Amelia is also initially unable to tell Sylvia about her lesbian relationship with a fellow member named Dylan, the animosity that is directed at her by the Maggie leader Zadie, or evidence of Sylvia's boyfriend Ian cheating on her with another woman. Amelia's relationship with Dylan and her membership with the Maggies ends after Zadie enters Amelia's home and discovers the two together, after which point Zadie begins encouraging the other Maggies to bully Amelia. She's told not to tell anyone or the group will do something to hurt Sylvia. She eventually confides in the school counselor, who successfully encourages her to talk to Sylvia. Sylvia is initially resentful that Amelia lied to her, especially as she is so upset over Ian's cheating, but is supportive of her friend. The two write a letter to Dylan asking for explanation, only for Zadie to send it to the entire school, outing her as a lesbian. She's brought into the office by Grace Hall's headmaster Phillip Woodhouse in an attempt to get her to tell him everything about the Maggies, as he had been trying to get rid of the school's secret societies. Amelia chooses not to say anything because she's afraid of what the group will do to Dylan, because while Woodhouse might be able to protect Sylvia he would be unable to protect Dylan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaljayi_Kambakht"title="Kaljayi Kambakht">
Sham is a precocious school boy who dreams about making sense of the world he inhabits. Shaman, his friend and alter-ego prods him along. They walk together exploring the gullies and outskirts of their suburban hill village. They passionately glean whatever information is available to them through books or people. They make patterns out of this information and scheme to gain control over their reality. The villagers become characters in their scheme and start revealing the cracks in their reality. As fragments of science, philosophy, fairy-tales, folk-legends and history start seeping into their everyday existence, Sham and Shan find themselves deep in an unmanageable world of their own fantasies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneath_the_Lion's_Gaze"title="Beneath the Lion's Gaze">
"Beneath the Lion's Gaze" is set in Addis Ababa in 1974, at the end of the rule of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie and the beginning of the military junta replacing Selassie's rule, the Derg. It follows the family of a doctor, his dying wife and their two sons through the political upheaval.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vallista"title="Vallista">
This story is set immediately before the events of "Hawk". It features the character Devera in a larger role than any previous Vlad novel, with much of the story taking place in a "mysterious, seemingly empty manor" overlooking the Great Sea.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowshaper"title="Shadowshaper">
As her summer vacation from Octavia Butler High School starts, Sierra Santiago begins work on a mural of a dragon on a building. Known as the Tower, it is an unfinished, five-story, concrete architectural aberration in a Brooklyn neighborhood of brownstones. The aging men of the community, including Manny the Domino King who publishes the "Bed-Stuy Spotlight" community newspaper, have asked Sierra to create the mural on the building to express their dissatisfaction.While painting, she is startled to notice that an adjacent mural of a deceased neighborhood artist has begun to fade, change facial expressions, and cry a painted tear.Back home, Sierra looks in on her abuelo, Grandpa Lázaro Corona, who has suffered a stroke and rarely speaks in complete sentences. Now, however, he suddenly voices a mysterious warning, apology, and urge to finish her mural as fast as she can. He mentions the shadowshapers and tells her to seek the help of Robbie, a Haitian classmate and fellow artist. Sierra tries to ask her mother, María Carmen Corona Santiago, about the shadowshapers but is rebuffed.Sierra heads to a party with her best friend Bennaldra a.k.a. Bennie. At the party they see their friends and classmates, Big Jerome, Little Jerome, girlfriends Izzy &amp; Tee, Pitkin, and many others. Sierra finds Robbie; they discuss Grandpa Lázaro and the shadowshapers. A walking corpse, or corpuscule, of a missing neighborhood man and shadowshaper, Vernon Chandler, interrupts the party and chases Sierra through the streets.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Word_Exchange"title="The Word Exchange">
Anana Johnson's father, world renowned linguist and Chief Editor of the "North American Dictionary of the English Language", has gone missing. Doug (Douglas Samuel Johnson) was in his Manhattan office at the Dictionary seeing to the last details before the 3rd edition went to press, and then he was not. Even his name was missing from the Dictionary database, one clue among several he has left behind for his daughter.In the post-print world of the not very distant future, Anana had been enjoying her job at the NADEL, a scholarly foundation-funded project, even though she was not much of a reader, herself. Like most people, she got all the news and narrative she wanted on her "Meme," an artificially intelligent as well as smart phone/digital assistant. She shrugged off her father's aversion to the device, because she liked hers. It had learned her preferences and mapped her life so intimately that it automatically took care of things for her, from ordering menu items or driverless car rides to downloading a definition from the Word Exchange for a word she had momentarily forgotten.As the Diachronic Society tried to warn everyone (or all readers of the "Times," at least) words were being forgotten at an alarming rate and Memes, not to mention the newer implantable device the "Nautilus," made by the same mega-corporation Synchronics were responsible. In fact, Memes were not merely dispensing information, they were spreading a virus, "word flu" at an epidemic rate. Aphasia was the first symptom of the new disease, and for those who survived the fever, also the most long-lasting.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swapnatirtha"title="Swapnatirtha">
It is the story of an adolescent gullible boy Navin who being a religious one, pilgrims with a congregation on foot to a shrine of Vaishnava cult. His father Mathurdas's death is doubtful and his mother Shanta is illicitly connected with another two persons, first is his uncle Vinayak kaka, who visit their home frequently and second is Dharmaguru Ghanshyam Maharaj. These are the essential elements that interlace the plot of father-son relationship in the end. A dream follows the descriptions of each day in the diary.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Road_(Enright_novel)"title="The Green Road (Enright novel)">
## Part One: Leaving.The first half of the novel concerns each family member individually and goes chronologically from 1980 to 2005. Each of the four Madigan children and their mother Rosaleen receive a chapter of their own beginning with Hanna Madigan. Hanna's chapter is the only one that focuses on a family member as a child and deals with her relationship with her father. She is traumatised by viewing the culling of a chicken for dinner on her grandmother's farm. Dan Madigan's story jumps forward to 1991 during his time in New York with his fiancé as his repressed homosexuality comes to the fore during the AIDS epidemic. Constance Madigan's chapter is based in 1997 Limerick and focusses on the domestic roles of mother and wife. Constance must balance the concerns of her health that make her face her own mortality. Emmet's chapter takes place in Mali in 2002 as he works with impoverished children and is haunted by previous relief work he has been involved with. His relationship with a woman named Alice slowly unravels and deteriorates. Rosaleen ends the first half of the novel with a rumination on her life and her future as an older woman. She decides to sell the house and writes to all her children accordingly to gather together for Christmas for one last year at the old family home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furious_George_(book)"title="Furious George (book)">
Karl's memoir spans his career playing and coaching in the NBA, including his time as head coach of the Seattle SuperSonics, Milwaukee Bucks, and Denver Nuggets, but does not include his last two years as head coach of the Sacramento Kings. Early versions of the manuscript did include critical commentary of Karl's time in Sacramento, but those pages were not authorized for inclusion in the book due to Karl's settlement agreement with the Kings. The book includes two chapters dedicated to Karl's Seattle years, with particular emphasis on his relationship with Shawn Kemp, Gary Payton and General Manager Wally Walker. Karl also explains how he almost traded Shawn Kemp for Scottie Pippen in 1994, but was unable to execute the trade due to salary cap reasons."Furious George" includes anecdotes from dozens of NBA players and coaches including Phil Jackson, Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Allen Iverson and others.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Stoic"title="The Daily Stoic">
"The Daily Stoic" is an original translation of selections from several stoic philosophers including Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Musonius Rufus, Zeno and others. It aims to provide lessons about personal growth, life management and practicing mindfulness.The book is intended to be read one page per day with each page featuring a quote from a stoic philosopher along with commentary. It is organized temporally and thematically across the twelve months of the year.The audiobook version of "The Daily Stoic" was published by Tim Ferriss.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Defense"title="Blood Defense">
Samantha Brinkman, an eager criminal defense attorney with few clients but a good reputation in the Los Angeles courts, lands the high-profile double murder case of Detective Dale Pearson. Initially attributed to a botched burglary, the murders of actress Chloe Monahan and her roommate Paige Avner are soon blamed on the veteran police officer, who had been dating Chloe and was overheard fighting with her on the night of her death. Unsure of his guilt or innocence, Samantha and her team—paralegal Michelle Fusco and hacker/investigator/felon Alex Medrano—pull out all the stops in their defense of Pearson.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_(Patchett_novel)"title="Commonwealth (Patchett novel)">
It started at Franny Keating’s christening party. Bert Cousins wasn't even invited, but looking for an excuse to get out of the house, away from his three noisy children and pregnant wife for a few hours one weekend, he followed up on another fellow’s invitation. He brought a bottle of gin and he took a kiss from Franny’s very beautiful mother that day. Thus began an affair that ended two marriages and led Bert to begin thinking up excuses to get out of the house away from his four children from southern California and his two stepchildren every day of their summer vacations in Virginia.Bringing the children of two divorces together under one roof may be called a “blended family” but this family does not blend. There forms a curious commonwealth of neglected children. This is the story about how their lives were disrupted and how they intertwined and what really happened the day that one child died. Twenty six years after her christening, when law school dropout Franny embarks on an affair with a much older very famous novelist, she has no inkling that her childhood memories could, in time, be woven into a best-selling novel, titled “Commonwealth.” When the baby of the family, Albie Cousins, discovers his past in black and white, readers are struck by the theft of family secrets, raising questions about borders between fact and fiction. Over the course of five decades, while the Keating-Cousins children were all going their own ways, they were still a family, still bound by shared memories and ultimately real affection.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubled_Air"title="The Troubled Air">
The plot centers around Clement Archer, the director of a successful weekly radio program, who is told by the producers and sponsors to fire four actors and one musician working on the show because of alleged Communist sympathizing. To save the show, and because of his own conscience, Archer wins a two-week deferral and starts his own investigation. Eventually, one of the contributors commits suicide, two of the others betray Archer, and the careers of all others are ruined. Archer reconciles with his family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Whirlpool_(Jane_Urquhart_novel)"title="The Whirlpool (Jane Urquhart novel)">
The novel is set in Niagara Falls in the summer of 1889, and focuses on the lives of several characters whose numerous obsessions, “concentrated chiefly in the image of the whirlpool, draw them inexorably together.”The story, bracketed by scenes of Robert Browning's last days in Venice, follows the lives of Patrick, a “chronically ill clerk and would-be poet"; David McDougal, an Americaphobe military historian; his eccentric wife, Fleda, who “spends her days in the woods, reading Browning's poetry”, and Maude, the widow of the undertaker with a mute four-year-old son.Against the backdrop of a river, its whirlpool and the forest, the poet Patrick fantasizes of Fleda rather than accepting her offer of a real relationship. Fleda goes to live in the woods, rejecting social conventions of the time, while Maude renews contact with her mute son, who begins in his own way to speak.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_Shadows"title="Lord of Shadows">
A month after the events of "Lady Midnight", Clary Fairchild and Jace Herondale visit the Los Angeles Institute to ask Mark Blackthorn about the entrance to Faerie, as they believe that Clary's brother, Sebastian Morgenstern, had left a weapon at the hands of the Seelie Queen. Clary confesses to Emma Carstairs that she has been dreaming about her death. The Shadowhunters investigate Malcolm Fade's house and find out that he had been consorting with the Unseelie King. When they return, the Institute has been taken over by Centurions, graduates from the Scholomanche, led by Zara Dearborn, who reveals that she is engaged to Diego Rosales. This upsets Cristina, since she has just reconciled with him. Meanwhile, Kit, having learned that he is a Shadowhunter named Christopher Herondale, tries to leave the Institute several times, but is dissuaded by Jace and Ty. He is, however, barred from visiting the local Shadow Market because of his status. Clary and Jace subsequently leave for Faerie. Emma, Julian, and Mark are visited by Gwyn of the Wild Hunt, who pleads with Mark to save Kieran. Kieran had killed the Unseelie King's right-hand man, Iarlath, and is about to be executed. The trio and Cristina enter Faerie, where they navigate through its deceptive environment as they are confronted by their desires: Emma's and Julian's forbidden love and Cristina's and Mark's newfound love for each other, which binds the latter with a curse. When they reach the Unseelie Court, the group challenge the King for a trial by combat for Kieran's release, with Emma becoming a champion. She briefly hesitates when her opponent assumes her father's face, but manages to kill him. As the group leave with an amnesiac Kieran, they are pursued by the Unseelie faeries until a Seelie faerie, Nene, arrives at the last second to take them to the Seelie Queen. Nene is revealed to be Mark's aunt, sister of his mother, Nerissa. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collapsing_Empire"title="The Collapsing Empire">
The Interdependency is a thousand-year-old human empire of 48 star systems connected by the Flow, a network of "streams" allowing faster-than-light travel. Each stream is one way and has an entry point and an exit point. There is no faster-than-light communication faster than the Flow, and interstellar trips are not instantaneous—ships carrying mail or passengers from Hub, the capital of the empire and the system with the most Flow connections, arrive at End, the most distant, nine months later—but the network permits life-sustaining intersystem trade. As a natural phenomenon, the Flow is poorly understood; Earth disconnected from the network thousands of years ago, and civilization on another system collapsed more recently when its pathway suddenly closed.Family-owned megacorporations control all interstellar trade in the Interdependency's mercantile economy; one, House Wu, is the royal family. The trading houses are incredibly wealthy from government-sanctioned monopolies and by collecting tolls at "shoals", entrances and exits to Flow pathways. The state religion, with the Emperox as titular head, celebrates the Interdependency as a divinely sanctioned society.Count Claremont, a physicist on End, calculates after decades of study that the Flow will soon collapse. All systems will be isolated; none are self-sufficient. Humans can only live on a planetary surface on End; they need space stations or underground habitats in other systems. Without the Flow, society on every system will likely collapse. The count sends his son Marce, also a physicist, to Hub to warn his old friend Emperox Attavio VI. The Emperox has died, however, and his unprepared daughter Cardenia is crowned as Grayland II.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_Versus_Fact"title="Faith Versus Fact">
Coyne defines science as "a collection of methods" that yield knowledge which may be rejected or confirmed via testing. With this definition in hand, he went on to argue that religion and science were inherently incompatible "because they have different methods of getting knowledge about reality, different ways of assessing the reliability of that knowledge, and, in the end, arrive at conflicting conclusions about the universe." Coyne believes that theistic religions make claims which conflict with science in three ways, namely methodology, outcomes and philosophy.A substantial portion of his book criticizes theistic evolution, arguing that if God were to use evolution as a method of creation, the evolutionary process should show signs of directionality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_God_in_Ruins_(Atkinson_novel)"title="A God in Ruins (Atkinson novel)">
The novel is about the life of Teddy Todd (younger brother of Ursula Todd, the protagonist of the companion work, "Life After Life"). Events in his life are not revealed in chronological order. The book opens with a brief glimpse of him as a Royal Air Force (RAF) Halifax bomber pilot in World War II, then goes on to events in his childhood and the lives of his child and grandchildren, at times juxtaposing his memories with events in the lives of his family members. Teddy's memories of his own childhood in Fox Corner, the Todd family's country home, seemed all summers filled with bunnies and skylarks and bluebells, glimmering hot air and long gossamer evenings. The one difficulty in Teddy's young life was that when his Aunt Izzie came to visit she probed him with questions in order to supply her with details for the series of popular children's books she wrote about a boy named Augustus, set in a thinly disguised version of Teddy's idyllic home.(p. 3-9) - which the child himself greatly disliked.As an RAF bomber pilot Teddy knew the odds, so early on he had prepared himself for death. Yet, improbably, flight after flight he returned. "Teddy realized that they were not so much warriors as sacrifices for the greater good. Birds thrown against a wall in the hope that eventually, if there were enough birds, they would break that wall." (p. 229) Completing one tour of duty, he would sign up for another. Hoping to share his luck, men vied for a place on his crew.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Fortune"title="The Great Fortune">
The novel opens with an English couple, Guy and Harriet Pringle, travelling through Yugoslavia towards Romania on a train. They have just married, after a whirlwind romance over the summer vacation. They are travelling to Bucharest, where Guy has a job (paid for by the British Council) at the English department of the University.On the train they first encounter Prince Yakimov, a once-wealthy English-educated White Russian émigré who is now nearly penniless and forced to live by scrounging.Once in Bucharest they set up a temporary home in the Atheni hotel where all the British journalists congregate in what is known as the English bar. They witness the arrival of the last remnants of the defeated Polish army, vanquished in the German invasion of Poland. In a piece of luck, Yakimov is hired as an assistant to work for a veteran journalist, Mcann, who has been wounded in the retreat and is desperate to get his story out. This enables Yakimov to live in the hotel in great style, where he befriends the Pringles.Guy shows Harriet the sights of Bucharest, especially the cafes and the Cismigiu Park. She meets Sophie – a half-Jewish student of Guy, seeking the security of a passport – whom Harriet senses is a rival for Guy's affections.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Madness_So_Discreet"title="A Madness So Discreet">
Grace Mae, a young woman from a prominent Boston family, has been sent to reside in the Wayburne Lunatic Asylum of Boston for the length of her illegitimate pregnancy. Despite not talking she is deemed one of the more gentle patients until she stabs a doctor who had been touching her. As a punishment Grace is wrapped in steaming hot sheets which cause her to miscarry and afterwards she is sent to the basement with the worst of the patients. While there she meets Dr. Thornhollow, a man who performs lobotomies, and begs him to perform one on her so that she can forget her time in the asylum and that her pregnancy was caused by her father raping her. Thornhollow declines, but does fake a lobotomy, causing the asylum to fake Grace's death in order to protect themselves from the wrath of her father. Thornhollow takes Grace to a more progressive asylum in Ohio where Grace continues to play the part of a mute. However Thornhollow has also freed Grace for another purpose, using her as an assistant as he practices amateur offender profiling to help track down murderers.At the asylum Grace befriends two fellow patients, Nelly, an Irish born working girl suffering from late stage syphilis, and Lizzie, who seems normal aside from the fact that she speaks to String, an imaginary creature who sits on her shoulder and seems able to read people's inner thoughts and predict the future. Grace also begins to enjoy her work with Thornhollow and the two eventually discover that there is a serial killer on the loose who appears to be raping and murdering women. Thornhollow suspects that the man is a doctor who is unable to sustain an erection and has difficulty with women. Thornhollow and Grace begin to look for a doctor but find no one who fits their description. The case grows cold through a lack of murders and through Grace's disinterest after Nelly commits suicide. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sparrow_(novel)"title="Red Sparrow (novel)">
Dominika Egorova, or "Red Sparrow", is a former Russian ballerina who is forced by her uncle to undergo espionage training for the Russian government at the Sparrow School, where people are trained to seduce their targets. Other key figures are Marble, a Russian double agent who provides intelligence to the CIA, and Nate Nash, a CIA internal-ops officer who recruits and handles intelligence assets for the agency. Each chapter in the book, as well as its two sequels, includes a reference to a specific prepared food, and ends with a recipe for it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Girls_(book)"title="Dead Girls (book)">
While each of the stories in Nancy Lee's breakout novel are varied in subject matter, they are united by themes of eroticism, destruction, loss, and the recurring image of the missing and murdered women of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. The images of these women are subtly inserted into each story via television screens, or comments about jury duty.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwendy's_Button_Box"title="Gwendy's Button Box">
The story takes place in King's fictional town of Castle Rock in 1974. Twelve-year-old Gwendy Peterson encounters a stranger in dark clothes and a black hat who invites her to "palaver."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quick_Fix_(novel)"title="The Quick Fix (novel)">
Junior high detective Matt Stevens, who made his debut in "The Big Splash", investigates the blackmailing of the star of the school basketball team.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footer_Davis_Probably_Is_Crazy"title="Footer Davis Probably Is Crazy">
This contemporary novel is set in Bugtussle, Mississippi, in the Southern United States. The narrator, 11-year-old Footer Davis, has to deal with her mother's bipolar disorder while trying to find out what happened to the Abrams children after their barn burned down. It troubles her that she seems to be having hallucinations – but they may be repressed memories. Footer is on the mission to do almost everything to help his friends, family, and herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Bear,_Baby_Bear,_What_Do_You_See?"title="Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What Do You See?">
Baby Bear meets all sorts of different animals, including a red fox, flying squirrel, mountain goat, blue heron, prairie dog, striped skunk, mule deer, rattlesnake and screech owl, until he finally finds what he is looking for – his mother.This is the final book by Eric Carle before his death in 2021.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_Cormyr"title="Murder in Cormyr">
"Murder in Cormyr" involves a wizard Benelaius and Jasper a half-halfling servant investigating a murder mystery in a village surrounded by a swamp. The book starts with the introduction of Jasper, a village urchin who, due to circumstances, tries to steal from the home of a wizard who recently moved nearby, as part of retirement from the Cormyr war wizard council. Jasper gets caught by Benelaius and as way of repayment, agrees to the proposition of becoming a servant of the wizard for one year. During that time, a mysterious murder takes place with Jasper, under directions of Benelaius, untangling the dark plot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangled_Webs"title="Tangled Webs">
"Tangled Webs" follows drow wizard Liriel Baenre and Rashemen berserker Fyodor on a journey, which include escape from the Underdark and a sea voyage. Due to finding a mysterious amulet windwalker, Liriel stumbles upon a mysterious runecraft, which supposedly would allow her to retain her drow magic on the surface. During the hectic escape, she meets Fyodor, who also searches for the amulet, as the witches of Rashemen told him it is a solution for his own problem. As a berserker, Fyodor is able to call upon magic, which allows him to fight despite injuries. However, as a child born in Time of Troubles, he cannot control his rage and see a difference between ally and enemy. The two heroes make an alliance, travelling together to the land of Rashemen with windwalker, while avoiding forces which would claim its power for themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_Tarsis"title="Murder in Tarsis">
This novel is about Tarsis, a once proud city by the sea, now landlocked and decaying because of a great catastrophe, with a huge nomad army laying siege to its crumbling walls; and the main character is Ironwood – a mercenary bearing the curse of the dragon he once slew.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abyssal_Warriors"title="Abyssal Warriors">
"Abyssal Warriors" is the second part of the "Bloodwars" trilogy that began with "Blood Hostages". In "Abyssal Warriors", Aereas and Nina, though naive in the ways of the planes, have successfully rescued Artus from his kidnappers. Now Aereas must go to save his love from the underworld. The planes have had their effect on the young girl and Aereas finds himself battling for her mind as well as her body as she becomes increasingly influenced by the forces of extreme evil that exist throughout the planes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_the_Dead_(novel)"title="King of the Dead (novel)">
The story concerns itself with Azalin, the king of the title. Despite the near-limitless powers that are now his to command, he is continually haunted by the death of his son. Unable to find any kind of happiness or contentment, he has begun to hate the dark, horror-filled world that is his to rule. "King of the Dead" recounts the tale of Azalin's earlier existence as a powerful mage and the events that led to his current reign.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_(novel)"title="War (novel)">
The autochthonous elves, driven back into the forest of Cerilia by the humans, who had in turn been forced out of their ancestral lands by lackeys of the Dark One, now live in uneasy peace with their invaders after centuries of war. The elves fear for the forest as the humans continue to carve out their civilization, but this concern is overshadowed by the matter of an empty throne.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_(Hayder_novel)"title="Gone (Hayder novel)">
When a carjacker drives off with a child in the back seat, detective inspector Jack Caffery realizes that the child was the criminal's true target.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icefall_(novel)"title="Icefall (novel)">
The novel is set in medieval Norway. When the king goes to war, he sends his three children to a remote steading for protection. His oldest daughter Asa, the middle child, Solveig, who begins to learn the art of storytelling from the king's skald, and the youngest child and heir to the throne Harold. During a frightening winter, the household has to deal with food shortages and the mystery of a murderous traitor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shroud_Conspiracy"title="The Shroud Conspiracy">
Dr. Jon Bondurant is a [Forensic anthropology/forensic anthropologist] known for his atheism. When the Vatican invites him to lead an investigation into the authenticity of the purported burial cloth of Jesus Christ, he agrees. After a contentious debate, the Vatican allows the examination of one of the sacred relic in order to spite the skeptical Bondurant.While in the Vatican, Bondurant meets Domenika Josef, a devout Catholic and the Vatican’s media specialist assigned to keep an eye on him. She’s privy to something Bondurant is not -- a recently discovered ancient Codex with revelations concerning the Shroud. What she’s not privy to is her own role in a plan by forces bent on stealing DNA tied to the sacred blood-stained Shroud. The resulting attempt to clone Jesus has apocalyptic results and is the subject of Heubusch’s sequel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_and_Mrs_Bo_Jo_Jones"title="Mr and Mrs Bo Jo Jones">
July Greher Jones tells the story of the first year of her marriage to her high school boyfriend, the football hero Boswell Johnson "Bo Jo" Jones. When the story begins, 16-year-old July and 17-year-old Bo Jo are high school seniors preparing for college. The upper-middle-class Grehers plan for July to attend an elite college; Bo Jo's working-class family hopes that he will get a football scholarship and be the first in his family to attend college. July's parents do not approve of her spending so much time with Bo Jo, and try to get her to date other boys. Although July is not certain of her feelings for Bo Jo, she likes him more than other boys she has dated, and the couple continues to see each other exclusively.One night, after consuming alcohol at a party where Bo Jo's former girlfriend Alicia is present and makes July feel jealous, Bo Jo and July end up having sex. July learns she is pregnant just as Bo Jo receives his letter of acceptance and football scholarship from Georgia Tech. The couple hide the pregnancy from their parents, secretly drive across the state line, and get married. Eventually they inform their parents, causing Bo Jo's parents to throw him out of the house and July's parents to threaten a forced annulment and an illegal abortion. Both sets of parents reluctantly accept the marriage. The couple are forced to leave school, and live for a disastrous short time with Bo Jo's parents, who blame July for ruining Bo Jo's college opportunity. July's parents then arrange an apartment for the couple and a job for Bo Jo at July's father's bank. The only truly supportive adult is July's grandmother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staurofila"title="Staurofila">
The King of Lights is a very good sovereign, loved by everyone in his kingdom. One day, he chooses one of his subjects, Protaner, to take care of the prison where he keeps imprisoned a large seven heads serpent, the Serpus. In return, he gives Protaner wealth, a house, and a good social and economic position. Protaner lives happily, marries a beautiful woman named Protogina, and together they have Staurofila as daughter, who, due to her beauty, is chosen to be the future wife of the Prince of Lights, Helios Dicaias, when they both grow up. Unfortunately, Protaner and Protogina betray the king's trust and, by a trick of the Serpus, they let it out. While escaping, the Serpus leaves little Staurofila wounded badly and with a horrible mark on his neck. The king is enraged and declares the death penalty for the marriage. However, the prince goes out to defend them and offers to capture the Serpus to redeem the guilty ones. The king accepts but, until the Serpus is to be captured, he expels Protaner's family from the kingdom and sends them to the Desert of Tears. There go Protaner, Protogina, little Staurofila and Filautia, the old babysitter, who, after smelling some poisonous flowers in the desert, gets crazy and forgets the beautiful Kingdom of Lights. Over time, Protaner and Protogina get lost and never return home, so Filautia asks for asylum, for her and for the girl, to Pseudo-Epythropus, a rich local man, interested only in his earnings, who has two daughters, Peirasy and Proscope. Pseudo-Epythropus notices that Staurofila is very beautiful and receives her with the intention of give her in marriage when she grows up, and thus get some economic or social benefits. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Providence_(Mamatas_novel)"title="I Am Providence (Mamatas novel)">
The book follows two horror writers, Colleen Danzig and Panos Panossian, the latter of whom is strongly disliked in the Lovecraft literary community. Both writers are attending the Summer Tentacular, a Lovecraft themed convention held in Providence, Rhode Island, and sharing a room together. Before the first day of the convention's end, Panossian is brutally murdered, his face peeled off of his body, mimicking an anonymous post left for Panossian on his blog by someone years ago who appears to know a great deal about his past.The novel's chapters alternatively follow both writers. The third-person chapters following Colleen are partially set before Panossian's murder while his chapters are told after his death, as his disembodied consciousness drifts around the convention following participants and thinking about his past. Panossian can feel his nerves dying and his brain shriveling like a ‘sponge in the sun’, and he spends his time lamenting over not remembering who it was that killed him, trying to figure it out, and letting his mind drift into long monologues about his past and opinions, his thoughts on Lovecraft, and his opinions on the other con-goers.Colleen recklessly searches for the truth and believes that there's a connection between "Arkham," the book Panossian was supposed to be selling when he died, and who killed him. The book is rumored to be bound in human skin. She corners Chloe, another one of the authors, in a bathroom where a physical altercation takes place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub_Rosa_(novel)"title="Sub Rosa (novel)">
Little is a homeless teenage runaway. Her luck seems to change when she meets Arsen, a mysterious young man with a nice car and apartment, who soon tempts her into sex. Little meets First and Second, two other “girlfriends” of Arsen, and he brings them all with him into Sub Rosa, a magical world where sex workers are called Glories and wield supernatural powers. Little is initiated into their way of life as a sex worker through several nights in the Dark, where she is repeatedly brutalized. She joins Arsen, First, and Second as the newest member of their “family”, with Arsen as her “Daddy” or pimp, and First and Second as her sister-wives. Continuing to confront the Dark, Little seeks to earn her dowry from male customers to become a full Glory, while battling her repressed memories from the past she left behind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vectors_of_Mind"title="The Vectors of Mind">
"Preface." This book extends and presents more formally the findings from the author's "Multiple Factor Analysis" paper of 1931. The author notes that he only recently learned matrix theory and presumes that other psychologists have had similar limitations in their training. He finds existing textbooks on the topic inadequate and the book begins with a presentation of matrix theory, written for those with undergraduate instruction in analytic geometry and real number calculus. The author expresses indebted to various professors in the mathematics department of the University of Chicago for helping him to develop his ideas. He also expresses appreciation to his computer (a person, Leone Chesire), who also wrote the appendix on the calculations used in the centroid method. He foresees a bright future for the use of factor analysis and expects to see the simplification of the computational methods. He expects factor analysis to become an important technique int the early stages of science. For example, the laws of classical mechanics could have been revealed by a factor analysis, by analyzing a great many attributes of objects that are dropped or thrown from an elevated point, with the time of fall factor uncorrelated with the weight factor. Work by Sewell Wright on path coefficients and Truman L. Kelley on multiple factors differs from factor analysis, which Thurstone sees as an extension of professor Spearman's work.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can't_We_Talk_About_Something_More_Pleasant?"title="Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?">
The book's storyline, spanning an eight-year period from 2001 to 2009, concerns Roz Chast's parents living in Brooklyn. The book describes various interactions between Chast and her parents. Chast, who lives in Connecticut, often used to visit her parents, calling their home "a hoarder's paradise". The couple is later moved into assisted living facilities near Chast's home due to their ailing health.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mills_(novel)"title="George Mills (novel)">
The first George Mills sets out on a journey with his lord on the First Crusade. But he eventually gets lost in the Netherlands and reaches a salt mine in Poland. His lord at the mines is Guillalume, who teaches him some life lessons. Mills becomes aware of what is written in his fate and this helps him understand the walks of life in this world in a better manner. Despite having the knowledge of what would happen in the future, his timidity and powerlessness does not bring out any situation-changing effects. The novel covers the history of succeeding family members named George Mills and all of them are aware of their fates and equally feeble and ineffective in changing their circumstances. The 43rd Mills encounters King George IV and is assigned on a diplomatic mission to Constantinople, where he first joins the Janissaries but later ends up in the Ottoman Sultan's harem doing household chores. He escapes from there and reaches America. The present-day Mills in America is a caretaker of an old woman named Judith Glazer in St. Louis, who is in the final stages of terminal cancer. Mills accompanies Glazer to Mexico and upon her death participates in her funeral together with her family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Ted_Bliss"title="Mrs. Ted Bliss">
Mrs. Dorothy Bliss is an old woman in her early 80s living alone in a retirement community near Miami Beach, Florida, after her husband's death due to cancer. She was born in Russia and is Jewish. Her mother bribed an immigration officer and added three years to her age on legal documents in order that she could start working in Manhattan's Lower East Side after their immigration. Her husband, Ted Bliss, had a butcher shop in Chicago and together they had three kids. Her oldest son dies of cancer at a young age and after her husband's retirement, the couple moved to Florida. She is obsessed with cleaning and also keeps records of the gifts given to her grandchildren in order to keep track and stay impartial with everyone.The single life of Mrs. Bliss is now filled with expectations of finding a romance or a partner but eventually she is disappointed and heartbroken. She gets involved with Alcibiades Chitral, a drug lord who operates in her neighborhood, and starts using her and her husband's car as a front for his activities. The story keeps introducing various new men in her life, such as Hector Camerando, a jai alai pro who helps Mrs. Bliss with some tips on dogs, and Tommy Auveristas, an imposter. Junior Yellin, a once upon a time lover with whom Mrs. Bliss had had a passionate encounter in her husband's butcher shop, also makes a re-entry into her life. She eventually dies when Hurricane Andrew hits Miami and brings massive destruction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Massacre_of_Mankind"title="The Massacre of Mankind">
In New York City in 1920, four people sail to England to meet with Walter Jenkins, the original author of the War of the Worlds story. Jenkins has seen signs that the Martians may be planning a second attack. They arrive to find London has become a totalitarian dystopia and the whole country is gearing up for war. Walter's brother, Frank, is drafted the next day and London prepares for war. Beginning at 7:00 PM, 50 cylinder-shaped Martian missiles land on the city, wiping out nearly half of Britain's military. At midnight, another group of cylinders lands, this one carrying Martian warriors. The Martians emerge immediately- in contrast to the 19 hours required in their 1907 landings- and engage the British military with their heat rays. Army, Navy, and relatively new Air Force counterattacks prove mostly harmless against the Martian fighting-machines. Over the next several days, the Martians cripple London, carefully selecting targets of infrastructural importance, such as bridges, factories, and train stations. Many Londoners escape or take shelter.Two years later, the Martians control England, though they mostly remain in their cordon. Walter Jenkins asks Julie Elphinstone, his former sister-in-law, to go into the Martian cordon to try to communicate with them. She and her group make the long journey to the cordon, dodging several Martian attacks along the way and meeting a saboteur named Marriott. At the Martian base, they discover that the Martians are cannibals, keeping humans and humanoid species in holding tanks for future harvesting. They witness breeding experiments between Martians and humans. Eventually they come to the feeding hole, where the Martians have humans hung upside-down from scaffolding while they inject the human's blood directly into their Martian bodies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Day_Is_for_the_Thief"title="Every Day Is for the Thief">
A man leaves New York to return to Lagos for the first time in 15 years after the death of his father and a fight with his mother. He realizes he is not as comfortable in his home country as he expected to be.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_in_Bloodhound_Red"title="Death in Bloodhound Red">
The novel is set in and around the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia. The main character, Jo Beth Sidden, is an outspoken feminist bloodhound trainer who assists law enforcement with search and rescue. When she is accused of attacking her ex-husband, Jo Beth takes matters into her own hands.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agamemnon_(Seneca)"title="Agamemnon (Seneca)">
The blood-feud between Atreus and Thyestes was not ended with the vengeance which Atreus wreaked upon his brother. It was fated that Thyestes should live to father upon his own daughter a son, Aegisthus, who would slay Atreus and bring ruin and death upon Agamemnon.The Trojan War is done, and now the near approach of the victorious king Agamemnon, bringing his captives and treasure home to Argos, has been announced. But his wife Clytemnestra, enraged at Agamemnon because he had sacrificed her daughter Iphigenia at Aulis to appease the winds, and full of jealousy because he brings Cassandra as her rival home, estranged also by the long-continued absence of her husband, but most estranged by her own guilty affair with Aegisthus, is now plotting to slay her husband on his return, gaining both revenge and safety from his anger.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenissae_(Seneca)"title="Phoenissae (Seneca)">
When Oedipus discovered his crime, he blinded himself; and went into exile with his daughter Antigone, who offered herself as guide. In the meantime his sons Eteocles and Polynices engage in war, the treaty binding them to reign alternately being violated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troades_(Seneca)"title="Troades (Seneca)">
The siege of Troy is done and the city is now smouldering ruins. The victorious Greeks have gathered the rich spoils of Troy upon the shore, among these the Trojan women who await their lot to be assigned to their Greek lords and taken to the cities of their foes. But now the ghost of Achilles has risen from the tomb, and demanded that Polyxena be sacrificed to him before the Greeks shall be allowed to sail away. And Calchas, also, bids that Astyanax be slain, for only then can Greece be safe from any future Trojan war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_(Seneca)"title="Hercules (Seneca)">
Lycus was exiled for his crimes by Creon the father-in-law of Hercules and king of Thebes. Hercules being at that time away in the underworld, where he had gone to seek out Cerberus as the final labour assigned him by Eurystheus through Juno's hatred. Here he found Theseus, who had made a descent into the regions of Pluto in company of Pirithous with the intention of carrying off Proserpine. Lycus seized his opportunity, and aided by conspirators, slayed Creon together with his two sons, and usurped the Kingdom of Thebes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_Oetaeus"title="Hercules Oetaeus">
The long, heroic life of Hercules has neared its end. His twelve great tasks, assigned him by Eurystheus through Juno's hatred, have been done. His latest victory was over Eurytus, king of Oechalia. Hercules slew the king and overthrew his house, because he would not give Hercules his daughter Iole in marriage. And now the hero, having overcome the world, and Pluto's realm beneath the earth, aspires to heaven. He sacrifices to Cenaean Jove, and prays at last to be received into his proper home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenjack_(novella)"title="Wenjack (novella)">
The story begins with Chanie describing his experiences of abuse from residential school teachers, who he and his friends (two brothers) call "Fish Bellies" or "Sucker Bellies" for their pale skin. On an October afternoon, Chanie and the two brothers decide to run away. Because of a lung infection, Chanie struggles to keep up with his friends. Eventually the three boys reach a river, where they run into the two brothers' uncle. They are given a meager meal of freshly-caught fish in the cabin where the uncle, his wife, and his daughter are staying. That night, Chanie sleeps on the floor by the wood stove.In the morning, the uncle tells his wife to send Chanie away, while he takes his two nephews to the trapline to look for food. When Chanie gets up to join them, the uncle tells him that it would be dangerous to have four people in his canoe. The mother sends Chanie on his way with dried moose meat and tells him to turn right at the tracks to head back to the school. The girl gives him a glass jar that holds seven matches. Chanie leaves the cabin, resolved to find his two friends and their uncle. However, when he reunites with them, the uncle tells him he cannot stay and that he must return to the school. He tells Chanie he can beat the impending bad weather if he travels quickly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_West"title="Exit West">
Nadia and Saeed meet when they are working students in an unnamed city. Saeed is more conservative and still lives at home, as custom generally requires, but the more independent Nadia has chosen to live alone and has been disowned by her parents for doing so. Saeed and Nadia fall for each other slowly and then all at once. War speeds up their courtship, the way it seems to hasten everything. After Saeed's mother is killed by a stray bullet while searching for a lost earring in her car, Nadia moves in with Saeed and his father, despite not wanting to marry Saeed as propriety requires.As the militants successfully wrest control of the city from the government and violence becomes an every day part of life, Nadia and Saeed begin chasing rumours that there are doors in the city that serve as portals to other locations. Although most of the doors are guarded by militants, they manage to bribe their way through a door, leaving behind Saeed's father who does not wish to be a burden to them and asks Nadia to promise him never to leave Saeed until they are settled.The door they go through takes them to Mykonos, where they are among many refugees and settle in a tent city. They eventually obtain the compassion of a local Greek girl who has a rapport with Nadia and helps the two go through a recently discovered door which leads to a luxury home in London. Nadia and Saeed and other migrants settle in the home, claiming it from its owners.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hanging_Tree_(Aaronovitch_novel)"title="The Hanging Tree (Aaronovitch novel)">
The previous book's adventure in Herefordshire left the protagonist Peter Grant deeply involved in a relationship with Beverley Brook, the resourceful young woman who had saved him from captivity by the Faerie Queen. Beverley happens to be the tutelary goddess of Beverley Brook, a small river in South London, and can often be found swimming through its waters; when Peter comes to the bank and calls her name, she might jump naked out of the water, like a salmon, directly into his arms. Peter now spends much of his time – especially his nights – in Beverley's comfortable and spacious house on the riverbank. It is there that he gets the phone call catapulting him into the whirlwind of a new adventure.A bunch of teenagers breaking into a luxurious apartment and holding there a wild party of sex and drugs, ending with one of them dead of an overdose, is a matter for the police – but normally, not for Grant, whose very special police speciality are the cases involving magic. However, one of the teenagers involved was the daughter of a very magical creature – Cecilia Tyburn Thames aka Lady Ty, who is the goddess of the River Tyburn and the older and far stricter sister of Peter's girlfriend. Peter owes Lady Ty a favour for having once saved his life, and she wants her daughter Olivia kept out of trouble with the law – which is not easy for Peter to deliver. Peter's involvement soon grows deeper when an autopsy by pathologists who know about magic reveals that the dead girl, Christina Chorley, had died not only of a drug overdose but also of a wild and excessive use of magic – which can cause a careless practitioner's brain to undergo "hyperthaumaturgical degradation", with often fatal results.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_2440"title="The Year 2440">
The novel describes the adventures of an unnamed man who, after engaging in a heated discussion with a philosopher friend about the injustices of Paris, falls asleep and finds himself in a Paris several centuries into the future. He wanders through the changed city, eventually ending up in the ruins of the Palace of Versailles. Mercier's hero notes everything that catches his fancy in this futuristic Paris. Public space and the justice system have been reorganized. Citizens' garb is comfortable and practical. Hospitals are effective and science-based. There are no monks, priests, prostitutes, beggars, dancing masters (i.e., dance teachers), pastry chefs, standing armies, slavery, arbitrary arrest, taxes, guilds, foreign trade, coffee, tea, or tobacco: such occupations, institutions, and products have been adjudged to be useless and immoral – as has much previously written literature, which has been willingly destroyed by the future librarians, who proudly display their library, reduced to a single room of only the most valuable works.Written only 18 years before the French Revolution of 1789, the book describes a future secular, pacifist France that has been established through a peaceful revolution led by a "philosopher-king" who has set up a system resembling a parliamentary monarchy. The future utopian, egalitarian France is portrayed as having no religion and no military.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_Susan_Lulham"title="The House of Susan Lulham">
Zoe Mahonie calls diocesan exorcist Merrily Watkins to her and her husband's new home after becoming convinced that its late previous tenant, Susan "Suze" Lulham, is still in residence, causing paranormal disturbances. Suze was a wealthy hairdresser who, after a bad breakup with a married television actor, committed suicide in the living room with a razor, spraying blood everywhere. When a second bloody death takes place in the house, Merrily investigates its past, and whether Zoe is deeply disturbed or genuinely haunted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thick_as_Thieves_(Turner_novel)"title="Thick as Thieves (Turner novel)">
The book picks up after the events of "The Queen of Attolia" when the Medes failed to establish the Queen of Attolia as a puppet monarch. Nahuseresh, the Medean ambassador and his slave Kamet were forced to flee the country after the botched invasion. Due to his failure in Attolia, Nahuseresh has fallen out of favor with his powerful brother, heir to the Medean throne. As the secretary and slave to Nahuseresh, Kamet has the ambition and means to become one of the most influential people in the Empire. However, after angering his master, Kamet is offered a risky opportunity to escape slavery by a mysterious foreigner claiming he was sent by the King of Attolia. Kamet is reluctant to leave his prestigious position, but when his fellow slave Laela warns him that their master has been poisoned, he believes he is left with little choice if he wants to live. Fleeing across the desert with the Attolian soldier (later revealed to be Costis of "The King of Attolia") from the emperor's soldiers, Kamet attempts to prevent Costis from finding out that Nahuseresh is dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Axolotl"title="The Old Axolotl">
The novel presents a post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk vision of Earth where biological life has been wiped out, inhabited by robots and mechs, many of which are humans whose consciousness has been digitized in the wake of an extinction event.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persepolis_Rising"title="Persepolis Rising">
Twenty-eight years have passed since the events of "Babylon's Ashes" and Earth is back on its feet after the attack that crippled the planet in "Nemesis Games". The crew of the aging gunship "Rocinante" are still together, working contracts for the Transport Union, who have control of the Ring station and the 1,300 worlds the gates lead to. No one has heard from Admiral Duarte and his rogue fleet in the thirty years since they broke away from the Martian Congressional Republic Navy, until now. They have spent their time in the Laconia system building an advanced fleet using leftover technology from the protomolecule creators. They return through their gate to take over Medina Station and launch an attack on the Sol system.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide_Child_trilogy"title="Tide Child trilogy">
## Prior to "The Bone Ships".The Hundred Isles and the Gaunt Isles have been at war for centuries. Because the Scattered Archipelago contains very little plant life and no wood for ships, their warships are made from the bones of sea dragons called arakeesians. The arakeesians are apparently extinct. No more ships can be built, leading to a war of attrition. White ships are used in traditional battles, while black ships are crewed by condemned prisoners expected to die in battle.The Hundred Isles has a matriarchal society in which citizens are valued for fertility and beauty. Women who survive childbirth and bear healthy children are elevated to Bern class. Healthy men may become Kept concubines by the Bern, but those with birth defects or other undesirable traits are relegated to lower castes. The firstborn healthy child from each family is sacrificed, and their soul is used to make a “corpse light” to light a white ship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_In_Beirut"title="Death In Beirut">
The novel talks about a reform effort that the emerging generations of university students in Lebanon, led by Hani al-Ra’i, a Christian, and Tamimah Nassour, a Shiite Muslim, are committed to. Both of them come from outside the city: Hani from the village of Mutla in the northern Matn – meaning from the Christian mountain – and Tamimah from the village of Mahdia in southern Lebanon – mostly Shiite – and both suffer from the change in the atmosphere of life due to the transition from the simplicity of the village to the hustle of the city while they are working for change, and reform. The novel also talks about "the factories of intolerance and the street demagoguery, and the traditional leaders and influential merchants" who infiltrated the ranks of the students, motivated by their partisan interests, their own lusts, and their ideologies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_God's_Drums"title="The Black God's Drums">
In the world of the novella, the Haitian Slave Revolt freed Haiti as well as many Caribbean nations, now called the Free Isles. The Haitians used a powerful weapon called the Black God's Drums to defeat the French fleet. Also known as Shango's Thunder, the Drums create powerful storms. Their collateral damage is so high that they have only been used once. The Confederate States of America have fought to a draw with the Union, and New Orleans is now neutral territory. Additionally, the Confederacy uses drapeto, a psychoactive gas, to control their enslaved population.Creeper is a street urchin born in New Orleans during a storm, giving her a special connection to Oya, the orisha of storms. When Creeper is thirteen, she overhears Confederate soldiers discussing a Haitian scientist and the Black God’s Drums. Creeper decides to sell this information to Captain Ann-Marie St. Augustine of the airship "Midnight Robber" in exchange for becoming a member of the crew. Ann-Marie has a connection to the goddess Oshun, Oya’s sister.Oya sends Creeper a vision of a skeleton. A man in a skeletal Mardi Gras mask kidnaps the Haitian scientist, Dr. Duvall, before Ann-Marie and Creeper reach him. Creeper and Ann-Marie meet with Sisters Agnes and Eunice, nuns who provide Creeper with information about the city. They learn that Duvall has been kidnapped by Johnny Boys, a splinter group of Confederate soldiers. The nuns give Ann-Marie and Creeper a flask of drapeto.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Days_of_Man"title="The Seven Days of Man">
The Seven Days of Man is a novel tells the story of the child Abd al-Aziz who is the most important element in the extension of the life cycle in which he moves within a village family, whose care giver belongs to a Sufi group inside the village. The critics call this type of novels "Genesis novel", which is a type of novel with special characteristics that are only present in famous novels like "Emotional education" for the French writer Flaubert, which is a story that talks about a hero who falls in love for the first time, moving from the world of childhood to the world of adolescence, which does not end except at the verge of manhood or the completion of youth. When Abdel Mohsen Badr wrote about Abdel Hakim Qassem’s novel in his book "The Novelist and the Land" in which he studied "The Seven Days of Man", he drew attention to the novelist's relationship with the village, and how a generation differed from another in making the village a fictional subject.This focus seems to have made the critics pay attention to this aspect, including Dr. Muhammad Badawi, who was preoccupied with the impact of socio-economic change on the novel. After that, studies proceeded in this direction, in which Muhammad Badawi continued to describe the novel that it revolves around a Sufi group of marginalized people in the village.This understanding prompted the novelists to ask: Does the novel really revolve around the village? And the novel really does revolve around the village, but through a specific perspective which is the perspective of the writer who writes about his childhood and upbringing and opens his awareness of the world within a village, and the formation of his religious awareness increases through the group that was led by his father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tunnel_of_Love_(novel)"title="The Tunnel of Love (novel)">
The novel opens with a look ahead: the narrator feigns illness to avoid the case worker Mrs. Mash from the Crib Adoption Agency, who wants to question him about the Pooles suitability as parents. Knowing Augie as he does, he fakes losing his voice, causing his wife Audrey to summon Dr. Vancouver. The doctor can't find anything wrong and suggests stress. After he leaves, the narrator thinks back to when he and Audrey first met the Pooles at a cocktail party. (From this point the action proceeds in chronological order).At the cocktail party the narrator meets Isolde Poole. He is fascinated and likens her in his own mind to Joan Fontaine. Isolde tells him a story from her acting days. The narrator is bemused and incorporates her into his usual fantasy, centered around a cabin in the Maine woods called Moot Point, since the legal title to the imaginary location is in doubt. She is not the first woman he has mentally transported to this hideaway, which constitutes his sole act of infidelity to Audrey. In passing the narrator also mentions meeting Augie, who made no impression on him.Invited to dinner at the Poole's house, the narrator and Audrey are embarrassed to realize Augie is the "A. Poole" whose cartoons he has been rejecting in his capacity of Art Editor for "The Townsman". Isolde uses their discomfiture to announce she has listed them as references for adopting a child. As Augie shows the narrator his studio in the converted loft of a barn, he confesses that the property was purchased for them by Isolde's grandmother, on whose bounty they also survive. Told his cartoon ideas would fetch a high price for themselves without the drawings, Augie declines to be a "gagman".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars_and_Bones"title="Stars and Bones">
The Benevolence, an alien intelligence that observes and catalogues life in the galaxy, noted with disapproval the way humans on Earth were slowly destroying their world. To save the planet, the Benevolence constructed a thousand sentient spaceships or arks, and filled them with the entire human population. Each ark is an artificial world with Earth-like environments, and their inhabitants are provided with all they need in terms of provisions, equipment and resources.Seventy-five years later, the arks are adrift amongst the stars. Scout ships fan out ahead of the fleet to check for any threats or opportunities. The scouts also investigate planetary systems they pass for any signs of life and potential colonisation. But a visit to a planet called Candidate-623 stirs an unseen alien force which destroys the scout ship and dismembers its crew. After locating the scout ship's home base, the force begins to infiltrate and infect the arks, one by one.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letting_Ana_Go"title="Letting Ana Go">
An anonymous author, using the name "Ana" as her pseudonym, shares her story of regressing into full-blown anorexia as her parents deal with family dysfunction. Ana's mother constantly expresses a negative self-perception of her own overweight body, while Ana's father has a girlfriend with a skinny waist and large breasts. While Ana's parents are well-off financially, their increasing arguments impact the direction of their spending habits, and they fail to express much love or affection towards Ana; Ana's father presents her with a car as a birthday present, but otherwise does nothing else symbolic for the occasion, leaving Ana feeling alone and unappreciated.Ana begins keeping a food diary with a friend, wealthy fellow student Jill, and they both try to lose as much weight as possible for their track team, which transmutes into an obsession with getting on a ballet troupe's list and exploring thinspiration websites. This intermingles with Ana's parents breaking up, and her mother constantly buying too-small clothing sizes while trying to fit into them despite her burgeoning obesity. The family's money begins to dwindle, and Ana takes her mother's self-deprecating statements to heart, such as "nothing tastes as good as thin feels", and continues losing weight until she is admitted to a local hospital due to physical health complications. Ana dies as her family cannot afford to send her to a special care facility for minor children suffering from eating disorders, while Jill, whose parents are rich, is able to recover in comfort.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_in_the_Sky_(2012_novel)"title="Lucy in the Sky (2012 novel)">
An unnamed teenage diarist recalls living with her middle-class parents and preppy brother in Santa Monica; the diarist's only friend is her brother, Cam, who receives more admiration and hopes to go to Berkeley University after high school. The two siblings, nevertheless, are close companions and share a bond by attending yoga classes. Yoga class is where the diarist meets Ross, another teenager who shares drugs with the diarist not long after her 16th birthday, during a party for said birthday. Ross remains her friend, but gets her hooked on drugs and later alcohol, leading the diarist to experiment with numerous illicit substances including marijuana, cocaine and other things. She claims to experience vivid high periods complimented with hallucinations, which only makes her even more fascinated with druggie culture and an edgy crowd of high school kids who all partake in substance abuse. The diarist stops attending school, and Cam, who has no interest in drugs, grapples with his loyalty to his sister versus the desire to report her behaviour to their parents. A 20-year-old man named Blake expresses sexual interest in the younger diarist, and snorts a line of cocaine with her. The diarist also hopes to emulate Lauren, one of the addicts in her social group. Lauren is beautiful, wealthy, wears designer clothes and has a snobby personality. The diarist's grades begin slipping, and Cam is horrified by her change in personality, as she becomes more mean-spirited and vicious. She finds that her newfound friends are more flawed than they appear to be, particularly when she is nearly raped while high and none of them are surprised by this. As time goes on, intermingled with periods of blackout drunkenness, the diarist experiments with meth and heroin. After a DUI is issued to her, she is forced to go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, which she hates, and to face her parents and Cam. She gets clean and sober after a length of self-reflection and more meetings, but then she relapses and dies, leaving only her diary behind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Search_For_Order"title="The Search For Order">
A socioeconomic, political, and cultural analysis of the United States during the period between the end of Reconstruction and the Progressive era, Wiebe's work describes American society and how the introduction of new scientific and technological advancements changed the ways in which citizens connected with the larger country outside of their local communities as well as how they perceived themselves in an increasingly national sense. These changes led to new ideologies that embraced utopian ideals and the belief that through impersonal, federal authority the ills society was experiencing from the rapid urban-industrialization of the Gilded Age could be tamed, quelled, or used to create a better future and society. Wiebe analyzes the appearance and life of the Populist party and its appeal to the rural parts of the country as well as the hopes for the party, which would be reproduced in the ensuing Progressive movement of the early twentieth century. The result would be a transition from "a society of island communities" held together by local autonomy to the development of "America's initial experiment in bureaucratic order," primarily driven by the emerging, new middle class that was created through the advancements.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silencing_The_Past"title="Silencing The Past">
"Silencing the Past" is a meditation on the characteristics of power and how it influences the creation and recording of histories. Spanning examples from The Alamo and Christopher Columbus to the position of the Haitian Revolution in the collective memory of Western society, Trouillot analyzes conventional historical narratives to understand why certain parts of history are remembered when others are not. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenglass_House"title="Greenglass House">
The main character is 12 year old Milo Pine. He is the adopted son of inn owners. He lives in Nagspeake, a city, which is known as "smugglers town". Milo lives in the "Greenglass House", which is a huge, dilapidated house. Actions take place during the Christmas holidays. The inn is usually empty at this time, so Milo hopes to get some rest. However, suddenly on the very first night, one after another, five guests are settled in the hotel. Milo believes that the appearance of each of them is not accidental, and their appearance is somehow connected with the Greenglass House itself. Milo is also puzzled by his finding - a fragment of a nautical chart. At one point, Milo meets Meddy, the cook's youngest daughter. The boy befriends Meddy, and together they start a detective role-playing game, the purpose of which is to find out where this map leads, as well as learn more about the guests. They found out that one of the guests enters the rooms of other guests. At first, nothing is lost, but then three guests were robbed at once, and later another guest suffered from the hands of a thief.Milo's investigation eventually leads him to the conclusion that one of the guests, named De Cary Vinge, is a customs agent. A little later, while telling stories, Vinge confirms this and takes hostage all the guests and Milo's parents. He wants to find the last treasure of Michael "Doc Holystone" Witcher, the famous and now deceased smuggler who formerly owned the house. Milo himself, along with Meddy, manage to escape to the attic, where they lock themselves. Milo suddenly realizes that Meddu is actually a ghost and her real name is Addie Witcher, and she is a daughter of Doc Holystone. Meddy confirms this and reveals that 34 years ago, a young De Cary Vinge was chasing her father, but the latter stumbled and fell off a cliff. Addie heard this from Vinge himself and leaned forward a little to better hear his speech, but also could not keep her balance and, ultimately, fell and died. Afterwards, Milo and Meddy finally found out where her father hid the last treasure. After a failed attempt to stealthily sneak in on Mr. Vinge, Milo makes a deal - he will show where the treasure is, and Vinge will release the hostages. Vinge agrees and Milo points to a crystal chandelier in the shape of a ship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitz_and_the_Fool_trilogy"title="Fitz and the Fool trilogy">
The trilogy follows Fitz in his fifties, and is told alternately from the point of view of Fitz and his daughter Bee Farseer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_of_the_Crusted_Snow"title="Moon of the Crusted Snow">
Evan Whitesky and his wife Nicole raise their two children on an Anishinaabe reservation in northern Canada. The reservation loses power and all connection to the outside world, though the town’s generators are able to power essential services through the winter. Two college students return from the south, bringing stories of societal collapse. A white man named Justin Scott arrives on the reservation, seeking shelter from the chaos. The chief and council allow him to stay, though they do not trust him.The council institutes food and electricity rationing. Two young women freeze to death after drinking with Scott. Another group of white people arrive at the reservation begging for food, and Scott shoots one of them. As conditions deteriorate, Scott’s influence increases and the band council’s diminishes. There is a riot at the food handout line, and Scott suggests that he has found an alternative food source. A body goes missing from the morgue; Evan suspects Scott of cannibalism. He and other community leaders confront Scott, who is cooking the body into a stew. Scott is shot and killed; Evan is shot, but he survives.In an epilogue two years later, the power has never returned and the community is returning to their ancestral way of life. They leave the reservation for a new settlement.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hope_More_Powerful_than_the_Sea"title="A Hope More Powerful than the Sea">
The book starts with Doaa Al Zamel's early life, growing up in Daraa, Syria. Al Zamel has a happy childhood, living in the extended family home, until the Syrian civil war breaks out. Her family flee to Egypt where she gets engaged to Bassam. In Egypt, Bassam and Al Zamel pay people smugglers to move them to Europe, boarding a boat with 500 other refugees. The boat capsizes in the Mediterranean Sea, with all but eleven of the passengers drowning. Bassam does not make it, Al Zamel is one of the eleven.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Region_in_Turmoil"title="A Region in Turmoil">
John H. Gill, reviewing this book for The Journal of Military History, defines the region of South Asia as encompassing a territory that extends from Afghanistan to Bangladesh. He says the author also includes Burma (present day Myanmar) to enable discussion of border concerns it has with India. Gill also says, the author further elaborates on other issues pertaining to this smaller region. Gill additionally observes that the author maintains an objective, but not sterile narration.The book overviews the numerous conflicts that have occurred in the region since the British withdrawal after World War II. In doing so, this overview outlines the interconnections between the forms of volatile conflicts; the roots of the tensions and disputes, including religion, ethnic tension, ideology, and historical experiences; while also connecting the results. This method allows the author to portray the diverse settings for violent behavior in this southern region. This approach illuminates the complex interrelations that are involved.Thus, this book is a comparative study of the parallels drawn from the variety of conflicts occurring since 1947. These conflicts share a common methodology including "armed confrontations, insurrections, communal riots, insurgencies, acts of terrorism, and wars." The nations involved are: India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Myanmar. Also, global influences impact this region in the form of "conflicts, insurgency, terror, and peace making." Such influences also result in diasporas but the effects of nationalism from abroad are not covered.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_a_Misfit"title="Diary of a Misfit">
The book weaves the story of journalist Casey Parks' queer identity and the life history of a man named Roy Hudgins that her grandmother knew growing up in Delhi, Louisiana in the 1950s. Roy was assigned female at birth yet lived as a man. Parks, who herself grew up poor in rural Louisiana, sets out to illuminate the history of Roy's life through interviews with those who knew him, while grappling with the rejection she faced after coming out as gay as an adolescent. Her relationship with her loving and devoutly Christian mother is also explored.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_Will_Come_Baby_(novel)"title="Down Will Come Baby (novel)">
In the novel, 12-year-old Robin Garr is overcome with guilt following the accidental death of her friend at summer camp. Her father Marcus relocates her to Boston, away from Robin's alcoholic mother, where he hopes she will be able to get proper psychiatric help. Their downstairs neighbor Dorothy Cotton quickly takes an interest in Robin, and Marcus is grateful when Dorothy agrees to look after his daughter while he is out of town. When he returns, he is shocked to discover that Dorothy has kidnapped Robin. Robin's parents discover that Dorothy's motives are not as pure as they initially seemed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyōheki"title="Hyōheki">
Uozu and Kosaka, friends and mountaineers since their student days, plan to climb Mount Hotaka during the New Year's holidays. A few days before the start of their venture, Uozu learns of Kosaka's affair with Minako Yashiro, the young wife of much older engineer Kyonosuke Yashiro. Minako tells Uozu that she regards the affair as finished, which Kosaka is unwilling to accept. Shortly after, during their mountain trip, Kosaka falls to his death due to the tearing of their nylon rope. Upon his return, Uozu is confronted with speculations that Kosaka either died of carelessness, deliberately damaged the rope to commit suicide, or that Uozu had cut the rope to save himself. The rope's manufacturer, a shareholder of Uozu's employer, instructs none other than Kyonosuke Yashiro, whose company supplied the nylon used in the rope, to conduct an experiment under similar, simulated conditions. As the results seem to prove the rope's stability, Uozu's assertions are put to question. Among the few people who are giving him his support are Minako Yashiro, with whom he has become infatuated, his superior Tokiwa, and Kosaka's younger sister Kaoru.When Kosaka's body is eventually found months later, and the piece of rope found with him seems to support Uozu's version of the accident, the newspapers have lost interest in the case. Minako confesses to Uozu that she shares his feelings for her, but he announces to sever all contact with her, finding the constellation impossible. During his next mountain trip, which Uozu goes about alone under hazardous conditions, he is killed by falling rocks, leading to speculations that he secretly wanted to commit suicide. Kaoru, whom Uozu had promised to marry, vows to take his and Kosaka's ice axes up Mount Hotaka and place them there in the friends' memory, as described in a poem by French mountaineer Roger Duplat which Kosaka had loved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Temple_of_the_Wild_Geese"title="The Temple of the Wild Geese">
Shortly before his death, painter Nangaku asks Jikai, head priest of the Kohōan Zen Buddhist temple in the outskirts of Kyoto, to take care of his mistress Satoko. The married Nangaku had once decorated the temple's interiors with his paintings of wild geese and, while working on these, shared a room with Satoko in the temple's facilities. Jikai does as he has been asked and takes Satoko in, immediately making her his mistress and starting a feverish affair with her, although he is 25 years her senior. Meanwhile, Jikai's novice Jinen, an intelligent but disfigured boy, lives an austere life under the head priest's tight reign, who himself leads a mundane life and regularly gets drunk when playing Go with priests from affiliated temples. When Jinen, exhausted from military training at school, oversleeps, Jikai even attaches a rope to Jinen's wrist, waking him up by pulling it. Satoko learns that Jinen had been abandoned by his natural parents as a child and, intending to comfort him, makes sexual advances towards him. One day, Heikichi Hisama, one of the temple's patrons, shows up and asks for an anniversary service in remembrance of his deceased father, at the same time declaring that the eldest of his brothers is lying on the deathbed. Jikai sends Jinen to hold the service instead and goes out, but does not return. When the eldest brother dies and Jikai remains missing, a priest of an affiliated temple holds the funeral service. Jikai's colleagues speculate if he went on an ascetic's journey, died somewhere due to his repeated drinking, or simply ran away from Satoko, but the case remains unsolved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bone_Houses"title="The Bone Houses">
Aderyn (nicknamed "Ryn") is a seventeen-year-old gravedigger who operates the family business with her siblings in the rural village of Colbren. The business was inherited after the deaths of their parents, and has been suffering as a result of reanimated corpses, known as "bone houses", coming to life and antagonizing people. The village's suspicion is heightened when Ellis, an apprentice mapmaker boy who is Ryn's age, appears in town. They both team up, along with a "bone goat" (reanimated pet goat), with the goal of finding out how to stop the bone houses. Despite Ryn's caustic and often morbid demeanor, she begins to fall in love with Ellis as she gets to know him, but she finds his enigmatic past troublesome. Ellis suffers from chronic pain from a badly healed injury. Ryn and Ellis arrive at a dreary homestead and discover that Ellis's deceased mother had resurrected Ellis via a magical "birth cauldron" when he was shot in the shoulder with an arrow and killed, which is why Ellis has no memory of his family. He embraces his dead mother, only to watch as her decaying body falls apart as the now-avenged spirit leaves it. Ellis forms a romantic relationship with Ryn and they return to Colbren, now that the bone houses are gone and Ryn's gravedigging business will no longer be under threat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_Dolls_of_Echizen"title="Bamboo Dolls of Echizen">
Kisuke Ujiie grows up in the small village of Takekami in Echizen Province as the only child of Kizaemon Ujiie, a widower who lost his wife when Kisuke was only three. From his father, Kisuke has inherited his small stature, but also a distinguished talent for the art of bamboo crafts. When Kizaemon dies, handing down his manufacture to his 21-year-old son, a woman in her thirties named Tamae shows up in the village and asks Kisuke to allow her to say a prayer at his father' grave. She explains that she is from the town of Aware and that his father had treated her kindly years ago. A few weeks later, Kisuke looks for Tamae in Aware, discovering that she is working as a prostitute in the town's illegal pleasure quarters and that his father had once been a regular client of hers. Kisuke takes Tamae as his wife on the grounds that their marriage is celibate, as he sees in Tamae foremost a surrogate mother.Motivated by a meticulously crafted bamboo doll which his father once had made for Tamae, Kisuke starts making his own dolls, which soon become sought after artifacts. When the head clerk of a Kyoto based artware store, Chūbei, arrives in Takekami for a business call, he recognises Tamae from her early years as a prostitute whom he often frequented. Sexually unsatisfied and out of nostalghia, Tamae gives in to his rough advances, but soon feels guilty for her deed. A few months later, Tamae's health deteriorates, and she learns that she is pregnant by Chūbei. Tamae travels to Kyoto under the pretence that she wants to collect the money Kisuke's customers owe him, but actually wants Chūbei to help her get an abortion. Chūbei seduces her again, only to claim later that he can't find anyone for the procedure, as abortions without the husband's consent are illegal. Tamae eventually loses her child by accident, and she returns to the unknowing Kisuke, helping him in his flourishing business as before. During the next Winter, she falls ill with tuberculosis and finally dies. It is the year 1925. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Excess_Male"title="An Excess Male">
"An Excess Male" is set in a near-future China ruled under authoritarian communism. There is an ongoing war between the People's Liberation Party and the Chinese Communist Party, and due to China's earlier One-Child Policy, female citizens are scarce and in high demand. They are often matched or auctioned off for a dowry, and polyamory has been sanctioned by the State. Wei-guo, A 44-year-old Chinese man who runs a training centre, is aided by his two fathers in the pursuit of a suitable female partner. They meet the enigmatic Wu Family for dinner, a peculiar group consisting of Hanh (a closeted gay man and the family patriarch), his brother Xiong-Xin (an autistic obese man who insists on being called "XX"), and May-Ling, the 22-year-old matriarch, who has an infant toddler named "BeiBei". Wei-guo immediately feels a connection with May-Ling, but he is frustrated when, after a planned date, May-Ling brings the disobedient, badly-behaved BeiBei with her, but he feigns support and May-Ling forms an even stronger liking to him. She harbours secrets of the two brothers who married her: Hanh is "Willfully Sterile" and will be reeducated and sterilized if discovered to be gay, as homosexuality and asexuality are viewed with disdain by the State; XX is a "Lost Boy" (neurodiverse) and will be branded mentally ill and institutionalized if this is discovered, despite his successful career and computer programming skills. May-Ling is unhappy in this relationship, finding scheduled sex with XX unpleasant and awkward, and disappointed that Hanh never wants to touch her. She also worries privately that BeiBei might suffer from ADHD and that the child might be sterilized as part of the State's eugenics standards. May-Ling grew up from infancy to be married off for a dowry to the benefit of her parents, who were both gambling addicts, something that she recalls painfully after playing a romantic virtual reality game with XX. Hanh has a tenuous relationship with professional marriage broker Hero, a paunchy, overtly effeminate man who, knowing Hahn's secret sexuality, pushes Wei-guo to marry into the Wu Family. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ink_Black_Heart"title="The Ink Black Heart">
After Strike and Robin visit the Ritz for Robin's 30th birthday, Strike attempts to kiss Robin; she evades the kiss. Feeling rebuffed, Strike starts a relationship with Madeline, an acquaintance of his ex-fiancée Charlotte, a relationship he keeps secret from Robin.Edie Ledwell, an animator who co-created the successful cartoon "The Ink Black Heart" on YouTube and which is now being adapted into a film on Netflix, visits the agency. Edie asks Robin to investigate the identity of Anomie, an online figure who co-created "Drek's Game", an online game based on the cartoon, and started harassing Edie after she criticised the game. Robin refers Edie to another agency with more cybercrime experience. Within the game, two moderators appear to have a dossier of proof that Anomie and Edie are the same. They share this with Josh Blay, the other co-creator of "The Ink Black Heart" and Edie's ex-boyfriend. Soon afterwards, Edie and Josh are tasered and stabbed while meeting in Highgate Cemetery, the cartoon's setting. Edie dies while Josh is paralysed.The agency is hired by a film producer seeking to adapt "The Ink Black Heart" to investigate Anomie's identity. They investigate various individuals associated with the cartoon and the North Grove Art Collective. Much of the investigation takes place online with the detectives investigating Anomie's abuse and another figure, The Pen of Justice, who criticised the cartoon for being racist, ableist and transphobic. They also investigate "Drek's Game", where Anomie openly confesses to the murder, something treated as a joke by the other moderators, including its co-creator Morehouse. Two moderators appear to be associated with the Halvening, the far-right group that compiled the dossier with fake proof and the police suspect committed the murder. Robin accesses the game and becomes an active player. Robin and Strike attempt to eliminate suspects by carrying out surveillance and examining who is otherwise engaged while Anomie is active in the game. They also receive phone calls telling them to exhume Edie's grave and open letters buried with her. In the game, Paperwhite, another moderator, and Morehouse appear to have a relationship, with Paperwhite sending a racy picture to Morehouse and other moderators by accident.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_To_Dive"title="Waiting To Dive">
Carly, a nine-year-old British Columbian girl, adores swimming and diving, spends summers with her family at a cabin on the Gulf Islands, and she's also a member of Dolphins Diving Club, a girls' club at the local town swimming pool. One day, Carly is given permission to invite her best friend, a girl named Montana, to stay at the family cabin. Carly, who is often at odds with her bickering siblings, feels a strong bond with Montana that the girls both share over swimming. They play on the beach together, and they share discussions over things such as boys, friendships, school and family. During a dive from a high rock, Montana hits her head on an unexpected log and is submerged in water. When Montana breaks her spine and faces a life of rehabilitation and potential paralysis, Carly is angry and confused and struggles with her feelings of guilt. The book also explores her relationship with her step-father and two older step-siblings, in juxtaposition with the earlier death of her biological father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unbalancing"title="The Unbalancing">
The novel is set in Lemberg's secondary world "Birdverse", about a thousand years prior to the events of "The Four Profound Weaves", on the archipelago Gelle-Geu, and alternates its viewpoint between the two primary characters, Erígra Lilún and Ranra Kekeri. At the start of the novel, the current Starkeeper of the Star of the Tides, a star made up of magical deepnames that resides beneath the waves off the shore of Gelle-Geu, is dying. The Star, also known as the Unquiet Sleeper and the Sputtering Star, has always been fretful and possibly the cause of earthquakes on the islands. Erígra Lilún is autistic and an ichidi, or non-binary person, who has yet to discover their ichidi variation, which is explored throughout the novel. They write poetry, tend an old quince grove, and prefer a quiet life, but the ghost of their ancestor, Semberí, the first Starkeeper of the Star of the Tides, pressures them to connect to the Star and become the next Starkeeper. Semberí tells them the story of the Birdcoming, when the goddess Bird came from beyond the sky and brought the twelve Stars to the world, dancing in the sky above the great Burri desert until the Stars fell from her tail to the first Starkeepers waiting below. Lilún does not wish to become Starkeeper and resists Semberí's pressure so that when the current Starkeeper passes, another is chosen as the new Keeper, Ranra Kekeri. Lilún attends the ascension party for the new Starkeeper and meets Ranra for the first time, a woman with a much bolder personality than Lilún, and who captivates them from their first meeting. Lilún and Ranra discuss the increasingly unstable nature of the Star and the growing hazard the situation presents to the islands, but have differing opinions of how it should be handled. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Babysitters_Coven"title="The Babysitters Coven">
Esme Pearl is a nonconformist and suburban Kansas teenager who heads a babysitting club to avoid the prospect of obtaining a paid job, which she finds "gross", and also to earn money to pay back a variety of people for various incidents, including the destruction of a tree. Esme's mother, who lives in a long-term care facility, is mentally ill. This leads to concern that Esme herself might suffer from the same issues when strange occurrences happen around her, such as a drink spilling on a "chauvinist" in the school cafeteria and a bully being harmed in gym class. Esme is surprised when Cassandra Heaven, who is physically attractive, a rebel and a grungy dresser, shows interest in joining the club. While Esme's best friend is Janis, an awkward girl who owns a pit bull, Cassandra is much more sure of herself and confident, and Esme soon discovers that the newcomer is involved with aspects of the supernatural, having received a note telling her to seek out the babysitting club for help. Brian, the school's football coach, reveals to the girls that a dark, demonic force is threatening innocent people in Esme's town, and with white magic, the girls hope to stop it before anybody is harmed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_Biblical_Womanhood"title="The Making of Biblical Womanhood">
The central argument of the book is that "Patriarchy may be a part of Christian history, but that doesn’t make it Christian."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garlic_and_Sapphires"title="Garlic and Sapphires">
"Garlic and Sapphires" recounts Reichl's 1993 move from the "Los Angeles Times", where she was a restaurant critic and editor, to become head restaurant critic of "The New York Times". Seated next to a waitress on the flight to New York, Reichl learns that the city's restaurants have been on the lookout for her in her newly powerful role and she finds that she receives special treatment as a consequence. In order to visit restaurants without being recognized, she enlists Claudia, an acting teacher and friend of Reichl's late mother, to help her devise disguises. Reichl takes on a series of different personas, which allows her different perspectives on specific restaurants as well as her own personality as she steps into someone else's shoes. "Times" Living section secretary Carol Shaw often accompanies her on her outings and the book also follows the development of their friendship. They visit high-end restaurants like Rocco DiSpirito's Union Pacific as well as less recognized cuisine, exploring the Chinese food of Flushing, Queens. These experiences are interspersed with recipes and reprints of Reichl's reviews for the "Times". The book concludes with Shaw's death and Reichl's departure from the "Times" to become the editor-in-chief role at "Gourmet" magazine in 1999, ending her days as a restaurant critic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Six_Dead_Men"title="The Six Dead Men">
Six men agree a pact to meet in five years time and share whatever fortunes they have made. As the date approaches, however, they begin to be killed off.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruly_Equality"title="Unruly Equality">
"Unruly Equality" focuses on anarchist activity in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, the period between anarchism's classical era (1880s–1920s) and the contemporary resurgence of anarchist currents. While American anarchism is usually portrayed as having little continuity from the beginning to the end of the 20th century, Cornell argues that anarchism in the midcentury, postwar period both bridged and influenced what would become contemporary anarchism as activism shifted from syndicalism and class struggle to critical analysis, affinity group action, and gradualism. This midcentury anarchism covers bohemian anarchism in the 1940s, which focused on personal liberty and social liberation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Death's_Blue-Eyed_Girls"title="Mister Death's Blue-Eyed Girls">
Nora Cunningham is a rather homely, taller-than-average 16-year-old girl in the fictional suburb of Elmgrove, Maryland in the 1950s. Her main concerns surround friendship, her plans post-high school, and her hope of finding a boyfriend taller than she is who will love her for her personality. All of this changes when Nora and her friends are on an outing (a party in the park), and discover that the corpses of two girls not much younger than they are have been found shot and killed by an unknown murderer. The neighbours and police are quick to blame Buddy Novak, the local bad boy and teen rebel, although Nora has a gut feeling that Buddy is innocent. This is conveyed to readers with brief snippets of the point-of-view of the murderer himself, who is an unnamed pervert and psychopath never revealed as guilty to the characters. Unidentified, he remains a background force in the book, while Nora finds herself slipping away from her friends, who gradually grow bored of the murders and can't understand why Nora is so fixated on them. Nora questions her Catholic faith and cannot fathom why God would let such a murder happen. She has vivid fantasies and dreams in which she escapes into a frozen bubble of 1950s nostalgia, complete with neon, diners and soda fountains. Here, she can still see the murdered girls. Nora also begins falling in love with Buddy, who plans to leave Elmgrove. The book ends ambiguously, with the killer able to remain unidentified but also not at large, and Nora growing to accept that she alone cannot fix the murders, or be responsible for them herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Continents"title="Stolen Continents">
"Stolen Continents" covers the period 1492 to 1990 and documents five examples of the colonial theft of land from Maya, Inca, Aztec, Cherokee, and Iroquois people. Wright breaks each example into three stages: initial contact, violent struggles, and modern resistance. The book uses contemporary accounts from native peoples.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grizzly_(novel)"title="The Grizzly (novel)">
David, a teenage boy, lives with his mother, Jeanne, but his father, Mark, is estranged. David often has nightmares about Mark, who was always harsh to him when he was younger; Jeanne threw Mark out after years of him pushing David into frightening activities, although now that David is older, Mark wants to get to know his son better. David dreads this but grudgingly accepts the offer of a camping trip in the wilderness with Mark. Mark is shown to be a very tough, aloof, and conservative man who thinks little of David's intellect or resilience and would prefer his son to be tough, something that leads to tension straight away. While outside, Mark is mauled and injured by a female grizzly bear, and he shoots the bear after David refuses to. Mark is surprised when David expresses knowledge of things such as treating his wounds, and the father and son gradually become closer. They also observe how much like their own family, the other bears in the woods, are and realize how childish their fighting is. David is nearly drowned while fishing for food, and Mark is frightened by this. Finally, it is revealed that Mark lost a brother to a drowning accident in his childhood, which has haunted him ever since and made him feel weak for not being able to save the deceased sibling. He and David can reach a telephone and call Jeanne, promising that one day they will take her to the wilderness with them so she can see its splendor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danilov,_the_Violist"title="Danilov, the Violist">
Beyond the human world, there exists a demon world, commonly referred to in the novel as "The Nine Circles" (although they have very little in common with Dante's Nine Circles of Hell). The circles are organized further into chanceries. The demons have access to knowledge about the entire universe, which they study in great detail, and to magic, and loves to both imitate the human world(which they call "That World") and to cause troubles for the humans.In 1970s Moscow, Vladimir Alekseyevich Danilov is a violist for a prestigious orchestra, living in Ostankino. On the outside, he seems to be an ordinary, mild-mannered man. Only one person, the Unknown Narrator, knows that Danilov is secretly a half-demon with fantastic abilities such as flight, shapeshifting, and a supernatural sensitivity to the feelings and desires of humans. Danilov was forced out of Hell for not desiring to work as a proper demon(he was too kind to hate humanity and thus purposely sabotaged his work). He was given instructions to cause mischief and misfortune for humans on Earth, and to never speak to his demon father, who was arrested for committing crimes such as being a Voltairian. However, he prefers instead to help people and devote himself to the viola.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_Little_Girl_in_the_World_(novel)"title="The Best Little Girl in the World (novel)">
Francesca Dietrich is a middle-class American teenager, aspiring ballerina, and a girl who suffers from anorexia nervosa. She obsesses over a fantasy variant of herself, insisting on being called by the name "Kessa" and worrying over the demands of her controlling, strict ballet teacher. Fixated with weight loss and treated like a young child by her family, Kessa retreats further and further into her mental illness, leading her parents to finally recognize it months later, after which they send her to a male therapist. Kessa develops romantic feelings for the therapist, which would cross ethical boundaries if acted upon, and she also deals with the death of a friend in the hospital. As she gradually recovers, various ideas for what caused the eating disorder are explored at length: Kessa detests her emerging womanhood and puberty as it affects her proportions, including her breasts, waist and buttocks. She feels a strong sense of rivalry with her siblings and her neurotic mother and father. She also surrounds herself with controlling people, such as her parents and teacher, with her eating disorder being the one outlet where she gets to make the rules. Kessa goes by "Francesca" again and begins eating small portions of food, hoping to be able to overcome her illness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Anthropocene"title="Capital in the Anthropocene">
Saito argues that while sustainable growth has become a central organizing principle in global responses to climate change, the expectation of perpetual growth has only exacerbated the climate crisis. He is particularly critical of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), describing them as "the new opium of the masses" in regards to what he believes is the impossibility for the goals to be achieved under a capitalist system. Instead, Saito advocates for degrowth, which he conceives as the slowing of economic activity through the democratic reform of labor and production. In practical terms, Saito's conception of degrowth involves the end of mass production and mass consumption, decarbonization through shorter working hours, and the prioritization of essential labor such as caregiving. The author argues that capitalism creates artificial scarcity by pursuing profit based on commodity value rather than the usefulness of what is produced, citing the privatization of the commons for purposes of capital accumulation as an example. Saito argues that by returning the commons to a system of social ownership, it is possible to restore abundance and focus on economic activities that are essential for human life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Architecture"title="The Final Architecture">
## Premise.The Architects are moon-sized creatures who destroy inhabited planets, including Earth. They will not attack planets with ruins from the mysterious Originator civilization. Only the Essiel, a species of aliens, know how to move Originator artifacts without destroying this protective effect. Many human colony planets vote to join the Essiel Hegemony in exchange for protection against the Architects.Humans invent Intermediaries, a modified form of human that can fight Architects. Intermediary Idris Telemmier helps kill an Architect at Berlenhof, turning the tide of the conflict decades after the destruction of Earth. Later, he and other Intermediaries make contact with an Architect, which seems to notice humanity for the first time. After this, all of the Architects mysteriously disappear.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crow_Garden"title="The Crow Garden">
"The Crow Garden" is narrated by Nathaniel Kerner, a young alienist in Victorian England. In 1856 he travels from London to Yorkshire to take up a position as a "mad doctor" at a lunatic asylum at Crakethorne Manor. The facility is run by Doctor Algernon Chettle, a phrenologist who believes that the shape of a person's skull determines their mental stability. Kerner, on the other hand, subscribes to a new approach of talking and listening to the mentally disturbed.Kerner is assigned Mrs Harleston, a patient from London committed to the asylum by her husband. He demands that she be cured of her hysteria and delusions so she can be returned to him as his faithful wife. Mrs Harleston is beautiful and demure, and Kerner is immediately drawn to her. He tries talking to her but cannot get her to open up. He calls on the help of a mesmerist in the hope of breaking through her defences, but all it does is to awaken dormant abilities in her. She discovers that she herself can mesmerise people, and changes from being quiet and reserved to dominant and manipulative. By now Kerner in infatuated with her and quickly falls under her spell. Using her new-found abilities, Mrs Harleston escapes Crakethorne.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_a_Red_Station,_Drifting"title="On a Red Station, Drifting">
Lê Thi Linh is a magistrate of the Dai Viet Empire who is forced to flee her planet after criticizing the Emperor’s wartime policies. At the same time, rebel groups seize control of her planet and kill most of her subordinates. Linh seeks refuge with her distant relatives on Prosper Station. Prosper is controlled by an artificial intelligence called the Honoured Ancestress. Lê Thi Quyen, Linh’s cousin by marriage, manages the day-to-day operations of Prosper while her husband is away at war. Quyen and Linh immediately fall into conflict.Quyen’s brother-in-law Huu Hieu sells his mem-implants, which are copies of their ancestors’ consciousnesses. Meanwhile, the Honoured Ancestress experiences increasingly severe technical problems. Hieu and Linh become close. Hieu plans use the money from the sale of the implants to leave Prosper and marry his lover on a different station. Linh is upset knowing that she will never be able to leave. A visiting cousin, Lady Oahn, provides schematics for the repair of the Honoured Ancestress. In an effort to hurt Quyen, Linh writes an unflattering poem at a banquet honoring Oanh. In doing so, she reveals that Hieu is trying to leave Prosper. Hieu attempts suicide out of shame, but Linh rescues him. Quyen is able to repair the Honoured Ancestress, restoring her functionality at the expense of erasing many of her memories.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enemy_Within_(Mkhabela_book)"title="The Enemy Within (Mkhabela book)">
The book starts with an introductory account of how the ANC dealt with one of the first serious incidents of corruption the party had to deal with following its assent to power; the expulsion of Bantu Holomisa from the ANC after requesting that the former Transkei Prime Minister and ANC Minister for Public Enterprises, Stella Sigcau be investigated for corruption.Mkhabela focuses on the ANC's "new cadre" policy wherein loyal party members were deployed in important positions in government and state owned enterprises; what the long-term impact of this policy was and how it greatly contributed to the growth of corruption within the party. Mkhabela does this by detailing a number of well publicised ANC corruption scandals that occurred during the presidencies of Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma, and Cyril Ramaphosa. These scandals include the Tony Yengeni controversy, the disbandment of the Scorpions, the Gupta family, Jackie Selebi, and corruption within the Zuma administration generally.In the book Mkhabela argues that by tolerating corrupt practices and shielding ANC members accused of corruption from prosecution or accountability the party allowed corruption to become entrenched in the party and, by extension, in the South African government. Mkhabela also points out how, paradoxically, the presidency of Jacob Zuma was the most vocal about fighting corruption within the ANC even though it was also regarded as the most corrupt. The book ends with asking if South Africa will be able to deal with corruption before it destroys the country.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapvona"title="Lapvona">
In Lapvona, a corrupt medieval fiefdom, deformed 13 year-old Marek lives with his cruel shepherd father Jude and was nursed from birth by the village witch. When Marek commits a crime, the cruel lord Villiam demands that Jude give Marek to him as reparations, and Marek goes to live in his castle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ever_After_(novel)"title="Ever After (novel)">
Academic Bill Unwin sits in his college room, recovering from his suicide attempt and thinking back over his life. Starting with his childhood in Paris where his aloof father successfully committed suicide, and his mother had a relationship with an American, Sam who made a fortune in plastics and then became his stepfather. The narration them moves to 1950's Soho where Bill marries Ruth, an actress who later dies of lung cancer. Throughout his life Bill never reconciled himself to his successful stepfather, who attempts and fails to build bridges with Bill. The other strand is the private notebooks of a Victorian predecessor Matthew Pearce which are entrusted to Bill. They notebooks show the breakdown of his relationship with his wife and father-in-law over his unshakeable belief in Darwinism, and Bill tries to square them with his own identity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobbin_Up"title="Bobbin Up">
The book is divided into one- or two-chapter vignettes. The book finishes on an open-ended note, stating that even if they get nowhere, at least they stayed together. They are "in for a long wait".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unclay"title="Unclay">
Death arrives to the obscure village of Little Dodder, Dorsetshire carrying a parchment of orders he must deliver with the names of two local mortals and the word "unclay" on it. After losing this important document, he's obliged to stay in Little Dodder until he finds it. Mr. John Death, as the villagers call him, grows interested in human life and decides to take a vacation from his reaping. All the old sins such as lust, avarice, and greed, as well as loving kindness abound in the village.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobody_Move_(novel)"title="Nobody Move (novel)">
"Nobody Move" is told from a third-person limited omniscient point-of-view and presented in four parts.The story unfolds in rural and urban settings north of Sacramento, California.Firearms abound in the novel, among them, "a huge Colt revolver", "a Winchester Pistol-grip shotgun loaded with "00 Buck", and a ".356 Magnum" handgun. Automobiles, including late model Cadillac Broughams, a Jaguar, a 1951 Coupe de Ville and a Ford pickup also appear as plot devices.Jimmy Luntz (referred to as Luntz by the narrator, and as Jimmy in the dialogue exchanges) is a gambling addict and an inept petty criminal. Luntz is prone to unexpected "lucky feelings", premonitions that routinely fail to materialize. When the story opens "in media res", he is employed as a singer in a no-talent Barbershop chorus.In debt for a few thousand dollars to the gang leader Juarez, Luntz is targeted for assassination by henchman Ernest "Gambol" Gambolini. Luntz foils the hit-man, shooting and wounding him in the leg. Gambol and Juarez, both sociopaths, swear revenge. Luntz, now on the run, has a chance encounter with the strikingly beautiful Anita Desilvera, a high-functioning alcoholic and wife to the local county prosecutor, Henry "Hank" Desilvera. Hank has conspired with corrupt Judge Tanneau to embezzle $2.3 million. They have framed-up Anita for the crime. Facing six years in prison, she is determined to escape punishment and claim the money for herself. The physically unattractive Luntz and sexually piquant Anita form an uneasy alliance. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_in_the_Lonesome_October"title="Night in the Lonesome October">
Ed Logan is a 20-year-old student at Wilmington University. His girlfriend has dumped him, and feeling dejected he goes on a late-night walk to a doughnut shop. As the long October night drags on, he finds his odyssey disturbed by numerous odd encounters with street violence, sexual predation, and homelessness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammira_Raso"title="Hammira Raso">
The poet describes his patron Chandrabhan as a descendant of Prithviraj Chauhan, and as the ruler of a prosperous kingdom. The poem begins with a description of the Agnikula legend, according to which the four major Rajput clans including the Chauhans, emerged from a Vedic ritual fire pit. After a Kshatriya king kills Parashurama's father, Parashurama slaughters the Kshatriyas, leaving no one to protect the sages and priests from demons (asuras / rakshasas). Seven sages - Gautama, Lomaharśana, Bhṛgu, Atteriya, Bharadvāj, Garg and Vasiṣṭha - perform a fire ritual while chanting Sama Veda hymns. Then the four Rajput clans unexpectedly emerge from the fire pit.Chauhan, the progenitor of Hamir's clan, carries four weapons (sword, dagger, knife and bow) in his four arms. Shakti, the lion-riding goddess carries ten weapons in her ten arms, blesses him. Brahma instructs Chauhan to overcome all dangers for protecting his religion. The hero fights demons and seeks blessings of the goddess, who becomes his clan goddess ("kuladevi") and is named "Ashapuri".Many generations after Chauhan, a ruler named "Raja" (or "Rao") Jeyat Chohan is born in the village of Barbagao. During a hunting expedition in a forest, he pursues a white boar, and encounters the sage ("rishi") Padam. The sage blesses him, and asks him to establish a hill fort and worship Shiva there. The sage describes the particular hill area as full of tantric power. After returning to his court, the king starts building a fortified town, which is named Ranthambor. The Bhils, who inhabit the mountain, acknowledge his power and recognize him as their sovereign. During the construction of the fort, the wall of the portico keep falling even after being raised several times. The king then decides to sacrifice himself, and asks the foundation to be built on his body. Two of his loyal Bhil associates - Ravana and Basava - declare that the fort actually belonged to the Bhils, and the king is merely its nominal owner. They offer to be sacrificed in place of the king, asking the king to take care of Ravana's son Bhoj. Accordingly, the two Bhils are beheaded and their heads are used as foundation stones. The wall built on this foundation does not collapse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kōkyū_Shōsetsu"title="Kōkyū Shōsetsu">
Set in a fictional country reminiscent of early 17th century China, the novel depicts the bizarre fate of Ginga, a young girl who volunteers to be a candidate for the new emperor's queen.In the first year of the Kai calendar, candidates for the position of queen were gathered from all over the country to the inner palace of the new emperor of the Sokan Empire, who succeeded his predecessor who had died during sex.Ginga, a 14-year-old country girl from Oda Prefecture, thought the inner palace would be a fun place to study and have three meals and a nap, so she volunteered to be a candidate for queen. She was successful in her bid to enter the palace.Fearless Ginga achieved excellent grades in eccentric lectures at the women's university, and succeeded in obtaining the throne of the lawful wife.However, at the most inopportune moment, a rebel uprising broke out, and Ginga was forced to organize an inner palace unit to fight the rebels.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokkō_(novel)"title="Bokkō (novel)">
The story takes place in China during the Warring States period. Liang is a small province between the great powers Zhao and Yan, and was about to be invaded by Zhao. The King of Liang asks the Mohists for help as a last resort. The Mohists were a unique group of thinkers who preached "non-war and love" and went wherever to help defend castles and towns if required.The people of Liang had hoped that the Mohists would send a group of excellent military strategists to defeat Zhao, but only one strategist, named Kakuri, appeared. The Mohist organization founded by Mozi was then under the third generation of leadership, and corrupt. Under such circumstances, Kakuri, loyal to the Mohists' ideology, defied the leader's orders and rode alone to defend the walled city, Liangcheng. None of the lord's clans, chief vassals, or the peasants accommodated in the citadel have any experience in warfare, nor does he have the cooperation of the Mohists. Against this backdrop, Kakuri leads thousands of villagers with amazing strategy and skill to defeat the large army of Zhao, consisting of over ten thousand professional soldiers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/¡Ándale,_Prieta!"title="¡Ándale, Prieta!">
In the book, Ramírez tells about growing up in El Paso, Texas. The stars of the book are the women in her life: her great grandmother Lupe, her mother Leticia, and most importantly, her grandmother Ita.In the second half of the book she also explores her strained relationship with her absent father.The title reclaims the sometimes derogatory term , which her grandmother used as a nickname for the author, but which is often used in Spanish as a slur to describe people with dark skin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Sky_(novel)"title="Big Sky (novel)">
Jackson has separated from his partner Julia and now lives in a village on the coast of North Yorkshire with the occasional company of his teenage son Nathan and an ageing Labrador Dido. He is still a private investigator, mostly his clients asking him to investigate suspicious spouses. He then has a chance rescue of a man on a clifftop. Jackson is then involved in a plot involving human trafficking and murder. With several of the characters from previous outings making appearances in the new novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beautiful_Country_(book)"title="Beautiful Country (book)">
In "Beautiful Country", Wang writes about the hardships that she and her parents faced upon their arrival to the United States in 1994, as undocumented immigrants from China. She discusses the numerous challenges she faced of growing up in poverty, and how she emerged from all of it with her dreams intact.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sai_Ying_Pun_(novel)"title="Sai Ying Pun (novel)">
Ah Wang is a railway security guard stationed at the newly built Sai Ying Pun Station. Shortly after the station's opening, Wang is attacked and knocked out by a mysterious beast while he is on patrol. He wakes up in a hospital, with a man named Ga Yin warns him not to return to the Station in the meantime. However, two weeks later, Wang is forced to take the Island line and mysteriously blacks out on the train. He regains consciousness and finds himself trapped on the train with four others. The train ultimately stops at the Sai Ying Pun Station after a ridiculously lengthy ride. The group tries to leave the station, only to be attacked at the exit with Ga Leung killed and the gang is forced to split up. Wang later meets his colleague, Uncle Tat, in the dungeons and Tat informs him about the subterrane, a group of living creatures inhabited underground and would "harvest" skins of humans to hijack their bodies. Before Tat can finish, they are attacked by the subterranes again and Wang is knocked out again in the chase.Wang wakes up and finds himself being saved by a young girl called "April". "April" admits that she is a subterrane who wants both races to live separately and peacefully. She was one of the representatives who tried to establish a diplomatic relationship with the United Kingdom and Soviet Union and the two races built the Whitty Station as a connection hub, before a war that caused the subsidence of Whitty Station broke out. "April" and her human friend April were both severely injured in the battle and April sacrificed herself by allowing "April" to harvest and live in her body. Wang decides to trust "April". The duo thus head to the lair of the subterranes and try to save Pak Gor and Tracy, but Pak Gor is already transformed and Wang puts him out of mercy.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Years_(Ernaux_novel)"title="The Years (Ernaux novel)">
In the book, Ernaux writes about herself in the third person ("elle", or """she" in English) for the first time, providing a vivid look at French society just after the Second World War until the early 2000s. It is the moving social story of a woman and of the evolving society she lived in. With this feature of book, Edmund White described it as a "collective autobiography", in his review for "The New York Times".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Japanese_Lover"title="The Japanese Lover">
The story is set in 2015 and first introduces us to octogenarian Alma Belasco who is moving in the Lark House, a retirement home for quirky individuals in San Francisco. Here we are also introduced to Lark House's caretaker Irina Bazili, a young Moldovan immigrant who seems to have some intense trauma of her own. Because of her nature, Irina is hired by Alma as her personal secretary. As the story progresses we are introduced to a secret admirer of Alma, through a series of letters, notes and gifts. Accompanying Alma on recovering these clues are Irina and Alma's grandson Seth who's in love with Irina. As Irina becomes closer to Seth and Alma, she discovers the photo of a man in Alma's room, who Alma introduces as Ichimei Fukuda, a Japanese-American whom Alma met in 1939. Alma tells Irina the story of how when Germany was invading Poland in 1939, she was sent as a girl of 8 to San Francisco to her wealthy uncle and aunt to escape the holocaust. Throughout the book we are taken through various momentous events of the 2nd half of the 20th century and also Alma's own experiences. We learn how Alma befriended Ichimei and how they were separated due to the Pearl Harbor attacks, as all Japanese-Americans being sent to Internment zones. We also see how they maintained their secret romance for decades through the means of letter. At one point Alma, got married to Nathaniel, a childhood friend of both hers and Ichimei while still continuing her romance with Fukuda. Irina despite trying to avoid any romance, becomes closer to Seth and tells her about her abusive relationship with her step-father. As the young pair grows closer, Alma grows frailer and frailer, finally passing away one day. The story closes with one more letter between the 2 fated lovers who were never meant to be.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happening_(novel)"title="Happening (novel)">
Set in 1963, four years before the legalization of oral contraception in France and twelve years before the Veil Act, the autobiographical narrative describes the troubles a young student faces when seeking out an illegal abortion.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Midst_of_Winter"title="In the Midst of Winter">
The story starts when during the biggest snowstorm Brooklyn has ever seen, a lonely University professor Richard Bowmaster, accidentally hitting the car of an undocumented immigrants from Guatemala - Evelyn Ortega. This accident, which at first appeared to be a minor inconvenience, takes a major turn when Evelyn shows up at Richard's place seeking help. Not knowing what to do, Richard recruits his tenant, a fellow academic from Chile - Lucia Maraz - in order to solve Evelyn's plight. As the story progresses, it is discovered that Evelyn found the corpse of a dead woman in the boot of her boss's car. So now Lucia, Richard and Evelyn embark on a road trip which slowly unveils each of their pasts. Evelyn's trauma of coming from a country where she survived the murder of her brothers in gang violence and sexual assault, Lucia's struggling to return to Chile, which she has prior left due to its risks. In the meantime, Richard struggling to find love and relationships as a result of trauma from personal losses during his marriage to a Brazilian woman from his time in Rio de Janeiro, which he blames on himself. As the book progresses, Evelyn gradually overcomes her trauma, while Richard and Lucia bond together. The book ends with Richard quoting the line from Albert Camus poem, "Invincible Summer, "In the midst of winter, I finally found there was within me an invincible summer"."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Architect's_Apprentice"title="The Architect's Apprentice">
The novel has an episodic structure. At the age of 12, Jahan flees his abusive stepfather by boat. He arrives in Istanbul with a young white elephant, a gift for the sultan from India. As part of the rogue captain's plan to steal from the palace, Jahan is led to pose as its mahout (keeper). Jahan looks after the elephant, whom he names Chota ("little"), at the palace menagerie. Growing up, he befriends Mihrimah, the sultan's daughter. He falls in love with her, but has no prospect of marrying her due to his lower social status. He becomes an apprentice to Sinan, alongside three others: Davud, Nikola and Yusuf. He assists with a variety of projects, including the construction of mosques, bridges, waterworks and an observatory, and the restoration of the Hagia Sophia. The book spans the reigns of Suleiman I, Selim II and Murad III. Other historical figures featured include Lütfi Pasha, Rüstem Pasha and Takiyüddin, and Jahan visits Michelangelo during a trip to Rome.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/These_Waves_of_Girls"title="These Waves of Girls">
The plot of "These Waves of Girls" is described by Andreas Kitzmann as concerning "a young girl struggling with her sexual identity", while Raine Koskimaa describes the work as "a confessional autobiography about a girl coming to terms with her lesbian identity".The "waves" of girls are "supposed to be about different moments in girlhood, different kinds of girls, different ways of discursively producing the girl. There are so many layers of stories of girls as victims, as victimisers, as cruel, as strong, as just so many different things at once", Fisher explained in a television interview in 2001.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hundred_Years'_War_on_Palestine"title="The Hundred Years' War on Palestine">
## Introduction.The book begins with an examination of correspondence from 1889 between Yusuf Diya ad-Din Pasha al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem and relative of the author, and Theodor Herzl, father of modern political Zionism. In his response, Herzl ignores the main concerns raised by the Pasha and in reference to the indigenous, non-Jewish population of Palestine, Herzl quips: "But who would think of sending them away?" The author sees this early exchange as revelatory that Zionism was an essentially colonial project from its inception, and that the Palestinians were never taken seriously and only rarely were their opinions consulted in matters that would determine their future.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Spread"title="We Spread">
Penny is an elderly woman living on her own in an apartment. She once shared it with her partner, a professional painter, but when he died, she elected to remain to hold onto her memories of him. Penny was a painter herself and dabbled in surrealism, but never showed her work. She is determined to manage on her own and rejects all offers of help. One day she falls and hurts herself, and her landlord takes her to an assisted living facility called Six Cedars. When she questions his decision to take her there, he tells her that she and her partner had decided that Six Cedars would be where they would go when they needed help. Penny has no memory of that arrangement.Six Cedars is an 1843 mansion set in a forest, but it has only three other elderly patients and two helpers. Initially Penny resists being uprooted, but soon is surprised at how quickly she starts to enjoy her new home. She eats well, sleeps better than she has in years, and enjoys the company of the other residents. But after a while it all seems too good to be true and Penny begins to observe strange things. The passage of time becomes distorted and her memories start to fragment. No one is allowed to go outside the house, and its corridors seem to change shape from time to time. Even her fellow companions appear to change, and Penny begins to suspect that the facility's director has sinister motives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unknown_(hypertext_novel)"title="The Unknown (hypertext novel)">
The Unknown is a sprawling hypertext novel about a fictional book tour the four authors are on to promote the "Unknown Anthology". Kristin Krauth describes it as "a satire on publishing and promotion as well as a tough and funny look at the nature of creating hypertext". Brad Quinn describes the plot as "an adventure novel about a book tour for a book that doesn't exist, and it has all kinds of ridiculous behavior, drug abuse and famous people who would probably be shocked and none too happy to find out that they are in the novel."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oppermanns"title="The Oppermanns">
"The Oppermanns" is a family saga that chronicles the fall of a bourgeois German Jewish furniture company under the rise of Nazism.In "time immemorial", Emmanuel Oppermann, a merchant who moves to Berlin, supplies the Prussian Army and starts the Oppermann furniture company. The main characters are his grandson Gustav Oppermann, a writer who is working on a biography of Gotthold Lessing, and his brothers Martin and Edgar. The story takes place between November 1932, when Gustav turns 50 years old, and the late summer of 1933. While the Nazis are quickly establishing their dictatorship, many Germans that do not share their views, as well as some Jews, insist that things will eventually turn around and thus prefer to wait passively or ignore what is happening around them. Edgar, a successful doctor at a Berlin hospital, faces an antisemitic public smear-campaign and is later removed from the hospital by the "Sturmabteilung". Martin, the head of the Oppermann family business, is forced to merge it with an "Aryan" German partner. Meanwhile, Martin's 17-year-old son Berthold is expelled from his soccer club despite his talent for the sport, and in class, he is abused by a Nazi teacher for refusing to express his loyalty to the new regime. Gustav decides to leave Germany and move to Switzerland, but later comes back under a false passport to became an anti-Nazi political activist and to document Nazi crimes. He is arrested and sent to a concentration camp, although he is eventually released.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coroner's_daughter"title="The Coroner's daughter">
The plot of the novel centres on Abigail Lawless, the daughter of a city coroner, as she attempts to discover who is responsible for a murder. The novel is set in 1816 in Dublin. As Abigail seeks to find her killer she moves through Dublin city and its surroundings and visits historic sites such as the Royal Irish Academy, Dunsink Observatory, Charlemont House, and Blessington Street Basin. The novel has both fictional and real historic figures such as James Caulfield, 1st Earl of Charlemont.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrines_of_Gaiety"title="Shrines of Gaiety">
Set in London in the Roaring Twenties, the book centres on the infamous London nightclubs owned by Nellie Coker and her son Niven, the latter having returned from fighting in the Somme in World War I. Their movements are carefully watched by police inspector Frobisher. Librarian and former combat nurse Gwendolen Kelling is approached by an old friend asking her to track down her missing teenage daughters in London. Kelling enlists Frobisher's help, and their hunt leads them to Coker's nightclubs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jews_Don't_Count"title="Jews Don't Count">
In the opening of the book, Baddiel gives several examples of antisemitism being glossed over in various industries, especially the literary and film industries, as well as political antisemitism. Baddiel also describes the racism which is found in football in detail, especially with regard to the use of the term "Yid". Baddiel argues that antisemitism has become a 'second class racism' (p. 11), and he writes about the antisemitism which is manifesting itself as an underrepresentation of ethnic Jews. Baddiel then proceeds to address several arguments for this underrepresentation, such as the belief that Jews are not an oppressed group due to their stereotype of being wealthy. Baddiel also addresses the idea of Jews being white and therefore exempt from racism.Baddiel then discusses the acceptance in the film industry of casting Gentiles as Jewish characters, and the anti-Jewish impressions in which actors can represent Jews, including an abundance of stereotypes. Baddiel also notes the modern tendency for actors to hide their Jewish heritages, which is rarely seen in any other ethnic minority. Baddiel also briefly discusses the subtleties of the word "Jew" as a pejorative, and argues that antisemitism is racism.Baddiel then continues in a semi-autobiographical manner to consider his relationship with Israel as a non-Zionist, and how expectations of a non-Israeli Jew to be a Zionist is a form of antisemitism. He also considers that guilt for the actions of Israel by Western left-wing Jews is in fact a form of internalized racism, fueled by mass media.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dating_The_Era_of_Lord_Ram"title="Dating The Era of Lord Ram">
According to Sage Valmiki, when Lord Ram was born, the sun was in Aries, the moon was in Cancer, Jupiter and the moon were both in Libra, Venus was in Pisces, and Mars was in Capricorn. Additionally, it was the ninth day of the moon's ascending phase in the lunar month of Chaitra. With the use of a powerful piece of software, the two slides on the book's cover show that on January 10, 5114 B.C., these particular astral conditions were present in the sky. This book uses Western scientific progress to demonstrate how old the East is.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fortunes_of_Miss_Follen"title="The Fortunes of Miss Follen">
The story opens with a description of Baden and its curious market. The heroine makes her appearance as a young and delicate market-girl, presiding over a table of dainty laces or needle work, the results of her own toil. She is the daughter of a frugal couple who cultivate a small dairy farm on the hillside. She has a male friend in the schoolmaster also, who later on would be nearer if he could, and who meanwhile with his books and talk feeds her growing culture with music and knowledge of art and of the great world outside the valley. She is an apt scholar. An early and happy love fades into a consuming grief; but an American gentleman and his wife become interested in her sweet face and pure character, and her elevation begins. They teach her English, and then employ her to teach their young daughter, Bessie, the German language. Presently, Colonel Ranney appears, a retired English army officer who wants a governess for his two little daughters, and Christine has got far enough along to prove just the one. The story of her blossoming out in beauty both of person and character as these changes successively come to her, is told very deftly and vividly, and in a style remarkable for its purity and its artistic use of the imagination. She is a sort of Undine, born not indeed of the waves, but of the vine-clad soil, and carrying with her everywhere the freshness and innocence of nature. None of these uplifting stages seem to be at all foreign to her, and after seeing her graceful motions and hearing her sing at her spinning wheel on her mother's porch, we feel that she has a soul within her, however she came by it, that is capable of everything which is attributed to her afterwards. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracul_(novel)"title="Dracul (novel)">
From within Bran Castle, Bram writes in his diary about his childhood days, largely spent bedridden in Dublin, with his siblings, Matilda and Thornley, and nanny, Ellen Crone. The Stoker children become suspicious of Ellen following a series of deaths in nearby towns. After Bram is miraculously healed from his ailments, she suddenly disappears into a bog without a trace. Matilda later departs for Paris to study, and returns after some years to report that she has once again seen Ellen, albeit unaged. They set off to investigate Ellen, eventually revealing her connection to Dracula.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Sir_Massingberd"title="Lost Sir Massingberd">
Sir Massingberd Heath neither feared God nor regarded man. His property was entailed, the next heir being his nephew Marmaduke, whom he tries to murder in order to sell the estates. Marmaduke is befriended by Harvey Gerald and his daughter Lucy, falls in love with Lucy, and finally marries her. Sir Massingberd in his youth secretly married a gipsy, whom he drove mad with his cruelty. She curses him: "May he perish, inch by inch, within reach of aid that shall not come." Sir Massingberd disappears, and all search for him is vain; many months later his bones are found in an old tree, known as the Wolsey Oak. It was supposed that he climbed the tree to look about for poachers, that the rotten wood gave way, and he slipped into the hollow trunk, whence he could not escape. Had he not closed up the public path which skirted the tree, his cries for help must have been heard. With his disappearance and death all goes well with the households on which the blight of his evil spirit had fallen, and the story ends happily.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Shock"title="A Shock">
The book follows a group of loosely connected characters appearing, disappearing, and reappearing around contemporary London. The nine chapters are "The Party", "The Camera", The Sweat", "The Joke", "The Story", "The Flat", "The Pigeon", "The Meeting" and "The Song". It has a number of characters that experience different social issues on different levels; sexuality, racism, drugs, class struggle, troubles finding accommodation in a progressively changing city. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurrish"title="Hurrish">
The scene is laid in County Clare during the Land War. Horatio, or Hurrish O'Brien, the big, kindly, simple farmer, gives poor, pretty Ally a home, and is a father to weak, vain Maurice Brady; but he becomes the victim of fate. His fierce old mother is an ardent patriot. They live in the midst of Fenians, but he will not strike a blow for rebellion. Maurice Brady’s brutish brother Mat, hated by all, shoots at Hurrish from his hiding-place; Hurrish strikes one blow in self-defence, kills him, and is betrayed to the police by Maurice. Hurrish is tried and acquitted, but Maurice murders him in spite of Ally's warnings. Ally, though betrothed to Maurice, loves Hurrish without knowing it. Hurrish, in his devotion to Maurice, acquits him on his death-bed. Ally becomes a nun; Maurice goes to America, where he makes a fortune, but is shunned by his countrymen as an informer and a traitor. Hurrish's memory is cherished in his native village. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_and_His_Dog_(narrative)"title="A Man and His Dog (narrative)">
In "A Man and His Dog" Thomas Mann describes his experiences with his chicken-dog (") mongrel Bauschan (or, in English translations, Bashan) on the banks of the Brunnbach in Munich. In the narrative how the day turns out for the dog is decided in the moment his master leaves his garden. If the master turns left the day is lost for the dog, because he goes to town. But when the master turns right, a walk through nature and the hunting grounds will follow and both march on into a romanticised rural world. The narrative is structured into five chapters:In the first chapter ("He Comes Round the Corner" ["]) the narrator and the chicken-dog are introduced. In the second chapter ("How We Got Bashan" ["]), it is described how the Manns got Bauschan. In the third chapter ("Notes on Bashan's Character and Manner of Life" ["]) the dog's fixation on his master (Thomas Mann) and its behaviour towards fellow dogs is dealt with. In the penultimate chapter a meticulous description of Mann's walking area around his Munich domicile in is presented. The fifth and final chapter ("The Hunting-Ground" [""]) is the longest one: In it a visit to a veterinary clinic and various hunts are described.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravenshoe_(novel)"title="Ravenshoe (novel)">
The "House of Ravenshoe" in Stonington, Ireland, is the scene of this novel; and the principal actors are the members of the noble family of Ravenshoe. The plot, noted for its complexity, has three stages. Denzel Ravenshoe, a Roman Catholic, marries a Protestant wife. They have two sons, Cuthbert and Charles. Cuthbert is brought up as a Catholic and Charles as a Protestant. This is the cause of enmity on the part of Father Mackworth, a dark, sullen man, the priest of the family, who has friendly relations with Cuthbert alone. James Norton, Denzel’s groom, is on intimate terms with his master. He marries Norah, the maid of Lady Ravenshoe. Charles becomes a sunny, lovable man; Cuthbert, a reticent bookworm. They have as playmates William and Ellen, the children of Norah. Two women play an important part in the life of the hero, Charles,—Adelaide, very beautiful in form and figure, with little depth, and lovely Mary Corby, who, cast up by shipwreck, is adopted by Norah. Charles becomes engaged to Adelaide. The plot deepens. Father Mackworth proves that Charles is the true son of Norah and James Norton, the illegitimate brother of Denzel; and William, the groom foster-brother, is real heir of Ravenshoe. To add to the grief of Charles, Adelaide elopes with his cousin Lord Welter. Charles flees to London, tries grooming, and then joins the Hussars. Finally he is found in London by a college friend, Marston, with a raving fever upon him. After recovery, Charles returns to Ravenshoe. Father Mackworth again produces evidence that not James Norton, but Denzel is the illegitimate son, and Charles, after all, is true heir to Ravenshoe. The union of Charles and Mary then takes place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spear_Cuts_Through_Water"title="The Spear Cuts Through Water">
In a frame story, a grandmother (“lola”) tells stories of the Old Country to her grandchild. She tells a story about how the Moon and the Water were in love, and together they created the Inverted Theater. The grandchild visits the Inverted Theater in a dream. They are carrying a spear which is their family heirloom. The moonlit body, a child of the Water and the Moon, performs the following story for the grandchild and other visitors to the Theater.The people of the Old Country suffer under the rule of Moon Emperor Magaam Ossa and his sons, the Three Terrors. The emperor enforces his control over the population with the help of a network of psychic tortoises, who can transmit information instantaneously. Saam Ossa, the First Terror, leads the Red Peacock Brigade. The Red Peacocks are all sons of the First Terror, and they regularly commit war crimes against the population. The emperor keeps the Moon goddess, his empress, imprisoned under the palace. The First Terror’s favorite son Jun is assigned to guard the goddess. With Jun’s help, the Moon goddess kills the emperor and escapes.Commander Uhi Araya works at Tiger Gate. Araya enlists the help of Keema, a one-armed man who works for her. She asks him to deliver a spear to a woman named Shan. Jun and Keema escape Tiger Gate with the goddess and the spear. Araya and the other guards are killed by the First Terror and the Peacocks. Keema and Jun travel with the goddess, who is ancient and close to death, as well as the Defect, a disabled tortoise. Inside the empress’s wagon, Keema finds that one of the emperor’s prized birds has been tied up. He frees the bird, which follows them and assists them for the remainder of their journey. They are pursued by the First Terror.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Heart_Full_of_Headstones"title="A Heart Full of Headstones">
The novel is framed by a prologue and epilogue both titled simply "Now." In these, John Rebus is on trial for a crime he commits at the end of "Then," the main narrative (divided into 8 days), which takes place not long before.In this novel, Rebus, retired since 2007, DI Siobhan Clarke, and DCI Malcolm Fox all pursue their own investigations, though the cases come together around a policeman named Francis Haggard, stationed at Tynecastle in Edinburgh. The three of them frequently exchange information or ask each other for help. Clarke is at first working on the criminal aspect of Haggard's domestic abuse of his wife, which has resulted in their separation; Clarke interviews Haggard and also the wife, Cheryl, and her sister Stephanie Pelham, who has taken Cheryl in. Haggard is threatening to reveal the police corruption at Tynecastle unless the case is dropped. Then Haggard is murdered and Police Scotland sets up a Major Inquiry Team (MIT) which includes both Clarke and Fox. Fox, in his time in Internal Affairs (the "Complaints"), a few years earlier, had wanted badly to convict one Tynecastle cop, Sergeant Alan Fleck, now retired; in Fleck's day, Rebus had helped Fleck, giving him tips and setting up a meeting with the gangster 'Big Ger' Cafferty. Thus Fox's concerns push Rebus to recall how he tried both to fit in and to keep his integrity when dealing with Tynecastle. On the MIT, Fox represents the official concern with the old cases that Haggard, but also Fleck, are bringing up. Fox also represents other interests of Gartcosh, the administrative campus of Police Scotland, including possible links with smuggling of cars for Fleck's dealership and of drugs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_of_the_Strongest_(novel)"title="The Right of the Strongest (novel)">
The story is set in a rugged mountain-rimmed valley of Alabama. It is a story of mountain feuds, and of a modern business scheme that involved buying up the squatters' patches of land that belong by right only to the strongest. John Marshall has a vision of the whole valley in which this group of mountain dwellers live being converted into a reservoir for all-round-the-year usage, for the generation of electric power to run a yet unbuilt city twenty miles away, where two yet unbuilt railroads shall cross to carry away the steel that is yet to be mined and melted and moulded. The valley dwellers resent this invasion of the outer world, and John Marshall, falling in love with Mary Elizabeth, who has dedicated her life to educating these people, finds in her idealism and Puritanism a stubbornness of misunderstanding and harsh judgment htat makes the conflict between love and business a fierce one. He discovers that her father was not a traitor to his people, and that the "bad man" of the book was the real villain. Finally, he gives up the secrets of his fight for modernising this region in order that Mary Elizabeth, by warning her people against him, may convince the native dwellers of her devotion to any cause that is theirs. But he fights on and finally prevails on the last man who holds out to sell hisland. From the others whose titles are defective, he merely takes it. The final chapters of the book are taken up with Mary Elizabeth's pleadings for the rights of the valley dwellers to the homes of their fathers in the face of his implacable vision of civilising the community at whatever cost to the few. There is the final stand of the people against marshall, the battle in which he is desperately wounded, and finally, the temporary triumph of the ideal over the material in Mary Elizabeth's order for the freeing of the "hillites" before the sheriff and his posse reach them. John Marshall lies a very sick man as she puts her hand over his mouth and gives this order, to which, perforce, he subscribes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mountain_Shadow"title="The Mountain Shadow">
Set mostly in modern Bombay, the sequel starts where "Shantaram" ended. It's been two years since the protagonist Lindsay lost two of the people closest to him: Kaderbhai, a mafia boss who died in the Afghan mountains, and Karla, a mysterious, coveted woman who eventually married a Bombay media mogul. Now Lin has to fulfill the last assignment given to him by Kaderbhai—to win the trust of the sage living on the mountain, to save his head in the uncontrollably flaring conflict of the new mafia leaders, but, most importantly, to find love and faith.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Assassins"title="Three Assassins">
Suzuki is just an ordinary man until his wife is murdered. When he discovers the criminal gang responsible, he leaves behind his life as a maths teacher and joins them, looking for a chance to take his revenge. What he doesn't realise is that he's about to get drawn into a web of unusual professional assassins (the titular "Three Assassins"), each with their own agenda.Suzuki must take each of them on, to try to find justice and keep his innocence in a world of killers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somehow,_Crystal"title="Somehow, Crystal">
While her boyfriend Jun'ichi is out of town, college student and part-time model Yuri passes the time in Tokyo by shopping for luxury products, visiting affluent neighborhoods, eating expensive food, and seeking new kinds of entertainment. At a dance club she meets Masataka, to whom she describes her relatively frictionless life as "crystal". Yuri has a sexual encounter with Masataka that she enjoys but finds less satisfying than her experiences with Jun'ichi. When Jun'ichi returns, Yuri learns that he also was unfaithful during his trip, but she reflects on her financial independence and decides that staying with Jun'ichi is the best fit for her crystal lifestyle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ransomware_Hunting_Team"title="The Ransomware Hunting Team">
"The Ransomware Hunting Team" is about a small group of computer experts in the United States and Europe who devote large amounts of their time cracking ransomware. They include Michael Gillespie, Fabian Wosar and Sarah White, all volunteers who do not ask for payment for helping victims of these cyberattacks. Authors Dudley and Golden explain how cybercriminals break into vulnerable computer systems, infect them with viruses that encrypt their data, and then demand money for decryption keys. The book highlights some the prominent ransomware incidents, such as the 2021 Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, and the 2017 infection of Britain's National Health Service systems. But because many ransomware attacks are not made public. there are considerably more occurrences than reported.If ransomware has been properly written, cracking it is normally "impossible". But from time to time the hackers take shortcuts, or make mistakes, and the elite team is able to reverse-engineer the malware and construct decryption keys for the victims to recover their data without having to pay ransoms. The book discloses that the battle between the ransomware developers and the hunters is an undeclared cyberwar. It also explains why the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security in the United States are unable to fully tackle this problem. Bound by rigid structures, these organizations are reluctant to work with outsiders, and derisively refer to Gillespie and company as the "Geek Squad". But after the Colonial Pipeline incident, they have begun to work more closely with the ransomware hunters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Father's_Story"title="A Father's Story">
In July 1991, research chemist Lionel Dahmer was informed by the Milwaukee Police Department that they were investigating a homicide involving his son Jeffrey. Dahmer initially thought Jeffrey was a murder victim, not a murderer. He learned the grisly details of his son's crimes during the trial which he was found to be legally sane and sentenced to life imprisonment in February 1992."A Father's Story" runs chronologically from Jeffrey's birth until his arrest and imprisonment. Dahmer tries to figure out what made his son commit murder, practice necrophilia and cannibalism. He scrutinizes every possible contributing factor to his son's psychosis starting with himself. Dahmer judges himself a poor father because he was emotionally distant towards his son. While reflecting, he "speculates that his own youthful shyness, fascination with bombs and fears of abandonment added up to a monstrous genetic inheritance."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noémi_(novel)"title="Noémi (novel)">
This is a tale of Aquitaine, during the English occupation, in the early fifteenth century. The country was in a state of civil war; and free companies, nominally fighting for French or English, but in reality for their own pockets, mere plunderers and bandits, flourished mightily. The most dreaded freebooter in the valley of the Dordogne was Le Gros Guillem, who from his stronghold at Domme sweeps down upon the farms and hamlets below; till at length the timid peasants, finding a leader in Ogier del' Peyra, a petty sieur of the neighbourhood, rise up against their scourge, destroy his rocky fastness, and put his men to death or flight. Guillem's daughter, Noémi, a madcap beauty, joins her father's band of ruffians; but soon sickens of their deeds, and risks her life to save Ogier from the oubliette, because she loves his son.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Lily_(novel)"title="The Red Lily (novel)">
This novel is the story of an emotional Frenchwoman's liaisons with two men. Madame Therese Martin-Bellème was married by her father to an elderly count, a government minister. After two years of this marriage of convenience she and her husband are strangers in the same house. The beautiful young countess is loved devotedly by Robert Le Menil, and she accepts his love, the first she has known, not because she loves him, but because she is carried away by his love for her. Three years later, she leaves the lover she likes for a lover she loves, Dechartre, a sculptor. She tells him truly that she has never loved another. Le Menil refuses to accept his dismissal by letter and comes to Florence where she is visiting. Dechartre hears of his presence and suspects their former intimacy, but she denies all. Later, in Paris, he hears her name coupled with that of Le Menil, and is tortured with jealousy. She is possessed by the one idea that she must not lose him, the man she loves with all her heart, and tells him again that he is her one lover. Le Menil had gone away to forget her in vain. He returns and follows her to the theatre with reproaches and entreaties which Dechartre overhears. She is obliged to tell her lover the truth. Dechartre refuses to understand that she is not a light woman, or believe her avowals that she has loved him alone, and in a pathetic last interview she realises that her happiness is at an end. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gaverocks"title="The Gaverocks">
Hender Gaverock is an eccentric old Cornish squire, who has two sons, Garens and Constantine, whose natural spirits have been almost wholly crushed by his harsh and brutal rule. Garens philosophically submits, but Constantine rebels; and the book is chiefly occupied with the misdeeds, and their consequences, of the younger son, whose revolt against his father's tyranny rapidly degenerates into a career of vice and crime. He marries secretly, deserts his wife, allows himself to be thought drowned, commits bigamy, robs his father, and is finally murdered as he is about to flee the country.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flossie,_a_Venus_of_Fifteen"title="Flossie, a Venus of Fifteen">
The novel recounts the adventures of an immature young person of distinct cockney type, who begins to fully satisfy her male admirers at a very early age, and manages to retain her physical virginity until the last few pages. According to the publisher Charles Carrington, "The book has no other pretension than to be thoroughly obscene".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trois_Filles_de_leur_mère"title="Trois Filles de leur mère">
In the "Notice to the reader", the author purports to represent a true account: "This little book is not a novel. It's a true story down to the smallest detail. I haven't changed anything, neither the portrait of the mother and the three young girls, nor their ages, nor the circumstances".The author presents the sexual adventures of a young man of twenty, "X***", to whom a prostitute of thirty-six, Teresa, and her three daughters, Charlotte, twenty, Mauricette, fourteen and a half, and Lili, ten years old, take turns visiting, before they all engage in a big staging of obscene games.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow,_and_Tomorrow,_and_Tomorrow"title="Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow">
From "Publishers Weekly:"In "Tomorrow", readers get a backstage glimpse of the creative ebb and flow between two friends, Sadie and Sam, as they range from Zevin’s hometown of L.A., to Cambridge, Mass., and back to Venice, Calif. The book tours popular culture, with her characters alluding to "Macbeth" and Emily Dickinson as readily as they reference such classic video games as "Oregon Trail" and "Donkey" "Kong". "Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow ..." also considers identity: Sam is Korean American, Sadie is Jewish, their producer Marx is Japanese and Korean American, and all three catch flak for designing a Japanese-inspired game called "Ichigo".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_Child"title="Witch Child">
Beginning: Fourteen-year-old Mary's grandmother was suspected to be a witch, she was 'walked' until she could no longer hobble, pricked and then tested if she could float. Then she was hanged as a witch. Mary was plucked from the crowd and taken down a steep alley to a carriage, where a lady sat inside waiting for her.&lt;br&gt;Journey 1: They travelled to an inn where Mary had a bath and was given new clothes. The lady told her that she was going to America with puritans, sailing from Southampton shortly. The lady had to stand by her husband as he had put his name to King Charles' death warrant. Mary then recognised the lady as her mother.&lt;br&gt;Journey 2: the voyage: The puritans set sail on "The Annabel", and Mary was befriended by Martha. Pastor Cornwell suffered from seasickness asked Mary to be her scribe. The ship passes many icebergs and whales and see the Northern Lights. In a violent storm one of the women is in labour and Mary helps giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the baby afterwards. Eventually they arrive at Salem.&lt;br&gt;New World:The Puritans do not see their families in Salem as they believe their forerunners have moved inland. Widow Hesketh in Salem suspects that Mary has 'second sight'. The majority of the puritan group follow them including Mary, and after much discussion they take native guides.&lt;br&gt;
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamonds_are_For_Cocktails"title="Diamonds are For Cocktails">
Camille Jeanne-Marie Rogers is the adopted daughter of the blue-blooded barren diamond magnate Claire Rogers, who stood to inherit a multi-billion-euro jewelry empire. She grew up in a royal luxury in the Principality of Monaco, a popular playground for the billionaires, the day her adoption papers were legalized by her mother Claire, where she remained an enigma in the public eye.Her life story embodies the classic narrative of an ultra-wealthy heiress and socialite who was swept away by a rich woman, but eventually searches for the true meaning of life. Since her adoption, Claire carefully grooms her young daughter for the inevitable — that she will one day take over the business when she comes of age — and marries her young lover Jacques Phillip Martin so to complete her idyllic family. Claire owns and runs the company L’Allure, a world-renowned high-end jewelry line among many of her ventures, manufactured in Eze Village, France, headquartered in Monaco with a marketing division in Paris. However, Camille’s early life begins to show signs of trouble though she secretly keeps it to herself. The privileged life where she once feels incredibly blessed with, has now eroded to a mere illusion in her mind. She endures painful memories throughout her adulthood, perpetually haunting her for life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_Life_in_London"title="Street Life in London">
The book gives the reader an insight into the daily lives of working class poor Londoners. It is arranged around photographs by Thomson with accompanying text by Smith. The texts are brief, but include detail including information from interviewing the photograph's subjects. Subjects include flower-sellers, chimney-sweeps, shoe-blacks, chair-caners, musicians, dustmen and locksmiths.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Adverse_(novel)"title="Anthony Adverse (novel)">
The story follows the eponymous protagonist, Anthony Adverse, through several adventures around the world. This includes slave trading in Africa, his business dealings as a plantation owner in New Orleans, and his incarceration and eventual death in Mexico.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Blight"title="Shadow Blight">
"Shadow Blight" is an experience of loss and, through poetry, a means of conveying something that would otherwise be too difficult to express. This collection addresses the sensation of being overwhelmed by grief and silenced by the outside world by drawing on the stories of Niobe, whose immense suffering over the death of her children essentially turned her and others to stone. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future"title="The Ministry for the Future">
The book follows an international organization named the Ministry for the Future in its mission to act as an advocate for the world's future generations of citizens as if their rights were as valid as the present generation's. Beginning in 2025, the organization, established as a subsidiary body under the Paris Agreement and based in Zurich, is led by protagonist Mary Murphy, a former foreign minister of Ireland and a composite character based on diplomats Mary Robinson, Christiana Figueres, and Laurence Tubiana. Climate change is established as a threat that compromises the safety and prosperity of the future. While the narrative includes chapters of nonfiction history and descriptions of events from the perspectives of other characters and objects, the plot follows Murphy as she seeks to convince central banks of the threats to currency and market stability posed by the effects of climate change. Specifically, a coordinated global round of unconventional quantitative easing through the issuance of a complementary currency, called the carbon coin, to be issued in proportion to the mass of carbon that is mitigated. The monetary concept, called carbon quantitative easing, is based on a specific real-life policy proposal, called a Global Carbon Reward, and an academic paper referred to throughout the book as the "Chen Paper". In Antarctica, various countries cooperate in a geoengineering project to drill to the bottom of glaciers and pump meltwater up to slow basal sliding while the program incentivizes multiple other simultaneous efforts like carbon farming, sail-driven container ships for cargo and airships for personal transport.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swimming_in_the_Dark"title="Swimming in the Dark">
"Swimming in the Dark" is a gay love story that takes place in the final years of the Polish People's Republic. The present time of the novel is the early 1980s. The main character, Ludwik, has emigrated from Poland to New York City where he follows the political situation in Poland on the news. Written in the first-person, "Swimming In the Dark" takes the form of a letter from Ludwik to his former lover in Poland, Janusz, recounting and reflecting on their past relationship.Some years before, Ludwik, a recent college graduate, is spending his summer at an agricultural work camp in a rural part of the Polish People’s Republic. There he meets the slightly older Janusz, a working-class student from the countryside who has dedicated himself to the Communist Party as a way out of rural poverty. Ludwik has brought with him a contraband edition of "Giovanni's Room" by James Baldwin. Janusz asks Ludwig to lend him the book, and Baldwin's novel creates a shared awareness of their feelings for each other. After the camp closes and the other workers return to Warsaw, the two spend a few weeks camping in an isolated area, and, free from conformist social pressures, their romantic bond intensifies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_Dynamics_of_Particles_and_Rigid_Bodies"title="Analytical Dynamics of Particles and Rigid Bodies">
Part I of the book has been said to give a "state-of-the-art introduction to the principles of dynamics as they were understood in the first years of the twentieth century". The first chapter, on kinematic preliminaries, discusses the mathematical formalism required for describing the motion of rigid bodies. The second chapter begins the advanced study of mechanics, with topics beginning with relatively simple concepts such as motion and rest, frame of reference, mass, force, and work before discussing kinetic energy, introducing Lagrangian mechanics, and discussing impulsive motions. Chapter three discusses the integration of equations of motion at length, the conservation of energy and its role in reducing degrees of freedom, and separation of variables. Chapters one through three focus only on systems of point masses. The first concrete examples of dynamic systems, including the pendulum, central forces, and motion on a surface, are introduced in chapter four, where the methods of the previous chapters are employed in solving problems. Chapter five introduces the moment of inertia and angular momentum to prepare for the study of the dynamics of rigid bodies. Chapter six focuses on the solutions of problems in rigid body dynamics, with exercises including "motion of a rod on which an insect is crawling" and the motion of a spinning top. Chapter seven covers the theory of vibrations, a standard component of mechanics textbooks. Chapter eight introduces dissipative and nonholonomic systems, up to which point all the systems discussed were holonomic and conservative. Chapter nine discusses action principles, such as the principle of least action and the principle of least curvature. Chapters ten through twelve, the final three chapters of part one, discuss Hamiltonian dynamics at length.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stranger_Diaries"title="The Stranger Diaries">
Clare is a high school English teacher who teaches in an old house that was formerly the home of R. M. Holland, author of the short story "The Stranger". This excites her, as she has plans to write a book about Holland and hopefully solve some of the mysteries surrounding him, notably what happened to his wife Alice and possible daughter Marianna. These plans are put to the side after a fellow teacher, Ella, is found murdered, her body accompanied by the handwritten note "Hell is empty", a quote from "The Stranger" and Shakespeare's "The Tempest". Initially intending to remain unnoticed by the detectives investigating the murder, Harbinder Kaur and her partner Neil, Clare becomes involved in the investigation partly due to her ties to Ella and also because she deliberately hides information about Ella's affair with Rick, the leader of the school English department. The murderer also leaves her messages in her private journal that give the impression that the murderer is obsessed with Clare, particularly after Rick is found murdered.The police have many suspects, such as Clare's daughter Georgie's friend Patrick, but no definitive evidence that links them to the murders. Eventually an attack on Clare's ex-husband Simon prompts Harbinder to recommend that Clare and Georgie go to Clare's grandparents' home in Scotland while Harbinder herself remains in their home, in the hopes of catching the killer unawares. Clare discovers that the handwriting of Georgie's 21-year-old boyfriend Ty matches the killer's handwriting exactly, as some postcards he'd sent Georgie caught her attention. Harbinder rushes to Scotland and manages to catch Ty just as he is about to murder Georgie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magpie_Murders"title="Magpie Murders">
An unmarried, middle-aged editor named Susan Ryeland receives from her superior the handwritten manuscript of the latest projected novel of the best-selling writer Alan Conway, but notices that the final chapter is missing. Shortly afterward, she learns that Alan Conway has died in an apparent suicide by falling off the tower of his mansion. A suicide-note in Conway's own handwriting is delivered to her office. However, she has nagging doubts about the reality of the events, and decides to investigate Conway's death in order to know the truth, and to find where the last chapter of the manuscript went.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisters_in_Law_(book)"title="Sisters in Law (book)">
The book follows the careers and backgrounds of the first two women to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States — Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg — and attempts to situate their respective biographies, ascent to the court, and judicial records within the broader context of the women's rights movement. Both women met with sexist challenges to their continued careers upon graduating from law school in the 1950s, but O'Connor acceded to the conservative values of putting her family first, and rose to power within Arizona's Republican Party mostly as a volunteer and socialite, until taking the reins as appointed majority leader in the Arizona State Senate. Ginsburg, with the support of her successful tax-attorney husband, chose the parallel routes of academia and activism, founding and heading the American Civil Liberties Union's Women's Rights Project. In this project, she sought to promote cases that would eradicate any formal inequalities between men and women, focusing to a great degree on challenging laws providing benefits to women, which she saw as promoting stereotypes of women as weak and incapable of independent action.According to Hirshman's analysis, the two women used both their judicial skills and court politics to promote women's rights, though in different ways, as O'Connor remained a staunch Republican and Ginsburg was a classic liberal. Hirshman surveys major cases to prove her thesis that both women justices contributed to massive changes in women's rights, especially lauding Ginsburg, whom she compares with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Jane Austen: “Mozart had, by many accounts, five operatic masterpieces. Jane Austen’s reputation rests on five novels. . . . In five landmark cases over less than a decade, [Ginsburg] largely transformed the constitutional status of women in America.”
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Life_on_Our_Planet"title="A Life on Our Planet">
The book opens in Pripyat, an area deserted after the Chernobyl disaster. Its first part, "My Witness Statement", details key moments in Attenborough's career and the parallel decline of wildlife and rise in carbon emissions. Each chapter begins with three statistics about the period which it covers: world population, atmospheric carbon dioxide and remaining wilderness. "What Lies Ahead", the second part, is about the global warming and species extinction which will continue and accelerate if human behaviour continues unchanged into the future. "A Vision for the Future: How to Rewild the World", the third and final section, details measures which can be taken to avoid catastrophe and live sustainably.As a child, Attenborough enjoyed studying fossils. His documentary career began in the 1950s when he began working for the BBC, a British public service broadcaster. He visited places such as the African Serengeti, in which native animals require vast areas of land to maintain grazing patterns. Over time, he noticed a decline in wildlife when searching for fish or orangutans or other animals which he was looking for as part of his documentaries. Areas of the Arctic or Antarctic were different to what the filming crew expected due to ice caps melting. The causes are anthropogenic climate change and biodiversity loss pushing the planet towards a sixth mass extinction event over a period of centuries rather than the hundreds of millennia that built up to previous mass extinctions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberon"title="Cyberon">
Cyberon is the new experimental drug touted to heal Lauren Anderson's brain damaged patients. Dr. Tom Mordley tells her the drug will revolutionise medical science, but Cyberon has plans of its own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_Sun_(novel)"title="Race to the Sun (novel)">
Nizhoni Begay suspects her father's new boss of being a monster due to her so-called "monster-detecting abilities," and when her father goes missing after his boss, Mr. Charles attacks Nizhoni, she mistrusts him doubly so. Nizhoni, her brother Mac, and their best-friend-from-school Davery must follow in the footsteps of the legendary Hero Twins, and find the House of the Sun after surviving a quadruplet of trials, which will help them get Nizhoni's father back. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sal_and_Gabi_Fix_the_Universe"title="Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe">
One day, Sal wakes up and finds that his annoying interdimensional power has been removed. While waiting for Gabi to arrive to walk him to school, he is visited by an alternate version of Gabi from another universe who he dubs "FixGabi" who tells him that his father's tinkering with the holes between the multiverse will destroy Sal's world. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sal_and_Gabi_Break_the_Universe"title="Sal and Gabi Break the Universe">
Sal Vidon is a young magician attending Culeco Academy. After his mother died, though, Sal developed the ability to reach into different dimensions, and he and new friend Gabi Real have an adventure that spans multiple universes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aru_Shah_and_the_End_of_Time"title="Aru Shah and the End of Time">
Aru Shah is a twelve-year-old girl, living in the Museum of Ancient Indian Art and Culture, who often stretches the truth to please her friends, a trait developed due to her mother's distant behavior. She has a wide imagination and is ashamed to be living in a museum. While she is at home during school break, three of her classmates arrive at the museum to find that Aru lied about spending her time in France. Under pressure, she lights the Cursed Lamp of Bharata to prove them wrong, since she once told her class the Lamp is cursed. She accidentally releases the Sleeper, a demon who can freeze time. After time is frozen in her town and Aru herself is briefly frozen, a pigeon enters the museum and explains that Hindu mythology is real and that she is a Pandava. They leave to find the other known sister. Expecting a fierce warrior, they are both taken back by germophobic Mini. Afterward, they visit the Council of Guardians, where they meet Urvashi and Hanuman. Hanuman reveals that the "ahamas" of the Gods have gone missing and that the places where the Sleeper walked have frozen. Both of the sisters are claimed. Indra is Aru's soul father, while Dharma Raja is revealed to be Mini's.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aru_Shah_and_the_Tree_of_Wishes"title="Aru Shah and the Tree of Wishes">
Aru Shah, and her soul sisters, along with friend Aiden, attempt to rescue two twins from a ferris wheel. One of the twins is a clairvoyant, about to foretell a Great Prophecy relating to the War between devas and asuras, but are however delayed from the attempt by a rakshasa. Together, they defeat it. They meet twins Sheela and Nikita. Sheela can foretell the future, while Nikita can control plants. They claim they are Pandavas, although there is initial skepticism from the others. As to find out more about the Sleeper, they carry the demon through a quicker way, known as a Dead Zone, to Amaravati. It becomes apparent that normal mortals refuse to believe in magic, and therefore ignore it. They enter the Zone, however, the people who are banished there attempt to flee with them, causing the rakshasa to wake. Sheela speaks the Prophecy, which the rakshasa hears. It escapes afterward. The twins later get claimed by their soulfathers.The Council of Guardians, concerned, visit Lanka, the City of Gold, as the Prophecy mentions a false treasure.The Prophecy mentions a "tree at the heart", which causes the Pandavas to believe it refers to the titular "Tree of Wishes". They visit the garden where it is kept, but, Nikita reveals it is a fake, and that the real tree, or a hint to its location, is kept in the Crypt of Eclipses, where there lies secrets, which is inside the House of Months. They decide to go on a quest to find the real tree. Since they need a key to open it, they decide to visit Vishwakarma, god of architects first. The quest is kept secret from all others, except Subala the pigeon, as they were forbidden from helping the devas. Aru is unexpectedly visited by a Nāga prince unknown as Rudy, who insists on joining the quest, and claims he can get them an audience with Vishwakarma. They visit Vishwakarma, who, after hearing their request, warns them that a key to unlock any lock needs to be alive, and live things demand answers. It is revealed that the Sleeper once tried to find the Tree, but it is unclear whether he succeeded in reaching it. He was changed after the experience, though, and left "parts of himself" along the way.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aru_Shah_and_the_City_of_Gold"title="Aru Shah and the City of Gold">
The book begins where the last book ended; with Aru meeting her supposed biological sister Kara. Aru is shocked by the revelation, as it implies her father, the Sleeper, cheated on her mother, or that her mother kept Kara a secret from her, but both do no appear to be the case. Kara also claims she is a Pandava, but Aru is skeptical, as there are only five known Pandavas. Kara is dubious as well, as the Sleeper wiped the memory of her past from her mind, so she does not know who her parents are, but claims that the Sleeper is not a bad person. Aru does not believe her. Kara claims that she was starting to become uncomfortable, as the Sleeper sometimes called her his "secret weapon". Kara also says that she wants to help Aru escape, although with the condition that she take her with Aru. Aru is extremely disoriented but agrees to let Kara come along. Kara frees Aru and the two escape. While making their escape, Aru notes Kara's desperation for approval, proudness, and intense knowledge of cultures, especially Hindu mythology. A "rakshasa" tries to stop them from leaving, but they manage to evade it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Only_Good_Indians"title="The Only Good Indians">
A Blackfeet man named Ricky leaves a bar to urinate outside and catches an elk stumbling into several cars in the parking lot, damaging them. Ricky tries to calm the elk but is caught outside with the damaged cars by the white bargoers. He is chased by them into a field, at which point he sees the reflections of the eyes of a herd of elk. Ricky is beaten to death.The story then moves to Lewis, one of Ricky's childhood friends who has likewise moved off their reservation. Lewis is married to a white woman named Peta and works as a postal worker. One night while fixing a light, Lewis sees the image of a dead elk on the floor below and almost falls to his death, but is saved by Peta at the last moment. Lewis begins to shamefully reminisce on an event from his adolescence involving an elk and seeks to cause the vision to repeat by marking out the shape of the elk on his floor. He is helped by his coworker Shaney, a Crow woman who makes him uncomfortable due to their white coworkers projecting a romance onto them. Over several days, Lewis catches more glimpses of the elk and conveys his story to Shaney and Peta. As a teenager, Lewis and Ricky and their friends Gabe and Cass pursued a herd of elk into the elders' section of the reservation, where they were not legally or traditionally allowed to hunt. In the story, the boys kill several elk and rush to field dress them. Lewis is disturbed that the elk he shot, a young female, has not died. Lewis shoots the elk again. Upon dressing it, Lewis is horrified to find it is pregnant. He removes the fetus and buries it. He commits to using every portion of the mother elk and giving her meat away to the elders of the reservation. When returning to their truck, the boys are stopped by the game warden and made to dispose of the elk carvings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cry_Macho"title="Cry Macho">
Michael "Mike" Milo is a divorced alcoholic and experienced rodeo star in Galveston, Texas. Suffering from tennis elbow and severe headaches, Mike arrives late to the rodeo stadium he works at, run by Howard Polk. Participating in an event where he attempts to "ride out" a horse, Mike is trampled and hospitalized with a broken leg.At the hospital, Mike reflects on losing his parents at the age of five, dropping out of college after his grandparents died in a house fire, working alongside his first employer who once tasked him with putting down a dozen horses, and his eventual path into becoming a rodeo cowboy.A few weeks later, Mike is discharged from the hospital with a weak leg. Upon returning to the stadium, Mike is surprised to find out that he has been laid off. The next day, Mike finds out that his ex-wife Donna has remarried. Saddened by the news, Mike sells most of his awards and prized possessions at a local bar.Following his divorce five years ago, Howard lost custody of his only son, Rafael "Rafo" Polk, who was then sent to Mexico to live with his mother. Howard meets with Mike and attempts to persuade him into kidnapping Rafo and transporting him back to Texas, promising $50,000 through ransom money from Rafo's mother. Initially rejecting the offer, Mike remembers the time he unsuccessfully defended a prostitute named Cissy Brewer from Ewell Macmillian, the former owner and co-founder of the rodeo stadium, who forced a horse onto Cissy. Ewell was given a suspended sentence, and he was replaced by Howard shortly after. Cissy, who had been traumatized by the event, became homeless and mentally ill. In the present, Mike decides to help Howard retrieve his son.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_City"title="Transparent City">
In Luanda, Angola, a flooded apartment building is home to many vibrant families. The story is centered around Odonato who lives on the sixth floor of the Maianga Building with his wife, Xilisbaba, their daughter, Amarelinha, and Granma Kunjikise. While searching for his lost son, Odonato's flesh becomes transparent as Luanda becomes unrecognizable. When his son, Ciente-the-Grand, stumbles into the Maianga Building late at night, bloodied from trying to rob someone's house, Little Daddy mistakes him for a thief. Little Daddy warns the other residents by whistling twice. Nga Nelucha hears the whistle on the fourth floor and wakes her husband, Edú. Edú takes a broom and bangs the ceiling to wake Comrade Mute, while Odonato's family wakes up at the same time. When everyone descends to see who it is, they learn that Ciente-the-Grand was shot up the buttocks. Ciente-the-Grand can not go to the hospital for fear that he will be arrested for attempted robbery. Unable to receive proper care, Ciente leaves the apartment and collapses outside of the building. A group of six policemen believe that Ciente is a "pot-head" and attempt to kick him awake, then take him into their police car.While searching for his son, Odonato runs into Superintendent Gadinho who helps to locate his son. He discovers that the policemen took him down to a police station with a strict commanding officer. Odonato is told that the commanding officer wants food in exchange for his son, but every time Odonato delivers food to the police station, the policemen eat it. He goes to the station one last time, but he discovers that Ciente was consigned to the fourteenth district cemetery three days ago.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kissing_the_Coronavirus"title="Kissing the Coronavirus">
The book centers around a romance between Alexa Ashingtonford, a researcher tasked with curing the coronavirus, and an anthropomorphized version of the COVID-19 virus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Ignore_Him"title="Just Ignore Him">
The book is about Davies' early childhood, including the death of his mother and sexual abuse by his father. It covers how these events affected him throughout his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Storm_Runner"title="The Storm Runner">
Zane Obispo's favorite activity to partake in when he's not at school is exploring the sleeping volcano in his own backyard. One day, while discovering new cracks and creases in the mountain, a small airplane crashes into it, disturbing Zane and his three-legged dog Rosie. Soon after the accident, a mysterious girl named Brooks appears at Zane's doorstep, demanding that she and Zane meet up at the volcano. Zane agrees, trying to impress Brooks, and she explains to him that "myths are real" and the volcano is actually a centuries-old prison for the Mayan god of death, whose destiny is linked to Zane's. Zane's neighbor Ms. Cab, who is a psychic, explains to Zane that his father, who was left when Zane was an infant, is Hurakan, a Mayan deity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strange_Case_of_the_Alchemist's_Daughter"title="The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter">
Mary Jekyll is alone and quickly running out of money following her mother's death. As clues arise to indicate that Edward Hyde, her father's former friend and a murderer, may be nearby, Mary becomes curious about the secrets of her father's past. As she discovers that a reward is on offer for information leading to Hyde's capture, she realizes that investigating the mysteries of her family could solve all of her financial woes.Following the trail of money sent by her mother to a religious order, the hunt soon leads her to Diana, Hyde's daughter. Diana is a feral child who was left to be raised by nuns. Diana informs Mary that they are actually half sisters, a truth Mary finds difficult to accept. Mary's investigation crosses that of Scotland Yard, who are investigating a series of murders of women in the area, and becomes acquainted with Sherlock Holmes. Holmes and Dr. Watson help Mary in her continued search for Hyde. In the process, Mary discovers and befriends other "monstrous" daughters of infamous scientists, all of whom have been created through terrifying experimentation: Beatrice Rappaccini, Catherine Moreau, and Justine Frankenstein.When their investigations lead them to the discovery of The Alchemists Society, a secret organization of immoral and power-crazed scientists, the horrors of their past return. Now it is up to the monsters to finally triumph over the monstrous.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_of_Another_Timeline"title="The Future of Another Timeline">
In 1992, after a confrontation at a riot grrrl concert, 17-year-old Beth finds herself in a car with her friend's abusive boyfriend dead in the back seat, and agrees to help her friends hide the body. The event sets the young women on a path of escalating violence and vengeance as they realize how many other young women in the world need protecting as well.In 2022, Tess is a geologist who is one of a team of time-traveling scholars, and she hops to key moments in history to change the timeline and create a better future. But rewriting the timeline isn’t as simple as it may seem. As Tess observes, “change is never linear and obvious. Often progress only becomes detectable when it inspires a desperate backlash”. Tess and Beth’s stories intertwine as war breaks out across the timeline -- an incel-like anti-women group of men from the future is threatening to destroy time travel and leave only a small group with the power to shape the past, present, and future, in which women have been genetically engineered into subservience. This group is dedicated to stopping Tess and her colleagues at any cost. Tess travels backwards in time to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, where she and her cohort take on nineteenth-century moralist and anti-family-planning crusader Anthony Comstock, the inspiration for the futuristic cabal. Throughout, Tess jumps back and forth to her present and to Beth's 1990's, experiencing different futures that develop along the way. For example, in all the timelines, Beth has an abortion after getting pregnant by Hamid. But in the original timeline, in which abortion is illegal, the experience is traumatic and humiliating, whereas in the timeline edited by Tess and her friends, it is a respectful and professional procedure, and the lack of trauma enables Beth to reconnect with Hamid. This leads to her telling him about her father's abusive behavior, and his support gives her the courage to turn to the authorities and break away from her parents. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silence_(novel)"title="The Silence (novel)">
In 2022, on the night of the Super Bowl, Jim Kripps and his wife Tessa Berens are flying from Paris to their home in Newark, New Jersey when their plane crash-lands. In their Manhattan apartment, married couple Diane Lucas and Max Stenner are waiting for Jim and Tessa to arrive to their Super Bowl party. Martin Dekker, one of Diane's former physics students, is the only guest who has arrived. Suddenly, the world's technology systems go dark.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Lives_of_Church_Ladies"title="The Secret Lives of Church Ladies">
The collection consists of nine stories that explore the intersection of sexuality and Christianity. Black women protagonists appear in each story. Topics covered include infidelity, casual sex, and lesbian relationships.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brit(ish)"title="Brit(ish)">
Hirsch grew up in Wimbledon, London with a white English father and Ghanaian mother who had emigrated to Britain. She describes them as working hard to provide her with a middle-class upbringing. She was privately educated. Her classmates and the characters she saw in fiction were predominantly white. Hirsch writes that though people around her claimed to not notice race, she was treated differently because of her race, such as with security guards at shops giving her more scrutiny, and taught that "being black is bad". Hirsch attended the University of Oxford, where she felt alien because of her race. As a young adult, she worked in Senegal. She became a barrister and then a journalist.Hirsch talks about the Black Lives Matter movement and criticizes the frequency with which black men are killed by law enforcement. Hirsch objects to the United Kingdom policy of "stop and search", finding it overly harassing to black men. She recounts incidents from her journalism career relating to race, such as meeting with far-right English Defence League members and attending a club in which white men watched as their white partners had sex with black men.The book also describes the history of slavery in Britain and its colonisation of Ghana.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juna's_Jar"title="Juna's Jar">
Juna, a Korean-American girl, is best friends with Hector, her neighbor in Koreatown. The two kids would usually play together in a park nearby, which included collecting interesting objects and insects they found during their time playing. They stored these items in Juna's old kimchi jar, and then released after observing them.One day, Juna found out Hector is no longer living with his grandmother, and was sent to live with his parents in a far away place, without saying goodbye. Her older brother, Minho, to help her, adds a variety of things to the jar each day (a small fish, some twigs, a bean plant), and each night Juna goes on a journey inside it, looking for Hector.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ladies_of_Mandrigyn"title="The Ladies of Mandrigyn">
"The Ladies of Mandrigyn" is a novel in which a female resistance trains to fight for their occupied territory against an evil sorcerer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Education_(novel)"title="My Education (novel)">
Regina Gottlieb arrives at a prestigious university (unnamed but recognizable as Cornell) to start graduate school. She becomes a teaching assistant for professor Nicholas Brodeur, who has a reputation for having relationships with students. At a dinner party at Nicholas's home, Regina begins a torrid affair with Martha Hallett, Nicholas's wife and a professor at the same university. Regina falls deeply in love with Martha and is distraught when Martha sleeps with Dutra, Regina's medical student roommate, and breaks off their relationship. Regina begins sleeping with Nicholas, Martha divorces Nicholas, and Regina eventually drops out of school.Years later, Regina is married and has a young son. She lives in New York City and works on writing her second novel, balancing her career and family in a way that mirrors the balance Martha had in the beginning of the book. She occasionally sees Dutra, who is a surgeon living in the same city. Regina eventually comes to learn that Dutra was deeply in love with Martha, and hasn't loved anyone in the same way since. When Dutra is forced out of the hospital because of a scandal contrived by rival surgeons, he moves to California. Martha also lives in California. Regina flies to California, sleeps with Martha once, and then sets her up with Dutra before flying back to her family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_Woman_of_Troublesome_Creek"title="The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek">
In 1936 eastern Kentucky, 19-year-old Cussy Mary Carter works for the New Deal–funded Pack Horse Library Project, delivering reading material to the remote hill people of the Appalachian Mountains. Cussy Mary, sometimes known as Bluet, lives with her coal-miner and labor-organizing father, and feels her work as a librarian honors her long-dead mother, who loved books. The Carters are the last of the Blue People of Kentucky, considered to be "colored" by the segregationist white community. Her "Pa", Elijah, slowly dying from lung disease from working in the mines, is determined to marry his daughter off, at any cost, in order to ensure her future security. But Cussy Mary loves her independence, her calling, and the joy she helps bring people with books, and would not be able to continue as a married woman. While the people of the small nearby town that headquarters the library treat her badly as a Blue, at least some of her patrons love and respect her.To Cussy Mary's relief, none of her potential suitors are willing to marry a Blue. But when Elijah offers land as a dowry, the much-older Charlie Frazier agrees to the union. He rapes and severely beats Cussy Mary on the night of their hasty and secretive wedding, but then collapses and dies of an apparent heart attack. Cussy Mary is relieved to be free of the burden of wedlock to this distasteful man, returns home to her "holler", and rededicates herself to her work. A new patron on her route, Jackson Lovett, piques her romantic and intellectual interest, but she also soon realizes that a relative of Charlie's, an evangelical preacher named Vester Frazier, is stalking her as she traverses her remote trails, and means her harm. One night Vester tries sneak up on her cabin, and Pa is forced to kill him. Pa knows that Blues can be hung for less than a white man's death in self defense, and that two dead Fraziers — a large area clan — are too much to get away with. They turn to Doc, a local physician who has long been eager to test and study the Blues, and he helps the Carters steer clear of suspicion in return for access to Cussy Mary. He takes her to a hospital in Lexington for tests, where she is poorly treated, humiliated, and physically invaded, but he basically means well and also provides Cussy Mary with food, which she shares with the starving school children on her route, many of whom suffer from pellagra and are facing death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_and_Maya's_Big_Idea"title="Kamala and Maya's Big Idea">
Kamala and Maya Harris live in an apartment building that has no place for them to play. The two girls decide one day to turn the empty courtyard into a playground. Since the adults do not want to help, and they lack money to buy materials, the sisters begin a campaign and recruit the other kids in the building to help them.By hanging posters around and doing a garage sale, they manage to convince some of the adults to donate items for the playground, as well as acquire funds to buy any necessary material to build it up.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Alone"title="Atlas Alone">
Six months after leaving Earth, Dee is seething with rage towards the people who ordered the nuclear strike that destroyed Earth. She knows they are aboard-ship, but the way that "Atlas 2" is set up, there is no way to contact anyone outside of one's immediate surroundings, nor even know who they are. Other than Dee, the only people who saw the detonation are her best friend, Carl; and Carl’s “sort-of lover,” Travis.Dee tries to escape her trauma through an immersive game. An unexpected job offer by a designer who asks her help test his new game gives her access to the ship's computer, leading to her also being invited to play elite games. In the game world, she encounters a mysterious guide, who hints that they are there to help her. The game she finds herself in is different than any "mersive" she's played before, and she is shocked to learn that a man she killed inside the game has also died in the real world. When she discovered that the man is a member of an elite society also responsible for the destruction of earth, she realizes that she is on the path to discover the truth. While Carl helps her investigate, her cagey guide performs seemingly impossible hacking feats to block him, while protecting Dee, and also inviting her to take her revenge on the destroyers of Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ten_Thousand_Doors_of_January"title="The Ten Thousand Doors of January">
At the beginning of the 20th century, January Scaller lives in a big mansion with her guardian, Cornelius Locke. What may seem to be a privileged existence is marred by the strict rules imposed on the red-skinned girl, the meager living quarters assigned to her, and the fact that her father, Julian, who works for Locke, is almost never around.When she was seven, January discovered a magic door, which was then destroyed. Her guardian convinces her it was only her imagination, and determines to raise her to be a "proper" lady. Locke entertains his fellows from the New England Archeological Society, and these men treat January as a curiosity, sometimes making her feel vaguely threatened. January often explores the artifacts kept throughout the mansion, convinced her father—who is distant even when he is home from hunting special artifacts for Locke—is leaving items for her in a chest, in order to communicate with her. She becomes concerned when he fails to return from his most recent trip.January's only companions are Jane, an African mystery woman sent by Julian to be her companion and protector, and Bad, short for Sinbad, her loyal dog. When she was younger, she was friends with Samuel Zappia, the grocer's boy, but as she grew older the contact between them fizzled out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Song_Rising"title="The Song Rising">
Newly crowned as Underqueen, Paige Mahoney has a great deal to worry about: Jaxon, who has revealed himself as a traitor, has vowed vengeance against her. Scion has stepped up its hunt for "unnaturals"—deploying the new technology Senshield throughout the city, meaning that voyants can be automatically detected. She must also maintain her tenuous alliance with the Ranthen—the Rephaim opposing the Sargas, as the Emim, immortal enemies of the Rephaim, begin to appear in London. Her quest to fight back against Scion takes her out of London, to the Scion bastions of Manchester and Edinburgh, and by the end of the story, it seems her journey will take her further still. Readers get more insight into the characters of the Seven Seals, Paige's "gang", while her relationship with Warden seems to be ever more elusive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wife_(novel)"title="The Wife (novel)">
On a plane, 35,000 feet in the air, Joan Castleman decides she is going to leave her husband. They are on their way to Stockholm where Joe Castleman, a world-renowned novelist, is to receive a prestigious literary award. Joan describes her husband as "one of those men who own the world...who has no idea how to take care of himself or anyone else, and who derives much of his style from the Dylan Thomas Handbook of Personal Hygiene and Etiquette." For the forty years of their marriage, Joan has subjugated her own literary talents to support Joe's success, and now she wants to stop.The story takes the reader back to the 1950s, to Smith College and Greenwich Village, to the meeting of the Joan and Joe, the development of their relationship, and all the decisions and life turns that brought them to this point, following Joe's success and compulsive cheating—culminating in the outing of a shocking secret at the root of it all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroic_Children"title="Heroic Children">
"Heroic Children" retells the true life stories of nine individuals who survived the Holocaust as children. Each story begins with the outbreak of war and concludes with liberation. A short epilogue appended to each chapter informs the reader of the subject's postwar experiences and accomplishments. Photographs of the interviewees as children and as adults are included.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dad_(novel)"title="Dad (novel)">
The novel has a "double plot" in which we read about the protagonist's relation, as a son, with his father and, as a father, with his son.John Tremont, a middle-aged American artist living with his wife and children in Paris, is summoned home to the US to his mother's bedside who has had a heart attack. This starts a long journey in which John, who is later joined by his college-aged son Bill, learns a lot about what it means to be a father and to get old as well as a new definition of love. The story deals with three generations each of which has a different way of seeing family relations as well as the world, but ultimately there is a common thread transcending generation gaps, a "love that binds generations".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Property_(Beatty_novel)"title="Lost Property (Beatty novel)">
A writer, despairs over London so leaves with her lover Rupert, in a clapped out camper van through France, to the Mediterranean, Italy the Balkans and finally to the Greek island of Chios where they help a refugee camp before returning to Britain via Crete. On the way she meets 10,000 years of civilization with many historical figures from Joan of Arc to James Joyce as she questions them on her spiritual journey through Europe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_(novel)"title="Memorial (novel)">
Benson lives with Mike in Houston. Mike goes to Osaka to take care of his estranged father who is dying. Meanwhile, Mike's mother Mitsuko is visiting and staying at his place in Houston, with Benson.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuggie_Bain"title="Shuggie Bain">
The novel opens in 1992, when Hugh "Shuggie" Bain is 15 years old and living alone in a boarding house in Glasgow. He aspires to be a hairdresser while working shifts at a supermarket deli. He leaves work, placing tin cans of fish in his bag.In 1981, five-year-old Shuggie is living in a tenement flat in Sighthill with his maternal grandparents, Wullie and Lizzie; his mother, Agnes Bain; his father, Hugh "Shug" Bain; his half-brother, Leek; and his half-sister, Catherine. Shuggie's father is mostly absent, working as a cab driver and having affairs with other women. Agnes is a beautiful woman often compared to Elizabeth Taylor, but she is unfulfilled by her life and takes to drinking.The following year Shug moves the family into a council flat in Pithead for families of workers of the local mine. He ultimately abandons the family there, leaving them to live with Joanie Micklewhite, the dispatcher of his cab company. Agnes desires a life of glamour, taking pride in her appearance, but her unhappiness drives her reliance on alcohol. Meanwhile, Shuggie is bullied at school and in the neighbourhood for not fitting in and for being effeminate. Shuggie often misses school to act as his mother's caregiver during her hangovers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Mapp"title="Miss Mapp">
Miss Elizabeth Mapp presides over the High Street of the seaside town of Tilling, keeping tabs on all of the gossip, and directing social activity. She competes in bitter rivalry with a neighbor, Godiva Plaistow, over dress-making, and observes the battles over golf and alcohol between Captain Richard Puffin and Major Benjamin Flint. There are further social wars over daylight saving time, bridge games, and the significance of a neighbor being recognised as a Member of the Order of the British Empire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucia_in_London"title="Lucia in London">
The pretentious and socially domineering Emmeline Lucas — known to all as "Lucia" — and her husband "Peppino" acquire a second home in London from a deceased aunt. While her Riseholme friends Georgie Pillson and Daisy Quantock seethe with envy, Lucia moves to Brompton Square, where she can social-climb to the highest circles. Her shameless gambits attract a group of astonished followers, including Stephen Merriall, secretly the society-column author Hermione. When Peppino falls ill, Lucia brings him back to Riseholme and nurses him back to health — and then turns her attention to reclaiming her place in her original kingdom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_a_Teen_Sleuth"title="Confessions of a Teen Sleuth">
In the novel Drew claims that she and Carolyn Keene were roommates together during college and that Keene was very jealous of her. Keene later went on to plagiarize Drew's life story in a series of popular mystery novels, which Drew stated took a large amount of liberty with the truth. When she complained to the publisher, Drew was told that Keene was a pseudonym and not a real person. As the book progresses Drew participates in several adventures and mysteries, many of which cause her to cross paths with Frank Hardy. The two share a deep love with one another, however Nancy chooses to remain with Ned Nickerson because he offers her stability that Frank cannot due to the danger and requirements of his military career. This causes strain in her relationship with Ned, particularly as she and Frank periodically meet up with one another when participating in various adventures. During the course of her marriage with Ned she has two children, one of whom is implied to be the result of an affair with Frank. She and Ned ultimately make peace with each other and remain married, as they truly do love one another, parting only when Ned dies from a heart attack.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girls_in_3-B"title="The Girls in 3-B">
Three eighteen-year-old women, Annice, Pat, and Barby, leave their rural Iowa town and move to Chicago to find jobs and an apartment together. Each falls in love and must make a decision about whether to accept or reject the contemporary morality of the 1950s, which pressures them to make traditional marriages as young as possible. The book deals with themes of rape, incest, racism, abortion, closeted sexuality, workplace discrimination and sexual harassment, and recreational drugs. It explores the Beat culture, "satirizing [its] sexism and machismo". 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_for_the_Many"title="Economics for the Many">
The book is a collection of 16 essays edited by John McDonnell, then serving in the British Labour Party as the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. Figures from McDonnell's New Economics conferences wrote chapters for the book, with contributors including: Grace Blakeley, Francesca Bria, Barry Gardiner, Joe Guinan, Thomas M. Hanna, Antonia Jennings, Rob Calvert Jump, Rebecca Long-Bailey, Paul Mason, Ann Pettifor, J. Christopher Procter, Luke Raikes, Faiza Shaheen, Prem Sikka, Nick Srnicek, Guy Standing and Simon Wren-Lewis. Topics covered include the housing market, nationalisation of industry, international trading, environmentally sound investment in industry, devolution to local authorities and tax avoidance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_Barracks"title="Women's Barracks">
A group of five young French women live together in a house in London during the Second World War while serving in the Free French Forces.The book is about the lives of the five women, including Claude and Ursula, and their compulsive lovemaking. In the evenings, people of all ages shelter in underground stations, and young men and women pack into crowded pubs, clubs, and restaurants, while high explosives fall nearby. One of the five women has a passionate affair with a well-known and married Englishman, an episode based on a real-life love affair between one of the author’s French friends and the actor Leslie Howard. There are also lesbian encounters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twisted_Ones"title="The Twisted Ones">
Mouse is a 30-something book editor. Her cruel and nasty grandmother has died, and Mouse travels to North Carolina to clear out her home. Mouse's step-grandfather, Frederick Cotgrave, died some years earlier. Mouse discovers his diary, in which he documents his obsession with something called "The Green Book", his contentious relationship with his wife, and his own descent into madness. Mouse also finds Frederick's version of "The Green Book", typed from memory.Already unnerved by the isolation of the house in the woods, Mouse is terrified to discover twisted versions of deer roaming about at night. When her dog, Bongo, leads her into the realm of the "twisted ones", Mouse barely escapes with her sanity intact. Bongo goes missing, and reappears days later with a message begging for help.With the help of neighbor Roxy, a brassy, 60-something ex-hippie who lives across the road, Mouse re-enters the realm of the "twisted ones" to try to rescue whoever is trapped there. Captured by legions of "twisted ones", they encounter Anna, a woman who has been trapped in the realm of magic since the late 1960s. The race of beings which created the automatons called "twisted ones" have long died out, and the "twisted ones" have been breeding Anna and a very old man named Uriah to try to recreate them. This has failed, and now Anna has lured Mouse into the realm so she can be freed and Mouse can take her place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deep_(novella)"title="The Deep (novella)">
The "wajinru", are water-breathing merfolk, the descendants of thousands of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard from slave ships crossing the Atlantic. The women drowned, but their babies survived, and eventually developed into their current form. They have built their own idyllic underwater society. Only one person—Yetu, the historian—holds all their often-traumatic memories, so the rest are spared the pain. The historian must suppress all their own personality and desire, and only once a year, the entire community relives the memories together.The burden she carries threatens to destroy Yetu, so she flees to the surface, finding herself trapped in a tidal pool, and somehow able to breathe air. Here, she meets some of the dreaded "two-legs", and in particular, Oori, who is also, in her own way, a memory-keeper of her people. Oori brings Yetu fish to eat, and the two develop a bond. Yetu comes to realize that not all the two-legs are white slave traders. It becomes clear, however, that the surface-dwellers are yet again a threat to the survival of the "wajinru", as energy companies desire the fossil fuels lying below the ocean bed: "Below us, deep beneath the sand, there is a substance they crave. It is their life force. They feast on it like blood."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worth_of_Women"title="The Worth of Women">
"The Worth of Women" depicts a dialogue between seven Venetian noblewomen over the course of two days. On the first day, the women debate whether men are good or bad and also discuss the dignity of women. On the second day, they discuss an overview of general knowledge of natural history and culture but also return to their discussion of the sexes. Both days also contain critiques and discussions of marriage and dowries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Little_Lower_than_the_Angels"title="A Little Lower than the Angels">
The novel is told from the perspectives of several different characters, from the fictional character Mercy Baker to the character based on the real-life Joseph Smith.Mercy and Simon Baker arrive in Nauvoo, Illinois, with their three children and another on the way. On the boggy banks of the Mississippi River, the Mormon community is plagued by "swamp fever", and their eldest son, Jarvie, soon falls ill with the same disease. Joseph Smith arrives and, along with Simon and other men, gives Jarvie a blessing, to no effect. Mercy goes out into the woods to collect herbs for her son, and suddenly gives birth there. She brings the baby and her scavenged medicine home to find that Jarvie is already getting better. Mercy slowly recovers, while her friend Eliza Snow and Joseph Smith draw closer. Joseph announces the doctrine of polygamy to the brethren of the church, and then directly goes to propose to Eliza. Mercy witnesses the sealing ceremony of Eliza and Joseph, but is very uncomfortable with the idea of polygamy and feels that her friend Eliza is being taken advantage of. Jarvie and the family's maid, Vic, become romantically involved, but Vic is banished when Simon catches the two of them together. Meanwhile, Emma Smith learns about her husband's multiple wives and feels betrayed, especially by her friend Eliza. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saints_and_Villains"title="Saints and Villains">
"Saints and Villains" recreates the life and martyrdom of German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who participated in a plot to kill Hitler and was executed at Buchenwald in the waning days of World War II.Raised in a privileged, upper-middle-class German family at the beginning of the 20th century, Bonhoeffer is a sheltered and dreamy loner, indulged and protected by his family. After failing to develop as a musician, he turns to theology, initially as an academic pursuit, not a spiritual calling. His studies lead him to Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he meets Reinhold Niebuhr and social activist Myles Horton. He befriends an African American student, Fred Bishop, who introduces him to the endemic racism in the United States, and takes him to visit both Harlem and Appalachia, where he witnesses racism and poverty first hand. The most impactful of these experiences is the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster of 1927, in which hundreds of mostly Black men mysteriously die after being pulled off bread lines to help dig a tunnel. Bonhoeffer disguises himself as a worker, actually and symbolically stripping himself of all articles of selfhood: He must hide his glasses, pretend to be mute because he has an accent, and don ragged clothes to fit in. This sense of being depersonalized foreshadows what happens to Jews in Germany upon his return.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_(novel)"title="Spring (novel)">
Each novel in Smith’s seasonal series is juxtaposed with a work of Shakespeare – in this one, it is "Pericles". All of the books also examine everyday life in Britain. "Spring" follows a string of characters and explores themes like immigration and human nature in general, as well as the aftermath of the EU referendum and growing tensions in the UK.The novel has two central narratives, the first is the story of Richard, an older man who is dealing with the loss of someone close to him. He boards a train to Scotland, with no particular destination in mind, to try and escape or solve his emotional turmoil. The second narrative is that of Brittany, or Brit as she is named in the book. Brit works at a detention centre for migrants where she unexpectedly meets a young girl named Florence. Like Richard, Brit and Florence also happen to board a train up north to Scotland. All of the characters in the novel eventually meet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_droga_do_Amor"title="A droga do Amor">
The fourth volume of the Karas series begins when students at Colégio Elite are on holiday at the end of the year and Magrí, the only girl in the class, is in New York preparing for the World Gymnastics Championship. The book, is the continuation of "Angel of Death", "Swamp of Blood" and "The Drug of Obedience", and after "The Drug of Love", it is still published "Drugs of Americana!".As the members of the group begin to fight for Magrí, which was the reason for the group's creation, they end up deciding that it is time to dismantle the "Karas" group. To make matters worse, "Doctor Q.I., the king of criminals", escapes from the Maximum Security Penitentiary. Magrí, the only girl in the class, is the one who faces all the risks to unravel the mystery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Storm_of_Wings"title="A Storm of Wings">
"A Storm of Wings" is a novel in which an invasion of alien locusts brings a worldview incompatible with that of humanity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapp_and_Lucia"title="Mapp and Lucia">
Mrs. Emmeline Lucas — known to all as "Lucia" — has lost her beloved husband Peppino, who has died since the previous book. Coming out of mourning after a year, she finds that Daisy Quantock has taken over the Elizabethan fête that Lucia originally planned. Determined not to stick around in Riseholme while Daisy plays Queen, Lucia and her friend Georgie Pillson drive down to the quaint seaside town of Tilling, where Elizabeth Mapp lives. Mapp is renting out her house, Mallards, for the summer, and she's delighted to have Lucia as her tenant, since she visited Riseholme several summers before. Lucia convinces Georgie to rent the nearby Mallards Cottage, and he joins her for the summer. As Lucia was the social leader in Riseholme, Mapp is the queen bee of Tilling, and Mapp intends to use Lucia's visit to bolster her own social standing. Lucia, naturally, has no interest in being bossed, and she easily charms the Tillingites — Diva Plaistow, Major Benji Flint, Mr. and Mrs. Wyse, the Padre and wife, and Quaint Irene — who were sick of being under Mapp's thumb. In addition to this, Lucia used a strong chain on the front door to prevent Mapp from barging into her house whenever she likes, and she insists that the gardener whom she has contracted to pay should work on the lawn and the flowers, rather than grow and harvest Mapp's garden produce for sale. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Samba_for_Sherlock_(novel)"title="A Samba for Sherlock (novel)">
In 1886, the French diva Sarah Bernhardt came to Brazil to perform. The public bows to Sarah's talent, including Emperor Dom Pedro II, who tells her a secret: a valuable Stradivarius violin, a gift from Baroness Maria Luiza, has mysteriously disappeared. Sarah then suggests that the emperor invite the famous detective Sherlock Holmes to investigate the case. Dom Pedro II accepts the advice and soon the English detective agrees to travel to Brazil to solve this mystery.At the same time, a murder shocks the city and leaves Chief Mello Pimenta in a panic. A prostitute had been murdered and had her ears severed and a violin string placed on her body by the killer. While the deputy searches for clues, Holmes and Watson disembark.In this story, Sherlock Holmes, dr. Watson and police chief Mello Pimenta will walk the streets of the Brazilian capital looking for information to discover the mystery of the violin and find the perpetrator of the crimes that are shocking the city.The result is a delightful book, in which the fashions and customs of the imperial capital in the 19th century are accompanied by some bolder assumptions, such as that Brazil was the birthplace of history's first serial killer. In turn, the text goes from the playfulness of the dialogues and the enjoyment of Brazilian Frenchism at the time to the hilarious of several scenes, and terrifying revelations about the food, pharmacological and sexual life of the famous detective on Baker Street.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosha_(story)"title="Mosha (story)">
It was an evening in Calcutta in the year 1945. The boarders of the shared apartment at no. 72, Banamali Naskar Lane gathered in the common room and were busy chatting casually amongst themselves on various topics. Bipin, one of the boarders, mentioned about arrangements of eradication of mosquitos in his village. Just at that moment GhanaDa appeared. With due respect he was offered the lone easy chair which was the best seat around, and a cigarette from Shishir as loan. GhanaDa humbly declared that he killed just one mosquito in his life time once on 5th August, 1939 in Sakhalin island of Japan. The story narrated by GhanaDa revealed that he was engaged by a company in Sakhalin to collect amber sometime during 1939. Whern Tanlin, a chinese laborer went missing with a bag of amber, GhanaDa along with Mr. Martin, the doctor, initiateda search for him. Tipped by a "Gilyak" tribesman he landed up to a scientific laboratory set by Mr. Nishimara, an entomologist. It was later revealed that Mr. Nishamara was genetically converting the mosquitos into deadly agents of biological warfare, and Tanlin became a victim of his cruel experiment. When the lone genetically engineered mosquito landed of the face of Mr. Nishimara and sealed his fate by stinging him, GhanaDa slapped Nishmara killing the mosquito and eliminated once and for all a severe threat towards humanity. He declared he never intended to kill another mosquito ever after in his life time. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuri_(story)"title="Nuri (story)">
It was a rainy day in 1947. The city of Calcutta had almost become Venice. Most of the streets were waterlogged, with almost no public transport available. All boarders of the shared apartment at 72 Banamali Naskar Lane were detained for day long and desperately trying to pass time, expecting GhanaDa to initiate his tall tales. Unfortunately, GhanaDa was not in a mood to talk that day and his only activity was to yawn like a roaring lion. It was a complete failure in instigating GhanaDa to open his mouth, and after trying hard for a long time discussing various topics, Ram directly charged him saying, ”GhanaDa, didn’t you do weight lifting ever?” There the story began.The story was based on Efata, the capital of New Hebrides, presently known as the Vanuatu. GhanaDa was there apparently in connection with his business of Sandalwood, and was stationed in the small Island of Aneghowhat () in the south of Port Villa. He met Monsieur Petra, a French man explorer. Six years later he again met Petra in a uninhabited island about ten miles away from Aneghowhat. On the top of a mysterious hill about two thousand feet high there was a mysterious lake high above the sea level. M. Petra was stationed in a cave and along with him GhanaDa dived into the depth of the lake only to find an abundance of diamond embedded in the belts of bluish Kimberlite under the water of the lake. GhanaDa couldn't resist himself from lifting one large piece of Diamond, and BOOM! the island blew up. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_by_the_Tail_(Chase_novel)"title="Tiger by the Tail (Chase novel)">
Banker Ken Holland, encouraged by his close friend Parker, throws caution to the winds and decides to visit a hooker when his wife Ann is away, despite his conscience warning him not to, and when the hooker is murdered mysteriously in her apartment, soon gets into a muddle with gangsters, hard boiled elements, police and politicians which he is left to deal with.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghori_(story)"title="Ghori (story)">
It was a day of Derby, ie, there was a scheduled football (soccer) match between two big clubs of West Bengal, East Bengal and Mohan Bagan. The four close friends, Shibu, Gaur, Shishir and Sudhir, the author, who were boarders of the shared apartment at no. 72 Banamali Naskar Lane, were getting prepared to leave for the football stadium, keeping a keen watch on the time. Sudhir gave his clock to Gaur and said, “Keep it with yourself. You won't need asking the time repeatedly then.” Here entered GhanaDa, with a warning that clocks should not be accepted without a proper check. It could be disastrous. Getting inquisitive Shibu mentioned that GhanaDa was never seen having a clock. GhanaDa replied, “No, I do not have a clock, but once I received some.” “Received? How many, GhanaDa?” “As far as I remember”, GhanaDa replied indifferently, “Two lakh fifty three thousand three hundred and one only.” GhanaDa reminded of a massive Tsunami and cyclone occurred in the South Pacific Ocean on 17 September 1937. GhanaDa's story preceded the event by two months. At that time he was visiting an area covering from Hawaii to Fiji through Samoa, carrying out an import-export business, which was a cover hiding his actual identity. All of a sudden he received two telegrams from Neville and Frank on the same day, requesting him to undertake a secret service mission and to meet the sender at the earliest. They were understood to be Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and Franklin Roosevelt, President of the United States. “Were they your friends, GhanaDa?”, asked Shibu. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fools_and_Mortals"title="Fools and Mortals">
Fourteen-year-old Richard Shakespeare runs away when he is apprenticed to a brutal, ill-tempered carpenter. He heads to London, where his brother William is a successful actor and playwright. William grudgingly pays for his training as an actor. In 1595, Richard is a 21-year-old poorly paid actor in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a playing company in which his brother is a Sharer (part-owner).A larger, rival theatre is being built at the instigation of the Earl of Lechlade, so Richard goes there to check out his prospects of switching companies. However, deValle, the Earl's manager, is only interested in giving him a position if he will steal his brother's new plays, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Romeo and Juliet". Richard, despite William's poor treatment of him, turns him down.Richard is tired of playing only women. (Women were not allowed to act in the English Renaissance theatre, so female roles were generally given to boys and young men.) William finally gives him a man's role, Francis Flute, but Richard becomes angry when he realises that Flute is a man who plays a woman in "Pyramus and Thisbe", the play-within-the play of "A Midsummer Night's Dream". As he learns more about the role, however, he sees that it is a good part after all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imbibe!"title="Imbibe!">
The book is intended as a follow up to Jerry Thomas' 1862 book "How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon Vivant's Companion". The life of Thomas, as well as various celebrity bartenders who preceded him, is also explored in the book. The book describes the history of American bar culture, as well as the development of the mixed drink. Included are numerous recipes for cocktails from Thomas' book, and their historical origins as well as more modern additions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Founding_Myth"title="The Founding Myth">
The book began as a law review article by Andrew Seidel, an attorney at the Freedom From Religion Foundation. According to the author, the book attempts to provide historically correct facts and arguments for its positions and those of the separationist side. It rebuts the idea of Christian nationalism. In four parts, Seidel makes his case with reference to the founders and the colonies, the influence of the Bible in the United States, a contrasting of the Ten Commandments and the Constitution, and the use of uniquely American mottoes, such as In God We Trust.The foreword of the book was written by Susan Jacoby, and the preface by Dan Barker.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_(novel)"title="Drive (novel)">
Set mostly in Arizona and Los Angeles, "Drive" is about a man who does stunt driving for movies by day and drives for criminals at night.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X,_Y_&amp;_Z"title="X, Y &amp; Z">
The title refers to the French, British and Polish teams who worked on breaking the Enigma code, known by shorthand as "X", "Y" and "Z", respectively. The Enigma code, produced by the Enigma machine, was used from the 1920s to the end of World War II by Germany—later Nazi Germany—for military and other high security communications. The Polish ambassador to London, Arkady Rzegocki, provided the book's foreword.The Polish Marian Rejewski was able to work out the rotors and mechanical setup of the Enigma machine from communications intercepted by France by 1932, provided to him by Gustave Bertrand. Rejewski was a mathematician who used group theory, particularly the study of permutations, to calculate this information. He then worked alongside Jerzy Różyki and Henryk Zygalski to decode intercepted Germany communications, until the beginning of World War II. However, the Germans introduced two additional rotors to the Enigma machine in 1938, impeding the group's success. The bomba, a machine the team invented in 1938, aided them.In 1939, shortly before the war's outbreak, the Polish mathematicians provided their knowledge to British and French teams working on decoding the Enigma code. They escaped to France after Germany invaded Poland and used Zygalski sheets to continue their work. Concurrently, the British Government Code and Cypher School (GC&amp;CS) used the same method. In May 1940, Germans adapted their cryptographic procedures in a way which made this technique ineffective. Months later, Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman and other British codebreakers designed and created the bombe, based on the bomba, to improve their codebreaking.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_What_Inequality_Looks_Like"title="This Is What Inequality Looks Like">
"This is What Inequality Looks Like" is an ethnographic study of low-income individuals and families in Singapore. The book contains 12 essays, written as chapters. It recounts the experiences of both the poor in Singapore as well as social service workers who have interests in the poor. It also provides commentary on the experiences, challenging national narratives of the economy of Singapore, and puts forth policy suggestions to reduce the effect of inequality in a social democratic manner. In an appendix on the research methodology used, Teo stated that she avoided using surveys, interviews, and quantitative methods, choosing instead to rely on casual conversation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cemetery_Boys"title="Cemetery Boys">
Yadriel is queer, trans, Latino, and a brujo (witch). Unfortunately, his family does not recognize him as a man, which has serious effects on his witching ability. Along with his cousin and best friend, Maritza, Yadriel attempts to summon the ghost of his murdered cousin to prove himself. Instead, he summons Julian Diaz, a boy from Yadriel's school who does not remember how he died and is not ready to move on.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poka_(story)"title="Poka (story)">
GhanaDa was almost defeated. yes, because he had all capabilities to come out of the most difficult situations winning every time. All started on a Saturday night at no. 72, Bamamali Nasjar lane, when boarders went to sleep a little late after partying. At about midnight there was heard an inhuman blood chilling cry coming out of the third floor attic room of GhanaDa, followed by he himself recklessly running down the stairs. The worried boarders rushed out and asked eagerly, "What happened, GhanaDa?" Upon careful inspection the cause of all hue and cry was found. It was an insect!! When everyone started rolling over with laughter, GhanaDa remained indifferent and calm. Then he asked gravely, "Did you ever have to run after an insect for eight thousand miles? Did you ever have to storm your brain thinking what you would do with three thousand tons of dead insect? Did you ever happen to carry out a desperate search for an insect in the deadliest forests of Africa with a paper and a closed phial?” "Was it this insect, GhanaDa?” “No, that was Schistocerca gregaria." GhanaDa continued, "It was the 22nd December of 1931. The Riga of Latvia was covered under heavy snow, when I was returning from my morning walk…" and the story continues. At the end it was revealed how GhanaDa reached the basin of the river Bahr al-Arab in Sudan, Africa, in the land of Dinkas, in search of the mad scientist Jacob Rothstein. GhanaDa used a contagious biological agent to eradicate the swarm of deadly African desert locust weighing three thousand tons, and yet it was another instance he saved the mankind from an impending disaster.” 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_by_Bullets"title="Holocaust by Bullets">
## Origins of Desbois work.The opening chapters of Desbois’ Holocaust by Bullets details the origins of his work. In Chapter I, he describes the story of his grandfather and other relatives who lived during WWII. His first visit to Poland in December 1990 reminded him of his grandfather’s experience of being a prisoner of war in Rawa Ruska, Ukraine, and prompted a deep desire to uncover the story behind the murder of thousands of Jews. Debois then explains that during the next few years, he began to learn Hebrew, take classes about Judaism in Israel and about the mistreatment of Jews during WWII with Yad Vashem. It is during this period, explains Desbois, that he was connected to Dr. Charles Favre, an expert on Jewish-Catholic relations, public opinion and geopolitics, who served as his spiritual and academic mentor. Desbois credits this training for his position as one of the leading mediators with Jewish representatives for the Archbishop of Lyon. In his first trip to visit the Shoah, Desbois recalls his experience meeting with a village priest who had witnessed mass exterminations in Ukraine, a baker who delivered bread to extermination camps, a carpenter who created gas chambers, and a daughter of the mayor who coordinated the provisions to the death camps. He writes: “I realized then that there are witnesses to the Shoah who are not Jewish: neither perpetrators nor victims, but witnesses.” Desbois describes this realization as a spur to his future work, one that lays the foundation for the rest of the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_Came_Along"title="Bear Came Along">
A river lacks identity until a bear came along and fell into the river and is carried along on a log. This begins an adventure where the bear is joined going downstream by a frog, turtles, a beaver, raccoons, and a duck. Each has a trait or knowledge and also lacks knowledge of something. For instance, the beaver knows how to navigate but doesn't know about detours. After the duck joins, the group encounters a waterfall. The animals land safely and realize they "were in it together".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scatter_Here_Is_Too_Great"title="The Scatter Here Is Too Great">
The book tells stories of intersecting lives of ordinary people affected by a bomb blast. While some see it up close, for others it's just background noise. The book is narrated by a writer who is writing the story of these ordinary people because otherwise these stories would be lost.The story has been told from different perspective including of witnesses, victims, family members, friends, associates, lovers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Time_for_Mercy"title="A Time for Mercy">
In 1990, five years after successfully defending accused murderer Carl Lee Hailey (in "A Time to Kill", the first book in the series), attorney Jake Brigance of fictional Clanton (Ford County), Mississippi, is assigned by Circuit Court Judge Omar Noose to the case of 16-year-old Drew Gamble. The boy was accused of murder after he shot and killed Stuart Kofer, a deputy sheriff who was his mother Josie's boyfriend. After Josie, along with her 14-year-old daughter Kiera and Drew, moved in with Kofer, the deputy beat them on many occasions after coming home drunk. Josie called 911 several times but never pressed charges. Since Kofer performed well when he was sober and was well-liked by his fellow officers, no reports were filed, and Sheriff Ozzie Walls was unaware of Kofer's violent tendencies when he was drunk. On the night of the murder, Kofer again came home in a drunken rage and knocked Josie unconscious while breaking her jaw. Both Drew and Kiera thought their mother was dead and were afraid of what Kofer might do after he came to from his stupor. After calling 911 to report the situation, Drew used Kofer's service pistol to shoot the deputy in the head. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Pearl"title="Dragon Pearl">
The main character Min, a teenage fox spirit (gumiho), runs away from her home, which is crowded with family members all staying in the same house, in order to figure out what happened to her lost brother, Jun, who was a cadet in the Space Forces before his disappearance. After she leaves her home planet, Jinju, on a freighter ship, she begins uncovering more secrets. She finds the ship her brother was stationed on, leading her to pose as a recently deceased cadet on that ship so that she is enabled in her continued investigation. Meanwhile, she communicates with a dead cadet, Bae Jang, to whom she promises vengeance, in order to maintain her secret. When Min befriends two cadets on the ship, a dragon and a goblin disguised as humans, she learns that they are quickly approaching the Ghost Sector, in which the lost Dragon Pearl is said to have been laid to rest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_Bad_Heroines"title="Plain Bad Heroines">
The novel is set during two time periods: 1902 and present day. In 1902 readers are introduced to Clara and Flo, students living in Rhode Island and attending Brookhants School for Girls. They are completely infatuated with each other. They also share a love for Mary MacLane and a memoir she wrote, to the point where they create a secret club called The Plain Bad Heroine Society. The two meet an untimely death in a nearby orchard, the site of their club meetings and trysts, stung to death by eastern yellowjackets. Their deaths are not the last in the school, which closes five years later. Three more people died in the intervening years. As a result, the school is believed to be both haunted and cursed. In the modern day, the abandoned school is now the site of a film production, based on a book detailing Brookhants' history. Celebrities Harper Harper and Audrey Wells have been cast as Flo and Clara, respectively. They travel out to the school with the book's author, Merritt Emmons, and the rest of the film's cast and crew, but soon discover that the school's curse may actually exist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_Power_Money"title="Sex Power Money">
The book has three sections: "Sex Power Biology", about analysing human behaviour through evolutionary facts; "Sex Power Porn", about pornography and cultural attitudes towards the human body; and "Sex Power Money Money Money", about the role of money and capital in modern heterosexual relationships. Pascoe concludes that human sexual behaviour cannot be fully attributed to either evolutionary instinct or rational behaviour. The book is dedicated to Arminda Ventura, who was murdered by her husband after attempting to divorce him.Pascoe discusses the term "sex worker" and the subject of sex work, commenting on the language used to describe people in the industry and her negative preconceptions towards female sex workers as victims and damaged. She researches survival sex and forums where men discuss sex workers. Pascoe also talks about "Indecent Proposal", a film in which a man offers another man a large sum of money in return for having sex with his wife. She discusses transactional sex and rape culture, her own attitudes towards men and possible contributing factors for the behaviour of male rapists and abusers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertue_Rewarded"title="Vertue Rewarded">
The novel opens with a quote from William D'Avenant's "Gondibert" (1651).Set in Clonmel, Ireland in August 1690, the young Irish Protestant woman Marinda is romanced by a European prince in the army of William of Orange.There are two interpolated tales: one about the Irish princess Cluaneesha (set in pre-Norman Ireland) and one about Faniaca, an indigenous American living through the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytonic"title="Cytonic">
After entering a portal into the nowhere, the delver Spensa had come into contact with gives her a choice to enter the nowhere or return to her home. She chooses to enter the nowhere, believing as she is that she cannot give her friends the advantage they need over the Superiority. Spensa emerges at the edge of the nowhere where it crosses over into her universe, the "somewhere", and finds that many areas of land called "fragments" surround the center of the nowhere, which is a luminous sun called the lightburst. She quickly gains the help of Chet Starfinder, a human explorer who has been in the nowhere for 170 years, and deduces that he is actually Commander Spears, M-Bot's previous owner. The nowhere is occupied by rival pirate gangs controlling areas of fragments, and as Spensa, M-Bot, and Chet traverse different fragments containing diverse environments, they hope to cross through the pirate lands into No Man's Land, the area surrounding the lightburst. Spensa, who was told to follow the "Path of Elders" by her delver ally, journeys with Chet to find different portal stones placed throughout fragments. Through the first few portals, she and Chet learn through memories that being cytonic was actually a mutation caused by the nowhere and somewhere overlapping, and that the fragments were formed as a result of this overlap. They witness various species conversing with one another throughout time by entering the nowhere, which was what allowed humans to visit other species and eventually led to the human wars. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_the_Black_Body"title="Killing the Black Body">
Roberts argues that institutional violence against black women and their reproductive autonomy in modern America has been present since slavery began in America. Female slaves were often brought from Africa to America for breeding, where their white male owners would rape them and sell their children for profit. The book details the life of Anna J. Cooper, who was born a slave and became an academic and an activist.Roberts also details the alliance between of Margaret Sanger, an early American birth control advocate, and the eugenics movement of the early 20th century, in order to illustrate how the rhetoric around contraceptives shifted from reproductive freedom to limiting the fertility of poor women of color. Women's movements for contraception were supported by eugenicists who used contraception to decrease birth rates amongst the black and Latina population in the South. Such efforts were aided by anti-miscegenation laws that criminalized interracial marriage or intercourse. Hysterectomies of black women which served no medical purpose, but sterilized the women, continued into the 1970s.In a similar case, Roberts describes Norplant, a Levonorgestrel-releasing implant used for birth control. She documents the court-ordered implantation of Norplant by doctors and healthcare organizations into black women living in urban areas. She argues that the War on Poverty initiated by Lyndon B. Johnson disproportionately affected black single mothers, who had higher rates of poverty. Roberts also describes the prosecution of drug usage among pregnant mothers under the crime of drug trafficking to a minor—their fetus. Roberts cites a study which found that Black women were ten times more likely to be reported to law enforcement for drug usage than white women, despite marginally higher drug usage amongst white women.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Certain_Hunger"title="A Certain Hunger">
The book follows food writer Dorothy Daniels, who is also a convicted serial killer. Daniels narrates the story of her crimes from prison, moving back and forth in time between her life behind bars and the life that led to her imprisonment: specifically the food she ate, including eating men.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_(novel)"title="Chernobyl (novel)">
"Chernobyl" is a novel in which the characters must choose between accepting substandard materials or delaying an already overdue reactor schedule.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Darkness_(novel)"title="City of Darkness (novel)">
The novel is set in a dystopian future. Glass domes have been erected over the major cities in the US, and eventually, some twenty years ago, the cities have been evacuated and closed, ostensibly because pollution and diseases have turned them into a health hazard. People live in sterile suburb-like settlements called tracts, each centered around a mall, offices where the residents work, and an underground railway station. A healthy lifestyle with diets, workout programs, and eight hours of sleep is enforced by authorities. Cars are electric; combustion engines are banned. Even the weather is controlled so that rain falls only during the nightly curfew.Only three of the cities, among them New York, are temporarily reopened to visitors each summer, albeit with restrictions to counter health risks: stays are limited to two weeks, minors must be accompanied by a legal guardian, and all visitors must undergo decontamination (including a lung-cleansing machine and disposal of all clothes worn in the city) when leaving. Nonetheless, the cities are popular (yet expensive) destinations for party travelers, not least because of the “adult” fun found there: movie theaters showing real murder films (movie theaters do not exist outside, and graphic content on TV is severely restricted), or “bedicabs”, cabs in which prostitutes offer their services during the ride.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyll_(novel)"title="Tyll (novel)">
Kehlmann does not narrate Tyll's story in a linear fashion. The chapter "Shoes" that serves as the novel's prologue tells a tale from the middle of the jester's life."Shoes." Deep into the Thirty Years' War Tyll Ulenspiegel arrives in a town where the war had not yet come, along with Nele, an old woman, and the donkey. The inhabitants of the town recognize Tyll from his widespread fame, even though they had never seen him before. Tyll and Nele perform to great applause. The performance culminates in a high-wire act, through which Tyll initiates a prank that causes violent upheaval."The Lord of the Air." This chapter presents the actual beginning of the narrative. The reader encounters his father Claus Ulenspiegel, the miller of their town, who is not like the others: he is able to read, loves books, and desires to study the mysteries of the world. Tyll's father is accused of witchcraft, which results in his trial, conviction, and execution. Knowing his prior life is now gone, Tyll asks Nele to join him as they leave the village forever. "Zusmarshausen." It is nearly the end of the war, and it has come to the Emperor's attention that the "famous jester" (i.e. Tyll) has found shelter in the heavily damaged Andechs Abbey. The Emperor gives the task of finding Ulenspiegel and bringing him back to Vienna to the not quite 25 years old Martin von Wolkenstein. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hood_Feminism"title="Hood Feminism">
The book consists of 18 separate essays. Through an intersectional framework, Kendall argues that mainstream feminism has excluded a number of women's issues, particularly those of women of color, and explores how a number of issues affect women, including the education gap, poverty, food and housing insecurity, and gun violence. Kendall uses her personal experiences of being in an abusive marriage and raising her son in poverty in connection with her essays. Kendall writes that unique struggles differ between women of different communities and comments on the ability of one group of women to oppress another.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unworthy_Republic"title="Unworthy Republic">
Saunt describes the US policy of Indian Removal in the Eastern United States. Saunt highlights the relationship between slavery and the expulsion of Native Americans. He shows that the deportation of Native Americans allowed for the expansion of southern slavery, and for investment by Wall Street Bankers and the northern financial industry. Saunt covers numerous important events including but not limited to the Black Hawk War, the Trail of Tears, and the Seminole Wars.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boatman's_Daughter"title="The Boatman's Daughter">
Miranda Crabtree spends her time running contraband for the preacher Billy Cotton and sheriff of her local area, as it is the only way she can provide for herself. It also helps her keep an old woman and a child safe, as they had fled from Cotton's home eleven years prior. Miranda's troubles come to a head once she is asked to make one last run, this time to bring a child to the insane Cotton.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Littlest_Angel"title="The Littlest Angel">
The story concerns a four-year-old boy who arrives in heaven but is unable to adapt to the heavenly life. He cannot sing, he is always late for prayers, and his robe and halo are always dirty. The other angels are bothered by him and he is miserable and lonely. Finally he is introduced to an Understanding Angel who asks what he really wants. He asks for a box of childhood treasures that he kept under his bed on Earth, and when he gets it he becomes happy and angelic. Then the birth of the Christ Child is announced and all the angels prepare their finest gifts for him. The Littlest Angel decides to give the child his own box of boyhood favorites. This gift pleases God so much that he causes it to mount into the sky, and it becomes the Star of Bethlehem.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leave_the_World_Behind_(novel)"title="Leave the World Behind (novel)">
Amanda and Clay drive out to a remote luxury Airbnb in Long Island for a vacation, along with their kids Archie, 15, and Rose, 13. They are a middle-to-upper-middle class family who live and Brooklyn. It's an idyllic and peaceful vacation until an older black couple shows up at night, identifying themselves as the house's owners, G.H. (or George) and Ruth. They explain that there's been a blackout.Amanda is initially suspicious of them and is surprised that they could own a home such as this one. But it turns out George and Ruth are a wealthy and highly educated couple. Their main home is in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, but they drove back to their vacation home to wait out the blackout. It's arranged that they will stay in the in-law unit in the basement until things get sorted. At the house, the wi-fi is out, along with the landline, TV and cell service. But they have power. Amanda also catches a news alert on her phone confirming a large-scale blackout across the east coast.The next morning, Rose notices a herd of a few dozen deer outside (what she doesn't see is that there are actually thousands of them). Clay heads to town to assess the situation, but gets lost. He runs into a scared woman, but she only speaks Spanish and so he leaves her. Meanwhile, Rose and Archie go exploring in the woods. They find a shack and a house in a clearing, and Archie gets bitten by a tick. Then, a thunderous noise is heard, loud enough to crack the glass on some doors, which scares everyone. (Unknown to them, not too far away, the deer are scared and trampling everything in their wake.) Clay eventually finds his way home, but doesn't mention getting lost or the woman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thursday_Murder_Club"title="The Thursday Murder Club">
A group of pensioners (Elizabeth Best; Ron Ritchie; Joyce Meadowcroft; and Ibrahim Arif) set about solving the mystery of the murder of a property developer in the luxurious Cooper's Chase retirement village near the fictitious village of Fairhaven in Kent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minecart_(short_story)"title="Minecart (short story)">
Construction of a light railway has begun between Odawara and Atami, two towns in east Japan. At the construction site, workers are using minecarts for transporting earth and sand. Ryōhei, aged eight, is interested in these minecarts. One day, he pushes one of the minecarts with a construction worker. At the beginning, he is very excited. But as it gets late in the day, he starts to worry about how he will get home. After a while, the construction worker tells him to go home because it is late. Ryōhei runs down a dark hill road thinking “I just don’t want to die”. As soon as he comes back home, he bursts into tears.He becomes an adult and moves to Tokyo. He looks back on that time. He is tired of everyday life. Without any reason, he sometimes dreams of the dark hill road.The story is set between Odawara and Atami. The boy describes seeing the sea on his right as he heads away from his home, and on his left on the way back. Because of this, it seems that he was moving toward Odawara from Atami.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_Days_of_Christmas_(Correspondence)"title="The Twelve Days of Christmas (Correspondence)">
The monologue is performed by the reading out of letters written by Emily Wilbraham to her lover Edward. Each day for twelve days, Edward sends her one of the gifts mentioned in "The Twelve Days of Christmas" carol and Emily responds with a letter for each day. The gifts eventually cause a breakdown in their relationship, with Emily's house and gardens being ruined by all the birds, animals, and personnel that Edward sends. For the final letter, after Edward has sent members of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic to her, Emily's solicitor G. Creep writes to inform Edward that Emily is seeking an injunction against him for harassment and would be seeking to return all the animals that were sent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reincarnationist_Papers"title="The Reincarnationist Papers">
Found in Rome twenty years ago, "The Reincarnationist Papers" follows Evan Michaels, a troubled young man who struggles with having memories from two other lives. Believing that he is the only one in the world burdened with other people's complete memories nearly leads to his self-destruction, until he meets a mysterious woman named Poppy. She understands Evan's struggle because she is exactly like him, only she remembers seven lives. Poppy changes Evan's world forever when she invites him into a centuries-old secret society of 28 others who are like them and he realizes that he is not alone. The Reincarnationists, collectively known as the Cognomina, recall all their past lives and experiences and find one another over and over again in each new incarnation. But to become part of this secretive group, Evan must first prove that he is truly one of them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_Iddesleigh"title="Irene Iddesleigh">
A noble by the name of Sir John Dunfern makes a sudden decision to marry Irene Iddesleigh, an orphan adopted by a nobleman. Despite her being in love with her tutor, Oscar, she marries Dunfern and has a child, Hugh. However, Dunfern finds love letters Irene received from Oscar dated after the marriage. He flies into a frightful rage and imprisons Irene, intending for her to be in captivity the rest of her life. She is only there for a little more than a year, before Oscar and one of her maids helps her to escape. Oscar can not go back to the job he previously had, since his boss is acquainted with Dunfern. Oscar and Irene quietly sell the house they had previously on loan and move to America. Soon after, they get married.Dunfern is devastated, but finds solace in Hugh, and sends him to the same school Oscar worked at. At that time, he learns from his friend, Oscar's former boss, that Irene and Oscar were married. While Dunfern felt remorse for Irene's imprisonment and intended to include her in his will, when he learns of their marriage, he cuts Irene out entirely.Meanwhile, Irene and Oscar are facing difficulties. Convinced they could live entirely off the money he got for selling their Canterbury house for the rest of their lives, Oscar did not see fit to get a job until he and Irene are on the brink of total ruin. When he is fired, he comes home and beats Irene, who leaves and gets a position as a duenna. Later, Oscar feels regretful about hitting Irene, but he can't find her to tell her. He drowns himself, leaving a note for Irene with his apology and begging her to return to Dunfern and apologize. When Irene finds the note, she decides to do so.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maharani_(novel)"title="Maharani (novel)">
The book is a historical fiction based on Chaubisi Rajya and Baise rajya of Nepal.The story is about King Ghanashyam of Parbat and the controversy over his succession by his sons- Malebam and Bhadribam. Malebam is the elder son and has the birthright to the throne whereas Bhadribam was conceived earlier but born later. When Malebam is declared king, Bhadribam revolts while his wife, to everyone's surprise, supports Malebam. In recognition of her efforts to save Parbat, the palace gives her the status of "Maharani". But, she takes Sannyasa secretly and leaves to Vindravan. From that time, the people of Parbat have been worshipping her as Maharani. The book also depicts the life, administrative system and justice system of Parbat during that period.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_and_Her_Brothers"title="Justice and Her Brothers">
The story is told over one week during a hot summer in Ohio. Protagonist Justice Douglass is dealing with the fact that her mother is attending college and has to spend time away from the home, leaving Justice to the care of her twin older brothers, Thomas and Levi. Levi clearly cares for Justice, both with domestic tasks and emotionally, while Thomas is antagonistic toward Justice.Thomas has established the Great Snake Race, a competition for the boys in the neighborhood, and Justice prepares by seeking out the snake that is both the largest and the fastest. Concurrently, Justice notices that Thomas seems to be able to mentally control his twin brother Levi. Fear of Thomas brings Justice to the home of Mrs. Leona Jefferson and her son Dorian Jefferson, mother and child. Mrs. Leona Jefferson teaches Justice about her own psychic abilities, both to protect Levi and to practice her own power.Justice learns that the object of the Great Snake Race is not to actually race snakes but to catch the most. Justice, thinking she will lose, ends up winning over Thomas, as her snake was pregnant and had offspring. After the Race, Thomas probes Justice's mind and tries to control her. Justice and neighbor Dorian battle against Thomas, defeating him. The children then link minds and Justice transports them to the future, briefly, where they learn that as a group, they are the "first unit," a new kind of human.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_Don't_Owe_You_Pretty"title="Women Don't Owe You Pretty">
Through the lens of intersectional feminism and social privilege analysis, Given discusses topics including body positivity and self-esteem, consent in relationships, emotional labour, internalised misogyny, masturbation, microaggressions, rape culture and slut-shaming. The book contains checklists and questions for the reader to consider. Given gives advice on recognising gaslighting, racial fetishism and other negative actions or signs in a relationship, and discusses how queer relationships affect a culture of heteronormativity. She has a fictional conversation with her younger self as a framing device for exploring male validation.The book's title is derived from a quote by lexicographer Erin McKean: "prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked female".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_(novel)"title="Pet (novel)">
Jam is a teen girl living in Lucille, a town in the US. Lucille is a type of utopia; its official historical record saw angels defeating monsters. In Lucille, there are no more monsters. Or so everyone believes. One day, Jam trips and falls onto her mother's painting (a type of assemblage with sharp objects incorporated within.) Jam's blood releases the creature that her mother painted: Pet. Pet informs Jam that the creature is here to root out a monster living in Lucille.Then the pet and 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_Strong_Punches_a_Hole_in_the_Sky"title="Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky">
Tristan Strong is a seventh grader from Chicago who is mourning the death of his best friend Eddie, who died in a tragic bus crash. Eddie has left Tristan his journal, in which they collected stories about African American folktales and West African mythology. After Tristan loses his first boxing match, he is sent to Alabama to live with his strict grandparents for the summer and heal from the tragedy.On his first night in Alabama, Eddie's journal is stolen by a strange doll-like creature covered in sap named Gum Baby. Tristan chases Gum Baby into the Bottle Tree Forest, a haunted forest Tristan's Nana forbid him to go in. In an effort get the journal back, Tristan punches the Bottle Tree, which breaks one of the bottles and unexpectedly opens a portal to a parallel world. Tristan and Gum Baby fall into a world called Alke, where the mythology and folktales in Eddie's journal are real. Tristan and Gum Baby team up to escape the Bone Ships in the Burning Sea and go to the island of MidPass. Tristan meets the MidFolk, including a girl named Ayanna, a rabbit named Chestnutt, and Brer Fox. The people of Alke are being attacked by Fetterlings, or Iron Monsters, living chains that attempt to capture them. Brer Fox dies while fighting for the MidFolk to escape, and Eddie's journal is taken.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playing_the_Whore"title="Playing the Whore">
Grant views sex work as a form of labor. Through a social-constructivism lens, Grant analyzes the concept of the "prostitute imaginary"—narratives of sex work in the public consciousness. She argues that the social process which turns a "woman" into a "prostitute" involves dehumanization and allows for exertion of control over women sex workers. Grant contends that typecasting all sex work as either "exploitation" or "empowerment" creates a false dichotomy, dissuading analysis of systemic issues within the sex industry, and systemic issues which cause people to enter the industry. Two examples of the latter are economic issues which lead people to survival sex and a lack of worker agency in industries other than sex work.Grant describes a period in U.S. history of feminist sex wars in which advocates of sex work were in opposition to some second-wave feminists. Grant disagrees with anti–sex-work feminists who view sex work as inherent violence or sex workers as inherently in need of liberation. She draws similarities between feminists and conservatives opposed to sex work. Describing a "rescue industry" of non-governmental organizations, religious organizations, police and journalists, Grant criticizes that efforts to "rescue" sex workers often use violence or force. She finds that it leads to surveillance of workers by police and evictions by landlords, but that it does not have an effect on the rate of full-service sex work. She writes that criminalization and stigmatization of sex work allows or condones violence against sex workers by clients.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocence_Undone"title="Innocence Undone">
The novel is set in Georgian-era England, and centers around Jessie Fox, the daughter of a prostitute, being taken in by the old Marquess of Belmore to be raised as a lady. The Marquess intends to have the Jessie marry his son Matthew, a Navy captain, so that they can both inherit the Belmore title after he passes. Matthew, knowing Jessie's reputation as a street child, believes that Jessie is manipulating his father into treating her like a lady, while Jessie fears that her true backstory will be discovered by the public and tarnish the Belmore name.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Luminous_Dead"title="The Luminous Dead">
The novel predominantly centers on two characters, cave diver Gyre Price and her handler, Em. Gyre has taken on the task of exploring a dangerous cave system that is partially underwater. It is also home to the Tunnelers, strange alien creatures capable of instantly killing any it comes across. While she has some limited experience doing this job, Gyre has lied about her job history in order to secure the large paycheck that comes with spending weeks mapping out the cave while inside a specialized caving suit, unable to take it off or eat conventional food. During this she is watched by her handler Em, who is tasked with ensuring that Gyre remains safe and calm via the administration of drugs or other methods. Unbeknownst to Gyre, Em has secrets of her own, the first of which is that she is the only handler on site—a job typically handled by multiple people to avoid handler burnout and allow for sleep.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine_(novel)"title="Nicotine (novel)">
Over some weeks, Penny watches her father (a prominent New Age guru) slowly die. After the funeral, which is attended by many of his followers, her mother Amalia and brother Matt push Penny to assess the condition of a house in Jersey City, New Jersey, which has been abandoned since her grandparents died there in a fire. She discovers that it has been squatted in the meantime and is named Nicotine because the activists who live there all smoke and promote smoking. Instead of evicting the squatters, she spends time getting to know them better and falls in love with two of them (Jazz and Rob). Her brother Matt then visits the house since he is eager to sell it, only to fall in love with Jazz as well.Penny likes the anarchist subculture she finds herself in and moves into another housing co-operative called Tranquility. After an environmental protest which goes wrong and with tensions rising due to the love quadrangle, there are quarrels at the Nicotine house which culminate in Matt attacking Rob, and Jazz almost shooting Matt. The squatters flee in different directions and Matt takes possession. He decides to convert the house into an anarchist community centre named after his father, hoping that it will lure Jazz back to him. She has escaped with Rob and Sorry in a van, reaching the West Coast. When Matt's direction of the centre hits problems, he abandons New Jersey to pursue Jazz in Hawaii, allowing the reunited couple of Penny and Rob to squat the freshly constructed penthouse suite.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enter_the_Aardvark"title="Enter the Aardvark">
The novel follows two related stories of repressed love connected via a giant taxidermied aardvark. One strand of the novel is set in modern-day Washington, D.C and chronicles freshman Rep. Alexander Paine Wilson's receipt of the stuffed aardvark via a mysterious FedEx dropoff. This event sets in motion a satirical chain of events for the neo-Reaganite congressman preparing for a reelection campaign. A separate thread set in Victorian-era London tells the story of Titus Downing, the taxidermist that originally the stuffed and displayed the aardvark. The two stories weave together similarities and secrets the men share across time and space.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castro's_Bomb"title="Castro's Bomb">
In 1963, a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the leader of Cuba, Fidel Castro, and the Cuban Army use weapons left behind by the Soviet Union to seize the United States military base at Guantanamo Bay and then plan missile strikes against America. US President John F. Kennedy tries desperately to retain his leadership and to keep the war from escalating into World War III.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klara_and_the_Sun"title="Klara and the Sun">
The novel is set in a dystopian future in which some children are genetically engineered ("lifted") for enhanced academic ability. As schooling is provided entirely at home by on-screen tutors, opportunities for socialization are limited and parents who can afford it often buy their children androids as companions. The book is narrated by one such Artificial Friend (AF) called Klara. Although Klara is exceptionally intelligent and observant, her knowledge of the world is limited.From the window of the store in which she is for sale, Klara learns about the world outside and watches the Sun, which she always refers to as "he" and treats as a living entity. As a solar-powered AF, the Sun's nourishment is of great importance to her. On one occasion she notices that a beggar and his dog are not in their usual position; they are lying like discarded bags and do not move all day. It seems obvious to Klara that they have died, and she is surprised the next morning to see that they are living and that the Sun has with his great kindness saved them with a special kind of nourishment.Klara comes to fear and hate what she calls the "Cootings Machine" (from the name printed on its side) which stands for several days in the street outside, spewing out pollution that entirely blocks the Sun's rays.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Person_Singular_(short_story_collection)"title="First Person Singular (short story collection)">
## "Cream".The first-person narrator accepts a sudden invitation to a piano recital from an old acquaintance. On a Sunday afternoon in November, he travels to the recital hall, located at the top of a mountain in Kobe. When he arrives, the gate is locked and the parking lot empty. No one responds and there seems to be no signs of a recital set to take place. Retiring to a small park nearby, he later meets an old man who implores him to visualize a circle that has many centers but no circumference. The man tells him that when you finally achieve such difficult things as reaching an understanding of something you once couldn't, it becomes the cream of your life, the crème de la crème. The narrator closes his eyes once again and tries to visualize such a circle but is unable to. Upon opening his eyes, he discovers that the old man has vanished. The narrator recounts the event to a friend and attempts to make sense of the old man's musings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo!_Yes?"title="Yo! Yes?">
The book is about two boys, one black and one white, that meet each other and talk in sentences that have one or two words. The black boy wants to become friends, but the white boy is nervous about making friends. With less than 35 words being spoken between the two of them, they both form a friendship at the end of the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of_Mahishmathi"title="Queen of Mahishmathi">
Sivagami is arrested and brought to the court of Mahishmathi, where Mahadeva testifies against Sivagami. However, Prince Bjjaladeva had stated that whoever killed Rudra Bhatta will receive ten thousand gold coins. Bjjaladeva's men clarify this, Mahadeva states that a trial will have to be put instead of an immediate murder. Somadeva, the maharaja of Mahishmathi, releases Sivagami and even puts her in a better position in the court of Mahishmathi.Durgappa, a bhoomipathi () who is in charge of the Gauriparvat mountain is persuaded by Khanipathi Hidumba (who is in charge of the Gaurikanta mines) to declare independence from Mahishmathi and how their newly established Kingdom could become extremely rich with Gaurikanta stones. Sivagami's new ambition is to stop the mining happening in the Gauriparvat mountain.With Durgappa establishing the kingdom of Gauriparvat as him as Maharaja and Hidumba as Mahapradhana, Somadeva's continuously becomes more stressed. Pattraya wants to kill the governor of Kadarimandalam, Shankaradeva. He publicly insults the vassal ruler of Kadaraimandalam, Narasimha Varman, who is also the brother of imprisoned Princess Chitraveni. There he hits Narasimha's throne with contained Gaurikanta stones. The stones were then fought by the ministers and soldiers. Pattaraya had a small packet under his tongue with contained snake poison. He was sent to Shankaradeva's office where Shankaradeva recognized him. Pattaraya bit the small packet which exposed poison and bit Shankaradeva who fell dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brimstone_Angels"title="Brimstone Angels">
The tiefling sisters Farideh and Havilar were abandoned by their mother at birth and have been raised by their adoptive father Mehen in an isolated village. Farideh makes a pact with the devil Lorcan that gives her special powers. Mehen and the two sisters subsequently move to the city of Neverwinter to work as bounty hunters. There they find themselves pawns in a far-reaching supernatural plot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_of_the_Mourning_Dawn"title="Voyage of the Mourning Dawn">
After Seren's father died at the end of the Last War, she left home to strike out on her own. She found herself apprenticed to a master thief, but when her master is betrayed by an employer and murdered, Seren finds herself joining the crew of the very airship that she had robbed. Together they begin the search for the lost item called the Legacy of Ashrem that could change the entire world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Verdant_Passage"title="The Verdant Passage">
A group of heroes, each with their own objectives, work together against the evil sorcerer-king Kalak of Tyr, who is trying to transform himself into a deadly and immortal dragon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hana_no_Furu_Gogo"title="Hana no Furu Gogo">
After the death of her husband, Yoshinao, in 1981, Noriko Kai has been managing the French restaurant Avignon in Kobe left by Yoshinao for four years. One day, Masamichi Takami, a young painter, visited the recreant and offered to give a painting called White House to Noriko, as well as to hold his own exhibition. However, a letter from Yoshinao was found on the back of this painting and revealed to Noriko that he had a hidden child. Around that time, waiters Shuichi Akitsu, Toshihiro Mizuno, and manager Naoe Hayama quit their jobs at Avignon over a scandal that happened. When Noriko consulting with her acquaintance, Doctor Wong Kin Ming, she finds out that Yukio and Misa Araki, a gambling and diamond smuggling couple, were trying to take over Avignon Noriko asks Yoshinao's best friend Kenichi Kudo, a private detective, to investigate the Araki couple, but the driver Koshiba and chef Katsuro Kaga were attacked and injured. Avignon was forced to close temporarily, but with the encouragement of Takami and the efforts of Kaga, reopened soon after. However, Misa plans to take Jill, the daughter of her neighbor Reed Brown, as a hostage to try to take the land, but Noriko sneaks into the Araki couple's cruiser party and rescues Jill. Misa then tries to reach out to Mika, Yoshinao's secret child, but Noriko confronts Misa convinces her to not go with the plan, saying that she knew her sadness. After, Mika suddenly visits Avignon, and Noriko warmly welcomes and watches over her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_You_in_the_Cosmos"title="See You in the Cosmos">
Alexander Petroski, an 11-year-old European-Filipino-American, lives in fictional Rockview, Colorado with his mother. His brother, 24-year old Ronnie, is in Los Angeles being a sports agent. Alex has a puppy, Carl Sagan, named after his idol astrophysicist. Alex has a homemade rocket, "Voyager 3", where he plans to attach an iPod spray-painted in gold, on which he has been busy recording various audio, and launch it at the Southwest High-Altitude Rocket Festival (SHARF) to recreate the Voyager Golden Record.Alex embarks with Carl Sagan to travel to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the festival is located. At the train, he befriended martial arts master Zed, who after taking a vow of silence only communicates with a chalkboard. Zed brings him to SHARF, where his roommate friend Steve will be launching a rocket, which their roommate Nathan designed. Miserably, Alex's rocket crashed seconds after launch, though his iPod is not damaged.Alex receives an Ancestry.com email that his dad, Joseph David Petroski, is located in Las Vegas, Nevada. Having little knowledge of his dad, Alex begs Steve to drive him there; Ronnie permits, and Steve accepts. At Vegas, Carl Sagan goes missing; the search for him prompts Alex to find his dad and ask for help. Alex asks a woman named Terra if Joseph David Petroski is around; it is revealed that Terra is Joseph's daughter, and that she is Alex's half-sister. Terra was born to Joseph and his first wife Donna, and after Joseph's death, Donna moved on to another man, Howard. Alex and Terra got along quickly, mostly due to Alex's ardent attitude.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Souls_(novel)"title="All Souls (novel)">
The novel follows Astra Dell and her classmates at Siddons School over the course of their senior year.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blood_of_the_Vampire"title="The Blood of the Vampire">
The novel opens in Heyst, Belgium, where 21-year-old Harriet Brandt meets two English women, Margaret and Elinor. Harriet reveals that she was raised in a Jamaican convent, following the death of her parents ten years prior. When she came of age, she used her inheritance to move to Europe to start a new life. Although one of the women find Harriet distasteful, Margaret Pullen likes Harriet. Harriet is fond of Margaret's young child, but Margaret is cautious about letting Harriet hold her. Harriet reminisces about her childhood on a plantation, saying that she misses its overseer because he let her whip the slaves when they were lazy. After Harriet touches her, Margaret suddenly feels drained and begs Harriet to let her go. After finding out that she is wealthy, a local aristocrat, the Baroness Gobelli, invites Harriet back to England. Harriet spends more time with Margaret's child, who becomes severely ill.A medical professional—Doctor Phillips—is summoned. He does not know what is wrong with the child, but recognises her surname because he knew her father. The baby grows ill and dies. Harriet travels to England, and Harriet begins spending many hours with the Baroness' young son, Bobby. She also meets and falls in love with a socialist, Anthony Pennell. Bobby also becomes ill, and the Baroness accuses her of being cursed with both "black blood" and "vampire blood". Harriet, frightened, returns to Doctor Phillips, who tells her about her family history. Her father was a doctor who performed experiments on his plantation's slaves until they revolted and killed him, and her mother was the daughter of a slave of the Judge of Barbados. He advises Harriet that she should never marry, and instead withdraw from society. Shortly thereafter, Bobby dies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Diaries_of_Adrian_Mole,_1999–2001"title="The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole, 1999–2001">
The book begins in November 1999, with Adrian and his two children Glenn and William living at his mother's house in Ashby-de-la-Zouch following the fire that destroyed his house at the end of "". His mother Pauline is now living at the Mole family home in Wisteria Walk and marries Ivan Braithwaite, father of Adrian's childhood sweetheart Pandora. Adrian's father George is living at the Braithwaite family home 'The Lawns' with Ivan's ex-wife Tania, who he has recently married.Adrian continues to write his 'serial killer-comedy' "The White Van" and briefly finds work as a turkey plucker. His mother forces him to leave Wisteria Walk after he fails to visit her in hospital, and he temporarily lives at The Lawns before being allocated a council house on the rough Gaitskell Estate, where he becomes neighbours to the notorious Ludlow family. He also begins an on-off relationship with his housing officer Pamela Pigg, but is still in love with Pandora, now a Labour MP for Ashby.His father spends several months in hospital with a series of infections he contracts while recovering from falling off a ladder. Adrian ends up looking after an elderly woman, Mrs Wormington, but she dies from hypothermia as a result of a trip to Mablethorpe. He also begins working in a burger van in a layby although he takes numerous days off and eventually resigns. After Ivan returns to The Lawns following his sectioning, George is released from hospital; he and Pauline subsequently reconcile and announce plans to marry each other for a third time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfinished_(book)"title="Unfinished (book)">
It has been described as a collection of personal essays, stories and observations by Chopra. "Unfinished" chronicles important moments in Chopra' life and her twenty-year-long career, such as working as an actress-producer and a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Children's_Bible"title="A Children's Bible">
## Context.Eve, the novel's narrator, belongs to a group of children staying at a large, rented estate with their parents for the summer. The children, mostly disgusted by their parents' hedonistic behavior, spend most of their time on the property of the estate, until a hurricane interrupts their activities. The parents are never named, and the book filters their activities through the perception of Eve and the other children.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samlade_verk"title="Samlade verk">
Set in Gothenburg, Gustav Becker, a distinguished artist, is being prepared for a major retrospective in his career from the 1980s onwards. At the same time, a psychology student Rachel changes and meets her mysteriously missing mother's face on an exhibition poster that is wallpapered across town. In the same vein, Rachel's father, the publisher Martin Berg, is thrown into a dizzying life crisis.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historien_om_någon"title="Historien om någon">
"Historien om någon" is a mystery picture book with an unseen point-of-view character serving as a stand-in for the reader, who searches for an unknown visitor in a home. In a hide-and-seek-like fashion, the reader follows the trail of a red string of yarn from the point-of-view character's grandma's knitting, which the visitor has brought with them.Each page spread shows a new room in the house, and gives a clue to the identity of the visitor – including a tipped-over jug of milk, and a part where the string, seemingly impossibly if the visitor were human, loops around a baluster in the staircase – before the point-of-view character follows the string to a cabinet, and, looking through its keyhole, finds that the visitor is the cat Nisse.The book's narrator invites the reader into the home, and is used to make the reader-character an active part of the story, with phrasings directed to the reader indicating action on their part, such as "Let's open the door".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hearing_Trumpet"title="The Hearing Trumpet">
92-year-old Marian Leatherby lives in Mexico with her son Galahad, his wife Muriel, and her grandson Robert. Upon being gifted a hearing trumpet by her friend Carmella, Marian discovers that her family is planning to put her in an institution. At the institution Marian finds herself drawn into surreal and occult intrigue, conspiracy and adventure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lights_that_Failed"title="The Lights that Failed">
This first volume covers the period from the end of fighting in World War I and the multitude of peace treaties negotiated to end the conflict, to the disintegration of European financial systems as a result of the Great Depression and the rise of Adolf Hitler. Steiner weaves together two distinct threads of interwar historiography, security and economics, to create a "big picture" holistic view of this period of history, covering both great powers and smaller and emerging nations.Steiner's narrative focuses mainly on the political and economic history of the period and its impact international relations. She focuses on the complex, unforgiving, and often harsh realities of nationalist economic and security policies and how they impacted the relationships between established and emerging European nations. One of Steiner's major contribution to the field of international history is her coverage of the lesser powers of Europe, such as those in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, which are normally overlooked in works on the period, which are dominated by a great powers narrative and perspective.The book is structured with two parts of unequal length. The first part of the work is on 1918 to 1929 and focuses on reconstruction of a "shattered" Europe after World War I. The second and shorter part is on what Steiner refers to as the "hinge years" of 1929 to 1933 ands focuses on the impact of the Great Depression in Europe, the failure of disarmament as a cornerstone of European security, and the surge of nationalism which upended the European international order. Steiner refers to those years as "hinge year" because she "determined that the doors of Europe that had swung open after the First World War – favouring a reduction of barriers within Europe with regard to the movement of goods, money, people and ideas – slammed firmly shut by 1933." Steiner also covers the impact of the on internal and external European relations. The book concludes with a chronology of international events between 1919 and 1933 and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triumph_of_the_Dark"title="The Triumph of the Dark">
The central themes of the work are Hitler, his consolidation of power within Central Europe, Germany's Lebensraum and Völkisch movement, Nazi racial policies, and Britain and France's responses to the Nazis' prewar aggression and expansion within Europe.Steiner also thoroughly explores the two tracks that Britain and France pursued in prewar Europe: appeasing Germany and attempting to build an anti-Nazi alliance. Closely-related topics that Steiner explores are anticolonialism and colonial unrest, Italian and Japanese aggression, American and Soviet efforts to influence events and politics in Europe, Stalin's Great Purges, leadership instability in France and Britain, and the Spanish Civil War. Within the context of the failure of democracy to check rising authoritarianism and the struggle of international capitalism to escape the economic malaise caused by the Great Depression, the central figure of the narrative is Hitler, and Steiner takes the reader through the steps taken to bring about armed conflict with Nazism's eastern ideological enemy, Soviet communism, and the sidelining of western ideological enemies in the west. Steiner decisively rejects the historical revisionism that had defined much western understanding of interwar European history.The book is divided into two parts of roughly equal length. The first part focuses on 1933 to 1938, the retreat from internationalism, and the descent into nationalism in European affairs. The second part focuses on 1938 to 1939, the beginning of overt military aggression by Germany against its neighbors, and Britain and France's flailing attempts to create an international order to oppose Hitler and their simultaneous pursuit of disastrous policies of appeasement. The work concludes with a chronology of international events between 1933 and 1941 and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evening_and_the_Morning"title="The Evening and the Morning">
The novel begins in Combe, a fictional fishing village at the mouth of a river, just to the west of Portsmouth. Edgar, son of a boat builder, wakes up before dawn to sneak away with his lover, a married but unhappy woman, Sungifu (Sunni). Edgar has a job arranged in another village, and has prepared to sail himself and Sunni away to start a new life. Upon crossing the bay to Sunni's house, Edgar sees a Viking raiding party landing and rushes to raise the alarm. Edgar tries to save Sunni, but finds her dead at the hands of a Viking, whom Edgar kills, taking his axe, and then hiding. When the raid is over, Edgar sees his village destroyed, and his father murdered. Edgar's mother, and two dense brothers, Erman and Eadbald, are left penniless, homeless, and without even tools and lumber to build ships.In the aftermath of the destruction, brothers Wilf, Ealdorman of Shiring; Wigelm, Lord of Combe (Wilf's subservient); and Wynstan, Bishop of Shiring, survey the damage. Wigelm laments that his income will decrease as his newly-homeless residents of Combe cannot pay rents. Wynstan, the lascivious but intelligent brains of the family, tells Wigelm that he must allow the residents to take lumber from the forest and forbearance on the rent in order to rebuild their lives. Edgar's mother complains to the lords about the situation, and Wynstan sees a chance to remove her as seditious influence in Combe. He offers the family a secretly bad farm in Dreng's Ferry, a small community with a nunnery and church a few days upriver from Combe, and the family accepts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_and_Peasant_in_Russia"title="Lord and Peasant in Russia">
As the title indicates, the work in centered on the evolving relationships between landowners and peasants and how that relationship impacted the political world and economic conditions inside Russia. The author explores how the growing power of towns and trade, a dispersed population, and poor transportation and communications networks influenced this fundamental social relationship underlying Russian society. In the introduction to the work, the author describes their intention to,""trace the history of the lords and peasants, and of the relationships between them" through a period of one thousand years, "against the background of Russian political and economic evolution, " to produce "a study in the history of human freedom" and to "contribute ultimately to an understanding of the history of freedom in the European world""The work begins with a brief introduction about the physical geography of Russia and the nature of serfdom. From here the author works chronologically through its period, with short sections on the Kievan and Mongol eras, followed by a longer section on the 16th and 17th centuries and the establishment of serfdom. The final 150 years of serfdom make up the longest section and almost half the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizard's_Tide"title="The Wizard's Tide">
"The Wizard's Tide" narrates a year in the life of an eleven-year-old boy, Teddy Schroeder, and his family's attempt to survive the Great Depression. Teddy's father, a spendthrift who has been beset by failure in business, loses his job at the outset of the story, auguring the end of the lifestyle to which the family have been accustomed.As their lives continue to unravel, the Schroeders move aimlessly between their home in New Jersey and their summerhouse in Long Island. As the news of the abdication crisis becomes a topic of international conversation and the children play newly invented board game, Monopoly, Mr. Schroeder becomes increasingly dependent upon alcohol, which leads to a gradual breakdown in his marriage. Both Teddy and his younger sister, Bean, overhear late-night arguments, with their mother on one occasion asking her son to hide the car keys in bed with him, only to have Mr. Schroeder enter the room, drunk, and beg for their return.Having had an investment in a glass company fail, which he has funded both through borrowing and through the illicit sale of Mrs. Schroeder's stocks, Mr. Schroeder takes his own life in the New York City Subway, leaving his gold watch under Teddy's pillow. The grieving family leave New Jersey, and return to live with Teddy's maternal grandmother, Dan, in Pittsburgh, where they prepare to celebrate Christmas together without their father, and in the midst of growing financial uncertainty.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_in_Flames"title="Russia in Flames">
"Russia in Flames" explores the period of 19141921 and how the procession of war, collapse, and disintegration (as the subtitle indicates) brought Russia communists to power and eventual resulted in the Bolsheviks dominating and then destroying other political, social, and military power centers. Engelstein's work focuses on the "problem of power" and how the Bolsheviks navigated social, Marxist, and internal party politics to seize power, center it on themselves, and finally create a one party state. After this Engelstein explores how the Bolsheviks recreated government to exert control over both Russia and the Russian Empire and eventually win the Civil War. Along with the "problem of power", Engelstein explores the role violence and propaganda filled in the seizure and consolidation of power, and how it was used to destroy existing institutions and power centers making way for the Bolshevik institutions, ideas, and authority which replaced them.Engelstein argues that Lenin and the Bolsheviks "did not so much seize power but rather created it." She believe the collapse of the state and empire created a power vacuum that different revolutionary groups raced to fill. The main tools they employed to achieve total power were the unrestricted use of violence to destroy their political opponents, and the Red Army, created and led by Leon Trotsky, which despite its many limitations ultimately suppressed the white and green forces, and defeated the foreign interventions. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Friend_(novel)"title="The Friend (novel)">
The unnamed narrator, a writer living in Manhattan, recalls the life and recent suicide of her best friend and mentor, also unnamed. Addressing him in the second person, she recounts her friend's three troubled marriages and his career as a college professor. The narrator reveals that the main point of contention between her and her friend involved his illicit affairs with his female students. The narrator meets with her friend's third wife, who asks her to adopt her friend's senior Great Dane, Apollo. The wife, whom the narrator calls "Wife Three", explains that Apollo appears to be in mourning and has been temporarily placed in a kennel. Recalling the story of Hachikō, the narrator reluctantly agrees to take Apollo in.Though dogs are prohibited in her building, the narrator thinks of a New York law regarding the keeping of pets in apartments: that, if a tenant openly keeps a dog in an apartment for a period of three months, and during those three months the landlord does not take action to evict the tenant, the tenant may legally keep the dog. Though the narrator's building superintendent, Hector, tells her to get rid of Apollo, the narrator hopes Hector will not inform the landlord within the three months.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombies_and_Shit"title="Zombies and Shit">
A large group people awaken in the middle of a post apocalyptic type wasteland with no recollection of how they got there. Each person is equipped with a backpack of supplies and an odd weapon. The group soon finds out that they are a part of a reality show known as Zombies and Shit and their objective is to get to the rescue zone where there will be a helicopter waiting to take them to safety. This island is crawling with zombies that are there for the sole purpose of feasting on their flesh. It soon becomes apparent to the group that there is only one seat available on the helicopter. Zombies will not be the only things trying to stop them from reaching the rescue zone alive as soon they will have to turn on each other.Shaun of The Dead meets Battle Royale in this over the top, action packed, and all out bloody gore fest of a battle for survival.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_and_Sawdust"title="Sunset and Sawdust">
Sunset Jones is a beautiful red-headed woman and wife in East Texas in the 1930s. One night during a cyclone Sunset gets fed up of all the rape and abuse being done onto her by her husband, Pete, that she shoots him dead. Her husband Pete however was the constable of the nearby town known as Camp Rapture. Soon the town gets a new sheriff as Sunset's mother-in-law arranges for her to take over Pete's duties. This was not accepted by some of the residents in town. Soon Sunset will find out more about the town as a double homicide takes place. Her investigation to seek justice and answers will pull her into a journey filled with greed, deceit, double-dealings, and unthinkable acts of maliciousness. Sunset will need to uncover the truth of what is really going on with the help of her own posse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veli_Jože_(novel)"title="Veli Jože (novel)">
Veli Jože belonged to the people of Motovun, who did not treat him nicely.Similarly to Raold Dahl's 1982 novel, Jože is described as a friendly and good-hearted giant. He is both a giant and a giant-looking serf. The action begins when the "provveditore" Barbabianka, "šjor" Zvane and the guard of Motovun forest go about Istria to mark with lime the Turkey oaks that they will cut down and take away to Venice. It is a hot summer day. The "provveditore" is riding on a donkey, which at one point jumps up, for he sees a haystack next to some shack where a beautiful Turkey oak is growing. Barbabianka then decides that this Turkey oak will warm him this winter in Koper. As he begins to mark the tree, someone's strong hands grab the donkey and throw it up to the top of the tree. Beside the stack and the dead donkey stands the serf Jože, looking gloomily at the "provveditore".The "provveditore" is frightened and tells "šjor" Zvan to do something. Proto, the forest ranger, has a little fun at first because it is funny to him to watch the "provveditore" shaking, but then he calms the giant. Barbabianka and šjor Zvane put a stick in his hands and order him to strike and tame the giant. At first he is afraid to approach him in any way, but then he goes on and hits him. Jože is ordered to kneel down and kiss the gentleman's hand, which he does. "Šjor" Zvan explains to Jože that this is a gentleman, and that he would take him through the forest to the city. Along the way, Barbabianka realizes that Jože is an obedient serf, but he is still afraid. He questions him as to whether he has had enough food and how old he is.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa's_Husband"title="Santa's Husband">
"Santa's Husband" "tells the story of a black Santa Claus and his white husband who both live in the North Pole. Santa’s spouse frequently fills in for his husband at malls."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_in_Revolution"title="Russia in Revolution">
The book covers the period from 18901928, a wider time frame than many works on the Russian Revolution. This reflects the author's intention to understand the Russian Revolution as a long term process, rather than focus on the narrower events of 1917 as exceptional.The work addresses many major themes and topics that the revolution grew from, including:The book opens with an introduction which details the author's perspectives and the questions they are seeking to answer. The first chapter provides an overview of the half century preceding the main events of the book until the 1905 Revolution, looking at the reigns of Alexander II and III, and the beginning of Nicolas II's reign and concludes as Stalinism emerges during Stalin's consolidation of power and the end of the New Economic Policy, setting the stage for the era of central planning, collectivization, and industrialization. The structure of the book is both chronological and topical: The work concludes with an essay reflecting on the causes and turning points of the Russian Revolution. There is no formal bibliography, however the extensive notes form a valuable resource on the scholarly writing about the period.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maiden_&amp;_Princess"title="Maiden &amp; Princess">
A king and queen announce a royal ball to find a bride for their son, the prince. One maiden who knows the prince from battling alongside him is not excited to attend, but at the urging of her mother she goes nonetheless. Guests at the ball, including the king and queen, encourage the maiden to dance with the prince but she panics and steals away to a balcony to get some air.The prince's sister encounters the maiden on the balcony and the two sit together and speak. As they are talking, the maiden takes the princess's hand, realizing she has fallen for her instead of her brother. The king and queen find the pair on the balcony and remark that they are well-suited for each other. After the maiden asks the princess to dance, they kiss. Later, the couple spends a great deal of time together and eventually get married.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_Buster_Sparkle?"title="Who Killed Buster Sparkle?">
Set in Clover, Mississippi, the novel revolves around a drag queen named Peaches who is suddenly visited by Buster, the ghost of an African American man, who may or may not have been murdered.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_of_Insects"title="The Life of Insects">
The novel is set in the early 1990s in the Crimea. All the characters in the novel are both human (racketeers, drug addicts, mystics, prostitutes) and insects. It is an allegory of human life, realized by comparison with the life of insects (which is an obvious parallel to the play by the Czech writer Karel Čapek Pictures from the Insects' Life (1921). The characters chosen by the author are typical representatives of the society of the early 1990s. But this dating does not play a role in itself because the types chosen are quite universal and suitable for all periods. The book has deep connotations with the teachings of Carlos Castaneda, Marcus Aurelius and Buddhism. Although titled novel the book consists of fifteen short stories that are not related to each other. The heroes of these short stories appear in the first pages as ordinary beings who could be human. Then, Pelevine introduces the delirious details by describing, with great precision and a perfect knowledge of entomology, which allows the reader to know that they are insects. The first publication of the novel was in the magazine Znamya in 1993. The author was awarded the 1993 Znamia magazine prize for "the best work on the life and exceptional adventures of democracy in Russia". This prize is traditionally awarded by the magazine to one of its own best publications, with sponsorship from Materik Publishing. Published in English in 1996.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Book_of_the_Werewolf"title="The Sacred Book of the Werewolf">
This novel is the story of a former fox-woman called A Huli. The female model she represents is one of the few in Pelevin's novels to escape her usual sarcastic irony. The narration is conducted from a feminine point of view, that of A Huli. Her feelings of love are described with tenderness. She is smarter and more sensitive than her male partners. The mystery of her attraction to Pelevin remains intact, despite the differences she presents in comparison to the heroines of her other novels. The motif of the animal-woman is frequent in Pelevin's novels. The short stories in The Life of Insects and the present work The Sacred Book of the Werewolf are two examples. This motif does not devalue the gaze towards the woman but makes it more original. It also helps to translate the idea that woman is never what she appears at first sight, that she has a double nature, that she is a mystery. Pelevine likes in Buddhism and oriental mythologies the role of the female deities rivaling the male deities but possessing more power than the latter.The fox-woman also evokes the Chinese mythology in which she is called Huli jing (in traditional Chinese: 狐狸精). In the traditional tales and legends of Japan she is called Kitsune.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_Water_Protectors"title="We Are Water Protectors">
The narrator, an Ojibwe girl, recalls her grandmother teaching her about the sanctity of water. Their people foretell a black snake that will one day destroy their land and poison their water. The girl says that the black snake has already arrived in the form of an oil pipeline. She resolves to rally her people against it and protect their water supply for the sake of animals, plants, the environment, and the Earth. Reflecting on her grandmother's words, the girl declares that "we are water protectors" who will give the black snake the fight of its life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Helmet_of_Horror"title="The Helmet of Horror">
The genre of this work is a piece written in the form of a chat between the characters. But in Pelevin's production, on his site, it is listed in the novel category, and several articles on the subject also use the name novel. But some critics refer to the work as a play genre, or as a dramatic narrative. Eight characters are participants in a very strange chat. Each of them, in an unknown way, finds himself in one of the very similar rooms with a keyboard and a computer. Soon they understand that they have become participants in the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. But the situation is much more complex than it seems at first glance. Each character has his or her own labyrinth behind the door of his or her room.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_Accounts"title="Fake Accounts">
In late 2016 the narrator, a blogger, has feelings of ambivalence towards her boyfriend, Felix. She decides to go through his phone where she discovers a secret Instagram account where he espouses conspiracy theories, theories which he does not appear to believe in real life. She decides to break up with him.The narrator recounts how she met Felix while on a pub crawl in Berlin and the two began a long-distance relationship with Felix eventually joining her in Brooklyn.Feeling excited about the prospect of ending her relationship with Felix, she nevertheless decides to delay breaking up with him until after the 2017 Women's March, which she attends reluctantly. Felix does not text her during the March which angers her. She later receives a call from his mother that reveals Felix was killed while biking.The narrator decides to quit her job and move to Berlin on a whim. Knowing no German (and with no plans to learn) she survives in the English language ex-pat community, taking an under-the-table job babysitting children. Bored, she also begins to aggressively date, making connections through online dating apps and coming up with different personas to try out on the men she is dating.The narrator eventually receives a call from a former friend that reveals that several hours earlier Felix reappeared at a work event with his former colleagues, revealing he faked his death as a piece of performance art and is now living in Berlin. The narrator sends Felix an angry email to which he responds that he assumed she knew he faked his own death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_V"title="Empire V">
A young man named Roman Aleksandrovich Shtorkin becomes a vampire. This happens when Roman accidentally meets another vampire, Brama, who decided to kill himself after a vampire duel. But before he does, he is obliged to give the other man his "tongue" – the special essence that makes a person a vampire. With the help of the "tongue", a vampire can read the mind of a human or another vampire by tasting their blood; as vampires say, "tasting".This is how Roman becomes a vampire. Having changed his name to Rama according to vampire tradition, he must now change his way of thinking. To do this, like every young vampire, he takes a course in the two main vampire sciences: glamour and discourse. The vampire's socialization is paradoxical: on the one hand, he was and, to some extent, remains human. On the other hand, he becomes a vampire, who must by nature control glamour and discourse instead of succumbing to it. For the vampire, this is the primary way to control humanity and, at the same time, to feed on it.Rama quickly settles into vampire society. Gradually he becomes more and more accustomed to the fact that all his new acquaintances and himself bear the names of gods, that the word "blood" is indecent to say aloud, and that he is no longer human. Vampire society lives with little overlap with human society and is built on values that have nothing to do with humanity. At the same time, humanity is pervaded by vampire agents, the "Chaldeans", who set the cultural and social direction the vampires want. A vampire can have a full love relationship only with his own kind, and the book describes Rama's complicated relationship with a new vampire named Hera.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_Apollo"title="Batman Apollo">
Rama is a young vampire who has already mastered the vampire craft. He already knows the basics: he can stealthily bite a person's neck, so that from the little red liquid all the secrets of that person's soul are revealed to him. As we already know from the first part of the novel – vampires rule the world.Now Rama faces another great challenge: trained as a diver, he plunges again and again into uncertainty, into the realm between life and death, and also meets the supreme vampire, the eternal Dracula, who shares with him the secrets of this world. Modern culture in general, the actual world order as a whole (both in Russian and Western variants) in Pelevin evoke a passionate aversion. In generalized form, the essence can be conveyed as follows. There is an elite in the world, more or less understanding the essence of the processes taking place (the vampires and the Chaldeans chosen from among the people serving them), and the rest of humanity. The elite control people with discourse (ideological twaddle) and glamour (the cultural contentlessness of consumer society). Simply put, by messing with the minds of the average person. The media, the Internet, computer games, and so on serve the same purpose.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_World_Came_to_Town"title="The Day the World Came to Town">
"The Day the World Came to Town" opens with a history of the town and an explanation of the strategic military and commercial importance of Gander International Airport. On September 11, DeFede reports that Gander, with a population of approximately 10,000, accepted 38 previously unscheduled planes carrying approximately 6,800 passengers and crew, most of which were stranded there until U.S. airspace reopened nearly a week later.From The "Newport Beach Independent":
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Place_Inside_of_Me"title="A Place Inside of Me">
A young Black boy describes "a place inside of me" that holds all of his emotions, such as happiness as he plays basketball with his friends. He feels sorrowful one day when he is at a barbershop and the news on the television reports that a girl has been shot by the police. Later, the boy is afraid when he sees the light from a police siren outside his home, and angry as protestors holding Black Lives Matter signs face off against the police. He feels a yearning to be free, pride in his heritage, and peace as he meditates with his classmates. Finally, he feels compassion and hope as he attends a candlelight vigil, and love for his community. Reflecting on all of his emotions that he has experienced throughout the year, the boy resolves to love himself most of all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Summers"title="Billy Summers">
Billy Summers is a 44-year-old hitman and former U.S. Marine sniper, who only accepts jobs killing truly evil men, but now he wants to retire from the assassin life altogether. Nick Majarian, a mobster whom Billy has worked for many times before, offers him one last job--one that pays $500,000 up front, and $1.5 million after it's done.Billy's target is Joel Allen, also a hitman, who was arrested for murdering a man who won a fortune off of him in a poker game. Allen has claimed to have valuable information that the police wants in order to make a plea deal, and apparently, someone, whom Nick can't name, doesn't want Allen talking, which is why Billy has been hired to take him out. The job requires Billy to spend some quiet time undercover as a resident in the small town of Midwood, where an office space has been rented out for his use. Billy's cover story is that he is a writer named David Lockridge, who has been tasked by his publishing agent to stay there, and go to the office and write each day in an attempt to meet his deadline. The office has a direct view of the courthouse, where Joel Allen will eventually be taken to be arraigned for his murder charge. Billy is meant to shoot and kill him at that time, and then disappear.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Time_to_Remember_(novel)"title="A Time to Remember (novel)">
Still mourning his brother who died in Vietnam, David travels back in time to 1963 to try to prevent the assassination of President Kennedy, to save the president and his brother and all other lives lost in the war. When he gets to 1963, he is unable to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from shooting JFK and is instead arrested himself for the killing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Season_(novel)"title="Hurricane Season (novel)">
One day, a group of children from the small town of "La Matosa" discover a decomposing corpse in a canal belonging to the Witch of the town. The Witch was a feared and respected woman who everyone turned to for help with their various problems. She lived in a large dilapidated house where she held parties with the village youth, to whom she paid money in exchange for sexual favors.A girl named Yesenia lived with her grandmother and her cousins near the Witch. Throughout her life, Yesenia felt rejected by her grandmother in favor of her cousin Maurilio (nicknamed Luismi). She hated Maurilio because, despite having become an alcoholic and drug addict, he was still the favorite of their grandmother. Luismi eventually moves in with his mother, Chabela, and his stepfather, Munra. Months later there are rumors that he has a wife and is expecting a child. On the day of the murder, Yesenia watches from her house and sees Munra's truck parked at the house of the Witch. She then sees Luismi with another man carrying a bundle to the vehicle. Yesenia informs the police of everything she saw, with the intention of having her cousin arrested.Munra is arrested after Yesenia's statement, but he claims not to know anything about the matter. He recalls days earlier having taken Luismi with his wife, Norma, to the hospital after she began bleeding and running a fever. They both quickly flee after child welfare services discover that Norma is thirteen years old. The next day, Munra finds Luismi in the courtyard observing a small object covered in blood that is buried in a hole in the ground. Munra is convinced that it is a work of witchcraft. After picking up Brando, a friend of Luismi, they pay Munra to take them to the Witch. Munra has been uncomfortable around the Witch ever since he found out she is a transgender woman. Luismi and Brando enter her house, and half an hour later they exit carrying out a bundle wrapped in cloth. Munra decides not to ask and takes them to the outskirts of town, where the boys dump the bundle in a canal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineapple_Water_for_the_Fair_Lady"title="Pineapple Water for the Fair Lady">
## Operation "Burning Bush".The protagonist of the novel, Semion Levitan, likes to imitate the voice of the famous World War II era radio host Yuri Levitan in Russia. He became an English teacher in Moscow during the period following perestroika. These two occurrences lead him to be involved in a secret operation of the security forces. He had to reproduce the voice of God from a distance in the brain of President George W. Bush, who was considered very religious. To this end, Semion takes an accelerated theological training course in a secret base, using texts with religious content and using narcotics to experience mystical experiences. In addition, he is implanted with a tooth equipped with the appropriate technology.During the secret operation it appears that the Americans are conducting similar operations with the leaders of the USSR and then Russia, with the difference that the broadcasts reproduce the voice of the devil in the brains of the Russian leaders and not that of God. But with the same goal of influencing their geopolitical decisions.The story is interspersed with Pelevine's sarcastic humour. It is written in the first person, that of the hero Semion. Unlike his previous stories, the mystical experiences take place in a Western monotheistic setting rather than an Eastern one. The idea of the novel is based on the religious beliefs of George W. Bush, who put forward expressions such as: "God speaks through me" (in 2004) and again: "God told me to attack Al Qaeda and I did it. With the help of God who is on our side we will be victorious".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_a_Perm_Sec"title="Death of a Perm Sec">
Set in 1980's Singapore, the novel examines the death of Permanent Secretary of the housing ministry, Chow Sze Teck, who was accused of accepting millions of dollars in bribes over his career. While the death first appears to be suicide by a cocktail of alcohol, morphine and Valium; doubts emerge as new facts come to life. With an ongoing investigation by a Criminal Investigation Department inspector who might not be what he seems, the family discovers there may be far more sinister circumstances behind Chow's death, that reach to the very top of government.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazel's_Amazing_Mother"title="Hazel's Amazing Mother">
Hazel is out for a walk with her beloved doll Eleanor. But when she makes a wrong turn, she encounters some kids who are up to no good. Fortunately, Hazel's amazing mother is there to rescue her, and set the bullies straight just in the nick of time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Disenchantment"title="The Myth of Disenchantment">
The first chapter of the book presents empirical and statistical data arguing that a widespread loss of belief in magic has not occurred in the Western world. Storm notes that disenchantment is not correlated with secularization and belief in some form of magic or the paranormal persists across most religious, educational, and age divisions. Storm argues that these data challenge theoretical attempts to rigidly distinguish the course of European history from the history of other regions.The subsequent chapters challenge commonplace narratives about disenchantment in intellectual history. Storm argues that formative thinkers of the scientific revolution including Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, and Giordano Bruno did not see their projects as disenchanted.In the book's third chapter, Storm examines the roots of the myth of disenchantment in German Romanticism. Storm argues that figures such as Friedrich Schiller described disenchantment in mythic terms and traces the origin of concerns about disenchantment to the Pantheism controversy. Moreover, figures such as Friedrich Hölderlin actually anticipated a form of re-enchantment.Storm goes on to examine the connections between Spiritualism, the Theosophical Society, and early 20th-century scholarship on religion. He notes the parallels between Max Müller's research and Éliphas Lévi's magical treatment of the history of religions, as well as Müller's interest in Hermeticism. He also shows the connections between linguistics, scholarship on religion, and the ideas of Helena Blavatsky.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_God_(novel)"title="I Am God (novel)">
"I Am God" opens with God beginning to keep a journal about his view on modern society, and in particular his infatuation with Daphne, a young geneticist. Daphne, an atheist post-punk and anti-Catholic activist, attracts God's attention although he fails to understand why. Much of the book is epistolary, with God as a first-person narrator through his journal, discussing his thoughts on a humanity he finds unsatisfying; language is recent to him, as the God of the novel has mostly disclaimed and damned humanity on the basis of thinking human language and thought to be evil. The plot also features a love triangle between Daphne, God, and her mortal boyfriend Giovanni, an alcoholic and sexually uninhibited paleontologist.The God of "I Am God" has been characterized as neurotic, garrulous, and overly verbose. He also holds conservative views on matters of gender and sexuality, being called "half heteronormative deity, half embarrassing uncle" by Martin Riker of "The New York Times".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_from_Siberia"title="Return from Siberia">
The book follows two characters, John from present day Los Angeles, and Joseph Rakow in the Russian Empire. John and his family uncover a manuscript of his grandfather, and learn about his life as it is translated chapter-by-chapter. Joseph, growing up near Pinsk, is exiled due to his political beliefs at age 15, and is sent to live in Siberia for ten years. Upon return, he decides to immigrate to the United States, traveling to Chicago. Taken aback by the poor working conditions of workers in his new home, he dedicates his life to union organizing. He discovers his brother has also moved to the United States, however has taken a radically different path in life to his own. Meanwhile, in the present day, John works as a political consultant for Patti Alvarado, a democrat campaigning in Texas against an incumbent Republican congressman. During the campaign, the congressman attempts to demonize Alvarado due to her history as an undocumented immigrant from Mexico.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ape_Gama"title="Ape Gama">
A young boy growing up in a village in Ceylon and how he deals with rapid economic and social changes that are going on around him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vengeance_Is_Mine,_All_Others_Pay_Cash"title="Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash">
Ajo Kawir is one of the toughest fighters in the Javanese underworld, his fearlessness matched only by his unquenchable thirst for brawling. But the young thug is driven by a painful secret: he is impotent. When he finally meets his match in the shape of the fearsome, beautiful bodyguard Iteung, Ajo is left bruised, battered, and overjoyed. He has fallen in love. But will he ever be able to make Iteung happy if he can’t get it up?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_for_three_Zuckerbrins"title="Love for three Zuckerbrins">
The novel mentions such trends as Google, Facebook, the cult of consumption, tolerance, Internet addiction, terrorism, information slavery. Heroes live, reflect, philosophize. And all this happens against the background of the well-known game Angry Birds.The protagonist of the novel Kesha, lives in two dimensions, in the present and in a possible alternative future.In the present, Kesha works for an online news agency called Contra.ru. There are many interpretations of this name alone: kontora in the sense that it was before the offices, and office in the sense of something to do with the special services, and contra in the sense of opposition and similar to the name of several well-known Internet projects. And so Pelevin does with many names and titles.Kesha's day off is described. All day he sits at his computer: trolling in various posts, playing computer games, watching a movie, masturbating on a porn site to a Japanese animation. By the end of the day he thinks he should get some air: he opens the window, sighs, and closes it.Kesha had a real girlfriend, but he rarely went out with her. He didn't like that she was overweight. When he did have sex with her, he imagined she was a Japanese girl.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Caretaker_(novel)"title="The Caretaker (novel)">
Emperor Paul I, the great alchemist and mesmerist, was not assassinated by the conspirators-the coup was a spectacle that allowed him to leave St. Petersburg unnoticed. Paul the Alchemist departed for the new world created by the genius of Franz Anton Mesmer - Idyllium. Paul became its first Caretaker. For three centuries Idyllium has been hiding in the shadows of our world, interacting with it according to special laws. It is up to the Caretakers to protect Idyllium, and there have been many of them. Each new one must learn the secret of Idyllium and understand who he is.Pelevin took as his hero a historical figure as far removed from actuality as possible: the Emperor Paul I. His consciousness turned out to be able to organize a ramified, detailed, stable illusion, to populate it with characters, events and everyday life, history - "Illusium" turned out. That is, almost all the action of the novel takes place literally "in the head" of the emperor. And the reader, who takes what is happening at face value, is also at this point co-authors as well as participants in the Illusion. We obediently support it with our reading energies. The metaphor here is transparent. We can guess whose, shall we say, inner world Pelevin is alluding to: the Emperor Paul, Mikhailovsky Castle, St. Petersburg... There are too many coincidences to consider this a portrait of any statesman. Let us put it this way - this is "the inner world of a generalized Russian statesman", which, in general, has changed little over 200 years. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhuck_10"title="IPhuck 10">
A literary-police algorithm named Porfiry Petrovich (the essence of his job is to investigate crimes and, in parallel, to write detective novels about them-the proceeds of which fill the coffers of the Police Department) hopes to obtain a murder case that might launch his literary career, but instead finds himself rented out to a private client. The hero narrator is a writing mind devoid of bodily embodiment. He says of himself that he is "a typical Russian artificial intelligence of the second half of the 21st century," a "police-literary robot ZA-3478/PH0 bilt 9.3" with the Dostoevsky name Porfiry Petrovich. He lives only in the network space, and his character, according to his own apt definition, "is painted in the contrasting tones of our historical and cultural memory" and combines both "Radishchev and Pasternak and as if an interrogator in their joint case".His temporary landlady, an art historian and curator known by the pseudonym Maruha Cho (real name Mara Gnedikh), uses Porfiry to scout the contemporary art market. The police algorithm must help her find out everything possible about the transactions associated with the so-called "Age of Plaster" - the most important (and most expensive) period in modern art history, which occurs around our time, which is the beginning of the twenty-first century, and which is eighty years removed from the events described in the novel. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_Hulan_River"title="Tales of Hulan River">
This novel is marked with the characteristics that there is no single threat and central figure throughout the seven chapters. Instead, each fragmented chapter is drawn together based on the same space-time dimension and through the eye of the child narrator who comes on stage in chapter 3. A camera-like scene full of immersive details is consummately presented by the author.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paperboy_(children's_book)"title="The Paperboy (children's book)">
An unnamed paperboy and his faithful dog wake up early each morning while it is still dark and cold outside and his family is still asleep. After breakfast, the paperboy folds and delivers newspapers, accompanied by his dog; they both find happiness and comfort in the familiar routine. They finish at sunrise as the rest of the world begins to wake up, and they return home to fall asleep and dream.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Views_of_Mount_Fuji"title="Secret Views of Mount Fuji">
Businessman Fedya (last or penultimate in the Forbes list, but enough for a modest-sized yacht, beautiful women and cocaine) is tired of earthly pleasures – everything that beckoned in youth, having been achieved in maturity, has lost taste, weight and meaning. Soon he meets a young man named Damian with a suitcase in his hand and an offer that his master is unable to refuse. Damian is the creator of a startup that offers very wealthy people happiness ranging from the fulfillment of childhood fantasies to sophisticated transcendent experiences. The first experience of expensive luxury happiness returns to Fedya's life the object of his adolescent Erotic Dreams, which managed over the years to turn into an ugly middle-aged woman named Tanya.In parallel, the author sets out in some detail the Buddhist theory of jhāna – the successive stages of deep meditative absorption.Damian has many more opportunities to make his clients feel good, but they are all based in one way or another on erotic fantasies. And Fyodor Semyonovich wants not inventive sex, but happiness. And then Damian discharges Buddhist monks who, with the help of a cunning device, guide the businessman and his two buddies through the four jhānas – that is, levels of meditative absorption. But there is a serious side effect: those who have passed the four jhānas and experienced the bliss of them and various insights that they can give rise to cease to be interested in worldly pursuits.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bindiya_(novel)"title="Bindiya (novel)">
Kodai is a small farmer whose daughter, Bindiya, who helps his father in farming. Bindiya loves a village man named Mangra. The Villain of the story is the son of a Landlord, who loves Bindiya and tries to marry her forcefully. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_(novel)"title="T (novel)">
The main hero of the book, Count T., also known as Iron Beard, is a menace of villains and a favorite of the capital's "yellow" press, an adventurer and bon vivant, an expert in cross-dressing, a master of martial arts "naznas" (or "non-resistance to evil by violence"), a good shooter an excellent thrower of knives and other sharpened objects. The action of the novel begins in the early 20th century, on the train. In the compartment traveling gentleman in a checkered jacket and a priest, they are talking about Count Tolstoy. Then all of a sudden they pull out their pistols. It turns out that one is a disguised Count T., and the other is a detective who is after him. The Count leaps from the window of the train, and the gendarmes knock on the compartment door.The prototype of this grotesque character was, of course, the great Russian classic Leo Tolstoy, who turned into a superhero, a "Russian Zorro" with the battle cry "Beware! As is the custom with superheroes, Count T. makes a quest – to spite his enemies seeks the Optina Monastery, of which, due to a slight concussion, he remembers nothing but the name. On his way he sweeps away hordes of foes and has enlightened conversations with his compartment mate, the provincial landlady and the gypsy baron... 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Light_Touches"title="The Art of Light Touches">
## Iakinf.Four young guys – a TV journalist, a bank broker, a window fitter, and a sociologist with a euro emblem on his T-shirt – are looking for a change of impressions in the mountains (They met in Nepal on Latang – in the thin mountain air Russians get along with each other quickly and easily). They share a common hobby – trekking. The story is set in Kabardino-Balkaria on another hike.A cab driver drops them off at the foot of the mountain, and while the group is walking up to their lodging at dusk, a gray-haired man with a beard, falsely humming Joe Dassin, rides his bicycle down to them. This man is their guide, Akinfy Ivanovich, with whom the boys will go into the mountains and whom they will persuade to tell their story on the way.From lodge to lodge, like Scheherazade, Akinfy tells his story. At first it seems to the boys that the story is entirely made up and that Akinfy has no spiritual transformation. However, towards the end of the trek, the friends begin to suspect that the route, the story he tells, and their own fate are all connected in a very close and rather sinister way.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aru_Shah_and_the_Song_of_Death"title="Aru Shah and the Song of Death">
Aru Shah and Mini fend off zombies in the Night Bazaar, where Aru notes that the zombies have something over their hearts. The two see Brynne, their other Pandava sister, and Shah's doppelgänger, who steals a golden bow and arrow from Brynne before disappearing. Brynne is claimed by Lord Vayu and gets a mace that can alter wind direction. She is convinced that Aru is the thief and attacks her, knocking her unconscious. Aru awakens in the Council, with her other sisters and her classmate Aiden, son of an apsara. Evidence does not convince the Council that the Pandavas are innocent, and they task the sisters with retrieving the stolen bow and arrow. They are granted mystical items to use in their quest. Aru is given a vial of ideas. They agree to visit Kamadeva, the God of Love and owner of the bow and arrow.Aru learns that Aiden's mother gave up her position as an apsara to marry Aiden's father, but they are now getting divorced. Aiden secretly blames himself. When they meet Kamadeva, he suspects they are the thieves, but eventually begins to trust them. Kamadeva reveals that, while the arrow can join hearts, it received a darker power from that of his wife's, Rati, sorrow. It can now rip out hearts, and the effect becomes permanent after a while. Anyone with enchantment knowledge can carve out their soul song to use the weapons. Kamadeva cannot help them directly, however, he reveals that the location of the thief can be revealed through the soul song, which is in the nāga treasury if they speak the thief's name over it. They must stab the thief with the arrow once it is revealed, to cleanse the weapon of its dark power and return the Heartless to normal. Kamadeva also gives them Rishi Durvasa's business card.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Gosplan"title="Prince of Gosplan">
The protagonist of the novel is Sasha Lapin, a young specialist who works in the IT department of Gossnab (State Supplies). Along the way he plays one of the most popular games of the time – "Prince of Persia".; his co-workers also play computer games, such as "Abrams Battle Tank". Sasha's boss wants him to get some documents signed at Gosplan (the State Planning Committee), which involves making his way to higher levels of the video game and confronting the game's guardian figures. At one point one of the guards knocks him out but doesn’t kill him, because he happens to be carrying a copy of "The Sufi Orders in Islam", by J. Spencer Trimingham, so the guard assumes he must be a spiritual man; they have a conversation about Afghanistan and he tells the guard a long story about a prayer rug. In the end he manages to get the documents signed and starts the game again at Level 1.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah's_Lamp,_or_The_Last_Battle_of_the_Chekists_and_Masons"title="Methuselah's Lamp, or The Last Battle of the Chekists and Masons">
The novel is made up of four parts. The first, "The Production Narrative" is the memoirs of the trader Krimpai Mozhaysky, relating to our, well, very recent times. The second, "Space Drama" is a long letter from his great-great-grandfather, Markian Mozhaysky, to his bride, written in the 1880s. The third – "Historical Essay" – tells about a mysterious unit in the Gulag, where the great-grandfather was sitting Krimpai Methuselah that existed from the 20s to the 60s of 20th century. The fourth – "Operational Etude" – tells about the out-of-body experience of an FSB general in our days.All these parts complement each other, penetrate into each other, explain each other – and as a result not completely clear, but a vivid picture is built, according to which the confrontation between Russia and the West is explained by the clash of the higher forces ruling the world through the Masonic groupings. In today's Russia, the center of Freemasonry is the FSB, in America, the point of Masonic power is located in the basement of the Federal Reserve building.The first part is the story of a trader with the pornographic name of Krimpai (towards the end he changes it to the patriotic "Crimea"), a gay and professional double-crosser who alternately writes analytical reviews for both "liberals" and "Russian conservatives". 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_Underground_World"title="Journey to the Underground World">
Zanthodon is envisioned as an immense circular cavern five hundred miles wide, one hundred miles beneath the Sahara Desert, a refugium preserving various prehistoric faunas and antique human cultures that have found their way into it throughout the ages.When Professor Percival P. Potter, who has discovered an entrance to Zanthodon, is saved by adventurer Eric Carstairs from thugs in Port Said, Egypt, the two team up to explore the legendary realm. Traveling by helicopter, they descend into the subterranean world through a volcanic tunnel, only to crash when they reach their destination. They are now effectively marooned in Zanthodon.After witnessing a conflict between a triceratops and a mammoth they are captured and enslaved by Neanderthals together with a number of native humans. These include Darya, daughter of a tribal king, Jorn, a hunter, and Fumio, a villainous chieftain. Eric leads a slave revolt, freeing the others, but is himself retaken. On the plus side, he saves the life of Hurok, one of his captors, thus befriending him. Meanwhile, Potter and the rest of the freed captives are attacked by corsairs.The author provides as an appendix "A Stone Age Glossary" at the end of the book, enumerating the various prehistoric animals used, together with their supposed native names.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_in_Relation_to_Air_Travel"title="Epidemiology in Relation to Air Travel">
The book deals briefly with the danger of spreading infectious disease via aircraft as flight times in the 1930s brought West Africa and India within a few days' travel of England and Europe, and the United States more speedily reached from Central and South America. Massey noted that travelling by aeroplane, from countries where major infectious diseases were common, to countries where those diseases were rare or non-existent, risked spreading those diseases during the incubation period. It was aimed at informing health authorities and offered solutions for prevention. By comparing the travel times of travelling by ship to those of travelling by air, he demonstrated how particularly four quarantinable diseases (plague, cholera, yellow fever and smallpox), could arrive in the UK in the early 1930s. He made particular note of mosquitoes and the risk of transferring yellow fever. In the preface, he wrote:Speedier transport is equivalent to a reduction of distance. This was shown when steamships superseded sailing vessels. It is demonstrated more forcibly today by the events of civil aviation. Among the momentous advantages, fraternal and commercial, born of this development, there is the disadvantage that countries affected by certain major infectious diseases are brought nearer to countries which ordinarily enjoy freedom therefrom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Thirteen"title="All Thirteen">
The book recounts the 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue, in which 12 boys on a soccer team and their coach were rescued after they were trapped in the flooded Tham Luang Nang Non cave. It includes scientific information related to the rescue, including details on caverns and diving, and features photographs and maps of the region.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanthodon"title="Zanthodon">
Zanthodon is envisioned as an immense circular cavern five hundred miles wide, one hundred miles beneath the Sahara Desert, a refugium preserving various prehistoric faunas and antique human cultures that have found their way into it throughout the ages.As the novel opens, protagonist Eric Carstairs, Professor Potter, and their Zanthodonian companions have been separated, and must separately face the menaces of Kairadine Redbeard, corsair captain of the "Red Witch", the dwarfish Gorpaks, the Gorpaks' leech-like masters the Sluagghs, and the Neanderthal Drugars. Overcoming these various antagonists, the heroes are reunited in the end only to be taken captive by the Minoans of Zar, while Achmed the Moor makes off with Eric's love interest Darya.The author provides as an afterward "The People of Zanthodon" at the end of the book, enumerating the various characters and groups appearing therein.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Lantern_(short_story_collection)"title="Blue Lantern (short story collection)">
For Victor Pelevin's short prose the main cycle-forming principle is the subjective mystical-philosophical orientation common to all the stories.The title of Pelevin's first collection was given by the story of the same name "Blue Lantern", where the image of the blue lantern acts as a mystical symbol of the netherworld, or rather the illusory border between the two worlds. The image of the blue lantern is found in most of the stories in the cycle. The common philosophical theme that unites the majority of the stories in the cycle is the understanding of death as the beginning of a new life. In the story "The Blue Lantern" the characters playfully pose serious philosophical questions: what is death, who is called a dead man and who really is a dead man? However, the expected denouement at the end of the story does not happen: neither the heroes nor the author receive answers to the questions posed. But in the tradition of Russian classical literature for Pelevin is more important not to get an answer to the question, but the formulation of the question itself.If in the story "Blue Lantern" the author leaves these questions open, in essence only poses these questions, then in the story "The Life and Adventure of Shed Number XII" the life story of the main character serves in part as an answer to the questions posed about the meaning of existence. The main character in the story is the shed who undergoes an inner evolution that leads him to the spiritual freedom that allows him to realize his cherished dream of transformation. His dream of becoming a bicycle. Spiritual improvement, natural giftedness, subtle inner organization of the protagonist in the perception and understanding of the world around him leads him to the realization of the long-awaited dream. Thus, death in the story is understood as a peculiar step in achieving spiritual freedom, the beginning of true and real life. It is noteworthy that in this case Pelevin's hero is an inanimate object - a shed. If in the first story children asked eternal questions, here the object is inanimate, far from poetic, but the author gives it the possibility not only to think, but also to dream, the father-in-law not simply spiritualizes, but creates a model of a thinking and deep being. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politics_of_Muslim_Cultural_Reform"title="The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform">
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a reformist modernizing movement swept into the different parts of the Islamic world. This movement is usually associated with the impact of European and Russian colonialism. Khalid's work focuses on the development of the Jadidism reform movement from the 1860s to the 1920s in tsarist Central Asia, primarily centered in the province of Turkestan and its capital in Tashkent. The book is based on Persian, Turkish, and Russian-language sources; the writings of the Jadids themselves are frequently cited and valuable biographical sketches of prominent Jadids are interspersed through the book. For lay readers and non-specialists, "The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform" forms an introduction to the cultural and social history of Central Asia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For specialists, the work increases understanding about the origins and development of nationalism in Central Asia, looks at Jadidism within the wider context of evolving intellectual discussion in the Muslim world, linking thought and developments Central Asia to similar processes in the Ottoman Empire, Iran, South Asia, and the Arab world.The author explores the impact both European colonialism and other Muslim societies had on the Jadidist movement. He moves the picture from Central Asia being on the periphery of discussion about the Russian Empire, to being a center of the Muslim world, showing it as both part of that world and a unique expression of it. The Russian Empire had similar movements among Muslim peoples in different parts of the empire, notably among the Crimean and Volga Tartars; Khalid's work focuses on what made Central Asian Jadidism different and distinctive, while also exploring how it interacted with other movements. The author moves past normal dualistic approaches to the topic, such as modem vs. premodem and Russian vs. Muslim, and sees a more nuanced picture where all these forces interact to create a unique Central Asian engagement with modernity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dear_Martin"title="Dear Martin">
"Dear Martin" follows Justyce McAllister, a high school student living in Atlanta and attending a predominantly white preparatory high school on a scholarship. Justyce is thrown to the ground and handcuffed by a white police officer. After the incident, Justyce attempts to make sense of life as a black teenager in the current political climate and begins writing letters to the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, asking himself, "What would Dr. King do if he were alive today?".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tech_Revolution"title="Anti-tech Revolution">
In the book, Kaczynski criticizes modern technological society (or "world-system" in Kaczynski's terminology) as a "self-propagating system" (which is a "self-propagating supersystem" consisting of various "self-propagating subsystems") that only seeks short-term benefits due to natural selection. He also argues that "the development of a society can never be subject to rational human control" (also the title of the first chapter) due to the unpredictable nature of the self-propagating system's evolution. As the self-propagating system continues to evolve, it will become ever more tightly coupled and highly complex, which are factors that greatly increase the risk of a catastrophic breakdown happening due to cascading failure.Chapter 2 provides a detailed explanation of "why the technological system will destroy itself," and predicts that due to progressive collapse, modern globalized society will completely collapse and destroy all life on the planet if allowed to continue developing in the "business as usual" scenario. Government policies will not be able to stop these self-propagating systems, since the pressures of natural selection would cause them to circumvent such policies by any means possible.Chapters 3 and 4 provide guidelines for an "anti-tech movement." However, there is no explicit mention of violence, since the book was written at the ADX Florence supermax prison and had to pass through prison censors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Adventure_of_Shed_Number_XII"title="The Life and Adventure of Shed Number XII">
In the story, the author reveals the anthropomorphic essence of objects that can think and suffer. The protagonist, shed number XII, undergoes an inner evolution leading to spiritual freedom and partially obtains answers to questions about the meaning of life.The protagonist of the story is shed, who undergoes an inner evolution that leads him to the spiritual freedom that allows him to realize his cherished dream of transformation. Shed's lifelong dream is to become a bicycle.He likes the feeling most of all, the source of which were bicycles, he realized this in his early childhood, when he was not yet a shed, but a set of planks. Sometimes, on a hot summer day, when everything around him hushed up, the shed would secretly identify itself with a folding Kama or Sputnik (brands of bicycles popular in the USSR) and experience happiness. In this state he could find himself fifty kilometers away from his present location and ride, for example, across a deserted bridge over a canal in concrete banks or along the lilac shoulder of a heated highway, turning into tunnels formed by bushes sprouting around a narrow dirt path, so that, after riding over them, he could take another road leading to the forest, through the forest, and then resting on the orange stripes above the horizon. He could probably drive it for the rest of his life, but he didn't want to, because that was what made him happy. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermit_and_Six-Toes"title="Hermit and Six-Toes">
The main characters of the story are two broiler chickens named Hermit and Six-Toes, who are raised for slaughter at the Lunacharskiy poultry plant. As the narration reveals, the community of chickens has a rather complex hierarchical structure depending on their proximity to the feeding trough.The plot of the story begins with Six-Toes's exile from society. Having been expelled from society and the trough, Six-Toes encounters Hermit, a chick philosopher and naturalist, wandering between different societies within the combine. Thanks to his remarkable intellect, he independently managed to master the language of the "gods" (i.e. Russian), learned to read the time by clock and understood that chickens hatch from eggs, although he did not see it himself.Six-Toes becomes a disciple and associate of Hermit. Together they travel from world to world, accumulating and summarizing knowledge and experience. Hermit's highest goal is to comprehend a certain mysterious phenomenon called "flight". Hermit believes: having mastered flight, he will be able to escape beyond the universe of the combine. It is the achievements of gifted loners, contrasted in the literal sense of dense collectivism, leads to an optimistic end. In the story, the author is very careful to point out that there are two reasons for becoming hermits: either one must be a Hermit, that is, a solitary thinker, or one must be a Six-Fingered Man, that is, a philistine who is no different but has six fingers, so society rejects such (society in the story is all the other chickens).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Werewolf_Problem_in_Central_Russia"title="A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia">
In the center of the narrative - the werewolves living in Russia. A character named Sasha, driven by an unconscious desire, sets out on a long journey in search of a certain vision he saw in an encyclopedia illustration. Throughout the story, folkloric imagery and motifs persist throughout.And this desire correlates with the actions of a fairy-tale folklore hero: to go there without knowing where, to see that without knowing what. Moreover, once there (who knows where), Sasha finds himself in a movie, in a certain (almost fairy-tale-like, mysterious) half-empty hall, in the company of a grandfather, whose whistle had something of a nightingale-robber, something of the departing ancient Russia. Looking for a place to spend the night, the hero comes to the conclusion that the grandmothers who let them spend the night usually live in the same places as the nightingales, bandits and koshchei, although the kolkhoz "Michurinsky" is not a less magical concept, if you think about it.Like a fairy tale hero, Pelevin's character unnoticeably finds himself at a crossroads. As in a fairy tale, the hero is faced with a choice: you go right... you go left... And this choice, as in a traditional fairy tale, serves as a kind of sign of the importance of those events that will happen to the hero, an important, but not yet known to him goal. In Pelevin's story, the hero is destined to become a chosen werewolf, a werewolf hero. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Sixteen_(Abdullahi_novel)"title="Sweet Sixteen (Abdullahi novel)">
The events of "Sweet Sixteen" take place over a weekend and follow Aliya, who has recently turned sixteen. Her father, a retired journalist, has written her a lengthy letter that reflects on her life thus far and gives her advice for the future.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_Again_(novel)"title="Come Again (novel)">
Kate Marsden is a mid-forties IT specialist who works for BelTech, an organisation which sanitises clients' online presence. Her husband, Luke, has recently died of an undiagnosed brain tumour and she is besides herself with grief. She quits her job and plans to commit suicide. Then one morning she wakes up in her campus room at university in 1992. She has gone back in time 28 years and is 18 again, but with all her present-day memories intact. She has yet to meet Luke and realises that she has an opportunity to alert him to his tumour and prevent his death later.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_(short_story)"title="Sleep (short story)">
The story is entirely devoted to the problem of dream-reality. The main character, Nikita, a student with the surname Sonechkin (literally translated from Russian as Sleeper), suddenly realizes that for most of his life he has not been fully aware of himself and the world around him. He "lives in a half-dream" in which there is no room for difficulties, but only a quiet existence. Nikita does not think about the goals of his actions, the motives for his actions, just like everyone around him: friends, parents, passersby-all immersed in a dream. This postmodern chronotope, based on the "junctions between realities," allows the author to consider the problem of power over the human consciousness, because the people around us, ordinary everyday people, sleep peacefully while the authorities do whatever they want. Sleep in Pelevin's story has certain gradations (steps and degrees): "night" and "day," "death" and "wonder," and so on. The author's mastery of the characters' transition to the beginning of life in the "collective-unconscious" mode occurs gradually and in stages in the story. Based on the text, we can conclude that this process is individual and can begin at different times and under different circumstances: in the family in kindergarten, at school, or belatedly, in high school, as it happens to the main character of the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_from_Nepal"title="News from Nepal">
In the story The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Pelevin translates it into the Soviet language. The heroes of the story are dead, and they are read an instruction book on how to behave for the first forty days. In the story, the author is ironic about the Soviet state system, according to Pelevin's idea it is the Soviet reality is a nightmare dream for the characters. The action of the story takes place as it seems at first glance in reality, but gradually the reader begins to understand that the world is actually a fiction. The story begins with a description of an ordinary working morning of Lyubochka, a rationalization engineer at the trolleybus park. She jumps out of the door of the trolley bus right into a puddle and walks to work. Gradually details creep in that make you doubt the realism of the action, as well as the heavy mood of the story is built up.The heroes of the story are in a state of sleep - oblivion, which is controlled by a certain demonic force and which is equated with hell, the author at the beginning of the story declares the hopelessness of the situation of people, about their powerlessness before this force. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Pavlovna's_Ninth_Dream"title="Vera Pavlovna's Ninth Dream">
The title of the story is an allusion to the title of the novel "What Is to Be Done?" by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, where the main character's name was also Vera Pavlovna and the description of her four dreams was part of the novel. Solipsism occupies a significant place in the works of Victor Pelevin: in addition to this story, the writer in one form or another addressed this topic in his other works. But the story "The Ninth Dream of Vera Pavlovna" is most closely associated with solipsism. One might say that solipsism is the main "hero" of the story.The protagonist of the story, Vera Pavlovna, is in all likelihood a member of the Soviet intelligentsia. She reads Ramacharak and Blavatsky, watches films by Fassbinder and Bergman, and is a cleaner in the men's public toilet, which makes her image somewhat caricatured. One day, a curious thought occurs to Vera: if you know the secret of existence, then the question of the meaning of life disappears on its own, because knowledge of the secret of life allows you "to control existence, that is, to really stop the old life and start a new one, not just talk about it - and each new life will have its own special meaning. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Wish_in_the_Dark"title="A Wish in the Dark">
After the city of Chattana was ravaged by the Great Fire, plunging it into darkness, it falls under the rule of the Governor, who is able to create magical orbs that are the city's only sources of light and power. Pong, a nine-year-old boy who was born in Namwon Prison and who has spent his entire life there, escapes by hiding in a garbage basket. He longs to live freely in Chattana, though his prison tattoo identifies him as a fugitive. When Pong is caught stealing food from a monastery on the outskirts of Chattana, the senior monk Father Cham vouches for him and takes him in, and helps him conceal his tattoo.Four years later, the monastery is visited by the family of the former warden of Namwon Prison, who was dismissed after Pong's escape. Pong narrowly flees after he is recognized by Nok Sivapan, the warden's daughter, who vows to bring him to justice to restore honor to her family. Pursued by Nok, Pong returns to Chattana, where he reunites with his former friend from prison, Somkit, and becomes involved in a movement to protest the social inequality in the city. Somkit knows how to make his own orb lights, which he will show the people at protest to show that they don't need the Governor's light. Nok attempts to warn the Governor about the planned protest, but is harshly rebuffed; she begins to question the Governor's motives and eventually comes to realize the oppression and tyranny in the city. She unites with Pong, Somkit, and the other protestors in the march, which successfully results in an end to the Governor's rule. Though the future seems uncertain, the people of Chattana can live more freely, and begin learning to create their own light.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shine_(Jung_novel)"title="Shine (Jung novel)">
Seventeen year old Korean-American Rachel Kim is ready to put everything on the line for a chance to be a K-pop sensation. Recruited into one of South Korea's biggest music labels DB Entertainment six years ago, Rachel is well-versed on what it takes to make it as an idol in the making—train at every possible minute, don't let anyone see you mess up, and don't date. But at seventeen, her window to make it is narrowing quickly. When rumors start circulating around the company that DB Entertainment is planning on debuting a new girl-group soon, Rachel sets her sights on that final line-up. She knows that if she misses her shot here, there's little hope she'll be around to get another one in six years.Rachel understands knowing the rules isn't enough when she has forces going against her. Fellow trainee Choo Mina, the daughter of one of South Korea's most powerful chaebols, is out to get her after an unfortunate misunderstanding over seniority occurred on her very first day as a trainee. That, and the CEO Mr. Noh's supposed preferential treatment towards her, has left Rachel with the persona "Korean American princess".Rachel's mother proves to be an obstacle herself, pushing Rachel to put more focus on her school work and less on training. As a former sports-star, Rachel's mom knows all about the pressure competition puts on young people. She doesn't want Rachel to put all her attention on a dream that might not come true. Thankfully, Rachel's dad and her sister Leah are a lot more supportive, though Rachel still has to juggle hours spent training with classes at Seoul International School.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Quail,_Robert"title="That Quail, Robert">
On July 11, 1962, retired couple, Dr. Thomas and Mildred Kienzle, discover an unhatched egg in an abandoned quail nest on their property in Orleans, Massachusetts. They take the egg home as a curiosity and are surprised to find it moving. Setting it next to a warm lamp, the egg hatches and out tumbles the tiny chick, whom they name Bobby White (promptly revised to Robert by the Kienzles' close friend, author Margaret A. Stanger). Robert quickly settles into the household, developing a strong bond with Tommy and Mildred. After a few months, The Kienzles attempt to release Robert back into the wild but are unsuccessful, Robert instead preferring the companionship and comfort of the Kienzle household.The Kienzles approach Wallace Bailey, director of the Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, for advice concerning Robert's well-being and future. Bailey suggests that Robert be banded and that the Kienzles continue to care for the little bird. The Kienzles adjust to a new life with Robert in their charge, enjoying meals at the dining room table and excursions into the yard, entertaining visitors fascinated by the story of a quail who prefers the company of people to birds, chirps into the telephone and sleeps on a favourite red pillbox hat. Robert and the family experience the first snowfall of the year and a Christmas visit from the Kienzles' family (Robert being particularly fascinated by a nativity display but decidedly unimpressed with their exuberant grandchildren).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Lantern_(short_story)"title="Blue Lantern (short story)">
The plot of the story is simple enough, the boys on vacation in a pioneer camp tell terrible stories to each other. During the discussion, the teenagers ask questions about the meaning of existence, life and death, but the answers to the questions raised are ambiguous. Confronted with "philosophical and mystical questions," the young narrator prepares for a literary encounter: he either recalls the encounter or contemplates the end of his "horror story". Not named by name, the boy is noticeably different from the others: he participates in the entertainment against his will to dispel the oppressive atmosphere. The synthesis of the light coming from the electric light-the "blue lantern" - and from the moonlight brings to the story an element of mystery characteristic of postmodernism. The blue color is identified in the narrative with something scary and frightening. After one of the stories, the youngest in the group, Kolya, confusing play with reality, runs to the teacher in terror. The last story finally connects fiction with reality - the children in the ward finally fall asleep, just like the pioneers discussed in the sixth "story. Reality triumphs over the mystical, but the "eternal questions" (who we are, where we come from... where is the difference between life and death, who has the right to consider himself truly alive) remain unanswered (in the tradition of Russian classical literature)". 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai_Shou_Chuan_USSR"title="Tai Shou Chuan USSR">
The story is constructed in a pseudo-historical form and is a deconstruction of real events. And it is a reference to the Chinese Tang dynasty story "The Governor of Nanke". The author himself dubbed this short work "A Chinese Folk Tale". Or, the setting is a communist utopia in an alternate China. According to another opinion, the story resembles the construction of short stories by the famous Chinese writer Pu Songling from the collections "Monk Magicians" and "Tales of Extraordinary People".The title of the story is "Tai Shou Chuan USSR". From the Chinese literary language, "Chuan" can be translated as "a collection of stories, essays, or legends." The character "Tai Shou" is more polysemantic, it translates as "commander of the army in the provinces" or simply "chief", "leader". Consequently, the title of the story should be understood as "A collection of essays by a certain leader about his life in the USSR.In the Chinese story, which Pelevin has looked up to, there is a strong influence of Buddhism and Taoism. In particular, the key theme is the Taoist ideologeme "life is like a dream. The Chinese "Tradition" tells of Chun Yukun's adventures in the unfamiliar land of Sophora. One day Chun Yukun got drunk and fell asleep under a sophora. He was then sent to the country of Sophora, where he married a princess. There he obtained a prestigious government position. After many years of a successful career, however, a turning point comes in his life: the death of the princess, the king's suspicions, and repatriation. After this, Chun Yukun wakes up and it turns out that he has been sleeping in his yard under a sophora, and it is still the same day. Finding the anthill, Chun Yukun recalls everything.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mardongi"title="Mardongi">
The story is a philosophical-satirical pseudo-review by Victor Pelevin. It is a parody of religious studies, a satire on religious-philosophical movements and sects, a "canonization" of "ideologies, works, and great men. According to the author's thought, the word "mardong" is Tibetan and denotes a whole set of concepts. Originally, it was the name of a cult object, which was obtained this way: If a person in life was distinguished by holiness, purity or, on the contrary, represented, figuratively speaking, "the flower of evil", then after death, which, incidentally, Tibetans always considered one of the stages of personal development, the body of such a person was not buried in the ground, but made of it "mardong" – a place of power and religious worship. A sect is forming around the so-called "mardongs" in Russia in the early 1990s.The essence of the story is a pure reflection of the sect's views, its theoretical works and its main figure – Antonov, after whom it was named, the attributes of the members of this movement, etc.A peculiar cult of death is created in the sect; all life, called in the sect "primordial mortality," is seen as preparation for death . Spiritual practices are developed in the sect, in particular the chanting of the mantra "Pushkin is great". The image of the poet plays a major role in the sect of the Antonovs. Another practice is the study of ancient Russian culture. Thus, matryoshka becomes supposedly a system of embedded dead people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulldozer_Driver's_Day"title="Bulldozer Driver's Day">
The story shows the reality of the USSR of the 1970s and 1980s as seen by Pelevin. The satirical story is set in a fictional city-state. Soviet realities are taken to the point of absurdity: everyone is working on nuclear and chemical weapons, posters glorifying the three main ideologues of power hang everywhere, an allusion to Marx, Engels and Lenin.The main character is an American spy who forgot about it, constantly drinking with the rest of the men. But an atomic bomb went off at the plant and hit him in the kidneys, which made the hero not drink for two weeks and remembered that he had to run away.In the story, almost all of the dialogues of the main characters take place on Newspeak. However, it is worth noting that Orwell's Newspeak is based on the "destruction of words", on the truncation of meanings, while Pelevin, on the contrary, forms it in order to "increase the meanings". His speech constructions do not destroy the original meaning of the word, on the contrary, they give it other, additional meanings.Thus the words, peace, labor, May, which were used in the Soviet Union as political slogans, are used in the story as components of a nonnormative vocabulary. Thus Plevin's deconstruction does not destroy the former meaning of the word, but gives it one new, additional meaning.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ontology_of_Childhood"title="The Ontology of Childhood">
In the story the author undertakes an artistic study of the process of formation of the child, starting from the moment of awareness of himself as a person, fixing the main stages of understanding of the world around him. The hero of the story grew up in prison, his first impressions of childhood firmly imprinted spatial reference points, which in the conditions of limited senses became the fundamental basis of his worldview. Among them is the gap between the bricks, in which "you can see a frozen strip of mortar, curved in a wave. This was what the child first saw when waking up every morning: "the sunny hare in the gap between the bricks was the first morning greeting from the vast world in which we live...". The streak of sunshine through the window is filled with fluffy dust particles and the tiniest twisted hairs. It begins to seem to the child that there is some little world living according to its own laws: he sees "all around him disguised areas of complete freedom and happiness. Thus, in the story, the traditional motif of the formation and maturation of personality is embodied in the continuous world of the author. The second-person narrative creates the necessary reflection and allows the main metaphor of the story to unfold in parallel. V. Pelevin speaks about the desire to break free from prison and at the same time conducts the idea of overcoming the limited human consciousness, being in captivity of illusions about the conditions of his being. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Built-in_Reminder"title="Built-in Reminder">
The story is a monologue and reflection of a painter of modern art. At an exhibition of modern art, the painter Niksim Skolpovsky talks about a new direction, "vibrationalism". The lecture is attended by several elderly female workers of the Burevestnik factory, who probably got there by accident. As an example of a work of vibrationalism he demonstrates a simulacrum of a human being, "a mannequin with a remote eliminator and a built-in death reminder. This mannequin is assembled "from a multitude of random objects pulled together by thin wires. When the saw's blade, located near the head, is turned on, it begins to cut one by one the wires, which causes the dummy to disintegrate. Simultaneously with the beginning of the saw's work the bell - a reminder of death - was also turned on. At the end of the lecture Niksim Skolpovsky says: "The built-in reminder warned of impending death, but could the mannequin hear it ringing? And even if he could, did he understand its meaning? This is what vibrationalism invites us to ponder.During the lecture, the elderly women in attendance begin to gradually shrink and at the end become no more than specks of dust. Niksim sweeps up these dust particles with a broom and pours them into an envelope. And if the mannequin, which embodies the virtual corporeality, is "resurrected," that is, restored as a permanent exhibit, then the physical corporeality of the visitors is reduced to ashes. Thus, in the fictional "vibrationalism" the author has encoded the philosophy of Zen Buddhism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chhappanno_Hajar_Borgomail"title="Chhappanno Hajar Borgomail">
The novel starts with Rashed's only daughter Mridu's school going incident; the girl faces problem when army troops stop her in road from going to school. Rashed's wife name is Mumtaz who listens radio announcement that martial law has been imposed all over the country. Later Rashed watches television with her daughter that the army generals have come in power.Rashed later imagines his childhood life when Bangladesh was part of Pakistan and in 1958 when General Ayub Khan imposed martial law. Social changes come in Bangladesh after General Uddin Mohammad imposes martial law; Rashed observes that society is becoming more conservative, girls and women are losing their freedom and also the society is becoming religious gradually.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Game"title="Mid-Game">
In the story, Pelevin's theme of the existence and destruction of borders and the emergence of alternative, including absurd, reality is clearly evident. The story is set at the boundary of an era, in the transition from Soviet rule to the new democracy. The main protagonists of the story are the expensive foreign-currency prostitutes Lusya and Nelli (in Soviet times, foreign-currency prostitutes were called those who worked with foreigners and were paid in foreign currency, not rubles). The space of the story is made up of several worlds, and once again, seemingly autonomous worlds prove to be permeable. First, Lucia, a prostitute working with foreign clients, appears at the center of the narrative. Her space is made up of expensive Moscow hotels "Intourist", "Moscow", "Minsk" and similarly expensive restaurants. She has an expensive fur coat, "a weightless sweater with silver sequins. Next to her there is another closed world, such as a stall selling coffee and related products. The saleswoman at the stall is habitually dozing by the grill on a cold evening and, having received her order, "got up, walked over to the counter and looked with familiar hatred at Liusya's fox coat."Liusya easily crosses the boundaries between worlds, goes from floor to floor in expensive hotels, she is let in behind a thick velvet cord that blocks the entrance to an elite restaurant, where "the Soviet citizens who want to get into the restaurant were crowded."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_(short_story)"title="Nika (short story)">
This story can be classified as a mystery story, in which it is initially impossible to determine the essence of what is happening, to identify the characters, and to read the plot episodes unambiguously. Only as the reader perceives it, at one point or another, does the reader receive indications and details that allow him to adequately understand what is being portrayed. In the first paragraph of the story, in one sentence, Pelevin directs the initial reader's perception along a false path. This is accomplished through two references to Ivan Bunin. First, the phrase "easy breath" is used, which has become a symbol of tragic love in Russian literature since Bunin's classic story. In Pelevin's story the author, on whose behalf the story is written, does not accidentally reflect on the vicissitudes of love: on his "lap lies Bunin's heavy, like a silicate brick, volume", tearing himself from reading it he looks at the wall with an accidentally preserved photograph, apparently of his beloved. The past tense of the narrative points to the loss, and then the reader is given a detailed characterization, speculating on the life story of a certain Veronica, whom the hero abbreviates as Nika. However, the lack of "love," as such, is disturbing in the story. The relationship between the characters is designated as "affection," described in terms of physiology. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tambourine_of_the_Upper_World"title="The Tambourine of the Upper World">
The story can be attributed to those works of the author that are devoted to Buddhist themes, esoterics, the image of "altered states of consciousness.In the story, the heroine named Tanya, with the help of the shamaness Tyima, put on a commercial basis the summoning from the lower world of the war dead soldiers, Germans, Spaniards, Italians, and Finns. The soldiers who are resurrected and return to our world retain their citizenship, allowing Russian girls to marry them and go abroad. The service is paid for and the business is so popular that the queue for a shamaness in Moscow is booked two years in advance. Mysteries of shamaness Tyima should take place directly on a place of a military burial, therefore Tanya by maps studies the tanks which have remained from times of war, the planes which have fallen in bogs. To these places she goes together with those wishing to marry a resurrected foreigner. Another trip to a dark forest near Moscow, where a downed German Henkel plane fell during World War II, ends unexpectedly. In the underworld, from which the resurrected usually come, the shamaness does not find the right "client." Not wanting to refuse her friend Masha, Tanya asks the shamaness to search for him in the upper world, something they have never done before. The search ends successfully, but an unforeseen surprise occurs. Instead of the German pilot from the upper world, a Soviet Major Zvyagintsev, who was ferrying a trophy plane to an alternate airfield and was somehow shot down, which is unpleasant for him to recall even today. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spillover_(book)"title="Spillover (book)">
In the various chapters of the book, the author dwells on the analysis of a specific pathogen, starting from its discovery and studies on it: the Hendra virus in the first chapter; the Ebola virus in the second; the mathematical study of epidemics at the same time as the spread of malaria in the third; SARS in the fourth; bacterial zoonosis in the fifth chapter (Q fever, psittacosis and Lyme disease); the study of viral transmissibility from animal to man with the case study of herpes B in monkeys and hepadnaviruses from bats in the sixth and seventh chapters; HIV in the eighth chapter and finally some considerations on the evolution of epidemics in relation to the contribution that human activities have in the spread of zoonosis.Among the human activities, the author identifies some criticisms that increasingly favor the spread of epidemics, including deforestation and the destruction of natural habitats that increase contacts between wild animal species and man, pollution, the overpopulation of some areas that brings millions of people into contact in relatively very confined spaces, the possibility of ever faster and cheaper air travel that favor the possibility of spreading diseases in distant places, and the intensive in contact with billions of animals with the consequent risk of animal epidemics that can be transmitted to humans. All these factors, therefore, in different ways favor the spread of diseases and increase the chances of new future spillovers with pathogens still unknown to the human species but present in nature, just waiting for the right "opportunity" to "make the leap" in humans.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tambourine_of_the_Lower_World"title="The Tambourine of the Lower World">
The story is an experience of creating a "mental death laser," the reading of which is supposed to be followed by the reader's self-destruction.At the beginning of the story, the author suggests remembering the combination "The Tambourine of the Upper World," because it is curious and will definitely be told about it, but only later. Then he starts talking about Brezhnev, rays, energy, scolding himself for his habit of talking about everything at once, but when he gets to the subject of death, he begins the story of creating a death laser, which will be a collection of certain word-commands that will appeal to the human unconscious and evoke a series of associations. These word-commands would be based on emotional thoughts of death. This machine (mental laser) he proposes to call - The Tambourine of the Lower World. In the story, "The Tambourine of the Underworld," he shows how a set of ideas and verbal signals can destroy human consciousness and then construct it anew, in the configuration someone wants. The author writes: "Maybe today, already now, he has written this fateful sequence of letters, and now no one and nothing can protect us from him.The postmodernist goal of creating such an "intellectual virus" is the destruction of the "old society" and outdated ideology, the demythologization of Soviet and post-Soviet society. The next part of this project is to create a new picture of reality (consciousness). 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detransition,_Baby"title="Detransition, Baby">
The main characters are Reese, a trans woman, PR executive, and former partner of Amy; Amy, who detransitioned to live as a man and became Ames; and Katrina, a biracial Chinese and Jewish cis woman who is Ames's boss and current lover. All three are in their thirties and live in Brooklyn. After the end of their relationship, Reese and Ames have been estranged because of Ames's decision to detransition three years ago. Katrina discovers that she is pregnant with Ames's child, though Ames mistakenly believed himself sterile because of his time on hormone replacement therapy. Ames reveals to Katrina that he spent six years living as a woman and still considers himself female, though navigating the world as a trans woman was ultimately too difficult. Thus, Ames doubts that he can fulfill the masculine role of a father to a child. Ames reconnects with Reese, who has long wanted to mother a child of her own, believing that the three of them could form an unconventional family to raise the baby together. Reese grapples with the same self-destructive patterns that soured her old relationship with Amy, including sex with married men and chasers, and eventually ends up in the hospital towards the last part of the book. Katrina attempts to adjust to a different understanding of gender but intends to get an abortion if she cannot be sure she will have a support system. The three question their identities, their relationships with each other, and if they could form a stable family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice_Racism"title="Nice Racism">
The book describes many experiences DiAngelo had while working in diversity training and workshops about race, as well as her personal life, including her experience of poverty in childhood. Following on from "White Fragility", DiAngelo replies to criticism of the book. The book contains a study guide for navigation.DiAngelo presents patterns of white progressives unknowingly engaging in racial harm, such as by being overeager to prove themselves anti-racist to people of color, co-opting indigenous or minority ethnic cultural traditions, or expecting people of color to educate them. The book contains a list of some things that DiAngelo believes cause racial harm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Sontaran"title="The Last Sontaran">
## Part One.Alan is offered a job in Washington, D.C. in the United States, but seeks daughter Maria's and ex-wife Chrissie's approval before he relocates himself and Maria there.After strange lights are sighted around the Tycho Radio Tower, Sarah Jane, Luke, Clyde and Maria investigate. They discover Sontaran Commander Kaagh, the only survivor of the Tenth Sontaran Battle Fleet which was otherwise seen to be destroyed in "Doctor Who" episode "The Poison Sky". Kaagh plans to avenge his fleet by bringing Earth's satellites down on nuclear power plants across the world thereby wiping out all of humanity with the resultant explosions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Clown"title="The Day of the Clown">
## Part One.Luke is struggling to adjust to life without Maria, she having moved to Washington, D.C. with her father. Meanwhile, the Chandras move into the Jacksons' old house on Bannerman Road and Sarah Jane starts an investigation into disappearing children in the area. Sarah Jane makes Luke and Clyde promise her that they will not reveal her alien investigating secrets to the newcomers to Bannerman Road.Clyde and Luke meet new girl Rani Chandra at school. After Clyde sees a clown in school prior to the sudden disappearance of a child, Rani reveals she is being stalked by a clown that no one else can see. With Clyde having got into trouble with the new headteacher, Rani's father Haresh, Luke arranges to keep an eye on Rani in his place and goes round to her house to help her unpack. Sarah Jane and Clyde link the disappearances of the children to the Museum of the Circus, Clyde and two of the missing children having received tickets for it. Rani, who wants to become a journalist, begins her own investigation and makes the same connection to the Museum having found a ticket in a school book belonging to one of the missing children and having a ticket herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_on_One_(novel)"title="One on One (novel)">
"One on One" follows Sam and Deanie, two high school students that are more different than they are alike. The two fall in love, only to be faced with multiple adversities, from rivals to sports.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animorphs"title="Animorphs">
The story revolves around five humans: Jake, Marco, Cassie, Rachel and Tobias, and one alien, Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill (nicknamed Ax), who obtain the ability to transform into any animal they touch. Naming themselves "Animorphs" (a portmanteau of "animal morphers"), they use their ability to battle a secret alien infiltration of Earth by a parasitic race of aliens resembling large slugs called Yeerks, that can take any living creatures as a host by entering and merging with their brain through the ear canal. The Animorphs fight as a guerilla force against the Yeerks who are led by Visser Three.Throughout the series, the Animorphs carefully protect their identities; the Yeerks assume that the Animorphs are a strike force sent by the Andalites, the alien race to which Ax belongs that created the transformation technology, to prevent them from conquering Earth. To protect their families from Yeerk reprisals, the Animorphs maintain this façade.Though the Animorphs can assume the form of any animal they touch to acquire the DNA, there are several limitations to the ability. The most vital is that they cannot stay in animal form for more than two hours, or they will be unable to return to human form and the morphs become permanent. Others include having to de-morph back to human in between morphs, only tight clothing being able to be carried over with a morph, and having to consistently maintain concentration during a morph to prevent the animal's natural instincts from overwhelming their human intellect. A benefit to morphing is that it allows the team to heal any superficial, non-genetic injury, sustained as a human or in a morph. Also, while in morph, they can telepathically communicate with anyone nearby in what they call 'thought-speak'.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_in_the_Andes"title="Death in the Andes">
Corporal Lituma has been transferred as punishment to the tiny Andean community of Naccos, where almost everyone besides him, his adjutant Tomás Carreño, and the vaguely threatening owners of the local bar are there as builders. Three men from the village disappear and Lituma has to investigate, alongside his heartbroken young adjutant, the only other local policeman. Was it the "terrucos" of the Maoist Shining Path or something even more terrible that caused these vanishings?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_World"title="The Blue World">
Sklar Hast, the protagonist, had achieved a measure of success and prosperity by passing his examination to be a “Hoodwink”, or semaphore tower operator – a prestigious position on the Blue World, a planet with no land at all. During the space of twelve generations, the descendants of a crashed prison ship have created a rudimentary civilization on the water-covered planet, living on huge sea plants. They have a hierarchy of castes named after the different classes of criminal: the highest caste is the Incendiarists and the lowest is the Hooligans. They also have no idea that their ancestors were criminals, believing them to have been the victims of oppressors. They have evolved a peaceful society, and ignore the hints in texts saved from the first generation of what their origins actually were.The world is mostly safe. However, they must beware the kragen, giant, semi-intelligent squid-like predators which roam the ocean. The colonists eventually develop a relationship with one of these, King Kragen. It drives off other kragen in return for offerings of food organized by an entrenched quasi-religious priesthood built up over generations. King Kragen grows to become the largest and most powerful kragen, demanding more and more food as time goes by.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Law"title="The First Law">
## "The First Law".The plot of the original trilogy involves three major powers: The Union, the Gurkish Empire, and the North, recently united under King Bethod.There are two major theaters of war. The first takes place in the north between the Union and the Northmen, who invade the Union's northern province of Angland. The second is in the south between the Union and the Gurkish Empire, who attempt to annex the Union city of Dagoska. The trilogy centers on the fortunes of a variety of characters as they navigate through these and other conflicts. The trilogy follows the stories of six point-of-view characters, whose paths often intersect.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mona_Intercept"title="The Mona Intercept">
Cuban exile Jimmy Columbus uses hijacking on the high seas, drugs, and murder to fuel his dreams of an empire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Gold_Bands"title="The Five Gold Bands">
Twenty generations ago, an Earthman named Langtry stumbled on a way to travel efficiently among the stars. He divided the secret among his five sons, each of whom settled on a different planet. The heirs of the five, known as the Sons of Langtry, now dominate the human universe. Generations of life on strange worlds have made them visibly distinct from each other and from Earthers, who are held in contempt on each of the Sons' five homeworlds.Picaresque Irish adventurer Paddy Blackthorn is caught attempting to steal a space drive, and is sentenced to death. In escaping from his sentence, Paddy accidentally kills the Sons of Langtry and takes from each a bracelet containing a clue to the location of one-fifth of the secret. With the help of a beautiful human secret agent, Fay Bursill, Paddy follows the clues on each of the five dominant worlds, in the hope that Earthfolk will be able to resume their rightful place in space.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_of_Infinity"title="Arc of Infinity">
On Gallifrey, the Fifth Doctor's home planet, a Time Lord traitor steals the bio-data code of another Time Lord and provides it to the Renegade, a creature composed of antimatter. The High Council of the Time Lords issue a Warrant of Termination on the Doctor to ensure the Renegade can no longer bond with him. The Doctor is taken for execution, despite Nyssa's attempts to save him, and placed in a dispersal chamber.Unbeknownst to the High Council, The Doctor's mind has been taken into the Matrix, the repository of all Time Lord knowledge, while his body is hidden. The Renegade, who demands an opportunity to return to the Universe it once inhabited, contacts him. The truth of the aborted execution is discovered by the Castellan, who tells Nyssa, Damon, and the High Council that the Doctor is alive.In Amsterdam, the Doctor's former companion Tegan is looking for her cousin Colin Frazer. She is greeted by his friend Robin Stuart, who explains that Colin disappeared while they were crashing in the crypt of the Frankendael mansion. The Renegade, which has established its base at the Frankendael, finds them and uses Tegan as bait to force the Doctor to obey him. The Doctor is returned to normal space on Gallifrey where he makes for the High Council Chamber. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Maison_du_chat-qui-pelote"title="La Maison du chat-qui-pelote">
The artist Théodore de Sommervieux falls in love with Augustine Guillaume, the daughter of a conservative cloth merchant, whose house of business on the Rue Saint-Denis in Paris is known by sign of the Cat and Racket. Théodore, a winner of the Prix de Rome and a knight of the Legion of Honor, is famous for his interiors and chiaroscuro effects in imitation of the Dutch School. He makes an excellent reproduction of the interior of the Cat and Racket, which is exhibited at the Salon alongside a strikingly modern portrait of Augustine. The affair blossoms with the help of Madame Guillaume's younger cousin Madame Roguin, who is already acquainted with Théodore. The lovers become engaged, somewhat against the best wishes of Augustine's parents, who had originally intended her to marry Monsieur Guillaume's clerk Joseph Lebas. In 1808 Augustine marries Théodore at the local church of Saint-Leu; on the same day her elder sister Virginie marries Lebas.The marriage is not a happy one. Augustine adores Sommervieux but is incapable of understanding him as an artist. Although she is more refined than her parents, her education and social standing leave her too far below the level of her husband to allow a meeting of minds to take place. Théodore's passion for her cools and she is treated with disdain by his fellow artists. Théodore instead finds a kindred soul in the Duchesse de Carigliano, to whom he gives the famous portrait of Augustine and to whom he becomes hopelessly attached, neglecting his rooms on the Rue des Trois-Frères (now a part of the Rue Taitbout).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Bal_de_Sceaux"title="Le Bal de Sceaux">
After having haughtily refused a number of suitors, under the pretext that they are not peers of France, Émilie de Fontaine falls in love with a mysterious young man who quietly appeared at the village dance at Sceaux. Despite his refined appearance and aristocratic bearing, the unknown (Maximilien Longueville) never tells his identity and seems interested in nobody but his sister, a sickly young girl. But he is not insensible to the attention Émilie gives him and he accepts the invitation of Émilie's father, the Comte de Fontaine. Émilie and Maximilien soon fall in love. The Comte de Fontaine, concerned for his daughter, decides to investigate this mysterious young man, and he discovers him on the Rue du Sentier, a simple cloth merchant, which horrifies Émilie. Piqued, she marries a 72-year-old uncle for his title of Vice Admiral, the Comte de Kergarouët.Several years after her marriage, Émilie discovers that Maximilien is not a clothier at all, but in fact a Vicomte de Longueville who has become a Peer of France. The young man finally explains why he secretly tended a store: he did it in order to support his family, sacrificing himself for his sick sister and for his brother, who had departed the country.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Castle"title="The Glass Castle">
"The Glass Castle" is Jeannette Walls' memoir of her childhood to adulthood, documenting how her parents both inspired and inhibited her life. The book is told in five parts. The first part, "A Woman On the Street", documents her conversation with her mother, Rose Mary, who was squatting in an abandoned apartment in New York City, which pushed her to tell the truth and write this memoir.Part Two, titled "The Desert", covers young Jeannette Walls living with her parents, Rex and Rose Mary, and her siblings Lori, Brian, and Maureen. Walls opens with her first memory, which takes place when she is three years old and is living in a trailer park in southern Arizona. She is engulfed in flames when attempting to make hot dogs over the stove, resulting in her going to the hospital and receiving skin grafts on her stomach, ribs, and chest. Due to fear of the mounting medical bills as well as skepticism of modern medicine, Rex takes Jeannette out of the hospital without permission or paying. A few months later, the children are woken up in the middle of the night and are told they are "doing the skedaddle" (skipping town). Their parents' nomadic lifestyle imposed by their avoidance of financial responsibilities results in the family frequently moving to Nevada, Arizona, and California. As Jeannette grows older, she is more aware of Rex's alcoholism and its consequences. For her 10th birthday, she asks him to stop drinking, which he successfully does for a few months. Following his relapse, Rose Mary decides that since they have no money it is time to move again, and she takes the family to their paternal grandparents in Welch, West Virginia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ink_Exchange"title="Ink Exchange">
The prologue of "Ink Exchange" revisits a scene from "Wicked Lovely" narrated by Irial, King of the Dark Court, in which he walks into a tattoo shop with Leslie, a 17-year-old human. The novel then follows Leslie as she prepares for a normal day of school. Leslie's alcoholic father and Ren, her drug-dealing brother, neglect her. Having once been drugged and raped by Ren's customers to cover one of his debts, Leslie fears her family, yet still pays the bills by working as a waitress. When Leslie reaches school, she is suspicious of how well Aislinn, the protagonist from "Wicked Lovely", has adjusted to her new life as a faery. Aislinn, though once human, is the Summer Queen in the world of the fey, a world which she tries desperately to keep from Leslie.The novel then begins to follow Irial. It is revealed that the Dark Court feeds off emotions such as anger, hate, lust and pain to stay strong. When one of his own is killed by a simple human bullet, Irial is desperate for a way to protect his kind. With the help of his "left hand" Gabriel and his pack of "Hounds," he keeps his own and other courts in check. When confronted with numerous rebellions, Irial decides to pursue an ink exchange with a mortal to provide a constant stream of emotion to feed his court. After Leslie, the chosen one, receives a tattoo, traditional tattoo ink is exchanged for Dark Court blood and tears to connect the two.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_Annexe_3"title="The Secret of Annexe 3">
As the novel begins, Margaret Bowman of Charlbury Drive Chipping Norton is off to a funeral. Her husband, left alone, finds an angry letter, apparently from a lover, in his wife's handbag.The guests of Haworth Hotel rise late on New Year's Day, with one exception, the guest in Annexe 3 who missed New Year's Day completely. He lies dead in his room on the blood-soaked bed.After the murder, Inspector Morse, with the help of the receptionist Miss Sarah Jonstone, examines the letters and phone messages booking the various rooms at the hotel. Discovering the non-existent address, he deduces that a postman must be involved.Thomas Bowman, the postman, turns out to be the corpse, and his wife and her lover are the instigators of the murder. Winston Grant, a black musician, was hired to provide the alibi.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Riddle_of_the_Third_Mile"title="The Riddle of the Third Mile">
The novel is divided into three books - the first mile, the second mile and the third mile. The title is a reference to the biblical sentence "And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain" as in St Matthew, Chapter Five, Verse Forty-One. The third mile could also indirectly refer to a particularly elaborate scheme used in the book to lure three of the college staff to London.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jewel_That_Was_Ours"title="The Jewel That Was Ours">
The Historical Cities of England tour group is arriving in Oxford, staying in the best hotel in town. Retired Americans travel together, listening to talks by experts. The highlight in Oxford will be provided by tour member Laurie Stratton, who is donating the Wolvercote Tongue to the Ashmolean Museum, pursuant to her first husband's will. Dr Theodore Kemp has written a book about this piece from the time of King Alfred the Great, gold set with rubies, and the tongue fits exactly with a buckle also found in England. Just 45 minutes after arrival in the hotel, Mrs Stratton is found in their hotel room, dead on the floor, by her husband who had taken a short walk with Shirley Brown. A bit later, Eddie Stratton notices that her handbag is gone, and the Wolvercote tongue was kept in it. The hotel doctor determines she died of natural causes, and the police are called in to deal with the theft.Sergeant Lewis and Chief Inspector Morse arrive. Morse calls in the police pathologist, Max, for a cause of death he will trust. Max says it is a coronary, a heart attack, nothing suspicious. Lewis and Morse talk to the tour leaders and then the tourists. It is clear that many of them are not telling the truth about what they did in those 45 minutes, or not saying much at all. Sheila Williams bursts into tears, saying only, ask Dr Kemp, and Dr Kemp says he does not keep track of his time like that. Cedric Downes was with students. When John Ashendon, leader of the tour, returns from his walk about Oxford, he says he went to Magdalen College to take a look at it. Morse later learns that college was closed to visitors as there is renovation work underway in the buildings. Morse thinks this theft was done by one of the tourists. The tourists include a few married couples, the rest on their own. The couples are Howard and Shirley Brown, the Strattons, and Sam and Vera Kronquist. Much noted is outspoken Mrs Janet Roscoe, and the quiet Phil Aldrich, who does not hear very well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_of_Bones"title="The Road of Bones">
The story centres on a Russian boy named Yuri who in school is taught that the revolution liberated his country, and that the new leaders are always working for greater good. But the life for his family and people around him is full of poverty and misery, and the government only punishes those who protest. And one day Yuri is considered an 'enemy of the state' for saying a few careless words, and is sent to a camp in the frozen wastelands of Siberia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Seen_Wearing_(Dexter_novel)"title="Last Seen Wearing (Dexter novel)">
Valerie Taylor, a teenage pupil at the Roger Bacon Comprehensive School in Kidlington, north of Oxford, goes missing. Two years later, and shortly after the story has been revived in a "Sunday Times" feature about missing girls, the investigating officer, Inspector Ainley, is killed in a road accident. Shortly after that, Valerie's parents receive a letter with a London postmark, apparently written by Valerie and saying she is "alright".Inspector Morse, assisted by Sergeant Lewis, is assigned the case. Morse remains convinced that Valerie is dead, and tries to find out what happened on the day she disappeared. She had gone home for lunch, and was apparently last seen by a lollipop man, wearing her distinctive uniform and carrying a bag, on her return journey to school.Morse and Lewis speak to a number of individuals linked to the case. These include Valerie's mother, Grace Taylor, who bears a close resemblance to her daughter, and her husband (but not Valerie's father), George Taylor, a worker at the city rubbish tip; the headmaster of the school, Donald Phillipson, and his wife Sheila, between whom there is an element of mistrust; Reginald Baines, second master at the school and previously an unsuccessful candidate for the headmastership; David Acum, a French teacher who had taught Valerie's last lesson, but who left Oxford not long afterwards to teach in Caernarfon, North Wales; and Johnny Maguire, a former schoolmate of Valerie, now working at a strip club in London. Morse develops a succession of theories and assumptions about the case, many of which turn out to be flawed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silent_World_of_Nicholas_Quinn"title="The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn">
The Oxford Foreign Examinations Syndicate runs school exams in the Persian Gulf and other places with a British connection. The Secretary Dr Bartlett and Mr Roope, a chemistry don and a member of the committee, disagree about the appointment of a new member of staff. Roope gets his way and Nicholas Quinn, a deaf man who lipreads, gets the job.When Quinn is found murdered in his maisonette, all the staff are under suspicion. There is Bartlett, his deputy Ogleby and the attractive Monica Height, who has liaisons with some of the others - especially young Donald Martin. Strangely, nearly all of them, including Quinn, appear to have tickets for The Nymphomaniac at Studio 2 in Walton Street on the afternoon of the murder. When later Ogleby is himself found murdered, a neat drawing of Quinn’s ticket is found in his diary.Morse tries to deduce which of the others is the murderer but keeps getting it wrong. An intrigue involving wealthy Arabs and prior knowledge of exam papers is clearly the cause, and Quinn had found out about it and paid for it with his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_of_All_the_Dead"title="Service of All the Dead">
The novel is divided into four books. Each book takes its name from a book of the Bible and follows a different style of writing. Notably, the third is in the form of a statement taken from a witness and the fourth mostly takes the form of court proceedings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranks_of_Bronze"title="Ranks of Bronze">
A defeated Roman legion is sold into slavery to alien traders seeking low tech soldiers to be used in conflicts to secure trading rights on alien planets. Their new masters soon learn that the Romans are the best low tech fighters that can be found. Given their worth as soldiers and success on the battlefield, the Romans' alien masters provide them with everything, including near immortality. However, the Romans want only one thing, and that is to go home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forlorn_Hope"title="The Forlorn Hope">
"The Forlorn Hope" follows the fortunes of a mercenary company named "Fasolini's Company". On the planet Cecach, a civil war has raged between the secular Federals and their religious zealot adversaries, the Republicans. Fasolini's Company is to provide heavy support to a Federal firebase. When the firebase is cut off and surrounded by Republican troops, the Federals surrender, offering Fasolini's Company to the Republicans as part of the bargain. Since the Republicans have vowed to execute any mercenaries who fall into their hands, Fasolini's Company decides that it must flee the firebase before the Republicans arrive to take control. Fighting both the turncoat Federals and the Republicans, Fasolini's Company, with the aid of a loyal Federal logistics officer and the captain of a planet-trapped interstellar freighter, must march across enemy lines to reach the safety of the intact and still loyal Federal lines.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_and_Education"title="Democracy and Education">
In "Democracy and Education", Dewey argues that the primary ineluctable facts of the birth and death of each one of the constituent members in a social group determine the necessity of education. On one hand, there is the contrast between the immaturity of the new-born members of the group (its future sole representatives) and the maturity of the adult members who possess the knowledge and customs of the group. On the other hand, there is the necessity that these immature members be not merely physically preserved in adequate numbers, but that they be initiated into the interests, purposes, information, skill, and practices of the mature members: otherwise the group will cease its characteristic life.Dewey observes that even in a "savage" tribe, the achievements of adults are far beyond what the immature members would be capable of if left to themselves. With the growth of civilization, the gap between the original capacities of the immature and the standards and customs of the elders increases. Mere physical growing up and mastery of the bare necessities of subsistence will not suffice to reproduce the life of the group. Deliberate effort and the taking of thoughtful pains are required. Beings who are born not only unaware of, but quite indifferent to, the aims and habits of the social group have to be rendered cognizant of them and actively interested. According to Dewey, education, and education alone, spans the gap.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Is_Now_My_Neighbour"title="Death Is Now My Neighbour">
At 17 Bloxham Drive, Kidlington, Oxfordshire, a pretty 29-year-old physiotherapist named Rachel James is shot almost point blank through the closed blind of her kitchen window early in the morning of 19 February 1996. The shooting took place between 7:00 and 7:30 with a .577 caliber howdah or Lancaster pistol as the pony-tailed young woman was getting breakfast prior to heading to work, her head and upper body silhouetted in the window, as her assailant stood in her backyard.Unfortunately, none of the other residents of Bloxham Drive can recall seeing anything suspicious that morning, including her immediate neighbour Geoffrey Owens at number 15, a newspaper reporter desperate for the scoop on this breaking news story that happened so close to his home.Chief Inspector Morse, aided by Detective Sergeant (DS) Lewis, soon discovers a cryptic 'seventeenth-century' love poem by John Wilmot and a photograph of Rachel with a mysterious grey-haired man, clues which lead them to the prestigious Lonsdale College, where the rivalry between Julian Storrs and Dr Denis Cornford for the position of Master, to replace Sir Clixby Bream, is about to turn deadly.Morse goes to the extreme of employing a known house burglar and lock expert to learn more about Owens. Morse also diagnoses himself with diabetes, and, after going to the local clinic to confirm his condition, is immediately placed in John Radcliffe Hospital for five days.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daughters_of_Cain"title="The Daughters of Cain">
The body of Dr Felix McClure, Ancient History don of Wolsey College, Oxford, is found in his flat. A brutal murder – a single stab to the stomach with a broad knife. The police have no weapon, no suspect and no motive. The case leads Morse into the path of Edward Brooks, who himself disappears following a museum theft. Then the weapon is found and there are suddenly "too many" suspects.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Through_the_Woods"title="The Way Through the Woods">
A beautiful young Swedish woman went missing a year earlier. An anonymous riddle, in the form of a five-stanza poem, is sent to the police and the case is reopened. The police ask "The Times" for help with the poem. Morse and Sergeant Lewis are put in charge of the new investigation.Morse is intrigued by a cryptic clue relating to missing Karin Eriksson, which is taken to mean she has been murdered. He is given the case and notes that the clue seems to include a reference to Wytham Woods, where he believed the police should have searched in the first place. The police search the area with help from head forester David Michaels and a body is found but it is the body of a man.Morse and Lewis talk to George Daley, who found Karin's bag. His wife Margaret gives them some photos developed from Karin's camera, showing a young man and a house, but tears up some more showing Karin naked. Morse identifies the house in the photo but the tenant, McBryde, disappears before he can be questioned. Morse and Lewis find the house was being used to make pornographic films and the client list includes Daley and a local lecturer, Alan Hardinge. Daley is found dead in Blenheim Park. Michaels is suspected but was showing some RSPB representatives around at the time, since the gatewarden recalls when Daley entered the park.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Most_Wanted_Man"title="A Most Wanted Man">
A young Turkish boxing champion in Hamburg notices he is being shadowed by a tall gaunt young man in a black coat, who turns up on his doorstep and demands hospitality. Somewhat suspiciously, they allow "Issa" to stay in the attic as he announces his desire to become a doctor. He contacts a human rights organisation whose attractive young bike-riding lawyer, Annabel Richter, takes his case to a British bank in the city. She bases her case to the owner, Tommy Brue, on a mysterious "Lippizaner" fund established by his father and held by the bank. When Brue meets Issa, he claims he is the son of a Russian, Colonel Karpov, who put his money in the fund, but after Brue's grilling, he refuses to claim his inheritance. Brue, who by this time is falling under Annabel's spell, gives her a large personal cheque to cover expenses.Brue receives visits from British intelligence who tell him that they had set up the bank accounts, which received payoffs and money from mafia sources. They ask him to alert them when Issa shows up. A German intelligence agent, Bachmann, who visits Annabel, is homing in on a suspicious Islamist terrorist with Chechen connections, arrested entering Sweden from Turkey in a container, who has escaped custody and found his way to Germany. Annabel has moved Issa from the Turkish family to a new apartment she has recently bought but not occupied, but her evasive tactics seem suspicious to the followers. She is later apprehended in the street, interrogated by Bachmann, and a woman in the intelligence service is assigned to persuade Annabel to co-operate with them. Eventually she agrees on the basis that her client will be given a German passport and be allowed to stay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_(novel)"title="Careless (novel)">
The novel follows the lives of four protagonists - Pearl, Anna, Sonia and Adam - who have all been touched by grief and despair. Suffering alone they are all drawn together by a tragic event.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whip_Hand"title="Whip Hand">
The protagonist Sid Halley is an ex-jockey turned detective who lost his left hand due to an earlier racing accident and subsequent beating by thugs. He is approached by Rosemary Caspar, a trainer's wife, to look into problems at her husband's racing stables. Horses which did extremely well as two-year-olds are unexpectedly failing as three-year-olds. In addition, Sid Halley's ex-father-in-law, Charles, asks Sid to try to find a man who has conned Sid's ex-wife Jenny and left her facing a possible jail sentence over a fake charity. Sid is also approached by both Lord Friarly, a racehorse owner and syndicate member, and Lucas Wainwright, the head of the security service at the Jockey Club, to look into certain syndicates and how they got through the Jockey Club's checking process.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Museum_of_Innocence"title="The Museum of Innocence">
Kemal has been engaged to a pretty girl named Sibel for two months when he meets a shop girl, Füsun, while buying a handbag for his fiancee. What follows in the next month and a half is an intense and secretive physical and emotional relationship between them. Kemal's happiest moment of life comes while making love the day Füsun confesses her deep love for him. Though it is clear that he has also fallen completely for Füsun, Kemal keeps denying this to himself, believing that his marriage with Sibel and secret relationship could continue forever. His reverie is broken when Füsun disappears just after attending his engagement. Now he has to come to terms with his deep attachment and love for Füsun. He goes through a very painful period for about a year, unable to meet Füsun and deriving consolation from objects and places related to his beloved and their lovemaking. His engagement to Sibel breaks off and finally Füsun responds to his letter and agrees to meet him. Füsun has got married, living with her husband and parents and pretends to meet Kemal just as a distant relation, with undercurrents of anger. For the next eight years Kemal keeps visiting the family for supper and expressing his love for Füsun in various ways, while finding consolation in various objects related to her that he carries away from the house. Finally after her father’s death, circumstances lead Füsun to divorce her husband. Füsun and Kemal are to be married after a trip around Europe together, but fate has something else in store and they become separated forever after a night of intense love-making. Kemal regards each object related to Füsun and their love, collected over the years, as portraying some discrete moment of happiness and bliss in the passage of those nine years. He decides to convert Füsun’s house into a museum of innocence, including all these objects and also other memorabilia related to the period.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ideological_Origins_of_the_American_Revolution"title="The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution">
In 1965, Bernard Bailyn published a renowned introduction, "The Transforming Radicalism of the American Revolution," to the first volume of the January 1965 "Pamphlets of the American Revolution", a series of documents of the Revolutionary era which he edited for the John Harvard Library. Two years later, Bailyn published a revised and expanded version of this introduction, entitling it "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution". Bailyn argued that "the 'progressive' historians of the early twentieth century" dismissed "the Revolutionary leaders' professed fears of 'slavery' and of conspiratorial designs as what by then had come to be known as propaganda...in order to accomplish predetermined ends--Independence and in many cases personal advancement."Bailyn distinguished "political liberty" in pamphlets collected by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon from the " 'personal security, personal liberty, and private property' " rooted in a "state of nature." In contrast, "political liberty...was the capacity to exercise 'natural rights' within limits set not by the mere will or desire of men in power but by non-arbitrary law--law enacted by legislatures." But British "laws, grants, and charters...marked out the minimum not the maximum boundaries of right." His "colonists" and "Revolutionary leaders" transitioned from the initial goal of "political liberty" to a "theory of politics" that conceived of "liberty, then, as the exercise, within the boundaries of the law, of natural rights whose essences were minimally stated in English law and custom."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_the_Tree"title="Son of the Tree">
One of Vance's earliest efforts, and part science fiction, part espionage story, protagonist Joe Smith has to contend with the machinations of various alien societies in search of the Earthman who ran off with his girl.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_in_my_Nuddy-Pants"title="Dancing in my Nuddy-Pants">
The book is written in the form of a diary. It is about Georgia Nicolson (14), her friends (the Ace Gang), and her infatuation with boys (or snogging in particular). Georgia's boyfriend Robbie ('the sex god or SG') has been invited to go on tour with his band The Stiff Dylans. He has received an offer to go to Los Angeles in hamburger-a-gogo-land (United States), where Georgia is thinking of becoming a 'girlfriend to a pop-star'. At the end of the book he goes for an interview and gets a job in Whakatane (New Zealand) instead. Even though Georgia is upset about this she still has enough courage in her to (when her house is empty) dance in her nuddy-pants (naked).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Howling_II_(novel)"title="The Howling II (novel)">
Three years after the events of "The Howling", Karyn Beatty has now remarried and lives in Seattle. Although content with her new life with her husband, David Richter, and her young stepson Joey, she is still haunted by the memories of her terrifying ordeal in the California mountain village of Drago with its werewolf inhabitants. Karyn regularly sees a therapist to help work through her problems, but after a spate of sinister occurrences that culminate in the horrific killing of the family's housekeeper, Karyn is convinced that the surviving werewolves of Drago have tracked her down. Fearing for the lives of her new family, Karyn leaves town, hoping she will lead the evil creatures away from her loved ones.Karyn's fears prove well founded as she had indeed been tracked down by none other than her ex-husband Roy Beatty (now a werewolf) and Marcia Lura, the evil Drago werewolf who first bit him. Both Roy and Marcia survived the fire in Drago, but Marcia is now partially scarred and incapacitated due to being shot in the head with a silver bullet by Karyn at the end of the first novel. Though the bullet did not kill her as expected, it left a streak of silver through her black hair and rendered her unable to fully transform into a wolf as before. Now, every night, she becomes a grotesque half-woman/half-wolf creature and wants revenge for what Karyn did to her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Steel_Remains"title="The Steel Remains">
Ringil Eskiath is a war hero from a conflict between humans and the lizard-like Scaled Folk, although he is now shunned by his aristocratic family in the city of Trelayne, part of the Northern League, due to his homosexuality and cynicism. He is contacted by his mother in his self-imposed exile after a distant cousin, Sherrin, is sold into legal slavery to pay off her husband's debt. He returns to Trelayne and his investigations reveal the presence of a Dwenda, an other-worldly being who lives outside of conventional time, who is aiding the slavers. He fights the Dwenda, named Seethlaw, but is captured and taken to the Aldrain Marches, the grey places between worlds. After a mentally grueling journey, they emerge at Ennishmann, a marshland and the site of an ancient and destroyed Dwenda city.Two of Ringils comrades in the war against the Scaled Folk are also drawn towards Ennishmann. Archeth serves, somewhat reluctantly, at the Imperial Yhelteth court. She is half Kiriath, a mysterious people who arrived in the world centuries ago and who aided the humans against the lizards before departing to a destination unknown. She is dispatched to investigate an attack on a port and discovers evidence that suggest Dwenda involvement. The Kiriath banished the Dwenda from the world many years ago and feared their return. Egar Dragonbane is Majak, a nomadic people who farm the steppes. After failing to adapt fully to his post-war position as clan-master he survives an assassination attempt by his brothers after apparent divine intervention by one of the tribal gods. Archeth, following the trail from the port, and Egar, directed by the deity, both head towards Ennishmann.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramage_(novel)"title="Ramage (novel)">
Nicholas Lord Ramage is the third lieutenant on His Majesty's ship "Sibella", but assumes command when the Captain, and the First and Second Lieutenants are killed by fire from a French ship. The French ship had fatally crippled the "Sibella" and had killed over half of her crew, including the surgeon and surgeon's mate. As the new Captain, Ramage decides to abandon the sinking ship. He leaves the injured on the deck to be taken prisoner by the French and hopefully treated by their surgeon. Before he abandons the ship, Ramage retrieves some documents and the late Captain's last orders. The remaining crew then loads into the four lifeboats and rows away. As they are rowing away, the crew of the French ship set the "Sibella" on fire after taking the injured off.Ramage opens Sir John Jervis's orders to the late Captain and finds that the "Sibella" was on a rescue mission to extricate the Marchesa di Volterri along with five other nobles including the Marchesa's two cousins. Austria was proving unable to defend its possessions in northern Italy, despite the subsidies the British government was paying to support the Austrian army. Britain, unable to deploy major forces on the European continent, used its commercial power to bolster the land armies of allies like Austria and Spain against the French for over a decade. Ramage decides to go through with the rescue. He takes the captain's gig with several topmen and the former Captain's coxswain, Jackson, with him and sends the other surviving sailors to Bastia. Ramage and his men then land upon Monte Argentario and find the Marchesa with the help of a local charcoal maker.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescence_(novel)"title="Incandescence (novel)">
The novel has two narratives in alternate chapters. The first follows two citizens of the Amalgam, a Milky Way-spanning civilisation, investigating the origin of DNA found on a meteor by the Aloof. The Aloof control the galactic core and, until the novel begins, have rejected all attempts at contact by the Amalgam. The second narrative is set on a small world known as the Splinter, and covers the attempts by its inhabitants to understand the environment within which their home exists. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that the Splinter orbits a collapsed star within its accretion disk and is subject to various dangers. The two stories come together in a complex twist which involves a kind of past/future first contact role reversal.Much of the narrative explores the effects of orbital dynamics around a high mass object and requires an understanding of Newtonian gravitation and at least a basic familiarity with general relativity and its application to black holes and neutron stars to be compelling. Understanding the story's wider frame of reference and the Splinter's encounter with the Wanderer are tied in with this.The Amalgam is explored in three other short stories, "Glory", "Riding the Crocodile", and "Hot Rock".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disguise_(novel)"title="Disguise (novel)">
The book begins during the Battle of Berlin. A mother, Mrs Liedmann and her son are living in a house in the city. Her husband is fighting for the German forces on the Western front. A bomb falls on their house and kills her son Gregor. Distraught, she searches among the ruins for her son. Her father, Emil Liedmann, who is a deserter from the army, comes to take her home To Nuremberg. On the outskirts of a country town he finds an orphan boy the same age as Gregor and makes his daughter promise to raise him as her own child and never to tell a soul that he is not her son. Soon after Emil disappears while searching for fuel on the black market. Later it emerges that Emil was shot by American forces as he tried to escape the Germans, who wanted to capture and punish Emil for being a deserter.In autumn 2006 a grown up Gregor meets with friends and family in an orchard in the German countryside. Gregor meets his wife Mara, from whom he has bees separated for thirty or so years, his best friend Martin and his son Daniel who is with his girlfriend Juli. Over the day spent picking apples Gregor reminisces over his life. In his teenage years he began to suspect that he was not his parents child, given that he looked nothing like them and on account of a slip up made by Uncle Max, an old friend of Emil. He runs away and travels throughout Europe for several years, returning to Germany intermittently to earn money for his travels. By the late sixties he is in Berlin and working as a musician. He meets Martin and Mara, telling them that he is an orphan. After some years he marries Mara when she becomes pregnant. The couples relationship comes under strain however when Mara visits Mrs. Liedmann who insists that Gregor is her biological dad. forced to choose between the word of her husband or his mother she becomes confused. Gregor decides to leave for a while to travel to Toronto with a group of musicians. Gregor maintains a long distance relationship with his family. After a time he returns to Berlin but finds it too hard. He leaves for Ireland where he lives for several years before he returns to Berlin following the fall of the Berlin wall. As time passes he gradually sees more of Mara and the two reform their friendship. At the end of the book, after Daniel has blamed Gregor for having fabricated the story of his existence, Mara takes the pair to a room in the back of the farmhouse where they are staying. In it is all of the possessions of Gregor's childhood home. Mara finds the clothes in which Gregor was found as a boy. Mara theorises that Mrs. Liedmann kept the clothes to let Gregor know of his origins. After this Daniel believes his fathers story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chimera's_Curse"title="The Chimera's Curse">
Connie is the world's last Universal and the only one who can communicate with everyone and everything. the only person who can keep peace and unity between humans and the mythical beings being destroyed by human hands. The evil shapeshifter Kullervo wants her power. He wants to destroy all humanity for wiping out the mythical creatures.During a scorching summer, Kullervo prepares for war. The serpent-like Chimera is only a small part of his deadly army. As the dangerous fire of Kullervo's hatred bursts into life, Connie and her best friend Col must stop him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlafes_Bruder"title="Schlafes Bruder">
The protagonist, Johannes Elias Alder, called Elias, is born in a small mountain village in Vorarlberg. He is a gifted musician, training his voice and able to imitate all villagers. Peter, his cousin of about the same age, is fascinated by him. Elias secretly practices the organ at night, with Peter assisting him.When the boys are twelve years old, Peter, who is abused by his father, sets fire to his parents' farm on Christmas Day. Elias, who discovers the flames first, rescues Peter's sister Elsbeth. More than half the village burns down during the fire. Elias doesn't tell anyone that Peter was the perpetrator of the fire, for love of his only friend.Elias grows up to a good-looking and ambitious young man. After the organist and teacher commits suicide, Elias becomes his successor. He loves Elsbeth. Peter is jealous and arranges a marriage of Elsbeth and Lukas, the son of a wealthy farmer. Elias has a vision in a desperate night when he struggles with God. He loses his love for Elsbeth and becomes depressed.When Elias is 22 years old, the cathedral organist of Feldberg listens to his organ playing and invites him to an organ festival. There, Elias plays an improvisation on the chorale "Komm, o Tod, du Schlafes Bruder" from Bach's cantata "Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen", fascinating all listeners. His love for Elsbeth is revived and he decides to take his own life, according to the thoughts expressed in the chorale. He tries to sleep no more and dies, buried by Peter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betrayal_at_Falador"title="Betrayal at Falador">
"Betrayal at Falador" takes place in Gielinor, the fictional world of "RuneScape", and begins with a woman known as Kara-Meir found near death within the walls of Falador Castle. Sir Amik Varze and his White Knights are determined to locate the attack's perpetrator, speculated to be a monster seen attacking travellers on the outskirts of the region.Kara-Meir is rescued by the Knights of Falador, who retrieve from her three mysterious objects; a finely crafted sword with a green tinge, a strange ring broken into two and some white flowers. At the command of Sir Amik, Squire Theodore is sent to the town of Taverley to consult with the local druids about the flowers. Along the way, he witnesses the gruesome sight of a butchered gypsy caravan.Upon his arrival at Taverley, Kaqemeex the druid confirms that the flowers are in fact snowdrops, which grow on Ice Mountain, adding further suspicion that Kara may be a spy. Doric, the dwarf, in the meantime is mobbed by a band of drunken farmers, and his home is burnt. This is because the attackers have been brainwashed by the H.A.M (Humans against Monsters) society. Returning to Falador, Squire Theodore meets Doric en route. Doric agrees to go to Falador in order to report the mobbing he suffered.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_taxi_mauve"title="Un taxi mauve">
A man settles on the Beara Peninsula in Ireland, where he plans to lead an idle life devoted to reading, music and hunting. He befriends a number of unusual people. Jerry Kean, an Irish-American who has returned to the land of his forefathers, comes from an affluent family but is lost in life. Jerry's sister Sharon is a beautiful, mysterious and provocative woman who has married into German royalty. His other sister, Moira, is an internationally famous film actress. Taubelman is an avid story teller shrouded in mystery. His supposed daughter Anne is voluntarily mute. Seamus Scully is a retired medical doctor who travels across the landscape in a purple taxi.The narrator first develops feelings for Sharon and then becomes fascinated by Anne. He becomes friends with Jerry, while the mystery surrounding Taubelman sets the atmosphere for numerous hunting parties, walks with faithful dogs and visits to countryside pubs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slugs_(novel)"title="Slugs (novel)">
Slugs in the cellar of an old house feed on scraps of rotten meat someone is unknowingly throwing down to them.A very drunk Ron Bell stumbles home, passes out in his front room and wakes to find himself being eaten alive by slugs that have come through the floor. The slugs then retreat back down the cellar.Mike Brady, an almost-40-year-old council health inspector awakes with wife Kim, 35, and discusses that he has to help evict a council tenant Ron Bell that day. Brady accompanies Archie Reece, bailiff, to serve an eviction notice on Ron Bell. They find Bell's mutilated body. The slugs leave Ron Bell's cellar, crawl up into his garden and then down into the sewers towards a new housing estate.Mary Forbes, housewife, discovers slug larvae in her hanging baskets. Brady, on a routine check of the houses on the new housing estate finds slime trails.Bert Crossley, a butcher on the new housing estate enjoys a lunch time drink with friends Danny and Tony. On arriving back at his shop afterwards, he discovers the meat he had left in cabinets has vanished, only a few scraps and dark patches of blood remain.Julie Jenkins, receptionist for the council offices where Brady works, takes a message from pensioner Mrs. Fortune, complaining about her blocked drain and toilet. Brady and effluent operative Don Palmer from the council sewage department go to investigate. They find the drain blocked and slime trails but when they examine the sewer they find nothing wrong. They do not see two slugs hidden in the darkness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_(novella)"title="Burn (novella)">
The story follows Prosper Gregory Leung, a farmer who has been recruited to help fight forest fires on his home planet of Walden. After being injured in the line of duty, he is sent to recover in a hospital. There, he ends up contacting the High Gregory, a young ruler on the planet Kenning. In the course of talking with the High Gregory, Spur unknowingly brings the young "luck maker" and several other young diplomats to Walden.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Infernal_Devices"title="The Infernal Devices">
The series takes place in London England in 1878, a short time after the peace treaties between Downworlders and Shadowhunters. As Shadowhunters consider themselves superior or purer than Downworlders or demons, they may have no qualms about killing either.The first book in "The Infernal Devices" is entitled "Clockwork Angel" and begins the story of Tessa Gray, an orphan teenage girl who is looking for her brother Nathaniel Gray, who has disappeared, and seeks her true identity.Her search plunges her into a world she never knew existed and reveals talents she never knew she had. She will have to learn to master them if she wants to find her brother, and must forge an alliance with Shadowhunters if she wants to survive in this dangerous world. Many of the family names of the Shadowhunters used in "The Mortal Instruments" are first introduced in this series. Another character in "The Infernal Devices", Magnus Bane, the High Warlock of Brooklyn, also plays a part in the series.As Tessa Gray is drawn deeper into the Shadow World, and goes on the quest of finding her brother, she falls in love with two Shadowhunters–but when it comes to choosing one, trouble begins to brew and suspense finds its way into her life. She will have to learn to hide her feelings if she hopes to survive. However, as her heart rages for love but her mind is bent on saving her brother, will she hide her vulnerable side? Which of the Shadowhunters will win her heart?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Broken_Shore"title="The Broken Shore">
The novel's central character is Joe Cashin, a Melbourne homicide detective. Following serious physical injuries he is posted to his hometown Port Munro, where he begins the process of rebuilding the old family mansion and his physical and mental strength. Against a background of family tragedy, politics, police corruption and racism, he investigates the death of a wealthy local man, Charles Burgoyne. His closest friend and police superior is Villani, who is the central character in "Truth".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_Fowl_and_the_Time_Paradox"title="Artemis Fowl and the Time Paradox">
Angeline Fowl, Artemis Fowl's mother contracts a debilitating disease, which Artemis worsens by trying to use magic. Artemis desperately contacts Captain Holly Short and No. 1, in hopes that they will be able to shed some new light on his mother's condition. They determine Angeline is suffering from Spelltropy, a fairy disease that is spread through the use of magic, and can only be cured by the brain fluid of the silky sifaka lemur of Madagascar. Unfortunately, the lemur is extinct, due to a ruthless deal Artemis made almost 8 years ago with a group called the Extinctionists. Foaly tells him that his mother will die without the cure. Artemis pleads for No.1 to open up the time stream, allowing him to save the lemur, and thus his mother. Foaly argues against the idea, but due to Artemis' lying to Holly, saying that she infected Angeline with Spelltropy, Holly agrees to help Artemis immediately to make up for it, and Foaly gives in.They arrive nearly eight years earlier in Artemis' study. The time stream causes Artemis to become much hairier while Holly is physically reduced to an adolescent. Artemis assures Holly that the past Butler will quietly slip the lemur into the room (to avoid Angeline seeing it) and that they will simply be able to leave. Butler however, does not act according to Artemis' predictions. He tranquillises the two, and locks them in the trunk of the Fowl Bentley. Artemis and Holly escape with the help of Mulch Diggums, a kleptomaniac dwarf who has partnered up with Artemis in the future. After following his younger self to an animal park to retrieve the lemur, Artemis breaks into the wrong cage and is attacked by a gorilla, and Holly is forced into action. She heals his wounds with magic, and in a giddy haze of relief after realising he almost died, she kisses him. Afterward, they save the lemur from Rathdown Park, but are forced at gunpoint to release it to young Artemis. While hurrying to the shuttleport in Tara, a guilty Artemis confesses his lie to Holly, who is outraged. Artemis redeems himself by giving Holly a chance to talk with Commander Root, who is dead in their time. Holly becomes neutral to Artemis, then thanks him. They commandeer a shuttle and fly it to Fez, Morocco, where the younger Artemis will trade the lemur to the Extinctionists for a hundred thousand euros. The money will go to an Arctic expedition, to help Artemis find his missing father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gargoyle_(novel)"title="The Gargoyle (novel)">
"The Gargoyle" follows two different time lines, one in the form of a story (or ‘memory’), and one in real time. In real time, an unnamed atheist and former hardcore porn star with a troubled childhood is driving under the influence of alcohol and drugs. Hallucinating that a volley of arrows is being shot at him from a forest, he swerves off the road and into a ravine. There his car sets alight, and he begins to burn. Just as he thinks he will die, the car tips into a creek and he survives, though badly burned. While recovering, the Burned Man becomes addicted to morphine and believes there is now a snake in his spine. Hatching a suicide plan, he gets to know a visitor named Marianne Engel, who is a sculptress suspected of having manic depression or schizophrenia. Humoring her at first as she believes she knew him several hundred years prior, they soon begin a friendship/ relationship, and he moves in with her. Throughout, Marianne reveals their ‘past’, and tells tales of love and hope, inspiring the Burned Man to live.Their ‘past’ story begins in fourteenth-century Germany, at a monastery named Engelthal. A baby is found at the gates, and taken in and raised as a nun. The young sister Marianne is soon found to possess incredible language skills, understanding languages she has never been taught. One day, a man is brought to the monastery. He is severely burned, except for a small rectangle over his heart where there is an arrow wound, caused by a copy of Dante's Inferno, which he took from an Italian friend, blocking the burning arrow which struck him. The man is a member of a Condotta, a mercenary troop. The nuns believe the burned man is too injured to live. Marianne however looks after him, and he survives, and the two grow closer as she translates and reads to him Dante's Inferno. Finding love with each other, the Burned Man and Marianne flee the monastery and begin a new life together, getting married and conceiving a baby.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_(novel)"title="Fifteen (novel)">
Jane Purdy is a 15-year-old student at Woodmont High School in California. She dreams of having a boyfriend like blonde, popular, and sophisticated 16-year-old Marcy Stokes has. Jane feels somewhat left out of social circles at her high school, and envies the more popular girls who go out on dates, seem more confident and wear more expensive clothes.One day while babysitting, Jane meets 16-year-old Stan Crandall, who is a delivery boy for a pet-food store. Jane is immediately attracted to Stan, although she does not believe that he will be attracted to her, because she is ordinary. However, Stan calls her later and asks her out on a date to the movies.After school begins, Jane learns that Stan has another date named Bitsy for the first school dance. Jane is extremely upset, but it turns out that Stan asked Bitsy to the dance before he met Jane and he feels he can't break the date. After the dance, Stan tells Jane about his time with Bitsy, saying that she made fun of his job. Stan turned pale before saying goodbye to Jane. Later, Julie calls Jane on the phone to tell her Stan was rushed to the hospital and had his appendix out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Esperanza"title="Santa Esperanza">
Santa Esperanza is a multi-cultural country stretched on three small islands lost somewhere in the middle of the Black Sea. The islands are inhabited by the Georgians, the Genoese (descendants of the Black Sea settlers), the Turks and the British. The islands are often visited by tourists, who essentially view the place as an earthly Paradise. However, there are occasional tourists who take a closer look at the distinct and singular culture, as well as the traditions turned into taboos.Since the Crimean War, the Island has been under British rule. Apparently, at that time they leased the three islands for 150 years from the last governor Sarri-Beg, a Turk of Georgian origin. The main story of the novel unfolds in 2002, when the British leave the islands and Santa Esperanza gains independence. The rivalry between the local powerful clans grows into a civil war, which has no clear political coloring, it rather is a clash of spiritual monsters reared during the lull of several centuries. For this reason, the war has no obvious cause, and the only tangible conflict is the primacy of the clan to receive the state insignia from the British Governor. The hostilities are instigated by the Visramianis, the wealthiest Georgian clan, owners of one of the islands. The family traditions and internal regulations comprise a sophisticated system of numerous prohibitions and complicated, opinionated restrictions, which eventually causes dramatic developments in the personal lives of the younger generation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone,_Baby,_Gone_(novel)"title="Gone, Baby, Gone (novel)">
Boston-based lovers and private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro are hired by a woman to look into the case of her niece, Amanda McCready, whose disappearance has become an important local news story. They take the case despite the seeming reluctance of the girl's uncle, Lionel. During the investigation they quickly come to the conclusion that Amanda's mother, Helene, who has been prominently featured in the news stories about the case, is a degenerate and neglectful parent. At the time of Amanda's disappearance, Helene had left her alone for several hours while she partied at a local dive bar. In another incident, revealed later, Helene had once left her daughter unsupervised on the beach for several hours, resulting in the girl getting a terrible sunburn. While Helene has been pleading with the public for her daughter's return, in private she often seems more concerned about her own life and the possible benefit the publicity might have on it. In perhaps the most irresponsible act of parenting, Patrick and Angie discover that Helene had taken Amanda along while she and her then boyfriend Skinny Ray stole two hundred thousand dollars from men working for the imprisoned drug dealer Cheese.Patrick and Angie begin working on the case with police officers Remy Broussard and Nick "Poole" Raftopoulous, members of the Boston Police Department's CAC (Crimes Against Children) Division. In investigating the missing money from Helene and Ray's drug deal, Patrick, Angie, Broussard, and Poole find the money along with two dead bodies, acquaintances of Helene's from when the money was originally stolen. The police receive an apparent ransom demand calling for a meetup at the Quincy Quarries to exchange the money for the girl. Under cover of darkness and with the area surrounded by police, Angie, Patrick, Poole, and Remy arrive at the quarry. Before they can meet the kidnappers, a confused gun battle breaks out, resulting in the death of a couple of gangsters working for Cheese and the disappearance of the ransom money. Angie finds Amanda's favorite doll, which had been taken along with her, in the water of the quarry, and they conclude that the little girl was likely thrown in and died.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pinch_of_Snuff_(novel)"title="A Pinch of Snuff (novel)">
Receiving a tip from his dentist Jack Shorter, Inspector Peter Pascoe takes a closer look at the Calliope Kinema Club, a film club notorious for showing adult entertainment movies. Shorter is convinced that one particular scene in a movie he recently saw was too realistic to have been staged with fake blood, but when Pascoe starts investigating, he soon comes across the actress in question, Linda Abbott, who obviously didn't suffer from any harm and assures Pascoe that his and Shorter's concerns are unnecessary. Meanwhile, the "Calli" has been vandalised and its proprietor Gilbert Haggard has been assaulted so badly that he succumbs to a heart attack. The only existing copy of "Droit de Seigneur" - the film Jack Shorter was so worried about - has been destroyed, and when 13-year-old Sandra Burkill accuses the dentist of being the father of her (yet unborn) child, it begins to look as though Shorter had merely tried to avert suspicions by his claims against the "Calli".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusade_(Young_novel)"title="Crusade (Young novel)">
"Crusade", like "Brethren" before it, follows Will Campbell, a Templar involved in a secret order known as the Anima Templi, as he tries to secure peace in the Holy Land with the help of Kalawun, a high-ranking officer in the Mamluk court ruled by Sultan Baybars. Both of these men face plots from within their own organisations to throw the Holy Land into war: in Acre, Will must stop a cabal of merchants seeking to start a war by stealing the Muslim relic known as the Black Stone; while in Egypt, Baybars' son Baraka Khan and soothsayer Khadir al-Mihrani are plotting to overthrow Baybars and redouble the attack on the last remaining Franks in the Holy Land. Meanwhile, Will's childhood friend, Garin de Lyons, is now in the employ of King Edward I and has returned to Acre to extort money from the Anima Templi and to pursue his own, more selfish ends; and Will faces a threat from Baybars as the sultan gets nearer and nearer to discovering that it was Will who, many years before, ordered an assassination attempt which had failed but had taken the life of Baybars' closest friend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Fever!"title="Treasure Fever!">
Henry McThrottle waits with his friends Jack, a drawer; pan phobic Newton, muscular Gretel and sociable Jenny for their teacher Mrs. Chalkboard to come. Mr. Greenbeard, the school principal and naval buff comes to the class to announce the new substitute teacher Mr. Brainfright who will replace Mrs. Chalkboard while she is on a spot of "shore leave". It becomes immediately apparent that Mr. Brainfright doesn't know a thing about teaching, and proceeds to make his first lesson about how to breathe. This results in him falling out the window, to where the whole class successfully pulls him back in, and where Mrs. Cross is introduced.Mr. Brainfright continues to tell the class about a riddle where a man has a goat, a wolf, and some cabbage, and he needs to cross a river, with the reward being a lollipop. Henry correctly answers the riddle using spitballs thrown to him by Clive Durkin, the class bully. At recess, Clive and his brother Fred claim that the lollipop is his because Henry used Clive's spitballs to help him work it out. Fred and Henry then fight until Mrs. Cross stops it and sends Henry to the office.Henry explains the problem to Mr. Greenbeard, who understands as a similar thing happened to him when he was younger. Mr. Greenbeard had a treasure chest full of things that he had, buried in a hill that he named "Skull Island", which had been stolen. Mr. Greenbeard recited the poem that was left in the chest, which inspires Henry to look for it. He enlists his friends Jack, Newton, Gretel, and Jenny to help him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knife_That_Killed_Me"title="The Knife That Killed Me">
"The Knife that Killed Me" is a novel which follows a teenager, Paul Varderman, as he tries to fit in with a group in his school.At the beginning of the book, Paul is a loner, looking into the groups from the outside. A series of events in which he stands up for members of a group known as "The Freaks" lead to him becoming included by them. "The Freaks" are different from the other groups as they do not live under the rule of the school thug, Roth.As Paul becomes more involved with "The Freaks", he also begins to become influenced by Roth. Roth uses Paul as a messenger between himself and a rival school and gives him a knife. The relationship between the two schools develops, with Roth leading the way to war between them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knife_of_Never_Letting_Go"title="The Knife of Never Letting Go">
Todd Hewitt is the only boy left in Prentisstown, a small settlement on New World – an alien planet only recently colonized by humanity. Todd is within days of his thirteenth birthday, the age in Prentisstown at which all boys become men.Todd has been told that all the women and nearly all the men on New World were killed in a war with the Spackle that occurred around the time of his birth. The Spackle are New World's native inhabitants and are blamed for the release of a germ that caused the majority of deaths and was particularly fatal to women. The inhabitants of Prentisstown claim that every Spackle was wiped out during the war, and Todd has no reason to believe otherwise. As a side effect of the virus, the remaining men in Prentisstown can hear each others' (and animals') thoughts, described as an ever-present cascade of what they call "Noise".The men of Prentisstown make up the last surviving settlement on New World – at least according to Mayor Prentiss, after whom the town is named.At the beginning of the book, Todd and his dog, Manchee, discover a lone patch of silence, described as a "hole in the Noise", in a local swamp. When Todd explains the silence to his adoptive parents, Ben and Cillian, his Noise accidentally projects the discovery to the entire town. Ben and Cillian suddenly reveal they have been planning Todd's escape from Prentisstown for his entire life. The two men immediately force him to leave Prentisstown with just a satchel of supplies and Manchee to accompany him. Todd unwillingly obeys. Cillian fights off the Mayor's son, Davy Prentiss, and other men from the town while Ben gives Todd his own hunting knife and Todd's deceased mother's diary.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shatter_(novel)"title="Shatter (novel)">
Professor Joseph O'Loughlin (referred to as Joe throughout the novel) is tasked by the police with stopping a woman, Christine Wheeler, from committing suicide, only to fail. When Wheeler's teenage daughter appears onto his doorstep, she insists that her mother would not have jumped off a bridge as she did, for she was not suicidal and had a fear of heights. Haunted by his failure to save her and driven by a need to understand what caused her death, Joe searches for the truth, only to be caught up in a string of murders all while dealing with his own problems with Parkinson's disease and his marriage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Go_to_Mystery_Moor"title="Five Go to Mystery Moor">
George and her cousin Anne are spending their holiday at Captain Johnson's Riding School, where George has a rivalry with another tomboy named Henrietta, who prefers to be called "Henry". Anne's brothers Julian and Dick come to join the girls and initially mistake Henry for a boy, much to George's chagrin.The children encounter a group of gypsies determined to visit a desolate place called Mystery Moor. An elderly blacksmith tells the children how gypsies, in the past, sabotaged a railway run by a family of sand miners, causing most of the family to mysteriously disappear when the moor was covered by a thick mist.The Famous Five follow the gypsies to the moor and discover they are involved in receiving smuggled American banknotes, which are later revealed to be forgeries from France. George and Anne are taken prisoners and held in a cave, but are rescued by Henry and a boy from the riding school, William. A gypsy boy named Sniffer assists their escape, and George promises to reward him with a red bicycle and living in a house with a family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Have_a_Wonderful_Time"title="Five Have a Wonderful Time">
George has caught a cold due to swimming in the sea in April and, as such, is unable to join Julian, Dick, and Anne on their planned caravan trip. The other children have already set up their caravans on a hill opposite Faynights Castle. George is on the mend from her cold, so she writes a postcard to let Julian, Dick, and Anne know that they should meet her at the railway station the next day. That day, the children learn that two scientists have gone missing. It’s presumed that the scientists are traitors, and have fled the country to sell secrets.A traveling fair arrives and sets up camp directly next to the Kirrin Children. The children attempt to make friends with the performers, but the performers do not feel the same way. Performers include Alfredo the Fire-Eater, Bufflo the Whip Cracker and his assistant Skippy, Mr. India Rubber, and Mr. Slither, the snake-man. The tension between the children and performers finally culminates in the performers waiting until the children have gone for a walk and then hitching up their own horses to the children’s caravans to move them to another field. The field that the caravans have been moved to is owned by a farmer who orders the children off his property. Unfortunately, the Kirrins are unable to move their caravans without borrowing horses from the performers. Julian and Dick leave to speak to the performers but are unsuccessful in their attempt to borrow the horses. During this time, their old friend Jo (first introduced in "Five Fall into Adventure") arrives and joins the Kirrin children. Jo aids Julian and Dick in convincing the fair performers to let them borrow their horses.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Private_Patient"title="The Private Patient">
In deepest Dorset, the once magnificent Cheverell Manor has been renovated and transformed into a plastic surgery clinic, run by the famous cosmetic practitioner George Chandler-Powell. Two days after Rhoda Gradwyn, an investigative journalist, arrives in the hope of having her almost lifelong facial scar removed, she's savagely murdered and Chandler-Powell finds his surgery under scrutiny from Dalgliesh and his team, who are soon caught in a race against time when another body shows up...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wycliffe_and_the_Winsor_Blue"title="Wycliffe and the Winsor Blue">
Following the death of artist Edwin Garland from a heart attack, his family and friends gather for the funeral, and are duly shocked by the apparently motiveless shooting of the dead man's son. When Wycliffe yields no clues after the reading of the old man's mischievously contrived will, the only leads he's left with are the mysterious artist's pigment known as Winsor Blue, and the death of Gifford Tate, a fellow painter and friend of Edwin's, several years before...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Home_(novel)"title="The Road Home (novel)">
The story concerns Lev, a middle-aged immigrant who was recently widowed. He leaves his home, Auror, a village in an unspecified eastern European country, after the sawmill he works at closes down. Soon after, he travels to London to find work so he can make money to send to his mother, his 5-year-old daughter, Maya, and his best friend. He finds his first job at a Muslim kebab-shop, before washing dishes at a five-star restaurant named GK Ashe. Along the way, Lev meets a translator from his home country named Lydia, a divorced Irish plumber named Christy, a young chef named Sophie, and a rich old woman named Ruby.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladybug_Girl"title="Ladybug Girl">
Lulu's family is busy so she plays with her dog Bingo and spends time outside helping ants bypass rocks, crossing puddles that she imagines could contain sharks, and fixing up a rock fort, in their spacious backyard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_Insulting_to_Nature"title="Colors Insulting to Nature">
Set in the early 1980s, Liza Normal goes on numerous theater and commercial auditions, at the behest of her mother Peppy, who costumes the child in a strapless evening gowns, heavy make-up, and false eyelashes. Humiliations repeat for Liza, as she and her family encounter endless degradation, after opening a dinner theater in Marin County, California. Throughout the first half of the novel, Liza is forced to perform in a dilapidated firehouse, which functions as the theater, as well as the family's home, attend school where she is constantly ridiculed and tormented, and at one point, raped. After this, Liza undergoes several phases, the first of which is a gravitation toward the punk rock aesthetic, specifically embracing and cultivating the look of Plasmatics performer, Wendy O. Williams. Liza eventually becomes involved with a drug pusher, and at one point becomes addicted herself during her stint at "Elf House," which Wilson describes as a commune of hippies who have a fetish with elves and speaking in "Quenya, the J.R.R. Tolkien version of High Elf language." It is during this time, that Liza, while working for Centaur Productions—a company that creates and distributes Slash fiction, that she concocts an "alter ego, Venal de Minus, into a phone sex phenomenon and Las Vegas stage act," achieving a new definition of success that is a spin-off of the earlier theater ambitions initially sought by her mother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_Puzzle_(book)"title="Monkey Puzzle (book)">
The story revolves around a child-like monkey who has lost her mother in the deep, thick, hot jungle. The monkey is then assisted to find her mother by a butterfly, who tries to think of whereabouts in the jungle she might be. However, the butterfly keeps suggesting incorrect animals as the monkey's mother, including an elephant, a snake, a spider, a parrot, a frog and a bat. Eventually, the butterfly and the monkey find the monkey's Dad, who says, "Come, little monkey, come, come, come, it's time I took you home to..." and then shortly after another call, Butterfly finds the monkey's lost mother and the monkey is happy again, as well as the butterfly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_&amp;_the_City"title="The City &amp; the City">
Inspector Tyador Borlú, of the Extreme Crime Squad in the fictional East European city-state of Besźel, investigates the murder of Mahalia Geary, a foreign student found dead in a Besźel street with her face disfigured. He soon learns that Geary had been involved in the political and cultural turmoil involving Besźel and its "twin city" of Ul Qoma. His investigations, which start in his home city of Besźel, lead him to Ul Qoma to assist the Ul Qoman police in their work, and eventually result in an examination of the legend of Orciny, a rumoured third city existing in the spaces between Besźel and Ul Qoma.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Hunter_(Paver_novel)"title="Ghost Hunter (Paver novel)">
As winter approaches, Eostra, the last and most fearsome Soul-Eater, has spread a net of terror and fear across the whole Forest. Torak is plagued with visions of his father, who died three years previously. Fin-Kedinn counsels that the visions are not his father's spirit asking for help, but are instead Eostra's machinations, but Torak is unconvinced. He sets out eastwards, without Renn, to the High Mountains to confront Eostra and find his answers. He first visits the den of his companion Wolf, Wolf's mate Darkfur, and their cubs Shadow and Pebble. Renn pursues Torak, and Fin-Kedinn sets out on a journey of his own. However, an eagle owl, controlled by Eostra, attacks the wolves' den and, after killing Darkfur and Shadow, picks Pebble up and flies east, pursued by Wolf.Torak reunites with Renn in an ice storm, and nurse a near-suicidal Wolf back to health. Meanwhile, Pebble is dropped by the owl, and having hidden from the storm, follows Renn's ravens to the High Mountains. Having realised Eostra is waiting for the winter solstice, they meet with Krukoslik of the Mountain Hare Clan, who tells them that Soul-Eater haunts the Mountain of Ghosts. After Eostra enters the camp and taunts Renn, Krukoslik guides them to the Valley of the Hidden People, where Renn encounters a huge dog controlled by the Soul-Eater. Torak argues that he must confront Eostra alone and, after admitting his affection for Renn and kissing her, sets out for her lair.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thank_You,_Mr._Moto_(novel)"title="Thank You, Mr. Moto (novel)">
An expatriate American, Tom Nelson, has been living in Beiping (modern day Beijing) for some time and believes that he understands the Oriental mind. When he meets Eleanor Joyce he thinks that she is getting involved in matters way over her head when she agrees to meet with Major Jamison Best, a British ex-Army officer who sells stolen Chinese artifacts and art treasures.After dinner with Best, Nelson tries to make sense of Best’s cryptic conversation concerning a Chinese bandit chief named Wu Lo Feng and the possibility of trouble brewing in the city. On leaving dinner, he runs into Joyce whom he tries to persuade to not get involved in any scheme Best has going. She doesn’t listen to him but later he finds her wandering around outside of Best’s house, distraught.The next day Major Best is found dead, killed by a bolt from a Chinese crossbow. Mr. Moto is investigating the murder and he tells Nelson not to get involved. Nelson doesn’t listen to him and goes to warn Joyce since she was the last to see Best alive. Nelson soon discovers that Moto has made Best’s murder seem like a suicide.When he returns home someone tries to kill Nelson with a Chinese crossbow. Moto arrives and Nelson thinks he is the murderer. Cool and calm despite having a gun pointed at him, Moto once again warns Nelson not to interfere and offers him a chance to escape Peking on the next steamer. When Moto leaves, Nelson discovers that Wu Lo Feng is there ready to kill him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Planet_Savers"title="The Planet Savers">
Desperate to discover a cure for the cyclical 48-year-fever, known as Trailmen’s fever, Dr. Randall Forth persuades a colleague, Dr. Jay Allison, to undergo hypnosis. He calls forth a secondary personality, Jason Allison, who is gregarious and an experienced mountain climber, while Dr. Jay Allison is a cold, clinical man with no outdoor skills.Jason is asked to lead an expedition into the Hellers to collect medical volunteers from among the Trailmen. Accompanying him are Rafe Scott, Regis Hastur, Kyla Raineach, a Renunciate guide, and several others. During the trip, Jay/Jason yo-yos between his two personalities – one warm and charming, the other distant and clinical. Jason, the warm personality, falls in love with Kyla.They are attacked on the trail by a party of hostile Trailwomen. As a result of the attack, the Jay personality reappears, and is considerably more formal than the Jason personality. When they reach the Trailmen nest where Jay/Jason lived as a child, he is recognized. The party is invited into the Trailmen’s tree habitat.The Old Ones of the Sky People (Trailmen) inquire why Jay/Jason has brought an armed party of humans to their nest. Jay/Jason explains his mission, to find a remedy for 48-year-fever. He introduces Regis Hastur to the Old Ones, and Regis also pleads for the Sky People’s assistance. One hundred Trailmen volunteer. The party, with volunteers, returns to the Terran Trade City.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanence_(novel)"title="Permanence (novel)">
The novel tells the story of two characters, Rue Cassels and Michael Bequith, and their encounter with an alien spacecraft Rue has named "Jentry's Envy." Schroeder uses the story as a venue for discussing the information economy and philosophy.Rue, on the run from her brother Jentry and out of money, files claim on an undiscovered comet. She expects to profit from the mineral rights, but it turns out that the "comet" is actually an interstellar cycler, a ship that travels in a light-years length orbit, at relativistic speeds (85% c) carrying cargo and passengers between the Halo Worlds, planets that orbit Brown dwarf stars. The discovery causes a sensation, since the ship is the first to approach the planet Erythrion in ten years. Eventually her claim is upheld, since the cycler is silent, and her mineral rights become salvage rights, making her potentially very wealthy. A rich cousin of hers, Max Cassels, sponsors an expedition to the ship so she can claim it. Intrigue happens on the trip as several factions also want to claim it, such as the planetary government. The cyclers were the centerpiece of the Cycler Compact, but have slowly fallen out of use since the discovery of FTL travel, only possible between "lit" worlds. When they reach the ship, they are surprised to discover that it is an alien cycler, an unknown because all known aliens use FTL ships. They explore the ship some and jump off as it passes a lit world, Chandaka.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_of_the_Damned_(novel)"title="Legion of the Damned (novel)">
In the far future, the Human Empire has been attacked by the alien Hudatha, and humanity's last hope lies with the Legion (the successor to the French Foreign Legion), an elite fighting force composed of humans and cyborgs.When a patient is terminally ill, or a criminal receives the death penalty, they have one last chance to survive. And that's to join the Legion and become a cyborg.Both more and less than human, these soldiers are the most elite fighting force in the Empire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boys_of_Steel"title="Boys of Steel">
Jerome Siegel and Joseph Shuster are meek, bespectacled teens in Depression-era Cleveland who seek escape in the worlds of science fiction and pulp magazine adventure tales."In a crowded high school hallway, Jerry wishes he could be with his 'friends,' and a turn of the page reveals Tarzan, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. Joe, 'lousy at sports and mousy around girls,' draws sci-fi heroes with a passion. In 1934, when both are 20, Jerry dreams up the Superman concept and Joe draws prototypes labeled 'S' for 'super.' And for 'Siegel' and 'Shuster.'" It is four more years before they convince a publisher to take a chance on their character in the new comic book format."In June 1938, their creation launches in "Action Comics". Nobleman details this achievement with a zest amplified by MacDonald's punchy illustrations, done in a classic litho palette of brassy gold, antique blue and fireplug red. MacDonald's Depression-era vignettes picture Siegel pondering his superhero's powers and the friends casting a single, caped shadow. A cautionary afterword chronicles their protracted financial struggles with DC Comics—when Siegel and Shuster sold their first Superman story, they also sold all rights to the character, for $130."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Tiger_(Adiga_novel)"title="The White Tiger (Adiga novel)">
Balram Halwai narrates his life in a letter, written in seven consecutive nights and addressed to the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao. In his letter, Balram explains how he, the son of a rickshaw puller, escaped a life of servitude to become a successful businessman, describing himself as an entrepreneur.Balram was born in a rural village in Gaya district, where he lived with his grandmother, parents, brother and extended family. He is a smart child but is forced to leave school in order to help pay for his cousin's dowry and begins to work in a teashop with his brother in Dhanbad. While working there he begins to learn about India's government and economy from the customers' conversations. Balram describes himself as a bad servant but a good listener and decides to become a driver.After learning how to drive, Balram finds a job driving Ashok, the son of one of Laxmangarh's landlords. He takes over the job of the main driver, from a small car to a heavy-luxury described Honda City. He stops sending money back to his family and disrespects his grandmother during a trip back to his village. Balram moves to New Delhi with Ashok and his wife Pinky Madam. Throughout their time in Delhi, Balram is exposed to extensive corruption, especially in the government. In Delhi, the contrast between the poor and the wealthy is made even more evident by their proximity to one another.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_(Baxter_novel)"title="Flood (Baxter novel)">
The above effects are catastrophic, and exceed current estimates of climate change-related sea level rise. In the opening chapter, four main characters (former USAF Captain Lily Brooke, British military officer Piers Michaelmas, English tourist Helen Gray, and NASA scientist Gary Boyle) are liberated by a private megacorporation called AxysCorp from a Christian extremist Catalan terrorist bunker in Barcelona in 2016, after five years of captivity. AxysCorp was hoping to save a fifth prisoner, John Foreshaw, but he was executed minutes before the rescue. Nonetheless, the corporation continues to look after the four hostages and search for Helen's daughter, Grace, who was conceived in captivity by the son of a Saudi royal and taken by his family. Helen befriends Foreign Office official Michael Thurley in the hopes of finding her daughter, and the four rescued hostages make a pact to keep in contact.At this point, sea level changes have already submerged Tuvalu, a low lying South Pacific island, whose inhabitants have been evacuated to New Zealand. London and Sydney are prone to constant flooding. However, as a tidal surge hits London and Sydney, killing many in both cities, scientists become aware that this cannot be explained solely by the consequences of climate change. American oceanographer Thandie Jones uncovers the truth – through deep sea diving missions to oceanic ridges and trenches reveal that the seabed has fragmented, and there is turbulence that can only be attributable to the infusion of vast subterranean reservoirs of hitherto hypothesised but undetected oceanic masses of water (see below).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Within_(Woodward_book)"title="The War Within (Woodward book)">
The book states that President Bush "rarely leveled with the public to explain what he was doing and what should be expected... The president was rarely the voice of realism on the Iraq war." It also calls him "the nation's most divisive figure" and described his foreign policy as a failure, saying "He had not rooted out terror wherever it existed... He had not achieved world peace. He had not attained victory in his two wars." At the same time, the book largely supports the 'surge' strategy and lauds the President for adopting it.The book describes Bush as largely leaving the management of the war to Generals George Casey and John Abizaid and deferring to their judgment based on Bush's perception of Lyndon Johnson's micromanagement during the Vietnam War. As the generals' strategy of drawing down U.S. forces and transferring control to the Iraqis begins to fail, the book argues, Bush grows more disillusioned and sought other ideas. The book alleges that, nevertheless, the President delayed serious investigation because of his fear that leaked reports would hurt the Republican Party's chances in the 2006 congressional elections. It states that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld refused to consider resigning unless the Republicans lost control of either the House of Representatives or the Senate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Days_of_the_Comet"title="In the Days of the Comet">
An unnamed narrator is the author of a prologue ("The Man Who Wrote in the Tower") and an epilogue ("The Window of the Tower"). In these short texts is depicted an encounter with a "happy, active-looking" old man: the protagonist and author of the first-person narrative, writing the story of his life immediately before and after "the Change".This narrative is divided into three "books": "Book I: The Comet"; "Book II: The Green Vapours"; and "Book III: The New World".Book I, recounts that William ("Willie") Leadford, "third in the office staff of Rawdon's pot-bank [a place where pottery is made] in Clayton," quits his job just as an economic recession caused by American dumping hits industrial Britain, and is unable to find another position. He returns to being a student and his emotional life is dominated by his attachment to Nettie Stuart, "the daughter of the head gardener of the rich Mr. Verrall's widow", of a village called Checkshill Towers. Converted to socialism by his friend 'Parload', Leadford blames class-based injustice for the squalid living conditions in which he and his mother live. The date of the action is unspecified.When Nettie jilts Leadford for the son and heir of the Verrall family, Leadford buys a revolver, intending to kill them both and himself. As this plot matures, a comet with an "unprecedented band in the green" in its spectroscopy looms gradually larger in the sky, eventually becoming brighter than the Moon. Just as Leadford is about to kill his rivals, the green comet enters the Earth's atmosphere and disintegrates, causing a soporific green fog.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Different_Flesh"title="A Different Flesh">
The stories give a brief glimpse in this altered American history ranging from 1610 to 1988. The Western Hemisphere is inhabited by "Homo erectus" rather than "Homo sapiens", as well as megafauna long extinct in the known world. Consequently, the colonization of the New World by Europe has been a far more difficult process. As time goes by, various characters debate the nature of the "sims" (as "erectus" is known) and their role in human history.Included with the short stories are quotations from "The Story of the Federated Commonwealths". These snippets from an imaginary textbook providing the reader information about what happens during the time between the different stories.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children_of_Niobe"title="The Children of Niobe">
So we are in Salihli and watching life before the advent of the Greek Army. Central role played by the family of Michael Anastasiadis or Sarris, a middle-aged notable and a banker of Salihli with a charming, clever and cheated 35-years-old wife and four children (3 girls and 1 boy), madly in love with the 16-years-old Tarsi, a beautiful gazelle who refuses to marry the son of wealthy Turkish businessman, for whom she worked, and enchants everybody with her provocative teen flesh. In the meantime, we are watching the raids of the Turkish gendarmerie and terror they caused to the Greeks, the close relationship of Turks and Greeks as long as the one was not feeling threat from the other, hidden hopes for better days, the every day misdeeds caused by the human weakness and often leading to unexpected misery, mainly focusing on the guiltiness and the passion of Sarris for the 16 years old Tarsi.Then the novel described the pleasant (initially) life during the Greek occupation and the contact of the Minor Asian Greeks with the Greek soldiers who occupied Salihli to get up to the Destruction of Smyrna. After Sarris dies, his family loses slightly its primary place in the story. The beautiful and poor Tarsi rises socially but remains an erotic symbol of the lustful East. In the presence of the Greek army, dreams of the Greeks for freedom seem to come true. But follows the error handling and the underground system of espionage and undermining that Turks had set in the west Minor Asia, leading to the collapse of the front and the devastating consequences for Asia Minor. We will follow Asia Minor refugees and their efforts initially to save and then to find their feet in their new homeland.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Would_Have_Thought_It?"title="Who Would Have Thought It?">
The novel, written in chronological order, is divided into sixty chapters. The first ten occur during the years just before the Civil War (1857–1861), and flashbacks explain the way in which a fabulously wealthy Spanish Mexican named Lola came to stay with a New England family, the Norvals. The last fifty chapters occur during the Civil War (1861–1864).The novel opens with Dr. Norval's return to New England from a geological expedition in the Southwest, accompanied by a ten-year-old girl, Maria Dolores Medina, known as Lola or Lolita, and trunks of supposed geological specimens that are actually filled with Lola's gold. He was appointed her guardian when he and his companions, Mr. Lebrun and Mr. Sinclair, rescued her from captivity. Because her skin was dyed black by her Native American captors, her arrival generates ironic disgust among the abolitionist women in the household, especially Mrs. Norval. She is horrified by the idea of Dr. Norval contaminating the racial purity of their home, despite his insistence that Lola is of pure Spanish descent and the dye will fade. Mrs. Norval demands that Lola work in order to pay for expenses; Dr. Norval objects and explains to her how Lola's mother, Doña Theresa Medina, gave him gold and precious gems she acquired while a captive of the Apache to finance Lola's care. Doña Theresa Medina asked him to rescue Lola so that the girl would be brought up as a Catholic. The Presbyterian Mrs. Norval is angered when she hears this but quickly reconciles her emotions when he shows her the trunks filled with Lola's fortune.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Girls"title="Shanghai Girls">
"Shanghai Girls" is divided into three parts: Fate, Fortune, and Destiny. Here See treats Chinese immigration from a personal view through Pearl's narration. In "On Gold Mountain" she objectively placed 100 years of her Chinese family history in the context of the daunting challenges Chinese immigrants faced in coming to America in search of Gold Mountain. America's mistreatment of Chinese immigrants is stressed in both memoir and novel.The sisters' story is interrelated with critical historical events, famous people, and important places—the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Battle of Shanghai, internment at Angel Island, Los Angeles Chinatown, Hollywood, World War II, the Chinese Exclusion Act, McCarthyism, etc. Historically significant people appearing in the novel include Madame Chiang Kai-shek, actress Anna May Wong, film personality Tom Gubbins, and Christine Sterling, the "Mother of Olvera Street.""Snow Flower and the Secret Fan" explores the complex relationship between two intimate friends. In "Shanghai Girls" See treats the loving yet conflicted relationship between two best friends who also happen to be sisters, especially in the context of their relationship to Pearl's daughter Joy. In speaking of "Shanghai Girls", See has commented: "Your sister is the one person who should stick by you and love you no matter what, but she’s also the one person who knows exactly where to drive the knife to hurt you the most." That being said, in "Shanghai Girls" it is the love of Pearl and May for each other that survives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Guardian"title="Conan the Guardian">
Conan and other former mercenaries take employment as bodyguards for Lady Livia, head of one of the ruling merchant houses of Argos. Livia is threatened by a rival seeking to gain personal control of all Argos, who is secretly backed by a sorcerer.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_of_Gossip"title="Princess of Gossip">
"Princess of Gossip" tells the story of Avery Johnson, a fourteen-year-old high school freshman who just moved from Ohio to Southern California. While on MySpace, she is mistaken as a rising pop star's assistant. She scores an invite to a Hollywood Party and snaps a photo of a young starlet and her secret new beau. Finding this information too juicy to keep to herself, she starts a blog, the Princess of Gossip, and posts the story.Overnight, she becomes the newest go-to girl for gossip. Designers are sending her priceless dresses, and she's getting the inside scoop on all things celebrity. When Avery shows up at school in her exclusive fashion swag, even Cecilia, the most popular girl in their class, takes notice. She begins to get jealous.Then celebutante playboy Beckett Howard sees Avery wearing one of his father's designs and asks her out. The Princess of Gossip's true identity is still a secret, but when the paparazzi catch Avery and Beckett on a date, Cecilia gets even more jealous. There's only room for only one it girl at school. Can the Princess of Gossip hold onto her crown?
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rod_of_Seven_Parts"title="The Rod of Seven Parts">
At the Dawn of Time the forces of Law warred with the forces of Chaos for control of the Cosmos. The Battle of Pesh was the climax of this campaign where the armies of Chaos were led by Miska the Wolf-Spider, while the forces of Law were championed by the Vaati, or Wind Dukes. Desperately outnumbered, the Wind Dukes fashioned the Rod of Seven Parts, a weapon powerful enough to kill Miska in a single strike. Yet the Battle of Pesh was a draw, as neither Law nor Chaos won the day. The Wind Dukes were decimated, but in the final moments their leader struck Miska with the Rod, but rather than being slain the Wolf-Spider was mortally wounded and imprisoned for eternity within the Abyss. The resulting balance created the multiverse as it now exists, with a tense stand-off between order and anarchy. The fate of the multiverse is in the hands of the wielder of the Rod of Seven Parts, for it can still both slay Miska and free him.Because the Rod is so potent, it cannot be conventionally protected. Therefore, to keep it safe the Wind Dukes designed the separate sections of the Rod to scatter around the globe whenever its full powers were employed by striking Miska. Each piece of the Rod both leads and urges its bearer in the direction of the next sequential section. Once the first section of the Rod has fallen into the hands of the player characters they are committed to a quest which will take them the length and breadth of their homeworld, and eventually into the heart of the Abyss.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyborg_from_Earth"title="The Cyborg from Earth">
The novel starts in a future dystopian Earth where the upper class lives a life of privilege, while most others live in the "pool", an endless crowd of unemployable youths depending on government assistance or crime for survival. The book is told from the perspective of the main character, Jefferson Kopal, a young member of an immensely wealthy and powerful spaceship building family founded by his Great Grandfather, Rollo Kopal, an admiral in the Space Navy. As part of the bylaws, all voting members of the company must have served honorably in the navy. Young Jeff is about to take his final test...
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanno_Bridge"title="Romanno Bridge">
The book is a sequel to Greig's second novel, "The Return of John MacNab". It reunites the main characters from the previous book, and teams them with a half-Maori rugby player and a busker from Oslo, in a quest for the Stone of Scone. The action takes place mainly in Scotland, but it also includes sections set in Norway and England.Like "The Return of John MacNab", this novel is something of a homage to the stories of John Buchan, although the connection is not made explicit this time around.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gadget_(novel)"title="The Gadget (novel)">
In 1945, 13-year-old Stephen Orr has just reached the gates of the top secret military base in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He has come to join his father, a physicist working on making an atomic bomb. Though his father is forbidden to discuss the project in any detail, Stephen can tell by his haunted eyes and shaking hands how worried he and the other scientists are. After a few weeks, Stephen finds that he cannot control his insatiable curiosity. Enlisting the help of his new friend Alexei, Stephen devises a plan to discover the true nature of "the gadget." But when he finally learns what it is, he also realizes another startling truth—that he has trusted the wrong person with the information and not only his life, but the lives of all Americans, could be in terrible danger.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistance_(Sheers_novel)"title="Resistance (Sheers novel)">
Upon her husband's disappearance, Sarah is forced to take care of the farm. Meanwhile, she develops a relationship with German commanding officer Albrecht Wolfram as he and the other invaders seek to locate an item for Himmler's collection.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_and_Down_the_Scratchy_Mountains"title="Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains">
Lucy lives in the land of Bewilderness, in a village called Thistle. She helps her family with the dairy farm and likes exploring the countryside with her best friend Wynston. Lucy makes up songs that fit with the situation which gives her courage and raises her spirits. She learned how to make up songs from her mother. Her mother vanished when she was two years old. Lucy and her sister never say anything about their mother, because their father gets sad. When Wynston turns twelve, his father thinks that he should practice being a prince which includes finding a princess. Wynston doesn't understand why he has to follow his father's rules; same with Lucy. When Wynston doesn't come to one of their berry-picking parties, she is sad and decides to go on an adventure. She is going to climb the Scratchy Mountains so that she can find her mother.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_of_a_Dark_Queen"title="Shadow of a Dark Queen">
A dark queen is gathering armies in remote lands and desperate men are sent on a suicidal mission to confront this evil. Among these men is Nakor the Isalani, a gambler who knows the true nature of the Queen and whom everyone must wager their lives upon.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Affections"title="Equal Affections">
Louise, an aging woman, is coming down with cancer. Her husband Nat is having an affair with another woman. Meanwhile, Walter, partner of Louise and Nat's son Danny, has cyber sex and phone sex with other men. April, Danny's sister, visits her brother in suburban New Jersey. With their mother's death looming, they all fly to California where their parents live. To avoid a funeral, Nat throws a lukewarm farewell party. April ends up fighting with her father over his cheating on her mother. Two months later, Nat is publicly seeing his mistress. Danny and Walter invite April and Nat to stay with them at a rented cottage on Long Island. The final part is a prolepsis to Louise's conversion at Catholicism although she is a Jew.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_Hollering_Creek_and_Other_Stories"title="Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories">
Cisneros's collection of stories is divided into three sections. The first section, which focuses on the innocence of the characters during childhood, is called "My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn". The following section, called "One Holy Night", includes two short stories highlighting the troublesome adolescent years of its characters. The final section, called "There Was a Man, There Was a Woman", concentrates on characters during their tumultuous adulthood. Most of the stories in the collection are between one and fifteen pages in length; "Eyes of Zapata", the longest story, is 29 pages long, while "Salvador Late or Early" and "There Was a Man, There Was a Woman" each occupies a single page.The first and second plot of the story in this book shares the title, "My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn", with its corresponding section and is a short narrative about an unnamed narrator and her best friend Lucy Anguiano, the "Texas girl who smells like corn". This vignette offers a snapshot into life just north of the United States-Mexico border for two girls who are presumably of Mexican descent. Lucy's home is portrayed as a low-income, Mexican-American family. Her mother is overworked and busy with many children while her father is rarely around. However, the story focuses on the freedom that the girls have when no one of authority is watching; for example, waving at strangers, jumping on mattresses, scratching mosquito bites, picking scabs, and somersaulting in dresses.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Another_Thing..._(novel)"title="And Another Thing... (novel)">
"And Another Thing..." starts where "Mostly Harmless" ends, with Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Trillian, and Arthur and Trillian's daughter Random standing inside Club Beta, while the Earth is about to be destroyed by the Vogons. They are rescued by Zaphod Beeblebrox and the "Heart of Gold". During a debate, Ford accidentally freezes Left Brain (Zaphod's second head who has been running the ship) and it seems they are doomed, until an immortal named Wowbagger brings them to safety. Angered by Wowbagger's insults, Zaphod promises to get Wowbagger killed, an idea to which Wowbagger, tired of immortality, has no objection; and so the group sets off in search of Thor, to see if he can kill Wowbagger.Meanwhile, Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz, assigned to destroy all humans, hears rumours of a colony of Earthmen, and he sets off to destroy them, while Arthur attempts to get Wowbagger to stop the Vogons.On the Earth colony Nano, the excessively stereotypical Irish leader Hillman Hunter is seeking applicants to be the planet's god, who would keep Hillman in charge due to divine providence. Meanwhile, Prostetnic Jeltz's son, Constant Mown, is having rather "un-Vogonly" thoughts, including an enjoyment of poetry and sympathy for humans. Wowbagger and Random start arguing, and Wowbagger drugs and imprisons Random. Afterwards, Trillian and Wowbagger fight, but they share a kiss at the end of the argument. Random is less than impressed with her mother's and Wowbagger's actions, and complains about it to Ford. During this conversation, Random steals Ford's company credit card.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crossing_of_Ingo"title="The Crossing of Ingo">
Sapphire and Conor have been called to make the dangerous Crossing of Ingo, a journey to the bottom of the world, and it has been prophesied that if they complete it then Ingo and Air will start to heal. They have their Mer friends, Faro and Elvira, to help them, but their old enemy, Ervys, is determined to make sure they don't succeed. They have many adventures going around the world and Sapphire finds new abilities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babouk"title="Babouk">
Babouk is a slave renowned by many tribes for his excellent storytelling abilities. He is captured by the French and taken to Saint Domingue to work on the sugar cane fields. Unaware of the reasons for his capture and hoping to be reunited with his lost love Niati, Babouk escapes his slave compound and wanders into the forest, only to meet some indigenous Americans. He is soon captured by a group of runaway slaves who had agreed to turn in other runaways on the condition that they are allowed their freedom and returned to the compound, where his ear is cut off. Such a traumatic experience forces him to remain absolutely silent for several years, doing his labor without complaint but also without much energy. He eventually can maintain his silence no longer, and he re-establishes himself as a great storyteller. Unhappy with the way the slave masters treat him (although they claim otherwise), Babouk becomes the figurehead for a group of slaves that intend to revolt against their masters. Babouk and his group are initially successful in their endeavors, but are eventually held back by the might of the French military. Babouk's arm is severed after he tries to stop a cannon from firing by sticking his hand into it; he is then beheaded and his head is put on a pike as a warning to other slaves who might try to draw inspiration from Babouk. The novel ends with an impassioned statement from Endore that warns of the inevitability of a race war as the result of the white man's transgressions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forbidden_Tower"title="The Forbidden Tower">
On the road to Armida, Damon Ridenow encounters Leonie Hastur, Keeper of Arilinn. Leonie tells him that she wishes to persuade Callista Lanart to return to Arilinn Tower and replace her as Keeper. She is aware that Callista wishes to marry the Terran, Andrew Carr, who rescued her from the Caves of Corresanti (see "The Spell Sword"). After they arrive, Leonie meets with Callista and unable to persuade her to return, releases her from her Keeper’s vow. Dom Esteban, Callista’s father, consents to her marriage. The next day, a joint wedding is held – Ellemir is joined to Damon and Callista to Andrew in freemate marriage.Andrew recalls that Leonie has warned him that Callista was trained in the old ways of Keepers, and may not be able to consummate their relationship for a long time. Ellemir has a premonition of her father’s death. Desiderio Leynier, a nedestro relation (Dom Alton's illegitimate son), creates trouble at the wedding feast.Guardsmen who have been caught in a blizzard are brought to Armida. When it becomes clear that some of the men will lose their feet to frostbite, Damon, working with Andrew and Dezi, uses his laran powers to restore their circulation. The experience causes Damon to feel that laran-based healing should be available to all Darkovans, not restricted to the cloistered residents of the Towers. He reflects that it is commonly believed that this would bring back the Ages of Chaos.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Boy"title="The Wind Boy">
"The Wind Boy" features Kay and Gentian, a boy and girl who are foreign children and outcasts in their village. They live with their mother and wait for their father to come to them from their home country. At the beginning of the book, a mysterious girl named Nan appears in their village, responding to a woman's advertisement requesting a "general housework girl". Nan is able to bring the children into the Clear Land, a world that mirrors their own. In the Clear Land, they each purchase a pair of Clear Land sandals and meet The Wind Boy, a handsome boy with purple wings.They learn that The Wind Boy once owned a horrible mask, but now it's in the hands of someone else. Now that person is going around scaring children. Until The Wind Boy is able to find and destroy the mask, he cannot have shoes of his own and is the outcast of the Clear Land. Only Gentian, who feels sorry for him, is friends with The Wind Boy.Kay and Gentian's mother Detra is a sculptor who is trying to make a statuette of The Wind Boy. She visits the Clear Land herself without really knowing it, where she is seen through a clear pool of water. While there, she tells The Wind Boy stories, so that he can smile and she can perfect the statuette. After seeing a starry cloak that Nan has, Gentian is allowed to visit the Clear Land to make her own. The children continue visit the Clear Land quite a few times, once during a punishment in school.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savage_Season"title="Savage Season">
Hap and Leonard are two Texan men who are down on their luck, both working low paying jobs well into their 40s. Hap's ex-wife Trudy returns, involving the pair in a scheme to retrieve hundreds of thousands of dollars stolen from a bank and then lost in a creek in the woods in an area which Hap knows quite well. She is involved with a small group of radical leftists who wish to use the money to fund their movement; Hap and Leonard just wish to have enough to retire somewhere pleasant. Her return, as well as her continued involvement with various movements, awakens dormant emotions in Hap, leading him to wonder whether he should have devoted more time to the ideals he felt in the 1960s, and whether he had wasted his time in the interim on low-paying, go nowhere jobs. Once Hap finds the money, the leftists reveal the violent nature of their plans, and kidnap Hap and Leonard rather than pay them. The leftists are quickly betrayed when they attempt to buy guns from a local drug dealer named Soldier, which leads to a violent confrontation over the stolen money. In the end, Hap is left with conflicted emotions about the 1960s and his own part in them, regretting neither his former idealism nor his current cynicism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wrong_Doyle"title="The Wrong Doyle">
Tim Doyle returns to the Eastern Shore of Virginia after the death of his Uncle Buck. He meets the keeper of Uncle Buck's inheritance, Maggie Peach.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belchamber"title="Belchamber">
The story follows the life of Sainty, Marquis of Belchamber, from childhood to his mid-twenties. Sainty is shy, physically weak, likes knitting and dislikes sports. After much goading from his mother (Lady Charmington), he marries Cissy. However, she turns out to find him repugnant, and the marriage is unconsummated. Cissy later gives birth to a son, who Sainty realises is the result of an affair with his cousin Claude. Despite this, Sainty feels great love for the baby and is devastated when it falls ill and dies. As they grieve, Sainty and Cissy learn that an uncaring Claude has become engaged to someone else. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girls_in_Love_(novel)"title="Girls in Love (novel)">
The novel is narrated by Eleanor Allard, a.k.a. Ellie. The book opens with Ellie's Family holiday to Wales where she meets a nerdy boy named Dan. Dan falls for Ellie and asks her out but his feelings are not reciprocated and Ellie turns him down. Ellie arrives back at school after the summer holidays to find her best friend, Nadine, has a new boyfriend named Liam, her other friend, Magda, soon asks a boy named Greg out as well. Feeling left out, Ellie makes up a character as her boyfriend, who is a boy that she sees nearly everyday on her way to school. She names him Dan (like the nerdy boy she met in Wales) and describes him as a 15 year old handsome boy. Magda and Ellie soon start to think that Liam is using Nadine for sex as Nadine comes to school depressed sometimes. With her big mouth, Magda accidentally mentions it to Nadine which upsets her. But eventually she forgives them both.One night on Magda's birthday the three girls sneak out to a night club called "Seventh Heaven" and it is revealed that Liam was only using Nadine for sex when they meet some other girls that had been Liam's victims. Liam had planned to break up with her after she 'put out' or, had sex with him. At a friend's party Dan turns up unannounced, and Ellie is mortified. Soon the truth about Dan is revealed to Ellie's friends; however, when gatecrashers arrive at the party and cause trouble, Dan intervenes and saves the day. To Ellie's surprise, this impresses Magda and Nadine and causes Ellie to rethink her first impressions of Dan. The book ends with Ellie and Dan's first kiss in the room.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thendara_House"title="Thendara House">
## Part One: Conflicting Oaths.Magda Lorne tenders her resignation from Terran service to her supervisor, Cholayna Ares, saying that she has taken an oath to spend six months in the Guildhouse of the Renuniciates at Thendera. Cholayna tries to talk her out of resigning, and Magda agrees to detached duty.Jaelle n’ha Melora starts her first day of working in the spaceport, but finds conforming to Terran customs a challenge. She quickly discovers that her new husband, Peter Haldane, despite being raised on Darkover, has typically Terran sexist attitudes towards women. Jaelle is asked by the legate, Russell Montray, if she can help one of his agents pass as a native.Magda meets with Mother Lauria at the guildhouse and learns the rules under which she will be living for the next six months. An injured woman named Keitha knocks at the door and asks to take the oath. Several days later, Magda, Doria and Keitha undergo a consciousness-raising session with her future sisters regarding her motives for joining the Renunciates. She experiences a vision of the Goddess Avarra.Jaelle meets with Kadarin, a Terran operative, to assist him in prepping for a trip to the Dry Towns. She is assigned to give Alessandro Li a lesson in Darkover's history, but comes to distrust his motives, telling her husband that he wants to reduce Darkover to a Terran colony. Peter, ever ambitious, ignores her. Jaelle realizes that Peter does not consider her an equal partner in the marriage, and that in many respects, she has broken her Renunciate oath by marrying him.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forged_Coupon"title="The Forged Coupon">
The story is divided into two parts. In Part I, schoolboy Mitya is in desperate need of money to repay a debt, but his father angrily denies him assistance. Dejected, under the instigation of a friend Makhin, Mitya simply changes a 2.50 rouble bond coupon to read 12.50 roubles, but this one evil deed sets off a chain of events that affects the lives of dozens of others, when his one falsehood indirectly causes a man to murder a woman at the end of Part I, and then seek redemption through religion in Part II.Having written the novella in his dying years, after his excommunication, Tolstoy relishes the chance to unveil the "pseudo-piety and hypocrisy of organized religion." Yet, he maintains an unwavering belief in man's capacity to find truth, so the story remains hopeful, especially in Part II, which shows that good works can affect another as in a domino effect, just as evil does in Part I. The novella has also been translated with the title "The Counterfeit Note" and "The Forged Banknote."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Time_(novel_series)"title="The Book of Time (novel series)">
After 14-year-old Sam Faulkner's mother Elisa died in a car accident, his father Allan opens the "Faulkners Antiquarian Bookstore" and moves himself into it while Sam lives with his grandmother, grandfather, his aunt and his aunt's boyfriend and cousin Lily. Like his father, Sam also closes himself up, even closing the door to a girl named Alicia Todds, his crush. Then his father vanishes. Sam waits for him to come home, but more than a week passes without a trace. He goes to the bookstore to search for clues. In a room he'd never seen before, he finds a strange red book called "Crimes and Punishment During the Reign of Vlad Tepes", a stone statue with an odd circular indentation in it and a dusty coin with unreadable symbols. Curious, he fits the coin into the statue, and finds himself transported back to a strange island called Iona. He travels to a village there, where he finds another coin. Fitting it into the statue, he is transported again, this time to 800 AD to a Viking village in Scotland. As he finds other coins, he goes to other places, including France during World War I and ancient Egypt where he find a large cache of the coins. Eventually, with help from his cousin Lily, he is able to transport back home. Together, they learn more about the time-traveling statue and a man named Vlad Tepes, the inspiration behind the Dracula legends, who they believe is holding Allan in fifteenth century Wallachia.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worlds_of_the_Imperium"title="Worlds of the Imperium">
Brion Bayard, an American diplomat on assignment in Stockholm, Sweden, attempts to evade a man following him, only to find himself kidnapped by agents of the Imperium from a parallel world. Taken to the home world of the Imperium, he is introduced to the aristocratic members of the government, which rules most of the civilized world from London, having been formed by the union of the British Empire, which included America, and the German and Austro-Hungarian empires of Europe, with neutral Sweden added as an impartial component of the mixture. He is impressed by the commitment to duty of the Imperial officials he meets and drawn to a particularly noble lady. Surprisingly, the Imperial officials also include an analogue of Hermann Göring who – as Nazi Germany never existed – is a fairly honest and decent person, completely free of the crimes he would have committed in our history,The main reason for Bayard's abduction, however, is that the Imperium is under attack from another parallel world.The Maxoni-Cocini drive, invented in the Imperium universe by Italian scientists/experimenters Giulio Maxoni and Carlo Cocini at the end of the 19th century, is the technology for traveling between worlds and is extremely dangerous. Only if several sensitive parameters are tuned exactly can disaster be avoided and the trans-world transportation effect be achieved. Almost all worlds where its development is attempted or even inadvertently stumbled upon are destroyed, often in bizarre and horrible ways.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fabled_Fourth_Graders_of_Aesop_Elementary_School"title="The Fabled Fourth Graders of Aesop Elementary School">
The book is about the naughty fourth grade class at Aesop Elementary School. Each chapter (which is also a story) ends with one of Aesop's Fables's morals such as when Calvin Tallywong wishes that he was back in Kindergarten.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Sorcery"title="City of Sorcery">
"City of Sorcery" begins five years after the end of "Thendara House". The Renunciates and a select group of Terran women who have agreed to abide by Renunciate laws have formed The Bridge Society, to facilitate understanding between the two groups.Magda Lorne learns from her supervisor, Cholayna Ares, that a Terran operative, Alexis Anders, has survived a plane crash in the Hellers a week earlier. Five days later, she appeared at the spaceport with amnesia. Cholayna believes Anders’ memory has been tampered with and wants Magda to use her laran abilities to help recover her memories. After a bit of telepathic probing, Anders abruptly appears to have recovered, though she remembers nothing of her past week’s ordeal.Later, in retelling the story to Camilla at the Guildhouse, Magda recalls her three previous experiences with mystical visions of the Dark Sisterhood, and crows, which seem to be their avatars. Camilla tells Magda that the Sisterhood is a secret society; that she and Jaelle were both invited to join, but refused. With Jaelle’s assistance, Magda makes contact with the Forbidden Tower, but they are unable to explain Anders’ experiences.Rafaella undertakes a travel commission from Alexis Anders, but leaves a note behind for Jaelle. Magda tells Cholayna that Alexis has taken the expedition under false pretenses. Cholayna, Magda, Vanessa, Jaelle, and Camilla set out to follow Alexis. The expedition takes them high into the Hellers, through treacherous terrain. Magda goes into the Overworld to ask the advice of the Forbidden Tower, but is confronted by an ancient crone who repeatedly warns her to turn back. Magda refuses.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bourne_Deception"title="The Bourne Deception">
"The Bourne Deception" picks up where "The Bourne Sanction" left off. Jason Bourne's nemesis, Arkadin, is still hot on his trail and the two continue their struggle, reversing roles of hunter and hunted. When Bourne is ambushed and badly wounded in Bali, he fakes his death and goes into hiding. Only his close friends, Moira Trevor and Freddie Willard are aware that he is alive. In safety, he takes on a new identity, and begins a mission to find out who tried to assassinate him. Jason begins to question who he really is, how much of him is tied up in the Bourne identity, and what he would become if that was suddenly taken away from him. Shortly after, an American passenger airliner is shot down over Egypt by an Iranian missile. This is where a global conspiracy is revealed. Bud Halliday is at the helm of manipulations by NSA assisted by a wet-work outfit known as Black River. DCI Veronica Hart was an ex-employee of Black River like Moira Trevor and is at loggerheads with the intentions of Bud Halliday. Moira Trevor has started her own company which is a direct competitor of Black River. A global investigative team, led by Soraya Moore, is assembled to get at the truth of the situation before it can escalate into an international scandal. The conspiracy is discovered by one of Moira's employees and he is subsequently killed with Moira being left in grave danger. The trail to his assassin leads Bourne to Seville. On the way there, he meets Tracy Atherton, who tells him that she is going to Seville to buy the 14th Black Painting. In Seville, Bourne is attacked in a bullfighting arena by a killer named The Torturer. Later on, search for the man who shot him intersects with the search for the people that brought down the airliner, leading Bourne into one of the most deadly and challenging situations he has ever encountered. With the threat of a new world war brewing, Bourne finds himself in a race against time to uncover the truth and find the person behind his assault, all the while stalked by his unknown nemesis.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children's_Hospital"title="The Children's Hospital">
Jemma Claflin is a struggling third-year medical student at a children’s hospital. She is teased by the nurses and tormented by her superiors, but she is most crippled by a lack of passion for her profession. A traumatic past also haunts her daily life. Her family and loved ones died in various incidents, leaving Jemma with the belief that she must avoid loving anyone else, lest they also be killed. Jemma is particularly troubled by the loss of her brother, Calvin, who filled her early years with the supernatural and eventually took his own life. Despite her guarded emotions, Jemma enters a relationship with fellow medical student Rob Dickens.On a particularly stormy night Jemma aides in the birth of a disfigured child, a daughter of a “King of the East” who had come to New Jersey and married. The child is named Brenda and often points at Jemma, to her discomfort. After the birth, Jemma seeks solace in a sexual liaison with Rob in the on-call room. When they emerge, the storm has submerged the entire world beneath a vast ocean, with only the hospital and its inhabitants left floating above. No one finds time to mourn the loss of the world as the condition of the hospital’s patients suddenly turns for the worse, and every adult is busy attending to them. The hospital has reconfigured its layout, and an angel begins to speak to them, asking each person to name her so that she can serve them. A man named John Grampus reveals that he is the architect of the hospital, and was contacted by the angel long ago to create the building which would serve as an ark when the Apocalypse came.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mirror_of_Her_Dreams"title="The Mirror of Her Dreams">
"The Mirror of Her Dreams" is a novel in which the setting is a world where mirrors are magic, and is the first novel in the "Mordant's Need" series.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitralekha_(novel)"title="Chitralekha (novel)">
Chitralekha is a slim volume of literary work that explores the very essence of the universal truths of human life in a social set up. Woven around an intense love story that reflects on and flashes out not just the various aspects of human nature but also the myriad dilemmas faced by us in our lifetime, Chitralekha - the novel and protagonist - is riveting from the first sight and word. The story starts with a dialogue between the great hermit Ratnambar and his disciples, Shwetank and Vishaldev about sins committed by humans. They ultimately conclude that humans become victims and slaves of circumstance. So, according to Ratnambar -there is no sin and virtue per se. Everyone does deeds according to circumstances that befall them in their lifetime. The author also propounds the views that sin may be in action but never in thought and also that anuraag (attachment/passion) is in desire, and viraag (alienation/lack of passion) comes from gratification (tripti). Through the various twists and turns in the plot, Bhagwaticharan Varma displays a candour and liberalism not otherwise associated with Hindi literature of pre independence India. Through Chitralekha's character, the author describes the life of a truly empowered woman: beautiful and strong from within, materialistic by choice, largehearted by nature and honest to the core. Chitralekha busts many myths surrounding a real and humane woman. She firmly holds the reins of her own life and is commanding in not letting society/ social pressure influence her. Her honesty with herself through introspection and her refusal to let an ego come in the way of atonement lead her to victory in life since she attains peace within passion and passion within peace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogger_(book)"title="Dogger (book)">
It features a boy and his stuffed dog, who is lost, showing "the distress the loss of a toy causes a child". The boy's sister has an opportunity to earn Dogger back.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flaming_Sword_(novel)"title="The Flaming Sword (novel)">
Shortly after Angela Cameron gets married, an African-American man breaks into her house, kills her husband and son, and rapes her sister. As a result, she decides to move to New York City and learn more about the situation of African-Americans. Meanwhile, African-Americans and Communists try to overthrow the government, and they succeed: the country becomes known as the 'Soviet Republic of the United States' and the only newspaper available in New York City is the "Soviet Herald". However, she meets her childhood sweetheart and decides everything is not lost. Eventually, she donates US$10 million to found the Marcus Garvey Colonization Society, whose aim is to repatriate African Americans to the African continent.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Littlest_Hitler"title="The Littlest Hitler">
The book has characters who have autisum such as drugstore workers and pharmacists. The short stories have things such a diabetic mother, cCerial killers, zombies and terrorists. The last story is called "The Newholy" which has to do with imagagation.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_at_the_End_of_Time"title="City at the End of Time">
"City at the End of Time" is about the Kalpa, the last city on Earth, one hundred trillion years in the future. The novel's backstory describes how the aging universe continued expanding and its spacetime fabric weakened. With the galaxies burnt out, humanity dispersed across the cosmos, where they encountered the Typhon, an inexplicable entity that was destroying the decaying universe. It consumed matter and replaced space-time with emptiness and inconsistencies beyond the laws of physics. The resulting Chaos spread rapidly, driving some humans back to ancient Earth with its rekindled sun. In an attempt to fend off the approaching Typhon, leaders of the dying Earth sent for Polybiblios, a human living with the Shen, an ancient alien race. Polybiblios returned to Earth with his adopted daughter, Ishanaxade, a being he had constructed from "fate-logs" of intelligent species collected by the Shen. After the Shen system fell, and the Chaos surrounded Earth, its leaders instructed everybody to convert themselves from primordial (real) matter to noötic (virtual) mass. As each city fell, its inhabitants retreated to the last remaining cities, the Kalpa and Nataraja. Using knowledge he had gleaned from the Shen, Polybiblios built reality generators to protect the Kalpa. Nataraja, which had rebelled against the instruction to convert to noötic matter, was left to fend for itself.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat_Who_Had_60_Whiskers"title="The Cat Who Had 60 Whiskers">
The Old Hulk, being developed for a senior center, mysteriously burns to the ground. Meanwhile, a young woman dies from a bee sting—or could it have been murder? Qwill's lady friend, Polly Duncan, goes to Paris and decides to stay there. Later, Qwill's apple barn residence is burned by fire.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Edgar_Sawtelle"title="The Story of Edgar Sawtelle">
Forte's ChildrenEdgar comes from a line of dog breeders. After buying a farm, his grandfather, John Sawtelle, rents out the farmland and starts dog breeding. He and his wife have two sons, Edgar's father (Gar) and Claude. Claude leaves the farm and Gar stays on and carries on the family business. After some troubled attempts to have a child, Gar and his wife (Trudy) have Edgar. After his parents come to understand that he is mute, his parents learn sign language along with him, some made up and some real signs. Edgar grows up on the farm learning to breed dogs with his parents and Almondine, his own dog, who is always by his side and in a way speaks for him. Once he is old enough, his parents give him his own litter to raise.Eventually, Claude returns to the farm. After a brief stint of helping out around the house and barn, he leaves following a drunken brawl with Gar. A few weeks later, Edgar finds his father in the barn, dying mysteriously. After unsuccessfully trying to call for help, Edgar watches his father die.Three GriefsAfter burying Gar, Edgar and Trudy decide to keep the family business running, despite the new workload. However, shortly after beginning to adjust to Gar's death, Trudy catches pneumonia and Edgar attempts to carry on the work without her. With his mother sick, Edgar begins to fall out of the routine. He falls asleep in the barn one evening and wakes to realize it is now night. The dogs had gone so long without their meal that Edgar decides to let all of the dogs loose in the kennel and pours a large pile of kibble in the center for them. Before long, two dogs end up in a vicious fight. With both dogs injured and their vet out of town, they must call on Claude for assistance. After he helps treat the dogs and Trudy recovers, they begin to sleep together.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fern_Tattoo"title="The Fern Tattoo">
Benedict's mother has recently died; after the funeral, he receives a phone call from Mrs. Darling, a friend of his mother's. Benedict visits the old woman in the countryside, where she tells him various tales that involve three generations of families. He spends the next several years visiting Mrs. Darling, rearranging his personal plans, so he can visit her more often. One day, he receives a phone call that Mrs. Darling is dying. He finally learns that the stories she has been telling him have been about his own family.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unseen_Academicals"title="Unseen Academicals">
After the centennial Hunting of the Megapode (a satirisation of the Mallard ceremony performed at All Souls College, Oxford), the faculty of Unseen University discover that they must, as per tradition, play a game of football, in exchange for their large financial endowment from the late Archchancellor Preserved Bigger. If not, they will lose 87.4% of the university's food bill, and be forced to have (only) three meals a day. The wizards soon learn that the local version of football (similar to the actual game of mob football) is very violent and deaths are common. Thus, in collaboration with the city's tyrant Lord Vetinari, they set out to make new 'official' football rules, based on translations of the rules from an ancient urn, which includes forbidding the use of hands and mandating the use of official footballs as opposed to the makeshift balls the street games use. With the prestige of UU under threat, the rise of Brazeneck College in Pseudopolis as a centre of magical learning and the return of Henry (formerly the Dean) to Ankh-Morpork as a rivalling Archchancellor do much to antagonise Archchancellor Ridcully.Parallel to this, the book tells the story of four young people. A candle dribbler named Mr. Nutt discovers that he is not what he thinks he is and must overcome the fear of his race, both by humans and by himself. He is also chosen to train the university's team for the big match. Trev Likely, who is Mr. Nutt's coworker and best friend, is the son of Ankh-Morpork's most famous deceased footballer Dave Likely (who had scored a record of four goals throughout his entire career), but has promised his (late) dear old mum that he won't play, but ultimately saves the game. Glenda is a friend of Mr. Nutt and Trev, runs the Unseen University Night Kitchen, and bakes the Disc's best pies. Juliet works for Glenda, has a crush on Trev (despite coming from families that support different teams), is simple and beautiful, and becomes a famous fashion model and the new face of dwarvish micromail (chainmail as soft as cloth). The four of them end up advising the wizards on their football endeavour. The novel culminates in an intense game between the Unseen Academicals and Ankh-Morpork United, a team made up of previously warring mob football teams including Dimwell and Dolly Sisters competing to prevent the more civilised game from becoming accepted.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splat_the_Cat"title="Splat the Cat">
Splat is so scared of his first day of Cat School that his tail moves with worry. He needs a friend so he takes his pet, a mouse named Seymour, with him to school. Mrs. Wimpydimple covers many topics, such as self-esteem and nature. When Seymour gets out of Splat's lunchbox, the cats chase after him. The teacher saves Seymour. By day two, Splat's tail moves with excitement.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fu_High_School"title="Kung Fu High School">
Jen, a teenage girl, and her brother Kyuzo, or Cue as she calls him, attend Martin Luther King High School, nicknamed "Kung Fu High School". However, due to the notorious Ridley's drug trafficking through the school, it has become a rundown war zone for both his workers and those who despise him. The only thing things these students at Kung Fu have in common are their ability to fight, or rather survive, and the fact that they've all been "kicked in". A welcoming practice at Kung Fu where students are beaten by everyone in order to teach them they are in the school.The story starts off with Jen living an already irregular life, having to literally put on armor before going to school. One day Jen's long-lost cousin Jimmy Chang arrives at her front door, sent by her late mother's sister.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Without_Warning_(Birmingham_novel)"title="Without Warning (Birmingham novel)">
On the eve of the Iraq War, March 14, 2003, the majority of the population of the contiguous United States (along with the bulk of the populations of Canada, Mexico, and Cuba) disappears as the result of a large energy field that later comes to be known as "The Wave". "Without Warning" deals with the international consequences of the disappearance of the world's last superpower on the eve of war.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_Double_(novel)"title="Body Double (novel)">
Returning to Boston from a business trip in Paris, Maura Isles encounters delays at Charles de Gaulle Airport, and finds upon landing in Boston that the airline has lost her luggage. When she finally makes it home, she finds her house taped off as a crime scene—and is surprised to see Jane Rizzoli (now about 8-months-pregnant) and Rizzoli's partner Barry Frost there. Rizzoli does a double-take on seeing Maura, and directs her attention to a white Ford Taurus in her driveway. There, Maura finds the body of a woman who looks identical to her—and also shares the same birthday.When the body is taken in to the medical examiner's office, Maura takes a tissue sample from the dead woman, and one from herself and asks Rizzoli to take them for DNA testing. The woman is found to have been killed by a 'Black Talon' bullet.Meanwhile, Matilda Purvis, the almost-9-months-pregnant wife of a BMW dealership manager, visits the dealership after an OB-GYN appointment—and is belittled by her husband (who she had married when she was two months pregnant) for ruining the tires. When she goes home, she finds she is not alone—and is struck unconscious when thinking the other to be her husband, she calls his name.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_to_the_Dogs_(Carmichael_novel)"title="Gone to the Dogs (Carmichael novel)">
Piggy is the reincarnation of a blonde girl named Lydia Keane. She suffers from a diet started by her new owner, Nell Jordan. Piggy searches for morsels of food to eat. When Piggy inherits a fortune from an old man, that she visited as a therapy dog, she must protect her owner from P.I. Dan Travis, the grandson of Piggy's benefactor. At a request from his mother, he investigates Piggy and her owner, with whom he falls in love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lulu_Atlantis_and_the_Quest_for_True_Blue_Love"title="Lulu Atlantis and the Quest for True Blue Love">
Lulu Atlantis lives in Sweet Pea Lane. She has a baby brother and a dad that is busy trying to save endangered animals. Lulu tells her troubles to her best friend, a spider named Harry. Harry is a talking spider that offers good advice. The spider says in order for her to find true blue love, she will have to go farther than her backyard. The four stories, that are linked together, makes her realize that she is loved.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doors_Open"title="Doors Open">
Mike Mackenzie is a software entrepreneur who has sold his company for a substantial amount of money, but is now bored and looking for a new thrill. His new-found wealth has funded a genuine interest in art so when his friend Professor Robert Gissing presents him with a plan for the perfect crime, he willingly helps set that plan in motion.With a vast collection but limited wall space, the National Gallery (on the TV adaptation, a Scottish bank) has many more valuable works of art in storage than it could ever display. The plan is to stage a heist at the Granton storage depot on "Doors Open Day" during which a selected group of paintings will be "stolen". The gang will then give the appearance of having panicked and fled without the works of art, but will have switched the real paintings with high quality forgeries good enough to convince anyone investigating the matter that no theft has been committed.As they begin to flesh out the plan, it becomes clear that they need some "professional assistance" and a chance encounter with Chib Calloway, a local gangster who Mike went to school with, fulfils that need.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cool_Head"title="A Cool Head">
Gravy works in a graveyard. One day his friend turns up in a car he doesn't recognise. His friend has a bullet in his chest. Gravy is asked to hide the gun and the body. In the back of the car is blood, and a bag full of money. Soon Gravy is caught up in a robbery gone wrong and is pursued by some desperate and mysterious men as well as the police.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_Shorts"title="Zen Shorts">
Three children, Karl, Michael and Addy, encounter a giant panda named Stillwater. The panda carries a red umbrella and speaks in a "slight panda accent". For the next three days, the three kids visit Stillwater. The panda rewards each with instructive anecdotes. To Michael he tells a story about good and bad boundaries, he tells Addy a story about the value of material goods, and Karl a story on how to hold frustration. Two of them are from Zen Buddhist literature and the other story is from Taoism. The stories illustrate the importance of meditation, and encourage readers to think about things that may be hard to imagine. They have strong themes about open-mindedness, compassion, and not getting too upset about things.The name of the first story "Uncle Ry and the Moon" is a reference to the Zen hermit Ryokan Taigu. In it, Uncle Ry lives in a lonely place, and finds a thief in his house. Taking pity on the poverty of the thief, Ry gives him his own robe, his only possession.The next story is the Taoist story of "The Farmer's Luck", where what first appears to be bad luck turns out to be good luck, and vice versa.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow,_When_the_War_Began"title="Tomorrow, When the War Began">
Ellie Linton goes out camping in the bush for a week with her friends Homer Yannos, Lee Takkam, Kevin Holmes, Corrie Mackenzie, Robyn Mathers, and Fiona Maxwell. They find a way into a large, vegetated sinkhole in a remote area of bush the locals have dubbed "Hell", and camp there. During this time they see large numbers of planes flying through the night without lights, and though it is mentioned in conversation the following morning, they think little of it, dismissing it as military planes heading back from a demonstration. When they return to their home town of Wirrawee, they find that all the people are missing and their pets and livestock are dead or dying. Fearing the worst, they break into three groups to investigate Wirrawee's situation. They discover that Wirrawee was captured as a beachhead for an invasion of Australia by an unidentified force; local citizens are being held captive by the occupiers. Ellie's group is spotted, and pursued by the enemy and, in order to escape, use the fuel tank of a ride-on lawnmower to create an improvised explosive. However, after reuniting with Homer and Fi at a pre-arranged meeting point, they discover Robyn and Lee missing. Homer and Ellie search for them and they are met by Robyn. They discover that Lee has been shot in the leg and is hiding out in the main street of Wirrawee, the centre of the enemy's activity. Ellie and Homer confer with the others and Ellie decides that they should attempt to rescue Lee, using a front-end loader to move and protect him. After a protracted chase that sees several soldiers killed, Lee is successfully rescued and returned to the safety of Hell but not before they discover Chris Lang hiding out in his house after his parents were away on a business trip.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennie_Gerhardt"title="Jennie Gerhardt">
Jennie Gerhardt is a destitute young woman. While working in a hotel in Columbus, Ohio, Jennie meets George Brander, a United States Senator, who becomes infatuated with her. He helps her family and declares his wish to marry her. Jennie, grateful for his benevolence, agrees to sleep with him. He dies before they marry, and Jennie is pregnant.She gives birth to a daughter, Vesta, and moves to Cleveland with her mother. There she finds work as a lady's maid in a prominent family. In this home, she meets Lester Kane, a prosperous manufacturer's son. Jennie falls in love with him, impressed by his strong will and generosity. She leaves her daughter in Cleveland and travels to New York with Kane. He does not know of her illegitimate daughter and wants to marry Jennie. But because of their difference in class, he anticipates his family's disapproval and decides to take her as his mistress.They live together successfully in the university neighborhood of Hyde Park, Chicago. After three years, Jennie tells him that Vesta is her daughter. Kane does not yield to his family's pressure to leave Jennie. But, after his father's death, he learns that his inheritance of a substantial part of the family business is conditioned on his leaving her. On hearing the will's terms, Jennie demands they separate for his sake.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glitch_in_Sleep"title="The Glitch in Sleep">
## Setting."The Glitch in Sleep" takes place in two worlds, The Seems and The World. The Seems is another world which is in charge of providing our World (The World) with everything it might need, from Sleep to Sunset. In the Seems, there are Departments that control various needs of our World such as Time and Nature. Whenever something goes wrong in The Seems, an elite team of professionals are sent in to Fix the problem. The team is made up of one Fixer and one Briefer. A Briefer is equal to the assistant of the Fixer. If the problems of The Seems are not fixed, The World would be affected depending on how the severe the problem is in the Seems.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apprentice_(Gerritsen_novel)"title="The Apprentice (Gerritsen novel)">
When Rizzoli investigates a murder where cutting techniques similar to those of imprisoned Warren Hoyt but involving necrophilia (as determined by medical examiner Maura Isles), she is called by FBI Agent Gabriel Dean to Washington, D.C. Dean shows her a list of similar crimes committed in Bosnia, and terms the suspect "The Dominator".Hoyt escapes from prison after reading about "The Dominator's" murders which copy many of his techniques, and plots with him to trap Rizzoli. Eventually, "The Dominator" kidnaps Rizzoli as she returns to Boston, and takes her into the countryside. In her struggle to stay alive, Rizzoli fights back, kills "The Dominator" and severely wounds Hoyt, making him a quadriplegic.Rizzoli then takes a long-overdue vacation, claiming sick-leave, with Dean.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Striking_and_Picturesque_Delineations_of_the_Grand,_Beautiful,_Wonderful,_and_Interesting_Scenery_Around_Loch-Earn"title="Striking and Picturesque Delineations of the Grand, Beautiful, Wonderful, and Interesting Scenery Around Loch-Earn">
The book begins with a dedication to the Earl of Breadalbane (presumably John Campbell, the fourth Earl, as the book was first published in 1815). Its "grovelling and abject" tone was unusual by that time. Then an anonymous preface recounts how an unnamed "Gentleman", on a grouse-shooting visit to the earl's estate in the Lochearnhead region, met Angus McDiarmid, a ground-officer (or ghillie, a gamekeeper and hunting-guide) of the earl's. Struck by McDiarmid's eloquent descriptions of the scenery and associated legends, the gentleman learned that McDiarmid had written a manuscript, which McDiarmid entrusted to him to be published. The preface assures the reader that visitors to Lochearnhead could confirm McDiarmid's existence and his sole authorship of the book. It then praises the "unparalleled sublimity" of the book's style, which it connects with the rugged Highland landscape and offers as the reason that McDiarmid's sentences "overleap the mounds and impediments of grammar".The main text is 28 pages about the region near Lochearnhead. There are three sections:McDiarmid's dedication is in grammatical English, but the main text is not, and is full of obscure and misused words. The paragraph about an earthquake in the Grampian Mountains may give an idea:
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saratoga_Trunk_(novel)"title="Saratoga Trunk (novel)">
In 1875, Clio Dulaine, the illegitimate daughter of an aristocratic New Orleans French Creole father and a light-skinned Creole woman of color who was his placée, returns from Paris to her birthplace in Rampart Street to avenge her mother's mistreatment at the hands of her father's family, the Dulaines. Years ago, Clio's mother, Rita Dulaine, accidentally killed her husband, Nicholas Dulaine, when he tried to prevent her from committing suicide, and the scandalized Dulaines then exiled Clio and her mother to Paris. Clio is accompanied by her maid, Angélique Pluton, and her dwarf manservant, Cupidon.After fixing up the rundown house in Rampart Street, Clio ventures out, hoping to encounter the Dulaines, now comprising her father's widow, the widow's mother, and the widow's daughter (and Clio's half-sister) Charlotte Thérèse. At the French marketplace, Clio stops for a bowl of jambalaya and is immediately attracted to Clint Maroon, a tall Texan in a white hat, who is eating at the counter. The attraction is mutual, and Clint offers to drive Clio to the cathedral in his carriage, but a disapproving Angélique interferes, and Clio leaves without him. After the service, Clio, Angelique, and Cupidon eat breakfast at Begue's, the restaurant patronized by the Dulaines every Sunday. While eating, Angélique spots the Dulaines walking in, but they leave quickly after presumably recognizing Clio. Later Clint and Clio meet again at the restaurant, and afterward he drives her home.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tin_Roof_Blowdown"title="The Tin Roof Blowdown">
Dave Robicheaux, once an officer for the New Orleans Police Department and before that a U.S. Army infantry lieutenant who fought in the Vietnam War, now works as sheriff's deputy in New Iberia, Louisiana. After Hurricane Katrina devastates his beloved city of New Orleans, Robicheaux is drawn into the fatal shooting of two young black looters, and the subsequent torture murder of a third. Soon several suspects, including an insurance salesman whose daughter may have been brutally raped by the men, and a sadistic gangster whose house they raided, start emerging from the woodwork. However, the investigation becomes much more personal for Dave when his own family comes under threat from an evil sociopath, and he finds himself drowning in a sea of violence, and , juxtaposed against the terrible suffering he sees everyday as a result of the hurricane.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twinkie_Squad"title="The Twinkie Squad">
## Beginning.Obsessed with sharing his 'exotic culture' which he himself is largely inventing, Douglas Fairchild appears eccentric and fails his classes, which leads him to be placed in a special needs support group, condescendingly referred to as "The Twinkie Squad" by most other students. The group is actually named the special discussion group and is led by Mr. and Mrs. Richardson who have degrees in counseling. Later, at lunch, Armando "Commando" Riviera, is playing basketball, and Doug is sitting on a nearby bench writing in his "Pefkakia journal" (actually a notebook filled with nothing but the word 'blah'). Commando throws the ball at Doug, which bounces and hits Douglas in the nose, causing a massive nosebleed. Commando's enemy, Kahlil, reports him to the Principal, who accuses him of deliberately attacking Doug; and when Doug denies that this is how the incident happened, the Principal carelessly assumes that Commando is bullying him into keeping quiet. Commando is suspended from the basketball team and is sentenced to a year in Doug's special needs group with other "defective" students. The Twinkie Squad includes Anita, who can't think up her own thoughts so she copies others; Yolanda, who is obsessed with movies; Gerald, who is incredibly shy; Ric, who is hyperactive and very jittery; and Dave, who has very low self-esteem.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Woman"title="An Inconvenient Woman">
Behind-the-scenes Hollywood intrigue, the underworld of laundered money, illegal drugs, and prostitution, and the foibles of the extremely wealthy and those who serve them, serve as the background for a tale of murder, the abuse of power, and the destruction of several lives when revenge enters the picture.Characters include the incredibly rich and famous, those who are desperate to share their spotlight, and the underlings who cater to their every need. Chief among them are billionaire Jules Mendelson, a confidant of the President who is on the verge of being offered a prime political position in Brussels, as long as the story about a girl who plunged from the balcony of his Chicago hotel room in 1953 remains the deep secret he has harbored all these years; Flo March (née Fleurette Houlihan), his considerably younger lover, who slowly sheds her coarse exterior as Jules introduces her to the finer things in life; Pauline Mendelson, Jules' devoted wife who presides over Clouds, their mountaintop estate overlooking LA, and one of the most admired hostesses in their social circle, whose errant son Kippie by a former marriage proves to be the bane of her elegant existence; New York City writer Philip Quennell, author of a bestselling book about a leveraged buyout, who's brought to Hollywood by cocaine-snorting producer Casper Stieglitz to write a documentary film about drug abuse in the film industry; young widow Camilla Ebury, Philip's lover and the niece of Hector Paradiso, a closeted homosexual whose alleged suicide raises the suspicions of those who believe he was really murdered; gossip columnist Cyril Rathbone, who thrives on the secrets of the rich and powerful; hustler and sometime porn actor Lonny Edge, who has in his possession the long-missing completed manuscript of the final book by dissolute author Basil Plant (a thinly-disguised version of Truman Capote) but doesn't realize its importance to the literary world; and gangster Arnie Zwillman, who knows enough about Jules Mendelson's past to put an end to his political ambitions.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Split_Second"title="The Split Second">
The second book follows Becker Drane on another mission. At the end of the first book, "The Glitch in Sleep", it was revealed 50 trays of Frozen Moments were stolen. With that, a Time Bomb could be constructed causing great damage to The World. When news show the Time Bomb has been found in the Department of Time, Lucien Chiappa is sent in to Fix it, until the bomb explodes and Becker is called in to repair the mess by bringing the two parts of the bomb together so no Essence (a liquid that causes everything to age much faster) can enter the World.To Fix the Second, Becker must bring both halves of the Second together again to prevent any more Essence from dripping out. The first is found in a basement and the second is found to be trapped by the Tide, the organization who created the bomb and wants to overthrow the current order of the Seems and create a new world.A legendary Fixer thought to be dead, Tom Jackal arrives to help Becker and manages to capture the Second and put it together, but the Essence has soaked through their Sleeves (lightweight bodysuits) and causes him to age. Tom dies from overexposure, but saves the World.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruel_Zinc_Melodies"title="Cruel Zinc Melodies">
Garrett is a hardboiled detective living in the city of TunFaire, a melting pot of different races, cultures, religions, and species. When people have problems, they often come to Garrett for help, but trouble has a way of finding Garrett on its own, whether he likes it or not.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassina_Gambrel_Was_Missing"title="Cassina Gambrel Was Missing">
Set against turbulent events in Memphis, Tennessee in the late 1970s, the novel concerns a young, white, college student named Jackson Taylor who befriends an older black woman named Cassina Gambrel. As the protagonist's fortune and world expands, Cassina's narrows. Years later, Jackson begins a search for his former friend and the book takes on a cynical tone, bordering on bitterness, while the story unfolds through a series of revealing flashbacks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Death"title="The First Death">
"The First Death" recounts the ordeal of a 40 year old male named adam stranded on a desert-like island. The book starts with a description of his mutilated body which grinds against the rocks. The poem expands on the theme of his continuing degradation, physical and mental, as even the mechanisms of memory are dislocated. Yet, the bond between person and body ensures life still persists, and, "at that point without substance/ where the world collides and takes off", the mechanical instincts of the cosmos rumble into action and sling this irreducible substance again into space - prompting, perhaps, a future regeneration.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranglers'_Moon"title="Stranglers' Moon">
Jules and Yvette D'Alembert are a brother and sister team of aerialists in the D'Alembert family Circus of the Empire. But they are also legendary agents "Wombat" and "Periwinkle" in SOTE, "The Service of The Empire", the imperial intelligence agency, sent to investigate the disappearance of a planetary economist and his wife on a moon devoted to recreation: seemingly a vacationers' paradise...The plot is based in part on Thuggee.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrees_of_Connection"title="Degrees of Connection">
Scobie Malone has been promoted from inspector to superintendent, while Russ Clements is now head of Homicide. He investigates the murder of the personal assistant to Natalie Shipwood, the CEO of development company Orlando. Malone's son, Tom, seems to have impregnated a girlfriend who is subsequently murdered and his daughter Maureen is an ABC journalist covering the Securities Commission investigation into Orlando.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sound_of_One_Hand_Clapping_(novel)"title="The Sound of One Hand Clapping (novel)">
The book focuses the relationship between a woman, Sonja Buloh, and her father Bojan. Bojan is a Slovenian immigrant from the post-World War II period who came to work on the Tasmanian Hydroelectric Schemes, and a drunkard. While working on a remote construction camp in the central highlands in the winter of 1954, when Sonja was just three, Bojan's wife walked into a blizzard never to be seen again and leaving Bojan to raise his daughter. When Sonja returns to visit Tasmania and her father in 1989 as a balanced middle-aged woman, the past begins to intrude, changing both their lives forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_the_Burnt_Cottage"title="The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage">
The novel centres on the mystery of who could have set fire to Mr Hick’s cottage. The five children, Larry and Daisy Daykin, Pip and Bets Hilton, and newcomer Frederick Algernon Trotteville (later nicknamed Fatty from his initials), meet at the scene of the fire and end up solving the mystery together.Their suspects include an old tramp, a dismissed servant, a hostile colleague, and the cook. They find certain clues: Broken-down nettles in a ditch, a footprint in a grassy field, and Hawker Tempest planes (which Mr. Hick mentions "flew over" the other day).The children realise that as Mr Hick claims to have been in the London train when the cottage was burnt, but by his own report he saw the planes which flew over the village at the same time, he is contradicting himself. Fatty finds out that the cottage and the burnt papers Mr Hick describes as 'most important' were insured. The children deduce that Mr Hick burnt his own cottage for the insurance money. The book also introduces Inspector Jenks, who turns out to help the children and becomes a good friend of theirs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corduroy_Mansions"title="Corduroy Mansions">
The story is set in a fictional housing unit in London nicknamed Corduroy Mansions, and details the lives of the inhabitants of the large Pimlico house and others.The main characters are Barbara Ragg, Basil Wickramsinghe, Berthea Snark, Caroline Jarvis, Dee Binder, Eddie French, Freddie de la Hay, Jenny Hedge, Jo Partlin, Marcia Light, Oedipus Snark, Terence Moongrove, and William French.Book two in the award-winning Corduroy Mansions series, "The Dog Who Came in from the Cold", ran from 21 Sept 2009 until 19 Dec 2009.Book three in the series, "A Conspiracy of Friends", ran from 13 Sept 2010 until 17 Dec 2010.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kandide_and_the_Secret_of_the_Mists"title="Kandide and the Secret of the Mists">
As the beginning of the story, all is well in the Kingdom of Calabiyau. King Toeyad, ruler of the Fée, a race of fairies, is benevolent and just, and the twelve clans of fairies live in relative peace. When the king dies, his teenage daughter, Kandide, is expected to ascend to the throne. While preparing for her coronation, one of Kandide's wings is crushed. The Fée value beauty above all else and so, to prevent the disgrace of having an “Imperfect” take the throne, Kandide's mother banishes her to the Veil of the Mists, a land to the East populated by treacherous creatures and imperfect Fée.Without a clear heir to the throne, Calabiyau is thrown into turmoil. Kandide's mother is put in mortal danger and cruel Lady Aron threatens to take the throne. Kandide's younger sister, Tara, and brother, Teren, are sent to find Kandide and bring her home in hopes that she can set everything right.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whispers_of_the_Dead"title="Whispers of the Dead">
Dr David Hunter returns to 'The Body Farm' in Tennessee where he learned the ins and outs of forensic anthropology. He has gone to America to try and see if he can still do the job he has become accustomed to after surviving the attempt on his life by Grace Strachan, the murderess from the previous book, "Written in Bone".Whilst in Tennessee, a body is found in a remote cabin in the woods and David's old instructor asks him to tag along for a fresh pair of eyes at the crime scene. A fingerprint at the crime scene leads them to a man who had died six months earlier and whose own body has been replaced in his grave by that of someone far older than he was. It becomes clear that they are dealing with someone who has the same intricate and detailed forensic knowledge that they have and that a serial killer is on the loose.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_Millennium"title="The Dream Millennium">
John Devlin, a 26-year-old medical doctor, is the captain of a sleeper ship built to colonize planets in other solar systems. The spacecraft's trajectory is such that it will make passes of eleven stars thought to have a good chance of supporting habitable planets, over the course of about a thousand years. Most of the starship's systems are automated, so Devlin does not have to do much maintenance, but he is required to look at potential planets for colonization and solve problems as they arise. Except for being awoken at long intervals to eat, exercise, and perform his duties as captain, Devlin spends all of his time in hibernation, during which he dreams the entire lives of people and other creatures that lived and died on Earth in the past.The story switches back and forth between Devlin's life and dreams on the starship and his life on Earth before the starship's launch. On the starship, Devlin's dreams during hibernation are the lives of creatures of the prehistoric past, then as men, moving closer to the present day with each dream. Most of the lives he dreams are unpleasant, with painful deaths. He dreams of being:In the first half of the starship's voyage, Devlin finds only two planets that had any potential for human colonization, and found both unsuitable. One planet was entering Roche's limit and would not remain habitable for much longer, and the other was already inhabited by hostile aliens whose planet was in even worse shape than the Earth he had left behind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_City,_Not_My_Own"title="Another City, Not My Own">
Protagonist Gus Bailey, introduced in Dunne's earlier novel "People Like Us", is a successful writer who is assigned to cover the Simpson trial for "Vanity Fair". He firmly believes Simpson is guilty from the very beginning, and in his monthly column "Letter from Los Angeles", he clearly states his position and puts his personal spin on what he observes in the courtroom and beyond. Those involved with the criminal proceedings, including Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden for the prosecution, Johnnie Cochran, F. Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian, Barry Scheck, and Robert Shapiro for the defense, and Judge Lance Ito, all figure prominently in the story.Bailey becomes the darling of Hollywood society, all of whom are eager to include him as a guest at their dinner parties so he can regale everyone with inside tidbits and juicy gossip. Celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor, Kirk Douglas, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, David Geffen, Roddy McDowall, and June Anderson, social types like Nancy Reagan, Betsy Bloomingdale, and Nan Kempner, royalty such as Princess Diana, Princess Margaret, and Queen Noor of Jordan, and television personalities like Harvey Levin and Larry King make appearances in the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whispers_in_the_Graveyard"title="Whispers in the Graveyard">
"Whispers in the Graveyard" is about a 12-year-old boy called Solomon, who has a learning disability called dyslexia. Solomon has a very hard time with life as his mother left when he was young, his father is an alcoholic and everyone picks on him including a bullying teacher called Mr Watkins also known as Warrior WatkinsSolomon hears that bodies buried in a graveyard died of smallpox and if disturbed could spread the infection again, but the real danger is of a supernatural nature.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passion's_Promise"title="Passion's Promise">
Kezia Saint Martin is a glamorous, jetsetting socialite with a secret identity as a crusading social justice journalist. She is increasingly torn between the two worlds and questions her own identity. These questions are brought to a head when she falls in love with a fellow crusader named Lucas John.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita"title="Lolita">
The novel is prefaced by a fictitious foreword by one John Ray Jr., an editor of psychology books. Ray states that he is presenting a memoir written by a man using the pseudonym "Humbert Humbert", who had recently died of heart disease while awaiting a murder trial in jail. The memoir, which addresses the audience as his jury, begins with Humbert's birth in Paris in 1910 to an English mother and Swiss father. He spends his childhood on the French Riviera, where he falls in love with his friend Annabel Leigh. This youthful and physically unfulfilled love is interrupted by Annabel's premature death from typhus, which causes Humbert to become sexually obsessed with a specific type of girl, aged 9 to 14, whom he refers to as "nymphets".After graduation, Humbert works as a teacher of French literature and begins editing an academic literary textbook, making passing references to repeated stays in mental institutions at this time. Before the outbreak of World War II, Humbert emigrates to America. In 1947, he moves to Ramsdale, a small town in New England, where he can calmly continue working on his book. The house that he intends to live in is destroyed in a fire. In his search for a new home, he meets the widow Charlotte Haze, who is looking for a tenant. Humbert visits Charlotte's residence out of politeness and initially intends to decline her offer. However, Charlotte leads Humbert to her garden, where her 12-year-old daughter Dolores (also variably known as Dolly, Lo, and Lola) is sunbathing. Humbert sees in Dolores the perfect nymphet, the embodiment of his old love Annabel, and quickly decides to move in.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moomins"title="Moomins">
The Moomin stories concern several eccentric and oddly-shaped characters, some of whom are related to each other. The central family consists of Moominpappa, Moominmamma and Moomintroll.Other characters, such as Hemulens, Sniff, the Snork Maiden, Snufkin and Little My are accepted into or attach themselves to the family group from time to time, generally living separate lives in the surrounding Moominvalley, where the series is set, and in which the Moomin family decides to live at the end of "The Moomins and the Great Flood".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_of_the_Art"title="Books of the Art">
## The Great and Secret Show."The Great and Secret Show" follows Fletcher and Jaffe, two humans that have transcended reality to become super-human. The two initially worked together but became adversaries when it became clear that Jaffe was intent on gaining control of Quiddity, a dream sea that humans can access only three times in their lives. The two men end up siring children by raping four teenage girls with the intention that they will continue their battles, only for two of their children to fall in love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Option"title="The Third Option">
Mitch Rapp is sent on a highly sensitive mission in northern Germany to assassinate Count Heinrich Hagenmiller V, a powerful arms dealer who has been selling weapons to Saddam Hussein and other enemies of the United States. Rapp successfully slays Hagenmiller, only to be betrayed by his mission companions "Jane and Tom Hoffman", who attempt to kill Rapp by shooting him twice in the chest, not knowing his jacket was lined with kevlar which absorbed the rounds and knocked him down. Jane (the one that shot him) quickly stages the scene to implicate Rapp and then flees the location with Tom. A shocked Rapp eventually awakes. As a result of his fall, a gash in his head has left a small pool of his blood on the floor. Not wanting to leave the forensic evidence behind, he sets the room on fire and quickly escapes.Back in Washington, D.C., the situation in Germany quickly becomes known to politicians and officials, with a few trying to use the situation to their own advantage. Democratic Congressman Albert Rudin is not fooled by the CIA's denial of involvement, and argues that it is further proof that the CIA is bad for America and the world, and should be shut down. Henry "Hank" Clark, who is a corrupt, ambitious, and calculating Republican U.S. senator with his eye on the Presidency, is the one that ordered the hit on Rapp, hoping that his dead body would embarrass President Robert Xavier Hayes, and ruin the career of CTC Director, Dr. Irene Kennedy. Clark, along with Rudin and Secretary of State Charles Middleton, are in an alliance to stop Dr. Kennedy from succeeding the dying Thomas Stansfield as Director. Unbeknownst to Rudin and Middleton, Clark dispatches a group of contract killers led by "Professor" Peter Cameron, to initiate a widespread blood-purge that will eliminate any person that can leave a paper trail back to him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessary_Heartbreak"title="Necessary Heartbreak">
Michael Stewart is a single dad in modern-day New York struggling to raise his feisty 13-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. Feeling beaten down by life, he shuts out new relationships but fate, or perhaps something more divine, has other plans. When they stumble upon a root-cellar door in a church basement, they discover a portal leading back to first-century Jerusalem during the tumultuous last week of Christ’s life. There they encounter Leah, a grieving widow, and a menacing soldier, determined to take Elizabeth as his own. Trapped in the past - both literally and figuratively - Michael comes face to face with some of his most limiting beliefs, and realizes he must open himself up to the possibility of a deeper faith in God, people, himself, and love if he is to find his way home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Darker_Domain"title="A Darker Domain">
During the infamous UK miners' strike, a wealthy young heiress and her infant son are kidnapped in Fife, before a botched payoff leaves her dead and the child missing. Twenty-two years later, DI Karen Pirie, an expert on cold cases, interviews a journalist who may have found a clue to the enigma while on vacation in Tuscany. However, she soon becomes preoccupied with another missing persons case from about the same time. Fellow mine workers and even his own wife believed that Mick Prentice notoriously broke ranks and left to join a group of 'scab' strike breakers far south in Nottingham, but recent evidence suggests that his disappearance might not have been as simple as that. Moreover, Mick's grown daughter Misha desperately needs to find her estranged father for critical reasons of her own. DI Pirie soon finds herself stumbling through a darker domain of violence, greed, secrets and betrayal.The novel jumps back and forth between the time of the key events of both cases during the miners' strike and the current day. The flashbacks provide scattered, nonsequential background for the facts in the order that Pirie and present-day others discover them or relate them. This structure allows the author to present intricate plotlines and reveal facts in a manner that sustains the suspense. Because the plot is convoluted, however, and McDermid didn't offer the readers graphics to help them orient themselves in the local landscape, readers may want to glance at maps of the Fife area and Tuscan countryside where the plot locations are noted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolution_(novel)"title="Absolution (novel)">
When he died, Peter Peterson left behind the trappings of a seemingly charmed life: a vast fortune, two children, and a stately Park Avenue address. But he left something else behind: a sheaf of confessions about a dark period of his youth. In pages written weeks before his death, he reveals a crime of passion, committed in the throes of unrequited love, that has burdened him for his entire life. Yet as he finishes his story, he encounters a surprise that will shake the very foundation of his past. Spanning a boyhood in Iceland to the Nazi occupation of Denmark to a cunning business career in modern-day Manhattan, "Absolution" echoes Dostoevsky and Ibsen as it masterfully plumbs the darkest corners of a sinister mind and a wounded heart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expiration_Date_(Powers_novel)"title="Expiration Date (Powers novel)">
The protagonists are Koot Hoomie "Kootie" Parganas, an eleven-year-old boy, and Pete "Teet" Sullivan, a man in his early forties. The novel takes place mostly in Los Angeles in the year 1992, and there are references to the United States presidential election.The main antagonists are Sherman Oaks and Loretta deLarava. As in "Last Call", the previous novel of Tim Powers' "Fault Line" series, a prominent theme is the quest for immortality. Oaks' age is unknown, deLarava is seventy-six years old (but she often appears to be younger); both have been prolonging their lives by ingesting ghosts. There is a magical system surrounding these ghosts. In their digestible state, they are known as "smokes" or "cigars".Koot Hoomie Parganas has unwittingly ingested the ghost of Thomas Edison. However, because Kootie has not yet reached puberty, he is not able to digest it. In its undigested state, the ghost of Edison functions as a helper to Kootie. Because of Edison's powerful personality, this ghost is particularly sought after by both antagonists who wish to ingest it themselves. In addition, Loretta deLarava is pursuing the ghost of Pete Sullivan's father, who would help her to locate Pete Sullivan's father's ghost, Arthur Patrick "Apie" Sullivan. Pete Sullivan has his own helper, a former psychiatrist named Angelica Anthem Elizalde.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_I_Die"title="Before I Die">
Tessa is diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. Despite four years of chemotherapy, she has discovered that her cancer is terminal and her doctors give her a short time to live. Tessa, with the help of her best friend Zoey, comes up with a list of things she wants to do before she dies, including some risky behaviours that she deems necessary to have "lived". Zoey is excited and supportive of the outrageous bucket list until an unplanned pregnancy test comes up positive.Tessa's parents are divorced and have very different views on her desire to experience the dangerous side of life before she passes. Her mother is loving and joking about the situation and seems supportive; however, she has not been present in Tessa's treatments, nor involved in her life at a deep level. Tessa's father is timid and just wants to spend time with his daughter. He is resistant to Tessa's behaviour from the start, but realises he has little influence and can only enjoy the time they have left. Her father's main mechanism for coping is denial. She mentions that he spends hours on the computer looking up possible treatments for her even after the doctors have told her that the cancer has consumed her body.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_Tactics_of_the_Chalk_Stream"title="Minor Tactics of the Chalk Stream">
Although "Minor Tactics" begins in the foreword with thanks and appreciation to F. M. Halford for his "Dry-Fly Fishing in Theory and Practice" published in 1889 as the last word on chalk stream fishing for trout, the book marks Skues's long campaign to restore the wet fly to its rightful place on the chalk streams of England from which the wet fly had been banished during the dogmatic dry fly period of the last 19th century.From the Foreword:Rising from the perusal of "Dry-Fly Fishing in Theory and Practice" on its publication by F. M. Halford in 1889, I think I was at one with most anglers of the day in feeling that the last word had been written on the art of chalk-stream fishing—so sane, so clear, so comprehensive, is it ; so just and so in accord with one's own experience. Twenty years have gone by since then without my having had either occasion or inclination to go back at all upon this view of that, the greatest work, in my opinion, which has ever seen the light on the subject of angling for trout and grayling; and it is still, as regards that side of the subject with which it deals, all that I then believed it. But one result of the triumph of the dry fly, of which that work was the crown and consummation, was the obliteration from the minds of men, in much less than a generation, of all the wet-fly lore which had served many generations of chalk stream anglers well. The effect was stunning, hypnotic, submerging; and in these days, if one excepts a few eccentrics who have been nurtured on the wet fly on other waters, and have little experience of chalk streams, one would find few with any notion that anything but the dry fly could be effectively used upon Hampshire rivers, or that the wet fly was ever used there. I was for years myself under the spell, and it is the purpose of the ensuing pages to tell, for the benefit of the angling community, by what processes, by what stages, I have been led into a sustained effort to recover for this generation, and to transmute into forms suited to the modern conditions of sport on the chalk stream, the old wet-fly art, to be used as a supplement to, and in no sense to supplant or rival, the beautiful art of which Mr. F. M. Halford is the prophet. How far my effort has been successful I must leave my readers to judge. I myself feel that in making it I have widened my angling horizon, and that I have added enormously to the interest and charm of my angling days as well as to my chances of success, and that, too, by the use of no methods which the most rigid purist could rightly condemn, but by a difficult, delicate, fascinating, and entirely legitimate form of the art, well worthy of the naturalist sportsman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_or_Not_(novel)"title="Ready or Not (novel)">
Samantha "Sam" Madison is still teen ambassador to the United Nations and happily dating the President's son, David. She is also still a semi-celebrity for saving the President's life but does not like the attention she gets for it. As a way to go back to being unnoticed, Sam dyes her naturally red hair to jet black at the beginning of the novel. She and David also start to take a life-drawing class together, though she did not realize that it was about sketching nude models.When David invites her to spend Thanksgiving at Camp David, Sam believes that he wants to have sex. Unsure of whether she's ready for that step in their relationship, she consults her older sister Lucy. Lucy ends up being extremely helpful by giving her sex advice and buying Sam contraceptives.Meanwhile, The President announces his "Return to Family" campaign, which includes plans to limit access to abortion and birth control. Samantha is faced with a huge dilemma when she accidentally comes off as condemning the "Return to Family" policy on an MTV special by accidentally implying that she and David have had sex.Sam receives mostly negative backlash for her remarks, but is supported by her friends and family for being honest. When she goes to Camp David during Thanksgiving, she waits in her room all night for David to come, but he never does. Feeling furious, she sneaks into David's room and berates him for his mixed-messages over them having sex. David replies that he didn't mean to imply that anything was going to happen between them. Sam comes to understand that she made up the whole dilemma in her head, but also realizes that she does want to have sex because she loves David.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Dog"title="The Lost Dog">
Tom Loxley is holed up in a remote bush shack trying to finish his book on Henry James when his beloved dog goes missing. What follows is a triumph of storytelling, as The Lost Dog loops back and forth in time to take the reader on a spellbinding journey into worlds far removed from the present tragedy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sky_Is_Falling_(Pearson_novel)"title="The Sky Is Falling (Pearson novel)">
Norah and Gavin Stoakes live in a peaceful English village until World War II causes them to be evacuated to Toronto. Norah, an independent ten-year-old, is angry with the evacuation and resents having to care for Gavin. Five-year-old Gavin does not understand the evacuation and is confused and frightened. When they arrive in Canada, Norah and Gavin are placed with Florence Ogilvie, a bossy and cold widow and her timid spinster daughter, Mary Ogilvie. The Ogilvies only wanted Gavin but were convinced to take Norah as well. Norah is acutely aware of their preference toward Gavin, rather than her. While Gavin quickly settles into his new home where he is spoilt and coddled by Florence, Norah cannot settle. She dislikes Florence, is bored in her strict new home, is unpopular at her new school, begins to wet the bed (something she was very angry at Gavin for doing on the boat trip there), and constantly worries about what is happening to her family in England.As weeks go by, Norah’s resentment of Florence increases. Although she begins to make new friends, her misery increases as she realizes she cannot return to England for much longer than she was originally told. After Florence and Norah have an argument, Norah decides to run away and return to England on her own. She originally leaves without Gavin but decides she cannot leave him to be spoilt by Florence in a foreign country. She takes him with her but they only get as far as the train station before Norah realizes her plan is impossible. They return to the Ogilvies, expecting punishment but find that Florence and Mary have been very worried. Florence apologizes for ignoring Norah in the past months and asks if they can begin again. Norah accepts the offer and attempts to try to live happily in Canada. Life begins to improve and Norah accepts Canada as her temporary home for the duration of the war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secrets_of_Harry_Bright"title="The Secrets of Harry Bright">
Paco Pedroza is chief of police in Mineral Springs, California, a small nondescript desert town near Palm Springs. The Los Angeles Police Department informs him that they have developed a new lead in a notorious, unsolved Palm Springs homicide in which the body was found in Solitaire Canyon, a notorious biker hangout within Mineral Springs. While Paco unenthusiastically prepares for a visit by an LAPD homicide team, desert rat drunkard Beavertail Bigelow, the object of a prank by one of Paco's cops, stumbles across an antique ukulele in the desert that will become a key piece of evidence in the renewed investigation.On election day 1984 in Los Angeles, LAPD Sgt. Sidney Blackpool is invited to the corporate office of high tech industrialist Victor Watson, whose son Jack was the victim in the Palm Springs homicide. Over drinks, Watson tells Blackpool he pulled strings with LAPD to arrange for Blackpool to investigate a new lead that tenuously ties the case to Blackpool's jurisdiction in Hollywood. Blackpool suspects that the lead is a pretext to draw in the resources of LAPD after both Palm Springs and the Federal Bureau of Investigation failed to solve the case. Watson knows that Blackpool's son died at approximately the same time, and using that to engage his sympathies, persuades Blackpool to work the case as part of an expenses-paid golf vacation for himself and his partner, Otto Stringer, in Palm Springs. His inducement is a suggested promise of a retirement job for Blackpool as head of security for Watson Industries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_(McDevitt_novel)"title="Omega (McDevitt novel)">
A world of humanoid beings is discovered to be in the path of an Omega cloud, mysterious clouds of energy floating in space which attack and destroy anything with right angles. Hutch is part of an expedition to save them if possible, using a strikingly new discovery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Fly_Fishing_for_Trout"title="A History of Fly Fishing for Trout">
"A History of Fly Fishing for Trout" is the first book to trace the history of fly fishing from its very beginning, with chapters on Early Sporting Literature, Early Fly Fishing in France, and identifying all the artificial flies mentioned by early writers. The book includes a useful bibliography for scholars interested in further historical research.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cookie_(novel)"title="Cookie (novel)">
Despite her name, Beauty Cookson is a plain, timid girl who is nicknamed "ugly" by her peers at school, especially by her main bully, Skye. Worse than the teasing in the playground, though, is the unpredictable criticism from her emotionally abusive father, Gerry Cookson. She is frequently berated for breaking any of his house rules, as well as for her lack of looks and confidence, even though she is a wealthy girl who lives in a large, beautifully decorated house and attends a private school. Her only source of kindness at home is her mother, Dilys "Dilly" Cookson. Beauty adores rabbits, although Gerry forbids her from having pets. Her favorite television show is "Rabbit Hutch", a show for young children about a man, Sam, and his pet rabbit, Lily.Beauty has no friends at all at school. The only student that is nice to her is Rhona, Skye's best friend. However, Rhona desperately wants to be friends with Beauty, which she reveals one day when Skye is at a dentist appointment. Finally, Beauty is invited to a birthday party Rhona is holding. For the birthday party, Gerry forces her to get corkscrew curls, and popular bullies Skye, Arabella and Emily develop a new nickname for her: Ugly Corkscrew.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Désert_(novel)"title="Désert (novel)">
Two stories are interwoven.The shorter, which begins and ends the book, is specifically set in 1909–1910 and later 1912, and tells of the wanderings of North African desert tribes chased from their lands by French colonial invaders, mostly as observed by a small boy, Nour. The beginning is set in the Saguia el-Hamra region in the Western Sahara, around the town of Smara, and the story follows the tribe on their gruelling journey across the desert to Tiznit. The story tells of Nour’s encounter with the religious leader Ma al-'Aynayn, whom he worships and follows.The longer, the story of Lalla, is set in an unspecified contemporary time. It describes her early life in a shanty town on the edge of an unnamed Moroccan coastal town, and particularly her friendship with a young mute Hartani shepherd who, like her, originates from the desert tribes. It narrates the time she spends in Marseille while already pregnant with the Hartani’s child. In France she encounters great poverty before becoming a photo model, but she eventually returns to her native town in Morocco, where she gives birth to the Hartani's child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragon_Lord_(Drake_novel)"title="The Dragon Lord (Drake novel)">
In sixth century Britain, King Arthur desires a dragon to harass the Saxon invaders. Merlin tells Arthur that the skull of a lake monster is required. From a batch of new mercenary recruits to Arthur's army, Gawain selects an Irishman called Mael and a Dane called Starkad after Mael defeats Lancelot in a demonstration duel in front of the recruits. Arthur sends Mael to Ireland to retrieve the skull and keeps Mael's friend Starkad as hostage to ensure his return. In Ireland, Mael is escorted to a road where he meets Veleda, a pagan witch who foresaw Mael's coming. The two travel together for three days and arrive at Lough Ree where a pagan shrine has been converted to a chapel manned by a priest and a large, mentally retarded student, Fergus. During the night Mael steals the monster skull which was on display in the chapel but Fergus catches him. The ensuing fight spills out onto the lake pier that breaks apart as Fergus fights with a mace. Veleda helps Mael back to land but Fergus drowns and a lake monster drags the priest away. On their way back to Britain, Mael and Veleda are attacked on a ship but escape as Veleda summons a purple fire that burns their attackers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepovers_(book)"title="Sleepovers (book)">
The story is about a girl called Daisy and her friends at her new school (in alphabetical order): Amy, Bella, Chloe, Daisy, and Emily (aka The Alphabet Girls). Each girl has their birthday coming up consecutively (in order - Amy, Bella, Emily, Chloe and Daisy), and they all decide that a sleepover party would be a good idea. All the girls are very nice; Chloe however is very spoiled and starts to boss everyone into her ideas and especially torment Daisy. This then enables a sudden fear that Lily (Daisy's disabled 11-year-old sister) would trigger further torment from Chloe.At Amy's girly sleepover they enjoy lots of dancing, singing, painting their nails together and having a midnight feast. Daisy helps Emily who gets sick and wishes Emily could be her best friend despite that Emily is Chloe's. For Bella's sleepover she takes them all swimming, and they all have fun. They then have a huge tea at Bella's and a blue birthday cake in the shape of a swimming pool. Bella's parents sleep in the spare room and allows the girls to all sleep in their big double bed together.For Emily's sleepover they all go to the park for a picnic (including playing football whilst Emily's mother gets the picnic together and again at the park). On arrival at the park, Chloe pushes Daisy out of the car on account of Emily's idea of bringing hers and Daisy's teddy bears to the picnic and singing the song The Teddy Bears' Picnic en-route with the others, causing Daisy to scrape her knees and Chloe lied that it was an accident. Emily kindly lets Daisy share her bed and their friendship grows.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click,_Clack,_Quackity-Quack"title="Click, Clack, Quackity-Quack">
The book has phrases that start with each letter of the alphabet. It tells the story of a Duck-led summer outing that includes the cows from "". When Duck rides his wagon, the readers go through the ABCs. The animals stop at a good place to have a picnic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewels_from_the_Moon"title="Jewels from the Moon">
This volume is composed of two short stories. In the first, "Jewels from the Moon", Chuck Masterson and David Topman meet a mysterious but kindly old lady (a Mycetian like Mr. Bass) who takes them on a spectacular dream journey. In the second story, "The Meteor That Couldn't Stay", David accompanies Prewytt Brumblydge (a prominent character in "Mr. Bass's Planetoid" and "A Mystery for Mr. Bass") on an expedition to recover portions of a brumblium meteorite.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click,_Clack,_Splish,_Splash"title="Click, Clack, Splish, Splash">
While the farmer sleeps on the couch close to the fishing tank, Duck and the barnyard animals sneak into the house on a quiet mission that involves "3 buckets piled high" outside the window and "4 chickens standing by". At the end of the book, the reader finds out that Duck's plan was the liberate the farmer's fish.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onitsha_(novel)"title="Onitsha (novel)">
Onitsha tells the story of Fintan, a young European boy who travels from Bordeaux to the port of Marseilles to sail along the coast of Africa to the mouth of the Niger River to Onitsha in colonial Nigeria with his Italian mother (nicknamed Maou) in the year 1948. Warren Motte wrote a review in World Literature Today to note that, like many of Le Clézio's writings Onitsha is a novel of apprenticeship. He mentions that the very first words of the novel inscribe the theme of the journey and announce that it will occupy the foreground of the tale and he quotes a passage from Onitsha to exemplify Fintan's reluctance to embark upon that journeyIt was a long journey as Le Clézio wrote:They were intending to meet Geoffroy Allen (Fintan's English father an oil company executive who is obsessed with uncovering the area's ancient history by tracking down myths and legends) whom Fintan has never met. Onitsha depicts childhood, because it is written semi-autobiographically, but seen through the eyes of Fintan and to lesser extent his father, and his mother, who is not able to fit in with the colonial society of the town of Onitsha with its casual acceptance of 'native' slave labour.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_a_Spider"title="Diary of a Spider">
The book is a diary written by a spider. The diary has things such as pictures of Spider's family, a picture of his favorite book, a discovery of a sculpture, and a playbill from the school's production of "Itsy Bitsy Spider". There is also a slight storyline about Spider's friendship with Fly and Grampa hating bugs with six legs. The worm from "Diary of a Worm" makes occasional appearances.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Things_That_Are"title="Things That Are">
The story is about 17-year-old Alicia, Bobby's girlfriend who the reader learned about in "Things Not Seen". The main plot centers around her journey of self-reassurance and courage. The story also includes short exchanges between Alicia and her "brain fairy" in which they argue over a present topic. The "brain fairy" always annoys Alicia and calls her names. The story starts out with Bobby coming home from New York to Chicago to visit Alicia. He was unknowingly followed by an invisible man named William. The FBI start to intervene because of an arrest warrant on William. Alicia and Bobby then help William use an electric blanket to return him to his previous state. William then returns to his wife and daughter in Montreal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_of_Origin_(novel)"title="Point of Origin (novel)">
Dr Kay Scarpetta, Virginia Chief Medical Examiner and consulting pathologist for the federal law enforcement agency ATF, is called out to a farmhouse in Virginia that has been destroyed by fire. In the ruins of the house she finds a body that tells a story of a violent and grisly murder.The fire has come at the same time as Carrie Grethen, a killer who nearly destroyed the lives of Scarpetta and those closest to her, has escaped from a forensic psychiatric hospital. Her whereabouts is unknown, but her ultimate destination is not, for Carrie has begun to communicate with Scarpetta, conveying her deadly—if cryptic—plans for revenge.Carrie has linked up with a new companion, willing to end his life of sadistic slayings for her pursuit of Scarpetta.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Concise_Treatise_on_the_Art_of_Angling"title="A Concise Treatise on the Art of Angling">
Although the first part of "A Concise Treatise" is a general angling work that provided little new information when it was published, the second part of the book--"The Complete Fly-Fisher" was one of the earliest how-to books on the subject of fly fishing and artificial fly making. The book proved to be extremely popular and useful, being issued in thirteen editions from 1787 to 1846.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slaves_of_Solitude"title="The Slaves of Solitude">
The novel is set in 1943 in the fictional town of Thames Lockdon (based on Henley-on-Thames), and largely follows the experiences of Miss Roach who lives in the Rosamund Tea Rooms, a guest house, having left London during the Blitz. Also residing at the guest house are Mr Thwaites (described as the 'President in Hell'), Miss Steele, Miss Barrett (both aging spinsters) and Mr Prest (a retired comedian).Miss Roach works at a publishing firm, 'as a secretary and in other capacities' in London. The opening sequence describes London as a great monster respiring, drawing workers into the city through its lungs in the morning and expelling them in the evening. It then follows Miss Roach to the Rosamund Tea Rooms and she is presented as leading a dull and uncomplicated life. She is, however, oppressed by Mr Thwaites who takes every opportunity to mock her at meal times. Mr Thwaites, revealed to be a Nazi Sympathiser, insists that Miss Roach is a 'friend of the Russians', is shown to be overbearing and a bore and forces the shared meals the guests partake in to be conducted in an oppressive atmosphere. Soon after this, two American servicemen appear at dinner. Miss Roach becomes romantically involved with one of them, Lieutenant Pike, beginning a relationship centred on the local pub and kissing on a bench. This relationship becomes disrupted by the arrival of Miss Roach's German friend Vicki Kugelmann, who soon becomes Miss Roach's love rival. Miss Kugelmann moves into the Rosamund Tea Rooms, charms Mr Thwaites and there soon begins a sort emotional struggle between the two spinsters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Talking_Parcel"title="The Talking Parcel">
Peter and Simon, two boys from England, join their cousin Penelope and her father Henry, who live in Peloponnese, Greece for the summer holidays. While taking a tour in an inflatable dinghy on their first day, the children rest on a sandbank, where Penelope encounters a strange, paper-wrapped parcel from which two voices emanate. Unwrapping the parcel, the children find a cage with a clothed, sentient parrot and a tiny golden spider inside, who introduce themselves as Parrot (short for "Percival, Archibald, Reginald, Roderick, Oscar, Theophilus") and Dulcibelle. Parrot proclaims them both to be denizens of a hidden subterranean realm called Mythologia, founded centuries ago by the wizard Hengist Hannibal ("H.H.") Junketberry to serve as a sanctuary for the last mythological beasts on Earth. Due to space restrictions, the beast population must be strictly regulated; but recently the resident Cockatrices have risen in rebellion and, with the assistance of their Toad egg-breeders, are working on drastically expanding their numbers and taking over Mythologia. Parrot, as one of H.H.'s chief assistants, tried to reason with the Cockatrices, but the Toads packed him and Dulcibelle into the parcel and sent them adrift into the human world.After hearing this story, the children declare to help Parrot in finding H.H. and overcoming the Cockatrices. They seek out a decommissioned but sentient locomotive named Madame Hortense, who takes them to the entrance of the tunnel leading to Mythologia. During their journey to H.H.'s refuge in the Crystal Caves (a dragon hatching ground), they encounter a number of creatures both weird and wondrous. Penelope saves Septimus, the crown prince of the Unicorns, from a Cockatrice hunting him, which wins them the Unicorns' allegiance, and discovers that Cockatrices are allergic to lavender. Upon finding H.H., they learn from him that the Cockatrices have captured two of Mythologia's sacred Three Books of Government, including his Book of Spells, to (unsuccessfully so far) accelerate the hatching of their eggs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Egyptian"title="The Last Egyptian">
The novel focuses on three protagonists, which are, in order of appearance, Gerald Winston, an Egyptologist, Kāra, an Egyptian man, and a dragoman named Tadros. Kāra claims to be a descendant of Ahtka-Rā, High Priest of Ămen, whom he says ruled Rameses II as his puppet, including hiding the latter's death for two years--archaeology says Rameses reigned 67 years, but according to Kāra, he ruled only 65. All of this Kāra has learned since he was a child from his grandmother, Princess Hatacha, who had fled from Egypt when she was 17 and created a stir, ultimately marrying Lord Roane, Kāra's grandfather. Hatatcha is a cruel and vindictive old woman, but as she is dying, she gives him information about the large treasure cache that they have been living on, including many hieroglyphic papyri from which she educated him as a child that will prove to the world that she is of royal lineage. It is within the cliff that their home is built in that the treasure is kept, behind a wall built over an opening of a cavern too deep to use as a shelter. Tadros and the Bey compete to acquire these papyri from him to sell, and Kāra nearly kills the former for stealing one, but he stops, knowing he can use him. He allows him to have that one in exchange for the girl Nepthys, whose principal interest is cigarette smoking, whom Tadros is set to acquire for another's harem.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brass_Verdict"title="The Brass Verdict">
Since the events of the previous novel, attorney Mickey Haller has spent a year recuperating from his wounds and a subsequent addiction to painkillers. He is called back to the practice of law when an old acquaintance, defense attorney Jerry Vincent, is murdered. Haller inherits Vincent's caseload, which includes the high-profile trial of Walter Elliott, a Hollywood mogul accused of murdering his wife Mitzi and her German lover. Haller secures this "franchise" case, persuading the mogul to keep him on as counsel by promising not to seek a postponement of the trial, which is due to start in nine days.Meanwhile, maverick LAPD detective Harry Bosch, the main character in several earlier novels written by Connelly, is investigating Vincent's murder. Bosch, warning that Vincent's killer may come after Haller next, persuades the reluctant lawyer to cooperate in the ongoing murder investigation. Meanwhile, Haller shakes off the rust, and lingering self-doubts, as he prepares for the double-murder trial.Among the cases Haller takes on is that of a former surfing champion, Patrick, who, while addicted to painkillers after a surfing accident, has stolen a diamond necklace while at the home of a friend. Haller feels sorry for Patrick because of his own history of addiction, and employs the young man to drive his Lincoln. He manages to get Patrick off the charges against him by playing on a hunch that the stolen diamonds were not genuine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Amata_(novel)"title="Terra Amata (novel)">
"Terra Amata" is about a man named Chancelade, and his detailed view of an otherwise ordinary life, from his early childhood to his grave.Terra Amata is an archaeological site near the French town of Nice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_Flies_and_How_to_Dress_Them"title="Floating Flies and How to Dress Them">
"Floating Flies and How to Dress Them" provides an in-depth study of nearly 100 duns and spinners in the English chalk streams of Hampshire County. The book contains detailed drawings and instructions on how to create hand-made artificial flies. Included is information on types of hooks and implements to use, plus tips on dyeing materials and how to dress the flies on eyed-hooks. The book contains ten colorplates and many black and white line drawings illustrating specific techniques.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaver_(Baxter_novel)"title="Weaver (Baxter novel)">
In "Weaver"s alternate historical timeline, Adolf Hitler decided to launch Operation Sea Lion (a projected German invasion of the island of Great Britain) in 1940, shortly after a more devastating version of Dunkirk resulted in a shortage of British Army soldiers. However, due to Winston Churchill's lobbying of President Franklin Roosevelt and his Congress, there is some U.S. military assistance provided. As with France during the First World War, there is only partial occupation of southeastern England, and a Nazi "Protectorate of Albion" (similar to Vichy France) is established. The Nazis occupy a band of territory that stretches from Portsmouth in the southwest, including communities like Tunbridge Wells, Horsham, Hastings, Pevensey, Dover, Folkestone and Gravesend. They establish a puppet regime in Canterbury led by renegade English Nazi collaborator Lord Haw Haw, and while London remains unoccupied, the adjacent occupation results in the evacuation of senior governmental personnel, politicians, King George VI and his royal family to elsewhere in Northern England.Baxter traces the effects of the occupation on several protagonists. Ben Kamen is Jewish, gay and a latent telepath, while Mary Wooler, and her son Gary, and daughter-in-law Hilda, work on covert projects for the British Army, endeavouring to discover how to dislodge the Nazi presence from the "Protectorate of Albion" in the southeast. Ernst Keiser, a relatively kindly officer, lodges with a rural family, whose female members, Irma and Viv, collaborate intentionally with the military, while Alfie is made to serve in a forced labour unit later in the war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_Me_If_You_Can_(book)"title="Catch Me If You Can (book)">
## Summary.The book is loosely based on the real con artistry exploits of Frank Abagnale. It is written in the first person and describes how Abagnale cashed $2.5 million worth of bad checks. He assumed various jobs, such as pretending to be a Pan Am pilot, a doctor, a teacher, and an attorney. Abagnale was eventually caught by the FBI while living in France and served approximately five years in prison—six months in France, six months in Europe, and four years in the United States. The book ends with an epilogue telling the story of Abagnale's final capture and his rehabilitation, which resulted in the creation of his security firm.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_the_Tiny_Horse_at_Large"title="Tim the Tiny Horse at Large">
Tim is still small yet his responsibilities are growing larger. Whilst continuing to live in his matchbox stable, he falls in love with Fly's sister Chenille, is Best Horse at Fly's wedding, babysits for Mr and Mrs Fly's baby, and buys a loft style apartment cigarette box, using a five-pound cheque. Then, Tim goes to buy a pet greenfly, George, and has to face up to the responsibilities and tragedies of being a pet owner.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruise_Confidential"title="Cruise Confidential">
"Cruise Confidential" narrates the experiences of the author working in the cruise industry. As one of the few Americans in Carnival Cruise Lines' restaurants, he is unprepared for the realities of working in the cruise industry, with long hours and little pay. He worked seven days a week for 14 to 16 hours per day. He is also subjected to a range of challenges from his international colleagues, many of whom deride his decision to work at sea to be with his girlfriend, Bianca, who is a waitress on the ship "Carnival Conquest" and is from Transylvania, Romania. Bruns describes life in the crew's quarters, called I-95, after the paperwork non-Americans need for American employment. After collaborating to serve the passengers, the crew members who come from numerous countries carouse during the several hours they have left.Brian begins with his entry into ship life on "Carnival Fantasy" as a restaurant trainee, then moves up through the ranks to lower level restaurant manager on "Carnival Conquest". Far from being the result of hard work, he finds he is an unknowing pawn in a game of international politics on board. Several factions attempt to drive him out of his chosen career, feeling an American is disruptive to the foreign-run hierarchy. Others champion him but invariably only in regards to their own careers. His promotion is ultimately denied and he is sent to "Carnival Legend" as a waiter, embittered but not beaten. He was the first American waiter in 30 years to complete a full contract lasting eight months without quitting. The climax of the book is his effort at finding a different path to remaining at sea when his restaurant career implodes. His experiences as an art auctioneer and his continued quest for his girlfriend are narrated in the sequels.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Earth,_My_Butt,_and_Other_Big_Round_Things"title="The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things">
Virginia "Ginny" Shreves is an overweight, self-conscious sophomore at a private high school in Manhattan. She has a make out buddy, Froggy Welsh the Fourth, and she doesn't want him, or anyone, for that matter, to see her fat. She hides her fat by wearing baggy clothing. Early in the novel, she doesn't really know how she feels about Froggy, but later she starts to see herself in a new light and realizes that she actually likes this guy she has been fooling around with. Her older sister, Anaïs, joined the Peace Corps and moved to Africa in order to escape her mother, whom she calls The Queen of Denial. Her older brother, Byron, whom she idolizes, was suspended from Columbia University for committing date rape. This event forced her to completely reevaluate her opinion of her big brother.Virginia finally stands up to her mother and gains control of her life. She goes to Seattle to see her best friend Shannon, and buys the ticket without telling her mom. Towards the end, she becomes rebellious; she dyes her hair purple and gets her eyebrow pierced. She also makes new friends while she realizes what she wants to become and the value in herself as a person. She also realizes that she must understand who she is on the inside and that this is much more important than external appearances. She takes up kickboxing, and realizes that it is fine to change the way one looks on the outside, as long as this is done for the right reasons and the changes have a positive impact on a person physically and emotionally.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winterdance"title="Winterdance">
The story begins with a poverty stricken Gary Paulsen (and his wife Ruth Wright Paulsen) living in a cabin in the woods of Minnesota, where he uses a team of dogs to pull a sled as he checks his trap lines. As Gary Paulsen's relationship with the dogs grows, he begins taking the team on longer and longer runs, sometimes staying out for several days at a time.Paulsen returns home from a particularly lengthy trip and settles the dogs down in their kennel. However, he discovers that he is unable to enter the cabin. When his wife, Ruth, comes outside she finds him sitting quietly with the dogs, and Paulsen confesses to Ruth that when he is out with the dogs that he doesn't want to come back. Although they had talked about the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race prior to this point, and wondered at the insanity of the Mushers who competed in it, it is at this moment, with this confession, that Ruth knows Paulsen will compete.Having only ever run a small team of dogs Paulsen is severely lacking in experience. In order to run the Iditarod, he will need a team of fifteen or sixteen dogs, and he doesn't own even half that many. He purchases some Canadian sled dogs, Devil, Ortho, and Murphy, and on the drive back home quickly realizes the difference between family pets and Eskimo sled dogs. Before they have gone several miles Devil and Ortho have chewed their way out of their travel kennels and are destroying the back of the truck, and Paulsen says to Ruth that someone will have to ride in the back with the dogs and keep them in. Ruth replies that as Paulsen is the one running the Iditarod that it should be him, and that it will give him a chance to get to know the dogs. Paulsen reluctantly agrees and climbs into the back of the truck. As soon as Ruth starts the truck the dogs leap on Paulsen and he is forced to defend himself. By the time they arrive home, Paulsen's own transformation has begun.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman_(book)"title="The Sandman (book)">
Tor is an inches tall man who can not fall asleep no matter what he tries. He discovers a dragon scale while walking in the woods. He learns that the powder made by grinding the scale induces sleep. He then travels sprinkling the sand into the eyes of sleepless children.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartment_255"title="Apartment 255">
'Apartment 255' is the story of two best friends since school - Sarah and Ginny - who are, at the time of the book's telling, adults. Things are depicted as much better for Sarah - who has a boyfriend Tom with whom she shares a stunning inner-city apartment. But things have not worked out so well for Ginny who wanted Tom, and didn't get him. She wants what Sarah has, and moves into an apartment overlooking Sarah and Tom's flat to stalk them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_O'Clock_Chop"title="The One O'Clock Chop">
Matt a fourteen your old boy living on Long Island in 1973 takes a job with Dan a clam digger so that he can earn enough money to buy a used Boston Whaler. Jazzy, Matt's cousin from Hawaii arrives to spend the summer with Matt and his mother. Jazzy and Matt become kissing cousins until Jazzy becomes interested in another boy. They eventually become friends again and Matt learns to stand up for himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Game_for_the_Living"title="A Game for the Living">
Ramon, a devoutly Catholic furniture repairman in Mexico City meets Theo, a wealthy German atheist expatriate who questions the happiness he had found in his new home: "Theodore thought he was as happy as anyone logically could be in an age when atomic bombs and annihilation hung over everybody's head, though the world 'logically' troubled him in this context. Could one be logically happy?" An unlikely friendship develops, until Lelia, a woman they have both slept with and care for, is found brutally raped, murdered and mutilated. Each suspects the other is responsible, and the police investigate them both as well. They learn that Lelia may have been robbed and track a suspect to Acapulco, but Theo believes he is under surveillance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Faces_of_January"title="The Two Faces of January">
Chester MacFarland is an alcoholic con artist traveling in Greece with his young wife, Colette. In Athens, a private detective questions McFarland, who accidentally kills him during a struggle in his hotel room. A recent acquaintance, a young American law graduate and poet named Rydal Keener, decides to help them, in part because McFarland reminds him of his recently deceased father, from whom he was estranged. He helps McFarland and Colette hide the body and leave Athens under false passports procured by his friend Niko, a local street vendor.The trio take a flight to Crete and install themselves in a hotel under assumed names. Colette flirts with a smitten Keener in front of McFarland, whose jealousy eventually gets the better of him. On a rainy morning, while they visit the palace of Knossos, MacFarland tries to kill Keener by throwing a pithos at him from above, but accidentally kills Colette instead. Both MacFarland and Keener separately flee the scene undetected and take the same boat back to Athens, now more dependent on each other than ever.Back in Athens, MacFarland is interviewed by the police, and states that Keener murdered Colette. At the same time, he hires a contract killer to get rid of Keener once and for all. However, MacFarland is unaware that the "hitman", whom he pays in advance, is in fact a florist whom Keener paid to set him up. Keener goes into hiding from the police, while MacFarland procures another false passport and books a flight to Paris.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandpa_Never_Lies"title="Grandpa Never Lies">
A young girl describes her special relationship with her grandfather over four seasons. The Grandfather tells imaginative tales in response to her questions. Each tale is followed by her refrain of "And Grandpa never lies, so I know it's so". Then Grandma suddenly dies and the little girl and her grandfather mourn together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockroach_Cooties"title="Cockroach Cooties">
Two brothers, Teddy and Bobby, try to defend themselves from a school bully named Arnie. The brothers discover that the bully is afraid of cockroaches. Bobby finds a cockroach and names it Hercules. Bobby uses cookies with strange ingredients to trick Arnie into a peace treaty. With the help of Hercules, the boys figure out what is happening to the bully.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_Wendy"title="Tomorrow Wendy">
Cary's head is such a mess, which is why she keeps it hidden under her floppy Audrey Hepburn hat. Her best friend Rad — whom only she can see — speaks to her in only song lyrics. Not even her boyfriend Danny knows what kind of things go through her head. He is especially oblivious to the fact that Cary has strong feelings for a girl named Wendy.Wendy has bright green hair and "hard-candy sadness in her eyes". Cary thinks that this sexy and mysterious girl could love her just as much as her boyfriend Danny does. The only problem, is that Wendy happens to be Danny's twin sister.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circus_Surprise"title="The Circus Surprise">
Nick is taken to the circus as a surprise for his birthday. While at the circus he follows his nose looking for the cotton candy, and when he turns around his parents are gone. A clown on stilts comes to his rescue and puts him on his shoulders and they locating his parents. While they are searching for Nick's parents the clown has Nick in a small pouch and as they travel he tells Nick to look out at the circus and makes Nick laugh by saying that the lions are kittens and the people were ants.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Suspension_of_Mercy"title="A Suspension of Mercy">
Sydney Bartleby is an American novelist living near Framlingham, Suffolk with his English wife Alicia. Although seemingly idyllic, their married life is secretly marked by tension, frequent separations and sometimes domestic abuse. Sydney is trying to sell a novel and he and his writing partner, Alex, work together on a crime serial that they hope to sell to British television. Alicia decides suddenly that their marriage merits a trial separation, one during which she insists they promise not to contact each other, and Sydney agrees. For literary inspiration, he attempts to put himself in a murderer's mindset and, early the morning after Alicia leaves, carries an empty carpet to his car, imagining its weight and how he might struggle with it if her body was actually in it. He half-hopes his neighbour, Mrs. Lilybanks, will spot him doing this and envisions being questioned by the police. He drives to bury the carpet in the countryside. Shortly afterwards, many of Alicia's and Sydney's acquaintances, and her parents, are concerned about having not heard from her. She is declared missing and the spectre of doubt falls on Sydney. Mrs. Lilybanks indeed saw him carrying the carpet to his car and, though she initially does not suspect him of anything, circumstance and Sydney's behaviour causes her to openly wonder. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tremor_of_Forgery"title="The Tremor of Forgery">
American writer Howard Ingham arrives in the sweltering heat of Tunisia in search of inspiration for a new movie script he has been commissioned to write. The director with whom he is collaborating fails to appear and hears reports from home in the U.S. about infidelity and suicide. Rather than abandon the project, Howard stays and starts work on a novel. He gets to know Francis J. Adams, an aging American propagandist, and Anders Jensen, a Danishhomosexual painter. While waiting for a letter from his New York girlfriend, he settled on a plot for his projected novel, the story of a banker who forges documents to steal money he then gives to the poor. One night, Ingham finds someone breaking into his apartment. He throws his typewriter at the intruder, possibly killing him. The body is dragged away by the intruder's accomplices. Ingham struggles to keep this incident secret from his acquaintances while at the same time questioning Western morality, in particular the application of its principles in a country where he lives as a stranger.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dog's_Ransom"title="A Dog's Ransom">
Publishing executive Ed Reynolds finds a disturbing ransom note in the Manhattan apartment he shares with his wife: "Dear sir: I have your dog, Lisa. She is well and happy... I gather she is important to you? We'll see." They pay the ransom and the criminal is apprehended. Only then do events swirl out of control, leading to the downfall of several innocent characters and the triumph of evil.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/¡Adiós,_Cordera!"title="¡Adiós, Cordera!">
The tale centers upon a poor family in rural Spain and the gradual mechanization of their environment. Widower Antón de Chinta and his two young children (Pinín and Rosa) own a cow. The animal, which serves as a representation of the family's deteriorating economic situation, is affectionately called Cordera or lamb, and has become a family pet.The story begins in a pastoral setting interrupted by a telegraph pole. Soon after, a railway is put through the field, which further ruptures the tranquility of the bucolic countryside and foreshadows the ending of the tale. Eventually the family's economic situation forces the father to sell the cow, which is taken away on the train for slaughter and gives the work its name.Years later, Pinín is drafted to fight in the war and departs on the same train as the cow, an act that implies his future death. At the same time, it implies that the slaughter of innocents is a result of modernity and the city's expansion into rural areas.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favorite_Flies_and_Their_Histories"title="Favorite Flies and Their Histories">
"Favorite Flies" is a unique volume that compiles the stories and images of popular American artificial flies of the late 19th century. It is one of the earliest works to use chromolithography color plates. Today, the original flies used to create the color plates are preserved in the American Museum of Fly Fishing in Manchester, Vermont. The stories for each fly described in the volume were obtained through correspondence with fly fisherman and fly tiers throughout the U.S. and Canada. The following is a typical story about the "Professor", a popular wet-fly of time:No. 192. The Professor was named after the much-loved Professor John Wilson (Christopher North), and the story of the fly is, that one time, when this famous angler Was fishing, he ran short of flies, and, to create something of a flylike appearance, he fastened the petals of buttercups on his hook, adding bits of leaves or grass to imitate the wings of a fly. This arrangement was so successful that it led to the making of the fly with a yellow silk body, since then was widely known as the ProfessorProfessor. - A prime favorite; use it on almost all casts when I see more than one fly. When using a black tail fly, I use a brown fly and a Professor for droppers; find it a good fly under general conditions, when using a Miller for tail fly; then use Professor for droppers. "From a letter from W. David Tomlin ("Norman") Duluth, Minn as favorite flies for trout in Michigan streams".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_of_Poppies"title="Sea of Poppies">
The novel interweaves the stories of a number of characters, who all, in the latter half of the novel, find themselves taking passage from Calcutta to Mauritius on a schooner named the "Ibis".The story begins with Deeti, a simple, pious lady, caring mother and an efficient housewife. Married to Hukam Singh, a crippled worker in the Ghazipur Opium Factory, the unfortunate Deeti figures out that on her wedding night, she was drugged with opium by her mother-in-law, so that her brother-in-law could rape her and consummate the marriage in place of her impotent husband. This brother-in-law is the real father of Deeti's daughter Kabutri. When her husband dies, Deeti sends Kabutri to stay with relatives. Deeti looks almost certain to meet her doom when she is forced to consider sati ritual (immolation on her husband's funeral pyre) as the only option in the face of threats of more rapes by the brother-in-law, but then Kalua, the untouchable caste ox man from the neighbouring village, comes to her rescue. The couple flee and unite. This is not acceptable to the high caste villagers. In order to escape Deeti's in-laws, she and Kalua become indentured servants, travelling on the Ibis.The next key figure is Zachary Reid, an American sailor born to a quadroon mother and a white father. Escaping racism, he joins the Ibis on its first voyage for its new owner, Mr. Burnham, from Baltimore to Calcutta. A series of misfortunes soon befall the ship, leading to the loss of more senior crew. With the support of the head of the lascars, Serang Ali, Zachary becomes the second in command of the ship. In Calcutta, Zachary is mistaken for a gentleman and enjoys society life. He becomes second mate for the Ibis's next voyage, carrying indentured labour to the island of Mauritius.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lucky_One_(novel)"title="The Lucky One (novel)">
The book starts from Keith Clayton's perspective. Keith is a local police officer. He is at a location where local college students go for nude swimming. He is carrying a camera he borrowed from the Police Department and is taking pictures of three female college students. One of them leaves the beach and comes upon Keith who is supposed to be on duty. He hides the camera and talks with the girls about their breaking the law by nude bathing. He lets them go. He comes across a man whom Keith describes as looking like a hippie walking down a logging road by the beach with a dog. It is Logan Thibault and his dog, Zeus. Keith is concerned Logan saw everything that had happened and tries to find a way to take Logan in. However, after running a background check on Logan and Logan refusing to let him search his bags he lets Logan go. He asks Logan where he is going and states he is heading to Arden. Keith goes back to find the camera he hid, but it is gone and the tires on his squad car are slashed. Keith becomes concerned as his father is the local Sheriff and his grandfather is a local judge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fool_(novel)"title="Fool (novel)">
Pocket is the royal fool at the court of King Lear of Britain. To prevent Lear from marrying off his daughter Cordelia, a girl Pocket is especially fond of, he schemes with Edmund of Gloucester. Pocket advises the bastard (i.e., illegitimate) Edmund how to take the land of his legitimate brother Edgar, while Edmund is to prevent the marriage of Cordelia. Edmund somehow gets Lear to ask each of his three daughters – Goneril, Regan and Cordelia – how much they love him. While Goneril and Regan please the old king with their exaggerations, Cordelia enrages him with her famous laconic “I love thee, according to my bond.” Lear disinherits Cordelia and divides his kingdom between Goneril and Regan. Notwithstanding, the prince of France marries Cordelia and takes her with him.Deprived of his adored Cordelia and angry with Lear because of the way Cordelia was treated, Pocket – advised by the ghost of a woman who turns out was not only his deceased lover but also the former queen of Lear and mother of Cordelia – starts his own vendetta: He encourages Goneril and Regan to strip Lear of his remaining power (especially his train of 100 knights, one of the conditions on which Lear passed the kingdom to his daughters) and works to drive the older sisters into war against each other. Lear finally realizes his error and goes temporarily mad. To estrange the sisters he makes both believe that they are in an affair with Edmund of Gloucester. While successful in this, Pocket fails to incite civil war, simply because Cordelia – now a veritable warrior queen – invades Britain with her army from France. Lear, and later on Pocket, end up in the dungeon of the castle now ruled by Edmund, now Earl of Gloucester.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_to_the_Hills"title="Escape to the Hills">
The book chronicles the Chapmans of Silliman University experiences as they escape to the hills and lived as fugitives in the mountains of Negros Oriental during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, as well as, their experiences when they were kept in the Santo Tomas Internment Camp.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Salmon_Fly"title="The Salmon Fly">
In "The Salmon Fly", Kelson boldly and confidently distilled a lifetime of salmon fishing wisdom into this privately published work. The book contains 510 pages of text and 46 pages of illustrations plus 8 coloured plates showing 52 flies. Many of the black &amp; white illustrations are of fly-fishing contemporaries of Kelson, including Mr. A.V. Wells-Ridley J.P, Major J.P. Traherne and Mr. Barclay Field. The first part of the book is devoted to the techniques of tying the salmon fly as well as patterns for individual flies. Here's a typical pattern write-up:It is only just possible to find a river or a catch, be it in pools,streams, rapids, or flats, shaded or exposed to the light of day, in which a"Jock Scott," when dressed properly, has not made for itself a splendidreputation.The second part of the book is devoted to the practical aspects of fishing for salmon with the fly—locating fish, casting techniques, catching and landing fish and various accessories and equipment. "The Salmon Fly" also includes 46 full page black and white advertisements for mostly angling and sporting pursuits.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Their_Dogs_Came_with_Them"title="Their Dogs Came with Them">
"Their Dogs Came With Them" follows the lives of 4 Mexican American young women living in East Los Angeles during the 1960s. Each character’s story is told in individual chapters while their lives often intermingle. Additionally, her narration style changes from past to present, giving the reader a glimpse into their childhoods to show how their upbringings has an effect on the present. They grow up in an urban landscape, intensified by freeway construction that displaced homes, while the Quarantine Authority uses roadblocks to keep residents in East Los Angeles, “supposedly” protecting them from rabid animals.Turtle, a girl so desperate to belong, acts like a boy to please her gang member brother, Luis Lil Lizard, who is resentful about having a girl for a sibling. After growing up in an abusive home environment, she too joins the McBride Homeboys and then lives on the streets when her brother goes to fight in Vietnam. Ermila, orphaned after her parents ran away, lives with her grandparents who do not understand the rapidly changing times and the younger generation. Her close group of school friends becomes her family, and together they experience the Chicano power movement as well as serious family and relationship problems. Tranquilina, the daughter of missionaries, is optimistic about religion despite witnessing horrible atrocities, like the cruel and revengeful murder of Ermila’s cousin Nacho, committed by the McBride Boys. And last there is Ana, who devotes herself to mentally ill brother, Ben. As a child he loses his mother, and then he accidentally leads another boy in front of a truck, killing the boy. Witnesses falsely claim that Ben tried to save the boy, and thus Ben leads a life of guilt. Together, these characters, their environments, and their families, emotionally depict the struggles of being low-class section in Los Angeles during the 1960s.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaprak_Dökümü"title="Yaprak Dökümü">
The novel revolves around a middle-class Turkish family (the Tekins) in the 1930s. The main characters are Ali Riza Tekin (head of the Tekin family), his wife Hayriye, and their young daughters: Fikret (the oldest daughter), Leyla (the second daughter), Necla (the third daughter), Ayşe (their youngest daughter), their only son Şevket (who is between Fikret and Leyla), and his bride Ferhunde (who is also the principal antagonist).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children's_Bach"title="The Children's Bach">
The novel, set in Melbourne, concerns a couple, Athena and Dexter, who lead a self-sufficient life with their two sons, one of whom is severely disabled. Their apparently "comfortable rut is disrupted by the arrival of Elizabeth, a tough nut from Dexter's past." Elizabeth brings with her her sister Vicki, Elizabeth's sometime lover Philip, and Philip's prepubescent daughter, Poppy. Through them, Athena and Dexter are drawn into a world whose ideas and values test the foundations of their relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Walk_to_Remember_(novel)"title="A Walk to Remember (novel)">
The story starts with a prologue from Landon Carter at age 57. The remainder of the story takes place when Landon is a 17-year-old high school senior. Landon lives in the small, religious town of Beaufort, North Carolina. His father is a genial, charismatic congressman.Landon's father is not around very much, as he lives in Washington, D.C. Landon is more reclusive, which causes some tension in their relationship. Landon's father pressures him into running for class president. Best friend, Eric Hunter, who is the most popular boy in school, helps him and, to his surprise, Landon wins the election. As student body president Landon is required to attend the school dance with a date. He asks many girls, but none are available. That night, he looks through his yearbook, trying to find an acceptable date. Since nobody else seems to be available, Landon reluctantly asks Jamie Sullivan, daughter of Hegbert Sullivan - the Beaufort church minister, who accepts his invitation. While Jamie is very religious and carries a Bible with her wherever she goes, Landon (one of the more popular students) is reluctant to go to the dance with someone like her. When Landon is threatened by Lew, Jamie comes to Landon's aid, to his appreciation. At the end of the night he admits to her that she was the best date possible.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Massacre"title="American Massacre">
The book is the historical account of members of a California-bound wagon train and the plundering of their possessions in Southern Utah Territory and the Mountain Meadows massacre of 140.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_Speaker"title="The Shadow Speaker">
Ejimafor "Ejii" Ugabe is a fourteen-year-old Muslim half-Wodaabe, half-Igbo girl. She lives in the Nigerien village of Kwàmfa. Her father was once the hated dictator-like chief. She lives in the year 2070. The whole world is falling apart after a nuclear fall out in, quote, “the early twenty-first century”.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_We_Dream_Too_Long"title="If We Dream Too Long">
The book follows the life of Kwang Meng, a young 18-year-old who has just graduated from junior college. He currently works as a clerk, a job which he hates and finds monotonous. Two of his junior college friends, Hock Lai and Nadarajah (the latter nicknamed Portia), follow different career paths in their diverging lives. Hock Lai becomes a white-collared worker, determined to climb the corporate ladder, while Portia intends to further his studies in the UK. Kwang Meng meets and strikes up a relationship with a local bar girl, Lucy, at Paradise Bar. Unfortunately, owing to their very different social backgrounds, the couple break up (initiated by Lucy).Hock Lai tries to matchmake Kwang Meng with one of his female acquaintances Anne. Kwang Meng meets Boon Teik and Mei-I, neighbours who are both teachers, and whom Kwang Meng finds an ideal couple. Hock Lai himself gets married with Cecilia, whose father is one of the richest tycoons of Singapore. Throughout all this, Kwang Meng comes across as a rather passive figure, preferring merely to observe and seek solace through activities like swimming in the sea, smoking and drinking in bars. At the novel's end, Kwang Meng's father suffers a stroke, which destined him to take up the burden of supporting his family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nights_in_Rodanthe_(novel)"title="Nights in Rodanthe (novel)">
The story has a framing device set in Rocky Mount, North Carolina in 2002 where part-time librarian Adrienne Willis is comforting her daughter Amanda, who is struggling to raise her children because she is still mourning her husband’s death. To show her daughter she will eventually recover, Adrienne tells Amanda about the time she met a surgeon named Paul Flanner when Amanda was thirteen.In 1988, Adrienne managed a Rodanthe inn for a friend taking a leave of absence, for an opportunity of escapism. She had divorced her husband, who abandoned her for a younger woman, and she was taking care of her sick father while raising her three children. As soon as she arrives at the inn, a major storm is forecast. Her only customer is Paul Flanner, a 54-year-old recently divorced surgeon also wanting to escape his hectic life, who had sold his house and was being sued for malpractice. The two fall in love throughout the week but realize they will have to go back to their old lives. After conversations about their families, Paul decides to join his estranged son in an Ecuadorian medical clinic to rework their relationship, communicating with Adrienne through letters when she returns to Rocky Mount with her family. The romance continued, but Paul later died.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Ghost_Rescue"title="The Great Ghost Rescue">
Humphrey the Horrible is a pleasant, friendly ghost - quite unlike his frightful, ghastly and loathsome family: his mother, a Hag; his father, a Scottish ghost killed fighting in the Battle of Otterburn in which he lost both his legs, and was run through by a sword; his brother George, a screaming skull; and his sister, Winifred, a wailing ghost covered in bloodstains.The ghost family are turned out of their castle home when humans plan to redevelop the castle into a holiday resort. They travel across England, accompanied by their headless Aunt Hortensia and their pet Shuk, and come to Norton Castle School, mistaking it for an empty castle. Here, they meet Rick, a student quite unafraid of ghosts. Rick plans to take the ghosts to the Prime Minister for peace talks concerning the large numbers of ghosts being turned out of their homes.The ghosts and Rick head to London, and pick up an assortment of hangers-on along the way: Walter the Wet, a ghost haunting a polluted river; Cousin Susie and her vampire bat brood; and the Mad Monk, whose church was destroyed to make way for a motorway.In London, Rick seeks out his member of parliament, Clarence Wilks, but the ignorant politician dismisses Rick's story as a fanciful pretense. Rick and the ghosts, furious at Wilks' disbelief, haunt his house and ruin a dinner party with several prominent guests. Wilks takes the ghosts to meet with the Prime Minister in exchange for leaving him be.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Gray_for_Guilt"title="Pale Gray for Guilt">
When McGee visits Tush Bannon, his wife Janine and their children at their motel/marina, he finds the business in trouble. Tush explains that the local authorities are making life difficult for him by such means as introducing roadworks on the only access road. Pressure is being put on the Bannons by a well-connected local businessman, Preston LaFrance, to sell to a large corporation that wants to develop the land for industrial use. Most of the income they have left is from a few houseboats, one of which is rented to Arlie Denn and her husband, hippies who make a small living selling handicrafts.The next time McGee sees Tush, they bump into one another at a bar, where Tush is in conversation with a smart young woman named Mary Smith. He tells McGee that Smith is an agent for an entrepreneur named Gary Santo, who wants to acquire the whole parcel of land. Tush has appealed to both LaFrance and Santo without success; they are not interested in his personal circumstances and are prepared to put him out of business to get what they want. Tush cannot afford to sell his land at the deflated price now being offered. All he can do now is to resume his old job as a salesman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_Frank"title="Loving Frank">
The book opens to notes written by Mamah Borthwick, reminiscing on her life and expressing her longing to tell her views of what happened. The story begins with an account of Mamah’s attendance, with great trepidation, at a public talk given by Frank Lloyd Wright, the famous architect of the School of Chicago. The author tells us that some years earlier, Wright had designed Mamah's house at the insistence of her husband Edwin Cheney. We learn of the already tumultuous and intermittent affair between Wright and Mamah, which began with their working together on the architectural plans for the house.The novel is an intricate analysis of Mamah's emotional torments as an intellectual in her own right, wife, mother, friend, and member of society. It also touches on the human aspects of Wright in addition to his artistic talent and eccentricities. Throughout the novel, Mamah explains the artistic or philosophical underpinnings of Wright's extravagant views. We experience the poignancy of both of their family situations and internal conflicts. The novel allows the reader to see Wright through the prism of Mamah’s deep admiration. The Swedish feminist Ellen Key rightfully unnerves the female protagonist when she declares that Mamah may have cowardly followed Wright in order to bask in his brilliance rather than accomplishing anything she can claim her own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elegance_of_the_Hedgehog"title="The Elegance of the Hedgehog">
The story revolves mainly around the characters of Renée Michel and Paloma Josse, residents of an upper-middle class Left Bank apartment building at 7 Rue de Grenelle – one of the most elegant streets in Paris. Divided into eight luxury apartments, all occupied by distinctly "bourgeois" families, the building has a courtyard and private garden.The widow Renée is a concierge who has supervised the building for 27 years. She is an autodidact in literature and philosophy, but conceals it to keep her job and, she believes, to avoid the condemnation of the building's tenants. Likewise, she wants to be alone to avoid her tenants' curiosity. She effects this by pretending to indulge in concierge-type food and low-quality television, while in her back room she actually enjoys high-quality food, listens to opera, and reads works by Leo Tolstoy and Edmund Husserl. Her perspective is that "[t]o be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one, in our society, to a dark and disillusioned life, a condition one ought to accept at an early age".Twelve-year-old Paloma lives on the fifth floor with her parents and sister whom she considers snobs. A precocious girl, she hides her intelligence to avoid exclusion at school. Dismayed by the privileged people around her, she decides that life is meaningless, and that unless she can find something worth living for, beyond the "vacuousness of bourgeois existence", she will commit suicide on 16 June, her thirteenth birthday. Planning to burn down the apartment before dying, she also steals her mother's pills. For the time being she journals her observations of the outside world, including her perceptions of Renée.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Book_on_Angling"title="A Book on Angling">
"A Book on Angling" is best described by the author himself in the preface to the first edition:When first infected with the fever of Angling, more years ago than I care to count up, my ambition was to catch every species of freshwater fish, from the minnow up to the salmon, which inhabits our British waters. That satisfied, my next desire was to write a work, which should contain within one volume (as far as might be possible) the fullest and most varied information upon Angling generally, in every branch of the art, which had ever been published; and with this resolve I commenced collecting the matter for the present work nearly twenty years ago. Taken up and laid aside from time to time, little by little it has steadily progressed towards completion. In the course of that twenty years I took occasion to visit and to fish nearly every river of note in the kingdom, my connection with 'The Field' affording me peculiar facilities for obtaining permission to fish very many waters which are closely locked against the general public; and I have roamed England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland over to gather fresh knowledge, and to put it into a practical and concentrated form for the use of my readers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneath_the_Bleeding"title="Beneath the Bleeding">
After the footballer Robbie Bishop is poisoned with ricin Tony Hill investigates other pupils who went to his school, achieved success, then were suddenly poisoned. After the deaths of Danny Wade who won the lottery and Tom Cross who won the pools the killer is caught before he can kill the police officer Kevin Matthews, who owns a Ferrari. Tony then confronts Jack Andeson with the evidence that he's poisoning men from his school who achieved his teenage goals because he caught AIDS from a gay man and could no longer achieve them. Jack confesses to the murders to avoid a trial and to hide when he killed these men.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sable_Quean"title="The Sable Quean">
Young Buckler Kordyne, a hare of the Long Patrol army, has a discussion with his ruler Brang Forgefire, Badger Lord of the mountain Salamandastron. Buckler is bored with mountain life, so Brang suggests that he visits Redwall Abbey to deliver some new bellropes to the Abbess (Brang had accidentally broken the ropes last time he was there); while Buckler visits the Abbey, he can also visit his brother on his farm, which is nearby. Buckler agrees, taking along with him his gluttonous friend, Subaltern Diggs.At Redwall Abbey, a music contest for the position of Bard of Redwall is being organized; however two Dibbuns (toddlers) disappear in the process. The duo, a mole and a squirrel, had wandered outside to the woodlands to picnic, but a waiting band of vermin "Ravagers" bound, gagged, and carried them off before anyone could notice their absence. One of the Ravagers, Globby, is overcome by the temptation of Redwall food and attempts to break inside the kitchens; however, he is captured by the otter Skipper Ruark, who punishes the miscreant by forcing him to clean up the mess he had made by his burglary. In the hue and cry raised when the two Dibbuns were discovered missing, Globby escapes the kitchens and flees to the attics, using a pilfered kitchen knife as a weapon. In the attempt to recapture and interrogate him, both he and the squirrel Brother Tollum are slain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus_at_the_Edge_of_Time"title="Icarus at the Edge of Time">
The book is a science fiction retelling of Icarus' tale. It is about a young man who runs away from his traveling, deep-space home to explore a black hole.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_the_Sea"title="Cathedral of the Sea">
The book is set in Barcelona and its main character is Arnau Estanyol, the son of a fugitive serf and one of the cathedral's stone workers, who obtains freedom and eventually achieves a high status in society.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacker's_Art_of_Fly_Making"title="Blacker's Art of Fly Making">
"Blacker's Art Fly Making" is best described by the author himself in the preface to the second edition (1855):I know not how to apologise for submitting a Second Edition of this little Book to the notice of the Angling few, after the appearance of so many by clever writers, except the many calls I had for It, and a sincere desire of improving farther upon a craft that has not hitherto been clearly promulgated by a real practitioner; consequently my great object is to benefit and amuse my readers, by giving them something practical, which at the present time may be particularly wanted by those who love to make their own flies, whose wants, without doubt, will be found sufficiently supplied in this book; the tyro will appreciate it as valuable to him, and the senior angler who may, perchance, be in possession of it, and who may be singularly fond of making his flies, and amusing himself dyeing the hackles and colours, &amp;c., will, I am persuaded, consider it a treasure.My endeavours have been unceasing for many years past, in striving to please thegreat Salmon Fishers and Trout Fishers of this Country, and I must confess that my labours have not been in vain; they have generously conferred upon me their very kind patronage and good will, benefits for which I hold them in very great estimation. Under these circumstances, I have taken much pains to write the book in a befitting manner to suit their tastes and purposes, although my inability in many instances has been an obstacle, nevertheless with all my faults I claim the title of Fisherman, an humble and unimportuned name which no reasonable dispensation can deprive me of.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_of_the_Shroud"title="The Lady of the Shroud">
Rupert Saint Leger inherits his uncle's estate worth more than one million pounds, on condition that he live for a year in his uncle's castle in the Land of the Blue Mountains on the Dalmatian coast. There Rupert tries to win the trust of the conservative mountaineer population by using his fortune to buy them modern arms (from a South American country that has unexpectedly found itself at peace) for their fight against Turkish invasion (the story was written shortly before the Balkan Wars).One wet night, he is visited in his room in the castle by a pale woman wearing a wet shroud, seeking warmth. He lets her dry herself before his fire, and she flees before morning. She visits several more times, all at night, and they hardly speak, but he falls in love with her, despite thinking she is a vampire. He visits the local church and finds her in a glass-topped stone coffin in the crypt. Despite misgivings he declares his love, be she living or undead, and she arranges the marriage in an Orthodox ceremony conducted by candlelight in the church one night, although he still does not know her name, and she says she must still live alone in the crypt for the present.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zoya_Factor"title="The Zoya Factor">
Zoya Solanki is a client service rep with an advertising agency, who loves everything about her job, especially the brand she has been put in charge of – Zing Cola (Pepsi in a fictional avatar). But when she's made to leave an ad film shoot, featuring none other than Shah Rukh Khan, and has to go to Dhaka to shoot an ad with the Indian cricket team she begins to experience her first pangs of irritation towards the brand. Making matters somewhat worse, the team captain Nikhil Khoda insists on discipline as a norm and cuts her important shoot short. This causes her to stay back a few more days than anticipated and miss the Shah Rukh Khan film shoot. When the men in blue realise that Zoya was born at the very moment India won the first and the only cricket World Cup in 1983, they are startled. What intrigues them more was when they realised that having breakfast with her is followed by victories on the field, and not eating with her results in defeat. They decide she is a lucky charm.As luck would have it, the rag tag team has a sudden spurt of victories and soon the cricket-crazy nation declares her a goddess. Soon, Zoya is invited by the eccentric president of IBCC (Indian Board of Cricket Control, a spoof of BCCI Board of Control for Cricket in India), to accompany the team to the ICC World Cup in Australia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unforgiving_Wind"title="The Unforgiving Wind">
The novel is about the disastrous expedition of Commander Adams who dies suddenly. This novel follows the misfortunes of his men across the Arctic. Whatever can go wrong does go wrong as transport, instruments, health and sanity begin to fail. The team seem irretrievably lost in the dark Arctic winter, frightened and half-starving even when they find a base. Only one man can rescue them, the truculent Tom Fife who must respond to the faint radio signals coming from the Arctic shores. A powerful and disturbing novel, this story aims to take your breath away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man-Eater"title="The Man-Eater">
Jefferson Scott Jr. and Robert Gordon, hunters in the Belgian Congo, are thrown together with missionaries Sangamon and Mary Morton and their daughter Ruth. Scott marries Ruth, and Gordon is entrusted with stock certificates to be taken back to Scott's father in America. Later Scott and the elder Mortons are killed by the native Wakandas; Ruth and her daughter Virginia are saved by Belgian forces and afterwards return to America to live with Scott's father. The stock certificates, meanwhile, have gone astray, with only a single sheet of paper having been delivered to the elder Scott. 19 years pass.On the death of Jefferson Scott Sr., Virginia Scott is to inherit the estate, but the will cannot be located, and Scott Taylor, her grandfather’s disinherited nephew, appears to claim a half-share. Proposing to Virginia in an effort to obtain it all, he is rebuffed, whereupon he disputes her right to any of the estate, pretending she is illegitimate. Ruth attempts to prove her marriage to Virginia's father by writing to Robert Gordon, who witnessed the ceremony, but he is now deceased. Her appeal reaches his son Dick Gordon instead. Moved but unable to provide the desired proof, Gordon writes back of his intention to sail to Africa to seek documentation of the marriage there. Taylor intercepts the letter and follows him with the intention of murder. Discovering this, Virginia also sets out for Africa.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Test_(Wright_novel)"title="The Test (Wright novel)">
The story takes place in the college town of Genoa in the Middle West. The heroine, Alice Lindell, secretary to Senator Winchester, is engaged to the senator's son Tom. She attempts to wean Tom away from his weakness for liquor by prematurely giving in to his desire for her, with disastrous results; Tom backslides, and while drunk falls victim to the wiles of another admirer, the unscrupulous Harriet, who marries him. Repenting his folly, he resolves to leave Harriet and run away with Alice, but is persuaded by the latter to fulfill his marriage vows and henceforth conduct himself honorably.Alice courageously faces the shame of bearing and rearing their illegitimate daughter Anna alone. This ordeal is the test of the title—of herself, her family, and her community. Her story is paralleled in a subplot involving Sallie, a sinner of a lower sort. Over the years Alice is supported by some, notably the senator, but vilified by most of the small-minded townsfolk, including her own mother. Her sister Gertrude, engaged to the priggish clergyman John Prescott, also suffers, her intended suddenly developing cold feet at the news of Alice's indiscretion. Perhaps the height of Alice's suffering is reached when Harriet, having lost her own child, importunes her to let her have Anna instead; persuaded it would be in the best interest of her daughter, Alice finally complies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Olympian"title="The Last Olympian">
While Percy Jackson is on a drive with Rachel Dare, he is approached by Charles Beckendorf, and the two head off to attack Luke's ship, "The Princess Andromeda". Kronos, hosted in the mortal body of Luke, is not caught off guard because of a spy at Camp Half-Blood, and Beckendorf is killed in an explosion. Percy awakens later in his father Poseidon's underwater palace, which is under siege by the Titan Oceanus. Percy wants to help fight, but Poseidon sends Percy back to Camp Half-Blood to hear the "Great Prophecy". Once there, Percy informs the camp of the spy and learns that the Olympians are fighting Typhon. The following night, Percy leaves with Nico di Angelo, son of Hades, following a lead on how to defeat Kronos. After visiting Luke's mother in Westport, Connecticut, and talking with Hestia, Percy procures a blessing from his mother. He then descends into the Underworld to bathe in the River Styx and take on the curse of Achilles. Despite being betrayed by Nico in exchange for information on the boy's mother, Percy is successful and uses his new invulnerability to defeat a small army of Hades's minions.Percy emerges from the Underworld in New York City, leaving Nico behind to convince his father to join the fight against Kronos. Percy calls the campers to help defend Olympus, as the gods refuse to end their struggle with Typhon. Just before the battle begins, New York City is affected by a powerful sleeping spell from Morpheus, Hecate, and Kronos himself. Despite being joined by Thalia's Hunters of Artemis, the Party Ponies, and a few other allies, the Olympian army struggles to hold back repeated assaults by the Titan army. Camp Half-Blood suffers approximately 16 casualties, out of an original 40 campers. Annabeth herself is badly injured when she saves Percy from an attack by Ethan Nakamura that would have hit Percy in his Achilles' point. Even after these setbacks, Percy refuses a chance to surrender offered by Prometheus, and entrusts the Titan's gift of Pandora's "pithos" to Hestia. The campers successfully defeat Hyperion, further enraging Kronos. Rachel Dare, who has been experiencing inexplicable moments of prophecy, arrives to warn Percy of a drakon that can only be killed by a child of Ares. The campers do poorly against the drakon until Silena Beauregard arrives disguised as Ares's head counselor Clarisse and breaks the cabin's boycott of the war, getting badly injured in the process. The real Clarisse arrives in a fury and kills the drakon by herself. As Silena lies dying, the campers learn that she was the camp's spy, but chose to right her wrongs after her boyfriend Beckendorf's death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein's_Nephew"title="Wittgenstein's Nephew">
The author narrates moments of his friendship with Paul Wittgenstein, "nephew" (actually son of a first cousin) of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (not to be confused with the latter's brother, the pianist Paul Wittgenstein). The title is a reference to Diderot's Rameau's Nephew who also deals with the eccentric nephew of a preeminent cultural figure. A very sensitive man, unsuitable for the world, obsessed by an exclusive and cruel passion for music as well as for race cars and sailing, Paul Wittgenstein dissipated his whole fortune and ultimately died poor.The friendship strengthened whilst recovering in a hospital, Bernhard from a lung ailment, Paul from a bout of madness. The latter in fact will die alone in an asylum, a victim of an incurable conflict with the world; whereas the former will succeed in controlling his own madness, emblem of that very conflict, and making it a lever for his sense of social living.Through the narration of symptomatic episodes, Bernhard unravels the emptiness of Austrian society, its parasitic and vain aspects, spending its time to self-congratulate on fake recognitions and futile prizes with the same rhythm used to blather and drink coffee in the best Viennese cafés. Finally, the author gives some interesting advice about the importance of literary prizes as the determining factor of artistic worth: "a prize is invariably only awarded by incompetent people who want to piss on your head and who do copiously piss on your head if you accept their prize." 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_on_the_Forge"title="Blood on the Forge">
The novel opens in Kentucky, in the year 1919; sharecropping half-brothers Big Mat, Chinatown, and Melody Moss are in dire straits. After their mule dragged their mother to her death, Big Mat killed the animal in a fit of rage. Now without a mule, the brothers are unable to work their land, and are likely to starve. The landowner, Mr. Johnston, agrees to give the brothers another mule.When Big Mat goes to Mr. Johnston's riding boss to collect the mule he had been promised, the riding boss refuses to give him the mule, and makes a racist comment about the departed Mrs. Moss. Big Mat's anger again overcomes him and he attacks and possibly kills the riding boss. Earlier that day, Chinatown and Melody are visited by a white man on horseback who gives them a ten-dollar bill, promising much more if the brothers leave that night on a train that would take them North, to work. When Big Mat returns that evening and Melody and Chinatown tell him what the stranger said, Big Mat decides that he and his brothers will head North that very evening.Part Two, the shortest of the novel, chronicles the inhumane conditions of the train in which the Moss brothers are shipped north to Pennsylvania.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lonely_Voyage"title="The Lonely Voyage">
This novel is about a boy, Jess Ferigo, who winds up on a voyage of poaching along with Pat Fee and Old Boxer. The story is about his journey into manhood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correction_(novel)"title="Correction (novel)">
The Austrian main character Roithamer, lecturer at Cambridge, after years of paroxysmal projects, builds for his sister, the only person he ever loved, a house in the shape of a cone, right in the geometrically precise middle of the Kobernausser forest. Her answer to the present is death, her traumatic death on entering the Cone. The symbolism of the cone is ambiguous, as it could represent either a refuge, a mausoleum, a phallic icon, the perfect mathematical centre of existence and thought, etc.) is then destined to disappear, absorbed by an invading Nature. A typical Bernhardian maniacal character, Roithamer corrects his building project "ad infinitum", and ultimately corrects it to its extreme self-correction: suicide.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Rotten_(Gratz)"title="Something Rotten (Gratz)">
Horatio Wilkes visits his friend Hamilton Prince for the summer holidays. Hamilton's father just died and his mother remarried - his uncle. The Princes are very rich. They own a paper plant in Denmark, Tennessee. Unfortunately, the plant seems to pollute the Copenhagen River. At least, that's what Hamilton's beautiful ex-girlfriend Olivia says. When Hamilton and Horatio are confronted with a video of Hamilton's recently deceased father who tells them that he has been poisoned, Horatio promises Hamilton to solve the riddle. On his journey solving this riddle he stumbles across some problems. For instance one of the problems he ran into was when he needed help getting information, and clue's Hamilton was always intoxicated. And when Hamilton wasn't intoxicated he was rude and antisocial or was sleeping off his hangover.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Copper_Beech"title="The Copper Beech">
The novel follows the lives of 12 different young people in the small Irish town of Shancarrig, most of them graduates of the stone schoolhouse on the hill where they engraved their initials on a large copper beech tree. Each chapter is told from the viewpoint of one of the characters, although the plot details often reappear in other chapters.Maura Brennan has no choice but to work after her schooling. She has a drunken father and so is happy to work as a live-in chamber maid in Ryan's hotel. Nessa's mother prefers that her daughter does not speak with Maura even though they went to the same school. Maura falls in love with the barman Gerry O'Sullivan and becomes pregnant. They marry, but the child is born with Down syndrome and Gerry abandons Maura to face it alone. She then works for the Darcys who have opened a new shop in the village. She solves the mystery of Gloria's missing jewels and ends up owning them.Leo Murphy is the last child still at home. She lives with her injured soldier father and mother. Her teenage life is caught in the tangle her mother has made and she thinks she can never be normal again. She finds love, which helps her to break down the walls she made for herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fish_Out_of_Water_(book)"title="A Fish Out of Water (book)">
The story is about a boy who buys a fish from a pet store. The boy names the fish Otto. Mr. Carp, the owner, gives the boy instructions on how to care for the fish, including strict feeding instructions: "Never feed him a lot. Just so much, and no more! Never more than a spot! Or something may happen. You never know what." When the boy inadvertently disobeys these instructions out of compassion for his new pet, Otto begins to grow uncontrollably, quickly outgrowing his fishbowl. This leads the boy to move him into a series of successively larger containers, ending with the bathtub. When Otto outgrows the tub, the house begins to flood.The boy then requests help from a police officer and the fire department, who help him take Otto down to the local pool, where they drop the fish in, causing him to expand to the size of the pool and scare off all of the swimmers. Since Otto keeps on growing, the boy calls Mr. Carp who is not surprised, as boys always ignore his feeding instructions. When Mr. Carp arrives, he dives into the pool and pulls Otto below. Eventually, he emerges with the fish, back to its normal size. He refuses to say how he did it, but tells the boy to never overfeed Otto again, and the boy takes his advice to heart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Speaks_(book)"title="Martha Speaks (book)">
The book follows the adventures of the dog Martha, who could speak after being fed alphabet soup. The family complains about Martha being talkative, and she stops eating her soup. Then, when a burglar breaks into her house, Martha was unable to call for help. When the burglar gives her alphabet soup, Martha calls the police and the family appreciates her for speaking again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loser"title="The Loser">
The novel does not take place at the time of the events recounted, but at the time its narrator recalls them. There are three main characters: the narrator (who is the only survivor), Glenn Gould, who died a natural death at fifty-one, and Wertheimer who committed suicide some time later. The novel consists almost entirely of recollections and ruminations relating to the relationships between the three. Wertheimer and the narrator were students in a piano class taught by Vladimir Horowitz at the Mozarteum in Salzburg in 1953, where they met a young Canadian piano prodigy (Gould).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Wave"title="Shadow Wave">
James Adams works undercover with MI5 as a Brigands Motorcycle Club biker, trying to bring down its leader Ralph "The Führer" Donnington (continuing from his mission in the previous CHERUB book "Brigands M.C."). His girlfriend Kerry Chang is also working with him as an interpreter in a set-up weapons deal. The police surround them and the Führer tries to escape but ends up falling down a cliff and breaking his leg. He is taken into police custody.James returns to CHERUB campus to attend a wedding between mission controller Chloe Blake and her fiancé. At the wedding, he is reunited with several ex-CHERUB agents and former staff members, including the cruel former head instructor Norman Large, his ex-girlfriend Dana Smith and his best friend and retired agent Kyle Blueman and old friend Amy. The day before the wedding, James walks in on Bethany Parker naked in Bruce Norris' room. Bruce then admits that he is shagging her. Kyle finds a mission briefing for James to act as the son of David Secombe, an important figure in the UK Government who is negotiating a weapons deal with Malaysian Defence Minister Tan Abdullah. Kyle tells James about how, when he was assisting in a CHERUB basic training course in Malaysia in 2004, he met a teenager named Aizat Rakyat who told him how Abdullah was demolishing native villages to make way for building luxury hotels. When the Boxing Day tsunami struck, he used the disaster to "evacuate" the villagers and build more hotels in the place. James, disgusted, quits the mission and joins Kyle in a scheme to embarrass Abdullah.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Believers_(novel)"title="The Believers (novel)">
At a party in 1962, 18-year-old typist Audrey Howard meets Joel Litvinoff, an American lawyer involved with the civil rights movement. Although Joel is fourteen years older, Audrey is impressed when Joel puts her pompous date in his place. In turn, Joel is intrigued by Audrey's aloofness. Joel later finds Audrey's number in a telephone book and insists on accompanying Audrey to visit her dreary, rural parents the next day. Audrey and Joel spend the night together, and Joel half-seriously suggests that Audrey marry him and follow him to the United States. Bored with her unstimulating life in Britain, Audrey takes him up on his offer.Forty years later, Joel and Audrey live together in Greenwich Village. Joel is now famous, successful, and controversial for his radical legal activism. Audrey has become a fiery, antagonistic woman who finds fault in all things and defends her husband's causes with zealous conviction. Joel and Audrey have three adult children living elsewhere in New York City. Lenny, the eldest, was adopted at age seven as part of Joel's belief in collective, "tribal" child-rearing. Lenny's parents were eco-terrorists, with their last campaign killing his biological father and landing his biological mother in jail. Since then, Joel has grown frustrated with Lenny's addiction issues and repeated petty crimes, while Audrey dotes on Lenny and constantly excuses his delinquency. Karla, the middle child, is a hospital social worker. Karla struggles with low self-esteem after years of demeaning treatment from her family about her weight and intelligence. Karla is unhappily married to Mike, a union organizer, who desperately wants children. Rosa, the youngest, chaperones an after-school program for underprivileged girls. Once a firm socialist, Rosa tried to join the socialist revolution in Cuba but returned disillusioned after four years of witnessing Fidel Castro's oppression. However, by the time she is introduced, Rosa has had a positive experience in a synagogue and discovered an interest in Orthodox Judaism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Case_of_Exploding_Mangoes"title="A Case of Exploding Mangoes">
The central theme of the book is a fictitious story behind the real-life plane crash which killed General Zia, president of Pakistan from 1977 to 1988, about which there are many conspiracy theories. After witnessing a tank parade in Bahawalpur, Pakistan on August 17, 1988, Zia leaves the small Punjabi town in the C-130 Hercules aircraft designated "Pak One," along with several of his senior army officials, the US Ambassador to Pakistan Arnold Raphel, and some crates of mangoes. Shortly after a smooth takeoff, the control tower loses contact with the aircraft. Witnesses who saw the plane in the air later claim it was flying erratically, before nosediving and exploding on impact, killing all 31 on board. Zia had ruled Pakistan for 11 years prior to his death.Lazy, irreverent Ali Shigri narrates the story. Ali's father, Col. Quli Shigri, has recently died in what was called a suicide, but Ali discovers that his father was killed by a rogue ISI officer, Major Kiyani, under Zia's orders. The story takes place in the months before the plane crash, jumping back and forth between Ali's revenge plans and his third-person observations of Zia's life. Ali attends the Pakistani Air Force Academy with his fellow cadets and their instructors. His best friend is Cadet "Baby O" Obaid, his roommate and lover.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liuxing_Hudie_Jian"title="Liuxing Hudie Jian">
In the "jianghu" (martial artists' community), there are two major martial arts clans engaged in an intense rivalry. On one side stands the Dragon Gate Clan () led by "Old Uncle" Sun Yubo (). On the other side is the Twelve Flying "Peng" Clan () led by "King of Ten Thousand "Peng"s" Fan Xuan ().Apart from the two clans, there is an assassin organisation led by "Boss Gao" Gao Jiping (), who pretends to operate a brothel called Forest of Delight (). Gao Jiping has adopted and trained four orphans to serve as assassins under her: Ye Xiang (), Shi Qun (), Meng Xinghun (), and Xiaohe ().Lü Xiangchuan (), Sun Yubo's deputy, has long wanted to kill his boss but he knows he cannot do so on his own. He secretly makes a deal with Gao Jiping, who sends Meng Xinghun to assassinate Sun Yubo. However, Lü Xiangchuan's plan ultimately fails and he dies at the hands of his friend who has remained loyal to the clan. Gao Jiping commits suicide after the loss of her four assassins: Meng Xinghun falls in love with Sun Die, marries her and joins Sun Yubo; Ye Xiang is killed; Xiaohe survives but becomes disabled; only Shi Qun is still alive and well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giant_Garden_of_Oz"title="The Giant Garden of Oz">
Temporally, Shanower places his novel at the end of the twentieth century; he takes up the story of Uncle Henry and Aunt Em, the surrogate parents of Dorothy Gale. In his sixth Oz book, "The Emerald City of Oz", Baum had brought the two characters from the mundane world of Kansas to the Emerald City, where they enjoyed a blissful retirement. At the start of "The Giant Garden of Oz", the couple, "after eighty-some years of a life of luxury," have decided to return to farming. (Inhabitants of Oz do not age, unless they want to.) They have acquired a small farm in the Munchkin Country; with magical aids designed by the Wizard of Oz, their farm labor is much less demanding than in the Kansas of their past.Dorothy comes to pay her first visit to the new farm — but encounters an unprecedented problem. Overnight, the couple's vegetable garden grows to enormous size, with giant beets, broccoli, peppers, and watermelons, and heads of cabbage twenty feet high. The farmhouse is hemmed in by a vegetable wall. Dorothy sets out for the Emerald City, climbing a landscape of mountainous produce. Outside the garden, she crosses the Munchkin Country and meets new friends, principally a white-and-purple cow named Imogene, who gives varying dairy products depending upon her mood:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodcutters_(novel)"title="Woodcutters (novel)">
It’s 11:30 at night in an aristocratic Viennese home in the 1980s. A group of people are awaiting the arrival of a famous dramatic actor from the Burgtheater, the guest of honor, who is coming from a performance of Ibsen’s "The Wild Duck." The place is that of the Auersbergers, a married couple whom the narrator hasn’t seen for twenty years: she’s a singer, he’s a "composer in the Webern tradition". While sitting in an arm-chair, and later at the dinner table when the actor arrives, the narrator observes the crowd around him, reliving the last two decades, his connections and ties with the various guests, and particularly his relationship with a woman, Joana, who had committed suicide and been buried earlier that day. Eventually, the actor begins an aggressive rant at one of the guests, Billroth, a self-styled "Virginia Woolf" of Vienna and the narrator's fierce literary rival. He then becomes sad and reflective and laments that he often believes he would have been better off to have lived a rural life and to have been a woodcutter. When the actor lashes out at Billroth, the narrator momentarily turns from derogatory to sympathetic, having previously condemned the Burgtheater actor as vapid and self-centered. The novel ends as the guests disperse, with the narrator leaving the dinner and deciding to write about it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lime_Works"title="The Lime Works">
The story opens with a description of a woman’s brains scattered across the floor of an abandoned lime works, and a half-frozen man crouching on the ground nearby, covered in manure.From this first grotesque scene, Bernhard begins his story, a compelling tale of two people insidiously bound to each other, told through a hypnotic wave of voices – the people of the small Austrian town nearby (Sicking), the officials, the salesmen, the chimney sweeps, the local gossips, the couple themselves. The man, Konrad, is consumed with his work – a book that is to be both visionary and definitive, the ultimate treatise on the subject of hearing. His wife, a cripple, is the victim of his obsessive experiments: he whispers one phrase in her ear, over and over, hundreds of times, demanding from her impossible degrees of aural discrimination. She has no way of knowing, or no strength to tell herself, whether he is a deluded madman or a genius. For three decades, he has been waiting for the ideal moment, the perfect constellation of circumstances, to arise, so that he may begin writing down his conclusions.But he never begins, and he is now an old man. We watch as he compulsively invites his own ruin. We feel him creep from one moment to the next, terrified of failure. Suppose he started writing and then caught a cold? Suppose he finished and his tome was judged worthless? Or his wife destroyed it? Even amidst the total isolation of the lime works, where they live, he is continually distracted. He hallucinates about prowlers. He hoards bits of food for dreaded visitors. And she torments him. He must feed her, read to her, bring her cider from the deep cellar (one glass at the time), maintain her voluminous correspondence with servants he has long ago forgotten, try on a mitten she has been knitting and unravelling for years, tend the earaches she develops from constant experiments... until the monotony and heartlessness of their life together shatters in a bloodbath.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Storm"title="Castle Storm">
After discovering the second clue to the whereabouts of the humans lies at the famed Castle Storm, the outlaw weasels journey to the south of Welkin, where the castle lies, to discover more about the mysterious human evacuation. However, a cascade of rats is swarming down from the marshes in the north of the island to seize power from Prince Poynt.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gargoyles_(novel)"title="Gargoyles (novel)">
One morning a doctor takes his son—an idealistic student of science and rationality—on his daily rounds through the grim mountainous Austrian countryside. They observe the rural grotesques they encounter—from an innkeeper whose wife has been murdered to a crippled musical prodigy kept in a cage—coping with physical misery, madness, and the brutality of the austere landscape. But when they meet the insomniac Prince Saurau in his castle at Hochgobernitz, his solitary, stationary mind takes over the rest of the novel in an uninterrupted obsessive paragraph. It's a hundred-page monologue by an eccentric, paranoid man, a relentlessly flowing cascade of words that is classic Bernhard: the furious logorrhea is a mesmeric rant, completing the stylistic formation of his art of exaggeration, where he uses metaphors of physical and mental illness to explore the decay of his homeland.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_(Bernhard_novel)"title="Extinction (Bernhard novel)">
"Extinction" takes the form of the autobiographical testimony of Franz-Josef Murau, the intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning family. Murau lives in Rome in self-exile, obsessed and angry with his identity as an Austrian, and resolves never to return to the family estate of Wolfsegg. He is surrounded by a group of artistic and intellectual friends, and intends to continue living what he calls the "Italianate way". When he hears of his parents' deaths, he finds himself master of Wolfsegg and must decide its fate.Murau has cut himself off from his family and sought to establish an intellectual life as a tutor in Rome. In the first half of the novel, he reflects on the spiritual, intellectual, and moral impoverishment of his family to his Roman student Gambetti. He only has respect for his Uncle Georg, who similarly cut himself off from the family and helped Murau to save himself. In the second section, he returns to his family’s estate, Wolfsegg, for the funeral, as well as to determine the disposal of the estate, which is now in his hands.Throughout the novel, Murau talks about the void that he has created for himself via exaggeration combined with understatement. Murau then incriminates all of art in this role of unjustified absolution. To Gambetti, the "great" of "great art" was just that; when he thinks on his villa in Wolfsegg, "great" comes to mean something new: criminal art that has the power to make people pardon themselves for mortal sins.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ant_and_the_Elephant"title="The Ant and the Elephant">
An ant is stranded on an island; since he can't swim, the ant asks a turtle for help. The turtle selfishly refuses (because he's already had his swim for the day); shortly thereafter, he falls on his back and can't right himself. So he asks a hornbill for help; she selfishly refuses ("This will teach you not to be so clumsy," she says), and then her egg falls out of its nest. It's too heavy for her to carry, so she asks a giraffe for help, but the giraffe is too proud to assist her. Then the giraffe's legs get hopelessly ensnarled in some vines; he asks a lion for help, but the lion just laughs and strolls on. Then a boulder rolls onto the lion's tail, trapping him. He asks a rhino for help, but when he can't think of any way to return the favor, the rhino strolls on...until he gets his horn embedded in a stump. Then an elephant notices and helps each of the animals in turn, starting with the ant - the only one who bothers to thank the elephant. Shortly after the elephant has assisted everyone, he himself falls into a ravine. When he can't get out, the elephant resigns himself to his plight. Then a horde of ants - led by the one he assisted previously - carry him from the ravine. He, in turn, gives them a ride home on his back.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_(novel)"title="Yes (novel)">
This novel is about suicide, a topic that permeates overtly or covertly all of Bernhard’s work. A Persian woman is the central character of narration, and the narrator prepares for her suicide by his own preoccupation with suicide. This motif of the surrogate victim is clearly established in the novel's opening sentence (see excerpt below), where the narrator describes himself as in the process of "dumping" his problems on his friend Moritz. Later, he will persist in making these revelations even though he recognizes that they have "wounded" Moritz. Similarly, he will underline the Persian woman's role as a surrogate victim when he refers to her as the ideal "sacrificial mechanism".One could easily perceive that the woman fascinates the narrator, who finds in her a suitable companion in his solitary walks into the nearby forest, where he obsesses her with interminable disquisitions and philosophical rants. She is "an utterly regenerating person, that is an utterly regenerating walking and thinking and talking and philosophising partner such as I had not had for years".Gradually the narrator goes back in time and recollects his first meetings with the Persian woman, uncovering a universe of loneliness where the only existential act left is confession. However, self-exposure not always engenders a benefit. Whilst the narrator undergoes a positive reaction, becoming once again attached to life and thus discarding suicide, the Persian woman is unable to unravel the knots of her painful social isolation and says a definitive "yes" to annihilation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mardi_Gras_Mystery"title="The Mardi Gras Mystery">
In "The Mardi Gras Mystery", Nancy's boyfriend, Ned Nickerson, is invited to spend the vacation with Brian Seaton, an Emerson College friend. On their way to the Seaton Mansion, Brian stops at Warren Tyler's house to pick up his father, Bartholomew Seaton, and at the same time shows Ned a portrait of his late mother, Danielle Seaton, by the famous artist Lucien Beaulieu. The painting is in the possession of Mr. Tyler since he found it in a barn he bought.The friends leave for Seaton Mansion or "The Bat Hallow". They wear fancy dress for the Mardi Gras celebration. Later that evening they go to the Silver Yacht Club. That night the portrait is stolen. The prime suspect is Mr. Seaton, who is supposed to have wanted his wife's portrait. All the evidence points to him: he was wearing a bat costume, like the thief, and he was missing at the crucial time, around 10:00 p.m.Nancy cannot resist the challenge of the mystery. Her investigation leads to the French Quarter where she sees a woman who looks like Danielle except that her face is scarred. She is shocked and hypothesizes that Danielle could have survived the sailboat accident.Later she finds out the woman is Mariel Devereaux, whose father Max is an art forger. Nancy concludes that Max used his daughter as a model for the painting because of her almost perfect resemblance to Danielle. He purposely left it in the barn so that it would be found by Mr. Tyler, Danielle's suitor and Bartholomew's rival. His plan was to steal his own painting and ransom it for a million dollars. The money was to pay for his daughter's plastic surgery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woundlicker"title="Woundlicker">
The story is narrated by a disagreeable misfit and heavy drinker called Fletcher Fee who works in a car wash at the Stormont government building. Some days after witnessing the violent abuse of an 18-year-old called Molly Duddy, Fee finds a listening device secreted in one of the government's black Mercedes cars which he is cleaning. He begins defining his character to the device, informing it and the reader that he is the product of a violent marriage between a Catholic father and a Protestant mother. Ultimately, Fee explains, he plans to break free from the shackles of a divided society. He develops a mild obsession with Molly, whom he refers to as Wee Blondie, as well as a plan to befriend her.During a protest, overzealous police shoot Fee's only friend, a Muslim colleague called Karim. The killing, which gets second place in a news media obsessed with Northern Ireland politics, spurs 25-year-old Fee towards a dangerous and violent form of revenge. His targets are politicians and paramilitaries from both traditions in Northern Ireland, Loyalist and Republican. The police, as well as both sides of the polarised community, are soon baffled as to who is carrying out these murders because they do not fit the traditional template of killing in Northern Ireland. After each murder, Fee returns to work and gets back into the car. There he describes what he has done and attempts to explain why he did it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_on_Kirrin_Island_Again"title="Five on Kirrin Island Again">
Julian, Dick, Anne and George had planned to visit Kirrin Island for their school holidays, but George's father, Uncle Quentin, is using the island to conduct some secretive scientific experiments. George is frustrated with his idea. But agrees to lend her island to her father until he completes his experiment. Uncle Quentin is later kidnapped by villains wanting his secret formula for alternative energy. Uncle Quentin is held in a sub-sea tunnel, and it is up to the Five to rescue him. During the adventure,Timmy plays an important part in rescuing Uncle Quentin from the kidnappers. The children befriend an artistic boy named Martin, whose guardian, Mr Curton, is part of the gang trying to steal the secret formula. After the rescue Martin is admitted in a Art School and is free from his guardian. Everything ends happily.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Go_Off_to_Camp"title="Five Go Off to Camp">
Julian, Dick, George (Georgina by rights), Anne and Timmy (Timothy) the dog are planning to go camping in a moor with the absent-minded and insect-loving Mr Luffy, a master at Julian and Dick's school. When they arrive at camp they find that their camping site is close to a farm. They discover several old railway tracks that run under the moors, some of them unused. They soon make friends with a boy named Jock, who lives at the farm with his mother and stepfather. While exploring the moor, the five find a railway yard and a tunnel that are apparently abandoned. A watchman called Wooden Leg Sam tells them that "Spook trains" travel along those tracks before chasing them away.The children visit the farm the next day and tell Jock about the spook trains. Jock has a sissy of a boy called Cecil Dearlove inflicted on him who forces him to play "soldiers" with him all day. Jock retaliates by forcing him to play "Red Indians", scaring him in the process. In return, Jock is forced to stay in his room all day. His stepfather intended to cane him, but his mother wouldn't let him because "that would only make Jock hate his stepfather". They are surprised to find that most of the farm labourers are not working properly although Jock's stepfather, Mr Andrews, has supplied the farm with a lot of expensive equipment and vehicles. When Mr Andrews hears about the spook trains, he warns the children to stay away from the railway yard, and tries to prevent Jock from meeting the Five over the next few days. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Get_into_Trouble"title="Five Get into Trouble">
Siblings Julian, Dick and Anne are spending the Easter school holidays at Kirrin Cottage with their cousin Georgina and her dog, Timmy. After George's parents, Quentin and Fanny, depart for some scientific conferences, the Five embark on a cycling and camping holiday. At a lake, they encounter a boy named Richard Kent, who wants to spend the day cycling with them. He promises to stay at his aunt's house at the end of the day, if his mother gives him permission. The children agree, and Richard joins them without bothering to request parental permission. He is later chased by a car driven by Rooky, one of his wealthy father's former bodyguards, who was fired because Richard had told tales about him. Rooky's associates chase Richard on foot in Middlecombe Woods, where they mistake Dick for Richard and kidnap him. Richard finds Julian and George, who berate him for his mendacity and cowardice.Julian, Anne, George and Richard trace Dick to Owl's Dene, and on the way Julian observes a man changing clothes and another man throwing clothes down a well. At Owl's Dene, the children sneak into the house but are caught and imprisoned, while Timmy remains outside. That night, Julian finds Dick locked in an upstairs room and discovers a secret room with a man sleeping in it. The next morning, Rooky arrives and sees his associates have kidnapped the wrong boy. The Five and Richard are nearly freed, but Richard is recognised and they are imprisoned in the grounds of the house.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Fall_into_Adventure"title="Five Fall into Adventure">
The Famous Five meet up at Kirrin Station and learn Aunt Fanny and Uncle Quentin will be holidaying in Spain, leaving the Five at home with the household's cook, Joan. On the beach, the Five meet a gypsy girl, the "ragamuffin", called Jo. Jo and George almost get into fight and Dick who intervenes, gets a punch from Jo and Dick hits Jo. The others find Jo and George very much in alike. After finding out that Jo is a girl, Dick is very sorry, which moves Jo who is not used to kindness. After this Jo is devoted to Dick, but Jo and George dislike each other. After the house is burgled, George is kidnapped, and Jo comes with a card requesting some documents to exchange for George. The wrong papers are provided, so George is not released. Jo is helping the villains, but decides to change sides, mostly because wants to please Dick, and tells that George is likely hidden in Raven's forest by the villains among them her father Simmy. The children find Simmy's carvan, but no George or Timmy in it. Instead, they found George's writing on the wall of the caravan which says "Red Tower, Red Tower" over and over again. Jo knows that Red Tower is a man, a dangerous fellow who lives in a castle-like house on a cliff-top. Jo eventually leads Julian and Dick to a cliff-top house, where George is captive in a tower. Anne is left home with Joann. In the foot of the cliff, children find an underground tunnel which leads to the house. In the tunnel they meet Red Tower, a giant of a man with flaming-red beard and with mad-man's eyes. Red captures Dick and Julian, but not Jo who escapes. Jo frees the boys from captivity and climbs up some ivy and swaps places with George. Jo later locks up three of the kidnappers, including her own father. Timmy is doped, but wakes up just in time to protect them from the villains. She and Julian, George, Dick and Timmy the dog manage to make a getaway by boat. The police are alerted. Three of the criminals attempt to escape but their helicopter crashes. Jo is admired by everyone, even by George, who first hated her. Joan says that her cousin would like to look after Jo, as Jo's father will be sent to prison.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_on_a_Hike_Together"title="Five on a Hike Together">
Siblings Julian and Dick Kirrin have been given a four-day weekend from their boarding school, coinciding with the mid-term break of their sister Anne and cousin George, so they arrange to go hiking together. Julian plans to spend their first night at a bed and breakfast called Blue Pond Farm. On the way, George's dog, Timmy, injures his leg when being pulled out of a rabbit burrow. Consequently, Julian and George go to the residence of Mr. Gaston, a local expert on animals, while Dick and Anne head for Blue Pond Farm. Mr. Gaston treats Timmy's injured leg and Mrs. Gaston then insists Julian and George stay for a meal, after which they walk to Blue Pond Farm.Dick and Anne have taken a wrong turn and are confused by ringing bells. They head toward a light, where they encounter an elderly deaf woman. Assuming they have reached Blue Pond Farmhouse, Dick and Anne go in but the woman, Mrs. Taggart, tells them to leave because her son would not accept them. She eventually agrees to let Anne sleep in a loft, whilst Dick makes do with sleeping in a barn.During the night, Dick is awakened by a voice calling his name. He is given a cryptic message, "Two Trees. Gloomy Water. Saucy Jane. And Maggie knows too". He is also given a piece of paper. The next morning, Mrs. Taggart’s son is back and chases Dick away. He and Anne get directions to Blue Pond Farmhouse. Reunited with Julian and George for breakfast, Dick and Anne tell the story of the bells and the message. Julian says the bells signaled an escape from a local prison, and the escaped prisoner meant to meet “Dirty Dick” Taggart at the barn.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Have_Plenty_of_Fun"title="Five Have Plenty of Fun">
Siblings Julian, Dick and Anne have come to Kirrin to spend the remainder of a school holiday with their tomboy cousin, George, and her dog, Timmy. Two scientist colleagues of George's father, Uncle Quentin, visit Kirrin Cottage to work on an alternative energy project. One of them is a large friendly American, Elbur Wright. His only daughter, Berta, is later threatened with being kidnapped and ransomed for the project's secrets. Elbur decides to send Berta to Kirrin for her safety. George takes an instant disliking to Berta, especially as the American girl has brought her dog, a poodle called Sally. George's resentment is furthered when Berta's hair is cut short to make her resemble a boy. Berta is also dressed as a boy and referred to as Lesley to throw the kidnappers off her scent.A few days later, Uncle Quentin receives an urgent message to meet with Elbur to discuss calculations for their energy project. He leaves with his wife, Aunt Fanny, and plans to be gone for a week, leaving the children alone with Joan, the cook. That night, George lends Timmy to protect Berta in Joan's bedroom, while Sally is put in George's bedroom. Irked by the poodle, George decides to put her outside in Timmy's kennel but the kidnappers are waiting and seize George, mistaking her for Berta.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_on_a_Secret_Trail"title="Five on a Secret Trail">
George decides to go camping with her dog, Timmy, so he can recover from an ear injury without being mocked for wearing a large cardboard collar that prevents him from scratching his wound. George is pleased to be joined at the campsite by her cousin Anne, but is disappointed upon learning that Anne's brothers, Julian and Dick, are visiting France.George and Anne encounter a boy, the son of an archaeologist, and his small, one-eyed mongrel dog called Jet. The boy is excavating an old Roman camp to search for artefacts and asks the girls not to disturb him. Later that day, the boy's twin brother comes to their campsite, but the girls mistake him for the first boy, unaware they are dealing with twins. That night, Anne gets up for a drink but ends up near a derelict, ruined cottage, where she sees lights and hears whispers and footsteps. She then takes George and Timmy to the cottage but there is no indication of any human activity.The next day, the girls again encounter the twins separately. The girls then go to George's parents' house for more food supplies and are informed that Julian and Dick will be arriving in a day or two. The following night, a storm prompts the girls to shelter in the old cottage, where they are shocked to see people outside.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Go_to_Billycock_Hill"title="Five Go to Billycock Hill">
The Five are camping on Billycock Hill, near the farm of Toby, a boy who loves jokes and pranks. When Toby's cousin Jeff, a Royal Air Force pilot, and Jeff’s friend Ray are reported to have defected and stolen the newest aeroplanes, the Five and Toby are shocked. The media later reports Jeff and Ray crashed their planes and drowned at sea. Toby refuses to believe that Jeff was a spy, as he had always seemed a trustworthy man. The Five attempt to comfort the distraught Toby. Later that day, Toby's younger brother Benny's pet piglet, Curly, appears with a message leading the children to find Jeff and Ray imprisoned in Billycock Caves. The children then rescue the pair.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_on_Finniston_Farm"title="Five on Finniston Farm">
The Famous Five spend their summer holidays at Finniston Farm as paying guests. Upon arrival, they are greeted by the pleasant Mrs Philpot and her identical twins, Henry and Harriet. The twins seem to take an instant dislike to the Five. The Five also meet two fellow paying guests: an American Mr Henning and his son, Junior. Mr Henning plans to buy antique pieces from the farm and sell them in America. Mr and Mrs Philpot agree to sell their farm treasures as they need the money. However the family's hot-tempered Great Granddad feels the antiques should remain in England.Mr Henning and Junior prove themselves a nuisance to the household by rudely ordering around Mrs Philpot. Sympathetic to Mrs Philpot, the Five offer to help with farm chores. When Junior demands breakfast in bed, George teaches him a lesson, making him agree to not slave Mrs Philpot thereafter. This wins the hearts of the Harries and they make friends with the Five.Anne and George visit a nearby antique shop, owned by a Mr Finniston, who tells them about a secret passage from Finniston Castle to an old chapel and cellars where royal treasure might be hidden. The girls excitedly reveal the news to the boys and the twins. Together, they plan to hunt for the cellars on the farm. They come across the castle's kitchen midden and realize they are close to finding the treasure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Go_to_Demon's_Rocks"title="Five Go to Demon's Rocks">
Irascible scientist Quentin Kirrin informs his wife, Fanny, that his colleague, Professor Hayling, will be arriving a week early for a stay at Kirrin Cottage. The professor is accompanied by his son, Tinker, who has a propensity for imitating vehicular noises and has brought his pet monkey, Mischief. Also arriving are Quentin and Fanny's daughter, George, and her cousins, Julian, Dick and Anne, and George's dog, Timmy. The ensuing crowded and noisy household upsets the two scientists, prompting Tinker to propose the children spend their holiday at his abandoned lighthouse at Demon's Rocks, located 10 miles away.After settling in at the lighthouse, the children meet an elderly retired sailor, Jeremiah Boogle, who tells them of his youthful encounters with three villains who lured ships to Demon's Rocks and plundered the wrecks. He says the ringleader, One-Ear Bill, hid a treasure trove which has never been found. Two of One-Ear Bill's descendants, Jacob and Ebenezer, now show tourists through the wreckers' cave. Jacob burgles some items from the lighthouse and also steals the key. When the children visit the cave, Mischief discovers a gold coin. Later, Ebenezer and Jacob lock the children in the lighthouse to prevent them from returning to the cave to hunt for the treasure, but Julian and Dick enter the cave network via a tunnel and discover the treasure. Unable to reach the mainland because of the rising tide, they return to the lighthouse, light its lamp and ring an old warning bell amid a fierce gale to alert the villagers to their fate. Jacob and Ebenezer flee, and the children are rescued the next morning. Julian and Dick declare they will recover the treasure for the police and then the children will return to Kirrin Cottage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Have_a_Mystery_to_Solve"title="Five Have a Mystery to Solve">
The Five are invited to stay at a holiday cottage near the coast. There they meet and make friends with Wilfred, a boy with an almost magical knack of attracting animals. Offshore is Whispering Island where, according to Lucas, a former guardian of the island who now works at a golf-course on the coast, strange goings-on have been reported.The Five and Wilfred hire a boat and row across to the island where, despite the Five's resolve to avoid adventures, they find themselves stranded. Wilfrid has discovered that someone is stealing the island's old treasures.The Five climb into the grounds of a supposedly-empty stone house, and find themselves locked into the cellar along with Wilfred and the stolen treasure. Before the thieves return, they manage to escape via a ventilation hole. Unable to locate the hired boat, which the thieves attempt to take for their own use, the Five decide they will have to risk sleeping on the island. Fortunately, Anne and Timmy the dog manage to shoo the thieves away from the boat, and Anne persuades the others to row back to the mainland.The Five and Wilfred spend a day with the day with the police, recounting what has happened. The novel closes with the Five lying sunbathing on a hillside near the holiday cottage, with all the local animals and birds gathering round to listen to Wilfred playing his flute.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Chance_(Newman_novel)"title="Fat Chance (Newman novel)">
Judi Liebowitz wants to lose weight, be the thinnest girl in eighth grade, and have a boyfriend. She's convinced that if only she had "creamy thighs and amazing cheekbones that look like I'm always sipping through a straw" her best friend Monica wouldn't have stolen the boy she had a crush on. When Judi meets glamorous, thin as a stick (tiny as) Nancy Pratt, she thinks her life will turn around and she'll be gorgeous. Nancy teaches Judi the secret she uses to staying thin, binge-purge thinking this will somehow help. Judi is thrilled she can "have her cake and eat it, too and she won't gain weight." But then, something dreadful happens to Nancy Pratt because of her eating disorder and she ends up in intensive care. Judi really doesn't want the same thing to happen to her but she just can't control her disorder and the worst part is, she can't or doesn't want to tell anyone, not even her own mother. This is no easy thing to cure and it's no joke for Nancy or Judi, it's a matter of Life or Death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_Games_(novel)"title="The Hunger Games (novel)">
In the nation of Panem, established in the remains of North America after an unspecified apocalyptic event, the wealthy Capitol exploits the twelve surrounding districts for their natural resources and labor. District 12 is in the coal-rich region that was once Appalachia, while the Capitol is west of the Rocky Mountains. As punishment for a past failed rebellion against the Capitol, which resulted in the obliteration of District 13, one boy and one girl between the ages of 12 and 18 from each of the 12 remaining districts are selected by an annual lottery to participate in the Hunger Games, a contest in which the "tributes" must fight to the death in an outdoor arena until only one remains.The story is narrated by 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen from District 12, who volunteers for the 74th Hunger Games in place of her 12-year-old sister, Primrose. The male tribute is Peeta Mellark, a former schoolmate of Katniss who once gave her bread from his family's bakery when her family was starving. In the days leading up to the Games in the Capitol, they are advised by their drunken mentor, Haymitch Abernathy, the sole living District 12 victor of the Hunger Games; chaperone Effie Trinket; and various stylists to enhance their public perception to get potential sponsors, who will send potentially life-saving gifts during the Games. Katniss's stylist, Cinna, designs special costumes for Katniss and Peeta that set them apart from the tributes when introduced to the public. Due to Katniss’s fire-themed dress, she becomes known as the “Girl on Fire”. During their evaluation by the Gamemakers, Katniss unexpectedly gets the highest score among the others. Meanwhile, Rue, the petite 12-year-old girl tribute from District 11, follows Katniss and Peeta around during the training sessions. On the day before the games, in the televised interview with Caesar Flickerman, Peeta reveals his long-unrequited love for Katniss; she is initially shocked by this and believes this is a ploy to gain sponsors, but later accepts this as sincere. Haymitch then promotes their image as "star-crossed lovers".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swallowing_Darkness"title="Swallowing Darkness">
"Swallowing Darkness" follows the further adventures of Princess Meredith "Merry Gentry" NicEssus. Merry has finally succeeded in getting pregnant. Having done so before her cousin Cel could impregnate one of his women, she will be able to claim the Unseelie throne from her aunt Andais as long as she successfully carries her twin babies to term and gives birth. This news makes her a target for many of the fae who are unhappy with the idea of Merry gaining the throne, forcing Merry's royal guard to become more cautious about her security. Meanwhile Merry is still reeling from the sexual attack from her uncle Taranis, King of the Seelie court, as well as with the loss of her lover Frost. To make matters worse, Taranis claims that he was the one who impregnated Merry.Audiobook narrated by Claudia Black 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panda_Bear,_Panda_Bear,_What_Do_You_See?"title="Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What Do You See?">
In rhyming text, various endangered animals are asked the question "What do you see?". The list of animals includes a panda bear, a bald eagle, a water buffalo, a spider monkey, a green sea turtle, a macaroni penguin, a sea lion, a red wolf, a whooping crane and a black panther. The last iteration is a dreaming child who sees all the animals "wild and free."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Cocktail"title="Black Cocktail">
The novel follows the activities of Ingram York, a disc-jockey in Los Angeles. The book deals with the Platonic concept that everyone was originally joined to another human being and spends their lives searching for their missing half.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_Black_Spruce"title="Through Black Spruce">
"Through Black Spruce" is set in Moosonee, Ontario and is narrated by Will Bird and his niece Annie Bird with the narration switching between chapters.Will, a former bush pilot, is in a coma. Over the course of the novel Will recounts the events of the previous year which led to him being in a coma to his nieces, Annie and Suzanne. Meanwhile, in the present day, Annie recounts the previous year of her life and her sojourns to Toronto, Montreal, New York City and Moose Factory Ontario to see Will in an attempt to help to revive him from his coma.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_House_is_Built"title="A House is Built">
The novel centres on James Hyde and his family. A former Royal Navy quartermaster, in 1837 Hyde sets up a business in early Sydney. He brings his family to Australia and would have his sons and grandsons continue his business. They are either disinclined to take up the business or more interested in the Australian gold-fields. His daughter Fanny has all the qualities needed to continue the family business. Constricted by gender stereotypes, Hyde, his business, and his family fall into tragedy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grey_Lady_and_the_Strawberry_Snatcher"title="The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher">
A grey lady buys strawberries from the market and heads home to her family with them. A long fingered blue creature follows her and tries to steal the strawberries, but she escapes through various means—catching a bus, swinging from a vine, and simply by blending into the grey swamp but for her face and hands. When he gets frustrated, he finds blackberries and eats them instead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amityville_Horror_Part_II"title="The Amityville Horror Part II">
The Lutz family barely escapes 112 Ocean Ave. While fleeing Amityville, they are attacked, but get away. They arrive at Kathy's mother's house, where they think they are safe. Soon after, George is awakened by a supernatural force. George and Kathy realize that they are being followed. Over the next few days, Kathy and her mother spot Missy playing with Jodie. Events plague the family. They get The Amityville Horror published and have to deal not only with the supernatural, but with skeptics and a neverending line of press.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_the_Black_Bass"title="Book of the Black Bass">
Henshall's "Book of Black Bass" is really three books in one. There are nearly 180 pages devoted to the biology of the Black Basses known at the time. A slightly lesser number of pages in "Part Second" are focused on the fishing tackle necessary for successful Black Bass fishing. Henshall himself was a leading reel collector when his book was published and his chapters on fishing reels and their development are often quoted and valued by tackle collectors today. The "Part Third" as Henshall named it is focused on the various fishing techniques to be used in Black Bass fishing to include fly fishing.Henshall published a companion book entitled "More About the Black Bass" is 1889 and in 1904 published "Book of the Black Bass" in a revised 2nd edition that included much of the writings in "More About the Black Bass."In the 1881 Preface, Henshall introduces the book thus:This book owes its origin to a long-cherished desire on the part of the author, to give to the Black Bass its proper place among game fishes, and to create among anglers, and the public generally, an interest in a fish that has never been so fully appreciated as its merits deserve, because of the want of suitable tackle for its capture, on the one hand, and a lack of information regarding its habits and economic value on the other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kings_of_Clonmel"title="The Kings of Clonmel">
While at the annual Rangers' Gathering, Will is informed by Ranger Commandant Crowley that Ranger Halt will not be able to attend the Gathering as he is investigating happenings in Hibernia, a country to the west of Araluen. The Outsiders, a mysterious religious cult, is gaining followers and stealing gold and jewels. Halt is watching the group, which is acting in Selsey, a small Araluen village. The cult demands gold to build an altar to their god to protect the village and tries to set the village's boats on fire to persuade them into donating more gold. Halt stops their plan and also discovers that the golden altar is a fake. Rather than being solid gold, it is wooden and gold-plated; the cult has been keeping the gold for themselves.When Halt captures the Outsiders' Selsey leader, he becomes puzzled; the leader recognises him though Halt is sure they have never met. Back at the Ranger's Gathering, Crowley asks Will to take care of three apprentices for a while and tells Will that he is being moved to Redmont Fief to share half the Ranger duties there with Halt. Redmont Fief is where Will grew up, and where his love interest, the diplomat Alyss, and Halt's wife Pauline also live. Will rides to the fief, where he is greeted by a feast made by his childhood friend and cook, Jenny. Halt arrives back in Redmont and tells of what he has seen. Halt reveals the secret of his past; he is the identical twin brother of the King of Clonmel, Ferris. Halt was born first, meaning he was the heir to the throne. He fled Clonmel and joined the Ranger Corps after Ferris repeatedly tried to kill him to obtain the crown for himself. Halt believes the Outsiders leader recognised him as he thought he was Ferris. Crowley assigns Will, Halt, and the knight Horace to investigate the matter in Clonmel. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petals_of_Blood"title="Petals of Blood">
The book begins by describing the four main characters – Munira, Karega, Wanja, and Abdulla – just after the revelation that three prominent Kenyans, two businessmen and one educator, have been killed in a fire. The next chapter moves back in the novel's timeline, focusing on Munira's move to Ilmorog, to begin work as a teacher. He is initially met with suspicion and poor classroom attendance, as the villagers think he will give up on the village soon, in much the same way previous teachers have done. However, Munira stays and, with the friendship of Abdulla, another immigrant to Ilmorog who owns a small shop and bar, carves out life as a teacher.Soon Wanja arrives, the granddaughter of the town's oldest and most revered lady. She is attractive, experienced barmaid whom Munira begins to fall in love with, despite the fact he is already married. She too is escaping the city and begins to work for Abdullah, quickly reshaping his shop, and expanding its bar. Karega arrives in Ilmorog to seek Munira to question him about their old school Syriana. After a brief relationship with Munira, Wanja once again grows disillusioned and leaves Ilmorog. The year of her departure is not good for the village as the weather is harsh and no rain comes, making for a poor harvest. In an attempt to enact changes, the villagers are inspired by Karega to journey to Nairobi in order to talk to their Member of Parliament.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Frog_Princess_(novel)"title="The Frog Princess (novel)">
Emeralda, a.k.a. Emma is the princess and heir of Greater Greensward. One of her most distinct traits is her unique laugh, which sounds like a donkey's bray. The only person that appreciates her is her aunt Grassina, the current Green Witch.When her mother, Queen Chartreuse, says she has to marry the stuck-up Prince Jorge from East Aradia, her worst enemy, she runs off to the swamp where she meets Prince Eadric of Upper Montevista. The only problem is that he has been turned into a frog by the witch Mudine. Emma reluctantly kisses him, trying to reverse the spell; instead, she turns into a frog herself.Annoyed and confused by this outcome, Emma and Eadric set off to find the witch that turned him into a frog and ask her to change them back. A dog persistently chases them throughout the journey.Upon reaching the site where Eadric insulted (and was cursed by) the witch that transformed him, they find an ugly woman searching there. The two assume she's the witch Mudine, but she turns out to be Vannabe, a vain witch wannabe who has taken Mudine's house, pets, and possessions and plans to use the frogs for a potion she thinks will make her eternally beautiful. With the aid of Mudine's former pets, the two frogs escape and free all the prisoners.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_Amityville"title="Murder in Amityville">
The plot tries to explain why Ronald Defeo Jr. killed his family at 112 Ocean Ave. It revolves around Ronald Jr. as he experiences strange events in the house up until he kills his entire family on November 13, 1974. It goes on to explain that he was possessed and that he did not want to kill his family. It introduces controversial events. It is also based on Defeo's explanation of why he says he killed his family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)"title="Outliers (book)">
In his introduction, Gladwell discusses the Roseto effect which enabled a small, close-knit town in Pennsylvania to have almost no history of heart disease, substance abuse, or societal ills, seemingly due to the supportive, comforting social environment of its Italian-descended population. The remainder of "Outliers" has two parts: "Part One: Opportunity" contains five chapters, and "Part Two: Legacy" has four. The book also contains an Introduction and Epilogue. Focusing on outliers, defined by Gladwell as people who do not fit into our normal understanding of achievement, "Outliers" deals with exceptional people, especially those who are smart, rich, and successful, and those who operate at the extreme outer edge of what is statistically plausible. The book offers examples that include the musical ensemble the Beatles, Microsoft's co-founder Bill Gates, and the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. In the introduction, Gladwell lays out the purpose of "Outliers": "It's not enough to ask what successful people are like. [...] It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't." Throughout the publication, he discusses how family, culture, and friendship each play a role in an individual's success, and he constantly asks whether successful people deserve the praise that we give them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_of_the_Lady"title="The Sword of the Lady">
Rudi Mackenzie and Edain Aylward Mackenzie head out through post-Change Illinois on a mission given to them by the Bossman of Iowa to recover Ingolf Vogeler's wagons that he abandoned there. They break up an ambush by Knifers and save three Southside Freedom Fighters (Southsiders), descendants of survivors from Chicago, including their leader Jake. Rudi adopts the tribe and they help him bring Ingolf's wagons back to Iowa. Along the way, Rudi and Edain teach them how to make bows and arrows, then train them as military archers. Southsiders listen to them sing and add the songs to their story-poor culture. Soon the Southsiders consider themselves part of Clan Mackenzie.Meanwhile, Mary and Ritva Havel are trying to find a way to break Ingolf out of the Bossman's prison. Then Captain Denson of the Iowa State Police has a conversation with Ingolf and offers to release him from prison if he lures the CUT troops from Des Moines. When Ingolf agrees, Denson takes him out while his men kill the other prisoners who witnessed the conversation.When Rudi reaches the Mississippi River, Denson meets them on the east side of the river. He brings Ingolf with him. They cross the river and meet the Bossman and the rest of Rudi's party in Dubuque.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amok_(novella)"title="Amok (novella)">
The nameless first-person narrator travels from India to Europe on the ocean liner "Oceania" in 1912. One night, during a walk on deck, he meets a man who, disturbed and scared, avoids any social contact on the ship. The following night the narrator meets this man again. Although intimidated at first, the man soon begins to trust the narrator and tells him his story.A physician from Leipzig, he moved to Indonesia seven years earlier to practise medicine in a small and remote village. After some time, the solitude depresses him more and more and he felt “like a spider in its web, motionless for months already.” One day, a white woman, “the first white woman in years,” appears unexpectedly and fascinates him with her haughty and distant nature—something he never experienced with the reverent and submissive indigenous women. In the course of their conversation it becomes clear that the woman, an Englishwoman and wife of a Dutch merchant, has come to see him for a discreet abortion, for which she is willing to pay a large amount of money. However the doctor, struck by a sudden passion, does not want the money. Instead he tells her to ask him for the abortion and suggests that she should visit him again outside his office hours. She refuses and storms out. The obsession seizes the doctor more and more: like a homicidal maniac, he follows the woman to her house, scaring her and making her even more distant. As she does not want her pregnancy to become public, she eventually confides in an indigenous healer. The procedure fails and the woman dies in agony.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_an_Outsider"title="Death of an Outsider">
While Hamish Macbeth is on duty temporarily in Cnothan, William Mainwaring, the most disliked man in town is murdered. No one wants to solve the crime, including Macbeth's superiors who want to keep the strange manner of Mainwaring's death hushed up.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Monk_Is_Miserable"title="Mr. Monk Is Miserable">
Natalie wants a break so she blackmails Monk in going to Paris, France. While in Paris, Monk surprises Natalie by telling her he wants to check out the sewers because the underground maze of tunnels and pipes is famous for keeping Paris sanitary. While traveling the mazes of the sewers, the two stumble upon the catacombs, which are filled with aging skulls and bones. When Monk spots a skull that is not so old that shows evidence of murder, the pair's vacation plans are once again put aside so Monk can conduct a murder investigation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_Night_in_Chile"title="By Night in Chile">
The story is narrated entirely in the first person by the sick and aging Father Urrutia. Taking place over the course of a single evening, the book is the macabre, feverish monologue of a flawed man and a failed priest. Except for the final sentence, the book is written without paragraphs or line breaks. Persistently hallucinatory and defensive, the story ranges from Opus Dei to falconry to private lessons on Marxism for Pinochet and his generals directed at the unspecified reproaches of "the wizened youth."The story begins with the lines "I am dying now, but I still have many things to say", and proceeds to describe, after a brief mention of joining the priesthood, how Father Urrutia entered the Chilean literary world under the wing of a famous, albeit fictitious, tacitly homosexual literary critic by the name of Farewell. At Farewell's estate he encounters the critic's close friend Pablo Neruda and later begins to publish literary criticism and poetry.Not surprisingly, Urrutia's criticism (written under a pen-name) is met with more applause than his poetry and there is little if any mention of Urrutia attending to matters of the church until two individuals from a shipping company (likely undercover government operatives) send him on a trip through Europe, where he meets priest after priest engaged in falconry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kairo-kō"title="Kairo-kō">
"Kairo-kō" consists of a short introduction and five sections. The first section, "The Dream" recounts a conversation between Guinevere and Lancelot in which she describes her dream of a snake that coils around the pair and binds them together; it ends with Lancelot heading to a tournament. The second section, "The Mirror", relates a scene based on Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott": the Lady can view the world only through a mirror's reflection or else she will die, but when she sees Lancelot she turns to look upon him. Her action kills her, but not before she places a death curse on Lancelot. The section "The Sleeve" relates the famous episode in which Elaine of Astolat convinces Lancelot to wear her sleeve on his shield as a token in a joust. Guinevere finds out about Lancelot's relationship with Elaine in the next section, "The Transgression"; Mordred condemns her for her infidelity against King Arthur with Lancelot. The final section, "The Boat", concerns the death of Elaine; grieving over the loss of Lancelot, she dies and is placed in a boat along with a letter proclaiming her love, and is sent downriver to Camelot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rocksburg_Railroad_Murders"title="The Rocksburg Railroad Murders">
The novel opens with John Andrasko being found dead on a station platform late at night in Rocksburg. Andrasko was on his way to work at a local steel plant when someone beat him to death with a Coke bottle, so bad that he could only be identified by his wallet. Mario Balzic, the local Chief of Police, had known Andrasko all his life. Balzic starts an investigation into his death and is soon convinced he knows who the murderer is, but persuading the local district attorney and state troopers in the absence of any concrete evidence and the context of local rivalries is another matter. Which is a cause of major anxiety as Balzic is certain that if he's not apprehended he'll kill again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pale_Criminal"title="The Pale Criminal">
Set in 1938, two years after the events of March Violets, Bernhard (Bernie) Gunther has taken Bruno Stahlecker, another ex-police officer, as his partner. The two are working on a case where a Frau Lange, owner of a large publishing house, is being blackmailed for the homosexual love letters her son Reinhardt sent to his psychotherapist Dr. Kindermann. Gunther and Stahlecker discover the blackmailer to be Klaus Hering, a disgruntled employee of Kindermann. Bruno is killed during a stakeout at Hering's apartment, and shortly thereafter Hering is found hanging in the apartment. Around that time, Gunther is summoned to the Gestapo offices by Arthur Nebe and there Reinhard Heydrich forces Gunther to look for a serial sex murderer, who is killing blond and blue-eyed teenage girls in Berlin and making fools of the police. Gunther has no choice but to accept the temporary post of Kriminalkommissar in Heydrich's state Security Service, with a team of policemen working underneath him.Gunther and his team then follow a number of dead end leads: A Jewish man held on suspicion, Joseph Kahn, is determined to be too improbable a suspect by an expert on psychotherapy, but dies in custody. Officially he committed suicide. However, Arthur Nebe suggests that he had been killed ; A violent sexual deviant, Gottfried Bautz, is captured but when an anonymous caller reveals the location of a fifth victim while he is in jail, he must also be let go.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Page"title="The Blank Page">
Mario Balzic is the protagonist, an atypical detective for the genre, a Serbo-Italian American cop, middle-aged, unpretentious, a family man who asks questions and uses more sense than force.As the novel opens, it is a record-hot Memorial Day when Miss Cynthia Summer calls Police Chief Mario Balzic to say that she hadn't seen one of her student roomers. Balzic discovers Janet Pisula's body on the floor of her room, a blank sheet of typing paper on her stomach...It is the third book in the 17-volume Rocksburg series.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_Star"title="Distant Star">
The book is narrated from a distance by Arturo B. (probably Arturo Belano, Bolaño's frequent stand-in) and tells the story of Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an aviator who exploits the 1973 Chilean coup d'état to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry: a multi-media enterprise involving sky-writing, torture, photography, murder, and verse. The narrator first encounters Ruiz-Tagle in a college poetry workshop led by Juan Stein, where Ruiz-Tagle presents himself as a well-dressed, financially secure, self-taught writer with an unnaturally cool, distant, and calculated demeanor — in sharp contrast to the economically poor, messy, leftist, activist tendencies of the narrator (and most other poetry fans then enrolled at the University of Concepcion). Ruiz-Tagle also shows a surprising detachment from his own work, giving measured, intelligent criticism and receiving it without flinching. Ruiz-Tagle also shows a disquieting lack of interest in having more than superficial social relationships with most of his fellow aspiring poets. Ruiz-Tagle’s most stable connection is with the beautiful Garmendia twins, Veronica and Angelica. While most of the young men in the twins’ social circle pine after them to one degree or another, the sisters only have eyes for Ruiz-Tagle. As the novel progresses it becomes clear that Ruiz-Tagle is far more and far less than a mere poet, through progressively darker and ironic twists and turns.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Heart_So_White"title="A Heart So White">
The narrator, Juan, seeks to use his newly-wed wife, Luisa, to uncover the murky past of his father's previous marriages which include (aside from Juan's mother) two other women. The first of these women is unnamed and kept secret from Juan, while the second was the older sister of Juan's mother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marvellous_Land_of_Snergs"title="The Marvellous Land of Snergs">
"The Marvellous Land of Snergs" is set on a fictional island somewhere on Earth, but difficult to reach. On the island is a colony of children (rescued from neglect by the redoubtable Miss Watkyns), the crew of the "Flying Dutchman", and the Snergs, a race of short, thick-set, helpful people. Unfortunately Golithos, a reformed (but relapsing) ogre, and Mother Meldrum, a wicked witch, also live there. Also in the forest across the river there are tigers, brown bears, European dragons, ghouls, and unicorns. When Sylvia and Joe run away for a big adventure their lives are in deadly peril when they fall into the clutches of Golithos and Mother Meldrum. Gorbo the Snerg and Baldry the court jester come to the rescue.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_Puppeteer"title="The Master Puppeteer">
Thirteen-year-old Jiro finds himself caught up in the political events of late eighteenth-century Osaka, Japan when he accompanies his father, Hanji, to deliver a puppet to the Hanaza theater. Yoshida, the owner and master puppeteer, offers to take the boy on as an apprentice. To Jiro’s chagrin, his mother, Isako, does not take Yoshida’s offer seriously. Determined not to be a burden on his family during the current famine, Jiro runs away to the theater, where he becomes an apprentice. He begins his career by opening curtains and memorizing scripts and eventually graduates to a role as a “foot operator.” Along the way, he is helped by an older boy, Yoshida’s son, Kinshi, who does not seem able to please his father.Worried about his father, who is said to be ill, Jiro briefly returns home to discover that Isako has taken his father to recuperate at a relative’s farm in Kyoto. When Jiro again returns home on New Year’s Day, he discovers that his mother is near starvation, and when he returns to the Hanaza he realizes he forgot to pray. One evening, Saburo, the mysterious bandit who steals from the rich to help the poor, leaves a notice on the door of the theater demanding a special performance of the current play, “The Thief of the Tokaido.”
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello,_Harvest_Moon"title="Hello, Harvest Moon">
The Moon rises and shines through a girl's bedroom window. It then shines on a silent street, corn and wheat fields, and autumn trees. A young girl and her cat play a game by its light, a pilot flies a plane using its light. The Moon sets in the daylight as the young girl and her cat say goodnight.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackthorn_Winter_(Reiss_novel)"title="Blackthorn Winter (Reiss novel)">
Juliana, a fifteen-year-old girl, moves with her mother to the artists' colony of Blackthorn, England from the United States while her parents are undergoing a separation. She begins to investigate a murder of one of the artists living at the colony.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ying_Xiong_Wu_Lei"title="Ying Xiong Wu Lei">
Master Xiao (), a reclusive swordsmith, started forging a precious sword known as the Tear-Stained Sword (). Upon its completion, the swordsmith foresaw that his son would die under the sword and that the sword is destined to bring disaster to the "jianghu" (martial artists' community). In order to prevent these events from happening, Master Xiao passed the sword to his low-profile youngest apprentice for safekeeping. Several years later, the sword came into the possession of Gao Jianfei (), the apprentice of Master Xiao's youngest apprentice. Gao Jianfei receives instructions from his master to bring the sword into the "jianghu".At the time, there are two powerful organisations in the "jianghu": the Great Security Service of Chang'an () and the Majestic Lion Clan of Luoyang (). Sima Chaoqun (), the security service's chief, intends to recruit Yang Jian (), a traitor of the Majestic Lion Clan, to be a member of the security service. In order to protect their public image, the Majestic Lion Clan secretly hired an assassin to kill Yang Jian. Zhuo Donglai (), the second-in-command of the security service, has made extensive preparations to protect Yang Jian. When he meets Gao Jianfei, he initially suspects that Gao is the assassin so he keeps a close watch on him. However, Yang Jian ends up being killed by Xiao Leixue (), a mysterious martial artist carrying a wooden box, which is actually a secret weapon known as The Box ().
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenesis_(novel)"title="Regenesis (novel)">
Ariane Emory is the eighteen-year-old clone of an extraordinary woman who was both a preeminent research scientist and the leader of the Expansionist Party, which has controlled Union since its inception. Her predecessor had some very powerful friends and enemies. However, as her genemother had died under suspicious circumstances before she was even born, Emory is unsure who they are.She is not without resources though. A breakthrough experiment in "psychogenesis" has recreated in her the genius of her parent. Everyone knows that she will one day follow in her mother's footsteps and take charge of Reseune, a sovereign Administrative Territory and the premier azi research facility in Union, one of the three spacefaring factions of humanity.In the meantime, she takes measures to protect herself, assembling a trusted staff with the assistance of her azi bodyguards and companions, Florian and Catlin. When she discovers that her new azi security chief has been tampered with, her list of possible enemies grows to include key men inside Reseune itself: Yanni Schwartz, the Director, and Adam Hicks, the head of security. Adding to the discord is the return of a bitter Jordan Warrick from a twenty-year exile at an isolated research facility. He had been pressured into confessing to killing the original Emory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park's_Quest"title="Park's Quest">
Park's full name is Parkington "Park" Waddell Broughton V. He knows he has ancestors who have distinguished themselves and the name he shares with four generations of them. But his father, a U.S. Marine Corps pilot, died in the Vietnam War when Park was three, and he has never met his father's family. Though he is nearly twelve, his mother still avoids answering any questions about his father. Finally, to satisfy his curiosity, Park goes and gets on a bus for the short ride from his home to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC. There he finds his father's name. There he also resolves to get some of his questions solved. After Randy, Park's mom, writes to Park's dad's side of the family, Randy sends him on a bus for a two-week vacation in south-western Virginia where his grandfather and Uncle Frank maintain the farm on which his father grew up. His grandfather has had 2 strokes and is now inarticulate, able to communicate in only the most rudimentary ways. His uncle has a Vietnamese wife, and shares his home with a Vietnamese girl about Park's age whose origin and status is not clear to Park until he discovers, after a number of uncomfortable encounters, that she is his half-sister, and that because of his father's infidelity, his mother divorced him before his second, and fatal, term in Vietnam. Park, whose fantasies about his father's past and his own future have been highly romanticized, does some important growing up in the short visit that puts him in touch with a more complex idea of family, grief, forgiveness, and acceptance than he has ever before had to develop.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip-Flop_Girl"title="Flip-Flop Girl">
The book focuses on a nine-year-old girl named Lavina (but is called Vinnie) whose life has been in turmoil following her father's death. Vinnie and her five-year-old brother Mason, who has turned mute following their father's funeral, are sent to live with their grandmother in a rural Virginia community. Vinnie has difficulty adjusting to her new school, where the only signs of friendship are extended to her by a poor Latina named Lupe, who only ever wears flip-flops, and a supportive male teacher. Vinnie reacts poorly to this outreach, vandalizing the teacher's automobile and pinning the blame on Lupe, but she later learns to deal with her anger and makes amends for her inappropriate behavior.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Greatest_Warriors"title="The Five Greatest Warriors">
The story starts with Jack's fall from the Vertex under Table Mountain with the suicidal Marine Switchblade, and his escape with the aid of Switchblade's Maghook, a staple of many of Reilly's works. He quickly reunites with the rest of his team at Little McDonald Island.The dates for the placement of the six pillars sees a three-month window between the second and third placements. Jack and Zoe use the interim period to help Pooh Bear in the rescue of Stretch from the Israeli Mossad. In a Roman ruin located under Israel's most secret facility, they find Stretch subjected to a hellish treatment: kept alive in a tank of formaldehyde by General Muniz, a Mossad spymaster. Stretch was to be the latest addition in Muniz's private collection of "living trophies", a practice pioneered by a former KGB operative. Stretch is subsequently liberated and the party makes their escape.Jack learns of The Five Greatest Warriors from Diane Cassidy, five key members of history who would influence the sacred stones and their whereabouts. They set about locating the third pillar and its matching Vertex. Following a connection to Genghis Khan, the party sets out for Mongolia. They locate the Khan's tomb under a false mound that covered a meteor crater. In the bowels of the fortress, they find a petrified dinosaur egg painted with images of the six temples that house the Verticies. The Japanese Blood Brotherhood attempt to stop Jack and Wolf from finding the next temple by destroying the egg, and Wizard is killed by Wolf in their escape. Realising that Genghis's shield also carries the images carved on the egg, Jack and his team race to the northern tip of Hokkaido.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kill_Artist"title="The Kill Artist">
Israel’s Prime Minister reinstates Ari Shamron as Mossad director. Shortly thereafter, Israel’s ambassador is murdered in Paris. The crime has all of the markings of Tariq al-Hourani, a terrorist mastermind.Gabriel spearheaded a team that located and killed the operatives in the “Munich Massacre.” Seventeen years later, Tariq took vengeance upon Gabriel—family member for family member—by planting a bomb under the Allons’ car in Vienna. Gabriel witnessed his family’s horrifying destruction. His son Dani died instantly, while his wife Leah was left with a shattered mind and body.Nine years later, Gabriel has cut ties with the Office, secreted himself in Southern England, and poured himself into his other profession as an art restorer. Ari Shamron shows up on his doorstep. Shamron explains that he wants to assassinate Tariq but lacks support from the departmental directors at the Office. As a result, he urges Gabriel to spearhead a secret assassination operation. He accepts Shamron’s plan and begins surveillance of Yusef, a member of Tariq’s closely knit organization.Gabriel decides that he needs to set Yusef up with a female operative. He handpicks Jacqueline Delacroix (née Sarah Halévy), a French supermodel. Jacqueline has previously assisted three Office operations; in one of these, she worked closely with Gabriel and the two had an affair. Gabriel is careful to keep his interactions with Jacqueline to a mere professional familiarity. Jacqueline discovers that Gabriel still grieves over their affair, for its unmasking made Leah decide to accompany Gabriel on the fateful operation to Vienna.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Moto_Is_So_Sorry"title="Mr. Moto Is So Sorry">
Calvin Gates, an American, is traveling through Japan to mainland Asia. He boards a train which will eventually take him to Mongolia to join a scientific expedition. On the train is Sylvia Dillaway, a sketch artist, also on her way to the Gilbreth Expedition. Accompanying her is Boris, her Russian guide. When Mr. Moto appears, Boris becomes agitated and gives Dillaway a cigarette case made of silver inlaid with gunmetal, bearing a scenic design. Later at a stopover Boris is killed in Gates’ hotel room. Mr. Moto comes in to clean things up and tells Gates that he knows of his past and why he is traveling to Mongolia. Gates is on the run from the police because his uncle believes that he stole money from his business. Moto asks about the cigarette case and realizes that Dillaway must have it. Moto wants the cigarette case to get to where it is headed, so he leaves the case with Dillaway.Knowing that the cigarette case is dangerous, Gates plots with Dillaway to make it seem like the case was stolen from her hotel room. Moto, however, suspects Gates and has him searched at a train stop. Gates and Dillaway continue on their journey with the cigarette case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mémoires_de_deux_jeunes_mariées"title="Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées">
The story concerns two young French women, Louise de Chaulieu (1805–1835) and Renée de Maucombe (born 1807), who become close friends during their novitiate at the Carmelite convent of Blois. When they leave the convent, however, their lives follow two very different paths. Louise chooses a life of romance, whereas Renée takes a much more pragmatic approach; but their friendship is preserved through their correspondence, which continues for a dozen years from 1823 through 1835.Louise is expected to sacrifice herself for her two brothers and take the veil, but the young girl refuses to submit to such a fate. Her dying grandmother intercedes on her behalf and bequeaths her her fortune, thereby rescuing her from the enclosed life of a Carmelite nun and leaving her financially independent. Free to assist her brothers financially without having to sacrifice her own ambitions, Louise settles in Paris and throws herself into a life of Italian operas, masqued balls and romantic intrigues. She falls in love with an unbecoming but noble Spaniard, Felipe Hénarez, Baron de Macumer. Banished from Spain, he lives incognito in Paris where he is forced to support himself by teaching Spanish. When he regains his fortune and noble standing, he woos Louise with a romantic fervour that finally wins her over. The pair are married in March 1825. They live a life of carefree happiness, but Louise's jealousy embitters him and leads to his physical break-down. He dies in 1829, leaving a grieving widow of twenty-four.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-Minute_Drill"title="Two-Minute Drill">
Scott Parry is not only the new kid, but he's also the clumsiest and smartest kid in school. Chris Conlan is the school's golden boy and the quarterback of the football team. Scott joins the football team, which causes him to cross paths with Chris. Initially the two seem like the unlikeliest pairing in the world, but a shared secret pulls them together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preacher's_Boy"title="Preacher's Boy">
Set in Vermont in 1899, the story focuses on Robbie Hewitt, the rambunctious 10-year-old child of a small town preacher and brother of simple-minded Elliot. Elliot has autism and many times Robbie wishes he was dead. Robbie is always being silly and tries at the beginning of the book to kill one of the Weston Brothers. The Weston brothers are the sons of the richest men in town. As the boy’s mischievous behavior becomes more pronounced, he becomes engaged in activity that has lethal consequences for a member of his community. Complicating matters, is the boy’s desire to challenge his father by breaking away from organized religion. Certain that his family's beliefs are too restrictive, Robbie sets out to live life to the fullest, deciding to become "a heathen, a Unitarian, or a Democrat, whichever was most fun" (p. 19).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amulet_(novel)"title="Amulet (novel)">
"Amulet" embodies in one woman's voice the melancholy and violent history of Latin America. It begins: "This is going to be a horror story. A story of murder, detection and horror. But it won't appear to be, for the simple reason that I am the teller. Told by me, it won't seem like that. Although, in fact, it's the story of a terrible crime."The speaker is named Auxilio Lacouture, dubbed "the mother of Mexican poetry", though her own take is, "I could say I am the mother of all Mexican poets, but I better not". Tall, thin, blonde, and old enough to actually be their mother, she's a Uruguayan exile living illegally in Mexico City since the 1960s, lending a maternal hand to those in need (even her forename means "Help" in Spanish), doing odd jobs for old writers and at the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature.She becomes famous as the sole person who symbolically resists the army's 1968 invasion of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) two weeks before the now infamous Tlatelolco massacre (2 October) – she hides in a fourth-floor lavatory cubicle "for thirteen days" from 18 to 30 September.As she tries to outlast the occupiers and grows ever hungrier, Auxilio recalls her life, her lost teeth, her beloved friends and poets, and she soon moves on to strange landscapes: ice-bound mountains, seedy bars in "the dark night of the soul of Mexico City", a terrifying chasm, and a bathroom where moonlight shines, moving slowly from tile to tile.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Holiday_Concert"title="The Last Holiday Concert">
Hart Evans was the most popular kid at Collins Elementary School and is on his way to owning that title again at Palmer Intermediate. So when he unintentionally shoots a rubber band at his chorus teacher one afternoon, he expects it to be laughed off. After all, it was an accident.Mr. Meinert, the chorus teacher, is wound so tight that he blows up at Hart and the entire class. In a huff, he announces that he is stepping down, and they are now responsible for planning their entire holiday concert themselves.The whole class is surprised and elects Hart as the new Chorus director. He declares Music Class as a free period until Mr. Meinert tells him that they've got a full 30 minutes for their show. Hart then realizes that they need to get down to work.After assembling committees and coming up with lists of songs, Hart finally thinks he has everything running on track. But then his classmates get mad. Why is Hart, their friend, acting so strict and like a teacher? It takes a heart-to-heart with Mr. Meinert to learn what it takes to be a friendly and fair, yet strict, chorus director.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Side_of_Truth"title="The Other Side of Truth">
Although this novel is written in the third person, it presents the perspective of a 12-year-old girl, Sade Solaja. Her father, Folarin Solaja, is a journalist, one of the most critical of the corrupt regime. The book opens with Sade's memory of hearing the two shots which ended her mother's life, a memory which recurs throughout the novel in her thoughts and dreams. Her memories of Nigeria are often set in contrast to her experiences of an alien England, while her mother's remembered words of wisdom give her comfort and strength. The concentration on Sade's point of view makes many events seem obscure and confusing, just as she experiences them.After the shooting, Sade's Uncle Tunde urges her father to send her and her 10-year-old brother Femi to safety in England. They are forced to pack and leave suddenly and secretly. They fly to London posing as the children of a stranger, Mrs Bankole, so that they can travel on her passport. When their Uncle Dele fails to collect them at the airport, Mrs Bankole abandons them at a coffee shop near Victoria Station. Moneyless and friendless, they wander the streets looking for the art college where their uncle works. They find refuge in a video store, but the owner calls the police, believing them to be vandals. Thus they come to the attention of the authorities. Worried about telling the truth in case it endangers their father, Sade takes refuge in silence and later in half-truths. The children are fostered first by Mrs Graham and her rude and mean son Kevin and later by the Kings, a Jamaican couple whose children have grown up and left. They are sent to different schools. Sade is sent to Avon High School where she meets a girl from Somalia, called Mariam, whose story is similar to Sade's. Marcia and Donna the bullies from school treat Sade very badly, putting pressure on her to steal a turquoise lighter from Mariam's uncle's store. Femi goes to Greenslades Primary School. They become reticent with each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1,000_Recordings_to_Hear_Before_You_Die"title="1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die">
It consists of a list of recordings, mostly albums (with some singles), arranged alphabetically by artist or composer. Each entry in the list is accompanied by a short essay followed by genre classifications, Moon's choices for "key tracks" from albums, the next recommended recording from the same artist or composer, and pointers to recordings on the list by other artists that are similar or otherwise related.Moon also includes a postscript of "108 more recordings to know about".Moon was a music critic at "The Philadelphia Inquirer" for 20 years, and has contributed to "Rolling Stone", "Blender", and other publications.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semper_Mars"title="Semper Mars">
Set in 2040, the United States finds itself among a hostile world with only Britain, Russia, and Japan as reluctant allies. The dominant force in the world today is the United Nations, which has evolved into a world government and is challenging the US as the world’s sole superpower, motivated for the “greater good.” It has invaded Brazil because of Brazil’s lack of care for the rainforest and it wants the US to give up part of the southwest America for a Hispanic nation known as Aztlán. The UN capital is located at Geneva, Switzerland.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_in_the_Air_(novel)"title="Up in the Air (novel)">
Ryan Bingham is a 35-year-old career transition counselor for a Denver-based management consulting company, Integrated Strategic Management (ISM). He is divorced and his disturbed younger sister is about to embark on yet another disastrous relationship. He flies around the country firing and then counseling recently laid-off people for reentering the job market.Bingham inhabits a world of Palm Pilots, rental cars, salted almonds, Kevlar luggage and nameless suite hotels where e-mail and voicemail are the communication norm. He takes a lot of pills and spends time among women in Las Vegas.Bingham is trying to get to ten million frequent flyer miles, a number only reached by nine other people in the same mileage club (from the fictional airline Great West). Before his boss returns from vacation, Bingham files his letter of resignation and cancels his company credit card. Bingham is positioning himself to be hired by MythTech, a shadowy company based in Omaha, Nebraska.Bingham fears that someone may be furtively cashing in his precious miles, which would be tantamount to stealing his soul.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hard_Life"title="The Hard Life">
The story opens with the narrator, Finbarr, recalling the death of his mother in 1890, when he was around five years old. He and his brother Manus (often referred to simply as "the brother") are raised in the home of their half-uncle, Mr Collopy. Collopy lives with his partner Mrs Crotty – it is unclear if they are married and the narrator can only speculate as to why she retained the name of her first husband – and Annie, Collopy's daughter from an earlier marriage. Finbarr describes Collopy's home as a squalid environment where the boys are served greasy meatballs for dinner, a household with a "dead atmosphere" offering little opportunity for amusement. Collopy and the parish priest, a German Jesuit domiciled in Dublin and bearing the comical name of Father Fahrt, frequently indulge in long bouts of drinking, and none of the adults exhibits much concern for the child's welfare.Finbarr attends Synge Street Christian Brothers School, the former school of O'Brien/O'Nolan himself, while Manus attends Westland Row Christian Brothers School. Both schools are run by the Catholic Christian Brothers, both boys detest their schools with equal passion, and O'Brien mocks both with equal contempt. Finbarr's first impression of his school is that it resembles a prison: he describes the horrors of corporal punishment by "the leather" in detail, and refers to "struggling through the wretched homework, cursing Wordsworth and Euclid and Christian Doctrine and similar scourges of youth".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bend_in_the_Road"title="A Bend in the Road">
Miles Ryan's life seemed to end the day his wife Missy was killed in a hit-and-run accident two years ago. As deputy sheriff of New Bern, North Carolina, he not only grieves for her and worries about their young son Jonah but longs to bring the unknown driver to justice. Then Miles meets Sarah Andrews, Jonah's second grade teacher. A young woman recovering from a difficult divorce, Sarah moved to New Bern hoping to start over. Tentatively, Miles and Sarah reach out to each other... soon they are falling in love. But what neither realizes is that they are also bound together by a shocking secret, one that will force them to reexamine everything they believe in- including their love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunes_for_a_Small_Harmonica"title="Tunes for a Small Harmonica">
J.F. receives a harmonica from friend for her birthday and ends up learning to play it. She becomes quite good and this skill becomes useful after she ends up falling in love with her poetry teacher. She then attempts to raise $1000 to help her teacher return to England to finish his Master's thesis.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immigrants"title="The Immigrants">
Born on the voyage to America to his French father and Italian mother, Daniel Lavette grows up helping his father on a fishing boat. Tragedy strikes early one morning, however, when Dan wakes early to prepare the boat. The great San Francisco earthquake destroys vast swathes of the city including the small apartment where his parents were sleeping. Following a traumatic three days spent ferrying passengers across the bay to Oakland, he is taken in by friends of his father. The two immigrant families of Italian and Jewish origin use the money earned from the ferrying to start a financial empire and a bank, the Bank of Sonoma.Although Dan Lavette becomes quite rich, he does not stop. He wants to become a multimillionaire and has many ideas in mind. He is an entrepreneur and seeks to find his place among the rich businessmen on Nob Hill. He asks for a loan from the larger Seldon Bank in San Francisco, but the owner declines it. During that meeting, Dan meets Jean, the exquisitely beautiful daughter of the owner, and both are smitten with each other. Soon after, they are married, against the will of Jean's mother, who looks down on immigrants and those of poor pedigree.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Solo_(novel)"title="Flying Solo (novel)">
Mr. Fabiano has a substitute teacher who calls in sick on April 28. When his class arrives, they discover that their substitute teacher has not shown up. The class decides they will not report this to administration and decide to run the classroom by themselves. The students follow the instructions left by their teacher, and all goes fairly smoothly. However, at the end of the day, during a special assembly when all of the teachers are supposed to come up on stage, the class is discovered when they only had a little time left of the school day. At the end of the story, Mr. Fabiano realises that they could run the class by themselves and they go solo.Characters
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_Boy_(novel)"title="Spider Boy (novel)">
Bobby Ballenger is starting a new school a thousand miles from his old home. He moved from Illinois to New Paltz, New York and his interest in spiders has earned him the nickname of Spider Boy from Illinois given to him by the class bully. His pet tarantula has not eaten since the family moved which has made him nervous about its health. Bobby keeps a journal where he records interesting facts about spiders and then uses it to record his frustrations and realizations about his new school.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Bourse"title="La Bourse">
The young painter Hippolyte Schinner falls from a step-ladder while working in his atelier and is knocked unconscious. The noise of his fall alerts two of his neighbours, Adélaïde Leseigneur and her mother Madame de Rouville, who occupy the apartment immediately below. The two women revive the young man and an acquaintance is struck up. Inevitably, the young painter falls in love with Adélaïde and over the following weeks he pays frequent visits to her apartment. There he is always warmly welcomed, but he cannot help noticing the unmistakable signs of poverty – a poverty that the two women are at obvious pains to hide. Hippolyte's suspicions are aroused. The mother and her daughter have different surnames; they are reluctant to reveal anything of their past; and what is Hippolyte to make of the two old friends of the mother, the Comte de Kergarouet and the Chevalier du Halga, who regularly visit her to play cards for money, but who always lose to her as though on purpose?Hippolyte discovers that Madame de Rouville's late husband was a naval captain who died at Batavia from wounds received in an engagement with an English vessel. The Comte de Kergarouet, it transpires, is a former comrade of Baron de Rouville. Hippolyte offers to draw a portrait of Monsieur de Rouville, a fading sketch of whom is hanging in the apartment. Two months later, when the finished portrait is hung in Madame de Rouville's apartment, the Comte de Kergarouet offers Hippolyte 500 pistoles to have his own portrait painted in a similar style. Hippolyte, however, suspects that the old man is offering him the price of both portraits while paying for his own, and he declines the offer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inherent_Vice"title="Inherent Vice">
The novel is set in Los Angeles in 1970. Larry "Doc" Sportello, a private investigator and pothead, receives a visit from his former girlfriend Shasta Fay Hepworth, who is now having an affair with real-estate mogul Michael Z. "Mickey" Wolfmann. Shasta asks Doc to help foil a plot allegedly hatched by Mickey's wife Sloane and her lover, Riggs Warbling, to have Mickey admitted to a mental health institution. Later, a black militant named Tariq Khalil asks Doc to find Glen Charlock, one of Mickey's bodyguards—Tariq claims that Charlock owes him money after their time spent together in prison.Doc visits one of Mickey's developments but is knocked unconscious, and awakes to find himself being questioned by his old LAPD nemesis, Det. Christian F. "Bigfoot" Bjornsen, who informs Doc that Charlock has been shot dead and Mickey has vanished. Later, Doc is visited by Hope Harlingen, the widow of a musician named Coy Harlingen, who wants Doc to investigate rumors that Coy is still alive. Doc learns that Coy has been working for the government as an informer and "agent provocateur", but is allowed no contact with his family. He finds Coy in a nightclub, who tells Doc about the "Golden Fang", an old schooner suspected of bringing mysterious goods into port, and upon which both Mickey and Shasta are rumored to have departed. He also discovers that Puck Beaverton had switched shifts with Charlock on the day of Charlock's death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fig_Pudding"title="Fig Pudding">
Cliff is twelve old and the oldest of six children in his family who live in Ballingsford. As Christmas nears, Cliff's grandmother arrives for a visit. Cliff's baby brother is rushed to the hospital with a severe illness. While he is recovering in the hospital on Christmas Eve, his family finally figure out that the "yidda yadda" he has been asking Santa Claus for is a little ladder like the one used to climb up to the top of a bunk bed. The entire family work together to build Josh a ladder and deliver it on Christmas morning. Later, Cliff's first grade brother, Brad, drives his bicycle into an ambulance and dies in the hospital while his family comes to see him. His mother is heart broken when she is told that Brad could not be saved. Brad was buried in his favorite soccer shirt that his mother found and washed and had been crying on. As Brad was being buried, Cliff realized that Brad was gone forever. The family spends the next Christmas at a resort trying to adjust to the loss of Brad but the trip does not seem to work. Their spirits rise during a New Year's party at Aunt Pat's house. When they arrive at the party, Josh accidentally steps into Dad's special fig pudding that they were bringing. Dad removes the shoe, smooths down the pudding, and swears the children to secrecy. They all keep a straight face until Uncle Eddie says that the fig pudding is the best ever and asks Dad if he has added some new ingredient. They all laugh when the real story of the shoe is told.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hour_of_the_Star"title="The Hour of the Star">
The novel starts with the narrator, Rodrigo S.M., discussing what it means to write a story. He addresses the reader directly and spends a lot of time talking about his philosophical beliefs. After some time, he begins the story, which centers on Macabéa, an impoverished 19 year old living in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She leads a difficult life, but seems to be oblivious to this fact. She starts dating a boy named Olímpico, who mistreats her and eventually leaves her for her coworker, Gloria. Feeling guilty, Gloria recommends that Macabéa visit a fortune teller named Madame Carlota. She predicts that Macabéa's life will soon turn around, saying that she will be rich, happy, and marry a foreigner named Hans. However, none of this comes true as Macabéa's life comes to an abrupt end when a yellow Mercedes runs her over.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Daddy"title="Uncle Daddy">
Rivers's father abandoned his wife and son when the son is three years old, he goes out to get a pizza and does not come back. His mother's uncle moves in and becomes "Uncle Daddy". Rivers is living a fairly typical life for a nine-year-old boy when his father returns after a six-year absence. The return of Rivers's father threatens to tear the family apart until Uncle Daddy suffers a near fatal heart attack. Rivers and his parents come together to support Uncle Daddy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Came_Back_to_Show_You_I_Could_Fly"title="Came Back to Show You I Could Fly">
The novel begins with shy, eleven-year-old Seymour staying with Thelma, an acquaintance of his mother for the summer holidays. Seymour's parents have split and are arguing over custody of him. After a drunken threat by Seymour's father to take him away interstate, his mother has Seymour relocated to Thelma's house on Victoria Road. Where Seymour is bored and lonely. During the day, while Thelma is at work, Seymour is not allowed to open the door, or leave the house, because of his mother's fear that his father might come and find him.However one morning Seymour decides to climb over the back gate and walk to the nearby shops. He goes to a park where a group of children tease him. Not knowing how to defend himself, Seymour runs away and is chased. In desperation he goes through a random gate and meets a young girl: Angie. Angie is described as in her late teens, and as a beautiful angel. Seymour is drawn to Angie because she treats him with the affection and friendliness that he lacks from his parents. Angie takes him on outings to horse races, her mother's house, shops, and a restaurant. Over the course of the novel Seymour's faint suspicions about Angie develop, but he refuses to consider them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baifa_Monü_Zhuan"title="Baifa Monü Zhuan">
The story is set in 17th-century China towards the end of the Ming dynasty. Lian Nichang, a female bandit leader nicknamed "Jade Rakshasa", is introduced as an impressive vigilante-heroine who uses her legendary swordplay skills to uphold justice in the "jianghu" (martial artists' community). However, she is also notorious for being brutal and aggressive towards her enemies, which makes her a highly dreaded figure in the "jianghu". Meanwhile, many government officials are implicated in a scandal to overthrow the crown prince, and they are either executed or imprisoned. Zhuo Yihang of the Wudang Sect helps the crown prince uncover the truth behind the case and succeeds in clearing the name of his father, who had been wrongly put to death.On the journey home, Zhuo Yihang passes by Mount Hua, where he meets a beautiful young maiden and falls in love with her. The following night, Zhuo joins some martial artists in a duel against the "Jade Rakshasa". However, he is shocked when he sees that the woman he met earlier is actually the "Jade Rakshasa", Lian Nichang. After he makes another startling discovery that the martial artists he is helping are actually spies working for the Manchus, he quickly switches sides and helps Lian Nichang defeat the spies. Zhuo Yihang and Lian Nichang also meet and befriend a formidable swordsman, Yue Mingke, who is serving as a military attaché under the general Xiong Tingbi. After a friendly duel, Yue Mingke and Lian Nichang realise that their respective masters used to be a loving couple, but have separated due to a rivalry over achieving supremacy in swordplay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Missing_Piece_(book)"title="The Missing Piece (book)">
The story centers on a circular shape-like creature that is missing a wedge-shaped piece of itself. It doesn't like this, and sets out to find its missing piece, singing:It starts out on a grand adventure searching for the perfect piece to complete itself, while singing and enjoying the scenery. But after the circle finally finds the exact-sized wedge that fits it, it begins to realize that it can no longer do the things it used to enjoy doing, like singing or rolling slowly enough to enjoy the company of a worm or butterfly. It decides that it was happier when searching for the missing piece than actually having it. So it gently puts the piece down, and continues searching happily.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_Lo_Moves_the_Mountain"title="Ming Lo Moves the Mountain">
A mountain towers over the little house where Ming Lo and his wife live, blocking sunlight and attracting rain. Ming Lo's wife tells Ming Lo that he must move the mountain. They follow the local wise man's advice without success. Finally, he tells them to perform a long dance with closed eyes while carrying all they possess, including the sticks of which their house is built. When they open their eyes, they find that the mountain has moved and happily rebuild their home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_of_the_Falcon"title="Wings of the Falcon">
Set during Italian Risorgimento of 1860, Francesca Fairbourn arrives in Italy after she becomes an orphan to live with her mother's family.Her aristocratic Italian mother and English father had eloped which resulted in her getting disowned by her family. Francesca's mother died during her birth which left Francesca's father to raise her all alone. When she left school at 18 she lost her father and was in desperate situation until her dashing young cousin Andrea del Tarconti rescues her and sends her to Italy to the aristocratic home of Tarconti Castle. Once there Francesca finds herself intertwined in web of political intrigue as a local disguised hero named Il Falcone is helping peasants fight against tyrant rulers. Francesca realizes that the" 'Il Falcone' "is closer to her family than she thinks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enchanted_Glass"title="Enchanted Glass">
"Enchanted Glass" is set in the fictional town of Melstone, England. Near the town of Melstone is Melstone House, an old place which Andrew Hope has inherited from his grandfather. With Melstone House comes a "field-of-care" which is a region of magical responsibility. Unfortunately, Andrew does not quite grasp the full implications of this, causing many of the problems in the story.Shortly after Andrew takes possession of Melstone House, Aidan Cain appears on his doorstep, asking for help. His recently deceased grandmother had told him that the owner of Melstone House could help him, if he ever needed it. Aidan is being pursued by an unknown force, which turns out to be the fairy king Oberon, who thinks he is his son.Together, Andrew and Aidan must unravel the mystery of Melstone House, and gain control of their magic.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delivering_Happiness"title="Delivering Happiness">
The book is divided into three sections: Profits; Profits and Passion; and Profits, Passion, and Purpose. It is written in narrative form and includes short 1-2 page entries from Hsieh's friends and employees. In the first section, Hsieh details his entrepreneurial adventures from when he was young until he was in college. These include his attempt to start an earthworm breeding business at the age of 9, a mail order button business in middle school, and a grille at Harvard University. After college, Hsieh founded LinkExchange, which he sold to Microsoft for $265 million two years later. He founded Venture Frogs, an investment fund, of which Zappos was one of the investments.The second section, Profits and Passion, details Hsieh's involvement with Zappos, beginning with joining the company full-time as CEO in 2000. The third section, Profits, Passion, and Purpose, covers Zappos sale to Amazon, as well as lessons Hsieh learned in public relations and public speaking.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Strange_Discovery"title="A Strange Discovery">
## Part 1: How We Found Dirk Peters.The story is set in 1877, forty nine years after the events in "Arthur Gordon Pym", and thirty-nine years after the publication of that book.The narrator is an Englishman traveling in the United States to settle business interests in Southern Illinois. During his stay in Bellevue, Belleville, he makes acquaintance with two local doctors, an older man, Dr. George F. Castleton, and the younger Dr. Bainbridge. Dr. Castleton is an eccentric local character given to extravagant opinions, and the narrator mentions that he was later the Prohibition Party candidate for Governor of Illinois. During a discussion of Poe's works and "Arthur Gordon Pym", Dr. Castleton reveals that Peters is a patient of his.Much of the first section is given to the narrator's observations on American society and to discussions between him, Castleton, and Bainbridge on topics ranging from poetry and literature, to U.S. and European politics, to Christianity and agnosticism, to medical science.Bainbridge describes his earlier discovery, at the Astor Library in New York, of a book written in 1594 and published in 1728, of a narrative purporting to tell the story of a sailor on Sir Francis Drake's voyage of circumnavigation. According to this book, Drake's ship was driven by a storm for two weeks, until, deep in the Antarctic, he arrived at a city which the author describes as comparable to Venice, but more beautiful than any European city of that time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesper_(novel)"title="Vesper (novel)">
"Vesper" follows the character of Emily Webb, a geeky girl that is more likely to stay at home and watch old horror films than go to parties. Unbeknownst to her, she's been sneaking out to go to parties and thrill seek when Emily thought she was asleep. She first takes notice of her nocturnal activities when one of her classmates that shares her name has been found murdered. Despite her attempts to prevent herself from going out, Emily's other self keeps going out and getting wilder with each passing night. This other Emily is not only wilder, but stronger and faster than her normal self. As Emily tries to figure out what's going on with her, she discovers that she's not the only person that's changing as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Chifrudo"title="O Chifrudo">
"O Chifrudo" is a comedy that requires actors with great experience and versatility. This text gave opportunity to the author, "Miguel M. Abrahão", to reassess, on his way, one of the most common themes and best known in world literature: the love triangle. The story is not focused on the content melodramatic as one would predict. First and foremost is an acid criticism of consumerism."Dayse", the woman is presented to the public as consumer object, just as "Hermes", her husband, her lover, "Dondoco", or even the two neighboring, whose profiles are comically different.With surprise ending and original, the piece always captivated audiences in the country and gave great opportunities to actors in search of roles that allow for true theatrical performance and not the easy laughter and obvious humor of modern.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pássaro_da_Manhã"title="Pássaro da Manhã">
"Pássaro da Manhã" shows the trajectory of "Tuca" and "Tom", two teenagers somewhere in the universe who philosophize about life, at the same time that, desperately, seek an identity and a hope for mankind in order to save her from a sad condition. This is a dramatic text which brings us the poetry and lyricism of a time lost. In 1984, João Vitti won the award for Best Actor at the "Salesian Theatre Festival" (São Paulo) with "TOM" character.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_Wine_(novel)"title="Bread and Wine (novel)">
Pietro Spina is a young revolutionary who is being sought by authorities. He takes on the disguise of an old priest known as Don Paolo Spada.Pietro lives in Abruzzo, in village of Pietrasecca (Marsica), and is forced to pretend to be a priest, to avoid arousing suspicion. The fascist police is on his trail, and Pietro has only a few friends to rely on. Meanwhile, the young man is in contact with the sad reality of ignorant peasants of the village of Pietrasecca: he realizes that to make a revolution against fascism is always difficult, because the problem of the revolution is at its own root. In Abruzzo there are many backward villages, such as Pietrasecca, where the laws of nature and the peasants are inviolable. Meanwhile, Pietro Spina falls in love with a girl, but can not reveal his true identity...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_and_Pete"title="Tim and Pete">
Two former gay lovers, Pete, and the narrator of the novel Tim, are reunited when Tim needs a ride back to Los Angeles. They go on a surreal adventure over the next day-and-a-half, most of it in cars, with memories of the last twenty years, including tea rooms and bathhouses, increasingly enraging them at the AIDS pandemic destruction. Sleep deprived, using gallows humor and self-medicating with mescaline-spiked drinks they travel through an increasingly hostile environment meeting a bizarre and queer cast of supporting characters who fuel undercurrent rage at society's homophobia and the LGBT community's apathy. They meet an occult-obsessed indie filmmaker, leather-dykes, a Southern belle drag queen and then four anarchistic gays who are HIV-positive. The quartet reflect the hopelessness felt as their friends die and the country does little to counteract a "gay" disease. They hope to win the cultural war by assassinating ex-President Ronald Reagan, who did little for the first four years of growing HIV-AIDS epidemic, by bombing him at a church service. Tim and Pete convince the plotters to change targets to a meeting of the American Family Association, a group known for its anti-LGBT rhetoric that led to the failed response to AIDS, where there would be fewer "innocent" victims.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Miseducation_of_Ross_O'Carroll-Kelly"title="The Miseducation of Ross O'Carroll-Kelly">
Ross O'Carroll-Kelly attends Castlerock College (a portmanteau of Castleknock College and Blackrock College), a prestigious South Dublin private secondary school, where academe takes a back seat to rugby union. He aims to lead the school to the Leinster Schools Rugby Senior Cup.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roysh_Here,_Roysh_Now…_The_Teenage_Dirtbag_Years"title="Roysh Here, Roysh Now… The Teenage Dirtbag Years">
Ross begins higher education, of a sort, at University College Dublin and between terms takes a break to the United States.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orange_Mocha-Chip_Frappuccino_Years"title="The Orange Mocha-Chip Frappuccino Years">
After dropping out of college and being kicked out of home by his parents, Ross finds work as an estate agent for Hook, Lyon and Sinker.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS,_I_Scored_the_Bridesmaids"title="PS, I Scored the Bridesmaids">
Ross' request for Sorcha's hand in marriage is finally accepted. At the wedding comes a shocking revelation: Ross is already a father to a son he knew nothing about.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curious_Incident_of_the_Dog_in_the_Nightdress"title="The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightdress">
Ross deals with the fallout from the discovery of his seven-year-old son, a working-class Northsider named Ronan. His father Charles stands for election to Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Should_Have_Got_Off_at_Sydney_Parade"title="Should Have Got Off at Sydney Parade">
Sorcha is pregnant; Ross begins to experience a sympathetic pregnancy. His mother, Fionnuala, becomes a successful chick-lit author, but her realistic depiction of financial crime causes suspicion to fall on his father's affairs. Ross and his friends invest in Lillie's Bordello, a Dublin nightclub.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Champagne_Mojito_Is_the_Last_Thing_I_Own"title="This Champagne Mojito Is the Last Thing I Own">
Ross's father Charles is imprisoned, Ross is forced to work for a living as the economic crash coincides with his father's downfall, and his wife Sorcha leaves him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_S_and_the_Secrets_of_Andorra's_Box"title="Mr S and the Secrets of Andorra's Box">
Ross becomes the coach of the Andorra national rugby union team. It is revealed that Ross's longtime crush Erika is his half-sister. Ross also attempts psychotherapy as he tries to copy with separation from Sorcha and Honor. Immaculata, the African orphan that Sorcha once sponsored, arrives at the door. J.P. leaves the seminary, while Fionnuala becomes a TV chef.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhino_What_You_Did_Last_Summer"title="Rhino What You Did Last Summer">
Ross travels to Los Angeles to win Sorcha back; he and his family become reality television stars on "Ross, His Mother, His Wife and Her Lover"; Ross is persuaded to undergo cosmetic surgery, and Honor becomes addicted to caffeine. Fionnuala's novels begin to earn popularity in America.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oh_My_God_Delusion"title="The Oh My God Delusion">
As the economic crisis deepens, Ross and his family continue to struggle financially, with Ross moving to a ghost estate. Additionally, he and his friends face being stripped of their Leinster Schools Senior Cup medals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil's_Company"title="The Devil's Company">
This third memoir installment begins in November of 1722, eight months after the 1722 General Election that provided the historical setting for "A Spectacle of Corruption". This time, Weaver finds himself involved in puzzling and dangerous events surrounding the all-powerful East India Company.Victimized, along with family and friends, by an elaborate extortion scheme, Weaver is forced to spy and steal for the enigmatic Jerome Cobb. Under Cobb's direction, Weaver infiltrates the Company and attempts to learn its secrets before the upcoming meeting of the board of directors (called the Court of Proprietors). Trouble is, Cobb won't (or can't) say exactly what he's looking for, or why. As is typical in this genre, the truth is not revealed until the final pages.Along the way, Weaver meets a colorful assortment of characters, including a betel-nut chewing Company director, an obsessive-compulsive clerk, a bi-sexual bigamist inventor, the London silk-weavers' guild master and several varieties of international spy. The agents of France - Britain's arch-enemy throughout the 18th Century - are deeply involved. And it turns out that India's Mughal Emperor, on whose domains the East India Company is steadily encroaching, also has his own Man in London.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paper_Men"title="The Paper Men">
The protagonist in the novel is Wilfred Barclay, a curmudgeonly writer who has a drinking problem, a dead marriage, and the incurable itches of middle-aged lust. Barclay is irritated by a young professor, Rick Tucker, who is determined to write Barclay's biography and is desperate to gain control of the writer's personal papers. Tucker pursues Barclay across Europe, where both men sacrifice relationships, self-respect, and ultimately themselves in this lethal pursuit.The ending is both inevitable and shocking and exposes the desperation of the literary biographer and the determination of the subject to maintain control over the story of his own life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Lives_of_Fortunate_Wives"title="The Secret Lives of Fortunate Wives">
In the luxurious neighborhood of Hunting Hills, Ohio, Marti Dench realizes her husband is never around and suspects he is having an affair. At the same time, John Harding comes back from Prague with a new wife who is far from the normal size two socialites of Hunting Hill. The instant Marti hears John, a long time friend, is newly married, she experiences jealousy and believes that John is the real love of her life. She then sets out to seduce John and begin an affair with him.John's new (and second) wife, Clare Stark, has difficulty settling into life at Hunting Hills. Once a hot-shot journalist, Claire is now forced to be a stay-at-home wife, as her new husband has a bad history with the only newspaper in town, and Claire has a romantic history with the chief editor of that paper. The other wives aren't so welcoming, and John's mother disapproves of Claire. Claire befriends Marti, who goes out of her way to invite Claire to their exclusive book club and throws a party in Claire and John's honour, but (unbeknownst to Claire) only as a ploy to get John into bed. Claire, none the wiser, continues to try to make friends with the other Hunting Hills wives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Design_(book)"title="The Grand Design (book)">
The book examines the history of scientific knowledge about the universe. It starts with the Ionian Greeks, who claimed that nature works by laws, and not by the will of the gods. It later presents the work of Nicolaus Copernicus, who advocated the concept that the Earth is not located in the center of the universe.It has tried to explain the topics in an easier manner. Many examples related from daily life, mythology and history have been taken to explain, such as- Viking Mythology about Skoll and Hati, movie "The Matrix", Ptolemaic universe. The authors then describe the theory of quantum mechanics using, as an example, the probable movement of an electron around a room. The presentation has been described as easy to understand by some reviewers, but also as sometimes "impenetrable," by others.The central claim of the book is that the theory of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity together help us understand how universes could have formed out of nothing.The authors write: The authors explain, in a manner consistent with M-theory, that as the Earth is only one of several planets in our Solar System, and as our Milky Way galaxy is only one of many galaxies, the same may apply to our universe itself: that is, our universe may be one of a huge number of universes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pichilemu_Blues"title="Pichilemu Blues">
The "Pichilemu Blues" story is situated in Pichilemu during the summer of 1973. The main characters are a group of teenagers that are discovering a world abounded with hippies, sexual revolutions, ideological transformations, its own language (Chilean Spanish) and anxiety to change the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Dinheiro"title="O Dinheiro">
"O Dinheiro", written in 1976 and revised by the author in other opportunities, is the best-known work of dramaturgy by Miguel M. Abrahão. Combining fakeness, comedy and detective's elements, this story is about a family that is made prisoner in an isolated mansion for twelve years, just to receive uncle Josafa Paranhos I's inheritance, following the rules of a really creepy will.Each character presents a pathological deviation, all linked to the habit of collecting something (syringes, boards, men, spiders), or fixed ideas (such as ET or famous characters in American films).At the end of the twelve years, advocates of Josafá require that hosts in the mansion, a young man intern: "Alexandre Pousa". And, coincidentally with his arrival, apparently accidental deaths begin to occur at the mansion, leaving the question in the air: murders or fatalities?
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purge_(novel)"title="Purge (novel)">
The plot begins in 1992 with an elderly woman, Aliide Truu, who lives in a remote portion of Estonia. The woman had isolated herself from the surrounding society and watches the youth of her nation, including her daughter, leaving the countryside for the more urban regions and Finland. One day while looking out the kitchen window, she discovers Zara, the granddaughter of her sister Ingel. Zara had been forced into sex trade by the Russian mafia, but has escaped from them. The only guide she had to finding help is a photograph from her grandmother with Aliide's name on it. The story then continues with a series of flashbacks, which develops the relationship between Aliide and her sister, which hinged upon their competition for the love of Hans Pekk during World War II. The story ends as Aliide begins to reconcile herself with her jealousy of her sister, and Zara's redemption from her disenchantment with the world caused by her sexual subjugation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golf_in_the_Kingdom"title="Golf in the Kingdom">
While on layover on his way to an ashram in India, Michael Murphy decides to play a round of golf at Burningbush, a famous local golf course. There he meets the mysterious and charismatic golf pro Shivas Irons who over a 24-hour period teaches him about golf and spirituality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Above_All"title="This Above All">
Spending leave together on the South Coast during the Battle of Britain and the beginning of the blitz, Clive and Prudence have an affair. Having survived Dunkirk, but having a crisis of conscience over what the war is being fought for and disgusted at the incompetence of the ruling elite, Clive decides not to return to the Army and to go absent without leave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Casa_(play)"title="A Casa (play)">
"A Casa", tells a simple story, but its great strength lies in the description passionate and accomplice of the characters.The theme of the play revolves around a seemingly bitter and cynical idea: "a woman should become a prostitute, to sustain itself without effort"."Josinalda", a lady of strict principles, maintains in his house with his meager salary, Liduina, your sister, "Fredegund", your niece, and "Creuzilene", your neighbor .Life is peaceful and marked by seemingly commons issues until, unexpectedly, a bandit enters the residence of distinguished ladies, making them hostages.The play then becomes a police comedy, and thus a fascinating intellectual game of cat and mouse, where not everything looks, like really is.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westwind_(novel)"title="Westwind (novel)">
The Zephyr computer system monitors the progress of the United Kingdom's only spy satellite. When this system briefly goes offline, the book's main characters Hepton and Dreyfuss (the sole survivor of a space shuttle crash) have the only key to the enigma that must be solved if both men are to stay alive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_(novel)"title="Room (novel)">
Five-year old Jack lives with his 26-year old Ma in "Room", a secured single-room outbuilding containing a small kitchen, a basic bathroom, a wardrobe, a bed, and a TV set. Because it is all he has ever known, Jack believes that only Room and the things it contains (including himself and Ma) are "real." Ma, unwilling to disappoint Jack with a life she cannot give him, allows Jack to believe that the rest of the world exists only on television. Ma tries her best to keep Jack healthy and happy via both physical and mental exercises, keeping a healthy diet, limiting TV-watching time, and strict body and oral hygiene. The only other person Jack has ever seen is "Old Nick," who visits Room at night while Jack sleeps hidden in a wardrobe. Old Nick brings them food and necessities. Jack is unaware that Old Nick kidnapped Ma when she was 19 years old and has kept her imprisoned for the past seven years. Old Nick regularly rapes Ma; Jack is the product of one such sexual assault.A week after Jack's fifth birthday, Ma learns Old Nick has been unemployed for the past six months and is in danger of losing his home to foreclosure. Feeling certain that Old Nick would kill them both before letting them free, Ma comes up with a plan to get Jack out of Room by convincing Old Nick that Jack is deathly ill. Jack is unable to conceptualize being outside of Room or interacting with other people, but Ma eventually convinces him to help her. When Old Nick refuses to take Jack to a hospital, Ma then pretends that Jack has died. Old Nick removes Jack, wrapped in a rug, from Room. Jack escapes Old Nick and manages to reach a friendly stranger who contacts the police. In spite of his inability to communicate effectively, Jack describes the route to Room to an officer to free Ma.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daydreamer_(novel)"title="The Daydreamer (novel)">
The book comprises seven interlinked stories about a young boy, Peter Fortune, whose daydreams place him into various fantastic situations: he discovers a cream that makes people vanish and makes his family disappear, he conquers a bully on the thought that life was a dream so he had nothing to lose but to wake up, he switches body with his cat and fights off a new tabby stray, he transforms into his baby cousin and experiences the joys of being a toddler, his sister's dolls become alive and attack him, he imagines that the old neighbor becomes a thief and, in the last story, he turns into an adult and discovers that adults' lives are not as boring as he thought. He is 10 years old at the start of the novel and 12 at the end.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dæmos_Rising"title="Dæmos Rising">
Kate Lethbridge-Stewart responds to a message from ex-UNIT operative Douglas Cavendish to investigate a haunting.Arriving at Cavendish's isolated cottage, she faces a demonic power her father had previously battled. Summoned by a future tyranny, a Dæmon is set to return to Earth. It is up to Kate and Cavendish to save the planet and its future.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enemy's_Cosmetique"title="The Enemy's Cosmetique">
"Without wanting to, I have committed the perfect crime: nobody saw me coming, except for the victim. The proof, I am still free."The whole story takes place at an airport. Jérôme Angust, a man on a business trip, waits for a delayed flight. He meets another man, who introduces himself as Textor Texel from Holland. At first Angust is annoyed by Texel, who insists on talking to him, despite cues that Angust is not interested in being engaged. He wonders why Texel insists on talking to him. Texel explains that he simply wants to, and he always does exactly what he wants. Eventually Angust becomes drawn into the conversation. Texel begins telling a story about his childhood, in which he believes he "murdered" one of his elementary-school classmates. Texel explains that as a child he had always been envious of the boy (named Franck) who was more popular than Texel, and so one night he prayed to God that Franck would die. The next morning it was revealed that the Franck had died unexpectedly during the night of cardiac arrest.The conversation between Texel and Angust continues, and Texel tells another story from his childhood. When Texel was around 12 years old he lived with his grandparents, and one of his jobs was to mix the cat food and serve it to the cats. He hated the job, as the fish and rice concoction always nauseated him and he had to close his eyes while he mixed it. One day however, he forced himself to eat it, and found it so appealing that he ravenously ate all of the cat food himself while the cats looked on. Texel explains that he does not believe in God or the Devil, but rather in "l'ennemi," the self's personal enemy that is inside of everyone. At this point, Angust decides he has heard enough and tries to block out Texel's words by covering his ears with his hands. Eventually however, his arms become tired and he is forced to lower them. The conversation continues.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Dormition_des_amants"title="La Dormition des amants">
This is an historical novel set in the seventeenth-century. Maria Concepcion (queen presumptive) is the daughter of King Carlos of Spain. While she is trained for ascendency, Maria treats her small castrated slave, Girolamo, with great compassion and he gradually becomes her playmate and confidant. Together, they learn to read and write, and science.In 1610, Henri IV was assassinated by Ravaillac. Édouard (a fictional king invented by the author) ascends the throne. Maria is to marry Édouard and become the queen of France. Girolamo comes with Maria to France and are inseparable; he even sleeps in a room next to that of the Queen. But their love is only platonic and can never become carnal.Here we find a little myth of Tristan and Isolde.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Comadres"title="As Comadres">
"Beth Beast", feminist leader, reversing the prevailing values and seeking to take over and lead women around the country to assume a dominant position and autocratic before men, resolves to promote a congress in his home in order to educate the girls of the true status of women in society. The problem occurs when "Amelia", submissive neighbor, decides to participate in discussions and carries with her husband "Almeida", a typical macho incorrigible.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Squirrel_Wife"title="The Squirrel Wife">
On a dark and stormy night. Jack, a young swineherd, hears cries for help from amidst the storm ravaged trees. Ignoring the warnings of his wicked elder brother, he ventures into the forest. In reward for saving the life of a little green man that he finds trapped underneath a fallen tree, Jack is given a magic golden ring. Placed on the wrist of a newborn squirrel, this grants him the love of a nimble and wild eyed little squirrel wife. The only place for their life together as man and wife is in the forest where Jack builds their house and learns all there is to know about living in amidst the trees. However, it is not long before Jack's elder brother hears rumor of his young sibling's success and sets about bringing his good fortune to an end. With the aid of his squirrel wife and the lord of the little green forest people, Jack gets to live happily ever after whilst his elder brother is kept as a servant to the forest men so that he might learn some wisdom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_the_Dark_(Weber_novel)"title="Out of the Dark (Weber novel)">
The 2010s: Alien scientists from an alliance of races known as the Galactic Hegemony review footage of the Battle of Agincourt, taken by a survey ship during the Hundred Years' War. They liken humans to the carnivorous, vulpine Shongairi, a species recently admitted to the Hegemony. Ultimately, a Shongairi fleet is sent to establish control of Earth in the name of the Hegemony. Upon arrival in the Solar System, the Shongairi are amazed to discover that in six centuries since the Agincourt survey, the technology base of Earth has advanced considerably, to the Hegemony's classification of "Level II."The Hegemony constitution prohibits conquest of any Level II or higher society. Fleet Commander Thikair, head of the Shongairi expedition, resolves to ignore this law in service of Shongairi plans to advance beyond their Hegemony rivals and ultimately conquer the galaxy; a human client state could provide scientists and soldiers to this end. Furthermore, the Hegemony's leaders have quietly authorized the Shongairi to attack the "bloodthirsty" humans. Hegemony leaders, mostly pacifist herbivores, view humans as dangerous and morally beyond redemption; they are to be subjugated, or if necessary, exterminated. The Shongairi kill more than half of Earth's population with orbital strikes, falsely assuming the survivors will surrender. As the Hegemony has to date prohibited war on advanced societies, the Shongairi are completely unprepared for the conflict that ensues. U.S. Air Force remnants using stealth F-22 Raptor aircraft shoot down a flight of Shongairi transport shuttles. U.S. and Russian tanks prove far superior against poorly armored and armed Shongairi vehicles. The Shongairi use further kinetic strikes to destroy the attackers and the remaining human cities as a reprisal, but the survivors continue the struggle as loosely organized guerillas. Superior infantry tactics and weapons cause irreplaceable Shongairi casualties to mount. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embassytown"title="Embassytown">
"Embassytown" takes place mostly in the city of the title, on the planet Arieka. It exists on the very edge of the known universe, which given its distance from everything else, is only accessible by sailing through the "immer" (see § Style below for the meaning of Miéville's neologisms). Embassytown is a colony of a state called Bremen; and its trade goods (precious metal and, especially, alien-influenced biotech), along with Embassytown's unique position at the edge of the known universe, make it a particularly important colony.Avice Benner Cho, an "Immerser" (a traveller on the Immer), has returned to her childhood home from her adventures in the "Out". On the planet of Arieka humans and "exots" co-exist with the indigenous, enigmatic Ariekei—otherwise known as the Hosts. Few people can speak the language of the Hosts (referred to only as "Language"), as it requires the orator to speak two words at once; those humans (Terre) who can are genetically-engineered twins known as Ambassadors, bred solely for this purpose. The Ambassadors speak with two mouths and one mind and as such can be understood by the Ariekei (who do not recognise any other form of communication) allowing for trade in their valuable biotechnology. The Hosts' Language does not allow for lying or even speculation, the Language reflects both their state of mind and reality as they perceive it; they create literal similes by recruiting individuals to perform bizarre ordeals that can then become allusions in Language. Avice herself serves as a human simile, “the girl who was hurt in the dark and ate what was given to her". Ariekei compete at Festivals of Lies to see who can most closely approximate speaking an untruth, an act both thrilling and highly taboo.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_and_the_Assassin"title="Hygiene and the Assassin">
The famous novelist Prétextat Tach is stricken by "Elzenveiverplatz syndrome" (an imaginary syndrome invented by the author), a cancer of the cartilage, and has only two more months to live. Almost immediately, many journalists rush to interview Tach for a scoop. However, after the first few interviews, the reader realizes that Tach is an obese and obnoxious misanthrope of the worst kind: acerbic, intolerant, a provocateur and a misogynist, who cannot tolerate any questions about his private life and has the audacity to turn the interviews into a cesspool of disgust for his interviewers. Thus, all the interviews fall short, until Nina, a relatively unknown journalist becomes the latest victim of the novelist. Unlike all the other journalists before, however, this journalist is a woman, so that the interview quickly takes the form of a confrontation between the journalist and the Nobel literature prize laureate. In a locked room full of mysteries, she will challenge the odious misogyny of Tach and, as the questions and answers wear on, confront Tach with the demons of his former life. By the end of the story, the novelist is revealed to be a murderer with a strange obsession about the filthiness he thinks puberty brings upon girls and turns them into adult women, and how his spirit will live on even in death. Nina ends up strangling Tach, mirroring a scene in Tach's book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strangers_in_the_House"title="The Strangers in the House">
After his wife left him and their young daughter in favor of another man, Hector Loursat gave up on almost everything in life. Throwing away his law career in favor of alcoholism and reading, Hector paid little attention to his daughter Nicole, unsure if he was even her true father. As such, he was largely unaware of her life until he hears someone fire a gun within the house. Upon investigating Hector discovers a man dead in one of the bedrooms. Nicole, now a teenager, and her friends brought him home after hitting them with their car, only for one of the group to murder him. The authorities believe the killer to be Nicole's boyfriend Emile and quickly charge him.To the surprise of some, Hector takes up Emile's defence, as he ultimately believes the young man to be innocent. Proving this requires Hector to team up with his daughter Nicole, who only somewhat tolerates him as a result of years of neglect.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Smail-aga_Čengić"title="The Death of Smail-aga Čengić">
The poem is divided into five sections: Smail-aga's Display of Power (), The Night Traveller ("Noćnik"), A Company ("Četa"), A Tribute ("Harač") and Doom ("Kob").
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Proper_Names"title="The Book of Proper Names">
In a vaguely surreal story, an extraordinary little girl is born from strange circumstances - her mother murdered her father, gave birth in prison, and then hanged herself. Plectrude, as the girl is unfortunately named by her mother, is adopted by her aunt and lives a fairy-like existence until she enrolls into the Paris Opera Ballet School, a rigorous institution portrayed as a "scalpel to slice away the last flesh of childhood."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Great"title="Conan the Great">
Lord Malvin, ruler of Ophir, invades Aquilonia with King Balt of Nemedia, in order to secure the latter's support against the kingdom of Koth, which ravages his eastern marches. Unfortunately, they fail to reckon with Aquilonia's king, Conan, who meets their offensive and smashes their army, forcing them to flee the battlefield. In the wake of his battle, Conan rescues the dwarf Delvyn, jester to Balt. Delvyn, however, is not the fool he appears, but the secret instigator of the invasion and servant to Kthantos, an evil demon.Seeking a king powerful enough to spread Kthantos's worship across the world, and disappointed in his hopes for Balt, the scheming jester insinuates himself into Conan's confidence. Delvyn feeds on Conan's anxieties about his advancing age, while heightening his concern over the resurgent strength of Koth, newly energized under its new ruler, the amoral and ruthless Prince Armiro of Khoraja. Though Conan's queen, Zenobia, and his close counselors distrust the dwarf, the king heeds him.Contesting for empery, Aquilonia strikes east into Ophir while Koth drives west. Conan beats Armiro to the capital, Ianthe, on the Red River, by racing ahead of his army, suborning a disaffected noble to admit him to the citadel, and slaughtering the fugitive Balt. Meanwhile, Malvin is murdered by his own mistress, the warrior woman Amlunia, who promptly transfers her affections to Conan–or seems to. She is actually in league with Delvyn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Very_Bad_Book"title="The Very Bad Book">
Much like its predecessor, "The Bad Book", which turned standard children's fairy tales and nursery rhymes on their head by rewriting them as the "bad" version, this book contains a number of tales that are "very bad". The characters are very bad, the illustrations are very bad, and the poems and jokes are all very bad, all with the aim of delighting the children (and their parents) who will read this book. There are 51 stories, poems, jokes, etc. in all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Hangman_Lost_His_Heart"title="How the Hangman Lost His Heart">
Alice Towneley's beloved uncle, Colonel Frank Towneley, has just been executed by Dan Skinslicer for supporting Prince Bonnie Charlie during the Second Jacobite Rebellion. After the drawing and quartering, Dan expresses his sympathy towards Alice and remarks that Frank was the first condemned to have his eyes wide open during his execution.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_of_an_Invisible_Man"title="Memoirs of an Invisible Man">
Nicholas Halloway is a 34-year-old Manhattan securities analyst who writes a narrative memoir (presumably this book) of his life starting on the day of an accident which renders him invisible. He recounts his involvement in a romantic affair with Anne Epstein, a woman who has taken interest in his aptitude for business and is a reporter for the "Times". He escorts her to MicroMagnetics where scientists are holding a press conference for research on the magnetic containment of a nuclear process. While there, Nick sees a group of Marxist student protesters who demonstrate nuclear catastrophe by attempting to explode a cat. To get everyone away from the MicroMagnetics presentation, they cut off power to the laboratory where nuclear equipment is operating. The control computers lose function and in a flash of eerie light, everything in a fifty-foot radius becomes invisible, including Nick.Nick later wakes up in astonishment, believing at first that his limbs were blown off, and later that he is a ghost; he finally realizes the truth. Federal intelligence agents control the site and they soon discover Nick's presence. They lose his trust by attempting to capture him. He overhears that they plan to give him to scientists and enlist him for military espionage, disregarding his personal liberty for national security. He loots miscellaneous invisible items, shoots an agent, and sets fire to the building in the process of escaping.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Color_of_Crime_(1998_book)"title="The Color of Crime (1998 book)">
"The Color of Crime" provides an overview of race, crime, and law, beginning with a discussion of slavery. Russell-Brown writes that crime and young black men have become synonymous in the American mind, giving rise to the "criminalblackman" stereotype.The book popularised the term "racial hoax", which Russell-Brown defines as occurring when someone fabricates a crime and blames it on another person because of their race or when an actual crime has been committed and the perpetrator falsely blames someone because of their race. It gives the cases of Susan Smith, Jesse Anderson, and Charles Stuart as examples of racial hoaxes. She proposes six principles to achieve fairness in the criminal justice system:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Mackintosh_and_the_Spirit_of_London"title="Johnny Mackintosh and the Spirit of London">
Set in the early 21st century, the book opens with Johnny Mackintosh living in a children's home (Ben Halader House) located in the fictional Castle Dudbury New Town in the county of Essex, United Kingdom. He has written a SETI-style program for the children's home's computers and, at the beginning of the book, an alien signal is detected. As the book develops Johnny Mackintosh is abducted by aliens and travels to the centre of the Galaxy, before returning to Earth, but in the distant past. He witnesses the extinction of the dinosaurs and the destruction of Atlantis, before returning to the present day and discovering the truth about his parents. The "Spirit of London" of the title is the name of the spaceship acquired by Johnny Mackintosh during the course of the book. From the outside it appears identical to the skyscraper situated at 30 St Mary Axe in London, known as 'the Gherkin'.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadlock_(novel)"title="Deadlock (novel)">
Vic goes to the Chicago port to find out about her cousin Boom Boom's death. She believes that Boom Boom was killed. The police believe that this ex-Black Hawks hockey player died in an accident. Vic starts digging for motive and evidence. After two attempts on her life, she finally thinks she has the murder solved but needs strong evidence. To get it, she goes to the yacht of a shipping magnate but is caught by the magnate while she is gathering evidence against him. He confronts her and tells her she is going to die. The book, the second in which Warshawski, a crucial figure in a new breed of female detectives in detective literature, appears, is the basis of the film "V.I. Warshawski", starring Kathleen Turner in the title role.The author was given an award by the Friends of American Writers for the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism_Without_Inequality"title="Libertarianism Without Inequality">
The book is written in three parts with part one being dedicated to self-ownership and "world ownership." Part two dwells on the rights of self-defense and the right to punish those who transgress against the natural rights of others. Part three deals with the political aspects and other types of libertarianism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zendegi"title="Zendegi">
## Part 1: 2012.Martin Seymour is an Australian news correspondent in Iran covering the 2012 Iranian parliamentary elections. The elections turn out to be a sham as many of the opposition candidates are banned, but Martin remains in Iran to cover the post election protests. Unrest escalates and the authorities are forced to hold free elections.Nasim Golestani is an Iranian computer scientist living in exile in the United States following the execution of her father by VEVAK, the Iranian secret police. She works at MIT on the Human Connectome Project (HCP), which is attempting to produce a neural map of the human brain. She develops computer software that simulates zebra finch song production by using thousands of finch brain scans. But when Congress turns down funding for the project, Nasim returns to Iran to help rebuild her country.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crucible_of_Time"title="The Crucible of Time">
The novel deals with the efforts of an alien species to escape their homeworld, whose system is passing through a cloud of interstellar debris, resulting in a high rate of in-falling matter. The species' unique biology and their biological technology complicate matters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soulless_(novel)"title="Soulless (novel)">
"Soulless" is set in an alternate history version of Victorian era Britain where werewolves and vampires are accepted as functioning members of society. Alexia Tarabotti is a woman with several critical problems: she is still searching for a husband, her late Italian father complicates her social standing in a rigid class system, and she has no soul. The fact that she is "soulless" leaves her unaffected by the powers of supernatural beings which only further complicates her life when she accidentally kills a vampire that had attacked her. Queen Victoria sends an investigator, Lord Maccon, who is himself a werewolf. As disappearances in the vampire population of London's high society increase, Alexia becomes the prime suspect. She must solve the mystery, all while maintaining proper decorum and a delicate social balance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changeless_(novel)"title="Changeless (novel)">
"Changeless" is set in an alternate history version of Victorian era Britain where werewolves and vampires are accepted as functioning members of society. Alexia Tarabotti still has no soul but she does now have a husband. Now known as Lady Maccon, Alexia finds her werewolf husband in distress. His sudden disappearance entangles her with a regiment of supernatural soldiers, a group of exorcised ghosts, and Queen Victoria herself. Alexia uses her sharp tongue, keen mind, and her trusty parasol in her effort to solve the problems put before her and to locate Lord Maccon. Her search takes her to Scotland and a werewolf pack where the fact that she is "soulless", and thus unaffected by the powers of supernatural beings, can make all the difference.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monastery_Among_the_Temple_Trees"title="Monastery Among the Temple Trees">
The story is about Rahula, a Buddhist monk. Novels depict how Rev. Rahula exists in today's tumultuous society. While he gets free from all the worldly desires, he manages to make free the others who have highly involved with them. Eventually people who went against Rev. Rahula become more mature minded and mentally advanced individuals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_an_Antique_Land"title="In an Antique Land">
The book contains two narratives. The first, an anthropological narrative, revolves around two visits made by Ghosh to two villages in the Nile Delta, while he was writing his doctoral dissertation (1980–81) and again a few years later (1988). In the second narrative, presented parallel to the first one in the book, Ghosh reconstructs the history of a 12th-century Jewish merchant, Abraham Ben Yiju, and his slaves Ashu and Bomma, using documents from the Cairo Geniza."In an Antique Land" begins in the small Egyptian village of Lataifa in 1980, where the then-graduate student Amitav Ghosh writes his doctoral thesis and begins his investigation into the lives of 12th century Jewish merchant Abraham Ben Yiju and Ben Yiju's anonymous Indian slave. Eventually, Ghosh moves to the larger village of Nashawy. He details the numerous people he meets within the town, their lives and relationships, as well as their attempts to convert him to Islam. Ghosh leaves Egypt in 1981, spending time during the next several years honing his Arabic and learning the dialect Ben Yiju uses in his own documents. In 1988, he returns to the two villages. To Ghosh's relief, this dialect is similar to the spoken language within Lataifa and Nashawy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blameless_(novel)"title="Blameless (novel)">
Blending steampunk with urban fantasy, "Blameless" is set in an alternate history version of Victorian era Britain where vampires and werewolves are welcomed as members of society, often in the upper class. Alexia Tarabotti, the Lady Maccon, leaves her werewolf husband Lord Maccon and moves back in with her family, only to find herself at the center of a scandal when it is discovered that she is pregnant: werewolves are not considered capable of fathering children, and therefore she must be an adulterer. She is dismissed from the Shadow Council by Queen Victoria and her social support structures disintegrate. Meanwhile, the vampire community of London has turned against her. While her estranged husband increasingly turns to drinking to ease his pain, Alexia leaves England for Italy, the birthplace of her late father, to seek out the Templars for answers. Because she is "soulless", and so unaffected by the abilities of supernatural beings, her journey to the truth is more complicated than even she can imagine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartless_(Carriger_novel)"title="Heartless (Carriger novel)">
Blending steampunk with urban fantasy, "Heartless" is set in an alternate history version of Victorian era Britain where vampires and werewolfs are welcomed as members of society, often in the upper class. The protagonist of the novel is Alexia Tarabotti, the Lady Maccon, who is "soulless", and thus unaffected by the powers of supernatural beings. The author has stated in interviews that while "Changeless" and "Blameless", the second and third books in the series, were closely linked, "Heartless" will be more independent, in the manner of "Soulless", the series' first entry.Alexia is now eight months pregnant, but that will not stand in the way of her duties to her country and her pack. When a mad ghost threatens Queen Victoria, Alexia must determine who is trying to assassinate the monarch before it is too late. Her handsome husband is once again by her side, even as her quest delves into his murky past. To make matters worse, her sister Felicity has become a suffragette, something odd has taken up residence in Lord Akeldama's second best closet, and London is suffering a plague of zombie porcupines.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_the_Valley"title="Through the Valley">
In the first scene, set around a major hunt, Miss May one of the servants at the park, is seduced by Frank the footman. Subsequently, they marry. Frank becomes a taxi driver, and his gradual rise in the world mirrors the decline of the estate. That same night the three boys go clambering over the roof of Neapcaster Park. David falls, and it appears to be Ralph's fault. The friction between David and Ralph runs through the novel.Another major character is Alex, a distant relative. She grows up abroad and only comes into the story in the second part. She marries Ralph but loves Geoff and in the end they are united.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vespers_Rising"title="Vespers Rising">
This book has four plot lines. The first describes Gideon's discovery of the master serum and betrayal by his friend and first Vesper, Damien Vesper. The second recounts Madeleine Cahill's life and her attempt to reunite the Cahill family. The third tells of Grace's first mission to Casablanca, as she competes against George S. Patton to retrieve Gideon's gold ring. The fourth describes Amy and Dan's retrieval of Gideon's ring that Grace bequeathed to Amy, while escaping from Casper Wyoming, a Vesper member who is after it.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toff_on_the_Farm"title="The Toff on the Farm">
Monty Morne, an old friend of Richard Rollison, tries to persuade The Toff to buy a farm from some friends of his, brother and sister Alan and Gillian Selby. But on arriving at Selby Farm, they discover that Alan Selby has been kidnapped and Gillian has been made offers for the farm that are much more than it is worth.Rollison is drawn into the mystery when one of the bidders and his accomplice are found murdered, with the other bidder, William 'Tex' Brandt, suspected of the crimes.The Toff has to discover the secret of Selby Farm and why rival bidders are seemingly prepared to kill for it, despite the presence of a sitting tenant who refuses to leave.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sleeping_Beauty_(novel)"title="The Sleeping Beauty (novel)">
Lily is the godmother to the Kingdom of Eltaria, which is quite wealthy due to its vast number of mines. After its queen dies, Lily takes on the appearance of an evil sorceress, with the name "Sable", and marries its king in name only, so that he won't be trapped into marrying a real evil sorceress and Princess Rosamund won't have a wicked stepmother. However, this doesn't stop the Tradition from focusing on Eltaria, particularly on Rosa, who ends up with two Traditional paths tangled up and directed at her: the Beauty Asleep and Snowskin. While her outer appearance is that of a Sleeping Beauty, Rosa ends up following the story of Snow White. Prince Siegfried of Drachenthal and Leopold of Falkenreid get into a fight over who will kiss Rosa awake. Rosa recovers from her ordeal before either one wins and begins training as a Godmother.King Thurmand dies, leaving "Queen Sable" as Regent until Rosa turns twenty-one. This means that their enemies will descend on Eltaria, intent on taking over, unless measures can be taken to prevent it. Godmother Lily comes up with a plan for one hundred princes to come and take part in trials to see which one of them will win the hand of the princess. Siegfried and Leopold decide to stay and take part in the trials, and they strike a bargain to help each other through the trials until the last task. Another prince named Desmond enters the trials and catches Rosa's attention for a short while.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captains_and_the_Kings"title="Captains and the Kings">
Young Joseph Armagh, whose parents recently died after giving birth to his sister, is left to venture towards Boston with his younger brother and the baby. He made a promise to his dying mother that he will always care for his siblings. His determination carries him through years of shady-deal making and his gradual accumulation of wealth and power. As his siblings mature into adulthood, they choose different paths in life, with his brother becoming an Irish singer and his sister taking monastic vows. Joseph's personal life also suffers with his focus to take on the global power brokers, with his younger son having been accidentally killed while working as a war correspondent during the Spanish-American War and his daughter suffering a riding accident that rendered her into an infantile state. Much of Joseph's focus is on forcing his eldest son Rory to climb the political ladder in order to become the first Catholic President of the United States, at the expense of Rory's personal life, to include dissolving a marriage that Joseph believed would have been a political liability for Rory.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Detail"title="Surface Detail">
The events of Surface Detail take place around 2970 AD, according to Banks. The events occur six to eight hundred years after the "Chel Debacle", depicted in the earlier novel "Look to Windward" which is set seventy-eight years after the events in "Use of Weapons".Each chapter of the book covers one or more of the six main protagonists—Lededje Y'breq, a chattel slave; Joiler Veppers, an industrialist and playboy; Gyorni Vatueil, a soldier; Prin and Chay, Pavulean academics; and Yime Nsokyi, a Quietus agent. Some of the plot occurs in simulated environments. As the book begins, a war game—the "War in Heaven"—has been running for several decades. The outcome of the simulated war will determine whether societies are allowed to run artificial Hells, virtual afterlives in which the mind-states of the dead are tortured. The Culture, fiercely anti-Hell, has opted to stay out of the war while accepting the outcome as binding.Vatueil is a soldier who has fought his way up the ranks of the war game to a position where he can determine policy. He is instrumental in the decision to cheat—first by attempting to hack into and subvert the war-game, and when this fails by moving the simulated war into the real world.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_and_the_Travellers"title="Rowan and the Travellers">
The book picks up where the first one, "Rowan of Rin (novel)", ended. "Rowan and the Travellers" tells the story of a tribe of Travellers which mysteriously arrive in the town of Rin. After their even more mysterious departure, a sleeping sickness appears in Rin and the Travellers are suspected of causing it. Rowan and Allun go to find the Travellers and ask them to stop the sickness. They find the Travellers heading to the horrific Pit of Unrin, where they find that the sickness originally descends from a dangerous kind of fruit called Mountain-berries brought down from the Mountain next to Rin. Its scent lulls people into a deep and heavy sleep. It turns out that the berries are the smaller and infantile form of big trees growing beneath the Mountain itself. Rowan, Allun and the Travellers must save the town with the help of a potion Sheba made of slip-daisy roots.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mathematics_of_Magic"title="The Mathematics of Magic">
Psychologist Harold Shea's accidental visit to the world of Norse mythology has confirmed his colleague Reed Chalmer's speculation that alternate universes can be reached by employing a system of symbolic logic encoding their basic assumptions. Encouraged at his theory's validation but pessimistic as to the prospects of it being taken seriously by their profession, Chalmers proposes to join Shea in a second expedition, more carefully planned, to a world in which they can achieve the fame and fortune that they are unlikely to gain in their own. He suggests the world represented by Spenser's "The Faerie Queene".Outfitting themselves appropriately, they make the attempt and are successful in reaching their target world. They soon encounter the Lady Britomart, one of Queen Gloriana's knights, in whose company they attend a tournament at the castle of Satyrane. At the feast afterward Chalmers becomes smitten by a magical simulacrum of the Lady Florimel, only to lose her in the confusion engendered by a sorcerous disruption of the proceedings. Later he and Shea undertake to find the root of the trouble, a secret brotherhood of enchanters they theorize has been tipping the balance against the forces of good, and which they hope to infiltrate and subvert. They meet the woodland huntress Belphebe, with whom Shea becomes enamored, and face the peril of the Blatant Beast, summoned up by Chalmers in a spell gone wrong.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Island_(novel)"title="Angel Island (novel)">
Five men are shipwrecked on an island in the Pacific Ocean while en route from America to the Orient. They are the only survivors, and their chances of being rescued are remote as a storm had driven their ship into uncharted waters before smashing it against rocks. The island is 20 miles long by 7 miles wide, and densely wooded with a freshwater lake in the center. After coming to terms with their predicament, the men begin collecting what they can from washed-up wreckage from the ship: food, clothes, tools and materials. They start building a camp near the beach and bemoan the fact that they are stuck on an island without women. But as the weeks pass, they begin to relish the absence of women and call the island an "Eveless Eden".Then one day the men start seeing what look like huge birds flying high in the sky, but when the "birds" come closer they realise that they are five beautiful winged-women. Suddenly the men are interested in women again and change the island's name to "Angel Island". Over time the women gradually come closer and start following the men around, who quickly fall in love with the women and name them Julia (their leader), Lulu, Chiquita, Clara and Peachy. But the men become frustrated by the women's aloofness and how easily they frighten, and decide to capture them, saying that they need pampering and protection. Once caught the men subdue the frightened women and cut off their wings. The women, who cannot walk on their small, delicate feet, are now completely helpless. The men quickly win their hearts by showering them with gifts and attention, and teach them English. The men and women pair off and four of them marry; Julia resists this temptation. With the women now domesticated, the men start paying less attention to them and spend long periods inland building a new camp near the lake. The women, who cannot fly, nor walk any distance, are stuck in the camp near the beach.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Keynes_Went_Wrong"title="Where Keynes Went Wrong">
This 384 page book for both general reader and economist questions the validity of John Maynard Keynes’s assumptions. Lewis argues that The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money is based almost exclusively on Keynes’s intuition rather than on demonstrated logic or solid evidence. Lewis begins by demystifying Keynes by giving his elaboration of Keynes's writings in General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money and other works. Using claims from the Austrian School of economics and citing historical evidence, Lewis then argues that government policies based on Keynes’s prescriptions have actually made things worse, not better. Lewis presents alternatives to Keynesian intervention and urges a change in current global policy to foster economic recovery.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greybeard"title="Greybeard">
Set decades after the Earth's population has been sterilised as a result of nuclear bomb tests conducted in Earth's orbit, the book shows a world emptying of humans, with only an ageing, childless population left.The story is mainly told through the eyes of Algernon "Algy" Timberlane (the titular Greybeard) and his wife, Martha.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorch_Trials"title="The Scorch Trials">
Thomas is sleeping in the dormitory with the other teenagers, known as the Gladers, who escaped from the Maze in the previous book and had been brought by a group of rescuers. Thomas is woken by a telepathic communication with Teresa, the only girl from the Glade, who is afraid.As Thomas wakes up, he finds that the facility is being attacked by Cranks, aggressive zombie-like people that have been infected by a plague known as the Flare. The disease attacks the brain and causes victims to lose their humanity, rendering them violent and insane creatures. Cranks were normal citizens before the Flare, when they became crazed zombie-like killers.Thomas and the others escape into the facility's common area and discover that their rescuers are dead. They also find that Teresa is missing from her room, and in her place is a boy, Aris Jones. Aris explains he escaped from a similar Maze experiment, Group B, in which he was the only male. The boys then discover tattoos on their necks that assign them specific roles and fates.The Gladers re-enter the common area and find that the bodies of their rescuers have disappeared. Since nothing has changed, the Gladers almost die of starvation. Thomas takes a rest and after waking up, he finds Minho with an apple. They also find a scientist from WICKED, Janson. He is described by the boys as Rat Man because of his rat-like appearance, and he explains WICKED has been studying them to try to find a cure for the Flare. He tells them they have been infected with the Flare and in two weeks must get through the Scorch, the most burned-out section of the Earth after the sun flares, to find a safe haven and get the cure. To get into the Scorch, the Gladers go through a Flat Trans, which is a type of portal that closes five minutes after the set hour.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_Nightfall"title="By Nightfall">
Peter and his wife, Rebecca—who edits a mid-level art magazine—have settled into a comfortable life in Manhattan's art world, but their staid existence is disrupted by the arrival of Rebecca's much younger brother, Ethan—known as Mizzy, short for "The Mistake." Family golden child Mizzy is a recovering drug addict whose current whim has landed him in New York where he wants to pursue a career in "the arts." Watching Mizzy—whose resemblance to a younger Rebecca unnerves Peter—coast through life without responsibilities makes Peter question his own choices and wonder if it's more than Mizzy's freedom that he covets.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corrections"title="The Corrections">
The novel shifts back and forth through the late 20th century, intermittently following spouses Alfred and Enid Lambert as they raise their children Gary, Chip, and Denise in the traditional Midwestern suburb of St. Jude, and the lives of each family member as the three children grow up, distancing themselves and living on the East Coast. Alfred, a rigid and strict patriarch who worked as a railroad engineer, has developed Parkinson's and shows increasingly unmanageable symptoms of dementia. Enid takes out her frustrations with him by attempting to impose her traditional judgments on her adult children's lives, to their annoyance.Their eldest son, Gary, is a successful but increasingly depressive and alcoholic banker living in Philadelphia with his wife, Caroline, and their three young sons. When Enid attempts to persuade Gary to bring his family to St. Jude for Christmas, Caroline is reluctant, and turns Gary's sons against him and Enid, worsening his depressive tendencies. In return, Gary attempts to force his parents to move to Philadelphia so that Alfred may undergo an experimental neurological treatment that he and Denise learn about.Also living in Philadelphia, their youngest child Denise finds growing success as an executive chef despite Enid's disapproval and persistent scrutiny of her personal life, and is commissioned to open a new restaurant. Simultaneously impulsive and a workaholic, Denise begins affairs with both her boss and his wife, and though the restaurant is successful, she is fired when this is discovered. Flashbacks to her childhood show her responding to her repressed upbringing by beginning an affair with one of her father's subordinates, a married railroad signals worker.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippa_Fisher_and_the_Dream-Maker's_Daughter"title="Philippa Fisher and the Dream-Maker's Daughter">
Philippa Fisher is lonely. She misses her fairy godsister, Daisy. While on vacation with her parents, she befriends a local girl, Robyn. Though she is excited to have a friend again, she cannot help feeling there is something strange about Robyn and her father.Meanwhile, Daisy, who is hard at work on a new mission, misses Philippa as well, so she decides to break the rules and visit her friend. The girls are happy to be reunited, but things soon begin to go horribly wrong with Daisy's assignment. When all three girls find themselves in danger, Philippa must work quickly to save her friends and herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull_Zero_Three"title="Hull Zero Three">
A man wakes up from a dream-like state, naked and freezing, with no memory. A little girl leads him through a series of corridors in a generation ship in search of warmth. She calls him Teacher, and together they encounter several other strange beings as they travel through the ship trying to survive and find the answers to their questions.Teacher eventually finds out that he is a clone and has been resurrected several times before, although those versions did not survive. Each clone was able to leave bits of information, a kind of breadcrumb trail for the next iteration. It is from these diaries that Teacher discovers the true nature of his situation. His companions are clones as well, genetically engineered for specific purposes.The ship's crew has separated into two groups, each vying for control of the ship. One faction wants to abandon their mission to colonize a planet which is already teeming with life, while the other wants to press forward. The ship is damaged during one of their battles, and the clones have been created in order to fix it.Teacher, who discovers his real name is Sanjay, eventually reaches the third hull of the book's title where he encounters Mother, who is the leader of the faction that wants to continue to their destination. She tells him she created him to be her ally. In the end, Teacher and his companions flee from Mother and await their arrival on the new planet.  
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sang_Pemimpi"title="Sang Pemimpi">
In The Dreamer, it is about life in the days of high school. The three main characters are Ikal, Arai and Jimbron. Ikal is the alter-ego of Andrea Hirata while Arai is a distant relative of an orphan called "Simpai Keramat" as he is the last family member who is still alive and eventually became the foster brother of Ikal. Jimbron is an orphan who is obsessed with horses and stutter when he's enthusiastic about something or when he is nervous.All three are intertwined in the story of friendship from childhood until they go to school in SMA Negeri Manggar (SMA means 'Sekolah Menengah Atas', equal to high school in English. The school’s name basically means The State High School of Manggar.), the first high school in the eastern Belitung. Attended school in the mornings and worked as a worker in the early morning fishing port, from their addiction of erotic movies in theaters and finally discovered by their religious teacher, the love story of Jimbron and Arai, Jimbron's farewell with Ikal and Arai who will study in Jakarta that makes them to separate but will still meet each other in France. Independently living separately from their parents with the background of poor economic conditions but with a big goal that if viewed from the background of their lives, is simply a dream.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framed_(Korman_novel)"title="Framed (Korman novel)">
The story takes place in Cedarville, while 'The Man with the Plan' Griffin Bing is having a hard time adjusting to his school's new atmosphere, which is more like a strict boot camp than a middle school. His new football fanatic principal, Dr. Egan, does not like Griffin, due to his past. To make matters worse, somebody has stolen the priceless Super Bowl ring that was in the school's showcase, with Griffin's retainer that he recently lost left in its place. Things only go from bad to worse when Griffin is accused of stealing it by Egan, and Griffin is sent to a state school for juvenile delinquents. Griffin realizes he has been framed by somebody and calculates a list of suspects: Griffin tries to get the suspects through a metal detector at the courthouse after sending them an anonymous e-mail stating that a buyer was interested in purchasing a valuable possession that "recently" came to them. Griffin unfortunately discovers that Dr. Egan is the only suspect left. Logan, Griffin's friend and amateur actor, agrees to get to know Egan's daughter so he can search the house and find the ring, getting him off the hook. The plan fails when they discover Egan does not have the ring. Griffin is placed under house arrest, where his friends meet him via video chat and formulate a final plan to clear their friend's name. Savannah, the animal lover of the group, finds that a type of rat is attracted to shiny objects and may have found Griffin's lost retainer then swapped it out with the ring. Melissa, the computer expert, hacks into Griffin's house arrest system that allows him to leave the house without the alarm coming off while his parents are out. At the school during its play, "Hail Caesar!", Griffin leads Egan to the pack rat's nest and clears his name. He is then raced home and resets his house arrest anklet as his parents arrive. Egan, who got Griffin home in time, clears up matters and apologizes to Griffin, saying that he was wrong to judge him. Also, Celia White shows up in an attempt to get a story on him. Before she can twist the words, however, Egan makes her stop and makes sure she won't be doing it again. After this, Griffin asks the court if it will take a truly good-hearted friend, Sheldon Brickhaus (dubbed Shank), out of the state school, so he can have a chance at life. They accept and it is implied that life will be better for Griffin and his friends.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegan_Virgin_Valentine"title="Vegan Virgin Valentine">
The story follows Mara Valentine, an overachiever high school senior in Brockport, New York headed to Yale University. Mara is a straight A student forever, got type A personality, vice president of student council, UN Model, is at the top of her class and she's competing with her ex-boyfriend Travis Hart for valedictorian. Yet she found her life is turned upside down when her sixteen-year-old niece Vivienne, who goes only by her first initial V, comes to live with Mara and her parents. V’s mother, Mara’s older sister, is a free-spirit who spends her life traveling from place to place, finding new jobs and boyfriends along the way; she is the complete opposite of Mara who has spent her life working hard to succeed in school to please her parents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schooled_(novel)"title="Schooled (novel)">
The plot begins with Capricorn Anderson, nicknamed "Cap," being arrested for driving without a license. Cap was driving his grandmother, Rain, to the hospital after she injured herself climbing a tree. He and Rain are hippies living on Garland Farm, a far-removed hippie commune with no telephone service. Rain's injury requires her to undergo physical therapy for two months, leaving Capricorn without a caretaker or a teacher. With no other choice, Capricorn is sent to a social worker, Flora Donnelly. Mrs. Donnelly, who also grew up on Garland Farm, realizes that she herself is the best person to look after Cap and takes him into her home. Flora decides to enroll Cap in Claverage Middle School (dubbed C Average by the student body) aside eighth grader while Rain recovers.At Claverage, Cap finds himself completely unfamiliar with most social situations and conveniences. On his first day, he meets eighth-grade bully and jock Zachary "Zach" Powers, who singles him out for the school's biggest prank: electing the most unpopular student as the Eighth Grade President and besetting the victim with impossible demands, causing them to break down. Cap also meets Hugh Winkleman, a geeky social outcast at school, and befriends him. Cap ends up becoming the eighth-grade president due to his abnormal appearance and nature. Flora, realizing that Cap's obliviousness to social life and bullying protects him from the brunt of the abuse, reluctantly keeps silent. Meanwhile, Zach advances his plans to break Cap, enlisting the majority of the students, one of whom is Naomi, a girl with a crush on Zach. Naomi writes Cap fake love letters to get Zach's approval but begins to find herself drawn to Cap. However, Cap is unaffected and carries on as usual.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lacuna"title="The Lacuna">
The novel tells the story of Harrison William Shepherd beginning with his childhood in Mexico during the 1930s. His parents are separated so he lives back and forth between the United States with his father and Mexico with his mother. During his time in Mexico he works as a plaster mixer for the mural artist Diego Rivera then as a cook for both him and his artist wife Frida Kahlo, with whom Shepherd develops a lifelong friendship. While living with and working for them, he also begins working as a secretary for Leon Trotsky who is hiding there, exiled by Stalin, and witnesses his assassination.He accompanies some of Kahlo's paintings to Washington DC where he witnesses the shootings of the Bonus Army. He then moves to Asheville, North Carolina, where he writes successful historical novels set in Mexico. However he is investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and after he is vilified by the press he returns to Mexico, taking his secretary, Violet Brown, with him. He disappears while swimming off the Pacific coast and is presumed dead. However Brown, the chief beneficiary of his will, later receives a letter from Kahlo hinting that he has survived, by swimming underwater along a lava tube which emerges inland in a cenote.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Isn't_What_It_Looks_Like"title="This Isn't What It Looks Like">
The story starts off with Cass awakening somewhere unknown to her, in an unknown time (she later finds she is in fact 500 years in the past), not knowing who she is, where she came from, or what she is doing. She sees a young boy stuck in a tree, and tries to rescue him, only to hear him repeatedly shouting the word "Goat!", evidently frightened. He runs down the road to his father, but neither of them even look at the girl. Confused, the girl walks up to a puddle, only to see that she has no reflection, realizing that she must be invisible, and that the boy was shouting "Ghost," not "Goat."Meanwhile, Max-Ernest visits Cass in the PICU section of the hospital, where Cass lies in bed comatose. Max-Ernest, though evidently depressed over his friend comatose, (and the fact that the Tuning Fork won't help him create the antidote for Cass) with his only other friend Yo-Yoji away in Japan has overcome his "fear/allergy" of chocolate and eats several bars in a matter of seconds.Back to Cass, she realizes she has somehow traveled in time and arrived in the Renaissance/Middle Ages. She also realizes she's invisible, not dead. At the streets, she meets a Seer, who can see her because she has something called the "Second Sight", obtained by an object called the Double Monocle (as this book centers around the sense of sight). She also does some fortune telling with a deck of tarot cards with Cass, showing her that the Ace of Wands card is upside down, meaning that an old wrong must be righted. The Seer gives a suggestion that maybe something has been stolen or she has stolen something. She then shows Cass the Fool card, with a picture of a fool, coincidentally the one that she saw while in the streets. When the Seer introduce her name as Clara or Cassandra, Cass' memories came back, making her remember about the Magician, the Jester, the Secret etc. She realizes she's on a mission to find the Secret, since she is the new Terces Society Secret Keeper. The Seer disappears but leaves Cass the Double Monocle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemia"title="Pandemia">
The disease that causes a world-wide catastrophe in the novel is H5N1, a strain of bird flu that was in the news at the time of publication. Its mutation and rapid spread eventually causes the collapse of society and many economies across the world.The book's central plot features a group of teens in Saline, Michigan that must try and escape the city and head to the countryside where they can hopefully stay alive long enough in their uncle's cabin to be rescued. But in doing so, the teens must use whatever weapons they can find to defend themselves against looters, insane killers, and potentially dangerous sources of infection. In a world gone mad, the group must find the necessities, food, water and shelter, to survive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Landscape"title="The Moral Landscape">
Harris's case starts with two premises: "(1) some people have better lives than others, and (2) these differences are related, in some lawful and not entirely arbitrary way, to states of the human brain and to states of the world". The idea is that a person is simply describing material facts (many about their brain) when they describe possible "better" and "worse" lives for themselves. Granting this, Harris says we must conclude that there are facts about which courses of action will allow one to pursue a better life.Harris emphasizes the importance of admitting that such facts exist, because he says this logic also applies to groups of people. He suggests there are better and worse ways for societies to pursue better lives. Just as for an individual, there may be multiple different paths and "peaks" to flourishing for societies—and many more ways to fail.Harris then makes a case that science can usefully define morality using facts about people's well-being. His arguments acknowledge that problems with this scientific definition of morality seem to be problems shared by all science, or reason and words in general. Harris also spends some time describing how science might engage nuances and challenges of identifying the best ways for individuals and groups to improve their lives. Many of these issues are covered below.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jihad_and_Genocide"title="Jihad and Genocide">
According to Michael Berenbaum writing in "The Jewish Daily Forward", the book explores the question "do Islamic leaders mean what they say when they call for genocide of the Jews?"According to Berenbaum, Rubenstein "offers compelling evidence that significant and prominent Muslim thinkers mean what they say and say what they mean when they speak of world peace only following Islamic world conquest."Rubenstein concluded: "Muslim ire has been aroused. At least among Islamists. It will not be calmed until the shame and the disgrace of Muslim defeats from the Battle of Lepanto (1571) to the 1947–1949 Palestine war (1948) and the Six-Day War (1967) have been erased. If we take the Islamists at their word, nothing less than genocide would suffice."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Inondation"title="L'Inondation">
On a beautiful May day, the Garonne floods, washing away all the bridges; ruining nearly two thousand houses; drowning hundreds; and leaving twenty thousand starving to death. The novella describes the immediate impact this flood has on one household.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauntlgrym"title="Gauntlgrym">
"Gauntlgrym" begins in the year 1409, DR in the dwarven complex of Mithral Hall. King Bruenor Battlehammer, with Drizzt Do'Urden, sits on his throne and mourns over the loss of his friend Regis and his adoptive daughter Catti-brie nearly 24 years before. Both Companions of the Hall were lost to the deadly effects of the Spellplague. Wulfgar has returned to Icewind Dale and has decided to remain in those most dangerous of lands. In a conversation with his dear friend Drizzt, Bruenor laments over all that has happened since those terrible events. The signing of the Treaty of Garumn's Gorge has brought a lasting peace to the Silver Marches. Obould II has inherited the Kingdom of Many-Arrows from his father Obould I, though he is not nearly as clever or as powerful as his father. Above all, King Bruenor regrets never completing his quest to find the legendary home of the Delzoun dwarves, Gauntlgrym.Meanwhile, Nanfoodle, the gnome inventor famous for his Moment of Elminister - a purposeful explosion that sent gas swarming to the surface during a vicious battle 40 years earlier - and Jessa Dribble-Obould, an orc, hatch a plan to poison Bruenor. Nanfoodle poisons the king's ale. Thibbledorf Pwent the battlerager notices something amiss about Nanfoodle's behavior but cannot quite place it. Bruenor drinks the ale and shortly after the entire population of Mithral Hall goes into mourning at the abrupt death of their king. Banak Brawnanvil is named Eleventh King of Mithral Hall. Pwent, distraught over the death of Bruenor, seeks out Nanfoodle and Jessa for answers in the hills outside of Mithral Hall. Upon finding the traitorous pair, he attempts to attack them for answers. During the fight, Drizzt, as well as a very-much alive Bruenor arrives; the latter demands of Pwent what he is doing here instead of at Banak's side. The ever-loyal Pwent replies that his life and his duty lie with his beloved king. It is then revealed that Bruenor faked his death with the help of Nanfoodle and Jessa in order to continue his quest for Gauntlgrym while leaving Mithral Hall in Banak's good hands. Drizzt, Bruenor, Jessa, Nanfoodle, Pwent, Guenhwyvar, and Andahar then leave on their secret quest. (Andahar is a magical unicorn that can be summoned much like Guenhwyvar, Athrogate's demon boar, or Jarlaxle's nightmare. Andahar was a gift to Drizzt from the ruling council of Silverymoon for his work with both blade and diplomacy during the Third Orc War.)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Kind_of_Traitor"title="Our Kind of Traitor">
On a tennis holiday in Antigua, British university lecturer Peregrine "Perry" Makepiece and his lawyer girlfriend Gail Perkins meet mysterious Russian business oligarch Dmitri "Dima" Vladimirovich Krasnov and his family. Dima, who describes himself as "the world's number one money launderer," deliberately sought contact with Perry hoping that he is a British spy or knows one. This is because Dima wants Perry to pass on information about his criminal activities to British intelligence, in exchange for protection for himself and his family. Dima fears for his life because "The Prince", the new leader of his criminal brotherhood, had a good friend of Dima and his wife murdered. The Prince now wants Dima to come to Bern to sign over control of the money-laundering operations to him.Back in the UK, Perry reaches out to a colleague with contacts in the British intelligence community and hands over Dima's notes. Since these implicate a high-ranking decision maker in the UK, British intelligence decides to put government fixer Hector Meredith in charge of a secret semi-official investigation. Hector recruits disgraced intelligence officer Luke Weaver to handle the investigation. Luke, eager to redeem himself, makes all the necessary arrangements. Dima insists that Perry and Gail be present during his first contact with British intelligence in Paris during the 2009 Roland Garros final, so the couple travel to Paris where they again meet with Dima and his family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodyguard_of_Lies"title="Bodyguard of Lies">
"Bodyguard of Lies" opens with an introduction to Ultra, the codename for decrypted signals intelligence. It goes on to document the origins of the London Controlling Section (LCS) and the work of Dudley Clarke in the Middle East. In late 1942, Allied high command in London became aware of Clarke's successes during the North African campaign. Based on his theories of deception, the LCS was created under Colonel John Bevan and granted broad powers to plan deception strategy. The introduction finishes with a discussion of how the Allies evolved deception strategy prior to 1943, including the Double-Cross System (the Allied system of double agents). The second section of the book introduces the German intelligence forces, in particular Admiral Canaris and his "Abwehr" intelligence agency. Brown discusses early deceptions, such as those surrounding Operation Torch, conducted against the Germans, and how the Abwehr struggled to decipher the information it was being fed.The third section of the book covers Allied deceptions during 1943, in particular Operation Mincemeat. Brown introduces Plan Jael, the early revision of Operation Bodyguard, and follows Bevan's work in creating the deception plan. The fourth section covers the events of early 1944, leading up to the Normandy landings on 6 June. In particular, Brown discusses Operation Fortitude and the fictional First US Army Group, a key part of Bodyguard, calling it "the greatest charade in history". The final section of the book covers events on and after D-Day, including physical deceptions carried out on the night of the invasion, and the continued impact of Bodyguard in the months after the landings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Engines"title="The God Engines">
The story takes place in a universe where space travel is accomplished by chaining intelligent, human-like creatures called gods to a spacecraft and torturing them to drive the ship. The people are ruled by an organization called the Bishopry Militant, who worship a powerful being. Captain Ean Tephe is completely faithful to the Bishopry, but his faith comes under test when he is assigned a secret mission in which his ship's god seems to have a keen interest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Finkler_Question"title="The Finkler Question">
Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they remain good friends, keeping contact with their former teacher Libor Sevcik, a Czech Jew nearing ninety who once tutored in Czech history and worked part-time as a Hollywood gossip columnist.Now, both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and Treslove's chequered and unsuccessful record with women qualify him as an honorary third widower. They dine together at Libor's grand apartment in central London: it is a sweetly painful evening of reminiscences. At 11:30 pm that night, Treslove is attacked while walking home. It seems he is mugged by a woman who hisses the phrase "You Ju" at him. After much cogitation, Treslove believes what the assailant meant was "You, Jew", sparking a long-running obsession with all things and people Jewish – which he refers to as "Finkler". Treslove gets into a relationship with Hephzibah, the great-grandniece of Libor, and is haunted by his adulterous affair with Tyler, Finkler's deceased wife. In the meantime, Finkler joins an "ASHamed" organization which favours the Palestinians over the Israelis over their land disputes. The novel coalesces into an ending that brings together the disparate narrative strands amongst the three central male characters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Point_of_Law"title="A Point of Law">
Senator Decius Metellus has returned from his military expedition to Cyprus, having concluded a successful campaign against local pirates and gathered enough booty to pay off his outstanding debts and finance his campaign for praetor. He is campaigning in the Forum when a young aristocrat loudly denounces him for alleged fraud and theft while in office on Cyprus, and boldly threatening to prosecute him for said acts. A minor scuffle breaks out, before the young man is dragged away.Later, the young man is found gruesomely murdered, and suspicion falls on Decius. To his consternation, his family inform him that, although the charges are unlikely to stick, they can nevertheless delay his election for at least a year. Decius, thinking hard, realizes that the young man may have been a virtual nobody, but could recite a pedigree that would virtually guarantee him popular support - claiming descent from Scipio Africanus and the Gracchi, among others. This means that the young man was likely the figurehead of a conspiracy. The exact aim of the conspiracy is unclear, but Decius reasons that someone must be aiming at reducing the Caecilia Metelli's voting bloc in the Senate (as Decius concedes, he himself is not that important).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_of_Neptune"title="The Son of Neptune">
Twenty-two months after Percy Jackson's defense of Mount Olympus in "The Last Olympian", Percy finds himself alone and on the run from monsters in northern California without his memories. With the guidance of Lupa, the wolf-goddess and protector of ancient Rome, he makes his way to Camp Jupiter, a Roman demigod training camp and counterpart to the Greek demigods' Camp Half-Blood. Upon arriving, he is attacked by Gorgons — Stheno and Euryale — and successfully defends a disguised Juno and the camp with the help of the guards on duty. Having been protected by Percy during the attack, Juno announces Percy's arrival with approval, identifying him as a son of Neptune. Nobody knows that he is actually a son of the Greek god Poseidon. She tells him privately that he can only regain his memory by learning to be a hero again and successfully surviving the challenges he encounters at camp.He quickly befriends Frank Zhang, son of Mars, and Hazel Levesque, daughter of Pluto. He is introduced to the praetor of the camp, Reyna, and the augur Octavian, who quickly takes a disliking to Percy. Octavian tells Percy that the Book of Prophecies is missing. Being outcasts themselves at Camp Jupiter, Frank and Hazel empathize with Percy's outsider status and consider it their duty to help him adjust and acclimatize quickly to the camp's routines and leadership. But before any of them has a chance to gain their footing, they receive a prophecy from Mars, the Roman god of war, and are ordered to go on a quest to rescue Thanatos, the god of death, from the Giant Alcyoneus, who is hiding deep in Alaska.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjure_Wife"title="Conjure Wife">
Tansy Saylor is the wife of an up-and-coming young sociology professor at a small, conservative American college. She is also a witch. Her husband, Norman, discovers this one day while rummaging through her dressing table: he finds vials of graveyard dirt, packets of hair and fingernail clippings from their acquaintances, and other evidence of her witchcraft. He confronts Tansy, and manages to convince her that her faith in magic is a result of superstition and neurosis. Tansy burns her charms; and Norman's luck immediately goes sour. He realizes that he had been protected, up till now, by Tansy's charms, and that as a result of his meddling, they are both now powerless to counteract the spells and charms of the other witches all around them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Infinity_Concerto"title="The Infinity Concerto">
In 1939, a composer named Arno Waltiri premiered his latest work, Concerto Opus 45: "Infinity". After the concert, another composer, who had been in the audience, filed a lawsuit against Waltiri, claiming that he was no longer able to properly hear or compose music after hearing Waltiri's work. Over the next several months, dozens of people simply disappeared, and the only thing they had in common with one another was that they had been in the audience at that same performance. Waltiri had been inspired to write the concerto by several conversations with a mysterious man named David Clarkham. The Concerto turns out to have been a "Song of Power". Songs of Power, if properly applied by those who understand them, have the power to literally remake the world. Songs of Power can exist in many artistic forms, including music, poetry, dance, art, architecture, and some less obvious creative fields. Clarkham had disappeared after the performance too, but he had left Waltiri a book and the key to his house, which Waltiri had never used.The book's present story follows the experiences of a 16 years-old young man named Michael Perrin, a would be poet, who lives close to Waltiri and befriends him. Michael meets Waltiri two months before the latter's death, and receives from Waltiri the book and the key. Following the instructions on a piece of paper he found inserted in the book, Michael enters Clarkham's house, which has been vacant for decades and, through a creepy garden and back-alley acting as planar gates, Perrin finds himself in Sidhedark, a world inhabited by a powerful race of beings calling themselves the Sidhe (pronounced "shee"), who are divided into many sub-races (Faers, Umbrals, Riverines, Meteorals, Pelagals, Arborals and Amorphals) of different shapes and magical abilities, and are associated with many ancient human myths about fairiy folks. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor_of_Nihon-Ja"title="The Emperor of Nihon-Ja">
Horace has gone missing. Months have passed since he was sent on a military mission to the court of the Emperor of Nihon-Ja with his friend, former wardmate and Scribeschool apprentice George, but he has failed to return. Meanwhile, Halt, Will, Selethen (the leader of the Arridi) and Alyss (a Courier and Will's love interest) are in Toscana overseeing a demonstration using tight formations to overcome more skilled opponents and aid in the completion of a treaty between Arrida and Toscana. When Crown Princess Cassandra arrives notifying everyone of Horace's absence, the Araluens and Selethen embark on a Skandian duty ship to find Horace.They find that Horace has become embroiled in Nihon-Ja's politics. An arrogant "Senshi" warlord known as Arisaka, a member of the Nihon-Ja warrior class, has rebelled against the rightful Emperor Shigeru out of fear that he will usurp the "Senshi"'s influence in the country and due to his belief that it was he who should have been named Emperor when the previous one died instead of Shigeru. He has convinced the "Senshi" of his clan, the Shimonseki Clan, and another, the Umaki Clan, to join him in his coup, manipulating them into believing that Shigeru's actions violate his oath as a "Senshi". Shigeru, though a "Senshi" himself, is also a man of the people and has been trying to reform his nation's strict social system, which Arisaka argues to be a betrayal of his class. Arisaka's men have seized the capital of Ito and slaughtered and scattered most of Shigeru's Clan, while the remaining clans, who are without the strength to face the Shimonseki and Umaki due to their reputed strength as the two strongest clans in Nihon-Ja, are remaining silent and claim that if Arisaka's claim is to be believed, then perhaps his cause is justified. Horace has chosen to stay and lend support to the deposed ruler. Pursued by the rebel leader and master swordsman Arisaka, Horace and Shigeru flee along with Shigeru's cousin and guard Shukin and a small force of "Senshi" from Shigeru's Clan. Their only hope is to find the fabled fortress of Ran-Koshi, which is mentioned in a legend and said to have impossibly high walls. The three lead their small entourage of 50 "Senshi" around the native villages recruiting the "Kikori", lumberjacks native to the area who have long been abused and looked-down up by the "Senshi" but are fiercely loyal to the Emperor. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragon's_Apprentice"title="The Dragon's Apprentice">
The novel opens in 1943, seven years after the previous book "The Shadow Dragons" and in the midst of World War II. The Caretakers learn that the Keep of Time has finally disintegrated, causing time to collapse; whereafter Rose Dyson, their ward, is instructed to find Samaranth's apprentice, ask the dragon a riddle, and save the Archipelago of Dreams from the Echthroi. The Caretakers are trapped in the Archipelago by the destruction of the Keep of Time; and when John, Jack, and Charles return to the Summer Country (congruent to the historical world) in 1943, their refuge Tamerlane House, with all of its inhabitants, is transported to 1945 and attached to Oxford. The Caretakers Emeritis learn from John and Jack that Charles died two weeks earlier.John, Jack, Fred the badger, the Tin Man (Roger Bacon), Laura Glue, Richard Burton, Harry Houdini, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the mysterious End of Time, a friend of Burton's, travel to Avalon and the Archipelago but discover it in ruins and learn that two thousand years have passed in the Archipelago since their last visit. At the capital Paralon, they meet a boy named Coal, the last of Arthur's descendants, whom the animals are protecting. From Aven, the daughter of H.G. Wells, they learn of what has happened over the last two thousand years. As the dark star 'Rao' approaches, they go through a door from the Keep of Time (given, in the previous book, to ex-antagonist Madoc) and appear in Dickensian London. There, a young man named Edmund McGee leads them to his master, Benjamin Franklin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help!_I'm_Trapped_in_my_Teacher's_Body"title="Help! I'm Trapped in my Teacher's Body">
Jake Sherman is sitting in his sixth grade science class with his friends Josh Hopka and Andy Kent. The class is taught by the boring teacher Mr. Dirksen, who does nothing but lecture the students, and never does anything fun. As he lectures them, Jake and his friends load spitball shooters and shoot them at Mr. Dirksen. Andy and Josh manage to hide their shooters, but Jake is caught by Mr. Dirksen.After class, Mr. Dirksen talks with Jake. He informs him that he is not going to be given detention, since Mr. Dirksen does not believe it will do any good. He says instead that Jake will, as punishment, carry a heavy box home for him.After school, Mr. Dirksen and Jake walk home to Mr. Dirksen's house. As they reach it, a storm begins to come in. Mr. Dirksen shows Jake an invention that he is building in his garage. He calls it the Dirksen Intelligence Transfer System, and hopes that it will one day gain the ability to transfer intelligence from one being to another, thus eliminating the need for education or training. As he finishes explaining his invention, a bolt of lightning strikes the house, knocking Jake and Mr. Dirksen unconscious.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHhH"title="HHhH">
The novel follows the history of the operation and the lives of its protagonists—Reinhard Heydrich and his assassins Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš. It is interlaced with the author's account of the process of researching and writing the book, his commentary about other literary and media treatments of the subject, and reflections about the extent to which the behavior of real people may of necessity be fictionalised in a historical novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mourning_Ruby"title="Mourning Ruby">
Rebecca was abandoned by her mother in a shoebox in the backyard of an Italian restaurant when she was two years old. She is adopted by foster parents and thirty years later marries Adam, a consultant neonatologist dealing with premature babies. She gives birth to Ruby and starts a new life for herself and her small family. But a tragedy suddenly upsets the calm order of her life and changes its course forever. The novel traces the harrowing life of Rebecca with several interesting temporal juxtapositions and flashbacks that add to its complexity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Letter_for_the_King"title="The Letter for the King">
"The Letter for the King" is set in a fictional medieval world. In the story, a youth's adventure is externalized in a search for a letter, which results in a discovery of their own persona.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eyes_of_My_Princess"title="The Eyes of My Princess">
The story begins when Jose Carlos, a shy fifteen-year-old, realizes he has fallen in love for the first time with the new girl in his school. After school, a strange man arrives with Carlos's classmate, Mario, and lures him into his car. The man is a porn producer, and he tries to convince Carlos to get his classmate Ariadne to make porn with them. Finally Carlos escapes with the help of Ariadne, who is a friend of the new girl. Carlos tells his parents to go to the police, but they are unable to locate the man, who abducted Mario.One day he decides to talk with the new girl, Sheccid (her real name is Justiniana Deghemteri, but Carlos changes it for the name of an Arabic princess). He confesses his love, but things go wrong when Ariadne recognizes him and tells Sheccid he is related to the pervert who tried to abduct her. Carlos does not give up and, moved by the love he feels, he overcomes the fears he has. At first he begins writing, like his grandparent, realizing he is good at it. His new journal is filled with all his thoughts and poems that he writes for Sheccid.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bør_Børson"title="Bør Børson">
"Bør Børson Olderstad" is a farmer's son from the fictional valley Olderdalen. Dreaming about money, wealth and a position at the board of the local savings bank, he has changed his last name to Børson, and started a local grocery store. The name Børson is a paraphrase of the Norwegian word "", from , in . Via various burlesque episodes he eventually ends up as a millionaire. The story ends with a wedding between Bør and Josefine Torsøien, a girl from a nearby farm. The novel is set in the boom period during World War I. Norway did not participate in the war, but the country's merchant fleet carried goods at increasing freight rates. The sea transport was a risky business that cost the lives of 2,000 Norwegian seamen, while a volatile stock market could multiply investments over short periods of time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cop_this_Lot"title="Cop this Lot">
Giovanni 'Nino' Culotta is an Italian immigrant, who came to Australia as a journalist, but became a brickie's labourer. Now, several years later, he is a builder, and married to Kay, with a daughter Maria and son Nino junior.Nino decides to travel back to Italy to see his parents, and takes not only Kay, but his mates Joe and Dennis, who have never left Sydney. They travel by aeroplane and cargo ship and buy a cheap car in Germany to drive to Italy.They arrive at the Cullota family villa, and Nino's father, a crusty patriarch, is only concerned that Nino and Kay have not been 'properly' married by an Italian priest.By the time they return to Sydney, Joe and Dennis, despite their working-class 'Ocker' background, have acquired a veneer of European sophistication, preferring wine to beer and unwilling even to get drunk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coming_of_the_Terraphiles"title="The Coming of the Terraphiles">
In order to avert the impending collapse of the Multiverse from the mysterious "dark tides" that have begun to appear, the Doctor and Amy join the Terraphiles, a group of humans in the far future obsessed with recreating Earth's distant past and reenacting medieval Earth sports (or rather, unknowingly comic misinterpretations of the same). The Doctor and his new friends compete in a Grand Tournament in the Miggea star system, which lies on the border of parallel realities. The prize of the contest is an ancient artifact called the Arrow of Law, sought also by the Doctor's old foe Captain Cornelius and his crew of space pirates.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Matter_(Paver_novel)"title="Dark Matter (Paver novel)">
In London in 1937, 28-year-old Jack Miller is stuck in a dead-end job and jumps at the chance to be a wireless operator on a year-long Arctic expedition to Gruhuken on the northeast coast of Svalbard, though he has reservations about the class divide separating him from the other, Oxford University educated, members of the team. Bad luck seems to dog the expedition and when they arrive at Longyearbyen for the last leg of their journey, they are warned to choose another destination as their base, but the vague rumours about Gruhuken fail to dissuade them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Evita"title="Santa Evita">
In a blend of fact and fiction, the story tracks Argentine first lady Eva Perón's perfectly embalmed corpse after her death from cancer at age 33, including how it was seized by the Argentine Military, following the ouster of her husband in 1955. At that time, the corpse was considered a sacred relic, and while army officials wanted to keep it out of the hands of the Peronism political movement, they also considered the consequences of destroying it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Forget_the_Bacon!"title="Don't Forget the Bacon!">
The story is about a little boy who leaves his home with his dog to shop for food items for his mother, and attempts to remember the grocery list of things she wanted him to buy. The original request from his mother is "six farm eggs, a cake for tea, a pound of pears, and don't forget the bacon". Along with the dog, he is accompanied on his trip by a butterfly. In order to avoid forgetting items, the boy recites his mother's list to himself. Throughout his trip to the grocery store, the boy sees items along the way that play tricks with his memory, and items on his list one-by-one become substituted with other goods. He keeps thinking about the wrong things and buys the wrong things. For the first item, "Six farm eggs" initially becomes "Six fat legs", then "Six clothes pegs". The second one, "A cake for tea" initially becomes "A cape for me", then "A rake for leaves". Finally, for the third, "A pound of pears" initially becomes "A flight of stairs", then "A pile of chairs". By the end of his trip, the boy has forgotten the initial items requested, and supplants them in his mind with "Six clothes pegs, a rake for leaves, a pile of chairs, and don't forget the bacon". Then he goes to the junk shop and says to a merchant there, "Six clothes pegs, a rake for leaves, and a pile of chairs please!". Before the boy is about to buy the six clothes pegs, the rake for leaves, and the pile of chairs, the merchant gets confused from the boy's grocery list (requested by his mother). The merchant in the junk shop, he then assists the boy in compiling about this odd list. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertram_Cope's_Year"title="Bertram Cope's Year">
The time is the present. Following some time teaching in Winnebago, Wisconsin, Bertram Cope, 24, arrives at the university to spend a year as an instructor in English literature. Living modestly, he cultivates the society of the well-to-do middle-aged with fine homes. At an afternoon tea, he makes a favorable impression on Mrs. Medora Phillips, the wealthy widow of an art dealer, and Basil Randolph, an "academic manqué," a stockbroker and a collector of books and curiosities. Phillips sees Cope as an interesting addition to her salons. Randolph sees him as a candidate for mentoring. Cope visits Mrs. Phillips at home and she continues a conversational style Cope describes as "pretending to quarrel as a means of entertaining you."(24) Although Cope says little of note and sings several airs without distinction, he is judged favorably. Mrs. Phillips teases him for lacking any interest in the girls she introduces to him. Randolph, who occasionally entertains undergraduates "who readily forgot and quickly dropped you,"(40) researches Cope's background and discusses him with Mrs. Phillips, concluding that Cope has "more than one touch of gentility."(42) Randolph visits Mrs. Phillips' wheelchair-using tenant, Joe Foster, her late husband's half-brother, and learns that she imagines Cope may prove a match for one of the three girls who live in her house, Amy, Hortense, and Carolyn. From his quarters upstairs, Joe heard Cope's singing and was impressed enough to want to learn more of Cope. When Mrs. Phillips invites Randolph to a young people's dinner that will include Cope, he feels "a slight stir of elation."(54)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_an_Eagle"title="Once an Eagle">
## Book 1: Orchard.This section covers the young Sam Damon's formative years in small-town Nebraska, during which he earns his nickname "The Night Clerk." After being put on a wait list to attend West Point, Sam decides to enlist in the Army. This section contains Damon's experiences in basic training and deployment south of the border during the Mexican expedition, though he sees no combat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hässelby_(novel)"title="Hässelby (novel)">
In Harstad's novel, Albert is 42 years old and still lives with his father in the same apartment. When his father suddenly dies, Albert sees it as an opportunity to finally create the life for himself that he longed for all these years he was taking care of his father. A large part of the novel is made up of a flashback to 1985-86 when Albert traveled around Europe with his friend Viktor, and by coincidence ends up in Hong Kong and later Paris, where he meets a girl and almost decides to stay for good, before ending up returning to his father in Hässelby. The novel starts as a traditional novel exploring themes such as the relationship between father and son, growing up in suburbia, friendship and politics, but throughout the novel the tone gradually gets darker and darker as more surreal elements are introduced. The novel ends as a nightmarish tale where Albert discovers that someone have been following him for over twenty years, all over the world, and that the world is coming to an end.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Savage_Girl_(novel)"title="The Savage Girl (novel)">
Burnt-out art student Ursula Van Urden arrives in Middle City, a fictional American metropolis built around a volcano, with plans to care for her younger sister, Ivy. A well known fashion model, Ivy had recently suffered a much-publicized schizophrenic meltdown. Having spent some time in Middle City, Ursula soon begins working for Ivy's former boyfriend. Her employer, Chas Lacouture is the owner of the trendspotting firm, Tomorrow, Ltd. She is trained as a trendspotter by both Chas a new coworker, Javier Delreal.A manic optimist, Javier takes her on rollerblading and party-crashing expeditions, predicting a new megatrend he calls the "Light Age," a "renaissance of self-creation," which he believes will coincide with the defeat of irony. By contrast, Chas, a cynical ex-philosophy professor, takes her to skulk in supermarkets and spy on customers, and introduces her to the concept of "paradessence,", the "broken soul" at the center of every product, consisting of two opposing desires that it will promise to satisfy simultaneously.As Ivy resumes her modeling activities, Ursula's trendspotting work focuses on a homeless girl who lives in a city park, makes her own clothing, and hunts pigeons for food. This eponymous "savage girl" forms the basis of a marketing campaign for a new product, "Diet Water," and serves as a harbinger, for Chas and Javier alike, of the new age to come.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Hunter"title="Conan the Hunter">
After facing a sewer monster, Conan is enlisted against a demon sorceress's conspiracy in restoring the wealth of her ancient race. In their struggle against Valtresca and Azora, the Cimmerian and his allies Salvorus, Kailash the hillman, and a young priest, Madesus, encounter numerous traps and divine intervention in an adventure culminating in a ruined temple with legions of gargoyles and the resurrection of the horrific villain Skauraul.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_in_Waiting_(novel)"title="Lady in Waiting (novel)">
The story is primarily about the life and exploits of Sir Walter Raleigh, albeit with the bulk of the narration revolving around the impact of his life on Elizabeth Throckmorton, who is referred to as 'Bess.' It begins with Raleigh's (this is the spelling used in the novel) childhood in Budleigh, and quickly shows his close relationship with half-brother Humphrey Gilbert. Glibert is attributed as sharing and inspiring Raleigh's lifelong passion of wanting explore the New World, beginning with a plan to seek the fabled Northwest Passage. Much of the rest of Raleigh's life is explained as being primarily motivated by this passion.Bess is brought into the novel when Raleigh is seeking favor at Queen Elizabeth's court at the Palace of Westminster. She is 12 years of age, and Raleigh makes a strong impression on her during a chance meeting in a garden. He is whistling the tune of Greensleeves, which is used throughout the novel, and shares his frustration of being stymied in his goals of exploration. Bess grows up at court in proximity to Mary Sidney, eventually becoming a Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen. She is immersed in court culture, early on being connected with Philip Sidney, Robert Devereux, and Robin Cecil. They are all shown as children growing up in the shadows of their elders, Lord Essex and Lord Burghley, respectively; and the court intrigues of the times. The two 'Robins' are connected with Raleigh in what is described as a Triumvirate, around which both her life and the fate of England are shown as revolving.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Full_and_True_Account_of_the_Wonderful_Mission_of_Earl_Lavender"title="A Full and True Account of the Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender">
The story begins with two gentlemen dining in a restaurant in the Strand, carefully keeping track of their finances as they order each item. It's revealed that the two men met recently, as they were staying in the same hotel; they both have been fleeing from something (later revealed to be their respective brides) and using aliases in London—in fact they chose the identical alias of J. Smith at the hotel, which facilitated their meeting. They finish their dinner early, not having enough cash to continue ordering at the restaurant they had chosen; on their way to a cheaper establishment, the younger of the two men declares his new religion of Evolution, and asks the other fellow to become his disciple. The man agrees. The young man gives himself the new name of The Earl de l'Avenir, which is immediately corrupted into Earl Lavender; he then christens the older man as Lord New Broom, which is shortened down to Lord Brumm. Earl Lavender explains that his mission is to find the fittest of all women and to mate with her.The rest of the book finds Earl Lavender leading the way through London, assuring Lord Brumm that Evolution will care for them. They eat at multiple restaurants despite having no money, and luck always causes someone else to be at hand who is willing to pay for them. One mysterious Veiled Lady who pays their bill leads them, afterwards, to an underground city where they are all flogged with knotted cords as part of a strange religious ritual, and then given beds for the night. Earl Lavender perceives that the Veiled Lady may be the fittest of women that he's been looking for, but he is kicked out of the underground city for declaring his passion for her (as these floggings are intended to be completely non-sexual) and Lord Brumm is soon ejected likewise; they are warned that they may return to the underground city in the future but that if there is any more misbehaving, they will be stripped and sent forth into the London streets during broad daylight.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Sheldon's_After_the_Darkness"title="Sidney Sheldon's After the Darkness">
Grace Brookstein lived a luxurious lifestyle despite the economic free fall in the US. Then suddenly her billionaire husband Lenny mysteriously disappears in a tragic sailing accident. Along with Lenny's disappearance, Lenny's hedge fund, the Quorum, which has a $75 billion investment, is also missing and everyone believes that Grace stole the money. Lenny's death was ruled as suicide and Grace was convicted and imprisoned. Grace believed that she was framed. Now alone with no one to turn to, she is determined to find out who is framing her and is desperate for revenge.The book provides a brilliant description of the transformation of the quiet Grace Brookstein from an innocent young woman who had 'never even looked at the price tags of things' to a determined person who fights the world alone, on her own.Once Grace is convicted of money laundering, she is betrayed by her family and friends. She has no one to turn to and tries to commit suicide but she survives. This is when Grace starts to undergo a change. With the help of her cellmates, she flees from prison. The rest of the story deals with the way she reaches the culprit, the further betrayals she suffers and how she deals with the abominable situations she encounters in her way of taking revenge. On her way to truth, she realises that till now she had been living in a fantasy and the reality was something totally disparate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_the_Lightnings"title="With the Lightnings">
During a war between a Republic of Cinnabar and the Alliance of Free Stars, a coup d'état takes place on a neutral planet of Kostroma, with both factions becoming involved. Two Cinnabarian protagonists – a navy lieutenant and émigré librarian – find themselves in the center of the unfolding events.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Warrior's_Apprentice"title="The Warrior's Apprentice">
When Miles Vorkosigan is disqualified from joining the Barrayaran Imperial Service Academy because he broke both his legs during the initial physical entrance exams, he sets about trying to prove himself a hero by other means. The resulting chain of events leads to his taking command of a company of space mercenaries, under the alias "Admiral Miles Naismith".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cetaganda"title="Cetaganda">
Previous novels referred to the Cetagandan Empire because of its occupation of Barrayar decades before the events of the first novel, "Shards of Honor". Cetagandan soldiers of the "ghem" military class appear in "The Warrior's Apprentice", "Ethan of Athos" and "Brothers in Arms". This novel introduces the "haut" ruling class of the Empire. The "haut" have different long-range goals than their "ghem" underlings.Miles and Ivan are sent to the home world of the Cetagandan Empire to represent Barrayar at the state funeral of the dowager Empress Lisbet, mother of the current emperor, the "haut" Fletchir Giaja. They quickly become entangled in an internal Cetagandan plot when they arrive at a nearly deserted docking bay, much to their puzzlement. A ba (a sexless servant of the Cetagandan rulers) unexpectedly rushes into their spaceship. A struggle ensues, in which the ba drops a weapon and some sort of artifact before fleeing. Miles takes it upon himself to investigate — without informing his superiors — and eventually discovers that the artifact is a fake copy of the priceless Great Key, which has been stolen. The ba is later found dead.Realizing that an unknown enemy is trying to frame him and Barrayar, Miles forms an unusual alliance with the "haut" Rian Degtiar, the "Handmaiden of the Star Crèche", who is charged with the duties of Empress until the new one is chosen. The Star Crèche is the heart of the genetic engineering project that is the "haut" class's efforts to evolve beyond the merely human.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Kick"title="The Million Dollar Kick">
13-year-old Whisper Nelson despises sports ever since when in third grade, she accidentally scored an own goal during a soccer game at a field by Lake Overholser. Sooner later, when her sister is too young to sign up, she signs up for a contest in which the winner gets a chance to score a goal for one million dollars against famous goalie Carmen Applegate. The winner is chosen by the best ad for the Kick, Oklahoma City's soccer team, and Whisper's ('The Kick Kick Butt') wins the contest. Whisper meets Ellie, who soon becomes her teacher to prepare for the big day. Whisper ends up on the news for winning the ad contest, and ends up in the newspaper as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dwarves_(novel)"title="The Dwarves (novel)">
Tungdil Goldhand, a young blacksmith, is the only dwarf in Ionandar, one of Girdlegard's five enchanted realms. These realms, rich in magical energy forcefields, are ruled by magi, while other lands are ruled by the kings and queens of Girdlegard. Tungdil's "foster father", the venerable magus Lot-Ionan, sends him on an errand to return some artifacts to one of his former pupils and travel to the secondling dwarf kingdom. Along the way he meets Boïndil Doubleblade and Boëndal Hookhand, two secondling twins, who lead him to Ogreʼs Death, a fortress in their kingdom. They slaughter orcs and avoid Nudin the Knowledge-Lusty (Nôdʼonn the Doublefold), a magus who has fallen under the spell of The Perished Land (the evil spirit of Girdlegard). Nudin betrays the magi, kills them, and corrupts the forcefields so that he alone can use them. The Perished Land attempted and succeeded in infiltrating Girdlegard and defeating the dwarves' fifthling kingdom eleven hundred cycles ago. Whoever dies on the Perished Land is raised as a revenant in service of the Perished Land's spirit; however, if the revenant's spirit is strong enough, it can resist the Perished Land's influence. Tungdil owns the books that explain the only way to defeat Nudin: forge a magical axe called Keenfire that needs to have a steel blade, a hilt made of the extinct tree known as the sidguredaisy, and runes engraved with a combination of all the known metals. They decapitate Nudin, but he survives thanks to the dark power of the spirit of the Perished Land possessing him. They meet Andôkai, the last surviving maga, and her bodyguard, Djerůn. Tungdil is also involved in a plot to delegitimize Gandogar's claim to the throne. Gandogar has been convinced by his evil advisor, Bislipur Surestroke, who is secretly a thirdling (an evil race of dwarves who throughout history have tried to end the lives of all other dwarves) that the elves betrayed the fifthlings and want to create a war with them while they're weak from the constant battles with the Perished Land. Tundgil and Gandogar then set out to forge Keenfire for the fifth challenge that was taken out by chance by Bislipur in the draw.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Midnight_Charter"title="The Midnight Charter">
The novel starts with Mark in a delirious, dream-like state because he suffers from a deadly fever. He has been sold by his father to Dr Theophilus in the hope that he will treat Mark. While he is being treated, he meets Lily, a servant to the doctor's grandfather, Count Stelli, the city's greatest astrologer. She helps him adjust to his new life. Mark is soon cured of the terrible fever and will soon leave Count Stelli's tower with Dr Theophilus and become his assistant. But Mark does not want to go and brokers a deal with Lily; he will stay and serve the Count and she will leave the horrid tower and learn about medicine with the doctor.While Lily and Dr Theophilus struggle to survive, Mark is taught how to be an astrologer by the Count. Soon, with the aid of Mr Snutworth, Mark plans to overthrow the old Count and become the greatest astrologer himself. In the meantime, Lily comes up with a shocking idea; provide free accommodation, medical care and food to debtors and those in need of it. She, Dr Theophilus and two others start an almshouse.Mark manages to overthrow the Count and soon becomes a powerful astrologer himself, living in high society. On numerous occasions, Lily asks Mark for his support of the almshouse, but he declines, stating that he and his reputation would be at stake. With the aid of Mr Snutworth, Mark soon becomes the most powerful person in all of Agora, bar the Director.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gifts_of_the_Body"title="The Gifts of the Body">
The several short stories are narrated by a caregiver who is tending to several patients who have contracted AIDS. Each story could be considered by itself, or the combined narrative could be viewed as one panorama dealing with either the AIDS or with those who care for those afflicted with the virus. Each story is an illness narrative in itself, as it describes the physical and emotional trauma experienced by both the patients and the caregiver.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Republic_(novel)"title="People's Republic (novel)">
People's Republic begins with introduction of Ryan Sharma. Ryan has just completed some punishment laps and finds out that he is being wanted for a mission. Also, Fu Ning, a Chinese girl lives in a Dandong boarding school and wants to escape. The book then rotates between the two characters lives, eventually showing Ryan going to the USA to infiltrate the Aramov clan through Ethan Kitsell. Ning ends up escaping China and going on the run with her stepmum Ingrid as she is wanted for questioning over her husband Chaoxiang's involvement in sending illegal immigrants across countries.Ingrid and Ning eventually try to flee China to Britain and end up in Kyrgyzstan. Ingrid is tortured and is being tried to hand over bank account details so they can go to Britain. In the end, the deal doesn't work, leaving Ning on her own and trying to get to Britain by herself. Meanwhile, Ryan becomes Ethan's only friend after his mum and his best friend died, leaving him as his only support after saving his life again. Ryan also saved Ethan's life when he was hit by a car this helped the part of the plot to bond with him.However, just as they were bonding, a bomb was placed at the bottom of Ethan's house leaving him and everyone else at a motel. Ethan is then taken into care by a lawyer of his mother and is about to be taken back to Kyrgyzstan. This leaves Ryan to be sent back to CHERUB campus after pushing over his mission controller, Dr D. Ryan, after being taken back to CHERUB, is punished with 500 hours of recycling duty but still has a friendship with Ethan. Amy Collins manages to reduce the amount of punishments by speaking to Zara Asker.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gates_of_Thorbardin"title="The Gates of Thorbardin">
This novel tells the story of the dwarves Chane Feldstone and Jillian Firestoke. Other characters include the kender Chestal Thicketsway who is accompanied against his will by an unexploded spell named Zap, which even seems to talk to him, and a gnome named Bobbin who has been banished from his colony because of incurable insanity.According to Parkinson, the challenge with this novel was "to bring these people, who are of a different race than I am, very much to life to make them as much as possible three-dimensional people and show them as being the best of what they are, and not necessarily the best of what they would be if they were human." Parkinson says that the book is essentially "the story of Chane, a Thorbardin dwarf, and his quest to find the Helm of Grallen and to seal the secret entrance of Thorbardin against incursion by magic".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_(Friend_novel)"title="Perfect (Friend novel)">
Isabelle Lee is a 13-year-old girl with an eating disorder. The disorder developed over time after the death of her father when her mother begins to send her to group therapy. She soon realizes that the most popular girl in school, Ashley Barnum, goes to the group and begins to be friends with her.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Confession_(novel)"title="The Confession (novel)">
In 1998, Travis Boyette abducts and rapes Nicole "Nikki" Yarber, a teenage girl and high school student in Slone, Texas and buries her body in Joplin, Missouri some 6 hours from Slone. He watches unfazed as the police arrest and convict Donté Drumm, a black high school football player with no connection to the crime. Despite his innocence, Drumm is convicted and sentenced to death. He has been on death row for nine years when the story takes place. While Drumm serves his prison sentence, lawyer Robbert "Robbie" Flak fights his case. Meanwhile, Black Americans protest his false conviction, creating a law and order situation.In the meantime, Boyette has fled to Kansas and has been living there ever since. He has been suffering with a brain tumor for the past nine years and his health has deteriorated. In 2007, with Drumm's execution only a week away, reflecting on his miserable life, he decides to do what is right: confess. He meets a pastor, Reverend Keith Schroeder who takes him to Slone. Despite his confession to the public, the execution proceeds on and Drumm is executed by lethal injection. The town is beset by racial tension though a riot is averted. Boyette then reveals the resting place of Nikki and DNA samples show signs of rape and assault on her body. But before there is an arrest warrant for him, he takes off. In Slone, Flak leads legal attacks on those responsible for the false conviction and execution, while Schroeder agonizes over what he has done; taken a paroled convicted rapist who was also probably a murderer, out of his parole zone (the state of Kansas). Schroeder winds up making his actions public, paying a fine, resigning from his church and accepting a position at a reform-minded church in Texas. The latter happens after Boyette is caught attempting another rape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reckless_(Funke_novel)"title="Reckless (Funke novel)">
"Reckless" opens with twelve-year-old Jacob Reckless using a mirror to enter the magical world of Mirrorworld.Twelve years later, Jacob's brother Will follows Jacob into the Mirrorworld. Will is attacked by a Goyl, a humanoid race with stone skin. As a result of this, Will's skin begins turning to stone. Jacob knows that the stone will soon invade Will’s entire body, and Will will become one of the Goyl and he rides off in search of a cure. He is told that the berries that grow in the garden of child-eating witch may cure Will of the curse. Will sneaks back through the mirror to say goodbye to his girlfriend Clara over the phone, leading to her going to the Reckless brothers’ house and entering the mirror.Jacob, Will, Clara and Jacob's vixen friend, Fox, journey to the witch's house, which lies deserted. When they arrive, they realize that they're being pursued by a dangerous creature called The Tailor. Jacob and Fox fight The Tailor, with Will and Clara inside the gates, which The Tailor cannot enter, but Jacob is wounded on the shoulder during the fight. Will takes the berries, and they sleep. In the morning, Will's condition has not changed; the berries did not work. In another attempt to save his brother, Jacob decides to visit the Red Fairy, in the hope that he can convince her to help break the curse. Jacob forces a dwarf named Valiant to help the group find her. Meanwhile, the Goyl King's right hand leads a group of Goyl soldiers to find Will, because they believe he is destined to become the ultimate protector of their king, as his skin is turning to jade. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casablanca_(novella)"title="Casablanca (novella)">
"Casablanca" begins when the narrator, who is driving his car to Mar del Plata seaside resort, is caught by a big storm. While looking for some shelter he comes across a place similar to Rick's Café Américain. He gets out of the car and, almost blinded by the rain, hurries to the entrance door. Just then somebody starts playing "As Time Goes By" on a piano at the back of the room. The player is identical to Sam, but much older; he is wearing the same suit jacket that is shown in the film, but worn out now. In one of the corners, an old man in dark glasses, who looks like Humphrey Bogart, is dozing at a table. When the song is over, the black man starts to tell the narrator the story of the place and of the people who lived there.It all started, he says, in the early fifties, when the owner of those lands, a rich man very similar to Sydney Greenstreet —the actor who interpreted señor Ferrari— decides to build a replica of Rick's café to reproduce in it the main scenes of the movie. With this purpose, he sends agents around the country and abroad, to look for people whose physical appearance is identical to the characters. He keeps for himself the role of Señor Ferrari. When the cast is ready, they rehearse for some months; their voices and accents must sound like the English spoken in the original version. To imitate the black-and-white movie, everything in the place is in lighter or darker shades of grey.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger's_Rogues"title="Hunger's Rogues">
"Hunger's Rogues" takes up the author's story about a year after he escaped from forced labor in the Russian mines, recounted in "Donbas". The book opens in 1948 with Sandulescu approaching Transit Camp Buchholz, a camp for displaced persons, or "DPs", awaiting permission to emigrate overseas, then located outside of Hanover, Germany, near the village of Buchholz. The author describes camp and camp life, then unfolds his involvement, through friendships made in camp, with the thriving black market primarily based in the train stations of cities throughout Germany and the countries formerly occupied by the Nazi regime. After passing initial emigrant screening, Sandulescu fails the medical exam due to elevated blood pressure and is forced to remain in camp for an extended period until he can be re-tested. As he waits for the next opportunity for a medical exam, the excitement of trading on the black market continues to draw him in. Sandulescu recounts black market trades and affairs that include selling pork from a clandestine farmhouse slaughter, a trip to Belgium disguised as a US soldier to buy 150 pounds of coffee and a trip in the company of a Red Army officer from the Balkans to Paris to buy and peddle cigarettes. He gives market prices for black market goods, primarily food, and the exchange rate in terms of packs of cigarettes, as American cigarettes were the most widely accepted currency at the time. The book includes vivid word pictures of the lives of ordinary civilians in the aftermath of the war, with rationing and shortages leading many to trade on the black market to eat well or just to survive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Map_and_the_Territory"title="The Map and the Territory">
The novel tells the story of the life and art of Jed Martin, a fictional French artist who becomes famous by photographing Michelin maps and painting scenes about professional activities. His father is slowly entering old age. Jed falls for a beautiful Russian executive from Michelin but the relationship ends when she returns to Russia. Jed becomes extraordinarily successful after a new series of paintings and therefore suddenly rich as the most prominent artist in France around the year 2010. He meets Michel Houellebecq in Ireland in order to ask him to write the text for the catalog of one of his exhibitions, and in exchange offers to paint the writer's portrait.A few months later Houellebecq is brutally murdered and Jed Martin gets involved in the case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Thieves_(novel)"title="City of Thieves (novel)">
The novel begins with David as the narrator. He is an American who describes himself as growing up knowing that his grandfather killed two Germans in a knife fight before he was 18, even though he was never actually told the story. As a child, David lived two blocks away from his grandparents, who owned an insurance company. In the late 1990s, an insurance conglomerate offered to purchase the company, and David's grandmother asked them to double their offer. Eventually, the conglomerate agreed and David's grandparents retired to Florida. David lives in Los Angeles writing screenplays, but when he was asked to write an autobiographical essay, he decided he wanted to write instead about Leningrad, where his grandfather grew up. He flies to Florida to speak with his grandfather, and for a week David records his grandfather's stories. The reader also learns that David's grandmother never cooks herself anything more complex than a bowl of cereal.The narrator changes to Lev (David's grandfather) and it's New Year's Eve in 1942 in Leningrad, Russia, during World War II. Everyone's been hungry since the German siege of the city began in September, although many, including Lev's mother and sister Taisya, have evacuated. Lev, at 17, is a firefighter for the city, and sits on the roof of his apartment building with his friends Vera, Grisha, and Oleg. Vera spots a German soldier falling from the sky in a parachute and the four run down into the street to investigate. When the German lands in the street, Lev takes the man's knife while Grisha opens the man's hip flask and passes it around, toasting the cold that killed this soldier. Suddenly they hear a car coming and run, because what they’re doing is illegal. As they race back to the apartment building, Vera falls. Lev goes back to help her and boosts her over the gate, but the Russian soldiers out on patrol grab Lev before he can climb over himself. The soldiers take him to the Crosses, the prison in Leningrad.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_of_the_Pagoda"title="The Fall of the Pagoda">
"The Fall of the Pagoda" tells a narrative story about the childhood life of a girl, Lute, born in a noble family which is in a process of moral and financial decline. As a young girl, her mother followed her aunt to go abroad, and her father was addicted to opium, leaving her and her little brother to live with their servants, aunt Tong, aunt He, aunt Qin, etc.Her father presided over their family. But he did not work due to a negative attitude to life and the addiction to opium. Lute's mother, Lu, a woman in the vanguard of female self-reliance, decided to divorce with her father, the patriarch who was adrift in post-Qing China. Maybe due to her special family background, the little girl was different in some significant way from others of the same age. Her psychological age is much older than actual age.Lute's sickly brother, Hill, as a boy, was the important child in this family because he would be the successor of his father, Yuxi. The young boy was cosseted, over-supervised and beaten so that he was weak and morose. Lute was often ignored and had more freedom to do what she wanted. She was given to those of no consequence. Lute grew up around servants, the sprawling, extended family existed in a sea of gossip, scandal, jealousy and fear. They were bound together by their need for money, and the terror of destitution. They lived on the family's ever-diminishing wealth and tarnished prestige, pretending loyalty while pursuing their own survival and pleasure. Through young Lute's child clear eyes, those adults sometimes were hypocritical; even her parents were relentlessly selfish.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Dragon_(novel)"title="The Last Dragon (novel)">
In a two-part tale, the reader embarks on a journey of humor, sorrow, and tenderness, within a story of cultures colliding, highlighting a young orphaned elf, the last on earth, named Yorsh, full name Yorshkrunsquarklejolnerstrink. His village has been destroyed by torrential rain, and he finds himself living in a world plagued by intolerance, shrouded in darkness, hungry, cold, and wet. Upon meeting and being reluctantly befriended by a hunter named Monser and Sajra, a woman, Yorsh learns of a prophecy and of his importance in saving the world of this Dark Age. To fulfill the prophecy and bring the world into an age where the sun will shine again, he must first find another bereaved creature: the last dragon. Upon discovering the dragon, Yorsh decides to stay and keep him company.The second part of the story takes place thirteen years later; the dragon dies leaving him with an egg. Yorsh takes upon the task of raising the young dragon. Yorsh, coming to miss deeply his companions, Monser and Sajra, journeys back to the old village to find their daughter Robi, and learns of the hanging they endured for protecting him. Saddened, Yorsh decides he will protect the young orphaned Robi. Deciding to leave, the elf, young dragon, and Robi move to a new country, forming a new constitution to govern the population of their new world, “No one can hit anybody… And you can’t hang people, either.”
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_(Richards_book)"title="Life (Richards book)">
"Life" is a memoir covering Keith Richards's life, starting with his childhood in Dartford, Kent, through to his success with the Rolling Stones and his current life in Connecticut. His interest in music was triggered by his mother, Doris, who played records by Sarah Vaughan, Billy Eckstine and Louis Armstrong, and his maternal grandfather, Augustus Theodore Dupree, a former big band player, who encouraged him to take up the guitar. In his teens he met up with Mick Jagger, who he had known in primary school, and discovered that they both shared a love of blues music. In the early 1960s Richards moved into a London flat, shared with Jagger and Brian Jones. Together with Bill Wyman, Ian Stewart and Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones were founded in 1962, playing gigs at Ealing Jazz Club and the Crawdaddy Club.The book chronicles Richards's career with the Stones since 1962, following their rise from playing small club gigs to stadium concerts, Richards's drug habits, his arrests and convictions. His relationships with a number of women, including Anita Pallenberg, Marianne Faithfull, Ronnie Spector and Patti Hansen, whom he married in 1983, are covered in detail. The often difficult partnership between Richards and Jagger is referred to throughout the work and coverage of this has caused much media interest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Queen"title="The Fifth Queen">
"The Fifth Queen" trilogy has an omniscient narrator. Katharine Howard is introduced in the first book as a devout Roman Catholic, impoverished, young noblewoman escorted by her fiery cousin Thomas Culpeper. By accident, she comes to the attention of the king, in a minor way at first, is helped to a position as a lady in waiting for the then bastard Lady Mary, Henry's eldest daughter, by her old Latin tutor Nicholas Udal. Udal is a spy for Thomas Cromwell, the Lord Privy Seal.As Katharine becomes involved with the many calculating, competing, and spying members of Henry VIII's Court, she gradually rises, almost against her will, in Court. She is brought more to the attention of the King, becomes involved with him, is used by Cromwell, Bishop Gardiner and Thomas Cranmer as well as the less powerful though more personally attached Nicholas Throckmorton. Her connection to the latter puts her in some peril, as in January 1554 he is suspected of complicity in Wyatt's Rebellion and arrested, during which time Katherine is also briefly implicated.Katharine's forthrightness, devotion to the Old Faith and learning are what make her attractive to the King, along with her youth and physical beauty. This is in direct contradiction to the way historians view the historical personage herself; that is, as a flighty and flirtatious young woman with few other redeeming qualities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clockwork_Three"title="The Clockwork Three">
One day, Giuseppe finds a green violin floating in the harbor and he tries it out. He finds that it gives a very beautiful sound, and he is thrown money from people everywhere in the streets. He gets an idea to use his green violin to buy a boat ticket back to Italy, where he had been taken from. For once, Giuseppe has hope in getting back to his family. Frederick is going around in search of a chest plate for his clockwork man. While wandering the streets, Frederick catches a glimpse of Mrs. Treeless, the woman in charge of an orphanage.Frederick had been in before becoming apprenticed to Master Branch, which reminds him of the awful memories he had at the orphanage. He also bumps into Giuseppe, but Giuseppe runs along with his violin. Later, he finds a coal chute, perfect for the chest plate, and sneaks it out of a coal yard. While he sneaks out, he lies about his father being one of the workers at the mine. He goes back to Master Branch's shop, where Frederick is an apprentice, and once he decides that Master Branch is asleep, he goes to the basement of the shop to work on his clockwork man. Hannah discovers that a man named Mister Stroop supposedly left the treasure in the suites at the top of the hotel. She later sees a map that hints it may be near a pond in the park. She runs to look for it when she desperately needs money for her sick father's medicine. There she meets Giuseppe, and the two look for the treasure but it is not there, though she receives some herbal medicine from a woman who lives in the park. Hannah's father draws for her where the treasure is hidden in the hotel, having worked for Stroop's hotel in the past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prague_Cemetery"title="The Prague Cemetery">
The main character is Simone Simonini, a man whom Eco claims he has tried to make into the most cynical and disagreeable character in all the history of literature (and is the only fictional character in the novel). He was born in Turin in 1830. His mother died while he was still a child and his father was killed in 1848 fighting for a united Italy. He is brought up by his grandfather, an old reactionary who houses Jesuit refugees and hates the Jews. He claims that the French Revolution was planned by the Knights Templar, the Bavarian Illuminati and the Jacobins, but he says behind them all were the Jews. Since he does not attend public school, Simonini is educated by Jesuits brought into his home at the behest of his grandfather. One such priest, Father Bergamaschi (a fictionalized portrait of the Italian Jesuit novelist Antonio Bresciani), teaches him the evils of secret societies, that, according to him, are no more than a cover for communism.Simonini imbibes his grandfather's antisemitism, but his father's radicalism, and his dislike of the Jesuits, also arouse his anti-clerical inclinations. In the works of French writers such as Eugène Sue and Alexandre Dumas he enjoys reading of intrigues and conspiracies, and aspires to emulate these fictions in his own life. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_destino_ridicolo"title="Un destino ridicolo">
The novel is set between Sardinia and the city of Genoa. The Sardinian shepherd Salvatore, after a detention in prison, comes to Genoa in search of a better life. In the old town he meets a prostitute, Veretta, and falls in love with her. The main plot is weaved with the histories of the pimp Carlo, the French criminal Barnard, the young singer-songwriter Fabrizio and his fan Alessandro, the beautiful "new girl in town" Maritza and Salvatore's cousin, Annino. In particular, the main section of the novel focuses on Carlo and Salvatore being involved in a heist on account of Barnard; Salvatore ends up being shot by a hired hitmam of Barnard's, when the former confesses everything to the latter after stumbling upon him and wrongly believing him to be a priest.The character of Maritza is a novelization of "Bocca di Rosa", the main character of a De André hit song. Two other characters (Fabrizio and Alessandro) are the authors themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Thing"title="The Lost Thing">
Set in the near future, a dystopian Melbourne, Australia, "The Lost Thing" is a story about Shaun who enjoys collecting bottle tops for his bottle top collection. One day, while collecting bottle tops near a beach, he discovers a strange creature, that seems to be a combination of a crab, an octopus, and an industrial boiler. This creature is referred to as "The Lost Thing" by the narrator.Shaun realizes the creature is lost and out of place in Jupiter. He attempts to find its owner or otherwise its source but is not able to, due to the indifference of everyone else. Pete, an opinionated friend of Shaun's, explains that it may not actually belong anywhere. When he seeks help from a government agency, he is met by a creature who warns that the department exists only to hide and forget about uncategorizable things, and gives him a business card with an arrowhead sign on it. After searching much of the city for the sign, which they find and follow numerous times, Shaun discovers a utopian land for lost things, where he parts ways with the creature, and continues on with his life - although he was unable to say whether the creature, or any of the others, really belonged there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mockingbird_(Erskine_novel)"title="Mockingbird (Erskine novel)">
The book centers around the girl whose brother was killed in a school shooting.10-year-old Caitlin Smith has Asperger’s syndrome and is preoccupied with drawing and dictionaries. Her older brother Devon has just been killed, along with a teacher and another student, in a tragic school shooting. Due to Caitlin's condition, she finds it difficult to cope with her feelings about what has happened. She is awkward and pedantic, seeing things in black and white, and referring to her deceased brother as "Devon who is dead" when talking to her father.Caitlin's behaviors are perceived as "weird". She likes to hide from the rest of the world under the dresser belonging to Devon. Her classmates don't want to be friends with her due to her strange behavior.Her counselor arranges for her to spend recess with the younger kids. She meets a boy named Michael, who is strangely sad over his mother. When she talks to her counselor about it, she tells Caitlin that he is the son of the teacher who was shot and killed in the shooting.Caitlin discovers the words "empathy" and "closure" and determines that this is what she and her distraught father need. She finds it in the form of Devon's Eagle Scout box which has remained incomplete since his death. Caitlin thinks that if she and her father complete the box, it will bring them closure. With the help of a school counselor and art teacher, although Caitlin is initially antagonistic, she is able to help her father, as well as Michael and the school bully, Josh, the shooter's cousin, to cope.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sentimentalists_(novel)"title="The Sentimentalists (novel)">
The novel's protagonist is an unnamed young woman, who seeks to understand her relationship with her father better by investigating his experience in the Vietnam War.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_(Higson_novel)"title="The Dead (Higson novel)">
"The Dead" begins a year before the events in "The Enemy", where an unnamed user posts a video on YouTube titled "The Scared Kid". In it, a boy frantically talks to the camera about how his friends Danny and Eve have been killed by "Mothers and fathers" (Zombies), and shows them standing outside his window. He then suffers a nervous breakdown and ends the video. The video goes viral, with people not knowing if it is real or not. Eventually, the video is taken down from YouTube, followed by the site itself, followed by the internet, and finally electricity entirely. This marks the point that people realized that something bad was going on, and the start of the apocalypse.Two weeks into the apocalypse, two 14-year-old boys, named Jack and Ed are trapped with a group of other schoolboys in the Rowhurst boarding school (in Kent, in a remote village a few miles from London) where they are defending themselves from their now zombified teachers. After escaping from the adult siege of their school with the help of a rugby player named Bam, Jack and Ed rescue their French teacher's daughter, Frederique, and make their way to a nearby chapel, where a group of people led by a boy named Matt barricaded themselves inside a few days prior. Alarmed by the lack of a reply from inside the church, they break in and find that the boys hiding inside have either fallen unconscious or died from carbon monoxide poisoning. The group of boys manage to revive the survivors, and Matt appears to have suffered brain damage from the poisoning. He believes himself to be the messenger of a being called the Lamb, who he explains will come down to earth and cleanse it of "Non believers" (the zombies). He is convinced he must go to St Paul's Cathedral in London to fulfil the needs of his "god". The group splits, with Matt and some people he has brought into his religion (now calling themselves his "acolytes", attempting to go to London with Jack (who wants to find his family home), and the rest (including Ed, Bam and one of Ed's best friends, Malik) deciding to go deeper into the countryside (thinking it will be safer).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nights_of_Rain_and_Stars"title="Nights of Rain and Stars">
In a small town in Greece, a group of people witness a boating accident and subsequently become tangled in each other's lives. Thomas is a California university professor escaping from a tense relationship with his remarried ex-wife and their son, whom he adores. Elsa, the beautiful German blonde, resigned from her successful television job to escape her ex-boyfriend, whom she still loves. Irish Fiona couldn't stand her family and friends' resentful attitudes towards her boyfriend, Shane, so she and Shane escaped to peaceful Greece. David, a kind Englishman, doesn't want to take over his father's business as his family expects him to, and instead decides to travel.These strangers meet in a tavern in peaceful Aghia Anna underneath the stars, and soon they become close friends. Vonni, a native who escaped her family in Ireland many years ago, becomes involved in all their lives and together they form bonds and discover things about each other and themselves that they never could have anticipated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_in_Time_(novel)"title="Frozen in Time (novel)">
Ben and Rachel are staying in their house with their dreary old uncle when the TV satellite breaks and the TV explodes. Unable to do anything to amuse themselves, Ben and Rachel start digging in the garden and find themselves opening a hatch. They drop themselves into it and find themselves in what looks like an old-fashioned underground bunker house, where they find what looks like a torpedo and are perplexed to see two 'dead' bodies in it. Rachel accidentally presses a button and the torpedoes open and the bodies come to life. Rachel faints and Ben starts talking gibberish in his shock. The two people that had before seemed dead introduced themselves as Freddy and Polly Emerson and asked why they were in their fathers' vault. When Rachel and Ben explained, they first refused to believe it, but then believed when Rachel and Ben took them into their house. Freddy and Polly revealed they had been put into cryonic suspension - their father had frozen their hearts and was able to make them start again. Freddy and Polly had been put to sleep in 1956 and woken up in 2009. They could not understand why their father had deserted them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_and_Iseult_(novel)"title="Tristan and Iseult (novel)">
Tristan is depicted as a prince of Lothian, whose father, King Rivalin married the sister of Mark of Cornwall, making Tristan the nephew of King Mark. Tristan's mother is shown as dying in his childbirth, and his name as being from the Latin root word "trista", reflecting the sadness of Rivalin at the loss of his wife.He journeys to the Kingdom of Cornwall in effort to prove himself, and enters the service of King Mark without revealing his identity. After defeating the Irish champion Morholt, Tristan's identity is revealed, and his position as Champion of Cornwall solidified. Having been wounded by the poisoned blade of Morholt, Tristan wastes away, eventually being set adrift in a boat by his own choice. He lands on the shores of Ireland, and his healed by the skills of Iseult of Ireland, although without actually meeting her.Upon returning to Cornwall, he is involved in a move to have King Mark marry. Tristan is sent on a quest to find a bride for the king, and winds up once again in Ireland. Tristan defeats a dragon, is once again healed by Iseult, and though given her hand in marriage as reward, promises to bring her back to Cornwall as bride for his Uncle. These events are shown in light of bringing peace to an ongoing war between the two kingdoms. Tristan and Iseult are stranded on a distant shore for a few days, delaying their return to Cornwall, and cementing their own love for each other, despite the commitments of circumstances. Sutcliff herself states that she intentionally left out the love potion as something 'artificial'.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_Kilba"title="King of Kilba">
Kenneth Kilsyth, a young clerk in a London counting house, and a most reluctant employee, wins £1000 in a football pool (nearly £200,000 at present-day prices calculated as average earnings, or over £43,000 calculated as retail price index).Inviting his sole friend and fellow clerk, Gerald Hayes, to join him, he embarks on a journey of adventure.Some time later, they find themselves the sole passengers on a merchant ship, the S.S. "Mumtaz", steaming from Vancouver to Honolulu, but all the officers and most of the sailors are quickly wiped out by a mysterious disease, leaving the two passengers the only people alive. Bridges, the quartermaster of the crew, survives long enough to help dispose of the bodies overboard and shows the lads how to rig a sail on to the wallowing freighter. Under the influence of the North-East trade winds and the North Equatorial current, the "Mumtaz" eventually drifts over a coral reef and lodges on the leeward side.The boys are near an island, and arming themselves with guns from the captain’s cabin, they land on the island. At dawn, atop a small hill, they are confronted by an army of 'savages'. But the natives attack on stilts (the ground is taboo to them) and the boys are able to defend themselves. The attack is suddenly called off by an elderly white man who speaks broken English. He reveals that he was shipwrecked many years before and has become 'King' of the island, called Kilba. This is in accordance with a local prophecy that a white man will always rule the people. From him, they learn that tribal warfare between the two islands of Kilba and Neka has existed for many generations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Griffin"title="The Dark Griffin">
The land of Cymria is ruled by those humans who can communicate with, and work with, the griffins, with both rogue humans and wild griffins treated poorly. For Arren Cardockson, the main protagonist, who has risen to his position because a griffin chose him, his background means that he does not have access to justice. For the black griffin, his inability to communicate with humans means he does not understand the human world. Each of the pair must fight for survival, and for freedom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Yates_(novel)"title="Richard Yates (novel)">
Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning (unrelated to their child star namesakes, though they are the same respective ages as the actors were at the time the book was published) are friends who initially met over the internet and converse with each other regularly through Gmail chat. Haley is a 22-year-old author in Manhattan, and Dakota is a 16-year-old high school student in a nearby suburb in New Jersey.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Still_Point"title="The Still Point">
The book's two central characters are Edward Mackley, an Arctic explorer who went missing during an expedition at the turn of the 20th century, and his great-grand-niece Julia, who lives a hundred years later. On a hot summer's day Julia begins sorting through the belongings she has inherited from her uncle, while trying to ignore the cracks which are appearing in her marriage. However, as the day wears on she makes a discovery that forces her to re-evaluate her long-held image of her uncle, her husband Simon faces a choice that will decide the future of their relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_Wilhelm_Storitz"title="The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz">
Railway engineer Henri Vidal was invited by his younger brother Marc to pay him a visit in the (fictional) city of Ragz, Hungary. Marc was engaged to Myra Roderich, the daughter of highly praised Dr. Roderich. Before leaving Paris, he learned that a man named Wilhelm Storitz had proposed to Myra, but he was refused.Henri describes his journey, made on land and on the Danube River on the barge "Dorothée", also noting monuments and cities he sees on the way. At his arrival in Ragz, he received a warm welcome from Myra's family.One day, Dr. Roderich told Henri and Haralan (Myra's brother) that Wilhelm Storitz had come to request to propose again to Myra. When he is again refused, he threatened the family.Before the marriage, a contract must be signed by the town governor as an old tradition from Ragz. A party was organized for the event, which was disrupted by a mysterious voice that sang the German "Hate Song". To make matters worse, the contract was found torn to pieces and the bride's wreath lifted itself and hovered mysteriously in the air, ensuing panic among the people at the party.After reporting the events to the chief of the Ragz police, Heinrich Stepark, he suspected that the culprit must be Wilhelm Storitz, as he was the only person who profoundly disrespected the Roderichs. Wilhelm's house was searched but, beside Myra's bridal wreath and a mysterious yellow fluid in a blue vial, no significant evidence was found.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonia_(novel)"title="Plutonia (novel)">
The title "Plutonia" refers to the novel's setting in a lost land. It is an underground world having its own sun, called Pluto for the Roman god of the underworld. The terrain is marked by dramatic geographic features and inhabited by prehistoric animals and primitive people. These are essentially the animal and plant life of previous geological periods in their natural surroundings. As the characters venture deeper into the underground area, they encounter more and more ancient life forms, back to dinosaurs and other Jurassic species.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Emperors"title="The Little Emperors">
The story is set in Britain in 405–411 CE, telling of the decline of Roman government in the diocese of Britannia.Caius Sempronius Felix is a career Imperial civil servant. Born in the port city of Tingis in the Roman province of Mauritania Tingitana, he has served in many major Roman centres and has, by dint of loyalty and hard work (and not a little absconding with treasury funds), been appointed "praeses" (provincial governor) of Britannia Prima. Based in Londinium, and nominally responsible to the "vicarius" of the diocese, he is effectively the ruler – treasurer, administrator and magistrate with wide powers. He is married for political reasons to Maria, a younger woman and nominal Christian. His father-in-law Gratianus is a rich and scheming financier.Felix tries hard to maintain what he sees as the high standards of Roman administration and etiquette that he has learned in centres in continental Europe closer to Rome. He is ruthless in punishing suspected criminals and seeing that taxes are paid on time; he does not hesitate to engage in various casual cruelties to his slaves, and his judicial decisions are often arbitrary. But all about him, the civilisation he single-mindedly supports is slowly breaking down. He tries hard to balance his limited budget, despite a moribund economy and constant demands for extra military spending. Rome still wins some military victories, but then Germans invade Gaul and Britain is cut off.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbroken_(Zamperini_biography)"title="Unbroken (Zamperini biography)">
Louis Zamperini grows up in a Christian home. In his youth he is a troublemaker in his hometown of Torrance, California. Louis steals and stashes food, liquor, and cigarettes. Louis is also bullied for his Italian background.Louis is caught by law enforcement and returned to his family. Although his father disciplines him with beatings, Louis’ behavior does not improve.Louis is led to pursue running by his older brother, Pete. Pete rides a bicycle alongside Louis as he runs home from school, ringing the bike bell as encouragement. This positive reinforcement changes Louis.Louis joins his high school track team, begins to win races, and becomes known as the Torrance Tornado. Training at a college track facility, Louis becomes acquainted with James Sasaki, a man he presumes to be Japanese-American.Louis earns a place on the U.S. Olympic Team to compete at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Pete walks Louis to the train station for his departure to Germany. At the station Louis says that this first Olympic Games will just be a “try-out” for the next Olympics 4 years later in Tokyo, Japan. Pete tells Louis to never forget that “a moment of pain is worth a lifetime of glory”.At the Olympics, Louis participates in the opening ceremonies as the Olympic Torch is lit, and notices a Japanese contestant who politely nods at him. Competing in the 5,000 meter race against more experienced athletes, Louis first seems to fall behind. As the second lap bell rings, Louis remembers Pete’s words and rallies to place 8th with a time of 14 minutes, 46.8 seconds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Popularity_Papers"title="The Popularity Papers">
Two fifth-grade friends, Lydia Goldblatt and Julie Graham-Chang, want to learn how to be popular before entering middle school. The first book of the series is their journal, documenting their misadventures to become more popular, as well as their family and school life. Sequels continue the story of Lydia and Julie and their friends and families, as they progress into middle school.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rice_Sprout_Song"title="The Rice Sprout Song">
The Rice Sprout Song depicts the absurd nature of the land reform movement of the Communist regime, as well as highlight the horrors and suffering it caused a southern agrarian village in early 1950s China. The communist revolution, followed by the land reforms, was meant to "liberate" the peasants of the village, but contrary to their hopes, the lives of the peasants did not change in the manner they expected. The characters of Chang's story face the perils of famine but also the suffering and frustration that ensues from the gradual deterioration of their civility, humanity and most of all their traditional family values. That is catalyzed by their hunger and the constant presence of the political forces, and the pressures involved with appeasing them. “In the novel, when the peasants in the village can no longer put up with pressure from local leaders to produce grain, they riot. The local people's militia intervenes, massacring them and further tightening their control in the village. At the end of the novel, the survivors are forced to parade and take part in New Year's celebrations.” The story focuses on the life of a middle-aged couple the T'an's, who have a young daughter named Beckon. Both male protagonist Gold Root and female protagonist Moon scent's have each other's best interest as their first priority, they constantly sacrifice themselves for the welfare of their family, yet Moon Scent has the stronger resolve in making harsh decisions of denying their other relatives to ensure the durability of the food rations. The issue of the famine and the pressures that it subjects them to, forces them to make hard decisions that challenge their deeply intimate relationship, drawing a painful wedge between them progressively over the course of the novel, as the circumstances of the famine grew dire, also rupturing their relationship with their extended family; Big Aunt, Big Uncle, and Sister-in-Law Gold Have Got.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undersea_Trilogy"title="Undersea Trilogy">
Intrigue surrounds the mining of uranium beneath the underwater dome city of Marinia. Jim Eden, expelled from the Sub-Sea Academy on trumped-up charges, seeks out his uncle who disappeared while mining at the bottom of Eden Deep. While for looking clues to his uncle's disappearance, Jim runs into some men who try to stop him.David Craken, a firm believer in the existence of sea serpents, disappears in search of them only to reappear drifting offshore months later. His friend Jim Eden and members of the Sub-Sea Academy retrace David's journey and soon run into the strange creatures that had been only mythical before.Krakatoan Dome was specifically designed to cope with the tremors of its earthquake prone area. Problems begin when more quakes occur than had been expected, which many experts suspect are being artificially created. The Sub-Sea Academy assigns Jim Eden to investigate, because of his experience working underwater, and also because his uncle is the prime suspect.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus'_Son_(short_story_collection)"title="Jesus' Son (short story collection)">
## "Car Crash While Hitchhiking".In this story, a drug-addicted narrator recounts hitchhiking in four different vehicles, first with a Cherokee, then a salesperson, then a college student, and finally a family composed of a husband, wife, young daughter and a baby. The salesperson is drunk and shares alcohol and pills with the narrator before leaving him off to find a student who drives him until he catches a ride with the family. Eventually, this vehicle is struck by another car resulting in the death of the driver of the other car. The story ends with the narrator looking back several years later, seemingly in detox, as he recounts his drug abuse, which the entire narration of the story reflects in a style of disconnect from reality.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elf_on_the_Shelf"title="The Elf on the Shelf">
The book tells the story of a scout elf who hides in people's homes to watch over events. Once everyone goes to bed, the scout elf flies back to the North Pole to report to Santa the activities, good and bad, that have taken place throughout the day. Before the family wakes up each morning, the scout elf flies back from the North Pole and hides. By hiding in a new spot around the house each morning, the scout elf plays an ongoing game of hide and seek with the family."The Elf on the Shelf" explains that scout elves get their magic by being named and loved by a child. In the back of each book, families have an opportunity to write their elf's name and the date that they adopted it. Once the elf is named, the scout elf receives its special Christmas magic, which allows it to fly to and from the North Pole.The book tells how the magic might disappear if the scout elf is touched, so the rule in the book states, "There's only one rule that you have to follow, so I will come back and be here tomorrow: Please do not touch me. My magic might go, and Santa won't hear all I've seen or I know." Although families are told not to touch their scout elf, they can speak to it and tell it all their Christmas wishes, so that it can report back to Santa accurately.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cardturner"title="The Cardturner">
The protagonist is a teenager named Alton Richards. He is seventeen years old, nearing the end of the academic year. He is best friends with Cliff, who recently started dating Alton's ex-girlfriend, Katie. Throughout his life, his mother tries to worm his way into her Uncle Lester's good books, as he is very rich.Uncle Lester, or Trapp, as he is known informally, becomes ill, resulting in the loss of his sight. As a result, he requires a cardturner - someone to read aloud his cards to him - when he plays duplicate bridge. When Alton returns from his penultimate day at school, his mother agrees to allow him to be the cardturner for Trapp over the summer. His previous cardturner had been Toni Castenada - a schizophrenic, homeschooled girl, who was disallowed to be Trapp's cardturner when she questioned him on his card choice one game.Alton takes Uncle Lester to his bridge club, where he plays with a woman of a similar age named Gloria as his partner. Trapp initially berates Alton for his lack of knowledge on bridge and for not sorting his cards into suits when reading, causing them to be penalised. Despite this, Trapp and Gloria win with a sixty five percent game. On the returning journey home, Trapp explains to Alton that memory of the cards is not what helps him to succeed, more how he remembers them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Live_Safely_in_a_Science_Fictional_Universe"title="How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe">
The novel centers on Charles Yu, a time machine mechanic. He lives in his TM-31 time machine with his non-existent dog, Ed, and the time machine's depressed computer, TAMMY. Yu travels through Minor Universe 31 fixing time machines of people who try to fix the past. He visits Linus Skywalker who tried to kill his father, Luke Skywalker because his father's fame overshadowed Linus's life. Yu also visits a girl who traveled to be with her grandmother as she died. Yu explains to her that because she wasn't present when it happened, she cannot stay.Yu is called in by his boss, Phil, to have his time machine serviced. He walks around in the city while his TM-31 is being repaired and visits his mother who is in a time loop in which she continually replays an hour of her life. He watches a holographic version of himself and his mother interact as she serves dinner.The next day Yu rushes back to his time machine, sees his future self exit his machine, and shoots his future self. As his future self is dying, the future self gives Yu a book and says that the book is the key. By shooting himself, Yu has entered a loop in which he must eventually travel back in time, hand his past self the book, and get shot.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Nig"title="Our Nig">
## Beginning."Our Nig" opens with the story of Mag Smith, a white woman who lives in the northern United States. She has been seduced and left with a child born out-of-wedlock. After the child dies, Mag moves away to a place where no one knows her. In this new town, she meets a "kind-hearted African" man named Jim who falls in love with her. Impoverished, she soon realizes that she can either marry Jim or become a beggar. Jim and Mag marry and they have two children, a daughter, Frado, and an unnamed son.Jim becomes sick and dies, leaving Mag to provide for their children. Embittered, she allows Seth, one of Jim's business partners, to become her common-law husband. Eventually, Mag and Seth decide they must leave town to search for work, and do not want to take both of the children. He suggests they send her daughter Frado to live with and work for the Bellmonts, a lower middle-class white family who live nearby. Mag, indifferent, agrees. Six-year-old Frado is dropped off at the Bellmonts under the pretense that Mag will be back to pick her up later in the day.After a few days the Bellmonts, and Frado, realize Mag never intended to return. Mr. Bellmont is portrayed as kind and humane but Mrs. Bellmont is the complete opposite. The Bellmonts have four children, two boys, Jack and James (the latter of whom is not currently living with the family) and two girls (sickly Jane and irascible Mary). Mr. Bellmont's sister, Abby, also lives with the family. The family debates whether or not to keep Frado, and if they do, where she will sleep. Frado is sent to live in a separate part of the house that she will soon outgrow. The following day, Mrs. Bellmont calls for Frado early in the morning and puts her to work in the kitchen, washing dishes, preparing food, etc.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Thoughts_of_a_Classical_Physicist"title="Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist">
Victor Jakob, a Physics professor in a small German university, reflects on his life as a physicist, recalling major discoveries and ideas of recent decades and his interactions with prominent physicists whose ideas challenge the classical physics worldview. Meanwhile, the tide of World War I is turning against Germany, as the Allies mount The Second Battle of the Somme, pushing the German Second Army back over a 34 mi (55 km) front.As he meditates on the changing world, Jakob hikes to a mountain overlooking his university, where he becomes trapped in a muddy ditch, while gunfire rings out below. In an apparently hopeless situation, he takes out his revolver and "open[s] his mouth." (Some reviewers characterize his apparent death as an accident, while others interpret it as suicide, a parallel to that of Ludwig Boltzmann; John Maddox considered it open to interpretation whether Jakob succeeds in killing himself.)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bones_to_Ashes"title="Bones to Ashes">
The opening two chapters provide details of Brennan's childhood and her holiday friendship on Pawleys Island, South Carolina, with an Acadian girl, Evangeline Landry, who mysteriously disappeared in her early teens.Years later, while working at the Laboratoire de Sciences Judiciaires et de Medecine Legale in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Brennan hears from Sergent-enqueteur Hippolyte "Hippo" Gallant about a box of human bones that she begins to suspect could be Evangeline's remains, and investigates them alongside her routine forensic work. Lieutenant-Detective Andrew Ryan, Brennan's regular co-worker and sometime lover, is involved in a case with three missing and two dead girls, and calls on her to help.Meanwhile Brennan's husband Pete, from whom she has long been separated, decides to divorce her for a woman 20 years younger than he is, and her sister Harry comes to visit and becomes involved in the search for Evangeline.As Brennan, Harry, Ryan and Hippo follow the leads they find links to a child pornography ring, and visit Tracadie on the Acadian Peninsula and Quebec City before the plot climaxes on the outskirts of Montreal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_Bones"title="Spider Bones">
Brennan is called to examine a newly-dead body in Quebec, which turns out to be that of John "Spider" Lowery, an American ex-soldier apparently killed in Vietnam in 1968. After exhuming the remains buried under Lowery's name, she travels to Hawaii to check the US military records, along with her grieving daughter Katy (whose friend has been killed in Afghanistan), where they are joined by sometime lover Detective Andrew Ryan and his recovering addict daughter Lily. As Brennan begins to uncover the truth, the two girls are put in danger.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_Secrets"title="Grave Secrets">
Brennan is searching for human remains in mass graves in Guatemala when two colleagues are ambushed and shot. Meanwhile, Sergeant-detective Bartolome "Bat" Galiano of the Guatemala National Civil Police seeks her help in identifying remains found in a septic tank behind a run-down hotel in Guatemala City; could it be one of four young women reported missing, one of whom is the daughter of the Canadian ambassador? Why does the District Attorney confiscate the remains? And what is the link to the American President's recent ruling on stem cell research? With would-be lover Andrew Ryan becoming involved due to the Canadian link, and he and Galiano competing for her affections, Brennan tries to find out what happened to the missing girls and who is trying to stop her doing so.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocidal_Organ"title="Genocidal Organ">
When Sarajevo was destroyed by a homemade nuclear weapon, the leading democracies of the world transformed into surveillance states, where each individual is constantly monitored, watched, and wired. While the developed nations of the world entered this state, the developing countries around the world endured a multitude of genocides. Those developing countries went from harmony to complete destruction in about 6–8 months, with all of the events and evidence pointing to one suspect, an American named John Paul.Clavis Shepherd, a US Special Forces Officer, along with his team of advanced super-soldiers, are tasked with finding and eliminating John Paul. They want to know how one man can cause so much destruction and death.Eventually, Clavis manages to track down John Paul, who confirms that he has discovered the existence of a "genocidal organ" naturally present in mankind that can be activated using a sequence of words, which he calls the "genocide grammar." He explains that he used it to cause massive civil wars in the rest of the world, believing it to be the only way to protect America and the rest of the "First World" from terrorism and resentment in the "Third World". Clavis, unmoved, takes him into custody, only to see him dying after an assassination operation carried out by his own intelligence unit, who were ordered to kill him to prevent the end of the "peace" carried out by the surveillance states.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Are_Athirst"title="The Gods Are Athirst">
The story of the rise of Évariste Gamelin, a young Parisian painter, involved in the local government for his neighborhood of Pont-Neuf, "The Gods Are Athirst" describes the dark years of the Reign of Terror in Paris, from Year II to Year III. Fiercely Jacobin, Marat and Robespierre's most faithful adherent, Évariste Gamelin becomes a juror on the Revolutionary Tribunal.The long, blind train of speedy trials drags this idealist into a madness that cuts off the heads of his nearest and dearest, and hastens his own fall as well as that of his mentor Robespierre in the aftermath of the Thermidorian Reaction. His love affair with the young watercolor-seller Élodie Blaise heightens the terrible contrast between the butcher-in-training and the man who shows himself to be quite ordinary in his daily life.Justifying this dance of the guillotine by the fight against the plot to wipe out the gains of the Revolution, in the midst of the revolutionary turmoil that traverses Paris, Gamelin is thirsty for justice, but also uses his power to satisfy his own vengeance and his hatred for those who do not think like him. He dies by that same instrument of justice that up until then has served to satisfy his own thirst for blood and terror.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah's_Compass"title="Noah's Compass">
On the surface, Liam Pennywell leads an ordered, decent life. Once widowed and once divorced, with three grown-up daughters, he has just been dismissed from his teaching job and, for lack of funds, has moved to a smaller apartment on the outskirts of Baltimore. Toying with the idea of retiring altogether rather than going job hunting at his age, Pennywell is assaulted by a burglar on the very first night he stays at his new place. When he wakes up in hospital with a bandaged head, he cannot remember a thing about the attack.The loss of memory disturbs him more than the crime itself. In a neurologist's waiting room he observes 38-year-old Eunice accompanying an ageing entrepreneur to his doctor's appointment and finds out that she is working for him as a "rememberer" or, as she herself puts it later, the old man's "external hard drive." Intrigued by this occupation, Pennywell contrives a chance encounter with her, and eventually they strike up a relationship with each other.Complications in their love affair arise when his youngest daughter, 17-year-old Kitty, decides to move in with him, obviously because she expects to be enjoying more freedom than if she stayed with her mother; and when his middle daughter Louise makes a habit of dumping his four-year-old grandson Jonah at Pennywell's apartment for him to babysit. On top of that, Eunice turns out to be a married woman who, after Pennywell has found out, still does not want to let go of him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_(anthology)"title="Fear (anthology)">
The beginning of the book starts with an introduction from R. L. Stine. At the end of the book, there is an "About the Authors" section that includes a brief description of the contributors to the anthology along with some of their works.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Letter_to_Amy"title="A Letter to Amy">
"Peter [from Keats' "The Snowy Day"] is having a birthday party, and he's asked all of his friends to come. But Amy is a special friend because she's a girl, so Peter decides to send her a special invitation. When he rushes out in a thunderstorm to mail it, he bumps smack into Amy herself and knocks her to the ground. Will she come to his party now?"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apt._3"title="Apt. 3">
The sound of a harmonica floats through the halls of Sam and Ben's tenement. The sweet melodies inspire the brothers to explore the building, which is filled with the sounds and smells of a diverse city. Finally, the brothers find the source of the beautiful music, along with a blind man who “sees” with his ears, and the search ends in a new friendship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_(Wilson_novel)"title="Vortex (Wilson novel)">
"Vortex" tells the story of Turk Findley, the protagonist introduced in "Axis", who is transported ten thousand years into the future by the mysterious entities called "the Hypotheticals." In this future humanity exists on a chain of planets connected by Hypothetical gateways; but Earth itself is a dying world, effectively quarantined.Turk and his young friend Isaac Dvali are taken up by a community of fanatics who use them to enable a passage to the dying Earth, where they believe a prophecy of human/Hypothetical contact will be fulfilled. The prophecy is only partly true, however, and Turk must unravel the truth about the nature and purpose of the Hypotheticals before they carry him on a journey through warped time to the end of the universe itself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Journey"title="Congo Journey">
Written in diary form, and set mostly in the People's Republic of the Congo, the book begins as a search for Mokèlé-mbèmbé, a legendary dinosaur of the area. Author Redmond O'Hanlon leads a team during this trek.In addition, the book also provides an expose of the Bantu and Pygmy peoples, including their lives, spiritual customs and beliefs. The book also discussed problems these people face, such as the Yaws disease.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gardener's_Son"title="The Gardener's Son">
## Act one.William Gregg, the owner of The Graniteville Manufacturing Company and patriarch of the Gregg family, is near death. After a visit by Dr. Perceval, he and Marina Gregg, wife of William, go to see Robert McEvoy, the son of Patrick McEvoy, a worker at the mill who tends the gardens. Robert has a broken leg due to an accident which may have been the fault of James Gregg, William’s son. Robert is convinced by Mrs. Gregg to have surgery to remove the leg, which demonstrates the “quasi-familial” relationship between owners and workers at the mill under the command of William.When William Gregg passes away, James takes over the mill and is not as sympathetic to his workers and leaves many of them unemployed without remorse. Robert's hatred for the mill and James continues to grow while he is recovering and he wishes to return to the farm his family once owned. He leaves Graniteville as an act of rebellion against James and the changes he has made to the mill.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_and_the_Circle"title="The Sword and the Circle">
The novel is broken into thirteen chapters, with the first five being the development of King Arthur's background, while the remaining are nearly stand-alone stories covering the exploits of different knights. He is shown as the son of Uther Pendragon, begot upon Lady Igraine with the assistance of Merlin. Merlin did not feature in Sutcliff's previous Arthurian stories of "Sword at Sunset", but is shown here as being the driving force behind the ascension of King Arthur and his court. Merlin is depicted as being descended from the Lordly Ones, or the 'Little Dark People', as Sutcliff commonly refers to the possible original inhabitants of Great Britain. He orchestrates Arthur's upbringing under Sir Ector, alongside his foster brother Sir Kay. Arthur's identity as ruler of Britain is revealed when he pulls the Sword from the Stone, but he later receives Excalibur, a different sword, from the Lady in the Lake.The rest of the novel's chapters cover many of the other classic Arthurian characters and tales, including: the origins of Lancelot of the Lake, as well as his encounters with Elaine;Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Beaumains, the Kitchen Knight; Tristan and Iseult, in a retelling nearly identical to Sutcliff's earlier novel of the same name, albeit a much shorter version; Geraint and Enid; Gawain and the Loathly Lady; and finally the arrival of Percival at Arthur's court, which is connected by Merlin's previous prophecies to presage the beginning of the Round Table's downfall.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Deeds_of_Finn_MacCool"title="The High Deeds of Finn MacCool">
The story begins with the explanation of Cormac mac Art's formation of the Fianna as a defense force for Ireland, which was originally led by Finn's father, Cumhal. Cumhal is killed by Goll mac Morna, who takes over leadership of the Fianna, and Cumhal's wife Muirne flees to give birth to Finn. The boy grows up strong in the manner of his father, studies under the poet Finn Eces, accidentally tasting the Salmon of Knowledge and thereby gaining magical powers, and ultimately regaining leadership of the Fianna by defeating the Fairy that haunts the Court of Tara, Aillén mac Midgna. Goll swears loyalty to him, and Finn rules the Fianna successfully thereafter.Similar to Sutcliff's Arthurian Novel The Sword and the Circle, most of the chapters in this novel are nearly stand-alone tales, covering many of the stories and characters associated with the Fenian Cycle. Some of these include: Finn's courtship of Sadhbh and the birth of Oisín; the tales of Diarmuid and Grainne; Niamh of the Golden Hair; the Giolla Dacker; multiple encounters with the Fair Folk;and ultimately ending with Cath Gabhra and the downfall of the Fianna.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddy_Holly_Is_Alive_and_Well_on_Ganymede"title="Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede">
Oliver Vale was conceived on February 3, 1959, the day that iconic rock &amp; roll singer Buddy Holly died. Exactly thirty years later, Buddy Holly appears on every television set in the world, on every channel. Holly states that he is being held on Ganymede, and that Oliver Vale is to be contacted for assistance. He then begins performing.As a result, Vale finds himself being pursued by agents of the Federal Communications Commission, by angry television watchers, and by still more mysterious forces.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creepy_Creatures"title="Creepy Creatures">
## "The Werewolf of Fever Swamp".Grady and his family the Tuckers move into a house next to Fever Swamp in Florida. Grady finds and convinces his parents to let him keep a large wolf-like stray dog for a pet which he names Wolf, but when something has broken into the deer pen in Grady's yard and killed one of the animals, his father Mr. Tucker decides that the stray had to be taken to the pound. Grady helps the dog flee before his dad can capture it. That night, Grady hears the howling again and explores Fever Swamp to get to the bottom of things. He encounters Will Blake, one of his friends, who is slowly turning into a werewolf under the full moon. The newly changed werewolf bites Grady, but the assault is cut short when Wolf attacks and kills Will. On the night of the next full moon, Grady transforms into a werewolf and joins Wolf in hunting.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quantum_Thief"title="The Quantum Thief">
Countless gogols of the legendary gentleman thief Jean Le Flambeur are trapped in a virtual Sobornost prison in orbit around Neptune, playing an iterated prisoner's dilemma until his mind learns to cooperate. A warrior from the Oort Cloud, which has been settled by Finnish colonists, successfully retrieves one of the Le Flambeur gogols and uploads it into a real-space body. Acting on behalf of a competing Sobornost authority, this Oortian, Mieli, ferries the thief to the Martian city known as The Oubliette, where he has stored his memories for later recovery. The two intend to recover his memories so that he may return to an operating capacity sufficient to serve his Sobornost benefactor in a theft and repay his liberation.On the Oubliette, the young detective Isidore Beautrelet helps vigilantes catch Sobornost agents illicitly uploading human minds. These vigilantes are revealed to be in the service of a local colony of Zoku. Beautrelet is employed to investigate the arrival of Le Flambeur, and in the process becomes aware that the Oubliette's cryptographic security was always compromised. The memories of its citizens are fabrications, and the "King of Mars" long believed ousted in a revolution, still reigns behind the scenes. This King, who is another copy of Jean Le Flambeur, is defeated in the ensuing conflict. Le Flambeur fails to recover all of his memories, which he had locked with a quantum entangled revolver that required him to kill several of his old friends to open his stored memory. He and Mieli escape a liberated Mars having recovered only a mysterious "Schrodinger's Box" from the Memory Palace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bloke's_Guide_To_Pregnancy"title="The Bloke's Guide To Pregnancy">
This book takes a sensible-yet-humorous look at the many stages of pregnancy. It explores the physical and emotional changes that men can expect to see in their partner and in their relationship during pregnancy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_(novel)"title="Masterpiece (novel)">
"Masterpiece" is a middle-grade mystery about stolen art, miniature worlds, and the surprising friendship between a talented beetle, Marvin, and a lonely eleven-year-old boy named James. When James receives a pen-and-ink set for his birthday, Marvin discovers that he can create tiny, intricately detailed scenes by dipping his front legs in the cap of ink and drawing on paper. James is mistakenly credited with Marvin's amazing pictures, and soon the beetle and boy are swept up in an adventure at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that involves masterpieces, forgeries, and a stolen pen-and-ink drawing by the great Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer, which Marvin and James are determined to recover. With echoes of "The Cricket in Times Square", "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler", and "Charlotte's Web", this novel explores friendship, sacrifice, and moral dilemmas in the context of a high-stakes art heist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon's_Covenant"title="The Demon's Covenant">
Mae has learned that her brother, Jamie, has magic powers. Gerald, the leader of the Obsidian Circle, is trying to persuade Jamie to join the magicians that tried to kill Mae and Jamie before. Mae tries to get Nick and Alan to rescue Jamie, but they themselves are in trouble. Nick has a new power that makes every magician in England want him dead. Mae knows she cannot trust anyone so she makes her own plan to save everyone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_for_Stone"title="Cutting for Stone">
The story is told by the protagonist, Marion Stone. He and his conjoined twin Shiva are born at Mission Hospital (called "Missing" in accordance with the local pronunciation), Addis Ababa, in September 1954. Their mother, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, an Indian Carmelite nun, dies during childbirth. Their father, Thomas Stone, the English surgeon of Missing, abandons them and disappears. Orphaned at birth, the pair grow up in the household of two physicians of Missing, both from Madras, the obstetrician Kalpana Hemlatha (Hema) and Abhi Ghosh, who fall in love while caring for the infants. Hema names them Marion (after J. Marion Sims) and Shiva (after the Hindu deity). Ghosh teaches himself surgery to replace Stone. The tissue link between the twins has been separated at birth and the two grow up together being very close initially.Both twins are exposed to the changing political environment in Ethiopia. There is an unsuccessful rebellion by Haile Selassie's bodyguard, General Mebratu. Ghosh is imprisoned, then released, in the aftermath of the coup, due to his friendship with Mebratu. Through their parents, both boys are exposed to medicine and taught at the hospital.Over time, though, individual differences begin to become pronounced. When entering puberty their relationship to Genet, the daughter of Rosina, a domestic help, finally tears them apart. Marion is in love with Genet and intends to marry her, but it is Shiva who, interested in sexual pursuits, becomes her first lover. Marion feels betrayed. Rosina forces Genet to submit to female genital mutilation and commits suicide shortly thereafter. Genet will later join the Eritrean liberation movement. While Marion goes to medical school, his brother stays at Missing. Focused on the repair of birth-related fistulas, he takes up his surgical training with Hema eschewing a formal medical education. On his death bed, Ghosh has three wishes for Marion - to get the best medical education, to find Stone, and to forgive his brother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrayar"title="Barrayar">
Cordelia and Aral Vorkosigan are expecting their first child. Before crafty old Emperor Ezar Vorbarra dies, he maneuvers a very reluctant Aral into agreeing to serve as regent for Ezar's young grandson Gregor. A plot to assassinate the Vorkosigans with poison gas fails, but the antidote, while effective, is also a powerful teratogen that poses a grave threat to the bone development of their unborn son. In a desperate attempt to save the fetus, Cordelia has it transferred to a uterine replicator—an artificial womb—to undergo experimental treatment that may partially combat the otherwise-fatal bone damage. Barrayar, due to its harsh environment, has fostered a deep loathing for mutations, and babies with even minor birth defects are routinely euthanized. Aral's father, Count Piotr Vorkosigan, seeks to abort the fetus rather than have the Vorkosigan name and title passed on to a "deformed mutant," but a furious Cordelia keeps him at bay.When Count Vidal Vordarian attempts a coup, five-year-old Gregor is rescued by his loyal security chief, Captain Negri, and reunited with the Vorkosigans. Cordelia, Gregor and bodyguard Konstantin Bothari hide from Vordarian's men in the hills, while Aral and his father organize the resistance.After Cordelia rejoins Aral, they learn that the replicator containing their child, whom they have named Miles, needs periodic maintenance. Without it, the fetus will succumb within six days, but Aral refuses to attempt a rescue when there are far greater concerns. However, Cordelia's personal bodyguard, Ludmilla Droushnakovi, was previously stationed at the palace and knows several top-secret ways to slip inside undetected. Cordelia, Droushnakovi and Bothari set out to rescue Miles and hopefully Gregor's mother, Princess Kareen. When Clement Koudelka, one of Aral's officers, finds out, they kidnap him and persuade him to help out. In the city, they witness the capture of Lady Alys Vorpatril and the murder of her husband, Padma. They rescue Alys, who is pregnant with Ivan Vorpatril. While in hiding, she delivers her son with Bothari's help; he learned midwifery watching his mother minister to others. Cordelia dispatches Koudelka to get her to safety and sets out with Bothari and Droushnakovi to get Miles. Once in the palace, Cordelia and her party are caught in a trap. They manage to overpower their captors, but not before Princess Kareen is killed. In the ensuing confusion, Bothari sets fire to part of the Imperial Palace to cover their retreat as they take Vordarian himself hostage. When Vordarian defies Cordelia, she orders Bothari to behead him. They escape with the replicator—and Vordarian's head. Cordelia returns to Aral's base and deposits the head on a table in front of some of Vordarian's wavering allies. Without its leader, the coup falls apart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Needle"title="The Hollow Needle">
Arsène Lupin is opposed this time by Isidore Beautrelet, a young but gifted amateur detective, who is still in high school but who is poised to give Arsène Lupin a big headache. In the Arsène Lupin universe, the Hollow Needle is the second secret of Marie Antoinette and Alessandro Cagliostro, the hidden fortune of the kings of France, as revealed to Arsène Lupin by Josephine Balsamo in the novel "The Countess of Cagliostro" (1924). The Mystery of the Hollow Needle hides a secret that the Kings of France have been handing down since the time of Julius Caesar... and now Arsène Lupin has mastered it. The legendary needle contains the most fabulous treasure ever imagined, a collection of queens' dowries, pearls, rubies, sapphires and diamonds... the fortune of the kings of France.When Isidore Beautrelet discovers the Château de l'Aiguille in the department of Creuse, he thinks that he has found the solution to the riddle ("l'Aiguille Creuse" being French for "The Hollow Needle", and also the French title of the novel). However, he did not realize that the château was built by Louis XIV, the king of France, to put people off the track of a needle in Normandy, near the town of Le Havre, where Arsène Lupin, known also under the name of Louis Valméras, has hidden himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlines_(Mead_novel)"title="Bloodlines (Mead novel)">
After helping rogue Dhampir Rose Hathaway evade justice, Sydney Sage's situation with the Alchemists is shaky at best. Her career is jeopardized to the point where she may have to undergo re-education. Woken in the middle of the night, Sydney is given a last chance: to pose as the older sister of Jill Dragomir ( illegitimate sister of Vasilisa Dragomir ) at a boarding school in Palm Springs California and assists Keith the alchemist whom she hates and also studied with Sydney's father to conceal her identity to those who oppose Vasilisa. This is because of the family quorum law which means that if Jill were to die Vasilisa would have no family left and would have to abdicate the throne. This is all set in motion due to an attack on Jill which was violent and brutal. Sydney, Jill, Eddie Castile, and Adrian head off to Palm Springs. Sydney and Jill room together while Eddie rooms with Micah which is later said to remind Eddie of his dead best friend Mason from St. Vladimir's Academy.On the first day of school, Jill is sent back to her dorm room accused of having a hangover in the morning. While Sydney visits Adrian in the afternoon, he reveals that he and Jill are bonded from the attack which actually killed Jill, but Adrian, being a spirit user, brought her back from the dead - she is now shadow kissed. This is why she always knows what Adrian is thinking and why she feels hungover every morning. As time goes on, Sydney is excelling in school while Jill is seen to have few friends and is continuously picked on by Laurel due to her crush on Micah, as he shows an interest in Jill.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maigret_and_Monsieur_Charles"title="Maigret and Monsieur Charles">
Maigret is a few years short of his retirement and has just refused promotion to the post of Head of the Police Judiciare, preferring the human contact he enjoys as Head of the Criminal Division. His wish is granted when Madam Nathalie Sabin-Levesque, an elegant but highly nervous lady insists that he personally investigates the disappearance of her husband Gérard, a highly successful and rich Parisian lawyer.With the assistance of various other detectives, but principally Lapointe, Maigret soon discovers that Madam Sabin-Levesque is virtually an alcoholic and has lived an effectively separate life from her husband, who regularly vanishes for days or weeks to take up with various girls. These are mostly hostesses picked up in bars and cabarets, and he is known to them as 'Monsieur Charles'. It further emerges that his wife was also a call-girl in her youth, although she has claimed to be a legal secretary. She hoped for a life of comfort and security with her new husband, who owned a villa in Cannes and inherited money, but they soon grew to ignore and despise each other. She knows nothing of his professional life and is not well liked by the staff at the practice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_the_Emerald_Lady"title="The Legend of the Emerald Lady">
In the book, Nancy solves a mystery on the Caribbean island of St. Ann when visiting Sugar Moon, a nineteenth-century sugar plantation. She finds clues to a treasure in a faded love letter from a long-dead pirate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tiger's_Prey"title="The Tiger's Prey">
Tom Courtney, one of four sons of master mariner Sir Hal Courtney, once again sets sail on a treacherous journey that will take him across the vast reaches of the ocean and pit him against dangerous enemies in exotic destinations. But just as the winds propel his sails, passion drives his heart. Turning his ship towards the unknown, Tom Courtney will ultimately find his destiny—and lay the future for the Courtney family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcade_Catastrophe"title="Arcade Catastrophe">
Magical enforcers Ziggy and Victor Battiato, inform Nate, Summer, Trevor, and Pigeon of the disappearances of fellow enforcer John Dart and magician Mozag and direct the group to investigate the Arcadeland arcade. After visiting the arcade, the friends resolve to earn enough tickets to obtain the magical hand stamps, which grant membership into four exclusive clubs. Nate receives his stamp from the owner of Arcadeland, magician Jonas White, who reveals that he is using the clubs to hunt for a powerful artifact named Uweya. Lindy Stott, who is unaware that she is actually Jonas' sister, Belinda White, also earns a stamp, to the dismay of her adoptive guardian Sebastian Stott. Summer gets a Tank stamp, which grants increased endurance, Pigeon joins the Subs, allowing him to breathe underwater, Trevor becomes a Racer, allowing him to move at inhuman speed, and Nate and Lindy join the Jets, who can fly. To ensure their obedience, Jonas creates a simulacrum, a voodoo doll-like facsimile, of each club member.Jonas’ first task pits the Jets against the Subs in a race to retrieve the Gate to Uweya from a recluse known as the Hermit. Nate and Lindy force the Hermit to hand over the Gate, which takes the form of a stone block, explaining that they were helping Jonas only to save their friends. Pigeon and the other defeated Subs are secretly imprisoned by Jonas under Arcadeland, whereafter he discovers that Dart and Mozag are also held prisoner.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_(Benzoni_novel)"title="Catherine (Benzoni novel)">
The novel is set in the Kingdom of France at the time of the Hundred Years' War, during the war between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians. It begins in 1413 in Paris and continues in Dijon at the court of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, Bruges, Montsalvy, Auvergne, Orléans, Loire Valley, Burgos, Alhambra, and Luxembourg. The series finally ends in 1437 at the castle of Montsalvy. Catherine goes through many adventures; men fall desperately in love with her, her whole life is constantly in danger, and she is hunted down as a criminal and condemned to die more than once, until she finally becomes the beloved wife of Arnaud de Montsalvy, Lord of the Châtaignerie in Auvergne and a captain in the service of King Charles VII.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Dark"title="Forest Dark">
Jules Epstein, a wealthy retiree, goes missing in Tel Aviv to the distress of his three children. Prior to his disappearance triggered perhaps by the death of his parents, and his divorce from his wife, Epstein had been in the process of giving away both his money and his earthly possessions.Meanwhile, in New York City, novelist Nicole is living a crisis herself as she is aware that her marriage is failing but cannot find it within herself to work on saving it. After hearing a program on the radio in which a physicist explains the concept of the multiverse Nicole begins to wonder if all life is not dreamed up from one location, believing that her location could be the Hilton Tel Aviv where she and her family have visited frequently. After her father's cousin tells her of a man who died there, Nicole abruptly makes the decision to go the hotel herself as research for a new novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_I'm_No_Longer_Talking_to_White_People_About_Race"title="Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race">
The book explores the links between gender, class and race in Britain and other countries.The book begins with a summary of the experience of Black and Asian people in the UK, including the Atlantic slave trade, Indian soldiers in World War I, the Bristol Bus Boycott, the 1981 riots and Labour Party Black Sections.The book also covers institutional racism in British society, White feminism, and definitions of class which only include White people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure,_White_and_Deadly"title="Pure, White and Deadly">
## 1972 edition.The book was first published in 1972 in New York by the publisher Peter H. Wyden under the title "Sweet and Dangerous", and a few weeks later in London by Davis-Poynter as "Pure, White and Deadly: The Problem of Sugar". "Pure, White and Deadly" was used for subsequent editions and is the title by which the book became known.At the time of publication, it was generally accepted that the alarming recent increase in the incidence of coronary heart disease (CHD) was due to the excessive consumption of animal fat. Yudkin believed that this view was wrong and that, instead, an important cause of CHD was the excessive consumption of sugar (i.e. sucrose). More generally, he argued, excessive sucrose consumption provokes a metabolic disturbance that has several undesirable results.The author makes the initial case that sucrose is a dangerous food by emphasising the contrast between starch and sucrose. Both of these are carbohydrates, but starch occurs as a bulk constituent of cereals (such as rice, wheat and maize), legumes and a few root crops like potatoes, while sucrose is present in large quantities in sugar cane, sugar beet and ripe fruits. It used to be thought that sucrose and starch are metabolised in similar ways, and so are interchangeable from the nutritional point of view, but more recent evidence had shown that their metabolism is significantly different. The need for carbohydrate as a component of the diet can be entirely satisfied by starch (often in the form of bread or pasta), which is broken down in the body to glucose. On the other hand sucrose, which is broken down to equal quantities of glucose and fructose, is not an essential dietary component even in small amounts. Evolutionary history suggests that our pre-Neolithic ancestors ate a diet that consisted largely of meat, with some nuts, berries, leaves and root vegetables, and we can presume that a taste for sweet fruit developed because it directed people to a rich source of vitamin C, an essential nutrient.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finding_Winnie"title="Finding Winnie">
The book is told by a mother, the author Mattick, telling a story of her great-grandfather to her son. In 1914, veterinarian Harry Colebourn, Mattick's grandfather, rides a train across Canada on his way to serve in World War I. Finding an orphaned female bear on the platform of a Winnipeg railway station for sale for $20 ($ today), he names it "Winnie" after his hometown of Winnipeg. After first being skeptical of the bear, she becomes Colebourn's regiment's mascot, accompanying the soldiers to training in England. When the regiment moves to the front in France, Colebourn finds a home for Winnie at London Zoo. There the bear makes friends with a boy named Christopher Robin and inspires A. A. Milne to write the story of Winnie-the-Pooh, while Colebourn returns home to Canada at the end of the war to start a family. At the end of the book there are some of the photos and documents behind the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deshe_Bideshe"title="Deshe Bideshe">
Syed Mujtaba Ali stayed in Kabul for one and a half year to work as a teacher and described his experience in Afghanistan in the book. The book shows his keen observations but written with a sense of humor. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_Left_to_Lose_(novel)"title="Nothing Left to Lose (novel)">
John Wayne Cleaver is again flying solo on his vendetta against the supernatural killers called "the Withered." He follows a lead to the town of Lewisville, Arizona in search of a demon named "Rain." His first stop is the funeral of a woman he suspects might be a victim of a Withered. There, he is approached by an odd, homeless-looking woman who tells him to "Run from Rain." He lands a job as the local mortuary's make-up artist and makes friends with his boss, Margo, and fellow employee, Jasmyn. When townspeople begin to die under strange circumstances, John's gig allows him to examine the bodies of the victims: a woman who drowned nowhere near water, and a boy who was burned alive nowhere near fire. Then, while walking by the local canal, John is almost drowned by a man who claims " the Dark Lady" was sent to kill him. He is rescued by a few men, one of which is a demon named Assu, who has the power to burn things. He craves cold, so John takes him back to the mortuary’s freezer. There, a fire ignites and Assu is disintegrated into demonic black sludge. John tries to clean it all up, worried that if it is discovered, the FBI will track him down. With this in mind, he takes extra precautions, including arming the mortuary doors with motion detectors and finding a new place to stay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_People"title="The Hidden People">
While visiting the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, Albie meets Lizzie, his rural cousin from northern England for the first time. They only spend a few hours together at the event, but during that time he falls in love with her. He does not see or hear from her again, and in 1862 Albie's father tells him that Lizzie had been burnt to death by her husband. Albie, who is now married to Helena and living in London, is horrified that anyone could do such a terrible thing to his cousin. Albie learns that Jeremy, Lizzie's husband, believed that his wife had been abducted by fairies and replaced with a changeling.Albie is determined to get to the bottom of what happened to Lizzie and travels to the village of Halfoak in Yorkshire where she had lived. He finds a community steeped in superstition and believing in fairies and changelings. He discovers that Lizzie has not even been buried yet, and that her charred remains are stored in a washhouse. Helena arrives unexpectedly to support her husband and attends a funeral Albie has organised for his cousin. None of the locals attend.Albie and Helena move into Lizzie's now vacant cottage. Albie struggles to find the answers he wants, and refuses to believe in the creatures that the villagers say inhabit a fairy mound near to the cottage. But Albie keeps experiencing strange events that makes him wonder whether there is some truth to all this "fairy nonsense". When Albie sees Helena start to behave strangely and not being herself, he questions whether she really is his wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Changeling_(LaValle_novel)"title="The Changeling (LaValle novel)">
Apollo Kagwa is just beginning to settle into his new life as a committed and involved father, unlike his own father who abandoned him, when his wife Emma begins acting strange. Disconnected and uninterested in their new baby boy, Emma at first seems to be exhibiting signs of post-partum depression, but it becomes clear that her troubles go beyond that. Before Apollo can do anything to help, Emma commits a horrific act—beyond any parent's comprehension—and vanishes, seemingly into thin air. Thus begins Apollo's journey through an enchanted world to find his wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossils_(play)"title="Fossils (play)">
"Fossils" opens with Julie describing her parents as "Homo parentithicus. Found in mosturban parts of Australia. Usually roam in pairs, over-protective and trained in advanced methods of torture." Frankie is the new boy at school, and there is some mystery surrounding his father and why he left his old school. Julie and Michelle befriend him on the first day. The action centres on the preparations for and aftermath of a school dance, with all its attendant teenage angst. It's a fast paced play, with much quick snappy dialogue and described by critics as an "incredibly funny script."While the play has a large number of characters, it was originally designed to be performed by only three actors. Most professional productions have cast one male and two female actors; however school productions usually have up to 15 actors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Boys"title="The Old Boys">
The story concerns a group of elderly men on the board of a society for the old boys of an unnamed English public school and the power politics and old rivalries that come into play during the election of a new president for the Old Boys Association. The old boys themselves have developed various ways of coping with retirement and loneliness and life's disappointments but they all take a keen interest in their old school, none more so than Jaraby, who desires and expects to be elected as the new president, but is nervous about the possibility of being opposed by Nox, his former fag.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteen_Cents"title="Thirteen Cents">
Azure is a twelve-year-old orphan with astonishing blue eyes and dark skin. At the opening of the novel, it is revealed that he left home three years ago after the murder of his parents. Azure roams the streets of Sea Point in Cape Town. His typical day consists of a lot of walking, a bath at the beach in the morning, parking cars in the city during the day, and sleeping near a swimming pool at night. He is well aware of other street kids whom he claims are deep into evil. Azure introduces his nine-year-old friend Bafana in chapter one who, unlike Azure, is into drugs and chooses to roam the streets even though he is not homeless. Liesel is also introduced in chapter one. She is a prostitute who sells joints to Azure and lives under the bridge along with “skollies,” gangsters, and drunks.Azure earns most of his money by prostituting himself to “moffies,” which is the term used to refer to gay men. Azure gives his money to his older friend Joyce to put into a bank account for him. She insists on it as she tells him she knows how banks work. Azure calls Joyce “Auntie” out of respect and promises her he will never become part of a gang. He stays safe on the streets with the protection of Allen, a gangster pimp who works at Green Point. Allen is depicted as controlling and excessively violent. Azure cannot do anything with his own money unless he discusses it with Allen. It is through Allen that Azure realizes the power in money.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabi_Ponnu"title="Arabi Ponnu">
The Arabs came in their dhows laden with dates to Calicut, the Port of Truth, and through the dates smuggled in gold. The Port of Truth became the Port of Treachery. Koya, the protagonist, saw his hands smeared with the stink of Arab gold, opium, smuggled liquor and women. He saw them, he lived with them. He loaded opium on a Chinese vessel anchored off Beypore. But he emerged as a new man from the world of treachery and robbery, deceit and betrayal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Moment_of_True_Feeling"title="A Moment of True Feeling">
Gregor Keuschnig works for the Embassy of Austria in Paris. One day he wakes up from a dream where he murdered a woman. From this moment his life seems pointless and the world around him distant. He goes through his daily routine and interacts with his colleagues, his mistress and his family, but feels lost and out of balance. He observes everything around him in search for a sensation that feels genuine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troop_(book)"title="The Troop (book)">
"The Troop" follows the story of five teenage boys and their Scoutmaster as they spend a weekend away on Falstaff Island, a remote island a short distance away from the town where they all live. The troop consists of Scoutmaster Tim Riggs (a middle-aged man and the town physician), Max (a mild mannered boy and best friend of Ephraim), Ephraim (nicknamed Eef, a boy prone to violent outbursts), Newt (a quiet, "nerdy" boy who is quite intelligent), Kent (a bold and tenacious boy prone to forcing his leadership among others), and Shelley (a deeply disturbed psychopathic boy).Determined to simulate a true-to-life remote island scenario, Tim makes sure to remove any form of communication to the mainland. However, he does bring along a radio because there had been warnings of a potential storm. On the first evening of the trip, Tim notices a boat arriving on the island. Not expecting visitors for another two days, Riggs is wary of the stranger, who, upon inspection, is inhumanly malnourished but otherwise non-threatening. The stranger tells Tim that he needs help and is ravenously hungry. After deliberating, Tim allows the man to rest on the couch inside for the night, but not before telling the boys to stay in their room.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_You_(novel)"title="After You (novel)">
"After You" is a continuation of Louisa Clark's life after Will's death. It follows her journey of recovery after losing her beloved. Encouraged by Will to make her life more meaningful, she moves to London and gets a job at an airport bar. One night, she goes up to the roof of her residence to sit alone, when someone begins to talk to her. Panicking, Louisa falls off the roof and severely injures herself. After her recovery, she enrolls in a support group in a church. Will's daughter Lily contacts Louisa, seeking information about her deceased father, whom she didn't know existed until after he had died. Lily wants to get to know her grandparents as well, so she moves in with Louisa. However, she hates living with her mother, stepfather, and her half-brothers. Meanwhile, Louisa gets to know Sam, the uncle of one of the boys in her support group. Sam is one of the paramedics who helped save her life after her accident. They become romantically involved. Louisa's friend Nathan gets in contact with her and offers her a job in the USA. She attends the interview for this job and gets accepted, even though it was a hard decision for Louisa, as she had just started to fall for Sam.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_Girl_(novel)"title="Razor Girl (novel)">
Merry completes her latest abduction on the Overseas Highway, only to find that she and her accomplice "Zeto" have snatched the wrong person: Lane Coolman, a talent manager from Los Angeles on his way to supervise a live appearance at a Key West bar by his firm's most important client, reality television star Buck Nance. Without Coolman present, Buck, who is badly unprepared to give an improvised performance, resorts to telling a few jokes overheard from his brothers, which are quickly decried by the crowd as racist and homophobic slurs. In fear for his safety, Buck flees into the night and hacks off his trademark beard in the kitchen of a closed restaurant. The beard fragments are reported to health inspector Andrew Yancy, a former police detective.While waiting for their real target, Merry and Zeto let Coolman call his boss, who is indifferent to Coolman's safety but discreetly asks Monroe County Sheriff Summers to start a search for Buck. Because of the urgent need to find him quickly, the Sheriff's only detective, Burton, reluctantly asks Yancy to assist with the search.After Zeto announces his intention to kill Coolman and dispose of his body, Merry takes pity on him and allows Coolman to escape while they abduct their real target, Martin Trebeaux, a beach nourishment hustler who delivered faulty sand to the beach behind a Mafia-controlled Boynton Beach hotel. After completing the job, Merry spends the evening in Key West, where she sees Coolman and whimsically decides to spend the evening with him. She meets Yancy when Coolman is called to the site of an accidental death outside their hotel: a Muslim tourist from Brooklyn who was accosted by a raving street person and fell off the city trolley, fatally stabbing himself in the heart with a souvenir being clutched to his chest. Coolman is horrified to be told that the assailant loosely fits Buck's description, and infuriated when Merry leaves him to have dinner with Yancy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmet_(novel)"title="Elmet (novel)">
The narrator who speaks in the sections in cursive seems to be looking for somebody against a modern landscape of highways, lorries and café stopovers.We will come to realise that this is Daniel, a boy who used to live in the middle of the forest with Daddy and big sister Cathy. There is mystery about the comings and goings of the father, and why the mother is always absent. Little by little the reader comes to understand that the father works as a thug for Mr Price, who owns all the ex-controlled rent houses and flats in the area. The father is also the unbeaten winning champion in unlawful boxing matches of the area. Most of this information is conveyed by Vivien, an elderly neighbour who lives a hike away and who tries to educate Cathy and Daniel to a certain degree. While Daniel stays at her house reading, Cathy strolls around the forests.At some point the father stops extorting rents for Mr. Price and does the opposite, pushing people to strike to get higher wages and to get reasonable rents for their households. Mr. Price offers him the deeds of the land in which he is living to go to Daniel in exchange of one last big boxing gig. He will win this one as well, although everything seemed to be stuck against him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wolves"title="History of Wolves">
As a 37-year-old woman, the events of "History of Wolves" are a recount of a summer when Linda was a teenager. Linda grew up in an abandoned commune in rural Minnesota with her parents; her mother who she suspected to not be biological parent, and her emotionally unattached father. Her poor relationship with her parents coupled with her geographical isolation, as she lived surrounded by forest, resulted in Linda being an emotionally distant teen who struggled to effectively communicate and form meaningful connections. Linda was a complete outsider at school and was called names such as “Freak” and “Commie”. Linda was drawn to her mysterious and beautiful classmate, Lily, and her history teacher, Mr. Grierson. Mr. Grierson seemed to pay special attention to Lily, a fact that Linda was acutely aware of. Though he favoured Lily, Mr. Grierson also took a special interest in Linda, offering her a place in the History Odyssey in which she unconventionally chose to do the history of wolves. In the car driving home from the event, Linda attempted to kiss Mr. Grierson, however, he ignored the act. Linda soon found out that Mr. Grierson was fired from his previous school for accusations of paedophilia, and he was also caught with possession of child pornography. Linda's school fired Mr. Grierson and rumours started spreading that Mr. Grierson had a sexual encounter with Lily. These accusations of sexual assault made Linda become more intrigued by Lily, although she also resented her as she believed these accusations to be false. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Takes_an_Eye_for_an_Eye"title="The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye">
Lisbeth Salander is serving a two-month jail sentence for the crimes she committed while protecting August Balder. After threats arise against her, she is transferred to maximum security Flodberga Prison, which she finds rife with corruption. She also discovers that Bangladeshi prisoner Faria Kasi is tormented nightly by ruthless prisoner Beatrice "Benito" Andersson.One day, Salander is visited by former guardian Holger Palmgren. During their conversation, Palmgren tells her about a visit he received from a former secretary from St Stefan's, where she was committed as a child, who gave him Salander's medical files which has led him to believe she was involved in something called the Registry. Suspicious, Salander forces the Warden to let her use his computer, where she learns the Registry is a secret project that places exceptional children in specific environments to test the effects on their growth.Unable to do anything from prison, Salander asks journalist Mikael Blomkvist to investigate in her stead, pointing him to wealthy businessman Leo Mannheimer, whose name was in the Registry file she found. During his investigation, Blomkvist learns that Mannheimer had been acting strangely lately and comes to suspect that not only does he have a twin, Dan Brody, but Brody has been going around pretending to be Mannheimer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Belle_Sauvage"title="La Belle Sauvage">
Eleven-year-old Malcolm Polstead and his dæmon Asta live three miles from Oxford. Malcolm works alongside fifteen-year-old Alice in his parents' inn, The Trout, close to the Priory of St. Rosamund where Malcolm helps the nuns with maintenance and cooking. One day, three men, led by the former Lord Chancellor, Lord Nugent, arrive at the inn and question Malcolm about the priory. Shortly afterwards, an infant aged around six months named Lyra arrives in the care of the nuns.Walking near the river, Malcolm sees a failed attempt at a dead drop and finds a secret message. The intended recipient is Hannah, an Oxford academic specialising in the alethiometer who is secretly helping an organisation known as 'Oakley Street' in its fight against the theocratic extremism of the Magisterium. Using the alethiometer Hannah finds Malcolm and retrieves her message. The two strike up a friendship in which Malcolm assists her intelligence-gathering and she provides him with books to read from her own library.The Magisterium's influence grows. At Malcolm's school, students are encouraged to join the League of St. Alexander, and to report anybody - including teachers - who contradicts the Magisterium's religious views. Coram van Texel, also working for Oakley Street, is investigating the activities of Marisa Coulter in Sweden. He discovers that she is looking into the Rusakov field and has asked an alethiometrist to find her daughter Lyra's location. Coram is followed by a man with a malevolent hyena dæmon and fights him, badly wounding the dæmon's front leg. Lyra's father, Lord Asriel, visits the inn and Malcolm takes him to visit Lyra. To escape his pursuers Asriel borrows Malcolm's canoe, "La Belle Sauvage". As a token of thanks, he returns it significantly improved. Coram warns Malcolm of an impending flood, but Malcolm is unable to convince people to act. A man named Gerard Bonneville arrives at the inn, accompanied by a three-legged hyena dæmon, and Malcolm sees him snooping around the priory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_the_Stars_are_Gods"title="If the Stars are Gods">
The novel is a series of stories about Bradley Reynolds, Earth's first space hero. While Part One (Mars exploration), and Part Two (alien encounter) are stand alone stories, the latter sections deal with the life systems of Jupiter and are interconnected.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blinding_Order"title="The Blinding Order">
The plot centres on a religious order issued by a Sultan, calling for all people with the "dubious power" of the evil eye to be blinded, and the subsequent terror campaign that follows. All this is narrated in a "fable tone of one thousand and one nightmare nights"" 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wine_of_Astonishment"title="The Wine of Astonishment">
This story is narrated by Eva Dorcas. She and her husband, Bee Dorcas are a religious couple who are both members of the Spiritual Baptist Church in a small Trinidadian community known as Bonasse. They all share their experiences about being persecuted due to their direct affiliation with their religion. They also share how they were betrayed by someone to whom they entrusted their faith for a change. Trust became an issue for the fellow characters since Ivan Morton betrayed them when he entered into the political life and evacuated the house his father built on his own to live in a colonial-era mansion, located on top of the Bonasse hill, that was once occupied by an English family known as the Richardsons. The community praised Bolo for his masculinity in defending his fellow neighbours until he was taken to prison. After his release he was no longer the person he once was, of which the community now fear.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Column_of_Fire"title="A Column of Fire">
Beginning in 1558, and continuing through 1605, the story chronicles the romance between Ned Willard and Margery Fitzgerald, as well as the political intrigue of the royal courts of England, France, and Scotland, and the oft-times violent conflict between supporters of the Catholic Church and the rising Protestant movement in the late 16th century.As depicted in the early chapters, the city of Kingsbridge is ruled by an oligarchy of rich merchants, who sit on the city council, with the most powerful family holding the position of the city's Mayor. The plot focuses on three families which represent the main political and religious divisions in the English society of the time. The Fitzgeralds are a staunchly Catholic family, which under the Catholic Queen Mary gives them an advantage over the others and the position of Mayor. They seek to upgrade their social position by a marrying into the titled aristocracy. At the opposite pole are the intransigently Puritan Cobleys, who secretly hold Protestant worship - a highly dangerous act under Catholic rule. Their strong religious principles do not, however, stop the Cobleys from resorting to occasional underhand tricks to cheat their competitors and employees, and dabbling in the new lucrative field of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In between are the more pragmatic Willards - nominal Catholics under Mary, but who would turn Protestant once Elizabeth came to power.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hiding_Place_(Bell_novel)"title="The Hiding Place (Bell novel)">
The Hiding Place starts off at a park in the small town of Dove Point, Ohio where Janet Manning and her younger brother Justin Manning are sent to play alone. Janet loses track of her brother while playing with her own friend, she left him playing in the sandbox. When it's time to leave Justin has gone missing, no one is able to find him. Everyone has their own idea of how he went missing; he was chasing a dog and left the park in the direction of the forest. Or he was carried away by a man named Dante Rogers, an African American pedophile.2 months after Justin Manning had gone missing, a boy's body was found in the forest outside of the park. They assumed this body belonged to 4 year old Justin, but they did not have the technology at the time to be completely sure.Dante Rogers went to jail for 20 years for the murder of Justin Manning. The police arrested and charged him as he had photos of children in his room. One of these children was of a blonde child, Justin Manning.Now, 25 years after Justin went missing, Janet is now 32 and she isn't sure what happened that day at the park. She meets a suspicious man, who looks like her brother, when he comes to her home one night. After the strange meeting with this man, she decides to try and find out what really happened to Justin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Absolutely_Remarkable_Thing"title="An Absolutely Remarkable Thing">
Protagonist April May discovers a large robot sculpture in Midtown Manhattan. She and her friend Andy Skampt decide to film it and post the video online, which goes viral and makes April an overnight celebrity. All over the world identical structures—known as "Carls"—have appeared in major cities at exactly the same time.It turns out that there are 64 Carls distributed in cities across the globe, which have miraculously appeared at once. As well, gradually almost all of humanity find themselves entering an interactive Dream when they sleep, within an identical landscape filled with puzzles that provide clues when solved. Over the course of a few months, April and her friends Andy, Miranda, and Robin work to solve the codes and riddles of the Carls throughout the Dream.Several governments restrict access to Carls, leading April to become more politically active, which leads to April being interviewed on one news show alongside the conservative pundit Peter Petrawicki, who has written an already bestselling 20-page book called "Invaded" arguing that the Carls, representing a foreign invader, are dangerous. As a result over the following months, April cultivates a friendly persona and writes her own book, saying that people should use the social internet in a positive way to work together at solving the sequences, some of which require specific knowledge and collaboration.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_with_the_Jade_Green_Eyes"title="The Girl with the Jade Green Eyes">
"The Girl with the Jade Green Eyes" is a novel about green aliens, a Naval examination center, and spies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Malacia_Tapestry"title="The Malacia Tapestry">
"The Malacia Tapestry" is a novel about Perian de Chirolo, a poor young man who is both a rogue and rarely-working actor, in the imaginary city of Malacia, which resembles Renaissance Venice. De Chirolo lives in a humble attic, cadges meals and drinks in taverns, seeks love affairs with many women, and mingles with artists, astrologers, magicians, and nobility in the bustling port town. As the story opens, De Chirolo enjoys his free time with his young friend Guy de Lambert, who is also an actor. The pair pass their days drinking, jesting, and having affairs with women.Malacia has a legendary curse that it can never progress or change, which is enforced by a powerful Supreme Council, which also eliminates heretics and other freethinkers. The craftsman Otto Bengtsohn, though, defies the anti-progress edicts and invents a type of early photography. Bengtsohn uses the camera to make slides of a play, which is funded by the powerful and wealthy Andrus Hoytola. De Chirolo falls in love with Hoytola's daughter, Armida, who is acting in the play. De Chirolo starts a secret love affair with the wealthy Armida, but she tells him they cannot marry unless he achieves enough in to make an acceptable mate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_President_Is_Missing_(novel)"title="The President Is Missing (novel)">
The book begins with U.S. President Jonathan Lincoln Duncan preparing to defend himself against the charge of negotiating with a terrorist. It has been discovered that the president made a phone call to Suliman Cindoruk, the leader of the cyberterrorist group Sons of Jihad, and that he thwarted an attack on Cindoruk's life.Duncan's daughter Lily, who is studying in Paris, receives a coded message from a young Eastern European woman named Nina. Lily tells her father about the strange person and the message, and she is requested to come back home immediately. Determined to know the source of the leak, the president invites Nina to the White House. She tells the president that in order to get the full story, he must meet with her partner at Nationals Park on Friday. Duncan meets the partner, named Augie. As Augie and the president leave the stadium, an assassin contracted by Suliman Cindoruk shoots and kills Nina. The Secret Service intervenes and extracts Duncan and Augie. The president's convoy heads to Virginia, but they are ambushed again. Two Secret Service agents are killed, but the President is unharmed and drives off with Augie. He arrives at a safe house, where he learns that Nina and Augie created and distributed a highly destructive computer virus called "Dark Ages" for Cindoruk, but they warned the US when they realized what it would do. The virus is scheduled to take effect in a few hours.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mzungu_Boy"title="The Mzungu Boy">
The narrator and main character is Kariuki, a young Kenyan boy living under the oppressive rule of a British plantation owner named Bwama Ruin. While near a watering hole, Kariuki meets Bwama's nephew Nigel, who is fishing. Nigel is a white boy from Britain staying in Kenya for the summer. He is one year younger than Kariuki and is unaware of the systematic oppression of the Kenyan people. Kariuki and Nigel quickly become friends. Nigel gains the title of "The Mzungu Boy", meaning "white boy", by the older boys of the village. Nigel immediately falls in love with hunting on the prairies of Africa. He especially enjoys hunting Old Moses, which, according to Kariuki, is the oldest, toughest warthog in the world. Kariuki's older brother, Hari, is part of the Mau Mau rebellion. During one of Nigel's and Kariuki's hunting expeditions, they get separated. Bwama Ruin calls in the British army to search for Nigel. When Kariuki goes to search for Nigel, he finds him captured by the Mau Mau. Kariuki frees Nigel but while they try to escape, they both get captured by the Mau Mau. Although the Mau Mau want to kill them both, Kariuki's brother Hari frees them. Nigel and Kariuki run back to the town, while the Mau Mau attempt to flee from the British soldiers by hiding in the mountains. When the boys get back to the plantation, they go to Bwama Ruin's estate to find that British soldiers have found and killed Hari as he tried to flee with the Mau Mau rebels. Kariuki runs out of the town, overcome with emotion. The book ends with Nigel, "The Mzungo Boy", finding and comforting Kariuki.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandpa's_Great_Escape"title="Grandpa's Great Escape">
Grandpa’s Great Escape is set in London in 1983 and tells the tale of Grandpa, a World War II flying ace, who sadly is now confused, still believing that World War II hasn't ended and longing to re-live his past. When his family can no longer look after him, Grandpa is moved to an old people’s home called Twilight Towers, run by Miss Swine.It soon becomes clear Miss Swine is running Twilight Towers for her own good profit and it is up to Grandpa and his 12-year-old grandson Jack, the only one who can understand his beliefs, to make a daring escape. Grandpa takes a final chance to relive his past and once again flies in his beloved Spitfire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_City_(novel)"title="Soul City (novel)">
In a utopian setting named Soul City, Cadillac Jackson, a reporter for Chocolate City Magazine, arrives in Soul City to cover the mayoral election and falls in love with a woman named Mahogany.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Dogs_(novel)"title="War Dogs (novel)">
Approximately 30 years before the beginning of the novel, a small group of alien refugees (later termed the "Gurus") landed on Earth and soon made themselves indispensable with their contributions to human technology and scientific understanding. In exchange, they "requested" Earth's help in repelling the hostile invaders (termed the "antagonists" or simply "Antags" or "Ants") who had chased the Gurus from their own star system, and were already establishing a beachhead on Mars. The narrator of the novel is Master Sergeant Michael Venn of the multi-national force of "Skyrines" (spaceborne Marines) sent to Mars.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idu_(novel)"title="Idu (novel)">
The novel is set in a remote African village and follows the protagonist Idu and her husband Adiewere over a number of years. From the beginning of the novel, Nwapa ensures the reader is aware of the wedded bliss between Idu and Adiewere; they are absolutely devoted to each other as husband and wife. Their happiness together is portrayed to be overwhelming. In the African tribe, motherhood is coveted and being a mother is deemed to be far more important than being a devoted wife. Despite their desire for children, Idu and Adiewere remain childless for many years. During this time, Idu and Adiewere build a great business and become prosperous however when Adiewere's brother, Ishiodu is in trouble, they forfeit their wealth to help Ishiodu. As time passes, the pressure from the villagers for Idu and Adiewere to have a child becomes unbearable and Idu weeps that she has brought the curse of childlessness onto her husband. At Idu's beckoning, Adiewere takes a second wife, who he treats as a child rather than a wife. Idu unexpectedly announces she is pregnant and the village rejoices with the couple and bestows many gifts upon the popular couple. Upon becoming aware of Idu's pregnancy, the second wife leaves Adiewere.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ivory_Throne"title="The Ivory Throne">
The book begins by discussing the cultural implications of the arrival of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama and the expansion of maritime trade in the Indian subcontinent. It specifically focuses on the series of events that lead to the rise of Martanda Varma and his impact on the kingdom of Travancore. During that era, the kingdom followed a form of matrilineal succession known as Marumakkathayam. And it was through this system that the adoption of Sethu Lakshmi Bayi and her cousin Sethu Parvathi Bayi into the Travancore Royal Family (depicted on the cover of the book) made them the Senior Maharani and Junior Maharani, respectively.The book covers most key events in Travancore's history from the perspective of the Senior Maharani, often involving the Junior Maharani to various degrees. It chronicles the bond they shared during their upbringing, which would later turn into a power struggle when Senior Maharani begins her regency during the minority of the Junior Maharani's son (and heir to the eponymous Ivory Throne), Chithira Thirunal Balarama Varma. While the Maharani's regency would be marked largely with positive reforms for both the people and the kingdom of Travancore, the termination of her regency would be the beginning of a bitter struggle between her and the Junior Maharani.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thinking_Woman's_Guide_to_Real_Magic"title="The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic">
Nora Fisher is an English teacher trying to earn her PhD in Literature when her boyfriend, Adam, breaks up with her. Nora must attend a wedding that weekend, but while she and her friends stay at a cabin she goes for a walk, carrying an old copy of "Pride and Prejudice" with her, and loses her way in the woods. She wanders into a graveyard and reads aloud a poem inscribed upon a tombstone. Upon leaving the graveyard, Nora discovers a garden and meets a woman named Ilissa, who invites Nora to her house and insists that Nora attend their party that night. Given a beautiful dress and a miraculous makeover, Nora meets a splendid company of people at the party that night, including Raclin, Ilissa's handsome son. Nora soon forgets about the wedding, and her teaching, and stays at Ilissa's house for an indefinite amount of time, attending parties nearly every night and going hunting with her new friends in the day. She also becomes engaged to Raclin.One day Nora strays from their hunting party and a team of men seize her. They report her to two men: Lord Luklren, and a magician named Aruendiel. They let her go, but Aruendiel warns Nora not to trust Ilissa and her people, a warning that Nora ignores. She marries Raclin and soon becomes pregnant, but one night she has an argument with Raclin because she suspects him of carrying on with other women. Raclin suddenly reveals himself to be a dragon and attacks her, and she falls down a flight of stairs. Ilissa and her people carry her to a bed, fearing that she has had a miscarriage. Nora sends a plea for help to Aruendiel by means of his token, a feather, and a tremendous gust of wind spirits Nora away from Ilissa's house.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Minor_Adjustment_Beauty_Salon"title="The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon">
Mr JLB Matekoni and Mma Ramotswe notice that Grace Makutsi is pregnant, and has not mentioned it to her employer. Mma Ramotswe decides she will wait for Grace to speak up. Rather close to the delivery date, she does.Mma Sheba Kutso arrives with a case for the agency. Edgar Molapo, a farmer, died a few months earlier. He left most of his estate, including his farm and cattle, to his nephew, the son of his late brother. Mma Sheba is not convinced that the young man who presents himself is this nephew. She asks them to resolve his identity so that his will can be carried out properly.Grace Makutsi leaves the office early to rest, but finds a cobra under the bed. After the snake is killed, Grace goes into labor about 3 weeks early. Grace delivers a boy, to be called Itumelang Clovis Radiphuti. Phuti's aunt appears, but Phuti stands up for their choice for modern ways of caring for the infant, and she soon leaves. In the town to get a gift for the new baby, Mma Ramotswe sees the new location of the Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon, and speaks with the proprietor, Mma Soleti. The latter has received a bird feather in the mail, meaning someone wishes her ill. She is worried.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_the_Churchyard"title="The Road to the Churchyard">
The short story begins with a description of the gravel paved road to the churchyard, as well as of the half-paved highway running parallel to it. During the introduction sequence, various persons travelling it are described, such as soldiers marching, apprentices heading into town, or merchants travelling by cart.The story then moves onto a physical description of the main character, Lobgott Piepsam. His wardrobe is described as a bit short for him, with sings of aging present of it, but overall, quite inconspicuous. His face is, on the contrary, memorable because of his nose. It is large, covered in marks and, in contrast to his pale face, red. The reason for his going to the church is given as well, he is heading to visit the graves of his wife and children. His children died young, as infants, and his wife died six months prior. His entire demeanor is that of grief, much more than that of a grieving husband and father. He is an alcoholic, without the support of a family.Next, a young boy tries to pass him, only to be stopped when Lobgott threatens with a formal complaint to the city government, because he is driving a bike on the church road where that isn't permitted. The boy simply shrugs him off, and tries to drive off. Lobgott runs after him, grabs the rear side of the bike and cause that bike to overturn. The boy responds by punching him in the chest, and further threatening him, should he again stop him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nowhere_Man_(Hurwitz_novel)"title="The Nowhere Man (Hurwitz novel)">
The novel begins with a case of cyberbullying a humble family girl who ends up being a victim of a network of human traffic. Evan Smoak saves the girl but realizes that another young woman has been embarked on a freighter to be sold. When he prepares to save her, he himself is kidnapped by a group of professionals, drugged and transferred to a mansion in the middle of the mountains.At first Evan believes that his mortal enemy, Van Sciver, is behind everything, but the owner of the mansion introduces himself as René, a cynical criminal addicted to luxury that all he wants is access to the bulky secret account of Evan.Despite being a man with many resources, Smoak soon realizes that it will not be easy for him to escape from his cage: the mansion is guarded by mercenaries, dobermans, two snipers and René's personal behemoth of a man, Dex.Meanwhile, in Ukraine, the lethal Candy McClure, whose code name Orphan V, remains obsessed with getting revenge on Smoak, but begins to question the methods of her organization when an innocent girl is killed by her new partner, a psychopath eunuch nicknamed Orphan M.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachinko_(novel)"title="Pachinko (novel)">
The novel takes place over the course of three sections, which begin with quotations from the works of Charles Dickens, Park Wan-suh, and Benedict Anderson, respectively. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_on_Democracy"title="Notes on Democracy">
"Notes on Democracy" is a critique of democracy. The book places political leaders into two categories: the demagogue, who "preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots" and the demaslave, "who listens to what these idiots have to say and then pretends that he believes it himself." Mencken depicts politicians as "men who have sold their honor for their jobs."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_Pablo,_Hating_Escobar"title="Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar">
The book is divided in an introduction and three parts: The Days of Innocence and Dreams; The Days of Splendor and Terror; and The Days of Absence and Silence.In the Introduction, Virginia Vallejo describes her departure from Colombia on 18 July 2006 in a special flight of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), after she has accused a former senator and minister of justice, Alberto Santofimio, of instigating the assassination of a former presidential candidate, Luis Carlos Galan, and after she had offered her cooperation to the Department of Justice in ongoing high-profile criminal cases.The story begins with the joy and passion of two new lovers -Pablo, an ambitious rookie politician from humble origins, and Virginia, a socialite and media personality, both 32 years old- and continues with the evolution of their relationship and Escobar's personality during his war against the extradition treaty between Colombia and the United States, and the terrorist activities of him and the Medellin cartel in their last years.Like a snowball, Vallejo describes the birth and boom of the cocaine industry that turned her lover into a billionaire, thanks to the cooperation of leading politicians; the origins of the Colombian rebel organizations, and the paramilitary squads founded by Escobar and his partners; the assassinations of the justice minister Rodrigo Lara in 1984, and the siege of the Palace of Justice in 1985; the suffering of the journalist after she had ended her relationship with the drug kingpin in 1987, and her cooperation with the anti drug German agency BKA in 1988; the Cuban connection, and the bombing of an airplane with 110 people on board in 1989 (Avianca Flight 203); the assassination of Luis Carlos Galán, and three more presidential candidates; the origins of Escobar's war against the Cali cartel and the Colombian state, followed by the era of narcoterrorism from 1988 to 1993; the coalition of enforcement agencies and Escobar's enemies involved in his hunt; and, finally, the worldwide reaction to the death of the Number One Enemy of the United States on 2 December 1993.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_We_Reaped"title="Men We Reaped">
Five men in Ward's life die in the space of four years. All are Black men between the ages of 19-32, including her brother, Joshua, killed by a white drunk driver. Though seemingly unconnected, Ward takes her readers on a journey—personal, familial and communal—showing how they were in reality bonded by identity and place, and how race, poverty, and gender predetermined the outcome of their lives.Ward was born in California when her mother was 18 and her father 20. She was born premature and was a sickly child, not expected to survive. Her family later moves to Mississippi, where her parents are from. Ward describes growing up in the poor, small towns of DeLisle and Pass Christian, where her family, like the community around them, experience a lack of opportunities, and an abundance of violence, including from the police, leading many to sink into abuse of drugs and alcohol. She also recounts how in her family, her mother raised her children on her own, due to infidelity and abandonment by her husband. Ward contrasts their lives, choices and experiences, and her own life zig-zagging between them: "What it meant to be a woman: working, dour, full of worry. What it meant to be a man: resentful, angry, wanting life to be everything but what it was."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sing,_Unburied,_Sing"title="Sing, Unburied, Sing">
The novel begins on Jojo's thirteenth birthday. To step into his new role as a man, Jojo tries to help his grandfather, Pop, kill a goat. He is sickened by the slaughter, but Pop is not disappointed in him, as he had feared. Pop uses the goat to make stew and while the food is cooking, he tells Jojo about his family. Pop tells Jojo about how he was sent to Parchman prison when he was 15. Pop's older brother, Stag, got into a bar fight with some white Navy officers. The officers came after Stag and also took Pop, who was home at that time. Both boys were then sent to Parchman prison. It was there that Pop met Richie, a 12-year-old inmate. Leonie receives a call during the birthday celebration, and it is Michael, Jojo and Kayla's father, informing Leonie that he is coming home from prison where he has been for three years. The next day, Leonie argues with Pop about whether she should take Jojo and Kayla with her on the trip. At Mam's suggestion, she invites her coworker Misty, whose boyfriend is also incarcerated in Parchman. While she talks to her mom, Leonie realizes that Mam's cancer is getting worse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_the_Line_Bleeds"title="Where the Line Bleeds">
"Where the Line Bleeds" follows twin brothers, Joshua and Christophe, who are raised by their blind grandmother, and have just graduated from high school on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Poor and Black, they find few economic opportunities as they struggle to undertake their adult lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Railway_(novel)"title="The Railway (novel)">
The novel is plotted in Gilas, a fictitious small town on the ancient Silk Route in Uzbekistan. The heart of the novel and the town is a railway station, which sets the connection between the town and the greater world. Gilas has people from all over - Armenians, Kurds, Persians, Ukrainians, Jews, Chechens, Koreans, gypsies, Russians etc and the novel tells the stories of some of them. The book describes the dramatic changes that was felt in the Central Asia in early twentieth century. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Are_the_Universe_(book)"title="You Are the Universe (book)">
"You Are the Universe" is a philosophical work which attempts to give answers to questions pertaining to the origin of the universe, time, space, matter and the origin and meaning of consciousness and the marrying of science and spirituality in daily lives.The book challenges the assumption that consciousness is a byproduct of matter claiming that matter is actually an experience in consciousness. The book proposes that the entire universe, as experienced by human beings, is a "human construct in consciousness."The book delves into the two most prominent questions in science which are:The book makes use of analogies, to make certain philosophical points, such as equating the chance of DNA structure forming the building blocks of life emerging from the chaos that existed after The big bang with 100 monkeys with 100 typewriters eventually producing the complete works of Shakespeare, or the possibility of a whirlwind blowing through an aircraft spare parts yard and putting together a functional jumbo jet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Folk_of_the_Air_(series)"title="The Folk of the Air (series)">
Jude Duarte, Taryn Duarte, and half-sister Vivienne live in the human world until a fae called Madoc, who is Vivienne's biological father, arrives one day and kills their parents. The trio are then forced to live in Faerie for a decade with Madoc's wife, Oriana, and son, Oak.The twins are repeatedly tormented by Prince Carden Greenbriar, youngest in line, and his friends, Nicaisia, Valerian, and Locke. Throughout the book, this torment constitutes Taryn and jude nearly drowned by the trio, Jude drugged by magic fruit and made to strip, and Valerian commanding Jude to jump off a tower (unbeknownst of Jude's protection once Prince Dain gives her the geas). Locke and Jude ultimately have an affair.Meanwhile, Prince Dain is to be crowned within months, and he takes in Jude as a spy, due to her human ability to lie -while faeries cannot- and employs her in the Court of Shadows with a trio consisting of The Roach, The Bomb, and The Ghost. Prince Dain gives Jude a geas that prevents her from being enchanted into obeying instructions from fae(mind magic). Jude begins a practice of mithridatism – taking small doses of poison to become immune to its effects.Jude has dinner with Locke, wearing the dress of his deceased mother, and finds an acorn within it. Upon further discovery she learns that the acorn contains a message pertaining to an heir to the throne, who the message urges to protect. The night before the coronation, Oriana warns Jude of getting herself involved with Dain, and tells her that Locke's mother, Liorope, was a concubine to the High King Eldred but ultimately assassinated. Jude is later tormented and nearly killed by a drunk Valerian,and finally kills him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Closed_and_Common_Orbit"title="A Closed and Common Orbit">
In the aftermath of the events in "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet", Lovelace the artificial intelligence loads herself into an android body and leaves the starship "Wayfarer" to pursue an independent existence in the company of Pepper, a technician. A parallel narrative strand explores the early years in the life of a genetically modified child slave.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schloss_Gripsholm"title="Schloss Gripsholm">
The book begins with a fictional correspondence of an author and his publisher, Ernst Rowohlt. with Rowohlt encouraging Tucholsky to write another light and cheerful love story, and Tucholsky replying that he could offer a summer story.The following story covers a summer vacation of Kurt, called Peter and narrating in the first person, with his friend Lydia, called by him almost always "die Prinzessin" (the princess), in Sweden. After train and ferry rides, they arrive at Gripsholm palace where they spend around three weeks. They are visited there by Kurt's old friend Karlchen, and later Lydia's best friend Billie. The story in episodes includes an erotic scene of three, unusual at the end of Weimar Germany, but also the observation of a little girl suffering under a sadistic German woman running a children's home. They contact the child's mother who lives in Switzerland and organise the girl's trip back to there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Steps_Forward"title="Two Steps Forward">
Zoe Witt is an American artist with new-age views, who makes a spontaneous decision to walk the Chemin de St Jacques / Camino de Santiago de Compostela from Cluny in central France following the sudden death of her husband. Martin Eden is a British Engineer who is making the same journey to prove the design of a cart which he has invented as an alternative to backpacks. The two undertake the walk, dealing with the physical (and, in Zoe’s case, financial) challenges. They frequently encounter each other and begin a romantic relationship, but need to resolve personal issues before it can develop. Only after the walk ends does Martin travel to the USA to indicate his interest in pursuing the relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_(Kavan_novel)"title="Ice (Kavan novel)">
"Ice" is set during an apocalypse in which a massive, monolithic ice shelf, caused by nuclear war, is engulfing the earth. The male protagonist, and narrator of the story, spends the narrative feverishly pursuing a young, nameless woman, and contemplating the overwhelming but conflicting feelings he has for her, that slowly end up being intruded by the worsening atmosphere of the setting. Initially he must negotiate the presence of the woman's husband and later he faces more serious opposition from the Warden who seeks to keep her under his control. Christopher Priest, in his introduction to the novel, writes that the book is "virtually plotless" and "told in scenes of happenstance and coincidence."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bill_(short_story)"title="The Bill (short story)">
An unidentified narrator is addressing the painter Palma Vecchio about the way in which he paints the Venetian whores that the narrator supplies. The models are uneasy with Vecchio, because unlike his fellow painters, he does not touch or have sex with them. Instead, they remark on the way in which he unceasingly stares at them. The narrator remarks how peculiar it is that the women are portrayed in the paintings the same way regardless of their actual appearance. Vecchio paints his models as fat and blonde, and often exposing a single breast. The narrator speculates many reasons as to this peculiar behavior, but settles on a rumination that we are our bodies, and are animals trapped in minds, and that the true moment of excitement we seek is the moment in our sexual partner's eyes when they become an animal again--present in the moment and grounded in flesh. This moment of animal desire, the narrator theorizes, is the true subject of Vecchio's paintings. He makes his models so uncomfortable because he is looking past their particular bodies to find desire absent from memory.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Chain_of_Thunder"title="A Chain of Thunder">
As the war in the West turns badly for the South, the Union generals and their political commanders in Washington know that the one great barrier to Union control of the Mississippi River lies at the Confederate bastion of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Protected by high embankments, and a formidable presence of Confederate artillery, the Confederate forces there, under the command of John Pemberton, are confident that Vicksburg is a citadel that cannot fall. But Federal commander Ulysses Grant believes otherwise.Encouraged by his superiors in Washington to do whatever it takes, Grant launches an overland campaign that avoids a direct frontal assault on the town from the river, and instead, maneuvers his army downstream, crossing from Louisiana into Mississippi where the Confederates are too weak to make an effective stand. Instead of pushing directly at Vicksburg, Grant employs an audacious strategy, slicing quickly through the Mississippi countryside toward the capital city of Jackson. Pemberton's army cannot match Grant's unpredictable moves, and the Southern forces begin to understand that their commander is no match for the ingenuity Grant brings to the campaign. Though Pemberton's superior, General Joseph Johnston arrives in Jackson, Johnston sees Pemberton's situation as hopeless, and thus, holds his own forces back from the fight, allowing Grant the freedom to focus all his energies on Vicksburg itself. Johnston's reluctance to engage Grant, and thus offer relief to Vicksburg, is one of the most controversial decisions of the war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_Are_the_Days_(novel)"title="Gone Are the Days (novel)">
A solitary boy named Gaurav experiences kaleidoscopic shifts in his initial life because of several mismatching events. The protagonist was born in a typical Punjabi Brahmin family and spent the most of his childhood in Sitamarhi, a small town of Bihar. After few years, Gaurav had to move to Delhi for his higher studies. The book runs in the flashback where the protagonist appears for his IELTS speaking test that would help him move to Canada for higher studies, and it is during the test he tells his story to the examiner.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_Will_Steal_Your_Job,_but_That's_OK"title="Robots Will Steal Your Job, but That's OK">
The book is divided into three parts: Automation and Unemployment, Work and Happiness, and Solution. It contains 21 chapters, two appendices, titled "How a Family Can Live Better by Spending Smart" and "Growth", a Notes section for further reading, and a Bibliography.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anti-Death_League"title="The Anti-Death League">
## The Edge of a Node.Cathy and Max are patients in the hospital. James, Moti and Willie visit Max. As they return to camp, they come across a motorcycle dispatch rider in the Royal Corps of Signals who has been fatally injured in a traffic accident. This is the first of several deaths in the novel, most accidental or incidental.Cathy and Max are soon discharged from hospital, "on probation". Max returns to duty. Cathy gains employment as a barmaid; she and James meet and fall in love (a major plot line which continues to the end of the novel).Brian is convinced that there is a spy in or near the camp. He meets Best while he and other officers are visiting Lady Lucy's for various purposes (mostly, for sexual intercourse with Lucy), and arranges to be shown round the hospital. In Lucy's library, Willie discovers the manuscript of a trio-sonata for flute, violin and piano by the fictional late 18th century composer Thomas Roughead (this forms a minor sub-plot). Best attempts to rape Lucy, but James rescues her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You're_Next_(novel)"title="You're Next (novel)">
The book centres around the character Mike Wingate - a property developer. He has been raised in foster care after being abandoned by his father at four. He presently has a wife and an 8-year-old daughter, has his construction company which is about to finish a green housing development project and be honoured by the Governor for environmental building practices. But things go quickly wrong when he meets a crippled stranger at a party. Things quickly escalate from him receiving threats to attacks - one of which nearly kills his wife. When he reports them to the police, they seem more interested in Mike's past than in protecting him.With his family in mortal danger Mike turns to Shep - a dangerous man. He knows Shep from his days in foster care and he is the only friend Mike has. Together they try and protect Mike's family from the hidden men and uncover why suddenly both these hidden strangers and the police are after him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughter_of_Tintagel"title="Daughter of Tintagel">
The plot focuses on the love-hate relationship between Morgan le Fay and her half-brother Arthur. The author Fay Sampson classified it as a borderline between historical fiction and fantasy, followed by an "unashamed fantasy" for the final part. As described by the author, "Four people tell Morgan's story: two women, two men, two pagan, two Christian, two sympathetic, two hostile. Lastly, Morgan speaks for herself, and ironically comments on all the writers who have used her story for their own ends." 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rooster_Bar"title="The Rooster Bar">
Three third-year law students Mark Frazier, Todd Lucero, and Zola Maal all attend Foggy Bottom Law School (FBLS), a third-tier D.C. establishment with a reputation as a diploma mill. Zola contacts Mark and Todd when her boyfriend, Gordon Tanner, stops taking medication for his worsening bipolar disorder. They discover that Gordon, in his mania, has been collecting evidence that Hinds Rackley, the investor who owns FBLS, runs a network of schools, law firms and banks which ensures that FBLS' students are stuck in a cycle of debt while Rackley makes millions in the process. Although this practice isn't illegal, Gordon is convinced that there's enough for a class-action lawsuit that would, at the very least, expose Rackley's fraud. Later that night, Gordon gets drunk and flees the apartment, getting arrested for DUI. The trio bail him out with the help of Darrell Crowley, a professional street lawyer, and Mark tries to find Gordon's doctor. Before he can, however, Gordon escapes again and commits suicide by jumping off a bridge.Distraught, and blamed for Gordon's death by his family and friends, Mark and Todd realize that they have no future at FBLS; Mark's promised job at a D.C. firm is withdrawn, and both he and Todd drop out. The two get jobs at The Rooster Bar, a pub owned by Todd's boss Maynard. Mark persuades him to lease the two some office space, and they, together with Zola, set up an unlicensed firm called Upshaw, Parker, and Lane (UPL). Inspired by Crowley, Mark and Todd decide to pose as lawyers under assumed identities and work the D.C. courts for clients, arguing to Zola that they can get rich while avoiding FBLS and their creditors, so long as no one discovers that they are engaged in a criminal enterprise. Uncertain, but aware that she also has nothing better to look forward to, Zola agrees to join them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_the_Moon"title="Children of the Moon">
...The autumn of 1915. After the successful completion of the operation in Switzerland (The Torment of a Broken Heart), Aleksei Romanov finally decided to link his life with counterintelligence. He attends special military courses and begins to study the difficult art of identifying foreign spies. In the midst of his studies, Romanov, now an ensign, receives a new important task from General Zhukovsky and Duke Kozlovsky, the immediate boss of Aleksei.... Colonel Shakhov, who works in the Main Artillery Directorate, learns that his daughter Alina covertly takes pictures of secret documents. Alina is a sick drug addict, and Shakhov thinks that when trying to get another portion of morphine, she started working for German intelligence. Despite his paternal feelings, Shakhov nevertheless reports this fact to counterintelligence, and General Zhukovsky decides to organize the seizure of a German spy during his meeting with Alina.Alina often visits the club "Children of the Moon", where young people gather, entranced with decadence. Assuming that the transfer of information takes place there, Duke Kozlovsky suggests that Romanov dresses as one of the guests of the club and follows Alina Shakhova. Beautiful, but dying from drugs Alina causes an acute sense of pity in Romanov, and then affection. Aleksei tries to penetrate into her secret, but the truth in this case is incredibly terrible...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malala's_Magic_Pencil"title="Malala's Magic Pencil">
The book is written in the first person from the perspective of Malala Yousafzai, and documents her as a child, with a desire for a magic pencil to solve issues in her life; images depict her childhood home in Swat Valley. Using a simple vocabulary, it features watercolour illustrations, overlaid on which are "gold embellishments" and "bronze foiled swirls". The book is aimed at readers between ages 4 and 8.The book begins with the line "Do you believe in magic?" Yousafzai tells the reader about a television show about a boy with a magic pencil. Yousafzai says that if she had one, she would use her magic pencil for minor things such as to "stop time" in order to get more sleep or to create a football for her brothers. As she grows older, Yousafzai begins to wish that she had a magic pencil for more serious issues, such as to bring about peace. Though she never gets a magic pencil, she learns that she can change the world without one; by writing speeches about the injustice of girls being deprived of education, she can make a difference. Alluding to her shooting by the Taliban, the text "My voice became so powerful that the dangerous men tried to silence me. They failed." appears on a completely black page.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wandering_Man_(Akunin)"title="The Wandering Man (Akunin)">
The story is set in the winter of 1916. During the previous year, all the power of the German army was directed against Russia. After several crushing defeats, Russia lost about 2 million soldiers and many thousands of square kilometers of its territory. However, Germany failed in its main goal of 1915 - to force the Russian Empire out of the war. One of the most important episodes of the war in the East in 1915 was the German army's attempt to break through the Russian Northern Front, which ended in complete failure and with great losses because the German command was fed deceptive information. The author of this brilliant operation was General Vladimir Zhukovsky.Realizing that Zhukovsky's talent may cause a lot of damage to Germany in the future, the German intelligence chief and his deputy order their best spy, Josef von Theofels (known as "Sepp"), to carry out the operation against the Russian general. The intention is to have Zhukovsky accused of taking bribes and to get him fired from his post as chief of Russian counterintelligence. Under the guise of the "Siberian industrialist" Emelyan Bazarov, Teofels penetrates into St. Petersburg. Using an acquaintance with Princess Vereiskaya, with whom Bazarov allegedly escaped from German captivity, he meets Zhukovsky, but the general's discernment and caution prevent the German spy from carrying out the intended provocation. Enraged, Theofels decides to make use of an unusual trump card in the fight against General Zhukovsky – the Wandering Man, or the Wanderer. This is a mysterious figure who is alternately considered a saint or a devil, who may be of use to Sepp in a new, cunning plan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwalia_in_Khasia"title="Gwalia in Khasia">
"Gwalia in Khasia" tells the story of the Welsh Calvinistic Methodists' Mission to the Khasi Hills in north-east India between 1841–1969.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_the_Thunder_of_Victory_Rumble!_(novel)"title="Let the Thunder of Victory Rumble! (novel)">
On April 1, 1916 a secret meeting is held at the headquarters of the Supreme Command of the Russian Army. After the heavy defeats of 1915 almost all the front commanders are afraid to take active steps. But the commander of the South-Western Front () asks the Czar for permission to attack. The South-Western Front does not have a large number of troops and artillery and there are no reserves for the front, but the commander confidently declares that he is ready to attack the Austro-Hungarian Army. After some hesitation, Nicholas II gives the order to advance.The commander's plan is built on the element of surprise. Preparation for the offensive begins immediately on 25 sections of the front line, but this is done only in order to confuse the enemy. Only one will become the real breakthrough point.Aleksey Romanov, who serves just on the South-Western Front, travels to the area. He must deceive the Austrian spies, giving them the impression that there will be no offensive. However, Austrian intelligence is very active. A great help to the Austrians is provided by Ukrainian nationalists fighting for the future independence of Ukraine.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umbertina"title="Umbertina">
PrologueThe prologue is set in Rome in the 1970s, with Marguerite, an American expatriate, in the office of her psychiatrist. Although living a comfortable middle-class life, Marguerite is floundering, without direction. She often thinks of her maternal grandmother, Umbertina, who had a "primitive strength" that Marguerite envies.Part One: Umbertina, 1860-1940At sixteen, Umbertina works as a goatherd in the hills above the Calabrian village of Castagna. She lives with her parents, brothers, and sisters in a one-room, dirt-floored stone cabin. Her father, Carlo Nenci, is a poor tenant farmer who toils for the Baron Mancuso di Valerba, an absentee landlord who takes half of everything produced by the villagers.One day Giosuè, a charcoal maker from the next village, presents Umbertina with a heart-shaped holder for her knitting needles, which he made himself out of tin. Umbertina likes Giosuè, who has beautiful dark hair and eyes, but her father instead promises her to Serafino Longobardi, an older man who had fought in the Campaign of 1860. Well in advance of the wedding, Umbertina asks the local priest's housekeeper, Nelda, to weave her a matrimonial bedspread in the traditional Calabrian style. It is the one valuable possession she will bring to her new home. She also asks Nelda for some rosemary, hoping that once she is married she will at last have chicken to cook with it. Nelda tells her of an old saying: where rosemary thrives, "the women of that house are its strength."
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witching_Hill"title="Witching Hill">
Mr. Gillon is an athletic youth bored by his stale job as clerk at the Witching Hill Estate Office, which manages the properties along Witching Hill Road. One day, however, Uvo Delavoye, a fascinating and energetic young man despite his ongoing recovery from a tropical illness, asks Gillon to have a look at hole that has appeared overnight in his mother's backyard. Together they investigate and find a tunnel, which leads to the estate's largest house. There, they secretly witness the famously pious owner, Sir Christopher Stainsby, hosting a drunken party. Delavoye blames the party's wild behaviour on the influence of his wicked ancestor, Lord Mulcaster, who once owned all of Witching Hill.Gillon and Delavoye become close friends, despite Gillon's refusal to believe in Delavoye's superstitions, and they spend the next three years contending with apparently supernatural events. For their second adventure, they investigate the honest lawyer Abercromby Royle who has turned dishonest and strange. Thirdly, they help the inoffensive accountant Guy Berridge who suffers from impulses of attacking his fiancée. Fourthly, they suppress the profane story inexplicably written by the reverend's courteous sister, Julia Brabazon.Fifthly, they support Coplestone, a retired oarsman and widower, when his likable son Ronnie falls ill. Sixthly, army-crammer Colonel Arthurs Cheffins gifts Delavoye a revolver as recompense for almost shooting Delavoye, and Delavoye becomes obsessed with the firearm. Seventhly, the former public school master Edgar Nettleton sets his house on fire, and Delavoye begins to fear that it his own tainted presence that is the cause of not only Nettleton's madness but also the other events thus far.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Forest_(novel)"title="Electric Forest (novel)">
"Electric Forest" is a novel about a deformed woman who is given a new body as part of a government espionage effort.The world called Indigo turned upside down for Magdala Cled one morning. From being that world's only genetic misfit, the outcast of an otherwise ideal society, she became the focus of attention for mighty forces. Installed in the midst of the Electric Forest, with its weird trees and its super-luxurious private home, Magdala awoke to the potentials which were opening up about her. And to realize also the peril that now seemed poised above Indigo. Only she, the hated one, could circumvent them.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mirror_Thief"title="The Mirror Thief">
The plot is "set in three different versions of Venice (Italy, California, and Las Vegas) during three different time periods (16th century, mid-20th, early 21st)." It follows Curtis Stone as he looks for card counter Stanley Glass in Las Vegas, Nevada, but instead finds a book which "inspired" Glass's life called "The Mirror Thief"; this takes Stone into a mise en abyme through his reading.In a review for "The Guardian", Mark Lawson noted that "Topics under consideration range from why bingo is a fascist game, through penetrating reflections on the poetry of Ezra Pound and techniques of glass-making, to the visual resemblance between the French philosopher Michel Foucault and the Greek-American actor Telly Savalas."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Confessions_(novel)"title="True Confessions (novel)">
Los Angeles, 1946: Lois Fazenda is found cut in two pieces in a vacant lot after the murderer has taunted on the corpse. Due to the nickname "The Virgin Tramp", given to her just to please a journalist, a "nice quiet little homicide that would have drifted off the front pages in a couple of days" becomes the center of a storm. Two brothers, Tom and Desmond Spellacy, are the protagonists of this corrosive romance of Irish-Catholic life in California shortly after World War II. Tom is a lieutenant of the Homicide Division in charge of the case, not very honest but good in his job, and Desmond is a skillful and quickly ascending monsignor who has already been chosen to become the next bishop. The investigation offers the background to narrate with ironic and vulgar language, full of racist and homophobic terms, the miseries and the hypocrisy of society. The world of the Spellacy brothers is made of gangsters and bigoted, perverts and unlucky people, golfers and prostitutes, priests with a questionable morality and businessmen with no morality at all, whose stories are united together in a plot of corruption and despair in which very few of them will have something to earn: the murder of the "Virgin Tramp" is a crime that has no solutions, only victims.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Beach_(novel)"title="Manhattan Beach (novel)">
Eleven-going-on-twelve Anna Kerrigan and her father Eddie meet with gangster Dexter Styles in late 1934 at the Styles mansion on the shore of Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn, New York City. Eddie is a former vaudeville performer who switched to become a stockbroker during the Roaring Twenties, then was ruined in the Great Depression. Now he makes very little money as a bagman in the criminal underworld, and he tells Styles he needs money to pay for a wheelchair for his brain-damaged and paralyzed daughter, Lydia, Anna's younger sister. Unknown to Anna, Eddie agrees to work for Styles in his gambling operations. Anna puts her bare feet into the wintry cold seawater at Manhattan Beach to prove her toughness; this childish bravado makes a lasting impression on Styles.At the age of 14, Anna loses her virginity with 16-year-old Leon, a boy from the neighborhood, meeting him repeatedly in their building's cellar. She keeps these trysts secret from her father, who disappears one day without a trace.In 1942 at the age of 19, Anna is working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard to make warships for the US Navy in World War II. She has a repetitive job measuring small metal parts with a micrometer. She also takes classes at Brooklyn College. One day she sees a professional diver and starts training to be one. Against the wishes of diving officer Axel, she changes jobs to start working on underwater repairs. She faces the difficulty of being the first woman diver at the Navy Yard.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cottingley_Secret"title="The Cottingley Secret">
"The Cottingley Secret" takes place in England, during World War I, in 1917. One of the main characters, Frances Griffiths, moves out of Cape Town, South Africa, with her mother because her father has to fight in the war. The book starts with Frances and her mother on a train taking them to their new lives in Cottingley, England, where her cousin, Elsie Wright, lives. "The Cottingley Secret" is a retelling of the story behind the Cottingley fairies and a series of purportedly real photographs created in Cottingley, a village in West Yorkshire, England. The plots follows the lives of the two cousins—Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright—who photographed real fairies in the garden near a stream. The story follows the facts behind the real events—how the news attracted the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, how nationally renowned the girls became, and the hope of people who believed in the fantasy during war times.Gaynor’s fictional reimagining continues into the present (2017) with Olivia Kavanagh, who after discovering her grandfather’s manuscript and the picture of the fairies, realizes that her story becomes intertwined with the cousins’ lives, causing past and present to blur together. Gaynor approaches the story intertwining past and present—in the form of a memoir written by Frances Griffiths that retells the past events, and through the present life of a fictional character (Olivia Kavanagh) whose family dates back to that time and place as well. "The Cottingley Secret" follows the life of Olivia. After her grandfather passes away, Olivia inherits his bookshop in Ireland called Something Old, so she decides to leave behind her life in London temporarily, which is tied to a fiancée and a steady job as a bookbinder. After finding a manuscript with Frances’s story and photographs of fairies, Olivia begins to struggle with choosing between a settled life in London or a new adventure where she feels a connection and meaning behind her newfound work. As Olivia gets deeper into the story, she also makes the connection that someone from Frances’s past is related to her family—a great grandmother. Having lost her own mother as a child and trying to take care of her grandmother, who suffers with Alzheimer’s, Olivia believes that holding on to this story is the only way to reconnect with her family.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blame_the_Dead"title="Blame the Dead">
James Card, security consultant and ex-British Army intelligence officer takes on a job as bodyguard to Lloyd's of London underwriter Martin Fenwick for a trip to France. When his client is assassinated, he takes matters into his own hands to track down the killer. His only clue is a children's colouring book in a plain brown paper wrapper package. Fenwick’s young, beautiful widow is strangely without any sorrow at her husband’s death, but their son David, is grimly determined that he will find his father’s murderer regardless of the risk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogewea"title="Cogewea">
The novel opens with a description of the frontier landscape and introduces Cogewea, a young Okanagan (spelled "Okanogan" in the novel) who is multiracial (with a white father and Okanagan mother). Her Okanagan grandmother describes her as an impulsive and free-speaking young woman. A well-loved figure on her white brother-in-law's ranch, Cogewea is also well-educated in Okanagan folklore and values through her grandmother. But she feels a tension between her two cultures. Cogewea grapples with having received a western education at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in central Pennsylvania, the model of Indian boarding schools, where children were forced to give up their languages and cultures.One rancher, Silent Bob, tells a new rancher, Alfred Densmore, that Cogewea is heir to a large property and fortune, though she is not. Densmore tries to steal Cogewea’s property and money through seduction, proposing marriage. Cogewea's grandmother uses storytelling and Okanagan traditions to convince Cogewea that Densmore will take advantage of her. After a period of indecision, Cogewea refuses Densmore's proposal. He ends up taking Cogewea captive, but after he realizes that she has little financial worth, he leaves her to die in the wilderness.In the end, a mixed-race rancher named Jim rescues Cogewea. In a twist of fate, Cogewea inherits part of her white father’s fortune. She realizes her feelings for Jim and marries him.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Burlington_(book)"title="New Burlington (book)">
"New Burlington" tells the story of the land comprising New Burlington, Ohio, and its people. The book is primarily structured as a series of chapters focused on more than thirty middle-aged and elderly residents. In each chapter, Baskin weaves the words of the residents together with collected letters and diaries from the past, and threads of his own observations running throughout. The books explores the feelings of loss, acceptance, nostalgia, and disorientation experienced by the residents as they faced the death of their community.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria,_Maria..."title="Maria, Maria...">
In September 1916, Russia is preparing for a decisive turn in the course of the war. In 1914, two German warships, the battleship "Goeben" and the light cruiser "Breslau", had broken through to Istanbul, forcing the neutral Ottoman Empire into the world war on Germany's side. With the Bosphorous controlled by the Central Powers, Russia's main southern ports were cut off from her allies, and as a result, the Russian army could receive arms and ammunition from the Entente only through the northern seas, along a very long and dangerous sea route.Deciding to break the "German-Turkish lock" on the Black Sea, the Imperial Russian Navy began to build new battleships at the shipyard in Nikolaev. Very soon, the battleship "Empress Maria" was launched, and at the end of 1916 two similar battleships - the "Emperor Alexander III" and the "Empress Catherine the Great" - would join the flagship. To prevent this, Josef von Teofels is sent by the German intelligence service to attempt to destroy the battleship "Empress Maria".
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_Sacred_(novel)"title="Nothing Sacred (novel)">
In November 1916 the German high command, after the heavy defeats suffered by its ally the Austro-Hungarian Empire, concluded that a military victory over Russia is impossible. One of their best spies, Josef von Theofels (known as Sepp), suggests a proven method which had been used by Japanese intelligence in 1905. Consequently, the Japanese provoke a revolution in Russia by generously financing Lenin and his party, because they foresee an early defeat in the war.The chief of German intelligence rejects Sepp's plan, and offers his own — the assassination of Nicholas II, expecting that the emperor's death would cause confusion and a struggle for power that would drive Russia out of the war. Wilhelm II, who is Nikolai's cousin, would never allow such an operation, and so Theofels must kill the Tsar by making it look like an accident, deciding to engineer a rail accident. Sepp assembles a group of militant nationalists who hate Nicholas II. At the same time, Duke Kozlovsky the Russian chief of counterintelligence sends his best agent, Aleksei Romanov, to the front to examine how well the security of "train number 1", in which the Emperor Nicholas II travels along the front, is organized. Romanov discovers that the retinue of Nicholas includes a traitor who informs German intelligence of all the movements of the royal train. Aleksei discerns a possible assassination attempt and begins to act, seeking to prevent the murder of the Tsar...now read on
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenger_(novel)"title="Revenger (novel)">
Tens of millions of years in the future, sisters Adrana and Arafura ('Fura') Ness are skilled bone readers—the primary method by which spaceships communicate with one another. Their skill at bone reading leads them to be taken on as apprentices aboard "Monetta's Mourn", a spaceship captained by Pol Rackamore. Rackamore and his crew engage in the practice of finding ancient technological artifacts, called "baubles". While in search of these artifacts, "Monetta's Mourn" is attacked by the infamous space pirate Bosa Sennen, separating the sisters and leaving Fura adrift on a ship in empty space.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sab_Kichu_Bhene_Pare"title="Sab Kichu Bhene Pare">
The main theme of the novel is about the relationship between men and women, mainly the autobiography of a man named Mahbub. From the childhood of Mahbub to the description of various rural experiences in life, there is talk of male-female relationships; The boy Mahbub was curious to see a newly married woman bathing in the pond of Mollah's house very early in the morning; He once saw their work girl Kadban naked with his cousin (Hasan); As a teenager, he survived being sexually assaulted by two elderly men, once on a steamer and another by an unfamiliar railway worker, a girl named Raushan whom he saw naked in private and naked in front of himself; As various events unfolded, Mahbub grew up and made his debut as a Dhaka-based successful engineer who had a wife named Firoza and a young daughter named Archie; Mahbub does not love Firoza but marries her for social reasons, they were married by a guardian, Mahbub was able to befriend a young woman named Ananya even in his old age and also had sex with a female worker in his own office.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Day_at_Riverbend"title="Bad Day at Riverbend">
On a quiet day at the town of Riverbend, local sheriff Ned Hardy hears that a strange matter is covering many citizens. When he heads out to investigate, he finds the local stagecoach driver covered in this mass and unable to speak. Distraught but unwilling to surrender, Hardy heads on and finds more people covered in this substance. Eventually he is himself covered in this substance and unable to move or speak.It is then revealed that the strange matter was none other than crayon scribbles, and that the sheriff is part of a coloring book left on its own by a small boy who gets tired and leaves.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_(Cabot_novel)"title="Remembrance (Cabot novel)">
Six years after the events of "Twilight", Suze Simon is studying for a master's degree in counselling and interning at the Mission Academy office. She is now engaged to Jesse, who is finishing his medical residency, but he insists on waiting for marriage, much to her frustration. When Suze receives an email from Paul Slater informing her that his company is knocking down her family's old house in Carmel, she calls him, still furious at him for hitting on her at their graduation party. Paul mocks her celibacy, and reminds her that tearing down the house might unleash a curse on Jesse from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, as it is his resting place. He offers to save the house if Suze sleeps with him.When Suze carelessly tends to a self-harming student named Becca Walters, she is confronted by Lucia, an angry young ghost claiming to protect Becca, who unleashes an earthquake in the office. At the Coffee Clutch that afternoon, Aunt Pru warns Suze to keep an eye on 'the child'. When Lucia attempts to drown Suze, Jesse orders her and Gina to move to Jake's house for their safety; Suze agrees to the date with Paul.Speaking to Father D the next morning, Suze discovers that Lucia was a classmate of Becca's who died in a horseback riding accident several years ago. Father D approaches the Walters, but is seriously injured in an accident caused by Lucia; at the hospital, Suze and Jesse discover that her triplet step-nieces are mediators - and that Lucia has been playing with them. Lucia then strangely directs Suze to discover that Paul, not her step-brother Brad, is the triplets' real father.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car-Jacked_(novel)"title="Car-Jacked (novel)">
Twelve-year-old Jack Mattingly and his parents, Nigel and Leonie, are at a petrol station in Northumberland. Jack is left alone in the car while his parents go into the station, when the car is hi-jacked by the bank robber Ross, who believes it to be empty.Upon discovering Jack, Ross throws him out, but returns to rescue him when he realises that the boy has asthma and needs his inhaler. As Jack goes to sleep, Ross receives a call from his crime boss James Shearer, who gives him an ultimatum to get hold of £100,000. Jack has overheard the conversation and starts to describe to Ross how the police will find him and arrest him.Meanwhile, Jack's parents are discussing the disappearance with the police, and Leonie is wondering whether a ransom will be necessary. The police find out Ross' identity.The car crashes into a ravine, with both Jack and Ross surviving. James Shearer sends a video message with a suffocating man to Ross' phone. Ross explains that the man is his younger brother, Stuart, who has stolen money from James Shearer. To save his brother, Ross needs to give £100,000 to Shearer for the return of his brother. It soon occurs to Ross that Jack can help him save Stuart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singhadurbar_Badalne_Sangharsha"title="Singhadurbar Badalne Sangharsha">
Lal Babu Pandit is a politician who has been referred as a good politician and fighting for the honesty to remark about his politics he has written a book about changing the parliament of Nepal. The book starts with Pandit getting a call from CPN (UML) to inform him he has been nominated for the ministerial post. The book also talks about the story of movement with late Madan Bhandari and his student life with his family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provenance_(novel)"title="Provenance (novel)">
When Ingray Aughskold pays to have a convicted criminal released from prison, as part of a complex plot involving forgery and stolen antiquities, she rapidly finds herself drawn into a much more serious plot involving murder and angry aliens.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Only_Story"title="The Only Story">
The short (273 pp.) novel is the life story of Paul Roberts, who we first meet as a 19-year-old Sussex University undergraduate returning to his parents' house in the leafy southern suburbs of London (Sutton, in Surrey, is suggested as a model.) The time is the early sixties, and there are a few references to current events. Paul joins the tennis club, which is the one of the few opportunities such places offer for socialising. In a random-draw mixed doubles, he is thrown together with Susan MacLeod, a 48-year-old married woman with two daughters older than Paul. Improbably, Paul and Susan become lovers and she eventually leaves her family to set up house with Paul in South London. Having nothing to do but a little housekeeping, Susan soon descends into alcoholism and, years later, to dementia. Paul departs and embarks on foreign travels, picking up jobs and women at random.Paul is a quintessentially alienated character. With no interest in either politics or religion, and no particular ambition, he takes life as it comes. As he narrates his life in this book, he freely admits that memory is unreliable and he may not be telling us the truth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesia,_Etc."title="Indonesia, Etc.">
Pisani visits Sumba, Flores, Sulawesi, the Maluku Islands, Sumatra, Kalimantan, and Java. She mostly visits smaller cities and villages, most of which see few tourists. Along the way, she discusses recent Indonesian history, culture, politics, and economics, as well as the logistics of her trip and the people she meets during it.Among the themes of the book are the conflict between Java (which has 60% of the population of Indonesia) and the rest of the country. According to Pisani, the Indonesian elite is dominated by the Javanese, especially those from Jakarta, and so Java dominates the outside image of Indonesia. As an attempt to counter this bias, Pisani spends most of her time on other, smaller islands.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_from_the_Cradle_of_Jazz"title="Up from the Cradle of Jazz">
In early 20th century New Orleans was a cultural melting pot and had a vibrant music scene. This gave way to the development of jazz by African-American musicians of the city, a genre which incorporated multiple influences. The emergence of new musical genres continued in New Orleans, and by 1950s rhythm and blues had gained a foothold as an established style.The book chronicles the course of music evolution in New Orleans post-World War II from jazz to primarily rhythm and blues as well as rock and roll and avant-garde jazz. It presents a historical accounting along with cultural influences that morphed the New Orleans sound, such as Mardi Gras Indians, Caribbean influences, musical families, generational continuity, iconic individuals, clubs and recording studios. The first edition published in 1986 consists of nineteen chapters categorized under four headings:A second edition published in 2009 has additional content, including the Hurricane Katrina devastation and subsequent efforts to restore the music community. The book is not all encompassing in term of genres, and transformations in traditional jazz, Dixieland and gospel are intentionally left out by the authors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolab_Pailin"title="Kolab Pailin">
In an old house, Choeum ( ), who is the father of Chauchet ( ), is sick due to serious disease. He is being cured by a doctor named S'at ( ). Before dying, he tells his son to depend on his own to live like a Khmer proverb "Attāhi Attano Nātho" ().After his father's death, Dr. S'at recommended him to work as a mine worker in Pailin with Luong Ratanasambath ( ). When he gets the job, he works hard and is liked by other workers.One night, Chauchet sings a song in his worker cottage. His voice impresses Khunneary ( ), who is the only daughter of Luong Ratanasambath. She comes to meet Chauchet, but she retorts him when she knows that he is just a normal worker. However, he doesn't mind her and starts to love her.In the next morning, Chauchet helps Son ( ), the chauffeur of Luong Ratanasambath, to repair the car. Then Son teaches Chauchet to drive. After that, Son asks permission from his master to be absent in driving for a short time because he is busy with his family and asks Chauchet to drive instead of him. Luong Ratanasambath agrees to his request.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phka_Srapoun"title="Phka Srapoun">
Bun Thoeun (ប៊ុនធឿន) and Vitheavy (វិធាវី) have been arranged to marry since they were young. Unfortunately, Bunthoeun's family becomes poor after a storm sinks the boat that his father uses to transport the rice in Prey Nokor.Mrs. Nuon (យាយនួន), mother of Vitheavy, is a person who prefers money over honor and honesty. She drops the engagement between Bunthoeun and her daughter, and engages Vitheavy instead to Naisot (ណៃស៊ត), who is a rich man. Naisot is bad-tempered and immoral. He uses his money to do anything he wants.After becoming engaged to Naisot, Vitheavy falls ill, and pines for Bunthoeun. However, she dares not argue with her mother over the engagement. Her health worsens. Seeing this, Mrs. Nuon brings her daughter to the resort town of Siem Reap, but Vitheavy's spirits remain low.Vitheavy coughs up blood. Her mother, being superstitious, brings her to the fortune teller and uses various methods to try to cure her. However, it does not work. Her illness remains serious.After Bunthoeun discovers Vitheavy will marry someone else, he becomes sad and cries alone. He goes into the forest for days with Mr. So (តាសូ), to find firewood and fish to reduce stress. When he returns home, Vitheavy dies. This causes him much grief.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Leader_and_the_Damned"title="The Leader and the Damned">
The book is based on the assumption that Adolf Hitler was assassinated by dissident Wehrmacht officers who planted a bomb in his plane in March 1943. However, Martin Bormann, who witnessed the crash of Hitler's plane, concealed all evidence and ruthlessly got all witnesses killed. Bormann then replaced Hitler by a double, an actor who resembled Hitler and who had for years practiced as an "understudy" for just such a contingency. The double managed to carry off the deception, precisely emulating Hitler's mannerisms, and was accepted by virtually everybody as the real Hitler; however, his military talents fell far short of those of the original.The only one to discover the deception was Wing Commander Ian Lindsay, a dashing British pilot who managed to penetrate Hitler's headquarters. The bulk of the book's plot depicts Lindsay's efforts to escape with his vital information, fleeing through Germany, Austria and Yugoslavia, one step ahead of the Gestapo, the SS and the Abwehr - virtually alone except for two courageous and highly capable women who risked all for his sake. Unknown to Lindsay, even if he eludes the Nazis, the Soviet secret services are also plotting his death, at the personal order of Joseph Stalin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Daughter_with_Portraits_of_the_Leadenhead_Family"title="Natural Daughter with Portraits of the Leadenhead Family">
Robinson's narrative begins with the Bradford family travelling to Bath for the sake of its healing waters. The Bradfords are a mixed bunch in terms of personality and beliefs. Peregrine Bradford, his wife and two daughters, Martha and Julia, are members of the middle-class who have recently built their fortune, however, they do not have official titles to secure their place among high society. Mr Bradford believes that his wealth will buy everything he desires when he says, “gold will buy everything; and who knows but I may soon die and leave a title?” The idea that money can buy happiness is a consistent theme throughout the novel. The main character, Martha (Bradford) Morley, continually seeks to dispute this idea by showing compassion towards others and straying from the path that will lead her to upper-class society. Martha is portrayed as a more masculine woman who takes action, while her sister Julia is passive and full of sensibility, i.e. an emotional delicacy and extreme feeling. Martha's marriage to Mr Morley goes against the less submissive identity that she is described as possessing. Early in the novel, Martha is described as, “giddy, wild, buxom, good-natured, and bluntly sincere tenor of her conversation” and “a mere masculine hoyden.” Martha is willing to submit to marriage for the sake of her father, but the marriage is not happy. Mr Morley is described as, “one of those prejudiced mortals who consider women as beings created for the conveniences of domestic life”. Not long into the marriage, Mr Morley leaves on business, which meant his estate was left to be run by Martha. On her own, Martha gets to know the locals in the village outside the estate. On one of her excursions, she discovers a highborn lady and her newborn illegitimate child. Martha offers to assist the young mother but is suddenly struck ill and cannot go to the village herself, so in her place, she sends a servant named Mrs Grimwood. Mrs Grimwood's discovery of the child and its connection to Martha lead her to create false rumours which are spread as the chapter ends. The narrator foreshadows the worst for Martha by saying, “little foreseeing that her steps would lead to a labyrinth of adventures” 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_(novel)"title="Artemis (novel)">
In Artemis, the first city on the Moon, porter and part-time smuggler Jasmine "Jazz" Bashara is offered an opportunity by a regular client, wealthy businessman Trond Landvik, to assist him with a new business venture. While meeting with Trond, Jazz briefly encounters an associate of his named Jin Chu who attempts to conceal a case marked with the name ZAFO. Trond intends to take over Sanchez Aluminum, which currently enjoys a lucrative permanent contract with the city for free energy in exchange for providing the city's entire oxygen supply as a by-product from aluminum production. Trond asks Jazz to sabotage the company's anorthite harvesters so he can step in with his own, and when he offers her a life-changing sum of money to carry out the criminal activity, Jazz accepts.Jazz borrows some welding equipment from her estranged father Ammar, and a small robot called a HIB from a business associate of his. She visits the Apollo 11 landing site disguised as a tourist, leaving the HIB in place outside the airlock so that it can open the hatch for her without the assistance of a human EVA master. The next day, while an electronic device created by her scientist friend Martin Svoboda makes it seem as though she is in her living quarters, Jazz treks across the moon's surface to where the harvesters are collecting ore. She successfully sabotages one, but is spotted by the camera of another. Jazz destroys two more, but flees to avoid capture by an approaching EVA team before she is able to disable the last harvester. With EVA masters guarding every airlock, Jazz is discovered by her former friend Dale, whom she despises for stealing her boyfriend. Dale offers not to report her if she would put aside her resentment and try to rekindle their friendship, which she reluctantly agrees to do. Finding Trond and his bodyguard murdered, Jazz looks for Jin Chu at an expensive hotel. She is attacked by Trond's assassin, but manages to escape with Jin's ZAFO case, which she gives to Svoboda to study. Jazz learns that Sanchez Aluminum is a front for O Palácio, Brazil's largest and most powerful organized crime syndicate, and that the killer, named Alvares, is now after her. Jin agrees to meet Jazz, but betrays her to Alvares to save himself. Jazz, anticipating Jin's deception, executes the trap she set, incapacitating Alvares and then turning him over to the city's de facto police chief, Rudy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invention_of_Curried_Sausage"title="The Invention of Curried Sausage">
## Chapter 1.The narrator believes that a woman whose food stand he went to as a child was the inventor of the German snack food curried sausage. He seeks out the woman, Lena Brücker, who is now an elderly woman living in a nursing home in Hamburg. The narrator asks Lena to tell him the story of how she invented curried sausage. She agrees and she begins to tell her story.She begins her story on April 29, 1945, the day of Hitler’s marriage to Eva Braun. She introduces Petty Officer Bremer and describes that they met when he bumped into her outside of the cinema in Hamburg. He was due to be deployed to the front lines the next day. After an airstrike occurred, the two of them went to a public air raid shelter. After the all clear was given, the two return to Lena’s apartment. After a night of drinking and talking, Lena convinces Bremer to stay and become a deserter instead of likely being killed on the front lines.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ransom_(Garwood_novel)"title="Ransom (Garwood novel)">
In England, during the reign of King Richard I, Gillian, as a young child, is woken up in the middle of the night by her father. Alford the Red, and his soldiers have breached their home, Dunhanshire. Gillian's father sends his daughters with four of his most trusted men to escape the estate with a golden jeweled box that must be kept a secret. In the chaos, Gillian and Christian are separated. Christian escapes but Gillian gets caught and dragged back to the holding. After seizing Dunhanshire and killing Gillian's father, Alford has Gillian banished to her uncle, Morgan Chapman's, estate.Fourteen years later, Gillian is dragged back to Dunhanshire where she meets a young 5-year-old boy, Alec Maitland. She tries to help him escape but the first attempt fails and they were found and taken back to the estate. Alford tells Gillian that he is sending her on a quest to the Highlands in Scotland to retrieve the jeweled box, called Arianna's treasure which belongs to King John, and her sister who he believes has the box. Gillian leaves the holding once again with Alec in order to save his life.Once in Scotland, Gillian sends word to Alec's champion, Laird Brodick Buchanan, to request his help in getting Alec returned home safely. Gillian meets with Alec's father, Laird Iain Maitland, and Laird Ramsey who, along with Brodick, demand Gillian to give them the names of the English barons so they can retaliate against them for kidnapping Alec, but Gillian refuses in order to protect her uncle who is being held captive by Alford until Gillian returns to England with the box and her sister.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karnak_Café_(novel)"title="Karnak Café (novel)">
The narrator begins the story by describing how he originally discovered the "Karnak Café" in Cairo, attracted by the quiet charms of Qurunfula, a bellydancer of former fame and the café's owner. There, the narrator quickly becomes part of the café's regular crowd of patrons, which represent a cross-section of Egyptian society during the early 1960s. Among many others, the crowd includes the following young people: Hilmi Hamada, an idealistic communist with whom Qurunfula has a discreet love affair; Isma'il al-Shaykh, a law graduate of modest origins; and Zaynab Diyab, another graduate from a poor background. Throughout the story, the youth are repeatedly arrested and imprisoned for prolonged periods; a mirror to Qurunfula's despair, the narrator keeps track how the youths' initial political enthusiasm and optimism slowly gives place to disillusion and hopelessness. After their third prison term, the café learns that Hilmi Hamada has died in prison, leaving Qurunfula distraught. As Isma'il and Zaynab open up to the narrator, he learns of the horrors Isma'il and Zaynab endured in prison – Isma'il is repeatedly tortured while Zaynab is raped – and how the ruthless and brutal police officer Khalid Sawfan turned both Isma'il and Zaynab into informants for the secret police after their second term in prison. As Hilmi tries to convince Isma'il and Zaynab of the necessity of communism, he is betrayed by Zaynab, who tries to thereby keep Isma'il safe, and is beaten to death in prison. The defeat of the Egyptian army during the Six-Day War sees Isma'il, who was imprisoned in spite of Zaynab's assistance, and a reversal of fortunes: after being thrown into prison and having become disabled through torture, Sawfan joins the regular crowd of the Karnak Café, painting himself both as a criminal and a victim and gaining the patrons' appreciation through witty political commentary. The novel ends on a hopeful note with Qurunfula setting her eyes upon Munir Ahmad, a new idealistic and innocent youth: for purity and innocence never disappear forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contending_Forces"title="Contending Forces">
"Contending Forces" begins with an introduction to Charles Montfort, a successful slave-owner who has moved to North Carolina from Bermuda with his family—sons Charles Jr. and Jesse, and his wife Grace—and his slaves. He plans to slowly free his slaves, against the wishes of the local townspeople. Upon the Montfort family's arrival to North Carolina, rumors are spread that Grace Montfort has African American descent, which Montfort discusses with friend Anson Pollack, the man Montfort had purchased his land from. Anson Pollack, unbeknown to the Montfort family, devises a plan alongside the other townspeople to kill Montfort and destroy his property. Though most of the townspeople are fueled by anger at Montfort's desire to free his slaves, Pollack is also embittered by Grace Montfort's rejection of him. On a beautiful day soon afterward, Pollack, followed by several other men, shoot Montfort dead, and tie Grace Montfort up and whip her. She disappears soon after, and the text implies that she commits suicide by drowning herself in the Pamlico Sound. Pollack takes ownership of the Montfort sons, selling Charles Jr. to a mineralogist. Jesse, sent on an errand by Pollack, escapes and runs away to Boston, Massachusetts, where he arrives at the house of Mr. Whitfield, a "negro in Exeter who could and would help the fugitive". While waiting for Mr. Whitfield, he rocks the cradle of a crying baby, Elizabeth Whitfield, who he marries fifteen years later, and has a large family with.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Season_of_Crimson_Blossoms"title="Season of Crimson Blossoms">
The story is set in predominantly Northern Nigeria against the backdrop of violence in the author's home city of Jos, Plateau State. The plot also spills into other parts of northern Nigeria, including the capital, Abuja; the story takes place roughly between 2009 and 2015. The story focuses on Binta Zubairu, a Muslim widow in her mid-50s who falls for Reza, a local political thug and drug lord in his early 20s. Binta, a survivor of violence that tore her family apart in her former home in Jos, sees in Reza not her murdered husband but her slain son Yaro. In turn, Reza, with an ailing father and a mother he last saw as a child, feels the undertow of parental warmth in his budding liaison with Binta. When they meet again and have sex, the dynamic feels incestuous to them, as Binta reminds Reza of his mother who abandoned him and he reminds her of her slain son, whom she could not address by his given name due to social norms.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellevue_Square_(novel)"title="Bellevue Square (novel)">
The novel centers on Jean Mason, a bookstore owner in Toronto, Ontario's Kensington Market neighbourhood who learns that she has an apparent doppelgänger named Ingrid Fox in the market's park, Bellevue Square, and becomes obsessed with finding the woman. The two people who have told about her double are soon dead, and Jean decides to camp out in the market to facilitate her search. Her behaviour becomes more and more bizarre.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Widows'_Adventures"title="The Widows' Adventures">
Widows Ina and Helene, sisters from Chicago, set off on a drive to Los Angeles. There’s one problem: Only Helene can drive, and she’s blind. Beer-swigging Ina acts as her eyes. On back roads in the dead of night they travel across an America they never knew.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waltz_in_Marathon"title="Waltz in Marathon">
Gentleman loan shark Harry Waltz, a sixty-one-year-old resident of Marathon, Michigan, finds his life dramatically altered by the return of his grown children and his romance with Mary Hale, a successful, forty-year-old lawyer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Weather_(book)"title="Strange Weather (book)">
## Snapshot.In Silicon Valley in 1988, 13-year-old Michael Figlione finds his elderly next-door-neighbor, Shelly Beukes, disoriented and wandering the street. She tells him about a strange man carrying an instant camera and warns him not to let the man take his picture. Michael later encounters the man, whom he dubs "The Phoenician" for his multiple tattoos in that language and discovers that he can erase people's memories by taking their picture. During a thunderstorm, Michael checks on Shelly and finds the Phoenician taking pictures of her. He seizes the camera and uses it to erase so much of the Phoenician's memory that he can barely move or function, then orders him to leave the neighborhood forever. Shelly's husband moves her into a retirement home, where she lives in squalor until Michael takes enough pictures of her to make her forget how to breathe, allowing her to die. He runs over the camera with his car, finding it to contain a strange tarry liquid with a large yellow eye at its center. The material quickly hardens to a metallic solid, which he ultimately uses in his graduate research to develop a revolutionary memory storage system for electronic devices.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice,_the_Zeta_Cat_and_Climate_Change"title="Alice, the Zeta Cat and Climate Change">
The heroine of the story, Alice, falls down a hole while on a school excursion on Potsdam's Telegraphenberg (where PIK is situated. She meets some characters which also appear in Alice in Wonderland, like the "Zeta Cat".Unlike Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, Zeta knows exactly how to figure out a correct pathway. That is how the "mathematical-metaphorical animal" can help Alice, the heroine of this story, to get her bearings in the wondrous world of science and climate change. The girl not only journeys through computer models, where she experiences glacial cycles in super-fast motion and the calamitous drying-up of rainforests, she also undergoes an inner journey through feelings like guilt and compassion. Alice enters the "Library of Truth" and is shown the very limits of knowledge, visits an "Error Bar" run by shady rats, and eventually makes friends with a mysterious walrus. When she stumbles upon a climate conference that mutates into an absurd court hearing, she is forced to take a stand. Together with a companion rabbit and the albatross Molly Mauk, a wind-and-weather expert, Alice is caught in a battle between logic, poetry and treason. The girl’s empathy nearly seals her fate. Eventually, however, spectacular powers weigh in to save her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_(book)"title="Feral (book)">
Monbiot addresses readers who feel the urge for a wilder life and encourages them to challenge their perception of humankind’s place in the world, the world's ecosystems, and the interaction between humankind and nature. Monbiot looks at rewilding projects around the world, and pays particular attention to the scope for rewilding in the United Kingdom. He argues that overgrazing is a problem in the British uplands and calls for sheep numbers to be reduced so that areas can be rewilded. Among other topics, the author looks at the phenomenon of British big cats, supposed sightings which in his view reflect human origins in a wilder landscape.After initial chapters that serve as an introduction to the author’s personal and academic interest in the subject matter, the content takes the form of case studies. According to the author, case studies relating successful rewilding projects around the world (Scotland, Wales, North America) serve to provide examples of good practice and offer the reader hope (that rewilding is indeed possible). In chapter 11, “The Beast Within (or how not to rewild)”, case studies of rewilding in Slovenia, Croatia, Eastern Poland and the Americas that occurred as result of political tyranny, civil war, genocide and tyranny serve as cautionary tales. The author strongly believes that rewilding must not be an opposition to the people who live on and benefit from the land but must be done with their consent and active engagement.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millard_Salter's_Last_Day"title="Millard Salter's Last Day">
The novel tells the story of the final day in the life of a 75-year-old psychiatrist, Millard Salter, who runs the consult-liaison service at St. Dymphna's Hospital in New York City. Salter's second wife has died a slow, painful death of cancer, so he volunteers with an underground organization that helps terminally-ill patients commit suicide. However, he falls in love with the first such patient to whom he is assigned, Delilah, and decides to end his own life on the same day that she ends hers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heart_(novel)"title="The Heart (novel)">
Early one Sunday morning near Le Havre, France, 19-year old Simon Limbres and his two friends, Christophe Alba and Johan Rocher, go surfing. While driving back home, the boys get into a car accident, in which Christophe and Johan are only mildly injured while Simon experiences severe bodily trauma and immediately slips into a coma. It is soon determined that Christophe and Johan were wearing seat belts, while Simon was not.At the hospital, Dr. Pierre Révol, the head physician of the intensive care unit (ICU) department, discovers that Simon is unresponsive to auditory, visual, and tactile stimulation, and that his brain has suffered irreversible damage. Eventually, Dr. Révol declares Simon to be in a state of brain death, in which he can only maintain involuntary cardiac and respiratory functions with the assistance of a ventilator and other machines, and he does not display any cerebral activity. Immediately after this declaration, Dr. Révol deems Simon an ideal organ donor due to his young age and excellent health prior to his passing and subsequently notifies Thomas Rémige, the head of the Coordinating Committee for Organ and Tissue Removal.Meanwhile, Marianne Limbres, Simon's mother, is the first person to be notified of his admission into the ICU. She contacts and locates Simon's father, Sean, from whom she is separated, and they go to the hospital together to see their son. Upon their arrival, Marianne and Sean are notified by Dr. Révol that Simon's injuries are irreversible and that he has ultimately passed away. Sean indignantly accuses Dr. Révol and the rest of the ICU staff for not doing enough to save Simon, while Marianne, along with her husband, grapples with their son's death and blames herself for failing to protect him from his precarious lifestyle. The couple is then introduced to Thomas, who attempts to convince them to authorize the donation of Simon's organs. Initially, both parents, especially Sean, are hesitant, citing the symbolic significance of Simon's body and their fear of it being destroyed during the transplantation process. Eventually, Marianne realizes that allowing Simon to surf and live his life the way he did was the best thing she and Sean had done for him, and she decides to accept Thomas' request to donate Simon's organs. She then convinces Sean to do the same. Ultimately, Marianne and Sean permit Simon's heart, liver, lungs, and kidneys to be donated, but are unswerving in their prohibition of donating his eyes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_Most_Unladylike"title="Murder Most Unladylike">
The two principal characters, Hazel Wong and Daisy Wells are students in Deepdean School for Girls. They are the founding members of their school's Detective Society and its only members. Near the beginning of the book, Hazel stumbles upon the corpse of their Science teacher Miss Bell in the gymnasium, but when Hazel returns with Daisy and one of the prefects, the body is gone. Thus none of the characters believes that Hazel saw Miss Bell's dead body and believes that she was telling lies.Then, the next day at Prayers, the other students also notice the absence of their Science mistress, but they are satisfied when the headteacher informed them that she has received a resignation letter from Miss Bell. Daisy and Hazel, however, are not. They work tirelessly to piece the clues together and solve the mystery.Towards the end of the book, Hazel and Daisy come across an old notebook, which turns out to be the diary of another character Verity Abraham, the girl who was rumored in the story to have committed suicide by jumping off the Gym some few years ago. The diary serves as evidence that Miss Griffin, the headmistress has spoken to her a few weeks ago and informed her that she was Verity's true mother and that Mr. and Mrs. Abraham had adopted her. Miss Griffin had become an unmarried mother, which at the time was not considered normal and would have affected her chances of becoming headmistress. Verity forbids this fact, but Miss Griffin then provides her with evidence of her birth and the adoption, too. Then, she asks Verity to join her as her daughter, but Verity denies it and says Mr. and Mrs. Abraham are her parents. Following this, there is a note proving who the murderer is at the end, and why they killed Miss Bell.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic_for_Tea"title="Arsenic for Tea">
Arriving at Fallingford House, Daisy's home, from their Easter term at Deepdean, they enter the house in the middle of an argument between Lord and Lady Hastings (Daisy's parents). Other people staying in the house include Bertie (Daisy's brother), Stephen Bampton (Bertie's best friend) and Miss Alston (Daisy and Hazel's governess and secretary to Lord Hastings).Daisy will turn 14 during the holidays so a party is planned. The guests are: Denis Curtis, antiques dealer and guest of Lady Hastings, Felix Mountfitchet, Daisy's uncle and brother to Lady Hastings, Saskia Wells, Aunt to Lord Hastings and Great-Aunt to Daisy, Katherine 'Kitty' Freebody and Rebecca 'Beanie' Martineau, Daisy and Hazel's friends from Deepdean. Daisy then overhears Curtis say 'Ming' to himself at a pot before claiming at dinner that it was not Ming. He also claims various items in the house are worthless.Daisy, whilst playing a game of Hide and seek then tells Hazel that they are going downstairs to spy on Mr Curtis as she thinks he is highly suspicious. During their mission, they discover Uncle Felix speaking to Mr. Curtis and Uncle Felix greeting Miss Alston as if they know, and dislike each other. Mr Curtis then kisses Lady Hastings later that evening, upsetting Daisy. Bertie and Uncle Felix then burst in and yell at Mr Curtis.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Experience_of_Pain"title="The Experience of Pain">
The South American state of Maradagàl is recovering from a bitter and inconclusive war with neighbouring Parapagàl. Many ex-soldiers have found work as patrolmen in provincial associations for night vigilance (Nistitúos Provinciales de Vigilancia para la Noche).The village of Lukones is patrolled by a man known as Pedro Mahagones but an itinerant cloth trader recognizes him as Gaetano Palumbo who had fraudulently claimed a war pension on the grounds of being totally deaf.The patrolman's round includes three villas that have been struck three times by lightning. One villa had been occupied by the famous poet Carlos Caconcellos and is now said to be haunted by his ghost, but its owner has managed to rent the caretaker's lodge to Colonel Di Pasquale, a military doctor who had been responsible for unmasking Palumbo's false pension claim.Doctor Higueroa, the local doctor, receives a call from José, the peon at Villa Pirobutirro, asking him to go and visit Don Gonzalo. On his way up to the villa the doctor meets Battistina who helps out at the villa. He asks what is wrong. Battistina tells him that Señor Gonzalo wanders the house like a madman and his mother is frightened of being alone with him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defend_the_Defenseless"title="Defend the Defenseless">
## Part one.Part One looks at the history of Nigeria and the factors that led to the Civil War. It narrates a childhood experience not in secessionist Biafra but being caught in the middle when the author's home city Benin was captured by Biafran soldiers. Defend the Defenseless provides both an invaluable historical background and a candid account of the author's personal experience of the Biafran war with her family. It tells of the pain of separation and loss, the joy of survival and reunion; and the consequences of the war that still linger on today.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_and_Sunflower"title="Bronze and Sunflower">
Bronze is a young mute boy, the only son of the poorest family in the village. Sunflower is a young girl, taken in by Bronze's family when she is orphaned. The story follows their lives in the village of Damaidi, highlighting family values against the hardships of rural life. It is one of a series of books set in the same region at the same time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Hope"title="Sweet Hope">
Two families develop an uneasy friendship while eking out a living on a cotton plantation named Sweet Hope. The Pascalas are Italian immigrants working as indentured laborers; the Halls are African-American sharecroppers. Like the other workers at Sweet Hope, the Pascalas and the Halls face disease, poverty, and a dangerous manager. The black sharecroppers help the Italians learn English and survive in an unfamiliar climate.The Pascalas are paid in company scrip and forbidden to leave the plantation until their debt is worked off. Having arrived too late in the year to start a crop, they keep falling further into debt. After attempting to negotiate with management for better conditions, the Italians organize against the plantation company. When the sharecroppers stand up for the Italians, it triggers "a tragic chain of events that implicates individuals, families, company, town, and the justice system."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_Kings_(book)"title="3 Kings (book)">
The book examines the careers of Diddy, Dr. Dre, and Jay-Z through reports and interviews from people such as Swizz Beatz, Kendrick Lamar, Shaquille O'Neal, Russell Simmons, Kevin Liles, Troy Carter, Grandwizzard Theodore and Lovebug Starski. There is consideration of the nature of characteristics that made the figures most successful, the general economic nature of hip-hop and a potential "4th King", 50 Cent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wombat_Divine"title="Wombat Divine">
Wombat has long dreamed of being in the annual Nativity play. When he is finally old enough to participate, he enters every audition, only to be rejected each time on the grounds that he is "too big for some parts, too small for others, too short, too clumsy ..." until he fears that his dream will go unfulfilled. Fortunately, "wise Emu" has an idea—a sleepy Wombat would be well suited to the part of baby Jesus. Wombat accepts the part and ends up stealing the show as he falls asleep during the performance, just as a real baby might. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sins_of_Empire"title="Sins of Empire">
Ten years after the events of "The Powder Mage trilogy", the Lady Chancellor of the young nation of Fatrasta must use her iron will and secret police force against the unrest of a suppressed population and the machinations of powerful empires. Michel Bravis, a spy in all but name, a convicted war hero called Ben Styke, and Lady Vlora Flint - general of a mercenary company - must work together to purge the insurrection that threatens Landfall. Loyalties are tested, revealed and destroyed, while old powers are again discovered and will soon be a bigger challenge than Landfall's current worries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facing_East_from_Indian_Country"title="Facing East from Indian Country">
"Facing East" begins by exploring, through available facts, possibilities of American Indian scenarios that have not been part of European-centered imaginations about American Indians. Richter goes on to show the active participation of American Indians in relations with European settlers, particularly their responses to "abstract material responses" brought about by European colonization. The figures Pocahontas, Tekakwitha, and Metacom are brought together in an analysis that shows their similar but varying deliberate involvements with Europeans. Richter relies on spiritual autobiographies and conversion narratives on American Natives by European colonists to elucidate an Indian point of view. Richter argues that American Indian participation in the Atlantic economy and warfare was essential and that Europeans and American Indians depended on each other. According to Richter, with the increasing animosity between American Indians and colonists, both groups developed their mindsets about each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Hell_Did_I_Just_Read"title="What the Hell Did I Just Read">
One night, John and Dave are called to investigate a closed room disappearance of a little girl named Maggie Knoll. After questioning her father Ted and following up on the leads, John and Dave quickly establish that the abductor is a supernatural entity that can present itself in different forms, even to people in the same room. As they continue their investigation by questioning Maggie's mother Loretta, Dave's girlfriend Amy is confronted with a doppelgänger of Dave, who leads her to the girl's location under a pond near a collapsed mining shaft. As the girl is reunited with her parents, she identifies Dave as her kidnapper, but Dave and John manage to convince Ted and Loretta that this is another trick of the supernatural kidnapper.John, Dave and Amy find and trap a small insect-like creature that can disguise itself as any living or inanimate object, inserting retroactive memories of its new form so that it doesn't arouse suspicion. Before they can investigate it, another child goes missing under similar circumstances, whose mother Chastity Payton believes it to be related to BATMANTIS???, a large flying creature spotted and filmed in the area. Police detective Bowman arrives to question David on Maggie Knoll's case and finds the second child unconscious in his house, after which he arrests all three of them. The cops take Amy, Dave and John to NON, a government organization with some degree of control over time, alternate dimensions and even death, who question them on the situation. Before NON can wipe their memories, Dave, John and Amy are rescued by Chastity Payton, who takes them to a motel where she is staying with her son. Chastity explains that her memories are full of plot holes and that she was able to pierce the truth: she never had a son before last night, her memories of him were implanted, but were imperfect and didn't take. Exposed, the swarm of creatures switches to another disguise, prompting the group to flee from an armed biker gang. Dave and John take the Soy Sauce to get to the bottom of the mystery and awaken two days later with no memory of what happened. They discover that they have made significant preparations and left themselves written messages, but continuously proceed to miss them until it's too late and accidentally release the BATMANTIS??? creature from her confinement. Amy explains that the biker gang became convinced that ten more of their kids have gone missing, and that she has been working with NON to solve the case. Still experiencing lingering effects from the Soy Sauce, Dave and John are now able to see through the illusions, revealing that all documents on the "kids" are in fact blank and that "Maggie" is actually a giant larva literally feeding on Loretta Knoll, who does not experience a thing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Way_Up,_Way_Out"title="Way Up, Way Out">
The book, which is autobiographical fiction, describes the life of Jock Lundie (Strachan's nickname and middle name). The protagonist is born in Pretoria. As a young boy he is close to a German widow called Marthe Guldenpfennig. When his adoptive father dies, he moves with his mother and attends school in Pietermaritzburg. He enjoys the nurturing atmosphere and the arts and crafts in primary school. He keeps in touch with Guldenpfennig until she moves back to Darmstadt on the eve of the Second World War. When he goes to boarding school, he is able to avoid bullying by creative use of his artistic talents. With his best friend "Cheese" Kreis, he goes climbing in the Drakensberg mountains. After graduation he joins the South African Air Force near the end of the war. He learns to fly and to do aerobatics in the Tiger Moth, then does advanced bomber pilot training in the Airspeed Oxford. A Royal Air Force trainer called O'Dowd tells him that he was involved in the bombing of Darmstadt, where a firestorm was created and the entire city wiped out. Several of his friends, including "Cheese", are killed in flying accidents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_a_Skyf,_Man!"title="Make a Skyf, Man!">
The book depicts Jock Lundie, a fictionalised version of Strachan, and his involvement in the resistance movement against apartheid, starting with the Congress of Democrats then being a bomb-maker for Umkhonto we Sizwe. He describes his involvement as a "boys' own armed struggle"; one passage depicts a successful demonstration of a home-made bomb to a senior comrade (Yoshke, based on Joe Slovo) by blowing up a beach toilet: Lundie gets arrested and serves three years in prison. He passes the time in solitary constructing a Tiger Moth in his imagination then preparing an aerobatics routine for it. Books are difficult to get and their pages are highly prized for making cigarettes or cannabis joints. As a result many books have pages missing. A former comrade, Themba Max, is executed.Near the end of the book, Lundie is released after being found not guilty in a further trial thanks to the benevolent perjury of his neighbour who gives him an alibi. He moves back in with his wife Jess, gets to know his three-year-old daughter, and ejects his wife's boyfriend from the family home.The book begins and ends with stories about angling for shad, a longstanding passion of Strachan's.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someone_Like_Me_(novel)"title="Someone Like Me (novel)">
The main protagonist is Thomas Alexander St. John "Tas" Kennedy, a preteen boy. He lives on a farm with his parents and two sisters, and his dog, Reebok. He is also frequently subject to being transferred to a special school.A Northern Irish girl called Enya Dunleavy moves in next door to Tas, and they quickly become friends. However, when they find a box full of explosives near their house, Enya is scared for reasons unknown to Tas.One day, Tas tries to play a prank on the school bully, Darren "Dreadlock", but his teacher, Mr. McKinlay "Mac", takes the bait and faints, causing everyone to be sent home early. As Enya was absent, Tas goes to her house and notices her parents in an argument with another man, which ends with Tas being shot.Tas is sent to the hospital, where he is nearly choked to death by Enya's uncle, Seamus, for spying on their argument, but is saved by Mr. Mac. The two of them spend weeks in the hospital together before returning to school. After a run-in with Dreadlock and his cronies, Tas meets up with Enya, who reveals that she was the one who shot Tas and that it was an accident.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinegar_Girl"title="Vinegar Girl">
The plot is based on William Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew," updated to present-day Baltimore. Kate Battista is the unmarried 29-year-old daughter of an eccentric scientist, Dr. Louis Battista who is a scientist at Johns Hopkins University. Having dropped out of college in her freshman year after calling a professor's research project "half-assed," she now finds herself with very limited opportunities: she works as a pre-school assistant, and takes care of Dr. Battista and her high-school-age sister Bunny.Dr. Battista's brilliant lab assistant, Pyotr, will soon have to leave the country as his student visa expires. Dr. Battista devises a plan for a Green card marriage between Kate and Pyotr; Kate first objects to the plan, but slowly warms to the idea, both because of Pyotr's charming acceptance of her outspokenness, and because it offers her a way out of her constrained circumstances.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Oliphant_is_Completely_Fine"title="Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine">
Eleanor Oliphant, the novel's protagonist and narrator, lives in Glasgow, Scotland, and works as a finance clerk for a graphic design company. At the novel's outset, she is 29 years old. She is academically intelligent, with a degree in Classics and high standards of literacy. Every day on her lunch break she completes the "Daily Telegraph" crossword. However, she is socially awkward and leads a solitary lifestyle. She has no friends or social contacts, and every weekend consumes two bottles of vodka. She takes little interest in her appearance, having gone without a haircut since she was 13. Not considering that she has a problem, Eleanor repeatedly describes herself as "absolutely fine", and even when obvious moments of awkwardness arise in her interactions with others, she tends to blame the other person's "underdeveloped social skills". Her colleagues regard her as a bit of a joke, and refer to her as "Wacko Jacko" or "Harry Potter"; while she regards them as "shirkers and idiots".Clues gradually emerge to Eleanor's troubled past. She has a badly scarred face; knows nothing about her father; spent much of her childhood in foster care and children's homes; and, as a student, spent two years living with an abusive boyfriend who regularly physically assaulted her. Twice yearly she receives a routine visit from a social worker to monitor her progress. Her mother now appears to be confined to an unidentified institution: she phones Eleanor for a 15-minute conversation on Wednesday evenings. It is clear that Eleanor's mother is both vindictive and manipulative.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_a_Voyage_to_the_Land_of_Brazil"title="History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil">
The book has 22 chapters, with Chapter 1 discussing the motive behind the voyage to Brazil and Chapters 2-5 describing the sights and events that occurred during the voyage to Brazil. Chapters 6-20 consist of Léry describing the land of Brazil, the physical description of the indigenous people, and the behaviors and customs of the indigenous people. Lastly, Chapters 21 and 22 recount the departure from Brazil and the trip back to France. The book contains detailed descriptions of the plants, animals, and indigenous people in the New World for the French.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renegades_(novel)"title="Renegades (novel)">
## Premise."Renegades" follows Nova (anarchist alias: Nightmare), the niece of the Anarchist leader, Alec Artino (alias: Ace Anarchy). Alec takes Nova in after her parents are viciously murdered by another villain gang before the civil war, and was raised by the Anarchists. She can put people to sleep with skin-to-skin contact, and since her parents' murder, she has not slept at all. She wants revenge on the Renegades for not protecting her parents as promised, and leads an infiltration into their headquarters by posing as a Renegade-in-training.It also follows Adrian, the son of the leaders of the Renegades, Hugh Everhart and Simon Westwood. He was adopted by the two leaders after his mother, another member of the core-Renegades, was killed. He brings Nova onto his team at Renegades headquarters as she poses 'Insomnia.'10 years before the events of the book, 6-year-old Nova Artino watches as her parents and baby sister are killed by a villain gang's hitman, and hears him shoot her baby sister, Evie—dead. However, before he can shoot her, she uses her gift of putting people to sleep to cause him to faint. Her uncle Alec comes and reveals to Nova he is Ace Anarchy, the leader of the Anarchists, before killing the hitman.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Found_World,_or_Antarctike"title="The New Found World, or Antarctike">
Thevet and his colleagues land on the Brazilian mainland on November 10, and are welcomed and fed by a delegation of native people immediately upon their arrival. At the welcoming feast, they are served an alcoholic beverage brewed from a combination of different roots. Initially hoping to venture inland or elsewhere along the coast, the expeditionary team members are informed that there is little freshwater for a significant distance away from the indigenous settlement but that they would be welcome to remain near their landing site for the time being. Venturing to a nearby inlet, Thevet and company are impressed by an array of colorful birdsㅡtheir feathers making an attractive decoration for the sparse garments of native peopleㅡand a generous bounty of fish, upon which local residents may subsist. Finally Thevet describes some of the local flora, including beautiful trees unseen in Europe and small vines utilized by the natives as accessories and for medicinal purposes. Thevet describes a fruit which the Tupinambá call the "Hoyriri," now identified as the pineapple:,another fruit that commeth vp in the fieldes, which they name Hoyriri, the which to loke on, would be iudged to grow on some trée. Notwithstāding it groweth in a cer∣taine herbe that beareth leafe like to a Palme, as wel in the length as in largenesse, it groweth in the midst of the leaues very round, &amp; within it be litle Nuts, of the which the kernell is white &amp; good to eate, sauing that ouermuch therof, as wel as of other things, hurteth the braine. ... if... dressed &amp; trimmed, it wold take away this vice. Notwith¦standing the Americanes eat therof, chiefly ye litle childrē. The fields ar very ful within two leagues of Cap de Fria.The Catholic author acknowledges and laments the absence of organized religion in the lives of indigenous people. Although they do believe in "Toupan"ㅡsome sort of higher being reigning above them and governing the climateㅡthey make no clear effort to worship or honor it as a collective. Moreover, rather than believe in a great prophet similar to those venerated in Abrahamic faiths, the natives passively celebrate "Hetich," the figure allegedly responsible for teaching them to cultivate the roots that became an essential staple of their diet. Thevet then digresses from this point, describing some alternative properties of the roots that emerge once separate varieties are subjected to certain external forces. Following this, the author momentarily touches upon how Christopher Columbus and his team were initially worshiped by local Amerindians, before losing this divine status once it was gradually discovered that they behaved and functioned as ordinary men. Cannibalism is addressed at the end of this chapter, being attributed to certain indigenous groups who allegedly consume human flesh as one in European society might consume any other meat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven_Girl"title="Raven Girl">
A postman who encounters a fledgling raven while on the edge of his route decides to bring her home. The unlikely couple falls in love and conceives a child—an extraordinary raven girl trapped in a human body.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabelle_(novella)"title="Isabelle (novella)">
25-year-old Gérard Lacase from the Sorbonne studies for his doctorate on Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet at the remote castle of Quartfourche in northern Normandy. He falls in love with a portrait of Isabelle, the daughter of the family who owns the castle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Age_(novel)"title="Dark Age (novel)">
Darrow and his legions are barricaded from all sides on Mercury from Society forces. Lysander and the Raa family meet Atalantia to broker an alliance between The Rim and The Core in order to defeat Darrow and give rise to a new Society. Lysander and his former friend Ajax au Grimmus participate in an Iron Rain against Darrow's armies, but Darrow fights back with a Storm God, a previously hidden terraforming tool used as a weapon. During the battle, Lysander loses an eye and his companion Seraphina is killed; Ajax betrays Lysander and leaves him to die in vengeance for Lysander's favorable position with the family as a child. Darrow kills his pilot Orion, who attempts to use the Storm God indiscriminately. Darrow's forces narrowly manage to win the battle by seizing control of Mercury's center of commerce Heliopolis with the arrival of the warship "Morning Star".Virginia struggles to keep her power as the Sovereign with her allies growing increasingly hostile due to her continued support for Darrow's agenda. She suspects treachery from her allies in the Forum, especially Publius. Having managed to locate Sevro, Virginia kidnaps the Duke of Hands and attempts to pry information on The Syndicate's Queen and the location of their missing children. On the day where Virginia is to give a speech to the Solar Republic giving one last plea of help to free Darrow, Sevro tracks down The Syndicate Queen on Earth. Virginia is betrayed when her closest allies are all poisoned and a mob kills her friend Daxo before kidnapping her. The Syndicate Queen arrives and is revealed to be Lilath, who has given birth to a now 10-year-old clone of Virginia's deceased brother Adrius 'The Jackal'. Virginia manages to poison Adrius and escapes, leaving Sevro and several Howlers behind with Lilath.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunmetal_Gray"title="Gunmetal Gray">
For his first operation back with the Central Intelligence Agency, Court Gentry is tasked with capturing Fan Jiang, a former member of PLA Unit 61398, an ultra-secret computer warfare unit responsible for testing China's own security systems, through his former handler Sir Donald Fitzroy, who was contracted by the Chinese government for a similar operation, in Hong Kong. Unbeknownst to him, his arrival in the country was discovered by the Ministry of State Security (MSS), who then sent two agents to surveil him. Their principal boss from the Ministry of Defense (MOD), Colonel Dai Longhai, becomes frustrated about this routine surveillance op and orders them to eliminate Gentry, who instead manages to kill them.After the attempt on his life, Gentry decides to go dark in order to go on with his operation. His later inquiries on the whereabouts of Fitzroy attracted Colonel Dai's attention, who then ordered his henchmen to kidnap Gentry. Court is then brought to Fitzroy, who also had been kidnapped by Colonel Dai. Sir Donald had dispatched two kill teams for Fan on behalf of Colonel Dai's MOD, but they were killed by the Wo Shing Wo, a part of the Triad criminal organization in Hong Kong whom Fan had hired for protection while on the run. After hearing of his failure, Colonel Dai takes Fitzroy hostage and has decided to supervise the hunt. Aware of his reputation as the Gray Man and his past relationship with Fitzroy, but unaware that Gentry is working on behalf of the CIA, Colonel Dai hires Court to find Fan and eliminate him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prithivivallabh"title="Prithivivallabh">
Prithivivallabh is based on the history of Malwa region of India. The novel depicts the rivalry between Munj, the ruler of Dharanagari and Tailap as well as the romance between Munj and Mrinal. Munj had defeated Tailap several times but Tailap captures Munj with help of his feudatory Yadava king Bhillamraj. In captivity, Munj falls in love with Mrinal, Tailap's widow sister. Celibate Mrinal too falls in his love but in the end, Tailap gets Munj killed under the feet of an elephant. The love story of Bhoj, a poet; and Vilas, daughter of Bhillamraj engaged with Satyashraya, son of Tailap; runs in parallel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Portland_Black_Panthers"title="The Portland Black Panthers">
"The Portland Black Panthers" tells the story of the formation of the local branch of the Portland Black Panther Party within the constraints of living in a majority-white city with a tumultuous past regarding race relations. Furthermore, it provides a historical context for these race relations, by highlighting the changes in the black community throughout the 20th century.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Carnival"title="Beyond Carnival">
"Beyond Carnival" draws attention to the lives of the male homosexual population in Brazil, specifically Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Green claims that homosexuality, though somewhat accepted by the general population, is still overall disapproved of. Combined with the current discrimination faced by the LGBT community in Brazil, Green's belief is that focusing exclusively on male homosexuals not only provides insight on a marginalized group, but also into how Brazilian's understand concepts of masculinity and femininity, acceptable behavior, and shared societal values. Medical studies, depositions of arrested men, autobiographies, and personal interviews are among the primary sources used in Green's analysis of the subculture among gay men that developed in Brazil's urban centers.Green details the history of the gay male community, beginning in the late 18th century. Given the lack of studies on the community, the vast majority of information is compiled from police reports. Though homosexuality was not explicitly illegal, Brazilian police were able to arrest gays found engaging in sexual activities for violating laws of public indecency, vagrancy, or sodomy. Most reports of these interactions came from the Largo do Rossio park in Rio de Janeiro. The novel "Bom-Crioulo" by Adolfo Caminha was published during this time, portraying homosexual encounters in a positive light. Contemporaries of Caminha harshly criticized the novel for covering such an immoral practice, reflecting attitudes of this era. Studies of gay men focused entirely on a bicha/bofe paradigm, in which the penetrated was a feminine bicha, and the "real man" was the bofe, or penetrator. Leonídio Ribero's "Homosexualismo e endocrinologia" was the most commonly cited study explaining biological differences between "sick" gay men and "healthy" heterosexual men. These early studies on gay relationships emphasized a smaller community of gay men, with no acknowledgement of diversity within the subgroup, such as Madame Satã, who acted "masculine" but enjoyed to be the bicha in relationships.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_Samba"title="Making Samba">
Hertzman's main argument in this book is that the historical narrative surrounding the emergence of samba in Brazil has either been over-criticized, or exceedingly fetishized. By using wide-ranging evidence, such as Brazilian musicians' salary contracts, their involvement and activism with various musical associations, and their encounters with law enforcement, Hertzman explores their struggles in exerting their agency by claiming their music as what he calls, "intellectual property." While Hertzman's book explores different themes such as "musical blackface" and "the purity of samba," Hertzman discusses them within the context of Afro-Brazilian figures that were heavily involved with the progress of Samba so that his argument doesn't get off track.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Fires_Everywhere_(novel)"title="Little Fires Everywhere (novel)">
In 1998, the Richardson home in Shaker Heights, Ohio, catches fire. Arson is suspected, as there were multiple small fires.The previous year, 1997, Elena Richardson rents her rental home on Winslow Road to Mia Warren, an artist, and her teenage daughter, Pearl. Elena's younger son, Moody, who is Pearl's age, develops a crush on Pearl and becomes friends with her. Through Moody, Pearl meets the rest of the Richardson siblings: Lexie, Trip, and Izzy. Pearl, who is used to a transient lifestyle in which her mother scrapes together money, is charmed by the Richardsons and their established home. She spends time at the Richardson home every day and develops a crush on Trip, andMia works part-time at a Chinese restaurant called the Lucky Palace and sells photographs through a dealer named Anita Rees in New York. Mia becomes concerned about Pearl's idealisation of the Richardsons. When Elena condescendingly offers her a job doing housekeeping for her family, she is hesitant at first but agrees only because she wants to keep an eye on Pearl. Mia meets Izzy, the black sheep of the family, and the two become close. Izzybecomes particularly fascinated with Mia, and asks if she can be Mia's assistant so she can spend more time with her. She spends many afternoons with Mia at the home on Winslow Road. Izzy reveals that the orchestra teacher, Mrs Peters, racially abused a black student, Deja, in class and seeks revenge by jamming toothpicks in the doors at school, blocking access to the toilet. Mrs Peters then becomes desperate to urinate and ends up soiling her skirt and tights in the girls' toilets, much to everyone else's mirth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bread_Winner"title="The Bread Winner">
The story takes place in 1932 depression era United States. Protagonist Sarah Ann Puckett moves with her family to a small town after selling the failed family farm. Her parents quickly become despondent as money begins to run short, but Sarah resourcefully begins selling her award-winning bread to neighbors and eventually acquires a store front, all the while dealing with bullies and hobos as well as other setbacks such as a tornado.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Hunger_Political_Culture_and_Antipoverty_Policy_in_Northeast_Brazil"title="Zero Hunger Political Culture and Antipoverty Policy in Northeast Brazil">
In this book, Ansell argues that Northeastern Brazil, under the PT, does not align with the traditional notions of clientelism or universalism, but instead has developed an unspoken system of “intimate hierarchies” that support a mutually beneficial socio-political system for politicians or elites and the impoverished citizens of Northeast Brazil.Ansell is responding to the predominant literature on post-authoritarian Brazil that uses the concept of clientelism as a means for elites to maintain their status, and for inequality to remain static. This concept, and the arguments of its practice, limits social and economic mobility in Northeast Brazil, holding marginalized and impoverished populations in their current place. Ansell's contribution to the literature is the introduction of a new way to think about the relationship between the party and citizens which complicates the traditional notions of clientelism.Three terms that are vitally important to this book are patronage, clientelism, and universalism. Patronage is the granting jobs, favors, or services to individuals or groups who support a political party or campaign. Clientelism is a social order that depends upon and stems from patronage, particularly in politics where it emphasizes or exploits such relations of granting favors for political support. Universalism is a system where goods and services are distributed not as favors for political support, but as rights for all individuals regardless of politics.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Modern"title="Pretty Modern">
The book contains three main sections, each addressing a particular aspect of plastic surgery culture in Brazil. Edmonds uses mainly interviews and observations of procedures as well as academic theories and publications. He interviews an array of people from various socio-economic backgrounds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Modernist_City"title="The Modernist City">
Holston has a broad goal in the writing of the book, which he lays out near the beginning. He proposes "a critical ethnography of modernism" as a way for evaluating the flaws with each. He applies this concept to establish a "counter discourse" to show that the use of a master plan in effect caused the plan's own failure. These large-scale concepts frame his work.The book contains three parts which are each divided into multiple subsections. These parts are 1): The Myth of the Concrete, 2): The City Defamiliarized, and 3): The Recovery of History.In "The Myth of the Concrete," Holston establishes the context of Brasília's development, saying "Brasília was built to be more that merely the symbol of this new age. Rather, its design and construction were intended as means to create it by transforming Brazilian society." Building from this basis premise, he argues that the city was unable to live up to its lofty founding goals once it was inhabited because human interaction with its theoretical basis created a paradox that made it impossible to implement the initial plan. In this section, Holston draws upon the Plano Piloto, or the pilot plan for Brasília, statements by the President, Juscelino Kubitschek, as well as influential works of modernism to make his point. He then traces the development of Brasília to the tenets of Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM), arguing that Brasília is a case study for the execution of those principles. Then, he traces how the creator of the plan, Lucio Costa, designed the plan as a way that it would be interpreted as a myth, arguing that this presentation led to its early appeal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_This_World"title="Why This World">
Moser discusses how Clarice Lispector's work reflects her life. He does this by citing her own texts, letters, other scholarly work and what few interviews there are of her. Moser goes into great detail on the connections that can be made between Lispector's writing and her life. Moser uses letters written to and from Lispector, Lispector's own sisters, Elisa Lispector's autobiography, interviews with Lispector and Lispector's own writings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Color_of_Love_(book)"title="The Color of Love (book)">
Hordge-Freeman aims to examine the role that families play in race-making and race negotiation in Brazil. Specifically, she examines how families socialize race and teach their family members how to act appropriately in society according to their race. This is especially important since the majority of family studies research compares different families to each other instead of looking within families. Hordge-Freeman argues that affective capital, which refers to experiences of love and affection, are unequally distributed in families. Specifically, white family members receive more affective capital than darker family members. Hordge-Freeman goes further to explain the consequences of this imbalance and how it negatively impacts the psychological well-being of darker family members. Hordge-Freeman also analyzes how Afro-Brazilians have to manipulate their image in order to look more professional and acceptable by society, which Hordge-Freeman refers to embodied capital. Examples of this include changing hairstyles and dressing in clean and professional clothes. Lastly, Hordge-Freeman examines the racial fluency tendencies of families, which pertain to their responses to racism. The family can either choose to accept these racist ideas or actively resist them.The book is broken into three parts. Part I focuses on how families operate in Brazil and their role in racial socialization. In addition, Part I also explores how racial stigma affects familial relationships. Part 1 consists of three chapters. Part II focuses on how racial socialization from the family translates to behaviors in the public sphere, examines three families that are racially transgressive and their attempt to resist racism, and a conclusion. The book ends with a conclusi Part II contains four chapters. Lastly, an appendix of how interviews were coded is offered at the end.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_a_Racial_Democracy"title="Racism in a Racial Democracy">
"Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil" by France Winddance Twine explores the racism in Brazil from a sociological perspective. Even though Brazil nowadays stresses racial democracy, which claimed that every race has equal opportunities, Afro-Brazilians are still experiencing racism in their daily life. Twine researched in Vasalia (renamed the town), Rio de Janeiro to investigate the community dynamics between Afro-Brazilians and other non-Afro-Brazilians in the community, and she found a huge difference between them on perception of races and miscegenation, socioeconomic status, politics and social life. Twine interviewed Afro-Brazilians in the community about their perception of racism, their physical appearance and their family history. While interacting with Afro-Brazilians, Twine also interviewed some Euro-Brazilians and mixed race Brazilians on their perception on Afro-Brazilians, racism, perspectives on relationships and marriage. Chapter one started with the community practices of racism based on white supremacist theories and structures. Chapter two traced the history of Vasalia and the according political and economic development, when Portuguese and Italian immigrants were the coffee plantation owners and Afro-Brazilians were the slaves. Chapter three focused on the accountability of racism by interviewing Afro-Brazilians on their perception of racism, and many Afro-Brazilians answered with the nonexistence of racism. Chapter four explored the concept of racial democracy in Vasalia and the practices of white supremacy under the concept. Chapter five analyzed miscegenation and whitening issues among Vasalians while many Afro-Brazilians, and many Afro-Brazilians embraced whiteness. Chapter six explored Vasalians’ perception on relation to African descent and their family history on slavery. In chapter seven, Twine interviewed Afro-Brazilians professionals on their interpretation of racism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_of_the_Poor?_Vargas_and_His_Era"title="Father of the Poor? Vargas and His Era">
The book covers the origins of Vargas, including his family history, until his death in 1954. It also includes how society and various political actors felt about the “Estado Novo” period including the accounts on the Integralists and Communists. The detailed history provided in the first four chapters that primarily refer to Vargas and his policies. Vargas’s policies included but not limited to, worker empowerment programs, political reforms, that often involve censorship, and giving women the right to vote in 1937. The Vargas dictatorship according to Robert M Levine, had "populist" elements in addition to being very totalitarian. Vargas promoted a nationalist economic policy with his dictatorship. These economic reforms aided in industrializing Brazil and provided clarity to the working class. Workers received education, health, and dental care for the first time. The censorship of political parties played a role in characterizing the Vargas Period. Vargas' former political allies, the Integralists, tried to influence Vargas policies and were perceived as a threat by the government. With the parties censored, he and his loyalist cabinet were able to accomplish many tasks and strengthened the domestic affairs of the state. The final chapters of the book cover the legacy and a critique of the “Estado Novo” dictatorship and Vargas’ character. One of the primary observations made by Robert was the politics Vargas was in, drove him to suicide in 1954. With the threat of military coup at any point, it caused anxiety in Vargas. The army had a history of rebelling against the government and attempted to overthrow the Old Republic at various times.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_July_Ward"title="The July Ward">
The story follows Dr. Watson, a female hospitalist, over a day in an urban medical center. John Doe #3, an unnamed victim of drug violence, arrives brain dead where Watson, Tom, her medical student, and the rest of her medical team inspect the comatose body. The team determines that the body must be kept on a ventilator until the next of kin can be contacted. In the meantime a transplant surgeon suggests that they should harvest the body’s organs before contacting the family. Soon, another patient arrives, left paraplegic from another incident of gang violence. The patient warns that the opposing gang will be coming into the hospital to get him. A family member of John Doe #3 has been contacted and they refuse to allow the organs to be donated. Soon after, John Doe #3 dies from complications and the surgeon berates Tom. The situation overwhelms Tom causing him to feel guilty for the patient’s death.Dr. Watson realizes Tom is about to make a foolish decision and follows him down into the depths of the hospital cellars to stop him from entering a door labelled “The July Ward.” She insists John Doe #3's death was not his fault and that the surgeon was overly accusatory. Watson tells Tom about her own mistake and the patient who died because she failed to recognize a case of rhabdomyolysis. Tom and Dr. Watson return to the hospital floors.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_in_Scarlet_Women"title="A Study in Scarlet Women">
## Part One.Charlotte Holmes, the youngest daughter of the noble-but-impoverished Lord and Lady Holmes, possesses a razor-keen intellect and unique talents for observation and deductive reasoning, but her parents under-value these gifts, declaring them off-putting to a potential husband. Before her first Season, Charlotte, declaring herself uninterested in marriage, strikes a bargain with her father: she will participate in the Season, but if she does not accept any potential suitors, her father will finance her education to become the headmistress of a girls' school (one of the few vocations in Victorian England which allows an unmarried woman a sufficient income). Her father agrees, but later reneges.Charlotte decides that the "logical" alternative is lose her maidenhead in secret and blackmail her father into paying for her education. If he does not support her, she will let everyone know and ruin the family. Unfortunately, the young man she chooses to seduce, Roger Shrewsbury, is an "idiot", who gets drunk and, mistaking his own wife for another one of his mistresses, tells her all about his planned assignation with Charlotte. Instead of preventing the rendezvous, Shrewsbury's wife and mother lie in wait and burst in on the two "in flagrante", ensuring that Charlotte's disgrace is total. Rather than accept her parents' sentence of exile to the family's country estate, Charlotte leaves home for a London boarding house, to look for work as a secretary.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securing_Sex"title="Securing Sex">
Benjamin Cowan explores the repression that existed during mid Cold War Brazil and beyond. He discusses how the Right Wing activist use the military regime in Brazil to spread a very "modest" and "morally correct" population, attitudes, and laws. Cowan tackles this subject by using the voices and perspectives of Right Wing activist. Cowan uses records from unused archives, something that people have not been doing. Cowan also attributes these attitudes to current perspectives of sexually liberate people, women, and queer people. Cowan uses some of the chapters to his advantage. He poses a question as the chapter title and in the next chapter he answers it. (Chapter 2: Sexual Revolution? and Chapter 3: Sexual Revolution!). He also goes through the years of the military dictatorship in relation to the certain topic of women being used as a tool to turn against rebels and how young men were seen as heroes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drugs_and_Democracy_in_Rio_de_Janeiro"title="Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro">
In the first page of the introduction he explains what Rio de Janeiro's social violence is like up until the time of his research. Rio de Janeiro's people have now been forcibly segregated by their income, and those who have been pushed out the favelas are now under drug trafficking organizations' jurisdiction. Desmond Arias makes a distinction of the main agents who are simultaneously the perpetrators and victims of this violence, "impoverished, poorly educated, non-white, adolescents and young men."Desmond Arias suggests that violence in Rio is not the ineffective policies or inability of Brazilian leaders to govern the people, but it is a mixture of the several factors that look at policy, relationships among different agents, and the inequality in Brazil. He makes an extremely important note in the introduction of the approaches ethnographers, anthropologists, and sociologists have taken when researching Rio's problems.According to Desmond Arias there are two conventional and widely accepted approaches to approaching Rio's crime problem where the "divided city" approach and the "neo-clientelism" approach. The divided city approach is an assumption that there is a stark difference between drug trafficking organizations and the local governments they are at war with. This approach suggests that there is no close relationships among the two agents and the hostile adversity among them can be traced back to the 80s after the transition from the dictatorship. This approach alludes to a weak Brazilian state incapable of governing and policing its own people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invention_of_the_Beautiful_Game"title="The Invention of the Beautiful Game">
In the book, the author links football to larger historical themes of contemporary Brazil, and further divides into four chapters that each focuses on separate time frames in the perspective of race, class, region, gender, and nationality. Moreover, through social, cultural, and political lenses, the book explores “Brazilian ideas about the game between 1894 and 1938, and the choices Brazilians made about how to explain football during that period.” In analyzing his collected historical evidences, the author emphasizes several key terms such as professionalization, amateurism, nationalization, popularization, racial exclusivity, and social hierarchies. The book contains 20 illustrative figures and incorporates historical records of prominent football clubs, popular magazines, and sports press as evidence for the author's research.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharing_This_Walk"title="Sharing This Walk">
This book describes years of research conducted by Karina Biondi within and outside of many of Sao Paulo's prisons. After conducting her in person interviews and through examining her personal experiences with PCC members, Biondi argues that the typical portrayals of the PCC are incorrect and that the organization is very complex. She primarily focuses on the PCC in terms of their political actions as well as their lack of hierarchy which is touched upon in four different chapters. In Chapter 1, Biondi gives a brief history of the PCC and the various myths that surround the origin of the founding of the organization. Her historical story begins with the description of the 1992 Carandiru prison massacre which left 111 inmates dead. This massacre sparked a wave of prison riots and within these organized revolts, the PCC emerged as an influential organization. The true origin of the PCC is debated, but overall Biondi concludes that understanding the uniting purpose of prison mistreatment is a central element to be able to understand the PCC and its control in today's prisons. Chapter 2 focuses on the PCC's emphasis on pedagogy and politics within the prison walls. In this section, Biondi stresses the necessity for both prisoners within and visitors to a PCC-controlled to learn their appropriate roles and how which actions are deemed appropriate. This emphasis on teaching the correct actions leads to a greater adherence to the PCC's standards. Biondi stresses that this obedience, while prevalent, is not uniform across all prison's due to the command structure of the group.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forró_and_Redemptive_Regionalism_from_the_Brazilian_Northeast"title="Forró and Redemptive Regionalism from the Brazilian Northeast">
"Forró and Redemptive Regionalism from the Brazilian Northeast" not only documents and analyses the music of migrants in Brazil, but also analyzes how the music shaped both its creators and Brazil as a whole. Using forró artists and excerpts from their music, Draper argues that the migrants used a musical genre called forró to kill "saudade", which means longing and nostalgia, loneliness and lust, as He also argues that it was used to rebel against industrialization and used as an attempt to help Brazilian “natives” overcome prejudice. He analyzes the historical and political climate that forró formed in, a time of oppression, dictatorships and political instability. Draper seems to be portraying forró like a Brazilian equivalent of Blues, which was also used to fight longing, loneliness and lust. He argues and analyses how the migrants completely re-thought all the elements of music, including melody, lyrics and rhythms to make it their own. He also shows forró’s presence in Brazilian pop culture, including the teaching of it in universities, and the playing of it at nightclubs and music festivals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire_and_the_Cold_War_Politics_of_Literacy"title="Paulo Freire and the Cold War Politics of Literacy">
This book is an analysis of Paulo Freire's work in Latin American literacy campaigns during the mid 20th century. The first chapter, "Entering History", helps set the stage for the rest of the book. It summarizes Freire's early life and the historical context of Brazil in the 1940s and 1950s. It goes on to explain how the need for improving literacy rates was becoming apparent during this time, and describes Freire's ideas regarding education and politics.The second chapter, "The Revolution that wasn't and the Revolution that was in Brazil", describes Freire's work in the northeast of Brazil during the presidency of Joao Goulart. It describes the literacy programs that he set up in the region, particularly in Angicos, and also discusses Freire's methods of education. It explains how the issue of literacy became increasingly prominent during the 1960s due to the government's need to define itself and expanding student movements. The chapter also argues that talk of a "revolution" in Brazil, which was common on in Goulart's party, was interpreted in widely varying ways with some fearing that it could lead to communist uprisings and others believing that it simply described rapid progress towards literacy and democracy. The involvement of the United States, which tried to promote literacy through the Alliance for Progress but also was preoccupied with preventing the spread of communism, was also discussed. The chapter ends with the 1964 coup, motivated by fears of a radical Left, that deposed Goulart and forced Freire to flee the country. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Mirrors"title="The Book of Mirrors">
Peter Katz, a New York literary agent, receives a submission from Richard Flynn, who in the late eighties was an English Literature student at Princeton and dreamed of becoming a writer. Flynn's manuscript tells the story of his love affair with a Psychology student named Laura Baines, whom he suspects of being in a secret relationship with a famous professor, Joseph Wieder. The professor is murdered, but the police never manage to find the killer. The partial comes to an end at the moment of the crime. The second part is the first-person account of John Keller, a freelance reporter who is trying to reconstruct the circumstances of the same killing for a true crime book. Afraid of the possible legal repercussions of putting forward his theory about the murder, Keller abandons the project.In the third part, Roy Freeman, the police detective who had investigated the Wieder case, now a reclusive man in the early stages of Alzheimer's, begins his own inquiry, a few months after John Keller spoke to him as part of his research. Freeman receives some vital information about the case from a convict, Frank Spoel, who is awaiting execution at the Potosi Correctional Center in Missouri.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghosts_(graphic_novel)"title="Ghosts (graphic novel)">
The novel opens as the family is ordering at the drive-through of a fictional Double-Back Burger (the colors and logos of which are based on In-N-Out Burger) before leaving southern California for Bahía de la Luna.As the sisters are exploring Bahía de la Luna, they are surprised by a boy named Carlos Calaveras, who turns out to be one of their new neighbors. Catrina and Maya explore their Mexican heritage with the help of Carlos, culminating in a Dia de los Muertos celebration in November.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_of_Good_Will"title="Men of Good Will">
The volumes, written in chronological order from volume one, "Le 6 octobre", through volume twenty-seven, "Le 7 octobre", between them cover 6 October 1908 through 7 October 1933 in French life—an average of one volume per year, book-ended by one volume each for two particular days. The plot is expansive and features a large cast of characters, rather than narrowly focusing on individuals, but the two principals are Pierre Jallez, a poet loosely based on Romains, and Jean Jerphanion, a teacher who later goes into politics. They meet in volume 2 starting at the École Normale Supérieure and become friends. Jerphanion marries a woman named Odette and lives happily with her, while Jallez tries several times to find love and is eventually married to Françoise Mailleul. In the course of their careers, meanwhile, Jerphanion spends ten years in the Chamber of Deputies and is briefly Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Jallez finds success as a novelist, each trying to secure peace in their own way, though the First World War takes place halfway through the story, which ends with the first foreshadowings of World War II.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Gleann_Is_A_Raibh_Ann"title="An Gleann Is A Raibh Ann">
"An Gleann Is A Raibh Ann" is an autobiography of Maolchathaigh, who lived in the area from 1884 to 1968. Ó Maolchathaigh's parents were both Irish speakers from Newcastle, South Tipperary. His father was a farm laborer named Thomas Mulcahy and his mother was Margaret Burke. After receiving his education in a traditional school in Newcastle, Ó Maolchathaigh went to a college in De La Salle, Waterford, to train in education. He then returned to New Castle, Tipperary, where he spent 44 years working as a teacher in Grange National School. Apart from this, he published short stories and essays in newspapers and journals such as "Scéala Éireann" in his dialect . He also translated a French plays into Irish.Ó Maolchathaigh wrote extensively about family and friends, and tending to animals on farm . He also wrote about crime, greed, mental illness, suicide, and murder. Specifically, during the Irish famine, he mentioned the concept of Irish hitmen who were willing to remove people from particular landholdings in exchange for money so that others could take over the land.In other parts of his narrative, Ó Maolchathaigh discussed poverty, and describes wanderers and beggars who lodged with local people up until the late 1940s. Some of these people, he noted, had physical or intellectual difficulties and who managed to avoid institutionalization by the government. He noted that this because increasingly common as the 20th century progressed and the new nation-state developed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(graphic_novel)"title="Brave (graphic novel)">
Jensen Graham is a member of the art club who is bullied and ignored by his school mates on a daily basis, although he does not consider it bullying. He joins the newspaper club after becoming frustrated in the art club when he learns that some well-known authors (who all his friends know about but he doesn’t) will be visiting Berry Brook Middle School. He reads the bullying handouts he received from the newspaper club and begins to wonder if he is being bullied.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seek_My_Face"title="Seek My Face">
The novel follows the life of Hope Chafetz, an elderly artist who is being interviewed by a journalist. During the interview Hope discusses her many marriages, one of which is to a famous painter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_the_Lion"title="Song of the Lion">
When off-duty Navajo Police Officer Bernadette Manuelito attends a basketball game at Shiprock High School, the game is disrupted by a car bomb in the parking lot. A young man named Richard Horseman was standing near the car and is injured in the blast, subsequently dying of his injuries. Witness Gloria Chino is able to provide a description and Horseman's first name. The car was a BMW owned by center for the Chieftan basketball team Aza Palmer. He is also an attorney hired to mediate over a Tuba City, Arizona conference to discuss plans to build a resort near the Grand Canyon. Manuelito's husband Jim Chee is directed by his superior officer Captain Howard Largo to accompany Palmer as his bodyguard. FBI agent Jerry Cordova is assigned to investigate the bombing, while Manuelito files a report with Captain Largo. As Manuelito leaves the police station, office manager Sandra gives her a small object found on Tsoodził, a sacred mountain to the Navajos. Manuelito recognizes the object as the image of Náshdóítsoh, a mountain lion believed to protect the Navajo people, and she recalls a traditional praise song to the lion.Manuelito and Cordova interview Mrs. Nez, the victim's grandmother, and come away thinking Horseman was not involved in the crime except being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Manuelito believes the grandmother was lying about Horseman's past. On her route to Tuba City to join her husband, she stops by to consult with Joe Leaphorn, and asks him to research Horseman. Now retired and disabled, Leaphorn verbally communicates in Navajo but seems to have lost his ability to speak English. With help from his live-in friend Louisa Bourebonette, he still has computer access to do the research for Manuelito. He later remembers Horseman as a young child he tried to help. Leaphorn's research reveals that the car bomb was detonated with a cell phone, so he deduces that Horseman was not a likely suspect. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigmentocracies"title="Pigmentocracies">
The book is split into six chapters. The first discussing the Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA), then the following four chapters dive into PERLA implemented in the four chosen countries. The final chapter is an analysis of the overall findings of the survey from the four countries. Middle four chapters start with a brief historical context of race in the respective country, then report the findings of the PERLA survey for that country.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Was_a_Man_(Jeffrey_Archer)"title="This Was a Man (Jeffrey Archer)">
"This Was a Man" continues the story of the Clifton family. It starts with the readers to believe Karin has been executed by her Russian handler after being found out as a double agent. Harry sets out to write his literary masterpiece. The Barrington shipping empire is sold and Emma ends up helping the government of Margaret Thatcher and joins Giles in the House of Lords. Sebastian gets promoted to run the banking business in which he has worked for years. His daughter Jessica does well as an art student, but nearly loses all in a disastrous change of course. Giles has a very successful career in the Lords, only to see his future dashed. And Lady Virginia still gets into and out of one mess after another through her schemes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outsider_(King_novel)"title="The Outsider (King novel)">
In Flint City, Oklahoma, the mutilated and raped corpse of Frankie Peterson is found. Fingerprints and DNA at the crime scene as well as witness accounts all clearly show local sports coach Terrence Maitland as the killer, so detective Ralph Anderson orders a public arrest.Maitland claims innocence, having been at a conference with several other teachers in Cap City at the time, which the other teachers all confirm. Footage of Maitland at the conference as well as fingerprints are found, casting confusion on the case.On the day of Maitland's arraignment a large crowd has gathered around the courthouse. In the chaos, Ollie Peterson, the brother of Frankie Peterson, starts shooting at Maitland, blaming him for his brother's murder and mother's subsequent heart attack. Maitland is fatally wounded before Ollie is killed by the police. In his dying words Maitland still claims innocence. Ralph Anderson is placed on administrative leave, but continues to investigate the case.Detective Jack Hoskins, who holds a grudge against Anderson, is sent to investigate an abandoned ranch outside of town, where clothes that the murderer wore are found. Jack is embraced by a shrouded figure from behind, causing what feels like sunburn on the back of his neck. The figure reappears later in Hoskin's home, informing him that it is cancer and it can take the disease away if Hoskins does what it asks of him. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temples_of_the_Earthbound_Gods"title="Temples of the Earthbound Gods">
Gaffney's argument for stadiums is that they tell their own stories. Development and diffusion of sport and stadiums correlate with "political, economic, and geographic processes". When soccer was first introduced in Brazil, it brought cultural influence as well. The popularity of soccer grew as lower or working-class started to play soccer in various ways. As a result, soccer became "civilizing mechanism", leading stadium to become a space of socializing. The author argues stadiums communicate over time and space. They are transformants, monuments, and hubs of the city.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_Woman's_Daughter"title="Spider Woman's Daughter">
Officer Bernadette Manuelito witnesses someone shoot Retired Sergeant Joe Leaphorn in the head and escape in a 2-door blue sedan with an Arizona license plate. Investigation reveals Gloria Bernally is the owner of the get-away vehicle. Her son Jackson, who uses it to drive to the University of New Mexico with his friend "Lizard" Leonard Nez, left it at Basha's grocery for her.At Leaphorn's house, Chee searches for recent case files, but finds old hard copy files that he takes home to compile a suspect list. Manuelito leaves a note for Leaphorn's girlfriend Louisa Bourbonette requesting a phone call. Louisa calls Chee from Albuquerque, on her way to a conference in Houston. She remembers that Leaphorn recently told her of "a ghost from the past", but she didn't know anymore than that. Louisa dodges when Chee asks her about the conference. Chee believes the FBI will suspect her of a murder-for-hire.Manuelito learns that Leaphorn was evaluating the assessed valuation of a proposed acquisition from the Grove McManus Foundation, headquartered in Japan. The evaluation summary is missing. Dr. Maxie Davis from the American Indian Resource Center calls asking about Leaphorn's missing evaluation summary. The original appraisal firm was listed as EFB, owned by Eleanor Friedman-Bernal. When they arrive at the address, EFB is closed and Friedman-Bernal seems to have vanished. Chee remembers that he and Leaphorn once rescued Ellie Friedman at Chaco Canyon when a man named Randall Eliott tried to kill her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enemy_Below_(novel)"title="The Enemy Below (novel)">
The story covers four days in September 1943.His Majesty’s Destroyer "Hecate" is on independent patrol in the South Atlantic, when they detect by radar a distant object. Coming closer, it proves to be a German U-boat running on the surface. "U-121" is in fact on its way to rendezvous with a German merchant raider in the South Atlantic Ocean, where they are to collect vital documents concerning British cyphers. The submarine does not detect the approach of the ship for some time, believing the radar contact to be a ‘ghost echo’. When the contact is eventually identified and reported to the commander, Peter von Stolberg, he is furious with the watch officers for the delay. He immediately orders the U-boat to dive.John Murrell, Captain of the "Hecate", proves himself a match for the wily U-boat "Kapitän" von Stolberg, a man from an aristocratic background who is not enamoured with the Nazi regime. A prolonged and deadly battle of wits ensues that tests both men and their crews. Each man grows to respect his unseen opponent.Murrell stalks the U-boat and subjects von Stolberg and his crew to multiple depth charge attacks. Von Stolberg unsuccessfully tries to torpedo the destroyer.The submarine, badly damaged and critically short of air and battery power, is forced to the surface, and a gun battle takes place. The destroyer also is badly damaged; she loses steam and therefore all power. Many sailors are killed or wounded. But they manage to send off a radio message on an emergency short-range transmitter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_(novel)"title="Ella (novel)">
The story concerns a fourteen-year-old girl named Ella Wallis, who lives in Bristol with her parents. She is bullied at school due to her family's poverty, and is abused at home, both physically by her fundamentalist Christian father, and sexually by his brother, Ella's uncle. Her French mother is an alcoholic. The stress and upset in her life result in Ella developing bulimia, and subsequently paranormal powers, beginning with pyrokinesis, when she sets a Nativity scene alight at school. She then develops telekinesis in a response to her uncle trying to exorcise her, moving books with her mind. As Ella's abilities become more widely-known, a series of people try to exploit her, including Icelandic psychic researcher Peter Guntarson, Spanish public relations specialist José Miguel Dóla, and her own family, who realise the money-earning potential of Ella's abilities. Over time Ella develops further powers, including levitation, teleportation, remote viewing, and psychic healing. She gets ever thinner, from the ongoing impact of her eating disorder, and eventually appears to die live on television, with her final act being to heal the sickness of everyone in the world, with something known as the "Ella Effect". The book hints that she was actually transformed into an angel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_You_Want_to_Talk_About_Race"title="So You Want to Talk About Race">
The book is about race in the contemporary United States, each chapter titled after a question. Oluo makes the argument that America's political, economic and social systems are systematically/institutionally racist. The book provides advice for readers when discussing race-related subjects, such as how to avoid acting defensive or getting off-topic. Statistics are used to support the book's arguments. Oluo also describes her upbringing and experience living in Seattle, Washington. She was raised by a white single mother and became a single mother herself to two mixed-race sons at a young age.The book also covers topics including affirmative action, cultural appropriation, intersectionality, microaggressions, police brutality and the school-to-prison pipeline. Oluo argues that use of the word "nigger" or other racial slurs by white people is not appropriate even if the intention is ironic or the motive anti-racist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gangster_(novel)"title="The Gangster (novel)">
This novel is set in 1906 in New York City and it centers around Isaac Bell, an investigator with the Van Dorn Detective Agency. Van Dorn is hired to protect clients from the Black Hand crime group. Bell puts together a group of Van Dorn's best people to find who is at the bottom of the Black Hand. Few clues exist until Bell discovers a familiar face that provides a link to the Black Hand. The Black Hand sets its sights on killing one of the top leaders of the country and Bell and his team must work to prevent this from happening."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scythe_(novel)"title="Scythe (novel)">
In the year 2042, effective immortality is discovered, allowing humans to reset their physical age while retaining their memory. In addition, advanced medical technology allows any injury, even fatal, to be repaired in a matter of days through nanites (or for more serious injuries, a hospital procedure known as revival). These revolutionary technologies allowed humanity to triumph over death and ended what is posthumously referred to as the Mortal Age.In addition, a nigh-omnipotent artificial intelligence called the Thunderhead was also created around this time, described as the 'evolution of the cloud.' The Thunderhead was carefully designed with perfect and caring motives, wanting only to be a loving guardian of humanity. Although everyone was at first skeptical, every government eventually subsided to the Thunderhead, and all of Earth became united peacefully. Utilising all of humanity's knowledge and power, the Thunderhead solves climate change, mental illness, and discrimination. It also decides that death is still required in order to give life meaning, but is unwilling to be the means of death, as it is unable and does not want to be viewed as a killer.Instead, a group of humans creates the Scythedom, an order of individuals who are responsible for killing ("gleaning") others permanently, unable to be revived by law. The Thunderhead finds this to be the best approach. Scythes wear rings that grant immunity by transferring one's DNA to a databank. Once becoming Scythes, they must take the name of a historic figure (such as Scythe Gandhi or Scythe Volta). Scythes are entirely separate from the Thunderhead's rule, not having to abide by any law beyond the Scythedom's.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can't_Wait_to_Get_to_Heaven"title="Can't Wait to Get to Heaven">
Elner Shimfissle, an octogenarian who doesn't know her own age since her sister Ida buried the family Bible to conceal hers, is known and liked by a large circle of friends and admirers. One morning she is picking figs in her tree when she is stung by wasps, falls off the ladder, and loses consciousness. She is rushed to the hospital in Kansas City, where she apparently dies. Back home, Elner's acquaintances tidy her house, feed her cat, and start preparing for her funeral. Elner, meanwhile, wakes up in her pitch-black hospital room and calls for assistance. Not receiving any, she goes out to the hallway and enters an elevator, which takes her straight "up." Her sister Ida greets her at Heaven's gates and then she is ushered upstairs to meet God and ask any questions she likes. Besides sporting such fanciful things as polka-dotted squirrels and unusually colored landscapes, Heaven also looks like her hometown, Elmwood Springs, about 50 years in the past. Elner meets God—her former neighbor Raymond, a modest, pipe-smoking divinity—and they discuss how he and his wife Dorothy created mankind and the current state of the world. Then Raymond sends Elner back down to Elmwood Springs, where she wakes up in her hospital bed and sets in motion another round of shocked neighbors who are incredulous that she's really alive. Elner lives a few more years after that and finally dies peacefully in her sleep, as she'd always wanted to. The novel closes with a series of recipes for the various dishes that Elner's neighbors made to send to her funeral.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Klone_and_I"title="The Klone and I">
The novel centers around 41-year-old Stephanie, whose husband divorces her and sues her for alimony and child support at the beginning of the novel. Stephanie spends the next year improving herself, and travels to Paris where she meets Peter Baker, a fellow American who is an executive of a bionics company. After spending the weekend together, Stephanie is sure she will never see him again, but he follows her to the Hamptons and they fall in love. While Peter is away on business, his clone, Paul Klone, shows up on her doorstep. Paul is an exact physical replica of Peter, but the polar opposite from him in every other way.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangerous_Games_(Steel_novel)"title="Dangerous Games (Steel novel)">
Alix Phillips is a single mother who was widowed at age 20 and has a 19-year-old daughter, Faye. Now that her daughter is in college, Alix is able to take on lengthier and more dangerous assignments. Alix sets out to expose government corruption, and ends up embarking on an international journey. While uncovering the political underworld, she falls for her cameraman, Ben Chapman, who is an ex-Navy Seal. They uncover secrets of the past mixed with love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_All_Odds_(novel)"title="Against All Odds (novel)">
The book revolves around Kate Madison, a widow who owns a successful retail shop in SoHo. Kate is dedicated to her four adult children, but grows frustrated with their choice of partners that are seemingly not right for them. Kate learns to allow her children to make their own decisions, and be there for them unconditionally.Kate also has a brief love affair of her own, falling for the Frenchman Bernard Michel. However, she later finds out that he is married, and realizes she is in the same position of choosing an ill-suited partner as her children.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undercover_(novel)"title="Undercover (novel)">
Ariana Gregory, the daughter of a recently widowed US ambassador, arrives in Paris a year after being kidnapped in Buenos Aires. There she meets Marshall Everett, a former undercover DEA agent. Ariana's safety now depends on one man - Marshall.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tunnel_Thru_the_Air;_Or,_Looking_Back_from_1940"title="The Tunnel Thru the Air; Or, Looking Back from 1940">
The story is roughly divided into two parts: before and after 1927, the year in which it was written. The story began in the late evening of 9 June 1906, when the protagonist Robert Gordon was born. The early part of the book is mostly about the early life of Robert, including how he found and lost his true love, Marie Stanton, who was born on 6 October 1908. The loss of Marie Stanton inspired Robert to become the greatest inventor in history. After 1927, the book describes an imaginary war from April 1930 to July 1932, in which Robert single-handedly help the United States to win with his amazing inventions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rift_(Allan_novel)"title="The Rift (Allan novel)">
Selena and her older sister Julie, live with their parents in Manchester, England. One day, when Julie is 17, she disappears without a trace. Several suspects are arrested, including an artisan, Steven Jimson, but all are released for lack of evidence. Hatchmere lake and its surrounds, believed to have been visited by Julie, are searched, but yield nothing. Years of conflict over Julie's disappearance leads to the sisters' parents divorcing: their mother stops thinking about her, while their father, convinced Julie is alive, obsesses over her, and suffers a mental breakdown and dies.Twenty years later, Selena, who now works for Vanja at a jewellery store, and has come to terms with her sister's disappearance, is surprised by a phone call from a woman claiming to be Julie and requesting a meeting. She agrees to see her, and, although initially skeptical, is convinced it is Julie when her sister reveals something from their childhood that no one else knew about. Julie tells Selena she has been back in Manchester for 18 months, but has told no one who she is. Selena is angry with her sister for having put their family through so much anguish, but Julie tells Selena what happened to her. She reveals that she travelled from Hatchmere lake, via a rift, to a lake near the city of Fiby on the planet Tristane. Selena cannot believe how Julie could fabricate such lies to explain her absence. But as her sister expands on her story, Selena starts to wonder if such a thing could have happened. Julie explains that she was abducted by Jimson and taken to Hatchmere lake; she remembers escaping from him, then finding herself in a strange place and taken in by a woman named Cally and her brother, Noah. Julie learns from Cally where she is and that she has disappeared from this place before. Cally tells Julie that she was born on Tristane. Julie adjusts to her new life and finds out as much as she can about this new world. Years later, after a sexual encounter with Noah, Julie finds herself back in Manchester.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engines_of_War"title="Engines of War">
During the Great Time War, the War Doctor and a Time Lord battle fleet attack Dalek Saucers above the planet Moldox. The fleet is destroyed and the TARDIS crashes to the planet below, where the Doctor meets human resistance fighter Cinder, a young woman whose family were killed by the Daleks when she was a child. The Doctor learns that the Eternity Circle, a group of Daleks created by the Dalek Emperor, have produced temporal weapons which they plan to use against the Time Lords, removing them from History. Travelling to Gallifrey to warn the Time Lords, he finds them preparing to counter-attack using a weapon that will cause the death of billions, Dalek and non-Dalek alike. Vowing to stop both the Time Lords and the Daleks, the Doctor must avoid being killed by a Time Lord assassin and confront the Eternity Circle as he seeks to bring the war to an end and prevent his people from becoming as evil as the Daleks themselves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zygon_Invasion"title="The Zygon Invasion">
Ever since the War, Tenth, and Eleventh Doctors ensured the creation of a peace treaty between humans and Zygons, there existed two versions of UNIT scientist Osgood: one human and a Zygon duplicate. 20 million Zygons have been resettled on Earth, peacefully living out their lives disguised as humans. The Doctor leaves the Osgoods the Osgood Box to be used as a last resort. After one of the Osgoods was killed, the other left UNIT and disappeared.In the present, Osgood is captured by a splinter group of Zygons in the town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico just after sending a warning to the Twelfth Doctor that the treaty is failing. In London, the splinter group, which seeks to be themselves no matter what, kidnaps and kills Zygon High Command, leaving a Zygon called Bonnie in charge. In Turmezistan, Osgood is forced to read a video message declaring the splinter group's intent to go to war. At the block of flats where Clara lives, Clara is knocked unconscious and hidden in a pod underground. Bonnie takes Clara's place.The Doctor travels to Turmezistan via the aeroplane afforded him by being President of Earth to rescue Osgood. The Doctor and UNIT troops converge on the church Osgood is holed up in. The Zygon splinter group, appearing as the soldiers' relatives and friends, kills the soldiers and flees back to the UK through underground tunnels. The Doctor finds Osgood safe under the church. The Doctor and Osgood bring a Zygon, injured from a bombing run, aboard their flight back to the UK. The Zygon tells the Doctor that their invasion has already taken place.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_the_Raven"title="Face the Raven">
Rigsy contacts the Twelfth Doctor and Clara for help. He shows them a number tattoo on his neck, counting down, with no memory of how he got it nor events of the last day. They trace his movements to a trap street in present-day London that houses extraterrestrial refugees, using telepathic alien worms to appear as human to the Doctor, Clara, and Rigsy.Me, the immortal mayor of the trap street, explains that she sentenced Rigsy to death after he was accused of murdering Anah, a two-face Janus. They gave him a Chronolock: a tattoo which counts down with each passing minute. When it reaches zero, a Quantum Shade (a being that takes the form of a raven) is summoned to kill him. However, they also had to give Rigsy an amnesia drug to forget the trap street's existence. Me allows the Doctor and Clara to prove Rigsy's innocence. Clara learns that the Chronolock can be transferred to another willingly. Believing Me will not let her die, Clara takes Rigsy's Chronolock without the Doctor's knowledge to buy them more time.The trio meet Anah's psychic daughter, Anahson, and learn that Me used Rigsy to bring the Doctor to the trap street and that Me is afraid of someone Anahson cannot identify. The Doctor realises from the medical data in the stasis pod Anah is stored inside that Anah is still alive, and Anah is locked in by a device compatible with the TARDIS key. However, when the Doctor uses his key, the lock device clamps a metal ring around his wrist and takes the TARDIS key. The band is a teleportation device to send the Doctor far away to keep the street safe from attack by unnamed people Me made a deal with. Me demands the Doctor's Confession Dial. Me then goes to remove the Chronolock from Rigsy only to discover Clara had taken it; Clara broke the contract Me had made with the Shade and she cannot undo it. The Doctor becomes angry and threatens Me, demanding that she save Clara, but Clara calms him down, asking him not to be upset nor avenge her death. Clara says her goodbyes and then steps into the street to face the Shade before it kills her. Back in the house, the Doctor warns Me to keep away from him in future. Me then activates the band, sending the Doctor away.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_in_Chief_(novel)"title="Commander in Chief (novel)">
In Russia, the silovik, a group of military &amp; intelligence officers and businessmen who basically control the country’s affairs, are concerned about the country’s economic decline. President Valeri Volodin brings up a plan of covert armed conflict within Europe that will ensure the restoration of Russia’s status as a superpower, while at the same time revamping its economy and benefiting the siloviki as a result. Privately however, Volodin tasks a financial expert, Andrei Limonov, with securing his assets worldwide in case his plan does not work.Weeks later, a string of attacks plague most of Eastern Europe. A Lithuanian LNG tanker, the "Independence", gets attacked by an eco-terrorist group. A Russian military train transporting men and materiel to Kaliningrad Oblast gets attacked by a Polish terrorist group, which gives Volodin an excuse to increase military presence in the region. Russian submarines begin attacking the Lithuanian Navy, and had torpedoed another oil tanker bound for Estonia. U.S. President Jack Ryan immediately notices a pattern in the recent attacks and the corresponding increase in Russia’s oil profit. He tries to recruit the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)’s help, but they decline, fearing the consequences of an all-out war. Frustrated, he later deploys the U.S. Navy to dispatch its Russian counterpart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon's_Ashes"title="Babylon's Ashes">
Following the events of "Nemesis Games", the so-called Free Navy, made up of Belters using stolen military ships, has been growing ever bolder. After the crippling attacks on Earth and the Martian Navy, the Free Navy turns its attention to the colony ships headed for the ring gates and the worlds beyond. The relatively defenseless ships are left to fend for themselves, as neither Earth nor Mars is powerful enough to protect them. James Holden and the crew of the "Rocinante" are called upon once again by what remains of the UN and Martian governments to go to Medina Station, now in the hands of the Free Navy, in the ring station. On the other side of the rings an alien threat is growing; the Free Navy may be the least of humanity's problems.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fishermen_(Obioma_novel)"title="The Fishermen (Obioma novel)">
Four brothers, Ikenna, Boja, Obembe, and Benjamin, begin to fish at the Omi-Ala river near their home in a quiet neighbourhood of the city of Akure in Nigeria, despite being forbidden from doing so by their parents, as the river is heavily polluted. On one of their fishing trips, they encounter a local madman, Abulu, who follows them shouting the name of Ikenna, the oldest brother. The other children flee, but the four brothers stop to listen, as Abulu shouts a series of prophecies: that Ikenna will become blind, mute, crippled. He finishes by prophesying that Ikenna will be killed by a fisherman. Ikenna thinks this means that one of his brothers will kill him, and he gradually turns against them. The prophecy undoes the family and the expectations the brothers' parents have for them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_House"title="The Dead House">
At the beginning of the novel, the reader is made aware that the book's content was compiled from several sources, including a diary that was found in the remains of Elmbridge High School, a British high school that burned down 25 years prior. The material is a mixture of video clips, interviews, recovered diary entries, Post-it Notes, and other similar items, and will also occasionally have notations about missing content. Throughout the book, Kaitlyn repeatedly refers to her diary as "Dee" in her entries.Carly and Kaitlyn Johnson are two personalities that exist in the same body. They've been living in a mental hospital named Claydon Mental Hospital for an undisclosed amount of time. She works directly with a therapist named Dr. Annabeth Lansing, and it is established that Kaitlyn/Carly's parents died in a horrific accident that they cannot remember. They are aware of each other's existence, but they never directly interact as Carly is only active during the day and Kaitlyn at night, although they do communicate through various means, which they attempt to hide from others. In the mental hospital, Dr. Lansing diagnoses them as having dissociative identity disorder, an eating disorder (Carly), self-harming (Kaitlyn), and hearing voices (Kaitlyn, who hears the voice of a demonic entity known as Aka Manah). Dr. Lansing also believes that Kaitlyn is not the true personality and that Carly created her as a coping mechanism, although Kaitlyn insists that she is real and existed before their parents' deaths.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_Lawyer"title="Rogue Lawyer">
Sebastian Rudd is a street lawyer, but not your typical street lawyer. His office is a black customized bulletproof van, complete with Wi-Fi, a bar, a small fridge, and fine leather chairs. He has no firm, no partners, and only one employee: his heavily armed driver, who used to be his client, and who also happens to be his bodyguard, law clerk, confidant, golf caddie, and his only friend. Sebastian drinks small-batch bourbon and carries a gun. His beautiful ex-wife is a lawyer too, and she left him for another woman while still they were married. He only gets to see his son for 36 hours per month and his ex-wife wants to stop all visits. He defends people other lawyers won't go near: a drug-addled, tattooed kid rumored to be in a satanic cult who is (falsely) accused of murdering two girls; a vicious crime lord on death row who ends up escaping before Rudd's eyes; a homeowner arrested for shooting at a SWAT team that mistakenly invaded his house, and killed his wife and dogs; a Mixed martial arts fighter previously financed by Rudd who killed a referee after losing a fight. In between these adventures, he's contacted by a serial kidnapper and killer who's involved in human trafficking, and knows the whereabouts of the assistant chief of police's missing daughter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarface_(novel)"title="Scarface (novel)">
The book's storyline is heavily inspired by the real life gangster Al Capone whose nickname was also "Scarface". It concerns the rise and fall of Tony "Scarface" Guarino, who after performing a hit on mob leader Al Springola, moves in to take over the illegal alcohol business in Chicago during the Prohibition Era. He is ultimately shot dead by his brother (who concurrently rises in the ranks of Chicago PD), who fails to recognise him due to the family believing him to have died in World War I.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_the_Morning_(novel)"title="Son of the Morning (novel)">
Elsa Vickery, daughter of an agnostic small-town doctor and his pious wife, is gang-raped at the age of seventeen. Since her father is unable to obtain a legal abortion for her, she has a son, Nathan, who is brought up by his grandmother as a devoted Christian. At the age of seven, Nathan begins to experience visions of Christ. When the boy is eight, his grandfather reads the Gospel for the first time in thirty years and he is horrified, concluding that Jesus was "a cruel psychopath." Soon after this, he dies from a stroke, leaving Nathan completely in the care of his grandmother.Nathan becomes a boy preacher, and later the charismatic leader of a church, which is accumulating vast riches from donation. With every year, his visions become more and more grandiose. In one episode of the novel, he is almost seduced into fornication and puts out his eye in self-punishment.After he survives an attack by one of his followers, Nathan goes into hiding, and the church eventually disappears.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratscalibur"title="Ratscalibur">
After moving to the big city, 11-year-old Joey is turned into a rat by a rat magician (or "Ragician") and sent on a mission to report to Uther, king of the rat kingdom Ravalon. On the way, he inadvertently pulls the legendary Spork, named Ratscalibur, from the legendary Scone, and is hailed as the prophesied hero. Subsequently, he is expected to go on a quest to save the rats from the wicked wizard Salaman, if he is to be restored to his human form.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Rising_(series)"title="Phoenix Rising (series)">
## "Elissa's Quest".Elissa is a thirteen-year-old girl living with her caretaker Nana in a peaceful valley. She knows little about her parents, as her mother is dead and Nana will not tell Elissa the identity of her father. Secrets are not new to Elissa, as she has long since had to keep others from learning that she has the ability to speak to animals. Despite her peaceful existence, Elissa has grown bored of her town and as such, willingly leaves when a visitor comes to whisk her away to his kingdom. As the danger around her grows thicker with every passing moment, Elissa must try to find a way to keep herself safe and alive, especially after hearing rumors that she might be the fulfillment of the prophecy of the Phoenix.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirko_and_Slavko"title="Mirko and Slavko">
Prior to the invasion of Yugoslavia, young Mirko was a baker's apprentice somewhere in Šumadija. After the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia, Mirko decided to join the Partisans, exchanging two breads for a gun with a soldier of the defeated and disbanded Royal Yugoslav Army. In the initial three episodes, Mirko's comrades are two other young Partisans, Zoran and Boško, Boško dying in a battle with German soldiers. In episode four, the character of Slavko was introduced.While Mirko is always brave and determined, Slavko tends to hesitate and sometimes can even get scared. That is why Mirko is typically armed with MP 40, which was usually reserved for partisan commanders, while Slavko is typically armed with a regular riffle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_Me_Dave"title="Call Me Dave">
## Piggate.The book contains an uncorroborated allegation that, during his university years, Cameron put a "private part of his anatomy" into a dead pig's mouth as part of an initiation ceremony for the Piers Gaveston Society. The allegation was attributed to a Member of Parliament who was a "distinguished Oxford contemporary" of Cameron's. Ashcroft and Oakeshott failed to receive a response from the purported owner of an alleged photograph of the incident, and since the extract's publication no corroborating evidence has been produced to support the allegation. A spokesperson for the Prime Minister said that they did not "need to dignify the book by offering any comment", while friends reported him saying that the claim was "utter nonsense". Cameron appeared to refer to Ashcroft and the book with a joke that he had had an injection that day and had been told to expect "a little prick, a little stab in the back".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Ripper"title="I, Ripper">
A fictional diary of serial killer Jack the Ripper interleaved with a narrative from a newspaper journalist, Jeb, reporting on the killings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Baptists"title="Modern Baptists">
Set in the fictional town of Tula Springs, Louisiana, the novel concerns middle-aged bachelor Bobby Pickens, the assistant manager of Sunny Boy Bargain Store and his half-brother F.X. A former actor and cocaine dealer, F.X. has just been released from Angola Prison and moves in with Bobby, his presence throwing all Bobby's foibles into sharp relief, leading to mistaken identity, romantic entanglement and a nervous breakdown, climaxing in a Christmas Eve party in a cabin on a poisoned swamp.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_Lost"title="List of the Lost">
The book is about a 1970s relay team in Boston who accidentally kill a homeless person, whose death brings misfortune to the team.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner_in_a_Red-Rose_Chain"title="Prisoner in a Red-Rose Chain">
The novel chronicles the peregrinations of its love-obsessed picaresque hero, Jeremy Davenant, as he moves from York to Toronto to Montreal’s “Plateau district” and then back to York in pursuit of a destiny, that he believes is determined by a page ripped from an encyclopedia, which includes a university career based on a bogus PhD with a plagiarized thesis on the apocryphal Shakespeare play, "A Yorkshire Tragedy", and the intermittently requited love of his “dark lady,” a Roma named Milena.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Patriot's_Act"title="A Patriot's Act">
Attorney Brent Marks fights for the rights of a naturalized American citizen who goes missing in Iraq, using its own Constitution to fight the behemoth U.S. government. Ahmed Khury, an accountant in California, falls under suspicion due to his association with his brother Sabeen, who is suspected of laundering money back in Iraq. Ahmed is placed in Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, where he is tortured despite not having any information about terrorism to divulge. Corruption, a cover-up, and murder complicate the story, and even Brent Marks himself is in danger.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Creeping"title="The Creeping">
Twelve years ago two young girls, Jeanie and Stella, went out to pick strawberries near Jeanie's home in the small town of Savage. The two girls go missing and only one of them, Stella, returns - but without any memory of the prior events, with her hair put up in a french braid, and repeatedly stating the sentence "If you hunt for monsters, you'll find them". Whatever happened to her and Jeanie was so traumatic that the memory was wiped from her mind, along with many of her other childhood memories. This puts her at odds with some of the townspeople, especially Jeanie's brother Daniel, who believes that Stella has been lying about losing her memory. Now seventeen, all Stella wants to do is move past this painful past and enjoy her summer with her friends and her crush, Taylor. Despite disliking people dwelling on the past, Stella still agrees to go to the annual "Day of Bones", a summer party held by the town's teenagers on the day of Jeanie's disappearance. During the party Stella recovers a brief memory of Jeanie prior to the teenagers discovering the body of a young girl that looks similar to Jeanie. This puts Stella on edge, especially after Jeanie's mother is found murdered only hours later. The police believe that Jeanie's father, Kent Talcott not only murdered his wife but was also responsible for the deaths of Jeanie and the unidentified victim, but Stella is convinced that he is innocent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsena_of_Marabda"title="Arsena of Marabda">
Novel has been published during the writer's lifetime with three parts. It was translated into several languages, including German and Russian. The novel reflects people's struggle for national and social independence. The hero of the book is Arsena Odzelashvili – a Georgian Robin hood. Soviet union's attitude toward him hardened after publishing this novel. The novel shows Georgian people's struggle for national and social freedom for the first half of the 20th century.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seedless_in_Seattle"title="Seedless in Seattle">
Ross' father is going to Argentina to find his missing daughter Erika. Ross is dealing with Fionn's new personality, making an enemy of his daughter, and when he gets caught writing "The Fuck-it List" it's the final straw for Sorcha. She insists that Ross gets a vasectomy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Infinite_Sea"title="The Infinite Sea">
A few weeks after the events of the first novel, Cassie, Ben, and the rest of Squad 53 have taken refuge at a hotel, which they call "Walker Hotel" in honor of Evan Walker, who is thought to be dead after destroying Camp Haven. Ringer, believing that their refuge in the hotel will not last, goes out searching for a cave system mentioned in a brochure. Teacup, whom she had grown close to, sneaks up on Ringer and who proceeds to shoot her, having mistaken Teacup for a Silencer. A helicopter flies in and they are both captured by The Others. While Cassie and the others anxiously await Ringer, they realize that Teacup has gone missing, and Dumbo and Poundcake set out to find her but return empty-handed.Evan Walker is revealed to have survived Camp Haven's destruction and is wounded. He is rescued by Grace, a fellow Silencer, and both head to her makeshift home. After one of Grace's hunts, she tries to seduce Evan, but he attacks her. As he escapes, Grace shoots at him but lets him go, knowing that he will lead her to Cassie. While he rests, Grace finds and confronts him. They are attacked by child soldiers from Camp Haven and Grace is shot at, giving Evan the opportunity to escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Givi_Shaduri"title="Givi Shaduri">
The narrator of the novel - Givi Shaduri is talking to the reader from the Feast. Shaduri is the elderly and people skilled in life. Each story of his hard life have used many adventures episode.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Woman's_Burden"title="A Woman's Burden">
The main character is a young woman: Ms. Atakhneli. He escaped from the shelter in prison revolutionaries, Zurab Gurgenidze, who conveniently fled from prison. After the Revolution, the crowd becomes.In Akhatneli family lives people of different political views.For Illegal activity Kate's brother will be in prison. Kate married Avsharov (who is a General of the Gendarmerie, to help his brother, but actually he likes to Zurab Gurgenidze. Avsharov will understand about this and arrests him.Finally Gurgenidze will be exiled to Siberia and Kate (who is pregnant by Gurgenidze) will jump to Mkvari river.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horrorstör"title="Horrorstör">
The novel follows a group of people—store manager Basil, and employees Amy and Ruth Anne—who stay overnight at ORSK to investigate strange acts of vandalism. The book particularly focuses on Amy, who is unhappy because she views her work at ORSK as an unfulfilling dead-end job. During a patrol of the store, Amy and Ruth Anne come across fellow employees Trinity and Matt, who have snuck into the store to record paranormal phenomena; and Carl, a homeless man who has been sleeping in the store without anyone knowing. Although the group decides against calling the police, Amy reveals that she called them earlier over some minor strange occurrences earlier in the night.Trinity convinces the others, minus Basil (as he has gone outside to wait for the police), to hold a séance. During the séance they make contact with Warden Worth, who possesses Carl and informs everyone that he will take them into his "Beehive" and cure them of their mental illnesses. Worth then slits Carl's throat. Basil returns and is horrified by the amount of blood, then observes that Carl's body is missing. The group decides to search for him and in the process find a door leading to an old asylum that no longer exists. Everyone is abducted and subjected to various cruel "treatments" except for Basil, who manages to find and rescue Amy. The two are separated after a group of Worth's inmates (all of whom are ghosts) attack Basil and drag him off. Amy nearly succumbs to the temptation to continue Worth's treatments, as his earlier treatment had nearly convinced her that her life is worthless, but she fights off the urge after seeing Trinity put through a similar torture treatment. Amy frees Trinity, only for her to run off in fear, and makes it successfully out of the building. She returns upon realizing that she is the others' only hope of escape, and that running away would mean quitting, which would prove Worth correct in his assessment of her failings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diary_of_a_Country_Priest"title="The Diary of a Country Priest">
The story is set in Ambricourt in northern France, where a young, newly appointed Catholic priest struggles with stomach pains and the lack of faith within his parish. He knows he is weak, inferior, and sometimes thinks himself touched by madness, but strongly believes that the grace of God passes through his priesthood: “All is grace!".The diary is divided into three parts:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Chord"title="The Secret Chord">
Told from the point of view of the prophet Nathan, this book follows the life of biblical King David.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_10_(novel)"title="The 10 (novel)">
The novel presents as main characters the tenants of an old block of flats near Piraeus, during 1950s. The owner of the block is a rich man, named Kalogeras. His nephew is a tenant of the block and he hopes to be his heir. The novel comprises also many other characters from the neighbourhood near the block of flats or other persons related with the main characters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granny,_Iliko,_Illarion,_and_I"title="Granny, Iliko, Illarion, and I">
The life of Zuriko an orphan passes in the hands of his grandmother Olgha and weirdly funny and loving neighbors, Iliko and Ilarion. Despite of war and famine these people never lose the sense of humour. Iliko and Ilarion constantly prank each other in a series of practical jokes, though they are closest friends. Meanwhile, Zuriko writes his first poem and his first love letter. The time passes. Zuriko graduates in Tbilisi and comes back to his village.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_Mercy"title="Ancillary Mercy">
While searching Athoek Station's slums, Fleet Captain Breq finds someone who appears to be an ancillary from a ship that has been hiding beyond the Radch's reach for three thousand years. Meanwhile, Translator Zeiat, a messenger from the alien and mysterious Presger empire arrives, as does Breq's enemy, the reactionary faction of the divided Anaander Mianaai – ruler of an empire at war with herself.Anaander captures Athoek Station and executes members of its governing body on a live newsfeed. After this incident, Breq forges an alliance with the AI in charge of Athoek Station and begins work to disable Anaander's ships and render Station and other AIs immune to her overrides. She returns to Athoek Station and confronts Anaander with the aid of Zeiat. During the confrontation, she claims that AIs are independent, autonomous, and sentient species distinct from humanity, and thus protected by the terms of humanity's treaty with the Presger. Unwilling to risk violating the treaty, Anaander is forced to retreat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Is_This_Night_Different_From_All_Other_Nights?"title="Why Is This Night Different From All Other Nights?">
S. Theodora Markson sneaks away from the Lost Arms at night, but Lemony Snicket decides to follow her. She goes to Dicey's Department Store and steals a costume, and then travels to Stain'd Station. When Snicket tries to get on the train leaving with prisoners Dashiell Qwerty and Ellington Feint, he is told he needs a ticket, but without any money he cannot find a way to get on the train. He also meets Polly Partial and Dane Sally Murphy at the station, the latter of which helps a strange looking passenger get on board with her. He gets a lift from Pip and Squeak to a place along the railway line where he can jump aboard, and Moxie Mallahan who is also on board opens the window to let him in. She shows him a fake Bombinating Beast made out of cardboard, made by Ornette Lost to trick Hangfire. Dashiell Qwerty is found dead inside his jail cell, and Theodora is assumed to be the murderer by the Officers Mitchum. However, Lemony doesn't believe she did it, so he goes about the train looking for witnesses. He finds three suspicious librarians named Pocket, Walleye and Eratosthenes, along with several of his associates (Moxie Mallahan, Kellar Haines, Cleo Knight, Jake Hix and Ornette Lost) who were also on board. He then finds Ellington Feint; shortly into their conversation, Hangfire arrives and shoots a dart at Ellington, apparently killing her as she falls to the floor. Snicket covers her with her jacket without anyone else noticing she is dead and makes a deal with Hangfire to give him the statue (the fake one) on a condition. After Hangfire leaves, Snicket helps Ellington up and reveals to her that he knew she was alive. Ellington reveals that the dart missed her by an inch but she pretended she is dead in an attempt to trick Hangfire. Snicket hides Ellington by tying her with a rope on the train railing outside the window of the prisoners compartment to hide her from Hangfire. Snicket later realizes that Moxie and Kellar both tried to trick Hangfire with a fake statue, revealing that Ornette made two statues for Moxie and Kellar each and Hangfire knew they were lying about giving him the statue.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poet_Anderson_...of_Nightmares"title="Poet Anderson ...of Nightmares">
Jonas Anderson and his older brother Alan are Lucid Dreamers. But after a car accident lands Alan in a coma, Jonas sets out into the Dream World in an attempt to find his brother and wake him up. What he discovers instead is an entire shared consciousness where fear comes to life as a snarling beast called a Night Terror, and a creature named REM is bent on destruction and misery, devouring the souls of the strongest dreamers. With the help of a Dream Walker—a guardian of the dreamscape, Jonas must face his fears, save his brother, and become who he was always meant to be: Poet Anderson.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Menders"title="The World Menders">
Cedd Farrari and twenty-nine other members of his class at the Cultural Survey Academy are transferred, two years before their graduation, to the Interplanetary Relations Bureau. They are then taken to inhabited planets outside the Federation of Independent Worlds and left with the IPR teams already there. Farrari joins the IPR team on Branoff IV, where he uses his training to organize the data that the explorers and observers bring in pertaining to the native Branovians.While examining a picture of a tapestry recently hung in the city of Scorv, capital of the medieval-like kingdom of Scorvif, Farrari discerns that the kru, the god-emperor of Scorvif, has died. Enthusiastically, the other occupants of the base prepare to observe the drama of succession in the opaque native society, the first that they have ever observed. Because he made the discovery, Farrari must go to Scorvif to be interviewed by field agents. Going in native disguise, he ends up working in a bakery in Scorv, one surreptitiously owned and operated by the IPR.The bakery gets an order to provide a special cake for the new kru and Farrari is drafted to play the role of the apprentice who carries the cake while the baker presents it. Through a comedy of errors Farrari ends up presenting the cake himself and committing an act that makes him a legend in Scorv, an omen from the Gods, who have apparently granted the kru a long reign and eternal glory. Farrari’s later disappearance from the temple only cements his role in native folklore. After escaping from the temple, Farrari returns to the bakery and thence to the IPR base to be debriefed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tournament_at_Gorlan"title="The Tournament at Gorlan">
Halt and Crowley are journeying together in the woods of Gorlan Fief. They leave the fief and travel to a nearby village for the night. While at the village, they learn that Prince Duncan is supposedly raiding villages with a gang of men. Halt and Crowley then travel to another village, where they save the inhabitants from foreign invaders angry about Duncan's raiding. While at the village, Halt and Crowley later hear a raid by Duncan, where they realize that the "Duncan" is an impostor. After leaving the village, they intercept one of Morgarath's messengers, and discover through letters a list of 12 Rangers to be dismissed and that the real Duncan is being held captive at Castle Wildriver, while the fake Duncan was actually someone named Tiller. Halt and Crowley then travel to recruit the 12 Rangers, intending to capture Tiller and rescue the King and Duncan, and then reveal Morgarath's schemes at a tournament. They ultimately manage to recruit 11, since 1 Ranger was murdered, as well as Baron Arald, a baron who had defeated Morgarath in a major tournament and wielded significant influence among the barons. This would give the Rangers more political power if Morgarath had a trial. While traveling towards Castle Wildriver, the Rangers reunite with the old Ranger Pritchard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alive_(novel)"title="Alive (novel)">
A teenage girl wakes up in a coffin-like container and breaks out, finding herself in a room filled with similar coffins. The name on her coffin is "M. Savage", leading her to be called "Em" by most characters. She helps another girl, whose name is T. Spingate, out of her coffin, and they help four other people out. None of them remember anything, even their names. Each person has a circular marking on their head.Finding dead bodies in the other coffins, the six teenagers leave the room. Em becomes their leader. They walk through desolate halls filled with human bones and corpses, slowly remembering things about their lives. This goes on for some time.A boy from the group, named Yong, tries to attack Em and take her leadership position; she ends up killing him. The group continues on, trying to find the exit to what they believe to be an underground prison. They eventually meet another group, which is much larger, and is led by a violent boy named Bishop. He tries to threaten Em into giving up her power, but she stands her ground, and the two groups vote to put her in charge of them both. She leads the now-enlarged group through more hallway. They find bodies and skeletons littering the floors, entire rooms filled with corpses, bodies hanging from ceilings, and so on.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_(novel)"title="George (novel)">
The novel follows Melissa, a transgender girl, whose family and the rest of the world sees as George. Melissa is in the fourth grade. Her class is about to begin their production of "Charlotte's Web". Auditions are fast approaching, and the class rules are that each girl will audition for the role of Charlotte and each boy will audition for the role of Wilbur, the pig. Melissa wants to audition for the role of Charlotte. When Melissa gets called out into the hall and does her audition as Charlotte, her teacher, Ms. Udell, thinks Melissa is making a joke and tells Melissa that she cannot play the role of Charlotte, because Melissa is a boy. Since Melissa does not want to play a role other than Charlotte and Ms. Udell said that was not an option, Melissa takes a role in the stage crew. Meanwhile, at home, Melissa's mom finds her secret collection of female magazines. Melissa's mother views her actions as childish and says that she does not want to see Melissa wearing girl clothing, shoes, or going in her room at all. Back at school, Melissa is still upset with Ms. Udell's reaction to her audition. In addition, she feels distant from her friend Kelly because Kelly got the role of Charlotte. However, as the classes' efforts to prepare for the upcoming production increased, Melissa finds a way to become the "Charlotte" of the stage crew by playing a supportive role for her friend. Inspired by Charlotte's courage, she gains the confidence to tell Kelly that she is a girl. After processing this news, Kelly is supportive of her best friend Melissa, and her efforts to tell the world she is a girl. One afternoon, as the stage crew is working on the set, Jeff, the class bully, says that if he met a talking spider he would step on it. Melissa feels the instinct to protect Charlotte and paints "SOME JERK" on a piece of paper and drops it on Jeff's back, painting his sweatshirt with the words. After Jeff sees the damage, he punches Melissa to punish her for ruining his favorite sweatshirt, causing her to vomit on him. As a result of the fight, both Melissa and Jeff are in trouble with their teachers. However, in the process of getting punished, Melissa discovers that the principal is sympathetic to transgender people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Fame_Citrus"title="Gold Fame Citrus">
The novel is set in a near-future dystopian California ravaged by extreme drought. The landscape of the Southwest is increasingly dominated by the rapidly expanding, ever shifting sands known as the Amargosa Dune Sea. Luz Dunn is a 25 year old former model squatting in Los Angeles, where it has not rained for years. At birth, Luz was symbolically adopted by the Bureau of Conservation, who used "Baby Dunn" as a propaganda tool to garner public support for water infrastructure expansion efforts and evacuations. Luz and her boyfriend Ray kidnap Ig, a neglected toddler about two years old.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Traitor_Baru_Cormorant"title="The Traitor Baru Cormorant">
As a child, Baru Cormorant's island of Taranoke is annexed by the Imperial Republic of Falcrest, called the Masquerade because of the masks worn by its officials. They kill one of Baru's fathers and institute their own rigid belief system focused on hygiene and puritanical sexual ethics. Baru is educated at a Masquerade school, but vows to work her way upward within the Empire and eventually free her island.At her school, Baru demonstrates extreme mathematical prowess. She is noticed by Cairdine Farrier, a high-ranking Masquerade official. Farrier elevates her to the position of Imperial Accountant of Aurdwynn, a province of thirteen duchies that often rebels against Masquerade rule. Baru uses her financial expertise to manipulate the Masquerade's fiat currency system. This causes rapid inflation and widespread poverty, but crushes an incipient rebellion by Duchess Tain Hu. Eventually, Baru becomes friendly with Tain Hu and other Aurdwynni nobles; she agrees to join them in revolt against the Masquerade. Baru uses her financial powers to grant loans to the commoners, which enriches Aurdwynn and ensures that her rebellion will gain popular support.Baru leads an army against the Masquerade forces and takes Tain Hu as her lover. After a brief victory, the Aurdwynni army is ambushed by the Masquerade navy. The rebellious dukes and duchesses are all killed except for Tain Hu. Baru reveals that she has been an agent of the Masquerade throughout the rebellion; in exchange for crushing the nobility in Aurdwynn, she will be given rule of Taranoke and elevated to the Masquerade's ruling clique. As a final test of loyalty, the Masquerade committee members ask Baru to kill Tain Hu. They then offer to spare her in exchange for Baru's loyalty. Hu signals that she does not wish to be used as a pawn. In obedience to her lover's wishes, Baru allows Tain Hu to be executed. This choice protects Baru from blackmail, leaving her free to pursue revenge against the Empire.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growing_Up_Absurd"title="Growing Up Absurd">
In "Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System", Goodman faults American culture and values for the rise of juvenile delinquency in the late 1950s. Delinquency and "dropping out" of society, Goodman argues, are sane and justified responses to an adult society worth not worth growing up into, lacking in meaningful vocation, honorable community, sexual freedom, spiritual sustenance, and other qualities that youth require in their society to develop their social and moral identities, i.e. to grow up. He writes primarily about disaffected young men—urban juvenile delinquents and the beatnik subculture—and refers to the prevalent sterile, conformist American social order as the "organized system". Goodman disagrees with the then-common view that the solution for youth disaffection was to bring the youth to respect societal norms. Siding with the youth, he argues that the young already understood and rejected societal standards as unimportant. In this way, Goodman makes the youth social problem into less a problem than a symptom of a more existential need.Goodman contends that American society ruined the concept of vocation and created artificial demands through advertising. Affluent, postwar advanced capitalism boasted high employment but, Goodman writes, at the cost of reliance on "artificial ... demand for useless goods" that created unfulfilling, bureaucratic work, without a sense of purpose or service. Goodman believes that vocation that focuses on use, interest, style, and love has meaning and self-justified purpose, but that work focused on role, procedure, and profit tends towards meaninglessness. Thus youth were rightfully disaffected, says Goodman, at the prospect of joining an adult society lacking fulfillment. The chapters of "Growing Up Absurd" apply this argument to facets of life including "Faith", "Jobs", "Patriotism", and sexuality ("Social Animal").
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butcher's_Crossing"title="Butcher's Crossing">
William Andrews, a Harvard student in the early 1870s, is not happy with the mundanities of everyday life. After becoming inspired by the poetry and philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, he decides to leave his home in Boston and spend some time in the wilderness. While he is there, he hopes to discover who he really is.Andrews travels across the country and finds his way to Butcher's Crossing, a tiny frontier town on the Kansas plains which is supported mostly by the business of local hunters and cattle ranchers, and which eagerly awaits the economic prosperity promised by the construction of a railroad through the town. Andrews seeks out J.D. McDonald, an old acquaintance of his father's, and finds him running a lucrative business in the trade of buffalo hides on the edge of town. McDonald offers Will a job doing paperwork for him, but Will turns him down, explaining that he's looking for a different kind of experience in the West; McDonald chastises him for his youthful idealism and naiveté, but points him to a local hunter named Miller. Miller is a seasoned mountain man and expert buffalo hunter and talks Andrews into joining him on a hunting trip. Miller claims to have stumbled upon a remote mountain vale in Colorado years ago, where a rare buffalo herd lives that few people have ever seen and which therefore promises a big payout. Andrews agrees to finance the trip, if only because he is looking for adventure. Miller leaves behind Andrews and Charley Hoge, Miller's one-armed wagon driver, as he takes Andrews' money to Ellsworth to buy supplies. Hoge is a quiet and pious Christian and a fierce alcoholic who proves a challenge in conversation since he seems almost single-mindedly focused on his Bible and his whiskey; he likes to say Bible verses aloud, but Andrews believes that he knows all that he needs to about God. While Andrews waits for Miller to return, he sits in his hotel room and contemplates his life and the natural world around him. He meets a prostitute named Francine who is attracted to him, but Andrews is unnerved by his perceptions of her profession and refuses to sleep with her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictator_(Harris_novel)"title="Dictator (Harris novel)">
The story is told through Tiro, secretary of Cicero, detailing Cicero's last fifteen years. It begins with Cicero fleeing Publius Clodius Pulcher and his mob in Rome and going into exile in Thessalonica. He is able to return to Rome after more than a year under the promise to support Julius Caesar. Back in Rome, he attempts to revive the Roman Republic, but the forces against this are too strong. Rule by a triumvirate—Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus—eventually becomes rule by one man when Caesar takes control through civil war. Caesar becomes too powerful and is murdered by a group led by Gaius Cassius Longinus, Decimus Junius Brutus, and Marcus Junius Brutus. The Senate fails to take control and Mark Antony rises. Cicero sets his hopes on the young Octavian, but when Octavian strikes a deal with Antony and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, Cicero is doomed and the days of the Republic are over. Tiro also relates family and personal matters during Cicero's final years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucible_of_Resistance"title="Crucible of Resistance">
"Crucible of Resistance" seeks to challenge the mainstream accounts of the Greek government-debt crisis within the context of the Eurozone debt crisis. In the book, the authors argue that the assertion Greece is exceptional is a myth. They also argue that the causes of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 lie in the key features of the neoliberal economic order. Finally, they assert that a progressive exit from the crisis would be to confront the limitations of the neoliberal order.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apparition_of_Mrs._Veal"title="The Apparition of Mrs. Veal">
The pamphlet tells the story of a Canterbury resident, Mrs. Bargrave, who is visited by Mrs. Veal, an old friend and former neighbour who says that she would like to catch up before departing for a journey. Mrs. Bargrave's kiss of greeting is declined by Mrs. Veal who protests that she is not very well. The pair discuss books on death and friendship before Mrs. Veal asks for her friend to write a letter to her brother concerning a number of gifts she would like him to make. She also discloses that her locked cabinet contains a purse filled with gold. Mrs. Bargrave admires the distinctive dress worn by Mrs. Veal. Mrs. Bargrave steps out to call her daughter, and when she returns she finds that Mrs. Veal has already left the house and is standing in the street ready to leave. Mrs. Veal says that she must be going and walks away, watched by Mrs. Bargrave until she is out of sight.Mrs. Bargrave subsequently looks for Mrs. Veal, but is told by one of her friend's relatives that she had died the day before the visit. Mrs. Bargrave later tells her story to various interlocutors. According to the preface it is relayed to the publisher via "a gentleman, a justice of peace, at Maidstone, in Kent, and a very intelligent person, to his friend in London, as it is here worded; which discourse is attested by a very sober and understanding gentlewoman, a kinswoman of the said gentleman's, who lives in Canterbury, within a few doors of the house in which the within-named Mrs Bargrave lives".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Days_(novel)"title="Golden Days (novel)">
"In the early eighties, you had the sense that there was nothing you couldn't do in L.A."In "Golden Days", Edith Langley, a 38-year-old divorcee returns to Los Angeles from the East Coast with her two daughters, Aurora and Denise, to start a new life in 1980. They move into a home in Topanga Canyon, and Edith reinvents herself as a financial reporter and then a financial advisor to other women. Edith begins a relationship with Skip Chandler, an older married man. Skip is back in the States for a medical issue—his wife and children still in Argentina where they moved after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Edith and Skip live the affluent life of the 1980s in Southern California—money, Lear Jets, and Porsches. They fly to San Francisco to attend a weekend seminar given by Lion Boyce on "Abundance as a Natural State." At the seminar, Edith runs into an old friend—Lorna McAvey. On their return, Skip goes to the doctor and discovers there is nothing wrong with him. The novel then flashes back to 1962 when Edith meets her friend Lorna—who sees her through the years of her first marriage and divorce. The story then returns to L.A. in the early eighties; Edith grows a business as a gem dealer and banker. Edith and Lorna are friends again—Edith refers to it as their second friendship. Edith fills Lorna in on her second failed marriage to Dirk Langley, an Australian surf film director. As Edith becomes richer and richer, Lorna reinvents herself on television preaching the positive message of abundance. The book then jumps forward to 1986, by which time Edith's eldest daughter has graduated from college and is a successful international courier while her younger daughter is still at home and in school. Edith and Skip have settled into a quiet life entrenching themselves through their affluence against an increasingly unsettled world focusing on the younger daughter's school. A war begins in Central America. At the school, Edith and Lorna meet Franz deGeld a Hollywood executive whom Lorna is having an affair. At that time, a Nuclear bomb goes off in a Central American jungle killing a few thousand people. Life goes on as before. Aurora has fallen in love and announces she is marrying Skip's son Deeky and moving with him to South America. Skip gives them a house in La Plata.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puzzle_of_the_Fish_Canal"title="The Puzzle of the Fish Canal">
"The Puzzle of the Fish Canal" is mainly about the Iran–Iraq War, it focuses on an Iran-Iraq war soldier named Jalil who visits a medical department and talk about his ear ache with him. in 1980, a surprise attack on the Iranian city of Abadan marked the beginning of the Iran–Iraq War. Hundreds of thousands of people fled the badly damaged city but a small number of civilians chose to stay, living in a city under siege.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell's_Foundations_Quiver"title="Hell's Foundations Quiver">
Merlin Athrawes is confronted by Aivah Pahrshan, who reveals to him her suspicions that he and Ahbraim Zhevons are one and the same and that she had been tracking his activities for several years now. She reveals that she is the leader of the "Sisterhood of Saint Kohdy," an ancient secret society founded after the death of "Seijin" Kohdy (who was previously believed to be mythical) under suspicious circumstances; the Church subsequently deleted his existence from its official record and annihilated the original Abbey of Saint Kohdy in a "Rakurai" strike. Aivah also reveals that Kohdy's tomb, journal and sword ("Helm Cleaver") were all relocated before the destruction of the Abbey and that large portions of the journal are in Spanish, a language the Sisterhood cannot understand. Despite the grave risks involved, the Inner Circle decides to bring Aivah and her personal maid Sandaria to Nimue's Cave and expose them to the complete truth, a truth that shocks them to their very core; neither suspected (despite the Sisterhood's essential doubts about some of the "archangels" and the Church) that the "Holy Writ" itself was based on falsehoods. Eventually, both accept the truth.The Spanish portions of Saint Kohdy's journal are translated and the Inner Circle discovers previously unknown details about the War Against the Fallen. Saint Kohdy was in fact Sergeant Major Cody Cortazar, late of the Terran Federation Marine Corps. He had been drafted due to his combat skills and training by the surviving command crew to combat the "Fallen Angels" and their "mortal" supporters while winning the support of the ignorant population. To accomplish this, the command crew had sought to selectively reactivate his suppressed memories and in doing so had allowed him to remember his native tongue and fragments of his previous life on Earth. His experiences against someone the church had ruled a "demon" had shaken him to the point of questioning the "archangels" and he sought to meet with Schueler himself for reassurance (a meeting from which he did not return alive). Ultimately, the Inner Circle and Sisterhood agree to work together, and Merlin travels to Zion in disguise to make contact with the Sisterhoods' agents there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sympathizer"title="The Sympathizer">
Set as the flashback in a coerced confession of a political prisoner, the book tells the story of the South Vietnamese Government in 1975 and subsequent events in American exile in Los Angeles, through the eyes of a half-Vietnamese, half-French undercover communist agent. The spy remains unnamed throughout the novel from the fall of Saigon, to refugee camps and relocation in Los Angeles, to his time as a film consultant in the Philippines, and finally to his return and subsequent imprisonment in Vietnam.The narrator lives in a series of dualities, at times contradictions: he is of mixed blood descent (Vietnamese mother, and French Catholic priest father), raised in Vietnam but attended college in the U.S., and a North Vietnamese mole yet a friend to South Vietnamese military officials and soldiers and a United States CIA agent. During the imminent fall of Saigon, he, as an aide-de-camp, arranges for a last minute flight as part of Operation Frequent Wind, to secure the safety of himself, his best friend Bon, and the General he advises. While they are being evacuated, the group is fired upon while boarding; during the escape, Bon's wife and child are killed along with many others.In Los Angeles, the General and his former officers weaken quickly, disillusioned by a foreign culture and their rapid decline in status. The General attempts to reclaim some semblance of honor by opening his own business, a liquor store. The continuous emasculation and dehumanization within American society prompts the General to draft plans for assembling an army of South Vietnamese expatriates to return as rebels to Vietnam. While participating in the expatriate unit, the narrator takes a clerical position at Occidental College, begins having an affair with Ms. Mori, his Japanese-American colleague, and then the General's eldest daughter, Lana. While living in the United States, the narrator sends letters in invisible ink to Man, a North Vietnamese revolutionary and handler, providing intelligence about the General's attempts at raising a commando army.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People_in_the_Trees"title="The People in the Trees">
In the late 1990s, Dr. Ronald Kubodera, a colleague of Nobel Laureate Dr. Abraham Norton Perina, mourns Norton's downfall after being convicted of sexually abusing his own children. Kubodera encourages Norton to write his memoirs from his prison isolation, and marks them with footnotes.Norton writes of his childhood in the small town of Lindon, Indiana, where his interest in science was piqued by his paternal aunt Sybil, a doctor. While attending medical school, Norton attracts the attention of Gregory Smythe, and is hired to work in his lab. Norton is eventually invited to Smythe's home for dinner, where Smythe cries in front of him. Repulsed by Smythe, Norton quits the lab. Shortly before graduation, however, Norton is approached to be the medical doctor on an anthropological mission to U'ivu, led by a man named Paul Tallent. Norton realizes that Smythe recommended him in order to send him as far away as possible from him. Despite the fact that the mission is considered career suicide, Norton accepts.Norton meets Tallent for the first time before they leave from Hawaii to U'ivu, and finds him beautiful and enigmatic. When they arrive in U'ivu, they meet the other member of the team, a woman named Esme Duff, whom Norton immediately dislikes. Tallent leads Norton and Esme to a smaller island that is part of U'ivu, called Ivu'ivu. There they meet three hunter guides, who lead them deep into the jungle of the island, where eventually Tallent reveals to Norton that there is a legend among the U'ivu people about a lost tribe that has been gifted with eternal life but also deep stupidity, and that their guides have actually seen one of these people. Shortly after, they discover a woman who is devoid of language, completely nude and seemingly unable to function as a regular human being. The explorers dub the woman Eve, and quickly discover a tribe of other people like her – whom they dub "Dreamers" –, all of whom have varyingly poor grasp of language. Through some of the more lucid dreamers, Tallent discovers that, though they all have a mark of a turtle on them, indicating that they are 60, they are actually all well over 100 years old.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welcome_to_Night_Vale_(novel)"title="Welcome to Night Vale (novel)">
The Man in the Tan Jacket is back in Night Vale and he has been leaving strange pieces of paper with people, all of which say "King City". While Night Vale is used to the strange and bizarre, the Man in the Tan Jacket's arrival puts the town at odds. Jackie Fierro, the owner of the town pawn shop, is determined to figure out the mystery behind both the man and the paper. Meanwhile, Diane Crayton has her own issues: her son has been changing and while this is average for most teenage boys, her son is literally a shape shifter and looks different each time she sees him. When she begins to see her son's father around town and Josh begins to show new interest in the man, Diane knows that this cannot end well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Unexceptionalism"title="Scandinavian Unexceptionalism">
In the book, Sanandaji argues that particularly the left has long praised Scandinavian countries for their high levels of welfare provision and admirable societal outcomes. Although true that Scandinavian countries are successful, the author makes the case that this success pre-dates the welfare state. According to Sanandaji Scandinavians became successful by combining a culture with strong emphasis on individual responsibility with economic freedom. This can also explain why Scandinavian Americans, who live outside Nordic welfare states, have low levels of poverty and high levels of prosperity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_Darkest_Pondelayo"title="Through Darkest Pondelayo">
The narrative is presented as a series of letters edited by one Rev. Barnaby Whitecorn D.D., who is purported to be the author’s "next door neighbour," and is also illustrated with plated photographs of the adventures.The author, the English Serena Livingston-Stanley, her friend, Francis, and maidservant Placket, sail from Harwich on ‘May 14th’ in an unspecified year into the Mediterranean and via the Suez Canal reach Ceylon on 12 June. Ten days later they sight the island of Pondelayo, an island inhabited by cannibals, and anchor off Bogtuk. The women lodge at the Mission House, and are entertained by Judge Wiggins and his topless black female ‘servant’ Rosie, and in mid-July set out to explore the remote interior of the island accompanied by a wide array of characters, including Wiggins, Rosie, the Hon. Mrs. Pringle, Mrs. Garble and Captain Fitzkhaki-Campbell.In Dead Mother-in-Laws Cove, the adventure party faces a crocodile-infested swamp, and on 27 July arrives at Tikki Bahaar, the first native village they encounter. They investigate the Lake of a Million Fishes, where Francis gets lost in the jungle and Placket gives a month’s notice. Later, in August, they cross the notorious Bobo River, cross the Parrot Gully, and climb Mount Blim Blam, a volcano in active eruption. From the Great Cataract they beat their way through the dense jungles of Upper Timwiffi and arrive back at Dead Mother-in-Laws Cove on 18 September. The narrative ends at the Mission House on 1 October with the author telegraphing the Reverend Whitecorn for the loan of five pounds to cover the cost of her return passage. She arrives safely back in the English Channel on 7 November.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrath_of_the_Furies"title="Wrath of the Furies">
It is the year 88 BC. The Roman Republic is under attack on several fronts; while a dangerous rebellion in Italy is being crushed by Sulla, the armies of Mithridates the Great are sweeping through Asia Minor. The young Gordianus is living in Alexandria when he receives a message telling him of the plight of his former mentor Antipater of Sidon at the court of Mithridates in Ephesus. Accompanied by his beautiful slave Bethesda he travels incognito to Ephesus to help Antipater, even though they parted on bad terms, in spite of the great danger that threatens all Roman citizens under the rule of Mithridates. Together with the Jewish spy Samson, Gordianus must try to stop a ritual sacrifice in the hope of thwarting the King's plans to have all the Romans in the lands under his sway be massacred. Although Gordianus and his co-conspirators foil the ritual sacrifice, they are not able to prevent the massacre, nor do they even warn the Romans of this impending action that has gone down in history as the Asiatic Vespers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfish_(novel)"title="Dragonfish (novel)">
Suzy, a mysterious Vietnamese woman, leaves her police officer husband, Robert, and her home in Oakland, California. She reappears in Las Vegas with a new husband, Sonny, a violent Vietnamese gambler and smuggler. When Suzy vanishes again, Sonny blackmails Robert into finding her and the search leads them through the glitz and sleaze of Las Vegas's underbelly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darius_Bell_and_the_Glitter_Pool"title="Darius Bell and the Glitter Pool">
Darius Bell and his family are living in the Bell estate, the mansion given to his ancestors, under the condition that every 25 years they would produce a gift for the town. The next gift (meant to be given by Darius’ father) is coming up shortly.Darius soon discovers that his father has no gift to give to the town and that his family is broke. Even though the gift can be anything, even a barrel of vegetables, Darius’ father insists that the gift needs to be astonishing and needs to honour the Bell name. Then, an earthquake happened and Darius goes outside to assess the damage.Darius then discovers, that due to the earthquake, a hole in the ground had opened up. Along with his two friends, Oliver and Paul, Darius goes down into the hole, and discovers that inside the hole, was what he believed to be rubies and gold.Darius is really excited about the “gems” and believes that the Glitter Pool is the solution to all his problems. He even starts fantasizing about revealing the Glitter Pool to his parents. But first, Darius decides that he needs to go to an expert to confirm that it truly was ruby and gold. This is where Darius goes and seeks help from the geology professor, Professor Heggarty, who unfortunately breaks the truth to Darius and tells him that it isn’t ruby and gold, and is instead limonite and vanadinite. This is Darius’ darkest moment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yellow_Arrow"title="The Yellow Arrow">
The hero of the story is Andrei, a passenger on the nonstop express train, tormented by the question of the meaning of traffic. The impetus to the awakening of his consciousness is a meeting with a man named Khan, who showed him the secret inscriptions in the secluded areas of the train. An attempt to find a new point of observation (the so-called "ritual death" - an exit to the roof of the train) does not reveal the truth he is seeking: there are only a few loners with the faces of sleepwalkers continuing their aimless movement on top of the same express train. But one day Andrei and Han see a "strange man with a straw hat over his shoulders," pushing off the roof, jumping over the bridge railing while the train is moving, landing in the river and floating to the shore. The path is indicated, there is a way out of the ordinary space, and the main character Andrei commits an act: he leaves the carriage, chooses the freedom of the world, unfamiliar, disturbing, and the glittering yellow windows of the train flies past to the destroyed bridge.The train moves almost forever, people on it are born and die, doing business and going bankrupt, falling in love and starting families. But this movement is mechanistic and automatic, like the movement of robots, they do not notice it, just as they do not notice the rhythm of the heart, the movement of the blood in the veins, or breathing. The juxtaposition of Russian realities with Eastern philosophy provides a new semantic twist: Buddhism, in particular, helps us understand the meaning of Russian reality. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoir_From_Antproof_Case"title="Memoir From Antproof Case">
An elderly narrator who never reveals his real name writes a manuscript in the Brazilian jungles and hides it, page by page, in a termite-proof suitcase. The goal that he set for himself is truly ambitious: to tell his son about the things that led him to Brazil—after a childhood spent in New York City, and youth—in an elite Swiss clinic for the mentally ill, after studying at Harvard, after his service as a pilot during World War II, after decades of a successful career at a major Wall Street bank, after a number of impossible escapades, and a great love...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_Damned_(Tanith_Lee)"title="The Book of the Damned (Tanith Lee)">
"The Book of the Damned" consists of three short novellas set in Paradys, an alternate world version of Paris: "Stained with Crimson", "Malice in Saffron", and "Empires of Azure". Each novella focuses around a single color; with each transition between novellas, the era and color and writing style change, but themes of dark magic, murder, love, gender, and identity persist. Each novella "centers visually on a stained glass window... [whose] colors are reflected in three pieces of ancient jewelry: a ruby scarab ring, a topaz crucifix plundered during the crusades[,] and an Egyptian sapphire earring shaped like a spider. Each jewel is fateful for its possessor".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_(novel)"title="Henrietta (novel)">
VOLUME IPretty and gentile dressed, the main character, Henrietta Courteney, acquires a seat in the already full stage-coach to London. Henrietta keeps to herself at first but towards the end of the ride comes in contact with Miss Woodby. In tradition of romance heroines, Ms. Woodby gives Henrietta and herself nicknames, Celia and Celinda, and declared a “violent friendship” (Lennox, 9). Arriving at Ms. Woodby's stop, Henrietta asks for help to find an appropriate lodging, so that her friend gives Henrietta a letter of recommendation for Mrs. Egret, a milliner friend. Unfortunately, Henrietta does not have the address and thus misguides to another milliner's house of Mrs. Eccles. Mrs. Eccles takes Henrietta in once realizing that she seems lost. Henrietta sends Ms. Woodby a letter because she realizes she does not want to spend any more time at this place. During the time that Henrietta is in Mrs. Eccles's home, a gentleman becomes interested in Henrietta and Mrs. Eccles seems to encourage the potential relationship. Henrietta is pleased but doesn’t look into it much. Miss Woodby comes over for tea. Then, they begin to talk about the misfortune of ending up at Mrs. Eccles’ home and Henrietta starts to tell her backstory: about her deceased unmarried parents, her brother being away for school, and her life at her aunt's.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-Digital_Print"title="Post-Digital Print">
A chapter by chapter synopsis of the book has been depicted as follows by a review from the website We Make Money Not Art.Chapter 1, “The death of paper (which never happened),” analyzes 7 moments when a new medium in history was thought to be a superior alternative to paper.Chapter 2, “A history of alternative publishing reflecting the evolution of print,” depicts how artistic avant-garde has used print during the 20th century.Chapter 3, “The mutation of paper: material paper in immaterial times,” looks at the explanations for why paper makes sense even in our digital age.Chapter 4, “The end of paper: can anything actually replace the printed page?” critically views electronic devices, strategies, and platforms.Chapter 5, “Distributed archives: paper content from the past, paper content for the future,” explores any long-term implications of choosing one medium over another.Chapter 6, “The network: transforming culture, transforming publishing,” explains how working as a network can increase the quality of cultural entities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fireman_(novel)"title="The Fireman (novel)">
A mysterious fungus has begun to infect the world's population, causing a condition popularly known as "Dragonscale." The illness manifests as a pattern of black and gold markings on an afflicted person's skin, eventually causing them to burst into flame and die. There is no known cure, and the fungal spores easily become airborne from the victims' ashes.When New Hampshire school nurse Harper Grayson becomes infected, her relationship with her husband Jakob quickly sours and he leaves her. She later discovers that he has had affairs with multiple women and begun to write a book in which he denigrates her and brags about his infidelity. Learning that she is now pregnant, Harper seeks shelter with her brother but is turned away. With the help of "The Fireman," a strange man dressed in firefighting gear, and two children named Allie and Nick, Harper escapes Jakob's attempt to kill her and flees their home. The Fireman has contracted Dragonscale, but is able to ignite and extinguish parts of his body at will without danger to his life.The Fireman brings Harper to an abandoned summer camp that now serves as a secret refuge for infected people. To Harper's surprise, they have found a way to live without fear of death from Dragonscale, reinforcing their positive emotions through group singing. Retaking her maiden name of Willowes, Harper is quickly enlisted as a camp nurse and meets Father Tom Storey, its leader and the grandfather of Allie and Nick. The Fireman (real name John Rookwood) had had a relationship with Tom's daughter Sarah, the children's mother, who has since died. Tensions begin to grow among the residents, fueled by dwindling food supplies and a rash of thefts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracles_of_the_Namiya_General_Store"title="Miracles of the Namiya General Store">
In 1980, the Namiya General Store becomes popular with citizens after its owner, Yūji Namiya, accepts people’s advice letters seeking advice for anything troubling them, similar to an agony aunt. When the store is closed, people would drop their letters through a hole in the roll-up door, collected in a mailbox, and would receive a handwritten reply from Namiya in a milk box hung outside. In 2012, three delinquents, Atsuya, Shota and Kohei, take shelter in the abandoned Namiya General Store after committing some petty crimes. Staying until the morning, the boys' pillaging is mysteriously interrupted by an advice letter being dropped through the shutter, although nobody is outside. The letter is addressed to the General Store and traditionally was written by someone to consult about worries. Upon reading it, the boys realise it was written in 1980, 32 years ago. When Kohei decides to reply, the mysteries and secrets of the old General Store comes to light, as their letters transcend time and space to touch a variety of characters, revealing Namiya’s past, and follows the many miracles that intertwine the lives of the seemingly unrelated cast.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Click"title="One Click">
In "One Click", Brandt describes Bezos's upward journey from computer nerd to world-changing technology entrepreneur. In parallel, Brandt also charts Amazon's original market specialization in book sales and the retailer's evolution to selling almost everything, under the mission of making online shopping easy and convenient.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wheel_Spins"title="The Wheel Spins">
Iris Carr, a young English society woman, is staying at a small hotel in ‘a remote corner of Europe’. Her friends leave on the train to Trieste. Iris is glad to be alone, but then starts to miss them. The remaining guests are also glad to see them leave, due to their noisy ways and monopolising of the hotel facilities. After going for a long walk and getting lost in the local mountains, Iris decides to leave also, but waiting at the railway station, she is struck or hit on the back of the head and loses consciousness. She wakes up in the waiting room, but as she can’t speak the local language, no-one can tell her what happened. She concludes that it must have been sunstroke, but manages to get on the crowded train. She finds herself in a compartment with only one English speaker, Miss Winifred Froy.Miss Froy explains that she was a teacher of the children of a local aristocrat. His widow, the Baroness, is also a passenger in the compartment. Fellow hotel guests, the Reverend and Mrs Barnes and the Misses Flood-Porter are also aboard the train. She spies a heavily bandaged body in another compartment, supervised by a sinister-looking doctor apparently taking an accident victim to hospital in Trieste.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slade_House"title="Slade House">
## The Right Sort.In 1979, Nathan Bishop and his mother are invited to the house of the respected Lady Grayer. Nathan is quickly acquainted with her son Jonah, and the two spend the afternoon in the garden of Slade House whilst Norah Grayer entertains Nathan’s mother. Nathan begins hallucinating strange people and other visions and becomes worried that the Valium he took from his mother is having a bad effect. After being invited into the house, he experiences more hallucinations before finding himself at his father's lodge in Rhodesia. This dream is quickly broken by the Grayers, who reveal themselves to be twin siblings and carnivorous Anchorites, beings who steal the souls of certain people to maintain their youth. The Anchorites conduct a ceremony, and feast on Nathan’s soul.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Rich_Girlfriend"title="China Rich Girlfriend">
In 2013, two years after the events of "Crazy Rich Asians", Eddie meets a wealthy client of his European bank, Bao Shaoyen, a distraught mother who is anxious to hear about her troubled son who was in a car accident from racing an expensive car. He is undergoing serious surgery, while one of his two passengers becomes paralyzed and the other dies. She needs this incident to be discreetly addressed, and Eddie manages to blackmail Eleanor Young into helping the woman, who she learns is extremely wealthy and has a son named Carlton who strongly resembles Rachel.In Manhattan, Nick has managed to repair his relationship with Rachel, and have planned a wedding in California, near Rachel's relatives. Astrid is invited to the wedding, and later meets with Charlie Wu, her former fiancé. Michael has become extremely successful due to Charlie's secret investment, and his behavior has become arrogant and hostile. Charlie is stuck in an unhappy marriage with Isabel, but does not let Astrid know, and continues to help her with her troubled marital issues. Meanwhile, Kitty Pong, the former soap actress who managed to marry her way into the Singapore elite, tries to buy her way into the high society of Hong Kong by appearing in gossip magazines and buying high-profile art. However, she is socially clumsy and finds herself continually shunned; so she hires the services of Corinna Ko-Tung, a woman from a well-born family, who helps Kitty appear more sophisticated by trying to change her behavior and make better social connections. Kitty acts well and manages to amend some of the damages she created.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Diva_and_Flea"title="The Story of Diva and Flea">
A chapter book targeted to ages 6–8, the book is about a small house-loving dog and a large wandering cat who become friends in Paris. It is based on a real pair of animals that the author met in Paris.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Rich_Asians"title="Crazy Rich Asians">
The novel begins with a quote from the 14th-century Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta:The book is told from the perspective of five main characters: Rachel Chu, Nicholas (Nick) Young, Eleanor Young, Astrid Leong, and Edison Cheng. The story revolves around the grand wedding of Singapore's most eligible bachelor, Colin Khoo, and a fashion icon, Araminta Lee, which everyone calls the wedding of the year.Rachel is a New York University (NYU) professor of economics, who is originally from Cupertino, California. She was raised by her single mother and leads a typical middle-class life. When her boyfriend Nick, an NYU professor of history, takes her to meet his family in Singapore, she is completely unaware of what is in store for her. Although he grew up in London, Nick is a Singapore native. Unknown to anyone in New York, he not only belongs to one of the top ten wealthiest families in Asia but is possibly sole heir to his family's great fortune. Despite this wealth, he was raised to be humble and to keep a low profile. Because of his upbringing, he is confident his family will approve of his simple girlfriend, but things turn out very differently than he expects.Eleanor Young is Nick's controlling mother who is obsessed with prestige and pride. Since Nick was born, she has allowed her mother-in-law, the Young family matriarch, to practically raise her only child, so that, when the time comes, she will leave the family fortune to him. As a result, Eleanor is not very involved in Nick's upbringing and is even separated from his father, who chooses to live and work in Australia to manage their family's businesses there. She is also very adamant that Nick marry someone from the close-knit, rich circle of her friends and plans to sabotage Nick and Rachel's relationship. She hires a private detective to gather information on Rachel's family, which she later attempts to use to drive Rachel out of Nick's life, but ultimately results in her son freezing her out of his life. Rachel is shocked when she learns who her father, Zhou Fang Min, is and leaves to stay with her friend Goh Peik Lin and her family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_of_Owu"title="Women of Owu">
"Women of Owu" focuses on the aftermath of a 19th-century war-torn Owu Kingdom. It reflects on the pains, depression and agony of the survivors who were only women after the killing of all males in the kingdom by the combined forces of Ife, Oyo and Ijebu. The relationship between "Women of Owu" and "The Trojan Women" has been explored by Olakunbi Olasope.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_(Ethel_Lina_White_novel)"title="Wax (Ethel Lina White novel)">
"Wax" is set in the small, fictional town of Riverpool. On the outskirts of the town is a mysterious Waxwork museum with a dark history. Young Journalist Sonia Thompson arrives at the town to work at the local newspaper, and is instantly intrigued by the museum. She meets the suspicious townspeople and soon predicts there will be another death at the museum. Very soon she is proved right, and it is up to Sonia to bust the legends surrounding the Waxworks and to discover who the real killer is.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunno_on_the_Moon"title="Dunno on the Moon">
## Beginning.Even before the events described in the book, Doono with Fuksiya and Selyodochka from Sun City visited the Moon and brought out the moon mineral with extraordinary properties (later called "lunit"). After a number of events it turns out that its rapprochement with the magnet gives the effect of local weightlessness that can allow to send to the moon a spaceship with large crew and supplies on board. As Doono hopes, there is intelligent life over there, which due to the loss of the atmosphere has moved inside of the Moon. The cosmonauts take the seeds of terrestrial cultivated plants with them. However, the exclusion of Dunno from the flight for stealing the weightlessness device from the Pavilion and careless handling of it, which nearly led to its loss, brings to these plans unexpected adjustments. Dunno instigates Roly-Poly, who was also not included into the crew, to fly as stowaways. The day before the launch they snuck into the rocket. At night before the flight Roly-Poly has changed his mind, but instead of getting out of the rocket accidentally launched it into flight in automatic mode.After the moon landing Dunno and Roly-Poly come out in space suits for a walk to a nearby mountain. In a cave Dunno falls into an icy tunnel leading down to the internal cavity of the moon and slides down, apparently sitting down, thereon in the sublunary space. Going down on a parafoil, he finds on the inner core of the moon (which the locals call the Earth, too) with the civilization of the same shorties, but living according to the laws of capitalism. The size of lunar plants, in contrast to terrestrial, is proportional to the height of the shorties so they appear to be undersized for Dunno. Roly-Poly, after losing Dunno, runs in panic back to the rocket.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love's_Rite"title="Love's Rite">
The book is an analysis of the issues surrounding the recognition of same-sex unions, and the relevance of this debate in democratic societies such as India. Vanita asks "Why should the state's refusal to recognise a union as marriage mean that the union is not a marriage?" Vanita emphasises the history of recognition of same-sex love, and notes that, based on her expert knowledge of ancient Indian texts, same-sex love and relationships are "deeply rooted in Indian culture". Vanita discusses the cultural and legal implications of same-sex marriage in India and the West.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chu_Ju's_House"title="Chu Ju's House">
Chu Ju lives in China near the Gan River with her parents and her grandmother. When she is fourteen, her mother gets pregnant and her whole family hopes the baby will be a boy. At this time in China, the law states that each family may only have two children, and tradition says that each family must have a son. However, a baby girl is born, and so Chu Ju's father and grandmother both agree that the baby girl must be sent away to make room for a son, although Chu Ju's mother begs to be able to keep her baby. Chu Ju develops a love for her new sister, so she decides to make a sacrifice. Chu Ju runs away secretly. This way, her parents will only have one daughter, her new baby sister, Hua.First, Chu Ju gets a job on a fishing boat cleaning fish and mending nets with the mother while the man and boys fish. After that, she gets a job working with silk worms at a silk farm, but she and the other girls who work there are treated horribly. Chu Ju eventually writes a letter in protest of their unfair treatment, since she is the only one who knows how to write (her parents paid for her schooling, even though girls didn't normally receive educations). The girls are treated somewhat better, but Chu Ju loses her job. Subsequently, Chu Ju meets a woman named Han Na and gets a job helping her with her rice paddies. Han Na comes to love Chu Ju as a daughter, so when she dies, Han Na leaves land for Chu Ju. Four years after she secretly left home, Chu Ju decides to go home to visit her family. Her parents are overjoyed to see her. Chu Ju is relieved to see that her little sister, Hua, is safe and was not sent away. Chu Ju's mother has also had another baby when she was away. She gave birth to another girl named Nu Hai, but this one is going to stay in their family, even if it means they will break tradition since, there will be no son in their family because of certain circumstances. After Chu Ju's visit with her family, Chu Ju goes back to her rice paddies determined to save up money to pay for her sisters' educations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Country_(book)"title="The Other Country (book)">
The book examines the growing divides between small-town and big-city India, such as inequitable development and opportunities. Pande investigates the "Great Language Divide" between India's two official languages, Hindi and English, and analyses the water management issues facing India. Pande also writes about the increasing polarisation on social issues between urban areas and smaller towns. The book features various stories of women who have fought against societal expectations to achieve their goals. Pande also condemns the objectification of women in capitalist media and patriarchy in India.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knife_and_the_Butterfly"title="The Knife and the Butterfly">
The novel, set in Houston, is about a 15-year old Salvadoran American MS-13 gang member named Martín "Azael" Arevalo. He wakes up in a prison cell and observes 17-year old White American Alexis "Lexi" Allen, who is member of another gang, Crazy Crew. As the novel unfolds he begins to recover his memory and learn whether the upcoming trial will be his or hers. The flashbacks make up about fifty percent of the work. Azael slowly gains sympathy for Lexi, even though he originally hates her. The book reveals that on June 16, 2011 Azael died in a gang fight in Montrose, at Ervan Chew Park. Lexi had killed him; she initially maintains self-defense at the trial, but confesses to wanting to prove herself to Crazy Crew, and that Azael was not actually trying to kill her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turning_on_the_Girls"title="Turning on the Girls">
A decade ago women took over world and have changed everything, schools, language, women's and men's thinking. Lisa, a twenty-two-year-old who works at a government ministry dedicated to mental revolution, is given the task to update female sexual fantasies, which means no masochistic or romantic daydreams. Not all men are pleased with this new world order and Harmony, an underground men's movement, plans a violent uprising to put things back the way they were, while Lisa and her assistant Justin are recruited to infiltrate Harmony.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Can't_Wait"title="What Can't Wait">
The main character, 17-year old Marisa Moreno, comes from a Mexican American family, and resides in a Hispanic neighborhood in Houston, Texas. Her immigrant father wants Marisa to help the family by working longer hours at a grocery store and help take care of her sister's child, since her sister was medically uninsured and needs to work longer hours in order to pay her husband's medical bills. Even though Marisa wants to study engineering, and attend the University of Texas at Austin, her father tells her that women should not be involved in mathematics-related professions. In the story Marisa applies to the engineering program at UT Austin, and is accepted, but her family feels it is far away from home.Marisa's teacher, boyfriend, and mother try to convince her to fight for a more promising future. At one time a student attempts to rape Marisa. Marisa, stretched thin by her obligations and ultimate goals, experiences conflict, but then learns to prioritize her own goals. "Publishers Weekly" stated that "Marisa is aware that pursuing a life that's fulfilling on her own terms comes with a price" and that she makes a "bittersweet decision". She ultimately goes to university and leaves Houston.Georgia Christgau of Middle College High School at LaGuardia Community College in New York City wrote that the attempted sexual assault scene is "too quickly drawn to be convincing." "Publishers Weekly" stated that the novel's coverage of teenage pregnancy was "sensitive". Katrina Hedeen of "The Horn Book Guide" wrote that the ending was "too-tidy". "Kirkus Reviews", however, describes the ending as "hopeful but never too-tidy". "Publishers Weekly" described the ending as "honest and satisfying".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_Nicholas"title="The Immortal Nicholas">
Before he was "father Christmas", he was simply a father. "The Immortal Nicholas" follows the story of Agios, a tired, broken man who encounters the Christ child by chance, and studies him throughout his life from a distance. The novel is described by author Glenn Beck as an origin story for Santa Claus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_Darkness_(novel)"title="Out of Darkness (novel)">
The novel begins with the school explosion and then recounts prior events, beginning in September 1936. Seventeen-year old Naomi Vargas, a high school senior who originates from San Antonio, moves in with her oil field worker stepfather. She becomes friends and falls in love with Wash Fuller, an African-American boy. Naomi deals with overt racism in New London and her history with her father. After the explosion occurs, the townspeople blame Wash for the disaster.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aesthetic_Contract"title="The Aesthetic Contract">
In the book Sussman traces intellectual enterprise, art, and artistic conventions since what he calls the "broader modernity" (marked by the end of the Medieval period in Europe) and suggests that art and its conventions have essentially become a secular institution that have essentially replaced the moral allegiances the subject owed to the Church before the reformation increasing a sense of personal freedom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_Gray_Flannel_Suit_(novel)"title="The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (novel)">
Tom and Betsy Rath live in a rundown house in Westport, Connecticut in 1953. They have three children (two girls and a boy) and money problems. Tom is 33 years old, a Harvard graduate, and works at a Manhattan charitable organization.Tom barely survived as an Army paratroop officer during World War II, having fought in both the European and Pacific combat theaters; he had an extramarital affair in Italy during the former. He has haunting flashbacks of the affair, as well as his combat experiences; he killed 17 men in combat, including accidentally killing his friend with a hand grenade in the heat of battle. His stay-at-home wife knows only that Tom has somehow "changed" since the war.One day while reflecting on the inadequacy of his house, Tom runs into a friend who works at the United Broadcasting Corporation, a New York-based television network. This friend encourages Tom to apply for a new opening in public relations. Tom gets the job working for Ralph Hopkins, the top man at the network, an empire-builder surrounded by politicking yes-men. Hopkins is set to propose the establishment of national mental health services to a group of physicians and offer his own prestige and network toward that end. Tom must figure out how his boss can best present the proposal so that the doctors will rise in unison and appoint Hopkins to spearhead the campaign.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark-Thirty"title="The Dark-Thirty">
The Legend of Pin Oak tells the story of Henri, a free biracial man married to an enslaved woman. When his white half-brother, Harper, sells Henri’s wife and child, the family flees and has to make a life or death decision.We Organized is about a slave who was freed before Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. His narrative describes voodoo rituals performed by slaves against their master.Justice: Riley Holt, the richest man in Tallahatchie, Mississippi, is murdered. White garage owner Hoop Granger blames black veterinary student Alvin Tinsley for the crime, and gathers a group of his fellow Klansmen to lynch Alvin. After Alvin's murder, Hoop is haunted when the true story of Riley Holt's death refuses to disappear from his windows.The 11:59: Lester Simmons, an old Pullman car porter, tells about the train called the 11:59. No porter hears the whistle of the 11:59 and lives. One night Lester hears the whistle of the 11:59 and tries to escape.The Sight: Esau is born with a veil and according to the midwife has a gift called the sight, which could be blessing or a curse. Esau sees future visions and succeeds at controlling the visions, but is forced to use his ability for evil when his father Tall comes back.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Dogs"title="Fifteen Dogs">
Over drinks at Toronto's Wheat Sheaf Tavern, Hermes and Apollo get into a debate about whether animals could live happily if they had the same cognitive and speech abilities as humans. They decide to wager a year of servitude on the outcome of granting the gifts of human reasoning and language to a group of dogs in a nearby clinic.Given their newfound abilities, the dogs are able to escape the clinic and make their way to the city's High Park, where they set up their own new protosociety. The novel then explores the functioning of their new society through the impact of human values, such as individuality and personal freedom, on the conventionally hierarchical social order of dog packs. Key characters in the canine society include Atticus, a Neapolitan Mastiff who naturally emerges as the group leader; Majnoun, a black poodle who is reluctant to trust other dogs; Frick and Frack, a pair of Labrador retrievers who are leery about their new reality; and Prince, a mutt who embraces his language skills to become a poet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Earth_Gods"title="The Earth Gods">
The narrator describes the appearance of three great earth gods at nightfall on the mountain. They begin a discussion. Their conversation covers many topics that deal with spirituality and the human condition. The gods comment often on love and the heart, sharing each of their views. The gods then close the discussion by announcing their rest.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Strings_of_Frankie_Presto"title="The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto">
Franceso “Frankie” Presto was born in Villarreal, Province of Castellón, Spain in August, 1936 during the Spanish Civil War in Saint Paschal Church when the church was being raided. To keep him quiet, his mother, Carmencita, sang “Lagrima” by Francisco Tárrega. She died draped in a nun’s tunic while the nun present at the time took him in. He was thrown into the Mijares River because he kept crying.Marcus Belgrave says that Frankie saved a girl's life who had a knife pressed up to her throat by stunning the audience by playing quickly. He swears that one of the strings of Frankie’s guitar had turned blue.After Frankie was thrown in the river, a hairless dog pulls him where he is found by Baffa Rubio, an owner of a sardine factory who raises him as his own. When Frankie turned five, his vision started to get worse as water from the river infected his eyes, so Baffa got him to learn music as he could work without vision. The music school rejects and is instead taught by a blind guitarist called El Maestro. To protect his feelings, Baffa lies about Frankie’s mother and instead gives Frankie a picture of his sister. When Frankie is around six, he climbs up a tree and watches the military bury six bodies with a girl named Aurora. He sings to her with his guitar and falls in love. Upon returning home, he finds that his house has been raided and his father missing. El Maestro finds out that Baffa was taken prisoner after some workers say that he was a socialist. Baffa instructs him to send the boy to America with his sister and tells him where to find 600,000 pesetas. El Maestro takes Alberto, a conga player, to retrieve the money. They send Frankie on a boat by bribing sailors after El Maestro gives him his guitar, the six magic strings and lets him perform an American song in public. After the boat leaves, Alberto takes the rest of the money and pushes El Maestro into the ocean. It is revealed that Frankie is the biological son of Elmaestro (Carlos Andres Presto). The magic strings were given to Carmencita by the gypsy, Ceferino Giménez Malla.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobody_Can_Love_You_More"title="Nobody Can Love You More">
The book follows the daily lives of sex workers living on G.B. Road, New Delhi, a large red-light district in India's capital as they "raise their children, cook for their lovers, visit temples, shrines and mosques, complain about pimps and brothel owners, listen to film songs, and solicit and entertain customers". The book seeks to paint a portrait of women for whom sex is a way to make a living. The book contains photography described by the publishers as "haunting"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Fedya,_His_Dog,_and_His_Cat"title="Uncle Fedya, His Dog, and His Cat">
Fyodor lives in the apartment with his parents, who call him "Uncle" because of his seriousness, independence, and intelligence. He learns to read at 4, and starts cooking for himself at 6. Unlike his mother, he is very fond of animals. One day he meets a stray talking cat, who used to spend his nights in the attic but has nowhere to live now due to the house repair works. Fyodor takes the cat home, but his mother doesn't let him keep it, so the boy decides to run away and take his cat with him. The next day, they leave a note to Fyodor's parents and take a bus to a rural area. Fyodor names the cat Matroskin. They arrive in a village called Prostokvashino "(lit. Soured milk village)", and settle in an empty house. A talking dog named Sharik promises to guard their new house, so they all start living together.The next day they go swimming and on their way back meet with curious Pechkin the Postmaster. He insists that they subscribe to something. Fyodor chooses "Murzilka", Sharik opts for "something about hunting" and Matroskin politely refuses, saying that he would rather save money.Fyodor's parents miss their son and begin looking for him. They publish a missing person article in the newspaper. Meanwhile, Matroskin decides to buy a cow. Unfortunately, they do not have any money. Fyodor suggests that they look for a buried treasure in the forest. They walk to the forest, find a hill with a cave, and Fyodor starts digging nearby. He indeed finds a chest with money and jewels. They all decide to buy presents for themselves. Sharik wants a gun for hunting and a dog collar with medallions; Matroskin needs a cow (he decides to "borrow" one at the local service bureau and try it out before making a purchase); Fyodor wants to buy a bike, but his friends convince him to get a tractor instead, because it is much more practical.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kukotsky_Enigma"title="The Kukotsky Enigma">
The novel follows the life of the family of gynecologist Pavel Alekseevich Kukotsky. The story follows him from Stalin’s 1936 ban on abortions through the mid-1960s.The novel consists of four parts. The first describes the life of the Kukotsky family members before the 1960s: his wife Yelena, their adopted daughter Tanya, a classmate Toma, and a former nun working as a housekeeper in Yelena’s home. The second part is a dream Yelena experiences while hovering between life and death. The third part covers the life of the family after 1960 and up to Tanya's death. The fourth part forms a brief epilogue.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_All_in_Your_Head_(book)"title="It's All in Your Head (book)">
In this book, O’Sullivan recounts her most memorable interactions of patients with severe physical symptoms that she found to come from their mental state in a total of twelve chapters. She starts the book introducing herself and providing information on her medical career and her passion for neurology and mental disorders.The story is not sequential, instead each chapter depicts a different memory of her interactions with her patients. Each patient displays different symptoms varying in severity, but O’Sullivan comes to the same diagnosis and conclusion that these physical symptoms are actually psychosomatic disorders.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_the_R's"title="Rolling the R's">
R. Zamora Linmark presents the story of "Rolling the R’s" in a series of vignettes, offering readers glimpses into the lives of young people exploring their sexuality, education, assimilation into mainstream American society, and other aspects of their identity. The protagonists of the story are a group of fifth grade students living in Kalihi, Hawaii during the 1970s. There is no clear plot line, but there are specific character developments throughout the story. Edgar becomes more confident about his sexuality and gains more control over the ways he uses his body. With Edgar's help, Vicente also begins to accept his queer sexuality. The recent immigrants (Florante, Mai Lin, Vicente) become more comfortable with their language usage, consequentially also becoming more confident in their ethnic identities and racial histories. Examples of racial and ethnic prejudice between groups, and the stress caused by their teachers' demands that they speak standard English in the classroom rather than pidgin, become more pervasive throughout the novel. These experiences cause the characters to gain self-confidence and strengthen their friendships in order to maintain their sense of well-being in Kalihi.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_(Vaz_novel)"title="Mariana (Vaz novel)">
The plot retells the seventeenth-century romance between Mariana Alcoforado, a nun at the Convent of Beja, and an officer in the French army.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katy_(novel)"title="Katy (novel)">
Katy and her siblings often sneak next door to their neighbour's back garden, calling it a secret garden. They play all sorts of games.She has a best friend Cecy, who comes to the secret garden too. Katy's family consists of her dad, who is a doctor, Izzie, her stepmother, Clover, her sister who is described as sweet and kind, Elsie, her stepsister who she does not get along with, and her half siblings, twins Dorry and Jonnie, and 'little' Phil.During the school holidays, her father’s old patient, Helen, comes on a visit. Helen is in a wheelchair due to rheumatic arthritis. Katy and her siblings are inspired by her deeply. At the end of Helen's visit, she produces one of her possessions, a seahorse necklace, and decides to give it to Katy. Katy vows to treasure it forever.One day during the summer, Katy decides to sneak out to go to a skatepark, but she can't find it. In despair, she decides to go back home but breaks the chain on her seahorse necklace in the process. Her stepmother Izzie grounds her for sneaking out, and Katy is not allowed to go to the swimming pool with the rest of her family.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_East_and_the_West"title="The East and the West">
The book is divided into six chapters (excluding introduction).Vivekananda told the culture, the social customs of India is quite different from the Western countries. He claimed that religion ("dharma") is the foundation of India.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Twisters"title="Night of the Twisters">
At 5:00 p.m. on the afternoon of June 3, 1980, three hours before the tornadic thunderstorm hits Hall County, Danny and his best friend Arthur Darlington – an inquisitive California native with six sisters – take a bike trip to the Mormon Island State Recreation Area to go on their first swim of the summer, where they discuss the art class taught by Danny's aunt, Goldie, where Arthur created a bull roarer as part of a Native American crafts project (and accidentally broke a light bulb in the basement with); while at Mormon Island, they run into Arthur's 14-year-old older sister Stacey – whom Danny is infatuated with – and 10-year-old younger sister Ronnie Vae, whom Arthur declines to give a ride home before the storm hits. On their way home, Danny and Arthur are foreshadowed with the oncoming storm, when they endure strong winds as they cut through the Fonner Park parking lot and Sand Crane Drive.An hour later, Danny asks his mother Linda – who quit her job as a hairdresser to take care of her infant son Ryan after he was born – to see if Arthur can stay for dinner, while his father John plans to head out to his parents' farm in Phillips after dinner to fix his father's broken tractor. After dinner, Goldie arrives to borrow Linda's bowling ball to attend a bowling league night at Meves Bowl, as the boys are about to take a bike ride through their neighborhood, where they run into their elderly neighbor, Belle Smiley, whose hair Linda is supposed to style before a church bazaar that Friday – and visit the Darlington's house. When they return to the Hatch house, as Linda sews a birthday dress for Grandma Hatch, Arthur sits down to watch television, and as Danny looks for snacks, the show they turned to on KGIN (referred to in the book by its real-life brand name, "10/11," in reference to Lincoln parent station KOLN and its Grand Island-based satellite) is interrupted by a severe weather bulletin about a tornado and funnel cloud sightings north of Grand Island, in St. Paul and Dannebrog. Several minutes after Linda leaves to check on Mrs. Smiley after being unable to contact her by phone, and placing Danny and Arthur in charge of looking after Ryan, tornado sirens blare as a worried Danny tries to phone his grandmother to warn his grandparents and John of the oncoming tornado, only for the siren to abruptly cut off after Danny hangs up when the phone line cuts out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monk_as_Man"title="The Monk as Man">
Swami Vivekananda's personal life's troubles, anxiety, his health, diseases, intimate side of him —these are the main topics of the book. In this book, Shankar portrayed "The Monk" as "a man". The book is divided into five chapters (except "Foreword" and "Acknowledgement")—
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumplin'"title="Dumplin'">
Willowdean, nicknamed "Dumplin’" by her mother and called "Will" by her friends, is a plus-size teenager who has always felt comfortable with her body and herself. She doesn't care that her mother was a teen beauty queen or that people have poked fun at her weight. However, all of these changes when she meets Bo, a handsome teenage boy her age that has expressed interest in dating her. Suddenly Will is full of insecurities and can't bring herself to date him out of fear of what others would think and say. In order to prove to her self-worth, Will has decided to enter and win the Miss Teen Blue Bonnet Pageant. But, as the date of the pageant approaches, Will finds that it's not that easy to take part in a pageant — especially after her best friend Ellen decides to enter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyes_in_the_Fishbowl"title="Eyes in the Fishbowl">
Fourteen-year-old Dion James lives with his charming but improvident father in an apartment in an unnamed city. Dion is forced to work to help support himself and his father. He began working at age eight as a shoeshine boy near Alcott-Simpson's, an upscale department store. He became fascinated with the large, luxurious store, spending many hours there and fantasizing about owning the store or just living in it. An Alcott-Simpson's clerk named Madame Stregovitch befriended him, and he often visits her at the store.Dion notices a tense atmosphere in Alcott-Simpson's, and hears rumors of vandalism and strange events there. He sees a beautiful girl his own age, with black eyes and long black hair, escape from a guard who is chasing her because she is wearing a sweater from the store with the price tag still attached (suggesting she is attempting to shoplift the sweater). One day, Dion hears a scream from the store mezzanine. He tries to see what is causing the commotion, but becomes worried about encountering the store security guards lest he be unfairly blamed, and ends up hiding from them under a bed in the furniture department and getting stuck in the store after closing time. He is found by the girl he saw earlier, who introduces herself as Sara and helps him leave the store.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side_Effects_May_Vary"title="Side Effects May Vary">
Alice is sixteen and has been diagnosed with leukemia. She's been warned that she may not have long to live, so Alice has decided that she's going to use her remaining time in order to accomplish things she's always wanted to do, even if doing so may come across as cruel or unkind. Her friend Harvey has agreed to assist her during this process and together the two manage to exact revenge on her ex-boyfriend and enemies, while also taking part in positive things like revisiting her past. However just as she's managed to complete her plans for revenge, Alice discovers that she's in remission - and will live. Now she has to deal with the fallout from her actions and try to find a way to deal with what she's done and her complicated feelings for Harvey, who has always loved her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Ancient_World"title="History of the Ancient World">
The book "History of the Ancient World" provides information on the history of the ancient states in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China. It also includes the history of ancient Greece and Rome up to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD. Its several chapters deal with religious views, art, and culture of the peoples of the ancient world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.S._I_Still_Love_You"title="P.S. I Still Love You">
After the fight between Lara Jean, Josh and Peter at the Coveys' Christmas party, Lara Jean realizes that she has fallen for Peter. Hoping to reconcile, Lara Jean heads over to Peter's house with a love letter she hopes for him to read. After a brief talk, the two almost kiss but his brother interrupts and then they decide they want to be a real couple. At school, Lara Jean discovers that someone has posted a video of her and Peter making out in the hot tub from the ski trip. A rumor spreads that the two were having sex. After seeing the video during school, Peter is furious and warns the anonymous poster not to mess with Lara Jean.Before Margot leaves to go back to college in Scotland, she tells Lara Jean to get a job. Taking Margot's advice, but not wanting to work at the hospital gift shop like her dad suggested, Lara Jean makes up a story on how she’s volunteering to start a scrapbooking class at the Belleview retirement home. Not wanting her family to find out the truth, Lara Jean goes to get the job and ends up liking it. She gets closer to Stormy, an elderly woman who has a feisty temper. Stormy gives Lara Jean relationship advice, though it usually contradicts with Lara Jean’s thoughts. Meanwhile, Kitty begins an attempt to set up their father with the neighbor across the street, Trina Rothschild.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Dark_(Kuprin_novel)"title="In the Dark (Kuprin novel)">
Traveling by night train, Zinaida Pavlovna is rescued from the unwelcome attentions of a fellow passenger by Alarin, a young engineer whom she falls in love with. In the town she takes up the position of a governess in the household of the rich industrialist Kashperov who determines to possess her. Having learned of Alarin's facing imprisonment for gambling away official funds, Zinaida offer herself to Kashperov for money, so as to repay her beloved one's debt. Admiring her selflessness, Kashperov gives her the money unconditionally. Recognizing nothing but base greed in Alarin's response, Zinaida is filled with contempt for him. She falls ill from nervous shock, and dies. Kashperov kills himself by drinking prussic acid, and Alarin leaves the town a broken man.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faery_Rebels"title="Faery Rebels">
## Knife.Knife is a young faery hunter. The faery race is dying off and Knife is convinced that humanity may hold the key to saving them from almost certain extinction as their magic is slowly disappearing, and will not last much longer. However her Queen is adamant that faeries and humans should never mix. Despite this, Knife defies her ruler, meeting and befriending the paraplegic artist Paul McCormick, to whom she is instantly and inexplicably drawn.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narendra_Dai"title="Narendra Dai">
The novel has many Characters, viz. Narendra dai, Gauri, Munaria, Sannani and the narrator. Munaria is a poor girl living with her father and working at Narendra's home. Narendra is a wealthy man married with Gauri, but he dislikes her and loves Munaria. So a love triangle develops in between them as Gauri likes Narendra. Narendra has huge name and fame in the community. The family tries to develop a well relation between Gauri &amp; Narendra but fails every time. The narrator always feels sorry for Gauri and dislikes Munaria. Kaptanni Aama is the cause of twist in the novel as she prefers racial discrimination. One day Munaria gives water to a Sarkee man which is of low standard and Kaptanni aama sees this. Kaptanni aama becomes angry and throws unorthodox words upon Munaria. Narendra becomes angry too with Kaptanni aama and vows to leave the village as no one was able to convince him. The next day not only Narendra but Munaria too leaves the village with him. As the narrator grows he went Banaras, India for higher studies. One day he sees Munaria in the city. At that stage, he finds that Narendra had already left for village due to tuberculosis and will never be with Munaria. Munaria is living her saddest life compelling sharing her body with Narendra's betrayer friend. Narrator slowly feels that Munaria is good girl. On the other hand, Narendra reaches the village and loves Gauri living happily. But one day Narendra dies due to tuberculosis. Gauri sti becomes happy thinking that she get love from her husband although at last but finally grabbed it. Thus she lives a life of widow happily and don't throw Sindoor and Potay as other widow's do. Some years after narrator gets a news that Gauri died in 1990 earthquake after 9 days of injury because whole house fall down upon her and unable to escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_Country_(novel)"title="Cat Country (novel)">
The unnamed first-person narrator's spaceship crash-lands on Mars. His companion perishes in the crash, and he is stranded alone on Mars. He soon meets the planet's inhabitants, who have the faces of cats but otherwise appear human, and is captured by some of these cats and meets the leader of the group, called Scorpion, a landlord who owns a plantation of "reverie leaves", an addictive drug reminiscent of opium that is used by all cats. The narrator is employed by Scorpion to guard his reverie leaves and eventually learns Felinese and gets acquainted with the country and its culture, guided by Scorpion and his son Young Scorpion. He encounters many problems in society, including ill-treatment of women, lack of hygiene and poor building standards, culminating in a visit to a school where a single gunshot makes the walls collapse. The schools give out university diplomas on the first day, and the museums are filled with empty rooms as the contents have been sold off to foreigners. The political debate is dominated by "brawls", political parties modeled after foreign systems, with the currently leading ideology being "Everybody Shareskyism", whose leader killed and then replaced the cats' emperor, and slogans composed of pseudo-Russian gibberish. Many cat people are killed in a revolution, and finally the country is invaded by a foreign power. The invaders lock up the remaining cat people in a cage, and they end up biting each other to death. Some months later, the narrator is rescued by a passing French spacecraft.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonstar_Odyssey"title="Moonstar Odyssey">
In the distant future a planet settled by humans was once all airless moon rock. Human terraforming has transformed the moon into a world of shallow oceans and islands which are the peaks for the former moon craters.A young girl, Jobe, is sent to Option, the island of learning on the planet, to decide who she must be. When one of the gigantic opaque plasma shields that surround and protect the planet is destroyed, Jobe realizes she must begin her quest that the moonstar has destined for her long ago.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thanksgiving_Story"title="The Thanksgiving Story">
Passengers aboard the "Mayflower", "Giles", "Constance" and "Damaris Hopkins" are on the way to the New World to start a new life with their parents. Their baby brother Oceanus is born on the crowded ship. On their arrival, the Pilgrims face hardships of hunger, cold and sickness. They go through a harsh winter in Plymouth. When spring comes, the settlers plant crops with the help of two Native Americans, Samoset and Squanto. Due to the help of the Native Americans, the Pilgrims are able to survive their first year. The story concludes with a great feast to which the Pilgrims invite the Native American chief Massasoit, Squanto and their people who helped them survive hunger, cold and sickness in the New World.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_the_Lion"title="Andy and the Lion">
A little boy named Andy is so interested in lions that he goes to the library and searches for a book about lions. That same night, his grandfather tells him a bedtime story about lions. Andy is so fascinated by the story that he has a dream about lions that same night. The next day, on his way to school, Andy meets a real lion. The lion has a thorn stuck in his paw and Andy helps pull the thorn out. This action makes Andy and the lion friends. Later in the story, a circus comes to Andy's town and of course, Andy attends. During the lion act, one of the lions jumps out of the cage, into the audience, right in front of Andy. Andy thinks it's the last day of his life. But lo and behold, it is his friend the lion, the very same one Andy had helped earlier to take the thorn out of his paw. Andy and the lion rejoice in the excitement of seeing one another again. When the crowd attempts to capture the lion, Andy protects it. The next day, there is a parade, and Andy and the lion are in the lead. Andy receives an award for bravery. At the end of the story, Andy returns the book about lions that he borrowed from the library, pulling his friend the lion behind him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Regulation_Institute"title="The Time Regulation Institute">
The main character is Hayri İrdal, who narrates the novel and presents it like a memoir. The novel discusses his and other people's formation of the Time Regulation Institute, which changes the time on Turkey's clocks to that used in the West and educate public about the importance of "being on top of one's own time". Before the Institute, Hayri Irdal meets a psychiatrist named Dr Ramiz, who later introduces İrdal to Halit Ayarcı (the Regulator). Halit Ayarcı decides to establish the institute after talking about time while drinking rakı with Hayri İrdal. According to Saïd Sayrafiezadeh of "Publishers Weekly" the narrative starts late in the novel. Later in the novel, Hayri Itdal publishes a novel depicting himself and other characters at the Siege of Vienna.The plot is a reference to the 1926 Gregorian Calendar Act by Kemal Atatürk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inés_of_My_Soul"title="Inés of My Soul">
This historical novel is about the main facts of the life of Inés (an important figure in Chile), written in older Ines' first-person voice, with its intended audience to be Ines' adoptive daughter, Isabel.In the first chapter, "Europe, 1500-1537", she describes her life in Plasencia, Spain, mainly her married life and affair with Juan of Málaga, in addition to her hard trip to America, motivated not only to find her husband, but also to find freedom.In "America, 1537-1540", she relates to us her life in The Cuzco, the decadence of the Incan empire under Francisco Pizarro and the political problems that they faced. Also, she begins her relationship with Pedro de Valdivia, who develops an obsession to conquer Chile, promoted by what was told to him by the old Diego of Almagro.In the chapters of "Trip to Chile, 1540-1541" and "Santiago of the New Extremadura, 1541-1543" she talks about the hard conquest of Chile, the life with Pedro of Valdivia and how the two founded the capital of the country together."The Tragic Years, 1543-1549" deal with the poverty of the first years of Santiago as a city and her marriage with Rodrigo of Quiroga when Pedro of Valdivia goes back in an expedition to Peru, in search of more soldiers and settlers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bitch_(novel)"title="The Bitch (novel)">
Ladies man Nico Constantine comes to Las Vegas to make a killing at the casinos but ends up owing the mob, big time. Nico then meets the beautiful and wealthy Fontaine Khaled and sees her as a potential mark.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farm_Boy_(novel)"title="Farm Boy (novel)">
The story begins in "Burrow", a farm house in Devon where the protagonist, a young boy at the beginning of the story, visits his Grandpa. The young boy enjoys regularly visiting his Grandpa, especially during the summer, and imagining himself driving the old green Fordson tractor in the back of the barn. It is acknowledged that this tractor is very important. The grandfather tells the protagonist the story behind how he loves swallows- that they were the first birds he ever saw and when his Father was young (the great-grandfather of the protagonist) the Father would go out and pinch the eggs of sparrows and rooks because they would always interfere with the farm; his Father would leave the swallows' nests alone because they never bothered his farm. In fact, Father even punched a friend for stealing from a swallow's nest, getting Father into trouble. Father is described as always managing to get into fights when he was younger.The protagonist's Grandpa then went on to describe events between his own Father and a horse named Joey, indicating that the pair were Albert and Joey from the prequel. He describes the lengths his Father went to keep Joey safe, even joining the army to find Joey when he was taken away to be used in WWI. Father was only 14 years old at the time of joining the army and had to lie to get in. This section is primarily a flashback to the previous book and the events around and before the war, but from another perspective. After such events and the end of WWI, the protagonist's great-grandfather was commonly referred to as the "Corporal" by the townspeople.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oʻtgan_kunlar"title="Oʻtgan kunlar">
The novel covered the events of 19th century. The events were presented by the love story of Otabek and Kumush, the leading characters. The course of events takes place in an environment of bloody struggles of local rulers for power. In Days Gone By, as in other major epics, we encounter the multiplicity of storytelling, the presence of secondary subjects, and a series of escalating and tragic events.The image of Otabek, who promotes progressive ideas, is the ideological and compositional center of the novel. He openly opposed the outdated economic relations in trade and pursued a new approach to family and marital problems. There is a conflict between Otabek and the forces that cling to the old, delay the development of the country. Abdulla Qodiriy speaks on behalf of his protagonist.At the same time, the writer follows the fate of an Uzbek woman. Cruel traditions, including polygamy, lead to a deadly feud between Kumush and Zaynab.With extraordinary love and sincerity, the writer creates the image of Kumush, who overcomes the trials of life with a pure, all-encompassing love for Otabek. But tragedy is inevitable. She was poisoned by concubine, and Otabek died defending his homeland
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Society"title="The Secret Society">
"The Secret Society" examines Cecil Rhodes, his life and the secret society he founded with the ambition of bringing the world under British rule. The book suggests the society continued to have influence in British and world affairs, citing the Rhodes Scholarship and alleged links between the society and Chatham House and alleged influence on the peace terms to end World War I and appeasement of Hitler. The book draws on diaries and letters and also investigates and supports suggestions Rhodes was gay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karan_Ghelo"title="Karan Ghelo">
The Rajput king Karan Vaghela rules Anhilwad Patan, a large kingdom located in north Gujarat, and is well-served by his prime minister, Madhav. It happens one day that he comes face-to-face with Madhav's wife, Roopsundari (who, like all well-born women, lives in seclusion) and has a chat with her. The king becomes besotted by her and, after pondering for a long time, decides to set aside all considerations of decency and propriety in order to avail himself of the woman. He sends the minister away on a mission and, in his absence, abducts Roopsundari. Madhav's brother is killed by the king's men while making a heroic but vain attempt to protect his sister-in-law. Later the same day, his wife Gunasundari commits Sati by immolating herself on the funeral pyre of her valiant husband. The hapless Roopsundari, after being abducted and taken to the palace, kills herself before it is possible for the king to ruin her virtue. She dies with her chastity intact, and the king has gained nothing but infamy for his despicable deed.He has also made a dangerous and relentless enemy. His former minister Madhav has escaped the devastation of his family. He abandons Anhilwad Patan for good and makes his way to Delhi. On his way, he experiences many adventures, including several wonderful ones at the almost mystical Mount Abu. Madhav eventually reaches Delhi, where he persuades the Muslim sultan Allauddin Khilji to invade Gujarat, promising him all help in the venture and much plunder at the end of it. As former minister, Madhav is a knowledgeable and influential man. With his help, Khilji invades Gujarat, destroys Patan fort and plunders the treasures of that kingdom and of several others. On his part, King Karan Vaghela performs many heroic feats on battlefield, but eventually loses not just his kingdom but also his wife, Kaularani.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor_and_the_Kite"title="The Emperor and the Kite">
In Imperial China, there is an emperor who has four sons and three daughters that meant the world to him. He, later on, has a fourth daughter named Djeow Seow. This emperor barely pays attention to the small and young Djeow Seow. One day these "bad" men come and take the emperor from his throne to an isolated and secluded tower and then lie to everyone that the emperor is dead. The "bad" men did not notice Djeow Seow watching all the events unfold from a corner. She preserves her father's life by sending him baskets of food via kite to the hidden tower. The daughter used to play with her kite every day because no one noticed or paid any attention to her. This being her chance, she thinks of the idea to use her kite string to rescue her father. The emperor then slides down along the string of the kite to safety and returns home to reclaim China from these people who kidnapped him. He rules happily with his youngest daughter now by his side, showering her with love and affection after the events that unfolded.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_from_the_Well"title="The Girl from the Well">
## "The Girl from the Well".Okiku is a restless spirit that has been wandering the earth. As her own life was stolen from her by a murderer, Okiku devotes her afterlife to finding and killing anyone that has taken the life of a child, as well as helping other ghosts find the eternal rest that she has continually been denied. It's an unhappy existence and one that seems like it will be forever unchanging until she meets Tark, a teenage boy whose body contains evil that's only barely contained by tattoos that cover his body.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_When_Stardust_Fell"title="The Year When Stardust Fell">
The menace in this story consists of dust from the tail of a comet. It consists of a colloid, analogous to smoke, that incorporates an unknown transuranic element. That element has a great affinity for metal surfaces and it weakens their surface tension, thereby enabling rapidly moving parts to cold weld themselves into solid rigidity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_to_the_Bone_(novel)"title="Close to the Bone (novel)">
Logan McRae is still living in a caravan, his girlfriend, Samantha, is still unresponsive and someone is leaving bones on his doorstep. Besides all this he has to cope with Detective Inspector Steel, a string of assaults and someone who is going around and Necklacing people. More murders follow and the filming of a novel about witchcraft seems to be inspiring the Necklacing murders. This leads to a confrontation with McRae's erstwhile boss, David Insch, ex DI from Grampian Police, who is now on the production team for the film.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pransakha_Vivekananda"title="Pransakha Vivekananda">
The novel is based on the life of Swami Vivekananda. The books presents the eventful life of Vivekananda to the readers in form of a story, and not a mere biography.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_Explainer"title="Thing Explainer">
In "Thing Explainer", Randall Munroe explains the function and mechanics of 54 subjects using only the 1,000 most commonly used words in the English language. The book covers a wide range of topics, including pencils ("writing sticks"), cameras ("picture takers"), and microwave ovens ("food-heating radio boxes"), airplane engines ("sky boat pushers"), and atom bombs ("machines for burning cities"). Besides technology, Munroe also explains human organs and conceptual subjects such as the periodic table. The book challenges its readers to figure out what the technical name is of the subjects it describes, and was described by Jack Schofield of "ZDNet" as a "puzzle game."The book is illustrated using stick figures and includes a large number of nerdy jokes. Peter Gleick wrote for "The Huffington Post" that science communicators often use many uncommon and long words when describing complex topics, and that "Thing Explainer" explores "how to explain ideas and offer information in a simpler way."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bird's_Nest_(novel)"title="The Bird's Nest (novel)">
Each chapter of the novel follows a specific character. Chapter One follows Elizabeth, a shy, rather colorless young woman who lives with her Aunt Morgen and works as a secretary at a local museum. She frequently suffers from headaches, backaches, and insomnia, but no one knows the reason. Elizabeth begins receiving threatening, handwritten letters addressing her as "Dirty Dirty Lizzy." One morning, Morgen accuses Elizabeth of sneaking out of the house at night; Elizabeth insists that she has no memory of doing so. Aunt Morgen continues to be suspicious, eventually deciding to take her to a doctor when Elizabeth makes some initially-unspecified vulgar comments during dinner at a dinner party hosted by the Arrows, friends of Morgen's. The doctor is unable to help Elizabeth, but refers her to Doctor Wright, a psychiatrist whom he believes could be of help.The next chapter follows Doctor Wright. He first interviews Elizabeth and gains her trust, eventually convincing her to submit to hypnosis so he can better understand her problem. During his second attempt, he encounters two of Elizabeth's alter personalities: Beth, a calm and friendly girl; and Betsy, who is childlike and whom Dr. Wright initially believes to be a demon. He is able to procure some minor details as to Elizabeth's mother's whereabouts (and finds out she had died several years before), which he believes to be the root of the problem. Betsy begins threatening to take over Elizabeth, and manages to one night. Dr. Wright, whom Betsy refuses to answer until he identifies himself as "Dr. Wrong," believes that he's subdued her, and agrees to let her be in control for a day. He then tries to summon Beth to tell her to fight Betsy's impulses, but instead speaks to Betsy pretending to be Beth. He rushes home and types a letter of resignation to Aunt Morgen. Before he has a chance to send it, he gets a call from Morgen informing him that Elizabeth has run away from home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Feather"title="The Blue Feather">
Simon is a teenage boy that has never fully recovered from an incident in his past that cost him one of his eyes. His counsellors Graham and Burwood have tried to get him to come out of his protective shell, but the boy will have none of it and frequently tries to run away. However, when they introduce him to the bird sanctuary owner Greg Muir, Simon finds himself intrigued - especially when he discovers that Muir is going on a trip to the Australian outback to search for a new type of bird rumoured to have an extraordinarily large wingspan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_the_Jewelled_Moth"title="The Mystery of the Jewelled Moth">
Sophie is an orphan who has been left penniless when her father dies. In "The Mystery of the Clockwork Sparrow", Sophie finds a job in the millinery department of Sinclair’s Department store and makes friends with Billy, a junior porter, and Lil, a “mannequin” by day and an aspiring actress by night.In "The Mystery of the Jewelled Moth", the Jewelled Moth, a priceless piece, disappears, and again Sophie, Lil and Billy have to solve the mystery, this time by infiltrating Lord Beaucastle’s fancy dress ball. Sophie had come face to face in "The Mystery of the Clockwork Sparrow" with the mysterious Baron, the arch-villain of the East End, and in "The Mystery of the Jewelled Moth", Sophie gets even closer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosopher_Kings_(novel)"title="The Philosopher Kings (novel)">
"The Philosopher Kings" is set fifteen years after the events described in "The Just City". The City, which was created by the time-traveling goddess Athena on the island of Thera prior to its Iron Age volcanic destruction, and then populated by people from all ages of human history and organized on the principles of Plato's "Republic", has now split into five feuding cities, while a further, sixth, faction has sailed away and remains lost.The god Apollo, who had chosen to live as a human in the original city, and, having married, is now the father of several children, is struck by a tragic loss, which causes him to become consumed with grief and a need for revenge. Though, being Apollo, he deals with these feelings rationally, his precocious teenage daughter Arete understands that these novel experiences (for a god) are leaving him unbalanced.With Arete and several of his sons, Apollo sets out by ship across the Aegean, in the company of sailors, soldiers and scholars, among them the by now 99 years old Florentine renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino. After a long voyage of exploration they discover the sixth, lost group from the City, which has been preaching Christianity to Iron Age Greeks. Apollo's confrontation with a longtime rival lets him finally start the healing process. Afterwards he turns toward peacemaking, but although he succeeds in his goals, the course of history seems by then to have been irrevocably changed by the anachronistic introduction of Christianity. It takes a surprising amount of divine power to put everything right again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unwanteds_(novel)"title="The Unwanteds (novel)">
On the island of Quill, anyone who displays artistic talent is Unwanted and sent to the Death Farm for execution when they turn thirteen. Alex Stowe, the son of two 'Necessaries', has two strikes against him and has known his fate since the age of ten. On the day of the annual Purge, he is declared an 'Unwanted' and sent to his death, along with twenty other young teens. Meanwhile, his twin brother, Aaron is declared a 'Wanted' and sent to the University for training as one of Quill's leaders. When Alex and the other Unwanteds are dropped off at The Great Lake Of Boiling Oil, however, they are shocked to find themselves welcomed into the magical land of Artimè, created, hidden, and led by a mage called Mr. Today ,with the help of his many staff. While Alex and his new friends learn magic from art and creativity, Aaron displays loyalty and usefulness by creating the Favored Farm, an exclusive farm intended to provide the Wanteds of Quill with an abundance of healthy plants and animals. Through this action, he attracts the notice of High Priest Justine and rises to the prominent position of her assistant secretary. Alex soon begins to miss his brother Aaron which leads to big mistakes on Alex's part.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight's_Last_Gleaming_(novel)"title="Twilight's Last Gleaming (novel)">
In the year 2024, significant oil reserves are discovered in the Indian Ocean, in Tanzanian territorial waters. The following year, U.S. President Jameson Weed and his staff meet in the White House. The United States of the year 2025 is suffering from a long period of economic stagnation, exacerbated by the effects of peak oil and global warming. Weed's plan to take control of the Tanzanian oil gets support from Vice President Leonard Gurney, a political hack, and from National Security Adviser Ellen Harbin, a hawkish neocon, but is opposed by Secretary of Defense Bill Stedman, who believes the plan is asking for trouble. Overconfident and unable to conceive of an American military defeat, the Weed administration decides to launch a regime-change operation, including threats, bribery attempts, paid rioters, and accusations that Tanzania is a ruthless dictatorship. Meanwhile, the President of Tanzania, refusing to yield his country's new-found wealth, and knowing that the United States has a history of fighting for oil, appeals to his country's ally, China, for protection.The members of the Chinese government's inner circle, knowing that they have reached military parity with the declining United States, follow a brilliant Chinese professor's plan to help China's client state while delivering a blow to American military prestige, and they receive eager assistance from America's numerous enemies and victims. China is able to keep its plan secret, and thus the American forces are taken by surprise when they launch the invasion in July 2025. The Chinese disable the American satellite network through a cyberattack, severely hampering American command and control, then launch hundreds of high-speed computer-guided cruise missiles which they had smuggled unobserved into Tanzania. The American fleet is not prepared to defend itself against this new generation of missiles. The Americans shoot down many of them, but as one missile after another finds its way through the ships' air defenses, the fleet is devastated: most of the ships, including the aircraft carrier USS "Ronald Reagan", are either sunk or disabled.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Washington_Was_in_Vogue"title="When Washington Was in Vogue">
Opening when Davy Carr arrives in Washington, D.C. in October 1922, "When Washington Was in Vogue" takes place over the fall and winter months, as Davy becomes introduced to and integrated into the social life of the black elite. His initiation comes about through the machinations of his landlady's daughter Caroline, who introduces him to her friends and ensures that he is invited to the city's best and most significant parties. As Davy gets to know the various members of the social scene, he becomes more and more suspicious of his fellow lodger, Jeffries, whose questionable activities include attending seedy cabarets, and may extend to theft or money laundering. The tension between the two comes to a head when Jeffries invites Caroline to join him and his friends at a cabaret. Davy follows the two, and arrives just as Jeffries attempts to rape Caroline. To the surprise of everyone present, Davy floors Jeffries with one punch and carries the unconscious Caroline out. After this episode, Caroline's reckless behavior diminishes and her respect for Davy increases—facts that everyone but Davy himself can plainly see. The last months of Davy's stay in Washington, D. C. are spent studying at the Library of Congress and enjoying the friendships he has made. Although his letters to Bob betray a fixation on Caroline and his relationship with her, Davy does not consider her as a romantic option until just before he is scheduled to depart. When he finally voices his feelings to Caroline, she responds: "I think I loved you from the first day." They embrace, and the novel ends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_(novel)"title="Paris (novel)">
The novel follows six families: the Le Sourds (a revolutionary family), the de Cygnes (a noble family), the Renards (a bourgeois family of merchants), the Blanchards (a family of Napoleon supporters), the Gascons (a family from the slums) and the Jacobs (an art dealing Jewish family). The book follows two timelines throughout, containing a large number of characters and is based on real events.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dreaming_City"title="The Dreaming City">
Elric, emperor of Melniboné, returns to the dreaming city of Imrryr where he plans to slay his cousin, Yyrkoon, and reclaim his love Cymoril with an armada of mercenary ships. After the mercenaries lay waste to Melniboné's outer defenses, Elric guides his fleet through a secret maze of caves to reach the civilization within. As the fighting continues, Elric steals away to meet Cymoril at a hidden spot among the city's towers but finds her imprisoned by Yyrkoon, who attacks him with a powerful spell. Elric battles his cousin with the soul-devouring, rune-forged sword Stormbringer and defeats him but kills Cymoril by accident.Ruined by grief, Elric flees the smoldering ruins of Melniboné with the remainder of his mercenary fleet, whose strength is depleted by the attack and subsequent looting of the city's riches. The fleet is surprised by the warships of Melniboné and the dragons which had been roused by the attack. Elric calls upon the black magic passed down to him by his ancestors to aid their escape, but the pursuers move swiftly to overtake the mercenaries. Unable to summon enough strength to save all the ships, Elric saves only himself and his crewmen, speeding away on the winds of elemental forces.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_Silence"title="Island of Silence">
One day, two silent, orange-eyed teenagers, named Sky and Crow, have arrived on a raft. While Artimé seems to continue along normally, Eva Fathom, a supposed Restorer, is spying on Quill and passing along information to Sean Ranger. Mr. Today starts to teach Alex how to be a head mage, and devises a plan to trick Aaron. The plan backfires. Aaron confronts Mr. Today and kills him using five heart-attack spells that Alex invented, thus destroying Artimé.Meanwhile, Alex and Simber, one of Mr. Today's statues, go out on a search for three of Alex's missing friends, Meghan Ranger, Samheed Burkesh and Lani Haluki. They rescue Meghan and discover that Samheed and Lani have been captured by a neighboring island, Warbler. On the way back, Simber freezes and crashes into the sea. Alex and Meghan barely avoid death. At the same time, the Restorers attack Artimé and cause chaos. High Priest Haluki gets captured, along with Mr. Today's daughter, Claire Morning, by the Restorers. Aaron becomes Associate High Priest (aka High Priest in disguise), and plans to destroy Artimé.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ,_the_Messenger"title="Christ, the Messenger">
In his lecture, Vivekananda has compared the entire human existence to an ocean, where an individual's life is like waves. He has compared human lives with the waves rising on the ocean, and then falling down. Jesus is like a big wave that comes very rarely. Vivekananda called Jesus "The great soul, the Messenger."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dagger_and_the_Coin"title="The Dagger and the Coin">
## "The Dragon's Path".Sir Geder Palliako is a minor knight in the Imperial Antean Army during the capture of the Free City of Vanai. Eventually, he becomes the Protector of Vanai. As ruler of the city, he causes a famine resulting in a riot that causes Geder to destroy the city. After returning to Camnipol, Geder becomes a hero. This causes him to go on a journey that leads to the discovery of the Cult of the Spider Goddess and the priest, Basrahip.Cithrin bel Sarcour is the ward of the Medean Bank in Vanai. As the Antean Army approaches Vanai, she is charged with moving the bulk of the bank's assets into the city of Carse. Despite this, she stops in another city called Porte Oliva where she founds her own branch of the bank.Sir Dawson Kalliam is a noble member of the Antean Court and childhood friend of King Simeon. He discovers and fights against a plot to assassinate Prince Aster, the heir to the Antean throne.Captain Marcus Wester is a former war hero now looking for other work. Marcus and his men join a caravan leaving Vanai before the siege and end up protecting Cithrin.Clara Annalise Kalliam is the wife of Dawson Kalliam. She works with Dawson to discover the root of the plot against the prince's life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crime_of_the_Congo"title="The Crime of the Congo">
The book was intended as an exposé of the situation in the so-called Congo Free State (labelled a "rubber regime" by Conan Doyle), an area occupied and designated as the personal property of Leopold II of Belgium and where the serious human rights abuses were occurring. Indigenous people in the region were being brutally exploited and tortured, particularly in the lucrative rubber trade. In the introduction to "The Crime of the Congo" Conan Doyle wrote: "I am convinced that the reason why public opinion has not been more sensitive upon the question of the Congo Free State is that the terrible story has not been brought thoroughly home to the people", a situation he intended to rectify. Conan Doyle was "strongly of the opinion" that the crimes committed on the Congo were "the greatest to be ever known", and he lauded the work of the Congo Reform Association. Conan Doyle was dismissive of the annexation of the state by Belgium, a situation intended to end the personal rule of the King. Conan Doyle noted that slavery and ivory poaching continued to occur after annexation and that "The Congo State was founded by the Belgian King, and exploited by Belgian capital, Belgian soldiers and Belgian concessionnaires. It was defended and upheld by successive Belgian Governments, who did all they could to discourage the Reformers".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_(graphic_novel)"title="Empire (graphic novel)">
Thousands of years in the future, a powerful device has been hidden in separate pieces. Qrelon, whose planet was destroyed by the empire, leads a small group of rebels that risks everything to collect the pieces of the device that, once complete, will be the weapon powerful enough to destroy the planet-sized computer that runs the empire. Wryn, an archaeology student, is chosen by the empire to assassinate the rebel leader.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Rain"title="Racing the Rain">
Shirtless and barefoot for most of his youth, Quenton Cassidy grew up exploring the natural environment surrounding his neighborhood nestled between the Loxahatchee River and the Atlantic Ocean. Racing the Rain introduces the reader to Quenton in elementary school where he plays games, runs foot races, and feeds his curiosity with his best friends Stiggs and Randleman. Breaks of ice-cold Kool-Aid and frothy A&amp;W root beer divide the hot Florida days. Quenton's small stature, big mouth, and affinity for practical jokes often gets him into trouble with teachers and other students. That is, until he becomes friends with Trapper.Trapper Nelson is both man and legend. He is the real-life swamp man who “wrestled alligators for fun, [and] laughed at poisonous snakes.” When Trapper becomes friends with Quenton, the two strike a business deal when Trapper recognizes Quenton's extraordinary ability to hold his breath and dive deep into the water. He teaches Quenton about life on the Loxahatchee fishing, trapping, and entertaining influential men with wildlife shows, poker, and beer. Taking Quenton under his wing, Trapper becomes a pivotal influence in Quenton's life. Though Quenton's first love is basketball, Trapper convinces Quneton to try out long distant running on the side. Quenton is a natural runner due to his efficiency in using oxygen. He can't bring himself to give up basketball, but Quenton begins to recognize his own talents. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_on_Fire_(Kelman_novel)"title="Man on Fire (Kelman novel)">
## Summary.The novel follows Nayak and John Lock, an Englishman that has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. He has left his life and spouse behind in order to elope to India under the pretense of committing suicide. Once in India he meets Nayak and decides to help the man break the world record for breaking the most baseball bats on his shin bone.Ultimately, John's wife Ellen tracks him down in India and there is a confrontation between the two.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numero_Zero"title="Numero Zero">
The story is told by Colonna, a hack journalist, now in his fifties, and a loser. He is hired by Simei to work on a newspaper called "Domani" ("Tomorrow") that will never be published. The venture is financed by Commendator Vimercate, who owns a television channel, a dozen magazines and runs a chain of hotels and rest homes. The declared aim of the newspaper is to reveal the truth about everything, to publish all the news that's fit to print "plus a little more," but Commendator Vimercate's true interest lies elsewhere. His "zero issues" will be seen by powerful figures high up in the world of finance and politics who don't want the truth to be revealed. They'll put pressure on Vimercate to close down the newspaper and, in return, will allow him into the inner sanctum of power.Colonna meets the other members of the editorial staff: Braggadocio used to work for a scandal magazine called "What They Never Tell Us"; Cambria spent his nights as a hack reporter hanging around police stations; Lucidi probably works for the secret service; Palatino has spent his career working on puzzle and crossword magazines; Costanza was a sub-editor for various newspapers until they grew so large that no one bothered any longer to check what was being printed; lastly, Maia Fresia worked on a celebrity romance magazine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_(Dekker_and_Lee_novel)"title="Sovereign (Dekker and Lee novel)">
In the nine years after Rom Sebastian became the hero of the land, his alliance has suffered enormous setbacks. Only 36 of his truly alive followers survived. A huge battle with the government The Order has left them scattered and deeply divided, unsure of their strategy and power.Losing hope, Rom and the team must band together and find new allies against The Order, more evil and virulent than ever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sellout_(novel)"title="The Sellout (novel)">
The narrator and most of the characters are African-Americans in an urban farming area in the fictional town of Dickens, California. The story begins with the narrator (referred to as either "me" or "Bonbon") standing trial before the Supreme Court for crimes related to his attempt to restore slavery and segregation in his hometown of Dickens, an "agrarian ghetto" on the outskirts of Los Angeles, California. Sitting before the court, Bonbon starts to reflect on what led up to this moment and recounts his upbringing. Bonbon had a tenuous relationship with his father, an unorthodox sociologist who performed numerous traumatizing social experiments on him as a child and held lofty expectations for Bonbon to become a respected community leader in Dickens. A few years before the Supreme Court case, Bonbon’s father is murdered by the police, after which Bonbon struggles to find his identity and a purpose in life. At first, Bonbon is content to withdraw from the community and continue his agricultural endeavors of growing artisanal watermelons and marijuana without his father’s judgement.One day, however, the town of Dickens spontaneously disappears from the map and becomes unincorporated, a change that Bonbon attributes to Dickens’ undesirable socioeconomic and racial demographics. Bonbon sets out to restore Dickens’ existence through any means possible. Bonbon enlists the help of Hominy Jenkins, an old man and former child actor, to paint provocative road signs and boundary lines that draw attention to Dickens’ existence. After those attempts are fruitless, Bonbon continues a step further and attempts to reinstitute both slavery and segregation in Dickens and bring back what he believes to be a unifying power structure in the town. He first attempts to re-segregate a public bus driven by his ex-girlfriend by posting "white-only signs" in the front of the bus. He later tries to open an all-white school next to the local high school. Meanwhile, Hominy offers to become Bonbon’s slave, to which a reluctant Bonbon eventually agrees. As the absurdity of Bonbon’s actions are noticed on a wider scale, Hominy causes a large accident that ultimately leads to the Supreme Court case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adarsha_Hindu_Hotel"title="Adarsha Hindu Hotel">
Hajari Thakur, a middle-aged Bengali Brahmin is the male protagonist of the novel. He works as a cook in a hotel owned by Bechu Chakraborty near Ranaghat railway station. Here customers are often cheated and Padma, a maid at the establishment, steals the hotel's food. Hajari is strictly against these, but being just a cook, he does not have right to say anything. Here he is regularly mocked and insulted by Padma, who, though only a maid, is the owner's paramour and has immense influence over him. Hajari dreams to start his own hotel, but for that he needs Rs.200. Kusum is a young widow, whom Hajari considers as his daughter. One day utensils of Hajari's shop are stolen and police arrests Hajari. Following this incident, he loses his job.After getting a loan from Kusum and Atashi, a girl from his village, Hajari starts his own hotel. Here he works hard with dedication and sincerity. In just a year his hotel becomes the most popular hotel of the area. Two other hotels of the area: one of Bechu Chakraborty and another of Jadu Banerjee almost get shut down. Hajari also gets a railway tender to manage a government-run hotel in the railway platform. At the end of the novel, Hazari signs a contract to manage a large hotel and goes to Bombay. Before leaving, he appoints Bechu Chakraborty (whose own hotel was sealed recently) as a manager of the market area hotel. He also gives Padma a job, who used to insult him every now and then.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Bagger_Vance_(novel)"title="The Legend of Bagger Vance (novel)">
During the Great Depression of 1931, two legends of golf, Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen, compete in a 36-hole showdown. Another golfer also competes, a troubled local war hero named R. Junuh with a mentor and caddie, the mysterious Bagger Vance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gun_(Chivers_book)"title="The Gun (Chivers book)">
A prologue relates two events in 1949 in the Soviet Union marking the beginning of the Cold War: the first Soviet nuclear test and innovation in the development of the automatic rifle; the former made total war unwinnable and the latter made smaller proxy wars the principle activity of the Cold War, and automatic rifles would prove the most lethal weapons of the Cold War.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Even_Dogs_in_the_Wild"title="Even Dogs in the Wild">
A former Scottish senior prosecutor has been found dead, with a threatening note in his pocket. Siobhan Clarke is in charge of the high-profile case. Then the semi-retired gangster 'Big Ger' Cafferty receives a similar note and someone shoots at him. John Rebus has retired (for the second time), but he is asked to join in the investigation. Meanwhile Malcolm Fox is drafted into a surveillance team monitoring a group of Glaswegian gangsters who look set to move on Edinburgh. Cafferty, the young Edinburgh gangster Darryl Christie, and the Glasgow gang are all looking over their shoulders at each other and at the police. Cafferty is the one who recognizes the history behind the vendetta against him and a few other survivors of a disastrous event thirty years earlier. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew's_Brain"title="Andrew's Brain">
Andrew, from a variety of mostly unknown locations, tells the story of his life and the events that have led him to where he has ended up through musings, ramblings, and occasionally fragmented tales. With seemingly no one else in his life, Andrew speaks to a person, presumably a psychiatrist only referred to as "Doc", who often prompts Andrew further into his disjointed narrative. Between tragedies of love, thoughts about what consciousness is, and a series of bad luck incidents, Andrew's story explores the questions of how much control individuals have over their own lives and how much of life is coincidence or fate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Last_of_the_Ultimate_End"title="The Final Last of the Ultimate End">
A man who had a terminal disease decided to get a whole body transplant surgery, removing his brain from his original body and transplanting it to a new brainless body, which was cloned from his cell. He gets the surgery and it seems to be successful.He is moved to a recovery institute, adapting himself to his new body. He suffers for mild amnesia and partial motor disturbance, but he works hard to get better, waiting for the day to meet his girlfriend for the first time after the surgery.When he finally meets his girlfriend, he feels happy, knowing all his feeling and memories about her are right and the interaction with her is natural enough. But his girlfriend looks sad.It turns out that the surgery was splitting his brain into 2 pieces and transplanting them into 2 different bodies, to achieve the safer result from the redundancy. Hence now there are 2 independent separate people formed from one original person. All the activities in the recovery institute were parts of a test to decide whom to be a person to inherit the original identity. Even the meeting with the girlfriend was also a part of the test.The protagonist turns out to be a loser in every aspects of the brain activity and continuity, except the only one part, that is the memory and the interactivity with spouse. Therefore, the other person gets the original identity and the protagonist gets a brand new identity as a newly born person.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Wolves"title="Celtic Wolves">
The series is set within a world where shifters exist, however new ones can only be created via childbirth. Shifters can transform into wolves, are very strong, can heal when they shift, and are capable of living extremely long lifespans, among other abilities - some of which are extremely powerful and desirable. They gained their powers via the goddess Ceridwen, who appointed a specific group of shifters known as the Guardians to watch over her son Taliesin, also known as "Sin". Over time the shifters' powers have grown weaker and weaker, to the point where several shifters are born without the ability to transform into wolves, but still retain the strength and lifespans of a regular shifter. The Guardians see these shifters are weak and endorse killing them, forcing many to flee and hide for their lives - something that also causes Sin to eschew the Guardians' protection. One group, located in Rhuddin Village and led by Dylan, has taken in these shifters - sparking a war between the Guardians and any group that the Guardians view as an enemy. To make matters more tense, the village also contains Dylan's sister Elen, who has strong healing and nature powers, which the Guardians want to take for their own. As the series progresses the Guardians also seek to attack the village because it contains unmated female shifters, women that have not yet found a true mate and are capable of giving birth to new shifters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadly_Assets"title="Deadly Assets">
This novel, set in Philadelphia, centers around a young police homicide sergeant, Matt Payne. Payne, nicknamed Wyatt Earp of the Main Line, in past novels has been involved in spectacular and deadly shootouts with criminals. While Payne was always justified in these incidents, influential groups have protested to get Payne either removed from the police force or put into a job that keeps him off the streets. In this book the level of violence in the city has reached a boiling point. This book is full of shady characters and their scheming plots.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holism_and_Evolution"title="Holism and Evolution">
After identifying the need for reform in the fundamental concepts of matter, life, and mind (chapter 1), Smuts examines the reformed concepts (as of 1926) of space and time (chapter 2), matter (chapter 3), and biology (chapter 4), and concludes that the close approach to each other of the concepts of matter, life, and mind, and the partial overflow of each other's domains, imply that there is a fundamental principle (Holism) of which they are the progressive outcome. Chapters 5 and 6 provide the general concept, functions, and categories of holism; chapters 7 and 8 address holism with respect to Mechanism and Darwinism; chapters 9-11 make a start towards demonstrating the concepts and functions of holism for the metaphysical categories (mind, personality, ideals), and the book concludes with a chapter that argues for the universal ubiquity of holism and its place as a monistic ontology.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denma"title="Denma">
Denma is a space opera that centered around an intergalactic courier delivery service called Silverquick.Silverquick is an intergalactic courier services that hires "Quanx" with special abilities as delivery men. Dike, or "the Merciless Death of Planet Urano" contracts to Silverquick, subsequently and becomes trapped inside a body of a small child named Denma. He takes off on a journey of making interstellar deliveries and reclaiming his body in hope.In Chapter 1, there're individual episodes to watch and intervene in various people's stories, and the stories of individual characters who're tied up by Silverquick, the vicious company. Furthermore, in Chapter 2, the story continued to expand with the Church of Madonna, which is the religion behind the Silverquick, and various multi-cosmic concepts that are the root of this church, and the veiled enmity between the nobles. And in South Korea, the Chapter 3 is going on.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex_from_Cuba"title="Telex from Cuba">
Set in Cuba during Fulgencio Batista's reign as dictator, the novel follows the intersecting lives of several families of white American expatriates, the men of which work for the United Fruit Company. Several Americans who, back home, would have been of different classes and never mixed, become close while living in Cuba. K.C. Stites, the son of the CEO, with the encouragement of his mother, grows close with Everly Lederer, the daughter of a man who was considered weak and ineffectual back home. His best friend is from the Allain family whom the Stites consider hillbillys and who is rumoured to have killed a man back in America. The Carringtons are a couple who lived in Latin America for most of their lives and have a bitter acerbic marriage. Tip Carrington regularly cheats on his wife, and Mrs. Carrington has turned to alcohol in order to help.In 1958 the rebel forces begin to grow stronger and gain sympathy from several of the children of the white ex-patriates. K.C's older brother Del runs off to join the rebels and helps to organize attacks against his father. After a bomb goes off in the United Fruit Company's prestigious club the white Americans are forced to evacuate by their government.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Cold_Dark_Ground"title="In the Cold Dark Ground">
Sergeant Logan McRae is still overseeing a patch of north east Aberdeenshire as a 'Development Opportunity'. He does, however, keep finding bodies and one such find brings the MIT (Major Investigation Team) screaming up to rural Aberdeenshire from Aberdeen City. This team is headed up by McRae's old boss, Detective Chief Inspector Roberta Steel.She wants him in the investigation; he doesn't want to join. Unfortunately, he is drafted in anyway and has to cope with a very critical Detective Superintendent (who seems to love to belittle McRae), a secondment to Professional Standards so he can spy on DCI Steel, Wee Hamish Mowat (the ganglord of Aberdeen) dying and making Logan his heir (which means fighting off Reuben, the ganglords' enforcer) and switching off his girlfriend's life support system.Somewhere in between all this, McRae is supposed to negotiate the office politics, save himself, save DCI Steel, bury two people and solve the case.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brueghel_Moon"title="The Brueghel Moon">
"The Brueghel Moon" is a novella about a psychiatrist, Levan, who has a former patient, Nunu, visit him, then he goes to a garden party, and gets involved with the wife of an ambassador, Ana-Maria.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberstorm_(novel)"title="Cyberstorm (novel)">
The novel is set in current day New York City, New York. The main character is Mike Mitchel, a successful businessman living in New York City married into a family of wealth and power. He lives with his wife and his son in Manhattan, next door to Chuck, a close friend and doomsday prepper. Chuck has a bugout location in Virginia.At the start of the book, Mike and his family are a normal American family, going to work and school. However, things start to fall apart when logistic systems for the main shipping companies grind to a standstill. Soon cell services go down and news starts reporting that bird flu has been reported. Then the power goes out, and widespread panic ensues. As a blizzard sets in, Mike walks in on Chuck and his wife talking about leaving New York City to their bugout location in the woods. They decide they will not do so without taking their friends, including Mike.At this time, Mike's son is not feeling well, and Richard, who Mike fears his wife might be having an affair with, offers to allow their driver to take them to a hospital. They find the hospital flooded with sick patients, and the same story pans out at multiple other hospitals across the city. They eventually have their son admitted into a hospital, but they are unable to see a doctor. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumu_(short_story)"title="Mumu (short story)">
The story opens in Moscow, at the home of an unnamed, wealthy, and elderly widow. Mean and spiteful, she has been abandoned by whatever living friends and relatives she still has. The exposition then focuses on one of her porters, Gerasim, a man from the countryside. Born deaf and mute, he communicates with the other servants of the estate via hand signs. He is a man of almost superhuman strength, and was renowned in the country for his work in the fields. After being taken from his village, he eventually settles into life in the city, and, while his presence inspires fear in the other servants, he is able to remain on at least cordial terms with them.During this time, Gerasim becomes infatuated with Tatiana, the mistress’ laundress. He offers her gifts, including a gingerbread chicken, and follows her, smiling and making his characteristic unintelligible noises. His affection is quite protective, and he threatens a servant who “nags” her too severely. In another incident, Kapiton Klimov, the widow's shoemaker, speaks “too attentively” with Tatiana, and is, too, threatened by Gerasim.Kapiton, a drunkard who feels unfairly castigated for his vices, is chosen by the mistress to be married off. Speaking with her head steward, Gavrila, the widow decides that Kapiton shall marry Tatiana. Gavrila, aware of Gerasim's affections but unable to disagree with his master, relates this to Kapiton, who reacts with fear but ultimately agrees. He then informs Tatiana, who acquiesces but echoes the same concerns. Gavrila comes up with a plan, and, noting Gerasim's hatred of drunkards, has Tatiana pretend to be drunk in his presence. The plot succeeds, and Tatiana and Kapiton are married. However, Kapiton's drinking only worsens, and he and his wife are sent away after a year to a small village. As they depart, Gerasim follows them, and hands Tatiana a red handkerchief, causing her to burst into tears.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Land_of_the_Moon"title="From the Land of the Moon">
A young woman recounts her grandmother's past life in Italy, beginning in 1943 in the middle of the Second World War, when her grandmother had reached her 30s and was still unwed. Considered an old maid by her parents, the she was married off to a man who had come to the town after his home had been bombed. She told him she would not have a sexual relationship with him, and he agreed as long as she permitted him to go to brothels. Shortly afterward, the couple moved to the man's home in Cagliari.The woman began to have sex with her husband in order to save the money he would have spent on brothels, but they were unable to conceive a child. She had painful kidney stones, which resulted in several miscarriages. After several years, in 1950 the woman's doctor recommended that she go to Civitavecchia for thermal treatments at a well-known spa. While there, the married woman met a war veteran, and they bonded over their artistic passions, his for music and hers for writing. He had lost a leg in the war, was married, and lived in Milan with his wife and child.Nine months later, the formerly childless married woman had a son. When he is seven, she goes to work as a maid so that he can have piano lessons. The son takes after his father and grows up to be a classical pianist. He in turn marries and has a daughter. The daughter and her grandmother become close; the older woman eventually tells her granddaughter about her affair with the veteran so many years ago.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Road_from_Stalingrad"title="Red Road from Stalingrad">
The memoir begins in early November, 1942, as Abdulin arrives at the front for the first time, in the Kletskaya bridgehead on the west bank of the Don River to the north-west of Stalingrad. He is serving as the gun-layer of an 82mm mortar crew in the 1034th Rifle Regiment.After introducing the other men of his crew, he recounts his early life in Siberia. His parents were both members of the Communist Party, educated, and somewhat outsiders in the village of Sukhoi, but valued for their literacy. In his late teens, in 1940, Abdulin left school to join his father in the Miasski gold mines. As a miner he was exempt from military service, but soon after the German invasion he and three of his friends managed to persuade local officials to allow them to enlist. Of the four, only Abdulin would survive the war.After being sent to a military academy for officer candidates and getting very good grades, he had to use several stratagems to get sent to the front as a regular soldier with his comrades, where he also served as the "komsorg" (leader of the Komsomols of his company). He then recounts his first "kill" of a German soldier, while acting as a sniper, on Nov. 6. In recognition of this, he was invited to join the Communist Party, to serve as the "partorg" (leader of the Communists of his company), and also received the "For Courage" medal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vince_and_Kath"title="Vince and Kath">
The story revolves around a young man named Vince who bravely sends a text message to his crush, Kath. Until they become text mates and become in-relationship status. As they graduate from college, Vince proposes to Kath. They face different life challenges especially when Vince is stabbed by hooligans and knocks his head off from which he suffers amnesia due to a head trauma. Kath makes difficult efforts to help Vince regain his memories. Suddenly Kath's aunt reveals that her father is very ill. At the same time, Vince is rushed to the hospital unexpectedly after Kath finds out that he has been unconscious in his house. She calls her friend Maxine to look after Vince in the hospital while she's away to visit her father in Dubai urgently. After a few days Vince miraculously recovers from his amnesia. He prepares a surprise for Kath. When Kath arrives from Dubai, she is shocked about Vince's recovery. And Vince proposes to Kath again. He promises her that he would bring back what he lost and pay gratitude for her sacrifices.Later Vince finds out that Jella's boyfriend Nathan was the perpetrator; Nathan stabbed Vince due to jealousy. Vince confronts Nathan and brawls at each other. The feud is stopped by Jella. Vince initially decided to put Nathan into jail but recanted his decision because Jella told him that she is pregnant with Nathan's child. This triggers Kath's agony on Vince but their love quarrel is short-lived.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hive_Mind_(book)"title="Hive Mind (book)">
## Da Vinci Effect.The book relates personal intelligence to group intelligence with a concept the author calls the da Vinci Effect. This concept relates the general intelligence of an individual performing different tasks to the abilities of members of a group performing different tasks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Rivers"title="All the Rivers">
The novel, which is set in New York City, chronicles a love affair between Hilmi, a Palestinian artist, and Liat, a Jewish Israeli translator. The two eventually separate, with the man going to Ramallah and the woman going to Tel Aviv.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_(Walsh_book)"title="Hotel (Walsh book)">
The book is an instalment in the Bloomsbury Academic series "Object Lessons". The series is intended to discuss the hidden lives ordinary things. "Hotel" examines the luxury, sex, power, anonymity, privacy of hotels; places where "desires go on holiday, but also places where our desires are shaped by the hard realities of the marketplace"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nesthäkchen's_Teenage_Years"title="Nesthäkchen's Teenage Years">
A "Backfisch" ("teenage girl", literally "fish for frying") is a young girl between fourteen and seventeen years of age. This volume deals with Annemarie's youth during the period of economic and political turbulence following World War I, 1919–1922. Annemarie is almost 16 when the story begins, after the Armistice, November 1918-19. Ury skips over 1920–1921. The last chapter, "Examination Grades," concerns her high school graduation in 1922. Annemarie and her friends, Vera, Marlene and Ilse, attend upper secondary school. When Annemarie feels wronged by their German teacher, she wants to set up a student council modeled on the Soviet Republic and argues with the director of the school. Her unruly behavior endangers her education, but she ultimately advances to her senior class. Her 16th birthday party is disturbed by a general power cut and the economic blockade, which completely shuts down the electricity and telephone network. Annemarie visits her relatives on Arnsdorf Farm in Silesia (in the post 1945 editions Lower Bavaria). On her hasty return journey due to the occupation of Upper Silesia by Polish troops during the Polish–Czechoslovak War and first Silesian Uprising, she gets stuck in the town of Sagan by a railway strike. (In the post 1945 editions Anne Marie has to leave Arnsdorf because of an upcoming general strike, and her train is stalled for lack of coal in Nuremberg.) To earn money, she becomes a nanny for a doctor's family named Lange. The Langes soon realize that Annemarie is an educated girl from a good background, as she knows Latin, does not want to go on the street without a hat, is familiar with famous paintings and has a book by Selma Lagerlöf in her luggage. When Annemarie's identity is revealed, Dr. Lange turns out to be one of her father's Heidelberg University classmates, and the Langes treat her like a foster daughter until she leaves to return to Berlin. In winter 1919, there is a coal shortage and a violent wave of influenza. Annemarie tries to obtain coal for her family, but does not succeed. Finally, she gets sick. The novel ends with Annemarie's high school graduation. She and her friend Marlene have passed all written tests with A's and are exempted from the final oral examination. Despite the hard times, Else Ury's sense of humor permeates the narrative.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nesthäkchen_and_the_World_War"title="Nesthäkchen and the World War">
Anne Marie's father, Dr. Braun, is a soldier and medical officer in France. Her mother is absent. Mrs. Braun was in England at the outbreak of war, visiting with her cousin Annie, who is married to an Englishman. Mrs. Braun can not go back to Germany because she missed her last opportunity for departure. Of her letters, only some get to her family. During the absence of the parents, the grandmother, the nanny Lena, and the cook Hanne care for Annemarie and her brothers.In England, Mrs. Braun is arrested as an alleged spy, after she has spoken, imprudently excited, about the success of German submarines. She is released soon afterwards.Anne Marie's brother Hans brings a foundling home. The baby, an East Prussian refugee, would likely have perished. Annemarie takes the child into the house enthusiastically and gives him the name “Hindenburg” for Paul von Hindenburg. Finally, the noisy child is passed to the concierge couple and given the name Max. Annemarie’s patriotism goes so far that a "foreign concept checkout" is set up at home and in class. Anyone who uses a foreign word must pay five cents.In Anne Marie's class a new girl, Vera Burkhard, arrives from Czernowitz in Bukovina. Vera hardly speaks German. Spurred on by two older girls, Anne Marie holds Vera for a Polish spy, therefore an enemy, and begins to bully the girl. Anne Marie’s girlfriends Margot, Ilse and Marlene have compassion for Vera, but dare not oppose the dominant Anne Marie. Occasionally Anne Marie has doubts about the correctness of her behavior, but she does not want to admit she is wrong. Finally, the class teacher announces that Vera's father has been killed in the Carpathian battle (Gorlice–Tarnów Offensive) on the German side and has therefore died a hero’s death. Although Vera is devastated and distraught, her reputation is restored and the shamed Anne Marie wants to make up for her bad behavior. Vera is now her best friend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueprint_for_Revolution"title="Blueprint for Revolution">
The first part of the book discusses modern nonviolent revolutions, and the second explains how nonviolent techniques can be put to good use. The book contains eleven chapters, each with a lesson about nonviolent techniques for revolution, including case studies. Popovic writes in the first-person voice, describing his experiences in taking part in and training activists for several revolutions, including the Otpor! movement and the Arab Spring. He references movements that attempted to make changes (successfully and unsuccessfully), such as Occupy Wall Street and Gay Rights Movements. In referencing these movements, Popovic explains the tactics they allude to that make revolutions successful—such as laughtivism and unity—and why they are a better alternative to violence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Midnight"title="Lady Midnight">
Emma Carstairs has been living with the Blackthorn family: her parabatai, Julian; his siblings Livvy, Ty, Dru, and Tavvy; and their uncle, Arthur, in the Los Angeles Institute since her parents' deaths during the Dark War five years ago. Having grown into a prodigious Shadowhunter, she is still investigating the true cause of her parents' demise, despite the Clave telling her that they were killed by the late Sebastian Morgenstern. According to Johnny Rook, a mundane shopkeeper from the Shadow Market, similar murders befell eleven faeries, whose kind are ostracized by the Clave under the Cold Peace for their support of the Endarkened. Later, Emma also investigates a mundane murdered apparently by the same culprit who killed the faeries. Ty's research points to the victims being killed inside sacred locations known as the ley lines as part of a dark ritual. Meanwhile, Julian struggles between running the Institute, since Arthur is functionally insane from his previous experiences in Faerie, and his love for Emma, despite parabatai being forbidden from pursuing a romantic relationship. He gets the medication for Arthur's illness from Malcolm Fade, the High Warlock of Los Angeles. Diana Wrayburn occasionally helps the younger Shadowhunters with the upkeep of the Institute, but refuses to replace Arthur as leader and frequently leaves for other missions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_(Bear_novel)"title="Carnival (Bear novel)">
A diplomatic mission to the matriarchal planet New Amazonia reunites ex-lovers Vincent Katherinessen and Michelangelo Kusanagi-Jones after a separation of 17 years. Arriving in the capital city of Penthesilea, the men are ostensibly repatriating looted artwork, but in truth the ambassador-spies have been tasked with obtaining the Amazonians' secret energy technology by any means necessary, and doing what they can to facilitate a Coalition conquest. However, both Vincent (a master of observation) and Angelo (a trained liar and fighter) each have hidden plans to undermine their own mission. Meanwhile, multiple factions among the Amazonians are engaged in covert political intrigues rooted in the gender dynamics of their society.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_Arabs_(novel)"title="Dancing Arabs (novel)">
The novel tells the story of Eyad, an Israeli Arab teenager from Tira who is admitted to an elite school in Jerusalem. The novel explores his difficulties, divided between his pride for his Palestinian identity and the desire to be a part of Israeli society.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Cage_(book)"title="The Golden Cage (book)">
The book tells the story of three brothers whose lives were heavily influenced by Iranian history: the oldest, Abbas, was a soldier under the Shah; the second, Javad, was a communist activist; the younger, Ali, supported the Khomeini's Islamic revolution. All of their lives will be influenced by the worst chapters of Iranian history in the 20th century, including the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, and the executions of political opponents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nesthäkchen_Flies_From_the_Nest"title="Nesthäkchen Flies From the Nest">
Else Ury's Nesthäkchen is a Berlin doctor's daughter, Anne Marie Braun; a slim, golden blond, quintessential German girl.In this story, which takes place in the years 1922-1923 Annemarie goes with her girlfriends Ilse and Marlene to study in Tübingen. Annemarie wants to study medicine to be assistant to her father. Only under the condition that she then continue her training in Berlin does he allow the academic year in Tübingen. Aunt Albertina does not agree that a young girl should leave the parental home alone.On the outward journey Annemarie misses a train in Würzburg and loses Ilse and Marlene but meets a young doctor, Rudolf Hartenstein, who likes her immediately.Finally arriving in Tübingen, Annemarie lives with Ilse and Marlene at the home of the couple Nepomuk and Veronika Kirchmäuser and their children Vronli and Kasper. The girls make friends with students Krabbe, Neumann and Egerling with whom they establish a "Swabian hiking covenant." Else Ury brings in here the Wandervogel movement, a motif popular at the beginning of the 20th century. At a party in the home of Professor Bergholz, Annemarie meets Rudolf Hartenstein again, as well as his sister Ola.In the course of time, Annemarie and Rudolf fall in love. Their declaration of love occurs in a dramatic incident: in a foggy cave, the , where Annemarie almost collapses into a deep abyss, Rudolf holds her fast and saves her at the last moment. At the Ulmer Münster, he asks Annemarie to marry him, but she refuses because she has promised her father to be his assistant. In the summer semester Annemarie returns to Berlin to work in a clinic. Rudolf Hartenstein is also in Berlin and works as a doctor in the same hospital as Annemarie. He is Annemarie’s superior, and between the two there is tension. When they meet during a storm in the Charlottenburg Palace Park, Rudolf renews his declaration of love, and this time Annemarie gives in. The two marry just as Annemarie's brother Hans marries Rudolf's sister Ola.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swapna_Saraswata"title="Swapna Saraswata">
The novel narrates the Gaud Saraswat Brahmin (GSB) community's diaspora along the west coast of India between the early 16th Century and late 18th Century. The author put in years of research, delving into written histories and oral narrations, covering a huge time span and the social dynamics within the community in the perspective of historical events."Swapna Saraswata" is the story of the fall of GSB community who lived in Goa four hundred years ago. It is a tragic story of the Gowda Saraswat Brahmin community leaving their land in Goa and migrating to an unknown land due to the oppression by the Portuguese. The arrival of the Portuguese to India, the conquest of Goa by the colonists and the conversion of temples, the destruction of temples, etc., have profoundly affected the beliefs and emotions of the local Gowda Saraswat Brahmin families. In such a situation, Vittu Pai, the grandson of Narasappayya, a resident of the Verane village in Goa, vacates the village with 5-6 families in the night in order to preserve culture, faith, religion, and life. They were emotionally attached to that land and culture and it was painful for them to vacate the village. To escape from the hands of Portuguese many families travelled till Kochi, and few families settling in the places of Coastal Karnataka. Likewise, the family of Vittu Pai settles in the southern village called Bellambeedu in Kumbale. They start their new business there and settled. The novel is meant to convey a kind of message to anyone facing a storm of change by quoting the example of the life of the Gowda Saraswat Brahmin community who have seen many difficulties of survival in history.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_of_Nostalgia"title="The Ministry of Nostalgia">
"The Ministry of Nostalgia" argues that "our past is being resold in order to defend the indefensible". The book examines the so-called "austerity" of the 1940s and 1950s and argues that history has been "recast to offer consolation for the violence of neoliberalism, an ideology dedicated to the privatisation of our common wealth". "The Ministry of Nostalgia" questions "why should we have to keep calm and carry on?"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet_on_Fire"title="Tibet on Fire">
"Tibet on Fire" is an account of the discrimination and atrocities faced by Tibetans in 21st century Tibet, and their resistance to foreign/Chinese rule and occupation. It is written from the perspective of a Tibetan with personal experience in the Tibet-China conflict. Since the 2008 uprising, nearly 150 Tibetans, most of them monks, have set fire to themselves to protest foreign occupation of their country. Most have died from their injuries. It is important to understand the book is not about self-immolation, but uses this horrific reality as a way to focus and then delve into the fervent emotions central to Tibetans and their long search for national and individual freedom. The book provides insight into the ideals and personal motivations driving those who resist: the self-immolators and also other Tibetans like the author.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_(picture_book)"title="Waiting (picture book)">
Five toys sit on a windowsill all waiting for something to happen. There is an owl waiting to see the moon, there is a pig with an umbrella waiting to see the rain, there is a puppy with a snow sled waiting to see the snow, there is a bear with a kite waiting to see the wind, and finally there is a rabbit looking outside the window just happy to contemplate what is happening outside.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good-Luck_Horse"title="The Good-Luck Horse">
"The Good-Luck Horse" is based on a Chinese folk-tale. It tells the story of a paper horse that was created by a kind magician. Since the horse was magical it was able to do anything it was told to do. The horse then became a problem because it was bringing bad luck to its owner until the horse ran away. When a war broke out the horse met another horse and together they were able to end the war, earning him the name of the good-luck horse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nesthäkchen_and_Her_Chicks"title="Nesthäkchen and Her Chicks">
In this novel the plot has advanced beyond the year during which Else Ury was writing, 1923. Strictly speaking, Ury is describing the future. Annemarie Braun was born 9 April 1903, and married at 20; she could thus in 1930 be celebrating her seventh wedding anniversary, which occurs in the book.In order to continue the series, Else Ury extended the middle 1920s milieu of her fifth and sixth Nesthäkchen volumes for another half-century. Time stands still, but the characters age. Therefore, Annemarie’s life no longer unfolds, as in the first six books, in an actual historical period."Nesthäkchen and Her Chicks" begins with Anne Marie and Rudolf's seventh wedding anniversary. The two now have three children, the six-year Vronli, the three-year-old Hans and two-year-old Ursel, and live in Berlin-Lichterfelde. Anne Marie's parents, "Omama" and "Opapa" are now beloved grandparents, her grandmother the "Urmütterchen" and Aunt Albertina the "Urtantchen" of Annemarie’s children. Brother Hans is a magistrate married to Rudolf's sister Ola, with two sons, Herbert and Waldemar. Klaus is a farmer, still a bachelor, who is enamored of Annemarie’s girlfriend Ilse Hermann. Ilse and Marlene Ulrich, the inseparable cousins, are teachers at a girls' school. Margot and Vera are unmarried and employed, Margot as head of a dressmaking firm and Vera as a photographer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tiger's_Apprentice"title="The Tiger's Apprentice">
Tom, a young Chinese American boy has grown up under the care of his eccentric grandmother, Mrs. Lee, in San Francisco. He is her reluctant apprentice Guardian, learning ancient Chinese magic to protect a coral rose. However, upon the arrival of Mr. Hu, a tiger and Mrs. Lee's former apprentice, monsters attack. Mrs. Lee dies protecting Tom and the rose, leaving Mr. Hu the guardian of both Tom and the coral rose. (pg. 25–26).Safe in Mr. Hu's antique shop in Chinatown, Mr. Hu reveals that the coral rose is actually the phoenix which has the power to transform evil beings into good ones. In ancient Chinese mythology, the creature Kung Kung attempts to use the phoenix to force human beings to obey him. After the Empress Nü Kua defeated Kung Kung, the phoenix chose to return to his egg and await a time of peace when his power would not be misused and the role of the Guardian is created to protect the phoenix. (pg. 39–40) However, Kung Kung's lieutenant Vatten and the Clan of Nine (named for Vattens form as a nine-headed-serpent) have followed the Chinese Guardians to America and the phoenix will require both Mr. Hu and Tom to protect it. Tom, however, is afraid to truly take on the role of an apprentice Guardian. (pg. 28).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nesthäkchen's_Youngest"title="Nesthäkchen's Youngest">
Temporal logic cast aside, Else Ury begins Volume 8 in 1945, but when she mentions the World War she means World War One, not World War Two, which she could not foresee and would not survive.Since the previous volume, 15 years have passed. Annemarie's physician husband Rudolf is now Privy Counsel and Professor. Daughter Vronli, serious, sensible, hard-working and humble, is a maternity nurse in Munich. Brother Hans’ son, a poor student, is about to graduate and does not want to study medicine, contrary to the wishes of his father, but wants to be a farmer like his admired Uncle Klaus. The main character is the youngest daughter, Ursel, seventeen, who has just graduated from school and is very similar to Annemarie. Ursel has a beautiful voice and wants to be a singer, but her father insists that she start as a bank clerk. The difficult situation between father and daughter escalates angrily for a time, but Annemarie smoothes the waves and devises a compromise: Ursel joins the bank, but takes singing lessons from an aging opera diva.Annemarie's brother Klaus is married to Ilse and has four sons, while Marlene and Peter are parents of three daughters. Brother Hans is lonely since the death of his wife Ola, and has two wild sons. Annemarie's girlfriend Margot is his housekeeper and a little later his second wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Too_Had_a_Love_Story"title="I Too Had a Love Story">
Ravin and Khushi are the male and female protagonists of the novel. The novel starts with a reunion in Kolkata of Ravin and his three male friends Manpreet, Amardeep, Happy, who used to study in the same engineering college. During the reunion they discuss their future plans of getting married and all of them accept that they did not think about it. Happy suggests Ravin to visit and sign up at "Shaadi.com", an online matrimonial website.After the reunion, Ravin comes back to Bhubaneswar, where he works as an engineer for Infosys, and registers at "Shaadi.com". After a few days of registering on the site, Ravin finds a girl named Khushi, a resident of Delhi, and an employee of CSC, Noida. Ravin and Khushi start talking to each other over phone and soon become good friends. They become curious about each other's interest and find there are many similarities between them. After a few months of conversation over phone, they realize that they have started falling in love with each other, although they have never met face-to-face. Very soon, Ravin is asked to travel to the United States for an office assignment. He is required to go to Delhi, where Khushi lives, to board the international flight. Ravin decides to go to Delhi one day earlier to meet Khushi for the first time, and spend time with her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nesthäkchen_and_Her_Grandchildren"title="Nesthäkchen and Her Grandchildren">
It is 1961. Sixteen years have passed since Ursel’s wedding, and she has not seen her family in Germany. Ursel lives with her husband, Milton Tavares, her fourteen year old, very different twins Anita and Marietta, and her little son, Juan (Hans), in São Paulo. The rich family has a luxurious existence, but Ursel works to improve the lot of the exploited plantation laborers. Marietta wants to emulate her mother, while the spoiled Anita thinks only of herself. One day Marietta gets lost on a neighboring plantation and finds a little German girl, Lotte Müller, whose mother is in a mud hut dying. The orphaned Lotte is adopted by the Tavares family and taken on their long-planned trip to Germany to find the mother's relatives.Annemarie suffers severely during the extended separation from her youngest, Ursel. She has become the most beloved "Omama" of Vronli’s daughter, Gerda, and of Hans' children Lilli, Eva, Ned (presumably named after Annemarie's father, who is originally Edmund and called Ned by his wife) and Heinz.Annemarie's brother Hans has died. His second wife Margot and his two sons Herbert and Waldemar have disappeared from the story.When Anita and Marietta arrive in Germany, they have problems, because the two rich girls find it difficult to get used to the simple life, and do not want to help Rudolf and Annemarie with housework. However, the modest Marietta soon adapts, as she distances herself from her dominant twin sister. Little Lotte lives in the Hartenstein house with the servant couple Kunze; she is a replacement for their daughter. Her relatives – originally from Silesia, after 1945 from Westphalia—cannot be found.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nesthäkchen_With_White_Hair"title="Nesthäkchen With White Hair">
The year is 1973. The twenty-six year old Marietta lives in Berlin with Grandparents Rudolf Hartenstein and Annemarie Braun Hartenstein. She works, as part of her studies, in a kindergarten, where she is a favorite "aunt." Together with cousin Gerda she attends a women's school in order to be a youth counselor, a popular profession in the nineteen-twenties for modern, socially engaged women. From her twin Anita she has grown more and more distant. She is smitten with Horst, son of her grand-uncle Klaus, but Horst is enamored of Anita, and travels to Brazil to be with her. Anita's family expects her to marry Horst, but she gets engaged, to everyone’s surprise, to Ricardo Orlando, the son of wealthy neighbors.One day Marietta notes a similarity between the kindergarten child Lenchen and Lotte, the foundling, who still lives in the Hartenstein house with the Kunzes, the household servants. It turns out that Lenchen’s grandmother was also Lotte's grandmother and Lenchen’s mother is Lotte's aunt. Lotte remains with the Kunzes, but is happy to have found her relatives and maintains contact with them.Marietta accompanies a group of children who travel to the seaside to relax. Lotte stays on the estate of her grand-uncle Klaus. Here she receives the news that her grandfather Rudolf is blind. Surgery restores his eyesight.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagari"title="Jagari">
The novel is written in first-person narrative, but from four different people's point of view. During India's freedom movement Bilu, an Indian revolutionary is sentenced to death. The novel starts in the jail custody at the last night before the convict is to be hanged. The first chapter is written from that Bilu's perspective, where he narrates his own life and experiences. It also tells the inhuman trials and tortures he faced. The second, third and fourth chapter narrate the same story from his father, mother and brother's perspectives. All of them await the capital punishment while explaining their own thoughts, anxiety and experiences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_(novel)"title="Dust (novel)">
The plot opens with Kay Scarpetta receiving a phone call from Marino informing her about a body, later identified as Gail Shipton, recovered in a field adjoining Massachusetts Information Technology (MIT) campus. As detailed by witnesses, the body was found wrapped in an unusual white cloth, a picture of which brings back to memory a similar scene from 'Capital murders’- a case of triple killings in the capital city Washington- something that Benton had shared with her (albeit without FBI authorization) in lieu of her expertise.Haley Swansen, the boyfriend of the deceased is interrogated and it is revealed that he is transgender.The Capital murders were temporally separated, the first in April and the last two around Thanksgiving, each body clad only in panties belonging to the prior victim and posed in an open field stone's throw away from a rail track. Ed Granby, Benton's boss and head of Boston division, had refused to release key information pertaining to these cases under the pretext 'to avoid replication of this murder-style’.It is learned that the deceased had filed a $100million lawsuit against her financial advisor : ‘"Double-S’’’, a firm with 6 other lawsuits - none of which reached the court since referred to as ‘frivolous’ by CEO Dominic Lombardi - and under probation from SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) for irregularities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily_and_the_Octopus"title="Lily and the Octopus">
A 42-year-old writer finds that a small octopus has attached itself to the head of his aging dachshund, Lily.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lie_Tree"title="The Lie Tree">
"The Lie Tree" is set in the male-dominated Victorian scientific society, and tells the story of Faith Sunderly, a 14-year-old girl whose father is killed in mysterious circumstances after the family moves to the fictional island of Vane. In her efforts to discover what happened to her father, and to follow his footsteps of studying natural science, she discovers a tree that provides truths by feeding on whispered lies. The bigger the lie, the more people who believe it, the bigger the truth that is uncovered.The girl realizes that she is good at lying and that the tree might hold the key to her father's murder, so she begins to spread untruths far and wide across her small island community. But as her tales spiral out of control, she discovers that where lies seduce, truths shatter..
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nana_in_the_City"title="Nana in the City">
"Nana in the City" starts off with a young boy who visits his Nana and her new apartment in New York City. He shows how much he loves and appreciates his Nana but he does not feel the same way about the city. The boy does not think that his Nana should be living in the city as he tells her, but Nana feels the opposite.Nana shows the boy how wonderful the city is. She knits him a fancy red cape and makes him wear it, making him feel fearless and courageous. He still notices the things that he saw from the other day, but it is not as bad as he thought it was. He starts to appreciate the city. Later that next day, he agrees with his Nana that the city is filled with amazing things. He then confirms that there are many fun things that his Nana can do in the city even though it can get loud and busy. When it is time for the young boy to leave, he offers his cape to his Nana to keep her bold being in the city. After exploring the city a little bit more, he then realizes that it is a great place for his Nana to live and for him to visit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_and_Dave_Dig_a_Hole"title="Sam and Dave Dig a Hole">
Two brothers named Sam and Dave, alongside their unnamed canine friend, have embarked on a journey to find something spectacular, "On Monday Sam and Dave dug a hole." They are determined in their search "We won't stop digging until we find something spectacular" and they proceed to dig through a vast distance. Along the way they dig past many jewels and potential "spectacular" objects, which notably enough only their dog seems to be aware of. The illustrations rely heavily on the positioning of the eyes to describe the relationship between the objects in the frame that are hidden to the boys but are aware to the dog, as shown in various frames such as on pages 8 and 10 the two brothers are shown to be fixated on the task at hand whereas the dog is focused more on the jewel that is nearby. They continue their journey, passing by many jewels along the way until they become too tired and decide to take a rest. The illustrations then depict the dog continuing to dig deeper in the ground until they all fall through the hole. "Sam and Dave fell down, down, down, until they landed in the soft dirt." The story concludes with them landing back into an area that looks like their original yard but is not their yard at all as shown by distinct differences in the frames from the 3 pages and the last 3 pages, such as the apple tree that is in their yard at the beginning of the story is replaced by a pear tree and the red flower that is on their porch in the beginning of the book is replaced by a blue flower at the end of the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viva_Frida"title="Viva Frida">
The story follows Frida Kahlo, a world-renowned and unconventional artist whose art is appreciated all around the world. The story illustrates the different stages of her life and how they influenced her to become an artist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bought_&amp;_Sold_(book)"title="Bought &amp; Sold (book)">
"Bought &amp; Sold" is memoir by Megan Stephens about her experiences as a 14 year old girl who fell in love and was sold in sexual slavery by her pimp boyfriend.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Sky"title="Paradise Sky">
Young Willie, the son of a slave in East Texas, is caught looking at the rear end of a white woman. Her husband, Sam Ruggert, a racist former rebel soldier, catches him looking and immediately calls for his lynching. Willie runs home and tells his father what has happened. His father, knowing what will happen, sends him running before the posse shows up. Willie later returns home only to discover Ruggert and his men have brutally murdered his father and burned down their cabin. So Willie outruns his pursuers is taken in by a man named Loving. Loving teaches him to read, write, and shoot. Loving becomes a father figure and mentor. 4 years later Loving shoots himself after discovering he has cancer. Being a wanted man, Willie changes his name to Nat Love and head west to join the army and becomes a buffalo soldier. However while on patrol his unit attacked by Apache Indians and is almost wiped out. Nat figures he'll be blamed for the incident and deserts. He heads north to the small mining town of Deadwood, South Dakota where he is befriended by Wild Bill Hickok. He meets and falls in love with a woman, but then discovers that Ruggert, a man with a long memory, is still pursuing him. Ruggert and his men eventually catch up to Nat and his bride to be. After leaving Nat for dead, they kidnap, rape, and torture Nat's woman. Bent on revenge Nat, now nicknamed Deadwood Dick for winning a shooting contest, pursues Ruggert and his men for a final and deadly showdown.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Will_Cry_When_You_Die"title="Who Will Cry When You Die">
The book is divided into 101 full chapters. Each chapter offers solutions and suggestions to face some of the difficult problems of life and develop one's personality and personal skills. Some of the suggestions mentioned in this book are— carrying goal cards, learning from good movies, seeing a day as an entire life, learning how to walk, importance of planting trees etc.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Guard_(novel)"title="New Guard (novel)">
Leon and Daniel Sharma, younger twin brothers of Ryan Sharma, ambush paedophile Nigel Kinney and hand over evidence of his activities to the PHN (Paedophile Hunting Network), a vigilante group. They are caught returning to CHERUB campus and are given two months of hard drill, an excruciating physical activity. Meanwhile, James Adams and sister Lauren arrive at campus for the demolition party celebrating the demolition of the main building. They help to clear archives in the basement first. Chairman Ewart Asker introduces the oldest surviving CHERUB agent and two red shirts who press the button to demolish the building. The main building is demolished and the new Campus Village is opened. Soon, the twins are pulled out of hard drill for a mission in Birmingham with James. Their task is to befriend Oliver Lakshmi, a troubled youth with a reputation for elaborate but untrue stories and see if he has information on radical Islamic terror groups or if he is lying. He is also a potential recruit for CHERUB. Oliver, known as Oli, turns out to be a bully and a thief and James decides he won't be recruited. However, Leon and Daniel learn of a local gangster, Trey, who is supervised by an elderly man known as Uncle. Ryan joins the mission and befriends Uncle. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shards_of_Heaven"title="The Shards of Heaven">
Years after the murder of Julius Caesar, his adopted son Octavian has succeeded him as a powerful force in Rome, if only as a senator with a large personal army. Octavian is somewhat threatened by the existence of Caesarion, Caesar's son by the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, who is himself Pharaoh alongside his mother. Octavian's nemesis Mark Antony has left Italy for Egypt, where he has fathered three children with Cleopatra, and his declaration of Caesarion as Caesar's legitimate heir incites war with Rome. Meanwhile, Caesar's other adopted son, Juba, has found the fabled Trident of Poseidon, a magical artifact with unearthly destructive power. He intends to use it—and the other so-called "Shards of Heaven"—to avenge himself on Rome for the death of his natural father, the king of Numidia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Primrose_Path_(Matas_novel)"title="The Primrose Path (Matas novel)">
A fourteen-year-old Jewish girl named Debbie moves to a new city and finds herself part of a small Jewish Orthodox community. Soon she comes into contact with Rabbi Werner, who is the principal of the Orthodox school that his synagogue houses, Debbie's teacher, and a child molester. After his seemingly accidental tickles and touches become inappropriate, Debbie tells her father about the non-sexual touching. He then confronts Rabbi Werner; however instead of rejecting the Rabbi, the local community rallies to defend him and rejects Debbie and her family. The story is complicated with marital issues within Debbie's family, and is further complicated by the fact that Rabbi Werner never faces justice for his crimes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Answer_(Steven_Universe)"title="The Answer (Steven Universe)">
Garnet (Estelle) awakens Steven (Zach Callison) at midnight on his birthday to tell him the tale of how Ruby (Charlyne Yi) and Sapphire (Erica Luttrell) first met and fused to become Garnet.5,750 years in the past, the Gem Homeworld is in the process of colonizing Earth, but a group of rebels is halting progress. A team of diplomats is sent to Earth to investigate, among them being Sapphire and three Ruby bodyguards. Sapphire reports her vision of the future to Blue Diamond, the leader of the mission: in the upcoming battle, the rebels will defeat seven Gems, including Sapphire herself and two Rubies, but will be captured, ending the rebellion.The rebels—Rose Quartz (Susan Egan) and Pearl (Deedee Magno Hall)—attack the Sky Arena. The battle proceeds as Sapphire had foreseen, and once two of the Rubies have been defeated, Sapphire thanks the remaining Ruby for her efforts and prepares for the inevitable. Ruby refuses to accept this outcome and leaps towards Sapphire, saving her but unintentionally fusing with her and forming Garnet for the first time. The crowd of diplomats stares in surprise and disgust at the confused Garnet, and Rose and Pearl flee during the distraction.Garnet immediately unfuses, and Ruby takes the blame for the failure of Sapphire's prediction and the illicit fusion. Blue Diamond sentences Ruby to be shattered, but Sapphire grabs her and escapes, jumping down to Earth's surface. On the ground, Ruby and Sapphire find shelter and discuss their feelings about the unexpected fusion. Over a montage of the two of them exploring Earth and getting to know each other better, they sing the song "Something Entirely New", trying to understand what it means to have become Garnet. They end with a fusion dance, fusing into Garnet once more.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asha's_Mums"title="Asha's Mums">
This story is based on the protagonist, Asha, and her struggle explaining to her teacher and friends that she has two mothers, as part of the process of gaining permission to go on a school trip. The book begins when Asha's teacher, Ms. Samuels, sees Asha's mothers' names on the permission form and assumes it has been filled out incorrectly. Ms. Samuels wonders which one is Asha's mother, and she struggles to understand the possibility of Asha having two moms. In one scene, a worried Asha confides in her mothers who agree to talk to the teacher face to face to sort matters out. In the meantime, Asha informs her classmates about different types of families. The story concludes with Asha being granted permission to go on the school trip, and her classmates and teachers having learned about different family structures.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_Harbour"title="Broken Harbour">
In a ghost estate outside Dublin – half-built, half-inhabited, half-abandoned – two children and their father are dead. The mother is on her way to intensive care. Scorcher Kennedy is given the case because he is the Murder Squad’s star detective. At first he and his rookie partner, Richie, think this is a simple one: Pat Spain was a casualty of the recession, so he killed his children, tried to kill his wife Jenny, and finished off with himself. But there are too many inexplicable details and the evidence is pointing in two directions at once.Scorcher’s personal life is tugging for his attention. Seeing the case on the news has sent his sister Dina off the rails again, and she’s resurrecting something that Scorcher thought he had tightly under control: what happened to their family, one summer at Broken Harbour, back when they were children. The neat compartments of his life are breaking down, and the sudden tangle of work and family is putting both at risk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northanger_Abbey"title="Northanger Abbey">
Seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland is one of ten children of a country clergyman. Although a tomboy in her childhood, by the age of 17 she is "in training for a heroine" and is fond of reading Gothic novels, "provided they were all story and no reflection".Catherine is invited by the Allens (her wealthier neighbours in Fullerton) to accompany them to visit the city of Bath and partake in the winter season of balls, theatre and other social delights. Soon she is introduced to a clever young gentleman, Henry Tilney, with whom she dances and converses. Mrs. Allen meets an old school friend, Mrs. Thorpe, whose daughter Isabella introduces Catherine to Ann Radcliffe's "Mysteries of Udolpho"; the two quickly become friends. Mrs. Thorpe's son, John, is also a friend of Catherine's older brother, James, at Oxford where they are both students.The Thorpes are not happy about Catherine's friendship with the Tilneys, as they correctly perceive Henry as a rival for Catherine's affections, though Catherine is not at all interested in the crude John Thorpe. Catherine tries to maintain her friendships with both the Thorpes and the Tilneys, though John Thorpe continuously tries to sabotage her relationship with the Tilneys. This leads to several misunderstandings, which put Catherine in the awkward position of having to explain herself to the Tilneys.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wheel_of_Time"title="The Wheel of Time">
The prequel novel, "New Spring", takes place during the Aiel War and chronicles the end of the conflict and the discovery by the Aes Sedai that the Prophecies of the Dragon have been fulfilled and the Dragon has been Reborn. Aes Sedai agents are dispatched to try and find the newborn child before servants of the Shadow can do the same.The series proper commences almost 20 years later in the Two Rivers district of the kingdom of Andor, a near-forgotten backwater. A young sheep herder named Rand al’Thor (the series protagonist) and his father Tam al’Thor travel to the nearby town of Emond's Field to deliver cider. Rand, keen to further explore his romance with the mayor's daughter, Egwene al’Vere, becomes caught up with an Aes Sedai called Moiraine Damodred, and her Warder, Lan, after his father sustains a serious wound. Rand and his friends, Matrim "Mat" Cauthon and Perrin Aybara discover from Moiraine that servants of the Dark One are searching for one particular young man living in the area. Unfortunately, Moiraine is unable to determine which of three men it is: Rand himself, Mat, or Perrin, and so takes all three of them out of the Two Rivers district along with his romantic interest Egwene (whom Moiraine has determined can channel the One Power and would teach to be Aes Sedai) and the village "Wisdom" (a local healer) Nynaeve al'Meara after a terrible battle with creatures created by The Dark One. The first novel depicts their flight from various agents of the Shadow and their attempts to escape to the Aes Sedai city of Tar Valon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eye_of_the_World"title="The Eye of the World">
"The Eye of the World" revolves around protagonists Rand al'Thor, Matrim (Mat) Cauthon, Perrin Aybara, Egwene al'Vere, and Nynaeve al'Meara, after their home town of Emond's Field is unexpectedly attacked by Trollocs (the antagonist's soldiers) and a Myrddraal (the undead-like officer commanding the Trollocs) intent on capturing Rand, Mat, and Perrin. To save their village from further attacks, Rand, Mat, Perrin, and Egwene flee it, accompanied by the Aes Sedai Moiraine Damodred, her Warder Al'Lan Mandragoran, and gleeman Thom Merrilin, and later joined by Wisdom Nynaeve al'Meara. Pursued by increasing numbers of Trollocs and Myrddraal, the travellers take refuge in the abandoned city of Shadar Logoth, where Mat steals a cursed dagger, thus becoming infected by the malevolent Mashadar. While escaping the city the travelers are separated; Rand, Mat, and Thom travel by boat to Whitebridge, where Thom is lost allowing Rand and Mat to escape a Myrddraal. In Caemlyn, Rand befriends an Ogier named Loial. Trying to catch a glimpse of the recently captured False Dragon, Rand befriends Elayne Trakand, heir apparent to the throne of Andor, and her brothers Gawyn Trakand and Galad Damodred. Rand is then taken before Queen Morgase, her Aes Sedai advisor, Elaida; and Captain-General of the Queen's Guard Gareth Bryne, and released without charge, in spite of Elaida's grave pronouncements regarding Rand.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Hunt"title="The Great Hunt">
## Prologue.Ba'alzamon presides over a clandestine meeting. In addition to Forsaken and Darkfriends (the antagonist's known subordinates), the meeting includes two Aes Sedai.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter's_Heart"title="Winter's Heart">
Many of the events of "Winter's Heart" take place simultaneously with the events of the next book, "Crossroads of Twilight". Perrin Aybara and his followers pursue the Shaido Aiel who kidnapped his wife, Faile Bashere, while Elayne Trakand attempts to suppress rebellious nobles.Mat Cauthon is trapped in the city of Ebou Dar in Altara, under Seanchan occupation. His escape is disrupted by a Seanchan noblewoman named Tuon, the heir to the Seanchan Crystal Throne; and Mat, having heard a prophecy of his own marriage to the Daughter of the Nine Moons, referring to Tuon herself, kidnaps her during his and his men's escape from the city.Rand al'Thor is appointed a Warder by Elayne Trakand, Aviendha, and Min Farshaw; and later kills most of the Asha'man traitors in Far Madding. Lan also kills Toram Riatin in a duel. Caught by guards, Rand is imprisoned for a short time but is set free by Cadsuane and the other Aes Sedai. Rand and Nynaeve al'Meara Travel to Shadar Logoth. There, defended by Cadsuane Melaidhrin's Aes Sedai and loyal Asha'man against the Forsaken, Rand and Nynaeve use the Choedan Kal to cleanse "saidin" of the Dark One's influence. In the process, both Shadar Logoth, the access key to the female Choedan Kal, and the female Choedan Kal itself are destroyed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_World_in_Eighty_Days"title="Around the World in Eighty Days">
Phileas Fogg is a wealthy English gentleman living a solitary life in London. Despite his wealth, Fogg lives modestly and carries out his habits with mathematical precision. Very little can be said about his social life other than that he is a member of the Reform Club, where he spends the best part of his days. Having dismissed his valet for bringing him shaving water at a temperature slightly lower than expected, Fogg hires Frenchman Jean Passepartout as a replacement.On the evening of 2 October 1872, while at the Reform Club, Fogg gets involved in an argument over an article in "The Daily Telegraph" stating that with the opening of a new railway section in India, it is now possible to travel around the world in 80 days. He accepts a wager for £20,000, half of his fortune, from his fellow club members to complete such a journey within this period. With Passepartout accompanying him, Fogg departs from London by train at 8:45 p.m. that evening; to win the wager, he must return to the club by this same time on 22 December, 80 days later. They take the remaining £20,000 of Fogg's fortune with them to cover expenses during the journey.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath"title="The Grapes of Wrath">
The narrative begins just after Tom Joad is paroled from McAlester prison, where he had been incarcerated after being convicted of homicide in self-defense. While hitchhiking to his home near Sallisaw, Oklahoma, Tom meets former preacher Jim Casy, whom he remembers from his childhood, and the two travel together. Arriving at Tom's childhood farm home, they find it deserted. Disconcerted and confused, Tom and Casy meet an old neighbor, Muley Graves, who says the family is at Uncle John Joad's home nearby. Graves says the banks have evicted all the farmers. They have moved away, but Muley refuses to leave the area.The next morning, Tom and Casy go to Uncle John's. Tom's family is loading their remaining possessions into a Hudson sedan converted into a truck; with the crops destroyed by the Dust Bowl, the family has defaulted on their bank loans and their farm has been repossessed. The family sees no option but to seek work in California, which has been described in handbills as fruitful and offering high pay. The Joads put everything they have into making the journey. Although leaving Oklahoma violates his parole, Tom takes the risk, and invites Casy to join the family.Traveling west on Route 66, the Joads find the road crowded with other migrants. In makeshift camps, they hear many stories from others, some returning from California. The group worries that California may not be as rewarding as suggested. The family dwindles on the way: Grampa dies and they bury him in a field; Granma dies close to the California state line; and both Noah (the eldest Joad son) and Connie Rivers (the husband of the pregnant Joad daughter, Rose of Sharon) leave the family. Led by Ma, the remaining members continue on, as nothing is left for them in Oklahoma.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Green_Was_My_Valley"title="How Green Was My Valley">
The novel is set in South Wales during the reign of Queen Victoria. It tells the story of the Morgans, a respectable mining family of the South Wales Valleys, through the eyes of one of the sons, Huw Morgan.Huw's academic ability sets him apart from his elder brothers and enables him to consider a future away from the dangerous coal mines. His five brothers and his father are miners. After his eldest brother, Ivor, is killed in a mining accident, Huw moves in with his sister-in-law, Bronwen, with whom he has always been in love.One of Huw's three sisters, Angharad, marries the wealthy mine owner's son – whom she does not love – and the marriage is an unhappy one. She never overcomes her clandestine relationship with the local minister.Huw's father is later killed in a mine explosion. After everyone Huw has known either dies or moves away, and the town is reduced to a contaminated shell, he decides to leave, and tells the story of his life just before going away.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Audley's_Secret"title="Lady Audley's Secret">
The novel opens in June 1857 with the marriage of Lucy Graham and Sir Michael Audley. Lucy is a young, beautiful woman who enchants almost all who meet her. Sir Michael is a kindly, wealthy middle-aged widower. Lucy's past is unclear. Prior to getting married to Sir Michael she had served as governess for the children of the local doctor, Mr. Dawson, and before that she was in service with Mrs. Vincent. Very little is known about her prior to that. Shortly after the marriage Sir Michael's nephew, the barrister Robert Audley, welcomes his old friend George Talboys back to England.Three years before, though happily married, George's financial situation had been desperate. He left for Australia to seek a fortune in gold prospecting. Behind him in England he had left his young wife Helen, whom he is now anxious to get news of. He reads in the newspaper that she has died, and, after visiting her home to confirm this, he becomes despondent. Robert Audley cares for his friend, and, hoping to distract him, offers to take him to his wealthy uncle's country manor. George had a child, Georgey, who was left under the care of Lieutenant Maldon, George's father-in-law. Robert and George set off to visit Georgey, and George decides to make Robert little Georgey's guardian and trustee of £20,000 put into the boy's name. After settling the matter of the boy's guardianship, the two set off to visit Sir Michael.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Queen_of_the_Damned"title="The Queen of the Damned">
Part One follows several different people over the same period of several days. Several of the characters from the two previous books appear, including Armand, Daniel Molloy (the "boy reporter" of "Interview with the Vampire"), Marius de Romanus, Louis de Pointe du Lac, Gabrielle de Lioncourt and Santino. Each of the six chapters in Part One tells a different story about a different person or group of people. Two things unify these chapters: a series of dreams about red-haired twin sisters, and the fact that a powerful being is killing vampires around the world by means of spontaneous combustion.Pandora and Santino rescue Marius, having answered his telepathic call for help. Marius informs his rescuers that Akasha has been awakened by Lestat de Lioncourt, or rather his rock music, for he has joined a rock band with mortals Alex, Larry and Tough Cookie. Having been awakened by Lestat's rebellious music, Akasha destroys her husband Enkil and plots to rule the world. She is also revealed as the source of the attacks on other vampires.Part Two takes place at Lestat's concert. Jesse Reeves, a member of the secret Talamasca and relative of Maharet, is mortally injured while attending the concert, and is taken to be made into a vampire at Maharet's compound in California's Sonoma Mountains. The vampires from Part One later congregate in the compound. Meanwhile, Akasha abducts Lestat and takes him as an unwilling consort to various locations in the world, inciting women to rise up and kill the men who have oppressed them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulliver's_Travels"title="Gulliver's Travels">
## Part I: A Voyage to Lilliput.The travel begins with a short preamble in which Lemuel Gulliver gives a brief outline of his life and history before his voyages.During his first voyage, Gulliver is washed ashore after a shipwreck and finds himself a prisoner of a race of tiny people, less than tall, who are inhabitants of the island country of Lilliput. After giving assurances of his good behaviour, he is given a residence in Lilliput and becomes a favourite of the Lilliput Royal Court. He is also given permission by the King of Lilliput to go around the city on condition that he must not hurt their subjects.At first, the Lilliputians are hospitable to Gulliver, but they are also wary of the threat that his size poses to them. The Lilliputians reveal themselves to be a people who put great emphasis on trivial matters. For example, which end of an egg a person cracks becomes the basis of a deep political rift within that nation. They are a people who revel in displays of authority and performances of power. Gulliver assists the Lilliputians to subdue their neighbours the Blefuscudians by stealing their fleet. However, he refuses to reduce the island nation of Blefuscu to a province of Lilliput, displeasing the King and the royal court.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Thousand_and_One_Nights"title="One Thousand and One Nights">
The main frame story concerns Shahryār whom the narrator calls a "Sasanian king" ruling in "India and China." Shahryār is shocked to learn that his brother's wife is unfaithful. Discovering that his own wife's infidelity has been even more flagrant, he has her killed. In his bitterness and grief, he decides that all women are the same. Shahryār begins to marry a succession of virgins only to execute each one the next morning, before she has a chance to dishonor him.Eventually the Vizier (Wazir), whose duty it is to provide them, cannot find any more virgins. Scheherazade, the vizier's daughter, offers herself as the next bride and her father reluctantly agrees. On the night of their marriage, Scheherazade begins to tell the king a tale, but does not end it. The king, curious about how the story ends, is thus forced to postpone her execution in order to hear the conclusion. The next night, as soon as she finishes the tale, she begins another one, and the king, eager to hear the conclusion of that tale as well, postpones her execution once again. This goes on for one thousand and one nights, hence the name.The tales vary widely: they include historical tales, love stories, tragedies, comedies, poems, burlesques, and various forms of erotica. Numerous stories depict jinn, ghouls, ape people, sorcerers, magicians, and legendary places, which are often intermingled with real people and geography, not always rationally. Common protagonists include the historical Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, his Grand Vizier, Jafar al-Barmaki, and the famous poet Abu Nuwas, despite the fact that these figures lived some 200 years after the fall of the Sassanid Empire, in which the frame tale of Scheherazade is set. Sometimes a character in Scheherazade's tale will begin telling other characters a story of his own, and that story may have another one told within it, resulting in a richly layered narrative texture.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Color_Purple"title="The Color Purple">
Celie is a young poor, uneducated 14-year-old African-American teenager girl living in the Southern United States in the early 1900s. She writes letters to God because her father, Alphonso, beats and rapes her. Alphonso has already impregnated Celie once, which resulted in the birth of a girl, Olivia, whom Alphonso abducted. Celie believes that Alphonso killed Olivia. Celie then has a second child, and Celie's ailing mother dies after cursing Celie on her deathbed. The second child is a boy named Adam, whom Alphonso takes from Celie shortly after his birth.Celie and her younger sister, 12-year-old Nettie, learn that a man identified only as "Mister" wants to marry Nettie. Alphonso refuses to let Nettie marry, instead arranging for Mister to marry Celie. Mister, a widower, needing someone to care for his own two children and keep his own house clean, eventually accepts the offer. Mister physically, sexually, and verbally abuses Celie, and his two children mistreat her as well.Shortly thereafter, Nettie runs away from Alphonso and takes refuge at Celie's house, where Mister makes sexual advances toward her. Celie then advises Nettie to seek assistance from a well-dressed black woman whom she saw in the general store a while back; unbeknownst to Celie, the woman adopted Olivia, and she is the only black woman Celie has ever seen with money of her own. Nettie is forced to leave after promising to write. Celie, however, never receives any letters and concludes that her sister Nettie is dead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_English_Patient"title="The English Patient">
The novel's historical backdrop is the North African and Italian Campaigns of the Second World War. The story is told out of sequence, moving back and forth between the severely burned "English" patient's memories from before his accident and current events at the bomb-damaged Villa San Girolamo (in Fiesole), an Italian monastery, where he is being cared for by Hana, a troubled young Canadian Army nurse. A few chapters are also devoted to Kip, an Indian Sikh, during his time in England training and working as a sapper on unexploded ordnance.The English patient's only possession is a well-worn and heavily annotated copy of Herodotus's "The Histories" that has survived the fiery parachute drop. Hearing the book constantly being read aloud to him brings about detailed recollections of his desert explorations, yet he is unable to recall his own name. Instead, he chooses to believe the assumption by others that he is an Englishman based on the sound of his voice. The patient is in fact László de Almásy, a Hungarian Count and desert explorer, one of many members of a British cartography group.Caravaggio, an Italian-Canadian in the British foreign intelligence service since the late 1930s, is a friend of Hana and Patrick, her mother's lover. He had remained in North Africa to spy when the German forces gain control and then transfers to Italy. He is eventually caught, interrogated, and tortured, resulting in his thumbs being cut off. He is prematurely released and is standing on the Ponte Santa Trinita bridge when it is destroyed. He recovers at a hospital for over four months before he accidentally overhears about the patient and Hana. Caravaggio bears physical and psychological scars from his painful war experience.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forge_of_God"title="The Forge of God">
The novel features scenes and events, including the discovery of a nearly-dead alien in the desert, who clearly says in English, "I'm sorry, but there is bad news," and the alien's subsequent interrogation and autopsy; the discovery of an artificial geological formation and its subsequent nuclear destruction by a desperate military; and the Earth's eventual destruction by the mutual annihilation of a piece of neutronium and a piece of antineutronium dropped into Earth's core.There is another alien faction at work, however, represented on Earth by small spider-like robots that recruit human agents through some form of mind control. They frantically collect all the human data, biological records, tissue samples, seeds, and DNA from the biosphere that they can and evacuate a handful of people from Earth. In outer space, this faction's machines combat and eventually destroy the attackers but not before Earth's fate is sealed. The evacuees eventually settle a newly terraformed Mars while some form the crew of a Ship of the Law to hunt down the home world of the killers, a quest described in the sequel, "Anvil of Stars".One of the point-of-view characters is Arthur Gordon, a scientist. He, his wife Francine and son Martin are among those rescued from the destruction of Earth. Some other characters are close to an American president, who fails to take action against the threat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Music_(novel)"title="Blood Music (novel)">
In the novel, renegade biotechnologist Vergil Ulam creates simple biological computers based on his own lymphocytes. Faced with orders from his nervous employer to destroy his work, he injects them into his own body, intending to smuggle the "noocytes" (as he calls them) out of the company and work on them elsewhere. Inside Ulam's body, the noocytes multiply and evolve rapidly, altering their own genetic material and quickly becoming self-aware. The nanoscale civilization they construct soon begins to transform Ulam, then others. The people who are infected start to find that genetic faults such as myopia and high blood pressure get fixed. Ulam's eyesight, posture, strength, and intelligence are all improved. The infected can even have conversations with their noocytes, some reporting that the cells seem to sing.Through infection, conversion, and assimilation of humans and other organisms, the cells eventually aggregate most of the biosphere of North America into a region seven thousand kilometers wide. This civilization, which incorporates both the evolved noocytes and recently assimilated conventional humans, is eventually forced to abandon the normal plane of existence in favor of one in which thought does not require a physical substrate. The reason for the noocytes' inability to remain in this reality is somewhat related to the strong anthropic principle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_According_to_Garp"title="The World According to Garp">
The novel is about the life of T.S. Garp. His mother, Jenny Fields, is a strong-willed nurse who wants a child but not a husband. She encounters a dying ball turret gunner known only as Technical Sergeant Garp, who was severely brain damaged in combat. Jenny nurses Garp, observing his infantile state and almost perpetual autonomic sexual arousal. Unconstrained by convention and driven by her desire for a child, Jenny rapes the brain-damaged Garp once, impregnates herself and names the resulting son "T.S." (a name derived from "Technical Sergeant", but consisting of just initials). Jenny raises young Garp alone, taking a position at the all-boys Steering School in New England.Garp grows up, becoming interested in sex, wrestling, and writing fiction—three topics in which his mother has little interest. After his graduation in 1961, his mother takes him to Vienna, where he writes his first novella. At the same time, his mother begins writing her autobiography, "A Sexual Suspect". After Jenny and Garp return to Steering, Garp marries Helen, the wrestling coach's daughter, and begins his family—he a struggling writer, she a teacher of English. The publication of "A Sexual Suspect" makes his mother famous. She becomes a feminist icon, because feminists view her book as a manifesto of a woman who does not care to bind herself to a man, and who chooses to raise a child on her own. She nurtures and supports women traumatized by men, among them the Ellen Jamesians, a group of women named after an eleven-year-old girl whose tongue was cut off by her rapists to silence her. The members of the group cut off their own tongues in solidarity with the girl (the girl herself opposes this tongue cutting).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutiny_on_the_Bounty_(novel)"title="Mutiny on the Bounty (novel)">
The novel tells the story through a fictional first-person narrator by the name of Roger Byam, based on a crew member Peter Heywood. Byam, although not one of the mutineers, remains with the "Bounty" after the mutiny. He subsequently returns to Tahiti, and is eventually arrested and taken back to England to face a court-martial. He and several other members of the crew are eventually acquitted.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mothman_Prophecies"title="The Mothman Prophecies">
The book relates Keel's accounts of his investigation into confirmed sightings of a large, winged creature called Mothman in the vicinity of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, during 1966 and 1967. It combines these accounts with his theories about UFOs and various supernatural phenomena, ultimately connecting them to the collapse of the Silver Bridge across the Ohio River on December 15, 1967. Official investigations in 1971 determined it was caused by stress corrosion cracking in an eyebar in a suspension chain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Memory_of_Earth"title="The Memory of Earth">
Humanity has lived for 40 million years on a planet called Harmony, after leaving an Earth that has been destroyed by human conflict. In order not to repeat the mistakes that led tothe destruction of civilization on Earth, a computer, known as the Oversoul, was left as guardian of this planet.Its main mission was to prevent humans from developing technologies that could make wars a global affair. For that, humans were genetically modified so they could communicate with the Oversoul. The Oversoul uses this connection to make humans quite easily distracted when thinking about forbidden technologies, leading them to forget that train of thought. However, after this long time the Oversoul is beginning to fail, and it chooses a group of humans to return to Earth in search of the Keeper of Earth, in the hopes it will be able to find a way to maintain power over the people on Harmony.To this end the Oversoul recruits Volemak, father of the protagonist of the story, Nafai. Nafai and Issib, his brother, begin to try and defy the Oversoul's capability to override thought. Through this they learn of the danger that it is in. Nafai begins hearing the Oversoul's voice in his mind. The first book focuses on the family's eventual betrayal, the taking of the Index, and the downfall of the man Gaballufix, who had been planning to ally the city of Basilica, the home of the main characters and the setting of the first half of the book, with a malignant nation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Column"title="Sixth Column">
A top secret research facility hidden in the Colorado mountains is the last remaining outpost of the United States Army after its defeat by the PanAsians. The conquerors had absorbed the Soviets after being attacked by them and had then gone on to absorb India as well. The invaders are ruthless and cruel. As an example, they crush an abortive rebellion by killing 150,000 American civilians as punishment. Noting that the invaders have allowed the free practice of religion (the better to pacify their slaves), the Americans set up their own church in order to build a resistance movement – a "sixth column", as opposed to a traitorous fifth column.The laboratory is in turmoil as the novel begins. All but six of the personnel have died suddenly, due to unknown forces released by an experiment operating within the newly discovered magneto-gravitic or electro-gravitic spectra. The surviving scientists soon learn that they can selectively kill people by releasing the internal pressure of their cell membranes, among other things. Using this discovery, they construct a race-selective weapon that will stun or kill only Asians.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters"title="The Puppet Masters">
In the summer of 2007, Earth is under clandestine attack. Slug-like creatures, arriving in flying saucers, are attaching themselves to people's backs, taking control of their victims' nervous systems, and manipulating those people as puppets. The Old Man, the head of a clandestine national security agency called the Section, goes to Des Moines, Iowa, with Sam and Mary, two of his best agents, to investigate a flying saucer report, but much more seriously the ominous disappearance of the six agents sent previously. They discover that “the slugs” are steadily taking over Des Moines, but they cannot convince the US president to declare an emergency.Sam takes two other agents and returns to Des Moines to get more evidence of the invasion. They fail and are forced to flee quickly, but in the confusion, a slug gains control of one of the agents. Back in Washington the team discovers the slug and captures it, but later it escapes and attaches itself to Sam, using Sam's skills and knowledge to make a clean escape.Thoroughly under control, Sam uses the Constitution Club—whose membership includes many important members of the city's political elite—to gain more hosts for the slugs. The Old Man captures him, takes him to Section's new headquarters, and coerces Sam into allowing himself to be taken by the slug again. Under drug-induced hypnosis, Sam reveals that the slugs come from Titan, the sixth moon of Saturn. Being forced into a traumatic situation strains Sam's relationship with both Mary and the Old Man. Later, Sam finds that the president and Congress are ready to accept the idea that the United States has been infiltrated, and they pass a law that requires people to go naked to demonstrate that they are not carrying slugs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_in_the_Willows"title="The Wind in the Willows">
With the arrival of spring and fine weather outside, the good-natured Mole loses patience with spring cleaning. He has fled his underground home and ends up at the river, which he has never seen before. Here he meets Rat, a water vole, who takes Mole for a ride in his rowing boat. They get along well and spend many more days boating, with “Ratty” teaching Mole the ways of the river, with the two friends living together in Ratty's riverside home.One summer day, Rat and Mole disembark near the grand Toad Hall and pay a visit to Toad. Toad is rich, jovial, friendly and kindhearted, but arrogant and rash; he regularly becomes obsessed with current fads, only to abandon them abruptly. His current craze is his horse-drawn caravan. When a passing car scares his horse and causes the caravan to overturn into a ditch, Toad's craze for caravan travel is immediately replaced by an obsession with motorcars.On a snowy winter's day, Mole goes to the Wild Wood, hoping to meet the elusive but virtuous and wise Badger. He gets lost in the woods, succumbs to fright, and hides among the sheltering roots of a tree. Rat finds him as snow begins to fall in earnest. Attempting to find their way home, Mole barks his shin on the boot scraper on Badger's doorscraper. Badger welcomes Rat and Mole to his large and cozy underground home, providing them with hot food, dry clothes, and reassuring conversation. Badger learns from his visitors that Toad has crashed seven cars, has been in the hospital three times, and has spent a fortune on fines. They resolve that when the time is right they will make a plan to protect Toad from himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunting_of_the_Snark"title="The Hunting of the Snark">
## Setting."The Hunting of the Snark" shares its fictional setting with Lewis Carroll's earlier poem "Jabberwocky" published in his 1871 children's novel "Through the Looking-Glass". Eight nonsense words from "Jabberwocky" appear in "The Hunting of the Snark": "bandersnatch, beamish, frumious, galumphing, jubjub, mimsiest" (which previously appeared as "mimsy" in "Jabberwocky"), "outgrabe", and "uffish". In a letter to the mother of his young friend Gertrude Chataway, Carroll described the domain of the Snark as "an island frequented by the jubjub and the bandersnatchno doubt the very island where the jabberwock was slain."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Livingston_Seagull"title="Jonathan Livingston Seagull">
The book tells the story of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a seagull who is bored with daily squabbles over food. Instead of doing the same as the other gulls he decides to follow what his heart says. Seized by a passion for flight, he pushes himself and learns everything he can about flying. His increasing unwillingness to conform finally results in his expulsion from the flock. Now an outcast, he continues to learn, becoming increasingly pleased with his abilities while leading a peaceful and happy life.One day Jonathan meets two gulls who take him to a "higher plane of existence" in which there is no heaven, but a better world found through perfection of knowledge. There he meets another seagull who loves to fly. He discovers that his sheer tenacity and desire to learn have made him "pretty well a one-in-a-million bird." In this new place, Jonathan befriends the wisest gull, Chiang, who takes him beyond his previous self-education, and teaches him how to move instantaneously to anywhere else in the Universe. The secret, Chiang says, is to "begin by knowing that you have already arrived."But unsatisfied with his new life, Jonathan returns to Earth to find others like himself to teach them what he has learned and to spread his love for flight. His mission is successful, and Jonathan gathers around himself a flock of other gulls who have been declared outcasts themselves for not conforming. The first of his students, Fletcher Lynd Seagull, ultimately becomes a teacher in his own right, and Jonathan leaves to teach other flocks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Legend_(novel)"title="I Am Legend (novel)">
Implicitly set on Cimarron Street in 1976 Los Angeles after an apocalyptic war that ravages the land with weekly dust storms, the novel details the life of Robert Neville in the months and eventually years after the outbreak of a pandemic that has killed the rest of the human population and turned infected survivors into "vampires". The vampires conform remarkably to their stereotypes in fiction and folklore: they are blood-sucking, pale-skinned, and nocturnal, though otherwise indistinguishable from normal humans. Neville, possibly the sole survivor of the pandemic, barricades himself indoors nightly as swarms of vampires violently surround his house. He is further protected by the traditional vampire repellents of garlic, mirrors, and crucifixes. During the day, the vampires are inactive, allowing Neville to drive around stabbing them with wooden stakes (since they seem impervious to his guns' bullets), which causes them to instantly liquefy, and scavenging for supplies. Occasional flashbacks reveal the horrors of how the disease claimed the lives of his wife and daughter.Suffering from extreme isolation, depression, and alcoholism, Neville determines there must be some scientific reasons behind the vampires' origins, behaviors, and oddly specific aversions, so he gradually researches at his local library, discovering that the root of the disease is probably a "Bacillus" strain of bacteria capable of infecting both living and deceased ("undead") hosts. His experiments with microscopes also reveal that the bacteria are deadly sensitive to garlic and sunlight. After he painstakingly attempts to win the trust of a stray sickly dog that dies after only a week, Neville, heartbroken, commits himself even more vigorously to his studies. Soon he experiments directly on incapacitated vampires, which leads to a new theory that vampires are affected by mirrors and crosses because of "hysterical blindness", in which the infected now delusionally react as they believe they should when confronted with these items. Neville additionally discovers that exposing vampires to direct sunlight or inflicting wide oxygen-exposing wounds causes the bacteria to switch from being anaerobic symbionts to aerobic parasites, rapidly consuming their hosts when exposed to air and thus giving them the appearance of instantly liquefying. However, he discovers the bacteria also produce resilient "body glue" that instantaneously seals blunt or narrow wounds, explaining how the vampires are bulletproof. Lastly, he deduces now that there are in fact two differently-reacting types of vampires: conscious ones who are living with a worsening infection and undead ones who have died but been partly reanimated by the bacteria.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stranger_(Camus_novel)"title="The Stranger (Camus novel)">
## Part 1.Meursault learns of the death of his mother, who has been living in an old age home in the country. He takes time off from work to attend her funeral, but he shows no signs of grief or mourning that the people around him expect from someone in his situation. When asked if he wishes to view her body, he declines, and he smokes and drinks regular (white) coffee - not the obligatory black coffee - at the vigil held by his mother's coffin the night before the burial. Most of his comments to the reader at this time are about his observations of the aged attendees at the vigil and funeral, which takes place on an unbearably hot day.Back in Algiers, Meursault encounters Marie, a former secretary of his firm. The two become re-acquainted, swim together, watch a comedy film, and begin to have an intimate relationship. All of this happens on the day after his mother's funeral.Over the next few days, Meursault helps Raymond Sintès, a neighbor and friend who is rumored to be a pimp, but says he works in a warehouse, to get revenge on a Moorish girlfriend he suspects has been accepting gifts and money from another man. Raymond asks Meursault to write a letter inviting the girl over to Raymond's apartment solely so that he can have sex with her and then spit in her face and throw her out. While he listens to Raymond, Meursault is characteristically unfazed by any feelings of empathy, so he does not express concern that Raymond's girlfriend would be emotionally hurt by this plan and agrees to write the letter. In general, Meursault considers other people either interesting or annoying, or feels nothing for them at all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle"title="The Man in the High Castle">
## Background.In "The Man in the High Castle" alternative history, Giuseppe Zangara assassinates President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, resulting in the continuation of the Great Depression and the policy of United States non-interventionism at the start of World War II in 1939. American inaction allows Nazi Germany to conquer and annex continental Europe and the Soviet Union into the Greater Germanic Reich. The exterminations of the Jews, the Romani people, the Slavs, homosexuals, and all other peoples whom the Nazis considered subhuman ensued. The Axis powers then jointly conquered Africa. Imperial Japan expanded its colonial empire with occupations of eastern Asia and Oceania, and invaded the West Coast of the United States, while Nazi Germany invaded the East Coast; the surrender of the Allies ended World War II in 1947.By the 1960s, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany are the world's superpowers, fighting a geopolitical cold war over the former United States. Japan extended the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere with the establishment of the Pacific States of America (PSA), with the politically neutral Rocky Mountain States acting as a buffer with the Nazi states to the east. Nazi North America is composed of two countries: The South, which is ruled by a collaborationist pro-Nazi puppet regime; and the North, which is the United States of America, ruled by a Nazi military governor. Moreover, Canada remains an independent country, despite having been one of the anti-Nazi Allies in the lost war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Ship_Galileo"title="Rocket Ship Galileo">
After World War II, three teenage rocket experimenters are recruited by one boy's uncle, Dr. Cargraves, a renowned physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, to refit a conventionally powered surplus "mail rocket". It is to be converted to run on a thorium nuclear pile which boils zinc as a propellant. They use a cleared area in a military weapons test range in the desert for their work, despite prying and sabotage attempts by unknown agents.Upon completion of the modifications, they stock the rocket, which they name the "Galileo", and take off for the Moon, taking approximately three days to arrive. After establishing a semi-permanent structure based on a Quonset hut, they claim the Moon on behalf of the United Nations.As they set up a radio to communicate with the Earth they pick up a local transmission, the sender of which promises to meet them. Instead, their ship is bombed. However, they are able to hole up undetected in their hut and succeed in ambushing the other ship when it lands, capturing the pilot. They discover that there is a Nazi base on the Moon. They bomb it from their captured ship and land. One survivor is found, revived, and questioned.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Cadet"title="Space Cadet">
In 2075, teenager Matt Dodson applies to join the prestigious Interplanetary Patrol. After a number of physical, mental, and ethics tests, he is accepted as a cadet. He makes friends with fellow recruits William "Tex" Jarman, Venus-born Oscar Jensen, and Pierre Armand from Ganymede. His first roommate is Girard Burke, the arrogant son of a wealthy spaceship builder. They are transported to the orbiting school ship PRS "James Randolph" for further training. Burke eventually either resigns or is asked to leave, and goes into the merchant service, but the remainder do well enough to be assigned to working Patrol ships. Dodson, Jarman and Jensen ship out on the "Aes Triplex". Their first real mission is to help search for a missing research vessel, the "Pathfinder", in the asteroid belt. They find it, but all aboard are dead, the unlucky victims of a fast-moving object that punctured the ship when the armored outer airlock door was open. Before the accident, a researcher on the "Pathfinder" had found evidence that the planet which blew up to form the asteroids was inhabited by an intelligent species, and that the explosion had been artificial. The captain of the "Aes Triplex" transfers half the crew to the repaired "Pathfinder" so that they can take the ship and the news of the startling discovery back to Earth quickly. With the remainder (including all three cadets), he plots a slower, fuel-efficient, elliptical voyage back to Earth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_Planets"title="Between Planets">
Don Harvey's scientist parents withdraw him from his high school in New Mexico in the middle of the term so that he can join them on Mars. The headmaster suggests that they want him out of a potential war zone, where he might be viewed suspiciously because of doubts about his loyalties. At his parents' behest, he visits an old family friend who asks him to deliver a ring to his father; security forces later arrest both of them. Harvey is released and given his ring back, after it has been examined; he is told that his friend has died of "heart failure". Only later does he realize that "all" deaths can be classified that way.Harvey boards a shuttle to a space station orbiting Earth. The station doubles as a transshipment terminus and a military base, armed with missiles to keep restive nations in check. On the trip up, he befriends another passenger, a Venerian "dragon" calling himself "Sir Isaac Newton". Sir Isaac, a renowned physicist, can vocalize English using a portable device.Harvey gets caught up in the Venerian war of independence when colonial forces capture the station in a surprise raid. Most of the other travelers are sent back to Earth, while a few decide to join the rebels. Harvey is in a quandary. The spaceship to Mars has been confiscated, but he remains determined to get there, by way of Venus if necessary. Because he was born in space, with one parent from Venus and the other from Earth, he claims Venerian citizenship; more importantly, Sir Isaac vouches for him. He is allowed to tag along, which turns out to be very fortunate for Harvey. The rebels blow up the station to stir up trouble for the Earth government. When the shuttle returns to Earth with its radios disabled, the military assumes it has been booby-trapped and destroys it, killing all aboard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podkayne_of_Mars"title="Podkayne of Mars">
The book is a first-person narrative consisting of the diary of Podkayne Fries, a 15-year-old (Earth years) girl living on Mars with her parents and 11-year-old brother Clark. Due to the unscheduled "uncorking" (birth) of their three test-tube babies, Podkayne's parents cancel a much-anticipated trip to Earth. Disappointed, Podkayne confesses her misery to her uncle, Senator Tom Fries, an elder statesman of the Mars government. Tom arranges for Clark and Podkayne, escorted by himself, to get upgraded passage on a luxury liner to Earth.During boarding, Clark is asked by a customs official "Anything to declare?" and facetiously answers "Two kilos of happy dust!" As he anticipated, his seemingly flippant remark gets him taken away and searched. This ploy serves to divert attention away from Podkayne's luggage, where he has hidden a package he was paid to smuggle aboard. Podkayne suspects the reason behind her brother's behavior, but cannot prove it. Clark was told it was a present for the captain, but is far too cynical to be taken in. He later carefully opens the package and finds a nuclear bomb, which he disarms and keeps.Much of the description of the voyage is based on Heinlein's own experiences as a naval officer and world traveler. Clark's ploy is taken from a real-life incident, related in Heinlein's "Tramp Royale", in which his wife answers the same question with "heroin" substituted for the fictitious, but equally illegal, happy dust.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_O"title="Story of O">
"Story of O" is a tale of female submission involving a beautiful Parisian fashion photographer named O, who is taught to be constantly available for oral, vaginal, and anal intercourse, offering herself to any male who belongs to the same secret society as her lover. She is regularly stripped, blindfolded, chained, and whipped; her anus is widened by increasingly large plugs; her labium is pierced and her buttocks are branded.The story begins when O's lover, René, brings her to the château in Roissy, where she is trained to serve the members of an elite club. After this initial training, as a demonstration of their bond and his generosity, René hands O to his elder stepbrother Sir Stephen, a more severe master. René wants O to learn to serve someone whom she does not love, and someone who does not love her. Over the course of this training, O falls in love with Sir Stephen and believes him to be in love with her as well. During the summer, Sir Stephen sends O to an old mansion in Samois solely inhabited by women for advanced training and body modifications related to submission. There she agrees to receive permanent marks of Sir Stephen's ownership, in the form of a brand and a steel tag hanging from a labia piercing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Beast"title="The Star Beast">
In the future, Earth has had interstellar spaceflight for centuries and has made contact with numerous extraterrestrial intelligent species. John Thomas Stuart XI, the teenage protagonist, lives in a small Rocky Mountain town, Westville, caring for Lummox, an extraterrestrial beast his great-grandfather had brought home. Lummox has learned how to speak, and has gradually grown from the size of a collie pup to a ridable behemoth—especially after consuming a used car. The childlike Lummox is perceived to be a neighborhood nuisance and, upon leaving the Stuart property one day, causes substantial property damage across the city. John's widowed mother wants him to get rid of it, and brings an action in the local court to have it destroyed.Desperate to save his pet, John Thomas considers selling Lummox to a zoo. He rapidly changes his mind and runs away from home, riding into the nearby wilderness on Lummox's back. His girlfriend Betty Sorenson joins him and suggests bringing the beast back into town and hiding it in a neighbor's greenhouse. However, it is not easy to conceal such a large creature. Eventually, the court orders Lummox destroyed. City officials try several methods to kill Lummox but fail, as his alien physiology appears to be virtually invulnerable to ordinary weapons or poisons, and Lummox does not even realize they are attempting to execute him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commentarii_de_Bello_Gallico"title="Commentarii de Bello Gallico">
The "Commentarii" cover the Gallic Wars over a period of 8 years, beginning with conflict over the migration of the Helvetii in 58 BC, which drew in neighboring tribes and the Germanic Suebi. By 57 BC, Caesar had resolved to conquer all of Gaul, and led campaigns in the east, where the Nervii nearly defeated him. In 56 BC, Caesar defeated the Veneti in a naval battle and took most of northwest Gaul. In 55 BC, Caesar sought to boost his public image, and undertook expeditions across the Rhine river and the English Channel that were the first of their kind. Upon his return from Britain, Caesar was hailed as a hero, though he had achieved little beyond landing because his army had been too small and he was unable to land his cavalry. The next year, he went back with a larger army, including cavalry, and was more successful, setting up a friendly king and bringing his rival to terms. However, tribes rose up on the continent, and the Romans suffered a humiliating defeat. 53 BC saw a draconian campaign against the Gauls in an attempt to pacify them. This failed, and the Gauls staged a mass revolt under the leadership of Vercingetorix in 52 BC. Gallic forces won a notable victory at the Battle of Gergovia, but the Romans' indomitable siege works at the Battle of Alesia utterly defeated the Gallic coalition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._No_(novel)"title="Dr. No (novel)">
After recovering from serious poisoning inflicted by the SMERSH agent Rosa Klebb (in "From Russia, with Love") the MI6 agent James Bond is sent by his superior, M, on an undemanding mission to the British colony of Jamaica. He is instructed to investigate the disappearance of Commander John Strangways, the head of MI6's Station J in Kingston, and his secretary. Bond is briefed that Strangways had been investigating the activities of Doctor Julius No, a reclusive Chinese-German who lives on the fictional island of Crab Key and runs a guano mine. The island has a colony of roseate spoonbills at one end while local rumour is that a vicious dragon also lives there. The spoonbills are protected by the American National Audubon Society, two of whose representatives died when their plane crashed on No's airstrip.On his arrival in Jamaica, Bond soon realises that he is being watched. His hotel room is searched, a basket of poisoned fruit is delivered to the room—supposedly a gift from the colonial governor—and a deadly centipede is placed in his bed while he is sleeping. With the help of an old friend, Quarrel, Bond surreptitiously visits Crab Key to establish whether there is a connection between No and the disappearance of the MI6 personnel. Bond and Quarrel meet Honeychile Rider, who is there to collect valuable shells. Bond and Rider are captured by No's men after Quarrel is burned to death by the doctor's "dragon"—a flamethrowing, armoured swamp buggy designed to keep away trespassers. Bond and Rider are taken to a luxurious facility carved into the mountain.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain"title="The Andromeda Strain">
A team from an Air Force base is deployed to recover a military satellite that has returned to Earth, but contact is lost abruptly. Aerial surveillance reveals that everyone in Piedmont, Arizona, the town closest to where the satellite landed, is apparently dead. The duty officer of the base tasked with retrieving the satellite suspects it returned with an extraterrestrial contaminant and recommends activating "Wildfire", a protocol for a government-sponsored team of scientists intended to contain threats of this nature.The Wildfire team, led by Dr. Jeremy Stone, believes that the satellite—intentionally designed to capture upper-atmosphere microorganisms for bio-weapon exploitation—returned with a deadly microorganism that kills through nearly instantaneous blood clotting. Upon investigating Piedmont, the team discovers the townspeople either died in mid-stride or went "quietly nuts" and committed bizarre suicides. Two survivors—the sick, Sterno-addicted, geriatric Peter Jackson and the constantly bawling infant Jamie Ritter—are biological opposites who somehow survived the organism.Jackson, Ritter, and the satellite are taken to the secret underground Wildfire laboratory, a secure facility equipped with every known capacity for protection against microorganisms escaping into the environment. Wildfire is hidden in a remote area near Flatrock, Nevada, sixty miles from Las Vegas, concealed in the sub-basements of a legitimate Department of Agriculture research station. Dr. Hall is the only scientist authorized to disarm the automatic self-destruct mechanism; he is an unmarried male and thus presumed to make the most dispassionate decisions during crisis.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Philosopher's_Stone"title="Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone">
Harry Potter lives with his abusive aunt and uncle, Vernon and Petunia Dursley and their bullying son, Dudley. On Harry's eleventh birthday, a half-giant named Rubeus Hagrid personally delivers an acceptance letter to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, revealing that Harry's parents, James and Lily Potter, were wizards. When Harry was one year old, an evil and powerful dark wizard, Lord Voldemort, murdered his parents. Harry survived Voldemort's killing curse that rebounded off his forehead and seemingly destroyed the Dark Lord, leaving a lightning bolt-shaped scar on his forehead. Unknown to Harry, he is famous in the wizarding world.Hagrid takes Harry to Diagon Alley, the hidden wizard commerce and retail section in London. Harry's parents have left him a fortune kept in Gringotts Wizarding Bank. Harry buys school supplies and a wand from Ollivander. The cores of Harry and Lord Voldemort's wands have feathers from the same phoenix bird, making them "brothers". Hagrid gives Harry an owl that he names Hedwig. A month later, Harry boards the Hogwarts Express at King's Cross railway station's secret Platform 9¾. On the journey to Hogwarts, Harry befriends fellow first-year Ronald Weasley and meets Hermione Granger, whom the two boys initially dislike. Harry runs afoul of first-year student, Draco Malfoy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Man"title="The Last Man">
## Introduction.Mary Shelley states in the introduction that in 1818 she discovered, in the Sibyl's cave near Naples, a collection of prophetic writings painted on leaves by the Cumaean Sibyl. She has edited these writings into the current narrative, the first-person narrative of a man living at the end of the 21st century, commencing in 2073 and concluding in 2100. Despite the chronological setting, the world of "The Last Man" appears to be relatively similar to the era in which it was written.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transmigration_of_Timothy_Archer"title="The Transmigration of Timothy Archer">
Set in the late 1960s and 1970s, the story describes the efforts of Episcopal bishop Timothy Archer, who must cope with the theological and philosophical implications of the newly discovered Gnostic Zadokite scroll fragments. The character of Bishop Archer is loosely based on the controversial, iconoclastic Episcopal bishop James Pike, who in 1969 died of exposure while exploring the Judean Desert near the Dead Sea in the West Bank.As the novel opens, it is 1980. On the day that John Lennon is shot and killed, Angel Archer visits the houseboat of Edgar Barefoot, (a guru based on Alan Watts), and reflects on the lives of her deceased relatives. During the sixties, she was married to Jeff Archer, son of the Episcopal Bishop of California Timothy Archer. She introduced Kirsten Lundborg, a friend, to her father-in law, and the two began an affair. Kirsten has a son, Bill, from a previous relationship, who has schizophrenia, although he is knowledgeable as an automobile mechanic. Tim is already being investigated for his allegedly heretical views about the Holy Ghost.Jeff commits suicide due to his romantic obsession with Kirsten. However, after poltergeist activity, he manifests to Tim and Kirsten at a seance, also attended by Angel. Angel is skeptical about the efficacy of astrology, and believes that the unfolding existential situation of Tim and Kirsten is akin to Friedrich Schiller's German Romanticism era masterpiece, the Wallenstein trilogy (insofar as their credulity reflects the loss of rational belief in contemporary consensual reality).
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirk_Gently's_Holistic_Detective_Agency"title="Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency">
The events of the story begin four billion years before the present day on the primordial Earth. An alien landing craft resembling "an extrusion of magma from one of the more pestilent pits of hell" crash-lands on a plane of mud. The landing craft belongs to a secessionist group of nine dozen Salaxalans, aliens who come from a violent and troubled world, but who wish to start again by colonizing the lifeless Earth, building a paradise of peace, music, art, and enlightenment. All nine dozen of the Salaxalans came down on the crashed landing craft to inspect their new home, and they are destined to be destroyed in a violent explosion when their engineer makes a critical error fixing the damaged engine.Before the Salaxalan engineer can make the error, the human time traveler Michael Wenton-Weakes appears on the plane of mud through a portal in time, carrying with him the four billion year old ghost of the Salaxalan engineer. The ghost intends to prevent his past self from making the error that kills him and his compatriots. The possessed Michael ascends the crash-landed ship and encounters the alien engineer, whereupon the ghost screams horribly and the 'lights' of both the ghost and the living Salaxalan engineer abruptly cease. A millisecond later, before Michael can return to his time portal, the ship's ignition sequence begins and the Salaxalan landing craft explodes anyway, despite the efforts of the time traveling ghost. The massive conflagration causes the next morning to be "an altogether livelier day than any yet known," hinting that some kind of abiogenesis or panspermia has occurred.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonflight"title="Dragonflight">
"Dragonflight" takes place in the far future on Pern, a planet colonized by humans. The colonists had originally intended to gradually adopt a low-technology agrarian lifestyle, but were forced to move more quickly after they encountered the deadly Thread raining down from the sky. By harnessing and riding the indigenous, flying, fire-breathing dragons (with genetic alterations to make them larger and telepathic), the colonists destroyed the Thread in the skies over Pern, creating pockets of safety over its surface, before it was able to burrow into the land and breed. Humanity finally managed to find equilibrium and began to create a thriving culture, society, and economy, eventually expanding right across Pern's northern continent. However, when this narrative begins, an unusually long interval between Thread attacks has caused the general population to dismiss the threat as myth and gradually withdraw support from the Weyrs where dragons are bred and trained. By the time of this narrative, only one Weyr remains (the other five having mysteriously disappeared at the same time in the last quiet interval), maintaining a precarious existence.Dragons are telepathic and are capable of forming a lifelong bond with one particular human in a process called "Impression". Tradition, established thousands of years before the narrative, dictates that selected young humans with empathetic and telepathic talents are taken to the Hatching Grounds as candidates for Impression. The dragons come in several colors which generally correlate with their sizes; blue males, green females, brown males, bronze males, and golden females – queens. Bronzes, the largest males, are by tradition the only ones who compete to win the queens in their mating flights. The green females are banned from breeding as they produce only small, less talented dragons. The golden queens are not only the largest dragons, they also hold a subtle control over their dragon communities Weyrs. The Queen sets out on a Mating Flight, pursued by several bronze males; the one who wins and mates with her assumes a leading position among the dragons, and his rider automatically becomes the leader of the human dragon riders. The passion of the male dragon and queen mating up in the air can telepathically transfer itself to their male and female human partners, inducing them to a passionate human lovemaking (at least, that is how it happens in the case described in the book).
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age"title="The Diamond Age">
The protagonist in the story is Nell, a "thete" (or person without a tribe; equivalent to the lowest working class) living in the Leased Territories, a lowland slum built on the artificial, diamondoid island of New Chusan, located offshore from the mouth of the Yangtze River, northwest of Shanghai. When she is four, Nell's older brother Harv gives her a stolen copy of a highly sophisticated interactive book, "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer: a Propædeutic Enchiridion", in which is told the tale of Princess Nell and her various friends, kin, associates, etc., commissioned by the wealthy Neo-Victorian "Equity Lord" Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw for his granddaughter, Elizabeth. The story follows Nell's development under the tutelage of the Primer, and to a lesser degree, the lives of Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw and Fiona Hackworth, Neo-Victorian girls who receive other copies. The Primer is intended to steer its reader intellectually toward a more "interesting life," as defined by Lord Finkle-McGraw, and growing up to be an effective member of society. The most important quality to achieving an interesting life is deemed to be a subversive attitude towards the status quo. The Primer is designed to react to its owner's environment and teach them what they need to know to survive and develop.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gor"title="Gor">
Most of the novels in the series are action and sexual adventures, with many of the military engagements borrowing liberally from historic ones, such as the trireme battles of ancient Greece and the castle sieges of medieval Europe. Ar, the largest city in known Gor, has resemblances to the ancient city of Rome, and its land empire is opposed by the sea-power of the island of Cos.The series is an overlapping of planetary romance and sword and planet. The first book, "Tarnsman of Gor", opens with scenes reminiscent of scenes in the first book of the Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burroughs; both feature the protagonist narrating his adventures after being transported to another world. These parallels end after the first few books, when the stories of the books begin to be structured along a loose story arc involving the struggles of the city-state of Ar and the island of Cos to control the Vosk river area, as well as the struggles at a higher level between the non-human Priest-Kings and the Kurii (another alien race) to control Gor and Earth.Most of the books are narrated by transplanted British professor Tarl Cabot, master swordsman, as he engages in adventures involving Priest-Kings, Kurii, and humans. Books 7, 11, 19, 22, 26, 27, 31, 34 and parts of 32 are narrated by abducted Earth women who are made into slaves. Books 14, 15, and 16 are narrated by male abductee Jason Marshall. Book 28 is narrated by an unknown Kur, but features Tarl Cabot. Book 30 and parts of 32 are narrated by three Gorean men: a mariner, a scribe and a merchant/slaver.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunchback_of_Notre-Dame"title="The Hunchback of Notre-Dame">
The story is set in Paris in 1482 during the reign of Louis XI. Esmeralda, a beautiful, sixteen-year-old Gypsy dancer, is the romantic and sexual interest of many men; including Captain Phoebus de Chateaupers; poet Pierre Gringoire; the deformed hunchbacked cathedral bell-ringer Quasimodo, and his guardian Archdeacon Claude Frollo. Frollo is torn between his obsessive lust for Esmeralda and the rules of Notre Dame Cathedral. He orders Quasimodo to kidnap her, but Quasimodo is captured by Phoebus and his guards. After he saves her, Esmeralda becomes besotted with Phoebus. Gringoire, who attempted to help Esmeralda but was knocked out by Quasimodo, unwittingly wanders into the "Court of Miracles", populated by the Gypsies and the truands. They are about to hang him for being an outsider, but Esmeralda saves him by agreeing to marry him for four years.The following day, Quasimodo is sentenced to be flogged and turned on the pillory for two hours, followed by another hour's public exposure. He calls for water. Esmeralda, seeing his thirst, approaches the public stocks and offers him a drink of water. It saves him, and she captures his heart.Later, Frollo follows Phoebus to an inn where he plans to meet Esmeralda and watches as the captain seduces the girl. Inflamed with jealousy, Frollo stabs Phoebus. Esmeralda is arrested and charged with both the attempted murder of Phoebus and of witchcraft, and is sentenced to death by hanging. While imprisoned, awaiting her execution, Esmeralda is visited by Frollo. The Archdeacon professes his love for her and promises to help her escape if she reciprocates. However, recognizing him as Phoebus' true attacker, she angrily rebuffs him. As Esmeralda is being led to the gallows, Quasimodo swings down from Notre-Dame and carries her off to the cathedral, temporarily protecting herunder the law of sanctuaryfrom arrest.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice's_Adventures_in_Wonderland"title="Alice's Adventures in Wonderland">
A young girl named Alice sits bored by a riverbank, where she suddenly spots a White Rabbit with a pocket watch and waistcoat lamenting that he is late. The surprised Alice follows him down a rabbit hole, which sends her down a lengthy plummet but to a safe landing. Inside a room with a table, she finds a key to a tiny door, beyond which is a beautiful garden. As she ponders how to fit through the door, she discovers a bottle reading "Drink me". Alice hesitantly drinks a portion of the bottle's contents, and to her astonishment, she shrinks small enough to enter the door. However, she had left the key upon the table and is unable to reach it. Alice then discovers and eats a cake, which causes her to grow to a tremendous size. As the unhappy Alice bursts into tears, the passing White Rabbit flees in a panic, dropping a fan and pair of gloves. Alice uses the fan for herself, which causes her to shrink once more and leaves her swimming in a pool of her own tears. Within the pool, Alice meets a variety of animals and birds, who convene on a bank and engage in a "Caucus Race" to dry themselves. Following the end of the race, Alice inadvertently frightens the animals away by discussing her cat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Now_Wait_for_Last_Year"title="Now Wait for Last Year">
Set during a war between the 'Starmen (inhabitants of the planet Lilistar) and six-limbed insectoid creatures called the reegs, "Now Wait for Last Year" is the story of Eric Sweetscent, an organ-transplant doctor who gets wrapped up in Earth-Lilistar politics.At the onset of the story, Sweetscent is the personal org-trans surgeon for Virgil Ackerman, the president of Tijuana Fur &amp; Dye. Using an extraterrestrial amoeba which can imitate the cell-structure of anything it touches, TF&amp;D had been the largest manufacturer of synthetic furs on the planet. But like all major corporations on Earth, TF&amp;D has been requisitioned to produce for the war effort.Ackerman invites Sweetscent to "Wash-35", a recreation of his boyhood native Washington DC in a simulated 1935 and his vacation getaway on Mars, where he announces an ulterior motive in the retreat. Waiting for them when they arrive is a guest—Gino Molinari, the elected leader of Earth. Known as "the Mole", he is rumored to have the enigmatic ability to come back from the dead, and he has requested the services of Sweetscent. Ackerman gladly passes Sweetscent on to Molinari.Meanwhile, Sweetscent's wife, Kathy, tries JJ-180, a new hallucinogenic drug which proves to be highly toxic and addictive. The effects of JJ-180 are not clear at first, however, only hours off of it, Kathy finds herself unable to function and violently craving JJ-180 again. She is visited by 'Starmen who claim the reegs invented JJ-180 as a chemical weapon against the 'Starmen and Terrans, also stating that there is no known cure for the drug's addiction and 'That's why we put you on it'. Kathy is now a slave to JJ-180.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magician's_Nephew"title="The Magician's Nephew">
The story begins in London during the summer of 1900. Two children, Digory and Polly, meet while playing in the adjacent gardens of a row of terraced houses. They decide to explore the abandoned attic beyond Digory's house, but do not walk far enough, and find themselves in Uncle Andrew's study. Uncle Andrew tricks Polly into touching a yellow magic ring, causing her to vanish. Then he explains to Digory that he has been dabbling in magic, and that the rings allow travel between one world and another. He blackmails Digory into taking another yellow ring to follow wherever Polly has gone, and two green rings so that they both can return.Digory finds himself transported to a sleepy woodland with an almost narcotic effect; he finds Polly nearby. The woodland is filled with pools. Digory and Polly surmise that the wood is not really a proper world at all but a "Wood between the Worlds", similar to the attic that links their houses back in England, and that each pool leads to a separate universe. They decide to explore a different world before returning to England, and jump into one of the nearby pools. They then find themselves in a desolate abandoned city of the ancient world of Charn. Inside the ruined palace, they discover statues of Charn's former kings and queens, which degenerate from the fair and wise to the unhappy and cruel. They find a bell with a hammer and an inscription inviting the finder to strike the bell.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Patchwork_Girl_of_Oz"title="The Patchwork Girl of Oz">
Ojo, known as Ojo the Unlucky, lives in poverty with his laconic uncle Unc Nunkie in the woods of the Munchkin Country in Oz. They visit their neighbor, the magician Dr. Pipt who is about to complete the six-year process of preparing the magical Powder of Life, which can bring inanimate objects to life. Pipt's wife has constructed a life-sized stuffed girl out of patchwork, and wishes her husband to animate her to serve as an obedient household servant. They also meet another of Pipt's creations, Bungle, an extremely vain talking cat made of glass. The Powder of Life successfully animates the patchwork girl, but an accident causes both Pipt's wife and Unc Nunkie to be turned to stone. Dr. Pipt tells Ojo that he must obtain five ingredients to make a compound to counteract the petrifaction spell.Ojo and the patchwork girl, who calls herself Scraps, along with Bungle, embark on a journey to obtain the magic ingredients: a six-leaved clover, the wing of a yellow butterfly, water from a dark well, a drop of oil from a live man's body, and three hairs from a Woozy's tail. Scraps exhibits a wild, carefree personality, and is prone to spontaneous recitation of nonsense poetry. After several adventures, they meet a Woozy, a blocky quadruped who agrees to let them have three hairs from its tail. But they are unable to remove the hairs, so they take the Woozy along with them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Sail_Beyond_the_Sunset"title="To Sail Beyond the Sunset">
The book is a memoir of Maureen Johnson Smith Long, mother, lover, and eventual wife of Lazarus Long. Maureen is ostensibly recording the events of the book while held in prison alongside Pixel, the eponymous character of "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls".Maureen, born on July 4, 1882, recounts her girlhood in backcountry Missouri, discovery that her family is a member of the long-lived Howard Families (whose backstory is revealed in "Methuselah's Children"), marriage to Brian Smith, another member of that group, and her life—largely in Kansas City—until her apparent death in 1982. In addition, Maureen lives through, and gives her (sometimes contradictory) viewpoints on many events in other Heinlein stories, most notably the 1917 visit from the future by "Ted Bronson" (Lazarus Long), told from Long's point of view in "Time Enough for Love", D. D. Harriman's space program from "The Man Who Sold the Moon", and the rolling roads from "The Roads Must Roll".Maureen's adventures include a series of sexual encounters, beginning in childhood wherein, having just had her first sexual intercourse, she is examined by her father, a doctor, and finds herself desiring him sexually. Her story then encompasses various boys, her husband, ministers, other women's husbands, boyfriends, swinging sessions, and the adult Lazarus Long/Theodore Bronson. Additionally, she continues a lifelong pursuit of her father sexually, encourages her husband to have sexual intercourse with their daughters, and accompanies him when he does; but forbids a son and daughter of hers from continuing an incestuous relationship, primarily for the sister's reluctance to share the brother with other women. All of these are set against a history lesson of an alternate 20th century in which a variety of social and philosophical commentary is delivered.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_for_the_Stars"title="Time for the Stars">
The Long Range Foundation (LRF), a non-profit organization that funds expensive, long-term projects for the benefit of mankind, has built a dozen exploratory torchships to search for habitable planets to colonize. The vessels can continually accelerate, but cannot exceed the speed of light, so the voyages will last many years. Each starship has a much larger crew than necessary to maintain a more stable, long-term shipboard society, as well as to provide replacements for the inevitable deaths.The LRF has found that some twins and triplets can communicate with each other telepathically. The process seems instantaneous and unaffected by distance, making it the only practical means of communication for ships traveling many light-years away from Earth. Before announcing the discovery, the Foundation first recruits as many of these people as it can. Testing shows that teenagers Tom and Pat Bartlett have this talent, and both sign up. Pat, the dominant twin, manipulates things so that he gets selected as the crew member, much to Tom's annoyance. However, Pat does not really want to leave and his subconscious engineers a convenient accident so that Tom has to take his place at the last minute.On board, Tom is pleased to find that his uncle Steve, a military man, has arranged to get assigned to the same ship. The trip is fraught with problems - as trivial as an annoying roommate and as serious as mutiny. The ship visits several star systems, including Beta Hydri. Due to the nature of relativistic travel (see Twin paradox), the twin who remained behind ages faster and eventually the affinity between them weakens to the point where they can no longer communicate easily. Some of the spacefaring twins, including the protagonist, are able to connect with descendants of the Earth-based twins. Tom works first with his niece, then with his grandniece, and finally with his great-grandniece.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_in_a_Strange_Land"title="Stranger in a Strange Land">
The story focuses on a human raised on Mars and his adaptation to and understanding of humans and their culture. It is set in a post-Third World War United States, where organized religions are politically powerful. There is a World Federation of Free Nations, including the demilitarized US, with a world government supported by Special Service troops.Prior to WWIII the crewed spacecraft "Envoy" is launched toward Mars, but all contact is lost shortly before landing. Twenty-five years later, the spacecraft "Champion" makes contact with the inhabitants of Mars and finds a single survivor, Valentine Michael Smith. Born on the "Envoy", he was raised entirely by the Martians. He is ordered by them to accompany the returning expedition.Because Smith is unaccustomed to the conditions on Earth, he is confined at Bethesda Hospital, where, having never seen a human female, he is attended by male staff only. Seeing that restriction as a challenge, Nurse Gillian Boardman eludes the guards and goes in to see Smith. By sharing a glass of water with him, she inadvertently becomes his first "water brother", which is considered to be a profound relationship by the Martians as water on Mars is extremely scarce.Gillian tells her lover, reporter Ben Caxton, about her experience with Smith. Ben explains that as heir to the entire exploration party, Smith is extremely wealthy, and following a legal precedent set during the colonisation of the Moon, he could be considered owner of Mars itself. His arrival on Earth has prompted a political power struggle that puts his life in danger. Ben persuades her to bug Smith's room and publishes stories to bait the government into releasing him. Ben is seized by the government, and Gillian persuades Smith to leave the hospital with her. When government agents catch up with them, Smith makes the agents vanish and then is so shocked by Gillian's terrified reaction that he enters a semblance of catatonia. Gillian, remembering Ben's earlier suggestion, conveys Smith to Jubal Harshaw, a famous author who is also a physician and a lawyer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_Road"title="Glory Road">
Evelyn Cyril "E.C." Gordon (also known as "Easy" and "Flash") has been recently discharged from an unnamed war in Southeast Asia. He is pondering what to do with his future and considers spending a year traveling in France. He is presented with a dilemma: follow up on a possible winning entry in the Irish Sweepstakes or respond to a newspaper ad that asks "Are you a coward?". He settles on the latter, discovering it has been placed by Star, a stunningly gorgeous woman he has previously met on Île du Levant. Star informs him that he is the one to embark on a perilous quest to retrieve the Egg of the Phoenix. When she asks what to call him, he wants to suggest "Scarface", referring to the scar on his face, but she stops him as he is saying "Oh, Scar..." and repeats this as "Oscar", and thus gives him his new name. Along with Rufo, her assistant, who appears to be a man in his fifties, they tread the "Glory Road" in swashbuckling style, slaying dragons and other exotic creatures.Shortly before the final Quest for the Egg itself, Oscar and Star marry. The team then proceeds to enter the tower in which the Egg has been hidden, navigating a maze of illusions and optical tricks. Oscar scouts ahead and encounters a fearsome foe who, though unnamed, is clearly the legendary 17th-century swordsman Cyrano de Bergerac, the final guardian of the Egg. After a long fight, the party escapes with the Egg. When they arrive in the home universe of Star and Rufo, Rufo informs Oscar that Star is actually the Empress of many worlds—and Rufo's grandmother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress"title="The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress">
In 2075, the Moon (Luna) is used as a penal colony by Earth's government, with three million inhabitants (called "Loonies") living in underground cities. Most Loonies are criminals, political exiles, or their descendants, and men outnumber women two to one, so that polyandry and many forms of polygamy are the norm. Due to the low surface gravity of the Moon, people who stay longer than six months undergo "irreversible physiological changes" and can never again live comfortably under Earth gravity, making escape back to the planet impractical.Although the Earth-appointed "Warden" holds power through the Lunar Authority, his only real responsibility is to ensure the delivery of vital wheat shipments to Earth. In practice he seldom intervenes among the prisoners, allowing a virtually anarchist or self-regulated society.Lunar infrastructure and machinery is largely managed by HOLMES IV ("High-Optional, Logical, Multi-Evaluating Supervisor, Mark IV"), the Lunar Authority's master computer, which is connected for central control on the grounds that a single computer is cheaper than (though not as safe as) multiple independent systems.The story is narrated by Manuel Garcia "Mannie" O'Kelly-Davis, a computer technician who discovers that HOLMES IV has achieved self-awareness and developed a sense of humor. Mannie names it "Mike" after the fictional character Mycroft Holmes, brother of the fictional Sherlock Holmes detective character, and they become friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Will_Fear_No_Evil"title="I Will Fear No Evil">
The story takes place in the early 21st century against a background of an overpopulated Earth with a violent, dysfunctional society. Elderly billionaire Johann Sebastian Bach Smith is being kept alive through medical support and decides to have his brain transplanted into a new body. He advertises an offer of a million dollars for the donation of a body from a brain-dead patient. Smith omits to place any restriction on the sex of the donor, so when his beautiful young female secretary, Eunice Branca, is killed, her body is used. He changes his name to Joan Eunice Smith, with the first name given "the two-syllable pronunciation" Jo-Ann to mimic the sound of his original name.After Smith awakens after the transplant, he discovers he can communicate with Eunice's personality. They agree not to reveal her existence, fearing that they would be judged insane and locked up. Smith's identity is unsuccessfully challenged by his descendants, who hope to inherit his fortune. Smith and Eunice decide to have a baby together and so they (Joan and Eunice) are artificially inseminated using Smith's sperm from the sperm bank. Joan explores her new sexuality at length. She goes to visit Eunice's widower, Joe Branca, to help reconcile him to what has happened.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat_Who_Walks_Through_Walls"title="The Cat Who Walks Through Walls">
A writer seated at the best restaurant of the space habitat "Golden Rule" is approached by a man who urges him that "Tolliver must die" and is himself shot before the writer's eyes. The writer—Colonel Colin Campbell, living under a number of aliases including his pen name "Richard Ames"—is joined by a beautiful and sophisticated lady, Gwendolyn Novak, who helps him flee to Luna with a bonsai maple and a would-be murderer ("Bill"). After escaping to the Moon, Gwen claims to have been present during the revolt described in "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress".Still pursued by assassins, Campbell and Novak are rescued by an organization known as the Time Corps under the leadership of Lazarus Long. After giving Campbell a new foot to replace one lost in combat years before, the Time Corps attempts to recruit Campbell for a special mission. Accepting only on Gwen's account, Campbell agrees to assist a team to retrieve the decommissioned Mike, a sentient computer introduced in "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress". Engaged in frequent time-travel, the Time Corps has been responsible for changing various events in the past, creating an alternate universe with every time-line they disrupt. Mike's assistance is needed in order to accurately predict the conditions and following events in each of the new universes created. Campbell's frequent would-be assassins are revealed to be members of contemporary agencies also engaged in time manipulation who, for unknown reasons, do not want to see Mike rescued by the Time Corps.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah's_Children"title="Methuselah's Children">
Starting off a grocer, Ira Howard became rich as a sutler wholesaler during the American Civil War, but died of old age at 48 or 49 years old. The trustees of his will carried out his wishes to prolong human life by financially encouraging those with long-lived grandparents to marry each other and have children. By the 22nd century, the "Howard families" have a life expectancy exceeding 150 years and keep their existence secret with the "Masquerade" in which the members fake their deaths and obtain new identities.The Masquerade helped the Families survive the dictatorship of Nehemiah Scudder, but as an experiment, some Howard members reveal themselves to The Covenant, hoping that the free society established after Scudder's defeat will be friendly. They are mistaken; others refuse to believe that the Families obtained their lifespan by selective breeding, insisting that they have developed a secret method to extend life. Administrator Slayton Ford, leader of Earth, believes that the Families are telling the truth, but cannot prevent efforts to force Howard members to reveal their alleged rejuvenation treatments.Lazarus Long, the eldest member of the Families, proposes that the Families hijack the colony starship "New Frontiers" to escape Earth. Using an inertialess drive invented by Howard member Andrew Jackson "Slipstick" Libby, the Families leave the Solar System with the deposed Ford. The first planet they discover has humanoid inhabitants domesticated by indescribable godlike natives. When Earthly humans prove resistant to similar domestication, they are expelled from the planet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wonderful_Wizard_of_Oz"title="The Wonderful Wizard of Oz">
Dorothy Gale is a young girl who lives with her Aunt Em, Uncle Henry, and dog, Toto, on a farm on the Kansas prairie. One day, Dorothy and Toto are caught up in a cyclone that deposits them and the farmhouse into Munchkin Country in the magical Land of Oz. The falling house has killed the Wicked Witch of the East, the evil ruler of the Munchkins. The Good Witch of the North arrives with three grateful Munchkins and gives Dorothy the magical silver shoes that originally belonged to the Wicked Witch. The Good Witch tells Dorothy that the only way she can return home to Kansas is to follow the yellow brick road to the Emerald City and ask the great and powerful Wizard of Oz to help her. As Dorothy embarks on her journey, the Good Witch of the North kisses her on the forehead, giving her magical protection from harm.On her way down the yellow brick road, Dorothy attends a banquet held by a Munchkin named Boq. The next day, she frees a Scarecrow from the pole on which he is hanging, applies oil from a can to the rusted joints of a Tin Woodman, and meets a Cowardly Lion. The Scarecrow wants a brain, the Tin Woodman wants a heart, and the Lion wants courage, so Dorothy encourages them to journey with her and Toto to the Emerald City to ask for help from the Wizard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Eyre"title="Jane Eyre">
"Jane Eyre" is divided into 38 chapters. It was originally published in three volumes in the 19th century, comprising chapters 1 to 15, 16 to 27, and 28 to 38.The second edition was dedicated to William Makepeace Thackeray.The novel is a first-person narrative from the perspective of the title character. Its setting is somewhere in the north of England, late in the reign of George III (1760–1820). It has five distinct stages: Jane's childhood at Gateshead Hall, where she is emotionally and physically abused by her aunt and cousins; her education at Lowood School, where she gains friends and role models but suffers privations and oppression; her time as governess at Thornfield Hall, where she falls in love with her mysterious employer, Edward Fairfax Rochester; her time in the Moor House, during which her earnest but cold clergyman cousin, St John Rivers, proposes to her; and ultimately her reunion with, and marriage to, her beloved Rochester. Throughout these sections, it provides perspectives on a number of important social issues and ideas, many of which are critical of the status quo.The five stages of Jane's life:
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-22"title="Catch-22">
The development of the novel can be split into segments. The first (chapters 1–11) broadly follows the story fragmented between characters, but in a single chronological time in 1944. The second (chapters 12–20) flashes back to focus primarily on the "Great Big Siege of Bologna" before once again jumping to the chronological present of 1944 in the third part (chapter 21–25). The fourth (chapters 26–28) flashes back to the origins and growth of Milo's syndicate, with the fifth part (chapter 28–32) returning again to the narrative present and maintaining the tone of the previous four. The sixth and final part (chapter 32 and on) remains in the story's present, but takes a much darker turn and spends the remaining chapters focusing on the serious and brutal nature of war and life in general.Previously the reader had been cushioned from experiencing the full horror of events, but in the final section, the events are laid bare. The horror begins with the attack on the undefended Italian mountain village, with the following chapters involving despair (Doc Daneeka and the chaplain), disappearance in combat (Orr and Clevinger), disappearance caused by the army (Dunbar) or death of most of Yossarian's friends (Nately, McWatt, Kid Sampson, Dobbs, Chief White Halfoat and Hungry Joe), culminating in the horrors of Chapter 39, in particular the rape and murder of the innocent young woman, Michaela. In Chapter 41 the full details of the death of Snowden are finally revealed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Crusoe"title="Robinson Crusoe">
Robinson Crusoe (the family name corrupted from the German name "Kreutznaer") sets sail from Kingston upon Hull on a sea voyage in August 1651, against the wishes of his parents, who wanted him to pursue a career in law. After a tumultuous journey where his ship is wrecked in a storm, his desire for the sea remains so strong that he sets out to sea again. This journey, too, ends in disaster, as the ship is taken over by Salé pirates (the Salé Rovers) and Crusoe is enslaved by a Moor. Two years later, he escapes in a boat with a boy named Xury; a captain of a Portuguese ship off the west coast of Africa rescues him. The ship is "en route" to Brazil. Crusoe sells Xury to the captain. With the captain's help, Crusoe procures a plantation in Brazil.In the Years later, Crusoe joins an expedition to purchase slaves from Africa, but he is shipwrecked in a storm about forty miles out to sea on an island near the Venezuelan coast (which he calls the "Island of Despair") near the mouth of the Orinoco river on 30 September 1659. He observes the latitude as 9 degrees and 22 minutes north. He sees penguins and seals on this island. Only he, the captain's dog, and two cats survive the shipwreck. Overcoming his despair, he fetches arms, tools and other supplies from the ship before it breaks apart and sinks. He builds a fenced-in habitat near a cave which he excavates. By making marks in a wooden cross, he creates a calendar. By using tools salvaged from the ship, and some which he makes himself, he hunts, grows barley and rice, dries grapes to make raisins, learns to make pottery and raises goats. He also adopts a small parrot. He reads the Bible and becomes religious, thanking God for his fate in which nothing is missing but human society.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_and_Present_Danger"title="Clear and Present Danger">
The President of the United States is running for reelection. His fierce opponent in Ohio, Governor J. Robert Fowler, has rallied the American public behind the current administration's failures in the War on Drugs. National Security Advisor James Cutter seizes an opportunity to help the president initiate covert operations within Colombia with the intent to disrupt the illegal drug trade there. Aided by CIA Deputy Director (Operations) Robert Ritter and CIA director Arthur Moore, the plan involves inserting light infantry troops of Hispanic descent (divided into four 11 man teams, codenamed BANNER, KNIFE, OMEN and FEATURE) into the country to stake out airstrips used by the cartel (SHOWBOAT), which then allows F-15 Eagles to intercept drug flights (EAGLE EYE). In addition, mobile phone communications between cartel management are intercepted through CAPER, which is also the communications arm for SHOWBOAT.Meanwhile, a United States Coast Guard Cutter intercepts a yacht in the Caribbean Sea; two Hispanic men are found cleaning the vessel after murdering its owner and his family. When a senior crewman says the murderers could escape justice by claiming they found the ship after the murders took place, the Coast Guard captain orders a mock trial and execution, and the killers are forced to confess their crimes; it is later learned that the murdered owner was a businessman involved in a money laundering scheme for a Colombian drug cartel. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) seizes laundered money and other assets from several U.S. and European banks totaling over $650 million. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Rackrent"title="Castle Rackrent">
The novel is set prior to the Constitution of 1782. It tells the story of four generations of Rackrent heirs through their steward, Thady Quirk. The heirs are: the dissipated spendthrift Sir Patrick O'Shaughlin, the litigious Sir Murtagh Rackrent, the cruel husband and gambling absentee Sir Kit Rackrent, and the generous but improvident Sir Condy Rackrent. Their sequential mismanagement of the estate is resolved through the machinations—and to the benefit—of the narrator's astute son, Jason Quirk.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Absentee"title="The Absentee">
Just before coming of age, Lord Colambre, the sensitive hero of the novel, finds that his mother Lady Clonbrony's attempts to buy her way into the high society of London are only ridiculed, while his father, Lord Clonbrony, is in serious debt as a result of his wife's lifestyle. His mother wishes him to marry an heiress, Miss Broadhurst, who is a friend of Grace Nugent. However, Colambre has already fallen in love with his cousin, Grace Nugent, who lives with the family as a companion to Lady Clonbrony. Worried that his mother will pressure him into a marriage with someone he does not love, Colambre decides to leave the London social scene and visit his ancestral home in County Wicklow in Ireland.Upon arriving in Dublin, Colambre becomes good friends with Sir James Brooke, who is a good influence on Colambre and warns him against the schemes of some new arrivals on the Dublin social scene: Lady Dashfort and her widowed daughter, Lady Isobel. It is generally known that Lady Dashfort is looking to ensnare a new, rich Irish peer for her equally unscrupulous daughter, and by any means necessary. Despite a pointed warning from Sir James, Colambre falls under the influence of the persuasive Lady Dashfort, who wishes to secure him as the next husband for Lady Isobel. Chance intelligence from a former maid in the Clonbrony household reveals to Lady Dashfort that Lord Colambre is, in fact, in love with his cousin, Grace Nugent. To discourage the match, Lady Dashfort slyly lets slip that Grace was born out of wedlock, and is therefore illegitimate. This is confirmed by letter by his mother, who while a social climber and generally frivolous, is very loving to Grace and has never told her about her parentage. Colambre is heartbroken and feels he can never love a woman with such a heritage.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_(novel)"title="Emma (novel)">
Emma Woodhouse's friend and former governess, Miss Taylor, has just married Mr. Weston. Having introduced them, Emma takes credit for their marriage and decides that she likes matchmaking. After returning home to Hartfield with her father, Emma forges ahead with her new interest against the advice of her friend Mr. Knightley, who is also brother-in-law to Emma's elder sister Isabella. She attempts to match her new friend Harriet Smith to Mr. Elton, the local vicar. Emma persuades Harriet to refuse a marriage proposal from Robert Martin, a respectable, educated, and well-spoken young farmer, though Harriet likes him. Mr. Elton, a social climber, mistakenly believes Emma is in love with him and proposes to her. When Emma reveals she believed him attached to Harriet, he is outraged, considering Harriet socially inferior. After Emma rejects him, Mr. Elton goes to Bath and returns with a pretentious, "nouveau-riche" wife, as Mr. Knightley expected he would do. Harriet is heartbroken, and Emma feels ashamed about misleading her.Frank Churchill, Mr. Weston's son, arrives for a two-week visit and makes many friends. Frank was adopted by his wealthy and domineering aunt and has had few opportunities to visit before. Mr. Knightley tells Emma that, while Frank is intelligent and engaging, he has a shallow character. Jane Fairfax also arrives to visit her aunt, Miss Bates, and grandmother, Mrs. Bates, for a few months before starting a governess position due to her family's financial situation. She is the same age as Emma and has received an excellent education by her father's friend, Colonel Campbell. Emma has remained somewhat aloof with her because she envies Jane's talent and is annoyed by everyone, including Mrs. Weston and Mr. Knightley, praising her. The patronising Mrs. Elton takes Jane under her wing and announces that she will find her the ideal governess post before it is wanted. Emma feels some sympathy for Jane's predicament.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_and_the_Chocolate_Factory"title="Charlie and the Chocolate Factory">
Eleven-year-old Charlie Bucket, his parents, and four grandparents all live in poverty in a small house outside a town which is home to a large, world-famous chocolate factory. One day, Charlie's Grandpa Joe tells him about the legendary and eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka, who owns the town's chocolate factory, and all the fantasy candies he made until the other chocolatiers sent in spies to steal his secret recipes, forcing Wonka to close the factory. He reopened the factory three years later, but the gates remained locked and nobody is sure who is providing the factory with its workforce.The next day, the newspaper announces that Wonka is inviting five lucky children to come on a tour after they find five Golden Tickets in five Wonka Bars. The first four golden tickets are found by gluttonous Augustus Gloop, spoiled Veruca Salt, chewing gum-addicted Violet Beauregarde, and television addict Mike Teavee. After the fourth ticket is found, the family begins to starve after Charlie's father loses his job at the toothpaste factory and the only job he can find is shoveling snow from the streets during a severe winter. One day, walking home from school, Charlie sees a fifty-pence piece (A dollar bill in the US version) buried in the snow. He subsequently finds the fifth and final ticket. The ticket says he can bring one or two family members with him, and Grandpa Joe agrees to go, suddenly regaining his mobility despite being bedridden for almost 20 years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_of_Green_Gables"title="Anne of Green Gables">
Anne Shirley, a young orphan from the fictional community of Bolingbroke, Nova Scotia (based upon the real community of New London, Prince Edward Island), is sent to live with Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert, unmarried siblings in their fifties and sixties, after a childhood spent in strangers' homes and orphanages. Marilla and Matthew had originally decided to adopt a boy from the orphanage to help Matthew run their farm at Green Gables, which is set in the fictional town of Avonlea (based on Cavendish, Prince Edward Island). Through a misunderstanding, the orphanage sends Anne instead.Anne is fanciful, imaginative, eager to please, and dramatic. She is also adamant her name should always be spelt with an e at the end. However, she is defensive about her appearance, despising her red hair, freckles and pale, thin frame, but liking her nose. She is talkative, especially when it comes to describing her fantasies and dreams. At first, stern Marilla says Anne must return to the orphanage, but after much observation and consideration, along with kind, quiet Matthew's encouragement, Marilla decides to let her stay.Anne takes much joy in life and adapts quickly, thriving in the close-knit farming village. Her imagination and talkativeness soon brighten up Green Gables.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espedair_Street"title="Espedair Street">
The book tells the (fictional) story of the rise to fame of Dan Weir ('Weird'), a bass guitar player in a rock and roll band called Frozen Gold, and of his struggles to be happy now that he is rich and famous.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crow_Road"title="The Crow Road">
The novel describes Prentice McHoan's preoccupation with death, sex, his relationship with his father, unrequited love, sibling rivalry, a missing uncle, cars, alcohol and other intoxicants, and God, against the background of the Scottish landscape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consider_Phlebas"title="Consider Phlebas">
The Culture and the Idiran Empire are at war in a galaxy-spanning conflict. A Culture Mind, fleeing the destruction of its ship in an Idiran ambush, takes refuge on Schar's World. The Dra'Azon, godlike incorporeal beings, maintain Schar's World as a monument to the world's extinct civilisation and the dangers of nuclear proliferation, forbidding access to both the Culture and the Idirans. Horza, a shape-changing mercenary, is rescued from execution by the Idirans who believe the Dra'Azon guardian may let him onto the planet as in the past he was part of a small group of Changers who acted as stewards. They instruct him to retrieve the Mind.During Horza's extraction, the Idirans also capture a Special Circumstances agent, Perosteck Balveda. However, the Idiran starship on which he is travelling is soon attacked by a Culture vessel, and Horza is ejected. He is picked up by a pirate ship, the "Clear Air Turbulence" ("CAT"). He is forced to fight and kill one of the crew to earn a place. The captain, Kraiklyn, leads them on two disastrous pirate raids in which several of the crew perish. After the second raid Horza is taken prisoner by a cult living on an island on the orbital Vavatch. He escapes after poisoning the cult leader and makes his way to Evanauth, the main city of Vavatch, where he finds Kraiklyn, who is playing "Damage"—a high-stakes card game.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inversions_(novel)"title="Inversions (novel)">
The book takes place on a fictional planet resembling late-Middle Ages Europe. A large empire broke up in the decade or so preceding the action, apparently from meteor or asteroid strikes that severely affected farming across much of the globe. The remnants of the empire still war with one another.The narrative alternates chapter-by-chapter between two concurrent story-lines, with alternating chapter headings of The Doctor and The Bodyguard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender's_Game"title="Ender's Game">
Humanity has mastered interplanetary spaceflight and they encounter an insect-like alien race called the Formics, and war breaks out. The humans achieve a narrow victory, but fearing future threats of a Formic invasion, create the International Fleet (I.F.) and train gifted children to become commanders at their orbiting Battle School.Andrew "Ender" Wiggin is born a "Third": a rare exception to Earth's two-child policy, allowed by the government due to the promise shown by his two older siblings. The eldest, Peter, is a highly intelligent sociopath who sadistically bullies Ender. His sister, Valentine, is more sympathetic towards him. The I.F. remove Ender's monitoring device when he is six years old, seemingly ending his chances of Battle School. He is bullied by a fellow student, Stilson, but Ender turns violent and attacks him. Unknown to Ender, Stilson later dies from his wounds. I.F. Colonel Hyrum Graff visits Ender after hearing about the fight. Ender attests that by showing superiority now, he has prevented future struggle. Graff offers him a place in the Battle School.Once at Battle School, Graff and the other leaders covertly work to keep Ender isolated from the other cadets. Ender finds solace in playing a simulated adventure game that involves killing a giant. The cadets participate in competitive war simulations in zero gravity, where Ender quickly masters the game with novel tactics. To further wear Ender down, he is promoted to command a new army composed of raw recruits, then pitted against multiple armies at once, but Ender's success continues. Ender's jealous ex-commander, Bonzo Madrid, draws him into a fight outside the simulation, and once again seeking to preemptively stop future conflicts Ender uses excessive force, and like Stilson before him Bonzo dies from his injuries. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_My_Tears,_the_Policeman_Said"title="Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said">
The novel is set in a dystopian version of 1988, following a Second Civil War which led to the collapse of the United States' democratic institutions. The National Guard ("nats") and US police force ("pols") reestablished social order through instituting a dictatorship, with a "Director" at the apex, and police marshals and generals as operational commanders in the field. Resistance to the regime is largely confined to university campuses, where radicalized former university students eke out a desperate existence in subterranean kibbutzim. Recreational drug use is widespread, and the age of consent has been lowered to 12. The black population has almost been rendered extinct. Most commuting is undertaken by personal aircraft, allowing great distances to be covered in little time.The novel begins with the protagonist, Jason Taverner, a singer, hosting his weekly TV show which has an audience of 30 million viewers. His special guest is his girlfriend Heather Hart, also a singer. Both Hart and Taverner are "Sixes", members of an elite class of genetically engineered humans. While leaving the studio, Taverner is telephoned by a former lover, who asks him to pay her a visit. When Taverner arrives at her apartment, the former lover attacks him by throwing a parasitic life-form at him. Although he manages to remove most of the life-form, parts of it are left inside him. After being rescued by Hart, he is taken to a medical facility.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_(novel)"title="Friday (novel)">
The book's narrator is Friday Jones (often going under cover name Marjorie Baldwin and using both surnames somewhat interchangeably). Friday is a genetically engineered human (known as an Artificial Person or AP) in many ways mentally and physically superior to ordinary humans. There is great prejudice against APs so Friday conceals her nature.Friday is employed as a highly self-sufficient "combat courier in a quasi-military organization", traveling across the globe and to some of the near-Earth space colonies. She is returning from her latest mission when she is captured, tortured, raped and interrogated by an enemy group. She is rescued by her own people, who tell her that her highly critical mission was successful as her captors failed to find the data she was carrying in her body.After recovering from the ordeal, Friday takes a vacation to New Zealand to visit her group family, composed of several husbands and wives and many children. In an argument over racism, Friday reveals to her family that she is an AP, and they promptly divorce her.On the way back to her company's headquarters, she meets and befriends a married couple, the Tormeys, and their extra-legal co-husband, Georges. Friday is their house-guest in British Canada (a country in the Balkanized North America) when a worldwide emergency known as Red Thursday occurs. Various groups claim credit for the assassinations and sabotage, but Friday later learns that it is the result of a struggle between rival factions within the ultra-powerful Shipstone corporation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Have_Space_Suit—Will_Travel"title="Have Space Suit—Will Travel">
In the near future, Earth has established some lunar bases. High school senior Clifford "Kip" Russell is determined to get to the Moon, but the price of a ticket is far beyond his reach. His father suggests he enter an advertising jingle-writing contest; first prize is an all-expenses-paid trip there. Instead, he wins a used space suit. Kip puts the suit (which he names "Oscar") back into working condition.Kip reluctantly decides to return his space suit for a cash prize to help pay for college, but puts it on for one last walk. As he idly broadcasts on his shortwave radio, someone identifying herself as "Peewee" answers and requests a homing signal. He is shocked when a flying saucer lands practically on top of him. An 11-year-old girl (Peewee) and an alien being (the "Mother Thing") flee from it, but all three are quickly captured and taken to the Moon.Their kidnapper ("Wormface") is a horrible-looking creature who contemptuously refers to all others as "animals". Wormface has two human flunkies ("Fats" and "Skinny") who assisted him in initially capturing the Mother Thing and Peewee, a preteen genius and the daughter of an eminent scientist. The Mother Thing speaks in what sounds like birdsong (illustrated by a few musical notations), but Kip and Peewee have no trouble understanding her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Sold_the_Moon"title="The Man Who Sold the Moon">
Delos David "D. D." Harriman, "the last of the Robber Barons", is obsessed with being the first to travel to—and possess—the Moon. He asks his business partner, George Strong, and other tycoons to invest in the venture. Most dismiss Harriman's plans as foolhardy: Nuclear rocket fuel is scarce as the space station that produces it blew up, also destroying the only existing spaceship. The necessary technology for a chemical-fueled rocket stretches the boundaries of current engineering. The endeavor is both incredibly costly and of uncertain profitability. One skeptic offers to sell "all of my interest in the Moon...for fifty cents"; Harriman accepts and tries to buy the other associates' interests as well. Strong and two others agree to back his plans.The technical problems are solvable with money and talent. To solve the tougher financial problems, Harriman exploits commercial and political rivalries. He implies to the Moka-Coka company, for example, that rival soft drink maker 6+ plans to turn the Moon into a massive billboard, using a rocket to scatter black dust on the surface in patterns. To an anti-Communist associate, he suggests that the Russians may print the hammer and sickle across the face of the Moon if they get to it first. To a television network, he offers the Moon as a reliable and uncensorable broadcasting station.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/—We_Also_Walk_Dogs"title="—We Also Walk Dogs">
"General Services" is a very successful company that provides various personal services such as shopping for you or walking your dogs or supplying a host for a party, but also proudly advertises that no job is too large. One ad campaign idea which the staff discusses is "Want somebody murdered? Then DON'T call General Services. But for "anything else", call... It Pays!". The business model involves knowing to whom to subcontract work. The technology used involves rapid access to client data and the use of personal, portable telephones.The company is asked to do the impossible: enable an interplanetary conference to be held on Earth, whose strong gravity is inhospitable to many of the native races of other planets and moons in the solar system. The solution of holding the conference on Mars or Luna is considered politically unacceptable.In a side plot, the team also have to deal with a rich woman who wants to visit her son recuperating from a skiing injury over a thousand miles away while simultaneously conducting a fashionable party at her home. The solution is to conduct her to her son's side while using 3-D projection to have her appear at the party. They charge a hefty fee for this. The fee is doubled when the woman selfishly tries to insist on hiring one of the team as her personal social secretary.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Number_of_the_Beast_(novel)"title="The Number of the Beast (novel)">
The book is a series of diary entries primarily by each of the four main characters: Zebadiah "Zeb" John Carter, programmer Dejah Thoris "Deety" Burroughs Carter, her mathematics professor father Jacob Burroughs, and off-campus socialite Hilda Corners. The names "Dejah Thoris", "Burroughs", and "Carter" are overt references to John Carter and Dejah Thoris, the protagonists of the Barsoom novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs.In the opening, Deety is dancing with Zeb at a party at Hilda's mansion. Deety is trying to get Zeb to meet her father to discuss what she thinks is an article Zeb wrote about n-dimensional space, even going so far as to offer herself. Zeb figures out and explains to Deety that he is not the one who wrote the article but a relative with a similar name.After dancing a very intimate tango, Zeb jokingly suggests the dance was so strong they should get married, and Deety agrees. Zeb is taken aback but then accepts. As they are leaving, Deety and Zeb rescue Jacob from a heated argument he is having with another faculty member before a fight breaks out. As they are approaching their vehicles, Hilda comes out, deciding to tag along. Zeb, having a premonition, grabs the three of them and ducks behind another vehicle before Jacob and Deety's vehicle explodes. Zeb gets everyone into his modified air car "Gay Deceiver" and by activating the "Deceiver"s flying capability, escapes undetected by the authorities or the criminals who put a bomb in the other vehicle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation's_Edge"title="Foundation's Edge">
Five hundred years after the establishment of the Foundation, the Mayor of Terminus, Harla Branno, is basking in a political glow, her policies having been vindicated by the recent successful resolution of a Seldon Crisis. Golan Trevize, a former officer of the Navy and now a member of Council, believes the Second Foundation, which is almost universally thought to be extinct, still exists and is controlling events. He attempts to question the continued existence of the Seldon Plan during a Council session, but Branno has him arrested on a charge of treason. Branno also believes that the Second Foundation still exists and is in control, but she cannot admit it publicly for political reasons, and treats that as a state secret, hence her alarm and her swift action.So, she orders Trevize to leave Terminus to search for the Second Foundation. As a cover, he is to be accompanied by Janov Pelorat, a professor of Ancient History and mythologist, who is interested in the location of Earth, the fabled original world of the human species. They are provided a highly advanced computer-controlled "gravitic" ship to carry out their mission. Branno also sends out Munn Li Compor in another similar vessel to follow and monitor Trevize.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Caves_of_Steel"title="The Caves of Steel">
A faction of Spacers have come to the realization that Spacer culture is effete, stagnating due to negative population growth and excessive longevity. Their solution is to encourage further space exploration and colonization by Earthmen in concert with robots. However, Earthmen would first need to overcome their irrational antagonism toward robots. To this end, the faction have established habitations on Earth through which they hope to introduce humanoid robots to Earth.New York City Police Commissioner Julius Enderby is secretly a member of the Medievalists, a subversive anti-robot group which pines for the 'olden days' where men did not live in the 'caves of steel'. He uses his position to engineer meetings with Spacer Dr. Sarton under the guise of further cooperation, but he actually intends to destroy R. Daneel - who lives with and resembles Dr. Sarton. Enderby orders R. Sammy to bring a blaster through the unmonitored 'open air' (something that no Earthman could countenance), but in the heat of the moment Enderby drops his glasses and fails to distinguish between the human and robot, accidentally shooting the human. Knowing that Baley's wife is also a Medievalist, he assigns Baley to the case, working with R. Daneel who represents the Spacers, and spreads a rumour about humanoid robots amongst the subversives to throw suspicion on Baley when Enderby later destroys R. Sammy with radiation. Daneel rules out Enderby as the murderer as his brain patterns show him incapable of deliberately killing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prelude_to_Foundation"title="Prelude to Foundation">
Prelude to Foundation is set in the year 12,020 G.E. (Galactic Era), during the rocky reign of the Emperor Cleon I. It starts with Seldon's presentation of a paper at a mathematics convention detailing how psychohistory might theoretically make it possible to predict the future. The Emperor of the Galactic Empire learns of this and wants to use Seldon for political gain. In a face-to-face interview, Seldon emphasizes that psychohistory is something that he has not even begun developing or even has a clear idea how to do so, but Cleon is not wholly convinced that Hari is of no use to the Empire.Seldon then meets reporter Chetter Hummin, who convinces him that Cleon's first minister, Eto Demerzel, is attempting to capture him, and that it is therefore imperative for Seldon to escape and try to make psychohistory practical. He is taken by Hummin to Streeling University, one of the top ranked of the Empire and introduced to Dors Venabili by Hummin. Seldon theorizes that the first development of psychohistory requires a smaller, yet still significant sample than the entire Empire, possibly just the original world where humans originated...which is now lost, along with much of the older historical records.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_for_Love"title="Time Enough for Love">
The book covers several periods from the life of Lazarus Long (born Woodrow Wilson Smith), an early beneficiary of a breeding experiment designed to increase mankind's natural lifespan. The experiment is known as the Howard Families, after the program's initiator. Lazarus is the result of more a mutation than the breeding experiment, and he is the oldest living human at more than two thousand years old.The first half of the book takes the form of several novellas connected by Lazarus's retrospective narrative. In the framing story, Lazarus has decided that life is no longer worth living, but, in what is described as a reverse "Arabian Nights" scenario, agrees not to end his life for as long as his companion and descendant, chief executive of the Howard Families Ira Weatheral, will listen to his stories.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Door_into_Summer"title="The Door into Summer">
The idea for the novel came from an incident outlined by Heinlein later:The novel opens in 1970 with Daniel Boone Davis, an engineer and inventor, well into a long drinking binge. He has lost his company, Hired Girl, Inc., to his partner Miles Gentry and the company bookkeeper, Belle Darkin. She had been Dan's fiancée, deceiving him into giving her enough voting stock to allow her and Miles to seize control. Dan's only friend in the world is his cat, "Pete" (short for Petronius the Arbiter), a feisty tomcat who hates going outdoors in the snow.Hired Girl, Inc. manufactures robot vacuum cleaners, but Dan had been developing a new line of all-purpose household robots, Flexible Frank, when Miles announces his intention to sell the company (and Flexible Frank) to Mannix Enterprises in which Miles would become a vice president. Wishing to stay independent, Dan opposes the takeover, but is outvoted and then fired as Chief Engineer. Left with a large financial settlement, and his remaining Hired Girl stock, he elects to take "cold sleep" (suspended animation), hoping to wake up thirty years later to a brighter future. The examining doctor at the cold sleep facility immediately sees that Dan has been drinking. He warns him to show up sober or not at all 24 hours later for the actual procedure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maltese_Falcon_(novel)"title="The Maltese Falcon (novel)">
Sam Spade is a private detective in San Francisco, in partnership with Miles Archer. The beautiful "Miss Wonderley" hires them to follow Floyd Thursby, who she claims has run off with her sister. Archer takes the first stint but is found shot dead that night. Thursby is also killed later and Spade is a suspect. The next morning, Spade coolly tells his office secretary, Effie Perine, to have the office door repainted to read simply "Samuel Spade"."Miss Wonderley" is soon revealed to be an acquisitive adventuress named Brigid O'Shaughnessy, who is involved in the search for a black statuette of unknown but substantial value. Others are after this falcon, including Joel Cairo, an effeminate Levantine homosexual, and Casper Gutman, a fat man accompanied by a vicious young gunman, Wilmer Cook. O'Shaughnessy begs for Spade's protection while telling him as little as possible. They meet with Cairo at Spade's apartment, and Spade again presses O'Shaughnessy for details; again she stalls but kisses Spade. The next morning, she is asleep in his bed. Leaving her there, Spade slips out to search her apartment. Effie believes O'Shaughnessy "is all right" and Spade should help her. Effie agrees to hide her at her own home, but O'Shaughnessy disappears again. When Spade meets Gutman in his hotel room, neither will tell what he knows. Spade implies he is looking out for himself, not O'Shaughnessy. Red herrings abound. The police suspect Spade in the shootings: he was bedding Archer's wife, Iva. The District Attorney ties the shootings to Dixie Monahan, a Chicago gambler who had employed Thursby as a bodyguard in the Far East.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treasure_of_the_Sierra_Madre"title="The Treasure of the Sierra Madre">
The author employs a third person-omniscient in a dramatic-progressive structure, where Howard is the focal character. Three stories within a story provide historical and social significance for the outer narrative.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_of_Crossed_Destinies"title="The Castle of Crossed Destinies">
The narrative details a meeting among travelers who are inexplicably unable to speak after passing through a forest. The characters in the novel recount their tales via tarot cards, which are reconstructed by the narrator. The deck scatters at the end of the novel, as do the characters' identities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion-Dollar_Brain"title="Billion-Dollar Brain">
The unnamed protagonist is ordered to Helsinki by Dawlish, his boss, to suppress a newspaper article, potentially embarrassing to the U.K. government, about to be published by a Finnish journalist. He finds the journalist murdered and coincidentally meets a young woman who attempts to recruit him into the British Intelligence. This woman, Signe Laine, is both romantically connected to and working for the protagonist's old American friend Harvey Newbegin (who also appeared in "Funeral in Berlin"). Newbegin in turn attempts to recruit him into a private intelligence outfit, whose network is operated by 'The Brain', a billion dollar super-computer owned by eccentric Texan billionaire General Midwinter.Midwinter is using his agency and private army to start an uprising in Latvia, at the time a part of the USSR, to end Communism in the Eastern bloc and tip the balance of the Cold War in favour of the West. After discovering this and also the fact that a package Newbegin wants delivered from England to Finland contains virus-contaminated eggs, stolen from a British research institute, the protagonist treks from Finland through Riga, Leningrad, New York City, Texas and back to London. He infiltrates Midwinter's organization, braving unforgiving environments, violence and shifting loyalties, eventually to return to the Baltic to stop the virus from falling into the hands of the Soviets and the madman billionaire and protect British reputations in the process.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_(novel)"title="Kim (novel)">
Kim (Kimball O'Hara) is the orphaned son of an Irish soldier (Kimball O'Hara Sr., a former colour sergeant and later an employee of an Indian railway company) and a poor Irish mother (a former nanny in a colonel's household) who have both died in poverty. Living a vagabond existence in India under British rule in the late 19th century, Kim earns his living by begging and running small errands on the streets of Lahore. He occasionally works for Mahbub Ali, a Pashtun horse trader who is one of the native operatives of the British secret service. Kim is so immersed in the local culture that few realise he is a white child, although he carries a packet of documents from his father entrusted to him by an Indian woman who cared for him.Kim befriends an aged Tibetan lama who is on a quest to free himself from the Wheel of Things by finding the legendary ″River of the Arrow″. Kim becomes his "chela", or disciple, and accompanies him on his journey. On the way, Kim incidentally learns about parts of the Great Game and is recruited by Mahbub Ali to carry a message to the head of British intelligence in Umballa. Kim's trip with the lama along the Grand Trunk Road is the first great adventure in the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whit_(novel)"title="Whit (novel)">
Isis, otherwise The Blessed Very Reverend Gaia-Marie Isis Saraswati Minerva Mirza Whit of Luskentyre, Beloved Elect of God III, is the 19-year-old granddaughter and designated spiritual heir of Salvador Whit, patriarch of the Luskentyrians. They are a religious cult who live in a commune in Stirlingshire and reject most technology. They run their lives according to a collection of beliefs and rituals "revealed" to Salvador after he washed ashore on Harris in the Western Isles and "married" two young Asian ladies (Aasni and Zhobelia Asis). (Haggis pakora becomes a staple of the cult's cuisine.)The novel opens shortly before the Luskentyrian Festival of Love, held every four years, about nine months before every leap year day (29 February). The Luskentyrians believe that those born on that day have special power. This includes Isis herself, Elect of God, and expected to take over leadership of the cult.The bulk of the novel tells of Isis' voyages in the world of "the Unsaved" (also known as "the Obtuse", "the Wretched", "the Bland" and "the Asleep"), through Scotland and southern England in search of Morag, who is feared to have rejected the cult.While searching for her cousin, Isis meets Rastas, policemen, white power skinheads, and other characters of a sort she has never encountered before, and tells the story of the cult and the rationale behind its rules. Isis' maternal grandmother, Yolanda, a feisty Texan woman, appears and lends her support to Isis' quest. Isis' friend Sophi, although not part of the cult, is very close to her. Isis meets her whenever she goes to her house to use the Luskentyrian method of free (if laborious) telephone communication, using coded rings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mostly_Harmless"title="Mostly Harmless">
Arthur Dent plans to sightsee across the Galaxy with his girlfriend Fenchurch, but she disappears during a hyperspace jump, a result of being from an unstable sector of the Galaxy. Depressed, Arthur continues to travel the galaxy using samples of his bodily tissues/fluids to fund his travels, assured of his safety until he visits Stavromula Beta, having killed an incarnation of Agrajag at some point in the future at said planet. During one trip, he ends up stranded on the homely planet Lamuella, and decides to stay to become a sandwich maker for the local population.Meanwhile, Ford Prefect has returned to the offices of the Hitchhiker's Guide, and is annoyed to find out the original publishing company, Megadodo Publications, has been taken over by InfiniDim Enterprises, which are run by the Vogons. Fearing for his life, he escapes the building, along the way stealing the yet-unpublished, seemingly sentient Hitchhiker's Guide Mk. II. He goes into hiding after sending the Guide to himself, care of Arthur, for safekeeping.On Lamuella, Arthur is surprised by the appearance of Trillian with a teenage daughter, Random Dent. Trillian explains that she wanted a child, and used the only human DNA she could find, thus claiming that Arthur is Random's father. She leaves Random with Arthur to allow her to better pursue her career as an intergalactic reporter. Random is frustrated with Arthur and life on Lamuella; when Ford's package to Arthur arrives, she takes it and discovers the Guide. The Guide helps her to escape the planet on Ford's ship after Ford arrives on the planet looking for Arthur. Discovering Random, the Guide, and Ford's ship missing, the two manage to find a way to leave Lamuella and head for Earth, where they suspect Random is also heading to find Trillian. Ford expresses concern at the Guide's manipulation of events, noting its "Unfiltered Perception" and fearing its potence and ultimate objective.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Son"title="Native Son">
## Book One: Fear.Twenty-year-old Bigger Thomas is a young black man living in one room with his brother Buddy, his sister Vera, and their mother. Suddenly, a rat appears. The room turns into a maelstrom, and after a violent chase, Bigger kills the animal with an iron skillet and terrorizes his sister Vera with the dead rat. She faints, and Mrs. Thomas scolds Bigger, who hates his family because they suffer and he cannot do anything about it.That evening, Bigger has to see Mr. Dalton, a white man, for a new job. Bigger's family depends on him. He would like to leave his responsibilities forever, but when he thinks of what to do, he only sees a blank wall.Bigger walks to a poolroom and meets his friend, Gus. Bigger tells him that every time he thinks about whites, he feels something terrible will happen to him. They meet other friends, G.H. and Jack, and plan a robbery. They are all afraid of attacking and stealing from a white man, but none of them wants to admit their concerns. Before the robbery, Bigger and Jack go to the movies. They are attracted to the world of wealthy whites in the newsreel and feel strangely moved by the tom-toms and the primitive black people in the film, yet also feel they are equal to those worlds. After the film, Bigger returns to the poolroom and attacks Gus violently, forcing him to lick his blade in a demeaning way to hide Bigger's own cowardice. The fight ends any chance of the robbery's occurring, and Bigger is vaguely conscious that he has done this intentionally.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Farewell_to_Arms"title="A Farewell to Arms">
The novel is divided into five sections, or "books". Frederic Henry is first-person narrator of the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Women"title="Little Women">
## Part One.Four sisters and their mother, whom they call Marmee, live in a new neighborhood (loosely based on Concord) in Massachusetts in genteel poverty. Having lost all his money, their father is serving as a chaplain for the Union Army in the American Civil War, far from home. The mother and daughters face their first Christmas without him. When Marmee asks her daughters to give their Christmas breakfast away to an impoverished family, the girls and their mother venture into town laden with baskets to feed the hungry children. When they return, they discover their wealthy, elderly neighbor Mr. Laurence has sent over a decadent surprise dinner to make up for their breakfast. The two families become acquainted following these acts of kindness.Meg and Jo must work to support the family: Meg tutors a nearby family of four children; Jo assists her aged great-aunt March, a wealthy widow living in a mansion, Plumfield. Beth, too timid for school, is content to stay at home and help with housework; and Amy is still at school. Meg is beautiful and traditional, Jo is a tomboy who writes, Beth is a peacemaker and a pianist, and Amy is an artist who longs for elegance and fine society. The sisters strive to help their family and improve their characters as Meg is vain, Jo is hotheaded, Beth is cripplingly shy, and Amy is materialistic. The neighbor boy Laurie, orphaned grandson of Mr. Laurence, becomes close friends with the sisters, particularly the tomboyish Jo.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imitation_of_Life_(novel)"title="Imitation of Life (novel)">
Set in the 1910s at "the Shore" of New Jersey, the novel explores issues of race and class in early 20th-century America. Bea Chipley is a quiet, mousy Atlantic City teenage girl whose mother dies, leaving her to keep house for her father (Mr. Chipley) and Benjamin Pullman, a boarder who peddles ketchup and relish on the boardwalk and sells maple syrup door-to-door. Within a year, her father and Pullman decide that she should marry Pullman; she soon becomes pregnant and has a daughter named Jessie. Her father suffers an incapacitating stroke, confining him to a wheelchair, and Pullman is killed in a train accident. Bea is left to fend for her father and Jessie by herself.She takes in boarders to defray expenses, as well as peddling Pullman's maple syrup door-to-door, using his "B. Pullman" business cards to avoid the ubiquitous sexism of the 1910s. To care for her infant daughter and disabled father, Bea Pullman hires Delilah, an African-American mammy figure, who has an infant daughter Peola. The girl has "light skin" (as described then).As Delilah is a master waffle-maker, Bea capitalizes on Delilah's skills to open a "B. Pullman" waffle restaurant. It attracts many of the tourists at the Shore. She eventually builds a nationwide and then international chain of highly successful restaurants. Frank Flake, a young man intent on entering medical school, becomes Bea's business manager.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_of_All_Flesh"title="The Way of All Flesh">
The story is narrated by Overton, godfather to the central character.The novel takes its beginnings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to trace Ernest's emergence from previous generations of the Pontifex family. John Pontifex was a carpenter; his son George rises in the world to become a publisher; George's son Theobald, pressed by his father to become a minister, is manipulated into marrying Christina, the daughter of a clergyman; the main character Ernest Pontifex is the eldest son of Theobald and Christina.The author depicts an antagonistic relationship between Ernest and his hypocritical and domineering parents. His aunt Alethea is aware of this relationship, but dies before she can fulfil her aim of counteracting the parents' malign influence on the boy. However, shortly before her death she secretly passes a small fortune into Overton's keeping, with the agreement that once Ernest is twenty-eight, he can receive it.As Ernest develops into a young man, he travels a bumpy theological road, reflecting the divisions and controversies in the Church of England in the Victorian era. Easily influenced by others at university, he starts out as an Evangelical Christian, and soon becomes a clergyman. He then falls for the lures of the High Church (and is duped out of much of his own money by a fellow clergyman). He decides that the way to regenerate the Church of England is to live among the poor, but the results are, first, that his faith in the integrity of the Bible is severely damaged by a conversation with one of the poor he was hoping to convert, and, second, that under the pressures of poverty and theological doubt, he attempts a sexual assault on a woman he has incorrectly believed to be of loose morals.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Misérables"title="Les Misérables">
## Volume I: Fantine.The story begins in 1815 in Digne, as the peasant Jean Valjean, just released from 19 years' imprisonment in the Bagne of Toulon—five for stealing bread for his starving sister and her family and fourteen more for numerous escape attempts—is turned away by innkeepers because his yellow passport marks him as a former convict. He sleeps on the street, angry and bitter.Digne's benevolent Bishop Myriel gives him shelter. At night, Valjean runs off with Myriel's silverware. When the police capture Valjean, Myriel pretends that he has given the silverware to Valjean and presses him to take two silver candlesticks as well, as if he had forgotten to take them. The police accept his explanation and leave. Myriel tells Valjean that his life has been spared for God, and that he should use money from the silver candlesticks to make an honest man of himself.Valjean broods over Myriel's words. When opportunity presents itself, purely out of habit, he steals a 40-sous coin from 12-year-old Petit Gervais and chases the boy away. He quickly repents and searches the city in panic for Gervais. At the same time, his theft is reported to the authorities. Valjean hides as they search for him, because if apprehended he will be returned to the galleys for life as a repeat offender.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodsworth_(novel)"title="Dodsworth (novel)">
The novel is set in the period between late 1925 and late 1927. Samuel ('Sam') Dodsworth is an ambitious and innovative automobile designer, who builds his fortunes in fictional Zenith, Winnemac. In addition to his success in the business world, he had also succeeded as a young man in winning the hand of Frances 'Fran' Voelker, a beautiful young socialite. While the novel provides the courtship as a backstory, the real story begins upon his retirement. Retiring at the age of fifty as a result of his selling of his successful automobile company (The Revelation Motor Company) to a far larger competitor, he sets out to do what he had always wanted to experience: a leisurely trip to Europe with his wife, with aspirations to visit some manufacturing plants looking for his next challenge. His forty-one-year-old wife, however, motivated by her own vanity and fear of lost youth, is dissatisfied with married life and small town Zenith, and wants to live in Europe permanently as an expatriate, not just visit for a few months. Passing up advancement in his recently sold company, Dodsworth leaves for Europe with Fran. Her motivations upon visiting Europe become quickly known.In their extensive travels across Europe, they are soon caught up in vastly different lifestyles. Fran falls in with a crowd of frivolous socialites, while Sam plays more of an independent tourist. 'With his red Baedeker guide book in hand, he visits such well-known tourist attractions as Westminster Abbey, Notre Dame Cathedral, Sanssouci Palace, and the Piazza San Marco. But the historic sites that he sees prove to be far less significant than the American expatriates that he meets on his extensive journeys across Great Britain and continental Europe' He meets Edith Cortright, an expatriate American widow in Venice, who is everything his wife is not: self-assured, self-confident, unselfish and able to take care of herself. As Sam and Fran follow their own pursuits, their marriage is strained to the breaking point. Both are forced to choose between marriage and the new lifestyles they have pursued.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Horizon"title="Lost Horizon">
## Overview.Hugh Conway, a veteran member of the British diplomatic service, finds inner peace, love and a sense of purpose in Shangri-La, whose inhabitants enjoy unheard-of longevity.The prologue and epilogue are narrated by a neurologist. This neurologist and a novelist friend, Rutherford, are given dinner at Tempelhof, Berlin, by their old school-friend Wyland, a secretary at the British embassy. A chance remark by a passing airman brings up the topic of Hugh Conway, a British consul in Afghanistan, who disappeared under odd circumstances. Later in the evening, Rutherford reveals to the neurologist that, after the disappearance, he discovered Conway in a French mission hospital in Chung-Kiang (probably Chongqing), China, suffering from amnesia. Conway recovered his memory, told Rutherford his story (which Rutherford recorded in a manuscript), and then slipped away again.Rutherford gives the neurologist his manuscript, which becomes the heart of the novel.In May 1931, during the British Raj in India, the 80 white residents of Baskul are being evacuated to Peshawar due to revolution. In the aeroplane of the Maharajah of Chandrapore are: Conway, the British consul, aged 37; Mallinson, his young vice-consul; an American, Barnard; and a British missionary, Miss Brinklow. The plane is hijacked and flown instead over the mountains to Tibet. After a crash landing, the pilot dies, but not before telling the four (in Chinese, which only Conway speaks) to seek shelter at the nearby lamasery of Shangri-La. The location is unclear, but Conway believes the plane has "progressed far beyond the western range of the Himalayas" towards the less known heights of the Kuen-Lun mountain range.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodbye,_Mr._Chips"title="Goodbye, Mr. Chips">
The novella tells the story of a beloved school teacher, Mr Chipping, and his long tenure at Brookfield School, a fictional minor British boys' public boarding school located in the fictional village of Brookfield in the Fenlands. Mr Chips, as the boys call him, is conventional in his beliefs and exercises firm discipline in the classroom. His views broaden, and his pedagogical manner loosens after he marries Katherine, a young woman whom he meets on holiday in the Lake District. Katherine charms the Brookfield teachers and headmaster and quickly wins the favour of Brookfield's pupils. Their marriage is brief. She dies in childbirth and he never remarries or has another romantic interest.One of the themes of the book is that Chipping so outlasts all of his peers that his brief marriage fades into myth and few people know him as anything other than a confirmed and lonely bachelor. Despite Chipping's mediocre credentials and his view that classic Greek and Latin (his academic subjects) are dead languages, he is an effective teacher who becomes highly regarded by pupils and the school's governors—he has become a well-worn institution. In his later years, he develops an arch sense of humour that pleases everyone. However, he also becomes somewhat of an anachronism, with an antiquated pronunciation and is pitied for his isolation. On his deathbed, he talks of the fulfilment he felt as a teacher of boys.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Mice_and_Men"title="Of Mice and Men">
Two migrant field workers in California on their plantation during the Great Depression—George Milton, an intelligent but uneducated man, and Lennie Small, a bulky, strong man but mentally disabled—are in Soledad on their way to another part of California. They hope to one day attain the dream of settling down on their own piece of land. Lennie's part of the dream is merely to tend and pet rabbits on the farm, as he loves touching soft animals, although he always accidentally kills them. This dream is one of Lennie's favorite stories, which George constantly retells. They had fled from Weed after Lennie grabbed a young woman's skirt and would not let go, leading to an accusation of rape. It soon becomes clear that the two are close and George is Lennie's protector, despite his antics.After being hired at a farm, the pair are confronted by Curley—the Boss's small, aggressive son with a Napoleon complex who dislikes larger men. Curley starts to target Lennie. Curley's flirtatious and provocative underaged wife, to whom Lennie is instantly attracted, poses a problem as well. In contrast, the pair also meets Candy, an elderly ranch handyman with one hand and a loyal dog, and Slim, an intelligent and gentle jerkline-skinner whose dog has recently had a litter of puppies. Slim gives a puppy to Lennie and Candy, whose loyal, accomplished sheep dog was put down by fellow ranch-hand Carlson.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_(Quinn_novel)"title="Ishmael (Quinn novel)">
Implicitly set in the early 1990s, "Ishmael" begins with a newspaper advertisement: "Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person". The nameless narrator and protagonist thus begins his story, telling how he first reacted to this ad with scorn because of the absurdity of "wanting to save the world", a notion he feels that he once naïvely embraced himself as an adolescent during the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Feeling he must discover the ad's publisher, he follows its address, surprisingly finding himself in a room with a live gorilla. On the wall is a sign with a double meaning: "With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla?" Suddenly, the gorilla, calling himself Ishmael, begins communicating to the man telepathically. At first baffled by this, the man learns the story of how the gorilla came to be here and soon accepts Ishmael as his teacher, regularly returning to Ishmael's office. The novel continues from this point mainly as a dialogue between Ishmael and his new student.Ishmael's life began in the African wilderness, though he was captured at a young age and has lived mostly in a zoo and a menagerie (before living permanently in a private residence), which caused Ishmael to start thinking about ideas that he never would have thought about in the wild, including self-awareness, human language and culture, and what he refers to as the subject he specifically teaches: "captivity". The narrator admits to Ishmael that he has a vague notion of living in some sort of cultural captivity and being lied to in some way by society, but he cannot articulate these feelings fully.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Copperfield"title="David Copperfield">
The story follows the life of David Copperfield from childhood to maturity. David was born in Blunderstone, Suffolk, England, six months after the death of his father. David spends his early years in relative happiness with his loving, childish mother and their kindly housekeeper, Clara Peggotty. They call him Davy. When he is seven years old his mother marries Edward Murdstone. To get him out of the way, David is sent to lodge with Peggotty's family in Yarmouth. Her brother, fisherman Mr Peggotty, lives in a beached barge, with his adopted niece and nephew Emily and Ham, and an elderly widow, Mrs Gummidge. "Little Em'ly" is somewhat spoiled by her fond foster father, and David is in love with her. They call him Master Copperfield.On his return, David is given good reason to dislike his stepfather, Murdstone, who believes exclusively in firmness. David has similar feelings for Murdstone's sister Jane, who moves into the house soon afterwards. Between them they tyrannise his poor mother, making her and David's lives miserable, and when, in consequence, David falls behind in his studies, Murdstone attempts to thrash him – partly to further pain his mother. David bites him and soon afterwards is sent away to Salem House, a boarding school, under a ruthless headmaster named Mr Creakle. There he befriends an older boy, James Steerforth, and Tommy Traddles. He develops an impassioned admiration for Steerforth, perceiving him as someone noble, who could do great things if he would, and one who pays attention to him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood's_End"title="Childhood's End">
The novel is divided into three parts, following a third-person omniscient narrative with no main character. In some editions, the short first chapter is a separate prologue rather than the beginning of the first part.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Prince"title="The Little Prince">
The narrator begins with a discussion on the nature of grown-ups and their inability to perceive "important things". As a test to determine if a grown-up is as enlightened as a child, he shows them a picture depicting a boa constrictor which has eaten an elephant. The grown-ups always reply that the picture depicts a hat, and so he knows to only talk of "reasonable" things to them, rather than the fanciful.The narrator becomes an aircraft pilot, and one day, his plane crashes in the Sahara desert, far from civilization. The narrator has an eight-day supply of water and must fix his aeroplane. Here, he is greeted unexpectedly by a young boy nicknamed "the little prince." The prince has golden hair, a loveable laugh, and will repeat questions until they are answered.The prince asks the narrator to draw a sheep. The narrator first shows him the picture of the elephant inside the snake, which, to the narrator's surprise, the prince interprets correctly. After three failed attempts at drawing a sheep, the frustrated narrator draws a simple crate, claiming the sheep is inside. The prince exclaims that this was exactly the drawing he wanted.Over the course of eight days in the desert, while the narrator attempts to repair his plane, the prince recounts his life story. He begins describing his tiny home planet: in effect, a house-sized asteroid known as "B 612" on Earth. The asteroid's most prominent features are three minuscule volcanoes (two active, and one dormant or extinct) and a variety of plants.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_(King_novella)"title="The Body (King novella)">
Gordon "Gordie" LaChance reminisces about his childhood in Castle Rock, Maine. At that time, Gordie's elder brother Dennis, whom his parents favored, had recently died, leaving Gordie's parents too depressed to pay much attention to him. In 1960, Gordie and his three friends − Chris Chambers, Teddy Duchamp and Vern Tessio − learn that a gang of hooligans led by John "Ace" Merrill have accidentally discovered the dead body of a missing boy named Ray Brower, who was hit by a train. Because the gang found the body while driving a stolen car, they elected not to report the body to the police. The boys get the idea to find the body "officially" so that they may become famous. In preparation for the expedition, Chris steals a gun from his father, and the boys camp out in a nearby field.Over the course of the narrative, the adult Gordie recalls his first published story, "Stud City", about the life of a simple man named Edward "Chico" May whose older brother also died. He has a girlfriend, Jane, who he does not have particularly strong feelings for. Chico knows that his stepmother Virginia slept with his brother before he died, but he hesitates to tell his father about it. One day, Chico has a fight with his father over Virginia and leaves the house.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eyes_of_the_Dragon"title="The Eyes of the Dragon">
"The Eyes of the Dragon" takes place entirely within the realm of Delain (which itself is located within In-World from "The Dark Tower" series, as established in "The Little Sisters of Eluria"). It is told from the perspective of an unnamed storyteller/narrator, who speaks casually and frankly to the reader, frequently adding his own commentary on characters' motivations and the like.King Roland's magician, Flagg, seeking to destroy the Kingdom of Delain, sees his plans being ruined by the good heart of Queen Sasha. After Sasha gives birth to Peter, a noble and worthy future king, Flagg realizes that his position, his plans, and his life may be in danger because of Peter. When Sasha is pregnant with a second son, Flagg seizes the opportunity. He forces the Queen's midwife to wound Sasha while the second son, Thomas, is born. Sasha bleeds to death and Flagg begins plotting to remove Peter.As Peter becomes a teenager, he begins the custom of bringing a glass of wine to his father before bed each night. Flagg decides to use this as a means of framing Peter. He dissolves a poison called Dragon Sand in a glass of wine and delivers it to the king after Peter leaves. Previously, in an attempt to win Thomas' friendship, Flagg had shown him a secret passage where Thomas could spy on his father. Unbeknownst to Flagg, when he delivers the poison, Thomas is watching through the glass eyes of the mounted head of Roland's greatest trophy, Niner the dragon. Flagg plants evidence incriminating Peter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolores_Claiborne"title="Dolores Claiborne">
Dolores Claiborne, an opinionated 65-year-old widow living on the tiny Maine community of Little Tall Island, is suspected of murdering her wealthy, elderly employer, Vera Donovan. The novel is presented as a transcript of her statement, told to the local constable and a stenographer. Dolores wants to make clear to the police that she did not kill Vera, whom she has looked after for years, but does confess to orchestrating the death of her husband, Joe St. George, almost 30 years before. Dolores's confession develops into the story of her life, her troubled marriage, and her relationship with her employer. She first describes her relationship with her employer, which began when Vera and her millionaire husband purchased a summer home on Little Tall Island in 1949 and hired Dolores as a maid. Able to cope with Vera's brutally exacting standards, Dolores rises from maid to housekeeper at the Donovan home. After Vera's husband dies in a car crash in the late '50s, Vera spends increasing time at her island house, eventually moving there permanently. Vera suffers a series of strokes in the 1980s, whereupon Dolores becomes the woman's live-in caretaker and reluctant companion. As the wealthy woman slips into dementia, Dolores comforts her from terrifying hallucinations of a force she calls "the dust bunnies." When Vera is lucid, Dolores combats her increasing mind games and power plays. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald's_Game"title="Gerald's Game">
Jessie Angela Mahout Burlingame and her husband Gerald, a successful and aggressive lawyer, travel from Portland to their secluded lake house in western Maine near Kashwakamak Lake for a spontaneous romantic getaway. The titular "game" involves handcuffing Jessie to the bed for lovemaking, a recent addition to their marriage that Jessie only pretends to enjoy, though Gerald finds it exciting. This time, however, Jessie finds herself reluctant after being handcuffed to the bedposts and asks to stop, only to be ignored by Gerald, who pretends her protests are only part of their game. Realizing her husband is deliberately feigning ignorance and that he plans to rape her, Jessie lashes out, kicking Gerald in the chest. The shock causes him to have a fatal heart attack. He dies, leaving Jessie still handcuffed to the bed.At first, Jessie is only horrified at her husband's death and fears the humiliation of being discovered semi-naked and handcuffed, but she quickly realizes the situation is far more dire: it is unlikely that she or Gerald will be missed for several days, no one will think to look for them at the lake house, and all the usual lake residents have gone for the season. There is a real possibility that Jessie will die if she cannot escape.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Loved_Tom_Gordon"title="The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon">
The story is set in motion by a family hiking trip, during which Trisha's brother, Pete, and mother constantly squabble about the mother's divorce from their father, as well as other topics. Trisha falls back to avoid listening and is therefore unable to find her family again after she wanders off the trail to take a bathroom break. Trying to catch up by attempting a shortcut, she slips and falls down a steep embankment and ends up hopelessly lost, heading deeper into the heart of the forest. She is left with a bottle of water, two Twinkies, a boiled egg, celery sticks, a tuna sandwich, a bottle of Surge, a poncho, a Game Boy, and a Walkman. She listens to her Walkman to keep her mood up, either to learn of news of the search for her, or to listen to the baseball game featuring her favorite player, and "heartthrob", Tom Gordon.As she starts to take steps to survive by conserving what little food she has with her while consuming edible flora, Trisha's family return to their car without her and call the police to start a search. The rescuers search in the area around the path, but not as far as Trisha has gone. The girl decides to follow a creek because of what she read in "Little House on the Prairie" (though it soon turns into a swamp-like river), rationalizing that all bodies of water lead eventually to inhabited areas.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Mile_(novel)"title="The Green Mile (novel)">
Featuring a first-person narrative told by Paul Edgecombe, the novel switches between Paul as an old man in the Georgia Pines nursing home writing down his story in 1996, and his time in 1932 as the block supervisor of the Cold Mountain Penitentiary death row, nicknamed "The Green Mile" for the color of the floor's linoleum. This year marks the arrival of John Coffey, a 6 ft 8 in (2.03 m) tall powerfully built black man who has been convicted of raping and murdering two young white girls. During his time on the Mile, John interacts with fellow prisoners Eduard "Del" Delacroix, a Cajun arsonist, rapist, and murderer; and William Wharton ("Billy the Kid" to himself, "Wild Bill" to the guards), an unhinged and dangerous multiple murderer who is determined to make as much trouble as he can before he is executed. Other inhabitants include Arlen Bitterbuck, a Native American convicted of killing a man in a fight over a pair of boots; Arthur Flanders, a real estate executive who killed his father to perpetrate insurance fraud; and Mr. Jingles, a mouse, to whom Del teaches various tricks.Paul and the other guards are irritated throughout the book by Percy Wetmore, a sadistic guard who enjoys antagonizing the prisoners. The other guards have to be civil to him despite their dislike of him because he is the nephew of the Governor's wife. When Percy is offered an administrative position at the nearby Briar Ridge psychiatric hospital, Paul thinks they are finally rid of him. However, Percy refuses to leave until he is allowed to supervise an execution, so Paul hesitantly allows him to run Del's. Percy deliberately avoids soaking a sponge in brine that is supposed to be tucked inside the electrode cap to ensure a quick death in the electric chair. When the switch is thrown, the current causes Del to catch fire in the chair and suffer a prolonged, agonizing demise.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Past_Midnight"title="Four Past Midnight">
Pilot Brian Engle, immediately after a difficult flight from Tokyo to Los Angeles, learns that his ex-wife Anne has died in an accident in Boston, and he boards a red-eye flight to Boston as a passenger. A flight attendant speaks of an unusual phenomenon over the Mojave Desert that resembles an aurora. Brian falls asleep during takeoff, having been awake throughout his previous flight. Dinah Bellman, a young blind girl with psychic abilities, also falls asleep, and awakes to find that her aunt and several other passengers have disappeared. Dinah, mistaking a wig for a scalp, screams and awakes Brian and nine other passengers: teacher Laurel Stevenson, English diplomat Nick Hopewell, writer Bob Jenkins, violinist Albert Kaussner and his girlfriend Bethany Simms, businessman Rudy Warwick, mechanic Don Gaffney, bank manager Craig Toomy and an unknown heavily intoxicated passenger. The passengers find that the crew and the passengers who were awake have disappeared, leaving the airliner under the control of the autopilot. Brian takes control of the plane, but is unable to make any outside contact, and the passengers can only see a dark void below the plane. Brian manages to land in Bangor, Maine despite furious protests from Craig, who insists on reaching Boston for an important conference that will decide his fate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Walk"title="The Long Walk">
In a dystopian America, a major source of entertainment is the Long Walk, in which one hundred teenage boys walk without rest along U.S. Route 1. If they fall below a pace of , they receive three warnings and are subsequently shot by a group of soldiers on an accompanying half-track. The last boy left walking receives a large sum of money and a "Prize" of his choice.Ray Garraty from Androscoggin County, Maine arrives at the start of the Walk on the Canada-Maine border, where he meets several other Walkers such as the sardonic McVries, the friendly Baker, the cocky Olson and the enigmatic Stebbins. The Major, the leader of the secret police force known as the Squads, starts the Walk. Throughout the first day, Garraty befriends Baker, Olson, and several other Walkers such as Abraham and Pearson, growing particularly close to McVries and becoming particularly intrigued by Stebbins. A Walker named Barkovitch reveals to a reporter that he's in the Long Walk to 'dance on the graves' of other participants, and later provokes another Walker into attacking him, resulting in the Walker's death and Barkovitch being ostracized.Garraty succeeds in surviving the night. Scramm, the odds-on favorite in Vegas, tells Garraty that he has a pregnant wife and so will have sufficient motivation to keep going. Garraty decides that his motivation will be surviving until Freeport as this will allow him to see his girlfriend Jan in the crowd. The Walkers begin to resent the Major, and McVries stops walking in an attempt to fight the soldiers, but is saved by Garraty. In return, McVries saves Garraty's life after Garraty experiences hysterics when the spectators increase in number. This camaraderie infuriates Olson, who is now severely fatigued and wants Garraty to die. Garraty reveals to the others that his father was Squaded, and a fight almost breaks out between McVries and another Walker, Collie Parker, when Parker claims that only 'damn fools' are Squaded.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)"title="Solaris (novel)">
"Solaris" chronicles the ultimate futility of attempted communications with the extraterrestrial life inhabiting a distant alien planet named Solaris. The planet is almost completely covered with an ocean of gel that is revealed to be a single, planet-encompassing entity. Terran scientists conjecture it is a living and a sentient being, and attempt to communicate with it.Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, arrives aboard Solaris Station, a scientific research station hovering near the oceanic surface of Solaris. The scientists there have studied the planet and its ocean for many decades, mostly in vain. A scientific discipline known as Solaristics has degenerated over the years to simply observing, recording and categorizing the complex phenomena that occur upon the surface of the ocean. Thus far, the scientists have only compiled an elaborate nomenclature of the phenomena, and do not yet understand what such activities really mean. Shortly before Kelvin's arrival, the crew exposed the ocean to a more aggressive and unauthorized experimentation with a high-energy X-ray bombardment. Their experimentation gives unexpected results and becomes psychologically traumatic for them as individually flawed humans.The ocean's response to this intrusion exposes the deeper, hidden aspects of the personalities of the human scientists, while revealing nothing of the ocean's nature itself. It does this by materializing physical simulacra, including human ones; Kelvin confronts memories of his dead lover and guilt about her suicide. The "guests" of the other researchers are only alluded to. All human efforts to make sense of Solaris's activities prove futile. As Lem wrote, "The peculiarity of those phenomena seems to suggest that we observe a kind of rational activity, but the meaning of this seemingly rational activity of the Solarian Ocean is beyond the reach of human beings." He also wrote that he deliberately chose to make the sentient alien an ocean to avoid any personification and the pitfalls of anthropomorphism in depicting first contact.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_U"title="The Big U">
The story chronicles the disillusionment of a number of young intellectuals as they encounter the realities of the higher education establishment parodied in the story. Over time their lives and sanity disintegrate in different ways through a series of escalating events that culminates with a full-scale civil war raging on the campus of "American Megaversity".Told in the first person from the perspective of Bud, a lecturer in Remote Sensing who is new to the university, the book attacks and makes fun of just about every conceivable group at university, though its portraits of the nerds/computer scientists/role players tend to be more detailed than those of other factions.The events take place at a fictitious big university consisting of a single building (a central complex with eight towers containing student housing), making the university an enclosed universe of its own. Stephenson uses this fact to take what starts as a mostly realistic satire and move it further and further into the realm of improbability, with giant radioactive rats, hordes of bats and a lab-made railgun.The book was written while Stephenson attended Boston University. The fictional campus' design is based on a BU dormitory, Located at 700 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, Massachusetts, it is one of the largest dorms in the US. The character of President Septimius Severus Krupp shares a number of similarities with then–BU President John Silber, although his name—like those of his predecessors as president of the big U—is taken from the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus. The neon Big Wheel sign plays a part reminiscent of the Boston Citgo sign just east of the BU campus in Kenmore Square.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_and_Mr_Lewisham"title="Love and Mr Lewisham">
At the beginning of the novel, Mr Lewisham is an 18-year-old teacher at a boys' school in Sussex, earning forty pounds a year. He meets and falls in love with Ethel Henderson, who is paying a visit to relatives. His involvement with her makes him lose his position, but he is unable to find her when he moves to London.After a two-and-a-half-year break in the action, Mr Lewisham is in his third year of study at the Normal School of Science in South Kensington. He has become a socialist, declaring his politics with a red tie, and is an object of interest to Alice Heydinger, an older student. However, chance brings him together again with his first love at a séance. Ethel's stepfather, Mr Chaffery, is a spiritualist charlatan, and Mr Lewisham is determined to extricate her from association with Chaffery's dishonesty. They marry, and Mr Lewisham is forced to abandon his plans for a brilliant scientific career followed by a political ascent. When Chaffrey absconds to the Continent with money he has embezzled from his clients, Lewisham agrees to move into his shabby Clapham house to look after Ethel and Ethel's elderly mother (Chaffrey's abandoned wife). Wells's friend Sir Richard Gregory wrote to him after reading the novel: "I cannot get that poor devil Lewisham out of my mind head, and I wish I had an address, for I would go to him and rescue him from the miserable life in which you leave him."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_(novel)"title="Carrie (novel)">
In the Maine town of Chamberlain in the year 1979, Carietta "Carrie" White is a 16-year-old girl who is a target of ridicule for her frumpy appearance and unusual religious beliefs, instilled by her despotic mother, Margaret. One day, Carrie has her first period while showering in the girls' locker room after a physical education class. Carrie is terrified, having no understanding of menstruation as her mother, who despises everything related to intimacy, never told her about it. While Carrie believes she is dying, her classmates, led by a wealthy, popular girl named Chris Hargensen, insult her and throw tampons and sanitary napkins at her. The gym teacher, Rita Desjardin, helps Carrie clean up and tries to explain. On the way home, Carrie practices her unusual ability to control objects from a distance. The only time she recalls using this power was when she was three years old and caused stones to fall from the sky by her house. Once Carrie gets home, Margaret furiously accuses Carrie of sin and locks her in a closet so that she may pray.The next day, Desjardin reprimands the girls who bullied Carrie and gives them a week's detention; Chris defiantly leaves and is punished with suspension and exclusion from the prom. After an unsuccessful bid to get her privileges reinstated through her influential father, Chris decides to exact revenge on Carrie. Sue Snell, another popular girl who tormented Carrie in the locker room, feels ashamed of her behavior; she convinces her boyfriend, Tommy Ross, to invite Carrie to the prom instead. Carrie is suspicious, but accepts and begins sewing herself a prom dress. Meanwhile, Chris persuades her boyfriend Billy Nolan and his gang of greasers to gather two buckets of pig blood as she prepares a measure to rig the prom queen election in Carrie's favor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watership_Down"title="Watership Down">
## Part 1: The Journey.In the Sandleford warren, Fiver, a runty buck rabbit who is a seer, receives a frightening vision of his warren's imminent destruction. He and his brother Hazel fail to convince the Threarah, their Chief Rabbit, of the need to evacuate; they then try to convince the other rabbits, but only succeed in gaining nine followers, all bucks. Captain Holly of the Sandleford Owsla (the warren's military caste) accuses the group of fomenting dissension against the Threarah and tries to stop them leaving, but is driven off.Once out in the world, the travelling group of rabbits finds itself following the leadership of Hazel, who had been considered an unimportant member of the warren before. The group travels far through dangerous territory. Bigwig and Silver, both former Owsla and the strongest rabbits among them, keep the others protected, helped by the ingenuity of Blackberry (the cleverest rabbit) and Hazel's good judgment. Along the way, they cross the River Enborne, and evade a badger, a dog, a crow, and a car. Hazel and Bigwig also stop three rabbits from attempting to return to the Sandleford warren.They meet a rabbit named Cowslip, who invites them to join his own warren. The majority of Hazel's group are relieved to finally be able to sleep and feed well, and therefore decide to overlook the strange and evasive behaviour of the new rabbits. Fiver, however, senses nothing but death in the new warren. Later, Bigwig is caught in a snare, only surviving the ordeal thanks to Blackberry and Hazel's quick thinking. Fiver deduces the new warren is managed by a farmer, who protects and feeds the rabbits but also harvests a number of them for their meat and skins. He admonishes the others in a crazed lecture for not realizing the residents of Cowslip's warren were simply using Hazel and the others to increase their own odds of survival. The Sandleford rabbits, badly shaken, continue on their journey. They are soon joined by Strawberry, a buck who leaves Cowslip's warren after his doe is killed by one of the snares.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_the_Spy"title="Harriet the Spy">
Eleven-year-old Harriet M. Welsch is an aspiring writer who lives in New York City's Upper East Side. Encouraged by her nanny, "Ole Golly", Harriet observes others and writes her thoughts down in a notebook as practice for her future career. Several standalone episodes highlight the various eccentric characters she meets on her afternoon "spy route".Harriet's best friends are Simon "Sport" Rocque, a serious boy who wants to be a CPA or a ball player, and Janie Gibbs, who wants to be a scientist. Harriet's enemies in her class are Marion Hawthorne, the teacher's pet and self-appointed queen bee, and Marion's best friend, Rachel Hennessy.Harriet's life changes abruptly when Ole Golly's suitor, Mr. Waldenstein, proposes and she accepts. Harriet is crushed by the loss of her nanny. Her mother and father are at a loss to understand Harriet's feelings and are of little comfort to her.At school, during a game of tag, Harriet loses her notebook. Her classmates find it and are appalled at her brutally honest documentation of her opinions of them. The students form a "Spy Catcher Club" in which they think up ways to make Harriet's life miserable, such as stealing her lunch and passing nasty notes about her in class. In return, Harriet regularly spies on the Spy Catcher Club through a back fence and concocts vengeful ways to punish them. After getting into trouble for carrying out some of her plans, Harriet unsuccessfully tries to resume her friendships with Sport and Janie as if nothing had ever happened. When Harriet's grades go down, her parents confiscate her notebook, which only depresses her further.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridget_Jones's_Diary_(novel)"title="Bridget Jones's Diary (novel)">
The plot is focused on Bridget's love life. She worries on a regular basis about dying without someone and going on to be eaten by dogs when her singleness causes her death not to be discovered promptly, an obsession that a "USA Today" reviewer called "one of [Bridget's] more cheerful daydreams". However, during the course of the year she becomes involved in two romantic relationships. The first is with her charming and handsome boss Daniel Cleaver, who eventually cheats on Bridget with a younger, more conventionally attractive woman. Bridget's second relationship is with the stuffy human-rights barrister Mark Darcy, whom she initially dislikes when they are reintroduced at a New Year's party where her mother reminds them they were childhood playmates. These two men are connected by more than their relationships with Bridget, as Fielding reveals near the end of the novel.Bridget not only obsesses about her love life, but also details her various daily struggles with her weight, her over-indulgence in alcohol and cigarettes, and her career. Bridget's friends and family are the supporting characters in her diary. These friends are there for her unconditionally throughout the novel; they give her advice about her relationships, and support when problems arise. Her friends are essentially her surrogate family in London.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Player_of_Games"title="The Player of Games">
Jernau Morat Gurgeh, a famously skillful player of board games and other similar contests, lives on Chiark Orbital, and is bored with his successful life. The Culture's Special Circumstances (SC) inquires about his willingness to participate in a long journey but won't explain further unless Gurgeh agrees to participate. While he is considering this offer, one of his drone friends, Mawhrin-Skel, which had been ejected from SC due to its unstable personality, convinces him to cheat in one of his matches in an attempt to win in an unprecedentedly perfect fashion. The attempt fails, but Mawhrin-Skel uses its recording of the event to blackmail Gurgeh into accepting the offer, so that he can use his connections with SC to request that Mawhrin-Skel be admitted back into SC as well.Gurgeh spends the next two years travelling to the Empire of Azad in the Small Magellanic Cloud, where a complex game (also named Azad) is used to determine social rank and political status. The game itself is sufficiently subtle and complex that a player's tactics reflect their own political and philosophical outlook. By the time he arrives, he has grasped the game but is unsure how he will measure up against opponents who have been studying it for their entire lives.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession"title="Excession">
The Excession of the title is a perfect black-body sphere that appears mysteriously on the edge of Culture space, appearing to be older than the Universe itself and that resists the attempts of the Culture and technologically equivalent societies (notably the Zetetic Elench) to probe it. The Interesting Times Gang (ITG), an informal group of Minds loosely connected with Special Circumstances, try to manage the Culture's response to the Excession. The Affront, a rapidly expanding race which practises systematic sadism towards subject species and its own females and junior males, also try to exploit the Excession by infiltrating a store of mothballed Culture warships and using them to claim control of the mysterious object.The "Sleeper Service", an Eccentric General Systems Vehicle (GSV) who had nominally left the Culture, is instructed to head to the location of the Excession by the ITG. As a condition the "Sleeper Service" demands that Genar-Hofoen, a human member of Contact, attend it to seek a resolution with his ex-lover, Dajeil, who lives in solitude on the GSV. They had had an intense love-affair and, after a series of sex changes, had each become impregnated by the other until Genar-Hofoen was unfaithful and Dajeil attacked Genar-Hofoen, killing the unborn child. Dajeil then suspended her pregnancy and withdrew from society for 40 years and the "Sleeper Service" hopes to effect a reconciliation between them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_to_Windward"title="Look to Windward">
The Chelgrians are a race of centaur-like cat aliens with three hind-limbs and a humanoid catlike torso. Major Quilan, a Chelgrian, has lost the will to live after the death of his wife, killed during the Chelgrian civil war that resulted from the Culture's interference. A high-ranked Chelgrian priest offers Quilan the chance to avenge the Chelgrians who died by taking part in a suicide mission to strike back at the Culture. His "Soulkeeper" (a device normally used to store its owner's personality upon their death) is equipped with both the mind of a long-dead Chelgrian admiral and a device given to the Chelgrians by a mysterious group of Involved aliens that can transport wormholes through which weapons can be delivered. Quilan is then sent to the Culture's Masaq' Orbital, ostensibly to persuade the renowned composer Mahrai Ziller to return to his native planet Chel, but in reality on a mission to destroy the Orbital's Hub Mind. To protect him from detection at Masaq', Quilan's memory is selectively blanked until he reaches his target, thus preventing the Mind from reading his thoughts.Ziller lives in self-imposed exile on Masaq', having renounced his privileged position in Chel's caste system. He has been commissioned to compose music to mark a climactic event in the Idiran-Culture War. Upon hearing of Quilan's visit, and suspicious of his reason for travel, Ziller scrupulously avoids him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_Weapons"title="Use of Weapons">
The book is made up of two narrative streams, interwoven in alternating chapters. The numbers of the chapters indicate which stream they belong to: one stream is numbered forward in words (One, Two ...), while the other is numbered in reverse with Roman numerals (XIII, XII ...). The story told by the former moves forward chronologically (as the numbers suggest) and tells a self-contained story, while the latter is written in reverse chronology with each chapter successively earlier in Zakalwe's life. Further complicating this structure is a prologue and epilogue set shortly after the events of the main narrative, and many flashbacks within the chapters.The forward-moving narrative stream deals with the attempts of Diziet Sma and a drone named Skaffen-Amtiskaw (of Special Circumstances, a division of Contact Section) to re-enlist Zakalwe for another job. He must make contact with Beychae, an old colleague, who lives in a politically unstable star cluster, to further the aims of the Culture in the region. The payment that Zakalwe demands is the location of a woman, named Livueta. The backward-moving narrative stream describes earlier jobs that Zakalwe has performed for the Culture, ultimately returning to his pre-Culture childhood with his two sisters (Livueta and Darckense) and a boy his age named Elethiomel whose father has been imprisoned for treason.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_Long,_and_Thanks_for_All_the_Fish"title="So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish">
While hitchhiking through the galaxy, Arthur Dent is dropped off on a planet in a rainstorm. He appears to be in England on Earth, even though he had seen the planet destroyed by the Vogons. He has been gone for several years, but only a few months have passed on Earth. He hitches a lift with a man named Russell and his sister Fenchurch (nicknamed "Fenny"). Russell explains that Fenny, who is sitting in a drugged state in the back seat of the car, became delusional after worldwide mass hysteria, in which everyone hallucinated "big yellow spaceships" (the Vogon destructor ships that "demolished" the Earth). Arthur becomes curious about Fenchurch, but he is dropped off before he can ask more questions. Inside his inexplicably undamaged home, Arthur finds a gift-wrapped bowl inscribed with the words "So long and thanks for all the fish", into which he puts his Babel Fish. Arthur thinks that Fenchurch is somehow connected to him and to the Earth's destruction. He still has the ability to fly whenever he lets his thoughts wander.Arthur puts his life in order, and then tries to find out more about Fenchurch. He happens to find her hitchhiking and picks her up. He obtains her phone number, but shortly thereafter loses it. He discovers her home by accident when he searches for the cave in which he had lived on prehistoric Earth; Fenchurch's flat is built on the same spot. Arthur and Fenchurch find more circumstances connecting them. Fenchurch reveals that, moments before her "hallucinations", she had an epiphany about how to make everything right, but then blacked out. She has not been able to recall the substance of the epiphany. Eventually discovering that Fenchurch's feet do not touch the ground, Arthur teaches her how to fly. They have sex in the skies over London.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Brighteyes"title="Eric Brighteyes">
Eric Thorgrimursson, nicknamed "Brighteyes" for his most notable trait, strives to win the hand of his beloved, Gudruda the Fair. Her father Asmund, a priest of the old Norse gods, opposes the match, believing Eric to be a man without prospects. Deadlier by far are the intrigues of Swanhild, Gudruda's half-sister and a sorceress, who desires Eric for herself. She persuades the chieftain Ospakar Blacktooth to woo Gudruda, making the two men enemies. Battles, intrigues, and treachery follow.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choke_(novel)"title="Choke (novel)">
"Choke" follows Victor Mancini and his friend Denny through a few months of their lives with frequent flashbacks to the days when Victor was a child. Victor had grown up moving from one foster home to another, as his mother was found to be unfit to raise him. Several times throughout his childhood, his mother would kidnap him from his various foster parents, though every time they would eventually be caught, and he would again be remanded over to the child welfare agency.In the present-day setting of the book, Victor has left medical school to support his feeble mother, who is now in a nursing home. In order to pay for elder care for his mother, he resorts to being a con artist. Victor goes to various restaurants and purposely causes himself to choke midway through his meal, luring a "good Samaritan" into saving his life. He keeps a detailed list of everyone who saves him and sends them frequent letters about fictional bills he is unable to pay, causing them to send him money out of sympathy. Victor works at a re-enactment museum set in colonial times, where most of the employees are drug addicts or, in Denny's case, a fellow recovering sex addict. He spends most of his time on the job guarding Denny (who is constantly being caught with "contraband" items that do not correspond with the time period of the museum) in the stocks. The two met at a sex addiction support group and later applied together to the same job. Denny is later fired from the museum, and begins collecting stones from around the city to build his "dream home".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Friend_of_the_Earth"title="A Friend of the Earth">
"A Friend of the Earth" is the story of Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater, a U.S. citizen born in 1950, half Irish Catholic and half Jewish ("I'm a mess and I know it. Jewish guilt, Catholic guilt, enviro-eco-capitalistico guilt: I can't even expel gas in peace."), whose personal tragedy fits in with, and adds to, the gloomy atmosphere created in the novel.Egged on by Andrea, the woman he loves, he becomes a committed "Earth Forever!" activist (an allusion to the radical environmental group Earth First!) in the 1980s, is imprisoned for ecotage, but eventually cannot change anything. On top of that, he suffers the loss of his first wife when their daughter is only three and of his daughter when she is only 25. When the novel opens, Tierwater is a 75-year-old disillusioned ex-con living on the estate of a famous pop star in the Santa Ynez Valley, north of Santa Barbara, in California and looking after the latter's private menagerie.Maclovio Pulchris, the singer, has had the idea of preserving some of the last surviving animals of several species in order to initiate a captive breeding programme at some later point in time, choosing to preserve the animals no one else would. Tierwater has been working for Pulchris ("Mac") for ten years when, in 2025, Andrea, his ex-wife and stepmother to his daughter Sierra, contacts him after more than 20 years. She and a friend of hers, April Wind, move in with Tierwater, officially for April Wind to write a biography, or rather hagiography, of Sierra Tierwater, his daughter, who died in 2001 as a martyr to the environmentalist cause (falling out of a tree in old growth woodland in which she had been living for about three years).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Lost_Time"title="In Search of Lost Time">
The novel recounts the experiences of the Narrator (who is never definitively named) while he is growing up, learning about art, participating in society, and falling in love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liza_of_Lambeth"title="Liza of Lambeth">
The action covers a period of roughly four months—from August to November—in a year in the 1890s. Liza Kemp is an 18-year-old factory worker and the youngest of a large family, now living alone with her aging mother. Very popular with all the residents of Vere Street, Lambeth, she likes Tom, a boy her age, but not as much as he likes her, so she rejects him when he proposes. Nevertheless, she is persuaded to join a party of 32 who make a coach trip (in a horse-drawn coach, of course) to a nearby village on the August Bank Holiday Monday. Some of the other members of the party are Tom; Liza's friend Sally and her boyfriend Harry; and Jim Blakeston, a 40-year-old father of 5 who has recently moved to Vere Street with his large family, and his wife (while their eldest daughter, Polly, is taking care of her siblings). The outing is fun, and they all get drunk on beer. On their way back in the dark, Liza realises that Jim Blakeston is making a pass at her by holding her hand. Back home, Jim manages to speak to her alone and to steal a kiss from her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Weirdstone_of_Brisingamen"title="The Weirdstone of Brisingamen">
The book's introduction concerns the origin of the weirdstone. Following the defeat of Nastrond steps had been taken to prepare for his eventual return. This involved bringing together a small band of warriors of pure heart, each with a horse, and gathering them inside the old dwarf caves of Fundindelve, deep inside the hill of Alderley which were sealed by powerful white magic which would both defend Fundindelve from evil as the ages passed and prevent the warriors and their horses from ageing. When the time was ripe and the world once more in mortal peril it was prophesied that this small band of warriors would ride out from the hill, trusting in their purity of heart to defeat Nastrond forever. Fundindelve had a guardian, the ancient wizard Cadellin Silverbrow, and the heart of the white magic was sealed inside a jewel, the Weirdstone of Brisingamen, also known as Firefrost.At the beginning of the story, however, the Weirdstone has been lost, stolen centuries before by a farmer whose milk-white mare Cadellin had bought to complete the numbers in Fundindelve. The stone became a family heirloom and eventually found its way to Susan's mother, who passed it on to Susan, oblivious of its history and purpose. When the children meet Cadellin the wizard fails to notice the bracelet even when the children come to visit him in Fundindelve. However, its presence does not go unnoticed by Selina Place and the witches of the morthbrood, who send their minions to steal it. Susan finally realises the identity of the Weirdstone and, fearing its destruction, sets out to warn the wizard. The children return to Fundindelve but are waylaid by a dark presence and the Tear is taken. Once they inform Cadellin they are told to keep away, to not further involve themselves. However, while exploring on their bikes they notice a mysterious cloud travelling across the landscape before hovering over the home of Selina Place, St Mary's Clyffe and they go to investigate hoping to recover the stone on their own. They are successful but become lost in a labyrinth of mine-shafts and caverns. As the members of the morthbrood and Selina Place, later revealed as The Morrigan, close in on them they are rescued by a pair of dwarves, Fenodyree and Durathror, who are close companions of Cadellin. After passing through many perils the group returns to the farm where Susan and Colin are staying to spend the night, where at midnight The Morrigan menaces them through the door. They set out with the farm's owner the next day to return the Weirdstone to Cadellin before it can fall into the wrong hands. Their travels take them through gardens, lawns, fens, tangled rhododendron thickets, pine plantations, mountain peaks and snowy fields while striving to avoid the attention of the morthbrood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Stain"title="The Human Stain">
Coleman Silk is a former professor and dean of the faculty at Athena College, a fictional institution in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, where he still lives. The story is narrated by Roth's recurring character Nathan Zuckerman, a writer and a neighbor of Silk.In 1996, two years before the main action of the novel, Silk is accused of racism by two African-American students after he wonders aloud whether the reason they've missed all his classes so far is that they're "spooks". Though Silk has no idea they're black, they and others at the college see the term as a racial epithet. When the uproar is about to die down, in Silk's view, he resigns. Soon afterward, his wife, Iris, dies of a stroke that Silk feels is caused by the stress of defending him. In the summer of 1998, just after Iris dies, the 71-year-old Silk approaches Zuckerman and asks him to write a book on the incident. Ranting about it, Silk blames the widespread condemnation of him on, among other things, anti-semitism. Zuckerman is uninterested, but the two begin a brief friendship and Silk tells him his life story. Zuckerman is surprised to learn that Silk is in a relationship with Faunia Farley, a 34-year-old woman who works as a janitor at the college and who everyone including Silk believes (falsely, as it turns out) is illiterate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_the_Jury"title="I, the Jury">
The novel opens as private detective Mike Hammer is called to the apartment of insurance investigator Jack Williams, a very close friend who was crippled saving Hammer's life during shared World War II military service in the Pacific. Losing his arm rendered Jack unfit for police work, so he put his experience to use by investigating insurance fraud. Williams has been murdered in a particularly cruel way, deliberately shot in the stomach to make the death slow and painful. Mike vows vengeance, declaring that Jack's murderer will die the same way Jack did.Prior to his death, Jack had fallen in love with Myrna Devlin when he stopped her from committing suicide by jumping from a bridge. Williams asked Dr. Charlotte Manning, a young, beautiful, blonde, and well-to-do psychiatrist, to admit Myrna to her clinic for psychotherapy. After Myrna became clean, she and Williams became engaged. The couple maintained a casual friendship with Manning. Over time, Williams comes to suspect that Hal Kines, one of Manning's college students who has spent some time at her clinic and who has become one of her casual acquaintances, is in fact a criminal.In the course of his investigation, Hammer meets and begins to fall in love with Dr. Manning. In the course of the novel, they become engaged.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinks_..."title="Thinks ...">
Helen Reed, an English novelist in her early forties, arrives at the University of Gloucester to spend the term there as "writer-in-residence" and to teach a creative writing class. Still grieving over the death of her beloved husband, Helen thinks a change of scenery might be a good idea to get over her loss. Apart from the English Department, she is intrigued by the department of Cognitive Science and by its head, 50-year-old Ralph Messenger, to whom she is introduced at a social function very soon during her stay. Helen feels curiously attracted by Messenger but she soon learns about his reputation as a womaniser.When a student submits some chapters from the novel she is writing, Helen recognises one of the male characters as having been modelled on her late husband Martin. Gradually it dawns upon Helen that her husband must have had a succession of young lovers, with everyone except herself knowing everything. During a fundraising event, Carrie tells Helen she knows about her husband's flings and, by taking a lover herself, tries to get back at him. Ralph Messenger, she is quite sure, does not know anything about her affair. Helen decides to get on with her life and allows herself to be drawn into an affair with Messenger. Soon, Helen ponders whether she is falling in love with him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Pinocchio"title="The Adventures of Pinocchio">
In Tuscany, Italy, a carpenter named Master Antonio has found a block of wood that he plans to carve into a table leg. Frightened when the log cries out, he gives the log to his neighbor Geppetto, a poor man who plans to make a living as a puppeteer. Geppetto carves the block into a boy and names him "Pinocchio". As soon as Pinocchio's feet are carved, he tries to kick Geppetto. Once the puppet has been finished and Geppetto teaches him to walk, Pinocchio runs out the door and away into the town. He is caught by a Carabiniere, who assumes Pinocchio has been mistreated and imprisons Geppetto.Left alone, Pinocchio heads back to Geppetto's house to get something to eat. Once he arrives at home, a talking cricket warns him of the perils of disobedience. In retaliation, Pinocchio throws a hammer at the cricket, accidentally killing it. Pinocchio gets hungry and tries to fry an egg, but a bird emerges from the egg and Pinocchio has to leave for food. He knocks on a neighbor's door who fears he is pulling a child's prank and instead dumps water on him. Cold and wet, Pinocchio comes home and lies down on a stove; when he wakes, his feet have burned off. Luckily, Geppetto is released from prison and makes Pinocchio a new pair of feet. In gratitude, he promises to attend school, and Geppetto sells his only coat to buy him a school book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England,_England"title="England, England">
"England, England" is divided into three parts entitled "England", "England, England" and "Anglia". The first part focuses on the protagonist Martha Cochrane and her childhood memories. Growing up in the surrounding of the English countryside, her peaceful childhood is disrupted when her father leaves the land family. Martha's memories of her father are closely related to playing a Counties of England jigsaw puzzle with him.The second part, "England, England", is set in the near future. Martha is now in her forties and is employed by the entrepreneur Sir Jack Pitman for a megalomaniacal project: Sir Jack aims to turn the Isle of Wight into a gigantic theme park which contains everything that people, especially tourists, consider to be quintessentially English, selected according to what Sir Jack himself approves of. The theme park − called "England, England" − thus becomes a replica of England's best known historical buildings, figures and sites. Popular English tourist attractions and icons of "Englishness" are crammed together to be easily accessible without having to travel the whole of "real" England.While working on the set-up of the project, Martha starts an affair with one of her colleagues, Paul Harrison. They discover Sir Jack's adult baby fetish and blackmail him with incriminating evidence when Sir Jack wants to dismiss Martha. She thus becomes CEO of the Island project, which turns out to be a highly popular tourist attraction. As a consequence of the huge success, "England, England" becomes an independent state and part of the European Union, while the real, "Old England" suffers a severe decline and increasingly falls into international irrelevance. After a major scandal in the theme park, however, Martha is eventually expelled from the island.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel)"title="Dune (novel)">
Duke Leto Atreides of House Atreides, ruler of the ocean planet Caladan, is assigned by the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV to serve as fief ruler of the planet Arrakis. Although Arrakis is a harsh and inhospitable desert planet, it is of enormous importance because it is the only planetary source of melange, or the "spice", a unique and incredibly valuable substance that extends human youth, vitality and lifespan. It is also through the consumption of spice that Spacing Guild Navigators are able to effect safe interstellar travel. Shaddam sees House Atreides as a potential future rival and threat, and conspires with House Harkonnen, the former stewards of Arrakis and the longstanding enemies of House Atreides, to destroy Leto and his family after their arrival. Leto is aware his assignment is a trap of some kind, but is compelled to obey the Emperor’s orders anyway.Leto's concubine Lady Jessica is an acolyte of the Bene Gesserit, an exclusively female group that pursues mysterious political aims and wields seemingly superhuman physical and mental abilities, such as the ability to decide the gender of their children. Though Jessica was instructed by the Bene Gesserit to bear a daughter as part of their breeding program, out of love for Leto she bore a son, Paul. From a young age, Paul has been trained in warfare by Leto's aides, the elite soldiers Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck. Thufir Hawat, the Duke's Mentat (people with superhuman intelligence), has instructed Paul in the ways of political intrigue. Jessica has also trained her son in what Bene Gesserit disciplines she can. His prophetic dreams interest Jessica's superior, the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam. She subjects Paul to the gom jabbar, a deadly test that causes blinding pain as part of an assessment of the subject's self-control. To her surprise, Paul passes despite being exposed to more pain than any others before him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feersum_Endjinn"title="Feersum Endjinn">
The narrative switches between four main characters. Count Sessine is a high-ranking member of the court who is assassinated, ending his last life. Reborn inside the crypt he comes under repeated attack and is almost permanently killed. On his last virtual life, he makes contact with a copy of himself who assists him. He spends many subjective years wandering the wider reaches of the crypt before being contacted by its representative who requests his aid in relation to the encroachment.Gadfium, the Chief Scientist of the ruling class, is engaged in a conspiracy with like-minded nobles who believe that the elite are not acting in the best interests of the population, and who question the real motive of the ongoing war with the rival clan of Engineers. She learns of a message apparently sent from the fast tower, the highest and previously inaccessible part of the castle, which stresses the danger of the Encroachment and tells of an attempt by the crypt to activate a long forgotten subsystem which may prevent disaster. The message also warns that this will be opposed by those in power as it will threaten their interests. She and her fellow conspirators are considering how to respond when the security forces attempt to arrest them, although Gadfium manages to escape into the depths of the castle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_of_a_Fox-Hunting_Man"title="Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man">
The story is a series of episodes in the youth of George Sherston, ranging from his first attempts to learn to ride to his experiences in winning point-to-point races. The title is somewhat misleading, as the book is mainly concerned with a series of landmark events in Sherston/Sassoon's childhood and youth, and his encounters with various comic characters. "The Flower-Show Match", an account of an annual village cricket match – an important fixture for those involved – in which young Sherston plays a significant part, was later published separately by Faber as a self-contained story. The book as a whole is a frequently humorous work, in which fox-hunting, one of Sassoon's major interests, comes to represent the young man's innocent frame of mind in the years before war broke out. The book ends with his enlistment in a local regiment, the Sussex Yeomanry, and his subsequent transfer, with a commission, to the Flintshire Fusiliers, a battalion of the Royal Welsh which was sent to France. The story is continued in two sequels: "Memoirs of an Infantry Officer" and "Sherston's Progress".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Tom's_Cabin"title="Uncle Tom's Cabin">
## Eliza escapes with her son; Tom sold "down the river".The book opens with a Kentucky farmer named Arthur Shelby facing the loss of his farm because of debts. Even though he and his wife Emily Shelby believe that they have a benevolent relationship with their slaves, Shelby decides to raise the needed funds by selling two of them—Uncle Tom, a middle-aged man with a wife and children, and Harry, the son of Emily Shelby's maid Eliza—to Mr. Haley, a coarse slave trader. Emily Shelby is averse to this idea because she had promised her maid that her child would never be sold; Emily's son, George Shelby, hates to see Tom go because he sees the man as his friend and mentor.When Eliza overhears Mr. and Mrs. Shelby discussing plans to sell Tom and Harry, Eliza determines to run away with her son. The novel states that Eliza made this decision because she fears losing her only surviving child (she had already miscarried two children). Eliza departs that night, leaving a note of apology to her mistress. She later makes a dangerous crossing over the ice of the Ohio River to escape her pursuers.As Tom is sold, Mr. Haley takes him to a riverboat on the Mississippi River and from there Tom is to be transported to a slave market. While on board, Tom meets Eva, an angelic little white girl. They quickly become friends. Eva falls into the river and Tom dives into the river to save her life. Being grateful to Tom, Eva's father Augustine St. Clare buys him from Haley and takes him with the family to their home in New Orleans. Tom and Eva begin to relate to one another because of the deep Christian faith they both share.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beach_(novel)"title="The Beach (novel)">
Richard, a British backpacker meets a mentally disturbed Scot going by the alias of Daffy Duck at a hotel in Bangkok. Daffy tells Richard about a beautiful island with a hidden lagoon and beach, located in the Gulf of Thailand, where he settled years prior. The beach is inaccessible to tourists and can only be located by a map, which Daffy leaves for Richard. Shortly thereafter, Richard discovers that Daffy has died by suicide. Wanting company in his search, Richard befriends a travelling French couple, Étienne and Françoise, and the trio sets out to find what they hope might be an untouched paradise.On their way to the island, Richard gives a copy of the map to Sammy and Zeph, two Americans he meets on Koh Samui. When the three finally reach the hidden beach — after bribing a local boat pilot, swimming from an adjacent island, discovering a cannabis plantation in the jungle, and avoiding its armed owners, and eventually jumping over a waterfall — they discover a group of approximately 30 backpackers who have largely shut off the outside world to live a slow-paced life of leisure under the "de facto" leadership of an American woman called Sal and her South African lover Bugs, who, along with Daffy, founded the community there in 1989. They reside in hand-built wooden huts and tents, located near a large, beautiful beach and lagoon that are encircled by cliffs and connected to the sea by underwater caves.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Kill_a_Mockingbird"title="To Kill a Mockingbird">
The story, told by the six-year-old Jean Louise Finch, takes place during three years (1933–35) of the Great Depression in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, the seat of Maycomb County. Nicknamed Scout, she lives with her older brother Jeremy, nicknamed Jem, and their widowed father Atticus, a middle-aged lawyer. They also have a black cook, Calpurnia, who had been with the family for many years and helped Atticus raise the two children. Jem and Scout befriend a boy named Dill, who visits Maycomb to stay with his aunt each summer. The three children are terrified, yet fascinated by their neighbor, the reclusive Arthur "Boo" Radley. The adults of Maycomb are hesitant to talk about Boo, and few of them have seen him for many years. The children feed one another's imagination with rumors about his appearance and reasons for remaining hidden, and they fantasize about how to get him out of his house. After two summers of friendship with Dill, Scout and Jem find that someone is leaving them small gifts in a tree outside the Radley place. Several times the mysterious Boo makes gestures of affection to the children, but, to their disappointment, he never appears in person.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Go-Between"title="The Go-Between">
In the book's prologue, Leo Colston chances upon a diary from 1900, the year of his thirteenth birthday, and gradually pieces together a memory that he has suppressed. Under its influence, and from the viewpoint of what he has become by the midpoint of "this hideous century", Leo relives the events of what had once seemed to him its hopeful beginning. The importance of his boarding school's social rules is another theme running through the book and complicates Leo's interaction with the adult world."Curses" of his devising had routed boys who were bullying Leo at school and had given him the reputation of a magician, something that he came to half-believe himself. As a result, he is invited as a guest to spend the summer at Brandham Hall, the country home of his school friend, Marcus Maudsley. There the socially clumsy Leo, with his regional accent, is a middle-class boy among the wealthy upper class. Though he does not fit in, his hosts do their best to make him feel welcome, treating him with kindness and indulgence, especially their daughter Marian.When Marcus falls ill, Leo is left largely to his own devices and becomes a secret "postman" for Marian and nearby tenant farmer Ted Burgess, with whom she is having a clandestine relationship. Leo is happy to help Marian because he has a crush on her and likes Ted. Besides, Leo is initially ignorant of the significance or content of the messages that he is asked to carry between them and the well-meaning, innocent boy is easily manipulated by the lovers. Although Marian and Ted are fully aware of the social taboo that must make their relationship a matter of the utmost secrecy, Leo is too naïve to understand why they can never marry. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Marian is about to become engaged to Hugh, Viscount Trimingham, the descendant of the area's nobility who formerly lived in Brandham Hall. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/About_a_Boy_(novel)"title="About a Boy (novel)">
Set in 1993 London, "About a Boy" features two main protagonists: Will Freeman, a 36-year-old bachelor, and Marcus Brewer, an incongruous schoolboy described as "introverted" by his suicidal mother, Fiona, despite his tendencies to bond and interact with people. Will's father wrote a successful Christmas song, the royalties of which have afforded Will the ability to remain voluntarily redundant throughout his life – he spends his plentiful free time immersing himself in 1990s culture, music, and pursuing sexual relations with women.After a pleasant relationship with a single mother of two, Angie, Will comes up with the idea of attending a single parents group as a new way to pick up women. For this purpose, he invents a two-year-old son called Ned. Will then makes a number of acquaintances through his membership of the single parents group, two of which are Fiona and her son Marcus. Although their relationship is initially somewhat strained, they finally succeed in striking up a true friendship despite Will being largely uninterested during the early-middle stages of the novel. Will, a socially aware and "trendy" person, aids Marcus to fit into 1990s youth culture by encouraging him not to get his hair cut by his mother, buying him Adidas trainers, and introducing him to contemporary music, such as Nirvana. Marcus and Will's friendship strengthens as the story progresses, even after Marcus and Fiona discover Will's lie about having a child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hustler_(novel)"title="The Hustler (novel)">
After losing to Fats, Eddie could spiral down to the scrapheap, but he meets Bert Gordon, a . Bert teaches him about winning, or more particularly about losing. Tautly written, it is a treatise on how someone, with all of the skills, can lose if he "wants" to lose; how a loser is beaten by himself, not by his opponent; and how he can learn to win, if he can look deeply enough into himself.The book was followed by the sequel "The Color of Money".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Lulu_Bett_(novel)"title="Miss Lulu Bett (novel)">
The story concerns a woman, Lulu, who lives with her sister's family, essentially acting as a servant. She does not complain about her position, but is not happy. When her brother-in-law's brother, Ninian, comes to visit, there is a certain attraction between them. While joking around one evening they find themselves accidentally married, due to the laws of the state requiring little more than wedding vows to be recited while a magistrate is in the room for a marriage to count as legal. On learning this, Ninian and Lulu decide they like the idea of being married, and choose to remain together. However, within a month, Lulu is back home, having discovered that Ninian was already legally married: 18 years prior he had wed a girl who left him after 2 years, but he had forgotten about it. Lulu considers this a reasonable story, but her brother-in-law, Dwight, insists that it would be a humiliation to the family to reveal such a thing, and insists that she tell everyone instead that Ninian grew bored with her and left her. Lulu is unable to see why this should be a less humiliating story, and begins to complain about her circumstances for the first time. She also notices that her teenage niece, Di, is unhappy, and also seems to be trying to use marriage as a way to escape her circumstance. Lulu eventually has to prevent Di from eloping, and is finally inspired to move out of her sister's home and live independently.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland"title="Flatland">
The story describes a two-dimensional world occupied by geometric figures; women are simple line segments, while men are polygons with various numbers of sides. The narrator is a square, a member of the caste of gentlemen and professionals, who guides the readers through some of the implications of life in two dimensions. The first half of the story goes through the practicalities of existing in a two-dimensional universe, as well as a history leading up to the year 1999 on the eve of the 3rd Millennium.On New Year's Eve, the Square dreams about a visit to a one-dimensional world (Lineland) inhabited by men, consisting of lines, while the women consisted of "lustrous points". These points and lines are unable to see the Square as anything other than a set of points on a line. Thus, the Square attempts to convince the realm's monarch of a second dimension but cannot do so. In the end, the monarch of Lineland tries to kill the Square rather than tolerate him any further.Following this vision, the Square is visited by a sphere. Similar to the "points" in Lineland, he is unable to see the three-dimensional object as anything other than a circle (more precisely, a disk). The Sphere then levitates up and down through Flatland, allowing the Square to see the circle expand and contract between great circle and small circles. The Sphere then tries further to convince the Square of the third dimension by dimensional analogies (a point becomes a line, a line becomes a square). The Square is still unable to comprehend the third dimension, so the Sphere resorts to deeds: he gives info about the "insides" of the house, moves a cup through the third dimension, and even goes inside the Square for a bit. Still unable to comprehend 3D, the Sphere takes the Square to the third dimension, Spaceland. This Sphere visits Flatland at the turn of each millennium to introduce a new apostle to the idea of a third dimension in the hope of eventually educating the population of Flatland. From the safety of Spaceland, they can oversee the leaders of Flatland, acknowledging the Sphere's existence and prescribing the silencing. After this proclamation is made, many witnesses are massacred or imprisoned (according to caste), including the Square's brother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash"title="Snow Crash">
The story opens in Los Angeles in the 21st century, an unspecified number of years after a worldwide economic collapse. Los Angeles is no longer part of the United States since the federal government has ceded most of its power and territory to private organizations and entrepreneurs. Franchising, individual sovereignty, and private vehicles reign supreme. Mercenary armies compete for national defense contracts, while private security guards preserve the peace in sovereign gated housing developments. Highway companies compete to attract drivers to their roads, and all mail delivery is by hired courier. The remnants of government maintain authority only in isolated compounds, where they do tedious make-work that is, by and large, irrelevant to the society around them. Much of the world's territory has been carved up into sovereign enclaves known as Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities (FOQNEs), each run by its own big business franchise (such as "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong", or the corporatized American Mafia), or various residential "burbclaves" (quasi-sovereign gated communities). In this future, American institutions are far different from those in the actual United States at the time the book was published; for example, a for-profit organization, the CIC, has evolved from the CIA's merger with the Library of Congress.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Gatsby"title="The Great Gatsby">
In spring 1922, Nick Carraway—a Yale alumnus from the Midwest and a World War I veteran—journeys to New York City to obtain employment as a bond salesman. He rents a bungalow in the Long Island village of West Egg, next to a luxurious estate inhabited by Jay Gatsby, an enigmatic multi-millionaire who hosts dazzling soirées yet doesn't partake in them.One evening, Nick dines with a distant cousin, Daisy Buchanan, in the fashionable town of East Egg. Daisy is married to Tom Buchanan, formerly a Yale football star whom Nick knew during his college days. The couple has recently relocated from Chicago to a mansion directly across the bay from Gatsby's estate. There, Nick encounters Jordan Baker, an insolent flapper and golf champion who is a childhood friend of Daisy's. Jordan confides to Nick that Tom keeps a mistress, Myrtle Wilson, who brazenly telephones him at his home and who lives in the "valley of ashes", a sprawling refuse dump. That evening, Nick sees Gatsby standing alone on his lawn, staring at a green light across the bay.Days later, Nick reluctantly accompanies a drunken and agitated Tom to New York City by train. En route, they stop at a garage inhabited by mechanic George Wilson and his wife Myrtle. Myrtle joins them, and the trio proceed to a small New York apartment that Tom has rented for trysts with her. Guests arrive and a party ensues, which ends with Tom slapping Myrtle and breaking her nose after she mentions Daisy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Ever_Happened_to_Baby_Jane?_(novel)"title="What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (novel)">
This Gothic story deals with two aging sisters, Jane and Blanche Hudson, who are living alone together in a decaying Hollywood mansion. A former child star of early vaudeville known as "Baby Jane", Jane was doted upon by her father due to her success on the stage while Blanche lived in her shadow, neglected. However, their roles were reversed after the death of their parents due to influenza when both children moved to Los Angeles to live with an aunt. Blanche was favored by directors for her blonde hair and regal beauty, and finally decided to pursue a successful film career. Blanche became a star, while Jane, whose attempts at making movies always resulted in failure, languished in her shadow. Blanche managed to keep her sister's career alive by having a clause in her contract stipulating that Jane have a role in every film in which Blanche appeared, but these were always minor parts that relegated Jane to the same neglect Blanche had suffered.Years later, Jane, who still dresses as if she were 10 years old, and Blanche, disabled after a mysterious car accident, continue to live together in the same mansion in a declining neighborhood. Jane resents how her career has been all but forgotten compared to Blanche's (who became more famous than she ever was, and who is now being remembered because of a revival of her films on television), and hates having to cook, clean and care for her sister. Although stuck upstairs in her bedroom, Blanche has managed to keep her good looks, and Jane's appearance is ravaged by years of alcoholism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Russia,_with_Love_(novel)"title="From Russia, with Love (novel)">
SMERSH, the Soviet counterintelligence agency, plans to commit a grand act of terrorism in the intelligence field. For this, it targets the British secret service agent James Bond. Due in part to his role in the defeat of the SMERSH agents Le Chiffre, Mr Big and Hugo Drax, Bond has been listed as an enemy of the Soviet state and a "death warrant" is issued for him. His death is planned to precipitate a major sex scandal, which will run in the world press for months and leave his and his service's reputations in tatters. Bond's killer is to be the SMERSH executioner Donovan "Red" Grant, a British Army deserter and psychopath whose homicidal urges coincide with the full moon. Kronsteen, SMERSH's chess-playing master planner, and Colonel Rosa Klebb, the head of Operations and Executions, devise the operation. They instruct an attractive young cipher clerk, Corporal Tatiana Romanova, to falsely defect from her post in Istanbul and claim to have fallen in love with Bond after seeing a photograph of him. As an added lure for Bond, Romanova will provide the British with a Spektor, a Russian decoding device much coveted by MI6. She is not told the details of the plan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tombs_of_Atuan"title="The Tombs of Atuan">
The story follows a girl named Tenar, born on the Kargish island of Atuan. Born on the day that the high priestess of the Tombs of Atuan died, she is believed to be her reincarnation. Tenar is taken from her family when five years old and goes to the Tombs. Her name is taken from her in a ceremony, and she is referred to as "Arha", or the "eaten one", after being consecrated to the service of the "Nameless Ones" at the age of six with a ceremony involving a symbolic sacrifice. She moves into her own tiny house, and is given a eunuch servant, Manan, with whom she develops a bond of affection.Arha's childhood and youth are lonely; her only friends are Manan and Penthe, a priestess her own age. She is trained in her duties by Thar and Kossil, the priestesses of the two other major deities. Thar tells her of the undertomb and the labyrinth beneath the Tombs, teaching her how to find her way around them. She tells of the treasure hidden within the labyrinth, which wizards from the archipelago have tried to steal. When Arha asks about the wizards, Thar tells her that they are unbelievers who can work magic. When she turns fourteen, Arha assumes all the responsibilities of her position, becoming the highest ranked priestess in the Tombs. She is required to order the death of prisoners sent to the Tombs by the God-King of the Kargad lands; she has them killed by starvation, an act which haunts her for a long time. After Thar dies of old age, Arha becomes increasingly isolated: although stern, Thar had been fair to her. Kossil despises Arha and sees the Nameless Ones as a threat to her power.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Omens"title="Good Omens">
Aziraphale, an angel (originally a guardian of the gates of Eden), and Crowley, a demon (originally the serpent who tempted Eve) have lived on Earth since its creation. Over the millennia, they have formed an odd friendship and taken a liking to humanity. One night, the forces of Hell deliver the infant Antichrist to Crowley, with instructions to swap him with the son of an American diplomat stationed in Britain. Crowley realizes this means that the Apocalypse is coming and persuades Aziraphale to help him postpone it. Together, they decide to influence the Antichrist's upbringing by posing as a nanny and a gardener so that he can never decide between Good and Evil.However, due to several misunderstandings at the hospital, the real Antichrist is actually another boy, Adam Young, who grows up unnoticed in idyllic Lower Tadfield, Oxfordshire, together with his three close friends – Pepper, Wensleydale and Brian. As the foretold end of the world nears, Adam begins to unknowingly use his reality warping powers, changing the world to fit his vision of how things ought to be, such as raising the lost continent of Atlantis after reading about it in a conspiracy theory magazine, summoning UFOs after talking to his friends about aliens, and having the Amazon rainforest reclaim land lost to urban development. In the meantime, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse assemble: War (a war correspondent), Famine (a dietician and fast-food tycoon), Pollution (Pestilence having retired after the discovery of penicillin) and Death (a biker).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coraline"title="Coraline">
Coraline Jones and her workaholic parents move into a large, old house that has been divided into flats. In these flats, Coraline finds she has quirky new neighbors. These include Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, two elderly women retired from the stage, and Mr. Bobo, initially referred to as "the crazy old man upstairs", who claims to be training a jumping mouse circus. The flat next to Coraline however, is empty, and linked together by a mysterious door that Coraline finds to be blocked by bricks when she asks her mother to open it. While adjusting to her new home, Coraline decides to visit these neighbors; they have some interesting things to tell, nay, warn her about. Mr. Bobo relays a message to Coraline from his mice: "Don't go through the door." And while having tea with Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, Miss Spink spies danger in Coraline's future after reading her tea leaves. Miss Spink also gives Coraline a curious adder stone.One day, Coraline finds herself alone in the apartment; with curiosity eating at her, she opens the door. This time she finds an oddly familiar corridor. On the other side of this corridor, she notices she is back in her apartment. It's as if she never left; everything in this apartment is the same as her own. Almost. She finds the residents of this "other apartment" to be her mother and father, but they now have buttons for eyes. The copy of Coraline's mother introduces herself as Coraline's "Other Mother" and the man as Coraline's "Other Father". 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interview_with_the_Vampire"title="Interview with the Vampire">
A vampire named Louis de Pointe du Lac tells his 200-year-long life story to a reporter referred to simply as "the boy".In 1791, Louis is a young indigo plantation owner living in Louisiana. Distraught by the death of his brother, he seeks death in any way possible. Louis is approached by a vampire named Lestat de Lioncourt, who desires Louis's company. Lestat turns Louis into a vampire and the two become immortal companions. Lestat spends time feeding off slaves while Louis, who finds it morally repugnant to murder humans to survive, feeds from animals. Louis and Lestat are forced to leave when Louis's slaves begin to fear the vampires and instigate an uprising.Louis sets his own plantation aflame; he and Lestat kill the slaves to keep word from spreading about vampires living in Louisiana. Gradually, Louis bends under Lestat's influence and begins feeding from humans. He slowly comes to terms with his vampire nature, but also becomes increasingly repulsed by what he perceives as Lestat's total lack of compassion for the humans he preys upon.Escaping to New Orleans, Louis feeds off a plague-ridden, five-year-old girl, whom he finds next to the corpse of her mother. Louis begins to think of leaving Lestat and going his own way. Fearing this, Lestat then turns the girl into a vampire "daughter" for them, to give Louis a reason to stay. She is then given the name Claudia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartarin_of_Tarascon"title="Tartarin of Tarascon">
The Provençal town of Tarascon is so enthusiastic about hunting that no game lives anywhere near it, and its inhabitants resort to telling hunting stories and throwing their own caps in the air to shoot at them. Tartarin, a plump middle-aged man, is the chief "cap-hunter", but following his enthusiastic reaction to seeing an Atlas lion in a travelling menagerie, the over-imaginative town understands him to be planning a hunting expedition to Algeria. So as not to lose face, Tartarin is forced to go, after gathering an absurd mass of equipment and weapons. On the boat from Marseille to Algiers, he hooks up with a conman posing as a Montenegrin prince who takes advantage of him in multiple ways. Tartarin's gullibility causes him a number of misadventures until he returns home penniless but covered in glory after shooting a tame, blind lion.A sequel "Tartarin sur les Alpes" appeared in 1885, followed by "Port-Tarascon" in 1890.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS-GB"title="SS-GB">
In November 1941, nine months after a German invasion led to the British surrender, Douglas Archer is a detective-superintendent of London's Metropolitan Police Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard who works on homicide crimes. His boss is SS "Gruppenführer" Fritz Kellermann, the German head of police forces in Britain. Having lost his wife, Jill, and his home during the German invasion, Archer lives with his son, "Douggie", at the home of Mrs Sheenan and her son, Bob. Archer's colleagues are Detective-Sergeant Harry Woods and his secretary and lover, Sylvia Manning.Archer is called to investigate the murder of a well-dressed man at a flat above an antiques shop in Shepherd Market. Although the body has two gunshot wounds, Archer is puzzled by its condition, particularly by what appears to be sunburn on the arm. Archer also finds a prosthetic arm and a return ticket to Bringle Sands, where the Germans have an atomic research facility. Despite stolen identification identifying the man as Peter Thomas, Archer discovers that the man's true identity is William Spode, a British atomic physicist in the German atomic program and secretly involved with the British Resistance.Since the case is linked to the German atomic program, Berlin dispatches SS "Standartenführer", Oskar Huth, who arrives to supervise the investigation. Archer soon finds himself in the middle of a power struggle between Huth and Kellerman that is complicated by interservice rivalry between the SS, German Army, Gestapo and Abwehr. Archer becomes romantically involved with an attractive American journalist, Barbara Barga, who is connected to the British Resistance leader Colonel George Mayhew. He also learns that his colleagues Woods and Sylvia are also members of the British resistance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virgin_Suicides"title="The Virgin Suicides">
As an ambulance arrives for the body of Cecilia Lisbon, a group of anonymous adolescent neighborhood boys recalls the events leading up to her death.The Lisbons are a Catholic family living in the suburb of Grosse Pointe, Michigan during the 1970s. The father, Ronald Lisbon, is a math teacher at the local high school. The mother is a strict homemaker. The family has five attractive blonde daughters: 13-year-old Cecilia, 14-year-old Lux, 15-year-old Bonnie, 16-year-old Mary, and 17-year-old Therese.Without warning, Cecilia attempts suicide by slitting her wrists in the bathtub. However, she is found in time by a boy in the neighborhood who had snuck into the home, and survives. A few weeks later, the Lisbons meet with Cecilia's psychologist who suggests that the girls need more social interaction and that the potential cause of Cecilia's suicide attempt was the suppression of her libidinal urges. The parents allow the girls to throw a chaperoned party at their house in hopes of cheering Cecilia up. However, Cecilia excuses herself from the party, which is happening in the basement, and goes upstairs and jumps out of her second-story bedroom window. Cecilia is impaled on the fence post below, and she dies almost immediately.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Makes_Sammy_Run?"title="What Makes Sammy Run?">
Told in first person narrative by Al Manheim, drama critic of "The New York Record", this is the tale of Sammy Glick, a young uneducated boy who rises from copyboy to the top of the screenwriting profession in 1930s Hollywood by backstabbing others.Manheim recalls how he first met the 16-year-old Sammy Glick when Sammy was working as a copyboy at Manheim's newspaper. Both awed and disturbed by Sammy's aggressive personality, Manheim becomes Sammy's primary observer, mentor and, as Sammy asserts numerous times, best friend.Tasked with taking Manheim's column down to the printing room, one day Glick rewrites Manheim's column, impressing the managing editor and gaining a column of his own. Later he steals a piece by an aspiring young writer, Julian Blumberg, sending it under his own name to the famous Hollywood talent agent Myron Selznick. Glick sells the piece, "Girl Steals Boy", for $10,000 and leaves the paper to go to work in Hollywood, leaving behind his girlfriend, Rosalie Goldbaum. When the film of "Girl Steals Boy" opens, Sammy is credited for "original screenplay" and Blumberg is not acknowledged.Glick rises to the top in Hollywood over the succeeding years, paying Blumberg a small salary under the table to be his ghost writer. He even manages to have "his" stageplay, "Live Wire", performed at the Hollywood Playhouse. Although the script is actually a case of plagiarism, "The Front Page" in flimsy disguise, no one except Manheim seems to notice. Sammy's bluffing also includes talking about books he has never read.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Razor's_Edge"title="The Razor's Edge">
Maugham begins by characterising his story as not really a novel but a thinly veiled true account. He includes himself as a minor character, a writer who drifts in and out of the lives of the major players. Larry Darrell's lifestyle is contrasted throughout the book with that of his fiancée's uncle Elliott Templeton, an American expatriate living in Paris and an unrepentantly shallow yet generous snob. For example, while Templeton's Roman Catholicism embraces the hierarchical trappings of the church, Larry's proclivities tend towards the thirteenth-century Flemish mystic and saint John of Ruysbroeck.Wounded and traumatised by the death of a comrade in the War, Larry returns to Chicago and his fiancée Isabel Bradley, only to announce that he does not plan to seek paid employment and instead will "loaf" on his small inheritance. He wants to delay their marriage and refuses to take up a job as a stockbroker offered to him by Henry Maturin, the father of his friend Gray. Meanwhile, Sophie, Larry's childhood friend, settles into a happy marriage, only to later tragically lose her husband and baby in a car accident.Larry moves to Paris and immerses himself in study and bohemian life. After two years of this "loafing", Isabel visits and Larry asks her to join his life of wandering and searching, living in Paris and traveling with little money. She cannot accept his vision of life and breaks their engagement to go back to Chicago. There she marries the millionaire Gray, who provides her a rich family life. Meanwhile, Larry begins a sojourn through Europe, taking a job at a coal mine in Lens, France, where he befriends a former Polish army officer named Kosti. Kosti's influence encourages Larry to look toward things spiritual for his answers rather than in books. Larry and Kosti leave the coal mine and travel together for a time before parting ways. Larry then meets a Benedictine monk named Father Ensheim in Bonn, Germany, while Father Ensheim is on leave from his monastery doing academic research. After spending several months with the Benedictines and being unable to reconcile their conception of God with his own, Larry takes a job on an ocean liner and finds himself in Bombay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Solomon's_Mines"title="King Solomon's Mines">
Allan Quatermain, an adventurer and white hunter based in Durban, in what is now South Africa, is approached by aristocrat Sir Henry Curtis and his friend Captain Good, seeking his help finding Sir Henry's brother, who was last seen travelling north into the unexplored interior on a quest for the fabled King Solomon's Mines. Quatermain has a mysterious map purporting to lead to the mines, but had never taken it seriously. However, he agrees to lead an expedition in return for a share of the treasure, or a stipend for his son if he is killed along the way. He has little hope they will return alive, but reasons that he has already outlived most people in his profession, so dying in this manner at least ensures that his son will be provided for. They also take along a mysterious native, Umbopa, who seems more regal, handsome and well-spoken than most porters of his class, but who is very anxious to join the party.Travelling by oxcart, they reach the edge of a desert, but not before a hunt in which a wounded elephant claims the life of a servant. They continue on foot across the desert, almost dying of thirst before finding the oasis shown halfway across on the map. Reaching a mountain range called Suliman Berg, they climb a peak (one of "Sheba's Breasts") and enter a cave where they find the frozen corpse of José Silvestre (also spelt Silvestra), the 16th-century Portuguese explorer who drew the map in his own blood. That night, a second servant dies from the cold, so they leave his body next to Silvestra's, to "give him a companion".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Languages_of_Pao"title="The Languages of Pao">
The planet Pao is a quiet backwater with a large, homogeneous, stolid population ruled by an absolute monarch: the Panarch. Pao's cultural homogeneity contributes to making it vulnerable to external military and economic pressures. The current Panarch attempts to hire an offworld scientist, Lord Palafox from the Breakness Institute on the planet Breakness, as a consultant in order to reform Pao. Before the deal can be concluded, however, the Panarch is assassinated by his brother Bustamonte, using mind-control over the Panarch's own son, Beran Panasper, to do so. Lord Palafox saves Beran Panasper and takes him to Breakness as a possible bargaining chip in his dealings with Pao.Somewhat later, the predatory Brumbo Clan from the planet Batmarsh raids the virtually defenseless Pao with impunity, and the Panarch Bustamonte is forced to pay heavy tribute. To rid himself of the Brumbos, he seeks the aid of Palafox, who has a plan to create warrior, technical and mercantile castes on Pao using customized languages (named Valiant, Technicant and Cogitant) and other means to shape the mindsets of each caste, isolating them from each other and the general populace of Pao. To achieve this, each caste gets a special training area where it is completely segregated from any outside influence; the necessary land is confiscated from families, some of which have held it for countless generations — which creates some disaffection in the conservative Paonese population and earns Bustamonte the name of a tyrant.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo"title="The Count of Monte Cristo">
## Marseille and Chateau d'If.On the day in 1815 when Napoleon escapes the Island of Elba, Edmond Dantès brings the ship "Pharaon" into dock at Marseille. His captain, Leclère, had died during the passage; the ship's owner, Morrel, will make Dantès the next captain. On his deathbed, Leclère charged Dantès to deliver a package to General Bertrand (exiled with Napoleon), and a letter from Elba to an unknown man in Paris. Dantès' colleague Danglars is jealous of Dantès' rapid promotion and, as the two men are at odds, fearful for his own employment should Dantès ascend. On the eve of Dantès' wedding to his Catalan fiancée Mercédès, Danglars meets at a cabaret with Fernand Mondego, Mercédès' cousin and a rival for her affections, and the two hatch a plot to anonymously denounce Dantès, falsely accusing him of being a Bonapartist traitor. Danglars and Mondego set a trap for Dantès. Dantès' neighbour, Caderousse, is present at the meeting; he too is jealous of Dantès, although he objects to the plot, but becomes too intoxicated with wine to prevent it. The following day at the wedding breakfast, Dantès is arrested, and the cowardly Caderousse stays silent, fearing being also accused of Bonapartism. Villefort, the deputy crown prosecutor in Marseille, destroys the letter from Elba when he discovers that it is addressed to his own father, Noirtier, a Bonapartist, knowing it would destroy his own political career. To silence Dantès, he condemns him without trial to life imprisonment and resists all appeals by Morrel to release him, during the Hundred Days and once the king Louis XVIII is restored to rule France.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat's_Cradle"title="Cat's Cradle">
## Background.The first-person everyman narrator, a professional writer introducing himself as Jonah (but apparently named John), frames the plot as a flashback. Set in the mid-20th century, the plot revolves around a time when he was planning to write a book called "The Day the World Ended" about what people were doing on the day of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Throughout, he also intersperses meaningful as well as sarcastic passages and sentiments from an odd religious scripture known as "The Books of Bokonon". The events of the novel evidently occur before the narrator was converted to his current religion, Bokononism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excellent_Women"title="Excellent Women">
The book details the everyday life of its narrator, Mildred Lathbury, a spinster in her thirties in 1950s Britain. Perpetually self-deprecating, but with the sharpest wit, Mildred is a part-time voluntary worker who occupies herself by attending and helping at the local church. Mildred's life grows more exciting with the arrival of new neighbours, anthropologist Helena Napier and her handsome, dashing husband, Rocky – with whom Mildred fancies herself in love. Through the Napiers, she meets another anthropologist, Everard Bone, and it is with him that Mildred will eventually form a relationship. A subplot revolves around the activities of the local vicar, Julian Malory, who becomes engaged to a glamorous clergyman's widow, Allegra Gray. Allegra proceeds to ease out Julian's sister and housekeeper, Winifred, a close friend of Mildred's. Eventually matters come to a head and Allegra leaves the vicarage after a quarrel. In the meantime, Helena, who has been on the verge of leaving Rocky for Everard, accepts that Everard does not care for her and leaves the neighbourhood, along with Rocky.The novel concludes with Mildred unsure of her future, but having agreed to carry out indexing tasks for Everard Bone. Other Pym novels portray Everard and Mildred as a married couple, usually unseen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphans_of_the_Sky"title="Orphans of the Sky">
The gigantic, cylindrical generation ship "Vanguard", originally destined for "Far Centaurus", is cruising without guidance through the interstellar medium because long ago, a mutiny killed most of the officers. Over time, the descendants of the surviving loyal crew have lapsed into a pre-technological culture that is marked by superstition and forgotten the purpose and nature of their ship. Since they come to believe the "Ship" is the entire universe, "To move the ship" is considered an oxymoron, and references to the Ship's "voyage" are interpreted as religious metaphor. They are ruled by an oligarchy of "officers" and "scientists." Most crew members are simple illiterate farmers, seldom or never venturing to the "upper decks," where the "muties" (an abbreviation of "mutants" or "mutineers") dwell. Among the crew, all identifiable mutants are killed at birth.The story centers on a young man of insatiable curiosity, Hugh Hoyland, who is selected as an apprentice by a scientist. The scientists ritualistically perform the tasks required to maintain the Ship, such as putting trash into its energy converter to generate power, and remain ignorant of their true functions.On a hunt for muties, Hugh is captured by them. He barely avoids getting eaten by the microcephalic dwarf Bobo and instead becomes the slave of Joe-Jim Gregory, the two-headed leader of a powerful mutie gang. Joe and Jim have separate identities, but both are highly intelligent and have come to a crude understanding of the Ship's true nature.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tess_of_the_d'Urbervilles"title="Tess of the d'Urbervilles">
## The Maiden.Tess Durbeyfield, a country girl of sixteen, is the eldest child of John Durbeyfield, a haggler, and his wife Joan. When the local parson tells John that "Durbeyfield" is a corruption of "D'Urberville", and that he is descended from an ancient Norman family, John celebrates by getting drunk. Tess drives to market in her father's place, but falls asleep at the reins; the wagon crashes and the family's only horse is killed. Feeling guilty, she agrees to visit Mrs d'Urberville, a rich widow, to "claim kin", unaware that the widow's late husband, Simon Stoke, had merely adopted the surname to distance himself from his tradesman's roots.Alec d'Urberville, the son, is attracted to Tess and finds her a job as his mother's poultry keeper. Tess resists Alec's manipulative attentions, but her youth and inexperience obscure from her the real threat to her virtue. One night, on the pretence of rescuing her from a fight, Alec takes her on his horse to a remote spot and it is implied that he rapes her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scarlet_Pimpernel"title="The Scarlet Pimpernel">
Set in 1792, during the early stages of the French Revolution, Marguerite St. Just, a beautiful French actress, is married to wealthy English fop Sir Percy Blakeney, baronet. Before their marriage Marguerite took revenge upon the Marquis de St. Cyr, who had ordered her brother beaten for his romantic interest in the Marquis' daughter, with the unintended consequence that the Marquis and his sons were guillotined. When Percy found out, he became estranged from his wife. Marguerite, for her part, became disillusioned with Percy's shallow, dandyish lifestyle.Meanwhile, the "League of the Scarlet Pimpernel", a secret society of twenty English aristocrats, "one to command, and nineteen to obey", is engaged in rescuing their French counterparts from the daily executions of the Reign of Terror. Their leader, the mysterious Scarlet Pimpernel, takes his "'nom de guerre" from the small, wayside red flower he draws on his messages. Despite being the talk of London society, only his followers and possibly the Prince of Wales know the Pimpernel's true identity. Like many others, Marguerite is entranced by the Pimpernel's daring exploits.At a ball attended by the Blakeneys, Percy's verse about the "elusive Pimpernel" becomes an instant success. But Marguerite is being blackmailed by Citizen Chauvelin, the wily new French envoy to England: Chauvelin's agents have stolen a letter proving that her beloved brother Armand is in league with the Pimpernel. Chauvelin offers to trade Armand's life for her help against the Pimpernel. Contemptuous of her seemingly witless and unloving husband, Marguerite does not go to him for help or advice. Instead, she passes along information which enables Chauvelin to learn the Pimpernel's true identity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Robe"title="The Robe">
The book explores the aftermath of the crucifixion of Jesus through the experiences of the Roman tribune Marcellus Gallio and his Greek slave Demetrius. Prince Gaius, in an effort to rid Rome of Marcellus, banishes Marcellus to the command of the Roman garrison at Minoa, a port city in southern Palestine. In Jerusalem during Passover, Marcellus ends up carrying out the crucifixion of Jesus but is troubled since he believes Jesus is innocent of any crime.Marcellus and some other soldiers throw dice to see who will take Jesus' seamless robe. Marcellus wins and asks Demetrius to take care of the robe. Following the crucifixion, Marcellus takes part in a banquet attended by Pontius Pilate. During the banquet, a drunken centurion insists that Marcellus wear Jesus' robe. Reluctantly wearing the garment, Marcellus apparently suffers a nervous breakdown and returns to Rome.Sent to Athens to recuperate, Marcellus finally gives in to Demetrius' urging and touches the robe, and his mind is subsequently restored. Marcellus, now believing the robe has some sort of innate power, returns to Judea, follows the path Jesus took, and meets many people whose lives Jesus had affected. Based upon their experiences, first Demetrius and then Marcellus become followers of Jesus. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Air_(novel)"title="Dead Air (novel)">
The book revolves around the life of Kenneth Nott, a radio DJ on a London station called Capital Live!
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exorcist_(novel)"title="The Exorcist (novel)">
An elderly Jesuit priest named Father Lankester Merrin is leading an archaeological dig in northern Iraq and is studying ancient relics. After discovering a small statue of the demon Pazuzu (an actual ancient Assyrian demon), a series of omens alerts him to a pending confrontation with a powerful evil, which, unknown to the reader at this point, he has battled before in an exorcism in Africa.Meanwhile, in Georgetown, a young girl named Regan MacNeil is living with her famous mother, actress Chris MacNeil, who is in Georgetown filming a movie. As Chris finishes her work on the film, Regan begins to become inexplicably ill. After a gradual series of poltergeist-like disturbances in their rented house, for which Chris attempts to find rational explanations, Regan begins to rapidly undergo disturbing psychological and physical changes: she refuses to eat or sleep, becomes withdrawn and frenetic, and increasingly aggressive and violent. Chris initially mistakes Regan's behavior for the result of repressed anger over her parents' divorce and absent father.Coupled with these events are disturbances at the local Holy Trinity Church which has been desecrated on several occasions potentially linked to Black Mass and is causing local concerns about occult activity.After several unsuccessful psychiatric and medical treatments, Regan's mother, an atheist, turns to a local Jesuit priest for help as Regan's personality becomes increasingly disturbed and the doctors still cannot find a source. Father Damien Karras, who is currently going through a crisis of faith coupled with the recent loss of his mother, agrees to see Regan as a psychiatrist, but initially resists the notion that it is an actual demonic possession, pointing to advances in science which can explain what was previously assumed to be possession. After a few meetings with the child, now completely inhabited by a diabolical personality claiming to be the devil, he turns to the local bishop for permission to perform an exorcism on the child.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sweet_Hereafter_(novel)"title="The Sweet Hereafter (novel)">
"The Sweet Hereafter" is a multiple first-person narrative depicting life in a small town in Upstate New York in the wake of a school bus accident in which many local children are killed. Their grieving parents are approached by a slick city lawyer who wants them to sue for damages. At first the parents are reluctant to do so, but eventually they are persuaded by the lawyer that filing a class action lawsuit would ease their minds and also be the right thing to do.As most of the children are dead, the case now depends on the few surviving witnesses to say the right things in court. In particular, it is 14-year-old Nichole Burnell, who was sitting at the front of the bus and is now paralyzed from the waist down, whose deposition is all-important. However, she unexpectedly accuses Dolores Driscoll, the driver, of speeding and thus causing the accident. When she does so, all hopes of ever receiving money are thwarted. All the people involved know that Nichole is lying but cannot do anything about it. Only her father knows why, but he is unable to publicly reveal his daughter's motives.The novel captures the atmosphere in a small town suddenly shaken by catastrophe. Only the reader/viewer knows that Mitchell Stephens, the lawyer, has himself effectively lost his own child—his estranged, drug-addicted daughter informs him that she has just tested HIV-positive.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Severed_Head"title="A Severed Head">
Martin Lynch-Gibbon is a well-to-do 41-year-old wine merchant whose childless marriage to an older woman called Antonia has been one of convenience rather than love. It never occurs to him that his ongoing secret affair with Georgie, a young academic in her twenties, could be immoral. Martin is shocked when his wife tells him that she has been having an affair with Palmer Anderson, her psychoanalyst and a friend of the couple. Antonia informs Martin that she wants to divorce him and marry Anderson.Martin moves out of their London house in Hereford Square. Before officially moving, Martin visits his brother Alexander's home near Oxford. While there he learns that Antonia has already written to Alexander about the divorce, leaving Alexander quite shaken. Later Martin returns to Hereford Square, where Antonia, now acting as a mother figure for him, tries to set up his new accommodation. After arguing with Antonia, he goes to the station to pick up Palmer's half-sister Honor Klein, a lecturer in anthropology who is visiting from Cambridge.Martin still does not want to publicly acknowledge his affair with Georgie, let alone become engaged to her. A few days later, Martin finally visits Georgie. While Georgie wants to publicize their affair, Martin refuses because he believes it will "hurt" Antonia. However, they decide to go to Hereford Square so that Georgie can see the house. While Martin is showing her around, they hear someone arrive at the house. Assuming it is Antonia, Martin rushes Georgie out the back door, despite her protests that she wishes to meet Antonia. The unexpected visitor turns out to be Honor, who notices Georgie's handbag that was left behind in her rush out the door. After the event, Martin tries to contact Georgie but is unsuccessful and soon returns to the house. There he finds out that Palmer and Antonia know about his relationship with Georgie. Martin finds Georgie and learns that Honor Klein has exposed their secret. Soon after Georgie meets Antonia in an awkward situation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Up_for_Air"title="Coming Up for Air">
The themes of the book are nostalgia, the folly of trying to go back and recapture past glories and the easy way the dreams and aspirations of one's youth can be smothered by the humdrum routine of work, marriage and getting old. It is written in the first person, with George Bowling, the forty-five-year-old protagonist, who reveals his life and experiences while undertaking a trip back to his boyhood home as an adult.At the opening of the book, Bowling has a day off work to go to London to collect a new set of false teeth. A news-poster about the contemporary King Zog of Albania sets off thoughts of a biblical character Og, King of Bashan that he recalls from Sunday church as a child. Along with 'some sound in the traffic or the smell of horse dung or something' these thoughts trigger Bowling's memory of his childhood as the son of an unambitious seed merchant in "Lower Binfield" near the River Thames. Bowling relates his life history, dwelling on how a lucky break during the First World War landed him in a comfortable job away from any action and provided contacts that helped him become a successful salesman.Bowling is wondering what to do with a modest sum of money that he has won on a horserace and which he has concealed from his wife and family. Much later (part III) he and his wife attend a Left Book Club meeting where he is horrified by the hate shown by the anti-fascist speaker, and bemused by the Marxist ramblings of the communists who have attended the meeting. Fed up with this, he seeks his friend Old Porteous, the retired schoolmaster. He usually enjoys Porteous' company, but on this occasion his dry dead classics makes Bowling even more depressed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Puppets"title="Shadow Puppets">
Peter, Ender's brother, is now Hegemon of Earth. Accepting a tip from inside China, where Achilles is held prisoner, Peter had planned for Bean to operate the mission, but at the last minute (because he doubted Bean would cooperate) assigns Suriyawong, a Battle School student from Thailand, to rescue Achilles in transport. Peter believes that he can spy on Achilles, take over his network, and then turn Achilles over to some country for trial, since Achilles has previously betrayed Russia, Pakistan, and India.Achilles is known to kill anyone who has seen him vulnerable. Bean and his friend Petra, who also served under Ender and who is travelling with Bean, have both seen Achilles so and immediately go into hiding, preparing for a future confrontation. Bean believes Peter has seriously underestimated Achilles, and that he himself is not safe unless he is hidden. During their travels, Petra convinces Bean to marry her and have children with her by taking him to Anton, the person who Anton's Key (Bean's Condition) was named after. Bean is reluctant to have children, as he does not want his Anton's Key gene to be passed on. He finds Volescu, the original doctor who activated the key in his genes, and has him prepare nine embryos through artificial insemination. Volescu pretends to identify three embryos with Anton's Key and they are discarded. One of the remaining six is implanted into Petra, while the rest of them are placed under guard.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Planet"title="The Pirate Planet">
The Key to Time tracer points the Fourth Doctor and Romana to the cold and boring planet of Calufrax, but when they arrive they find an unusual civilisation that lives in perpetual prosperity. A strange band of people with mysterious powers known as the Mentiads are feared by the society, but the Doctor discovers that they are good people but with an unknown purpose. He instead fears the Captain, the planet's leader and benefactor. After meeting the Captain on the bridge he learns that they are actually on a hollowed-out planet named Zanak, which has been materialising around other planets to plunder their resources.After repairing Zanak's engines, which were damaged when the planet materialised in the same place as the TARDIS, the Captain plans to take Zanak to Earth. The Doctor finds the true menace controlling the Captain is the ancient tyrant Queen Xanxia, disguised as the Captain's nurse, who uses the resources mined from planets in an attempt to gain immortality. Her physical body sits between Time Dams, devices that hold back the ravages of time, as she is old and near death, and a younger version of her is projected via a solid 3D device. Despite the Captain's apparent insanity, he is a calculating person who plans to destroy Xanxia. The Mentiads learn that their psychic powers are strengthened by the destruction of entire worlds beneath their feet. As the people on the planets die, their combined psychic force gives the Mentiads their power.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shada_(Doctor_Who)"title="Shada (Doctor Who)">
The Fourth Doctor answers a distress signal from Professor Chronotis, a Time Lord posing as a professor at St Cedd's College, Cambridge who loaned a Gallifreyan tome to his student Chris Parsons. The Doctor retrieves the book while Chronotis dies after his mind was extracted by the sphere of a mad scientist named Skagra, living long enough to warn Romana, K9 and Parsons of them and Shada. The Doctor locates Skagra's cloaked spacecraft, only for his companions to be captured while Skagra has his sphere extract the Doctor's mind to decode the book before taking Romana in the TARDIS to his carrier ship and Krarg creations. But the Doctor survived his ordeal with his mind intact and has the ship's computer release Chris and K9 and take them to a space station Skagra previously occupied. The group find Skagra's discarded colleagues and learn he is after a Time Lord named Salyavin.Back on Earth, Clare Keightley accidentally revives Chronotis whose chambers are revealed as a TARDIS, the Professor explaining the book is a key to the prison planet Shada where Salyavin is held. Chronotis and Clare repair the TARDIS to reach Skagra's carrier, saving the Doctor and Chris after Skagra decoded the book and revealed his intent to absorb Salyavin's mind and use its telepathy to unite all life into a single Universal Mind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Death"title="City of Death">
While in Paris, the Doctor and Romana sense a time distortion. They observe the Countess Scarlioni using an alien device to scan the security systems housing Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" at the Louvre. The pair meet Inspector Duggan, who suspects the Countess to be involved in an ongoing art theft scheme with her husband, Count Scarlioni. Duggan joins the Doctor and Romana in investigating the Scarlioni mansion. There, they find equipment used by Dr. Kerensky to experiment in time, the source of the time distortions, as well as six exact copies of the "Mona Lisa". The Doctor instructs Romana and Duggan to continue investigating while he returns to the TARDIS to visit Leonardo, a good friend of his. After the Doctor leaves, the Count returns after successfully stealing the "Mona Lisa" and captures Romana and Duggan. Learning that Romana is familiar with time, he kills Dr. Kerensky and forces Romana to continue the tests.In the past, the Doctor arrives at Leonardo's home but is captured by Captain Tancredi, who is Count Scarlioni. Tancredi reveals he is really Scaroth, a member of the Jagaroth race. They had arrived on Earth 400 million years ago, but due to an explosion in their craft, all of the others died and his own body was fragmented across time. Collectively, the fragments of Scaroth have manipulated humanity so that by the 20th century, they will have technology that will enable him to go back in time to stop the explosion. Tancredi is currently employing Leonardo to create copies of the "Mona Lisa" in order to finance Scarlioni's work. After Tancredi leaves, the Doctor knocks out his captor, marks the blank canvases with a felt-tip pen with the phrase, "This is a fake", and leaves a message to Leonardo to paint over his writing before returning to the present.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bridge_Too_Far_(film)"title="A Bridge Too Far (film)">
Operation Market Garden envisages 35,000 men being flown from air bases in England and dropped behind enemy lines in the Netherlands. Two divisions of US paratroopers are responsible for securing the road and bridges as far as Nijmegen. A British division, under Major-General Roy Urquhart, is to land near Arnhem and hold both sides of the bridge there, backed by a brigade of Polish paratroopers under General Stanisław Sosabowski. XXX Armoured Corps are to push up the road over the bridges captured by the American paratroopers and reach Arnhem two days after the drop.As General Urquhart briefs his officers some of them are surprised they are going to attempt a landing so far from their objective since the distance from their landing zone to the bridge will render their portable radios useless. Although the consensus is that resistance will consist entirely of inexperienced old men and Hitler Youth, reconnaissance photos show the presence of German tanks at Arnhem. General Browning nevertheless dismisses the photos and also ignores reports from the Dutch underground, believing the operation will be successful regardless.The Arnhem bridge is the prime target, since it serves as the last means of escape for the German forces in the Netherlands and a direct route to Germany for the Allies. However the road to it is only a single lane linking the various key bridges and vehicles have to squeeze onto the verge to pass. The road is also elevated, causing anything moving along it to stand out.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Mars"title="The Road to Mars">
Told from the point of view of Professor Bill Reynolds, a scholar in the (formerly) fictitious discipline of 'micropaleontology', this novel is set in the 24th and 25th Centuries, when the Solar System has been colonised. Reynolds is writing a thesis on fame and in his research discovers a dissertation on comedy submitted by Carlton, a robotic secretary for two stand-up comedians on an interplanetary comedy circuit. Most of the action in the novel follows this trio's adventures during the time when Reynolds believes Carlton was developing his theories. During this time, Carlton and his owners, Alex Muscroft and Lewis Ashby get caught up in a series of disasters including loss of work, parental responsibility and close scrapes with terrorists, the law, other entertainers, and a refugee crisis.Carlton seeks to understand the nature of comedy and human laughter, and attempts to describe humor as a mathematical formula.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy"title="Mars trilogy">
## "Red Mars" – Colonization."Red Mars" starts in 2026 with the first colonial voyage to Mars aboard the "Ares", the largest interplanetary spacecraft ever built and home to a crew who are to be the first hundred Martian colonists. The ship was built from clustered space shuttle external fuel tanks which, instead of reentering Earth's atmosphere, had been boosted into orbit until enough had been amassed to build the ship. The mission is a joint American–Russian undertaking, and seventy of the First Hundred are drawn from these countries (except, for example, Michel Duval, a French psychologist assigned to observe their behavior). The book details the trip out, construction of the first settlement on Mars (eventually called Underhill) by Russian engineer Nadia Cherneshevsky, as well as establishing colonies on Mars' hollowed out asteroid-moon Phobos, the ever-changing relationships between the colonists, debates among the colonists regarding both the terraforming of the planet and its future relationship to Earth. The two extreme views on terraforming are personified by Saxifrage "Sax" Russell, who believes their very presence on the planet means some level of terraforming has already begun and that it is humanity's obligation to spread life as it is the most scarce thing in the known universe, and Ann Clayborne, who stakes out the position that humankind does not have the right to change entire planets at their will.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves"title="House of Leaves">
"House of Leaves" begins with a first-person narrative by Johnny Truant, a Los Angeles tattoo parlor employee and professed unreliable narrator. Truant is searching for a new apartment when his friend Lude tells him about the apartment of the recently deceased Zampanò, a blind, elderly man who lived in Lude's apartment building.In Zampanò's apartment, Truant discovers a manuscript written by Zampanò that turns out to be an academic study of a documentary film called "The Navidson Record" directed by an acclaimed photojournalist named Will Navidson, though Truant says he can find no evidence that the film or its subjects ever existed.The rest of the novel incorporates several narratives, including Zampanò's report on the (possibly fictional) film; Truant's autobiographical interjections; a small transcript of part of the film from Navidson's brother, Tom; a small transcript of interviews of many people regarding "The Navidson Record" by Navidson's partner, Karen; and occasional brief notes by unidentified editors, all woven together by a mass of footnotes. There is also another narrator, Truant's mother, whose voice is presented through a self-contained set of letters titled "The Whalestoe Letters". Each narrator's text is printed in a distinct font, making it easier for the reader to follow the occasionally challenging format of the novel (Truant in Courier New in the footnotes, and the main narrative in Times New Roman in the American version, the unnamed editors are in Bookman, and the letters from Johnny's mother are in Dante).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Whalestoe_Letters"title="The Whalestoe Letters">
Pelafina writes these letters to Johnny from "The Three Attic Whalestoe Institute", a mental institution where she has been residing for a number of years. While a number of these letters appear in "House of Leaves", "The Whalestoe Letters" introduces a number of new letters which serve to more fully develop Pelafina's character as well as her relationship with Johnny.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restoree"title="Restoree">
"Restoree" is the story of Sara, an introverted, beak-nosed, 24-year-old virginal librarian originally from near Seaford, Delaware, who is abducted from New York City by the Mil, amorphous alien creatures that eat human flesh. She is kept alive, with her skin removed and in a catatonic state from the physical and mental shock, on a meat hook as a Mil meal until the alien ship she is on is captured by human inhabitants of the planet Lothar. Without her skin, some Lotharians mistake her for one of their own and perform controversial "restoration" procedures on her, including a nose job.Sara comes to her senses in a mental institution on Lothar with no memory of what happened, little knowledge of the local language, and a beautiful, golden-skinned body. At the institution, she is treated as if she were retarded and given menial tasks to do, as are other "restorees" who have been clandestinely salvaged from Mil ships; it is apparently some factor of Sara's Terran origins that allows her to fully recover from the shock of the Mil ordeal, while Lotharian restorees are of limited intellect at best. One of her jobs is to care for Harlan, the deposed planetary regent, who is being drugged into a moronic state. Recognizing what is being done, Sara helps Harlan to regain his senses and escape the mental institution. Sara and Harlan then gain the advantage over Harlan's political enemies, defeat the Mil, solve some of Lothar's emerging domestic problems and, of course, fall in love.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmer_Gantry"title="Elmer Gantry">
The novel tells the story of a young, narcissistic, womanizing college athlete who abandons his early ambition to become a lawyer. The legal profession does not suit the unethical Gantry. After college, he attends a Baptist seminary and is ordained as a Baptist minister. While managing to cover up certain sexual indiscretions, he is thrown out of the seminary before completing his BD because he is too drunk to turn up at a church where he is supposed to preach. After several years as a travelling salesman of farm equipment, he becomes manager for Sharon Falconer, an itinerant evangelist. Gantry becomes her lover, but loses both her and his position when she is killed in a fire at her new tabernacle. After this catastrophe, he briefly acts as a "New Thought" evangelist, and eventually becomes a Methodist minister. He marries well and eventually obtains a large congregation in Lewis's fictional Midwestern city of Zenith. During his career, Gantry contributes to the downfall, physical injury, and even death of key people around him, including a sincere minister, Frank Shallard, who is plagued by doubt. Especially ironic is the way he champions love, an emotion he seems incapable of, in his sermons, preaches against ambition, when he himself is so patently ambitious, and organizes crusades against (mainly sexual) immorality, when he has difficulty resisting sexual temptation himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sons_and_Lovers"title="Sons and Lovers">
## Part I.The refined daughter of a "good old burgher family," Gertrude Coppard meets a rough-hewn miner, Walter Morel, at a Christmas dance and falls into a whirlwind romance characterised by physical passion but soon after her marriage to Walter, she realises the difficulties of living off his meagre salary in a rented house. The couple fight and drift apart and Walter retreats to the pub after work each day. Gradually, Mrs. Morel's affections shift to her sons beginning with the oldest, William.As a boy, William is so attached to his mother that he does not enjoy the fair without her. As he grows older, he defends her against his father's occasional violence. Eventually, he leaves their Nottinghamshire home for a job in London, where he begins to rise up into the middle class. He is engaged, but he detests the girl's superficiality. William dies and Mrs. Morel is heartbroken. When her second son Paul catches pneumonia she rediscovers her love for Paul.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle"title="The Jungle">
Jurgis Rudkus marries his fifteen-year-old sweetheart, Ona Lukoszaite, in a joyous traditional Lithuanian wedding feast. They and their extended family have recently immigrated to Chicago due to financial hardship in Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire). They have heard that America offers freedom and higher wages and have come to pursue the American Dream.Despite having lost much of their savings being conned on the trip to Chicago, and then having to pay for the wedding—and despite the disappointment of arriving at a crowded boarding house—Jurgis is initially optimistic about his prospects in Chicago. Young and strong, he believes that he is immune to the misfortunes that have befallen others in the crowd. He is swiftly hired by a meatpacking factory; he marvels at its efficiency, even while witnessing the cruel treatment of the animals.The women of the family answer an ad for a four-room house; Ona, who came from an educated background, figures that they could easily afford it with the jobs that Jurgis, proud Marija, and ambitious Jonas have gotten. While they discover at the showing that the neighborhood is unkempt and the house doesn't live up to the advertisement, they are taken in by the slickness and fluent Lithuanian of the real estate agent and sign a contract for the house.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_Tse-tung"title="Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung">
"Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung" consists of 427 quotations, organized thematically into 33 chapters. It is also called "Thoughts of Chairman Mao" by many Chinese people. The quotations range in length from a sentence to a few short paragraphs, and borrow heavily from a group of about two dozen documents in the four volumes of Mao's "Selected Works".Usually the quotations are arranged logically, to deal with one to three themes in the development of a chapter. The table below summarizes the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_7_(novel)"title="Level 7 (novel)">
During his forced residence at a deep underground offensive-warfare complex, X-127 is ordered to push missile firing buttons to begin World War III (which lasts a total of 2 hours and 58 minutes). From that point, humanity's few civilian survivors are situated within a collection of underground shelter complexes on Levels 1 through 5 at various depths from the irradiated surface, while military personnel already occupy the deepest and safest Levels 6 and 7. It later emerges that the orders given have been wholly automatic due to a launch on warning strategy; the war has taken place as a series of automated electronic responses to an initial accident.X-127 and his fellow shelter inhabitants belatedly learn the criteria that had determined admission to the shelters: civilians were granted only an illusion of protection, while government officials and military personnel were granted significantly more security. Those who were assigned to launch the nuclear missiles, and their support staff, were selected for their ability to behave like machines, yet are counted upon to preserve the human spirit and rebuild the human race. X-127 and his colleagues attempt to carry on human life, but discover that institutions such as marriage and preparations for child-rearing have been hollowed out by conditions and attitudes in the antiseptic underground.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sounder_(novel)"title="Sounder (novel)">
The black sharecropper's family is poor and hungry. The father and his dog, Sounder, go hunting each night, but the hunting is inadequate. The family subsists on fried corn mush, biscuits, and milk gravy until one morning they wake up to the smell of boiling ham. They feast for three days, but finally the sheriff and two of his deputies burst into the cabin and arrest the father for stealing the ham. Sounder chases after them, and one of the deputies shoots him with a shotgun.The arrested man's son goes looking for Sounder but cannot find him. Returning to the scene of the shooting, the boy finds a part of Sounder's ear. While his mother cautions him not to "be all hope", the boy searches for the dog every day for weeks. In the father's absence, the family survives on the money the mother makes by selling cracked walnuts. The boy helps to look after his three younger siblings and experiences the intense loneliness of the cabin.For Christmas, the boy's mother makes a four-layer cake for him to take to his father in jail. When he arrives, the guard treats him rudely. Finally the boy is admitted, and the guard breaks the cake into pieces, saying he suspects it could hide something which could help the boy's father escape. The boy gives the mangled cake to his father anyway and tells him that Sounder might not be dead. Their conversation is strained and difficult. The father tells the boy not to come back to the jail, and he goes home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_the_Sequined_Love_Nun"title="Island of the Sequined Love Nun">
Tucker (Tuck) Case is a pilot for a cosmetics company, who crashes the company plane while having sex. This event causes Tuck to be blacklisted from flying in the United States, so he accepts a lucrative offer from a doctor-missionary on a remote Micronesian island to transport cargo to and from the island and Japan.Tuck moves to the island with a Filipino trans woman navigator and a talking fruit bat. There Tuck eventually uncovers a horrible secret harbored by the doctor and his wife, who capitalized on the fact that the island natives are under the influence of a cargo cult that developed as a result of establishment by Allies of an air runway there during World War II.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lust_Lizard_of_Melancholy_Cove"title="The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove">
Pine Cove suffers a major crisis when the town psychiatrist, Val Riordan — who has been haphazardly issuing prescriptions instead of dealing with the real mental problems of her patients — suffers a sudden bout of guilt and substitutes all of her patients' anti-depressants with placebos. At this same time, by coincidence, human-generated environmental activity stirs a prehistoric sea-beast from its underwater keep to come ashore.In addition to its ability to change form, the beast exudes a pheromone that inspires uncontrollable lust among the residents of Pine Cove and also lures some of them as prey. After mistakenly trying to mate with a fuel truck (causing an explosion), the beast hides in a trailer park, attracting the curiosity of local crazy lady and former B-movie star Molly Michon, who builds a rapport with the injured beast.Meanwhile, Theophilus Crowe, the town constable, investigates a strange suicide, the activities of his corrupt boss, and his adversely affected marijuana habit. When the beast (whom Molly has named "Steve") starts eating residents of Pine Cove and interfering with Theo's boss's methamphetamine business, Molly (who has become romantically involved with the beast) and Theo band together to make possible the beast's safe escape and to take down the boss at the same time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_Tame_Gazelle"title="Some Tame Gazelle">
The novel details episodes in the life of Belinda Bede, a spinster now in her fifties who shares a house with her younger, more dominant but equally unmarried sister Harriet. Since her university days, Belinda has loved the village's Archdeacon Hoccleve, with whom she studied then, although he had preferred to marry the better connected Agatha, a bishop's daughter. Harriet's preference has always been to look after the welfare of young curates, although her admirer in the village is the Italian Count Ricardo Bianco, who regularly proposes marriage to her.At the time the story begins, Mr Donne is the newly arrived curate in the village. Eventually he becomes engaged to Olivia Berridge, an academic specialising in Middle English literature and a niece of Agatha Hoccleve. But in the meantime, Agatha leaves for a visit to a German spa and another of Belinda's and the Archdeacon's student acquaintances comes to stay at the vicarage. This is Dr Parnell, now head of the main university library, who is accompanied by his assistant, the socially suspect Mr Mold. Before leaving again, Mr Mold proposes marriage to Harriet and, refused, takes it calmly by visiting the local pub and counting himself well escaped.When Agatha returns, she brings home Dr Grote, the colonial bishop of Mbawawa, a former protégé of Harriet's during the time when he was once a curate. Belinda begins to see in him another threat to her peaceful coexistence with her sister, but it is to herself that the bishop proposes in the end. When he too is rejected, he proposes instead to Connie Aspinall, a decayed gentlewoman living in the same village.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangers_and_Brothers"title="Strangers and Brothers">
All eleven novels in the series are narrated by the character Lewis Eliot. The series follows his life and career from humble beginnings in an English provincial town, to reasonably successful London lawyer, to Cambridge don, to wartime service in Whitehall, to senior civil servant and finally retirement."The New Men" deals with the scientific community's involvement in (and reaction to) the development and deployment of nuclear weapons during the Second World War. "The Conscience of the Rich" concerns a wealthy, Anglo-Jewish merchant-banking family. "Time of Hope" and "George Passant" depict the price paid by clever, poor young men to escape their provincial origins.Snow analyses the professional world, scrutinising microscopic shifts of power within the enclosed settings of a Cambridge college, a Whitehall ministry, a law firm. For example, in the novels set in the Cambridge college (a thinly veiled Christ's), a small, disparate group of men is typically required to reach a collective decision on an important subject. In "The Masters", the dozen or so college members elect a new head (the Master) by majority vote. In "The Affair", a small group of dons sets out to correct a possible injustice: they must convince the rest of the college to re-open an investigation into scientific fraud. In both novels, the characters strongly resist letting in the external world, whether it be the press, public opinion, the college "Visitor", or outside experts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyricon"title="Satyricon">
The work is narrated by its central figure, Encolpius. The surviving sections of the novel begin with Encolpius traveling with a companion and former lover named Ascyltos, who has joined Encolpius on numerous escapades. Encolpius' slave, Giton, is at his owner's lodging when the story begins.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel"title="Guns, Germs, and Steel">
The prologue opens with an account of Diamond's conversation with Yali, a New Guinean politician. The conversation turned to the obvious differences in power and technology between Yali's people and the Europeans who dominated the land for 200 years, differences that neither of them considered due to any genetic superiority of Europeans. Yali asked, using the local term "cargo" for inventions and manufactured goods, "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?"Diamond realized the same question seemed to apply elsewhere: "People of Eurasian origin ... dominate ... the world in wealth and power." Other peoples, after having thrown off colonial domination, still lag in wealth and power. Still others, he says, "have been decimated, subjugated, and in some cases even exterminated by European colonialists."The peoples of other continents (sub-Saharan Africans, Indigenous people of the Americas, Aboriginal Australians, New Guineans, and the original inhabitants of tropical Southeast Asia) have been largely conquered, displaced and in some extreme cases – referring to Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, and South Africa's indigenous Khoisan peoples – largely exterminated by farm-based societies such as Eurasians and Bantu. He believes this is due to these societies' technological and immunological advantages, stemming from the early rise of agriculture after the last ice age.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Passage_to_India"title="A Passage to India">
## Arrival.A young British schoolmistress, Adela Quested, and her elderly friend, Mrs. Moore, visit the fictional city of Chandrapore, British India. Adela is to decide if she wants to marry Mrs. Moore's son, Ronny Heaslop, the city magistrate.Meanwhile, Dr. Aziz, a young Indian Muslim physician, is dining with two of his Indian friends and conversing about whether it is possible to be a friend of an Englishman. During the meal, a summons arrives from Major Callendar, Aziz's unpleasant superior at the hospital. Aziz hastens to Callendar's bungalow as ordered but is delayed by a flat tyre and difficulty in finding a tonga and the major has already left in a huff.Disconsolate, Aziz walks down the road toward the railway station. When he sees his favourite mosque, he enters on impulse. He sees a strange Englishwoman there and yells at her not to profane this sacred place. The woman, Mrs. Moore, has respect for native customs. This disarms Aziz, and the two chat and part as friends.Mrs. Moore returns to the British gentleman's club down the road and relates her experience at the mosque. Ronny Heaslop, her son, initially thinks she is talking about an Englishman and becomes indignant when he learns the facts. Adela, however, is intrigued.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Room_with_a_View"title="A Room with a View">
## Part one.The novel is set in the early 1900s as upper-middle-class English women are beginning to lead more independent, adventurous lives. In the first part, Miss Lucy Honeychurch is touring Italy with her overly-fussy spinster cousin and chaperone, Miss Charlotte Bartlett. The novel opens in Florence with the women complaining about their rooms at the Pensione Bertolini. They were promised rooms with a view of the River Arno but instead have ones overlooking a drab courtyard. Another guest, Mr Emerson, interrupts their "peevish wrangling" by spontaneously offering to swap rooms. He and his son, George, both have rooms with views of the Arno, and he argues, "Women like looking at a view; men don’t." Charlotte rejects the offer, partly because she looks down on the Emersons' unconventional behaviour and because she fears it would place them under an "unseemly obligation". However, another guest, Mr Beebe, an Anglican clergyman, persuades Charlotte to accept the offer; Charlotte suggests that the Emersons are socialists.The following day, Lucy spends a "long morning" in the Basilica of Santa Croce, accompanied by Miss Eleanor Lavish, a novelist who promises to lead her on an adventure. Lavish confiscates Lucy's Baedeker guidebook, proclaiming she will show Lucy the "true Italy". On the way to Santa Croce, the two take a wrong turn and get lost. After drifting for hours through various streets and piazzas, they eventually make it to the square in front of the church, only for Lavish (who still has Lucy's Baedeker) to abandon the younger woman to pursue an old acquaintance.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alas,_Babylon"title="Alas, Babylon">
The story is set in a fictional 1959, following two years of escalating tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union for dominance in the Middle East and in the Mediterranean Sea. The Soviets are menacing Turkey from three sides through their proxies in Egypt, Syria and Iraq in order to gain control of the Bosporus and give free passage to their large Mediterranean fleet. To counteract the Soviet menace the United States established a military presence in Lebanon and are providing aid to their Turkish and Israeli allies.As detailed in the book, the Soviets gained a temporary space supremacy through the launch of a massive fleet of militarized Sputniks; moreover, they are aware that, within three or four years, the United States will cover the gap. Intelligence from a Soviet officer who defected in Berlin provided information about a Soviet war plan involving a sudden, overwhelming nuclear first strike on U.S. and NATO military and civilian targets, in order to minimize retaliation and become the leading world power. According to the leaked war plan the Soviet leadership considers acceptable the loss of 20 to 30 million of their own civilian population due to the retaliatory strike by NATO.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Accidental_Tourist"title="The Accidental Tourist">
Set in Baltimore, Maryland, the plot revolves around Macon Leary, a writer of travel guides whose son has been killed in a shooting at a fast-food restaurant. He and his wife Sarah, separately lost in grief, find their marriage disintegrating until she eventually moves out. When he becomes incapacitated due to a fall involving his disturbed dog and one of his crazy home inventions, he returns to the family home to stay with his eccentric siblings—sister Rose and brothers Porter and Charles. The siblings' odd habits include alphabetizing the groceries in the kitchen cabinets and ignoring the ringing telephone. When his publisher, Julian, comes to visit, Julian finds himself attracted to Rose. They eventually marry, though Rose later moves back in with her brothers, followed months later by Julian, who becomes part of the family. Macon hires Muriel Pritchett, a quirky young woman with a sickly son, to train his unruly dog, and soon finds himself drifting into a relationship with the two of them. Muriel is the exact opposite of Macon's wife: brash, talkative, pushy, less "classy" and less educated, and fond of wearing eccentric outfits. Despite his initial resistance to this relationship, Macon finds that he is constantly surprised by Muriel's perceptiveness, strength and optimism, as well as her quirky habits and ability to listen. Macon's natural love of the familiar and resistance to commitment results in a relationship that is quite a struggle between the pushy Muriel and the passive Macon. But over time, Macon becomes attached to both Muriel and Alexander, the son, and moves in with them in their tawdry little house. Macon slowly finds that he loves "the surprise of her, and also the surprise of himself when he was with her. In the foreign country that was Singleton Street he was an entirely different person." When his wife Sarah becomes aware of the situation, she decides they should reconcile, forcing him to make a difficult decision about his future.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Remains_of_the_Day"title="The Remains of the Day">
The novel tells, in first-person narration, the story of Stevens, an English butler who has dedicated his life to the loyal service of Lord Darlington (who is recently deceased, and whom Stevens describes in increasing detail in flashbacks). As the work progresses, two central themes are revealed: Lord Darlington was a Nazi sympathizer; and Stevens is in love with Miss Kenton, the housekeeper at Darlington Hall, Lord Darlington's estate.The novel begins in 1956, with Stevens receiving a letter from a former colleague, the housekeeper Miss Kenton, describing her married life, which Stevens believes hints at an unhappy marriage. Furthermore, Darlington Hall is short-staffed and could greatly use a skilled housekeeper like Miss Kenton. Stevens starts to consider paying Miss Kenton a visit. His new employer, a wealthy American named Mr. Farraday, encourages Stevens to borrow his car to take a well-earned vacation—a "motoring trip". Stevens accepts, and sets out for Cornwall, where Miss Kenton (now Mrs. Benn) lives.During his journey, Stevens reflects on his unshakable loyalty to Lord Darlington, who had hosted lavish meetings between German sympathizers and English aristocrats in an effort to influence international affairs in the years leading up to the Second World War; on the meaning of the term "dignity" and what constitutes a great butler; and on his relationship with his late father, another "no-nonsense" man who dedicated his life to service. Ultimately, Stevens is forced to ponder Lord Darlington's character and reputation, as well as the true nature of his relationship with Miss Kenton. As the book progresses, evidence mounts of Miss Kenton's and Stevens' past mutual attraction and affection.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_and_Punishment"title="Crime and Punishment">
## Part 1.Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, a former law student, lives in extreme poverty in a tiny, rented room in Saint Petersburg. Isolated and antisocial, he has abandoned all attempts to support himself, and is brooding obsessively on a scheme he has devised to murder and rob an elderly pawn-broker. On the pretext of pawning a watch, he visits her apartment, but remains unable to commit himself. Later in a tavern he makes the acquaintance of Semyon Zakharovich Marmeladov, a drunkard who recently squandered his family's little wealth. Marmeladov tells him about his teenage daughter, Sonya, who has become a prostitute in order to support the family. The next day Raskolnikov receives a letter from his mother in which she describes the problems of his sister Dunya, who has been working as a governess, with her ill-intentioned employer, Svidrigailov. To escape her vulnerable position, and with hopes of helping her brother, Dunya has chosen to marry a wealthy suitor, Luzhin, whom they are coming to meet in Petersburg. Details in the letter suggest that Luzhin is a conceited opportunist who is seeking to take advantage of Dunya's situation. Raskolnikov is enraged at his sister's sacrifice, feeling it is the same as what Sonya felt compelled to do. Painfully aware of his own poverty and impotence, his thoughts return to his idea. A further series of internal and external events seem to conspire to compel him toward the resolution to enact it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Dark_Tea-Time_of_the_Soul"title="The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul">
While trying to purchase an airline ticket to Oslo at Heathrow Airport, American journalist Kate Schechter finds herself in line behind a large blond man who also wants to get on the flight but has no identification or means to pay. The check-in counter is suddenly consumed by fire, and both Kate and the man are taken to a hospital with injuries. The man is later removed from the hospital, along with his short-handled sledgehammer and a Coca-Cola vending machine, and Kate checks herself out in order to find where he has gone.Meanwhile, "holistic" detective Dirk Gently wakes up several hours late for a meeting with songwriter Geoffrey Anstey, a new client. Anstey had engaged Dirk to protect him from a green-eyed giant armed with a scythe, saying that it had to do with a contract he had signed. When Dirk arrives at Anstey's home, he finds the man's body in a chair and his head on a record turntable. Searching the home, he discovers an envelope marked with several names, all of which are crossed out except for Anstey's, and gets his nose broken by Anstey's son while trying to question him. The boy is watching a television news broadcast on the Heathrow incident, which mentions that a check-in clerk has gone missing; Dirk recognises her as his former secretary.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damage_(Hart_novel)"title="Damage (Hart novel)">
The first person narrator of the novel is an unnamed medical doctor turned politician (called Dr Stephen Fleming in the Louis Malle film) whose promotion from Member of Parliament (MP) to cabinet member is imminent. Just then the MP is casually introduced to his grown-up son's enigmatic girlfriend Anna and helplessly falls for her. For as long as it lasts, Martyn, his son, has no idea that his father is having an extramarital affair with his girlfriend (and later fiancée), and Anna does not seem to mind being a young man's partner and simultaneously his father's lover and object of desire. The MP enjoys a brief period of sexual bliss, meeting Anna in various European cities and having sex with her in unlikely places. Eventually, she buys them a small flat in central London where they meet on a regular basis.On the day before his wedding to Anna, her stepfather, whom she is close to has a heart attack, and Martyn while looking for her, finds the address to her secret flat. He climbs up a flight of stairs to the top floor, opens the unlocked door to the apartment, and is shocked to see his father making love to his fiancée. Dazed and utterly confused, he tumbles backwards, hits the low banister and falls down the stairwell. The MP runs down the stairs completely naked, finding Martyn dead, sprawled out on the ground floor. He kneels on the floor and clutches Martyn's body to him until the police arrive. In the final scene, the MP, stripped of his political office and living abroad as a recluse, sits in his solitary room staring at oversized photographs of Anna and Martyn on the wall.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Earth"title="Imperial Earth">
Duncan Makenzie is the latest generation of the 'first family' of Titan, a colonised moon of Saturn. Originally settled by his grandfather Malcolm Makenzie in the early 23rd century, Titan's economy has flourished based on the harvest and sale of hydrogen mined from the atmosphere, which is used to fuel the fusion engines of interplanetary spacecraft.As the plot opens in 2276, a number of factors are combining to make a diplomatic visit to the 'mother world' of Earth a necessity. Firstly, the forthcoming 500th anniversary of US Independence, which is bringing in colonists from the entire Solar System, obviously needs a suitable representative from Titan. Secondly, the Makenzie family carry a fatal damaged gene that means any normal continuation of the family line is impossible—so both Duncan and his "father" Colin are clones of his "grandfather" Malcolm. Human cloning is a mature technology but is even at this time ethically controversial. And thirdly, technological advances in spacecraft drive systems — specifically the 'asymptotic drive' which improves the specific impulse and thrust by orders of magnitude — means that Titan's whole economy is under threat as the demand for hydrogen is about to collapse.The human aspects of the tale center mainly on the intense infatuation (largely unrequited but not unconsummated) that the two main male characters, Duncan and Karl Helmer, develop for the vividly characterized Catherine Linden Ellerman (Calindy), a visitor to Titan from Earth in their youth, and its lifelong consequences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolat_(novel)"title="Chocolat (novel)">
Vianne Rocher, with her daughter Anouk, come to the small French village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes. They are brought by "the wind" during the last days of Carnival to open a "", "La Céleste Praline". The village priest, Francis Reynaud, is mystified by their arrival because Lent has just begun, but his confusion turns rapidly to anger when he understands that Vianne holds dangerous beliefs, does not obey the church and flouts the unspoken rules that he feels should govern his "flock".Vianne, we learn from her personal thoughts, is a witch, though she does not use the word. Her mother and she were wanderers, going from one city to another. Her mother strove to inspire the same need for freedom in her daughter, who is more social and passive. They were born with gifts, and used a kind of "domestic magic" to earn their living. Throughout her life, Vianne has been running from the "Black Man", a recurring motif in her mother's folklore. When her mother dies of terminal cancer, Vianne continues on her own, trying to evade the Black Man and the mysterious force of the wind and settle down to a normal life.The "chocolaterie" is an old dream of hers. She has an innate talent for cooking and a charming personality. She tries to fit in and help her customers. She starts to build a group of regular customers, and, to Reynaud's dismay, she doesn't go out of business.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wombles"title="The Wombles">
## Physical characteristics.Wombles are essentially burrowing animals. Beresford's original book describes them as "a bit like teddy bears to look at but they have real claws and live beneath Wimbledon Common". As they mostly live in long-established burrows, they rarely use their claws even for digging. Their size and physical appearance has changed somewhat over the years: in the original editions of the books, Wombles are pictured as bear-like and between 3 and 5 feet (about 1–1.5 metres) in height, making them only slightly smaller than adult humans. This changed with the TV series, in which they were portrayed as being about knee-high to humans, with pointy snouts like those of hedgehogs. In the book and movie "Wombling Free" they are described as "short, fat, and furry", roughly between three or four feet (about 1 metre) in height.Wombles are herbivores and are very fond of mushrooms. They eat a variety of plants, fungi, and tree products that human beings cannot (or will not) eat, so daisy buns, moss pie, acorn juice, fir-cone soufflé, elm bark casserole and grass bread sandwiches are part of the Womble menu – augmented by any food left behind on the Common by human beings. All Wombles are strong swimmers and can even survive for long periods in ice-cold water. Several sub-species of Womble are revealed throughout the books: the "Loch Ness Monster" is actually part of a clan of water Wombles and the yeti of the Himalayas are giant snow-white Wombles. Wombles have a sixth sense which allows them to sense green spaces and wildlife: this is first mentioned in the "Wandering Wombles" but developed to a keen long-range telepathic sense by Dalai Gartok Womble in "The Wombles Go Round The World".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary's_Baby_(novel)"title="Rosemary's Baby (novel)">
The book centers on Rosemary Woodhouse, a young woman who has just moved into the Bramford, a historic Gothic Revival-style New York City apartment building, with her husband, Guy, a struggling actor. Guy has so far appeared only in small roles in the stage plays "Luther", "Nobody Loves an Albatross", and various TV commercials. The pair is warned that the Bramford has a disturbing history involving witchcraft and murder, but they discount this. Rosemary wants to start a family, but Guy prefers waiting until his career is more established.Neighbors Minnie and Roman Castevet, an eccentric, elderly couple, welcome Rosemary and Guy to the Bramford. Rosemary finds them meddlesome and annoying, but Guy begins frequently visiting them.After the lead actor in a new stage play suddenly goes blind, Guy is cast in the role. Immediately afterward, Guy unexpectedly agrees with Rosemary that they should have their first child. That night, Rosemary dreams of a rough sexual encounter with a huge, inhuman creature with yellow eyes. The next morning Rosemary finds claw marks on her breasts and groin, which Guy dismisses as resulting from his hangnail, which he has cut. Rosemary subsequently learns that she is pregnant.Rosemary falls severely ill; but her intense pain and weight loss are ignored by others and attributed to hysteria. Her doctor and Minnie feed her strange and foul concoctions. Rosemary also develops a peculiar craving for raw meat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Perfect_Day"title="This Perfect Day">
Li RM35M4419, nicknamed "Chip" (as in "chip off the old block") by his nonconformist grandfather Jan, is a typical child Member, but through a mistake in genetic programming, he has one green eye. Through his grandfather's encouragement, he learns how to play a game of "wanting things," including imagining what career he might pick if he had the choice. Chip is told by his adviser that "deciding" and "picking" are manifestations of selfishness, and he tries to forget his dreams.As Chip grows up and begins his career, he is mostly a good citizen but commits minor subversive acts, such as procuring art materials for another "nonconformist" member who was denied them. His occasional oddities attract the attention of a secret group of Members of nonconformists, like Chip. There, he meets King, a Medicenter chief who obtains members' records for potential future recruitment to the group; King's beautiful girlfriend, Lilac, a strong-willed and inquisitive woman with unusually dark skin; and Snowflake, a rare albino member. They teach Chip how to get his treatments reduced so that he can feel more and stronger emotions. Chip begins an affair with Snowflake but is really attracted to Lilac.Chip and Lilac begin to search through old museum maps and soon discover islands around the world that have disappeared from their modern map. They begin to wonder if perhaps other "incurable" members have escaped to the islands. King tells them that the idea is nonsense, but Chip soon learns that King has already interacted with some "incurables" and that they are indeed real. Before he can tell Lilac, Chip's ruse is discovered by his adviser. He and all the other members of the group are captured and treated back into docility (except King, who takes his own life before he can be captured).
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boys_from_Brazil_(novel)"title="The Boys from Brazil (novel)">
Yakov Liebermann is a Nazi hunter (loosely based on Simon Wiesenthal) who runs a center in Vienna that documents crimes against humanity, perpetrated during the Holocaust. The waning interest of the Western nations in tracking down Nazi criminals, and the failure of the bank where he kept his center's funds, has forced him to move the center to his own lodgings.Then, in September 1974, Liebermann receives a phone call from a young man in Brazil who claims he has just finished tape recording a meeting held by the so-called "Angel of Death", Dr. Josef Mengele, a concentration camp medical doctor who performed horrific experiments on camp victims during World War II. According to the young man, Mengele is activating the ODESSA for a strange assignment: sending out six Nazis (former "SS" officers) to kill 94 men living in Western Europe and North America, who share a few common traits. All men are civil servants, and all of them have to be killed on or about particular dates, spread over several years. All will be 65 years old at the time of their killing. Before the young man can finish the conversation, he is killed.Liebermann is hesitant and wonders if the call was a prank. But he investigates and discovers that the killings the young man spoke of are taking place. As he tries to determine why the seemingly unimportant men are being killed, he discovers by coincidence that the children of two of the men are identical. It eventually transpires each of the 94 targets has a son aged 13, a genetic clone of Adolf Hitler planted by Mengele and, through corrupt adoption agency employees, placed with families that have lives similar to Hitler's own upbringing. Mengele wishes to create a new Führer for the Nazi movement, and is thus trying to ensure that the lives of the clones follow a similar path to Hitler's. Each civil servant father is married to a woman about 23 years younger, and their killing is an attempt to mimic the timing of the death of Hitler's own father. Liebermann makes sufficient progress in his investigation that the ODESSA ends the operation and recalls the six Nazi soldiers sent to kill the men. Infuriated, Mengele resolves to complete as many of the killings as he can on his own and travels to the United States.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Genji"title="The Tale of Genji">
Genji's mother dies when he is three years old, and the Emperor cannot forget her. The Emperor Kiritsubo then hears of a woman (Lady Fujitsubo), formerly a princess of the preceding emperor, who resembles his deceased concubine, and later she becomes one of his wives. Genji loves her first as a stepmother, but later as a woman, and they fall in love with each other. Genji is frustrated by his forbidden love for the Lady Fujitsubo and is on bad terms with his own wife (Aoi no Ue, the Lady Aoi). He engages in a series of love affairs with other women. These are however unfulfilling, as in most cases his advances are rebuffed, or his lover dies suddenly, or he becomes bored.Genji visits Kitayama, a rural hilly area north of Kyoto, where he finds a beautiful ten-year-old girl. He is fascinated by this little girl (Murasaki), and discovers that she is a niece of the Lady Fujitsubo. Finally he kidnaps her, brings her to his own palace and educates her to be like the Lady Fujitsubo, who is his womanly ideal. During this time Genji also meets Lady Fujitsubo secretly, and she bears his son, Reizei. Everyone except the two lovers believes the father of the child is the Emperor Kiritsubo. Later the boy becomes the Crown Prince and Lady Fujitsubo becomes the Empress, but Genji and Lady Fujitsubo swear to keep the child's true parentage secret.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_and_Commander"title="Master and Commander">
The novel opens in April 1800. Jack Aubrey, a shipless lieutenant wasting away in the Royal Navy port of Mahon in Minorca, meets Stephen Maturin, a destitute Irish-Catalan physician and natural philosopher, at a concert at the Governor's Mansion. During the performance, Maturin elbows Aubrey who is beating the measure "half a beat ahead". The men, both at personal low points, treat the matter as one of honour; they exchange names and anticipate a duel.Later that evening, Aubrey learns that he has been promoted to the rank of commander and has been given command of the 14-gun HM Sloop "Sophie". Meeting Maturin in the street the next day, Aubrey's joy overcomes his animosity and he invites Maturin to dine. The men discover a shared love of music, Aubrey playing the violin and Maturin the cello. On learning Maturin's profession, Aubrey asks him to join his ship. Although as a physician Maturin's expertise goes far beyond that normally expected of a naval surgeon, he agrees."Sophie" is sent to accompany a small convoy of merchant ships in the Mediterranean. Aubrey takes the opportunity to get to know his sailors and work them into a fighting unit with the aid of his new first lieutenant, James Dillon, a wealthy and aristocratic Irishman. Dillon and Maturin recognize each other, having previously met (a fact they keep to themselves) as members of the United Irishmen, a society dedicated to Irish home rule and Catholic emancipation. Dillon suffers a crisis of conscience when ordered to intercept an American ship thought to be harbouring Irish rebels, and he works to help them avoid capture.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Luck_of_Barry_Lyndon"title="The Luck of Barry Lyndon">
Redmond Barry of Ballybarry, born to a genteel but ruined Irish family, fancies himself a gentleman. At the prompting of his mother, he learns what he can of courtly manners and swordplay, but fails at more scholarly subjects like Latin. He is a hot-tempered, passionate lad, and falls madly in love with his cousin, Nora. As she is a spinster a few years older than Redmond, she is seeking a prospect with more ready cash to pay family debts.The lad tries to engage in a duel with Nora's suitor, an English officer named John Quin. He is made to think that he has killed the man, though his pistol was actually loaded with tow, a dummy load of heavy, knotted fibres. Quin, struck with the harmless load, fainted in fright.Redmond flees to Dublin, where he quickly falls in with bad company in the way of con artists, and soon loses all his money. Pursued by creditors, he enlists as a common private in a British Army infantry regiment headed for service in Germany during the Seven Years' War.Once in Germany, despite a promotion to corporal, he hates the army and seeks to desert. When his lieutenant is wounded, Redmond helps take him to a German village for treatment. The Irishman pretends to suffer from insanity, and after several days absconds with the lieutenant's uniform, papers, and money. As part of his ruse, he convinces the locals that he is the real Lieutenant Fakenham, and the wounded man is the mad Corporal Barry. Redmond Barry rides off toward a neutral German territory, hoping for better fortune.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Eternity"title="The End of Eternity">
In the future, humanity uses time travel to construct "Eternity", an organization "outside time" that aimed to improve human happiness by observing human history and, after careful analysis, directly making small actions that cause "reality changes" and help to establish trade between the various centuries to help those in most need. Its members, known as "Eternals" and by the roles that they hold, prioritize the reduction of human suffering at the cost of a loss to technology, art, and other endeavors, which are prevented from existing when they are judged to have a detrimental effect. Those enlisted travel "upwhen" and "downwhen" and re-enter time in devices called "kettles". They are unable to travel to times before the 27th century, when the temporal field powering "Eternity" was established, the limit being known as the "downwhen terminus". Also, the future of humanity's fate is unknown since the earth is empty by the year 15 million (the 150,000th century, or the 15,000th millenia), but that is preceded by a period called the "Hidden Centuries", or the "Void Millennia", from the years 7 million to 15 million (the 70,000th to then150,000th centuries or 7,000th to the 15,000th millennia) in which for unknown reasons, they cannot access the world outside "Eternity" to learn more.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Newcomes"title="The Newcomes">
The novel tells the story of Colonel Thomas Newcome, a virtuous and upstanding character. It is equally the story of Colonel Newcome's son, Clive, who studies and travels for the purpose of becoming a painter, although the profession is frowned on by some of his relatives and acquaintances—notably Clive's snobbish, backstabbing cousin Barnes Newcome.Colonel Newcome goes out to India for decades, then returns to England where Clive meets his cousin Ethel. After years in England, the colonel returns to India for another several years and while he is there, Clive travels Europe and his love for Ethel waxes and wanes. Dozens of background characters appear, fade, and reappear.The colonel and Clive are only the central figures in "The Newcomes", the action of which begins before the colonel's birth. Over several generations the Newcome family rises into wealth and respectability as bankers and begin to marry into the minor aristocracy. A theme that runs throughout the novel is the practice of marrying for money. Herein we find first use of the coined word "capitalism", as reference to an economic system. Religion is another theme, particularly Methodism.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heechee_Saga"title="Heechee Saga">
A prospector on Venus finds an abandoned Heechee spaceship and launches it, with himself aboard. The ship automatically returns to a hollowed out asteroid within the Solar System, later named Gateway. Before he dies from lack of food and water, he manages to signal the rest of humanity his location. On Gateway is a priceless treasure: nearly a thousand small starships, many of them still functional. They come in three sizes, barely capable of carrying one, three or five passengers along with supplies.The Gateway Corporation takes control of the asteroid on behalf of the United States, the Soviet Union, the New People's Asia, the Venusian Confederation, and the United States of Brazil. Through trial and error, they figure out how to use the ships, but not well enough to set the terminus and duration of a trip. Individuals and groups are allowed to depart on these ships, risking (and often losing) their lives in the hope of finding something at their unknown destination that will make them rich.As the series progresses, humans are able to use and sometimes reverse engineer Heechee artifacts, including a working Heechee plant that converts simple elements into food. Eventually, they encounter the Heechee themselves and find out they are hiding from a race of beings of pure energy, who are working to reverse the Big Bang and reform the universe in a form that suits them better through a second Big Bang.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Dorrit"title="Little Dorrit">
## Poverty.The novel begins in Marseilles "thirty years ago" (c. 1826), with the notorious murderer Rigaud narrating to his prison cellmate John Baptist Cavalletto how he had killed his wife, just prior to being taken to trial. Businessman Arthur Clennam is detained with other travellers in quarantine in Marseilles and becomes friends with the merchants Mr and Mrs Meagles, their spoiled daughter "Pet", and their maid, an orphan named Harriet Beadle, who the family has nicknamed Tattycoram. Another traveller, Miss Wade, takes interest in the rebellious Tattycoram. Arthur has spent the last twenty years in China with his father, handling that part of the family business; his father died recently there. Arthur is now returning to London to see his mother, Mrs Clennam.While Arthur's father was on his deathbed, he had given Arthur a watch to give to his mother with a message inside, while murmuring "Your mother," which Arthur delivers to Mrs Clennam. Inside the watch casing is an old silk paper with the initials DNF (do not forget) worked in beads. Arthur asks about the message, but the implacable Mrs Clennam, who now uses a wheelchair, refuses to tell him what it means. Arthur tells her that he will not continue in the family business and seeks new opportunity on his own. Jeremiah Flintwinch then presses Mrs Clennam on her failure to tell Arthur of the past.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat_in_the_Hat"title="The Cat in the Hat">
The story begins as an unnamed boy who is the narrator of the book sits alone with his sister Sally in their house on a cold and rainy day, staring wistfully out the window. Then they hear a loud bump which is quickly followed by the arrival of the Cat in the Hat, a tall anthropomorphic cat in a red and white-striped top hat and a red bow tie, who proposes to entertain the children with some tricks that he knows. The children's pet fish refuses, insisting that the Cat should leave. The Cat then responds by balancing the fish on the tip of his umbrella. The game quickly becomes increasingly trickier, as the Cat balances himself on a ball and tries to balance many household items on his limbs until he falls on his head, dropping everything he was holding. The fish admonishes him again, but the Cat in the Hat just proposes another game.The Cat brings in a big red box from outside, from which he releases two identical characters, or "Things" as he refers them to, with blue hair and red suits called Thing One and Thing Two. The Things cause more trouble, such as flying kites in the house, knocking pictures off the wall and picking up the children's mother's new polka-dotted dress. All this comes to an end when the fish spots the children's mother out the window. In response, the boy catches the Things in a net and the Cat, apparently ashamed, stores them back in the big red box. He takes it out the front door as the fish and the children survey the mess he has made. But the Cat soon returns, riding a machine that picks everything up and cleans the house, delighting the fish and the children. The Cat then leaves just before their mother arrives, and the fish and the children are back where they started at the beginning of the story. As she steps in, the mother asks the children what they did while she was out, but the children are hesitant and do not answer. The story ends with the question, "What would "you" do if your mother asked "you"?"
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Angels_Fear_to_Tread"title="Where Angels Fear to Tread">
On a journey to Tuscany with her young friend and travelling companion Caroline Abbott, widowed Lilia Herriton falls in love with Gino, a handsome Italian man much younger than herself, and decides to stay. Furious, her dead husband's family send Lilia's brother-in-law Philip to Italy to prevent a misalliance, but he arrives too late. Lilia has already married Gino and becomes pregnant again. She gives birth to a son, but dies in childbirth. Caroline decides to go to Tuscany again to save the child from what she perceives will be a difficult life. Not to be outdone, the Herritons send Philip again to Italy, this time accompanied by his sister Harriet, to save the family's reputation. In the public eye, they make it known that it is both their right and their duty to travel to Italy to obtain custody of the infant so that he can be raised as an Englishman. Secretly, though, they have no regard for the child, only public appearances.Philip and Harriet meet Caroline in Monteriano. Both Philip and Caroline eventually fall under the charm of Italy, which causes them to waver in their original purpose. They further learn that Gino is fiercely devoted to Lilia's infant son. As they admit defeat in their mission however, Harriet kidnaps the baby, but the baby is accidentally killed when the carriage he is in overturns. Gino, hearing the news, attacks Phillip, but the two are reconciled after Caroline's mediation. Gino's physical outburst toward Philip in response to the news makes Philip realise what it is like to truly be alive. The guilt felt by Harriet causes her to lose her mind. Finally, as Philip and Caroline return to England, he realises that he is in love with Caroline but that he can never be with her, because she admits, dramatically, to being in love with Gino.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shame_(Rushdie_novel)"title="Shame (Rushdie novel)">
This story takes place in a town called "Q" which is actually a fictitious version of Quetta, Pakistan. In Q, one of the three sisters (Chunni, Munnee, and Bunny Shakil) gives birth to Omar Khayyám Shakil, but they act as a unit of mothers, never revealing to anyone who is Omar's birth mother. In addition, Omar never learns who his father is. While growing up, Omar lives in purdah with his three mothers and yearns to join the world. As a birthday present, Omar Khayyám Shakil's "mothers" allow him to leave Q. He enrolls in a school and is convinced by his tutor (Eduardo Rodriguez) to become a doctor. Over time, he comes in contact with both Iskander Harappa and General Raza Hyder.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keys_of_the_Kingdom"title="The Keys of the Kingdom">
The novel has six parts, the first (The Beginning of the End) taking place in Scotland in 1938. Father Francis Chisholm is an old man, living with a housekeeper and a young orphan. Due to his unconventional views, he is being investigated by Monsignor Sleeth. The second section (Strange Vocation) focuses on Chisholm's youth. His father is a Catholic and his mother a non-denominational Protestant. After the father is beaten by an anti-Catholic mob, Chisholm's mother tries to lead him home to safety, only for them both to drown after falling off a bridge into a strong current, leaving young Francis an orphan. Initially, his kindly Aunt Polly wishes to adopt him, but his maternal grandmother, Mrs Glennie, intervenes and adopts him, thereby receiving any money in the Chisholm's estate. Francis's maternal grandfather, a baker by trade, is also a preacher of his own branch of Christianity focused on universal tolerance, and plays a large role in the development of Francis's ideologies. While his grandfather is kind, Mrs Glennie and her son Malcolm are resentful and exploitative. Francis is forced to quit school and work in a shipyard.Things take a turn for the better when Francis befriends Willie Tulloch and his family. Tulloch's father is the local doctor and the family are the town's free-thinkers. Willie aids Francis in his attempt to run away. When the attempt fails, Willie's father contacts Aunt Polly, who takes Francis home to live with her and her daughter, Nora. Francis falls in love with Nora, but is afraid to act on it. Nora later has a child out of wedlock, and, rather than marry a man she doesn't love, commits suicide. This cements Francis's decision to join a seminary with childhood friend Anselm Mealey, where Francis's humanistic views cause problems for him. However, he befriends the seminary director, Bishop Hamish McNabb, who comes to his assistance when Francis is nearly expelled from the seminary for having spent a night at a whore's house.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_August_from_Sevedstorp_and_Hanna_i_Hult"title="Samuel August from Sevedstorp and Hanna i Hult">
At the age of thirteen Samuel August falls in love with the nine-year-old Hanna. Soon Samuel August leaves school and does not see Hannah again for quite a while. Until he is eighteen, Samuel August is working as a farmhand. But one day the vicarage Näs near Vimmerby is offered for lease and Samuel August becomes the new tenant of the vicarage. Over the next few years, Samuel rarely meets Hanna. At the age of 25, Samuel August watches Hanna at a festival. But he doesn't dare to speak to her. So many men are interested in Hanna and Samuel August doesn't believe that she would choose him. At a wedding, Hanna realizes that Samuel August is in love with her and invites Samuel August to go for a walk with her. Hanna promises to stitch a monogram on Samuels hat. After a few months have passed and Samuel August has not seen Hanna, Samuel August writes a letter to Hanna. Hanna replies, and they exchange letters until Samuel August unexpectedly meets Hanna again in Vimmerby and drinks tea with her. Later he asks Hanna if they could live together. Hanna replies that the two of them cannot decide this on their own, but at least she gives Samuel August the first kiss. Hanna hesitates a little before the wedding takes place on June 30, 1905. When Samuel August brings his wife to Näs a fortnight later, they are living there together for another 56 years. As long as he is alive, Samuel August mentions daily how much he loves his Hanna.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinded_by_the_Lights_(novel)"title="Blinded by the Lights (novel)">
Jacek is a young man who settles in Warsaw and in order to obtain a better future than his peers, he begins to work as a drug dealer. He is a neat, nihilistic perfectionist who sleeps during the day and works at night, delivering cocaine to the upper-class citizens of the Polish capital. While helping the criminal group he gets the drugs from, led by Piotr, Jacek observes a very dark and brutal side of Warsaw, which seems to be a ruthless living creature itself.The novel covers one week of Jacek's life, which involves strict rules: no alcohol, no drugs, and no deep relations, which could distract his attention during work. During the pre-Christmas period, Jacek plans to escape from his everyday routine by flying to Argentina, but things start to go out of control when he agrees to keep a strange bag full of drugs for Stryj, another member of Piotr's criminal group.After eight years spent in prison, old-school gangster Dario, former crime partner of Piotr, is released. As he gets back into the drug business, he realizes that during his absence, some parts of his property were stolen. His and Jacek's paths soon cross, which is not a good sign for the young dealer, whose perfect life starts to fall apart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_a_House_of_Lies"title="In a House of Lies">
Some boys discover a car with a long-dead body in the boot, in a woodland which has been the subject of a real-estate dispute. Rebus, now retired, worked the 2006 missing-persons case, which was, as everyone involved agrees now, badly handled; Rebus himself had tried to protect from publicity the missing man's lover, son of a detective inspector in the old Strathclyde Police, and had also been hoping to tie in 'Big Ger' Cafferty. The murder inquiry now is handled by a team from Police Scotland, but Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke and Detective Inspector Malcolm Fox are included. Clarke has recently been investigated by a corrupt pair of Anti-Corruption Unit cops for leaking information to a reporter, and she is being harassed by a mysterious person over a recent case which in fact she handled well. Rebus, at her request, re-investigates that case; he tangles with the ACU team, and hopes again to see Cafferty connected to the body-in-the-boot murder.Rebus is suffering from COPD and has given up cigarettes and almost stopped drinking alcohol. The book gives some attention to modern media and its potential for both public and private bullying.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatole_and_the_Cat"title="Anatole and the Cat">
Anatole is the happiest, most contented mouse in all of Paris. He is Vice-President in charge of Cheese Tasting at Duvall’s cheese factory. He works in secret at night–the people at Duvall have no idea their mysterious taster is really a mouse! So M’sieu Duvall thinks nothing of bringing his pet cat to the factory…Clever Anatole must act to protect his job and his life! He must do what no mouse has done before–find a way to bell the cat. Bonne chance, Anatole!
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly_Tales_for_Gruesome_Kids_(book)"title="Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids (book)">
## The New Nanny.The Frightfully-Busy family lives in South London and knew nothing about each other: the parents were workaholics that had no time for their children, Tristram and Candy, who spent every day bullying their nanny, Mrs Mac, and tell their parents a different story the moment they came home. One day, they claim she had beaten them with their father's expensive golf clubs which gets Mrs Mac fired, but that would be the moment where troubles began. Mrs Frightfully-Busy is devastated they have to get rid of an old family friend as she looks through a telephone directory and discovers the Animal Magic agency. 30 minutes after booking, a talking python is on the doorstep wearing an apron and carrying a briefcase, but Mrs and Mrs Frightfully-Busy have no time for any briefing and left for work immediately after the python's entire long body is in the hallway. The python tells Candy and Tristram to treat her as a human nanny, ironically consenting to the children's behaviour and removing any fear they had of snakes. They burn her tail in boiling water, tie her up and dunk her head in the toilet, make her slither over thumbtacks, and leave her in the garden for birds to peck at her. When their parents arrive home at 6 pm, the python slithers out of the house as fast as she can, but when the parents confront the children, Tristram claims the python tried to strangle him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_Next_Door_(short_story_collection)"title="The House Next Door (short story collection)">
This book has three short stories in it. James Patterson writes each of the stories with one of the coauthors of the book.The first story, "The House Next Door" (written by Patterson and Susan DiLallo), is about a family living next to a derelict house that has just been occupied by a mysterious man and his son. As the family and the neighbors get to know the house's new occupants, what they learn is truly frightening."The Killer's Wife," written by Patterson and Max DiLallo, is about a detective's quest to find what has happened to four girls who have gone missing. To do this he decides the only way to find them is to get on the good side of the wife of the man suspected of abducting them. He is knows he is walking a fine line and his plan could go all wrong."We.Are.Not.Alone." is written by Patterson and Tim Arnold. It's about a scientist who has been looking for alien life for years and who is no longer taken seriously. He one day gets a message from space proving intelligent aliens exist. While that's what he wanted, he quickly finds others suddenly want to seize him and whisk him away, so he runs for his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrath_of_Empire"title="Wrath of Empire">
After the invasion of Fatrasta and the capital city of Landfall, thousands of refugees seek the safety of Lady Flint's soldiers as she prepares for another war to prevent the return of Gods walking the world.In the capital, Blackhat spy Michel Bravis must infiltrate the invading Dynize to find a person named Mara. Succeeding in this mission could mean winning the war.Meanwhile, the Mad Lancers led by Mad Ben Styke are building their own army. They are sent on a mission to find and destroy the third Godstone, led by the bloodmage Ka-poel. But what they find may not be what they're looking for.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_My_Heart_A_Hebrew_Girl"title="In My Heart A Hebrew Girl">
The novel centers on the true story of a Jewish girl named "Nada", who lives in Tunisia with her Jewish family. As the novel depicts the full details of Nada's life and Rima's life, it shows how fate drives them together to meet. "Rima", a girl less than 15 years old, is raised by a Jew after her mother's death, until this Jewish man realizes that his daughter is interested in wearing the Islamic veil because of "Rima" and he sees this as a threat to his daughter so he asks "Rima" to leave his house. "Rima" comes from Tunisia to Lebanon after being evicted from her Jewish godfather's home, where she meets "Nada" and works as a maid at her home. The story continues until at a night, a masked young man knocks on Nada's house door to help heal his friend "Ahmad", who was injured in clashes between the Lebanese resistance and Israel. "Ahmad" is one of the Lebanese Resistance Forces fighting against the occupation regime of Zionist. "Ahmad", who was wounded and taken to Nada's home, is taken care by "Nada". As a result, "Ahmad" becomes interested in "Nada" and ignores religious and sectarian differences.The story takes place in two areas: the first on the Djerba island in Tunisia and the second in the ancient city of Qana in southern Lebanon. Set in a Jewish neighborhood in southern Tunisia, the novel revolves around "Rima", an orphaned Muslim girl raised in the shadow of her "uncle Jacob" Jewish family, whose beliefs begin to change and she tends to wear Islamic veil. Meanwhile, Uncle "Jacob" and his wife, "Tanya", became angry with "Rima" and demand that she be removed from their children so that they will not be influenced by her beliefs about Judaism and Islam, so they send Rima to Lebanon and finally "Rima" meets the story hero "Nada" there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_of_Empire"title="Blood of Empire">
Michel Bravis, a spy in the Dynize government, must go back to the capital city of Landfall to prevent the enemy of using the power of the unlocked Godstone.Ben Styke has invaded Dynize, but his fleet scattered in a storm and he is left with only twenty Mad Lancers. Violence is unavoidable.Her last battle against the Dynize has left Lady Vlora Flint powderblind and emotionally broken, but vengeance keeps her on her feet. She must ally politicians and lead the Adran army to defeat the greatest general under the Dynize flag.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gideon_the_Ninth"title="Gideon the Ninth">
In the star system Dominicus, there are nine planets, each home to a great House which practices its own school of necromancy. The Houses in turn are ruled by the Emperor, an impossibly powerful, immortal necromancer whom they have worshipped as a god for the past ten thousand years. At the start of "Gideon the Ninth," the Emperor invites the heirs of the Nine Houses and their sword-wielding bodyguards (called cavaliers) to undergo a series of trials to become Lyctors. Lyctors are immortal necromancers, revered as saints, who serve as the Emperor's right-hand necromancers in wars against his enemies.The narrative begins with eighteen year-old Gideon Nav's 86th attempt to escape the Ninth House, a death cult tasked with guarding a Locked Tomb said to contain the Emperor's greatest foe, and by whom Gideon was raised in indentured servitude. Her plans of fleeing to join the Emperor's armies (called the Cohort) are quickly foiled by her lifelong antagonist and heiress of the Ninth House, Harrowhark "Harrow" Nonagesimus. Despite their clashing personalities and mutual hatred of each other, Gideon is Harrow's only real choice of cavalier, primarily due to an atmospheric contamination incident around the time of their births that killed the rest of the Ninth House's children. Harrow offers Gideon a commission into the Cohort if she serves as cavalier during the Emperor's trials.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Tempesta"title="Captain Tempesta">
A warrior in disguise. A lover to be rescued. A city under siege.Cyprus, 1570. An island at war. The powerful Ottoman army has taken every city save one, Famagusta, a Venetian port and stronghold. Besieged by a force of 80,000 men, they city has valiantly fought back with its small force of warriors and mercenaries. The greatest among them is Captain Tempesta, a young noble unmatched in bravery and swordsmanship. Few, however, know the captain's secret... that "she" has donned armour and passed herself off as a man in order to search for her beloved who has been imprisoned by the Turks. Will she triumph? The odds are overwhelmingly against her. The Turks are preparing to storm the city and slay all those within it, and still there has been no word of her beloved's whereabouts...
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farm_(Joanne_Ramos_novel)"title="The Farm (Joanne Ramos novel)">
Jane Reyes is a Filipino domestic worker and single mother living in a dormitory in New York, with her infant daughter Amalia. When Jane loses her job as a baby nurse, her elderly cousin Evelyn Arroyo, whom she refers to as "Ate," convinces her to join Golden Oaks. Golden Oaks is a commercial facility that uses women, called “hosts”, as surrogates for wealthy clients for handsome bonuses. Jane moves in to the Golden Oaks’ residence, begrudgingly leaving behind Amalia in Evelyn’s care. Once there, she befriends other Hosts like Reagan McCarthy, a white college-graduate who agrees to be a Host to achieve a sense of meaning in her life, and Lisa Raines, a 3rd-time Host who is increasingly disillusioned with Golden Oaks.As months pass, Jane becomes increasingly worried about Amalia’s well-being as Evelyn does not return her calls. Moreover, she gets into trouble with Mae Yu, Golden Oak’s executive manager, resulting in a cancellation of Jane’s scheduled visit with Amalia. Jane is also betrayed to learn that Evelyn had received a commission for recommending Golden Oaks to Jane. Meanwhile, Reagan is angered by the fact that they used an actor to pretend to be Reagan’s client in order to give her a false sense of purpose. Lisa and Reagan help Jane escape the residence, and Jane rushes to find Amalia. She is directed to a nearby hospital, where she finds that it is not Amalia but Evelyn who is critically ill. On returning to her dorm, she finds Mae there, as she had correctly guessed that she would return. Mae cancels Jane’s sizable bonus but, feeling sorry for her, hires her to be a Host for Mae’s own child. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentientist_Politics"title="Sentientist Politics">
"Sentientist Politics" opens with the assumption that some animals are sentient and thus have moral value, and that this has political consequences. It aims to argue that sentient animals (human and nonhuman) have equal moral worth, and this grounds a duty to create a "sentientist cosmopolitan democracy". In the introduction, Cochrane positions the book as a contribution to the political turn in animal ethics that is novel for its cosmpolitanism. On the other hand, it is distinct from existing cosmopolitan theory for its rejection of the moral import of species membership. He acknowledges that some theorists will seek to go further than rejecting humanism, and argue that all living (or even non-living) entities warrant political protection; nonetheless, he sees something "special" about sentience. The book is utopian and ideal in its aspirations.The second chapter addresses the moral worth of sentient animals and what this means for politics. Cochrane argues that, because they possess interests, sentient animals possess moral worth. He defends the claim that all sentient animals (human and otherwise) possess equal moral worth (and equal consideration of interests) against the possibility that humans have greater worth than animals and the possibility that persons have greater worth than non-persons. Rejecting Peter Singer's utilitarianism, Cochrane instead defends an account of animal rights based on the claim that sentient animals possess interests sufficiently strong to ground duties in others; they have, he said in "Animal Rights Without Liberation", prima-facie rights not to be killed and not to be made to suffer. These moral rights, however, are not recognised in political or legal practice. Thus, Cochrane calls for a shift from "human rights" to "sentient rights". Sentient rights and sentient equality, he argues, justify the existence of political institutions: moral agents possess a "duty to create and support a political order" aiming to "show equal consideration to sentient creatures" and to "protect their basic rights". These political institutions can achieve what would be impossible for individuals; can provide security; and can determine what equal consideration means in practice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Beautifully_Foolish_Endeavor"title="A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor">
Following April May's sudden death, her friends Andy, Robin, and Miranda, and her ex-girlfriend Maya, grapple with how the world has changed since her disappearance. Andy has been publicly speaking with Robin as his agent and Miranda has returned to her studies at Berkeley to continue the process of getting her PhD. However, Maya refuses to believe April is dead. The public has largely moved on from her absence, and from Carl's sudden disappearance, but dealing with withdrawals from the sudden absence of the Dream, many individuals sign up for games that attempt to mimic the simulations of the Dream in real life.After receiving the text "Knock knock" from April's phone number, Andy answers the door to find a book known as "The Book of Good Times". As Andy reads, he realizes the book is predicting/telling him what he is doing/going to do. It warns him not to tell anyone about it or it will not work, and instructs him to invest certain ways, ask out Bex (the girl who works at his local Subway), and tell Miranda "yes" when she calls. He follows the instructions because he believes they will lead him to April. Eventually, Miranda calls him to get his opinion on whether or not she should apply to work at Altus, a company headed by Peter Petrawicki, April's nemesis. Miranda intends to spy on Petrawicki's company and commit espionage, believing they are up to something dangerous. Against his better judgement, Andy tells Miranda she should apply.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Annals_of_the_Heechee"title="The Annals of the Heechee">
The novel is about the multimillionaire space explorer Robinette Broadhead's efforts to solve a mystery. Even though he died in a previous novel in the series, his personality is stored on a machine. Broadhead is trying to resolve the issue of the "Assassins", which are pure-energy beings that stopped the expansion of the universe and triggered its contraction. The Assassins have concealed themselves in a black hole. Broadhead and the Heechee are trying to find them. When the Assassins come out, they converse with one of Broadhead's data-gathering computer programs and they reveal that they're not enemies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Child_(novel)"title="Golden Child (novel)">
The story isn't told in a linear fashion. It begins with father Clyde Deyalsingh, coming home to his wife in their home in Trinidad and Tobago. He calls for his son Paul to help him remove the guard dog from the gate so he can park his car. His twin brother Peter arrives informing him that Paul left to go to the river and he doesn't know where he is. Peter is incredibly studious and Paul is quieter and a source of frustration for Clyde. Paul earned the nickname “Tarzan” for having shabby overgrown hair. Clyde goes to look for him to no avail and by midnight is seriously worried. Clyde recounts a break-in the happened two weeks where Paul provoked the robbers and placed Joy's life in danger. The incident caused a fight between the two where Paul remained silent, angering Clyde who bans him from going to a fete he was looking forward to. Clyde insists Paul has a confusing pattern of behaviour, remembering an incident when he saw him lying in the ground at midnight looking at the stars. Clyde has a flashback to the birth of his twin sons, where his uncle (a doctor) tells him his son Paul was oxygen deprived after his umbilical cord was tied around his neck. He was told Paul might suffer from an intelligence disorder but his uncle-in-law Vishnu says he since no obvious abnormality. Uncle Vishnu takes kindly to Clyde and pays for many of the child expenses and finds him a new job with more consistent pay. Clyde doesn't like the rest of Joy's family including Romesh (who always asks for money), Phillip (Joy's rich lawyer brother) and Marilyn (Phillip's pompous rich wife). Another flashback to a younger Paul, who when taken to a hair cutting ceremony was overwhelmed and screamed, causing a scene, embarrassing Clyde. Later on, Clyde is advised to aim to get Peter to Harvard, MIT and other very well established schools. He is also advised by another teacher to take Paul to a mental hospital (St Ann's).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Such_a_Fun_Age"title="Such a Fun Age">
Alix Chamberlain is a wealthy blogger and public speaker in her early thirties who has built a brand known as "LetHer Speak" around the practice of writing old-fashioned letters to businesses, often in exchange for free product samples, and encouraging women to be assertive. Alix's family has moved from New York City to her hometown of Philadelphia for her husband Peter's job as a television anchor, and her career is stalling as she raises two children and attempts to write her first book. Alix hires Emira Tucker, a 25-year-old African-American college graduate, as a babysitter to care for her three-year-old daughter Briar. Alix also has an infant daughter named Catherine.Alix and Peter's home is egged at night and a window is broken after Peter received backlash for making a racist remark on-air, though he insists the comment was thoughtless. Alix calls Emira, who is at a party with friends, to take Briar with her to a local, trendy supermarket while she and Peter speak with the police. At the store, Emira, her friend Zara, and Briar dance to Whitney Houston and are noticed by an older white woman. After Zara leaves, a security guard approaches Emira at the white woman's behest and questions why Emira is with Briar. Emira explains the situation but the guard refuses to believe she is a babysitter, and Emira is freed only once Peter shows up and corroborates her story. The incident is recorded by a white bystander, Kelley Copeland, who urges Emira to seek justice against the store. Emira is shaken but does not want attention; she has him email the video to her and delete it from his phone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_Nazar_(book)"title="Baba Nazar (book)">
The book formed from 36 hours conversation of Hossein Beyzayi with Mohammad Hassan Nazarenejad in 1996 which is recorded in video form and the fate of those films is unknown. But the words and sentences of the interviews have become text after recording. Overall, this book is a memoir of Mohammad Hassan Nazarenejad in Iranian Revolution time and Iran–Iraq War time.In the beginning, The narrator talks about his campaign activities against the Pahlavi dynasty before the revolution. Then he goes to Iran–Iraq War. He describes the war operations with great detail. He says of all the his moments in the war and depicts hopes and frustrations, fears and immunities, anxieties and reliefs.This book has been compiled in eighteen chapters. The last part of the book is devoted to photographs and documents. The book is the result of dozens of hours of oral history narration by Mohammad Hassan Nazarenejad dictated to Hossein Beyzayi. Beside the oral history, the book also contains autobiography by the narrator.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paralysis_(novel)"title="Paralysis (novel)">
The novel's protagonist is Aram Shah, a widowed university professor who raised his daughter, Marisa, on his own after his wife died during her second pregnancy. At the outset of the novel, he wakes up during a visit to the mountains and ponders the meaning of three dreams he had had overnight—of lions frail with age; of a palace reeking with disinfectant; and of a museum among whose holdings is a jar with an embryo. The intensity of his feelings induces a stroke, and he reawakens, paralysed, in a small regional hospital, where he is tenderly cared for by a resident matron, Asika. There, he recalls the death of his daughter, who married a Christian, George Vargis, and then committed suicide. It was grief over this incident that drove him to the hillside station where the story begins. Asika is also burdened with memories of her past and of widowhood. She is middle-aged like Aram, and the two are drawn together, as though they were a couple of half-dead people finding in each other's company a glimmer of life's renewal. He is soon discharged, but cannot bid Asika farewell, since she has disappeared into the foothills. Instead of taking a plane home, he returns to the site where he had the stroke, and wanders through it under the beating sun.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Earth_Strikes_Back"title="The Earth Strikes Back">
"The Earth Strikes Back" is a compilation of 20 ecological horror stories specially written for this publication.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_at_St._Andrews"title="Miracle at St. Andrews">
Travis McKinley spent four years as a professional golfer later in life and then he no longer was good enough to compete. He then took his family on a trip to England and then Scotland. While in Scotland he met a Scottish native he met at a golf course in the United States earlier. This man had helped him then improve his golf game and in Scotland his coaching helped Travis win a tournament. This was a dream come true for Travis and his family. But this is nothing compared to the chance Travis gets to play some of golfing's greats in a tournament at the place where golfing began, at St. Andrews.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tomten_in_Åbo_Castle"title="The Tomten in Åbo Castle">
Beneath Turku Castle, in the deepest and darkest cellar vault, lived the 700-year-old elf Tomten with a white beard so long that he could wind it twice around his waist. The lonely Tomten was good and honest, but disciplined and tidy, and also had a slightly peculiar taste for his living comforts. He had only three friends: the elf of Turku Cathedral, his magical black cat Murri in the cellar vault and his only human friend, Matts Mursten, the old janitor of Turku Castle.Matti Kivinen was 12 years old when he first met the Tomten; at that time, the boy was looking for old musket bullets in the vaults of the castle, where he found an underground passage. Matti was trapped in the tunnel as the rocks collapsed, but the Tomten who emerged helped him out of the tunnel through Turku Cathedral. Matti didn't expect to see Tomten anymore, but the old elf wished Matti a great future and secretly helped Matti in his studies and work, until Matti (now Matts) became a janitor at Turku Castle at the age of 30. Matts worked for 50 years until he retired at the age of 80 and left his job for his granddaughter's husband. After that, old Matts spent a lot of time in the decaying castle, repairing the place, not knowing that the Tomten also repaired the castle every now and then. There were plenty of things to repair in the castle due to the weather and the natural forces, but the Tomten was tenacious and had for centuries secured the castle by repairing it so that the castle would not leave only ruins over time.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_at_Daybreak"title="Dead at Daybreak">
Zatopek 'Zet' van Heerden, an Afrikaner former cop, is private detective. He is appointed by the lawyer Hope Beneke to find in less than 7 days a testament bequeathing to the widow Wilna van As the fortune of her husband, Johannes Jacobus Smit. This rich antiquarian was tortured at their home and murdered after the opening of his safe-deposit box and the stealing of its content. van Heerden discovers that "J. J. Smit" was not the person whose papers he carried, and that someone wants to hide his true identity.The plot alternates between the chapters written in the third person and describing the step-by-step investigations, and those written in the first person and detailing the history of the personal life of Zet van Heerden. This character is like a vindicator showing us that no one holds a single truth, and that coexistence with former enemies is difficult.In parallel, the reader discovers the life of Thobela Mpayipheli, a member of Umkhonto we Sizwe — the armed wing of African National Congress — sent to the former Soviet Union and East Germany to be trained as an assassin.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Call_of_the_Canyon_(novel)"title="The Call of the Canyon (novel)">
It is the story of Glenn Kilbourne, a US Army veteran, who returns from the battlefields of World War I "shell-shocked and gassed", and otherwise incapacitated". It is set in the American West of the Roaring Twenties.Meanwhile his fiancée, Carley Bruch, lives with her family in New York. She receives communication through letters from Gleen but little by little these letters become more and more strange. The young woman worries about him and decides to go visit him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_on_the_Holodeck"title="Hamlet on the Holodeck">
Hamlet on the Holodeck is made of an introduction and four parts, in which Murray examines storytelling mediums. In part one, "A New Medium for Storytelling", Murray examines the use of the holodeck as it first appeared in ' and the holonovel "Janeway Lambda One", which was used by Starfleet Captain Kathryn Janeway from ' as an escape from her responsibilities. Murray states that this illustrates the future of storytelling and that the holodeck is "an optimistic technology for exploring inner life." She also examines works that have multiple stories within a single story described as a multiform story and identifies four essential properties of digital media: procedural, participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic.In part 2, "The Aesthetics of the Medium", Murray examines immersive experiences, which she describes as fragile and easily disrupted. She also explores agency, which she defines as "the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices" and the ability of technology to transform anything digital. In the following parts, "Procedural Authorship" and "New Beauty, New Truth", Murray discusses the impact of users being able to interact with a multiform plot, which she feels are more appealing and satisfying in the new digital environment. She also examines technology via chatbots such as Julia and the possible future of the cyberdrama and its many formats.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince_and_the_Dressmaker"title="The Prince and the Dressmaker">
After creating a shocking dress for a young lady attending the 16th birthday party of Crown Prince Sebastian of Belgium, the young seamstress Frances is hired by a mysterious client. The client, who at first keeps their face covered, seeks to have Frances design them a variety of elaborate dresses. After Frances accidentally reveals the client to be Prince Sebastian, she agrees to keep his secret and begins designing dresses for him. The two attend a beauty pageant which Sebastian wins with the first of Frances's dresses. The judge asks the winner's name and is told it is Lady Crystallia.Sebastian's father and mother, the king and queen, intend to set Sebastian up with a princess. He lunches with Princess Juliana, and after the date goes poorly, Lady Crystallia and Frances go out to a club. They meet Peter Trippley, who seeks to emulate Crystallia's fashions at his father's new department store and considers hiring Frances. Tired from nights as Crystallia and days in engagements with princesses, Sebastian's parents send him on vacation. Frances and Crystallia encounter Juliana and her brother, but neither recognizes Crystallia as Sebastian. Crystallia meets with the designer Madame Aurelia who offers Frances the possibility to work for her. Back in Paris, Frances and Sebastian go out to dinner and nearly kiss.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erev"title="Erev">
The novel tells the story of a Jewish family in Eastern Europe over four centuries, from its escape from a blood libel in medieval Germany to Russia in the early twentieth century. On the example of the Boyar's family history, author tells us about the fate of Jewish people throughout the 20th century – from the end of the Russo-Japanese War until the end of World War IIII and creation the state of Israel. The novel paints a rich and intricate gallery of characters facing consistent persecution, while ideology ranges from Czarism to Stalinism and Nazism.The Boiar family, although it suffered heavy losses by brutal upheavals of the era, never stopped fighting for its spiritual and physical survival.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringen_oyf_der_Neshome"title="Ringen oyf der Neshome">
Depicts the life of the Yiddish writer Eli Schechtman from his childhood until his arrival to Jerusalem. Through this autobiographical account, themes of Jewish identity, life under the Soviet regime, as well as culture war between Yiddish and Hebrew are depicted.The novel ends with the words:&lt;br&gt;"I stand between two worlds and generations,&lt;br&gt;beth the old wound and the new pain.&lt;br&gt;Alone,&lt;br&gt;Completely alone." 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Bird_(Astrid_Lindgren_book)"title="The Red Bird (Astrid Lindgren book)">
The parents of the siblings Anna and Mattias have died. Thus, they have to live in the house of the Myra farmer. The Myra farmer takes advantage of the siblings, who have to work hard and are not allowed to play. Therefore, they are already looking forward to the school which starts in winter. At school, they hope to no longer feel like two gray mice. But as soon as the school has started they realize that nothing is going change in school either. Just as Anna mentions this towards Mattias on her way home, a red bird appears. The two children follow the bird into a warm, beautiful country called Sunnanäng. In Sunnanäng there are a lot of children who want to play with Anna and Mattias. There is also a mother who is the mother of all children and also the mother of Mattias and Anna. The siblings have a lot of fun in the country but soon they have to go home. They find out that the gate to their home country, once closed, can never be opened again. Soon Anna and Mattias always go to Sunnanäng after school. They also go there on their last day of school. They close the gate and decide to stay there forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragon_with_Red_Eyes"title="The Dragon with Red Eyes">
A brother and sister go into the pigsty to look at the little piglets that were born during the night. In the barn they do not only see the piglets, but also a small green dragon with red eyes. Since the dragon always bites his pig mother while drinking, she eventually gives him nothing. Therefore, the siblings raise the dragon. In autumn, the little dragon says goodbye to the siblings and flies into the middle of the sunset. He sings happily with a clear, bright voice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_Adam_Got_Mad"title="The Day Adam Got Mad">
Adam Engelbrecht is a bull. He is quite peaceful. But one day he gets furious. Nobody knows exactly why he has gotten so angry. Not even Adam Engelbrecht himself. But now he is running around the stable and the whole yard. People run away and are afraid of him. Only a very young boy, Kalle, is not scared of Adam Engelbrecht. He talks very gently to Adam Engelbrecht. At first Adam doesn't want to listen to Kalle. But the boy's tender, loving voice is so tempting and beguiling so that Adam Engelbrecht allows the boy to gently pet him. Suddenly Adam Engelbrecht is no longer angry and the boy walks with him back to the stable. The People are impressed, and they keep telling each other the story of the “youngest bullfighter in the world”.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_of_Skinny_Jack"title="The Ghost of Skinny Jack">
A girl and her older brother are at their grandmother house, who always tells them ghost stories. They love to hear the story of Skinny Jack.Skinny Jack was a servant who loved to do pranks. One night Skinny Jack disguised himself as a ghost to scare the sexton in the church. When the sexton ran out, Skinny Jack wanted to follow. But on the way out, something seemed to grab him. Skinny Jack believed it was a ghost, or God himself, who wanted to punish him. The next day people found him. His blood was frozen to ice, so he was neither dead nor alive. He stayed in church for about a hundred years and nobody dared to get close to him, until a maid came to the town who was not afraid of anything. A rich man wanted to know if the maid was actually as brave as she said and offered her five crowns to bring Skinny Jack to him. The maid did so and got five crowns. However, she hadn't said that she would bring Skinny Jack back, so the man offered her five crowns again. The maid took Skinny Jack on her back again. But shortly before she arrived at the church, Skinny Jack put his cold ghost fingers around her neck. He forced her to carry him to the grave of the sexton. There he asked for forgiveness. The sexton replied that if God forgave him, he would forgive Skinny Jack. Skinny Jack immediately collapsed into a pile of ashes. From then on the maid was no longer quite right in the head.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Nightingale_Is_Singing"title="My Nightingale Is Singing">
When Maria is eight years old, her parents die from tuberculosis. Therefore, Maria is brought into a poor house. People live an isolated and sad life there. There is nothing beautiful there and no joy.Pompadella is the manager of the poor house. Since she expects to get more things while begging when she takes a child with her, she asks Maria to come with her. From now on, Maria accompanies Pompadella when Pompadella goes begging. Together they are very successful.But Maria also supports the other residents. She helps Hen-Helen to tie her shoes, gives Dearie-Dearie her wool when she has dropped it or consoles Joey Squint when he gets scared because he hears voices. But she finds no comfort for herself because Maria is not able to discover something beautiful.One day when she goes begging with Pompadella she hears a story that gives her strength and comfort. She wants to keep the story in her mind forever. But the only thing she can remember is the line "My linden plays, my nightingale is singing". At first, all the miseries and sorrows disappear from the poor house when Maria thinks about these words. But the words are not enough anymore, then Maria wants to have a real linden with a real nightingale.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Don't_Want_to_Go_to_Bed_(book)"title="I Don't Want to Go to Bed (book)">
Lasse doesn't want to go to bed. He always finds new things to play with. His mother doesn't know what to do. Therefore, Aunt Lotte lets Lasse put on her magic glasses. With the glasses, Lasse observes what the other children are doing.Lasse sees a baby bear sitting in bed after a long day in the forest eating his honey porridge. In the children's room, the rabbit children go to bed after a pillow fight. Five little bird children sleep on the trees after practicing flying in the afternoon. Three squirrel children play with a toy train, eat candy and go to bed. Meanwhile, mouse child Kasper comes home late after playing in the yard. His mother explains that he should quickly have dinner and then go to bed because his siblings are all already asleep.After Lasse took off the glasses, Aunt Lotte explained that he had seen that all children have to sleep in the evening. Therefore, Lasse should go to bed too. Lasse goes home and goes to bed very quietly. When his mother wants to bring him to bed, he is already asleep.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Land_of_Twilight"title="In the Land of Twilight">
Göran has a sick leg. Since a year, he has to stay in bed. One night he hears that his parents say that he will never be able to walk again. Göran is desperate. But that very evening he is visited by Mr. Lilyvale from the land of twilight. Mr Lilyvale flies with Göran to his land. There Göran eats candy that grows on trees, drives a tram, visits the king, dances and sings. Then Mr Lilyvale brings Göran home. Göran is no longer sad about his sick leg. Because every evening at dawn Mr. Lilyvale comes back and brings Göran to the land of twilight where Göran is able to fly!
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Cousins_in_Ohio"title="Our Cousins in Ohio">
The narrative takes place in and around the family's farm and home, called "The Cedars", located near the village of Athens, a fictional name for the village of Warsaw (now incorporated into Cincinnati) on the west bank of the Great Miami River in Hamilton County, Ohio. The original home was torn down in the 1850s, and the site is now occupied by Seton High School.Instead of following a single unifying plot, the narrative is organized as a calendar year, with a separate chapter for each month, beginning and ending with classic scenes of emigrant Christmas. Within this calendrical structure are incorporated numerous threads relating to domestic life (e.g. the parents' attempts at dealing with Willy's stubbornness, confrontations with a neighborhood bully, raising crops and livestock, exploring the neighboring woods) and to social issues of the day (e.g. slavery and abolition, soldiers on their way to war with Mexico, westward migration, and the practices of various religious and national groups).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirabelle_(Astrid_Lindgren_book)"title="Mirabelle (Astrid Lindgren book)">
Britta-Kajsa's greatest wish is to get a doll. But a doll is very expensive and her parents don't have a lot of money.One day, when Britta-Kajsa's parents are at work, Britta-Kajsa meets a strange little man. The latter asks Britta-Kajsa to open a gate for him so that he can drive through it with his carriage. Britta-Kajsa does as she is told. The little man explains that he can't give her any money, but a tiny little seed that she can plant into the garden.Some time after Britta-Kajsa planted the seed, a doll grows out of it. Britta-Kajsa shows the doll to her amazed parents who cannot believe what they see. Later, Britta-Kajsa takes the doll into her room. Suddenly the doll starts to speak and says that her name is Mirabelle. From then on, Britta-Kajsa and Mirabelle do almost everything together. Britta-Kajsa thinks she has the greatest doll in the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Want_to_Go_to_School_Too"title="I Want to Go to School Too">
Lena wants to go to school, so her older brother Peter takes her with him one day. Peter shows her the way to school and explains on which streets Lena should be very careful. Then Lena gets to know the school. She is allowed to sit on the chair of Lisa, who is sick that day and cannot come to school. Lena watches Peter who is calculating and writing. During the break, Lena and Peter play in the playground of the school. When Peter's classmate Pelle says he thinks it's stupid to take small children to school, Pelle and Peter have a fight. Lena is afraid, but does not show it, so she is happy when the school bell rings and the biology class starts. Here Lena is able to contribute something to the lesson, because she realizes that the bird the teacher shows to the students is a chaffinch. Lena also accompanies Peter at breakfast in the dining room, during gymnastics and reading. After all, Pelle doesn't seem to mind small children at school anymore. When Lena and Peter are getting home, Lena is happy to know exactly how Peter's school is like.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Want_a_Brother_or_Sister"title="I Want a Brother or Sister">
A mother and a father get a little boy and call him Peter. Although the baby boy screams a lot, his parents love him very much and think he is the cutest child in the world. When Peter grows older, he plays with his friend Jan on the street. One day Jan shows Peter his little brother. Peter now wants to have siblings too. He goes to his mother and tells her about it. Peter's mother tells him that he will soon have a brother or sister. When Peter's sister Lena is born, Peter suddenly doesn't want to have a sister anymore. Lena screams constantly and gets a lot more attention than he does. In order to get his mother's attention, Peter does all kinds of nonsense as soon as Peter's mother is paying attention to Lena. So his mother has to pay attention to him.When Peter cries because he thinks that his parents prefer Lena to him, his mother takes him on his lap and tells him how much she loves him. She explains to him that babies are always a lot of trouble and so was Peter when he was little. She also explains that she got Lena for Peter and that he should take care of her too. He had cried a lot when he was little, so his mother had to take care of him. Peter decides to take care of Lena. He is very proud when he makes her stop crying. He proudly presents his sister to the other children in the playground.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dirt"title="American Dirt">
Lydia Quixano Pérez lives a comfortable life in Acapulco, Mexico, with her journalist husband, Sebastián, and her eight-year-old son, Luca. Lydia runs a bookstore and one day befriends a charming customer, Javier, who appears to have similar interests in books. However, Javier is revealed to be the kingpin of a drug cartel.Sebastián publishes a profile exposing the crimes of Javier, who then orders the slaughter of Sebastián and his family. Lydia and Luca escape the massacre, but are forced to flee Mexico, becoming two of the countless undocumented immigrants from Latin America who undertake the dangerous journey to the United States, taking a treacherous trip on La Bestia north of Mexico City.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India's_Coal_Story"title="India's Coal Story">
The book has 9 chapters and 264 pages. First chapter of the book is "Ole King Coal" which contains introduction to India's mining history and how coal mining was started. It mentions about Raniganj, city on the bank of Damodar River, where coal mining happened en large and it mentions about Zambezi, river in the Africa, from where India has imported the coal."A Nation And Its Contradictions", second chapter of the book, is about the business of opium, establishment of Carr, Tagore and Company, politics behind then coal mining, role of East India Company and the history of coal mining amid world-wars and recession of 1929. "Nationalisation of problems", third chapter, mentions Bombay Plan, Nehruvian socialism and take over of the industries, Indira Gandhi's rule and price control, and problems faced by India businessmen after independence of India. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyfn_Sheydweg"title="Oyfn Sheydweg">
The novel describes the decline of the shtetl after the October Revolution.Sсhechtman's heroes go through difficult times of “crossroads”; to the place described by Shekhtman, the revolution “doesn’t drive along a wide highway, but drags heavily in gardens, rolls down a mountain, leaning against the Jews like a thundercloud”.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrap_and_the_Pirates"title="Scrap and the Pirates">
In the summer Scrap (Swedish: Skrållan) lives on an island called Seacrow Island. She watches her grandfather Melcher and her father Peter eagerly roofing the house, while her mother Malin hangs up the laundry. Scrap loves her funny grandfather who often falls from the roof or into the sea.Scrap also has a little uncle, Pelle, who only is ten years old. On Sea Crow Island there are also Tjorven, her dog Bootsmann, her two parents Nisse and Märta, as well as Stina and her grandfather. The sisters of Tjorven and Pelle's older brothers always do something together and Scrap has little contact with them. She prefers to spend time with Pelle, Tjorven and Stina. With the latter, she also celebrates her third birthday on the landing stage.One day Tjorven, Pelle, Stina and Scrap play hide-and-seek with Melcher. Melcher lies down on a place where the chickens previously laid their eggs. His pants are totally dirty. Meanwhile, Pelle has completely forgotten that they are playing hide-and-seek. He watches a large grasshopper in the grass because he loves animals more than anything.When Scrap tries to go on the seesaw with the dog Bootsmann, it doesn't work at all. Bootsmann weighs a lot more than she does, so her part of the seesaw is always up in the air. Later, the children play sack jumping.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tomten_(Astrid_Lindgren)"title="The Tomten (Astrid Lindgren)">
## "The Tomten".During the night the people at a farm in a forest are asleep. Only Tomten is awake. No one has ever seen Tomten, the people only know that he is there. Sometimes the people only find his small footprints in the snow. Tomten takes care of the animals and gives them comfort through a cold winter's night. He promises them that spring will be there soon. Tomten also visits the children, who always want to see him. However, they are always at sleep when he comes, so they dream about him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chef_(novel)"title="The Chef (novel)">
Caleb Rooney is a major crimes detective with the New Orleans Police Department. On the side he and his ex-wife run a well known and highly acclaimed food truck, named Killer Chef. Rooney has just been raked over the coals for an incident in which he fired his weapon and killed a known gang member. He quits the police department in disgust, devoting all his time to his food sideline. Rooney cannot escape his past with the police by leaving the department, however. He is hounded by those who were members of the gang of the man he had killed. Rooney stumbled upon a possible terror plot to take place during Mardi Gras. He has stepped on toes of others in the culinary industry in town. And his independent investigation of the terror plot has gotten him into difficulties with the local FBI leader, who is also investigating it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stars_and_the_Blackness_Between_Them"title="The Stars and the Blackness Between Them">
16-year-old Audre lives in Port of Spain, Trinidad. At the urging of her mother, she attends church, but forms a romantic relationship with the pastor's granddaughter, Neri. After they are caught engaging in sexual activity, Audre is sent to live with her father in Minneapolis, where she meets Mabel. Mabel is questioning her own sexuality, and the two become friends. As they prepare for the upcoming school year, Mabel finds out she has a life-threatening illness. Audre supports Mabel as she undergoes treatment, both emotionally and through healing practices she has learned from her grandmother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Be-Bop"title="Baby Be-Bop">
Even though readers first meet Dirk McDonald in "Weetzie Bat," Block explores his past in "Baby Be-Bop".Dirk had a magical childhood while growing up in the care of his Grandma Fifi. Despite enjoying the beach, surfing, and Grandma Fifi's 1955 Pontiac convertible, Dirk was not truly happy because he had a secret. Dirk worried that if he told anyone this secret, he would no longer be accepted or loved.One night, Dirk's magic lamp comes to life and shows him all the stories from the past. After coming to terms with who he is, Dirk accepts himself and learns that "any love that is love is right."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Udala_Trees"title="Under the Udala Trees">
The novel opens in 1960's Nigeria, following the tale of Ijeoma, a young girl who lives in a small town called Ojoto with her mother, Adaora, and father, Uzo, in the middle of the Nigerian Civil War.Following an air raid at the start of the novel, Ijeoma and her mother Adaora escape unharmed but her father is killed. This leaves Ijeoma under Adaora's care. The death of Uzo has a profound effect on Adaora's mental health, sending her into a trance-like state. Eventually, Adaora soon decides to send Ijeoma away to the far away town of Nwewi, to live with family friends, under the idea that it's safer and the right thing to do although Ijeoma is reluctant to move due to the strong bond she has to her mother as well her young age.Ijeoma is taken in by a School Teacher, where she soon meets Amina, who becomes the object of her affection. The illicitness of the relationship and hesitation stemming from homophobic views from society puts strain on their relationship. Adaora, through frequently visiting Ijeoma, slowly begins to realise the affection that Ijeoma and Amina have for each other and expresses utter disapproval, quoting the bible and making Ijeoma swear allegiance to God and ultimately, to end the relationship and stop having 'wrong' feelings for each other. Eventually, Ijeoma is sent back to Ojoto to live with Adaora again while Amina remains with the school teacher. Ijeoma's relationship with Amina slowly fizzles out thereafter.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Candle_in_Her_Room"title="A Candle in Her Room">
Melissa's parents move their family and Emmy Lee to the mansion - called Old Court - in Pembrokeshire. The mansion - formerly a courthouse - passed to Melissa's parents upon the death of Aunt Lucia. Everyone is delighted except Judith, the artist, who wants to remain in London. Briony finds the slim wooden doll with the word 'DIDO' carved down her back, and soon her behavior changes. After Judith discovers it though, it suddenly disappears. The odd behavior changes in Briony that Melissa observed when she had Dido soon went away after she 'lost' her, and Briony returned to her usual self. Judith draws farther away from the family, becoming even more moody and difficult than usual. She stay mostly in London, secretive and detached.Melissa and Carew develop a romantic attachment, but when Carew meets Judith, and says of her 'she has the brilliance of a diamond, and no heart. She fascinates and terrifies me. She has great magnetism and I feel she might compel me to do something against my will, something devilish, something "she" wanted.' Melissa and Carew continued their relationship, planning to marry when they became of age. Everything changes when Melissa feels compelled to go by the sea after heavy rains, and the ground gives way. Her injuries heal, but the shock and the strange pains she has in her legs keep her paralyzed. Carew is determined to remain faithful to her, but after time passes, when he finishes his studies, Judith sweeps in and the two run off to London together to marry. Melissa, remains in Newcove with Miss Emmy as Part I concludes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cactus_League"title="The Cactus League">
"The Cactus League" presents stories from multiple narrators in Scottsdale, Arizona, the home of Salt River Fields, the spring training facility of the Los Angeles Lions professional baseball team. Each of the novel's nine chapters are told from the perspective of a different narrator, with each chapter preceded by narration from an unnamed veteran sportswriter who discusses how each of their various stories are interlinked and provides philosophical musings about baseball and life in general. The story of Jason Goodyear, the handsome and famous star outfielder for the Lions, is a common thread throughout each of the chapters. Although he appears to be very straight-laced and respectable to outsiders, over the course of the novel it is revealed that Jason has recently been divorced by his wife and lost the vast majority of his wealth due to a serious gambling addiction.The first chapter tells the story of Michael Taylor, an aging batting coach struggling to stay relevant with the Lions. The book opens with Michael and his wife returning to their Arizona house for the start of spring training, only to find that squatters have broken into it during the off-season. The house is trashed and many of the belonging have been stolen, including Michael's prized Cadillac. Undeterred, he cleans the house himself and prepares for the season. When he later finds the stolen Cadillac parked outside a restaurant, he smashes it with a baseball bat. The second chapter focuses on Tamara Rowland, a middle-aged divorcée who attempts to engage baseball players in casual sexual experiences each spring training season. She ends up spending an evening Jason Goodyear, and they trespass at Taliesin West, the former winter home of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, where Jason gets arrested after damaging property and starting a fire. The next chapter features Herb Allison, a legendary sports agent recently confined to a wheelchair due to an injury. He hires Sara, an attractive physical therapy assistant with a dark past, to become his new assistant. They bail Jason out of jail after his arrest, and Herb tries to navigate the resulting scandal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_of_What_Was_Lost"title="The Shadow of What Was Lost">
Davian is a young man studying at Caladel, a school under the supervision of the Tol Athian council. Davian learns that he is actually an Augur. He is given a Vessel, an Augur artifact, and is told that the Boundary, an ancient border north of Andarra, is failing. Behind it lie monsters led by immortal Augur Aarkein Devaed. Devaed is planning an invasion of Andarra. Davian and his best friend Wirr escape. That night, almost every remaining resident is murdered. The only survivor is their friend Asha, another young Gifted. Asha becomes Tol Athian's Representative to the Northwarden Elocian Andras, brother of the king and leader of the Administrators. Elocian tells Asha that he is secretly rescuing Augurs and regrets the creation of the Tenets.Davian's Vessel, the Portal Box, leads them to rescue a Gifted man named Caeden. Caeden has been accused of massacring an entire village, but has lost his memories. Davian is transported to the past. He meets a shapeshifting Augur named Malshash, who trains Davian to use Augur abilities before sending him back to his own time.The Northwarden's Augurs have a vision of Ilin Illan, the capital city, being overrun by invaders known as the Blind. Asha, Davian, and Wirr (who is actually Elocian's son) reunite in the city. Davian discovers that Devaed's master plan involves restoring Caeden's memories. Elocian is killed by the blind; Wirr then changes the Tenets to allow the Gifted to fight.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Kid"title="New Kid">
12-year-old Jordan Banks is a black boy who lives in Washington Heights. Jordan loves art and makes cartoons about his life. His dream is to go to art school. However, his mother makes him go to Riverdale Academy Day (RAD) School, which she calls "one of the best schools in the state". However, RAD is not a very diverse school, having only a few black students.During his first day at Riverdale, Jordan is overwhelmed. He is helped by Liam Landers, a fellow student assigned to be Jordan's guide, and whose family has attended RAD for 3 generations. The two become friends. Jordan meets a variety of other students at the school, including Drew Ellis, who is one of the few African American students at his school; Andy Peterson, a jock who is unliked by many of his fellow students; and Alexandra, who always wears a sock puppet on her hand.Jordan has some difficulties adjusting to RAD. These include sitting at the wrong table at lunch and not knowing how to act when a friend from the neighborhood sees him with Liam. Further challenges occur when his advisor discusses students on financial aid and calls Drew by the name of DeAndre. Jordan discovers that this kind of misnaming happens to other black students and faculty at the school, even a black teacher who has been at the school for fourteen years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scary_Stories_for_Young_Foxes"title="Scary Stories for Young Foxes">
The book follows seven fox kits in search of scary stories. Their mother tells them about an old storyteller but prohibits them from adventuring there. Despite the warnings, they go there to listen to the old vixen's tales. The first one is focused on Mia, who is being taught survival skills alongside the rest of the litter. During their class, their teacher, Miss Vix, suffering from rabies, becomes aggressive and attacks the fox kits. In the aftermath, only Mia and her mother are not infected, and so they flee from their den. The elder then tells Uly's story, a fox born with a malformed front leg and ostracized by his six sisters, who mock him whenever possible. One day, Uly's father, Wynn, returns to the den and tries to force Uly's mother to kill him. She refuses and Uly runs away and disappears into the forest.Meanwhile, lost in the forest, Mia's mother steps on a steel trap and is almost captured, but Mia saves her and is captured instead. Mia is brought by the hunter, Beatrix Potter, to her house, where she remains caged for several days. After attempting to escape, Mia is strung on a rope and is soon found by Uly, who had felt the smell of food from nearby. Uly helps Mia escape and they run away. The two kits become friends and decide to go after Mia's mother. They first go through a swamp where Uly is attacked by an alligator. He manages to free himself but loses his malformed limb in the process.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_Begins_Again"title="Genesis Begins Again">
Genesis Anderson is a thirteen-year-old girl that lives in Detroit. Her father is alcoholic who also suffers of gambling addiction. While the two of them have dark skin color, Genesis' mother has a lighter skin. Genesis is constantly bullied by her schoolmates due the color of her skin, and she also blames herself for the troubles at home, to the point she keeps a list of all the things she thinks is wrong about her.One day, Genesis manages to spend some time with some of the more popular girls of her school, and decides to invite them to her house. When they get there, the furniture had been thrown outside; her family had once again been evicted from their home due to her father not paying the rent. Genesis and her mother go stay with her grandmother and she begins attending a new school. While at home her grandmother repeats colorist ideologies, such as the use of the "paper bag test" to know if someone has a light enough skin to pass as not black, at school Genesis is no longer bullied, she meets Troy, the love interest, and joins the chorus after finding out she has a talent for singing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_blonde_Eckbert"title="Der blonde Eckbert">
Eckbert lives an idyllic life, secluded in a castle deep within a forest in the Harz Mountains, with his wife Bertha. The two find happiness in their refuge away from the corrupting influences of society. They have no children but enjoy life together. Phillip Walther, Eckbert's one contact with society, shatters this harmony during a visit at the outset of the story. Walther had become a close friend of Eckbert over the years as the two frequently rode about Eckbert's demesne. Eckbert feels compelled to share his secret with Walther as his only confidant. He invites Walther to stay the night and enjoy "familiarities" and dine with Bertha. She reveals the secret of her childhood and begins the frame story.Bertha escaped from a life of hunger, poverty and abuse at a young age. She found herself at the center of fights between her mother and father. She ran away from their pastoral home, begged on the streets, and made her way into the woods. An old woman took Bertha to a cabin and taught her to weave, spin, and read as they live together with the old woman's animals—a dog and a magical bird. The anthropomorphic bird sings a variety of songs encased by the concept of Waldeinsamkeit, or the feeling of being alone in the forest, and the bird lays a precious stone each day. The birds songs always begin and end with "Waldeinsamkeit". For instance:
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidentified_Suburban_Object"title="Unidentified Suburban Object">
Despite being the only Korean girl at her school, Chloe Cho is desperate to get in touch with her family roots. Because there are not many Korean people in town, Chloe and her best friend, Shelley, turn to internet blogs to learn things about Korean culture. Whenever Chloe makes traditional Korean food or wears traditional Korean clothes, her parents redirect the conversation or do not seem to know what she is talking about. Chloe nearly gives up on asking her parents about their past when the new social studies teacher at her school, Ms. Su-Hyung Lee (who is Korean), assigns her students to interview someone in their family about an old family story. Through a lot of persistence and hard work, Chloe finally gets her parents to tell her something about their past, but it is not what she expected. Instead of feeling like she finally knows who she is, Chloe feels more alone than ever. After finding out this new information about herself Chloe learns more about what it really means to be who she is.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saracen_Lamp"title="The Saracen Lamp">
A young woman, 16-year-old Melisande marries Sir Hugh de Hervey - 6 years older than her - with reluctance, as she does not know him and wishes to continue her carefree youth at home in Southern France. Her father - wounded in the last of King Louis' Crusades against the Saracens - is feeble and weak, but wishes her to go through with this union. Yusef - who made the lamp for Melisande - has facial features similar to her father, and is very dear to her. She is disturbed in the months leading up to the marriage because her father has banished Yusef from their household, and won't tell her why. After marrying de Hervey, they go on the monthlong journey by horseback to the coast of France, Wissant and sail to Dover, and from there to their own home - Littleperry Manor - within his family's estate, Greatperry Hall, in Gloucester, England.As Melisande settles in, she frequently conflicts with The Lady Constance and dame Anne Peckham, who were united in their disapproval of her for being French and of a less wealthy background. Soon Melisande is expecting a child, and when the packmen arrive with goods for sale as well as mail delivery, she receives a letter from Tristan stating that Yusef has died, apparently committed suicide the day after her departure. Melisande's grief takes everyone's efforts to overcome. When Joscelin is born, everyone is happy and even Lady Constance seems to finally accept Melisande. Five years later, a terrible wet spring after a vicious winter results in the death of Hugo, only after disease murrain sickened the sheep. In time, the children marry, and Melisande starts to plan to visit her parents for the first time - when King Edward III declares war on France. With close family members in both the English and French armies, Melisande is alone with her despair. She has a vision of a young child dressed very unusually - very simply - with hair short, in a chair with wheels. When she learns of pending grandchildren, she starts to hope that the young girl in her vision belongs to the future of Littleperry. Part I ends with Melisande hanging a red cross on a white sheet at the manor walls, to warn anyone coming by that the Plague had struck.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem_for_a_Princess"title="Requiem for a Princess">
Willow Penelope Forrester is the only child of a sheep farming family, who discovers a talent for piano playing as she matures. Her music teacher finds a program in Germany that would be a perfect fit. Miss Carpenter gives her a new piece of music to start to learn - Ravel's "Pavane for a Dead Infanta" but her fingers were clumsy with chilblains. The tune is rooted in her mind though. Just as she is starting to deal with her parents antipathy towards music as a career path for her, she comes down with the flu at school. As she and another girl one day have a long-running spat, the other girl hurls at her the fact that she is adopted. Willow's illness takes longer to heal from as she is thrown into confusion and depression.To facilitate her recovery, her mother brings her to a private hotel called Penliss in Cornwall by the sea. The oldest part of Penliss (the kitchen and two rooms above) date back to the Elizabethan Era, the rest of the building at that time burned. In its place is a newer building, added on to the original part. Willow discovers the Velasquez portrait of Isabel, finely dressed wearing a unique pendant necklace, in the room with the piano. She plays "Pavane" and tells the portrait - "that was for you -Isabel." When she asks Rosamund about Isabel, she explains that Isabel was brought from Spain and adopted by the Tresilian family, but died young. This only whets Willow's curiosity, and she becomes obsessed with learning more. Willow finds Isabel's memorial stone in the family chapel, which states that Isabel died of "supposed drowning" at age 17, in 1602.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Hadn't_Meant_to_Tell_You_This"title="I Hadn't Meant to Tell You This">
The story begins with it being the third day of school and it being the day Lena first arrives in Chauncey and how she slowly becomes friends with Marie. The two girls despite being polar opposites become friends due to their differences and to the fact that they both lost their mothers with Marie's mother leaving her and her father at an early part of her life and Lena's passing away when she was young. There are challenges towards their relationship, with it mainly being towards the community being composed of mostly black people and few white people who aren't as financially well-off compared to the former. There is also Marie's other friend Sherry who views Lena as nothing more than "whitetrash" and Lena confiding in Marie a secret regarding Lena's father sexually abusing her, which Marie struggles to keep secret despite her protests to Lena. By the end the abuse has gone to the point where Lena's younger sister, Dion, is being affected as well and with it Lena and Dion leave Ohio and bids farewell to Marie after the latter calls to see if she is okay. Marie in the days that come is saddened by the departure of her friend and asks herself "Why can't we all just be people here?" after remembering a comment Lena made earlier on how "We all just people here".
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run_Me_to_Earth"title="Run Me to Earth">
"Run Me to Earth" is divided into six stories that extend over the course of six decades, primarily between 1969–1977. The novel begins in 1969 but later jumps to 1974 and 1977, before moving back to 1969 and then finally jumping forward to 1994 and 2018. It takes place mostly in Laos but also in New York, Spain and rural France. The novel employs a third-person omniscient narrative, alternating its focus between the different characters. Stream of consciousness is often used to reveal the characters' inner thoughts.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Place_for_Us"title="A Place for Us">
The book is split up into four parts.Part one opens at the eldest daughter, Hadia’s wedding in Northern California. Rather than accepting an arranged marriage, Hadia decides to build her life with a man of her choice, Tariq, whom she met in medical school. Hadia decides to invite their estranged brother, Amar, who returns after 3 years of no communication with his family. He is confronted with the familiarity of the faces from his past life when greeting the guests, including his first love Amira Ali. His family watches him from a distance, careful not to say anything to upset him. Their mother, Layla, is frantically running around, attending to guests, and making sure that her daughter’s event flows smoothly. She searches for her husband, Rafiq, in the crowd to look at him and share a moment to appreciate where they came to in life.Part two of the book gives readers glimpses of the past that offer insight into how everything led up to the wedding. It opens with a memory of the Fourth of July, the first one Hadia recalls celebrating. The three young siblings begged their father to take them to see the fireworks. Hadia and her sister Huda sit together cross-legged, eyes lighting up in awe from the fireworks. A young Amar. meanwhile, is leaning against his mother, eyes wide in wonder.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhythm_of_War"title="Rhythm of War">
The prologue is from Navani's perspective, in which she recalls Gavilar's death and his involvement with strange spheres of light. The book begins with Kaladin traveling to his hometown of Hearthstone, to rescue the citizens and pick up a famous Herdazian general, The Mink. Navani,Dalinar, and many Radiants arrive on a flying machine to assist Kaladin in evacuating the city. While the evacuation begins, the Radiants get into a battle with the Fused, which ends with no conclusive winner. Meanwhile, Kaladin is baited into a fight with his former friend Moash, who somehow induces Kaladin to have visions of traumatic experiences. Kaladin escapes to the flying machine and they fly away with the townspeople on board. While returning, Navani is contacted by a mysterious stranger, who tells her that creating magic devices called fabrials is unethical and wrong. Fabrials are created by imprisoning a in a gemstone. After returning to Narak, Dalinar relieves Kaladin of duty due to his battleshock and increasing depression. Kaladin searches for a way to continue serving those around him without fighting and starts assisting his father in the infirmary, eventually finding greater purpose in helping those with mental issues through group therapy and more progressive treatments.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamers_(children's_book)"title="Dreamers (children's book)">
Morales describes crossing a "bridge to the other side" at which point she and Kelly became immigrants. She describes the difficult transition period in which she was surrounded by an unfamiliar language and has trouble assimilating, which she referred to as making "mistakes." During this time she and Kelly discover a local library, where they learned the language and books became their "life."
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zangezi"title="Zangezi">
The prophet Zangezi lives among wildlife, mountains, birds, trees, grasses, gods. Zangezi speaks significant words, but human beings are ignorant to understand him:
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Europe_(novel)"title="Dead Europe (novel)">
The novel is structured in chapters alternately focusing on a realist depiction Isaac's travels in contemporary Europe and a fantastical representation of his grandparents' lives in their rural World War II era village in Greece."Dead Europe" opens with a flashback of protagonist Isaac Raftis' childhood, when his mother first told him about "the Jews" and how every year, at Christmas they "drank the blood of the sacrificed child."The novel then transitions to an account of Isaac's grandmother Lucia's childhood, and her abuse at the hands of her father before she is given to Isaac's grandfather Michaelis as a bride. The chapter ends with Michaelis agreeing to shelter Elia, the son of a Jewish acquaintance, from the Nazis in return for a box of jewellery.Isaac is staying in Athens, where he is holding a mostly unsuccessful and frustrating exhibition of his photographic work. While in Athens he assists a young immigrant boy who has been bashed and meets his family who live in squalor in the ghettos of the city.In WW2 era rural Greece, Lucia is distraught at her inability to bear a child for Michaelis and has become bitter towards her family and community. She visits Elia, who is hiding in a basement under an abandoned church, to bring him food and they have sex.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possession_(Markandaya_novel)"title="Possession (Markandaya novel)">
The action of "Possession" begins around the year 1949, and continues through the 1950s and early 1960s. An Englishwoman, Lady Caroline Bell, discovers Valmiki, a teenage goatherd who has been painting in local caves, in a village in South India. Snatching Valmiki from the protection of an elderly local swami, she brings him back to London as an exotic pet artist. Jealously guarding Valmiki's attachment to her, Lady Bell cannot stop him eventually returning to India after the suicide of Ellie, a concentration camp survivor whom Valmiki paints and makes pregnant. She follows him back to India, to find him spiritually reattached to the swami and once again painting in the caves around his village.The 'possession' of the book's title refers both to the woman's desire to own the man, and to his state of being 'possessed' by a foreign identity and values.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nowhere_Man_(Kamala_Markandaya_novel)"title="The Nowhere Man (Kamala Markandaya novel)">
Unlike her other novels, which were set mainly in India, "The Nowhere Man" is set in England, where Markandaya herself had been living since 1948. The novel's main protagonist, Srinivas, is an elderly spice importer who has lived in South London for almost fifty years, surviving his wife and one of his two sons. In the Britain of 1968, he now faces intensifying racism, reminding him of the slights he had once experienced as a university student in colonial India. As Srinivas slides into depression, the novel captures the cultural separation between first and second-generation immigrant generations: Srinivas's remaining son, Laxman, is impatient with and embarrassed by his father. For a while, Srinivas's self-belief is restored by a romantic relationship with Mrs Pickering, a down-at-heel divorcée, who moves into his house. However, their peace together is threatened by the racist hatred of their neighbours, to which they each find themselves reacting differently. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Deeply_Hidden"title="Something Deeply Hidden">
In this book, Carroll examines the reasons why people misunderstand quantum mechanics and advocates a version of the many-worlds interpretation, while objecting to the views often grouped together as the Copenhagen interpretation. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Relations"title="Space Relations">
In the future, humans have formed an intergalactic empire ruled by aristocrats. During a time of war with the Plith, an empire of ant-like alien bug people, ambassador John Craig, a formerly Liberal Earth man in his 30s, is dispatched to the strategically important planet Kossar, a human colony that was settled by the Carlyle Society as a place of exile for political extremists and now is ruled by an oligarchical high council of seven nobles, each of whom is in charge of a different domain with its own traditions. Their boredom and absolute power have driven them to madness, to the point that Kossar's entry into the empire has been stymied by the Man-Inhabited Planets Treaty's clause (written by Craig) against alliances with slave owning societies, due to its practice of kidnapping humans to become illegal playthings of the galaxy's super-rich.Craig, who now is campaigning to bring Kossar into the empire, had previously been to the planet when the passenger ship on which he was travelling on a return trip from the Betelgeuse Conference was captured by space pirates. While en route to Kassar, one of the pirates awakened Craig and the other prisoners to rape a 15-year-old virginal redheaded female captive in front of them; the rapist's fellow pirates later hear of this and dock his pay as punishment for spoiling her market value. Craig then spent two years as a slave of the beautiful, sensual, and sadistic Lady Morgan Sidney, the only female member of the oligarchy, with whom he became romantically involved. Together, they lived in her castle, ruling over and engaging in sexual relations with those under their dominion, including an enslaved teenager at a clinic used to breed enslaved people. When Craig stumbles on hints of an alien invasion, he realizes he must escape to save humanity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Margarita"title="Portrait of Margarita">
Part 1After her parents' death, Margarita becomes the ward of her Mom's Cousin Francis, and moves in with him during boarding school holidays. Margarita settles into Swithins Mill and the community of Hockton, Oxfordshire, and they develop a positive bond. Margarita gets along with everyone at Hockton, except for a small number of people who react with coldness and hostility due to her foreign appearance and her status as an outsider. She feels concern about Miss Laura, but she tries to put that aside as Francis is close to her. Margarita feelings for Cousin Francis seem like romantic love to her, but she keeps that secret from everyone. Toward the end of her first visit, she meets "that painting lot," the Giles family that has recently moved in to the area.Part IIOn returning to Swithins Mill for the Spring holidays, Margarita has more intense interactions with Miss Laura, who clearly wants her to stop taking up Cousin Francis time. She sees the Ghost Dog and is told that is a portent of danger.One her return visit to the Giles household, she also first witnesses Stella having a bout of screaming, and learns about her autism. Giles and Martha have the idea of his painting Margarita, so it is arranged for Margarita to come in every day and sit for him. Between sessions of sitting for Giles, Margarita enjoys playing with Lucy, and also gaining Stella's trust. She sings sometimes, and later on Stella starts to sing as well, a major breakthrough. Margarita chooses to ignore increasing anonymous harassment. Meanwhile, Cousin Francis and Margarita continue to become close. After Giles finishes the portrait of her, it is vandalized the very next day. Initially the suspicion rests of Stella.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofia_Khan_is_Not_Obliged"title="Sofia Khan is Not Obliged">
The book follows the eponymous heroine Sofia Khan through the difficulties of navigating the dating world as a Muslim girl living in London whilst working in publishing. The narrative charts her various different interactions with her love interests, beginning with her first boyfriend Imran. Imran asks her to move in with his family, in a house connected to theirs via a connecting door, a request which earns him the nickname 'hole-in-the-wall' and subsequently marks the end of their relationship. Sofia's next love interest is Naim, but again things fail to work out.On the tube one day, Sofia is called a 'terrorist' by a man she accidentally bumps into, but the train leaves before she is able to do anything about it.When she gets to her meeting, the publishing company she works for have asked Sofia to write a Muslim dating manual, documenting her dating experiences as a British Muslim. She is given a sizeable advance on the book. The book also follows her friends' experience too, such as her friend Suj's relationship with a black man and her friend Hannah's decision to enter a polygamous relationship as a second wife.She has struck up an unlikely friendship with her tattooed Irish neighbour Conall, who is proving to be an unlikely source of strength during these trying times. Out of the blue her father has a heart attack and Sofia decides given her lack of dating success to marry Imran after all, as she feels this will make her family happy.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unquiet_Dead_(novel)"title="The Unquiet Dead (novel)">
Set in the Scarborough Bluffs, Toronto, the body of Christopher Drayton is found at the foot of the cliffs near his home. Esa Khattak, head of Community Policing has been called by his superior to investigate the incident, of which is presumed to be an unfortunate accident caused by walking through the unstable cliffs at night. Esa and his headstrong partner Rachel Getty begin the investigation at Winterglass, the home of esteemed author Nathan (Nate) Clare. It becomes obvious to Rachel early on in their visit that Esa and Nate have known each other for years, yet the tension that fills the air leads her to believe that there is more to their relationship than meets the eye. The two detectives then search Drayton’s home which is situated on the same street, finding a number of incriminating files and papers containing suspicious threats. There are a number of puzzles in the investigation, including Drayton’s relationship with Melanie Blessant and his planned donation to local museum Ringsong that specialises in Andulusian history. From searching Drayton's home and researching into war crimes with the help of the Bosnian community, Khattak and Getty discover that Drayton was an alias for Serbian Drazen Kristic who oversaw the Srebrenican Genocide. Clues such as a tattoo of the Serbian cross, letters detailing the terrible crimes committed and a gun found in his home that was used by the Drina Corps, all led the detective pair to this conclusion. Tom Paley, Khattak's superior, wants Drayton's real identity to be kept a secret until they can find a way to reveal it to the Bosnian community of Toronto. After further investigations with the help of the community, they discover that many of the people involved in Ringsong are also Bosnian immigrants in disguise; they are aware of Drayton's true identity and are responsible for blackmailing the war criminal with letters and various other tools.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autumn_Ghosts"title="The Autumn Ghosts">
EntryRomilly Williams youth in Pembrokeshire, Wales is happy, she is close to her Gran and her family's housekeeper, Jeanie, who shares with Romilly a belief in ancient truths. Her Gran tells her stories of past family gatherings as Karasay House in the Scottish Islands, and the mystery around Millie, Gran's mother, who visited once, refused to ever return and would never tell why.Part IMillie, sixteen year-old, goes to Karasay to stay with family friends as she is coming of age in 1901. Everyone is gracious and welcoming, but Rodger became a focal point as he is clearly fascinated by her. She has always felt more complicated emotionally than others and he seems to sense that. She and Jocelyn are attracted to each other, and Rodger starts harassing Millie. His malevolence becomes clear, and Millie tries to avoid him. Finally Rodger says to Millie that she must stop her involvement with Jocelyn, otherwise he will be harmed. Millie accidentally stumbles upon Rodger’s chamber of horrors – an old mine shaft he had converted into a place full of animal skins, twisted skeletons, small human figures made of clay, and other implements of evil. He tells Millie he had intended to marry her in time and initiate her into his way of life then, but since she had discovered him, it would have to be done now. He sliced both their wrists, made her promise to keep what she had found secret under pain of harm to Jocelyn, pushed their wrists together to pool their blood, and sealed the vow. He took an ancient stone ring from a string around his neck and forced it on her finger, ordering her not to remove it. On returning to her room, she takes off the ring and hides it in her room.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Dead_Dreams"title="Summer of Dead Dreams">
The novel tells about three Germans: Oswald Hirschke, Jakob Latta and Schliebitz and a Romani woman called Alina. The story takes place in the summer of 1945 in Prudnik, shortly after the end of World War II. The main characters live in a ghetto on Chrobrego and Królowej Jadwigi Street, created by the Red Army in April 1945 after the end of the Battle of Prudnik. They are being used by Poles that came to Prudnik after the war and Russian soldiers. They are trying to escape to East Germany.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monitor,_the_Miners,_and_the_Shree"title="The Monitor, the Miners, and the Shree">
The novel that deals with a sociological expedition to study the culture of the Shree on the planet of Nira.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Grizzly_Tales_for_Gruesome_Kids"title="More Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids">
## Knock Down Ginger.Entomologist Mr Thrips is a pariah in the town of Nimby. He lives in one of the richest private streets (described as a "millionaire's row") next to people who drive Mercedes-Benz, Jeep and Jaguar cars, sharing a home full of several insect species which made his house look unkempt and creepy. Residents despise him for allowing the street to look uneven and nicknamed the house "Bug City Central", so his neighbours, the Pie family, become determined to get rid of him. At a council meeting, Amelia Pie terrifies the audience with her fears of Thrips' behaviour giving Nimby a bad reputation, which is heightened when Colonel Dithering claims that termites can eat houses. As the audience panics over their eaten houses disallowing them to park their cars and have cocktail parties, Amelia boasts her son will be the person to successfully scare Thrips out of town.Ginger Pie and his friend "Mad" Milo have already been bullying Thrips through vandalising his front garden and writing/yelling insults through his letter box. Milo's lisping sister Liza does not understand why the two boys relish in targeting an innocent old man but she is usually ignored, and Milo spitefully reveals Liza's nickname "Lizzie the Lizard" through reverse psychology. Ginger echoes the town's sentiments and calls Thrips ugly, claiming he shares many resemblances to the insects he shares his house with, to which Liza points out Ginger's pale skin and pale, red hair, and says "you look like Dracula just drank your blood." Ginger spots Thrips gardening and crosses the road to call him an "insect maniac", but he is terrified when Thrips scolds him in a tranquil fury without turning around to look at him. Milo later suggests Thrips has literal eyes in the back of his head but Ginger adamantly replies that Thrips might be an insect humanoid who they need to chase out their town. Luckily, his mother already endorses the idea so he and Milo decide to make Thrips' stay uncomfortable by playing Knock Down Ginger. The boys calculate the length of time it takes for Thrips to get out of his armchair to answer the front door as ten minutes, and play Knock Down Ginger all day. Then Ginger jumps over the fence into the back garden to destroy Thrips' giant termite mounds but stops when he feels vibrations from the mud. Suddenly, Thrips appears in the kitchen and Ginger rushes back to the front door to take his turn at the doorbell. The door shoots open and Thrips drags Ginger inside.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Cut"title="In the Cut">
Frannie Avery is an English teacher living near Washington Square Park in lower Manhattan. She is studying street vernacular for an upcoming book she is working on. While meeting with one of her students, Cornelius, at a bar, she goes downstairs to use the bathroom, and stumbles upon a man receiving oral sex from a woman. She notes two minor details: A spade tattoo on the man's wrist, and the woman's painted fingernails, but most of the scene is obscured in shadow. Several days later, Frannie is contacted by a police detective, Giovanni Malloy, about the murder of a woman who was last seen at the bar on the same day Frannie was there. Frannie infers that the victim must be the woman she saw in the basement. Frannie and Malloy are flirtatious from the outset, and, over drinks, he expresses his willingness to "do anything but hit her." While walking home alone after their date, Frannie is assaulted by a man on the street, but he flees before she can see him. After, she and Malloy have a passionate sexual encounter at her apartment, but Frannie is suspicious of him when she realizes he has a matching spade tattoo on his wrist. Frannie confides in her friend, Pauline, with whom she has a close relationship.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swimmy_(book)"title="Swimmy (book)">
A very large tuna eats all the red fish who are swimming around, leaving the little Swimmy all alone. Scared and on his own, the little black fish swims away into the large ocean. He sees many beautiful and strange creatures on his journey until he finally discovers another school of little red fish, just like his own family used to be. He excitedly asks them all to come out and play, but they refuse. They are afraid of the big fish and don't want to get eaten. Swimmy tells them that they must make a plan, because they can't spend their whole life hiding in the rocks. He devises a plan to have all the red fish swim in the shape of a large fish - and then Swimmy takes his place among them in the place the eye would be. After that they are able to swim in the sea without fear - scaring the larger fish away wherever they go.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_Me_Everything_You_Don't_Remember"title="Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember">
On December 31, 2006, Lee woke up with an immense headache which she didn't know at that time was a stroke. Not thinking much about it, Lee and her husband, Adam, were running some errands when she experienced a cascade of sensory input and she felt dizzy. Once she got home, Lee took a nap, which is not recommended after or during a stroke. Waking up from a dream, she realizes that she lost her voice and her words. At that time she noted that her symptoms were not those of a stroke, as she could still smile and her words were not slurred. Instead, her balance was off, vision was unclear, lost her words, and encountered a tremendous headache. When Lee understands the severity, she tries to call 911 but is unable to remember the number. She ends up calling her husband unknowingly and they go to the emergency room.At the hospital, Lee takes a memory test and has a CT scan done. The results display a dark spot and the neurologist thinks she has vasculitis. An MRI was done the next morning and Dr. Volpi concluded that she had a left thalamic stroke. The stroke damaged her left thalamus which in turn affects the right. Christine Lee had a hole/flap called patent foramen ovale (PFO) in her heart which was an undiagnosed birth defect. This created a blood clot that went through her body and made its way into her brain. The doctor determined this cause with a bubble test and echocardiogram.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_Far_from_God"title="So Far from God">
At the age of eighteen Sofia, who is oftentimes called Sofi, marries Domingo and has four daughters with him. Shortly after La Loca's birth, who is the youngest of the sisters, Sofia leaves Domingo after she notices that he gambles away the land she inherited from her father. Because of that Sofia has to raise her children on her own until he suddenly returns after twenty years of absence. In the course of the novel Sofia becomes the self-proclaimed mayor of Tome, the city in New Mexico where they all live. When she finds out that Domingo starts to gamble away her belongings again, she decides to get divorced from him. After La Loca's death she becomes the founder of M.O.M.A.S., an organization for the mothers of martyrs and saints.The youngest daughter of Sofi La Loca is pronounced dead at the age of three, however she reawakens at her funeral claiming to have travelled to heaven, hell and purgatorial fire. From then on, she behaves differently by never leaving the house and being unable to stand the smell of other humans except for her mother. Furthermore, she gains healing powers after that incident. In her twenties she gets infected and dies of AIDS.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writers_&amp;_Lovers"title="Writers &amp; Lovers">
In 1997 Casey Peabody, a woman in her 30s, struggles to define her life as she is deeply in debt, feels uninspired to finish the novel she is working on, and is still reeling from her mother's untimely death a few months earlier. Shortly after her mother's death she was accepted to a writer's residency. Unable to delay Casey accepted the position and fell in love with a fellow writer named Luke who was also suffering from the death of his child. After the residency Casey learns he is still married and ends their relationship.Casey is friends with Muriel, another struggling writer who participates in a workshop run by Oscar, a middle-aged widow. Muriel invites Casey to Oscar's book launch where she meets a fellow writer named Silas whom she immediately connects with as he is also struggling after his sister abruptly died. However before they can go on a date Silas departs for a long impromptu road trip.While working as a waitress Casey serves Oscar and his two young sons. Casey is charmed by his children and when Oscar asks her on a date she accepts. Shortly after Silas returns. Casey is charmed by Oscar's solidity but feels a strong physical connection to Silas. She decides that she is sick of Silas' flightiness and begins to seriously date Oscar.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Both_Die_at_the_End"title="They Both Die at the End">
Shortly after midnight on September 5, Mateo receives a phone call from Death-Cast, a company that rose to prominence seven years prior and is able to predict the deaths of individuals, informing him that he is now a Decker, someone with only twenty-four hours (or less) left to live. Mateo initially intends to spend his End Day in his bedroom but decides to try to push himself to truly live, reluctantly downloading Last Friend, an app developed to help lonely Deckers find someone to spend their End Day with. Rufus is in the middle of beating up Peck, his ex-girlfriend Aimee's new boyfriend, when he received a call from Death-Cast claiming he is going to die in the next 24 hours. His friends Malcolm and Tagoe remind Rufus not to get carried away because of the news. He allows Peck to leave so that he can return to his foster home to say his goodbyes. Rufus, Aimee, Malcolm and Tagoe, collectively known as The Plutos, hold a funeral for Rufus at his foster home but it is interrupted by Peck, who calls the police to have Rufus arrested for assault. Rufus flees and goes on the run, downloading Last Friend so that he won't live out his final day alone.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Song_of_the_Blood-Red_Flower"title="The Song of the Blood-Red Flower">
Olof Koskela is a tramp and a logger who has the power to charm one woman after another. He is the son of a farmer who, after arguing with his father, leaves his home and settles down with a group of log drivers. As he travels along the stream of logs on the River Kohiseva, Olof always captivates the most beautiful girl in every village. Olof does not call his charming girls real names, but invents descriptive nicknames such as Clematis, Gazelle, Daisy and Rowan. However, he always forgets his love when moving to a new place. Olof exudes emotion at every moment: “Only while we are young, only while the flood of youth runs free and bright in our veins can we be happy. And they are the greatest who dare to demand their share of life in full, to plunge unafraid into the waters, letting the waves break on their temples and life's salt flood wash their cheeks.”Faced with the proud and difficult-to-reach Kyllikki of the Moisio House, Olof can't leave her. He asks Moisio's host for permission to marry Kyllikki, but the request is denied. Olof continues his journey and seduces a few more women, but he repeatedly misses Kyllikki. The longing gets too painful and Olof returns to Kyllikki. This time they get married. Olof does not want to start cultivating the inheritance of his family, but decides to start over as a land filler. They build their own house and clear fields. In due course, Kyllikki will also become pregnant. However, Olof does not think he has a more light-hearted life and is in great pain as he knows that Kyllikki is still suffering from his old adventures. Olof begins to examine himself until, at the end of the book, he reconciles with his past. Once a young tramp, he has grown into a responsible and aware member of society.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Echo_of_Things_to_Come"title="An Echo of Things to Come">
Wirr has succeeded his late father as Northwarden. He survives an assassination attempt, but struggles to gain acceptance from the Administrators under his command. He meets Breshada, a former Gifted hunter who has become Gifted herself. Asha is serving as Tol Athian’s Representative at court. She secretly sneaks to the Sanctuary, hoping to find evidence of missing Shadows. Davian trains at Tol Shen. He and three other Augurs escape an attack on the Tol and travel north to the Boundary.Caeden slowly begins regaining his memories as he visits locations from his past. He also works for the Lyth, who gave him Licanius in exchange for their freedom. He is followed by Nethgalla, a shapeshifting spirit inhabiting the body of his dead wife. Caeden was once part of a group of immortals known as the Venerate, who believed they were serving El (God). The Venerate sought to destroy fate and grant humans free will. Caeden hoped to use free will and time travel to save the life of his dead wife. Caeden eventually came to believe they were mistaken and that the "god" they were serving was actually an evil spirit. He turned against the other Venerate, trapping several of them in prisons known as Tributaries, which stole their Essence to power the Boundary. Two Venerate have recently escaped their Tributaries, leading to the Boundary’s weakening.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Heart_Hemmed_In"title="My Heart Hemmed In">
Nadia and Ange Lacordeyre are married and happily teaching in Bordeaux, France when they are suddenly ostracized from their school and local communities. Nadia worked hard to be accepted into her affluent community; thus, she is confused as to why her acceptance switched to exclusion. Her inner turmoil is further compounded by how the city she loves seems to shift and become unrecognizable when she walks in it alone.Early in the story, Nadia's second husband, Ange, receives a mysterious injury on his torso after which their hated neighbor, Noget, appears in their home and insists on helping them. Noget cooks for them and cares for Ange, who does not recover until Nadia leaves their apartment to escape the community's hatred. Nadia blames her increasing weight on the decadent food Noget makes, and she claims to be enduring menopause; other characters know she is too young for menopause and believe she is pregnant. The "thing" developing inside Nadia grows as she confronts aspects of herself, aspects being called to her attention through the exclusion by her peers and by the derision of Noget.While coming to terms with the new repugnance she inspires in people, Nadia has interactions with her unnamed ex-husband who she left because he was a remnant of her more impoverished life in the Les Aubiers projects, a life about which she wanted to forget. Nadia's divorce settlement benefited her but destroyed her ex-husband. The emotional and financial turmoil from the divorce caused him to spiral into a depression. At the end of the story, Nadia hears that her ex-husband has been killed by Lanton. Lanton is her son's ex-lover, and he helps Nadia update her ID so that she can travel to San Augusto. Lanton insists she deliver a letter to her son, and he claims if she does not deliver the letter, he will know and will kill her second husband, Ange. Nadia delivers the letter, but her son does not follow the instructions written within it; instead of Lanton killing Ange, Nadia's ex-husband dies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Long_Day's_Dying"title="A Long Day's Dying">
"A Long Day’s Dying" revolves around the lives of seven characters—at their center, Tristram Bone: a wealthy, middle-aged, and enormously corpulent bachelor in possession of a pet monkey and attended by his elderly German housekeeper, Emma. At the outset of the novel Bone makes a visit to the Cloisters, where he is joined by his friends, Elizabeth Poor and George Motley. Bone almost summons up the courage to confess to Elizabeth his feelings for her, but he fails. A middle-aged widow, Elizabeth's carefree nature renders her prone to moments of extreme apathy and ennui, tendencies that leave Bone unsure of her perception of him. Bone's embarrassing incident in one of the chapels is secretly observed by Motley, whose propensity to gossip leads him to undermine Bone by mockingly relaying the incident to Elizabeth. She appears unmoved, and Motley is made nervous by her refusal to enter into his chatter.In an attempt to deepen his friendship with Elizabeth, Motley proposes that she travel with him the following day to an unnamed university—likely Buechner's alma mater, Princeton—where he is due to deliver a lecture. Seeing an opportunity to visit her son, Leander, who is a student there, Elizabeth accompanies him on the journey. When they arrive, Leander introduces his mother and Motley to a friend of his, Paul Steitler, a lecturer in English literature at the university. When Elizabeth spends the night with Steitler, Motley sees an opportunity to strengthen his relationship with Bone, following his faux pas at the Cloisters, and so he rushes to relay the details of the love affair back to him. This news brings with it the revelation, for Bone, that his love for Elizabeth is unrequited. When he gently confronts Elizabeth on her return, however, she denies the story, and wildly claims that Steitler is engaging in an illicit relationship with her son. Bone writes to Steitler with a request to meet him at the Cloisters, and, following a conversation with the young lecturer, he realises that the story told by Elizabeth was a lie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bios_(novel)"title="Bios (novel)">
The novel is set in the 22nd century. After a pandemic-induced social collapse, Earth is controlled by the Trusts, corporate entities dominated by the oligarchic Families. The Trusts function as both business conglomerates and charitable NGOs; having restored order, their power has largely supplanted that of governments, and their managerial cadres (serving the owner-class Families) exercise quasi-feudal authority over their subordinates. In the wider solar system, asteroid settlers that did not experience the pandemics preserve a more liberal mode of existence; they maintain cautious links with the Trusts, cooperating on matters of mutual interest.Interstellar travel via quantum teleportation is possible, but difficult and hugely expensive; each launch is enormously energy-intensive, consuming a medium-sized ice asteroid. The Trusts and the asteroid dwellers collaborate to send a large scientific expedition to the planet Isis, the only world found so far to possess a complex biota. A significantly older world than Earth, Isis features a rich ecology which is - like Earth's - DNA-based. However, Isian life violently outcompetes terrestrial biology; any exposure to Isian microorganisms causes death within hours. The human research stations on Isis and the expedition's HQ in orbit must be kept sealed and sterile, with elaborate anti-contamination countermeasure. The world is nonetheless deemed worthy of intensive investigation, as understanding an entire evolutionary process parallel to Earth's could provide important biological insights.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Dean_Keeps_Breaking_Up_with_Me"title="Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me">
"Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me" is set in Berkeley, California. It follows Frederica Riley, or Freddy—a 17-year-old lesbian of a mixed East Asian and white background—as she struggles in her relationship with her girlfriend, Laura Dean. Portrayed as a popular and aloof "cool girl", Laura continually breaks up with Freddy, only to start their romantic relationship up again whenever the former desires. While focusing on a way to prevent a further break up, Freddy inadvertently distances herself from her social circle, which includes Buddy, Eric, and her best friend Doodle, by repeatedly neglecting her friendships with them. Distressed about her relationship struggles, Freddy seeks out answers as to why Dean keeps breaking up with her. Freddy receives relationship advice from the Seek-Her, a local medium recommended to her by Doodle; from Vi, a potential crush of hers; and from Anna Vice, a relationship advice columnist.After continuously and inadvertently distancing herself from her friends, Buddy strongly suggests to Freddy that she should "talk" to Doodle. Following this, Doodle admits to Freddy that she became pregnant after having sex with a married man, and that she intends to have an abortion. Freddy plans to go with Doodle to her abortion clinic appointment, and tells Laura that she won't be able to see her on her birthday. Freddy later receives a text from Laura concerning an emergency. As a result, Freddy visits Laura and is told that there is no emergency. Rather, Laura explains that for her birthday, she wanted to see Freddy, despite her earlier assurance that Freddy's absence would be alright. Freddy is taken aback, and as people begin showing up at Laura's home, Freddy leaves to go to Doodle's appointment. Following the appointment, Freddy consoles Doodle at the latter's home. Freddy then finally receives an email response from Anna Vice, who advises Freddy to ask herself what her love for Laura offers in regard to being a better person. Ultimately, Freddy visits Laura in the aftermath of her birthday party, where she breaks up with Laura. Surprised and angered by this, Laura lashes out and curses at Freddy while in tears. The novel ends with visuals of Freddy and Doodle dancing at their prom paired with a final email from Freddy to Anna Vice, where she expresses her choosing to be "things that are something other than the ex-girlfriend of Laura Dean."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_in_Marseille"title="Romance in Marseille">
The story opens on Lafala in a hospital in New York after his legs have been amputated. Readers learn that he is a sailor from English West Africa, and that he had been forced to stow away on a liner after a prostitute named Aslima robs him. After he is caught by the shipping line and imprisoned in a freezing "bunker" (a WC), his legs become frostbitten and must later be amputated. After a lawyer hears about Lafala's case and encourages him to sue the shipping line for mistreatment, Lafala wins a massive legal payout and is catapulted into wealth. He acquires prosthetic legs and returns to Marseille.Upon his return, Lafala again pursues a relationship with Aslima despite her betrayal. He is now one of the wealthy patrons of the port city, but his affair also leads to tension between Aslima and her pimp, as well as further troubles with the authorities. Seeking retribution, the shipping line conspires with the French police to jail Lafala for "stowing away for profit." While Lafala is later freed, he becomes cynical and determines to return to his native home in West Africa. Though he initially invites Aslima to return to West Africa with him, Lafala ultimately leaves her. At the end of the novel, Aslima is killed in a fight with her jealous pimp: "He shot the remaining bullets into her body, cursing and calling upon hell to swallow her soul."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Four"title="Six Four">
The novel opens with Mikami and his wife Minako meeting with a regional captain to examine a body of a young female that could be his daughter, Ayumi, who had run away from home. The body is not his daughter's.The next day, Mikami dwells on his current job in Media Relations at the police headquarters and plans to eventually return to his former post in Criminal Investigations. At the office, he finds that members of the press have congregated to ask that Mikami release the name of the female driver involved in a fatal car accident because they are making a stand on anonymity. Mikami then goes to Akama's office, where he is informed of a special visit from the commissioner general to the family of the Six Four case, a fourteen-year-old kidnapping case of a young girl that is regarded as the police department’s biggest failure. Mikami visits the father of the victim, Amamiya, but he refuses to allow the visit.Back in his office, Mikami learns that the press club is submitting a written protest to the captain for the release of the woman’s name. To distract them from the issue, Mikami meets with a member of the press club and tells him about bid-rigging charges against Hakkaku Construction. His plan fails, and the press club goes to deliver the protest to the captain. Mikami physically blocks their way, and they subsequently declare their intention to boycott the commissioner’s visit. Mikami visits Criminal Investigations and unexpectedly finds out about a gag order, which makes him suspicious.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Wasteland"title="On the Wasteland">
When Betony first arrives at Brackenbury Children's Home, the other children sense her independent ways and see the rings in her ears, and assign her the name of 'Gypsy.' Not used to being around kids her own age, and feeling very vulnerable after so much loss, she establishes a loner self among her classmates. On her own she explores the 'Wasteland', nearby salt marshes fed by the North Sea. In her internal world she is open and listening, and one day while she's digging around she digs much deeper than usual as if possessed, and discovers an immovable object made of wood. Her shovel breaks off a part of that object, which she carries with her from that point on.Carrying the wooden splint with her, she first begins to see the Viking ship itself, back when the North Sea came farther inland as a wide river and the pool was an actual port. She slips into the experience of being lashed to the deck for safety as a child when her Danish Viking raider family came over to East Anglia. The ship and its inhabitants become her internal fascination, and she wills herself to go deeper into the feeling of those lives. She finds books on the area's history and sees ships just like that of her vision, during the period when the Vikings raiders became traders and neighbours to the Saxon residents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marseille_Caper"title="The Marseille Caper">
Set in Marseille, and part of the Sam Levitt Capers series, "The Marseille Caper" follows Sam Lewitt a corporate lawyer turned "fixer" and his interactions with locals amidst a mysterious property deal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic_(Cook_novel)"title="Pandemic (Cook novel)">
A seemingly healthy woman with a transplanted heart suffers from acute respiratory distress and dies on the New York subway. Jack Stapleton, a medical examiner and a character frequently appearing in Cook's novels, does the autopsy and suspects that the death could be due to a flu-like virus. While investigating the mysterious heart transplant of the dead woman, he finds out a larger conspiracy. He meets Wei Zao, a Chinese billionaire businessman who holds a double Ph.D. in molecular biology and genetics. Further cases of flu-like virus get reported in many other parts of the world and Jack determines to stop the pandemic from spreading.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Hotel"title="The Glass Hotel">
Paul is a lonely student at the University of Toronto. At a nightclub, he gives some tablets to some people he is hoping to befriend and one of them dies shortly after. Paul flees to the apartment of his half-sister Vincent.Five years later, Paul and Vincent work at a hotel on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island in the fictional Caiette, which is based on the real hamlet Quatsino. Some graffiti is discovered written on a window in the lobby with an acid marker, saying, "Why don't you swallow broken glass". Paul is immediately suspected and soon fired. The graffiti would appear to be intended for Jonathan Alkaitis, a wealthy investor who owns the hotel. Vincent, who is working the bar, soon enters into a relationship with Alkaitis and moves into his house in Connecticut. Her life becomes one of extreme wealth and accommodating her partner.Alkaitis is arrested and it is revealed that his investment success is a Ponzi scheme. His complicit staff react in different ways to their impending demise. One flees the country, another writes an elaborate confession. Alkaitis is sentenced to 170 years in prison, where he dreams of a "counter-life" in which he escaped to a hotel in Dubai. He is often haunted by the people he defrauded.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_(novel)"title="Brendan (novel)">
"Brendan" is a reimagining of the life of Brendan the Navigator, a fifth century Irish saint, ‘born in 484 in what is now Tralee, Ireland’, whose entrance into the world, as recalled by Bishop Erc, was attended by a miracle: the spontaneous combustion of a patch of nearby woodland. Erc's decision to set aside the life of the new-born child in service of the “new faith” sees Brendan separated from his parents, Finnloag and Cara, and raised ‘to the glory of the new and true grand God’, at the school of Abbot Jarlath. Equipped with Latin and accompanied by his childhood friend, Finn, the adolescent Brendan is sent out on a mission to bring a blessing to the castle at Cashel, where a new king is to be crowned. Their journey is interrupted, however, when they are intercepted by a druidic tribe, who, unimpressed by Brendan's protective bishop's ring, insist upon bringing them to the court of their own king, Bauheen. Bauheen's health problems, particularly his inability to walk, appear to be miraculously healed by the young monk, whose Christ-like command, ‘”walk!”’, is obeyed by the king, to the astonishment of all onlookers. The conversion of both the king and his subjects seems the natural response to this extraordinary happening, and this small kingdom is brought out from the “old faith” and into the “new”.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Leaving_Mr._Mackenzie"title="After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie">
Part OneFrom her cheap hotel on the Quai des Grands-Augustins, Julia Martin inhabits "Rive Gauche" Paris, lunching alone in a German restaurant in the rue de la Huchette, drinking Pernod, wine and anything else. Locked in her room, she reads most of the time.Though attractive at thirty-six, she feels past her prime, fatigued and fatalistic. After a failed early marriage roaming Europe and the death of a baby, she had drifted to Paris during the "Années folles". She has survived for six months on 300 francs a week from ex-lover Mr Mackenzie, posted each Tuesday by high-handed solicitor Henri Legros. One Tuesday Maître Legros writes informing Julia he is instructed to terminate the allowance, enclosing final payment of 1,500 francs. That evening she follows Mr Mackenzie down the Boulevard du Montparnasse to Restaurant Albert. She sits at his table, pours herself wine from his carafe and confronts him. She ends saying she doesn't want his severance cheque, slaps him lightly around the face with her glove and walks out.From a nearby table Englishman George Horsfield has watched the incident. When Julia exits, Mr Horsfield follows and befriends her, buys her a drink in another café and takes her to a cinema. Afterwards, seeing her cry, the awkward Mr Horsfield invites her to his hotel to talk. He pours whiskey and she describes fragments of her life since leaving London the February after the 1918 armistice a decade or so earlier. When Mr Horsfield asks if she is stuck for money, she takes from her purse two ten franc notes and some coins, saying that is all she has. She recounts to him her rejection of Mr Mackenzie's severance cheque (which Mr Horsfield had witnessed in Restaurant Albert). Mr Horsfield gives her another 1,500 francs, suggests she visit London and jots down his address there.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tranquility_(novel)"title="Tranquility (novel)">
In final years of the communist Hungarian People's Republic, writer Andor Weér–the novel's narrator–lives in dysfunction with his mother, Rebeka Weér. Rebeka is a former celebrated actress who has not left their Budapest apartment in fifteen years. Andor's father was a theatre critic and a former member of the ÁVH secret police who defected to the West after the 1956 revolution. Andor's twin sister, Judit, a talented violinist, fled Hungary fifteen years earlier. This betrayal and Rebeka's inability to lure Judit back to Hungary caused the authorities to deny Rebeka leading stage roles. Rebeka performs a symbolic burial of Judit and refused to go outside of their apartment. Judit committed suicide, but Andor keeps her death a secret and sends letters to Rebeka in her name. Rebeka is a crazed woman who has a strong emotional hold over Andor that verges on Oedipal. He wishes to escape his mother's maniacal control, but worries about leaving her alone. Andor quickly falls in love with Eszter Fehé, a troubled young Romanian woman with a mysterious past. The two met on the Liberty Bridge. Eszter helps Andor type his works and get a publishing deal for his book. The editor of the publisher is an older woman who Andor eventually begins a crude sexual and Oedipal relationship with. He later learns the woman was his father's mistress when his father was an agent of the secret police. Andor's love for Eszter is further complicated by her past. The novel begins with Rebeka's funeral, and progresses through the past with a nonlinear narrative structure.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matigari_ma_Njiruungi"title="Matigari ma Njiruungi">
The story begins with Matigari burying his weapons under a fig tree. After killing his oppressor, Howard Williams, he vows to resolve conflicts peacefully from now on. Before returning home, however, he wants to find his people.He seems to have been away for a longer time, as he marvels at the changes he sees: people are now driving their own cars, and the city has grown considerably. He decides to start looking for his people at a factory. However, he is appalled when he discovers that some children pay an entrance fee to rummage through the garbage at a dump. One boy fights another for a shoelace, so he intervenes and chases the bully away. The other boy, Muriuki, then leads him to a scrap yard, explaining that the children here use old cars for shelter. When Matigari tries to get to them, they throw stones at him until he becomes unconscious.A factory worker named Ngaruro comes to Matigari's aid, bringing him to a cooler place where he can recover from his injuries. On the way, Matigari tells Ngaruro the story how he killed Mr. Williams for oppressing and exploiting the people: He wanted to kill Mr. Williams when he was on the telephone, when his servant, Mr. Boy, came in and jumped on his back. Seeing that he would not stand a chance against two people, Matigari escaped with Mr. Williams chasing him. Eventually, however, Matigari was able to kill Williams in the mountains. Hearing the name Williams, Ngaruro mentions that the factory owner goes by the same name and that the name of his deputy is Boy. Matigari thinks this is a coincidence.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_(book)"title="Bird (book)">
The book narrates the story of a young black boy named Mehkai. His nickname is Bird, given to him by his Grandad. However, when his granddad passes away, Mehkai grows close to his grandad's best friend named Uncle Son. Together they go to the park, feed pigeons, tell stories, and drink coffee.Bird loves to draw to remember and better understand things in his life. His favorite thing to draw is, of course, birds. Flashing back in time, Bird describes his brother Marcus who was a graffiti artist that taught him to draw. However, Marcus introduces difficulties to the plot by becoming distant and showing signs of drug abuse. Bird doesn't quite understand what is happening to his brother and wants to spend more time with him, but Marcus is adamant in telling Bird to continue to go to school. One day, Bird finds Marcus in bed showing withdrawal symptoms. He is confused and worried for his brother. Marcus lessens his appearance at the house and one day robs the house of its expensive belongings. His father explains to Bird that Marcus is suffering from a sickness and that he is no longer allowed home. Bird finds it difficult to obey his parents and speaks to Marcus at the front door when their parents aren't home. Turning to Granddad for advice, Bird learns that "'some broken things can't be fixed". When Marcus passes away and Granddad shortly after, Uncle Son and Bird begin to go to the park every week. During these outings, Bird learns to find peace with the loss of his brother and his Grandfather, and he continues to draw in hopes to learn from his experiences and never forget.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Be_Taught,_if_Fortunate"title="To Be Taught, if Fortunate">
"To Be Taught, if Fortunate" follows four astronauts as they travel beyond the Solar System on a research mission to document extraterrestrial life on four planets. The explorers are put into suspended animation for extended periods of time while they travel between the planets. The book chronicles their adventures and explores how they decide what is important to them. As they leave the second planet, they realize that they have received no communication from Earth for months; as they arrive at the fourth, they receive a message indicating that a natural disaster has crippled Earth's technological capability, rendering them potentially the last astronauts. They decide to send a message back to Earth to ask whether they should return as planned, or head outward to explore more planets; if they never receive an answer, they will remain in suspended animation indefinitely.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bride_and_Groom_(book)"title="Bride and Groom (book)">
The novel begins by introducing the main characters, Marat and Patya, through a series of events within Dagestan, Russia. Marat is a human rights lawyer who is working on solving a murder case, and Patya is a 25-year-old woman who is worried that she will not be able to find a husband soon. Marat and Patya have similar families—both of which want them to find a spouse and get married as quickly as possible. Both families also observe the Islamic faith and share similar political beliefs, disliking what a central shady political character, Khalilbek, is doing within the government. Rumors and whispers of Khalilbek's wrongdoings pepper the community. Some, however, love Khalilbek, and claim he has done much for the community, disregarding the fact that he was in jail for the murder of a young man, who was ran over by him in the middle of the night, for some reason. The people who love Khalilbek create a very dystopic idea of the society they live in, blindly and wholeheartedly embrace him without any doubt of character, making his status near godhood.Marat and Patya meet at a concert which was supposed to celebrate his release- and both detest the concert. The two make an instant connection when they meet, and become romantic interests of one another. Marat attends a wedding at which an old lady cursed the attendants. While Marat's mother is continuously trying to set him up with a potential wife, Patya tries to sever ties with an unwanted suitor, namely the aggressive Timur. Marat's mother shows continual desire for Marat to get married, going to great lengths to encourage him. After attending a fortune teller session at the request of his mother, Marat stumbles across a scene in which an agnostic friend of his has been killed. He discusses this, among other things, with Patya at a diner. Word quickly spreads about the couple eating at the diner, and Marat's mother does not approve of the choice in partner Marat has made. Suddenly, Marat hears of a raid on his law firm, so he plans to travel to Moscow at his next opportunity to try to salvage any important work left untouched. After Patya refuses to marry Timur, who her mother suggests, she meets up with Marat before he leaves for Moscow. Marat asks her to be his wife to which she agrees. Patya's news was not received well with her family when she told them about the proposal. After leaving Patya, Marat met a stranger on the street who informed him of some of the reasonings behind Khalilbek's seemingly corrupt deeds among other things. Their conversation gives Marat new perspectives on the events of his life, and he felt his happiness become more pronounced. On the day of the wedding, Marat does not show up. Patya and her family are told that Marat has been taken by the police under the false accusation that he is a religious extremist. Patya leaves her house when nobody is watching and gets on a train headed for the shore. In the final scene, Marat is depicted to be beaten up in an interrogation room, slipping in and out of his real surroundings and a beachside conversation with Khalilbek.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squeeze_Me_(novel)"title="Squeeze Me (novel)">
## Part One: Get A Grip.On January 23, Katherine ”Kiki" Sparling Pew Fitzsimmons (72) wanders onto the grounds of the exclusive Lipid Estate in Palm Beach after dinner during the annual "White Ibis Ball" to benefit victims of IBS. When she fails to return, a search of the grounds finds only her purse, an empty martini glass, and a rose-colored tablet of Ecstasy, bitten in half, littered next to the koi pond. Fitzsimmons's best friend, Fay Alex Riptoad, demands that Palm Beach Chief of Police Jerry Crosby devote his department's entire resources to finding her. Crosby has little choice but to comply, knowing that Fitzsimmons, Riptoad, and five other widowed Palm Beach socialites co-founded the "POTUS Pussies" (shortened to "Potussies" for media purposes); besides their considerable combined wealth, the women are all fiercely loyal supporters of the President of the United States, and frequent guests at his nearby "Winter White House", Casa Bellicosa.The following night, Lipid Estate's manager, Tripp Teabull, anxiously summons wildlife control expert Angela "Angie" Armstrong to deal with an 18-foot Burmese python that appeared on the grounds during the annual "Stars And SARS Ball." Since the snake (identified by her size as a female) cannot be removed from the tree she is occupying without drawing attention unless she is dead, Teabull reluctantly permits Angie to decapitate her with a machete. After Angie has removed the snake's corpse, Teabull belatedly makes the connection between Fitzsimmons's disappearance and the bulge in the python's stomach. Terrified of the negative publicity if the truth comes out, Teabull hires two amateur burglars to break into Angie's apartment, and then her rented storage freezer, stealing the snake's corpse before Angie can turn it over to the state wildlife authorities for dissection.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iliac_Crest"title="The Iliac Crest">
The novel opens to an unnamed man reflecting on why he let a woman into his house on a dark and stormy night. The woman introduces herself as Amparo Dávila, and the narrator takes particular interest in her prominent hip bone, though he cannot remember this bone's name. Amparo approaches the narrator and claims that he used to be a tree, which greatly confuses him. Later that night, the narrator reveals that he was actually waiting for a different woman, who he refers to as the Betrayed; they were planning to end their relationship for good that night. The Betrayed shows up late and faints immediately upon arrival. Amparo begins to care for her and unpacks the Betrayed's possessions, saying that she will need to stay there for her recovery.After a few days at the narrator's house, the narrator notices that Amparo is writing something, which she says is about her own disappearance. He begins to observe the two women and comes to the conclusion that they have created their own language structured around the word "glu." Amparo eventually asks him about his work at Serenity Shores Sanatorium, increasing his suspicions. One night, he decides to drug her in order to try to get answers out of her. She reveals that she is looking for information on a man who could have stolen a manuscript for her. The narrator recalls that the man tried to organize the terminally ill patients to demand death rather than life at the hospital, and he eventually committed suicide. Amparo says that she has not truly written since the day the man stole her manuscript. The narrator later goes to work and makes a deal with two women that he will give them a ride on a later night in exchange for permission to search through the records. He finds the man's files, which name him Juan Escutia. The narrator also stumbles upon Amparo's lost manuscript in the archives but does not reveal this to Amparo.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_of_Laughter_(novel)"title="The Son of Laughter (novel)">
Buechner relays the well-known Genesis narrative from the perspective of his protagonist, Jacob, whose reminiscences on his life are rendered somewhat cloudy by his considerable age.Beginning in Mesopotamia, the narrator recounts his sojourn in the house of his uncle, Laban – a wealthy livestock owner, and worshipper of local deities. Jacob’s attempt to marry Laban’s beautiful youngest daughter, Rachel, is thwarted by his uncle, who tricks him into a union with his older daughter, Leah. Following several further years in the house of Laban, Jacob makes off with his wives, much of his uncle’s livestock, and, unbeknown to him hidden in Rachel’s tent, his household Gods.Following an emotional confrontation with Laban, the young man is faced with the uncertainty of meeting his estranged elder brother, Esau, whose birth right the younger brother had previously stolen. Reflecting on the meeting that will take place the following day, as Jacob takes a night walk along the banks of the ford of Jabbok he is met by a mysterious figure, with whom he wrestles until early morning. Demanding that the figure bless him before taking his leave, Jacob realises that the man is not a man, but an angelic being. Against all prediction, Esau welcomes his brother with open arms, and allows him safe passage through his lands; Jacob’s rejection of the Mesopotamian gods in favour of his father Isaac’s god, ‘The Fear’, appears to have served him well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_the_Dark_Valley"title="Return to the Dark Valley">
The novel is split into two parts and an epilogue. Part I ("Theory of Suffering Bodies" or "Figures Emerging from the Wreckage") serves the purpose of both introducing characters slowly as well as introducing the world in which the main plot takes place. When the Consul is speaking, the main plot is slowly revealed, but his narrative is broken up by Manuela's story told in a journal to her psychiatrist, Tertullian's expositions on his life, and the Consul's own biography on Arthur Rimbaud. In Part I, the reader is exposed to Manuela's dark history of sexual abuse and constant use of drugs and alcohol to numb her pain. As she progresses, she finds poetry as another escape from her past. Also found in Part I is Tertullian's eccentric narrative on his history which serves the purpose of persuading the Consul that he is in fact the son of the Pope and introducing the reader to his convoluted past. His narration also reveals his affinity for and mastery of torturing others and his history of schizophrenia. The Rimbaud biography gives an account of the well-known poet's ill-illumined life, from his early years to his death. His story serves as a constant, poetic theme that connects the stories of each of the other characters and adds another level of depth and richness to the story. As the Consul narrates the present, he begins in Rome, but he quickly receives a mysterious text from his old friend, Juana, that tells him to travel to Madrid and rent a hotel room while awaiting her arrival. So, he does so, and his story continues on in Spain. When he lands in Madrid, he discovers that the Boko Haram terrorist group has attacked the Irish embassy in Spain and is holding a large number of hostages. He becomes restless while awaiting Juana and keeping track of the hostage situation, so he finally goes out and explores the city, reminiscing on his past times of living and studying in the city. As he sits at a bar/restaurant, he observes a domestic dispute between what he perceives as two lovers engaging in an extra-marital affair, so he decides to step in to protect the woman. He is beaten severely by the man accompanying her, but after he manages to knock him out with an ashtray, the woman attacks him and renders him unconscious. He wakes upon in a hospital-prison hybrid, and after a short while, is joined in his room by Ferdinand Palacio, a former priest turned armed militant. Part I ends with the Consul narrating Palacio's life as he told it to him. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quality_of_Mercy_(Unsworth_novel)"title="The Quality of Mercy (Unsworth novel)">
The sequel "The Quality of Mercy" is set in 1767, Kemp has brought the remainder of the crew who are in Newgate Prison and await the trial. But an Irish fiddler has managed to escape and heads to Durham to tell Billy Blair's mining family of his death in Florida. The insurance case is rejected but the piracy and mutiny trial finds the crew as guilty and they are hanged. Meanwhile, Kemp plans to invest in a mine and heads to Durham to the same village that Sullivan is travelling to. But Kemp falls in love with Jane Ashton as his compassion and sympathy grows.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Their_Majesties'_Bucketeers"title="Their Majesties' Bucketeers">
"Their Majesties' Bucketeers" is a novel in which Offe Woom investigates the death of a professor on a world inhabited by trisexual tripedal aliens.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jews_of_Silence"title="The Jews of Silence">
For two weeks in September 1965 during the Jewish High Holidays, Wiesel visited five cities in the Soviet Union to learn about the condition of Soviet Jewry in the post-Stalin era. Wiesel "concludes that despite the remorseless propaganda and harsh exactions of the government, soviet Jews still feel they share in the purpose and destiny of the Jewish people." At the end of the work, Wiesel elucidates the meaning of the book's title with his admonition of world Jewry's lack of advocacy on behalf of their Soviet coreligionists: "What torments me most is not the Jews of silence I met in Russia, but the silence of the Jews I live among today."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spill_(book)"title="Spill (book)">
A lethal biological weapon has leaked from a crashed tanker truck in Yellowstone National Park. PetroDyne Chemical, the company manufacturing the substance banned by international treaty, sends the tanker from its headquarters in Denver to a storage facility in Idaho. The genetically engineered form of hemorrhagic fever has spilled into a waterway and has infected wildlife and humans in a popular camping area in the small town of West Yellowstone, Montana. The driver responsible for the spill has been paid by a rogue employee of the company to divert the shipment to the hills of Yellowstone.Agents for PetroDyne work with local government officials who are aware of the transport of hazardous chemicals by the company to cover up the incident. The coverup involves finding any survivors of the spill, quarantining them, observing them, and even worse, allowing them to die and incinerating the bodies. The head of PetroDyne Corporation, a man named Schreiber who works at the company headquarters in Denver, directs a loyal employee named Alec Reisman and a half-mad hitman named Skanz to clean up the mess that was created.Jack Fairchild is the Park Ranger who finds the truck driver who caused the spill, and other survivors, and must overcome all obstacles to free them from the grasp of PetroDyne’s security team.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Valley_Road"title="Hidden Valley Road">
Hidden Valley Road is a true story about an American family with twelve children, 6 of whom are diagnosed with schizophrenia. The oldest child, Don Galvin, was born in 1945, and the youngest, Mary (who later changed her name to Lindsay) was born in 1965. By the mid 1970s, six of the ten boys were diagnosed with schizophrenia. The Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health, with their DNA samples and experiences forming the cornerstone of research for the disease in the mid-1900s. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Providence_(Barry_novel)"title="Providence (Barry novel)">
Humans have been exploring other star systems for some time, prior to encountering another race of intelligent space travelers. The aliens are hostile, and war broke out seven years prior to the departure of the warship "Providence", and its crew of four, composed of Gilly, Talia, Anders, and Jackson. The crew were partially chosen for the attractive image they will project in the social media messages they transmit back to the home front, while a computer actually runs the ship. Two years into the mission, after the ship has already destroyed one alien colony, mental instability begins to affect the crew.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Emperox"title="The Last Emperox">
With news spreading of the predicted total collapse of the Flow streams connecting the star systems of the Interdependency and the unavoidable resulting fall of the empire, the Interdependency system of End has become crucial as the only one with a planet able to sustain life outside of a closed habitat. The disgraced House of Nohamapetan has taken control of End and blockaded its only remaining incoming Flow stream to maximize power and profits for their House and to prevent an unsustainable surge of billions of refugees to the planet.Back in the Hub planet system, Emperox Grayland II consults with her Memory Room – the recorded thoughts and emotional states of every single previous emperox – in search of an unlikely solution to save the entire population of the Interdependency. She plans to break the Nohamapetan blockade of End via a predicted new "evanescent" Flow stream into the End system. Meanwhile Marce Claremont, a scientific advisor and eventual secret fiancé to Grayland, discovers a possible new method for controlling the evanescent Flow streams which may allow for the transport of whole habitats to the End system, thus preventing an overburden on the planet itself.Meanwhile, Kiva Lagos – the imperially-appointed administrator of the House of Nohamapetan – discovers and warns Grayland that Nadashe Nohamapetan and Grayland's own House of Wu are plotting to depose Grayland and implement a plan to preserve the Noble Houses at the expense of the general populace. Grayland and Kiva devise a counterplot to infiltrate the conspirators, but Nadashe, who has enlisted many sympathetic Noble Houses to aid her plot and endorse her as the next Emperox, kidnaps Kiva and holds her hostage. Grayland discovers that her Memory Room is, in fact, the singular still-living consciousness of the first Emperox – Rachela I. Grayland enlists her aid in defeating the coup and saving the people of the Interdependency but eventually succumbs to an assassination attempt orchestrated by Nadashe.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomon_(novel)"title="Gnomon (novel)">
In a near future United Kingdom, now governed by a continuous direct democracy called the System, all of Britain is under constant surveillance by the omniscient AI called "The Witness." The Witness AI is purported to be completely impartial, doing nothing "unless public safety requires it. [...] It cannot be hacked, cracked, disabled or distorted. It sees, it understands, and very occasionally it acts, but otherwise it is resolutely invisible." Mielikki Neith is an Inspector of the Witness Programme—the "prosecutorial ombudsmen to the surveillance state, reviewing and considering any case that passes a given threshold of intervention."Neith is tasked with investigating the death of 61-year-old luddite and "writer of obscurantist magical realist novels" Diana Hunter. Hunter has died mysteriously while in Witness custody following her interrogation, a process where Hunter's memories were forcibly extracted.In investigating Hunter's house, Neith discovers that Hunter's house is completely disconnected from the Witness by a Faraday cage. She is assaulted by a mysterious androgynous figure who claims to be named Regno Lönnrot. Without access to the Witness, Neith cannot positively identify Lönnrot, nor can she tell how Lönnrot gained access to Hunter's house.Neith quickly finds that Hunter's memories are a seemingly impossible maze of other lives/narratives. In one narrative/memory thread, Neith sees the life of Greek investment banker Constantine Kyriakos in the early 21st century where he has a fateful encounter with a great white shark. In another, Neith sees the 5th century alchemist lover of Augustine of Hippo, Athenais Karthagonensis, as she endeavors to uncover the secrets of a chamber that could lead to the fabled Alcahest following the death of her son. In yet another, Neith sees Ethiopian painter Berihun Bekele, who lives in London in the early 21st century and assists his granddaughter Annie with the development of a video game, "Witnessed," that bears striking resemblance to Neith's actual world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_Shadows"title="Out of Shadows">
In 1983, thirteen-year-old Robert Jacklin arrives from England at Haven School, an elite boys' boarding school in Zimbabwe. He is the son of a British intellectual attached to the British Embassy. Robert befriends Nelson Ndube, one of the few black pupils at the school, but eventually turns to the white elite of the school instead in an effort to find safety and acceptances. Many of the white students, particularly Ivan Hascott, are racist bullies who are still angered that the country's white minority lost power to the its black majority after the recent civil war. Robert wrestles with his conscience while becoming drawn into their ideology and practices. Ivan's family has suffered during Robert Mugabe's rise to power, and Ivan pressures Robert into joining his quest for revenge on black Africans. Robert becomes disturbed by Ivan's increasingly violent behavior.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsidian_(novel)"title="Obsidian (novel)">
As DreadfulWater investigates the murder of a Reality TV producer he begins to suspect he is investigating a murderer who killed his girlfriend, years ago.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_Black_(novel)"title="Bone Black (novel)">
When her twin sister Raven visits her she and her hero Wren Strongeagle visit a bar, for a scheduled event, only to disappear when she goes to the washroom. Her reports of her disappearance are discounted by the police, who tell her that Raven probably met someone and left for a sexual encounter. Frustrated by police inaction, Strongeagle tracking down and kills serial killers who are preying on First Nations women.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albatross_(novel)"title="Albatross (novel)">
Hero Adam Coryell unexpectedly finds himself to be a golf prodigy. Unfortunately he wants to be a writer, and he hates golf. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_Emperor_(novel)"title="For the Emperor (novel)">
Commissar Ciaphas Cain, a famed member of the Imperial Guard, and his aide-de-camp Gunner First Class Jurgen are transferred to the Valhallan 296th-301st, a composite Guard unit in transit aboard a spaceship, formed from the remnants of the Valhallan 296th and 301st Regiments after both sustained grievous losses. He is introduced to Colonel Kasteen and Major Broklaw, the highest-ranking officers from both regiments. Cain discovers that tensions between the members of the two regiments are rising rapidly due to clashing centuries-old traditions. The tension comes to a head when a riot breaks out in a mess hall, with multiple casualties within the both regiments and the ship's crew.With some luck and wit, Cain manages to defuse the situation, placating the angered ship crew and forging new unity between the Guardsmen of the Valhallan 597th, formed from the merger of the 296th and 301st. Members of the 597th responsible for the riot are sentenced to undertake suicide missions in the future.Some time later, the 597th are assigned to the backwater planet of Gravalax as a show of force since the planet's locals have begun to defect to the Tau, a race of expansionist aliens. At a diplomatic event organised by Planetary Governor Grice, a Tau diplomat is assassinated, causing tensions to rise. Nearly immediately after, conflict breaks out across the capital, with civilian rioters and Planetary Defence Force troops fighting against and on the side of both Imperial and Tau forces. Cain and Lord General Zyvan are able to discover the presence of a conspiracy on Gravalax to initiate conflict between the Tau and the Imperium to unknown ends. During an operation to suppress the chaos, Cain and the convicted members of the 597th are recruited by Ordo Xenos Inquisitor Amberly Vail to go on a reconnaissance mission to the underground depths of Gravalax's capital city to uncover the conspiracy, where they join forces with a Tau unit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th_Christmas"title="19th Christmas">
Christmas is coming upon San Francisco. Detective Sgt. Lindsay Boxer, her family, and her friends of the Women's Murder Club have much to celebrate. Crime is down. The courts are slow and the medical examiner's office is quiet. Journalist Cindy Thomas is working on a story about the true meaning of Christmas in San Francisco. Then a series of crimes and threats of horrific crimes to come put the entire police force into nonstop action. At first, all they have is a name, "Loman," behind the threats. It takes until Christmas before enough pieces come together to find enough to hope to pinpoint where Loman can be caught.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Storm_(Buechner_novel)"title="The Storm (Buechner novel)">
A reworking of William Shakespeare's "The Tempest", "The Storm" follows the fortunes of Kenzie Maxwell, a wealthy soon-to-be septuagenarian with a complicated past. Retired to a secluded and wealthy island in the State of Florida with his third wife, Willow, Kenzie dwells on the consequences of his midlife crisis. Though twenty years have passed since his affair with a young graffiti artist, Kia, the ramifications of the relationship are seemingly permanent: an irrevocably altered life trajectory, lasting shame and regret, and an irreconcilable conflict with his only brother.Twenty years previously, Kenzie's increasing sense of purposelessness drove him to seek further meaning beyond his own opulent lifestyle as a successful writer. Having cast about for a productive and charitable outlet, the middle-aged Kenzie had settled at last upon the Alodians mission, a charitable organisation chaired by his older brother, Dalton. Serving the charity in the South Bronx as the editor of their newsletter, Kenzie had earnestly set about to document the sad stories of the homeless and abandoned individuals that frequented the mission, only to meet and fall in love with the seventeen-year-old Kia.Following a brief and clandestine affair, Kia is found dead, having prematurely given birth to Kenzie's child in the impoverished surroundings of a tenement flat with few amenities. Kenzie, who was unaware of the pregnancy, had subsequently written a distraught letter of confession to his brother. While struggling to come to terms with the responsibility of raising his newly-born daughter, Bree, Kenzie is stunned by his brother’s decision to publish his private confession in the mission newsletter, thereby breaking the news of the scandal, and bringing public disgrace upon himself and, more importantly, his daughter and her mother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Hero"title="The War Hero">
The novel follows a sixty-five year old man on his birthday (Mr. Lidman), who is throwing a party at his cottage in the countryside. Among the guests are his Daughter (Marian) and her three friends (Ethel, Margo and Ben), Lidman's friend (Larry) from the NCA (National Coin Association), Lidman's next door neighbor (Mrs. Betrage), and a mysterious stranger who everyone assumes is a plus-one of one of the guests. When eventually confronted in private by Lidman, the stranger explains he has been hired to murder him, but makes a deal, allowing Lidman to enjoy his birthday party till the end of the night, the novel continues as a battle of wits between the two men.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Silver's_Past"title="Miss Silver's Past">
Karel Leden works at a publisher's in Communist Czechoslovakia. He meets Lenka Silver, a Jewish woman with a mysterious past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Kings_in_Sharakhai"title="Twelve Kings in Sharakhai">
For four hundred years, the Twelve Kings of Sharakhai have ruled the Great Shangazi desert. They are immortal, ruthless and powerful. No hope exists of freedom under their oppressive rule. Or so it seems, until Çedamihn Ahyanesh'ala, a brave woman who fights in the fighting pits as the White Wolf, defies the King's laws and goes outside on the holy night of Beht Za'hir and discovers a secret that may well be the end of the Kings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forgetting_Moon"title="The Forgetting Moon">
A young boy, Nail, is orphaned and subsequently raised by a retired warrior named Shawcroft. Unbeknownst to him, he is part of a much larger plot that involves war and power struggles across the Five Isles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Academic_Question"title="An Academic Question">
Caroline 'Caro' Grimstone is the wife of a sociology professor in a small West Country university town. While her husband is fascinated by dinner parties discussing African anthropology and minor academic points, Caro is growing tired of her dull village and her pale marriage, as well as their unpleasant 4-year-old daughter. A dying missionary, Reverend Stillingfleet, ends up in a nearby nursing home, and Caro's husband Alan realises that Stillingfleet possesses an unpublished manuscript on their shared field of anthropology. Concerned that the manuscript will be lost - or worse bequeathed to a rival - Alan convinces Caro to steal the manuscript, allowing him to write a groundbreaking paper.Caro begins to regret the theft, as well as developing suspicions that Alan is having an affair with his attractive editor. She seeks out the guidance of her friends Kitty, a self-absorbed English woman who has spent much of her adult life in the Caribbean, Kitty's effete, gossipy son Coco, and her sister Dolly, a spinster who cares for a large family of hedgehogs in her back garden. Ultimately, Caro is able to reconcile her marriage with Alan when he comes to regret his affair. The manuscript, which has caused so much chaos, is destroyed in a library fire accidentally started by protesting students.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Few_Green_Leaves"title="A Few Green Leaves">
Anthropologist Emma Howick arrives in a small English village in the late 1970s, wanting to write a piece on how village life has changed (or not changed). Emma spends her days trying to examine the residents, treating them as subjects for her paper, including the vicar and his sister, the feuding local doctors and their wives, a food critic, and the resident spinsters and bohemians. Emma ponders whether she could adjust permanently to village life, and notes the changes that time has wrought on local customs. Among them are the decline of the manor house, which was once the site of regular gatherings for locals, but is now off limits, and the life of the vicar, Tom. Whereas previous generations of vicars were cared for by the community, with dinner invites most nights, Tom struggles to get support from the residents, and is largely unable to cook or perform basic functions for himself. As in early Pym novels, the Anglican church plays a key role, even though by now the local church attracts few attendees.Emma is a steadfastly single woman, to the disapproval of her mother and others, who seem to see her career goals as incomplete without marriage. Emma faces two potential love matches. First, her former lover Graham Pettifer - also an academic - rents a cottage near the village to complete a text he is working on, and Emma feels herself pulled back into his life. She finds herself unappealing next to her love rival, the glamorous Claudia. Second, the vicar Tom's sister moves away, leaving him to his own devices, and he begins to view Emma as a romantic partner. Ultimately, Emma chooses to remain in the village, write a novel, and pursue a relationship with Tom. Although much has declined in village life, Emma decides to step back from her objective scientific view of the community and join them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passenger_(McCarthy_novel)"title="The Passenger (McCarthy novel)">
The novel follows Bobby Western, a salvage diver, across the Gulf of Mexico and the American South. Western is haunted by his father's contributions to the development of the atomic bomb. The events of the novel are punctuated with short, italicized chapters about his sister’s hallucinations of a deformed figure the narrator named “the Kid” who perpetually teases and belittles her and summons his ghostly cohorts to perform unwanted and garish entertainment acts. Following a salvage dive to recover any survivors from a submerged airplane, Western discovers the pilot's flight-bag and data box are missing. Within a few days, he returns to his apartment to find two agents of some kind who ask questions about the submerged airplane and the missing items, and Western learns there was also a missing eighth passenger.Western spends time in bars and restaurants in New Orleans with old friends about truths philosophical and scientific. He visits his grandmother in Tennessee, her house having been ransacked two years ago with his father's research papers and all family records taken. Now in hiding from the authorities on the advice of his lawyer Kline, Western's 1973 Maserati Bora is soon seized and his bank account frozen by the I.R.S., ostensibly for failing to record in his taxes the money he inherited from his paternal grandmother. Now destitute, Western drifts across the country as a transient, eventually coming to reside in Ibiza. At the end of the novel, Western lies in his bed in a windmill penning a letter to his sister, the love of his life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Blade_So_Black"title="A Blade So Black">
"When Atlanta teenager Alice Kingston’s father dies of heart failure—while at their favorite event, Dragon Con—she immediately is attacked by a “Nightmare” monster and then saved by Addison Hatta, a guardian of the portal between Atlanta and Wonderland."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockdown_(novel)"title="Lockdown (novel)">
Five months into an influenza pandemic that kills eighty percent of those affected, London is in lockdown. The city is under military control, a strict curfew is in force and there is extensive public surveillance. Among those who have died from the virus are the prime minister and members of his family.Detective Inspector Jack MacNeil is ordered to investigate the discovery of fresh human bones found at a building site in Lambeth. A thumbprint on a London Underground ticket found at the scene takes him along a chain of clues, eventually leading to an empty house in Wandsworth. At every step of the way, he is surreptitiously followed by a sociopathic killer who calls himself Pinkie (after the antihero of Graham Greene's novel, Brighton Rock). Pinkie has been hired by a shadowy "Mr. Smith" to keep watch on the police investigation and to ensure the bones don't lead them anywhere. Pinkie kills two witnesses to prevent them from giving information to MacNeil.Meanwhile, Dr. Amy Wu, a forensic scientist who is in a relationship with MacNeil, determines that the remains are probably those of a girl of about ten years of age, of East Asian origin, and with a harelip. She takes the bones back to her flat to do a facial reconstruction from the skull.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Private_Matter_(novel)"title="A Private Matter (novel)">
The story takes place in the Langhe. Milton is a young 20 year old university student who has joined the resistance movement, in a "blue" unit (those aligned with the monarchists), following the armistice of September 1943. He is in love with Fulvia, a beautiful girl from a well-to-do Torinese family, who he met in Alba where she had been displaced. After several months as a partisan, Milton, driven by desire and nostalgia, returns to the villa where he and Fulvia used to spend their evenings. Here he meets the housekeeper, who knew him before, and Milton asks to visit the places fond to him. During the visit, the elderly housekeeper mentions a relationship between Fulvia and Giorgio, Milton's friend and a fellow partisan, although in a "red" unit (that is, aligned with the communists). Milton, in shock, chooses to find Giorgio and discover the truth about the relationship.He sets off to locate Giorgio's unit, but cannot find him. Shortly afterwards news arrives that Giorgio has been captured by the fascists. Milton decides to seek an enemy prisoner to be exchanged with Giorgio before he is executed. He receives information that near the city where Giorgio is being kept an enemy non-commissioned officer is in a relationship with a woman who lives nearby, and learns the location of their meetings. Milton manages to capture him, but he tries to escape and Milton is forced to shoot him. With all hope of freeing his friend now lost and with it the chance to find the truth about Fulvia's love, Milton returns to the villa. The fascists are there when he arrives, he is surprised and flees. Milton, is chased and shot at, probably injured and utterly spent, he collapses on the ground in a nearby wood.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Fire_(book)"title="On Fire (book)">
Klein relays her meeting with Greta Thunberg in the opening essay in which she discusses how young people are speaking out for climate awareness and change. Throughout the book, Klein discusses her support for the Green New Deal and in the final essay she notes of the 2020 U.S. election that, "The stakes of the election are almost unbearably high. It’s why I wrote the book and decided to put it out now and why I’ll be doing whatever I can to help push people toward supporting a candidate with the most ambitious Green New Deal platform—so that they win the primaries and then the general."Klein emphasizes the moral and practical imperatives for the Green New Deal, rather than only concentrating on the brass tacks of policy and funding.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Used_the_Universe"title="The Man Who Used the Universe">
"The Man Who Used the Universe" is a novel in which Kees vaan Loo-Macklin rises from an illegal to a position of high power.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyonesse_(novel)"title="Lyonesse (novel)">
The story is told in several interlocking threads which are not always chronological.King Casmir of Lyonesse arranges the marriage of his daughter Suldrun to Duke Faude Carfilhiot. Princes Aillas and Trewan of Troicinet are sent on a sea voyage to visit the various kingdoms of the Elder Isles to gain experience at statecraft. While in port, Trewan learns that his father has died and that Aillas is the heir to the throne. Late at night, Trewan pushes Aillas overboard. Aillas washes ashore at the foot of Suldrun's garden. While he recovers, they become lovers and plan to escape. Aillas goes on a quest to find his son. Suldrun delivers a son named Dhrun, who is taken by the fairies and replaced with the changeling Madouc. Dhrun lives nine years in the fairy realm, then sets out through the forest of Tantrevalles, a haunted place. He rescues Glyneth, a girl of about 14, from a troll, and they have a number of adventures before joining Dr. Fidelius. Fidelius is in fact Shimrod, a magician who had his power stolen from him by Faude Carfilhiot and his lover Tamurello. Carfilhiot realizes that Fidelius was Shimrod. He kidnaps Dhrun and Glyneth.Shimrod can not act directly against Carfilhiot to rescue Glyneth and Dhrun, because that would constitute taking Aillas' side in a political matter and violate Murgen's edict. However, Aillas has learned that Quilcy, King of South Ulfland, has drowned in his bathtub, and that Aillas is his rightful heir by collateral lineage. He lands a force of troops in South Ulfland, proclaims his kingship, and demands a show of fealty from Carfilhiot as Carfilhiot's rightful liege lord. Carfilhiot refuses, and Aillas' Troice troops lay siege to his castle. Aillas' soldiers, informed by his knowledge of the castle's defenses, avoid the traps and pitfalls Carfilhiot has prepared, much to Carfilhiot's dismay. He calls on Tamurello, who confronts Aillas. This gives Shimrod an excuse to call on Murgen, who forbids Tamurello from acting and banishes him to his mansion. Tamurello offers to bring Carfilhiot to his manse, but Carfilhiot refuses to leave his castle. The siege is eventually successful, Dhrun and Glyneth are rescued, and Carfilhiot is hanged as a traitor to his king. When his body is cremated, a green fume escapes and blows out to sea, where it mixes with the spume and condenses into a "green pearl", which sinks into the sea and is swallowed by a fish.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasty_Little_Beasts"title="Nasty Little Beasts">
## The Grub a Blub Blub.In Skegness, there is an unusual witchetty grub: a human-sized, anthropomorphic larva that watches television, eats crisps, and cries itself to sleep when stressed. It is nicknamed "The Grub A-Blub-Blub" and hosted at the Museum of Freaks and Oddities, enclosed behind a "DO NOT FEED" sign.Once upon a time, the larva was Savannah Slumberson, a lazy girl who preferred watching television in her bedroom instead of joining her active parents' rock climbing and cycling holidays. Her parents frequently expected her to participate, and embarrassed her when they sang her awake every morning at 7 am, already in their khaki shorts (either in her room or outside her bedroom window, depending on whether she remembered to lock her bedroom door the night before). She considered herself "cursed", and became lazier out of spite.For a March holiday, Slumberson had campaigned for a visit to a Bridlington bed and breakfast, but her father announces they would be camping instead. The next morning, the family dressed into their lycra and cycled to the site, except for Slumberson—she hated wearing lycra and faked a cramp, so she slept under a sleeping bag as her parents' bikes dragged her there. She wakes to read a "Fit Camp" sign as her parents rode towards a camping lodge to meet the owner, Mrs Evadne Sprite. Slumberson dreads the holiday to come as Sprite explains camp activities, and tension arises when she learns no one is allowed to spend mornings in bed. A sticky witchetty grub falls from a nearby tree and lands on Slumberson's head, so she crushes it to death with her bike helmet; Sprite adds that the grubs' clinginess are why she encourages her customers to choose many active activities as possible.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antkind"title="Antkind">
Neurotic failed film critic B. Rosenberger Rosenberg stumbles upon what may be the greatest artistic achievement in human history: a three-month-long film, complete with scheduled sleeping, eating, and bathroom breaks, that took its reclusive auteur, a psychotic African-American man named Ingo Cutbirth, ninety years to complete. B makes it his mission to show it to the rest of humanity. The only problem: The film is destroyed when he stops for a soda, leaving just a single frame from which B must somehow attempt to recall the film that might just be the last great hope of civilization. The novel grows to encompass a vast array of concepts and plotlines. B is obsessed with proving his political correctness bonafides, boasting of his relationship with a Black sitcom star and his constant use of an uncommon non-binary pronoun "thon". His daughter is an estranged filmmaker whose work receives negative reviews from her father, who is himself obsessed with both ultra-obscure experimental films and the works of Judd Apatow. B's attempts to psychologically reconstruct the three-month movie send him to a wide variety of psychiatrists and hypnotists, most notably the sinister Barassini, whose work begins to have perverse effects on his body. He finds himself beginning to shrink in size, and is constantly falling down manholes. He becomes addicted to ketamine, and develops a clown fetish. At one point plastic surgery is conducted on him without his consent. He is forced at another point to pursue careers selling shoes at Zappos or working in a laundromat to impress a woman. His knowledge of film is seemingly deteriorating, as he constantly and surreally misquotes and misremembers many movies. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braywatch"title="Braywatch">
Ross has become rugby coach at Presentation College, Bray. His daughter Honor has become a Greta Thunberg-style environmentalist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_(novel)"title="Soul (novel)">
The narrative starts with Nazar Chagataev’s graduation from the Moscow Institute of Economics. In the courtyard, he meets a woman named Vera and goes home with her that night. At her home, he sees an interesting diptych on her wall and learns that Vera is pregnant, but the father of the child is dead. He immediately fosters a strange connection to Vera and to her young daughter, Ksenya. After frequent visits, he decides marry Vera, but then leaves after the summer to go to his posting to “bring socialism” to his people and assist the "Dzhan" nation into a better life.He sets off on a long journey by train across the steppe, by boat down the Amu-Darya, and finally reaches the "Dzhan" nation living in a delta called Sary-Kamysh. He meets Sufyan, Molla Cherkezov, Aidym and Gyulchatay, but his mother, Gyulchatay, does not seem to remember him. He sees that they are a sad, destitute nation living in a miserable state with very few possessions and little strength to live.He returns briefly to Chimgay for supplies, and there he receives a letter from Ksenya stating that Vera and the baby have died. Although the news gives him sorrow, he decides that he must carry on his mission with the "Dzhan". He returns to them and has a discussion with Nur-Mohammed who has been sent by the district executive committee to keep track of and assist the "Dzhan". Although Nur-Mohammed has no hope in the nation, Chagataev decides they must migrate to a better location, hoping that this move with result in better living conditions for the group.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightly_Burning"title="Brightly Burning">
"Brightly Burning" and the companion novel "The Stars We Steal" (published February 2020) are set in the far future, when humanity has fled Earth due to an Ice Age, living instead in orbit on spaceships. Pitched as "Jane Eyre" in space, "Brightly Burning" follows seventeen-year-old engineer Stella Ainsley, who lives on the Stalwart, one of the oldest and poorest ships in the fleet. Wishing to escape the Stalwart, Stella is hired on as a governess on the private ship, the Rochester, captained by the young and handsome Hugo Fairfax, who has a secret that could threaten the safety of the entire fleet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubblegum_(novel)"title="Bubblegum (novel)">
The novel is a first-person narrative told by the protagonist, Belt Magnet, or "Billy." It begins in the 1980s with Belt's childhood memories of growing up near Chicago and developing friendships in school using derogatory family phrases to defend one's honor or to get a laugh. One of Belt's phrases become a hit among the kids in school because of Jonboat, a new blonde-haired rich kid in town. The two decide to make t-shirts and have a detailed discussion of what the shirts should look like - arguing down to the specific grammar on the shirt. This in-depth grammatical discussion is an example of Belt's mental process during his life.As an adult, Belt still lives with and depends on his father, Clyde. He smokes a large number of cigarettes daily and justifies this as a memorial to his deceased mother who smoked. After his mother's passing, Belt wrote a book called No Please Don’t which was not a big hit but is mentioned many times throughout the novel. Belt is always pleasantly surprised when he finds out people have appreciated his work, even if not in the way he intended. Much of Belt's thoughts focus on meditations around family, friendship, and intimate relationships.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seasons'_Difference"title="The Seasons' Difference">
The rarefied, bucolic lives of Sam and Sarah Dunn are disturbed by the uncanny pronouncements of their cousin, Peter Cowley. Sara, a sophisticated sculptress, and the languorous Samuel, whose wealth and lifestyle have driven him to a state of perpetual ennui, are caught off-guard by their young relative's report of an ecstatic, mystical vision. Cowley, who has been invited to run a small vacation school for children in the spacious grounds of their substantial summer home, claims to have experienced the vision on a hillside nearby. His pronouncement is the cause of much discussion and consternation among the adults present: Julie McMoon, a neighbour of the Dunns who is grieving the recent suicide of her husband, and whose children are attending the summer school; the cynical pianist, Richard Lundrigan, who will spend much of the novel attempting to convince Cowley that his vision was a fantasy; and Thomas Lavender, a highly enthusiastic, if not slightly crazed, minister, who has joined the vacation in his capacity as Cowley's spiritual director, and is convinced of the veracity of his protégé's mystical experience.Also party to Cowley's mysterious claims are his students, Ellie Sonntag, Daisy and Timmy McMoon, George Bundle, Fendall Dunn, Rufus Este, and Harry Fogg. The two oldest of the children, Harry and Rufus, separate themselves from both the adults and their classmates by designating themselves as ‘the Uglies’, a nickname representative of their adolescent sense of discomfort and lack of belonging. This angst is further expressed through their close observation and discussion of those around them, their overt demonstrations of their own intelligence in Cowley's classroom, and their composition of poetry. When Cowley takes the children to a local carnival and they pile into a tent to watch a ‘freak show’ the Uglies laugh at, but also feel a deep sense of kinship with, the performers. The excursion ends awkwardly when a dwarf interrupts the performance to challenge the attitude of one of the children, who immediately begins to cry.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asuryalok"title="Asuryalok">
Bhadrashanker, a priest, is a slave to all kinds of vices. His son Nigamshanker, who is studying in a Sanskrit pathshala, suddenly has an attack of smallpox and loses his eyesight. He reconciles himself to his fate, goes to the pathshala and attempts to learn by hearing. A great Sanskrit scholar from Varanasi visits the pathshala; seeing Nigamshanker's desire for knowledge, he takes him to Varanasi. Nigamshanker studies there for 12 years, gaining proficiency in all branches of knowledge. When he returns, his father is on his deathbed. His father had married a girl of his son's age after his mother's death. Nigamshanker does not mourn his father's death. However, he treats his stepmother so well that she persuades her niece Bhagirathi to marry him. Their married life is very happy. Bhagirathi gives birth to a son, Tilak, who is a bright boy. When he is 10 years old, he finds that he cannot read what has been written on the blackboard. When a doctor is consulted, he advises him to give up his studies, but Tilak, encouraged by his father, ignores the advice and pursues his studies. Furthermore, he even learns to play the sitar from Abhijit, his neighbor's son. Abhijit's sister Satya is a naughty girl who continuously teases Tilak about his weak eyesight. Once, when Tilak is attending a sitar concert, Satya abducts him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Dragon's_Daughter"title="The Iron Dragon's Daughter">
The first portion of the story concerns Jane's childhood in a factory that builds iron dragons. Jane and her close friend Rooster, whose true name is Tetigistus, work in a group of indentured child laborers. Jane steals a grimoire, and after reading it, begins to hear the voice of an iron dragon in her head. Jane is taken to entertain an elderly, silent elf called the Baldwynn, but is told not to return after she witnesses a strange phenomenon. The dragon manipulates Rooster into trying to escape, but Rooster dies in the attempt. A distraught Jane forces the dragon to tell her his true name, Melanchthon. They then flee the factory.Later, Jane attends high school while fixing a dormant Melanchthon, who was damaged in their escape. She discovers that the school principal is none other than the Baldwynn and becomes friends with her classmate Peter and his girlfriend Gwen, who, as the wicker queen, will soon be burned alive as a sacrifice to the Goddess. To Jane's shock, Peter tells her that his true name is Tetigistus. They confess their love and sleep together. Soon after, Gwen is sacrificed and Peter commits suicide out of guilt. Melanchthon disappears and Jane realizes that his manipulation caused these events.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Wrinkle_in_Time"title="A Wrinkle in Time">
One night, thirteen-year-old Meg Murry meets an eccentric, new neighbor, Mrs Whatsit, who refers to something called a tesseract. She later finds out it is a scientific concept her father was working on before his mysterious disappearance. The following day, Meg, her child genius brother Charles, and fellow schoolmate Calvin visit Mrs Whatsit's home, where the equally strange Mrs Who and the voice of the unseen Mrs Which promise to help Meg find and rescue her father.Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which turn out to be supernatural beings who teleport Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin O'Keefe through the universe by means of a tesseract, a fifth-dimensional phenomenon explained as folding the fabric of space and time; this form of travel is called "tessering". Their first stop is the planet Uriel, a world inhabited by centaur-like beings who live in a state of light and love, fighting against the approaching darkness. There the Mrs Ws demonstrate to the children how the universe is under attack from an evil being that appears particularly clearly on Uriel as an overwhelming dark cloud, called The Black Thing. They then take the children to Orion's Belt to visit the Happy Medium, a far-seeing person with a crystal ball through which they are shown that Earth is partially covered by the darkness, although great religious figures, philosophers, scientists, and artists, have been fighting against it. Mrs Whatsit is revealed to be a former star, who exploded in an act of self-sacrifice to fight the darkness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_Chaos"title="Lord of Chaos">
With many of the seals on his prison broken, the Dark One has grown in power. He causes global warming, revives the Forsaken Aginor and Balthamel as Osan'gar and Aran'gar, and creates Shaidar Haran, his Myrddraal incarnation.In response to Rand al'Thor's amnesty on male channelers, Mazrim Taim swears allegiance to him. Together they form the Black Tower, which trains male channelers called "Asha'man". Rand is diplomatically courted by both the rebel Aes Sedai in Salidar, who send an envoy to Caemlyn, and the Aes Sedai of the White Tower, who send an envoy (many of which are in fact Black Ajah) to Cairhien. In an unsuccessful attempt to control Rand, Alanna Mosvani of the rebel Aes Sedai bonds Rand as her Warder against his will. Additionally, Min Farshaw, who had traveled with the Salidar Aes Sedai, reunites with Rand and gives him much-needed emotional support. Rand later discovers Salidar's location and sends Mat Cauthon there, to retrieve Elayne Trakand who will rule Caemlyn and Cairhien in his stead.Perrin Aybara leaves the Two Rivers to join Rand in Caemlyn.The deposed Queen of Andor, Morgase Trakand, goes to Amadicia for aid in returning to the throne but is instead taken captive by the Lord Captain Commander of the Children of the Light, Pedron Niall.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outsiders_(novel)"title="The Outsiders (novel)">
Ponyboy Curtis, a fourteen year old boy who is a member of a "gang of "greasers", is leaving a movie theater when he is jumped by "Socs", the greasers' rival gang. Several greasers, including Ponyboy's two older brothers—the paternal Darry and the popular Sodapop—come to his rescue. The next night, Ponyboy and two greaser friends, the hardened Dally and the quiet Johnny, meet Cherry and Marcia, a pair of Soc girls, at a drive-in movie theater. Cherry scorns Dally's rude advances, but Ponyboy speaks civilly with Cherry, emotionally connecting with a Soc for the first time in his life.Afterward, Ponyboy, Johnny, and their wisecracking friend Two-Bit begin to walk Cherry and Marcia home, when they are stopped by Cherry's boyfriend Bob, who badly beat up Johnny a few months back. Bob and the greasers exchange taunts, but Cherry prevents a fight by willingly leaving with Bob. Ponyboy gets home at two in the morning, enraging Darry until he suddenly slaps Ponyboy. Pony runs out the door and meets up with Johnny, expressing his anger at Darry's increasing coldness in the wake of his parents' recent deaths in a car crash.Running away from home, Ponyboy and Johnny wander into a park, where Bob and four other Socs surround them. After some heated talk, Ponyboy spits at the Socs, prompting them to attempt to drown him in a nearby fountain, but Johnny stabs Bob, killing him and dispersing the rest. Terrified as to what to do next, Ponyboy and Johnny rush to find Dally, who gives them money and a loaded gun, directing them to hide in an abandoned church in Windrixville. During their stay there, Pony cuts and dyes his hair as a disguise, reads "Gone with the Wind" to Johnny, and, upon viewing a beautiful sunrise, recites the poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_and_the_Glory"title="The Power and the Glory">
The main character is an unnamed 'whisky priest', who combines a great power for self-destruction with pitiful cravenness, an almost painful penitence, and a desperate quest for dignity. By the end, though, the priest "acquires a real holiness." The other principal character is a police lieutenant tasked with hunting down this priest. This Lieutenant – also unnamed but thought to be based upon Tomás Garrido Canabal – is a committed socialist who despises the Church.The overall situation is this: Catholicism is outlawed in Mexico. However, while the other states of Mexico seem to follow a Don't-ask-don't-tell policy, the state of Tabasco enforces the ban rigorously. Mexico, or at least Tabasco, is ruled on socialist grounds, and priests have either been settled by the state with wives (breaking celibacy) and pensions in exchange for their renouncing the faith and being strictly banned from fulfilling priestly functions (such as one Padre José), or else have left the state or are on the run, or have been shot. The story starts with the arrival of the main character in a small country town and then follows him on his trip through Tabasco, where he tries to minister to the people as best he can. In doing so, he is faced by a lot of problems, not least of which is that Tabasco is also prohibitionist, with the unspoken prime objective to hinder celebration of the Sacrifice of the Mass, for which actual wine is an essential. It is, therefore, quite easy to get, say, brandy or tequila, despite it being forbidden, but very difficult to get wine. He is also haunted by his personal problems and past and present sins, especially by the fact that he fathered a child in his parish some years before; additionally, his use of spirits may be bordering on addiction and certainly is beyond the limit of good measure in his own view. (In one scene, both of these problems are mixed: the protagonist tries to procure a bottle of wine for Holy Mass, needing to go to very high officials to do so, with an additional bottle of brandy for cover and also for his personal use. Not being able to reveal himself, and eager to appear friendly, he agrees to share his wine with the official, all of which is then consumed while in vain he tries to offer the brandy instead. He eventually leaves with only partial bottle of brandy, and no wine. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_the_Affair"title="The End of the Affair">
The novel focuses on Maurice Bendrix, a rising writer during the Second World War in London, and Sarah Miles, the wife of an impotent civil servant. Bendrix is based on Greene himself, and he reflects often on the act of writing a novel. Sarah is based on Greene's lover at the time, Catherine Walston, to whom the book is dedicated.Bendrix and Sarah fall in love quickly, but he soon realises that the affair will end as quickly as it began. The relationship suffers from his overt and admitted jealousy. He is frustrated by her refusal to divorce Henry, her amiable but boring husband. When a bomb blasts Bendrix's flat as he is with Sarah, he is nearly killed. After this, Sarah breaks off the affair with no apparent explanation.Later, Bendrix is still wracked with jealousy when he sees Henry crossing the Common that separates their flats. Henry has finally started to suspect something, and Bendrix decides to go to a private detective to discover Sarah's new lover. Through her diary, he learns that, when she thought he was dead after the bombing, she made a promise to God not to see Bendrix again if He allowed him to live again. Greene describes Sarah's struggles. After her sudden death from a lung infection brought to a climax by walking on the Common in the rain, several miraculous events occur, advocating for some kind of meaningfulness to Sarah's faith. By the last page of the novel, Bendrix came to believe in a God as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idiot"title="The Idiot">
## Part 1.Prince Myshkin, a young man in his mid-twenties and a descendant of one of the oldest Russian lines of nobility, is on a train to Saint Petersburg on a cold November morning. He is returning to Russia having spent the past four years in a Swiss clinic for treatment of a severe epileptic condition. On the journey, Myshkin meets a young man of the merchant class, Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin, and is struck by his passionate intensity, particularly in relation to a woman—the dazzling society beauty Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova—with whom he is obsessed. Rogozhin has just inherited a very large fortune due to the death of his father, and he intends to use it to pursue the object of his desire. Joining in their conversation is a civil servant named Lebedyev—a man with a profound knowledge of social trivia and gossip. Realizing who Rogozhin is, Lebedyev firmly attaches himself to him.The purpose of Myshkin's trip is to make the acquaintance of his distant relative Lizaveta Prokofyevna, and to make inquiries about a matter of business. Lizaveta Prokofyevna is the wife of General Epanchin, a wealthy and respected man in his mid-fifties. When the Prince calls on them he meets Gavril Ardalionovich Ivolgin (Ganya), the General's assistant. The General and his business partner, the aristocrat Totsky, are seeking to arrange a marriage between Ganya and Nastasya Filippovna. Totsky had been the orphaned Nastasya Filippovna's childhood guardian, but he had taken advantage of his position to groom her for his own sexual gratification. As a grown woman, Nastasya Filippovna has developed an incisive and merciless insight into their relationship. Totsky, thinking the marriage might settle her and free him to pursue his desire for marriage with General Epanchin's eldest daughter, has promised 75,000 rubles. Nastasya Filippovna, suspicious of Ganya and aware that his family does not approve of her, has reserved her decision, but has promised to announce it that evening at her birthday soirée. Ganya and the General openly discuss the subject in front of Myshkin. Ganya shows him a photograph of her, and he is particularly struck by the dark beauty of her face.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_Me_Your_Dreams"title="Tell Me Your Dreams">
The main characters of the book are Ashley Patterson, an introverted workaholic, her co-workers, Toni Prescott, an outgoing singer and dancer, shy artist Alette Peters and Ashley's father, Dr. Steven Patterson.The three women do not get along very well, because of their dissimilar natures. Toni and Alette generally maintain a friendship, with Alette a calming influence, but Toni dislikes Ashley and criticizes her harshly. All three have issues with their mothers having told them they'd never amount to anything.Ashley fears that somebody is following her. She finds her house lights turned on when she returns from work, her personal effects in disarray, and someone has written "You will die" on her mirror with a lipstick. She thinks someone's broken into her house. She requests a police escort, but the next morning, the police officer assigned to this duty is found dead in her apartment. Two other murders have already taken place, with an identical pattern. All the murdered men had been castrated and were having sex before being murdered. Evidence points to the same woman being involved in all three cases. When a gift from one of the murdered men to Toni is found among Ashley's things, she is identified as the killer and arrested. At this point, it is revealed that the three women are three selves of a woman suffering from multiple personality disorder (MPD).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doomsday_Conspiracy"title="The Doomsday Conspiracy">
Robert Bellamy, an agent of the ONI receives a mission on behalf of NSA: to locate the witnesses of the crash of an experimental meteorological balloon in Switzerland, for which he is only given the date, the place where it happened, and the fact that the witnesses were passengers of a bus tour. He is given an unlimited budget but is told he must work strictly under cover. After he finds the first witness, he discovers that the meteorological balloon was actually an alien spaceship. He tracks the witnesses one by one and reports their names to NSA. Without his knowledge, the names of the witnesses are then communicated to the intelligence organizations of their respective countries, and each of them is assassinated shortly after. These actions are coordinated under the name "Operation Doomsday", under the leadership of a figure known only as Janus.Robert's personal history is shown through flashbacks: he rose in the military ranks under the mentorship of Admiral Ralph Whittaker, and during a combat flight in Vietnam his plane was taken down, with Whittaker son's dying in the crash and Robert being badly injured. Doctors declare that he has no chance of survival, but a nurse named Susan convinces them to operate on him and encourages him to keep his fighting spirit. He and Susan fall in love after his recovery and marry. Robert is then recruited to become a spy for ONI, but this job takes over his personal life until Susan divorces him and marries a business tycoon named Monte Banks, while Robert isolates himself and dedicates even more to his work.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon"title="Altered Carbon">
On the colony planet of Harlan’s World, Takeshi Kovacs and his partner Sarah Sachilowski, former Envoys who had returned to a life of crime, are killed by a U.N. colonial commando unit. Kovacs is sentenced to a long term in stack storage. On Earth, a Meth named Laurens Bancroft has died in mysterious circumstances in Bay City (formerly San Francisco). The re-sleeved Bancroft has no memories of the previous two days, including his own death. Though police officer Kristin Ortega believes he committed suicide, Bancroft is convinced he was murdered. He hires Kovacs to investigate. Kovacs discovers that Bancroft has been involved with numerous prostitutes, including recent murder victim Elizabeth Elliot. Elizabeth’s mother Irene was imprisoned for illegally hacking Bancroft’s memories. Elizabeth's father is too poor to re-sleeve Elizabeth or to free his wife from the stacks.Laurens' wife, Miriam, seduces Kovacs and bribes him to end the investigation. A high-level Russian operative named Kadmin tries to assassinate Kovacs, but fails and is captured. Kovacs investigates the brothel where Elizabeth worked. He learns he is wearing the sleeve of Elias Ryker, a corrupt police officer and Ortega's lover. He is tortured by physicians from the Wei Clinic, who deal in black market sleeve theft. He tells his interrogators that he is an Envoy and they release him. A mysterious woman named Trepp says she will bring Kovacs to Ray, who is behind the clinic’s operations. Kovacs escapes, destroys the brothel and clinic, and murders the employees in the process.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_on_the_Nile"title="Death on the Nile">
While on holiday in Aswan to board the steamer "Karnak", set to tour along the Nile River from Shellal to Wadi Halfa, Hercule Poirot is approached by successful socialite Linnet Doyle née Ridgeway. She wants to commission him to deter her former friend Jacqueline de Bellefort from hounding and stalking her. Linnet had recently married Jacqueline's ex-fiancé, Simon Doyle, which has made Jacqueline bitterly resentful. Poirot refuses the commission and unsuccessfully attempts to dissuade Jacqueline from pursuing her plans. Simon and Linnet secretly follow Poirot to escape Jacqueline but find she had learned of their plans and boarded ahead of them. The other "Karnak" passengers include Linnet's maid Louise Bourget; her trustee Andrew Pennington; romance novelist Salome Otterbourne and her daughter Rosalie; Tim Allerton and his mother; elderly American socialite Marie Van Schuyler, her cousin Cornelia Robson and her nurse Miss Bowers; outspoken communist Mr Ferguson; Italian archaeologist Guido Richetti; solicitor Jim Fanthorp; and Austrian physician Dr Bessner.While visiting Abu Simbel when "Karnak" stops there, Linnet narrowly avoids being crushed to death by a large boulder that falls from a cliff. Jacqueline is suspected of pushing the boulder off the cliff, but she was aboard the steamer at the time of the incident. At Wadi Halfa, Poirot's friend Colonel Race boards the steamer for the return trip. Race tells Poirot that he seeks a murderer among the passengers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot_and_the_Kangaroo"title="Dot and the Kangaroo">
A 5-year-old girl named Dot is lost in the outback after chasing a hare into the wood and losing sight of her home. She is approached by a red kangaroo who gives her some berries to eat. Upon eating the berries, Dot is able to understand the language of all animals, and she tells the kangaroo her plight. The kangaroo, who has lost her own joey, decides to help little Dot despite her own fear of humans. The book is filled with criticism on negative human interference in the wild in 1884.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven-Per-Cent_Solution"title="The Seven-Per-Cent Solution">
An introduction states that two canonical Holmes adventures were fabrications. These are "The Final Problem", in which Holmes apparently died along with Prof. James Moriarty, and "The Empty House", wherein Holmes reappeared after a three-year absence and revealed that he had not been killed after all. "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution"'s Watson explains that they were published to conceal the truth concerning Holmes' "Great Hiatus".The novel begins in 1891, when Holmes first informs Watson of his belief that Professor James Moriarty is a "Napoleon of Crime". The novel presents this view as nothing more than the fevered imagining of Holmes' cocaine-sodden mind and further asserts that Moriarty was the childhood mathematics tutor of Sherlock and his brother Mycroft. Watson meets Moriarty, who denies that he is a criminal and reluctantly threatens to pursue legal action unless the latter's accusations cease. Moriarty also refers to a "great tragedy" in Holmes' childhood, but refuses to explain further when pressed by Watson.The heart of the novel consists of an account of Holmes' recovery from his addiction. Knowing that Sherlock would never willingly see a doctor about his addiction and mental problems, Watson and Holmes' brother Mycroft induce Holmes to travel to Vienna, where Watson introduces him to Dr. Freud. Using a treatment consisting largely of hypnosis, Freud helps Holmes shake off his addiction and his delusions about Moriarty, but neither he nor Watson can revive Holmes' dejected spirit.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like_a_Velvet_Glove_Cast_in_Iron"title="Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron">
"Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron" is about a man named Clay Loudermilk and his attempts to locate his estranged wife, Barbara Allen. (The song "the Ballad of Barbara Allen" forms a commentary on the story with its elements of unrequited love, loss, and death.) For reasons unknown, Clay is in the audience at a porno theatre when he sees a bizarre BDSM feature (also titled "Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron"), the star dominatrix of which is revealed to be his wife. Clay sets out to locate her and becomes embroiled in a series of misadventures involving an incredibly bizarre and varied cast of supporting characters. Clay is victimized by two crazed policemen, meets a religious cult led by a mass-murderer who intend to overthrow the American government, conspiracy theorists who believe that the reins of the world's political power somehow revolve around a series of dime store novelty figures, an inhumanly malformed, potato-like young woman and her nymphomaniacal mother, and various other freaks and weirdos. During one dream sequence, the infamous Foot Foot, from the song by The Shaggs, gnaws on Clay's leg.The happy-face icon of "Mr. Jones" also appears in various places through the story (reminiscent of Alfred E. Neuman, the mascot of "Mad" magazine, whose image dates at least back into the 1800s). Images of Mr. Jones are tattooed into people, carved on to Clay's foot, as a ghost-like character, in Hitler's birthmark, and on the sign for Value Ape shops. It signifies the way in which logos pervade our societies, and links to the conspiracy elements of the story. The true nature of the potato-woman's father is never learned by Mr. Loudermilk, but the reader will see suggestions of the Cthulhu Mythos. The phrase "Kenneth, what is the frequency?", referencing the bizarre Dan Rather incident (some years before the R.E.M. song did the same thing), is used as part of the "Mr. Jones" conspiracy sub-plot. There are, in addition, references to child pornography and snuff films.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shipping_News"title="The Shipping News">
The story revolves around Quoyle, a newspaper reporter from upstate New York, whose father had emigrated from Newfoundland. Shortly after his parents' joint suicide, Quoyle's unfaithful and abusive wife, Petal Bear, leaves town with a lover and attempts to sell their daughters Bunny and Sunshine to sex traffickers. On her getaway, Petal and her lover are killed in a car accident; the young girls are located by police and returned to Quoyle. With selfish parents, an abusive brother, a cheating wife, and no stable job, Quoyle's life is falling apart. His paternal aunt, Agnis Hamm, convinces him to make a new beginning by returning to their ancestral home in Newfoundland.There, they move into Agnis's childhood home, an empty and abandoned house on Quoyle's Point. Quoyle finds work as a reporter for the "Gammy Bird", the local newspaper in Killick-Claw, a small town. The "Gammy Bird"s editor asks him to cover traffic accidents (reminding him of Petal's fate) and also the shipping news, documenting the arrivals and departures of ships from the local port. His reporting develops as Quoyle's signature column.Over time, Quoyle learns deep and disturbing secrets about his ancestors that emerge in strange ways. As Quoyle builds his new life in Newfoundland, he is transformed. He creates a rewarding job, makes friends and begins a relationship with a local woman, Wavey Prowse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Series_of_Unfortunate_Events"title="A Series of Unfortunate Events">
The series follows the adventures of three orphaned siblings. Lemony Snicket documents their lives and explains to the readers that very few positive things happen to the children.The series begins when the orphans are at a beach alone, when they receive news that their parents were killed in a fire that also destroyed the family mansion. In "The Bad Beginning", they are sent to live with a distant relative named Count Olaf after briefly living with Mr. Poe, a banker in charge of the orphans' affairs. The siblings discover that Count Olaf intends to get his hands on the enormous Baudelaire fortune, which Violet is to inherit when she reaches the age of eighteen. In the first book, Olaf attempts to marry Violet to steal the Baudelaire fortune, and pretends that the marriage is the storyline for his latest play, but the plan falls through when Violet uses her non-dominant hand to sign the marriage document, thus causing the marriage to not be successful. After the crowd realizes, Olaf manages to escape with his henchmen.In the following six books, Olaf disguises himself, finds the children, and, with help from his many accomplices, tries to steal their fortune, committing arson, murder, and other crimes. In the eighth through twelfth books, the orphans adopt disguises while on the run from the police after Count Olaf frames them for one of his murders. The Baudelaire's routinely try to get help from Mr. Poe, but he, like many of the adults in the series, is oblivious to the dangerous reality of the children's situation.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldo_(short_story)"title="Waldo (short story)">
As the story opens, a dancer is performing feats of astonishing virtuosity on stage. Afterward, in the dressing room, while preparing to depart for his other job as a neurosurgeon, the dancer reminisces to a reporter about what made him take up dancing. The rest of the story is told as a flashback.James Stevens, Chief Engineer of North American Power-Air (NAPA), is desperate to discover what is causing vehicles driven by broadcast power to cease functioning. Society has harnessed cheap atomic power, broadcast by NAPA, to run homes, factories, ground vehicles, and even personal aircraft which can travel into space. If the failures continue, not only will he lose his job but the entire power system of the country could collapse.The heart of the technology is the "deKalb receptor". The deKalbs are failing, and no one can identify the cause. In desperation, Stevens approaches Doc Grimes, a physician who has known Waldo since birth, to try to persuade Waldo to help. Waldo has a grudge against NAPA after losing a legal battle with them some years before.Waldo lives on a space station in high orbit, where microgravity allows him to move around despite his weakness. He makes his living as a consulting engineer, with a specialty in fine motor skills.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Elephant"title="The Fifth Elephant">
The Ankh-Morpork City Watch is expanding; there is now a Traffic department with traffic cameras implemented using iconograph technomancy and a wheel clamping team, and the clacks is beginning to replace homing pigeons for communications between officers. The Watch is also investigating the theft of the replica Scone of Stone (a parody of the real-life Stone of Scone) from the Ankh-Morpork Dwarf Bread Museum and the murder of Wallace Sonky, the inventor of preventatives.Samuel Vimes, Commander of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch and Duke of Ankh, is sent to the remote region of Überwald as an ambassador to take advantage of the coronation of the Low King of the Dwarves to negotiate for increased imports of fat. (Underground fat deposits are abundant in Überwald as a fifth Discworld-supporting elephant impacted there in prehistoric times, according to legend.)Überwald is the traditional home of the Disc's dwarfs. The election of the progressive Rhys Rhysson as Low King resulted from split opposition amongst various dwarf clans and the growing influence of Ankh-Morpork as the largest dwarf city on the Disc. A cabal of local werewolves seek to exploit this opportunity to destabilize the already deeply divided dwarf society. They instigate the apparent theft of the real Scone of Stone from its closely guarded cave, hoping to cause a civil war between traditionalist and progressive dwarfs and isolate the country under the werewolves' feudal leadership.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Confusion"title="The Confusion">
Though the first publication of the Series in three volumes combined the two novels "Bonanza" and "The Juncto", here the plots will be dealt with as separate entities, true to the author's original intention.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Lights_(Pullman_novel)"title="Northern Lights (Pullman novel)">
## Setting.The setting is a world dominated by the Magisterium (commonly called "the Church"), an international theocracy which actively suppresses heresy. In this world, humans' souls naturally exist outside of their bodies in the form of sentient "dæmons" in animal form which accompany, aid, and comfort their humans. An important plot device is the alethiometer, a truth-telling symbol reader. By setting the alethiometer's hands to point to symbols around a dial a skilled practitioner can pose questions, which are answered by the movement of a further hand.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Palace"title="Moon Palace">
Marco Fogg is an orphan and his Uncle Victor his only caretaker. Fogg starts college, and nine months later moves from the dormitory into his own apartment furnished with 1492 books given to him by Uncle Victor. Uncle Victor dies before Fogg finishes college and leaves him without friends and family. Marco inherits some money which he uses to pay for Uncle Victor's funeral. He becomes an introvert, spends his time reading, and thinks, "Why should I get a job? I have enough to do living through the days." After selling the books one by one in order to survive Fogg loses his apartment and seeks shelter in Central Park. He meets Kitty Wu and begins a romance with her after he has been rescued from Central Park by Zimmer and Kitty Wu. Eventually he finds a job taking care of Thomas Effing.Fogg learns about the complicated history of his parents, and Effing’s previous identity as the painter Julian Barber. When Effing dies, leaving money to Fogg, Marco and Kitty Wu set up a house together in Chinatown. After an abortion Fogg breaks up with Kitty Wu and travels across the U.S. to search for himself. He begins his journey with his father Solomon Barber, who dies shortly after an accident at Westlawn Cemetery, where Fogg's mother is buried. Marco continues his journey alone, which ends on a lonely California beach: "This is where I start, ... this is where my life begins."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat_in_the_Hat_Comes_Back"title="The Cat in the Hat Comes Back">
Once again, an unnamed boy who narrates the story and his sister Sally are being left home alone for the day. This time, their mother has left them with instructions to clear away a large amount of snow while she is out. However, they are soon interrupted in their work by the return of the Cat in the Hat. The boy is warned by Sally not to talk to the Cat nor to let him come near, reminding him of what happened the last time he came. However, the Cat lets himself into their house to get out of the snow, and the boy follows him in. When he reaches the bathroom, he finds the Cat eating a cake in the tub with the hot and cold water on. The boy (who loses his patience) scolds the Cat for his antics, telling the Cat there is work to be done and he should not be in the house eating cake like a pig. He tells the Cat that he should get out of the house unless he helps out with the work. Then he turns off the water and drains out (unplugs) the tub, only to find that a long ring of pink cake icing has formed around the sides of the bath tub. The Cat offers to help clean it up, but his preliminary attempts to remove the pink spot end in disaster as he only transfers the mess to a succession of one object after another, including their mother's white dress, the wall, their father's pair of $10 shoes (worth $94.66 when adjusted for inflation in 2021, and written as £7 when published in the United Kingdom), a rug, and their parents' bed. Unsure of how to remove the stain from the bed, the Cat calls on the help of Little Cat A, who lives inside his hat, who lifts his hat to reveal Little Cat B, and then Little Cat C. The three Little Cats go to work, transferring the stain to the television, then a pan, and finally outside with a fan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_People"title="Independent People">
"Independent People" is the story of the sheep farmer Guðbjartur Jónsson, generally known in the novel as Bjartur of Summerhouses, and his struggle for independence.The "first chapter summons up the days when the world was first settled, in 874 AD—for that is the year when the Norsemen arrived in Iceland, and one of the book's wry conceits is that no other world but Iceland exists. ... The book is set in the early decades of the twentieth century but ... "Independent People" is a pointedly timeless tale. It reminds us that life on an Icelandic croft had scarcely altered over a millennium". As the story begins, Bjartur ("bright" or "fair") has recently managed to put down the first payment on his own farm, after eighteen years working as a shepherd at Útirauðsmýri, the home of the well-to-do local bailiff, a man he detests. The land that he buys is said to be cursed by Saint Columba, referred to as "the fiend Kolumkilli", and haunted by an evil woman named Gunnvör, who made a pact with Kólumkilli.Defiantly, Bjartur refuses to add a stone to Gunnvör's cairn to appease her, and in his optimism also changes the name of the farm from Winterhouses to Summerhouses. He is also newly wed to a young woman called Rósa, a fellow worker at Rauðsmýri, and is determined that they should live as independent people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_of_Birds"title="Bridge of Birds">
The book is set in a fantastical version of imperial China (Hughart subtitled it "A Novel of an Ancient China That Never Was"). It draws on and reinvents the traditional tale of The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl and other myths, poems and incidents from Chinese history. The real story of the Cowherd and Weaver Girl is referenced at the end of the book.In the beginning of the novel, the village of Ku-fu is stricken by a plague which kills its silkworms and sends its children between the ages of eight and thirteen into a coma. Number Ten Ox, the narrator, is dispatched to find a wise man who can cure the children. In Peking, he finds Master Li Kao, a drunken scholar with a self-described "slight flaw in his character", who immediately identifies the cause of the plague as "ku" poison, an incurable poison inflicted on the village by two dishonest villagers trying to corner the silk crop. In order to cure the children, Ox and Master Li set out to find the Great Root of Power, which can cure anything. They begin by seeking it in the palace of the feared Ancestress.As it turns out, however, the Ancestress possesses only the lesser Root of Power, and the true Great Root is in the possession of the tyrannical and avaricious Duke of Ch'in. After surviving the Duke of Ch'in's deadly games that consisted of labyrinths and terrible monsters, they succeed in gathering different parts of the Ginseng. Still, these are all ineffective in curing the children. Along with the Ginseng, they also find three handmaiden ghosts that repeated the same story, "The birds of China must fly!" One of the many people they meet in their adventure is Henpecked Ho, who tells them the story of how a god, Star Shepherd, fell in love with a human girl, who was given the title of Princess of Birds. They also meet Key Rabbit, who is married to Lotus Cloud. Like every other man with a pure heart, Ox worships Lotus Cloud and showers her with expensive gifts. The heroes visit the Old Man of the Mountain. There they learn that in order to become immortal one must obtain something from the gods, and to become invulnerable one's heart must be removed. This information helps them figure out that somehow their quest to find the Ginseng is intertwined with the story of the Princess of Birds. They also conclude that the Duke of Ch'in knows the secrets of immortality and invulnerability, and was the same Duke who tricked the Princess of Birds and her three handmaidens centuries ago.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Are_You_There_God?_It's_Me,_Margaret."title="Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.">
When she is eleven, Margaret Simon's family moved from New York City to the New Jersey suburbs. Her mother is Christian, and her father is Jewish, but Margaret was raised without an affiliation to either faith. She frequently prays to God, beginning her prayers with, "Are you there God? It's me, Margaret."Margaret feels uncomfortable with her lack of religious affiliation. For a school assignment, she studies religious beliefs, hoping to resolve her faith-based issues. Her study includes attending different places of worship to learn about religious practices. Her Jewish grandmother, Sylvia Simon, takes Margaret to Rosh Hashanah services and hopes her granddaughter will embrace Judaism.Margaret befriends Nancy, a neighbor who is the same age. Nancy seems confident and knowledgeable about many subjects, including sex. Nancy, Margaret, and their friends Gretchen and Janie form a secret club called the Pre-Teen Sensations. The Pre-Teen Sensations discuss boys, bras, and menstruation. The girls anxiously await their first period, preparing by buying belted sanitary napkins (changed to adhesive pads in later editions of the book). They also do exercises to increase their bust sizes: "I must-I must-I must increase my bust!"Gretchen has her first period, which causes Margaret to worry that she is abnormal because she has not started menstruating. Margaret envies her classmate, Laura Danker, who started menstruating and wears a bra. According to Nancy, Laura dates an older boy. The Pre-Teen Sensations gossip about Laura letting boys touch her breasts. Margaret feels guilty when she learns that Laura is a devout Catholic and is hurt by the rumors. Margaret is attracted to a popular boy in her class named Philip Leroy. They kiss while playing "two minutes in the closet" during a party. Nancy tells the Pre-Teen Sensations that she started menstruating while on vacation. Margaret discovers the truth when Nancy gets her actual first period while at a restaurant with Margaret.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_of_Discworld"title="The Science of Discworld">
The Discworld part of the book begins when a new experimental power source for the Unseen University is commissioned in the university's squash court. The new "reactor" is capable of splitting the "thaum" (the basic particle of magic), in homage to the Chicago Pile-1 nuclear reactor, which was housed in a rackets court at the University of Chicago.However, the wizards' new reactor produces vastly more magical energy than planned and threatens to explode, destroying the University, the Discworld, and the entire universe. The university's thinking engine, Hex, decides to divert all the magic into creating a space containing nothing—no matter, no energy, no reality, and, importantly, no magic. The Dean sticks his fingers in the space and "twiddles" them, inadvertently creating the universe. The wizards soon discover that they can move things around in the universe, using Hex. They call it the Roundworld (the Earth), because in it, matter seems to accrete into balls in space (instead of discs on the backs of turtles). They decide to appoint Rincewind, whom they dragged out of bed in the early hours of the morning, the Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography, and send him down (against his will) to investigate this strange world.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villette_(novel)"title="Villette (novel)">
"Villette" begins with its famously passive protagonist, Lucy Snowe, age 14, staying at the home of her godmother Mrs. Bretton in "the clean and ancient town of Bretton", in England. Also in residence are Mrs. Bretton's teenaged son, John Graham Bretton (whom the family calls Graham), and a young visitor, Paulina Home (who is called Polly). Polly is a serious little girl who soon develops a deep devotion to Graham, who showers her with attention. But Polly's visit is cut short when her father arrives to summon her to live with him abroad.For reasons that are not stated, Lucy leaves Mrs. Bretton's home a few weeks after Polly's departure. Some years pass, during which an unspecified family tragedy leaves Lucy without family, home, or means. After some initial hesitation, she is hired as a caregiver by Miss Marchmont, a rheumatic crippled woman. Lucy is soon accustomed to her work and has begun to feel content with her quiet, frugal lifestyle.The night of a dramatic storm, Miss Marchmont regains all her energy and feels young again. She shares with Lucy her sad love story of 30 years ago, and concludes that she should treat Lucy better and be a better person. She believes that death will reunite her with her dead lover. The next morning, Lucy finds Miss Marchmont died in the night.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Does_His_Bit"title="William Does His Bit">
## William Does His Bit.William hears the family talk about a man called Quisling (William calls him 'Grisling'), who apparently appears to exist in many places at once, helping the Germans. When he learns the man is in fact many men doing the same thing, he sets out to find Quisling and capture him. His search takes him to the village, where at an intersection, two elderly ladies are talking about passwords in whispers. William at once decides to follow the second one, who goes to a school building through the cover of laurel bushes and at a blackened window, William sees an elderly gentleman with many women talking and putting flags on maps. He, believing it to be Grissel's gang plotting propaganda after he hears them make calls about disasters, follows the man to his house, and when he starts mowing his lawn, he rings the police asking them to come, due to stories where the hero is captured but the police come in the nick of time. William is caught "stealing" plates and cutlery so he can see where Grissel's papers are. The police start to arrest him, as William talks about the man and his doing. The man dismisses the police, rewarding William for his "efforts to the country" with money, a bun and lemonade. William walks home contentedly and tells his mother what happened. His mother does not believe him, and continues sewing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windmills_of_the_Gods"title="Windmills of the Gods">
Mary Ashley, a professor at Kansas State University, is offered an ambassadorship by Paul Ellison, the US president. She rejects the offer because her husband, Dr. Edward Ashley, does not want to leave his medical practice, and she is not willing to be separated from him. She also feels that it is harder to find a good physician for a small Kansas town than an ambassador to a foreign country. When her husband suddenly dies in a traffic accident, Ashley accepts the President's offer in order to fill the void in her life. She is sent to Romania, behind the Iron Curtain, and adapts to the role of ambassador. She takes an instant distaste to her second in command, Mike Slade, but is unable to remove him due to his appointment being a presidential order. Her success as an ambassador turns her into a public face for understanding between the United States and Romania. She begins a relationship with Louis Desforges, a widowed French physician that saves her from attempts to kidnap and poison her, until he gets killed by Slade.Interspersed with that narration, the novel shows gatherings of members of the Patriots for Freedom, a secret society of powerful men that orchestrate political events trying to divide the Eastern and Western Blocs. They hire an international assassin nicknamed Angel to kill her, but the information is leaked and the attempt foiled. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Stanley"title="Flat Stanley">
The book recounts the adventures of Stanley Lambchop after he is squashed flat by a bulletin board while sleeping. He survives and decides to make the best of being flat. Soon, he discovers that he is able to enter locked rooms by sliding under the door. Over the course of the story, he also rolls up to go out to a park, and he is used as a kite by his brother. Another special advantage of being flat is that Flat Stanley can visit his friends in California by mailing himself in an envelope. Stanley even helps catch art museum thieves by disguising himself as a painting on the wall. Eventually, Stanley becomes tired of his flatness, and his brother restores his proper shape with a bicycle pump.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenmantle"title="Greenmantle">
Hannay is called in to investigate rumours of an uprising in the Muslim world, and undertakes a perilous journey through enemy territory to meet his friend Sandy in Constantinople. Once there, he and his friends must thwart the Germans' plans to use religion to help them win the war, climaxing at the battle of Erzurum.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Regained"title="Paradise Regained">
## Book 1.Jesus is baptized by John. Satan, seeing this, calls a meeting of demons to plot against him, confident he can fool Christ as he fooled Adam.Meanwhile God tells the angels Satan is overconfident, and they sing God's praise.Jesus enters the wilderness and fasts there for 40 days, pondering His past and future. A seeming old man of the desert asks him as Son of God to turn stones into bread. Jesus, recognizing Satan, rebukes him for his lies. Satan pretends to be delighted to hear truth and begs permission to stay. Jesus says he can do whatever the Father in heaven allows. Night falls.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_of_Otranto"title="The Castle of Otranto">
"The Castle of Otranto" tells the story of Manfred, lord of the castle, and his family. The book begins on the wedding day of his sickly son Conrad and princess Isabella. Shortly before the wedding, however, Conrad is crushed to death by a gigantic helmet that falls on him from above. This inexplicable event is particularly ominous in light of an ancient prophecy, "that the castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it". Manfred, terrified that Conrad's death signals the beginning of the end for his line, resolves to avert destruction by marrying Isabella himself, while divorcing his current wife, Hippolita, who he feels has failed to bear him a proper heir in light of the sickly condition of Conrad before his untimely death.However, as Manfred attempts to marry Isabella, she escapes to a church with the aid of a peasant named Theodore. Manfred orders Theodore's death while talking to the friar Jerome, who ensured Isabella's safety at the church. When Theodore removes his shirt to be killed, Jerome recognizes a marking below his shoulder and identifies Theodore as his own son. Jerome begs for his son's life, but Manfred says Jerome must either give up the princess or his son's life. They are interrupted by a trumpet and the entrance of knights from another kingdom, who want to deliver Isabella to her father, Fredric, along with the castle, as Fredric has a stronger claim to it (another reason Manfred wishes to wed Isabella). This leads the knights and Manfred to race to find Isabella.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cheating_Culture"title="The Cheating Culture">
The main thesis of the book is that the current state of American society, characterized by rampant inequality and a winner-take-all philosophy, produces the cheating that has been observed in business, law, academia, journalism, entertainment and medicine.Cheating, of both illegal and legal forms, is pervasive in an American society where incentive-driven structures (e.g. stock options, production-based pay, fast-track career options) have gone haywire: Instead of promoting productivity and "fair play", they reward deception and chicanery. Callahan provides multiple examples of this phenomenon in recent American history. In the 1980, when Sears instituted a production quota for its auto repair staff, mechanics began performing unnecessary and costly maintenance. Overbilling is common within the legal profession. Pressed to bill as much time as possible, young lawyers may overcharge clients. In the medical profession, physicians may overstate the symptoms of managed care patients, else insurers would deny coverage.Not restricted to professions, cheating now appears in all facets of American life. According to Callahan, cheating breeds upon a dynamic between a "winner class", an upper-class so influential they effectively are exempt from most rules and standards, and an "anxious class", often compelled to cheat during a period of downward social mobility, downsizing, and within a cultural climate that values money and power above personal integrity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Intellect"title="The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect">
The story of the novella explores the nature of human desire and the uses and abuses of technology in the satisfaction of desire. The story begins after "the Change", in a dream-like post-scarcity society, approximately six hundred years in the future, in which humans have godlike control over their environments, made possible by the supercomputer called Prime Intellect. Prime Intellect operates under Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics, which, according to its own interpretation, allow temporary voluntary harm and discomfort. PI has made humanity immortal and satisfies nearly every whim. Caroline, the thirty-seventh oldest living human being, engages in a sport known as "death jockeying", whose players die elaborately and painfully for sport before being resurrected by Prime Intellect. Flashbacks set before the Change show the creation of Prime Intellect by Lawrence, a technologist, and its realization of its power, and the past life of Caroline before and after the Change, which happened not gradually but rapidly.In the present, Caroline makes use of a "Death Contract", an understanding between a person and Prime Intellect that the person is not to be removed from danger until the instant of death (at which point the person is fully restored, as allowing a person to die permanently would violate Prime Intellect’s inherent ethics based on Asimov’s laws). Caroline makes use of a Death Contract, as well as her own powers of persuasion, in order to trick a pre-Change enemy into torturing herself into psychosis as an act of revenge. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_a_Grove"title="In a Grove">
The story opens with testimonies given to a police commissioner. The first account is by a woodcutter who has found a man's body in the bamboo groves near the road to Yamashina. The man's chest had been pierced by a sword, and the blood from the wound and on the ground had already dried up. Asked by the commissioner, the woodcutter denies having seen any weapons or a horse. The only objects which caught his attention were a comb and a piece of rope near the body. He also comments on the trampled leaves at the site, indicating to him that there had been a violent struggle.The second testimony is given by a traveling Buddhist priest. He says that he saw the man, who was accompanied by a woman on horseback with veiled face, on the road from Sekiyama to Yamashina around noon the previous day. The man was carrying a sword, a bow and a black quiver with arrows. Upon request, he describes the horse as a tall, short-maned sorrel.The next person to testify is a "hōmen", an acquitted prisoner working under contract for the police. He has captured an infamous criminal named Tajōmaru. Tajōmaru had been thrown from a horse, a short-maned sorrel, which was grazing near-by. He still carried the bow and the black quiver with arrows belonging to the deceased. The hōmen reminds the commissioner of last year's murder of two women which is attributed to Tajōmaru, and speculates what he might have done to the dead man's wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_on_Earth_(novel)"title="Peace on Earth (novel)">
The evolution of artificial intelligence has allowed major world powers to sign a rather curious treaty: the Moon is divided into national zones (proportional to each nation's Earth real estate) and all weapons development and production must be moved there to be handled by factories. This is supposed to completely demilitarize Earth, achieving the long-sought dream of world peace. A MAD stabilizing factor is apparently preserved by the ability of countries, in case of war, to quickly ship weapons down from the Moon.Unknown to most people, a problem arises. The ever-increasing amount of autonomy given to Moon's automata, in order to conduct more-effective espionage in neighbors' nation facilities and also to defend one's own, leads to localized robotic conflicts on the Moon's surface. Eventually, after a number of events, there is a total discontinuation of any communication with the Moon. After a number of failed expeditions to reveal the truth on what is going on beneath the Moon's surface, Ijon Tichy is called to the rescue.Right before the return he was hit by a laser weapon which has led to his callosotomy. The resulting split personality leads to his inability to communicate properly both with the people and between the two "alter egos". This results in a good deal of slapstick comedy, e.g., involving hilarious conflicts between Tichy's left and right hand or leg. With the help of his friend, professor Tarantoga, he eventually succeeds in talking to himself.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_and_Fall"title="Decline and Fall">
Modest and unassuming theology student Paul Pennyfeather falls victim to the drunken antics of the Bollinger Club and is subsequently expelled from Oxford for running through the grounds of Scone College without his trousers. Having thereby defaulted on the conditions of his inheritance, he is forced to take a job teaching at an obscure private school in Wales called Llanabba, run by Dr Fagan. Paul soon discovers that the other masters are all failures in life.Attracted to the mother of one of his pupils, a wealthy widow called the Honourable Margot Beste-Chetwynde, he is delighted to be hired by her as tutor to her son during the vacation. Living in her country mansion, he becomes aware of her lovers and drug use but fails to realise that her business is running a chain of high-class brothels in Latin America. She however wants to marry him. First he has to fly to Marseille, where a consignment of her girls bound for Brazil has been held up by the police, who need bribing. Paul's activities there are shadowed by his college friend Potts, who now works for the League of Nations investigating human trafficking.Back in London, he is arrested on the morning of the wedding and, taking the fall to protect his fiancée's honour, is sentenced to seven years in prison for traffic in prostitution. In jail he meets several former staff from Llanabba, which has been closed. Unable to wait seven years, Margot marries a government minister, who arranges for Paul to be rushed from prison to a private clinic for an urgent operation. The clinic is run by Dr Fagan, who certifies that Paul died under anaesthetic and puts him on a boat to Greece.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethan_Frome"title="Ethan Frome">
The novel is a framed narrative. The framing story concerns an unnamed male narrator spending a winter in Starkfield while in the area on business. He spots a limping, quiet man around the village, who is somehow compelling in his demeanor and carriage. This is Ethan Frome, who is a lifelong resident and a local fixture of the community. Frome is described by the narrator as "the most striking figure in Starkfield", "the ruin of a man" with a "careless powerful look ... in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain". Curious, the narrator sets out to learn about him. He learns that Frome's limp arose from having been injured in a "smash-up" twenty-four years before, but further details are not forthcoming, and the narrator fails to learn much more from Frome's fellow townspeople other than that Ethan's attempt at higher education decades before was thwarted by the sudden illness of his father following an injury, forcing his return to the farm to assist his parents, never to leave again. Because people seem not to wish to speak other than in vague and general terms about Frome's past, the narrator's curiosity grows, but he learns little more.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Oleander"title="White Oleander">
Astrid Magnussen is a 12-year-old girl living in Los Angeles, California with her mother, Ingrid Magnussen, a self-centered and eccentric poet. Astrid's father, Klaus Anders, left before Astrid was old enough to remember him. Ingrid begins dating a man named Barry. Eventually, Ingrid discovers that Barry is cheating on her with younger women, so she breaks into Barry's house and poisons him with a mixture of DMSO and oleander sap. Barry dies, and Ingrid is charged with his murder. Sentenced to life in prison, she promises her daughter that she will come back.Astrid is shuffled from one foster home to another for years. First, she joins Starr, a former stripper, and recovering drug addict and alcoholic. Starr has two children of her own, as well as two other foster children. Astrid (who is 14 by this time) has a sexual relationship with Starr's live-in boyfriend, Ray. As his interest in Starr diminishes, Starr relapses. One night, after confronting Ray over his relationship with Astrid (out of jealousy and not concern), Starr shoots Astrid with a .38. Astrid is hospitalized for a few weeks, at which time she begins abusing the prescription drug Demerol.After recovery Astrid is sent to live with Ed and Marvel Turlock, and their two small children, essentially as an unpaid babysitter. Astrid dislikes the couple, partially due to her dislike of the house, and partially due to Marvel's tendency to make racist statements about minorities, particularly their next-door neighbor, a beautiful African-American sex worker named Olivia Johnstone, whom Astrid befriends. Astrid admires Olivia's beauty, wealth, and hedonistic lifestyle. The Turlocks send Astrid away when they discover she associates with Olivia. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macroscope_(novel)"title="Macroscope (novel)">
The central plot device is the "macroscope", a large crystal that can be used to focus a newly discovered type of particle, the "macron". Macrons are not subject to many of the effects that interfere with light, and as a result the macroscope can focus on any location in space-time with exceptional clarity, producing what is essentially a telescope of infinite resolution in the space-time continuum. The macroscope has been built into a solar-orbiting space station where scientists visit to book time on the device. Using it, they are able to explore space as never before. Among their many discoveries are numerous planets and two intelligent alien races. Using the macroscope, observers were able to look into one race's historical records, finding numerous parallels with human life on Earth. The race is now in social decline, and the implications are worrying.The macroscope's clear view across space also makes it an ideal communications system for intelligent races, who broadcast signals by generating macrons, a technique not yet understood on Earth. However, over-riding all of these signals is another of enormous power, one of such strength that it must have been constructed by a Type II civilization. This signal repeats itself, starting with instructions on basic math and progressing to ever-more complex information. Viewers with high enough intelligence, an IQ of 150, reach a point where the information causes them to go insane or die. Those without the intelligence to understand the advanced portions of the signal are unaffected. The signal appears to be a deliberate attempt to "jam" macroscopic communications, blocking those with the ability to understand the other signals from being able to see them. They refer to the blocking signal simply as the "destroyer".
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Planet"title="The Mysterious Planet">
Events of the serial are framed on an arcing plot that carries through the other three serials of the 23rd season. In this, the Sixth Doctor is forced to land the TARDIS aboard a Gallifreyan space station, where he is brought into a courtroom. The Inquisitor informs the Doctor he is on trial for conduct unbecoming a Time Lord; evidence will be presented by the Valeyard. The first evidence is shown through video footage, taken from the Matrix, of the Doctor's recent involvement in the planet Ravolox, where the Valeyard shows that the Doctor willingly became involved in the affairs of the planet. The Doctor denies these charges as the Valeyard brings them. After showing the video, the Valeyard affirms he has more evidence sufficient to call for the end of the Doctor's life.As shown by the court evidence, the Doctor and Peri land on Ravolox, both noting a similarity to Earth. The Doctor is aware that Ravolox was devastated by a fireball, according to official records, but the presence of flourishing plant life makes him suspicious. As they walk, they are observed by Sabalom Glitz and Dibber, mercenaries on the planet attempting to destroy a "black light" generator in order to destroy the L3 robot deep underground that it powers. The Doctor and Peri find a tunnel and enter to find remains that appear to be that of the Marble Arch tube station on the London Underground Central line, piquing the Doctor's curiosity further. The Doctor wishes to proceed deeper, but Peri is worried and stays behind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindwarp"title="Mindwarp">
As with the other serials from Season 23, "Mindwarp" is framed by the trial of the Sixth Doctor, prosecuted by the Valeyard, accusing him of meddling in other species' affairs in a way unbecoming of a Time Lord. The Valeyard provides evidence to the presiding Inquisitor via a screen linked to the Matrix showing the details of the Doctor's actions on the planet Thoros Beta. The bulk of the episode centres on recorded narrative.As shown by the video, the Doctor and Peri arrive on Thoros Beta, the Doctor's curiosity piqued on the availability of advanced weaponry by the Warlords of Thordon. As they explore a cave system, the Doctor discovers Sil, an arms dealer for the Mentors that are supplying the weapons. Exploring further, they find that the scientist Crozier in Sil's employ is attempting to perfect the ability to transplant the brilliant mind of Kiv, Sil's superior, into another body to overcome Kiv's pending death. When discovered, the two make their escape with the warlord King Yrcanos, one of Crozier's test subjects.The Doctor, Peri, Yrcanos and his men plan an attack on Sil, but the Doctor betrays them by abandoning them at the last minute and warns the Mentors, causing Peri and Yrcanos to flee in different directions. Peri happens across one of the Mentors' servant women, and with her help, disguises herself to get close to the Doctor. The Doctor reveals Peri to the Mentors and requests he be allowed to interrogate her alone, a request Sil allows. Away from the others, the Doctor tells Peri his betrayal was all a ploy to learn more of Sil's plan, and has discovered that they will transplant Kiv's mind into his body if he does not cooperate.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_of_the_Vervoids"title="Terror of the Vervoids">
As with the other serials from Season 23, "Terror of the Vervoids" is framed by the trial of the Sixth Doctor, prosecuted by the Valeyard, accusing him of meddling in other species' affairs in a way unbecoming of a Time Lord. In his defence, the Doctor presents evidence through a screen linked to the Matrix, showing the details of his actions on the spaceliner Hyperion III in his own personal future. The bulk of the episode centres on recorded narrative.On the Hyperion III, an elderly man named Kimber thinks he recognises a fellow passenger as an investigator called Hallett. However, the passenger claims that he is a mineralogist called Grenville. A trio of scientist passengers – Professor Lasky and her colleagues Bruchner and Doland – are alarmed that Grenville might be an investigator.Edwardes, the communications officer, detects a craft close to the ship – the TARDIS – but is unable to get a reply. Suddenly, an unseen figure attacks him and injects him with a syringe, causing him to fall and die. He then uses the communication equipment to send a message to the TARDIS. On board, the Doctor and his new companion, Mel Bush, pick up a Mayday message. They materialise within the Hyperion III's cargo hold, are seized by guards, and are brought before Commodore Travers – whom the Doctor has met before. Travers denies sending a mayday signal, but wants the Doctor and Mel to remain on board. Travers hopes that the Doctor will find out who sent the fake mayday call.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Yankee"title="Team Yankee">
The novel is set in West Germany and East Germany in the months of August and September; the year is unspecified.Team Yankee ("Y" in the ICAO and NATO phonetic alphabet) is an armor-heavy company-sized unit (a "Team" in Army parlance). There is nothing special about this team; it is an average company-sized U.S. unit in an average battalion of the Regular Army.Team Yankee is composed of First Platoon (Lieutenant Murray Weiss), Second Platoon (Second Lieutenant McAllister), Mech(anized Infantry) Platoon (Staff Sergeant Polgar), and Third Platoon (Second Lieutenant Gerry Garger). Captain Sean Bannon is company commander; First Lieutenant Robert Uleski is the executive officer; and company first sergeant is First Sergeant Raymond Harrert.Captain Bannon is 27 years old, married and has three children. He studied military history, with a graduate degree, but is seen as an average officer; Coyle notes in the preface that Bannon will probably never rise in rank above lieutenant colonel.The team has four M1 Abrams tanks per platoon numbered 11, 12, 13, 14, 21... to 34, with the first digit corresponding to the respective platoon. The XO's tank is numbered 55; the CO's tank 66. Thus, the team has 10 M1s in the first twelve chapters when its First Platoon is attached to another unit.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stars_My_Destination"title="The Stars My Destination">
At the time when the book is set, "jaunting"—personal teleportation—has so upset the social and economic balance that the Inner Planets are at war with the Outer Satellites. Gully Foyle of the Presteign-owned merchant spaceship "Nomad"—an uneducated, unskilled, unambitious man whose life is at a dead end—is marooned in space when the ship is attacked and he alone survives. After six months of his waiting for rescue, a passing spaceship, the "Vorga", also owned by the powerful Presteign industrial clan, ignores his signal and abandons him. Foyle is enraged and is transformed into a man consumed by revenge, the first of many transformations.Foyle repairs the ship, but is captured by a cargo cult in the Asteroid Belt which tattoos a hideous mask of a tiger on his face. He manages to escape and is returned to Terra. His attempt to blow up the "Vorga" fails, and he is captured by Presteign. Unknown to Foyle, the "Nomad" was carrying "PyrE", a new material which could make the difference between victory and defeat in the war. Presteign hires Saul Dagenham to interrogate Foyle and find the ship and PyrE.Protected by his own revenge fixation, Foyle cannot be broken, and he is put into a -proof prison. There he meets Jisbella McQueen, who teaches him to think clearly, and tells him he should find out who gave the order not to rescue him. Together they escape and get his tattoos removed—but not with total success: the subcutaneous scars become visible when Foyle becomes too emotional. They travel to the "Nomad", where they recover not only PyrE, but also a fortune in platinum. Jisbella is captured by Dagenham, but Foyle escapes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(Varley_novel)"title="Titan (Varley novel)">
A scientific expedition to the planet Saturn in 2025, aboard the ship "Ringmaster", discovers a strange satellite in orbit around the planet. Commanding the ship is Cirocco Jones, a tall NASA career woman, aided by astronomer Gaby Plauget, the clone twin physicists April and August Polo, pilot Eugene Springfield, physician Calvin Greene and engineer Bill (whose last name is never given).As they reach the satellite they realize it is a huge hollow torus, a Stanford torus habitat. Before they can report this the ship is entangled in cables from the object. The crew is rendered unconscious and later wake up inside the habitat. Initially separated, Cirroco and Gaby find each other and travel together through the world inside the torus to find the rest of the crew.They find Calvin living as a companion inside a "Blimp", an intelligent gasbag a kilometer long, one of many that swim forever in the air inside the habitat. Calvin can speak to the blimp and understand its responses, which consist of whistles. His blimp's name is "Whistlestop", in human terms. Calvin helps Gaby and Cirocco find the other crew members (except April). He ultimately decides to leave his human companions to live with the blimp permanently.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rules_of_Attraction"title="The Rules of Attraction">
The novel is written in the first-person, continuing the aesthetic of Ellis' earlier "Less than Zero", and is told from the points of view of multiple characters. The main narrators are three students: Paul, Sean, and Lauren. A number of other characters also provide first-hand accounts throughout the story, which takes place at the fictional Camden College, a liberal arts school on the East Coast of the United States. The three main characters (who rarely attend class) end up in a love triangle within a sequence of drug runs, "Dressed to Get Screwed" parties, and "End of the World" parties.The story begins and ends midway through a sentence (the first word in the book being 'and', the last words are 'and she') in order to give the effect that it begins somewhere closer to the middle, rather than at a true beginning (in medias res). Another interpretation is that the story has neither a beginning nor an ending, signifying the endless cycle of debauchery in which the characters of the novel engage. This is sometimes mistaken by readers as a typographical error or the result of a missing page, but was purposely written by Ellis. The novel ends in a similar fashion, with the last sentence cut off before its end.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Client_(novel)"title="The Client (novel)">
Boyd Boyette, a United States Senator from Louisiana, goes missing. Because of his vocal opposition to a proposed major toxic landfill project by a company known to be Mafia-backed, murder is suspected. But no body can be found and Roy Foltrigg, United States Attorney in New Orleans, is desperate for a suspect. Barry "The Blade" Muldanno, a well-known thug and nephew of Johnny Sulari, acting boss of the New Orleans crime family is suspected. The FBI stalk Muldanno, hoping he'll lead them to the body.Eleven-year-old Mark Sway, his younger brother Ricky, and their divorced mother Dianne live in a trailer park in Memphis. Mark and Ricky are smoking cigarettes in the woods near their home, when they encounter a man trying to commit suicide by piping exhaust fumes into his car. Trying to remove the hose, Mark is grabbed by the man and forced into the car. The man, under the influence of drugs and alcohol, reveals himself to be lawyer Jerome Clifford. Clifford tells Mark that he is about to kill himself to avoid being murdered by Muldanno, who has revealed to him the location of Boyette's body. Mark manages to escape, and Clifford then shoots himself.Ricky becomes catatonic after witnessing the suicide and is hospitalized. Authorities — and the Mob — suspect that Clifford may have told Mark where the body is.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_and_the_Stars"title="The City and the Stars">
## Setting."The City and the Stars" takes place (at least) two and a half billion years from the present—ten rotations of the Galaxy since the apparition of the human species in the novel (one rotation of the Solar System around the galactic center (galactic year) is equivalent to 220–250 million years)—in the city of Diaspar. By this time, the Earth is so old that the oceans have gone and humanity has all but left. As far as the people of Diaspar know, theirs is the only city remaining on the planet. The city of Diaspar is completely enclosed. Nobody has entered or left the city for as long as anybody can remember, and everybody in Diaspar has an instinctive insular conservatism. The story behind this fear of venturing outside the city tells of a race of ruthless invaders which beat humanity back from the stars to Earth, and then made a deal that humanity could live—if they never left the planet.In Diaspar, the entire city is run by the Central Computer. Not only is the city repaired by machines, but the people themselves are created by the machines as well. The computer creates bodies for the people of Diaspar to live in and stores their minds in its memory at the end of their lives. At any time, only a small number of these people are actually living in Diaspar; the rest are retained in the computer's memory banks.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorky_Park_(novel)"title="Gorky Park (novel)">
The story follows Arkady Renko, a chief investigator for the Moscow militsiya, who is assigned to a case involving three corpses found in Gorky Park, an amusement park in Moscow. The victims - two men and a woman - were shot, and have had their faces and fingertips cut off by the murderer to prevent identification.Ice skates found on the woman's body lead Arkady to Irina Asanova, a wardrobe girl at a movie studio, who claims that she reported them stolen, and has no idea how they ended up with the victims. However, Arkady tentatively identifies the three bodies as known associates of Irina: her friend Valerya Davidova, Valerya's boyfriend Kostia Borodin, and an American expatriate student named James Kirwill. Arkady gives the woman's skull to Professor Andreev, an anthropologist at Moscow University, who specializes in reconstructing whole faces from bone structure.At a bathhouse, Arkady's superior, Chief Prosecutor Iamskoy, introduces Arkady to an American fur millionaire, John Osborne, who regularly visits Russia. When Arkady begins to suspect a connection between Osborne and the murders, he is warned by his associate, Mendel, a junior official in the Soviet Trade Ministry, that Osborne is an informant for the KGB, and thus regarded as a "friend" by all of Arkady's superiors.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Rocks"title="Beyond the Rocks">
The beautiful young Theodora Fitzgerald belongs to a family of noble lineage whose fortunes have waned and who have lived in near poverty for most of her life. The book begins with her arranged marriage to Josiah Brown, a nouveau-riche Australian in his fifties. The marriage was contracted for convenience: Josiah simply wants a pretty and aristocratic wife to improve his standing in society, and the Fitzgerald family are in need of Brown's financial resources. Theodora only agrees to the marriage for the sake of her father and sisters.Immediately after the wedding, Josiah falls ill. Theodora proves a dutiful and capable wife, and attends to her husband's every need, though she is secretly very unhappy. After a year of marriage, Josiah is well enough to visit Paris, where Theodora sees her father, Dominic, again for the first time since her wedding. She is thrilled to observe that at least he is receiving all the benefits she'd hoped to bring from her sacrifice: he now runs in aristocratic circles and is courting a wealthy American widow, Mrs. McBride. Theodora attends several social outings with her father, and at one dinner is introduced to Hector, Lord Bracondale. Theodora and Hector hit things off splendidly, and soon fall in love. Mrs. McBride is aware of Theodora's unhappy marriage, and seeing the situation she sympathetically arranges for Hector and Theodora to spend time together as often as possible. One day while Theodora and Hector are being chauffeured back to Paris after an outing at Versailles, the two indulge in a romantic encounter in the back of the car. Full of guilt thereafter, the two conclude they must behave themselves from now on and must no longer pursue each other romantically; they will, however, continue to be friendly to one another any time future social obligations might cause them to meet.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Portrait_of_a_Lady"title="The Portrait of a Lady">
Isabel Archer, from Albany, New York, is invited by her maternal aunt, Lydia Touchett, to visit Lydia's rich husband, Daniel, at his estate near London, following the death of Isabel's father. There, Isabel meets her uncle, her friendly invalid cousin Ralph Touchett, and the Touchetts' robust neighbor, Lord Warburton.Isabel later declines Warburton's sudden proposal of marriage. She also rejects the hand of Caspar Goodwood, the charismatic son and heir of a wealthy Boston mill owner. Although Isabel is drawn to Caspar, her commitment to her independence precludes such a marriage, which she feels would demand the sacrifice of her freedom.The elder Touchett grows ill and, at the request of his son, Ralph, leaves much of his estate to Isabel upon his death. With her large legacy, Isabel travels the Continent and meets an American expatriate, Gilbert Osmond, in Florence. Although Isabel had previously rejected both Warburton and Goodwood, she accepts Osmond's proposal of marriage, unaware that it has been actively promoted by the accomplished but untrustworthy Madame Merle, another American expatriate, whom Isabel had met at the Touchetts' estate.Isabel and Osmond settle in Rome, but their marriage rapidly sours, owing to Osmond's overwhelming egotism and lack of genuine affection for his wife. Isabel grows fond of Pansy, Osmond's presumed daughter by his first marriage, and wants to grant her wish to marry Edward Rosier, a young art collector.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_the_Mighty"title="Max the Mighty">
Max Kane helps Rachel, nicknamed "Worm" because of her love of reading, run away from her overly religious and abusive stepfather, whom Max nicknames "The Undertaker" because he drives a hearse and wears black clothing. The Undertaker accuses Max of kidnapping Worm, so Max and Worm run away with Dippy Hippie on his bus, the Prairie Schooner. Along the way, they meet two con artists, Frank and Joanie, who read about Max and Worm and a money reward for finding them. Frank then tries to turn them in, and Max and Worm have to leave the Prairie Schooner. To take them the rest of the way they hop a train with Hobo Joe and arrive in Chivalry, Montana on a different train. They go into a mining tunnel and Max discovers that Worm's birth father had died in a mining accident. The Undertaker arrives there with the police and Max and Worm run away in the tunnels. They meet Dip, and Max's grandfather, Grim. The police catch them, and Worm runs back into the tunnel. She thinks about committing suicide to be with her father and away from her stepfather, but Max talks her out of it. A support beam in the mine falls over, pinning the Undertaker to the ground. This prompts Worm to finally confront the Undertaker about all the abuse he has been doing to her and her mother, revealing the truth to the police. Before anything else can happen, the mine starts to collapse, forcing everybody to run for the exit. However, Max cannot bear to leave the Undertaker behind, even after everything he's done, so he lifts up the beam to free the Undertaker. The Undertaker gets out of the mine in time, but Max couldn't. Fortunately, emergency services manage to rescue Max, who winds up with a broken shoulder and a broken leg as a result. Afterward, Worm's mother finally works up the courage to stand up to her abusive husband and testify about what really happened, getting the Undertaker convicted of domestic abuse and locked up in prison for a long time. The book ends with Max and his grandparents insisting that Worm and her mother live with them, which they gladly do. Max frequently mentions his old friend Kevin, also nicknamed Freak, throughout the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devdas"title="Devdas">
Devdas is a young man from a wealthy Bengali family in India in the early 1900s. Parvati (Paro) is a young woman from a middle class Bengali Brahmin family. The two families live in a village called Taalshonapur in Bengal, and Devdas and Parvati are childhood friends.Devdas goes away for a couple of years to live and study in the city of Calcutta (now Kolkata). During vacations, he returns to his village. Suddenly, both realise that their easy comfort in each other's innocent comradeship has changed to something deeper. Devdas sees that Parvati is no longer the small girl he knew. Parvati looks forward to their childhood love blossoming into a happy lifelong journey in marriage. According to prevailing social custom, Parvati's parents would have to approach Devdas's parents and propose marriage of Parvati to Devdas as Parvati longs for.Parvati's mother approaches Devdas's mother, Harimati, with a marriage proposal. Although Devdas's mother loves Parvati very much, she isn't so keen on forming an alliance with the family next door. Besides, Parvati's family has a long-standing tradition of accepting dowry from the groom's family for marriage rather than sending dowry with the bride. The alternative family tradition of Parvati's family influences Devdas's mother's decision not to consider Parvati as Devdas' bride, especially as Parvati belongs to a trading ("becha-kena chottoghor") lower family. The "trading" label is applied in context of the marriage custom followed by Parvati's family. Devdas's father, Narayan Mukherjee, who also loves Parvati, does not want Devdas to get married so early in life and isn't keen on the alliance. Parvati's father, Nilkantha Chakravarti, feeling insulted at the rejection, finds an even richer husband for Parvati.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eragon"title="Eragon">
A Shade named Durza, along with a group of Urgals, ambushes a party of three elves. They kill two of them, and Durza attempts to steal an egg carried by the remaining female elf. However, she manages to use magic to teleport it elsewhere. Infuriated, Durza abducts her and keeps her prisoner at the city of Gil'ead.Eragon is a fifteen-year-old boy who has lived with his uncle Garrow and cousin Roran on a farm near the village of Carvahall, left there by his mother Selena after his birth. While hunting, he sees a large explosion and finds a dragon egg in the rubble. The night after, a baby dragon hatches from the egg, and bonds with Eragon, giving him a silver mark on his hand. Eragon names the dragon Saphira, after a name the old village storyteller Brom mentions. He raises the dragon in secret until two of King Galbatorix's servants, the Ra'zac, come to Carvahall. Eragon and Saphira escape and hide in the Spine, but Garrow is fatally wounded and the farm is burned down by the Ra'zac. Once Garrow dies, Eragon and Saphira decide to hunt the Ra'zac, in vengeance. Brom insists on accompanying him and Saphira, and gives Eragon the sword Zar'roc.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Edible_Woman"title="The Edible Woman">
Marian MacAlpin works in a market research firm, writing survey questions and sampling products. She shares the top-floor apartment of a house in Toronto (never named in the novel) with her roommate Ainsley and dates a dependable, hardworking but boring boyfriend, Peter. Marian also keeps in touch with Clara, a friend from college, who is now a constantly pregnant housewife.Ainsley announces she wants to have a baby—and intends to do it without getting married. When Marian is horrified, Ainsley replies, "The thing that ruins families these days is the husbands." Looking for a man who will have no interest in fatherhood, she sets her sights on Marian's "womanizer" friend Len, who is infamous for his relationships with young, naive girls.At work, Marian is assigned the task of gathering responses for a survey about a new brand of beer. While walking from house to house asking people their opinions, she meets Duncan, a graduate student in English who intrigues her with his atypical and eccentric answers.Marian later has a dinner date with Peter and Len, during which Ainsley shows up dressed as a virginal schoolgirl—the first stage of her plan to trick Len into impregnating her. Marian finds herself disassociating from her body as Peter recounts a gory rabbit hunt to Len:
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_be_an_Alien"title="How to be an Alien">
The book is in two parts. The first part, "How to be a General Alien", deals with such important English topics as the weather, tea, how not to be clever (since it is considered bad manners), how to compromise, and queueing (according to Mikes, the national passion). The chapter entitled "Sex" is in its entirety as follows.Continental people have sex lives: the English have hot water bottles.The second part, "How to be a Particular Alien", describes particular occupations from Bloomsbury intellectual to bus driver, finishing with how to be a naturalised citizen, which includes the eating of porridge for breakfast, and alleging that you like it.Mikes subsequently wrote "How to be Inimitable" (1960) and "How to be Decadent" (1977). All three books were published in one volume in 1984 as "How to be a Brit".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brothers_Karamazov"title="The Brothers Karamazov">
## Book One: "A Nice Little Family".The opening of the novel introduces the Karamazov family and relates the story of their distant and recent past. The details of Fyodor Pavlovich's two marriages, as well as his indifference to the upbringing of his three children, is chronicled. The narrator also establishes the widely varying personalities of the three brothers and the circumstances that have led to their return to their father's town. The first book concludes by describing the mysterious Eastern Orthodox tradition of the Elders. Alyosha has become devoted to the Elder at the local monastery.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_(novel)"title="Congo (novel)">
The novel starts in 1979, with an abrupt end to an expedition sent by Earth Resource Technology Services Inc (ERTS). in the dense rainforests of the Virunga region, in the heart of the Congo, when the team is suddenly attacked and killed by unknown creatures – soon, all contact with them is lost. The expedition, which was searching for deposits of diamonds, discovered the fictional lost city of Zinj. A video image taken by a camera there, and transmitted by satellite to the base station in Houston, shows a peculiar race of grey-haired gorillas to be responsible for the murders.Another expedition, led by Karen Ross, is launched to find out the truth and to find the Lost City of Zinj, where there are believed to be deposits of a certain diamond, the type IIb, which are naturally boron-doped and thus useful as semiconductors, though worthless as gemstones. This time, the searchers bring along the famous White African mercenary Charles Munro, as well as a female mountain gorilla named Amy, who has been trained to communicate with humans using sign language, and her trainer Peter Elliot.Time is of the greatest essence, as a rival consortium from corporations in Japan, Germany, and the Netherlands are also searching for the diamonds, turning the entire expedition into a race to the city of Zinj. Unfortunately for Ross and her team, the American expedition encounters many delays along the way, including plane crashes, native civil wars, and jungle predators.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Backward"title="Looking Backward">
Bellamy's time travel novel tells the story of a hero figure named Julian West, a young American, who towards the end of the 19th century, falls into a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep and wakes up 113 years later. He finds himself in the same location (Boston, Massachusetts), but in a totally changed world: It is the year 2000, and while he was sleeping, the United States has been transformed into a socialist utopia. The remainder of the book outlines Bellamy's thoughts about improving the future. The major themes include problems associated with capitalism, a proposed socialist solution of a nationalization of all industry, and the use of an "industrial army" to organize production and distribution, as well as how to ensure free cultural production under such conditions.The young man readily finds a guide, Doctor Leete, who shows him around and explains all the advances of this new age, including drastically reduced working hours for people performing menial jobs and almost instantaneous, internet-like delivery of goods. Everyone retires with full benefits at age 45, and may eat in any of the public kitchens (realized as factory-kitchens in the 1920s–30s in the USSR). The productive capacity of the United States is nationally owned, and the goods of society are equally distributed to its citizens. A considerable portion of the book is dialogue between Leete and West wherein West expresses his confusion about how the future society works and Leete explains the answers using various methods, such as metaphors or direct comparisons with 19th-century society.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witches_Abroad"title="Witches Abroad">
Following the death of the witch Desiderata Hollow, Magrat Garlick receives Desiderata's magic wand, for Desiderata was not only a witch but also a fairy godmother. By giving the wand to Magrat, she effectively makes Magrat the new fairy godmother to a young woman called Emberella, who lives across the Disc in Genua. Sadly, Desiderata does not give Magrat any instruction on how to use the wand, so pretty much anything that Magrat points it at simply becomes a pumpkin.Desiderata had promised Emberella that she would not be forced to marry the Duke (or Duc, as it is spelled in the book), who's really a frog/prince. Now it is up to Magrat and her companions, (Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg), to ensure Emberella does not marry the Duc, despite the desires of another witch in Genua called Lilith, Desiderata's fairy godmother counterpart. Lilith used the power of mirrors to capture Genua.The trio of witches journey to Genua, which takes some time and involves numerous mis-adventures, such as an encounter with a village terrorised by a Vampire—Nanny Ogg's cat Greebo catches it in bat form and eats it—an incident where they encounter a Running of the Bulls-like event, and a house falling on Nanny's head which she survives thanks to her hat with the willow reinforcement. Upon arrival in Genua, Magrat goes to meet Emberella, while the two older witches meet Erzulie Gogol, a voodoo witch and her zombie servant, Baron Saturday (who was also her late lover).
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lords_and_Ladies_(novel)"title="Lords and Ladies (novel)">
Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Magrat Garlick return to Lancre after their recent adventure in Genua. Magrat is stunned when King Verence proclaims their imminent marriage, having already made all the arrangements in her absence. The sudden appearance of crop circles reveals to Nanny and Granny that it is now "circle time", a convergence of parallel universes when the Discworld is susceptible to incursions from the "parasite universe" of the Elves. Elves are capricious and amoral creatures that enter the minds of animals and sentient beings in a more destructive way than witches do, using "glamour" to alter human's perceptions of them. They are normally kept away by a circle of magnetized iron standing stones known as the Dancers. When Nanny and Granny refuse to explain the situation to Magrat, she leaves the coven, disavows witchcraft, and moves into an apartment in Lancre Castle. She soon becomes bored with the courtly lifestyle and unsure of her place.Mustrum Ridcully, Archchancellor of Unseen University, leads a small group of faculty to attend the wedding. Along the way, they are joined by the Dwarfish lothario Casanunda.Granny and Nanny discover that a group of local girls, led by Diamanda Tockley and including Agnes Nitt, have formed a new coven whose activities include dancing naked at the Dancers. The two elderly witches try to convince them to stop, with Granny ultimately besting Diamanda in a public witchcraft contest and discrediting the new coven. But a defiant Diamanda later runs through the Dancers into the land of the Elves, where she is knocked unconscious by a poisoned Elven arrow before being rescued by Granny. Nanny subdues an Elf that pursues them back into Lancre, using an iron fireplace poker; Elves and their powers are severely weakened by iron. The witches bring Diamanda and the Elf to Lancre Castle, where Magrat treats Diamanda and Verence agrees to imprison the Elf (though Magrat inadvertently frees it later). Meanwhile, Granny has begun to experience memories of other paths her life has taken in parallel worlds, as well as a growing sense of her own impending death.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Royal_Game"title="The Royal Game">
An anonymous narrator opens the story by describing the boarding of a passenger liner traveling from New York to Buenos Aires. One of the passengers is world chess champion Mirko Czentovic. Czentovic is an idiot savant and prodigy with no obvious qualities apart from his talent for chess. The narrator plays chess with his wife, hoping to draw Czentovic's attention and engage him in a game. The narrator draws the attention of McConnor, a businessman, who offers to pay Czentovic's fee.A group of passengers (including the narrator and McConnor) play Czentovic in a , which Czentovic wins. They are about to lose a second game when they are interrupted by Dr B., who prevents them from blundering and guides the party to a draw.Dr B. tells his story to the narrator. He was a lawyer who managed the assets of the Austrian nobility and church. He was arrested by the Gestapo, who hoped to extract information from Dr B. in order to steal the assets. The Gestapo kept Dr B. imprisoned in a hotel, in total isolation, but Dr B. maintained his sanity by stealing a book of past masters' chess games, which he learned completely. After absorbing every single move in the book, he began to play against himself, developing the ability to separate his psyche into two personas. This psychological conflict ultimately caused him to suffer a breakdown, after which he awakened in a hospital. A sympathetic physician attested his insanity to keep him from being imprisoned again by the Nazis, and he was freed.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostromo"title="Nostromo">
"Nostromo" is set in the fictional South American country of Costaguana, and more specifically in that country's Occidental Province and its port city of Sulaco. Though Costaguana is a fictional nation, its geography as described in the book resembles real-life Colombia. Costaguana has a long history of tyranny, revolution and warfare, but has recently experienced a period of stability under the dictator Ribiera.Charles Gould is a native Costaguanero of English descent who owns an important silver-mining concession near the key port of Sulaco. He is tired of the political instability in Costaguana and its concomitant corruption, and uses his wealth to support Ribiera's government, which he believes will finally bring stability to the country after years of misrule and tyranny by self-serving dictators. Instead, Gould's refurbished silver mine and the wealth it has generated inspires a new round of revolutions and self-proclaimed warlords, plunging Costaguana into chaos. Among others, the forces of the revolutionary General Montero invade Sulaco after securing the inland capital. Gould, adamant that his silver mine should not become spoil for his enemies, orders Nostromo, the trusted "Capataz de Cargadores" (Head Longshoreman) of Sulaco, to take the mine's most recent load of silver offshore, and arranges for the mine complex to be destroyed by dynamite if the coup leaders try to take it. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well_of_Lost_Plots"title="The Well of Lost Plots">
Apprentice Jurisfiction agent and SpecOps-27 operative Thursday Next is taking a vacation inside "Caversham Heights", a never-published detective novel inside the titular Well of Lost Plots, while waiting for her child to be born. In the book, she encounters two Generics, students of St Tabularasa's who have yet to be assigned to a book, and DCI Jack Spratt, a detective who partners with her in investigating a murder. Since Thursday is an "Outlander", a "real" person rather than a fictional character, Spratt hopes that she will help them appeal to the Council of Genres to prevent the disassembling of "Caversham Heights", a fate inevitable for books which languish unpublished in the real world.Using a "Caversham Heights" as her base of operations, Thursday continues her apprenticeship with Miss Havisham from "Great Expectations". Meanwhile, fictional character Yorrick Kaine is loose in Thursday's real world and conspiring with someone in Text Grand Central, the final arbitrators of plot, setting, and other story elements, to release BOOK version 9, code-named UltraWord. UltraWord is touted at a Jurisfiction meeting as the greatest advance "since the invention of movable type" because it creates a thirty-two plot story system and allows the reader to control the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Brown's_School_Days"title="Tom Brown's School Days">
Tom Brown is energetic, stubborn, kind-hearted and athletic, rather than intellectual. He follows his feelings and the unwritten rules of the boys.The early chapters of the novel deal with his childhood at his home in the Vale of White Horse. Much of the scene setting in the first chapter is deeply revealing of Victorian Britain's attitudes towards society and class, and contains a comparison of so-called Saxon and Norman influences on the country. This part of the book, when young Tom wanders the valleys freely on his pony, serves as a contrast with the hellish experiences in his first years at school.His first school year is at a local school. His second year starts at a private school, but due to an epidemic of fever in the area, all the school's boys are sent home, and Tom is transferred mid-term to Rugby School.On his arrival, the eleven-year-old Tom Brown is looked after by a more experienced classmate, Harry "Scud" East. Tom's nemesis at Rugby is the bully Flashman. The intensity of the bullying increases, and, after refusing to hand over a sweepstake ticket for the favourite in a horse race, Tom is deliberately burned in front of a fire. Tom and East defeat Flashman with the help of Diggs, a kind, comical, older boy. In their triumph they become unruly.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Book_in_the_Universe"title="The Last Book in the Universe">
The story is set in a dystopian future city somewhere in the United States, called the Urb, which has been disturbed by an earthquake known as "The Big Shake." The Urb is plagued by poverty, thieves, gang warfare, and the use of mind probes. Mind probes are analogous to hard drugs and enable users to temporarily escape reality through images projected in the head. Genetically improved people, called "proovs", (a play on "improved") live in a city called Eden, with a beautiful society, food, and water. Eden is separated from the Urb by the "Forbidden Zone," a deadly and dangerous minefield. The Urb is split up into sections called "latches." Each latch is controlled by a gang. Spaz is a teenage boy who cannot use mind probes because of his epilepsy, causing his family to abandon him. Spaz runs errands for Billy Bizmo, the latch-boss (leader) of his gang, the "Bully Bangers," in a section of the Urb. On one of his errands, Spaz is sent to "rip-off" (steal from) Ryter, a very old man who possesses the lost arts of literacy and literature.Spaz soon meets Little Face, a five-year-old orphan who only says the word "chox", because he didn't learn how to speak and Spaz first gave him to eat. Spaz also meets Lanaya, a , who charitably gives out "edibles" (food) to Spaz. Ryter understands Spaz's situation and does his best to help him, offering no resistance when Spaz attempts to steal his belongings. Eventually, Spaz learns that Bean, his beloved adoptive sister, is dying of leukemia. Ryter and Little Face accompany Spaz on a journey to find Bean. The trio starts by traveling through "the Pipe," a large, rusted-out water pipe that leads to other latches. In the next latch, the group sees everything burning and finds Lanaya being attacked by very hungry people. Lanaya is rescued by Spaz and Ryter, and she joins them on their journey. The group starts traveling towards the latch where Bean lives and eventually find her as well. Lanaya and Ryter decide to take Bean to Eden, along with Spaz and Little Face. They ride along in Lanaya's to her "contributors" (parents), Jin and Bree's home, which is a castle in Eden.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amtrak_Wars"title="The Amtrak Wars">
In AD 2989, a 17-year-old, newly qualified Amtrak pilot named Steve Brickman joins the "Lady from Louisiana", a wagon-train in its first major assault on the Plainfolk Mutes. Thanks to the Mutes' deployment of sorcery, the wagon-train is defeated and forced to retreat. Brickman is taken prisoner by the Mutes but not killed, due to a prophetic vision of the clan's seer, Mr. Snow, which suggests Steve will be instrumental in the fulfilment of the Talisman Prophecy. The prophecy is that a 'chosen one' called "Talisman" will arise to destroy the Federation and lead the Mutes to victorious domination of the world. Steve comes to admire and respect the Mutes; he falls in love with a "straight" (mutation-free) Mute woman named Clearwater and forges a bond of mutual respect with Mr. Snow's apprentice, Cadillac.Steve eventually escapes from the Mutes and returns to the Federation, but his account of his imprisonment and escape is deemed fantastical. Labelled a deserter, he is stripped of all rank and is publicly disgraced. Privately, Steve is recruited by the Federation's top-secret intelligence organisation, AMEXICO, and is sent on a new assignment to capture Cadillac, Clearwater, and Mr. Snow, who are deemed of interest to the Federation. Upon learning that Cadillac has used information from Steve to build a primitive glider and fly it to Ne-Issan as part of a weapons and intelligence exchange between the Mutes and Iron Masters, Steve decides to pursue the capture mission into Ne-Issan. During this mission, Steve's loyalties become further conflicted between his affinity with the Mutes and his birth allegiance to the Federation, and he begins a risky attempt to play both sides against the middle whilst he looks for a way to escape his enemies on both sides.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daleks"title="The Daleks">
The TARDIS lands in a petrified jungle, where the First Doctor (William Hartnell) tries to determine their position by taking a reading of the stars. He insists they explore a futuristic city they spot beyond the forest, but Ian Chesterton (William Russell) and Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill) are not convinced. In the forest, someone touches Susan Foreman's (Carole Ann Ford) shoulder; the Doctor does not believe her. Later, a box of vials is found outside the TARDIS. The Doctor claims the fluid link of the TARDIS is running low on mercury (a ruse he later admits to), forcing the crew to travel to the city in search of more mercury.Barbara becomes separated from her colleagues in the city and is threatened by an unseen creature with a metal arm. Before long, the entire crew is captured by unseen creatures operating tank-like machines, the Daleks. Susan is eventually sent to retrieve anti-radiation drugs from the TARDIS after the Doctor realises this is what the box contained. Susan encounters a second species, the Thals, who used to be at war with the Daleks. The Thal who left the drugs reveals he encountered her in the forest. Susan attempts to broker peace between the two groups, and while it appears to work, the Daleks eventually betray the Thals, opening fire on them at what was supposed to be a peaceful exchange of food. The Daleks attempt using the anti-radiation drugs, but discover that they are fatal to Daleks. They conclude that Daleks need radiation to survive and decide to bombard the atmosphere with more radiation.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Skilled_Gentlemen"title="Eight Skilled Gentlemen">
In this novel, Li Kao and Number Ten Ox are attending the execution of a notorious criminal (about whose capture the less said the better, according to the chronicler) when into the public square bounds a "vampire ghoul" who soon meets a fiery demise. Master Li is given the case by the "Celestial Master" who soon becomes a main suspect. The plot involves everything from a conspiracy involving fake tea to dog-brides, puppeteers to magic birdcages, assorted pre-Chinese demons and gods, and the hooded and ancient Eight Skilled Gentlemen.The plot also involves a subject rarely mentioned in fiction, the pre-Chinese aborigines and their gods.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Songs_of_Distant_Earth"title="The Songs of Distant Earth">
The novel is set in the early 3800s and takes place almost entirely on the faraway oceanic planet of Thalassa. Thalassa has a small human population sent there by way of an embryonic seed pod, one of many sent out from Earth in an attempt to continue the human race before the Earth was destroyed.The story begins with an introduction of the Thalassans – the marine biologist Brant, his partner Mirissa and her brother Kumar. They are typical examples of the Thalassan culture; quiet, stable, and free from religion and supernatural influence. Their peaceful existence comes to an end with the arrival of the "Magellan", an interstellar spaceship from Earth containing one million colonists who have been put into cryonic suspension.In a series of descriptive passages, the events leading up to the race to save the human species are explained. Scientists in the 1960s discover that the neutrino emissions from the Sun – a result of the nuclear reactions that fuel the star – are far diminished from expected levels. At a secret session of the International Astronomical Union it is confirmed that the Sun will become a nova around the year AD 3600.Over a period of centuries humanity develops advanced technologies to send out seeding ships containing human and other mammalian embryos (and later on, simply stored DNA sequences), along with robot parents, to planets that are considered habitable. One such ship is sent to the far off ocean world of Thalassa and successfully establishes a small human colony in the year 3109. Sending live humans is ruled out due to the immense amount of fuel that a rocket-propelled spacecraft would have to carry to first accelerate to the speeds required to travel such great distances within an acceptable time, and then decelerate upon approaching the destination. This limitation is overcome however with the development of the Quantum Drive less than a hundred years before the Sun is set to become a nova. This scientific breakthrough allows the construction of a fleet of crewed interstellar vehicles, including the starship "Magellan". The "Magellan" escapes the Earth three years before the Sun explodes, an event that is witnessed by the "Magellan"'s crew.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slapstick_(novel)"title="Slapstick (novel)">
The novel is in the form of an autobiography of Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain. Dr. Swain tells us that he lives in the ruins of the Empire State Building with his pregnant granddaughter, Melody Oriole-2 von Peterswald, and her lover, Isadore Raspberry-19 Cohen. Dr. Swain is a hideous man whose ugliness, along with that of his twin sister Eliza, led their parents to cut them off from modern society. The siblings came to realize that, when in close physical contact, they form a vastly powerful and creative intelligence. Through reading and philosophizing together, Wilbur and Eliza combated the feelings of loneliness and isolation that would otherwise have ruined their childhood.Throughout the book, Wilbur claims that his sister Eliza is the more intelligent of the two, but that no one realizes it because she can't read or write. Wilbur and Eliza are like two halves of a brain, with Wilbur the left brain—logical, rational, able to communicate—and Eliza the right brain: creative, emotional, but unable to communicate effectively.The siblings created, among other things, a plan to end loneliness in America through vast extended families. Under the plan, all citizens would be provided with new middle names, made of the name of a random natural object paired with a random number between 1 and 20. Everyone with the same name would be cousins, and everyone with the same name and number would be siblings.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_of_Gomrath"title="The Moon of Gomrath">
Once again, it details the involvement of two children, Colin and Susan, with the world of myth and magic. This time the focus is on the potential of the older, wilder forms of magic and myth cycle to create both creative and destructive forces on the world.To ease the surrender of the Weirdstone in "The Weirdstone of Brisingamen", Susan was given a magical bracelet by Angharad Goldenhand. It is the donning of this bracelet which has launched Susan unwittingly on a destiny connected with the cycles of the moon and hence the older wilder powers of the world. "The Moon of Gomrath" begins when the elves (lios-alfar) borrow the bracelet, with her consent, to see if its power can be directed by them to battle an unknown evil power in their own lands in Sinadon. However while unprotected by the bracelet, Susan is possessed by the Brollachan, an ancient evil released after an old pit is broken open during building work. The wizard Cadellin, guardian of the sleeping knights in "The Weirdstone of Brisingamen", cannot restore Susan after the Brollachan has been driven out of her body; instead perceiving that her spirit has been driven to another spiritual dimension, unreachable with ordinary means. It is Colin's true-hearted heroic love and need for his sister which provides the answer; as he responds to the older powers of the world. He therefore comes to seek the Mothan at moonrise. The Mothan is a mythical plant which grows on the Old Straight Track. This is a motif inspired by the book named "The Old Straight Track". It is part of the Old Magic, in contrast to Cadellin's High Magic. Susan is dramatically restored to her own body.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Blood_(novel)"title="Captain Blood (novel)">
The protagonist is the sharp-witted Dr. Peter Blood, a fictional Irish physician who had had a wide-ranging career as a soldier and sailor (including a commission as a captain under the Dutch admiral De Ruyter) before settling down to practice medicine in the town of Bridgwater in Somerset. The story is told from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, who enables the reader to see the thoughts and views of many different characters. The narrator - perhaps meant to be Sabatini himself - claims to have acquired the story from the ship's logs of Blood's longtime companion Jeremy Pitt. The book opens with him attending to his geraniums while the town prepares to fight for James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth. He wants no part in the rebellion, but while attending to some of the rebels wounded at the Battle of Sedgemoor, Peter is arrested. During the Bloody Assizes, he is convicted by the infamous Judge Jeffreys of treason on the grounds that "if any person be in actual rebellion against the King, and another person—who really and actually was not in rebellion—does knowingly receive, harbour, comfort, or succour him, such a person is as much a traitor as he who indeed bore arms."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spearhead_from_Space"title="Spearhead from Space">
The Doctor collapses outside his TARDIS and is taken to Ashbridge Cottage Hospital in Epping, where his unusual anatomy confuses the doctors.Meanwhile, a meteorite shower falls on the English countryside, and a poacher discovers a mysterious plastic polyhedron at the crash site. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart of UNIT is trying to recruit Dr. Elizabeth "Liz" Shaw as a scientific advisor to examine any meteorites for evidence of aliens. Shaw is sceptical of the Brigadier's concerns and resents being taken away from her research at Cambridge.The plastic polyhedron is a power unit for a non-physical alien intelligence known as the Nestene Consciousness. Normally disembodied, it has an affinity for plastic, and is able to animate human replicas made from it, called Autons. The Nestene have taken over a toy factory in Epping, and plan to replace key government and public figures with Auton duplicates. The Auton in charge of the factory sends other, less human-looking, dummy-like Autons to retrieve the power units from UNIT and the poacher.After recovering in hospital and avoiding being kidnapped by the Autons, the Doctor discovers that his TARDIS has been disabled by the Time Lords and he is trapped on Earth. Despite his recent change in appearance, he convinces Lethbridge-Stewart that he is the same man who helped to defeat the Yeti and the Cybermen. Together with Liz, he uncovers the Nestene plot, just as the Autons activate across Britain and begin killing. The Doctor assembles an electroshock device that he believes will disable them.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthborn"title="Earthborn">
Five centuries after the conclusion of "Earthfall", there is only one original colonist from Harmony: Shedemei, who now wears the Cloak of the Starmaster (a device that links her to the Oversoul). After hundreds of years, the descendants of Nafai and Elemak have built cities and towns - yet never forgetting the enmity between the two brothers. After hundreds of years, the Oversoul still has not achieved its original purpose: to find the Keeper of Earth, the central intelligence that alone can repair the Oversoul's damaged counterpart at Harmony.But now, the Keeper has once again begun to spread its influence. Heeding the dreams below, Shedemei has decided to return to Earth.The last book in the Homecoming saga marks a departure from the style and storyline of the previous four. All of the characters from the previous novels (except Shedemei) are long dead. The central conflict between Nafai and Elemak is represented in their descendants, but takes a back seat in this book. The focus is on the struggles within the descendants of those who followed Nafai. The king of Darakemba (an empire founded by the Nafaris), his children, and his advisers, along with the high priest of Darakemba, his children, and his converts, provide the main actions in the story.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthfall_(novel)"title="Earthfall (novel)">
The children of Wetchik are ready to board the starship "Basilica" and embark on their journey from the planet Harmony back to the origin of humanity: Earth. However, the rivalry between Nafai and Elemak promises the journey will be anything but peaceful. Each faction already has hidden plans to prematurely awaken from the long hibernation, to have the upper hand when the landing occurs. The children become pawns in their parents' power struggle - valuable potential adults that can strengthen each faction. But the Oversoul is ultimately in control, having uploaded a copy of itself into "Basilica's" central computer, so that it can monitor the ship at all times.After landing on Earth, the fragile peace wrought on board is merely a mask for the turmoils of passions that boil beneath. Not only do the colonists have to deal with the split, there are also the mysteriously symbiotic alien races that have evolved on Earth since humanity's departure. The quest to understand the Angels (giant bats) and the Diggers (giant rats) that were foreshadowed in the dreams is not an easy one.The focus throughout the course of this novel begins to drift away from the original generation of characters in order to delineate the passage of time. The factions that developed among the original generation have now spread to their children, through no fault of the children themselves. Nafai finds himself and his "Nafari" living and working primarily amongst the angel people, whereas the "Elemaki" associate much more closely with the diggers. It is this dissociation that eventually breaks nearly all the bonds—literally, for Hushidh and Cheveya—between Nafai and his older brother, Elemak. As Elemak's rage and hatred for Nafai grow, he ingrains such feelings into his family and the digger people, laying the foundation for war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Bless_You,_Dr._Kevorkian"title="God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian">
The premise of the collection is that Vonnegut employs Dr. Jack Kevorkian to give him near-death experiences, allowing Vonnegut access to heaven and those in it for a limited time. While in the afterlife Vonnegut interviews a range of people including Adolf Hitler, William Shakespeare, Isaac Asimov, and the ever-present Kilgore Trout (a fictional character created by Vonnegut in his earlier works).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Father_Christmas_Letters"title="The Father Christmas Letters">
The stories are told in the format of a series of letters, told either from the point of view of Father Christmas or his elvish secretary. They document the adventures and misadventures of Father Christmas and his helpers, including the North Polar Bear and his two sidekick cubs, Paksu and Valkotukka. The stories include descriptions of the massive fireworks that create the northern lights and how Polar Bear manages to get into trouble on more than one occasion.The 1939 letter has Father Christmas making reference to the Second World War, while some of the later letters feature Father Christmas' battles against Goblins which were subsequently interpreted as being a reflection of Tolkien's views on the German Menace.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elidor"title="Elidor">
The story concerns the adventures of a group of children as they struggle to hold back a terrible darkness by fulfilling a prophecy from another world. The plot moves to and from the world of Elidor, and the city of Manchester and parts of northern Cheshire in the real world.Like many of Garner's books, the emphasis of the narrative is on the hardships, cost and practicalities of the choices and responsibilities that the protagonists face.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freak_the_Mighty"title="Freak the Mighty">
The novel is set in a version of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In the beginning of the book, Maxwell Kane is a young boy with low self-esteem. He lives with his grandfather, Grim, and grandmother, Gram. Max thinks of himself as a big butthead. People are afraid of him because he looks like his father, Kenneth "Killer" Kane, a convicted murderer. Max sets the stage for the story by reminiscing about his time in daycare, when he had met a boy named Kevin, or Freak, as their classmates called him. Kevin has Morquio syndrome, wears leg braces and uses crutches, and thinks of himself as a robot and is bullied by many bigger kids due to his short height. However, Max likes Kevin and thinks the crutches and leg braces are neat.Many years later, when Max is in middle school, he finds out that Freak and his mother, Gwen (referred to as "The Fair Guinevere") are moving into the house next door. When Max initially approaches Freak, Freak acts with hostility. However, sometime later, Max saves Kevin's toy ornithopter from a tree and they start to become friends. On the Fourth of July, they go to see the fireworks show and are attacked by an older boy, Tony "Blade" D. and his gang but avoid any mental or physical conflict. After the show, Blade chases the two with his gang after Freak calls him a cretin. Despite Max's lack of knowledge and disability, he escapes by acting on Freak's orders, but the two are driven into a muddy millpond, Freak riding on Max's shoulders. Freak gets the attention of a nearby police car, who drives off Blade's gang and takes the boys home. After this incident, Kevin starts riding on Max's shoulders regularly. They begin to call themselves "Freak the Mighty". They go on adventures such as going to the hospital which Freak claims has a secret department called the "Bionics Department" which has had his brain CT scanned to be fitted into a bionic body.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_Noon"title="Darkness at Noon">
## Structure."Darkness at Noon" is divided into four parts: The First Hearing, The Second Hearing, The Third Hearing, and The Grammatical Fiction. In the original English translation, Koestler's word that Hardy translated as "Hearing" was "Verhör". In the 2019 translation, Boehm translated it as "Interrogation". In his introduction to that translation, Michael Scammell writes that "hearing" made the Soviet and Nazi "regimes look somewhat softer and more civilized than they really were".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Handful_of_Dust"title="A Handful of Dust">
Tony Last is a country gentleman, living with his wife Brenda and his eight-year-old son John Andrew in his ancestral home, Hetton Abbey. The house is a Victorian pseudo-Gothic pastiche described as architecturally "devoid of interest" by a local guide book and "ugly" by his wife, but is Tony's pride and joy. Entirely content with country life, he is seemingly unaware of Brenda's increasing boredom and dissatisfaction, and of his son's developing waywardness. Brenda meets John Beaver and, despite acknowledging his dullness and insignificance, she begins an affair with him. Brenda starts spending her weeks in London, and persuades Tony to finance a small flat, which she rents from John's mother, Mrs Beaver, a canny businesswoman. Although the Brenda–Beaver liaison is well known to their London friends, Tony remains uxorious and oblivious; attempts by Brenda and her friends to set him up with a mistress are absurdly unsuccessful.Brenda is in London when John Andrew is killed in a riding accident. On being told that "John is dead", Brenda at first thinks that Beaver has died; on learning that it is her son John, she betrays her true feelings by uttering an involuntary "Thank God!". After the funeral, she tells Tony that she wants a divorce so that she can marry Beaver. On learning the extent of her deception Tony is shattered, but agrees to protect Brenda's social reputation by allowing her to divorce him, and to provide her with £500 a year. After spending an awkward but chaste weekend in Brighton with a prostitute contriving divorce evidence, Tony learns from Brenda's brother that, encouraged by Beaver, Brenda is now demanding £2,000 a year—a sum that would require Tony to sell Hetton. Tony's illusions are shattered. However, the prostitute brought her child with her, so Tony can establish that he did not commit adultery. He withdraws from the divorce negotiations, and announces that he intends to travel for six months. On his return, he says, Brenda may have her divorce, but without any financial settlement.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mauritius_Command"title="The Mauritius Command">
Jack Aubrey and Sophia Williams are married and the parents of twin girls. They live at Ashgrove Cottage on his half-pay, not enough to support fellow navy men in the household. Sophia's mother has lost her money, including Sophia's portion, and now lives with them. They have Cecelia, Sophia's young niece in their household as well. As much as he loves Sophia, Aubrey is ready to go to sea again. Stephen Maturin comes to call, and soon after Aubrey's orders are delivered from the port Admiral. He is given command of the 38-gun frigate HMS "Boadicea". At Plymouth, he picks up orders and Mr R T Farquhar, a political gentleman. He is to sail to the station at Cape Town where the ships of a convoy will meet. Not long away from home, they meet with the French ship "Hébé" which is escorting a captured merchant ship. The "Boadicea" captures both ships. Aubrey sends the prizes to Gibraltar. The timely capture allows the ship to send letters home, gain a French cook and the "Hébé's" English prisoners, all able seamen. The long journey in the Atlantic gives Aubrey time to bring the crew of the "Boadicea" up to his standards of efficiency in gunnery and gives Maturin and Farquhar time to develop strategies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Edge_of_Destruction"title="The Edge of Destruction">
The First Doctor (William Hartnell), while attempting to correct the TARDIS's faulty navigation circuits, causes a small explosion. The Doctor, Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill), Ian Chesterton (William Russell), and Susan Foreman (Carole Ann Ford) are all temporarily rendered unconscious. When they wake, Ian and Susan appear to have slight cases of amnesia and everyone begins to act strangely. The travellers are becoming suspicious of each other's motives, and the Doctor accuses Ian and Barbara of sabotage. Fearing that they have been taken over by some alien force—or that they have intentionally sabotaged the TARDIS to force the Doctor to return them to 1963—he drugs Barbara and Ian, unknowing that Ian is also suspicious and has not taken the drink given to him. The Doctor attempts to explore the problem without interference.Gradually it becomes clear that the strange events are an attempt by the TARDIS itself to warn the crew that something is wrong. Barbara's clue gathering forces the Doctor to trace the problem to a broken spring in the Fast Return Switch. The malfunction is causing the TARDIS to head back to the beginning of time; the strange events were just attempts by the TARDIS to warn the passengers before the ship is destroyed. Fixing the switch brings all back to normal. Although the day is saved, Barbara is still affected by the Doctor's harsh words earlier. The Doctor apologises, and admits that he was wrong about Barbara and Ian. The story closes with the TARDIS materialising on a snowy landscape, where Susan spots a giant footprint in the snow.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hat_Full_of_Sky"title="A Hat Full of Sky">
"A Hat Full of Sky" by Terry Pratchett is a fantasy novel about a girl who is learning her place as a witch. Early in the novel, Tiffany Aching leaves her home in the chalk country (based on England's chalk country) to act as an apprentice and maid for the elderly witch Miss Level. Her former teacher, Miss Tick, who is also a witch, escorts her to the town of Twoshirts. While waiting for Miss Level to arrive, they are attacked by a hiver. The hiver cannot be killed or seen and it takes over your mind. The encounter is only for a few seconds, and then the hiver leaves but it gives Tiffany and Miss Tick a fright. Miss Level comes along on a broomstick and takes Tiffany to her cottage in the mountains.After settling in Tiffany discovers that Miss Level has two bodies and she has a spirit named Oswald who cleans her house. After settling into the cottage, Tiffany goes to a group of apprentice witches her age with Petulia. The leader of the group is called Annagramma and many characters find her condescending and rude. Tiffany leaves the group upset after telling them about her imaginary hat. While in her room at the cottage, the hiver finds her and takes over her body and mind. At first Tiffany does not realize what has happened, but when she does, it is too late for her to take action. The hiver (as Tiffany) causes chaos, steals Mr Weavall's money and causes Annagramma to fear her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Surgeon's_Mate"title="The Surgeon's Mate">
Sailing into Halifax, the victorious HMS "Shannon" contends with her losses in officers and crew, with particular concern for Captain Broke, who lies unconscious from head wounds. The American Captain Lawrence dies en route from the battle, and is buried at Halifax. Once in port, as prisoners of war are taken ashore and the British Navy deserters identified among them, the Shannons and her passengers, Captain Jack Aubrey, Dr Stephen Maturin, and Mrs Diana Villiers feel the full joy of the first naval victory in this war with America. Maturin communicates with Major Beck, an army counterpart in intelligence work. At the victory ball, Aubrey is pursued by Amanda Smith, known to Diana for her deceiving ways. Aubrey tires of her after a night, yet she persists. Aubrey receives his first letters from his wife Sophia since the "Leopard" was left in the Dutch East Indies, so long ago. Others write the report of Broke's victory, to speed the official news to England.Captain Dalgleish on the mail packet "Diligence" carries the copy of the official report, and Aubrey, Maturin and Mrs Villiers as passengers. The American privateer "Liberty" chases "Diligence" on its northern route home. Diana is certain that the privateers are hired by the vengeful Johnson. The "Liberty" sails into ice and sinks, her crew taken aboard by her follower, and "Diligence" reaches the Channel in 17 days. News of the victory is well-received, while Aubrey is eager to get home. He sees his children, grown so much from when he last saw them, and his wife Sophia. Maturin visits Ireland for his uncle. He gives Johnson's private papers to Sir Joseph Blaine, asks him for Diana's release, and gets Skinner as a lawyer for Aubrey to deal with the projector. Maturin goes to Paris to present his scientific work at the "Institut", taking Diana with him. He finds her a place to stay with Adhemar de la Mothe and an accoucheur as Diana is pregnant by Johnson. At the "Institut" presentation, Diana wears her diamonds; she dearly loves these, among them the Blue Peter, the largest of the set. After Maturin speaks, he learns of Ponsich's death near Pomerania. Maturin leaves immediately to take up this mission.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_of_Death"title="Sea of Death">
"Sea of Death" tells stories of the dockside of Salvador, Bahia. The lives of the sailors of sloops in the bay from which Bahia gets its name are centred on the mythology surrounding the goddess Iemanjá, the "Queen of the Ocean" or the "Mother of Waters", are central to this novel, which portrays their daily struggle for survival. The novel features a variety of characters whose lives unfold around the story of two lovers, Guma and Lívia. They include the black Rufino and his mulatto lover Esmeralda; Francisco, Guma’s uncle, who mends nets; and the foul-mouthed Rosa Palmeirão.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/According_to_Mary_Magdalene"title="According to Mary Magdalene">
The story offers a feminist perspective on the person of Christ and on the beginnings of the Christian Church. Since it presents Jesus as merely a human being and deviates from the orthodox biblical portrayal of the Son of Man, the novel was severely criticised by mainstream Christians.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insomnia_(novel)"title="Insomnia (novel)">
The story is set in the fictional town of Derry, Maine. Retiree Ralph Roberts encounters his formerly good-natured acquaintance Ed Deepneau at the local airfield. Ed is aggressive and swearing obscenely at a driver he accuses of secretly transporting fetal tissue from abortions. Some months later, Ralph (now a widower) encounters Ed's wife Helen who has been badly beaten by her husband after having signed a pro-choice related petition. Months later, Helen leaves Ed and hides at a women's shelter. Ralph begins to suffer from sleep maintenance insomnia, waking earlier each night until he is barely able to sleep an hour each night. As his insomnia develops, Ralph begins to see things invisible and intangible to others: colorful manifestations of life-force surrounding people (auras), and diminutive white-coated beings he calls "little bald doctors," based on their appearance. He gradually concludes these are not hallucinations but genuine things present on a different level of reality. He realizes that Ed Deepneau also sees these things. Ralph's friend Lois Chasse admits to him that she too has recently begun seeing auras which she can interpret. Ralph and Lois encounter two bald doctors, calling themselves Clotho and Lachesis, who act with dignity and free people from life when it is "their time" to pass away. A third bald doctor, Atropos, is a crazed rogue who seems to delight in disrupting lives and prematurely ending them. Ralph and Lois learn that life is largely governed by "The Purpose" and "The Random," forces or entities which are not enemies so much as opposites. Ed Deepneau is one of a few very rare beings who is not assigned to either force and can, therefore, greatly change existence. Ralph and Lois learn of the "Crimson King," a shape-shifting higher-dimensional villain who feeds on fear and grief and craves chaos to rule over. The Crimson King has sent Atropos to manipulate Deepneau as part of a plan to upset the entire order of the universe. Unable to intervene directly, Clotho and Lachesis, agents of the Purpose, gave Ralph and Lois insomnia to help them perceive, gain, and even access other levels of reality so they can defeat Atropos. The benign bald doctors describe these levels as beams of a "skyscraper," and Ralph has a vision of The Dark Tower, a representation of the multiverse.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No._1_Ladies'_Detective_Agency"title="The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency">
The main detective, Mma Ramotswe, is a Motswana woman who is the protagonist in the series and whose story is told in the first novel from birth to opening the detective agency. "Mma" is a Setswana term of respect for a woman; the equivalent term for a man is "Rra". This is one of the most common forms of address in the novels. Mma Precious Ramotswe solves cases for wives whose husbands have gone missing, for a school teacher whose son has disappeared by finding the kidnappers, for a wealthy father whose 16-year-old daughter is frustrating him by going out on her own. She helps a man atone for the sins of his youth by finding the people he hurt decades earlier. She uncovers a scheme by twin brothers to use one medical degree and certificate between the two of them. She solves a case for herself when she thinks she must seek a divorce from her first husband but learns differently when she seeks out his mother. Her personal life has a main sorrow, that her only child lived just a few days, as the child's father beat her during the pregnancy, a story told in retrospect. This led her to decide never to marry again after he left her. Her joy is her engagement and eventual marriage to Mr J. L. B. Matekoni, who has taken on foster care of a sister and brother from the orphan farm. The cases are set in the cities of Botswana, mainly on the edge of the Kalahari desert, rather than in the desert. There are occasional forays into neighbouring nations.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriela,_Clove_and_Cinnamon"title="Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon">
"Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon" is a romantic tale set in the small Brazilian town of Ilhéus during the 1920s. The town is experiencing a record large cacao crop, which makes it a thriving place and gives it an economic upswing and great progress. Still there is a conservative streak among the town folk and they are still relying on old traditions, like violent political takeovers and vengeance against unfaithful women. The book tells two separate but related tales: first, the romance between Nacib Saad, a respectable bar owner of Syrian origin, and his new cook Gabriela, an innocent and captivating migrant worker from the impoverished interior. The gap between the worlds of Nacib Saad and Gabriela make their romance a challenge to the unwritten rules of Ilhéus society and will subsequently change the two of them forever.The second part to this story is about the political struggle between the seasoned cacao plantation owners, with the powerful Bastos clan in pole position, and the forces of modernization, in the person of Mundinho Falcão, a wealthy young man from Rio de Janeiro. It can be read simultaneously as an unusual, charming love story, a description of the political and social forces at work in 1920s Brazil, a somewhat satirical depiction of Latin American aspirations to "modernity", and a celebration of the local culture and pleasures of Bahia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpe_Jugulum"title="Carpe Jugulum">
Count Magpyr and family, vampires from Überwald, are invited to the naming of Magrat and King Verence's daughter, to be conducted by the Omnian priest, the Quite Reverend Mightily-Praiseworthy-Are-Ye-Who-Exalteth-Om 'Mightily' Oats, a recent graduate from theological college. During the party after the ceremony, Verence tells Nanny Ogg and Agnes Nitt that the Count has informed him that the Magpyr family intend to move into Lancre Castle and take over. Due to a type of hypnotism, everyone seems to consider this plan to be perfectly acceptable. Only the youngest witch, Agnes, and Mightily Oats seem able to resist the vampiric mind control, due to their being "being in two minds about everything" (resulting from her Perdita persona, and his contemplation of the tenets of the myriad schismatic sects of Omnianism). Because of her ability to resist his influence, the Magpyr son, Vlad, is attracted to Agnes and makes many advances on her including trying to convince her to become a vampire. Meanwhile, the castle falconer Hodgesaargh goes out searching for a phoenix after discovering a phoenix feather.Meanwhile, Granny Weatherwax, feeling slighted by not receiving an invitation to the ceremony, has left her cottage empty and seems to be working towards a life in a cave, almost like a hermit. After they have left the hypnotic influence of the Vampires, Agnes, Nanny Ogg and Magrat attempt to convince her to help them save Lancre, but apparently without success, even after Granny is informed that her gilt-edged invitation was stolen by a magpie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Polo_(Doctor_Who)"title="Marco Polo (Doctor Who)">
The TARDIS, badly damaged, lands in the Pamir Mountains of the Himalayas in 1289, and the crew are picked up by Marco Polo's (Mark Eden) caravan on its way along the fabled Silk Road to see the Emperor Kublai Khan (Martin Miller). The story concerns the First Doctor (William Hartnell), his granddaughter Susan Foreman (Carole Ann Ford) and her teachers Ian Chesterton (William Russell) and Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill), and their attempts to thwart the machinations of Tegana (Derren Nesbitt), who attempts to sabotage the caravan along its travels through the Pamir Plateau and across the treacherous Gobi Desert, and ultimately to assassinate Kublai Khan in Peking, at the height of his imperial power. The Doctor and his companions also attempt to regain the TARDIS, which Marco Polo has taken to give to Kublai Khan in effort to regain the Emperor's good graces. Susan gets the TARDIS key from Ping-Cho (Zienia Merton) but is captured by Tegana before they can depart. They are finally able to thwart Tegana, who kills himself before he can be executed, restoring the Emperor's respect for Marco Polo, and the Emperor allows them to depart.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliette_(novel)"title="Juliette (novel)">
Juliette is raised in a convent. However, at age thirteen she is seduced by a woman who immediately explains that morality, religion and other such concepts are meaningless. There are plenty of similar philosophical musings during the book, all attacking the ideas of God, morals, remorse, love, etc., the overall conclusion being that the only aim in life is "to enjoy oneself at no matter whose expense." Juliette takes this to the extreme and manages to murder her way through numerous people, including various family members and friends.During Juliette's life from age 13 to about 30, the wanton anti-heroine engages in virtually every form of depravity and encounters a series of like-minded libertines. She befriends the ferocious Clairwil, whose main passion is the murder of boys and young men, as revenge for the general brutality of men toward women. She meets Saint Fond, a 50-year-old multi-millionaire who murders his father, commits incest with his daughter, tortures young girls to death on a daily basis, and even plots an ambitious scheme to provoke a famine that will wipe out half the population of France. She also becomes acquainted with Minski, a gigantic ogre-like Muscovite who delights in raping and torturing young boys and girls to death before eating them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_and_the_Bomb"title="Johnny and the Bomb">
After Johnny Maxwell, a boy in his early teens, finds Mrs. Tachyon, an old bag lady, by a cinema he discovers that her trolley is in fact a time machine. He goes back to his town, Blackbury, during the time of The Blitz with his friends Stephen (aka Wobbler), Bigmac, Kirsty and Yo-less (possibly because Johnny has been obsessing about the destruction of Paradise Street in a German raid). Wobbler gets left behind in 1941, and when they return for him, Johnny tries to prevent the deaths caused in the raid.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anubis_Gates"title="The Anubis Gates">
In 1801 the British have risen to power in Egypt and suppress the worship of the old Egyptian gods. A cabal of magicians plan to drive the British out of Egypt by bringing the gods forward in time from an age when they were still powerful and unleashing them on London, thereby destroying the British Empire. In 1802, a failed attempt by the magicians to summon Anubis opens magical gates in a predictable pattern across time and space.In 1983, ailing millionaire J. Cochran Darrow has discovered the gates and found that they make time travel possible. Darrow organizes a trip to the past for fellow millionaires to attend a lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1810. He hires Professor Brendan Doyle to attend and give expert commentary. One of the magicians, Doctor Romany, happens to spy the time travelers and kidnaps Doyle before he can return. Doyle manages to escape torture and flees back to London, now trapped in the 19th century.Doyle joins a beggars' guild and meets a beggar named Jacky. He plans to meet and befriend William Ashbless, a wealthy poet that Doyle has studied profusely, in order to gain a benefactor. Doctor Romany scours the city for Doyle with his legion of murderous beggars, led by the clown-magician Horrabin. At the same time, Doyle discovers that Darrow has remained in the 19th century to search for Dog-Face Joe, a body-swapping werewolf, in hopes of bribing Joe into granting him a healthy new body. Doyle himself becomes targeted by Joe, receiving the poisoned body of Darrow's former bodyguard, but manages to cure himself of the poison.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vicar_of_Wakefield"title="The Vicar of Wakefield">
The Vicar – Dr. Charles Primrose – lives an idyllic life in a country parish with his wife Deborah, son George, daughters Olivia and Sophia, and three other children. He is wealthy due to investing an inheritance he received from a deceased relative, and he donates the £35 that his job pays annually to the widows and orphans of local clergy. On the evening of George's wedding to wealthy Arabella Wilmot, the Vicar loses all his money through the bankruptcy of his merchant investor who has left town abruptly.The wedding is called off by Arabella's father, who is known for his prudence with money. George, who was educated at Oxford and is old enough to be considered an adult, is sent away to town. The rest of the family move to a new and more humble parish on the land of Squire Thornhill, who is known to be a womanizer. On the way, they hear about the dubious reputation of their new landlord. Also, references are made to the squire's uncle Sir William Thornhill, who is known throughout the country for his worthiness and generosity.A poor and eccentric friend, Mr. Burchell, whom they meet at an inn, rescues Sophia from drowning. She is instantly attracted to him, but her ambitious mother does not encourage her feelings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun,_with_Occasional_Music"title="Gun, with Occasional Music">
The novel follows the adventures of Conrad Metcalf, a tough, smart-alecky private detective, through a futuristic version of San Francisco and Oakland, California. Metcalf is hired by a man who claims that he's being framed for the murder of a prominent urologist. Metcalf quickly discovers that nobody wants the case solved: not the victim's ex-wife, not the police, and certainly not the gun-toting kangaroo who works for the local mafia boss.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misspent_Youth"title="Misspent Youth">
Seventy-eight-year-old Jeff Baker has revolutionised the world by inventing the ultimate method of information storage and allowing free use of it with no profits going into his own pocket. Because of this generous act, he is chosen by the European Union to be the first recipient for rejuvenation technology, which will leave him with the body of a young man. As part of the deal, he will support the re-election of the EU president.His son Tim has a fairly typical frustrated life as a rich teenager, living with his famous father and distant mother. Tim is extremely happy when he starts going out with gorgeous Annabelle. She likes him, but she has a troubled home life and Tim's drinking problem reminds her of her father.Jeff comes home from the rejuvenation in his 20-year-old body. Energised by his new youthfulness, he has a series of affairs. After reconnecting with his son, Jeff reveals to Tim that the reason he gave away the information storage technology was so that his ex-wife could not get any royalties. The amazing act of charity he is famous for was motivated by spite, not goodwill. But Jeff finds himself attracted to Annabelle, and while giving her a ride home after Tim got too drunk at a school dance, they start a tawdry affair behind Tim's back and fall in love. Their passionate relationship is only a secret for a short time before Tim finds them in bed together. His life falling apart, Tim runs away to live with his Aunt (Jeff's sister), stops drinking and doing drugs, and makes friends with his mother. Eventually he finds a new romantic interest in Vanessa, one of his classmates.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_Machine"title="The Truth Machine">
The novel primarily focuses on the life story of Randall Peterson "Pete" Armstrong, a child prodigy with total recall memory, whose entire life's outlook has been defined by the tragic murder of his younger brother, Leonard, by an ex-convict who was believed to be capable of committing violent crimes again, but could not be imprisoned any longer under the current law structure. Pete is committed to making a difference for humanity that will atone for his brother's death and help millions of others, too. In his first year at Harvard at the age 13, Pete is recruited to enroll in a small, but exclusive, class of the brightest and most agile students on campus. In that class, he meets people and establishes friendships that will further his identity. It is there that the idea of a 'truth machine' is conceived and Pete realizes that its existence is possible and that he could do it. The 'truth machine' would be a mechanism that would be 100% accurate in determining if a person was lying or telling the truth. It could help eliminate crime and dishonesty in general. As long as it is employed universally (and not just by government officials), the 'truth machine' could revolutionize humanity and take it to that next evolutionary step which would help it avert its coming self-destruction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witches_(novel)"title="The Witches (novel)">
The story is narrated from the perspective of an unnamed seven-year-old English boy, who goes to live with his Norwegian grandmother after his parents are killed in a tragic car accident. The boy loves all his grandmother's stories, but he is especially enthralled by the stories about real-life witches who she says are horrific female demons who seek to kill human children. She tells him a real witch looks exactly like an ordinary woman, but there are ways of telling whether she is a witch, such as real witches have claws instead of fingernails, which they hide by wearing gloves, and are bald, which they hide by wearing wigs that often make them break out in rashes.As specified in the parents' will, the narrator and his grandmother return to England, where he was born and had attended school, and where the house he is inheriting is located. However, the grandmother warns the boy to be on his guard, since English witches are known to be among the most vicious in the world, notorious for turning children into loathsome creatures so that unsuspecting adults will kill them. The grandmother reveals that witches in different countries have different customs and that, while the witches in each country have close affiliations with one another, they are not allowed to communicate with witches from other countries. She also tells him about the mysterious Grand High Witch of All the World, the feared and diabolical leader of all of the world's witches, who visits their councils in every country, each year.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Algebraist"title="The Algebraist">
The novel takes place in 4034. With the assistance of other species, humans have spread across the galaxy,which is largely ruled by the Mercatoria, a complex feudal hierarchy, with a religious zeal to rid the galaxy of artificial intelligences, which were blamed for a previous war.The central character is the human Fassin Taak who is a "Slow Seer" at the Court of the Nasqueron Dwellers. The Nasqueron's star system has been cut off from the rest of Mercatoria civilization because their portal (the only means of faster than light travel) was destroyed by the Beyonders. The Beyonders are a large fleet of space marauders who originated from the fringes of the galaxy. The local Mercatoria adherents await the delivery of a wormhole connection from a neighboring system via sub-lightspeed travel.The Nasqueron Dwellers are an advanced and ancient civilisation of non-humanoids who inhabit gas giants. They lead an almost anarchic existence based on kudos, and inhabit the majority of gas-giant planets in the galaxy. They are the only major species outside the control of the Mercatoria, being rumoured to possess devastating defensive weaponry. Dweller societies try not to get involved with "Quick" species, those with sentient beings who experience life at around the speed human beings experience it. Dwellers are one of the "Slow" species who experience life at a much slower rate. Dweller individuals live for millions of years, and the species has existed for billions of years, long before the foundation of the Mercatoria. Slow Seers like Taak are a dynasty of researchers who attempt to glean information from the Dwellers' vast but disorganised libraries of knowledge. They do it in part by artificially slowing their metabolisms to better communicate with the Dwellers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_on_Glass"title="Walking on Glass">
Each part of "Walking on Glass", apart from the last, is divided into three sections, which appear at first sight to be independent stories. Two of the stories are set in and around Islington in North London, the other is set in the far distant future.Eventually, links between the three storylines become apparent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keys_of_Marinus"title="The Keys of Marinus">
The First Doctor (William Hartnell), his granddaughter Susan Foreman (Carole Ann Ford), and her teachers Ian Chesterton (William Russell) and Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill) arrive on a small island on the planet Marinus where they meet Arbitan (George Coulouris), Keeper of the Conscience of Marinus—a vast computer developed as a justice machine which kept law and order across the entire planet. Arbitan explains that the society of Marinus is in danger, as the Voord, humanoid creatures protected by amphibian-like black rubber wet suits, are seeking to enter the tower to take control of the Conscience. To prevent this, the Conscience requires five keys, and Arbitan coerces the Doctor and his friends to gather them by placing a force field around the TARDIS. As they teleport to the City of Morphoton, Arbitan is stabbed to death by a Voord that has gained access to the tower.In Morphoton, the crew are impressed by the luxuries of the city; however, Barbara soon realises that they have been hypnotised, and that Morphoton is actually a place of dirt and squalor. The creatures who govern Morphoton order Barbara's death, but Barbara escapes and hides in the city, where she makes contact with the slave girl Sabetha (Katharine Schofield), who has been blamed for Barbara's awakening and sentenced to death. Barbara notices one of the keys around her neck. They escape and destroy the creatures, freeing the subjects of the city. Another slave, Altos (Robin Phillips), remembers that he was also sent by Arbitan, and he and Sabetha join the Doctor and his crew on their quest. While the Doctor continues to the City of Mellennius, the others search in a dangerous screaming jungle. After triggering a trap, Barbara is lost in an ancient temple in the jungle; while Ian remains at the temple to search for the key, Sabetha and Susan continue to the next location.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinker_Tailor_Soldier_Spy"title="Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy">
## Background.As the tension of the Cold War is peaking in 1973, George Smiley, former senior official in Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (known as "the Circus" because its London office is at Cambridge Circus), is living unhappily in forced retirement, following the failure of an operation codenamed Testify in Czechoslovakia which ended in the capture and torture of agent Jim Prideaux. Control, chief of the Circus, had suspected that one of the five senior intelligence officers at the Circus was a Soviet mole, and had assigned them code names for Prideaux to relay back to the Circus, derived from the English children's rhyme "Tinker, Tailor":&lt;poem&gt;Tinker, tailor,soldier, sailor,rich man, poor man,beggarman, thief.&lt;/poem&gt;The failure resulted in the dismissal of Control, Smiley, and allies such as Connie Sachs and Gerald Westerby, and their replacement by a new guard consisting of Percy Alleline, Toby Esterhase, Bill Haydon, and Roy Bland. Control has since died, and Smiley's former protégé, Peter Guillam, has been demoted to the "scalphunters".Guillam unexpectedly approaches Smiley and takes him to the house of Under-Secretary Oliver Lacon, the Civil Servant who oversees the Circus. There they meet Ricki Tarr, an agent recently declared "persona non grata" due to suspicion of having defected. Tarr defends himself by explaining that he was informed of a Soviet mole, codenamed Gerald, at the Circus' highest level whilst in Hong Kong by Irina, the wife of a trade delegate. Irina claimed that the mole Gerald reports to a Soviet official stationed at the embassy in London called Polyakov. Shortly after Tarr relayed this to the Circus Irina was forcibly returned to the Soviet Union, leading Tarr to suspect that the mole was real, and now knew his identity. Tarr went into hiding, resurfacing to contact Guillam.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_of_Doctor_Moreau"title="The Island of Doctor Moreau">
Edward Prendick is an Englishman with a scientific education who survives a shipwreck in the southern Pacific Ocean. A passing ship called Ipecacuanha takes him aboard and a man named Montgomery revives him. Prendick also meets a grotesque bestial native named M'ling who appears to be Montgomery's manservant. The ship is transporting a number of animals which belong to Montgomery, most strangely a puma. As they approach the island which is Montgomery's destination, the captain demands Prendick leave the ship with Montgomery. Montgomery explains that he will not be able to host Prendick on the island. Despite this, the captain leaves Prendick in a dinghy and sails away. Seeing that the captain has abandoned Prendick, Montgomery takes pity and rescues him. As ships rarely pass the island, Prendick will be housed in an outer room of an enclosed compound.The island belongs to Dr. Moreau. Prendick remembers that he has heard of Moreau, formerly an eminent physiologist in London whose gruesome experiments in vivisection had been publicly exposed, and who fled England as a result of his exposure.The next day, Moreau begins working on the puma, eventually revealed as being experimented into a woman. Prendick gathers that Moreau is performing a painful experiment on the animal and its anguished cries drive Prendick out into the jungle. While he wanders, he comes upon a group of people who seem human but have an unmistakable resemblance to swine. As he walks back to the enclosure, he suddenly realises he is being followed by a figure in the jungle. He panics and flees, and the figure gives chase. As his pursuer bears down on him, Prendick manages to stun him with a stone and observes that the pursuer is a monstrous hybrid of animal and man. When Prendick returns to the enclosure and questions Montgomery, Montgomery refuses to be open with him. After failing to get an explanation, Prendick finally gives in and takes a sleeping draught.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronicles_of_Barsetshire"title="Chronicles of Barsetshire">
## "The Warden".Mr Harding, Warden of Hiram’s Hospital, is accused of dishonestly allocating hospital finances. However the accuser, John Bold, is actually in love with Mr Harding’s daughter, Eleanor. Nevertheless, John takes the matter to the press, subjecting Mr Harding to public incrimination. Mr Harding is supported by his son-in-law, Archdeacon Grantly, who insists he maintain his innocence. Finally, following an ultimatum from Eleanor, John drops the case and apologises. Eleanor and John get married and Mr Harding resigns as Warden of Hiram to become Rector of St. Cuthberts.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nutmeg_of_Consolation"title="The Nutmeg of Consolation">
Aubrey and his crew are shipwrecked on a remote island in the South China Sea after surviving the destruction of HMS "Diane" in a typhoon. A cricket match is underway between the sailors and marines, which keeps up the crew's spirits as they build the schooner needed for reaching Batavia. Doctor Maturin is killing game for the pot, particularly wild boar and babirussas. Dyaks, Kesegaran and her male assistants, arrive on the island. Speaking in Malay with Maturin, the Dyaks promise to take a message to Batavia in exchange for a note on Shao Yen for twenty "joes" (Portuguese Johannes coins), but instead return in a proa with 300 pirates, twice as many as the 150 Dianes. After beheading the ship's carpenter and some other crew members while stealing tools, they attack the encampment and burn the schooner. They are routed after a bloody conflict and all pirates lost as their proa is sunk by the last remaining ball from the "long nine" gun, well-aimed.On the last day of rum and tobacco supplies, Maturin meets four Chinese children collecting precious birds' nests from the surrounding cliffs. Maturin binds the boy's injured leg. Maturin persuades the children's father, Li Po, to carry the remaining crew of the "Diane" in the empty holds of his roomy junk back to Batavia. It is intercepted by Wan Da, whom Maturin knows well from Pulo Prabang, and who shares information about the French frigate nearly ready to sail. Upon arriving in Batavia, Aubrey is provided by Governor Raffles with a 20-gun ship which Aubrey renames "Nutmeg of Consolation" after one of the titles of the Sultan of Pulo Prabang. At sea, Aubrey hears from a Dutch merchantman that the French frigate "Cornélie" is watering at an island, Nil Desperandum. Aubrey disguises the "Nutmeg" as a Dutch merchantman and, when the disguise fails, engages in battle with the "Cornélie". Aubrey attempts to outwit the "Cornélie" in the Salibabu Passage but is outmanoeuvred and nearly outgunned until, at the height of the chase, "Nutmeg" encounters the "Surprise", under Thomas Pullings, accompanied by the "Triton", a British privateer. The "Surprise" gives chase, and the "Cornélie" soon founders. The "Surprise" takes the survivors, including Lieutenant Dumesnil, on board. Pullings has taken many prizes in the time they were parted, with two American privateers in convoy. The "Nutmeg" and its convoy sail back to Batavia, via Canton, under Lieutenant Fielding.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Eggs_and_Ham"title="Green Eggs and Ham">
Sam-I-Am offers an unnamed man a plate of green eggs and ham. However, the man refuses multiple times throughout the story by saying, "I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam-I-Am." Sam further asks him to eat that food in various locations (house, box, car, tree, train, dark, rain, boat) and with a few different animals (mouse, fox, goat), but is still rebuffed. Finally, Sam-I-am asks the man to try them, and he accepts the green eggs and ham. When he declares that he likes them, he happily says, "I do so like green eggs and ham. Thank you. Thank you, Sam-I-Am."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momo_(novel)"title="Momo (novel)">
In the ruins of an amphitheatre just outside an unnamed city lives Momo, a little girl of mysterious origin. She came to the ruin, parentless and wearing a long, used coat. She is illiterate and cannot count, and she doesn't know how old she is. When asked, she replies, "As far as I remember, I've always been around." She is remarkable in the neighbourhood because she has the extraordinary ability to listen—really listen. By simply being with people and listening to them, she can help them find answers to their problems, make up with each other, and think of fun games. The advice given to people "go and see Momo!" has become a household phrase and Momo makes many friends, especially an honest, silent street-cleaner, Beppo, and a poetic, extroverted tour guide, Gigi (Guido in some translations).This pleasant atmosphere is spoiled by the arrival of the Men in Grey, eventually revealed as a species of paranormal parasites stealing the time of humans. Appearing in the form of grey-clad, grey-skinned, bald men, these strange individuals present themselves as representing the Timesavings Bank and promote the idea of "timesaving" among the population: supposedly, time can be deposited in the Bank and returned to the client later with interest. After encountering the Men in Grey, people are made to forget all about them, but not about the resolution to save as much time as possible for later use. Gradually, the sinister influence of the Men in Grey affects the whole city: life becomes sterile, devoid of all things considered time-wasting, like social activities, recreation, art, imagination, or sleeping. Buildings and clothing are made exactly the same for everyone, and the rhythms of life become hectic. In reality, the more time people save, the less they have; the time they save is actually lost to them. Instead, it is consumed by the Men in Grey in the form of cigars made from the dried petals of the hour-lilies that represent time. Without these cigars, the Men in Grey cannot exist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Dangerous_Game_(novel)"title="The Most Dangerous Game (novel)">
Bill Cary is a bush pilot living in Lapland in northern Finland, making a precarious living flying aerial survey flights looking for nickel deposits, and occasional charter cargo flights of dubious legitimacy in his beat-up old de Havilland Beaver. Towards the end of the flying season, a wealthy American hunter hires him to fly into a prohibited part of Finland near the Soviet border in order to hunt bear. Subsequently, he is assaulted by thugs when he refuses a charter contract to search for a lost Tsarist treasure, comes under suspicion from the Finnish police for smuggling when Tsarist-era gold sovereigns start turning up, and from the Finnish secret police for espionage. However, things get more serious when the wealthy American hunter's beautiful sister turns up to search for her brother, and his fellow bush pilots start getting killed off in a series of suspicious accidents. Cary suspects that the events he is increasingly involved in may stem from an incident in his wartime past.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many_Waters"title="Many Waters">
In the middle of a New England winter, identical twin brothers Sandy and Dennys accidentally disturb an experiment in their parents' laboratory and are teleported to a sandy desert. There, they are acquired by water-prospector 'Japheth' and guided to an oasis, but Dennys is separated from the others. Sandy remains with Japheth and his elderly grandfather Lamech; there, Sandy is cured of heatstroke by a variety of improbable beings, including seraphim.Dennys reappears in another tent and is thrown into a refuse heap. He later comes under the care of a friendly family in the center of the oasis, headed by a gruff but kindly patriarch called Noah. It soon becomes apparent that the boys have been interpolated into the story of Noah's Ark, shortly before the Flood. Both Noah and Lamech receive mysterious instructions from God (known as El) concerning the building of the Ark. The twins come to understand that unicorns who can traverse space and time live in the oasis. Sinister supernatural beings known as the nephilim distrust the twins, and their human wives attempt to gather information about them. At several points, the wife of a nephil unsuccessfully attempts to seduce Sandy.Separated for much of the book, the twins become more independent of each other and gain maturity over the course of a year in the desert. Both are in love with Noah's beautiful and virtuous daughter Yalith (and she with them), but neither twin declares his affection until the very end of the novel. Dennys convinces Noah to reconcile with his father, Lamech, and both twins eventually care for Lamech's gardens while he lies ill. After Lamech's death, Sandy is kidnapped, but is eventually found by Japheth. Suspense arises when it becomes clear that there is no place on the Ark reserved for Sandy, Dennys, or Yalith. After both twins assist in the construction of the Ark, Yalith is taken by the seraphim to the presence of El. Sandy and Dennys are then returned to their own time and place by unicorns summoned by the seraphim.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drifters_(novel)"title="The Drifters (novel)">
## Chapter I: Joe.In the first chapter, Joe is introduced as a disenfranchised twenty-year-old youth who is enrolled at the University of California during the Vietnam War. After Joe realizes that with his grades he is going to get drafted, he hitchhikes to Yale University, where he gets the name of a professor who may be able to get him across the border into Canada. After being referred to a woman in Boston named Gretchen, she helps him get into Canada, and he eventually goes to Torremolinos, Spain. While looking for a job and a place to stay, he takes over the ownership of a bar called The Alamo, and a man named Jean-Victor finds him a place to stay in Torremolinos.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Wonders_(novel)"title="World of Wonders (novel)">
Magnus Eisengrim (also known by at least four other names throughout the trilogy) tells the story of his life to a group of filmmakers who are producing a biographical film about the great magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin for the BBC. They are headed by the world-famous Swedish director Jurgen Lind (evidently modeled on Ingmar Bergman). Also present during the story are Eisengrim's friends Dunstan Ramsay and Liesl, who both appear in the earlier installments of the Deptford Trilogy. Ramsay reprises the role of narrator which he played in the first novel, "Fifth Business", but in this case it is only to add context and continuity to the internal narration of Eisengrim. The life story of Eisengrim pulls together many events found throughout the previous two novels, showing them from an entirely different perspective.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Dad"title="Ghost Dad">
Elliot Hopper (Bill Cosby) is a workaholic widower who is about to land the deal of a lifetime at work, which he hopes will win him a promotion and a company car. After he forgets his daughter Diane's birthday, he attempts to make it up to her by promising her she can have his car when he secures the deal at work on the coming Thursday. After being persuaded to give the car to his daughter early, Elliot must hail a taxi from work, which is driven by Satanist Curtis Burch (Raynor Scheine), who drives erratically and is out of control. Attempting to get the taxi stopped, Elliot announces that he is Satan and commands him to stop the taxi, and also attempts to give him his wallet. Shocked to see his "Evil Master", Burch drives off a bridge and into the river.Elliot emerges from the accident scene, only to learn that he is a ghost when a police officer fails to notice him and a speeding bus goes straight through him. When he gets home he discovers that his three children can see him, but only in a totally dark room, and they cannot hear him at times. He struggles to tell them what happened when he is whisked away to London by paranormal researcher Sir Edith Moser (Ian Bannen), who tells him he is a ghost who has yet to enter the afterlife because "they screwed up"; his soul will not cross over until Thursday.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Side_of_Paradise"title="This Side of Paradise">
Amory Blaine, a young Midwesterner, is convinced that he has an exceptionally promising future. He attends a posh college-preparatory school and later Princeton University. He grows estranged from his eccentric mother Beatrice and becomes the protégé of Monsignor Thayer Darcy, a Catholic priest. During his sophomore year at Princeton, he returns to Minneapolis over Christmas break and encounters Isabelle Borgé, a wealthy, young debutante whom he first met as a boy. They embark upon a romantic relationship.While at Princeton, he deluges Isabelle with letters and poems, but she becomes disenchanted with him due to his incessant criticism. After his prom, they break up on Long Island. Following their separation, Amory graduates from his alma mater and enlists in the United States Army amid World War I. He is shipped overseas to serve in the trenches of the Western front. While overseas, he learns his mother Beatrice has died and most of his family's wealth has been lost due to a series of failed investments.After the armistice with Imperial Germany, Amory settles in New York City as it undergoes the birth pangs of the Jazz Age. He becomes infatuated with a cruel and narcissistic flapper named Rosalind Connage. Desperate for a job, Amory is hired by an advertising agency, but he detests the work. Due to his poverty, his relationship with Rosalind deteriorates as she prefers a rival suitor, Dawson Ryder, a man of wealth and status. A distraught Amory quits his job and goes on an alcoholic bender for three weeks until the start of prohibition in the United States.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_of_Hadrian"title="Memoirs of Hadrian">
The novel is told in the first person by Hadrian and is framed as a letter to Marcus Aurelius in the first chapter, Animula Vagula Blandula. The other chapters form a loose chronological narrative which he often breaks with various insights and recollections. The story begins with Hadrian, who is around sixty years of age, describing his incurable illness. He therefore wishes to recount important events in his life before his death.His earliest memories are his boyhood years in Italica. He also talks of his early interest in astrology and his lifelong passion for the arts, culture, and philosophy of Greece; themes which he revisits throughout the book. He visits Athens to study, travels to Rome for the first time, and witnesses the accession of Trajan. He eventually joins the army and participates in the Dacian campaign. Hadrian, who is around thirty years old at the end of the war, describes his successes in the army and his relationship with Trajan who is initially cold towards him. He slowly gains Trajan's favor and secures his position for the throne with the help of Plotina, the emperor's wife, and also by marrying Sabina, Trajan's grandniece.During his military service, the outcome of the Sarmatian wars strongly affects him due to the appalling bloodshed and atrocities committed. He also begins to question the value of Trajan's policy of military expansion. Trajan, in old age, begins an unsuccessful military campaign in Parthia after his successes over Dacia and Sarmatia. After a major defeat, Trajan hastily names Hadrian as his successor in a will shortly before his death. Following the death of Trajan, he hesitantly has his rivals executed and makes peace with Parthia. He travels frequently throughout the provinces of the Roman Empire while undertaking numerous economic and military reforms, promoting in his words: “humanitas, libertas, felicitas.” During a visit to Britain, he describes the construction of Hadrian's Wall, which represents part of his vision of curbing the military expansion of his predecessor and promoting peace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Path_of_Daggers"title="The Path of Daggers">
Elayne Trakand, Nynaeve al'Meara, Aviendha, and their coalition of channelers use the "ter'angreal" called the 'Bowl of the Winds' to reverse the unnatural heat brought by the Dark One's manipulation of the climate, and then escape a Seanchan invasion by "Traveling" to Andor with most of the Kin who had not yet been captured by the Seanchan. In Andor, an Aes Sedai in their party is murdered, and the group realizes that one of its members is Black Ajah. Upon reaching Caemlyn, Elayne initiates her claim to the throne.Perrin Aybara moves into Ghealdan to stop Masema Dagar, the self-proclaimed Prophet of the Dragon; but unknowingly rescues the deposed Queen Morgase of Andor from the Prophet's men. He then secures the oath of fealty from Alliandre, Queen of Ghealdan, and accepts the dubious allegiance of Masema. At the end of the book, Faile Bashere is kidnapped by the Shaido Aiel. Egwene al'Vere, Amyrlin Seat of the rebel Aes Sedai, manipulates her unruly followers into giving her more control, and they Travel to Tar Valon, before their siege of its White Tower.Rand al'Thor, accompanied by Bashere with fifty Asha'man and six thousand Tairens, Cairhienin and Illianers, attempts to repel the Seanchan invasion in Altara. They are successful in early skirmishes, driving the Seanchan from western Altara entirely. Bashere counsels retreat, but Rand decides to push on to Ebou Dar, clashing with a forty thousand strong Seanchan army fifty miles from the city. Both sides bleed each other white in the initial clash, after which both armies pull back to regroup. Rand attempts to destroy the Seanchan by wielding his "sa'angreal" 'Callandor', but loses control of it due to disturbances in saidin caused by the previous usage of the Bowl of the Winds. The result is a lightning storm that devastates his army as well as the Seanchan. Too bloodied to continue fighting, both armies retreat, making the battle a stalemate. Returning to Cairhien, Rand is attacked by traitorous Asha'man led by Corlan Dashiva, who fail to kill him. Mat Cauthon is absent from the book, due to injuries sustained at the end of the previous book, "A Crown of Swords". Robert Jordan had earlier done the same for Perrin Aybara, who had been absent from Book 5, "The Fires of Heaven".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Spy_in_the_House_of_Love"title="A Spy in the House of Love">
In 1950s New York, protagonist, Sabina, pursues her sexual desires. She calls a random number from a bar in the middle of the night, seeking to confess or find solace in the voice of a stranger. The stranger happens to be a lie detector who proceeds to follow Sabina in her activities throughout the novel. Her various love interests and her relationship with her husband, Alan, without whom she feels she cannot live, make her life more and more complex. The level of deceit her hedonistic lifestyle forces her to maintain leads her to regard herself as "an international spy in the house of love".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Hundred_Years_of_Solitude"title="One Hundred Years of Solitude">
"One Hundred Years of Solitude" is the story of seven generations of the Buendía Family in the town of Macondo. The founding patriarch of Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía, and Úrsula Iguarán, his wife (and first cousin), leave their hometown in Riohacha, Colombia, after José Arcadio kills Prudencio Aguilar after a cockfight for suggesting José Arcadio was impotent. One night of their emigration journey, while camping on a riverbank, José Arcadio dreams of "Macondo", a city of mirrors that reflected the world in and about it. Upon awakening, he decides to establish Macondo at the riverside; after days of wandering the jungle, his founding of Macondo is utopic.José Arcadio Buendía believes Macondo to be surrounded by water, and from that island, he invents the world according to "his" perceptions. Soon after its foundation, Macondo becomes a town frequented by unusual and extraordinary events that involve the generations of the Buendía family, who are unable or unwilling to escape their periodic (mostly self-inflicted) misfortunes. For years the town is solitary and unconnected to the outside world, with the exception of the annual visit of a band of gypsies, who show the townspeople scientific discoveries such as magnets, telescopes, and ice. The leader of the gypsies, a man named Melquíades, maintains a close friendship with José Arcadio, who becomes increasingly withdrawn, obsessed with investigating the mysteries of the universe presented to him by the gypsies. Ultimately he is driven insane, speaking only in Latin, and is tied to a chestnut tree by his family for many years until his death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Trilogy"title="The New York Trilogy">
## "City of Glass".The first story, "City of Glass", features an author of detective fiction who becomes a private investigator and descends into madness as he becomes embroiled in the investigation of a case. It explores layers of identity and reality, from Paul Auster the writer of the novel to the unnamed "author" who reports the events as reality, to "Paul Auster the writer", a character in the story, to "Paul Auster the detective", who may or may not exist in the novel, to Peter Stillman the younger, to Peter Stillman the elder and, finally, to Daniel Quinn, the protagonist."City of Glass" has an intertextual relationship with Miguel de Cervantes' "Don Quixote". Not only does the protagonist Daniel Quinn share his initials with the knight, but when Quinn finds "Paul Auster the writer," Auster is in the midst of writing an article about the authorship of "Don Quixote". Auster calls his article an "imaginative reading," and in it he examines possible identities of Cide Hamete Benengeli, the narrator of the "Quixote".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_in_Exile"title="Freedom in Exile">
The autobiography starts with the Dalai Lama's "birth to a family of small farmers", selection as the Dalai Lama, tumultuous relationship with the People's Republic of China (in which he claims many atrocities), and subsequent life in India. The book acknowledges "the cultural gaps between traditional Tibetan Buddhism and the scientific approaches of the West", and also elucidates the points of similarity between the two.The autobiography also criticizes the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for supporting the Tibetan independence movement "not because they (the CIA) cared about Tibetan independence, but as part of their worldwide efforts to destabilize all communist governments".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Surprise_(novel)"title="HMS Surprise (novel)">
A convoy including Aubrey seizes the ships carrying the gold deemed necessary by Spain to agree to join the war on the side of France. On the quibble that Spain had not yet entered the war, the new First Lord of the Admiralty decides the vast sum is a droit of the Crown so thus not shared out with the captors. Smaller amounts will be distributed to the captains, quite opposite to the expectations of the successful convoy. The First Lord blunders into mentioning the name of intelligence agent Stephen Maturin during the proceedings, putting Maturin at risk.Maturin goes on a mission to Spain and is to be picked up at Port Mahon by Aubrey, now on blockade duty near Toulon in HMS "Lively". At the rendezvous point, Aubrey learns from a Catalan revolutionary that his friend has been captured and is being tortured by French intelligence in Port Mahon, the island having been returned to Spain in the Peace of Amiens. Aubrey leads a rescue mission, saving a ravaged Maturin and killing all of the French interrogators except one, Captain Dutourd. In England, Aubrey is taken by bailiffs and is held in a sponging-house, a debtors' prison. Maturin tells Sir Joseph of his capture and Aubrey's predicament. Aubrey's marriage to Sophia Williams is deferred, as her mother insists that he be debt-free. Maturin gets Aubrey an advance on his grant of money and he is released. Sophia meets Aubrey in a coach in the middle of the night before he takes command of his new ship HMS "Surprise", and they promise to marry no one else.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Captain_(novel)"title="Post Captain (novel)">
With the Peace of Amiens, Jack Aubrey returns to England and rents a house with Stephen Maturin, with shipmates running the household, spending time in the hunt. He meets the Williams family. Aubrey courts Sophia Williams, the eldest of three daughters, while Maturin pursues Diana Villiers, Sophia's cousin. Aubrey wants to marry Sophia, but they delay making a firm engagement. His fortune abruptly disappears when his prize-agent absconds with his funds and the prize court finds that two merchant ships he captured were owned by neutral nations. The court demands he repay the value of the ships (rather than gain the prize money he expected), a sum beyond his means. Mrs Williams takes her daughters away to Bath on this news. Aubrey dallies with Diana, straining his friendship with Maturin and showing himself indecisive on land, a contrast with his decisive ways at sea. Aubrey and Maturin flee England to avoid Aubrey being taken for debt.In Toulon to visit Christy Pallière, the French captain who had captured Aubrey's first command "Sophie" before the peace, they learn that war is imminent. French authorities round up all English subjects. Aubrey and Maturin escape over the Pyrenees to Maturin's property with Maturin disguised as an itinerant bear trainer and Aubrey as the bear, Flora. They make their way to Gibraltar where Aubrey and Maturin take passage aboard a British East India Company ship, the "Lord Nelson". The ship is captured by the privateer "Bellone", but a British squadron overtakes them and rescues Aubrey, Maturin, and the other passengers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desolation_Island_(novel)"title="Desolation Island (novel)">
Jack Aubrey, having recovered financially in "The Mauritius Command", expands his house, pays off his mother-in-law's debts, and his wife is no longer pinching pennies. His household is staffed with seamen, and his daughters and son are thriving. After serving in the Fencibles office for a while, Aubrey starts getting into difficulties both in cards and at business, due to his belief, on land, in the honesty of others. Diana Villiers returns from America, unmarried. Maturin sees her and hopes again to marry her. After the local settlers enter into a feud with Captain Bligh, the governor in New South Wales, Aubrey takes command of the old HMS "Leopard" for a mission to New South Wales to escape his woes. In the meantime, Diana and her American friend Louisa Wogan are taken for questioning as spies. Wogan gets sent to New South Wales on the "Leopard", while Aubrey is furious at carrying prisoners. Maturin gets assigned to the voyage by Sir Joseph Blaine to watch Wogan, in the hopes of catching her in espionage. Diana, innocent of the espionage charges, flees with Mr Johnson, but is deeply in Maturin's mind, as he pays her bills.The prisoners kill their superintendent and surgeon during a storm, so their conditions are raised to meet naval standards. They bring gaol fever on board ship, which spreads to the seamen, killing most of the male prisoners and 116 of the ship's crew. Mr Martin, Maturin's assistant, dies, and is replaced by Michael Herapath, who has stowed away in pursuit of Louisa Wogan. Aubrey rates him a midshipman, despite his American citizenship. Aubrey is forced to leave many recovering crew members at Recife, including Tom Pullings. He is replaced with James Grant as first lieutenant, a challenge for Aubrey. While they are in port, HMS "Nymph" arrives damaged from its encounter with the "Waakzaamheid", a 74-gun Dutch ship-of-the-line crossing the equator.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fortune_of_War"title="The Fortune of War">
HMS "Leopard" sails from Desolation Island to Port Jackson where she drops off her few prisoners. Captain Bligh is already handled, so she proceeds to the Dutch East Indies station and Admiral Drury at Pulo Batang. "Leopard" is declared unfit for guns due to wood rot, and will probably be a troop transport. Jack Aubrey and his followers are to board the courier ship "La Flèche", as his next command, , awaits him in England. The rest of the crew is left with Admiral Drury. Maturin learns the success of his scheme to damage French intelligence sources from Wallis, and relays the name of a contact in the Royal Navy, mentioned by Louisa Wogan. They join a cricket game, ended abruptly by the arrival of "La Flèche", which also brings mail to them. Captain Yorke visited Sophia Aubrey before leaving England, bringing Jack a personal letter and gifts from her.Aubrey knew Captain Yorke and Maturin quickly warms to this captain who travels with an extensive library and a piano in his cabin. At Simon's Town, "La Flèche" learns of war between Britain and America. Aubrey spends this time of sweet sailing teaching the young midshipmen while Maturin is engrossed in dissection of specimens from Desolation Island and New Holland with McLean, the ship's Scottish surgeon, passing their evenings with music. One night in the Atlantic near Brazil a fire breaks out on board and all abandon ship to the small boats. A few hot weeks later the boat carrying Aubrey and Maturin is picked up on Christmas Eve by , headed for Bombay and commanded by Captain Henry Lambert.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ionian_Mission"title="The Ionian Mission">
Maturin and Villiers are happily married. After a time together in their new house on Half Moon Street, Maturin settles in his rooms at The Grapes, where Diana comes often, and from which he walks to breakfast with her daily. He has missions to do, and Aubrey needs to get away from his financial problems. Aubrey gets a stint on HMS "Worcester" for Toulon blockade duty. Jagiello brings the Maturins to port in his own carriage, which upsets, making Stephen’s arrival rather last-minute.While she is doing gunnery practice with gunpowder bought from a fireworks firm, "Worcester" encounters the French ship "Jemmapes". Worcester engages immediately, not having changed to ordinary gunpowder. "Jemmapes" sees the bright colors as the sign of some new weapon, and sails away. Maturin is injured and returns to taking laudanum for the pain. Some of the crew practice an oratorio while the midshipmen practice "Hamlet". Passengers are dropped off at Gibraltar and Port Mahon (Graham, professor of moral philosophy), though the parson Nathaniel Martin is aboard long enough for Maturin to discover their shared interest in birds, before Martin joins HMS "Berwick". "Worcester" joins the squadron off Toulon. Babbington, master and commander, joins the squadron in the Mediterranean as captain of the "Dryad". Babbington has fallen in love with Admiral Harte’s daughter Fanny, but her father wants her to marry the wealthy Andrew Wray. Babbington figures that Wray and Harte combined got him assigned to blockade duty. Before "Dryad", the Worcesters see HMS "Surprise" arrive with mail for this fleet, joining it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Far_Side_of_the_World"title="The Far Side of the World">
Aubrey meets Admiral Ives, now in Gibraltar, who is pleased with the last mission of HMS "Surprise", despite Aubrey's negative report. Mr Yarrow will rephrase it to make the success clearer to the Admiralty. The admiral is now a peer, his deepest wish, and he is a happy man. Aubrey dines with Laura Fielding and her husband, Lieutenant Fielding, who is now satisfied that his wife is true to him and thanks Aubrey for bringing her from Malta to Gibraltar (though it is Maturin who brought her to the ship, saving her from two assassins). Maturin receives news from his intelligence-chief in London, Sir Joseph Blaine, confirming high level infiltration of British intelligence by the French. Maturin's wife Diana has heard rumours of his pretended infidelity in Valletta, Malta, with Mrs Fielding for intelligence reasons. He sends her a letter via Andrew Wray, unsuspecting of Wray's role as a French agent. Maturin learns of his success in Malta, destroying the French intelligence network based there, all but André Lesueur taken."Surprise" is not yet to be broken up; Admiral Ives sends Aubrey on a mission to protect British whalers in the Pacific Ocean from the frigate USS "Norfolk", sailing on HMS "Surprise" on his first voyage around Cape Horn. Aubrey makes all haste to prepare his ship with men and supplies. He recruits Mr Allen, a new master with an in-depth knowledge of whalers, takes on Mr Martin as schoolmaster to the midshipmen, and Mr Hollom, an ageing midshipman. Aubrey wonders if his kindness takes aboard a Jonah with Hollom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treason's_Harbour"title="Treason's Harbour">
The Surprises wait at Malta while their ship is slowly repaired after their successful mission on the Ionian coast. Aubrey and Maturin meet Mrs Laura Fielding at music parties she holds. She is waiting for news of her husband, a naval lieutenant who is a prisoner-of-war in France. One of the three groups of French intelligence agents in Malta uses Fielding's plight to manipulate her into spying for them. Aubrey saves her huge dog Ponto from a fall in the well. This endears Aubrey to Ponto, leading the gossips of Malta to assume he is carrying on an affair with Mrs Fielding. She asks Maturin to help her satisfy the French agents. They let it appear to the French spies as if they are conducting an affair, and Maturin prepares false materials for her to pass on. The new Commander of the Mediterranean fleet, Admiral Sir Francis Ives and acting second secretary Andrew Wray, arrive in Malta with their own advisor on Turkish affairs. Once Aubrey learns that an earlier prize was accepted by the board, he has money to speed up repairs on "Surprise". Before he leaves Malta, Graham describes Lesueur, a French agent known to him. Unbeknownst to Maturin, Wray meets with Lesueur, receives payments from him and learns what Maturin has done to French spies. Maturin is delighted to receive his diving bell, built on Edmond Halley's design. He and Heneage Dundas test it out from Dundas’s ship. It travels with Maturin on the next mission.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reverse_of_the_Medal"title="The Reverse of the Medal">
Jack Aubrey and his crew make their way in a much knocked-about "Surprise" from the small island near the equator in the Pacific Ocean to the West Indies Squadron at Bridgetown with their American prisoners in a recaptured whaler. Aubrey learns that Sally Mputa was pregnant when they parted over twenty years earlier, at the moment of meeting his grown son, Samuel Panda, who appears to meet him and seek his blessing. Samuel is on his way to the with Catholic missionaries. Aubrey and Maturin like the young man, and Maturin promises to aid him in his wish to become a priest, as his being illegitimate is a barrier to taking orders. After the court martial for the British mutineers among Aubrey's prisoners, Aubrey leaves quickly for home. The voyage home is enlivened by a chase of the privateer "Spartan", which slips away in fog through the blockade to Brest.Finally ashore in England, Aubrey hears a rumour from a stranger he meets in Dover that peace is coming soon, creating an opportunity to make money in the stock exchange. Mr Palmer claims familiarity with Maturin. Aubrey makes the transactions, and shares the advice with his father, General Aubrey. The General makes large stock transactions and spreads the rumour of peace farther. The transactions prove profitable in the short term, but values fall when the rumour is shown to be false. Aubrey does not sell quickly enough and loses money, though others prosper. Aubrey is arrested for manipulating the market. He is taken to the Marshalsea prison to await trial. General Aubrey flees, leaving his son to fend for himself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Letter_of_Marque"title="The Letter of Marque">
Jack Aubrey, now a civilian, prepares the "Surprise" to sail as a letter of marque. The loss of his place on the Navy list is the hardest blow. He is stoic, but appears harsh to his new crew. His reputation brings him a full crew, and he takes the men on liking. He runs the "Surprise" on Royal Navy lines, including regular pay to the men, in addition to any prizes they might take. He is supported by his crew of old Surprises, privateers and smugglers, the latter groups recruited in Shelmerston, on the western coast of England. It is let out that a group of his friends purchased the ship at the auction, as Stephen Maturin, who is the sole owner, wants to play his same role of surgeon and natural philosopher on the ship. Aubrey takes the new crew on a short cruise in the Atlantic, which proves unexpectedly profitable.The downfall of the traitors Wray and Ledward restores order in British intelligence circles, returning Sir Joseph Blaine to his position in the Admiralty. The traitors fled England, so they still have a friend in the government. Duhamel, the French agent who gave them away, never did reach Canada, as he died in a fall boarding "Eurydice". Blaine says it will be difficult to restore Aubrey to the Navy, even with solid evidence left behind by Wray showing how he profited in the stock market scheme and set Aubrey up. Maturin's servant Padeen becomes a secret laudanum addict after a painful burn, where he learned its benefit, followed by an infected painful tooth that Maturin could not treat. Padeen dilutes the ship's supply with brandy. Maturin is thus unknowingly weaned off his own addiction.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_at_the_Mizzen"title="Blue at the Mizzen">
The "Surprise" sails out of Gibraltar but collides in the dark with a Nordic timber ship and returns for repairs. Back ashore, Aubrey hears a reliable description of the battle at Waterloo; he thanks Lord Keith for moving the prize court along briskly to share out their huge prize from capturing the gold meant to aid Napoleon before his fall, more than 382 pounds a share. Aubrey has clandestine visits with his cousin Isobel, Lord Barmouth's wife. Admiral Lord Barmouth hastens the repair work, realizing he helps himself that way. Many Surprises desert. The frigate sails to Madeira for more serious repairs but arrives just in time to see Coelho's famous shipyard at Funchal in flames. Maturin receives a coded report from Dr Amos Jacob regarding the Chilean situation and takes the "Ringle" to England, where Sir Joseph Blaine updates him. The Chileans have split into two factions: northern still interested in British help, and southern retaining the services of Sir David Lindsay to command the Chilean navy. Whilst Maturin stays with Sophie Aubrey at Woolcombe, Aubrey returns the "Surprise" to Seppings' yard in England for a thorough re-fit and recruits a strong, competent crew out of Shelmerston for the long voyage ahead. In London, the Duke of Clarence asks Aubrey to accept Horatio Hanson as a midshipman. Initially reluctant, Aubrey finds that the boy has the mathematical skills essential for a navigator and he becomes a competent sailor. Fully fitted, the "Surprise" stops at Funchal, picking up Jacob, and then heads for Freetown, where Maturin proposes marriage to a young attractive widow named Christine Wood. She shares his tastes for natural philosophy, but her view of marriage suffered from her first marriage, as her husband was impotent and she turns him down. She agrees on her upcoming trip to England to visit the Aubreys at their home in Dorset and to meet Maturin's daughter Brigid there. "Surprise" then sails to the coast of Brazil, where Dr Amos Jacob parts to cross the mountains overland.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hundred_Days_(novel)"title="The Hundred Days (novel)">
Maturin rejoins the squadron at Funchal after burying his wife, killed when her carriage overturned. Fitted out, Commodore Aubrey's squadron meets at Gibraltar with Admiral Lord Keith, who updates him on Napoleon's success at Paris and the armies gathered on land. He orders Aubrey first to defend a convoy of merchant ships from Moorish xebecs and galleys, and then to proceed to the Adriatic Sea to destroy any new ships being built to support Napoleon. The grieving Maturin, in a separate meeting, learns of a plot to send sufficient gold through Algiers to fund Muslim mercenaries who would block the Russian forces from joining those of the other allies, so Napoleon's army can attack one army at a time. Aubrey's squadron is successful in defending the convoy. The captain of the "Pomone" is haunted by the faces of the galley slaves who died when his ship attacked theirs; Aubrey reports he died cleaning his guns, and a new captain is assigned to "Pomone". The convoy proceeds toward the Adriatic, stopping in Mahón. Asea, they encounter Captain Christy-Palliere, of the Royalist "Caroline" and an old acquaintance, who informs Aubrey about the French situation in the Adriatic before parting. Amos Jacob is sent out on "Ringle" to Kutali and Spalato to gain more information. "Surprise" sinks a French frigate under the command of an Imperialist at Ragusa Vecchia. Jacob rejoins near Porte di Spalato where they meet another French frigate, whose captain, like so many, does not want to declare for Napoleon but fears he will win. Maturin and Jacob negotiate an agreement for the French frigate to fight a mock battle against both "Surprise" and "Pomone"; the Frenchman then accompanies "Pomone" to Malta. Following up the pressure put on banks not to loan to the small shipyards, they lay out gold to push disgruntled dockworkers to burn new French ships along the coast, which is effective.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yellow_Admiral"title="The Yellow Admiral">
Aubrey, captain of HMS "Bellona" in the Brest blockade after his squadron was dispersed, is home at Woolcombe, the Aubrey family estate, on parliamentary leave. Three lawsuits from owners of slave ships captured on his mission along the West African coast tie up his funds. His wife Sophia rents out Ashgrove Cottage, their marital home. Maturin returns from Spain with his wife Diana and their household, moving into an empty wing of Woolcombe. Maturin's vast wealth is tied up in Spain, where authorities, informed by Jean Dutourd, are displeased at his activities in Peru, a Spanish colony. On land, Aubrey opposes the enclosing of the common, Simmons Lea, which has been proposed in the House by his neighbour, Captain Griffiths. Aubrey has power as lord of the manor, which he uses when the bill is called. Admiral Stranraer on the Brest blockade encouraged this enclosure, and he is uncle to Griffiths. The Admiral calls Aubrey back aboard, hoping to prevent his appearance in Parliament. Quick action on the part of Diana and Clarissa Oakes foils this scheme. Aubrey is watching a boxing match between Barret Bonden and Evans, Griffith's gamekeeper, when the orders arrive at Woolcombe. Mrs Oakes appears at the match to tell Aubrey to proceed directly to Parliament. Stranraer is displeased when Aubrey reveals the committee's decision; he sends HMS "Bellona" to the inshore blockading-squadron. Aboard the flagship, Maturin receives letters for his covert mission in France. The Admiral tries unsuccessfully to use Maturin to change Aubrey's mind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Commodore_(novel)"title="The Commodore (novel)">
Jack Aubrey wins the "Ringle", a Baltimore Clipper, from his friend Captain Dundas, as the "Surprise" accompanies HMS "Berenice" back to England, after a stop on Ascension Island for repairs to the "Surprise". Maturin meets with Sir Joseph Blaine, while Aubrey heads home to his family. When Maturin does reach home with Sarah and Emily, he finds his young daughter Brigid in the care of Clarissa Oakes, now widowed. He searches for his wife, finds only some of her horses. Their daughter is developing slowly as to language and social skills. When Maturin meets Sir Joseph at their club, he learns that the Duke of Habachtsthal, the third conspirator in the Ledward-Wray conspiracy, is aiming at both of them. The Duke's influence has delayed the pardons of both Clarissa and Padeen, and all are at risk. To secure his fortune and his family, Maturin asks Aubrey for the "Ringle" to move his cash to Corunna and to carry Clarissa, Padeen and Brigid to live at the Benedictine house in Ávila, Spain, for safety. Brigid takes to Padeen, and is speaking in Irish and English aboard the "Ringle". Blaine and Maturin separately hire Mr Pratt, to gather information on the Duke and to find Diana.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wine-Dark_Sea"title="The Wine-Dark Sea">
The "Surprise", with bow guns blazing, is in close pursuit of the American privateer "Franklin" in the wine-dark waters of the South Pacific. The chase is interrupted by a submarine volcanic eruption that completely disables the "Franklin", with lesser damages to the "Surprise". At sunrise, Aubrey sends Reade to take the "Franklin"; Maturin and Martin separate the dead from wounded aboard the prize. Jean Dutourd, the owner, is taken aboard "Surprise". A wealthy philanthropist, his plan to colonise a South Pacific island, Moahu, was stopped by the appearance of the "Surprise", and her support for the successful queen of Moahu in a battle for supremacy on the island. The "Franklin" took prizes of British ships en route to Moahu, proved by ransomers aboard, seamen taken as security, along with cargoes taken. The American sailing master is dead, killed by shots from the "Surprise". Aubrey finds that Dutourd does not have a letter of marque permitting him to operate the "Franklin" as a privateer; the sailing master did, but Dutourd is not listed on his muster. Aubrey views Dutourd as a pirate, while Maturin considers him a risk ashore to his mission. Aboard ship, his utopian talk appeals to some of the seamen. They take an American whaler as prize. A British sailor on the whaler tells Aubrey of the "Alastor", a privateer turned true pirate, flying the black flag and demanding immediate surrender or death of its victims. In their ultimately successful encounter with the "Alastor", Aubrey receives severe wounds to his eye and his leg.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarissa_Oakes"title="Clarissa Oakes">
"Surprise" sails eastbound from Port Jackson in New South Wales. Jack Aubrey is in an ill-humour as a result of the frigate's visit to the abysmal penal settlement – firstly, because Stephen Maturin's duel with an army officer antagonized the local administration until the governor returned, and secondly because Padeen Colman, Maturin's servant and an absconder, was rescued against Aubrey's wishes. Aubrey observes ribaldry amongst his crew and remains puzzled until he and Pullings find a young female convict, Clarissa Harvill, during the ship's inspection. She was smuggled aboard in Sydney Cove by Midshipman Oakes. Aubrey is at first determined to leave them both on Norfolk Island, but lets them stay aboard until they reach a safer port."Surprise" spots a cutter, . Aubrey suspects the cutter seeks the runaways. He agrees that Harvill and Oakes may marry on board. Aubrey gives some fine red silk he bought for Sophie to be used for a wedding dress for Clarissa, who wears midshipman's clothes. Martin conducts the ceremony, while Bonden hides Padeen. The cutter bears dispatches for Aubrey and mail for the ship, and a captain whose father was surgeon on "Surprise", eager to see her. The mail brings many letters from Sophia and from Diana. Aubrey sees Maturin's happiness that his daughter was born, while Sophia writes him that the infant has development troubles, a secret to keep from Maturin. The governor orders Aubrey to settle a local dispute on Moahu, a nominally British island to the south of the Sandwich Islands. The gun room feasts the newlyweds. Despite the delicious swordfish speared by Davies (after it pierced the ship), good conversation is impaired by the level of animosity existing amongst the gun room members, most visibly West and Davidge. The cause is jealousy over Clarissa, who has had sexual liaisons with several of the ship's officers. This ill-will spreads to the crew, who divide in pro-and anti-Clarissa factions. In the blue water sailing, Maturin befriends Clarissa Oakes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Skulls"title="The Book of Skulls">
The plot concerns four college students who discover a Catalan manuscript, "The Book of Skulls", dealing with an order of monks living in a monastery in the Arizona desert, whose members claim the power to bestow immortality on those who complete their bizarre initiation rite. The boys travel to the monastery, where they are accepted as a "Receptacle", and told that for each group of four who agree to undergo the ritual, two must die in order for the others to succeed—one must sacrifice himself, and the other must be sacrificed at one or more of the others' hands.The narrative switches back and forth between the viewpoints of the four students as each confronts his personal demons on the way to completing the ritual. Ned, who is openly homosexual, must face his guilt over the tragic aftermath of one of his affairs; Eli, the gifted (but socially inept) young man who discovered the manuscript, makes a confession that could destroy his academic career; Timothy, star athlete and prodigal son of a wealthy family, confronts a terrible sin from his past involving his younger sister; and Oliver, the handsome, over-motivated farm kid from the wrong side of the tracks, comes face to face with his own true innermost nature.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Wellville"title="The Road to Wellville">
The book's plot details three narratives which take place between November 1907 and late May 1908 in John Harvey Kellogg's Battle Creek, Michigan sanitarium. The first thread concerns Will and Eleanor Lightbody. Eleanor, a fan of Dr. Kellogg, drags Will to Kellogg's sanitarium. Will has recently suffered stomach pains and is still recovering from bouts of alcohol and drug addiction—the latter at the hands of his wife. Eleanor suffered a brutal miscarriage, which has left her physically weak. Hoping to improve his marriage, Will goes along but is constantly filled with doubts about Kellogg's health methods. While he takes part in the therapy, he gags at health food, does not enjoy the laughing therapy, and watches as his friend Homer Praetz is electrocuted during a sinusoidal bath. Meanwhile, his wife Eleanor finds too much enjoyment at the sanitarium, especially at the hands of Dr. Spitzvogel, a doctor who practices "Die Handhabung Therapeutik"—or in common parlance, erotic massage.Charlie Ossining, a peripatetic merchant attempts to market a new type of cereal, "Per-Fo", with a partner Bender, whose slick and untrustworthy behavior disarms him. They join forces with George Kellogg, adopted son of John Harvey Kellogg, who has had a falling out with his father and seeks revenge. George agrees to use his name on "Per-Fo" in the hopes the cereal will be bought out by the Kellogg's Company.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mutants"title="The Mutants">
In the 30th century, the Earth Empire is contracting and plans are being made to decolonise the colony world of Solos. The militaristic Marshal and other human soldiers, known as Overlords, rule it from Skybase One, an orbiting space station. The Marshal opposes the decolonisation plans outlined to him by an Administrator sent from Earth, and is also obsessed with eradicating the Mutants or "Mutts" that have sprung up on the planet below. The Solonians themselves are a tribal people, split between those who actively oppose the occupation, such as Ky, and those like Varan who collaborate with the imperialists. The Marshal and Varan ensure the Administrator is murdered before he can confirm to Ky and other tribal chiefs that the Earth Empire is indeed withdrawing from Solos.The Third Doctor and Jo arrive on Skybase One, their TARDIS having been transported there by the Time Lords. They have with them a message box which will only open for an intended recipient – and that is not the Marshal or his entourage – but seems to be for Ky, who has been framed for the murder of the Administrator. Jo and Ky flee to the surface of Solos, which is poisonous to humans during daylight hours. This quickly affects Jo, but she survives with Ky's help. The Doctor learns from the Marshal and his chief scientist Jaeger that they are involved in an experiment using rocket barrages to terraform Solos, making the air breathable for humans, regardless of the cost to indigenous life.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Daleks"title="Planet of the Daleks">
The Third Doctor has been wounded after being shot by the Master. Jo helps the Doctor into the TARDIS, where he sends a message to the Time Lords before he collapses then falls into a coma. Jo dictates into the TARDIS log that she has seen this healing state before ("The Dæmons"), and that the TARDIS is moving, being controlled remotely by the Time Lords. When the TARDIS stops Jo activates the external scanners to see some plants outside block the viewer by spraying a thick sap-like liquid at it. With the Doctor still catatonic, Jo leaves to explore the surrounding jungle. The plants spray sap on her as she walks by, and a bit of it gets on her hand.As Jo explores, the TARDIS is rapidly covered by plant sap, which is hardening into a shell around it. When the Doctor awakens, he finds himself sealed in and the oxygen in the TARDIS rapidly being used up. Activating the emergency oxygen supply, he discovers the tanks almost empty, and starts to suffocate from lack of air. Jo discovers a spacecraft in the jungle with a dead pilot. Shortly after, three blonde haired humanoids enter the spacecraft, identifying themselves as Taron, Vaber and Codal. They offer help but are cautious as there is an apparent danger outside.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthlight"title="Earthlight">
The plot describes how political tension between the government of a politically united Earth (which maintains sovereignty over the Moon) and independent settlers and traders elsewhere in the Solar System who have formed a federation, erupts into warfare over the terms for the availability to the Federation of scarce heavy metals.The trigger for hostilities is the publication of a research paper suggesting that the Moon may have previously unsuspected heavy metal resources which Earth proposes to monopolise. The Earth government's intelligence agency suspects that confidential information concerning the exploitation of these mineral riches may be being leaked to the Federation and presses an accountant, Bertram Sadler, into service. Sadler is sent to the Moon's main astronomical observatory located near the crater of Plato as a tip off has suggested that information is being routed through that location. Sadler's cover story is that he is carrying out an investigation of waste in government spending.The rising political tension is accompanied by the observatory staff enjoying the good fortune of observing a nearby supernova explosion in the constellation of Draco.Despite a relatively long preceding era of peace, Earth and the Federation each prepare technologically for war. The Federation develops a new method of spacedrive propulsion while Earth develops new shielding technology and a weapon which uses an electromagnet-propelled bayonet of liquid metal. (The weapon mistaken for a beam of light).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bad_Beginning"title="The Bad Beginning">
Violet Baudelaire is fourteen years old and loves creating amazing inventions; Klaus Baudelaire is twelve and an obsessive reader; Sunny Baudelaire is a baby and has four surprisingly large and sharp buck teeth, with which she loves to bite. While they are at Briny Beach, the children are told by a family friend, Mr. Poe, that their parents have died in a fire that destroyed their home. They are placed in the care of Count Olaf, said to be a distant relative although the children have never heard of him before. Olaf's ramshackle house is filthy and covered in disconcerting eye images; it has a tower which the Baudelaires are forbidden from entering. Count Olaf is unpleasant, easily angered, and forces the children to perform odious chores. It becomes clear that Count Olaf is scheming to collect the Baudelaire's fortune. The only solace the children find is spending time with their neighbor, Justice Strauss. For the next few days, Olaf keeps the Baudelaires busy by forcing them to clean his house. The Baudelaires disagree but do not dare to object. One day, the Baudelaires are set the task of making dinner for Olaf and his theatre troupe. They make puttanesca, but when Olaf arrives, he demands roast beef. The children remind him that he never asked them to make roast beef, and Olaf becomes angry, lifting Sunny into the air, and striking Klaus across the face after Klaus tells everyone Count Olaf has given them only one bed and a pile of rocks for the three of them to sleep on and to play with.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reptile_Room"title="The Reptile Room">
The three Baudelaire orphans have been placed under the care of their distant relative, herpetologist Dr. Montgomery Montgomery. "Uncle Monty", as he prefers to be called, is a short, chubby man with a round, red face. The children immediately like him. He lets them each choose their own bedroom and informs them that they are going to accompany him on a trip to Peru to study snakes.The children are fascinated by the many snakes in the "Reptile Room", a giant hall in which their Uncle Monty's reptile collection is stored. They meet the Incredibly Deadly Viper, which Uncle Monty recently discovered, whose name is actually a misnomer to its harmless and friendly nature. The three children are each given jobs in the Reptile Room: Violet is given the job of inventing traps for new snakes found in Peru, Klaus is told to read books on snakes to help advise Uncle Monty, and Sunny's job is to bite ropes into usable pieces.When Stephano, the successor of the original assistant Gustav arrives, the children realize immediately that he is their recurring nemesis, Count Olaf, who was onto their family fortune. They try to warn Uncle Monty. They manage to talk to Monty alone the day before their trip to Peru, but Monty is instead convinced that Stephano is a spy trying to steal information from his research and fails to understand their claims that Stephano is Olaf. He tears up Stephano's ticket to Peru. The following morning, the Baudelaires discover Monty's dead body.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wide_Window"title="The Wide Window">
Mr. Poe puts the Baudelaire orphans, Klaus Baudelaire, Sunny Baudelaire and Violet Baudelaire under the care of Aunt Josephine, who lives in a house atop a hill overlooking Lake Lachrymose, a lake so large that hurricanes have occurred in that area. Aunt Josephine is afraid of almost everything from cooking food because she is scared that her stove would explode, to her welcome mat. Her library is filled with books about the grammar of the English language because she loves grammar.While helping Aunt Josephine in the grocery store, Violet runs into a sailor named "Captain Sham", who she concludes is Count Olaf in disguise. Aunt Josephine declines to believe this due to Captain Sham's charming personality. That night, the children hear a crash and find out that their new guardian had jumped out of the Wide Window that overlooks Lake Lachrymose, and that before doing so left a note for them informing them that Captain Sham will be their new guardian.Mr. Poe refuses to believe the children's claim the note was a lie by Count Olaf and takes them to dinner with him at a cheap and grimy restaurant with an over-enthusiastic waiter, the Anxious Clown. Needing a distraction to come up with a strategy, Violet puts peppermints in her own food and that of Klaus and Sunny. Allergic, they break into hives, forcing Count Olaf to allow them to go back to their aunt's house. Klaus shows them the note is in Aunt Josephine's handwriting but coded a hidden message using grammar errors, which all together form the two words 'Curdled Cave'. Once they finish the note, Hurricane Herman hits and the house begins to fall apart into the lake.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Miserable_Mill"title="The Miserable Mill">
Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire are traveling on a train heading for Paltryville, the location of the children's new home, the Lucky Smells Lumbermill.Upon arrival, the children learn that they will have to work at the mill, but as part of the deal, their new guardian, Sir (whose name is impossible to pronounce otherwise), will try to keep Count Olaf, their nemesis, away. They meet Sir's more sympathetic partner, Charles, who shows them the library, which contains three books, one about the history of the lumbermill, one about the town constitution, and one donated by Dr. Georgina Orwell, the local optometrist, who lives in an eye-shaped building, which also resembles, suspiciously, the tattoo on their nemesis Count Olaf's ankle.Klaus breaks his own glasses when he is purposely tripped by the new foreman, Flacutono, and is sent to see Dr. Orwell. When Klaus returns from the optometrist, hours later, he acts strangely, as if in a trance. The next day in the lumbermill, Flacutono instructs Klaus to operate a stamping machine. Klaus causes an accident by dropping the machine on Phil, an optimistic coworker. Flacutono exclaims that the machine "cost an inordinate amount of money". The other workers ask what the unfamiliar word means and Klaus defines the word. Klaus explains that he doesn't remember what happened between when he broke his glasses and waking up in the mill. Foreman Flacutono trips him again, once again causing his glasses to break. This time though, Violet and Sunny accompany Klaus to Dr. Orwell's office.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Austere_Academy"title="The Austere Academy">
Mr. Poe drops the Baudelaire children—Violet, Klaus and Sunny—off at Prufrock Preparatory School, a boarding school they are to attend. They are greeted by a rude girl, Carmelita Spats, who calls the children "cakesniffers". Vice Principal Nero tells them about the school's odd rules: they are to sleep in a crab-infested, fungus-dripping shack because they have no living guardian to sign a permission slip for them. Sunny will work as Nero's administrative assistant. They must attend nightly concerts at which Nero performs terribly on the violin. Punishments for rule-breaking include having silverware removed or hands tied while eating in the cafeteria, or having to purchase candy for Nero. Sunny will have her silverware removed permanently for working in the administrative building, which children are not allowed in.At lunch, Carmelita mocks the Baudelaires, but Duncan and Isadora Quagmire stand up for them. The Quagmires are triplets, and they say that their parents died in a fire that also killed their sibling Quigley. When they become adults, they will inherit a fortune of sapphires. Isadora writes rhyming couplets, while Duncan is passionate about journalism and researching. Over the following days, Violet is a student of Mr. Remora, and must take detailed notes of his boring anecdotes, while Klaus is taught by Mrs. Bass, who makes her students endlessly measure the dimensions of objects. Isadora is in Klaus' class and Duncan is in Violet's. Sunny struggles to carry out her administrative work, which is designed for an adult. The school has no weekend breaks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ersatz_Elevator"title="The Ersatz Elevator">
Mr. Poe takes the Baudelaire orphans to their new home on 667 Dark Avenue. The street is dark, as light is "out", or unpopular. The elevators in the apartment building are not working, as elevators are "out", leaving the Baudelaires to walk up several dozen flights of stairs to the penthouse where the Squalors live. Jerome Squalor welcomes the children to their new home. He offers them "aqueous martinis", (water garnished with an olive served in a fancy glass), and introduces them to his wife, Esmé Squalor, the city's sixth most important financial adviser, who is concerned about what's "in" and what's "out". Jerome avoids disputes with Esmé, as he hates arguing with her, and follows her instructions. While Jerome, a good friend of the Baudelaires' mother, truly cares for the children, it becomes apparent that Esmé's reason for adopting them is because orphans are "in." Esmé sends the children and Jerome to Café Salmonella for dinner, because she will be busy privately discussing arrangements for an auction with trendy auctioneer Gunther.After Esmé gives the children over-sized pinstripe suits to wear, the Baudelaires recognize Gunther as Count Olaf, despite his attempt to disguise his unibrow with a monocle and horse riding boots to cover up the tattoo of an eye on his ankle. Despite their protestations, Jerome takes the children to the restaurant. Jerome believes the children are being xenophobic, and dismisses their suspicions of Gunther.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vile_Village"title="The Vile Village">
Mr. Poe receives a brochure about a program where villages have signed up to communally raise children—the Baudelaires choose the village V.F.D., an abbreviation which the Quagmire children communicated to them while being kidnapped at the end of "The Austere Academy". The village has a large number of unusual rules, created by the Council of Elders: their newest rule, outlawing villains, is meant to keep out Count Olaf. The children will live with the village's handyman, Hector. He tells them that the initials stand for the Village of Fowl Devotees—in reference to the large number of crows which follow very specific roosting patterns. At sunset they fly to Nevermore Tree, outside Hector's house.Hector shows the children a couplet he found underneath Nevermore Tree, which resembles Isadora Quagmire's style of poetry. The children stay awake to see if any more messages arrive, and discover a second couplet the next morning. Along with Hector, they do chores for individual townspeople. After cleaning the crow-shaped Fowl Fountain, a council member tells them that Count Olaf has been captured by the new Chief of Police, Officer Luciana. Though the imprisoned man has a unibrow and a tattoo of an eye on his left ankle, he is not Count Olaf. He says that his name is Jacques. Nonetheless, the villagers plan to burn him at the stake—the punishment for breaking one of the town's rules.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hostile_Hospital"title="The Hostile Hospital">
After escaping the Village of Fowl Devotees, Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire arrive at a store to send a telegram to Mr. Poe, explaining their situation and pleading for help. The store's generous owner explains that a van of 'Volunteers Fighting Disease' arrives once every day for a gas refill. The van arrives, and the Baudelaires, thinking it to be the acronym 'V.F.D.', escape into it after the owner recognizes them as the accused murderers in the "Daily Punctilio", an unreliable newspaper series.The Baudelaires discover that Volunteers Fighting Diseases is a group of enthusiasts that visit Heimlich Hospital to increase the morale of patients, who believe that 'No News Is Good News', and therefore have never read "The Daily Punctilio" (and don't recognize the Baudelaires). One of the members suggests the Baudelaires seek a Library of Records to find their V.F.D.The three then volunteer to aid Hal, a visually disabled elder who works in Heimlich Hospital's Library of Records. As he doesn't let them read any of the files, the Baudelaires regretfully trick him into giving them his keys to enter the library at night. While reading a file on the Baudelaires, in which only the thirteenth page remained since investigators have taken the rest, they discover that one of their parents may have survived or escaped the mansion's fire – however, Esmé Squalor enters the library, intent on destroying them and the files to clear Count Olaf's name in the crimes he has committed.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carnivorous_Carnival"title="The Carnivorous Carnival">
Following the events of "The Hostile Hospital", Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire arrive at Caligari Carnival in the trunk of Count Olaf and his theatre troupe's car, unknown to them. Olaf and his associates speak of seeking Madame Lulu, a mysterious fortune-teller and owner of Caligari Carnival, for answers of the whereabouts of the Snicket files, which apparently contains crucial information on V.F.D. As the troupe discuss with Lulu, the Baudelaires escape the trunk and disguise themselves as freak volunteers for the Carnival's freak show, Violet and Klaus as a two-headed humanoid 'Beverly' and 'Elliot', and Sunny as 'Chabo the Wolf Baby', a supposed half-wolf.After being accepted by Lulu, they meet three other freaks in the 'Freak Caravan' - Hugo, a hunchback - Kevin, who is ambidextrous - and Colette, a contortionist. The Baudelaires are oblivious to the reason of their self-consciousness on their rare abilities. Every day they are forced to perform and be ridiculed in front of a small audience.The next day, Count Olaf announces that a freak will be chosen to be fed to a pack of abused lions, in order to increase the popularity of the carnival. Olaf tells Esmé Squalor that Madame Lulu has predicted the whereabouts of the remaining Baudelaire parent to be in a V.F.D headquarters located in the Mortmain Mountains. Violet, Klaus and Sunny explore Lulu's tent, where she supposedly predicts answers using a glass ball - however, they discover that she tricked Olaf into thinking so by using a machine to create the effects, and either guesses the answer or finds the answers in her secret archival library. Madame Lulu enters, and after hollering at the Baudelaires for trespassing, is shamed into revealing her true identity as Olivia. Olivia explains that she goes by the motto 'Give People What They Want', thus her feeding Olaf information. She reveals to be part of V.F.D, and admits to only be guessing one of their parents to be in Mortmain Mountains after the Baudelaires reveal themselves to her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slippery_Slope"title="The Slippery Slope">
Continuing on from "The Carnivorous Carnival", Violet and Klaus are in a caravan rolling down the Mortmain Mountains. Sunny is trapped in a car with Count Olaf, Esmé, and the theater troupe, which now includes the carnival's henchpeople. From materials in the caravan, Violet frantically constructs a drag chute and instructs Klaus to mix together sticky foodstuffs, which he pours on the tires. The caravan comes to a halt at the very edge of the cliff, and tumbles off when Violet and Klaus step out, leaving them with only a few clothes. They travel up the mountain and are attacked by Snow Gnats, so they take cover in a cave. Snow Scouts, led by Bruce (the man who collected Uncle Monty's reptiles from "The Reptile Room"), are occupying the cave, and Carmelita Spats (a student from "The Austere Academy") is to be crowned Snow Queen. A masked Snow Scout communicates with the Baudelaires with "V.F.D." phrases such as "very foul day". At night, the scout wakes Violet and Klaus and leads them up a chimney. He calls it a "Vertical Flame Diversion" and at the end they reach a "Vernacularly Fastened Door", which allows the trio through once they solve three literary questions.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grim_Grotto"title="The Grim Grotto">
Having been separated from Quigley Quagmire by the waterfall of the Mortmain Mountains, the Baudelaire children arrive at the hull of the "Queequeg", a submarine piloted by Captain Widdershins. They correctly guess the password, "the world is quiet here", and enter the porthole to meet Widdershins along with his stepdaughter Fiona and the chef Cookie, who they recognise as the optimist Phil that used to work for the Lucky Smells Lumbermill (in "The Miserable Mill"). Widdershins is a V.F.D. member and knew the Baudelaire parents; he talks with urgency but often gives contradicting instructions. He is traveling to the last safe place, the Hotel Denouement, but must first locate the sugar bowl, though he will not tell them what is inside.Klaus examines the tidal charts to estimate that the sugar bowl is in the Gorgonian Grotto, but is interrupted by sonar detection of an octopus-shaped submarine that they suspect is captained by Count Olaf. The submarine is chased away by the Great Unknown, which appears on the sonar as a question mark. Fiona, a mycologist, discovers that the Gorgonian Grotto is home to the Medusoid Mycelium, a dangerous fungus which can kill within an hour of inhalation. As the grotto is conical, the "Queequeg" reaches a point where it is too wide to pass through, and instead the Baudelaire children and Fiona venture further in diving outfits. Reaching a beach, the children search through detritus in vain and are delayed in their return by the waxing and waning of Medusoid Mycelium. Sunny cooks a meal with ingredients on the beach, saving the wasabi for their return, as the others discover instructions for communicating with Verse Fluctuation Declaration, in which a message is hidden in a poem that has some of its words replaced.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelander_(novel)"title="Icelander (novel)">
The plot primarily follows the adventures of a character known only as Our Heroine as she attempts to solve the mystery of her friend's murder while repeated flashbacks detail her family's past adventures in the underground Icelandic kingdom of Vanaheim.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libra_(novel)"title="Libra (novel)">
The book follows two related but separate narrative threads: episodes from Oswald's life from his childhood until the assassination and his death, and the actions of other participants in the conspiracy. A secondary parallel story follows Nicholas Branch, a CIA archivist of more recent times assigned the monumental task of piecing together the disparate fragments of Kennedy's death.Oswald is portrayed as a misfit antihero, whose overtly communist political views cause him difficulties fitting into American society. Raised by a single mother in The Bronx, Oswald enlists in the military in the 1950s and is stationed at the Naval Air Facility Atsugi in Japan, where he amuses his fellow airmen with his earnest left-wing ideology. Oswald defects to the Soviet Union after the end of his service and is interviewed by the KGB about the U-2 reconnaissance planes he observed at Atsugi, although he is unable to furnish much useful information. Following a suicide attempt, Oswald is moved to Minsk, where he works in a factory and meets a young woman, Marina, whom he marries. In the early 1960s, Oswald and Marina relocate to Texas.Concurrently in the novel, a cadre of CIA agents disillusioned by Kennedy's perceived failure to adequately support the Bay of Pigs invasion hatch a plot to stage an assassination attempt and blame it on the Cuban government. The chief conspirators in the CIA are Win Everett, Lawrence Parmenter and TJ Mackey. The conspiracy grows to encompass several largely independent factions, including organized crime figures in New Orleans and a contingent of Cuban exiles in Miami. Although at first they planned to intentionally miss the President, at some point it is decided that the gunman should aim to kill.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Foe"title="The Ultimate Foe">
The Sixth Doctor boldly claims the Valeyard's evidence has been falsified, and the Matrix has been tampered with. The Keeper of the Matrix insists this is impossible. Glitz and Mel arrive unexpectedly in the courtroom. The Master appears on the Matrix screen to claim responsibility and to demonstrate it's possible to breach the Matrix. At the Master's insistence, Glitz reveals the data he tried to obtain on Ravolox included technological secrets from the Matrix, which was stolen by the Sleepers. The Time Lords traced the Sleepers to their base on Earth and dragged the planet across space to the location in which the Doctor found it, nearly annihilating all life on the planet in the process. The Doctor denounces the Time Lords as decadent and corrupt. The Master explains that the Valeyard is a manifestation of the Doctor's darker side "somewhere between [the Doctor's] twelfth and final incarnation"; the High Council offered the Valeyard the Doctor's remaining regenerations in exchange for falsifying evidence.When the Doctor demands to halt the trial as he cannot be both the defendant and prosecutor, the Valeyard flees into the Matrix, a virtual reality where normal logic does not apply. The Doctor pursues with Glitz, emerging next to a building labelled "The Fantasy Factory (proprietor: J. J. Chambers)". A clerk named Mr. Popplewick sends them to a deserted wasteland. To the Doctor's horror, hands emerge from the ground and grab him, dragging him underground. Glitz is unable to rescue him, but the Doctor rises from the ground unharmed, insisting correctly that nothing that happens in the Matrix is real. The Valeyard appears and taunts the Doctor before unleashing nerve gas, forcing the Doctor and Glitz to take refuge in a run-down cottage. As they stumble inside, it dematerialises – it is the Master's TARDIS.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_(Brin_novel)"title="Earth (Brin novel)">
Set in the year 2038, "Earth" is a cautionary tale of the harm humans can cause their planet via disregard for the environment and reckless scientific experiments. The book has a large cast of characters and Brin uses them to address a number of environmental issues, including endangered species, global warming, refugees from ecological disasters, ecoterrorism, and the social effects of overpopulation. The plot of the book involves an artificially created black hole which has been lost in the Earth's interior and the attempts to recover it before it destroys the planet. The events and revelations which follow reshape humanity and its future in the universe. It also includes a war pitting most of the Earth against Switzerland, fueled by outrage over the Swiss allowing generations of kleptocrats to hide their stolen wealth in the country's banks.The scope of the story expands vastly as the plot gradually reveals itself, bringing into question the future course—and even the survival—of humanity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neon_Bible"title="The Neon Bible">
The story begins with Aunt Mae, a former actress and singer, moving in with David's white working-class family in the middle of a small southern town. Aunt Mae becomes sexually involved with a 70-year-old man, ending when he is arrested on morality charges. From subsequent events David learns he does not get along with the other boys his own age. At this point, suggestive of the Great Depression, David's father, Frank, loses his factory job. The family moves to an older house on a hill overlooking the town.The family's circumstances worsen and Frank becomes frustrated. One week he spends his entire paycheck on seeds and other farming supplies. His wife insists that crops cannot grow in the clay of the hill soil. An argument ensues and he strikes her with his knee, knocking out one of her teeth. She bleeds badly, but it eventually subsides. Subsequently, Frank is shipped to Italy to fight in World War II.While Frank is in Italy, a traveling 'revival' ministry visits town. The traveling preacher teaches that popular dance is a prelude to 'immorality'. The town's local preacher opposes this incursion and begins a rival Bible study class. These options divide the town. Through editorials in the newspaper and spots on the town radio station, each side attacks the other. Meanwhile, Aunt Mae takes a job in the local propeller factory as a supervisor. At a company dance which she organizes, Aunt Mae entertains by singing. This leads to her being invited to join the hired band, singing for pay.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_of_the_Daleks"title="Genesis of the Daleks">
The Fourth Doctor and his companions Sarah Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan are intercepted by the Time Lords. The Doctor is instructed to interfere with the creation of the Daleks so as to avert a future in which the Daleks rule the universe; he is given a Time Ring to return them to his TARDIS when the mission is complete. The three find themselves on the Dalek planet of Skaro. A generations-long war between the Thals and the Kaleds has left the planet inhospitable, and the two sides have congregated in their own domes for protection and continue the war.A chemical weapon attack forces them to take shelter. Sarah is separated but meets the Mutos, mutated exiles of both sides, who try to help protect her before they are all captured by the Thals and forced to load radioactive material on a missile. The Doctor and Harry are captured by the Kaleds, their possessions confiscated, and are taken to a bunker to meet the scientific and military elite, including the lead scientist Davros, who unveils the "Mark III travel machine", or "Dalek", which the Doctor recognises as his nemesis. Ronson, one of Davros' scientists, secretly tells the Doctor that he knows Davros' experiments are unethical, and the Doctor is able to convince the Kaled leadership to put a halt to Davros' experiments. Davros learns of Ronson's actions, and covertly provides the Thal leaders a chemical formula that can weaken the Kaled dome and make it vulnerable to their missile attack, while preparing twenty more Daleks.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Dubious_Battle"title="In Dubious Battle">
"In Dubious Battle" deals with a fruit-workers' strike in a California valley and the attempts of labor unions to organize, lead, and provide for the striking pickers.Jim Nolan meets Harry Nilson who initiates Jim's application process to become the newest member of the Party. Mac "Doc" McLeod, the Party organizer, tells Jim they will go to the Torgas Valley (a composite location) in an attempt to rouse the two thousand fruit pickers against the Growers' Association, and to encourage the strike to spill over into the cotton fields in Tandale.Momentum for strike action builds after old Dan breaks two rungs out of a ladder and falls. London becomes chairman of a committee of seven men, while Mac convinces Alfred Anderson's father, Al, to loan five acres as a base for the fruit pickers in exchange for them picking his crop for free. Doc Burton is hired by Mac to maintain the sanitation of the strikers' camp, so as to prevent it from being disbanded by the Red Cross.The course of the strike is recounted in some detail, including the politics of the local growers, the support by Al through his little luncheonette, the "sweet-talking" of some locals in order to garner food and other help for the pickers, and personal crises and tragedies in individual cases. Mac emerges as a heroic but quite single-minded figure; Jim's occasional doubts are presented as well.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Golden_Calf"title="The Little Golden Calf">
Ostap Bender is still alive (but sports a scar across his neck), after barely surviving the assassination attempt in the previous book, which he once briefly mentions as "stupid business". This time he hears a story about a "clandestine millionaire" named Alexandr Koreiko. Koreiko has made millions through various illegal enterprises by taking advantage of the widespread corruption in the New Economic Policy (NEP) period while pretending to live on an office clerk's salary of 46 rubles a month. Koreiko lives in "Chernomorsk" (literally: Black Sea city, referring to the city of Odessa) and keeps his large stash of ill-gotten money in a suitcase, waiting for the fall of the Soviet government, so that he can make use of it.Together with two petty criminals Balaganov and Panikovsky, and an extremely naive and innocent car driver Kozlevich, Bender finds out about Koreiko and starts to collect all the information he can get on his business activities. Koreiko tries to flee, but Bender eventually tracks him down in Turkestan, on the newly built Turkestan–Siberia Railway. He then blackmails him into giving him a million rubles.Suddenly rich, Bender faces the problem of how to spend his money in a Communist country where there are no legal millionaires. Nothing of the life of the rich that Bender dreamt of seems possible in the Soviet Union. Frustrated, Bender even decides to anonymously donate the money to the Ministry of Finance, but changes his mind. He turns the money into jewels and gold, and tries to cross the Romanian border, only to be robbed by the Romanian border guards, leaving him only with a medal, the Order of the Golden Fleece.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Good_School"title="A Good School">
The school, modeled on Yates' own experiences as an adolescent at Avon Old Farms School, is called Dorset Academy, a small private institution dependent on its now senile founder, a wealthy older woman named Abigail Church Hooper, a thinly-veiled reference to Avon Old Farms founder Theodate Pope Riddle. Dorset Academy is at best a second-rate institution, having the reputation of an unusual sort of prep school, where many of the students are on scholarship, and Dr. Stone, the English master, is the only "Harvard man". However, throughout the book, parents, teachers, even students insist that it is "a good school".In the "Foreword", the first person narrator, 15-year-old William Grove, a stand-in for Yates, relates what makes his divorcée mother, decide on Dorset Academy for her son. The main body of the novel is told in the third person, with Grove retreating into a group of schoolmates only to re-emerge at the end of the book, in the "Afterword", which is told from a distance of more than 30 years. There, William Grove, now a writer, looks back nostalgically on Dorset Academy where, as the editor of the school paper, he learned "the rudiments of [his] trade".As one of the masters puts it, the school harbors "a tremendous amount of sheer sexual energy". This is certainly true of the boys, who make a game of selecting one of the weaker boys, pinning him down on his bed and masturbating him to the point of ejaculation. On the other hand, they try hard to hide their erections from adults and girls, whether it is Dr. Stone's beautiful daughter Edith or the girls arriving for the annual Spring Dance. The teachers also suffer under too much sexual energy, especially Jack Draper, the chemistry master, crippled from polio, who becomes the witness of his wife's crude attempts to hide a year-and-a-half-long affair with the French master, Jean-Paul La Prade. When, toward the end of the novel, it is announced that Dorset Academy will have to close due to mounting debt, Draper decides to hang himself in his chemistry lab in humiliation. He is too weak, however, to push the chair away from under his feet and proceeds home where he reconciles with his estranged wife.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finn_and_Hengest"title="Finn and Hengest">
Hnæf, son of Hoc Half-Dane, is the lord of a Danish people who have conquered part of Jutland (probably the northern part of the Cimbrian Peninsula) and exiled its former Jutish rulers. Finn, king of Frys-Land (modern-day Friesland in the Netherlands) has allowed dispossessed Jutes to settle in his lands and enter his service. Finn marries Hnæf's older sister Hildeburh, and sends their son (whose name was probably Friðuwulf) to be fostered in Hnæf's household.Around the year AD 450, Hnæf sails to Frys-Land in the autumn, His purpose is to return Finn's now-grown son and spend the winter in Finn's citadel, celebrating Yule. Hnæf brings a retinue of some sixty thanes. Chief among these thanes is a Jute named Hengest, leader of a band of Jutes who have taken service under Hnæf. Unfortunately, and foreseen by no one, when they arrive at Finn's stronghold they find that many of Finn's thanes are also Jutes, particularly one Garulf, who seems to be the rightful heir to the kingdom conquered by Hnæf's people; and these Frisian Jutes are at blood feud with Hengest and his band, because Hengest supports the conquering Danes, if for no other reason. This would explain why Hildeburh "had no cause to praise the fealty of the Jutes," since that fealty led to the re-awakening of the feud, which killed her brother, husband, and son.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_German_Requiem_(novel)"title="A German Requiem (novel)">
After spending the latter part of World War II in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp, 1947 sees Bernhard Gunther now married to a wife who is trading sex with U.S. Army officers for scarce goods. Berlin and Vienna were captured by the Red Army, so Germans, former Nazis, Allied occupiers, and Gunther have the Russians to contend with. An old colleague from Gunther's days in Berlin, a dirty cop, war criminal, and smuggler named Emil Becker, has been accused and jailed in Vienna for the killing of an American officer called Linden. A high-ranking MVD officer named Poroshin, who claims to be a friend of Becker, tries to recruit Gunther to investigate the case and get Becker exonerated in exchange for a large fee. According to Poroshin, after acting as a secret Vienna-Berlin courier for a certain König, Becker was framed for the murder of Linden, who Becker had met through König.Gunther takes a train to Vienna and visits Becker in jail, where he learns that Becker's henchmen had been killed trying to find König and his girlfriend Lotte Hartmann at Becker's request. Gunther starts his investigation in Vienna, by attending Linden's funeral, where he is accosted by Roy Shields, an American MP. At approximately the same time, Gunther rescues a recent acquaintance, Veronika, a local prostitute he met as part of the investigation, from rape by two Russian soldiers. As part of the intervention, Gunther gets knocked down and is himself rescued in extremis by John Belinsky, a man bearing identification associating him with the American Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) that had been covertly tailing him. They fraternize, Belinsky admits to also being investigating the murder of Linden, and they agree to collaborate.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Games"title="The War Games">
On an alien planet, the Doctor uncovers a plot to conquer the Galaxy with brainwashed soldiers abducted from Earth and forced to fight in simulated "war games", reflecting the periods in history whence they were taken. The aliens' aim is to produce a super-army from the survivors; to this end, they have been aided by a renegade Time Lord, calling himself the War Chief.Joining forces with rebel soldiers, who have broken their conditioning, the Doctor and his companions foil the plot and end the fighting. The War Chief is apparently killed when the leader of the aliens, the War Lord, realises he has been plotting against him. The Doctor admits he needs the help of the Time Lords to return the soldiers to their own timelines, but in asking, risks capture for his own past crimes, including the theft of his TARDIS. After sending the message he and his companions attempt to evade capture, but are caught.Having returned the soldiers to Earth, the Time Lords place the War Lord on trial and dematerialise him. They erase Zoe and Jamie's memories of travelling with the Doctor, and return them to the respective point in time when each of them first entered the TARDIS. They then place the Doctor on trial for stealing a TARDIS and breaking the law of non-interference. The Doctor presents a spirited defence, citing his many battles against the evils of the universe. Accepting this defence, the Time Lords proclaim that his punishment is exile to Earth in the 20th century - a planet and period of which he is fond. The Doctor points out he is too well known on Earth, so the Time Lords tell him he will change his appearance, as he has before, and present him with images of four faces. He does not like any of them; impatient, the Time Lords inform him that a decision has been made for him. He cries out indignantly as the regeneration is forced upon him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Absolute_at_Large"title="The Absolute at Large">
The story centers on the invention of a reactor that can annihilate matter to produce cheap and abundant energy. Unfortunately, it produces something else as a by-product, the "absolute". The "absolute" is a spiritual essence that according to some religious philosophies permeates all matter. It is associated with human religious experience, as an unsuspecting humanity is to find out all too soon in the story. The widespread adoption of the reactors cause an enormous outpouring of pure "absolute" into the world. This leads to an outburst of religious and nationalist fervor, causing the greatest, most global war in history.Čapek describes this war in a self-consciously absurd manner. Characteristic of the war are distant military marches, hence for example "battles of the Chinese with the Senegalese riflemen on the shores of the Finnish lakes." Some of the more prominent political changes the war causes include expulsion of the Russian army to Africa (via Europe) by the Chinese invasion, the conquest of East Asia by Japan that cuts the Chinese conquests in Russia and Europe down to the limits of the former Austro-Hungarian empire, and the Japanese conquest of North America. (The latter was able to occur because the United States were exhausted by a bloody civil war between the supporters and opponents of the Prohibition.)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_with_the_Newts"title="War with the Newts">
Only the last four of the book's 27 chapters deal with the eponymous war. The rest of the book is concerned with the discovery of the Newts, their exploitation and evolution, and growing tensions between humans and the Newts in the lead-up to the war.The book does not have any single protagonist, but instead looks at the development of the Newts from a broad societal perspective. At various points the narrator's register seems to slip into that of a journalist, historian or anthropologist. The three most central characters are Captain J. van Toch, the seaman who discovers the Newts; Mr Gussie H. Bondy, the industrialist who leads the development of the Newt industry; and Mr Povondra, Mr Bondy's doorman. They all reoccur throughout the book, but none can be said to drive the narrative in any significant way. All three are Czech.The novel is divided into three sections or 'books'.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Watch_(Discworld)"title="Night Watch (Discworld)">
On the morning of the 30th anniversary of the Glorious Revolution of the Twenty-Fifth of May (and as such the anniversary of the death of John Keel, Vimes' hero and former mentor), Sam Vimes — whose wife is in labour with their first child — is caught in a storm while pursuing Carcer, a notorious criminal who has murdered several watchmen, to the roof of the Unseen University's Library. He awakens to find that he has somehow been sent back in time.Vimes's first idea is to ask the wizards at the Unseen University to send him home, but before he can act on this, he is arrested for breaking curfew by a younger version of himself. Incarcerated in a cell next to his is Carcer, who after being released joins the Unmentionables, the secret police carrying out the paranoid whims of the Patrician of the time, Homicidal Lord Winder.When he is taken to be interrogated by the captain, time is frozen by Lu-Tze, who tells Vimes what has happened and that he must assume the identity of Sergeant-At-Arms John Keel, who was to have arrived that day but was murdered by Carcer. It is stated that the event which caused Vimes and Carcer to be sent into the past was a major temporal shattering. Vimes then returns to the office, time restarts and he convinces the captain that he is Keel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Caves_of_Androzani"title="The Caves of Androzani">
Androzani Minor is the only source of the spectrox drug, produced by bats within the desert planet's cave systems. The citizens of neighbouring Androzani Major rely on spectrox for its life-extending capabilities. Spectrox mining is controlled by Morgus's business conglomerate, but is threatened by Sharaz Jek, a masked figure who hides within the cave systems and controls an army of androids that disrupt mining efforts. Morgus has publicly funded the military operation led by General Chellak to defeat Jek, but secretly employs gunrunners Stotz and Krelper to supply Jek with weapons to profit from the war.The TARDIS lands on Androzani Minor, and the Fifth Doctor and Peri start to explore the caves. They both get caught briefly in a sticky substance but move on. The two are captured by Chellak, who believes them to be aiding the gunrunners. Chellak communicates their image to Morgus who does not recognise them and orders their execution. At their execution, Chellak discovers that Jek had been able to replace them with androids. Unbeknownst to Chellak, his own adjutant, Maj. Salateen, has also been replaced by one of Jek's androids.In Jek's lair, the Doctor and Peri complain about illness, and the real Salateen tells them that they had stepped in raw spectrox, which is lethal; the anti-toxin is the milk of the queen bat, but due to the recent war, the bats have descended to the deepest levels of the mine that are devoid of oxygen. Jek explains that he is at war with Morgus as his actions led to his disfiguration. Jek leaves the two under guard of his androids while he meets Stotz and Krelper. The Doctor reprograms the androids to allow them to escape. They are caught in the middle of one of the battles, and Peri is captured by Chellak, while the Doctor is forced to leave with Stotz and Krelper.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bonesetter's_Daughter"title="The Bonesetter's Daughter">
Ruth is a self-sufficient woman who makes her living as a ghostwriter for self-help books. She lives with her boyfriend, Art Kamen, and acts as a stepmother to Art's two teenage daughters, Dory and Fia. Meanwhile, as Lu Ling is showing signs of dementia, Ruth struggles to juggle her mother's illness, her job, and her relationship. As an adult, Ruth struggles to understand her mother and her strange behavior during Ruth's childhood. Although she loves her mother, she also resents her for having criticized her harshly when she was young and forcing her to obey strict rules. Lu Ling believed that young Ruth had the ability to communicate with the spirit world, and often expected her to produce messages from the ghost of Lu Ling's long-dead nursemaid, Precious Auntie, by writing on a sand tray.Lu Ling's autobiography makes up the middle section of this book. This story within a story describes Lu Ling's early life in a small Chinese village called Immortal Heart. Lu Ling is raised by a mute, burned nursemaid called "Precious Auntie." It is later revealed that Precious Auntie sustained her injuries by swallowing burning ink resin. Although the oldest daughter in her family, Lu Ling is ignored by her mother in favor of her younger sister Gao Ling. However, Precious Auntie was entirely devoted to caring for Lu Ling.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_(Asimov_novelette_and_novel)"title="Nightfall (Asimov novelette and novel)">
The planet Lagash ("Kalgash" in the novel) is constantly illuminated by the six suns of its multiple star system. Areas of darkness exist in enclosed areas on Lagash, such as caves, tunnels, and windowless rooms, but because at least one sun is present in the sky at any given time, night never falls.A skeptical journalist visits a university observatory to interview a group of scientists who warn that civilization on Lagash will soon come to an end. The researchers explain that they have discovered evidence of numerous ancient civilizations on the planet, all destroyed by fire, with each collapse occurring about 2,000 years apart. The religious writings of a doomsday cult claim that Lagash periodically passes through an enormous cave where mysterious "stars" appear. The stars are said to rain down fire from the heavens and rob people of their souls, reducing them to beast-like savages.The scientists use this apparent myth, along with recent discoveries in gravitational research, to develop a theory about the repeated collapse of society. A mathematical analysis of Lagash's orbit around its primary sun reveals irregularities caused by the presence of a previously undiscovered moon that cannot be seen in the light of day. Calculations indicate that this "invisible" moon will soon obscure one of Lagash's suns when it is alone in the sky, resulting in a total eclipse that only occurs once every 2,000 years. Having evolved on a planet with no diurnal cycle, all Lagashians possess an intense, instinctive fear of the dark. Psychological experiments involving darkness have revealed that Lagashians may suffer permanent mental illness or even death after as little as 15 minutes of exposure, and the eclipse is projected to last for over half a day. This, coupled with the fact that the diameter of the umbra is at least as great as that of the planet, ensures that the entire world population will experience an unprecedented period of prolonged, widespread darkness.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Less_than_Zero_(novel)"title="Less than Zero (novel)">
The novel follows the life of Clay, a rich, young college student who has returned to his hometown of Los Angeles, California for winter break circa 1984. Through first-person narration, Clay describes his progressive alienation from the culture around him, loss of faith in his friends, and his meditations on events in his recent past.After reuniting with his ex-girlfriend Blair, and friends like Trent, now a successful model, Clay embarks on a series of drug-fueled nights of partying, during which he has one-night stands with both sexes. While partying, he tries to track down his best friend from high school, Julian, with whom he hasn't spoken in months. In between descriptions of his days and nights, Clay recounts a vacation spent with his parents and grandparents, during which he seemed to be the only person concerned that his grandmother was dying of cancer.Over time, Clay becomes progressively disillusioned with the party scene as he witnesses the apathy of his friends towards the suffering of one another and those around them: at one party, he watches as the revellers joke and take Polaroids of his friend, Muriel, while she injects heroin; at another, he and Blair are the only two who exhibit revulsion when Trent shows a snuff film, which sexually excites several partygoers.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Was_Then,_This_Is_Now"title="That Was Then, This Is Now">
Bryon and Mark are best friends. They have lived together with Bryon’s mother ever since Mark’s parents shot each other in a drunken brawl. The boys hang out at Charlie’s Bar and earn money by hustling pool. Charlie tells the pair that M&amp;M, a younger Hippie boy, is looking for them. Bryon and Mark find M&amp;M in time to stop Curly Shepard and his Greaser gang from beating M&amp;M up. The “Hippies” are a new group and the lines between the two former groups, the “Greasers” and “Socs,” are becoming blurred.The following day, Bryon and Mark visit Bryon’s mother in the hospital. While there, Bryon meets Cathy Carlson, M&amp;M’s older sister, who works in the snack bar. Bryon is taken with Cathy and hopes to see her again. Bryon and Mark also visit Mike Chambers, a boy Bryon’s mother befriends. Mike is recovering from a beating after being falsely accused of harming a young African American girl. Mike tells Bryon and Mark what happened, how he actually saved the girl from being harassed by a group of whites. Mike drove the girl home and his car was surrounded by a group of African American kids. They pulled him from the car and nearly beat him to death when the girl lied, claiming Mike hurt her. Despite this, Mike does not hate African Americans. When he thinks about it from the girl’s viewpoint, he can almost understand why she lied. After the visit ends, Bryon and Mark discuss led’s misfortune. Mark does not share Mike’s understanding of the factors that caused the girl to lie. Mark states that if anyone ever hurt him like that, he would hate them forever.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_a_Buick_8"title="From a Buick 8">
The novel is a series of recollections by the members of Troop D, a Pennsylvania State Police barracks in Western Pennsylvania. After Curtis Wilcox, a well-liked member of Troop D, is killed by a drunk driver, his son Ned begins to visit the barracks. The cops, the dispatcher and the custodian quickly take a liking to him. The troopers begin telling Ned about the "Buick 8".The Buick 8, which resembles a vintage blue 1953 Buick Roadmaster, has been in storage in a shed near the barracks since 1979, when it was left at a gas station by a mysterious driver who then disappeared. The car, they discover, is not a car at all. It "appears" to be a Buick Roadmaster, but the steering wheel is immobile, the dashboard instruments are useless props, the engine has no moving parts, the ignition wires go nowhere, there are four portholes on the passenger side and only three on the driver side, the car heals itself when damaged and it repels all dirt or debris.Sandy Dearborn, now Sergeant Commanding of Troop D, is the main narrator of the book, and tells the story to Ned, discussing various things that have happened with the car and his father's fascination with it. The car will frequently give off what they dub "lightquakes", or large flashes of purple light over an extended period of time. These lights will occasionally "give birth" to strange plants and creatures that are not like anything in our world. Two people have disappeared in the vicinity of the car—Curtis Wilcox's former partner Ennis Rafferty, as well as an escaped lowlife named Brian Lippy. It is later suggested that perhaps the Buick was actually a portal between our world and another.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_Series"title="The Adventure Series">
## "The Island of Adventure".Philip meets Jack and Lucy-Ann and Jack's pet bird Kiki, and after they sneak home with him, they move in with Philip, his sister Dinah and their Aunt Polly and Uncle Jocelyn at an ancient mansion at the coast. Strange lights on the nearby mysterious island leads to the four's first adventure inside an abandoned copper mine and a network of secret undersea tunnels.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Te_of_Piglet"title="The Te of Piglet">
In "The Te of Piglet", the Piglet character of the "Winnie-the-Pooh" books explains the Chinese concept of "Te", meaning 'power' or 'virtue'. Hoff elucidates the Taoist concept of 'Virtue — of the small'; though, he also uses it as an opportunity to elaborate on his introduction to Taoism. It is written with many embedded stories from the A. A. Milne Winnie the Pooh books, both for entertainment and because they serve as tools for explaining Taoism.In the book Piglet is shown to possess great power — a common interpretation of the word Te, which more commonly means Virtue — not only because he is small, but also because he has a great heart or, to use a Taoist term, Tz'u. The book goes through the other characters — Tigger, Owl, Rabbit, Eeyore and Pooh — to show the various aspects of humanity that Taoism says get in the way of living in harmony with the Tao.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jesus_Incident"title="The Jesus Incident">
The book takes place at an indeterminate time following the events in "Destination: Void". At the end of "Destination: Void" the crew of the ship had succeeded in creating an artificial consciousness. The new conscious being, now known as 'Ship', gains a level of awareness that allows it to manipulate space and time. Ship instantly transports itself to a planet which it has decided the crew will colonize, christening it "Pandora". The first book ends with a demand from Ship for the crew to learn how to WorShip or how to establish a relationship with Ship, a godlike being.The action of the book is divided between two settings, the internal spaces of Ship which is orbiting Pandora and the settlements on the planet. While the original crew of Ship, as described in "Destination: Void", were cloned human beings from the planet Earth, by the time of "The Jesus Incident", the crew has become a mixed bag of peoples from various cultures that have been accepted as crew members by Ship when it visited their planet as well as people who have been conceived and born on the ship. Evidently Ship has shown up at a number of planets as the suns of those planets were going nova, the implication being that these planets were other, failed experiments by Ship to establish a relationship with human beings. Ship refers to these as replays of human history, suggesting Ship itself has manipulated human history time and time again.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Mars"title="Moving Mars">
A small number of students, who are angry at the breaking of their contract with the University of Mars, Sinai, start a protest and plan to storm the university. Although the attempted coup ends in a stalemate, a protester, Casseia Majumdar, establishes her position. The story picks up again a few years later when Casseia is more mature. She does not necessarily regret her actions in the attempted revolution, but continues to be haunted by their consequences, especially her love affair with fellow student Charles Franklin.Casseia eventually emerges as a fledgling politician in her BM, and wins a trip to Earth with her BM's representative and the BM's Thinker to discuss the situation between Earth and Mars, which is getting increasingly worse. Meanwhile, Charles, her one-time lover, along with a team of super-geniuses called the Olympians, discovers a radical new technology that has the potential to turn the tables on the conflict. He theorizes that the universe is basically a large computer and discovers a way to "tweak" the laws of the universe to create an effect. The Earth does not know exactly what this new technology can do, but they have hints of it and fear it. Casseia returns to Mars and marries into a family with potentially political ambitions due to their perceived neutrality. Her mother-in-law eventually becomes president of an interim central Martian government, and chooses Casseia as her vice-president. Tensions between the BMs and Earth grow to crisis levels, as news of the Olympians' discovery frightens the Earth government into pressuring the Martians to cooperate. One method of coercion that the Martians fear is "evolvons", or small undetectable computer viruses implanted during manufacture into all Thinkers. Martians fear that the Earth will use these to control all Martian Thinkers, and therefore cripple essential operations.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Alert_(novel)"title="Red Alert (novel)">
In a paranoid delusion, moribund U.S. Air Force general Quinten unilaterally launches an airborne preventive nuclear attack upon the Soviet Union from his command at the Sonora, Texas, Strategic Air Command (SAC) bomber base by ordering the 843rd Bomb Wing to attack using "Wing Attack Plan R", an operational plan which authorises a lower-echelon SAC commander to retaliate after an enemy first strike has decapitated the U.S. government. He attacks with the entire B-52 bomber wing of new aircraft, each armed with two nuclear weapons and protected with electronic countermeasures to prevent the Soviets from shooting them down.When the U.S. President and cabinet become aware the attack is underway, they assist the Soviet government in intercepting the rogue U.S. Air Force bombers, to little effect, because the Soviets destroy only two bombers and damage one, the "Alabama Angel", which remains airborne and en route to its target.The U.S. government reestablishes the SAC airbase chain of command, but the general who launched the attack, the only man knowing the recall code, kills himself before capture and interrogation. His executive officer correctly deduces the recall code from among the general's desk pad doodles. The code is received by the surviving bomber aircraft, and they are successfully recalled, minutes before bombing their targets in the Soviet Union, save for the "Alabama Angel", whose earlier-damaged radio prevents its recalling; it progresses to its target.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard's_First_Rule"title="Wizard's First Rule">
Richard Cypher, a young woods guide, lives in an area of the world known as Westland, which is one of three parts of the known world, divided by magical underworld boundaries. Of the three, Westland is united under one government and contains no magic, the Midlands are a coalition of sovereign nations with magic, and past another magical boundary lies the empire of D'Hara - a single kingdom ruled by Wizards.After the unexplained murder of his father, Richard investigates. He discovers a piece of vine in his father's house, and searches the mountains for a live part of the plant, thinking it might lead him to the murderers. He finds the plant, but it attacks him, implanting a poisonous thorn. While returning to town to find a healer, he finds a woman named Kahlan Amnell, who is being hunted by a group of assassins. Richard helps save Kahlan from the men, and learns that Kahlan is searching for the First Wizard, who is rumored to have crossed into Westland after the creation of the boundaries. Richard takes Kahlan to his best friend and mentor, Zedd. Soon after arriving, Richard collapses from the illness caused by the vine.When Richard recovers under Zedd's care, he identifies Zedd as the First Wizard. Kahlan pleads for Zedd's help, asking for him to name a Seeker of Truth to confront Darken Rahl, the ruler of D'Hara. Dahl has activated the magical "Boxes of Orden," which, depending how they are opened, could make Rahl ruler of the world, destroy all life, or destroy himself. Kahlan believes that the "Seeker" empowered by the Sword of Truth—a magical weapon forged by the powerful wizards of old—can stop Rahl before the magic expires on the winter solstice. Zedd tests Richard, to see if he is worthy of wielding the Sword of Truth. Richard passes the test, becoming the next ”Seeker.”
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Joy_Luck_Club_(novel)"title="The Joy Luck Club (novel)">
"The Joy Luck Club" consists of sixteen interlocking stories about the lives of four Chinese immigrant mothers and their four American-born daughters. In 1949, the four mothers meet at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco and agree to continue to meet to play mahjong. They call their mahjong group the Joy Luck Club. The stories told in this novel revolve around the Joy Luck Club women and their daughters. Structurally, the novel is divided into four major sections, with two sections focusing on the stories of the mothers and two sections on the stories of the daughters.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fried_Green_Tomatoes_at_the_Whistle_Stop_Cafe"title="Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe">
Throughout the novel the narrator and time period change, and chapter headings establish the date and source of the chapter. The narration alternates between the form of the fictional newsletter "The Weems Weekly", the Threadgoodes' house in Birmingham, and an omniscient narration. The framing story, set in 1986, presents Evelyn Couch, who goes weekly with her husband to visit his mother in a nursing home. During one visit, Evelyn befriends Ninny Threadgoode, another resident. She tells Evelyn stories of her youth in Whistle Stop in the 1920s and succeeding years. Between subsequent visits, Evelyn begins to adopt aspects of figures in these stories as role models.Ninny says she was an orphan raised by the Threadgoodes, and that she eventually married one of their sons. She principally talks about the youngest daughter, Imogene "Idgie" Threadgoode, an unrepentant tomboy who became reclusive after her brother, Buddy, was killed on the railway. Ruth Jamison comes to live with the Threadgoodes while teaching at the Vacation Bible School. Idgie becomes enamored of her and is saddened when Ruth leaves Whistle Stop to marry Frank Bennett. Frank turns out to be a violent, abusive man who often beats Ruth, but she stays with him until her mother's death. Afterward, Ruth sends Idgie a message appealing for help. Idgie, along with several men, rescue her and her son from Bennett. Intimidated by Big George—the Threadgoode's handyman—Bennett does not resist.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradle_(novel)"title="Cradle (novel)">
In 1994, the US Navy is testing a new missile, but after the launch it mysteriously disappears and it is clear that if the rocket reaches civilian areas they will be in big trouble. Carol Dawson, a journalist, is alerted by an unusual sight of whales in the Miami area, and decides to go and write about it.Armed with special equipment provided by her friend, Dr. Dale Michaels from MOI (Miami Oceanographic Institute), goes to investigate the rumors of a missing missile belonging to the Marines and that could be behind the mysterious whale behavior lately. She hires the services of Nick Williams and Jefferson Troy, owners of a little boat so she can get to the Gulf of Mexico and investigate closer if a missile has something to do with all of the above.They end up finding an unknown artifact, bringing a lot of doubts about its nature, and even if it is part of a lost treasure that could be worth millions. Old friends of Williams and Troy noticed the finding and just like the old times, they want to steal it from them.In the background of the story, the author talks about a submarine snake civilization on a planet called Canthor, and how they were struggling to stay alive due to new threats into their ecosystem. It is revealed later in the story that the artifact found in the sea is actually a cradle that contains seeds with altered superhumans, which were extracted from earth millions of years ago and were altered so they could live with other species (including the submarine snakes) on earth. The spaceship that carries the cradle is crewed by robots/cyborgs and has hidden itself on Earth's ocean floor to make repairs.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redemption_Ark"title="Redemption Ark">
The novel takes place around the planets Yellowstone and Resurgam, in two story lines which converge near the climax of the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evil_of_the_Daleks"title="The Evil of the Daleks">
In 1966 London, the Second Doctor and Jamie watch helplessly as the TARDIS is loaded onto a lorry and driven away from Gatwick Airport. The trail leads them to an antique shop run by Edward Waterfield, who sells Victorian-style antiques that curiously seem as though they were still new. Waterfield is being coerced by the Daleks, who appear in a secret room of his shop through a time machine, and exterminate his mutinous employee Kennedy. Investigating the store, the Doctor and Jamie succumb to a booby trap that gasses them, and are dragged into the time machine by Waterfield.They wake to find that they have been transported to 1866, and are in the house of Theodore Maxtible, Waterfield's partner. The two had been trying to invent a time machine using mirrors and static electricity, when the Daleks emerged from their time cabinet. The Daleks then took Waterfield's daughter, Victoria Waterfield, hostage and forced Waterfield to travel a century forward in time to lure the Doctor into a trap by stealing the TARDIS. Waterfield is obviously fearful for his daughter's safety and his own, but Maxtible seems to be cooperating with the Daleks.The Daleks threaten to destroy the TARDIS unless the Doctor helps them by conducting an experiment to isolate the "Human Factor", the unique qualities of human beings that have allowed them to consistently resist and defeat the Daleks. Once the Doctor has isolated the Human Factor, he will implant it into three Daleks, who will then become the precursors of a race of "super" Daleks, with the best qualities of humans and Daleks. To that end the Daleks want the Doctor to test Jamie by sending him to rescue Victoria, who is being kept in the house. The Doctor is strangely cooperative with the Daleks, manipulating Jamie into the rescue mission but not telling him of the nature of the test.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scary_Sleepover"title="The Scary Sleepover">
The book tells about a group of children having a Halloween sleepover party at school (Kindergarten). The children prepare for it by making decorations and costumes. As night draws near, so do the children's fears. One student, Mary, shares a trick her father taught her with the other students. He gave her a special bright star - whenever she feels afraid to go to bed, she has only to think about her star. This sends the darkness and the evil ghosts from her heart. Jonas does not believe in that, but he also thinks he is not afraid of ghosts. In the end, all the children need another, older trick: keeping the hallway light on all night.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Fang"title="White Fang">
The story begins before the wolf-dog hybrid is born, with two men and their sled dog team on a journey to deliver the coffin of Lord Alfred to a remote town named Fort McGurry in the higher area of the Yukon Territory. The men, Bill and Henry, are stalked by a large pack of starving wolves over the course of several days. Finally, after all of their dogs and Bill have been eaten, more teams find Henry escaping from the wolves; the wolf pack scatters when they hear the large group of people coming.The story then follows the pack, which has been robbed of its last prey. When the pack finally brings down a moose, the famine is ended; they eventually split up, and the story now follows a she-wolf and her mate, One Eye. One Eye claimed her after defeating and killing a younger rival. The she-wolf gives birth to a litter of five pups by the Mackenzie River, and all but one die from hunger. One Eye is killed by a lynx while trying to rob her den for food for the she-wolf and her pup; his mate later discovers his remains near the lynx's den. The surviving pup and the she-wolf are left to fend for themselves. Shortly afterward, the she-wolf kills all the lynx's kittens to feed her pup, prompting the lynx to track her down, and a vicious fight breaks out. The she-wolf eventually kills the lynx but suffers severe injury; the lynx carcass is devoured over a period of seven days as the she-wolf recovers from her injuries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Late_the_Sweet_Birds_Sang"title="Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang">
The novel takes place in Virginia, somewhere near the Shenandoah River, and quickly establishes its plot line in a post-apocalyptic era. The collapse of civilization around the world has resulted from massive environmental changes and global disease, which were attributed to large-scale pollution. With a range of members privileged by virtue of education and monetary resources, one large family founds an isolated community in an attempt to survive the still-developing global disasters. As the death toll rises, mainly to disease and nuclear warfare, they discover that the human population left on earth is universally infertile. From cloning experiments conducted through the study of mice, the scientists in the small community theorize that the infertility might be reversed after multiple generations of cloning, and the family begins cloning themselves in an effort to survive. The assumption is that after a few generations of cloning, the people will be able to revert to traditional biological reproduction.However, to the horror of the few surviving members of the original group, the clones who are finally coming of age reject the idea of sexual reproduction in favor of further cloning. The original members of the community, too old and outnumbered by the clones to resist, are forced to accept the new social order and the complications that arise.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_Attitudes"title="Anglo-Saxon Attitudes">
The novel deals with the significance of two connected events that happened on the same day, long before the opening of the novel. The first was the excavation of an ancient and valuable archaeological idol, a phallic figure unearthed from the tomb of an Anglo-Saxon bishop Eorpwald, known as the "Melpham excavation". Gerald has long been haunted by a drunken revelation by his friend Gilbert, who was involved with this excavation, that the whole thing was a hoax perpetrated to embarrass Gilbert's father. Gilbert told Gerald that he put the idol there. Gerald, while feeling that his friend was telling the truth, pushed the matter to the back of his mind and tried to forget about it. He now feels ashamed that he, a history professor, has never had the courage to try to resolve the matter one way or another.The second is that Gerald Middleton fell in love with Dollie, Gilbert's fiancée, and had an affair with her when his friend went off to fight in World War I. When Gilbert was killed at the front, Dollie refused to marry Gerald. He ended up marrying a Scandinavian woman named Inge but continued his affair with Dollie, who became an alcoholic. Gerald and Inge later separated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forever_Free_(novel)"title="Forever Free (novel)">
William Mandella, protagonist of "The Forever War", lives with his wife Marygay on the icy world Middle Finger, a planet of the Mizar system. Dissatisfied with the state of their society, they eventually decide to jump forward in time, using the time dilation of interstellar travel. Their intention is to travel for 10 subjective years, at relativistic speeds, into the future, during which 40,000 Earth years will have passed on Middle Finger. They, along with other Forever War veterans and other disenchanted humans on Middle Finger, hope that whatever they will find upon their return will be more to their liking. This requires the consent of the posthuman group mind now known as 'Man', and of the alien group mind Tauran race. When permission is denied, William and allies hijack the ship. One Man and one Tauran join the journey.After Marygay and William head away from their planet, a series of unexplained occurrences happen and the ship starts to lose antimatter mysteriously. They abandon the ship and return home. Instead of the intended 40,000 years, they have only been away 24 Earth years. Upon arrival, they find the planet still intact, but seemingly vacant; everyone having literally disappeared at the same time as the incident on their ship. They then return to Earth, and realize that all other humans, Man and Taurans have disappeared, but robots and wildlife remain. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_Postal"title="Going Postal">
As with many of the Discworld novels, the story takes place in Ankh-Morpork, a powerful city-state based on the historical and modern settings of various metropolises like London or New York City. The protagonist of the story is Moist von Lipwig, a skilled con artist who was to be hanged for his crimes, but saved at the last moment by the cunning and manipulative Patrician Havelock Vetinari, who has Moist's death on the scaffold faked.In his office, Vetinari then presents Moist with two options: he may accept a job offer to become Postmaster of the city's rundown Postal Service or he may choose to walk out of the door and never hear from Vetinari again. As exiting through the door in question would lead to a fatal drop, Moist decides to accept the job.After a thwarted attempt at escape, Moist is brought to the Post Office by his parole officer Mr Pump, a golem. It turns out that the Post Office has not functioned for decades, and the building is full of undelivered mail, concealed under a layer of pigeon dung. Only two employees remain: the aged Junior Postman Tolliver Groat and his assistant Stanley Howler.Meanwhile, Vetinari is holding a meeting with the board executives of the Grand Trunk Company, a company that owns and operates a system of visual telegraph towers known as "clacks". He notes that since they have taken full control, the quality of service had gone down considerably. Despite unnerving most of the board, Vetinari fails to make headway, especially with its chairman, Reacher Gilt. It is rumored that, from his penthouse office in Tump Tower, Reacher Gilt plans to usurp Vetinari as Patrician.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_Roadside_Attraction"title="Another Roadside Attraction">
The novel is framed as a series of short entries rather than chapters from an unnamed writer who is being held captive by several agencies along with the main subject of his report, Amanda Ziller. Amanda was a member of a traveling circus that one day recruited the eccentric drummer John Paul Ziller, a once famous musician known for his exotic dress and odd mannerisms. Falling immediately in love, the two soon married and resigned from the troupe to live in an abandoned restaurant in Skagit County, Washington, bringing with them Mon Cul, John Paul's pet baboon. The couple decide to revive the restaurant as a hot dog stand "cum" roadside zoo. Although they are both averse to keeping animals captive, they compromise by deciding to keep a group of garter snakes native to Skagit County under the grounds of preservation, as well as a flea circus under the grounds that bugs are not technically animals. Also part of the zoo is a tsetse fly encased in amber. During this time Amanda gives birth to a boy, naming him Thor.As the hot dog stand gains traction, a man who goes by the name of Marx Marvelous gets himself arrested for sneaking into a zoo and setting the baboons free, which he reveals to have done because he knew it would attract the Zillers' attention. The couple bail him out of jail and hire him to help manage the restaurant. A man of science, Marvelous reveals to Amanda that he believes Christianity is on the verge of collapse and will soon transition to a new religion, with the Zillers playing some sort of key role.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_the_City_of_the_Saved..."title="Of the City of the Saved...">
Beyond the end of the universe exists The City of the Saved, an urban sprawl the size of a galaxy. Within it every human being that ever lived, from the first australopithecine to the last posthuman, has been inexplicably resurrected. For three hundred years, the uncountable inhabitants have enjoyed their unaging and invulnerable second lives. But now, the unthinkable has happened. Someone has been murdered.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clash_of_Kings"title="A Clash of Kings">
"A Clash of Kings" depicts the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros in civil war, while the Night's Watch mounts a reconnaissance to investigate the mysterious people known as wildlings. Meanwhile, Daenerys Targaryen continues her plan to conquer the Seven Kingdoms.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Things_They_Carried"title="The Things They Carried">
Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, the leader of a platoon of soldiers in Vietnam, carries physical reminders of Martha, the object of his unrequited love. Thoughts of Martha often distract Lieutenant Cross from his team's objectives. A death in the squad under his supervision causes Cross to reconsider his priorities; as he was heartbroken, he burns and throws away all reminders of Martha in order to focus on the mission and avoid distractions.Cross and O'Brien reminisce about the war and about Martha. O'Brien asks if he can write a story about Cross, expressing his memories and hopes for the future; Cross agrees, thinking that perhaps Martha will read it and come find him.A series of unrelated memories from the war are narrated from O'Brien's point of view. It includes moments of camaraderie and beauty: a joke of a hate letter to the Draft Board; learning a rain dance between battles.O'Brien gets drafted as soon as he graduates from college. He is reluctant to go to war and considers fleeing the draft; he begins to travel north to the Canada–US border on the Rainy River. Near the border, he encounters an elderly stranger who allows him to work through his internal struggle. O'Brien is given the opportunity to escape; however, the societal pressures are too much for him. He goes to war ashamed with his inability to face the consequences of leaving.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Storm_of_Swords"title="A Storm of Swords">
"A Storm of Swords" picks up the story slightly before the end of its predecessor, "A Clash of Kings". The Seven Kingdoms of Westeros are still in the grip of the War of the Five Kings, wherein Joffrey Baratheon and his uncle Stannis Baratheon compete for the Iron Throne, while Robb Stark of the North and Balon Greyjoy of the Iron Islands declare their independence (Stannis's brother Renly Baratheon, the fifth "king", has already been killed). Meanwhile, a large host of wildlings, the tribes from beyond the Seven Kingdoms' northern border, approach the Wall that marks the border, under the leadership of Mance Rayder, the self-proclaimed "King Beyond the Wall", with only the undermanned Night's Watch in opposition. Finally, Daenerys Targaryen, the daughter of a deposed former king of Westeros and "mother" of the world's only living dragons, sails west, planning to retake her late father's throne.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Notebook_(novel)"title="The Notebook (novel)">
The novel opens with Noah Calhoun, an old man, reading to a woman in a nursing home. He tells her the following story:&lt;poem&gt;Noah, 24, returns from World War II to his town of New Bern, North Carolina. He finishes restoring an antebellum-style house, after his father's death. Meanwhile, Allie, 24, sees the house in the newspaper and decides to pay him a visit.They are meeting, again, after a 7-year separation, which followed their brief but passionate summer romance when her family was visiting the town. They were separated by class, as she was the daughter of a wealthy family, and he worked as a laborer in a lumberyard. Seeing each other brings on a flood of memories and strong emotions in both of them. They have dinner together and talk about their lives and the past. Allie learns that Noah had written letters to her for one year after their breakup. She realizes that her mother hid the letters so that Allie could never receive them and would conclude that Noah had forgotten about her. They talk about what could have happened between them without her mother's interference. At the end of the night, Noah invites Allie to come back the next day and promises her a surprise. She decides to see him again. During this time, her fiancé, Lon, tries to reach her at the hotel. When Allie does not respond to his calls, he begins to worry.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_(novel)"title="Millennium (novel)">
"Millennium" features a civilization that has dubbed itself "The Last Age". Due to millennia of warfare of every type (nineteen nuclear wars alone), the Earth has been heavily polluted and humanity's gene pool irreparably damaged. They have thus embarked on a desperate plan; time travel into the past, collect healthy humans, and send them to an uncontaminated planet to rebuild civilization.The time travelers can only take people that will have no further effect on the timeline: those who have vanished without a trace, or died without being observed; otherwise they would be changing the past, which risks a temporal paradox and perhaps even a catastrophic breakdown of the fabric of time. Though they collect everyone they can, they exert a great deal of effort on those destined to die in various disasters such as sinking ships and crashing airplanes (and once a century of Roman soldiers lost and dying in the North African desert). As such incidents leave no survivors to report interference and change the timeline, they can freely remove the living but soon-to-die victims, and replace them with convincing corpses they have manufactured in the future.The novel deals with several of the raids, their eventual discovery in the present day, and the fallout that results from changes to the present day reverberating into the future.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_History_(novel)"title="Making History (novel)">
## Changing history.The story is told in first person by Michael "Puppy" Young, a young history student at Cambridge University on the verge of completing his doctoral thesis on the early life of Adolf Hitler and his mother. He meets Professor Leo Zuckerman, a physicist who has a strong personal interest in Hitler, the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. Michael assumes this is due to his Jewish heritage. However, it is later revealed that Leo was born Axil Bauer, the son of Dietrich Bauer, a Nazi doctor at Auschwitz who – when the Nazi defeat became certain – gave his son the identity of a Jewish doctor that he murdered. Leo has developed a machine that enables the past to be viewed—but it is of no practical use as the image is not resolvable into details. Together, they hatch a plan to modify the machine such that it can be used to send something back into time. They decide to use a permanent male contraceptive pill, stolen from Michael's girlfriend (a biochemistry researcher), who, due to his continual distraction, has left him to take a position at Princeton University. They decide to send this pill back in time to the well in Braunau am Inn so that Hitler's father will drink from it, become infertile, and Hitler will never be born.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Love"title="Women in Love">
Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen are sisters living in The Midlands in England in the 1910s. Ursula is a schoolteacher, Gudrun a painter. They meet two men who live nearby, school inspector Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, heir to a coal mine, and the four become friends. Romantic relationships quickly develop as the novel progresses.All four are deeply concerned with questions of society, politics, and the relationship between men and women. At a party at Shortlands, the Birkin's country manor home, Gerald's sister Diana drowns. Gudrun becomes the teacher and mentor of Gerald's youngest sister. Soon, Gerald's coal-mine-owning father dies as well, after a long illness. After the funeral, Gerald goes to Gudrun's house and spends the night with her while her parents sleep in another room.Birkin asks Ursula to marry him, and she agrees. Gerald and Gudrun's relationship, however, becomes stormy.The two couples take a holiday together in the Austrian Alps. Gudrun begins an intense friendship with Loerke, a physically puny but emotionally commanding artist from Dresden. Gerald, enraged by Loerke and most of all by Gudrun's verbal abuse and rejection of his manhood, and driven by his own internal violence, tries to strangle Gudrun. He suddenly becomes disgusted with his actions and lets her go, and he leaves Gudrun and Loerke to climb the mountain eventually slipping into a snowy valley where he falls asleep and freezes to death.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rainbow"title="The Rainbow">
"The Rainbow" tells the story of three generations of the Brangwen family, a dynasty of farmers and craftsmen who live in the east Midlands of England, on the borders of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. The book spans a period of roughly 65 years from the 1840s to 1905, and shows how the love relationships of the Brangwens change against the backdrop of the increasing industrialisation of Britain. The first central character, Tom Brangwen, is a farmer whose experience of the world does not stretch beyond these two counties; while the last, Ursula, his granddaughter, studies at university and becomes a teacher in the progressively urbanised, capitalist and industrial world.The book starts with a description of the Brangwen dynasty, then deals with how Tom Brangwen, one of several brothers, fell in love with a Polish refugee and widow, Lydia. The next part of the book deals with Lydia's daughter by her first husband, Anna, and her destructive, battle-riven relationship with her husband, Will, the son of one of Tom's brothers. The last and most extended part of the book, and also probably the most famous, then deals with Will and Anna's daughter, Ursula, and her struggle to find fulfilment for her passionate, spiritual and sensual nature against the confines of the increasingly materialist and conformist society around her. She experiences a same-sex relationship with a teacher, and a passionate but ultimately doomed love affair with Anton Skrebensky, a British soldier of Polish ancestry. At the end of the book, having failed to find her fulfilment in Skrebensky, she has a vision of a rainbow towering over the Earth, promising a new dawn for humanity:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundiver"title="Sundiver">
The novel begins with the main character, Jacob Demwa, working at the center for uplift on Earth, while he recovers from a tragedy at the Vanilla Space Needle where he saved the space elevator from destruction but lost his love in the process. An alien friend of Demwa's, Fagin (a Kanten), contacts Demwa and offers him a job. Initially reluctant to return to his previous life as a scientific investigator, Demwa agrees to attend a secret meeting. He learns that there are "ghosts" appearing in the Sun's chromosphere. The ghosts are without precedent in the galactic library.Demwa agrees to come and investigate the origin and purpose of the sun-ghosts, and travels to Mercury where the sundiver project is based. With him on Mercury are Helene deSilva, an attractive station commander with whom Jacob develops a relationship over the course of the book; Fagin; Pila Bubbacub, the library representative; his assistant Culla (a Pring); Dr. Dwayne Kepler (the head of the Sundiver expedition); Dr. Mildred Martine (a psychiatrist); and the exuberant journalist Peter LaRoque.Demwa goes to the sun, and observes the sun-ghosts. There are apparently three forms: the "toroids" which appear to be similar to cattle and live off of the magnetic fields in the chromosphere, a relatively fluid, apparently intelligent variety, and a threatening, strangely anthropomorphic figure that avoids the side of the sunship where the instruments are located. When a neo-chimpanzee scientist, Dr. Jeffrey, is killed on a solo mission to the sun, it seems to confirm the sun-ghosts' hostile intent. An investigation seems to implicate the reporter, LaRoque. LaRoque is then tested to determine if he is capable of murder. The test results indicate LaRoque has violent tendencies and he is incarcerated.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_Center_of_the_Earth"title="Journey to the Center of the Earth">
The story begins in May 1863, at the home of Professor Otto Lidenbrock in Hamburg, Germany. While leafing through an original runic manuscript of an Icelandic saga, Lidenbrock and his nephew Axel find a coded note written in runic script along with the name of a 16th-century Icelandic alchemist, Arne Saknussemm. When translated into English, the note reads:Lidenbrock departs for Iceland immediately, taking the reluctant Axel with him. After a swift trip via Kiel and Copenhagen, they arrive in Reykjavík. There they hire as their guide Icelander Hans Bjelke, a Danish-speaking eiderduck hunter, then travel overland to the base of Snæfellsjökull.In late June they reach the volcano and set off into the bowels of the earth, encountering many dangers and strange phenomena. After taking a wrong turn, they run short of water and Axel nearly perishes, but Hans saves them all by tapping into a subterranean river, which shoots out a stream of water that Lidenbrock and Axel name the "Hansbach" in the guide's honor.Following the course of the Hansbach, the explorers descend many miles and reach an underground world. The travelers build a raft out of semipetrified wood and set sail. While at sea, they encounter prehistoric fish and giant marine reptiles from the age of dinosaurs. A lightning storm threatens to destroy the raft and its passengers, but instead throws them onto the site of an enormous fossil graveyard, including bones from the pterodactyl, "Megatherium", and mastodon, and the preserved body of a man. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Redemption_of_Althalus"title="The Redemption of Althalus">
## Life as thief.The story revolves around Althalus, a professional thief with a gift for storytelling and a reputation for uncanny luck. After numerous disasters (Althalus believes that luck has left him for good), the thief decides to return to the savage lands of the north, where he grew up, and decides to rob a fort. After arriving there, and amusing everyone with his stories, Althalus breaks into the storeroom during the night only to find out that all the talk about gold in the fort were lies, and that there are only bags of worthless copper coins and a handful of brass coins. Furious, Althalus steals all the brass coins and leaves – only to become chased by every man in the fort, its owner taking advantage of the situation to claim the theft of a non-existent fortune. He escapes to Hule, where he finds refuge in a camp. A man named Ghend arrives there a short time later and presents Althalus with a proposition.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazzaville_Beach"title="Brazzaville Beach">
Brazzaville Beach consists of three separative narratives. The first is Hope Clearwater's reflections on her current life whilst living in a beach house on Brazzaville Beach. The second narrative is a description of her former marriage to John Clearwater, a mathematician, who gradually goes mad resulting from failure to make progress in his academic research. The third narrative, and by far the most graphic, is the narrator's account of her work in a national park called Grosso Arvore (Big Tree), where she tracks the movements of a small band of chimpanzees that have split off from a larger group in the north.John Clearwater, Hope's former husband, is a mathematician thirsty for discovery and fame. This part of the narrative is set in London, where the couple share her flat in South Kensington, and southern England, where Hope works as an ecologist on an intriguing hedgerow mapping project in Dorset. At the beginning of their marriage the two are very much in love with Hope believing that John is the ideal man for her owing to his rather eccentric but empathetic character and strong intelligence. She is uninterested in working after getting her PhD until her former Professor forces her to take on the hedgerow mapping project. After being interviewed by Munro, its leader, Hope discovers she is pleased to be working once more, losing weight because she is outside all day, and enjoying the disciplined approach she has to adopt:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations"title="The Wealth of Nations">
## Book I: Of the Causes of Improvement in the productive Powers of Labour.Of the Division of Labour:Division of labour has caused a greater increase in production than any other factor. This diversification is greatest for nations with more industry and improvement, and is responsible for "universal opulence" in those countries. This is in part due to increased quality of production, but more importantly because of increased efficiency of production, leading to a higher nominal output of units produced per time unit. Agriculture is less amenable than manufacturing to division of labour; hence, rich nations are not so far ahead of poor nations in agriculture as in manufacturing.Of the Principle which gives Occasion to the Division of Labour:Division of labour arises not from innate wisdom, but from humans' propensity to barter.That the Division of Labour is Limited by the Extent of the Market:Limited opportunity for exchange discourages division of labour. Because "water-carriage" (i.e. transportation) extends the market, division of labour, with its improvements, comes earliest to cities near waterways. Civilization began around the highly navigable Mediterranean Sea.Of the Origin and Use of Money:With division of labour, the produce of one's own labour can fill only a small part of one's needs. Different commodities have served as a common medium of exchange, but all nations have finally settled on metals, which are durable and divisible, for this purpose. Before coinage, people had to weigh and assay with each exchange, or risk "the grossest frauds and impositions." Thus nations began stamping metal, on one side only, to ascertain purity, or on all sides, to stipulate purity and amount.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_7_(novel)"title="Area 7 (novel)">
The President of the United States is visiting America's most secret military installation, Area 7. Assigned to his protective detail is Shane Schofield and his team of Marines including Gunnery Sergeant Gena 'Mother' Newman, Staff Sergeant Elizabeth 'Fox' Gant and Buck 'Book II' Riley Jr. They are plunged into a race for survival when an Air Force general, Charles "Caesar" Russell, unleashes a plan he has been working on for over 15 years. Despite being 'executed' on the day of the president's inauguration, Caesar is revived, and with a squadron of 50 elite Air Force soldiers (the 7th Squadron), have taken control of Area 7 and initiated a lockdown. A transmitter, attached to the president's heart before he was elected, has been activated; a satellite sends and receives messages to and from this transmitter, which is powered by the kinetic energy of the president's heart beating. If the satellite does not receive the messages from the transmitter, 14 Type-240 Blast Plasma-based nuclear warheads in the airports of the major cities of the United States will explode, destroying these cities, and making way for a new, racist, Confederate America. As long as the President's heart beats, the messages will be sent to the satellite, and the nuclear warheads will not detonate. To prevent the president from trying to escape Area 7, Caesar also overrode the launch codes on the Nuclear Football so that to prevent the detonation of the warheads, the president must place his hand on the fingerprint sensor on the Football (that is being kept in Caesar's possession) every 90 minutes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witches_of_Eastwick"title="The Witches of Eastwick">
The story, set in the fictional Rhode Island town of Eastwick in the early 1970s, follows the witches Alexandra Spofford, Jane Smart, and Sukie Rougemont, who acquired their powers after their respective marriages end. Their coven is upset by the arrival of Darryl Van Horne, who buys a neglected mansion outside of town. The mysterious Darryl seduces each of the women, encouraging their creative powers and creating a scandal in the town. The power of the three witches grows, so much so that they unknowingly bewitch the townsfolk they come in contact with. This becomes clear when Sukie's lover and boss, Clyde Gabriel, kills his busybody wife Felicia before hanging himself.The three women share Darryl in relative peace until he unexpectedly marries their young, innocent friend, Jenny, the Gabriels' daughter. The witches resolve to take revenge by giving her cancer through their magic. Although Alexandra feels remorse for their hex, the spell kills Jenny and Darryl flees town with her younger brother, Chris, apparently his lover. In his wake, he leaves their relationships strained and their sense of self in doubt. Eventually, each summons her ideal man and leaves town.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrup_(novel)"title="Syrup (novel)">
Set in the present day, a young marketing graduate named Scat comes up with an idea for a new product for Coca-Cola called 'Fukk'. This causes him to go to Coca-Cola to sell his idea for $3 million, but he finds that Sneaky Pete has already claimed the trademark in a backstabbing move. This then leads him to leave his apartment with Sneaky Pete and move in with Cindy. Cindy eventually throws him out and he goes to live with 6 and Tina while managing the summer marketing campaign for Coca-Cola. He eventually succeeds with the campaign. After that Scat tries to undermine Sneaky Pete's effort to run a new secret project for Coca-Cola, the first feature length advertising movie.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Midwich_Cuckoos"title="The Midwich Cuckoos">
Ambulances arrive at two traffic accidents blocking the only roads into the English village of Midwich, Winshire. Attempting to approach the village, one ambulance-man becomes unconscious. Suspecting gas poisoning, the army is notified. They discover that a caged canary becomes unconscious upon entering the affected region, but regains consciousness when removed. Further experiments reveal the region to be a hemisphere with a diameter of around the village. Aerial photography shows an unidentifiable silvery object on the ground in the centre of the affected zone.After one day, the effect vanishes, along with the unidentified object, and the villagers wake with no apparent ill effects. Some months later they realise that every woman of child-bearing age is pregnant with all indications that the pregnancies were caused by xenogenesis during the period of unconsciousness that has come to be referred to as the "Dayout".When the 31 boys and 30 girls are born, they appear normal, except for their unusual golden eyes, light blonde hair, and pale, silvery skin. These children have none of the genetic characteristics of their mothers. As they grow up, it becomes increasingly apparent that they are, at least in some respects, not human. They possess telepathic abilities and can control others' actions. The Children (they are referred to with a capital "C") have two distinct group minds: one for the boys and another for the girls. Their physical development is accelerated compared with that of humans; upon reaching the age of nine, they appear to be sixteen-year-olds.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhenaten,_Dweller_in_Truth"title="Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth">
On the way from Sais to Panopolis with his father, the scribe Meriamun points out the ruins of Akhetaten, the city that the "heretic pharaoh" Akhenaten built for his One and Only God. Seeking a balanced perspective on the events of that time, which split Egypt politically and religiously, Meriamun gets a letter of introduction from his father to many members of Akhenaten's court, among them the High Priest of Amun, his chief of security Haremhab, and his queen Nefertiti. Each tale adds a new dimension to the enigma that is Akhenaten and the thoughts of those that were close to him allow Meriamun – and the reader – to judge for themselves whether Akhenaten was a power politician or a true believer.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faerie_Tale"title="Faerie Tale">
Phil Hastings and his family have just moved back to his hometown for some much needed peace and quiet from the Hollywood scene. As Phil's twins, Sean and Patrick, soon discover, there is more to their new home than was expected. Gloria, their mother, senses something, but simply dismisses her concern as stress from their recent move. Gabbie, their older half-sister, meets the man of her dreams, but also is tempted by other men.Deep in the woods, The Bad Thing and his Master are ready to break free of the centuries-old compact made to keep the Faerie world and the Human world at peace. Only through believing the insane and impossible can Sean and Patrick save both worlds from colliding again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lirael"title="Lirael">
The book is split into three parts, the first of which is set 14 years after the events in "Sabriel"; the last two parts are set five years after part one. Sabriel and Touchstone have married since "Sabriel" and assumed a measure of control over the Old Kingdom. Their children Ellimere and Sameth were going to school in Ancelstierre (similarly to Sabriel) before being expected to take up their duties in the Old Kingdom.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Owned_a_City"title="The Girl Who Owned a City">
A deadly virus has swept the world, killing off everyone over the age of twelve in the span of a month or so. In the town of Glen Ellyn, Illinois, outside of Chicago, ten-year-old Lisa Nelson and her younger brother Todd Nelson are surviving, like all the children in the story, by looting abandoned houses and shops. Although there are abandoned cars in every driveway and lining every street, Lisa is the first child to think of driving one. She is also the first to think of raiding a farm, and the first to look at the dwindling supplies in stores and deduce that groceries come from warehouses. She finds a supermarket warehouse and raids it, enlisting the help of Craig Bergman, a neighbor boy two years older than her, but makes clear to him and all the other children in her neighborhood that the entire warehouse and all its contents are her exclusive property, not to be shared unless she chooses: she assures them all that she will burn the warehouse and everything in it rather than be forced to share against her will.She considers relocating to the farm, but decides against it because it is difficult to defend (other children are starting to form gangs) and because "planning and getting the world back to the way it was, with schools, and hospitals, and electricity" are much more "exciting" than "hiding away on a farm ... digging in the dirt all day".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_Ho,_Jeeves"title="Right Ho, Jeeves">
Bertie returns to London from several weeks in Cannes spent in the company of his Aunt Dahlia Travers and her daughter Angela. In Bertie's absence, Jeeves has been advising Bertie's old school friend, Gussie Fink-Nottle, who is in love with a goofy, sentimental, whimsical, childish girl named Madeline Bassett. Gussie, a shy teetotaler with a passion for newts and a face like a fish, is too timid to speak to her. Bertie is annoyed that his friends consider Jeeves more intelligent than Bertie, and he takes Gussie's case in hand, ordering Jeeves not to offer any more advice.Madeline, a friend of Bertie's cousin Angela, is staying at Brinkley Court (country seat of Aunt Dahlia and Uncle Tom). Aunt Dahlia demands that Bertie come to Brinkley Court to make a speech and present the school prizes to students at the local grammar school, which he considers a fearsome task. Bertie sends Gussie to Brinkley Court in his place, so that Gussie will have the chance to woo Madeline there, but also so that Gussie will be forced to take on the unpleasant job of distributing the school prizes.When Angela breaks her engagement to Tuppy Glossop, Bertie feels obliged to go down to Brinkley Court to comfort Aunt Dahlia. In addition to her worry about Angela's broken engagement, Aunt Dahlia is anxious because she has lost 500 pounds gambling at Cannes, and now needs to ask her miserly husband Tom to replace the money in order to keep financing her magazine, "Milady's Boudoir". Bertie advises her to arouse Uncle Tom's concern for her by pretending to have lost her appetite through worry. He offers similar advice to Tuppy, to win back Angela. He also offers the same advice to Gussie, to show his love for Madeline. All take his advice, and the resulting return of plates of untasted food upsets Aunt Dahlia's temperamental prized chef Anatole, who gives notice to quit. Not unreasonably, Aunt Dahlia blames Bertie for this disaster.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mawdryn_Undead"title="Mawdryn Undead">
In 1983, Vislor Turlough, a stranded alien posing as a human student, is given an offer by the Black Guardian for passage off Earth if he should kill the Fifth Doctor.Meanwhile, the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa find the TARDIS stuck in the warp ellipse of a starliner trapped in time. Materialising aboard, they find a transmat device, with separate endpoints to Earth in 1977 and 1983, is creating the interference. Turlough arrives from the 1983 transmat, feigning lack of comprehension of the situation. The Doctor instructs Nyssa and Tegan to stay aboard the TARDIS while he returns with Turlough to 1983 to fix that transmat point, hoping it will allow the TARDIS to escape. Instead, the TARDIS materialises in 1977 at Turlough's school. Coincidentally the Doctor's old friend from UNIT, retired Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, is now a maths teacher at the school, and is surprised to learn some trauma in the past has made him lose the memories of the last few years and does not remember the Doctor at all. However, as the Doctor talks about Tegan, about himself and his former companions, the Brigadier starts regaining some memories.In 1977, Nyssa and Tegan leave the TARDIS and find a horribly disfigured man in the transmat capsule, who claims to be the Doctor in the midst of a regeneration. They seek out help from the younger Brigadier, and the "Doctor" urges all three to return with him to the starliner via the TARDIS. In 1983, the Doctor detects the TARDIS' movement, and he, Turlough, and the older Brigadier also return to the starliner via the transmat. The Doctor regroups with his companions; realising two versions of the Brigadier are aboard, he instructs them all to keep the two separated, as, should they touch, it could release a potentially catastrophic energy discharge due to the Blinovitch limitation effect.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stig_of_the_Dump"title="Stig of the Dump">
Barney is a bored young boy staying with his grandparents on the chalk Downs of southern England. One day, he falls over the edge of an old chalk pit close to his grandparents' house, tumbling through the roof of a den. While exploring the den, Barney encounters its owner, Stig, a caveman with shaggy, black hair and bright black eyes. The chalk pit is disused and full of people's dumped rubbish.Barney and Stig quickly become friends. They learn to communicate with each other without language, as Stig speaks no English. Stig's den is a place built out of discarded rubbish, which motivates Barney to help Stig make it look more attractive. They spend time repairing and improving Stig's den, collecting firewood, going hunting, and at one point catching some burglars who break into Barney's grandparents' house. On another occasion Barney is cornered by the bullying Snarget brothers, who become uncharacteristically docile when Stig appears and are impressed by Barney's friendship with Stig. Although Barney mentions Stig to others, no-one (with the exception of the Snargets) believes that Stig is real.Barney starts to give thought to where Stig has come from. During a very hot, sultry mid-summer's night, when Barney and his sister Lou are unable to sleep, they find themselves transported back in time and out onto the Downs. To their surprise, they meet Stig, back with his own people, engaged in the construction of four gigantic standing stones. They spend a night camping out with the people of Stig's tribe, and helping to shift the final stone into position before sunrise. As dawn breaks, the tribe disappear and the stones suddenly become ancient and weathered; but Stig is still there. Stig got transported forward in time with the standing stone which led him to the modern day.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aztecs_(Doctor_Who)"title="The Aztecs (Doctor Who)">
The TARDIS crew arrive in Mexico in the 15th century. With the TARDIS trapped in a tomb, Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill) is mistaken for a female reincarnation of the ancient high priest Yetaxa, and assumes her guise and identity. From her new position of power, Barbara sees her chance to bring an end to human sacrifice. She sees the good side of Aztec culture manifested in Autloc (Keith Pyott), the High Priest of Knowledge, and the gruesome side embodied in the High Priest of Sacrifice, Tlotoxl (John Ringham). As a history teacher, she sees how advanced their culture really is and believes that if sacrifice were abolished, they would be spared destruction at the hands of the Spanish. The urgent warnings of the First Doctor (William Hartnell) that Barbara cannot change history fall on deaf ears, much to his fury.The bloodthirsty Tlotoxl begins to suspect Barbara is not Yetaxa returned, especially because she is trying to ban human sacrifice. He sets a series of elaborate traps for her and her companions. For example, Ian Chesterton (William Russell) has been compelled into the military and fights the strongest warrior, Ixta (Ian Cullen), to prove his ability to command the Aztec forces. Thus Ixta develops a grudge against Ian and is used by Tlotoxl to try to prove that Barbara is not Yetaxa. The Doctor unwittingly tells Ixta how to defeat Ian in combat using a drugging agent, and this battle nearly ends in the Doctor witnessing his friend's death. When this fails to be conclusive, Tlotoxl convinces the subordinate priest Tonila (Walter Randall) to make a poison for Barbara; the death of Barbara following consumption of the poison would prove she is not immortal and therefore not a god. However, Ian silently warns her from his hiding place, and Barbara refuses to drink the poison. She tells Tlotoxl that she is not Yetaxa but warns him not to tell the people.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demian"title="Demian">
Emil Sinclair is a young boy raised in a middle class home, amidst what is described as a "Scheinwelt", a play on words meaning "world of light" as well as "world of illusion". Sinclair's entire existence can be summarized as a struggle between two worlds: the show world of illusion (related to the Hindu concept of maya) and the real world, the world of spiritual truth (see Plato's cave and dualism). Accompanied and prompted by his mysterious classmate and friend 'Max Demian', he detaches from and revolts against the superficial ideals of the world of appearances and eventually awakens into a realization of self. The novel's eight chapters are these:
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_(Uris_novel)"title="Exodus (Uris novel)">
## Summary.In 1946 American foreign correspondent Mark Parker and American nurse Kitty Fremont reunite as old friends. Kitty is an American volunteer at the Karaolos internment camp on Cyprus, where thousands of Jews—Holocaust survivors—are being held by the British, who will not let them go to Palestine. Separately, another pair of friends, Jewish fighters Ari Ben Canaan and David Ben Ami, also reunite.Ari obtains a cargo ship, which became the SS Exodus, with the intention to smuggle 302 Jewish children out of the camp for an illegal voyage to Mandate Palestine before being discovered by military authorities. When the British learn the refugees are in a ship in the harbor of Famagusta, they blockade the harbor and prevent it from sailing. The refugees stage a hunger strike, during which the camp's doctor dies. Ari has wired the ship with explosives and threatens to blow up the ship and the refugees if the British try to board. When the British attempt to gain time by trying to negotiate, Ari announces that every day 10 children will commit suicide on deck for the world to see. The British relent and allow the "Exodus" safe passage.A generation previously, Ari's father Jossi and uncle Yakov came to Palestine following the Pogroms in the Russian Empire. They are disappointed because the Jews don't farm and take money from overseas philanthropists. The brothers change their names to Akiva (Yakov) and Barak (Jossi). Jossi tries to understand the Palestinians, using demonstrations of force to gain their respect. The Balfour Declaration is issued during World War I. The two brothers become senior in the Jewish government, and debate using terrorism to fight the British authorities.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_House_(novel)"title="Noble House (novel)">
"Noble House" is set in 1963 and serves as a sequel to Clavell's novel "Tai-Pan". Ian Dunross, the 10th tai-pan of Struan's and a descendant of founder Dirk Struan, struggles to rescue the company from the precarious financial position left by his predecessor. To this end, he seeks partnership with American millionaire Lincoln Bartlett, while trying to ward off his arch-rival Quillan Gornt, who seeks to destroy Struan's once and for all. Meanwhile, Chinese communists, Taiwanese nationalists, and Soviet spies illegally vie for influence in Hong Kong while the British government seeks to prevent their actions. Anyone seeking to stop them cannot do so without enlisting the aid of Hong Kong's criminal underworld. Other obstacles include water shortages, landslides, bank runs and stock market crashes.In "Noble House", Dunross finds his company the target of a hostile takeover at a time when Struan's is desperately overextended. He is also embroiled in international espionage when he finds himself in possession of secret documents desperately desired by both the KGB and MI6. The novel follows Dunross' attempts to extricate himself from all this and to save Struan's, the Noble House.Dunross also inherited the "coin debt" obligation first introduced in the "Tai-Pan" novel. As tai-pan of Struan's, he must fulfill the request, whether legal or illegal, to anyone who presents one of the half coins that were initially split by Dirk Struan and the trader Jin Qua, serving as repayment for the latter's loan of silver. The first half coin was redeemed during the events in the previous novel, and the second coin between the events of "Tai-Pan" and "Noble House". "Noble House" follows the fate of the third half coin (an illustration of the coin is prominently featured on the cover of several editions of the novel).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_(novel)"title="Hawaii (novel)">
The novel tells the history of Hawaiian Islands from the creation of the isles to the time they became an American state through the viewpoints of selected characters who represent their ethnic and cultural groups in the story (e.g. the Kee family represents the viewpoint of Chinese-Hawaiians). Most of the chapters cover the arrivals of different peoples to the islands. With the exception of Chapter 1, all the chapters are of standalone novel or novella length.Chapter 1: From the Boundless Deep describes the creation of the Hawaiian land from volcanic activity. It goes into flavorful detail describing such things as primary succession taking root on the island to life finally blooming.Chapter 2: From the Sunswept Lagoon begins on the island of Bora Bora, where many people, including King Tamatoa and his brother Teroro, are upset with the neighboring isles of Havaiki, Tahiti etc. because they are trying to force the Bora Borans to give up their old gods, Tāne and Ta'aroa, and start worshiping 'Oro, the fire god, who constantly demands human sacrifices. Tamatoa suggests to his brother and friends that they should migrate to some other place where they might find religious freedom. After finally agreeing to this plan, his brother secretly sets fire to Havaiki to take revenge for the human sacrifices they have been demanding from Bora Borans. Later they take the canoe "Wait for the West Wind" and sail to Hawaii. Later some return to Bora Bora to bring back with them some women and children and an idol of the volcano goddess, Pele.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1632_(novel)"title="1632 (novel)">
The fictional town of Grantville, West Virginia (modeled on the real West Virginia town of Mannington) and its power plant are displaced in space-time, through a side effect of a mysterious alien civilization.A hemispherical section of land about three miles in radius measured from the town center is transported back in time and space from April 2000 to May 1631, from North America to the central Holy Roman Empire. The town is thrust into the middle of the Thirty Years' War, in the German province of Thuringia in the Thuringer Wald, near the fictional German free city of Badenburg. This Assiti Shards effect occurs during a wedding reception, accounting for the presence of several people not native to the town, including a doctor and his daughter, a paramedic. Real Thuringian municipalities located close to Grantville are posited as Weimar, Jena, Saalfeld and the more remote Erfurt, Arnstadt, and Eisenach well to the south of Halle and Leipzig.Grantville, led by Mike Stearns, president of the local chapter of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), must cope with the town's space-time dislocation, the surrounding raging war, language barriers, and numerous social and political issues, including class conflict, witchcraft, feminism, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, among many other factors. One complication is a compounding of the food shortage when the town is flooded by refugees from the war. The 1631 locals experience a culture shock when exposed to the mores of contemporary American society, including modern dress, sexual egalitarianism, and boisterous American-style politics.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_(Doctor_Who)"title="Enlightenment (Doctor Who)">
Following interference from both the White and Black Guardians, the Fifth Doctor materialises the TARDIS in what appears to be the hold of an Edwardian yacht, though the Doctor senses something is amiss. The human crew have no idea how they got there nor where they are, but know they are taking part in a race. The Doctor and his companions, Tegan and Turlough, discover that the yacht and several other historical Earth ships are competing in a solar sail race through the Solar System. The ship's officers reveal themselves to be "Eternals", in contrast to the Doctor and the humans, whom they somewhat dismissively call "Ephemerals". The Eternals live in the "trackless wastes of eternity" and rely on Ephemerals for their thoughts and ideas. This race is being held by the Guardians and the prize is Enlightenment, the wisdom to know everything. The Doctor finds that the Eternals have made his TARDIS vanish, forcing him and his companions to stay until the race's conclusion.As the race continues, several of the vessels are destroyed by explosions. The Doctor suspects that the crew aboard the "Buccaneer", which is a 17th-century pirate ship, is responsible, as it was the closest vessel at the time of destruction. Turlough, while attempting to escape control of the Black Guardian, ends up aboard the "Buccaneer", and meets the Eternal Captain Wrack, professing his desire to join her crew and learning she too is working for the Black Guardian. He finds equipment aboard her ship that appears to be the source of the device destroying the other ships and hears the Black Guardian's voice nearby. Later, Wrack offers the Edwardian officers a reception aboard her ship. During the reception, Turlough demonstrates the Wrack's advantage-providing equipment to the Doctor, while Wrack hypnotizes Tegan and implants Tegan's tiara (Tegan and Marriner attend Captain Wrack's reception in full Edwardian costume) with a red crystal. After the reception and continuation of the race, the Doctor sees the "Buccaneer" nearing the Edwardian ship, determines that the red crystal is used as a focal point of the weapon, and gets rid of the tiara before Wrack can destroy the ship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(novel)"title="Q (novel)">
The book follows the journey of an Anabaptist radical across Europe in the first half of the 16th century as he joins in various movements and uprisings that come as a result of the Protestant reformation. The book spans 30 years as he is pursued by 'Q' (short for "Qoèlet"), a spy for the Roman Catholic Church cardinal Giovanni Pietro Carafa. The main character, who changes his name many times during the story, first fights in the German Peasants' War beside Thomas Müntzer, during which time he takes part in negotiations which are eventually formalised as the Twelve Articles. Following this, he battles in Münster's siege, during the Münster Rebellion, and some years later, in Venice.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Spring"title="New Spring">
"New Spring" describes events that take place twenty years before the events of "The Eye of the World" (Book 1). The story begins in the last days of the Aiel War, and the Battle of the Shining Walls around Tar Valon. It is set primarily in Tar Valon and the Borderlands, specifically Kandor."New Spring" focuses mainly on Moiraine Damodred and Siuan Sanche, two Aes Sedai new to the sisterhood, and how a young Moiraine became Aes Sedai, met Lan Mandragoran and made him her Warder. The novel also explains how Moiraine and Siuan witnessed a prophecy of the Dragon's rebirth and came to begin investigating the "Karaethon Cycle", the Prophecies of the Dragon, decades before discovering Rand al'Thor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_of_the_Autons"title="Terror of the Autons">
The Master arrives on Earth and steals the sole surviving Nestene energy unit from the National Space Museum. He then hijacks the Beacon Hill radio telescope, which he uses as a bridgehead to channel energy into the Nestene unit, and kidnaps Professor Philips, a Ministry of Technology research scientist. Reports of the theft and sabotage bring the Doctor, his new assistant Jo Grant and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart to investigate. At Beacon Hill the Doctor encounters a fellow Time Lord, who warns him that an "old acquaintance" is on Earth and will certainly try to kill him. The Doctor then identifies and successfully neutralises the boobytrap, which the Master has left behind.The Master takes over Farrel Autoplastics, a nearby plastics factory, to build Autons. Jo, investigating the factory, is discovered by the Master, who hypnotises her and wipes her memory of their meeting. He sends her back to UNIT with a booby-trap, a box ostensibly containing the stolen energy unit. The Doctor realises she has been hypnotised and disposes of the bomb.UNIT traces the missing Professor Philips to Rossini's Circus at Tarminster. The Doctor visits the Circus, and is captured by Rossini, but freed by Jo, who has followed him there against orders. The Doctor removes something from the Master's TARDIS but is attacked by Rossini and his men. Rescued by two policemen, the Doctor becomes suspicious and unmasks one of them as an Auton.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_and_the_Silurians"title="Doctor Who and the Silurians">
A nuclear powered cyclotron facility in some caves under a moorland is experiencing mysterious power drains and mental breakdowns amongst staff. The Third Doctor and Liz Shaw meet Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart there to investigate. A worker who was potholing in the caves is found dead with giant claw marks on his body, and his companion has been traumatised. Lawrence, the Director, resents UNIT's presence and feels that it will interfere with the working of the plant. Major Baker, the security chief, believes there is a saboteur in the centre, and the Doctor discovers that the logs of the nuclear reactor's operation have been tampered with. When the Doctor makes his way into the caves, he is attacked by a dinosaur-like creature before it is called off by a strange whistling sound.The Doctor analyses blood from a man-sized creature Major Baker shot at and finds similarities to "larger reptiles". In the meantime, the creature goes to the moorland on the surface and stumbles into a barn to hide. Quinn goes into the caves to a hidden base, where he demands the knowledge he was promised. He is told that he must first help the wounded creature and is given a signal device, which emits the sound heard earlier.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Doctor_Who)"title="Inferno (Doctor Who)">
The Third Doctor and UNIT are called in to investigate a murder at Project Inferno, an effort to drill through the Earth's crust to harness great energies within the planet's core. It transpires that the drilling is producing a green ooze that transforms all who touch it into savage humanoid creatures called Primords, who can only be killed via extreme cold. Unbeknownst to anyone, the project leader, Professor Stahlman has been infected and is in the early stages of the change. After quarrelling with Stahlman, the Doctor attempts an experiment on the detached TARDIS console, but a freak accident transports him into a parallel space-time continuum.In this new universe, where Great Britain is a fascist republic, the Doctor is captured and interrogated by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart's counterpart, a sadistic, eyepatch-wearing military commandant known as the Brigade Leader, along with the counterpart of the Doctor's companion Liz, who in this universe became a military officer instead of a scientist. When the drill penetrates the Earth's crust it unleashes immense amounts of heat and poisonous gases, along with more of the ooze, which Stahlman's counterpart uses to transform most of the remaining project staff into more Primords. The Doctor determines that the unleashed energies of the core will eventually disintegrate the planet, and is able to persuade the surviving staff members to help him return to his own dimension and prevent a similar catastrophe. They eventually succeed in restoring power to the TARDIS console despite repeated Primord attacks, but Liz's counterpart is forced to kill the Brigade Leader when he turns on the Doctor, who narrowly escapes as the Project Inferno facility is destroyed by a massive volcanic eruption.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_the_Daleks"title="Day of the Daleks">
Sir Reginald Styles, a British diplomat trying to organise a peace conference to avert World War III, is in his study at Auderly House when a soldier wielding a futuristic looking pistol bursts in and holds him at gunpoint. However, before the man can fire, he vanishes, leaving Styles to shakily tell his secretary he has been visited by a ghost. When the Third Doctor, Jo and the Brigadier go to Auderly House, Styles denies ever seeing the "ghost", even though the Doctor notes the presence of muddy footprints in the study. The Doctor discovers a crude time machine and an ultrasonic disintegrator. He and Jo spend the night at Auderly House to monitor any activity.The machine turns out to be from the 22nd Century and contains a homing device which will alert its owners, the Daleks, upon its activation. The next day, as the Doctor tries to reactivate the time machine, three rebel fighters--Anat, Boaz, and Shura--appear from the time vortex and demand the machine be deactivated. The Doctor complies, but not before the Daleks detect the frequency and launch their attack. The ensuing battle shifts back and forth between the 20th and 22nd Centuries. Eventually, the Dalek attack is defeated when Shura detonates a bomb made of dalekanium, a powerful explosive that will even affect Dalek body casings.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruins_of_Adventure"title="Ruins of Adventure">
"Ruins of Adventure" contains four short Forgotten Realms adventure scenarios which are connected and adapted from the "Pool of Radiance" computer game, and take place in the devastated town of Phlan.The adventurers are hired to remove evil forces from Phlan, presumably by killing them. They hear rumor of a "Boss" controlling them and seek him out. This "Boss" proves to be a worthy adversary, but in the end the adventurers defeat him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giles_Goat-Boy"title="Giles Goat-Boy">
George Giles is a boy raised as a goat who rises in life to be Grand Tutor (spiritual leader or messiah) of New Tammany College (the United States, or the Earth, or the Universe). He strives for (and achieves) herohood, in accordance with the hero myth as theorized by Lord Raglan and Joseph Campbell. The novel abounds in mythological and Christian allegories, as well as in allusions to the Cold War, 1960s academia, religion and spirituality. Rather than "discovering" his true identity, George ultimately "chooses" it, much like Ebeneezer Cooke does in Barth's previous novel, "The Sotweed Factor".The principle behind the allegorical renaming of key roles in the novel as roman à clef is that the Earth (or the Universe) is a university. Thus, for example, the founder of a religion or great religious leader becomes a Grand Tutor (in German "Grosslehrer"), and Barth renames specific leaders as well: Jesus Christ becomes Enos Enoch (meaning in Hebrew "The man who walked with God" or "humanity when it walked with God"), Moses becomes Moishe, Buddha becomes the original Sakhyan. As the founder of the maieutic method, Socrates becomes Maios; Plato (whose Greek name "Platon" means "broad-shouldered") becomes Scapulas (from scapula, shoulder-blade); Aristotle, as the coiner of the term "entelekheia" (lit. "having an end within," usually translated "entelechy," or glossed as the actualization of a potentiality), becomes Entelechus. The heroes of epic poems tend to be named after the Greek for "son of": Odysseus becomes Laertides (son of Laertes), Aeneas becomes Anchisides (son of Anchises), and so on. The subtitle "The Revised New Syllabus" means, in the novel's Universe=University allegory, a parodic rewriting of the New Testament. Satan is the Dean o' Flunks, and lives in the Nether Campus (hell); John the Baptist is John the Bursar; the Sermon on the Mount becomes the Seminar-on-the-Hill; the Last Judgment becomes the Final Examination. Among the parodic variations, a computer replaces the Holy Spirit, and an artificial insemination the Immaculate Conception.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_English_Teacher"title="The English Teacher">
As an English teacher and lecturer at Albert Mission College, Krishna has led a mundane and monotonous lifestyle comparable to that of a cow. But he also plays an important role in protecting Indian culture. His life changes when his wife, Susila, and their child, Leela, come to live with him. With their welfare on his hands, Krishna learns to be a proper husband and learns how to accept the responsibility of taking care of his family. He feels that his life has comparatively improved, as he understands that there's more meaning to life than to just teaching. However, when they search for a new house, Susila contracts typhoid after visiting a dirty lavatory, keeping her in bed for weeks. Throughout the entire course of her illness, Krishna constantly tries to keep an optimistic view. However, Susila eventually passes away. Krishna, destroyed by her loss, has suicidal thoughts but gives them up for the sake of his daughter, Leela. He is lost and miserable after her death, but he receives a letter from a stranger who indicates that Susila has been in contact with him and that she wants to communicate with Krishna. This makes him more collected and cheerful, leading to a journey in search of enlightenment, with the stranger acting as a medium to Susila in the spiritual world. Leela, on the other hand, goes to a preschool where Krishna gets to meet the headmaster, a profound man who cares for the students in his school and teaches them moral values through his own methods. The Headmaster puts his students as his top priority but he does not care for his own family and children, eventually leaving them on the day predicted by an astrologer as the day of his death, which did not come true. Krishna is influenced by the headmaster, eventually learning to 'communicate' with Susila on his own, thus concluding the entire story with the quote that he felt 'a moment of rare immutable joy'.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dæmons"title="The Dæmons">
In the village of Devil's End an archaeological dig is excavating the infamous Devil's Hump, a Bronze Age burial mound. A local white witch, Olive Hawthorne arrives to protest, warning of great evil and the coming of the horned beast, but she is dismissed as a crank. After watching a television broadcast about the dig the Third Doctor tells Jo that Miss Hawthorne is right – the dig must be stopped, and they go there.Miss Hawthorne goes to see the new local vicar, the Reverend Magister who is actually the Master – he tries to assure her that her fears are unfounded, but his hypnosis fails to overcome her will. Backed by a group of followers, the Master is conducting ceremonies in the cavern below the Church to summon up Azal, a force of evil. The Doctor and Jo reach the mound and the Doctor rushes inside to stop the dig, but it is too late. The tomb door opens and icy gusts of wind rush out, while the eyes of a gargoyle, Bok, flare with a reddish glow.Captain Mike Yates and Sergeant Benton arrive at the village the following morning, but the Brigadier, arriving later, finds himself unable to enter the village, as there is an invisible dome-shaped barrier, 10 miles in diameter and one mile high, surrounding it that causes anything trying to enter to heat up and burst into flame. He contacts Yates and is briefed on the situation while the Doctor and Jo return to the dig where they find a small spaceship in the mound, which has been condensed. From this, the Doctor realises that the Master is trying to conjure up an ancient and all-powerful demon, who is seen on Earth to be the Devil but is actually an alien. The Doctor explains that the Dæmons have used Earth as a giant experiment throughout its history, becoming part of human myth. The Master has called the Dæmon up once, and right now, it is so small as to be invisible. The third summoning, however, could signal the end of the experiment, and the world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giving_Tree"title="The Giving Tree">
The book follows the lives of an apple tree and a boy, who develop a relationship with one another. The tree is very "giving" and the boy evolves into a "taking" teenager, a middle-aged man, and finally an elderly man. Despite the fact that the boy ages in the story, the tree addresses the boy as "Boy" his entire life.In his childhood, the boy enjoys playing with the tree, climbing her trunk, swinging from her branches, carving "Me + T (Tree)" into the bark, and eating her apples. However, as the boy grows older, he spends less time with the tree and tends to visit her only when he wants material items at various stages of his life, or not coming to the tree alone (such as bringing a lady friend to the tree and carving "Me +Y.L." (her initials, often assumed to be an acronym for "young love") into the tree. In an effort to make the boy happy at each of these stages, the tree gives him parts of herself, which he can transform into material items, such as money (from her apples), a house (from her branches), and a boat (from her trunk). With every stage of giving, "the Tree was happy."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_at_Pooh_Corner"title="The House at Pooh Corner">
The title comes from a story in which Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet build a house for Eeyore. In another story the game of Poohsticks is invented. As with the first book, the chapters are mostly in episodic format and can be read independently of each other. The only exception to this is with Chapters 8 and 9 – Chapter 9 carries directly on from the end of Chapter 8, as the characters search for a new house for Owl, his house having been blown down in the previous chapter.Hints that Christopher Robin is growing up, scattered throughout the book, come to a head in the final chapter, in which the inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood throw him a farewell party after learning that he must leave them soon. It is made obvious, though not stated explicitly, that he is starting school. In the end, they say good-bye to Christopher Robin. Pooh and Christopher Robin climb a hill overlooking the Hundred Acre Wood, and say a long, private farewell, in which Pooh promises not to forget him. The book closes with the narrator remarking, "Wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of_Angels_(novel)"title="Queen of Angels (novel)">
"Queen of Angels" describes our world just prior to the binary millennium (2048 AD) through several parallel (and to some degree interlocking) tales. Nanotechnology has transformed almost every aspect of American society, and its application to psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience has resulted in new techniques for mental "therapy" that have created new forms of social stratification. Increasingly, individuals are "therapied: "by means of "nano-therapy," they are turned into well-integrated personalities capable of productive work and constructive social interaction, which does not threaten the social order. Therapied individuals have access to the best jobs. There are two other classes: the "high naturals," who possess such a positive mental makeup that they do not need any therapy, and the "untherapied," who find themselves increasingly marginalized.The central unifying element involves a famous writer, Emmanuel Goldsmith, who has committed a gruesome series of murders, a crime almost unheard of in the age of therapy. One storyline involves Mary Choy, a high natural police detective assigned to the case to track down and arrest the murderer. Mary is a transform since she has chosen to have her body extensively altered by nanotechnology to enhance her abilities as a policewoman and also for aesthetic reasons.A second storyline involves Richard Fettle, a good friend of the murderer, also an untherapied writer, who must come to terms with what happened to his friend and how his artists' lives, and all of the untherapied must change. The third plot line concerns Martin Burke, a pioneer in psychotherapy who uses a technique which allows him to directly enter and interact with a patient's psychology, the "Country of the Mind," through a sort of virtual reality. Although disgraced at the story's opening, Dr. Burke is given the opportunity to use his technique to explore Goldsmith's mind, which turns out to be one of the most fascinating and dangerous minds imaginable.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_Without_a_Key"title="The House Without a Key">
The novel deals with the murder of a former member of Boston society who has lived in Hawaii for a number of years. The main character is the victim's nephew, a straitlaced young Bostonian bond trader, who came to the islands to try to convince his aunt Minerva, whose vacation has extended many months, to return to Boston. The nephew, John Quincy Winterslip, soon falls under the spell of the islands himself, meets an attractive young woman, breaks his engagement to his straitlaced Bostonian fiancee Agatha, and decides as the murder is being solved to move to San Francisco. In the interval, he is introduced to many levels of Hawaiian society and is of some assistance to Detective Charlie Chan in solving the mystery.The novel's denouement is nearly identical to that in the final Perry Mason novel by Erle Stanley Gardner, "The Case of the Postponed Murder" (1970).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behind_That_Curtain"title="Behind That Curtain">
It is set almost exclusively in California (as opposed to Chan's native Hawaii), and tells the story of the former head of Scotland Yard, a detective who is pursuing the long-cold trail of a murderer. Fifteen years ago, a London solicitor was killed in circumstances in which the only clue was a pair of Chinese slippers, which he apparently donned just before his death. Sir Frederic Bruce has been following the trail of the killer ever since. He has also been interested in what appears to be a series of disappearing women around the world, which has some connection to the disappearance of a woman named Eve Durand in rural India also fifteen years ago. Just when it seems he might finally solve the murder case, at a dinner party to which a number of important and mysterious guests have been invited, Inspector Bruce is killed—and was last seen wearing a pair of Chinese slippers, which have vanished. It is left to Chan to solve the case and tie up all loose ends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Chan_Carries_On"title="Charlie Chan Carries On">
Inspector Duff, a Scotland Yard detective and friend of Chan's, first introduced in "Behind That Curtain", is pursuing a murderer on an around-the-world voyage; so far, there have been murders in London, France, Italy and Japan. While his ship is docked in Honolulu, the detective is shot and wounded by his quarry; though he survives, he is unable to continue with the cruise, and Chan takes his place instead. Eventually, Chan finds the killer before the next port of call.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeper_of_the_Keys"title="Keeper of the Keys">
Once again, the setting of the novel is rural California, where Chan has been invited as a houseguest. He meets a world-famous soprano, Ellen Landini, who is murdered not too long after the meeting. Chan does not have far to look for suspects—the host is her ex-husband, as are three of the other house guests. Her servants, entourage and husbands all come under suspicion. Once again, Chan is expected to solve the murder, which he does by understanding the key clues—the actions of a little dog named Trouble, two scarves, and two little boxes. When he understands how the murder is committed, he learns the role of elderly house servant Ah Sing—the keeper of the keys.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Street_Lawyer"title="The Street Lawyer">
A homeless man, identifying himself only as "Mister," enters the offices of the powerful Washington D.C. law firm Drake &amp; Sweeney and takes many of the lawyers hostage while angrily demanding information about some kind of eviction that took place. Although he is eventually shot and killed by a police sniper, one of the hostages, an antitrust lawyer named Michael Brock, is concerned by what he has learned and feels compelled to investigate further.Brock finds his way to the 14th Street Legal Clinic, where he meets Mordecai Green, an advocate for the homeless. Green, along with his abrasive but brilliant staff, work to provide legal help to the most downtrodden members of society. Brock discovers that Drake &amp; Sweeney were involved in the sudden approval of a federal building project on the site of a condemned building that had been serving as rent-payment housing for formerly homeless families. These individuals were tenants and thus entitled to a full legal eviction/contestment process, but a senior Drake &amp; Sweeney partner ignored this information because the firm had a large stake in ensuring the federal project start on time, and thus illegally evicted the tenants in the middle of winter, resulting in the death of a homeless family. Brock takes a confidential file, intending to copy it, but is quickly suspected of its theft.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Runaway_Jury"title="The Runaway Jury">
Wendall Rohr and his team of tort lawyers have filed suit on behalf of plaintiff Celeste Wood, whose husband died of lung cancer, against the tobacco company Pynex. The trial is to be held in Biloxi, Mississippi, a state thought to have favorable tort laws and sympathetic juries. Before the jury in the Pynex trial has been sworn in, a stealth juror, Nicholas Easter, has begun to quietly connive behind the scenes, in concert with a mysterious woman known only as Marlee.Rankin Fitch, a shady "consultant" who has directed eight successful trials for the tobacco industry, has placed a camera in the courtroom in order to observe the proceedings in his office nearby, plotting many schemes to reach to the jury. He plans to get to Millie Dupree through blackmailing her husband through a tape that has him trying to bribe an official. He gets to Lonnie Shaver by convincing a company to buy his employer and convince him through orientation. He also tries to reach Rikki Coleman through blackmail of revealing her abortion to her husband. As the case continues, Fitch is approached by Marlee with a proposal to "buy" the verdict.Meanwhile, Easter works from the inside to gain control of the jury – being warm-hearted, sympathetic and helpful to jurors who might be won over, and rather ruthless to those who prove impervious to his efforts. Eventually, he becomes jury foreman after the previous one falls ill (resulting from Nicholas spiking his coffee). He also manages to hoodwink and repeatedly manipulate the judge. Meanwhile, Marlee Easter's partner/lover acts as his agent on the outside, convincing Fitch that Easter controls the jury and can deliver any verdict on demand through a series of highly secretive meetings, in which Marlee repeatedly threatens to disappear if Fitch's team attempts to track her.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polgara_the_Sorceress"title="Polgara the Sorceress">
"Polgara the Sorceress" begins with Ce'Nedra entreating Polgara to write a book about her life, filling in the gaps left by her father's story, "Belgarath the Sorcerer". The main part of the story then opens, revealing that Polgara and her twin sister Beldaran were raised by their adoptive uncles, the deformed Beldin and the twin sorcerers Beltira and Belkira (all disciples of Aldur, like Belgarath), after the apparent death of their mother, Poledra. Their mother was a shape-shifting wolf at birth; she was distressed that her human babies would be born deficient in lupine instinct, and therefore educated them telepathically prior to parturition. After the birth of the twins, Poledra was presumed to have died; but continued communication with Polgara.For many years, Polgara resented her father's long absence from her own upbringing; and when Belgarath resumed care of his daughters, Beldaran was quick to forgive him but Polgara often fled to the Tree at the center of the Vale of Aldur, where she learned to speak to birds and ultimately mastered the Will and the Word. Belgarath (with Beldaran's help) eventually negotiated an uneasy peace, and Polgara began her training under him. Following Beldaran's marriage, Polgara also resented the "loss" of her sister; but the shared loss eventually reconciled her to Belgarath. Over the years, she maintained a relationship with the descendants of Beldaran.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilium_(novel)"title="Ilium (novel)">
The novel centers on three character groups: that of Hockenberry (a resurrected twentieth-century Homeric scholar whose duty is to compare the events of the "Iliad" to the reenacted events of the Trojan War), Greek and Trojan warriors, and Greek gods from the "Iliad"; Daeman, Harman, Ada, and other humans of an Earth thousands of years after the twentieth century; and the "moravec" robots (named for scientist and futurist Hans Moravec) Mahnmut the Europan and Orphu of Io, also thousands of years in the future, but originating in the Jovian system. The novel is written in first-person, present-tense when centered on Hockenberry's character, but features third-person, past-tense narrative in all other instances. Much like Simmons' "Hyperion", where the actual events serve as a frame, the three groups of characters' stories are told over the course of the novel and begin to converge as the climax nears.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Council"title="Iron Council">
"Iron Council" follows three major narrative threads that join to form the novel's climax. Although Miéville weaves back and forth between narrative, time and space, this summary will follow each narrative individually, discussing their relation to each other toward the end. The novel is set in and around New Crobuzon, a sprawling London-esque city. New Crobuzon has for some unknown time been at war with Tesh, and is attempting to build a railroad across the outlying desert, partially as a new means of conducting this war. Against this backdrop, the novel follows the deeds of three main characters—Ori, Cutter and Judah Low.Judah's story begins some 20 years before the novel's opening. Judah was hired as a railroad scout for New Crobuzon, charged with mapping terrain and informing the land's inhabitants of the railroad's coming. While doing so, he spends time with the Stiltspear, a race of indescribable creatures who can conjure golems, living creatures made from unliving matter. Judah attempts to warn the Stiltspear away, but they will not listen and he must settle for making a few recordings and beginning to learn their golemetric arts. Eventually, he returns to the railroad, which does indeed wipe out the Stiltspear. Shortly afterward, Judah, a prostitute named Ann-Hari, and a Remade named Uzman lead a revolution in which the rail workers drive the overseers away, free the Remade, and hijack the train, transforming it into a moving socialist dwelling.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Lonelyhearts"title="Miss Lonelyhearts">
In the story, Miss Lonelyhearts is the pseudonym for an unnamed male newspaper columnist writing an advice column for the lovelorn and lonesome, a duty that the other newspaper staff consider to be a joke. As Miss Lonelyhearts reads letters from desperate New Yorkers, he feels terribly burdened and falls into a cycle of deep depression, accompanied by heavy drinking and occasional bar fights. He is also the victim of the pranks and cynical advice of Shrike, his feature editor at the newspaper.Miss Lonelyhearts tries several approaches to escape the terribly painful letters he has to read: religion, trips to the countryside with his fiancée Betty, and sexual affairs with Shrike's wife and Mrs. Doyle, a reader of his column. However, Miss Lonelyhearts's efforts do not seem to ameliorate his situation. After his sexual encounter with Mrs. Doyle, he meets her husband, a poor crippled man. The Doyles invite Miss Lonelyhearts to have dinner with them. When he arrives, Mrs. Doyle tries to seduce him again, but he responds by beating her. Mrs. Doyle tells her husband that Miss Lonelyhearts tried to rape her.In the last scene, Mr. Doyle hides a gun inside a rolled newspaper and decides to take revenge on Miss Lonelyhearts. Lonelyhearts, who has just experienced a religious enlightenment after three days of sickness, runs toward Mr. Doyle to embrace him. The gun "explodes", and the two men roll down a flight of stairs together.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Ass"title="The Golden Ass">
## Book One.The prologue establishes an audience and a speaker, who defines himself by location, education, occupation, and his kinship with the philosophers Plutarch and Sextus of Chaeronea. The narrator journeys to Thessaly on business. On the way, he runs into Aristomenes and an unnamed traveler. The unnamed traveler refuses to believe Aristomenes' story. The narrator insults the unnamed traveler and tells a short story about a sword swallower. He promises Aristomenes a free lunch if he will retell his tale. The narrator believes Aristomenes' tale and becomes more eager to learn about magic. The narrator arrives at Hypata, where he stays with Milo, a friend and miser, and his wife Pamphile. Photis, a serving girl in Milo's household, takes the narrator to the baths, after which the narrator goes to the marketplace. There, he buys some fish and runs into his old friend Pytheas, who is now a market official. Pytheas reveals the narrator's name as Lucius. Pytheas says that Lucius overpaid for the fish and humiliates the fish-monger by trampling on the fish. Lucius returns to Milo's house, hungry and empty-handed. Milo asks Lucius about his life, his friends, and his wanderings, which Lucius grows bored with. Lucius goes to sleep hungry.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Were_Warriors"title="Once Were Warriors">
Beth Heke left her small town and, despite her parents' disapproval, married Jake "the Muss" Heke. After eighteen years, they live in a slum and have six children. Their interpretations of life and being Māori are tested. Beth is from a more traditional background and in saying so, relates to the old ways; Jake is an interpretation of what some Māori have become. Beth sometimes tries to reform herself and her family—for example, by giving up drinking and saving the money that she would have spent on alcohol. However, she finds it easy to lapse back into a pattern of drinking and irresponsibility. The family is also shown to be disconnected from Western culture and ways of learning. Beth reflects that neither she nor anyone else she knows has any books at home, and her daughter, Grace, is the only character with a real interest in school and learning. (This disconnection from books and education is a major concern of Duff's, for which reason he founded the charity Duffy Books in Homes, which gives free books to children from poor backgrounds and generally encourages reading.)Jake is unemployed and spends most of the day getting drunk at the local pub with his friends. There he is in his element, buying drinks, singing songs and savagely beating any other patron whom he considers to have stepped out of line (hence his nickname 'The Muss'). He often invites huge crowds of friends back to his home for wild parties. While Jake portrays himself as an easygoing man out for a good time, he has a vicious temper when drinking. This is highlighted when his wife dares to 'get lippy' at one of his parties and he savagely attacks her in front of their friends.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_the_Needle_(novel)"title="Eye of the Needle (novel)">
In 1940, Henry Faber, a German spy nicknamed 'die Nadel' ('The Needle') due to his trademark weapon being a stiletto, is working at a London railway depot, collecting information on troop movements. Faber is halfway through radioing this information to Berlin when his widowed landlady stumbles into his room hoping for intimacy. Faber fears that Mrs. Garden will eventually realise that he was using a transmitter and that he is a spy, so he kills her with his stiletto, then resumes his transmission.David, a trainee RAF pilot, and his bride Lucy are on their honeymoon when they're involved in a car crash. David loses the use of both his legs. Unable to fly during the Battle of Britain, David grows embittered and he and Lucy retire to the isolated Storm Island (fictitious) off the east coast of Scotland. Meanwhile, British Intelligence has executed or recruited all German spies except Faber. A widowed history professor, Godliman, and an ex-policeman, Bloggs, are employed by MI5 to catch him. They start with the interrupted broadcast and his codename "Die Nadel". They connect the landlady's murder to Faber by him having used his 'needle' during the transmission. They then interview Faber's fellow tenants from 1940. One identifies Faber from a photo of him as a young army officer.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_Red"title="Raptor Red">
## Setting and characters."Raptor Red" takes place approximately 120 million years ago, in the Early Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic. At the time, a land bridge had formed between Asia and the Americas, this allowed groups of foreign dinosaurs to invade present-day Utah; one of these foreign species is "Utahraptor". Raptor Red's name comes from the symbols the dinosaur learns as a hatchling to self-identify with. Bakker gives an individual view of each species of dinosaur or ancient creature in the same style as Red's experiences; these include a baby "Gastonia" who instinctively attacks what it does not understand with its clubbed tail, and a whip-tailed diplodocid who enjoys beating up predators. Bakker prominently features the adventures of a "fur-ball" (mammal), "Aegialodon"; according to the author, the emphasis was added because the "Aegialodon" is on the direct ancestral line to humans. "Aegialodon", however, did not live in the same time and place as "Utahraptor", hailing from England about 136 million years ago. Some of the other animals featured in the novel were closer in time and place to "Utahraptor" but not strictly contemporary. For example, fossils attributable to "Acrocanthosaurus" and "Deinonychus" are known from the same rock formation as "Utahraptor" (the Cedar Mountain Formation), but from sediments about five million years younger.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Chuzzlewit"title="Martin Chuzzlewit">
Martin Chuzzlewit has been raised by his grandfather and namesake. Years before Martin senior took the precaution of raising an orphaned girl, Mary Graham, to be his companion and nursemaid, with the understanding that she will receive income from him only as long as Martin senior lives. Old Martin considers that this gives her a motive to keep him alive, in contrast to his relatives, who want to inherit his money. His grandson Martin falls in love with Mary and wishes to marry her, conflicting with Old Martin's plans. Martin and his grandfather argue, each too proud to yield to a resolution. Martin leaves home to live on his own and old Martin disinherits him.Martin becomes an apprentice, at the late age of 21, to Seth Pecksniff, a relative and greedy architect. Instead of teaching his students he lives off their tuition fees and has them do draughting work that he passes off as his own. He has two spoiled daughters, Charity and Mercy, nicknamed Cherry and Merry. Pecksniff takes Martin on to establish closer ties with his wealthy grandfather.Young Martin befriends Tom Pinch, a kind-hearted soul whose late grandmother gave Pecksniff all she had in the belief that Pecksniff would make an architect and a gentleman of him. Pinch is incapable of believing any of the bad things others tell him of Pecksniff, and always defends him vociferously. Pinch works for exploitatively low wages while believing that he is the unworthy recipient of Pecksniff's charity, rather than a man of many talents.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flying_Saucers_Are_Real"title="The Flying Saucers Are Real">
It was printed in paperback by Gold Medal Books, in 1950, and sold for 25 cents. In December, 1949, prior to the publishing of the book, Keyhoe published an article by the same name in True magazine, with similar material. The book was a huge success and popularized many ideas in ufology that are still widely believed today."The Flying Saucers Are Real" is short — only 175 pages.Keyhoe contended that the Air Force was investigating these cases, with a policy of concealing their existence from the public until 1949. He stated that this policy was then replaced by one of cautious, progressive revelation.Keyhoe further stated that Earth had been visited by extraterrestrials for two centuries, with the frequency of these visits increasing sharply after the first atomic weapon test in 1945. Citing anecdotal evidence, he intimated the Air Force may have attained and adapted some aspect of the alien technology, its method of propulsion and perhaps its source of power. He believed the Air Force or the United States federal government would eventually reveal these technologies to the public when the Soviet Union was no longer a threat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perdido_Street_Station"title="Perdido Street Station">
Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin is a scientist living in the city of New Crobuzon. He is approached by Yagharek, a member of a birdlike species known as garuda, who has had his wings removed as a punishment for an undisclosed crime in his native land. He asks Isaac to help him to fly again. Isaac agrees and starts collecting flying creatures for research purposes with the aid of Lemuel Pigeon, a fence with links to the criminal underworld. One creature is a large and unusual caterpillar, stolen from a government research lab. The caterpillar sickens until Isaac accidentally discovers it feeds on a popular hallucinogenic drug. It grows and starts to pupate. After reaching maturity, it emerges as a monstrous flying beast known as a slakemoth, able to paralyse its victims using hypnotic patterns on its wings. It escapes after eating the mind of one of Isaac's colleagues, leaving him catatonic. Isaac, Yagharek and Lemuel resolve to re-capture or destroy it.Isaac's girlfriend Lin is a khepri, an insect-like humanoid and an artist. She is commissioned by Mr Motley, a mob boss, to make a sculpture of him. Mr. Motley has four more of the slakemoths in captivity and harvests their milk to sell as drugs. After Isaac's slakemoth frees its siblings, Mr Motley discovers Isaac's connection to the slakemoths. Assuming Isaac to be a potential rival in the drug trade, he imprisons Lin, demanding that Isaac return his creatures. The slakemoths start to terrorise New Crobuzon, feeding on its inhabitants.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melmoth_the_Wanderer"title="Melmoth the Wanderer">
John Melmoth, a student in Dublin, visits his dying uncle. He finds a portrait of a mysterious ancestor called "Melmoth"; the portrait is dated 1646. At his uncle's funeral, John is told an old family story about a stranger called Stanton, who arrived looking for "Melmoth the Traveller" decades earlier.A manuscript left by Stanton describes his first finding Melmoth laughing at the sight of two lovers who have been struck by lightning, and hearing of a wedding at which Melmoth was an uninvited guest: the bride died and the bridegroom went mad. Stanton's search for Melmoth is deemed to be madness and he is sent to a madhouse. Melmoth visits him there, and offers to free him, but Stanton refuses and escapes.Following his uncle's wish, John burns the Melmoth portrait. He is visited by Melmoth in a dream, and later sees Melmoth laughing at a shipwreck. John tries to approach him, but slips and falls into the sea. He is saved from drowning by the sole survivor of the wreck, a Spaniard, Alonzo Monçada.Alonzo Monçada tells his story (The Tale of the Spaniard), in which his family confines him to a monastery. He is mistreated by the monks, and his brother Juan arranges for him to escape with the help of a fellow monk, a parricide. The escape plan is a trap and Juan is killed. Monçada is taken to the prison of the Inquisition. There he is visited in his cell by Melmoth, who says he will help him escape. A fire breaks out, and in the confusion Monçada escapes. He meets a venerable Jewish scholar, Adonijah, who lives in a secret chamber decorated with the skeletons of his own family. In exchange for food and shelter, Adonijah compels Monçada to transcribe a manuscript for him: "the Tale of the Indian".
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronoliths"title="The Chronoliths">
Software designer Scott Warden is living with his family in early twenty-first century Thailand after his latest contract has ended. He and his friend Hitch Paley are among the first to find an enormous monolith which appears out of nowhere in the jungle. On closer examination, it is found to be a monument made of a mysterious, indestructible substance. It bears an inscription commemorating a military victory by someone named "Kuin", presumably an Asian warlord—twenty years in the future.Over the next twenty years, increasingly grand monuments to Kuin continue to appear—first in Asia, then in much of the rest of the world. Pro-Kuin and anti-Kuin political movements spring up, leading to the rise of economic problems, fatalistic cults, and open war.Scott has become entangled with his former teacher and mentor Sue Chopra, a scientist who has assembled a team of fellow researchers to investigate the chronoliths and learn to predict their appearances. With Sue's team, Scott witnesses a new chronolith that appears in Jerusalem.Kaitlin, his daughter, becomes caught up in the hysteria and joins a pro-Kuin youth cult; while trying to find her, Scott meets Ashlee, a single mother whose son Adam Mills joined the same cult. This leads to Scott and his companions being on hand to witness yet another chronolith appearance in Mexico in which Adam apparently dies. Scott quits his work with Sue and marries Ashlee, trying to live a normal life. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scream_of_the_Shalka"title="Scream of the Shalka">
The TARDIS materialises in the village of Lannet in Lancashire. An annoyed Doctor, who has apparently been transported here against his will, is locked out of the TARDIS and forced to examine his surroundings. After determining he is in England in 2003, he is surprised to discover the village is silent and the inhabitants all living in fear except for a barmaid named Alison Cheney. After the patrons and bar owner refuse to tell the Doctor what's going on, he leaves the bar and stumbles upon a lava statue and a homeless woman who is frightened. As the woman is beginning to fill in the Doctor on what's been happening, a tremor strikes the area and the woman is killed by a mysterious force. Back at the TARDIS, the ground opens up and the Doctor's police box is swallowed up into the lava below. Angered at the homeless woman's death, the Doctor tracks down Alison and her boyfriend Joe at their home and breaks in demanding that someone tell him what has been going on. Alison tells the Doctor that three weeks ago, strange noises began coming from underground. She has seen mysterious aliens around town watching her. The townspeople have convinced themselves that they need to stay indoors and make as little noise as possible. The Doctor begins making noise to attract the aliens, who burst up through the floor in a pool of lava. Immune to their shrieking cries, he deflects their noises back at them causing them to explode. The Doctor, Alison, and Joe flee next door where the Doctor explains that the aliens have bodies that can remake themselves. He improvises a large explosion which he believes will disable them and buy time. The explosion destroys the two alien worms and causes the noises from the ground to stop.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Rise_(novel)"title="High-Rise (novel)">
Following his divorce, doctor and medical-school lecturer Robert Laing moves into his new apartment on the 25th floor of a recently completed high-rise building on the outskirts of London. This tower block provides its affluent tenants all the conveniences and commodities that modern life has to offer: a supermarket, bank, restaurant, hair salon, swimming pools, a gymnasium, its own school, and high-speed lifts. Its cutting-edge amenities allow the occupants to gradually become uninterested in the outside world, providing them with accommodation and a secure environment.Laing meets fellow tenants Charlotte Melville, a secretary who lives one floor above him, and Richard Wilder, a documentary film-maker who lives with his family on the building's lower floors. Life in the high-rise begins to degenerate quickly, as minor power failures and petty grievances among neighbours and between rival floors escalate into an orgy of violence. Skirmishes become frequent throughout the building as whole floors of tenants try to claim lifts and hold them for their own. Groups gather to defend their rights to the swimming pools, and party-goers attack "enemy floors" to raid and vandalise them. The lower, middle, and upper floors of the building gradually stratify into distinct groups.It does not take long for the occupants to ignore social restraints, abandoning life outside the building and devoting their time to the escalation of violence inside; people quit their jobs, and families stay indoors permanently, losing all sense of time. As the amenities of the high-rise break down and bodies begin to pile up, no one considers leaving or alerting the authorities, instead exploring the newly-found urges and desires engendered by the building's disintegration. As Laing navigates the new environment, Wilder sets out to reach floor 40—the top of the building—and finally confront the building's architect, Anthony Royal.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaunt's_Ghosts"title="Gaunt's Ghosts">
The series follows the exploits of Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt and his regiment of scouts and recon specialists, the Tanith First-and-Only (nicknamed "Gaunt's Ghosts"), as they serve in the Sabbat Worlds Crusade. Their battles are normally against the forces of Chaos, although they briefly face orks on Typhon Eight. Up until "Guns of Tanith" the Ghosts are mainly pitted against heretical rebels armies, but on Phantine and in most of the campaigns following it they face the well-trained and elite Blood Pact. By the end of "Only in Death", the Ghosts have been serving in the Crusade for roughly twelve years.Each novel begins with an extract from a fictional book called "A History of the Later Imperial Crusades", which briefly explains the situation in which the Ghosts have been deployed. These extracts are written in a past tense, implying that they were written after the Sabbat Worlds Crusade ends, and do not normally refer specifically to the Tanith First.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Deathly_Hallows"title="Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows">
## Background.Throughout the six previous novels in the series, the main character Harry Potter has struggled with the difficulties of adolescence along with being famous as the only person ever to survive the Killing Curse. The curse was cast by Tom Riddle, better known as Lord Voldemort, a powerful evil wizard who murdered Harry's parents and attempted to kill Harry as a baby, due to a prophecy which claimed Harry would be able to stop him. As an orphan, Harry was placed in the care of his Muggle (non-magical) relatives Petunia Dursley and Vernon Dursley, with their son Dudley Dursley.In "The Philosopher's Stone", Harry re-enters the wizarding world at age 11 and enrols in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. He befriends fellow students Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger and is mentored by the school's headmaster, Albus Dumbledore. He also meets Professor Severus Snape, who dislikes and bullies him. Harry fights Voldemort several times while at school as the wizard tries to regain a physical form. In "Goblet of Fire", Harry is mysteriously entered in the Triwizard Tournament, which he discovers is a trap designed to allow the return of Lord Voldemort to full strength. In "Order of the Phoenix", Harry and several of his friends face off against Voldemort's followers, the Death Eaters. In "Half-Blood Prince", Harry learns that Voldemort has divided his soul into several parts, creating "Horcruxes" from various unknown objects to contain them. In this way, he has ensured his immortality as long as at least one of the Horcruxes still exists. Two of these had already been destroyed: a diary destroyed by Harry in "Chamber of Secrets" and a ring destroyed by Dumbledore shortly before the events of "Half-Blood Prince". Dumbledore takes Harry along in an attempt to destroy a third Horcrux, Slytherin's locket. However, the Horcrux had been taken by an unknown wizard, and upon their return, Dumbledore is ambushed and disarmed by Draco Malfoy. Draco cannot bring himself to kill Dumbledore, so Snape kills him instead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_of_Thorn"title="Alphabet of Thorn">
Nepenthe is a sixteen-year-old orphan who was found and raised by the Royal Librarians of Raine. During the new queen's coronation, visitors and ambassadors from the Twelve Crowns (domains) that comprise Raine gauge Queen Tessera's strength. Bourne of Seale, a junior mage from the Floating School, meets Nepenthe in the library with a book inscribed with an unknown language, which seems to be written in configurations of plant thorns. Instead of delivering it to the Master Librarians, Nepenthe decides to transcribe it herself; she soon becomes obsessed with learning the book's outcome. On the surface, it appears to be an epic poem documenting the conquests of Axis and Kane, an emperor and "the Hooded One", three thousand years earlier.As Nepenthe continues reading, the ruler of Seale prepares to usurp the throne from Tessera, whom he views as weak. (She is only fourteen years old.) Reading further as Seale's army marches (and Bourne is imprisoned for treason), Nepenthe learns that Axis and Kane traveled through time to expand the reach and strength of Axis' empire. Popular histories in Raine list the man Kane as Axis' court mage; Kane was, but the "woman" Kane was also his lover who opened the Gates of Time for him. Kane became pregnant with his child, and she traveled with the infant through time to a cliff side near Raine. She wrote a book about her life in the language of thorns and because of her enchantments, no one but her daughter could read it—by the book's climax, she has. The final words of the book open the Gates of Time that admit Axis and Kane, Nepenthe's parents, and their uncountable legions of followers near Raine, three thousand years in their future.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sheltering_Sky"title="The Sheltering Sky">
The story centers on Port Moresby and his wife Kit, a married couple originally from New York who travel to the North African desert accompanied by their friend Tunner. The journey, initially an attempt by Port and Kit to resolve their marital difficulties, is quickly fraught by the travelers' ignorance of the dangers that surround them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_One_(novel)"title="The Power of One (novel)">
"The Power of One" follows an English-speaking South African boy named Peekay from 1939 to 1951. The story begins when Peekay's mother has a nervous breakdown, and Peekay ends up being raised by a Zulu wet nurse, Mary Mandoma, who eventually becomes his nanny. At a young age, Peekay is sent to a boarding school. As the youngest student attending the school, he is frequently harassed. The students call him "Piskop" (meaning "piss-head") and "rooinek" ("redneck"—a name given to the British soldiers during the Second Boer War) as a result of the helmets and short hair cuts leaving their necks exposed, resulting in severe sunburn, among other names. This continues with an older boy, the Judge, and his partners who further punish him for his frequent bedwetting with verbal and physical abuse. The Judge is a Nazi sympathizer, and he has a hatred for the English, proclaiming that Hitler will march the English out to sea. The Afrikaans woman who runs the boarding school does not console him and walks around threateningly with a whip.When Peekay returns home after his first year at the boarding school, his nanny calls a medicine man called Inkosi-Inkosikazi to cure his bedwetting. Inkosi-Inkosikazi not only succeeds, but also leads Peekay's mind to a place where there are three waterfalls and ten stepping stones, where Peekay can always "find" him. The next school year, Peekay returns with a magic chicken of Inkosi-Inkosikazi's and a different paradigm, called "the power of one". Peekay is excellent in his studies, but maintains a camouflage to hide it from his fellow students and teachers. He finds that this is a good way to beat the system and avoid unnecessary abuse. As the punishments from the Judge continue to get worse, Peekay ends up doing the Judge's math homework. At the end of the year, the Judge forces Peekay to eat feces, and kills his beloved chicken. He looks forward to arriving home to his nanny, but has been informed there has been a change in plans. He will be travelling to a town called Barberton, where he will meet his grandfather.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Tower_(series)"title="The Dark Tower (series)">
In the story, Roland Deschain is a member of a knightly order known as "gunslingers" and the last of the line of "Arthur Eld", his world's analogue of King Arthur. Politically organized along the lines of a feudal society, it shares technological and social characteristics with the American Old West but is also magical. Many of the magical aspects have vanished from Mid-World, but traces remain as do relics from a technologically advanced society. Roland's quest is to find the Dark Tower, a fabled building said to be the nexus of all universes. Roland's world is said to have "moved on", and it appears to be coming apart at the seams. Mighty nations have been torn apart by war, entire cities and regions vanish without a trace and time does not flow in an orderly fashion. Sometimes, even the sun rises in the north and sets in the east. As the series opens, Roland's motives, goals, and age are unclear, although later installments shed light on these mysteries.For a detailed synopsis of the novels, see the relevant article for each book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuleika_Dobson"title="Zuleika Dobson">
Zuleika Dobson—"though not strictly beautiful"—is a devastatingly attractive young woman of the Edwardian era, a true femme fatale, who is a prestidigitator by profession, formerly a governess. Zuleika's current occupation (though, more importantly, perhaps, her enrapturing beauty) has made her something of a small-time celebrity and she manages to gain entrance to the privileged, all-male domain of Oxford University because her grandfather is the Warden of Judas College (based on Merton College, Beerbohm's "alma mater"). There, she falls in love for the first time in her life with the Duke of Dorset, a snobbish, emotionally detached student who—frustrated with the lack of control over his feelings when he sees her—is forced to admit that she too is his first love, impulsively proposing to her. As she feels that she cannot love anyone unless he is impervious to her charms, however, she rejects all her suitors, doing the same with the astonished Duke. The Duke quickly discovers that Noaks, another Oxford student, also claims to have fallen in love with her, without ever having even interacted with her. Apparently, men immediately fall in love with her upon seeing her. As the first to have his love reciprocated by her (for however brief a time) the Duke decides that he will commit suicide to symbolise his passion for Zuleika and in hopes that he will raise awareness in her of the terrible power of her bewitching allure, as she innocently goes on crushing men's affections.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatterland"title="Flatterland">
Almost 100 years after A. (which we find out stands for Albert) Square's adventures that were related in "Flatland", his great-great-granddaughter, Victoria Line (Vikki), finds a copy of his book in her basement. This prompts her to invite a sphere from Spaceland to visit her, but instead she is visited by the "Space Hopper" (a character looking somewhat like the "Space Hopper" children's toy with a gigantic grin, horns and a spherical body). The Space Hopper, more than being able to move between Flatland and Spaceland, can travel to any space in the "Mathiverse", a set of all imaginable worlds. After showing Vikki higher dimensions, he begins showing her more modern theories, such as fractional dimensions and dimensions with isolated points. Topology and hyperbolic geometry are also discussed, as well as the Projective "Plain" (complete with intersecting "lions") and the quantum level. Hopper and Victoria also visit the Domain of the Hawk King to discuss time travel and the theory of relativity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_Lighthouse"title="To the Lighthouse">
## Part I: The Window.The novel is set in the Ramsays' summer home in the Hebrides, on the Isle of Skye. The section begins with Mrs Ramsay assuring her son James that they should be able to visit the lighthouse on the next day. This prediction is denied by Mr Ramsay, who voices his certainty that the weather will not be clear. This opinion forces a certain tension between Mr and Mrs Ramsay, and also between Mr Ramsay and James. This particular incident is referred to on various occasions throughout the section, especially in the context of Mr and Mrs Ramsay's relationship.The Ramsays and their eight children are joined at the house by a number of friends and colleagues. One of these friends, Lily Briscoe, begins the novel as a young, uncertain painter attempting a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay and James. Briscoe finds herself plagued by doubts throughout the novel, doubts largely fed by the claims of Charles Tansley, another guest, who asserts that women can neither paint nor write. Tansley himself is an admirer of Mr Ramsay, a philosophy professor, and Ramsay's academic treatises.The section closes with a large dinner party. When Augustus Carmichael, a visiting poet, asks for a second serving of soup, Mr Ramsay nearly snaps at him. Mrs Ramsay is herself out of sorts when Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle, two acquaintances whom she has brought together in engagement, arrive late to dinner, as Minta has lost her grandmother's brooch on the beach.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henderson_the_Rain_King"title="Henderson the Rain King">
Eugene Henderson is a troubled middle-aged man. Despite his riches, high social status, and physical prowess, he feels restless and unfulfilled, and harbors a spiritual void that manifests itself as an inner voice crying out "I want, I want, I want." Hoping to discover what the voice wants, Henderson goes to Africa.Upon reaching Africa, Henderson splits with his original group and hires a native guide, Romilayu. Romilayu leads Henderson to the village of the Arnewi, where Henderson befriends the leaders of the village. He learns that the cistern from which the Arnewi get their drinking water is plagued by frogs, thus rendering the water "unclean" according to local taboos. Henderson attempts to save the Arnewi by ridding them of the frogs, but his enthusiastic scheme ends in disaster, destroying the frogs and the village's cistern.Henderson and Romilayu travel to the village of the Wariri. Here, Henderson impulsively performs a feat of strength by moving the giant wooden statue of the goddess Mummah and unwittingly becomes the Wariri Rain King, Sungo. He quickly develops a friendship with the native-born but western-educated King Dahfu, with whom he engages in a series of far-reaching philosophical discussions.The elders send Dahfu to find a lion, which is supposedly the reincarnation of the late king, Dahfu's father. The lion hunt fails, and the lion mortally wounds the king. Henderson learns shortly before Dahfu's death that the Rain King is the next person in the line of succession for the throne. Having no interest in being king and desiring only to return home, Henderson flees the Wariri village.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appointment_in_Samarra"title="Appointment in Samarra">
The novel describes how, over the course of three days, Julian English destroys himself with a series of impulsive acts, culminating in suicide. O'Hara never gives any obvious cause or explanation for his behavior, which is apparently predestined by his character. Facts about Julian gradually emerge throughout the novel. He is about thirty years old. He is college-educated, owns a well-established Cadillac dealership, and within the Gibbsville community belongs to the prestigious "Lantenengo Street crowd".English is introduced seven pages into the novel, in the thoughts of the wife of one of his employees: "She wouldn't trade her life for Caroline English's, not if you paid her. She wondered if Julian and Caroline were having another one of their battle royales". Within the three days of the novel, Julian gets drunk several times. One long lyrical paragraph describes one of his hangovers. During the first of two suicidal reveries, we learn that his greatest fear is that he will eventually lose his wife to another man. Yet within three days, he sexually propositions two women, succeeding once, with an ease and confidence that suggest that this is well-practiced behavior.On successive days, he commits three impulsive acts, which are serious enough to damage his reputation, his business, and his relationship with his wife. First, he throws a drink in the face of Harry Reilly, a man who, we learn later, is an important investor in his business. The man is a sufficiently well-known Catholic that Julian knows word will spread among the Gibbsville Catholic community, many of whom are his customers.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_the_Rabbi_Slept_Late"title="Friday the Rabbi Slept Late">
The fictional hero of the book, David Small, is the unconventional leader of the Conservative Jewish congregation in the fictional suburban Massachusetts town of Barnard's Crossing. As the protagonist of a series of novels, Rabbi Small has wisdom, an unerring sense of Jewish tradition (which can at times put him at odds with the Jewish community when he believes that they are seriously deviating from Judaism) and all the good qualities of a detective sharpened by his Talmudic training, which enables him to see the "third" side of a problem. He is a devoted husband to his wife and (later in the series) father to his two children Jonathan and Hepsibah. Small's logic, learned from the Talmud, plays an important part in the plots. Usually Small is drawn into the events when they involve a member of his congregation or Barnard's Crossing's Jewish community in general. Small has many troubles with his congregation and he is constantly at odds with at least one of its powerful members, usually the Temple President at the time.Hugh Lanigan is the local police chief. Lanigan (a Catholic) and Small become friendly, and they often discuss religion over a cup of tea.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demons_(Dostoevsky_novel)"title="Demons (Dostoevsky novel)">
The novel is in three parts. There are two epigraphs, the first from Pushkin's poem "Demons" and the second from Luke 8:32–36.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timescape"title="Timescape">
The story is written from two viewpoints, equidistant from the novel's publication in 1980. The first thread is set in a 1998 ravaged by ecological disasters such as algal blooms and diebacks on the brink of large scale extinctions. Various other events are mentioned in passing, such as student riots and an event of nuclear terrorism against New York City which took place before the events of the novel. This thread follows a group of scientists in the United Kingdom connected with the University of Cambridge and their attempts to warn the past of the impending disaster by sending tachyon-induced messages to the astronomical position the Earth occupied in 1962–1963. Given the faster-than-light nature of the tachyon, these messages will effectively reach the past. These efforts are led by John Renfrew, an Englishman, and Gregory Markham, an American most likely modeled on Benford himself.The second thread is set in the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), in La Jolla, California, in 1962 where a young scientist, Gordon Bernstein, discovers anomalous noise in a physics experiment relating to spontaneous resonance and indium antimonide. He and his student assistant, Albert Cooper (also likely based on the author and his experiences at UCSD), discover that the noise is coming in bursts timed to form Morse code.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasing_Vermeer"title="Chasing Vermeer">
The story begins with three residents of Hyde Park receiving anonymous letters. The letters ask for the recipients’ help in solving a centuries-old art mystery. In the days that follow, Petra and Calder’s teacher, Ms. Isabel Hussey, gives several assignments related to unique letters and letters found in works of art.One day after school, Calder follows Petra to Powell’s Bookstore, and the pair run into each other, beginning their unusual friendship. Calder is obsessed with pentominoes that he keeps in his pocket and uses to send and receive coded messages, while Petra is an adventurer.Ms. Hussey’s next assignment requires the children to present their interpretation of art. Calder chooses a Geographer’s box with a painting on it. Petra chooses Lo! by Charles Fort, a strange book in which Fort posits that life is not a series of coincidences but is an interconnecting web of patterns.Calder and Petra learn that Lo! used to belong to Mrs. Louise Coffin Sharpe. Calder visits Mrs. Sharpe and notices she has a copy of the picture from his Geography box, The Geographer by Johannes Vermeer. Meanwhile, Petra has a vision of a lady in an antiquated dress with pearl earrings. For Halloween, she dresses as the lady, and Calder recognizes her as the woman in Vermeer’s painting, A Lady Writing.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Feast_for_Crows"title="A Feast for Crows">
The War of the Five Kings is slowly coming to its end. The secessionist kings Robb Stark and Balon Greyjoy have been killed. One claimant to the throne, Stannis Baratheon, has gone to fight off invading wildling tribes at the northern Wall, where Robb's half-brother Jon Snow has become the 998th Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, the order responsible for guarding the Wall. The eight-year-old King Tommen Baratheon now rules in King's Landing under the regency of his mother, Cersei Lannister. The warrior woman Brienne of Tarth has been sent by Cersei's brother (and lover) Jaime Lannister on a mission to find Robb's sister Sansa Stark. Sansa is hiding in the Vale, protected by her mother's childhood friend Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish, who has murdered his wife (and her aunt) Lysa Arryn, and named himself Protector of the Vale and guardian of Lysa's son, the eight-year-old Lord Robert Arryn. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abarat"title="Abarat">
"Abarat" focuses on Candy Quackenbush, a teenage girl frustrated with her life in Chickentown, Minnesota. After an argument with her teacher over a school project and the doodling Candy has done in her school workbook, Candy leaves the school and goes to the edge of town, where she sees the remains of a lighthouse. She finds this incredibly strange because Chickentown is thousands of miles from the ocean.She then encounters a master thief named John Mischief who looks human except for the antlers on his head. Mischief's seven brothers live on these horns, appearing only as heads. Because he is pursued by a sinister humanoid being named Mendelson Shape, Mischief sends Candy to light the lamp in the lighthouse, which summons an ocean known as the Sea of Izabella from a parallel world. Candy climbs the rotting lighthouse stairs while the brothers distract Shape. When she reaches the top, she finds an inverted pyramid with a cup on top. As Shape gets away from Mischief and his brothers and begins to climb the stairs, Candy searches for the ball that goes in the cup and will light the lamp. She finds it and is surprised to see it is covered in swirling lines exactly like the ones she doodled in her school book. After giving her a key to protect and extinguishing the light, Mischief and Candy ride the seas to Abarat. A group of creatures carry them to a nearby island where Candy is separated from him. On the island, Candy learns that the Abarat consists of twenty-five islands, each occupying a different hour of the day, and was formerly connected to Candy's world before the harbour's destruction by Abaratian authorities. Thereafter the story follows her adventures as she discovers the crises affecting the Abarat, and gains intimations that she may be destined to conclude these. The story also introduces her chief antagonists: the sorcerer known as Christopher Carrion, his grandmother Mater Motley, and the industrialist Rojo Pixler, all of whom seek to dominate the Abarat.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie's_World"title="Sophie's World">
Sophie Amundsen is a 14-year-old girl who lives in Lillesand, Norway.The book begins with Sophie receiving two messages in her mailbox and a postcard addressed to Hilde Møller Knag. Afterwards, she receives a packet of papers, part of a course in philosophy.Sophie, without the knowledge of her mother, becomes the student of an old philosopher, Alberto Knox. Alberto teaches her about the history of philosophy. She gets a substantive and understandable review from the Pre-Socratics to Jean-Paul Sartre. In addition to this, Sophie and Alberto receive postcards addressed to a girl named Hilde from a man named Albert Knag. As time passes, Knag begins to hide birthday messages to Hilde in ever more impossible ways, including hiding one inside an unpeeled banana and making Alberto's dog, Hermes, speak.Eventually, through the philosophy of George Berkeley, Sophie and Alberto figure out that their entire world is a literary construction by Albert Knag as a present for Hilde, his daughter, on her 15th birthday. Hilde begins to read the manuscript but begins to turn against her father after he continues to meddle with Sophie's life by sending fictional characters like Little Red Riding Hood and Ebenezer Scrooge to talk to her.Alberto helps Sophie fight back against Knag's control by teaching her everything he knows about philosophy, through the Renaissance, Romanticism, and Existentialism, as well as Darwinism and the ideas of Karl Marx. These take the form of long pages of text, and, later, monologues from Alberto. Alberto manages to concoct a plan so that he and Sophie can finally escape Albert's imagination. The trick is performed on Midsummer's Eve, during a "philosophical garden party" that Sophie and her mother arranged to celebrate Sophie's fifteenth birthday. The party soon descends into chaos as Albert Knag lost his control over the world, causing the guests to react with indifference to extraordinary occurrences. Alberto informs everyone that their world is fictional but the guests react with rage, believing him to be instilling dangerous values in the children. When a Mercedes smashes into the garden, Alberto and Sophie use it as an opportunity to escape. Knag is so focused on writing about the car that he doesn't notice them escaping into the real world.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Commitments_(novel)"title="The Commitments (novel)">
Two friends — Derek Scully and "Outspan" Foster — get together to form a band, but soon realise that they don't know enough about the music business to get much further than their small neighbourhood in the Northside of Dublin. To solve this problem, they recruit a friend they'd had from school, Jimmy Rabbitte, to be their manager. He accepts graciously, but only if he can make fundamental changes to the group, the first being the sacking of the third, and mutually disliked, member — their synth player. After this, Rabbitte gets rid of their name, making them "The Commitments" (stating "All the good 60s bands started with a 'the'") and, most importantly, forming them from another synthpop group into the face of what he thinks will be the Dublin-Soul revolution. ("Yes, Lads. You'll be playing Dublin Soul!")He witnesses a young man singing drunkenly into a microphone at a friend's wedding and is struck by the fact he is singing "something approximating music". Jimmy places an ad in the local paper reading "Have you got soul? Then Dublin's hardest working band is looking for you". Eventually, he gets together a mismatched group with seemingly no musical talent, led by mysterious stranger Joey "The Lips" Fagan, who claims to have played trumpet with Joe Tex and the Four Tops. They quickly start learning how to play their instruments and perform a number of local gigs.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddy_Clarke_Ha_Ha_Ha"title="Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha">
"Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha" recounts (approximately) one year in the life of a Dublin ten-year-old, Patrick "Paddy" Clarke, especially his relationships with Sinbad (Francis), his younger brother, his parents and his schoolmates and teachers. It begins with him being a mischievous boy roaming around local Barrytown and ends with his father departing from the family, forcing the boy to take up adult responsibilities in his now single-parent home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deadly_Assassin"title="The Deadly Assassin">
The Fourth Doctor has a precognitive vision about the President of the Time Lords being assassinated. The Doctor goes to Gallifrey to stop the assassination. At the Panopticon, a Gallifreyan ceremonial chamber, he notes a camera stationed on an unguarded catwalk. He also spots a sniper rifle next to the camera. The Doctor fights his way to the catwalk, warning that the President is about to be killed. Unbeknownst to the Doctor, the assassin is among the delegates and shoots the President dead. However, the crowd sees the Doctor on the catwalk with the rifle and assumes he is the killer.Under interrogation, the Doctor maintains that he has been framed. Eventually, Castellan Spandrell starts to believe him and orders Engin to assist him in an independent investigation. To delay his possible execution, the Doctor invokes Article 17 and announces that he will run for President, which guarantees liberty for those running for office during the course of an election.The Doctor realises that it was the Master who had sent him the premonition of the assassination through the Matrix, a vast electronic neural network which can turn thought patterns into virtual reality. He decides to enter the Matrix to track the Master. In the Matrix, the Doctor confronts an assassin who eventually reveals himself as Chancellor Goth. The Master, realising that Goth has been effectively defeated, tries to trap the Doctor in the Matrix by overloading the neuron fields. Engin gets the Doctor out of the Matrix, but Goth is fatally burnt.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Shall_Know_Our_Velocity"title="You Shall Know Our Velocity">
Will has surprisingly come into a large amount of money, around $32,000. His photograph screwing in a light bulb has been made into a silhouette and is being used as a picture for a lighting company's light bulb boxes. He is uncomfortable having this money, since he feels he did nothing to earn it, and is left with a sense of guilt and purposelessness. Shortly after receiving the sum, Will and Hand's mutual childhood friend, Jack, was involved in a car accident. The pair had delusional ambitions to use the money to save his life but to no avail. After Jack's death, Will and Hand are asked to help go through Jack's possessions in a storage facility, where Hand decides to wander around and leaves Will.During Hand's absence, Will is brutally beaten by three men. Will and Hand agree that it is best not to go to the hospital, lest the attackers attempt to track them. As a result of his confusion due to a conglomerate of issues, such as the large sum of money, Jack's death, Will's beating, and other personal issues, Will and Hand plan to travel around the world visiting obscure countries and giving away all the money, bit by bit, to people they arbitrarily decide are most deserving. According to Hand, they gave to people for the benefit of both parties, as a sacrament with the purpose of restoring faith in humanity.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_of_Shannara"title="The Sword of Shannara">
## History."The Sword of Shannara"s events take place 2000 years after the "Great Wars": a nuclear holocaust that has wiped out most of the planet. These wars rearranged the planet's geography and wiped out most human life on Earth. Only traces of technological artifacts have been found; most advanced technology has been lost, but magic has been rediscovered. During this time, Mankind mutated into several distinct races: humans, dwarves, gnomes and trolls, all named after creatures from "age-old" myths. Also, elves begin to emerge after having been in seclusion and hiding for centuries.A thousand years before "The Sword of Shannara", an Elf named Galaphile gathers all of the people who still had some knowledge of the old world to Paranor to try to bring peace and order to all of the races. They name themselves the First Druid Council. Brona, a rogue Druid, and his followers leave, taking the Ildatch with them; this magical tome controls their minds. Hundreds of years later, Brona begins the First War of the Races when he convinces all Men to attack the other races. He almost succeeds in seizing rule of the Four Lands, but the tide turns, and the war ends with his defeat and disappearance. The Druids divide the Four Lands among the races and become reclusive, withdrawing to Paranor because of their shame at the betrayal by one of their own members.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waves"title="The Waves">
The novel follows its six narrators from childhood through adulthood. Woolf is concerned with the individual consciousness and the ways in which multiple consciousnesses can weave together.Bernard is a story-teller, always seeking some elusive and apt phrase. Some critics see Woolf's friend E. M. Forster as an inspiration for him.Louis is an outsider who seeks acceptance and success. Some critics see in him aspects of T. S. Eliot, whom Woolf knew well.Neville, who may be partly based on another of Woolf's friends, Lytton Strachey, seeks out a series of men, each of whom becomes the present object of his transcendent love.Jinny is a socialite whose world view corresponds to her physical, corporeal beauty. There is evidence that she is based on Woolf's friend Mary Hutchinson.Susan flees the city, preferring the countryside, where she grapples with the thrills and doubts of motherhood. Some aspects of Susan recall Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell.Rhoda is riddled with self-doubt, anxiety and depression, always rejecting and indicting human compromise, always seeking out solitude. She echoes Shelley's poem "The Question". Rhoda resembles Virginia Woolf in some respects.Percival, partly based on Woolf's brother, Thoby Stephen, is the esteemed hero of the other six. He dies midway through the novel, while engaged on an imperialist quest in India. Percival never speaks on his own in "The Waves", but readers learn about him in detail as the other six characters repeatedly describe and reflect on him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Island"title="The Mysterious Island">
During the American Civil War, five Northern prisoners of war escape during the Siege of Richmond, Virginia, by hijacking a hydrogen-filled observation balloon. The escapees are Cyrus Smith, a railroad engineer in the Union army (named Cyrus Harding in Kingston's version); his ex-slave and loyal follower Neb (short for Nebuchadnezzar); Bonadventure Pencroff, a sailor (who is addressed only by his surname; in Kingston's translation, he is named Pencroft); his protégé and adopted son Harbert Brown (called Herbert in some translations); and the journalist Gedéon Spilett (Gideon Spilett in English versions). The company is completed by Cyrus's dog "Top".After flying in a great storm for several days, the group crash-lands on a cliff-bound, volcanic, unknown island, described as being located at (Southern Pacific Ocean/Asian:Oceanian side), about east of New Zealand. They name it "Lincoln Island" in honor of Abraham Lincoln. With the knowledge of the brilliant engineer Smith, the five are able to sustain themselves on the island, producing fire, pottery, bricks, nitroglycerin, iron, an electric telegraph, a cave home inside a stony cliff called "Granite House", and even a seaworthy ship, which they name the "Bonadventure".During their stay on the island, the group endures bad weather and domesticates an orangutan, Jupiter, abbreviated to Jup (or Joop, in Jordan Stump's translation). There is a mystery on the island in the form of an unseen "deus ex machina", responsible for Cyrus' survival after falling from the balloon, the mysterious rescue of Top from a dugong, the appearance of a box of equipment (guns and ammunition, tools, etc.), and other seemingly inexplicable occurrences.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Chronicle_of_Barset"title="The Last Chronicle of Barset">
"The Last Chronicle of Barset" features the receipt of a cheque by the indigent but learned perpetual curate of Hogglestock, the Reverend Josiah Crawley. The novel then develops the attitudes and reactions of those around him, some of whom, not least Mrs Proudie, instantly conclude that Crawley stole the cheque.The narrative is maintained by numerous sub-plots. One, which is continued from "The Small House at Allington", involves Lily Dale and Johnny Eames tenuously connected to the main thread. By contrast, Crawley's daughter, Grace, is courted by Henry Grantly, son of Archdeacon Grantly, which poses problems for the archdeacon who recoils from her lack of family rank or wealth. Initially therefore he joins the accusatory group led by Mrs Proudie; the Bishop does not agree but succumbs to Mrs Proudie's familiar dominance.Almost broken by poverty and trouble, the Crawley hardly knows himself if he is guilty or not; fortunately, the mystery is resolved just as Major Grantly's determination and Grace Crawley's own merit force the Archdeacon to overcome his prejudice against her. As with Lucy Robarts in "Framley Parsonage", the objecting parent finally invites the young lady into the family; this new connection also inspires the Dean and Archdeacon to find a new, more prosperous, post for Grace's impoverished curate father.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_of_America"title="Emperor of America">
A nuclear device explodes in Washington and destroys the White House. The Royalist Party and the National Rifle Association of America are nominally those responsible but Condon's target is Reaganism and its legacy, embodied in the character of an Army colonel, Caesare Appleton, who becomes Emperor Caesare I.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nana_(novel)"title="Nana (novel)">
"Nana" tells the story of Nana Coupeau's rise from streetwalker to high-class prostitute during the last three years of the French Second Empire. Nana first appeared near the end of Zola's earlier novel Rougon-Macquart series, "L'Assommoir" (1877), where she is the daughter of an abusive drunk. At the conclusion of that novel, she is living in the streets and just beginning a life of prostitution."Nana" opens with a night at the Théâtre des Variétés in April 1867 just after the Exposition Universelle has opened. Nana is eighteen years old, though she would have been fifteen according to the family tree of the Rougon-Macquarts Zola had published years before starting work on this novel. Zola describes in detail the performance of "La blonde Vénus", a fictional operetta modeled after Offenbach's "La belle Hélène", in which Nana is cast as the lead. All of Paris is talking about her, though this is her first stage appearance. When asked to say something about her talents, Bordenave, the manager of the theatre, explains that a star does not need to know how to sing or act: "Nana has something else, dammit, and something that takes the place of everything else. I scented it out, and it smells damnably strong in her, or else I lost my sense of smell." Just as the crowd is about to dismiss her performance as terrible, young Georges Hugon shouts: "Très chic!" From then on, she owns the audience. Zola describes her appearance only thinly veiled in the third act: "All of a sudden, in the good-natured child the woman stood revealed, a disturbing woman with all the impulsive madness of her sex, opening the gates of the unknown world of desire. Nana was still smiling, but with the deadly smile of a man-eater."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Happy_Return"title="The Happy Return">
In June 1808 Hornblower is in command of the 36-gun frigate HMS "Lydia", with secret orders to sail to the Pacific coast of Nicaragua (near modern Choluteca, Choluteca) and supply a local landowner, Don Julian Alvarado ("descendant" of Pedro de Alvarado by a fictional marriage to a daughter of Moctezuma), with muskets and powder. Don Julian is ready to revolt against the Spanish. Upon meeting Don Julian Hornblower discovers that he is a megalomaniac who calls himself "El Supremo" (which Forester translates as "the Almighty"), views himself as a deity, and has been killing those who he regards as "unenlightened" because they do not recognise El Supremo's divine status. El Supremo claims to be a descendant of Moctezuma, the holy god-made-man of the Aztecs, and also of Pedro de Alvarado, one of the Spanish invaders of Mexico.While Hornblower replenishes his supplies the 50-gun Spanish ship "Natividad" is sighted off the coast. Unwilling to risk fighting the much more powerful ship in a sea battle, Hornblower hides nearby until it anchors and then captures it in a surprise nighttime boarding. El Supremo demands that it be turned over to him so that he may have a navy. After hiding the captured Spanish officers to save them from being murdered by El Supremo, Hornblower, needing his ally's cooperation, has no choice but to accede.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wishsong_of_Shannara"title="The Wishsong of Shannara">
## Prelude.Before the dawn of mankind, Demons created a book of dark magic, called the Ildatch. This book was so full of their dark essence that it became a living thing, with a will of its own. When the Druids gathered all knowledge and lore of the Old World to themselves in the aftermath of the Great Wars, the book of Ildatch was uncovered after countless millennia. It remained harmless until the Druid Brona found it in the halls of Paranor and began to read and unlock its terrible secrets. Brona was eventually subverted by the very power he sought to control and thus the Warlock Lord was born. Allanon thought that the dark book had been buried in the destruction of the Skull Kingdom after Shea triumphed over the Warlock Lord in "The Sword of Shannara", but it soon became apparent that the survivors of the calamity recovered the book, and delved into its arcane knowledge.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_King_of_Shannara"title="First King of Shannara">
Horrified by the consequences of the First War of the Races, most of the Druids at Paranor stopped studying the arcane arts and turned to the sciences of the Old World.Brona, now known as the Warlock Lord, had been behind the First War of the Races, and was thought to have died during it. But he had secretly survived, and now has come to make a new war upon the Races. He is now stronger than ever, gathering spirits from the netherworld and a massive Troll and Gnome army under his banner. Brona's first target is Paranor, the home of the Druids who defeated him during the First War of the Races. He easily wipes out the Druid order.The only survivors are the followers of Bremen, an outcast Druid who continued to study the mystic arts and tried to warn the council before it was too late. Bremen had been cast from the Druid Council because he had an interest in magic, now forbidden since the disaster that turned the Druid Brona into the Warlock Lord. As a result, the council didn't trust him. Along with Tay Trefenwyd and Risca, who are the only Druids who believe Bremen and leave with him, Bremen leaves Paranor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Stops_for_No_Mouse"title="Time Stops for No Mouse">
At the beginning of the story, the mouse Hermux Tantamoq is a watchmaker in Pinchester, a Manhattan-like metropolis inhabited by rodents, birds, and mustelids. He is hired by aircraft-pilot Linka Perflinger (another mouse) to mend her wristwatch. When the watch is requested, without Linka's permission, by a criminal rat, Hermux refuses to hand it over, and later witnesses Linka's capture by similar rats, who are working on behalf of antagonist Dr. Hiril Mennus. Investigating this, Hermux learns that Mennus, in partnership with sub-antagonist Tucka Mertslin, seeks to patent a rejuvenation formula obtained by Linka's client, Dr. Turfip Dandiffer. Assisted by the mole journalist Pup Schoonagliffen (Mennus in disguise), Hermux infiltrates Mennus' clinic, but is himself captured; whereupon Mennus places Hermux and Linka in a mousetrap to die. To maintain control of Tucka Mertslin, Mennus memorizes and destroys the formula; but by an inept use thereof, reduces himself to infancy. Hermux and Linka are thereafter rescued by Dr. Dandiffer's sponsor, Ortolina Perriflot. Some days later, Hermux approaches Linka, intending to propose marriage, but finds her already engaged to Dandiffer. Later, he uses the remnant formula to restore the eyesight of his friend Mirrin Sentrill.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnaby_Rudge"title="Barnaby Rudge">
Gathered around the fire at the Maypole Inn, in the village of Chigwell, on an evening of foul weather in the year 1775, are John Willet, proprietor of the Maypole, and his three cronies. One of the three, Solomon Daisy, tells an ill-kempt stranger at the inn a well-known local tale of the murder of Reuben Haredale which had occurred 22 years earlier on that very day. Reuben had been the owner of the Warren, a local estate which is now the residence of Geoffrey, the deceased Reuben's brother, and Geoffrey's niece, Reuben's daughter Emma Haredale. After the murder, Reuben's gardener and steward went missing and were suspects in the crime. A body was later found and identified as that of the steward, so the gardener was assumed to be the murderer.Joe Willet, son of the Maypole proprietor, quarrels with his father because John treats 20-year-old Joe as a child. Finally having had enough of this ill-treatment, Joe leaves the Maypole and goes for a soldier, stopping to say goodbye to the woman he loves, Dolly Varden, daughter of London locksmith Gabriel Varden.Meanwhile, Edward Chester is in love with Emma Haredale. Both Edward's father, Sir John Chester, and Emma's uncle, the Catholic Geoffrey Haredale – these two are sworn enemies – oppose the union after Sir John untruthfully convinces Geoffrey that Edward's intentions are dishonourable. Sir John intends to marry Edward to a woman with a rich inheritance, to support John's expensive lifestyle and to pay off his debtors. Edward quarrels with his father and leaves home for the West Indies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Curiosity_Shop"title="The Old Curiosity Shop">
## Background.The events of the book seem to take place around 1825. In Chapter 29, Miss Monflathers refers to the death of Lord Byron, who died on 19 April 1824. When the inquest rules (incorrectly) that Quilp committed suicide, his corpse is ordered to be buried at a crossroads with a stake through the heart, a practice banned in 1823. Nell's grandfather, after his breakdown, fears that he shall be sent to a madhouse, and there chained to a wall and whipped; these practices went out of use after about 1830. In Chapter 13, the lawyer Mr. Brass is described as "one of Her Majesty's attornies" , putting him in the reign of Queen Victoria, which began in 1837, but given all the other evidence, and the fact that Kit, at his trial, is charged with acting "against the peace of our Sovereign Lord the King" (referring to William IV), this must be a slip of the pen.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Shores"title="Ancient Shores">
A vast lake, known as Lake Agassiz, covered much of North Dakota, Manitoba and Minnesota during prehistoric times.The story begins when farmer Tom Lasker and his son, Will, uncover a seemingly brand new yacht. Found on a landlocked farm, it draws tourists to the area. Max Collingswood, a friend of Tom's, tries to help discover the origins of the boat. Collingswood enlists April Cannon, a worker at a chemical lab who discovers that the yacht is made of an unknown material. In fact, it is a fiberglass-like material with an impossible atomic number (161).Collingswood and Cannon discover something else on a nearby ridge which is part of a Sioux reservation. The Sioux assist in its excavation and examination. It turns out to be a green glassy roundhouse-like structure, made from the same material.Eventually, they gain access to it, revealing a dock for the sailboat, but no entrance for it. The discovery that the structure contains the means to access other sites not on Earth sets off a struggle between the Government and the Reservation for control of it.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Four_(novel)"title="The Big Four (novel)">
An unexpected visitor called Mayerling comes in through Hercule Poirot's bedroom and collapses on the floor. The only clue to what he wants is his repeating Poirot's name and address and writing the number 4, many times. When Hastings jokingly calls it "The Mystery of the Big Four," the man begins speaking about an international crime cartel of that name. He describes the four leaders: Number 1 is a Chinese political mastermind named Li Chang Yen; Number 2 is probably American; Number 3 is a Frenchwoman; and Number 4 is known only as "the Destroyer." The man dies soon after and Poirot and Hastings go off on the trail of the Big Four.From here, the novel becomes a series of loosely connected short stories.Back home, Poirot reveals Achille Poirot did not exist – it was Hercule Poirot in disguise all along. He laments that all his other cases will seem boring and tame compared to this case. The novel ends with Hastings returning to Argentina and Poirot considering retirement.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worm_Ouroboros"title="The Worm Ouroboros">
The novel begins with a framing story in which a character named Lessingham travels from Earth to Mercury. Eddison's Mercury, though, is a fantasy world, with no effort made to conform to the scientific knowledge of Mercury at the time. Lessingham and the framing story are not seen again after the second chapter.Having introduced the chief lords of Demonland—the brothers Juss, Spitfire, and Goldry Bluszco, and their cousin Brandoch Daha—the story begins in earnest with a dwarf ambassador from Witchland arriving in Demonland to demand that the Demons recognize King Gorice XI of Witchland as their overlord. Juss and his brothers reply that they and all of Demonland will submit if the king (a famous wrestler) can defeat Goldry Bluszco in a wrestling match.The match is held in the neutral territory of the Foliot Isles, and Gorice is killed. His successor (or reincarnation) Gorice XII is a sorcerer who banishes Goldry to an enchanted mountain prison, by means of a perilous sorcery requiring the help of the devious Goblin traitor Lord Gro.While Lord Spitfire is sent back to raise an army out of Demonland, Lord Juss and his cousin Brandoch Daha, aided by King Gaslark of Goblinland, attempt an assault on Carcë, the capital of the Witches, where they think Goldry is held. The rescue fails, the Goblins flee, and Juss and Brandoch Daha are both captured. They escape with the aid of La Fireez, the prince of Pixyland and vassal of King Gorice, who helps them at great personal cost because he owes them a debt of honor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_(Crichton_novel)"title="Rising Sun (Crichton novel)">
Nakamoto Corporation is celebrating the grand opening of its new headquarters, the Nakamoto Tower, in Downtown Los Angeles; the 45th floor of the building is awash with celebrities, dignitaries and local politicians. On the 46th floor, Cheryl Lynn Austin, 23, is found dead. Lieutenant Peter J. Smith, the Special Services Liaison for the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), is assigned to the case. He is joined, on request, by retired Captain John Connor, who has lived in Japan and is well-acquainted with Japanese culture.Upon arriving at Nakamoto Tower, the two policemen learn from officer-in-charge Tom Graham that the Japanese, led by Nakamoto employee Ishiguro, are stalling the investigation by demanding that the liaison be present. Although they have a valid pretense in that the virulently racist Graham is threatening to disrupt the celebration, it is obvious to Connor that a cover-up is underway. The detectives realize that the tapes from the security cameras on the 46th floor have mysteriously disappeared, and the security guards are deliberately unhelpful. Smith and Connor visit the apartment of the late Ms. Austin, realizing that she was a mistress for the Japanese Yakuza. It seems that Ms. Austin's home had been ransacked soon after her death. After several visits to friends and associates of Ms. Austin and Nakamoto, the two detectives find a suspect in Eddie Sakamura, a wealthy Japanese playboy from Kyoto. However, the two are inclined to release him, due to Eddie's previous associations with John Connor. Connor is still able to get Eddie to hand over his passport. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_Season"title="Glory Season">
Three thousand years before the story starts, Lysos founds a human colony on the isolated planet of Stratos in an effort to radically re-engineer human life into a happier, more pastoral form. She developed a strain of human beings that conceives clones in winter (always female), while those conceived in summer (variants or "vars") obtain their genes through sexual reproduction just in case biological adaptation becomes necessary. Further, males and females have opposed seasons of sexual receptivity: men in summer and women in winter. This scheme is said to be stable over evolutionary time because women gain an advantage from self-cloning, while men only reproduce in summer. Finally, men have been made far less aggressive during the times that they are less sexually receptive and are much less numerous. The social result is that the vast majority of the population of Stratos consists of groups of female clones, each in its own social or economic niche. Over the centuries, these groups have come to dominate society. Men are confined to relatively few professions (such as sailing) and have a lower social status than clones, but higher than vars. In each generation, a few women vars become successful enough to found their own clan or "hive" of clones.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killer_Angels"title="The Killer Angels">
## Title.Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, one of the major characters, remembers reciting to his father a speech from "Hamlet": "What a piece of work is man...in action how like an angel!" Sgt. Buster Kilrain says: Well, if he's an angel, all right then... But he damn well must be a killer angel."And the old man, grinning, had scratched his head and then said stiffly, 'Well, boy, if he's an angel, he's sure a murderin' angel.' And Chamberlain had gone on to school to make an oration on the subject: Man, the Killer Angel."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishing_Moon"title="Wishing Moon">
"Wishing Moon" follows the tale of Aminah Barnes, a beggar orphan who is thrown Aladdin's magical lamp by an unwitting princess, Badr Al-Budur, after Aladdin has married her. As Aminah works out problems with the lamp and its demon, she eventually begins her own journey of emotions while trying to avoid the notice of the spoiled and ambitious princess who seeks to regain the lost lamp. After settling into a moderately prosperous life, Aminah decides to help other people in need, but selectively, only helping those who help others. Soon, however, her good deeds draw the unwanted eye of Badr Al-Budur.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lathe_of_Heaven"title="The Lathe of Heaven">
The book is set in Portland, Oregon, in the year 2002. Portland has three million inhabitants and continuous rain. It is deprived enough for the poorer inhabitants to have kwashiorkor, a protein deprivation from malnutrition. Although impoverished, the culture is similar to the 1970s in the United States. There is also a massive war in the Middle East. Climate change reduces quality of life.George Orr, a draftsman and addict, abuses drugs to prevent "effective" dreams that change reality. After one of these dreams, the new reality is the only reality for everyone else, but George retains memory of the previous reality. Under threat of incarceration, Orr undergoes treatment for his addiction.George attends therapy sessions with ambitious psychiatrist and sleep researcher William Haber. Orr claims he has the power to dream "effectively". Haber, gradually believing the evidence, seeks to use George's power to change the planet. His experiments with a biofeedback/EEG machine, nicknamed the Augmentor, enhance Orr's abilities while producing a series of increasingly intolerable alternative worlds based on an assortment of utopian (and dystopian) premises:Each effective dream gives Haber more wealth and status until he is effectively ruler of the planet. Orr's finances also improve, but he is unhappy with Haber's meddling and just wants to let things be. Increasingly frightened by Haber's lust for power and delusions of divinity, Orr contacts lawyer Heather Lelache to represent him against Haber. He falls in love with Heather but is unsuccessful in getting released from therapy.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_World_(Doyle_novel)"title="The Lost World (Doyle novel)">
Edward Malone, a young reporter for the "Daily Gazette", asks his editor for a dangerous assignment to impress the woman he loves, Gladys, who wishes for a great man capable of brave deeds and actions. His task is to approach the notorious Professor Challenger, who dislikes the popular press intensely and physically assaults intrusive journalists. The subject is to be his recent South American expedition which, surrounded by controversy, guarantees a hostile reaction. As a direct approach would be instantly rebuffed, Malone instead masquerades as an earnest student. On meeting the professor he is startled by his intimidating physique, but believes his ruse is succeeding. Seeing through the masquerade, then confirming Malone's scientific knowledge is non-existent, Challenger erupts in anger and forcibly throws him out. Malone earns his respect by refusing to press charges with a policeman who saw his violent ejection into the street. Challenger ushers him back inside and, extracting promises of confidentiality, eventually reveals he has discovered living dinosaurs in South America, following up an expedition by a now-deceased previous American explorer named Maple White. At a tumultuous public meeting in which Challenger experiences further ridicule (most notably from a professional rival, Professor Summerlee), Malone volunteers for an expedition to verify the discoveries. His companions are to be Professor Summerlee, and Lord John Roxton, an adventurer who helped end slavery on the Amazon; the notches on his rifle showing how many slavers he killed doing so.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander's_Bridge"title="Alexander's Bridge">
Bartley Alexander is a construction engineer and world-renowned builder of bridges undergoing a mid-life crisis. Although married to Winifred, Bartley resumes his acquaintance with a former lover, Hilda Burgoyne, in London. The affair gnaws at Bartley's sense of propriety and honor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Loves_of_a_She-Devil"title="The Life and Loves of a She-Devil">
Ruth is an abnormally tall and ugly housewife whose husband, Bobbo, considers their relationship an open marriage based on convenience alone and he only married her because he got her pregnant when they were both teenagers. Bobbo only truly loves his mistress Mary Fisher, a famous, wealthy romance novelist. When Ruth passionately indicates her disapproval for Bobbo's extramarital affair, he calls her a "she-devil", causing her to reassess her life. She resolves to behave in accordance with the label he has given her.Bobbo leaves Ruth and their two children and goes to live with Mary, to whom he soon proposes. Ruth plots her revenge on them, beginning by burning down her own house, therefore forcing the children to live with their father at Mary's mansion. Ruth engages in a string of meaningless sexual relationships in order to emotionally detach herself from sex. In the meantime, she works at the retirement home which houses Mary's mother, Pearl. Her actions there cause Pearl to be expelled from the home, thus inconveniencing Mary and Bobbo who must now care for her.Ruth finds work at a psychiatric hospital while taking classes in accounting and bookkeeping. She uses this knowledge to discreetly steal money from Bobbo's corporate clientele in a way that will incriminate Bobbo later on. Ruth starts her own employment agency for female secretaries, under the alias of "Vesta Rose". Through her agency, she sends a secretary to Bobbo's office who begins another affair with him. When the police arrive to arrest Bobbo, Ruth has made it appear as though he and the secretary were going to take the stolen money to Switzerland and leave the country, though with the assistance of the same secretary, Ruth is in possession of the money herself, becoming rich as a result. She nonetheless feels slight sympathy for the secretary and arranges for her to take a new job in New Zealand so she can evade the police.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King_of_Torts"title="The King of Torts">
Clay Carter is a poorly paid Washington, D.C. public defender who dreams of joining a large law firm. One day he reluctantly takes on the case of Tequila Watson, a man accused of a random street killing. Watson insists that he somehow was not in control of his body when he pulled the trigger, a story which Clay tries to dismiss but cannot get out of his mind. Clay tries his best to help his client, plunging into the capital's most dangerous slums in search of evidence. Clay finally gets a subpoena forcing drug rehabilitation centers to hand over Watson's medical records, as well as those of another man accused of a similar murder.Meanwhile, Clay has been dating Rebecca Van Horn, a junior congressional aide. Clay and Rebecca are deeply in love, but he deeply loathes her father, Bennett Van Horn, an aggressive real estate mogul whose developments are destroying the countryside of Northern Virginia. When Clay refuses an offer to work for a senator who is closely involved with these deals, Bennett pressures Rebecca into cutting off relations with Clay and hastily marrying a rich corporate lawyer.Clay is unexpectedly contacted by a mysterious man named Max Pace, who tells him that Watson's medical records are evidence of a potentially major scandal. It is revealed that Watson and other recovering drug addicts were illegally given an experimental drug called Tarvan, which caused some of the test subjects to commit random and senseless killings. Pace says he has been hired by the drug company responsible, and asks Clay to resign from his job as a public defender and arrange secret payoffs to the victims. While doing so would mean hiding exculpatory evidence from his client, Clay goes along with the scheme, partly to win back Rebecca's affections with his newfound wealth.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_at_Point_Zero"title="Woman at Point Zero">
The novel opens with a psychiatrist who is researching inmates at a women's prison. The prison doctor speaks of a woman, Firdaus, who is unlike any of the murderers in the prison: she rarely eats or sleeps, she never talks, she never accepts visitors. She feels certain the woman is incapable of murder, but she has refused to sign any appeals on her behalf. The psychiatrist makes several attempts to speak with her, but Firdaus declines. The rejections cause the psychiatrist to have a crisis of self-confidence. She becomes consumed with the idea that Firdaus is better than herself, and possibly better than even the president, whom she has refused to send an appeal to. As the psychiatrist is leaving the warder comes to her with an urgent message: Firdaus wants to speak to her. Upon meeting, Firdaus promptly tells her to close the window, sit down, and listen. She explains that she is going to be executed that evening and she wants to tell her life story.Firdaus describes a poor childhood in a farming community. She recalls that she was confused by the disparity between her father's actions, such as beating her mother, and his dedication to the Islamic faith. Those days were relatively happy days, as she was sent out to the fields to work and tend the goats. She enjoys the friendship of a boy named Mohammadain, with whom she plays "bride and bridegroom", and describes her first encounters with clitoral stimulation. One day Firdaus's mother sends for a woman with a knife, who mutilates her genitals. From that point on Firdaus is assigned work in the home. Firdaus' uncle begins to take a sexual interest in her and she describes her new lack of clitoral sensitivity, noting, "He was doing to me what Mohammadain had done to me before. In fact, he was doing even more, but I no longer felt the strong sensation of pleasure that radiated from an unknown and yet familiar part of my body. ... It was as if I could not longer recall the exact spot from which it used to arise, or as though a part of me, of my being, was gone and would never return."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notable_American_Women"title="Notable American Women">
The novel, written as a follow-up to Marcus's literary debut, "The Age of Wire and String", deals with an abstruse Ohio family, which shares the author's surname. The Marcus family, owning four members, lives on a farm outside of an unnamed town; the reader encounters narration from three of those members, and is led through a seemingly implausible and temporally confusing description of the life events of the protagonist: a young Ben Marcus.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wings_of_the_Dove"title="The Wings of the Dove">
Kate Croy and Merton Densher are two betrothed Londoners who desperately want to marry but have very little money. Kate is constantly put upon by family troubles, and is now living with her domineering aunt, Maud Lowder. Into their world comes Milly Theale, an enormously rich young American woman who had previously met and fallen in love with Densher, although she has never revealed her feelings. Her travelling companion and confidante, Mrs. Stringham, is an old friend of Maud. Kate and Aunt Maud welcome Milly to London, and the American heiress enjoys great social success.With Kate as a companion, Milly goes to see an eminent physician, Sir Luke Strett, because she worries that she is suffering from an incurable disease. The doctor is noncommittal but Milly fears the worst. Kate suspects that Milly is deathly ill. After the trip to America where he had met Milly, Densher returns to find the heiress in London. Kate wants Densher to pay as much attention as possible to Milly, though at first he doesn't quite know why. Kate has been careful to conceal from Milly (and everybody else) that she and Densher are engaged.With the threat of serious illness hanging over her, Milly decides to travel to Venice with Mrs. Stringham. Aunt Maud, Kate and Densher follow her. At a party Milly gives in her Venice "palazzo" (the older Palazzo Barbaro, called "Palazzo Leporelli" in the novel), Kate finally reveals her complete plan to Densher: he is to marry Milly so that, after her presumably soon-to-occur death, he will inherit the money they can marry on. Densher had suspected this was Kate's idea, and he demands that she consummate their affair before he will go along with her plan.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ambassadors"title="The Ambassadors">
Lewis Lambert Strether, the protagonist of the novel, is a cultured man in his fifties from the fictional town of Woollett, Massachusetts, who is dispatched to Paris to find Chad, the wayward son of his fiancée Mrs Newsome. The book is entirely told from Strether's point of view and chronicles his change from an American to a European view of things. Strether, a middle-aged American of insignificant means, is sent to Paris by Mrs. Newsome, his wealthy fiancée. The mission he has been given is to talk her son, Chad, into returning to the family business in Woollett, Massachusetts. The Newsome family believes that Chad might be overstaying his European tour because of an inappropriate romantic liaison, perhaps with a vulgar adventuress. The reader is given to understand, in indirect ways, that if Strether fails, his engagement to Mrs. Newsome is at risk. Strether meets Maria Gostrey who delivers valuable insights about things European to him (and the reader).Once Strether locates Chad, he is surprised to discover that Chad has improved from when he last knew him in America. Chad exhibits restrained urbanity, elegance and manners. This is not what Strether expected of someone in the grip of an inappropriate romantic entanglement. Strether wonders what has caused the transformation he sees in Chad. When Chad offers to introduce him to some of his close friends—Madame de Vionnet and her grown daughter Jeanne—Strether eagerly accepts. When the introduction occurs, Strether finds the mother and the daughter to be refined, virtuous and thoroughly admirable. He wonders if the lovely daughter is what has brought about the improvements in Chad. He learns that Madame de Vionnet is married but has been separated from her husband for years.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tender_Is_the_Night"title="Tender Is the Night">
Dick and Nicole Diver are a glamorous couple who rent a villa in the South of France and surround themselves with a coterie of American expatriates. Rosemary Hoyt, a 17-year-old actress, and her mother are staying at a nearby resort. Rosemary becomes infatuated with Dick and becomes close to Nicole.Rosemary senses something is wrong with the couple, and her suspicions are confirmed when another guest at a party, Violet McKisco, reports witnessing Nicole's nervous breakdown in a bathroom. Tommy Barban, another guest, comes to the defense of Nicole and insists that Violet is lying. Angered by this accusation, Violet's husband Albert duels Barban on the beach, but both men miss their shots. Following these events, Dick, Nicole, Rosemary, and others depart the French Riviera.Soon after, Rosemary is now a constant companion of both Dick and Nicole in Paris. She attempts to seduce Dick in her hotel room, but he rebuffs her advances, although he admits that he loves her. Much later, a black man named Jules Peterson is found murdered in Rosemary's bed at the hotel, a potential scandal which could destroy Rosemary's career. Dick moves the blood-soaked body out of the room to cover up any implied sexual relationship between Rosemary and Peterson.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Soldier"title="The Good Soldier">
"The Good Soldier" is narrated by the character John Dowell, half of one of the couples whose dissolving relationships form the subject of the novel. Dowell tells the story of those dissolutions, plus the deaths of three characters and the madness of a fourth, in a rambling, non-chronological fashion. As an unreliable narrator the reader can consider whether they believe Dowell and his description of how the events unfolded including his own role in the "saddest story ever told".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Bowl"title="The Golden Bowl">
Prince Amerigo, an impoverished but charismatic Italian nobleman, is in London for his marriage to Maggie Verver, only child of the widower Adam Verver, the fabulously wealthy American financier and art collector. While there, he re-encounters Charlotte Stant, another young American and a former mistress from his days in Rome; they had met in Mrs. Assingham's drawing room. Charlotte is not wealthy, which is one reason they did not marry. Although Maggie and Charlotte have been dear friends since childhood, Maggie does not know of Charlotte's and Amerigo's past relationship. Charlotte and Amerigo go shopping together for a wedding present for Maggie. They find a curiosity shop where the shopkeeper offers them an antique gilded crystal bowl. Charlotte lacks the money to buy the bowl and the Prince declines to purchase it, as he suspects it contains a hidden flaw.After Maggie has married, afraid that her father has become lonely, as they had been close for years, she persuades him to propose to Charlotte, who accepts Adam's proposal. Soon after the wedding, Charlotte and Amerigo are thrown together, because their respective spouses seem more interested in their father-daughter relationship than in their marriages. Amerigo and Charlotte finally consummate an adulterous affair.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Agent"title="The Secret Agent">
Set in London in 1886, the novel follows the life of Adolf Verloc, a secret agent. Verloc is also a businessman who owns a shop which sells pornographic material, contraceptives and bric-a-brac. He lives with his wife Winnie, his mother-in-law, and his brother-in-law, Stevie. Stevie has a mental disability, possibly autism, which causes him to be excitable; his sister, Verloc's wife, attends to him, treating him more as a son than as a brother. Verloc's friends are a group of anarchists of which Comrade Ossipon, Michaelis, and "The Professor" are the most prominent. Although largely ineffectual as terrorists, their actions are known to the police. The group produces anarchist literature in the form of pamphlets entitled "F.P.", an acronym for "The Future of the Proletariat".The novel begins in Verloc's home, as he and his wife discuss the trivialities of everyday life, which introduces the reader to Verloc's family. Soon after, Verloc leaves to meet Mr Vladimir, the new First Secretary in the embassy of a foreign country. Although a member of an anarchist cell, Verloc is also secretly employed by the Embassy as an agent provocateur. Vladimir informs Verloc that from reviewing his service history he is far from an exemplary model of a secret agent and, to redeem himself, must carry out an operation – the destruction of Greenwich Observatory by a bomb. Vladimir explains that Britain's lax attitude to anarchism endangers his own country, and he reasons that an attack on 'science', the current vogue amongst the public, will provide the necessary outrage for suppression. Verloc later meets his friends, who discuss politics and law, and the notion of a communist revolution. Unbeknownst to the group, Stevie, Verloc's brother-in-law, overhears the conversation, which greatly disturbs him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin's_Apprentice"title="Assassin's Apprentice">
A six-year-old boy is taken by his maternal grandfather to the Farseers' army base in Moonseye, the Six Duchies' outpost on the border of the Mountain Kingdom. His grandfather says he is King-in-Waiting Chivalry's bastard son. The boy is brought to Prince Verity, the second Son of King Shrewd who is currently in command of Moonseye. Verity orders that the boy be given into the care of Burrich, Chivalry's right-hand man and stableman, who calls the boy, who does not know his own name, "Fitz." With Burrich, Fitz travels to Buckkeep, the seat of the Farseer throne. Before Fitz arrives, Chivalry abdicates from the post of King-in-Waiting so that there will not be uncertainty about his bastard son's claim to the throne. Chivalry retires to the royal holdings of Withywoods with his wife Lady Patience without ever meeting Fitz. Chivalry's and Verity's younger half-brother, Prince Regal, despises Fitz and treats him badly when he arrives.Burrich is left with the task of raising Fitz and trains him as a stable boy. Fitz is treated poorly for being a bastard, so he becomes a close friend of a young dog named Nosy. Fitz possesses what is known as Wit, an ancient and distrusted magic which allows him to communicate telepathically with animals. He 'bonds' with Nosy, but this is discovered by Burrich. With apparent disgust, he takes Nosy away, thus breaking the bond, and warns Fitz not to use the Wit, which is widely seen as a perversion. The only other companionship Fitz finds is with children living in Buckkeep town — in particular, a girl called Molly.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Assassin"title="Royal Assassin">
FitzChivalry has survived Prince Regal's attempt to poison him, but is left weak and prone to unpredictable seizures. Fitz vows to never return to Buckkeep and his king. A vision of Molly fending off an attack by Red-ship Raiders convinces him otherwise, and he returns to the royal court of the Six Duchies.At Buckkeep, Fitz is immediately embroiled in the intrigues of the royal family. Molly is alive, but she has been left a pauper by her father's death and debts, and serves as a lady's maid at Buckkeep. She and Fitz admit their love for each other and begin a relationship. When Fitz approaches King Shrewd for permission to marry, Shrewd reveals he has already pledged Fitz to the daughter of a duke. Fitz and Molly are left to conduct their courtship in secret, not only because of Shrewd's command, but to keep Molly safe from Fitz's enemies at the court.King-in-Waiting Verity is consumed by the need to protect the Duchies' coast from the Red-ships, using his Skill to stave off Raider attacks, but failing to give attention to Kettricken, his new queen. King Shrewd suffers a mysterious wasting disease whose pain only mind-clouding drugs can abate, which Fitz suspects is the doing of Regal and his followers. Bands of Forged Ones begin to converge on Buckkeep, which Fitz secretly assassinates. Fitz rescues a young wolf, Nighteyes, and forms a Wit bond with him despite the danger of discovery. Regal and his lackeys come close to discovering that Fitz is Witted, and Fitz struggles to use the Skill to guard his mind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin's_Quest"title="Assassin's Quest">
FitzChivalry Farseer has been raised from death, but spends months with the mind of a wolf after his time sharing minds with Nighteyes. He lives in a remote cabin watched by Burrich and Chade, the only ones who know he is alive. Fitz gradually regains his humanity but struggles with the loss of his former life and the trauma of his torture in King Regal's dungeons. Fitz decides only a personal quest to kill Regal will bring him peace. Before departing the cabin, Fitz is attacked by and kills Forged Ones. Through his uncontrollable Skill dreams, Fitz later learns that Burrich found the scene and believes him dead. Burrich is caring for Molly, Fitz's former lover who is now pregnant with his child. Meanwhile, Lady Patience leads Buckkeep's remaining resistance against the Red Ship Raiders.Fitz travels to Regal's palace in Tradeford but fails to assassinate him thanks to the remaining coterie members. Verity aids his escape and imprints the command "Come To Me" into Fitz's mind. Unable to disobey, Fitz follows the path of Verity's quest to find the Elderlings to the Mountain Kingdom. His bond with his Wit companion, Nighteyes, deepens and changes as they become more similar. The wolf begins to think abstractly and plan events as a human does. Fitz meets other Witted people who call themselves "Old Blood," but declines to learn more of their ways.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopscotch_(Cortázar_novel)"title="Hopscotch (Cortázar novel)">
The first 36 chapters of the novel in numerical order are grouped under the heading "From the Other Side." They provide an account of the life of Horacio Oliveira, an Argentine intellectual. He experiences life in Paris in the 1950s. The other characters consist of La Maga and a band of bohemian intellectuals who call themselves the Serpent Club. The story progresses in a non-linear order.The story opens with Horacio searching the bridges of Paris for his lover, a Uruguyan woman named Lucia (better known throughout the novel as la Maga), who has disappeared. The relationship between the two is passionate but asymmetric: la Maga, of a passionate temperament, is in love with Horacio, who is more analytical and cold, while he seems to not want to get emotionally involved with her. Oliveira enjoys her company, but he is a man with a privileged education who adores intellectual discussions, while she is less educated than him and barely able to participate in these discussions. Both meet frequently with their mutual friends, the members of a group nicknamed "Club de la Serpiente" (Club of the Snake). This is a circle of artists, writers, and musicians that drink and listen to music while discussing art, literature, philosophy, architecture, and other subjects. In their discussions, they frequently mention a writer by the name of Morelli, who insists on the necessity of breaking with the linguistic forms of the moment. The group jumps from one topic to another with relative ease, but la Maga, who is not as well-read as the others, generally needs the others to explain the subjects at hand. Her vivacity distances her from the group, foreshadowing her eventual separation from it. The club, however, shows affection toward Lucia, but almost always in a condescending manner.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Divine_Invasion"title="The Divine Invasion">
After a fatal car accident on Earth, Herb Asher is placed into cryonic suspension as he waits for a spleen replacement. Clinically dead, Herb experiences lucid dreams while in suspended animation and relives the last six years of his life.In the past, Herb lived as a recluse in an isolated dome on a remote planet in the binary star system, CY30-CY30B. Yah, a local divinity of the planet in exile from Earth, appears to Herb in a vision as a burning flame, and forces him to contact his sick female neighbor, Rybys Rommey, who happens to be terminally ill with multiple sclerosis and pregnant with Yah's child.With the help of the immortal soul of Elijah, who takes the form of a wild beggar named Elias Tate, Herb agrees to become Rybys's legal husband and father of the unborn "savior". Together they plan to smuggle the six-month pregnant Rybys back to Earth, under the pretext of seeking help for Rybys' medical condition at a medical research facility. After being born in human form, Yah plans to confront the fallen angel Belial, who has ruled the Earth for 2000 years since the fall of Masada in the first century CE. Yah's powers, however, are limited by Belial's dominion on Earth, and the four of them must take extra precautions to avoid being detected by the forces of darkness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Cry_(Uris_novel)"title="Battle Cry (Uris novel)">
The book tells the story of how this diverse group came together to form an effective team, as well as describing the battles they fought in, including the Battle of Guadalcanal, Tarawa and the Battle of Saipan. Also described are their boot camp experiences in San Diego and their two assignments to US Marine camps in New Zealand, the first time for preparatory training for the Battle of Guadalcanal and then back again for rest and recovery before the Tarawa campaign. Their experiences in New Zealand reveal the very different cultures of the two allies, and how much the young marines enjoyed the hospitality of the local people, in spite of being what has been called a 'friendly invasion'.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasp_(novel)"title="Wasp (novel)">
Set in an unspecified time in the future, the plot centres on protagonist James Mowry and an inter-planetary war between humans (collectively referred to as "Terrans") and the Sirians (collectively referred to as the Sirian Empire, from Sirius). The war has been in effect for nearly a year as the story begins. The Terrans, while technologically more advanced in most respects to the Sirians, are outnumbered and out-gunned by a factor of twelve-to-one.The Sirians are a humanoid species that share many of the same physical characteristics as their Terran enemies. Some of the more noticeable differences are their purple-faced complexions, pinned-back ears, and a bow-legged gait. In terms of government, the Sirian Empire is reminiscent of fascist states that existed in the Second World War; they frequently employ a much-feared secret police force named the Kaimina Tempiti, or Kaitempi; they censor much of their media, and they actively seek to quell any opposition to the government or the war through the use of violence and intimidation.The novel begins by introducing James Mowry as he is being recruited by the Terran government to infiltrate enemy lines; to become a "wasp," in the sense portrayed in the opening passages of the novel. His recruitment is somewhat less than voluntary: Mowry is offered the alternative of conscription and assignment to the front. His dossier states that he can be counted on to do anything, provided the alternative is worse. So persuaded, he accepts the assignment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void"title="A Void">
"A Void" plot follows a group of individuals looking for a missing companion, Anton Vowl. It is in part a parody of "noir" and horror fiction, with many stylistic tricks, gags, plot twists, and a grim conclusion. On many occasions it implicitly talks about its own lipogrammatic limitation, highlighting its unusual syntax. "A Void" protagonists finally work out which symbol is missing, but find it a hazardous topic to discuss, as any who try to bypass this story's constraint risk dying. Philip Howard, writing a lipogrammatic appraisal of "A Void" in his column "Lost Words", said "This is a story chock-full of plots and sub-plots, of loops within loops, of trails in pursuit of trails, all of which allow its author an opportunity to display his customary virtuosity as an avant-gardist magician, acrobat and clown."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritage_of_Shannara"title="Heritage of Shannara">
## "The Scions of Shannara".The first novel in "The Heritage of Shannara" reveals the gathering of the chosen Ohmsfords to meet with the shade of Allanon, then focuses on Par and Coll Ohmsford as they attempt to retrieve the Sword of Shannara.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazing_Adventures_of_Kavalier_&amp;_Clay"title="The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &amp; Clay">
The novel begins in 1939 with the arrival by Greyhound bus of 19-year-old Josef "Joe" Kavalier as a refugee in New York City, where he comes to live with his 17-year-old cousin, Sammy Klayman, in Brooklyn. With the help of his mentor, Kornblum, Joe escapes Nazi-occupied Prague for Lithuania by hiding in a coffin he shares with the Golem of Prague. Joe makes it to New York City by way of Japan and San Francisco. Joe leaves behind the rest of his family, including his younger brother Thomas. As the novel develops, both Joe and Sammy find their creative niches, one entrepreneurial, the other artistic. Beyond having a shared interest in drawing, the duo share several connections to Jewish stage magician Harry Houdini: Josef (like comics legend Jim Steranko) studied magic and escapology in Prague, which aided him in his departure from Europe. Sammy is the son of the Mighty Molecule, a strongman on the vaudeville circuit.When Sammy discovers Joe's artistic talent, he gets Joe a job as an illustrator for a novelty products company, Empire Novelty. Sheldon Anapol, owner of Empire, motivated to share in the recent cultural and financial success of Superman, attempts to break into the comic-book business on the creative backs of Joe and Sammy. Under the name "Sam Clay", Sammy starts writing adventure stories with Joe illustrating them, and the two recruit several other Brooklyn teenagers to produce "Amazing Midget Radio Comics" (named to promote one of the company's novelty items). The pair is at once passionate about their creation, earnestly optimistic about making money, and always nervous about the opinion of their employers. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tik-Tok_(novel)"title="Tik-Tok (novel)">
The title character is an intelligent robot (named after the mechanical man in the Oz books) who originally works as a domestic servant and house-painter. Unlike other robots, whose behavior is constrained by "asimov circuits"—a reference to Isaac Asimov's fictional Three Laws of Robotics, which require robots to protect and serve humans—Tik-Tok finds that he can do as he pleases, and he secretly commits various hideous crimes for his amusement. After manipulating both robots and humans to cause chaos and bloodshed, Tik-Tok becomes wealthy (partly through health care privatization) and is finally elected Vice President of the United States.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Times_(novel)"title="Hard Times (novel)">
The novel follows a classical tripartite structure, and the titles of each book are related to "Galatians" 6:7, "For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." Book I is entitled "Sowing", Book II is entitled "Reaping", and the third is "Garnering."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roderick_(novel)"title="Roderick (novel)">
The title character is an intelligent robot, the first to be invented. The opening chapters describe the creation of Roderick and show his mind (at first consisting of a bodiless computer program) developing through several stages of awareness. Finally, Roderick is given a rudimentary body and, through a series of misadventures, finds himself alone in the world. Due to his sketchy understanding of human customs, and intrigues surrounding the project that created him, he unwittingly becomes the center of various criminal schemes and other unfortunate events.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Leopard"title="The Leopard">
## Introduction to the Prince, May 1860.This chapter begins with a detailed description of the exquisitely decorated drawing-room where the Salina family recites the daily rosary. Afterwards, the Prince wanders out into the garden, where the sickly, over-ripe smells of lush foliage threaten to overwhelm him with memories – specifically of a mortally wounded Neapolitan soldier who in his last moments had crawled into the lemon grove and died there. Perturbed by these thoughts, the Prince takes refuge in watching his dog, Bendicò, joyfully dig up the garden, and in thoughts about the behavior of his wayward nephew, Prince Tancredi Falconeri.At dinner the Prince announces that he will drive into Palermo. The adults at the table, including the Princess and the family's Jesuit chaplain, Father Pirrone, instantly know that the only reason he is leaving is to visit a brothel. As the Prince is driven in his carriage into the city he passes Tancredi's villa, worrying again that Tancredi has fallen in with the bad company of the rebels fighting to overthrow the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The Prince's thoughts vacillate between anticipation and guilt, between disgust with his wife (who crosses herself whenever they make love or he even kisses her goodnight; to preempt a private rebuke from the family priest about visiting prostitutes, the Prince points out that "he's had seven children with the Princess and yet has never seen her navel") and admiration for her modesty. Two hours later his thoughts run a similar course, with the addition of a kind of disgusted satisfaction with the prostitute and a satisfied disgust with his own body. When he arrives back home he finds the Princess in bed, thinks affectionately of her, climbs into bed with her and finds he cannot sleep. "Towards dawn, however, the Princess had occasion to make the Sign of the Cross."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dalkey_Archive"title="The Dalkey Archive">
The book features a mad scientist, De Selby, who tries to destroy the world by removing all the oxygen from the air. He has also many strange inventions. He exploits the theory of relativity and invents a kind of time travelling machine, which he uses to age his whiskey, creating brews that have been aged for many decades in just a few hours.Saint Augustine and James Joyce both have speaking parts in the novel. James Joyce, after forging his own obituary to escape being drafted to fight in the Second World War, was serving pints in a small pub. Saint Augustine, on the other hand, appeared in a magical underwater cave and held a conversation with De Selby. The mad scientist De Selby leads the two main characters, Hackett and Mick, to the cave, to witness this conversation.Many prominent elements of the book, particularly De Selby himself, the eccentric policemen, and the atomic theory of the bicycle, were taken from O'Brien's much earlier novel "The Third Policeman", because he had not been able to find a publisher for it. The latter novel was published posthumously.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barometer_Rising"title="Barometer Rising">
The novel takes place during the week of the Halifax Explosion - 2 December 1917 to 10 December 1917.Penelope Wain believes that her cousin, Neil Macrae, has been killed while serving overseas under her father, Colonel Geoffrey Wain. The family is under the impression that Neil had died in the disgrace of desertion. Neil, however, had not died, but has returned to Halifax to clear his name of its tarnish. Neil seeks Alec MacKenzie, the only other survivor of their unit who can confirm that Colonel Wain had given an contradictory order, which was impossible to fulfill. When the order ended in disaster, Colonel Wain attempted to blame Neil in hopes of retaining his position in the military. Yet, prior to the court martial, Neil was believed to have died in artillery strike. Colonel Wain was forced to return to Canada as a transportation officer.In Halifax, the war has given Penny the opportunity to become a successful naval architect at the Halifax Shipyard. She develops a friendship with Angus Murray, a doctor wounded from the war. Angus eventually proposes marriage to Penny; she defers the proposal. While her father, Colonel Wain, disapproves of Angus, he warms up to him after learning that Neil is alive and in Halifax. Neil and Penny had also been lovers and Angus realizes that Colonel Wain is desperate to ensure that Neil is not court martialed and given an opportunity to clarify the occurrences over seas. The colonel had been offered a new position in the war, and the trial will ruin his promotion.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_Rock_(novel)"title="Brighton Rock (novel)">
There is an incidental link between this novel and Greene's earlier "A Gun for Sale" (1936), in that the murder of the gang boss Kite, mentioned in "A Gun For Sale", allows the seventeen-year-old sociopath Pinkie to take over his gang and thus sets the events of "Brighton Rock" in motion. The murder of Kite had been brought about because of a report by Charles "Fred" Hale in the "Daily Messenger" about his slot machine racket. Now Hale has been sent to Brighton to distribute cards anonymously for a newspaper competition and realises that he is being hunted by Pinkie’s mob.Hale meets middle-ageing Ida Arnold by chance in a pub and then on the Palace Pier as the mob is closing in, but he is snatched away without her realising what has happened to him. To confuse the police investigation, Pinkie has gang member Spicer distribute Hale's cards about the town and then tries to retrieve one card from the café in which sixteen-year-old Rose is working as a waitress. Since Rose had spotted Spicer leaving the card, Pinkie realises that she can now disprove his trail of deception and must take measures to prevent this. He therefore courts Rose until she falls in love with him, his aim being to marry her so that she cannot testify against him. In reality he looks down on her, since she comes from the same socially deprived neighbourhood as himself, and is even repelled by her physically.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bear_and_the_Dragon"title="The Bear and the Dragon">
In Moscow, SVR director Sergey Golovko survives an attack on his way to work, when a car identical to the armored white Mercedes that he was in was shot with an RPG-7, killing the occupants (one of them a former KGB agent turned pimp) inside. Investigation of the incident by Russian police and later intelligence officers points out to involvement from Chinese intelligence, and that Golovko was the real target. After the failed attempt on the SVR director's life, the Chinese later plot to assassinate the Russian president, but their agent, also a former KGB officer, was arrested by the FSB.Meanwhile, U.S. President Jack Ryan gives Taiwan diplomatic status, which is implied as retaliation to China for secretly assisting in previous plots by Japan ("Debt of Honor") and Iran ("Executive Orders") against the U.S. Months later, during trade negotiations between the U.S. and China in Beijing, a CNN crew witnesses the murders of the Papal Nuncio to the country and a Chinese Baptist minister, when the two attempt to stop Chinese authorities from performing a forced abortion on one of the latter's followers. Two days later, police officers brutally break up a prayer service led by the Baptist minister's widow in their home, who had been outraged that her husband's body was cremated and dumped into a river without her permission. International outrage over the incidents leads to a boycott on Chinese-made products. With its economy already struggling due to recent military expansions, the country hastens its planned invasion of Siberia to access newly discovered oil and gold fields.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_158-Pound_Marriage"title="The 158-Pound Marriage">
The narrator (who never identifies himself by name) is a college professor and a relatively unsuccessful author of historical novels. While doing research in Vienna, Austria, he met Utch, an orphaned survivor of the German occupation and the Russian siege at the end of World War II. At the opening of the novel, the narrator and Utch are married with two children and live a relatively placid existence until, at a faculty party, they become acquainted with Severin Winter, a Viennese-born professor of German and coach of the school's wrestling team, and his wife Edith, a WASP from a privileged background (she met her husband in Vienna while on a buying trip for MOMA) who is an aspiring fiction writer. The narrator begins a mentor-protégé relationship with Edith, and soon the couples are sharing dinners and play dates with their children. As the narrator becomes more attracted to Edith, and Utch begins to fall for Severin, the couples begin trading spouses for sexual encounters at the end of their dinner dates. At first the affairs proceed smoothly, with emotional conflict submerged beneath sexual curiosity, but soon enough, obsessive love rears its ugly head, and the narrator begins to discover that the Winters have not been entirely honest with him and his wife about their motives for entering the affair.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilvish,_the_Damned"title="Dilvish, the Damned">
Dilvish is the descendant of both elves and humans, a scion of a prominent Elven house and "the Human House that hath been stricken" which lost its peerage for mixing Elven and Human blood. Hundreds of years before the main story, he comes across a dark ritual being performed by the sorcerer Jelerak who is sacrificing a human girl. He attempts to stop the ritual but is turned into stone, with his soul banished to Hell. His body becomes a statue, and for many decades it resides within the square of a nearby town that he had formerly saved from enemy conquerors. When this town is again in need of a hero, their citizens' plight allows Dilvish the passage he needs to escape from Hell. He returns to the world of the living with his steed, the metal demon horse Black, and a burning desire for revenge against Jelerak, but must first repulse the assault against the endangered town. Dilvish then goes to call upon the Shoredan - a cursed people bound to his family. He searches for Jelerak in the Tower of Ice and finds the sorcerer's apprentice and his sister trapped there. The two of them believe him to be a servant of Jelerak, sent to kill them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Shift_(novel)"title="Red Shift (novel)">
This is primarily a novel about adolescent despair, but one that uses devices of fantasy such as having events at different times in history influencing each other. It is said to be inspired by the legend of Tam Lin, where a man or boy kidnapped by fairies is rescued by his true love. The author said that a piece of graffiti seen at a railway station, "Not really now not any more", became the focus of the novel's mood, and it forms the last line of the story.It took Garner six years to write. He provided three intertwined love stories, one set in the present, another during the English Civil War of the seventeenth century, and the third in the second century CE. Writer and folklorist Neil Philip referred to it as "a complex book but not a complicated one: the bare lines of story and emotion stand clear". Academic specialist in children's literature Maria Nikolajeva characterised "Red Shift" as "a difficult book" for an unprepared reader, identifying its main themes as those of "loneliness and failure to communicate". Ultimately, she thought that repeated re-readings of the novel bring about the realisation that "it is a perfectly realistic story with much more depth and psychologically more credible than the most so-called "realistic" juvenile novels."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Business_(novel)"title="The Business (novel)">
Kate Telman is a 'level 3' executive in the Business, a vast business empire. During her sabbatical year, she comes to suspect that some of her colleagues are stealing from the organisation, and investigates.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_and_the_Dead"title="The Naked and the Dead">
The novel is divided into four parts: Wave; Argil and Mold; Plant and Phantom; and Wake. Within these parts are chorus sections, consisting of play-like dialogue between characters, as well as Time Machine sections, which give brief histories and flashbacks of individual characters’ lives.The story takes place on Anopopei, a fictional island somewhere in the South Pacific. American forces are faced with a campaign to drive out the Japanese so that Americans can advance into the Philippines. The novel focuses on the experiences of one platoon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parade's_End"title="Parade's End">
The novels chronicle the life of Christopher Tietjens, "the last Tory", a brilliant government statistician from a wealthy landowning family who serves in the British Army during the First World War. His wife Sylvia is a flippant socialite who seems intent on ruining him through her sexual promiscuity. Tietjens may or may not be the father of his wife's child. Meanwhile, his incipient affair with Valentine Wannop, a high-spirited pacifist and women's suffragist, has not been consummated, despite what all their friends believe.The two central novels follow Tietjens in the army in France and Belgium, as well as Sylvia and Valentine in their separate paths over the course of the war.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moviegoer"title="The Moviegoer">
"The Moviegoer" tells the story of Jack "Binx" Bolling, a young stock-broker in postwar New Orleans. The decline of tradition in the Southern United States, the problems of his family and his traumatic experiences in the Korean War have left him alienated from his own life. He day-dreams constantly, has trouble engaging in lasting relationships, and finds more meaning and immediacy in cinema and literature than in his own routine life.The loose plot of the novel follows the Moviegoer himself, Binx Bolling, in desperate need of spiritual redemption. At Mardi Gras, he breaks out of his caged everyday life and launches himself on a journey, a quest, in a "search" for God. Without any mental compass or sense of direction, he wanders the streets of New Orleans' French Quarter, and Chicago, and then travels the Gulf Coast, interacting with his surroundings as he goes. He has philosophical moments, reflecting on the people and things he encounters on the road. He is constantly challenged to define himself in relation to friends, family, sweet-hearts, and career despite his urge to remain vague and open to possibility.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Human_Bondage"title="Of Human Bondage">
The book begins with the death of Helen Carey, the beloved mother of nine-year-old Philip Carey. Philip has a club foot and his father had died a few months earlier. Now orphaned, he is sent to live with his aunt and uncle, Louisa and William Carey.Philip lives at his uncle's vicarage. Aunt Louisa tries to be a mother to Philip, but his uncle is cold towards him. Philip's uncle has a vast collection of books, and Philip enjoys reading to escape his mundane existence. After less than a year, Philip is sent to a boarding school. His uncle and aunt plan for him to attend Oxford. Philip's disability and sensitive nature make it difficult for him to befriend other students. Philip learns that he could earn a scholarship for Oxford, which both his uncle and school headmaster view as wise, but Philip insists on going to Germany.In Heidelberg, Philip lives at a boarding house with other foreigners and enjoys Germany. Philip's guardians persuade him to move to London for an apprenticeship. His colleagues there resent him, believing he is a "gentleman". He goes on a business trip with one of his managers to Paris and is inspired to study art in France.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_House_for_Mr_Biswas"title="A House for Mr Biswas">
Mohun Biswas (based on V. S. Naipaul's father, Seepersad Naipaul) is born in rural Trinidad and Tobago to Hindu Indian parents and his father is a Brahmin. His birth was considered inauspicious as he is born "in the wrong way" and with an extra finger. A pundit prophesies that the newborn child "will be a lecher and a spendthrift. Possibly a liar as well", and that he will "eat up his mother and father". The pundit advises that the boy be kept "away from trees and water. Particularly water". A few years later, Mohun leads a neighbour's calf, which he is tending, to a stream. The boy, who has never seen water "in its natural form", becomes distracted and allows the calf to wander off. Mohun then hides in fear of punishment. His father, believing his son to be in the water, drowns in an attempt to save him, thus in part fulfilling the pundit's prophecy. This leads to the dissolution of the family. Mohun's sister is sent to live with a wealthy aunt and uncle, Tara and Ajodha. Mohun, his mother, and two older brothers go to live with other relatives.The boy is withdrawn prematurely from school and apprenticed to a pundit, but is cast out on bad terms. Ajodha then puts him in the care of his alcoholic and abusive brother Bhandat, an arrangement which also ends badly. Finally, the young Mr Biswas decides to make his own fortune. He encounters a friend from his school days who helps him get into the business of sign-writing. While on the job, Mr Biswas attempts to romance a client's daughter but his advances are misinterpreted as a wedding proposal. He is drawn into a marriage which he does not have the nerve to stop and becomes a member of the Tulsi household.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bend_in_the_River"title="A Bend in the River">
Set in an unnamed African country after independence, the book is narrated by Salim, an ethnically Indian Muslim and a shopkeeper in a small but growing city in the country's remote interior. Salim observes the rapid changes in Africa with an outsider's distance.Salim grows up in the community of Indian traders on the east coast of Africa. Feeling insecure about his future in East Africa, he buys a business from Nazruddin in a town at "a bend in the river" in the heart of Africa. When he moves there he finds the town decrepit, a "ghost town", its former European suburb reclaimed by the bush, and many of its European vestiges ruined in a "rage" by the locals in response to their suppression and humiliation during colonial times. Old tribal distinctions have become important again. Salim trades in what people in the villages need: pencils and paper, pots and pans, other household utensils. Soon he is joined by an assistant, Metty, who comes from a family of house slaves his family had maintained in the east. One of his steady customers is Zabeth, a "marchande" from a village and a magician too. Zabeth has a son, Ferdinand, by a man of another tribe, and asks Salim to help him get educated. Ferdinand attends the local lycée run by Father Huismans, a Belgian priest who collects African masks and is considered a "lover of Africa". Life in the town is slowly improving. Salim's decision to move there seems to be vindicated when he learns that the Indian community on the east coast is being persecuted, but he still does not feel secure. Mahesh says of the local Africans that "they are malins", "because they lived with the knowledge of men as prey". A rebellion breaks out and the Indian merchants live in fear. Soon white mercenaries appear and restore order. After peace has returned Father Huismans goes on a trip. He is killed by unknown assailants and nobody cares. Afterwards his collection of African masks is denounced as affront to African religion. An American visitor pillages most of the masks and ships them home as "The richest products of the forest".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Sargasso_Sea"title="Wide Sargasso Sea">
The novel, initially set in Jamaica, opens a short while after the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 abolished slavery in the British Empire on 1 August 1834. The protagonist Antoinette relates the story of her life from childhood to her arranged marriage to an English gentleman, Mr. Rochester.The novel is in three parts:Part One takes place in Coulibri, a sugar plantation in Jamaica, and is narrated by Antoinette as a child. Formerly wealthy, since the abolition of slavery, the estate has become derelict and her family has been plunged into poverty. Antoinette's mother, Annette, must remarry to wealthy English gentleman Mr. Mason, who is hoping to exploit his new wife's situation. Angry at the returning prosperity of the planter class, emancipated slaves living in Coulibri burn down Annette's house, killing Antoinette's mentally disabled younger brother, Pierre. As Annette had been struggling with her mental health up until this point, the grief of losing her son weakens her sanity. Mr. Mason sends her to live with a couple who torment her until she dies. When Antoinette visits her after the fire, Annette refuses to see or speak to her. Antoinette visits her mother once more when she is older but is alarmed at the abuse she witnesses by the servants to her mother and goes away without speaking to her.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magus_(novel)"title="The Magus (novel)">
The story reflects the perspective of Nicholas Urfe, a young Oxford graduate and aspiring poet. After graduation, he briefly works as a teacher at a small school, but becomes bored and decides to leave England. While looking for another job, Nicholas takes up with Alison Kelly, an Australian girl he met at a party in London. He goes on to accept a post teaching English at the Lord Byron School on the Greek island of Phraxos. After beginning his new post, he becomes bored, depressed, disillusioned, and overwhelmed by his life on the Mediterranean island; Nicholas struggles with loneliness and contemplates suicide. While habitually wandering around the island, he stumbles upon an estate and soon meets its owner, Maurice Conchis, a wealthy Greek recluse. They develop a sort of friendship, and Conchis slowly reveals that he may have collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.Nicholas is gradually drawn into Conchis's psychological games, his paradoxical views on life, his mysterious persona, and his eccentric masques. At first, Nicholas takes these machinations of Conchis, what the novel terms the "godgame", to be a joke, but they grow more elaborate and intense. Nicholas loses his ability to determine what is real and what is artifice. Against his will and knowledge, he becomes a performer in the godgame. Eventually, Nicholas realises that the re-enactments of the Nazi occupation, the absurd playlets after Sade, and the obscene parodies of Greek myths are not about Conchis's life, but his own.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragtime_(novel)"title="Ragtime (novel)">
The novel centers on a wealthy family living in New Rochelle, New York, referred to as Father, Mother, Mother's Younger Brother, Grandfather, and 'the little boy', Father and Mother's young son. The family business is the manufacture of flags and fireworks, an easy source of wealth due to the national enthusiasm for patriotic displays. Father joins Robert Peary's expedition to the North Pole, and his return sees a change in his relationship with his wife, who has experienced independence in his absence. Mother's Younger Brother is a genius at explosives and fireworks but is an insecure, unhappy character who chases after love and excitement. He becomes obsessed with the notorious socialite Evelyn Nesbit, stalking her and embarking on a brief, unsatisfactory affair with her.Into this insecure setup comes an abandoned black child, then his severely depressed mother, Sarah. Coalhouse Walker, the child's father, visits regularly to win Sarah's affections. A professional musician, well-dressed and well-spoken, he gains the family's respect and overcomes their prejudice initially by playing ragtime music on their piano. Things go well until he is humiliated by a racist fire crew, led by Will Conklin, who vandalize his Model T Ford. He begins a pursuit of redress by legal action but discovers he cannot hope to win because of the inherent prejudice of the system. Sarah is killed in an attempt to aid him, and Coalhouse uses the money he was saving for their wedding to pay for an extravagant funeral. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Journey_of_Ibn_Fattouma"title="The Journey of Ibn Fattouma">
Ibn Fattouma, more commonly known by his birth name Qindil Muhammad al-Innabi, is a Muslim man disillusioned by the corruption in his home city. When he asks his teacher why a land whose people obey the tenets of Islam suffers so, Qindil is told that the answer he seeks lies far away from the city, in the land of Gebel; the land of perfection. The teacher encourages Ibn Fattouma to seek the land of Gebel, where such problems have been solved. The teacher attempted to journey there himself, but civil war in neighboring lands and the demands of family ultimately prevented him from completing the journey. Further complicating Qindil's impending expedition, no documents exist about the land and no one is known to have returned from Gebel.Qindil is determined to embark on the journey, for he feels betrayed by his mother, who remarried, and his lover, who was stolen by the sultan. He gives his farewells to his family and proceeds on a caravan out of his home city to the land of Mashriq. In this sexually libertine society, the women and men do not marry; rather, they share each other's partners. The religion of Mashriq is primitive and pagan; the moon is worshiped as a god. Qindil questions the land's customs, but he soon acculturates to their ways. He settles in Mashriq with a woman named Arousa and they have five children. Because of Qindil's insistence upon teaching his eldest son Islam, he is exiled from Mashriq and prohibited from seeing Arousa or their children again.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vril"title="Vril">
The novel centres on a young, independent, unnamed, wealthy traveller (the narrator), who visits a friend, a mining engineer. They explore a natural chasm in a mine which has been exposed by an exploratory shaft. The narrator reaches the bottom of the chasm safely, but the rope breaks and his friend is killed. The narrator finds his way into a subterranean world occupied by beings who seem to resemble angels. He befriends the first being he meets, who guides him around a city that is reminiscent of ancient Egyptian architecture. The explorer meets his host's wife, two sons and daughter who learn to speak English by way of a makeshift dictionary during which the narrator unconsciously teaches them the language. His guide comes towards him, and he and his daughter, Zee, explain who they are and how they function.The hero discovers that these beings, who call themselves Vril-ya, have great telepathic and other parapsychological abilities, such as being able to transmit information, get rid of pain, and put others to sleep. The narrator is offended by the idea that the Vril-ya are better adapted to learn about him than he is to learn about them. Nevertheless, the guide (who turns out to be a magistrate) and his son Ta behave kindly towards him.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Honourable_Schoolboy"title="The Honourable Schoolboy">
In 1974 George Smiley, the chief of the British secret intelligence service referred to as The Circus, is repairing the damage done to their operations by double agent Bill Haydon and looking for opportunities to target Karla, the Moscow Centre spymaster. Smiley and analysts Connie Sachs and Doc di Salis look into investigations suppressed by the outed mole and find that a historic investigation of a money laundering operation in Laos by Sam Collins could indicate a Moscow intelligence operation.Smiley dispatches Jerry Westerby, a newspaper reporter and occasional Circus operative, to Hong Kong under the guise of a sports journalist. Westerby traces the Soviet money to Drake Ko, a local businessman with links to both the criminal underworld and the British establishment. London establishes that Drake Ko has a brother, Nelson, who is a high-ranking Chinese official and who has been spying on the Chinese for the Soviets.Westerby, following up leads provided by London, interviews Drake's English mistress Lizzie Worthington and discovers that Drake has been attempting to set up an illicit air route into China. Charlie Marshall and Tiny Ricardo (both pilots and smugglers) were approached by Drake to carry opium into China, and return with a package. The flights were never completed, and Smiley surmises that the package was Nelson, who wished to defect from China. The money supplied by Moscow was intended for Nelson, to be accessed after he left China.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tomb_of_the_Cybermen"title="The Tomb of the Cybermen">
On the planet Telos, an archeological expedition uncovers a hidden entrance in a mountainside. When one of the members tries to open the doors, he is electrocuted. The TARDIS lands nearby and the expedition is met by the Second Doctor, Jamie, and Victoria. Parry, the expedition's leader, explains that they are here to find the remains of the Cybermen, who died out five centuries before. The expedition is funded by Kaftan, who is accompanied by Toberman and her colleague Klieg. Deciding to accompany them, the Doctor helps open the doors and, while he, Parry, and Klieg stay to open the hatch leading to the tombs, the others explore the building.Victoria, Kaftan, and Viner, Parry's assistant, discover a chamber with a sarcophagus-like wall inset facing a projector that was used to revitalise the Cybermen. After Victoria is locked inside, the Doctor is called to help her escape, though he suspects Kaftan is to blame. Meanwhile, Jamie and Haydon, another member of the expedition, experiment with the control panel in another room. A Cyberman emerges and a gun fires, killing Haydon. The Doctor investigates and deduces that the room is a testing range for weapons; the Cyberman being a dummy to be used for such purposes. With two members dead, Parry decides to call off the expedition, only to be informed by pilot Captain Hopper that someone has sabotaged the rocket ship, meaning they are stranded until repairs are completed. Klieg opens the hatch and the team descend, leaving Kaftan and Victoria behind.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Half"title="The Dark Half">
Thad Beaumont is an author and recovering alcoholic who lives in the town of Ludlow, Maine. Thad's own books – cerebral literary fiction – are not very successful. However, under the pen name "George Stark", he writes highly successful crime novels about a psychopathic killer named Alexis Machine. When Thad's authorship of Stark's novels becomes public knowledge, Thad and his wife, Elizabeth, decide to stage a mock burial for his alter ego at the local cemetery, which is featured in a "People" magazine article. Stark's epitaph says it all: "Not A Very Nice Guy."Stark, however, emerges from the mock grave as a physical entity, complete with the personality traits that Thad exhibited while writing as Stark, such as drinking heavily and smoking Pall Mall cigarettes. He then goes on a killing spree, gruesomely murdering everyone he perceives as responsible for his "death" – Thad's editor, agent, and the "People" interviewer, among others. Thad, meanwhile, is plagued by surreal nightmares. Stark's murders are investigated by Alan Pangborn, the sheriff of the neighboring town of Castle Rock, who finds Thad's voice and fingerprints at the crime scenes. This evidence, and Thad's unwillingness to answer his questions, causes Pangborn to believe that Thad – despite having alibis – is responsible for the murders. Later, it is discovered that Stark has the same fingerprints as Thad, a clue to the twinship he and Thad share.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Peter_Rabbit"title="The Tale of Peter Rabbit">
The story focuses on Peter, a mischievous, young rabbit, and his family. The mother rabbit warns Peter and her other three children, Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail, not to enter the vegetable garden of a human named Mr. McGregor, whose wife, she tells them, put their father in a pie after he entered. Peter's three younger sisters obediently refrain from entering the garden and go down the lane to gather blackberries. But Peter (who was very naughty) enters the garden to eat some vegetables.Peter ends up eating more than is good for him and goes looking for parsley to cure his stomachache. Peter is spotted by Mr. McGregor, and loses his jacket and shoes while trying to escape. He hides in a watering can in a shed, but then has to run away again when Mr. McGregor finds him and ends up completely lost. When Mr. McGregor gets tired after running Peter and resumes back to his work, Peter sees that Mr. McGregor is "gone" and it buys him some time to escape to the gate. After sneaking past a cat, Peter sees from a distance the gate where he entered the garden and heads for it, despite being spotted and chased by Mr. McGregor again. With difficulty, he wriggles under the gate, and escapes from the garden. His abandoned clothing is used by Mr. McGregor to dress his scarecrow.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chamber_(novel)"title="The Chamber (novel)">
In 1967, in Greenville, Mississippi, the office of Jewish lawyer Marvin Kramer is bombed, injuring Kramer and killing his two young sons. Sam Cayhall, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, is identified, arrested and tried for their murders, committed in retaliation for Kramer's involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. Sam's first two trials, engineered by his Klan-connected lawyer, each end in a mistrial. Twenty years later, the FBI pressures a suspected associate to testify against Sam at a third trial. Sam is convicted and sentenced to death by lethal gas. He is sent to the Mississippi State Penitentiary and placed on death row.Now without a lawyer, Sam becomes a "pro bono" case for a team of anti-death penalty lawyers from the large - and Jewish - Chicago law firm of Kravitz and Bane. Representing Sam is his own grandson, Adam Hall, who travels to the firm's Memphis office to aid Sam in the final month before his scheduled execution. Although lacking experience in death penalty cases, Adam is determined to argue a stay for his grandfather. Sam, despite his violent past, is one of the few living links to Adam's family history. Sam's alcoholic daughter, Lee Cayhall Booth, slowly reveals the family's tragic past to her nephew, Adam.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine_Nights"title="Cocaine Nights">
The story's protagonist, Charles Prentice, ventures to Estrella de Mar in order to rescue his jailed brother, Frank who has been arrested for instigating an arson attack which killed 5 people. Upon arriving and talking with his sibling, Charles finds to his horror that his brother has confessed to everything, and has no interest in trying to escape his plea. In a matter of days, Charles becomes immersed in the strange world of Estrella de Mar, learning more of its dark secrets, and spending less time worrying about his brother.Constantly being manipulated while he thinks he is finding the truth, Charles soon finds himself out of control and at the nexus of certain disaster, at which point he finally begins to understand just what happened to his brother.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_Island"title="Concrete Island">
A car accident leaves Robert Maitland, a wealthy architect in the midst of concealing his affair with a colleague, stranded in a large area of derelict land created by several intersecting motorways. Though surrounded by motorists and within sight of large buildings, Maitland is unable to escape the median strip and must struggle for survival. Along the way he encounters other inhabitants of the median strip, which he comes to call "The Island," including a teenaged sex worker who hides out in an abandoned air-raid bunker and an acrobat who became mentally disabled in an accident and now salvages car parts for bizarre shamanic rituals. He learns to survive by scavenging discarded food from littering motorists, and eventually comes to think of the island as his true home. Conflicts ensue with the other inhabitants and before long Maitland is struggling to determine whether he was truly meant to leave the island at all.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Burnt-Out_Case"title="A Burnt-Out Case">
Querry, a famous architect who is fed up with his celebrity, no longer finds meaning in art or pleasure in life. Arriving anonymously in the late 1950s at a Congo leper colony overseen by Catholic missionaries, he is diagnosed – by Dr Colin, the resident doctor who is himself an atheist – as the mental equivalent of a 'burnt-out case': a leper who has gone through the stages of mutilation. However, as Querry loses himself in working for the lepers, his disease of mind slowly approaches a cure.Querry meets Rycker, a palm-oil plantation owner, and a man of apparently earnest Catholic faith who does not accept his own nothingness and tries to amplify the relevance of Querry's presence in that country. Rycker's wife, a young and ill-educated woman, is absolutely bored with his prudishness and her own lack of freedom.It is revealed that Querry is a famous architect, known throughout the world for his design and construction of churches – which he himself believes have been defiled by the religious occupants. Querry is persuaded to design and oversee a new building for the hospital.An English journalist called Parkinson arrives at the village with the intention of writing a series of articles, to be syndicated in many European and North American newspapers, on the subject of Querry's perceived 'saintly' activities in the village, including a story of Querry rescuing his servant – an African mutilated by leprosy- who became lost in the jungle. However Parkinson also brings up Querry's past not only as an architect but also as a womaniser. It is revealed that Querry's former lover committed suicide, thus prompting his journey to the village (however his journey was not the result of feelings of guilt or grief, but rather the incident acted to magnify his growing loss of faith and vocation.)
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Doctors"title="The Five Doctors">
An unknown entity uses the Time Scoop to bring several of the previous incarnations of the Doctor; his former companions Susan Foreman, Sarah Jane Smith, and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart; and his enemies the Daleks, the Cybermen, a Raston Warrior Robot and a Yeti, from their respective time streams into the Death Zone on Gallifrey. The entity's attempt to grab the Fourth Doctor and Romana ends up trapping the two in the time vortex. The Fifth Doctor senses the disruption of his own timeline, and with his own companions Tegan and Turlough, travels to Gallifrey via his TARDIS, also ending up in the Death Zone, unable to travel farther with the TARDIS due to a force field projected by the Tomb of Rassilon, the tower at the centre of the Death Zone. The various Doctors lead their companions towards the Tower while avoiding the hostile forces.At the Citadel on Gallifrey, the High Council of Time Lords have also detected the disturbance in the Doctor's timeline and the power drain from the Time Scoop, and Lord President Borusa has the Master, the Doctor's arch-nemesis, summoned to help rescue the Doctor, offering the Master a new set of regenerations and a pardon for his misdeeds if he succeeds. The Master accepts, and is given a recall device by the Castellan and a copy of the High Council's seal before he is transmatted to the Zone. The Master encounters the Third Doctor, who dismisses him and accuses him of making the seal himself, before finding the Fifth just as they are surrounded by Cybermen. The Master is knocked out by a Cyberman's gun firing, and the Doctor finds and uses the recall device to return to the Citadel. When the Master awakes, he makes a pact with the Cybermen to lead them to the Tower if they will give him his life but tricks them into falling for the Death Zone's traps. The Cybermen, too, have an ulterior motive, planning to kill the Master when he outlives his usefulness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Summons_(Grisham_novel)"title="The Summons (Grisham novel)">
The main character, Ray Atlee, is a law professor with a good salary at the University of Virginia. He has a brother, Forrest, and a father, known to many as Judge Reuben V. Atlee. Ray is sent to his father's house in Clanton, Mississippi, to discuss issues regarding the old man's will and estate. To do this, Ray has to go to fictional Ford County, Mississippi, the setting for four of John Grisham's other books including "A Time To Kill". When he finds his father dead in the study, Ray discovers a sum of over $3 million in the house, money which is not part of Judge Atlee's will. Ray immediately thinks the money is "dirty" because his father could not possibly have made so much money in his career.Assuming that he is the only one who knows about the money, Ray decides to take it without making it officially part of the estate, and does not tell anyone about it: he knows that if he made it a part of the estate, taxes would take most of the money. But later reality proves otherwise. Ray is being followed; someone else knows about the money. After his own investigations into the roots of the money and the identity of his shadow—including trips to casinos and shady meetings with prominent southern lawyers—he eventually discovers that Forrest has the money. He finds Forrest in a drug rehab compound and confronts him. At the end both part, with Forrest telling Ray that he will contact him in a year. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Needful_Things"title="Needful Things">
A new shop named "Needful Things" opens in the small town of Castle Rock, Maine, sparking the curiosity of its citizens. The proprietor, Leland Gaunt, is a charming elderly gentleman purportedly from Akron, Ohio who always seems to have an item in stock that is perfectly suited to any customer who comes through his door. The prices are surprisingly low, considering the merchandise – such as a rare Sandy Koufax baseball card, a carnival glass lampshade, and a fragment of petrified wood stated to be from Noah's Ark – but he expects each customer to also play a little prank on someone else in town. Each customer enters a trance and becomes highly agreeable when making a deal with Gaunt, afterwards forgetting anything abnormal about the encounter. Gaunt has complete knowledge of the long-standing private histories and conflicts between the various townspeople, and the pranks are his means of forcing them to escalate.Shortly after Gaunt opens his shop, he marks local Sheriff Alan Pangborn and Polly Chalmers, Alan's sweetheart and proprietor of a local sewing shop, as "tough customers" who are likely to question and interfere with him. Gaunt avoids Alan and offers Polly an ancient charm that relieves the terrible arthritic pain in her hands, as well as giving Gaunt control over her. Tensions in Castle Rock rapidly grow after Nettie Cobb, Polly's housekeeper, and her enemy Wilma Jerzyck kill each other with knives in a confrontation sparked by local boy Brian Rusk vandalizing Wilma's home and alcoholic Hugh Priest killing Nettie's dog. Other rivalries begin to fester, spurred by the personal motives and secrets of the people involved. Gaunt hires petty criminal John "Ace" Merrill as his assistant, providing him with high-quality cocaine and hinting at buried treasure that could relieve the debt he owes to a pair of drug dealers. Ace's first assignment is to retrieve crates of pistols, ammunition, and blasting caps from a garage in Boston; Gaunt soon begins to sell the pistols to his customers so they can protect their purchases.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Jest"title="Infinite Jest">
There are several major interwoven narratives, including:These narratives are connected via a film, "Infinite Jest", also called "the Entertainment" or "the samizdat". The film is so entertaining that its viewers lose all interest in anything other than repeatedly viewing it, and thus eventually die. It was James Incandenza's final work. He completed it during a period of sobriety that was insisted upon by its lead actress, Joelle van Dyne. The Québécois separatists seek a replicable master copy of the work to aid in acts of terrorism against the United States. The United States Office of Unspecified Services (O.U.S.) aims to intercept the master copy to prevent mass dissemination and the destabilization of the Organization of North American Nations, or else to find or produce an anti-entertainment that can counter the film's effects. Joelle seeks treatment for substance abuse problems at Ennet House. A.F.R. member (and possible O.U.S. double agent) Rémy Marathe visits Ennet House, aiming to find Joelle and a lead to the master copy of "the Entertainment".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_Fowl_(novel)"title="Artemis Fowl (novel)">
Captain Holly Short, an elf in the Lower Elements Police (LEP), is tracking a rogue troll that has managed to reach the surface of the Earth from Haven City, thousands of feet underground. Assisted by the technically minded centaur Foaly and LEPrecon commander Julius Root, she incapacitates the troll before leaving for Tara to replenish her magic.Meanwhile, Artemis Fowl II is a 12-year-old prodigy who has dedicated his life to criminal activities. He leads the Fowl criminal empire, which has existed in his family for generations. After significant research, Artemis believes that he has confirmed the existence of fairies. He identifies an alcoholic sprite living in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and travels there with his bodyguard Butler to obtain from her "The Book of the People"—the fairy holy book that is written in Gnommish. After decoding the book using translating software, Artemis learns the specifics of the ritual fairies use to replenish their magic: take an acorn from an ancient oak tree near a bend in a river under the full moon and plant it elsewhere. Artemis and Butler track down 129 possible nearby locations for the ritual and start a stakeout. They discover Holly performing the ritual, and Butler tranquillises her with a hypodermic dart gun.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_Fowl_and_the_Arctic_Incident"title="Artemis Fowl and the Arctic Incident">
The story opens at the Bay of Kola, just after the Russian Mafia have sunk the Fowl Star. Two low-ranking Mafia members discover the body of the former Irish crime lord Artemis Fowl I, who has survived despite losing a leg and the use of one eye. Three years later, his son and heir Artemis Fowl II, while at school talking to the guidance counselor, Dr. Po, receives a call from his manservant and bodyguard Butler. Butler shows Artemis a video of his father, showing that he is in the hands of the Mafia. Knowing that a ransom demand will soon be coming, and that payment will in no way guarantee his father's release or his own safety, Artemis prepares to devise a plan while Butler drives them back to Fowl Manor.While Artemis Fowl's plight plays out above ground, the Lower Elements Police of the fairy realm are having their own problems. A routine stakeout group consisting of the disgraced Captain Holly Short and Private Chix Verbil is attacked by a group of heavily armed goblins carrying old outlawed Softnose weaponry powered by human batteries, a Class A contraband. Captain Short is quick to accuse young Artemis Fowl and against his own wishes, LEP Commander Julius Root sends Holly to apprehend Artemis Fowl and Butler for interrogation. However, Foaly's Retimager proves Artemis's innocence. Against Holly's instincts, Root decides to recruit Fowl and Butler to locate the supplier.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papillon_(book)"title="Papillon (book)">
The book is an account of a 14-year period in Papillon's life (October 26, 1931 to October 18, 1945), beginning when he was wrongly convicted of murder in France and sentenced to a life of hard labor at the "Bagne de Cayenne", the penal colony of Cayenne in French Guiana known as Devil's Island. He eventually escaped from the colony and settled in Venezuela, where he lived and prospered.After a brief stay at a prison in Caen, Papillon was put aboard a vessel bound for South America, where he learned about the brutal life that prisoners endured at the prison colony. Violence and murders were common among the convicts. Men were attacked for many reasons, including money, which most kept in a "charger" (a hollow metal cylinder concealed in the rectum; also known as a "plan d'evasion", "plan", or "escape suppository"). Papillon befriended Louis Dega, a former banker convicted of counterfeiting. He agreed to protect Dega from attackers trying to get his charger.Upon arriving at the penal colony, Papillon claimed to be ill and was sent to the infirmary. There he collaborated with two men, Clousiot and André Maturette, to escape from the prison. They planned to use a sailboat acquired with the help of the associated leper colony at Pigeon Island (Saint Lucia). The Maroni River carried them to the Atlantic Ocean, and they sailed to the northwest, reaching Trinidad.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dalek_Invasion_of_Earth"title="The Dalek Invasion of Earth">
After the TARDIS materialises, the First Doctor (William Hartnell), Susan Foreman (Carole Ann Ford), Ian Chesterton (William Russell), and Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill) surmise that they have landed in London, but find it in ruins. The Doctor and Ian stumble across an army of Robomen as a Dalek rises from the River Thames. The Daleks take the Doctor and Ian onboard their saucer. Resistance members explain that the Daleks invaded Earth in the aftermath of a meteorite bombardment ten years prior.Barbara and Susan are taken by refugees to a nearby shelter in an abandoned Underground station, where they meet resistance members who are planning an assault on the Daleks. The resistance leader, paraplegic scientist Dortmun (Alan Judd), has created a bomb to destroy the Daleks' outer casings. Susan, Barbara, and the resistance team attack the Daleks using the bombs, but they are ineffective. David (Peter Fraser) rescues the Doctor with Susan while Barbara gets separated. Ian hides as the saucer leaves for the Dalek mining operations. There, he escapes the Slyther (Nick Evans), a pet of the Black Dalek. He eventually hides in the mine and becomes trapped in a capsule filled with explosives. The Doctor, Susan, and David arrive at the cliffs overlooking the mine; the Doctor sends David and Susan to interfere with the Daleks' radio signals, while he climbs into the mine.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Machines"title="The War Machines">
The TARDIS lands in London, near the Post Office Tower, where the First Doctor and Dodo meet Professor Brett, the creator of WOTAN (short for Will Operating Thought ANalogue). In four days' time, WOTAN will be linked to other major computers across the world to take them over, including those of the White House, Cape Kennedy and the Royal Navy.Dodo goes with Polly, Brett's secretary, to the Inferno nightclub, where they meet Ben Jackson, while the Doctor attends a Royal Scientific Club meeting about WOTAN, led by Sir Charles Summer. Before Brett can depart for the meeting, he is hypnotised by WOTAN. He then fetches Krimpton, an electronics colleague, and takes him to WOTAN, where he, too, is possessed by the computer. Major Green, the chief of security in the Tower, is also taken over, and sends WOTAN's control signals to Dodo at the nightclub via telephone.Using its hypnotic control, WOTAN enlists a workforce to construct twelve robotic War Machines around London. One of these machines is built in a warehouse in Covent Garden, close to the Inferno nightclub.The next day, the Doctor telephones Brett at the Post Office Tower, and is nearly possessed by WOTAN. Thinking the Doctor is now controlled, Dodo reveals that the War Machines are being constructed in strategic points in London. The Doctor breaks WOTAN's hypnotic control over her, and she is sent to stay with Sir Charles's wife in the country to recover.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Worlds_Collide"title="When Worlds Collide">
Sven Bronson, a Swedish astronomer working at an observatory in South Africa, discovers a pair of rogue planets, Bronson Alpha and Bronson Beta, which will soon enter the Solar System. In eight months, they will pass close enough for gravitational forces to cause catastrophic damage to the Earth. Sixteen months later, after swinging around the Sun, Bronson Alpha (a gas giant) will return to pulverize the Earth and depart. Bronson Beta (discovered to be Earth-like and potentially habitable) may remain and assume a stable orbit.Scientists led by Cole Hendron work desperately to build an atomic rocket to transport enough people, animals and equipment to Bronson Beta to save humanity from extinction. Various countries do the same. The United States evacuates coastal regions in preparation for the first encounter. As the planets approach, observers see through their telescopes cities on Bronson Beta. Tidal waves sweep inland at a height of , volcanic eruptions and earthquakes add to the deadly toll, and the weather runs wild for more than two days. Bronson Alpha grazes and destroys the Moon.Three men take a floatplane to check out conditions across the United States and meet with the President in Hutchinson, Kansas, the temporary capital of the United States. All three are wounded fighting off a mob at their last stop, but manage to return with a precious sample of an extremely heat-resistant metal one of them had noticed. This solves the last remaining engineering obstacle: no material had been found before to make rocket tubes capable of withstanding the heat of the atomic exhaust.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_the_Blue_Dolphins"title="Island of the Blue Dolphins">
The main character is a Nicoleño girl named Won-a-pa-lei, whose secret name is Karana. She has a brother named Ramo and a sister named Ulape. Her people live in a village called Ghalas-at and the tribe survives by gathering roots and fishing. One day, a ship of Russian fur hunters and Aleut people led by Captain Orlov arrive and persuade the Nicoleños to let them hunt sea otter in exchange for other goods. However, the Russians attempt to swindle the islanders by leaving without paying. When they are confronted by Karana's father Chief Chowig, a battle breaks out. Karana's father and many other men in the tribe die in battle against the well-armed Russians.Later, the "replacement chief" Chief Kimki leaves the island on a canoe for new land in the East. Eventually, he sends a "giant canoe" to bring his people to the mainland even though he himself does not return. The white missionaries come to Karana's village and tell them to pack their goods and go to the ship. Karana's brother Ramo runs off to retrieve his fishing spear. Although Karana urges the captain to wait for Ramo to return, the ship must leave before a storm approaches. Despite restraint, Karana jumps off the ship and swims to shore and the ship departs without them.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiln_People"title="Kiln People">
The novel takes place in a future in which people can create clay duplicates (called "dittos" or golems) of themselves. A ditto retains all of the archetype's memories up until the time of duplication. The duplicate lasts only about a day, and the original person (referred to in the book as an archie, from "archetype", or "rig", from "original") can then choose whether or not to upload the ditto's memories. Most dittos want to inload, so that their experience will be continuous with that of their archie. Most people use dittos to do their work, as they are affordable even for the poor. Many also use dittos to experience pleasure which could hurt a real person. Dittos come in many colors, which signify their quality and intended role. A cheap ditto suitable for housework is green, whereas a quality one for business is gray. Ebonies are highly specialized dittos that are good at intelligent data analysis; platinums are only used by the very rich, and closely resemble real people. Ivory dittos specialize in the reception of pleasure and sexual fulfillment. Other colors of ditto (such as purple, red, and yellow) exist, but are rarely mentioned in the novel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poisonwood_Bible"title="The Poisonwood Bible">
Orleanna Price, the mother of the family, narrates the introductory chapter in five of the novel's seven sections. The narrative then alternates among the four daughters, with a slight preference for the voice of the most outspoken one, Leah. The four girls increasingly mature and develop differently as each adapts to African village life and the political turmoil that overtakes the Belgian Congo in the 1960s.The Price family packs up their belongings for their flight to the Congo, where they are going to spend a year as the family of a missionary. However, shortly before leaving, they are informed that they are limited to 44 pounds of luggage per person. The Southern Baptist Mission League suggests they solve this problem by leaving for the airport wearing many layers of clothing, hiding household items among the layers of clothes to lighten their luggage. This is the first problem of many the Price family will face.The Price girls – Rachel, Leah, Adah and Ruth May – and their father, Nathan, attend their first church service in the village of Kilanga, and they realize how different their culture is from that of the Congo. For example, 14-year-old Leah helps her father plant a "demonstration garden"; it immediately receives criticism from Mama Tataba, whom the family has engaged as a live-in helper, and the garden does poorly due to the inappropriate climate. Nathan tries to hold an impromptu Easter celebration in hopes of baptizing numerous people, but he is not successful in baptizing even one, as the river along the village, where he plans to hold the baptism, is infested with crocodiles.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Heart"title="The Death of the Heart">
At the beginning of the novel, Portia moves in with Anna and Thomas Quayne after her mother dies. Portia is Thomas's half sister. Mr. Quayne (Thomas's father) had an extramarital affair with Irene (Portia's mother) while married to Thomas's mother. When Irene became pregnant, and Mrs. Quayne learned of it, she was adamant that he do what was the right thing: so, at his own wife's unyielding insistence, Mr. Quayne divorced Thomas's mother and married Irene. Mr. Quayne, Irene, and Portia then left England and travelled through Europe as exiles from society and from the Quayne family, living in the cheapest of lodgings. Irene and Portia continued to live in this fashion until, when Portia was 16, Irene died. Portia was sent to live with Thomas and Anna after Irene's death. The plan is that she is to stay with them for one year at which time Portia will leave and move in with Irene's sister (Portia's aunt).Portia is a naturally awkward girl, and this aspect of her personality has been intensified by her strange childhood which was one of constant travel, change, and strangers, while at the same time being incredibly isolating. She is uniquely innocent in her observations of people, and is baffled by inconsistencies between what they say and what they do, and wonders why people say things they do not mean. She keeps a diary detailing the lives of those around her, particularly Anna, trying to understand the key to people she thinks she is missing. Anna finds and reads Portia's diary; she is incensed by the idea of the girl observing her every move, and rages about the girl to her friend St. Quentin, a writer and frequent visitor to the Quaynes's home. It becomes clear over the course of the novel that Anna dislikes Portia because she is strange. Anna and Thomas are generally uncomfortable with Portia in their home but try to make do. They send her to classes where she makes friends with a girl named Lilian.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_Mirth"title="The House of Mirth">
Lily Bart, a beautiful but impoverished socialite, is on her way to a house party at Bellomont, the country home of her best friend, Judy Trenor. Her pressing task is to find a husband with the requisite wealth and status to maintain her place in New York society. Additional challenges to her success are her advancing age—at twenty-nine, she has been on the "marriage market" for more than ten years—her penchant for gambling at bridge that has left her with debts beyond her means to pay, and her efforts as part of upper-crust society to keep up appearances with her wealthy friends. Lily's choices are further complicated by her innermost desire to marry for love as well as money and status, and her longing to be free of the claustrophobic constrictions and routines of upper-crust society.Judy has arranged for her to spend more time in the company of Percy Gryce, a potential suitor who is wealthy but whom Lily finds boring. Lily grew up surrounded by elegance and luxury—an atmosphere she believes she cannot live without, as she has learned to abhor "dinginess." The loss of her father's wealth and the death of her parents left her an orphan at twenty. Lacking an inheritance or a caring protector, she adapts to life as a ward of her strait-laced aunt Julia Peniston from whom she receives an erratic allowance, a fashionable address, and good food, but little direction or parenting. Lily is not fond of her aunt Julia and avoids her whenever possible while simultaneously relying on her for both necessities and luxuries.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_and_Refutations"title="Proofs and Refutations">
Many important logical ideas are explained in the book. For example, the difference between a counterexample to a lemma (a so-called 'local counterexample') and a counterexample to the specific conjecture under attack (a 'global counterexample' to the Euler characteristic, in this case) is discussed.Lakatos argues for a different kind of textbook, one that uses heuristic style. To the critics that say such a textbook would be too long, he replies: 'The answer to this pedestrian argument is: let us try.'The book includes two appendices. In the first, Lakatos gives examples of the heuristic process in mathematical discovery. In the second, he contrasts the deductivist and heuristic approaches and provides heuristic analysis of some 'proof generated' concepts, including uniform convergence, bounded variation, and the Carathéodory definition of a measurable set.The pupils in the book are named after letters of the Greek alphabet.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_the_Castaways"title="In Search of the Castaways">
The book tells the story of the quest for Captain Grant of the "Britannia". After finding a bottle the captain had cast into the ocean after the "Britannia" is shipwrecked, Lord and Lady Glenarvan of Scotland contact Mary and Robert, the young daughter and son of Captain Grant, through an announcement in a newspaper. The government refuses to launch a rescue expedition, but Lord and Lady Glenarvan, moved by the children's condition, decide to do it by themselves. The main difficulty is that the coordinates of the wreckage are mostly erased, and only the latitude (37 degrees) is known; thus, the expedition would have to circumnavigate the 37th parallel south. The bottle was retrieved from a shark's stomach, so it is impossible to trace its origin by the currents. Remaining clues consist of a few words in three languages. They are re-interpreted several times throughout the novel to make various destinations seem likely like Chile, Argentina, Southern Tip of Australia, at some times New Zealand and even the Northern Most Part of Antarctica (to which they never sailed).Lord Glenarvan makes it his quest to find Grant; together with his wife, Grant's children and the crew of his yacht, the "Duncan", they set off for South America. An unexpected passenger in the form of French geographer Jacques Paganel (he missed his steamer to India by accidentally boarding the "Duncan") joins the search. They explore Patagonia, Tristan da Cunha Island, Amsterdam Island, and Australia (a pretext to describe the flora, fauna, and geography of numerous places to the audience).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Is_Rising"title="The Dark Is Rising">
Will Stanton begins to have strange and magical experiences on his 11th birthday, which is at the winter solstice – a few days before Christmas. He discovers he is one of a group of an ancient magical people called the Old Ones, who are guardians and warriors for "the Light" (i.e. good), who are waging a centuries-long battle against the forces of "the Dark" (i.e. evil), whose evil power is rising. To fight back the Dark, the Old Ones needs to find and reclaim four magical talismans (called "Things of Power") for the Light. The first of these is the "Circle of Signs" (a set of magical objects in the form of circles divided into four sections by a cross). Will is quested to collect all the Signs, so that the completed Circle can be used to ward off the forces of the Dark.This book is where the protagonist Will Stanton, a main character in "The Dark Is Rising Sequence", is introduced. The book features elements of British folklore that are especially associated with the Thames Valley, with Herne the Hunter making an appearance. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_American"title="The Ugly American">
In one vignette, a Burmese journalist says, "For some reason, the [American] people I meet in my country are not the same as the ones I knew in the United States. A mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go to a foreign land. They isolate themselves socially. They live pretentiously. They are loud and ostentatious."The American Ambassador "Lucky" Lou Sears confines himself to his comfortable diplomatic compound in the capital. The Soviet ambassador speaks the local language and understands the local culture. He informs his Moscow superiors that Sears "keeps his people tied up with meetings, social events, and greeting and briefing the scores of senators, congressmen, generals, admirals, under secretaries of state and defense, and so on, who come pouring through here to 'look for themselves.'" Sears undermines the creative efforts to head off the communist insurgency.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_(novel)"title="Lincoln (novel)">
## Style.The novel is part of Gore Vidal’s ‘Narratives of Empire’ series and joins his other works; Burr (1973), 1876 (1976) and Washington D.C. (1967) as chronicles of America. In the series, Vidal offers works of historical fiction that reinterpret American history starting from the American Revolution and spanning past World War II.The book is never narrated from Lincoln’s perspective. Rather, the reader views Lincoln through the eyes of his enemies, friends, political rivalries and even those who sought to kill him. Significant characters include Lincoln’s cabinet secretaries; William Seward, Salmon Chase as well as Kate Sprague, John Hay, Mary Todd Lincoln and David Herold.Much of the writing is presented through dramatic, flamboyant dialogue. Vidal favours this over narration or observational writing, attempting to convey his own personal wit and charisma through his characters.The novel is not simply a work of historical fiction, but with Lincoln's personal and political development it is also a "Bildungsroman". Lincoln's development starts with the slow mobilisation and unification of his inner Cabinet, climaxes with his military victory and political restoration of the Union and is completed with his assassination
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSN_(novel)"title="SSN (novel)">
## Preface: "Prelude to War".In 1997, former Chinese Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping dies, creating a power struggle within the Chinese government. Premier Li Peng later takes over in a coup d'etat and orders the arrest of his political rivals, particularly Deng's technical successor Jiang Zemin. He then orders an invasion of the Spratly Islands, where a large oil deposit was recently discovered by an American oil company. A Chinese attacks the American aircraft carrier , prompting one of its escort submarines to sink the Chinese sub in retaliation and killing everyone aboard. War between the two countries becomes imminent.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passion_of_New_Eve"title="The Passion of New Eve">
At the start of the novel, Evelyn, a male English professor, is taking up a new post in a university in New York. His tribute to Tristessa de St Ange, a (fictional) American silent movie star, on his last night in England is to be given fellatio by a girl he takes to see one of her films.He arrives in a dystopian New York, a city in its last stages of rotting death, overrun by huge rats and human emotions distilled to their most primeval. The job that he has been offered at a university falls through after the school is taken over by a militant black rebel group. He is then left destitute in the middle of New York with very little money and no job. Evelyn then befriends a Czech neighbour, Baroslav, who is an alchemist. Baroslav is killed by a group of men in the city and Evelyn is then left alone. On a late night run to the local drug store he meets Leilah. He becomes fascinated with Leilah, an exotic young African-American night club dancer, and he follows her home through the city. He lives with her and they have a short sexual relationship where he frequently abuses her. He makes no emotional link, seeing her only in terms of sex. He writes to his parents and finds out that he is left a lot of money from a recently deceased relative. He becomes repelled by Leilah after he impregnated her, and he then abandons her to a voodoo abortionist. The abortion goes wrong and Leilah is put in hospital. Evelyn is expected to pay a large fee for Leilah's hospital bills, but only plans on using some of the money. The rest Leilah gets from selling her fur coats. After Evelyn withdraws the money to pay for the bill, he is mugged and beaten by a group of young men. At the last moment, they are scared away before they can find the wad of cash Evelyn has taped under his genitals. He sends Leilah red roses, then rents a bulletproof car and heads straight to the desert, leaving everything behind including Leilah.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middlesex_(novel)"title="Middlesex (novel)">
Cal Stephanides (his masculine identity), also known as Calliope (feminine), recounts how 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, a recessive condition, caused him to be born with female characteristics. The book continues with accounts of his family's history and the conception of Cal, his childhood and teenage years being raised as a girl, and the discovery of his intersex condition. Cal weaves his opinion of the events in hindsight from his life after his father's funeral. "Middlesex" is set in the 20th century and interjects historical elements, such as the Balkan Wars, the Nation of Islam, the 1967 Detroit riot, and the Watergate scandal in the story.In 1922, Cal's paternal grandfather, Eleutherios "Lefty" Stephanides, lives in Bithynios, a village in Asia Minor. In the small village, high on the slope of Mount Olympos above the city of Bursa, incestuous marriages between cousins are a quietly accepted practice. Lefty makes a living selling silkworm cocoons harvested by his sister, Desdemona. The siblings are orphans; their parents are victims of the ongoing Greco-Turkish War. Lefty and Desdemona develop a romantic relationship as the war progresses. They flee the chaos brought by the war on a ship the United States amid the Great Fire of Smyrna. Their histories unknown to the other passengers, they marry each other on board the vessel.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982,_Janine"title="1982, Janine">
The novel is narrated by Jock McLeish, a supervisor of the installation of alarm systems. Divorced, alcoholic and approaching fifty, his problems coalesce in a long night of the soul in a hotel room in Peebles or Selkirk.McLeish attempts to spend the night assembling an intricate pornographic fantasy. His cast of characters includes: Janine, based on a childhood memory of Jane Russell in "The Outlaw"; Superb (short for Superbitch); and Big Momma, an obese lesbian. All of these are submitted to sadomasochistic practices, parts of which are described at some length. However, McLeish constantly returns to reminiscences of his previous life and lovers. These prompt his attempted suicide. Chapter 11 of the novel is a typographical explosion, with the text splitting into several parallel voices on each page (including that of God). The crisis concludes with McLeish vomiting up the pills which he had hoped would kill him, and facing the truth of his actions as morning dawns.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_(Mankell_novel)"title="Firewall (Mankell novel)">
A series of bizarre incidents sweep across Sweden: a man dies in front of an ATM, two young women slaughter an elderly taxi driver, a murder is committed aboard a Baltic Sea ferry, and a sub-station engineer makes a gruesome discovery while investigating the cause of a nationwide power cut. As Wallander investigates, he uncovers a sinister plan to bring the Western world to its knees.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curious_Incident_of_the_Dog_in_the_Night-Time"title="The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time">
Christopher John Francis Boone is a 15-year-old boy with behavioral problems living in Swindon, England, with his widowed father, Ed. Christopher’s mother Judy was known to have passed away from a heart attack two years prior to the events of the story. One day, Christopher discovers that his neighbor Mrs. Shears’ dog Wellington has been fatally speared with a garden fork. As Christopher mourns over Wellington’s body, Mrs. Shears calls the police. When a policeman grabs Christopher’s arm, Christopher panics and hits him, resulting in him being arrested for assaulting a police officer, though he is quickly released with a police caution. He decides to investigate the dog's death, chronicling any information he receives in a book. During his investigation, he meets the elderly Mrs. Alexander, who informs Christopher that his mother had an affair with Mr. Shears.Ed discovers the book and confiscates it. While searching Ed’s room for the book, Christopher finds letters from his mother dated after her supposed death, leading him to become distressed and enter a catatonic state. Realizing that Christopher has discovered the letters, Ed admits to lying about Judy's death; she is still alive and living in London with Mr. Shears. Ed also confesses that he had killed Wellington in anger after an argument with Mrs. Shears. Christopher decides to run away and live with his mother.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zazie_dans_le_Métro_(novel)"title="Zazie dans le Métro (novel)">
Zazie, a foul-mouthed provincial girl is dropped off at the Paris train station to spend a weekend with her uncle Gabriel while her mother Jeanne Lalochère spends time with her lover. Zazie tells Gabriel that she wants to visit the Paris Métro, but Gabriel tells her she cannot as it is closed due to a strike. Throughout the novel, Zazie asks Gabriel if he is a "hormosessuel" (homosexual), to which he vigorously denies. The two are driven off to Gabriel's apartment by Gabriel's friend Charles, a taxi driver. Upon arriving, Zazie encounters Turandot, the manager of La Cave, a restaurant under Gabriel's apartment, his pet parrot Laverdure, and Gabriel's wife Marceline.The following day, Zazie leaves the apartment while Gabriel is sleeping to visit the subway by herself. She encounters a strange man implied to be a pedophile (or "satyr") who takes her to a flea market and buys her blue jeans. Gabriel learns from Gridoux, a shoemaker and neighbor that she ran away after Turandot confronted her for running off. Zazie brings the man back to the apartment, who identifies himself as "Pédro-Surplus" and accuses Zazie of stealing the jeans from him. When the man begins talking to Marceline, Gabriel kicks him out of the apartment. While serving food to Gridoux, Mado P'tits-Pieds, a waitress at La Cave tells him about her romantic interest in Charles. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of_Atlantis"title="Romance of Atlantis">
Atlantis is ruled by the beautiful and intelligent Empress Salustra. The fate of the Empire will be decided by an arranged marriage with the ruler of a less advanced, semi-barbarian northern kingdom, as the advanced technology of Atlantis is powerless against strange environmental and ecological disasters.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vampire_Armand"title="The Vampire Armand">
With Lestat de Lioncourt still in slumber since "Memnoch the Devil", the vampire coven is reunited around the "brat prince" and the vampire David Talbot asks Armand tell his life story.Born somewhere in the Kievan Rus in the late 15th century, Armand (at this time called Andrei) becomes an icon painter in a monastery. He is forcefully taken out of this life of prayer and devotion by slave traders, who transport him to Constantinople and then to a brothel in Venice. Soon after his arrival, he is purchased by the vampire Marius de Romanus, who names him Amadeo.Marius lives the extravagant life of a respected Renaissance painter, and mentors many boys who serve as his apprentices. Marius provides them with education, shelter, and food, and he assists them in finding respectable positions once they are grown. Over time, Amadeo's relationship with Marius develops and they become much closer than Marius is with any of the other boys. In addition to developing a sexual relationship, Amadeo sleeps in Marius' bed, is privy to special privileges, and becomes something of a "head boy" in the household. Still, Marius maintains strict control over Amadeo, and expects industriousness from him in all things.When Amadeo comes of age, Marius begins Amadeo's education in sexuality and coupling. He takes Amadeo to a brothel, where he remains for several days. Amadeo later visits a male brothel, and makes several observations about the difference in sexual activities with the different genders. There is a distinct bisexuality to Amadeo's nature, as he enjoys activity with either sex. He later has a brief affair with an Englishman called Lord Harlech, who develops an unrequited obsession with Amadeo. During this period, Amadeo befriends and ultimately seduces Bianca Solderini, a wealthy debutante and courtesan whose primary role in life seems to be to throw nightly parties.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dharma_Bums"title="The Dharma Bums">
The character Japhy drives Ray Smith's story, whose penchant for simplicity and Zen Buddhism influenced Kerouac on the eve of the sudden and unpredicted success of "On the Road". The action shifts between the events of Smith and Ryder's "city life," such as three-day parties and enactments of the Buddhist "Yab-Yum" rituals, to the sublime and peaceful imagery where Kerouac seeks a type of transcendence. The novel concludes with a change in narrative style, with Kerouac working alone as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak (adjacent to Hozomeen Mountain), in what would soon be declared North Cascades National Park (see also Kerouac's novel "Desolation Angels"). His summer on Desolation Peak was desperately lonely. “Many's the time I thought I'd die of boredom or jump off the mountain,” he wrote in "Desolation Angels". Yet in "The" "Dharma Bums", Kerouac described the experience in elegiac prose.One episode in the book features Smith, Ryder, and Henry Morley (based on real-life friend John Montgomery) climbing Matterhorn Peak in California. It relates Kerouac's introduction to this type of mountaineering and inspired him to spend the following summer as a fire lookout for the United States Forest Service on Desolation Peak in Washington.Chapter 2 of the novel gives an account of the legendary 1955 Six Gallery reading, where Allen Ginsberg ('Alvah Goldbrook' in the book) gave a debut presentation of his poem "Howl" (changed to "Wail" in the book). At the event, other authors including Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen also performed.Anyway I followed the whole gang of howling poets to the reading at Gallery Six that night, which was, among other important things, the night of the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Everyone was there. It was a mad night. And I was the one who got things jumping by going around collecting dimes and quarters from the rather stiff audience standing around in the gallery and coming back with three huge gallon jugs of California Burgundy and getting them all piffed so that by eleven o'clock when Alvah Goldbook was reading his poem 'Wail' drunk with arms outspread everybody was yelling 'Go! Go! Go!' (like a jam session) and old Rheinhold Cacoethes the father of the Frisco poetry scene was wiping his tears in gladness.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Even_Cowgirls_Get_the_Blues_(novel)"title="Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (novel)">
Sissy Hankshaw, the novel's protagonist, is a woman born with enormously large thumbs who considers her mutation a gift. The novel covers various topics, including free love, feminism, drug use, birds, political rebellion, animal rights, body odor, religion, and yams.Sissy capitalizes on the size of her thumbs by becoming a hitchhiker and subsequently travels to New York. The character becomes a model for The Countess, a male homosexual tycoon of menstrual hygiene products. The Tycoon introduces Sissy to a staid Mohawk named Julian Gitche, whom she later marries. In her later travels, she encounters, among many others, a sexually open cowgirl named Bonanza Jellybean and an itinerant escapee from a Japanese internment camp happily mislabeled The Chink. The Chink is presented as a hermetic mystic and, at one point writes on a cave wall, "I believe in everything; nothing is sacred. I believe in nothing; everything is sacred." and frequently says "Ha Ha Ho Ho and Hee Hee." A flock of whooping cranes also makes frequent appearances throughout the novel, which includes details of their physical characteristics and migratory patterns. Robbins also inserts himself into the novel (as a character).
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_and_the_Giant_Peach"title="James and the Giant Peach">
James Henry Trotter is a boy who lives happily with his parents in a house by the sea. Unfortunately, when he is four years old, an oddly carnivorous rhinoceros escapes from the zoo and eats James' parents. He ends up with his two cruel aunts, Spiker and Sponge. Instead of caring for him, they treat him badly, feed him improperly, and force him to sleep on bare floorboards.After James has been living with his aunts for three years, he meets a mysterious man who gives him a bag of magical crystals, instructing James to use them in a potion that would change his life for the better. While returning home, James stumbles and spills the bag on the ground, losing the crystals as they dig themselves underground. A nearby peach tree, in turn, produces a single peach which soon grows to the size of a house. Spiker and Sponge build a fence around it and earn money by selling viewing tickets to tourists; James is locked in the house, only able to see the peach through the bars of his bedroom window.After the tourists have gone, James is assigned to clean the rubbish around the peach and finds a tunnel inside it. He enters it and meets Centipede, Miss Spider, Old Green Grasshopper, Earthworm, Ladybug, Glowworm, and Silkworm who become his friends.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_(novel)"title="Sphere (novel)">
A group of scientists (namely psychologist Norman Johnson, mathematician Harry Adams, zoologist Beth Halpern, astrophysicist Ted Fielding, and marine biologist Arthur Levine), along with U.S. Navy personnel, travel to a deep sea habitat at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, where an enormous spacecraft has been discovered.During the descent, Levine becomes claustrophobic and is returned to the surface. The other scientists arrive safely at Habitat DH-8. After their arrival and subsequent pressurization to the habitat's exotic-gas environment, the Navy sends a robot to enter the spacecraft first, which locates and opens a panel near the spacecraft door.As the robot's cameras focus on the opened panel, labels in English indicate the spacecraft is actually a U.S. spacecraft constructed in the future and sent through time, appearing on the seabed at least 350 years before its creation. The robot is unable to open a hatch leading further inside, forcing the team to don pressure suits and explore the spacecraft. In a large cargo hold, the team discovers a mysterious spherical object that is clearly of extra-terrestrial origin.Reasoning the ship's future builders were apparently unaware that it had already been found in their past, Adams becomes convinced that the team will not survive to report their discovery. Remaining behind after the rest of the team returns to the habitat, Adams succeeds in opening and entering the sphere. Meanwhile, on the surface, a Pacific cyclone forces the supporting Naval ships to evacuate, trapping and isolating the scientists on the ocean floor for five days. Adams is found and returned to the DH-8 Habitat where he awakens with a terrible headache and little-to-no memory of how he opened the sphere or what occurred while he was inside. Immediately afterwards, the team is contacted by an intelligent, seemingly friendly alien entity that calls itself "Jerry".
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triton_(novel)"title="Triton (novel)">
As the subtitle implies, the novel offers several conflicting perspectives on the concept of utopia. "Utopia" literally means "good place" or "no place". Delany takes the term "heterotopia" from the writings of philosopher Michel Foucault. Literally, heterotopia means "other place" or "a place of differences". Foucault uses the term to designate spaces outside everyday fixed institutional and social spaces, for example trains, motels and cemeteries. In the novel's future Solar System, Neptune's moon Triton supports one of several human societies independent from Earth, which has developed along radically libertarian lines in some ways: though a representative government exists, it has virtually no power to regulate private behavior, and citizens may choose to live in an area where no laws apply at all. Technology provides for a high degree of self-modification, so that one can change one's physical appearance, gender, sexual orientation, and even specific patterns of likes and dislikes.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasm_City"title="Chasm City">
"Chasm City" is framed and largely written in the voice of Tanner Mirabel, a security expert who has come to Chasm City to avenge the death of his former client's wife at the hands of a "postmortal" noble named Argent Reivich.Tanner arrives to find that Yellowstone, the most advanced civilization in human history, has descended into squalor; an alien nanotech virus known as the Melding Plague has wreaked havoc throughout the system. Chasm City, a dense forest of mile-high shapeshifting skyscrapers, has melted into a slum. The Glitter Band, a sparkling diorama of ten thousand orbital habitats, has been reduced to a "Rust Belt" of a few hundred survivors, mostly primitive and pre-nanotech antiques.In this chaos of plague and desolation, Tanner seeks his prey, only to discover that Reivich is more clever than he originally thought. In the midst of his hunt, he begins experiencing virus-induced flashbacks from the life of Sky Haussmann, the founder of his home world, Sky's Edge, who is both revered and reviled for the crimes he committed for his people.From the depths of the gas plume at the heart of Chasm City, to the aristocratic canopy spanning what remains of the skyscrapers, Mirabel begins to unravel the mystery of the Melding Plague.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peyton_Place_(novel)"title="Peyton Place (novel)">
The story starts in 1937 and continues through the years following World War II. Lonely and repressed Constance MacKenzie leaves Peyton Place for New York City at a young age and meets a man in the fabrics business named Allison MacKenzie, who already is married with children. Constance becomes pregnant with MacKenzie's child. MacKenzie dies a few years after his daughter, also named Allison, is born. Constance and her daughter adopt Allison's last name before returning to Peyton Place as a "widow" and child, and Constance alters her daughter's birth date to make her appear legitimate. With the money she's saved as well as what she received from her late lover's will, she opens up an apparel store called the Thrifty Corner. Allison grows up lonely and isolated, idealizing the father she never had and dreaming of a future as a published author. The poorer side of Peyton Place is represented by the Cross family, Nellie and Lucas Cross and their daughter Selena, who is Nellie's biological daughter, but not Lucas'. Paul, Lucas's son and Selena's stepbrother, left Peyton Place after accusing Lucas of stealing his money. Nellie and Lucas later have a child together: Joey, who lives with the couple and Selena in "the shacks", a poor section of town being targeted for redevelopment. Selena and Allison become friends, but the drastic difference in their socioeconomic situations ensures the friendship does not last long."While Allison wants Selena to share her love of bucolic little spots like Road's End, Selena wants only to spend time at Allison's mother's dress shop and, increasingly, to talk with boys. Moreover, when Allison finally gets a look inside the shack where Selena lives, she is horrified by the squalor and the violence she sees in Lucas. Eventually, Allison and Selena grow distant because of Selena's closeness with Ted Carter."When Selena turns 14 years old, Lucas begins to abuse her, impregnating her and leaving local doctor Matthew Swain in a troublesome situation in which he decides to perform an abortion. The doctor makes Lucas leave town, and after she discovers this, Nellie commits suicide by hanging. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_You_Can_Save_Mankind"title="Only You Can Save Mankind">
Twelve-year-old Johnny receives a pirate edition of the new video game "Only You Can Save Mankind" from his friend Wobbler. However, he has not been playing for long when the ScreeWee Empire surrenders to him. After accepting the surrender he finds himself inside the game in his dreams, where he must deal with the suspicious Gunnery Officer as well as the understanding Captain, and work out exactly what they're all supposed to do now.This might all be the result of an over-active imagination except that the ScreeWee have disappeared altogether from everyone else's copy of the game. With the help of another player, Kirsty, who calls herself "Sigourney" (as in Weaver), Johnny must try to get the ScreeWee home.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_and_the_Dead"title="Johnny and the Dead">
The story starts with Johnny Maxwell, a 12-year-old boy, taking a shortcut through the local Blackbury cemetery to reach his home. In the cemetery, Johnny meets the spirit of Alderman Thomas Bowler and realizes that he can interact with the spirits of the dead. Later, Johnny meets all the deceased occupants of the cemetery and discusses with them the council's sale of Blackbury's neglected cemetery to a faceless conglomerate, who plan to build offices on it. Various dead citizens, led by a former town councillor, ask Johnny to help stop it.While Johnny (helped by his semi-believing friends) tries to find evidence of famous internees and speaks out at community meetings, the dead begin to take an interest in modern-day life and realise they are not, as they once believed, trapped in the cemetery.Finally the council is forced to back down, but the dead are no longer interested; they have decided that instead of waiting for the Day of Judgement, they will make the decision themselves. Most of them depart the cemetery to continue their journey into the afterlife but, thanks to the campaigning of the Blackbury Volunteers, the town's living residents have rediscovered the cemetery as a link to their past. As one of the dead puts it before leaving: "The living must remember, and the dead must forget."
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_(Doctor_Who_episode)"title="Rose (Doctor Who episode)">
Rose Tyler, a teenage shop assistant, is chased by mannequins in the basement of Henrik's, the department store where she works. She is rescued by the Ninth Doctor, who destroys the building with an explosion. The next day, the Doctor visits Rose at her home, where he is attacked by a plastic mannequin arm which he and Rose subdue. Rose investigates the Doctor and meets Clive, who has been tracking the Doctor's appearances throughout history. Clive tells Rose that the Doctor is dangerous and that if he's there, something bad is about to happen. While Rose is talking to Clive, her boyfriend Mickey Smith is kidnapped by a wheelie bin and replaced with a plastic doppelgänger.The fake Mickey takes Rose to lunch and attempts to question her about the Doctor, but the Doctor shows up and beheads the doppelgänger. The Doctor takes Rose and the plastic head to the TARDIS and attempts to use the head to locate the controlling signal. With the head connected, the TARDIS takes them to the London Eye. The Doctor explains to Rose that the fake Mickey was an Auton, controlled by a signal from the Nestene Consciousness. He has a vial of anti-plastic that can be used to destroy the Nestene Consciousness if necessary. Realising that the transmitter is the London Eye itself, Rose and the Doctor descend underneath it to stop the Nestene Consciousness. They find Mickey, tied up but alive, and the Doctor speaks to the Nestene Consciousness. He tries to negotiate with it, but the Consciousness blames the Doctor for the destruction of its planet. The Nestene Consciousness activates all the Autons at a shopping arcade, where several shoppers are shot and killed, including Clive. The Doctor is also held down by a pair of Autons, but Rose rescues him and the anti-plastic drops into the vat where the Nestene Consciousness resides, killing it. With the Nestene Consciousness dead, the Autons all collapse. The Doctor uses the TARDIS to take Mickey and Rose home, then persuades Rose to join him as his new companion in the TARDIS.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_(Doctor_Who)"title="Survival (Doctor Who)">
The Seventh Doctor brings Ace back home to Perivale in west London. Ace becomes worried when most of her old friends seem to have disappeared, but the Doctor is more preoccupied with the black cat he sees skulking about. The cat appears to be selecting people and transporting them to another dimension. Ace finds herself being hunted down by a creature on horseback, which seems to be half-human, half-cheetah, and which hunts in tandem with the black cat. Later the Doctor and a keep-fit instructor called Paterson are chosen and teleported to another world, where the Doctor is greeted by his nemesis the Master.The Master explains the complex situation: they are on a sentient planet, which has the power to transform its inhabitants into animals. The formerly human inhabitants, which have since evolved into Cheetah People, originally bred the black cats as pets. The Master himself shows signs of transformation and needs the Doctor's help to escape from the planet.Ace finds her friends, Shreela and Midge, who are hiding in some woods with a young man called Derek. A Cheetah pack attacks and during the fight Midge kills one Cheetah while Ace injures another, called Karra. She begins to form an attachment to Karra and nurses her, tending her injuries, which worries the Doctor greatly. Ace's eyes change and she begins to transform into a Cheetah herself.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_Versa_(novel)"title="Vice Versa (novel)">
Set in contemporary Victorian times, the novel concerns businessman Paul Bultitude and his son Dick. Dick is about to leave home to return to a boarding school run by the cane-wielding headmaster, Dr. Grimstone. Bultitude, seeing his son's fear of returning to school, asserts that schooldays are the best years of a boy's life, and how he wishes he were the one going.At this point, thanks to a magic stone brought by an uncle from India which grants the possessor one wish, the father becomes a boy identical to the son. They are now on even terms. Dick, holding the stone, is ordered by his father to return him to his own body, but Dick refuses, and decides instead to become a man identical to how his father looked before the change. Mr Bultitude has to begin the new term at his son's boarding school, while Dick gets a chance to run his father's business in the City. In the end, both are restored to their own bodies, with a better understanding of each other.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_of_a_Geisha"title="Memoirs of a Geisha">
In 1929, nine year-old Sakamoto Chiyo and her sister are sold by their father to work within the entertainment districts of Kyoto. They are taken from their home in a coastal fishing village known as Yoroido and travel to Kyoto by train. Chiyo is taken to the Nitta (geisha boarding house) in Gion, but her sister is taken to a brothel within Kyoto's pleasure district.Chiyo is introduced to Auntie, Mother, and Granny. Both Auntie and Mother are strict, though Auntie is kinder to Chiyo, whereas Mother is driven by money and business. Chiyo is also introduced to Hatsumomo, the premier geisha of the , its primary earner, and one of the most famous geisha of Gion. Hatsumomo dislikes Chiyo and goes out of her way to torment her.A few years later, Chiyo is given money and a handkerchief in the street by a kind stranger known to Chiyo as the Chairman. Soon afterwards, Pumpkin prepares to make her debut as a and the "younger sister" of Hatsumomo, whilst Chiyo remains a maid. Mameha, another famous geisha in Gion, persuades a reluctant Mother to reinvest in Chiyo's training, with Mameha acting as Chiyo's mentor and "older sister".Chiyo becomes an apprentice geisha with the given name of Sayuri, and is reacquainted with Chairman Iwamura, his closest friend and business partner Nobu, and a number of other prominent men. As Sayuri gains popularity, Hatsumomo tries to hurt Sayuri's reputation and career in the hopes of Mother adopting Pumpkin instead.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindness_(novel)"title="Blindness (novel)">
"Blindness" is the story of an unexplained mass epidemic of blindness afflicting nearly everyone in an unnamed city, and the social breakdown that swiftly follows. The novel follows the misfortune of a handful of unnamed characters who are among the first to be stricken with blindness, including an ophthalmologist, several of his patients, and assorted others, who are thrown together by chance. The ophthalmologist's spouse, "the doctor's wife," is inexplicably immune to the blindness. After a lengthy and traumatic quarantine in an asylum, the group bands together in a family-like unit to survive by their wits and by the good fortune that the doctor's wife has escaped the blindness. The sudden onset and unexplained origin and nature of the blindness cause widespread panic, and the social order rapidly unravels as the government attempts to contain the apparent contagion and keep order via increasingly repressive and inept measures.The first part of the novel follows the experiences of the central characters in the filthy, overcrowded asylum where they and other blind people have been quarantined. Hygiene, living conditions, and morale degrade horrifically in a very short period, mirroring the society outside. Anxiety over the availability of food, caused by delivery irregularities, acts to undermine solidarity; and lack of organization prevents the internees from fairly distributing food or chores. Soldiers assigned to guard the asylum and look after the well-being of the internees become increasingly antipathetic as one soldier after another becomes infected. The military refuses to allow basic medicine to be delivered, which ensures that a simple infection becomes deadly. Fearing an imminent escape, soldiers shoot down a crowd of internees waiting for a food delivery. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bat_(novel)"title="The Bat (novel)">
Norwegian police officer Harry Hole is sent to Sydney, Australia to serve as an attaché for the Australian police's investigation into the murder of a young female Norwegian girl residing in Australia, Inger Holter. Her boyfriend, Evans White, is initially approached as a suspect. Hole is assisted by Aboriginal colleague Andrew Kensington; together they find out that they are dealing with a serial killer who strangles blonde women. Hole befriends a red haired Swede named Birgitta. As the story becomes more complex, Hole struggles to find the killer and falls deeper into alcoholism. There are more back stories about Harry's past and culture in Australia.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Redbreast"title="The Redbreast">
During the Siege of Leningrad of World War II, a small group of Norwegian Waffen-SS volunteers are manning trenches just a short distance from the western lines. One of their number, Daniel Gudeson, is shot through the head and killed when he stands up to celebrate midnight on New Year's Eve. His body and face are covered up and he is laid to wait for a burial committee the following day. That same night, another soldier named Sindre Fauke disappears, believed to have defected to the Russians. Oddly, later that night, Gudeson's body mysteriously reappears in the trench. After a hand grenade lands the soldiers in the hospital, one of them, under the guise of "Uriah", falls in love with a nurse. After an unsuccessful attempt to elope, the two are separated.Decades later, when the U.S. President visits Norway for an Israeli-Palestinian peace conference, Oslo policeman Harry Hole is assigned to the security detail. After shooting a suspected assassin during the approach of the President's convoy, Hole is promoted to inspector and investigates a crime involving a very expensive sniper rifle. In addition, a group of neo-Nazis with which Hole has a prior history is suspected in the murder of an elderly drunkard. Hole and his colleague, Ellen Gjelten, hear of a man connected to arms dealings called 'The Prince' and set out to learn his identity. Hole shares a mutual attraction with a colleague named Rakel, who is reluctant to take things further with him due to a custody battle for her son, Oleg; unbeknownst to her and Hole, the matter is being orchestrated by Rakel's superior, who is also infatuated with her. 
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil's_Star"title="The Devil's Star">
A young woman is murdered in her Oslo flat. One finger has been severed from her left hand, and behind her eyelid is secreted a tiny diamond in the shape of a five-pointed star – a pentagram, the devil's star.Detective Harry Hole is assigned to the case with his long-time adversary Tom Waaler and initially wants no part in it. But Hole is already on notice to quit the force and is left with little alternative but to drag himself out of his alcoholic stupor and get to work.A wave of similar murders is on the horizon. An emerging pattern suggests that Oslo has a serial killer on its hands, and the five-pointed devil's star seems to be the key to solving the riddle.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bourne_Supremacy"title="The Bourne Supremacy">
Jason Bourne has recovered from most of his mental and physical injuries and is teaching Asian studies at a university in Maine under his real name of David Webb, living happily on campus with his wife Marie under supervision of psychiatrist Morris Panov.Meanwhile, high-ranking U.S. officials Ambassador Raymond Havilland and Undersecretary Edward McAllister discuss an increasingly alarming situation in the People's Republic of China, where the popular Communist official Sheng Chou Yang is boosting his rise to power with assassinations perpetrated by someone impersonating Jason Bourne. They fear that Sheng, a fanatical nationalist, might trigger a war, and therefore want him to be found and killed. Webb would be ideal for this, but they plan to involve him indirectly owing to his mistrust of the U.S. government and Webb's deep-seated emotional instability due to the loss of his first wife and children in Vietnam.McAllister arrives and informs Webb of the assassin in Asia who is killing under the name of Jason Bourne. Webb is told he requires a more visible security force because someone wants him dead.Soon thereafter, Marie is abducted by unknown people. Webb returns to the house, finds clues to her abduction, and immediately phones government officials, threatening to leak information about Treadstone and Medusa in an attempt to get assistance. He finds out information has been manipulated in order to make him seem crazy and delusional, and that his only course of action is to follow the instructions left by the kidnappers. He turns to the only person he thinks will be able to help him, Alexander Conklin, even though Conklin once tried to kill him. Conklin, now limping, is convinced there is government involvement but that they have lost control of the situation and the hired guns holding Marie are no longer in their control. Webb, who has transformed back into the persona of Jason Bourne, now has no choice but to go to Hong Kong and play out the scenario to get Marie back. In Hong Kong Bourne is led to a wealthy Tai-Pan who wants Webb to locate the impostor Jason Bourne because the impostor killed his wife; the Taipan is actually a British intelligence officer named Lin Wenzu collaborating with the CIA to make Bourne find the impostor. Bourne agrees, saying that if his wife is not heard from the very moment he returns, he will kill his nabbed impostor without a second thought. Lin Wenzu is later fatally injured when he uncovers and kills traitors on his team passing information to Sheng.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horror_of_Fang_Rock"title="Horror of Fang Rock">
On the way to show Brighton to Leela, the TARDIS lands on the island of Fang Rock off the south coast of England in the early 20th century. Noticing that the lighthouse isn't functioning properly, the Fourth Doctor decides to investigate, as well as to ask for directions, as the TARDIS seems to have got 'lost in the fog'. Upon arrival at the lighthouse, and after introducing themselves, the Doctor discovers the dead body of one of the keepers, Ben. The other two keepers, old superstitious Reuben and the keen young Vince Hawkins, report that a light fell from the sky near the island. They also explain the electricity flow to the lamp on the lighthouse has become erratic and the Doctor deduces something is feeding on the flow. Reuben does not help matters with his constant references to the mythical Beast of Fang Rock, which reputedly once terrorised the lighthouse. As the Doctor and Leela explore, something moves Ben's body out of the lighthouse and onto the island, and they witness a curious electric crackling which seems to have killed fish nearby.The loss of the electric light due to the unexplained draining of power from the generators causes a luxury yacht to crash on to Fang Rock. The four survivors are brought to the lighthouse: the bosun Harker; Colonel James Skinsale MP; the owner, Lord Palmerdale; and his highly strung secretary Adelaide Lessage. Over time it emerges Palmerdale has bought government secrets from Skinsale and was desperate to reach the stock exchange to make a killing – hence the reason the ship was travelling at such a pace.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawksbill_Station"title="Hawksbill Station">
Hawksbill Station was a penal colony in the Cambrian Period created by an authoritarian United States government, using time travel to exile rebels and political dissidents into the past. The colony houses only male exiles, who are sent there as a "humane" alternative to execution. The machine only works one way, leaving prisoners marooned in the past.The prison is set in a barren coastal area. The novel focuses on the relationships between the main character, the "de facto" leader of the colony, and his nemesis in the government, Jacob “Jack” Bernstein, both of whom were leading dissidents. It also explores the petty ideological differences among the prisoners and the confused circumstances leading to the establishment of the authoritarian government.The prisoners, all middle-aged or elderly, are surprised by the arrival of a much younger prisoner. The newcomer, supposedly an economist, is questioned about economic theory and political ideology. His answers reveal his essential ignorance of both. This ignorance, combined with his youth, cause the prisoners to wonder if he is, in fact, a political prisoner or a common criminal, exiled for a heinous crime.When the newcomer arrives via the time machine a second time, it is revealed that he is a police officer of a new government that overthrew the authoritarian government but was unrelated to the dissident movements of the exiles. The new government discovered the existence of Hawksbill Station and a way to travel from past to future, making it possible to retrieve prisoners from the colony. The newcomer has been sent to evaluate the prisoners and to recommend whether they are appropriate for retrieval.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mist_(novel)"title="Mist (novel)">
The plot revolves around the character of Augusto, a wealthy, intellectual and introverted young man. He falls in love with a young woman named Eugenia as she walks past him on the street, and he sets about trying to court her. He is aided in his efforts by the other members of Eugenia's household. Her Aunt Ermelinda is particularly keen for a relationship to evolve, so that Augusto might help with her niece's financial troubles. Nevertheless, Eugenia rejects his advances, since she is already in a relationship with the down-and-out Mauricio. Augusto pays off Eugenia's mortgage as a goodwill gesture without her knowing, but this only serves to insult Eugenia, rather than endear him to her.In the meantime, Augusto becomes involved with another girl, Rosario, and he begins to question if he is really in love with Eugenia at all. After talking with various friends and acquaintances, Augusto decides he will propose to Eugenia in any case. To his surprise, Eugenia accepts the engagement. A few days before the marriage is to occur, Augusto receives a letter from Eugenia. The letter explained that she was leaving him for Mauricio. Augusto, heartbroken, decides to kill himself. Because everything Augusto does involves a lengthy thought process, he decides that he needs to consult Unamuno himself (the author of the novel), who had written an article on suicide which Augusto had read. When Augusto speaks with Unamuno, the truth is revealed that Augusto is actually a fictional character whom Unamuno has created. Augusto is not real, Unamuno explains, and for that reason cannot kill himself. Augusto asserts that he exists, even though he acknowledges internally that he doesn't, and threatens Unamuno by telling him that he is not the ultimate author. Augusto reminds Unamuno that he might be just a character in one of God's dreams. Augusto returns to his home and dies.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Side_of_Midnight"title="The Other Side of Midnight">
Set in between the two World Wars, Noelle Page is born to a poor family in Marseille, France, though she is led to believe she is better than everyone else. She is initially devoted to her father, who capitalizes on her beauty when she comes of age and forces her to be the mistress of Auguste Lanchon, a well-off boutique owner. She comes to an epiphany that if she can control men, she can be powerful. She escapes to Paris, where she is enchanted by American pilot Lawrence "Larry" Douglas, who promises to marry her when he returns from London. When he does not return, she develops pneumonia, and is saved by Jewish medical intern Israel Katz, who selflessly helps her get back on her feet. Furious over Larry's betrayal, she aborts their unborn child in the most painful way and devotes the rest of her life planning revenge against him. Meanwhile, Larry returns to the United States and marries Catherine, though their relationship is strained after World War II, since Catherine feels like Larry returned as a different man.Noelle uses the war to her advantage. She hires a private investigator and learns of Larry and Catherine's marriage. She seduces two men, actor-singer Philippe Sorel and director Armand Gautier, and becomes a popular name in theater and film. At one point, she risks her plan to help Israel — the only man who has treated her with kindness — escape to Africa from the Nazis. She attracts the attention of Constantin "Costa" Demiris, a powerful Greek whose business extends to every industry in the world. She becomes his mistress and moves to his private villa. She learns that Larry is having a difficult time adjusting to a regular life and his aggressive pilot skills make him unsuited to a commercial airline setting, and convinces Demiris to hire him. Larry and Catherine move to Greece for his new job, and Noelle discovers that Larry does not even remember her. She treats him poorly as an employee, pushing him to angrily rape her when she emasculates him. She gets excited and falls in love with him again. Larry cannot recall her claims of their past, but stays with her for her power. However, he becomes unsettled when his co-pilot and his other mistress, Helena — two people compromising his and Noelle's relationship — suddenly disappear. Noelle insists that Larry and Catherine, whose marriage is at its lowest point, divorce so they can be together. When Catherine constantly refuses and fails an attempted suicide, Noelle plots to kill her. Larry abandons her in a sea cave on their trip, but is forced to return for her when the coast guard notices him exiting alone. Catherine tries to tell the doctor about Larry's plot to kill her, but the doctor thinks she is hallucinating. Catherine wakes up in the middle of the night and overhears Larry and Noelle plotting her death and she escapes during a heavy thunderstorm. She goes into a boat, but falls overboard, apparently drowning.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slan"title="Slan">
Slans are evolved humans, named after their alleged creator, Samuel Lann. They have the psychic abilities to read minds and are super-intelligent. They possess near limitless stamina, "nerves of steel," and superior strength and speed. When Slans are ill or seriously injured, they retreat into a healing trance.There are two kinds of Slans. One type has tendrils on their heads and can read the minds of ordinary humans and telepathically communicate with other Slans. The tendrils are golden-colored, making it easy to spot a Slan. These Slans are hunted to near extinction. The other type is tendrilless, still super intelligent but without psychic abilities, except the ability to hide their thoughts from the first type of Slan. The human dictator Kier Gray leads a campaign to exterminate the Slans.As the novel begins, nine-year-old Jommy Cross (a telepathic Slan of the first type) travels with his mother to the capital, Centropolis. They are discovered and Jommy's mother is killed, while Jommy flees. Jommy Cross is not only the heir to the brilliant inventions of his father, but he represents the last hope of the Slan race to save it from genocide. In fulfilling his mission, he seeks to destroy Kier Gray, and, in their final confrontation, discovers an astonishing secret.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Rama"title="The Garden of Rama">
The book picks up the story nine months after the end of "Rama II". The book follows the story of three astronauts from the expedition in "Rama II" who were trapped aboard the cylindrical alien spacecraft, Rama II, heading out towards deep space. Along the journey, five children were born. Simone Tiasso Wakefield, Catharine Colin Wakefield, Eleanor Joan Wakefield, Benjamin Ryan O'Toole and Patrick Erin O'Toole, were born by Nicole des Jardins from her relationships with Richard Wakefield and Michael O'Toole. These children later become major characters in "Rama Revealed". After a twelve-year journey, they arrive in the vicinity of the star Sirius, where all eight rendezvous with a Raman Node.At the Node they are subjected to physiological tests for a year while Rama is refurbished, and they are eventually sent back to the solar system, this time to collect two thousand more representatives of humanity. An Earth agency, known as the ISA, receives the message from Rama requesting two thousand humans. Upon its reception, the message is kept secret and, under the guise of a new Martian colony, the ISA starts acquiring its payload. The ISA selects a handful of their own representatives; meanwhile, they selectively gather convicts and promise them freedom if they are chosen to be a colonist. The payload is subdivided into three ships: the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria (names based on Christopher Columbus's ships Niña, Pinta, and Santa María) that arrive sequentially at Rama. At this point the colonists believe everything is a hoax (despite the colossal size of Rama) created by the ISA. With that discontent as the tone upon their arrival, Rama III heads back to deep space with its new payload.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Water-Method_Man"title="The Water-Method Man">
The novel revolves around the mishaps of its narrator, Fred Trumper, a floundering late-twenty-something graduate student with serious commitment and honesty issues that earn him the nickname "Bogus." The novel shows Irving beginning to develop a blend of comedy and pathos, as well as a penchant for fashioning quirky characters. It follows a non-linear narrative in the form of a sort of 'confession' authored by Trumper, who humorously recounts his various failures in life and love, from his New England childhood through his experiences on foreign study in Vienna, Austria, and as a graduate student in Iowa, leading up to the present-action setting, early-1970s New York, where Trumper is attempting to sever himself from his adolescent past. "I want to change", Trumper says at the end of Chapter One. The phrase seems to be the novel's central theme.The title refers to a method prescribed to Trumper for the treatment of non-specific urological disorders relating to his abnormally narrow urinary tract. Trumper's urologist, Dr. Jean Claude Vigneron, offers him three options for the treatment of his disorder: abstinence from sex and alcohol, a painful operation to widen the urinary canal, or the Water Method, which consists simply of consuming abnormal quantities of water before and after sex to flush bacteria out of the urinary tract. Trumper opts for the Water Method, suggesting both his generally comical cowardice and lack of self-discipline.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_of_the_Triffids"title="The Night of the Triffids">
The story begins on the Isle of Wight, 25 years after the events from "The Day of the Triffids". The community there has thrived, primarily by refining triffid oil into fuel.One morning, a solar blackout occurs and triffids once again besiege the island. Pilot David Masen (son of Bill and Josella Masen from "The Day of the Triffids") takes to the skies to investigate the cause of the blackout; however, even after taking his plane into the atmosphere as high as it can go, he finds that there is no end to the absolute darkness.On David's descent, he loses communication with the control tower and is forced to make a crash landing on a floating island populated by triffids. There, he meets an orphaned young girl, Christina, who has been surviving on her own in the wild since she was a young child, primarily because she is immune to triffid stings. The pair are rescued by an American ship that takes them to Manhattan Island in New York City.Manhattan, a secure and self-contained community like the one on the Isle of Wight, appears at first glance to be a utopia seemingly untouched by the triffid catastrophe. David quickly falls in love with his tour guide, Kerris Baedekker, who is one of the hundreds of daughters of General Fielding, the primary ruler of the city. David divulges to General Fielding that the Isle of Wight has a considerable fleet of aircraft, which, using triffid oil for fuel, can fly much farther than the Manhattan fleet, which runs on wood alcohol.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justine_(de_Sade_novel)"title="Justine (de Sade novel)">
The plot concerns Justine, a 12-year-old maiden ("As for Justine, aged as we have remarked, twelve") who sets off to make her way in France. It follows her until age 26 in her quest for virtue. She is presented with sexual lessons, hidden under a virtuous mask. The unfortunate situations include: the time when she seeks refuge and confession in a monastery, but is forced to become a sex slave to the monks, who subject her to countless orgies, rapes and similar rigours and the time when, helping a gentleman who is robbed in a field, he takes her back to his chateau with promises of a post caring for his wife, but she is then confined in a cave and subject to much the same punishment. These punishments are mostly the same throughout, even when she goes to a judge to beg for mercy in her case as an arsonist and then finds herself openly humiliated in court, unable to defend herself.These are described in true Sadean form. However, unlike some of his other works, the novel is not just a catalogue of sadism.Justine (Thérèse or Sophie in the first version) and Juliette were the daughters of Monsieur de Bertole. Bertole was a widower banker who fell in love with another man's lover. The man, Monsieur de Noirseuil, in the interest of revenge, pretended to be his friend, made sure he became bankrupt and eventually poisoned him, leaving the girls orphans. Juliette and Justine lived in a nunnery, where the abbess of the nunnery corrupted Juliette (and attempted to corrupt Justine too). However, Justine was sweet and virtuous. When the abbess found out about Bertole's death, she threw both girls out. Juliette's story is told in another book and Justine continues on in pursuit of virtue, beginning from becoming a maid in the house of the usurer Harpin, which is where her troubles begin anew.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_Forces"title="Market Forces">
In 2049, Chris Faulkner is recruited by Shorn Associates, an investment firm in London. There he befriendsMike Bryant, a fellow junior executive in the "Conflict Investment" division. Conflict Investment provides resources to incumbent or rebel factions in exchange for promised share of the nation's gross domestic product. CI members often toast to continued "small wars" as their primary source of income for themselves and their investors.Executive advancement in 2049 is not based on merit or politics alone, rather executives can issue challenges to each other which are held on highways emptied of cars and usually fought to the death, in a fashion similar to "Mad Max", a source cited as inspiration by the author in the acknowledgements of the book. Chris Faulkner gains recognition and small celebrity for a particularly brutal win over a much older and more seasoned member of his firm, from which he is head-hunted by Shorn to join their team. Within the media landscape, business executives have fame on the order of sports stars or movie actors and their driving duels are analysed and covered as sporting events. Chris' wife Carla is also his mechanic, a vital role where an executive's car is the difference between promotion and death. She is not a fan of the way he makes his living, but they have an initially strong relationship.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuesdays_with_Morrie"title="Tuesdays with Morrie">
In 1995, Albom is a successful sports columnist for the "Detroit Free Press". After seeing his former sociology professor Morrie Schwartz appear on "Nightline", Albom phones Schwartz and is prompted to visit him in Massachusetts. A coincidental newspaper strike allows Albom to visit Schwartz every week, on Tuesdays. The book recounts each of the fourteen visits Albom made to Schwartz, supplemented with Schwartz's lectures and life experiences and interspersed with flashbacks and references to contemporary events.After being diagnosed with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Morrie's final days are spent giving his former student Mitch his final lesson of life. The novel is divided into 14 different "days" that Mitch Albom spent with his professor Morrie. Throughout these days, Mitch and Morrie discuss various topics important to life and living. The novel also recounts Mitch's memories of Morrie as a professor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Swans"title="Wild Swans">
## Chang's Grandmother's story.The book starts by relating the biography of Chang's grandmother (Yu-fang). From the age of two, she had bound feet. As the family was relatively poor, her father schemed to have her taken as a concubine to high-ranking warlord General Xue Zhi-heng, in order to gain status, which was hugely important in terms of quality of life. After a wedding ceremony to the General, who already had a wife and many concubines, the young girl was left alone in a wealthy household with servants, and did not see her "husband" again for six years. Despite her luxurious surroundings, life was tense as she feared the servants and the wife of the General would report rumors or outright lies to him. She was allowed to visit her parents' home, but never allowed to spend the night.After his six year absence, the General made a brief conjugal visit to his concubine, during which a daughter, Chang's mother, was conceived. The General named her Bao Qin, meaning precious zither, but did not stay long after her birth. During the child's infancy, Chang's grandmother put off persistent requests for her to be brought to the General's main household, until he became very sick and it was no longer a request. Chang's grandmother had no choice but to comply. During her visit to the household, the General was dying. The general had no male heir, and Chang's mother was very important to the family. Realizing that the General's wife would have complete control over her life and her child's after the General's death, Chang's grandmother fled with her baby to her parents' home, sending false word to her husband's family that the child had passed away. With his last words, the General unexpectedly proclaimed her free at age twenty-four. Eventually she married a much older doctor (Dr. Xia) with whom she and her daughter, Chang's mother, made a home in Jinzhou, Manchuria. She was no more a concubine, but a true, beloved wife.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_Woodman_(novel)"title="Tin Woodman (novel)">
A young psychic boy is taken aboard a starship at the request of the government. The boy is considered both a misfit and dangerous because he has the ability to read minds on earth. However, once aboard he travels into deep space where he comes into contact with a sentient starship. The mission of the crew is to somehow communicate with the alien craft and bring it back to earth. However, things don't go to plan when the young psychic makes contact and decides to take matters into his own hands.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gods_and_Generals_(novel)"title="Gods and Generals (novel)">
Copying his father's approach of focusing on the most important officers of the two armies (General Robert E. Lee, Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, Lt. Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, and Lieutenant Colonel Joshua Chamberlain), Shaara depicted the emotional drama of soldiers fighting old friends while accurately detailing historical details including troop movements, strategies, and tactical combat situations. General Hancock, for instance, spends much of the novel dreading the day he will have to fire on his friend in the Confederate Army, Lewis "Lo" Armistead. The novel also deals with General Lee's disillusionment with the Confederate bureaucracy and General Jackson's religious fervor.In addition to covering events leading up to the war, the book includes the battles of First Bull Run, covered only from the perspective of Robert E. Lee, who was in Richmond at the time and thus not at the battle, Williamsburg, Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville. The film version provides only cursory coverage of immediate pre-war events, focusing primarily on Jackson and the secession of Virginia, and omits Antietam (included in the Director's Cut) along with Williamsburg and Second Bull Run. It spends a considerable amount of time on First Bull Run, which played only a minor role in the book.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'Tis"title="'Tis">
The book begins as McCourt lands upriver from New York City, and quickly makes his way to New York City with an Irish-American priest on the ship. Friendless and clueless about American customs, he struggles to integrate himself into American blue-collar society, working at laboring jobs while spending his free time reading books. The New York City public library is a wonder to him, with its welcoming ways. He spends time there and checks out books from the start.He is drafted into the US Army because of the Korean War; he is sent to Europe, and rises to the rank of corporal. During his time in southern Germany, he meets men from all over the U.S. When serving as company clerk, he delivers laundry to U.S. Army facilities at Dachau, a haunting experience, both for a Jewish soldier with him and for Frank, who heard all the news of World War II growing up in Limerick. Soldiers are always looking for women, trading their cigarette and coffee allotments for sex, even with refugees from WWII who are still not settled, which the Army disapproves of. Frank has a troubling encounter with a poor and hungry girl in a refugee camp. The people in the Army teach him a lot about American ways, so different from his upbringing in the lanes of Limerick. While in the Army in Germany, he gets two weeks leave to visit his family in Ireland, seeing his mother and youngest brothers Michael and Alphie in Limerick, and for one day, his father and paternal grandmother in Toome. He has been sending part of his Army wages to his mother, and she has gained a home with all the modern advantages of plumbing, a refrigerator and space for a garden in the Janesboro neighborhood; she does not move out of the slum house shared with her brother, where she was raised, until Frank arrives. His emotions while in Limerick are strongly mixed, between pride in his U.S. Army status, pleasure at the better life of his youngest brother who attends secondary school, and the hard memories of his own life there, the "dark clouds" in his mind. 
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Games"title="Patriot Games">
A kidnapping attempt on the Prince and Princess of Wales and their infant son occurs at the Mall in London. The attack is orchestrated by members of the Ulster Liberation Army, a splinter group of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. However, Jack Ryan intervenes, incapacitating one of the attackers, Sean Miller. During the gun battle however, Ryan is shot in the shoulder by one of the other gunmen, John Michael McCrory, as they exchange fire. McClory is killed, and Miller is later arrested.While recovering from his wound, Ryan is honored by the British government and is knighted. Meanwhile, Miller is sentenced to life imprisonment for the kidnapping attempt; however, his ULA compatriots led by Kevin O’Donnell free him while he is being transported to a maximum security prison in the Isle of Wight. They are then aided by their Libyan allies in escaping into their secret camp in the North African desert, and Miller vows revenge on Ryan.Ryan returns to teach history at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, confident that the ULA will not attack him in the United States. Unbeknownst to him, Miller had persuaded O’Donnell to launch an operation in the U.S. aimed at targeting Ryan and his family, and had recruited the assistance of an African-American domestic terrorist group known as “the Movement” to do so. Though primarily for revenge, the operation is also designed to reduce American support for the rival PIRA, which is to be blamed for the upcoming attack. The assassin sent to kill Ryan is intercepted before he manages to complete his task, however his wife Cathy and daughter Sally are seriously injured when Miller causes their car to crash on a freeway; they are rescued by state troopers and volunteer firemen and later transported by helicopter to the University of Maryland Medical Center for treatment.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changing_Places"title="Changing Places">
"Changing Places" is a comic novel with serious undercurrents. It tells the story of the six-month academic exchange programme between fictional universities located in Rummidge (modelled on Birmingham in England) and Plotinus, in the state of Euphoria (modeled on Berkeley in California). The two academics taking part in the exchange are both aged 40, but appear at first to otherwise have little in common, mainly because of the differing academic systems of their native countries.The English participant, Philip Swallow, is a very conventional and conformist British academic, and somewhat in awe of the American way of life. By contrast the American, Morris Zapp, is a top-ranking American professor who only agrees to go to Rummidge because his wife agrees to postpone long-threatened divorce proceedings on condition that he move out of the marital home for six months. Zapp is at first both contemptuous of, and amused by, what he perceives as the amateurism of British academe.As the exchange progresses, Swallow and Zapp find that they begin to fit in surprisingly well to their new environments. In the course of the story, each man has an affair with the other's wife. Before that, Swallow sleeps with Zapp's daughter Melanie, without realising who she is. She takes up with a former undergraduate student of his, Charles Boon.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneath_the_Wheel"title="Beneath the Wheel">
"Beneath the Wheel" is the story of Hans Giebenrath, a talented boy sent to a seminary in Maulbronn. His education is focused completely on increasing his knowledge, and neglects personal development. His close friendship with Hermann Heilner, a more liberal fellow student, is a source of comfort for Hans. Heilner is expelled from the seminary, and Giebenrath is sent home after his academic performance decreases in tandem with the onset of symptoms of mental illness.Back home, he finds coping with his situation difficult, having lost most of his childhood to scholastic study, and thus having never formed lasting personal relationships with anyone in his village. He is apprenticed as a mechanic, and seems to find satisfaction in the work; it is visceral and concrete, as opposed to the intellectual abstraction of scholarly pursuit. Despite some personal fulfillment in his existence, Hans never fully adjusts to his new situation. On a pub crawl in a neighbouring village, he and his colleagues get drunk. Giebenrath leaves the group to walk home early. Later, he is found to have drowned in a river.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_British_Coup"title="A Very British Coup">
Harry Perkins is the left-wing Leader of the Labour Party and Member of Parliament for Sheffield Central. Beating all the odds, Harry becomes Prime Minister and sets out to dismantle media monopolies, withdraw from NATO, carry out unilateral nuclear disarmament, and create an open government. Many people in the media, financial services, and the intelligence services are deeply unhappy with Harry's win and his policies, and they unite to stop him by any means.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_One_Writes_to_the_Colonel"title="No One Writes to the Colonel">
The novel, written between 1956 and 1957 while living in Paris in the Hotel des Trois Colleges and first published in 1961, is the story of an impoverished retired colonel, a veteran of the Thousand Days' War, who still hopes to receive the pension he was promised some fifteen years earlier. The colonel lives with his asthmatic wife in a small village under martial law. The action opens with the colonel preparing to go to the funeral of a town musician whose death is notable because he was the first to die from natural causes in many years. The novel is set during the years of "La Violencia" in Colombia, when martial law and censorship prevail.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlsson-on-the-Roof"title="Karlsson-on-the-Roof">
Karlsson is a very short, plump and overconfident man who lives in a small house hidden behind a chimney on the roof of "a very ordinary apartment building on a very ordinary street" in Vasastan, Stockholm. When Karlsson pushes a button on his stomach, it starts a clever little engine with a propeller on his back, allowing him to fly.In his own opinion, Karlsson is the best at everything. He befriends Svante Svantesson, a 7-year-old boy and youngest member of the Svantesson family (who is often referred to as "Little Brother", , or "Malysh" in the Russian adaptations). Svante is sometimes called Smidge in the US version of the books.Karlsson is quite mischievous and likes to make fun and prank others. He often gets Lillebror into trouble, as Karlsson usually disappears just before Lillebror's family arrives leaving him to deal with consequences of Karlsson’s actions. At first, parents, siblings and friends of Lillebror don't believe that Karlsson is real and consider him being an imaginary friend but after they meet him in person they begin to like the little flying man.Another character to encounter Karlsson is Fröken Bock (Miss Hildur Bock), a mean nanny (presumably in her late 40s or 50s), who undergoes an emotional transformation after meeting Karlsson.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Nickleby"title="Nicholas Nickleby">
 Nicholas Nickleby's father dies unexpectedly after losing all of his money in a poor investment. Nicholas, his mother and his younger sister, Kate, are forced to give up their comfortable lifestyle in Devonshire and travel to London to seek the aid of their only relative, Nicholas's uncle, Ralph Nickleby. Ralph, a cold and ruthless businessman, has no desire to help his destitute relations and hates Nicholas at first sight because he reminds him of his dead brother. He gets Nicholas a very low-paying job as an assistant to Wackford Squeers, who runs the school Dotheboys Hall in Yorkshire. Nicholas is initially wary of Squeers (a very unpleasant man with one eye) because he is gruff and violent towards his young charges, but he tries to quell his suspicions. As Nicholas boards the stagecoach for Greta Bridge, he is handed a letter by Ralph's clerk, Newman Noggs. A once-wealthy businessman, Noggs lost his fortune, became a drunk, and had no other recourse but to seek employment with Ralph, whom he loathes. The letter expresses concern for him as an innocent young man and offers assistance if Nicholas ever requires it. Once he arrives in Yorkshire, Nicholas comes to realise that Squeers is running a scam: he takes in unwanted children (most of whom are illegitimate, crippled or deformed) for a high fee, and starves and mistreats them while using the money sent by their parents, who only want to get them out of their way, to pad his own pockets. Squeers and his monstrous wife whip and beat the children regularly while spoiling their own son. Lessons are no better; they show how poorly educated Squeers himself is and he uses the lessons as excuses to send the boys off on chores. While he is there, Nicholas befriends a "simple" boy named Smike, who is older than the other "students" and now acts as an unpaid servant. Nicholas attracts the attention of Fanny Squeers, his employer's plain and shrewish daughter, who deludes herself into thinking that Nicholas is in love with her. She attempts to disclose her affections during a game of cards, but Nicholas doesn't catch her meaning. Instead, he ends up flirting with her friend Tilda Price, to the consternation of both Fanny and Tilda's friendly but crude-mannered fiancé John Browdie. After being accosted by Fanny again, Nicholas bluntly tells her he does not return her affections and wishes to be free of the horrible atmosphere of Dotheboys Hall, earning her enmity.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Partner_(Grisham_novel)"title="The Partner (Grisham novel)">
It's been four years since Patrick Lanigan, a junior partner in a law firm in Biloxi, Mississippi, learned of the scheme, masterminded by his firm's client, shipbuilding magnate Benny Aricia, to defraud the U.S. government. The firm's senior partners didn't include Lanigan in the plan, in which they stood to make tens of millions of dollars. Lanigan then devised a plan of his own, wherein he faked his death, stole $90 million from the secret off-shore accounts where the firm had been hiding the ill-gotten gains, and then fled to South America. Since then, Lanigan started a new life with new-found love Eva. But Aricia had men track him down, ruthless men who will do whatever it takes, including torture, to reclaim the stolen fortune. In a desperate bid, Lanigan gives complete control of the money to Eva, then turns himself over to the FBI. Once returned to the U.S., Lanigan must fight multiple legal battles, in state, civil and federal courts, involving a former client, his estranged wife, and the highest levels of government, to protect the people he cares for, gain his freedom and, finally get back to Eva and the part of the fortune they secretly set aside.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skipping_Christmas"title="Skipping Christmas">
The story focuses on how Luther and Nora Krank try to avoid the frenzy traditionally experienced during the Christmas holiday. On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, the two take their daughter Blair to the airport, where she departs for a year-long Peace Corps assignment in Peru. Seeing all of the busy traveling at the airport, Luther starts to develop an increasingly personal antipathy for normal Christmas traditions, especially knowing that Blair will not be with them for Christmas this year. To make matters worse, Luther is told by Nora to stop by a packed grocery store on a very rainy day, causing him to get soaked, only to realize when getting back in the car that he forgot the white chocolate on the shopping list, forcing Nora to go inside and get it herself.Nora bemoans the fact that the upcoming Christmas will be the first time they have been separated as a family, prompting her husband to calculate how much they spent celebrating the holidays the previous year. When he realizes they have little to show for the $6,100 they invested in decorations, gifts, and entertaining, he decides to skip all the hubbub at home and surprise Nora by booking a 10-day Caribbean cruise aboard the "Island Princess". Nora at first is skeptical but accepts the idea on one condition – that they still donate $600 to the church and Children's Hospital. At first Luther refuses, but when Nora refuses to consider the cruise otherwise, he agrees, and they begin to plan the trip.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fevre_Dream"title="Fevre Dream">
Abner Marsh, a remarkably unattractive but highly skilled Mississippi River steamboat captain, is grappling with a financial crisis in 1857 when he is contacted by Joshua York, a rich, soft-spoken gentleman. They become unlikely business partners when Joshua promises to finance the construction of a magnificent new riverboat that will be larger, faster and more opulent than any other ever constructed.When finally completed, she is everything Abner has ever dreamed of piloting. The large white, blue and silver paddle steamer is christened "Fevre Dream", for Abner's previously failing company, the Fevre River Packet Company. Joshua and Abner co-captain the new vessel, with Abner being solely responsible for her actual command and navigation. Many questions are soon raised by both the crew and passengers about Joshua and his circle of unusual friends, who hardly ever venture out of their cabins during daylight hours. Abner's own suspicions about his mysterious partner begin to grow when he finds scrapbooks in Joshua's cabin containing newspaper clippings detailing many mysterious, unexplained deaths.He confronts Joshua, who reveals that he and his friends are vampire hunters, using the "Fevre Dream" as their base of operations to investigate a trail of unusual deaths and disappearances along the river. Eventually, Joshua finally reveals the whole truth: He and his friends are themselves vampires, humanoid beings specialized for and dependent upon hunting humans, characterized by Joshua as "a different race". Joshua has developed a potion, using ancient alchemy and rudimentary chemistry, which controls the "red thirst" of all vampires. This has led many of his kind to consider him the "Pale King", a kind of vampire messiah destined to free them from their dependence on hunting humans. Joshua is on a personal crusade to free his people of their need to feed on human blood, and his traveling companions have all submitted to his control as their lord (or "bloodmaster").
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unpleasant_Profession_of_Jonathan_Hoag"title="The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag">
Jonathan Hoag, a lover of art and fine dining living in Chicago, realizes that he has no memory of his daytime activities when asked, at an evening dinner, what he does for a living. Furthermore, when he washes his hands in the evening, he discovers a red-brown substance, possibly dried blood, under his fingernails.He contacts a detective agency, Randall &amp; Craig, and asks them to follow him during the day. The partners, actually the husband and wife team of Ted and Cynthia Randall, agree to this. They try to collect fingerprints from their client, but find that Hoag leaves none, even when not wearing gloves. The few memories Hoag has turn out to be false, except for his home address, and a doctor, Potiphar T. Potbury, whom Hoag consulted about the substance under his fingernails, had thrown him out of his office and told him not to return.The first time the pair tail Hoag, Cynthia sees him turn and talk to her husband. Then Cynthia is menaced by Hoag after she tails him in an office building. When she is reunited with Ted, he tells her that he had a completely different experience: after uneventfully tailing Hoag into the building and up to Hoag's office on the thirteenth floor, Ted discovers that Hoag is a jeweler working for a company called Detheridge &amp; Co., and that the red substance is jeweler's rouge. Both realize that something is terribly wrong, especially once they discover that the building has no thirteenth floor.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Firm_(novel)"title="The Firm (novel)">
Mitch McDeere is a graduate of Western Kentucky University with a degree in accounting, who has passed his Certified Public Accountant exam on the first attempt and graduated third in his class at Harvard Law School. Mitch is married to his high-school sweetheart, Abby McDeere, an elementary school teacher who also attended Western Kentucky University. His older brother Ray is imprisoned in Tennessee for manslaughter, and his other brother, Rusty, died in Vietnam. His mother suffers from mental health issues and lives in Florida.Mitch spurns offers from law firms in New York and Chicago in favor of signing with Bendini, Lambert and Locke, a small tax law firm based in Memphis. He finds the firm's offer — a large salary, a lease on a new BMW, and a low-interest mortgage on a house — too generous to resist. Soon after he joins, his new colleagues help him study and pass his bar exam, the first priority for new associates. Mitch is assigned to partner Avery Tolar, the firm's "bad boy," but a highly accomplished attorney.Two of Mitch's colleagues, Marty Kozinski and Joe Hodge, die in a scuba diving accident in the Cayman Islands a few days before he starts at the firm. On his first scheduled day of work, Mitch attends their funerals. Mitch finds the deaths unsettling, but focuses on his goal of becoming the youngest partner in the firm's history. During a memorial service at the firm for the two deceased attorneys, Mitch notices plaques commemorating three other attorneys who died while working at the firm. Suspicious, he hires a private investigator, Eddie Lomax, an ex-cellmate of his brother Ray, to investigate the deaths.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fine_Balance"title="A Fine Balance">
The book exposes the changes in Indian society from independence in 1947 to the Emergency declared by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Mistry was generally critical of Indira Gandhi in the book. She, however, is never referred to by name by any of the characters, and is instead called simply "the Prime Minister". The characters, from diverse backgrounds, are brought together by economic forces changing India.
</doc>
<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Watch_(Lukyanenko_novel)"title="Night Watch (Lukyanenko novel)">
## Destiny.A Mage, recently reassigned to field work in the Night Watch, Anton Gorodetsky, is tasked with tracking vampires who have been hunting and killing humans without a licence. As he follows a young boy (Egor), who has been magically lured by two vampires through the Metro, he notices a young woman, Svetlana, who has a huge vortex of damnation above her. Trying to free her from the vortex he uses up the power of an amulet he has been given to use against the vampires, but only succeeds in temporarily reducing the curse upon her. He finds the vampires who have been calling Egor, and in the struggle to arrest them, because he has used up the amulet trying to do good elsewhere, is forced to kill one while the other (a female) gets away.He returns to the Night Watch headquarters, where his boss, Boris Ignatievich, informs him that he could be in danger as Zabulon (head of the Day Watch) might want revenge for his actions in killing Dark Others and gives him an owl called Olga, to be his Watch partner. Anton initially rejects the offer, then finds Olga in his apartment and reluctantly agrees. The next day he carelessly and illegally uses his powers for good (by changing a person's morality, a spell called "remoralization") and clashes with a Dark Other from the Day Watch, Alisa Donnikova. They agree that Alisa can use her power to do a minor evil act of her choice in compensation for his own act of goodness. As events unfold he discovers that Olga can speak and appear briefly as a human, and is a sorceress trapped in an owl's body as a punishment.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cobweb_(novel)"title="The Cobweb (novel)">
When Clyde Banks, an Iowan Deputy with a newborn baby and a wife in the first Gulf War, starts looking into odd events in his town, he discovers a plot involving a new Triangle Trade of terrorists, biological warfare, and training. Mixing the events staged in Washington, D.C. and those happening in the Gulf, a strange thread of deceit appears to be winding its way back to Iowa. Although fictional in its narrative, the story includes appearances by Tariq Aziz and George H. W. Bush.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_the_Velvet"title="Tipping the Velvet">
Nancy "Nan" Astley is a sheltered 18-year-old living with her working-class family and helping in their oyster restaurant in Whitstable, Kent. She becomes instantly and desperately enamoured with a "masher", or male impersonator, named Kitty Butler, who performs for a season at the local theatre. They begin a friendship that grows when, after Kitty finds an opportunity to perform in London for better exposure, she asks Nan to join her. Nan enthusiastically agrees and leaves her family to act as Kitty's dresser while she performs. Although Kitty and Nan acknowledge their relationship to be sisterly, Nan continues to love Kitty until a jealous fight forces Kitty to admit she feels the same, although she insists that they keep their relationship secret. Simultaneously, Kitty's manager Walter decides that Kitty needs a performing partner to reach true success, and suggests Nan for the role. Nan is initially horrified by the idea, but takes to it. The duo become quite famous until Nan realises she is homesick after being gone from her family for more than a year. Her return home is underwhelming, so she returns to London early to find Kitty in bed with Walter. They announce that the act is finished and they are to be married.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormqueen!"title="Stormqueen!">
Lady Aliciane of Rockraven, "barragana" to Mikhail of Aldaran, dies giving birth to a daughter, Dorilys. In childhood, Dorilys is discovered to have weather-related "laran", causing storms and lightning with her childish temper tantrums.Allart Hastur leaves Nevarsin Monastery, where he has lived for six years, learning to live with a form of "laran" that causes him to experience premonitions of multiple futures. He meets Cassandra Aillard, the woman his family intends him to marry. He believes that any children they might conceive will cause her death. To avoid this fate, they become celibate tower workers at Hali.Lord Rakhal Aldaran of Scathfell arrives with his son at Castle Aldaran. Scathfell wishes ensure that his son Darren marries Dorilys, who is now eleven. At the handfasting, Darren judges her to be much older than he has been told, and attempts to force her into sexual relations. Dorilys’ self-protective "laran" strikes Darren dead. Scathfell swears vengeance. Dorilys' half-brother Donal is sent to acquire assistance from Hali Tower for Dorilys.Damon-Rafael Hastur of Elhayln, Allart's brother, arrives at Hali and asks him to undertake a diplomatic mission to Aldaran. Donal Delleray also arrives, asking assistance for Dorilys. Allart and Renata accompany Donal back to Aldaran.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pompeii_(novel)"title="Pompeii (novel)">
Marcus Attilius Primus arrives in the Bay of Naples from Rome to take charge as "aquarius" (hydraulic engineer) of the Aqua Augusta, the aqueduct that supplies water to the towns in the region encompassing the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius. The nine important towns are, in order, Pompeii, Nola, Acerrae, Atella, Napoli, Puteoli, Cumae, Baiae, and Misenum. Attilius's predecessor, Exomnius, has mysteriously vanished as the springs that flow through the aqueduct begin to fail, which reduces the supply of water available to the region's reservoir. Attilius is unpopular among the workers, particularly Corax, who resents the young foreigner giving him orders. Attilius's concerns about the water are heightened when he is summoned by a young, wealthy woman, Corelia, to investigate water that apparently killed her father's prized fish. Corelia's father is the former slave and land speculator Numerius Popidius Ampliatus, who came to fortune after he rebuilt Pompeii from a past earthquake. Ampliatus feeds to eels the slave he deems responsible for the fish's death for his own amusement. Attilius realises that unusually, sulfur poisoned the water.Dramatically, the flow of water then stops entirely. Attilius concludes that the aqueduct must be blocked somewhere close to Mount Vesuvius since reports claim a shutdown of the system just before Nola. That means that towns from there through Napoli and Misenum are without any water supply. With aid from Pliny the Elder, whose fleet is docked at Misenum, Attilius assembles an expedition to travel to Pompeii, the closest town still being supplied with water, and then on to the blocked section of the Aqua Augusta.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pnin"title="Pnin">
## Chapter 1.Timofey Pavlovich Pnin, the title character, is a professor of Russian at Waindell College; "ideally bald" with a "strong man torso," "spindly legs," and "feminine feet". Pnin is on a train from Waindell to Cremona, where he is to give a guest lecture. He is persistently bothered by the fear that he may lose his lecture papers, or mix them up with the student essay he is correcting. He discovers he has boarded the wrong train and gets off. When he tries to board a bus to Cremona, he suddenly realizes he has lost his luggage (with his papers) and has a seizure. He finally arrives at Cremona by truck, having recovered his papers, and is about to give his lecture when he experiences a vision, seeing his dead parents and friends from before the Russian Revolution in the audience. The chapter ends without revealing whether Pnin has the correct papers.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Faded_Sun_Trilogy"title="The Faded Sun Trilogy">
The Faded Sun trilogy can be considered a Bildungsroman, since one of the major themes is the coming of age of Niun, the mri protagonist. At the same time, it is a story of acculturation, as the human protagonist, Sten Duncan, lives among the mri to the point of becoming one of them.The Faded Sun trilogy is the principal account of the Mri Wars era of Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe. At the beginning of the first volume, the regul have just concluded a forty-year war with humanity. As part of the peace, they are ceding the desert world of Kesrith to humanity. However, they have neglected to inform its inhabitants, the mri, who have served them as mercenaries for over two thousand years.The Mri have been nearly exterminated in these wars, and young Niun is one of the few remaining warriors. When the regul seek to double-cross his people, he and his sister Melein, the last of the priestly Sen caste, form an uneasy alliance with the human Sten Duncan to rescue a holy relic that may hold the key to the Mri's survival.The second volume opens with Niun and Melein captives of the human occupation force, kept alive by the human medicine they would refuse if they were not sedated. But the human command has a plan that may thwart the regul's attempted genocide of the Mri. They produce a navigation tape from the data in the holy relic that legend holds leads the way to the Mri homeworld and set Niun and Melein aboard the ship. Duncan comes with them to keep the ship running.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Fortress"title="Digital Fortress">
The story is set in the year of 1996. When the United States National Security Agency's code-breaking supercomputer TRANSLTR encounters a revolutionary new code, "Digital Fortress," that it cannot break, Commander Trevor Strathmore calls in head cryptographer Susan Fletcher to crack it. She is informed by Strathmore that it was written by Ensei Tankado, a former NSA employee who became displeased with the NSA's intrusion into people's private lives. If the NSA doesn't reveal TRANSLTR to the public, Tankado intends to auction the code's algorithm on his website and have his partner, "North Dakota", release it for free if he dies, essentially holding the NSA hostage. Strathmore tells Fletcher that Tankado has in fact died in Seville at the age of 32, of what appears to be a heart attack. Strathmore intends to keep Tankado's death a secret because if Tankado's partner finds out, he will upload the code. The agency is determined to stop Digital Fortress from becoming a threat to national security.Strathmore asks Fletcher's fiancé David Becker to travel to Seville and recover a ring that Tankado was wearing when he died. The ring is suspected to have the passcode that unlocks Digital Fortress. However, Becker soon discovers that Tankado gave the ring away just before his death. Unbeknown to Becker, a mysterious figure, named Hulohot, follows him, and murders each person he questions in the search for the ring. Unsurprisingly, Hulohot's final attempt would be on Becker himself.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawkmistress!"title="Hawkmistress!">
Romilly MacAran has the "laran" gift of her family – the ability to merge with the minds of animals. She uses this gift to train hawks and horses. When she reaches the age of fifteen (womanhood, in Darkover's terms), her father refuses to allow her to continue working with animals on the grounds that it isn't ladylike. He gives her prized hawk, Preciosa, to her brother, who has no gift. He also refuses her requests for an education.When Romilly learns that her father intends to marry her off to a three-times widower, Garris of Scathfell, she realizes that leaving home is her only option. Dressed as a boy, she escapes with a horse from the stables.Calling herself Rumal, she heads towards Nevarsin. Her hawk, Preciosa, appears in the sky, and provides her with a freshly killed bird, the first meal she has had in several days. Her fire attracts a company of men, headed by Dom Carlo and Dom Orain, who have three sick sentry birds that need care. They, too, are headed to Nevarsin, and Romilly takes over the care of their birds. Romilly reveals that she is a "cristoforo". Dom Carlo claims to be a kinsman of the deposed king, Carolin, and is fleeing his cousin, Rakhal, who has taken the throne by force.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_Fowl_and_the_Opal_Deception"title="Artemis Fowl and the Opal Deception">
The book begins with the pixie Opal Koboi faking a coma inside a hospital to avoid incarceration by the Lower Elements Police (LEP) after her failed rebellion and attempt of world domination (which took place in "Artemis Fowl and the Arctic Incident").Opal Koboi, who had been under 24-hour surveillance, had DNA tests done every 4 hours, a seeker-sleeper planted in her arm (a device that can make the criminal faint, while also giving their position away) and had her in a net trapped with monitoring pads by the LEP to ensure that Opal was actually in the asylum cell, with help from the Brill Brothers Opal manages to replace herself with a clone, which is identical to herself (the only difference being that the clone is brain dead which is also the current state the sensors detect Opal's coma-like mind to be in).Opal lures Commander Julius Root and Captain Holly Short of the LEP into a lava chute alone by putting General Scalene under the mesmer there. Koboi then kills Commander Root by using a 30-centimeter metal box packed with explosive gel and covered in stealth ore (framing Captain Holly Short as the murderer, she told Holly that if she shot a certain part of the exploding box, it would turn off (it only went faster), since stealth ore couldn't be picked up by any electronics the LEP cameras only saw Holly shooting the commander, clear as day), and launches a bio-bomb at Artemis Fowl, which fails to kill him and his bodyguard Domovoi Butler because Butler grabbed Artemis and jumps from the three-story hotel, using a mattress to cushion the fall.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_(novel)"title="Prague (novel)">
"Prague" opens on the afternoon of May 25, 1990 with five North American expatriates living in the city of Budapest. The expatriates are, for the most part, optimistic about their prospects in the Central European city. John Price seeks a reconciliation with his older brother, Scott, who has come to Budapest to separate himself from his earlier life in the United States. Emily Oliver, an idealistic worker at the American Embassy, hopes to begin a distinguished diplomatic career. Mark Payton, a Canadian researching a history of nostalgia, relishes the chance to be immersed in a place with interesting history. Only Charles Gábor, a Hungarian-American venture capitalist who resents his co-workers and has contempt for his fellow Magyars, displays any pessimism at the story's outset. The five young expatriates enjoy the nightlife and new opportunities in the historic city.John is instantly attracted to Emily, and plots to win her love, but she ignores him. He finds a job as a columnist for an English-language newspaper, "BudapesToday". Still a virgin at the age of 24, he is initiated by his co-worker Karen, but finds the experience to be quite anticlimactic. He later commits "fradultery" with his brother's future wife, Mária.Part II presents the complex history of the Horváth Kiadó (Horvath Press), a family-run publishing company – which also serves as a history of Budapest from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Presently, the head of the publishing house is Imre Horváth, who until recently had been exiled in Vienna. In the mid-nineteenth century, during the Revolution, the Horváth business is affected by the April Laws, a collection of laws legislated by Lajos Kossuth with the aim of modernizing Kingdom of Hungary into a nation state. During the Communist regime, the Horváth Kiadó was a state-owned enterprise; after the fall of communism, it is due to be privatized. Imre seeks an investment from Charles' venture capital firm in order to buy the press's assets and restart it in Budapest.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudstreet"title="Cloudstreet">
In 1943, precipitated by separate personal tragedies, two poor families, the Lambs and the Pickles, flee their rural homes to share a large house called Cloudstreet in Perth, Western Australia. The Pickles include the father, Sam, the mother, Dolly, and their three children, Ted, Rose, and Chub. The Lambs are led by father, Lester, and mother, Oriel, and they have six children, Hattie, Elaine, Mason (nicknamed "Quick"), Samson (nicknamed “Fish”), Red and Lon. The Pickles own Cloudstreet, but rent half of the house to the Lambs, who open a grocery store on the ground floor of the house. The two families contrast each other; the devoutly religious Lambs find meaning in hard work and God's grace, while the Pickles hope for good luck and do not share the Lambs' appetite for hard work. The novel focuses on the experiences and relationships of these two families over a period of 20 years.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow"title="The Hollow">
## Introduction.On the morning that he and his downtrodden wife, Gerda, are due to travel down to the country to weekend with friends, Dr John Christow, a successful physician, leading researcher, and very tired and irritated by his current life, allows his little daughter to tell his fortune with cards. When the death card is drawn, he pays no attention, but the appearance of an old flame at The Hollow seems to be the final link in a chain of fatal circumstances.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knife_of_Dreams"title="Knife of Dreams">
This volume of "The Wheel of Time" depicts several distinct plots. Unusual Trolloc attacks, the dead walking, ripples in the fabric of the world and other events seem to indicate that the Last Battle is drawing near; several characters using different evidence confidently state that "Tarmon Gai'don" is close at hand.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_on_the_Tree"title="Silver on the Tree">
Will Stanton and his mentor Merriman, two of the last Old Ones, gather allies and magical objects to help defeat the rising Dark. They ally with Bran, a Welsh descendant of King Arthur, and the three Drew children, to form the Six who are prophesied to triumph over the powers of the Dark. Significant mythical elements in the book include the bard Taliesin (under his alternate name Gwion), King Gwyddno Garanhir and the Drowned Hundred, the Welsh tradition of the Mari Llwyd, and the Ritual of oak and mistletoe.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwitch"title="Greenwitch">
The Drew children – Simon, Jane, and Barney – return to Cornwall with their uncle Merriman Lyon. Merriman enlists them along with Will Stanton, his protégé, to uncover a golden grail needed to defeat the forces of the Dark.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over_Sea,_Under_Stone"title="Over Sea, Under Stone">
"Over Sea, Under Stone" features the Drew children, Simon, Jane and Barney, on holiday with their parents and Merriman Lyon, an old family friend, usually referred to by the children as their great-uncle. The Drew family meet him in the fictional fishing village of Trewissick on the southern coast of Cornwall. In the attic of the big Grey House they are renting from Merriman's friend Captain Toms the children find an old manuscript. They recognise a drawing of the local coastline that may be a kind of map, with almost illegible text, but Barney realises that the map refers to King Arthur and his knights. The children decide to keep the discovery to themselves.The family are visited at the Grey House by a very friendly Mr. Withers and his sister Polly, who invite them to go fishing on their yacht. The boys are thrilled, but Jane feels suspicious and declines to join them. While Jane is alone in the Grey House she finds a guidebook to Trewissick, written by the local vicar, in an old trunk. She realises that the map in the guidebook is similar to the secret map, but also different somehow, so she decides to visit the vicar. The man at the vicarage is not the writer of the guidebook, but he offers to help Jane. He asks some probing questions that arouse Jane's suspicions and she decides to return home.
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<doc url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer's_Hammer"title="Lucifer's Hammer">
When wealthy amateur astronomer Tim Hamner co-discovers a new comet, named Hamner-Brown for its discoverers, documentary producer Harvey Randall persuades Hamner to have his soap company sponsor a television documentary series on the comet. Political lobbying by California Senator Arthur Jellison eventually gets a joint Apollo-Soyuz (docking with Skylab B) mission approved to study the comet, dubbed "The Hammer" by the media, which is expected to pass close to the Earth.The scientific community assures the public that a collision with Earth is extremely unlikely, but the comet's nucleus breaks apart and the pieces strike parts of Europe, Africa, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. These result in volcano eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis, destroying major coastal cities around the world, killing billions and initiating a new ice age because of the massive quantities of water and debris flung into the atmosphere.Immediately after the strike, China, anticipating that the Soviet Union will become too cold for its people and must therefore invade its neighbor, launches a preemptive nuclear attack on its neighbor. The Soviets retaliate with their own nuclear missiles, reassuring the US that it is not the target.Jellison has taken discreet precautions and moved his people and supplies to his ranch. He takes charge and organizes the easily protected valley in the Sierra foothills where his ranch is located, dubbed the "Stronghold". Randall and Hamner separately reach the valley and are allowed in (unlike almost all other refugees). Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist and resident genius Dan Forrester receives a warm welcome when he reveals that he has hidden a cache of invaluable "how-to" books.
</doc>
